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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:33:09.110" Score="64" ViewCount="5979" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given two open source projects, each with different licenses, are there metrics or resources I can use to determine if it is legitimate to copy code from one of the projects to the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:29:15.007" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T13:44:35.767" Title="How can I determine if two open source licenses are compatible with each other?" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:42:35.057" Score="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always look at the schema drawn by David Wheeler: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot;&gt;Essay: FLOSS licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1G9Z.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrows show which license you can use in the context of another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: you can use software distributed as ASL 2.0 inside an LGPLv3 project and (a fortiori) inside a GPLv3 or AGPLv3 project. You can't use LGPLv3 software inside an ASL 2.0 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just follow the arrows as a rule of thumb and double-check when in doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T17:42:35.057" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:42:42.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Compatible&quot; in this case means that you can satisfy the terms of both licenses. So the only general approach is to read the licences, understand your obligations under all of them, and then determine if you can satisfy all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some common licenses, other people have already done that work. For example, the Free Software Foundation maintains a page called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot;&gt;“Various Licenses and Comments about Them”&lt;/a&gt; where they say if they believe a license is GPL-compatible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T17:42:42.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:42:48.173" Score="3" ViewCount="1588" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in academia and I think that as a matter of principle, my code should be open source. It's not likely to have a lot of users. It might have none other than myself. I have it published on github, even if it might be just for the convenience of using the github interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I choose a suitable license for my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:23:19.807" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T21:23:19.807" Title="How do I choose a suitable license for my academic software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T17:45:31.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:43:35.870" Score="14" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been told that I should not use some format because it's patented (gif, mp3, h264). I'm not a U.S. citizen but from E.U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these patents apply to me? Are they global? U.S. specific? Or is it more complicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user38" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T17:52:44.437" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:12:04.267" Title="Do software patents for common formats (gif, mp3, h264) apply globally?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-06-24T00:48:20.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="8" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:45:03.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;choose a license is an easy to use site that walks users through the selection process:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the site, If you really don't want to hold any patent or you just want to hold a simple licence you can go ahead with MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The MIT License is a permissive license that is short and to the point. It lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don’t hold you liable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to hold any rights to your code you can use the Apache Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Apache License is a permissive license similar to the MIT License, but also provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think anyone can improve your code and distribute the newly created work, you can select the GPL licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL (V2 or V3) is a copyleft license that requires anyone who distributes your code or a derivative work to make the source available under the same terms. V3 is similar to V2, but further restricts use in hardware that forbids software alterations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more licenses available such as Creative Commons etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T17:57:04.187" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T17:57:04.187" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:46:50.093" Score="11" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Codehaus shut down earlier this year. Many projects that were hosted there, including JIRA pages like &lt;a href=&quot;https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MASPECTJ-131&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, are now broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to access all the lost content of projects that were hosted in Codehaus, such as bug reports? Was it uploaded/dumped somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, since Google Code is also shutting down, a similar problem will probably show up soon. What can be done to prevent the loss of important information like bug reports and wiki pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T23:09:37.770" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T23:11:15.620" Title="How can I recover content from an open source project host that has shut down?" Tags="|codehaus|project-management|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="10" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:50:11.627" Score="9" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I work on new libraries and tools I potentially would like them to get contributors and activity. However, I'm not sure what I could to in order to encourage more participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a project owner, how can I make my open source project more accessible to new participants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:15:38.190" Title="How do I structure my project in an inviting way?" Tags="|project-management|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-06-24T00:28:17.773" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="11" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:51:04.447" Score="9" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF&quot;&gt;All relevant GIF patents expired in 2004&lt;/a&gt;. Use freely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MP3 is patented in the united states, so &lt;strong&gt;theoretically&lt;/strong&gt; you can use it in an open source... if it won't be published in the USA. TL;DR - Don't use freely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;H264 - Also patented in the US. Same as MP3 above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, patents are national affairs, but if you want people of that country to be able to really utilize the open-sourceness of your application, do not use patented formats or software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That applies to anything with patent, anything with a licence that doesn't permit distribution/modification (basically, only use MIT and forms of GPL), and anything else that might prevent someone from legally downloading, modifying and distributing your application, under the laws of any country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="40" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T18:00:06.457" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:00:06.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="58" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:51:13.500" Score="18" ViewCount="1648" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am developing a commercial product, but one heavily based on open source software. Further suppose one of the open source projects I use has a permissive license (such as Apache 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point, I realize I need to make significant changes to that open source component. I have two choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Work with the upstream team to get my changes accepted into the open source version of the component.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create an internal fork of the component and make my changes there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first option is obviously ideal, but there are considerations which may lead me to the second option. Some that I see are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The changes may not be acceptable/desirable to the people managing the upstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The timeframe for getting changes into the upstream project and available for use may not fit within my own schedule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I may wish to implement some proprietary features within the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point does it become desirable/practical to take the second path, and what are seen as the major drawbacks to doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:39:14.697" Title="When should I consider creating a private fork of a suitably licensed project for commercial use?" Tags="|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:51:30.943" Score="39" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;The well-known MIT (or &amp;quot;X11/MIT&amp;quot; license reads):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I really need the long &amp;quot;shouting&amp;quot; warranty disclaimer at the end? And does it &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be in all-caps? Or can I trim/lowercase it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many of my projects I lowercase it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software prodided &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I would prefer to just replace it with something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is provided &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot;, without warranty of any kind. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure if it is &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; enough to do so ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am from the E.U. (Netherlands).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user38" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T09:46:57.140" Title="Can I change the caps to lowercase in licenses?" Tags="|law|license-file|warranty|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:53:46.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Forking&quot; is the process of creating either a private version of an open source project, or creating a competing version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classic example of the latter is OpenOffice vs LibreOffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but a split in the developer community, a form of schism. -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;fork&quot; is used to reflect that such an event often represents a &quot;fork in a road&quot; where an existing project begins to take two (often diverging) development paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:40:00.930" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T13:40:00.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:53:46.380" Score="0" Body="For questions about creating either a private or competing version of an existing open project." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:25:22.220" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T13:25:22.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:54:21.860" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can recover that specific link via the way back machine:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20150507060802/http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MASPECTJ-131&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20150507060802/http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MASPECTJ-131&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;codehaus says from their termination page that you can redirect your projects:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you would like your projects links redirected then please see our redirector repository - create a sane squashed pull request and it will be added to the redirection system - you may add some 302s initially, but ultimately all redirects will be amended to 301s over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codehaus.org/termination/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.codehaus.org/termination/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to google code shutting down, as well as codehaus, short term solution would be to switch to GitHub; however that poses the same problem(s)/risk(s) that you are running into now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a believer in owning your data - I would suggest setting up your repos on servers and domains that you own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="51" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:08:13.847" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:08:13.847" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:56:12.417" Score="26" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a collaborator in a pretty popular open source project hosted on GitHub. We have a problem where people constantly show up in the issue tracker and post questions about the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dealing with these questions is time consuming, it pings a lot of people and is generally annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I easily direct people to the right support channels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have a contributing.md file that suggests the right channels and that hasn't been working out too well for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="13434" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T19:30:42.763" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T09:27:39.717" Title="How do I stop people from opening questions in the issue tracker?" Tags="|github|issue-tracking|support|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:57:20.350" Score="20" ViewCount="470" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to launch my current project as Open Source. People should feel free to do with the code whatever they want and luckily there are quite a few licensing options to choose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm looking for something very permissive. I've heard of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; and that sounds about right. There are other variants around as well though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I care? I mean, people should do with the code whatever they want. What would be the difference between not putting any copyright on it and putting such a very permissive copyright on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:24:48.727" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T21:25:58.170" Title="Very permissive license" Tags="|license-recommendation|permissive|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:59:13.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Documentation is key&lt;/strong&gt; - Not just usage documentation, but also development documentation! How do I build your project? How do I run tests? How do the internal APIs work? Github has the wiki feature for that, although you can just create a directory with a bunch of .md files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make your directory structure predictable&lt;/strong&gt; - Look at how other successful projects did it. Make it clear what's the source code, what are the tests, where is the entry point, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Making an attractive website helps&lt;/strong&gt; - With GitHub, just create a branch called &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; and your project's website is instantly live.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it clear how contributions are expected to arrive&lt;/strong&gt; - Don't be afraid to ask for things before accepting a PR. If you have tests, require a successful build. If you have a coding style, ask contributors to adhere to it (some languages offer style enforcement for that). Also, make it clear that not just PRs are considered contributions, opening issues, asking (and answering) questions, writing documentations, are all equally helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be active&lt;/strong&gt; - You got an issue? Respond to it! Someone asked a question? Answer! The better you respond, the better people will feel about participating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make it fun, be helpful, not annoying&lt;/strong&gt; - Things that may seem obvious to you, as the core developer, will not be obvious to newcomers. Encourage people to contribute when they find bugs, support them on the way, make the journey fun for them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remain professional&lt;/strong&gt; - No bad humor, no racist jokes, no annoying comments. Please.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, many people will be willing to put the time and submit a pull request when guided and assisted properly. It makes them feel good, as well as making valuable contributions to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T17:59:13.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="42" CreationDate="2015-06-23T17:59:28.637" Score="30" ViewCount="17188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard both terms thrown around, but I'm a bit unclear as to how the licenses differ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is copyleft different to a permissive license? Is copyleft just the standard for open source licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:26:44.823" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T21:26:44.823" Title="What's the difference between permissive and copyleft licenses?" Tags="|copyleft|terminology|permissive|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:00:32.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where are some points you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create a website&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a no-brainer: a website can inform about your project and can be the gathering point. You haven't host a website yourself, if you have the information in the web on some point (for instance on the main site for your project on a project hosting site like github), then it works too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have a public readable version control&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way it is easy to access your source code and therefore makes it easier for others to join.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have a clear policy on submits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it easy for possible contributors to understand what to do to participate. This could include stuff on how the code has to be formatted, which quality you expects and many other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create good documentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you look for contributors, this primarily means developer-doc. That includes source-code-documentation, but also some documentation with entry-points for beginning contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have automatic build-scripts and automated tests&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An automated build-script makes it easier to get from source to a running program. Document which tools (compiler for instance) are expected for the buildscript to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having automated tests makes it easier for potential contributors to check, if they break anything with their changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Have a clear goal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Define a goal of your software, so contributors can check if they want to go in the same direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide communication channels&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That not only includes communication channels to you, but to each other in the forming community around your project. So this includes mailinglist, forum, irc-channel, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T18:07:37.673" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:07:37.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:02:52.313" Score="26" ViewCount="1520" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some projects have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (as example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt&quot;&gt;CLA of the Apache foundation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it for? What are the consequences when I don't have one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T12:06:22.137" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T02:00:20.653" Title="What are the advantages of adding a Contributor License Agreement to a project?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:02:54.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well this is my personal opinion. I think there is no really perfect way for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm participating in many open source projects, often on GitHub and sometimes on &quot;private&quot; hosted repositories. Due to this participation, I have some things I've always check before participating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there clean &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_conventions&quot;&gt;Coding Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a team structure behind the project? Can I see those team structure? It's very important for me, as if there is some serious issue or a bug which tends to be exploitable, I need someone who could be consulted and someone who feels responsible for it. If the project is unstructured, it may fail in a short time. If I have this feeling, I won't waste my precious time for this project. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a good documentation of all the things which already exist? Most developer tend to leave the documentation out until a certain state is achieved. If I would like to join in the first days, this may stop me. As I don't want to spend hours or days reading through one or two classes to find their reason for being. This is just awful. If you document it right from the start, it will help you to get (fast) new participants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And my last reason, and maybe the most important. Can I commit on my own in branches or forks? Or do I have to put a diff to an issue tracker. This isn't the hardest thing. But a diff in an issue tracker tends to lie around for days or maybe months. After some months the patch may be obsolete and needs to be refactored at all. This means, my work was just for the garbage can. If I could push it to an fork or a seperate branch and generate a pull-request, it will be collected and may be merged faster. No one loves to waste his work. :-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this will help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:02:54.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:04:07.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft emphasises that you can not do &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; with the source. The usual example is GPL-style restrictions, which do not allow using the code in a closed-source project&lt;sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/220742/using-full-gpl-libraries-in-software-as-a-service-saas-models&quot;&gt;except as SAAS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. (The “left” is sometimes interpreted as: you have to give your own code &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt; if you want to have the benefits of somebody else's open-source project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses do allow this kind of reuse; their main requirement is that of attribution. (But I suppose public-domain / CC0, where not even attribution is necessary, would also be considered permissive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T21:26:14.443" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:04:45.547" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for something very permissive then you do have to use a license. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/&quot;&gt;GitHub's help page about licensing&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, which is a permissive, popular and OSI-approved license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:04:45.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="41" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:06:49.023" Score="16" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have published a project under the Apache 2.0 (or similarly permissive license). Internally I have another version of the same project, which provides significantly extended functionality and is intended to be sold commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial version obviously is heavily based on the open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license must I apply to the commercial version? Does it apply to all the code, or only the original open source files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T19:17:02.923" Title="What license must I use on a commercial version of an open source project?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:10:02.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an excellent site that explains license types in plain English. &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The TL;DR version to that, that if you want a permissive license, go with either &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt;, the main difference being that Apache License requires modifiers to keep a disclaimer and copyright line untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:10:02.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:10:18.037" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&lt;/a&gt; also has a listing of licenses as well as comprehensive listings of what they are capable of. For your purposes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot;&gt;The Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; provides an ultimately high freedom for your code to be reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:10:18.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="31" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:10:51.180" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify, since I don't know if &quot;platform&quot; is the right word: I'm talking about things like GitHub or the late Google Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What features should I look for in a code publishing platform so that people can suggest patches as easily as possible, and preferably have them approved as easily as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; talking about publicizing it, attracting developers, or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorDisplayName="anon" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T18:18:48.130" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:18:48.130" Title="What should I look for in a platform to make my project easy to edit?" Tags="|contributor|software|accessibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T18:27:01.020" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="32" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:12:04.267" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patents generally are regional, so US-patents don't work in the EU and vice versa. But in general, most big companies claim their patent in most jurisdictions worldwide, especially US, EU and Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:12:04.267" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:12:32.313" Score="95" ViewCount="15357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found out that the license I picked for my project does not quite do what I wanted it do (bad research).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to change the license. Is it as simple as changing the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; in the root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:58:09.993" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T10:25:17.707" Title="How can a project be relicensed?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="34" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="19" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:12:38.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would go with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-2-clause-license-%28freebsd%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause&lt;/a&gt; licence, because they're for one thing well known (as stated by Carpetsmoker), and because they can't hold you liable when something goes wrong and because (as well stated by Carpetsmoker) is some people might get all funky about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-wtf-you-want-to-public-license-v2-%28wtfpl-2.0%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Do What The F*ck You Want&lt;/a&gt; licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not restricted to a license that's already out there; you can make your own license if you want to. The PHP Group uses their &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/php-license-3.0-%28php%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;own license&lt;/a&gt;. You could make it so that people can do what the hell they would want to do with it, but can't hold you liable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside to having your own license is that it won't be recognized as much as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/php-license-3.0-%28php%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PHP License&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:25:58.170" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T21:25:58.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="35" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="39" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:13:12.587" Score="28" ViewCount="3415" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have scientific software that I would like to release under the BSD 3-clause licence, but it includes some old code that was released under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I still package it all and release as BSD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:32:42.567" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T14:38:37.343" Title="If I include some GPL code in my project, can I release it as BSD?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="36" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:13:42.343" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Programmers.SE has a similar question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/30329/can-i-remove-all-caps-and-shorten-the-disclaimer-on-my-license&quot;&gt;Can I remove all-caps and shorten the disclaimer on my License?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tim Post's answer (which he says was derived from advice from a lawyer) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The caps allow you to say 'no way could they have missed the disclaimer, it is hardly fine print!' This is important in a license or EULA that non-lawyers must read and accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between 'express' and 'implied'. Some areas have laws that allow people to 'imply' a warranty, even though one was not explicitly offered, unless you make certain specifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He suggested not making any changes to existing licenses, as that basically creates a whole new (and likely weaker) license...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the text of a disclaim is certainly risky business. Your proposed change, for example, merely says the software is &amp;quot;provided... without warranty of any kind&amp;quot;. It is unclear whether that disclaims &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;implicit warranties&lt;/a&gt; or only claims the absence of explicit warranties. Implicit warranties are automatically attached to qualifying transactions performed under a jurisdiction that applies them, so you saying, &amp;quot;I don't offer any warranties on this good/service,&amp;quot; doesn't clearly &amp;quot;turn off&amp;quot; the automatic implicit warranties that may apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the caps, there's a bit more hope. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adamsdrafting.com/all-capitals/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This post, apparently by a contract writer&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, section 2-316(2) [&lt;em&gt;of the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.)&lt;/em&gt;] states that a disclaimer of the implied warranty of merchantability must be conspicuous. But section 1-201(10) of the U.C.C. specifies that &amp;quot;language in the body of a form is 'conspicuous' if it is in larger or other contrasting type or color&amp;quot;; it doesn’t say anthing about all capitals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Amercian General Finance, Inc. v. Bassett, 285 F.3d 882 (9th Cir. 2002), debunked the notion that text needs to be in all caps to be conspicuous. I particularly like this sentence from that case: &amp;quot;Lawyers who think their caps lock keys are instant 'make conspicuous' buttons are deluded.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical example of a non-caps disclaimer, Mozilla is ready to stand by their normal-cased bold-text disclaimer as sufficiently &amp;quot;conspicuous&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their terms of service&lt;/a&gt;. That said, I don't see how a plain-text license document (without rich-text formatting) could contain differently-sized or differently-colored text, so capital letters appear to be the best we can do in plain text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also have grave concerns about altering a license document you received from someone else. If you plan to do this, absolutely consult a lawyer. (Actually, if you plan to do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; detailed in this post, consult a lawyer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:13:42.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:15:39.037" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is it for?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many companies that open source their code want to keep control over the software. The CLA helps for that. Also it can be used for some legal issues. Usually it demands, that you guarantee you violate no rights of others if you contribute to the project and that you transfer the rights to the project-owner, while you get the guarantee your contribution is open-source is given in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the consequences when I don't have one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you don't own the code of other contributors, you cannot go against the OS-license under which the code was contributed to you. So you might not be able to switch the license (at least if it isn't a compatible switch) later on without removing that code. You also might be liable for any rights violated by this contribution. Also you can enforce violations against the license only for the parts you hold the copyright for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I need one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends. Usually for smaller projects i wouldn't bother, it is a hurdle for potential contributors. If the project gets bigger it might be useful though. Formulating a good CLA is difficult though and might be a job for a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upsides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Might secure against possible problems with the law (assuming your contributors do bad stuff).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can give you more control over the codebase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downsides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be a hurdle for potential contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can lead to a rift in the community, if many of your contributors disagree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T20:07:54.240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:07:54.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:17:22.583" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wrote the code, you can do whatever you want with it. You own the code, you own the copyright. A license is  you granting others certain rights, but as the author you have not given up any of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you (probably) can't do is then turn around and take legal action against someone who's still using your code under the terms of the old license (though this hardly matters as you're going to a more permissive license). They'd probably be &quot;grandfathered in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't own all the code, you can not relicense code that others wrote (obviously). It was hard to tell from your question if you owned everything or not; if you're talking about bundling libraries with it that are GPL licensed (and not written by you), you may be in violation of the GPL if you distribute them (and you certainly can't re-license them). This would require a lot more information, however, and is probably deserving of its own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR — If you're the copyright holder, you determine the license and can do whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:17:22.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:17:29.690" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not with the license as it is. You will need to contact all the licensors of the GPL code, and request that they release it to you in a license that is compatible with the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can release your code as GPL too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:17:29.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:20:42.510" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot. By including GPL-code, you are including a dependency of GPL-protected code, and therefore your code is only derived work from it. The terms of GPL requires that derived work is also published under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the GPL faq:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any program which uses it has to be under the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, because the program as it is actually run includes the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastEditorUserId="61" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T18:32:41.317" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:32:41.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="27" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:22:18.017" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all: if you or your company are the only contributors to the commercial project and you don't use contributions made by thirds to the OS-part, you can do whatever you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use contributions made to the OS-version of your software you are bound to the license it is under (or you have an Contributors license agreement, but let's assume you have not). That means in the case of Apache 2.0 not much: you have to credit the original contributors mostly. As long as you keep these conditions inflicted by the OSS-license, you can create a license for the commercial version as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T19:17:02.923" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T19:17:02.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:22:33.473" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/policy/copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; invented the term Copyleft. Here's what they have to say about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So copyleft implies a stronger set of restrictions in the license than the terms &amp;quot;Free software&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Open Source&amp;quot; imply. Copyleft licenses &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; both free and open source licenses, but not all licenses that are free software or open source licenses are Copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft denotes a type of FOSS license that prevents, through license terms, the &amp;quot;proprietization&amp;quot; of FOSS code. If a license is not Copyleft, but it is FOSS, the user may (depending on the exact terms of the license), be able to release binary-only copies of the software, with limited distribution (e.g. license fees and criminal penalties for those who distribute the binaries without authorization from the developers), and without providing the modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the FSF, the Four Freedoms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license ensures that anyone who receives the binary version of the software is entitled to the source version (including any source modifications that went into any binaries they received), &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; that person, in turn, is also &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; to pass down the four freedoms to anyone else that &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; pass said binaries/code on to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-copyleft FOSS license could allow one person to receive the four freedoms as part of obtaining a copy of the code, but then that person can &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; whether they want to give the four freedoms (or any individual one of the freedoms) to someone else that they give the software to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that, based on the way the copyleft was defined, a license that &lt;strong&gt;requires&lt;/strong&gt; a recipient of the source or binaries to respect &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; freedoms, but not all of them, &lt;strong&gt;is not a copyleft license&lt;/strong&gt;. It is only copyleft if each recipient of the software must grant &lt;strong&gt;all four&lt;/strong&gt; freedoms to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; they give a copy to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider these simplistic licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are given the four freedoms with respect to this software. It's up to you if you want to give others any of the freedoms or not when you distribute it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are given the four freedoms with respect to this software. In addition, if you distribute this software to anyone else, you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; grant them Freedom 0 and Freedom 1. It's up to you if you want to give them Freedom 2, and you &lt;strong&gt;may not&lt;/strong&gt; give them Freedom 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; are given the four freedoms with respect to this software. In addition, if you distribute this software to anyone else, you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; grant them &lt;strong&gt;all four Freedoms&lt;/strong&gt;; otherwise, you violate this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first license is a standard permissive license (similar to the BSD license), and is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; copyleft because it does not &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; all four freedoms to be passed on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second license is a weird license (I've never seen one quite like this in practice) that &lt;em&gt;prohibits&lt;/em&gt; the passing-on of one freedom; &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; (optionally) another; and &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; two. But the requiring of the first two isn't enough to make it copyleft. It may be free software for the person receiving a copy initially, but it cannot be free software after that, because freedom 3 is prohibited from that point onwards in the distribution chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third license is a standard, copyleft-compliant license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to keep in mind that non-copyleft licenses can transform from being free/open source software to non-free, non-open source software licenses, because the enforcement of the preservation of the freedoms is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in place. Consider this distribution chain, where each letter is a person, and &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; is the person who originally wrote the first copy of the software and determined its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A -&amp;gt; B -&amp;gt; C -&amp;gt; D -&amp;gt; E&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a non-copyleft FOSS license, the only person guaranteed to have all four freedoms is &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; (well, technically, if he distributed it as FOSS, then &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; should have gotten all four freedoms, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is licensed under copyleft, then if every person, all the way down to &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;, does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have all four freedoms in respect to the software, then someone violated the license terms set forth by &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, and is liable for copyright infringement!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, when we talk about non-copyleft FOSS licenses, we have to ask the question, &lt;em&gt;free for &lt;strong&gt;whom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;? -- but in the case of copyleft licensed software, the answer is, &lt;em&gt;free for &lt;strong&gt;everyone&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:46:42.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:22:34.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses state the allowed uses, permissions and methods of operation within an area of interest. They state what actions are allowed to take place, and what actions are forbidden. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses normally take controls of issues such as intellectual property, monetary rights, as well as attribution and modification rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:08:40.513" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:08:40.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:22:34.037" Score="0" Body="Licenses help define the allowed uses and methods of operation within a given area of interest." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:08:29.273" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:08:29.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="35" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:23:40.513" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wrote the code yourself, then you're the licensor and can use the code as you see fit, &lt;em&gt;however&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL does not allow sub-licensing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you used code from other sources (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;), you'll need to attribute the code used, and review the license the code uses if the author/owner needs to give their express permission;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you released your code under a licence then change the license used, the previous licence &lt;strong&gt;still applies&lt;/strong&gt; to those who use the code under that license. You will be unable to take any legal action against them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (very obviously) can't 'pinch' code from somewhere and then re-license it (as your own creation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="82" LastEditorUserId="82" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T16:26:13.677" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T16:26:13.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:27:21.120" Score="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the only contributor: You can do it, without further problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise: It is difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If others contributed to your project, you have to respect their rights. So you can only assume the rights given to you by the open source license. Your options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact all contributors and ask for their permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;switch to a compatible license (this means, if your original license is permissive, it might have a lot compatible options, if it is copyleft, the compatible options may be limited)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove contributions of others before switching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a note: your old version of the software released under the old license can still be used under the terms of the old license. If that license is pretty permissive that may include the relicensing under some other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-18T10:16:54.387" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T10:16:54.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:27:23.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need one if you plan to re license your open source project under a different license. E.g. a commercial license. The agreement gives you full control of the contributed code so that you don't need contributor's permission later if you want to sell commercial closed source license for your open source project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:27:23.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:28:25.953" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the copyright holder you can choose to re-license your code as you see fit. What you cannot do is revoke a license if it was given in perpetuity or before the term of the license expires. What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are able to license your code to different people using different licenses. You can even let them choose which license to use. You can sell the license, give it away, and whatever else you want to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once someone has been granted a license then they are free to use the code in the terms of that license, though. Many open source licenses have provisions for the license being &quot;perpetual&quot;, lasting forever. So, if you offer your code, for example, using the GPL license, then the people who use that license to use the code have perpetual rights to continue doing that. You cannot revoke those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do, is release a new version with a different license, then people using that new version will need to have new terms in place (or they could &quot;fork&quot; the project and continue using and maintaining the older, licensed version, them selves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: No, you cannot revoke a license, but you can change it for new users, and you can have multiple options for licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:28:25.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:30:02.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A contributor license agreement can do several things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A CLA can &lt;strong&gt;require contributors to transfer copyright&lt;/strong&gt; of all contributions to the legal entity (person or corporation) responsible for your project. For example, the GNU project requires all contributions to have the copyrights transferred to the FSF. Without this provision, &lt;strong&gt;you cannot enforce copyright over all of your project&lt;/strong&gt;, since you don't own it. For example, if Alice writes module X for your project, and then Bob starts distributing module X in an unlawful way (e.g., your project is GPL-licensed and he's violating the GPL), you may not have legal standing to sue if Alice never transferred copyright of module X to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I suppose this kind of &quot;CLA&quot; is not strictly a &lt;em&gt;licensing&lt;/em&gt; agreement at all (since copyright rights are being transfer to a new owner rather than licensed by the current owner), and is referred to as a &lt;strong&gt;CTA&lt;/strong&gt; (copyright transfer agreement).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A CLA can grant you the necessary rights to &lt;strong&gt;re-license the project&lt;/strong&gt; under a new license. By default, only a copyright holder can re-license a work, so a project with no CLA and hundreds of contributors needs to do a lot of legwork to have past contributors to agree to re-license their code. If you own all the copyrights (by authorship or transfer) or have a CLA that grants you generous re-licensing rights, you can re-license the whole project very easily.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A CLA can &lt;strong&gt;protect you from copyright infringement performed by your contributors&lt;/strong&gt;. If Alice contributes some code, but then later it turns out she didn't have the legal write to give you that code. Bob actually wrote that code in a proprietary project and Alice just contributed it to your project without Bob's permission. You're committing copyright infringement by distributing Bob's code, and now Bob wants to sue you. If Alice contractually agreed, via a well-written CLA, that none of her contributions were infringing, you can more easily shift the blame back to her.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a CLA may scare off potential contributors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They may not wish to assign copyright to you, either because they are uncomfortable with losing their copyright or because they are afraid you may re-license to project to a license they dislike.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They may find the task of reading and signing a legal document onerous and uncomfortable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T02:00:20.653" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T02:00:20.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:31:09.183" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are not the sole author then it's more complicated. All contributors must agree to the license change explicitly. This agreement can be under the form of a Contributor License Agreement which states that the project owner is allowed to change the license or the previous license itself which grants the rights to distribute under a compatible license. If you don't have that then you will need to track down all the contributors and get them to agree. If any refuse the change then you are out of luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the only person who wrote the content in the project then you own the rights to relicense as much as you want. With the caveat that you can't revoke previous licenses the project was released under unless that license specifically has has a clause for revoking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for example, if the project was ever released under GPL then that version will forever be licensed under the GPL license which grants its rights to everyone who can get a version, and there is &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; you can do to revoke that as specified in the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:31:09.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="90" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:32:23.873" Score="17" ViewCount="3336" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put simply, is there any way to find out how widely used a given open source project is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, for example, I am looking for a serialization library. I can imagine various metrics to help choose among the many available, but a major one would be, &quot;How widely used is this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wide adoption tends to suggest either a very mature project, or one with a very active community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Python, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi&quot;&gt;PyPI&lt;/a&gt; at least provides download statistics. On GitHub you can see the number of forks as a guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a developer embarking on a new project, and wanting to leverage an OSP, this type of information is very valuable in making their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source movement is not just about publishers, but consumers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="1180" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T13:43:22.427" LastActivityDate="2021-10-31T08:39:21.010" Title="How can I find usage statistics for an open source project?" Tags="|statistics|software-use|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="86" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:32:47.097" Score="49" ViewCount="8202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, I was working on a software company that used some copyrighted JAR dependencies that they had bought from a medium-size obscure private company for a very expensive price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time using their JARs, I figured out that most of the content was a GPL'd software that they repackaged, obfuscated, encrypted and started to sell as if they made it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly a violation of the GPL terms (don't remember if it was GPL v2 or v3, but it is still a violation regardless of that). However, no one seems to care and I never heard about some lawyer suing somebody who is not a giant global player like Microsoft or Google due to GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, how would I prove that there was a GPL violation, since the software was obfuscated, encrypted and can't be legally acquired easily? Further, who should/could sue them and how? Since I can't answer those positively, I might sadly conclude that GPL restrictions can't be enforced in practice and thus are just empty words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this question deeply depends on the country and regional laws, but I expect that answers might give some light about what may happen in practice in most place of the world about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:30:31.197" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T03:59:02.473" Title="What can/should I do when I see a violation to GPL restrictions?" Tags="|gpl|law|enforcement|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="62" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:33:47.053" Score="21" ViewCount="1429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a project be licensed as &quot;open source&quot;, yet place a restriction on who can utilize the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if my software falls under software export controls, can I continue to license it as &quot;open&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:02:00.877" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:02:00.877" Title="Can I restrict who can utilize my software?" Tags="|licensing|restrictions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="78" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:34:56.170" Score="41" ViewCount="1485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project, currently by myself. It's a side project, I'm not expecting to make money on it. It's posted on GitHub, and I'm going to be building a project page for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once it's built, how do I get other programmers to want to contribute? I am checking in code constantly, but no other contributors makes it hard to continue on my own. The whole purpose of me releasing it as Open Source was to get other contributors who know more about programming than I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditorDisplayName="user38" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T01:26:32.940" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T18:02:44.503" Title="How do I attract new programmers?" Tags="|collaboration|marketing|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="66" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:35:57.153" Score="47" ViewCount="4787" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Google, Open Source is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be that the product seems to be available without restrictions to the public, as you can redistribute and modify it at will. It sounds like open source is like throwing something into the public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a difference between works classified as open source, and works in the public domain? What's the difference between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T22:56:08.190" Title="Does open source qualify as being part of the public domain?" Tags="|law|public-domain|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:38:31.600" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closing them on sight should give a clear signal that asking in the wrong places is not appreciated. From there, it is possible to guide the users making an honest effort to look in the &lt;code&gt;contributing.md&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:38:31.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:39:07.267" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a third option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a fork and publish it under the same license as the original&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your changes might not be desirable to the original upstream but that doesn't mean somebody else couldn't find use for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:39:07.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:39:14.697" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem with a private fork is that you now have to do the maintenance work of merging any changes made on the upstream version. This work will become more and more the further your forks diverge because you will encounter more and more conflicts (including some non-obvious ones). There are, however, still situations where you might still want to do a fork:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The upstream project is practically dead and you don't expect many future updates from them anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software already fulfills all your requirements (except those they won't implement) and so you believe you won't need any further updates from them anyway (even when security related).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to make changes to the software which are so significant that future updates won't apply to you anyway (but then why aren't you developing from scratch?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way: When you use the software only internally, you don't even need a permissive license. Most copyleft licenses (like the GPL) only require you to give away your sourcecode when you give away the binary. When you keep it to yourself, nobody can force you to license anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:39:14.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:39:36.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source does not mean without restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the GPL license does not allow you to distribute the project without the source also being available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:39:36.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:40:02.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source usually adds some restrictions. Common restrictions are the question of attribution of the original author, advertise with the software or relicense the software or modifications of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:40:02.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:42:18.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, in places that have a concept of &quot;public domain&quot; that normally means &quot;without copyright&quot;. However, Open Source Software generally means software which is licensed in such a way that it may be used freely (free as in freedom / libre, monetary cost has nothing to do with it). However, for something to be licensed it must still be under copyright (the license is just a limited grant of rights, but does not give you full rights to do whatever you want).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:42:18.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:42:18.360" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in&#xA;  a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the&#xA;  program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic&#xA;  research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a license restricting who can use your software isn't open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the question regarding export restrictions: yes you can license it as OSS, even if it falls under export restrictions. Your license allow the usage, but laws might restrict it. That doesn't mean your license isn't open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:13:09.170" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:13:09.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="73" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:42:24.353" Score="4" ViewCount="695" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using an open source library under GPL in a closed source project. If the libraries license changes from GPL to LGPL, does it mean the previous code (written when the library was GPL) should be made open source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T22:53:36.017" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T22:53:36.017" Title="What happens when a GPL licence is changed to a LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:43:00.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you need a strictly noticeable presentation of the disclaimer paragraph in order for it to fulfill the legal definition of &quot;conspicuous&quot; text. For plaintext, this means &lt;code&gt;YOUR ONLY WAY IS ALL CAPS&lt;/code&gt;, but if your license is not in plain text, you can learn / copy from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://bandcamp.com/terms_of_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bandcamp Terms of use&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] you won't find any 8-point type, or long sections of TOTALLY UNREADABLE ALL-CAPS intended to fulfill the legal definition of &quot;conspicuous&quot; (we're pretty sure Your Honor will accept &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;yellow, bold text&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; instead)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:43:00.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:43:49.193" Score="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a copyright context, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;public domain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a term which means the set of creative works not under copyright, because the work's copyright has either expired, never existed (such as U.S. government works), or been forfeited&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Generally, no special restrictions apply to the reuse of public domain works, and they can be freely modified and redistributed without limitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Open source software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as defined by the Open Source Initiative's &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, means software whose source code is available and can be freely modified and distributed. Open source software is typically still under copyright (i.e., typically &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; in the public domain), but the author grants rights to users via a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source software and public domain software are by no means the same thing, but there is some overlap. Open source software &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be in the public domain, and public domain software &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; satisfy the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UwnNO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Venn diagram showing intersection of Open Source and Public Domain&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary differences in definitions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Public domain software might not include source code.&lt;/strong&gt; Since public domain software automatically allows redistribution and modification, it satisfies &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; all of the open source criteria automatically, but not quite. It is notably missing the requirement that the program's source code be publicly available. It is therefore possible to have a piece of software in public domain that fails to satisfy the open source definition because its corresponding source code is unavailable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source software can grant a more limited set of rights than public domain.&lt;/strong&gt; Like public domain works, open source software grants the right to modify and redistribute the work. However, an open source license may impose other restrictions that do not exist on public domain works. For example, the GNU GPL requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: any derived work that uses GPL-licensed material may only be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Such a restriction does not violate the open source definition, but it is certainly far stricter than the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source software can be released under different licenses by the author.&lt;/strong&gt; The author of a copyrighted open source program can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue multiple licenses&lt;/a&gt; on the work. A common case of this is when an author licenses a program under a copyleft license, but will also issue individual proprietary licenses for a fee. Users can either get the software free of charge under copyleft rules, or pay money to get the software under another license. (See OSS Watch's article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dual-Licensing as a Business Model&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and the Free Software Foundation's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selling Exceptions to the GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.) Such a scheme is impossible with public domain software, because it relies on the author licensing the work's copyright in different ways. Since public domain software has no copyright, there is nothing to license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source licenses &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; grant patent rights.&lt;/strong&gt; Public domain software does not have any &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; on it, but its reuse may still be restricted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;patents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, if it contains an implementation of a patented mechanism. If you redistributed such patent-encumbered public domain software, you would not be liable for copyright infringement but may be liable for patent infringement. Some open source licenses, however, expressly grant you patent rights. For example, an author who releases software under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache Public License&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL (version 3)&lt;/a&gt; expressly grants recipients the right to use any of the authors' patents that apply to the software, so there is no risk of violating the author's patents.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Not all open source licenses do this&lt;/em&gt;, but it is an option for open source software under a license, whereas it is not an option for license-free non-copyrighted public domain software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that it is unclear if premature dedication to the public domain is truly possible in most jurisdictions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; If the author illegally used &lt;em&gt;someone else's&lt;/em&gt; patented mechanism without permission in the software, a downstream redistributor could be legally liable for that infringement.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T18:52:41.090" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T18:52:41.090" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:45:01.613" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Public Domain in the US means the copyright of something is owned by nobody, and cannot be owned by anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source is a license model. The creator of the software holds the copyright, and grants others a license to use it, under some conditions. The differences are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ownership. When something is in the Public Domain, nobody has intellectual property rights to it. When something is made available under some open source license, the creator keeps the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Terms. When something is in the public domain, there are no license terms to follow because there is no license. You are permitted to use the work whichever way you see fit without one. When something is licensed under an open source license, each license sets its own set of conditions, which can differ drastically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:18:09.457" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:18:09.457" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:49:11.633" Score="9" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been provided a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sourcemod.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SourceMod&lt;/a&gt; plugin for a community game server. I was provided the compiled plugin, but not the source code. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://svn.alliedmods.net/viewvc.cgi/trunk/public/licenses/LICENSE.txt?revision=2255&amp;amp;root=sourcemod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sourcemod.net/license.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;explanation&lt;/a&gt; provided describes all SourceMod plugins as derivatives, meaning I should also receive a copy of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one enforce such a requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clearer, this is not about the SourceMod source code. That is available at the links I provided. This is about source code from the derived plugins made by a third party. The plugin is not listed on the SourceMod page, thus the source code is not available via their forums. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:02:19.200" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:02:19.200" Title="How does one enforce aspects of a license?" Tags="|licensing|enforcement|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:49:40.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Public domain implies that the author &lt;em&gt;waives all rights&lt;/em&gt;, possibly including personal rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not necessarily applicable to open-source (though it can be) - open-source software can be licensed, which removes it from public domain. Open source software can also be explicitly declared as public domain (which, technically, is a requirement to be considered as such - work without an obvious copyright notice or license is assumed to be proprietary and non-copyable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:49:40.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:49:59.953" Score="11" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attract a community of users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Insert some bugs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wait for the pull requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is only partly in jest - the second step will happen by accident without you planning for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to find a way to build a community and get people using the product, just as for any piece of commercial software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Visit forums where likely users hang out, and sell it a little&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Develop some whizbang app based on your library which will attract people&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blog about it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you don't expect to make money, you still need to sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="95" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:39:19.967" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:39:19.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="72" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:50:14.020" Score="23" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/26/65&quot;&gt;heard&lt;/a&gt; an open source license described as &quot;popular and OSI-approved&quot;. To that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/19/very-permissive-license#comment23_26&quot;&gt;someone asks&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is OSI approval important?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a great — and important — question in its own right. So, is OSI approval important, and if so, why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:58:57.200" Title="Is OSI approval important for a license?" Tags="|licensing|osi|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="71" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:50:14.020" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not that OSI (the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;) is particularly magical or their blessing &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt;, but that license proliferation is a problem, and the list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI-approved licenses&lt;/a&gt; helps solve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI themselves released a &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/proliferation-report&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proliferation report&lt;/a&gt; about a decade ago, describing three main issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too many options make it hard to choose a license.&lt;/strong&gt; As we see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/19/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, choosing a license &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; important, and an intimidating list may increase the barrier to choosing one at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licenses interfere with each other.&lt;/strong&gt; Not all licenses are compatible. This makes it hard to mix and match code, and this scales badly as more licenses are added.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's hard to understand the overall combination of multiple licenses.&lt;/strong&gt; In some ways, this is an extension of #2. Even if you do figure out how all of the licenses work together for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; project, it's hard to communicate the total impact to your users. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#2 and #3 are the big deals to me (partly coming from my perspective working in the Fedora Project, and partly coming as a long-time user of open source). Fedora tries to be very careful that our users can trust that the software we distribute is licensed correctly and can, in fact, be distributed. Every new license adds to the very real expense of analyzing the interactions. Take a look, for example, at Fedora's &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;packaging guidelines regarding licensing&lt;/a&gt;, and then at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main licensing &#xA;page for Fedora&lt;/a&gt;. Maintaining this documentation is a considerable effort and expense — let alone actually &lt;em&gt;applying&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this, I would add: &lt;strong&gt;writing a license is hard&lt;/strong&gt;. While they may seem to be written in English, licenses are actually written in &lt;em&gt;legal code&lt;/em&gt;, and various clauses which may seem clever to a  programmer may in fact present problems. Perhaps most famously, the clause &quot;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil&quot; in the JSON license sends lawyers into a tizzy, and fair enough, because who gets to decide? — if my daughter were to be asked, she might include classroom testing software under &quot;evil&quot;. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#Bad_Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fedora's list of &quot;bad&quot; licenses&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI list is quite large, and &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; from the list should cover all reasonable open source situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, while &quot;open source&quot; does not enjoy trademark protection, if the open source community sticks to a reasonably strong definition, it helps prevent companies from calling software which does not respect user freedoms in a meaningful way by this label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:58:57.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="63" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:50:49.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is already an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you relicense a project (and a license change from GPL to LGPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-to-relicense-a-project&quot;&gt;needs the permission of all contributors&lt;/a&gt;, I assume that this is given) does not change the license on the old code. So the previous code is still available under the GPL, nothing changes in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:50:49.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="68" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:53:07.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enforcement is difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First step would be to politely ask. The last step would be to bring it to court. The difficulty is to chose wisely the escalation steps in between and to decide when to stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:53:07.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:55:29.880" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you release your software under the GPL, it means you give anyone a license to use your software under some terms and agreements. If somebody violates the agreement, they are in breach of contract with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you can sue them in a court of law. Depending on how principled you are this may or may not be worth it. Damages rewarded are typically low. Few start actual lawsuits, though for example busybox has been known to persue their copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can contact the owners of the copyright who originally licensed the software under the GPL, and whatever action they choose to pursue further is their prerogative. They might take action, or they might allow them to go ahead and use their product in the way it is used now. They own the copyright, they get to decide what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the owners of the copyright happen to be the Free Software Foundation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;you can contact them here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link also holds some additional information of concrete good ideas in case you want to contact the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:46:22.763" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:46:22.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:56:51.990" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This works in much the same way that attracting users/a community for other things does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to look at, as suggested in the comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Community Building&lt;/a&gt;, which has some advice about drawing and keeping communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essential part is to be seen to be engaged: if you're not interested in your own project, why should anyone else be? Keep contributing your own commits and new features to your codebase, and others will see that it's active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also promote it wherever possible: if you can, use social media to reach other people. There are groups for programming related topics on many platforms, including Google+ and Reddit. Always be mindful of their community rules though - if they don't want you recruiting, don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:23.397" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T18:56:51.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:56:56.603" Score="15" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I publish photos under multiple Creative Commons licenses and often want to indicate the licensing in a short caption or comment on the photo online or in print. If one of them is dual licensed, how can I represent that in a way that will be recognized by as many people as possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My naive approach has been to simply concatenate the license names with &lt;code&gt;||&lt;/code&gt; as a separator (example: &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-SA || CC-BY-NC&lt;/code&gt;), which indicates a logical OR to me, but might mean nothing to non-programmers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:32:39.277" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T10:49:45.120" Title="What is the most concise unambiguous way to represent dual licensing of a work?" Tags="|attribution|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-06-23T18:57:43.750" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of things that you can do to get other programmers contributing to your open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Make the project useful for others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think most programmers would like to contribute to and improve a project that involves something that is useful to them. It doesn't have to be something for only programmers, but if the project is something that would only be useful to a few people, then other programmers who it isn't useful to probably won't want to contribute to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Write good, well-structured code&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Messy code might deter programmers away from contributing. They can probably understand most of it pretty quickly, but actually adding to and improving it is a lot harder. Of course, this is something you should always do, but I think it is especially important if you are trying to work with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ask others to contribute&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can never hurt to ask specific people you might know to contribute. There has been a number of times when I've asked someone here on Stack Exchange (usually Stack Overflow) if they want to work with me on a project. Many times, a project will catch fire as more and more programmers start contributing. You can start that with just asking one or two people to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Advertise your project&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways that you can advertise your project to try to get others interested in it. This can be done many different ways. If you have a blog, blog about it. Post it on Google+ or Twitter or some other type of social media platform. Talk about it on websites like SE or sites similar to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Build a community&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, you're gonna want to have your open source project become a community. As mentioned in other answers and in the comments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Community Building SE&lt;/a&gt; is a great place for questions on how to build a community. As the first programmers start to contribute to your project, you'll probably need to be the leader of your community (improve the project, fix bugs, etc.), but as more and more contributors come along, the community will start to build itself. You can also use the project page you mentioned as a forum for the community. I would also suggest possibly doing a chat room. Who knows, maybe if the community is big enough, it will build those stuff itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:06:36.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="80" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:00:32.487" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're correct in your last paragraph at least: the &lt;code&gt;||&lt;/code&gt; symbol will mean nothing to people who have no programming knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know that the only people visiting your project will be programmers, that's OK, but there are still less ambiguous ways to represent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the simplest way may be to simply say it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project is dual-licensed under &amp;lt;X&gt; and &amp;lt;Y&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a short caption, you can simply shorten the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;dual-licensed under &amp;lt;X&gt; &amp;lt;Y&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for a longer explanation, perhaps on the project website, you can expand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project is dual-licensed, using licenses &amp;lt;X&gt; and &amp;lt;Y&gt;. You may choose to use either license when using any of this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Substitute the second sentence for the relevant condition. If it's their option which license to use, tell them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T08:21:02.153" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:21:02.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:02:25.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is usually sufficient to state that the project is dual licensed under two licenses and list them in the format of a list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// This software (The source code, executables compiled from the&#xA;// source and attached documentation files within the repository)&#xA;// is dual licensed under:&#xA;// - The GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.0; and&#xA;// - The Apache Software License (ASL) Version 2.0.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:02:25.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="82" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:03:05.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you can spare words and it doesn't have to be language neutral, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You may use this work under the terms of either CC-BY-SA, or (at your option) CC-BY-NC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Your choice of CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-NC&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is similar to what the GNU project uses in their GPL versioning to allow using the current or any later versions (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;, under &quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&quot;). The latter is by me, so use at your own risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:03:05.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="68" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:09:15.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enforcing any restrictions imposed is difficult, and ultimately you may have to bring it to legal proceedings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step for any project, yours or someone else's, is to notify: if you spot something that doesn't comply, you should notify the project's author. They can deal with their own restrictions - you don't know if they've made an exception for this case or not. If you're the owner, your job is to notify the non-compliant: a polite email, simply saying you've noticed they don't do X and would they please do so, will suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to take it on further, there are various legal proceedings. Ultimately, the courts have your back because it's your work and someone is using it in a way they aren't permitted to. You may also be able to issue a DMCA takedown request, which is a legally-backed way of telling someone to remove something you don't want there. Assuming you have permission to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:09:15.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:13:11.530" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first step in any legal issues is to notify relevant people. Initially, you should notify the copied project's owner. Since you weren't part of the team, you don't know whether the owner made an exception for this case or not. The theory is that the owner should deal with their own copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the owner completely ignores you, then after a reasonable period of time you could send a &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; email to the offending party, stating that you've noticed they're doing X which is against the license terms and asking if there's some reason you haven't noticed. This achieves the effect of telling the offender that someone &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; noticed they're doing something wrong (if they are), and gives them a chance to stop; or it gives them the chance to explain that actually, what they're doing is perfectly legitimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software isn't yours, it's not your job to initiate any legal proceedings against the offending party, so leave that battle for those who should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:13:11.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="52" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:14:04.017" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you do not own the copyright on the software whose license is being infringed:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not up to you to prove there was a GPL violation. It is not up to you to enforce the license of software for which you do not own the copyright. None of your rights are being infringed, so you have no standing to take legal action against the copyright infringement. As a practical matter, how can you be sure that the owner of the GPL-licensed software did not allow this other vendor to use it under a separate agreement? It is possible that the other software vendor could have purchased a separate license from the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing you can do is to bring the issue to the attention of the copyright holder, who has the exclusive right to take legal action. If they want to take legal action, they can; if they don't want to, that's their decision to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, since the seller took unfair advantage by &lt;em&gt;lying about the authorship of the software&lt;/em&gt; during the sale, your company may be able to take legal action for fraud. (But I'm not a lawyer and couldn't say for sure.) Note that this is different from legal action for the GPL violation itself: you would take legal action for the seller's &lt;em&gt;deceit&lt;/em&gt; that caused you harm, rather than the seller's &lt;em&gt;infringement&lt;/em&gt; of the original author's copyright (which has harmed only the author, not you). This is no different from how it would work for any other software, open or proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; own the copyright on the software whose license is being infringed:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your copyright is being infringed, and you are entitled to take legal action. For assistance, you can contact the Free Software Foundation with details about the infringement. They state on their page about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Violations of the GNU Licenses&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The FSF acts on all GPL violations reported on FSF copyrighted code, and &lt;strong&gt;we offer assistance to any other copyright holder who wishes to do the same&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the FSF has a social interest in teaching people to respect free software licenses (especially the GPL, which they authored), they offer some degree of assistance in taking legal action against offenders. There may, of course, still be significant cost to you, depending on how much aid the FSF can afford to give, but the FSF is far and away your best starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T15:36:48.543" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T15:36:48.543" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:20:00.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't come across any single, centralized place where all usage statistics for open-source projects are combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all is not lost: many software download sites have a download counter. Instead of looking centrally, try going to the software's download page and looking for any stats it might have there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I haven't seen any libraries that do the job for you, but if you were to write your own (and release it as open-source!) then you could take the download location as an input and scan through it for statistics to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:20:00.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="88" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="210" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:20:57.047" Score="132" ViewCount="16729" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many open source projects I see involve having dedicated servers, as well as the expensive infrastructure that powers it. Many employ developers to work on the software full or part time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the common ways that free and open source projects are monetized to cover the costs of development and deployment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastEditorUserId="61" LastEditDate="2023-11-29T20:37:30.700" LastActivityDate="2023-11-29T20:37:30.700" Title="How can free and open source projects be monetized?" Tags="|commercial|monetization|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:22:56.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referring to Mnementh's answer, the official definition of open source dictates that you can't, because you can't discriminate (laws excepted: export restrictions don't count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it all depends how strict you want to be with your open-source licensing. You could quite easily license your project in the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; rather than the letter of open source: making the source code available, making it easy to use and reuse, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; Technically no, but yes if you're flexible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:22:56.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="90" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:25:18.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no way of actually tracking down usage statistics without compromising the privacy of its users. Hence why it is impossible to properly see which Linux distribution is the most popular one (using this as an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could use some analytics like the number of downloads, the number of stars on GitHub, or the number of contributors to the project, but those analytics can in no way properly determine how broadly is the open source project actually used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it might be possible to do so for the corporate environment in some cases. Open source projects could theoretically keep a list of organizations using their product. Also, if the project is mentioned multiple times in the media, there's a higher chance that there are many users using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T15:54:56.630" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:54:56.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:25:48.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every platform has its own metrics and indications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;npm for example, shows download statistics. GitHub has stars, which is a good rough indication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact is, I don't need to host the file on some fancy VCS host for it to be considered open. I can host it on a server I control, and distribute my git URL for you and the public to clone and use. In which case, you will never have any sort of statistics unless I specifically make some. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:25:48.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:27:11.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends what you mean by usage statistics, but the website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openhub.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;www.openhub.net&lt;/a&gt; (formerly known as Ohloh) gives you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of commit per months&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the number of contributors per month&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a community rating&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastEditorUserId="1181" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T19:46:55.283" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T19:46:55.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:27:44.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be absolutely sure of what you're doing, it would be necessary to read through the legalese of the licenses to check what is and isn't allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many licenses have human-readable pages, which &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be sufficient for this: read through them, determine what the restrictions are on using code. You should check that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're allowed to reuse code snippets from the project you plan to copy from;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project you're adding to allows you to use code from other licensed projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point there won't be a problem most of the time, but it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if both projects are yours there's no problem at all: you don't have to follow the terms of either license because you own the copyright. Licenses are simply there to give some rights to others (otherwise, technically, nobody would be able to do anything with your software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:27:44.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="94" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:28:06.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Github is a project-hosting website with git as base version control. It allows easy forking and contributing changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:45:08.110" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:45:08.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:28:06.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T19:28:06.540" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:28:06.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:28:13.940" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a huge number of ways earning money with free software -- but none of them is guaranteed. Just a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Donations: Many users are willing to give a few coins each month for a project they like. If a huge number of people are doing it, your servers are paid for. Payment methods could be e.g. Flattr, Patreon, Paypal, Bitcoin or any other micro-payment service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Custom developments: A feature is missed by somebody who likes to spend money for it? Great. Go for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Education and Support: Many software projects lack good documentation. Therefore education and giving support can be a way to earn some money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:28:50.530" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:28:50.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:29:46.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Project managements refers to the management of content within a project, or the manage of resource that are available for use in an area of interest. It normally includes, but is not limited to, the following components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Planning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Organizing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Motivating&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Controlling Resources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Designing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating Procedures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating Protocols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:45:36.213" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:45:36.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:29:46.120" Score="0" Body="For questions about the management of content or resources within a project." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T14:02:10.817" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:02:10.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:30:56.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most successful open development projects are the result of contributions from multiple people. Often these contributors are from varied countries and cultures. This can bring benefits and problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Managing the project to maximize the benefits, and minimize the problems, is a source of many questions and one that can best be answered by experienced developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Care should be taken using this tag not to ask &lt;em&gt;primarily opinion based&lt;/em&gt; questions, but to ask for specific examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T18:00:34.883" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:00:34.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:30:56.993" Score="0" Body="Use for questions about the collaboration aspects of developing open projects" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T01:32:04.883" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T01:32:04.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:31:33.093" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no general guide for making money using open source projects because it highly depends on what the project is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects are combining open source + premium features (that are mostly sold to the companies) like GitHub is doing. Some projects might depend solely on the donations like elementary OS is. Other projects might be paying for the full time support for their product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reference, I highly suggest you the book called &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.com/resources/what-open-organization&quot;&gt;The Open Source Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance&lt;/a&gt; written by Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:31:33.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:31:43.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A contributor is anyone who made a modification, or addition to any open project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:55:38.697" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:55:38.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:31:43.627" Score="0" Body="For questions about contributors, and their resources and conditions. Use the collaboration tag if your question is specific to interaction between contributors." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:57:56.793" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:57:56.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:34:25.493" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several methods, often dependent on the type of software you've produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have space in a GUI, you could consider adding some adverts to it. There are plenty of services that provide you with money in return for taking some adverts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generosity. Users who genuinely like your product can be persuaded to give you some small donation in return. In general, the easier you make it the better - a Donate button on your distribution page is a good idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monetization of features. Offer some features for a premium 'account' (or whatever the alternative is)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further generosity. Some people may be willing to donate equipment or time instead of money. These people are useful, because they usually end up donating more value than the actual money - perhaps they're willing to host something, or monitor your servers for a while each week.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, it depends heavily on how much you're willing to let it impact the software experience: ads are invasive but effective, whereas a donation button is almost invisible but as such less effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a good video about this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2tvsY3yUqY&quot;&gt;on YouTube&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:34:25.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:34:35.910" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Large projects like MariaDB or some of the many under the Apache Foundation umbrella rely on sponsorship from big companies who benefit from using the software. Others sell support/training services of their software or make alternative versions with restricted features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html#how-to-donate&quot;&gt;Apache Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.org/en/supporters/&quot;&gt;MariaDB&lt;/a&gt; for examples, among many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:34:35.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="109" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:35:15.557" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of open source licenses out there. What should a person especially keep in mind while they're selecting a license for their project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:33:06.830" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T21:33:06.830" Title="What should I keep a close attention to when selecting a license for my project?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T19:43:41.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:37:45.200" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposing your app is nice and could be some day a popular one, I recommend the followings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Choose a nice name and description&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose a name which has not been taken by anyone else before. The shorter it is, easier to remember. Also, it should describe somehow what your app does. Same goes for description: short, good, easy to remember and describe what the project does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Write a nice README file&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user saw your project somewhere and the name was interesting for him/her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the next thing the user sees is the readme file. Write a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/markup&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;README.your_favorite_markup&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. README.md, for markdown).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my experience I saw that making a nice heading image attracts the people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IonicaBizau/node-typpy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typpy&lt;/a&gt; -- nothing new: just a tiny library to get the type of a value in JavaScript. In this moment it has 10 stars on GitHub. That means that people liked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IonicaBizau/node-typpy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Jw9L.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Create your own documentation format to write apps&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently wrote an article on my blog about how to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ionicabizau.net/blog/25-increasing-productivity-using-blah-2-0-0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;increase the productivity by using Blah&lt;/a&gt; -- a tool I have written. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IonicaBizau/node-blah&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blah&lt;/a&gt; generates documentation based on templates and project files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Make the contributing steps clear&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;Blah&lt;/em&gt; helps you again. You can write your user-level template for &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; and using &lt;code&gt;blah -c&lt;/code&gt; you generate the &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tell the world what you did&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Share your work on websites like Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit etc. It really helps. Got retweeted by a bot? Cool. Don't worry. Real persons will find your tweet anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are some tips I observed &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IonicaBizau&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;developing projects and publishing them on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;. These tips are not primary-focused on the project quality but on how people will &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you want to get popular, build something great. Something that didn't exist before. Build tools you need. Do you need an artificial intelligence to do some stuff? Cool. Probably others need that too. Do it. Publish it. Share it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will get stars, you will get issues, pull requests, contributions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:37:45.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="114" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:38:08.707" Score="8" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;What legal pitfalls should be considered when (re)selling OS bases solutions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can't ask any fee for the Open Source code itself this seems a sensitive area to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:03:35.087" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:03:35.087" Title="Legal pitfalls when (re)selling OS solutions?" Tags="|licensing|law|monetization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="106" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:43:51.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mainly you want to decide if you license it permissive or not. Other than that, some licenses are matured more and are tested better in courts. &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Choose a license&lt;/a&gt; should be helpful in picking a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically it recommends MIT if you want a permissive license, Apache if you want to consider software patents and GPL if you want to keep the project open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T00:02:43.850" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:02:43.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="108" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:44:04.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should ask a lawyer about the specific solution you wish to re-sell. There should be no pitfalls, since re-selling is allowed in most of the FLOSS licences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, who said you can't charge for the code itself? It is no etical to do so, but that is a different matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:44:04.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:44:14.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add couple of points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a &quot;How to contribute&quot; page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nurture the community right from the beginning. You start attracting even when the project is WIP.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:44:14.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="108" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:46:27.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, you can sell your code. From the Open Source Initatives &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#profit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can sell services based on the code (i.e., sell your time), sell warranties and other assurances, sell customization and maintenance work, license the trademark, etc. The only kind of profit strategy that is incompatible with Open Source is monopoly-based sales, also known as &quot;royalties&quot;. See this article for how to think about business strategies that make money from Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:46:27.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="123" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:48:19.067" Score="7" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've developed a small and useful library at work, I have permission from legal department, what are the steps I should take before, during and after open sourcing the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I transform a proprietary product to an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:19:56.353" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:19:56.353" Title="How should I approach open sourcing a library from work?" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="108" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:48:50.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should follow the license, that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question hints at a common misunderstanding. Freedom and price are orthogonal, they are not related. Think about two axes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free &amp;lt;--&gt; proprietary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gratis &amp;lt;--&gt; comes with a price tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have any combination of values from both axes, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free software with a price tag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free software that is distributed gratis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proprietary software that is distributed &quot;for free&quot; (but is not free)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;proprietary software sold for money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first axis is what Free Sofware and Open Source are about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:48:50.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="138" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:52:18.027" Score="13" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prime example being &lt;a href=&quot;https://iojs.org/en/index.html&quot;&gt;iojs&lt;/a&gt; as a fork of &lt;a href=&quot;https://nodejs.org/&quot;&gt;nodejs&lt;/a&gt;, where the main difference being (aside from the obvious advancement in technology versioning and being more up-to-date), is that iojs has an &lt;em&gt;Open Governance Model&lt;/em&gt;, which nodejs does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean exactly? How are the two different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T08:27:18.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T08:27:18.857" Title="What is the Open Governance Model? How is it different from other models?" Tags="|project-management|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="108" CreationDate="2015-06-23T19:55:51.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the license of the solution you want to sell, and the obligations it places on you for allowing you to redistribute the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of the licenses, you can get a rather comprehensive amount of additional information from the organizations behind them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Free Software Foundation got many GNU-GPL-specific topics covered in their Frequently Asked Questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative has a less license-specific FAQ section as well: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/faq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T19:55:51.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:00:23.390" Score="10" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A common misunderstanding is that free software&lt;/strong&gt; (replace the terms with &quot;open source software&quot; as you wish) &lt;strong&gt;will never involve costs.&lt;/strong&gt; While this might be indeed true regarding you don't need to pay for licenses, they often don't understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you might have to pay for actually getting access&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the learning curve might be steeper (which means more costs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you might have to pay for support, and are surprised if &quot;customer&quot; service will not help out for free&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you might want to pay somebody to extend the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;developers generally need something to eat and live from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd love to make them understand them the freedoms involved&lt;/strong&gt;, how to benefit from those, that they are (or should be) part of a community and if possible return something to the community (for example, pay somebody to develop new features and put them back into the original product).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to make customer understand free software might involve costs, but brings advantage beyond licensing costs?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:09:52.157" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:59:22.790" Title="How can I make a customer understand that free software involves some costs?" Tags="|monetization|commercial|freedoms|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T22:06:15.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:01:02.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;a non-profit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The organization is widely known for its set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;licenses&lt;/a&gt;. Not all are open-source, but many are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, many Creative Commons licenses are not intended for use within software contexts and applications, instead intended for application and implementation within the creative works. For example, works of writing, art, photography, graphic design and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a good summary of the licenses' status &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.opensource.stackexchange.com/q/76/98&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:56:10.323" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:56:10.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:01:02.237" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Creative Commons licenses and the organization behind them. There are many Creative Commons licenses, so if you are asking a question about a specific license be sure to state which one." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T14:15:21.857" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T14:15:21.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="128" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:03:18.007" Score="5" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recognized graphic designers usually charge a fee for their work, but what if this project isn't expecting any funds and is expected to run purely off the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I attract a graphic designer (or designers) to create logos, web site graphics and other artistic/graphical works? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user144" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T23:16:45.753" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T23:16:45.753" Title="How do I recruit a graphic designer to help on a project with no funding involved?" Tags="|project-management|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T20:52:23.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:04:53.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The public domain is the place for all works which are free to the public. They do not normally restrict use. They may have been brought to the public domain through multiple ways, including but not limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expiry of intellectual property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forfeited rights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inapplicable rights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Placed in public domain by law, such as the work of a US Government employee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, depending by countries, works automatically fall into the public domain after a certain period of time. However, it is important to note that not all legal jurisdictions have the concept of a public domain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/cc0&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cc0&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cc0&lt;/a&gt; license attempts to solve this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T14:15:50.827" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T14:15:50.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:04:53.873" Score="0" Body="The public domain contains works that have no copyright on them, either because the author dedicated it to the public domain or because copyright has expired." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T13:34:55.987" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T13:34:55.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="113" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:05:20.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a full book on the topic of making a project open-source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Producing Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt; by Karl Fogel. For your specific problem a chapter talks about &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/opening-closed-projects.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Opening a Formerly Closed Project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First you have to check, if something still shouldn't be released. Is some proprietary library used that needs to be replaced? Contains the buildfile the password to the FTP-server to upload the distribution? Contains the test-data private information? You should also check if older version in the version-control contain such information and maybe you want to start a new revision 1 to get rid of older revisions with stuff that doesn't need to be released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next would be some decisions. Which license do you want to use? &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Choose a license&lt;/a&gt; might help here. Add a file with the license to your code. You also need to add a file naming the author(s) of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add also a README or a similar file, explaining how to build the project. Add other explanations as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next would be the infrastructure. Do the project need a website? Do you create a public readable repository of the version control? Set up what is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally announce the open source release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:12:22.183" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:12:22.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:05:35.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Code was a project hosting environment provided by Google, offering a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. It can be found at the link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://code.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;code.google.com&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Began in 2006, Google Code announced it was shuttering in 2015; Google Code will be read only 2015-08-24 and will close 2016-01-25, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://%20http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their blogpost&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T19:29:34.940" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T19:29:34.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:05:35.283" Score="0" Body="Google code is a development environment for open source projects." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:46:41.597" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:46:41.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:06:24.287" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source software is basically 'given away' to users for free. But a large successful project will usually need a revenue stream to pay for the servers running the websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the infrastructure that must exist simply for the distribution of Ubuntu, let alone support sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monetization in the context of this site concerns questions about generating a revenue stream to support distribution and ongoing development of an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T10:41:55.837" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T10:41:55.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:06:24.287" Score="0" Body="For questions about generating revenue from an open project" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T12:34:56.470" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T12:34:56.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:07:01.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Visibly crediting their work on the site/product could be seen by some as &quot;payments through advertising&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some graphics design crowdsourcing sites &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; accept a &quot;volunteer/for free&quot; project category. Contributors would be interested to contribute to such projects to increase their visible portfolios, exposure, reputation and ultimately their chances of participating/winning in paid projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="15" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:27:46.867" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:27:46.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:16:08.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could try a fundraising area that asks your audiences to donate to help pay for the costs. Aside from that, you would generally want to try some volunteering initiatives. You could also consider the nature of the project, and attempt to market it to be more attractive to graphic designers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like always, give them credit for their work. It's their work that's making your software look pretty at first glance anyways. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:16:08.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:20:36.430" Score="3" ViewCount="1281" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free software evangelists often advertise free and open source software to be more secure than proprietary alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this true, and why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there security reasons &lt;em&gt;not to use&lt;/em&gt; free and open source software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T09:36:13.477" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:36:13.477" Title="Is open source software less or more secure than proprietary software?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T21:26:16.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1393" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:22:57.863" Score="39" ViewCount="4462" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons defines a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0&quot;&gt;CC0 license type&lt;/a&gt; (here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;full legal code&lt;/a&gt;) that claims to allow creators to release their works into the public domain by waiving &quot;all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot;&gt;They claim in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0&quot;&gt;the FSF confirms&lt;/a&gt;) that CC0 is compatible with the GPL, which is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for use with software. However, OSI has not approved CC0 and &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero&quot;&gt;does not recommend its use as an OSS license&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most serious of the concerns raised had to do with the effects of&#xA;  clause 4(a), which reads: &quot;No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are&#xA;  waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this&#xA;  document.&quot;. While many open source licenses simply do not mention&#xA;  patents, it is exceedingly rare for open source licenses to explicitly&#xA;  disclaim any conveyance of patent rights, and the Committee felt that&#xA;  approving such a license would set a dangerous precedent, and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;possibly even weaken patent infringement defenses available to users of software released under CC0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand the basis for concern here (or why CC0 includes this clause to begin with, but that's another issue). I understand that you can't make &lt;em&gt;someone else's patents&lt;/em&gt; available by putting code that utilizes those patents into the public domain, but the clause specifically refers to the &quot;Affirmer's&quot; patent rights (the person who decided to release the code in the first place). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What evidence is there to support the idea that using code released under CC0 would ever result in infringement of the author's own patents?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm looking for a specific example to illustrate when and how this could ever be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T18:08:59.613" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T21:45:25.533" Title="How could using code released under CC0 infringe on the author's patents?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|patents|cc0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:23:03.690" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some projects sell the right to companies to use their code under a proprietary license. This is covered by Wikipedia in the Multi-licensing page.&#xA;From&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing#Business_models&quot;&gt;Multi-licensing: Business models&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Multi-licensing is commonly done to support free software business&#xA;  models in a commercial environment. In this scenario, one option is a&#xA;  proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating&#xA;  proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a&#xA;  copyleft free software/open-source license, thus requiring any derived&#xA;  work to be released under the same license. The copyright holder of&#xA;  the software then typically provides the free version of the software&#xA;  at little or no cost, and profits by selling proprietary licenses to&#xA;  commercial operations looking to incorporate the software into their&#xA;  own business. This model can be compared to shareware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in that article, a well known example is MySQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:23:03.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:24:06.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't really tell what nodejs looks like (aside from being some javascript tool thingy), but the two projects appear to be very similar in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to iojs, it looks like Open Source Governance is a fancy way of calling something open source and indulges in its principles. I could be wrong in interpreting this, but here's what the project says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is open source governance?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source governance advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements in order to enable any interested party to add to the creation of the end product, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nodejs says that they have over 300 contributors, as well as some 15 people on a &amp;quot;technical steering committee.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, open source governance is implementing the open source concept and placing it into action. Both sites seems to have this, except iojs seems to talk about it more...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:24:06.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:25:06.107" Score="0" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a project grows from a single developer to a dedicated group to a large community, what are best practices for setting up the project hierarchy to encourage high quality contributions across all aspects of the project (code, tests, documentation, graphic assets)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:43:22.977" Title="Hierarchy of an open source project" Tags="|project-management|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T21:07:58.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1279" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:25:55.140" Score="13" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of licensing is somewhat fuzzy, it's something I wish I would have looked into more when I got into making open source projects...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being stated, are there licenses that will ensure forks of my project will stay open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone takes my project(s), and adapts it or makes it better in some way, what licenses can I choose from that are already well designed that require they keep it open source, even with their edits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user144" LastEditorDisplayName="user144" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T05:34:48.670" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T05:34:48.670" Title="What type(s) of licenses ensures that forks of my project will stay open source?" Tags="|license-recommendation|forking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="115" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:26:03.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason that io.js forked from node.js in the first place was that those originally involved in the forked project wanted the community using the fork to be able to give feedback to the design and add improvements. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.infoworld.com/article/2855057/application-development/why-iojs-decided-to-fork-nodejs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the words of team member Mikeal Rogers&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been working with Joyent since July to try and move the project to a structure where the contributors and community can step in and effectively solve the problems facing Node.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the best way to move Node forward is to get the community organized around solving problems and putting out releases, so that's what we're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open-source governance&lt;/a&gt; has been applied to a wide range of things, just as the open source movement has spread to many fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T16:36:56.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="132" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:27:41.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is open source software more secure than proprietary software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends. There can be secure proprietary software and insecure Open source software and it can be the other way. It depends on knowledge and involvement of the developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there reasons why Open Source Software can be more secure than proprietary software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The source code is visible to everyone. That means everyone can check for security problems and report them. That doesn't mean the software is checked, but it is possible. If the project in question is used often it might happen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is easier to deduct, if the developers do something about security. You can look at the source and the changes that are applied and learn if the developers actively working on resolving issues. That isn't that easy for proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:30:32.323" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:30:32.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:28:16.543" Score="7" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I keep people involved and motivated to work on a project that doesn't involve direct monetary benefit?&#xA;What specific strategies do open source projects tend to use to keep core developers involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partly this is a general &quot;what strategies reliably motivate most open-source developers&quot;, but it's also about &quot;how can you prevent people from forgetting they're involved at all? What specific tactics do project leaders use to remind people that they're part of something?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least in my own case, my largest problem with projects is that I have hundreds of barely started, and tens of half-finished things that I just completely forget about / put off, but that I do really want to see completed. While this arguably isn't specific to open source, to me at least it's the largest impediment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:48:11.457" Title="How can I keep a project from losing momentum?" Tags="|project-management|human-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-30T07:42:17.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:31:04.277" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, to answer your main question, the Open Source Initative says that they did not reach a consensus and that Creative Commons withdrew their application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In February 2012, Creative Commons submitted CC0 to the OSI for approval as an open source license, requesting that the OSI evaluate the public license fallback section, since the rest of the text is a waiver of rights rather than a license. An unexpectedly intense and detailed discussion followed — search for &amp;quot;CC0&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Creative Commons Zero&amp;quot; in the subject headers of the February 2012 and March 2012 archives of the OSI License Review mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC0 was not explicitly rejected, but the License Review Committee was unable to reach consensus that it should be approved, and Creative Commons eventually withdrew the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that, it seems that there was discomfort for the affirmer to release information under this license that could possibly conflict with anything that was included. To make this more clear, it looks like possible legal conflicts due to the inclusion of something could potentially wind up disastrous for the affirmer, as it may be interpreted that the patent had been released into the public domain. I don't know of any examples, but this might be a fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:31:04.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1081" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:33:14.763" Score="22" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of us know open-source and open-source concepts from software. Code is easily distributable. We have various licences that help us legalize and regulate how people use our code, and we have various services that help us reach out and show-off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How (and how well) do these concepts apply to hardware? How do I open-source a hardware product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T12:37:31.040" Title="How do open-source concepts apply to hardware?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:33:50.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;-licenses. The most commonly used and known are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt;. Also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Share Alike&lt;/a&gt; license works this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:33:50.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="140" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:35:03.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest incentives is to create well defined goals. With that, people will want to work towards something. With goals, people will understand their job, as well as what they would like to accomplish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this one may sound slightly ironic, but to not lose momentum, you need to keep activity from a fair number of contributors. If someone feels as if they are the only one working on something, and they don't understand what they're doing, their objective, their audience... it might be discouraging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option, could be to gamify it a little bit, similar to how we run here within the Stack Exchange community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:35:03.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:35:18.403" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The general term for this type of license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share-alike&quot;&gt;share-alike&lt;/a&gt; or (pejoratively) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license&quot;&gt;viral licenses&lt;/a&gt;. The two best-known examples of such licenses are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt; (for source code) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot;&gt;Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses&lt;/a&gt; (for any creative content). Note that these licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot;&gt;sometimes allow you&lt;/a&gt; to use an alternate, compatible license inside of the exact license you used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:35:18.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:41:02.273" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One option would be to make it easy to manufacture the product, e.g. by supplying blueprints or AutoCAD designs/files online. With the rise of 3D printers, it's much easier for people to use readily-available designs to make hardware. It's not cheap enough for the typical person to buy a 3D printer or CNC mill, but makerspaces/hackerspaces are becoming decently prolific, and it's easier (and sometimes free) for people to join one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="145" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T20:46:35.190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:46:35.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:42:53.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concepts of Open source can be applied to other fields, with some minor modifications. Well known is creative commons adapting open source for the arts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open source hardware&lt;/a&gt; also exists. It usually involves, that the blueprints to build the hardware are available under a license that follows the ideas of open source. Actually many projects choose an open source license to distribute their designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of open hardware include Novena, Arduino or RepRap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:42:53.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="136" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:43:22.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to lead you to one of the projects from another question I answered, nodejs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From their site, they have contributors (and over 300 of them!) as well as a &quot;technical steering committee&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Node.js project is sponsored by the Node.js Foundation and maintained by individual Collaborators. The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) membership consists of key Collaborators who have demonstrated both technical expertise critical to the ongoing maintenance and evolution of the project and a long term commitment to driving the project and community forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you could create an &quot;executive&quot; team, with different team leaders to foster certain components of a large project, similar to nodejs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:43:22.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:44:25.150" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to start by defining what your 'source' is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data-sheets are usually not restricted, but only the author contributes to it. If you make your data-sheets a shared effort, you are already well on your way. Of-course, you can expand this to all documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second would be the actual hardware. Do you want your contributors to have a say in what chips to use and how to route your lanes? What colours should be used? What should be the features of the next board? Those are all questions which could be handled in an Open Source way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with hardware relative to software is the production cost. Software can be shared without cost. Schematics and documentation can as well, but the actual product it results in always needs to be produced. Ergo, it's difficult to completely Open Source hardware projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But wait!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if only the theory behind the hardware should be freely available? Well, that's where sites like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.instructables.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Instructables&lt;/a&gt; come in (there are probably better examples around). Somebody states how he build something, uploads some pictures and the next person comes around. He rebuilds it, tweaks it a little, uploads some pictures, etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it doable? &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it more difficult than open-sourcing software? &lt;strong&gt;Usually&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How? WIRED recently wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; about whether or not open source hardware can work. One of their examples is the Arduino team (do note this may turn out to be a bad example as well, since the Arduino team is currently involved in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-were-the-real-arduino/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;naming conflict&lt;/a&gt;). The basic idea behind their approach is 'We built something, please copy this!', which doesn't happen often in the hardware business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quote from the article (page 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure enough, that's what happened. Within months, geeks suggested wiring changes and improvements to the programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example from the article is the Linksys WRT54G router. It probably wasn't intended as an open source project. Since the firmware was running Linux, hackers took it upon themselves to modify it anyway. Their efforts boosted the sale of that router (and other routers in that series later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:27:30.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="132" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:44:55.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This principle is sometimes referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law&quot;&gt;Linus' Law&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coverity &lt;a href=&quot;http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/with-many-eyeballs-all-bugs-are-shallow/&quot;&gt;published a study&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;found that open source code quality is on par with proprietary code quality for codebases of similar size&quot;; however, the Wikipedia page I quoted above points out that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed&quot;&gt;Heartbleed bug&lt;/a&gt; was inserted into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL&quot;&gt;OpenSSL&lt;/a&gt; code base on December 31, 2011, and -- despite OpenSSL being widely used piece of system software -- was not discovered until April 1, 2014, almost three years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:44:55.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-06-23T20:49:58.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Verilog, VHDL or any other hw specification language code for (digital) designs can be open sourced just like any sw code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could publish the design as libraries for various FPGA families (in a similar manner in which the FPGA manuafacturers share sample designs/code/libraries for their evaluation boards, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T20:49:58.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:02:26.340" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Working in an open source project has the result that sometimes developers with no experience in the codebase attempt to &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;learn the code&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a reoccurring trap I've seen, where new developers try to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;understand &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; before doing &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tend to be developers who only ever worked on their own projects, or at least smaller codebases, where this may work out OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My impression is that they try to read the code a bit like it's a book, hoping that somewhere near the end they will have an &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;ahah&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; moment where they will understand it and start writing new code and being productive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(I'm simplifying a bit here)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This always seems to end badly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than questioning their approach, they complain the code is confusing and needs more comments.&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Whether or not to include comments is a big topic. For purpose of discussion we can assume the code is reasonably well-commented.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to suggest the code is perfect either, but &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; developers manage to learn it and become productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the approach is flawed to begin with, but asking since this is such a common assumption/mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When developers have already tried and failed to enter a large codebase by reading over the code:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What steps might an open-source project take to help new developers avoid common pitfalls based on (often poor) assumptions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Note on the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;volunteers for open source&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; aspect (added for clarification)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might think that the volunteer part of the question isn't important and that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; new developer on a large codebase would run into these problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this may be true in some cases, there is a difference that volunteers aren't employed by the organization, they can do what they like, how they like - and may do a significant amount of work on their own without asking for guidance, further, they are free to ignore all advice too. &lt;em&gt;Even if their work is rejected for example, they may continue to develop it, start a fork etc...&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This typically isn't the case a developer employed to work on closed source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T08:27:56.037" Title="Guiding new volunteers learning a large codebase" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T23:10:07.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="276" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:18:25.807" Score="9" ViewCount="2652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to analyze my code I want to release as opensource to see if it is / or has parts that are already licensed or proprietary?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="161" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T01:51:22.207" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T01:51:22.207" Title="How can I determine if some code I want to release as opensource is already licensed or proprietary?" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:26:13.853" Score="-4" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sourceforge was once the number one in project hosting for open source projects. But things have changed. And &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.gluster.org/2013/08/how-far-the-once-mighty-sourceforge-has-fallen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some things&lt;/a&gt; Sourceforge does are worrying. The adware injected into binaries of Open-Source-projects is indeed not worthy of an OSS-hoster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now github or Google Code seem like good alternatives. The question I ask myself is: can I trust these sites, that down the line they not may resort to similar measures to squeeze money out of the users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-23T14:12:28.717" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T14:12:28.717" Title="Can I trust project-hosting websites after Sourceforge?" Tags="|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-06-23T22:05:27.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="157" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:37:22.483" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can (could, for Google Code) trust these sites, although that's primarily based on a user's experience with these sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as GitHub goes, they don't try to &lt;em&gt;squeeze&lt;/em&gt; money out of you... Git/GitHub is an elaborate system that's great for open source hosting, managing, collaberation, and also contributing to other's code.  GitHub also provides a community, in which you basically get free promotion (if your project is interesting enough to the community). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the case that you need a private repository (proprietary project hosting) is when they'll charge month, based on the amount of repositories you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;You can see their price table here&lt;/a&gt; for their private hosting, although that really goes against the terms of open source...  Just some extra information).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as Google Code goes, &lt;a href=&quot;http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;they're officially shutting down&lt;/a&gt;, so you should no longer use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user144" LastEditorUserId="197" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T15:55:13.780" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:55:13.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:41:37.347" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do not know where your code came from (you did not write it, or you did not buy or license it), then there is no way for you to know its heritage. As a result, you cannot then open source it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way that I know of to analyse the code, and determine it's heritage unless you have already pre-analysed the code it may have come from (i.e. you can do a 'diff', but you need the baseline to compare to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important when working with any code (open or not) to keep track of where the code comes from so that you can more easily make these determinations later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:41:37.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="140" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:48:11.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One aspect about keeping momentum is to always keep current on the latest features, and to ensure you support the people who are most dynamic in the areas of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this with JDOM (Java XML library - it is unfortunately a good example of how to stifle the momentum). A lesson learned there is that you have to ensure you keep reasonably relevant with the latest systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JDOM ensured that it kept compatibility with legacy systems, including Java all the way back to Java 1.2. This makes sense from a code maturity and legacy support basis, but it made adopters of Java 1.5 with generics a real problem. JDOM was too late to support the newer Java versions, and as a result, it lost momentum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep your code relevant, watch trends, and attract people who are developing things, not using things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means continuously building and supporting new features, probably while maintaining older versions to support legacy folk too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:48:11.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="154" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:54:50.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Write a wiki / documentation on the code that's already developed.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering you have a large amount of code, document it.  If I were looking to volunteer, the first thing I'd do is learn the structure of the code and how to use it if I don't already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Write a short guideline on what you're expecting from contributes.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More simply, just write guidelines.  It's a common practice on platforms like GitHub to create a &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; file, which outlines some expectations and guides the user to how to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Have the code-base commented where it's need.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment your code to help incoming contributes understand each individual bits that may appear confusing.  Comments in their name are pretty much self explanatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user144" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:54:50.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:55:59.467" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I patent an algorithm, X. Then I develop and release an implementation of that algorithm, Y. I release Y with an open source license, granting permission for others to use and distribute Y. Generally speaking, it has always been assumed that my granting of permission to use and distribute Y has also been a grant to use and distribute X. However, CC0 makes the very unusual decision to explicitly not make that grant. So, if I release Y under CC0 and you use Y in your project, then you have violated my patent rights in X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastEditorUserId="19" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T22:16:07.813" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:16:07.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="117" CreationDate="2015-06-23T21:59:22.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the costs: you already enumerate several of these. I am not sure that this needs to be explained, because the majority of organizations that purchase software understand that there will be bug fixes, security updates, etc. They need some IT staff to manage this, and support may cost money via a support contract. If an organization does not &quot;get&quot; this then put it this way: not paying for support also has a cost when it is midnight on Saturday, the network is down due to a DDOS or security issue, and nobody is on call to fix it. Money is no longer coming in to the company because an IT system is nonfunctional. No revenue means no profit: that is an easy sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, the benefits. &lt;em&gt;Whatever your feelings are, business suits do not typically care about the benevolence of giving back to the community&lt;/em&gt;. Unless there are some serious brownie points to be earned (e.g. a fracking company helping to clean up the environment is a good example), the political capital is ephemeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, focus on the benefits to the company. With open source, &lt;em&gt;you have the source&lt;/em&gt;. You can modify it and it does not cost anything. Be careful, however, as it may interfere with the support contract mentioned previously. At the very least, you can help the vendor fix bugs quicker when your own IT staff can audit the code, follow stack traces, understand core dumps, etc. You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be able to extend the code, write plugins, etc. that have minimal impact on support and provide business value to the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that right there is the key: what is the &lt;em&gt;business value?&lt;/em&gt; Think dollars and cents, and throw out any notion of the greater good. The people signing your paycheck probably do not care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user166" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T21:59:22.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="157" CreationDate="2015-06-23T22:02:15.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your trust level of any service is up to you. Do you trust GitHub? Do you trust your ISP? Do you trust your own machine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not trust GitHub, where do you host your code? An alternative like BitBucket? Do you trust them? Your own private server? Do you trust the company you rented the server from? It never ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub appears to be a pretty good choice, they don't appear to be doing much evil in the form of user mistrust (although there was a bit of drama with regards to claims of sexual harassment within the company). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:02:15.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="170" CreationDate="2015-06-23T22:45:05.703" Score="13" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm selling a device with my software pre installed whose license is GPL v3. I want to prevent an unauthorized OS from being installed. According to GPL v3, I will have to share the private key with the user that can sign the image that will be accepted by the device. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, when am I required to share the key? Can I share the key only when the user requests it? Can I stop sending updates and stop providing phone support if the user asks for the signing key? (Assuming it's already part of terms and conditions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T19:02:47.127" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T08:30:20.897" Title="What restrictions can I place on a device whose software is licensed using GPL v3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="71" CreationDate="2015-06-23T22:53:56.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to mattdm's excellent writeup of OSI and the issues with license proliferation, I think there are simple, succinct reasons for using OSI licenses and getting new licenses approved by them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OSI is the go-to site for choosing a license, comparing licenses, reading the license text all in one place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OSI is a neutral organization: just the facts, ma'am. No spin or bias.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OSI-approved licenses meet an arbitrary set of criteria as set forth by the ill-defined &quot;free and open source software&quot; community.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, OSI is a &lt;em&gt;really good&lt;/em&gt; repository of licenses that are heavily used by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user166" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T22:53:56.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2015-06-23T22:55:04.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're under a slight misunderstanding of what a license is. A license is merely a grant of permission subject to certain conditions to use something that you otherwise couldn't, in this case under copyright law. Copyright law tells you who make grant that permission (the copyright holder, basically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to determine if you can grant permission to use the code under an open source license, you need to determine if you hold the copyright(s) to the code, or have been given permission by those who do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wrote the code yourself, not based on someone else's code, and not as part of employment, then you probably own the copyright. As long as you haven't transferred the copyright to someone else (or given them an exclusive license, or otherwise agreed not to release the code), you can release it as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If parts of the code were written by other people, then you probably need their permission to release the code (or to do much anything with it). If you downloaded it from somewhere, the license likely accompanied it, and may give you that permission. You will have to read its terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you need to contact all the authors and get each author's permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard there are products that are used by large companies to scan their source code automatically, comparing portions against a large corpus of open-source code. They're intended to prevent one of their thousands of employees from copying open-source code into their proprietary apps (as that can give rise to a lot of liability for the company). But for a project with only a few developers, you can hopefully just trace all the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T23:08:08.563" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T23:08:08.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="165" CreationDate="2015-06-23T23:20:17.620" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; §6 calls the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;em&gt;Installation Information&lt;/em&gt;. The next paragraph requires that when you (paraphrasing) sell a device with the software installed, you must accompany it with the Installation Information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the answer to &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; is: it must accompany the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next paragraph explicitly says you do not need to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;provide support service, warranty, or updates for a work that has been modified or installed by the recipient, or for the User Product in which it has been modified or installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you do not need to provide updates or support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could probably have some &quot;unlock&quot; procedure the user must go through, that would indicate the device is no longer supported. But you must not &quot;break&quot; the device just because it's unlocked, GPLv3 prohibits that. Talk to a lawyer to review your specific plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user490" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T08:30:20.897" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T08:30:20.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2015-06-23T23:27:11.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see how just by looking at a piece of code you can figure out what license it uses. You wouldn't see this, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// You'll never know the (license goes here) that I've made super secret from the world&#xA;// and is hidden in this code. No one shall ever know, unless they come here of course...&#xA;// Mua ha ha ha ha!&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning code, there are two ways that I see to determine the license it uses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find the origin of the code:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the origin of the code will allow you to trace it to its roots, thereby connecting you to the original contributors or organization who wrote it. They would likely have the answer for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look at the documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since documentation is code in english (at least in my eyes it is), there will likely be a mention of it there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-23T23:32:46.540" LastActivityDate="2015-06-23T23:32:46.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="277" CreationDate="2015-06-23T23:40:08.713" Score="30" ViewCount="2833" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; is a Creative Commons license with a copyleft clause - if you derive something from it, you must also provide the derivative under the same license if you distribute it. The relevant clause is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ShareAlike&lt;/strong&gt; — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;actual license&lt;/a&gt;, it refers to derivation as &lt;em&gt;adapted material&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does inclusion in a software package turn the software into &lt;em&gt;adapted material&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I include a CC-BY-SA licensed image in the software, do I need to share just the image or does the entire software come under CC-BY-SA?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if I make modifications to this image, what do I need to share?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T14:09:20.760" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:44:46.003" Title="What do I need to share if I include CC-BY-SA artwork in my software?" Tags="|creative-commons|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:06:05.447" Score="22" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Windows installers for FOSS software make the user agree to the licence during installation: there'll be a page where the text is shown and a little tick box, you must have seen it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most FOSS licences put zero restrictions on how you can use licensed software; the licences are all about redistribution. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL3&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do so many installers not just tell you about the licence, not just show you the licence, but require you to &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; to it before proceeding? 90% of such users will never distribute the software in any form, of those who do most won't do anything other than share the installer on a USB drive. Are there reasons to make the user agree to it, other than it just being what most installers do now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T19:30:44.010" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T20:10:13.953" Title="For what reasons should you make the user agree to a FOSS licence during installation?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|software-use|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:10:18.900" Score="20" ViewCount="1555" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; 4.0 (and the related licenses with &amp;quot;BY&amp;quot; in their names, like CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC) includes a clause that says I must not place &amp;quot;additional restrictions&amp;quot; on the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that text, &amp;quot;technological measures&amp;quot; is hyperlinked to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license prohibits application of effective technological measures, defined with reference to Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;More info&amp;quot; links to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All CC license versions prohibit licensees (as opposed to licensors) from using effective technological measures such as “&lt;strong&gt;digital rights management&lt;/strong&gt;” software to restrict the ability of those who receive a CC-licensed work to exercise rights granted under the license. To be clear, encryption or an access limitation is not necessarily a technical protection measure prohibited by the licenses. For example, content sent via email and encrypted with the recipient's public key does not restrict use of the work by the recipient. Likewise, limiting recipients to a set of users (e.g., with a username and password) does not restrict use of the work by the recipients. In the cases above, encryption or an access limitation does not violate the prohibition on technological measures because the recipient is not prevented from exercising all rights granted by the license (including rights of further redistribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bold is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that I cannot include a CC-BY licensed work, like a sound effect or clip art, in software that I distribute in DRM-protected app stores, like the iOS App Store and Steam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T15:45:14.760" Title="Can I redistribute CC-BY works in DRM-protected app stores?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by|drm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:23:28.643" Score="31" ViewCount="2977" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GPL3&lt;/a&gt;, for example, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Conveying Verbatim Copies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code&lt;/strong&gt; as you receive it, in any medium, &lt;strong&gt;provided that you&lt;/strong&gt; conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and &lt;strong&gt;give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence goes on to say that distribution of binaries is allowed as long as they are distributed under the terms of sections 4 and 5, i.e., with a copy of the licence text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice is this really necessary? On a FOSS-aficionado's computer they must have hundreds of copies of each licence, and even on a regular proprietary-filled Windows machine there are probably a dozen copies. And if I wanted to look at the licence of the GPL or MIT I wouldn't go digging for the copy that's included in the program, I'd find the text of the licence online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks to me like it would be a technical violation of the licence, though it is exceedingly common. Debian packages do not include the common licences, and many npm packages don't either. So do we need to, and if we don't, would it impact the enforceability of the licence later on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T13:06:34.590" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:29:43.907" Title="Do I really need to include a licence file for common licences like GPL or MIT?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|distribution|license-file|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:27:06.247" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your analysis seems to be sound except:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be able get around this by&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Referring to the CC media rather than including it (downloaded from the web)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publishing a link (inside the app) to the CC media in an approved non-drm mechanism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Including the CC media in a form that is unprotected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: You &lt;strong&gt;CAN&lt;/strong&gt; use DRM, you just cannot &lt;strong&gt;restrict the rights&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:27:06.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="174" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:27:42.257" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conflation with EULAs&lt;/strong&gt;. As you mentioned, copyright licenses deal with &lt;em&gt;redistribution&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;. EULAs, as their name implies (End User License Agreement), are contracts that restrict your rights as a &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt;, and are therefore something the user &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; agree to &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; using the software, and naturally belong in places like the installer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt;. Many licenses require that the license text itself is reproduced in redistributions; some licenses also require attributing the original authors. The requirements vary, but many are quite flexible in &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; the license text appears. For examples, they could be placed in an About dialog, a Readme file, on the Download web page, in the Credits. The installer is just another place to mention those licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Convenience&lt;/strong&gt;. Most software that build installers include a way to embed a custom text file as a step in the installation. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Scriptable_Install_System&quot;&gt;NSIS&lt;/a&gt; has the function &lt;code&gt;MUI_PAGE_LICENSE textfile&lt;/code&gt; in its macro language. This is a much easier way of showing a license than other methods like building an About dialog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evangelism&lt;/strong&gt;. Many software developers using FOSS licenses are proud of doing so, and would like to loudly advertise this fact. Making users read this when installing is a good way of doing this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ultimately, copyright licenses (like the FOSS ones) &lt;strong&gt;do not require &quot;agreeing&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, only that some require the user be able to read about them somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:27:42.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="176" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:40:53.950" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL licenses are legal documents, so you modify them or ignore their terms at your own risk!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU.org has an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhyMustIInclude&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ addressing this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does the GPL require including a copy of the GPL with every copy of the program? (#WhyMustIInclude)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including a copy of the license with the work is vital so that everyone who gets a copy of the program can know what his rights are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be tempting to include a URL that refers to the license, instead of the license itself. But you cannot be sure that the URL will still be valid, five years or ten years from now. Twenty years from now, URLs as we know them today may no longer exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to make sure that people who have copies of the program will continue to be able to see the license, despite all the changes that will happen in the network, is to include a copy of the license in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does mean that, a sufficiently paranoid user will avoid your software because it does not include the full license, and they don't trust that whatever you linked to, or that when you mention &amp;quot;GPL3&amp;quot; it's a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT, BSD licenses are also quite clear on this matter; you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; reproduce those licenses, otherwise you are not fully complying with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a note, not all licenses require reproducing the full text. Some like the Creative Commons licenses are ok with including a link. See some &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:40:53.950" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="176" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:41:14.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is not fair to ask the user to search for the license terms and hoping he picked the right one, as he has to follow this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:41:14.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-06-24T00:48:13.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you mean computer hardware, then &lt;a href=&quot;http://opencores.com/&quot;&gt;yes, communities exist&lt;/a&gt;. The problem is that writing hardware is not nearly as intuitive as writing software, debugging is a much more involved process, and writing comprehensive test suites is far more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the problem is that most of the people writing open source hardware have only a software background, and treat hardware the same way, despite the fact that the hardware paradigm is fundamentally different. They can even get away with this in simulation, because HDLs generally contain constructs that would never actually work or make sense in hardware, but which are necessary for simulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while the community exists, it is smaller and less reliable. Partly because it's slightly more expensive (because to test on hardware you need an oscope, or at least a logic analyzer), and partly because, in order for it to be at all useful, it must be very thoroughly tested, and written by someone with some formal training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, really, expense is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the primary issue. Because in a very real sense you don't need to actually produce hardware; you can just program an FPGA or CPLD and in the overwhelming majority of cases you don't need to actually test by fabbing an ASIC. You can get an FPGA + JTAG programmer for under $100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory it could work, and in practice I'm sure there are some projects where it does work, but overall I wouldn't trust most open source hardware in stuff I write. I'd need to be sure the people writing it were actually qualified computer engineers. Because, otherwise, I might have a thing that simulates completely fine, but causes my FPGA to burst into flame as soon as it's programmed; in hardware it's not as easy as simply running untrusted code in a VM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="148" LastEditorUserId="148" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T00:54:01.270" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T00:54:01.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="185" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:13:10.853" Score="19" ViewCount="973" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take this into consideration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I post one of my software projects that I had written for school, and give it an open source license, and place it online for people to evaluate and contribute their thoughts. I do this in hopes that other more experienced developers will be able to optimize or add new features to my already existing program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how would I prevent malicious people from tampering with that code? If my project is the victim of multiple, continuous attacks and vandalism, it wouldn't be efficient on my part to &amp;quot;rollback&amp;quot; to earlier revisions. Not only would this be an annoyance, but it could make the project look less attractive to prospective contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I restrict or &amp;quot;approve&amp;quot; contributors to help me improve the project? I'm nervous that doing so would violate the Open Source concept. As seen on the Open Source &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#restrict&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I stop &amp;quot;evil people&amp;quot; from using my program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too. Fortunately, there are other laws that constrain the behavior of evil people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this apply only to the audiences of my program, or would it apply to people who try to contribute to it as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T14:33:23.430" Title="Can I select who can contribute to my Open Source Project?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="190" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:17:39.390" Score="19" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many software developing companies use open source tools or open source libraries. Sometimes they even tweak this software for their needs. So, one might argue that this tweaks should be given back to the OSS-project. That means, contributions of that company will become public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what are the advantages for a company doing so? Are there any at all? Are there disadvantages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T15:00:14.970" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T15:00:14.970" Title="What are the upsides for a company to contribute to an open-source software they use?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="183" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:17:52.100" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;You, as the maintainer, can decide what you merge into your project. That doesn't prevent others from forking and maintaining their own version of the code though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post the code to some place like GitHub or other code sharing service, you are given a set of permissions that determines who can merge changes to your master branch. It is not something that is open to the world. Others can submit pull requests (in the case of GitHub), but you are free to reject them as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T01:17:52.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="183" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:21:48.437" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're mixing up two concepts here. The quote you provided is for people using your software. If you want your software to be open source, you have to accept that everyone is permitted to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepting contributions is a completely different cup of tea. As a maintainer you can accept or reject whichever patch you like. Look how Linus does that constantly with Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, other people get a right to fork (open source per definition always allows that). So you can't forbid them to release their patches to your software, but you can reject them for your version of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T14:33:23.430" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T14:33:23.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="184" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:30:03.813" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;One major advantage is that by sending changes upstream, a company no longer has to maintain their set of downstream changes.  Suppose I add a compression feature to Gizmo 1.0.  If I don't share my patch, when version 1.1 is released, I have to port my patch to the new version.  And every subsequent version.  By contributing upstream, the changes are likely  to be merged (assuming they align with the project's goals), and you save yourself the effort of all the patching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An indirect advantage is that by contributing to a project, you are influencing it's future path.  You might be simply providing a capability that someone else also wants, or you may be opening up the project to a whole new use - either way, you are now influencing the path taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T01:30:03.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="183" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:37:38.007" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Carefully selecting which changes are accepted, and which are rejected is one way that you control the direction of your project.  Accept all submissions, and you'll end up with a mess, or at the very least, something you didn't envision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you document the vision and goals of the project, it becomes easier for you to select submissions, and it becomes easier for contributors to submit changes that align with your goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T01:37:38.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:46:29.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can build a website that hosts your project's online documentation, latest news, etc.  You can then track the &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; popularity over time, based on traffic.  You can use this to indicate increasing popularity, or trends for certain OSes or browsers - typical web traffic analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But regardless of any specific download-tracking mechanism, you are treading on your user's privacy, and that's not likely to be well received in the open source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T01:46:29.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="184" CreationDate="2015-06-24T01:50:00.817" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advantages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reduced maintenance.&lt;/strong&gt; If a company uses custom patches, every time upstream changes, the company has to re-apply those patches when they update their custom version. This gets worse when upstream undergoes major refactors or changes in interfaces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Publicity.&lt;/strong&gt; By having its name included in the project's contributor list, other users become aware of the company. This could mean potential hires who are interested in the project, but through the project apply for employment. There's also a lot of goodwill associated with open source software; Microsoft for example earned lots of kudos when it began contributing significant code to prominent open source software like Linux.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Employee perks.&lt;/strong&gt; Most software developers at companies are work-for-hire; every line of code they write is owned by the company. This means that when they go elsewhere, they cannot easily show the work they've done. But open source contributions are open for all, so they can point to specific projects and commits, improving their hireability and their market value. Also, some employees simply like contributing to open source projects for its own sake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Competition against a market leader.&lt;/strong&gt; A major reason why lots of companies work on open source software is they can pool resources on an open project that is in competition with a dominant, closed rival. Open source allows them to share the workload. For example, OpenStack is a collaboration by hundreds of companies to compete against market leaders like Amazon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disadvantages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Competitive advantage.&lt;/strong&gt; If a certain type of software is a company's competitive advantage, it is exceedingly unlikely that they'll share it, because obviously, their competitors can then take advantage of it. For this reason, most if not all corporate open source contributions are in software that is not part of their core business. Google for example does a lot of open source work with Android and WebKit, but that's because free and better mobile platforms and browsers helps point people to their bread-and-butter: viewing ads. There is almost no way that Google will open their search engine or ad serving software, without a major change in business models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk of losing intellectual property.&lt;/strong&gt; Even if a piece of software isn't a company's competitive advantage, critical pieces of code could accidentally sneak into the open. A careless developer could accidentally contribute an advanced algorithm, for example. Because of this, most companies run their open contributions through their legal department first. Most don't bother with this because it's more trouble than it's worth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Risk of legal trouble.&lt;/strong&gt; Not all code a company uses is fully owned by the company; there could be third party licensed code or code under NDAs and so forth. Accidentally opening these opens the company to legal problems. Again, most companies run through legal, and again most don't bother with the trouble.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T01:50:00.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:04:50.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC BY license is the most permissive of the Creative Commons family of licenses, with the simple requirement that any further modification or distribution of the licensed work credits the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:58:47.330" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:58:47.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:04:50.170" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to Creative Commons' Attribution (CC-BY) license." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:58:47.330" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:58:47.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:06:05.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(All versions)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T18:55:03.103" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T18:55:03.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:06:05.733" Score="0" Body="The Apache 2.0 license is a license created by the Apache Software Foundation. Use this tag when the item in question relates to this license." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T18:19:25.450" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:19:25.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:07:12.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T02:07:12.017" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T02:07:12.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:07:12.017" Score="0" Body="For questions about the no longer functioning hosting platform, Codehaus." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T15:13:57.433" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:13:57.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:08:59.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is a licensing principle where the license stipulates that re-distribution of the work or distribution of derivative or combined works is permitted, on the condition that it is done under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ensures the work always stays free and/or open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well-known examples of such licenses are the gnu family of licenses: the GPL, LGPL and AGPL, the Mozilla public license (MPL), and the Creative Commons licenses with a Share Alike clause, for example CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-02T08:52:20.567" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T08:52:20.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:08:59.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about the copyleft concept (also known as Share-Alike), a concept that promotes or enforces the use of the same or compatible license for derived works." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T10:20:28.063" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T10:20:28.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:10:11.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, or General Public License is a basic software license offered by GNU, which is sponsored by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. There are currently three major versions of the license; this tag is for questions specifically about GPL version 3 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(GPLv3)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T04:16:39.450" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T04:16:39.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:10:11.367" Score="0" Body="The General Public License, offered by GNU. Use this tag if the question involves version 3 of the license." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T18:19:18.810" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:19:18.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:10:43.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you need to provide an outlet - some acceptable place - for questions to be asked.  That could be a mailing list, online group, IRC and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T02:10:43.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="203" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:27:54.717" Score="62" ViewCount="8612" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many licenses, such as Apache 2.0, have both a long and a short form. Typically, the long form is included in the repository as a single LICENSE file, and the short form is used in the actual source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if you include the LICENSE file, is it actually necessary to include another copy (short or long) in every source file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about files which do not actually have a way to add comments (such as conformant JSON files)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T15:00:37.573" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T15:00:37.573" Title="Should I include license text in a single file or all source files?" Tags="|license-file|license-notice|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="202" CreationDate="2015-06-24T02:49:44.367" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Apache 2.0 License, there is both the legal code, and what you need to &quot;apply&quot; the license to the work in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a license file provides the legal code. That's great, but it doesn't tell me the specifics... does that license really apply here? When did the license take effect? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache page goes on to instruct you how to place it in your work, that you need to place the information to &quot;apply&quot; the license, and continues providing details and even a template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The text should be enclosed in the appropriate comment syntax for the file format. We also recommend that a file or class name and description of purpose be included on the same &quot;printed page&quot; as the copyright notice for easier identification within third-party archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For pages which don't have commenting support, I think it should be fine to even have the information in a basic &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; file, as long as people know what it is. If it helps, give it a filename such as &lt;code&gt;json-license.txt&lt;/code&gt; It may help to have additional information in that file (e.g. Why the license... Probably not that but you get what I mean)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ecelis also points out two links that provide some more information about where to place the licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot;&gt;How to use GNU Licenses for your own Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#apply-license&quot;&gt;How do I apply [some open source license] to software I'm releasing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T13:26:40.337" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T13:26:40.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T04:22:57.787" Score="15" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I compose a piece of music using instruments and sound effects that I don't own the copyright to (but am licensed to use), can I release my composition under a free/open license that allows derivatives, without violating one of the two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The free license that allows derivations, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My license to the instruments / sound effects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate: most closed music composition software provides collections of sound files for different instruments, called &lt;em&gt;sound banks&lt;/em&gt;, which they retain the copyright to. Under their user licenses, they often state that you are not allowed to redistribute those sound files, but it is implied that you own the copyright to any music that you compose &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; those sound files. An example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.propellerheads.se/agreements&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Propellerhead&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sound samples and musical examples connected to the Software may NOT be reformatted, mixed, filtered, re-synthesized, or otherwise edited or altered for use in any kind of commercial sampling product/package or software- this is strictly prohibited without the express written consent of Propellerhead Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundation.com/licensing-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soundation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sounds can be used royalty free by the purchaser of the downloads in any context except:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To make another sample/sound effect CD or database, even if the material has been manipulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To upload the individual sounds to a sound database to be used by others&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any sound file CD/database or multimedia sound library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any multimedia or game product DVD/CD or web game that includes isloated sounds from PowerFX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's the problem: free/open licenses allow derivation, so if I release under such a license, technically end users can take a portion of my music and redistribute it. For example, they can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sample&lt;/a&gt; it and release their own track with those samples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this mean that they can sample isolated sounds, like drum beats, and release a drum beat pack? If yes doesn't this violate the sound license? If no doesn't this contradict the free license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this affected by how well I mix the sound effects and make it harder to extract the original sound effects? What if I make a piece of &amp;quot;music&amp;quot; that is solely comprised of isolated sounds?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do these licenses fundamentally conflict, i.e. am I forced to look for a license with a no-derivatives clause, or a free sound bank?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or, can I include a clause prohibiting extracting individual sounds from my music?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:04:37.387" Title="Can I open source my music which includes copyrighted sound effects?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2015-06-24T04:38:04.833" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your real problem is that GitHub issues is a lightweight issue tracker that doesn't allow fine-grained access control, and it is being used as &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; a public Q&amp;amp;A forum and a development issue tracker. Fundamentally, you need to &lt;em&gt;separate the two&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; issue tracker&lt;/strong&gt;. One that restricts public access, or has things like approval, selective notifications etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use a separate, private repo for issues.&lt;/strong&gt; This repo only contains issues for your project and is accessible to the project collaborators only. If the public questions are still bothering you, you can then disable issues in the main project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T04:38:04.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="204" CreationDate="2015-06-24T04:45:23.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated by the propellerhead license, you can't use any of the examples or sound samples included, those are aren't yours. But you can bring your own samples to create your music and distribute as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the soundation's case, the music you create with those samples is your own, even if you redistribute it with a derivatives license, it will hardly be the isolated sounds for a library or collection, any derivative music would be based on your own creation which soundation allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T04:45:23.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T05:03:15.077" Score="19" ViewCount="6429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong but since the cryptographic algorithm is open source, doesn't it mean that everyone who can access the code would be able to crack it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm probably wrong since there are many successful open source algorithms but &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; does this prevent attackers from cracking the algorithm? Could anyone go over this concept for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="212" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:51:39.027" Title="How is open source encryption safe?" Tags="|cryptography|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2015-06-24T05:23:15.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many encryption systems in the 20th century used to rely on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity&quot;&gt;obscurity&lt;/a&gt; of the algorithm. This was a bad approach, as you have to keep the whole program secret, which is technically impossible if you want to distribute the program. If someone obtains a copy of the program, then you have to rewrite the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 21st century encryption, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle&quot;&gt;the only secret is your password&lt;/a&gt;. Even non-open source programs use algorithms that are public. The strength of encryption lies in the ability to protect data &lt;strong&gt;using only your password&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cryptographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier&quot;&gt;Bruce Schneier&lt;/a&gt; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness—and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source encryption is thus often &lt;strong&gt;more secure&lt;/strong&gt; than non-open source encryption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T06:02:48.947" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T06:02:48.947" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2015-06-24T06:46:46.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not only about OSS crypto is safer than non-opensource crypto, it's about the algorithm you are using. It's very easy to build up an encryption algorithm at your own and it's very easy to fail complete while doing it. A good example is Mifare Classic. So using a public and proofed algorithm can save you some headage. Good algorithm splitting up the logic and the key for it, so you don't have to worry about. Let's make an example: Everybody is knowing how a lock is working, but without the correct key you most likely won't be able to enter. It's the same on good crypto. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's also quiet easy to implement a good standard in a very poor way or with failures. This is what we have seen recently with openssl. It might be a simple failure or while acting in bad faith. Here opensource can help to find bugs and fix them faster than hiding your code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2015-09-20T18:51:39.027" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:51:39.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="88" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:16:09.770" Score="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether or not you can make money with an open source project, depends on many things. Based on experience, I see three factors that are important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which license did you choose? Take a look at the schema in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/3/27&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and you'll see that on one end, you have &lt;em&gt;permissive licenses&lt;/em&gt; and on the other hand you have licenses with a &lt;em&gt;strong copyleft&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which type of product are you offering? There's a huge difference between offering a tool for consumers (something they can just download, run and use) and offering a library in a B2B context, for instance: a piece of software that parses XML, but that doesn't work unless you write some code around it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is your business? Are you in the business of &lt;em&gt;selling software&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. you sell a game that can be downloaded and that can be played off line) or are you in the business of &lt;em&gt;selling a service&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. a game that can't be downloaded and that is played on line).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When to use a license with strong copyleft?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it was different in the past, I see that small &amp;quot;developer-driven&amp;quot; companies, wanting to create a &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; business in a B2B context, often benefit from a license such as the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warning:&lt;/em&gt; the original authors of the AGPL consider what I am going to write next as &lt;em&gt;nefarious use&lt;/em&gt; of the AGPL, but this is the way companies such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mongodb.org/post/103832439/the-agpl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://developer.sugarcrm.com/tag/agpl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SugarCRM&lt;/a&gt;, and others make money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my open source project of my own, and in the past 15 years I have tried making money in the following ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Donations&lt;/strong&gt;: In the early years, users of my software would buy my kids Lego. I would receive books for my birth day. Somebody even sent me cookies. While this was certainly appreciated. That doesn't make a business. Also: I live in Belgium: when somebody sent me a DVD from the US, (1) I had to pay taxes on it (customs could be excessive), (2) I couldn't play it because the DVD could not be played in my region (unless I fiddled with my DVD player).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Making money with ads&lt;/strong&gt;: I was an early adopter of Google AdSense. In 2004, I made $8,900 with ads, in 2005 $14,500, but the revenue dropped to $6,200 in 2006, $2,350 in 2007 and $1,900,... I had more content, more clicks, but less revenue. I noticed two things: (1) most of the people advertising on my site, were competitors, (2) if you want to make money with ads, you need to specialize in making money with ads. As a result, I removed all ads. Ads as a business model are dead. See for instance what &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codehaus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codehaus&lt;/a&gt; wrote when they shut down their business: the hosting cost was exceeding the cost of the revenue from ads. You can also see that &lt;a href=&quot;http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SourceForge has taken the wrong path&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing documentation:&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote two books for Manning Publications about my project. Manning sold about 11,600 copies of the first edition and almost 9,200 of the second edition. Illegal copies of the book were already available before FedEx had the chance to deliver me my first paper copies. As an author, I received 10% on the profits. I made approximately $33K with the first book and approximately $30K with the second book. I used this money as seed funding for my company. Writing documentation is hard work and when you compare the time you spend on writing such a book versus the money you make selling the book, you soon understand that this is not a sustainable source of money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Selling support and maintenance:&lt;/strong&gt; this works, but it's hard. It's not something you can do on your own, because it's not scalable: the more customers you have, the more employees you need to answer support tickets. Also: you face competition of professional players who offer support for a stack of open source products. By supporting more than one product, such a company can afford hiring more employees. In my case: I couldn't compete with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openlogic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenLogic&lt;/a&gt; when I first started doing business with my product. I had to find a different business model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Offering professional services:&lt;/strong&gt; you offer the software for free, but you sell professional services to install the software and to integrate your product into a tailor-made project. This is even harder than offering support, because you have to compete against all the large software integrators who have more money, more employees, more everything than you. Your business will even be less scalable than support and worse: all the time you spend on projects for customers is time you don't spend on further developing your product. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openhealthnews.com/articles/2014/heartbleed-apache-license-business-model-failure&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heartbleed disaster&lt;/a&gt; is an example of how that can go wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a single developer looking to start a business, making money with open source &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt;, your best chance at being successful, is by offering the software under a dual license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license? Well, you have to avoid &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/253925/how-to-avoid-being-forked-into-oblivion-by-a-more-powerful-contributor&quot;&gt;Being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor&lt;/a&gt;, so only a license with a strong copyleft makes sense. You'll understand what this means when you read the &lt;a href=&quot;http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#header-136&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eat me&lt;/a&gt; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#header-136&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ZeroMQ guide&lt;/a&gt;. I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the software industry, there are friends, foes, and food. BSD makes most people see us as lunch. Closed source makes most people see us as enemies. GPL, however, makes most people our allies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one make money with a copyleft license? That's explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/QHF3xcWnSD4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt;. You offer the software as free, open source software free of charge for every one who obeys the rules of the license. Companies who don't want to follow those rules, can still use the software, provided that they buy the software under another, commercial license. This model is called dual licensing. The weaker the copyleft of the license, the harder it will be to sell your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When to use open source with a permissive license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not a developer and you want to start a business offering a service. Or if you work a large corporation (say Google, Amazon,...), then you probably won't like what I wrote in the previous section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want to use software and do whatever you want with it. You don't like GPL-style licenses, because those limit what you can do with the software. You may even have to &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt; for the software you're using! The horror!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it is in your best interest to brainwash developers into thinking that open source software should be free as in free beer, that the GPL is bad and that open source software should not be offered commercially. You'll sponsor the most radical zealots that are popular among developers looking for a role model. As a result, these developers will start producing software under a permissive license that you can use any way you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your task will be to make choices: to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is not your business to sell software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are offering software as a service (e.g. Google)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a totally different business that relies on software (e.g. Amazon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You sell closed source, proprietary products and you make a lot of money in professional services (e.g. IBM or Wipro)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your main business is ads; your users are your product (e.g. Facebook)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you are successful enough in one of the above, you can afford giving away your software for free (as in free beer). As you have gained a monopoly, it doesn't matter if competitors can also use your software. If they are peers, they may improve the code and redistribute it, in which case you benefit too. If they are contenders just starting a new business, you either crush them (because your brand is king and your marketing budget is bigger) or buy them (and possibly kill them afterwards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a great way to make money with open source software, but I see some disadvantages. The moment a large corporation decides that the value created by a project doesn't justify the investment, the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;charity&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; will stop. Oracle &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tomitribe.com/blog/2013/11/feed-the-fish/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dropped GlassFish&lt;/a&gt;, IBM &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?infotype=AN&amp;amp;subtype=CA&amp;amp;htmlfid=897/ENUS913-081&amp;amp;appname=USN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;backed away from Geronimo&lt;/a&gt;, Pivotal &lt;a href=&quot;http://java.dzone.com/articles/total-bummer-pivotal-drops&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;left Groovy&lt;/a&gt;,... Only when disaster strikes (like was the case with Heartbleed), these companies suddenly start raising money to &amp;quot;save the developers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a sustainable model for open source, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there are any numbers about this, but it wouldn't surprise me if you'd see that most of the software distributed under a permissive license is written by &lt;em&gt;employees&lt;/em&gt; (people working for a large corporation), whereas most of the software distributed under a copyleft license is written by &lt;em&gt;entrepreneurs&lt;/em&gt; (people owning or working for a small to medium-sized company).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has it always been this way?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, free and open source software has undergone an enormous change. Large companies used to distribute FUD about software that was offered &lt;em&gt;for free&lt;/em&gt;. Often these are the same companies who are now claiming that open source software should be free as in free beer. If you want to know how it was in the early days, I recommend watching &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Eluzi70O-P4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OS Revolution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How am I making money today?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to read more about my history in open source, I recommend reading the &lt;a href=&quot;http://itextpdf.com/press/one-million-by-one-million-interview&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1M/1M blog by Sramana Mitra&lt;/a&gt;. I founded my first open source company in 2008, 8 years after the first open source release of my product. In 2014, the group was profitable with a revenue of 5 million euro and an EBITDA of 43%. The company ranked 28th place in Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 in the EMEA region and it won first place as the fastest growing technology company in Belgium in the period 2009-2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2021&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, I realized an exit. Right after I left the company, I wrote a book sharing my experience: &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entreprenerd: Building a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T14:08:55.207" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T14:08:55.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:22:06.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if your algorithm is in the open, each user keeps a secret: the password (or other secret that is used as key to en- and decryption). You want that the algorithm works safe, even if it is known. Because it is always possible through decompiling to get the algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the algorithm safe even if it is known? Because it works with mathematics, that need to much time decrypting it without the personal secret it was encrypted with. How that works in detail is out of the scope here, you should ask that on crypto.se or security.se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So having the implementation (and thus the algorithm) out in the open is no downside. But it is even an upside. Many algorithms people came up with over time are flawed or easy to break with current technology (Cesar-cipher for example). If you use that even closed source, it is easy to detect it and break it. Even more: if you use a well-known and good algorithm, there are many points at which you can fail at implementation and make the whole software unsecure. Look at the details of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Debian-OpenSSL-bug&lt;/a&gt; for an example. So, having your code in the open allows experts to analyze it, and they usually make it public if they find bugs in the implementation. If they can't access the code, they cannot do that. So I would trust an Open-Source crypto that has no known bugs or is broadly criticized more than an Closed source program that might or might not have a good implementation. Naturally you should avoid both open source and closed source crypto with known problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T07:46:16.767" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T07:46:16.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="207" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:22:12.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason open cryptography is considered safer than its closed alternatives is because open cryptography is open to reviews and auditing from security experts all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed algorithms are subject to internal company reviews, and paid experts reviews only. Which, by definition, is a small set than &quot;security experts all over the world&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old notion was that the more secrecy you have in your application, the safer it is. &quot;If an attacker can't see my code, he won't be able to attack me&quot; or &quot;If an attacker doesn't know which algorithms I'm using, he won't be able to brute force against me&quot;. Both of these have been proven wrong with timing attacks and rainbow tables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good algorithm is &lt;strong&gt;public and open&lt;/strong&gt;, the only secret thing is the  &lt;strong&gt;private key&lt;/strong&gt; or the &lt;strong&gt;shared secret&lt;/strong&gt; (like a password).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T07:22:12.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="214" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:27:02.043" Score="23" ViewCount="2000" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know GPL can be used as an open-source license for source code etc. But what if the source code released has very few lines and has a lot of probability that it might also have been written already or someone might write an almost identical code without being aware of the original code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A code like Hello World for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;using namespace std;&#xA;&#xA;int main(){&#xA;    cout &amp;lt;&amp;lt; &quot;Hello World, with a smile :-)&quot; &amp;lt;&amp;lt; endl;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And furthermore, what if he releases the code under some other license, say the BSD license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T21:37:26.270" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T00:11:46.127" Title="What happens if very common code is released under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:33:48.427" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;German law has something named 'Schöpfungshöhe', which Wikipedia refers to as '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot;&gt;Threshold of originality&lt;/a&gt;'. If no sufficient level of originality or effort is reached for the works, it cannot be copyrighted. That means, everyone can probably implement a copy-command, even if it will look pretty similar as the underlying mechanic is simple enough. Still, you shouldn't copy such lines directly but implement it yourself. But coming up with the same solution for similar problems is somewhat expected. When to draw the line? That's up for the courts in cases of disagreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: As I wrote I know this concept for German law, and Wikipedia indicates Anglo-American law also has this concept. But I don't know to which other jurisdictions this concept applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T21:06:42.253" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:06:42.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="216" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:38:48.620" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't know much about licensing. All I know is there are a hell of a lot of licenses out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there are so many, because each one exists for a specific use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of open source licenses with its corresponding usages available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I'm looking for an open source license for a mobile app. I'm pretty sure I'll have to adapt to the licenses of the framework(s) I be potentially using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know, if this still is too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="226" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:05:18.553" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:05:18.553" Title="What licenses can be used for open source projects?" Tags="|licensing|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-24T08:31:48.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="215" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:40:35.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A basic list of licenses can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Choose a license&lt;/a&gt; is designed to help you pick a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally: most modern licences (look at the popular licenses at opensource.org) are good for most software. But if you use libraries or frameworks by others, the license of these may have influence on the licenses you can choose. for instance the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL (GNU General Public License)&lt;/a&gt; demands, that every derivate code (and that includes code linked if it is a library) to be put under the same license. To know in detail we have to know the libraries/frameworks in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your first step should be to research in which way the stuff you use restricts you on the choice of license. If you are clear about that, you have basically to decide, if you want a permissive license, or one that demands derivates to be open source again (like before mentioned GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorDisplayName="user114" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T08:08:17.550" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:08:17.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="582" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:46:01.010" Score="242" ViewCount="138726" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many articles out there which cover the topic in length and breadth, but so far I haven't found a nice, concise answer to the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the most important differences between the BSD and the MIT licenses and in what way do their intended uses specifically differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21" LastEditorUserId="21" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T17:01:34.073" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T04:00:21.747" Title="What are the essential differences between the BSD and MIT licences?" Tags="|mit|bsd|license-comparison|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="215" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:47:20.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any license approved by the Open Source Initiative is technically an open source license. They have a list on their website, at &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picking a license &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; difficult. Generally, you need to look at the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;licenses of code you've used from other places (some licenses require you to use the same license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what you want other people to be able to do with your code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more you want people to be able to do with your stuff, the more permissive your license needs to be. Apache and public domain are permissive; GPL is more restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T07:47:20.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="202" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:49:40.680" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is recommended in many places, including by the license writers, to include the license header as well as the license file. Some reasons for this are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it clearly demonstrates what the license applies to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it points to the full license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license file itself can then contain solely the license, without having to list everything it applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T07:49:40.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="222" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:52:55.630" Score="20" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have put my code in one of the online repositories and have made it public but haven't licensed it... (to which the policy is that you retain the copyright). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough to just commit a licence text file along with the license header in every source file, in order to &quot;license&quot; the project? Or do I have to create a new project which has those from the very beginning, in which case what should I do with the old one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T12:36:38.373" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:36:38.373" Title="Can I license a project which I have already released without a license?" Tags="|relicensing|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2015-06-24T07:57:04.123" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the only contributor to a codebase, you can switch the license as you like. So yes, you can change the license, as long as you didn't use code of others. Check the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/33/55&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about relicensing, if you want to know under which circumstances you can change the license. Basically the same applies here, as you practically you change from an implicit copyright (license without giving any permissions) to an explicit license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:14:47.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="228" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:03:52.053" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some old projects that I personally consider close to worthless at this stage, if there's any user-base they are likely to have their own forks and while there's some nifty tricks in them the majority of the project is unsuitable for learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no longer got any intention of continuing working on these projects and I've got my own archive of them, so I'm wondering, for the sake of the community, what should I do with them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231" LastEditorUserId="231" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T08:11:30.877" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T11:17:02.107" Title="Should I archive/delete old projects of questionable quality" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-24T11:36:29.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="223" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:06:29.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically it is up to you. I would probably make an archive and offer an download with the source for anyone that might be interested but do nothing else. You should clearly note, that you don't support this anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:06:29.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="223" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:06:35.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no clear answer. Deleting on the internet is not making a huge sense, as it's nearly unlimited. However, you should consider adding a &quot;out of maintenace, do not use&quot; note. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T11:17:02.107" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T11:17:02.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:18:01.257" Score="36" ViewCount="3206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found on Stack Overflow a 10-lines block of code that does exactly what I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no license information in the post nor on the answerer's profile page, so the CC BY-SA 3.0 license of Stack Overflow applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To separate concerns, let's suppose the answerer has written the code by themselves, not copy-pasted from somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/strong&gt; Can I copy/paste this snippet into my GNU-GPLv3-licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T16:30:00.040" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T16:30:00.040" Title="Can I copy-paste a snippet from Stack Overflow into my GNU-GPL project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="223" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:24:34.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you remove those projects: fine, that's your decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't remove them: make sure you mark them in the sense that you add a visible note saying &quot;THIS PROJECT IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED&quot;, so that a visitor who stumbles upon your code knows that he's spending time on a dead project when he decides to use your code (he can have very good reasons to do so, for instance if he wants to revive the project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not removing your code can make sense if you ever intend to revisit your project. You never know what happens with your own archives (crashed disk drives, DVDs that are no longer legible,...) Keeping the code where it is now, can make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not removing your code can result in you being contacted about that code. For instance: I once made the mistake to add my phone number on a tutorial page (which was very stupid of me). Years after the project was discontinued, people still called me for support. If you live in Europe and people call you from the US during their business hours, this is a pain. Changing your phone number is the only option you have in that case. The same goes for mail addresses: make sure that you remove your priority mail address because people are going to contact you when they think they need your code, when they've tried it and when it doesn't work for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally: the internet never forgets. Even if you remove your project, there is a chance that other copies of your code are still out there somewhere. Again: I once left my phone number on a tutorial page, and even after I removed that page, people still called me because the page was copied on another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T08:52:08.320" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:52:08.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:25:02.297" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow contributions (and all of Stack Exchange's too) are licensed under &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That basically means that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You are free to&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms&#xA;as long as you follow the license terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under the following terms:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any&#xA;reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor&#xA;endorses you or your use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the&#xA;original.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problematic bit is the ShareAlike clause. You have to release your work under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that, assuming the work is original enough (depends on the laws in your country), you will not be able to add it as is to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing is stopping you from understanding the snippet and writing one on your own, that has nothing to do with the original one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T14:18:38.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="252" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:26:14.050" Score="20" ViewCount="4004" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking the following Stack Overflow question and its answers into consideration: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7883179/can-you-create-your-own-software-license&quot;&gt;Can you create your one software license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here however is not creating a completely new license from scratch (as I am not a lawyer and wouldn't know where to start), but rather slightly modifying an existing one and saving it under a new name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible? Are licenses licensed themselves? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a new 'custom' license need to be approved by official organizations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T08:46:44.823" Title="Can I create my own license by modifying an existing one?" Tags="|licensing|license-creation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:27:24.297" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa&quot;&gt;is not compatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two options under which you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use code from SO in your GNU GPL licensed code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The SO member has licensed the code under an additional license that is compatible with the GNU GPL. One such license is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. (I do this, see my profile).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code is trivial enough to not be covered by copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:27:24.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="230" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:29:55.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I create my own license by modifying an existing one? Is that possible?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, yes. It was done in the past. You should give it a different name though, to avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are licenses licensed themselves?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any examples where that is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does a new 'custom' license need to be approved by official organs?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can put your works under any license you seem fit. Approval isn't required. A recommendation by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; might be helpful to popularize your license though. Also the checkup with the two organizations might reveal some problem with your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T08:40:17.190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:40:17.190" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="235" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:54:52.293" Score="27" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;What will the licence of the code be? If this is jurisdiction / country based what is relevant in this case? The place of origin of the poster, the host where the code lives, or the one who tries to view and reuse the unlicensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:55:30.183" LastActivityDate="2021-08-29T17:40:37.260" Title="What happens if I share code online without any licence declaration?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="230" CreationDate="2015-06-24T08:57:25.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem you may find if you change an existing license is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;enforcement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. The mainstream licenses have been carefully drafted with enforceability in mind - and some courts have now ruled on those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify an existing license with your own wording, you may introduce some language that makes your license unenforceable - even if your new wording is fine, you won't be able to fully benefit from previous rulings and increase your risk of a ruling going against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what you suggest has been done in the past. For example Bloomberg have open sourced &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bloomberglabs.com/api/libraries/&quot;&gt;a proprietary API&lt;/a&gt; under a “free-use” MIT-style license (differences emphasised). These changes have certainly gone through the hands of a number of legal experts before being applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of &lt;strong&gt;this proprietary software&lt;/strong&gt; and associated documentation files&#xA;  (the &quot;Software&quot;), to use, publish, or distribute copies of the&#xA;  Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to&#xA;  do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any other use, including modifying, adapting, reverse engineering,&#xA;  decompiling, or disassembling, is not permitted.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[... - rest is the same]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a&#xA;  copy of &lt;strong&gt;this software&lt;/strong&gt; and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), &lt;strong&gt;to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights&lt;/strong&gt; to use, &lt;strong&gt;copy, modify, merge&lt;/strong&gt;, publish,&#xA;  distribute, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense, and/or sell&lt;/strong&gt; copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[... - rest is the same]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="91" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T08:57:25.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="233" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:00:15.690" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In that case copyright applies. In most countries, certainly in Europe, this is an automatic process: you publish something, and even without you adding the copyright symbol, you get the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is no different than literature. As a developer, you are considered being the author of your work. When you publish, you are the copyright owner. Copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In spite of the fact that people can read your source code, your code isn't &quot;free, open source software&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: if you don't add any license information, your code is protected, but make sure you add your name and document when you wrote/published it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extra comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I have faced a situation where a code contribution was done publicly and anonymously. I did a huge effort to track down the author (and documented my search), but I couldn't find the contributor. The lawyer told me that, in that case, it was safe to assume that the code was in the public domain, as there was nobody to claim ownership (even after me asking the author to make himself public in a comment section). It's always safe to consult a lawyer in cases like this. And document! document! document!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update based on a comment:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So it doesn't matter on what site it's published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it does. When you register on a site, when you publish something on a site, you agree with the terms of agreement of that site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these terms may not be legal in the country where you reside, in which case the terms are void. For instance: a site can claim that it owns the IP of every picture you upload. In some European countries, companies such as Facebook risk litigation if they do so, because that term is considered illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should take into account that the terms and agreements &lt;em&gt;can be&lt;/em&gt; valid, because the internet doesn't have any borders and you can't assume that people in other countries know what the law says in the country you live in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was another question that explains what happens if you post code on StackOverflow: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/229/27&quot;&gt;Can I copy-paste a snippet from StackOverflow into my GNU-GPL project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you post code or an answer on StackOverflow, every one is free to use it, provided that the rules are obeyed. For instance: I wrote a book &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.itextpdf.com/ebook-stackoverflow-questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Best iText Questions on StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; which bundles questions and answers that were posted on StackOverflow. I can do so, because I allow people to redistribute the content and I give credit to the people who wrote the questions and answers (actually, I am the author of most of the answers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the event that You post or otherwise use Subscriber Content outside of the Network or Services, with the exception of content entirely created by You, You agree that You will follow the attribution rules of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You will ensure that any such use of Subscriber Content visually displays or otherwise indicates the source of the Subscriber Content as coming from the Stack Exchange Network. This requirement is satisfied with a discreet text blurb, or some other unobtrusive but clear visual indication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You will ensure that any such Internet use of Subscriber Content includes a hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site on the Network (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You will ensure that any such use of Subscriber Content visually display or otherwise clearly indicate the author names for every question and answer so used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You will ensure that any such Internet use of Subscriber Content Hyperlink each author name directly back to his or her user profile page on the source site on the Network (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/a&gt;), directly to the Stack Exchange domain, in standard HTML (i.e. not through a Tinyurl or other such indirect hyperlink, form of obfuscation or redirection), without any “nofollow” command or any other such means of avoiding detection by search engines, and visible even with JavaScript disabled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at my book, you'll see that there's a link to the full question on StackOverflow under every question, as well as a link to the profile of the person who posted the question. I didn't provide such a link for the answers in case I am the author of the answer, because I have the choice to do with my own content what I want. However, I can't prevent that a third party takes my answer and copies it (that wouldn't be fair, but it has happened before and there's very little one can do about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:45:34.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="233" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:00:22.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you share code without any license declaration, the general assumption is you apply normal copyrights. That means copying it, modifying it or anything else might be risky. A court may judge, that the way you shared it implied some usage, but to depend on that is highly risky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And code without clear license declaration isn't open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:00:22.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:03:16.870" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people start abusing your issue tracker to get support, then obviously your other support channels are not accessible enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you have a separate support system which is both easy to find and easy to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I would have a problem with your software, a text file called &lt;code&gt;contributing.md&lt;/code&gt; would not be the first place to look. In fact I would likely not look at it at all, because I don't want to contribute. I want to ask a question. When you are lucky, I might look at a text file called &lt;code&gt;FAQ&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; or whatever documents I find in a sub-directory called &lt;code&gt;/doc/&lt;/code&gt;. But very likely the first place I would look would be your website, and when the only interactive feature I find there is the issue tracker, I would see no other choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mailing lists and IRC channels are nice, but they don't help when they aren't accessible from the web browser. With either medium I have no idea if they are even active. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have a mailing list archive which is searchable from the web and which can be easily found? That would allow people to see if the mailing list is active and if support questions are welcome there. They could also use the search function to check if their question is already answered which saves you a lot of time handling duplicate questions (a problem with a medium like IRC which has no persistence at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about a web-based support forum? Did you consider creating one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T09:22:23.530" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:22:23.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="240" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:24:26.020" Score="11" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I'll start writing some code with no actual expectations about where it will end up or how useful it will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any point in releasing the code for a small project, mainly done for myself, which will likely never be finished? Or is it better to keep that code private?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for answers that take into account both the benefit for the general public as well as the potential future of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T13:08:00.313" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T13:08:00.313" Title="Are there good reasons to open source &quot;trivial&quot; projects?" Tags="|benefits|publishing|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="233" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:27:03.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your code will be &lt;strong&gt;unlicensed&lt;/strong&gt; and no one would be allowed to use it. However, by posting it on services like GitHub, you are granting them [non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited] rights to publish your content in connection with the service. Unless the terms of the service requires otherwise and you accepted, you will retain copyright over the content and reserve all other rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="61" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:27:03.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="238" CreationDate="2015-06-24T09:35:11.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open sourcing a project is never evil. You can open source small scripts to full scale applications if you want, and be assured that among the millions of programmers out there, even if it is useful to a few of them, you've succeeded. You have essentially helped someone reduce his/her work by using your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the future of your project, well, I'm sure if you do something useful, and it is something that can potentially help out several others like you, people would want to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T09:35:11.650" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:03:51.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is that it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According the just the licensing: no, you can't, the licenses aren't compatible. But that's not the entirety of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That only applies if the snippet itself is eligible to be copyrighted in the first place. When that applies differs from country to country. Some take in to account the effort that was needed to create something - the &quot;sweat of the brow&quot; doctrine, as is used for example in the UK, but not in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other places the threshold is originality and creativity. This is rather vague, and it can only be tested in a court of law if the snippet meets the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Google vs Oracle, Google was found to have infringed on Oracles copyright through a 9 line method &lt;code&gt;rangeCheck&lt;/code&gt; that was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {&#xA;     if (fromIndex &amp;gt; toIndex)&#xA;          throw new IllegalArgumentException(&quot;fromIndex(&quot; + fromIndex +&#xA;               &quot;) &amp;gt; toIndex(&quot; + toIndex+&quot;)&quot;);&#xA;     if (fromIndex &amp;lt; 0) &#xA;          throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);&#xA;     if (toIndex &amp;gt; arrayLen) &#xA;          throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so apparently a snippet like that is sufficient to satisfy that criterion. I think there are few code snippets that demonstrate &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; originality and creativity than this snippet does, but the details is eventually for a court to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do have the option however to ask the original creator to license the snippet to you under your preferred license. Or you could take the presented algorithm, and re-implement it yourself. Ideas, and algorithms are ideas, are not eligible for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr. According to the license: no. Unless the work doesn't meet the threshold of originality, which based on precedent seems to be very low for software in the US. It's probably not worth the legal minefield to try it out. But you can re-implement the algorithm yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T10:15:55.133" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:15:55.133" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:15:28.233" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common misunderstanding is that if you put something online without a license text to accompany it, anyone is free to do with it whatever they want. This isn't true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you create is copyrighted to you, and can't be re-used without receiving a license from you allowing them to do so. Claims like &quot;all rights reserved&quot;, icons like ©, etc. don't mean much: they are all already implied for anything that doesn't have additional license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where many think that if something doesn't come with a license you may pretty much do anything with it, the truth it that if something doesn't come with a license you may pretty much do nothing with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of things you own the copyright on, you can do pretty much whatever you want. You may release it under an additional license, or you may stop distributing it under some license - though many (all?) open source license don't allow you to revoke a license. That means people who already obtained the software under those licenses retain the right to use it under such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, it is generally enough to just add a licence text file, and add a license header in every file the license applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:15:28.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="243" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:16:47.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software refers to any executable computer program that is not embedded into the hardware of the host device. Software is programmed and then released for others to use via various distribution methods. Common open-source distribution platforms include GitHub, SourceForge, and the soon-to-close Google Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used on questions about the open-source aspects of software. Open-source does not only refer to software, so if you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; asking about software you should use this tag. Take care that your question is about the open-source aspects of the software, rather than details about the software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:39:06.067" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T13:39:06.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:16:47.900" Score="0" Body="For questions about software in an open-source context; its uses and limitations." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:39:26.860" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T13:39:26.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="260" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:16:57.293" Score="12" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any other applications of Open Source other than on software/code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess you could apply the same idea to any other intellectual property (creations of the mind/intellect). But are there any real life examples outside the software industry and community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T14:22:24.917" Title="Are there any other applications of Open Source other than on software/code?" Tags="|software|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:28:11.193" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 3D graphics world, there are free-licensed models, textures, and the like.  When building a 3D graphical work, they're the rough equivalents of code libraries and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware&quot;&gt;open-source hardware&lt;/a&gt; movement (OpenCores, RepRap, etc.), though particularly in computing hardware, the line between &quot;software&quot; and &quot;not software&quot; gets a bit fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:28:11.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:31:37.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is the industry in which the open source industry is strongest, but other industries or arts can also be licensed openly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related industry is hardware. Some microcomputers are open-source licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DIY is one such industry: when you make a product, you can release the documents you used to help make it under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of computer-related arts are also open source-able: video editing, animation, copywriting, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:31:37.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:34:03.410" Score="18" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;Free Software&lt;/strong&gt; is typically associated with software licensed under an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;-approved license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;), and the term &lt;strong&gt;Open Source (Software)&lt;/strong&gt; is typically associated with software licensed under an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;-approved license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the applicable licenses are both, FSF- and OSI-approved. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/383/138&quot;&gt;there are exceptions&lt;/a&gt;. So &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not all &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Open Source (Software)&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not all &lt;em&gt;Open Source (Software)&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a term that includes both sets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_terms_for_free_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alternative term&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;FOSS&lt;/strong&gt;, which stands for &quot;free (and) open-source software&quot;, is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to its Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, for software that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can be classified as both free software and open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that this applies also to &lt;strong&gt;FLOSS&lt;/strong&gt;, which stands for &quot;free/libre (and) open-source software&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:05:34.757" Title="Is there a term that means &quot;Free Software and/*or* Open Source (Software)&quot;?" Tags="|software|osi|terminology|fsf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:35:36.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Code on StackOverflow is licensed under CC-BY-SA (which, incidentally, is a bad choice of license for any software or code). The problem with this is the SA part - the Share-Alike clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that any &lt;strong&gt;direct copies&lt;/strong&gt; of the work have to be released under the same license as the original. Thus, you cannot use the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you don't have to directly copy the snippet. Instead, use it to understand the principles behind why the author has done that, then write your own snippet that does the same thing. You get the same benefit out of it, and can use your own choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:35:36.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="248" CreationDate="2015-06-24T10:40:13.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just about the best term for it you have already mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FLOSS&lt;/strong&gt; is a fairly widely-used acronym for software that is both free and open-source. You can also use &lt;strong&gt;FOSS&lt;/strong&gt;, but there is an important note about &lt;strong&gt;FLOSS&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Libre&lt;/em&gt;, in French or Spanish, refers to 'free' in the way that we refer to it when saying 'free as in speech'. It means liberty, not lack of cost. Thus, if you use FLOSS as the acronym, you are technically implying that you could still charge for the software. FOSS could imply either. This is, however, a technicality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any single &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; that shows both free and open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T10:40:13.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2015-06-24T11:14:29.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the surface not, as the source is an integral part (every OSS license is demanding release of source code, not binaries). That is obviously not directly applicable to other copyrighted works, like for example stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the ideas of freedom, permission for everyone to copy, modify, redistribute and remix has arrived in other areas. Namely the Creative Commons licenses are heavily influenced by the idea of Open Source. But also many people also simply use OSS-licenses for other stuff than software, although it isn't a perfect fit. And there were developed also licenses in this spirit for other areas, for instance for open hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T11:14:29.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="230" CreationDate="2015-06-24T11:21:32.907" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses themselves are often licensed under separate terms which don't have much to do with their own. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, for example is licensed under the following terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a free-as-in-freedom license.  You need to check for each license separately which conditions apply to the license text itself. In the worst case the license text is not licensed at all, which implies &lt;em&gt;All Rights Reserved&lt;/em&gt; which means you are not allowed to use it for your own project, because that would be an illegal reproduction of the copyrighted license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even when the license of the license allows modification: &lt;strong&gt;Unless you are a lawyer specialized in copyright law you should not modify an existing license&lt;/strong&gt;. A license is a legal document, and writing legal documents should be left to the professionals. Otherwise you risk writing something which doesn't actually say what you want it to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason to not invent your own license is to &lt;strong&gt;prevent license proliferation&lt;/strong&gt;. There are already lots and lots of open source licenses with very similar terms, but yet they are often incompatible just because they say so. Inventing a new license even though an existing one would do makes it harder for all of us to keep track of all the licenses available and is a hinderance to developers who would like to combine code licensed under different licenses in one project. So unless you are &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; your new license fills an important niche not yet covered, please try to use one which already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &amp;quot;approval for new licenses&amp;quot;: A license is a legal agreement between you and your users. Nobody needs to approve it except for you and your users for it to be legally valid (except when it contradicts local laws - that's another reason why you should let a lawyer write them). However, when you want others to use your license for their FOSS project, you might seek approval from a quasi-official organization like the Free Software Foundation or Open Source Initiative. Their recommendation might not have any &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; weight, but it confirms that your terms are in agreement with their definitions of Free Software / Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T08:46:44.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="254" CreationDate="2015-06-24T11:51:46.173" Score="20" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot;&gt;text of the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; starts with the following disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this&#xA;  license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? The text of the GPL itself isn't open source? Will the FSF sue me in court if I change the text of the GPL and release it as Mnementh's Public License? What is the intention of this paragraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T12:57:13.267" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T12:57:13.267" Title="What are the licensing terms of the text of the GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2015-06-24T11:59:02.097" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence at the top of the GPL, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...changing it is not allowed,&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; does not give you permission to make a derived license from the text of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's GPL FAQ item on modifying the GPL&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; give you that permission (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I modify the GPL and make a modified license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to make modified versions of the GPL, but it tends to have practical consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can legally use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you &lt;strong&gt;call your license by another name&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;do not include the GPL preamble&lt;/strong&gt;, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and &lt;strong&gt;not mention GNU&lt;/strong&gt; (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to &amp;lt;licensing@gnu.org&amp;gt; for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;strong&gt;we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified license&lt;/strong&gt; in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the FSF (who is the author of the GPL) is explicitly allowing you to make and redistribute a derivative version of the GNU GPL, provided you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;change the name of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not reuse any part of the GPL preamble (this requires separate specific permission)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove mentions of GNU that appear in the how-to-use instructions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the FSF advises that you make use of the license's capability for exceptions instead of writing your own. That will allow you to make the license more permissive but also enjoy the legally-vetted and GPL-compatible verbatim text of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL, and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about GPL exceptions, see the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How can I allow linking of proprietary modules with my GPL-covered library under a controlled interface only?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FontException&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How does the GPL apply to fonts?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I am writing a website maintenance system (called a “content management system” by some), or some other application which generates web pages from templates. What license should I use for those templates?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T12:15:51.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="183" CreationDate="2015-06-24T12:38:14.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;http://haacked.com/archive/2012/02/22/spirit-of-open-source.aspx/&quot;&gt;the article &lt;em&gt;What Is The Spirit of Open Source?&lt;/em&gt; by Phil Haack&lt;/a&gt; is relevant here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were those who felt that it was was disingenuous for me to use the term “open source software” to describe a Microsoft project that doesn’t accept contributions and is developed under a closed model, even if it is licensed under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, publishing your code under an open source license is all you need to be an open source project. You don't need to accept any contributions at all. That's because anyone else can fork your project and use that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some would argue that this may not be in &quot;the spirit of open source&quot;, that's not really the right term to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Miguel [de Icaza] thought a better term is “open and collaborative development.” That’s the process that is so closely associated with developing open source software that it’s become synonymous with open source in the minds of many people. But it’s not the same thing because it’s possible to conduct open and collaborative development on a non-open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T12:38:14.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T13:30:43.607" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license is any notice that governs and rules a set of terms and conditions, outlining the rights of the licensee and licensor towards a certain area of interest or work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing refers to applying a license to a creative work, be it software, images, hardware, or any other licensable object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A software license is a legally binding agreement that specifies the terms of use for an application and defines the rights of the software producer and of the end-user. -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://its.uncg.edu/Software/Licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, a license defines the terms and conditions under which a third party can make use of the licensor's intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T01:30:18.053" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T01:30:18.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T13:30:43.607" Score="0" Body="Licensing refers to applying a license to an area of software. Only use this tag if your question concerns the application of a license to an area of interest. If your question concerns a specific license, use the tag that corresponds to your license. For more general questions, use this tag." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T13:37:01.163" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T13:37:01.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T13:59:19.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; released the definition of the term &quot;Open Source&quot; and keeps a list of conforming licenses with a selection of recommended ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's create the Open Source Definition, a &quot;standard&quot; in which licenses must comply to be open source. The open source reviews various licenses, and they are subject to approval. A list of licenses may be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:16:53.123" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:16:53.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="259" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T13:59:19.407" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Open Source Initiative and its relationship to free and open projects." OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:16:53.123" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:16:53.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2015-06-24T14:17:00.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Applications&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; notes that there are loads of uses, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transportation&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_robotics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;robots&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beer&lt;/a&gt;. Some fall under the umbrella of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source hardware&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite of these is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Open-source_design_evolution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyperloop&lt;/a&gt;, first pushed forward by Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors (some of the latter's ideas are open-source). Numerous groups have done studies and simulations on the design, allowing more progress to be made than any one group could make. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/16/elon_musk_to_release_open_source_hyperloop_plans_in_august/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Said Musk&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I really hate patents unless critical to company survival. Will publish Hyperloop as open source,&quot; he &lt;a href=&quot;http://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/356776740409974785&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt; on Twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="145" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T14:22:24.917" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T14:22:24.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="261" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T14:33:40.750" Score="10" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I create a system similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino&quot;&gt;Arduino&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't yet developed much more than a basic version, and so the hardware is only compatible with the software I created, so it makes sense for them both to be open source. For simplicity's sake, I would like to distribute them under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:11:11.647" Title="Can I distribute related software and hardware under the same license?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="264" CreationDate="2015-06-24T14:51:05.630" Score="41" ViewCount="24741" Body="&lt;p&gt;FOSS stands for &quot;Free and Open Source Software&quot;, whereas FLOSS stands for &quot;Free/Libre/Open Source Software&quot;. The use of &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; denotes the idea that the software is &quot;free as in free speech, not free beer,&quot; as Richard Stallman put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the practical difference between FOSS and FLOSS? Does the inclusion of &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; denote fewer restrictions in FLOSS, or is the difference subtler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.html&quot;&gt;a longer explanation by Stallman&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to indicate that FLOSS merely emphasizes the way the software is &quot;free&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T15:39:40.533" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:08:51.543" Title="What is the difference between FOSS and FLOSS?" Tags="|terminology|floss|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="262" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:00:53.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've partially covered this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/250/98&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;, which might be worth a read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Libre&lt;/em&gt; is from the French and/or Spanish (there may be other languages too, but those come to mind). In said languages, &quot;libre&quot; implies, as you say, free speech not free beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first difference, then, is that FLOSS is actually implied to be a bit &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; restrictive &lt;strong&gt;to the creator&lt;/strong&gt;: i.e. categorising your software as FLOSS implies you will not charge for it. FOSS, on the other hand, doesn't specify what &quot;free&quot; it means, so you can charge for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your users, on the other hand, won't see much of a difference apart from cost: whether software is FLOSS or FOSS, they will be able to use it in much the same way. This is as opposed to sourcing differences: the difference between open- and visible-source is large, whereas the difference between FOSS and FLOSS is small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems this is the only major distinction between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stallman has also written &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, which mentions FOSS and FLOSS briefly, among other discussion of the principles of &quot;free&quot; software. (Thanks to Pandya for bringing this up &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22385502#22385502&quot;&gt;in chat&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:08:51.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="262" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:07:19.150" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;French Skills to the test!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Libre -&gt; Free as in Freedom. I'm Free as a bird!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gratuit -&gt; Free as in Free Food. The Food is Free!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People started using the term FLOSS to help make the vision that the software is &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;, and not free. FLOSS meant Free/Libre Open Source Software, whereas FOSS would mean Free and Open Source Software. This is less clear, as FOSS may not be interpreted with freedom. If you want to accept both, you should use FLOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For More Info: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/comparison.en.html&quot;&gt;Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS - same same but different&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html&quot;&gt;FLOSS and FOSS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T15:10:47.077" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:10:47.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="261" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:11:11.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essential principles of open-sourcing hardware and software remain the same: primarily, to ensure everyone has the right to use and reuse what you've created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do, however, need to pick (or make - though that's not recommended) a license that will apply well to both software and hardware. Hardware has the difference of being rather, well, &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt;, and as such has different considerations to note. Specifically, there are two parts to the hardware: the documents you used to create it, and the product itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with all licensing, consider what you want users to be able to do with what you've made. If you're licensing so that people can modify and redistribute your software, do you want them hacking away at your hardware too and redistributing that? There's a different type and level of effort in creating hardware and software: are you more protective of one than the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; There's nothing stopping you, but consider what you want to happen with your creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:11:11.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="262" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:12:48.483" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;FOSS&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;FLOSS&lt;/em&gt; are synonyms. (The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU Project / Free Software Foundation: FLOSS and FOSS, by Richard Stallman&quot;&gt;FSF agrees&lt;/a&gt;, but recommends to use &lt;em&gt;FLOSS&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Free Software&quot; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Open Source&quot; refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;. The terms &lt;em&gt;FOSS&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;FLOSS&lt;/em&gt; are used to refer to software that is licensed under a license that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/248/138&quot;&gt;(not or)&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the &quot;F&quot; stands for &quot;free&quot;, and in both cases this &quot;free&quot; refers to the concept of freedom, not to gratis. FOSS &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; FLOSS may cost money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding &quot;L&quot; for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre_%28word%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;libre&lt;/a&gt;&quot; helps to clarify this, because &quot;free&quot; is ambiguous in the English language. (After all, it says &quot;free/libre&quot;, not &quot;free and libre&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:19:39.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="230" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:26:25.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as you check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses allow you to do this. Notably, the GPL &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;, though the note indicates otherwise: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/254/98&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for a full explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should simply be a matter of checking around the license creator's website or distribution mechanism to see whether they'd allow you to use their license to create a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is nothing saying you can (explicitly giving you permission), &lt;em&gt;you may not&lt;/em&gt;. It is a common misconception that if no license terms are available, you can do anything you like with it: this is not true. Instead, if no licenses is visible, you can do almost nothing with it (excepting fair use). So, if they don't give permission, you can't use the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also note that creating your own license is discouraged by many, notably GNU (creators of the GPL). They say that although you may use the GPL to create a new license, the new license will almost certainly be incompatible with the GPL. This reason sticks as a good reason not to write your own license based off any other. Additionally, the big-name accepted licenses like Apache, MIT, and GPL are legally vetted for you and you can be sure that there aren't (m)any holes. Your own license, unless you are a lawyer, likely will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:26:25.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:27:46.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, or General Public License is a basic software license offered by GNU, which is sponsored by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. There are currently three major versions of the license: 1, 2, and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU Licenses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(all)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-1.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T01:19:31.063" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T01:19:31.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:27:46.307" Score="0" Body="The GNU's General Public License, a commonly-used free software license. The GPL has various versions, v1-v3, so use this tag only for questions talking about overarching issues of the licenses or shared characteristics. For example, for a question about a unique section on version 3, use the [gpl-3] tag." OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2020-01-02T07:57:31.177" LastActivityDate="2020-01-02T07:57:31.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="272" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:29:30.847" Score="35" ViewCount="7355" Body="&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are the consequences of Open Source projects being discontinued, if it's done by a large organization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-to-relicense-a-project&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;the older version of project can still be used under the same old open source license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to make it so that the project can't be used under the old license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T22:21:14.543" Title="Is it possible to close an open source project?" Tags="|distribution|relicensing|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:44:09.523" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the question you linked, if you're the only contributor, you can do whatever you want with the project. You can take it off GitHub or whatever platform you decided, you can compile and sell it, and whatnot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;However&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot do that if you aren't the sole contributor. You are no longer the only rights holder, and thus, the decision has to be shared amongst all contributors (Or alternatively, remove all contributions not made by you).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot prevent someone who forked your projects when it was open source of continuing to distribute the application under the old license. You gave them a license to remix and redistribute your project, and cannot realistically revoke it. And what if their fork had forks? etc. This of course, depends on the license you've released your open source project with, and it is theoretically possible to add a revocation clause. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T15:54:36.857" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:54:36.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:48:25.613" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much would depend on the initial license chosen when creating the OS project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OSP was originally published under a copyleft license such as GPL, then the answer is clearly no. They can not continue development under a more restrictive license without violating the terms of the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A permissive license, such as Apache, allows the original publisher to effectively fork the project internally and abandon the open source version, making no more commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the project was ever used (or even downloaded) by someone, even deleting the 'authorative' source repository will not stop it reappearing under a different guise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:48:25.613" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="213" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:54:15.027" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright protection only comes into play when an actual &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; has been made of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two people write a &quot;hello world&quot; program independently of each other, then both programs are protected by copyright and can be published with any license that the author wants.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But as both worked independently of each other, neither can claim that the other infringed on his copyright because no copies were made.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It doesn't even matter here if one has published his work before the other even started, to claim a copyright infringement, you have to prove that someone made a copy of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one grey area here: If person A has read the code from person B and then creates something very similar, then there might be cases where person B could successfully argue that person A has effectively made a copy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For such a claim to be successful, most likely the code of person B has to be of enough originality that it would be unlikely that person A had come up with his solution without seeing the work from person B. This would not be the case with a &quot;hello world&quot; type of program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T15:54:15.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-06-24T15:57:57.330" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically yes, but practically no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Technically yes&lt;/strong&gt; - if you're the sole contributor, or you can get agreement with your co-contributors, you can do anything you like. It doesn't matter how you've distributed the software before: the original copyright is yours (or a group's and you have permission to act for that group) and you have permanent rights to do anything you like with it, unless you deliberately waive them. Thus, you can remove distributions, binaries, source, etc, from everywhere you've put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practically no&lt;/strong&gt; - if your project was any sort of popular, people will have copies of it that they are allowed to keep. Most (all?) licenses say that you can't revoke the right to use the software, as long as license terms are followed. If someone's got the software, tough. It may also have been forked and developed: you can't tell these people to stop either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T22:10:17.923" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T22:10:17.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="156" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:09:37.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are (paid) services such as &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/managed-services/open-source-software-audit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Duck &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openlogic.com/products-services/services/application-audit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Logic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that will audit your code, and report all of the licensed pieces of software found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will even find snippets in your code which are copy/pasted or too closely resemble snippets found on the internet which are shared with an unfavorable license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T08:46:12.833" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T08:46:12.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="173" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:16:47.867" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the large majority of cases, the software of a program and the artwork used by a program are not related to each other where copyright is concerned.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An exception might be an image that was created by a program from a fixed formula and the source code of that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a work to be considered a derived work, there must be a way to go from the original work to the target work. There is no such conversion path between the source code of a program and the artwork of a program. For that reason, the two are considered to be independent works as far as copyright is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two works are independent works for copyright, then their copyright licenses also don't affect each other. This means that you can perfectly combine artwork under a free (CC-SA) license with software under a closed-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you made changes to the artwork under the CC-SA license, then you must share your modified artwork under the same (or a compatible) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T16:16:47.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="173" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:28:57.993" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You only need to share the image under CC-BY-SA. This means your project will be multi-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important part is that &lt;em&gt;only the image&lt;/em&gt; is currently under BY-SA. Since the only requirement of the license is that if you share, modify or redistribute the image, you have to license &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; under BY-SA. The license of the image can have no bearing on the rest of your project, as long as the rest of your project isn't a derivative work of the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be wise, as in many cases, to include a Licensing file with your project, giving details of the project's licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The majority of this project is licensed under X. This includes the codebase and many assets. A list of exceptions is provided below, along with the license for each one. When using these assets, please be mindful that you are using the correct license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;image-name.jpg is licensed under CC-BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;other-image.png is licensed under Y&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;other exceptions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T16:28:57.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="531" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:51:46.290" Score="21" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use open source software for my business, and it is dual licensed. If I choose the paid license which provides support for any changes we require, will this mean that we are unable to change to a different support provider in future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/software/analysis-the-big-problems-with-open-source-3224021/&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; I was concerned by the following suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some vendors operate on a 'dual-licence' business model, in which customers can buy a license to get access to the vendor's support team or to extra features and extensions for the core software, such as management tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Mark Driver, an analyst at Gartner, the overwhelming majority of commercial open-source efforts today are based on a dual-licence model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Customers should know, he says, that with this option, &quot;the open-source-ness of the product comes into question&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While open-source software licences cost less than commercial software licences, they include terms and conditions that restrict your use and lock you into a vendor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this a valid concern at the time the article was written (2010) and does it still apply to dual licensed software today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T10:59:24.920" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T15:49:55.280" Title="Will a dual license lock me in to a provider?" Tags="|licensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="318" CreationDate="2015-06-24T16:54:30.940" Score="15" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some OSS projects include CA certificates and claims that they are subject to a particular OSS license. For example the certificates in &lt;a href=&quot;https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt&quot;&gt;https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt&lt;/a&gt; are said to be &quot;subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the certs themselves are mere large random numbers, which are &quot;mechanically generated&quot; and not  &quot;an original expression of an idea&quot;. Hence they might be considered as not copyrightable, and hence the OSS license cannot be applied. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a reasonable interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T17:21:28.220" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:13:28.900" Title="Do we need to follow the license for CA certs?" Tags="|licensing|restrictions|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T17:10:33.217" Score="16" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License&lt;/a&gt; states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;v. a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for my use of the license, I provide a direct link to the original material and the link rots or the page otherwise becomes inaccessible (for reasons which are not my fault), am I responsible for replacing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T16:54:55.480" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T00:42:48.447" Title="Am I responsible for fixing broken links under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2015-06-24T17:14:20.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the link rots, and the original work cannot be found, you are not liable to fix it. If the original work however, had moved projects (from the closing Google Code to GitHub, for example), and this transition is public and well known, it's likely that you must change the link to reflect that, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T18:42:18.330" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T18:42:18.330" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="389" CreationDate="2015-06-24T17:26:14.127" Score="15" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free software licences such as GPL depend on copyright law in order to be legally enforcable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there jurisdictions in which the law does not enforce such licenses, allowing the license to be ignored? If so are there any steps that can be taken to preserve the freedom of software in such jurisdictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T08:21:09.553" Title="Jurisdictions without compatible copyright law" Tags="|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="525" CreationDate="2015-06-24T17:35:03.673" Score="11" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a dynamically loadable module (.dll or .so) for a closed source program, but I would like to make the source code of this module available, and I'd like it to be (A)GPL licensed, so others could use my module, but I also want to make sure their code would also be open sourced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the whole project would be one executable at the end would the closed source program count as &quot;derivative work&quot;, thereby it would need to be GPL as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, can I add some kind of additional permission to the GPL licence of my code to explicitly allow this linkage to occur, so it could actually be distributed with the app?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, where and how should I put these additional permissions in the licence file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would this modified licence still be GPL (compatible)? What kind of open source code could I use within my module?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the resulting licence would not be GPL compatible are there any other licences that are better sutied for this situation, but are still similar in essence to GPL (e.g. reusing the code is only possible in case it's source is also released)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180" LastEditorUserId="180" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T18:19:15.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T08:59:08.563" Title="GPL licenced code for a module of a closed source program" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T19:14:15.047" Score="11" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a piece of software. The software is based on a piece of open source software. My question is how much must be changed / edited before I can call it my own? Also how do you classify how much is changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code I'm building on is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives&quot;&gt;BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; but if the code is still not technically my own (I did not write it) morally do you think I should provide some credit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T08:57:17.250" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T08:57:17.250" Title="When does code become my own?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="285" CreationDate="2015-06-24T19:28:12.097" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code you're building on in BY-NC-ND, which requires attribution, forbids commercial use, and disallowed derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you build on that code, it's a derivative, which is not allowed by the license. Even if you gradually replace everything, it is still a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything you change you can call your own, but the resulting work will always be a combined work of the original work and your changes, even if none of the original code remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T19:28:12.097" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T19:50:23.357" Score="9" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;If code has a licence that allows sharing of modifications, is it possible to prevent it being hosted on a site that uses third party advertising? Do licences with this intent exist, or is it not possible to prevent advertising without losing the ability to share modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:54:51.047" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:40:21.787" Title="Are there open source licences that prevent advertising?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:00:58.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe such a license exists. But it would not be an Free Software or Open Source license. A FLOSS license must not discriminate or forbid any form of usage. That includes the way in which the software is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of making or sharing modifications is conceptually unrelated to the question of usage restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditorDisplayName="user114" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T12:40:21.787" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:40:21.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:06:25.357" Score="14" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938017/why-big-open-source-projects-are-fleeing-sourceforges-free-software-hub.html&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; describes a problem with a particular online software hub:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The download-hosting site retreated after public outcry, removing the junkware it inserted into downloads of the popular GIMP image editing tool without the developers’ permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it was &quot;public outcry&quot; that caused this behaviour to stop. Are there any open source licences that preclude such behaviour? Is there a way of licensing that prevents legally adding junkware to software and then offering it for download?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this depend on whether it is claimed to be the original software, and whether it uses any protected trademarks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:07:18.490" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:07:18.490" Title="Junkware and permission to redistribute modified versions" Tags="|licensing|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="289" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:14:12.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;junkware&quot; was licensed as the license required, including it may not have been nice. But it was a legal thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any license that would prohibit any form of modification or usage would not be a Free Software or Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license which specifically prohibits adding bundled 3rd party software with a commercial goal would not be a Free Software or Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user114" LastEditorDisplayName="user114" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T20:19:56.827" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T20:19:56.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="300" CreationDate="2015-06-24T20:38:48.827" Score="46" ViewCount="8615" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is similar to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/202/should-i-include-license-text-in-a-single-file-or-all-source-files&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt;, but specifically about Copyright rather than Licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, each source file contains a line of the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2010-2015, Me&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this strictly necessary, or would a single COPYRIGHT file at the root of the repository cover all files within the project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need a separate COPYRIGHT file as well, to cover the entire project as a collection, rather than individual files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I have a copyright line in each source file, should they all reflect the same year range? Or should each file's line reflect the year-range from creation to the year it was last modified?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T11:11:47.550" Title="Should I include a copyright line in every file?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:10:56.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is partially based on preference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are distributing / publishing something as a package with one license included there is no need to put the licence on every page. However if you are making a website you may want to reference the license / put the copyright notice on every page to make people aware of the licence your work is published under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:10:56.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:12:41.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T21:12:41.850" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:12:41.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="295" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:12:41.850" Score="0" Body="For questions about the legal aspects of open source. Questions asking for legal advice are off-topic. You should consider mentioning the relevant legal jurisdiction in your question." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:17:39.800" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:17:39.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:27:23.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just going to add to Trevor's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license that you're using says something by this, then by all means you should follow it. Otherwise, I think a single file that explains that the copyright applies to all files in the repository should suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:27:23.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="301" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:31:13.570" Score="39" ViewCount="31893" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Preamble&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two other questions, specifically related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/202/should-i-include-license-text-in-a-single-file-or-all-source-files&quot;&gt;Licensing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/292/should-i-include-a-copyright-line-in-every-file&quot;&gt;Copyright&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reviewing the answers and comments, I get the feeling that people generally consider the two to be the roughly same thing. If this is true, why do we worry about both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that they are very different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For copyright&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It exists, without me doing anything to assert it, from the moment of creation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless explicitly assigned, or surrendered, it persists regardless of licence chosen for the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It grants the &lt;strong&gt;creator&lt;/strong&gt; very specific legal rights and remedies (although, these may vary by jurisdiction).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most forms of copyright have a defined duration (usually life + 'n' years).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In an open source project, every contributor retains copyright in their own contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For the Licence&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a legal document&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have to explicitly choose, or create, the license. It does not apply automatically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It grants &lt;strong&gt;users&lt;/strong&gt; of the software specific, and limited, rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless stated in the Licence itself, or until it is revoked, it remains enforceable in perpetuity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they aspects of the same thing, or do they actually serve two different populations (producers and consumers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T15:24:54.390" Title="What's the difference between Copyright and Licensing?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:33:19.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The F&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ree Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; defined the term Free Software and is owner of the GNU-licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T14:01:48.757" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:01:48.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:33:19.457" Score="0" Body="The Free Software Foundation defined the term Free Software and is owner of the GNU-licenses." OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T14:02:18.847" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:02:18.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:35:58.323" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to include both copyright and licensing information in all files: it ensures that everyone's rights are perfectly clear, regardless of what happens to the code in the future. Your project may be small and self-contained initially, but it often happens that interesting code ends up copied into multiple projects, or that projects get adopted by various people down the line. In both cases it's much easier to keep track of licenses and copyright information if it's specified in every file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you consider large projects nowadays, many of them include code from a huge variety of other projects, some large, some small, and in some cases single files copied from various sources (including sometimes old Usenet posts!). Firefox is a good example of this; it includes files from many different projects, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jhford/tooltool&quot;&gt;some quite small&lt;/a&gt; (included in Firefox &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/7b0df70e27ea/build/unix/build-clang/tooltool.py&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), and it can be quite hard to keep track of all the copyright holders and license information. Having it in every single file makes license auditors' jobs much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been cases in the past of projects which couldn't be included in Linux distributions because of a couple of files whose licenses or copyright information wasn't clear... (I don't remember specifics off the top of my head, I could find them if necessary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luis Villa wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;http://lu.is/blog/2012/03/17/on-the-importance-of-per-file-license-information/&quot;&gt;interesting blog post&lt;/a&gt; on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the difference between copyright and licensing goes, they are different, but licensing depends on copyright: a license is only valid inasmuch as it was originally given by the copyright holder. This reinforces the importance of including copyright information: it allows future users of your code to know who wrote it, and who to contact with any copyright-related queries (including licensing questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning copyright years, I'll defer to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot;&gt;GPL howto&lt;/a&gt; (I don't know the reasoning behind this rule but it's probably applicable beyond just the GPL): according to the FSF, copyright statements are supposed to list the years in which the project was released, not the years in which modifications occurred. So any file which is part of a release should have its copyright statement updated on release; there are a number of tools which can automate this (&lt;code&gt;copyright-update-directory&lt;/code&gt; in Emacs to name one). You can end up with different year ranges in your source files, but based on the first release they were part of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T07:32:31.760" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T07:32:31.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="297" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:36:43.103" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright is the legal term used to declare and prove who owns the intellectual property (the code, text, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing is the legal term used to describe the terms under which people are allowed to use the copyrighted material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can think of it in terms of physical property, if you want, the copyright is like the &quot;deed&quot; to a house. It says you own the house. If you want, you can rent the house out to someone, and that rental agreement is the 'license'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is different to a &quot;deed&quot; in that it is possible to license the material in different ways, to different people, all at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a &quot;deed&quot;, though, you can sell ownership of the code to someone else, and that would be called a copyright transfer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright owner (or their agent) can enter in to a license agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:36:43.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:36:55.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T21:36:55.967" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T21:36:55.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:36:55.967" Score="0" Body="an online hosting platform for git repositories" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T14:00:27.867" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:00:27.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="305" CreationDate="2015-06-24T21:59:58.933" Score="39" ViewCount="15802" Body="&lt;p&gt;Or in more general terms: Can I take code which is licensed under a permissive open source license (like the BSD license) and distribute it under a copyleft free software license (like the GPL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft and Apple seem to be allowed to take BSD (or similar) licensed code and distribute it under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, the permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems, both free and proprietary, to incorporate BSD code. For example, Microsoft Windows has used BSD-derived code in its implementation of TCP/IP and bundles recompiled versions of BSD's command-line networking tools since Windows 2000. Also Darwin, the system on which Apple's Mac OS X is built, is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD. Various commercial Unix operating systems, such as Solaris, also contain varying amounts of BSD code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Berkeley_Software_Distribution&amp;amp;oldid=664036786&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then there is this story from 2007 where some BSD people got mighty mad at linux kernel developers who took BSD licensed code and &quot;relicensed&quot; it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KernelTrap has an interesting article in which Theo de Raadt discusses the legal implications of the recent relicensing of OpenBSD's BSD licensed Atheros driver under the GPL. De Raadt says, &quot;it has been like pulling teeth since (most) Linux wireless guys and the SFLC do not wish to admit fault. I think that the Linux wireless guys should really think hard about this problem, how they look, and the legal risks they place upon the future of their source code bodies.&quot; He stressed that the theory that BSD code can simply be relicensed to the GPL without making significant changes to the code is false, adding, &quot;'in their zeal to get the code under their own license, some of these Linux wireless developers have broken copyright law repeatedly. But to even get to the point where they broke copyright law, they had to bypass a whole series of ethical considerations too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&amp;amp;sid=20070913014315&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenBSD Journal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to admit that I do not fully understand the legal implication of some of the terms. For example: incorporate, derive/derivative, or bundle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I used the term &quot;distribute&quot; in my question. A term which is not used in both the wikipedia article and the OpenBSD Journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that I am not asking whether I can &lt;em&gt;relicense&lt;/em&gt; the code. I am asking whether I can &lt;em&gt;redistribute&lt;/em&gt; the code under a different license. I understand that I cannot relicense code if it is not my copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean with &quot;distribute&quot; is roughly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download BSD licensed code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put GPL license file in root of project and GPL header in every relevant file and add note in README that the code is also licensed under GPL. Note that the BSD license is not removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upload the code to some website for everyone to download.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;???&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PROFIT!!1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand a downloader now has the option to take the code under the terms of the BSD license or under the terms of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is not allowed then please explain what Microsoft and Apple are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="115" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T20:22:10.063" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T20:22:10.063" Title="Can I take BSD licensed code and distribute it under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:10:58.450" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the BSD license in question is the two- or three-clause variant (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; without the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertising clause&lt;/a&gt;), I think you're technically allowed to do it, but you couldn't really enforce it: anyone who obtained a copy of the code you're distributing could re-use the BSD-licensed code under the provisions of the BSD license only, and the GPL wouldn't apply. (The GPL would apply to anything you hold the copyright for, and to the agregate; &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; resulting binaries would be GPL. But for that to be meaningful you'd have to add code of your own...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Microsoft and Apple are doing is complying with the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they don't redistribute source code then that doesn't apply. (Nothing forces them to redistribute source code; that's why the BSD license is called a permissive license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA;      the documentation and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;      distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll find that Microsoft and Apple products which incorporate BSD code do satisfy this, either in the documentation, or typically in the &quot;About&quot; box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name of the author may not be used to&#xA;      endorse or promote products derived from this software without&#xA;      specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow I doubt Microsoft or Apple would be interested in doing this anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final clause is the lack of warranty, which everyone disclaims anyway, so there's no change there either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four-clause BSD license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-incompatible&lt;/a&gt; so in that case you wouldn't be able to distribute under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2015-10-17T18:56:56.897" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T18:56:56.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="297" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:20:56.860" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A notable exception to your &quot;every contributor retains copyright in their own contributions&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many large projects use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; that specifies that copyright for contributed code is transferred from the code's author to the project/organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T22:20:56.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="317" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:27:04.963" Score="13" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I publish something on my website is a form of copyright automatically placed on that text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I know if you specifically say &quot;This is published under [insert some cc license here]&quot; then the copyright / usage rights are changed based on the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However what I don't know is what kind of copyright / usage rights are automatically applied to text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T22:46:28.243" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T23:57:23.613" Title="Is copyright automatic?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:35:01.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the random numbers can't be copyrighted, the use in which they were intended can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example someone might copyright a piece of text: &quot;Hello my name is Trevor&quot;. While you can't use those words as me or in my place, someone by the name of Trevor is still allowed to use those words in that order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody can take those numbers and use them as CA Certificates. However, you can still use those numbers in that order, as long as you're not using the number for the purpose used on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-24T23:01:38.663" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T23:01:38.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="314" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:44:19.393" Score="16" ViewCount="1104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Open Source Software a subset of free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was recently asked this and realized I was unsure the exact answer. I understand that free software is not a type of open source software, but I am unsure if the reverse is true or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T13:37:33.720" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T13:37:33.720" Title="Is Open Source Software a subset of free software?" Tags="|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|terminology|philosophy|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="307" CreationDate="2015-06-24T22:50:25.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright exists from the moment you put 'pen to paper' (figuratively speaking). The means of publication does not generally determine your copyright rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual rules and rights of Copyright vary based on jurisdiction, but in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anything you create is subject to copyright laws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every email you send&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A letter to your friend&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The menu at your favorite restaurant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the extreme, the shopping list you just wrote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The doodles on your notepad&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/297/whats-the-difference-between-copyright-and-licensing&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for the differences between Copyright and Licensing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text of any kind generally gains the same copyright protections as a full length novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T22:50:25.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="316" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:00:18.897" Score="15" ViewCount="2537" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a previously asked question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/261/can-i-distribute-related-software-and-hardware-under-the-same-license&quot;&gt;Can I distribute related software and hardware under the same license?&lt;/a&gt;, and then it occurred to me that hardware might have patents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that you can't release hardware under, let's say, a Creative Commons license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T16:07:16.797" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T16:07:16.797" Title="Can hardware have a license?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:11:11.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#free-software&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiatives FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Free software&quot; and &quot;open source software&quot; are two terms for the same thing: software released under licenses that guarantee a certain, specific set of freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source arose from people who supported the FSF, but later branched out over the decision of philosophy and marketing. There are differences, of course, such as the FSF has a 4-point definition for software freedom, while the OSI has 10. The FSF is sort of like a parent to the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we refer to software that is with Free Software and Open Source to be FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), or FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pandya raised &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; in chat: Looks like something where the FSF doesn't agree with Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T18:06:47.977" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T18:06:47.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="319" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:42:39.620" Score="9" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, are there rules regarding putting a license onto a license, for example if I had a license and I applied it with a license, in many cases this would cause a loop hole. Is there any way to fix this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:09:40.090" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:09:40.090" Title="Can you apply a license to a license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:52:39.693" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chumby HDK&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html&quot;&gt;The TAPR Open Hardware License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT License&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various BSD licenses&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the last four can also be used for software. None of the examples given are exclusively for hardware, with the exception of the TAPR Open Hardware License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can, in fact, release hardware under a Creative Commons license!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 This was given as an example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ladyada.net/library/openhardware/license.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, though not necessarily endorsed.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2 These were described and compared &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inmojo.com/licenses/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="145" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T00:25:13.053" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:25:13.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="307" CreationDate="2015-06-24T23:57:23.613" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright is automatic in all countries that have ratified the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;Berne convention&lt;/a&gt;. That's most of them. Copyright applies to any creative work. The interpretation of creative work is pretty broad. For example a mugshot isn't creative work but any photo that involves even the slightest attention to posing, light, choice of subject, etc. is a creative work. A shopping list is generally not creative work, but as soon as there are multiple ways to convey the same idea, a text expressing that idea is a creative work (the idea itself, however, is not subject to copyright). Copyright exists whether the author of the work is identified or not, and whether a copyright notice is present or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright&quot;&gt;Copyright&lt;/a&gt; is not a right to copy — in fact it's pretty much the opposite: it's a form of exclusive control that the author has over their work. &lt;strong&gt;Copyright forbids anyone other than the author from making copies of the work&lt;/strong&gt;, except in ways that the author has chosen to permit, and except in some very narrow ways that vary somewhat between jurisdiction and are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt; in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; is basically a way in which the author of a work authorizes others to make copies of the work and deal with them in a certain way. A license is a type of legal contract (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/contractvlicense.html&quot;&gt;more or less&lt;/a&gt;). Typically a license may allow dealing with the work in ways that are not allowed by default, in particular making multiple copies. Conversely a license may forbid dealing with the work in ways that are allowed by default, such as modifying the work¹.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain ways of distributing a work effectively carry an implicit license. For example, when you buy a book, you get the right to use that book, to resell it, to write annotations in the margin, etc. When a work is displayed on a web page, this allows anyone to view it in a web browser and (in most jurisdictions, though jurisprudence may still not be fully settled) to download it for offline perusal and edit that offline copy (but not to redistribute the downloaded copy to someone else). Details may vary depending on the type of work and the jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why contributing to an open source work always requires an explicit license grant. In the absence of a license, a creative work or a derivative of it cannot legally be redistributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt; In the absence of a license, modifying a work may or may not be allowed depending on the type of work, the type of modification and the jurisdiction. &lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-24T23:57:23.613" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="280" CreationDate="2015-06-25T00:13:28.900" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A certificate is not a creative work. It is a strictly codified representation of a piece of information. Copyright does not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some jurisdictions, there is a form of copyright for databases, i.e. collections of items which on their own may not be (and usually are not) subject to copyright. This is sometimes known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;database right&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In US law, database right is distinct from copyright, and databases are not legally protected — anyone can copy them. In the EU, databases are legally protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the European Union level, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;database directive&lt;/a&gt; declares that collections that are an “intellectual creation” where the author made a selection are protected by copyright (but with somewhat different rules for the European equivalent of fair use). Mozilla's list of CA certificates falls under this category. Databases that aim to be complete are protected by a distinct database right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus you can legally ignore any licensing terms if you obtain the Mozilla CA certificate database in a US jurisdiction. If you obtain it in an EU jurisdiction, Mozilla is entitled to prevent you from redistributing the database. They could restrict who had access to the database by not allowing everybody on the Internet to download it, if they so wanted. Since the database is provided with a license notice, if you download it, you are entitled to deal with the database only in ways that are allowed by this license. In other jurisdictions, consult the applicable laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:13:28.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="315" CreationDate="2015-06-25T00:16:26.513" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license is copyrightable since it is a substantial piece of text, so yes of course a copyright license can be applied to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, this is how the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3 license text&lt;/a&gt; is licensed (taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/241583/81527&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Programmers.SE):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might notice that this license is &lt;em&gt;less free&lt;/em&gt; than the terms of the GPL itself, but this is understandable as they want to protect the brand of GPL, and prevent people from changing this license and keep calling it GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why you think being able to change the license is a loophole; the license is a legal text that if you modify unilaterally, you void the license agreement between yourself and whoever you received it from. Sure you can use the modified license elsewhere, but it doesn't mean you can unilaterally change the terms of the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:16:26.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-06-25T00:37:50.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In practice, no. When someone obtains a copy of an open source work from the author, the license is effectively a contract where the author allows the recipient to deal with the work in many ways including use, redistribution and modification. The author is not allowed to unilaterally terminate this contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is of course allowed to stop doing any maintenance, to pull down their servers, and generally stop supporting anyone still using or wishing to obtain the work. They're also allowed to make a derivative of the original work and to not distribute the derivative under an open source license¹. But as long as someone else has a copy of the open source version and is willing to redistribute it, the author cannot prevent that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, some jurisdictions allow the author of a work to rescind their work. This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot;&gt;moral right&lt;/a&gt;, alongside the right to be recognized as the author and a few others, distinct from the economic rights (which are basically the right to control who may have copies of the work). US law has no moral rights. French law does, and in France, moral rights, unlike economic rights, cannot be contracted away (any contractual clause to this effect would be automatically void). For example, the author of a book may demand that the publisher stop distributing copies (though they cannot demand that buyers of the book turn their copies in). A painter may demand their painting back to destroy it. Of course the author must then compensate the publisher or the buyer of the painting for their loss, which makes rescinding difficult in practice. Continuing on French law, for software, unlike other forms of copyrighted works, there is no right to rescind unless explicitly mentioned in a contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of a practical possibility of rescinding a work is one of the important aspects of open source licenses. The fact that the source code (i.e. the prefered form of modification) will always be available means that a user of the work will always be able to continue maintenance if the original author stops doing so under satisfactory conditions. This is sometimes known as the “fork test” for open source licenses: they guarantee that no matter what the original author does, someone else can adopt the project and maintain their own version of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:37:50.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2015-06-25T00:49:41.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are responsible for replacing it, as the license states, “to the extent reasonably practicable”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the law and the contract do not provide any other indication, the only way to formally understand what “reasonably practicable” means is to study existing jurisprudence. In other words, it's up to judges to decide. I'm not aware of any existing jurisprudence on this particular topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you distribute printed flyers with the old URL, you are clearly not expected to fix the flyers that you handed out before the URL changed. But if you print a new batch where you've modified other parts of the text, and you were aware of the URL change, it's plausible that you could be required to update the URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T00:49:41.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="202" CreationDate="2015-06-25T01:08:22.507" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any jurisdiction that has a law that explicitly states that a license notice must be included in each file, or conversely that it need not be included in each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all countries that have ratified the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;Berne convention&lt;/a&gt;, all works are subject to copyright, whether they include a copyright notice or not. (A copyright notice may help, especially when seeking damages, but it is not required.) Absent a license, someone holding a legitimate copy of the work may deal with it in most ways (use it, modify it, etc.) but may not redistribute it. So if the license cannot be found, that's to the detriment of the recipient, not of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main risk if a file has no license notice is that the author A provides a user B with a complete multi-file work including a file stating the license terms, and B redistributes (lawfully, assuming an open source license) a single file to C without conveying the license terms to C. In this case, assuming a license that requires further distribution to be under the terms of the same license (which is the case for many open source licenses), C has not received a lawful copy of the work, since B's distribution to C would be a violation of the license. This is to the detriment of C, because they would then in principle not allowed to use the work in any way, lacking a lawful copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including a reference to the license in each file makes it more likely that in such circumstances, C will be properly informed of the provenance and the license of the collection of files. It's a good idea, but there is no strict legal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including a copyright notice in each file is also not required, since copyright is automatic as explained above. However it can be a good idea because a copyright notice can, in some cases, be circumstantial evidence of authorship and may allow the author to claim more damages in case of copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more bit that is often lumped with the license is a warranty disclaimer. That one's of a different nature, because unlike the bulk of the license, the warranty disclaimer protects the author. Warranty on works covered by copyright (such as software) is a bit of a strange beast — traditional law considers works covered by copyright to be artistic, not functional, and thus not subject to warranties. I'm not aware of jurisprudence regarding warranty statements on software, but it'll have to happen sooner or later. It's not even clear that typical warranty statements on software (whether open source or not) have any legal effect. However, if in doubt, this is one that you should include, since it protects the author if it's at all valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T01:08:22.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="342" CreationDate="2015-06-25T01:12:43.793" Score="7" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;If GPL and BSD code are combined in a piece of software, the entire work comes under GPL but its BSD portions can still be obtained under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the size of the GPL portion is exactly 0? If I take an existing BSD software, and without including any GPL code, can I then redistribute the software under GPL? Or am I required to add a copyrightable portion of GPL code, thereby turning the entire work into GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I am &lt;strong&gt;not interested in concealing the BSD origin&lt;/strong&gt;. Users will be fully aware that the software is also available under BSD, and its copyright text will be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're wondering, there are some weird places that accept GPL but not BSD, despite the fact that BSD is GPL-compatible, and I was wondering if and how this restriction can be overcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/304/175&quot;&gt;Can I take BSD licensed code and distribute it under GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/35/175&quot;&gt;If I include some GPL code in my project, can I release it as BSD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:12:47.497" Title="Can I redistribute BSD software under GPL with no changes?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T01:28:05.583" Score="20" ViewCount="2755" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses like MIT only require that you include the license text if you redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC licenses that have the BY part require that the original authors are attributed, but in flexible ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible to combine e.g. MIT with CC-BY, and redistribute under CC-BY?&lt;/strong&gt; That is, with a custom attribution requirement that the MIT license must be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC licenses have a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot;&gt;attribution types here&lt;/a&gt;; versions 1 through 4 require &quot;Copyright notice if supplied&quot;. Do permissive license texts constitute a &quot;copyright notice&quot;? If not, are there other items in that list that license texts can fall under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="174" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:30:39.983" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:30:30.990" Title="Are permissive licenses (MIT/BSD/zlib) compatible with CC-BY?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="183" CreationDate="2015-06-25T01:30:04.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can definitely select who contributes to your project. This violates neither the letter nor the spirit of any of the common definitions of free/libre/open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone may &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; your open source project, even if you don't like what they do with it. That's freedom 0 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF definition&lt;/a&gt;, clause 1 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, guideline 1 in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone may make a copy of your open source project and modify it in any way they like, even if you don't like the way they modify it. That's freedom 1, clause 3, guideline 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do retain the right to manage your project as you see fit. All open source projects, even the ones that have a publicly visible source repository and an address to submit patches, validate what modifications are accepted, and reject modifications that they don't like. Not all open source projects do accept patches — some just release a new version now and then and do all their development behind closed doors. Public repositories are common nowadays, but this wasn't always the case — in the 1990s, even GNU software was developed behind closed doors, only new releases were open source!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note in particular that you retain the right to be identified as the author of what you wrote, and conversely of not being identified as the author of what you didn't write. Many common licenses and common definitions of free/libre/open-source allow the original author to make reasonable requirements on attribution, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;rules about how to package a modified version are acceptable (…). Thus, it is acceptable for the license to require that you change the name of the modified version, remove a logo, or identify your modifications as yours. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSD&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clause 4 (“Integrity of The Author's Source Code”) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSD&lt;/a&gt;. This clause allows the practice that is common in some circles to require that modified versions of a work carry a different name. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LaTeX Project Public License&lt;/a&gt; requires third-party modified versions of packages to have a different name unless they are compatible with the original (§6.a).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program (…) provided that (…) the work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independently of copyright law, laws about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;libel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fraud&lt;/a&gt; would generally prevent someone else from claiming that their modified version is your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T01:30:04.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="327" CreationDate="2015-06-25T03:05:02.430" Score="8" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I place work I publish under two licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the two have conflicting attributes which property should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you specify which properties you want two be applied from the two licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T00:21:27.180" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T00:21:27.180" Title="Dual license compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="326" CreationDate="2015-06-25T03:27:00.220" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, the two licenses don't have to be compatible&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are legally allowed to dual license something, usually because you are the copyright holder, you can pick any two licenses, even if they conflict. As a matter of fact, dual licensing is usually used to &lt;em&gt;get around license conflicts&lt;/em&gt;, that is, by offering something under two conflicting licenses. One of the most notable examples is Mozilla Firefox, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Licensing&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tri-licensed&lt;/em&gt; under MPL, GPL and LGPL&lt;/a&gt;. This was done because MPL, the original license it used, is incompatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you dual license, it doesn't mean users must follow both licenses, especially if the licenses conflict, this would be impossible to do anyway. Instead, you may choose the license under which to receive the software. When you redistribute in turn, it is courteous (although not legally required) to pass on that dual licensing, as doing so does not limit the options of your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you cannot &quot;pick and choose&quot; clauses within the two licenses, as you are creating a third license that the original author never agreed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different situation to &lt;em&gt;sublicensing&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;relicensing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T03:27:00.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-25T03:41:07.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyrighting is the principle of assigning automatic rights over their work to content creators. These rights are in place to prevent work being stolen and used without permission for uses which perhaps the author doesn't want it to be used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very relevant to open-sourcing, because the principle of adding an open-source license is to give back to the community many of the freedoms (though not all) that they would enjoy without copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T18:51:37.627" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T18:51:37.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-25T03:41:07.873" Score="0" Body="For questions about the copyrighting process and principles. Questions solely pertaining to general copyright are off topic." OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:25:12.873" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T13:25:12.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T04:20:51.657" Score="18" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I suddenly die, my small open source project will survive (after all, the source code is open), but it can be hurt quite badly: The project's web domain is owned by me and it could become cybersquatted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are just a bunch of individuals who have never met. There is no overall organization/foundation. Patches get submitted by companies and individuals who have their own agenda that might or might not include openness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a commonly established practice to handle this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For instance, is there a kind of open source foundation that would accept to handle domain ownership/fallback in some way? In normal times it would do nothing, but when I die it would identify the core developers, contact them and established a transfer strategy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T01:28:29.753" Title="How to make my open source project's web domain bus-proof?" Tags="|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-25T05:08:13.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T05:08:13.707" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T05:08:13.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-25T05:08:13.707" Score="0" Body="For questions about technology for delivering voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211" LastEditorUserId="211" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T08:02:44.947" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T08:02:44.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2015-06-25T05:21:27.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You might be able to try one of the following.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a shared repository like GitHub or similar and then your domain name is not required for the project to continue i.e. graceful degradation of service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try gifting the domain name to a reliable/established group (might need to pay for a few years domain ownership first).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't rely on the domain name at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gift the code to Apache or Eclipse if you can.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gift the code to FSF if GPLv3 or LGPL is OK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it in your will / talk to your next of kin about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a real issue, but it also applies to company-backed open source and proprietary code, I have tracked down code that is supported by companies that don't exist / bought by Medical Device Manufacturers (experience talking), Open Source that is now off the web (yes it can happen) and similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does it really matter in the end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T01:28:29.753" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T01:28:29.753" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T06:03:52.597" Score="9" ViewCount="3682" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any legal consequences that I could encounter with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's possible, what should I keep a close attention to while I'm doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:12:44.880" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T18:29:08.317" Title="Can I develop closed source software with an open source development environment?" Tags="|licensing|law|proprietary-code|development-environment|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-25T12:11:59.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="337" CreationDate="2015-06-25T06:09:36.623" Score="3" ViewCount="1372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say that I want to use Linux kernel, but I want to create some proprietary code on top of it (like create a Linux distribution) and later on sell it combined with the Linux kernel (like Mac did on top of FreeBSD). Is it possible to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:16:31.403" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:16:31.403" Title="How can I build proprietary software on top of open source software?" Tags="|derivative-works|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-06-25T08:07:42.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="334" CreationDate="2015-06-25T06:11:20.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you are simply using the development environment, and are not using any code samples or libraries, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sticky situation could be the compiler, especially if it links your code to a standard library.  Check to make sure the compiler is either purely transformative (ie. turns your source code directly into object code), or has an explicit exemption for this (eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GCC's exemption for libstdc++&lt;/a&gt;) permitting the standard library to be linked with closed-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T06:11:20.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="335" CreationDate="2015-06-25T06:16:53.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt; was released under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt; version 2 (GPLv2). This means that you can build code on top of it, but as soon as you distribute it (e.g. you distribute software combined with the Linux kernel), your software needs to be distributed under the GPLv2 too (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-can-i-determine-if-two-open-source-licenses-are-compatible-with-each-other/3#3&quot;&gt;a license compatible with GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, such as GPLv3 or AGPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can charge money for support, for packaging your software (back in the old days, people charged money to put the distribution on a CD), for maintenance,... but all of this excludes distributing your software as closed source, proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comparison &quot;like Mac did on top of FreeBSD&quot; isn't correct. You're comparing &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized/210#210&quot;&gt;a permissive license versus a copyleft license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important:&lt;/strong&gt; I interpret &quot;create on top&quot; as:  your code doesn't merely &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the kernel. Your code is linked to the kernel. Your code doesn't work without the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T06:22:41.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="284" CreationDate="2015-06-25T07:46:39.403" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the owner of both sets of code, you can do as you wish with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That includes licensing the code to others as you wish, meaning you can license the module and not the program itself. You have all the rights relating to the code; the purpose of a license is to grant others some of those rights, according to specific conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use this fact to add a GPL license to the module and not the program. You should not need to grant extra permissions, since the DLL is a separate entity. Even if you want to incorporate the code into the executable, you can apply a &quot;visible source&quot; principle and only release some of the code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T15:07:59.743" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:07:59.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="334" CreationDate="2015-06-25T07:50:37.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends how the IDE is licensed. You will need to read the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you produce software with it, you're not relying on the code of the IDE when you release your software, so the GPL same license condition doesn't apply to your program. However, the IDE license may stipulate that any program you produce must be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read and check first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T07:50:37.530" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="334" CreationDate="2015-06-25T08:56:56.770" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally yes, though there are some exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a tool  (like an IDE, an buildtool, a continuous integration system, a version control) open source licenses put no restrictions on you, as the open source definition makes clear that nobody is discriminated because of the usage. So you can use the tools to create every software you wish, included closed source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compilers can be a different case and libraries and frameworks surely are. Still, you can use it for whatever. But, a compiler often links some runtime library to your code. If you use a library or framework, you directly link code. This has effects, as your work now counts as a derivate. With many permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache) this is still no problem, but copyleft-licenses like GPL would would impose that you release your derivate under the GPL too (unless it is never released to public and only privately used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real world example: GCC is GPL licensed, but use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;runtime library exception&lt;/a&gt;, so you can still develop closed source software with GCC. But the exception is needed in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T18:29:08.317" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T18:29:08.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="323" CreationDate="2015-06-25T09:12:47.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD is a very permissive license. It allows many things, including redistributing it under different conditions, including as closed source. The only thing to respect, are the conditions of the BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dive into this, there are different variants of the BSD-license. The original 4-clause-BSD, a three-clause-BSD without the advertisement-clause and a two-clause-variant that only keeps the first two clauses. The original BSD reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,&#xA;this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions&#xA;in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of&#xA;conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or&#xA;other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All advertising&#xA;materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the&#xA;following acknowledgement: “This product includes software developed&#xA;by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors&#xA;may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software&#xA;without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need: to keep the original copyright-notice (including the authors of the original work), include the BSD-license with your distribution and the disclaimer about Warranty (that I omitted) for clause one and two (that only decide this for source and binary form). Clause 3 asks that all advertisement material includes this notice and clause four simply asks not to misuse the name of the university. This has to be followed. The variants simply omit clause 3, or clause 3 and 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing: are these conditions compatible with the GPL. The result is: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original BSD isn't&lt;/a&gt; because of the advertisement-clause. The two variants omitting said clause &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are compatible&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tl;DR: You cannot with original BSD, but can with 3-clause- and 2-clause-BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:12:47.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-06-25T09:22:35.397" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all: There are three different BSD-licenses. The original BSD-license has four clauses, including a advertisement-clause. This advertisement-clause is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD&quot;&gt;incompatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, so you cannot redistribute it as GPL, the same as you cannot combine it with GPL-code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modified BSD-licenses drop this clause and make BSD compatible with GPL. This technically means you can redistribute it as GPL, as long as you follow the terms of the original license. That includes to put the text of the BSD-license with your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:22:35.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2015-06-25T09:28:16.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but you still have to follow all licenses included. So that usually means you have to include all license-texts with your resulting product and attribute all authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be precise:&#xA;Say you have taken Part A from something with MIT-license and part B from something with CC-BY. If you combine the two, part A is still licensed MIT, part B is CC-BY and anything you added is licensed whatever you like. But the license of part A doesn't impose any restrictions on part B and vice versa, that's what permissive licenses do (in difference to copyleft-licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T09:28:16.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="349" CreationDate="2015-06-25T09:45:22.683" Score="14" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes in regards to open source/free software I read about a 'right to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)&quot;&gt;fork'&lt;/a&gt;. What does it mean? Why is it relevant? Does all open source support this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T09:51:56.170" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:44:05.253" Title="What does the 'right to fork' mean?" Tags="|forking|philosophy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="345" CreationDate="2015-06-25T10:03:34.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being allowed to fork a piece of software simply means that you're allowed to redistribute a version of the software with changes you made, even if they're not merged back into the original piece of software. All free/open source software allows this: a free software license allows you to redistribute the software, even if you change it. As the Wikipedia page you linked mentioned, this can also happen with proprietary software: all you need is an appropriate license from the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect, any time you distribute software with a change you made, you're forking it, even if the intent of the fork is to be short-lived. This happens quite a lot: think of someone fixing a bug and asking other people to test the fix, or distributions shipping backported security fixes which aren't released as separate releases by upstream...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most people though forking would mean creating a new project based on the old one, with separate hosting etc. and an explicit intent to diverge if necessary. All free/open source software allows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T10:03:34.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="248" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:08:49.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF has a process to approve licenses they consider free. OSI has a process to approve licenses that they consider open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A requirement for the FSF to consider a license free is that it is open, so all free licenses are open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not all licenses that have been approved by the FSF have also be approved by OSI. Usually this is because they haven't sought out OSI approval. Does no OSI approval make it less open sourcy? I wouldn't say so. But it's difficult to be exact around vaguely defined concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that in general, saying Open Source Software includes all Free/Libre software and more, so the term you're looking for is open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only consider that software open source that has a license that has been approved by the OSI, this doesn't hold anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no singular term for software that is licensed under a license approved by the OSI other than &quot;software licensed under an OSI approved license&quot;. Nor is there a singular term for software licensed under a license approved by the FSF other than &quot;software licensed under a FSF approved license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want the &quot;fuzzy&quot; definition (like F(L)OSS in itself is a fuzzy definition) just use open source software or OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to mean only licenses approved by the FSF or OSI, you'll have to go with the more cumbersome &quot;Software under a FSF or OSI approved license&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T11:08:49.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="376" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:20:23.520" Score="21" ViewCount="709" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt; more or less mean the same thing. They have different definitions, but they result basically in the same thing. So why was  the Open Source Initiative founded and why did they coin the term open source? What are the differences they intended to make? How do the philosophies behind the two camps differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T14:39:14.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T14:39:14.013" Title="Why was open source as a term created, although free software was already established?" Tags="|philosophy|free-software-definition|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="345" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:26:51.277" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right to fork refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)&quot;&gt;forking&lt;/a&gt; as in taking a software project and maintaining it separately from the original. Having the right to fork a work means having the right to modify your own copy. In the context of freely distributable works, the right to fork means having the right to redistribute modified copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical importance of the right to fork is that is you don't like the way the original author maintains the work (not fixing the bugs that bother you, not adding the features you wany, etc.) then you can do what you like with your own copy. Having the source (i.e. the prefered form of modification) is critical there, since it is the only practical way to fork a work. A right to fork without having the practical means to make use of it, i.e. having the source, would not be very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination of being allowed to and able to modify the source and the right to redistribute allows anyone who's interested to take up maintenance. This is a guarantee that free software and other open source works won't die as long as someone somewhere, anywhere, is willing and able to take up maintenance. It's also a guarantee that if someone dislikes the way the project is maintained, they can make their own version if they're willing and able to invest the requisite effort or get someone to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All libre/free/open-source licenses grant the right to fork. This is sometimes known as the “fork test” for software license. It is freedom 1 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;, guideline 1 in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt;, clause 1 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T11:26:51.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="348" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:27:33.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative can sort of be thought of the branch of Free Software that became its own tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term &quot;free software&quot; is older, and is reflected in the name of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), an organization founded in 1985 to protect and promote free software. The term &quot;open source&quot; was coined in 1998 by a group of people — the founders of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — who also supported the development and distribution of free software, but who disagreed with the FSF about how to promote it, and who felt that software freedom was primarily a practical matter rather than an ideological one... &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#free-software&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those involved with Open Source supported the development and distribution of the software. They branched out because they disagree with the idea that software freedom is ideological; they thought that software freedom was primarily a practical matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page goes on to say that they had differences in why they should promote the software, and how to promote it, even though the ideas were incredibly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Not] surprisingly, one of the biggest concerns was the use of the word &quot;Free.&quot; For this reason, we see a lot of French in our English. :) Je suis libre!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, Open Source originated from people who supported the Free Software Movement, but disagreed with promotion and overall philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T11:27:33.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:31:05.113" Score="25" ViewCount="27900" Body="&lt;p&gt;This branched out from my previous question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/183/can-i-select-who-can-contribute-to-my-open-source-project&quot;&gt;Can I select who can contribute to my Open Source Project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having never worked on open source software before, and developing my own mini applications that I hope to release to the App Store sometimes this summer, I'm quite unfamiliar with the way most open source development structures are set up (forks, main repositories...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that popped up was the mention of a pull request. What exactly is a pull request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T16:22:10.603" Title="What exactly is a pull request?" Tags="|terminology|pull-request|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:49:12.320" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control&quot;&gt;distributed version control&lt;/a&gt; systems, every developer has a copy of the full repository. If you change something to the software, you commit your changes to your local repository. If different repositories should have these changes, you can push the changes (moving changes to another repository you have the right to write to) or pull the changes (copy revision from other repositories to your own). As many project have a main repository, a pull-request is the request that the maintainer pulls your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading up &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/pullrequest&quot;&gt;a bit on it&lt;/a&gt;, it seems the term is used also on non-distributed version-control, if one user ask for inclusion of his patches in the main branch of the project. Another read especially for github: &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/&quot;&gt;https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T12:13:39.740" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:13:39.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="355" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:51:15.170" Score="8" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia seems to imply that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbolinux&quot;&gt;Turbolinux&lt;/a&gt; bundles proprietary codecs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, under what conditions is it OK to mix proprietary and GNU-GPLv3 software into an operating system, and distribute it on a DVD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:28:22.000" Title="Distributing an operating system DVD bundling proprietary and GNU-GPL software?" Tags="|gpl-3|distribution|bundling|operating-system|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2015-06-25T11:59:02.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is OK, as long as no derivate software (or other product) derives from both. Distributing them together is another matter, and to be precise in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; it is clearly stated, that open source licenses cannot restrict bundling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate&#xA;software distribution containing programs from several different&#xA;sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such&#xA;sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some frown upon such distributions although it is conforming to the licenses involved. It doesn't only is true for TurboLinux, nearly every Linux-distribution has unfree parts. The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists completely free Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:03:50.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="68" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:16:14.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, in order to pursue legal action against someone, you need to have &lt;em&gt;standing&lt;/em&gt; — that is, be a directly involved party. While there might be some legal theories that users of GPL-licensed software are intended beneficiaries of the license and therefore could make a case, I'm not aware of this ever having been tested anywhere. Lawsuits like those brought by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gpl-violations.org&lt;/a&gt; work because they directly involved a copyright holder — one of the people who granted use to their code via the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but you don't have to take my word for it; here is Eben Moglen writing for the Free Software Foundation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &quot;distribution&quot; is just one of the freedoms granted by the GPL, but the same basic concept applies to the others as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that means that in this case, your best course of action is to contact the SourceMod authors and make them aware of the violation, and ask them to ask the module authors to comply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T12:22:42.710" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:22:42.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="358" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:44:17.333" Score="17" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives&lt;/a&gt;) is a fairly restrictive license. It does not allow derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Six_regularly_used_licenses&quot;&gt;Creative Commons licenses&lt;/a&gt; says that it is not a free/libre license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Description                    Acronym    Free/Libre&#xA;====================================================&#xA;Attribution + NoDerivatives    BY-ND      No&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Free Software Foundation does include it on their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbynd&quot;&gt;list of Free &quot;Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, they use it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the license used throughout the GNU and FSF web sites. This license provides much the same permissions as our verbatim copying license, but it's much more detailed. We particularly recommend it for audio and/or video works of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot;&gt;list of licenses on the OSI site&lt;/a&gt; does not mention &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; Creative Commons license, though the site itself is licensed under CC BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="235" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:20:55.973" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T06:00:00.227" Title="Is the CC BY-ND an Open license?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-nd|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:46:41.300" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, CC-BY-ND isn't Open Source. It violates rule 3 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Derived Works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow&#xA;  them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the&#xA;  original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also violates the freedom 3 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others&#xA;  (freedom 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF doesn't list it as free license. The link you provide not only has free licenses, it has sections for free (compatible with GPL), free (incompatible with GPL) and nonfree licenses. For instance is the Sun Community Source license listed in the unfree section. CC-BY-ND is listed in their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC-BY-ND&quot;&gt;nonfree documentation license section&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They list it again though, in their section for Viewpoints. The FSF claims that these opinions should be copied unchanged. The sections starts the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Works that express someone's opinion—memoirs, editorials, and so&#xA;  on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for practical&#xA;  use like software and documentation. Because of this, we expect them&#xA;  to provide recipients with a different set of permissions: just the&#xA;  permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim. Richard Stallman&#xA;  discusses this frequently in his speeches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the license is nonfree, but useful for a different purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T12:50:37.217" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:50:37.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:51:21.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF lists the CC BY-ND license under a different category: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OpinionLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction says (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with &lt;strong&gt;a different set of permissions&lt;/strong&gt;: just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it’s &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a license that conforms to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Free Software Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, as &quot;freedom 3&quot; is missing: &quot;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T12:51:21.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2015-06-25T12:57:44.457" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-ND is not compatible with either the OSI's Open Source definition or the FSF's Free Software Definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the FSF still considers it to have an appropriate use that is compatible with their movement: to licence opinions and testimonies. The licence shouldn't be used for documentation or project assets, but they do consider it to be appropriate for works which represent the thoughts of a single person and which it would be misleading to change. To quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html#opinions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Richard Stallman&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second class of work is works whose purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those people is their purpose. This includes, say, memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of goods for sale. The whole point of those works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes. To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is contentious and I doubt there's any agreement over it. I can see the merit of the argument, but I also think there's more reuse value than verbatim copying - it rules out translations for example, and sometimes quoting an excerpt is more appropriate than reproducing an entire work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T06:00:00.227" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T06:00:00.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T13:13:33.420" Score="7" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not uncommon for the source code of projects to be released, but not the assets. Examples include Doom and Quake and many other games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are many good reasons to do this for the benefit of others (allowing new uses of the core engine, unofficial ports etc.) but what benefits are there for the rights holder? If the assets are not included and others can't build the project then the potential for community bug testing and review etc will be significantly reduced, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T13:18:34.313" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:23:22.363" Title="What benefits would there be *for me* to freely license the code of my project but not the assets?" Tags="|benefits|assets|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="361" CreationDate="2015-06-25T13:21:29.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally open-source MMOs follow this model, they keep the assets as their own (because of the considerable amount of work involved) and release the code freely, this way they keep control of the assets and are able to received patches from other projects using the same engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlaneShift_(video_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PlaneShift&lt;/a&gt; follows this model and there's some games that are based on their engine (but use none of their assets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="231" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T13:34:39.710" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T13:34:39.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="367" CreationDate="2015-06-25T14:26:20.033" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I am reading an article published under the writers own license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do if the license is not available? For example the link is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What rules do I follow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T14:45:37.140" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:36:40.890" Title="License not available" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-06-25T16:04:07.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2015-06-25T14:35:13.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bad situation. You can't conform to a license that isn't available in text to you. So basically you have to assume, that it falls back into the status of being not licensed, so normal copyright applies and you can do basically nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a way to make the situation better. You could ask the author to repair the situation. If the author is unavailable the problem persists, you cannot guess which terms he dictates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T14:35:13.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="366" CreationDate="2015-06-25T14:53:36.207" Score="13" ViewCount="3312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a blog post, and I want to release it under a Creative Commons license. I later publish this post to my blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I apply a license to my blogpost?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to state how it is licensed at the bottom of the post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T23:00:27.123" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T08:52:13.610" Title="How can I license my content in a blogpost?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:21:18.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally you just state that you put the content under a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;defining the scope: which content is affected&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;defining the license: which license is used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also should do this if necessary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the license demands attribution: naming the contributor(s)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the work is derived from other works: referencing the original works in the proper way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful to put links as appropriate, for instance to the license. Some licenses have formulated a way to put something under this license, in this case you should follow the lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Creative Commons you have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interactive license chooser&lt;/a&gt;, which allows you to enter all relevant data and creates an proper HTML or text-fragment to include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put something under an open source license, then you have two goals with declaring your license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to enable other people to use the rights you give them over your work through the open source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to secure the rights you keep (for instance the demand that derivates have to released as open source if it is a copyleft license), so you can assert them if needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both points it is massively helpful, if your intention is as clear as possible for everyone looking at it. Confusion is not helpful to reach these goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the bottom of the Stackexchange-sites, they state the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;site design / logo © 2015 stack exchange inc; user contributions&#xA;  licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we know, all user-contributions are cc-by-sa and logo and design are non-free property of stack exchange inc. The cc-by-sa is linked to the license. The attribution required part is actually somewhat bad, as it is unclear and demands in the linked post stuff that isn't covered by cc-by-sa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example may be Wikipedia. They set at the bottom of each site this text (focused on the part relevant for the license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike&#xA;  License; additional terms may apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the license is linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T08:52:13.610" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T08:52:13.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:36:40.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always try searching the license. If the text at the bottom of the article states what license it's under (which it should do), search that. If there are multiple results that are similar if not identical, you should be able to assume that's the correct one. &lt;em&gt;Please note: this method is not legally sound. Only do this for things you're very unlikely to get sued for.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your only alternative is to ask the author: contact them, tell them the link's broken, and ask them to reply with a link to the correct license. This &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; legally sound, since the link comes directly from the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing works, you must assume the work has no license and therefore is totally copyrighted. You can't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:36:40.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="345" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:44:05.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right to fork is essentially the same as the right to derive. They both grant the user a right to develop your work further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right to &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; specifically has come about from hosting platforms like GitHub, whose primary deriving mechanism is forking. It's simply a different version of &lt;em&gt;right to derive&lt;/em&gt; that makes more sense for our current ways of distributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All&lt;/strong&gt; open source licenses must grant this right to be considered open and/or free. One of the essential parts of the definition is that other people must be allowed to use your creation: this is the right to derive, or right of derivation, right to fork, right to develop, etc. Denying this right means your project can no longer be officially considered open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:44:05.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="361" CreationDate="2015-06-25T15:57:58.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Benefits of open-sourcing the code&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are the same as those of any other open source project. The primary benefit to you is your contribution to the open source and programming communities: you have released new code into them which other people can find and make use of. Think: you've just saved someone a lot of time writing up their own flob-detection system. They can just use yours. There are also the points about bug detection, patches and security: many eyes make light (and quick) work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Benefits of keeping your assets&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assets are usually the bit that takes most effort to come up with. That gives a feeling of personal investment in them, and that you want to be the sole user of them. Beyond that, there's also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Branding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you release your assets for everyone else to use, then someone else can copy you. That major new game you just made? Someone can come along, take the code and assets, improve it a bit, merely credit you someone inconspicuous, and have a better version. You lose users and money. And there's nothing you can do about it&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, because they followed the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Originality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Slightly related to the last point, you want to be original. If you've created something visual, then it seems right that it's yours to use and yours alone: other people should make their own versions of it. Of course they can use yours as inspiration, but they'd have to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; them themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you could also release your assets under a non-open/free license, and charge royalties for their use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Besides going into hefty expensive lawsuits, that is. Or relying on the public's morals (ha ha good joke).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T15:57:58.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="372" CreationDate="2015-06-25T16:00:52.253" Score="7" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open source collaborative project with numerous other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often many people are working on it at once. This creates problems with multiple versions of the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any program (like google drive) that allows lots of people to edit code, and keep everything in one version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:14:50.817" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T02:44:26.307" Title="How to keep open source projects up to date" Tags="|community|version-control-systems|software-development|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2015-06-25T16:16:42.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;version control system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usual choices are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;git&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://subversion.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SVN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bazaar.canonical.com/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Bazaar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mercurial.selenic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mercurial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T16:16:42.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2015-06-25T16:20:18.780" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're describing is called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control&quot;&gt;Version Control System&lt;/a&gt; or revision control system. It essentially stores one canonical copy in a central place, which can be downloaded, edited, and committed back there. If someone else changes it in the time you do, you must review those changes and incorporate them into your code before recommitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some major version control systems are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Git, of which the main proponent is &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SVN&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mercurial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;among many others. You should try more than one out and work out which one is best for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T16:20:18.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:05:11.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pull request is related to version control systems. You may have several sets of users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Administrators/Owners&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Testers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want each of these people to be able to do different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Administrators/Owners&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These people can be trusted. They might have full access to the repository in question, including full rights to commit what they want when they want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These might be random people from the Internet; they might be lesser people in a company. Either way, you probably don't want them to be able to commit straight to the codebase - you want to review their changes first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where pull requests come in. Instead of allowing straight changes to the codebase from your contributors, they will instead &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; the repository, creating a copy on their local machine, and develop that. When they're done, they can create a pull request containing their updated code. Someone in the higher group can then review their changes for correctness and complicity with standards, and &lt;em&gt;merge&lt;/em&gt; their changes if they comply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:05:11.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:28:22.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely aggregating different works on the same media is not an action that is covered by copyright. There is no copyright for the aggregation. Copyright only comes into play if the works are meshed together in a way that displays some originality — this is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;derivative work&lt;/a&gt;. Bundling software on a single CD does not display any originality and is thus not subject to copyright: only the copyright and license of the individual pieces of software apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inasmuch as a distribution selects which software is included on the CD, the selection and arrangement may be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;database right&lt;/a&gt;. Database right is somewhat similar to copyright in that it restricts what others can do with the database. Database right is defined by the Berne convention, but is implemented differently in different distributions, e.g. in the US there is no such legal category (the provisions of the Berne convention are spread around other bodies of law) while in France database right is part of copyright but with many differences. In any case, database right applies only to the collection as a whole, individual copyright and licenses of aggregated components still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restricting software from being bundled with other software is generally considered to be an unacceptable restriction on its use and distribution. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; explicitly states that “the license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources”. The GNU GPL explicitly states that “inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running a mixture of software with different licenses on the same system is not covered by copyright, again because it is mere aggregation. Linking software with different licenses (i.e. running a program that uses various code libraries, or loading a plug-in) is not clear-cut. Linking itself is a mechanical process, not a creative one. However the process is more than mere aggregation. Opinions vary on the legal status; for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt; explicitly includes “shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work” in the requirement to provide source code, thus forbidding to link GPL-covered code with code whose source is not available under the GPL. Only “system libraries” are excluded from this requirement. Not all free software practitioners agree with this interpretation; for example, Linus Torvalds, main author of the Linux kernel, has explicitly stated that he allows closed-source drivers to be linked into the GPL-licensed Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:28:22.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="370" CreationDate="2015-06-25T17:48:02.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Version control systems are one way of allowing multiple people to work on the same files, but they don't support real-time collaborative editing of a single common version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are FLOSS editors which support shared editing of documents in a manner similar to Google Drive; I've found that &lt;a href=&quot;https://gobby.github.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gobby&lt;/a&gt; works quite well for this. It's used extensively during Debian conferences in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T17:48:02.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="348" CreationDate="2015-06-25T18:54:54.383" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most helpful analogies I've ever heard compares software development to government:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lots of people like democratic governance. Some people like democracy because it produces the &lt;em&gt;best results&lt;/em&gt; that maximize happiness of its citizens. Other people like democracy because they believe people have a &lt;em&gt;moral right&lt;/em&gt; to have their voices be part of their own government (regardless of the results). The first group is like open source; the second group is like free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Stallman coined the term &quot;Free Software&quot; to mean freely-shareable and freely-modifiable software that complies with his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;. The Free Software Foundation has always been an ethically-driven organization. In the documentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsHh2wfy_-4#t=595&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Revolution OS&lt;/em&gt;, Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF, says of the GNU project&lt;/a&gt;, (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And to me, [a non-disclosure agreement] was essentially a promise to be a &lt;strong&gt;bad person&lt;/strong&gt;... to cut myself off from... a cooperating community. [...] [By developing GNU,] not only could I give myself a way to keep using computers without &lt;strong&gt;betraying other people&lt;/strong&gt;, but I'd give to everybody else, too. Everybody else would have a way out of that &lt;strong&gt;moral dilemma&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;Open Source Software&quot; was invented later, in a meeting between Eric S. Raymond, some employees of VA Linux Systems, and a few others. There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsHh2wfy_-4#t=2766&quot;&gt;an interview with Eric S. Raymond in &lt;em&gt;Revolution OS&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in which he recalls the original effort to develop and popularize the term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Y]ou walk into an executive's office and say &quot;Free Software&quot;... Okay, if you're lucky, the response is something like, &quot;Hmm, Free Software, must be cheap, shoddy, worthless.&quot; And if you're not lucky, it has associations with the Free Software Foundation's wholesale attack on intellectual property rights, which -- regardless of what you think about the ethics of that -- it's lousy marking. It's not something businesses want to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a following clip from Larry Augustin, CEO of VA Linux Systems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We'd been calling this &quot;Free Software&quot; but people took the term &quot;Free&quot; and associated with &quot;free of charge&quot;. They thought they couldn't make money or couldn't sell. We wanted to get across the idea that the software was open and that the source code was available. Very important pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear from these interviews, &quot;open source&quot; was intended to capture the idea of freely-modifiable and shareable software in a business-centered way, rather than as an ethical concern. In addition, the confusion over &quot;free in cost&quot; was a point of concern for business adoption as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Stallman (and by extension, the whole FSF, which he founded), the freedom to modify and share software has always been a moral issue. The Open Source movement began as an attempt to capitalize on the practical benefits of freely-shareable and modifiable software without the ethical concerns that have always been at the core of the Free Software movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms, &quot;open source software&quot; means &quot;software complying with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;OSI's Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; while &quot;free software&quot; means &quot;software complying with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot;&gt;FSF's four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; The two definitions are not perfectly equivalent, but they are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T02:57:26.720" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:57:26.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="379" CreationDate="2015-06-25T19:27:06.583" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am building off of a project that was released under the Creative Commons BY license. Now that my project is done, I want to release my version of the product under my own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Is this possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes do I need permission?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no what limitation do I have?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:32:50.153" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T10:32:50.153" Title="Can I license a project that I have built on if it already has a license?" Tags="|cc-by|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2015-06-25T20:16:58.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. The CC-BY license is one of their more permissive licenses: it simply requires attributing the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; you don't need permission. You simply need to include, somewhere in your finished product (perhaps an about or credits screen) the name of the author and preferably a link back to where you found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no Share Alike&lt;/strong&gt; restriction on the CC-BY license, so you are not forced to keep the same license: you can thus choose to relicense your product as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T20:22:25.263" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T20:22:25.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:07:30.077" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;pull request&quot; comes from &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt;, where the &lt;code&gt;git pull&lt;/code&gt; command is used to merge a different repository into your local one. So if someone else has a copy of your &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; repository, and makes changes to it that they would like you to incorporate, they can ask you to &lt;code&gt;pull&lt;/code&gt; the changes from their repository; they're requesting a &lt;code&gt;pull&lt;/code&gt;, hence the term &quot;pull request&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays for most users this tends to be hidden behind a graphical interface of some sort, on Github or Bitbucket or via Gerrit for example; but the principle remains the same: someone copies your repository, makes changes and requests them to be merged into your own copy, presumably after you've reviewed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T21:07:30.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:29:44.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Behind the idea of open source or free software exists a strong philosophy about the rights of people using the creations of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the philosophy behind open source and free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:40:13.810" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T13:40:13.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:29:44.623" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the philosophy behind open source and free software." OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T13:40:26.117" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T13:40:26.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:31:23.093" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the definitions of the terms &amp;quot;Open Source Software&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Free Software&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common definition (and in my opinion it’s the one that should be used, otherwise the scope of the terms will be subjective):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free Software&lt;/strong&gt; is software licensed under an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;-approved software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(on the basis of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Free Software Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/strong&gt; is software licensed under an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;-approved software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(on the basis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, a Free Software license is also an Open Source Software license, and vice versa. But there are exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a definite and up-to-date answer, you should use the original sources and compare if both organizations, the FSF and the OSI, have approved each license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FSF-approved licenses: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OSI-approved licenses: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Wikipedia article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licences&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comparison of free and open-source software licenses&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses#Approvals&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Approvals&amp;quot; table&lt;/a&gt; where you can see this at a glance (but this information might not be accurate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example 1: &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Netscape’s early versions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla&lt;/a&gt; were released under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/NPL/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Netscape Public License version 1.0&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;its Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#NPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, but it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not&lt;/a&gt; approved by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;↳ So these early versions of Mozilla are Free Software, but not Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example 2: &lt;em&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Agenda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Active Agenda&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reciprocal Public License&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt; (currently in version 1.5), but it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not&lt;/a&gt; approved by the FSF (it’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#RPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as unfree&lt;/a&gt;, linking to version 1.3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;↳ So Active Agenda is Open Source Software, but not Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T21:31:23.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:32:00.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-25T21:32:00.050" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T21:32:00.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:32:00.050" Score="0" Body="For questions about works whose authors retain the ability to control derivates or distribution as given to them by copyright law" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T21:52:17.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T21:52:17.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:51:23.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about applying open source principles to hardware design, including schematics, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HDL&lt;/a&gt; source code and integrated circuit layout data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T00:54:47.367" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T00:54:47.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-25T21:51:23.230" Score="0" Body="For questions about applying open source principles to hardware design, including schematics, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout data." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T00:55:52.870" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T00:55:52.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="283" CreationDate="2015-06-25T22:16:34.487" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, international recognition of copyright is governed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;: if you publish your work in a country that has signed the Berne Convention, it's protected in all other signatory countries.  There are other treaties (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Copyright_Convention&quot;&gt;Universal Copyright Convention&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement&quot;&gt;TRIPS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty&quot;&gt;WIPO Copyright Treaty&lt;/a&gt;), but in general, a signatory to one of these is also a signatory to Berne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific cases I'm aware of where you can't enforce the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_Iran#International_conventions&quot;&gt;Iran does not recognize anybody else's copyrights&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory#Somalia&quot;&gt;Somalia does not have a working copyright regime&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be others; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_copyright_agreements&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list of parties to international copyright agreements&lt;/a&gt; for countries that haven't signed any of the large-scale agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Iran, you may be able to get your software protected by having an Iranian contributor copyright it locally, but doing so may expose you to other legal issues you'd rather avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T22:16:34.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T22:27:41.163" Score="5" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there established guidelines or best practices for checking open source software for security flaws prior to using it in a business environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this down to the individual business to decide for themselves or are there approaches that apply universally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:36:14.823" Title="Assessing potential security flaws in open source software" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-25T22:46:40.793" Score="4" ViewCount="2692" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most open source projects provide precompiled binaries for a variety of platforms in addition to the source code. How important is it to download the source code and compile it yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there security risks or performance problems with using downloaded binaries? Are they significant enough to worry about for non-business users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T08:00:39.953" Title="Source code or binaries? How important is this?" Tags="|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-26T07:29:35.107" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="392" CreationDate="2015-06-25T22:48:46.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, without source code it isn't open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The availability of source code allows for others to change the code, one of the main reasons to have open source in the first place. Without source code it isn't longer possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only intend to use the software, the differences between using precompiled binaries and compiling yourself are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can check the source code for unwanted code and compile it to be sure it has no backdoors. You can't be sure with the binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compiled specifically to your platform (CPU, OS-version etc.) the code might perform a bit better than a generic binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can apply patches from sources other than the maintainer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can fix minor bugs that affect your usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can remove parts you don't need and complicate usage, add security risks or hamper performance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last points already go in the area that you change the code, but still under the premise that you want to use the software. It seems if the code is available for change the line between using software and working on software can become unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T08:00:39.953" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T08:00:39.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="390" CreationDate="2015-06-25T23:12:27.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously you can apply all the checks that you can also apply to proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a few advantages you can use to check the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have access to the source code. That allows you to check the source: Make an audit. Also you can use tools for static code analysis with patterns for security related flaws. You can add logging of metrics to the source and use that in your test-environment to gain more insight into possible problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-25T23:12:27.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="417" CreationDate="2015-06-25T23:18:10.927" Score="25" ViewCount="1635" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, an open source project will attract contributors who have a lot of enthusiasm, but lack skill, knowledge (or patience to know the project). These contributors can cause clutter, put off other contributors or sometimes directly harm the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presuming that this contributor is actually harming the project in some way (which might not always be the case), what is the best way to deal with them. Preferably in a way that doesn't hurt anyone's feelings, appears professional and benefits everyone involved (if at all possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like any answer to this question to discuss projects with different ways of contributing. (Direct commits, pull requests, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T11:20:20.237" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T11:20:20.237" Title="How do I deal with (enthusiastic) contributors who damage more than they help?" Tags="|contributor|human-resources|problem-contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="399" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:08:15.660" Score="12" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Lets say I have a software I have been developing. I am about to release it but I first have to apply some licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Suppose I want to release part of the software (the code) under one license and the other part, such as pictures, under another licence, can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, what other things can I do to get this result?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T00:37:50.720" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:37:50.720" Title="Can I have one license cover part of a software and another covering the other half?" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="395" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:13:29.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to deal with people who are ultimately being more of a bother than a help is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Talk to them. &#xA;They may not know what they are doing wrong, talking to them may help solve the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If they still have not improved you may need to remove them from the project. Although this may be difficult, it may be the only thing to save your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tip (another idea)&lt;/strong&gt; If they are new, try to suggest they learn more of that language, and become more knowledgeable, explain this could help them (and the project) in the long run. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*Warning&lt;/strong&gt; Depending on how much they contributed they may have legal ownership (or co ownership) over the project. Try to work out a deal with them. To prevent legal issues if you publish the project!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:13:29.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:18:11.673" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes you can.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3&quot;&gt;source code for the video game Doom 3&lt;/a&gt; is released as GPL, but this release does not include the game data, which is still covered by the game's original release EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is obvious when you realise there's a misconception that seems to be quite common: &lt;strong&gt;if you are the copyright holder, you can license in whatever way you want. The license doesn't affect yourself.&lt;/strong&gt; Software licenses can't magically take away rights that &lt;strong&gt;you already have.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:18:11.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="397" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:20:36.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can do it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to think about it is from the perspective of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license compatibility&lt;/a&gt; (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-can-i-determine-if-two-open-source-licenses-are-compatible-with-each-other&quot;&gt;How can I determine if two open source licenses are compatible with each other?&lt;/a&gt;). In &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsfe.org/campaigns/gplv3/fisl-rms-transcript#licence-compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the words of Richard Stallman&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have two or three programs and each one has its own licence and you would like to merge them or link them together. Can you do that? Well, each of these licences might make a condition about the licence of the combination. So, the question is: is there anyway you can satisfy both of these licences at once? If there is, then the licences are compatible, you can make a combination because there is a way to licence the combination that satisfies both of these licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if there's no way to licence the combination so as to satisfy both of these requirements together, the combination can't be released. That means the licences are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two aspects of the same software can be used together if they are compatible. But choose wisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:34:59.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="403" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:38:31.450" Score="5" ViewCount="868" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building a website with my business partner. This website is going to contain information that we do not want to be reused. To do this I am going to release it under a creative commons license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event someone uses our content without our permission, would I be able to take action against this person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, to what extent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, why not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T02:08:53.530" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:08:53.530" Title="Are Creative Commons licenses enforceable in the event of a breach?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="402" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:44:32.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there have been several cases where violations of a CC licence have been taken to court, and the rights holders have won. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Legal_aspects&quot;&gt;Wikipedia lists just a few&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Creative Commons organisation would not be a legal party if this happened to you, and you would have to cover all of your own legal costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:44:32.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:48:44.730" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I was building a truck, and I wanted others to be able to help with the design. Assuming I applied a CC license to it. Could I release it as an open sourced truck? How would this work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different because I have already released it under a CC license, that does not mean it is open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T00:59:45.563" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T00:59:45.563" Title="Can you make an open source piece of hardware?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-06-26T01:31:23.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T00:58:12.340" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been writing a blog for a number of years, and it occurred to me that I never released any of my writing under a license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how do I determine whether or not I should use a license with my work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would this be better than any copyright? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:12:16.350" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:12:16.350" Title="How do I determine if I should use a license for my writing?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-07-01T07:15:57.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="405" CreationDate="2015-06-26T01:05:38.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only reason you would need to associate a licence with your blog is if you want others to be able to take and use your material on other sites.&#xA;Without a licence, it falls under the copyright laws of one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The country in which you reside&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The country where the server you publish on resides&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The home country of the company that &lt;strong&gt;owns&lt;/strong&gt; that server&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The country where the person who takes your content resides&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somewhere else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Resolving that needs the services of one or more lawyers, but most countries are signatories to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses are about about relaxing your copyright protection in a way that you control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing to consider, unless you publish on your own server, is that the blog service you use may stipulate a licence in its terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T01:05:38.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="409" CreationDate="2015-06-26T01:12:10.490" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I upload an image to my website under no license or copyright notice. But then I decide that I want to license it under specific open source CC attributes. Can I simply just add the license? Or am I no longer able to do this (because I already published it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, what would happen to someone that has already taken and used this image, but is now breaking the license since I changed it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T02:07:41.347" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T02:07:41.347" Title="Can I place a license on something that I already published?" Tags="|relicensing|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-26T05:09:43.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="408" CreationDate="2015-06-26T01:13:44.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder of a work* you can at any time change the licence of the work. This includes adding, removing or switching licences. But doing this will not retroactively remove the rights of anyone who acquired a copy of the work while it was licensed under the old licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(If you are not the sole copyright holder then you need to get all collaborators to agree to a licence change.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T01:13:44.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T01:23:52.147" Score="11" ViewCount="760" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/392/source-code-or-binaries-how-important-is-this&quot;&gt;Source code or binaries? How important is this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the larger, more widely used, FLOSS projects provide both source distributions and ready-to-install binary images. This seems especially common when one of the target operating systems is Windows (presumably on the assumption most users don't have a compiler installed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the advantages to doing so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the disadvantages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T08:41:39.340" Title="Should my project provide precompiled binaries?" Tags="|distribution|binaries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2015-06-26T02:05:58.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons to provide binaries, some stronger than others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First a passive reason - &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why not?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; : if you have any users on a given target platform, the code will need to be tested on that platform, which requires creating binaries. So you will already have the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now active reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Convenience:&lt;/strong&gt; if you make it easier for people to use your code, it will become more widely used, in turn making it more likely to have useful contributions. Note that even users with no software experience can spot bugs and request features.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reputation:&lt;/strong&gt; If you expect some of your users to be disinclined to use a compiler, then they can be expected to use precompiled binaries. If you don't provide these, they are likely to get them from somewhere else, which may be somewhere unscrupulous that provides them will malware or junkware. So providing binaries reduces the risk of ill-will being unfairly directed towards your project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:05:58.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T02:21:37.767" Score="16" ViewCount="5920" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a Java library that can be used under the GPL licence (not the LGPL licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I embed the library in my program without the requirement of using the GPL licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have no requirement to change the java library myself. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is actually a library to process pdf files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially I believe this is a question about if this a derivative work, or independent work with another component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T05:23:20.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T05:23:20.203" Title="Do I have to release my code as GPL when a Java Library is GPL" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="361" CreationDate="2015-06-26T02:23:22.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commercial projects often do this when the assets are the valuable parts. Games are a good example: often what makes a game worth purchasing is not the engine, but the level design, the graphics, etc. Another category of examples is having an open source reader for closed content; in this case the content may be distributed in a standard format for which open source readers are already available, such as PDF or EPUB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benefit of not making the asset open source is of course to make money by charging per user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of making the engine open source is that you can get others to do maintenance for you. A bug occurs? Some of your tech-savvy users will send a debug trace or even a patch, so it's less work for you to fix it. A new platform comes out? Someone may do the job of porting the engine to that platform. Your engine might be picked up by some free software distributions: free advertising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually some assets are available to everyone, e.g. demo levels. But in any case the people who will be most motivated to work on the open source engine are the ones who have purchased the assets. People can test their modifications on the demo levels or on the commercial levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:23:22.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="390" CreationDate="2015-06-26T02:36:14.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having the source code available makes it easier to review it for security problems. However, this is mostly of theoretical interest in the context of a business (or a non-profit) deciding to use a piece of software. In practice, reviewing code for security is a long process requiring rare expertise, so people don't do it. When an organization wants to have an assessment of the security of the software, they typically get professionals to do it; mid- to high-assurance assessments tend to require that the assessor has access to the source code (by special contract with the author, if the source code is not normally available). Typical prices charged by professionals are in the $10k–1m range for a few months spent to review and test a medium-sized project with a few security objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the development history and the review history is actually more valuable than having the source code. Seeing that a project follows good development practices and has a good review process gives confidence in its security, and that's relatively easy to assess, compared with directly assessing the security of the software. Professional security assessment schemes typically verify that the development process followed good practices, in addition to the source review and penetration testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the source available makes it easier to explore &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; potential security issues. If you worry about, say, the way a program generates cryptographic keys, then having the source code can give you an answer in a few minutes, whereas this particular topic is hard to assess without the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:36:14.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2015-06-26T02:42:15.527" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your program must also be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is quite clear on this matter: if your program links to a GPL library, no matter the type of linking, then your program also comes under the GPL (when you distribute). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-java.html&quot;&gt;LGPL adds a dynamic linking exception&lt;/a&gt;, but this doesn't apply in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Java it's no different; if your program links with a GPL .jar, it is considered a derivative as far as the GPL is concerned. LGPL also works as intended with Java.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The typical arrangement for Java is that each library an application uses is distributed as a separate JAR (Java Archive) file. Applications use Java's “import” functionality to access classes from these libraries. When the application is compiled, function signatures are checked against the library, creating a link. The application is then generally a derivative work of the library. So, the copyright holder for the library must authorize distribution of the work. The LGPL permits this distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your Java project, if it ever includes a .jar that is GPL, or you type in &quot;import foobar&quot; where foobar is GPL, then your program is also affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T02:42:15.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="395" CreationDate="2015-06-26T03:54:17.053" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds has talked about his experience on this subject; the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/&quot;&gt;Producing Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt; also has &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/difficult-people.html&quot;&gt;a section that deals with difficult people&lt;/a&gt;, which is mostly related. If you want to read more, look these up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maintain control.&lt;/strong&gt; How is it possible that contributors can do damage in the first place? Did you give them commit privileges without them demonstrating trustworthiness and aptitude beforehand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source doesn't mean you give away all the keys to the world; that's an invitation to disaster. You are still responsible for nurturing a community and directing the project in right directions. The most successful open source projects are very authoritarian at the topmost levels, as this makes decision making faster and easier, especially for the difficult decisions for the greater good that hurt a minority in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a term called &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/social-infrastructure.html#benevolent-dictator&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Benevolent Dictator&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is an example of this fact. This is where an individual wields final decision-making power over the entire project, much like a dictator. The reason why this often works is that open source projects are perpetually under threat of being superseded by a superior fork, so the dictator often acts in a manner that is beneficial to the project as a whole, hence the &quot;benevolent&quot; part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because your project may be large and has lots of contributors, doesn't mean you give them all commit privileges. Take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits&quot;&gt;linux commits&lt;/a&gt;; although hundreds of people contribute code, they are being merge-committed by a handful of people only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't give out privileges willy-nilly, keep the means to limit disruptive behaviour like spamming and being rude in forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/difficult-people.html#difficult-people-case-study&quot;&gt;case study of the producingoss book&lt;/a&gt;, a loquacious mailing list poster backed down after being threatened with being filtered. Method matters a lot but the important point is that you need to be able to control and limit problematic people's actions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Set expectations, communicate early and often.&lt;/strong&gt; When a project starts, many things are ambiguous or only known by the founders. When you start getting outside contributions, you will inevitably run into issues like coding style, naming conventions, testing procedures and so on. If there are differences, you should have conversations about these early, and set up policies and guidelines if necessary. This is not so much about having something to bash over the heads of people, but more about &lt;em&gt;setting expectations&lt;/em&gt; for contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be open to communications, and be proactive. If someone wishes to contribute, talk to them to make sure they understand what the expectations are, and how to improve the chances of their contribution being accepted. One of the worst things that can happen is that this is not made clear, and a contributor works in the dark for months, to contribute a giant changeset that is broken and unsalvageable. This is a big waste of time and leads to hurt feelings all around. Linus talks about having a similar experience in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;amp;v=MShbP3OpASA#t=2141&quot;&gt;this video here&lt;/a&gt;; it shapes why he is so blunt and rude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...I've literally had developers who were working on things that I didn't really like, but I didn't shut down early enough. They worked on it for a long time; they felt that it was ready, they submitted it to me, and I said &quot;no this was horrible&quot; because at that point I had to make a decision. And at least in one of those cases I had some other friends basically email me later and saying &quot;the guy is suicidal&quot;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully you will encounter much less drama than this, but you should still keep an eye out for what contributors are doing. If they go dark check up on them, make sure they are not going down the wrong path.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T03:54:17.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="419" CreationDate="2015-06-26T04:13:17.057" Score="11" ViewCount="2636" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open sourced project with some developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that I was not sure (legally) who the owner actually is due to it being an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the ownership spit equally between us contributors? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, how is it calculated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:09:32.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:09:32.553" Title="In an open sourced project who is the owner?" Tags="|contributor|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="418" CreationDate="2015-06-26T05:00:48.833" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;strong&gt;if you write the code, you own the copyright.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have written module A, or the file B, or the function C, or the line D. Doesn't matter who else worked on those parts, the parts you write are your own, and the parts you didn't write aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that, since this is an open source project, your co-contributors have the same rights as users of the software - they have access to the source, and can freely use, derive, and redistribute the source code to the extent allowed by the license. What they can't do is claim parts they didn't write as their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One notable exception is if you explicitly assign the copyright away. This is done so that the project can relicense in the future without having to bother the original authors. A common method of doing so is via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreements&lt;/a&gt;. Also, if you are writing code for compensation, check the terms because you're most likely working as a for-hire programmer, where your code is owned by whoever is paying you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;strong&gt;who owns the whole&lt;/strong&gt;, that's a difficult question to answer. Usually this is agreed upon or fought out in court, where one method may be to estimate the number of man-hours each author spent on the project, and multiply by some expected compensation rate. This is no different than how to split assets when a business partnership splits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T05:10:01.843" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T05:10:01.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="429" CreationDate="2015-06-26T05:27:04.790" Score="17" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a mechanism or service that allows me to offer my work under non-free terms, but guarantee that some time in the future, the work automatically becomes open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, could I release something under license A, but also under a free, irrevocable license B that only takes effect after the year 20XX?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there a well-known service, who will distribute my work under a free license of my choosing after an agreed date?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few motivations for doing so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps I want to monetise my work in the short term, but would like the work to become free at a date sooner than copyright limits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to add value to users by guaranteeing that the work eventually becomes free and maintainable by volunteers, even if I get hit by a bus or I go bankrupt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:49:54.770" Title="Can I force my work to be open sourced in the future?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T07:51:05.870" Score="14" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be a good license for computable data models? Technically they're source code, but they're always constrained and transformed to other artifacts before being used in actual software. At the moment we're using CC-BY-SA, which industry is wary about because of the -SA clause. CC is also not quite right because it's geared towards free works rather than free software. We've been thinking about Apache 2, MIT and BSD, but we're not sure about their merits for this particular purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data models in question are so-called &lt;em&gt;archetypes&lt;/em&gt; made using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://openehr.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;openEHR&lt;/a&gt; specifications and the ISO-standard Archetype Definition Language (ADL; ISO 13606-2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd like to allow sharing, forking/derivative works, and the use of derived artifacts &lt;em&gt;in software&lt;/em&gt; with no restrictions as to which license (if any) the derived work is released under. We're unsure if we'd like to allow re-licensing of archetypes that have not been converted to code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd prefer a well-known license, as we're in a market where vendors are very risk averse and generally skittish about open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="59" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T10:57:41.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T10:57:41.680" Title="What would be a good licence for computable data models?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2015-06-26T07:53:53.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you need here is a lawyer who can help you draft a license agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license agreement would give the buyer a propriety license to use your product, and also the right to receive an open license of your choosing at some point in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T07:53:53.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="428" CreationDate="2015-06-26T08:36:06.810" Score="8" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want something I have written release as open source, for instance a novel, is that possible? A novel does not have a source, the work itself is all that is needed to recreate the work. In cases of software I need the source code to create a changed version of the software, but in case of a novel all I need is the novel itself? So does the written text works as it's own source? Or are written text impossible to open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T17:02:53.383" Title="Can a novel be open source, although it does not have a source?" Tags="|source-code|writing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-26T08:53:11.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first formal definition of free software was published by FSF in February 1986. That definition, written by Richard Stallman, is still maintained today and states that software is free software if user who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information visit wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt;, Also visit GNU philosophy on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What is Free Software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T10:02:41.893" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T10:02:41.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-26T08:53:11.780" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for free software, defined as computer software that gives users the freedom to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, modify, and distribute the original software and the adapted versions. (consider free as in freedom ; don't confuse with freeware)" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T09:38:24.437" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T09:38:24.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2015-06-26T08:57:47.637" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Novels and other written works do have source code: it's the &quot;preferred form for modification&quot;, so basically the files you need if you want to edit the &quot;work&quot;, whatever it is. If you write your novel in LibreOffice, it's the &lt;code&gt;.odt&lt;/code&gt; file, plus any external files you may need (images, diagrams etc.). If you write it in LaTeX, it's the &lt;code&gt;.tex&lt;/code&gt; file, plus any external files required. Don't forget any files you may use to prepare the final output (the cover, etc.). For images, ideally you'd keep the &lt;code&gt;.xcf&lt;/code&gt; files for example if you're using the Gimp, as well as the PNGs or JPEGs you use in the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you work directly on paper (handwriting or using a typewriter or whatever), then the preferred form for modification is the manuscript because that's all there is. You can still use a free / open source license on the text though; it's just that the effort required is greater... (This is pretty much the same reasoning as allowing JPEGs of photos as the preferred form for modification, rather than everything that was photographed!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you can open source written text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T09:07:53.820" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T09:07:53.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="433" CreationDate="2015-06-26T10:13:32.027" Score="5" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Teaching materials like textbooks or work sheets can be opened up to free redistribution and free change for everyone. What risks does the publisher face, then deciding to do so? Are there legal consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:10:07.070" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:10:07.070" Title="What risks are involved for a publisher, if he decides to release teaching materials as open source?" Tags="|publishing|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2015-06-26T11:12:06.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Novels, unlike software, don't have the large transformation between source code and binary that is usually the case with software. You can study and &quot;tinker&quot; with novels, but you cannot do the same (without great difficulty) with software without source code. Source code is important for software since it is a prerequisite for modification and sharing derivations. Therefore terms like &quot;source code&quot; are mostly irrelevant for novels, or things like visual art and documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for this reason that, although you can apply software licenses to them, there are much better options. This is a big reason why the Creative Commons licenses were created; they, unlike software licenses, contain no mention of &quot;source code&quot; and are designed for creative works in general. GFDL may also be a suitable free license for such works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When referring to such licenses, it may be less appropriate to refer to them as &quot;free software&quot; or &quot;open source&quot;. Instead, people usually refer to these as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free culture&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Even though there is no source code, the goals and ethoses have large overlaps, and focus on user freedoms such as &lt;strong&gt;the freedom to use for any purpose&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;the freedom to redistribute&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;the freedom to share your modifications&lt;/strong&gt;. If you compare this to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's definition of free software&lt;/a&gt;, this is almost the same with the exception of freedom 1 which is inapplicable. Those licenses that do not grant these freedoms are &quot;not free culture licenses&quot;, or just &quot;non-free&quot; for short. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/freeworks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC is &quot;not approved for free cultural works&quot;&lt;/a&gt; because it restricts commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T11:12:06.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2015-06-26T11:30:54.993" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been stated, you would need legal advice before making a final decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that in addition to the possibility of using a licence conditional on date, there is also the possibility of using a licence based on other conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28software%29#Licensing&quot;&gt;Early in its history&lt;/a&gt;, Qt was available under a commercial licence, but with conditions to ensure that it would be made available under the BSD license should no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many commercial companies use source code escrow to ensure that they will gain access to source code of closed source software if the company providing the software fails to maintain and update the software for any reason. Similarly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow#Free_software&quot;&gt;source code escrow&lt;/a&gt; can be used to ensure source code will be released under an open source licence under such circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T11:30:54.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T12:07:13.147" Score="8" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;The authors of a free/libre work can change the license of their work any time, and they can even make it non-free again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not affect copies that were made before that change (and any further copies from that &quot;branch&quot;), so I may still use/modify/distribute it according the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s assume the authors remove the license as well as all mentions that their work once was published under this license (and they forbid the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; to publish older versions of their website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m distributing their work (according to the terms of the original license). &lt;strong&gt;How can I &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; that the work really was published under this license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I hope it will never be necessary to prove this, but better be safe than sorry.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T12:51:04.750" Title="How can I prove that a work was free/libre at some point?" Tags="|distribution|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="430" CreationDate="2015-06-26T12:51:04.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the license declaration they originally had bundled with their work. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/366/55&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; I said that the license declaration at least has to define which work is licensed and with which license. As you copy the work, you copy the license declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, anyone can claim that digital data is easily tampered with, so to be secure you should take measures to document that the work was licensed that way at the moment you copy this. This documentation can be used in the worst case in court, but probably helps already to prohibit it goes that far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you used that so far, didn't document and the source now does the silent change it is far more difficult. If you know about the change beforehand, you can use that for documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How far you go with the documentation is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T12:51:04.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T13:44:17.413" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Music can be shared under open source principles that allow remixing, for instance under matching Creative Commons licenses and on platforms like Soundcloud. It is common sense, that a release as open source makes the piece more attractive, it can gain through word-of-mouth advertising and can become more popular than non-free pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone had measured the positive effect on popularity for music? Or, if such a thing for music don't exist, how is it with other forms of work? How useful is opening up the work as a tool for marketing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:57:13.227" Title="Do numbers/studies exist that show, how much music is popularized by releasing it as Open Source?" Tags="|marketing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="427" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:12:08.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When open sourcing material, a commercial publisher faces the economical risk that anyone can offer the same material for a lower price. Another publisher would not have any cost for creating the content, only the cost of production, distribution and marketing (when they distribute electronically, the first two are very low). That would certainly allow them to underbid the original publisher and drive them off the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the publisher has no economical interests, there is no particular risk in open-sourcing their work, except maybe hurting their reputation when the material is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible legal consequences should be discussed with a lawyer who is familiar with the jurisdiction where the material is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T14:26:02.577" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T14:26:02.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="439" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:35:10.160" Score="4" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon choosing a license at the Creative Commons page, Creative Commons tells you if the license is a &quot;Free Culture License&quot;, or whether it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a Free Cultural Work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T13:45:21.997" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T13:45:21.997" Title="What is a Creative Commons Free Cultural Work?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="437" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:42:25.587" Score="30" ViewCount="3102" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a real world issue, at least for me. It is more about a thought experiment from a talk that I once had with a friend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that Acme develops closed source software for their own business and there are some sort of industrial secret on that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Acme, one of their staff members, Han Solo, is about to be fired. Knowing that, he grabs some of the Acme's code and saves it in a pen-drive or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After leaving the company, he decides to publish Acme's code at some Open Source hosting (like GitHub or SourceForge), adding some Open Source license with the intent of damaging Acme's business. Acme does not notices this soon enough, and many people then have downloaded the code, modified it, forked it and improved it as any successfully Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some day, Han's plan starts to work, and Acme starts to lose money and customers who do not want to pay for their software anymore, since there is an Open Source alternative that does exactly the same as Acme's code does and it is easily found in the internet for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acme would likely sue Han Solo, and Han Solo would be found guilty. But now we come to the question: &lt;strong&gt;What would happen with the now Open Source leaked code?&lt;/strong&gt; The Open Source project is the fruit of a crime, and it is in fact stolen software that was Open Sourced. Should/could Acme try to hunt down wherever it is hosted and close it again (which is very unlikely to work)? What Acme could/would/should do to the community that uses the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T19:15:56.497" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T15:07:23.667" Title="What happens if stolen software is published as Open Source?" Tags="|copyright|proprietary-code|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="441" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:46:43.917" Score="9" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are applications that are widely used out there (just think of PHP, MySQL, etc...). What would happen if the organisations behind them pull this software back into closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On what grounds can these companies bring (parts of) Open Source projects into closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, parts of MySQL now under management of Oracle, have become close source. How is this justified and isn't this against the OS licences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T22:23:16.740" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T22:23:16.740" Title="On what grounds can companies bring open source projects into closed source?" Tags="|software|relicensing|community|proprietary-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:49:28.710" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have done a thorough IP review on my own project in 2007. You can find some info about this project in this slide deck: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/blowagie/startup-legal-and-ip&quot;&gt;Startup Legal and IP&lt;/a&gt;. I encountered many situations that are similar to what you describe, although none of them were &quot;criminal.&quot; These are some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 1:&lt;/strong&gt; code that was proprietary to SUN, later open source by SUN under a friendly license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my project, I was using code originally developed at SUN. Some classes of th source code contained comments sections saying &lt;em&gt;This code is confidential and proprietary information of Sun Microsystems, Inc.&lt;/em&gt; etc. The code as a whole was released, also by SUN, under a friendly sample license. In short: the code was released with the best of intents, but it accidentally contained conflicting information referring to the original, more strict license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verdict of the IP lawyers:&lt;/em&gt; it's better to be safe than sorry. I had to remove the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 2:&lt;/strong&gt; The RC4 algorithm used to be a trade secret. Then it was anonymously published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the code that implemented the algorithm that was anonymously published. It was considered as part of the public domain, so I was allowed to continue to use it. However, I used a parameter named &lt;code&gt;RC4_ENCRYPTION&lt;/code&gt;, and although it was OK to use the code, I was not allowed to use the name RC4 in a parameter name because the name RC4 was trademarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verdict of the IP lawyers:&lt;/em&gt; as I was using the &lt;em&gt;Alleged RC4&lt;/em&gt; algorithm, I had to change the name of the parameter to &lt;code&gt;ARC4_ENCRYPTION&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 3:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt; by ACME versus &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt; from Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was using the &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt; class from &lt;a href=&quot;http://acme.com/&quot;&gt;ACME.com&lt;/a&gt;. This class mentioned: &lt;em&gt;This class is 90% based on JavaSoft's java.util.Hashtable&lt;/em&gt;. Because JavaSoft's class wasn't available under a friendly license, I was not allowed to use that class. However, I found an &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt; class in Apache-commons that was 99% similar to ACME's &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verdict of the IP lawyers:&lt;/em&gt; as the &lt;code&gt;IntHashtable&lt;/code&gt; class from Apache was available under the ASL, I was allowed to use it. I replaced the ACME class by the Apache class. It was 99% similar, but the former wasn't acceptable from a legal point of view, whereas the second got the approval from the lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 4:&lt;/strong&gt; I used a Quick-and-Dirty XML Parser example from a JavaWorld article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't read the fineprint that said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All contents of JavaWorld, including text, programs, applets, source code, and images are copyrighted and owned by IDG or the copyright holder specified, all rights reserved. No material may be reproduced electronically or in print without written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this situation, JavaWorld was like your ACME company, and I was like your Han, although I had no criminal intentions: I was just ignorant. I took copyrighted code from a magazine example, and I released it as open source software. I should have asked permission before I did this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Verdict of the IP lawyers:&lt;/em&gt; ask and get permission. This was a no-brainer. Permission was granted immediately, both by JavaWorld and the author of the article and the code sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarized:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, Han is doing something that is not allowed: he is publishing copyrighted work as if it were open source software. He can be sued and he will have to pay for all the damages that arise from distributing the code as open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody else, for instance Luke, downloads that software and starts using it, he is doing so in good faith. Usually, Luke won't be sued (or if he's sued, he'll win because he can prove that he didn't know he was doing anything wrong), but &lt;strong&gt;this doesn't mean that Luke can continue using that software. Acme can demand that he either stops using the software, or that he gets a license.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm pretty sure that Luke can also sue Han for the damages, for instance if Luke suddenly has to start paying Acme for his use of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, I removed some code from my code base entirely (see example 1), I made small adjustments (see example 2), I refactored my code (see example 3) or I asked and received permission (see example 4). There is no general rule. It depends from case to case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morale:&lt;/strong&gt; Don't use open source software of which the origin is shady. Try to establish a business relationship with the open source vendor distributing the code. That way, you are protected against situations like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T16:26:00.543" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T16:26:00.543" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:49:54.983" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Han never had copyright on the code. He was unable to license it to anybody. He claimed he gave people a license anyway, but this wasn't true, since he couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All derivative works who thought they had a license to do what they were doing, didn't have a license to do so at all. Han said he gave them a license to the work, but he was lying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright is owned by Acme, and nobody else. You can't license software you don't own. You can't sub-license software you don't have a license for in the first place (even though you thought you had).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, he shot first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T14:49:54.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="434" CreationDate="2015-06-26T14:50:47.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main idea is, &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Culture&lt;/a&gt; allows the covered work to be part of an ecosystem of reuse and improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This document defines &quot;Free Cultural Works&quot; as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four freedoms &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;which define a Free Cultural License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And four attributes which additionally make a particular work a Free Cultural Work, beyond the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Availability of source data: Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation or processing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying source data should be available alongside the work itself under the same conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition, the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication, the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use of a free format: For digital files, the format in which the work is made available should not be protected by patents, unless a world-wide, unlimited and irrevocable royalty-free grant is given to make use of the patented technology. While non-free formats may sometimes be used for practical reasons, a free format copy must be available for the work to be considered free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No technical restrictions: The work must be available in a form where no technical measures are used to limit the freedoms enumerated above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No other restrictions or limitations: The work itself must not be covered by legal restrictions (patents, contracts, etc.) or limitations (such as privacy rights) which would impede the freedoms enumerated above. A work may make use of existing legal exemptions to copyright (in order to cite copyrighted works), though only the portions of it which are unambiguously free constitute a free work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T14:50:47.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="448" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:03:10.730" Score="8" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to release a software program to the App Store, under an open source license. As I want to increase the number of downloads, I want to advertise that the software is an Open Source Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use the logo of the Open Source Initiative, to help me do this. Assuming that I would use the logo correctly, without misleading anything in my previews, would I be allowed to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T00:59:20.373" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T00:59:20.373" Title="Can I use the OSI logo to help me advertise my project?" Tags="|marketing|osi|trademark|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:07:50.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source license is a grant from the copyright holder to someone else, giving them additional rights.  If I give you the rights to version 2 of my work, I don't have to give you rights to use version 3 of my work, because it's mine.  If version 2 is GPL, version 3 can be BSD licensed, closed source, or only available to Martians, that's up to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if I have code in my work that belongs to other people that they have given to me under the GPL, I can't unilaterally change the license, because that would involve someone else's stuff.  But other licenses, such as BSD, would allow that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;Copyleft&lt;/a&gt; is relevant to your question - for non copyleft or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence&quot;&gt;permissive&lt;/a&gt; open source licenses, the fact that a derived work can disappear behind a closed source license is considered to be a feature, not a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both sets of free software licences offer the same freedoms in terms of how the software can be used, studied, and privately modified. A major difference is that when the software is being redistributed (either modified or unmodified), permissive licences permit the redistributor to restrict access to the modified source code, while copyleft licenses do not allow this restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:07:50.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="440" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:11:24.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your exact use, but probably not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI logo is a trademark of the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/logo-usage-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The logo usage guidelines&lt;/a&gt; implore that you may only use the logo if (among other things) it doesn't imply sponsorship, association with or endorsement of the OSI. It sounds like you want to use the logo to associate yourself with the OSI, which is one of the things that is disallowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:11:24.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="440" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:18:06.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, under certain conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom of the OSI website says that website materials are licensed under CC-BY. This generally means you can use them, including the logo. However, there are special considerations for the logo because it is also a trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you're using the logo in good faith for a reasonable purpose, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be OK (because this falls under the definition of fair use, you probably shouldn't rely on it though). You should not use the logo in any way that could imply endorsement or affiliation with the OSI. Thus you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; say that &quot;this project is open source, as defined by the [logo] OSI&quot;. You can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say &quot;this project has been approved by the OSI&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T15:23:18.103" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:23:18.103" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="324" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:30:30.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're combining the licenses from two different projects into one project while applying the licenses to different things, yes. That is, as Mnementh says, if image A is licensed under CC BY and code B is licensed under MIT, you could redistribute both together, multi-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to combine the licenses on one product in some strange mishmash, it gets more complicated. Technically, yes, since the only requirement of CC BY is to attribute, but you would have to add extra stipulations to ensure that both licenses are kept, which may introduce incompatibilities in one or other licenses. If this is your aim, I suggest check with a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:30:30.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:45:15.930" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Teaching materials like textbooks or work sheets can be opened up to free redistribution and the option to change it for everyone. What are the arguments for doing this, with respect to how it can benefit the quality of education? Are there examples or is there evidence of it having the effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:10:18.210" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:10:18.210" Title="What is the rationale behind open sourcing teaching material to help improve education?" Tags="|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-26T19:27:55.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="420" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:49:54.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's surprising really, how many times &quot;you're the owner so yes&quot; is the correct answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're the owner, so you can do pretty much as you wish with it. That does include adding conditions to ensure open source release in the future. However, as always, the advisability of this comes into question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd strongly advise you not to do this alone. Although you may think it's easy enough to just add more text saying &quot;after 20XX you may assume Y license instead&quot;, you actually need a lawyer to ensure you're writing legally sound text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also want an automated system to release the source code after that date, preferably. This requires careful thought and a security expert: I haven't seen any premade solutions, so you'd be baking your own. And you'd need to make sure that it will only release the code to you, or after the date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:49:54.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="432" CreationDate="2015-06-26T15:57:13.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the biggest difference releasing music under an open license makes is that the music can be used in other works (like videos) and become popular through them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an anecdotal example, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_MacLeod_%28musician%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Kevin MacLeod&lt;/a&gt;. He is known primarily thanks to the huge library of CC BY-licensed music he created, which was featured in a huge number of works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this would also mean that for music that's not very suitable for use as soundtrack, open license might not help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T15:57:13.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="440" CreationDate="2015-06-26T16:02:26.537" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the software uses a &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license that is approved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you follow the rules &quot;regarding the logo’s appearance&quot; from OSI’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/logo-usage-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Logo Usage Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you follow OSI’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Trademark Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/logo-usage-guidelines#The_OSI_Logo:_Usage_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;first section&lt;/a&gt; of their &lt;em&gt;Logo Usage Guidelines&lt;/em&gt; says (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OSI logo is a trademark of Open Source Initiative. In order to protect and grow the OSI brand, we have a distinguishable logo that &lt;strong&gt;can be used to mark software licensed under an OSI Approved License&lt;/strong&gt;. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the exact nature of the app store which guideline from the &lt;em&gt;Trademark Guidelines&lt;/em&gt; section &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines#Distributing_software_under_a_license_approved_by_OSI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Distributing software under a license approved by OSI&lt;/a&gt;&quot; applies in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s probably &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines#Software_distributed_under_OSI_Approved_Licenses_and_software_not_licensed_OSI_Approved_Licenses_separately_on_same_website&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses and software not licensed OSI Approved Licenses separately on same website&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you intend to use the logo, you should of course always read the mentioned documents. In the &quot;tl;dr&quot; variant this section says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use one of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/logo-usage-guidelines#Logo_Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their logos&lt;/a&gt; without editing it (unless it’s explicitly noted to be allowed). (It might also be required to state something like: &quot;The OSI logo trademark is the trademark of Open Source Initiative.&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that users won’t get the false impression that the other software available from this app store would also be licensed under an OSI-approved license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Right after publishing it, send the URL with your use of the logo (e.g., your app’s page) &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/contact&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;to the OSI&lt;/a&gt; (using the category &quot;Trademark enquiries&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T00:15:04.920" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T00:15:04.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="412" CreationDate="2015-06-26T16:05:11.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely yes. The GPL is very strict on this: any type of (code) linking to a GPL-licensed library is considered derivative and must also come under GPL. In Java, this means a single import statement can change your licensing options. In C#, if you &lt;code&gt;use&lt;/code&gt; a GPL library, you must choose the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear whether this only applies to code or any library that helped you out. &lt;em&gt;Technically&lt;/em&gt;, if you stared developing based off some GPL code then your work is a derivative even if you replace every bit of the original code. (Of course, nobody'll &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; in this case, but morals? No?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth also noting that the LGPL (linkable GPL) is more lax: you can dynamically link a library and keep your license. This includes DLLs and external JARs for Java.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T16:05:11.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1058" CreationDate="2015-06-26T17:07:47.090" Score="7" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;If open source robotics parts can be manufactured and sold by anyone, is it realistic to make a profit from selling them, or are they only sold at cost price with some other business model for making money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of open source robotics projects, but I cannot see a way of telling how they are funded/make money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T13:17:27.237" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T13:17:27.237" Title="How can a profitable business selling open source robotics parts be run if anyone can produce their own?" Tags="|monetization|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="450" CreationDate="2015-06-26T17:19:30.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many open source products are often crowd  funded. This means making a profit from selling it is not the goal of the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although if they do want to make money selling parts, they could do this by manufacturing difficult parts that the average manufacturer could not make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T17:19:30.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="454" CreationDate="2015-06-26T17:24:33.350" Score="-2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often when I see open source companies I notice one of their sources of funding is crowd funding? My question is why is this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there not any better methods of income that they could use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T20:18:15.510" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T22:09:56.503" Title="Why might open source companies use crowd funding?" Tags="|project-management|finance|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="452" CreationDate="2015-06-26T17:44:46.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is crowdsourcing used? It works pretty well. Open sourcing something nearly always means a community that is interested in it. So it can work that the community is enthusiastic enough to fund the open sourced thing through crowdfunding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a lot of other methods for making money. My examples for these methods are non-companies, but companies can make money with these methods as organization or persons can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most open source projects have a donate button or something similar. That is not far from actual organized crowdfunding. Some project make fundraisers at some times, Wikipedia does from time to time for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some classic open source projects release the open sourced software, but offer paid services around it: support, documentation, installation and configuration help and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects sell premium versions of the product. That is common for open books or music, digital is free, a printed version or a CD cost something. A way Cory Doctorow makes his money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merchandise is another way of income for an open-source-project. Selling coffee-cups, T-shirts, Posters, mousepads and so on with the logo of the project can bring a lot of money. XKCD finances itself mostly with merchandise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T22:09:56.503" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T22:09:56.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="457" CreationDate="2015-06-26T17:48:47.387" Score="5" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software I am developing has been closed source. Recently my friend suggested that I make it open sourced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I would like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What benefits do I have to making my software open sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:04:16.457" Title="What are the benefits of having an open sourced software?" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="458" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:01:59.557" Score="11" ViewCount="1324" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to get a program when I found out that you had to pay for it. After some time I noticed that it was also open sourced. This confused me! After a bit more digging I found that I could download a non compiled version (for free) and compile it myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did this and the program worked fine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the advantages to having an open sourced free product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T21:40:23.567" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T17:41:57.933" Title="What are the advantages of making an open source project free?" Tags="|software|commercial|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="455" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:04:16.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The benefits of open sourcing your project include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can reach more people (as it can be freely redistributed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more people trusting it (as code can be inspected)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may attract external contributors (hopefully making the software better)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;good karma ;-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also downsides (depends on how you see it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you cannot longer forbid usage in some fields (military, genetics, secret services) or for some people (North Koreans, murderers)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it may be more difficult to monetize your software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone may take your code and produce a changed variant and distributes it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people may complain about the quality of your source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:04:16.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="456" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:09:04.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can pay for open source software. With Open Source, the source code must be made available, and provide options for forking and the like. Compiled versions can be paid for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many other programs, open source software is generally similar to proprietary software. For developers, they can get their hands on code, and fork and experiment. For consumers, many might not see much of a difference, except that they may see it as open information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T10:35:13.577" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:35:13.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:13:14.787" Score="15" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange applies &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; to all posts. How does this interact with free or open source licences? If someone wants to ask a question about a piece of open source software can they post code snippets into their question or would some licences prevent code being posted under CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T00:26:24.560" Title="The Stack Exchange licence: Can I post open source code here?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="464" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:16:01.577" Score="3" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;While most operating systems have a closed source nature, from the beginning Linux / Ubuntu has remain open sourced. This has allowed it to become quite popular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How has it used open source to its advantage? And what has keeping it open sourced allowed it to do, that it otherwise wouldn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T19:49:28.697" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:51:13.210" Title="How does Linux use Open Source to its advantage?" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:25:59.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.storagecraft.com/blog/linux-advantages-disadvantages-open-source-technology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog post by Jennifer Marsh&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Linux being open-source, several distributions are available to the end-user. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint are just a few of the distributions available to end users, and these distributions are completely free to download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Security is the other main advantage. Several whitehat hackers have contributed to the overall security of Linux, and by making the source available to anyone, security experts can help identify any main security flaws in the operating system. The advantage over operating systems such as Windows is that security flaws are caught before they become an issue for the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping it open sourced allowed us to have so many choices in a wide variety of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:51:13.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="465" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:27:02.130" Score="3" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I release my software under certain Contributor Agreements, can I give the software the same effect as if I released it under an Open source license? My business partner and I are unsure which to use!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, Great!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, why not? And what other options do I have?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T18:31:42.150" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T23:55:44.510" Title="What are &quot;contributor agreements&quot;? Are they similar to open source licenses?" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="466" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:31:16.323" Score="10" ViewCount="1629" Body="&lt;p&gt;This person has a piece of open source code which is released under a copyleft license. They are required to give me this code, but numerous times they have refused. I am stuck because I need this code....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do to make them give me the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, what else can I do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T18:35:55.133" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T10:42:01.857" Title="Someone is violating the copyleft license, they are refusing to give me the source code even though they are required to!" Tags="|copyleft|enforcement|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="460" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:32:43.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Linus Torvalds developed a simple Unix-kernel for his home PC he decided to make it open source under the GPL-license, because he used GNU-software in making it and wanted to say thanks this way. GNU was building a free Unix-like OS by replacing step by step every program in System V Unix. They were already pretty far, but they still missed a kernel. Linux was that kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This decision had some consequences. As many people already followed the effort of the GNU-project to build an OS, Linux was very interesting. Linux making the kernel GPL resulted in many of them starting to be interested into Linux and many of them started to contribute to the project. Also Linux completed the GNU-system. So finally GNU could release a completely free system - with Linux as the kernel. This lead to a lot of buzz among the free-software-aficionados and started to make Linux popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T19:51:20.007" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:51:20.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="462" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:35:27.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contributor agreements aren't licenses for your software. They are instead like contracts between the main project managers and contributors. It's like the rules of being with us. So, they aren't software licenses. These agreements generally govern things such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intellectual Property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ownership&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T18:40:37.520" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:40:37.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:46:50.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enforcing can be difficult, and you would likely have to go through the courts, in order to enforce. Be sure to make sure that they have to do it under the terms of the license as well. Make sure that you notify the project's author, as they may be able to help you in this case as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:46:50.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:47:05.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there is. Legally challenge them in the courts and force them to back down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow, I suspect this is not the answer you are looking for (reference not intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, the only non-legal thing you can do is communication: send numerous emails. Always be polite, and start out by realising that they might not be doing it deliberately. So, if you haven't already, point out that he's licensed his product under X, which requires the source code to be made available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also ask other interested people to do the same: get your friends and fellow &lt;s&gt;Romans&lt;/s&gt; developers to email him as well, pointing out the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, you go to elevating the issue to higher authority. Report it to the hosting platform: although they may not be able to do anything legally or force him to provide the code, they are a greater authority than you (and many TOSes say they can delete your stuff at any time for any reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last resort is of course, legal challenges. If you really want to go that far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:47:05.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="476" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:55:05.613" Score="6" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I know that some (most) copyleft focused businesses often don't get the opportunity to choose the business model that they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my business I want to be able to choose exactly what business model that I want. By choosing an open source license, will this enable me to choose? Or will it be like copyleft businesses that are not free to choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T01:22:50.443" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T01:22:50.443" Title="Will open source licenses enable me to choose the businesses model I want?" Tags="|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="462" CreationDate="2015-06-26T18:55:23.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contributor agreements and licenses are both exactly what they say on the tin. Thus, you cannot license a project under a contributor agreement, and you cannot conduct relations with your contributors under a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; defines the terms under which people are allowed to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; your product. A contributor agreement defines the terms under which people are allowed to &lt;em&gt;contribute&lt;/em&gt;  to your product. Of course, as the owner you can accept or reject any changes you like, but the CA defines the accepted baseline by which all contributors are treated, so nobody complains of mistreatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T18:55:23.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:01:16.543" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking only the copyright holder can instigate legal action in these kinds of circumstances, since they're the party whose license is being violated. So it's not up to you to enforce the license, all you can do is inform the copyright holder about the violation, try to convince the violator, and (as a last resort) communicate more widely about the violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradley M. Kuhn has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2009/11/08/gpl-enforcement.html&quot;&gt;great blog post on GPL enforcement&lt;/a&gt; which you'd probably find relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:01:16.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:02:01.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the license and the owner, but likely no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;License&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code you want to post is licensed under GPL, don't even think about it. GPL has strict share-alike restrictions, so you must reshare under the same license. Posting to SE shares under CC BY SA, so violates these terms. Other licenses may have similar; I don't know them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Owner&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if you're the owner then ignore the whole lot of this and do as you like. If you're not, but you can contact the owner, you should consider doing so. You can ask them to relicense the work &lt;em&gt;solely to you&lt;/em&gt; because you want to post it to SE (add details about SE and why this is a good purpose), or to make an exception. This relies on their generosity, but many devs will be happy with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:02:01.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="456" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:02:08.290" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing prevents charging for open source software. In fact, if a license forbids charging for the software, it is not free/open-source, because it violates the freedom to distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charging for open source software may seem pointless, because once the author has sold it to someone, they can't prevent the buyer from making as many copies as they like and giving them out for free. However there are cases where it makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies make money by writing custom software, tailored for a client's very specific needs. The resulting software may be open source, either because the client requires it, or the company prefers it this way, or the software is derived from some generic software with a license that doesn't allow closed-source derivatives. In such cases, the customer pays because they want this software that's purpose-built for their needs, that nobody would bother to write if they didn't pay. Typically there wouldn't be many other people who'd be interested in having a copy anyway, and even if there are, the customer could be paying just to be the first to have the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies charge for their packaging of the software. People may be prepared to pay to get nice installers, or even just binaries for their platform. If the software has a permissive license that allows non-free derivatives, the seller may put a restrictive license on the binaries that doesn't limits the number of copies the driver may make and forbids redistribution. If the software has a copyleft license, the buyer is allowed to redistribute the binary, so it's a small market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the days before cheap Internet bandwidth, most people got their open source software on CDs. The CD distributors obviously charge for their work of pressing CDs, shipping them, etc. The CD itself may or may not be copied for free, depending on whether it also contains non-free software and whether the collection may count as a legally protected database (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/354/distributing-an-operating-system-dvd-bundling-proprietary-and-gnu-gpl-software&quot;&gt;Distributing an operating system DVD bundling proprietary and GNU-GPL software?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paying to install an open source program on a platform where deploying an application requires a fee is a more modern equivalent. iOS is a famous example: you need Xcode to make a package that you can install on your device, and you need a Mac to run Xcode; until recently you also needed a developer account with a yearly fee. Here the buyer is paying not because they can't obtain the software otherwise, but because they can't install the software otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T23:48:14.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:04:33.277" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you're a writer and you've wrote a lot of books. You release them all for no cost as download on your website (and some shops), but you also sell printed copies. You keep copyrights, but everyone can download the digital version for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now you decide it is better to make the book open. That involves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;everyone can redistribute it, not only the shops you authorized&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;everyone can use it to make money without asking you&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;everyone can change it or remix and distribute or sell the derivate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that impact the financials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, in both cases the book can be downloaded without costs involved, I want to know if there is such impact if price is no issue. Also it would be good if you have examples or even better studies to substantiate your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T22:15:28.940" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T22:15:28.940" Title="What financial impact does opening up a book have?" Tags="|finance|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="478" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:09:50.837" Score="6" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;When downloading software I often see open source alternatives. Many of these look quite similar but never quite the same. I continue to buy the paid version. Recently, I started to wonder if the open source versions may be better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What benefits are there to using open source products?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any downsides to using open source products?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T19:20:03.647" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T09:42:10.877" Title="What is the benefit to using open source alternatives?" Tags="|software|paid-software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="445" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:15:54.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sure it can but...&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would not necessarily be better than regular materials. School boards often spend money getting customized programs / information. This may not always happen if all the information is open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The catholic school board in Toronto has used companies to get custom software for its students:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.konverge.com/Custom-Software-Design-Clients/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.konverge.com/Custom-Software-Design-Clients/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:15:54.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="468" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:18:25.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Start by looking  at this from the other direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing the &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt; license can definitely prevent you from adopting the business model you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to sell your software, then any open license is likely to prevent you doing so .. because anyone can get the software for free. So you need a closed license in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make money by selling support, then a closed license might mean you can't create a large enough customer base quickly enough to survive until the revenue stream is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming from a different direction again, back in the 70's and 80's people would ask me what computer they should get for their business. My answer was always a different question: &quot;What software do you want to run?&quot; or &quot;What do you want to do with it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best approach is to clearly define your business model .. and let that then guide you in your choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your model is to sell services around your software (support, education, custom programming), you need to build up a large base of users so that, if only 'x' percent of them buy the service, you have sufficient revenue. That needs a license which encourages wide adoption and usage, while perhaps reducing the number of competing implementations that spring up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the issues that all new startups face when putting together their business plan. If you hope to make money from open source, then ironically you have to treat it as a business from the outset and plan accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:18:25.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:19:17.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see a major key issue here: &lt;em&gt;Everyone can redistribute it&lt;/em&gt;. That, mixed with &lt;em&gt;Everyone can use it to make money without asking you&lt;/em&gt; really looks like fancy wording for taking your work and selling it for free. Please don't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does that impact the financials?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if people can sell it for free, it's like asking...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you like a free delicious apple?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or Would you like an expensive delicious apple?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, everyone will ask of it for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no economist or anything, but your sales and revenue will decrease ridiculously, as you'll only get money from people loyal to getting something directly from authors, people who feel free is &quot;sketchy&quot;, and hardcover sales in your approved stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/12/01/author-discontent-grows-kindle-unlimited-enters-fifth-month/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;For example: The significant lack of income from Kindle Unlimited has seriously affected authors.&lt;/a&gt; I understand it's not the same as opening the book, but it demonstrates the lack of income that can affect people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T20:51:44.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:51:44.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:23:05.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Benefits&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benefits of open source are numerous. The most often quoted are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giving something to the community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More eyes on code (easier to spot bugs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free development (people submit patches for your bugs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also some less recognised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's fun. This is never quoted because we're serious developers and we don't have fun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's a learning experience. Also rare because we obviously know everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Disadvantages&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they do exist. Look at OpenSSL: Heartbleed, Poodle, Freak... If your open source software is popular, then the attackers can see the bugs in your code too and exploit them. And a lot of people use it, so a lot of people to defraud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also takes up time: unless you have a dedicated team of maintainers and helpers, you need to manually review patches and pull requests, and check that your license is being followed. That can take up a lot of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:23:05.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:23:39.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The benefits for users include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoid vendor lock-in: You have to stay with one vendor, because all your data is in his format. With open-source it is always possible to decode the data-format from inspecting the code and deduct the format. Also it's always possible to fork the software to create alternatives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;better survivability of the project: If a proprietary program generates no longer money for the company they often stop developing it. The developers of open source projects may also lose interest, but as the code is available and it is allowed to change it, someone with interest might be picking it up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bugfixing capability: Does a simple small bug drives you crazy with a software you otherwise love? Open Source allows you to find and smash this bug.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:23:39.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:32:02.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure they are!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to worry about the product getting discontinued (in most of the cases). If the project is popular, somebody's going to continue developing it no matter what.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will always get an upgrade.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The upgrade will not cost you anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can suggest new features and even work on them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to worry about vendor lockins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can get the software for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to worry about junkware being shipped with it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main developers are usually easier to reach if you need to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community is usually there to help you out to make the transition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disadvantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community is usually spread out to various products and they will often suggest you to switch to some other open source project to resolve your issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different open source softwares don't usually work well with each other (as an example, there's no Adobe-like all in one pack).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The support is kind of hard to get until know where to look for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You're expected to give back to the community in some way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open source projects are usually not as popular as proprietary solutions so it's a bit trickier to find tips and tricks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The documentation for the product can get outdated pretty quickly since new features are being introduced all of the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion is: Instead of paying $200 for a proprietary software, try using open source software and donating $100 to the developers. It will benefit you, its developers and probably everyone else using the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T22:48:39.520" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T22:48:39.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2015-06-26T19:48:01.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may have a couple of options&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first, as mentioned elsewhere, is to approach the authors of the open source software at issue, and get them to initiate an Intellectual Property suit. They are the only ones who can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, there seem to be a number of License Enforcement bodies who are acting on behalf of open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/about/&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt;. Their model implies that they act on behalf of member projects to defend their rights. So it would behoove you to determine if the project at issue resides under the roof of one of these organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot;&gt;clear and detailed page&lt;/a&gt; listing the steps to take if you suspect a violation. If the copyleft license is one of theirs, and they own the copyright, they say they will take action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have thought that the groups who create the licenses (FSF, Apache, OSI, etc) would have an interest in helping enforce them generally. It seems it should work a little like trademark law: if you don't protect your trademark, you lose it. In the case of the FSF, for example, if they allow GPL violations to stand simply because they don't hold the copyright on a particular piece of code, then they weaken their license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T19:48:01.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2015-06-26T20:14:22.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at this from a business's point of view, rather than a software developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I run a small business, perhaps a lawyer's office. No one in the company writes software. But my company needs a lot of software to make money. IT costs are a major issue for smaller companies, consider the basic infrastructure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A PC of some kind for every employer, and the operating system for it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, and probably presentation software)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;File servers and some collaboration software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other productivity software (time keeping, for example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accounting and payroll systems&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regular upgrades for all the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that long ago, a new business had only one realistic option. The OS came with the computer, and everything else followed. But today there are widely used open source alternatives for everything in the list above. Even more interestingly, if it's a Linux based solution, you can often get away with lower spec'd (i.e. cheaper) PC's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So going with Linux, Open/Libre Office, and other open source packages will save my company a lot of money each year. Possibly enough to hire another employee to help generate revenue. That's more jobs and more businesses feeding the economy. That may mean more clients and more revenue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest downside, of course, is the lack of a one-stop-support organization ... and anyone who's ever listened to the hold-jockeys at a certain company for hours can talk to you about just how well that works out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is simply the difficulty for a non-savvy user to know which software to use, or even what exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these actually open up scope for a new business: consultants who, for a fee, help set up the office for new businesses. They identify the right software, and set it up. They might even provide the ongoing support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a much smaller scale, my entire household is moving away from Windows to Macs as the old laptops die. I used to have multiple licenses of Office etc. Today, the only software I regularly buy is Turbotax once a year and every few years I update Quicken. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple doesn't even charge for major OS upgrades any more. And a Mac is close enough to Linux for me to be able to do full OS development on it with all my favorite libraries and tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My development desktop at work runs Ubuntu and there isn't a single piece of paid-for software on it. My employer has hundreds of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T20:14:22.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="452" CreationDate="2015-06-26T21:17:16.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why might open source companies use crowd funding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Open Source company&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, what is an open source company? In this context, I presume it means a company that develops and distributes open source software. Red Hat is considered to be a well know Open Source company, right? Canonical (of ubuntu fame) is another. But, does it end there? Google is an open source company by that definition (android, angular, and thousands of other things are open source... right?) So is IBM (eclipse, OSGi, parts of Java, parts of it's Z-OS code, IBM donated much code to Apache, etc.). Microsoft is Open Source - it's opening the .net platform, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume, at this point, that you are starting to disagree with me.... how can Oracle be an open source company - it does own MySQL and distribute it, though... so, it qualifies - even Java is open - and that's Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This concept of an open source company is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the concept be narrowed? An open source company cannot sell closed-source products? Well, there goes RedHat, Pentaho, Mandriva, SuSE, Canonical, etc. All the posterchilds are gone... leaving things like.... Apache, Eclipse, hmmm, not much else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, those are not companies, they are non-profits, or foundations...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Crowd Funding&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is crowd funding? Kickstarting is crowd-funding, but, it is actually an investment, and a contract. A kickstart campaign is a pre-order with a specified delivery, and a penalty if it fails. It is not exactly a donation. This sort of seed money is a common thing to do, and is a form of distributed venture-capital. A lot of people invest, and they have preferential returns on that investment (early/cheap access to cool things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kickstarting is crowdfunding, but it is almost always associated with something tangible, a book, a device, a bowl-of-soup, or whatever. Not software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, companies have complicated rules about accepting donations (but not so complicated when accepting investments or pre-orders). Companies are not charitable organisations, so they can't just say &quot;donate here&quot; without first making it clear that they are &quot;for profit&quot;, and they cannot (in the US, at least) issue tax benefits, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, individuals, and not-for-profit charitable organizations can accept donations (like Mediawiki, EFF, OSI, Apache, Eclipse, etc.). Then again, they are not companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. The Common case&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most companies who's primary business is related to open source software distribution (like RedHat, Pentaho, SuSE, Canonica, Elastic, etc.) make their money (and profits) from value-add - whether it be support, a premium experience, an enhanced management system, better scalability, or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where they don't make their money primarily from that, they make it from advertising, selling space on their pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. So, who does use crowd-funding for software?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individuals and non-profits. It is easy to throw up a &quot;donate&quot; paypal button. But, you should be aware, that most of those people get good value from advertising too, and also from esoteric things like &quot;wishlists&quot;, commissions, contract-work, and so on. If you are the lead developer on an open source project, you will likely be the person contracted to apply a custom hack for some company, or train people, etc. It is not a direct payment, but indirect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you become an &quot;evangelist&quot; at Google, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5. Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No company makes significant money from crowd funding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individuals and non-profits may, but there is no reason to believe it is significant... the bulk of value comes in from being able to put it on your resume, and selling your knowledge and skills, not your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="80" LastEditorUserId="80" LastEditDate="2015-06-26T21:30:54.650" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T21:30:54.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:19:43.750" Score="13" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to license my work under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, I could use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the international/unported version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the version ported for my jurisdiction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For example, in case of CC BY-SA 3.0: &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0 DE&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be possible reasons for choosing the ported version?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have guessed that I should always prefer the ported version (if available for my jurisdiction), but then I noticed that there are no more ported versions available for the CC 4.0 licenses, and there &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Affiliate_Network&quot;&gt;don’t seem to&lt;/a&gt; be planned any (&quot;Version 4.0 will not be ported absent compelling circumstances&quot;), so using the international version seems to be fine – but does this also apply to version 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:15:39.210" Title="When to use a ported (instead of an international) CC 3.0 license?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="495" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:42:38.780" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;From previous experience I know that when making an open source piece of software you often have documentation that moves with the file. Some of these files include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Readme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these things are good for digital files, when building hardware you don't have a folder with files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you keep documentation for an open sourced project, if it is a piece of hardware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T01:36:23.310" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T01:36:23.310" Title="When building an open sourced hardware project what documentation do I need?" Tags="|hardware|documentation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="492" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:49:03.410" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;When building a digital open sourced project it is very easy to apply the licence. You can do this by putting it anywhere in the product in places such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The bottom of a blog post&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the code itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I apply a licence to a piece of hardware? Do I physically write the license to the bottom of the object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T00:07:54.633" Title="When making a piece of hardware how do I apply a license to it?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="491" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:54:17.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's go over the ways you can create files to make an open source hardware design spread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AutoCAD files (and other files usable for 3D printing and related manufacturing, e.g. CNC machines)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blueprints&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data sheets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Materials lists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assembly guides&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should apply the license to the AutoCAD files and blueprints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't spread open source hardware by making physical objects available. You spread it by making the &lt;em&gt;design&lt;/em&gt; available. Apply the license to the documents/files behind the design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, if you want, add the license to the physical object (and sometimes it is required for some objects; see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a specific case. From a page about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the TAPR Open Hardware License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you create a design that you want to license under the OHL, you should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Include the OHL document in a file named LICENSE.TXT (or LICENSE.PDF) that is included in the documentation package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the file format allows, include a notice like &quot;Licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License (www.tapr.org/OHL)&quot; in each documentation file. &lt;strong&gt;While not required, you should also include this notice on printed circuit board artwork and the product itself;&lt;/strong&gt; if space is limited the notice can be shortened or abbreviated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Include a copyright notice in each file &lt;strong&gt;and on printed circuit board artwork.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="145" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T00:07:54.633" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T00:07:54.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="519" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:55:58.420" Score="9" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a design for a truck. Simple enough. Possibly in a .CAD file or some such program. I publish this design on my website under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/&quot;&gt;BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; licence. Someone on the web finds my design and builds it using wood or a 3d printer. Now we have a phyical object. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have this object does the licence from the design carry over onto the object that was created based on the design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T00:06:38.607" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T19:09:06.673" Title="Does a license apply to both the design AND the physical object (if it is made)?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:56:46.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open sourcing generally means releasing the format that you designed the hardware in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For hardware this would be circuit diagrams, trace design, blueprints. Things like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you previously took out a patent on it then you would provide the patent as well along with a license for people to use the patent freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T23:56:46.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="490" CreationDate="2015-06-26T23:58:01.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source hardware means that the designs and specifications (shape, size, materials, contruction methods) are open source. This could be one or several of various available formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;technical drawings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;written instructions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HDL source code&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_diagram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;circuit diagrams/schematics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;integrated circuit&lt;/a&gt; layout data&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of hardware, open source means that the instructions for making the hardware are available to everyone. Similarly to how in the case of software, open source means that the source code (instructions for making the compiled software) are available to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardware open source can include both instructions for manufacturers on how to construct fundamental parts, and instructions on how to put these parts together into composite parts or whole mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-26T23:58:01.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="496" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:08:49.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creating an open source item is half the battle. The next step is getting it to your users and consumers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distribution in the sense of open source refers to the process of sharing an item amongst many people, groups, or organizations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical questions under this tag might cover source vs binary packaging, notification of updates, how and where to post images, and so on .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T01:05:17.507" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T01:05:17.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="497" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:08:49.513" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the distribution of an object, package or notice to the developer or public community.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:25:17.823" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T13:25:17.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="609" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:12:39.213" Score="6" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I know:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have read ported licenses are for specific locations while non-ported licenses have been customized to work in as many places as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I license my work under a ported license does that mean it won't work in other locations EVER or does it just mean that depending on the locations laws it may not fully be compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T21:15:21.060" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T21:15:21.060" Title="What is the difference between a ported and non-ported licenses?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="513" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:17:20.380" Score="7" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While writing an article on Wikipedia I needed to include text that is licensed under a CC-BY license. After a bit of digging I found that Wikipedia uses a CC BY-SA license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite Wikipedia using a CC-BY-SA license, will I run into problems if I include CC-BY licensed text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T00:23:54.013" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:16:28.033" Title="In a Wikipedia article am I able to insert information licensed with CC BY even though they use a CC BY-SA license?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-compatibility|cc-by|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="527" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:18:28.563" Score="22" ViewCount="4305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have created an open source application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have also created a snazzy logo to go with the application (for example, the Eclipse logo)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I released my application's source code under a permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have not trademarked my logo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web pages on which my Logo appears may be covered by copyright, or a more restrictive license than the source code itself. But the source code distribution also contains an image file for the logo (so I can display it when the program is running).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that my logo is covered by the permissive license, and hence available for others to take and use for other purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T05:47:38.717" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T05:47:38.717" Title="Does being open sourced mean others can use my logo?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="586" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:24:02.563" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am developing an open source project. I am at the stage where I need to license my software. After doing research I find out that I live in a place where there is no ported CC license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I do if the CC license I want to use has not yet been ported in my country?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T17:13:53.987" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T17:13:53.987" Title="What can I do if there is no CC ported license in my country?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="459" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:26:24.560" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's just small snippets, then that likely falls under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;. In that case, the license doesn't matter and you are allowed to post them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though how small exactly would the snippets have to be is not specified, so you should be really careful about keeping them really small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T00:26:24.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="507" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:32:49.827" Score="5" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am working on a piece of open sourced software. Suppose I am unsure whether or not I want to sell it in future versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would using a permissive license make it easier for me to sell my product in later versions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, why so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, what can I do to make it easier?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:50:50.707" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:53:15.993" Title="Should I use a permissive license if I might charge for my product later?" Tags="|licensing|permissive|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="538" CreationDate="2015-06-27T00:39:10.117" Score="40" ViewCount="1419" Body="&lt;p&gt;On many sites, especially Stack Overflow, I can't help but notice such amazing code snippets. However, they come with a &quot;catch&quot; designed by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With user contributions being licensed with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 License&lt;/a&gt;, many users try and &quot;override&quot; this by stating how they license the work on their profile page. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All contributions that I make to this site shall be licensed under the Apache 2.0 License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This surprises me, because it seems to violate the policy of licensing, if not the Terms of Use that are present as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bDTed.png&quot; alt=&quot;Stack Exchange User Contribution Policy&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this acceptable? Are users allowed to essentially &quot;override&quot; and decide their own licenses, against what has been standardized by the organization?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T22:21:33.970" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T15:10:22.907" Title="Can I &quot;Override&quot; a licensing policy?" Tags="|licensing|enforcement|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:04:59.623" Score="8" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Patent system works on the premise that the community benefits from the information shared, and rewards the innovators by granting them a period to capitalize on it without others grabbing a free ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the FLOSS and FSF licenses preclude many of the most lucrative ways to monetize a creative idea. So, although the strong copyright protections remain, you effectively grant very broad rights to use your product. This includes the right for others to make money from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the open-source/free-software approach to sharing ideas and creations impede innovation by removing much of the financial incentive?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T02:50:55.850" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T13:21:59.847" Title="Does a seeming lack of strong protection for IP discourage innovation?" Tags="|monetization|philosophy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="503" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:15:15.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I am not a lawyer&quot; but this is generally a good idea. Apache is actually &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; good for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From experience (including legal discussions) such as license allows you to  push out an open source version, and then develop a much more capable &lt;strong&gt;closed&lt;/strong&gt; version based on the same code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using an appropriate  CLA also ensures that all community contributions can be used in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as the original author you can do what you want with your code at all times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T01:18:56.470" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T01:18:56.470" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="506" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:27:20.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;I don't believe that either the free or the open source approach to software or to anything else has any detrimental effect on innovation.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people innovate motivated by financial gain. Other people innovate with motives other than financial. The patent system and the copyright system provide the financial gain for those people who are motivated by it, leading to innovation. Free and open source projects provide a way for people who are not financially motivated to innovate collaboratively and hence more than they could individually. The copyright system provides the legal protection for free and open source licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, strong intellectual property protection is supporting both types of innovation (financially motivated and non-financially motivated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Grey areas&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the situation is not this simple, and many people work on proprietary projects for reasons other than financial, and many people working in free and open source projects have at least some financial incentive (whether direct or indirect). However, the point stands - both types of innovation and all the grey areas in between are protected by intellectual property law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't necessarily mean that current intellectual property law is the best way of doing things, or that it provides the most innovative environment, but until it is improved it does provide strong motivation for innovation, for both types of motive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T01:27:20.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="517" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:27:43.823" Score="12" ViewCount="792" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to licence a project I have been working on for quite some time. The goals for this license are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free to use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never to be sold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license would best suit my needs in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:13:06.133" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T14:43:32.953" Title="How can I start an open source project and keep people from taking it and selling it? I want to keep it free, open and never be sold" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="563" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:30:13.000" Score="7" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many open source solutions that are supported by an organisation, and that helps a lot when considering trainings and consultants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the point is contracts, for a database or an ESB for example, some companies don't consider open source solutions, as there is no legal responsibilities for impacts on the adoption of the respective solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we present open source solutions to larger organizations, and how would we deal with these responsibilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T01:34:42.790" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T17:11:40.187" Title="How to deal with support of open source solutions in bigger projects?" Tags="|marketing|contracts|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="518" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:30:49.990" Score="27" ViewCount="6934" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to choose the perfect license for my project....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After doing research I ran into a question which I could not find an answer to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between bazaar-style and cathedral-style open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T17:55:58.517" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T08:19:33.493" Title="What's the difference between bazaar-style and cathedral-style open source projects?" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:38:53.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that &lt;strong&gt;GNU Affero GPL v3.0&lt;/strong&gt; might serves you well. As described bellow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;GPL&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is the most widely used free software license and has a strong&#xA;copyleft requirement. When distributing derived works, the source code&#xA;of the work must be made available under the same license. There are&#xA;multiple variants of the GPL, each with different requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not avoid the Never be sold, but forces who uses to open its source too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, pay a visit to &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site from GitHub&lt;/a&gt; that was the source of previous quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="320" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T01:38:53.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="499" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:40:01.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can merge information from CC-BY sources into a CC-BY-SA work (but not the other way). That is because CC-BY-SA still includes all conditions of CC-BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, as suggested by Martijn in the comments: It is still important to correctly attribute the changes to their respective author (as bot CC-BY and CC-BY-SA demand). Also Wikipedia can have it's own guidelines for using tests from different sources, that extend over what the license demands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T20:16:28.033" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:16:28.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:40:54.973" Score="3" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to develop a software in a open sourced environment. Then one the software is complete change it to a closed source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, are there any issues with this?&#xA;If no, why not, what alternatives are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:08:00.007" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:08:00.007" Title="Can I develop closed source software with opensource development environment?" Tags="|development-environment|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-27T01:45:28.337" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="521" CreationDate="2015-06-27T01:56:39.070" Score="12" ViewCount="9101" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question that stems out from here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/412/do-i-have-to-release-my-code-as-gpl-when-a-java-library-is-gpl#comment544_412&quot;&gt;Do I have to release my code as GPL when a Java Library is GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the Java System libraries are licensed with a class path exception. After [attempting] to read what the class path exception is, it remains very unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a class path exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T06:59:02.427" Title="What is a class path exception?" Tags="|licensing|exceptions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="506" CreationDate="2015-06-27T02:02:54.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a wrong premise in your question: That open-source cannot offer monetary incentives. If you do it right, money can be made. That's the reason why a lot of companies are making money with or around open source projects: RedHat, Canonical, Google, IBM or Sun (now Oracle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another premise is unproved: That monetary incentives even benefit innovation. I have no data in either direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Track record&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can take a look at how much innovation comes from Open Source. Many basic functions of Internet or modern Operating Systems came from BSD. The X-Window-System was a MIT-project. The UMN Mapserver shaping modern GIS-systems is and was open source. The Apache Webserver was involved creating the modern internet. OpenSSH was an important driver of modern security standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall I would say that Open Source is not less innovative than proprietary development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T02:02:54.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2015-06-27T02:14:23.097" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible, if you keep it Open Source, you can always sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge&#xA;  as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to&#xA;  make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price doesn't make&#xA;  the software free, or even closer to free. So if you are&#xA;  redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a&#xA;  substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a&#xA;  good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a&#xA;  profit from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Absolutely. All Open Source software can be used for commercial&#xA;  purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell&#xA;  Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a catch. As open source guarantees that everyone can freely redistributes it, everyone else can also redistribute the original software at no price. Or people get it directly from you. So probably selling it at an unreasonable price is not a working business model. You can make that sure by offering the software in as much channels as possible. Selling for a reasonable price though - is exactly what many commercial Linux distributions do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T14:43:32.953" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T14:43:32.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="511" CreationDate="2015-06-27T02:23:35.023" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a metaphor from the book named &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'&lt;/a&gt; from open-source evangelist Eric S. Raymond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphor describes two different development-models for projects (not necessarily open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cathedral is a centralized effort. A defined group of developers (or even only a single one) is developing the software. Nobody else is involved and ideas or patches from the outside will be ignored. Usually proprietary software is developed that way, but this is not exclusively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bazaar makes the development open. Many people are tinkering with the source code without central control. Many are contributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality many OSS-projects are in between the two models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="28094" LastEditDate="2022-10-04T08:19:33.493" LastActivityDate="2022-10-04T08:19:33.493" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2015-06-27T06:22:21.473" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The .CAD model would be characterized as artistic, even if it is not exactly what people would expect as &amp;quot;art&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The act of 3D-printing the object would be characterized as a Reproduction in the terms of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, the license to the design does carry over onto the object that was created based on the design. But it barely manages to do that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license is inadequate to be applied to a .CAD file that could be 3D-printed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license has some holes that can be exploited for someone with the intent of circumventing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Detailed long explanation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an specialist on the subject, but I will try to answer based on the best knowledge that I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is somewhat lengthy to analyze in detail, so I will summarize the relevant points from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it is applied to a &amp;quot;Work&amp;quot;. What exactly is a work on this license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1(f) &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Work&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License including without limitation any production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary? Nope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific? Neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artistic? Possibly, so lets try to grab on this. Even if a truck is not exactly what people would normally wait from the word &amp;quot;artistic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] whatever may be the mode or form of its expression including digital form, such as a book, pamphlet and other writing; a lecture, address, sermon or other work of the same nature; a dramatic or dramatico-musical work; a choreographic work or entertainment in dumb show; a musical composition with or without words; a cinematographic work to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to cinematography; a work of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving or lithography; a photographic work to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to photography; a work of applied art; an illustration, map, plan, sketch or three-dimensional work relative to geography, topography, architecture or science; a performance; a broadcast; a phonogram; a compilation of data to the extent it is protected as a copyrightable work; or a work performed by a variety or circus performer to the extent it is not otherwise considered a literary or artistic work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant parts are &lt;strong&gt;architecture&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;sculpture&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;a work of applied art&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;three-dimensional work relative to geography, topography, architecture or science&lt;/strong&gt;. So, clearly the Work is the 3D representation of the truck encoded in the file. It is not a sculpture, since the .CAD file nor the model represented there are physical entities. It could be a three-dimensional work, although a truck is not geography or topography, but it is possibly (although hardly defensible) architecture or science. It could be a work of applied art (let's grab on that then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1(c). &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Distribute&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means to make available to the public the original and copies of the Work through sale or other transfer of ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1(h). &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Publicly Perform&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means to perform public recitations of the Work and to communicate to the public those public recitations, by any means or process, including by wire or wireless means or public digital performances; to make available to the public Works in such a way that members of the public may access these Works from a place and at a place individually chosen by them; to perform the Work to the public by any means or process and the communication to the public of the performances of the Work, including by public digital performance; to broadcast and rebroadcast the Work by any means including signs, sounds or images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1(i). &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Reproduce&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means to make copies of the Work by any means including without limitation by sound or visual recordings and the right of fixation and reproducing fixations of the Work, including storage of a protected performance or phonogram in digital form or other electronic medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reproduction and distribution are not clearly differentiated in those terms, but in general what the license tried to say is that playing a song in public is publicly performing, putting it inside a CD is a reproduction and giving or selling the CD is a distribution. In your case, &lt;strong&gt;3D-printing it would be a reproduction and giving or selling it would be a distribution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prove that, lets focus on &lt;strong&gt;to make copies of the Work by any means [...]&lt;/strong&gt;, clearly 3D-printing is that, so it is reproduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public performing a 3D-printed truck is unclear. The 3D-printed truck is clearly not something being communicated, recited, broadcasted or rebroadcasted. So the part that might apply is &lt;strong&gt;to make available to the public Works in such a way that members of the public may access these Works from a place -AND- at a place individually chosen by them&lt;/strong&gt;. In my interpretation, exposing the 3D-printed truck on a museum or in an event would be something like that. But... what if you are just selling the 3D-printed objects in a shop and they are not closed inside a box? Would be this be a public perform? I don't know, but it would be at least an overly-stretch of the intended purpose of that (which should be distribution, not public performance). And this could apply even if you are selling something like a painting or a map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1(b). &amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (&amp;quot;synching&amp;quot;) will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3D-printed object is clearly an unexpected outlier here, but I tend to interpret &amp;quot;adaptation&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;alterations&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;changes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;derivation&amp;quot;. Simply 3D-printing out the object is not an adaptation in that way. But if you say, change its color or change the position of the truck doors or add an extra pair of wheels, then you are adapting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a. to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections; and,&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b. to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you might 3D-print it freely (reproduce), give or sell it freely (distribute) and expose it freely (publicly perform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Adaptations. Subject to 8(f), all rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved, including but not limited to the rights set forth in Section 4(d).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's focus on this: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Adaptations.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; This means that you can't print it modified, except if required for some technical requirement (like adding supports to the 3D model to ensure that it would not break during the print process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4(d) says about royalties (so it is irrelevant here). And about 8(f), well... There is no section 8(f) there (WTF?). There is 8(a), 8(b), 8(c), 8(d) and 8(e), but no 8(f). Well, let's just move on then...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see section 4(a):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Restrictions.&lt;/strong&gt; The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt; a. You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. [...]&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;b. You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. [...]&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;c. If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may distribute but not change it. Adding a URI or a copy of the license to a physical 3D-printed object is strange, but I guess that this is doable with a small piece of paper with the URI given or distributed together with the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point it is clear to me that the 3D-printed object will be subject to the same license that the .CAD file was, mainly because 3D-printing it would be a reproduction. To finish with that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8(a) Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work or a Collection, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.E., if the 3D-printing process creates a reproduction, then the 3D-printed truck is subject to the license. &lt;strong&gt;So, your answer is YES, the license to the design carry over onto the object that was created based on the design.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you intend to 3D-print it and sell the produced item:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4(b) You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which basically means that you cannot sell or rent it for profit. You can only borrow or give it for free, or no more than sell it just by its production and shipping price. However, if you are intending to sell it for profit, it is really easy to circumvent this (don't know if this is a good or a bad thing). If you want to sell the 3D-printed truck for say $ 10.00, you might sell something else that costs $ 1.00 (e.g., a candy) for $ 11.00 and &amp;quot;give&amp;quot; the 3D-printed object as a gift to whoever buys the (overpriced) candy. As long as the government don't impose crazy taxes or regulations about the distribution of the 3D-printed object (like what would happen to a weapon), nothing on the license stops you from this type of circumvention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To finish the interpretation of the license, I don't think that the remaining sections of the license are relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That license were clearly written with something in mind that can be represented and transmitted as bits and bytes and be realized in the real world as text, sounds and images. It was designed mostly for text, music and video, but the 3D-printed object clearly is not that. In my opinion, putting the BY-NC-ND license into a .CAD object that could be 3D-printed is a bad idea, since the license was not really designed for things like that. The result is the need to apply some overly-stretched interpretations to make sense from the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I think that the license is somewhat shaky in its legalese:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that there is no section 8(f) is a blunder, or at least an epic failed typo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that restriction 4(b) can be circumvented is a failure also.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that the license fails to clearly define &amp;quot;Reproduction&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Distribution&amp;quot; is also bad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that it might need overly-stretched interpretations to make sense in some cases shows that a review in its terms is needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the Work was to be classified as a three-dimensional work of geography, topography, architecture or science, but suddenly a reproduction transforms it also in a sculpture without characterizing an adaptation. So, the work changed in its nature when it was not expected to do so. This will probably lead to unexpected consequences. BTW, 3D-scanning an physical object and creating a .CAD file from it also works as the inverse process.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, this only applies if the &lt;em&gt;Work&lt;/em&gt; is something &amp;quot;artistic&amp;quot;. If you can somehow demonstrate that there is no art in the 3D-printed object, you might be able to escape this. However, to demonstrate that something is or is not artistic, is something hard because the term &amp;quot;art&amp;quot; is inherently fuzzy and opinative. A model of Mona Lisa or of the Eiffel Tower is clearly artistic. A model of a truck is very debatable and unconclusive if it is artistic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can/could circumvent the license with the 3D-print process and make the physical object not protected by the license, by 3D-scanning the 3D-printed object back to a .CAD file you would be able to completely circumvent the license. Oops!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T19:09:06.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="515" CreationDate="2015-06-27T07:44:51.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of the OpenJDK code is covered by the classpath exception, documented as follows (the second paragraph constitutes the exception):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making&#xA;      a combined work based on this library.  Thus, the terms and conditions of&#xA;      the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you&#xA;      permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an&#xA;      executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules,&#xA;      and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your&#xA;      choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module,&#xA;      the terms and conditions of the license of that module.  An independent&#xA;      module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library.  If&#xA;      you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of&#xA;      the library, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not wish to do&#xA;      so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception means that you can link the relevant code with other code and use the license you wish, as long as you respect the license of code (modules, libraries etc.) which &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; covered by the classpath exception. As I understand it this effectively means that the license covering the code placed under the classpath exception has no effect on its use (and redistribution once linked), only on its modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classpath exception is just a way of allowing users of this implementation of the Java platform (compiler, VM and libraries) to use it for projects without affecting the resulting licenses. This is typical of compilers and platforms, since most compiler and platform authors don't want their use to restrict the licenses which can apply to projects using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OpenJDK itself is covered by the OpenJDK assembly exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking this OpenJDK Code statically or dynamically with other code&#xA;      is making a combined work based on this library.  Thus, the terms&#xA;      and conditions of GPL2 cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, Sun gives you permission to link this&#xA;      OpenJDK Code with certain code licensed by Sun as indicated at&#xA;      &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/exception-modules-2007-05-08.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/exception-modules-2007-05-08.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;      (&quot;Designated Exception Modules&quot;) to produce an executable,&#xA;      regardless of the license terms of the Designated Exception Modules,&#xA;      and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under GPL2,&#xA;      provided that the Designated Exception Modules continue to be&#xA;      governed by the licenses under which they were offered by Sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just means that you can use the OpenJDK under the terms of the GPL version 2, including code in the OpenJDK which isn't covered by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T07:44:51.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="283" CreationDate="2015-06-27T08:21:09.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark's good answer already covers the Berne Convention and non-signatories to it. There is only one thing to note: even signatories to the Berne Convention have small differences. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries&amp;#39;_copyright_lengths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;duration in which the copyright is valid is different in different countries&lt;/a&gt;. Most notably Canada only enforces the Berne minimum of 50 years after authors death, while europe and the US have a term of 70 years after authors death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T08:21:09.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="284" CreationDate="2015-06-27T08:59:08.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since the whole project would be one executable at the end would the closed source program count as &quot;derivative work&quot;, thereby it would need to be GPL as well?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic understanding of the GPL and it's intention saying: yes, the program must be GPL too, as through the linking you create a derivative work. That is the position of the FSF. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;But it is not shared by everyone.&lt;/a&gt; Some interpretations say, only static linking make it a derived work, not dynamic linking (which it would be, you saying it is a DLL). There are even angles, that differ even more. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lawrence Rosen&lt;/a&gt; (from the OSI) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary indication of whether a new program is a derivative work&#xA;  is whether the source code of the original program was used [in a&#xA;  copy-paste sense], modified, translated or otherwise changed in any&#xA;  way to create the new program. If not, then I would argue that it is&#xA;  not a derivative work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there are different interpretations. As far as I know this dispute wasn't put to test in the courts yet. The GPL was enforced multiple times in courts, but as far as I know it was always about violations in using the GPL-program, not because of linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If yes, can I add some kind of additional permission to the GPL licence of my code to explicitly allow this linkage to occur, so it could actually be distributed with the app?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Many projects use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt; to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If yes, where and how should I put these additional permissions in the licence file?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found no clear guidance of this, but in my understanding it must be clear that an exception is applied and which part is the original GPL. So I would have the copyright statement saying it is GPL with your exception and put both in the license file, but with clear distinction (new header or so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would this modified licence still be GPL (compatible)? What kind of open source code could I use within my module?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the code of your module can be used in other GPL-projects, but different GPL-code cannot be used in your module without the author consenting to your exception. Other than that, more permissive licenses still should work, as long as they are conforming with the terms of the GPL and your exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the resulting licence would not be GPL compatible are there any other licences that are better sutied for this situation, but are still similar in essence to GPL (e.g. reusing the code is only possible in case it's source is also released)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; doesn't count linking as creating a derived work, but still applies copyleft to the code of your module. That would imply your module can be linked to different programs without making them Open Source, but modifying your module still demands making that changes LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T08:59:08.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="515" CreationDate="2015-06-27T09:13:34.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is an exception used for the GPL. The GPL is pretty strict and demands that even linked code is put under the GPL. That also applies to compiler or programming languages released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance the GCC, the GNU Classpath project and OpenJDK use the GPL as license. Unmodified it would mean, every program developed with these tools would be subject to the GPL, as they link to the GCC runtime library or the Java classpath. To avoid that, these projects use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Classpath project&lt;/a&gt; and OpenJDK these linking exceptions are called classpath exceptions, as they make an exception regarding linking the classpath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T09:13:34.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2015-06-27T09:31:50.660" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Logos are a special case that reside in the creative domain covered by copyright, and the domain of trademarks related to identity. The logo itself, the style, colour, etc are usually a result of a creative process. This is usually what you can copyright. The logo denominating your product, company, etc, is what you can trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to prevent someone from using your logo to do anything besides use it as an identification tool, you would need a copyright for it. To prevent them to use it as an identifier you would need to register a trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may seem that having a copyright would suffice, in my experience a copyright would not cover the case where they would use the logo to promote a product based on your original product (which held the logo). Some copyright licenses permit this but I would suggest you carefully pick one that does allow exactly what you want to allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I assumed you can actually copyright your logo which may not be possible as the creative process might not be unique enough. If for some reason a copyright is not applicable to your logo, you should at least register the trademark to prevent reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up and answer your final point; even with a copyright, should it apply to your logo, others can use it for other purposes, likely even purposes that are completely unrelated to your activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T09:31:50.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="545" CreationDate="2015-06-27T09:55:45.783" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;For several years now, I've replied to CFPs from OSCON, submitting different open source topics. Unfortunately, year after year I receive the same boiler-plate reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The response to our Call for Proposals was overwhelming this year. We &#xA;  received over X proposals, a record number for us and far more than &#xA;  we can possibly accommodate in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We had intense competition for speaking slots, and we unfortunately have &#xA;  to turn away many strong proposals. We take this as an exciting signal of &#xA;  the demand for OSCON, but it also means we had some hard decisions to make &#xA;  in putting together the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're still working out a few loose ends in the program, but unfortunately &#xA;  this proposal was not selected for inclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried finding the criteria for selection, but I'm at a loss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quality of the proposal:&lt;/strong&gt; I always posted an original proposal for OSCON. After it was refused, I reused the proposal for other events, such as Tech Startup Days, Java One, Devoxx,... More often than not the &lt;em&gt;same proposal&lt;/em&gt; was accepted at that other event.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Seasoned speaker:&lt;/strong&gt; I am a mentor at the Founder Institute (about IP and Legal). I presented talks at Java One, Devoxx, T-DOSE, Startups.be, PDF Days, PDF Technical Conference,... I know how to entertain an audience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Source Champion:&lt;/strong&gt; I am the original developer of iText, a successful open source PDF library. I accrued &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/1622493/bruno-lowagie&quot;&gt;29K+ reputation points on StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expert:&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote two books for Manning publications. I am a member of the ISO committees for PDF. I've won Deloitte's Fast 50 competition in Belgium (ranking 28th place in the EMEA region),...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Experience:&lt;/strong&gt; I wrote my first open source library in 1998. I founded 5 companies, 4 of which still exist. I succeeded in creating a profitable open source business.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted: this list doesn't exactly sound modest, but I'd expect that all of these &quot;achievements&quot; are relevant in the context of choosing a speaker. Would I have a better chance at being selected for a talk at OSCON if I submitted a talk anonymously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a speaker at OSCON is one of those items that I just don't succeed in checking off from my bucket list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T11:25:55.560" Title="What could be criteria to be accepted as a speaker at OSCON?" Tags="|oscon|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-27T14:13:21.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="535" CreationDate="2015-06-27T10:23:48.417" Score="21" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt; (this means the concept of free as in freedom, not software that does not cost anything) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source&lt;/a&gt; have two distinct definitions. In practice though, they turn out to be mostly the same. But I was asking myself, if the minor differences can lead to a software license that is conforming to one definition but not the other? Does such an example exist? And what are the points in either definition, that make them different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T12:48:11.347" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:55:25.553" Title="Can a software license meet one of the FSF's and OSI's definitions without meeting the other?" Tags="|terminology|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2015-06-27T11:55:32.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses#Approvals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comparison of free and open-source software licenses &gt; Approvals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/nosa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NASA Open Source Agreement&lt;/a&gt; is open source but not free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NASA:-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NASA:-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The NASA Open Source Agreement, version 1.3, is not a free software license because it includes a provision requiring changes to be your “original creation”. Free software development depends on combining code from third parties, and the NASA license doesn't permit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We urge you not to use this license. In addition, if you are a United States citizen, please write to NASA and call for the use of a truly free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Open_Source_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; article in which you can see OSI approved : yes, FSF approved : no&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points to be noted:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Categories of free and nonfree software&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2m4UM.png&quot; alt=&quot;catagories&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: &lt;strong&gt;they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted&lt;/strong&gt;. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see reason is approval by different foundations and their ideas (bold added).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-open-overlap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Free Software and Open Source Relate as Categories of Programs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;    /----------------------------------------------\&#xA;   / |                                            | \&#xA;  /  |                                            |  \&#xA; /   |                                            |   \&#xA;     |                                            |&#xA;     |       Source license is GNU *GPL, Apache,  |&#xA;     |        original BSD, modified BSD,         |&#xA;free |        X11, expat, Python, MPL, etc.,      |&#xA;     |        and executable is not tivoized      |   open source&#xA;     |                                            | &#xA;     |                                            |&#xA; \   |                                            |&#xA;  \  |                                            |&#xA;   \ |                                            |   /&#xA;    \----------------------------------------------  /&#xA;     |     tivoized (tyrant) devices          | O | /&#xA;     ----------------------------------------------/&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source-misses-the-point&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is &lt;strong&gt;nonfree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue&lt;/strong&gt;; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; free, are open source but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fear of freedom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, &lt;strong&gt;but does not teach them to defend it&lt;/strong&gt;. That is good, as far as it goes, but &lt;strong&gt;it is not enough to make freedom secure&lt;/strong&gt;. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T09:55:25.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:55:25.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:18:09.733" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use the open source version, you can ask any 3rd party vendor you consider qualified for support. The original licensor can't prevent anyone from offering advise, and the right to fork gives 3rd parties the right to make any changes you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, be aware that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademark laws might make it difficult for 3rd parties to advertise their support services, so you might have issues finding a provider even though they are on the market.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobody knows the software as well as those people who developed it, so you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get higher quality support from the original company (your mileage may vary).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bugfixes and features you request from the original vendor might find their way into the mainline of the product, so there won't be any issues with them in future versions. But any modifications on your private fork made by a 3rd party contractor likely won't. That means your private fork will diverge and the maintenance overhead to apply the updates from upstream will increase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue which might prevent you from switching to the free version in the first place is when the proprietary version comes with extra features not included in the free version, and you grow too dependent on these tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T12:25:19.743" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T12:25:19.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="546" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:25:17.210" Score="13" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;With conventional copyright, N years after the author's death the copyright expires (where N varies from country to country). Since free and open source licences are supported legally by copyright law, what happens N years after the original author's death? Does the project move from being free or open source to being public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the result depend on who else contributed (since their copyright contributions will also be part of the overall project)? Do continuing contributions prevent the project from becoming public domain, or will those parts of the project contributed by people who have since died over N years ago become public domain, leaving the free or open source licence only applying to the more recent contributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T12:37:15.777" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T16:29:51.817" Title="What happens to an open source project when the copyright expires?" Tags="|copyright|public-domain|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="559" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:35:50.143" Score="8" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many open source projects, there are normally many contributors. Ownership of the code is generally clarified during the process of creating the contributor agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, who owns the intellectual property? While I'm sure that this &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be rectified in these contributor agreements, is it ever made clear? Does the intellectual property fall on who made the plan for the program in the start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T22:10:37.513" Title="Who owns the intellectual property?" Tags="|contributor|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:39:53.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is quite common for commercial open source projects to trademark their name, logo and corporate design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, any forks can use the sourcecode, but must use a different name. This is the reason why Debian-based Linux distributions usually come with a web browser called &quot;Iceweasel&quot; which is essentially Mozilla Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you don't trademark your projects identity, then others are free to use the name. When you don't state otherwise, your license terms also apply to your project logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T12:39:53.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:43:12.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the examples from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/383/138&quot;&gt;my answer to the question &amp;quot;Is Open Source Software a subset of free software?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example 1: &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Netscape’s early versions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla&lt;/a&gt; were released under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/NPL/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Netscape Public License version 1.0&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;its Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#NPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, but it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not&lt;/a&gt; approved by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;↳ So these early versions of Mozilla are Free Software, but not Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example 2: &lt;em&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/em&gt;, but not &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Agenda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Active Agenda&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reciprocal Public License&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt; (currently in version 1.5), but it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not&lt;/a&gt; approved by the FSF (it’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#RPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as unfree&lt;/a&gt;, linking to version 1.3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;↳ So Active Agenda is Open Source Software, but not Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various reasons why OSI could approve a license that FSF doesn’t, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses#Approvals&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Approvals&amp;quot; table in the Wikipedia article 'Comparison of free and open-source software licenses'&lt;/a&gt; lists cases where only one of FSF and OSI approved a license, and sometimes links to a source that explains why the other organization didn’t approve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License&lt;/em&gt; (WTFPL)&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, but not by the OSI. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/minutes20090304&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI’s Board Meeting Minutes&lt;/a&gt;, where this license was discussed, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Nelson's report includes the following licenses to be discussed and approved/disapproved by the Board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Title: WTFPL Submission: &lt;a href=&quot;http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:634:200902:aglgcgbhmfcheffmdgon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:634:200902:aglgcgbhmfcheffmdgon&lt;/a&gt; License: &lt;a href=&quot;http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/&lt;/a&gt; Comments: It's no different from dedication to the public domain. Author has submitted license approval request -- author is free to make public domain dedication. Although he agrees with the recommendation, Mr. Michlmayr notes that public domain doesn't exist in Europe. Recommend: Reject&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They decided to &amp;quot;reject the WFTPL as redundant to the Fair License&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T12:43:12.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="504" CreationDate="2015-06-27T12:59:44.377" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can make a claim like that, but it does not override the site policy, it adds to it. In effect, it means that your code is now dual-licensed under both the CC BY-SA and the Apache license and I can choose which of the two to apply when reusing your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T12:59:44.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="504" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:10:08.600" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. For Stack Exchange: yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you write something, you own the copyright, and have the right to do whatever you want with it (from a copyright perspective at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you post something to some site, you usually give a license to use that material on that site, through the terms and services, or you transfer the copyright to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the terms are to transfer the copyright to them, you no longer own the copyright, and you can't grant additional licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you grant them a license, it's either an exclusive license, or a non-exclusive license. If it is an exclusive license, you can't grant anyone else a license anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a non-exclusive license, you may still dual license your content, and make it available under some other license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Stack Exchange, the terms read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the&#xA;  Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange&#xA;  under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means it is a non-exclusive license, and you can release your content to others under a different license as well. This seems to be the most common scenario for other sites as well, but you should always double check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this doesn't &lt;em&gt;override&lt;/em&gt; the license. You are dual licensing your content. Per the terms and services, you have no choice but to license your work under CC-BY-SA. But you have no restriction to &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; license it under a different license of your choosing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These licenses don't have to be compatible. Anyone can choose under which license they use your work, the standard StackExchange one (CC-BY-SA), or another you offer personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T12:56:56.690" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T12:56:56.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="506" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:21:59.847" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source approach does discourage some kinds of innovation but at the same time, it encourages other kinds of innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pure commercial approach is to work on something by &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;, or in a group of people that you pay. You then sell what you created to your customers, but you try to make sure others can't duplicate your process. (In the case of software, that means closed source, patents and proprietary formats.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pure open approach is to &lt;em&gt;collaborate&lt;/em&gt; on something with a large group of other people (of varying degrees of engagement) and to make sure anyone can help in whatever way they wish. (In the case of software this means open source, open development and open standards.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the pure commercial approach is highly centralized, while the pure open approach is highly decentralized. Both lead to innovation, but that innovation is achieved in different ways and for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a lot of ground between the two extremes. For example, a mostly commercial-focused company can base their products on open standards. And a mostly open company can keep some of their code closed, or they may not be open to outside contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T13:21:59.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="542" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:27:27.810" Score="6" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know that copyrights on open source products expire. I have never come across anything regarding licenses, this lead me to ask this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can licenses expire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, under what conditions? Is there a time limit?&#xA;If no, why do copyrights expire but not licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:13:50.787" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:13:50.787" Title="Can a license on a open source product expire?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="544" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:28:06.057" Score="6" ViewCount="1432" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#IceWeasel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Iceweasel&lt;/a&gt; is a fork of Firefox which was made by the Debian project because the license conditions of the Firefox name and logo violate the Debian Free Software Guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Debian do any other changes to Firefox which were not just cosmetic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T07:21:27.020" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T10:57:50.367" Title="Differences between Firefox and Iceweasel" Tags="|forking|dfsg|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="540" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:39:38.803" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses exist to specify rights that the copyright-holder gives to license-holders; they only have meaning within the context of copyright legislation. So when copyright expires, the limitations linked to copyright expire as well, and the need for a license disappears. You could view this as meaning that a license expires when all the copyrights on the work it licenses expire themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a work is in the public domain you don't need a license; you can do anything you like with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to specify termination clauses in licenses, but that's not quite the same as expiration. You could write a license with an end date (but that wouldn't qualify as a free / open source license, unless upon termination it reverted to another free / open source license). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; includes a termination clause (section 8), but it only terminates the license for people who violate the license terms (so it's not expiration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T13:39:38.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="532" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:43:05.567" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends widely on what is losing its copyright. But no matter what it is put into,  people call the Public Domain. The public domain is just a fancy way of saying &quot;it is now available to the public as a whole, and therefore not subject to copyright&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project was already open sourced basically nothing changes, except for whatever license was on it. Now ANYONE can do WHATEVER they want to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So technically the Open Source is lost but also it is still there because now ANYONE can build and improve upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T20:51:54.177" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:51:54.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="541" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:45:31.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Debian, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/676799/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Iceweasel is Firefox&lt;/a&gt; once again, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-mozilla/iceweasel.git/commit/debian?id=15cc4433d63e2aa8e89339c248634c52d4e95789&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;March 10, 2016&lt;/a&gt;. There's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/iceweasel-branding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Iceweasel branding&lt;/a&gt; add-on which can be used to restore the Iceweasel branding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some non-cosmetic differences between Mozilla's version and Debian's; you can see all the patches &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-mozilla/iceweasel.git/tree/debian/patches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. You'll find changes which disable &quot;phone-home&quot; features (Firefox health report), change the way plugins and extensions are handled to work better in the context of a distribution with packaged plugins and extensions... There are also a series of bug fixes backported from work-in-progress upstream versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the kinds of changes you could find in any package in Debian (the old branding changes weren't, of course, although quite a few Debian packages include minor branding changes — &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; adding a &quot;Debian&quot; mention in version numbers in &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; and Wine). The Chromium package for example also disables various &quot;phone-home&quot; features; many packages include backported bug fixes, and changes to integrate the software into the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T10:57:50.367" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T10:57:50.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="528" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:49:04.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand the situation you must be going through however...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the announcement they released it sounds like no matter how good you are at the topic it may not make a difference. Where they said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a record number for us and far more than we can possibly accommodate &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It made it sound like they had an overflow of applicants and they couldn't have fully read / accepted all of the good ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recommendation:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would continue to submit your application every year, and complete it to the best of your abilities (a good application would approve your chances if they do read it). Other than that just keep trying, eventually they will get your application, read it, and be amazed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T13:49:04.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="532" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:51:28.110" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright on the combined work expires when the most recent part of the individual copyrights expires (in the US generally life + 70 years of the last author) and the project would enter the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older parts of the project enter the public domain before the newer parts, and with that, the combined work do. It's possible for a combined work to have its older parts in the public domain, while its newer parts are still under copyright. In that case, you could use the older version as a public domain version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most software projects this is somewhat of a non-starter. life + 70 years is effectively forever. I don't have my crystal ball with me at the moment, but I don't suspect much software written now will still have applications in the year 2085.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T20:49:39.167" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:49:39.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="540" CreationDate="2015-06-27T13:59:44.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, a license can be for a limited time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All open source licenses are perpetual licenses. Neither the FSF nor the OSI consider non-perpetual licenses for certification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the copyright expires, the license is redundant, as it can't enforce any conditions anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T13:59:44.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="558" CreationDate="2015-06-27T14:23:12.657" Score="18" ViewCount="1125" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While looking for open source projects I stumbled across a very interesting one. After further digging I found that it was also abandoned. PERFECT!! I can take over I thought, this led me to ask the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a project is abandoned and I take over, does the owner of the project / license become mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, why not? How could I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T17:27:48.303" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T17:27:48.303" Title="Are you legally allowed to use abandoned projects?" Tags="|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-27T14:26:33.627" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From other posts I have learned that copyrights expire some amount of time after the owner's death. But from what I know ownership can be passed on after death. If the owner of a copyright hands over the ownership (through a will or other means) does that mean that the copyright will now expire after the aforementioned amount of time after this person's death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T17:10:03.047" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T17:10:03.047" Title="Can copyright of an open sourced product be passed down through generations?" Tags="|copyright|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-06-27T17:54:18.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-27T14:32:18.127" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume a standard server-side Web application. Database, backend, frontend. It's basic knowledge that one should check the licences of the libraries used before deciding on the license for the final product. For example, if there is a GPL library used in the backend, the whole thing has to be made GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question is: if the application runs on a database management system with a copyleft license, does this make the whole application copyleft? On the other hand, if the application runs on a closed source DBMS like Microsoft SQL server, does this mean that making the whole application open source is impossible, because it would be required of the authors to also give the Microsoft SQL server along with the rest of the code? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it depends on how exactly the connection to the database is made, or how the product is distributed (e.g. does it have an installation file which installs a DBMS automatically), then what condition is important for the final judgment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:19:38.513" Title="Does the licence of the database used have an influence on the final licence of the product?" Tags="|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="550" CreationDate="2015-06-27T14:35:26.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the copyright term is x year after the creators death, not after the current owners death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T14:35:26.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="556" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:02:45.220" Score="14" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Chrome and Chromium look very similar and seem related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly do Google Chrome and Chromium relate to each other, and why are they separate products?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T18:22:08.567" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T18:22:08.567" Title="How do Chromium and Chrome relate to each other?" Tags="|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="529" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:10:14.913" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it exists, even if you don't count unor's examples of recognized/nonrecognized licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free but not open source&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, offering a service over the Internet already means that you are distributing your software to users. So in this definition, there are tons of examples, for example Google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if this is not the definition you had in mind, there are installable programs which are free to use but not open source. I don't have an exact name in my head, I think Treesheets used to be closed source once, so was the .NET framework and there are probably more, mostly historical, examples. Also many device drivers are available for free but the code is closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source but not free&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a very stringent definition of &quot;not free&quot;, this is of course impossible, because open source licenses prohibit you to charge for the source code, so there is always at least one method to obtain the software for free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you change the definition to &quot;the product is generally sold for money, but the code is available under an open source license&quot;, then this is available. A prominent example is CrossOver, a gaming platform allowing to run Windows games for Mac and Linux. They have a paid model, I even think that it was a subscription. Their code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeweavers.com/products/faq/source/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL licensed&lt;/a&gt;, and available for free. Still, there are many people who pay the price, either for the convenience of having the easy install + support, or out of a &quot;support the guys who write the software I use&quot; consideration. I have seen the second one happening in other cases with games, such as people paying high Humble Bundle prices for open sourced games, although sometimes I think the games were open sourced after the sale (sometimes as a direct result of the sale). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that the basic assumption of &quot;nobody will pay for it if they can have it for free&quot; is empirically shown to be as false as many other simplistic assumptions of standard economic theory. We are not Chicago's &lt;em&gt;homo oeconomicus&lt;/em&gt;. And we happen to have examples for free-but-not-open as well as open-but-not-free software products. But they are somewhat rare, because 1) people who want to do free prefer the benefits of open source, and 2) people (and especially institutions) who want to do non free are still afraid of monetary disadvantages under open source models (and may be right, if they choose the wrong model). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:10:14.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="553" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:16:35.703" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be more correct to state that Chrome is a fork of Chromium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chromium.org/&quot;&gt;Chromium&lt;/a&gt; is an open source web browser available under many different licenses. Many of them are permissive and allow to use it as part of a closed source application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/chrome/&quot;&gt;Google Chrome&lt;/a&gt; is a closed source web browser based on Chromium. However, Google is the driving force between both Chromium and Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By open-sourcing the core of their web browser, Google allows it to be used as part of pure open-source operating systems. This leads to a wider propagation of their Blink rendering engine which has various strategic advantages for the company. It also opens them up to contributions from the community which saves them development work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by having their actual flagship browser a closed source application based on it, they can put additional features into it which would not be allowed in a pure open source application, like inclusion of proprietary plugins (like Adobe Flash) or add features which would be frowned upon in an open source application (like those which submit usage data to Google).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T15:23:23.567" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:23:23.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="549" CreationDate="2015-06-27T15:33:46.033" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source license which fulfills the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt; gives you the right to fork a project, make modifications, and distribute this derived work, even in exchange for money. These should be all the rights you need to take over and keep the project alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that does not make you the copyright owner. The original copyright still belongs to the original author(s). Although you are the copyright owner of any modifications you make. This results in a work of mixed copyright. The old parts are copyrighted by the old author(s) and the new parts are copyrighted by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the project is under a permissive open source license, it might allow you to distribute the software under a different license, as long as some conditions are fulfilled (usually leaving the copyright message and license of the original authors intact). A share-alike license, however, forces you to release the new work under the same terms you received it. Consult the license terms of the project for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to gain complete copyright of the work, including the right to get rid of those license texts and the full right to release it under any license conditions you want without any strings attached, you need to contact the original author(s) and ask them to transfer the copyright to you. Keep in mind that when it was a collaborative project, you need the permission of &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; contributors, unless they explicitly transfered their copyright to the project maintainer by signing a contributors agreement with a copyright transfer clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that you will have to give them a reason to transfer the copyright to you. As stated above, the open source license they implicitly gave you should give you all the freedoms you need to continue the project. What they give you with the copyright is the permission to &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; the license to something they don't want. So some persuasion will be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T15:52:09.203" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T15:52:09.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="549" CreationDate="2015-06-27T16:42:09.853" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of issues to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, to answer the main question: you are legally allowed to use any abandoned open source project, the fact that it's abandoned doesn't change your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the fact that it's abandoned doesn't change its owners rights; in particular, copyright remains with the creators. But for an open source project that isn't particularly important, unless you wish to change the license. (Note too that in some jurisdictions copyright is non-transferable, or not fully transferable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, there's the issue of continued maintenance. Of course you can fork an open source project; in the vast majority of cases you can continue using the same name etc. What will be more difficult is recovering the original web sites if any, source code repositories etc. If the original maintainer(s) is/are still reachable, you can try asking them; if they haven't disappeared off the face of the earth there's a fair chance they'll be happy to pass the maintenance on to you! If they're not, and the hosting company (Sourceforge, Github etc.) don't have a process in place, things will be a bit more complicated: you'll need to contact various sites and organisations where the software you're taking over is mentioned, and tell them about the change. Generally speaking once you've proven you're a worthy maintainer, the transition will happen, and your new web site or code repository will end up being considered the authoritative source for the project. This becomes much easier once your new versions of the project are adopted by downstream distributions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did this a while ago for &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxconsole/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Linux console project&lt;/a&gt;; it was dormant upstream, and I was maintaining the package in Debian, adding more and more patches as time went by. At that time Sourceforge had a process in place for requesting a maintenance change; they contacted the original maintainer who OK'd the transition, and I became administrator of the Sourceforge project. No copyrights were changed: the original copyrights remain in place on the pre-existing code; but given that I had (and have) no plans to change the license, that's not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T07:59:39.347" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T07:59:39.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="533" CreationDate="2015-06-27T19:08:15.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Intellectual property, while not the same thing as copyright, tends to follow similar patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a single-owner project, the copyright is entirely theirs, and so is the IP. In a project with multiple contributors and no contributor agreement, the copyright is distributed: each contributor owns the copyright on any contributions he makes. The same applies to the intellectuals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, in a project with multiple contributors and a contributor agreement, it depends entirely on the agreement. There may be a copyright transfer and/or a IP transfer clause, or there may be neither. It requires reading the license agreement to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is also possible to assign the property rights to an entity instead of a person: I'm not sure whether you can simply assign them to the project, but it is certainly possible to create a skeleton company for the project and assign the rights to it. This way, no single person can direct what happens with the property, and no group of people can allow some to be used but not other stuff. Either the company's CEO directs, or the company's board directs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T19:08:15.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-27T19:36:46.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Debian Free Software Guidelines&quot; is part of the &quot;Debian Free Software Contract&quot; and is a set of commitments and rules used to define what constitutes a Debian component as Free Software. Those guidelines were adopted with minimal modifications and small adictions by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/docs/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;define what is Free Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guidelines are published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Debian's site&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Derived Works&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; if the license allows the distribution of &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;patch files&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. (&lt;em&gt;This is a compromise. The Debian group encourages all authors not to restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.&lt;/em&gt;)&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution of License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to Debian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a Debian system. If the program is extracted from Debian and used or distributed without Debian but otherwise within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the Debian system.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License Must Not Contaminate Other Software&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be free software.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example Licenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://perldoc.perl.org/perlartistic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Artistic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; licenses are examples of licenses that we consider &quot;&lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already mentioned before, those guidelines are very similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/docs/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition of Free Software by the Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T20:22:19.677" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:22:19.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-27T19:36:46.693" Score="0" Body="The &quot;Debian Free Software Guidelines&quot; (DFSG) is part of the &quot;Debian Free Software Contract&quot; and is a set of commitments and rules used to define what constitutes a Debian component as Free Software. Those guidelines were adopted with minimal modifications and small adictions by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to define what is Free Software." OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2015-06-27T23:15:49.360" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T23:15:49.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2015-06-27T21:56:12.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is a bit hard to answer directly. A software project can have both open source and closed source requirements and still be an open source project.  The trick is, only the files that are open source can be distributed and modified.  Other programs that are required for the project can be included with permission or simply not included with the source at all. If a project has dependencies that cannot be included with source code, it may just be part of the environment setup that must be taken on by the one who is using said package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the Microsoft database will not make the rest of the projected any less open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastActivityDate="2015-06-27T21:56:12.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="510" CreationDate="2015-06-27T22:01:49.787" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tough issue that has prevented lots of large companies to move to a more open source business model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most companies don't understand that just because your code is free doesn't mean you won't make as much money.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Options:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a sales representative or just a large supporter of open source material. Some things you could do are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;explain the benefits of using open source. These are things such as better code, more usable interfaces, customized software and hardware and less bugs and issues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explain to the company that open source does not mean less money. Often when people think of open source they think that the code is free so, therefore, no money. This is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Explain the helpful community that they could be apart of.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will not work for all people or companies. Despite your efforts to convince them it still may not work. Some people may be scared of the idea or even confused. The best way is to try your best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Educating people about stuff they don't  know about can often lead them to like the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T21:01:44.343" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:01:44.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T00:36:32.580" Score="9" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;On sites like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia (both use CC BY-SA 3.0), users can collaboratively create/edit a work. If I distribute such a work, I have to attribute all contributing users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what if I only want to distribute a part of the work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to attribute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only the user(s) that created/edited the part in question, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all users that edited the whole work, even if they had nothing to do with the specific part?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bob creates an answer to a question on Stack Overflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can solve it by adding a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; to the foo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alice edits Bob‘s answer by adding a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can solve it by adding a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; to the foo. Adding dots is fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Carl edits Bob’s answer by changing the first, but not the second, sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only solve it by adding a &lt;code&gt;.&lt;/code&gt; to the foo. Adding dots is fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use/distribute the second sentence (&amp;quot;Adding dots is fun.&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whom do I have to attribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice (because it’s only about her contribution?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob and Alice (because Alice’s sentence only exists in the context of Bob‘s answer?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob and Alice and Carl (because every contributor is relevant, not only the first author and the direct contributor?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T08:47:45.760" Title="Using only a part of a collaboratively created work – whom to attribute?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="573" CreationDate="2015-06-28T01:49:22.650" Score="5" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if someone could explain to me how to go about working on an open source project. I know that you can use git and other types of programs to commit code, but is there some sort of process in which to officially begin to add to a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how do open source projects guard against crappy code commits or bugs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="340" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T11:25:38.750" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T11:25:38.750" Title="What are the best ways to get involved with open source projects?" Tags="|project-management|community|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-06-28T22:58:27.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T04:20:03.197" Score="5" ViewCount="1283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a license file for my open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where in the project's directories hierarchy should I put that file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="209" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2024-03-11T09:11:32.953" LastActivityDate="2024-03-11T09:11:32.953" Title="Where should I place my Open Source license file in my project?" Tags="|license-file|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-28T20:32:43.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2015-06-28T05:51:35.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be easy to find. I'd say in the root of your project as a &lt;code&gt;license.ext&lt;/code&gt; or as part of the &lt;code&gt;readme.ext&lt;/code&gt; (where &lt;em&gt;&lt;code&gt;.ext&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would of course be the appropriate extension of the format it is in). Those are the most common ways I've seen in PHP open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course multiple variations of the license file are seen as text file, markdown file, lower case, upper case, etc (&lt;code&gt;License.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.TXT&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;License.md&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also most of the times on large scale projects the license is included in every file in the so called PHPdoc &quot;page&quot; section (again, this is in PHP projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On small scale projects, most commonly hosted on GitHub, it is included in the &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; file, which GitHub will parse and show on the project's home page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="111" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-07-24T09:07:54.387" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T09:07:54.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2015-06-28T06:25:50.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the other answers on the principal - it should be easy to find, although I'm not sure the examples his answer provided are are indeed the most common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Projects created on (i.e., by) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.github.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; have their licenses placed in a file named &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; (no suffix) in the project's root directory. Another common idiom for GitHub projects is to use &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; to gain markdown formatting for it. &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;COPYING.md&lt;/code&gt; are also fairly common, although I must say that, IMHO, calling the license file &quot;copying&quot; misses a great deal of the point of open source - it's not about freely copying the content, it's about collaborating on it (in other words - &quot;free as in speech, not as in beer&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T08:38:29.667" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T08:38:29.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="567" CreationDate="2015-06-28T06:29:40.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The License is the agreement between you, and the user of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license file is just a file that defines the agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear for the user what license he's getting, and what that license applies to, but there are no hard rules where to put the file, and what to name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Apache license advises that you put a text header in each file, which links to the Apache license online, and they don't advice putting the text of the license in your project at all, and from what I've seen, this is common practice for this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other projects don't have such a license header in their files, but just have the license file in the root of the project. Often these files are named something like &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt;, or the shouty variation &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.TXT&lt;/code&gt;, or just &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt;. Sometimes the license location is also included in a &lt;code&gt;readme&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important part is that it is clear what the license applies to, and it's easy to find. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T06:29:40.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T06:40:05.153" Score="22" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;To (most) people in IT, terms like &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;free software&quot; bring up a lot of associations. (For some those association differ wildly between these two terms.) Does the same go for the general audience of the products which these concepts can apply to? (Software, hardware, &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourceecology.org/&quot;&gt;industrial machines&lt;/a&gt;, ...) And if so, what are those associations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm looking for is &lt;strong&gt;research that has been conducted to find out what commonly used terms to describe free or open products mean to end users, if anything at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T15:11:37.163" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T03:52:04.553" Title="Has there been research about how aware the general public is of open source?" Tags="|marketing|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="564" CreationDate="2015-06-28T07:03:39.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When multiple people collaborate on a product, they produce a combined work, where each new revision is a derivative work of the previous revision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, Bob owns the copyright to the first phrase. Alice owns the copyright to her change to the work &quot;Adding dots is fun&quot;, and the combined line is a combined work, the copyright owned by both (and thus should be attributed to both)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you only want to use part of the combined work, it is generally understood to be part of the shared copyright. It is really difficult to make sure that the part you are using is only the free-standing addition, and not a part of the combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain what I mean by this, take, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;L.H.O.O.Q.&lt;/a&gt; This is a combined work of the Mona Lisa, the title, and the drawn upon mustache and beard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be very difficult to argue that the drawing of the mustache in isolation can be seen separate from the combined work. If I for example took the combined work, and removed all parts that are not the mustache, beard and title by coloring all other parts white entirely. It would be difficult to argue that this is not a derivative of the combined work in its entirely rather than a re-use of just the parts Duchamp created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the Mona Lisa, of course, is in the public domain, but that's besides the point here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with any case law where part of a combined work is reduced back to the part, and is more in the scope of law stackexchange than it is for this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, attribution is cheap, and legal morasses are swampy. Just attribute the entire combined work, and don't stray into the morass. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T07:03:39.557" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="565" CreationDate="2015-06-28T08:25:20.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer to your first question, getting involved with an open source software is as easy as looking at the &lt;code&gt;About&lt;/code&gt; section of your favorite software.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are loads and loads of open source software around and as a FOSS newbie, it's easy to get confused as to which one to pick and start working with. I'd suggest a software that you really care about and use everyday. Once you've done that, either look in the about section of that particular software or just Google, &lt;em&gt;How do I contribute to xyz&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;xyz&lt;/em&gt; being the name of the software.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, you need to find a channel through which the community maintaining the software communicates through. In general, these channels are &lt;code&gt;IRC&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;mailing lists&lt;/code&gt; or sometimes even &lt;code&gt;Gitter&lt;/code&gt;. I've also seen a couple of communities that use &lt;code&gt;chat.stackexchange&lt;/code&gt; to communicate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you're done finding the channel, go and &lt;code&gt;Hello World!&lt;/code&gt;. Just go to their comm channel and say that you've been using software xyz for a while and you think you can contribute, and that you'd like some help getting started. With the exception of a few people, most will help you personally, solving your doubts and giving you the right links whenever you need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links given by the community people will have one or more of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A getting started manual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A link to their github/git/other version control page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A link to their list of tools&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A link to their bugs page/review page/issues page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the manual completely if possible, it'll solve most of your doubts.     Download their codebase, read the README, try fiddling with the codebase, learn how to compile it. If you screw up, delete and re-download.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Download their tools, install them, see how they work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Look for basic bugs/ask for basic bugs on comm channel.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've solved your first few bugs, you'll start knowing the codebase better and you can go for bigger bugs/wishlist-items. That's it, now you're a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now your second question. Most organisations have rigid build tests/review systems which prevent against crappy code being pushed. And even if some bad code gets into deployment, affecting the software, the users come back and report to the organisation, and you can be sure that the bad code is removed within a short period, which is why open source is awesome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; This is not a generalization. These are the experiences of me and my colleagues when we started off with Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T08:25:20.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="580" CreationDate="2015-06-28T10:59:57.303" Score="25" ViewCount="6443" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most widely used and most popular free and open source software licences is the  General Public License. I want to know in simple terms: what are the differences between GPL Version 2 and Version 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further I found latest Linux-Kernel &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under GPL V2 not GPL V3 till. What are reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T13:32:57.980" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T13:32:57.980" Title="What are the differences between GPL V2 and V3 licenses?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:03:18.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, or General Public License is a basic software license offered by GNU, which is sponsored by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. There are currently three major versions of the license; this tag is for questions specifically about GPL version 2 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;(GPLv2)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T04:17:34.167" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T04:17:34.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:03:18.457" Score="0" Body="For questions about GNU General Public License Version 2." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T05:51:28.247" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T05:51:28.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="583" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:20:23.877" Score="15" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am part of a non-commercial bazaar-style open source project which is developed and maintained entirely by unpaid volunteers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few months ago a new programmer joined our team who is both skilled and prolific. They provide a large number of commits and, contrary to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/395/how-do-i-deal-with-enthusiastic-contributors-who-damage-more-than-they-help&quot;&gt;&quot;How do I deal with (enthusiastic) contributors who damage more than they help?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, their code quality is more than adequate. By any sensible metric, their productivity in the past few months was higher than that of all other contributors &lt;em&gt;combined&lt;/em&gt;. They have also taken over some non-programming related maintenance and project infrastructure responsibilities nobody had the time and motivation to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it has lately crystallized that their vision for the project differs quite a lot from that of the other project members. They want to move the focus of the project into a completely different direction than the rest of us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately they even started to remove features from the codebase, which they consider &quot;poorly developed&quot;, &quot;unnecessary bloat&quot; or &quot;must be removed before I can remake them much better&quot;. To be fair most of these feature were indeed in an unusable state, obsolete or not used by anybody, but their intentions are clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we as the original founders of the project keep our vision intact without losing this very valuable contributor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T19:56:30.870" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T15:44:32.493" Title="How to deal with a very productive contributor who wants to steer the project in a different direction?" Tags="|project-management|human-resources|problem-contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:23:51.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T11:23:51.067" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T11:23:51.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-28T11:23:51.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about contributors to open source projects who appear to do more harm than good to the project." OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T13:43:18.337" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T13:43:18.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="574" CreationDate="2015-06-28T12:12:20.843" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41460/what-are-the-differences-between-gpl-v2-and-gpl-v3-licenses&quot;&gt;was already asked&lt;/a&gt; on Stackoverflow in 2008 (but closed as off-topic there). This is a copy of the answer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/4089/will-m&quot;&gt;Will M&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is a short list of some the major differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;internationalization: they used new terminology, rather than using language tied to US legal concepts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;patents: they specifically address patents (including the Microsoft/Novell issue noted in another answer)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Tivo-ization”: they address the restrictions (like Tivo’s) in consumer products that take away, though hardware, the ability to&#xA;  modify the software&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;DRM: they address digital rights management (which they call digital restrictions management)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;compatibility: they addressed compatibility with some other open source licenses&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;termination: they addressed specifically what happens if the license is violated and the cure of violations&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I agree with the comment about consulting a lawyer (one who knows&#xA;  about software license issues, though). In doing these things (and&#xA;  more), they more than doubled the length of the GPL. GPL 3 is many&#xA;  things, and one of them is that it is a very complex, technical legal&#xA;  document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding why the Linux kernel does not adopt version 3, here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a video of Linus Torvalds where he explains his opinion&lt;/a&gt;. Some excerpts from his speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here we give your version 3 and then we try to sneak in these new rules and try to force everybody to upgrade. That was the part I disliked. And the FSF did some really sneaky stuff. Downright immoral in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am thinking tivoization isn't necessarily something that you should strive for. But in my world view it's your decision if you make hardware that blocks down the software. That's your decision as a hardware maker. That has no impact on my a decision as a software maker to give you the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T12:49:47.310" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T12:49:47.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="577" CreationDate="2015-06-28T12:22:16.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Bring it up, clearly.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem obvious, but can't be stressed enough. If you are positive that the direction they taking the project into is incompatible with the vision of most, then this needs to be addressed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Make sure that other people are on board with mentioning it to them, so you form a unified front, but avoid making the problem contributor feel like people have been conspiring against them. You don't want to come over as hostile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Try to compromise.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said, many changes the contributor has made were actually warranted, maybe some of their ideas can still be incorporated in a version of the project that you can both get behind. You'll want to try to avoid losing your most active contributor over this. Without enthusiastic contributors, you don't have a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't compromise on single issues however, discuss the single issues, generalize what comes out of that discussion and apply those generalisations. Everyone should follow the guidelines, if you don't agree they can perhaps be discussed, but you don't just do things the way you think they're best. That has to be made very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you can't find an agreement.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't work things out (and enough other contributors agree with you), you'll have to request that this problem-contributor stop making drastic changes to the project and actively roll back any changes they do make and perhaps even take away their rights if they persist. (if possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, they could maintain their own fork of the project where they get to do whatever they want with it and can still contribute to the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T06:24:05.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="217" CreationDate="2015-06-28T14:05:50.333" Score="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about BSD license, you have to be aware that there is not one, but actually four different BSD licenses. The most basic is the &lt;strong&gt;zero-clause BSD&lt;/strong&gt; license which is basically a public domain license. It doesn't even require attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have the &lt;strong&gt;two-clause BSD&lt;/strong&gt; license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this    list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,    this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation    and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;three-clause BSD&lt;/strong&gt; license adds this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the [organization] nor the&#xA;names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;strong&gt;four-clause BSD&lt;/strong&gt; license also this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software&#xA;must display the following acknowledgement:&#xA;This product includes software developed by the [organization].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;MIT license&lt;/strong&gt; does not contain any clauses regarding promotion and advertising material but does have an attribution clause, so it is most similar to the 2-clause BSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what both the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license have in common are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permits use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permits redistribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permits redistribution with modification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provision to retain the copyright notice and warranty disclaimer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition the MIT license also explicitly allows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;merging&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publishing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sublicensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all these freedoms are implied by the BSD license, because all these activities can be considered &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; and/or &amp;quot;redistribution&amp;quot; of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical differences between the 2-clause BSD license and the MIT license are marginal. Which one to pick is mostly up to personal taste. Especially considering that both licenses are considered compatible, so you can take code under one license and use it in a project under the other, as long as you keep the license text around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T16:47:00.470" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T16:47:00.470" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="577" CreationDate="2015-06-28T14:12:13.697" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Discuss, discuss, discuss&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is absolutely essential. You can't solve &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; problems &lt;em&gt;digitally&lt;/em&gt; - so when I say discuss, I mean call a meeting. You need to sort out some things with them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Project focus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If everyone has a different idea of where the project's going, it's obviously not going to work. This is the root of the problem. Discuss with them &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; they think the project should do, and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they think this. There may well be reasons behind it that you haven't thought of, that might actually change your view. Then, &lt;strong&gt;as a team&lt;/strong&gt;, come up with a project aim that you're all happy with. It should be a good compromise so that they don't feel like their ideas are being left out, but they do need to realise that they're one of many and need to be co-operative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Working policies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You need to work out who can do what. Your work should be organised so that there are no conflicts and no missed areas - two people should not be working on the same thing and neglecting something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Features&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Again, important. Features are a big part of the project, so it shouldn't be set up so that any developer can add or remove features on a whim without telling anyone. Get it re-organised so that adding or removing features has to be approved by a person or team. You can't have this person going around removing essential features because of a difference of opinion and derailing the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2022-04-12T15:44:32.493" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T15:44:32.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="706" CreationDate="2015-06-28T14:37:52.377" Score="8" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just acquired the Hypothetical Cafe (come and visit, we serve great hypothetical food and drinks), and some fancy posh glasses*. They're so posh that an international designer did a special design for them. However, because he hasn't been to Open Source Stack Exchange, he doesn't know the wonders of open source, and kept his design to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've now exhausted my hypothetical budget buying them, so I'm going to have to serve &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_cola&quot;&gt;open cola&lt;/a&gt; instead of Coca-Cola.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I put my open cola into these fancy glasses, I am essentially producing a consumable product with mixed licenses. I am then charging H$0.98 for the production and cleaning of this product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, is this legal? I'm charging for the use of the glasses, which seems a bit legally iffy - or am I covered because people only &lt;em&gt;consume&lt;/em&gt; the open part not the proprietary glasses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Disclaimer: glasses are actually from Ikea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="407" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T09:27:35.570" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:27:35.570" Title="Can I serve open cola in proprietary glasses?" Tags="|law|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2015-06-28T14:49:26.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pouring open cola in a glass does under most jurisdictions not meet the threshold of originality. Open cola in a glass is simply not a copyrightable concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, you are not selling the concept of open cola in a glass, the glass is a simple carrier for the product you're selling. Just as you can distribute free software on a non-free file-system, you can serve open cola from propriety glasses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can't do however, is serve a cocktail containing open cola under a closed license. The cocktail would clearly be a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T14:49:26.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="501" CreationDate="2015-06-28T14:59:19.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons recommends that you use their international licenses now. From their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We recommend that you use a version 4.0 international license. This is the most up-to-date version of our licenses, drafted after broad consultation with our global network of affiliates, and it has been written to be internationally valid. There are currently no ports of 4.0, and it is planned that few, if any, will be created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the ported licenses are at version 3.0 or earlier, which means licensors using those licenses do not have the benefit of the improvements made in the 4.0 license suite. But even before considering the improvements in 4.0, there are several reasons why the international licenses may be preferable for rights holders, even if the licenses have been ported to their jurisdiction. As an organization, CC itself licenses all of its own content under an international license because, among other reasons, the international licenses are essentially jurisdiction-neutral while remaining effective globally. The neutral nature of the international licenses appeals to many people and organizations, particularly for use in connection with global projects that transcend political borders. Finally, it is important to know that some of the ported licenses contain a choice of law provision, which may be undesirable for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the Version 4.0 licenses, there will be no ported versions. Creative Commons itself licenses their own content under the international license, to remain jurisdiction-neutral. The neutral nature appeals to many people and organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: If there is no ported license, you can use the International licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T15:05:49.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="591" CreationDate="2015-06-28T15:57:11.303" Score="14" ViewCount="1195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the case of a closed source project that has been developed for some time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the main things that should be done in order to ease its transition to a open source development?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've thought of so far is good documentation (at least good comments in the code) and an attractive purpose of that project for a good amount of potential developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also thought of publishing it on a collaborative platform, such as GitHub and/or Bitbucket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="336" LastEditorUserId="336" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:59:25.470" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T02:13:44.407" Title="What are the main steps to convert a currently closed source project into an open source one?" Tags="|closed-source|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="992" CreationDate="2015-06-28T16:15:47.977" Score="12" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing around when I came across this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415603&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This really struck me and surprised me. While I understand that harassment would be present in all fields and industries, I had never heard this. Some of the comments were interesting as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would &amp;quot;shame&amp;quot; me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of &amp;quot;registered&amp;quot; modules on cpan imo )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a main focus of Open Source being the source code available to all, I would say that the attacks, if true, are outright unreasonable and inconsiderate. Also, this is outright disturbing to developers working on projects, as well as the pioneers of the industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is harassment a big issue in the Open Source industry? Are there any statistics that show this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T03:24:40.743" Title="Studies about harassment in the world of open source development?" Tags="|contributor|human-resources|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="589" CreationDate="2015-06-28T16:20:39.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, all that needs to be done to make a previously closed source project open source is to put the sourcecode online with an OSI or FSF approved license of your choice attached. However, before you publish your sourcecode, a few things should be checked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you read and understood the license and checked it with your legal department? It is easy to publish something under a free license, but you can not un-publish it after you did. So think carefully about all the implications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have the rights to open source it? This means that any libraries you use must be under a compatible license. Also check if there are any 3rd party contributions in the codebase you might not have full copyright for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you solved any patent issues? When you hold any software patents which apply to your project, release a statement that you will not use your patent to prohibit the development and distribution of the program or derivatives. When you licensed any patents from 3rd parties, make sure that the license terms do not impair the rights of the project either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it usable without any closed source applications? Sometimes software depends on 3rd party components like databases or middleware. When this is the case for your application, make sure these components are also available under open source licenses or make sure that the software is either compatible with open source alternatives or is usable without them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can people easily build it? When you require custom tools or a very complicated toolchain to build the software from source, people will have problems to contribute to it in a meaningful way. Make sure that you provide everything that is needed to compile the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you remove any corporate secrets from the codebase, like passwords, cryptographic keys or slanderous comments? Keep in mind that when you publish the sourcecode with its version history, those will still be there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did you do a security audit? When the sourcecode is available, it becomes a lot easier for 3rd parties to find vulnerabilities. Sure, this also means that it is easier for 3rd parties to provide patches for them, improving the overall security in the long run. But it will take some time until the patches are made, applied and distributed. In the meantime all your customers will be vulnerable. So make sure the worst security blunders are fixed before you drop your pants to the whole world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be the minimum you should do before publishing your sourcecode.&#xA;However, when you want the project to attract a community of developers to contribute, you also need to provide some infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure the developers can start working easily. Provide clear instructions how to checkout the code, compile, configure and deploy it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offer communication platforms for your community to discuss the development of your project, like a mailing list. A public bugtracker is also a very useful tool. Make sure people can find them easily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a clear process explaining how people can provide patches to resolve bugs, what formal requirements must be fulfilled for you to accept them and how feature requests can be proposed. Publish the descriptions of said processes to keep it transparent for potential contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have personnel available to manage and moderate your communication channels and community contribution processes. You might be able to outsource this to trusted community members eventually (when you want to), but in the meantime you will need to handle this on your own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T16:49:23.143" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T16:49:23.143" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T16:52:40.960" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I invented a great open source license. I decided I wanted to gain money from it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I could charge people for using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, why not, and what alternatives do I have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T02:14:05.170" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T02:14:05.170" Title="Could I charge people to use an open source license?" Tags="|licensing|monetization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2015-06-28T17:18:32.717" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses are documents to which copyright can apply, and the copyright terms of a license itself don't need to have anything to do with its content. So you can &quot;license a license&quot; and prohibit anyone from using your license unless they pay a fee. However, be aware that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most people won't consider this in accordance to the FLOSS spirit, so you will have a hard time to convince the community that your license is worth it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There already is a large number of open source licenses which cover most common use-cases which are competing with yours and which can be applied for free. And when there isn't one which covers your novel idea, it won't take long until one shows up which expresses the same idea with different words and thus circumvents your copyright (because this is what the FLOSS community does). What could protect you from this is a patent, but I am not sure if contract clauses are patentable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure your licensing model for the license does not prevent the license from being &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;. For example, when your license mandates a strong copyleft and at the same time the &quot;license license&quot; mandates that every sub-licensee also buys a &quot;license license&quot; from you, then the work it is applied to is no longer free software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T17:35:23.170" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T17:35:23.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="594" CreationDate="2015-06-28T19:00:36.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing to stop you trying, as Phillip explains. The question is why would someone use your license rather than one of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more practically, what could you offer to entice people to use your license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is to provide service in return for the use of the license and the license fee. Perhaps you could provide promotion services for such projects, helping with search engine optimization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is to offer assistance in license enforcement for any registered Licensors. The FSF states that it will help enforce the GPL, but only if they own the copyright. You could differentiate your license by not requiring that the copyright be assigned, merely permission from the holder to act on their behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your license includes implicit guarantees of quality, you could support users of the licensed products by ensuring Licensors meet some agreed standard of 'quality'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could protect your License (and its use) via the trademark system. The US DoD took this approach with the Ada language to try and ensure that all implementations of the compiler and supporting tools met a high level of compliance to the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, you can do it, but there has to be a significant value to the Licensor and to consumers of the licensed products. And that is likely to lead you into areas of great expense and legal liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T19:00:36.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T19:16:33.527" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;By a quick count, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists almost fifty different open source / free software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming (and this may not be valid) that many of these licenses were created in the early days of the movement, when it was trying to settle on common conventions, why do they all persist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the seeming ideological split between the FSF and OSI, it is unlikely we would ever converge on a single common license. But much of the FLOSS movement is based on open standards, best practices, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What stops the FLOSS movement agreeing on a small set of licenses to cover, say, four or five levels of permissiveness, and everyone relicense to adopt them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T20:16:52.383" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T20:12:07.750" Title="What prevents the community converging on a small set of licenses?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-28T19:17:40.813" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my company we are developing a large open source piece of software. To do this we have hired many developers. To pay these developers we have gotten business partners and investors to help cover the cost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However these people are not the most tech savvy people and it is often hard to explain to them what they are investing in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to make open source projects more interactive for business partners or investors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: would it be recommended to teach them some coding to show them what they are investing in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:12:00.970" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T20:24:41.753" Title="How could I include my business partners / investors in the open source product development?" Tags="|project-management|monetization|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="623" CreationDate="2015-06-28T19:29:47.607" Score="2" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often when talking to friends or family they are unaware that open source is a completely different thing than free-ware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there studies about the awareness of open-source being a separate thing from free-ware/spyware/malware/adware, at least in certain milieus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T22:00:44.123" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:27:19.157" Title="Awareness of the difference free/libre/open-source software and zero-cost software" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2015-06-28T19:52:51.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trichoplax suggested a number of advantages to providing binaries, but no disadvantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the largest advantage to providing binaries is the high probability that this will increase the size of the user-base. The type of person who visits this site is technically very savvy, most likely with programming experience, and likely to &lt;strong&gt;prefer&lt;/strong&gt; to download source and compile it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are actually a very small subset of the number of people who use computers and browse the Internet. Most users do little more than browse the web, chat on Facebook, send emails, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chrome and Firefox  have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-january-2015-ie8-usage-triples/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;displaced Internet Explorer&lt;/a&gt; as the leading browser, helped by having alternatives to Windows as a platform. But how successful would this have been if every potential user was required to download the source of Chrome (and webkit!!) and compile it from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But success comes at a price (one which can kill small FLOSS projects), literally a dollars and cents price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Cost&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hosting sites like GitHub often have limitations on the size of individual files. And you really don't want to save large binaries in a Git repository. These sites also have limits on the amount of traffic that a given repository should generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you will need a host site which lets you publish potentially large binaries (multiple versions and multiple targets). It should also not be bandwidth limited. This costs money, which the project owners will need to raise from some source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Too many platforms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having bitten the bullet, and set up a server, you need to decide which platforms you will support. And which versions of those platforms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows Vista, 7, 8? One or all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which distro mechanisms of Linux? (rpm, deb, ppa, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OSX native, or Homebrew?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Android, iOS? Which versions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the project have access to contributors that can support all the platforms you want to distribute for? Do you have people who can test the provided binaries to ensure they actually work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Security and Liability&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, it's all taken off .. you have a distribution mechanism, binaries, and lots of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you prevent the insertion of adware (a la Sourceforge) if you aren't using your own servers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you avoid trojan injections (there are commonly adopted methods)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are you legally liable if someone downloads an infected executable from your site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you need some liability insurance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;High numbers of lower-skilled users&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your project (assume it's a complete application) attracts more and more 'average people', you will be held to a higher standard for support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have good &lt;strong&gt;user&lt;/strong&gt; documentation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will you provide translations for other (human) languages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you now need a bug tracker hosted on a larger site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T19:52:51.303" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="597" CreationDate="2015-06-28T20:25:07.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The major problem is one you've already noted: &lt;em&gt;having everyone relicense&lt;/em&gt;. There are, literally*, millions of open-source projects. For each project, the author might have abandoned it, or be unreachable, or just not want to relicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, one organization or meeting can't hope to cover all the needs of every developer and every project - software must have different licenses to hardware, to drinks, etc., so you'll get people contacting you for years afterwards asking for the addition of another license to cover X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of licenses will, over time, tend towards the smallest workable set, simply because humans are lazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, to some extent this has happened. If you ask someone involved in open source to tell you a few licenses, you can bet they'll say MIT, BSD, GNU GPL, and probably CC's set. Those are the accepted licenses, and people looking for a license will come across those first. Many of the others will (or have) fall out of use as people go for the big-name licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* No, I don't know this for certain, but it seems exceedingly likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T20:25:07.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="597" CreationDate="2015-06-28T20:42:59.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2013/lcs-slides-aaronw/#/chart-gp-adj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Somewhat sloppy quantative analysis on the current licences used on github&lt;/a&gt; shows that this is already somewhat happening. This is just a single datapoint, and it's not very solid data, but it does show that the MIT license, the BSD license(s), the GPL and the Apache license together make up for the vast majority of cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long tail is very long, but not very deep. I don't know about any initiatives by the OSI or FSF to trim down the number of licenses they certify out of name of simplicity, but that would still leave a very large number of existing projects with another license and no real incentive to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T20:12:07.750" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T20:12:07.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="605" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-28T21:11:47.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:11:47.833" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:11:47.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-28T21:11:47.833" Score="0" Body="Open Educational Resources are documents and media for use in education under open licenses which allow free use and distribution." OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:37:10.043" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:37:10.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="551" CreationDate="2015-06-28T21:19:38.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally understood that using another program generates no derivate work (in difference to linking there it is controversial). As far as I know nobody so far has claimed, that using a database creates a derivate work. Even more, if the interface is an standard used by different programs. If you stick only to standard-SQL, you could replace the Database in the installation without rewriting the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:19:38.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2015-06-28T21:23:12.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to teach your investors how to program is likely a waste of time. They are not inclined to learn it, they don't have the time to learn it, and it is unlikely to help them make a business decision (People who can code a bit are often worse managers than those who can not code at all, because they often believe to know far more than they actually do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source culture and its productivity might be fascinating to us programmers, but businesspeople are not interested in this. They are only interested in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much will it cost me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How will it make me money?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much money will it make me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When will it start to make me money?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the risk it won't make me money?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to convince businesspeople to fund your project, you need to present them a business case which answers these questions and explains why it is more profitable to open source this project than to develop it under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-28T21:34:20.177" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T21:34:20.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="498" CreationDate="2015-06-28T22:33:06.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In previous versions, the Creative Commons licenses have been written with the US legal system in mind. This might have created some issues in other countries, so it was an effort underway to adapt the text to different countries and also to translate it in the process. You can look in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_jurisdiction_ports&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia-article&lt;/a&gt; or in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_should_I_know_about_differences_between_the_international_licenses_and_the_ported_licenses.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FAQ of Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-28T22:33:06.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="616" CreationDate="2015-06-28T22:47:51.193" Score="11" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the claim is heard open source projects are especially unfriendly to women. Sometimes the claim is heard, that open-source projects are especially inclusive. It probably is impossible to answer which is more true, but we could get a hint by looking at real participation from females.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there studies comparing similar projects in open source and in proprietary projects that analyze the numbers and perhaps roles of male and female contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T06:01:44.727" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T06:01:44.727" Title="Do open source projects have better or worse female participation than proprietary projects?" Tags="|community|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="618" CreationDate="2015-06-29T01:36:02.343" Score="9" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons used to publish a license called &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Sampling Plus&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, it was retired/deprecated in 2011 due to inadequate demand and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Not compatible with any other CC license&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this license incompatible with the other CC licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;human-readable summary page&lt;/a&gt;, the license permits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative transformations for commercial and non-commercial uses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verbatim uses for non-commercial uses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the condition that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You attribute in the manner specified by the author/licensor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a glance, the freedoms are a mix of NC/ND and the condition is BY. Why is this incompatible with any other CC license? What specific use cases cause it to be incompatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T07:43:14.340" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T08:31:59.003" Title="Why is the CC sampling+ license incompatible with other CC licenses?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="619" CreationDate="2015-06-29T02:21:16.900" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often if employing a team to program a project you would need to pay: the programmers, office space, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In open source projects is it common for the programmers to be volunteers? Are there any other costs that you don't have compared to closed-source projects and vice-versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:07:14.477" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:07:14.477" Title="What costs are involved in an open sourced project compared to a non open sourced project?" Tags="|software|finance|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-29T13:24:58.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="610" CreationDate="2015-06-29T02:38:21.573" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Significantly less female participation.&lt;/strong&gt; It is estimated that female participation on open source projects is at about 2%, compared to 10-30% overall in computing or proprietary projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For overall female participation, NSF keeps &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/women/&quot;&gt;employment statistics for women&lt;/a&gt;, which has hovered around &lt;strong&gt;20-30%&lt;/strong&gt; for the &quot;computer and math scientists&quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of reference to the low participation of women in open source projects; one commonly referenced is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Policy Support&lt;/em&gt; (2006)&lt;/a&gt;, which lists a number of &lt;strong&gt;1.5%&lt;/strong&gt; - it's a while ago, but I'd be surprised if the number is much different today. To compare, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flossproject.org/report/FLOSS_Final4.pdf&quot;&gt;an earlier study (2002)&lt;/a&gt; listed &lt;strong&gt;1.1%&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlZH8QBl60oodEJTdFA5TlZOcDJCMU02RkZoSHF5SHc#gid=0&quot;&gt;other numbers&lt;/a&gt; which suggest that tech companies' employees are about &lt;strong&gt;12%&lt;/strong&gt; of women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now per-project numbers vary a lot and I'm not sure how useful individual comparisons will be, but here are some numbers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same source that lists 12% for a group of tech companies shows &lt;strong&gt;Mozilla&lt;/strong&gt; at about &lt;strong&gt;8%&lt;/strong&gt;. By comparison, Google reports &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/&quot;&gt;17% of women in their &quot;tech&quot; category&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=3651&quot;&gt;This blog post&lt;/a&gt; mentions &lt;strong&gt;5%&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;Ubuntu Members&lt;/strong&gt; as women. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership&quot;&gt;horse's mouth&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Official Ubuntu Membership means recognition of significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community.&quot; There are over 500 of these. By comparison, Microsoft reports &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/default.aspx#fbid=pAbVpUFMjVP&quot;&gt;28% female employment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know of better comparisons please edit them in, but again I want to emphasise that individual comparisons are no replacement for the overall statistics, which show significantly less female participation in open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T02:38:21.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="612" CreationDate="2015-06-29T08:31:59.003" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sampling+ license effectively prohibits whole-work derivatives (you can't take a Sampling+ work and incorporate it intact into another work, except in very limited circumstances).  This means the license is only partially compatible with the &quot;mainstream licenses&quot; (BY, BY-SA, BY-ND, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, and BY-NC-ND) -- you need to be careful about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you use the Sampling+ content in the combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going the other direction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't incorporate ShareAlike-licensed content into a Sampling+ work: it introduces an impermissible license restriction to the SA work (incompatible with BY-SA and BY-NC-SA).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't incorporate NonCommercial content into a Sampling+ work because the Sampling+ license permits commercial use of derivatives (incompatible with BY-NC and BY-NC-SA).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't incorporate No-Derivatives content in a Sampling+ work for obvious reasons (incompatible with BY-ND and BY-NC-ND).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leave only one possible way of freely combining a &quot;mainstream license&quot; work with a Sampling+ work: incorporating a CC-BY work into a Sampling+ work.  Everything else is restricted or forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T08:31:59.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="615" CreationDate="2015-06-29T08:36:26.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really depends on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are pure volunteer projects with a budget of zero. I have taken part in such projects myself and surprisingly it works when the problem is interesting enough. But you can not really rely on anything getting finished on time or getting finished at all, because all contributors work in their free-time and can stop working at any time when more important priorities appear in their life, they find a more interesting hobby or they get into personal conflicts with other project members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also open source projects which are carried almost entirely by paid developers employed by one or more companies. Some of these projects don't accept any outside contributions at all and only release the finished product to the public. With such projects, the budget does not differ at all from a proprietary project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are projects anywhere in between where a certain percentage of work is done by volunteers and a certan percentage by employees. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2015/02/linux-kernel-report-more-contributors-ever&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;2015 Linux Kernel report&lt;/a&gt;, for example, reads: &lt;em&gt;&quot;more developers than ever are paid for their work; a conservative calculation shows this number at 80 percent. Volunteer developers don’t stay that way for long, as companies continue to aggressively recruit the best Linux talent.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Note that in such projects, volunteer work isn't completely free, because it needs to be coordinated and reviewed by maintainers who are usually employed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T08:36:26.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="621" CreationDate="2015-06-29T10:47:38.033" Score="20" ViewCount="11150" Body="&lt;p&gt;In open source the term &quot;free&quot; is often used, sometimes with a qualifier, &quot;free as in beer&quot; or &quot;free as in speech&quot;. What is meant with these qualifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T00:01:32.757" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T02:15:03.010" Title="What is the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech?" Tags="|freedoms|terminology|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2015-06-29T12:14:09.893" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free as in beer, is like getting something without payment. Getting food from the community fair (There's one in Toronto that gives free hamburgers to the community every year), something from friends, these are things that you receive without making a payment. You don't pay money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free as in speech relates to the Free Software Movement. To recognize this, we normally refer to it adding the French word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, in order to help imply the freedom meaning. This is the reason as to why we have the acronym FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software). &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Libre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; means that you are unrestricted, like a bird in the skies, to do certain things. With &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; software, you can fork the software, and take it. You're allowed to do so, you're &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a confusion that can be quite confusing. As both words denote the same thing. With people around, they generally take the meaning of &quot;free as in food&quot;, rather than freedom. People specify what they mean with the expressions to help clarify and assure themselves that their message can come across reliably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T12:36:43.057" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T12:36:43.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2015-06-29T12:29:52.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Zizouz212 almost got the idea 100%. These ideas are not the same otherwise there would not be two phrases. The big difference with this concept can best be described from a great &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31717/what-do-the-phrases-free-speech-vs.-free-beer-really-mean/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How-To Geek Article&lt;/a&gt; on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Free as in beer&quot; is when someone gifts to you the software at no cost. You are in no way expected to pay any fee for this or give anything in return. You also cannot see the source code or any of the elements that make it up. Sure you may know that it contains an ingredient (C++,Java), but you don't know exactly how it is put together to make this great software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One community (joke / accepted practice) for this saying is if you really enjoy a software you (could / should / it's nice) to buy the developer a beer. Basically where this saying came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;free as in speech&quot; is pretty much right on, but is in association to actual open source. You can see and use any version of the code to improve and help yourself or the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So like I said they are different and do not mean pretty much the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not unheard of for both to be true at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="358" LastEditorUserId="358" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T02:15:03.010" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T02:15:03.010" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="599" CreationDate="2015-06-29T13:55:48.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Common misunderstanding for Free software is thinking as free of charge/cost. If any one just search in google : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/search?q=download+free+software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download free software&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/search?q=free+software+for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software for...&lt;/a&gt; then s/he is actually responded with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freeware&lt;/a&gt;. But If anyone just tries to search &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/search?q=what+is+free+software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is free software&lt;/a&gt; then s/he is going on right way!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following topics may helps you to aware the people:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aware people with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Software License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to clarify what different terms stands for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mZhhY.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen-shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, It is clear that spyware/malware/adware are &lt;strong&gt;deceptive and/or illicit&lt;/strong&gt; while free software, open source software are software distributed under free/open-source license and follows definitions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freeware is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software#License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one type&lt;/a&gt; of proprietary software (distinguishing with commercial software)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The English adjective free is commonly used in one of two meanings: &quot;for zero price&quot; (gratis) and &quot;with little or no restriction&quot; (libre). see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gratis Vs. Libre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#.22Free_beer.22_vs_.22free_speech.22_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Free beer&quot; vs &quot;free speech&quot;&lt;/a&gt; distinction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.&quot; — Richard Stallman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fs-translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translation of the term &quot;free software&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a list of recommended unambiguous translations for the term “free software” (&lt;strong&gt;free as in freedom&lt;/strong&gt;) into various languages. Also provided translations of “&lt;strong&gt;gratis software&lt;/strong&gt;” in a separate column to show how to make the contrast in various languages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T13:27:19.157" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:27:19.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T14:38:01.437" Score="5" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you publish software under a free or open source license, you are granting users certain freedoms. With that, it stands within reason there are certain consequences and liabilities, just as there are certain consequences and liabilities when you &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1357/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;entertain your right to free speech&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In publishing controversial &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt;, what 'criticism and consequences' might developers face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T16:38:24.277" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T17:09:01.193" Title="Are there consequences of publishing software under a free or open source license?" Tags="|freedoms|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1008" CreationDate="2015-06-29T14:38:43.920" Score="9" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many programming languages have popular open-source implementations: C, C++, Java, Javascript, Python, C#, PHP. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does statistical data exist that shows how much of the software (open source or not) is built with open source compilers or interpreters and how much with closed source? And does the data provide historical data, so that it can be seen if the usage of open-source development systems in programming has increased or decreased over time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T00:29:39.187" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T21:15:06.057" Title="Are there statistics showing the usage over time of open source implementations of programming languages compilers/interpreters?" Tags="|history|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="624" CreationDate="2015-06-29T14:46:26.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're reading too much into the analogy: &quot;free as in speech&quot; is by opposition to &quot;free as in gratis&quot;, to help people understand that &quot;free&quot; is about freedom, not price. The FSF don't claim that free software is like freedom of speech (at least not that I'm aware!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is usual with software (which doesn't mean it's not controversial), the FSF's free software licenses include the usual disclaimer of warranty to protect developers from the consequences of errors in their code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T14:46:26.900" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="629" CreationDate="2015-06-29T16:23:24.290" Score="4" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that people don't need degrees to create closed source software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because open source programming is different to closed source, is any other education REQUIRED to program open sources things? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, what degree / education?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, why not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:10:57.020" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T09:53:58.703" Title="Do you need a degree to become an open source developer?" Tags="|contributor|accessibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="642" CreationDate="2015-06-29T16:37:38.803" Score="9" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the development of programming itself which came first: open sourced or closed source? Which was more popular? Or did one come after the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:10:16.617" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:10:16.617" Title="Did open source or closed source come first?" Tags="|history|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="627" CreationDate="2015-06-29T16:40:56.433" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple answer: nope. I know this because I've made open source software and I don't have a degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The degree isn't required because the knowledge of programming required to make software doesn't change between proprietary and open source software. You still need to able to write good working code, and that doesn't require a degree - you can teach yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a degree is always &lt;em&gt;beneficial&lt;/em&gt; because it'll teach you things you didn't know and often will give you an overview of the business side of things too, but it's by no means necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T16:40:56.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:06:53.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arguably, open source came first via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ada Lovelace&lt;/a&gt; around 1850.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While translating an article on Babbage's Computation Engine, she made the leap of realizing that it could be programmed to solve more than a single dedicated problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her notes actually included a specification of what is considered to be the first algorithm specifically intended for implementation on a 'computer'. This algorithm was published in full in a peer-reviewed publication, thus making it 'open source'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T08:37:40.720" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:37:40.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:07:13.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Codified&lt;/em&gt; free / open source development dates back to the publications of the BSD and GPL licenses; Wikipedia dates &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot;&gt;BSD to 1988&lt;/a&gt; (although the first properly free version of BSD, 4.3BSD, was released in 1989), and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html&quot;&gt;GPL v1 was published in 1989&lt;/a&gt;. Before that, there were freely-developed packages; TeX dates back to 1978 and is known to be FLOSS since &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb07-2/tb15gordon.pdf&quot;&gt;at least 1986&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial software is older than that, so closed source development is older than codified free / open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back further than that would involve dating the first non-shared software development, and the first shared software development; early computers were purchased for bespoke setups, and the software run on them was closed source, so there again closed source came earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T17:07:13.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="624" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:09:01.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, there's no more or less consequence to publishing controversial proprietary software than there is for free software. Regardless of how you license it, software is software, and people will react to it how they choose. The fact that you've released the source and granted redistribution and modification rights for your controversial software doesn't really change anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the main risk I see is controversy introduced by a &lt;em&gt;downstream fork&lt;/em&gt; of your &lt;em&gt;non-controversial&lt;/em&gt; software. Suppose you made a free-software game engine, and someone else used your engine to make a game that glamorized some violent atrocity from history. Of course, you're not responsible for the creation of such an awful game, but, alarmingly, your copyright notice is in the credits, per the requirements of your license. I'm not totally sure what your legal options are there, but at minimum you could  probably insist that the author of the game clearly delineate the authorship of your engine and of the controversial game in the game's documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T17:09:01.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="504" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:37:51.067" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... it depends what you mean by &lt;em&gt;override&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; single-license your content under a different license to CC BY-SA. When you post on Stack Exchange, you automatically grant Stack Exchange the right to distribute your content under CC BY-SA, and you get no say in the license they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;, however, dual-license your work here under another license as well. You can say in your profile that you apply license X to your content as well, and then people will be able to choose which license they use when they use your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Stack Overflow, this may even be a good idea - CC BY-SA was not made for licensing code, so offering a different license specifically designed for code is probably a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user366" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T15:10:22.907" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T15:10:22.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="637" CreationDate="2015-06-29T17:39:29.840" Score="8" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a product released under some CC license. Someone comes to me and says &quot;can I please build off of your software without giving credit?&quot;. To this I say sure! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to write them a piece of paper with proof (ie: &quot;I hereby give permission to allow ________ to use my software without credit&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T23:08:25.350" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T23:08:25.350" Title="Can I give someone specific permission?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="641" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:03:09.090" Score="5" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I was about to launch a large open source project. From past experience I know that the best way to promote a product is to provide information that is detailed, and easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone knows about open source products, would promoting the fact that it is open source actually help? Or would it just confuse people more? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T18:09:47.967" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:30:45.750" Title="What is the best way to promote an open source product?" Tags="|marketing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-29T19:54:44.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="635" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:03:41.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can and no you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You're the owner. Since you own all the rights, you can of course allow them to use without attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't have to write anything. If someone complains to this other dev that they're not attributing, the other dev can just say they've got permission, and point the complainant back to you. You can just confirm that. Of course, it may be wise to have some publically visible record of this, so you don't have to constantly confirm it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:03:41.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:05:21.880" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Free&quot; is ambiguous in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;free beer&lt;/strong&gt; is a beer that you don’t have to pay for (you get it &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;free speech&lt;/strong&gt; is a speech where you have the right to express your opinion (you &lt;strong&gt;are free&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To disambiguate the meaning of &quot;free&quot;, you can refer to these concepts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free as in beer, if it’s about the price of zero (aka. &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free as in speech, if it’s about the freedom (aka. &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:05:21.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:07:23.810" Score="4" ViewCount="2185" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cio.com/article/2378859/open-source-tools/7-reasons-not-to-use-open-source-software.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cloud software is slightly different than conventional software. As a general rule, you don't get access to the source code, even if the hosted software is built entirely on open source software. That may not make the software proprietary, strictly speaking, but it doesn't give you all the benefits of open source. In that sense, the benefits of using the &quot;pay for what you use&quot; software as a service model may outweigh the disadvantage of not having access to the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstack.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenStack&lt;/a&gt; is bringing cloud support to the open source community, but what about &lt;em&gt;Software as a Service&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any open source SaaS projects out there? Does SaaS even make sense in a FLOSS context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T18:13:12.183" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:18:04.473" Title="Are there any open source Software as a Service projects?" Tags="|software|floss|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="639" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:16:34.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short there are many many open source SaaS projects out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;owncloud &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;openshift &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a list of over 60 examples go here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://datamation.com/open-source/60-open-source-apps-you-can-use-in-the-cloud-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These products have become popular because most are free, and easy to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T18:18:04.473" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:18:04.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="636" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:30:45.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way (I define best as with the most people reached and converted to users) is an expensive marketing campaign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But OSS-projects usually don't have much money. But there are some, that can raise a lot of money. The Mozilla Foundation did this and used money to print &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;big advertisements in newspapers&lt;/a&gt; in different countries. It's hard to measure how much that helped Firefox to reach todays popularity, but it surely had some impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common way to advertise OSS is through social media. This is relatively cheap (it takes the time of a volunteer or a paid community manager) and can reach a lot of people with resending of messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basics to help also any other form of advertising is a good informative website. Other advertisement can send visitors to the site, so the site must contain the information and download for the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much other forms of advertising exist, that are used from time to time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;presenting the software on conferences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create merchandise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use a popular project hosting platform (being on one alone helps to get hits)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;register in software catalogs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all advertisement it is helpful to keep in mind which target group the software has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the question if advertising with Open Source helps: again it depends on your target group. Firefox for example doesn't concentrate on being open source, it focuses on being without charge. In other communities it might be helpful to focus on being open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T18:30:45.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="628" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:40:06.573" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early on (long before personal computers) software was not seen as a product of its own, but a part of the computer. So the software was distributed without extra costs with the computer. Many of the purchasers of computers (often universities or scientific facilities) changed the distributed software and added their own programs. All this was practically open source, without the concept existing and no one ever really thought about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on some companies learned that they could sell software as a product of its own. Closed source software emerged. As a reaction to this new phenomenon of closed source, Richard Stallman started to think about other ways and eventually defined free software. Open Source was a term later coined, but mostly had the same features as free software, so that I see them mostly synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer which was first you have to decide if you count early software as open source. Following today's standards it wasn't, because it wasn't licensed. But in practice it was used the same way as open source is today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T23:56:38.517" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T23:56:38.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="644" CreationDate="2015-06-29T18:50:39.920" Score="6" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the larger open source projects receive serious backing from one or more Corporate sponsors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on CLA's and the license chosen, if contributions were made by engineers during their working hours (i.e. as part of their job) the copyright on those corporations belongs to their employers, not the individuals. The individuals might not even have the legal authority to assign the copyright via a CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/549&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; deals with accessing and forking the original source code. But this situation is slightly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to complications over the copyright (perhaps another company purchases the assets of the failed one), the loss of the sponsor might also imply the loss of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extensive web infrastructure for hosting, distribution, and support&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A large pool of contributors who are no longer being paid to contribute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some large users, who perhaps had commercial support agreements, or simply lose confidence in the project once its backers depart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happens to a large, popular OS project when its major corporate sponsor goes bust, taking all the above with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T10:22:05.847" Title="What happens when a corporate sponsor goes bust?" Tags="|collaboration|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="643" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:11:47.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This situation is one major strong point in comparison to closed source software. While nobody can claim the copyright anymore and therefore the license must be kept unchanged, the software can still be maintained and developed, as this is one basic right gained through open source. It may even happen the same developers work on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't exactly the same, but as Ulf Michael Widenius (the original developer of MySQL) became unhappy with the development of MySQL he forked the software and still develops the fork as MariaDB. The same can happen if the copyright-holder ceases functioning, a fork still is possible. It may be needed to change project-name though (depending on the license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There still may be some disruption from the changes and it isn't guaranteed a new development team will form to keep developing the software. Also the missing money from the corporate developer may lead to smaller development. But the Software survives and can be still maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T19:11:47.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="649" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:38:58.723" Score="16" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;If everyone can change the Wikipedia, can it be trusted? Do any studies exists that show it is less trustworthy than classical encyclopedias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T14:31:19.413" Title="How can I trust Wikipedia, if everyone can change it?" Tags="|collaboration|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="627" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:42:44.230" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source community is largely meritocratic. When you provide a patch for an open source project, nobody will ask you for your references or academic qualifications. Many open source projects would not even want to know your real name, unless they need you to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt;. Your contribution will only be judged on its own merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes open source a great opportunity for self-taught developers without formal qualifications to collect experience and build a portfolio they can use to convince potential employers of their competence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T19:48:05.347" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T19:48:05.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="656" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:45:12.290" Score="12" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partially inspired by this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/613/what-subject-areas-are-in-need-of-free-and-open-source-projects&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/613/what-subject-areas-are-in-need-of-free-and-open-source-projects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source development has greatly enriched and expanded many problem domains, not simply hardware. Open source 3D printer design, and the Arduino platform are excellent examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are there any domains or industries which are inherently off-limits for the creation of open-source solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by solution, I don't mean &lt;strong&gt;using&lt;/strong&gt; open source code, but providing an actual implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:06:03.197" Title="Is any problem domain off-limits to open source development?" Tags="|development-environment|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:45:12.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One area strikes me as inherently closed to open source solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to imagine the creation of an open source weapons system platform. Beyond the concerns of ethics, whilst there might be engineers out there who would be prepared to actively participate in such a project, it would probably quickly attract a very negative response from many government bodies and might even be in violations of numerous laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential area is that of medical equipment, which has to meet a prohibitively high legal burden of qualification and indemnity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T19:45:12.290" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="645" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:47:15.590" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not supposed to trust it - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source&quot;&gt;Wikipedia itself tells you that it is not a reliable source.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you are supposed to trust the sources it cites in the articles. This  will mostly be secondary sources, e.g. newspaper or magazine articles, books or studies about a topic, provided that these meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's requirements for reliable sources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter is also supposed to maintain overall quality of Wikipedia articles and prevent the inclusion of outright wrong information, though - anyone who adds or deletes or changes content of an article is supposed to back this up by sources, at least when their change is challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can't be guaranteed to work in all cases, though - and this is a difference to classical encyclopedias, where a number of people might be tasked with verifying the included information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia seems to do quite well, though, they have an article about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia&quot;&gt;reliability of Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; - again, you are not supposed to trust this article, but the sources cited in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I have added several links to Wikipedia in this answer - but not all of these links go to articles, some refer to pages in the Wikipedia: namespace. The latter is where Wikipedia's own policies are defined. You are supposed to follow those, no trust needed, or you may be sanctioned by users with the required privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T20:24:04.147" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:24:04.147" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="791" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:54:28.333" Score="27" ViewCount="7131" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;GNU Affero General Public License (Version 3)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is that it allows &quot;users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#AGPLv3.0&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot;&gt;Section 13&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;em&gt;AGPLv3.0&lt;/em&gt; contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &quot;&lt;strong&gt;if you modify&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Does this really mean that the source &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; has to be made available if it was modified (assuming that I don’t offer/distribute the application itself, i.e., its binary, at all)? Or am I missing something, maybe somewhere else in the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I install a Web application licensed under the AGPLv3.0 on my server.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don’t modify this application at all. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I allow people to use it over the Web.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to offer the source code of this application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="111" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T08:21:22.517" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:25:20.390" Title="Do I have to offer the source of an AGPL (v3.0) licensed Web app even if I didn’t modify it?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|source-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="645" CreationDate="2015-06-29T19:54:54.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;entire article on this subject&lt;/a&gt;, including several studies, most famously Giles, J. (2005). &quot;Internet encyclopaedias go head to head: Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries&quot; published in Nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, Wikipedia seems of roughly equal reliability as conventional encyclopedias. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-29T20:04:00.177" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:04:00.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="653" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:08:39.890" Score="7" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are working on a large open source project with 20+ people. Suppose one of these people get mad and decide they want to sabotage the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What measures (if any) could be taken to prevent loss of code and information, in the event of an internal sabotage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T15:24:51.390" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T17:39:45.440" Title="In open source projects, how do you minimize sabotage risks?" Tags="|project-management|collaboration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="652" CreationDate="2015-06-29T20:26:02.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is part of the purpose of version control systems, like git.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone makes a new feature, or changes any code at all in fact, they have to &lt;em&gt;commit&lt;/em&gt; it to the project. It's a bit like editing here on Stack Exchange: when you edit your post, an item is created in the post's history showing the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone sabotages your post (or in this case, project), then you can simply rollback the changes, setting your project back to the state it was in before the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other method is of course backups. If for some reason this disgruntled individual deletes the entire project, backups are your recourse. Taking regular backups means you have a record, kept separately from the project, of the stages of development. You can then simply restore a damaged or deleted project from these backups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T20:26:02.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="650" CreationDate="2015-06-29T22:53:35.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question - even after a few reads of the AGPLv3.0, I do not see where it requires you to make the source code available if you run an unmodified copy of the software on your server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the FSF's page about the motivation to use the AGPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot;&gt;Why the Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;, contains the following claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If some program on this server is released under the GNU Affero GPL,&#xA;  the server is required to offer the users the corresponding source of&#xA;  that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is embedded in a section about SaaSS, Software as a Service Substitute, which outlines the FSF's view on services that operate on data provided by users, but are outside of their control. The AGPL is said to not address this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its Basic Permission section, the AGPL states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey,&#xA;  without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Propagate&quot; and &quot;convey&quot; are terms that the FSF has invented to avoid ambiguities with copyright law terms of some jurisdictions. &quot;conveying&quot; software is what actually requires you to make source code available - but a user interaction with the software via a network, as in your question, is explicitly declared as not conveying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;convey&quot; a work means any kind of propagation that enables other&#xA;  parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user&#xA;  through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not&#xA;  conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, at this time I am siding with &quot;you do not have to provide the source code&quot;, but this is in spite of the claim that you have to on the FSF's own &quot;Why AGPL&quot; page. I hope someone can point out my error in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2015-06-29T22:53:35.787" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2015-06-30T01:19:08.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few topics in security benefit from being closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the general case. In cryptography and most of security, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs&amp;#39;s_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kerckhoff's principle&lt;/a&gt; applies. A system should be secure even if its design is fully public, because the adversary can usually learn the system's design anyway. In cryptography, secrecy is concentrated in a very small part: a key, a password, a nonce… The operations that are performed on these secret values are well-known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of security benefits from being open-source. For example, all recommended cryptographic algorithms are public and have undergone years of scrutiny by experts. For software, note that the benefit of being open source only comes into play if someone actually does review the software. This is rarely done because &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/390/assessing-potential-security-flaws-in-open-source-software/414#414&quot;&gt;it's expensive&lt;/a&gt;. I invite you to read threads on &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/opensource&quot;&gt;this topic&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Security Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4441/open-source-vs-closed-source-systems&quot;&gt;Open Source vs Closed Source Systems&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/51648/security-related-code-in-open-source-projects&quot;&gt;Security related code in Open Source projects?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/11271/how-are-open-sourced-operating-systems-and-software-kept-secure&quot;&gt;How are open-sourced operating systems and software kept secure?&lt;/a&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, there are a few specialized domains where closed source is an advantage for security. These are domains where in order to obtain information about the system design, an adversary has to conduct active attacks that run the risk of detection. Generally, in such domains, the design of the system evolves, so while adversaries can eventually gain the knowledge that they seek, by the time they manage to do so, that knowledge becomes obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Stack Exchange has measures to combat spam and vote fraud. These measures would not work as well if the detail of how they work was public. For example, it's known that there are filters to block spam, but the details of what makes the system decide that a new user is a spammer and isn't allowed to post are only known to a few Stack Exchange employees. Similarly, it's well-known that there is an automated process to cancel votes between sockpuppets of the same person, but the details of how this works is not public, it is not even known to moderators. In order to learn how to get through, spammers and fraudsters need to carry active probes where they try to post things and see what sticks and what gets shut down. All this probing leaves tracks, which help the defenders make the system more resistant and identity the attackers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is some of the security countermeasures on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_card&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;smart cards&lt;/a&gt;. Smart cards have to maintain secrecy in a hostile environment where the attacker has physical control over the card (e.g. a credit card thief). They are potentially vulnerable to many types of attacks, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attack&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;side channel&lt;/a&gt; leakage and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_injection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fault injection&lt;/a&gt;. Some of the protections on a smart card involve code that erases confidential data if it detects an attack (as well as physical protections such as dissolving part of the card if someone tries to drill a hole in it). These countermeasures work better if the attacker doesn't know exactly what triggers them, so that they'll need to brick many cards before they figure it out. Eventually they will figure it out, but if it takes them a few years and the cards using this technology have expired, the defenders have won.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both examples are a permanent arms race. Closed source is an advantage only temporarily, for a few years at most. Once ways to break the system are known, the whole design might as well be published. But making the design of these particular subsystems open from the get go would facilitate attacks. Closed source is good to protect a few tricks with expected obsolescence. This doesn't necessarily mean that such systems can't be open-source, but an open-source system would have to be extremely good to compete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T01:19:08.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="743" CreationDate="2015-06-30T01:48:38.483" Score="11" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should I do if someone is breaking the terms of my licensed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To create a small example for you, I'll take a section out of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and&#xA;may provide additional or different license terms and conditions&#xA;for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or&#xA;for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use,&#xA;reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with&#xA;the conditions stated in this License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that the person modifying the source &quot;accidentally&quot; re-licensed work that I had done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user144" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T01:55:17.800" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:29:23.453" Title="What am I supposed to do if someone is breaking the terms of my licensed software?" Tags="|licensing|enforcement|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="503" CreationDate="2015-06-30T04:29:03.980" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you create your software and you release it under a permissive license first, you can offer that product under a commercial licence later, but you will have a hard time making money because the &quot;free version&quot; will compete with the &quot;paying&quot; version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done this before. I started with a product under the LGPL. This is better than the Apache Software License, because people could use my software in a commercial context, but all improvements added to my software had to be released as LGPL too. This allowed me to improve my software. This obligation to contribute back doesn't exist with the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I changed the license to the AGPL (after an IP review and after all core contributors signed a CLA). I also started offering the software under a commercial license. The license change dates from 2009 and still the old version of my product is one of our main competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/253925/how-to-avoid-being-forked-into-oblivion-by-a-more-powerful-contributor&quot;&gt;How to avoid being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor?&lt;/a&gt; for more info. You should also read &lt;a href=&quot;http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#header-136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eat Me&lt;/a&gt;; it reads like a fun story, but the reality behind it is harsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T07:04:20.623" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="287" CreationDate="2015-06-30T04:29:52.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons NonCommercial licenses (&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BY-NC&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt;) may do what you want, but there are three problems with using them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;They are unsuited for use with software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The definition of commercial use is fuzzy, and hosting on a ad-supported site is probably the place where the uncertainty is greatest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CC-NC licenses are not free/open by anybody's definition (not &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/docs/definition.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt;, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeDocumentationLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T04:29:52.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="503" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:05:48.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both permissive and copyleft licences can work great, but they give rise to slightly different scenarios. Let's assume you have written an open source project OS, and a commercial fork COM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the permissive scenario, others are allowed to do more with your work, and you are allowed to do more with your contributors work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario others can take your project OS, make a closed source fork and sell them for profit. You won't be able to get patches back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, instead of forking your project and releasing their fork as closed source, or under an incompatible license, they could contribute to your project, and you are allowed to take the contributions others make to OS, and merge them in to your closed source fork COM, and sell it for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the copyleft scenario people can make a fork of OS, and this will be by definition copyleft as well. Your project OS can freely merge patches back from those forks. However your project COM can't make use of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To mitigate this in part, some organisations have a contributor license agreement (CLA), in which contributors assign their copyright to patches they submit to the project owner. Those projects often only accept contributions if their authors have signed the CLA. This way, you can still make use of patches contributed to OS in COM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patches contributed to a fork of OS are still off-limits for COM. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end in a permissive project it is more likely you can take other people's work and put it in your closed source commercial offerings, but it's also possible people run away with your work and start a competing fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a copyleft project people can't run away with your work and make a closed source offering, but you are less likely you can take other people's work and merge it to your closed source offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both scenarios you can make commercial closed source software with an open source base, but there are different risks and opportunities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T08:53:15.993" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:53:15.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="662" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:12:13.207" Score="7" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License, version 2&lt;/a&gt;, some limits on how you can modify the Program are listed. Point 2.b states that (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any work &lt;strong&gt;that you distribute or publish&lt;/strong&gt;, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there seem to be no further limitations on how the changes have to be licensed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you are not required to release your modifications&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I make changes to a GNU GPL v2 Program that I would not be allowed to distribute or publish provided I don't distribute and/or publish it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, adding some code coming from an Apache v2 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:08:45.113" LastActivityDate="2019-10-22T06:25:14.630" Title="Can I make a derived work of a GPL project and a non GPL project for personal use?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:19:30.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is always stated, that if you change an GPLed program but use it only internal without releasing any distribution, you have not to put your changes under GPL. That is covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/1492687/21005&quot;&gt;Stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt; and a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/100499/7654&quot;&gt;programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T08:19:30.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="650" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:30:00.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a short explanation by a lawyer about the AGPL in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCwhEWEPV-E&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 15-minute video&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software that &lt;em&gt;is based on&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;is linked with&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; an AGPL library is considered software that &lt;em&gt;modifies&lt;/em&gt; the software. It doesn't matter if you put the extra code inside the jar of the library or in a separate jar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just run AGPL software, you don't have to accept the license. However, if you integrate AGPL software in your own applications, then you do more than just running it, and other rules apply. Creating a work &quot;based on&quot; is considered being identical to &quot;modification.&quot; Linking your software to an AGPL library is considered modification. Modification is interpreted quite broadly. The AGPL is different from the GPL in the sense that distribution isn't limited to physical distribution. Offering a service that uses AGPL software as a service is also considered as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is implied in the text of the AGPL. It's not phrased explicitly, which may cause you to interpret it to your own advantage, but that doesn't count. What counts is how a court interprets the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to be sure, contact the original author of the library and ask him what his intention was when he chose the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:51:52.497" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:51:52.497" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T08:54:52.020" Score="10" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any licence that can be used for artistic projects (images, music, etc.) that are similar to CC-BY-SA, but with the additional constraint that not only the resulting work should be made available under the CC-BY-SA, but also the underlying project files that were used to generate the resulting derivate work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for example if I have an image file I've made using GIMP, and someone modifies it in any application (like Photoshop), I would also want that they publish these project files (.psd) as well along with their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T09:13:01.143" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:06:07.477" Title="Is there a share-alike licence for media which specifies that the project files must be published as well as the finished media?" Tags="|copyleft|license-recommendation|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T09:10:45.670" Score="19" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft and Share-Alike are two very similar types of licences. Here is how Wikipedia defines them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyleft (a play of the word copyright) is the practice of offering people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a work with the stipulation that the same rights be preserved in derivative works down the line. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar licence as the original. Copyleft licences are free content or free software licences with a share-alike condition. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share-alike&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any meaningful distinctions between these concepts, or is the only real difference their heritage and most common uses (software vs media)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T04:39:35.747" Title="Are Copyleft and Share-Alike synonyms?" Tags="|terminology|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T09:35:11.557" Score="9" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many FOSS projects start out without a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CLA). Many, if they become large and successful, will want to transition to system based on CLAs. But what about if they can't track down all of the old contributors? I can think of three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can continue without the contributors signing the CLA and proceed to change the license etc with the hope that the contributors will be found in the future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can rewrite all code contributed by them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can keep the existing license until all contributors have signed their CLAs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the first option possible or do such projects need to choose between the second and third?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:42:09.210" Title="What can you do if you can't track down all old contributors to sign a CLA?" Tags="|project-management|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="666" CreationDate="2015-06-30T09:55:28.380" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first option is possible, but with a risk. The risk is, one of the old contributors you couldn't find anymore (or his inheritor) comes out of the hiding and sues the project for violating his copyrights. If you assume this risk is small you could proceed with option 1. Option 2 and 3 are obviously less risky and probably preferable though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As Philipp correctly points out in his comment, you should include in your risk-analysis that the risks of #1 are kept, even after many years. It is known that a copyright-holder may be OK with something, but if he dies his inheritor might have another opinion. It isn't kept until eternity, but 70 years after authors death (like most countries have, Berne conventions demands 50 years after authors death) feel like an eternity. Also all forks of your software get the same risk, if they don't remove the offending code. This might lead to lesser forks and therefore some see this hurdle to forking as a violation of open source principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:42:09.210" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:42:09.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:17:01.857" Score="17" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many FOSS projects require &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreements&lt;/a&gt; (CLA) for all contributors. Even though we have many common FOSS software licenses, it seems that these projects have to create their own CLAs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any standard/generic/reusable CLAs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:48:46.510" Title="Are there reusable CLAs?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:49:31.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re-licensing is the concept of changing or adding a license to a project which has previously been licensed under any license, including previous versions of the newer license, or which have previously been protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:55:52.317" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:55:52.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:49:31.250" Score="0" Body="For questions about changing the license of a work which has already been published under a different license (or published under all-rights-reserved copyright)" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T05:51:39.797" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T05:51:39.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:50:26.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, software developers may want to combine code from different open sourced programs into one program. The only way for this to happen is for the two licenses to be &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a license is declared compatible, code licensed under these two licenses may be combined into a single program, given that none of the policies in the two licenses are disobeyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compatible licenses have similar overall ideas (e.g. to make content available to everyone without charge), which make them compatible. If two licenses oppose each other, they cannot be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22678" LastEditorUserId="22678" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T12:14:08.937" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T12:14:08.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:50:26.060" Score="0" Body="License compatibility is the comparison of two or more licenses to determine if certain usages and actions can be made. Use this tag if the question would like to determine the compatibility of licenses, or their individual clauses." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:41:38.713" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:41:38.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:51:07.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T10:51:07.297" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T10:51:07.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:51:07.297" Score="0" Body="Questions about the enforcement of a license; or what to do when someone violates the terms of a license" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:36:41.467" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:36:41.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:52:39.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many open source projects attract contributors who aren't in the initial or core project team. It is generally advisable, when taking contributions from these people, to cover yourself legally using a contributor agreement, which sets out the way in which the contributor provides their contribution, and the rights granted or reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main types of contributor agreements: license agreements, where the contributor agrees to permanently and irrevocably grant you a license to use their work; and copyright transfer agreements, where the contributor's copyright is transferred to the person or entity running the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:42:35.520" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:42:35.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:52:39.993" Score="0" Body="For questions about the legal documents covering contributions from outside a project's core team." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:40:56.653" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:40:56.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:53:22.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;License Recommendations are a unique genre of question where the community is asked to recommend a license that suits the author/licensor best depending on the criteria they provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information on effectively writing a license recommendation can effectively be found at the community meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;http://meta.opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/463/how-do-i-ask-for-a-license-recommendation&quot;&gt;How do I ask for a license recommendation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:18:11.083" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:18:11.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:53:22.633" Score="0" Body="For questions asking the community to recommend a particular license that meets criteria provided by the future licensor. Any question that seeks to have an open license is allowed, even if the criteria would render it impossible. Questions that ask for proprietary licenses explicitly are off-topic." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T03:20:32.470" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T03:20:32.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="679" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:55:54.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A permissive license is a license that tries to give end-users as many rights as practicable for the author. Such licenses include the MIT license, BSD licenses, and Apache. Unlike a copyleft license such as the GNU GPL, a permissive license imposes less restrictions on the redistribution of derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivative works of projects that held permissive licenses do not require the derivative to be licensed under the same license. This is contrary to the principle of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.stackexchange.com/tags/copyleft/info&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should use this tag when your question pertains to one of these licenses. Also consider using another tag more specifically related to your question: if your question is about the licenses &lt;em&gt;themselves&lt;/em&gt;, consider using the license specific tags; if it's asking for a recommendation, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/license-recommendation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;license-recommendation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;license-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;. Remember we also have tags specific to each license, so use these as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T23:19:57.397" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T23:19:57.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T10:55:54.817" Score="0" Body="For questions about permissive licenses, such as Apache or MIT. Note: this does not include public domain or CC0. Use [public-domain] instead." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T13:11:19.590" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:11:19.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:05:47.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:05:47.733" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:05:47.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:05:47.733" Score="0" Body="Questions about the history of open projects, philosophies, and coming to being." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T21:52:38.967" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T21:52:38.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="683" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:08:34.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:08:34.340" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:08:34.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="684" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:08:34.340" Score="0" Body="For questions about files containing the text of a license distributed alongside or within an open project." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T16:38:12.357" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T16:38:12.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:10:44.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally you cannot legally modify or redistribute unlicensed code, unless it has entered the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T03:15:32.487" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T03:15:32.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:10:44.647" Score="0" Body="Code which has not been published under a license and can be used only under regular copyright law." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T21:52:48.743" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T21:52:48.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:11:21.143" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:11:21.143" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:11:21.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:11:21.143" Score="0" Body="Intellectual Property is a superset of copyright, and also includes patents, trademarks and trade secrets." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T13:27:16.090" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T13:27:16.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:12:24.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:12:24.003" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:12:24.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:12:24.003" Score="0" Body="For questions about ownership of any component within an open project, including but not limited to, rights, intellectual property, and copyright." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:42:20.523" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:42:20.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:13:41.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:13:41.603" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:13:41.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:13:41.603" Score="0" Body="Works can be released under two (or more) licenses, which may or may not be compatible, giving recipients the choice of which terms they will abide by" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:48:30.587" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:48:30.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:15:17.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most open source licenses attempt to DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES AS A PART OF THE LICENSING STATEMENT, OFTEN USING ALL CAPITAL LETTERS LIKE THIS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some individuals or organizations will provide a warranty as a part of a paid contract, for software that they distribute or support; this is allowed if not encouraged by most licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T08:40:32.427" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T08:40:32.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="694" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:15:17.767" Score="0" Body="For questions about providing or disclaiming a warranty when distributing or supporting open source software." OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T08:39:53.530" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T08:39:53.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="695" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:16:51.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T11:16:51.950" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T11:16:51.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T11:16:51.950" Score="0" Body="Questions for the retention and building of community audiences, as well as the contributor and developer communities, that concern open projects." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T21:52:31.920" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T21:52:31.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T12:18:16.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The development of open projects must take into account a number of things, including financial and human resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T17:46:17.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T17:46:17.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="698" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T12:18:16.627" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions regarding the development of open projects." OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T17:19:22.870" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T17:19:22.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="665" CreationDate="2015-06-30T12:24:16.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are synonyms, to the extent where copyleft is considered to be a large subcategory of ShareAlike. There isn't much distinction. Creative Commons is the one that coined the term, ShareAlike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both practices are seen throughout: copyleft is present in many things, from software to literature, and the same is for ShareAlike. To understand why one practice is mostly applied in a field, rather than the other, would be to look at the nature of the licenses, and the organizations that foster them. Creative Commons is used much more for creative works, and as they coined the term ShareAlike, it's understandable that this would be seen more in creative works. Likewise can be said for Copyleft, where it was first seen in the GNU public license. Therefore, it was seen more often in Information Technology sectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't really much difference, and their varying applications are not a result of the ideologies themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T12:24:16.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="713" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:03:08.610" Score="3" ViewCount="913" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Freeware&lt;/a&gt; is software that is provided &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt; i.e. without cost, but without source or the freedoms like modification and redistributing those modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If freeware is being actively distributed by its authors, do users have the right to reproduce and redistribute without changes? For example, do software download websites have the right to host/mirror freeware downloads, or is this done with permission from the authors (whether implicit or explicit)? If the author wishes to cease distribution, are they within their rights to ask redistributors to also cease?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, free/open licenses grant the irrevocable right to redistribution. Even non-free licenses like CC-BY-ND still allow redistribution, provided that no modifications or derivations are made. Without such a license, is redistribution still allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T01:51:04.800" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T01:51:04.800" Title="Can freeware be redistributed without changes?" Tags="|law|freeware|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2015-07-02T08:16:37.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:05:29.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T13:05:29.300" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:05:29.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="702" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:05:29.300" Score="0" Body="For questions about how to correctly attribute the authors of works in derived works" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T05:51:34.610" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T05:51:34.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:17:14.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#contributor-agreements&quot;&gt;Opensource FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For more about contributor agreements in general, and some examples, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Contributor_Agreements/&quot;&gt;civiccommons.org/Contributor_Agreements&lt;/a&gt;. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://harmonyagreements.org&quot;&gt;Project Harmony&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;...a community-centered group focused on contributor agreements for free and open source software (FOSS).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Contributor_Agreements/#how-to-accept-code-and-documentation-contributions-legally&quot;&gt;How to Accept Code and Documentation Contributions Legally&lt;/a&gt; you can find &lt;strong&gt;CLA examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can get &lt;a href=&quot;http://harmonyagreements.org/agreements.html&quot;&gt;Harmony Contributor Agreement Templates&lt;/a&gt; in odt, html or pdf format. Or from &lt;a href=&quot;http://selector.harmonyagreements.org/&quot;&gt;Agreement Selector&lt;/a&gt; you can preview and get Example CLAs&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:17:14.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="700" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:19:39.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As freeware never got defined as a term like free software or open source. The common usage always includes that it is free of charge. That doesn't include that it can be downloaded from somewhere else except the &quot;official&quot; sources. So it depends on the product in question, how it turns out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice, I cannot name one case (but Stephen Kitt can, look at the comments), in which redistribution for free is restricted. I would look for the license or a statement of the author in any case before mirroring, just to be on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T14:51:32.633" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T14:51:32.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:34:59.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#copying-and-identity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does Open Source mean anybody else can use my name and logo?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, at least not any more than they could otherwise. Open Source is about software source code, not about identity. That is, letting people use your code under an Open Source license is not the same as letting them use your trademarks or other identifying attributes, except insofar as they would be permitted to anyway (for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nominative use&lt;/a&gt; doctrine). There are many companies and other organizations that release open source code while exercising tight control over their trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks and other marks of attribution are primarily about preventing public confusion over identity and provenance, and therefore trademark regulation is useful in Open Source software in the same way it is useful generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:34:59.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="584" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:49:34.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this wasn't your intention in the hypothetical, but copyright doesn't really enter the picture here. That is, it's not the &lt;em&gt;glass&lt;/em&gt; itself that is under copyright, it's the &lt;em&gt;glass design&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall that copyright gives authors exclusive rights on the &lt;em&gt;reproduction&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of creative works. Once those glasses have been sold to you (i.e. a transfer of ownership, as opposed to a license to use those glasses), the copyright holders can no longer dictate how you use that glass. For example, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine&quot;&gt;first-sale doctrine&lt;/a&gt;, you can then resell, rent or destroy those glasses with impunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you serve open cola in a glass of closed-source design, you are combining an open source work with something you own, so there are no problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:49:34.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="709" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:55:45.097" Score="14" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year, I participated in a Birds of a Feather panel discussion at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.devoxx.com/&quot;&gt;Devoxx&lt;/a&gt;. During this panel discussion, David Blevins explained:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We have this fairytale idea that open source is an infinite resource, but it's not,&quot; Blevins said. An approach that was suggested is for developers to approach their organization's CTO and say to them: &quot;Let's outsource all our software development to people we don't know&quot; and then, when the CTO looks surprised and annoyed at the suggestion, say: &quot;That's what we're doing already, shouldn't we get to know the organizations behind the software we're using?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theserverside.com/news/2240234582/Reflecting-on-open-source-software-Java-9-and-startup-strategies-at-Devoxx-2014&quot;&gt;Devoxx blog by Geertjan Wielenga&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The panel discussion was inspired by the Heartbleed disaster, where the person who introduced the bug accidentally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/man-who-introduced-serious-heartbleed-security-flaw-denies-he-inserted-it-deliberately-20140410-zqta1.html&quot;&gt;had to defend himself against the allegation that he introduced the bug intenionally&lt;/a&gt;. As it turned out, the piece of code that caused the problem was submitted on New Year's Eve. Another problem related to Heartbleed, was that the OpenSSL developers didn't make sufficient money to support their product:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;this team has a reported budget for all of their work of less than a million dollars, and through the course of this week —which you'd think would be a fairly important week for them— they have received $841 of donations. Which is sad. There's a section on the site here that says, if you give more than, I think, it's $20,000, we'll put your logo on our home page. There are no logos. No-one is giving these guys money.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zdnet.com/article/heartbleed-soul-search-regulation-proposed-for-critical-crypto-code/&quot;&gt;http://www.zdnet.com/article/heartbleed-soul-search-regulation-proposed-for-critical-crypto-code/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither did they get sufficient support in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, despite very wide distribution and use by millions of users, OpenSSL does not have adequate support. In spite of its many users, there are very few who actively participate in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/11/openssl_heartbleed_robin_seggelmann/&quot;&gt;Bloody nose for open-source bleeding hearts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OpenSSL had to take all kinds of jobs and the software suffered from their lack of time, leading to... Heartbleed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The response from the community was strange: large corporations suddenly started giving money (a fraction of the money they made by using OpenSSL), but... what about all the other open source projects they were using? I'm pretty sure there are other projects and developers that experience the same problem the OpenSSL developers had and that deserve financial support, but nobody cares about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings me to the question: isn't there a risk that every one will end up being an open source user and nobody will continue producing open source of companies do not pay for their use of open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T23:10:21.477" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T20:25:05.237" Title="Is the capacity of open source developers an infinite resource?" Tags="|philosophy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2015-06-30T13:56:16.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This model exists as a Creative Commons license, although not as a software license, as far as I know. It's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt;-License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could still, as the original copyright holder, write your own license that allows redistribution under the same license, but no commercial uses. It would grant almost the same rights like an Open Source license, but it wouldn't be termed Open Source by either the FSF or the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T13:56:16.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="707" CreationDate="2015-06-30T14:32:54.763" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're not really saying open source is a finite resource (something I wouldn't agree with) but that open source developers are a finite resource. And yes, obviously the community can only do that much. It's pretty obvious that paid developers can do much more than people doing stuff in their spare time. A paid developer can work 8 hours a day, five days a week on a project. An unpaid developer has a few hours a day (if even an hour at all) and cannot find time for the project every day of the week. Besides this being a lot less time, the time is partitioned with other tasks (filling the refrigerator, making meals, calling insurance or mechanics, getting the kid from school, ...) and the focus is a lot worse than in an work environment. So yes, we can't expect volunteers to outdo commercial development in every aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are two possible solutions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As you suggest companies should pay more developers to work on open source or even better fund open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The communities take tasks they can handle and reduce the workload by concentrating on the important. That includes we shouldn't expect everything from open source software, but only clearly focused core features.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both points can be combined for better results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the dilemma you describe is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tragedy of the commons&lt;/a&gt;. The commons in this case are the developers willing to work in their spare time. Luckily the tragedy of the commons in classic sense does not completely apply, as the developers in question are humans that can decide which tasks to do, and which not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T20:25:05.237" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T20:25:05.237" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="715" CreationDate="2015-06-30T15:07:08.600" Score="7" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a website. This website is an educational site and I am releasing it under [insert license here].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I have the license at the bottom of the page, is there any need to put a popup that gets users to agree to the license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:02:51.420" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:02:51.420" Title="Do I need to make my users agree to a license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2015-06-30T15:14:55.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are normally rectified through a Terms of Use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terms of Use is self-explanatory. If you would like to use the said product/service, you must abide by these instructions. In your terms of use, you can have a clause such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By using this site, you agree to [such and such] license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T15:14:55.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2015-06-30T15:50:27.550" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;An explicit agreement is only needed when you need the user to relinquish any rights they would usually have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses are usually not designed to take rights away from the user they already have. They give them rights they would usually not have, namely the right to modify and redistribute. When the user does not agree to your license, then &quot;all rights reserved&quot; applies and they are not allowed to copy it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to merely &lt;strong&gt;look at your website&lt;/strong&gt;, you do not need to bother the users with your license. You giving them the right to view the website is already implied by you putting it online on a public webserver without any access control in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you want users to &lt;strong&gt;submit content&lt;/strong&gt; under your preferred license, you need to make them aware of your license terms, because they are giving up certain rights to their work. Forcing them to confirm that they understood that &quot;all your contribution will be licensed under [LICENSE]&quot; is important to avoid any misunderstandings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T15:55:40.340" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T15:55:40.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="700" CreationDate="2015-06-30T16:02:00.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;Freeware&quot; is not well-defined. Some authors are OK with people redistributing their work unchanged, others are not. Check the license restrictions of the work in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible reasons why authors would not want people to redistribute their software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They offer the software for free download only to draw attention to their website and any other content it has (ads, for example).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They want to make sure that any copies which are offered are indeed unchanged and not infected with malware. Sure, doing that would be a breach of the &quot;unchanged&quot; restriction, but when you can find copies of the software everywhere it gets hard to make sure that every single website which offers it plays fair.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They want to have the power to stop distribution at any time for whatever reason. Even when the license conditions do allow them to revoke the permission for distribution, enforcing this quickly when the software is already widely distributed is a logistic problem because all distributors must be notified and must be cooperative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T16:14:07.097" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T16:14:07.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T17:59:27.383" Score="7" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#KDE&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, KDE uses Free Software Foundation Europe's Fiduciary Licence Agreement, which assigns the copyright to KDE e.V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quote confused me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, it is optional and every contributor is allowed not to assign their copyright to KDE e.V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does KDE remain free/libre software if some contributors withhold their copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:47:31.920" Title="How does the optional Fiduciary Licence Agreement for KDE allow it to stay free/libre software?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="710" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:00:27.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not at all necessary to simply use your website. Look at it this way: if you &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; have a license, then the work on the site would be copyrighted by you with no rights for other people. Adding a license gives other people some rights - is it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; necessary to say &quot;hey, do you agree to me giving you more rights?&quot;? You can just do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you accept work from other people to include in your website, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; necessary, because you'd be taking some of their rights away (the right to control distribution and licensing). In this case, you need their explicit agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:00:27.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="664" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:06:07.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are willing to publish your GIMP files along with the resulting image, you can use the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that sources are made available along with a copyrighted work and that requirement carries over to derived works.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Sources&quot; is defined in the GPL license as &quot;the preferred format for making modifications,&quot; which exactly corresponds to the .xcf/.psd files used by GIMP/Photoshop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:06:07.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="721" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:06:52.390" Score="14" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#Canonical&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As of August 2011, Canonical is requesting contributions be licenced under a Harmony Contribution Licence Agreement, rather than the copyright being assigned to Canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would appear to put contributors in a better position, being able to maintain the copyright of their contributions. Are there still any drawbacks? Does the contributor lose any rights with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/docs/ha-cla-i.html&quot;&gt;Harmony agreement&lt;/a&gt; that they would have kept when contributing to a project without a Contributor License Agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T18:20:01.803" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:27:10.703" Title="Do I lose any rights with Canonical's Harmony CLA?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:14:41.083" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;A collaborative project involves a number of people with different areas of expertise working on different aspects of the project. When thinking about attracting new contributors, are there any tasks or areas which are important to cover but often get overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there evidence of open source projects where with hindsight the contributors would have benefited from a particular specialised contributor/team member that they never thought to seek?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:26:40.710" Title="Which tasks on an open source project tend to be most often overlooked?" Tags="|collaboration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-06-30T19:59:25.140" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="722" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:21:40.677" Score="10" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am working on a project. I publish this project on a website. I release it without a copyright notice OR a licence. But in the project title /description I say it is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these circumstances is the project open sourced? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, under what conditions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T22:27:34.993" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T02:47:30.760" Title="Can a project be open source even if you don't have a license?" Tags="|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:26:40.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same as on commercial closed source development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High quality tutorial style documentation which is kept up to date&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, even when engineers are being &lt;strong&gt;paid&lt;/strong&gt; to write documentation, they are extremely reluctant to do so. Which means you tend to get the simplest form of docs to write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Name:    myfunction&#xA;param:   int len the length&#xA;returns: true on success&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of an explanation of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why you would use this function&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How it works with other functions from the same API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Detailed examples&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The package documentation for most R packages (including the base packages) is a prime example. So are the docs for &lt;code&gt;glib&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt; on the other hand does a very good job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:26:40.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="717" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:27:10.703" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed a better position to be in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright assignment means you lose all your rights. You no longer own the work in the eyes of the law and have no legal force over it; Canonical instead owns it and can do as they wish with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/docs/ha-cla-i.html&quot;&gt;Harmony CLA&lt;/a&gt; states (§ 2.1.a):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You retain ownership of the Copyright and Patent Claims in your Contributions and have the same rights to use or license the Contributions which You would have had without entering into the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For legalese, that's pretty clear: you're still the owner, you can still do as you like with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also (in §4 and §5) protects you: whereas copyright transfer would leave you open to legal claims against you if your work goes wrong, sections 4 and 5 are the 'Disclaimer' (i.e. you provide your work with no warranties) and 'Consequential Damage Waiver' (where Canonical agree not to sue you if you got something wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:27:10.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="719" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:30:32.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;claim&lt;/em&gt; it's open source, but it wouldn't be true. If you don't declare under what agreement people can use the work, or what rights they have, they should legally assume they have no rights (i.e. it is entirely your copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you haven't included a copyright notice doesn't matter: a CN is a nicety which is in fact there to remind people of the fact that it belongs to you and you can't use it in any way not allowed by the license. The Lack of a CN doesn't remove your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T00:51:28.120" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T00:51:28.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:41:02.283" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software would still be free even if &lt;em&gt;every single contributor&lt;/em&gt; withheld their copyright. Copyright assignments and CLAs are mechanisms that make certain legal operations easier, like enforcement or relicensing. They are not fundamental to free or open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider if the project maintainer had found a compatibly-licensed piece of code and decided to include it in the project. That doesn't require any copyright transfer. A contribution without a copyright assignment is just like that, except the contributor gives the code directly to the project, instead of having the project discover the code on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-06-30T18:47:31.920" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:47:31.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="714" CreationDate="2015-06-30T18:46:12.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright&lt;/em&gt; is not what allows them to use the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In submitting their contributions, contributors grant KDE a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; to use their contributions. Copyright assignment provides &lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt; rights for KDE and means they can do completely as they like with the work, but is not necessary for simple use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-06-30T18:46:12.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-06-30T20:46:20.280" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most common things that I see in open source projects is that they are maintained by a single developer. In my opinion, this often leads to abandoned projects due to the lack of time (or motivation) from the creator of the project and (if the project gains popularity) too many feature requests for a single person to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, many open source projects have several programmers but do not have any designer...which ends with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Good programs that are not very user-friendly and therefore have a very small user base&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lack of originality in those projects, which results in a slower gain of popularity among users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any &quot;thumb&quot; rules or recommendations to attract more contributors to join an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:08:48.840" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:08:48.840" Title="How can an open source project attract new contributors?" Tags="|contributor|project-management|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-06-30T21:44:01.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="727" CreationDate="2015-06-30T21:10:35.800" Score="7" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I publish a product under a CC-BY license. Someone takes my product and remakes it into a slightly different product and publishes that under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though a version of my product has been changed published and re licensed. Can I use their version for anything I want despite the license it was published under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T10:08:10.880" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:07:32.663" Title="Do I have full rights over derived works of my CC BY works?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2015-06-30T21:24:59.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You decide what conditions you publish your product under. With CC-BY that is that you require only attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They decide what conditions they publish their derived product under. You have to abide by the rules they set, just as they have to abide by yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA license has a Share Alike (SA) clause. This obliges people using your product to, if they publish derivatives, publish under a license that grants the same rights. This gives you the possibility to use &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; derivative work under the same terms they are using &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; original work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T15:07:32.663" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:07:32.663" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="732" CreationDate="2015-07-01T00:49:44.540" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been working on an open source software. The software is in its final stages of testing and I will soon publish it under a CC license. I would like to release it under the least strict license (to provide users full access to do whatever they wish to it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the CC-BY license the best license to use if I want to release it under no conditions or rules? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T21:06:36.437" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T21:06:36.437" Title="Is CC-BY the least strict CC license for my open source project?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="719" CreationDate="2015-07-01T00:51:50.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As ArtOfCode said, not choosing a License will make it copyrighted. But, if you don't want to choose a specific license, you may choose to &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;unlicense&lt;/a&gt; your project, which will make it public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="383" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T02:47:30.760" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T02:47:30.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2015-07-01T01:02:29.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC-BY still demands proper attribution. While some jurisdiction ask for that anyways, it is not everywhere the case. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Public Domain&lt;/a&gt; (with sources included) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; are the most permissive options. They demand basically nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T01:02:29.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="729" CreationDate="2015-07-01T01:42:02.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F&quot;&gt;The use of Creative Commons licenses for software is not recommended.&lt;/a&gt;  The CC licenses do not address concerns specific to software (such as the source code/object code relationship, or patent issues), and are incompatible with most open-source software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to license your software &quot;with no conditions or rules&quot;, you probably want either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot;&gt;The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication&lt;/a&gt; (which &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot;&gt;is suitable for use with software&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/about/&quot;&gt;Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Releasing into the public domain&quot; has the problem that not all jurisdictions permit you to simply abandon your copyright to a work; to get around this, CC-0 and WTFPL both retain copyright while relinquishing all rights to the greatest extent permissible by law; of the two, CC-0 is probably the better written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to retain the requirement of being attributed for your work, you want one of the highly-permissive licenses such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause_license_.28.22Revised_BSD_License.22.2C_.22New_BSD_License.22.2C_or_.22Modified_BSD_License.22.29&quot;&gt;three-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;.  These are similar to CC-BY, but are designed for the needs of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T01:42:02.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2015-07-01T04:15:13.393" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference is philosophical, and so subtle that it is easy to miss because it is not in any licence or list. It is that open source tends emphasize quality, reviewability, correctness and community whereas free software focuses on personal liberty, speech, and opportunity. Both camps endorse the others goals as good, just not quite as important to software and share methodologies and the belief that the ability to see, modify, and distribute source code is critical to their goals. Many projects have people from both camps as well as people who just contribute code and leave the licences to someone who cares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T04:15:13.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-07-01T05:03:35.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but you can't use the code. These days sudo is no longer distributed under the gpl, even though it is a direct descendant of root sudo which was gpl, because they kept track of which code had which licence, and replaced all the gpl code, which means that apple can now use sudo, make changes and not tell anyone. Bigger projects would find this more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T05:03:35.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T07:10:03.993" Score="11" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License&quot;&gt;Reciprocal Public License (RPL)&lt;/a&gt; is interesting in that it is the only license both OSI-approved and not FSF-approved. It is a copyleft license similar to GPL but with a &quot;reciprocal&quot; clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regarding deployment, under the RPL your changes, bug fixes, extensions, etc.&#xA;  must be made available to the open source community at large when you Deploy in&#xA;  any form -- either internally or to an outside party. Once you start running&#xA;  the software you have to start sharing the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;RPL 1.5, preamble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot;&gt;clauses 6.0 and 6.1&lt;/a&gt; require that any private modifications &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be provided back to the licensor and the public respectively, under the RPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this license approved by OSI but not by the FSF? Which specific essential freedoms, if any, does RPL violate? Why doesn't RPL violate any of the Open Source Definitions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T07:38:50.863" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T07:58:58.850" Title="Why is the Reciprocal Public License OSI-approved but not FSF-approved?" Tags="|copyleft|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="735" CreationDate="2015-07-01T07:58:58.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#RPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reciprocal Public License (#RPL)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Reciprocal Public License is a nonfree license because of three problems. 1. It puts limits on prices charged for an initial copy. 2. It requires notification of the original developer for publication of a modified version. 3. It requires publication of any modified version that an organization uses, even privately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T07:58:58.850" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T12:19:04.553" Score="5" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing some software for a particular operating system, OS1. Imagine this is the most awesome software ever! I want the users of OS1 to use the software as open source and restrict all others from using the software at all; so that all users migrate to OS1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I frame such a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="209" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T21:30:53.703" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:30:53.703" Title="Can I Open Source a software for a particular operating system?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="738" CreationDate="2015-07-01T12:32:51.567" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your reasoning for that would actually violate what Open Source is about. Look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#evil&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you are not allowed to restrict access from other groups of people. If you were to use such a license, it would not be considered open source. However, you can make it solely available for OS1, you're not required to make it available on other operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="388" LastEditorUserId="388" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T13:52:21.993" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T13:52:21.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="738" CreationDate="2015-07-01T12:33:39.493" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not if you want to meet any accepted definitions of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;the OSI definition&lt;/a&gt;, clause 8 addresses this specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF defines a set of rights that have to be met for them to consider the software free. Right 0 reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restricting the use to a specific operating system violates this right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could frame a license with this restriction in it, but it wouldn't be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T12:33:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-01T13:22:10.843" Score="18" ViewCount="1864" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL is a license designed primarily for software, but it can be used for non-software. The license text has many mentions of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot;, which is ambiguous for non-software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU/FSF claim that GPL can be used for non-software, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;as long as it is clear what constitutes the “source code” for the work&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL references the “source code” of a work; this “source code” will mean different things for different kinds of information, but the definition of “source code” — provided in the GNU GPL — holds true in any case: “&lt;strong&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bold is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, no concrete examples are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using common sense, I interpret this &amp;quot;preferred form&amp;quot; to mean for example PSD/XCF files for images, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DAW project files&lt;/a&gt; and/or MIDI files for audio/music. However, life experience has taught me that law and common sense seldom overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any notable examples of GPL being used in this fashion - to preserve access to the project files? Or any authoritative persons clarifying this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, unlike software, non-software can often be manipulated without &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot;, which raises this hypothetical: what if I take a lone, GPL-licensed image file, create a derivative using Photoshop, am I required to share the PSD file under GPL, in addition to the derived exported image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T12:01:39.620" Title="With GPL, what does &quot;source code&quot; mean for non-software?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="741" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:19:32.423" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of 'source' as something which is created in a manual process and then fed into an automated process to produce the final artifacts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider an open design for a PCB licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'source' in this case would be the schematics, which are fed in to applications that generate the solder masks, pick-n-place instructions, drilling templates, bill-of-materials, and all the other artifacts used by a modern PCB manufacturing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a GPL-licensed design of an object meant to be built using a 3D printer. Again, the detailed mechanical specifications act as the 'source' for the printer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider an animated movie, generated using something like &lt;code&gt;blender&lt;/code&gt;, and licensed under GPL. Again, the inputs which allow &lt;code&gt;blender&lt;/code&gt; to render all the frames of the movie creating the final product act as the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source code for software is edited using a text editor or IDE. The source for non-software items may not be human readable, and may be edited by advanced layout programs, or 3D graphics programs, but it is source 'code' nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:19:32.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="657" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:29:23.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a difficult position to be in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT... Here are some things you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Go on the persons website, look for contact information. Email or phone the person and ask them politely to take down / remove the stolen information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they don't, the next step is to gather evidence. Collect proof that your work has been stolen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hire a lawyer. Assuming the work that was stolen is VERY important to you this is your best line of defense. Although lawyers can be expensive copyright law is complicated and lawyers can help. Show them the evidence you have collected and they can help pursue the theif.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:29:23.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="746" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:36:19.597" Score="-7" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are a land owner. You own a large piece of land containing lots of amazing fossils and other important pieces of history. To share this with the world you decide you want to allow ANYONE to come and discover the history on your property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you apply an open source license such as CC-BY to all of the artifacts they find in the property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:50:41.370" Title="Could you apply a CC-BY license to a piece of land?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-07T22:29:25.863" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="744" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:38:35.363" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A piece of land is not a creative work. People can't copy it. It has nothing to do with licenses to copyrighted works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:38:35.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="744" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:41:05.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't fork land, you can't derive it or even copy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no, you can only normally license something that is your own creation, and land belongs to that of mother nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:41:05.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="750" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:49:25.153" Score="6" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am working on an open source project. I am nearly finished, and about to publish it. I would like to release it to the public so that they can learn and make their own version but I DO NOT want them to republish or sell in ANY way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the CC-BY-NC-ND license the most strict license that I can use to prevent users from republishing / selling / using for commercial use? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T14:54:28.077" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T15:01:08.743" Title="Is the BY-NC-ND license the most strict CC license for my open source project?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="741" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:51:16.017" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From GPL FAQ:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why don't you use the GPL for manuals?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;#WhyNotGPLForManuals&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to use the GPL for a manual, but the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is much better for manuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL was designed for programs; it contains lots of complex clauses that are crucial for programs, but that would be cumbersome and unnecessary for a book or manual. &lt;strong&gt;For instance, anyone publishing the book on paper would have to either include machine-readable “source code” of the book along with each printed copy, or provide a written offer to send the “source code” later.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the GFDL has clauses that help publishers of free manuals make a profit from selling copies—cover texts, for instance. The special rules for Endorsements sections make it possible to use the GFDL for an official standard. This would permit modified versions, but they could not be labeled as “the standard”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the GFDL, we permit changes in the text of a manual that covers its technical topic. It is important to be able to change the technical parts, because people who change a program ought to change the documentation to correspond. The freedom to do this is an ethical imperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our manuals also include sections that state our political position about free software. We mark these as “invariant”, so that they cannot be changed or removed. The GFDL makes provisions for these “invariant sections”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In above quote, text (For instance,...) is bolded  by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T14:51:16.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="747" CreationDate="2015-07-01T14:55:49.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best solution is not to stray into open source/free software at all. CC-BY-NC-ND is already non-free and non-open, but you can go much further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can publish your source all rights reserved. The act of publishing it grants an implicit license that people may read it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Projects that are NC, ND or all rights reserved are not open source projects though, so the premise that you're working on an open source project is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T15:01:08.743" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T15:01:08.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="747" CreationDate="2015-07-01T15:00:30.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would seem so. Many software licenses (and &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; open/free licenses) grant the right to redistribute and change at minimum, so picking one of those doesn't suit. CC licenses aren't made for software, and this is actually an asset to you for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-NC-ND is non-free, non-open, and grants &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; no rights at all. You're allowed to use the work as inspiration, to read the code, and to redistribute without modifications, but nothing else - &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;read the summary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; just say &quot;all rights reserved&quot;. You imply that people can read it by publishing, but if all rights are reserved they can't do anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T15:00:30.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="753" CreationDate="2015-07-01T15:47:41.390" Score="5" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am finishing an open source software. I am about to publish it but I just have to choose the license. I want it to be a CC-BY license but I don't want anyone to republish it under ANY other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I stop future users from just publishing it under any other license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also just found out about the &quot;ShareAlike&quot; attribute. Would this do what I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T19:46:54.607" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T19:46:54.607" Title="How do I stop republication under a different license?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|copyleft|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2015-07-01T16:08:21.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want it to be a CC-BY (as asked in question) and don't want anyone to republish it under any other license, then you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share-alike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Share-alike&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From wikipedia:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share-alike is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copyright licensing&lt;/a&gt; term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar licence as the original&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also visit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; which clearly following terms:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;same license&lt;/a&gt; as the original. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Share_Alike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SA&lt;/strong&gt;, aka Share Alike&lt;/a&gt;:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Share Alike aspect requires all derivatives of a work to be licensed under the same (or a compatible) license as the original. Thus, if a person were to use parts of a BY-SA movie to create a new short film that new short film would also need to be licensed as BY-SA. &lt;strong&gt;The advantage of this license is that future users are not able to add new restrictions to a derivative of your work; their derivatives must be licensed the same way&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also visit these &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-01T17:16:05.847" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T17:16:05.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2015-07-01T16:10:09.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When redistribution of a derivative work is permitted only under the same, or a compatible license, that is called CopyLeft or, in the context of Creative Commons ShareAlike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under such licenses, it is only allowed to redistributed a derivative work if the license under which it is redistributed meets all criteria of the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &quot;tag on&quot; Share-Alike to most of the Creative Commons licenses. In the case of &lt;code&gt;CC-BY&lt;/code&gt;, this would become &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that for some Creative Commons licenses this makes no sense. ND (no derivatives) can't also be SA, because you're not allowed to distribute a modified version at all. &lt;code&gt;CC-0&lt;/code&gt; doesn't place any restrictions, so it doesn't make sense to restrict is with SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest example of this kind of license is the GPL, a copyleft license. It has the restriction that derivative works must be published under the GPL, or a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T16:10:09.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2015-07-01T19:23:20.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking for a ShareAlike clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike licenses force the derived work to redistribute under the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; license, or one which is similar or compatible. However, without other clauses, these licenses won't stop others from producing and distributing derived/different versions of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license that you currently have is the Creative Commons Attribution license or &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt;. The same license with the ShareAlike clause would be the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-07-01T19:23:20.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="757" CreationDate="2015-07-01T19:54:11.197" Score="11" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following scenario&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Project A is originally licensed under a permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the time it reaches version 6, it has built up a strong user base, many of those users producing closed commercial products.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original copyright holders decide that version 7 should be licensed under a copyleft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This decision means that the commercial companies will not use version 7 for fear of being forced to disclose some IP they want to keep private (regardless of any realities).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, someone forks version 6, retaining the original license. They continue to develop it into a competing project which picks up all the old commercial customers (and possibly their funding and technical contributors and other resources).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is allowed by the original license: but it clearly subverts the intent of the original copyright holders expressed in their decision to relicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a natural consequence/risk of initially choosing a permissive license? Is this a problem, or a benefit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-09-05T23:12:03.320" LastActivityDate="2023-09-05T23:12:03.320" Title="Can the ability to fork override the copyright holder's desires?" Tags="|forking|philosophy|permissive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2015-07-01T20:48:44.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's pretty basic: an open source license is irrevocable. Code that was released once under the terms of an open source license can always be used under these terms if someone mirrored it so it is still available. If you change your mind it means that you cannot retract your earlier decision. You only can enforce a new license on new contributions, but if people were content with the old version, they still can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can the ability to fork override the copyright's owners desire? Sure, if the copyright owner changes his opinion (as people do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a natural consequence/risk of initially choosing a permissive license? it is the consequence of each open source license, be it permissive or copyleft. The problem pertains also with a copyleft-license. If you're the only copyright owner, you could relicense (for instance to proprietary if you wish), but your old code could still get redistributed and forked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a problem, or a benefit? This depends on who you ask. The reason why you can't take the rights away is trust of the the users, contributors and forkers. You can't say afterwards its all illegal. This is obviously an upside - but not for the copyright owner. In the end licensing under an open source license is always a decision to give up rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T08:56:49.043" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T08:56:49.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="763" CreationDate="2015-07-02T02:03:32.210" Score="5" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;As can be seen from answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/738/can-i-open-source-a-software-for-a-particular-operating-system&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, a piece of open source software cannot be licensed in such a way that it is only usable on one specified operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, can it be licensed in such a way that it can only be used on open source operating systems? Or on operating systems with a licence compatible with the licence of the software in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:47:35.210" Title="Can software be restricted to open source operating systems?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="761" CreationDate="2015-07-02T02:34:55.740" Score="15" ViewCount="842" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I contribute some code to an open source project, ought I to continue to work on that project? If I don't have the time to continue as a regular contributor, should I avoid starting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an analogy, charities seeking funding often state that one off donations are not useful and they prefer a fixed ongoing regular payment that they can plan around. Does the same apply to contribution of time to an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T03:30:38.857" Title="Should I feel guilty for one off contributions?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="759" CreationDate="2015-07-02T03:04:35.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That highly depends on what kind of a contribution you're thinking of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do something small, like fix a minor bug, add some new documentation, fix some grammar errors, make the code more readable... then you can step away and nobody will probably even notice that you are gone, but they will be grateful that you've made some changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do something big, like create a new feature or something similar, then the contributors will probably expect you to keep working on it in case something goes wrong. Maybe there will be new bugs because of your feature or your feature needs some additional work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no rules and it highly depends on the rest of the contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T03:14:11.220" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T03:14:11.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="759" CreationDate="2015-07-02T03:17:38.077" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;One-off contributions are the most common type of contribution in open source projects. It would be very disturbing to know that, by running an open source project, I'm spreading guilt throughout the world! Fortunately that's far from the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From experience, one-off contributions are almost always useful, even if about half the time the contributions aren't incorporated as-is. This is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributions come from super-users, users who care enough about the project to reach out with free work. Contributors, through their contributions or follow-up conversations, provide a valuable window into what super-users want out of the project. Open source, and free (gratis) software in general, suffer from this problem where creators are out of touch with users. Unlike paid software, there is no easy trail for creators to find out who their users are and what they're like. Market research is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Every contribution is a data point&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One-off contributions are usually simple and small, and something I missed despite this. Why? Because it's an &lt;strong&gt;edge case I didn't consider&lt;/strong&gt;. Because it's &lt;strong&gt;for a platform I didn't port to&lt;/strong&gt;. Because it's a &lt;strong&gt;hole in my testing procedures&lt;/strong&gt;. Because it &lt;strong&gt;scratches an itch I didn't have&lt;/strong&gt;. Because it's an &lt;strong&gt;issue I wasn't skilled enough to resolve&lt;/strong&gt;. Whatever it is, addressing it improves the polish of the project. Polish isn't a single feature, it is smoothing out thousands of rough edges, which is better addressed by multitudes of users providing feedback and sometimes contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, one-off contributions provided much more value than the changeset alone, and they were useful even if I rejected the contribution. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very minor formatting improvements to the readme. This taught me some Markdown tricks and got me thinking about how to better structure the readme to address its readers, to become a better writer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of bug reports around a common module. This alerted me to some poor code design, which motivated me to perform rewrites, greatly reducing the defect rate of future releases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A number of change requests to the build script. Even though I rejected all these because it turns out they didn't follow the instructions 100%, I eventually simplified the build process.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a doubt, one-off contributions helped me steer the project, improving their popularity and usefulness, as well as greatly improving my breadth of skills. If anything, the guilt is all on my end as I had to say no on occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the charity analogy is flawed; I think you've been duped by unscrupulous charities that want to guilt people into donating more. One-off donations are less useful but not entirely without value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T03:30:38.857" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T03:30:38.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1454" CreationDate="2015-07-02T03:21:51.333" Score="26" ViewCount="2303" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a case between Google and Oracle over the use of Java and it's standard library on the Google Android operating system. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/google-oracle-lawsuit-is-damaging-2014-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To recap: Oracle accused Google of copying some of its Java computer code when it wrote Android. Android itself wasn't the issue. Android is different than Java. But Google wanted developers who work with Java, a popular language for web apps, to jump to Android. So it incorporated Java's application programming interfaces (APIs) into Android. This allowed them to quickly convert their apps to Android and it meant that the millions of programmers trained on Java would be familiar with Android, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oracle sued claiming that the APIs were copyrighted. But the judge ruled that APIs are not subject to copyright laws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Friday, an appellate court just overturned that loss, and said APIs are subject to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If many popular APIs become subject to copyright laws and owned by the organizations that created them, how might this affect the projects that develop software applications that use these APIs, and how might it affect the Open Source industry at large?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="395" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2023-05-30T12:21:32.167" Title="What are the implications of the Google vs. Oracle case on the state of public APIs?" Tags="|law|api|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="758" CreationDate="2015-07-02T04:16:12.303" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You cannot do this with an open source license&lt;/strong&gt;. The reason is the same as in the linked question: you cannot discriminate usage, including platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you can construct a license that specifically requires running on open source operating systems, but this license won't be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without using the license, it is possible to construct your software in a manner that makes it impractical to run on closed source operating systems, but without a non-free license, there is nothing stopping a determined programmer from adapting it to run on closed source operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, there was a lot of software that was de facto tied to open source operating systems, because the only desktop operating systems that almost fully implemented Unix/POSIX standards happened to be open source. This is largely not the case today, as standards compliance and embracement of open source by proprietary software has improved across the board, making it easier to write portable software. Chances are good that if your software is useful, someone will port it to closed operating systems anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T04:16:12.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="775" CreationDate="2015-07-02T07:19:27.137" Score="7" ViewCount="731" Body="&lt;p&gt;csharp-sqlite is the only pure-C# implementation of an SQLite client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project used to live at &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/csharp-sqlite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/p/csharp-sqlite&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The last update was 4 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The homepage says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For preparing to google code will be disconnected at August. csharp-sqlite will be moved (exported) to GitHub. Later information will be posted here soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;q=csharp-sqlite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Many people have exported it to Github&lt;/a&gt; but none seems to be maintaining it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been months since this notice got posted, it seems like the maintainer has &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/csharp-sqlite/hMhtJJcyYs0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;moved on to other interests&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is csharp-sqlite maintained somewhere? Are there active forks (maybe renamed) that I haven't found?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2016-01-10T10:27:38.667" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T05:50:52.950" Title="Where is csharp-sqlite now maintained?" Tags="|forking|collaboration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-02T07:33:51.640" Score="4" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking of making one of my projects open source and I am thinking which communication channel to use. Mailing lists are great, but less on interactivity, IRC is high on interactivity, but generally intimidating to newbies and Gitter.im in non-intimidating, interactive and good looking, but it's privately owned and I'm not sure about it's policy regarding charges (It wasn't free until recently IIRC). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I opt for and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit (adding some more specifics):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a small project in C and C++, hosted on Github.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In future, if it picks up, I might be able to find upto 10 regular contributors.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the project would be useful to university students - they might be able to use it as an add-on to their own projects or they can even help in further development.     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The communication channel would help in both support and further development&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="66" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T12:55:36.777" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T13:52:30.200" Title="Which communication channel is favorable if I am making my project open source?" Tags="|community|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2015-07-02T07:51:59.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is primary a personal decision. I would see this more in the software recommendation section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, on newer projects I would suggest to use modern communications. One way can still be IRC or Mailinglists, but anyway I don't use them often. Even if I'm active in an project. They always had something from the 80th's fro me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use Github, you can document communications in the wiki (after they happened). If not or if you like to have a more private version for your open source project, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.gitlab.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gitlab&lt;/a&gt; for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For shorter communications like chats you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://slack.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Slack&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="52" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T07:51:59.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="765" CreationDate="2015-07-02T10:53:09.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should try to use and offer the communication channels where your target audience - user &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; developers - resides. This might be the same channels, different ones, or there may be a certain overlap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not want to force any of them to use one particular channel, especially if they don't like it. But you do not want to force yourself to use an channel that you are not comfortable with, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the GIMP project, we have two main mailing lists, one for development topics, one for user topics. There is also two IRC channels, one for mostly development topics, one for user topics. We also monitor Reddit and G+ and Twitter to some extent, but this is an effort done by individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell anything about whether we are active on Facebook - I have an account there, tried to use it, but couldn't because there was too much data I perceived as noise, and that was without following anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Web forums are done by third parties, without too much involvement from anyone of the core group. This turns out to be a problem sometimes - if I ever want to learn something I never knew about GIMP, or an esoteric reasoning for some GIMP behavior, I read those forums. But the amount of unverified and speculative information there also prevents me from subscribing - I'd probably be banned within hours for being &quot;too negative&quot; for all the &quot;no, this is not quite correct&quot; replies. This is a complaint that happened to someone from the inner circle when doing just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, lesson learned there: if you want to have a forum for your application, &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; run it and &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; make the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the admin for one of the forums, and I leave users there pretty free reign (I stop discussion when they get into ad hominem space, though). But recently, I found myself having a lot less time to check up on the posts - and found the same speculative creep starting there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lesson learned: if you run one communications channel, make sure that &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; keep control of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, my personal favorites are mail and IRC. I know that these feel antiquated to many users now, but I do not see myself using anything else comfortably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T12:49:05.520" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T12:49:05.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="756" CreationDate="2015-07-02T11:26:05.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Permit me to first go for kicking in the open door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to fork can override the copyright owner's desires if and only if it's not the owners desire that the project is forked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses were specifically invented for this. It is possible that not every larger project will play out as this scenario, but it is certainly the intention of the license that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By releasing under a permissive license, you explicitly give permission to do so. With your choice for a permissive over a copyleft license, it is your implicit hope that this will happen. Allowing for this is the reason for choosing a permissive license over a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By creating a project, your intention surely is to create something of value. The type of &quot;buyers remorse&quot; your expressing - discontent with the license you gave in perpetuity to everyone, and not being able to revoke it - seems to be most common when the intention to create value is fulfilled, and it is valuable enough to fork and close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems akin to saying you're willing to give something away for free to anyone who wants it - until people want it bad enough to pay for it, then you don't want to give it away for free anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this a problem, or a benefit? That depends on your goals and reason to release in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T11:26:05.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="758" CreationDate="2015-07-02T11:34:50.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a whole operating system, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people - the FSF included - claim that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the terms of use of the Apple App Store make distribution of GPL-licensed software not legally possible via this store&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a similar store is used by other platforms with comparable terms, and software installation to the platform is only possible via this store, then you can choose a license - the GNU GPL - to prevent your software to be legally installed on those platforms - and probably make it very hard for people who do not care about this, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; still haven't restricted the software, the software was restricted by the people who wrote the terms of use of that app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T21:47:35.210" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:47:35.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="773" CreationDate="2015-07-02T13:38:23.197" Score="10" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was confronted with several projects that claim to be open source. I was happy to find their source code on a public repository but when looking at the license I was wondering why they do not take up official open source licenses but introduce their own proprietary licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this  severely hinders the uptake of these works - as non-experts on licensing cannot evaluate if the proprietary license statements are OK. Hence the conditions of usage of the source code are left ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T17:22:29.983" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:24:45.787" Title="How to deal with unofficial/proprietary licences - are open source projects of this type really open?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="770" CreationDate="2015-07-02T14:22:45.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even a license that is not approved by the OSI, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/71/55&quot;&gt;might still be Open Source&lt;/a&gt;. But, with an unknown license, it is hard to know what implications the license has and if it really supports the basic traits of Open Source. The creators might have intended to make it open source, but unwittingly might have created a license that isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing a common license has another upside: it is more tested as many projects use it and problems are already found and may be tackled in a followup-version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:24:45.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="770" CreationDate="2015-07-02T14:44:12.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beware of projects which claim to be open source but don't have a standard license &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people misunderstand what &lt;em&gt;&quot;Open Source&quot;&lt;/em&gt; actually means. It is a very common misconception that simply allowing people to look at the source makes it open source. It doesn't - that's called &lt;em&gt;&quot;Source Available&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. To be really open source, a project must be licensed under a license which fulfills &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the open source definition&lt;/a&gt;. A very popular license clause some people try but which prevents a project from being open is a non-commercial clause. It violates the right of &quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor, Persons or Groups&quot;. It's far better to just use an existing license like the GPL which theoretically allows commercial use but practically has various conditions which make most common business models these people are usually afraid of completely infeasible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/230/can-i-create-my-own-license-by-modifying-an-existing-one/252#252&quot;&gt;Writing licenses is hard&lt;/a&gt;. Licenses are legal documents. When you are not a trained lawyer and try to write one, it will likely not say what you want it to say or include clauses which are simply invalid or meaningless. So even when the author understood the definition of open source and wants his project to follow this philosophy, their homebrewed license might still be proprietary without them realizing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how to deal with such licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the license is short, you could try to evaluate for yourself if it fulfills the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the definition of free software&lt;/a&gt;. But when the license is longer or hard to understand, chances are that as a legal layman you will be out of your league. The best advise would be to ask a lawyer, but unless you have commercial interest in the software, you likely don't want to afford one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also try to convince the author to switch to an approved open source license. There are so many licenses available that they will likely find one which says what they want (as long as what they want is actually open source). When they still do not want to abandon their own license, you might be able to convince them to at least dual-license the software under both their homebrewed license and a proper open-source license so that people can choose which one to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they also refuse to do that, you might still decide to use it and even contribute to it, but you must be aware that the software might be &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; and that when you contribute, you might be performing gratis work for a proprietary product. What you should do under no circumstances is merge the code into another project. That way you plant a legal landmine in the other project which might not just blow up on you but also on any downstream users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T15:09:00.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="776" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:16:48.317" Score="12" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the hallmarks of the FLOSS philosophy is its  reliance upon  open standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI has the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr&quot;&gt;one definition&lt;/a&gt; of an open standard. The FSF has &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsfe.org/activities/os/os.en.html&quot;&gt;its own&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many bodies which produce &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; standards: OSI, ITU, ETSI, IEEE, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standards most software developers will be familiar with are those which define programming languages such as &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;. But they touch many other things as well (such as ISO/IEC 14496, better known as MPEG-4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standards are certainly 'freely available' in that anyone can purchase a copy - though they are often quite expensive. But are they necessarily &lt;strong&gt;open standards&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MPEG-4 is a prime example, as it is burdened with issues surrounding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing&quot;&gt;patents&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples of such burdened standards? How does a FLOSS developer deal with this in providing an implementation of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T15:50:01.507" LastActivityDate="2024-04-02T03:02:56.163" Title="Is an official standard necessarily an open standard?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="764" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:29:38.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple answer: &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This product has been discontinued by the developer. It is up to the developer to do what he/she said they would do. It is quite possible they lost interest in the project and have moved on to other projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No activity could just mean they have not got around to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advice: stay patient, if you really need to know you could contact the developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T05:50:52.950" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T05:50:52.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="774" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:37:51.070" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://open-stand.org/about-us/principles/&quot;&gt;The definition of an open standard&lt;/a&gt; is quite different from that of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition mostly governs the processes which are used to &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt;  standards. The &quot;openness&quot; applies to the definition process being open to input from any parties it concerns and being transparent to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All it says about &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; an open standard is (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Standards specifications are made accessible to all for implementation and deployment. Affirming standards organizations have defined procedures to develop specifications that can be implemented &lt;strong&gt;under fair terms&lt;/strong&gt;. Given market diversity, &lt;strong&gt;fair terms may vary from royalty-free to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &quot;fair terms&quot; include no commitment to free distribution, which is the cornerstone of the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also nothing which governs the right to create derivate works. That's because in case of a standard, creating derivates is usually not desired. The intention of a standard is to convince everyone to follow it to ensure interoperability. Someone creating a slightly different yet incompatible competing standard would be counter-productive for that intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Open Standards&lt;/em&gt; have nothing to do with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T15:46:11.990" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T15:46:11.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="782" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:41:38.070" Score="21" ViewCount="7337" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I was finishing up an open source software. I needed to license it under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I not want to license my software under a Creative Commons license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are other licenses such as  MIT licenses better for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T21:20:07.087" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T21:20:07.087" Title="Why shouldn't Creative Commons licenses be used for software?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-08-29T11:57:56.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:47:33.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason you may want to use an international license rather than a ported one is for one reason: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is globally compatible. This means that anyone (almost anywhere) is subjected to the terms of your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dispite this ported licenses also have their advantages. For example they have been customized and &quot;hand crafted&quot; to specifically work with you local laws. CC says that ported license SHOULD work internationally but in some cases may not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To read more visit the CC faq page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions%23Should_I_choose_an_international_license_or_a_ported_license.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T18:41:34.113" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:41:34.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="814" CreationDate="2015-07-02T15:51:01.343" Score="6" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I was the owner of an open source project. Many people work in this project.. And many people use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have legal obligation to keep the project accessible to the contributors or the users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:09:40.497" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:09:40.497" Title="In an open source project does the owner hold any responsibility to keeping the project accessible?" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="787" CreationDate="2015-07-02T16:19:44.123" Score="-5" ViewCount="402" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use an open source web browser, but I see lots of different places offering a download of Firefox. How do I tell which one is the correct place to download from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T08:26:37.377" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T12:41:42.497" Title="Where is the safe place to download Firefox?" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-07-02T18:32:38.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="785" CreationDate="2015-07-02T16:23:17.350" Score="1" ViewCount="6024" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have downloaded and installed Notepad++ and it is working fine. I hear it is open source. How do I see the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:10:46.650" Title="How do I see the source code of Notepad++?" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-07-02T17:49:24.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="777" CreationDate="2015-07-02T16:45:45.510" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: because the CC licenses have not been designed for software and source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F&quot;&gt;answered by Creative Commons themselves&lt;/a&gt; in their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific&#xA;  terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important&#xA;  to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many&#xA;  software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to&#xA;  software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works.&#xA;  Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major&#xA;  software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed&#xA;  work with other free software. Existing software licenses were&#xA;  designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of&#xA;  rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T16:45:45.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2015-07-02T16:47:46.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under open source licenses, you are obligated to distribute the source code when you distribute the software. The exact way how you should do that differs per license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have an obligation to keep hosting a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T21:29:49.927" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:29:49.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="781" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:00:05.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source code to notepad ++ can be downloaded &lt;a href=&quot;https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.7.9.2.html/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link is the last bulletin under the download button. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, if you want to edit and run the product you will need to use a compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T17:10:46.650" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:10:46.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="781" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:02:14.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.7.9.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;downloads page&lt;/a&gt; lists a source code download (the last download on the list). The link points to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/releases/tag/v6.7.9.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub release&lt;/a&gt; of the current version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mostly written in C++, so you will need some method of compiling it if you want to run and modify it. Personally, I use MS Visual Studio 2013 because of its multi-language capabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be notified of when a new version of the source code comes out, you can watch the GitHub repository and a notification will be delivered to your GH account whenever it is updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:02:14.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="780" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:02:39.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to know if you are at the correct site is to look for a &quot;clean&quot; link. By this I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no subdomains (ie: &lt;code&gt;firefox.download.ca&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;look for &lt;code&gt;https&lt;/code&gt; in the url&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, this is the correct link for downloading mozilla firefox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T17:17:55.753" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:17:55.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="780" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:04:33.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wherever possible, you should download software directly from the vendor. If that's not possible, use a trusted, preferably secure (HTTPS) alternative source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firefox is made and released by Mozilla, so you should download from them wherever possible. The downloads page is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/new/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some indicators I use to determine how trustworthy a downloads site is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Page written in bad English - &lt;strong&gt;bad&lt;/strong&gt; but not 'leave this site now'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Page served over HTTP - ditto&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Page &lt;em&gt;doesn't have&lt;/em&gt; a HTTPS version (not just they served over HTTP, but no secure version exists) - &lt;strong&gt;bad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;FREE! ABSOLUTELY FREE! NO RISK! VIRUS SAFE!&quot; - &lt;strong&gt;get away from there&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they can't get the name right (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=7&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0CEgQFjAG&amp;amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.downloadfirefoxbrowser.com%2F&amp;amp;ei=Cm-VVdxTpqnsBpGGgKAD&amp;amp;usg=AFQjCNHzYR1m0BY7wnJDE-pFJq2WOv-qWg&amp;amp;sig2=9N5zYyB5v2OZyb7bTwXUkA&amp;amp;bvm=bv.96952980,d.ZGU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Fire Fox&quot;, anyone?&lt;/a&gt;) - &lt;strong&gt;bad&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T12:41:42.497" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T12:41:42.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="790" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:21:40.703" Score="4" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a peice of software that I am developing with a group of friends. Suppose we license our work under a CC license and publish it on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we license our software as open source are we legally obligated to provide access to the source code? If no, why not? Is this just optional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:32:39.007" Title="Am I legally obligated to provide access to my open source project?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="789" CreationDate="2015-07-02T17:32:39.007" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F&quot;&gt;aren't appropriate for software&lt;/a&gt;, in particular because they contain no requirement on the availability of source code. So technically (and legally) you could distribute your software as binaries under a CC license, and licensees would be allowed to modify the binaries, but that wouldn't be open source by any definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, section 2, requires the availability of source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T17:32:39.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="650" CreationDate="2015-07-02T18:05:33.450" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote to the FSF's licensing team about this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Does this [section 13] mean that if I run a *completely unmodified* AGPL-licensed program as a network service, I am *not* required to offer the source code to network users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I received this response (bracketed phrase added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] If you haven't modified the software then you are not required to add that functionality [i.e., to download the source]. Of course, if the functionality to download the source is already in the unmodified software, it will already be there for everyone to enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you use an unmodified AGPL application that doesn't have download-source functionality, &lt;strong&gt;you are not required to add one&lt;/strong&gt; or otherwise offer the source to users. If you do modify the software, of course, you are required to add a mechanism to allow users to download your modified source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical matter, an author who cares about source-sharing enough to license code under the AGPL would probably include a mechanism or link to download the source in the original program. This is kind of an edge case, because it only applies when both (1) you want to use the AGPL software unmodified, and (2) the AGPL software doesn't already include a download-source mechanism. If either of those conditions is false, the software must (or already does) include a way to download the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T18:25:20.390" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:25:20.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="795" CreationDate="2015-07-02T18:23:05.247" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I had a table in a database. This table contains user profile information. Each profile has: Name, birthdate, username, mini-bio, gender. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wanted to make the &quot;mini bio&quot; column open source but wanted to keep &quot;age&quot; closed source, could I do this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-02T20:48:27.670" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T20:48:27.670" Title="Can you open source part of a database and keep another part closed?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="793" CreationDate="2015-07-02T18:35:29.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old &quot;you're the owner&quot; comes up again... yes, you could. The only problem here is the implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To implement this, you simply need to make the mini-bio column publically available, perhaps through a UI on a website. You can keep the rest of the database private. You can then say at the bottom of each page&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mini-bios licensed under cc-by-sa with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it's open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T18:35:29.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2015-07-02T21:05:26.080" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what computable data (google searches give me how to compute and what not), so I'll be using the assumption that your data is like software source code. Please correct me if I am wrong in doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you would like a software license, Creative Commons should be out of the question. Their licenses aren't designed or suited for the use in software applications, but rather for use in the creative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All open source licenses allow sharing and forking. With this, any license that you find as OSI approved should be suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About re-licensing. If you want people to redistribute under the same or compatible license, you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; the ShareAlike clause. This is also known as copyleft. I'm going to assume that you would like people to redistribute under the same/compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; license for a couple of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows sharing and forking, like other licenses. People will be able to modify and distribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't allow others to redistribute under the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:05:26.080" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2015-07-02T21:15:39.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;People used ported versions of Creative Commons licenses because they hoped to take advantage of local legislation that would've supported them in their work. Take this into consideration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take a photo, and there's a specific law in Canada that says that my photo is super special, and is bound to receive rights under the federal law. As such, I may choose an appropriate license that allows me to say distribute, while still receiving the benefits of the local legislation. Making use of local legislation was one of the main motivators for choosing a ported license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:15:39.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="758" CreationDate="2015-07-02T21:19:13.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can get close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a good example of a license that is widely acknowledged as open source. The GPL prohibits linking with libraries that are distributed under GPL-incompatible licenses. However, the GPL makes an exception for libraries that are distributed as part of an operating system. (That's the short and perhaps not 100% accurate version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create license that is roughly the same as the GPL, except not containing any exceptions for system libraries, then you've effectively guaranteed that your own software, although still open source, cannot legally be compiled by the typical system compilers on Microsoft Windows, nor on some other closed source operating systems. Or more precisely, that the output of that compilation cannot legally be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not prohibit anyone from running your software in an emulation environment, though, or with non-standard libraries that provide similar functionality as the system libraries. Prohibiting that goes against fundamental principles of both the Open Source and the Free Software movements and as answered already makes your own application non-free. For example, suppose that your license allows running your application under Cygwin, then the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; makes it clear in points 9 and 3 that if someone wishes to distribute your application along with a minimal version of Cygwin pre-configured to just work, and you wish to word your license in a way to stop that, then your license is not Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="402" LastActivityDate="2015-07-02T21:19:13.230" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T01:46:05.133" Score="6" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Free/Opensource documentation, There are two license widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons BY-Share Alike&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both say re-distribution must be under same license as GFDL is copyleft and CC-BY-SA is with share-alike attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know whether they are compatible with each other or not? Further which should be used when?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T01:59:24.673" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T02:53:07.727" Title="GFDL and CC BY-SA compatibility and Use" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="802" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-03T01:49:36.897" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Related tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/creative-commons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;creative-commons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;creative-commons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/cc-by&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cc-by&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cc-by&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;All CC BY-SA licenses&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T16:36:35.293" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T16:36:35.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-03T01:49:36.897" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licenses." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T09:33:08.907" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T09:33:08.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-03T01:51:07.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T01:51:07.427" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T01:51:07.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-03T01:51:07.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL is copylefted)" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T06:23:55.163" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T06:23:55.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="801" CreationDate="2015-07-03T02:53:07.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 legal code&lt;/a&gt; (version 4.0 has similar wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of:...(iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Creative Commons Compatible License&amp;quot; means a license that is listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&lt;/a&gt; that has been approved by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, no non-CC licenses have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the Free Art license 1.3 is the only “BY-SA–Compatible License” for version 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, you cannot incorporate content from a CC-BY-SA work into a GFDL work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going the other direction is even more restrictive.  From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 4 of the GFDL 1.3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under&#xA;the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release&#xA;the Modified Version under precisely this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite explicit that the only permissible license for a derivative work of a GFDL document is the GFDL.  Section 11 (relicensing) doesn't change anything: it's essentially the &amp;quot;Wikipedia clause&amp;quot;, included to permit the Wikimedia Foundation to change from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you are interested in creating genuinely open content, &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BD-propagande_colour_en.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GFDL should not be used&lt;/a&gt;.  The mechanics of complying with it are extremely unwieldy: in particular, the requirement to include a copy of the 23KB of license text make it impractical for anything but electronic content or book-sized printed works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T02:53:07.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T03:22:49.900" Score="16" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started an open source app, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android&quot;&gt;AnkiDroid&lt;/a&gt;, which had been pretty successful so far, and I have managed to get it translated to 40 languages, but somehow almost nobody in India uses it (usage is very low compared to the number of Android users in India).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a big problem because I launched the app specifically to help students in countries like India. I think it is a chicken-and-egg problem: No Indian users mean no Hindi/Bengali/etc localizations get contributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://crowdin.com/project/ankidroid&quot;&gt;the Crowdin crowd translation platform that we use&lt;/a&gt;. For instance, the app only got popular in Japan after I convinced a Japanese friend to translate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/strong&gt; How can I kickstart a Hindi translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paying a professional translator is out of reach as the project does not generate any money. Is there maybe a kind of &quot;localization exchange&quot; platform where Hindi speakers would translate my app in exchange for me translating their app into Greek? Or any other solution to this chicken-and-egg problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are tens of translation platforms with the same features as the one we are using, so if your answer is to suggest another one, please make sure to explain how it is different, thanks! Maybe a solution could be a translation platform with &quot;points&quot;, where people would earn points for good translations, and give their points as &quot;bounty&quot; to the project+language of their choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T13:51:14.447" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T19:36:40.753" Title="How can I encourage translations for my app?" Tags="|marketing|gamification|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="807" CreationDate="2015-07-03T08:15:30.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you can't find a volunteer to do it, you might have to put in some money and hire a translator. When you do not have the money yourself but you have a sizable community, you might be able to get the money through crowdfunding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T09:22:02.300" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T09:22:02.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="841" CreationDate="2015-07-03T10:14:33.590" Score="15" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently an apprentice software developer at a small company where we develop a piece of proprietary software. I have no major gripes with this (especially not at this point yet), but would prefer to work on open source or free (as in speech) software only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not currently willing to quit my job and work in another field or put all my eggs in one basket and work full time on a project of my own (I am however willing to  join a small startup as long as I get paid a regular wage, though that does of course entail less security and possibly a smaller wage). So my question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a junior software developer, will limiting myself to open source leave me with sufficient job security?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am theoretically willing to relocate, so if the opportunities only exist in a certain area, this is no problem for the scope of this question. I also don't necessarily want you to tell me if I can make it or not, but rather to lay out clearly (and preferably supported by references or relevant personal experience) how much more difficult it is to get a job if you limit yourself to open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:16:20.917" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:16:20.917" Title="Is making a living by working only on FLOSS projects a viable option?" Tags="|monetization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T11:23:16.690" Score="9" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two famous programs by Google are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code-in for pre-university students&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summer of Code for students currently enrolled in a university&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these programs take a limited number of students and many students who do want to get involved and can get involved miss out due to the lack of relevant information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another program I know of is KDE's Season (During October-January).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some other similar programs for students to get started? In what ways can students get involved in Open Source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T16:13:56.407" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T16:13:56.407" Title="In what ways can students get involved in Open Source?" Tags="|collaboration|marketing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-28T08:21:08.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="807" CreationDate="2015-07-03T11:34:46.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu's &lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Launchpad site&lt;/a&gt; is set up to allow you to crowd source translations for your project, even from people who aren't users of it. I even got some contributions years after I stopped using it. So even if you don't use much of the rest of the site (unfortunately you will have to set up imports into their VCS), the translation service is valuable enough by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T11:39:54.457" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T11:39:54.457" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="816" CreationDate="2015-07-03T11:41:05.490" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source projects are backed by many people and organisations, for example Debian is backed by Developers and Ubuntu is backed by Canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask when is it necessary for an open source project to be backed by an organisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="228" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T14:49:48.480" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:38:52.957" Title="When is it necessary for an open source project to be backed by an organization" Tags="|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-07T09:43:48.813" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2015-07-03T11:42:05.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no intrinsic legal notion of “ownership” of a project in the sense I think you mean. A creative work is collectively owned by all the people who made a nontrivial¹ contribution. The fact that one person may have control over the hosting, may be the ultimate arbiter of who gets commit rights, may be considered the charismatic leader, etc. does not make them “the owner” in a legal sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participating in a creative work does not in itself carry legal² obligations³. You have legal obligations only if you entered a contract carrying these obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Participation in an open source project that isn't public domain intrinsically requires entering a contract, namely, the project's &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt;. Most open source licenses are light on pure obligations, they only specify what the contractors are allowed to do. Open source licenses mostly list permissions and restrictions to these permissions, but the restrictions only forbid things that would be forbidden by copyright law in the absence of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be atypical for an open source license to carry an obligation to make the project available, except for one thing: some licenses require that if you distribute a derived product, you also distribute the source. For example, the GNU GPL has such provisions, §3 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; and §6 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt;. The GNU GPL obligations on source distribution can be summarized by grouping them in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may distribute the source code alongside the derived product, under broadly similar terms. With this method, if you shut down the method to distribute the derived product, you are free of any further obligation regarding the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you make a distribution that lacks source code, you must fulfill requests to distribute the source code at cost (or cheaper) for the next three years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code distribution offer is an obligation on the distributor, who need not be a copyright holder and thus might not own the project at all. The easiest way not to incur any obligation is to always offer the source code alongside the derived product (offer it for download on the same server, put in in the same CD pack, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a completely different sense in which you're a project owner, and that's if you get &lt;strong&gt;funding&lt;/strong&gt;. When someone gives you money, ostensibly to work on a project, they generally require you to sign a contract promising some delivery. A funding contract is likely to obligate you to deliver your work (and possibly to coordinate, incorporate and deliver other people's work) at least to the funder. It may also obligate you to distribute the work to the public at large (e.g. if it's a grant to cover distribution costs). There's no standard form for such contracts, so read yours carefully, and get help from a lawyer if you're in doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt; I'm not going to go into what constitutes nontrivial here as it's irrelevant for this question. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;² &lt;sub&gt; I'm assuming “typical” jurisdictions, e.g. US or EU. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;³ &lt;sub&gt; Excluding some very specialized domains which might be subject to restrictions, e.g. knowledge pertaining to nuclear weapons. &lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T11:42:05.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="813" CreationDate="2015-07-03T12:58:04.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can read the whole thing or go straight to the point (look for a TL;DR) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to me, here's a possible timeline for an Open Source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Idea&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You think the world needs something that software can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The initial commits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You start off with a Git/SVN/Bzr/Hg repository and start pushing some code to it. You release v0.1 and show it off on Hacker News.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Userbase development&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some people see that your software is really helpful, and start using it. It gets used as a library over 10 more projects (or you get a userbase of 1k).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributors!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Someone feels that your project is awesome and can be improved upon further. He sends you a pull request. More developers follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Org development&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Over a few months you have several developers working on the project and its derivatives. You all decide to call yourself &lt;em&gt;Organisation X&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Growth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;OrgX has grown - both in terms of number of developers and the scope of software it produces. There are 15-20 developers who were there from the start and care for the org. There are new developers each day wanting to become contributors - to get a feel of Open Source or to develop their skills or to simply develop the application they love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Funds ahoy!&lt;/strong&gt;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you grow, you need funds for various purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To reward developers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To have meetups - not all developers live at the same place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To increase your brand value - users (not necessarily developers) choose products by their brand value. To actually increase that, you need to be an active promoter by sending off swag, ads, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To maintain servers - as you grow in userbase, your hits increase and you need bigger servers to maintain the cost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once in a while donation, kickstarter campaigns are good, but not enough. Hence, at times you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; an organisation to back you. The organisation provides you with funds, visibility and sometimes infrastructure, and you increase the org's visibility (and make them less evil).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; is the time when it's necessary for an open source project/organisation to be backed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T12:58:04.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="813" CreationDate="2015-07-03T13:09:53.963" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No project ever &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;needs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the support of an organisation. Even very large ones can be the work of a single individual, and need neither financial or logistically support. Arguably you could say that every project could proceed that way, though obviously many projects benefit greatly from having organisational backing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T22:38:52.957" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:38:52.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T14:39:18.410" Score="15" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can an open source project get volunteer contributors to document their contribution properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real-world example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've got an open source project with a scripting interface. Gradually we are adding more and more script bindings to it. Obviously, users can only use our script bindings when they know they exist and what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason I did this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I launched a sub-section on our wiki to document script bindings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I created a documentation template for script bindings on the wiki&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I documented all the script bindings I made and a few I did not make using said template.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I added a comment to the source file where all script bindings need to be declared &lt;code&gt;// When you add a script binding, remember to document it on https://wiki.example.org/scripting&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a developer pushed a change adding a script binding, I told them on our IRC channel &lt;code&gt;Thank you for your commit. Remember to document your new script binding on https://wiki.example.org/scripting&lt;/code&gt;. Usual answer: &lt;code&gt;Yeah, yeah, I'll do it whenever I have time&lt;/code&gt;. Usually they don't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When one of the users I support complains about the lack of documentation, I forward said complaint to whoever made the binding or to the IRC channel in general.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of that really helped. The majority of our script bindings are still undocumented. What else can I do to get people to document their work properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T16:37:23.480" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T01:29:43.277" Title="How can I get contributors to document properly?" Tags="|project-management|contributor|documentation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2015-07-03T15:47:15.990" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't merge, unless it meets your demands. All contributions are welcome, but only those that meet your standards are merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that is test coverage, a style guide, or documentation, it shouldn't be merged until it's OK. You can choose to do it yourself when you're merging, or you can turn down the patch until it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the maintainer, you are responsible for the quality of the project. You don't have infinite time (I assume), so turning down a patch because it doesn't meet the standards, and you don't have time to make it meet them is completely acceptable, and in many cases expected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T15:47:15.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2015-07-03T16:29:26.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're missing out on a couple things: motivation, and a suitable quality standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as if your developers aren't totally motivated. Many people (including myself) are interesting in writing the code, testing it and seeing if it works, not doing the paper work all the time for other people. The programs that I wrote in school normally suffered because my teacher would slam me due to the lack of comments, and he did it for the same reason. There was no clear words on to what the heck I was doing. I reasoned that the code made perfect sense - I had good variable names, and clear concise methods. It made perfect sense, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to me. Even with templates, people won't do it, most of the time because they might not see the need. Therefore, I would make it so that we can help them see the need. This would likely be done through increased collaboration between your developers, and perhaps more interaction between the developers and the community. Make them feel appreciated, and show them that what they do is important to many people. It could inspire them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other part, the quality standard, make a level that makes sense, so that developers will make these documents. If their submissions don't satisfy you, don't approve of them, and instead politely reject and perhaps provide feedback, that doesn't give the impression that you want this. Similar to the two stars and a wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T16:29:26.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="824" CreationDate="2015-07-03T20:52:56.880" Score="8" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;During development of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/388/parrotbot&quot;&gt;ParrotBot&lt;/a&gt;, I've ran into many issues in terms of debugging, design and integration. In the chat room, I've received lots of support that has helped me greatly, so that I could continue the project, with ease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've started wondering whether I could possibly be charged for this &quot;support.&quot; Having forked an open source project, could I be charged for this, being the developer of the forked version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T11:59:09.250" Title="Can I be charged for support from the original developers when I fork a project?" Tags="|forking|monetization|support|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2015-07-03T20:58:31.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes and no:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes if....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have previously agreed to pay them for their service. For example if you went to the people helping you and said &quot;I will give you $20 to help me&quot;. Them agreeing to help you under those conditions ( for $20) is a contract between you and the person helping you, you therefore need to pay him / her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No if... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They provide support and then later demand you pay them for helping you. Under this situation you never agreed to pay them and they provided a service. However you can CHOOSE to pay them, but this is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T21:08:21.013" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T21:08:21.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:09:33.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not after you've been given it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When giving you support, the supporter (the dev in this case) has essentially said &quot;I'm happy with the payment I'm getting for this.&quot; If the payment is nothing, fine. They're happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can't suddenly change their mind after giving you the support and say &quot;hey pay me for that now&quot; - it'd be like someone giving you a present and saying 3 months later, &quot;hey you should pay me back&quot; - you wouldn't stand for it, and they have no legal standpoint for it. It's already been gifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is refuse you support until you pay. That's OK under open/free licenses, and it's them wanting a support contract: in return for their help, you give them money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T21:09:33.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:28:48.660" Score="5" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there will be some differences, but are there some points of etiquette that are common to most open source projects and should be taken into account before contributing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T06:56:02.050" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T06:56:02.050" Title="Is there any general open source etiquette, or is it specific to each project?" Tags="|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:31:44.737" Score="15" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;When submitting a contribution to an open source project, whether a bug fix or a new feature, is testing this new code the responsibility of the person contributing it, or can testing be left to whoever decides whether to accept the new code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a division of labour with some people contributing code and others taking care of testing, or must every contributor also be a tester?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:10:17.007" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T00:57:44.140" Title="Whose responsibility is it to test contributions?" Tags="|project-management|collaboration|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="811" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:39:28.170" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One great way for students to get involved in coding is through a program called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hourofcode.com/ca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Hour of Code.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a FREE online course that allows students to enter into the world of coding. It has video tutorials and examples, to teach you the techniques you need. After you watch a video you can then try the process yourself with a helpful ui.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples of online coding websites include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codecademy.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.codecademy.com/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.org/learn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://code.org/learn&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeavengers.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.codeavengers.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T21:47:01.683" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T21:47:01.683" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-28T08:21:08.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:42:39.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When contributing to an open source project you should always make sure your solutions / additions work. This is not only out of courtesy (for the people working on the project) but also for the sake of the project. What is the point of uploading your patch if it is only going to cause problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said if you test your code and contribute it to the project.. The other people can HELP you solve the problems with your addition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T15:00:02.917" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T15:00:02.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="825" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:46:18.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When working on an open source project some things you should always keep in mind before starting the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who is working on what? You don't want to start a project and have 3 people doing EXACTLY the same thing at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How much is each person going to contribute? This is important if you are working in a company and prevents some developers from working 1hr a week while others are working 20hr + a week. Make sure the other members of the group are comfortable working / dedicating X amount of time each day / week / month to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exactly where do you want the project to go? Make sure all members of the group know what EXACTLY what direction you want the project to go. If you don't to this some people may start doing things that are unnecessary to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T22:37:44.857" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:37:44.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-07-03T21:57:07.887" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would believe that testing the project is the responsibility of all collaborators. It should fall under the hands of the contributor, as well as the maintainer. For example, a contributor should never let this go through (code in Python):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import os&#xA;os.system(&quot;rm -rf /&quot;) # Mua ha ha&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributors should be wary of what they submit, but they make mistakes. That's why testing should fall onto the entire group. Each person makes code, and each contributor and person involved in the project are responsible for integrating their contributions within the rest of the project. The project is a &lt;em&gt;collaborative&lt;/em&gt; effort, and all contributors should strive to make it as bug-free as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T14:10:21.500" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T14:10:21.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="831" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-03T22:53:47.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T22:53:47.110" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:53:47.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-03T22:53:47.110" Score="0" Body="For questions about statistical data relevant to the FLOSS movement" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T03:19:05.630" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T03:19:05.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="833" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-03T22:55:11.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-03T22:55:11.993" LastActivityDate="2015-07-03T22:55:11.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="834" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-03T22:55:11.993" Score="0" Body="For questions about the usages and roles of patents within open projects. This can concern protection of projects/patents, and their implications in licensing, projects, and usages." OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:42:06.557" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:42:06.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="825" CreationDate="2015-07-04T01:05:00.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, there is no rule for etiquette, but there is common sense. Most internet communities have a form of etiquette, many explicitly did write it down. And you will find common points: don't hate, don't insult, don't threaten, don't troll. Be nice to others. This is no official common code, but it shows fast that if you actually tolerate bad behaviour your community will go down the toilet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, already the earliest internet communities in the usenet developed such an etiquette, they called it netiquette back then. It later got written down as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1855&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 1855&lt;/a&gt;. This also shares these common points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to get it simple: there is one uncodified general etiquette, but not specific for open source but for all forms of internet communities. Every project itself may have special rules though, you should ask or read documentation (if the specific community wrote their stance down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T07:34:52.683" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T01:05:00.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="818" CreationDate="2015-07-04T01:29:43.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rejecting commits that don't include the documentation is to harsh and will alienate some contributors, as others have pointed out already. But treating them as second-class is something else. Define quality criterias for script-bindings. These include (but not only) the documentation. Bindings that fulfill these criteria get a constant set. Bindings without this can only be used if a certain option is set, can be removed completely with a compiler-flag and lead to a visible warning if used. That probably increases the interest in documenting it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T01:29:43.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-04T09:08:07.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freeware&lt;/a&gt; is computer software that is available for use at no monetary cost, which may have restrictions such as redistribution prohibited, and for which source code is not necessarily available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is free-as-in-beer and could be qualified as gratis. Don't confuse with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/free-software&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;free-software&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;free-software&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free-as-in-freedom&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linfo.org/freeware.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freeware Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T07:12:01.117" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T07:12:01.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="838" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-04T09:08:07.870" Score="0" Body="Questions about freeware, a computer software that is available for use at no monetary cost, which may have restrictions such as redistribution prohibited, and for which source code is not necessarily available." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T03:20:18.510" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T03:20:18.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-07-04T09:31:37.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that isn't the same for each project. A project which maintainers are burdened already with a lot of bugfixing and seldom find time is probably bad of with another patch adding functionality but probably also adding more bugs that is mostly untested. A project which is more or less stable for a long time and has a lot of contributors with enough spare time can handle that a lot better. So, it is overall a question of the policy the project sets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's said, more thorough testing on the side of contributor of the patch can never hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T09:31:37.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="842" CreationDate="2015-07-04T10:40:22.523" Score="7" ViewCount="8513" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNUzilla&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, &lt;strong&gt;they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;emphasized by me&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to understand the trademark license restriction. And how Firefox is not completely free. I would also like to ask: What are the differences between Firefox and IceCat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T16:07:48.513" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T05:06:33.837" Title="Differences between Firefox and IceCat?" Tags="|forking|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2015-07-04T10:47:31.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's heavily dependent on where you are/who you work for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many companies exist solely to sell a product. These kinds of companies tend not to publish their code so that others don't steal their ideas (yes, it's &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; illegal but people will do it). If you're working for one of these companies, your best shot at contributing to open source is getting the jobs writing their utility libraries: since they're not directly &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of the software, only used by it, you might be able to persuade a manager that it'd be OK to release these as open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of company you want to work for is a big company that's well known and has at least one major open source project - Mozilla for example. I say this because these companies are going to give you the most job security - enough people use their product and pay for other things they do that you're unlikely to be let go because there aren't enough customers. Of course, the best way to gain job security is always to be good at what you do so you're essential to your company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not getting enough money, you can always try running your own open source projects on the side, and charging for support or access to extra documentation, etc. This may not bring in huge amounts, though, and you'll need to check with your employer about their side-project policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T15:05:01.857" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T15:05:01.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="840" CreationDate="2015-07-04T10:55:48.267" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem (that also led to the development of Debian's Iceweasel) is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;trademark issue&lt;/a&gt;, that binds the use of the name Firefox and the logo to certain requirements, that were unacceptable to Debian and GNU. For instance in the case of Debian, Mozilla demanded to upgrade the version of Firefox instead of backport bugfixes as Debian does it. These issues are avoided by renaming it and use a different logo. As the creation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Icecat&lt;/a&gt; shows, that is pretty easy and functionality is unaffected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, Icecat (and some Linux distributions) remove a number of files from the distribution, they esteem as nonfree. Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gnuzilla/remove.nonfree?revision=1.9&amp;amp;root=gnuzilla&amp;amp;view=markup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;list of files removed from Firefox for Icecat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally another issue the GNU-project has, is also bolded in your quotation. Firefox allows proprietary plugins and extensions. Moreover, these are distributed through Mozilla's infrastructure and are recommended in the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T08:01:07.327" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T08:01:07.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="847" CreationDate="2015-07-04T11:00:52.337" Score="13" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some code which I would like to open source it (as part of the private repository), however the access should be limited only to the memberships who paid the access fee. Is it going to work? Which license can I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then can I protect from the unauthorised publishing of my code? Should all the people who have access to it sign the non-disclosure agreement, or accepting the specific licence should cover that as part of the purchase access procedure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T12:23:38.220" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T17:12:57.037" Title="Can I open source the code and charge for the access to it?" Tags="|licensing|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="843" CreationDate="2015-07-04T11:06:18.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assumming you release your source under an open source license, basically no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition both demand that source code is accessible to everyone who gets distributed a binary. That source might be distributed with the binary, easily accessible on the web (and the binary contains a pointer to this position), or on request the source code is sent to the requester. The last option can ask for money for mailing it, but not more. That last one is pretty restrictive already today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not distribute much of the binaries (because you have a webservice for example), you can restrict it more. For everyone who don't get the binaries, you can charge for access to the source as you want it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in each case there is a catch: Everyone who gets hold of the source code is allowed to redistribute it under the terms of the open source license you've choosen. That basically undermines your business model of charging for access to the code. If you want this business model, you don't want open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T12:39:47.297" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T12:39:47.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2015-07-04T11:56:54.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is what happened to BitTorrent. They have stopped contributing to the public repository at &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/bittorrent/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sourceforge&lt;/a&gt;, removed all the files apart of the latest version and re-designed website, so all links pointing to source code files were gone. Also the licence was changing in the source code almost every major version (for instance the latest known source code was published as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/4318969/55075&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;).  Further more, they've started new fork called uTorrent which is driven entirely on the closed source. So yes, theoretically you can close it. However I don't think the new more restrictive license would apply to the past already published code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T11:56:54.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="907" CreationDate="2015-07-04T12:15:16.220" Score="14" ViewCount="2847" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/529/55&quot;&gt;the answers to this question&lt;/a&gt; it was shown, that a few licenses exist, that are only open source but not free software or the other way round. Still, most licenses are both or neither, so the overlap is very big.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the communities around open source are distinctive and both strong, and some members of one community even disagree with the other. That seems strange for communities that are so similar in definition and goals. It points to a subtle philosophical difference the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: do such differences exist? And if yes: What are the differences in philosophy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T05:35:45.960" Title="What are the philosophical differences between open source and free/libre software (if they exist at all)?" Tags="|philosophy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="843" CreationDate="2015-07-04T12:18:12.533" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a precedent; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the unreal engine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time ago for a monthly fee and a percentage of your revenue you could use it and have access to the source and discuss it freely between other paying members. It wasn't open source (still isn't) but popular enough that they dropped the monthly fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unrealengine.com/faq#source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ it says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What modifications can I make to the source code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can extend it, modify it, fork it, or integrate it with other&#xA;  software or libraries, with one exception: You can’t combine the&#xA;  Unreal Engine code with code covered by a “Copyleft” license agreement&#xA;  which would directly or indirectly require the Unreal Engine to be&#xA;  governed by terms other than the EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Unacceptable Copyleft licenses include: Software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), Lesser GPL (LGPL) (unless you&#xA;  are merely dynamically linking a shared library), or Creative Commons&#xA;  Attribution-ShareAlike License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Acceptable Non-Copyleft licenses include: Software licensed under the BSD License, MIT License, Microsoft Public License, or Apache&#xA;  License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I share the Unreal Engine source code or tools with others?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can share the source code or tools, along with any modifications&#xA;  you’ve made, with anyone who is an Unreal Engine licensee who is&#xA;  authorized to access the same version of the engine as yours, e.g. the&#xA;  4.x.x version number of your installed build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would call such a setup a &lt;em&gt;source available&lt;/em&gt; license rather than a open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unrealengine.com/eula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EULA here&lt;/a&gt; if you want to base your own license on it. (I suggest you consult a lawyer though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="152" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T17:12:57.037" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T17:12:57.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="848" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-04T20:19:08.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-04T20:19:08.827" LastActivityDate="2015-07-04T20:19:08.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-04T20:19:08.827" Score="0" Body="ShareAlike is a clause intended to force derivatives to share under the same or compatible license. Use the tag when the question regards the clause, or a license or application that makes use of it." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T07:56:59.567" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T07:56:59.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="846" CreationDate="2015-07-04T21:08:09.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the obvious meaning for “open source” is not the meaning that its advocates intend, the result is that most people misunderstand the term. According to writer Neal Stephenson, “Linux is ‘open source’ software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.” I don't think he deliberately sought to reject or dispute the official definition. I think he simply applied the conventions of the English language to come up with a meaning for the term. The state of Kansas published a similar definition: “Make use of open-source software (OSS). OSS is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available, though the specific licensing agreements vary as to what one is allowed to do with that code.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;code&gt;open source&lt;/code&gt; was kind of created because &lt;code&gt;free software&lt;/code&gt; is not a very good term to use in a business world (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#The_emergence_of_the_.22open_source.22_term&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). Open source is a bit less restrictive than free software. Because every piece of free software can be classified as open source software too (taken from the content of their definitions &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/docs/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), it's perfectly normal that the term open source is more widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Free software's essential freedoms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Open source criteria&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derived Works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution of License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Be Technology-Neutral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Comparison&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software's freedom 0 requires OSD criteria 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10; freedom 1 requires OSD criterion 2 (and possibly 7); freedom 2 probably requires OSD criteria 1, 7, 8, and 9; and freedom 3 probably requires OSD criteria 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, every free software is open source software and satisfies all of its criteria. The reverse doesn't have to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, NASA's Open Source Agreement (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/nosa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NOSA&lt;/a&gt;) is approved by the OSI (&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; approved by the FSF because it allows only contributions that are developed by the contributor and doesn't allow contributions that use the code developed by some third party (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NASA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). Therefore, every piece of software that uses NOSA as its license is open source, but not free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum it up, open source means that the users have the access to the source code, but free software means that the users are free to use the code in any way they want. If something is considered as a free software, you can also use the term open source for it. But not every piece of open source software is actually free software. There's that big difference between the terms that confuses people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T06:48:43.057" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-04T21:42:28.180" Score="15" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 says the following about &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a&quot;&gt;Attribution&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &lt;strong&gt;ii.&lt;/strong&gt; a copyright notice;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s say the Licensed Material is an image, and the copyright notice is &quot;© ACME 1999&quot;, which is visible on the image itself (e.g., shown in the image’s lower right corner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;retain a copyright notice&quot; mean that this notice has to stay being part of the image itself? Or may I edit the image to remove the copyright notice from it, and include it in plain text in the attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T14:06:30.517" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T14:06:30.517" Title="Do I have to retain the copyright notice exactly where it’s specified?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-07-05T02:38:31.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, testing the contribution is responsibility of the contributor himself, before submitting a patch, to see if it breaks something or otherwise causes problems when combined with the rest of the codebase. This is true for every programing job, not just open source, &lt;em&gt;testing their own changes is the developer's responsibility&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, once submitted, each project handles it differently. Smaller projects tend to have few developers who share testing and reviewing tasks and everyone reviews everything. Larger projects sometimes have a group that does more reviewing. What each one actually does varies widely according to each one's customs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in every case, there is always the group review, every person involved with the project can look at commits, review code quality, standards, possible bugs introduced and the like. Not just people that actively contribute, just anyone that is used to see the code can spot problems before they go into a release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="306" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T03:31:32.793" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T03:31:32.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="857" CreationDate="2015-07-05T06:16:23.363" Score="0" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most licenses available do not seem to carry any legal weight. Are there any Open Source licenses that do? The old &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; laws used to impose a monetary fine for infringement, but then how do the newer licenses deal with infringement? What resources do I have available if the terms of the &quot;newer&quot; licenses are broken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T16:46:51.310" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T12:25:33.800" Title="Looking for a legally-strong open source license" Tags="|licensing|law|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="851" CreationDate="2015-07-05T07:27:59.543" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 3(a) of the license&lt;/a&gt; bit by bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a copyright notice;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a notice that refers to this Public License;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a list of attributive information which can be provided by the original author. They don't all need to be - you could put up a photo online anonymously and say that it's CC BY-SA licensed, and the only one of the list that would apply would be the URL. But, if the author wants, they can. Whichever the author decides to specify, you must reproduce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B. indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand why you'd have to reproduce the author's notice referring to the license as well as indicating the license yourself... so &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/856/190&quot;&gt;I've asked a question about this myself.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So section 3(a)(1)is about what information you must reproduce. Section 3(a)(2) is about how you must do so, and it says that you can do so in any reasonable way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my interpretation is that if the original media has an embedded copyright statement saying &quot;© ACME 1999&quot;, then you would have to reproduce that, but you don't have to embed it in your modified work in the same way. If you had an attribution section saying the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Photo of ACME by ACME, used under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 license&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://acme.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://acme.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could modify it to say something like this instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Photo of ACME by ACME, © ACME 1999, used under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 license&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://acme.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://acme.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T07:59:46.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-05T07:43:11.050" Score="7" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In section 3(a) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode#s3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution license&lt;/a&gt; (and I think all the others too) it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. &lt;strong&gt;retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a copyright notice;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a notice that refers to this Public License&lt;/strong&gt;;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B. indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. &lt;strong&gt;indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License&lt;/strong&gt;, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it look like that if the original author notes that the work is licensed under the licensed (which they surely will) you must reproduce that notice, as well as indicate yourself that your publication has used material licensed under the license, i.e. that you must mention the CC BY license twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which doesn't make much sense!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is such a &quot;notice&quot; defined?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is an example of one?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should these two clauses be understood together?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T11:08:13.647" Title="Do I have to mention the CC license twice?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="854" CreationDate="2015-07-05T08:38:02.720" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You claim most licenses don't carry any legal weight. But I'm not so sure about this being true. Naturally it is hard to say, how good licenses can be enforced in court, until it happens...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it happened already and courts enforced open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-Violations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popularity and flexibility of Linux lead to the wide usage of the kernel in multiple devices, namely routers. Some of the constructors of these routers used the software in violation of the GPL. Harald Welte - developer of the netfilter/iptables - was starting to take legal action against it. His law-suits lead to acknowledgment of the GPL in court. To better defend his claims he founded an organisation named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org&quot;&gt;gpl-violations&lt;/a&gt;. Some notable wins included cases against Fortinet, D-Link and Skype because of the violation of the GPL. In these cases Welte and gpl-violations won.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gpl-violations also sided with Cybits AG in a law suit against router-producer AVM. Cybits modified the AVM firmware for some goals, and AVM was taking court-action against that. As AVM also used a Linux kernel, FSF and gpl-violations were siding Cybits AG in this case. Also in this case the GPL was acknowledged from the court: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/avm-gpl-violation.html&quot;&gt;https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/avm-gpl-violation.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Software Freedom Law Center&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to the german based GPL-violations the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Law_Center&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Law Center&lt;/a&gt; enforces the GPL in the US. Notable cases here involve the BusyBox-developers against multiple developers of electronic devices that violated the terms of the license and the FSF against Cisco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses are enforcable in court. This as always depends on the details of the case and the jurisdiction you're in, but generally the terms of open source licenses can be accepted by courts. It is possible though, that some terms are unclear or not really working in law, because of the missing knowledge of the authors about law. It is for this reason you should prefer common popular licenses (more tested in court) and licenses that are written with the consultations of lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL seems the license you can be most sure it is enforcable, as that already happened multiple times with differing details in the case and in differing jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally recommendable you look for legal help if you want to enforce the license to your work. gpl-violations as of now seems no longer in action, but in the US you can search the help of the Software Freedom Law Center, also organizations like FSF (and the european version FSFE) might be helpful in case you want to defend your rights given to you from open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T08:38:02.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="856" CreationDate="2015-07-05T11:08:13.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paragraph A refers to text that was supplied by the upstream author “Licensor”. You're allowed to modify CC BY material, but there are a few things that you need to retain: basically the acknowledgement desired by the upstream author (author identification, copyright notice, license notice, warranty disclaimer, project identification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the upstream author will have included a license notice in the material, and all you need to do to fulfill paragraph C is to retain is as per paragraph A. However, in case there was no license notice, you must add one, otherwise the people you are distributing to would have no way to know that the license applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if Stack Exchange was licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (it isn't, it's under CC BY-SA 3.0 which has similar but not identical wording in §3.0), then when sharing a Stack Exchange post, you would need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify the creator through their Stack Exchange account, respecting the identification attached to the bottom of the post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No explicit copyright notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No notice referring to the license inside the work — it's conveyed through the page footer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No warranty disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a link to the Stack Exchange post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in addition you would need to include the text of or a link to the CC BY-SA license, because that didn't come attached to the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: if you print out and distribute CC BY-SA material that you obtained on the web, the material may well come with a notice like “Licensed under CC BY 4.0” with a hyperlink to the license. This notice under paragraph A isn't enough satisfy paragraph C, because the hyperlink won't be present in the printed text, the reader would just see “licensed under CC BY 4.0”. Instead you must include the text of the license, or at least print out the URL &lt;code&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T11:08:13.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2015-07-05T14:57:20.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would definitely be limiting your opportunities, but it's not out of the question. Completely open source jobs exist — but are a tiny fraction of the jobs which involve both open source and proprietary work or are entirely with proprietary software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company I work for employs over 7500 people, and is a pure open source company. (Not everything we do internally is opened, but everything we release is released under an open source / free software license.) We even employ to some people to work almost exclusively on the upstream community projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is rare — these days &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; companies are involved in open source, but usually around a mixed open / proprietary model. There certainly &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; other pure open source companies, but they are much smaller — and even 7500 is not much compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of employees at large software companies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &quot;pure&quot; jobs do exist, but, yes, you are also limiting your options. Particularly, if you start at a company with a mixed model working on the open source side and the company undergoes a reorganization (and companies do!), this could be very... career-limiting. Many startups today are centered around open source by default (side note: hooray! World domination!), but once initial funding runs out and the company is casting for other options, it doesn't always stay that way. You'd have to be either ridiculously essential to the company to say that you want to only work on the open part even when the company has a different vision for success, or willing and able to hop to a new employer when this happens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you're very passionate about open source and free software, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; jobs. I've been fortunate to have them for my whole career. It's a tighter market for sure, but if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want it, it's possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T17:20:17.847" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T17:20:17.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-05T15:06:58.947" Score="22" ViewCount="1505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen that some projects require a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CLA) and some require a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_transfer_agreement&quot;&gt;Copyright Transfer Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CTA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of places using a CLA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/faq/&quot;&gt;Django&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://contribute.jquery.org/CLA/&quot;&gt;jQuery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of places using a CTA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oca-486395.html&quot;&gt;Oracle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.cisco.com/fileMedia/download/0dbb0b8c-abb0-4978-bdc1-158690e21689&quot;&gt;Cisco&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between these two agreements? When should they be used with open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T14:16:01.737" Title="What is the difference between a CLA and a CTA?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2015-07-05T15:33:40.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could look outside corporate life. Universities often open-source their code; in this way their experiments / data analysis can be reproduced by other parties. If academic work suits you, you could look for a position as a scientific programmer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Note that a position in academia does not guarantee that you will be working on open source projects; it still depends on the exact position and who is funding the research.&#xA;(I'm thinking of public/private partnerships here, but have no experience with these; they probably differ per situation anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to work strictly on open-source projects, but doing so does indeed limit your options. The limitation is self-imposed though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T15:33:40.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="860" CreationDate="2015-07-05T16:07:35.620" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://harmonyagreements.org/&quot;&gt;Harmony Agreements&lt;/a&gt; explain the differences quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the difference is that with a CLA the contributor retains the copyright; with a CTA the organisation becomes the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CLA such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/docs/ha-cla-i.html&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; includes a permanent, irrevocable, free (gratis) license grant to the organisation so that they can always use the code you provide them. CLA's also often include a disclaimer and damage waiver, protecting the contributor from legal recourse if their contribution unintentionally causes problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CTA (also: CAA, copyright assignment agreement) instead takes the copyright (and therefore licensing rights) away from the contributor, and gives them to the organisation. This is a more heavy-handed way of ensuring the organisation always has the rights to use your code. CTA's are also used to ensure that the final product is single-copyright, instead of having multiple copyrights across the codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other important point to note about CTA's is they often &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; include a disclaimer or waiver, which could &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; leave contributors open to legal attacks if their contributions cause problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no defined way one should be used over the other. It depends on how the organisation wants to maintain their relationship with their community: some people hate CTA's, others say that CLA's result in legally messy products. The organisation also has to acknowledge that if they use a CLA, they likely won't be able to sue if something goes wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T14:16:01.737" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T14:16:01.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="879" CreationDate="2015-07-05T22:43:26.437" Score="8" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't quite grasped the implications of forking a licensed project to public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming that a similar license should be kept, but what happens if that's not possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am providing an example (as suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/83/michael-schumacher&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Michael Schumacher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in the comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Font Awesome&lt;/a&gt; is under the &lt;em&gt;SIL OFL 1.1&lt;/em&gt; license. If one is to fork it in order to extend or modify the font glyphs and thus modifying the font files, would the forked project be under the same license through a &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL#8e6f58a5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;DerivativeRenaming&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; clause? How should it be phrased in order to keep complying with this license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, since the license seems to specifically refer the owner in its &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL#83afb016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;usage terms&lt;/a&gt;, would this usage still be appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already forked projects, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bokmann/font-awesome-rails&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;font-awesome-rails&lt;/a&gt;, refer to the exact same license, but I found none that actually altered the actual fonts, therein lies my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="421" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T18:34:27.603" Title="When does a forked project require a license?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="863" CreationDate="2015-07-05T23:19:24.413" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;An Open Source license allows forking and redistributing with changes under the (at least) same license under which you got it (though there may be trademark issues). This is one of the fundamental requirements to be Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the same license is not necessarily required but depends on the license of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license like GPL requires that the same license needs to be used by the fork. Unless there is a clause (exception) that lets you release the fork under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more permissive license could let you even close source the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-05T23:39:51.690" LastActivityDate="2015-07-05T23:39:51.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="807" CreationDate="2015-07-06T08:36:14.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally managed to find your instructions for translating the app:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/ankidroid/wiki/Contribution#Translate_AnkiDroid_into_your_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/p/ankidroid/wiki/Contribution#Translate_AnkiDroid_into_your_language&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not see this page mentioned at any place any of your users will easily get to (the bottom of any web page is no such place - I know that you link there from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ankidroid.org/docs/help.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://ankidroid.org/docs/help.html&lt;/a&gt;). It could be that they are simply not aware of the fact that AnkiDroid can be translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an open source project, it is crucial for contributors to know that they can contribute, what they can contribute, where they should contribute it and how. The Wiki pages is quite comprehensive for the what and where and how to contribute, so a possible conclusion is that the user do just not know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T11:40:07.830" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T11:40:07.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="846" CreationDate="2015-07-06T09:25:00.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, the following part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot;&gt;Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software article&lt;/a&gt; sums up the difference (emphasis by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing&#xA;  campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives&#xA;  by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising&#xA;  issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other&#xA;  supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and&#xA;  social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open&#xA;  source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. &lt;strong&gt;The term “open&#xA;  source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only&#xA;  on practical values&lt;/strong&gt;, such as making or having powerful, reliable&#xA;  software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since&#xA;  then, and they make the same association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they&#xA;  stand for views based on fundamentally different values. &lt;strong&gt;Open source&#xA;  is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.&lt;/strong&gt; For&#xA;  the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative,&#xA;  essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy&#xA;  of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software&#xA;  “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is&#xA;  an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T09:25:00.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T10:32:44.500" Score="14" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a patent expires people are free to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this means, that the technology described in the claims are then Open Source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T11:41:06.750" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T12:48:34.303" Title="Is technology in expired patents open source?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="867" CreationDate="2015-07-06T10:43:46.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. These are public domain, which can be interprated as kind of Open Source, but in fact it's just public knowledge as the wheel is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T10:43:46.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="867" CreationDate="2015-07-06T11:36:18.783" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to differentiate here. A patent describes a technology on a general level. And patents can be implemented, by hardware or software. The owner of a patent can restrict implementations as he sees fit. The implementor has independent of the patent a normal copyright on his work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_and_free_software&quot;&gt;This is a problem for open source&lt;/a&gt;, as the open source licenses usually only covers copyright (well-known exceptions are GPL 3 and Apache 2, that address patent issues), a patent still can restrict the rights and make it in practice not open source. An example is the original bzip-implementation that was replaced with bzip2 to avoid conflict with a patent from IBM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent-owner can also give a patent-license, that allows similar rights to open source. This is done from some companies in patent pools, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network&quot;&gt;Open Invention Network&lt;/a&gt; is an example for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what happens if the patent expires? That means the technology covered can now freely be implemented. Existing implementations are still covered by their copyright. But the expiring of the patent might open the door to an open source implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; The patent itself and existing implementations don't become open source, but it allows for open source implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T12:48:34.303" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T12:48:34.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="872" CreationDate="2015-07-06T12:54:23.503" Score="13" ViewCount="2388" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU project has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html&quot;&gt;list of free GNU/Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt;. But it lists only a few Linux distros, although hundreds do exist. Even more, very common distributions like Debian, Linux Mint or Gentoo aren’t listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the list so restricted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T16:44:53.327" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T15:35:53.033" Title="Why are only so few Linux distributions listed by the GNU project?" Tags="|fsf|operating-system|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2015-07-06T13:06:51.403" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the page you linked is a link named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;why we don't endorse some common distributions&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you will find this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're often asked why we don't endorse a particular system—usually a popular GNU/Linux distribution. The short answer to that question is&#xA;  that they don't follow the free system distribution guidelines. But&#xA;  since it isn't always obvious how a particular system fails to follow&#xA;  the guidelines, this list gives more information about the problems of&#xA;  certain well-known nonfree system distros.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To learn more about the GNU/Linux systems that we do endorse, check out our list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free GNU/Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except where noted, all of the distributions listed on this page fail to follow the guidelines in at least two important ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They do not have a policy of only including free software, and removing nonfree software if it is discovered. Most of them have no&#xA;  clear policy on what software they'll accept or reject at all. The&#xA;  distributions that do have a policy unfortunately aren't strict&#xA;  enough, as explained below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The kernel that they distribute (in most cases, Linux) includes “blobs”: pieces of object code distributed without source, usually&#xA;  firmware to run some device.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words to be listed under GNU the distro must shun all non-free software. This seems to include not telling the user how to install non-free software on the distro if you examine some of the specific examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T15:35:53.033" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T15:35:53.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2015-07-06T13:18:56.380" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;They only list GNU/Linux distributions that follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html&quot;&gt;GNU FSDG&lt;/a&gt; (Free System Distribution Guidelines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the software (as well as the documentation, fonts etc.) is licensed under an appropriate FSF-approved license is one condition, but it’s not the only one. That’s why even a GNU/Linux distribution that only ships with free/libre software/information might not get listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another guideline, as example: The distribution is not allowed to &quot;encourage&quot; users to obtain &quot;any nonfree information for practical use&quot; (which includes software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice this could mean that the distribution project’s server may not host a repository that contains proprietary software (or free/libre software that downloads proprietary software from somewhere else). (This is the reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html#Debian&quot;&gt;why Debian is not listed&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T13:23:58.990" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T13:23:58.990" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T16:35:16.787" Score="4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a creator of a FLOSS project, what do I need to know about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, Github is often forced to remove sites based on DMCA requests. The requests are posted at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/dmca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/dmca&lt;/a&gt; and make for some interesting reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the take-down requests are based purely on piracy of source code, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/a7b4fcb808d2a01b2b1c24fb64d789597238b288/2014-07-11-MPAA.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; required that an open source project be taken down because it &lt;strong&gt;enabled&lt;/strong&gt; piracy of copyrighted assets (via BitTorrent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was part of the campaign by the MPAA to shut down &quot;Popcorn Time&quot;, a campaign which apparently has not succeeded (as any search for &quot;Popcorn time&quot; in google will quickly show). But the original developers &lt;strong&gt;were&lt;/strong&gt; forced to close out their project, despite this comment on &lt;a href=&quot;http://getpopcornti.me/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Popcorn Time as a project is legal. We checked. &lt;strong&gt;Four Times&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What lessons do FLOSS developers need to take away from this? Which sections of the DMCA are most likely to bite them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this question, and stack exchange in general, is not encouraging  or supporting piracy. But the DMCA is often used for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;other purposes&lt;/a&gt; (such as stifling competition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T16:41:17.013" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:56:54.447" Title="How does the DMCA affect me as a FLOSS developer?" Tags="|copyright|dmca|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-07-08T05:02:04.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="807" CreationDate="2015-07-06T16:43:55.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/809/46&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, Philipp mentions that you may have to give-in and just hire an actual  translator if you are unable to get a volunteer to do the job. There are some ways in which you may be able to improve your chances of getting a volunteer, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People volunteering their abilities know that they won't be getting paid, but they may still want something to recognize their contributions. There are several ways that you can do this. If your app has credits, put something in it that recognizes the people who helped translating app. You may want to give even more special recognition for those who translated into certain languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way that you may be able to get a volunteer is to specifically ask someone (and possibly make a trade). I bet that here on SE there are people that speak Hindi. I'm sure there are SO chat rooms where you can find Indian developers, some of whom may be able to translate your app. They may even be willing if you offer special recognition or your services in translating an application that they may have made into Greek. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="46" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:48:46.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="876" CreationDate="2015-07-06T16:55:28.177" Score="8" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most people who work in software development have signed an Intellectual Property Rights Assignment notice whenever they start a new job. The purpose of these assignments is to ensure the employer obtains ownership of anything the employee creates which would either attract copyright, or be suitable for patenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although they are &lt;strong&gt;meant&lt;/strong&gt; to cover work done on the employer's behalf, they are nearly always written fairly broadly, effectively covering &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt; the employee creates during their period of employment (even when 'off duty').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication of this is that a contributor to your project, who submits their contributions under a CTA (Copyright Transfer Agreement) might not actually &lt;strong&gt;own&lt;/strong&gt; the copyrights they are assigning to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of this having been tested in court, or of cases where this has caused problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to craft a CTA to work around this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T21:03:36.080" Title="Does an employee have the right to use a CTA?" Tags="|law|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="875" CreationDate="2015-07-06T17:40:50.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason these agreements exist is to avoid the issue outlined in the first few paragraphs of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/matters/matters-9608.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;: that developers may well still own the rights to software they develop after employment, and could in theory sell on to rival companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In theory,&lt;/strong&gt; the looseness of many of these agreements (be they CTA's or IPRAA's) means that the employer owns all software their employees create while working for them, whether in their free time or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;in practice&lt;/strong&gt;, many companies will not enforce this on software created in the developer's free time, because they want to keep the developer. Think: if your company won't let you sell this software you've got an idea for, but this other company will, would you not move to said other company and develop it while you're in their employment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, IANAL, but I've heard tell this is possible: if your employer is OK with you working part-time somewhere else as well as for them (though many aren't), then you can create a skeleton company. You then develop your software as part of a project for that company, so your first employer doesn't own the rights. Your skeleton company sells the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to craft a CTA so this is possible would be for the employer to make it less loose, and only include software developed in working hours for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T17:40:50.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="281" CreationDate="2015-07-06T18:03:49.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(based on reading the license as a layperson and non-native English speaker)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, you don’t have to fix a broken URI.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the URI no longer points to the licensed material, you don’t have to supply it (nor any other URI that still/now does point to the material).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a1A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3(a)(1)(A)&lt;/a&gt; uses this wording:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;① &lt;strong&gt;retain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;② &lt;strong&gt;if it is supplied by the Licensor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;③ &lt;strong&gt;with the Licensed Material&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;① The word &quot;retain&quot; makes clear that you have to provide the URI &lt;em&gt;as specified&lt;/em&gt; by the Licensors. So if they only specify &lt;code&gt;http://example.org/my-work&lt;/code&gt;, you have to use &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; this URI, not any other URI (strictly speaking, not even &lt;code&gt;https://example.org/my-work&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;② The word &quot;supplied&quot; again makes clear that it’s only about the URI which they specified themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;③ The words &quot;with the&quot; narrow it down to the URI that is specified in (or next to) the work. So you don’t have to look elsewhere to find a suitable URI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, nowhere does &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Attribution&quot;&gt;3(a)&lt;/a&gt; require that you would have to keep your attribution updated. You have to make your attribution once, when you share the material. What the Licensors do after that (e.g., change their names, change their website’s domain, or even remove the license) is of no concern to you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The only exception is &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3(a)(3)&lt;/a&gt;, but this requires you (if the Licensors request it) to &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; parts of the attribution (e.g., to remove the broken URI), not to &lt;em&gt;replace&lt;/em&gt; them (e.g., to add the new URI). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T00:42:48.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T00:42:48.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-07-06T18:16:19.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a team effort, with testing needed by both the contributor and integrator. But a high quality project begins with high quality contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is too easy to confuse contributing to a FLOSS project with a 'hobbyist' approach. But contributors should remember that any contribution they make is also a very public entry in their own resume - whether they work in the field or not. Even if applying for a non-programming job, you might want to cite your involvement in project 'X' as a showcase of your other abilities and interests - and employers are likely to look at it to judge your skills in teamwork, communication, and diligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, it behooves us to treat our FLOSS contributions with the same seriousness that a professional developer would. That means that the contributor should consider themselves responsible for (at a minimum)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code they are contributing, including following the project's coding standards and conventions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High quality documentation of the code, including good commit messages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High quality 'user' documentation - both in terms of mechanics and usability&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Automated test cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thorough pre-submission testing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short everything about each contribution should be 'ready to go'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other side of the coin, the project committers are also responsible for integrating contributions. That means they need to test the release under preparation as a whole, and deal with ensuring that contributions from disparate contributors 'play well together'. They are responsible for generating the release notes and creating and testing the binary distributions (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T18:16:19.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="863" CreationDate="2015-07-06T18:34:27.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a fork of a project, that fork will have the same copyright license as the original project.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Only the owner of the copyright can give away some of his rights by means of a copyright license. In an open source license, the common rights that are given away are the right to make copies, to make changes and to (re-)distribute either the original or the modified work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the rights that a copyright owner has is the right to determine if a (modified) work can be distributed under a different license than the original one. Licenses that don't allow a covered work to be distributed under a different license are commonly called copyleft or ShareAlike licenses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The SIL OFL 1.1 license has a ShareAlike clause, which means that if you fork a project with the SIL OFL 1.1 license, then your fork must use the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'DerivativeRenaming' clause in SIL OFL 1.1 means that if you change the appearance of the font, you must also call the font something differently. This is usually done to avoid confusion, so that users will know exactly what a letter A looks like if they talk about Font Awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T18:34:27.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="882" CreationDate="2015-07-06T20:34:56.970" Score="10" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendefinition.org&quot;&gt;Open Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Data is hence, any data that is open, according to this definition. So, then this leads me to the question: What is Open Knowledge, and how is it different from Open Data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T15:12:32.893" Title="What is Open Knowledge, and how is it different from Open Data?" Tags="|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="881" CreationDate="2015-07-06T20:34:56.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://okfn.org/opendata&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Knowledge Foundation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, doable, and used.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then what does this mean? The foundation goes on to list three key points about “openness”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open data are the building blocks of open knowledge. &lt;strong&gt;Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, usable and used.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Availability and Access&lt;/strong&gt;:  the data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reuse and redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;: the data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution including the intermixing with other datasets. The data must be machine-readable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Universal Participation&lt;/strong&gt;:  everyone must be able to use, reuse and redistribute — there should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, ‘non-commercial’ restrictions that would prevent ‘commercial’ use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, we refer to data as being of a certain situation, and knowledge when many agencies and groups of the public recognize and understand this data. The information is useful, available, and open to the public for their private or commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdr.undp.org/en/2014-report&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;United Nations Human Development Report as an example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It’s easily available&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The report is literally a click away from being in your hands. There’s no access restrictions put into place by the UN Development Programme. The PDF document is easy to read, access and index.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;You can share and redistribute these reports&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/copyright-and-terms-use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms Of Use&lt;/a&gt;, the content is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons International Organizations License&lt;/a&gt;. It says that you’re allowed to share the information, and adapt, or build upon it for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It’s available for any use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license goes on to say that you can use the data, even commercially. I’ve used these reports many times, particularly in my school research projects in a multitude of subjects, such as English, Geography and the like. The UN Development Programme doesn’t restrict or discriminate under anyone, and everyone can freely use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These development reports are a perfect example of Open Knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples of things that aren’t Open Knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The crumpled up note that you secretly passed with your girlfriend at school earlier today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That super secret document you gave to your boss about your company’s newest, fanciest phone that will beat Apple's iPhone and Samsung's whatever phone they have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The game article you sent to the newspaper the other day, only allowed for use for educational purposes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The prescription numbers of your recently acquired glasses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T15:12:32.893" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="972" CreationDate="2015-07-06T20:52:23.073" Score="8" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linux comes most often to your computer as a distribution. This distribution contains a lot more than only Linux: Browser, Editor, Games, Terminal, Spreadsheet and so on. But nearly all software in distributions is open source. Why is open source software often spread via distributions? There is no Windows-distribution, with all the important software like Office and so on, so why is it so common for open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T13:38:19.313" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T13:38:19.313" Title="Why is open source software often shared via distributions?" Tags="|software|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="883" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:06:14.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Windows software is as a whole far more closed source than Linux software is, especially the &lt;em&gt;essential software&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Windows itself is sold-source. The code is sold to people who can pay. To use the OS you require a license that you've paid for. The essential software, such as Office, is also proprietary, licensed, paid software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's more common to distribute open source software in a package because it's much easier. With closed source software you'd have to get explicit permission from every software author; with open source the license just allows you to do it. Think this piece of software goes well with this one? Sure, bundle them and distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T21:06:14.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="883" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:11:49.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linux distributions use package management tools to handle what you describe. It is very difficult to manage the legal hurdles involved in packaging and redistributing software that is not free, or is not allowed to be redistributed under broad terms. No one can put Microsoft Office in a package manager except Microsoft, because Microsoft won't give anyone a license to re-sell or re-distribute their software in that fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a lot of smaller-community and commercial progress in package management for Windows in the last ten years or so, but it will be a very long time before there is anything equivalent to the systems for operating systems that are themselves open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing package management systems for Windows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://chocolatey.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chocolatey.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ninite.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ninite.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://steampowered.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://steampowered.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potential package management functionality in Windows 10: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.howtogeek.com/200334/windows-10-includes-a-linux-style-package-manager-named-oneget/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.howtogeek.com/200334/windows-10-includes-a-linux-style-package-manager-named-oneget/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T21:11:49.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="888" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:24:36.487" Score="32" ViewCount="3785" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused by copyright notices on open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that a particular project is covered by a very permissive license, such as MIT or BSD.  A copyright notice appears from the company that originated the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's say that the project leader leaves the company, but continues to contribute to the project.  Should s/he add a new copyright notice, to indicate that portions are copyright from the original company and portions from the author no longer employed by that company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that anyone who touches a file essentially invalidates the copyright claims of anyone prior, because the file becomes a &quot;new creative expression&quot; based on those modifications.  How is the copyright supposed to be managed in a legally (and morally) robust manner as more and more people contribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="434" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T21:27:27.267" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T22:05:15.213" Title="Copyright and Contributing to an Open Source Project" Tags="|licensing|contributor|copyright|collaboration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="889" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:37:51.533" Score="27" ViewCount="3375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I share small snippets of code with friends, and would like to post them online for others to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure of the best license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking MIT, but it includes this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These code snippets are not very big, not enough to justify adding an entire license screen. And there is no &quot;read me&quot; or &quot;license&quot; text file distributed along with a mobile app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to change the user interface of my app, just so I can turn three lines of ugly code into one line of clean code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an open source license that does not require the license to be bundled with binary copies of the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps I should use MIT and delete that one clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-06T21:38:51.507" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T11:48:50.537" Title="License for code snippets?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|mit|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:51:51.593" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is where the problem (or advantage) of multiple copyright owners comes in with open projects. There are two scenarios, based on whether a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) is required to contribute to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a CTA is required to make contributions, then the issue is moot as the organization running the project becomes the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, a common practice is to have multiple copyright lines within each affected file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus you might see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright 1998..2015 Myorganization&#xA;// Copyright 2013 Fred Coder&#xA;// Copyright 2011 A N Other&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indicating that the file has been modified throughout its life by the official 'organization', but has also been touched by two different developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright in this case exists in the entire file, as a combination of all contributions, rather than in specific lines of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to have a single file (often named something like  &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTORS.txt&lt;/code&gt;) in the project root which identifies everyone who has some copyright claims to the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T21:51:51.593" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="887" CreationDate="2015-07-06T21:58:52.443" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like you want a permissive license. Perhaps, you could use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org&quot;&gt;unlicense&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From their site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, you would be able to license your code, placing little to no restrictions on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T21:58:52.443" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="886" CreationDate="2015-07-06T22:05:15.213" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;By default under international copyright law, all copyright is owned by the person who wrote the code (or owned by the company they work for if they are an employee, or owned by the client who hired them if they are a subcontractor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With open source projects, there can be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people who own copyright on a project. This means all of them own the copyright and any copy must be authorised by all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no one person who owns copyright, the original company who previously owned all the copyright now only owns part of it and therefor they have to get permission from all other contributors to make copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having a well written license (such as MIT or GPL) attached to the project all of the copyright holders have clearly given the world permission to make copies with certain restrictions, and this means that anybody can do so without having to ask for permission from everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time this really becomes a problem is when you do not want to comply with the restrictions of MIT or GPL. For example the VLC project tried to put their product on Apple's Store but this isn't allowed in their license and somebody sent a legal threat to Apple, resulting VLC being from the store. Since the license doesn't allow deploying on the store the only way to do so is with written permission from &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; who has ever contributed to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another (less common) way to approach the issue is for all contributors to assign copyright to the company/foundation who runs the project using a &quot;Copyright Transfer Agreement&quot;. This way there is only one copyright holder and they can do anything without having to comply with the license, since they own all of the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this is the Java project which was created by Sun and later purchased by Oracle. It is released under the GPL license, but Sun/Oracle also sell the product under a proprietary license that does not include GPL's &quot;copyleft&quot; restrictions. They need to own all of the copyright to take that approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something else to keep in mind is most projects use a good version control system such as Git and this allows you to know exactly who wrote every line of code in the project. This can be used to find who wrote some code so you can contact them for permission, and if they don't respond you could delete all of their code (and also any other code that &quot;derives&quot; from their code... talk to a lawyer to find out exactly how that works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T22:05:15.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="887" CreationDate="2015-07-06T22:12:46.607" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that you don’t need a typical FLOSS license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to let everyone use the code snippets and allow them to do whatever they want to do with them (which includes publishing these snippets themselves without explicitly granting others the freedom to use these), without having to attribute you and without having to reference a license, then you could release the works into the &lt;strong&gt;public domain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is not possible in all jurisdictions, there are legal tools that try to &quot;simulate&quot; the public domain to the greatest extent allowed by the respective laws. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A popular one is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC0 1.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (it’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#CC0&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero&quot;&gt;not approved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would just have to include something like this somewhere, e.g., in your site’s footer or your Stack Overflow profile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the extent possible under law, I have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to code snippets (posted on &lt;a href=&quot;http://example.com/&quot;&gt;http://example.com/&lt;/a&gt;) to the public domain worldwide. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot;&gt;CC0 1.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot;&gt;what CC and the FSF recommend to write&lt;/a&gt;; it’s, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#Why_do_some_works_indicate_the_jurisdiction_from_which_the_work_is_being_published.3F&quot;&gt;recommended to mention your jurisdiction&lt;/a&gt;. CC offers &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/&quot;&gt;a tool that outputs a possible snippet.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now everyone can use the snippets in any way (but it &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_about_other_IP_related_rights.2C_such_as_trademark_and_patent_rights.3F&quot;&gt;doesn’t affect&lt;/a&gt; your possible trademark or patent rights), without having to reference CC0 1.0 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#Does_CC0_require_others_who_use_my_work_to_give_me_attribution.3F&quot;&gt;without having to attribute you&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T14:28:36.607" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T14:28:36.607" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-07-06T22:49:55.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, you cannot.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A licence is a way for a copyright holder to grant certain rights to others that are otherwise reserved.  You don't own any copyrights to any stuff you just download from the internet, unless someone specifically transfers their copyright to you (e.g., what IEEE requires for scientific papers in order to publish them -- the authors must assign their copyright to IEEE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make sufficient changes to the code, then you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to choose a different licence for your changes.  But should you?  The issue with the BSD/Linux controversy in regards to Atheros comes down to the ethical considerations -- the GPL advocates claim that BSD licence allows companies to not release the source code (even though a lot of companies do, since it's cheaper that way, and a lot of diffs get incorporated into all BSDs that originate from these companies like Netflix, Apple and even Oracle), yet instead of playing nice with the BSD guys themselves, Linux guys do the exact opposite than what all of those commercial companies are actually doing -- they (re)licence their changes to GPL, making sure that all such changes are forever barred from going back to the BSD projects.  (Specifically, the conflict was fuelled by the fact that such re-licensing has occurred when only trivial and non-copyrightable changes have been performed on the existing code.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T22:49:55.203" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-06T22:58:33.153" Score="6" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a BSD developer, and I prefer to have a clear ISC licence at the top of every file that is fully self-sufficient in regards to the exact terms that I'm imposing on my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a variation of the BSD licence that I could use for an open-source service with a web-interface similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mdoc.su/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mdoc.su&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://ports.su/net/mrtg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mrtg&lt;/a&gt;, such that most or all deployments would be prohibited from removing a backlink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I perhaps just add some such condition between the &quot;Copyright&quot; header and the terms of the ISC licence?  What would be the shortest language that I could use, to ensure people comply easily, but also to ensure that it's not overly bothersome, either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T22:27:34.853" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T22:27:34.853" Title="Is there a simple web licence for a backlink?" Tags="|licensing|bsd|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="811" CreationDate="2015-07-06T23:00:18.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to join the development and commit-notification mailing lists for an Open Source project you have an interest in, subscribe to notifications on GitHub if applicable, join their IRC channels, if applicable. Become very familiar with using the application and offer assistance to new users attempting to use the product and/or experiencing issues with it. Carefully review the project's bug-tracker and look for issues people are experiencing and proposals for new functionality. Watch commit notifications and observe how the project changes over time, how new features are developed, as well as feedback and revisions to patches and commits. Step one is to &lt;em&gt;observe and learn&lt;/em&gt;, and this is critical. You should know a bit about what's going on before you just jump in. Ask questions, but be careful with assumptions. Read through the code comprehensively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a period of learning, it's time to begin contributing. Find a small issue you're capable of fixing, and submit a patch or pull request. Learn from the feedback you receive and avoid being defensive about your code. Follow the style and guidelines of the project. Engage in discussion on the development mailing lists, IRC, and bug trackers. As time goes on, you can begin working on bigger projects and more complex functionality. These communities are an easy place to gain respect and &quot;move up the ladder&quot; if you are a helpful contributor to the community, and behave in a respectful and respectable manner in the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Politics differ for each project, but it is often important to be politically-sensitive and aware. Much like a project at a for-profit company, sometimes politics are unavoidable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also contribute without actually writing code--improving documentation can be a good place to start! This is just my perspective from my contributions to the Open Source community (including acting as maintainer of a small-but-active OSS project with many community members several years back), and I welcome others to share theirs as well :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastActivityDate="2015-07-06T23:00:18.567" CommentCount="2" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-28T08:21:08.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="897" CreationDate="2015-07-06T23:35:11.217" Score="12" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative has created the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; to define what open source is. Also it has set up a formal process to approve licenses to be open source. Now, does a license need this formal approval to be an open source license or is conforming with the definition enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T00:15:12.283" Title="Does a license needs to be approved by the OSI to be an open source license?" Tags="|osi|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2015-07-07T00:14:58.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on how strictly you interpret the term &quot;open source&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you go with the strictest definition, Open Source is a term defined by the OSI so naturally OSI approval is required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, as you've hinted at, the approval process is somewhat different from the Open Source Definition. Among the differences are: when OSI disapproves of a license &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/minutes20090304&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;because it is redundant&lt;/a&gt;, or if they &lt;a href=&quot;http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:32:200801:chphgjcnoibafhhebkjc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;haven't gotten around to approving it&lt;/a&gt;. You could argue, with varying success, that if OSI says it's a license is redundant with an &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/Fair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;already OSI-approved one&lt;/a&gt;, or if you interpret the license as conforming to the OSD so OSI will approve it someday, then it's open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use &quot;open source&quot; as a generic term for software that allows unrestricted usage, modification and redistribution, then those licenses that aren't OSI-approved but approved by a similar body like the FSF or Debian Project are also open source. There are differences in opinion on what the generic term should be; FSF and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; use &quot;free software&quot;; others think the &quot;free&quot; is ambiguous with &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;, and terms like FOSS and FLOSS have been invented for this purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use &quot;open source&quot; as an even more generic term for copyright licenses that grant broad freedoms including usage, modification and redistribution, (like our site name does - we're not affiliated with the OSI! Really!) then not only are OSI or FSF approval not required, even non-software licenses will fall under this like the Creative Commons licenses. Some people refer to these licenses as simply &quot;open&quot;, or &quot;free&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, all the popular free software licenses conform to all these definitions, so you'll never confuse anyone by saying a license is &quot;open source&quot;, only that they may prefer you use a different term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T00:14:58.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2015-07-07T00:15:12.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open Source&quot; is not a formally defined term, so there are various definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might interpret it literally and apply it to any software whose source code is published (without necessarily any granted rights, e.g., to distribute it), some might apply it to any software that comes with certain not necessarily well-defined freedoms, some might apply it to any software that is licensed under a license that complies with &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, and some might apply it to any software that is licensed under a license approved by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Definitions&quot;&gt;unsourced claim in the Wikipedia article &lt;em&gt;Open-source software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, OSI’s definition is &quot;recognized as the standard or de facto definition&quot;. According to OSI itself, &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#free-software&quot;&gt;their founders coined the term&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#unlisted-licenses&quot;&gt;according to OSI’s FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, a license is only an &quot;Open Source license&quot; if it’s approved by the OSI:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is &amp;lt;SOME LICENSE&amp;gt; an Open Source license, even if it is not listed on your web site?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, no. We run all licenses through an &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/approval&quot;&gt;approval process&lt;/a&gt; to provide an accepted standard on which licenses are Open Source, and we list &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot;&gt;the approved ones&lt;/a&gt;. Be dubious of claimed Open Source-ness for licenses that haven't gone through the process. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/proliferation&quot;&gt;license proliferation&lt;/a&gt; page for why this matters so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#approved-licenses-only&quot;&gt;Another FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states essentially the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is &amp;lt;SOME PROGRAM&amp;gt; Open Source?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only if it uses one of the approved licenses, and releases appropriate software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this definition makes sense because it objectively makes clear which licenses are Open Source licenses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Deciding if a license complies to the OSD is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; always easy, and opinions might differ. If we’d only base the decision on the OSD and ignore if the OSI approves a license or not, we would most likely end up with licenses where some agree and some disagree that it’s an Open Source license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T00:15:12.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="899" CreationDate="2015-07-07T02:20:57.343" Score="22" ViewCount="1563" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL is a copyleft license where, if I make modifications to the source code and distribute the resulting binary, I need to provide the modified source code also under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if I make modifications to the binary alone, leaving the source code unchanged? For example, if I compile a binary from GPL'd source code, modify it using a hex editor, then distribute the modified binary, how does the GPL affect me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to provide the source code under GPL, even though it is unchanged? If yes, do I need to provide it myself, or is linking to where I obtained it sufficient?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about the binary modifications? Do I need to provide the unmodified binary? A description of the modifications I made, and in what format?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T11:32:49.533" Title="How does GPL affect binary-only modifications?" Tags="|gpl|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="898" CreationDate="2015-07-07T06:57:52.197" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot;&gt;The GPL, version 3&lt;/a&gt;, has the following to say about distributing modified copies of a covered program in a form other than source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:&#xA;  [list of acceptable ways to convey source code]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From section 1, the definition of &lt;code&gt;Corresponding Source&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're distributing a program in non-source form, you need to provide a way for people receiving it to get the source code, including whatever is needed to make your binary modifications (a binary patch, a set of hex values to change, or whatever the preferred form is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T06:57:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-07T07:44:50.433" Score="5" ViewCount="671" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webix.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webix&lt;/a&gt; is a UI components library licensed under the GPL, with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webix-hub/tracker/issues/235&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FLOSS exception&lt;/a&gt;. On GitHub, they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webix-hub/tracker/blob/master/codebase/webix_debug.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;distributed JavaScript in concatenated form&lt;/a&gt; only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must the authors of Webix publish the non-concatenated source code as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="447" LastEditorUserId="447" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T08:21:07.453" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T11:59:03.640" Title="Does licensing JavaScript code under the GPL require publishing the non-concatenated source code?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="900" CreationDate="2015-07-07T08:02:07.313" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's kind of a grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL mandates that the work must be conveyed in sourcecode form. Obfuscated sourcecode is still sourcecode which &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be edited when one is masochistic enough to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; defines &quot;sourcecode&quot; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artificially obfuscated sourcecode is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the preferred form of making modifications when the licensor also has the unobfuscated version available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your questions &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Must&lt;/strong&gt; the authors of Webix publish the non-concatenated source code as well?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;: Actually, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webix-hub/tracker/blob/master/codebase/webix_debug.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;they do offer the unobfuscated sourcecode&lt;/a&gt;. But for the sake of argument, let's pretend they would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they are the sole authors, then they would not break any license. They can publish their work however they want. When the GPL is violated, the only one whose rights are violated in a legally relevant way is the copyright owner. As a downstream consumer, your only right is to decide to not use their software when it does not fulfill your quality standards. The only people who &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to claim a violation of their rights are any upstream contributors whose work got included in the software and then got obfuscated to an unreadable form. Whether the obfuscation is a violation of their license terms or a permitted form of modification is for a court to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is questionable if it &lt;em&gt;makes sense&lt;/em&gt; to publish something under GPL and then discourage people from creating derivates or contribute patches by obfuscating your sourcecode. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T11:59:03.640" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T11:59:03.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-07-07T08:57:23.663" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theo de Raadt is wrong. Plain and simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD is a permissive license which allows to incorporate the licensed work under a different license, no matter if permissive, copyleft or proprietary. That's the point of using a permissive license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the original authors of OpenBSD didn't want this to happen, they shouldn't have used the BSD license in the first place. When one does not want their work getting taken away from them like this, they are free to publish their work under a copyleft or proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T08:57:23.663" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2015-07-07T09:09:51.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you copy someone else's code into an open source or a proprietary project, you obviously need to check the licenses that you see, as was discussed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just because it is on stackoverflow, and stackoverflow requires a certain license, doesn't mean the code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; actually licensed. If an employee takes copyrighted code of his employer and publishes it on stackoverflow without permission, then there is no license!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By far the best method is to take the code, study it, try it out, until you really understand it, and then write your own code. This has three advantages: You learned something. It is legally safe. And the code quality is now up to your own high standards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T09:09:51.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="905" CreationDate="2015-07-07T09:30:13.460" Score="8" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/271080/162730&quot;&gt;this related Meta Stack Exchange post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code you post on Stack Overflow is licensed &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Now this &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; pose problems for people wanting to use my contributions depending on what license they have for their own software. I want to prevent such obstacles for others as much as possible, and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/165090/162730&quot;&gt;this advice on uber-meta&lt;/a&gt; which comes down to placing a dual-license notice at the bottom of answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271293/419956&quot;&gt;this SO meta question&lt;/a&gt; also suggest leaving a notice along these lines...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unless noted otherwise, all my questions and answers on Stack Overflow are also released under X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(where X is wtfpl, public domain, or some other very permissive license)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...in your user profile is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to the question: what's the best way to make sure as many people as possible can use my SO contributions, with as little as possible restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is leaving such a comment in your profile enough? And on a side note: wouldn't this pose problems if your answer uses / builds on snippets from other answers or even other open source libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T13:39:40.697" Title="How to license Stack Overflow contributions as permissive as possible?" Tags="|licensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-07T11:44:38.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="904" CreationDate="2015-07-07T09:42:16.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the best license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To make sure as many people can use your contributions as possible, you should license them as public domain. Anyone can then use your work with no restrictions. However, this is not possible in some jurisdictions: look up where you live and if it's not possible, use CC0 instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is that enough?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes. You're the copyright owner, you can do as you like with your work. In your profile is not immediately obvious, but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; confer the license (or public domain) because you've explicitly said so. If you want it to me more obvious, try adding a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; note after your code snippets that says they're CC0 or public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can it cause problems?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Yes. If you're building on others' code, you still have to abide by their licenses and restrictions. If you've got a note in your profile that everything you post is under CC0, this requires that you add a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sub&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;sup&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; note that says this code is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under CC0 because X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T09:42:16.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-07T09:55:45.843" Score="5" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;A customer project built on an FLOSS platform or framework (a CMS like Drupal for instance) may require some fixes to the underlying platform if it is pushing the limits or is being delivered on a very new version of the platform. For projects which use or integrate multiple FLOSS platforms/frameworks/libraries there may be a number of fixes or small extension created that fall under different projects, potentially with different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that the code being built for the customer is separate from the platforms or frameworks (a custom Drupal module or theme for instance), then the customer would reasonably expect to own the rights to the code they have hired or subcontracted the delivery of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard form (ideally from a major foundation) for excluding any code contributed to FLOSS projects from the rights assignment to the customer up front?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The aim of such a clause or template would be to protect the subcontractor or freelancer, not the employer or send user organisation. Rights to any code built during the contract which is part of the supporting ecosystem should remain with the freelancer or subcontractor to be contributed under their relationship with the relevant projects[s].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would protect the freelancer or subcontractor from any claims that the customer's IP was given away when patches or extensions to ecosystem projects are contributed. If such an arrangement is in place at the start there won't be any complex or time consuming wrangling over individual contributions. If the process of contributing is simpler the customer will more likely be running on a standard rather than customised version of the ecosystem projects. Which would speed up development and ease maintenance and upgrades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="453" LastEditorUserId="453" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T14:25:39.330" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T14:25:39.330" Title="Are there standard templates or clauses to exempt contributed code from rights assignment?" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|contracts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="846" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:25:19.007" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend visiting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free software movement&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open-source movement&lt;/a&gt; for historical point of view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software for freedom&lt;/a&gt;, full article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source-misses-the-point&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-software-isnt-practically-superior.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Free Software Isn't (Practically) Superior&lt;/a&gt; for a &lt;strong&gt;Philosophic&lt;/strong&gt; point of view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philosophy of the GNU project&lt;/a&gt; is closely relevant with Free software movement and hence free software philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notable points (from GNU):-&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;In addition to / Including @&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/83/michael-schumacher&quot;&gt;Michael Schumacher&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/866/296&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement&lt;/strong&gt;. For the free software movement, &lt;strong&gt;free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom&lt;/strong&gt;. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of &lt;strong&gt;how to make software “better”&lt;/strong&gt;—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.......&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practical difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source doesn't take &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tivoization&lt;/a&gt; as issue while for Free Software, it is ethical/social problem: (Quoted form &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is &lt;strong&gt;nonfree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue&lt;/strong&gt;; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; free, are open source but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Different Values:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. &lt;strong&gt;But this is not guaranteed&lt;/strong&gt;. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. &lt;strong&gt;Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. I will get my work done some other way, and support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable para from fear of freedom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use, and even develop, free software, which has extended our community—but only at the superficial, practical level. &lt;strong&gt;The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it&lt;/strong&gt;. That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most GNU/Linux users were introduced to the system through “open source” discussion, which doesn't say that freedom is a goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/20140407-geneva-tedx-talk-free-software-free-society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Stallman's TEDx video&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NbDFz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NbDFz.png&quot; alt=&quot;Comparison of philosophical views&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notable points (from OSI):-&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mission&lt;/a&gt; of opensource says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. &lt;strong&gt;The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource history&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified &lt;strong&gt;this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label &amp;quot;free software.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#free-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; was coined in 1998 by a group of people — the founders of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — who also supported the development and distribution of free software, &lt;strong&gt;but who disagreed with the FSF about how to promote it, and who felt that software freedom was primarily a practical matter rather than an ideological one&lt;/strong&gt; (see for example the entry &amp;quot;How is 'open source' related to `free software'?&amp;quot; from the OSI's &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/19981206185148/http://www.opensource.org/history.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original 1998 FAQ page&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the coining of the term &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;, some of those who adopted it did so because they too had &lt;strong&gt;philosophical differences&lt;/strong&gt; with the FSF about the reasons why to promote such software, while others who adopted the term did so &lt;strong&gt;because of differences of opinion with the FSF about tactically how to support such software, even while sharing an ideological motivation&lt;/strong&gt;. These two groups can and do overlap, of course, and some people use both terms, choosing according to context and audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also categories of free and non-free software from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/530/296&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which graphically explains difference/overlap i.e how opensource is free (mostly) and non-free (rarely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T05:35:45.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:30:04.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T11:30:04.913" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T11:30:04.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:30:04.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about GNU Project (free software, mass collaboration project) or GNU Operating System (a Unix-like computer operating system composed wholly of free software)." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T12:30:56.407" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T12:30:56.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="898" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:32:49.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hex-edit the binary then the original source becomes less relevant and you have effectively made the new binary &quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications&quot;. Certainly if I wanted to make further changes to your binary I would prefer to hex-edit the binary, not edit the original sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the new binary now &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also a derivative of the original, and the GPL applies to it as completely as it were a &quot;normal source&quot; derivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is entirely speculative (and I advise you not to rely on it without real legal advice), but it does seem to be a consequence of the phrase &quot;the preferred form&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T11:32:49.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="912" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:41:51.350" Score="8" ViewCount="1962" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright-owner can choose any license they wish to. But if they decide to choose an open source license (lets say Apache 2), how much do they have to conform to the license? Especially, do they have to release the source code somehow (or make it accessible for whoever got the binaries that claim to be Apache-licensed). Or is it just a false claim, that it is open source, if the source isn't available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:36:19.817" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:36:19.817" Title="If the copyright-owner claims his works to be open source, do they have to release the source somewhere?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:52:39.637" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software isn't inherently licensed in any particular way.  Rather, it is &lt;em&gt;released&lt;/em&gt; under a licence; which licence or licences it is released under are at the discretion of the copyright holder.  That there can be many different licences under which a piece of software is released should make it clear that the licence isn't an inherent property of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyright holder claiming that their software &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; open source is making a statement with no real content; it can't be right &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; wrong, for it is meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a copyright holder claims to have &lt;em&gt;released&lt;/em&gt; a piece of software under an open source licence, but they have not in fact released it in this way (or at all), then they are wrong - because of the lack of a release, rather than because of a mis-statement about an inherent property of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T14:05:31.313" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T14:05:31.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="911" CreationDate="2015-07-07T11:58:02.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache version 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistribution. You &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source &lt;strong&gt;or Object form&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one is obliged to redistribute anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if they do, they don't have to supply the source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even with more restrictive licenses like GPL, point 1 still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you have to keep in mind that the copyright owner can distribute his project under whatever license they please to different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that you can release your project to people under an open source license and to no one else. And these people are in turn under no obligation to redistribute the project. In the case of Apache you can even make sure the actual source never sees the light of day (I believe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting that aside for a moment though, if you claim that your project is open source and no one can get a copy of the source code, what you're saying is, though perhaps technically correct, incredibly misleading at the least and likely not going to sit well with many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T06:54:29.513" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T06:54:29.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="915" CreationDate="2015-07-07T12:17:42.337" Score="17" ViewCount="1130" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: this is  a hypothetical situation, not one I have actually encountered. (And one I hope I won't encounter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started a small open source project and have gathered a few loyal committers. We don't have much in the way of a hierarchical structure and make our decisions by way of consensus. This has not led to any significant problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, the core contributors have split based on differing opinions about a rather central part of the project. (Which relates mainly to how users interact with the product on a very fundamental level.) A compromise seems unlikely and I fear the project will take a serious blow if it loses almost half of its contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I limit the damage this disagreement will deal to the project and how can I prevent something like this from happening in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For the sake of completeness, here are two &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/577/168&quot;&gt;related&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/395/168&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; (separate links)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T13:52:20.777" Title="What do I do if my contributors are split into two camps?" Tags="|contributor|community|collaboration|human-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="914" CreationDate="2015-07-07T13:10:29.153" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Been there, done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why does it happen?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, a split due to creative differences usually happens because different people have a different idea of what the project goal actually is, but nobody is aware of that. As soon as a contributor realizes that someone else's vision is different from theirs, arguments and power struggle will start, which can quickly become personal and tear a project apart when not moderated properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How to prevent it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to prevent this situation early on is to communicate your creative vision of the project early, clearly and often. Every project should have some kind of official document which outlines the goals. Make sure every contributor knows and understands it, so everyone is on the same page and nobody gets any misconceptions about where you are heading. Make clear that anyone who wants the project to go somewhere else, should fork from the start and not get involved in the mainline in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should there be any disagreements about aspects of the project direction which were &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; set in stone beforehand, it is important to make a binding decision &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; things turn ugly. Having a clear hierarchy or well-defined decision making process is fundamental here. Without a binding process to make a decision - whether autocratic or democratic - people have no other choice but to &quot;reach consensus&quot; by either talking down the opposition through countless hours of filibusting in your communication channels (time they could rather spend working) or driving them out of the project through bullying and intrigue (a lose-lose situation for everyone involved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, when the conflict is already under way, it is likely too late to establish a proper decision-making process. Such a process only works when everyone supports it. But when you try to establish it now, everyone will perceive it in the context of the current conflict and their support for it will depend on whether this process would decide the current matter in their favor or not. Opening up this new battlefield now will likely deepen the trench instead of bridging it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The split still happened. How to deal with it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the project is under a copyleft license (or when under a permissive license the other group is committed to keeping), you can still merge any of their commits into your codebase or vice versa, so the manpower is not completely lost to your project. But a split is still a considerable blow to the project because organisation structures and infrastructure need to be duplicated, coordination between the forks is impaired and their commits need to be carefully reviewed for relevance and merge conflicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T13:52:20.777" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T13:52:20.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:26:27.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terminology is the set of words used within a field or profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should use this tag on questions that have to do with terminology: asking about what term you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; use for something, asking &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; a term is used, or asking about the history of a term are all examples (though for the last one, also consider Linguistics.SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:41:24.833" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:41:24.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="917" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:26:27.420" Score="0" Body="For questions about the terms used in the field: their use, effects, and meanings." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:41:07.883" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:41:07.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:29:16.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google defines marketing as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should use this tag on questions about &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; aspects of marketing an open or free project: market research, advertising, promoting, selling, etc. General marketing questions are off-topic here, but if you have a problem specific to your open source project then this is the tag you should use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:41:40.187" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:41:40.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:29:16.557" Score="0" Body=".For questions concerning the promotion and advertising of open projects, and their implications with the general public, society, and respective organizations." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T07:56:47.273" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T07:56:47.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:46:52.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a formal &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition of open source&lt;/a&gt;, consisting of ten points every open source has to fulfill. Use this tag for questions regarding this definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T15:54:51.910" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T15:54:51.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-07T15:46:52.443" Score="0" Body="For questions about the definition of open source" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:24:58.310" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T13:24:58.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2015-07-07T19:24:02.917" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license would simply need to have a sharealike clause. Then anyone else that uses it MUST share it with the same license (and link). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event the license does not have a &quot;sharealike&quot; clause such as some CC license you can put &quot;a link to this license must be provided with all documents of this project&quot; or some such wording.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T19:24:02.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2015-07-07T19:28:45.067" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mainly any time you copy copyrighted assets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why Popcorn Time did not get shut down is because they are very popular, and have a TON of money. This allows them to hire lawyers that the average person (such as you or I) could not afford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So takeaway...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have lots of money, your most likely to get shutdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T19:28:45.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2015-07-07T19:50:54.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To prevent yourself from getting a DMCA takedown notice, you don't need to know more than any other software developer. Don't use sourcecode or assets which are not licensed to you. Also, don't piss off people who are so rich and powerful that they can hire far better lawyers than you, because in the US justice system, better lawyers can win cases even when the law is not on their side. The rules which apply to open source are no different than those which apply to proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as an open source developer you can use the DMCA takedown notices yourself as a weapon to take down people who violate your license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T20:56:54.447" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:56:54.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:06:34.727" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that you can make parts of a project open source and keep other parts colosed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a peice of software and I only make 1 line of the code in the software open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I classify this as open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, are there any limits to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, why not? How do you know if it is? It it percentage based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:42:15.213" Title="How much of the project needs to be open source for it be be considered open source?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="929" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:11:00.073" Score="5" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am working on a piece of software. I want to release it under an open source license. But after thought I decide that line 36 I would like to keep closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After doing research, I am still confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I able to do this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, are there any restrictions to this?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If no, why not? are there any other ways of doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T17:20:19.467" Title="Can I make a specific line of code not open source?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="937" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:17:38.823" Score="26" ViewCount="5397" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose your client asks you to build open source software for them. You begin doing the work and publishing updates on GitHub, but when you finish they tell you they don't like it and won't pay for your service. Due to your contract this is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile the customer just took the code off of GitHub and started using it for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are open source developers prone to this kind of scam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any laws in place to protect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the contract is there anything that the developer could do? Could they change the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:04:38.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T02:41:26.347" Title="Are open source developers at risk of being scammed?" Tags="|law|contracts|business|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:29:37.530" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the basic, you can license different parts of your work differently. This happens often, if you include libraries with different compatible open source licenses in your project. The library is licensed differently to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But doing as you describe has a lot of downsides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. It's complicated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You somehow have to indicate, which part is licensed how. This can be complicated enough if you license some files differently, if you do it for lines it will look horrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. It might be incompatible to some open source licenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a behaviour might be incompatible with certain open source licenses. Especially copyleft-licenses would be problematic. As long as the whole work is completely copyrighted by you it might work, but if you include for instance GPL-code, then you violate the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. It might confuse potential users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source is generally good for users. Such complicated license mess could confuse potential users, so they are unsure if these lines with other licenses somehow affect them. You may loose users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. It might discourage potential contributors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inconclusive license situation might be a no-go for many programmers and so they decide not to contribute to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. It misuses the trust of others&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source is usually met with a lot of trust that is hard earned. Creating such difficult license situation as you describe violates this trust. This might have negative long term effects on your reputation and the reputation of your project ... and it is basically wrong. (Thanks to Andrew Russell for the suggestion, see comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: It is possible but unwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:39:16.040" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:39:16.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:29:51.123" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer and so my answer will be from tech point of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that it is possible to make particular line of source code closed source when other part of file is open source, cause that line and corresponding file won't have sense without each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may make some part of your code closed source, but only in programming languages which allow binary distribution. I mean languages which can be compiled in some binary format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Closed source (In my opinion) means that source code of your product aren't shared with end user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="472" LastEditorUserId="472" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T20:38:33.550" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:38:33.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:33:55.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many software developers create software for customers, and if the customer wishes as open source. That is no problem, because the customer and the software developer making a contract about it. If anyone is violating the contract (for instance the customer is not paying) it can be end up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation you describe says between the lines that there was no written contract. That is always unwise, if you want to get money for work. but even in this case a verbal contract exists. Harder to proof, but still protected by law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:33:55.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="943" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:36:52.497" Score="11" ViewCount="698" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am a developer. I am developing a piece of software. I decide I want to make this code open source. &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;... I only want developers (or people that will be using the code in other projects) to be able to use it under CC-BY. But people using the code for general use (not in other projects) I would like to apply an MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the CC requirements it says I can't restrict it from anyone. Here I am not restricting anyone from anything. I am just applying different rules. Am I allowed to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T22:20:56.940" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T22:20:56.940" Title="Can I apply one license to specific users and another to others?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|multi-licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="932" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:39:58.650" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can license your intellectual property under different licenses to different people. But when your license follows the definitions of open source and/or free software, the licensees have the right to relicense it under the same terms to other people. So this would not be an effective way to control distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to control distribution, you shouldn't be using an open source license in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:39:58.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="926" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:42:38.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, already the smallest part being not open source makes the whole not open source, as the whole package now fails to follow the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;10 rules in the Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;. In practice though, if only small parts are not open source it will still be called open source by most, and if only small parts are open source it will be called not open source by most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/840/55&quot;&gt;Firefox&lt;/a&gt; is called mostly an open source project, as the parts that aren't are miniscule in comparison to the whole project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:42:38.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="926" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:48:24.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All of it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open source&quot; reasonably refers to strictly to that set of instructions (here, source code) that is made available under the applicable (open source) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a project with two components A and B, and only component B is open source while component A is proprietary, then the project is not open source. How could it be, when a third party does not have rights to use, alter, redistribute, etc. the project &lt;em&gt;in its entirety?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in advertising that a project is open source but unable to actually release all of its components under an open source license, I see a few options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simply state the truth—that the project includes or incorporates &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; open source components.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Organize the open source components of the project into a coherent set and give it a name that is very similar to the name of the entire project (but distinguishable); refer to this set of components as open source, and hope people associate your &quot;Open Source Project X Core&quot; with your entire &quot;Project X.&quot; This has the potential to mislead, depending on how you do it and whether the open source components of the project are reasonably separable from the rest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Call it open source anyway. You'll fool some people and anger others. Not recommended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:48:24.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:54:54.913" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of this &quot;scam&quot; and am not aware of the issue being raised with the Open Source Initiative or other organizations promoting Free and Open Source Software (Free Software Foundation, Software Conservancy, EFF, etc.), nor other related areas such as the open content movement, and the Creative Commons. Of course this does not mean that dubious practices have not been attempted. I would also think, that any company/organization that operated like this would quickly gain a bad reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific to laws:&#xA;You are protected as the author of any work, including software, by copyright laws. In the U.S. you, as the author of original work, have the right to license your work in any way you like. While I would first recommend creating a contract that protects you regarding getting paid (regular pay based on hours worked, sign offs--and payment based on gateways/accomplishments, etc.) You could initially hold your code for review/approval (including the code hosted in a public repository like that of GitHub) as &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot; until you are paid, and then upon payment, assign an OSI Approved License. You could also write this into your contract if you really felt it was an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you do not need to change the license, simply assign &quot;MySoftware, copyright Patrick Masson 2015, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.&quot; The company is thus not able to use it until you change the licence to an OSI Approved option--which you will do once they pay you (and of course you too have provided for all of your responsibilities under the contract).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T20:54:54.913" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="939" CreationDate="2015-07-07T20:56:24.287" Score="8" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you have an open source piece of software. You decide you want to publish the software under an open source license. You spend time researching licenses online and finally you find the perfect one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any (better) alternatives to simply adding a link to the chosen license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are some examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, why not? How could I prevent a broken link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T21:02:57.787" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:00:14.760" Title="What methods could you use to prevent broken licensing links?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2015-07-07T21:03:37.243" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll convert &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/938/what-methods-could-you-use-to-prevent-broken-licensing-links#comment1434_938&quot;&gt;my comment&lt;/a&gt; to an answer and suggest this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add the entire text of the license to your software, formatted like a comment (or as a separate file). This is essentially foolproof. Longer licenses would take up more space, but this should not be a problem. Licenses such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, which are quite short, should be easy to fit in. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/938/what-methods-could-you-use-to-prevent-broken-licensing-links/939#comment1711_939&quot;&gt;Zizouz212 mentioned&lt;/a&gt;, though, be sure to indicate that this is the text of the last updated version, in order to account for changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T16:02:54.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-07T21:14:41.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important clause which should appear in any work-for-hire contract is that transfer of copyright (in this case &quot;release under an open source license&quot;) doesn't happen before the transfer of money. Effectively, your work stays proprietary and doesn't become open source until you are paid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you publish your work on GitHub under an open source license, it is out there and free to everyone, paying client or not. When the client requests you to do this, you should insist on getting paid by the hour without giving a guarantee of satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about how you should design contracts when doing work for hire (open source or not) I recommend the aptly named talk &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vimeo.com/22053820&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;F**k you. Pay me.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Mike Monteiro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-07T21:25:53.757" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T21:25:53.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="926" CreationDate="2015-07-07T21:21:02.147" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can distribute one line of code as &quot;open source software&quot; by assigning that one line of code an &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI Approved Open Source License&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should only label your software as &quot;open source software&quot; (i.e. tell everyone it is open source) if you distribute it with an OSI Approved License. Calling it open source is meaningless--the license determines if it is open source software, not a marketing campaign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license you assign to your work not only determines if it is open source software, but--per your second question--how others may distribute derivatives of your work: either only as open source software (for example through the GPL family of licenses) or with proprietary software (for example through the Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you distribute your one line of code with a GPL-like &quot;copyleft&quot; license, anyone who modifies your one line will also need to distribute their edits under the same, open source (GPL) license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for example, you were to assign the BSD License to your one line of code, anyone can take that line of code and include it with their proprietary software and even sub-license it (as long as they include the copyright information in their distribution). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any software distributed with an &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI Approved Open Source License&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;open source software.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software NOT distributed with an OSI Approved License, but labelled as &quot;open source software&quot; should be considered suspect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great resource for learning about various open source licenses and their permissions/restrictions is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TL;DR Legal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:42:15.213" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:42:15.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2015-07-07T21:29:54.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;line 36&quot; is not critical to the functionality of the software then separate it out as an optional closed source extension/plugin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is critical then whilst it may be possible I don't see it being a practical open source product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would question your motivation for wanting to release the code under an Open Source license, what are you hoping to gain from it?  If it is contributors then I think you may struggle to find willing developers to contribute to a project that seemingly revolves around you keeping part of the code to yourself.  This is very different from taking an established Open Source product and allowing Closed Source extensions (Linux, Firefox etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side you could also question your motivation for keeping part of the code Closed Source.  Do you hope to make some financial gain from it?  Is it already Closed Source and you have stolen it from someone else so can't release it!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="477" LastEditorUserId="477" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T10:56:26.017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T10:56:26.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="932" CreationDate="2015-07-07T21:35:24.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons family of licenses are not &quot;Open Source Licenses&quot; and Creative Commons &quot;recommends free and open source software licenses for software&quot; like those listed by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/software&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you assigned your work a CC-BY license it would not be considered &quot;open source software&quot; and you should not label it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further the Open Source Definition, and thus OSI Approved Licenses, does not allow discrimination against persons or groups (Criteria No. 5) or  discrimination against fields of endeavours (Criteria No. 6). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are looking to Dual-License your software. You can find out more about dual-licensing open source software &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;at oss.watch&lt;/a&gt;. You can find out more about open source licenses' restrictions and permissions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TL;DR Legal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:40:55.163" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:40:55.163" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-07T22:46:26.140" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that the software is open source doesn't change anything about the contract that the developer has with their client. If the developer has done the work, the client owes the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contracts to deliver custom software (or many other services) often specify several stages of payments and delivery, and allow one party to suspend the contract if the other party has not fulfilled their obligations. For example, if the client misses a downpayment, the contract typically allows the programmer to suspend deliveries of the software. This works regardless of the license of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where having open source code may make a difference is that if the client doesn't pay, the developer loses the possibility of suing them for copyright violation in addition to breach of contract. If the client is using open source code, that's legal, regardless of any other contract they might be in breach of. On the other hand, if the contract is the only reason why the client has the right to use the code, then a broken contract may allow the developer to claim damages for copyright violation. (Consult your lawyer if it gets that far.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a contract to write code that will be open source does not imply that the code will be on Github. Most free/open-source licenses do not carry the &lt;em&gt;obligation&lt;/em&gt; to distribute modified version; they only require, if they're copyleft, that any distribution includes source and that further distribution remains allowed. There are works with a license that require contributing modified versions back upstream if they're distributed at all, but they're rare. Unless the contract specifies that delivery is via Github (probably a bad idea as it puts a third party into the loop), the developer has the same means of blocking delivery as with closed-source code. Of course, the developer may want to distribute the code publicly for other reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inasmuch as the license permits, it would be a good idea to treat the code written as part of the project as proprietary until payment in full, at which point the code becomes open source. However a copyleft license may make it impossible, depending on the structure of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you are finished you go to the customer and tell them you are finished. They tell you that they don't like your work and they won't pay you for your service. Due to your contract this is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the contract allows the customer to decline to pay because they “don't like” the work, there's something seriously wrong with the contract, regardless of the license of the code. A party shouldn't be allowed to cancel the contract at will. There should be objective acceptance criteria that make it mandatory for the client to pay, even if they've stopped caring about the work. The most common type of acceptance criteria for software are functional: the software shall have this and that feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-07T22:46:26.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2015-07-07T23:19:48.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Choose a well understood, common, supported and maintained Licence!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(just like you choose your software)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would choose one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL, LGPL, AGPL licences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons Licences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache Licence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eclipse Public Licence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD licence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or other &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Licences&lt;/a&gt; applicable to the language/platforms you inhabit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The organizations that support and promote these licenses are especially careful to keep the links valid. Usually, it is a key facet of the organisation's reason for existing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to company related links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. Oracle bought Sun and refocussed around open source, I am not sure if links changed much but some licenses were almost deprecated and the licenses won't be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:00:14.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2015-07-08T03:22:28.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are referring to link rot, the best solution is to archive it in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/web/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wayback machine&lt;/a&gt;. That way, should the link ever break, you can point it to the wayback machine's archive. A good way to ensure this would be to index the page in the wayback machine whenever you publish your document with the link.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do like @HDE 226868's suggestion of adding the license content too. I think you should combine them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is susceptible to going down, as is any reliance on a third party solution, however I do not think the internet archive is in any danger of going away anytime soon.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:40:26.020" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:40:26.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:40:48.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many great answers, but I just want to add that this &quot;problem&quot; also exists in the proprietary world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are requested to develop a Python enterprise application. The customer will probably want to test it in their staging environment, which is very common for enterprise software. Open source or not, the customer has access to your application's source code at this stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:40:48.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-08T07:52:29.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You run this &quot;risk&quot; whenever you put code on Github in a public repository with an open source license -- others can use it. Usually that is what is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are developing this for a customer, then &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; would you give them the option to cancel the entire thing when the work is already done? That's a very unusual clause in a contract that's not at all in the developer's favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are strong laws to protect developers -- contract law, copyright law, trade secret law, et cetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you willingly got into a contract that allows the customer to cancel it at will, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you voluntarily made your code public to the world on Github, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you voluntarily put an open source license on it to boot... you have made clear formal voluntary choices not to want any of all that protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't call it a scam at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="487" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T07:52:29.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:19:08.937" Score="8" ViewCount="765" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I write a program and release it under the GNU GPL. Can I call this software &quot;GNU software&quot;? If not, what is necessary to make it a part of GNU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T13:19:26.097" Title="Does using the GPL for a program make it GNU software?" Tags="|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="957" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:26:31.803" Score="10" ViewCount="1150" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot;&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt; is very long. If I have to include a copy of it with my program, can I drop the preamble to save space?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T11:07:15.023" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T11:07:15.023" Title="Can I omit the preamble of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:34:54.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. GNU is an organisation, who publish their license the GPL. Just like you wouldn't call your software &quot;Google software&quot;, you can't call your software GNU software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; call it GNU software if you developed it as part of a project for GNU, for example if GNU employed you to develop a new distribution platform for their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:34:54.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:35:09.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subject matter is not what should be free in GitHub. It is about terms and consideration in contract law. The company should pay for your effort as defined in contract. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example : If the content of contract is that I will pay you 5P in return for your service to fetch me a cup of water. It does not matter whether the water is free or belonging to you. I have to pay in consideration of your action of fetching. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="491" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:35:09.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:38:06.580" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it does not; releasing it under the GNU GPL makes your program &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU project &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html&quot;&gt;has a web page&lt;/a&gt; outlining what you need to do to offer your software to be part of the GNU project, which might be summarised as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Making a program GNU software means that its developers and the GNU&#xA;  project agree that “This program is part of the GNU project, released&#xA;  under the aegis of GNU”—and say so in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This means that you normally put the program releases on ftp.gnu.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It means that the developers agree to pay attention to making the&#xA;  program work well with the rest of the GNU system—and conversely that&#xA;  the GNU project will encourage other GNU maintainers to pay attention&#xA;  to making their programs fit in well with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another important GNU standard is that GNU programs should come with&#xA;  documentation in Texinfo format. That is the GNU standard&#xA;  documentation format, and it can be converted automatically into&#xA;  various other formats. You can use DocBook or any other suitable&#xA;  format for the documentation sources, as long as converting it&#xA;  automatically into Texinfo gives good results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a GNU program wants to be extensible, it should use GUILE as the&#xA;  programming language for extensibility—that is the GNU standard&#xA;  extensibility package. For some programs there's a reason to do things&#xA;  differently, but please use GUILE if that is feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A GNU program should use the latest version of the license that the&#xA;  GNU Project recommends—not just any free software license. For most&#xA;  packages, this means using the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a copyright assignment is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For a program to be GNU software does not require transferring&#xA;  copyright to the FSF; that is a separate question. If you transfer the&#xA;  copyright to the FSF, the FSF will enforce the GPL for the program if&#xA;  someone violates it; if you keep the copyright, enforcement will be up&#xA;  to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T08:43:16.550" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:43:16.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="949" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:55:35.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU-project&lt;/a&gt; is a project to develop a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/#More-GNU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;free UNIX-like operating system&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;read also&lt;/a&gt;). They developed the GPL to license the software their operating system consists of. But that doesn't mean every GPL-licensed software is part of the GNU-project (and hence GNU software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make your software part of the GNU-project, you should read what they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;written about how you can do that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:55:35.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="950" CreationDate="2015-07-08T08:58:43.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preamble is just a few percent of the text, I would think it could not make any significant difference, could it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="494" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T08:58:43.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="950" CreationDate="2015-07-08T09:00:24.053" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered (again), that my question is in fact a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preamble and instructions are integral parts of the GNU GPL and may not be omitted. In fact, the GPL is copyrighted, and its license permits only verbatim copying of the entire GPL. (You can use the legal terms to make another license but it won't be the GNU GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preamble and instructions add up to some 1000 words, less than 1/5 of the GPL's total size. They will not make a substantial fractional change in the size of a software package unless the package itself is quite small. In that case, you may as well use a simple all-permissive license rather than the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T09:00:24.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="959" CreationDate="2015-07-08T09:29:03.630" Score="19" ViewCount="2297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot;&gt;GNU GPL version 3&lt;/a&gt; uses the word &quot;convey&quot; where &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot;&gt;version 2&lt;/a&gt; used &quot;distriubte&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU GPLv2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is “convey” in GPLv3 the same thing as what GPLv2 means by “distribute”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T11:09:00.780" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:16:59.730" Title="GPL v3 &quot;convey&quot; vs. GPL v2 &quot;distribute&quot;" Tags="|licensing|gpl|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="958" CreationDate="2015-07-08T09:47:40.233" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ConveyVsDistribute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is “convey” in GPLv3 the same thing as what GPLv2 means by&#xA;  “distribute”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, more or less. During the course of enforcing GPLv2, we learned&#xA;  that some jurisdictions used the word “distribute” in their own&#xA;  copyright laws, but gave it different meanings. We invented a new term&#xA;  to make our intent clear and avoid any problems that could be caused&#xA;  by these differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, they mean basically the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T06:16:59.730" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T06:16:59.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="963" CreationDate="2015-07-08T11:30:19.247" Score="15" ViewCount="2397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Captain-Chaos/WorldPainter&quot;&gt;WorldPainter&lt;/a&gt;. It's licensed according to the GPL v3, but I am about to include some code (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webbukkit/DynmapCore&quot;&gt;dynmap&lt;/a&gt;) that is licensed according to the Apache License version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to both &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;, the APLv2 is compatible with the GPLv3 so I can include it. My question it, how does that work in practice? Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I include dynmap binaries which I build myself. The code is not modified, but the binaries do omit a lot of code which I don't need, to make them smaller. Does this mean I need to provide access to the dynmap source code, or is it sufficient to refer to dynmap on GitHub?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My code does include a handful of files copied from dynmap but heavily modified by me, mostly as glue to be able to invoke the dynmap code in ways it was never intended to. Are those files now GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the author of dynmap (Mike Primm) also retain copyright in the modified files? Should I list us both as copyright holders in those files? Should I list Mike as a copyright holder for the whole of WorldPainter? The files comprise a very small part of the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does any of the above imply that I should include a copy of the APLv2? Should I include a file explaining the situation with an overview of which license applies to which files? My estimation is that all the source code of WorldPainter proper, including the files copied from dynmap (since they are modified), is still GPLv3 and that it is therefore not necessary to include the APLv2. Is that correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will of course give full credit, in the credits of the program and in the copied files. This is just about the technical situation regarding the licensing of the files and the resulting program as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="494" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T12:00:33.913" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T12:09:36.620" Title="How does one combine differently licensed code in one open source program?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|relicensing|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="883" CreationDate="2015-07-08T11:39:20.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A large distribution like Debian has tens of thousands of packages, from thousands of original development teams. Distributions take care of most of the hassle involved in downloading the source files and compiling them for you - rather than everyone figuring it out themselves you can rely on the cooperative work of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that distributions handle for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensuring all the different types of files (binaries, libraries, shared header files, documentation, icons) end up in conventionalised locations, which differ depending on the distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Handle locating the correct version of a compiler or interpreter. You could have Python programs which need to run in versions 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.0 and 3.1, each of which expect to run with a simple &quot;python&quot; command. The distribution handles whatever changes are needed so that each package runs the version it needs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Handles dependencies for you. Want to install some scientific Python program? The distribution will automatically install both Python, NumPy and SciPy for you, and it will set them up to know where each other is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speed! You can get distributions that don't use binaries by default (Gentoo) but most will install binaries if they can, saving you a lot of compile time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributions will promptly give you important security updates. Before you read about the next SSL vulnerability you will probably already have installed a patch to fix it. If you had to manually patch it then it would take you longer, leaving you vulnerable for longer, and there's the risk you wouldn't patch it correctly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Windows and OS X do have distributions, in their app stores, and in Windows Update (and the Apple equivalent.) It's just harder to get stuff into them. Actually it's hard to get stuff into Debian too, but if a project is open source/free software you should be able to eventually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T11:39:20.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2015-07-08T11:54:18.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the code of the dynmap binaries only includes Apache licensed code you are not forced to make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If these files are included in your GPLv3 licensed project, they are GPLv3 licensed, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author of the original file is also (one) author of the modifed files. If the APL requires to name all authors, you will have to name him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should. Yes, you should. Yes, but it is no problem to include a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, include all licenses and name all copyright holders. Easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T11:54:18.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2015-07-08T11:57:10.683" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, &lt;strong&gt;or for any such Derivative Works as a whole&lt;/strong&gt;, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essentially means that the Apache license imposes no share-alike restrictions: you don't have to redistribute the work under Apache 2.0. In turn, this means that you could just license the entire project under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to answer the direct questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this mean I need to provide access to the dynmap source code, or is it sufficient to refer to dynmap on GitHub?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to do either, actually. According to the APL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and &lt;strong&gt;in Source or Object form&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that You meet the following conditions: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Object form includes binaries. If the binaries are included in your project, you're distributing in Object form, which is still OK by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are those files now GPLv3?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to you. Those files are derivative works of the original dynmap code: re-read the first quote from the APL and it shows you can redistribute under any license. Thus, those files are GPLv3 if you choose, or not if you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the author of dynmap (Mike Primm) also retain copyright in the modified files?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long quote from the APL now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the dynmap project contains copyright notices, you must include them in the relevant files. This would include, for example, the files in (2) - those are derivatives of his code, and if they have copyright notices on (or the project copyright notice covers them) then you must include the notice. Primm will retain any copyrights on any code he wrote, he's just allowing you to use it, so you need to demonstrate that. However, he does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; become a copyright holder for the whole of WorldPainter, because he didn't write it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... Is that correct?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Technically. You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to include the APL anywhere in your project if you don't want to, but it could be taken as courtesy: you're using someone else's work, so you should reference how they've made it available to you. If WorldPainter is any sort of size, including the license won't make much difference to the final package file. If it was me, I'd just include it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T11:57:10.683" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2015-07-08T12:02:08.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers to the parts of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm a bit confused about the details here. I understand you change the binaries to get rid of stuff you don't need. How does that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you change the binaries directly, I would document how you do it and put a script into your sources that does that, so that others can from the sources of dynmap get to the binaries you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you changed the sources or the buildfiles of dynmap to achieve that, you should release the changed  sources. To be clear, Apache doesn't really demand that, the GPL does, as you combine it the GPL would work here. As long as you're the only author of all GPL-code used, you may be legally allowed to do that, but if you accept any contributions you have to release the changed sources even of the software you link. But all legal stuff aside, it is nice for everyone if you release the changed sources. Github isn't needed though, just an archive with the changed sources somewhere in your webspace should be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, they are GPL now. As you linked to your software that is GPL, you made an derivative work. That means the result is GPL-licensed. That Apache 2.0 is compatible with GPL 3.0 (no other combination of version by the way, be careful) just means that the Apache license allows the license change and the terms of both licenses don't conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.&lt;/strong&gt; All authors of the files share the copyright. That includes the original author(s) and you as author of the changes. I think both involved licenses ask for proper attribution of the authors, so you probably have to include Mike Primm in the copyright-notice in WorldPainter. But many project make categories: main developer, other contributors, ... I would list him as: &quot;author of dynmap used and modified in WorldPainter&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.&lt;/strong&gt; Through creating a derivate you made dynmap as used by you GPL licensed. I would still include a notice like that: includes and modifies dynmap from XY originally licensed under the terms of the APL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T12:09:36.620" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T12:09:36.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T12:04:03.603" Score="13" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to redistribute a work licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND 3.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license summary says about ND (NoDerivatives):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;remix, transform, or build upon&lt;/strong&gt; the material, you may not distribute the modified material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that &quot;Merely changing the format never creates a derivative.&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But what about leaving parts (except for copyright notices) out? Does this count as &quot;remix, transform, or build upon&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A book released under CC BY-ND 3.0 consists of an introduction (which contains the licensing information and a copyright notice) and three chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute chapter 2 only, so I make a verbatim copy of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I copy the licensing info and the copyright notice from the introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I create a PDF of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this PDF only contains content exactly as written by the authors (so I didn’t change any words or added some myself), but it does not contain &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; the authors wrote in the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T12:08:15.933" Title="Can I leave out parts of a CC BY-ND licensed work when distributing it?" Tags="|creative-commons|distribution|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="965" CreationDate="2015-07-08T12:08:03.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Any modifications you apply that aren't sanctioned by the owner are classed as derivative works. Your result still contains the author's material, true, but you've changed the way it's presented - it's like removing some code that's just a wrapper for a routine. You're changing the product, which creates a derivative work, which is disallowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; No - you must distribute verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T12:08:03.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="965" CreationDate="2015-07-08T12:08:15.933" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that is not allowed. You have transformed the work by &lt;strong&gt;removing&lt;/strong&gt; parts. That is not different from transforming it by &lt;strong&gt;adding&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;changing&lt;/strong&gt; parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T12:08:15.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="968" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-08T13:17:01.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons CC-BY-ND (&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Attribution-NoDerivs&lt;/a&gt;) license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T02:57:52.977" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T02:57:52.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-08T13:17:01.370" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Creative Commons CC-BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivs) license " OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T21:42:11.913" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T21:42:11.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-08T13:21:24.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; considers software Free Software when the license terms grant the user four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T13:39:54.747" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T13:39:54.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-08T13:21:24.017" Score="0" Body="Questions about the definition of free software according to the Free Software Foundation" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T13:40:21.790" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T13:40:21.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="883" CreationDate="2015-07-08T15:16:56.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two factors at play that make Linux teem with distributions, both loosely related to being open source: it's freely redistributable, and it has a bazaar development model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a software distribution requires having the permission to distribute the software. When the software is freely redistributable, the distributor doesn't need to seek permission, so they can stick to technical issues and not worry about legal issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being open source is not necessary, but it can help for some common objectives of distributions. For example, distributions bear the responsibility for sharing timely security fixes; having the source available allows the distributor to make a security fix if a flaw is discovered, even if the original author is unresponsive. Having the source available also broadens the offer by allowing, for example, binary distributions for platforms that the original author cannot or is unwilling to support directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are distributions of non-redistributable software, even for-pay software. They tend to be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;app stores&lt;/a&gt;. App stores got started only when most people were downloading their software from the Internet; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apple's store for iPhone software&lt;/a&gt; made them mainstream. Windows got onto the act later because it started out when software was bought on floppies, but there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Store&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Windows store&lt;/a&gt; nowadays (since Windows 8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to the second point: what makes the Linux ecosystem different from BSD, when they're all free software? It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the bazaar vs the cathedral&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#Significant_BSD_descendants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD systems&lt;/a&gt; follow a cathedral-type model, where a team develops a core system. There are three main BSD systems (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Net&lt;/a&gt;) and a lot of minor ones. Each system comes with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_collection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;port collection&lt;/a&gt;: a distribution of third-party software, with a package manager. BSD systems make a clear distinction between the core software (not always written in-house, but maintained in-house) and the third-party software built through ports and managed by the package manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux distributions, on the other hand, put together a large assemblage of software that's maintained separately. Even a minimal Linux installation needs to assemble a lot of different products: at least a kernel, a bootloader, an init system, a shell, some system utilities, some file and text processing utilities, various hardware management and network configuration utilities, — and that's just to have the bare minimum with a system that does nothing useful. A desktop or server Linux system needs a lot more — web server, email, scheduled tasks, graphical user interface, … all come from one or more different providers. Linux distributions typically don't maintain any utilities themselves other than the system installer, a few configuration tools and the package manager and a few configuration tools (and sometimes even none of these.). Most Linux distributions don't make a sharp distinction between the core system and additional packages, if at all, and even if they do the core system consists of far more software than the distribution maintains by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T15:16:56.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-07-08T15:45:03.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;open source is like throwing something into the public domain?&quot; - No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;is there a difference between works classified as open source, and works in the public domain?&quot; - Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What's the difference between the two?&quot; - The short answer is that open source requires agreement to a license, Public Domain is without restrictions. However,  because the term Open Source is misleading here is my perception on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like most of life (and law) open source is not a binary yes or no, but can fall between the two depending upon the individual circumstances of the software/product/license/terminology combinations. The resultant fuzzy logic licensing of a complex project that pulls resources from multiple sources can result in much heated debate. I think of rights to using software code as sitting on a sliding scale. At one end is propriety software from a commercial organisation that keeps source code hidden and secret. At the other end is source code out in the wild that has no restrictions upon it at all, free to be used/changed/abused by everyone, this is software in the Public Domain. You need to slide the scale back a little for open source. How far the scale is slid back depends upon the particular licence. A bit for the MIT licence, a bit more for the GPL licence. It can be slid almost back to the beginning where source code is licensed as open for viewing and nothing else, no changes whatsoever, why? Just to see how it works and for interfacing purposes. This is not uncommon in industrial systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source is mainly about source code, however, software can be in the Public Domain but the source code is kept secret (e.g. a programmer waivers rights to a little utility but keeps the source code under wraps). Furthermore time will eventually start contributing to Public Domain software. Once enough years have passed software falls out of copyright and becomes Public Domain. (Open source licenses then lapse.) When that happens the source code no longer needs to be readily available for the compiled files. Thus, perversely, in the very long run, this could cause beneficial changes to source code not being available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of what it means to have free rights to the software is often misunderstood. The free is about freedom of expression, not cost. Some misunderstand this and think open source is free of cost. Open source software can be sold, as long as the code comes with it (though the purchaser is then able to provide the software without selling it). This is also why open source software can be sold on disc media, mainly to cover the costs of production and distribution. Again perversely once the software is in the Public Domain there is nothing stopping organisations from modifying/renaming it then selling the product and not releasing the software's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So open source is mainly about freedom of expression, but need not be, and is not in some cases. Public Domain is about freedom in all senses, expression and cost, but that may lead to software becoming less free. One reason why the term Open Source is disliked by some is that it is misunderstood and misused. If you want true freedom of expression in software then open source is not an appropriate term. Nor is releasing it into the Public Domain (waiving all your rights). Hence the GPL license is probably the most free licence. Though some perceive it as restrictive, but strangely it needs to be to allow for full freedom of expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would consider &quot;freedom software&quot; as a proper term for truly free open source software (GPLed). Unfortunately &quot;open source&quot; dominates and as an umbrella term that is not truly free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="517" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T15:45:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T19:13:35.597" Score="10" ViewCount="2022" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is DRM, which some spell as &quot;Digital Rights Management&quot;, others as &quot;Digital Restriction Management&quot;, allowed by the GPL? In other words, can software that implements DRM be licensed under the GPL? Assume version 3 of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the DRM scheme requires some kind of secret to work? Wouldn't the GPL require this secret to be published and GPL licensed too, making the DRM useless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T21:43:33.550" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T08:02:02.637" Title="Does the GNU GPL 3 prohibit DRM?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|drm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2015-07-08T19:34:48.007" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing which prohibits you from creating software which implements DRM and licensing it under GPL. The GPL can be applied to any software, regardless of what that software does when it is run. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from a purely technical viewpoint, open source software can hardly be effective at enforcing DRM because the user could easily modify the software to ignore any restriction the DRM mandates to impose on use of the data the program processes. Requiring some secret to make the software work would also be ineffective because the software could be modified to reveal said secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is also the legal aspect. There are laws in some countries which forbid to circumvent DRM in some situations, even when it would be technically possible to do so. However, the GPLv3 (not v2) tries to circumvent this.  It has section 3 &quot;Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law.&quot; which states that a GPLv3 covered software does never count as a protection measure in regards to laws which forbid to circumvent technical measures to enforce copyrights. This makes GPLv3 software ineffective for implementing DRM, both technically and legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A workaround which is available when the DRM-based software runs on dedicated hardware is to lock down the hardware in a way that a modified software does not run (&quot;tivoization&quot;). A clause which would have prohibited this did not make it into the final version of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T09:15:05.020" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T09:15:05.020" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-08T19:43:30.893" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The resounding &quot;No!&quot; answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/759/should-i-feel-guilty-for-one-off-contributions&quot;&gt;Should I feel guilty for one off contributions?&lt;/a&gt; raises the question, for me, of how easily a user could become a contributor to a given project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Easily&quot; is obviously very difficult to quantify here. The barriers to contribution for an advanced user of the project may be different to the barriers encountered by a technically advanced user who is less familiar with the project, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any studies or proposed frameworks for measuring the ease of contribution or barriers to contribution of FLOSS projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="453" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T13:48:44.907" Title="Are there any metrics/papers/studies on ease of contributing to projects?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-08T20:45:11.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of getting paid when you are finished implies a fixed price contract.  Most developers are against this type of contract due to the risk, but I'm not going to go there.  What I will say, is that if you're doing fixed price contract, you don't have to produce the source until they pay you.  Then they can push it up to a public github account if they want, or you can do it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if they want to create a new piece of software as open source, they are probably doing this to reduce their cost, in which case, they will be attempting to get other contributors and you won't be doing a fixed price contract since that doesn't make any sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they want you to modify an existing piece of open source software, I would suggest that you make an hourly arrangement with short invoicing cycles and short payment terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they want you to modify an existing piece of OSS, and you are ok with a fixed price contract, a) you have a greater appetite for risk than is prudent, and b) fork the code to a private repo and only after the client pays you, do you issue a pull request to merge back into the original repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way for you to deal with this, is if the contract is small, demand payment upfront.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'd be very suspicious about any company who wanted to pay you to create OSS.  There are reasons, but getting a consulting gig to create OSS is right up there with getting a job managing a unicorn stable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="534" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T20:45:11.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="979" CreationDate="2015-07-08T20:48:38.373" Score="11" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I am writing an article for a website. I go to a website for research, and I find a piece of text I want to include. At the bottom of the website it says &quot;Copyright website.com 2015&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to copy this text if I present it in my article quoted, and with a source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, am I allowed to publish my article under an open sourced license? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-08T23:58:06.407" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T23:58:06.407" Title="Can I quote stuff from a copyrighted piece of text and publish it open sourced?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="978" CreationDate="2015-07-08T21:29:42.707" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easy part: yes, you are allowed to publish your article under an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part: Whether or not you are allowed to copy the text depends greatly on where you are, and what you're doing with the text.  In general, this is covered under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing&quot;&gt;fair dealing&lt;/a&gt;, or other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_and_exceptions_to_copyright&quot;&gt;exemptions to copyright&lt;/a&gt;.  It is a very, very broad topic, with the rules varying wildly from country to country.  About the only thing that's consistent is that publishing your article under an open-source license doesn't change the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T21:29:42.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-08T21:30:43.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source factor is just a red-herring. As a software developer/contractor you will be paid if, and only if, you deliver the software the client requested. And contrary to most of the answers above, rights to the work you do for a client remain with the client, not with you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I said &lt;strong&gt;requested&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt;, they are two different things and it is normal for customers to not want the first draft of what is delivered. This is because what they requested is usually not what they wanted and they won't know what they want until they see it. You deal with that by agreeing on acceptance criteria. If the code fails the criteria, you don't get paid, if it passes, you do. If it turns out that it passes the criteria but is not what they want, you get paid and they have the option of setting new criteria. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good sense says show them early and often as that way the client gets more input into the shape of the product which ensures they will be happier with the result (and happier to pay). It also means you can stage the software accordingly so they are not paying upfront for any garbage they can't use and you don't get stung for work they don't want. This is the basis for agile software development. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="538" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T02:41:26.347" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T02:41:26.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="978" CreationDate="2015-07-08T23:06:37.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most jurisdiction in one way or another allow quotes. You should give a source and the quote (or quotes) should be only a small part of your complete text. As I said, this might vary in different jurisdictions. But if you follow the rules of your country you should still be able to claim your rights on your text and therefore make it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here's the catch. Open Source involves others can make derivates of your text. But on the quotes they would be still restricted. They cannot change the attribution from person A to person B. They also cannot change the quote. Both action would violate rights of the person who said the quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should probably point out, that your text is open source, but the quote(s) are still more restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-08T23:06:37.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2015-07-09T00:23:54.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One area where free software will not reasonably compete in the foreseeable future is playback software for premium video. Movie studios make their works available for rental and enforce the terms of the rental contract with DRM (digital restrictions management) so that an end user cannot turn a rental into a substitute for a purchase. Even when a particular DRM scheme is open to third-party implementations, all implementations must meet the scheme's &quot;compliance and robustness&quot; rules in order to get a player key to decrypt the video. A requirement for robustness against end user modification inherently rules out free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is video games. The vast majority of professional &quot;e-sports&quot; leagues have standardized on non-free games. Trying to provide free software to an e-sports league by &quot;cloning&quot; an existing video game is more legally risky than &quot;cloning&quot; a productivity application because case law doesn't leave quite as much room for an interoperability defense with games. (Compare &lt;em&gt;Lotus v. Borland&lt;/em&gt;, decided for the cloner, to &lt;em&gt;Atari v. Philips&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Tetris v. Xio&lt;/em&gt;, decided for the original games' copyright owners.) Furthermore, the makers of popular &quot;consoles&quot; (set-top video gaming devices) &lt;a href=&quot;http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06/gpl-scummvm-and-violations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ban all copylefted software&lt;/a&gt; from their platforms and authorize no way to load software created by the user of a retail device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private sector production of tax preparation software is a third. In this domain, the developer translates annual changes to the tax code into a machine-readable form. Users rely on the accuracy of this translation to an extent greater than the typical &lt;code&gt;ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY&lt;/code&gt; disclaimer can support. The specialized labor involved in the translation is why details of the translation are considered valuable trade secrets. In theory, it'd be possible for the public sector to provide free tax preparation software, but certain fiscal conservative political parties would be loath to accept what they would term government scope creep and unfair competition with the likes of H&amp;amp;R Block and Intuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T00:23:54.737" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1083" CreationDate="2015-07-09T01:23:12.413" Score="17" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY (4.0)&lt;/a&gt; is a flexible, permissive license that requires attributing the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if: Alice creates an artwork and distributes under CC BY, which is adapted by Bob who also distributes under CC BY, which is in turn used by Carol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who does Carol need to attribute? Just Bob, or both Alice and Bob?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T16:06:14.437" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T10:56:23.207" Title="Is CC BY attribution transitive?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2015-07-09T06:23:56.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adapted means Bob takes Alice work and improves on that? In that case Bob's result is a collaborative work of Bob and Alice. That means Carol has to attribute both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T07:05:16.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T07:05:16.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2015-07-09T08:59:33.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most legislations differentiate between rights of authorship, distribution (copyright) and usage (license); though terms, definitions and consequences may vary regionally and IANAL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Author's&lt;/strong&gt; rights (not copyright) can't be sold or transferred in any way, at least in Germany. If you've written the code, then you're the author. Period. In equivalence you can't make a contract to sell or transfer your human rights, e.g. become a slave. Such a contract would be invalid by law in developed countries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Originally the author has the copyright. The author may grant non-/exclusive rights of distribution to another party even barring himself from distributing his work. However if there's no payment, there's no deal and the granted copyright is void. Contracts saying otherwise are likely invalid by law.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder can provide licenses to anyone. However licenses can be changed. Paid for licenses usually expire after some time. Lifetime licenses need to be specified as such explicitly. They are valuable. Contracts not reflecting the value appropriately can be invalid by law. Not-paid for licenses can probably be revoked at will. After all the receiving party has not paid anything, so there's no obligation they receive anything. The other way round: If you received no money in exchange for the license, you can happily return any (i.e. &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; ) money received in exchange for revoking the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open source license does not change anything of the above. Most licenses use the author's rights to grant copyright to everyone by default. &quot;Copyleft licenses&quot; do the same but require derivative work to do so, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you as author charge for open source licenses, which is totally valid and seems to be the case, then anyone not paying but using your software is violating the license and thus commits what is commonly known as software piracy. Under some conditions it's punishable by law. In any case you have civil claims for the money they owe you. Please note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Punishable by law means any perpetrator may be sentenced to go to jail or just pay a fine. Any fine does not go to the copyright holder. It's punishment for a crime. It goes to the state. A relevant crime would be to distribute the software commercially without holding the copyright. Using the software is not a crime. Giving it to close friends privately is in a gray zone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regardless of any crime and punishment you still have the civil claim. Making your claim is way easier, if there's a sentence over a crime. However even if there's no verdict &quot;guilty&quot; the civil claim may still hold. It's just on you to prove it's applicable, i.e. the software was used without valid license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="564" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T11:58:07.223" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T11:58:07.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2015-07-09T09:34:54.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some companies consider some of their software programs as advantages that give them a leading edge against their competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both InvestmentBankA and InvestmentBankB are very similar, but what makes one earn more than the other is how smart its trading algorithm is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both WebAdsCompanyA and WebAdsCompanyB are very similar, but what makes one earn more than the other is how smart their program can match advertisement content to available advertising space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the opposite, most companies consider that they can win over their competitors thanks to their superior team, customer base, strategy, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T09:34:54.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="762" CreationDate="2015-07-09T12:40:35.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The impact is simple to state and impossible to quantify. Open source implementations that include copies of copyrighted APIs may constitute infringement. This is not a common case. Many common APIs are explicitly licensed permissively. So, for example, an API published under the GPL could preclude a GPL-incompatible implementation unless the copyright holder dual-licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, typing 'implements X' where 'X' is some API included in the JDK/JRE is not what this is about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T12:40:35.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="906" CreationDate="2015-07-09T13:41:30.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is not any standard form.  Unless the AGPL is in use, there is no problem here. Let's walk through the scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;start with an open source platform&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create modifications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use those modifications &lt;em&gt;in house&lt;/em&gt; to deploy an application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is that there is no distribution of the results. If an organization takes an open platform, modifies it, and uses the result internally, it has no obligations under any commonly used licenses except AGPL. If the internal use results in an externally-visible website, there are obligations under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the intent is to contribute these changes back, then the situation depends on the licensing and copyright regime of the project. These vary widely; some projects require copyright assignment even for tiny contributions, some don't ever require any at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final remark,  Given the legal complexities of 'derived work', it is unclear in the extreme if it is helpful to try to distinguish the 'ownership' of small patches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T13:41:30.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="999" CreationDate="2015-07-09T14:21:22.147" Score="17" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume I have programmed a cool application and released it as open source. But not many people are using it, as most install their programs through their distribution of choice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I somehow add my program to a distribution, specifically Debian? What have I to do to be accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can assume Debian in all cases this is different between distributions in your answer. So you can explain this specific to Debian, but I would like it, if it is mentioned which part is general for all/most distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T12:00:48.520" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T12:00:48.520" Title="How can I get my program into a Linux distribution (Debian)?" Tags="|distribution|software|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="590" CreationDate="2015-07-09T15:20:22.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question asks two questions: 'is it a problem?' and 'are there studies'? I offer a response to the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All internet communities are at risk of hostility. As a subset of internet communities, Open Source development projects have, at least, the same risks as anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Open Source communities work hard to avoid these problems. A core value of the Apache Software Foundation, for example, is 'community over code'. And the ASF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/policies/conduct.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Code of Conduct&lt;/a&gt;, which is mandatory for all open source projects, states quite clearly that the sort of bad behavior referenced here is unacceptable. The ASF is by no means the only locus of Open Source development to have such a code and such values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with all other aspects of 'open source', you cannot expect a general answer across all projects. Your Mileage Will Vary, and it's always wise to investigate the status and health of a community before investing energy into it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T15:20:22.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="995" CreationDate="2015-07-09T15:31:07.740" Score="34" ViewCount="20772" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some documents or blogs about development in open source projects, you can read stuff like 'upstream developer' or 'upstream fix'. What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:03:38.813" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T18:55:07.393" Title="What does 'upstream' mean?" Tags="|software|terminology|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2015-07-09T15:41:20.830" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the obvious analogy (from which the term flows - pun intended) ... water in a river flows 'downstream' and thus 'upstream' is the source from which the water comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analogy is deeply embedded in software development, so it's no mere coincidence that we use terms like 'head', 'source', 'upstream', 'downstream' and even 'flow' extensively in the field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of a forked software project, the 'upstream' is the source from which a particular project was forked. This might not be the absolute origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If project A is forked to produce project B which is then forked to produce project C, then B is 'upstream' of C and A is upstream of B (and C).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, an upstream developer is one who works on an upstream project. An upstream fix is one which exists in the upstream (parent) project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When working with Git, especially in the context of Github, it is not uncommon for a developer to set two remotes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;origin&lt;/code&gt; points to their own fork of a project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;upstream&lt;/code&gt; is conventionally used to point to the project from which they forked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows the owner of the fork to pull fixes and enhancements directly from the original project, thus keeping theirs in sync with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Github, I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kdopen/json-c&quot;&gt;a fork&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/json-c/json-c&quot;&gt;official json-c&lt;/a&gt; repository. My local repo is setup thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git remote -v&#xA;origin  ssh://git@github.com/kdopen/json-c (fetch)&#xA;origin  ssh://git@github.com/kdopen/json-c (push)&#xA;upstream    git@github.com:json-c/json-c.git (fetch)&#xA;upstream    ssh://git@github.com/json-c/json-c.git (push)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prepare changes in a local branch, regularly update my own fork with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git pull upstream master&#xA;$ git push origin master&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then rebase my own branches on the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have changes in my fork which I would like to see in the upstream version, then I create a &quot;pull request&quot; asking for them to accept my contribution. This process is referred to as &quot;pushing a change upstream&quot; which, for many projects, reflects the fact that its more work going upstream than down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T16:00:26.150" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T16:00:26.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="997" CreationDate="2015-07-09T16:35:46.600" Score="12" ViewCount="1487" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/883/55&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I asked why distribution are more common in the Open Source and Linux environment. It seems that a) open source makes the job easier for the distributor as it isn't needed to ask for permission and b) that Linux has an open development model instead of a centralized one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: How did people have the idea Linux would work better with a distribution and start the first distribution(s)? Which distributions were the first and when did these projects start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T14:14:24.060" Title="How did the first Linux distribution(s) develop?" Tags="|history|operating-system|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2015-07-09T17:26:19.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regards to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which distributions were the first and when did these projects start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is discussed at the beginning of Glyn Moody's book &amp;quot;Rebel Code&amp;quot;, in Chapter 6, &amp;quot;Boot Then Root&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentions the distribution from MCC (the Manchester Computing Centre) as being a very early example, though perhaps not the first. However, the book does not mention an earlier example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The First MCC Interim version, using the 0.12 kernel, appeared in February 1992.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the MCC Readme notes, &amp;quot;Very shortly after the first MMC Interim version of Linux appeared, other people released similar versions: Dave Safford's TAMU [Texas A&amp;amp;M University] releases, and Martin Junius's MJ Versions were eventually followed by Peter MacDonald's massive, comprehensive SLS releases and H. J. Lu's small base systems.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SLS (Softlanding Linux System) was an important early distribution.&#xA;Debian is generally considered an immediate successor of SLS, and Debian's founder, Ian Murdoch said at the time that SLS was &amp;quot;possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available; unfortunately it also [sic] quite possibly the most popular&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Slackware and Debian began in 1993. So the distributions mentioned above, none of which exist any more, could be considered the first wave before the distributions we know and love made their first appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did people have the idea Linux would work better with a distribution and start the first distribution(s)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has a clear answer. It is clear that not everybody can build their own distribution from scratch, any more than everybody can build their own automobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2023-10-26T14:14:24.060" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T14:14:24.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1000" CreationDate="2015-07-09T17:38:43.603" Score="11" ViewCount="3145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've encountered open/free (as in freedom) music, books, hardware, knowledge and naturally software. But do open source movies also exist? Is that even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T19:21:18.743" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T05:30:05.550" Title="Do open source movies exist?" Tags="|entertainment|movie|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2015-07-09T17:40:16.593" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Debian you can proceed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post an Intent to Package (ITP) bug report to the Debian Bug&#xA;Tracking    system (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/Bugs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.debian.org/Bugs/&lt;/a&gt;). Or if an existing&#xA;RFP (Request  for Packaging) bug report for the software already&#xA;exists, you can     assign it to yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/HowToPackageForDebian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Create the packaging for the software.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Upload the software and the packaging to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentors.debian.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mentors.debian.net/&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Wait for a sponsor (a Debian Developer who is interested in&#xA;uploading your package to Debian) to show up and people (mentors) to&#xA;critique your packaging. Possibly also post to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;debian-mentors&#xA;mailing list&lt;/a&gt; about your package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Improve your packaging to the point that a sponsor is willing to&#xA;upload it to the Debian NEW queue. If such a person doesn't show up &#xA;within a certain period of time, you are out of luck, but can try&#xA;again later. Note that your package will eventually be automatically&#xA;removed from &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentors.debian.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mentors.debian.net/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a sponsor has uploaded it to the Debian NEW queue, wait and see&#xA;if the FTP masters, who are Debian's gatekeepers, accept or reject&#xA;your package. If they reject it they will normally give a reason,&#xA;and you can try to fix the package and resubmit it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you happen to know a Debian developer who is willing to upload your package for you, you can skip steps 3 and 4. Note also that the #debian-mentors IRC channel on OFTC is a useful resource for packaging help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastEditorUserId="149" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T09:27:59.430" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T09:27:59.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-07-09T18:04:37.243" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, there is such a thing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_film&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;open-source films&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A definition of an open-source film is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI's open-source software definition&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Definition of Free Cultural Works&lt;/a&gt;. This definition can be applied to films where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The license of the movie is approved for &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Cultural Works&lt;/a&gt;. Specifically this is true for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BY&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The materials used in the movie (sources) are also available under a license which is approved for free cultural works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The movie and its sources are made publicly available via an online download or by other means that are either free or with a cost that covers reasonable reproduction expenses only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The sources should be viewable and editable with free/open-source software. If this is not the case, they must be convertible into such a format by using free/open-source software. The same applies to the movie itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It should be possible to re-create or re-assemble the movie using the source materials.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There don't seem to be many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_films&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;films listed as truly open source&lt;/a&gt; (sort by &lt;code&gt;Open Source Movie&lt;/code&gt;) but there are a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notable example is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sita_sings_the_blues/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;critically acclaimed&lt;/a&gt; movie &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Sita Sings the Blues&lt;/a&gt;. which is currently licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC0 (Public domain)&lt;/a&gt;. Of which you can actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Sita_Sings_the_Blues_Files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;download all .fla files&lt;/a&gt; and use them as you like, with the restriction of some none open source songs used in the movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="192" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T05:21:25.007" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T05:21:25.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2015-07-09T19:00:15.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upstream is not completely unique to open source, in the closed source world they just call it a vendor. It is however better in open source because you don't have to wait for the vendor to fix bugs which is why the river analogy is so popular (although not perfect as rivers are much more likely to only flow in one direction). A project can get software from many sources, put them together and distribute through a single distribution channel. Upstream is the projects you use to build your project. Which in most cases is more than one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="385" LastEditorUserId="385" LastEditDate="2015-07-09T19:10:25.017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T19:10:25.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-07-09T19:19:57.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://durian.blender.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another example&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;em&gt;Sintel&lt;/em&gt; from the organization behind Blender&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was exploring their site, my first impression from the downloads page was that only the finished video was available. But on the &quot;About&quot; page I found this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The movie itself, and all of the work of the Durian team in the past 18 months will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, free for everyone to distribute, learn from or re-use. The &lt;strong&gt;4-disc DVD set&lt;/strong&gt; will provide all data to be able to recreate and rerender the film in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, they didn't want to support the bandwidth for many users downloading a 16Gb dataset. But the full source of the movie is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is licensed under &quot;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.&quot; which I interpret as &lt;code&gt;CC BY&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this film, and others like it, are purely CGI. An open-source live-action film, or worse a documentary, might be much more difficult to create. What would you consider the &quot;source&quot; to be in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, thinking about it, if the live-action film was published in a digital form under a suitable license you could edit it, reorder the clips, or use clips from it in another video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T00:43:45.740" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T00:43:45.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2015-07-09T20:58:15.007" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; Linux - the kernel - is not very useful. In order to use it, you need some programs. At the very least a shell, its utilities, an editor, and probably a compiler so you can write more programs. Many of these were already written seperately by the GNU project, or available as BSD-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a minimal Linux system already includes code from the GNU project, the Regents of the University of California, Linus Torvalds, and his contributors. Once you've gone to the trouble of collecting all this though, you can do something you can't (legally) do with non-Free software: copy it to disk or tape and hand it to someone else. And that's a distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fancy things like names, websites, updates, packages, and release schedules, came later. Note that because systems didn't come with Linux preinstalled an installer of some sort was essential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask the reverse question: without a distribution, how would anyone ever get Linux? How would it be .. distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="583" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T20:58:15.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="996" CreationDate="2015-07-09T21:36:27.123" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distributions are older than Linux! Ever heard of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt;? The acronym stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. The original Berkeley Software Distribution was a collection of software developed at the University of California at Berkeley, which you could install on a Version 6 Unix system. The year was 1978. At the time, access to software sources was still the general rule, but the culture was changing; soon Richard Stallman would get the idea of writing a free operating system after having been unable to customize his printer driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years, BSD came to include more and more software, until there was a complete BSD operating system. BSD pioneered such novelties as the vi editor, the TCP/IP protocol stack, the curses user interface library, the csh shell, etc. I don't know when BSD started to include software not written at UCB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time the Linux kernel came onto the scene in 1991, there was a precedent for taking a collection of software which wasn't maintained as a coherent whole and assembling it into a working system. Linux distributions did take it further in that from day 1, they had to combine highly disparate software, written and maintained all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-09T21:36:27.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-10T00:08:21.143" Score="8" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to publish a blog post under a Creative Commons license (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;). This post includes several quotations (to the extent allowed by copyright law) from works which are not licensed under a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/choose/results-one&quot;&gt;As recommended&lt;/a&gt; by Creative Commons, I’ll write this in the post’s footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This work is licensed under a Creative Commons […] License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the quotations, although part of my work, are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, because I can’t make this decision for the quoted works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I have to do something about this?&lt;/strong&gt; Like mentioning that the license does not apply to quotations? Or is it well known (or even specified in the CC license?) that licensing doesn’t affect quotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T12:10:56.667" Title="Do I have to exclude quotations in the license notice?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-07-10T00:19:56.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;open source movies do exist and are spread out amongst varied organizations that support the movement.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the internet archive runs a community open source movies portal:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/opensource_movies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/opensource_movies&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wikimedia commons has a list of open source media, although i'm not sure how many of these videos qualify as &quot;movies&quot;, as opposed to simply video:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources/Video&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources/Video&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;penn state runs a similar site with a list of open source media:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mediacommons.psu.edu/free-media-library/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mediacommons.psu.edu/free-media-library/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the a/v film geeks archive (also by the internet archive) has over 1000 submissions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/avgeeks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/avgeeks&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;public domain flicks offers movies in the public domain:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.publicdomainflicks.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.publicdomainflicks.com/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can also try the open video project:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.open-video.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.open-video.org/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T00:19:56.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1018" CreationDate="2015-07-10T00:33:25.050" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have an image of a piece of paper on which I wrote. I publish this image under an open source CC-BY license on my website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the text in the image now also licensed under a CC-BY license? Or is just the image itself licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T00:41:33.053" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:16:26.120" Title="Are the contents of an image covered by the license applied to the image?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="625" CreationDate="2015-07-10T00:39:52.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;data from blackduck&lt;/a&gt; isn't broken down by open/closed compilers, but it does cover the specific languages and provide historical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it is focused on language use solely within open source projects. Obtaining this information for closed/proprietary projects is obviously problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the possible exception of the Visual Studio/.NET specific languages such as VB.NET, and probably C# and Apple's objective C, I suspect that most of the compiled language use is from &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; (which is, of course, more than just a &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;c++&lt;/code&gt; compiler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially likely as I doubt too many open source projects use proprietary compilers, as the cost is a barrier to contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the closest I've been able to find in the ten days since you asked the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T00:39:52.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2015-07-10T00:47:07.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have quoted text from other websites you should source where the text came from somewhere in the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example your page might look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum quis aliquet turpis. Quisque faucibus augue pharetra, finibus nisl at, luctus quam. Vivamus elit felis, lobortis vitae auctor eget, tempus a mi. Ut sed ante placerat, pharetra ipsum id, gravida dui.&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Your quoted text from another article&quot;[1]&lt;/strong&gt; Sed quis scelerisque eros. Vestibulum sed arcu id risus tincidunt vehicula in vitae quam. Aliquam non nisl viverra, gravida velit nec, fermentum purus. In non interdum magna. Sed rhoncus libero a elementum efficitur. Praesent scelerisque vulputate lectus. Proin sagittis nec diam eget porttitor. Aenean malesuada nisl elit. Sed a imperdiet libero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[1] &quot;Example Domain.&quot; Example Domain. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 July 2015.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This work is licensed under a Creative Commons […] License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario there is no issue with licensing the entire page (including your quote), you are licensing the work that you did, your not licencing the original text from the original website your licensing the quoted (and cited) piece of text. This is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T00:47:07.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2015-07-10T06:12:19.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say no, but this might depend on local rules. But this doesn't mean you don't have a copyright on the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright of an image is always at the person who made the image and is restricted to the image itself. That means: lights, color-filters, position of things you have on your picture etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the copyright of the piece of paper you made a photo from is still at the original author of the piece of paper, which is you too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also who is having the copyright of the piece of paper can also disallow/allow you to make a picture. This is depending on local law rules as a good example is e.g. the right to make a photo of a building/location and share it as currently discussed inside EU called freedom of panorama. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T06:12:19.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-07-10T06:18:57.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For exemple, here is a project called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/zemarmot-libre-movie-made-with-free-software/#/story&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ZeMarmot&lt;/a&gt;, a 2D animation movie (under CC BY-SA) made with Open Source softwares like Gimp, Blender on Linux. This project isn't finished yet but it becomes interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="598" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T06:18:57.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1054" CreationDate="2015-07-10T06:55:59.707" Score="8" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/998/168&quot;&gt;Do open source movies exist?&lt;/a&gt; and specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/998/do-open-source-movies-exist#comment1560_998&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; made me curious about Open Source movies. It seems like most Open Source movies are animated, which makes sense since you can make all content yourself and assure it's licensed appropriately and making additional content is feasible for other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose however, that I want to make a documentary, using original interviews, original footage and stock footage (from whatever source), as well as music that may or may not be original. Aside from picking the right license (probably &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some CC license&lt;/a&gt;), how would I go about making sure that this movie can not only technically be remixed and redistributed, but that it is also practically viable, without anyone having to fear breaking some sort of copyright law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T10:16:11.917" Title="How do I ensure my documentary adheres to Open Source principles as closely as possible?" Tags="|entertainment|movie|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="990" CreationDate="2015-07-10T08:04:14.677" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/149/faheem-mitha&quot;&gt;@FaheemMitha&lt;/a&gt; already gave a perfect answer for Debian, but I wanted to add the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages&quot;&gt;process for Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;. If a package is included in Debian, it will automatically be included in Ubuntu shortly down the road:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ubuntu regularly incorporates source packages from Debian, so it is encouraged to upload a package to Debian first to automatically have it in Ubuntu in due time. In addition to that your package will reach a much broader audience if it is in Debian and all of its derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are also recommended to file a bug with Ubuntu's LaunchPad to move the process along faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Packages that have recently been added to Debian unstable will be automatically synced into Ubuntu prior to the Debian Import Freeze (DIF). After the Debian Import Freeze, you will have to file a bug with the summary field &quot;Please sync  from debian &quot; where  is the package you would like to see. Find the date for Debian Import Freeze on the release schedule page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_Review_Process&quot;&gt;Fedora's process&lt;/a&gt; also involves filing a ticket. For CentOS, the process is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Packages/ContributeYourRPMs&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and is done primarily through a mailing list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For OpenSUSE, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Factory&quot;&gt;this guide&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amazon does not seem to provide a guide for Amazon Linux, but getting it into CentOS and Fedora should get Amazon to pick it up after a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/quick-porting.html&quot;&gt;don't forget about FreeBSD&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/submit.html&quot;&gt;NetBSD&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html&quot;&gt;OpenBSD&lt;/a&gt;)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T08:04:14.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-07-10T08:26:23.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add a live-action film to the list, the documentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Get Lamp&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is licensed CC BY-SA-NC. The source videos are &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/getlamp-interviews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hosted on the Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; and are licensed CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T08:26:23.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:17:01.533" Score="6" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a voting computer. The software running this computer is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this license mean that the voters using this computer to cast their votes must be able to modify the code of the software running the computer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T14:15:37.950" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T14:15:37.950" Title="Can voters modify the code of a voting computer?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:29:03.947" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that anyone can modify and redistribute the code of a GNU GPL v3 project. But no one is under any obligation to actually run a modified version that they do not want to run. So yes, you could create your own fork of the voting software and rig it, but no one will run that version on an actual voting computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a legitimate concern here though, namely that someone will add a feature or fix a bug and with that modification, sneak in some sort of exploit. If this modification makes it through, the person who made the modification could then use it to their benefit. This is one reason why all user contributions should always be thoroughly scrutinized before they are added to a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T09:29:03.947" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1007" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:44:34.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this specific example, the text &quot;I publish this image under an open source CC-BY license on my website&quot; is below the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;threshold of originality&lt;/a&gt;, which means that it is not entitled to copyright protection. A public license can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be applied to a work if it eligible for copyright protection, so the answer is clearly &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let's assume that the text on the photographed paper is an original poem or some other literary work that is above the threshold of originality. In that case the photograph of the text is a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of the original (literary) work.  In that case, applying a CC license to the derivative does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; retroactively enforce the license on the derivative on the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be blatantly obvious if the photograph is a photograph of somebody else's literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the law does not work differently, even if your photograph &lt;em&gt;your own&lt;/em&gt; literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a derivative work requires permission from the rights holder. This is permission usually simple to obtain if both the original work (literary text) and derivative work (photo) is both created by the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T11:16:26.120" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:16:26.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2015-07-10T09:56:24.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v3VotingMachine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. Companies distributing devices that include software under GPLv3 are at most required to provide the source and Installation Information for the software to people who possess a copy of the object code. The voter who uses a voting machine (like any other kiosk) doesn't get possession of it, not even temporarily, so the voter also does not get possession of the binary software in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T13:57:36.977" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T13:57:36.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:01:17.133" Score="20" ViewCount="2508" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider I've written a program and released it under the GNU GPL version 2. Now I want to release it under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot;&gt;GNU GPL version 3&lt;/a&gt;. Let's call this &quot;upgrading the license&quot;. Is this possible? How do I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for changing the license would be that I want to get the additional protection offered by the GNU GPL version 3. I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to license future work under the GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T02:36:48.227" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T14:38:55.360" Title="How do I upgrade from GPLv2 to GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|relicensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:02:41.050" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quotations are permitted by &lt;strong&gt;exceptions and limitations&lt;/strong&gt; to copyright (e.g. &quot;fair use&quot; in the USA), and accounted for my sec. 2(a)(2) in the CC licenses, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exceptions and Limitations&lt;/strong&gt;. For the avoidance of doubt, where Exceptions and Limitations apply to Your use, this Public License does not apply, and You do not need to comply with its terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all the public license does not apply to any quotations embedded in your blog post.  As far as the &lt;em&gt;CC license&lt;/em&gt; goes, there is nothing that is required of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the answer by Trevor Clarke, civil and academic norms requires you to provide &lt;em&gt;proper credit&lt;/em&gt; for any material reused under exceptions and limitations to copyright - but that follows from civil and academic norms - not from the CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T12:10:56.667" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T12:10:56.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1021" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:25:59.647" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; program (and not a derivative of somebody else's program, or something that a lot of other people has contributed to), you have the full right to do whatever you like.  So just create a new distribution and state that this distro is under &quot;GNU GPL version 3&quot;, replace &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; and edit any copyright notices to refer to the correct license - and you're done. Doing so will give you the &quot;additional protection&quot; you believe is offered under the newer version of GPL. Also doing so will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; license any &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; work you do on the program under the GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; version will still exist and be licensed under GNU GPL version 2.  There is nothing you can do to stop that from being distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that doing this will create a fork of your program.  GNU GPL version 2 and version 3 are mutually exclusive &amp;ndash; so doing this will create all sorts of problems for downstream recipients, and probably confuse a lot of developers unaware of all the pesky intricacies of FLOSS licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is IMHO not a good idea to change from one license into another, incompatible license in the middle of a program's life cycle. But if you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to do this, there is nothing to stop you from doing so,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T14:38:55.360" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T14:38:55.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1035" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:36:12.837" Score="63" ViewCount="8439" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some cases I have noticed that some people say GNU/Linux instead of just Linux. Why is that so? Do both terms mean the same or is there a subtle difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T01:01:19.293" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T14:39:32.850" Title="Why do some people refer to Linux as GNU/Linux?" Tags="|terminology|gnu|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:45:02.833" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are different terms for the same thing, used by two different groups of people.  Use of the &lt;em&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/em&gt; name is done at the explicit request of Richard Stallman and the GNU Project.  You can read the full rationale &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the GNU Project's website&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems to boil down to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the&#xA;  machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is&#xA;  an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it&#xA;  can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux&#xA;  is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the&#xA;  whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fair to say that opinion is divided about the merits of this.  I personally try to use the &lt;em&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/em&gt; term when I can, but I understand that not everyone sees it as desirable, or even sensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T11:34:04.993" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:34:04.993" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-10T10:49:46.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/a&gt; is the name of an OS distribution that uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux&lt;/a&gt; as the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just using a kernel will not get you anywhere, you need something called the &quot;userland&quot;: an editor, a filesystem, tools of all kinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different variants of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU&lt;/a&gt; system that use different kernels. One is GNU/Hurd that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurd&lt;/a&gt; as the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an extensive FAQ about this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorDisplayName="user490" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T10:57:13.510" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T10:57:13.510" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="176" CreationDate="2015-07-10T11:16:03.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some well known licenses (e.g. the GPLs) are included as part of the Debian base installation (in the &lt;code&gt;base-files&lt;/code&gt; package), and are in the directory &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/common-licenses/&lt;/code&gt;. Packages that are licensed under one of those licenses reference the corresponding license location path in the file &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/pkgname/copyright&lt;/code&gt;. I assume this satisfies the licensing requirements; Debian is pretty careful about such things. I don't know if every OS does the same thing, but if it did, it would satisfy the license requirements while still avoiding duplication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of the wording used (taken from &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/slrn/copyright&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On Debian systems the complete text of the GPL is in&#xA;  /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, here is a list of the license texts under &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/common-licenses&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Apache-2.0  Artistic  BSD  GFDL  GFDL-1.2  GFDL-1.3  GPL  GPL-1  GPL-2&#xA;  GPL-3  LGPL  LGPL-2  LGPL-2.1  LGPL-3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why the list is restricted to these licenses; there are other well-known licenses, like the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you are distributing the source of a program that is licensed under one of these well-known licenses, then the license should be included in the source regardless, but it doesn't need to be included in the corresponding Debian binary package, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastEditorUserId="149" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T11:29:43.907" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:29:43.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-10T11:40:59.607" Score="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;GNU project&lt;/strong&gt; was created to produce a free software alternative to Unix. They were able to produce most of the programs an operating system would provide, but their kernel, the GNU Hurd, was not stable enough to rely upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linux&lt;/strong&gt; is a kernel, the most base level of an operating system, and was created and published under the GNU GPL, a free license. It came to be adopted as the kernel of the GNU OS while the Hurd continued to be developed, but it remains an external project and is not officially part of GNU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is entirely reasonable to call the combination GNU/Linux as they are two distinct projects paired together. Strictly speaking, Linux by itself is not very useful without all the other software in GNU. But GNU is awkward to pronounce and is a nerdy acronym (but not nearly so nerdy as the double-recursive acronym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd#Name_and_logo&quot;&gt;Hurd/Hird&lt;/a&gt;). Linux is easier to pronounce and is a more conventionally marketable name (being a short word with no previous meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For better or worse, Linux is now a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot;&gt;metonym&lt;/a&gt; for the whole GNU/Linux OS and greater ecosystem. While it's not ideal that so many people only know the name &quot;Linux&quot; and not the GNU project which provides most of what they use, the reality is that language is incredibly hard to shift once it has settled, and I personally don't anticipate the situation ever changing. Let's educate people about the GNU OS, but let's not make a fuss if our grandparents (or grandchildren, depending on who you are) don't get the distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T11:48:21.767" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T11:48:21.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1021" CreationDate="2015-07-10T12:27:55.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another important consideration is whether you have accepted any contributions from other people into your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has submitted a pull request, and you have pulled in their changes (either to fix bugs, or add enhancements) but didn't get them to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla&quot;&gt;Contributor Licence Agreement&lt;/a&gt;, then they hold copyright on part of your code, and you will need to get their agreement before re-licensing your project (or you will need to remove their contribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than one open source project has fallen apart because the current guardians have been unable to contact some of the contributors and have thus been unable to secure the agreement of all copyright holders for an essential change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If only you have ever contributed to the project, then you hold the copyright on the entire project and can fork it or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot;&gt;multi-license&lt;/a&gt; as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="610" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T12:27:55.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1021" CreationDate="2015-07-10T12:32:26.487" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers are good but don't acknowledge another consideration that bears mentioning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You state in your question you've written a program, but if you've &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; assimilated contributions from other people into your program, relicensing becomes more tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly, you may not have the licence to license their work under another licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't relicense your GPLv2 program under MIT, which is what you intended when you picked the GPLv2 licence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equally, you can't relicense my GPLv2 contributions to your program under GPLv3, as I have only granted you the rights to redistribute my work under GPLv2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had your contributors sign a valid &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cla&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;, you are free to relicense as this grants you the ability to re-license the submitted code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="611" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T12:32:26.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1040" CreationDate="2015-07-10T13:12:16.107" Score="6" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my case we developed several software components that work together to build the final system. Now I want to release my developments under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When checking the dependencies I discovered that there are some static links to other components that are required to provide a runnable implementation. Unfortunately these source code packages are not open source and therefore cannot be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any methods exist to solve such a situation in which components of a framework are to be published but are closely linked to others that cannot be made available in a public repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-10T13:54:38.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T03:35:14.600" Title="What to do if a software component to be published under open source license is linked with other components that are not open source?" Tags="|project-management|gpl-3|proprietary-code|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1039" CreationDate="2015-07-10T13:20:42.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no way to combine non-free code components with free software with a copyleft license. The reason is that any such combination will be a derivative work of both, and since the terms are mutually incompatible, that would be illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This follows directly from text of the GPL (the quote below is from GPL version 2), but similar language is in GPL version 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The &amp;quot;Program&amp;quot;, below, refers to any such program or work, and a &amp;quot;work based on the Program&amp;quot; means either the Program or any &lt;em&gt;derivative work under copyright law&lt;/em&gt;. (my emphasis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that copyright law does not deal with computer science technicalities such as various methods of linking, a derivative work is a work that &lt;em&gt;depends&lt;/em&gt; on another work, and cannot exist without that other work being present. It is this &lt;em&gt;functional dependency&lt;/em&gt; that makes the composite a derivative, and not the method used to combine the components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also made clear by the FSF in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work? (#GPLStaticVsDynamic)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As always, Wikipedia can be relied upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to confuse matters&lt;/a&gt;. However, the FSF FAQ is written by lawyers, the Wikipedia is written by anybody that has an opinion about something.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to do is to develop free replacements for all the non-free components.  This has been done in several FLOSS projects in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T14:01:25.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1044" CreationDate="2015-07-10T16:17:15.870" Score="17" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/627/do-you-need-a-degree-to-become-an-open-source-developer&quot;&gt;Do you need a degree ...&lt;/a&gt; was closed as off-topic as it clearly applied to any area of development, not specifically open/free content development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a re-framing, but very specifically from the open/free side. However, some background is required to properly do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time I completed high school, degrees in software engineering (as opposed to computer science) were few and far between. After taking a brief - privately run - course, I was easily able to get hired as a programmer. No interviewer even questioned my lack of degree - they were more interested in what I could &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That has all changed today. Here in California, a degree of any kind is considered necessary to even begin searching for a job - and not just in software. I know many people with degrees in business or marketing filling posts we would once have considered 'menial'. It is a standing joke here that the University of California will soon be offering a Bachelors of Retail Science to help people get work as checkout operators at supermarkets - and that the supermarkets will then demand applicants have this degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, focusing on creative domains such as software engineering and the arts, the open/free content movement appears to have no such barrier to entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there indications that this movement is opening the way for &quot;unqualified&quot; people to find positions in their respective industry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible sub-questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there statistics about the average age of contributors to major open projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarly for their qualifications?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there well known examples of non-degreed people moving from the open world into professional positions on the strength of their published work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, can an early dedication to open/free content creation help you bypass the cost of a University education? Does this increase the equality of opportunity for the less well off?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lest people think my comment about the California job market is just an urban myth, vague feelig, or localized phenomenon, see this quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that total employment is expected to increase by 20.5 million jobs from 2010 to 2020, with 88 percent of detailed occupations projected to experience employment growth. In the midst of all this, jobs requiring a master’s degree are expected to grow the fastest, while those requiring a high school diploma will experience the slowest growth over the 2010- 20 time frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/2018-60-percent-job-openings-will-require-college-education&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;By 2018, 60 percent of job openings will require college education&lt;/a&gt;. The article itself is not a primary source but it cites (or at least quotes) BLS statistics and reports to support the headline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further &lt;em&gt;The Economist&lt;/em&gt; devoted a large part of its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/printedition/2015-01-24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;January 24, 2015 Edition&lt;/a&gt; to issues surrounding college education, its social and financial costs, and the growing gap in equality of opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T07:42:09.067" Title="Does the open/free content movement lower the barriers of entry for non-qualified people?" Tags="|accessibility|software-development|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1043" CreationDate="2015-07-10T17:05:49.567" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, many people have become professionals in coding without benefit of a degree, your perception of the California job market notwithstanding. A CEO whom I know well, amongst many others of my middle-aged peers, is an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I hire people, I put a lot of emphasis on 'portfolio', and I know that I'm not alone. Open source is certainly &lt;em&gt;convenient&lt;/em&gt; for this, but it didn't exist when many of my peers were launching their careers sans degree. So I don't see how it's possible to quantify the incremental effect of open source. It's entirely possible to create a portfolio on github.com entirely of one's own work, with no collaboration with open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, there's a catch-22 that applies to your thesis. You have to &lt;em&gt;know how to do useful work&lt;/em&gt; to contribute to an open source project. It's hard to do that without either studying the subject or getting yourself hired by someone who will teach you. But, if you do manage to teach yourself to the point of obtaining real skill, chances are that you can get a job whether or not you have ever submitted a patch to an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my time contributing to open source projects, I've never seen any evidence that anyone met your profile of bootstrapping themselves this way. Of course, no one has to reveal this. Or reveal their age, which would make it rather difficult to answer some of your other questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every few months, someone shows up at the Apache Software Foundation wanting to do a study or survey to learn something about who is involved in open source projects. If I had $10 for each such thing I've participated, I could buy a new camera. I can't tell you whether any of this has led to publication-quality research, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://arxiv.org/&quot;&gt;arxiv&lt;/a&gt; might yield something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.researchgate.net/publication/264799596_Understanding_the_motivations_participation_and_performance_of_open_source_software_developers_A_longitudinal_study_of_the_Apache_projects&quot;&gt;Understanding the motivations, participation, and performance of open source software developers: A longitudinal study of the Apache projects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://search.arxiv.org:8081/paper.jsp?r=1006.1244&amp;amp;qid=1436549350892mix_nCnN_-2127026584&amp;amp;qs=open+source+participation+apache&quot;&gt;Exploring the Impact of Socio-Technical Core-Periphery Structures in Open Source Software Development&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T11:22:09.450" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T11:22:09.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1043" CreationDate="2015-07-10T17:08:02.097" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: nice question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Degrees are looked upon as a fairly standardised measure of your ability in the subject you study. Employers look for them because they indicate (in theory) that this person is capable of doing the job they claim they can do. In today's fast-moving world, where you need this new hire &lt;em&gt;last week&lt;/em&gt;, they're useful in being able to say &quot;this person has a better degree; they should be able to do a better job.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; get a job without a degree. If you can instead demonstrate to an employer that you have just as much education and capability as another candidate, you're still a strong contender. The problem with doing this is that it's hard to have something that demonstrates this as quickly and concisely as saying &quot;I have a top degree in software from MIT.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leads nicely onto the actual question: &lt;strong&gt;can good content creation help you bypass university education?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, it can. However, it does have some problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It requires more time from the recruiter to review (time = money);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not as standardised. I remember seeing a question on Programmers.SE about a recruiter thinking self-taught candidates don't know programming concepts like Big O notation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's hard to compare. Is good content creation a better indicator of proficiency than a degree? (Opinion: yes, but I'll just throw that out there).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing to note about this phenomenon is the reason for it. With creative professions, it's easier to gather together a showcase of &quot;work wot i 'ave done&quot; and show it to an employer. If you want a job at a cash register, you can't really bring another cash register that you worked on previously to tell your employer how good you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T17:08:02.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="807" CreationDate="2015-07-10T19:36:40.753" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;transifex is an open source translation platform; they do have a free account, so it is open to some extent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.transifex.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.transifex.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ckan utilizes it:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.ckan.org/en/943-writing-extensions-tutorial/i18n.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://docs.ckan.org/en/943-writing-extensions-tutorial/i18n.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;mozilla does too &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i recommend also poking around in internationalization and accessibility forums (w3c, mozilla, wikimedia foundation, etc.), as well as open access, and closed captioning communities.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;google translator ceased being open source, but bing's is still open, although again, open limits your capabilities:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.microsoft.com/translator/getstarted.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.microsoft.com/translator/getstarted.aspx&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T19:36:40.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="976" CreationDate="2015-07-10T19:41:52.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there are studies. Many studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are links to two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2014/535724/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Understanding Contributor to Developer Turnover Patterns in OSS Projects: A Case Study of Apache Projects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.poly.edu/~onov/Oreg_Nov_CHB_2008_published.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Exploring motivations for contributing to&#xA;open source initiatives: The roles of&#xA;contribution context and personal values&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a steady stream of sociologists who find this question interesting, and run surveys, and write papers. They show up at the ASF quite regularly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To stave off 'link only' complaints: project vary &lt;em&gt;drastically&lt;/em&gt; in the barriers they set to new contributors. There is really no general statement to be made here; you need to study a project for yourself to get an indication of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T13:48:44.907" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T13:48:44.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-10T20:49:52.283" Score="25" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Linux vs. GNU/Linux&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Terminology and History-in-Brief&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In common usage, the terms &lt;code&gt;Linux&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;IPA: &lt;em&gt;/ɡəˈnuː slæʃ ˈlɪnəks/&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy&quot;&gt;†&lt;/a&gt; [though often said &lt;em&gt;sans&lt;/em&gt; 'slash', the FSF recommendation is to pronounce it] refer to the same thing: the software distribution running on a computer that includes &lt;code&gt;Linux&lt;/code&gt;, the operating-system kernel, consisting of low-level functionality and &lt;i&gt;drivers&lt;/i&gt; that operate the essential devices in a computer and are necessary for its operation, as well as operating-system-specific functionality such as creation of &lt;i&gt;processes&lt;/i&gt; and determining the &lt;i&gt;scheduling&lt;/i&gt; of when those processes will run, among many other things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;Linux&lt;/code&gt; kernel initially made functional, and was made functional by, the software tools that were created under the GNU project by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) specifically in order to drive development of software for an 'operating system' (loosely speaking) that would not be be bound by the restrictions of the then-dominant propriety system of the day, UNIX, which restricted those who wanted to do various things such as see the source code of, write modifications to, build other software upon, or share new code that was based upon, other code that was held under a proprietary license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.en.html&quot;&gt;argues that there are many reasons to prefer the name &lt;code&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as the name of the operating system as a whole, although the debate has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy&quot;&gt;long and, at times, contentious.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Current Linux-Based Software Distributions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &lt;code&gt;Linux&lt;/code&gt; is combined with additional drivers, other low-level software, additional, higher-level support software, and innumerable other frameworks and applications; filling the gamut in licensing—from public domain to proprietary, much of it meeting the definition of 'open-source' put forth by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which maintains a list license that are both free, and that do not have any conflicts with other free licenses, as there were some issues with incompatibilities in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on which of the many available distributions you choose (or you can even roll-your-own, obtaining all the source code, and building it all from scratch!) there can be upwards of hundreds, or even many thousands of additional bits of code as well, all including software from diverse sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, most desktop systems will have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.x.org/wiki/&quot;&gt;X.org&lt;/a&gt; which you might call a 'kernel for the graphics subsystem' (i.e. it provides the basic functionality needed for any windowed desktop), and probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B&quot;&gt;GTK+ (the GIMP toolkit)&lt;/a&gt; and I could go on... Then you'll have something on top like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kde.org/&quot;&gt;K Desktop Environment (KDE)&lt;/a&gt;, or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnome.org/&quot;&gt;Gnome&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://lxde.org/&quot;&gt;Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE)&lt;/a&gt;, or one of many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's going to be hard to run a windowed desktop system without any of this, and only a very small part of it is GNU software, and it's quite arguable that a lot of it still could be called part of the 'operating system' as it is used in common speaking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What &lt;i&gt;Should&lt;/i&gt; It Be Called&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey, I don't know. I always just say: &quot;I am running... &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Windows&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, though: let's talk about which term we are really talking about. Are we talking about how it is used in common speech? Or are we talking about the term as it is used in computer science? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Computer Science Term&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[NOTE: I see there is debate about this issue; this is how I understood and learned the term]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as a Computer Science Term, I don't think GNU has a case at all. Linux is the operating system. It provides all the basic functionality to operate the computer, and it does the process scheduling and provides resources to the applications. I don't know all the system internals of Linux so I can't say 100% that there is no overlap between what an operating system traditionally is thought of as doing and what the GNU tools do, but as far as I understand it, in general; well, GNU just doesn't &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; any of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Common Term&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking in common, everyday terms, you wouldn't argue that someone saying they run the 'Windows Operating System' means they are running the Windows NT kernel and a few subsystems, and that they aren't referring to Win32 and all the rest. Clearly most people don't make that distinction. So why would we make it here? And, I don't think I'm going to start calling my Linux OS choice 'GNU/Linux/X.org/GTK+/KDE' either. And, for that matter, if I &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; to tack on GNU, I would call it: Linux/GNU. But I wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, what I call my *n-x OS (I have quite a few VMs), is by its &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt;, version, and kernel type; which would determine both where the hard work was done (picking the packages, dealing with incompatibilities, patching things, etc.) and the thing that determines the ABI (application binary interface for executables). In other words, it's enough information that I could replicate that environment sufficiently to find other applications that would run under it. Well, at least it would &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; be enough; assuming I knew a bit more, like what type of machine it was running on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU both &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; important and I don't want anyone to forget that. But as far as I am concerned, it doesn't belong in the title to my OS. But the thing is, I'm not arguing that it doesn't belong in &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt;. It's actually kind of irrelevant; just make sure whoever you are talking to understands you and in this case, you can use the two terms interchangeably in common speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="638" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T14:59:39.213" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T14:59:39.213" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="810" CreationDate="2015-07-10T23:29:37.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can build up your own business as a self employed contractor. You won't really be working only &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; FLOSS projects, but you can easily limit yourself to working only &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; FLOSS project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your expenses are low you don't need much money in the beginning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can gradually raise your rates and get more clients.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the code written is not directly useful for others. Many clients will be ok with you releasing parts of your work under a free license (especially patches with bug fixes, but sometimes also new features). It's usually easy to explain to your clients that it's in their own long-term interest to have patches go upstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's probably wise to not limit your skill set to one software project and/or one programming language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's okay to make small exceptions. I personally dislike working with Windows, but if it's to help a client migrate or to implement an open source system it makes it much easier to swallow. (Cygwin helps.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build up your network, in real life and online: non-free networks like GitHub, Stackoverflow and Linkedin can be very useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonus: pick up some skills not immediately related to software, e.g. graphic design, marketing, legal knowledge. (You can also use these skills to further the cause of free software. Demand is high and supply low, within the free software community.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="648" LastEditorUserId="648" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T10:35:37.857" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T10:35:37.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-10T23:31:15.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easiest to understand by looking at other libc/kernel pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I know that there are people who run:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gnu/linux&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;musl/linux&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gnu/kfreebsd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="650" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T23:31:15.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2015-07-10T23:55:14.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides forks as @kdopen said, the &quot;upstream&quot; terminology also applies to Linux distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the &quot;upstream&quot; is the actual developer of the project and the &quot;downstream&quot; is the packager. Distros have to add the packaging scripts and sometimes have to patch build scripts or source files; these are all sent downstream but only some are sent upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can even be multiple levels, e.g. an Ubuntu package based on a Debian package of a fork of a project (libjpeg-turbo for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="650" LastActivityDate="2015-07-10T23:55:14.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2015-07-11T02:30:33.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the basic principle is universal and applies to movies as well as to software: make sure everyone can have everything you used to produce the release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the editing process, soundtrack will be combined with the video, some interviews may stay unused, some footage may be cut short etc. To produce an alternative version it would be convenient to have the music in separate audio files and it would be necessary to have the original unedited footage.&#xA;It's also a good idea to provide the original project files for video editors you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T02:30:33.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2015-07-11T04:06:52.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the technical side: pretend that the motherboard on your old computer died. You just got a new computer and you want to create a director's cut of your documentary. What do you need to copy over from your old hard drive? That questions should really help to guide you. You're obviously not going to recreate something that you can just drag and drop. So for someone else to be able to do the same, they would need access to all of the items that you just copied over. One thing people sometimes miss is editable pictures. A PNG is great but if you have a GIMP file with a bunch of layers, that GIMP file will allow you to easily change the final PNG. That is part of your &quot;source.&quot; Also, don't forget your audio and video mixing project files. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the legal side (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IANAL&lt;/a&gt;): make sure that all of your source material allows modified and unmodified redistribution. Make sure that it also allows combination with other media (that may be under a different license!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the comment referenced in the question: The first two points in the comment relate to whether or not you have authorship rights over the material. If you do (i.e. the actors/subjects have given their consent for you to use the footage however you please; presumably they have if you've made clear your intent to create an open source documentary) then you can assign whatever license you want to it. See above paragraph. If you do not, then you presumably aren't using that footage for your film anyway so it's not part of your &quot;source,&quot; so no problem. The second two points are items that are not part of your &quot;source&quot; since you're presumably not going to include junk footage in your final film. You can distribute or not distribute it, doesn't really matter either way. Hope that helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="192" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T07:25:52.130" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T07:25:52.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2015-07-11T10:11:43.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the surface it seems open sourcing documentaries is not difficult. Just put it under the right license and publish. But there are some problems to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First the thing you have to do with all things, if you want to open source them: release also the source. For an documentation this means the raw shootings without color and brightness adjustments you made later and without extra audio tracks like music you put in the background. The music you put in the background should be also available in the sources, but separated. Probably source material for animations or graphs you put into the movie. For all parts you need the consent of all contributors to make their part of the work open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not all. You have to consider that more than just copyright influences restrictions on creative works. In many area of work much of them doesn't matter, but documentaries touch some of them. And all naturally depends on the exact law in the jurisdiction you live in (or the one you shoot the movie).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is discussion in the european union at this point. A new proposal is discussed by some under the angle that it might restrict the freedom of panorama in the european union. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freedom of panorama&lt;/a&gt; means you can photograph or film stuff that is owned or copyrighted by others as long as this is in public places and include it in your publication. That includes buildings. If that is allowed or not &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Freedom_of_Panorama_world_map.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is different in different jurisdiction&lt;/a&gt; (and may change over time as the example of the european union shows). Such consideration alone can make it nearly impossible to shoot footage in a city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you shoot it on non-public places Freedom of Panorama doesn't work, that can even hit you in surprising ways. For example, I live in Potsdam. We a historic park, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanssouci_Park&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanssouci Park&lt;/a&gt;. That park can everyone go to, but it is not officially public, as it is owned and attended by a foundation. That foundation made news, as it sued different photographers for taking pictures in the park and selling the photographs. Many aren't aware that the freedom of panorama isn't working in the park, as the photos in the Wikipedia demonstrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you try to get consent from the owners, it will be more difficult for open source movies. Because it includes that everyone can redistribute or alter the images. Many that might be OK with a one-time publication might have reservations against the open source rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another problematic part. Think, you make an interview with someone and include it in your documentary. If that is open source, the license allows everyone to change it. That means, malicious people could synchronize other texts to the persons sayings and therefore completely alter what he/she said. That usually is prevented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Personality rights&lt;/a&gt;. Again, these laws can be very different in different jurisdictions. But usually you cannot alter footage to denigrate someone on these footage. As you basically cannot prevent this, you should add a disclaimer, saying that some changes that might be allowed by open source might still be illegal and declare that you have no influence onto other alterations of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address what Philipp said in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1012/how-do-i-ensure-my-documentary-adheres-to-open-source-principles-as-closely-as-p#comment1693_1012&quot;&gt;comment on the question&lt;/a&gt;, I would add that this is a smaller problem. Sure, everyone can change your documentary and the result isn't telling the truth anymore. That is right, but at the same time the derivate isn't exactly your documentary anymore, and we should be accustomed to the fact, that others don't always tell the/our truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the safest way to make an open source documentation might be shooting animals in the wilderness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T10:11:43.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T11:03:50.543" Score="3" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read somewhere that Emacs was important for the development of the idea of Free Software. How can that be if it's just a piece of software? Or is there more to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gospel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;church of Emacs&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally, Emacs is also part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/afs-paper/node6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;hacker folklore&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T14:12:07.540" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T18:46:04.020" Title="What is the influence/significance of Emacs to the Free Software Movement?" Tags="|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="450" CreationDate="2015-07-11T11:55:52.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not too sure if you're thinking of competition from other companies or from individuals producing their own parts, but it doesn't make too much difference really. Just because the designs are open source doesn't mean everyone will prefer to make the parts than buy them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hobby 3D printers and CNC milling are of much lesser quality than professional/industrial machines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if you were happy with lesser quality, such machines require a lot of specific knowledge that most end users of the parts won't have and won't be willing to spend the time learning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And there is a large upfront cost in these machines. Whether it's open source or not, larger volumes scale better&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your business has the equipment, trained personnel, good quality assurance processes and a head start, it's likely that you'll be able to maintain a profitable business for some time. As an example, I think Tesla were talking about licensing their batteries etc. for free (this involves patents rather than copyright, but it's still a decent parallel). So sure, anyone could make those components. But there will not be many people who could start a successful competitor to Tesla before those components are obsolete, and the size of the market is so large that those who do will be very unlikely to hurt Tesla at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening your hardware designs ensures that if your business goes bust that the innovations you have will not be lost, and it allows them to be brought now to markets you can't compete in. If the international shipping costs for your product are prohibitive but you have no desire to manage many international production factories, then opening your designs allows others to start producing the products for the international market so that more people can benefit from your amazing product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T11:55:52.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:05:34.680" Score="6" ViewCount="1105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cooking recipes are often used to explain novice programmers about the concept of algorithms. There are some basic similarities to these two. So I ask myself, if there are open source programs, are there open source recipes? And if not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T14:04:14.337" LastActivityDate="2022-05-07T22:50:49.103" Title="Do open source cooking recipes exist?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1059" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:33:34.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are open source cooking recipes. One example that is heavily in use is the microformat hrecipe. When used on websites, it not only declares the recipe in the markup, but makes it easily scrapeable for reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recipe I recently became aware of is open source cola. Just like the name suggests,  it is the open source version (of one flavor) of soft drinks, and it stands out in contrast to its cousin, the king of proprietary closed recipes, coca-cola. You can read more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_cola&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T15:15:02.657" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T15:15:02.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:41:18.550" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's to distinguish GNU/Linux from other operating environments built on Linux. Each of the following environments combines Linux proper, which is a kernel, with a different &quot;userland&quot;, or set of userspace programs and libraries. In rough order of appearance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GNU/Linux&lt;/strong&gt; is a fairly complete clone of the functionality of the UNIX system. Desktop and server apps designed for UNIX are more likely to require a full-featured C library and core utilities, and the popular choice for this is GNU, maintained by the Free Software Foundation. On desktop machines, it also generally involves installing X.Org X11.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Embedded Linux&lt;/strong&gt; is a lightweight userland seen in appliances such as home network gateways, televisions, and the like. It typically uses a lightweight C library, such as Newlib or uClibc, and commonly uses BusyBox as its shell and core utilities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Android&lt;/strong&gt; is a userland commonly seen on mobile phones and tablet computers. It uses Google Bionic as the C library. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#linuxsyswithoutgnu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU/Linux FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, published by FSF, uses Android as an example of a Linux-based environment that is not GNU/Linux.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are not hard distinctions. Once Android was released, some embedded Linux enviroments began to use Bionic, as Chris Stratton mentioned in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/16944647/2738262&quot;&gt;answer to &quot;Alternative to Newlib?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It's also possible to take bits and pieces from GNU, such as GCC and Binutils, and use them atop an Android system, embedded system, or even a system that doesn't use Linux at all. DJGPP and MinGW are notable distributions of GCC for Microsoft operating systems. Many of us are also familiar with Cygwin, a UNIX-compatibility layer for Windows that is based on GNU. Its name originally stood for &quot;Cygnus GNU/Windows&quot;. In Windows 10, Microsoft introduced its own port of GNU to Windows, (somewhat misleadingly) called &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_guide#enable-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-feature-gui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Windows Subsystem for Linux&lt;/a&gt;. And for a while, Debian was even building a GNU system atop the kernel of FreeBSD, resulting in &quot;Debian GNU/kFreeBSD&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#howmuch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;declines to clarify how much&lt;/a&gt; of the GNU system qualifies an operating environment to take the &quot;GNU/&quot; label. But as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://pineight.com/mw/?title=GNU/Linux#The_name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rule of thumb&lt;/a&gt;, I have applied the &quot;GNU/&quot; label to systems that contain GNU Core Utilities plus two of Bash, GNU Emacs, GCC, or a shared GNU C Library (glibc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T14:39:32.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1059" CreationDate="2015-07-11T12:42:50.037" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many recipes are &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20181108082341/https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not actually copyrightable&lt;/a&gt;. Now a particular written form of a recipe may be, as would the formatting and accompanying photos of a recipe book, but a list of ingredients is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not sure when a recipe would become copyrightable. Maybe lists of ingredients never will be, but the steps to combine them are? This would be a good question for the Law SE site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-05-07T22:50:49.103" LastActivityDate="2022-05-07T22:50:49.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2015-07-11T13:03:34.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can offer a bit of history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, there was TECO, a supercharged relation to what you might know, today, as 'ed'. Folks built a set of macros for teco that knew how to use the necessary escape sequences to do a WYSIWYG editor on a terminal. These macros grew into the first Emacs. It was not open source. It was not closed source. No one thought in those terms; it was just a thing at MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, a friend of mine was inspired by this to build a version for Multics written in Lisp. Thus was born &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Multics Emacs&lt;/a&gt;, written (in part) in Lisp. Stallman, who was the primary author of the ITS TECO version, riffed off of it to create &lt;a href=&quot;http://emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsHistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Emacs&lt;/a&gt;, also in Lisp. GNU Emacs was a very early example of Stallman's FLOSS efforts; it was very widely used, because, well, it was &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;. Because it was widely used, it was influential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T18:46:04.020" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T18:46:04.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1121" CreationDate="2015-07-11T14:11:34.310" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the software world the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; both accept licenses as free/open. They also promote licenses for usage. In the hardware world some open source licenses have been created, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAPR_Open_Hardware_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TAPR Open Hardware License&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_Open_Hardware_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CERN Open Hardware License&lt;/a&gt;. But I can't find any institution accepting these licenses as open, keeping a list of them and promoting them. Does such an institution exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T21:42:32.873" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T21:57:41.513" Title="Is there an institution that accepts and promotes open hardware licenses?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1084" CreationDate="2015-07-11T16:06:02.147" Score="11" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright for old works expire at some point. In most countries that happens 70 years after authors death. Can I take a book with expired copyright (say Dickens Oliver Twist), change it substantially (modern language, some different characters and so on) and release the result under an open license (let's say CC-BY-SA)? What are the restrictions in doing so? And if it is allowed, who do I attribute as author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T16:08:37.997" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T13:18:31.160" Title="Can I create a derivative of an old book?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|public-domain|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2015-07-11T16:08:15.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. As soon as Copyright expired, the book is in the Public Domain. It has no owner. It is yours, mine, everybodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can take the content, change it in any way you want, license it in any way you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T16:08:15.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2015-07-11T16:10:44.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the copyright of a certain work expires, it is released into the public domain. Hence, anybody can use it. There's no restrictions to it. For example, I can take one of Beethoven's music compositions, change it up, and then make it mine. With copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you can take any content that is in the public domain, and you can do anything that you would like with it: That is change it, make it pretty (or ugly), and even relicense it to your wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the attribution section, I'm going to quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/trouble-spots/#sthash.kZNngAOW.dpuf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy from a public domain writing, do you have to credit the author? The United States Supreme Court has answered, “No,” holding that there is no legal requirement to provide any attribution when public domain works are copied and placed into new works. (Dastar Corp. v. 20th Century Fox Film Corp., 123 S.Ct. 2041 (2003).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just because there is no legal requirement to give credit to the creators of public domain works, doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it. When copying works from the public domain, be careful to avoid plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plagiarism occurs when someone poses as the originator of words he did not write, ideas he did not conceive, or facts he did not discover. Although you cannot be sued for plagiarizing a public domain work, doing so can result in serious professional and personal penalties. For example, in the case of college professors and journalists, it may result in termination; for students, it could lead to expulsion; if done by well-known historians, it can result in public humiliation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to, but it's a good idea to so, morally and ethically, and so that people don't start throwing tomatoes on you when you present your modified&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; version of Beethoven's music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 - Modified meaning changing a single note on an instrument that you don't hear&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T03:57:08.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1057" CreationDate="2015-07-11T16:37:42.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emacs, in its incarnation as GNU Emacs, along with GCC, was one of the cornerstones of the GNU project, whose aim was to create a free Unix-like operating system. In 1985 GNU Emacs was licensed under the GNU Emacs License. The GNU Emacs License was the world's first copyleft license, and was eventually generalized to become what we know today as the GNU General Public License Version 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free as in Freedom Chapter 9&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing&#xA;  off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of&#xA;  Emacs to emerge. To close that escape hatch, Stallman and his free&#xA;  software colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to&#xA;  modify GNU Emacs just so long as they published their modifications.&#xA;  In addition, the resulting &quot;derivative&quot; works would also have carry&#xA;  the same GNU Emacs License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to&#xA;  sink in. At the time, Fischer says, he simply viewed the GNU Emacs&#xA;  License as a simple contract. It put a price tag on GNU Emacs' use.&#xA;  Instead of money, Stallman was charging users access to their own&#xA;  later modifications. That said, Fischer does remember the contract&#xA;  terms as unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique,&#xA;  highly unusual at that time,&quot; he says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastEditorUserId="149" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T18:17:13.530" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T18:17:13.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T17:37:48.657" Score="6" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novena_(computing_platform)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Novena&lt;/a&gt; tries to be an open source computing platform. But so far it's only &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;partially open source&lt;/a&gt;. Which parts are still not open source and have to be replaced to create a fully open source platform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Novena has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;abundance of documentation&lt;/a&gt;, but its mass is overwhelming and it is hard to understand without electronic engineering knowledge, for instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://bunniefoo.com/novena/pvt1_release/novena_pvt1.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this schematic&lt;/a&gt;. So I find myself unable to extract the information to answer my question, although it is probably hidden in this documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T19:20:47.017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T19:21:53.827" Title="What parts of the Novena are not open source?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1064" CreationDate="2015-07-11T18:07:52.693" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I understand 100% but P2P Foundation is an instutition and posts their definition, license, and terms on their site.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licenses&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSHW by Freedom Defined is an example of promotion/definition:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OKFN's Open Design and Hardware Group also does something similar:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://design.okfn.org/designdefinition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://design.okfn.org/designdefinition/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T21:57:41.513" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T21:57:41.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T18:29:15.393" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;This originally sprang out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/217610/where-should-i-ask-a-question-about-open-hardware&quot;&gt;this Meta question&lt;/a&gt;, and then &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22710791#22710791&quot;&gt;a quick discussion in chat&lt;/a&gt;. This question is designed to test the underlying assumption behind the Meta question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to some that open hardware is developing slower than open software is, though there are a non-negligible amount of projects. Going back in time, however, the rates might be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does open hardware attract contributors in similar speed as open source software early on did? By &quot;early on&quot;, I mean the 1980s, give or take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T01:50:56.607" Title="Does open hardware attract contributors in similar speed as open source software early on did?" Tags="|hardware|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-11T20:04:50.450" Score="5" ViewCount="597" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Public Domain&lt;/a&gt; contains works on which copyright has expired. Basically you can do nearly anything with it. Does Public Domain therefore count as Open Source or free/libre?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-11T21:48:15.920" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T02:30:22.023" Title="Is public domain open source?" Tags="|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-12T01:54:41.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1073" CreationDate="2015-07-11T20:55:47.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Public domain is indeed free/libre. This includes CC0 and the Unlicense, which are commonly used as public domain dedications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From gnu.org:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being in the public domain is not a license; rather, it means the material is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive non-copyleft free software license. Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to release your work to the public domain, we encourage you to use formal tools to do so. We ask people who make small contributions to GNU to sign a disclaimer form; that's one solution. If you're working on a project that doesn't have formal contribution policies like that, CC0 is a good tool that anyone can use. It formally dedicates your work to the public domain, and provides a fallback license for cases where that is not legally possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for open source, refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#public-domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Note that the OSI did not approve CC0 because of the explicit lack of patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; public domain is both free/libre and open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T02:30:22.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1073" CreationDate="2015-07-11T22:46:04.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple types of public domain. All can be viewed as open source (when there's source), but not all of them are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first type is works whose copyright had expired. Note that different countries have different copyright law, so anything newer than XIX century may happen to not be in public domain in one or more countries. Works that are not copyrighted anywhere anymore are free in the same sense as works under GPL or MIT or another free license. If it's still restricted in any country, it's not free in the same sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second type is works that were declared public domain by their authors. The problem with it is that in most countries you cannot declare your own work public domain, and the definition of public domain is restricted to particular cases like works created 70 years before the author's death or works by the government, so this claim is technically legally void.&#xA;Even though the author has no intention to sue anyone over it, there is no clear agreement between you and the author regarding what you can do and what you can't either, which may be important in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third type, which is not really public domain, is works released under CC0 and similar permissive licenses. These are indeed free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while it's hypothetical at this point, if some closed-source binaries survive until they meet the definition (1), they will be public domain but still closed source, there will not be any legal obligation for author's descendants to open source it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2015-07-11T22:46:04.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-11T23:39:47.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google's 'Summer of Code' is an annual program, open to students in tertiary education. Students are paired with a mentor and paid a stipend to work on selected open source projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information can be found at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GSOC website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T15:06:46.330" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T15:06:46.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-11T23:39:47.047" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions related to Google's Summer of Code (GSOC) program." OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T15:35:17.030" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T15:35:17.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-11T23:52:07.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a U.S. copyright law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.[1][2] Passed on October 12, 1998, by an unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DMCA does offer safe harbor protection to service providers provided they comply with Section 512, including notice and takedown procedures.&#xA;DMCA Takedown Notices are commonly used by copyright holders to remove copyrighted materials on the web.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original document&lt;/a&gt; can be found at copyright.gov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DMCA is of importance to open source developers, especially if they are producing code which could be deemed to 'subvert' a DRM mechanism (such as decoding DVDs). Although it is a US law, code published in another country is available in the US and thus may place the publishers under US Jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T12:52:50.573" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T12:52:50.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-11T23:52:07.307" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the context of open development." OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T12:52:57.027" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T12:52:57.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1072" CreationDate="2015-07-12T01:50:56.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that open hardware actually precedes open source software. In the age of analog electronics and early home computers when everyone could build a piece of hardware of equal or better quality than those available commercially, sharing schematics with the community through hobbyist groups and journals was a common practice.&#xA;So if we consider modern open hardware community a successor of the old electronics community, the number of contributors it attracts has declined dramatically, and will probably not rise until small scale hardware manufacturing becomes feasible again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T01:50:56.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-07-12T02:33:19.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Hardware Association has a list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org/definition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; that should be met to call a project &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Hardware&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Electronics is different from source code in that circuits themselves cannot be copyrighted (can anyone suggest references on this point?) while all material around them, such as design files, can be.  Things are further complicated because once you dip below the software side, it's unclear where the threshold should stop.  If I run free and open source software on a chip that is closed, does that count as open?  If I release the VHDL under a permissive license but the toolchain to program the chip is closed, can it really be considered open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these subtleties aside, the idea behind 'open sourcing hardware' is to provide all the necessary information available that would enable someone with similar means to reproduce your project.  This includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Releasing the electronic design files, such as schematics and PCBs, under a free (as in libre) license (for example, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY or CC0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making the source code available (if any) under a free (as in libre) license (for example, some GPL compatible license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Releasing the design files for other hardware under a free (as in libre) license (for example, CAD files for the enclosure under a CC-BY-SA, CC-BY or CC0 license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that any CC-NC (non-commercial) or CC-ND (no-derivatives) license does not qualify as 'open source hardware' in this context as it restricts the freedom to redistribute, sell and alter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="682" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T12:37:31.040" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T12:37:31.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-12T06:10:14.243" Score="5" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;While visiting the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free and open-source software&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed the Challenges section from template at the bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RcMfv.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen-shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital rights management&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_and_free_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software patents&lt;/a&gt; seems considerable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know about the interference/interaction of &lt;strong&gt;DRM&lt;/strong&gt; with Free &amp;amp; Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, how do we react with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note: This question is split off for software patents separately, also visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1088/296&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T21:41:12.573" Title="Interference of DRM with free &amp; open source software" Tags="|law|drm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2015-07-12T07:24:08.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the CC &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki page on attribution&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creator &lt;strong&gt;if supplied&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;attribution parties&lt;/strong&gt; if designated in reasonable manner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that Carol will need to attribute to Bob if (and only if!) Bob so wishes. Bob can even demand not to be attributed if he wants to. Now what are these attribution parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Credit_to_others_explicit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Further on the page&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1.0 and 2.0 licenses, CC licenses contemplated crediting the author only. Versions 2.5 and 3.0 allow licensors to identify another party or organization for attribution (called an “Attribution Party” in these licenses). This feature was introduced in part to alleviate burdensome or difficult attribution situations, such as when many people contribute to a collaborative effort and agree to be credited as a collective body. In licenses with this feature, licensors may designate another party for attribution purposes—such as a sponsor institute, publishing entity or journal—in addition to or instead of the author. &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5457&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You may review some of the concerns raised when CC proposed this change&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means concretely is that any contributor can choose freely who gets attributed for their work. So if Alice attributed her work to an organization she works for and doesn't ask Bob not to attribute this organization, the Bob will need to include this organization is his attributions as well. He can then choose who to attribute for his work. Carol will then have to attribute both Alice's and Bob's attribution, unless any of those two choose they do not want to be attributed by Carol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this has nothing to do with copyright, which under CC-BY is an entirely separate matter (which of course also works transitively).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T10:00:33.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2015-07-12T08:39:57.650" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright for old works expire at some point. In most countries that  happens 70 years after authors death. Can I take a book with expired copyright (say Dickens Oliver Twist), [...] and release the result under an open license (let's say CC-BY-SA)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Berne convention, works &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; pass into the public domain after life of author + 70 years (i.e. Berne signatories have to provide this &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt; protection for literary and artistic works).  However, the Berne convention does not impose a &lt;em&gt;maximum&lt;/em&gt; term of protection, and it also deals with two different sets of rights: Economic rights and  moral right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both economic rights and moral rights may be &lt;em&gt;inherited&lt;/em&gt;, and it is the heir who will exercise these rights after the death of the author. Any rights that is inherited in this way may pass down to future generations as long as the rights persist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the &lt;em&gt;economic rights&lt;/em&gt; have expired, you're allowed to make &lt;em&gt;verbatim reprints&lt;/em&gt; without asking for permission, and you can distribute those as you like (for money or for free).  I can't see any reason why you should not be able to attach a license, but since the original is without license, anybody can ignore the license just by saying they copied the original (and not your reprint).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;change it substantially (modern language, some different characters and so on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what is legally called &quot;an adaptation&quot;, and permission to create adaptations may be blocked by what is called &lt;em&gt;moral rights&lt;/em&gt; (droits d'auteur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most jurisdiction, and in particular those outside of northern Europe, moral rights is treated as equal to economic rights: I.e. they expire after the life of author + 70 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, in the USA, rather heavy handed adaptations of some classical works has been made, for instance Shakespeare's &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot; (West Side Story), and &quot;The Taming of the Shrew&quot; (10 Things I Hate About You).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://guide.lodzfilmcommission.pl/index.php?page=Chapter&amp;amp;id=30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some jurisdiction&lt;/a&gt;, such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania moral right &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; expire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the restrictions in doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, if you're allowed make an adaptation, you hold the copyright of the adaptation. So you can impose any terms you like (including a CC BY-SA) on the adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if moral rights are intact, you may not be allowed to make an adaptation.  You're only allowed to adapt if the adaptation respects the &quot;integrity of the work and the author&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a be-bop adaptation by Arne Domnérus of the Norwegian national anthem (&quot;Ja, vi elsker&quot; - composed by Rikard Nordraak, 1842-1866) was in 1977 (111 years after the death of Nordraak) by a Noregian court declared to violate Nordraak's moral rights and had to be pulled from the Norwegian market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ks0IU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover image of &amp;quot;Ja, vi elsker&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be said that this is an extremely rare example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if it is allowed, who do I attribute as author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if it is an &lt;em&gt;adaptation&lt;/em&gt;, then moral rights require you to &lt;em&gt;credit&lt;/em&gt; the original author (e.g. &quot;adapted from 'Oliver Twist' by Charles Dickens&quot;). However, if it is an adaptation, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, not Dickens is the author of the adaptation, so you list yourself as the author).  Moral rights also means that you're not allowed to state that Mr. Dickens is in any way &lt;em&gt;responsible&lt;/em&gt; for the adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the line between what is considered an adaptation, and what is a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; work that has some plot lines in common with some earlier work is blurred.  &quot;West Side Story&quot; is obviously an adaptation of &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot; (and Shakespeare adapted it from the 1562 poem &quot;The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet&quot; by Arthur Brooke). However, &quot;Wuthering Heights&quot; and countless other tragic love stories where societal norms prevents a happy ending, is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T13:18:31.160" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T13:18:31.160" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1082" CreationDate="2015-07-12T10:05:43.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this is a complicated matter. Generally open source uses and covers copyright. But the rights and freedoms granted by open source or free software can be restricted with more than just copyright. DRM is an example how these restrictions can be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DRM is a technical measure that tries to prevent copying or prevent execution of code that isn't allowed. This, for example, leads to Android phones that can only execute signed official Android-versions. Basically that prevents some of the rights the user usually gets with open source or free software. This seems not that important - you can buy other Android phones that allow switching the software, but it develops. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI_Secure_Boot#Secure_boot_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SecureBoot&lt;/a&gt; only boots up signed software. Currently, SecureBoot in normal PC can be deactivated, but that may change in the future. Effectively the mass usage of obligatory SecureBoot would mean that you have to choose the right PC to be able to run an Open Source operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most FLOSS-licenses aren't covering DRM restrictions, but the GPL version 3.0 is trying to cover DRM. These special considerations towards DRM are untested yet in court though, as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T10:58:31.880" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T10:58:31.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-12T10:40:19.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T10:40:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T10:40:19.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-12T10:40:19.380" Score="0" Body="DRM, also called Digital Restriction Management in the FLOSS community, are mechanisms implemented in hardware or software which prevent the user from copying, viewing, printing or altering a piece of digital content on their machine without permission of the copyright holder." OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T19:03:19.287" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T19:03:19.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1090" CreationDate="2015-07-12T10:56:11.333" Score="7" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;While visiting wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free and open-source software&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed the challenges from the template at bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RcMfv.png&quot; alt=&quot;screen-shot&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital rights management&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_and_free_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software patents&lt;/a&gt; seems considerable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know interference/interaction of &lt;strong&gt;Software patents&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;Free &amp;amp; Open Source Software&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words how do we interact with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note: This question is split off from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1082/296&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;  to be specific on Software patents.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T12:21:15.790" Title="Interference of Software Patents with Free &amp; Open Source Software" Tags="|law|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2015-07-12T10:59:54.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this is a complicated matter. Generally open source uses and covers copyright. But the rights and freedoms granted by open source or free software can be restricted with more than just copyright. Software patents are an example of how these restrictions can be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software patents restrict the rights of the user of open source software. The software may be licensed under an open source license, but still it might conflict with certain patents and therefore be illegal to distribute. That often depends on the jurisdiction, for instance in Europe software patents are formally not allowed, but the patent office has accepted several patents that can be counted as such. Many audio- and video-formats are surrounded by software patents, so that an open source implementation still underlies certain restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most FLOSS-licenses don't cover these restrictions, but the Apache license version 2.0 and the GPL version 3.0 try to consider software patents. These special considerations towards software patents are, as far as I know, still untested in court though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T11:43:19.367" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T11:43:19.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1088" CreationDate="2015-07-12T11:32:23.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Why is it a problem?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents are dangerous because they can put an additional restriction on the use and distribution of software which is not mentioned in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A company can freely contribute to an open source project and license their work under an open source license, but in the meantime file a patent on some aspect of their contribution. Later they can then use that patent to collect license fees from distributors and users of the allegedly free software. All of this is completely legal because licenses usually only deal with copyright law, and patent law is a completely different beast, even though the outcome is usually the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can also be done by companies which were not involved in the development at all but own a similar patent filed before the project was published. The patent doesn't even need to be enforceable. The threat alone that it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; apply can be enough to stunt the adoption of free software, because patent lawsuits are expensive. Companies fear that they might lack the resources to fight a patent lawsuit, even when they could win with enough money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents can also be used to prevent someone from creating a free alternative for a proprietary product. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing&quot;&gt;good example for this is the H.264 video encoding algorithm&lt;/a&gt;, also known as MPEG-4. The algorithm was developed as proprietary software, but how to implement it is no secret. An algorithm can not be copyrighted, only a specific implementation can. So as far as copyright is concerned, anyone could create a free implementation for everyone to use. But unfortunately there are various companies which hold several software patents which apply (or might apply) to this algorithm. This allows them to collect royalties from anyone implementing the algorithm, free or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Advocates of free software thus recommend to use different algorithms like OGG Vorbis which was specifically designed to circumvent any known patents on video encoding. But video encoding is such a minefield of patents that some people believe that there might still be some less known patents out there which could also be applied to Vorbis and fear that wide adoption of Vorbis could prompt the holders of these patents to surface and start to demand money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patent law is an area which is not internationally homogenized. Different countries have different laws regarding what can be patented and which laws apply. Software patents in particular is a shaky area which is handled differently in different jurisdictions. This can lead to the situation that a certain piece of free software is only free in some parts of the world and not in others, violating the right to free distribution without discrimination of certain groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How can we deal with it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Demand patent licensing&lt;/strong&gt; in licenses. The GPLv3 for example has a section on patents which says that any contributors must license any patents which apply to their work for free. However, this does not help against 3rd party patent claims.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Work around the patents&lt;/strong&gt;. When you have an open source project, do your research about which patents might apply to the area and try to not violate them. Release early, because after you released a product, any applications for new patents which apply to the product are invalid due to prior art.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bust the patents&lt;/strong&gt;. When prior art can be proven for a patent, it can be declared invalid. A good medium for crowdsourcing potential prior art is the stackexchange site &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Ask Patents&lt;/a&gt; which has a specific &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/prior-art-request&quot;&gt;tag for prior art requests&lt;/a&gt;. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/patent-busting&quot;&gt;patent busting project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Build a defensive pool of patents&lt;/strong&gt;. Just play the same game the patent trolls play. Register patents yourself, and then pledge that you will only enforce them against those who also try to press their own patent claims. This is the strategy many large companies use to protect themselves from frivolous patent claims. Unfortunately this only works against people who actually implement their patents in products and are not just in the business of filing lawsuits. Also, the strategy of fighting fire with fire might not sit well with the more ideological parts of the free software community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Political lobbying against software patents&lt;/strong&gt;. Software patents have already be declared unenforceable in large parts of the world. But there are still countries which have not yet understood how bad they are for innovation and the international competitiveness of the countries IT economy. Support organizations which try to convince politicians to change the local patent laws for the better. When you live in such a country, try to convince your local politicians yourself and consider their opinions about software patents when casting your vote in the next election.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T12:21:15.790" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T12:21:15.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1064" CreationDate="2015-07-12T11:36:49.393" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_Open_Hardware_License#Projects_using_the_CERN_OHL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Projects using the CERN OHL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the CERN OHL website they have a list of projects using their license&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki/CernOhlProjects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[4]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;. These projects include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ohwr.org/projects?q=&amp;amp;license_version_id=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Most projects in the Open Hardware Repository OHR&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gizmoforyou.net/site/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gizmo For You Ltd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplemachines.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SimpleMachines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinkerforge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Tinkerforge&lt;/a&gt; Bricks and Bricklets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXIOM_(camera)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AXIOM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apertus.org/alpha_prototype&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[5]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; – &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema_camera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;digital cinema camera&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Beer&lt;/a&gt; variation, brewed for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre_Software_Meeting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;RMLL&lt;/a&gt; 2012 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_recipe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recipe&lt;/a&gt; placed under the CERN OHL 1.1&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://2012.rmll.info/biere-libre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;[6]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAPR_Open_Hardware_License#Adoption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;TAPR Open Hardware License &gt; Adoption&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Graphics Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects/lotusgreendatacenters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lotus Green Data Centers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T11:36:49.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1092" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:32:44.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T12:32:44.617" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T12:32:44.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1093" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:32:44.617" Score="0" Body="For questions about the various distributions of the Linux OS, such as their origins and specific impacts on the community." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T12:43:57.440" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T12:43:57.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:41:10.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human resources (and HR departments) deals with the management of the most valuable resource within a project: humans. This involves the efficient deployment and feedback collection of employed human beings, among dealing with their other concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag on questions about HR from a project-management perspective. Think: is this a concern HR would have if I, the project manager, put this plan to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T13:11:24.653" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:11:24.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1095" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:41:10.657" Score="0" Body="For questions about the human management of a free/open project. Think HR departments." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-12T13:11:30.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T13:11:30.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:44:57.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original license used on BSD Unix had four clauses, and has been officially rescinded by UC Berkeley. The advertising clause (the third of four clauses) required you to acknowledge use of the copyright owner's code in your advertising of any product using that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD &quot;New&quot; 3-clause license omits that third clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An even newer BSD license omits the third clause of the New&quot; license and is the &quot;2-clause&quot; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OpenBSD license exists as the 3-clause BSD license and as a 1-clause BSD license with a shortened disclaimer, that is also known as the ISC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD_4Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Original 4-clause BSD license (rescinded)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD 3-Clause &quot;New&quot; or &quot;Revised&quot; license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause &quot;Simplified&quot; license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=License:FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FreeBSD license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://openbsd.wikia.com/wiki/OpenBSD&amp;#39;s_BSD_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenBSD license&lt;/a&gt; (also called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:ISC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ISC license&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Original BSD license is incompatible with GPL, but the two- and three-clause licenses have been declared to be compatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Gnu.org declares&lt;/a&gt; that the FreeBSD license is the same as the BSD 2-Clause licence, but the text of the FreeBSD license actually contains an additional disclaimer about &quot;views and conclusions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-28T20:12:15.350" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T20:12:15.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-12T12:44:57.793" Score="0" Body="The license-specific tag for the BSD family of permissive open-source licenses. Use on questions about them; their origins, use, and design." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-28T20:12:23.870" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T20:12:23.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1082" CreationDate="2015-07-12T15:14:11.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;DRM is also known as &quot;Effective Technological Measures&quot; (ETM).  Under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, 1996, WIPO Copyright requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Member States to provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention&lt;/a&gt; of ETM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anti-circumvention has since been incorporated into the copyright laws of most jurisdictions around the world.  Iin the USA, this is part of the DMCA (1998), in the EU, in European Directive 2001/29/EC (2001), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of ETM clearly challenges the very concept of FLOSS since the presence of ETM may first stop you from sharing an &lt;em&gt;unadapted&lt;/em&gt; program with others, and also stop you from creating a functioning &lt;em&gt;adapted&lt;/em&gt; version (thereby taking away the four freedoms associated with FLOSS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that there a &lt;em&gt;laws&lt;/em&gt; that prevent circumvention means that even if you have the &lt;em&gt;technical means&lt;/em&gt; to circumvent, you may not do so legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 is dated 1991, before ETM became protected by law, so it does not discuss DRM/ETM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, DRM/ETM (along with patents), was on the agenda in the work that resulted in GPLv3 (2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early drafts of GPLv3 first tried to deal with DRM by saying that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DRM is fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of the GPL, which is to protect users' freedom; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This resulted in protests from many developers, and the original creator of the Linux kernel - Linus Torvalds - wrote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I literally feel that we do not - as software developers - have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God. We are trying to show others that co-operation and openness works better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, this evolved into the following, which is in part 3 of GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This compromise text does not &lt;em&gt;forbid&lt;/em&gt; DRM/ETM in free software, but provides an &lt;em&gt;explicit permission&lt;/em&gt; to circumvent, thereby removing the legal protection otherwise given to ETM by the DCMA and similar laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar permissions to circumvent has been part of Creative Commons version 4.0 license suite. AFAIK, no other licenses deal explicitly with DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that since 1998, ETM has become ubiquitous on several important platforms for distrubuting software.  If you distribute your software via Apple iStore and Google play, ETM is added to your distro whether you want to or not.  So just banning it (as suggested in the early drafts of GPLv3) will effectivelty cut free software developers off from important distribution channels.  We may very well ask people not to use those platforms that incorporate DRM/TPM - but I don't think this strategy will win us friends or influence people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do we, as authors of FLOSS deal with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to using a license that &lt;em&gt;allow circumvention&lt;/em&gt; of the pesky TPM added by Apple and Google, we should always make it clear that the original source is available and can be downloaded from GitHub or similar sites.  Then, those who want to enjoy the four freedoms can get it there, and adapt it (for instance for use on platforms the original author do not support). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-12T15:14:11.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="974" CreationDate="2015-07-12T15:22:49.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the GNU GPL 3 does not prohibit DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in legal terms, DRM is usually referred to as (Effective) Technological Measures (ETM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relvant text is in part 3 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This text does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; forbid DRM/ETM in free software, but provides an &lt;em&gt;explicit permission&lt;/em&gt; to circumvent, thereby removing the legal protection otherwise given to ETM by the DCMA and similar laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a compromise text resulting from a massive resistance from hardware manufacturers and some software developers (including Linus Torvalds) to initial attempts to declare DRM/ETM incompatible with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if the DRM scheme requires some kind of secret to work? Wouldn't the GPL require this secret to be published and GPL licensed too, making the DRM useless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it would not.  DRM/ETM schemes that leverages on Public Key Encryption (PKE) technologies exists.  The DRM software would be open source.  However, the secret key to &quot;unlock&quot; the application would not, and could be delivered to individual users (presumably after they've paid a premium) out of band.  The TOS for the premium service could disallow public sharing of secret keys, and/or the PKE would tie each secret key to a single device, making sharing of secret keys ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the GPLv3 anti-DRM clause does, is to &lt;em&gt;permit&lt;/em&gt; brute force and other cryptographic attacks on this scheme, in jurisdictions (which is most of them in 2015) that has outlawed &quot;circumvention of technological measures&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T08:02:02.637" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T08:02:02.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1104" CreationDate="2015-07-13T11:57:02.657" Score="9" ViewCount="1144" Body="&lt;p&gt;When contributing to an open source project that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/352/168&quot;&gt;pull requests&lt;/a&gt; exclusively for contributions, I'm left wondering when a good time is for me to send a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially in doubt when it come to implementing rather major features, should I implement the entire feature on my fork and only push &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/993/168&quot;&gt;upstream&lt;/a&gt; when it works? My worry here is that it might be a lot of effort for them to check if my work is correct when they have to review a huge amount of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the spectrum, I'm afraid that sending a ton of tiny pull requests might get on people's nerves as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should I keep in mind when trying to figure out how quickly I should send a pull request?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This will obviously vary from project to project, I'd like to know what is the general preference and what the variations tend to depend on. &lt;strong&gt;This might also help me set standards if I start my own project.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T11:26:36.160" Title="How can I know how much of a change to make in each of my pull requests?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|pull-request|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2015-07-13T11:58:33.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what changes you're making. I judge my submission of pull requests by &lt;em&gt;criticality&lt;/em&gt;: for critical issues, it doesn't really matter how much you change, if you're fixing the issue; for tiny issues like code style, you just shouldn't change it because the author wrote it how the author wants it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could even assign a numeric scale to it, with 0 being uncritical and 10 being fix-this-or-die:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;00: code style                      Don't change&#xA;...&#xA;05: UI design errors                One line probably won't suffice&#xA;...&#xA;10: critical security flaws         Whatever's necessary&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, though, if you're fixing an issue you should submit a request that contains a &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; fix of the issue, having previously forked the repository and made and tested your changes. Whatever you do, it should be complete: a complete new feature, a complete fix, a complete page of documentation, etc. This applies even for tiny fixes: make them complete, and you can submit a pull request. The author may like you &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; if you bundle lots of little issue fixes, but if you've only got one to fix, submit when complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T12:04:46.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T12:04:46.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2015-07-13T12:23:50.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pull requests should be easy to review and integrate. Big pull requests can be easy if done properly, and small pull requests can be extremely tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your change is going to be big, or if it has a huge impact (e.g. breaks backwards compatibility), you should discuss what you are going to do with the maintainers first.&#xA;It may turn out that some of them are already working on an alternative solution, or if the upcoming changes are about to make your original idea inapplicable and it will need modifications, for instance.&#xA;If the design and implementation details of your feature/fix are agreed upon, it's usually easy to review and merge. Also, it allows other people to collaborate with you on it since they also know what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, suppose I send you a one-line fix that uses obscure syntax and I don't supply any explanation of what precisely it does. It's probably easier to dismiss than to find out if it's worth merging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think one pull request should correspond exactly to one logical change though, no matter how big. Several unrelated changes such as fixes for totally different bugs or several features unrelated to one another is a bad idea, even if the pull request is small in terms of size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T12:23:50.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2015-07-13T12:32:28.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should only submit a pull request if it is complete. The problem is the definition of &quot;complete&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must not break any existing unit/regression/integration tests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must include sample code and/or documentation for how to configure, deploy, use the feature,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must be based on the current commit of the branch you want your changes to be merged against,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should implement a feature that can actually be used OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;should include a complete change to parts of the system that are not directly usable but that prepare the ground for future changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T12:32:28.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1070" CreationDate="2015-07-13T13:50:39.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official website containing the documentation can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://novena-guide.readthedocs.org/en/PVT2/source-licensing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It seems that they have not made official documentation yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; you linked to, is over a year and a half old. Since then numerous other articles have been released saying it is now &lt;strong&gt;fully&lt;/strong&gt; open source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wired.com/2014/01/open-source-laptop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;First Totally Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/18/novena-the-crowdsourced-fully-open-laptop-is-shipping-this-winter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open source laptop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://techpp.com/2014/04/03/novena-fully-open-source-laptop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fully open sourced laptop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire laptop is open source - with one exception to this being the processor (a Cortex A9 CPU). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T19:21:53.827" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T19:21:53.827" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:01:11.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In order for a software to be public domain, it needs not to be copyrighted&lt;/strong&gt;. So only non-copyrighted open source softwares may qualify as public domain (&lt;em&gt;rather than open source!&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you want a program you have written to be in the public domain, you must take some legal steps to disclaim the copyright on it; otherwise, the program is copyrighted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T14:01:11.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:18:15.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only correct answer here is &quot;it depends&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to know your audience - in this case the people who will be accepting the pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, when you first start contributing to a project, the best approach is to choose a small (usually low priority) bug. Being low priority, it's probably not being worked on yet. Being a small fix, it is an excellent &quot;hello world&quot; introduction to that project's community and their practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, clone the repository ('pull request' as a mechanism is generally related with Git-like VCS systems), and study the pattern of accepted requests. Look for similar small fixes, and see how they were done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then FOLLOW the style which is used in that project&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I have seen a bug fix in Git rejected because the developer fixed the bug &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; renamed a local variable in the same commit. The renaming made sense (it was too similar to another, which had led to the bug being introduced). The community requested two pull-requests: one which did nothing more than rename the variable, and another which fixed the bug. Neither was more than a few lines of code. Both were accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other projects, I have seen entire features come in as a single commit. This makes sense when all changes are additive (perhaps adding a new entry in a dispatch table, and the functions that the entry calls to add the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that there is a difference between a &quot;pull request&quot; and a commit. Your single pull request can contain multiple commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T14:40:43.907" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T14:40:43.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:35:57.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT License can refer to several permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original MIT license reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The X11 (another variant) is largely similar, but includes an additional clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:18:42.133" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:18:42.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1113" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:35:57.407" Score="0" Body="For questions pertaining to the MIT/Expat license or the MIT/X11 license." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-13T19:58:50.307" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T19:58:50.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1118" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:53:59.617" Score="4" ViewCount="1601" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/657/what-am-i-supposed-to-do-if-someone-is-breaking-the-terms-of-my-licensed-softwar&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question says what to do if &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; is breaking the terms of a license, I am asking what do I do if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; breaking the terms of an open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was using a piece of software and misread one of the terms of the agreement. I reread the license recently and noticed I am breaking one of the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fix this issue, could I just delete all the files I have used in relation to this program? Or should I contact the owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:41:07.377" Title="What do I do if I broke the terms of an open source license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-07-13T18:08:48.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:57:10.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T14:57:10.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T14:57:10.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-13T14:57:10.333" Score="0" Body="A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. In this context this means a program that instead of being source code is compiled for a specific architecture and cannot (easily) be read by a human." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-13T15:28:22.570" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:28:22.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1115" CreationDate="2015-07-13T15:11:52.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on whether you have, in fact, distributed something to other people in violation of the license. If you have not, you almost certainly have not violated the license, just prepared to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have, I can tell you what we would generally do at the Apache Foundation if we found that we had, by some accident, incorporated some inappropriately licensed content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as practical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a commit to the source repository to remove the inappropriate content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a release of the product that no longer contains the inappropriate content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;notify that the release(s) containing inappropriate content had the problem they had.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make it harder to download those releases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't think that we'd do is to edit history in source control to remove all traces; for a license which imposes restrictions on distribution (the usual situation with FLOSS), there's no sufficient reason to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:11:52.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1115" CreationDate="2015-07-13T15:16:12.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends on the license, but in the case of the GNU GPLv3, this is what it says about termination (sec. 8):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you're usually &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to fix the issue by doing whatever it takes to repair the violation after you've discovered your mistake.  There are some other terms (depending on whether this is your first time transgression or not), but the gist is that a good-faith violation is repairable, and if you're able to repair, you can go on using the licensed materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; oblige you to inform the copyright holder (but other free software licenses may - read the license text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not able to repair (for instance, you're distributing GPL code as part of an unfree project), then you need to stop doing it, delete the files, issue a recall to your customers, and probably: hire a lawyer to help you sort out the mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T15:16:12.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2015-07-13T19:47:26.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you submit a pull request that's too big, they will just reject it and tell you to split it up.  If you submit one that's too small, they will just reject it and tell you to keep the branch around until it's done.  Pull requests are public.  You can get a good feel for the preferences of particular projects by viewing previous pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, most first-time contributors tend to err on the side of pull requests being a little too small.  They are eager to get their change accepted, and in the rush, they skip things like documentation, style guidelines, and unit tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larger endeavors should be run by the maintainers first.  Again, in my experience, this doesn't tend to be an issue, as most contributors are eager (some say over-eager) to tell people about their idea.  I did this successfully myself as a new contributor twice.  In both instances I was asked to make one small pull request with a proof-of-concept.  Once they saw my idea worked and how it fit into the project, I was given the go ahead to implement it more extensively, in a second, much larger, pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="722" LastActivityDate="2015-07-13T19:47:26.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1064" CreationDate="2015-07-13T21:06:01.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA)&lt;/a&gt; is probably one of the top organizations out there. They are active in the open hardware movement, increasing awareness and spreading information about projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Hardware_Association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;president Gabriel Levine&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OSHWA will continue to work together and with some advice from attorneys who are open to discussing some of the legal options and licenses available, compile some clarifying documents that can help companies and individual see what some legal options are available for producing and distributing open source hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I'm having trouble accessing their website right now, so I cannot get to said list. At the moment, this is technically a link-only answer (sort of). If someone could add the list on, that would be great. If not, and I continue to have computer difficulties, I will delete this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (change as necessary): I followed your link to the OSHWA and found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org/definition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; of Open Hardware and in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org/sharing-best-practices/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Best Practices&lt;/a&gt; is a section about Licensing, naming a few licenses, including normal OSS-licenses like GPL and BSD, Creative Commons-licenses and hardware-specific licenses like TAPR and CERN OHL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T09:07:25.223" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T09:07:25.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1122" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:16:44.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;DRM, aka Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management (though more commonly the former), is a class of copy protection technologies used by software and hardware developers with the intent to control the use of digital content after sale. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DRM in open source is generally viewed as a bad thing, because using it denies the Free Software Definition (aka you must not restrict how the licensed product can be used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag on questions about DRM in free/open applications and projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T21:38:42.087" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T21:38:42.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:16:44.177" Score="0" Body="For questions about DRM, aka Digital (Rights/Restrictions) Management, and its applications to projects." OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-18T07:10:49.917" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T07:10:49.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:45:44.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Operating systems are basic software to use a computer. The tasks an operating system undertakes involve: memory management, launching programs, organizing the file system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for questions about interaction of operating systems and open source software or open source operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T13:33:01.700" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T13:33:01.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:45:44.320" Score="0" Body="Operating systems are basic software to use a computer. This tag should be used for questions about interaction of operating systems and open source software or open source operating systems" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T13:32:57.037" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T13:32:57.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:56:45.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open-source and free software do not exclude commercial activity. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and&#xA;  community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run,&#xA;  copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free&#xA;  software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the&#xA;  concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in&#xA;  “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the&#xA;  French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not&#xA;  mean the software is gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four&#xA;  essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code&#xA;  is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a&#xA;  chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a&#xA;  precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And also&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away&#xA;  the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution&#xA;  containing programs from several different sources. The license shall&#xA;  not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of&#xA;  persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in&#xA;  a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the&#xA;  program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic&#xA;  research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-04T21:54:35.923" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T21:54:35.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-14T09:56:45.343" Score="0" Body="Commercial activity is anything to make money. This tag is for questions about making money with Open Source / Free Software, or other interaction between open projects and commercial activity.&#xD;&#xA;&#xD;&#xA;Warning: Open Source / Free Software can be commercial as well. Do not use this tag to mean not-open-source. Use the [proprietary] or [closed-source] tags instead." OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-12-01T09:48:32.090" LastActivityDate="2023-12-01T09:48:32.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:05:53.867" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Munich - one of the biggest cities in Germany - has migrated its infrastructure to Linux, a project called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limux&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Limux&lt;/a&gt;. There was a lot of discussion surrounding this project. In the discussion also often costs are discussed. The different sides argue how much the transition to Linux and Open Source Software costs. See for example this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.golem.de/news/muenchen-microsoft-veroeffentlicht-details-zur-limux-studie-1301-97192.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;news in german&lt;/a&gt; (I couldn't find something in english, sorry). There is discussed whether the project costs 23 million or 61 million Euro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: How can the usage of Open Source Software cost so much? Isn't the software free for download? Which costs are involved in using Open Source Software/Free Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T11:34:58.817" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T12:34:09.443" Title="How can it be that using open source software involves costs?" Tags="|commercial|finance|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1128" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:25:48.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nothing is free.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off lets split your question(s) up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Isn't the software free for download?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not always.&#xA;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/69/zizouz212&quot;&gt;Zizouz212&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/456/paying-for-open-sourced-software/458#458&quot;&gt;wrote on a similar question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can pay for open source software. With Open Source, the source code must be made available, and provide options for forking and the like. Compiled versions can be paid for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many other programs, open source software is generally similar to proprietary software. For developers, they can get their hands on code, and fork and experiment. For consumers, many might not see much of a difference, except that they may see it as open information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. How can the usage of Open Source Software cost so much?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, now that you know that you CAN indeed pay to use open source software you can imagine compaines / govenments such as Munich, they wold need to pay for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes to the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bug fixes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though they have the source code, they have no one to change / fix it, so they would need to hire experienced developers which would cost money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which costs are involved in using Open Source Software/Free Software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky question, mainly because it depends on many things but here are a few just as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developers (hiring them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Food for developers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Internet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Website hosting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Power (electricity bill)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just a FEW of the costs that could be involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that just because something is open source does not mean it is free, people have to pay for dinner somehow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:39:04.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1128" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:27:56.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using software is more than just downloading the program and hitting run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Migrating a existing infrastructure is a massive operation where you need to ensure no data is lost and minimize downtime. That takes planning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing all that takes people, people want to get payed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running the server itself takes electricity. Internet access isn't free either. I could go on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:27:56.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1128" CreationDate="2015-07-14T10:51:30.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You write, 'cost of change &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; ...'. Change has cost. People have to do work. Changing between Linux and FreeBSD would also be costly for a large infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The developers of the open source alternative may not have chosen to build facilities that assist in the deployment and management of large numbers of systems -- features that Windows might have. This might have cost implications for both the transition and ongoing operations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Newspapers are sold by, ahem, focussing. It's possible that Munich adopted Linux for ideological reasons, but more likely they did an analysis that showed cost advantages over the long term. You sell papers by focussing on the &lt;em&gt;transition&lt;/em&gt; cost and not mentioning the long term anticipated advantages.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T10:51:30.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T11:51:15.193" Score="8" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode#s3a3&quot;&gt;3(a)(3)&lt;/a&gt; of the license &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it does not explicitly say so in the license, might 3(a)(3) imply that the person that shares the Licensed Material (&quot;You&quot;) has to offer a way to be contacted by the Licensor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in other words: May someone share my work (licensed under CC BY) without giving me the chance to request removal of (parts of) the attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T23:18:28.403" Title="Sharing CC BY licensed material without offering a way to be contacted" Tags="|creative-commons|distribution|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1132" CreationDate="2015-07-14T12:48:20.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No,&lt;/strong&gt; someone may not share your work licensed under CC BY without giving you the chance to request removal of (parts of) the attribution. If you as the owner ask the person using your work to change the attribution, they legally MUST!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you do not need to give contact information to the owner, the CC-BY license would not &quot;imply&quot; anything, implying things causes confusion. Nowhere in the license does it say you MUST provide contact information. If the owner wants to request a change it is up to the owner to get in contact with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean that out of courtesy you can't contact the owner and ask. After all, you are using their hard work, and it would be kind to ask rather than putting the owner through the trouble of finding you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T23:18:28.403" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T23:18:28.403" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1135" CreationDate="2015-07-14T13:23:07.347" Score="0" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;While driving in the car recently I noticed a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/maps/about/images/behind-the-scenes/about/device-carousel1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Streetview car&lt;/a&gt; go by outside. Once I got home I went onto Google Streetview and looked around for a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when I noticed the copyright notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p4RXl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;google maps screenshot showing copyright notice&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is Google able to take photos of already possibly copyrighted/licensed objects, and how is it that they are able to relicense it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T21:38:15.323" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T21:38:15.323" Title="How is Google able to relicense their photos on Google Streetview, which may contain copyrighted content?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2015-07-14T21:26:52.960" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1134" CreationDate="2015-07-14T13:57:59.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Photography is a lovely thing. I can take a picture of my school, from one angle, and it will be my own work. Also, someone else can take a picture of my school, from the same angle, and it will be their work. Really, it depends on who clicked the button. Take this for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1etMl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;My Shot&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; This is my shot, &lt;s&gt;and I totally reserve all rights&lt;/s&gt; Darn user contributions&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XbT9y.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Other shot&quot;&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N812NW_Delta_Air_Lines_Airbus_A330-323X_-_cn_784_taxiing_@_Schiphol_on_13_July_2013_pic-001.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll tell you right now, they are the same model (Airbus A330), same location (Amsterdam Schipol), same a lot of things. But the works are distinct, in that I took the shot on top, and someone else took a shot on the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people apply licenses to their photographic work, it is normally only to their work, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the object that they took a picture of. Hence, if you were to open source the road, and I take a picture of the road, then the picture will be my work, and under full copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Google doesn't really need to do much. Many things that Google blurs out is for privacy reasons, if I walk beside a street view car, they'll have to blur out my face. So, if there is any issue, they simply blur it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pictures that Google takes is their own work. Therefore, they are able to license/place a full copyright... etc. And because the photos belong to Google, they are able to do whatever they want, regardless of whether a similar shot has been taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom Line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google is able to relicense these works because the photos &lt;em&gt;belong&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;. Since it is their own work, they are able to do whatever they would like with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-14T17:03:46.960" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T17:03:46.960" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-14T16:35:00.847" Score="11" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Open projects, the source needs to be made available to anyone who requests it. As a result, it is incredibly easy to determine what the source is being used for, what each component does, and who wrote it. You could tell what was happening, whether it was good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to my question: Was transparency of projects a main goal for the creation of FLOSS movements? Why is transparency such an important thing in FLOSS ideologies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, was transparency a large factor in the creation of open movements? I am looking for a source or reference to this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T05:30:51.790" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T22:36:54.387" Title="Was transparency a major factor in the formation of Open Movements?" Tags="|philosophy|history|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1136" CreationDate="2015-07-14T19:18:07.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with a concept like 'transparency' is that it is multi-layered. Being able to see the source code is an important aspect, but not all of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we talk about transparency in an organization's process, it means that we not only see the results of decisions (code changes in this context) but the &lt;strong&gt;reasoning&lt;/strong&gt; behind the decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for large projects, where much debate occurs in the open on mailing lists and discussion boards, there is often still a small group of core contributors (perhaps the maintainers) who determine the overall direction in which a project moves (short of it being forked). They may have a private agenda which goes beyond simply making the code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lest this sound paranoid, consider some major open source projects which are largely funded by Corporations. The corporate strategy meetings where licensing changes, or the choice of new features etc, are decided are almost certainly not open for any community member to attend. We have no idea what commercial business reasons may be driving some of their decisions unless they choose to share them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project is only truly transparent if &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; discussions are held in the open, and anyone can attend. And if meetings are fully minuted and the minutes published openly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(behavior)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this definition&lt;/a&gt; of transparency, I would deem it unlikely to be a major goal in the decision to make any given project open-source or free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T22:36:54.387" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T22:36:54.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1134" CreationDate="2015-07-14T21:27:20.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because they're licensing the &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; not the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could take a picture of Van Gogh's most famous painting, and copyright it. I could take a picture of the Milky Way, whose ownership cannot be claimed by anyone under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Outer Space Treaty&lt;/a&gt;, and call it mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can do these things because in those situations, I'm copyrighting &lt;em&gt;my work&lt;/em&gt; - i.e. the photo. I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; claiming to have any rights to the content of the photo - the painting isn't mine, and I certainly don't own the Milky Way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same for Google: even if they're taking pictures of copyrighted art installations, they're copyrighting their photos, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; those installations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T21:27:20.433" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1132" CreationDate="2015-07-14T21:33:18.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's not express in the license, it's &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; that it's not required (because people can use the defense that this requirement was unclear if it comes to court).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I can't find anything in the license that indicates you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; provide contact details, so it would seem to be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many methods of releasing an open source project come with contact details attached. Publishing on GitHub? You can be contacted using your account. Even if you release a binary on your personal website, there's still a chance - unless you've &lt;em&gt;deliberately&lt;/em&gt; obscured the whois information, it should contain a contact email address. And it's always possible that the registrar will give your contact details out, if law enforcement ask for it as a result of being informed of copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this clause is to specify that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you're contacted by the author and asked to change something, you must do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-14T21:33:18.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1141" CreationDate="2015-07-15T01:20:57.453" Score="8" ViewCount="1084" Body="&lt;p&gt;My employer has given me to permission to open source a component of a project that I have been working on, allowing me to retain ownership and control, with the condition that they be acknowledged in some way.  This open source tool would be hosted on GitHub, as part of a larger collection of tools in an existing collaborative organization's repository, so not a part of our company's GitHub organization repositories.  It would seem that the best way to acknowledge my employer in a permanent and visible way would be to include some note in the software's license, but I was not sure if this were appropriate, or even legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a common way of acknowledging people or organizations in FLOSS licenses?  If not, what other options are there for acknowledgements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="734" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T02:19:41.383" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T09:58:21.163" Title="Acknowledging employer in an open source project" Tags="|licensing|copyright|attribution|ownership|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2015-07-15T02:10:25.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me tell you one thing. Definitely, and please, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; don't modify the license that you apply to your software. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, is copyrighted itself (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll run into many problems by changing the legal code of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of making a note of your company (or even yourself) in the project, there are a few ways you can do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit the project's source code:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All you need to do is really put a few &quot;commented&quot; lines like so, likely at the top of the file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Haha! This source code file has been viciously made to make a reference to my&#xA;// company! This is lovely for [insert-company-name-here]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright, maybe not &lt;em&gt;exactly like that&lt;/em&gt;... but you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add a section in a &quot;&lt;code&gt;readme&lt;/code&gt;&quot; file.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is common for many projects to include a &lt;code&gt;readme&lt;/code&gt; file, with details such as installation instructions, notes, known issues... It makes sense to put some details here. The &lt;code&gt;readme&lt;/code&gt; file normally receives tons of traffic: people view it from within your repository, and even if they have the source code on their computer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overactor has also raised a good point: Using a FLOSS license would mean that others would be able to modify the files of the project that you make available themselves, when it is in their personal hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One problem I see here is that redistributors are not obligated to keep this notice in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a solution... &lt;s&gt;You could specify something to make sure that the license does not apply to these notices or separate files. As far as I can remember, this is allowed (I may be wrong), but I will find a source to back that up.&lt;/s&gt; Yar, I can't remember...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget all that -&gt; It's non-sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to Bart Van Ingen Schenau, the Apache 2.0 license has a clause requiring a NOTICE file to be kept within the project. The relevant clause is 4d):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you can acknowledge your employer in the NOTICE file, and it will pass on to its derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T16:34:02.257" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T16:34:02.257" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T04:29:53.903" Score="4" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering a question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1141/69&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; put me in a drawback. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Open Source projects, it's clear that copyright notices shall be retained, especially when they contain copyleft and share alike clauses. However, the question really made me think, more than twice, about whether I can keep other &quot;notice&quot; files within the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I need is to put a separate notice, such as security information, project stats, or any important data for that matter, within the project, and &lt;strong&gt;restrict its movement/deletion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wanting to know whether I am allowed to do this in a project, no matter what the license. If a specific kind of license is required, what clauses must it contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T10:18:36.163" Title="Can I force additional notices in my open source project?" Tags="|project-management|distribution|derivative-works|license-notice|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1153" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:02:53.277" Score="31" ViewCount="1650" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to the open source community. I've always wanted to contribute to successful existing open source projects. I thought that contribution to good open source projects was meant only for experienced great programmers. Since there is an open source community on Stack Exchange now, I thought I would ask here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can someone new to the open source community (like me) start?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does the contribution flow work in open source projects? (Like first maybe you monitor activities in that open source community, then read through the bugs list or contribute to documentation, etc. I don't know, I'm just speculating.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="738" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-15T01:38:54.877" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T00:47:14.510" Title="FLOSS projects : How and where can I start contributing?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:13:51.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, don't change the license. For most free software licenses, including GNU GPL, this is not even allowed.  Why having credits in the license itself is not a good idea is pointed out by the FSF in the essay: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The [unmodified] BSD License Problem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A legal requirements to preserve the &lt;em&gt;integrity of authorship&lt;/em&gt; and copyright information follows from article 6bis of the Berne Convention (about moral rights). In the USA, U.S. Code § 1202: &quot;Integrity of copyright management information&quot;, is quite explicit about this - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202&lt;/a&gt; - but similar provisions exists in the local laws for most Berne signatories. Since preservation of attribution, etc. is a &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; requirement, it applies universially (i.e. does not depend on the license used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, a reminder about this legal requirement can be found in many FLOSS licenses, such as Apache and the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the GPL explicitly let you add &quot;legal notices or author attributions&quot; in any materials you distribute and also obliges any downstream recipient to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; remove such notices (see sec. 1 in GPLv2 and sec. 7 of GPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the relevant language in GNU GPLv3 sec. 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an appendix to the license, there is a section titled: &quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&quot; that gives some examples, including a notice where you can assert authorship attribution and/or copyright.  If the program is interactive, you may also display this notice upon startup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 1 of Gnu GPLv2 section 7 of GNU GPLv3 states clearly that it is a breach of license to remove such notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also note that legal notices asserting authorship, attribution and copyright does not give anyone &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; rights than the right of acknowledgement. FLOSS licenses are designed to allow new maintainers to take over (in the worst case by creating a fork) if the initial sponsors/owners of a FLOSS project pull their support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T11:22:32.767" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T11:22:32.767" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1143" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:24:59.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing you should do is select a project. A good place to start would probably be a project you already &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;, or are at least passionate about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I'd do some lurking - subscribe to the mailing list(s), and read a bit so you get the &quot;vibe&quot; of the community and get an initial feeling of what's acceptable and what's not, what kind of patches are welcome, etc. Once you get comfortable with that, start participating - answer simple questions you feel you understand fully, share your opinion on open questions, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you're ready to start getting your feet wet. Don't expect your first contribution to be re-writing the entire thing from scratch. Baby steps is the way do to it.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Before starting &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt;, read the submission guide (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/SubmittingPatches&quot;&gt;here's git's&lt;/a&gt;, just as an example) and the coding standards (again, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingGuidelines&quot;&gt;git's&lt;/a&gt;). Following them will (hopefully) prevent your patches from just being out-right ignored, not to mention it's just common courtesy. The more &quot;outgoing&quot; projects have an open task list, and the really outgoing ones have it broken down by skill/knowledge levels. If your choice project doesn't have such a  list, it's bug/issue tracker is a good place to start. (Simple) bugs are usually well scoped, and even if the solution isn't always obvious, the requirements usually are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most importantly - be ready for feedback. Very few patches get accepted in their first iteration, and although the feedback you get may be worded harshly, remember to take it as feedback on the patch (&quot;this isn't good enough to be merged yet&quot;), and not personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T06:24:59.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1142" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:30:03.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short answer is &quot;no&quot;: You can not restrict users to not move or not delete any part of your project (except copyright notices - the integrity of copyright notices are required by law, and also by most free software licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 (sec. 7: Additional Terms) say that may add some additional terms to your license, and one of these may be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as this is limited to &quot;legal notices or author attributions&quot; it doesn't let you require preservation of arbitrary materials such as &quot;project stats&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to make this absolutely clear, the license goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, given that you want to use a &lt;em&gt;recognized&lt;/em&gt; (by the FSF or OSI) free software / open source license. Provided you use a license where you grant users the four freedoms that is inherent in free software - you cannot impose &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; additional restrictions on what the user can do.  (You can of course concoct a your own non-free custom license and put whatever you like, including restrictions on what the user may alter or delete, in it.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I know of no license that qualify as &quot;free software&quot; under the FSF definition, or &quot;open source&quot; under the OSI defintion, that will allow you to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by &lt;em&gt;user490&lt;/em&gt;, you can insist on having &lt;em&gt;unchangeable sections&lt;/em&gt; in a document that is part of your project if the document is licensed under the GFDL (instead of the GPL). However, this is a documentation license, not a software license, and besides: There is nothing that will stop someone downstream from you removing that particular &lt;em&gt;document&lt;/em&gt; - including the &quot;invariant section&quot; - if they for some reason really wanted to remove this text from their fork of your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T10:18:36.163" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T10:18:36.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1142" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:47:32.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the existing licenses for software that are Free Software licenses or that are approved by the OSI allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is something like what you ask for in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gfdl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/a&gt;. This license, which was created for manuals, textbooks, and other written documentation, knows something called &lt;strong&gt;Invariant Sections&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;Invariant Sections&quot; are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Let's look at an example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Emacs manual&lt;/a&gt;. The license for this manual is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with &lt;strong&gt;the Invariant Sections being “The GNU Manifesto,” “Distribution” and “GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE,”&lt;/strong&gt; with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual,” and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis by me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the invariant sections is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Manifesto.html#Manifesto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt; which &lt;strong&gt;must be included in all derived works unchanged&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU FDL also knows  something called &lt;strong&gt;Front-Cover Texts&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Back-Cover Texts&lt;/strong&gt; (see the above quote). These texts are small snippets of text that &lt;strong&gt;must be reproduced on the front- or back-cover of the work unchanged.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorDisplayName="user490" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T07:15:57.837" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T07:15:57.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1143" CreationDate="2015-07-15T06:51:39.897" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How and where should a newbie like me start?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pick a project you &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;, and that you think can be improved (a bug needs fixing, there is a feature that you would like to see added).  Make sure your contribution is small and focused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How does the contribution flow works in open source projects? (Like first maybe you monitor activities in that open source community, then read through the bugs list or contribute to documentation, etc. I don't know, I'm just speculating.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're on the right track.  The details depend on the project.  Drupal, for instance, offers a detailed description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/novice&quot;&gt;novice workflow&lt;/a&gt;. Look for similar guidelines in whatever project you're interested in contributing to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T09:40:59.807" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T09:40:59.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-15T09:59:20.757" Score="20" ViewCount="5836" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does publishing my code on GitHub make it FLOSS automatically? Is there some license automatically assigned to it? Is it &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1149/what-are-the-important-things-to-note-while-building-your-own-open-source-projec&quot;&gt;&quot;technically or say literally, open source&quot;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user490" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T22:21:50.580" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T22:21:50.580" Title="Is my code FLOSS just because it is published it on GitHub?" Tags="|licensing|publishing|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:03:39.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blog/1964-license-usage-on-github-com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;many open source projects does not specify the license&lt;/a&gt; on github. Legally, anything that comes without a license that provides freedoms to the users defaults to &lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;. On GitHub, there are &lt;em&gt;no defaults&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language giving permission to &quot;view and fork&quot; in the GitHub TOS are 1) not a license; and 2) may have no legal effect.  Do not confuse this with a real license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a real FLOSS license associated with your project, it is not &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;, and others will probably want to not use it because of the unknown legal hazards associated with doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You decide what license to use. A rundown of the properties of each is outside the scope of this question. However, to be called &quot;Open Source&quot; or &quot;Free Software&quot;, the license should preserve the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four essential freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF provides an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;excellent guide&lt;/a&gt; to free software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing FAQ at GitHub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T12:37:38.257" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T12:37:38.257" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:03:49.273" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, GitHub allows releases with different licenses. If you do not choose one, it is the usual basic assumption: all rights reserved. This is however overlayed by the terms of service you (implicitly or explicitly) accepted by using the site and creating an account. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot;&gt;case of Github&lt;/a&gt; it allows others to view and fork your project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to&#xA;  allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be&#xA;  viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your&#xA;  repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other websites may have other terms of services, and in a few cases an open license is automatically assigned, for example in Wikipedia and StackExchange user posts have automatically the CC-BY-SA license assigned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/&quot;&gt;help-site for choosing an open source license&lt;/a&gt;. Read there for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this help-site from Github is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license&quot;&gt;noted,&lt;/a&gt; that your project doesn't have an automatic license applied but some things from the terms of service:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to&#xA;  include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the&#xA;  implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that&#xA;  the default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all&#xA;  rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce,&#xA;  distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not&#xA;  be what you intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a&#xA;  public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service&#xA;  which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow&#xA;  others to view and fork your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to share your work with others, we strongly encourage you&#xA;  to include an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T10:44:53.987" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T10:44:53.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1143" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:33:58.300" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Where can I start contributing?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two obvious stages to this: pick a language, pick a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pick a language&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should pick a language with which you are familiar and proficient. I'd advise &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; trying to contribute to projects in languages you're not that great in - yes, it is a good opportunity to improve your skills in that language, but it's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a good way to annoy the developers because you're doing things in a way that the language could do much better. A good example of this is Python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;some_list = [&quot;a&quot;, &quot;b&quot;, &quot;c&quot;]&#xA;if hasattr(some_list, &quot;a&quot;):&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be correct to many new in the language: the documentation suggests that &lt;code&gt;hasattr&lt;/code&gt; returns true if the given list has the given attribute. However, it won't work as expected, and could actually be done in a much more 'Pythonic' fashion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;some_list = [&quot;a&quot;, &quot;b&quot;, &quot;c&quot;]&#xA;if &quot;a&quot; in some_list:&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral of the story: pick a language you're good at, so you don't have to worry about your coding style or practices being the cause of your pull requests getting rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pick a project&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you pick a project, written in your chosen language, that you want to contribute to. If you've had some exposure to the language, you may already have come across useful utilities or tools that you use that are open-source: these are good choices because you'll be &lt;em&gt;motivated&lt;/em&gt; to contribute well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should always pick a project which interests you. If you're not interested in crunching data, don't pick a graphing library. If machine learning gets you going, try to find something in that area. Maybe you can even contribute to a project you're already using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good resource for finding projects if you're stuck is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codetriage.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Code Triage&lt;/a&gt;, which lists repositories on GitHub by the number of open issues they have. Pick your language, pick an interesting project, pick an issue and try to solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What's the contribution flow?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This really depends what you're good at, though there are some givens. You should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; start by familiarising yourself with the project: read the documentation, read the codebase. If the hosting supports it, you should clone the repository and build the software on your local machine, and have a play around with the code to figure out what each part does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you're familiar, you can choose what you want to do. If you're a technical writer, writing documentation is probably a good choice for you. If you hate writing long documents, but you're good at programming, pick an issue and try to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do, make your changes in a fork of the project's repository somewhere you control. Test them (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/826/whose-responsibility-is-it-to-test-contributions&quot;&gt;Whose responsibility is it to test contributions?&lt;/a&gt; for information about who does what testing) and make sure everything works. Make sure your code style conforms to that of the project: developers aren't going to be happy with ten thousand different styles in their project because they've got lots of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/352/168&quot;&gt;pull requests&lt;/a&gt;. Make sure you've read any contributing information the project has. If you've conformed to everything, you can submit a pull request to the project's developers, who will review your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Expect rejection.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not perfect and neither is your code; the project developers may well find some issues with it or some style point they don't like. It's your work, so it's your responsibility to fix these: monitor the feedback on your pull request, and use it to change anything they ask you to. When that's done, you can resubmit your pull request and have it merged. Wash, rinse, repeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T11:06:39.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1157" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:38:26.297" Score="76" ViewCount="17459" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The GitHub FAQ states&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're under no obligation to choose a license. It's your right not to&#xA;  include one with your code or project, but please be aware of the&#xA;  implications. Generally speaking, the absence of a license means that&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;the default copyright laws apply&lt;/strong&gt;. This means that you retain all&#xA;  rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce,&#xA;  distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not&#xA;  be what you intend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if this is what you intend, if you publish your source code in a&#xA;  public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service&#xA;  which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, &lt;strong&gt;you allow&#xA;  others to view and fork your repository&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to share your work with others, we strongly encourage you&#xA;  to include an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a project is &quot;all rights reserved&quot;, but then users have the &quot;right to fork&quot; it, what's the license of the new fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="455" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T18:23:48.093" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T18:23:48.093" Title="How does GitHub's &quot;forking right&quot; cope with an &quot;All rights reserved&quot; project?" Tags="|copyright|github|forking|unlicensed-code|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2015-07-15T10:41:06.070" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you actually give up a few rights by accepting the terms of service. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt; declare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to&#xA;  allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be&#xA;  viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your&#xA;  repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So effectively you don't have all rights reserved, but most rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But doing so leaves big grey areas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the forker create and distribute binaries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the original or forked source code be released somewhere else than github?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under which conditions can the resulting program be used?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be not very safe to use such code with undeclared license on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T10:54:46.403" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T10:54:46.403" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2015-07-15T11:09:19.363" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two fragments you've highlighted contradict each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real question is: &lt;strong&gt;What will the courts make out of this, if a fork happens, and the original author decides to sue?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to predict the outcome of such a conflict. The court may decide the law is superior to the click-wrap of GitHub's TOS, or vice versa. Nobody will know the answer until this has been tried in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would strongly advice anyone against forking a GitHub project without a license. IMHO the legal risks of doing so outweigh any benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do so, &quot;what's the license of the new fork&quot;? Well, unless you put an explicit license on your fork the copyright law default (&quot;All rights reserved&quot;) applies to the derivative, with the original author holding the copyright on his lines of code, and you holding the copyright on your adaptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also: Putting an explicit FLOSS license will increase your legal liability if you do this. Not only are you violating the original author's copyright, you are falsifying the integrity of rights information. This may increase the damages you will have to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T13:45:40.807" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T13:45:40.807" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2015-07-15T12:05:45.870" Score="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, these two statements are made in sequence, not parallel (credit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/485/msalters&quot;&gt;MSalters&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1154/how-does-githubs-forking-right-cope-with-an-all-rights-reserved-project/1157#comment1978_1157&quot;&gt;crystallizing this point&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Generally speaking&lt;/strong&gt;, the absence of a license means that the default copyright laws apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;strong&gt;if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub&lt;/strong&gt;... you allow others to view and fork your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first statement is a &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; statement about copyright law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second statement is about a license grant required by the GitHub Terms of Service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are both true, and if you host your code on GitHub, the second, specific statement takes precedence over the first general rule wherever the second rule applies. The second statement is a notice that hosting on GitHub requires you to make certain license grants to GitHub users which differ from the default rules of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an inspection of what the &amp;quot;right to fork&amp;quot; could possibly mean, which will clarify the question: &amp;quot;What's the license of the new fork?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;This is not legal advice. Furthermore, this is barely &lt;strong&gt;regular&lt;/strong&gt; advice, and is based on a speculative -- but coherent -- reading of some ambiguity in the GitHub TOS.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; has to say about forking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The term &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; is not defined anywhere in the GitHub Terms of Service&lt;/strong&gt;, but it seems perfectly sensible to assume that &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; here is meant in the sense that it is used elsewhere on github.com: the Fork button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lr4ml.png&quot; alt=&quot;a &amp;quot;Fork&amp;quot; button on a GitHub repository page&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; intends &amp;quot;the right to fork&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;the right to use the Fork feature of the github.com website.&amp;quot; In this case, &amp;quot;creating a fork&amp;quot; would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean generally creating a copy or derivative work (as it does in general FLOSS parlance), but rather it means &lt;em&gt;triggering the software of github.com to create and host a verbatim copy of a repository&lt;/em&gt; and categorize that copy under the user's list of forks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original copyright owner doesn't license any other permissions, clicking that button is all that the TOS-required permission allows the user to do. This doesn't grant any rights to create a derivative work, or to redistribute the code outside of github.com, since the &amp;quot;Fork&amp;quot; feature is intrinsic to the github.com website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speculation: this right-to-fork language in the GitHub TOS was probably included to prevent legal issues around the use of the Fork feature. The intent was likely something to the effect of, &amp;quot;You must license the minimum amount of rights to allow github.com's Fork software feature to operate.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this reading of &amp;quot;fork,&amp;quot; if another user were to use a github.com-hosted forked-repository to prepare and distribute a derivative work, that would infringe on the owner's copyright, since such an action is outside the scope of the Fork software feature. Similarly, if the user were to create a verbatim copy outside the context of github.com's Fork functionality (e.g. copying the code to another website), that would also not be permitted. The TOS does not allow the right to create copies generally; it &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; requires the author to grant copying permission inasmuch as copying is a necessary component of the Fork feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All that said, this is speculative based on a specific reading of &amp;quot;fork.&amp;quot; I'd like to say, on a personal note, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; kind of ridiculous that the GitHub Terms of Service use &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; without a shred of definition to be seen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-03T18:58:32.800" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1128" CreationDate="2015-07-15T12:25:30.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The munich city administration has to do business in various areas. Ranging from citizen registration, via building requests, to lost-and-found office and a lot more. Some examples of how a move to open source solutions involves costs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The migration needs to be planned and organised, which is really a tremendous project on its own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Running dedicated applications that are &quot;self-made&quot; or at least largely customized. Hence it is not&#xA;sufficient to download and deploy existing open source software - it&#xA;has to be adapted to the special needs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if they switch from MS Office to OpenOffice/LibreOffice this cost money in terms of training and adapting additional components needed like templates and interfaces to other parts of the administrative infrastructure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand a lot of costs for licenses are saved and the dependance from single providers is reduced which are very positive factors for a final costs calculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief financial breakdown is given in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/elibrary/case/limux-it-evolution-open-source-success-story-never&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;press release&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In his final report, project leader Hofmann explains: “Even though the project timescale was extended by 80 percent from five to nine years, the cost only rose by 44 percent (from €12 million to € 18.7 million).” The distribution of costs reveals some interesting aspects:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  costs for applications were far lower than expected, because much more could be done with free software or local solutions (like local virtualisation) than initially predicted&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  expenses for internal staff were lower than expected, in part because there were not enough applicants for all of the jobs&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  external consulting costs were much higher than expected, because of both the lack of internal staff and missing technical knowledge within the municipality's administration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="399" LastEditorUserId="399" LastEditDate="2015-07-15T12:34:09.443" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T12:34:09.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2015-07-15T13:47:41.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common way would be to add the company to the copyright statements, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2012, 2013, 2014 Company Name&#xA;Copyright 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Your Name&#xA;&#xA;This is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reflects the reality quite well (they are still a copyright holder, which is why they had to agree to relicensing the software to make it open source), and also creates an attribution that may not be deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T13:47:41.327" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1136" CreationDate="2015-07-15T19:04:50.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, most FLOSS (free/libre/open-source software) projects have a public code repository, which everyone can browse. But historically this wasn't always the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason was of course that in the early days of free software, the tools for version control weren't as good as they are today (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System&quot;&gt;CVS&lt;/a&gt;, the first freely available version control system that managed whole projects and not just individual files, only appeared in the late 1980s). Another reason was that many people didn't have enough bandwidth to download sources, they could only get sources on tape or CD. Since distribution was infrequent, there was little motivation to get the whole change history. It was common to include a summary of changes in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changelog&quot;&gt;changelog file&lt;/a&gt; (a tradition that most projects either have abandoned, or keep going by generating the changelog from the VC history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond the technical issues, there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; philosophical differences. It's been a long time, and I'm working from memory, so I'm afraid I don't have references; I'll try to find some (probably old mailing lists). There definitely have been disagreements as to the importance of making all development public. In particular, GNU projects did not do so, for a long time. For the first 20 years or so of the project, only new beta or release versions were released, not intermediate working revisions, and this was presented as a normal thing, not a technical limitation. The OpenBSD project, in particular, criticized this model, and claimed that it was important to make the whole project history public in real time. So transparency was a major virtue for OpenBSD, but irrelevant for GNU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some famous FLOSS projects that kept their development hidden for a long time include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt&quot;&gt;TrueCrypt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack&quot;&gt;NetHack&lt;/a&gt;. With both of these effectively stopped, I can't think of any remaining major FLOSS project that develops behind closed doors, apart from projects maintained by companies as an enabler of their main business (such as Android), with open source chosen not for philosophical reasons but for practical reasons (ability to reuse existing open source code, encouragement for third parties to tune the software). I think that nowadays, most supporters of free software consider transparency during development the norm, whether they consider it philosophically important or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-07-15T19:04:50.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1166" CreationDate="2015-07-16T00:37:41.620" Score="7" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;With free licenses, one cannot restrict &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/53/can-i-restrict-who-can-utilize-my-software&quot;&gt;who or how the software is used&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I construct a &lt;a href=&quot;http://nonwhiteheterosexualmalelicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are not Steve you are permitted to license under &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;; if you are Steve then you are permitted to license under &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; are both terms that, when considered in isolation, would be free/open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the software is freely available to everybody at any point, but the exact terms discriminate based on some arbitrary criterion (let's pretend the &quot;you are Steve&quot; part is legally unambiguous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a license still considered free? Or open source? Both? Neither?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, because this is indeed a bit confusing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This license is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; dual licensing; not everyone can license under terms A, nor B; the licensor does not choose which terms to abide, it is dictated by the license itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license itself does not give the right to relicense; a not-Steve cannot fork and redistribute under terms that grant a universal license under A, even to the Steves, and vice versa. The discriminatory mechanism remains, that is, if Steve licenses from not-Steve, then he must follow terms B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:28:59.797" Title="Are discriminatory free licenses still free?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T03:22:10.983" Score="13" ViewCount="2479" Body="&lt;p&gt;When speaking to my friends about FOSS, a common concern comes up that if they release their code under a free and open source license, this might encourage companies to 'steal' their hard work without giving them compensation.  Obviously if the code was released under a free and open license it wouldn't be stealing but the sentiment remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there cases where individual contractors or small companies (1-5 employees, say) have released their source code under a free and open license and had a bigger company under cut them, take customers or profit away from them or drive them out of business?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately I think there are stronger arguments to make source code free and open than &quot;bigger companies won't take business away from you&quot; (i.e. &quot;that doesn't happen&quot;) but I'm curious if there are any real world cases where making software free and open have significantly hurt a small software shop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T09:29:48.437" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T08:23:11.990" Title="Examples of companies undercutting smaller companies using FOSS?" Tags="|software|monetization|history|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-06-07T05:26:55.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1163" CreationDate="2015-07-16T03:24:36.127" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the new license you've constructed has at is basis two well-known free licenses, it is still a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; license and it obviously fails the the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the definition, something should also be said of the problems this &quot;license&quot; will create for the community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To recapitulate: &quot;not-Steve&quot; is only permitted to license under license &quot;A&quot;, and &quot;Steve&quot; is only permitted to license under license &quot;B&quot;, where &quot;A&quot; and &quot;B&quot; are terms from well-known free licenses, but where the terms in addition calls for continuation of the discrimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. each derivative can only have &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of the two licenses, so this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; dual licensing, where downstream recipients can choose between the licenses. Provided the terms of &quot;A&quot; are not compatible with the terms of &quot;B&quot;, the initial discriminatory license has now forced the project to &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt;, which is considered harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So such a license both conflicts with the OSI definition of Open Source, and is having the harmful side-effect of forcing developers to create non-compatible forks. For these reasons, such a license should be classified as non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T04:28:59.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:28:59.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:02:11.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not own any copyright to any code you've written on this project, based on what you said in a comment to @SimonRichter's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I am open-sourcing is a core component of a work project I have developed on work time, using work computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law is clear. Since you did it as part of your job your employer owns &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the copyright and they are allowed to do anything they want no matter what license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless somebody outside the company contributes to the project, the terms and conditions of the license won't apply to your employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your goal is &quot;to retain ownership and control&quot; of the project, but unfortunately as things stand now you have zero ownership and zero control over the project and that will not change unless/until you leave the company and start working on the project from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your employer has asked to be acknowledged in the project, and the best way to do that right now is to simply say &quot;Copyright Acme Inc&quot; (perhaps with a year). Some licenses (like MIT) will have you place that line at the top of the license. Other licenses (like GPL) have you create an &quot;Authors&quot; file with that line in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically any open source license will allow you to continue to work on the project after you leave the company, and they will also allow you to create a fork of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to have as many rights as possible when you leave the company then you'll need to carefully consider what license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses (such as GPL) are &quot;copyleft&quot; and have strict restrictions (for example, you cannot place any GPL'd code on the iPhone App Store unless your employer gives you permission) so you may wish to avoid those licenses. GPL also has some pretty strong repercussions around patents if your employer owns (or licenses) any of those, but this probably isn't a concern for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licenses (Such as MIT) are &quot;permissive&quot; and will let you do &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; anything after you leave the company. Personally I prefer these licenses but it's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:02:11.830" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="456" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:26:51.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many different succesful business models for Free Software and Open Source software. Wikipedia even has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;long article&lt;/a&gt; devoted to the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to reproduce that long WikiPedia article here, but rather focus on one of these business models - Selling &lt;strong&gt;professional services&lt;/strong&gt; - with a bit more detail that what is provided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software#Selling_professional_services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for many small software companies is to actually get anyone to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; at their amazing software.  If the brand is not well not known, or the software not generally acknowledged as &quot;amazing&quot;, it may be real hard to get a customer to look at it.  If the customer has to &lt;em&gt;pay up-front&lt;/em&gt; to have a look, that hurdle is even bigger.  Even if it is free, but crippled (free only for thirty days, etc.), many prospective customers will not bother.  Their time is valuable, too valuable to spend on crippleware. Also, if your company is small, your customer cannot be sure you survive.  If they pay good money for closed source software, and the company behind it implodes, there will be no more support and no more releases.  This renders most software useless after some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software addresses all these concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can try it out for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will not stop working after some trial key expires.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your company implodes, they're not left high and dry. Since have the source code, and they get always get somebody else to support and maintain it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, so far I've only pointed out the advantages of free software for the customer.  You, the author, haven't seen any money yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What may happen if you do this, if your software truly is good and generally useful, is that you'll see thousands of downloads.  Most of those will indeed use the software for free, and never earn you a penny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you have &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; (hopefully thousands), and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of these users will want &lt;strong&gt;professional services&lt;/strong&gt;.  That this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay you an annual support fee, in return for you supporting them (hot-line for user questions, first priority bug-fixes, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay you for specific customizations that address specific use cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay consulting and custom development, where you adapt and integrate your free software to their specific ICT infrastructure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The business model for professional services is not unique to free software.  This is the usually a profitable business model for proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're a small software company, you may never see your software &lt;em&gt;used by anyone&lt;/em&gt; if you go the proprietary route. There are too many barriers between you and any users.  With free software, you may get thousands of users, and if only a fraction of those sign up for professional services, you still will have a healthy business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T04:33:12.770" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:33:12.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:43:04.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems obvious that this was intended to protect Github itself from claims of copyright infringement arising from the creation of forks.  It wasn't meant for the benefit of Github users, so it's not surprising that it's of little practical use.  You can create a fork, but without a license, you still can't do anything with the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="782" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T04:43:04.310" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1172" CreationDate="2015-07-16T04:57:00.403" Score="9" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I write scripts for a commercial GIS package (ArcGIS) using Python and the GIS package software API (Arcpy). I had been thinking about putting the scripts that I create on GitHub under an MIT licence but I am not sure if the API of the software makes my scripts open source or not. I guess my question is, how do you know if your work is open source if you use someone else API?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T13:53:26.180" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T08:45:43.330" Title="Can I release my plugin scripts as open source if they rely on a proprietary API?" Tags="|project-management|api|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1165" CreationDate="2015-07-16T05:12:30.507" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Stealing&amp;quot; code is copyright infringement, which is obviously avoided by most legitimate companies. Losing a copyright infringement suit can easily destroy most companies. On the other hand, without patents, reverse-engineering and feature-matching is perfectly legal and done all the time. Some unethical companies can very well be doing the former whilst pretending to do the latter, and this is where access to the source code lets them do that easily. But as soon as these companies become big enough and of consequence, they quickly clean up their act - DivX being a prominent, closed-source example, where it's suspected that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20120915160219/http://wmwiki.com/mcored/research/divx/antidivx.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;initial release was based on infringing Microsoft's source code&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it highly depends on how visible and active those FOSS projects are. It's important to remember that not all FOSS projects are Linux, GCC or Mozilla, and it also depends on your adversaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Large and active projects are practically immune&lt;/strong&gt;; their tremendous goodwill and visibility makes it very risky to &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; from, and their pace of development makes it hard to out-compete them regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Medium-sized projects can suffer but the damage is limited&lt;/strong&gt;. The reason is, again, if unethical competitors get large enough, it also makes them more attractive targets of lawsuits, so they either stay small or clean up. For example, FFmpeg - a suite of FOSS audio/video codecs - is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20100622191216/http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;popular target of copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt;. Although most are minor infractions of their (L)GPL licenses, no doubt some are blatantly infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Small projects can indeed be undercut&lt;/strong&gt;. If the market is small enough to stay under the radar of lawsuits, an unethical company can easily claim the code as their own, release a closed-source competitor and crowd out the market through providing superior value. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/260357/81527&quot;&gt;an example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A competitor [to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DikuMUD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DikuMUD&lt;/a&gt;], at the time, also had based theirs on the same codebase, and they opted to blatantly ignore the copyright, rip out all traces of it, and basically lie to everyone including themselves. Their logic was &amp;quot;none of the original code exists&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;we have done massive rewrites and improvement&amp;quot; and generally ignoring the fact that they started with 20,000 lines of code. They were charging for items in the game, and making too much money to stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="21216" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T21:03:45.913" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T21:03:45.913" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1170" CreationDate="2015-07-16T05:20:14.533" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;You need to look at what the license of your API will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=copyright%20information&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ArcGIS Copyright Information page&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as expressly permitted in writing by ESRI...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, using the api and allowing open source freedoms, such as reproduction and distribution is asking for trouble.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I misunderstood. It seems like the library in question is actually ArcPy, and not ArcGIS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, to answer your question, you need to look at the nature of your &quot;referenced libraries&quot;. You need to look at their copyright/licensing terms, analyze them, and determine how they will impact the goals of your project. For example, can I still fork, share it and the like. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; have specific terms and conditions, such as copyleft (also known as ShareAlike), or make it as permissive as possible (Such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this license&lt;/a&gt;). In the end, you will know your work is Open Source, if it meets their &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Derived Works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Distribution of License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Be Technology-Neutral&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T14:16:41.050" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T14:16:41.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1170" CreationDate="2015-07-16T09:08:10.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you have to consider the license of the API you're using. Such a license might restrict the ways you release programs based on that API (maybe only for internal use or fees for releasing a program or something like that). &lt;strike&gt;If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://gis.stackexchange.com/q/20276/1225&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that you cannot license a plugin based on ArcGIS as open source, as this license restricts the way the program can be used. But I don't know if it is the same API you're using. You might want to clarify that.&lt;/strike&gt; The question I gave doesn't apply, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//000v000000v7000000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ArcPy is a Python library&lt;/a&gt;. Still I'm unable to find the licenses/terms that apply to the usage of this library, so be wary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license of the API of the commercial App permits the creation of open source software, you still need to check if the open source license in question is compatible. You will have no problem with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive licenses&lt;/a&gt;, so MIT is OK. If you choose a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft license&lt;/a&gt; (like GPL) on the other hand, you have another problem. The GPL demands, that every linked software is distributed under the same terms, the GPL in that case. As the API links your software and the commercial app it is obviously impossible. Still, you can do that, as long as you the only contributor (or all other contributors also gave their consent). But you would be barred to incorporate any GPL-code from different projects. An prominent example was the KDE-project. At first &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28software%29#Licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt was released under a non-free license&lt;/a&gt;. Still, the release of KDE was legal, but the risks I described lead to massive protest and eventually to the start of the Gnome-project. Also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freecode.com/articles/why-debian-doesnt-include-kde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian-project was at some point denying KDE the inclusion in the distribution&lt;/a&gt;. In the end Trolltech released Qt under the GPL, thus solving these problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you cannot bundle your code with the commercial program. The users of your plugin still have to purchase a license of that program to use your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:33:47.520" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T08:45:43.330" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1174" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1175" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" Score="0" Body="Use this tags for questions about the connections between movies and open source, be it movies licensed under open source or the implications of using open source tools to create a movie" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T09:35:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T10:05:00.630" Score="7" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1163/are-discriminatory-free-licenses-still-free&quot;&gt;Are discriminatory free licenses still free?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless the merit of that particular question, one answers states that according to the definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was under the impression that there is still some debate about what does or does not constitute a free software licence? A short note can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license#Controversial_borderline_cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;related Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt;, but one can see that a few different bodies categorizes the different licenses: OSI, FSF, Debian, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So using licences that are already available make it clear if you fall in one or another definition. However with custom-made licences, it does not seem too clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone clarify that for me, or is there a universally accepted definition of &quot;free software licence&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; It came in the comments, as well as a VTC. So I should adress it in the question. I have read the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/620/what-is-the-difference-between-free-as-in-beer-and-free-as-in-speech&quot;&gt;What is the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and corresponding answers. I understand perfectly well the difference between &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; as in beer vs in speech. Let us forget about beers for the time being. Now, that question does not adress what I am asking here. There are different &quot;free&quot; licenses, most give some restriction. There are several bodies defining which licenses are free (I know of OSI, FSF and Debian, for example). They do not seem in effect, to agree on the freedom of certain licenses. So is there a more restricted, somewhat universal definition of a free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that I originally asked that question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/405/what-does-free-mean-in-free-software&quot;&gt;meta&lt;/a&gt;, but was suggested to ask it here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="445" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:43:30.440" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T15:00:30.447" Title="Is there a universal definition of free software?" Tags="|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2015-07-16T14:44:42.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2015-07-16T10:23:50.220" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, I was under the impression that there is still some debates about what does or does not constitutes a free software licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there are still any &lt;em&gt;serious&lt;/em&gt; debates about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, assuming this question is an earnest one, there are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; recognized definitions of of Free Software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; by the FSF, where the &lt;em&gt;four essential freedoms&lt;/em&gt; are defined (making it clear that it is a matter of &quot;freedom&quot;, not price).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Defintion&lt;/a&gt; of the OSI, which starts out by stating that &quot;Free Redistribution&quot; means the freedom to give away or to sell, &lt;em&gt;without restrictions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are subtle differences between the two, as answered in:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/846/what-are-the-philosophical-differences-between-open-source-and-free-libre-softwa&quot;&gt;What are the philosophical differences between open source and free/libre software (if they exist at all)?&lt;/a&gt; - they boil down to the same definition of &quot;free&quot; - that the idea is to provide maximum &lt;em&gt;freedom&lt;/em&gt; for users and developers, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; the freedom to constrain others. In &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; terms (but not in political) these two definitions of &quot;free&quot; are equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However with custom-made licences, it does not seem too clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Custom-made licenses&quot; should be avoided.  IMHO, they are a huge problem for the FLOSS community, as they often make it impossible to combine works because of trivial license incompatibilities. Also they are often written by people ignorant about copyright law, making them a legal hazard to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T13:47:01.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="142" CreationDate="2015-07-16T10:38:11.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By releasing the blue prints and documents detailing the manufacturing process under a permissive license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ted.com/talks/britta_riley_a_garden_in_my_apartment?language=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Windowfarms&lt;/a&gt; is a great example of how hardware can be open sourced. Release your design &amp;amp; process into the wild and hope people contribute their improvements back. The philosophy is not so different from open sourcing software. It's the implementation that differs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part about open sourcing hardware is merging changes back in upstream. There's really no infrastructure for version control of blue prints, although I could potentially see leveraging existing VCS to help with that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T10:38:11.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2015-07-16T11:58:21.213" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyleft&lt;/em&gt; is a term coined by the FSF and implies that if you distribute a derivative work of a work under a copyleft license, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; distribute the derivative under the &lt;em&gt;same license&lt;/em&gt; as the original work (it may however be combined with works under a permissive license that is deemed &quot;compatible&quot;, read on). Some people use the pejorative name &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;viral license&lt;/a&gt;&quot; for a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;permissive license&lt;/em&gt; is a license that permits re-licensing of derivative works (i.e. the derivative can have a different license than the original, and even be closed source with ARR).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some comments about the difference:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important property of a permissive license is that it is &lt;em&gt;sublicensable&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;GPL compatible&lt;/em&gt;. This means that you can legally use a component with a permissive license in a derivative work where the other components are under GPL (or a compatible license such as Apache 2.0) and then the entire work can be made available under the GPL license. This means that you can use a library under the MIT/expat license (permissive) in a project under the GNU GPL (copyleft), and the resulting composite would be GNU GPL (copyleft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that going in the opposite direction (from copyleft to permissive) is not possible. Such a derivative can &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; be MIT/expat, because that would violate the terms of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has made a handy &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference page&lt;/a&gt; about what licenses are permissive and allow re-licensing, as well as the chart below specifically for GNU GPL version 3. Note that the direction of flow is always from the permissive licenses to the copyleft licenses, and not the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dotted arrow from GPLv2 to GPLv3 is for a special version of GPLv2 written &quot;GPLv2 or later&quot; (sometimes abbreviated &quot;GPLv2+&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hcKzf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This chart introduces the terms &quot;weak copyleft&quot; and strong copyleft&quot;. Briefly, the difference is that &quot;strong copyleft&quot; insists on copyleft for a composite where at least one of the components are copyleft, while &quot;weak copyleft&quot; means that copyleft only apply to derivatives, not sibling components in a composite.  &quot;Copyleft&quot; when used without an adjective, usually means &quot;strong copyleft&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T03:26:37.997" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T03:26:37.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2015-07-16T14:44:20.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a universal definition of free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is universally accepted definition of &quot;Free Software&quot;&#xA;(Also visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...is there a universally accepted definition of &quot;free software licence&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free software license&lt;/a&gt; is universal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Universally Accepted Free Software Licenses are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license#FSF-approved_.22free_software.22_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF Approved Licenses&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license#OSI-approved_.22open_source.22_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI Approved Linceses&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T15:00:30.447" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T15:00:30.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1186" CreationDate="2015-07-16T15:58:18.893" Score="18" ViewCount="762" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was prompted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/can-i-release-my-plugin-scripts-as-open-source-if-they-rely-on-a-proprietary-api&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; which reminded of a past experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An open-source project supports a plug-in architecture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project is released under a copyleft license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plug-ins are discovered by the project by virtue of being installed into a specific directory (i.e. no registration with, modification to, or even recompilation of the project is required to add a plug-in).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plug-ins are self contained, not needing to link to or call into the  parent application beyond perhaps including a single header-file for declarations only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A theoretical example might help to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Project X processes images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plug-ins provide additional algorithms, or support for existing algorithms on new file types.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A plug-in simply exports a small number of functions which are called with all the necessary data to perform their processing and return the result.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Project X takes care of all rendering, updating menus, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose I want to publish a commercial plug-in for project X which implements a very proprietary algorithm, and which I intend to sell. Obviously, I don't want to publish the code for this implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the copyleft license on Project X consider my code to form  a &quot;combined work&quot; or similar term when installed on the user's machine, and thus require me to publish the source code of my plug-in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-18T04:30:27.907" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T14:52:13.993" Title="Does a host application's license apply to plug-ins written for it?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyleft|plugins|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-16T17:56:09.147" Score="4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on adding an entirely new set of features to an open source project that my team has created.&#xA;Before I got started though, I did some research to see what other were offering in that area etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another open source project is already light-years ahead of us in this regard, and we would probably never catch up if we tried to do it ourselves from the ground up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the proper way to go about using their work in our own project?&#xA;I think some important topics to address would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Compatibility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implementation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions on the Final Product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="805" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-16T17:59:11.887" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T18:37:36.130" Title="What's the proper way to use another project in your own open source software?" Tags="|law|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-07-16T19:58:24.447" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1181" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:01:00.687" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is: A host application's license apply to plug-ins written for it if the License is a &lt;em&gt;Copyleft&lt;/em&gt; License (such as the GNU GPL), and you distribute the plugin &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the application (so no private use exception apply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same rules do not apply for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/21/whats-the-difference-between-copyleft-and-permissive-open-source/1179#1179&quot;&gt;permissive license&lt;/a&gt; such Expat (MIT), but your question specifies Copyleft.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Drupal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a CMS that uses a plug-in architecture like the one described in the question.  Plug-ins for Drupal is known as &quot;modules&quot;.  Drupal is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later (GPLv2+).  This question is answered in the Drupal Licensing FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7: If I write a module or theme, do I have to license it under the GPL?&lt;/a&gt;. Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes. Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal. If you distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note Drupal does not try to &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; anyone from distributing  Drupal modules and themes &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; the Drupal-controlled ecosystem (the Git repo hosted on Drupal.org, and this policy has made some project's move to GitHub).  This is because such distros is permitted inder the private use exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this not some random opinion. The Drupal Licensing FAQ is written by copyright lawyers after careful discussion between the lawyers and the Drupal Association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wordpress&lt;/strong&gt; simply refers to the Drupal FAQ on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its page&lt;/a&gt; about its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people say &quot;it depends&quot;, and go on to say that it is the &lt;em&gt;software architecture&lt;/em&gt; used for linking will decide whether the plugin will be a derivative or not. However, this is very much a programming outlook, not a legal one. As pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1215/606&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, a court &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; decide that a program that &lt;em&gt;shares a file format&lt;/em&gt; with another program will be a derivative work of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T14:52:13.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1181" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:07:19.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source CMS projects cover this in their FAQ, Drupal and Wordpress being two notable instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Drupal FAQ #7&lt;/a&gt; states that plugins are derivatives of the original; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/support/topic/which-license-to-use-for-a-paid-plugin#post-2267631&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordpress Support forums&lt;/a&gt; tell you the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, it just depends on how the original is licensed. Wordpress is under the GPL, so derivative works must also be licensed under the GPL. Other licenses, such as MIT, might allow you to pick your own license for your plugin even though it's a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL, notably, would also &lt;em&gt;in theory&lt;/em&gt; allow you to pick your license, because the plugin merely dynamically links to the original work, which is allowed under its terms. However, &lt;em&gt;check that one&lt;/em&gt; before using it - IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T18:07:19.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1182" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:37:36.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not unusual in the world of free software to reuse libraries pulled from other projects (adapted, or unchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, there are really just two things you really need to be concerned about when doing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Compatibility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking from experience, I would say that &lt;strong&gt;license compatibility&lt;/strong&gt; may be a major obstacle when reusing code from another FLOSS project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if your project is going to be made available under the GNU GPL version 2 (GPLv2), and the &quot;other&quot; project's library is available under Apache 2.0, you can't legally combine them, because Apache 2.0 is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; compatible with GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;. (Apache 2.0 is compatible with GPLv3 - but that is no comfort if &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; project's license is GPLv2). Note that dual licensing will not solve this, because dual licensing allow downstream recipients to &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; a license, and you can't legally take Apache 2.0 and just permit relicensing to GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am been in this situation a number of times, and unless you have the privilege of re-licensing your own project (usually not feasible with a project that already have users relying on it keeping its license), the only route is to negotiate a with the owner of the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; project that they allow the re-licensing.  My experience is that most owners are nice people and will be happy to do this.  But abandonware is a problem. There is a lot of abandoned code out there with weird custom licenses that is unusable in new projects because their owners are unreachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt; is required by law, and usually also by the FLOSS license. This is much simpler do deal with.  Just make sure you &lt;em&gt;do it&lt;/em&gt;, and do it correctly.  My experience with some really large projects is that developers unfortunately are ignorant about this aspect of free software, and therefor sloppy in its execution.  In one of the FLOSS projects I manage, we're developing tools to assist our contributors in doing correct attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-16T18:37:36.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1181" CreationDate="2015-07-16T18:55:13.760" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Yes, you have to comply with the terms of the host application's license. However, a copyleft platform can choose to go either way. Some copyleft applications have a specific licensing exemption for plugins; in other cases, the technical architecture does not result in a derived work and thus an obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a plugin architecture where a plugin is just a command line that gets run and reads a file of unformatted data. In such a case, the plugin would involve no IP of the host, and have no interaction with the license. Pay particular attention to the GPL's definitions around 'linkage'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the connection between a plugin and its host counts as linking (like: the plugin must link in a library to work), or if a plugin must incorporate source code from the host to build and operate, then the plugin is fully subject to the copyleft terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that a user aggregates your plugin with their copy of the platform does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cause you to have obligations. It can't. You're not the one doing the plugging. What causes a derivative work or linkage is the relationship between your IP and the platform's IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given some other answers, I want to point out that there are some areas of open source licensing where the legal situation is clear, and there are some areas where the legal situation is less clear, and some where it's positively contentious. Some of the situations related to plugin architectures tend toward the later side of that spectrum. If you are building a plugin for a GPL-licensed platform, and the copyright owner of that platform makes a public statement that the GPL reaches plugins, you would be wise to avoid betting your livelihood on the possibility that they are wrong, or at least seek competent legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T19:39:57.413" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T19:39:57.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T00:51:55.863" Score="19" ViewCount="2209" Body="&lt;p&gt;The status of programs which are dynamically linked with Copyleft licensed binaries (such as a .dll) is contentious. I have created two questions for each side of the debate. The other can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1188/190&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF believes that dynamic links almost always constitute derivative works. The GNP GPL FAQ states explains their position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed&#xA;together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to&#xA;create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the&#xA;other software are non-free or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is&#xA;that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits&#xA;users from exercising rights that each program's individual license&#xA;would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with&#xA;two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will&#xA;decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the&#xA;mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a&#xA;shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication&#xA;(what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the last question I gather that the ultimate factor on whether they consider a 'link' to be derivative is whether the link means that the programmes share a memory address space. Pipes and sockets are fine, but no .dll or .so files. (Personally this seems like an odd criteria to me. It's my understanding that .dlls which directly access each other's memory are rather uncommon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the arguments in support of this position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T04:28:45.000" Title="What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|copyleft|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T01:06:18.727" Score="29" ViewCount="2828" Body="&lt;p&gt;The status of programs which are dynamically linked with Copyleft licensed binaries (such as a .dll) is contentious. I have created two questions for each side of the debate. The other can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1187/190&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the case for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works, it's been harder to find authorities stating that they do not. But here are some statements saying that there are at least some situations where they do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/17/79&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linus Torvalds wrote:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And don't get me wrong: I do not say that &quot;linking&quot; &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; creates &#xA;  derived works. I'm just saying that &quot;linking&quot; is just a technical step, &#xA;  and as such is not the answer to whether something is derived or not. &#xA;  Things can be derived works of each other &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; being linked, and they &#xA;  may not be derived works even if they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So &quot;linking&quot; basically has very little to do with &quot;derived&quot; per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking does have one thing that it implies: it's maybe a bit &quot;closer&quot; &#xA;  relationship between the parts than &quot;mkisofs&quot; implies. So there is &#xA;  definitely a higher &lt;em&gt;correlation&lt;/em&gt; between &quot;derived work&quot; and &quot;linking&quot;, &#xA;  but it's really a correlation, not a causal relationship.&#xA;  For example, if you link two object files together where neither is a &#xA;  &quot;library&quot; with standard interfaces, then the result is most likely a &#xA;  derived work from both. But it wasn't the &quot;act of linking&quot; that caused &#xA;  that to happen, but simply the fact that they were part of a bigger whole, &#xA;  and were meaningless apart from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/derivative.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The University of Washington's School of Law:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The results in this example seem to be the same as above. As long as module C(S) is not considered to be a work derived from G, then it is not within the scope of the GPL. If X can distribute C(S) separately from C(G'), and the combination of C(S) and C(G') is only made by the end-user, X should be free to license C(S) under whatever terms she chooses. And the distribution scheme seems a fraction less “kludgey” than the one employed in example 2, because the step of combination (linking) occurs transparently to the user of a dynamically linked system.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In short, the debate over static and dynamic linking simply misses the mark. As we shall see in our next example, using inter-module communication as the basis for a derivative work analysis will lead frequently to counter-intuitive and nonsensical results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the arguments in support of this position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T19:25:18.493" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T19:25:18.493" Title="What are the arguments for considering dynamic links not to constitute derivative works?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|copyleft|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2015-07-17T01:19:47.033" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/derivative.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The page from the University of Washington's School of Law goes on to say&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical object oriented programming languages include a standard class&#xA;hierarchy. This hierarchy provides a framework within which&#xA;application developers can build their programs. The standard classes&#xA;typically provide useful classes that represent user interface&#xA;elements (e.g. windows, buttons, etc.), collection classes (for&#xA;handling collections of data), and input-output abstractions (e.g.&#xA;files and networking connections). In many object oriented languages,&#xA;each class must be a subclass of exactly one superclass. And for this&#xA;reason, the class hierarchies are rooted by a highly generic, standard&#xA;class called Object. (The question of the superclass of Object is&#xA;beyond the scope of this article.) The class Object describes only the&#xA;most general properties and behaviors. For instance, in Java, the&#xA;class Object only performs a handful of functions. In Java, every&#xA;class is a subclass (directly or indirectly) of the Object class.&#xA;Under the GPL approach, then, every program written in Java is a&#xA;derived work of Object, because every program written in Java by&#xA;definition consists of classes that inherit from the Object class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a result certainly sounds extreme. The Object class in Java is&#xA;extraordinarily generic and bears little relation to many of the&#xA;classes that inherit from it. To be sure, all Java classes can perform&#xA;the behaviors defined by Object, precisely because they are subclasses&#xA;of Object, but this does not necessarily imply that those subclasses&#xA;should be considered derived works under copyright law. It would be as&#xA;if an author writes an incredibly generic, one-sentence long &amp;quot;story&amp;quot;&#xA;along the lines of &amp;quot;There are some characters who do things and stuff&#xA;happens to them&amp;quot; and then claims that just about every novel that&#xA;follows is a work derivative of his story. From a naive perspective,&#xA;almost every story (perhaps with the exception of Waiting for Godot)&#xA;can be considered derivative of our short story because it borrows or&#xA;incorporates the same essential plotline. Obviously, though, this is&#xA;not the result that we obtain under the law. Principally, the reason&#xA;is that the short story would not be considered copyrightable subject&#xA;matter, either because it does not meet the minimum creative&#xA;threshold, or because it is already in the public domain, or because&#xA;the idea of the story has merged with its expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, the answer in this example depends on questions of&#xA;copyrightability, incorporation, substantial similarity, market&#xA;demand, and public policy. As a general matter, in the case of&#xA;inheritance in object oriented systems, a subclass trivially&#xA;incorporates (and is substantially similar) to its superclass. The&#xA;analysis should then turn, to a larger degree, on questions of&#xA;copyrightability of the superclass, market demand, and public policy.&#xA;For example, if the class B is highly generic (as in Java's Object&#xA;class), it is unlikely that it would even be considered copyrightable&#xA;subject matter under the 102(b) bar. On the other hand, if B is highly&#xA;specialized—as are classes that we find on the fringes or leaves of a&#xA;class hierarchy—there may be a stronger argument that they contain&#xA;substantial copyrightable subject matter. This argues, then, for a&#xA;finding that D is a derivative of B. Even here, though, a market&#xA;demand analysis might argue against a finding of derivation. Class D&#xA;will not supplant demand for class B, simply because it makes no sense&#xA;to deploy D in the absence of B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this to mean that there is a good argument that subclassing through dynamic links can constitute derivative works, but it depends on what is being subclassed: the base Object class is too generic (and perhaps not even copyrightable), but if you subclassed a large class which represented most of the library then it would count as derived. This makes sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They address function calls in a different place, arguing that they are not derivative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third factor focuses on the amount of the original work used in the allegedly infringing work. Here, assuming that modern software engineering principles are followed, the amount of literal copying of code in G' is surely minimal. The relationship between S and G' is just that S makes function calls into G'. Therefore, S makes use just of the function names defined by G', and doesn't actually copy any portions of the G's program text. Finally, the market effect analysis also works in X's favor, because S does not supplant the market for G. In fact, anyone who wishes to use S has to also download a copy of G'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally they give a couple of examples of plugins, concluding that the precise method of linking things is the wrong criteria for determining whether something is derivative or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the implications of this method of boundary drawing,&#xA;consider for a moment the Acrobat Reader plugin for Firefox, and&#xA;assume that the browser is licensed under the GPL. The plugin offers&#xA;its own set of user interface buttons and is capable of rendering file&#xA;formats that are exotic to Firefox. Does this seem like a derivative&#xA;work of Firefox? Whatever our intuition may tell us, the answer&#xA;depends - according to the GPL's drafters at least - on the&#xA;particulars of the Firefox plugin architecture. If the plugin&#xA;architecture launches plugins and runs them in separate address spaces&#xA;as separate, running executables, then the GPL does not consider&#xA;Acrobat Reader a derived work of Firefox. On the other hand, if the&#xA;plugin is dynamically linked to Firefox, then the GPL urges the&#xA;opposite characterization. This seems to fly in the face of common&#xA;sense, which tells us that Acrobat Reader is not a work derived from&#xA;Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following thought experiment demonstrates the absurdity of the GPL&#xA;approach. Imagine taking the Firefox source code and modifying it in&#xA;such a way that it is encapsulated in a plugin, called Fireplug.&#xA;Common sense and the law tell us that Fireplug is a derivative work of&#xA;Firefox, based simply on the fact that Fireplug incorporates all or&#xA;most of the Firefox codebase. Now, when we plug Fireplug into Firefox,&#xA;we essentially have a Firefox browser running within a Firefox&#xA;browser. And depending on the Firefox plugin architecture, the GPL&#xA;drives us to incompatible results. If plugins are dynamically linked,&#xA;Fireplug is a derivative work. This is the right result, but the&#xA;reasoning is exactly wrong. Fireplug is a derivative work because it&#xA;incorporates and is substantially similar to Firefox, not because of a&#xA;decision made by the designer of the Firefox plugin architecture. On&#xA;the other hand, if plugins are launched as separate programs, then&#xA;Fireplug suddenly is not a derivative work, even though this result is&#xA;counter the common sense result above. Clearly, the mechanism of a&#xA;given plugin architecture are analytically unhelpful and misleading in&#xA;answering the derivative work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T12:01:13.490" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T12:01:13.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1187" CreationDate="2015-07-17T02:02:40.050" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it basically boils down to what is understood as a derivate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program that dynamically links a library is a derivate in this point of view, because it as a whole delivers the product function to the user. If you remove the library it stops working. A similar situation with plugins that are dynamically loaded and linked - without the original program they aren't working. So the working program/plugin is a derivative work, as for it's completeness is the linked part needed. Without it it's incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source authors accept this point of view. There are many reasons for it. First of all, it is the interpretation of the FSF, the authors of the license. So many simply accept that interpretations, as this was the intent. Similarly it is out of respect for the developers of software under the GPL. As these authors chose the GPL, they may have been considered this usage, so out of respect many don't challenge this claim, as it is clear what the developers wished who released their software under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One major example of a supporter of this interpretation of the GPL is Debian. As the cdrtools-author Jörg Schilling switched the license of parts of the code to the CDDL, Debian claimed this a violation of the GPL and started the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrkit&quot;&gt;fork cdrkit&lt;/a&gt;. A similar case happened with KDE, which used the library Qt which was back at that point not GPL-licensed. Debian saw that as a violation of the GPL and &lt;a href=&quot;http://freecode.com/articles/why-debian-doesnt-include-kde&quot;&gt;removed KDE from the distribution&lt;/a&gt;. In both cases there would be no violation if linking wouldn't create a derivative work, so Debian clearly seems to be the opinion it does so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as far as I know at least, there was no law-suit so far that tested that assumption. The GPL was used in law-suits, but never about the linking problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T02:02:40.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2015-07-17T02:21:57.640" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the position of the FSF about the interpretation of the GPL is clear, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot;&gt;few people have opposed this position&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus' position that is cited in the OP is, that all combined parts must be meaningless without being part of the combination to form a derivate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/1532.html&quot;&gt;Matt Asay&lt;/a&gt; compares linking of software to the act of referencing a character, a scene or something similar from a novel in another novel. He claims as with linking no code is copied, it is not derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lawrence Rosen &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366&quot;&gt;goes even farther&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The primary indication of whether a new program is a derivative work&#xA;  is whether the source code of the original program was used, modified,&#xA;  translated or otherwise changed in any way to create the new program.&#xA;  If not, then I would argue that it is not a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, dynamically or even statically linked programs are in this view not always derivates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But beware, the interpretation if linking is forming a derivative work has not yet (as far as I know) been tested in courts. GPL was topic of quite a few law-suits, but it was never about linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T08:45:02.410" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T08:45:02.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="571" CreationDate="2015-07-17T03:52:04.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any research where that has been the primary focus. In most of my reading; the meaning of &quot;open source&quot; is either quoted from a source like FSF or not referenced at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there has been a lot written about open source from perspectives other than software engineers.  From &lt;a href=&quot;http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10676-009-9209-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Convivial software: an end-user perspective on free and open source software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (C. Mitcham 2009):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As noted at the&#xA;  outset, from the end-user perspective what is important is&#xA;  not so much the direct availability of the source code as&#xA;  program or technical conviviality... From the perspective of end users, there is more with regard to free&#xA;  expression or openness than technical source code transparency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another article, &lt;em&gt;One size doesn't fit all: End users look for perfect 'fit' with open source code&lt;/em&gt; (L. Spinelli, Accounting Today, 2005) focusses a lot on how &quot;anyone can change&quot; an open source project, making it highly customisable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the problem&#xA;  with using a closed or proprietary&#xA;  system was its inability to&#xA;  bend to the company's inventory&#xA;  processes, creating a need&#xA;  for a third-party system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;free software&quot; tend to be used interchangeably, and there is more focus on the &quot;free speech&quot; aspect than the &quot;free beer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="814" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T03:52:04.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1195" CreationDate="2015-07-17T09:02:13.310" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of open source (everyone can change and redistribute) can be applied to many things. One could imagine open source news. But would that make sense? After all, news gets old after a few hours, nobody is interested in it anymore. So there is in practice no time to make use of it being open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are scenarios that would make it useful to open source news?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T20:55:11.670" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T20:55:11.670" Title="What value would open source news have?" Tags="|writing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2015-07-17T09:07:46.840" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This pair of questions (whether dynamic linking creates a derivative or not) is really a false dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Linus Torvalds is spot on when he says (quoted in the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So &quot;linking&quot; basically has very little to do with &quot;derived&quot; per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem with this false dichotomy it that leads to reasoning that if dynamic linking, does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; create a derivative, then something that dynamically links something is not a derivative of that library.  I think that pointing out that this is false reasoning is what is implied in last point in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.washington.edu/lta/swp/law/derivative.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Washington's School of Law&lt;/a&gt;  text quoted by &lt;em&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if plugins are launched as separate programs, then Fireplug suddenly is not a derivative work, even though this result is counter the common sense result above. Clearly, the mechanism of a given plugin architecture are analytically unhelpful and misleading in answering the derivative work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; saying that the hypothetical Firefox-derived program is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work.  IMHO, they're saying that it is, but that it unhelpful to use the  &quot;mechanism of a given plugin architecture&quot; to decide whether it is or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this false dichotomy is not helpful.  I sometimes see the following argument presented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since X is dynamically linked, and there is no legal precedence that dynamic linking produces a derivative, we can conclude that the composite that makes use of X is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative of X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a valid argument.  That something is dynamically linking is &lt;em&gt;irrelevant&lt;/em&gt; to deciding whether it is a derivative of X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, we must determine how the composite &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; X.  If the composite can not function without X, then the composite is a derivative of X, no matter what mechanism is used to produce the composite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is little case law in this area (and AFAIK, none involving FLOSS licenses), but I think the 9th circuit ruling on &lt;a href=&quot;http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/1998%20Micro%20Star%20Abridged.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.&lt;/a&gt; comes close. The court found that a CD-ROM with files containing fan-curated levels for a video game did create a derivative work when combined with the original game. While the court agreed that the game manufacturer (FormGen) had licensed its &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; to create an share such levels, the infringing company (Micro Star) has not been granted such a license.  The ruling says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing indicates that FormGen granted Micro Star any written license at &#xA;  all;  nor  is  there  evidence  of  a nonexclusive  oral  license.  The  only  written  license  FormGen  conceivably granted was to players who designed their own new levels, but that license contains a significant  limitation:  Any  new  levels  the  players  create  &quot;must  be  offered  [to  others]  solely  for free&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The  parties  dispute  whether  the  license  is  binding,  but  it  doesn't  matter.  If  the  license  is  valid,  it clearly prohibits commercial distribution of levels; if it doesn't, FormGen hasn't granted any written licenses at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it is not even a matter of static or dynamic &quot;linking&quot;.  The user-curated levels are delivered on a CD in the form of files on a format that is understood by the video game.  One of the things that makes these files a derivative is that these files are not &lt;em&gt;usable&lt;/em&gt; unless they are read of the original game program. It is not the software mechanism used to create the composite that makes this a derivative work, but the fact that derivative work cannot be separated from the original and still function, that decides the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also make it clear that I think Lawrence Rosen of the OSI is wrong when he &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a company releases a scientific subroutine library, or a library of objects, for example, people who merely use the library, unmodified, perhaps without even looking at the source code, are not thereby creating derivative works of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider Rosen's argument as politicised, and motivated by his personal belief that open source should be about convenience, not about freedom. Rosen, along with collegue Michael Einschlag writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The real reason you should care about this issue [i.e. what consitutes a derivative work] is that we want to encourage as much free and open source software to be created without scaring proprietary software users away.  If people believe that merely touching your open source software will &lt;em&gt;infect&lt;/em&gt; their software with a virus, you will make your software less attractive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;agree&lt;/em&gt; with Rosen that the exact mechanism you use to make use of the library in you program (static linking, dynamic linking, etc.) does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I &lt;em&gt;disgree&lt;/em&gt; with Rosen that &quot;merely use&quot; of said scientific subroutine library in a larger work does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; result in a derivative. I think this is a &lt;em&gt;lex ferenda&lt;/em&gt; argument. where Rosen wants the law to match OSI's agenda of making the use of free software attractive to commercial companies &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; permitting such companies to make use of free software in products that does not provide the community with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an interpretation of the law is IMHO wrong, and leads to undesirable situations. For instance, let's assume that the &quot;scientific subroutine library&quot; is made available under GPLv3, and some company use it to as part of some sort of proprietary scientific spreadsheet package.  Without the functions in the GPLv3 library, the spreadsheet would not be &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt;.  This use of the library would at least violate the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the author of the library, no matter how it is technically combined with other software to create the resulting composite work. (If the library author had intended to permit such uses, he/she would have picked a license that allowed incorporaton of the library in a proprietary work, such as LGPLv2.1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the technical architecture of the composite work that is the reason composite should be considered a derivative of the GPLv3 library, but the &lt;em&gt;functional integration&lt;/em&gt; of the two - i.e. the fact that without the GPLv3 library, the composite work (the proprietary scientific spreadsheet) would simply not work.  This means that if the spreadsheet &lt;em&gt;depends on&lt;/em&gt; the GPLv3 library, it is this &lt;em&gt;functional dependency&lt;/em&gt; (and not the technical architecture used to combine the two) that gives grounds to say that the spreadsheet is a derivative of the  GPLv3 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking is usually done because the functionality linked-in is required, so it is harder to come up with a counter-example (where something is somehow linked, but there is &lt;em&gt;no functional dependency&lt;/em&gt; between the parts).  But in a highly contrived example, one can think of a library that would replace the standard library &lt;code&gt;printf&lt;/code&gt; with an alternative version that would redact certain words in the program's output.  The original program is in no way functional dependent on the redacting version of &lt;code&gt;printf&lt;/code&gt; - linking in the alternative library simply changes the behavior of the program. In this case, even if the library is statically linked, the resulting composite is (probably) not a derivative of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to conclude: We should not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; conclude that using a dynamically linked library constitutes a derivative work of said library, but the opposite conclusion (that dynamic linking does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; constitute a derivative work) is equally false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-18T09:11:04.907" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T09:11:04.907" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1193" CreationDate="2015-07-17T11:06:47.823" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lawrence Lessig in his book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free Culture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; talks about the effect of all-rights-reserved copyright on news broadcasts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We take it for granted that we can go back to see what we remember&#xA;  reading. Think about newspapers. If you wanted to study the reaction&#xA;  of your hometown newspaper to the race riots in Watts in 1965,&#xA;  or to Bull Connor’s water cannon in 1963, you could go to your public&#xA;  library and look at the newspapers. Those papers probably exist on&#xA;  microfiche. If you’re lucky, they exist in paper, too. Either way, you&#xA;  are free, using a library, to go back and remember—not just what it is&#xA;  convenient to remember, but remember something close to the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Television, it turns out, is even more&#xA;  ephemeral than the Internet.While much of twentieth-century culture&#xA;  was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture&#xA;  is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded&#xA;  each evening by Vanderbilt University—thanks to a specific&#xA;  exemption in the copyright law. That content is indexed, and is available&#xA;  to scholars for a very low fee. “But other than that, [television] is almost&#xA;  unavailable,” Kahle told me. “If you were Barbara Walters you could get&#xA;  access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The same is generally true about television. Television broadcasts&#xA;  were originally not copyrighted—there was no way to capture the&#xA;  broadcasts, so there was no fear of “theft.” But as technology enabled&#xA;  capturing, broadcasters relied increasingly upon the law. The law required&#xA;  they make a copy of each broadcast for the work to be “copyrighted.”&#xA;  But those copies were simply kept by the broadcasters. No&#xA;  library had any right to them; the government didn’t demand them.&#xA;  The content of this part of American culture is practically invisible to&#xA;  anyone who would look. (p109-111)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &quot;After all news get old after a few hours, nobody is interested in them anymore&quot; that is a very short-sighted perspective. Often we don't know what will be significant in later decades and centuries. The first local campaign speech of a future Prime Minister or President may well have been broadcast, but if the rights holders restrict its archiving then in thirty years' time it may be impossible to find and view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's for news items that eventually turn out to be significant. There are so many more broadcasts that will be important, not for the events they show, but as a window into life in a particular place at a particular time. In 100 years time how many of the interviews with regular American citizens talking about the Ferguson unrest will still be accessible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'll never be able to archive everything, but we have the technology to archive a lot. We don't know what our grandchildren will want to rewatch, so we should try to archive as much as we can. Commercial broadcasters may never allow that, but we should at least demand from our public broadcasters the freedom to archive their new broadcasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T11:06:47.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1197" CreationDate="2015-07-17T12:37:43.033" Score="7" ViewCount="721" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does open source clothing exists? With that I mean, do sewing patterns, tutorials or steering files for sewing and weaving machines, that are licensed as open source exist? Meaning these patterns, tutorials and steering files can be freely changed and redistributed? Is it even possible to open source clothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T10:13:07.600" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T10:13:07.600" Title="Does open source clothing exist?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2015-07-17T13:49:41.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, open source sewing patterns exist, but there aren't many.  A search for &quot;creative commons sewing pattern&quot; yields several hits, and &quot;open source sewing pattern&quot; yields a few more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't link them here because you can easily find them yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Here's an example:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silverseams.com/opensource/&quot;&gt;www.silverseams.com/opensource&lt;/a&gt;.  It's a blog so I can't guarantee that the link will be good forever.  Besides patterns it includes a rationale for using open source licensing for patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T15:45:04.770" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T15:45:04.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T14:29:10.077" Score="10" ViewCount="1515" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 4th point of &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/docs/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; - Integrity of The Author's Source Code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of &quot;patch files&quot; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would someone want to restrict the distribution of modified source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T14:39:14.590" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T13:13:47.560" Title="Understanding 4th point (restriction to distribute modified source-code) of Open Source definition" Tags="|open-source-definition|restrictions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1198" CreationDate="2015-07-17T14:41:09.777" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that to be considered open, a license is allowed to enforce that the original source must be transmitted unmodified (with the patch file proviso).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for example useful for a security application where the original version has been vetted by experts in the field but random changes may open up vulnerabilities. Grouping the diffs into patch files will allow users or other experts to check whether those changes are valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the downside that changes can't become too big otherwise the patchfiles can become massive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T13:13:47.560" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T13:13:47.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1198" CreationDate="2015-07-17T14:41:48.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing here is that restrictions to modifying the source code are only allowed, if the distribution of patch-files with the source are allowed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28Unix%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Patch-files&lt;/a&gt; are simple files that save the differences between two versions of files - especially sources for software. A patch-file can be automatically applied by common tools to create another version of a file. This provides a way to modify the sources, while keeping the originals intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T15:40:39.787" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T15:40:39.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1181" CreationDate="2015-07-17T14:53:39.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; unless you specify otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plugin is derived from the API which specifies which functions the plugin needs to export and what they should do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you released X under GPL you can add an exemption for the plugins  and dual license the API itself with a less restrictive license that allows non-GPL license for the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way you can allow distribution of the plugin alongside the project without requiring the plugin to be released under GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T14:53:39.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-17T15:58:15.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of financial aspects to open source and free software, despite the fact that many open projects are available for no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used on questions relating to these financial aspects, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Supporting developers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pricing software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Purchasing necessary software (such as any IDE's or other software required)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T21:38:55.883" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T21:38:55.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-17T15:58:15.197" Score="0" Body="For questions about managing the financial aspects of projects, such as pricing and support." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-17T21:38:30.737" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T21:38:30.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1198" CreationDate="2015-07-17T16:19:56.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Freedoms 1 and 3 from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 1 of the Open Source Definition, linked in the question, also implies these freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mean that, to be free software, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be freely able to modify the code &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; distribute it. Restricting these freedoms is usually not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, going by the OSD, if you allow recipients of the program &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; way to modify how the program works and then distribute, it doesn't have to be by allowing distribution of the modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; someone would want to do this... I don't know. Perhaps the author is protective of how they wrote their code and doesn't want to see it mutilated in other redistributions of their software - though there's probably a more valid reason than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-17T16:19:56.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T18:28:27.803" Score="5" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt to break down: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1181/does-a-host-applications-license-apply-to-plug-ins-written-for-it&quot;&gt;Does a host application&amp;#39;s license apply to plug-ins written for it?&lt;/a&gt; into the underlying questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two programs 'communicate' via a text file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the programs is GPL (no exemptions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The format of the file's contents are defined by the GPL program&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existence of the file is the only form of linkage between the two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually irrelevant but, for simplicity, assume the GPL program reads the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also assume that the document describing the format of the file's contents is published under the same license as the rest of the project (i.e. GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the format of the file's contents constitute an API?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Also see my follow on question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1207/190&quot;&gt;Does sharing a file format make two programs either a combined or derived work?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T08:09:44.430" Title="Does a file format constitute an API?" Tags="|terminology|api|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-17T18:29:53.853" Score="7" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1206/are-two-programs-combined-if-they-share-a-common-file-format&quot;&gt;Does a file format constitute an API?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an attempt to break down: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1181/does-a-host-applications-license-apply-to-plug-ins-written-for-it&quot;&gt;Does a host application&amp;#39;s license apply to plug-ins written for it?&lt;/a&gt; into the underlying questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two programs 'communicate' via a text file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the programs is GPL (no exemptions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The format of the file's contents are defined by the GPL program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The existence of the file is the only form of linkage between the two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually irrelevant but, for simplicity, assume the GPL program reads the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this make the two programs a combined or derived work, possibly via linkage?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T16:44:31.267" Title="Does sharing a file format make two programs either a combined or derived work?" Tags="|gpl|file-formats|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1211" CreationDate="2015-07-18T02:04:11.233" Score="8" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the inverse of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-share-if-i-include-cc-by-sa-artwork-in-my-software&quot;&gt;What do I need to share if I include CC-BY-SA artwork in my software?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some webpages, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://codeforamerica.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Code for America&lt;/a&gt; are licensed under &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/code&gt;. If I want to adapt the code for this web page to host copyrighted content which cannot be redistributed, can I? Is it possible to retain the CC license for the template but have a separate copyright clause for the written content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="755" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T03:18:38.867" Title="Can I adapt a CC-BY-SA licensed webpage to host rights-reserved copyrighted content?" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="932" CreationDate="2015-07-18T02:19:30.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Based on the CC requirements it says I can't restrict it from anyone. Here I am not restricting anyone from anything. I am just applying different rules. Am I allowed to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, given free speech and all that - you can certainly say that you want different licenses to apply to different groups of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please be aware that nobody needs to &lt;em&gt;honor&lt;/em&gt; such additional terms imposed by you. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal code of CC-BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional or different terms or conditions communicated by You unless expressly agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of no approved (by the FSF or OSI) license that lets you impose any form of discrimination against people or uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, since such additional terms have no legal effect, there is no point in doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T04:19:44.263" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T04:19:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1209" CreationDate="2015-07-18T02:43:53.467" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes (provided I've understood the question correctly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I want to adapt the code for this web page to host copyrighted content which cannot be redistributed, can I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look inside the GitHub archive, you'll find the entire site there. All of it (markup &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; its existing contents) is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a copyleft license, you're allowed to adapt it. So whatever you &lt;em&gt;reuse&lt;/em&gt; from that site (HTML, CSS, Javascript, images, decorations, etc.) must be made available under CC-BY-SA.  Whatever you're left with after doing this is your website &lt;em&gt;template&lt;/em&gt;.  To simplify things, you may want to create a fork on GitHub and make it clear that the template in this fork is a derivative of the &lt;em&gt;Code for America&lt;/em&gt; repo, and that it is made available under CC-BY-SA 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; going through this process you can download your fork from GitHub. You can then proceed by &lt;em&gt;adding&lt;/em&gt; your own contents to it.  Since this original contents is not derived from anything in the &lt;em&gt;Code for America&lt;/em&gt; repo, it is not a derivative work, and you're not obliged to license this &lt;em&gt;original content&lt;/em&gt; under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to expand the answer a little, this not only applies to CC-BY-SA, but to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyleft licenses I am aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This again boils down to the legal definition of &quot;derivative work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;contents&lt;/em&gt; you place on a web-page does not make the composite (template + contents) a derivative of the template.  The reason is that the template and the contents does not require each other to function.  You could replace your contents with some other contents, and the template would still work.  You could use some other template to display your content, and it would still be the same contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the record, I have discussed a similar situation with the FSF, where the use case was a template available under the GNU GPL, and a client wanted to be sure that his proprietary images was not &quot;infected&quot; by the GPL virus.  This was the reply from the FSF:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is the position of the FSF that if a work licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL isn’t dependent on a particular image in any way, that is, the software would effectively function identically with any other image, then the image could be considered as being distributed in mere aggregation with the work. (Source: Private communication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(While this is about the GNU GPL and not the CC-BY-SA, I think it is applicable, as the &quot;ShareAlike&quot; provisions of the CC is very similar to the &quot;Copyleft&quot; of the FSF licenses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In legal terms, this low level of functional integration between the two means that the composite is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative, but a &quot;mere aggregate&quot;.  Even &lt;em&gt;strong copyleft&lt;/em&gt; licenses, such as the GNU GPL, does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make the copyleft license of a template or CMS apply to the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; that is published with the help of the template or CMS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also applies in the physical world.  If you write a novel, your publisher will probably hire a graphical designer to create the cover art, decide on page format, fonts, etc.  Your novel, however, will not be a derivative of the graphical designer's artwork - and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T03:18:38.867" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T03:18:38.867" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1206" CreationDate="2015-07-18T08:09:44.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To begin I cite the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia about the definition of API&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is&#xA;  a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software&#xA;  applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its&#xA;  operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the if file format describes how operations are executed and/or transfers data, it is part of an API. To make the API complete you still need a mechanism to exchange the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common example that practically fits your description are common web-APIs. A file (usually XML or JSON) is sent to the webservice in form of a POST-REQUEST and the result is sent back by HTTP status codes and another file as response. This more or less fits your description given in the question (with one exception I go into soon) and it is an API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing in your question that isn't fitting is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The existence of the file is the only form of linkage between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An API always needs a defined way to exchange the file. In the webservice-example it is the HTTP-connection. But it may also be as simple, as writing the file into a predefined directory that the other program monitors. Either way, without the definition of the communication-mechanism the file-format alone can be never enough, but the communication can be extremely simple (and therefore many people forget about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mention in your question that one of the programs is a GPL-licensed program, I assume your question targets in the direction of the usage of such an file-API makes the other program a derivate and therefore it has to be licensed under GPL too, This makes also sense, because without it, the question has no connection to open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the implicit question: No, the simple usage of an API  isn't creating a derivate and therefore triggering the GPL. The GPL is talking about linking the software, not about using an API. If linking is enough to create a derivate work &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1188/55&quot;&gt;is discussed&lt;/a&gt;, and not everyone shares the point of view of the FSF. But even the FSF stops at linking and I know of no one, who interprets the formation of a derivate even more inclusive than the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF addresses this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distinction in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;  definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;  linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;  combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;  communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;  So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;  separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;  intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;  could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, transferring files via Sockets or Pipes (including STDOUT and STDIN), does not qualify as combination into a larger program. The file could be also exchanged via a command-line parameter pointing to the position the file is saved. That is even more indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ has some consideration into 'complex internal data structures', so that could be an argument that both programs are combined. For a file with a defined content (needed for it being an API), we can argue against it being 'internal'. It's pretty obvious for text-files, that you defined in the question, internal data-structures (and that includes strings) have to be converted to fit into text-files. Strings have a length-integer at the beginning (seldom in use today) or are ended by a null-byte (more common). In a test-file strings are separated by a defined separator, commonly a line-break. That alone makes the data no longer internal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even for a binary file some sort of conversion is needed. Different compilers can lead to different memory-layout of data-structures: little vs. big-endian for multi-byte datatypes, direction for arrays, padding bytes included by the compiler, length of integers. If the file is part of an API all this has to be defined, meaning on a different platform with different compilers a conversion from the internal data-structure is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T08:09:44.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1207" CreationDate="2015-07-18T08:20:33.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the interpretation of the FSF (the issuer of the GPL): No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the direct interpretation of your questions title it is pretty obvious. If I write an MS Office document in LibreOffice and read and change it in OpenOffice, it doesn't mean LibreOffice and OpenOffice create a combined work. Even more so if the format that is used for the exchange is originating from a third program: MS Office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you go more into detail in the question and specify the shared format is used for communication. And your other question points toward the interpretation you want this to know for the case the communication with the shared file format is forming an API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even for that case the answer is no. The simple usage of an API isn't creating a derivate and therefore triggering the GPL. The GPL is talking about linking the software, not about using an API. If linking is enough to create a derivate work &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1188/55&quot;&gt;is discussed&lt;/a&gt;, and not everyone shares the point of view of the FSF. But even the FSF stops at linking and I know of no one, who interprets the formation of a derivate even more inclusive than the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF addresses this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distinction in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;  definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;  linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;  combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;  communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;  So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;  separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;  intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;  could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, transferring files via Sockets or Pipes (including STDOUT and STDIN), does not qualify as combination into a larger program. The file could be also exchanged via a command-line parameter pointing to the position the file is saved. That is even more indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ has some consideration into 'complex internal data structures', so that could be an argument that both programs are combined. For a file with a defined content (needed for it being an API), we can argue against it being 'internal'. It's pretty obvious for text-files, that you defined in the question, internal data-structures (and that includes strings) have to be converted to fit into text-files. Strings have a length-integer at the beginning (seldom in use today) or are ended by a null-byte (more common). In a test-file strings are separated by a defined separator, commonly a line-break. That alone makes the data no longer internal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even for a binary file some sort of conversion is needed. Different compilers can lead to different memory-layout of data-structures: little vs. big-endian for multi-byte datatypes, direction for arrays, padding bytes included by the compiler, length of integers. If the file is part of an API all this has to be defined, meaning on a different platform with different compilers a conversion from the internal data-structure is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, always it might be the case that some jurisdictions use different interpretations, I rely on the interpretation of the FSF, as they issued the GPL the question was about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FreeRadical points in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1207/does-sharing-a-file-format-make-two-programs-either-a-combined-or-derived-work/1213?noredirect=1#comment2864_1213&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; to the court case of &lt;a href=&quot;http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/1998%20Micro%20Star%20Abridged.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FormGen vs. Micro Star&lt;/a&gt; about Duke Nukem level files. I have to explain it a bit, that is too long for comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case is not the same situation as the question asks. The question of kdopen would be similar to Microstar creating a level editor (another program using the same file format). The case was about selling files created with the original level editor and about advertising the pack with screenshots. The screenshots indeed are derivates, as they contain information from both the level-file and copyrighted art from Duke Nukem. So the matter of the screenshots is pretty clear, however the court also concludes the map-files itself create a derivate. For that let interpret the map-file as a program. That is possible, as it contains instructions to the game engine how to use game art to create a new level. But still not matches kdopens question, as there are no two programs that are only linked together by a file format. In my question I cited the FSF with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address&#xA;  space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens here, as the map-file is loaded by the game into the address-space of the game. But kdopens question was about linking through exchanged files, not that the file itself is the derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T14:55:06.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1209" CreationDate="2015-07-18T08:28:48.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting, seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1211/55&quot;&gt;Free Radicals answer&lt;/a&gt; that comes to a complete different conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This again boils down to the legal definition of &quot;derivative work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I agree with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, here my assumption on what you do planning to do:&#xA;You want to take the HTML-code and CSS and probably some images from 'Code for America' and replace the content with your own. I think the integration of your written content with the HTML of Code for America is forming a derivative work and therefore the Share-Alike clause would be triggering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To err on the safe side you might ask Code for America about this and respect their wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T08:28:48.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1207" CreationDate="2015-07-18T09:21:55.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to provide a definitive answer to this, as the answer will often depend on the how and for what purpose the &quot;shared&quot; file format is used.  I am sure that there exists multiple instances of two programs sharing data by means of a particular file format that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make the two programs a combined or derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the opposite may also be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, in case law, I know about &lt;em&gt;one example&lt;/em&gt; where the court found that sharing a file format &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid any misunderstanding, the court in this particular case did not say that it was just using a shared file format that resulting in a derivative work, but that by &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; a shared file format for a specific purpose - i.e. to &lt;em&gt;create a sequel&lt;/em&gt; to a computer program game, a derivative work was created, and the defendant did not have the required license or permission to distribute this derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case I am referring to is the 9th circuit ruling on &lt;a href=&quot;http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/1998%20Micro%20Star%20Abridged.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plaintiff in this case &lt;em&gt;tried&lt;/em&gt; to make the court consider software architecture, by alleging that contested files (&quot;N/I MAP files&quot;) contained instructions to the game-engine and therefore was a &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; that was at run-time linked to the main game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the court &lt;em&gt;ignored&lt;/em&gt; this angle, and instead based its decision in favor of the plaintiff on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A copyright owner holds the right to create sequels, [...] and the stories told in the N/I MAP files are surely sequels, telling new (though somewhat repetitive) tales of Duke's fabulous adventures. A book about Duke Nukem would infringe for the same reason, even if it contained no pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while the court agreed that the game manufacturer (FormGen) had licensed its &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; to create an share such levels in the form of MAP files, the infringing company (Micro Star) has not been granted such a license.  The ruling says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing indicates that FormGen granted Micro Star any written license at &#xA;  all;  nor  is  there  evidence  of  a nonexclusive  oral  license.  The  only  written  license  FormGen  conceivably granted was to players who designed their own new levels, but that license contains a significant  limitation:  Any  new  levels  the  players  create  &quot;must  be  offered  [to  others]  solely  for free&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The  parties  dispute  whether  the  license  is  binding,  but  it  doesn't  matter.  If  the  license  is  valid,  it clearly prohibits commercial distribution of levels; if it doesn't, FormGen hasn't granted any written licenses at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point I am trying to make here is that when courts decide on what is and is not derivative works, they will often consider &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; aspects of interdependence between the works than those that follows from software architecture (be it file formats or types of linking). Many programmer's seem to think that courts care about software architecture just as much as they do. However, this is (usually) not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that software architecture or linking mechanism  may be &lt;em&gt;unsuitable&lt;/em&gt; as a criterion for deciding if the combination is a derivative work or not. Therefore, most questions about whether the use of some specific software mechanism cannot be answered beyond the generic: &quot;It depends on how, and for what purpose, that  mechanism is used.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unless&lt;/em&gt; the dispute is about a &quot;direct derivative&quot; (where original code is copied and transformed to create a derivative, and the outcome is obvious), the courts frequently uses &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; criteria than software architecture to decide whether something is a derivative or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T16:44:31.267" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T16:44:31.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-18T09:34:36.977" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have coded a program (Java). It consists of two piece a Main Component and the Calculation Component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limitations for the Main Component:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closed source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no allowed changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People i allow to it use are the only one who can use it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limitations for the Calculation Component:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no allowed changes &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People i allow to it use are the only one who can use it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which licenses would be matching?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to change the license type after publishing the software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would change from a license point of view if i would allow changes on the Calculation Component?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="835" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T07:09:37.637" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T07:09:37.637" Title="Matching Licence Model" Tags="|proprietary-code|license-recommendation|restrictions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-18T14:33:54.520" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1216" CreationDate="2015-07-18T10:01:31.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; demands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. (criteria 6)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That demands that the license doesn't impose restrictions on the usage. Your criteria 'no commercial use' conflicts with it. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/509/55&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derived Works. (criteria 3)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That demands, that the license allows everyone to change the code and redistribute the changes. Your criteria 'no allowed changes' conflicts with this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups. (criteria 5)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your criteria 'People I allow to it use are the only one who can use it' conflicts with it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your calculation component is therefore as proprietary as the main component. If you don't use an open source license, you can demand a lot of things in your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your single questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which licenses would be matching?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No open source license, as your demands conflict with the demands of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible to change the license type after publishing the software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, with some difficulties. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/33/55&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would change from a license point of view if I would allow changes on the Calculation Component?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would still not be open source, as two criteria are still conflicting, but it would be one step in the direction of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T06:20:04.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1198" CreationDate="2015-07-18T11:27:25.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The clause is actually a historical compromise copied from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Free Software Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;; the latter states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; if the license allows the distribution of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;patch files&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. &lt;em&gt;(This is a compromise. The Debian group encourages all authors not to restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause was added to the DFSG to allow Debian to carry software such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt; whose license requires (or used to?) changes to be distributed as patches (&amp;quot;change files&amp;quot;) without touching the original code. (This is alluded to in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/nm-templates.git/tree/nm_pp1_extras.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;templates&lt;/a&gt; for questions asked to candidates in the Debian New Maintainer process.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why one would want to distribute software in this way, it mainly comes down to control and preserving the ability to identify the &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; source code; &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; for security reasons, or interoperability, or in the case of TeX, being able to guarantee that a given input document will produce the same output with different versions of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T11:27:25.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1220" CreationDate="2015-07-18T12:18:59.360" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;What issues are involved when taking code from (for example) MIT licensed code and including it in a Apache 2.0/GPLv3 licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that there is simply no patent license granted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that situation any different from going from LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ to GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="838" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T03:05:39.393" Title="Integrating code without a patent license into a code base with a patent license" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1219" CreationDate="2015-07-18T12:38:13.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT/Expat license is a permissive license (i.e. no copyleft), so re-licensing code with this license for the purposes of creating a derivative is normally OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ licenses are not permissive, but they have &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; provisions that allow re-licensing to GPLv3, so re-licensing code with one of these license for the purposes of creating a derivative is also normally OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no patented code snippets present in the MIT/LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ code you integrate, then there is no problem doing this re-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the MIT licenses do not have an anti-patent clause, and the anti-patent provisions of LGPLv2.1 and GPLv2+ (unlike GPLv3) are not in the form of a patent indemnification clause.  This means that code distributed under MIT/LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; contain patented components (this is more likely to be the case with MIT than with GPLv2.1/GPLv2+).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; the code contains patented components, re-licensing it to GPLv3 becomes complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that mean that there is simply no patent license granted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the two possible scenarios if the code you plan to use is patented: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; hold &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; patent rights in the MIT/LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ licensed code.  When you take this code and include it in a Apache 2.0/GPLv3 licensed project you're at the same time &lt;em&gt;granting&lt;/em&gt; any downstream users the patent license. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Somebody else&lt;/em&gt; holds patent rights in the MIT/LGPLv2.1/GPLv2+ licensed code. Then you simply do not have the necessary &lt;em&gt;rights&lt;/em&gt; to use the code in a Apache 2.0/GPLv3 licensed project (unless the holder of the patent rights agrees to grant downstream users the patent license.  You should get such an agreement in writing before trying to do this.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The eventuality that you go ahead and re-license soebody else's patented code to GPLv3 &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; having the required patent rights is answered (as seen from the patent-holders perspective) in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2OrLaterPatentLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;: The answer first points out that your patents will not be invalidated by this (so the patent license clause of GPLv3 does not kick in). The FAQ then goes on to say that if you try to &lt;em&gt;enforce&lt;/em&gt; your patents under such circumstances, the FSF will be p*ssed off.  Here is the exact quote from the FAQ, as something may get lost in paraphrasing:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If users may also elect to use later versions of the GPL, that's merely an additional permission they have — it does not require you to fulfill the terms of the later version of the GPL as well.&lt;br&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do not take this to mean that you can threaten the community with your patents. In many countries, distributing software under GPLv2 provides recipients with an implicit patent license to exercise their rights under the GPL. Even if it didn't, anyone considering enforcing their patents aggressively is an enemy of the community, and we will defend ourselves against such an attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, patent license text from GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T03:05:39.393" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T03:05:39.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-18T14:50:33.680" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Growing up in the 21st century I was not around when Open Source started (or at least not on the computer). This made me wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did the consept of open source projects begin to take off? Was this a recient matter? Or has it been around for as long as computers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T16:04:34.967" Title="When did open source begin to get popular?" Tags="|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-07-18T21:45:35.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1224" CreationDate="2015-07-18T15:21:03.967" Score="9" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is a follow-up on a number of questions that all mention some sort of software architecture X for creating software composites, and then goes on to ask: &quot;Will using X to create a composite result in a derivative work?&quot;.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to *not* constitute derivative works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1181/does-a-host-applications-license-apply-to-plug-ins-written-for-it&quot;&gt;Does a host application&amp;#39;s license apply to plug-ins written for it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1207/does-sharing-a-file-format-make-two-programs-either-a-combined-or-derived-work&quot;&gt;Does sharing a file format make two programs either a combined or derived work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption behind under each and every one of them is that software architecture X may be suitable to for telling the difference between &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;aggregate&lt;/em&gt; composites (otherwise they would not be answerable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am starting to suspect that this assumption is wrong, and would like to try a new tack on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we know about composites that involve both proprietary software and free software?  (And yes, this is just rhetorical - I know that this far too broad for this site.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To turn this into a more focused question, I would like to see &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; of proprietary software that somehow makes &lt;em&gt;functional use&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. proprietary software that in some way depends on free software in order to perform a useful function).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that proprietary software runs on a kernel that is under GPL (e.g. Linux), and also that this is not considered a license violation. So this is an example of the sort of composite I am asking about.  I am of course not interested in being reminded about this well-known fact, but rather &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this is not considered a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To narrow it down further, I will say that I am looking for answers that clearly identify the components of the composite program, their interdependency, and how they communicate or are linked.  The best answer to this question will be the answer that is most illuminating in pointing out a &lt;em&gt;pattern&lt;/em&gt; of use or linking that can be used by non-lawyers to tell the difference between a derivative and an aggregate.  I have a priority interest in &lt;em&gt;concrete examples&lt;/em&gt; based upon &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;usable&lt;/em&gt; software.  The answer may also contain references to legal theory about this topic, but please note I am not looking for &quot;mere theory&quot;. Any legal theory need to be connected to real examples, and its relevance to the example (if not obvious), need to be pointed out in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: This question did not impose any &lt;em&gt;restrictions&lt;/em&gt; on what &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; of license was used for the free software.  It brought to light (some of?) linking and other exceptions that exists and how they are used in real projects.  (I learned a lot more about the &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; side of open source than I knew beforehand from the best answer).  However, I also would welcome examples that shows when and how copylefted free software can be combined with free software, but I believe this requires a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/are-there-examples-of-proprietary-software-that-functionally-depends-on-copyleft&quot;&gt;Are there examples of proprietary software that functionally depends on copylefted software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T09:49:43.670" Title="Are there examples of proprietary software that functionally depends on free software?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1223" CreationDate="2015-07-18T16:02:18.873" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll use Steam as an example. &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.steampowered.com/&quot;&gt;Steam&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.valvesoftware.com/&quot;&gt;Valve Software&lt;/a&gt;'s platform for hosting games (and movies etc.); it is itself &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/&quot;&gt;proprietary&lt;/a&gt;. Initially it was Windows-only, but in the last few years it has been made available on Mac OS X and on Linux. (In fact Valve now have their own Debian-based Linux distribution, &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/&quot;&gt;Steam OS&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Linux platforms it uses a number of open source libraries to function. The Steam client itself uses the following libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;% ldd $(find ~/.steam -name steam -type f) &#xA;    linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7786000)&#xA;    libX11.so.6 =&amp;gt; /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0xf736d000)&#xA;    librt.so.1 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xf7364000)&#xA;    libm.so.6 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xf731d000)&#xA;    libdl.so.2 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xf7318000)&#xA;    libstdc++.so.6 =&amp;gt; /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf7217000)&#xA;    libpthread.so.0 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xf71fb000)&#xA;    libc.so.6 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xf7051000)&#xA;    libxcb.so.1 =&amp;gt; /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0xf702a000)&#xA;    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7787000)&#xA;    libgcc_s.so.1 =&amp;gt; /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf700d000)&#xA;    libXau.so.6 =&amp;gt; /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0xf7009000)&#xA;    libXdmcp.so.6 =&amp;gt; /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf7002000)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The libraries are basically glibc and X11 client libraries. There's no license infringement here, all the libraries can be used in this way; but it's safe to say that it wouldn't be easy for Valve to replace the libraries with proprietary versions and still have Steam on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this of course is running on a Linux kernel, which is another piece of free software essential to allow Steam to function on a Linux computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to all this, many (most) games provided through Steam are themselves proprietary, and on Linux they depend on libraries as well. In addition to the above libraries, Steam itself includes a &quot;Steam runtime&quot; which includes many other open source libraries: NSS, Pango, GTK+, GStreamer, ALSA etc. Any program running on Steam is free to use these; their licenses allow linking proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why this is allowed, the libraries' licenses in this case are all either permissive (X11, Expat), LGPL, or GPL with a linking exception (&lt;code&gt;libgcc&lt;/code&gt;); this allows linking proprietary software to the libraries involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kernel itself includes a caveat in &lt;a href=&quot;http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/COPYING&quot;&gt;its copy of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, explaining that running programs which use the kernel via syscalls does not constitute derivative software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;   services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;   of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &quot;derived work&quot;.&#xA;   Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software&#xA;   Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux&#xA;   kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T16:02:18.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1222" CreationDate="2015-07-18T16:04:34.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about Open Source - but as far as I know it is a pretty new-fangled phenomenon that started to become popular around 1999, when Eric S. Raymond published &quot;The Cathedral &amp;amp; the Bazaar&quot; and the suits started to think about Open Source as a business model.  I think the &quot;Open source Definition&quot; (by the OSI) surfaced around the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was more than a decade after Stallman's publication of the &lt;em&gt;Gnu Manifesto&lt;/em&gt; (1985), which did a lot to both popularize and create a consistent philosophy for free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt; of free software is a much older than that.  The SIMTEL20 archives did host a large body a free software from late 1970ies, and hobbyist magazines like &lt;em&gt;Dr. Dobb's Journal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;People's Computing Company&lt;/em&gt; did champion free software from the early 1970ies (my own involvement with free software started about that time, and I've stayed with free software ever since).  Whether these efforts can be called &quot;popular&quot; depends, they were popular in &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; circles, but YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you look at it from an historical perspective, free software &lt;em&gt;predates&lt;/em&gt; proprietary software.  When you bought a mainframe in the 1950ies (that is before my time), it came with full source code and you had full access to it.  I am told that it was quite normal to create highly customized runtime environments by adapting this source code to the needs of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in those early days, the concept of source code was not the same as today.  I regard the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Story of Mel&lt;/a&gt; as a good retelling of the spirit of those early days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T16:04:34.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1229" CreationDate="2015-07-18T20:42:37.350" Score="15" ViewCount="1239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a number of software projects, licensed under varying licenses. For simplicity, let's take one of them, licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the GPL requires various things, and there may be occasions where people don't do all those things. If &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; notice those, I see two choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contact the relevant person with notification and request to comply;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Turn a blind eye.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine, that's up to me. However, if &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; contacts &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; to say that they've found someone who's not complying with the GPL, does anything change? Does their involvement and thus the fact that I am proven to know about the license violation change how I can react? &lt;strong&gt;Am I, in this scenario, obliged to enforce my license by contacting the offending party?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T23:49:41.010" Title="Are you obliged to enforce your license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|enforcement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1227" CreationDate="2015-07-18T21:10:18.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You are not. You hold the copyright, you make up your own mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal concept of adverse possession does not apply to copyright, and so you can't lose your rights by failing to enforce them, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-07-18T21:10:18.270" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1227" CreationDate="2015-07-19T12:12:10.690" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;GPL&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license doesn't have any specific requirements to make you enforce the license and the copyright holder is the only person who can take any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take&#xA;  action to enforce the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot;&gt;Violations of the GNU Licenses&lt;/a&gt; - GNU.ORG)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Copyright Law&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So only something in base copyright law could cause you to lose your rights from non-enforcement. Short answer: No, you won't lose your copyright if you do not defend it. That is something that applies to a trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the United States, if a trademark owner stops using a mark without&#xA;  intending to resume using it in the future, the mark will be deemed&#xA;  abandoned. Under U.S. trademark law, non-use of a trademark for three&#xA;  consecutive years creates a rebuttable presumption of abandonment of&#xA;  the mark (whether or not it is registered). Temporary or seasonal&#xA;  non-use of a trademark, particularly when such cyclical use is typical&#xA;  in an industry or market, generally does not constitute grounds for&#xA;  abandonment under U.S. law. Rather, periods of non-use must be&#xA;  accompanied by the “intent not to resume use.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In many other countries, grounds for abandonment depend solely on&#xA;  whether the mark at issue has been in use, without regard to the&#xA;  trademark owner’s intent. The period of non-use required to show&#xA;  abandonment of a mark typically ranges from three years (e.g., in&#xA;  Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, China, Russia and many Latin&#xA;  American countries) to five years (e.g., in various European&#xA;  countries, such as Ireland and Norway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/LossofTrademarkRightsFactSheet.aspx&quot;&gt;Fact Sheet: Protecting a Trademark&lt;/a&gt; - International Trademark Association). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Laches defense&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason you may be unable to defend your IP rights after a long period of not enforcing it is what is called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)&quot;&gt;laches defense&lt;/a&gt;. This is when there has been an unreasonable amount of time in pursing a claim. Laches is an affirmative defense and must be brought forth and proven by the defendant. The US Supreme court has stated that laches does not bar copyright infringement claims (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrella_v._Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,_Inc.&quot;&gt;Petrella vs MGM&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The majority rejected those arguments, however, saying copyright law&#xA;  was clear in allowing lawsuits up to three years after an infringing&#xA;  act, setting up a rolling period for owners like Petrella to sue&#xA;  although they can only collect on profits earned during that&#xA;  three-year window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is “nothing untoward” about waiting to see if an infringer’s&#xA;  investment paid off, Ginsburg wrote. In fact, the law  “allows a&#xA;  copyright owner to defer suit until she can estimate whether&#xA;  litigation is worth the candle.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Supreme Court’s decision “brings certainty to this issue, which&#xA;  was unique in the Ninth Circuit,” said William Kane&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/05/19/unusual-split-as-supreme-court-upholds-raging-bull-suit-vs-mgm/&quot;&gt;Unusual Split As Supreme Court Upholds `Raging Bull' Suit Vs. MGM&lt;/a&gt; - Forbes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there isn't anything different with someone telling you that someone has infringed on your copyright. You aren't required to enforce it. You can probably even wait and decide later that you want to enforce it but you can only do that within three years of the last infringing act and you can only expect damages based upon the last three years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More useful info about copyright myths (including this): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html&quot;&gt;http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I Am Not A Lawyer... if you want real legal advice you should contact one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="852" LastEditorUserId="852" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T23:49:41.010" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T23:49:41.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1232" CreationDate="2015-07-19T14:52:55.410" Score="24" ViewCount="8307" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I create some software from scratch. I sell the software, but I also keep it open source under the MIT License. Someone forks my repository and makes some great improvements to my software. Can I then clone their repository, and sell the improved software without sharing any profits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T21:29:35.050" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T21:29:35.050" Title="Can I sell my MIT-licensed software if it is modified by others?" Tags="|derivative-works|mit|monetization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2015-07-19T15:32:01.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;provided&lt;/em&gt; they license their improvements under MIT or another free/libre license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that MIT (Expat) is a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; license, so the fork &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; no longer be free/libre software - the improvements may even be proprietary (ARR) - in that case, the other party will be able to sell the improved version, but you will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have that option (but you can still sell the your original version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a &lt;em&gt;Copyleft&lt;/em&gt; license (e.g. GPLv3) instead of MIT/Expat, they can't do this.  Then any improvements to your program must be licensed under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the improvements have a free/libre license, you're allowed to sell free software, even if you don't hold the full copyright (or &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&lt;/a&gt; (while this is from the FSF, it also applies to permissive licenses such as MIT (Expat)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T16:18:41.217" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T16:18:41.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2015-07-19T15:42:10.770" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on how they chose to provide their fork, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license, which you chose to license your work under, doesn't prevent anyone downstream from changing the license, nor from changing the license of a derivative - unlike a copyleft license such as the GPL. They can essentially license their fork how they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they relicense it under CC BY-NC, you're not allowed to sell it because of the NonCommercial clause in BY-NC. However, that's not a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they've relicensed it under a free license (of which there's a list on the FSF website), then &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; this allows you to redistribute their work and sell it on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, however, that if they're providing the same package for free, you're not going to get many customers simply because it's cheaper elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T15:45:12.333" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T15:45:12.333" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1233" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-19T17:53:31.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC BY-NC-ND, or the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license is the most restrictive of the organizations 6 main licenses. It is not considered to be a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one freedom, and four restrictions put in place according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license deed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowed usages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sharing, copying and redistributing the material under any format&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution: You must attribute the original author of the work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Commercial Use: You may not use the material for commercial purposes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Derivatives: You may not adapt upon or transform the work for redistribution, but may do so internally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Additional Restrictions: You may not apply anything to this license that it would originally permit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T19:14:44.480" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T19:14:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1234" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-19T17:53:31.900" Score="0" Body="For questions about the restrictive Creative Commons license, CC-BY-NC-ND meaning: no derivatives, commercial usages and mandatory attribution." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T19:14:36.390" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T19:14:36.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-19T18:33:56.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cryptography is essentially about constructing and analyzing protocols that block adversaries.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Prior to modern times, Cryptography was essentially Encryption: the conversion of information from a readable state to apparent nonsense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering while incorporating various aspects of Information Security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation.&#xA;Cryptographic technology in the modern age is an essential tool for users who wish to remain anonymous, and as such has been classified as a weapon/criminalized by many governments to limit/prohibit Cryptographic Technology use/growth/export.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cryptography Resources:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.garykessler.net/library/crypto.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T21:37:39.103" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T21:37:39.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-19T18:33:56.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T18:33:56.903" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T18:33:56.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="174" CreationDate="2015-07-19T18:54:50.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some licenses, including the GPLv3, contain a &lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer of Warranty&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;Limitation of Liability&lt;/strong&gt; (Sections 14 and 15), which are relevant to using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having the user agree to the license as if it was an &lt;strong&gt;EULA&lt;/strong&gt;, you are telling him that he waives the right to sue you for (among others) any damage caused by the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="856" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T18:54:50.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-19T19:09:50.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;OSCON is an annual convention for the discussion of free and open source software hosted by O'Reilly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;OSCON is where all of the pieces come together: developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors. In the early days, this trailblazing O'Reilly event was focused on changing mainstream business thinking and practices; today OSCON is about real-world practices and how to successfully implement open source in your workflow or projects. While the open source community has always been viewed as building the future—that future is here, and it's everywhere you look. Since 1999, OSCON has been the best place on the planet to experience the open source ecosystem. At OSCON, you'll find everything open source: languages, communities, best practices, products and services. Rather than focus on a single language or aspect, such as cloud computing, OSCON allows you to learn about and practice the entire range of open source technologies.&quot;[1]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/content/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1. About: Open Source Convention - O'Reilly OSCON, July 20 - 24, 2015 in  Portland, OR&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T21:37:25.383" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T21:37:25.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1239" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-19T19:09:50.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T19:09:50.093" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T19:09:50.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-19T19:52:17.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;FOSS can be classified as both free software and open-source software, whose implementations include source code, allowing anyone free license to use, copy, study, and change it in any way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Differences between FOSS and FLOSS&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;“FOSS,” which stands for “Free and Open Source Software.” This is meant to mean the same thing as “FLOSS,” but it is less clear, since it fails to explain that “free” refers to freedom. It also makes “free software” less visible than “open source,” since it presents “open source” prominently but splits “free software” apart.&quot;[1]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1. FLOSS and FOSS&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T21:37:32.607" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T21:37:32.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-19T19:52:17.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-19T19:52:17.740" LastActivityDate="2015-07-19T19:52:17.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-19T20:11:50.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gamification is the use of game thinking and game design elements (including game mechanics) in non-game contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gamification is all about making systems more fun to use, and providing more tangible targets for users to work towards, thus improving user focus, engagement, and activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classic - and relevant - example is the system of 'Badges' used on StackExchange sites. Similar approaches have appeared in applications as diverse as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-earn-badges-on-the-Audible-iOS-or-Android-apps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Audiobook players&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitocracy#Quests_and_Achievements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Fitness Sites&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag on questions about this idea and its relationships to open projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T20:38:54.593" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T20:38:54.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-19T20:11:50.053" Score="0" Body="For questions about gamifying systems to improve usability and encourage users." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T19:14:24.077" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T19:14:24.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1246" CreationDate="2015-07-19T23:09:49.300" Score="13" ViewCount="954" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to include a bunch of images licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA inside my freemium web software.&#xA;The user can choose one or more of these images to make her own composition. This part of the software is completely free for use and free for distribute the generated work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to access other capabilities of the software the user has to pay. These capabilities aren't related with the images, they are like add sound or make a transition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the commercial part of my app comes from other things, does this usage violates the no commercial part of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="858" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T13:12:39.230" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T13:12:39.230" Title="Using CC-NC material inside a freemium app" Tags="|creative-commons|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-20T07:54:00.083" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start an IDE (GPL compatible) based on QtCreator code (that is licensed under GPL and LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to change all files/classes names within QtCreator source code because of L/GPL licenses? or just modified files? or a copyright notice is enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; sometimes modification within a file is just changing &quot;QtCreator&quot; to &quot;My App Name&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="870" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T08:54:02.960" Title="Changing code of an existing opensource application" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-07-20T13:48:46.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1244" CreationDate="2015-07-20T08:07:29.537" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is a question that has a straightforward yes or no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC NC clause is really hard to get a grasp on, and Creative Commons do not provide much guidance about it. Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Does_my_use_violate_the_NonCommercial_clause_of_the_licenses.3F&quot;&gt;FAQ: Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses&lt;/a&gt; is deliberately vague, and can be summed up in this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether a use is commercial will depend on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ answer about the NC clause concludes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NC clause is controversial, and there has been repeated requests to discontinue it, such as this one from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/&quot;&gt;Free Culture Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2008-9 Creative Commons commissioned a study from a professional market research company that resulted in a report with the promising title &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial&quot;&gt;Defining Noncommercial&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, but this report only summarizes how Internet users &lt;em&gt;perceive&lt;/em&gt; the terms “commercial use” and “noncommercial use” in the context of content found online.  It does not provide a &lt;em&gt;legal definition&lt;/em&gt; of these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study was met with some hostile responses. Here is the one from free culture proponent &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.no/2009/09/nonplussed-by-non-commercial.html&quot;&gt;Glyn Moody&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All that comes across to me from these figures is that &quot;non-commercial&quot; is so fluid a concept as to be useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not agree with Moody.  The wily NC-clause fills a much requested niche in the sharing (but not free) culture ecosystem - for instance it helps supplying schools and NGOs with materials that otherwise in all probability would have been ARR.  But the NC has a very narrow use case.  It is for creators who want their creations to &lt;em&gt;stay&lt;/em&gt; free (as in free beer), and not being exploited for money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since no relevant case law exists (AFAIK), and the concept is so difficult to pin down, it is not prudent to use materials with this clause in borderline cases (and I think said freemium app is a borderline case), &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you are really keen to &lt;em&gt;contribute&lt;/em&gt; to case law by being sued over borderline use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it is possible to give any defintive answer to your question without examining the specific app and the specific business model in detail - and even then the answer may turn out to be: &quot;Definitely maybe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can not provide this analysis for you on this web-site.  If you really need to use CC-BY-NC-SA images in your app, you must to hire a lawyer and have him/her access to your app and documents describing your business model and give you professional legal advice about your &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you're asking here, it can be presumed that you're &lt;em&gt;unsure&lt;/em&gt; about this, so the best answer &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; can provide is to repeat the answer from the CC FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T20:46:59.033" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T20:46:59.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1252" CreationDate="2015-07-20T08:35:07.667" Score="8" ViewCount="1113" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comments below &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1232/606&quot; title=&quot;ArtOfCode’s answer to the question &amp;#39;Can I sell my MIT-licensed software if it is modified by others?&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it is stated that while there is no ShareAlike clause (that would be CC BY-NC-SA), you would not be allowed to re-license Adapted Materials under commercial terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this interpretation of this license correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T00:20:54.730" Title="Can someone re-license an adaptation of my CC BY-NC materials under commercial terms?" Tags="|creative-commons|relicensing|commercial|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1245" CreationDate="2015-07-20T08:54:02.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you say, QT Creator is available under free software licenses (GPL and LGPL) that allows you to creative derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forking this project to create &lt;strong&gt;My App Name&lt;/strong&gt; is to create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license requires you to make it clear that your &lt;strong&gt;My App Name&lt;/strong&gt; is a fork of &lt;strong&gt;QT Creator&lt;/strong&gt; (so that nobody that uses your version will believe that they are using the original). You are also required to &lt;em&gt;preserve&lt;/em&gt; the original copyright notices and authorship attribution (so that nobody that uses your version will think that you wrote it from scratch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasonable way to to this is to make sure that your IDE is clearly branded as  &lt;strong&gt;My App Name&lt;/strong&gt;, and that you put additional copyright and attribution information in comment blocks in the files that you change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their is &lt;em&gt;no requirement&lt;/em&gt; to change file-names and class-names when you do this.  You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; do this, but my recommendation is to change as little as possible, to make it simple (by means &lt;em&gt;diff&lt;/em&gt; or similar tools) to separate your real changes and additions from the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T08:54:02.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2015-07-20T09:56:24.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone are allowed to &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; their contribution to some CC-BY-NC materials under commercial terms - but they're not allowed to &lt;em&gt;re-license&lt;/em&gt; the entire project in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a lot more difficult than I initially imagined, and cudos to &lt;em&gt;neo&lt;/em&gt; who made me see the light &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;.  Since I am aiming for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/help/badges/63/sportsmanship&quot;&gt;Sportsmanship&lt;/a&gt; badge, and since I've spent some time on sorting this out for myself, I'll keep my (heavily rewritten) answer online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we really need to determine &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is licensed in the case of an adaptation.  Here is the definiton (sec. 1(a)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not talking about an aggregate work here (a compilation of separate work that are easily separated and that can co-exist with different licenses for each component). &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of a process of transforming materials &quot;derived from or based upon the Licensed Material&quot; where the &quot;Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that it may &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; very hard to determine what is original and what is adapted material.  If a sub-routine does not work because the original authors has the got a comparison test in it backwards, and I create a fork and fixes the bug: Is the entire fixed subroutine &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt;, or just the change from &quot;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&quot; to &quot;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&lt;/code&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; is created, both licenses allows you to add an Adapter's License, and they differ in what they permit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-NC says (section 3(a)(4)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You Share Adapted Material You produce, the Adapter's License You apply must not prevent recipients of the Adapted Material from complying with this Public License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-NC-SA license instead says (section 3(b)(1)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-NC-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the case of CC-BY-NC-SA, your own improvements must also restrict users from commercial use, while in the case of CC-BY-NC, you can permit this for your own &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To figure out exactly what these terms apply to, we need to understand   2(a)(1) and  2(a)(5)(A). The first states that the license you receive from the original author is &lt;em&gt;non-sublicensable&lt;/em&gt; and you instead gets an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License. (My heartfelt thanks to &lt;em&gt;neo&lt;/em&gt; for pointing this in his answer).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; allowed to add your own license (otherwise, it it would be meaningless to talk about an &lt;strong&gt;Adapter's License&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case of CC BY-NC, since the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; license forbids commercial use, if your Adapter's License do not, you need (somehow) to make it clear to downstream recipients what license applies to what part of the project.  You can do this by distribution your part as a patchfile - and if your contribution is substantial it may even inspire downstream recipients who wants to get rid of the NC-restriction to do a clean-room rewrite the files that makes up original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this exercise mostly serves to remind us that extreme caution is required when one encounter materials that has (or at one point in their history has) been subject to the NC-clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T12:57:49.180" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2015-07-20T11:32:53.770" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The share-alike clause in other licenses is only relevant to contributions made by others than the original licensor. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC 4.0 license&lt;/a&gt; does not grant you the right to sub-license the original work at all, as shown in section 2(a)(1) (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, &lt;strong&gt;non-sublicensable&lt;/strong&gt;, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, every downstream recipient gets an offer to use the work under the terms of the original license by section 2(a)(5)(A):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Offer from the Licensor – Licensed Material. Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the license does not impose any restrictions on the &lt;em&gt;Adapter's License&lt;/em&gt; this is explicitly defined in section 1(b) (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapter's License means the license You apply to &lt;strong&gt;Your Copyright and Similar Rights&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;Your contributions&lt;/strong&gt; to Adapted Material in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so this right only extends to own work. This does not grant any additional right to use the original work without the restrictions of the original CC-BY-NC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, re-licensing the original work is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; granted by this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="871" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T14:23:01.097" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T14:23:01.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1142" CreationDate="2015-07-20T11:43:05.417" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the only copyright holder, then you can release the software on any license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license text itself, as legal document, is not a subject to copyright (at least in Poland), so you can copy and modify it to suit your needs/vision/etc. This includes putting additional files inside the distribution, restricting users from deleting the license etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you do this, you can't use names like Free Software Foundation, GNU, General Public License, because your new license is just a derivative, and has nothing to do with GNU or FSF or anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you only partially hold the copyright, eg. you're an original author of GPL-ed software and you already accepted patches from other people, then you're restricted by the rules of the license you originally used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="691" LastEditDate="2015-07-30T09:10:40.933" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T09:10:40.933" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="893" CreationDate="2015-07-20T14:12:41.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, there is currently no license having a slot reserved for a backlink URL that is recognized by the FSF or OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not hard to create such a license.  Adding a slot for the backlink URL to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ISC License&lt;/a&gt; and altering the permission statement as follows will do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice, &lt;strong&gt;URL&lt;/strong&gt; and this permission notice appear in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ISC License is permissive, and recognized by both the FSF and the OSI. Your custom license will not have this recognition, and license proliferation should not be encouraged, so I do not think you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; go on to create this custom license - but it is certainly possible to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in free software project I generally find contact information helpful. This goes both for project email address and backlinks that points to project members or master repo.  While link rot and email becoming a black hole is not unheard of, I still prefer to have access to contact information than not.  This allows me to contact the maintainers to inquire about the status of the project, and to make pull requests if I've fixed a bug or added a feature.  And even if the backlink URL leads to 404 or an unrelated site, it is helpful, because it is an indicator that the project is abandoned and if I want to continue using it, I may have to maintain it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license file is IMHO &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the right place to put contact information. If you're community has standardized on the ISC License, please continue to use the recognized version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each free software project should have a &lt;code&gt;README.txt&lt;/code&gt; with some basic information about the project, &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; any contact information you want to give your users.  If your project does not have it, I suggest you create it and put the backlink URL there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this part of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;such that most or all deployments would be prohibited from removing a backlink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't worry about this.  No serious developer will even &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about removing this information as long as it is useful.  Having some means to get in touch with the project's &quot;home base&quot; is treasured by free software developers.  The link will not be deleted until it returns 404 or point to some cybersquatter's porn site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T03:02:14.220" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T03:02:14.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1256" CreationDate="2015-07-20T15:18:23.110" Score="32" ViewCount="4059" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about selling FLOSS and its source-code. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot;&gt;Selling Free Software&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot;&gt;commercial purpose&lt;/a&gt;, Free Software can be distributed with or without charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend asked me two questions which I didn’t answer &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt;, so I would like to ask one here, in order to know &lt;em&gt;absolutely&lt;/em&gt; and explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a company that produces Free Software (e.g., VLC under GPL), and sells that software at some price on its website and/or in compact disc form. Suppose someone (say Alice) bought it. According to the FLOSS license, Alice is free to redistribute with or without charge. If Alice publishes a copy gratis on her website in public, then anyone can directly get a copy from Alice, thus taking customers away from the original paid authors. Thus, I don’t understand the selling strategy of FLOSS. Help me to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that some FLOSS packages are distributed with some paid services/maintenance and some with dual licensing (with proprietary software). But here I am talking about FLOSS-only open-source (no dual / with proprietary) licensing and not any services/maintenance charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief: &lt;strong&gt;How is selling FLOSS packages for monetary compensation a viable strategy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="235" LastEditDate="2015-07-21T22:50:09.790" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T22:28:52.310" Title="How is selling FLOSS packages for monetary compensation a viable strategy?" Tags="|commercial|floss|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-20T15:47:40.820" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, before ubiquitous access to the Internet, you could sometimes make money on free software by selling  it on a professionally produced CD-ROM.  People would pay for having a verified version of the software delivered to them directly from by the primary source, (the company that authored the software), instead of shopping around for a cheaper alternative supplier whose version would be of unknown vintage and provenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That business model is dead now.  Instant downloads from the Internet of a complete distribution is what is expected. Putting this distribution behind a paywall does not work, because Google makes it too easy to locate alternate suppliers that give users access to exactly the same tarball for free (i.e. &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the paywall).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However. there are many &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; successful business models for Free Software and Open Source software in 2015, but selling the packages themselves is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software&quot;&gt;long article&lt;/a&gt; devoted to the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not going to reproduce that long Wikipedia article here, but rather focus on the one of these business models I have personal experience with: Selling &lt;strong&gt;professional services&lt;/strong&gt; - with a bit more detail than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software#Selling_professional_services&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for many small software companies is to actually get anyone to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; at their amazing software.  If the brand is not well not known, or the software not generally acknowledged as &quot;amazing&quot;, my experience is that it is hard to sell software the traditional way (i.e. making cold calls, spending money on advertising in magazines, having stands on trade shows, etc.) Just making prospective customers software &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt; your software may in some projects be just as expensive as writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if your company is small, your customer cannot be sure your company will survive.  If they pay good money for closed source software, and the company behind it implodes, there will be no more support and no more releases.  This renders most software useless after some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making free software publicly available can be considered an &lt;em&gt;alternative way of marketing&lt;/em&gt; that makes your software reach more prospective customers that traditional selling techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software also comes with following advantages for the user compared to non-free software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is available from download on the Internet and they can try it out for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your company implodes, the users are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; left high and dry. Since they have the source code, they can get always get somebody else to support and maintain it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, so far I've only pointed out the advantages of free software for the &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt;.  You, the author, haven't seen any money yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What may happen if you do this, if your software truly is good and generally useful, is that you'll see thousands of downloads.  Most of those will indeed use the software for free, and never earn you a penny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you have &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; (hopefully thousands), and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of these users will want &lt;strong&gt;professional services&lt;/strong&gt;.  That this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay you an annual support fee, in return for you supporting them (hot-line for user questions, first priority bug-fixes, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay you for specific customizations that address specific use cases&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they will be willing to pay consulting and custom development, where you adapt and integrate your free software to their specific IT infrastructure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The business model for professional services is not unique to free software.  This is the usually a profitable business model for proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're a small software company, you may never see your software used by &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; if you go the proprietary route. There are too many barriers between you and any users.  With free software, you may get thousands of users, and if only a fraction of those sign up for professional services, you will have a healthy business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to selling professional services, there also exists a business model that involves some free software/open source components that is called &lt;strong&gt;freemium&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this business model, there is an application that can be downloaded for zero cost that is also free software (i.e. &quot;free&quot; as in &quot;freedom&quot; as well as in &quot;free beer&quot;).  However, this application only provides some limited service.  The service can be enhanced, either by buying non-free premium &lt;em&gt;plugins&lt;/em&gt; that integrates with, and enhances, the free application, or the free application communicates with some SAAS (Software As A Servivce) &lt;em&gt;web-service&lt;/em&gt; that only provides a very basic  service for free. To &quot;unlock&quot; more functions in the web-service, the customer has to pay for premium services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no personal experience with this business model, but the anti-spam tool &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/mollom&quot;&gt;Mollom for Drupal&lt;/a&gt; (available under GPLv2+) is an example of a project that is successfully using the &lt;strong&gt;freemium&lt;/strong&gt; business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T01:52:29.393" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T01:52:29.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-20T15:48:02.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software licensed on any GNU license, except GNU LGPL, cannot be &quot;sold&quot;. Instead the company can charge some fee for the distribution itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exactly, it can happen. So the correct selling strategy of open source software is to really sell implementation and/or customization services, know-how, technical support etc. instead of the software itself - OR sell the closed source parts (dual licensing, open core etc. - there are many possible techniques).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In recent years &quot;open core&quot; software has become popular. Open core means that core software is open source and free to redistribute, but there are several external paid, closed source plugins and tools created around the core. Example: MySQL Community Edition and Enterprise Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-20T15:55:59.523" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T15:55:59.523" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-20T16:14:40.537" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct, selling FOSS packages for money is generally a bad idea: someone else will come along, promoting their free distribution, and take all your customers away. This is not a very viable business strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is sell &lt;em&gt;peripherals&lt;/em&gt;: little extra bits that nobody else has, that people will think are &lt;em&gt;worthwhile paying for&lt;/em&gt;. This includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;support&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'premium' features, whatever they are in your case&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plugins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;priority development (if you pay, I'll dev your request first)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enterprise integration services (sounds posh, really just means installing it for a company)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last of these is especially of note. Companies are usually fairly willing to pay someone who &lt;em&gt;knows&lt;/em&gt; the software (such as the developer) to install it for them, so that they know it's done right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T16:14:40.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-20T19:00:55.743" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;To specifically answer the question of what the point of making allowances for people selling free software is, as why anyone would ever want to sell free software; consider, say, a TV. The manufacturers want a whole load of shiny features that connect to the internet, etc., so they decide to base the software on a fully-featured free operating system, along with free software to handle various other things, rather than writing their own. Then they sell the TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like this, they're selling the free software, while not specifically making money on the software. The software is just a necessary part for the other thing they're selling — the hardware — to be of any use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="879" LastActivityDate="2015-07-20T19:00:55.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-20T21:26:29.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to excellent @Free Radical answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar business model as creating free FLOSS software is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;loss leader&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; strategy: selling cheap printers to sell more ink cartridges, cheap coffee maker to sell keurig coffee cups, etc. In this case, loss leader is given away free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some applications, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ERP&lt;/a&gt;, cost of sale is huge (may take several weeks of highly qualified technical guru to show customer the features and customize it enough for customer to make buy/no buy decision). All this cost (tens of thousands of dollars) needs to be covered by profit from sales. If source is free, customer can try it (or pay experts to configure it before trying). So &lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net/openobject&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenERP&lt;/a&gt; can give code away, because value is not in code but in knowledge how to use and customize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way for FLOSS developers to make living is to develop custom features (for a hourly fee), which is possible (I asked) for FLOSS eCommerce framework &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.satchmoproject.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Satchmo&lt;/a&gt; based on (another FLOSS project) Django, which is based on another FLOSS project - Python. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turtles all the way down :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another similar strategy which for-profit companies use is &lt;strong&gt;commoditize what your competitors make&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Commodity&lt;/a&gt; is marketable product which is bought based mostly on price, because one item can be replaced by another (gas, potatoes, electricity, pork, coal, iron ore, etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back in days when hardware was expensive and software was added for free, Microsoft played  that card on IBM, and commoditized personal computers market: many different manufactures made computers which could run MS DOS and Windows (and IBM, inventor of category of personal computers, was forced out of that market) - customers bought hardware based on price, because distinguishing factor was ability to run MS DOS. Recently, IBM is returning the favor: Operating system and basic infrastructure software is becoming a commodity, and distinguishing factor are services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="883" LastEditorUserId="883" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T22:28:52.310" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T22:28:52.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1262" CreationDate="2015-07-21T00:52:51.260" Score="2" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often hear about GPL variants, MIT, BSD and many other license options. A general Internet search reveals sites like &quot;Top 20 licenses&quot; or pages some licenses going out of fashion and others coming in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With so many licenses to choose from, a major stumbling block for beginners in open sourcing is deciding what license to go for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the stats on the most frequently adopted open source license options, and what are there primary differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="886" LastEditorUserId="886" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T06:32:01.980" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T06:32:01.980" Title="What are the most common open source license options and how do they differ?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-21T05:34:19.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1261" CreationDate="2015-07-21T02:52:48.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Determining the relative popularity of various licenses is actually quite difficult.  Below are two graphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BlackDuck: Top 20 Open Source Licenses&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sv8Ge.png&quot; alt=&quot;BlackDuck: top 20 graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and list the following top 5 (making up 76 % av the total):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv2 (24 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT/Expat (20 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0 (16 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3 (10 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modified BSD (6 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one is taken from presentation at the 2013 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit &lt;a href=&quot;http://lanyrd.com/2013/linux-foundation-collaboration-summit/scmwxf/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licensing of Software on Github: A Quantitative Analysis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t0mjd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and list the following top 5 (making up 82 % av the total):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT/Expat (36 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modified BSD (13 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv2 (13 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3 (12 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0 (8 %)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of interesting data in the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit  presentation (e.g. the distribution between permissive, copyleft, weak copyleft and dual licensing, and the shift over time towards more permissive licenses).  I recommend clicking through all the slides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the source and methodology of these studies differ (and only the presentation made at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit explains the methodology used), both list the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; licenses as the top five, but their relative position differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these stats are not definitive (and I hope other answers can show us more studies of this type), I think it is quite likely that these licenses are among the most used ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how &quot;they differ in their most important terms and conditions?&quot;, that would make a very long answer. However, the FSF has a very good page about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;various licenses and comments about them&lt;/a&gt;, here are direct links to each of the top 5, with a note stating whether the license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1179/606&quot;&gt;copyleft or permissive&lt;/a&gt; - as this by far is the &lt;em&gt;main difference&lt;/em&gt; between the FLOSS licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT/Expat&lt;/a&gt; - permissive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modified BSD&lt;/a&gt; - permissive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLv2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; - copyleft&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GNUGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; - copyleft&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt; - copyleft, but allows downstream relicensing to GPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-21T04:59:38.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-21T09:49:48.693" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will answer the best I can. There are basically three distinct models I have had personal or professional experience with. I am a software developer, and thus my experience comes from that realm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, when making a profit on Opensource software, some times that profit comes from including that software in a larger package. For example, one of my clients used a Open source Credit card processing Library, to handle all their credit card processing. And while that client makes money off the library, that library is just part of the larger business model. To &quot;give back&quot; that client paid to have me write code that was pushed back to the library extending it's functionality. So the Library prospered, and the client's business prospered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the sale of services. Websites for example, run on Linux Servers (again for example). The providers of the servers (Lets say Linode) don't sell Linux but they sell their VPS hosting and management/support. Their business prospers by use of FOSS, and the FOSS prospers by gaining more server market share. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, By selling convenience. Any time a package or setup of FOSS is hard to do, selling the convenience of having it already setup is warranted. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonDevPay/latest/DevPayDeveloperGuide/EC2PaidAMI.html&quot;&gt;http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonDevPay/latest/DevPayDeveloperGuide/EC2PaidAMI.html&lt;/a&gt; for a common example. Your not really selling the packages themselves but the convenience of having them setup in a specific way. By extension I have seen some sell pre-compiled versions of their software while the source code is still covered under a FOSS licence. Growl for mac used to be under such a license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side Note: Many times a commercial open source application is Dual Licenced.  For &quot;free&quot; you get the Open source version and a &quot;agreement&quot; that you will, in turn for using the code, &quot;help out&quot; in some way (submit bugs, write patches, tout applications etc.), or a more &quot;restricted&quot; license that you pay for but then don't have to &quot;help out&quot;. For many companies it may be cheaper to by the &quot;commercial&quot; license then to &quot;have to&quot; publish source code back to the authors or to the people using the app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to wrap things up, your specific answer is the third. Selling the convenience of a pre-setup package over a &quot;configure it your self&quot; package usually warrants monetary compensation. Using this method it's important to remember that &quot;Your going to pay someone&quot; rather it's your staff via training or support, the package maintainer, or the Support company (RHEL for example). Paying for the package is sometimes cheaper then the other two. Usually a company that decides to go this route offers &quot;support&quot; in addition to the sale of the pre-configured system. Support is a much more profitable sale, but you can sell just the package, but most people paying  for a package will want some kind of support. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="892" LastEditorUserId="197" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T03:39:29.653" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T03:39:29.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1265" CreationDate="2015-07-21T11:57:31.020" Score="8" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_formalities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Formalities&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright notice&lt;/a&gt;, dating or even putting the author copyright notice in unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then explanations such as this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/20911485/4734474&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow Post&lt;/a&gt; make me wonder about how redundant dating is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except maybe to show when the work was start or published, what is the point of the date? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also how strict is GPL on including dates and date ranges? The FSF website says to use ranges but they just seem like a formality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user374" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:15:41.903" Title="Are dates mandatory in GPL licences?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2015-07-21T13:12:45.463" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at there licenses, you will notice that the following text appears near the end of page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the end of the license.  Nowhere &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; that text is there a requirement to add the year to the copyright notice. However, as pointed out in &lt;em&gt;Stephen Kitt's&lt;/em&gt; answer, if you &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; somebody else's  program GPLv3 section 5 &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; you to include a prominent notices stating that you modified it, with a date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement to record the date for changes you make to somebody else's program is to make sure that downstream recipients is made aware of modifications of the chronology and history of changes made to the original source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By law, your copyright is valid &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; a copyright notice (at least in Berne signatories, including the USA) - but if you leave it out (the notice, not the year), you may need to &lt;em&gt;assert&lt;/em&gt; your copyright by other means if your copyright is challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the web pages with the A(GPL) licenses, notice that below the &quot;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&quot;, there is a new headline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a helpful &lt;em&gt;guideline&lt;/em&gt; - not a license requirement.  Your license, and your copyright, is valid even if you choose to not follow this guideline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is a &lt;em&gt;good idea&lt;/em&gt; to have a copyright notice with the year of publication.  While not legally required, having such a notice in place may save you from proving that you've asserted your copyright by other means in the case of a dispute, and damages awarded may be reduced if there is no copyright notice in your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T14:15:41.903" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:15:41.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1255" CreationDate="2015-07-21T16:41:04.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another way to earn money for developing FLOSS is by getting paid by companies that stand to benefit from it. One example is IBM. IBM is in the server business and it is in their interest to have a free, reliable and powerful OS to run on their systems. Therefore it made sense for IBM to pay people to develop a fork of Linux for their own servers as well as contributing to the main kernel development itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can probably imagine an open source version of CAD software being developed by some large engineering firm in a similar way. Not because of any altruistic reasons but because they stand to benefit from a powerful piece of CAD software without expensive licenses attached to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way is to look at open source software like scientific research. Scientists are compensated by government and non-profit organizations to support their work. A good example of this is the Mozilla Foundation which funds development of the Firefox web browser. Scientific discoveries are considered a public good which benefits everyone which is why we fund them. An efficient general purpose web browser can be thought the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="896" LastEditorUserId="896" LastEditDate="2015-07-24T08:29:08.553" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T08:29:08.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1272" CreationDate="2015-07-21T21:12:06.330" Score="7" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;free&quot; is often considered to be unclear, and ambiguous. As such, the word is often used in conjunction with the word &quot;libre&quot;, as seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/264/69&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the spirit of clarity, the word &quot;libre&quot; is often used to clear the alternate meaning of the word &quot;free,&quot; so that the implication will be that of free as in speech, not free as in food. Free Software is often referred to as Free/Libre software, and the common acronym FLOSS, stands for Free/Libre and Open Sorce Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if the word free is consistently added as a pair to the word &quot;free&quot;, why doesn't the Free Software Foundation instead simply use the word libre? I can understand if there are considerable obstacles to make a complete, efficient transition to the clearer word libre, but I'm curious to see if the FSF has a stance on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I am not asking why the FSF doesn't make the switch, but rather what their stance and efforts are, or have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: To counteract the fact that the FSF uses &quot;free&quot; because of it's implied meaning, The FSFLA (or Free Software Foundation Latin America) has named their linux kernel to be this: &lt;em&gt;linux-libre&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More on the wikipedia article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-libre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux-libre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T14:16:41.930" Title="Why does the FSF continue to use the word &quot;free&quot; if it's ambiguous?" Tags="|terminology|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-22T00:20:25.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An Application Programming Interface (API) is a resource available to all developers, normally complete with various simple methods, tools and resources to assist with the development of any software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T14:40:17.360" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:40:17.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-22T00:20:25.647" Score="0" Body="Use the tag if an open project or license concerns the specific use or interaction with an Application Programming Interface (API)." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T14:40:20.280" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:40:20.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-22T00:23:09.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T00:23:09.303" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T00:23:09.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-22T00:23:09.303" Score="0" Body="For questions about the process of publishing free/open projects, involving decisions such as whether to provide binary builds or which packaging system to use" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T01:04:13.637" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T01:04:13.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1267" CreationDate="2015-07-22T02:28:07.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Libre&quot; is a French word (not English). So, people outside France (especially from various countries in the world) may not recognize it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, all the alternatives in English have problems of their own. We've looked at many that people have suggested, but none is so clearly “right” that switching to it would be a good idea. (For instance, in some contexts the French and Spanish word “libre” works well, but people in India do not recognize it at all.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF recommends considering free as in &lt;strong&gt;freedom&lt;/strong&gt; (think: &quot;free speech&quot;) on its definition page. So, (FSF expect/believes that) anyone understands  exactly what &quot;free software&quot; is once they read this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definition page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We prefer the term “free software” because, once you have heard that it refers to freedom rather than price, it calls to mind freedom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF also provides translation for &quot;free software&quot; in other languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;categories&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many languages have two separate words for “free” as in freedom and “free” as in zero price. For example, French has “libre” and “gratuit”. Not so English; there is a word “gratis” that refers unambiguously to price, but no common adjective that refers unambiguously to freedom. So if you are speaking another language, we suggest you translate “free” into your language to make it clearer. See our list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fs-translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;translations of the term “free software”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; into various other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally quoting from header @ &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&gt;about&gt;What is free software?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. &lt;strong&gt;We call this free software because the user is free.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I am unable to find &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;absolute/exact&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; information/statement by FSF. So, as you want to know why FSF continues the word &quot;free&quot; and why not simply using word &quot;libre&quot; instead, &lt;em&gt;I suggest to contact/discuss/&lt;strong&gt;ask&lt;/strong&gt; to FSF rather than just asking here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinion: I think FSF uses &quot;Libre&quot; software for explanatory only. As goal is &lt;strong&gt;Freedom&lt;/strong&gt;, recommends &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Also free relevant to freedom and libre to liberty, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/15367&quot;&gt;freedom vs Liberty&lt;/a&gt; may help to understand/different/&lt;strong&gt;focus&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:46.880" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T17:06:45.390" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1278" CreationDate="2015-07-22T10:16:42.433" Score="5" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is partially inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1255/168&quot;&gt;How is selling FLOSS packages for monetary compensation a viable strategy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading that question and some of its answers, I was left wondering if there are licenses which allow modification and redistribution of the project on the condition that one does not charge less money for the distribution than you paid yourself. This would circumvent the problems addressed in the above question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any licenses that allow this and if so for what reasons would these licenses (not) be considered Open Source/Free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I strongly suspect that these licenses would not be considered Free or Open, but one never knows.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T07:14:49.080" Title="Can I forbid distributing my open source project for less money than I do?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1275" CreationDate="2015-07-22T12:16:20.197" Score="22" ViewCount="3994" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm working on a FLOSS project and someone forked it and the forked project seems to be moving faster than mine and gains more popularity than my original project (possibly because the people behind the fork have a bigger team). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm excited people are showing interest in my project, but feel discouraged because, as the original creator of the project, I play no part in the development of the most popular fork of the project now, since no decisions regarding changes made to the fork are run by me. The maintainers of the fork show little to no interest in cooperating/communicating with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just abandon my fork and join theirs, if I want to stay relevant to the development of this project, or is there another option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T23:00:41.663" Title="What can I do when a fork of my project is out-competing mine?" Tags="|forking|human-resources|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2015-07-22T12:40:37.653" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forking is not only a possibility of open source development, it's an express intention. If their fork is more popular than yours, this may be because they do something technically better than you, in which case you can merge back their patches if they operate under a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are doing something socially better than you are, take notes and learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's just a differing direction they're taking, the fork created more choice, and yours proved the less popular one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I never experienced a fork that didn't try to solve the problem internally first, but just unilaterally forked without much communication. Usually, a fork is made either with the intention to merge back, or as a last resort when views turn out irreconcilable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T12:40:37.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1264" CreationDate="2015-07-22T13:01:02.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right in that adding a copyright statement doesn't add anything to the default protection you get under copyright law. But it is useful for documentation purposes; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/292/should-i-include-a-copyright-line-in-every-file/300#300&quot;&gt;Should I include a copyright line in every file?&lt;/a&gt; for more on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as licenses are concerned, some do require that dates be mentioned in some cases. For example, in version 3 of the GPL, section 5 (regarding modified source versions) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified&#xA;      it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't require that the information be present in a copyright statement, but adding a copyright statement is the easiest way of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T13:01:02.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="647" CreationDate="2015-07-22T14:07:58.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other answers have good points but in my mind the biggest issue by far is Patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a company holds patents and then issues open source code that is related to the patents, it can be argued that they are giving permission for anyone to use their patented technology. Some licenses (like GPL) make this very clear in their terms, while other licenses (like MIT) don't mention patents at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even though MIT/etc don't explicitly cover patents it does cover them indirectly - the license gives anyone permission to &quot;use&quot; the technology and that's enough to give an implied license for all patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it gets especially nasty is when the company writing the source code only has a license to the patent, instead of being the one who owns the patent. Often technology is covered by a patent &quot;pool&quot; involving a large number of independent corporations. For example this is widespread among video compression and cell phone radio technology. In these cases, a company (such as Qualcomm) will have permission to use and sell technology in the &quot;pool&quot; but they do not have permission to grant the open source community a license to the patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why video compression and cellphone hardware drivers are typically closed source components in an otherwise fully open source technology stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patent trolls are also a huge problem for open source development. For example Apple's FaceTime protocol, which they originally promised to open source but it never happened, likely because of patents more than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About a month after they promised to make FaceTime an open standard, Apple was sued by a patent troll name VirnetX, and spent ~3 years fighting in court. Eventually the court rued Facetime did infringe on a couple of the many patents VirnetX claimed Apple had violated. Apple always publicly maintained FaceTime doesn't violate any patents but they had to accept the court's ruling in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While defending themselves in court Apple was in no position to make FaceTime open (that would increase the damages from loosing a lawsuit) and after loosing the case they would have had to sign some kind of agreement to attain a license to VirnetX's patent portfolio which will have included language forbidding Apple from giving anybody else permission to use the patents covered by VirneX's 200 or so patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:07:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1273" CreationDate="2015-07-22T14:53:26.670" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anybody can make pretty much any license they want so yes you could ask a lawyer to write a license like you're describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this would not fit the definition of an open source license. The whole point of open source is to let other people take your work and build on it, and that includes having a different pricing structure to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes they might take your entire project and take it in a totally different direction, other times they might just fix a couple bugs that you haven't fixed and make it available on GitHub, other times they might include your project as a child work in a larger project, or perhaps they might just grab 5 lines of code you wrote and include it in their own completely unrelated project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any restrictions on pricing makes all of those situations nearly impossible. The only &quot;viable&quot; option under your license would be to take your project and sell it under a different name, but that's extremely rare. Why would anybody do that when it's so much easier to just contribute to the project you're running instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T14:53:26.670" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2015-07-22T15:55:00.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaurav's answer above is incorrect.  Viral licenses are called that for a reason: they are licenses that, like a virus, &lt;em&gt;spread beyond the source of your project&lt;/em&gt;.  It means that if my program has 99 features that I created myself, and 1 that requires a GPL library, the GPL &quot;infects&quot; my entire codebase and forces me to publish the entire thing under the GPL or a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not what the question is asking for, and to put it bluntly, this is not suitable for the majority of open-source project development.  The GPL is not &lt;em&gt;a license&lt;/em&gt; so much as it is &lt;em&gt;a political statement,&lt;/em&gt; declaring to the world that you believe non-&quot;free&quot; (as per the FSF definition) software to be inherently evil and something that must be fought against and eradicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's what you want, go ahead and use the GPL.  But if you're looking for an open-source license that will ensure that &lt;em&gt;modifications to your code&lt;/em&gt; must remain open and be published under the same license, (without limiting what the people who use your code in a wider project can do with it,) the license you're looking for is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;, which requires exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="503" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T15:55:00.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2015-07-22T16:56:05.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that legally a given line is copyrightable. But &lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt; (and details depend upon countries, law systems, opinions, etc..). So &lt;em&gt;ask your lawyer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that making a specific line proprietary is probably meaningless, and if it was possible, it would irritate many free software enthusiasts (including me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If coding in a language using a preprocessor (in particular C or C++ preprocessor), you might have a trick like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/// in some public header&#xA;#if HAVE_MY_PROPRIETARY_TRICK&#xA;extern void do_my_proprietary_stuff(void*);&#xA;#endif&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and inside your code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/// in your free software internal code&#xA;void some_naughty_routine(struct data_st*d) {&#xA;#if HAVE_MY_PROPRIETARY_TRICK&#xA;   /// calling some proprietary code, not for ordinary free software usage&#xA;   do_my_proprietary_stuff(d);&#xA;#endif /*HAVE_MY_PROPRIETARY_TRICK*/&#xA;   //etc...&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you might make your free software able to &lt;strong&gt;use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_%28computing%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;plugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and choose a license that permits you to use (and/or sell) some proprietary plugin. At least for courtesy, be sure to make your software usable without plugins, or/else provide a free software plugin making your software useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;I don't recommend doing that&lt;/strong&gt;  (mixing free software and proprietary one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T17:20:19.467" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T17:20:19.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2015-07-22T18:29:39.427" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they're out-competing you, they've got something you haven't. This may be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more updates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more in-demand features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;better publicity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever it is, try to find out what it is. If they're doing more publicity stuff than you, then increase what you do. Run things like community ads on Stack Exchange - they're free, and they get eyeballs on your project. Try to attract more contributors, or try to update more frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, engaging with your community is fairly effective: if you're seen to be engaged and proactive about the development of your product, people will recommend you to others, who will also recommend you, and you might get some new contributors and users that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be a little ethically unstable (not that I recommend this), look at your license. Is it GPL? If so, theirs must also be GPL, meaning you can copy things they've done with some attribution. This may encourage people to use your version, because you now have the features they want too, but beware that if people find out you've been copying features and trying to hide the fact - although it's &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; sound - it may not give you a very &lt;em&gt;socially&lt;/em&gt; sound position. Of course, if your licenses are compatible, you can just copy the features and be open about it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately though, there may not be a huge amount you can do. However, you can console yourself with the fact that you started it, and that your copyright notices will forever have to live on in the code of their fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T21:35:29.120" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T21:35:29.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2015-07-22T18:51:23.647" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main questions to resolve: Why did they fork?  What's at stake for them?  Similarly, what's at stake for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say they aren't receptive to your changes, but did they ever submit patches/pull requests to yours?  Without communication, you cannot effectively collaborate, even if you share coding and technical styles.  So if they are just determined to do it their way without you, then the best you can hope for is to both develop awesome features and frequently borrow changes from each other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are adding/maintaining features they want and they are adding/maintaining features you want, you don't necessarily have to be working on the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; project, but your work should &lt;strong&gt;relate&lt;/strong&gt; to each other's.  This would be aided by increasing the modularity, configurability and flexibility of your architecture, i.e. so you might have projects MyProject and TheirProject share a Project-Common library/gem/module/whatever.  (Note: such refactoring is non-trivial, increases release-packaging time/cost and still requires cooperation. But it is a good way to minimize the divergence in forks.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fundamentally disagree that pulling features from their fork would be socially questionable.  License permitting, it would be &lt;strong&gt;by far&lt;/strong&gt; preferred to keep the projects in sync instead of building a competing reimplementation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have a user community?  Do they?  Existing adopters have an interest in continuity.  New users just want the better package.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it sounds like your main concerns are with control and to a lesser extent, dilution of project prominence.  I would say don't sweat those too much.  You have a repo you control directly and the fork doesn't change that.  Even if their project becomes rapidly more popular and hugely divergent, you can always tout yours as &quot;the project TheirProject started from&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="914" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T18:51:23.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-22T19:19:49.373" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a software program I publish under a non-free license that does not give permission to create derivatives, and I own the copyright. Someone decides that despite the copyright they are going to make a derivative of it anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens: Do I own the derivative that the person made? Could I take the derivative and publish it under an open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T21:54:36.393" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T21:54:36.393" Title="Do I own derivatives of my copy written work? Can I make these open source?" Tags="|proprietary-code|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-22T19:24:52.420" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have an open source project. The developers I have are good, but I think an outside look (new coders) may help the project. We are currently running out of ideas, and are at a loss of what to do next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would inviting new developers help give new ideas to the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:04:17.033" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:04:17.033" Title="Could investing in marketing improve the development of my project?" Tags="|project-management|marketing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-22T19:27:19.473" Score="3" ViewCount="1524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have an open source project. I have 3 or so friends that have been helping with the development. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does having my project open source mean that &lt;strong&gt;anyone&lt;/strong&gt; can contribute to the project (including people I don't want)? Or am I able to select who I want working on the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contribute I mean make changes to the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:03:39.720" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:03:39.720" Title="Can anyone contribute to an open source project?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-08-05T15:34:46.380" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1283" CreationDate="2015-07-22T19:41:49.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you don't own the derivative that somebody else make of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a derivative requires &lt;em&gt;permission&lt;/em&gt; from the creator of the original work.  One of the purposes if free culture licenses is to grant anybody this permission up front.  If your work is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; free (for instance, it is &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot;), then nobody can legally create a derivative of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do if somebody goes ahead and make a derivative anyway, is to sue for copyright infringement.  If you win the case, you are eligible for monetary compensation, and the illegal derivative must be removed from the market - but the copyright of the adaptation is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; owned by the infringer and cannot be transferred to you by any legal decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T19:41:49.187" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1284" CreationDate="2015-07-22T20:00:21.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the developers in the world can only have so many ideas, and they'll only do as you're told. To get ideas for new things to do, you don't need developers, you need... a &lt;strong&gt;userbase&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide somewhere, like a forum on your product's website, where your product's community can suggest new features, report bugs, and express opinions about the project. These are the people who'll give you ideas, because these are the people who use the thing - listen to them, because they've got experience. They'll tell you what bugs bug them the most (pun all too much intended); they'll tell you what your software needs, they'll tell you how to improve what it already has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should give your developers enough to be getting on with. If they give you &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of ideas, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you might want some more devs to keep up with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T20:00:21.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1289" CreationDate="2015-07-22T20:01:18.800" Score="5" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has something called the Open Standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the Open Standard, and what is its purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T21:07:52.493" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T21:07:52.493" Title="What is the OSI's Open Standard?" Tags="|osi|osr|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1288" CreationDate="2015-07-22T20:01:18.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to first make clear that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) doesn't actually &lt;em&gt;define a standard&lt;/em&gt;. Instead, they &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr-intro&quot;&gt;say&lt;/a&gt; the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many definitions of &quot;Open Standard&quot;. We don't try to define it ourselves, but we know that if you can't implement an Open Standard under an Open Source License, it's not open enough for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, they've created something even better. That is, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Open Standard Requirement for Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So then, what is it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of creating a &quot;One Size Fits All&quot; standard, with a million and one clauses to effectively apply to everything, the Open Source Initiative needed to think of something simple, clean and innovative. Therefore, they made a requirement for standards. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;In essence, it’s a standard for open standards.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 5 points it must fulfill, contained within a single requirement: that an Open Standard may not prohibit any implementation that follows its rules. In order to comply with the Open Standards Requirement, the &quot;Open Standard&quot; must meet a set of 5 criteria, otherwise it will discriminate against Open Source Developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. No Intentional Secrets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just going to quote here…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, an open standard can't keep anything from you. Everything must be stated clearly, and they can't sneak this little clause that will allow others to make 100 dollars on every dollar you make. Also, since there will always likely be things that need fixing, those little things to clarify, there must be a defined procedure in order to fix those flaws, and correct them to a newer version that will still not violate the criteria listed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Availability&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty clear. Make sure that your standard is available, and make sure that people can access it without any issues. I won't put the &lt;em&gt;Zizouz212 version -1 public license&lt;/em&gt; on my imaginary, private hosting service. It should be out and about with the public - that is, they should be able to find it, and get it. There’s a couple of other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be available under royalty-free terms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a non-discriminatory cost, if any at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. Patents&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are any patents that are essential to the implementation, there are two things that it must follow: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The patents must be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The patents must have a promise of non-assertion when practiced by Open Source Software. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;4. No Agreements&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I should be able to take it and use it. I shouldn't have to agree to any terms of use, any license clauses or anything like that. I'll quote again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;5. No Incompatible Open Standard Requirement Dependencies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any implementation of the standard, the implementation should not have to rely on anything that doesn't conform to these requirements. In essence, everything that the standard needs must conform to whatever is in these requirements. Otherwise, it won't be &quot;open&quot; according to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So then what the heck is the point of this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m really going to quote on this now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The purpose of an open standard is to increase the market for a technology by enabling potential consumers or suppliers of that technology to invest in it without having to either pay monopoly rent or fear litigation on trade secret, copyright, patent, or trademark causes of action. No standard can properly be described as &quot;open&quot; except to the extent it achieves these goals.&#xA;  The industry has learned by experience that the only software-related standards to fully achieve these goals are those which not only permit but encourage open-source implementations. Open-source implementations are a quality and honesty check for any open standard that might be implemented in software; whether an application programming interface, a hardware interface, a file format, a communication protocol, a specification of user interactions, or any other form of data interchange and program control.&#xA;  To help industry participants (suppliers, consumers, and regulators) identify and specify standards that permit open source implementations, the OSI has defined a minimal Open Standards Requirement (OSR). The OSI has also created a set of Criteria that can be used to judge whether a standard fully complies with that Requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add on to that, the Open Source Initiative felt the need to help create a guideline. With many legal authorities adopting &quot;open standards&quot; of their own into their respective laws. They viewed that the lack of guidelines made the term &quot;open standard&quot; more aspirational, rather than a practical and defining term. As a result, the rationale for their requirement was to rectify these problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do I know if an Open Standard is compliant with this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI defines two levels of compliance, in an effort to assist the development of standards that conform to the requirement. This is similar to the way that the OSI approves licenses to be Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OSI Compatible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a mark that is provided to creators that have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;self-certified&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; their license is conformant to the requirement listed above. If the OSI, at anytime, deems the standard to be incompatible, the creator must modify the standard for it to be compatible, or remove the mark altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OSI Conformant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a mark that shows the OSI has deemed the standard to be conformant to the requirement listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources/References/Good Reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr&quot;&gt;Open Standards Requirement for Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr-compliance&quot;&gt;Open Standards Compliance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr-rationale&quot;&gt;Open Standards Requirement for Software - Rationale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osr-faq&quot;&gt;Open Standard Requirement for Software - FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Open Standards&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://open-stand.org/about-us/principles/&quot;&gt;Open Stand Principles (They are &quot;Global Advocates for Open Standards&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T20:11:37.757" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T20:11:37.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2015-07-22T20:04:32.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source license that satisfies the OSI definition of &quot;Open Source&quot; will allow &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; to fork a project (that is, creating their own version of it). This includes people you may not want to have anything to do with - for instance a group of people you politically disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;refuse&lt;/em&gt; to incorporate any pull requests or patches submitted by such people into &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code base (the one you and your three friends distribute) for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reason.  (Bad code quality of probably being the most &lt;em&gt;common&lt;/em&gt; ground for rejection.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/drbIR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/drbIR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1513/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xkcd&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can not stop them from creating a derivative by changing the source code, and then go on and distribute &lt;em&gt;their version&lt;/em&gt; to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're are good maintainer of your project (and that includes accepting &lt;em&gt;sensible&lt;/em&gt; patches and pull requests in a &lt;em&gt;timely&lt;/em&gt; fashion), a fork has small chances of attracting a following - but you cannot prevent them from  happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In a comment, &lt;em&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not that political disagreements are a good reason to refuse pull requests, &lt;em&gt;of course...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends: Let's say I create an open source educational simulation software that allows K-12 pupils to run through simulations of historical events, such as WWII. Let's also assume a group of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;holocaust deniers&lt;/a&gt; modifies the WWII part of this simulation to show &lt;em&gt;their alternate version&lt;/em&gt; of WWII and Nazi-Germany's treatment of jews - and submits it as a pull-request. If I was the author of such a simulation program, I am pretty darn sure I would reject it, simply because I disagree (to put it mildly) with the politics of holocaust deniers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, If I released this (hypothetical) software as Open Source or Free Software, I could &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; stop this group of holocaust deniers from distributing their own fork of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godwin's law&lt;/a&gt;, this question can now be &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="1138" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T03:24:22.760" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T03:24:22.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2015-07-22T20:38:25.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every open source project has a policy to restrict who can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mandatory for a project to succeed in the modern era, otherwise random &quot;contributors&quot; would would be injecting malware and spam into every open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the founder of the project will only allow contributions from people they trust. For larger projects they will delegate this work out to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also many projects have more arbitrary restrictions – WebKit famously will do performance tests on &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; change and if the performance is slower by even a single microsecond, the change is rejected and the developer must either refactor their code to be faster, or find something else to refactor to improve performance by at least as much as their change harmed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects try to avoid trusting &quot;people&quot; and instead focusing on wether or not they trust the code, considering each contribution on it's own merits. But there is still a question of who do you trust to accept/deny a contribution? And will you reject a contribution because it uses tabs instead of spaces? It's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obscure conditions may lead to your project being forked by the community and a new project which you have zero control over becoming more popular. &#xA;Or simply being slow to accept contributions can have the same result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: the only fork I ever made to a project was after somebody didn't reply to my emails asking to get involved - my fork now has dozens of contributors and ~70,000 users. The original project is dead, the source forge page just links to our website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T20:50:18.470" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T20:50:18.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-22T21:13:36.240" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Standard Requirement for Software is a requirement for various software standards, developed and maintained by the Open Source Initiative. The requirement is found on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;. Here is the standard, as of February 24th, 2016:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Intentional Secrets&lt;/strong&gt;: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Availability&lt;/strong&gt;: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patents&lt;/strong&gt;: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST:&#xA;  be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or&#xA;  be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Agreements&lt;/strong&gt;: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies&lt;/strong&gt;: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale for the standard is to prevent discrimination towards developers of open source projects, and of their users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that the OSR is vastly different from the Open Source Definition: the definition applies to licenses that meet the criteria for being &quot;open source,&quot; while the requirement for software applies to organizations that wish to create other standards of their own, similar to the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friendly explanation of the standard is available in &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1288/69&quot;&gt;What is the OSI's Open Standard?&lt;/a&gt; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:14:47.017" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:14:47.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-22T21:13:36.240" Score="0" Body="For questions about the open standard requirement for standard, a standard published and maintained by the Open Source Initiative." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T00:14:47.017" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:14:47.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2015-07-22T22:17:01.447" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/osd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.unterstein.net/su/docs/CathBaz.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need to submit patches for functionality the owner/mantainer wants or is willing to approve.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once you have submitted enough patches, eventually one of the patches will not be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then ask the owner/mantainer if he will accept that you fork the project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rename the project, to make it clear it is not the same project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="926" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-22T22:17:43.153" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T22:17:43.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2015-07-22T22:18:42.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your project's come to life! Other people are very interested in working on it. The end result will benefit mankind, or at least the portion that needs whatever your project does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative would be working hard on a project, and nobody cares. At least this way, your project will live, past the point you lose interest in it, or are unable to contribute. As the originator you have useful advice and guidance to give to contributors. Though of course it's their work they're doing, so ultimately they choose what they do. Hopefully an informal consensus will organise itself, and it'll go along well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what happens with open source, it's the whole idea. That's WHY open source becomes popular! You've created a baby, and now it's making friends and growing to become a part of the world. It won't always act as you want it to, but you're it's father and always will be. Wish it luck, and congratulate yourself on a job well done. This is how open-source is supposed to end up. That, or being forgotten. You did well!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="927" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T22:18:42.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1310" CreationDate="2015-07-22T22:36:43.087" Score="8" ViewCount="2340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I want to release as open source. However, the project interacts with some external web-based API that requires a key (issued by API owners specifically for the project), that should be kept in secret as said in the external API docs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I publish the project as is, I will show my key and, thus, it might get invalidated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to publish the project under open source license excluding the key?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="923" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T01:11:21.307" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T10:05:24.947" Title="Publishing software as open source while keeping an API key secret" Tags="|publishing|api|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1274" CreationDate="2015-07-22T23:00:41.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fork their fork and make it even better! Take all their changes and add the stuff that people ask for and get denied and you will soon be the real deal again .. this fork is brought to you from the original developer of XY .. don't forget to thank the guys! ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="929" LastActivityDate="2015-07-22T23:00:41.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2015-07-22T23:11:08.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your specific question seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it legal to publish the project under open source license excluding the key?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is clearly: &quot;yes&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don even have an idea &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; anyone should think otherwise, but there is nothing in the open source licensing model that invalidates your use of the license if you exclude the API license key (or any other information that should be kept confidential, such as login credentials) from what you share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not even considered &lt;em&gt;problematic&lt;/em&gt; to exclude a valid API license key from the distribution of an open source project.  For instance, there exist countless open source clients for web-services requiring API-keys that do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard solution is to ship the project with a dummy or no API key, and make provisions (for example during installation) for users to put in place their own, real, key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for making &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; the key is excluded, there are many different ways to do this, depending on whether the key lives in a file of its own, or is part of some other file that is otherwise required.  &lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; to exclude it is IMHO outside the scope of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(PS: My first reading of this question was that it was about whether it would be legal to &lt;em&gt;include&lt;/em&gt; a valid key in the source code.  Subsequent edits made it clear that is was really about whether it would be &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; to publish the project under an open source license if the valid key where to be &lt;em&gt;excluded&lt;/em&gt; from the source code.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T06:25:12.583" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T06:25:12.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1301" CreationDate="2015-07-22T23:21:02.547" Score="6" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to provide a service, intended to make me money, based upon free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It consists of a free plugin (client) and a web-service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client is published as Open Source, and it is deployed as a plugin for some popular free CMS platforms (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) that &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; its plugins to carry a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the plugin (client) really does is to provide a GUI to a web-service.  The web service is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; available unless the user purchase an API key.  Without having this API key, the free plugin (client) is useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plugin (client) is written by me, while the web-service is based upon publicly available Free Software written by somebody else, but &lt;em&gt;adapted&lt;/em&gt; by me to become a web-service that communicates with my free plugin through an API also designed by me.  I do not want to share the adapted source code, and I believe I do not have to, since the web-server part is not shared with anyone (it just runs on my web-server).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will this &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; be OK, or are there Free Software licenses (recognized as such by the FSF and OSI) that have restrictions in place that will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow me to do this this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T00:57:44.997" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T01:11:38.280" Title="Can I use Free Software as basis for a web-service without distributing the source?" Tags="|licensing|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1300" CreationDate="2015-07-22T23:28:13.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends on the license for the software used for the web-service. If we run trough all the licenses recognized by FSF and OSI, there are only two classes of licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Gnu Affero General Public License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; recognized licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The business model you describe is known as &quot;Software As A Service&quot;  (SAAS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt; FLOSS licenses, including GPLv2 and GPLv3 allow you to use this business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. you can take free software, add an API that requires the user to purchase a license key to access the API.  Because you never distribute your modified version of the software, you do not have to share its source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this business model &lt;em&gt;relies&lt;/em&gt; on the web-service being closed source. If the web-service component was open source, anyone could download it and set up their own web-service and hand out API-keys to this alternate web-service for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;Gnu Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt; (AGPL) does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow you to modify free software for this &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; giving the public access to the source code of your modified version of the free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there. (Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html&quot;&gt;Why the Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T01:11:38.280" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T01:11:38.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1496" CreationDate="2015-07-23T00:11:22.567" Score="16" ViewCount="1248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I run a moderately successful open source project on GitHub (it is a privacy enhancing tool for public websites, based upon some PETs I developed for my thesis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am getting quite a few feature requests, and some of them are accompanied with pull-requests from people unknown to me.  I think it is great that users want to contribute to the project, but I worry about the consequences of incorporating user-contributed code without proper vetting.  I am just a one-man show, and do this is my spare time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options to bring my project forwards with the help of its users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; tools on GitHub that will help me doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="924" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T07:42:55.563" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T07:42:55.563" Title="What tools on GitHub can help me do quality assurance for my projects?" Tags="|collaboration|github|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1302" CreationDate="2015-07-23T00:40:05.577" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a way you are already moving forward with help from the community; that's what those pull requests are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to pull-requests, you have other tools at your fingertips&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The project wiki&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which you may or may not have enabled. Like any wiki, this can double as a way for you to make announcements (publish guidelines for contributions, etc to your community) and a forum for discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Pull requests&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to making you aware of changes others would like to see included in your project, these also act as a forum for code reviews. Others who are interested can see the changes and make comments directly against the commits included in the request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relieves you a little of the burden of reviewing incoming requests, though as the project owner you still have the final say on which to take and when they are taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Issues&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github also provides you with a rudimentary issue tracker for your project, allowing you to set release dates, assign them to individuals for resolution, classify them via tags, and so on .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Collaborators&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get to know a few regular contributors well, you have the ability (under Collaborators on the project's settings page) to grant merge access to other people. This allows them to accept pull requests and push changes directly to the main repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github provides you with everything you need to run a small development project and manage who can do what. It's up to you to make use of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is successful enough to be attracting contributions from complete strangers, then it's off to a good start. But if you ignore your contributors one of them is going to fork it, accept the other people's changes, and effectively take the project away from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T01:18:41.950" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T01:18:41.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2015-07-23T05:07:01.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can push a project without publishing the API key. Developers do it all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you have prominent documentation explaining how other developers can acquire/install their own API key and make sure your source code detects a missing key and provides a helpful error message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using git, you can use a &lt;code&gt;.gitignore&lt;/code&gt; file to prevent the API key from being included in the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T05:07:01.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1306" CreationDate="2015-07-23T05:27:07.403" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following GitHub issue representing a suggested feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inactive&lt;/strong&gt; - has not been commented on in four months&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not popular&lt;/strong&gt; - requested by a single person, and no evidence suggests that anyone else is interested in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No implementation ideas&lt;/strong&gt; - there have not been any suggestions about how to implement the suggested feature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While perception varies a bit from project to project, are these criteria usually considered sufficient to close the issue?  If not, what other criteria should be considered?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the concept of criteria a bad idea to start with, maybe? Or should feature requests not be closed in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="937" LastEditorUserId="937" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T16:09:38.807" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T01:48:09.990" Title="Closing an inactive feature request?" Tags="|issue-tracking|feature-requests|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2015-07-23T07:45:47.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the question stands, the best option (of the three we're supposed to choose between) is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Not Sufficient&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a follow-up question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What other criteria should be considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This depends on the project, the request and the maintainer's outlook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There comes a time when it is clear that a feature request is not going to be worked on and it is time to close.  &lt;em&gt;When&lt;/em&gt; that time comes is not easy to pin down in the generic case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I maintain projects that has more than two year old feature requests (fitting &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your three criteria) open.  I keep such requests open because I (the project owner and maintainer) think the project will benefit from from having such a feature - even it has not attracted any &quot;me too&quot;-responses. I haven't found time to work on it myself, but keeping it open means that it is not off he charts, and a pull request to implement it will be welcome.  I usually leave a comment like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think I can find the time to work on this anytime soon, but it looks like a nifty feature, and I will commit a pull request that does a good job implementing it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I have closed a feature request after 14 days that fits &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of your criteria.  In the latter case, the criterion may (for instance) be given as (in somewhat more diplomatic language): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is an aim of this project to stay &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;lightweight&lt;/em&gt;.  Your pull request is bloated and ugly, and will only benefit a small group of users who will be better served by using project X for this feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, this is not the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; criterion for an almost instant closure - the list is almost infinite (depending on the project, the request and the maintainer's outlook), but you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually respond to a feature requests with no pull request that is pretty marginal with something that indicates that imminent closure is &lt;em&gt;likely&lt;/em&gt; unless the community takes steps to prevent closure. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I (the maintaner) am not going to work on this feature. This will be closed in about two weeks &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; there a pull request is posted in the next two weeks that passes community review for code quality and desirability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The latter answer depends on having in place a community driven triage system for pull requests, which I have for all my community driven free software projects.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T08:28:47.190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T08:28:47.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1307" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-23T07:46:27.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T07:46:27.673" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T07:46:27.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-23T07:46:27.673" Score="0" Body="GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers free accounts for FLOSS software projects. Use this tag for questions about how working with GitHub affects open source projects." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-06-26T15:17:07.393" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T15:17:07.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1311" CreationDate="2015-07-23T08:43:32.753" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always see these tags in the issues and pull requests on Github but do not know the meaning and find it hard to search for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/labels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;famous Caffe project.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="940" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T10:31:14.760" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T10:35:59.883" Title="What do the labels JD, JL and ES mean?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-07-23T17:49:41.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1296" CreationDate="2015-07-23T10:05:24.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is your project and doesn't include any external code, you can do what you want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can release it with a license that only allows near-sighted monkeys to use it while hanging from a tree. You can even publish the source under dozens of different licenses, each contradicting all others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is only important if you gave the code to someone (e.g. by putting it on the web with some license and someone downloaded it). The one who GOT the software then has to conform to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for you this is only important, if you use code in your project you didn't create yourself. You then have to conform to all the licenses of the code you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses you might use have additional restrictions on the text of the license itself. Sometimes you cannot copy parts of the license text only or add additional clauses. I am not aware of any license that puts restrictions on the IP you license with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no matter what license you release your code with, you still retain all rights. Even if you release your code with a AGPLv3 license, you can still make modifications, keep them closed, sell them, etc. &lt;strong&gt;as long as you don't use contributions from other people in your code&lt;/strong&gt;. Otherwise the common practice of releasing code under some open source license while also selling commercial licenses wouldn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="944" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T10:05:24.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1309" CreationDate="2015-07-23T10:12:48.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are custom labels. In the example you give, they seem to be the initials of developers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the project's &lt;a href=&quot;http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt;, the lead developer is called Evan Shelhamer (ES). JD seems to be a contributor named Jeff Donahue. JL would be contributor Jon Long. All these people are mentioned on the project's page, under &quot;The BVLC members who have contributed to Caffe are ...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In other words, not just contributors, but people from the Berkeley Vision and Learning Centre (BVLC) itself - people with leader(-like) positions on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T10:35:59.883" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T10:35:59.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1314" CreationDate="2015-07-23T10:50:19.177" Score="16" ViewCount="1631" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; have really been bugging me as I always seem to imply that they're different, but then in many ways the same. You hear the term fork many times on platforms such as Git Hub, but then in many legal documents, you may hear the word derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, I've got a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the difference? Is there a difference at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why do we still have the terms? Can't we just use a single term? In what contexts do we use the respective terms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonus: When and where did the terms start to appear?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-16T13:22:46.400" LastActivityDate="2021-12-16T13:22:46.400" Title="Derivatives and Forks... Is there a difference?" Tags="|forking|terminology|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1312" CreationDate="2015-07-23T11:06:11.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; implies that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29#Forking_of_free_and_open_source_software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;split in the community&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; does not necessarily have this negative association; moreover, the term &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; implies that the discussion is about the legal side - licenses and the freedom to create a derivative work. In this sense &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; is more positive, as it is an important aspect of Open Source - the ability to create your own version of a piece of code, that serves your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the linked Wikipedia article, the term &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; is at least as old as 1980:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of software development, &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; was used in the sense of creating a revision control &amp;quot;branch&amp;quot; by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of SCCS:[5]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a branch &amp;quot;forks off&amp;quot; a version of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; seems to originate with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: User &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/users/1405412/frepa&quot;&gt;@Frepa&lt;/a&gt; pointed out to me that a derivative work may also inherit from it's parent work - like Linux Mint inheriting material from Ubuntu, which in turn inherits material from Debian. In a fork (this is my observation) this is not necessarily the case, as the people who forked off from a project decided to go separate ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T11:49:12.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1312" CreationDate="2015-07-23T11:17:14.857" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the difference? Is there a difference at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious difference is that &quot;derivative (work)&quot; is a legal term, and &quot;fork&quot; is a software term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the musical and motion picture &quot;West Side Story&quot; (by Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, Arthur Laurents and Ernest Lehman) is a derivative work of the stage play &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot; (by William Shakespeare), which is a derivative work of the poem &quot;The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet&quot; (by Arthur Brooke).  I doubt you'll hear anyone (except perhaps die-hard hackers) say that Shakespeare &quot;forked&quot; Brooke's poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relationship between the software term and the legal term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;fork&quot; of a software project may simply be an alternate branch in a Source Control System (SCS) where code is held under joint copyright by a community of cooperating programmers.  In that case, a fork is not a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derivative may also result from some sort of &lt;em&gt;transformation&lt;/em&gt; of the original that is different enough to result in a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; copyrightable work. For instance, when the author of a novel writes the screenplay for a motion picture adaptation of his novel, then the screenplay is a derivative work of the novel, even if both are created by the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if somebody takes software away from one community, and sets up a &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; community and proceed to develop this separate version of the software (a &quot;schism in the community&quot;), then creating a &quot;fork&quot; also means creating a  &quot;derivative work&quot; in the &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; sense - and this situation is probably  the context of this question, as it applies specifically to free and open source software, so I'll discuss it in a bit more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We typically use the legal term &quot;derivative work&quot; instead of the software term &quot;fork&quot; when the legality of creating a fork of a software project is disputed: Since creating a derivative work is a &lt;em&gt;reserved right&lt;/em&gt;, creating a derivative work (including, but limited to, a &quot;fork&quot;) requires permission from the copyright holder.  If there is no permission, this is illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there exists &quot;forks&quot; (inside a SCS) that are not derivative works.  There &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; exists derivative software (i.e. software that a court of law says is a derivative work), &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; being a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of the latter is the 9th circuit ruling on &lt;a href=&quot;http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/IP/1998%20Micro%20Star%20Abridged.pdf&quot;&gt;Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.&lt;/a&gt;, where the court decided that sharing a specific &lt;em&gt;file format&lt;/em&gt; was sufficient to make a CD-ROM with fan generated &quot;levels&quot; for a video game a derivative work of said game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do we still have the terms? Can't we just use a single term? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal term &quot;derivative work&quot; (and its close sibling &quot;adaptation&quot;) tends to be used when one needs to decide on whether a specific derivative is &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt;.  In particular, when the disputed derivative is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a fork (as in the case &quot;Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.&quot;, it is really helpful to use legal word &quot;derivative&quot; to explain the situation, as the word &quot;fork&quot; may not even &lt;em&gt;apply&lt;/em&gt; to the specific situation at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I've argued above, a &quot;fork&quot; is not &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;derivative&quot; and vice versa, so having a single term for both does not make much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bonus: When and where did the terms start to appear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use of &quot;fork&quot; &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; creating a derivative (in the context if having separate branches in a Source Control System where software is held in joint copyright is AFAIK as old as source control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of &quot;forking&quot; to create a derivative, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Fork&quot; is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs) (1991) or the BSDs (1993–1994); Russ Nelson used the term &quot;shattering&quot; for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore. However, &quot;fork&quot; was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;fork&quot; seems to have &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; been applied to a community split (where somebody &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; took the software and created a derivative around 1994-1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;derivative work&quot; is a very old legal term, but I've not been able to pin down exactly &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; it first appeared in legal literature.  There is no trace of it in Statute of Anne (1710), which deals only with verbatim copies. However, in the USA, it surfaces in the exclusive-rights provision of the Copyright Act of 1909.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of free software, I believe the first mention of the term &quot;derivative&quot; is in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GPLv1&lt;/a&gt;.  The chief author of the GPL was Eben Moglen (professor law and legal history at Columbia University and chief author of the GPL) and it seems prudent of him to choose a well-established legal term to describe a transformed copy of a program to make sure the GPL stood up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T12:26:26.050" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T12:26:26.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1312" CreationDate="2015-07-23T12:17:22.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; a legal term for any work that builds on a previous work. Almost all software releases are derivative works. Windows 7 is a derivative work from Windows XP. Linux 3.1 is a derivative work of Linux 3.0. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LHOOQ&lt;/a&gt; is a derivative work of Mona Lisa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the term isn't used (or doesn't come up) with different versions of the same project, but they are derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these can be described as a fork though. A fork happens when a project splits. The development of a project starts to happen in two different places. For example, the MariaDB project is a fork of the MySQL project. Citizendium was a partial fork of Wikipedia. They both create derivative works from the fork point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the works produced by a fork are still also called a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, a derivate work describes a &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; that is derived from an earlier work. A &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; describes a situation where development of some project branches in to two different paths, and may also describe the works created in the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T16:02:52.423" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T16:02:52.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1302" CreationDate="2015-07-23T13:52:38.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to things already mentioned, GitHub recognizes a special &quot;CONTRIBUTING&quot; file (either with .md or .rst extension). &#xA;If this file exists in your repo, the message &quot;Please review the guidelines for contributing to this repository.&quot; will show up with a link to that file when someone creates a new issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use that to be a tad more explicit about what you expect from a contribution or issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example of a GitHub contributing file.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-23T15:22:26.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-23T15:22:26.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1327" CreationDate="2015-07-24T05:57:41.107" Score="9" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that I've written a program that I want to release as Open Source / Free Software (as defined by the OSI and the FSF), will choosing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/21/whats-the-difference-between-copyleft-and-permissive-open-source&quot;&gt;copyleft license&lt;/a&gt; help me control what others are able to do with my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that copyleft requires anyone that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1312/derivatives-and-forks-is-there-a-difference&quot;&gt;forks&lt;/a&gt; my program to &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; their fork under the same license (or at least under a license with the same terms as my license). But will a copyleft license (as opposed to a permissive one) give me control over &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; then the license they have to use for their fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T12:33:38.170" Title="Will copyleft help me control what others are able to do with my code?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2015-07-24T07:36:13.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, by using a copyleft license you renounce the rights to control the distribution of your code, and you only force anyone using this code to use and further distribute it on terms provided by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T07:36:13.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2015-07-24T11:24:44.643" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any OSI or FSF approved open source license does not allow to put restrictions on who can use the software and for what purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;calls these the essential freedoms 0 and 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom&#xA;  0). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it&#xA;  does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;The OSI definition of open source&lt;/a&gt; forbids discrimination against groups and field of endeavor. This is incompatible with any restrictions on how the code may be changed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of&#xA;  persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in&#xA;  a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the&#xA;  program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic&#xA;  research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as all downstream users comply with your license terms, there is nothing you can do... as long as you still want to call your project rightfully open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course release it under a license which is identical to a common copyleft license but includes additional clauses which restrict what people can do with it, but then you can no longer call it &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T11:24:44.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1332" CreationDate="2015-07-24T12:53:36.687" Score="15" ViewCount="861" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using Eclipse to code my program. After doing research on the Eclipse website I found that there was no clear answer to my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My issue is that I need to be able to license my software and have NO restrictions as to how I license it. But throughout the development of my software I have used wizards to generate some of my code numerous times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using these wizards, does this mean that my software is now a derivative of Eclipse? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done a bunch of research, all I could find was an indefinite answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:01:23.393" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:01:23.393" Title="Does using Eclipse wizards to generate code make my software a derivative?" Tags="|software|derivative-works|epl|development-environment|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1323" CreationDate="2015-07-24T12:56:57.370" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyleft &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; won't do it&lt;/strong&gt;. Part of the definition of copyleft is that it grants licensees the ability to use the code for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can get a similar effect by working within the broader category of what Creative Commons calls &quot;ShareAlike&quot; licenses&lt;/strong&gt;. Arguably the most famous example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't allow the licensed work to be used for commercial purposes, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; requires someone making derivative works to share alike. But licenses that restrict how the code is used are not copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="962" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T12:56:57.370" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1330" CreationDate="2015-07-24T13:14:25.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eclipse has it's own license, the Eclipse Public License. It's very difficult to find, but you can find this in Section 29 &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#EXAMPLE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Many Eclipse tools and wizards use code templates which are included in the application that is generated. Is the code generated by these tools considered a derivative work that must be licensed under the EPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to this question. To the extent that the code generated by a wizard is purely functional in nature and therefore not the proper subject matter for copyright protection, it could be argued that it is not subject to copyright protection, and therefore is not a derivative work. An example of that type of code would include calls to APIs or other technical instructions which are dictated by functional or technical requirements. Moreover, to the extent the generated code is a very small part of the final overall work, there is an argument that such use would be di minimus, and the final product or application should not be considered to be a derivative work. Finally, to the extent developers who use the generated code make many changes and additions to the code, there is also an argument that the resultant application is not a derivative work. Of course, these are just arguments and not &amp;quot;bright line&amp;quot; tests, and therefore each position could be subject to differing viewpoints. Eclipse cannot take a position on this issue, as it will ultimately be a question of the facts and circumstances associated with a particular use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading this, you can easily determine that any generated code is only functional in nature, and will consist a tiny fraction of your final project. Therefore, using the code generated by the Eclipse Wizards will not make your software a derivative of that. Don't worry, you can calm down! You're safe now! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T13:14:25.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1330" CreationDate="2015-07-24T14:29:03.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find using the words &quot;purely functional&quot; very odd, it already has an established and very specific meaning. &quot;Trivial&quot; would be a better word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some nontrivial code is already present in a program and you take and modify it (with a wizard or otherwise), it's better to treat it as a derivative work. You should check if they have any exception for it, and if not, check license compatibility with your own code.&#xA;A list of constants, function prototypes, or dummy methods with nothing but name and formal parameters could be considered trivial and not copyrightable. However, some wizards essentially copy a whole demo app for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a program generates code from scratch, then you don't need to worry about it. If you take a program that generates random code from a grammar specification (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dmbaturin/cfgen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;mine&lt;/a&gt; ;), you can be sure the code is yours. Some programs where substantial part of the generated code is stored and reused verbatim add exceptions to their license to avoid any ambiguity (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T14:29:03.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-24T18:14:09.573" Score="2" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a Graphics Design program, with less functionality than Photoshop, but more than MS Paint. I've targeted the application towards teenagers and kids, mainly for educational usages for subject fields such as Graphic Design, Photography and Digital Art. I've started writing it for my final project in school, and feeling quite happy with the work I have done, and having noticed a lack of related software programs for various operating systems, I would like to release it to the general public. &lt;strong&gt;It's currently in Alpha testing :)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want, I've made a couple pieces of fantastic artwork in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/80/community-promotion-ads/387#387&quot;&gt;Community Ads meta post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple aspects of the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;JRE System Library - It doesn't look like I'm allowed to include with my software...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tech/jai-142803.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java Advanced Imaging API&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/s&gt;. It looks like I will no longer be using this. Having done some more testing with my application, I have found bugs with this api, following operations with the &lt;code&gt;Tiff&lt;/code&gt; format, the primary reason for its use. I'm incredibly sorry for confusions this may cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apache Commons IO Library - The libraries are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jfontchooser.osdn.jp/site/jfontchooser/project-summary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JFontChooser&lt;/a&gt;. According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2120228/java-swing-font-chooser&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; Post, it is Open Source, however, &lt;s&gt;I am unable to exactly find which license it really uses in the documentation, nor its download link (However, I have reasons to believe it uses the MIT license).&lt;/s&gt; It uses the MIT license, it says at the download location, and the license file in the package is an exact match of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jython.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jython&lt;/a&gt;. The OSI claims that this fits the Open Source Definition, and the license itself &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/Python-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that it is very permissive. It should be noted that I am re-evaluating its usefulness within my application, and that I am considering its removal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional Files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have multiple image files as &amp;quot;sample&amp;quot; files that users can build upon that I hope to include within my project. These files are images that I have found online on various sites. Many of them are licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). I'm unsure of whether the ShareAlike clause will be an issue, but I can always remove them and substitute them with pictures of my own (I will likely do that in fact).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the general development guidelines and files that I created for my use during the development of the project, there's nothing else that isn't mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft clause -&amp;gt; This would allow me to sort of control re-licensing the project under different terms, thus providing different rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to see if I can discourage forking and derivatives for my project, more so from the general developer community. As I noted above, I wrote the application for my final (or cumulative) project for school. Since I'm 15, I'm still learning the nips and bits of Java, and it is still a learning experience for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also tried making a friendly environment from within my application, to submit feature requests, bugs and ideas. I'm planning on doing this from where I will be hosting the project as well (likely on my own website). I will also likely be hosting the source code, as well as the compiled application from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind using a license that people haven't heard of, as long as it is open, and it fulfills what I would like it to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I might be interested in dual-licensing here: According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/933/69&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, I would likely license a restrictive license like I've noted above, but then a permissive license when used for educational uses. I would likely use the Apache or MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I really also want to note that if someone can convince me to license my application in a different way, I am open to these sorts of suggestions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want my application to be open, but if I do receive a lot of backlash, I can always just place my program under a copyright, then dictate my own terms, and provided special rights for educational use. But then that's just a pain. I want my program to be Open. This is a learning experience in all directions for me - learning java, learning what makes open projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would be best suited for my purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T02:16:30.920" Title="License for Graphics Design Program" Tags="|software|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1334" CreationDate="2015-07-24T18:51:24.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual suspects for copyleft are the GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, and LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you are linking against incompatible libraries, the only license you can use of those is the LGPL: The only licensing information I can find for &lt;code&gt;JFontChooser&lt;/code&gt; is in the sources jar, which has an All Rights Reserved heading. This means you may not re-distribute this product at all, and the user should provide their own copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this license doesn't do, is restrict forking. The right to (unrestrictedly) fork is one most essential part of free and open source software, and you won't find a free and/or open source license that provides for this. This makes me wonder that if you don't want people to fork, why do you want it to be open source? It's rather contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another license with roughly the same conditions is the Mozilla Public License, which is file-level, so slightly more permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For dual-licensing under less restrictive licenses, you could use any old permissive license; the MIT seems to be the most popular choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The additional files can be individually licensed under their own license they are not part of the software, or essential to its functioning. Do make sure you fulfill the license requirements of each individual file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing that JFontChooser is MIT, you now have the following licenses for components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JRE: Assuming that you link against OpenJDK (and this is generally a very safe assumption, unless you are doing something very peculiar with an alternative implementation), GPL2 + classpath exception&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commons IO: Apache 2.0: GPL3+ compatible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;Java Advanced Imaging API: Not sure. GPL + classpath exception or Oracle Binary Code License. The former is GPL3+ compatible, the later isn't.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jython: Python Software Foundation License 2.0. GPL compatible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Annoyingly, GPL2 and GPL3 aren't compatible, but with the classpath exception, you're not bound to the GPL2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that leaves you, from restrictive to permissive:&#xA;&quot;GPL 3 or later&quot;, GPL3, LGPL or MPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T10:01:26.897" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T10:01:26.897" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1330" CreationDate="2015-07-24T21:09:35.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wizard itself doesn't determine if the output is covered by a license. The input determines copyright law and FLOSS licensing. For example, if you import a nondescript WSDL into Eclipse to generate a client, that client isn't subject to the Eclipse license or even copyright law (by itself). The entire work resulting from the use of that client could be licensed any way the developers see fit. Contrariwise, if you imported Eclipse's source code into Eclipse and compiled it, it would be subject to Eclipse's license, even if you modified it slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be able to import just a single file from Eclipse, if that file offered obvious functionality and was an insignificant portion of the software, without tainting the entire project with the Eclipse license (but, most people avoid that argument either way by simply not copying any source files from software with a license incompatible to their own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most wizards require user input and various actions to generate output, unless the input was licensed by a particular model, the output is subject to ordinary copyright law, which would generally either mean that the person that generated the code would own it, or the code can't be copyrighted, either because it doesn't meet the requirements for originality or triviality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this were not true, all FLOSS software would be in trouble. In order to create a project in Eclipse, you use &lt;em&gt;a wizard&lt;/em&gt;. By default, simply using the software basically requires the use of a wizard, so all the output of Eclipse would automatically be subject to Eclipse's licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly this isn't true, because either there'd be a lot more FLOSS software bearing Eclipse licencing, or Eclipse would cease to be viable for any developer unless they explicitly were okay with Eclipse's licensing model, which would basically mean that it would be useless for developing any other type of software. Simply using a program to generate a particular output does not automatically make that output assume a certain license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="523" LastActivityDate="2015-07-24T21:09:35.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-25T00:13:12.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T00:13:12.667" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T00:13:12.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-25T00:13:12.667" Score="0" Body="For questions about Eclipse Public License (EPL), that is a certified Open Source license created specifically for the Eclipse Foundation." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T07:25:01.733" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T07:25:01.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1342" CreationDate="2015-07-25T12:52:34.713" Score="8" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back, I ask this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/504/can-i-override-a-licensing-policy&quot;&gt;Can I Override a licensing Policy?&lt;/a&gt; I determined that instead of stating a license on a profile page, it dual-licenses the content posted by that user, instead of overriding the user contribution policy in effect by the company. This works because each post has an owner, and the content clearly has a license in place by site policy, and through notices in the user profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about Community Wiki posts here at Stack Exchange? These posts have multiple contributors, and they can be edited by anyone. Furthermore, there is practically no ownership of these posts &lt;code&gt;-&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; They are &lt;s&gt;owned by nothing&lt;/s&gt; owned by the community user, which isn't even a person. Community Wiki posts are owned by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community&quot;&gt;community user&lt;/a&gt;, not the members of the community who contribute to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, how are community wiki posts licensed? I would like to say that they would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA license -&gt; Because that is the user contribution policy, however, would it be multi-licensed from all the users who contributed, generally fraction amounts? Or are they licensed a different way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T00:07:23.010" Title="Licensing Community Wiki Posts at Stack Exchange" Tags="|licensing|community|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2015-07-25T13:01:23.483" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license is those of the original asker. Not the partial contributors (editors even).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone contributed to an open source software. Would the license now be those of the editor? No. It would still be the license the owner placed on it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that while there may be many contributors the license stays the same. It is the license that SE, or the person that asks the question applies to it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="271" LastEditDate="2015-07-25T13:13:03.957" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T13:13:03.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2015-07-25T13:22:09.360" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're conflating features of the Stack Exchange engine, which copyright law doesn't care about, with ownership and licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All user content (i.e. the posts and comments, not the user interface bits) on Stack Exchange is &lt;em&gt;owned&lt;/em&gt; by their authors (there is no transfer of copyright — that's not even a thing in some jurisdictions; it is in the US but SE doesn't require it). A majority of posts are owned by the single author who wrote them. Posts with multiple authors (the original poster and one or more editors) may have shared ownership if the contribution of others is significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All user content comes under a &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; with attribution requirements&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no dual licensing. The original author may use the same content elsewhere under a different license; in this case the path is from the original author directly to this elsewhere. That is not a dual licensing of the Stack Exchange post, that is a separate work by the same author which happens to have the same content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether a post is community wiki does not affect this&lt;/strong&gt;. Community wiki changes some Stack Exchange rules (lower reputation threshold for making edits without supervision, and no reputation granted for votes), and is a signal from the original poster that others are permitted and even encouraged to make significant contributions. It affects the user interface a bit; for example the name at the bottom of the post is the user who contributed the most content by some measure of length, whereas it's always the original author for posts not marked CW. The “Community” user is not involved. All of which does not matter from a legal perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the topic of posts with multiple authors — which, again, is not a matter of them being community wiki or not: the only impact of CW is that it makes it more likely for a post to have multiple authors — let me point you to the Meta Stack Exchange thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/208904/does-the-migration-of-edited-posts-violate-attribution-requirements&quot;&gt;Does the migration of edited posts violate attribution requirements?&lt;/a&gt; and in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/208904/does-the-migration-of-edited-posts-violate-attribution-requirements/208952#208952&quot;&gt;my answer there&lt;/a&gt;. The law (in all jurisdictions, I think) sets a threshold for when contributions to a work are considered significant enough for someone to be considered a co-author. The exact threshold is determined by jurisprudence and is not always consensual. For example, copyeditors on books are traditionally not given any recognition, whereas movies tend to credit many people whose contribution is purely material, not creative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the US in particular, the relevant law is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Title 17 of the U.S. Code&lt;/a&gt;, and in particular &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;. Neither it, nor the CC BY-SA license, define who is considered an author. The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1447&amp;amp;context=aulr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Defining “author” for purposes of copyright by Russ VerSteeg&lt;/a&gt; presents the main views regarding how a contributor to a work gains authorship status. Emphasis is mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“As a general rule, the author is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who &lt;strong&gt;translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression&lt;/strong&gt; entitled to copyright protection.” (Justice Thurgood Marshall, in &lt;em&gt;Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid&lt;/em&gt;, 490 U.S. 730, 737 (1989).)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“A collaborative contribution will not produce a joint work, and a contributor will not obtain a co-ownership interest, unless the contribution represents &lt;strong&gt;original expression that could stand on its own&lt;/strong&gt; as the subject matter of copyright.” (Paul Goldstein, &lt;em&gt;Copyright: Principles, Law, and Practice&lt;/em&gt; § 4.2.1.2, at 379 (1989).)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the majority view. VerSteeg's article goes on to present minority views (upheld by some US courts) which have a broader definition of authorship, requiring a lesser contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application to Stack Exchange is to the attribution requirements. The license is the same regardless of who the authors of a post are, but all authors of a work must be attributed if the work is reused. The onus is on the person reusing a Stack Exchange post to ensure that they abide by the licensing requirements and in particular credit all contributors who have authorship status. For a non-community-wiki post, that's usually only the original author, but legally speaking it's still the responsibility of the person reusing the work that's engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2015-07-25T13:22:09.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-26T10:57:21.087" Score="7" ViewCount="1852" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to release a framework for &lt;a href=&quot;http://unity3d.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unity&lt;/a&gt; under a copyleft licence but have some concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is for people to be able to use the framework to develop their own projects and only be required to release any changes made to the framework back to the community i.e. they should not be required to publish their project's 'content' as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GNU LGPL looks like it might be a good fit but has been written with a heavy focus on linking and object code.  While the unity editor can import a dll into a project I believe that for most platforms the final executable will be staticly linked.  I can't see how anyone receiving the framework could use it in a distributed game and not trigger the viral clauses if under the LGPL.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of this framework will be non-code files (prefabs, audio visual media files etc) that I would like to be covered by a similar, or preferably the same, licence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am also concerned that anti-DRM clauses in some licences may impact adoption, I do not want the licence to restrict use on any platform.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While I am not planning to release via the Asset Store I do not want to restrict that option for the future.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://unity3d.com/legal/as_provider&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Asset Store Provider Agreement&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5.10.4&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Provider represents and warrants that its Assets shall not contain any software licensed under the GNU General Public License or GNU Limited (Lesser) General Public License, or any other license with terms that include a requirement to extend such license to any modification or combined work and provide for the distribution of the combined or modified product’s source code upon demand so that Customer content becomes subject to the terms of such open source license; or (ii) any software that is a modification or derivative of any software licensed under the GNU General Public License, Limited (Lesser) Public License, or license with terms similar thereto so that Customer content become subject to the terms of such open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the standard copyleft licences are suitable for a Unity asset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="959" LastEditorUserId="959" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T13:46:18.107" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T13:46:18.107" Title="Which standard copyleft licences can be applied to Unity assets?" Tags="|copyleft|license-recommendation|drm|assets|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2015-07-26T12:07:28.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My goal is for people to be able to use the framework to develop their own projects and only be required to release any changes made to the framework back to the community i.e. they should not be required to publish their project's 'content' as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL/LGPL/AGPL do not trigger the &quot;linking&quot; requirement on artwork, unless the code itself is present in the artwork. Also note that no free license forces people to contribute back their private changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU LGPL looks like it might be a good fit but seems to have been written with a heavy focus on .dlls and code. Some of this framework will be non-code files (sprites, textures, sounds, etc) that I would like to be covered by the same licence. I am also concerned that anti-DRM clauses may limit adoption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of version 2.1, the LGPL has been renamed from &lt;strong&gt;Library General Public License&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;Lesser General Public License&lt;/strong&gt;. This means you can use it on any work, not just libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of this framework will be non-code files (sprites, textures, sounds, etc) that I would like to be covered by the same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &quot;one size fits all&quot; license. Your only viable option if you want everything to be licensed the same way is some form of public domain dedication, like CC0 1.0 Universal (which is suitable for everything, despite being part of Creative Commons; however, please note it is only FSF-approved and not OSI-approved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I recommend using two separate licenses if you are going to copyleft: one for code (GPL, LGPL, AGPL, version 3 or later) and one for assets (CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 depending on use case). If you want to maximize adoption of your framework, your best bet is using the Apache 2 (has a patent grant) or the MIT license for code, and CC BY 4.0 for assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="433" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T12:07:28.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2015-07-26T14:40:45.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's break this down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your title indicates that you want a copyleft license - this rules out &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the record: &amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; means that any downstream recipients who &lt;em&gt;distributes adaptations&lt;/em&gt; of your framework, is required to offer anyone who receives an adapted work, source code for the adaptation, under the same license (or one with identical terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is for people to be able to use the framework to develop their own projects and only be required to release any changes made to the framework back to the community i.e. they should not be required to publish their project's 'content' as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That requirement will not be a problem, the separation between &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;content&amp;quot; (sometimes called &amp;quot;assets&amp;quot; or data&amp;quot;) is well-known, and no copyleft license requires source code of &amp;quot;content&amp;quot; that is simply read by the program to be regarded as part of the adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU LGPL looks like it might be a good fit but seems to have been written with a heavy focus on .dlls and code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the answer by &lt;em&gt;Calinou&lt;/em&gt;, since 2.1 it has broadened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also concerned that anti-DRM clauses may limit adoption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; versions of Creative Commons are anti-DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.  (CC BY-SA 1.0 &amp;amp; 2.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. (CC BY-SA 3.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures. (CC BY-4.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language has been softened in ver. 4.0, from banning it outright in version 1-3, to allowing circumvention of DRM, in ver. 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the software licenses, there is no anti-DRM in GPLv2 or the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 and AGPLv3 is clearly anti-DRM, with a provision to circumvent, similar to CC BY-SA 4-0, so if this is a concern you should avoid those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of this framework will be non-code files (sprites, textures, sounds, etc) that I would like to be covered by the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I would not recommend using a software license for non-code. However, in this case, all the CC licenses are off the chart because they're anti-DRM. The GFDL is copyleft and allows DRM, but it is (IMHO) painful to use because its over-the-top formal requirements. Other content licenses I am aware of (i.e. Open Publication License, Free Art License, Academic Free License) are either non-copyleft, or they are anti-DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rules out using &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of these for your project's content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that we're left with free software licenses for the content as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice from there is how &amp;quot;strict&amp;quot; you want your copyleft to be and how much license compatibility you want to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/strong&gt; are &amp;quot;weak&amp;quot; copyleft licenses that allows downstream recipients to combine your framework with anything, including games that are sold commercially, without giving anything back to the community. The requirement to share adaptions does not trigger until they alter your code &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; distribute the resulting program.  If this is OK, then you should use one of these for the framework (I prefer LGPLv2.1 because I think it is clearer that GPLv3 - but this is a personal preference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPLv2&lt;/strong&gt; is &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; copyleft that requires both adapted and linked source code to be shared (if some derived work is distributed). This does not disallow use in commercial games, but the source code of any game that is distributed commercially must be given back to the community.  If you want this stronger type of copyleft, then GPLv2 seems to be the right license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid any copyleft confusion, you should specify (e.g. in &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt;) that the while the non-code assets are under the same license as the code, they are included as &amp;quot;mere aggregates&amp;quot; and do not trigger any copyleft clause on user created content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T00:29:52.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1349" CreationDate="2015-07-26T15:14:42.863" Score="14" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/Simple-2.0&quot;&gt;SimPL License&lt;/a&gt; which is described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This Simple Public License 2.0 (SimPL-2.0 for short) is a plain language implementation of GPL 2.0.  The words are different, but the goal is the same - to guarantee for all users the freedom to share and change software.  If anyone wonders about the meaning of the SimPL, they should interpret it as consistent with GPL 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly easier to read than the GPL, but is that a good thing?  Legally, can I be confident something licensed under the SimPL is protected as well as something licensed under the GPL?  Are there any disadvantages to using the SimPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="984" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T22:35:33.460" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T22:35:33.460" Title="Is there a reason to prefer the SimPL over the GPL? Does it carry the same legal weight?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1334" CreationDate="2015-07-26T15:58:25.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's first summarize what you will distribute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;JRE System Library. It doesn't look like I'm allowed to include with my software...&amp;quot; OK, so we need not consider this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Java Advanced Imaging API. It looks like I will no longer be using this.&amp;quot;  OK, so we need not consider this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Apache Commons IO Library. The libraries are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.&amp;quot; It is a permissive license with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1357/606&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;JFontChooser. It uses the MIT license.&amp;quot; Permissive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Jython.&amp;quot; Custom permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, the software you're going to include is either permissive, or has a linking exception.  In practice, this means that you can choose whatever licensing you like for your code, including ARR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have multiple image files as &amp;quot;sample&amp;quot; files that users can build upon that I hope to include within my project. These files are images that I have found online on various sites. Many of them are licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). I'm unsure of whether the ShareAlike clause will be an issue,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can safely include these.  The ShareAlike is not a problem. Each license only apply to the &lt;em&gt;independent&lt;/em&gt; work (the image) itself, it does not require license compatibility with other images (or with code).  This is because these does not depend on each other, so no derivative work is created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyleft clause. This would allow me to sort of control re-licensing the project under different terms, thus providing different rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope.  As explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1327/606&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, this is not what a copyleft clause does.  And as pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1163/are-discriminatory-free-licenses-still-free/1166#&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, if you try to put this in a copyleft license, the license will not qualify as free or open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So re-licensing the project under different terms, thus providing different rights is out of the question, I am afraid.  &lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; copyleft let you do, is to say that downstream recipients must license their derivative works under an identical license, it does no let you impose terms that discriminates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to see if I can discourage forking and derivatives for my project, more so from the general developer community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no FLOSS license with anything like that.  Also, words like &amp;quot;discourage&amp;quot; is very confusing if they appear in a legal document such as a license, as they have no legal effect.  If you try to put such provisions in a custom license you write for yourself, your license will look amateurish and have less of a a chance of being taken serious (by courts and by developers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I might be interested in dual-licensing here: According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/933/606&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, I would likely license a restrictive license like I've noted above, but then a permissive license when used for educational uses. I would likely use the Apache or MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huh?  The answer you link to correctly say that there is no way this would work.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this would not be an effective way to control distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely &lt;em&gt;no point&lt;/em&gt; in using multiple licensing if at least one of the licenses in the combo is permissive.  Permissive licenses means that &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt; permitted to do &lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt; they want with your code - e.g. make derivatives closed source - that is why they are called &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; license with a &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; license will negate any legal effect imposed by the copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what sort of licensing should you choose?  Well, a free and open license is ruled out, given your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let see what you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do by taking a new look at your requirements, but this time dropping the copyleft/free requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would likely license a restrictive license like I've noted above,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this to mean that you want to discourage forking and derivatives for the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, there is no point in &amp;quot;discouraging&amp;quot; people if you can't do anything about if they refuse to listen to you, because the people who're going to do it anyway are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the nice people who enjoy cooperating. No, if you do this, the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; people that will fork your project are nasty people who are inconsiderate about the feeling of others (and probably about other things too).  If you're serious about this, slap a big red &amp;quot;All Rights Reserved.&amp;quot; on it.  That will at least give you access to legal remedies if they're not discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but then a permissive license when used for educational uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just below the big red &amp;quot;All Rights Reserved.&amp;quot;, you put in nice, green, friendly letters: &amp;quot;Inquiries about educational uses welcome.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will take the project closed source, which would be legal for all the software libraries, as they're all permissive or have a linking excepetion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also be legal for the images, because the ShareAlike on the images does not &amp;quot;spill over&amp;quot; to your program.  Just make sure you obey the attribution clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T02:16:30.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1347" CreationDate="2015-07-26T16:40:13.060" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unacknowledged by the FSF, but was approved by the OSI in 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main problems with &quot;custom licenses&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ghettoization&lt;/em&gt; - where the custom license creates its own ghetto with code that nobody else can use because of license incompatibilities&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;legal hazards&lt;/em&gt; - where the terms of the license is not precise enough to be usable in litigation&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SimPL 2.0 has explicit provisons to allow downstream re-licensing to GPLv2 and GPLv3, so in that respect it works like GPLv2+ - there is no risk of ghettoization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just had a quick read-through, but it looks like it should stand up in court as well.  They've converted some of the twisty little passages of GPL, such as the patent-clause, into much shorter and more easy to understand language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not spot any &lt;em&gt;obvious&lt;/em&gt; omissions (but this is the Internet, and I spent about 5 minutes on it, so don't treat this as professional advice).  The bottom line is: until it is tested in court, we don't really know how well it will stand up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to search for case law involving this, but could not find any.  It sees to fly under the radar on all the sites that do statistics on license use, so I do not think it has seen much use yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T18:04:24.020" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T18:04:24.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:01:17.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other explanations are accurate but here is a simpler version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Permissive&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A permissive license typically lets anyone do anything with the code but cannot sue the author if there are bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some also require anyone who distributes the code to mention where they got it from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Copyleft&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license forces any &quot;derivative&quot; work to also be open source and copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot use copyleft code in a permiasive licensed project or a closed source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot distribute copyleft binaries under any other license. For example Apple's App Store has a single license that all binaries are distributed under and it is not copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there are others but these are the ones most people care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restrictions of a copyleft license do not apply to the cppyright holder, but if they acced third party contributions to the code then the restrictions will apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rivalry&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because copyleft code cannot be used in permissive licensed open source projects there is some tension between people who prefer one type of license over the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:01:17.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1352" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:33:00.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T21:33:00.653" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:33:00.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1353" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:33:00.653" Score="0" Body="For questions about restrictions on open licenses, and for questions about placing restrictions, or handling restrictions with open projects" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T03:48:41.487" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T03:48:41.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1354" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:41:50.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-26T21:41:50.017" LastActivityDate="2015-07-26T21:41:50.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-26T21:41:50.017" Score="0" Body="For questions about Free/Libre and Open Source Software. You can ask about the origin of the word, or it rationale for naming. For general cases, use the [terminology] tag. " OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T06:25:17.630" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T06:25:17.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1340" CreationDate="2015-07-27T01:31:11.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what about Community Wiki posts here at Stack Exchange? These posts have multiple contributors, and they can be edited by anyone. Furthermore, there is practically no ownership of these posts -&gt; They are owned by the community user, which isn't even a person. &lt;strong&gt;Community Wiki posts are owned by the community user&lt;/strong&gt;, not the members of the community who contribute to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No they aren't, not in the sense of copyright ownership! They are just primarily attributed to the community user rather than the original author. In both cases the edit history shows other contributing authors and their respective IP contributions (for which they retain authorship and ownership.) Those individual contributions are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, just like all other posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T01:31:11.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1364" CreationDate="2015-07-27T02:11:13.960" Score="24" ViewCount="9355" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/a&gt; has a built-in linking exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So linking a library under Apache 2.0 into a main program licensed under GPLv3 does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; create a derivative work according to the the Apache 2.0 License.  In other words, the library is considered a &quot;mere aggregate&quot; in relation to the main program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the Apache 2.0 license, in the case of linking, it leads to a situation where each component in the collection (i.e. the library and the main program) retains its &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; license. If there are any patented software in the main program (under GPLv2), the patent termination and indemnification provisions of the Apache 2.0 license does not apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;, you can not do this. Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that this license [Apache 2.0] is not compatible with GPL version 2, because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to discover exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the FSF declares the licenses incompatible, and what this incompatibility implies. It may, however, have something to do with FSF's position on linking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html&quot;&gt;Why Upgrade to GPL Version 3&lt;/a&gt; Richard M. Stallman, president of the FSF, writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt;, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program. There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system. For instance, the TeX license and the Apache license are incompatible with GPLv2, but that doesn't stop us from running TeX and Apache in the same system with Linux, Bash and GCC. &lt;em&gt;This is because they are all separate programs&lt;/em&gt;.  (My emphasis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that anybody will dispute that merging or combining code (i.e. copy/pasting some code into another project) will produce a derivative, but including &quot;linking&quot; in the actions that shall produce a derivative is not universally recognized, but seems to be the position of the FSF (assuming its founder and president speaks on behalf of the organiation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-java.en.html&quot;&gt;this essay&lt;/a&gt;, which is published of FSF's official website, and therefore can be assumed to use the phrase &quot;FSF's position&quot; with the approval from the FSF, David Turner writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has always been the FSF's position that dynamically linking applications to libraries creates a single work derived from both the library code and the application code. The GPL requires that all derivative works be licensed as a whole under the terms of the GPL, an effect which can be described as “hereditary.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Apache Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot;&gt;disagrees&lt;/a&gt; about them being incompatible.  They write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite our best efforts, the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license. The Apache Software Foundation believes that you should always try to obey the constraints expressed by the copyright holder when redistributing their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Apache Software Foundation says that you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; not do this, because the FSF disapprove of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But: &lt;em&gt;Could&lt;/em&gt; I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, are the licenses really incompatible - as the FSF say. Or do the linking exception in Apache 2.0 give me an explicit permission to link a Apache 2.0 library into software under GPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T07:24:35.073" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T08:08:38.423" Title="Can I link a Apache 2.0 library into software under GPLv2?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2015-07-27T05:30:01.470" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you misunderstand what the FSF and the Apache foundation have said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are allowed to link against Apache code from GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license clearly states that you don't need to follow any of its &quot;derivative&quot; terms if all you do is link against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T08:45:10.967" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T08:45:10.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1360" CreationDate="2015-07-27T08:29:45.463" Score="24" ViewCount="2986" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a free, permissive license for a small project, providing as &lt;em&gt;few restrictions&lt;/em&gt; as possible on the use of my code.  Somebody recommended the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/about/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;. I want my project to be freely shared, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... beside that, my concerns are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care about attribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care who uses my code or for what purpose;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care if somebody sells my work or uses it in a closed source project;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not concerned about the language in the license or whether it may offend someone;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want to modify the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the WTFPL a good license for my project, given the requirements above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T04:55:04.097" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T12:39:20.763" Title="Should I use the WTFPL for my FLOSS project?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2015-07-27T08:36:16.467" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;By using WTFPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you will not get any attribution when somebody use your work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offending language/title of the license itself &lt;strong&gt;may potentially&lt;/strong&gt; cause your project to be filtered out in some circumstances&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you don't drop any potential liability (that might possibly get you into trouble in some countries)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for better alternative, look at the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="691" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T11:45:30.383" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T11:45:30.383" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2015-07-27T09:46:48.900" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WTFPL fulfills your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three very similar things you can do with your requirements are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release it under the WTFPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release it under CC0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release it into the public domain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things are effectively equivalent, but in some jurisdictions it is impossible to release copyright into the public domain. Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes about this&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two differ in that CC0 places the work in the public domain if possible, and if not grants you a license to do whatever. The WTFPL doesn't attempt to put anything in the public domain, but always grants you a license to do whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the WTFPL makes you more of a rebel, and is more likely to confuse and scare suits. Whether that's a bug or a feature is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More conservative approaches maintain the copyright, but are still very permissive. They include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT/expat license, which is a very simple permissive license, has a liability disclaimer, and is compatible with pretty much every other licensing model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache2 license, which is slightly more complex, and includes a patent grant. It is compatible with the GPLv3 but not GPLv2 or earlier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any of the BSD licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ISC license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have the advantage of being better understood and are more battle-tested in a court of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T10:41:54.930" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T10:41:54.930" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2015-07-27T09:50:39.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WTFPL is a license that basically puts the work licensed with it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Public Domain&lt;/a&gt;. That is possible and there are multiple ways to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically putting a work into public domain allows everyone to use it as he sees fit. That is the same as the WTFPL claims. This also fulfills your requirements as you put them in the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acknowledgement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point here that needs some elaboration is the right to get attributed. While a Public Domain work asserts no rights for the author, it still is needed in some countries (like germany) to acknowledge the original author of the work (otherwise you are plagiarizing). So depending on the jurisdiction someone making a derivate of your public domain work may still put some acknowledgement to you. That is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_are_moral_rights.2C_and_how_could_I_exercise_them_to_prevent_uses_of_my_work_that_I_don.E2.80.99t_like.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt;, it may also (depending on jurisdiction) include the right, that your work isn't used to belittle or defame you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point often brought forward is the liability for damages your work creates. Many people recommend to put a disclaimer to deny all liability, something like this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This documentation is provided on an “as is” basis, without warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk! Under no circumstances shall the author(s) or contributor(s) be liable for damages resulting directly or indirectly from the use or non-use of this documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While such a disclaimer seems useful, it most likely does nothing. In most jurisdictions you cannot with a simple disclaimer avoid to be responsible for gross carelessness. At the same time any user of your work who get damages through the usage cannot just shift the responsibility to you, if you avoided major carelessness. In many cases a warning about possibilities of misuse that lead to damages may be enough to avoid being accountable. So the usefulness of such a disclaimer is low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WTFPL doesn't use such an disclaimer, but you're free to add one yourself, if you feel the need for it. As I explained, it will not do much, but depending on your jurisdiction it may have a bit of influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strong language&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly it may be pointed out, that child filters may restrict the availability of your work, if the inclusion of the license leads to the inclusion of the language that is considered strong by some. I personally wouldn't care, but if you do, you should use another way to put your work into public domain. Your OP says, that you don't really care either, so WTFPL is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are some other ways to put your work into public domain&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can just state, that this work is put into the public domain. You can add or not add a disclaimer to be not liable for any damages your work causes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC0 license&lt;/a&gt; from Creative Commons to declare your work as public domain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is a permissive license an alternative?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A permissive license like the MIT license or the BSD license granting the user a lot of rights, but they still reserve some for the original author. The WTFPL and other public domain dedications give the user more rights. If you think about the WTFPL the usual permissive open source licenses are more restrictive. Still, your requirements as you put them in the OP are also fulfilled by typical permissive licenses, they allow usage in a closed source project, allow reselling your work and allow the usage for any purpose. So depending how important the rights they still retain are for you, they may be an alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Go ahead, use the WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-27T15:22:52.987" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T15:22:52.987" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2015-07-27T16:26:20.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you want to keep the copyright (in jurisdictions where it's possible to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; keep it)?&lt;/strong&gt; Although &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/txt/copying/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; is brief and to the point, it can be argued that it's rather lacking in the legalese. The suits will &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; not be impressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you want to keep the copyright, WTFPL will get the job done&lt;/strong&gt;. However, as I and others have mentioned, WTFPL is not going to impress anyone who wears a suit to work. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; is probably better for these purposes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you don't want to keep the copyright, put it into the public domain. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; is a good tool for this&lt;/strong&gt;, since it covers jurisdictions where you can't actually put it into the public domain by using an extremely permissive license in those jurisdictions. But there are other possibilities: for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sqlite.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SQLite&lt;/a&gt; is public-domain, but the SQLite folks also sell licenses to people in jurisdictions where the public domain isn't feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: MIT is wordier, but a stronger equivalent to WTFPL. CC0 goes even further, and may match your intentions better, but I can't be sure of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="962" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-27T16:26:20.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2015-07-27T18:10:30.307" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Here's my best guess. This is obviously a very hairy problem to work through, and I've tried my best to reduce the problem down to basic principles. However, I may gotten some of those basic principles incorrect. It should go without saying that this is not legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0 (APL) is incompatible with the GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; simply because of the licenses' differing rules about patents (and the GPLv2's requirement that it must apply to the work as a whole). I'm not sure which particular clause is problematic, but the APL has a clause about termination of patent licenses that looks unlike anything in the GPLv2. If the GPLv2 indeed has no similar requirement to this, the APL and GPLv2 are incompatible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You institute patent litigation against any entity... alleging that the Work&#xA;       or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct&#xA;       or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses&#xA;       granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an additional restriction is sufficient to render the licenses incompatible, since the GPLv2 could not apply to the work as a whole while the APL imposes an additional requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this question asks whether we can &lt;em&gt;sidestep&lt;/em&gt; this incompatibility by having the linked works &lt;em&gt;not considered&lt;/em&gt; as a combined derivative work. For the purposes of this answer, we will assume that FSF's opinion that linking creates a derivative work is legally correct. (If it is not correct, and linking does not create a combined work, then you're home free and can ignore the rest of this answer! In that case, you need not worry about how the licenses interact, because they're &lt;em&gt;not interacting&lt;/em&gt; -- they're completely separate works!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crux of this question is whether the APLs linking exception is sufficient to allow applying the GPLv2 to the entire software. I think the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;: even if the APL library doesn't cause the APL to apply to the GPLv2 program, the GPLv2 program &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; cause the GPLv2 license to apply to the library. However, the licenses are incompatible (per the patent problem, above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter whether the APL considers the works combined; it matters whether &lt;em&gt;copyright law&lt;/em&gt; considers the works combined, and whether the GPLv2's section 2(b) applies to the library as part of a work that &quot;in whole or in part contains or is derived from the [GPL-licensed] Program.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If copyright law does consider them part of one work, then the library must (but cannot) be included under the work's overall GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If copyright law considers them separate works instead, then there is no license interaction, and therefore no incompatibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T14:27:22.973" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:27:22.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-27T23:36:54.753" Score="5" ViewCount="820" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what the license is for Mondor's MS Captcha? The only information that I could find on their site was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  MS Captcha is free to use in any kind of projects. The software is licensed, not sold.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the equivalent of this statement in terms of the existing Open Source licenses out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kirsanov.net/page/ASPNET-CAPTCHA.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Official MS Captcha Project Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1011" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T02:34:48.793" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:30:56.113" Title="License for Mondor's MS Captcha?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2015-07-28T01:01:33.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best license for work like this is Unlicense (&lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very similar to WTFPL without having an offensive name and also without the strange language in the license text is clearly intended to be entertaining but fails to do so (in my opinion). You might not be offended by the language but other people will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlicense has a nice single line summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And remains crystal clear once you go into the details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or&#xA;  distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled&#xA;  binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any&#xA;  means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WTFPL is lacking a section limiting your liability which could make you a target for a lawsuit if some corporation uses your code and hits a nasty bug. Unlicense does include a section on liability just like every good open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally Unlicense nicely handles the challenging problem of &quot;public domain&quot; being different from one jurisdiction to the next, especially those where it isn't actually legal to release code into public domain using a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org&lt;/a&gt; website is also an excellent resource explaining everything you need to know about using the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T01:01:33.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1365" CreationDate="2015-07-28T02:29:52.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you quote &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a custom, informal, non-free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MS Captcha is free to use in any kind of projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that you can &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; this software in other software projects, without restrictions on what &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; of project it is used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that no &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; rights than the right to use is licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and last sentence says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The software is licensed, not sold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is ambiguous.  It may just mean that you can go ahead and download the software without paying a fee, or it may impose a non-commercial restriction on use, meaning: &quot;you are not allowed to sell this software&quot;. Because the license is unclear on this point, I would strongly advice against selling a product where you use this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt; license?  For example: Does it allow you to fork the project by changing the code and making the result publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, no.  This permission to do this is not given in the license.  This means that default copyright law (that makes creating adaptations a reserved right) apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the author is to make this a non-free license. But since the right to adapt is not explicitly mentioned in the license, this right is technically still reserved, imposing a legal hazard (i.e. you have no &lt;em&gt;guarantee&lt;/em&gt; that this omission is unintentional) on users if they choose to treat this as a free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be the equivalent of this statement in terms of the existing Open Source licenses out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this license grants the user almost no freedoms, it cannot be compared to, or expressed in the terms of, existing Open Source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would not even &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about using code that are licensed under such unclear, ambiguous terms in any project of mine. YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T02:37:24.403" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T02:37:24.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1365" CreationDate="2015-07-28T03:04:52.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to what Free Radical has said, there are other issues with this application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, this is a binary-only distribution (the zip file contains a Windows DLL and a text file). You not only have no declared rights to modify it, you are prevented from doing so. As such, it can not be considered &quot;Open Source&quot; under any possible interpretation. The closest I might come to a classification is the old Freeware concept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined with the minimal license terms, this is almost an attempt to put it in the public domain. And, as mentioned elsewhere, it almost certainly fails miserably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider the purpose of this tool. It is often used to verify that a site is being accessed by a human, rather than a bot. But what else is it doing? What other information is it capturing about the user? Without source code, you have absolutely no idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason &lt;code&gt;openssl&lt;/code&gt; is one of the most widely used libraries for security functions: widespread expert review. The recent discovery of bugs  in &lt;code&gt;openssl&lt;/code&gt; may seem to argue against this, but their discovery and the fixes came about precisely &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it is open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wouldn't touch this (Mondor's Captcha) with a 100ft pole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &quot;license&quot; contains no disclaimer of liability. Mondor could find themselves in a world of hurt, legally, if a site &quot;protected&quot; by this was breached by a bot and the site owner could show that the loss was directly attributable to this component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T14:30:56.113" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T14:30:56.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1365" CreationDate="2015-07-28T07:13:28.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Additionally to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1367/55&quot;&gt;FreeRadicals excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; I can say that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.freelance.lv/index.php?PHPSESSID=e51a6cd6594fdd41cc23bd26bbbec15f&amp;amp;topic=947.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; covers this topic shortly and clarifies the authors intent a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q 1: What kind of licensing is tied to your captcha control?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: None. Component is freeware and there is no license for it. You are&#xA;  free to use it when, where and how you'd like to. And yes, it is free&#xA;  to use also in commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can use it in any project, even commercial ones. But it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freeware&lt;/a&gt; not open source, so no forks, you can only use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T07:23:24.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1273" CreationDate="2015-07-28T07:14:49.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any licenses that allow me this [to forbid distributing my open source project for less money than I do]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, no such license exists (AFAIK).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Abhi Beckert, there is nothing to stop you from hiring a lawyer to write such a license for you.  To be effective, the price-clause in this custom license must disallow &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; distribution models that undercut you on price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This custom license could have a CopyLeft-clause to pass the price-restriction on to further downstream derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if so for what reasons would these licenses (not) be considered Open Source/Free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided you mean Open Source as &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;defined by the OSI&lt;/a&gt; such a license would violate this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. if your custom license would disallow creating an aggregate software distribution with your project and some other program (e.g. &quot;Hello World&quot;), &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; that distribution is sold at or above a specific price point, then the license would not be an Open Source-license as defined by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided you mean Free as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;defined by the FSF&lt;/a&gt; such a license would violate the freedom to distribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Freedom to distribute (freedoms 2 and 3) means you are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to the FSF, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license clause that disallows distribution of copies &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; that distribution is sold at or above a specific price point will not be a Free Software-license as defined by the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Yes, you can create a custom license that does this, but it would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; qualify as Open Source under the OSI defintion, nor as Free Software under the FSF definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T07:14:49.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1372" CreationDate="2015-07-28T07:53:39.283" Score="19" ViewCount="3300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know &lt;code&gt;CC0&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;WTFPL&lt;/code&gt; for example exist to grant all rights associated with the public domain, without placing it in the public domain, because this is difficult, or in some cases impossible. I know it is impossible in Norway and Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this difficult, and how can I release some project effectively into the public domain, for jurisdictions that have such a concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it varies greatly per jurisdiction, how can I do it for the US?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T21:22:10.793" Title="How can I place software in the public domain" Tags="|public-domain|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2015-07-28T08:09:27.940" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safest way to signal your intent to give up all rights on your work currently is CC0 in most jurisdictions. The safest way to use works in the public domain is to still do it like moral rights apply, even if the copyright in your country doesn't know the concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, most jurisdictions have some concept that is more or less similar to public domain (in germany for instance 'Gemeinfreiheit'). But only some countries allow to explicitly assign a work to public domain. So in many jurisdictions a work only becomes public domain, if the time for exclusive rights expire (70 years after authors death in many countries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go more into detail here, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Application_to_copyrightable_works&quot;&gt;Wikipedia-article&lt;/a&gt; covers 4 ways a work can become public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Works not covered by copyright law&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is for works, that for some reasons are not covered by copyright laws. This is working in most jurisdictions, although there might be different rules what is covered and what not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expiration of copyright&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what I wrote above, pretty much all jurisdiction have a limit on how long a copyright can be claimed. After that the work can be counted as public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Government works&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is varying very much between jurisdictions. Which of governmental works (or works of other public bodies) is counted as public domain is very dependent on local laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dedicating works to the public domain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case the question implicitly asks. The author explicitly applies his works to public domain. Wikipedia writes here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Few if any legal systems have a process for reliably donating works to&#xA;  the public domain. They may even prohibit any attempt by copyright&#xA;  owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law,&#xA;  particularly moral rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen, this is the difficult part. Countries like Germany know the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law)&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt;, that you cannot give up. These cover the rights of the author for attribution or that a work isn't used to denigrate the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moral rights&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has to be noted, that many countries maintain the moral rights even after the commercial rights are expired. So in these countries you still may not use a work of a long dead author for example without proper attribution. In these cases you can say that it is impossible for a work to really properly become part of the public domain. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt; includes moral rights, although the final ratification still differs strongly even between signatories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for the US, that hasn't the concept of moral rights, it still might be against other laws to violate the moral rights, for instance laws against defamation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I dedicate a work to public domain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can simply declare, that you put your work under public domain. This may even work in countries that haven't the concept: I remember a law-suit, there the court accepted the public domain dedication as the authors intent to give up his rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there are some licenses (you name CC0 and WTFPL) that work in that way and give rights similar to what Public Domain would mean. CC0 seems a pretty safe way to make this work in most jurisdictions. Even if your country allows to dedicate a work to public domain, it may be safer to use CC0, as a user in another country might still not be allowed to use your work as PD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, be it a declaration of public domain or CC0, you will keep your moral rights in countries where it applies. So it may be safe to use such works still with proper attribution and not use it in an abusive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T08:38:40.457" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T08:38:40.457" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1365" CreationDate="2015-07-28T08:09:30.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This software is freeware, and not free/libre software and/or open source software (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1375/what-is-the-relation-and-or-difference-between-freeware-and-free-software&quot;&gt;What is the relation and/or difference between freeware and free software?&lt;/a&gt; for the difference)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its licensing conditions are unclear, and it is likely that the author of the software didn't know much about licensing issues (which is completely reasonable. They're a developer, Jim, not a lawyer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clearest the intention of the licensing is put in the FAQ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q 1: What kind of licensing is tied to your captcha control?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: None. Component is freeware and there is no license for it. You are&#xA;  free to use it when, where and how you'd like to. And yes, it is free&#xA;  to use also in commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that is phrased is legally nonsense. The license is the agreement between you and the publisher of the software of what you can and can't do. If the software doesn't have a license, you're not allowed to do much with it (apart from the implicit license to use the software, which is the clear intent of making it available for download without further conditions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statements that &quot;there is no license for it.&quot; and &quot;You are free to use it when, where and how you'd like to&quot; are mutually exclusive. But the authors intent is clearly for you to be allowed to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to believe you are allowed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the component in your software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute your software linking against the component, if the end user installs the component themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release your software under a permissive license or the LGPL (with the above distribution style)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unclear if you are allowed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute your software &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; the component. It certainly seems to be the intention of the author, but if they change their mind, and decide, no, that's not OK, it's unclear how it would stand up in a court of law. I think it's very likely that it would stand up, but I'm a guy on the internet. Would you want to be the person who tells the judge some guy on the internet told you it was probably OK?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reverse engineer and modify the software. See above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly not allowed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release your software under the GPL. You're linking against a non-free library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T08:57:39.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2015-07-28T08:24:41.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Placing your work in the public domain is impossible in many countries and even illegal in some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; license will place your work in public domain for people who live in a country where it's possible, and license the work as closely as possible to public domain everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my preferred approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T08:24:41.173" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1376" CreationDate="2015-07-28T08:44:55.037" Score="10" ViewCount="6862" Body="&lt;p&gt;Freeware and free software sound very similar. What is the relation between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T08:47:50.430" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T13:37:42.427" Title="What is the relation and/or difference between freeware and free software?" Tags="|terminology|free-software-definition|freeware|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2015-07-28T08:53:14.873" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot;&gt;Freeware&lt;/a&gt; is software that is released and can be downloaded and used without cost. No other rights are implied by the freeware label (although the author might offer more). So freeware doesn't imply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;access to the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;right to redistribute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;right to change&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All things &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt; does allow. Free software is defined by the four freedom it grants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-28T09:47:13.723" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T09:47:13.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2015-07-28T09:13:49.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freeware&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is free as in &lt;em&gt;free beer&lt;/em&gt;.  &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free software&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is free as in &lt;em&gt;freedom&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is elaborated on in the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/620/what-is-the-difference-between-free-as-in-beer-and-free-as-in-speech&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the restrictions commonly imposed on freeware are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No source code is provided (so you cannot adapt or review for security holes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No permission to adapt, even if source code is provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions on &lt;em&gt;type of use&lt;/em&gt;. (E.g. &quot;This program can only be used for good, not evil.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions on &lt;em&gt;type of users&lt;/em&gt;. (E.g. &quot;This program can not be used by the military.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrictions on distribution. (E.g. &quot;You're not allowed to redistribute its program. it shall &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be available for download from the website &lt;code&gt;example.com&lt;/code&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this list is by no means complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free software&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand, obliges the author to make available the source code to anyone who receives the program, and the owner (or others) can not impose &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; restrictions on type of use, type or user, or distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T09:13:49.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="620" CreationDate="2015-07-28T09:41:31.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is answered up front in the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is free software?&lt;/a&gt;, which starts out by using the often quoted &quot;free beer&quot; / &quot;free speech&quot; analogy.  Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this quote answers the OP's question pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However,  to make the meaning of &quot;free software&quot; crystal clear, the FSF goes on to list the &quot;four essential freedoms&quot; that characterizes free software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is IMHO, a very good definition of &quot;free software&quot;. In just four short bullet points, we are given all the information we need to decide whether something qualify as &quot;free software&quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, software that is just available at zero cost (aka. &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;freeware&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) may not provide &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of these freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I prefer the word &quot;freedom&quot; over &quot;free speech&quot;, as the former better conveys the idea of lack of restrictions.  This version is also used as the title for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the biography of FSF's Richard M. Stallman by Sam Williams&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxFuH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxFuH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T09:41:31.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1380" CreationDate="2015-07-28T09:56:17.313" Score="6" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source definition has a non-discrimination clause. From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The Open Source Definition (Annotated)&quot;&gt;annotated Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources. Therefore we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some countries, including the United States, have export restrictions for certain types of software. An OSD-conformant license may warn licensees of applicable restrictions and remind them that they are obliged to obey the law; however, it may not incorporate such restrictions itself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clearly means that for a license to be considered open source, the license must not discriminate against any person or group. The license may not, for example, only allow non-profits to use the work (because non-profits are good), or disallow clowns to use the work (because clowns are creepy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard people say that this also means I may not selectively license a work that I hold the copyright of under a free license. Is that true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, can I grant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia: 501(c) organization&quot;&gt;501(c)&lt;/a&gt; organizations an GPL-3 license to my software, but nobody else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that according to the terms, they are allowed to re-distribute the software to anyone else, so the effectiveness of this might be low, but my question only pertains to whether or not I have the right to deny an open source license to some people/groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T11:14:55.227" Title="Do non-discrimination clauses only count for my licensees, or also for me as a copyright holder?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1379" CreationDate="2015-07-28T11:01:23.040" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/912/458&quot;&gt;As I've said before&lt;/a&gt;, software doesn't possess any licence &lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; - it is &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; (or, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/958/gpl-v3-convey-vs-gpl-v2-distribute&quot;&gt;as the GPLv3 would have it&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;conveyed&lt;/em&gt;) under a licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You, as the copyright holder, may distribute your software under any kind of licence you want, to anyone you choose.  You may choose to distribute it only to 501(c) organisations, and only under GPLv3, if you want to.  As you correctly note, any such recipient will have the right to redistribute it to anyone they like - the GPLv3 gives them that right.  But the licence under which you distribute it to those parties doesn't force &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to distribute it to anyone else, or indeed to anyone at all, because you aren't bound by the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T11:01:23.040" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2015-07-28T11:21:42.867" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Things like CC0, Unlicense and WTFL create unexpeced legal hazards in some jurisdictions.  The MIT License does not really put anything in the public domain, but it the &lt;em&gt;safest&lt;/em&gt; license to use if you want to offer your stuff with as few restrictions as possible in a world-wide setting.  In the USA, &lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt; can be used, but I do not recommend it for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is this [to place software in the public domain] difficult?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of placing software in the public domain in the public domain is closely related to something called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that originated as civil law in the Napoleonic Code (1804, France) under the name of &lt;em&gt;droit d’auteur&lt;/em&gt; (literally: author's rights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jurisdictions with &lt;em&gt;strong moral rights&lt;/em&gt; have a tradition of making it near impossible to dedicate anything to the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral rights include the right of attribution, and the right of integrity (but the exact list of exactly what is protected by moral rights varies between jurisdictions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Norwegian copyright act, moral rights are described in the first parts of § 3, while the third part says that these rights cannot be waived. Here is a direct quote (translated by me):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The author may not waive his rights under the first and second paragraphs, unless the use of the work in question is limited in nature and extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;limited in nature and extent&quot; addendum allows ghostwriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However part four states than &lt;em&gt;under no circumstances&lt;/em&gt; can the right of integrity be waived.  Quote (translated by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This right may not be waived by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To compound the problem, moral rights are forever in Norway. In Germany, an  author can commit suicide and then wait for 70 years to dedicate his works to the public domain. In Norway (and a few other countries in northern Europe), this option is not available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can I release some project effectively into the public domain, for jurisdictions that have such a concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that this is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; for all jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most professional (as in: written by lawyers, not kids) attempt to create a legal tool to enable authors to dedicate their work to the public domain is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMNSHO, while well intended, it fails, and its use creates a &lt;em&gt;legal hazard&lt;/em&gt; in several jurisdictions (including Norway, where I live).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSI seems to think so as well. In 2012, &lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt; was submitted to OSI for review.  After facing harsh criticism, the application &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;was withdrawn&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One of better known legal hazards of CC0 is its infamous patent clause, which I discuss in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1393/606&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another license that is supposed to do this is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unlicense&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  AFAIK, it has never been submitted to OSI for review, but if it had, I am pretty sure it would have been summarily rejected.  OSI's co-founder &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/000047.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Perens&lt;/a&gt; call the the &lt;em&gt;Unlicense&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;crayon license&quot;, adding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The point is that such things have done serious harm to developers when &#xA;  they've not behaved as expected in court. Thus, naïvely propagating one &#xA;  could be considered to be in the category of irresponsible acts that can &#xA;  damage others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I believe that it is unrealistic to aim for the &quot;public domain&quot; if your audience is world-wide.  There are too many local quirks in copyright and a one-size-fits-all legal tool to put something in the &quot;public domain&quot; may have some totally unexpected (and harmful) side effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Norway, publicly performing recorded music distributed under CC0 requires you to &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt; a levy to GRAMO (a collecting society monopoly authorized under the Department of Culture), but doing the same with music distributed under CC-BY is free.  Yes, this consequence of the use of this license is totally absurd, but some copyright laws (at least in Norway) are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to stay clear of anything with pretense to put anything in the public domain, as well as &quot;crayon&quot; licenses such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;WTFL&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;Unlicense&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license that will put as few restrictions as possible on the use of your project, while not creating legal hazards for yourself and your users, is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (aka. Expat) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; license does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; abandon moral rights.  Since they're not mentioned, the jurisdiction's default civil law applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; license is also much more aligned with a &quot;traditional&quot; take on copyright. If you use the &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; license, authorship is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; abandoned, but specific (normally reserved) rights are &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; licensed to the licensee. This model fits much better into the legal framework of civil law jurisdictions than the much less conventional public domain dedications that is the gist of &lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;WTFPL&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Unlicense&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it varies greatly per jurisdiction, how can I do it for the US?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;em&gt;localized&lt;/em&gt; case, including the US, there is usually some recognized way to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for USA, you may consider using &lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt; if you don't mind having your downstream recipients worry about submarine-patents.  It was written by US lawyers, and it fits the legal situation in the USA to a tee - but it is really for artistic and literary works. IMNSHO, it should not be used for  software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me add that I think &lt;em&gt;CC0&lt;/em&gt; is pretty safe way of putting something in the public domain in &lt;em&gt;common law&lt;/em&gt; jurisdictions, but much less safe to use in &lt;em&gt;civil law&lt;/em&gt; jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T21:22:10.793" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2015-07-28T11:44:53.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Why does Freeware and Free Software sounds similar?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English adjective &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; is commonly used in one of two meanings: &quot;for zero price&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;gratis&lt;/strong&gt;) and &quot;with little or no restriction&quot; (&lt;strong&gt;libre&lt;/strong&gt;). So, &quot;free&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. freedom/cost).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clear understanding visit the wikipedia article : &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gratis versus libre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Definition&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linfo.org/freeware.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freeware&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Freeware is computer software that is made available free of charge, but which is copyrighted by its developer, who retains the rights to control its distribution, modify it and sell it in the future. It is typically distributed without its source code, thus preventing modification by its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Difference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Terminological&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&quot;free&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;&quot;freeware&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; refers to &lt;strong&gt;the price&lt;/strong&gt; of the software, which is typically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary&lt;/a&gt; and distributed without source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&quot;free&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;&quot;free software&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; refers to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/freedoms&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;freedoms&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;freedoms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; granted users under the software license (for example, to run the program for any purpose, modify and redistribute the program to others), and such software may be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sold&lt;/a&gt; at a price.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License &amp;amp; Rights&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Freeware:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software classified as &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/freeware&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;freeware&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;freeware&lt;/a&gt; may be used &lt;strong&gt;without payment&lt;/strong&gt; and is typically either fully functional for an unlimited time, or has limited functionality, with a more capable version available commercially or as shareware. The software license may &lt;strong&gt;impose various additional restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; like:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restriction on use e.g only for personal use, private use, individual use, non-profit use, non-commercial use, academic use, educational use, use in charity or humanitarian organizations, non-military use, use by public authorities, restricted use in a combination with some types of other software or with some hardware devices, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prohibited distribution over the Internet other than linking to author's website, restricted distribution without author's consent, restricted number of copies, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Free Software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The term &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/free-software&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;free-software&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;free-software&lt;/a&gt; is used for the software that gives users the &lt;strong&gt;freedom&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt; the software for any purpose as well as to &lt;strong&gt;study&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; the original software and the adapted versions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt; grants the recipient of a piece of software &lt;strong&gt;extensive rights&lt;/strong&gt; to modify and redistribute that software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Above difference is also given (shortly) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1376/296&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Software_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia template&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jr2V5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jr2V5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;wikiscreen&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freeware falls in category - &lt;strong&gt;compensation model&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Software falls in category - &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term “freeware” has no clear accepted definition, but it is commonly used for packages which permit redistribution but not modification (and their source code is not available).These packages are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; free software, so please don't use “freeware” to refer to free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, It is better to use &lt;strong&gt;gratis&lt;/strong&gt; instead of freeware while talking about free of cost software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also provide &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fs-translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translations&lt;/a&gt; of term &quot;free software&quot; into various languages with distinguishing it from &quot;gratis&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This graphical information (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catagories&lt;/a&gt;) may also helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MxuBz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MxuBz.png&quot; alt=&quot;catagories&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; relation between Freeware and Free Software And the difference is only terminological because actually comparable/distinguishable thing is &quot;Free software vs Proprietary Software&quot; (and may be &quot;Freeware vs Payware&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-30T13:37:42.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1392" CreationDate="2015-07-28T16:54:44.370" Score="8" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on python library that wraps a non-free C library. In order to develop this, I referenced the C library's copyrighted documentation. Because of that my function and variable names are the same as the non-free library's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I still okay to apply an open source license to my library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: My question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; whether I can use the C api, but whether using that api's documentation will violate the documentations copyright. I am not replacing or reverse engineering the copyrighted api, but an exposing that api's functions to a python library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1023" LastEditorUserId="1023" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T17:37:55.593" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T18:30:04.797" Title="Can I apply an open source license if I referenced copyright documentation during development?" Tags="|licensing|law|api|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1371" CreationDate="2015-07-28T16:59:55.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most ubiquitous works of software, SQLite, is in the public domain with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;no license at all.&lt;/a&gt; That is highly unusual in the world of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some wise people are behind SQLite, so I think you could do like they did and do the &lt;em&gt;no licensing&lt;/em&gt; option to have your software live in the PD.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, the no-license approach probably isn't a good idea. I would follow the industry norm of getting a license as the other replies here discuss in great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, wanted to post this in part to highlight that &lt;strong&gt;public domain&lt;/strong&gt; per se, may be what you asked for, but not what you intended. It can be a loaded word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1024" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T16:59:55.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T17:06:10.617" Score="9" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you notice &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following scaffold starter kit source code&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under MIT throughout the code base. Even the configuration file contain &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit/blob/master/webpack.config.js#L1-L7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a header of MIT licensed by the creator.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming, I have already written my application code and did some changes on the application config. How should I properly create a LICENSE which is attributed to me? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I be changing the LICENSE file? and replace all the attribution of each source code? Partly because it is now my application logic. I just use his code as the scaffolding or starter code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1025" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T19:54:00.097" LastActivityDate="2016-06-24T16:18:28.533" Title="How should I re-license the scaffold code for my new application? (it is licensed under MIT)" Tags="|attribution|relicensing|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-28T18:08:05.167" Score="18" ViewCount="1731" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice licensed her work under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot;&gt;CC0 1.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May Bob take Alice’s work and publish it under another Creative Commons license (e.g., CC BY-SA)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, may Bob publish it under his own name (i.e., not noting that Alice authored and published it under CC0), so that users would attribute him? (Of course users wouldn’t &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to follow the rules from CC BY-SA, because the work is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; also licensed under CC0; assuming that Bob didn’t make any modifications.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#May_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_a_work_in_the_public_domain.3F&quot;&gt;CC FAQ &quot;May I apply a Creative Commons license to a work in the public domain?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; says that it &quot;should not&quot; be done. So that means it &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be done, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this depend on Alice’s and/or Bob‘s jurisdiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T21:38:21.793" Title="May someone else apply a license to CC0 material?" Tags="|creative-commons|relicensing|multi-licensing|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2015-07-28T18:46:30.787" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob can relicense it under any license he wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking credit for Alice's work is another thing. In jurisdictions that hold up moral rights, Bob can't. The moral rights cannot be given up by Alice, so they are still intact. What consists moral rights differs a bit, but proper attribution is usually included. In jurisdictions without moral rights, copyright law may not prevent Bob from doing it, but depending on the situation, other laws may be in place, maybe something against fraud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T07:08:42.680" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T07:08:42.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1385" CreationDate="2015-07-28T19:18:40.110" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is a very permissive license, and allows re-licensing. The license doesn't require you at all to to keep the attribution line in any of the files, but it's kind of a dick move to remove it straight away. Keeping it there also makes it easier for re-users to find out who the copyright belongs to - though for a license as permissive as the MIT license, which is pretty much compatible with anything, this shouldn't be much of a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In accordance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/292/should-i-include-a-copyright-line-in-every-file&quot;&gt;Should I include a copyright line in every file?&lt;/a&gt; it's a good idea to have a header with what license applies and who is the copyright owner in every file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who is the copyright owner? You own the copyright to all changes you make, and all the new code you write. For a file you've changed, you have created a derivative work, and each holds the copyright to their own part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copy of the MIT license should remain until the work is no longer a derivative. It is not very clear when that is, but at least when none of your code is &quot;based upon&quot; any of the code that was there. If it were to come to it, it may be very difficult to ever prove that it's not based upon any of the old code anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your question is tagged license-change, I'm going to assume you want to change not only the attribution, but also the license. With the MIT license, you are free to re-license your derivative work under a different license of your choosing. A good way to do that is to add a second license text file, and refer to that license in a header in each new file you wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each file that is derived from the template code, link to that license, as well as to the original project and the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2015 Yeo&#xA;Copyright (c) 2014 Konstantin Tarkus (@koistya), KriaSoft LLC&#xA;&#xA;This software is licensed under &amp;lt;whatever license you fancy&amp;gt;.&#xA;&amp;lt;Additional header text you may want to include, conventions differ per license&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This software was based on &amp;lt;link to original project&amp;gt;,&#xA;licensed under &amp;lt;link to your local MIT license&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When doing that, it is clear what exactly is licensed by whom to whom, and people know what they are getting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-28T19:18:40.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2015-07-28T22:01:51.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC0 license is essentially a public domain dedication. Looking at the license deed, it does not depend on jurisdictions, as it waives all rights normally provided under the copyright law by the legal authorities of the jurisdiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob can take Alice's work freely, but Alice will still retain any moral rights that is entitled to her. You don't legally have to attribute Alice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If yes, may Bob publish it under his own name (i.e., not noting that Alice authored and published it under CC0), so that users would attribute him? (Of course users wouldn’t have to follow the rules from CC BY-SA, because the work is still also licensed under CC0; assuming that Bob didn’t make any modifications.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, yes you can, but consider the author's moral rights. In some jurisdictions, this include the right to be attributed properly, and this is a legal requirement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, to answer the question: yes, bob can relicense Alice's work, but must respect the moral rights of Alice, which can vary by jurisdiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T11:04:47.480" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T11:04:47.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1375" CreationDate="2015-07-28T23:22:20.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the terms can be, and are, so easily misunderstood most of us who have worked in this area avoid them and instead refer to specific licenses, which grant specific rights while reserving others. The Apache license, the partly or fully open versions of the Creative Commons family of licenses, and MIT's open-source license are among those which I've seen corporate lawyers approve of. The FSF/Gnu family has some versions (most notably the infamous &quot;infectious&quot; version, now mostly gone) which they wouldn't approve. And so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it's called free, freeware, shareware, open-source, or Fred, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;read and understand the licence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; before downloading, and if you can't live by the rules set in that license find another program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Free Software Foundation is certainly entitled to define what they mean when they use these terms... but there's no guarantee any other author/publisher agrees will use the terms exactly the same way. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Read and understand and obey the licence.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1031" LastEditorUserId="1031" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T00:31:20.250" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T00:31:20.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1383" CreationDate="2015-07-29T15:24:08.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, you can use a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; Open Source license for this wrapper program, but not a strong &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, to clear up something that has been raised in comments: As it is written I do not believe your question is about &lt;em&gt;reverse engineering&lt;/em&gt; a non-free C library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am working on python library that wraps a non-free C library. In order to develop this, I referenced the C library's copyrighted documentation. Because of that my function and variable names are the same as the non-free library's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this to mean that your python wrapper makes the functions and variables of the non-free C-library available for use in some python program that uses your wrapper to &quot;bridge&quot; the python program and the non-free C library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't mention the terms the non-free C library is made available under, but I am going to assume that it is All Rights Reserved (ARR), or at least under terms that does not allow redistribution alone or as part of a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what this question is about, then I do not believe the Appeals court's May 9, 2014 decision in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.potomaclaw.com/oracle-v-google-copyrightability-apis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Oracle vs Google&lt;/a&gt; apply.  This case was predominantly about reverse engineering, and the court ruled that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;structure, sequence and organization&lt;/a&gt; of the 37 API files Google had copied (in order to make &lt;em&gt;existing software&lt;/em&gt; that was based up Oracle's Java API simpler to port to Android.) was copyrightable. Because Google reused this in a competing product, Google was guilty of copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; copied an API, nor is your wrapper a derivative work of the API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've written a Python library wrapper that &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the documented API to a non-free C library in order to provide functional integration between python and said non-free library.  Since making it possible for programmers to use API functions and variables is the whole point of documenting an API, using the documented API as intended does not infringe the copyright of the API, even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the API itself is copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're allowed to do create a distribute this program without infringing copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's first assume you release your wrapper as ARR, with an explicit permission to combine the wrapper with the library. Will this create problems?  For instance, can you be sued if you do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice, but my &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; is that the answer is: &quot;no&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot distribute the non-free C library of course, so by itself, your wrapper will no do anything.  Python developers who want to use this have obtain a legal a copy of both an combine them themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having first determined that this is legal if you distribute your program as ARR, let's move on and see if you can also do it if your wrapper carry a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; Open Source license, such as MIT (Expat)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I see no problems.  Python developers who want to use this have obtain a legal a copy of both an combine them themselves.  However. the resulting derivative work &lt;em&gt;can not&lt;/em&gt; be distributed, because the the terms of the non-free C-library does not allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not believe you can distribute your wrapper under a strong copyleft license such as GPLv2 or GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did this, nobody could legally link your wrapper with the non-free library, because the resulting derivative&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; work would had be made available under GPL, and this is of course &lt;em&gt;incompatible&lt;/em&gt; with the C-library being ARR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) This is based upon the FSF's interpretation of linking. This interpretation is not universally accepted, but since there are plenty of other questions about this, I will no go into that discussion here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T18:30:04.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T18:30:04.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="133" CreationDate="2015-07-29T20:33:59.330" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sparr's&lt;/em&gt; original answer was good, but he should have &lt;em&gt;left in&lt;/em&gt; the bit about being sued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that the language used in CC0 constitutes a &lt;em&gt;legal hazard&lt;/em&gt; for anyone that receives a program under CC0 and uses it in good faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the infamous patent clause of CC0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical scenario that will create a legal hazard for you is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You work on a software project (it may be open source or ARR).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You see some other software (typically a library) that will fit very well into your project, and you notice that it is offered under the terms of CC0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You incorporate said library into your project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unknown to you, the library offered under the terms of CC0 contains patented code. The patent is owned by the Affirmer (the person that did the PD dedication, usually the initial author of the library).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After some time, for instance &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; your project has evolved into something successful and profitable - the Affirmer  surfaces with his submarine-patent and demands that you pay royalities to use the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, this patented library may be deeply integrated in your project and stopping using it may no longer be practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make sure he gets paid, the Affirmer can threaten to sue you &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you pay up.  &lt;em&gt;Because&lt;/em&gt; the CC0 dedication has the quoted sentence, you're going to have a real hard time defending yourself against the Affirmer's demands in court. In all probability, your cheapest option (at least if the Affirmer is not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; greedy) is to pay the patent royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you compare the CC0 with &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; free software licenses, such as GPLv3, you'll find this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you spot the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody would try to pull the submarine-patent trick with software licensed under GPLv3, it is very unlikely that they shall prevail if they sue you, as the license is &lt;em&gt;designed&lt;/em&gt; to make such a lawsuit fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that, if you choose to use a badly designed legal tool, which is what CC0 is, it is much &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; to intimidate you by into paying royalties, than if you stick to software that provide legal &lt;em&gt;immunity&lt;/em&gt; against this type of lawsuits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-29T21:45:25.533" LastActivityDate="2015-07-29T21:45:25.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T16:36:18.397" Score="0" ViewCount="1513" Body="&lt;p&gt;An interesting thought popped up to me earlier today as I was developing my project. My thought was whether I could charge royalties for a derivative (being used commercially) of my project. Would charging royalties allow my project to remain open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help narrow this down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to know about things such as patents and trademarks. Licenses such as the CC0 (though not considered open source) explicitly have clauses on patents and trademarks, and they don't bring these two items into the license with everything else. In a sense, using &quot;CC0&quot; patents/trademarks allows the original creator to legally demand royalties on patents and trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if it was a little unclear, but here is my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I [force] charge any royalties for derivatives of my open source project that are being used commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T10:08:23.477" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T11:23:13.133" Title="Can I charge a royalty for derivatives of my project that are used commercially?" Tags="|derivative-works|royalties|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-30T19:23:18.333" Score="11" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my Web server, I’m using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Content management system&quot;&gt;CMS&lt;/a&gt; licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, Version 3.0&quot;&gt;AGPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt;. I’m required to provide the source code of this CMS &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/650/138&quot; title=&quot;Do I have to offer the source of an AGPL (v3.0) licensed Web app even if I didn’t modify it?&quot;&gt;only if I have modified it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what exactly counts as a modification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly is a modification if I edit the &lt;strong&gt;core files&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, to change how a function works, to add new function, or to change the HTML of the backend template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about using &quot;intended&quot; ways of &lt;strong&gt;configuring&lt;/strong&gt; the CMS? For example, editing its configuration file (e.g., to provide the database login data) or changing settings in the backend (e.g., enabling some checkboxes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about using the built-in &lt;strong&gt;plugin manager&lt;/strong&gt;? For example, installing a new plugin (the plugin manager comes with a plugin browser, which automatically downloads and installs selected plugins), or uninstalling a pre-installed plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about &lt;strong&gt;creating a plugin&lt;/strong&gt; and adding it manually to the plugins folder (and then installing it with the built-in plugin manager)? While the plugin itself might be a derivative work whose source code has to be published in accordance with the AGPL 3.0, does installing this plugin &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; the CMS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about &lt;strong&gt;deleting files&lt;/strong&gt; the CMS ships with? For example, removing the guide &lt;code&gt;install.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T00:27:16.633" Title="What counts as a modification when using a CMS licensed under AGPL 3.0?" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1394" CreationDate="2015-07-30T22:11:27.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your project is free software, then you can't charge royalties for people using it. Free software implies that there is no restriction on use, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;freedom 0&lt;/a&gt;. “You can't use this unless you pay me” would be a restriction on use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the more liberal &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, you can charge the original recipient of the software, as in, you can make their use of the software subject to a fee. However you can't prevent them from distributing it further, without paying you or even informing you: that's spelled out in the very first clause of the OSD. Since clause 8 and clause 9 prevent restrictions from applying to a specific bundling of the software, I think that even if the original recipient is charged for use, they can use the legal loophole of redistributing the software to themselves, and using only that redistributed copy, which wouldn't be subject to your original usage restrictions. So you effectively can't restrict use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your license is a copyleft license, then even commercial users would have to respect the open source license. If you hold sole copyright over your project, or more generally if all the copyright holders agree, you may distribute it under a dual license: a copyleft one, and one that allows closed-source derivatives but requires a fee. This is fairly common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing your project under an open source license doesn't preclude charging for something other than the use of the source code. If you offer a service where people can run your software on your computers, you can charge for that. People would still not have to pay if they elect to run your software on their own computers or a third party's. Another common example is that if you hold a patent to an algorithm used by the software, you can distribute the code under an open source license but charge for its use. A few open source licenses (e.g. GPLv3) have the licensor waive patent rights, but most (including GPLv2) don't. I don't have an example in mind but I've seen patented algorithms where the patent holder charged royalties unless the algorithm was used in software that complied with certain compatibility standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastEditorUserId="60" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T11:23:13.133" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T11:23:13.133" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1395" CreationDate="2015-07-31T02:03:27.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, no case law about the AGPL exists, and opinions differs as to what actions results in the creation of a derivative work.  Until case law exists, we cannot know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSI's Lawrence Rosen (along with colleague Michael B. Einschlag) seem to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;say&lt;/a&gt; that the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; thing that will result in a derivative, is modification of core files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If their interpretation of the law is correct, then &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; except modification of the core files will create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there exists &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1207/does-sharing-a-file-format-make-two-programs-either-a-combined-or-derived-work/1215#1215&quot;&gt;case law&lt;/a&gt; (but not about open source) law that indicates that courts &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; rule on this on other criteria than those listed by Rosen and Einschlag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for the record: I believe Rosen and Einschlag are wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think anyone will dispute that if whatever modifications you do is &lt;em&gt;below&lt;/em&gt; the threshold of originality (i.e. they are trivial and not copyrightable), then the results of doing this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work, as &quot;copyrightability&quot; of the modifications is a legal prerequisite for something being a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go through your examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what about using &quot;intended&quot; ways of configuring the CMS? For example, editing its configuration file (e.g., to provide the database login data) or changing settings in the backend (e.g., enabling some checkboxes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  This cannot be a derivative, as making such changes to the configuration file are clearly below the threshold of originality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about using the built-in plugin manager? For example, installing a new plugin (the plugin manager comes with a plugin browser, which automatically downloads and installs selected plugins), or uninstalling a pre-installed plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is somebody else's plugin, freely available for download, then I would again say that what you've done (just downloading and installing it) is below the threshold of originality (i.e. not a derivative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about creating a plugin and adding it manually to the plugins folder (and then installing it with the built-in plugin manager)? While the plugin itself might be a derivative work whose source code has to be published in accordance with the AGPL 3.0, does installing this plugin modify the CMS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a &lt;em&gt;custom&lt;/em&gt; plugin that is not otherwise available (i.e. written by you, or somebody you've hired to do this), then creating the plugin &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; the threshold of originality and therefore a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether installing such a plugin would modify the CMS: Yes it would according the FSF's legal team's interpretation of the law about derivative works, but as noted initially, OSI's Larry Rosen seems to disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing FAQ for the Drupal CMS&lt;/a&gt; says this about plugins (known as &quot;modules&quot; or &quot;themes&quot;, depending on what they do):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes. Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal. If you distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Drupal licensing FAQ is written by real lawyers &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again: I believe the FSF and Drupal's lawyers has got this right, and that Rosen and Einschlag are wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about deleting files the CMS ships with? For example, removing the guide &lt;code&gt;install.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is below the threshold of originality, so the removal of this file does not create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T02:03:27.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1418" CreationDate="2015-07-31T02:46:27.767" Score="8" ViewCount="1739" Body="&lt;p&gt;The  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; has anti-patent clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 patent clause is &quot;liberty or death&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 patent clause requires all contributors to grant a royalty free patent license to all downstream recipients:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Most&lt;/em&gt; other free software licenses, including the &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; (Expat) license does not mention patents at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I license my software, containing patented ideas or methods where &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; own the patent right, under the MIT (Expat) license, will I be able to collect patent royalties from downstream recipients that use this MIT-licensed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this depend on jurisdiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will disclosure or non-disclosure of my patents (in &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; or similar) affect my chances of collecting royalties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer that cite relevant case law will be preferred, but if no case law on this exists, a well-argued answer will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T16:13:31.270" LastActivityDate="2024-03-20T12:42:38.570" Title="If I license software under the MIT license, will I be able to collect patent royalties?" Tags="|patents|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1400" CreationDate="2015-07-31T05:43:58.790" Score="41" ViewCount="57469" Body="&lt;p&gt;If software is licenced under a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; license, can it be used without restriction in a corporate/commercial environment? The software that I am refering to is QGIS which provides this description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qgis.org/en/site/about/#&quot;&gt;QGIS&lt;/a&gt; is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) licensed under the GNU General Public License. QGIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am of the understanding that it can be used (that the software is still considered free and opensource), while others in my office think differently when it is used in a commercial/corporate environment. They believe that once the software is used in a commercial environment, it is no longer considered free and falls under a difference licence (they didn't actually specify a difference licence, but was rather what would they believe would occur). We are not selling the software, but rather use it for analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone be able to shed some light on the subject to help clear things up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="345" LastEditorUserId="345" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T23:23:44.713" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T11:26:08.680" Title="Can GPL licenced software be used in corporate environments?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|software-use|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-07-31T06:24:28.530" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software licensed with any GNU license can be used and even modified everywhere, including in a corporate environment, without any restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However be aware that if you (or the company) ever make changes to the software and want to distribute it, it must be distributed with full source code, on the same license terms as the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if you make changes to the software and it is licensed using Affero license (eg. AGPL 3.0), and your company is providing web access to this software, then you'll also be required to publish full source code (including your changes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T08:50:13.833" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T08:50:13.833" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-07-31T06:24:43.040" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course free software can be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; and even &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; without restrictions in a corporate or for-profit environment!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Re-distribution&lt;/em&gt; of modified free software requires that you make the source of your modifications available - which some insists is a &quot;restriction&quot;. Without going into that debate, please see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL FAQ on internal distribution&lt;/a&gt;. It should be pointed out than when you purchase proprietary software for internal company use, the license on that do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow you to re-distribute it outside teh company. Often, a propretary software license will further restrict the number of computers inside your company that it may simultaneously be installed on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at some of the more common objections to free software you may find in a corporate environment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it is free software, I will not receive any support.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is simply not true for &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; free software. For instance, the Drupal CMS provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/support&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;several ways of receiving support&lt;/a&gt;. Some at no cost, drawing on the collective skills of thousands of dedicated and skilled developers and power users, some paid professional services.  If you don't trust gratis support, for all major free software distributions there exists companies that will provide you with the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; type of support you'll receive for proprietary software - for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other large corporations don't use free software.  Why should we experiment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is also false. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Hat&lt;/a&gt;, a company specializing in free software for corporate users: “More than 90% of Fortune Global 500 companies use Red Hat products and solutions.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Our company needs to buy and use a proprietary software to get a competitive edge.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you believe that, you could get ahead of the competition by picking free software as a starting point. Since you have the source code, you could go ahead and improve critical parts of it.  This will probably give you the edge faster than buying some proprietary software with no source code available.  Note that &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you start distributing binaries (or sell a internet-based service if the license on the software is AGPL), you are not obliged to share your improvements with &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;.  You're not going to be loved by the free software community if you do this, but there is nothing in the free software licenses that stops you from doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Won't programmers that make free software starve - or at least rapidly move on to some more profitable endeavour?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is no evidence of this. There exists &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1255/how-is-selling-floss-packages-for-monetary-compensation-a-viable-strategy/1256#1256&quot;&gt;profitable business models for free software&lt;/a&gt;, and many free software project that has been continued to be maintained and used for decades.  As long as there are engaged users, free software seems to be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Isn't free software written by amateurs that is unable to secure a job in the real software industry?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Indeed &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; free software are written by bozos, and you should not use it.  However, free software is a real industry, and free software companies with a successful business model pays a competitive salary to its staff. In addition, the ruthless peer review that takes place in competently run free software projects makes for a much more thorough quality assurance process than you'll find in some closed source projects.  And since you have the source code available, you could always get it vetted by a professional programmer to determine whether it is created by software professionals or not. But beware: Being free software is not &lt;em&gt;by itself&lt;/em&gt; a sign of high quality, (nor is being proprietary).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a free software project run out of steam, will it not leave our company high and dry?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Like in the world of proprietary software, where companies fail and even succesful companies &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macworld.com/article/1163747/life_after_iweb_the_state_of_web_design_on_the_mac.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;abandon&lt;/a&gt; its software, some free software projects also fail and are abandoned. There are never any guarantees that a software product will be maintained forever. However, when this happens with free software, it may not be the end of the road. Since you have the source code, you can get always pay somebody else to support and maintain it if you really need to continue using it.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can think of more objections, please add them to the question, and I'll try to address them. Let us make this the canonical question about corporate objections to free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T14:07:40.667" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="564" CreationDate="2015-07-31T08:42:29.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the very &lt;em&gt;specific case&lt;/em&gt; described in the question, Alice owns the copyright on the phrase: &quot;Adding dots is fun.&quot;  The &lt;em&gt;most correct&lt;/em&gt; attribution, if you re-use &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; this part, is to just credit Alice.&#xA;Assuming that this is a wiki, and anybody can add content without consulting other authors, attributing Bob and Carl would be morally wrong. You cannot be sure how they feel about this.  They may think adding dots are boring, and will embarrassed if they're publicly associated with adding dots being fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also add that in the case of &lt;em&gt;conventional&lt;/em&gt; multi-authored works (e.g. books and academic papers with more than one author), all co-authors has &lt;em&gt;agreed&lt;/em&gt; to have the final work published carried their byline, so  that would be different from the wiki-situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it should be noted that for many multi-authored works, no &lt;em&gt;revision history&lt;/em&gt; is available to outsiders, so when you use parts of the work, you have no of way of knowing who did what- In that case, your &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; option is to attribute &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; co-authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while not said explicitly, this question seem to be about use cases where the revision history is available to outsiders. This is typically the case with free software projects where the SCM-system is publicly accessible (e.g. projects hosted at GitHub), and free culture projects such as Wikis, where the editing history publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let us look at SE. While not really a Wiki, it allows user edits, and it makes the editing history publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some guidance about attributing questions ans answers pulled from StackExchange in this blogpost by SE co-founder Jeff Atwood: &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;Attribution required&lt;/a&gt;, where the most relevant line is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Show the author names for every question and answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, presumably, refer to the &lt;em&gt;publicly visible&lt;/em&gt; author names. Every non-wiki post on SE has a single, clearly identified, author.  There should be no need to dig into the revision history on SE, as user editing should only be trivial copy-editing (spelling corrections, language improvements, etc.) that would be below the threshold of creativity. Trivial copy-editing  need not be attributed. Unlike a wiki, &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt; changes that actually alters the meaning or message of a posting, is generally not allowed on SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we move on to &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; wikis, multiple edits by different contributors to a body of text tend to be much more &lt;em&gt;entangled&lt;/em&gt; than in the Bob, Alice, Carl string of edits in the OP's question.  In practice, it may not even be &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to sort out who did what.  Such entangelements are sometimes known as &lt;em&gt;massively collaborative projects&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;massively co-authored projects&lt;/em&gt; and depending on the number of co-authors, it becomes decreasingly practical to attribute all &lt;em&gt;individual&lt;/em&gt; co-authors by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem is addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/13232&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; by (then) vice president of the Creative Commons, Mike Linkswayer, and includes a summary of a survey conducted by the English and German Wikipedias regarding how contributors feel about what constitutes appropriate credit for using Wikipedia content. These are, in order of preference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the article must be given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collective credit (e.g. Wikipedia community).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Link to the version history must be given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For online use: link. For other uses: full list of authors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Full list of authors must always be copied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No credit is needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike does not conclude, but notes that the method ranked top in this survey is &quot;Link to the article&quot;, and that the the CC attribution license has since ver. 2.0 recognized the use of a link as a legitimate way to provide attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; it is no longer specified &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to attribute, instead this is delegated to the Licensor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in &lt;em&gt;any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor&lt;/em&gt; (including by pseudonym if designated); (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia guidelines&lt;/a&gt; for reusing contents made available under CC BY-SA says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So three alternate methods of attribution is suggested, and two of them involves using a hyperlink, not a long list of authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia &lt;strong&gt;Example [attribution] notice&lt;/strong&gt; (reproduced below) also contains no list of co-authors, just a link to the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This article uses material from the Wikipedia article&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable&quot;&amp;gt;&quot;Metasyntactic_variable&quot;&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;,&#xA;which is released under the&#xA;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot;&amp;gt;Creative Commons&#xA;Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the cases where the license is not a CC-license, or when the Licensor does not provide any guidance about how to attribute, you may need to review the specific license the material is made available under, and your use case for reusing the materials, in order to decide how to best fulfil the attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T08:47:45.760" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T08:47:45.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-07-31T08:47:56.193" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;These licenses are very suitable for use in a corporate environment. The licenses used by GNU are the Free Software Foundation family of licenses: GPL, LGPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These licenses have the restriction that you are obliged to include the source code and release your software under the same license &lt;em&gt;if you distribute the softeware&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't distribute the software, you don't have any further obligations. You do receive some freedoms though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are guaranteed to receive the source code, and you are free to modify it to suit your particular need.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are free to use the software for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license is the GPLv3 you receive a patent grant for any patents the publisher of the software has.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of software commonly used under the GPL are the Linux kernel and the rest of the GNU/Linux operating system, including the GCC compiler, Git, FileZilla and WordPress, just to name a few. The FireFox browser uses a similar copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all corporate environments make use of GPL licensed software. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fortune.com/2013/05/06/how-linux-conquered-the-fortune-500/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;90% of fortune 500 companies use Linux in some way&lt;/a&gt;, and there is a lot more GPL software than just Linux. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T14:52:56.277" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T14:52:56.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-07-31T12:11:22.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T12:11:22.543" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T12:11:22.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-07-31T12:11:22.543" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the GPL/GNU family of licenses: the various versions of the GPL, LGPL and AGPL." OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T12:43:55.567" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T12:43:55.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-07-31T18:22:30.470" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative considers the GNU &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; to be approved licenses, which means that they meet their &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.  Criteria for qualifying as Open Source licenses include &quot;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&quot; and &quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&quot;.  From a legal point of view, software covered by any of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot;&gt;many Open Source licenses&lt;/a&gt; would be allowable for use in a corporate/commercial environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not even required to accept the GNU license before running the software, and even if you did, the license states that you are free to run it for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License only address copying (or &quot;conveying&quot;, in GPLv3 terminology), not use.  In fact, you can use the software for any purpose you want, because &lt;em&gt;you aren't even required to accept the license&lt;/em&gt;.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section9&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar clause exists, for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; (paragraph 5) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.html&quot;&gt;LGPLv2&lt;/a&gt; (paragraph 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Library or its derivative works. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful, however, about sharing modified copies within the company.  If, for example, your company has international subsidiaries, a case could be made that a customization made by Acme LLC in the US that is used by Acme Ltd. in the UK is a conveyance that is covered by the GPL.  In that case, Acme LLC would be bound by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, each party is explicitly granted permission to run the code by GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;2. Basic Permissions.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&#xA;  This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And GPLv2 says this in paragraph 0 (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. &lt;strong&gt;The act of running the Program is not restricted,&lt;/strong&gt; and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="655" LastEditorUserId="655" LastEditDate="2015-07-31T19:24:08.890" LastActivityDate="2015-07-31T19:24:08.890" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-07-31T19:21:50.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has been said by everyone, there is no issue with a business using GPL licensed software within its organization. It happens all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that many of the answers and comments have raised a concern over distributing the software within the corporation, and its subsidiaries, etc. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1400/29&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, Tomasz states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However be aware that if you (or the company) ever make changes to the software and want to distribute it, it must be distributed with full source code, on the same license terms as the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is completely correct. But it can give the impression that you might be required to make the source available to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;, which is what scares people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the GPL requires you to make the source available to the people &lt;strong&gt;receiving the distribution&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, even if you were distributing it to a subsidiary in another country, as long as you provide them with the source you have met the license obligation. Such a distribution should also come with instructions not to release the software outside of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, it is perfectly possible to take an GPL licensed product, customize it heavily for internal use, and then distribute and use it widely through your organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explicitly covered in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted&#xA;  to the public?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any&#xA;  part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately,&#xA;  without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including&#xA;  companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use&#xA;  it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this now means you have all the hassles of maintaining a private fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T23:23:02.560" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1223" CreationDate="2015-07-31T22:17:24.430" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Stack Exchange is an example of proprietary software, then here are a few examples of open source projects that they use. Before I list the points though, I do want to highlight that although the question asked for software, Stack Exchange is more of a system, with many operations that they need to take. I've posted this answer namely as a way to help others to find further examples of such dependencies. Namely, Stack Exchange is well known across this community, so it may be more clear to everyone that visits this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackexchange.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Blog&lt;/a&gt;: (necessary for public communications, media relations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange blog is based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://jekyllrb.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jekyll&lt;/a&gt;, an open source project for powering blogs. Before, they used Wordpress. The blog looks amazing now, and I suggest that you check it out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.stackexchange.com/2014/11/announcing-bosun-our-new-open-source-monitoring-alerting-system/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bosun&lt;/a&gt;: (necessary for reliable operations, problem diagnosis, systems monitoring)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the monitoring system that Stack Exchange uses to make sure that their systems run smoothly without failure. It's able to forecast and predict failures, as well as maintenance on existing systems. You can check it out more on their blogpost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just examples that Stack Exchange uses in their everyday operations. I've posted this answer namely to help illustrate some examples that are indirectly seen by the active community on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T18:34:31.007" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-07-31T23:18:20.100" Score="4" ViewCount="871" Body="&lt;p&gt;A open software license generally outlines what conditions that a fellow software developer must follow in respect to the original project, be it someone who is plain out of the blue looking at it, and debating whether to do something to it, or whether it is a full-out fork or derivative. Basically, they just dictate what you can do. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the WTFPL makes absolutely clear it's single clause:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;0.&lt;/code&gt; You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many projects that are distributed to the general public are normally accompanied with the End User License Agreement, or EULA. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.avangate.com/avangate-resources/article/eula-software.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avangate&lt;/a&gt;: (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EULA (End User License Agreement) is, as its name shows it, a contract between the software developer and a potential user. By means of this contract it is established that the developer of the software is its de facto owner, and that a copy of the respective software bought from a vendor (or downloaded from the Internet) only licenses it to a user...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end user is only allowed to use it as long as certain terms are respected, and is also prohibited from any alterations or uses of the software without the specific consent of its rightful owner, the software company/developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does another developer count as a potential user? To me, it looks like yes: They are using the software, just in a different way from someone within the general public: they are using the code, but not necessarily the intended functionality, but they are still &amp;quot;using&amp;quot; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from what a &amp;quot;potential user&amp;quot; is really defined as, it sounds like an End User License Agreement is a license. If the developers behind a fork/derivative are &amp;quot;users&amp;quot; of the original project, could they be subject to the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement? Is an EULA the same thing as a license? Where is it ever appropriate to use an EULA in a project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T11:57:49.587" Title="What is the difference between a license, and an EULA when forking a project?" Tags="|distribution|derivative-works|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1413" CreationDate="2015-08-01T00:06:13.333" Score="19" ViewCount="3524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Java and a few java libraries provide a &quot;classpath&quot; exception. To me, this seems similar to the LGPL's linking exceptions. What is the difference between the GPL with a classpath exception and the LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T20:40:38.317" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:31:11.853" Title="What is the difference between GPL + Classpath exception vs LGPL" Tags="|gpl|exceptions|lgpl|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-01T02:43:11.603" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chromium development is still very much active on &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Code&lt;/a&gt;, which will turn read-only on August 25th 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BWfHh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BWfHh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chromium on Google Code&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the plans to move Chromium development?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="447" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T09:50:55.883" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T09:50:55.883" Title="Chromium move once Google Code becomes read-only" Tags="|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2015-08-02T07:13:11.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1411" CreationDate="2015-08-01T04:04:13.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you click on the link &amp;quot;this post&amp;quot;, you will see &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/ReadOnlyTransition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains more information about the process, including this  text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;previously announced&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;most of&lt;/strong&gt; Google Code will become read-only on August 25th, 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are still working with Google-affiliated projects (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/chromium/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/p/chromium&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/p/android/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/p/android&lt;/a&gt;) to get them migrated to other tools and make their projects read-only by the end of the year. &lt;strong&gt;These projects will remain read-write until we can transition all their data off of Google Code&lt;/strong&gt;. (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it says that you will be able to work on &lt;em&gt;Chromium&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;Android&lt;/em&gt;) in read-write mode &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; Google decides where to migrate them to some other tool chosen by Google (e.g. GitHub).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When&lt;/em&gt; a decision to migrate is made, it will probably be announced on that same page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T04:11:02.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1410" CreationDate="2015-08-01T04:43:08.490" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL and GPL + the Classpath exception share the property that if you link code under these terms into your  program, the resulting derivative work does not have to be made available as free software. Instead you can copy and distribute the resulting binary executable under terms of your choice.  This means that the source code does not have to be provided to downstream recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot;&gt;LGPL 2.1&lt;/a&gt; says (sec. 6):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;LGPL 3&lt;/a&gt; says (sec. 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e.: the LGPL permit &lt;em&gt;modifications&lt;/em&gt; of the combined work and &lt;em&gt;reverse engineering&lt;/em&gt; for debugging such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not much freedom, but apparently some people did not like the explicit permission to do modify the work and to make use of reverse engineering, so  GPL + the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html&quot;&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; does not contain such a permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T04:43:08.490" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="175" CreationDate="2015-08-01T05:06:08.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to answer this by dipping down in the actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;, and some of the work that led to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early on in the process to create CC version 4.0, it was objected that a too strict ban on &quot;Technological Protection Measures - TPM&quot; (lawyer-speak for DRM) that had been used in previous version would disallow use of CC licensed materials on too many platforms, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Several popular game and media distribution platforms, such as the PlayStation and most modern digital TVs (via HDMI/HDCP), require TPMs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Apple's iOS App Store app distribution platform uses the combination of FairPlay TPM (and perhaps other measures) to control use of iOS apps.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All Japanese terrestrial broadcasting is protected by a TPM. [...] When the image is CC-BY-ND, it is impossible to comply with the current language and broadcast CC materials over terrestrial TV in Japan. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0/Technical_protection_measures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern that locking-out CC materials from these platforms would make people decide to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use the CC license, as they wanted their materials distributed through these channels, even if that gave their audience/users less freedom.  If people opt to not use CC, CC loses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after a very long discussion, the CC-community decided to &lt;em&gt;keep&lt;/em&gt; the strong anti-DRM clauses of the previous versions, so also in CC ver. 4.0, there is an &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; anti-DRM-clause (sec 2(a)(4)) in ver. 4.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not [...] apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It uses the phrase &quot;Effective Technological Measures&quot;. This is also lawyer-speak for DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the license actually ban you from distributing any CC-licensed materials through re-distributions channels that use DRM, such as &lt;em&gt;iOS App Store&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Steam&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do this anyway, it is unlikely that CC is going to go after you for &quot;inappropriate use of a CC license&quot; &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, Creative Commons has &lt;em&gt;anticipated&lt;/em&gt; that this will probably happen from time to time. Many creators distributing on these platforms may not even be &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt; of the use of DRM. In order to mitigate this, the CC version 4.0 licenses explicitly allows circumvention of the DRM.  In the license text, you'll find this text (sec. 2(a)(4)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this waiver is made by the Licensor is because anti-circumvention laws are supposed to protect the owner of the copyright to the materials (i.e. the Licensor) from illegal use.  &quot;Effective Technological Measures&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; supposed to be used for &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; purposes, such has helping the re-distributor in locking-in customers. So only the copyright-owner can authorize DRM, and only copyright-owner can authorize circumvention of DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally wish they had left out the &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; anti-DRM-clause and just allowed circumvention, but the anti-DRM stance is very strong in the CC community, so the &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; anti-DRM-clause is still there in CC ver. 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that the permit circumvention clause in CC 4.0 is the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; as the one in GPLv3, and was indeed inspired by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T15:45:14.760" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T15:45:14.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1409" CreationDate="2015-08-01T05:49:11.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say that &quot;many projects that are distributed to the general public are normally accompanied with the End User License Agreement, or EULA&quot;.  However, but AFAIK, &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of these are &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt; projects, so such projects are not on-topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you did add an EULA to a project that already had a free software license, this would simply be dual-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing means that users can &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; which license they want. If the EULA imposes &lt;em&gt;less freedom&lt;/em&gt; than the free software license, users would just choose the free software license and ignore the EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the free software license is a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; free software license, written by lawyers so make &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; that additional notices that project owners may add can not take away from the user the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;four essential freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, dual-licensing with an EULA is both harmless and meaningless. Users can simply choose to ignore the EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does another developer count as a potential user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strike out &quot;potential&quot;.  A developer is a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the developers behind a fork/derivative are &quot;users&quot; of the original project, could they be subject to the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me qualify that a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original project came with a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; free software license such as GPL (any version), the developers behind a fork could choose GPL, and then delete the &quot;EULA&quot; from their fork and ignore whatever it said.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original project came with a &quot;crayon&quot; license (such as the WTFL), the legal consequences of also having an EULA in the project would be &lt;em&gt;legal hazard&lt;/em&gt; if you created a fork.  If somebody decided to sue for violating the EULA, you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; lose.  Despite claims about being &quot;absolutely clear&quot;, it is obvious that this particular license is written by bozos, not lawyers. For instance, it doesn't say how to interpret any &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; licenses that comes with the project. And since there is no real guidance about what takes &lt;em&gt;precedence&lt;/em&gt; if the terms of the WTFL and the EULA is inconsistent, the legal outcome of a dispute about would uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is an EULA the same thing as a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &quot;End User &lt;strong&gt;License&lt;/strong&gt; Agreement&quot;, so the answer is clearly &quot;yes&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where is it ever appropriate to use an EULA in a project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to to appear as a clueless moron that know nothing about free software licensing, then adding an EULA to a free software project is a good start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you also want to make sure your users are confused about what your licensing terms really means, then using WTFL + EULA dual-licensing would be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T06:04:29.660" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T06:04:29.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="434" CreationDate="2015-08-01T10:29:41.903" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons suite of licenses is built from &lt;em&gt;four&lt;/em&gt; basic components that also appear in the name of the license.  These components are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution (BY)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike (SA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NonCommercial (NC) - &lt;strong&gt;Non-Free&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NoDerivs (ND) - &lt;strong&gt;Non-Free&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter two are considered &lt;strong&gt;Non-Free&lt;/strong&gt; by Creative Commons, so if at least one of those components are included in a CC license, the license is not considered to be, a &quot;Free Culture License&quot;, and it's not advertised as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that of the six CC licenses, only CC BY and CC BY-SA are a Free Culture Licenses. In addition, Creative Commons say the CC0 legal tool (it is not a license) can be used for Free Cultural Works. This means that the following are considered by the Creative Commons organization as &quot;free&quot; tools and licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the following four CC-licenses are not free:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-ND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-NC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-ND-NC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terminology for &quot;Free Culture&quot; used by the Creative Commons corresponds to the criteria for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Cultural Works definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T17:11:46.203" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T17:11:46.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1394" CreationDate="2015-08-01T11:31:50.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for clarifying the question, which is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I [force] charge any royalties for derivatives of my open source project that are being used commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least not if you use a real free software license) that goes to some lengths to guarantee the user the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four essential freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, as charging royalties would conflict with the freedom to use (run) and freedom to distribute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freedom to distribute (freedoms 2 and 3) means you are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that whoever distributes or otherwise uses your program cannot do so &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; they pay you royalties would violate those essential freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you are not interested in patents or trademarks, but as a bonus &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;, you'll get those answered as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks are irrelevant. You're not allowed to use a trademark without permission, no matter what type of license is used, so just modify the software to not show it. There is no way to force anyone to pay for your free software even if you've trademarked it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for collecting royalties on patents: If your license is GPLv2, GPLv3 and AGPL, please note that all of these have &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; anti-patent clauses that would also prevent you from collecting patent royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for licenses that don't mention patents up front, such as the MIT license, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, &lt;strong&gt;free of charge&lt;/strong&gt;, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software &lt;strong&gt;without restriction&lt;/strong&gt;, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: [...] (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not as iron-clad as the anti-patent clauses of the GPL-licenses, the general language promising &lt;em&gt;unrestricted&lt;/em&gt; rights to use and the rights to distribution &lt;em&gt;free of charge&lt;/em&gt; will make it &lt;em&gt;very difficult&lt;/em&gt; for a licensor to collect &lt;em&gt;any money&lt;/em&gt;, for whatever reason, if the software is offered under the MIT license. It is very likely that if you hold a patent, and try to collect, the court will rule that by using those exact words, you've waived your right to collect &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; royalties - including patent royalties - on use and distribution of the licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T14:23:55.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2015-08-01T13:55:26.833" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a license does not mention patents, it does not grant a license to patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You hold a patent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You implement some software which uses the methods covered by the patent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You publish that software and attach an MIT license, or some other license that never says the word 'patent.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have not granted any patent rights. On the other hand, you also have not advertised the existence of the patent. Note the usual fine print on physical objects that lists the patents involved. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.webblaw.com/resources/faq/patents.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.webblaw.com/resources/faq/patents.htm&lt;/a&gt;, you can't claim damages from someone who infringes your patent unless you disclose in this fashion. It might also be considered &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; to warn people that the use of your software puts them in a position where they need a patent license from you if they realize economic gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T13:55:26.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-08-01T15:53:40.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest way to think about the GPL is that it means you have to distribute software in the form of source code. You can distribute pre-compiled binaries as well, if you like, but the primary form of software is source and that's what you get and give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More pithily: binaries are optional, source is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this has very little impact on whether a person or company can use the source code they have obtained obtain, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1068" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T15:53:40.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1394" CreationDate="2015-08-01T16:11:16.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer depends a lot on what you are referring to when you say &quot;derivative&quot;, who is making said derivative, and what kind of &quot;royalty&quot; you'd like to force, and what you mean by &quot;commercial&quot;. One might infer from your question as worded that you are referring to a fork of an open source project that is making money off the software somehow and you'd like to collect money for each user they have. If that's the case the answer is simply no. However there are many other possible ways you could mean derived, and other ways to collect fee's. Dual licensing, Charging for source, binaries, and other distributions, charging for plugins, or more feature rich versions, and requiring your competitor to rebrand come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you license the original work as GPLv3, as the copyright holder (presuming you're the sole or otherwise have a contributor license agreement that prevents them from being copyright holders). You can still license a derived work as proprietary under the same kind of dual licensing that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.qt.io/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Qt&lt;/a&gt;, and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MySQL&lt;/a&gt; use to release proprietary plugins, and other commercial derivatives. Basically as a copyright holder, you can relicense at will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the developer of a GPL-covered program bound by the GPL? Could the developer's actions ever be a violation of the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the GPL is a license from the developer for others to use, distribute and change the program. The developer itself is not bound by it, so no matter what the developer does, this is not a “violation” of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, if the developer does something that would violate the GPL if done by someone else, the developer will surely lose moral standing in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL explicitly allows you to charge redistribution, built binaries, documentation, and support. However, it  require that people building binaries, or that have paid for your source, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be required to charge for redistributing those. Basically once someone else has the source they can do all of those things too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some relevant sections of the GPL FAQ pertaining to my statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowRequireFee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to require that anyone who receives the software must pay me a fee and/or notify me?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. In fact, a requirement like that would make the program non-free. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the definition of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required to pay anyone a fee for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can charge people a fee to get a copy from you. You can't require people to pay you when they get a copy from someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLRequireAvailabilityToPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also pull a Mozilla and require that your trademark, e.g FireFox, only be applied to binaries build by you, Mozilla. If someone else builds the binaries they must use a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may distribute unchanged official binaries (i.e., the installer file available for download for each platform (code + config) and not the program executable) downloaded from www.mozilla.com or www.mozilla.org to anyone in any way, subject to governing law, without receiving any further permission from Mozilla. If you want to distribute the unchanged official binaries using the Mozilla Marks, you may do so, without receiving any further permission from Mozilla, as long as you comply with this Trademark Policy and you distribute them without charge. However, you must not remove or change any part of the official binary, including the Mozilla Marks. On your website or in other materials, you may truthfully state that the software you are providing is an unmodified version of a Mozilla application, keeping in mind the overall guidelines for the use of Mozilla Marks in printed materials, detailed above. We suggest that, if you choose to provide visitors to your website the opportunity to download Mozilla product, you do so by means of a link to our site, to help ensure faster, more reliable downloads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Trademark Policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One trick, that you might do is AGPLv3 the source, which means if anyone outside of the copyright holder is using it (including over the network) and modified it, they must distribute their source changes. You could then prevent, using that trademark policy the use of your trademark, and allow relicensing under less restrictive terms if they were to pay you. I am not a lawyer, I would ensure that AGPL allows the craziness of the Trademark Policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="1060" LastEditDate="2015-08-01T19:08:18.313" LastActivityDate="2015-08-01T19:08:18.313" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1422" CreationDate="2015-08-01T20:00:04.463" Score="26" ViewCount="3619" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a case between Google and Oracle over the use of Java and it's standard library on the Google Android operating system. From [this article]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;To recap: Oracle accused Google of copying some of its Java computer code when it wrote Android. Android itself wasn't the issue. Android is different than Java. But Google wanted developers who work with Java, a popular language for web apps, to jump to Android. So it incorporated Java's application programming interfaces (APIs) into Android. This allowed them to quickly convert their apps to Android and it meant that the millions of programmers trained on Java would be familiar with Android, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Oracle sued claiming that the APIs were copyrighted. But the judge ruled that APIs are not subject to copyright laws&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;On Friday, an appellate court just overturned that loss, and said APIs are subject to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/762/1060&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, Java is Open Source, and was at the time Google forked ( used loosely to mean copied some pieces of code), AFAIK. I'm not interested in whether APIs are copyright-able, let's assume they are (since that's where the case left off). How is what Google did not permissible under the Open Source license that it's distributed under (AFAIK GPLv2 (or 3?) with Classpath exception)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T14:25:06.710" Title="How is Oracle suing Google for copyright infringement when Java is Open Source?" Tags="|gpl|law|exceptions|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1421" CreationDate="2015-08-01T20:38:22.070" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;First Google never &quot;forked Java&quot; for Android. Google implemented its own Java for Android, but when doing so copied the API of &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;(and also copied a method named &lt;code&gt;rangeCheck&lt;/code&gt; of 9 lines of utterly trivial code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must to be careful when you say &quot;Java&quot;. Oracle has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/open-source/overview/index.html&quot;&gt;licensed &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt; under GPLv2 with the classpath extension&lt;/a&gt;. This is an open source project consisting of legacy code from the Sun Java project (taken over by Oracle). Oracle has never objected to the API or code from &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt; to be used in open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a closed source &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt;. This includes Oracle’s implementation of Java Plugin and Java WebStart, Oracle JDK Flight Recorder, as well as third party  components like a graphics rasterizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software like Android Studio expects &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; API to be used, not the &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt; API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oracle's infringement suit against Google is about the API to the &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T07:41:00.860" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T07:41:00.860" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1425" CreationDate="2015-08-02T02:54:57.537" Score="5" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.v-front.de/2013/08/a-myth-busted-and-faq-esxi-is-not-based.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; blog entry says, although the command line interface of the ESXi server (the virtualization host platform of the VMWare vSphere) isn't derived from Linux, but it is an independently developed, proprietary product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common misconception, that ESXi is a Linux, because its command line interface is very similar. It is true, but in the deeps there is a kernel which is completely different from the Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, this kernel, the VMKernel, uses a lot of different Linux drivers ported into it. Of course, its developers doesn't bored to develop independent drivers, they have simply imported them from the already available Linux kernel sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the &lt;em&gt;driver&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;modules&lt;/em&gt; of the VMKernel are Linux-derived products, thus they must be released on GPLv2. And, as I know, on the GPLv2 is it possible to sell software, but the owner must also release its source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having the source code of the VMKernel-ported drivers would make also possible to develop VMKernel drivers independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as I know, no part of the VMKernel was released in source form until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it possible? Or I know something badly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T05:03:07.233" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T01:28:44.217" Title="Should the source code of the Linux drivers ported to the VMKernel be released?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1424" CreationDate="2015-08-02T05:01:46.563" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think it is possible to answer this question with a &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot; at the present time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On March 5th 2015, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/05/vmware_sued_for_gpl_violation_by_linux_kernel_developer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VMware was sued for GPL violation&lt;/a&gt; and the main basis for this lawsuit was the integration of Linux device drivers in the proprietary VMKernel. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservatory&lt;/a&gt; is helping to fund the lawsuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SFC's FAQ argues&lt;/a&gt; that the GPL is violated by the VMKernel, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vmware.com/company/news/vmware-update-to-mr-hellwigs-legal-proceedings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VMware argues&lt;/a&gt; that it is not. Neither statement contains enough information to make it clear who is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until we have the final words from the courts about this, the only answer that can be given is that we do not know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T01:28:44.217" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T01:28:44.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-02T05:44:48.503" Score="5" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a lawsuit between Mattell regarding CPHack. As I remember, Mattell bought a company who made a product under the GPL, rescinded the license and sued all those who redistributed original or modified code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The court upheld Mattell, saying that since no one payed money to them, there was no true license and as Mattell is the owner of the code, they can &quot;unlicense&quot; it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a danger to GPL or BSD software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1079" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T09:07:59.677" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T09:07:59.677" Title="Have open source licenses been shut down in court?" Tags="|licensing|law|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-02T05:57:39.750" Score="7" ViewCount="1938" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I made a somewhat complicated website, and I want it (the layout/JavaScript) to be under a copyleft license (but not the text), which license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to pull others' forks so I have to obey my own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would GPL require that all the content also be licensed under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1080" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-08-22T22:01:44.337" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T22:01:44.337" Title="What copyleft license should I use for my website's HTML/CSS/JavaScript?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|copyleft|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1426" CreationDate="2015-08-02T07:13:53.713" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for the record: &lt;a href=&quot;http://tbtf.com/resource/cphack-history.html&quot;&gt;Mattel didn't &lt;em&gt;buy&lt;/em&gt; CPHack&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; was not released under GPL (but under an home-made variation based upon the GPL - a so-called &quot;crayon&quot; license), and no attempt to &quot;unlicense&quot; the code was ever made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a brief rundown of what happened: Mattel claimed &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; infringed on the copyright of &lt;em&gt;Cyber Patrol 4&lt;/em&gt;, and threatened to sue. The programmers behind &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; decided not to risk it in court, but &lt;em&gt;voluntarily&lt;/em&gt; assigned the copyright of &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; to Mattel on March 28th 2000, in return for not being sued for copyright violation and damages.  It should be noted that Mattel's copyright infringement claim was never tried in court.  If this claim had been put in front of a judge, I doubt that it would have prevailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After being assigned the copyright of &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt;, Mattel's lawyers started sending out legal threats (dubbed &quot;spampoenas&quot;) to sites that mirrored &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt;.  These did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; say that the mirror sites infringed the &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; copyright (now held by Mattel), but instead accused the mirror sites of acting &quot;in concert with&quot; the program's original authors.  On September 27th 2000, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that these legal threats could safely be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that the license in question was a &quot;crayon&quot; license, not GPL, that there is no evidence that Mattel believed that holding the copyright of the code would permit it to be &quot;unlicensed&quot;, and that nothing (except the bogus legal threats Mattel sent out to re-distributors) was ever tested in court. All this means is that the &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; incident is not really a good example to to refer to if you want an answer to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can anyone acquiring the rights to a free program &quot;unlicense&quot; it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we dismiss the &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; incident as irrelevant, and try to answer this directly, I believe the answer is: No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is supported by the fact that such &quot;unlicensing&quot; has (AFAIK) &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; happened, and that Mattel's lawyers, in the &lt;em&gt;CPHack&lt;/em&gt; case, did not try to &quot;unlicense&quot; the program. They did not even have this as &lt;em&gt;plan B&lt;/em&gt;, when &lt;em&gt;plan A&lt;/em&gt; (to prevent re-distribution of by alleging to re-distributors was &quot;acting in concert&quot; with the original developers), failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone that acquires the copyright of a free program can of course &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; distributing the free version, and if they hold the sole copyright they can go on to create a non-free fork and distribute that as binary-only.  But they can't &quot;unlicense&quot; the pre-fork copies that already exist. People will always be able to improve on, and continue to distribute, the free version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only think of &lt;em&gt;one thing&lt;/em&gt; that will make a court invalidate a free software license - and that is if the free software license is found to have  never been valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical case would be that somebody got hold of the source code of a  proprietary program (say the leaked source code of MS Word), and started to distribute a derivative work of this (perhaps somewhat disguised) as free software under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a case, the GPL is void. To distribute and license a derivative work you need to have permission from the original owner. If you don't have this permission, you can't distribute the derivative at all, nor are you allowed to stick your own license on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-04T03:34:45.640" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T03:34:45.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1427" CreationDate="2015-08-02T08:23:39.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let's look at your content concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would GPL require that all the content also be licensed under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, all variations of the GPL has some clause that ensures that any content is &lt;em&gt;excluded&lt;/em&gt; from the license. Here is the text used in AGPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their &lt;em&gt;nature extensions of the covered work&lt;/em&gt;, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an &quot;aggregate&quot; if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate &lt;em&gt;does not cause this License to apply to the other parts&lt;/em&gt; of the aggregate. (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the legalize may seem hard to parse, it is just a reminder that copyright law does not regard the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of any program code or markup used to create the layout and functionality for that content. Instead, such a combination is a said to be a mere &lt;em&gt;aggregate&lt;/em&gt; and that the copyleft clause of the license does not apply to &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; parts (i.e. the non-code) of that aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cited clause in the AGPL is not really required, as it is just a reminder stating that this separation between &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; is a part of copyright law, but it is helpful to have such a reminder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that such a clause is absent from CC BY-SA.  This is because the CC-licenses are created &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; for content. However, you can still refer to copyright law and just state that your content is a mere aggregate and shall not be licensed under any CC-license. However, Creative Commons do not recommend that you use CC-licenses for software, and I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is need to worry about &lt;em&gt;the license&lt;/em&gt; being applied to your content, if you intend that &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt; should use your HTML and Javascript &lt;em&gt;good design practice&lt;/em&gt; would be to separate the two.  This means that instead of making your entire website (including its content) available for sharing (by putting it on GitHub or similar site), you should create a proper &lt;em&gt;template&lt;/em&gt; consisting of only the components (HTML, CSS, Javascript) you &lt;em&gt;want to share&lt;/em&gt; + some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lipsum.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dummy content&lt;/a&gt; where necessary.  Finding your &lt;em&gt;entire site&lt;/em&gt; (code + real content) on GitHub may &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1209/can-i-adapt-a-cc-by-sa-licensed-webpage-to-host-rights-reserved-copyrighted-cont&quot;&gt;confuse&lt;/a&gt; some people, and will also make it harder for them to use your template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also want a &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; license, which means we're left with: GPLv2, GPLv3, and AGPLv3.   (CC BY-SA is also copyleft, but it is already deemed unsuitable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is for a website, forks may not be distributed, but instead used for alternative web-sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the copyleft clauses in GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and CC BY-SA) &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; applies in case of re-distribution, they may not be effective making sure a modified website-design being made publicly available.  This means that all these licenses are less suitable for a website-design if you care about copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4303/is-there-any-difference-between-the-gpl-and-agpl-for-code-executed-in-the-browse&quot;&gt;Some people argue&lt;/a&gt; that there is &lt;em&gt;no difference&lt;/em&gt; between GPL and AGPL for code executed in the &lt;em&gt;browser&lt;/em&gt;. However, there is no consensus about this being the case. AFAIK, the applicability of GPL to the client side components of SaaS has &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; been tested in court. Because of this uncertainty, I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; recommend using GPL for HTML, CSS or Javascript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.  This is a variant of GPLv3. The difference (compared to GPLv3) is that AGPLv3 requires anyone who creates a derivative work, based upon your HTML and JavaScript, and makes the result available on the world wide web, to provide some means to download their modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T08:24:01.293" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-08-02T11:52:32.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page for more information, it is written by same people that wrote GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T11:52:32.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-02T12:05:14.543" Score="7" ViewCount="781" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is a follow-up on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1223/are-there-examples-of-proprietary-software-that-functionally-depends-on-free-sof&quot;&gt;Are there examples of proprietary software that functionally depends on free software?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this is not a duplicate, as &quot;copylefted&quot; (and some more, see full list below) are added as criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can no longer add those criteria to the previous question, because it has already got a good answer. Adding new criteria would invalidate the accepted answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Here is the &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there examples of composite programs that involve both proprietary software and free software &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; that also meet the following six criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The free software component that is part of the composite is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; available under a strong copyleft license (no permissive license, no dual-license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The free software component does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow some exception to strong copyleft (i.e. no LGPL, no linking exception, classpath exception, system library exception, kernel exception, font exception, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The link that exists between the two programs is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one program interprets the other's data&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The composite is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a mere aggregate, where the free program just happens to be on the same file system or same media as the proprietary software, with no functional linking between the two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The composite work is &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; under non-free terms (not only used privatly).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A court of law has declared the distribution lawful, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the distribution has &lt;em&gt;never been challenged&lt;/em&gt; in a court of law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last requirement would exclude &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1424/should-the-source-code-of-the-linux-drivers-ported-to-the-vmkernel-be-released&quot;&gt;WMkernel&lt;/a&gt; from being used as example, as this has been challenged in a court of law (the decision is currently pending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well known that opinions differs between FSF, OSI and TLF about what type of linkage that triggers the copyleft clause.  My goal here is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to settle that dispute, or even to come up the the definitive answer about this (I don't even think that is possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I want to do, is to locate &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; meeting the six criteria listed above.  Yes, such examples &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be  &quot;a legal disaster waiting to happen&quot; (to quote a critic of the original question), but that is not the point. By identifying such examples and study them, we may learn something about what types of composites exist and that (so far) has not been challenged (or has prevailed) about copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I am looking for answers that clearly identify the components of the composite program, their functional interdependency, and how they communicate or are linked.  The answer may also contain references to legal theory about this topic, but please note I am not looking for &quot;mere theory&quot;, as I already is familiar with the theoretical positions of FSF, OSI and TLF. Any theory need to be connected to real examples, and its relevance to the example (if not obvious), should be pointed out in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Caveat:&lt;/strong&gt;  Do not even &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about acting on any of the examples or analysis that appear in answers as being authoritative.  This area is legally tangled and if you are going to create such a composite, you must either hire a lawyer to advice you, or you must secure explicit up-front permission to combine works from the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T15:32:02.160" Title="Are there examples of proprietary software that functionally depends on copylefted software?" Tags="|copyleft|distribution|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1434" CreationDate="2015-08-02T14:53:37.857" Score="9" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;As manager of several free software projects, I am familiar with feature requests that users of my project submit to its public issue queue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the suggestions are good, but having limited resources available, there is often no way I can assign a feature request to a member of our core development team.  Core team members are on a salary, and in order to  pay them, they have to do paid work (including working on feature-requests somebody will &lt;em&gt;pay for&lt;/em&gt; having implemented). Our contract with paying clients makes sure that the result of this for-pay work always makes it way back into the free software distribution we make available for everyone, but there is little overlap between what paying clients request, and what is requested by members of the public. As a result there is always a huge backlog of feature requests coming from users that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; paying clients of our company and that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; willing to sponsor development. I.e. they want it  for free. I've nothing against users that prefer to get their pet feature added for free instead of paying us to add it, I've just not yet found a sensible way to oblige.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already have in place a pretty good system for managing and reviewing user's pull-requests, as well as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt; that makes sure that user contributions can safely be merged into our project without creating future problems for our company or for  downstream recipents of our software. We're just not getting as many as we would like of these pull-requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first thought that we could provide additional support and some hand-holding to get the person requesting the feature to implement it. But after trying this out, we discovered that these users are not developers - they are literally &lt;em&gt;just using&lt;/em&gt; our software. So the person requesting the feature is simply not &lt;em&gt;capable&lt;/em&gt; of implementing the feature and submit a pull-request for review. To keep this question simple, just assume that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; these feature requests comes from non-developers unwilling or unable to sponsor development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given that the core development team can't provide this service without pay - how can I encourage &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; to implement features requested by &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the &lt;em&gt;best practices&lt;/em&gt; when dealing with feature requests from the community, given that I want to minimize the cost of doing this for the company, while at the same time encouraging capable users to contribute pull-requests that implements (some of) the requested features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid this being closed as &quot;too broad&quot; or &quot;opinion based&quot;, I am looking for specific strategies, backed up with references to real free software projects that has successfully encouraged and mobilized users to contribute in this way.  The strategies can either be taken for relevant literature, or from personal experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-02T14:59:35.767" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T07:24:58.327" Title="How can I encourage users to work on other user's feature requests?" Tags="|community|contributor-agreements|feature-requests|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2015-08-02T15:10:54.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a matter of community building. I've seen several variations on this theme in the Apache communities I've worked on.  I offer them for what they are worth, which might be nothing to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No such luck: open source communities are composed of people with itches. You can't make someone scratch someone else's itch. When people submit feature requests, ask them to submit a patch that implements it. Obviously, this is not helpful for end-users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mild Blackmail: ask new would-be committers to work on the backlog of feature requests and bugs as a prerequisite to being given permission to commit -- always assuming that you &lt;em&gt;grant&lt;/em&gt; permission to commit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Esprit de corps: Some communities develop a real feeling of collective pride and responsibility for the 'product', and this results in volunteers working on things just for the good of the product. &lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, in my experience, the more obvious it is that some people are being paid and managed to work on it, the less likely it is for volunteers to fill in, except when those volunteers are scratching their own, personal, itches. Esprit-de-corp is unlikely to develop, in my view, in an environment where only employees of a company have commit rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow voting on feature requests. This creates some social pull in the direction of implementing popular feature requests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you work for a commercial enterprise, your commercial enterprise's marketing department can help with the third item. You can't pay these people, but you can offer recognition and swag. Apache is very diffident about this, due to our concern to avoid commercial domination of projects, but you don't have that problem. Heck, you could even consider game-ification along the lines of Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T15:10:54.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2015-08-02T15:58:46.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Atlassian (the publisher of tools like Confluence and JIRA) has published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+Policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Feature Implementation Policy&lt;/a&gt;, which may be of some use. While not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; what you're looking for in that Atlassian still implement the features themselves, it does detail how they deal with scheduling feature requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, to get people to do something they're not &lt;em&gt;obliged&lt;/em&gt; to do, you need to provide an incentive. This is the most important consideration. When someone submits a feature to you, recognise that they've put a lot of work into it and reward them somehow. This could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;monetary: a small (£10 maybe) reward - the official staff need &lt;em&gt;salaries&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;rewards&lt;/em&gt; have no minimum value&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cosmetic: if your app has networking features, give them publically displayed status&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;swag: something tangible, a mug, a t-shirt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;privilege: let them do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to make it as easy as possible to contribute to your software. Even for developers, it can sometimes be hard to read through a codebase and understand it, which is a prerequisite for adding features. Provide &lt;strong&gt;good&lt;/strong&gt; documentation and support: perhaps set up a specific email inbox and someone to monitor it, and use it to support those with &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; problems trying to work with your codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T07:24:58.327" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T07:24:58.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1432" CreationDate="2015-08-02T19:51:53.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could charge the paying customers a small extra fee of a few percent for open source development. You can argument that without the community and their contributions the software would not exist in the current state and you want to pay back all the effort being put in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while one user maybe can't afford to spend thousand dollars to get a feature implemented, hundered users could afford to spend ten dollars each to get it done. You can offer mini-fundraising for features where the people donate and as soon as a feature is paid for, it gets implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you have an automated system for the donations and tax excemptions and so on, or you will spend lots of time on writing the documents. Also check your local law, what information from users you will need to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1090" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T19:51:53.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-08-02T23:26:31.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical policy is to require a contribution to come with comprehensive automated tests. If it fixes a bug, the contributor should start by creating a test that repros the problem, and then passes once the problem is fixed. If it's a feature, it must test the feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-02T23:26:31.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T04:55:33.487" Score="-1" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a piece of software I would like to use but I am unsure if I can use it in a an app which generates money for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the app's legal terms but I am used to basic licences like apache or MIT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://aviary.com/legal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://aviary.com/legal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use this in my commercial app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1094" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T07:30:26.510" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T07:30:26.510" Title="Is aviary free for commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-08-03T21:28:57.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1437" CreationDate="2015-08-03T06:26:42.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, understand that this document is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; anything like a free software license.  Just forget about all the freedoms to study, change, modify, improve and use the software that follows from free software licenses such as GPL, MIT and Apache.  This is not a software license, it is a developer contract that requires you to pay fees and also to pay Adobe/Aviary 70 % share of your &quot;Adjusted Gross Revenue &quot; from said app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is certainly not &quot;free&quot; for commercial use. Not free as in &quot;free beer&quot;, nor free as in &quot;free speech&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you also ask this specific question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I use this is my commercial app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this to mean:  Can I embed this software in my app, and then sell the app for money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes - of course you can.  This is the basic idea behind this document: You embed the Aviary Photo Editor in your app, sell it (e.g. through Apple's, Google's and Microsoft's app stores) and give 70 % of your profit (after Apple et al has taken &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; cut) to Adobe/Aviary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to having to pay fees and share revenue, entering into this contractual relationship with Adobe/Aviary binds you to plenty of &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; restrictions. Everything that is not &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; forbidden (such as reverse engineering) seems to require explicit approval by Adobe/Aviary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T06:45:28.717" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T06:45:28.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T12:44:15.347" Score="7" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I ship binaries of a closed source product and it just so happens that there's a piece of GPL source code inside my giant codebase that I'm unaware of. At some point I find this GPL code and replace it with my own equivalent and only ship the product binaries with my code after that moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So effectively I was shipping with unintentional GPL violation for some time and then removed the violating source code and only ship binaries made from my proprietary code afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I be forced to publish my proprietary code? What typically happens in such scenarios?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1096" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:03:43.807" Title="What's the typical practice for cases when OSS license violation is found and fixed?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1399" CreationDate="2015-08-03T13:09:13.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL software can be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; anywhere, without restrictions&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, the FSF (maintainers of the GPL) have harsh words for licenses that try to restrict use of the software in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL software can also be modified without restrictions, &lt;em&gt;as long as the modified software is kept private&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. If you intend to use the GPL'd software strictly within the company, you can make whatever changes you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What the GPL controls is &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of modified software&lt;/strong&gt;. If you want to turn your modified software into a product, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you have to release the source. There are no other restrictions: you can even charge for the software, as long as the source is available at no &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; charge to anyone who has bought a license. It does not have to be made available to anyone who hasn't bought a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They believe that once the software is used in a commercial environment, it is no longer considered free and falls under a difference licence (they didn't actually specify a difference licence, but was rather what would they believe would occur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; possible to do something like this, by releasing the software under two different licenses, but QGIS doesn't do that&lt;/strong&gt;. This is called &quot;dual licensing&quot;. Usually when a project does this, it releases the software under the GPL (or something very like it) for free, but people can pay to get an alternate license with different terms. Again, however, QGIS doesn't do this; there's only the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QGIS &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to offer a &quot;sponsorship program&quot;, as well as sales for commercial support, but these aren't alternate licenses, and they are never compulsory&lt;/strong&gt;. You don't have to become a sponsor or buy commercial support to use the software, even if you are a corporation. Being a sponsor doesn't give you any additional rights, nor does it impose any additional restrictions; the same goes for buying commercial support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="962" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T13:09:13.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1439" CreationDate="2015-08-03T13:56:52.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming the GPL version 3 for the purposes of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From section 8 of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of the GPL code in your closed-source program is a violation of the GPL, and terminates your license to use the GPL code. However, if you find it and remove it, you're no longer violating the license and can use it once again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your work, the GPL license doesn't cover it, and has no legal bearing on it if there is no interaction between the GPL code and your program. If the GPL code is included, then the rest of your work must also be distributed under the GPL. If the GPL code is then removed, you can distribute your work how you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; note that if the copyright owner pushes a court case, you may end up having to publish your source code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1444/98&quot;&gt;Free Radical's answer here&lt;/a&gt; goes into more detail about the possible legal proceedings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:03:43.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T15:37:23.013" Score="24" ViewCount="3837" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;typical&lt;/em&gt; situation when some company is found to violate the some copyleft free software license and refuses to fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the company then be forced to disclose any proprietary code that is linked with copylefted code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T16:07:23.590" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T04:30:40.813" Title="Must a company disclose proprietary source code if it violates a copyleft license?" Tags="|copyleft|enforcement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2015-08-03T15:53:43.093" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, this is not legal advice and there is no definitive answer. But yes, such a company &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; indeed be forced to publish its proprietary code in order to comply with the license (or it may not, read on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1441/606&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/em&gt; in an answer to a slightly different question&lt;/a&gt; section 8 of the GPLv3 provides you with some grace time that allows you fix the problem yourself and escape litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the copyleft license is not GPLv3, or such a company fails to comply with the license within the grace period, or just refuse to comply — what will happen then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the answer is: It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if the propietary program was distributed only to a few people and the infringed code was insignificant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;de minimis&lt;/a&gt; may apply, and any claim made against can not be enforced through the courts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/431/cpast&quot;&gt;cpast&lt;/a&gt; in a comment, the outcome may also depend on local law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be some quirk that prevents the license from being enforced. E.g.: the copyleft license in question is some home-made license, the linked software may have be linked in a manner that is not deemed to infringe copyright in the jurisdiction the litigation takes place, or the circumstances that brought the free software into the proprietary program may have been special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such quirks may prevent litigation, or they may influence the outcome of the litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the court finds that the company has breached &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt;, it will be ordered to provide &quot;injunctive relief&quot; (injunctive relief will in this case mean that it must fulfill its obligations and must make its source code publicly available).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the court finds that it has just breached a &lt;em&gt;contract&lt;/em&gt;, then injunctive relief is not available as a remedy, and instead, the court will probably order the company to pay monetary damages and stop distributing the infringed software (if it has not done so already).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please note that FSF feel &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;strongly&lt;/a&gt; about enforcing their license. They write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many copyright holders seek monetary damages when their license is violated. We do not — we only want violators to come back into compliance, and help repair any harm done to the free software community by their past actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All versions of GPL have been carefully designed to get &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; violation designated as &quot;breach of copyright&quot; (rather than breach of contract) in order to &lt;em&gt;enable&lt;/em&gt; the copyright holder to seek injunctive relief. Some other copyleft licenses may not have this property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the FSF finds that a GPL violation is serious enough to be tried in the courts, it will go to some lengths to 1) persuade the copyright owner to demand injunctive relief; and 2) find somebody willing to provide pro bono (free) legal counsel or to find someone to pay for legal counsel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not much case law available. Gatto (2007) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pillsburylaw.com/siteFiles/Publications/A9A22185D029BBE6EAA4332F1A7249E2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doubts Wane Over GPLs Enforcability&lt;/a&gt; writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The vast majority of the GPL enforcements have been private enforcements. That is to say, when the FSF (or copyright owner) becomes aware of a GPL violation, it sends a private letter to the violator and demands that the licensee either come into compliance with all of the GPL terms or cease copying, modifying or distributing the GPL software. These private enforcements have been largely successful. Many GPL violations have been inadvertent. Once notified, these innocent violators typically come into compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of no case where the company has responded in a timely manner to a letter about infringement by simply &lt;em&gt;removing&lt;/em&gt; the free software (i.e. stopped copying, modifying or distributing the software) that has resulted in litigation, no matter what type of copyleft license is used - so if a company does this, the precedence is that it will not have to publish its source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; case law on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gpl-violations.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gpl-violations.org&lt;/a&gt; and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.fsfe.org/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fsfe.org&lt;/a&gt;. The &quot;classic&quot; case in this area of controversy is a &lt;em&gt;Welte v. Sitecom Deutschland GmbH&lt;/em&gt; (No 21 0 6123/04 (LG München 1) May 19 2004).  &lt;em&gt;Sitecom Deutschland GmbH&lt;/em&gt; used code under GPL derived from &lt;code&gt;netfilter/iptables&lt;/code&gt; (authored by Harald Welte) in its  routers, and simply &lt;em&gt;refused&lt;/em&gt; to comply with GPL. A German court determined that the GPL provisions requiring source code distribution are valid and ordered injunctive relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it depends on the copyright holder. It is the copyright holder, not the FSF (or other advocacy group), who is entitled to &lt;em&gt;decide&lt;/em&gt; what to do about a license violation. And some holders of copyright to free software may choose to receive money through some settlement, instead of going to court over the principle of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T05:42:05.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1451" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:21:38.930" Score="128" ViewCount="19088" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bruce Perens (co-founder of OSI) has coined the term &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2011-December/017416.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been calling these &amp;quot;crayon licenses&amp;quot;, taking a line from an old Monty Python sketch about a dog license with the word &amp;quot;dog&amp;quot; crossed out and &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot; written in, in crayon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses referenced are typical well-intended free software licenses that have been written by programmers in simple, easy-to-understand, non-legalese language.  Some typical examples are the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; and the somewhat more elaborate &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/artistic-1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artistic License 1.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perens seems to imply that such licenses may pose a problem for developers using them, or for the open source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can these licenses be a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is Perens wrong about them being a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="26361" LastEditDate="2023-09-11T09:18:06.247" LastActivityDate="2023-09-11T09:18:06.247" Title="How can a &quot;crayon&quot; license be a problem?" Tags="|licensing|law|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1452" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:38:30.663" Score="26" ViewCount="5245" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice makes some proprietary software.  The source is available, but under a proprietary license which prohibits derivative works and sublicensing.  Bob writes some GPLv3 code.  Carol prepares a derivative work which incorporates both Alice and Bob's software and purports to release it under the GPLv3, in violation of Alice's copyright.  Carol provides source code and otherwise complies with standard GPL formalities.  Alice decides not to sue Carol, but threatens to sue anyone who makes derivative works of Carol's software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Carol violated the GPL, and if so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Carol has not violated the GPL, why don't companies do things like this all the time to subvert the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:28:44.603" Title="Why doesn't this GPL loophole work?" Tags="|gpl|law|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="762" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:48:51.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;APIs under copyright would be similar to software under copyright: you just can't use them as freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In software, if you have a piece of proprietary software, you're not allowed to redistribute, reverse engineer, modify, develop from, etc etc. If this applied to APIs, you simply wouldn't be able to use the API to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also sort of depends what kind of API you're talking about. If you have an API in the Stack Exchange API sense - a set of URLs you can request data from - you may still be able to use these. Putting a website on the internet implies a right to view it; making data available at a URL implies a right to see that data. You probably wouldn't be able to make use of it in a product though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're talking about an API as in the Java development API, then it suddenly becomes very hard for Java developers to write software, because they can't use the API without express permission from the copyright holder (Oracle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the implication of the case is that &lt;em&gt;if companies want to&lt;/em&gt;, they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; prevent people copying/using their APIs by applying copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:48:51.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1446" CreationDate="2015-08-03T16:58:31.177" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Carol hasn't violated the GPL, she's violated Alice's copyright and in doing so &lt;em&gt;invalidated&lt;/em&gt; her use of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simple terms, because Alice's code wasn't Carol's to release, she can't apply the GPL to it. There is no violation of the GPL, because it never applied to Alice's code in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why companies don't do this, it's because it's still copyright violation, which is worse. The GPL gives you a chance to rectify your mistake if you violate it, and keep your money, time, and rights to use the GPL-licensed software. If you violate a copyright, it's &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; up to the copyright holder what they do: they could sue you for copyright infringement and bring you to court. There's no guaranteed chance to rectify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; in deciding not to sue Carol, Alice has created a legally messy situation. Alice has, in effect, given Carol permission to license her software under the GPL, which &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; derivatives. When she then threatens to sue them, Alice forbids derivatives. It can now be argued from either side: either Alice gave up her right to sue derivative-makers when she didn't sue Carol, or because it's originally Alice's work and still copyrighted, she can sue who she wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one would come down to lawyers slugging it out in court, and a very long and messy court case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T16:58:31.177" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-03T17:16:30.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;crayon license&quot; is a free software license written by a programmer or someone else closely involved with software development for the purpose of being easy to understand, or humourous. They are typically written in English, not legalese. A good example of a crayon license is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about these crayon licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T19:07:43.367" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:07:43.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-03T17:16:30.910" Score="0" Body="For questions about non-legalese licenses written by programmers either jokingly or to be understandable." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-03T19:07:47.493" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:07:47.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2015-08-03T18:25:35.803" Score="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License proliferation&lt;/strong&gt; - The more licenses we have floating around, the more work everyone has to do to understand them.  Case law for one license will not necessarily apply to a differently-worded license, even if they're both intended to achieve the same effect.  And if everyone starts writing their own licenses, this becomes significantly worse.  To get an idea of how bad the situation is already, take a gander at the Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;annotated list of licenses&lt;/a&gt;.  Note the large number of licenses, and how little the FSF has to say about some of them.  We do not want to make this list any longer - there are more than enough licenses to go around already.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Legal uncertainty&lt;/strong&gt; - If a license is vaguely worded, it may not behave as we would like in a court of law.  When you write a vague computer program, the compiler will (normally) refuse to compile it; the grammar of the programming language disallows ambiguity at the syntactic level.  The program may not mean what you think it means, but it does mean &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;.*  This is not the case when you write legal code.  If it's vague, the court will have to guess, and they may guess wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contra proferentem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - Ambiguity in a contract is normally interpreted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in favor of the &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-drafting party&lt;/a&gt; (with the rationale that it's the drafting party's fault for creating the ambiguity in the first place).  It's not immediately obvious to me that this necessarily applies to an open source license, but if it does, it would greatly exacerbate the previous point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You might accidentally make a non-free license&lt;/strong&gt; - One crayon license actually in use is basically MIT/X11 + &quot;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&quot;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47028/how-could-we-rewrite-the-no-evil-license-to-make-it-free&quot;&gt;This is considered a non-free license&lt;/a&gt; (don't take our word for it, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF agrees&lt;/a&gt;), and resulted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=692614&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least one bug report&lt;/a&gt; asking for &lt;em&gt;downstream&lt;/em&gt; software to be removed from Debian.  This caused actual person-hours to be diverted from software development to deal with silly licensing issues that never should have arisen in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I am ignoring the issue of undefined behavior in C and C++ because they aren't really relevant to this analogy, but if you like, you can think of vagueness in a contract as like undefined behavior, but perhaps less evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T00:21:22.940" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T00:21:22.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1446" CreationDate="2015-08-03T19:28:44.603" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;ArtOfCode's answer correctly describes Carol's situation relative to &lt;em&gt;Alice's&lt;/em&gt; code: violation of Alice's original license (which is not the GPL) and therefore infringement of Alice's copyright.  The terms of the GPL are not relevant except in that they are incompatible with Alice's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;Bob's&lt;/em&gt; code is originally licensed under the GPL, and the GPL contains a clause anticipating exactly this sort of situation.  In version 3, it's section 12.  v2 had slightly different but (I think) legally equivalent wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. &lt;strong&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.)  In this case, the &quot;other pertinent obligations&quot; are Alice's original license, which is incompatible with the GPL.  Therefore, Carol's violation of Alice's license &lt;em&gt;causes&lt;/em&gt; a violation of the GPL as applied to &lt;em&gt;Bob's&lt;/em&gt; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious legal consequence of this is that Bob also has a copyright infringement case against Carol.  I don't know how Alice's having declined to sue Carol would affect the decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &quot;poison pill&quot; clause in the GPL is why Linux distribution maintainers tend to be cautious about combining GPL with works whose license &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; not be compatible.  For instance, this is why they hesitate to link GPLv2-licensed programs against OpenSSL.  (If I remember correctly, GPLv3's &quot;additional terms&quot; section renders that particular problem moot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1108" LastActivityDate="2015-08-03T19:28:44.603" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-03T20:39:01.263" Score="24" ViewCount="2711" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyfree Open Innovation License&lt;/a&gt; as a simpler alternative to Apache 2.0 (it is a permissive license with an explicit patent grant).  But because it's not so popular, not much information is available about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, where does it fit into this graph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bemj.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bemj.png&quot; alt=&quot;License compatibility graph, groups licenses into the categories &amp;#39;Permissive&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;Weakly Protective&amp;#39;, &amp;#39;Strongly Protective&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;Network Protective&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Image credit: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David A. Wheeler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it GPL-compatible?  With which versions?  And where does it fit in with the permissive licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastEditorDisplayName="user2594" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T22:13:26.083" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T06:48:30.020" Title="Copyfree Open Innovation License compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="762" CreationDate="2015-08-04T09:33:55.773" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to make it clear, the Appeals court's May 9th, 2014 decision in Oracle vs Google made it clear that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;structure, sequence and organization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (SSO) of the 37 API interfaces Google had copied (in order to make existing software that was based on the copyrighted &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; work with Android) was subject to copyright.  This is not &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; case law, but follows from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whelan_v._Jaslow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Whelan v. Jaslow&lt;/a&gt; (1986).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have adopted the API of the open source &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt; for Android, but choose not to do so, probably because most of the software that exists for mobile units assumes that &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that this case has &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; been finally decided (what has been finally decided is that an API is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; protected by copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15197092051369647665&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=6&amp;amp;as_vis=1&amp;amp;oi=scholarr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual decision that Oracle America, Inc. v. Google Inc., 750 F. 3d 1339 - Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit 2014&lt;/a&gt;, we see that the jury could not agree on Google's fair use defence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the jury deadlocked on fair use, we remand for further consideration of Google's fair use defense in light of this decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot; decision was passed on for the Supreme Court to decide, and the Supreme Court decided to return this decision to the Federal Circuit Court in San Francisco, where Google will get a new chance to argue that its use of the API will be allowed as fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were a betting man, I would put my money on &lt;em&gt;Oracle&lt;/em&gt; in this upcoming trial. While I think &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot; will apply in &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; uses of a protected API by free software, Google choose to incorporate the copyrighted API of the &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; in a &lt;em&gt;commercial product&lt;/em&gt;.  Commercial use is seldom considered fair use. Google's decision to use &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; also made Android interoperable with the proprietary &lt;em&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/em&gt; instead of the open source &lt;em&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/em&gt;. While use to create interoperability is &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; considered fair use, Google choose to create interoperability with a proprietary product in a situation when a free alternative existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for background about this ongoing litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the actual question, which seems to be about whether  the Appeals court's May 9th, 2014 decision about API's being protected by copyright is going to cause adverse effects for innovation and interoperability for free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think these fears are unwarranted. As already &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/988/606&quot;&gt;pointed out by bmargulies&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many common APIs are explicitly licensed permissively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oracle API, however, was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; licensed permissively, and Google &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; to not comply with the licensing terms.  That is rare situation and will probably not impact much of free software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious impact of Oracle v. Google is that developers (including open source developers) need to consider the licensing of APIs, and either accept the &lt;em&gt;legal hazard&lt;/em&gt; that follows from using a proprietary APIs without permission, or to make sure they have permission (either through the API license, or by asking the owner for an explicit permission to use the API).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-29T08:50:54.503" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T08:50:54.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2015-08-04T15:47:04.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Copyfree Open Innovation License License (CFOIL) is significantly shorter than the Apache 2.0 license. CFOIL grants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the right reproduce, modify, distribute, publish, sell, sublicense, use and/or otherwise deal in the licensed material without restriction; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable patent license to reproduce, modify, distribute, publish, sell, use, and/or otherwise deal in the licensed material without restriction; for any and all patents held by the licensor and any contributor that may be infringed by the work;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;provided that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the user retains applicable copyright or other legal privilege notices, these conditions, and the following license terms and disclaimer. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Apache 2.0, CFOIL lacks the additional supporting elements for &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; enforcement that are present in Apache License 2.0. Specifically, it lacks language throughout the license that indicates that the license grants has the terms and conditions of the license is a &lt;em&gt;precondition&lt;/em&gt; for the license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0, by constrast, is quite &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unlike&lt;/em&gt; Apache 2.0, CFOIL fails to make explicit that the &lt;em&gt;specific intent&lt;/em&gt; of the drafters is to provide the license grant to &lt;em&gt;only to&lt;/em&gt; those individuals or entities that abide by the terms and conditions contained in the license. Such an additional provision in the Apache 2.0 License strengthen the conclusion that the conditions in the license is, legally speaking a &quot;precondition&quot; rather than a &quot;covenant&quot;.  It also lacks the Apache 2.0 patent termination clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which makes its embedded patent-license weaker than the one in Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, its patent terms seems incompatible with &lt;em&gt;any copyleft license&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, these flaws in this license will limit your options (compared to Apache 2.0) if you want to seek legal remedy for license violations.  If all you want to have a really permissive license with a (sort of) patent license embedded, and do you will not even &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; about pursuing license violations, and do not fear patent suits filed from contributors will pose a problem, and you don't care about license compatibility, then it may be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if your alternatives are this license and Apache 2.0, you should be aware of the differences.  Apache 2.0 is IMHO superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as license compatibility goes, I don't think it is compatible with any version of the GPL or &lt;em&gt;any other copyleft license&lt;/em&gt;.  It &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like a permissive license but its messed up patent license clause rules out GPL comptability and compatibility with Apache 2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can understand why this one is not much used, as it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creates legal uncertanity (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem&quot;&gt;contra proferentem&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creates license proliferation for no good reason;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to conclude: I don't think it fits &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt; on the license map reproduced in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T15:47:04.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="435" CreationDate="2015-08-04T20:08:03.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is legally no such thing as &quot;industrial secret&quot;, but there are trade secrets. If Han Solo publishes code that contains trade secrets, then he is likely going to jail. Publishing trade secrets when you have no right to do so is criminal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most if the time the copying of source code is just plain old copyright violation, whether there are any secrets in the code or not. Depending on exactly what Han Solo is doing, it can be criminal or not. Even it's not criminal he can be sued for damages. By slapping on for example a GPL license and making everyone believe that they have the right to copy (so totally honest people will copy the code, not just copyright infringing lowlives) he maximises the damage and therefore the amount of money that he would have to pay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people copying the code in the belief that it is for example GPL licensed, Han Solo's action creates a legal nightmare. First, they are liable for copyright infringement even though they don't know they have done anything wrong. Second, the copyright holder can order them to remove the source code, which will cause them all kinds of problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: If you really want &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; to hate you, then distributing proprietary code illegally under GPL is an excellent way of achieving your goal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2015-08-04T20:08:03.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="726" CreationDate="2015-08-05T01:06:58.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can't. If you want to have some rights on derivative works, you should use a different license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This won't give you &quot;full rights&quot; (as stated in your question), but more than enough for all practical needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1138" LastEditorUserId="1138" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T15:06:02.277" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T15:06:02.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1461" CreationDate="2015-08-05T08:57:07.660" Score="8" ViewCount="3253" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is based on this one:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1446/why-doesnt-this-gpl-loophole-work?newreg=b29b58436f7543248dbd2e163275f032&quot;&gt;Why doesn&amp;#39;t this GPL loophole work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a program uses a GPL derived component, does said program also have to be GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&#xA;A game uses a music player that was derived from a GPL licensed music player. Does the game also have to comply with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1446/why-doesnt-this-gpl-loophole-work&quot;&gt;the linked question&lt;/a&gt; the end package is derived from both sources but in this version the GPL part is only used for its functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1144" LastEditorUserId="28856" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T17:10:17.033" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T17:41:23.283" Title="Proprietary software using GPL modules" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1459" CreationDate="2015-08-05T09:16:28.237" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr yes, if and only if you &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a component of a work you created is licensed to you under the GPL, you must license the entire work under the GPL &lt;em&gt;if you choose to distribute it&lt;/em&gt;. If you want to make something for your own use, this isn't distributing the software, and you are perfectly free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works that combine GPL licensed software with software that is incompatible with the GPL are effectively undistributable. Some licenses compatible with the GPL are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2 license for GPLv3 or higher&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT/Expat license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL doesn't have this restriction; you are free to link against an LGPL library and distribute the combined work under a different license, as long as you honor the LGPL for that specific library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL considers allowing users to use the program over a network (for example an interactive website) to be distributing the work. The &quot;regular&quot; GPL doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T09:16:28.237" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1459" CreationDate="2015-08-05T10:56:23.470" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, it depends on how tightly the programs are coupled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tight coupling:&lt;/strong&gt; This is what happens in the case of your game, as you almost certainly included the GPL music player within your binary or as a dynamically linked library. In those cases your software must be GPL, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Loose coupling:&lt;/strong&gt; If you have a generic program that happens to execute the music player as a separate program, there's no tight coupling going on. The GPL doesn't affect your code. You can choose any license you want, including a proprietary license. &lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; in that case you might want to add support for different music players, just to be sure. And you should refrain from shipping your application with the music player as a combined package, as that may give a wrong impression. On the other hand, a mere &lt;strong&gt;aggregation&lt;/strong&gt; of multiple packages (as in software distributions) is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;nobody forces you to distribute your application&lt;/strong&gt;. If you don't distribute your application at all, not even in binary form, the license question disappears: There is nobody you could license your application to. The GPL and all other FLOSS licenses grant you the right of private modifications. The virality of copyleft licenses only kicks in as soon as you distribute your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that tight/loose coupling is mostly a &lt;strong&gt;social term&lt;/strong&gt; and not so much a technical term. Usually, linking to a GPL library counts as tight coupling, while executing a separate GPL programm counts as loose coupling. However, this is not an absolute. The line blurs as soon as you start playing nasty games, and people will recognize that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could write a command-line wrapper around a GPL library, make only that wrapper GPL, and communicate with that wrapper using an application-specific RPC protocol. Even though your application starts the GPL code as a separate program, you would have a hard time explaining to FSF or a judge in a court that this is loose coupling. It would still count as tight coupling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1138" LastEditorUserId="1138" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T16:38:34.737" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T16:38:34.737" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2015-08-05T11:39:17.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;strong&gt;anyone can contribute&lt;/strong&gt;, but not in the way you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nobody&lt;/strong&gt; can force you to include their code in your project. You are free do publish only code that you are satisfied with. You can even decide not to include any contributions, ever.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everybody&lt;/strong&gt; can create their own version of your code. This is called a &lt;strong&gt;fork&lt;/strong&gt;. They can keep the fork private or they can publish the fork. If they publish it and it is very good, people may start using the fork instead of your version. As always with Free Software, it is ultimately the users who decide.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that forks happen comparatively seldom, because they incur the risk of duplicate efforts in the long term. So they usually happen only if the original project is either dead or badly maintained. In those cases, the fork takes over, no work is duplicated. However, it is also possible that the original and the fork co-exist side by side. The most famous examples are ffmpeg / avconv and ImageMagick / GraphicsMagick. Those projects have to deal with issues like duplicate efforts and a split of the developer community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1138" LastEditorUserId="1138" LastEditDate="2015-08-05T13:33:12.187" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T13:33:12.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2015-08-05T12:09:32.570" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the &lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt; (and accepted) answer posted by Kevin, I want to point out the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes argued that having license behaving predictable in a court of law only matters if you want to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; somebody.  With the possible exception of a disclaimer of warranty (which may or may not be legal, depending on jurisdiction),  there is no &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be too fussy about loose, permissive licenses such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;.  If you just want to &lt;em&gt;be nice&lt;/em&gt; and impose no restrictions on your users, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; the choice of license does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some managers of free software projects take licensing issues seriously.  Something that to non-professionals &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;looks like a lax and permissive license&lt;/a&gt;, may not &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1455/606&quot;&gt;be what it appears&lt;/a&gt;.  Such managers may refuse to accept any contribution or pull request unless the code is licensed under terms that are recognized as &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; with project's  main license.  Most &quot;crayon&quot; licenses fail that test.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The public domain may be great for cultural works (at least in jurisdictions that recognize the public domain).  IMHO, the public domain (or something trying to mimic it) is not a good idea for &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; (or for anything that is &lt;em&gt;functional&lt;/em&gt;, rather than &lt;em&gt;aesthetical&lt;/em&gt;).  One reason the PD is dangerous for software is a nasty thing called &quot;software patents&quot;.  If you put your software in the public domain, somebody else may just go ahead and patent some method it implements, and then accuse &lt;em&gt;your software&lt;/em&gt; of infringing &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; patent.  Too far fetched?  Well, this is what happened to a programmer named Bob Jacobsen&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, so it certainly cannot be ruled out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1) Kamind Associates, Inc. (a commercial company) sold a product named &quot;Decoder Commander&quot; that would &quot;normalize&quot; the interfaces for various types of model railway systems as part of a larger framework to let a personal computer control such a system. Katzer, the owner of that company, held various patents related to this software. At one point, Katzer sued a programmer named Bob Jacobsen for infringing those patents. The allegedly infringing software was a set of files know as &quot;DecoderPro&quot;, that Jacobsen had made publicly available under a very permissive license (Artistic License 1.0). As it turned out, Katzer had &lt;em&gt;copied&lt;/em&gt; those files from &quot;DecoderPro&quot;, and modified them slightly to create &quot;Decoder Commander&quot;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;In the end, Jacobsen prevailed in court, and the court decided that &lt;em&gt;Katzer&lt;/em&gt; had infringed on Jacobsen's &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt;.  But Jacobsen's poor choice of license (Artistic License 1.0) caused him a great deal of grief.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-05T13:08:36.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1465" CreationDate="2015-08-06T01:17:02.670" Score="13" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see this one quite a lot: an author releases something under a standard free/open license (i.e. &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445/175&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;), but on the same release page adds a clause that conflicts with the license. I.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free Frobnicator&lt;/strong&gt; is a handy utility that frobs widgets, by Jane Doe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Released under &amp;lt;license&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, &amp;lt;additional clause that conflicts with license&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These additional clauses could be from misunderstanding the license, or carelessness. I've seen these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Let me know if you use this in your project!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, no free/open license requires contacting the author if you use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Contact me if you want to use this commercially.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implying that the license doesn't already allow commercial use, which free/open licenses do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You are free to use however you want, except in pornography.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free/open licenses can't discriminate on usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do these extra conflicting clauses make the license invalid, or is the license unaffected?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it depend on the license used? Or is this legally ambiguous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T04:25:52.087" Title="Are licenses affected if the author adds conflicting clauses alongside?" Tags="|license-compatibility|restrictions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1464" CreationDate="2015-08-06T01:35:23.483" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking three questions, I think:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are they enforceable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do they tamper with the enforceability of the main license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do they pollute the open/free status of the overall license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the third question is 'yes'. If someone adds a clause that is incompatible with, for example, OSI, then it's not an OSI-licence. This has no legal implication at all. It's just a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two questions are for lawyers, but, in general, crayons are contagious. If you scribble on a license with a crayon, the results can very possibly be crayon-ish, since by ignorance the extra provisions can conflict with or change the interpretation of the base license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T19:21:45.750" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T19:21:45.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1464" CreationDate="2015-08-06T06:28:06.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say that you add this stuff on the project's &quot;release page&quot; (presumably the same place where people can download a release).  This is not in &lt;em&gt;any way&lt;/em&gt; enforceable.  When you make free software publicly available, people can share it with anybody &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; ever seeing your release page, so users may not been made aware of your terms. No court is going to let you enforce any such terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all jurisdictions I am aware of, including the EU and the USA, when you have a specific &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; document such as a license or a contract, a court will &lt;em&gt;refuse&lt;/em&gt; to look at anything except the specific license or a contract and any additional document &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; mentioned in the license or contract, to settle any dispute between two parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you put &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; on the project page that conflicts with the main license, it will be considered null and void. I.e.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not enforceable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will not tamper with the enforceability of the main license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will not even  pollute the open/free status of the main license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; written by the project head and linked from every project page. Sharing your thoughts about what you think &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be &quot;fair attribution&quot; is fine, but it only counts as a &lt;em&gt;suggestion&lt;/em&gt;. When staffers sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/258032/256282&quot;&gt;pretend&lt;/a&gt; that is more than that, such pretense does not change its legal status to being a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; that can be enforced by &lt;em&gt;legal means&lt;/em&gt;. I.e. such additional notes, in the shape of blog posts or otherwise, can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be enforced through courts, and will not tamper with, or pollute the main license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e.: Doing this will &lt;em&gt;not have any&lt;/em&gt; effect at all on the project's licensing situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However. it may identify the project head as a bozo and potentially quarrelsome (NB: I am not saying that this makes the project head a bozo, etc., only that it may make some people may &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; so).  This may make some people stay away from using code from the project.  As for the SE, the (then) project head's &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; goes on to &lt;em&gt;name and shame&lt;/em&gt; two specific websites that does not live up his attribution expectations.  This sort of enforcement technique is IMHO not an &lt;em&gt;ethical&lt;/em&gt; way to enforce your additions to a license, but if you don't want this to happen to you, you may need to &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; the SE recommendation if you reuse materials from SE, even if lacks any &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; licenses such as the GPL &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; additional terms. Read below the line for a more specific analysis of various ways of adding additional notices and how this applies to specific licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IANAL&lt;/a&gt; and all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; the line is my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking beyond the &quot;project page&quot; it may also be interesting to look at attempts to add additional terms to the projects distribution archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, let us assume that you add your additional terms &lt;em&gt;below&lt;/em&gt; the license text is the license file (e.g. &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;) included in the distro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to add or remove &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; to or from license &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, the license is no longer a recognized free software license. Doing so will &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; your license a crayon license (this is more or less how crayon licenses are defined), with all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;problems&lt;/a&gt; that follows from the use of crayon licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you put your additional terms is a separate document? E.g. you but your terms in a file named &lt;code&gt;EULA.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;NOTICE.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;README.txt&lt;/code&gt;, or some other conspicuous name) that lives in the distribution archive &lt;em&gt;along&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; when people download the project directly from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you need to read the license text to find out whether this is permitted and if it will be enforceable. By means of example, I shall look at two popular free software licenses, GPLv3 and MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; very explicitly &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; additional terms (see sec. 7. Additional Terms). but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; if they provide additional &lt;em&gt;permissions&lt;/em&gt; to the user, or &quot;supplement the terms of this License with terms&quot; [followed by a bullet list of six permitted types of additional terms]. Any &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; additional terms are not allowed, and permission to delete them is &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; granted downstream recipients:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” [...].  If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT/Expat&lt;/a&gt; grants a series of permission &quot;without restriction&quot;.  If you add terms somewhere in the distribution that &lt;em&gt;contradict&lt;/em&gt; the license grant by imposing some restrictions, these would not be enforceable if the language used do not make it clear that the intent of the drafter was to provide a precondition or a covenant for use. If this additional document is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a license, then it will be ignored by courts (see my introduction).  If it is an additional license, then, as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1415/606&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; it would amount to dual licensing and users would be free to pick the permissive license (MIT) that is provided over the more restrictive (the EULA).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no room here to run through &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; recognized free software licenses, but my general impression is that they do not give you much opportunity to impose restrictions on your users.  I cannot completely rule out that there exists a free software license that cuts more slack than GPLv3 or MIT/Expat - but I doubt it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for all free software licenses, provided you hold the sole copyright, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; have permission from all contributors (e.g. through a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;), adding terms that gives &lt;em&gt;further permissions&lt;/em&gt; are generally allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance you add a file with the following notice to a the distribution of a project licensed under MIT/Expat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the extent allowed by applicable law, I waive the right of attribution, and the requirement that a copyright notice and a permission notice shall be included in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a waiver would allow people to reuse your code without having to comply with the attribution, etc. requirements of the license.  If you add the following &lt;em&gt;restriction&lt;/em&gt; to the waiver:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Removing this waiver is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, that would not be enforceable, as it contradicts the main license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T09:08:37.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2015-08-06T07:28:36.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, you need a license note somewhere in that blog post, usually at the end.  If you want to license all your blog posts a certain way, a good way to do that is to put that license note in the footer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details depend a bit on the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GNU FDL requires you to post the whole license on your page (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;addendum&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC license chooser&lt;/a&gt; gives you HTML to put on your blog post.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can combine multiple licenses by saying what you want.  For example like this:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2015 XXXX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Verbatim copying and distribution of entire articles is permitted in&#xA;  any medium, provided this notice is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you may, at your choice, copy, distribute and/or modify&#xA;  this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,&#xA;  Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software&#xA;  Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no&#xA;  Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section&#xA;  entitled &quot;GNU Free Documentation License&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a third option, this work by XXXX is licensed under a Creative&#xA;  Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the short version is this:  All you need is a sentence saying that your text is under license X (maybe with a link to the license so people can find it) unless a license requires you to take specific other steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T07:28:36.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1464" CreationDate="2015-08-06T08:07:43.190" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concise, well-written &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1465/997&quot;&gt;answer by bmargulies&lt;/a&gt; does miss &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; thing in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it depend on the license used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes,&lt;/strong&gt; it does. The GNU GPL, for instance, specifically says that conflicting provisions are void if they add restrictions. This is from section 7 of v.3; v.2 had the corresponding text in its section 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licences that do not have such a clause &lt;em&gt;may or may not&lt;/em&gt; be affected; I'm not a lawyer. (But it seems to me that a comment &quot;alongside&quot; the licence is probably meant to be &lt;em&gt;part of&lt;/em&gt; the licencing terms, so yes, I think it'd be affected.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="997" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T08:07:43.190" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1459" CreationDate="2015-08-06T08:16:35.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a program uses a GPL component, it has to be distributed also on GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt; this doesn't exclude using GPL in proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always release for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a functional part of the whole proprietary software as open source, eg. open source music player daemon, that uses GPL sound drivers etc., which uses open but complicated to use network communication protocol&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;closed source game that communicates with the open source daemon through your protocol&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a simple open source client that also communicates with the daemon and eg. plays a single mp3 file (just to avoid accusations that you deliberately bypassed GPL license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way you even avoid tight/loose coupling discussion, since you use network protocol to separate open and closed parts of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for example, legally successful implementations of such bypass, you can look at firmware of most low-cost, low-end home routers, that use GPL components and still have closed source software parts. Note that there are many &quot;contact points&quot; between open and closed parts in such devices, and some of them were reported as GPL violations, while some others not. Most reported violations however concerned directly Linux kernel, while most types of closed-&gt;open wrappers and network bridges are recognized as clear from legal point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastEditorUserId="691" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T23:20:50.400" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T23:20:50.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T09:42:08.397" Score="2" ViewCount="1449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any providers of mailing lists for open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of the following so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Savannah&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sourceforge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Savannah requires a GPL project (and that is ok), but the process of getting accepted takes forever.&#xA;SourceForge is getting worse and worse. Never liked it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything else? Anything better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user374" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T10:35:26.703" Title="Free mailing list provider for open source projects?" Tags="|communication|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-08-06T15:24:15.260" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1140" CreationDate="2015-08-06T09:58:21.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of options to give credit or &quot;shoutouts&quot;, depending on the owner of the copyright, and the license you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; hold the copyright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hosting. Hosting on your employers GitHub page already establishes a strong link to your employer. Hostile forking &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; reduce the effectiveness of this measure, but is uncommon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hosting 2: Distributing binaries somewhere from your corporate website, including a nice project description, and hosted documentation cementing it as the official or original distribution. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Depending on the language: namespacing. If the code is namespaced in com.thecompany.yourproject it implicitly links your company to everyone using the code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;your company&lt;/em&gt; holds the copyright, in addition to the above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyright-holder notice (your company) in addition to an author (you) in file headers and/or license file. Depending on the license, this could be forked out, but that's widely regarded a bad idea and/or a dick move, and is not common.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it is always a bad idea to edit the license. This may be illegal (for example (A/L)GPL, which are copyright protected), or may just be a bad idea, as editing well-understood legal documents as licenses by a layperson might inadvertedly introduce legal hazards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: In various comments you state that you believe that you hold the copyright. You state you live in MA, USA and there are no specific copyright ownership clauses in your contract. That leads me to believe this work is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia: Work for hire&quot;&gt;Work for hire&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; (2)(...)&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and your employer holds the copyright. If you want to know the fine details, law.stackexchange.com would be a good place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T09:58:21.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="984" CreationDate="2015-08-06T10:24:23.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A legal requirements to preserve the &lt;em&gt;integrity of authorship&lt;/em&gt; and copyright information follows from article 6bis of the Berne Convention (about moral rights). In the USA, U.S. Code § 1202: &quot;Integrity of copyright management information&quot;, is quite explicit about this - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202&lt;/a&gt; - but similar provisions exists in the local laws for most Berne signatories. Since preservation of attribution, etc. is a &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; requirement, it cannot be removed by a license or a FAQ (and for the record: CC BY does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; remove this legal requirement). It applies universially (i.e. does not depend on the license used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if Bob adapts Alice's work and Carol adapts Bob's work, Carol has to attribute both, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; one or both request to be dis-associated with Carol's work by having their respective bylines removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When only &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; people are involved, the &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; way to attribute is to list all three of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the list of contributors become much longer than this (e.g. you build on a wikipedia article with hundreds of individual contributors where the contributions over time have been entangled), you may find an alternative &lt;em&gt;reasonable manner&lt;/em&gt; to provide lawful attribution. For example, you may credit &quot;Wikipedia contributors&quot; with a link to the article's  history page where the byline of each individual contributor is listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a page about &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution#This_is_a_good_attribution_for_material_from_which_you_created_a_derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;attribution best practices&lt;/a&gt; on the CC wiki that provides some helpful examples about how to attribute in a reasonable manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T10:56:23.207" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T10:56:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1470" CreationDate="2015-08-06T10:35:26.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all you want is a mailing list, you could use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freelists.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FreeLists&lt;/a&gt; which specifically states that it is not just free as in beer.  They use &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ecartis.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ecartis&lt;/a&gt; as a mailing list manager and not Mailman which you might be familiar with, but they are both free as in freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T10:35:26.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1464" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:09:30.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the good answers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1465/55&quot;&gt;bmargulies&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1466/55&quot;&gt;Free Radical&lt;/a&gt; there is a perspective beyond the legal stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you release something under an open source license, your express intent is to give others some rights, including the right to redistribute, use it without restriction and to modify and release the modified work. If you do not intent to grant these rights, you don't need to add a license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the contradicting clauses cause confusion. Especially people not experienced with the legal stuff, might be shying away from using their rights on your work. So you lose possible applications of your work against your intent. Even if you legally clearly know what you do is legally working, such confusion might lead to you losing possible users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example that shows how legal uncertainty lead to problems, although the reason of the legal uncertainties isn't an additional clause. The german programmer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Schilling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jörg Schilling&lt;/a&gt; is well known as the programmer of cdrtools. At some point he decided to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cdrtools#License_compatibility_controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;change the license&lt;/a&gt; on most of his work, while still incorporating some GPL-work. Jörg Schilling is sure, he isn't violating the GPL in this case as he expressed, and at no point any legal action happened (as far as I'm aware), this controversy didn't go to court. Still most binary Linux-distributions (source distribution is unaffected) removed cdrtools and use a fork named cdrkit. So, however the real legal situation is, the uncertainty alone lead to a lot of lost users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is generally  advisable to avoid confusion as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T13:09:30.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1476" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:20:16.470" Score="11" ViewCount="2024" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say there is some software hosted in a public github git repository under some license A. The owner and copyright-holder now decides to relicense the source-code to another license B. If i would now - after the copyright-holder already commited and pushed this commit with the new license B to github - clone the repository and checkout an older commit where the software was still under license A and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; use the source-code from this commit and older, which license would apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since i learned (Thanks @Mnementh♦) that i am allowed to use the Software under License A there is another small question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am i correct, that i can infact &lt;strong&gt;choose&lt;/strong&gt; which license i want to use, since the holder relicensed the source-code under a new license but even though he can't revoke the old license, the new license still applies to the source-code as a whole, which also includes the complete older source-code from commit X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1030" LastEditorUserId="1030" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T13:27:14.763" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T09:17:58.317" Title="Is a license bound to a commit?" Tags="|relicensing|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1475" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:22:56.917" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use older versions of the software before the license change still under license A, as open source license are irrevocable. The only reason you couldn't do that would be, if license A was illegal for the work in the first place (maybe some license compatibility issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new version is only usable with license B (well, the same issue with possible illegal use may apply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficult question is, if also can use the old version using license B. That depends. The copyright-holder can change license for his as he sees fit, also for the older version(s). But he must do it explicitly. Without this expression, you have to assume it is still only licensed under license A and B isn't applicable. Even if the copyright-holder expresses, that also the older version can now be used under the terms B too, you have a problem. In the committed code only license A is mentioned and only the text of license A is part of the code. You would have difficulties to prove you can also use this code with license B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safe way therefore is: Use the old code only with license A and the new code only with license B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T13:31:17.177" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T13:31:17.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1478" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:37:31.533" Score="7" ViewCount="3234" Body="&lt;p&gt;A 3rd-party Hardware manufacturing company is willing to sell me a Linux Driver for one of their products. The third-party company claims that the Linux Driver is derivative work of the driver they previously developed for OSX, so they say GPL does not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to sell systems which include this linux driver, do I have to disclose the source code of this third-party driver if any of my customers asks for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1169" LastEditorUserId="1169" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T08:50:59.737" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:05:59.487" Title="Do I have to disclose the source code of a Linux Driver I have not developed?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|linux-kernel|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:49:18.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The third-party company claims that the Linux Driver is derivative&#xA;  work of the driver they previously developed for OSX, so they say GPL&#xA;  does not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they link to the Linux-kernel, they link against GPL-software, so they are obliged to respect the terms of the GPL. It doesn't matter if the software was previously developed for OSX. In the worst case the licenses conflict and the Linux version is therefore illegal to distribute. Generally, all licenses of products combined here are to respect. If they aren't compatible, you cannot distribute this derivate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if the driver doesn't directly link to the kernel, that may not apply. I remember in the past some graphics drivers (I think NVidia, but aren't sure) had two parts. One GPL-part included in the kernel and offering an interface for the second part, that was proprietary. I don't know how legally stable this construct is, but it may work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't know in which way the driver you talk about works, I cannot say which applies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if case 1 applies, you cannot release the source code of others without their consent. If case 1 applies, you simply cannot distribute this solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side-note: the GPL always allows you to use such software internally without releasing the source, but as you talk about customers it isn't limited to internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T13:58:56.843" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T13:58:56.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T14:03:26.103" Score="16" ViewCount="5684" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use closed-source scientific software for my work.  I also use GPL licensed tools and libraries.  It would save me a lot of time to be able to call a GPL library directly from the closed-source software.  The closed-source program can be extended with &quot;plugins&quot; that are written in C, run as a separate process, but need to link against a closed-source &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication&quot;&gt;IPC&lt;/a&gt; library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I write a plugin to interface the closed-source software with the GPL library, for my private use?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the plugin as a compiled executable?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the source code of the plugin so others can compile it on their own computer?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to release the plugin code under the most permissive open source license possible while still complying with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me clarify why the answers to the linked duplicate don't answer my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That question refers to a GPL host application with closed-source plugins.  My question is about a closed-source host with a plugin that uses GPL libraries.  It's not clear to me if that makes a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the way the plugin attaches to the host application is very relevant to the GPL's restrictions.  If the plugin is a separate executable that the host launches and pipes textual input to, the restrictions don't apply.  The &quot;attachment&quot; method I described above is somewhat atypical: the plugin is a separate process and communicates with the host through a proprietary interprocess communication method.  To achieve this, the plugin executable needs to statically or dynamically link to a closed-source IPC library.  Possibly at this point it won't even matter anymore that this executable is a plugin and distributing it is clearly forbidden by the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1171" LastEditorUserId="964" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T03:17:36.667" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T03:17:36.667" Title="Can plugins for closed source software use GPL'd libraries?" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2015-08-06T14:40:39.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I write a plugin to interface the closed-source software with the GPL library, for my private use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the GPL does not affect private use. This is both due to private use exception in copyright law, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; because the GPL explicitly says that it only applies to distributions of &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; containing GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the plugin as a compiled executable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;attachment&amp;quot; method I described above is somewhat atypical: the plugin is a separate process and communicates with the host through a proprietary interprocess communication method. To achieve this, the plugin executable needs to statically or dynamically link to a closed-source IPC library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: GPL requires you to provide source code when you distribute your program in combination with GPL-code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, you link your plugin to a closed-source IPC library, creating a binary executable, and then the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the executable and &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; provide the source code to my plugin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this is: no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This triggers the &amp;quot;liberty or death&amp;quot; clause in the GPL (sec. 12 in GPLv3, but similar language is in all versions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you cannot provide source code for the closed-source IPC library, you cannot distribute this executable, &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt; if you provide all the source code to your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the IPC library were open source too then you could distribute the plugin executable, but you would be obliged to provide source to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; its components to downstream recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the source code of the plugin so others can compile it on their own computer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The source code to plugin is yours, it does not come under GPL just by having the potential to be linked with GPL. You can do with as you please.  If you want to distribute it to others, so that they too may enjoy its use under the law's  private use exception, that does not violate the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T15:31:08.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1479" CreationDate="2015-08-06T14:56:53.963" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you explicitly say the plugin &lt;strong&gt;runs as a separate process&lt;/strong&gt; from the closed-source program, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF presents the legal opinion that a plugin would probably be a separate work from the original&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I apply the GPL when writing a plug-in for a non-free program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins&lt;/strong&gt;, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them. So you can use the GPL for a plug-in, and there are no special requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is very difficult to determine whether two programs are actually separate works, and separate-processes factor appears to be a strong indicator of independence, but is probably not 100% dispositive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us first examine the case where your plugin doesn't link to a proprietary library, but still links to a GPL library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c11v0.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c11v0.png&quot; alt=&quot;GPL applies to the plugin, but not to the main application&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyleft of the GPL library causes your plugin to be covered by the GPL, but not the main application, which is probably a separate work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's add in your proprietary IPC library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w3ues.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w3ues.png&quot; alt=&quot;the GPL applies to both libraries and the plugin, but not the main application&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing software in this configuration is a &lt;strong&gt;GPL violation&lt;/strong&gt;, since you cannot satisfy the GPL terms for the proprietary library. As above, the GPL does not apply to the main application, but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; apply to the proprietary library linked by the plugin, which causes a distribution-time violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is very easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes. If you do not distribute any software, the GPL never imposes any requirements on you. You may do anything you like with GPL-licensed software without fear of violating the GPL if you are the only person ever involved in those operations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two are slightly more complicated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your whole plugin is covered by the GPL, since it links to a GPL library. Therefore, when you distribute your compiled binary, it must be accompanied by the source code per the requirements of the GPL. You cannot provide source code for the proprietary library, so you cannot distribute the plugin without violating the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can distribute the source code. I anticipate that your program's reliance on the GPL library would not cause the GPL to apply to the &lt;em&gt;source code in isolation&lt;/em&gt;, so you can &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; distribute your isolated source code under any terms you like (but you may wish to verify this with a legal professional first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T18:14:22.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T15:40:40.427" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that we &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; already check the patches which we distribute, does hosting the source tree of an OSS component obligate us to check it for copyright infringement, license compliance and/or security issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T19:22:01.373" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:05:46.823" Title="Are we obligated to scan the entire code base, or just patches?" Tags="|distribution|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-08-11T16:58:00.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2015-08-06T15:51:44.480" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a lawyer, but I disagree with Free Radical's interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COIL (it's not CFOIL) includes &quot;Permission to reproduce, modify, distribute, publish, sell, sublicense, use, and/or otherwise deal in the licensed material without restriction.&quot; It fits precisely with the MIT part of the graph in the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means one can completely sublicense, i.e. use the work in a derivative released on GPL or &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other license, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The misinterpretation comes from thinking that the patent clause must be strong. In fact, the patent clause is weak for the reasons Free Radical points out. If I want to bypass the patent clause, all I need to do is sublicense under MIT-style license, and the patent clause is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively, COIL is a &lt;em&gt;copyfree&lt;/em&gt; (as in the name) license with a patent clause. Being that permissive, it is not strong. It &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; explicitly state in your use of the license that you are including a patent license, so if you then turned around and sued someone over a patent, they would have some defense. But it &lt;em&gt;fails&lt;/em&gt; to ensure that the patent grant remains permanently for further distribution. The patent clause stays only as long as people continue to choose COIL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it would give you no legal recourse if someone else stripped out the patent clause for their derivative. Think of COIL as the lightest-weight version of a patent-sensitive license stating that you will never sue anyone over a patent you hold related to this work. It's unilateral patent disarmament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyfree concept basically rejects the whole nature of copyright law. It's not useful for those who intend to sue others over copyright violation. The only use of a copyfree license is to assure others that they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use the work and that they &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; be sued. In that regard, COIL assures them that you won't even sue over a patent either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Apache v2 and GPLv3 both provide stronger and more persistent patent protection. COIL allows you to have a weak license similar to MIT-style while still addressing the patent issue as long as people choose to keep the reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" LastEditorUserId="1176" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T15:24:54.540" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T15:24:54.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:00:23.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your critieria does not seem to exclude this simple answer: &quot;All proprietary software that runs only on Linux&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write software that requires Linux to run but your software is proprietary, you have a case of proprietary software that relies on copyleft software and the copyleft software has no special exception etc. There's no extra clauses added to the kernel's GPLv2. And there's no reason to think this is legally problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not satisfied with this answer, I think the clarification has to do with how reliant software can be / how connected etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T16:00:23.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1501" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:25:24.477" Score="5" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a library that I want to release under the GPL to prevent it from being incorporated in closed source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want people to use this library in their closed source commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time I do not want to prevent people from using this library in any plugins they might create for closed-source software, for as long as the plugin itself is released as open source.  Essentially I want plugins to be treated as separate units, for as long as they are not distributed together with the host application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this achievable by using the GPL and adding an exception?  More importantly, are there existing projects licensed like this?  Is it at all feasible to define the plugin-host separation in a defendable way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example situation: The library is for scientific use.  I don't want companies who are in the same business to integrate it into their product that they sell to research labs.  But at the same time I do not want to make it more difficult for other researchers to use this library in conjunction with proprietary scientific software such as MATLAB or Mathematica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1171" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T03:54:48.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T03:54:48.173" Title="Copyleft license that allows usage in plugins of closed-source host applications" Tags="|gpl|restrictions|exceptions|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="434" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:31:41.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license chooser&lt;/a&gt; has a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/freeworks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; when referencing this where it is explained well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Free&quot; means not overly encumbered, actually able to be used in all sorts of ways, no terms that specifically &lt;em&gt;block&lt;/em&gt; usage of the work. &lt;strong&gt;tl;dr: the non-free licenses are those that say &quot;NO&quot; (that's the ND and NC clauses)&lt;/strong&gt;. If a license says &quot;no&quot; (as in no derivatives or no commercial use), it's not able to be used freely, it isn't actually part of the real creative commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the &quot;no&quot; licenses exist at all is because CC originally set out just to provide tools for anyone looking to be more permissive than &quot;all rights reserved&quot;. This divide within CC is quite unfortunate, and there are many who wanted CC to only be the truly free licenses, just like all FSF or OSI approved licenses (which is another point: the non-free CC licenses violate FSF and OSI definitions as well, while the free licenses are more aligned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A software license that said &quot;no commercial use&quot; or &quot;no derivatives&quot; would be absolutely non-free, non-open-source. The same is true for other types of works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T16:31:41.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T16:55:05.313" Score="9" ViewCount="1398" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;General description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I create Python software that will dynamically link against a closed-source library that has a C API (the Python interpreter is not copyleft) and will also utilize a GPL licensed Python library?  It's not clear to me how exactly the GPL applies here given that calling a GPL'd Python library is not quite the same thing as dynamically linking to GPL'd software written in a compiled language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to enable communication between a GPL'd system written in Python and a closed-source system written in a compiled language.  The closed-source system provides a proprietary interprocess communication (IPC) library for extensibility.  I plan to create a Python interface for this IPC library with the aim to 1. allow the GPL'd Python system to be called from the closed-source one 2. allow the closed-source system to be called from the GPL'd Python one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I understand that the GPL restrictions refer to distribution.  For all the &quot;can I...&quot; questions in this post, assume that I want to distribute ready-to-use (i.e. compiled when applicable) software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1171" LastEditorUserId="1171" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T12:05:35.140" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T12:05:35.140" Title="How does the GPL's linking restriction apply when using a proprietary library with GPL'd interpreted code?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-06T17:13:18.740" Score="7" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that when I use MIT projects, I have to include the license text of that author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I use that stuff on the server-side should I render/send it to the client of the server?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I put the license into my source code as comments, also for things that are not directly seen/used by the client?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I use grunt.js for putting all the files together or I also use some sort of png captcha code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-06T23:32:59.283" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T23:32:59.283" Title="Should I send attribution/copyright notes to a client over a server?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1488" CreationDate="2015-08-06T18:52:28.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the only license that requires that you make its source available if it's a &quot;network&quot; program is the AGPL, the MIT license has no such requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T18:52:28.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1482" CreationDate="2015-08-06T19:10:49.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with anything you host publicly, you are responsible for any problem with that content.  There is not much of a difference between software and other content in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the country you live in, you may only be liable for violations in your hosted content once you are made aware of the issue.  Also, if you host code that you received under a free license, you may be able to claim &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_%28law%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;good faith&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T19:10:49.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2015-08-06T19:33:09.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that SF isn't popular anymore, but they are sitting on a valuable pile of historic data.  For example: &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/top&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://sourceforge.net/top&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1181" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T19:33:09.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1482" CreationDate="2015-08-06T20:05:46.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything under your control you can, in theory, be held responsible for. If you host code with a virus in, you are responsible for it; if it's copyright violation the same - and you can be asked to take it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; check your own code. Checking the codebase is extra work that's not &lt;em&gt;strictly&lt;/em&gt; necessary, but if you have concerns about it then it could be worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the more popular the project, the better your assurance that it's problem-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:05:46.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1485" CreationDate="2015-08-06T20:18:25.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand the GPL, it would be more restrictive than you desire. The situation of 'closed-source linksTo openSourcePlugin linksTo yourLibrary' would, I believe, look like 'linkage' in the eyes of the GPL. If you use LGPL, then you have the opposite problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, since you own the copyright, you can choose to selectively enforce your rights -- though different opinions have been expressed on this site as to the wisdom of that idea. And if you publish your intention to do so, you may be opening yet another can of worms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want a legally sound license that applies this set of terms, you'll need to find legal assistance to draft it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that, as I understand it, the FSF's goal is not to help people prevent commercial use, but to encourage the production of ever more free software. So I wouldn't, in particular, look for any assistance from that quarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T20:18:25.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1302" CreationDate="2015-08-07T00:04:52.483" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about some tools that &lt;em&gt;integrate&lt;/em&gt; with GitHub? Do you unit test your code? (Hint: You &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be.) Set yourself up with a build server to automatically run the tests when a pull request is received. The tool you use will likely be dependent on the language you're writing in, but AppVeyor and TravisCI are both popular solutions that integrate &lt;em&gt;extremely well&lt;/em&gt; into GitHub. Both of them will seamlessly display a pass/fail indication right on the GitHub PR. This makes it easy to tell if the PR broke anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we're talking about tests, look into Code Coverage tools that integrate with GitHub too. While CI servers can help you tell if anything existing was broken, these tools help you determine if the submitter bothered to include tests for new features. Coveralls is one such popular tool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2016-07-06T09:25:11.207" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T09:25:11.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1500" CreationDate="2015-08-07T01:19:37.460" Score="5" ViewCount="1490" Body="&lt;p&gt;In corporate software development, all developers are, typically, using the same IDE running on the same version of the same operating system. In OSS, the team is distributed and providing their own development environment. This can lead to some difficult situations where one contributor checking in code breaks the build for another. I've personally struggled with this exact situation. Every pull from the main branch breaks my build configuration. I fix it, do some work, push back, and then my partner does the same, fixing his build configuration before he can get any actual work done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What techniques/tools can be used to compensate for different development environments? Are there specific things that should (or shouldn't) be checked into the repository to help alleviate this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T11:57:06.380" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T11:57:06.380" Title="Dealing with different development environments" Tags="|collaboration|project-management|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1497" CreationDate="2015-08-07T03:30:06.890" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really broad subject so I'll answer at a very high level and not touch specifics unless they are relevant for OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Works for me&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really the crux of the problem; you have build environments that are different in a way that affects software behaviour. The industry at large has been tackling this for decades, and a number of best practices have emerged, such as making sure that development and production environments are exactly the same, or that all developers must set up their environments in the same way. Obviously some approaches work if you're paying someone full time to do whatever you want, but don't work if they are volunteers with their own devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Capture all configuration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that can affect your build - configuration files, environment variables, compiler flags, dependencies and versions - this all needs to be documented. &lt;a href=&quot;http://twoscoopspress.org/collections/everything/products/two-scoops-of-django-1-8&quot;&gt;Some&lt;/a&gt; go as far as recommending that these be &lt;em&gt;version controlled&lt;/em&gt;, so environments can be replicated easily by checking out the relevant files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;except for secret keys and passwords.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Continuous Integration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Write tests, run them with a CI service, for every build and every pull request. This should be your first line of defence - if it doesn't pass CI, don't check in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many CI services available, many free for OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make sure everyone uses the same environment... but the onus is on &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have the most complete walk-through on how to set up an  environment but if it's going to take a day to complete, forget about volunteer contributions. Having a project be &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-f5-key-is-not-a-build-process/&quot;&gt;as easy to set up as possible&lt;/a&gt; is great, but almost a requirement for OSS. This might mean writing scripts that automatically installs dependencies, or sets up a testing environment, or having a suite of samples and templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU's projects are a good example of this in action; all their projects can be built by running &lt;a href=&quot;https://robots.thoughtbot.com/the-magic-behind-configure-make-make-install&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;./configure; make&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. If you've ever had the misfortune of working with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_build_system&quot;&gt;autotools&lt;/a&gt;, you'll really appreciate how much wizardry and blood/sweat/tears goes into making a project easily build and run on almost any developer machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately things are much easier these days; modern build systems, languages or frameworks do a lot of this work for you. But the onus is still on you to make sure new developers can easily get started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Support as widely as possible&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which also means you often need to bend over backwards to support as many weird environments as possible, to minimise the barriers to entry. That is, instead of mandating The One True IDE, support all IDEs and editors. Don't use compiler-specific or bleeding-edge language features, stick to standard, widely-used ones. That also means keeping up to date with the latest developments, avoid using deprecated features, so your software doesn't break when built with the latest versions of its dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T03:30:06.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1497" CreationDate="2015-08-07T04:43:32.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't say anything about what type of revision control system (RCS) you use. However, the type of problem you describe is exactly the type of problem Git, being a &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; RCS, was created to fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;everybody&lt;/em&gt; works on the master branch, or if everybody tries to consolidate every commit made by another team to their branch instantly, GIT will not help you.  But Git will let you divide the project up in subtasks localized to specific areas of the code, and let a team create its own branch to work on its designated sub-task and not interfere with &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; areas of code.  You then postpone merging a team's branch into the master branch until its sub-task is completed.  This basically means that commits made by others will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; affect you  until you merge.  When you merge, you consolidate everybody's work, and then everybody (for a moment) shares the code of the master branch, before continuing on their own branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teams may also help each other between merges, but the general rule when you use GIT to coordinate work between distributed teams is that if somebody does some work on a subtask or code area assigned another team, they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; commit, but submit a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, if Git is used right it does a very good job of solving coordination problems.  Git let each team work for a long time on a separate branch and check in their code in a shared repo &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; affecting the build of any other team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When subtasks are complete, its branch need to be merged into the master branch. If the project is well managed and the teams disciplined, merging is painless.  If they are not disciplined, Git will report conflicts which has to be solved manually. This may sometimes require some work, but is always doable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no explicit mention of what RCS you use in the question.  But since you talk about &quot;pull&quot; and &quot;main branch&quot; I assume you do, and maybe the one you use is GIT.  If you do, and still have the problems described in the question, you need to look into &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you use Git, and how you manage your distributed teams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T09:00:30.260" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T09:00:30.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1497" CreationDate="2015-08-07T08:59:16.997" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In corporate software development, all developers are, typically, using the same IDE running on the same version of the same operating system&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a misconception. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I run Eclipse Luna with openjdk-1.7 on Ubuntu 15.04, my colleague runs Eclipse Kepler with oracle jdk 1.7 (previously 1.6) on Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still we got our builds working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to capture the bare minimum configuration for things to work &amp;quot;out of the box&amp;quot;, and discard everything else. There's simple tools for that in many many languages, the usual suspects are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dependency Management:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is the tool of choice to manage what you need for development, building and execution. It grabs all the things you need from a repository somewhere on the internet and makes them available to your IDE and the build-manager.&#xA;e.g. Ivy, NuGet, npm, Gradle, pip, ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Build Management:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;e.g Maven, Gradle, Ant (sorry I don't do much aside from java)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They provide often rather simple configuration files based on a declarative syntax (XML, YML, JSON) that set up your dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that this does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; include IDE settings!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;IDE Settings are one of the things I'd never check in to source control. Nobody should have to care where the project is checked out. Nobody should have to deal with suddenly different syntax-highlighting and IDE extensions. The only viable IDE setting to version is Formatting preferences! Everything else should (and in 99.9% of cases can) be left to each developer themselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important factor is making code not rely on platform features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Avoid hardcoded paths like the plague&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefer configuration over code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use Environment Variables where necessary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In short:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Things to leave out of VC:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;IDE settings (.project, .sln, .idea, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Things to get into VC:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dependency Configuration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build Configuration (based on env variables / relative paths)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formatting preferences (&lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1189" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T08:59:16.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1485" CreationDate="2015-08-07T09:04:31.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can achieve your goal with the GNU GPL, except for prohibiting commercial use.  Section 7 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt; states that you may add &quot;additional terms&quot; as long as they do not restrict the rights granted by the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you want to grant an additional exception from the conditions in the GNU GPL or at least clarify your point of view.  So instead of just saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at&#xA;  your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you would add something like this right after this statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a further permission, you may use this program in a plugin for a&#xA;  program covered by an incompatible license as long as the plugin&#xA;  itself is released as free software covered by one of the free&#xA;  software licenses listed here&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is best to differentiate the software you want to allow combinations with by license instead of referring to it directly as free.  That way, you have a specific list of licenses that you want to allow which makes it easier for anyone receiving your software and also is clearer in a legal sense because you do not need a possibly lengthy definition of free vs. non-free.  As an alternative, you could say something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as long as the plugin itself is released as free software as defined&#xA;  by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think this may be tricky legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the exception the way I described it, someone could use your code in a program covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;.  This combined work could not be made non-free because only your exception to the conditions of the GNU GPL allow your code to be used in a combined work covered by a more permissive license.  If you do not want to allow use in any free program, you need to restrict the list of allowed licenses.  For example, you could say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a further permission, you may use this program in a plugin for a&#xA;  program covered by an incompatible license as long as the plugin&#xA;  itself is covered by a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to disallow distribution of the plugin together with a non-free host application, you need to add another statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This additional permission does not apply to distributing this program&#xA;  together with a program covered by an incompatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this last statement may be not enforceable depending on how the distribution works.  If the plugin and the host program are in the same package, but the user has to load it into the host application, your exception may still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of the additional permissions may be removed by anyone distributing your software, though (also section 7 of the GNU GPL).  In that case, the program could only be used under the pure GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no way to restrict commercial use with any Free Software license.&lt;/strong&gt;  Commercial use is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, so as soon as you prohibit commercial use, your software becomes non-free.  Furthermore, the GNU GPL does not allow such further restrictions; those further restrictions are considered void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF also has a FAQ entry about when exactly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;using a plugin constitutes a combined work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, these statements also apply to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU AGPL&lt;/a&gt; which may be a good pick if you think your software may be run as a service over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T09:04:31.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1487" CreationDate="2015-08-07T09:11:40.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's break the question into two steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I create [and distribute] Python software that will dynamically link against a closed-source library that has a C API (the Python interpreter is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq#Can_I_bundle_Python_with_my_non-open-source_application.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not copyleft&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should cause no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the software is &lt;em&gt;designed&lt;/em&gt; to be linked to some closed-source library, imposes no constraint on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your software is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; software.  You may give it any license you like, and&#xA;distribute it as you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;and will also utilize a GPL licensed Python library? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This step is slightly more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this library means that the &lt;em&gt;combination&lt;/em&gt; of your software, closed-source library, and the GPL licensed Python library, means that the composite of all three must, &lt;em&gt;if distributed&lt;/em&gt;, be licensed under GPL (some may &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1181/does-a-host-applications-license-apply-to-plug-ins-written-for-it/1183#1183&quot;&gt;disagree&lt;/a&gt;, but let's for the sake of argument assume that this is effect of the GNU GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clearly rules out &lt;em&gt;distributing&lt;/em&gt; a project where all three components are included, as the license of GNU GPL library is &lt;em&gt;incompatible&lt;/em&gt; with including a closed source library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the fact that your software is written for the specific purpose of making all these (license-wise incompatible) components interoperate cannot impose any restrictions on how you choose to use your creative powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. the mere &lt;em&gt;existence&lt;/em&gt; of a legal tool know as the &quot;GNU GPL&quot; cannot in any way constrain what you create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; impose terms on what you &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt;.  If what you distribute &lt;em&gt;includes&lt;/em&gt; a component licensed under the GNU GPL, then you're bound by the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means that if you don't distribute any component licensed under the GNU GPL, then you're &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; bound by the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Provided &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't distribute &lt;em&gt;anything else&lt;/em&gt; along with your Python software, but just provide &lt;em&gt;instructions&lt;/em&gt; to your downstream users about how to find (buy?) the closed-source library, and the GPL licensed Python library, and the steps they need to go through to assemble the these components into a working composite, then you don't have to care about the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what about your users?  Given the scenario described above, they will now be able to take your software, separately acquire the closed-source library, and the GPL licensed Python library, and take the steps required to assemble the complete project into a functional piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;em&gt;the users&lt;/em&gt; breaking the GPL?  No, not as long as they don't &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the completed project.  The private use exception of the GNU GPL (and copyright law) makes the user's use of all the components  legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you subverting the GNU GPL by doing it this way?  IMHO, no.  The GNU GPL is essentially about &lt;em&gt;freedom&lt;/em&gt;.  The GNU GPL was not written to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; people from using closed source software in their projects.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T09:17:35.270" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1504" CreationDate="2015-08-07T09:44:30.200" Score="26" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I run a project with a decently-sized userbase - a couple of hundred people, perhaps. It's regularly used by all users, and I've made it clear who developed it, where it can be found, and that it's free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm currently the only developer and contributor. With the exception of some small amounts of documentation, nobody has made any pull requests to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got other things to do as well, and I can't spend all my time working on this one project. I need other people to pitch in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Given a sizeable, active userbase, how can I encourage users to contribute to my project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T07:44:07.720" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T07:17:11.430" Title="How can I convert users to contributors?" Tags="|contributor|project-management|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2015-08-07T10:17:05.017" Score="24" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it clear that you want contributions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would start by putting a friendly note in your project's ReadMe file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project is looking for contributors. If you have a feature you'd like to see implemented or a bug you'd liked fixed, the best and fastest way to make that happen is to implement it and submit it back upstream for consideration. All contributions will be given thorough consideration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or something like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, reach out to your users on your mailing list, forum, and social media letting them know that the project needs more developers. Seriously, I can't tell you how far a Twitter account and a few well placed hashtags can go into generating interest. Also, blog about your development on the project if possible. Anything you can do to get your project in front of even more users is a good thing, particularly if those users are also developers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if you get some interest that way, it won't matter unless you make it &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt; as pie to help out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write clean and understandable code. If people can't understand your code, they can't change or add to it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Document the build process thoroughly. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure that the project builds &quot;out of the box&quot; when cloned onto a clean machine. If people struggle with getting it to build, they'll quickly move on and just write off trying to help out. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a &lt;code&gt;Contributing&lt;/code&gt; file to the repo detailing the project standards and workflow. This goes a long way to reducing the frustrating back and forth that can happen during a pull request. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're able, add [up-for-grabs] and [easy-fix] labels to issues that someone new could easily tackle. This gives people a place to start. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be available for real time chat to help new contributors get started. There are often a lot of questions when new contributors get started. Real time chat is the best way to help them get on their feet. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reduce your standards. Don't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; reduce your standards, but go ahead and accept that patch that isn't quite up to par. You can always go ahead and take a few minutes to clean it up after the fact. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write unit tests. It can be hard to tell if you broke anything while making a change to someone else's code. Provide the tests to make it easy to make sure everything is still working correctly post change. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T11:46:11.293" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T11:46:11.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2015-08-07T10:24:22.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, finding contributors is very difficult.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://media.libreplanet.org/u/libby/m/mako/&quot;&gt;Benjamin Mako Hill described in a talk at Libreplanet&lt;/a&gt; that the median number of contributors to Free Software projects is 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it is a good idea to ease people into the process.  Make it easy for users to file good bug reports, maybe by adding a reporting tool to your software.  Then give them feedback on those bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let them make feature requests and have them participate in the community that way.  Also make sure there is a good and easy to use way to exchange ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, newcomers who want to help find it easier to help write or update documentation or translate documentation and parts of your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have people involved, translators who know a bit of code may be familiar enough with it that they start fixing small issues.  From there, they may go even further and take on bigger responsibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is with any of this is to keep the threshold as low as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T10:24:22.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1507" CreationDate="2015-08-07T11:05:23.660" Score="9" ViewCount="3004" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a 3d printer that I use to print some models. There is a model I like that is licensed in Creative Commons under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;the Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what &quot;Commercial purposes&quot; are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I sell it? (I guess the answer is no)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone wants me to print a  model for them, can I charge the expenses I have (material, post charges)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I contact the owner to agree a deal to sell it? Will he be able to grant me permission to sell or he has lost the control?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1192" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T11:52:58.517" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T03:18:51.610" Title="Can I charge expenses for a work under CC BY-NC-SA?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|monetization|commercial|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2015-08-07T11:26:41.213" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC NC clause is really hard to get a grasp on, and Creative Commons do not provide much guidance about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly exists a lot of examples where it is not possible to give a straightforward about exactly &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; is commercial use.  For an example of such a situation, see my answer to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1244/using-cc-nc-material-inside-a-freemium-app&quot;&gt;Using CC-NC material inside a freemium app&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I don't see why there is a need to cop out of &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; question about the NC clause by simply saying that it isn't clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to give a straightforward answer. Then we should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, there is almost no case law about the NC clause.  This means that it isn't often contested. In most cases, people are able to figure out if it applies or not, and do the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is one where I think it is reasonable to provide a straight answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal code defines &quot;Non-Commercial&quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that you cannot sell it for an amount of money that will make you a profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; asking you to print a model, you can obviously get compensated for your direct outlay in materials, but if you make a profit by providing this service, you're breaking the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until October 2008, the CC FAQ provided a much more &lt;em&gt;detailed&lt;/em&gt; guidance on how to understand the &quot;NC&quot; clause than the present, deliberately vague FAQ, does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old FAQ discussed a scenario where a commercial print copy shop were charging the &lt;em&gt;commercial rate&lt;/em&gt; for the service of making copies of some materials licensed under CC BY-NC, and concluded that this was not allowed. However, if a commercial print shop agreed to just charging its own costs for the same operation, then it would be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this specific example has since been removed from the CC FAQ, I think it still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the owner &lt;em&gt;allowing&lt;/em&gt; you to sell it: Yes. CC is not an exclusive license.  As with all CC licenses, can always ask copyright owners for an alternative licensing arrangement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T15:15:09.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2015-08-07T12:59:24.107" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Provided it is a real clean room Linux Driver (i.e. it is not &lt;em&gt;adapted from&lt;/em&gt; a GPL-licensed Linux Driver), then the company that owns its copyright does not have to respect the GPL.  Having the &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; to be linked to the Linux-kernel, or to Linux system libraries, or using some  Linux API in the manner it is supposed to be used, does not trigger the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the company can sell you and everybody else this Linux Driver as a binary component. They're not distributing anything derived from anything under GPL, so they can do as they please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you buy this binary, integrate it with your system, and want to distribute the result, then this may or may not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Linux Driver is designed to meet the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING&quot;&gt;Linux Kernel exception&lt;/a&gt; or the GNU GPL &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#SystemLibraryException&quot;&gt;system library exception&lt;/a&gt;, then it is &lt;em&gt;excepted&lt;/em&gt; from the GPL, and can you go ahead and distribute your Linux-based hardware &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; providing the source code for this component.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Linux Driver does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; meet the criteria for being excepted from GPL when integrated in your system, then GPL requires you to deliver its source code when you &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; your Linux-based hardware. If you're unable to meet this requirement, then you're not allowed to distrubute your hardware at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T13:05:59.487" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:05:59.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2015-08-07T13:12:23.957" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, this question is very similar to &lt;em&gt;how do I attract customers to my business?&lt;/em&gt; except instead of cash, you want contributions. Successful salespeople deeply understand their customers' needs and tailor their services to address those needs. It's a very powerful method: &lt;strong&gt;put yourself in your potential contributors' shoes&lt;/strong&gt;, and ask what's stopping you. Many things will become obvious in this light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keep the lights on&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the most common reason people don't contribute is simple: no one's home (or it seems so). How can contributions happen if there's no one at the other end receiving it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show activity if you have any.&lt;/strong&gt; For projects I care about, I love reading developer logs and other related blog posts. It shows that there are people also passionate about the project, that I can talk to. &lt;strong&gt;Talk about what you're working on &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, not what you've shipped a month ago. This is important for potential contributors, and is an unnatural skill for most developers, since they may have been burned by over-promising in the past. One of the biggest obstacles for new contributors is not knowing where to start. Well, here's one way you can not only give people a glimpse of the inner workings of the project, but also where they can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you show off your activity will depend on your target audience and what you can bother with. The most obvious is having a &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/web-site.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;. GitHub for example provides free light-weight web hosting and blogging, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/web-site.html#canned-hosting&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are many others&lt;/a&gt;. You could also use social media like &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/social-networking.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook, Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/irc.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IRC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/message-forums.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mailing lists, web forums&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're not actively working on the project, it's not all bad. &lt;strong&gt;Provide easy ways for people to get in touch.&lt;/strong&gt; If I find no one home but I still want to contribute, I'm going to touch base first instead of spending a week preparing a pull request. Have a public &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/bug-tracker.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue tracker&lt;/a&gt;. List an email address, or social media handles. Provide a comment section. Maybe forums or IRC where you hang out. Whatever it is, list it clearly &lt;strong&gt;and respond promptly.&lt;/strong&gt; Few things put off potential contributors more than seeing unanswered bug reports from months ago!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One point worth making is that you should &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/setting-tone.html#avoid-private-discussions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prefer open channels for communication.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; E.g. if appropriate, put it in the public issue tracker rather than private emails. This has many advantages: it shows activity (hey look, there are other people contributing), and it discourages cliquish behaviour once more contributors join (although that's a problem you wish you had). On occasion I've reposted IRC chats or emails on the issue tracker for these reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do people work on free software projects?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a trick question. Most people intuitively think the answer is &amp;quot;resume-padding&amp;quot;, or to &amp;quot;write good code&amp;quot;, and they are wrong. Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We find in contrast, that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how &lt;strong&gt;creative&lt;/strong&gt; a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver. We also find that &lt;strong&gt;user need&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;intellectual stimulation&lt;/strong&gt; derived from writing code, and &lt;strong&gt;improving programming skills&lt;/strong&gt; are top motivators for project participation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://flosshub.org/node/53&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why hackers do what they do: Understanding motivation and effort in free/open source software projects, Lakhani, Karim R., and Wolf R.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me to willingly contribute to someone else's project, I'd want to be able to work &lt;em&gt;creatively&lt;/em&gt; on a problem &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; find interesting, challenging, or that addresses one of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; needs (or my itch). The last thing I'd want to work on is an uninteresting, strictly-to-spec task to be judged by an opinionated or rude maintainer. After all, most people who do that get paid, in day-jobs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're hungry for contributors, you need to put in extra effort to appear approachable, and once in contact make them feel welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the best and often overlooked ways to do this is to &lt;strong&gt;show appreciation.&lt;/strong&gt; Say thanks! It's the bare minimum you should do, for anyone who reaches out. &amp;quot;Thanks for your interest!&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/managing-participants.html#users-to-participants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Treating users as potential contributors&lt;/a&gt; is a good attitude and start. If someone contributes a killer feature, the additional success of the project is reward enough, but that rarely happens. I don't want my contribution to simply wither away in the commit logs. Yes, non-trivial code changes mean you have to add contributors' names in the copyright notices, but that's out-of-sight. Does your project have a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/credit.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;credits&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;acknowledgements&amp;quot; section? What about other communication channels? One of the best acknowledgements I've received for contributing features was being mentioned by name in a blog post, as an example. What this also does is it &lt;strong&gt;shows future contributors that they will be acknowledged.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But external motivation may work too.&lt;/strong&gt; Not all projects have interesting and easy tasks to do, and you probably want to work on such tasks yourself, which is fair enough since the project is yours. But it does leave a backlog of interesting-but-hard, or simple-but-tedious tasks that no one wants to do, especially new contributors. I've wondered whether a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; for such tasks can attract new contributors to an obscure project, and I'm happy to report that it does, at least in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cxong.github.io/2015/03/bounties-for-your-game/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one time I've tried it&lt;/a&gt;. It did take one month after the bounty post for anything to happen though, which leads to my final point...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be patient&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a project is run by volunteers, things happen at an unpredictable pace. Motivation comes and goes, real life happens. Sometimes you'll be actively updating a project for months with no acknowledgement from the outside world, others you'll get a flurry of contributions on a project you've abandoned years ago - I've been there, on both ends. Be aware it's the nature of the beast, and most things just take time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T13:12:23.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2015-08-07T13:22:02.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the problems with CC NC is that when you say &quot;I am not sure what &quot;Commercial purposes&quot; are&quot;, you are not alone in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant clause in CC BY-NC 3.0 reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of NonCommercial in CC BY-NC 4.0 is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that means exactly is not very clear, and opinions differ on whether something is commercial use or not - and a whole lot of discussion about it has not produced much, if any, clarification on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons commissioned a study to what exactly the NC clause in their license means in 2008, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Defining_Noncommercial&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/17127&lt;/a&gt; which found that opinions on what exactly is commercial use differ significantly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it is generally thought that use of CC NC materials is not allowed on websites that are supported by advertisements, even if those advertisements are only intended to cover the running cost of the website. The study cited above found that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial” creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as “commercial.” However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case “not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs” ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to sell it, or receive a compensation for the materials (and power) used, one of the findings of the report is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;virtually all creators agree that a noncommercial use is one in which&#xA;  “no money changes hands.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the question where &quot;money would be made from the work, but only enough to cover the costs&quot;, which seems to be your scenario, roughly 60% of users considers this &quot;definitely commercial&quot; (about 10% &quot;definitely noncommercial, and the rest &quot;can't say&quot;), and about 45% of creators considers it &quot;definitely commercial&quot; (vs ~20% definitely non-commercial and the rest &quot;can't say&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright holder believes your use is commercial, it's up to the court to decide whether it is or not, creating a legal hazard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; contact the owner to make a separate deal that is not covered by the license, or discuss (and put in writing) whether they consider your use commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-08T14:15:34.750" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T14:15:34.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2015-08-07T15:32:02.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at firmwares of most low-cost, low-end home routers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They use tons of GPL (and other) components, while being closed source as a whole. If there are source codes of such devices provided, then only for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kernel (including drivers for custom chips used in router)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;used software in original versions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other source code, but only if this is convenient for some reason for the manufacturer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such devices there exist multiple contact points between open and closed parts, and while some of them were reported as GPL violations, most of them weren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course most of them were done intentionally, to lower manufacturing costs using GPL software and bypassing the license terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, most reported violations concerned directly Linux kernel and custom drivers, while most types of closed-to-open-source wrappers (for example to routing protocol daemons), network bridges etc. are recognized as clear from legal point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="691" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T15:32:02.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2015-08-07T15:59:16.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Transforming medium (CD→MP3, PDF→paper, 3D-file→physical, etc) doesn't change the copyright state so that does affect you directly if you want to sell the printings of the model directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest staying well away from the non-commercial definition nonsense. There madness lies. &lt;strong&gt;Be a service provider.&lt;/strong&gt; What most people in this space do is &lt;em&gt;lease&lt;/em&gt; their printers. Charge for the time, materials, finishing, postage, etc and the client takes responsibility for licensing. And you can be as unreasonable as you like. You can profit from your resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there's clearly overlap there. If you can freely give somebody the model file and they can legally hire you out, why can't you &lt;em&gt;pretend&lt;/em&gt; they give you the model and just sell the model? It might seem ridiculous but if you're doing this as a business, I'd work very carefully to make sure your business model remains that of a service provider; that you're letting them use your printer to print their files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can throw technology at this as a workaround. Provide your users a free 3D model storage service, a model library that where they can download to their storage, and then a printer hire service where they can print things from their storage. Convoluted, painful... But probably legal. At the very least, open to argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a copyright owner can transfer copyright assignment, but simply providing something under one license doesn't mean you can't also license it out under other licenses. For something like this, the original owner almost certainly has the ability to give you a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1201" LastEditorUserId="1201" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T16:49:11.423" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T16:49:11.423" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-07T17:23:35.810" Score="7" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common statement about the value of Free/Libre/Open programs: non-developers can hire developers to update the software (and not be reliant on a single monopoly control over this service).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this really happen much? Are there businesses or freelancers who do this? Or is it mostly hypothetical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1176" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T18:58:59.393" Title="Are there actual service businesses or freelance orgs for non-programmers to hire devs to update FLO software?" Tags="|community|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1514" CreationDate="2015-08-07T18:53:23.093" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This of course varies from project to project, but yes: there are both businesses and freelancers who do this.  But more so for large free software projects, than for small ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, look at a Drupal. Drupal is a FLOSS project (requiring &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; distributed components to be licensed under GPLv2+) that also sustains a large community of individual developers and companies that can help you with adapting and updating any Drupal project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Individual developers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/paid-services&quot;&gt;https://www.drupal.org/paid-services&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Companies: &lt;a href=&quot;https://jobs.drupal.org/&quot;&gt;https://jobs.drupal.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I am approached by clients about paid work for Drupal, the client is almost always aware of this, and tell me up front that my company is just one of the service providers they consider. They expect my offer to be competitive compared to other companies that offer Drupal-related services.  And if they know what they're doing (not all companies understand this), they require us to &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; what we deliver to them under GPLv2+ - which means that they can kick us out and hire somebody else to work on the software &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; create for them if they're are dissatisfied with our services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also believe that this is the case for &lt;em&gt;very many&lt;/em&gt; other free software projects, but my first hand experience is with the Drupal ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-07T18:58:59.393" LastActivityDate="2015-08-07T18:58:59.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1518" CreationDate="2015-08-08T07:39:37.490" Score="13" ViewCount="2489" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/657/what-am-i-supposed-to-do-if-someone-is-breaking-the-terms-of-my-licensed-softwar&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is about what we are supposed to do if someone is breaking the terms of a software license, I would like to know how I can know if some is doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I'm writing a software with a GPL license. It is a copyleft license. It is not allowed to use the code in a non-free licence. But, in practice, if someone uses this code in a non-open source software, how can I detect that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1209" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T19:24:59.707" Title="How can I detect if someone is breaking my license terms?" Tags="|copyleft|software|enforcement|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1517" CreationDate="2015-08-08T09:37:10.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be a number of ways, but there is no guarantee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have enough certainty, you could start a legal case and ask for sources to be disclosed. This in fact happened in the SCO case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can reverse-engineer the code, and show that it has non-trivial code that is exactly like yours, that would help. Whether it would convince a judge and a jury is another matter. Note that reverse engineering someone else's code may be illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also have inside information from the people who were involved in using your code in a non-open environment - whistleblowers or snitches, depending on where you stand on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you could look for behaviours that are characteristic for your code, although this is unlikely to be successful. As a wild example, you could put an Easter egg in your code and see if it shows up with the code from the license-breaker as well. This is tricky, however, as the nature of open source is that easter eggs are easier to find and remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T09:37:10.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2015-08-08T11:09:14.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could register your project at &lt;a href=&quot;http://up-for-grabs.net/#/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://up-for-grabs.net/#/&lt;/a&gt; as was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BringKindnessBackToOpenSource.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggested on Scott Hanselman's blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From their homepage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're looking for projects who can take the time out to help mentor developers as they get started with open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What sort of tasks are a good fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tasks should take no longer than a few nights' worth of work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tasks should stand alone - avoid core functionality on which other tasks depend&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Tasks should be well described with pointers to help the implementer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We suggest the tag &lt;code&gt;up-for-grabs&lt;/code&gt; but using a different name is also acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1214" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T11:09:14.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1517" CreationDate="2015-08-08T12:07:31.047" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking, in general, you can't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 'in general', I mean, 'you are part of the 99.99% of people who post up something with a FLOSS license.' You will have some users scattered all over creation. You will have no visibility into what they do. You may well have someone who uses your code in violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in the unusual .01% (numbers invented) you have created something with tremendous impact on the marketplace, like MySQL or Linux or the like. In which case, you might end up noticing some inappropriate use. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox&quot;&gt;BusyBox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The detection mechanism here is not technical. How could it be? Starting from the source, a bad actor can remove anything you leave in place to try to detect usage. Rather, it depends on (a) wide usage, and (b) conspicuousness, such as, well, a shell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you post some clever image analysis algorithm, and someone adapts it and incorporates it inappropriately, you have very limited means of noticing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T12:07:31.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1523" CreationDate="2015-08-08T21:35:14.103" Score="20" ViewCount="11456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating an open source project and I want to use an MIT license for that. I have found this page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I write under &quot;full name&quot;? Should the group of people, that I am working with be registered as a company? If I am the head developer, and other people are freelancers that I have hired, can I (or should I) just write my own name instead of the company's name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the &quot;year&quot; should I write basically the current year, the years when this project is available as open source or the year this product was released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2218" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T13:04:07.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T13:04:07.000" Title="What should be written in MIT license (year, full name)?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1522" CreationDate="2015-08-08T21:43:03.840" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;All these details are part of the copyright statement, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, they should be filled in with the details of the copyright that applies to the licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[year]&lt;/code&gt; is the &lt;strong&gt;year copyright was applied&lt;/strong&gt;. If you apply the copyright (which happens automatically when you write the work) in 2015, put in 2015. Some people like to put in a range of years (i.e. 2015-2020) - this isn't necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[fullname]&lt;/code&gt; is the &lt;strong&gt;full name of the entity that owns the copyright&lt;/strong&gt;. If the owning entity is a private individual, put their name in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2015, jackson&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's a company (and although you may write the code, if you write it for a company, your employment contract probably contains a copyright assignment clause), put in the name of the company:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2015, Stack Exchange, Inc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you're using &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com&quot;&gt;choosealicense&lt;/a&gt;, each license page has a section called &lt;strong&gt;How to apply this license&lt;/strong&gt;. You can find it on the top of the right-hand column of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-08T21:43:03.840" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1529" CreationDate="2015-08-05T22:38:47.900" Score="11" ViewCount="3067" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://oficinavirtual.mityc.es/componentes/first-steps.html&quot;&gt;this library&lt;/a&gt; in my project. Author says it is under the LGPL license, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://oficinavirtual.mityc.es/componentes/mityclibxades/license.html&quot;&gt;one of its dependencies&lt;/a&gt; is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence&quot;&gt;EUPL license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EUPL license isn't clear about if a closed-source application that uses the libraries inherits the EUPL license. What I understood so far is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL licence is compatible with EUPL license, so a library under LGPL license that uses another library under EUPL can be used for a closed-source commercial product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not mandatory to put a derived product under the EUPL license if it uses a library under the EUPL license (despite it mentions that Copyleft stuff).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/91/165&quot;&gt;http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/91/165&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Can I use a library under the EUPL license for my closed-source commercial product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2238" OwnerDisplayName="Broken_Window" LastEditorUserId="17729" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T10:59:59.557" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T10:59:59.557" Title="Is it possible to use a library under the EUPL license for a commercial closed-source project?" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|eupl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1537" CreationDate="2015-08-09T05:06:12.030" Score="11" ViewCount="2523" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are systems consisting of wholly free software, and in some cases the hardware is also driven by free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about mice? Do mice have software on them which would make them &quot;nonfree&quot;? I've plugged &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.logitech.com/product/mini-optical-mouse-plus&quot;&gt;this mouse&lt;/a&gt; into Ubuntu, Debian and Trisquel Linux distributions and was never prompted to install any nonfree software, which leads me to assume that mice are generic and just send keycodes to the computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computer Mice seem like trivial devices. But I do own &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.logitech.com/product/gaming-mouse-g500&quot;&gt;a more sophisticated mouse&lt;/a&gt; which can be loaded up with macros, so it doesn't seem like mice are necessarily so trivial, and the software driving those macros is probably nonfree. Would using either of these mice exempt me from running a &quot;wholly free system&quot;? (Or would the supposed triviality of such software--perhaps it is unable to make network requests, for instance--make it a non-issue?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2219" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T20:32:33.650" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T14:22:37.993" Title="Can a mouse be &quot;free software&quot;?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2015-08-09T07:29:00.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the mouse is hardware, and the underlying technology is old. AFAIK there are no patents covering the technology that are still valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mice have been around for a long time, so it's logical that the Open Source operating systems support them. Note that sometimes, Open Source coders reverse engineer a protocol to make their own implementation, as in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_%28software%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Samba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your more sophisticated mouse may require additional, proprietary code - whether in the mouse itself or in the drivers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an Open Source system with a regular mouse should still be &quot;wholly free&quot;. A mouse with more advanced features may not be, depending on what the producer decided to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T07:29:00.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T07:49:23.160" Score="7" ViewCount="1416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to modify and merge some software that is available under the two clause BSD license into a project that is available under the GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute the result under the GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed without getting permission from the owner of the copyright to the BSDed code? (I've tried to contact them, but there has been no reply.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is allowed, are there steps I need to take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="924" LastEditorUserId="924" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T10:00:25.890" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T09:42:00.617" Title="Can I relicense software under the modified BSD licence?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2015-08-09T09:03:09.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are allowed to do this, if the software is licensed under any BSD license other than the original 4 clause license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of different The BSD licenses. The Original BSD license or 4 clause BSD license is incompatible. The others (3 clause BSD license or revised BSD license, 2 clause BSD license or simplified BSD license and ISC license or OpenBSD license) are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original four clause license has become fairly rare. Its incompatibility stems from its clause 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the (organization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;FSF - Various Licenses and Comments about Them&quot;&gt;list of licenses&lt;/a&gt; which (among other things) indicate whether a license is compatible with the GPLv2 and/or GPLv3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T09:03:09.917" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1524" CreationDate="2015-08-09T13:03:58.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question turns on that hardy perennial favorite dilemma: aggregation versus derivation. The 'intermediate-ness' of the intermediate library doesn't matter. The reason it doesn't matter is that the question is asked about the work, as a whole. I do not believe that anyone thinks that the precise order and arrangement of the call graph is important; what matters is what people think about dynamic linking. From the standpoint of, well, &lt;code&gt;ldd&lt;/code&gt;, the EUPL library is linked into your work. Either that triggers obligations or it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, what matter is what (a) the copyright holder, and (b) a court, thinks of this. The FSF, authors of the GPL, see all dynamic linking as resulting in a derived work and thus source distribution obligations. What do the authors of the EUPL think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe Wikipedia, the dynamic linking situation of the EUPL is completely up in the air, subject to the legal breezes of each individual jurisdiction. So we have even less 'principle' to apply to predicting the legal view of dynamic linkage with an EUPL license than we do with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, your best best is to &lt;em&gt;ask the copyright holder&lt;/em&gt; of the library for her or his view of dynamic linkage. If the copyright holder gives you permission, you're good. If not, whatever anyone else thinks of the EUPL and dynamic linkage, you might be on the wrong end of a legal action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T14:25:31.973" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T14:25:31.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-09T14:43:36.217" Score="15" ViewCount="3143" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago, I encountered an edit suggestion on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;. The OP had posted a snippet that was under the GPL, and included the GPL in the snippet. The editor tried to remove the GPL as it was not relevant to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an SE point of view, this makes sense - as an SO user, I don't want to see licenses, just the code that the question is about.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to remove the license this way, assuming the snippet is a non-trivial piece of code? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T15:47:12.660" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T18:34:21.680" Title="Is it OK to remove the license terms for a code snippet?" Tags="|licensing|law|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1530" CreationDate="2015-08-09T15:40:09.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was contrary to the T&amp;amp;C of stackoverflow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the&#xA;  Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange&#xA;  under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author granted a CC license whether or not they posted a GPL notice. If the author lacked rights to grant that license, the whole post is invalid. So either the GPL goes, or the post goes. So, it's legal insofar as, under the T&amp;amp;Cs of the site, posting the code granted the CC license, and so the GPL notice was misleading noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author not only added the GPL notice, but &lt;em&gt;clearly stated&lt;/em&gt; that his or her intent was to dual-license both GPL and CC, then it would be reasonable, if kind of pretentious and noisy. But if the impression is that the OP is trying to avoid the CC license in favor of the GPL, it's no go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, some legal experts apply &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.davismcgrath.com/2013/02/14/the-de-minimis-doctrine-plays-an-important-role-in-copyright-law/&quot;&gt;de minimus&lt;/a&gt; to small software snippets. On the other hand, if the author is specifically claiming the snippet as a copyrighted work, it's probably not a good idea to pick a fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T17:08:12.680" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T17:08:12.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1532" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-09T15:51:05.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Code snippets are small, self-contained pieces of code. They are not complete programs and usually need some boilerplate code before they can be compiled, but they are sufficient to illustrate a point to someone proficient in the programming language in which they are written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T15:53:38.800" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T15:53:38.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1533" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-09T15:51:05.553" Score="0" Body="For questions about small, self-contained pieces of code within the context of open projects." OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:52:14.817" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:52:14.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1530" CreationDate="2015-08-09T16:39:46.637" Score="16" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the code snippet is is authored by user, then adding the GPL just means that it is dual licensed under the GNU GPL as well as CC BY-SA (the default licence applied to all content posted on SE). This was mighty helpful of the user, as it would otherwise not be possible to reuse that snippet in any program not licensed under CC BY-SA without finding it elsewhere under GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the code snippet was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; authored by SE user, and the code was was not too trivial to be uncopyrightable,  and its &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; licence was GPL, then posting it on SE would put it under CC BY-SA. However, only the original author can do this, so such an action without permission from the copyright owner would be unlawful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="924" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T16:39:46.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1530" CreationDate="2015-08-09T18:34:21.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the code snippet was actually just a snippet, then you could see it as a citation of the original source code and as long as the citation was necessary to enable people to comment properly, it may fall under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot;&gt;Fair Use&lt;/a&gt;.  Since Fair Use is an exception to copyright coverage, the license would not matter much in this case as long as the source it publicly available.  Countries that do not have the concept of Fair Use in their copyright legislation sometimes have specific exceptions for citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to judge if it was clearly just a citation without seeing the actual post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T18:34:21.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:13:09.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A mouse's design can be free or not free. Software inside of a mouse can be free or not free. This is not related to your ability to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are standard protocols for USB 'human interface' devices. So, I can build a mouse around a microcontroller, and I can load that microcontroller with 100% &lt;em&gt;not free&lt;/em&gt; microcode, and I can sell it and it will work perfectly well on every operating system in creation with no special drivers, free-, open-, or proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the software of this mouse, and perhaps many other similar murines, is not free. Further, the mouse is a piece of hardware, it has a design. That design is copyrighted, and the author may not have chosen to license that design under a free license. So the hardware design of the mouse is very likely &lt;em&gt;not free&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I could also publish the design of a mouse under a free license, and publish the microcode under a free license, if a free-range mouse was what I wanted to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no connection between the contents or design of the mouse and the ability of a FLOSSy operating system to communicate with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:13:09.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:41:14.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trivially, a mouse can't be free software, because a mouse is not software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what other questions could this be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a mouse's drivers be free and or open source software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a mouse's design be free/open?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a mouse's firmware be free/open?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To all questions, the answer is, obviously, yes, it can be. If there exist &quot;advanced&quot; mice with non-free firmware (the coding on the chips in the mouse), I don't know, but from a gut feeling* I assume it won't be all that many. The same goes for the design. I doubt many high-end manufacturers would go for an open design, as one of their main selling point often is their design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the drivers, there usually exist free drivers all consumer peripherals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*warning: answer contains a gut feeling. There are hardware manufacturers that embraced open technology, but it's not much, and &quot;gaming&quot; mice, the kind that usually have macros, are not generally closesly affiliated with the open source or free software movements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-09T20:56:31.967" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:56:31.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2015-08-09T21:06:46.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;real problems or questions that you’ve encountered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the history and philosophies of the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Initiative and Creative Commons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;understanding, applying, and complying with Free &amp; Open licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;issues related to project management, such as collaboration, monetization, marketing, distribution, hosting, and community communication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T00:01:19.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T00:01:19.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2015-08-09T21:08:53.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Questions that are primarily opinion-based&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;if you want to know how to use Free &amp; Open projects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;if you would like recommendations for Free &amp; Open media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T10:48:41.823" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T10:48:41.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1525" CreationDate="2015-08-10T09:52:15.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're thinking along the right lines but I think you're minifying the scope of your actual problem toward running a &quot;wholly free system&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPUs have proprietary firmwares (many required even for free drivers to work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CPUs ship with firmware &quot;microcode&quot; (which can be updated) which are often closed source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Common BIOSes are rubbish for being free (though there are free alternatives) and systems without BIOS at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All those other chips inside your computer (audio, disk controllers, on-SSD controllers, USB, firewire, etc, etc, etc) all have firmware, all have source... Very few are open source though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many displays are programmable and can be updated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just on mice, while many features can operate on standard USB HID drivers (evdev et al), mice &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; contain software to handle advanced features. &lt;strong&gt;Unless you can get the firmware source and upload your modifications, that's a nonfree mouse.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important thing to note is that just because it includes driver software, doesn't &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; it's running a proprietary firmware. It might be listening to &quot;standard&quot; button combinations and just doing something in software on the OS. The bundled software might also be proprietary, but in a lot of cases, there are ways of handling extra keys in pure open source too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to find out whether your mouse has a firmware. I honestly don't know of any advanced mice without a firmware, so you might need to explicitly look for free mice, or ask Logitech for the source...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But remember that it's not just your mouse you need to check if you want to be 100% free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1201" LastEditorUserId="1201" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T14:22:37.993" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T14:22:37.993" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1543" CreationDate="2015-08-10T13:43:21.373" Score="10" ViewCount="629" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a contributor to a very old project presently in violation of the GPL. Our project is a plugin for a closed-source program, but the GPL does not permit this kind of linking. The project should have been licensed under the LGPL instead, but the original authors were not aware of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only about 30 contributors to the project, but it's almost ten years old at this point; Many of these people have moved on and I'm not sure I can find them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I proceed with relicensing the project if I can't contact everyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T13:46:33.027" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T10:41:23.910" Title="Relicensing from GPL v2 to LGPL v2 - What if I can't contact all contributors?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|collaboration|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1542" CreationDate="2015-08-10T14:32:55.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;You need &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the copyright owners' permission to change license.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no natural GPL-implied path here because LGPL is more permissive. It allows redistribution of unmodified binaries without the offer of source, explicitly disallowed by GPL. This makes it moderately incompatible in this direction (but you could include LGPL in a GPL work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to distribute it under a different license, you need permission from either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright owners (all of them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An agent who operates the copyright on behalf of the owners (all of them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somebody with explicit permission to redistribute and sublicense under the terms you require.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some fancy combination of the above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't get suitable explicit permissions, you have to &lt;strong&gt;replace their work&lt;/strong&gt;. This could be quite simple (if they all did whole blocks that could be replaced from fresh without needing to look at them, ie a clean-room implementation), but equally, it can mean awfully painful bisects that make the process more legally dubious. It might be a good prompt to extract the best parts and rewrite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this is civil law and you only have to answer to these people or their agents. A best-effort to contact them, followed by a best-effort to remove their code will be seen by most as a honourable attempt to do the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a sidebar, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF isn't quite as adamant you need to move to LGPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins [...] there are no special requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, [...] that combination [...] would violate the GPL. &lt;strong&gt;However, you can resolve that legal problem by adding an exception to your plug-in's license, giving permission to link it with the non-free main program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You still have a licensing issue that requires everybody's input, but it might be a smaller step to leave the existing license in place and add an additional excepted license for the application you want to link into it, extra-GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1201" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T10:41:23.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1545" CreationDate="2015-08-10T16:16:05.323" Score="7" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a contributor to a very old project presently in violation of the GPL. Our project is a plugin for a closed-source program, but the GPL does not permit this kind of linking. The project should have been licensed under the LGPL instead, but the original authors were not aware of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relicensing is already covered in another question, so we will ignore that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only about 30 contributors to the project, but it's almost ten years old at this point. Many have moved on to other projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributors clearly intended for their work to be used with the closed-source program in question. They did not know the GPL forbade it. It is exceedingly unlikely that one of them will take legal action against the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project continues despite the GPL violation, what is our legal exposure to third parties? Can the FSF or any other group sue us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T16:17:41.867" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T19:09:37.890" Title="GPL Violation - What is our legal exposure to third parties (not our contributors)?" Tags="|gpl|law|collaboration|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1544" CreationDate="2015-08-10T19:09:37.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the project does not create and distribute a combined work of the plugin and the closed source host, then I see no realistic liability. This is because you aren't violating the GPL. A violation occurs when someone combines the GPL library with the closed source component and then distributes the result. You haven't done that, so &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; haven't violated anything. Someone who uses your plugin in the privacy of their home or business, but doesn't redistribute it, doesn't violate the GPL, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holders of your project have a course of action if someone does combine the works and distribute them. So if all of you agree that it was your intent to permit this use, then none of you will bother users. If none of you bother users, including anyone who creates and distributes a combination, there is no one to sue anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very faint liability might come into play if, in fact, some copyright holder did sue some third party for violating the license, and the third-party tried to come up with a counter-suite that you all somehow led him or her astray. I don't believe it; at worse, the fact that you all published this component looks to me like estoppel against any attempt by any of you to enforce the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, the GPL is a license that you, the copyright holder, grant. You own the rights. You are the only people who can bother anyone else for violating the terms of the license. If you choose (like Linux) to take a different view of plugins and linkage, you can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T19:09:37.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1547" CreationDate="2015-08-10T19:55:24.003" Score="9" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a contributor to a very old project presently licensed under the GPL. Our project is a plugin for a closed-source program, but the GPL does not permit this kind of linking. The GPL FAQ states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means that combination of the GPL-covered plug-in with the non-free main program would violate the GPL. However, you can resolve that legal problem by adding an exception to your plug-in's license, giving permission to link it with the non-free main program.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was interpreted to mean that WE were in violation of the GPL on our own code because the GPL does not permit dynamic linking between Free and non-Free code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bmargulies pointed out we that aren't violating the GPL, since a violation occurs when someone combines the GPL library with the closed source component and then distributes the result. Therefore it's OK for us to consider linking to the closed-source host as OK and not pursue it, and no third party can feasibly take legal action against us for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is great, but what if our project included in its source code GPLed source code from someone else's project? Can that project's owners decide that our interpretation of linking doesn't fly with them and take action against us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T20:03:25.027" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T22:12:23.067" Title="GPL interpretation - What is our legal exposure if we include another project's code?" Tags="|gpl|law|collaboration|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1546" CreationDate="2015-08-10T21:12:35.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, now we must note that the copyright holders of the included code are in a position to complain if someone distributes in violation of the GPL. However, by the same logic as my previous answer, I do not see how you and your fellows have distributed in violation. The hypothetical violators would be others who distributed the combination of your plugin (and thus these others' work) with the closed source program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of the included code would certainly have a legal course of action against someone who did that. On the other hand, since the host program is closed-source, who has rights to create a combined work that includes it and your plugin? I would guess that the owner of the closed-source program does not grant that right to anyone. So, if the owner doesn't bundle you in a release, who is left to violate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would certainly be &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; for you to post a notice explaining this situation and warning potential distributors that there is no way to distribute the combination of your plugin and the host program without legal liability. However, again, it takes a long stretch of the imagination to see how any of this leads to liability for you and your fellow creators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm especially not your lawyer. But I have been helping to run a software company that produces and consumes FLOSS software for quite a while, and it's part of my job to know the basic working parameters of this stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-10T22:12:23.067" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T22:12:23.067" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="533" CreationDate="2015-08-10T22:10:37.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it is made clear in contributor agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is no contributor agreement, the author(s) of each part of the code own the intellectual property for the part they wrote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2015-08-10T22:10:37.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-11T08:06:41.727" Score="13" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a library developer. I want to open source it soon, but I'm not sure what license will work best for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main concerns are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to provide a commercial license for somebody who is willing to pay on top of open source one (LGPL allows it, right?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to allow the usage in commercial projects (not sure what to do here, because LGPL has dynamic linking exception, but iOS is one of the platforms I'm targeting and on iOS static linking is still most popular option)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to be capable to merge any derivatives back without any permission from somebody who made modifications without preserving any of the credits of modifier. As well I want to have my copyrights on all the code, does not matter where from it comes, merged back from a fork or written in-house. Basically I need a license, that states that modifier waives any claims or demands to the modifications he made.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to forbid any third party to re-license the code and/or change copyright and credits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is trivial or not, but I will greatly appreciate any suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I want to monetise the software. I want to make it available free for open-source community, but I don't want any claims from any contributor (this does not mean that there will be no contributor list, though). I just want to preserve the right to merge anything back without any permission, so I want a license, that explicitly states, that modifier waives any claims and understands, that even his credit might not be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some interesting stuff discovered during my research. This thing I'm looking for does seem to be possible. Here is an example of FSF recognised license: &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:QPLv1.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:QPLv1.0&lt;/a&gt; Take a look at section 3b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2254" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T16:29:28.117" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T16:44:54.177" Title="Appropriate licence for later merging back" Tags="|copyleft|derivative-works|license-recommendation|lgpl|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2015-08-11T09:23:01.830" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to provide a commercial license for somebody who is willing to pay on top of open source one (LGPL allows it, right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a copyright holder you always have the option to dual license your works under any licenses you choose, including proprietary/commercial licenses. If you want to do so with others' contributions then you would be wise to get them to sign a Contributor License Agreement first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to allow the usage in commercial projects (not sure what to do here, because LGPL has dynamic linking exception, but iOS is one of the platforms I'm targeting and on iOS static linking is still most popular option)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe LGPL should allow this. You can also specify additional exceptions just to make sure that it will be okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to be capable to merge any derivatives back without any permission from somebody who made modifications &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe any FLOSS license requires you to publish all changes (i.e., forbidding private derivatives), if that's what you mean. If you're talking about published derivatives, then any copyleft license would require those derivatives to be published under a license that would allow you to merge them back in. But note that they retain copyright for their own changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;without preserving any of the credits of modifier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll find any FLOSS license which allows this - it is against the general principles of the movement, and possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors%27_rights&quot;&gt;against the law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As well I want to have my copyrights on all the code, does not matter where from it comes, merged back from a fork or written in-house. Basically I need a license, that states that modifier waives any claims or demands to the modifications he made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a FLOSS license this will not be possible - either you don't allow any derivative works, or you allow derivative works by allowing forkers to copyright their own changes. But again, you can use a CLA to get anyone contributing their code directly to you to transfer their copyright to you (but this may deter contributions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to forbid any third party to re-license the code and/or change copyright and credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most copyleft licenses do not allow you to re-license the code, except perhaps to a later version of the same. If you do not want that, you can usually specify so. No license will allow someone to change the copyright and credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T09:23:01.830" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2015-08-11T09:44:52.777" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The combination of conditions you set don't meet the Open Source Definition as set by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;Annotated Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Derived Works&#xA;  The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&#xA;  Rationale: The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want to allow people to make derivatives of your work and hold copyright to it. That makes it fail the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you could write up and find some non open source license, and call it open source because it meets your personal definition of open source, even if it's not a widely recognized definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think we can do better than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for now, we drop the requirement that all those creating derivative works signing over the copyright to their code to you, what can we do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of your requirements seem to be met with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. This license is a per-file license that allows for any kind of linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have created, what are essentially the LGPL + static linking exception. This is the route taken by, for example, 0MQ. There are concerns with this approach though, as this creates a crayon license, and 0MQ is moving towards the MPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the MPLv2, let's take a look at your conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I want to provide a commercial license for somebody who is willing to pay on top of open source one&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyright to everything you want to license commercially, then yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I want to allow the usage in commercial projects&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your comment after it, it seems you want to allow linking against your library, and allow the entity that does this to distribute the combined work under a non-free license. This is allowed in the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to forbid any third party to re-license the code and/or change copyright and credits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the standard. Note that you do want to allow a &quot;third party&quot; (I'm sort of losing track of parties here. If you're the first party, then who is the second party? And who is the third?) to create works under a different license, owning the copyright themselves, if they merely link to your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can we do with your third point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An often taken route is to let contributors sign a CLA - (individual) contributors license agreement, CAA - Contributors Copyright Assignment. In a CLA, a contributor to your library agrees to grant you a license that allows you use and to re-license their work. In a CAA, they agree to assign the copyright to their patches to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that both work by the agreement that you only allow patches from contributors who have signed the CLA or CAA. This doesn't restrict forks in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allow you to take contributions from the community offered to you under the CLA/CAA, and incorporate it in your non-open fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the closest you can approach your requirements, and still be open source as it is commonly understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harmonyagreements has &lt;a href=&quot;http://selector.harmonyagreements.org/&quot;&gt;a tool&lt;/a&gt; that can help you set up a CLA/CAA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T09:56:34.783" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T09:56:34.783" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1542" CreationDate="2015-08-11T11:56:24.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Step 1: document the situation. Put up a notice that explains the problem; but be clear, not alarmist. As discussed on other questions, there's no problem for &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; of your plugin, only for people who would want to distribute a combined work of your plugin and the host. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 2: Survey the contributions of the unreachable individuals. Perhaps they are very small? This might either make them easily replaceable, or not big enough to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Step 3: Survey the mailing list archives. If there's a clear intention to allow this usage, then you might conclude that it's safe to change the license (by adding a permissive term or by switching to LGPL) on the grounds that you have evidence that all the copyright holders intended this in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER: You've noted in other questions that you incorporated code from other GPL sources. You can't relicense that without permission from its copyright holders, so there's really no point to changing your license unless you can replace &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To repeat what I have written elsewhere: You and your fellow contributors have not violated anything. You have, however, created an opportunity for a very small group of people to violate the license of the GPL code you incorporated. If there is no realistic situation in which anyone would want to distribute a combined work, then this is more humorous than disastrous. Your notice would consist, more or less, of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, we used the GPL and we forgot to add a dynamic linking exemption, and we &#xA;  incorporated some other GPL code that has no dynamic linking exception.&#xA;  If you are an end user, this makes &lt;em&gt;no difference&lt;/em&gt; to you. The GPL&#xA;  gives you all the rights you need. Our mistake only matters if you&#xA;  want to create a derived work by combining our plugin with &amp;lt;INSERT&#xA;  APPLICATION NAME HERE&amp;gt; and distribute that combined work. In that case, we're really&#xA;  sorry, but we can't guarantee that some copyright holder won't call&#xA;  you out for a violation, so we have to tell you that this would be a&#xA;  very bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T11:56:24.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2015-08-11T12:19:30.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Office&lt;/a&gt; under Sun used this model. The code was LGPL, but all contributors had to sign over their copyright to Sun, who sold a version of OOo as the non-free &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Star Office&lt;/a&gt;. This was part of the impetus to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Go-Open Office&lt;/a&gt;, and later &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LibreOffice&lt;/a&gt;. you can find more information &lt;a href=&quot;http://slashdot.org/story/07/10/03/1212234/sun-refuses-lgpl-for-openoffice-novell-forks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;on slashdot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could implement this model with by requiring any contributor to sign or otherwise express agreement with a document similar to the following before accepting a Git merge request:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hereby relinquish all copyright claims against ... code, patch, files, ... to Daniel Tabasco and any agents of Daniel Tabasco ... I understand that the code may be used for commercial purposes ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the OP wants to prevent forks of his project, he may want to consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure of the details, but somehow &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postbox-inc.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PostBox&lt;/a&gt; made a Thunderbird derivative which does not provide the source code for their client. I've contacted a PostBox rep and he insists that the application is in compliance with the Mozilla Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="946" LastEditorUserId="946" LastEditDate="2015-08-11T13:04:40.230" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T13:04:40.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2015-08-11T13:06:27.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to provide a commercial license for somebody who is willing to pay on top of open source one (LGPL allows it, right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;None&lt;/em&gt; of the FLOSS licenses are &lt;em&gt;exclusive&lt;/em&gt; licenses.  This means that as long as you're the sole owner of the project's copyright, you're free to dual-license it under some FLOSS license (including LGPL), and a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to allow the usage in commercial projects (not sure what to do here, because LGPL has dynamic linking exception, but iOS is one of the platforms I'm targeting and on iOS static linking is still most popular option)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL has a very broad &lt;em&gt;linking exception&lt;/em&gt; (it covers all types of linking) that allows linking of code under LGPL to a commercial project &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; buying a commercial license.  Your dual-licensing business model will not work with LGPL.  Nor will the dual-licensing work with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; permissive license.  Dual-licensing &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; works with &lt;em&gt;strong copyleft&lt;/em&gt;, such the GNU GPL (because some commercial clients may be willing to pay for a commercial license to escape the copyleft obligations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to be capable to merge any derivatives back without any permission from somebody who made modifications without preserving any of the credits of modifier. As well I want to have my copyrights on all the code, does not matter where from it comes, merged back from a fork or written in-house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way you can do this under &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; real free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt; people to turn over their copyright to you by having them sign a legal document called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CLA). But if they don't want to sign your CLA, they don't have to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically I need a license, that states that modifier waives any claims or demands to the modifications he made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; (free or not) that does this.  What you're looking for is a &lt;em&gt;contract of employment&lt;/em&gt;.  People sometimes sign these, but not without a reasonable expectation of being paid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to forbid any third party to re-license the code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license, such GNU GPL, don't allow sub-licensing, so that should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and/or change copyright and credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can't remove &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; copyright or credit (but if it is under a FLOSS license, they can use it and fork it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can't stop anybody for copyrighting &lt;em&gt;their own&lt;/em&gt; improvements/modifications and then refuse to sign the copyright of those over to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you introduce a CLA that suggests they sign their copyright over to you, &lt;em&gt;expect&lt;/em&gt; that somebody takes your code and fork your project as a free/libre project that people can contribute to without signing any CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible (legal?) to add CLA/CAA inside the LICENSE of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a free country, so it is possible and even legal to destroy a good license with nonsense (this is called a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;&quot;), but it won't do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How enforceable is it in case of a breach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not at all.  Simply, by doing this, you've created a crayon license with &lt;em&gt;conflicting&lt;/em&gt; terms.  Such things are generally not enforceable through courts at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to enforce such strange terms, you need to have the other party &lt;em&gt;sign&lt;/em&gt; something that is &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; from the software license (e.g. a CLA, a CAA, or a contract of employment) - not just &quot;violate&quot; some arbitrary restriction that you want to impose on others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main idea is to allow all the forks and everything, but make every one who modifies the software to &quot;sign&quot; the CLA/CAA, not just the ones who want to merge back. So, if I would merge (find merged) LGPL and CLA/CAA into one combined license, would it be legal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be legal in the sense that there is no law against creating a license that does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and enforceable in a case of breach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem is that I want to monetise the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the problem is that you want to monitize &lt;em&gt;somebody else's&lt;/em&gt; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is absolutely no problem with you selling &lt;em&gt;your own software&lt;/em&gt; under a commercial license.  The problem starts when you want to take the work of &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt; and re-license it under a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; license than the license they offer their work under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to copyright law, you cannot do this without permission from the person who created the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to make it available free for open-source community, but I don't want any claims from any contributor (this does not mean that there will be no contributor list, though). I just want to preserve the right to merge anything back without any permission, so I want a license, that explicitly states, that modifier waives any claims and understands, that even his credit might not be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license you ask for does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For obvious reasons, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; such license exists.  And even if you did create one such a &quot;license&quot; yourself, it would not be enforceable &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you can get people to sign a physical paper copy of it and give that signed copy to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T14:02:57.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1549" CreationDate="2015-08-11T16:44:54.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is an experiment; you and others may not like it, but we'll see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write that you wish to make money with code you plan to publish with a (more or less) open source license. You might want to carefully consider your goals here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF did not write the GPL to help you do this. In the FSF's picture of the world, all software (at least) would be free (in their sense), and so no one would ever need to pay for a commercial license to circumvent the GPL. You, I, and everyone else would be paid for our labor as consultants, developers, teachers -- but not for licenses for our IP. Many people have attempted to arbitrage industry distaste for the GPL by offering a GPL + commercial license. However, unless your library is a true killer application, you are not likely to make a living this way. The first question people will ask themselves is, 'Can I find a non-virally-licensed alternative?' The second question is, 'Can I build it myself for about the same cost?' The third question is, 'Do I want to depend on this person actually having clear rights to sell me a license at all?' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, if they are building an in-house application and not redistributing, they can do that under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make your own crayon license, you will cast the third question into high relief, and the people with the most money to spend will become chary of doing business with you. The same applies to the less popular non-crayon licenses. It's the business equivalent of a 'code smell.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to return to the original goal: you wish to monetize your labor. What are your choices? (1) no FLOSS or free-as-in-beer license at all. You do sales and marketing like all the rest of us working stiffs. If you've built a better mousetrap, the mice will come. (2) You accept the framework of the free software movement entirely, and look to make money as a consultant and feature developer of your own code. (3) You do the usual dual-license thing, and accept that others are free to make derived works and do other things that you don't like. If your version is superior, people will pay you for it. If someone else makes it into a better mousetrap, well, they will take market share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-11T16:44:54.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-12T08:32:24.840" Score="40" ViewCount="3793" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time and again, it is noted how frustrating it seems to contributors when their contributions are rejected (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510964&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.learn-cocos2d.com/2013/08/contributing-open-source-projects/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23600.html?thread=471856&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). That is why I am somewhat undecided about how to handle a situation where someone has provided a rather not so helpful patch to one of my projects (let's call it &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; for now) without burning any bridges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I am seeing is composed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not talking about a large, well-known project, but about one of the zillions of largely unnoticed projects, which has accumulated a few hundred downloads in the course of several years and never before received a contribution from someone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The patch in question is not &quot;wrong&quot; per se, I simply see it as unnecessary. So far, the build process invokes a tool &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; (one of the wide-spread tools for its task for the technology in question) for the project, and hence some config files come in the format compatible with tool &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. The patcher decided to replace these config files with config files compatible with a different tool &lt;em&gt;B&lt;/em&gt;, which is equally wide-spread in the community (but which I do not use).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With no previous contributions from the outside, I fear rejecting this contribution will convey the impression to the contributor that project &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; is among those pseudo-open projects that reject all patches with some kind of a better-than-thou attitude. While the concrete effect on my project(s) would be negligible (and I am aware it is impossible to always acommodate everyone in life, so alienating the contributor in question may be unavoidable), I would hate if the one lasting effect to the realm of open source software caused by my projects is that I have provided yet another example of projects that do not accept any input from the outside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;How can unnecessary (even though not explicitly incorrect) patches be rejected in a diplomatic way, especially by small projects with little to no other contribution activity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;As there seems to be some kind of confusion about why tool-specific configuration files can be necessary, I am going to add a short explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With various modern programming languages, the source code of a program is not merely a bunch of uniform source code files, but a heterogenous collection of files that need to be treated in different ways. Moreover, unlike it was the case with languages like C, these files are not necessarily integrated into one another by a preprocessor; rather than that, project files define what files to integrate into which compiled artifact. These project files are not necessarily a part of the language standard; instead, there are various tools that consume such project files, with different expectations to the exact format and contents project files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my open source projects, I generally follow the philosophy that whoever pulls the contents from a VCS repository should immediately be able to build the same artifact that I can build myself, and deploy it the same way. The more automated this works, the better. &lt;em&gt;(The &quot;immediately&quot; comes with the sole restriction that sometimes, access credentials have to be configured, and a few tools expected by the build/deployment process may need to be placed on the search path. To reduce the obstacles to this as far as possible, I choose these tools based on how wide-spread and freely available they are.)&lt;/em&gt; Hence, I need to supply the project files along with the plain sources, for otherwise, a considerable amount of work would be required to first assemble the source files in the expected way before any artifacts can be compiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practice to integrate such tool-specific files in the VCS when they are essential to building etc. seems to be common practice, as implied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/347142/project-files-in-repository&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; (thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/97/martijn&quot;&gt;Martijn&lt;/a&gt; for digging up that question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT2: To those confused by the discussions - while the discussions have become a bit technical, this question is still entirely focused on the communication between two humans, project leader and contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T00:59:47.617" Title="How to react to unhelpful contributions to otherwise unnoticed projects" Tags="|project-management|collaboration|interpersonal-issues|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1560" CreationDate="2015-08-12T09:52:09.867" Score="14" ViewCount="2103" Body="&lt;p&gt;In trying to deal with a codebase that was originally proprietary and then open sourced, new contributors are coming along.  Each file has names on it (though usually the main author's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the codebase is drifting considerably.  Maintaining a list of names in each file seems to clutter it, and introduces an unnecessary awkwardness of &quot;when a change is significant enough to be on the list&quot;.  There's also an issue of accuracy, because the name is generally not the person to try and contact about issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking that it would be best to just strike the names entirely, rely on the git blame log, and switch to a CONTRIBUTORS file.  &lt;em&gt;(This is along with a general push to take stuff repeated in each file and move it out to coding guidelines documents, etc.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This project is on GitHub and is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mostly C code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; as its entry point for describing the project (80-column limited)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; in text file format (Apache2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what sort of model might one use for a contributors file?  An all-caps CONTRIBUTORS seems like a long name.  Wondering what people call it and what would go in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It hit me right after asking that CREDITS.md would be a good short name &lt;em&gt;(somewhat obvious, and I've even used it in the past I believe)&lt;/em&gt;.  But I wasn't acknowledging individual contributors to the code when I did this before, I was acknowledging the sources drawn from (libraries, tools, etc.) to build it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it still strikes me that these might be different files.  But maybe they could both go in one?  Then CONTRIBUTORS would be a section heading in the CREDITS.md file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2268" LastEditorUserId="2268" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T10:14:00.737" LastActivityDate="2022-11-04T09:55:50.067" Title="Standard for &quot;CONTRIBUTORS&quot;-style file (format, name, etc?)" Tags="|contributor|documentation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-12T10:08:03.743" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some guidelines that may be of use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Always thank the submitter for their patch (unless you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't want them to submit any patches anymore, which could be possible)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Establish guidelines for patches, and make sure contributors can easily find them. If you don't want IDE config changes, put it in your &lt;code&gt;contributing.md&lt;/code&gt; (or equivalent).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let submitters know what is wrong with the patch, and point to the guidelines. If it can be fixed, it leaves the submitter open to fixing it (tell them that it would be appreciated!) If it's a config only change, reject it. You could open a ticket in your tracker with the issue of how to deal with different IDE configs, or how to share them. A main repo might not be the best thing, but, if the config is really complicated, separate config repos could be useful. Or you could distribute static config files (that are not part of the repo).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's all the same to you, you could consider &lt;em&gt;accepting&lt;/em&gt; the patch, even if you don't really like it. If there is truely no harm (there might be, and there might be hidden costs and maintenance problems), why not accept it, even if you don't really like it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T10:08:03.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-12T10:10:43.443" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reject it with a message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't&lt;/strong&gt; accept it; accepting it sends the signal that this is a good contribution and you want more of them. If that's not what you want, don't accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you should do is reject it with a note explaining why, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thanks for your contribution. Your patch was rejected because it simply replaced config files. Since I use config files of the original format, it would have made extra work for me, which isn't ideal as I'm sure you understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be nice to them about it and they'll understand. Any reasonable person gets the fact that you don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; extra work if it's not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, it's a good idea to exclude IDE config files from your repository. If you're using Git as a version control system, you can use .gitignore to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T10:10:43.443" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2015-08-12T12:55:01.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are using &lt;code&gt;.md&lt;/code&gt; file, I take it that people won't be looking at the raw stuff with all the stars and what not. People will look mostly at the way that the file is &quot;marked down&quot;. This means that you can use headers, and emphasis just like you note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't really a &quot;standard&quot; of doing this: Most projects create their own policies and standards to deal with varying situations in all aspects of project management, including contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do create a &lt;code&gt;Credits.md&lt;/code&gt; file, it would make perfect sense to include your contributors, as well as your sources. The markdown format will allow easier readability, and hence organizations between sources and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separate files don't tend to be an issue either: If you feel that one file becomes too large and thus virtually overshadows other critical sections of files, then it becomes easier also to split them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an avid list of contributors, and you are recording each contribution they make to various files, then it would make perfect sense to keep them in separate files, just like I mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T12:55:01.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1517" CreationDate="2015-08-12T13:35:24.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You generally cannot practically detect (most) license violations -since detecting such violations is labor intensive-, in particular if you are a small entity (or a single person); e.g. you won't be able to detect that some obscure Chinese hardware manufacturer is modifying your GPL code and putting it (without publishing the modification) in some firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did detect a license violation, you might have hard time to stop it (e.g. you might need to go to a trial and give a proof -or at least a legitimate &amp;amp; persuasive explanation- of that violation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a big corporation probably won't risk such violation. Some former disgruntled employee might denounce that, and the bad publicity would be very harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some organizations are motivated and powerful enough to detect such violations (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gpl-violations.org/&lt;/a&gt; which is currently nonreachable, or perhaps the FSF). There is even some French startup (I forgot its name, the founders are from INRIA) which has developed some (proprietary) tools to scan executables -e.g. searching message strings &amp;amp; symbol names in them and matching them against a database- to find such violations (and license incompatibilities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2015-08-12T19:24:59.707" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T19:24:59.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2015-08-12T14:03:24.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; way of listing contributors, but there are some &lt;em&gt;conventions&lt;/em&gt; and habits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; compiler has a &lt;code&gt;MAINTAINERS&lt;/code&gt; file (in its source tarball) which could inspire you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2021-12-26T15:27:14.737" LastActivityDate="2021-12-26T15:27:14.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-12T15:37:10.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reject the patch if it doesn't have a tangible benefit - does it help compilation on other platforms, etc? If not, if you have no reason to accept it, you have no reason to accept it. If it's some compilation helper that could work alongside your method then that adds value, otherwise it doesn't move things forward (and using it could hold you up, at least in the short term, as you have to learn how to use and manipulate their system now; and even if it could live beside your method, you have to keep their method in sync with yours...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank the submitter, but explain that you don't feel that this patch benefits the project (with your explanation as given). If you have a features roadmap on your project, even if its just an informal wishlist, that would help. You could direct the submitter to that (or a bug tracker) and say that these are the areas that you are currently working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't dwell on it too much, the submitter possibly has integrated your project into some system of their own and thought it would be nice to share their changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2277" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T15:37:10.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-12T15:47:02.013" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that when you say it's &quot;unnecessary&quot;, you mean unnecessary for you. That's not the right way to collaborate: if you want others to contribute then they should have the same conveniences as you (build files in the repo for their preferred build tools).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you can politely reject the patch, with a remark that you would accept a patch that contained config files for B provided it did not remove the config files for A. If it's an oversight on the patcher's part then they'll understand the need to support A. If they are actively hoping to remove support for A from the project then they can forget about it, obviously you aren't going to accept a patch that prevents you working on the project in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the kind of thing where every tool added to the project needs to be added to the config file(s)? If so then you have a potential reason not to accept it (you can't test the file yourself), but also a basis for this contributor to remain active (to maintain the tool B config). You could in that case say that you will accept the file for as long as &quot;someone&quot; is responsible for testing it, and that you will remove it if at any point in the future it becomes apparent that nobody is doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose ultimately it depends on your attitude to &quot;use at your own risk&quot; files in your repo. Ideally someone should actively maintain it, but if it's just a &quot;nice to have&quot;, you could take the attitude that you'll include it as a minor courtesy to users of B, but that if it doesn't work you unfortunately can't fix it and will have to rely on a patch from a user of B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you (rightly IMO) don't want the discussion here to be about A vs B. But the discussion with your contributor potentially &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be about A vs B, in which case you should have that discussion. In particular supposing that B were a free tool and A is not, then this contributor might have a very good point about the direction your project(s) &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; take in this respect, to avoid the error of being &quot;pseudo-open&quot; as you fear! Or supposing that A is free and B is not, then you would have a very good reason for privileging A as the &lt;em&gt;assumed&lt;/em&gt; build tool for the project, with B as a marginal case that you support only if it's &quot;easy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastEditorUserId="736" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T10:04:58.540" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T10:04:58.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2015-08-12T16:19:14.793" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Developers inside big corporations (and perhaps even smaller ones) have lawyers and managers dictating them conditions for using (professionally) external free software. A &quot;crayon license&quot; is very likely to be forbidden in such contexts (probably such developers have a list of acceptable licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want your code to be widely used, I suggest to use an established &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; labelled open-source &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T16:19:14.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2015-08-12T21:27:41.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Talk to them.  Learn about their workflow, use cases, needs.  Ask them to write up what improvements would benefit them most.  Ask them to enter them as feature requests.  Ask them to compare various features requests and prioritize for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engage everyone you can - ask for feedback, discuss the project, show enthusiasm, it's infectious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastActivityDate="2015-08-12T21:27:41.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1569" CreationDate="2015-08-12T22:56:18.023" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a talk, complete with an accompanying resource pack and website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never released anything I believe to be of some actual significant monetary value to anyone else before so I'm a little bit stumped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I want to license all / any of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treat this content as if it's an unlimited, never-ending supply of free beer delivered as often as you like in a bottle with a label on. Provided all the &amp;quot;free beer&amp;quot; remains free you can do what you like with, drink it, give it to a friend, remix it, relabel it, share it with your friends. The only requirement is that you say where the &amp;quot;free beer&amp;quot; came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you however you wish to distribute the beer for money, as is or with modifications or as part of a larger pack of other similarly licensed free beers, via any distribution network that generates you revenue, you are required to purchase an additional license from the original provider of the beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which creative commons license can I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2283" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:12:44.550" Title="Do anything with this free beer except generate revenue, for that you'll need to purchase an additional beer license?" Tags="|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1567" CreationDate="2015-08-13T03:40:05.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: The &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; question requiring that any sharing of the materials should be restricted to the materials &quot;&lt;strong&gt;exactly in its current form&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.  This restriction was lifted and instead permission to &lt;strong&gt;remix&lt;/strong&gt; was added (to match another answer).  I've therefore edited my answer to match the &lt;em&gt;changed&lt;/em&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license model you're pursuing is sometimes referred to as &quot;Commercial Rights Reserved&quot;, where you offer your materials gratis for non-commercial uses, but do not allow commercial reuse.  Having this restriction in place means that someone who want to distribute the same materials for money, need to purchase a separate commercial license to be allowed to redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you want to allow non-commercial users &quot;remix&quot; (i.e. to create any derivatives of the materials), provided they share under the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; license as the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt; (CC BY-NC-SA) is a non-free (as in &quot;freedom&quot;) public license that will allow gratis reuse (including remixing) of the materials, but reserve commercial rights (which then can be licensed separately by means of a commercial license in a dual-license arrangement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the commercial license, these are usually custom made for each customer, and you need to hire a lawyer to help you with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no details about what is included in the &quot;resources pack&quot; you plan to distribute along with your talk, but please note that CC BY-NC-SA is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a software license and Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;recommends against using Creative Commons licenses for software&lt;/a&gt;.  However, CC BY-NC-ND is AFAIK the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; existing ready-to-use public license that imposes the &lt;em&gt;restrictions&lt;/em&gt; you are looking for and still allows some use of materials for non-paying users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T14:12:44.550" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:12:44.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1567" CreationDate="2015-08-13T12:29:04.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take a look:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of what you would like to license sounds like a creative one: It looks like you've got a talk, resource packages (which look like it is writing) and you've got a website. Already, we can narrow down to Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provided all the &quot;free beer&quot; remains exactly in its current form you can do what you like with, drink it, give it to a friend, share it with your friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alright, if you would like people to be able to share their work, but not make anything out of it, then you need to remove the &quot;derivatives&quot; clause. In order to make sure that other people don't take the &quot;derivatives&quot; from your friends, and start selling them, you're going to need a ShareAlike clause, to make sure that any changes will have to follow the same rules as what you originally gave to others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, your license of choice should be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt;. This one should do what you would like it to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second license, the site is not really in a position to help you. We don't deal with proprietary licensing, and proprietary licensing doesn't fall within the scope of the site. You'd probably be better to just slap it &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot; and then let people contact you: thus negotiating things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-13T13:48:10.413" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T13:48:10.413" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-13T13:20:59.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having been on both sides of this situation I'm going recommend that you accept it(with some caveats).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a project is opensource the goal is to have community collaboration and ultimately a tool that will be useful to a large portion of the community. There are two, relatively, equally used tools in your community for accomplishing a similar goal. This contributor has submitted a pull request because they want to use your project but found they had to make modifications(to use a different toolset) to do so. Modifications that a good portion of the community also using that tool would have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this really is as simple as providing additional configs to do so - what do you lose by including these configs? If half the community(to pull some SWAG here) uses tool B and you provide direct examples using tool A... providing the configurations required for tool B just doubled your potential audience, increased the number of people who can use the tool out of the box and encouraged someone who obviously cares enough about your project to make contributions that expand the influence and reach of the project. It's win win win as far as being open source and the relationship of contributor and owner goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caveat, however, is that this should be done in a way that doesn't replace the configurations that are provided but extends them. Perhaps they should go somewhere else(an 'example' directory is pretty common in a lot of opensource projects). Perhaps this should be added as a sort of plugin to the project or a new option in the project(depending on the kinds and amounts of changes required.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that it's inconvenient for you if this changes because you have a very specific pipeline(which is a conversation fraught with opinions for an entirely different venue). I also get that you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to decline this PR. But I think your two goals of &quot;Please contribute&quot; and &quot;Only contribute the things I want&quot; are at odds with one another. Further more I think &quot;Only contribute the things I want&quot; when combined with a small project owned by a single person is a sign that this project probably isn't all that opensource. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can decline this PR. It's entirely within your rights. I don't think you can decline this PR with the state of your project as it is without discouraging this user from contributing in the future(and potentially other contributors) . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasonable solution would be to decline to merge the PR as it is with suggestions on what would need to be done to support both the current configuration and the proposed additional configuration. The onus is then on the contributor to make those changes or abandon them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2291" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T13:20:59.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2015-08-13T14:10:15.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Reject the change and add some contribution guidelines&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should explain that the contribution whilst not without its own technical merit isn't strictly a contribution that adds anything to the project goals. Explain that this is what forks are great for and encourage the contributor to maintain their own fork. Thank them for their time and add some contribution guidelines so next time (whenever that may be) you can refer the contributor to the guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone submits a contribution that doesn't match the guidelines, it's a less personal rejection as they haven't met some known criteria they were already aware of before investing their time in something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2283" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-13T14:10:15.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-13T15:18:51.617" Score="4" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an application using &lt;a href=&quot;http://itextpdf.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;iText&lt;/a&gt;. iText, unless a commercial license is purchased, forces you to abide by the AGPL. My plan is to sell commercial pre-compiled copies of my software at a small cost, while leaving the source code on github for those technically adept to compile it themselves. Is this legal? Also, am I permitted to distribute iText binaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2293" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T06:46:11.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T12:00:03.533" Title="Commercial AGPL application" Tags="|multi-licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1581" CreationDate="2015-08-13T17:28:03.717" Score="8" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have built a program using several open source libraries. Most of them fall under MIT, BSD, Appache and  LGPL license. To my understanding some of them require the source code to be shared. I was hoping to build a website that would provide the source for download. My problem has to do with providing the correct version of the source. Is this mandatory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example say I am using package X version 1.2 and my site allows users to download package X from the creators of X's git repo. Time passes and package X is upgraded to version 3.1. Thus my website is now pointing at the new version of the source even through my program was distributed using version 1.2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this still meet the requirement to allow users to download the source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2305" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T00:52:00.780" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T12:12:07.377" Title="The download for source is a newer version than the version shipped" Tags="|attribution|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1574" CreationDate="2015-08-14T00:44:22.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What most people do is to make an archive &lt;em&gt;of the release&lt;/em&gt; available for download. Access to newer source is nice, but the terms of the licenses are best met by providing the actual source. As we say at Apache, 'Apache Releases are Source Release, the binaries are just for convenience.' So, the important thing, from a licensing standpoint, is the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T00:44:22.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1573" CreationDate="2015-08-14T06:31:43.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole developer or if you hold the copyright on all the code for other reasons, you can do with it as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model you mentioned is using a strong copy-left license and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;selling exceptions&lt;/a&gt; to it.  People who want to use your code in non-free software have to pay for this exception and they then get your code under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept contributions from others, this becomes more difficult because they may contribute under the AGPL.  In this case, you would also have to comply with the AGPL unless you ask for a copyright assigment or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you are free to not distribute binaries to the general public.  The requirement of the AGPL is to give the source code to people who have a binary copy (or use one over a network), but not the other way around.  The reason is that the source code enables you to exercise the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone else is free to use your source code and compile it, though.  They may even decide to then distribute those binaries and that would also be legal as long as the comply with the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T06:31:43.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1580" CreationDate="2015-08-14T06:53:14.047" Score="15" ViewCount="8842" Body="&lt;p&gt;With compiled languages, I understand when a work is considered derivative of another and thus, a license such as the GNU GPL covers the whole work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, with interpreted languages such as PHP or Python, I am not so sure.  If I find a library online that is covered under the GNU GPL v2 or later and I use this library in my PHP/Python/Ruby/... project, does the GNU GPL cover the whole work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about if I subclass classes from that library?  Are those subclasses covered by the GNU GPL?  Is the code that then uses those subclasses also covered by the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:24:48.347" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T10:40:26.217" Title="When is my project a derivative work in an interpreted language?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1579" CreationDate="2015-08-14T07:21:29.057" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A derivative work is a work &lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;derived from&lt;/em&gt; one or more already existing works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the arts, common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In programming, as well as in the arts, a derivative work is a “new edition” of a preexisting work in which the editorial revisions, improvements, elaborations, or other modifications that is present in &lt;em&gt;the whole work&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. the end result of combining all the different parts together to create a public facing work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above definition, it should not make any difference if the programming is compiled or interpreted.    If you find a library online that is covered under the GNU GPL and you use that library in your PHP/Python/Ruby/... project in such a way that a (non trivial) part of the  &lt;em&gt;functionality&lt;/em&gt; your project depends on said library, then the project is a derived work of that library, and the whole work must be licensed under the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that the &lt;em&gt;software architecture&lt;/em&gt; (dynamic vs. static linking, late binding (&quot;plugin&quot;) vs. compiled, subclassing, etc.) are analytically unhelpful and misleading in answering the derivative work question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quote from Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2014/SFLC-Guide_to_GPL_Compliance_2d_ed.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Law Center Guide to GPL Compliance 2nd Edition&lt;/a&gt; addresses this concern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL licenses, then, are explicit about limiting the scope of copyleft to the scope of copyright. They do not, however, as is sometimes suggested, do so in a way that distinguishes “dynamic” from “static” linking of program code in “early-binding” programming languages. It is occasionally suggested that a subroutine “dynamically” linked to GPL’d code is, by virtue of the linking alone, inherently outside the scope of copyleft on the main work. This is a misunderstanding. When two software components are joined together to make one work (whether a main and some library subroutines, two objects with their respective methods, or a program and a “plugin”) the combination infringes the copyright on the components if the combination required copyright permission from the component copyright holders, and such permission was either not available or was available on terms that were not observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the derivative work question, we need to examine whether combining two works together would infringe copyright (&lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; permission to create the combined work was granted by the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question cannot be found by examining the software architecture of the composite work.  Instead, we need to look at the actual components, and to what degree one components &lt;em&gt;depends&lt;/em&gt; on the other to create a functional, whole work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks specifically about class hierarchies: If a subclass builds on a very generic class (e.g. Java's top level &quot;Object class) and that subclass adds substantial functionality to the work that is not present in the generic class, it is &lt;em&gt;unlikely&lt;/em&gt; that the subclass will infringe the copyright of the generic class, because such a generic class is not copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases, a class may be considered copyrightable, but the courts may decide that linking should be considered fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet in other cases, if one were to subclass a very rich and functional class, for instance a class that provides checkout and payment in e-commerce context, it is very likely that such use would require permission from the copyright holder, and as a result, a subclass of this as part of an e-commerce application or website would in this particular situation, be considered a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="606" LastEditorUserId="606" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T14:49:10.983" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T14:49:10.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1574" CreationDate="2015-08-14T07:57:56.067" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Project licenses&lt;/a&gt; are specific about what counts as source for a work: redistribution requires that one must also make available to every recipient the “&lt;strong&gt;complete corresponding source&lt;/strong&gt;” for that very same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ensures the recipient has effective freedom to modify and redistribute the same work themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for a work licensed with that wording, it is a violation to fail to offer the source for &lt;em&gt;the same&lt;/em&gt; work as was distributed to the recipient. In other words, source for some other version does not satisfy that clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete corresponding source for the work is a pre-requisite for the recipient's effective freedom to modify and/or redistribute the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-copyleft licenses, the redistributor is not required to distribute source at all. So they do not ensure the recipient's freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to ensure recipients can get the complete corresponding source for the same work they received, license that work with terms of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft from the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL v3 or later&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T07:57:56.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-14T11:59:04.477" Score="5" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I release a program specification [1] under the AGPL, and the program itself under the AGPL, the two are obviously compatible: I can develop them at the same time, copy text (for example, method headers) between them freely, &quot;derive&quot; methods from the spec requirements, back-derive requirements from implementation (it happens, ok ;). But, the specification would not be compatible with BY-SA works (say, Wikipedia or Stack Exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I release the specification under BY-SA instead, it is still compatible in one direction (from spec to software), because BY-SA is one-way compatible with the GPL [2], and the GPL is compatible with the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if I release the specification under BY-SA (including releasing it before the software), am I &quot;losing&quot; any of the copyleft strength of the AGPL. i.e. enabling someone to create a non-copyleft work where they couldn't before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Looking at it another way, if I release just an AGPL specification, am I guaranteeing that any implementation must be AGPL? Or is anyone free to develop the &quot;ideas&quot; in the spec under any license they want?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] To clarify, a specification is not end-user documentation (a manual), it is a (sometimes very detailed) outline and plan for what the software must do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer obviously rests on the judgment of to what extent the code is a derivative work of the specification. I will obviously accept an answer of &quot;it depends&quot;, &quot;not tested in law&quot;, etc, if that is the most accurate answer possible :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] It appears I am dreaming and this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/cc-by-4-0-and-cc-by-sa-4-0-added-to-our-list-of-free-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;underway, but not yet finalised&lt;/a&gt;. Let's assume for the sake of argument we are a few months in the future and it's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T15:14:07.213" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T15:14:07.213" Title="Does a CC BY-SA 4.0 specification lose any AGPL3+ benefits?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyleft|cc-by-sa|agpl-3.0|software-development|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1573" CreationDate="2015-08-14T12:00:03.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;My plan is to sell commercial pre-compiled copies of my software at a small cost, while leaving the source code on github for those technically adept to compile it themselves.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your application includes iText, and you licensed it under the AGPL, you need to abide by the license conditions, especially section 6 of the AGPL (Conveying Non-Source Forms). The form 6d is essentially what you suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Am I permitted to distribute iText binaries?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you received iText under the AGPL, you can distribute binaries when you also include the sourcecode or a written offer to provide the sourcecode if asked to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you bought a commercial license, the conditions are explained in the proprietary license agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T12:00:03.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2015-08-14T12:06:55.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is a software license. It doesn't work well for media content like documentation. Even the FSF does not recommend to use the GPL-family licenses for documentation. The AGPL is even worse than the GPL, because its addition to the GPL, clauses for using the software over a computer network, is even more nonsensical when it comes to documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF recommends the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/a&gt; for documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but by offering the documentation under other conditions than the software itself you will likely not weaken your rights on the software, because documentation and software are independent creative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T11:08:26.553" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T11:08:26.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1579" CreationDate="2015-08-14T15:52:36.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is offered as a supplement to FreeRadical's fine exposition, and is focussed on subclasses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that it is helpful to focus on individual classes. Copyright law looks at a 'work'. If a class is intrinsically part of a work, and you build code that depends on that class, I think that there's a fair chance that you're making a derived work, regardless of the triviality of the class. I believe that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The GNU classpath license&lt;/a&gt; was created for this reason, to 'disconnect' all Java classes that use or derive from the JRE's boot classpath from the JRE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by this logic, if some interpreter is object-oriented, and the license does not specifically exempt works that use the standard library, you might be deriving from the standard library and be subject to its license. Since PHP and Python are 'permissively' licensed, they don't cause this problem; but other things (oh, here I go mentioning Drupal after suggesting that FreeRadical should not) like Drupal explicitly go here. (So maybe I was wrong to suggest that he edit that reference out.) Drupal isn't an interpreter, it's a library. Imagine that there was some GPL-licensed class library that had a trivial 'Object' class at the bottom of the class hierarchy, I am suspecting here that deriving from the class counts as 'using' the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-14T16:05:10.093" LastActivityDate="2015-08-14T16:05:10.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2015-08-14T16:13:42.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A specification is a document describing some programs, in many cases interfaces. Regarding the implication of the licenses: it is relevant what implementing a specification does. I don't know about any law-suits indicating that the implementation of a specification is forming a derivate or even violating the copyright of the author of the specification. That might be the case though, because most authors of specifications intend it to be implemented multiple times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we assume that implementations of the specification can be done without being influenced by the license of the specification, then we can conclude the following:&#xA;If the implementation is based on your implementation (licensed AGPL) it must be licensed AGPL. If the implementation is independent, it can have any license its author chooses. So how you license the specification only affects direct derivates of this specification (for instance extensions to the specification). As both AGPL and CC-BY-SA are copyleft-licenses the differences are small. Relevant here is, that AGPL is a license for software, many clauses don't make sense for a document. So I would recommend to license it as CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having software under one license and documentation for it under another doesn't implicate any compatibility-problems (you said that having both under AGPL is compatible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T13:37:00.030" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T13:37:00.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1574" CreationDate="2015-08-15T12:12:07.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you say that it points to the creator's git repo, I assume you mean their central repository on GitHub. By default, links on GitHub point to the latest version of the code, but it is possible to get a link to a specific version of the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navigate to the &quot;Commits&quot; page. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find the commit that corresponds to the release you're using. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navigate to it and select &quot;Browse Files&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy the url. This link points to the repository as it was at that commit. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, many repositories use Tags for release versions. You may be able to use a tag to find the proper version. It's also worth noting that a link to the source may not be enough to full-fill the obligations of the license. You may be responsible for hosting the files yourself. It's a bit unclear to me if using a third party (GitHub) to host the source files fulfills the obligation in regards to the LGPL. Particularly if it's not your repository that you're pointing to. I would take a look at the following link for questions about GPL compliance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the creator used GitHub releases, just browse to the release page, find the proper version and download the zipped source files so that you can host it yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm wrong and it's not a GitHub repository, you may still accomplish this by finding the proper tag and commit. It will just be a little more work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T12:12:07.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1588" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A derivative, or derived, work is one that derives (hence the name) the core of itself (for example core code, code for extra functionality, or perhaps part of a creative work) from another open work. This is made possible by the various licenses we see, such as the MIT and GPL licenses, and the Creative Commons family of licenses for creative works. In many cases, a derivative work can be made very simply by copying the part of the work you're interested in, incorporating it into your project, and crediting the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about these works, including about their legal status and creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1589" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" Score="0" Body="For questions about works that derive their core from another open work." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T21:56:44.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1590" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A linked library, in programming, refers to a set of code that is stored in a special file outside of the main codebase, and referred to internally by the codebase. Examples of these are the Windows .dll files, and Java's compiled .jar files can also be linked as libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These libraries have special legal status in a number of licenses, notably the LGPL, which allows the use of dynamically linked libraries without requiring them to be licensed under the GPL (as the regular GPL would do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag on questions regarding the use of linked libraries in open projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1591" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the use of linked libraries such as DLLs and linked JARs." OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" LastActivityDate="2015-08-15T22:03:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1582" CreationDate="2015-08-16T05:24:13.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a recipient to effectively exercise freedom to make modified versions of a work, it is necessary that they have access to the digital information that is preferred for making such a modified work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the source form of the work — that is, whatever digital form of the work is preferred for making modifications to that work — the recipient is &lt;strong&gt;artificially hindered in their freedom to make modifications&lt;/strong&gt; on a par with what they received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL guarantees that freedom by requiring such distributors to make available the complete corresponding source form of the work. The recipient can request the source form, which is the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no Creative Commons license which has such a requirement to make the source form of the work available. That's a benefit which would be lost by choosing CC By-SA for a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T23:32:05.070" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T23:32:05.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1593" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-16T12:02:12.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T12:02:12.933" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T12:02:12.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1594" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-16T12:02:12.933" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions related to (software) development environments such as IDE's and editor and build stacks" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-16T13:43:34.943" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T13:43:34.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2015-08-16T13:49:37.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't talk to them about things they don't care about. Clients who come to you to ask &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to write code for them have no interest in learning how to write said code themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talk to them about things they do care about. At risk of sounding a little harsh, basically all your client cares about is getting a good product for a small cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell them what &lt;strong&gt;features&lt;/strong&gt; you're working on, and ask them how they'd like them done. Talk about how &lt;strong&gt;on-time&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;under-budget&lt;/strong&gt; you are if possible (don't lie). If something goes wrong, tell them about that too, because if you don't and they hear of it later they won't be happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should get their &lt;strong&gt;opinions&lt;/strong&gt;, mainly. It's a work for them, make sure they're happy with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastActivityDate="2015-08-16T13:49:37.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1596" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-16T18:53:27.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL, or GNU Lesser General Public License, is a basic software license offered by GNU, which is sponsored by the Free Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(FSF)&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It differs from the GPL in that libraries licensed under the LGPL can be used in proprietary programs. The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recommends not using&lt;/a&gt; the LGPL for new libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="15601" LastEditDate="2020-09-25T01:23:05.217" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T01:23:05.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1597" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-16T18:53:27.230" Score="0" Body="For questions about the GNU Lesser General Public License, how to apply it, or how to re-use works under this license" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T05:51:43.253" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T05:51:43.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2015-08-17T00:52:28.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The person who decides to accept the code is required to make sure the code has been properly tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They chose to accept the code, so the buck stops with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean they have to actually test the code, they can delegate it to somebody else who is deemed competent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As somebody contributing code, you should also make sure your work has been properly tested so you don't waste anybody else's time with obvious bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly who does the testing will depend on the people involved and the specific project. When I'm accepting code, if it's from somebody I don't know I will test it myself thoroughly every time. But if it's someone I know and they have a history of writing reliable and tested code, then I might only do a quick skim read over their code before accepting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more complex scenarios. For example a difficult to reproduce bug might require a binary sent to an end user who is the only person ever to see the problem. In that case you're getting the user to do your testing, but it is still the responsibility of the person accepting the code to make sure those tests were carried out properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T00:57:44.140" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T00:57:44.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="598" CreationDate="2015-08-17T01:03:56.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My preferred approach is to pick an open source project with a business model similar to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example Automatic (the parent company of wordpress.com) has about 400 employees and they serve 131 million customers per month. Compare this to Facebook who serves 129 million customers and has around 10,000 employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Wordpress was closed source, they would not be anywhere near as successful as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another good comparison is Windows compared to OS X and Android. Microsoft was extremely successful when their only competitor was closed source (Mac OS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once Apple started using open source for the core of their software platform, and later on Google came in and did the same thing with Android, those those two companies managed to create operating systems far more successful than Windows will ever be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing with web browsers, IE dominated when all the good browsers were closed source. But faced with open source competition like WebKit and later Blink, suddenly IE is unable to compete and only kept alive because of Microsoft's monopoly position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at Microsoft's more recent projects, they're using open source all over the place. Microsoft has recognised that being closed source is a massive disadvantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to find a similar comparison to those ones, where open source allows a project to be far more successful than if it was closed source in a way that matches your own project and explain why open source will work for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for getting them involved, about the only thing you can do is encourage them to be active in your issue tracker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-17T01:09:34.507" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T01:09:34.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-17T12:34:30.583" Score="19" ViewCount="2513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started accepting development contributions to a project of mine on Github. I've had a PayPal donate button on there for about a month prior and received a few donations already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that other developers are also contributing to the project how would you suggest donations are fairly distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a lot of money, but it does seem unfair if a co-contributor adds a massive addition and the project owner is the only one that benefits from donations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would just adding separate donate buttons for each major contributor be the easiest? The only thing with that is with this solution it may confuse people who wish to donate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any good ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2328" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T15:15:35.907" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T15:15:35.907" Title="Donations and open source projects with multiple contributors" Tags="|contributor|finance|donations|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1600" CreationDate="2015-08-17T13:54:41.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A reasonably complete answer depends on the original stated purpose of the donations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the donations were to supply you, as the original author, with some recompense for making the project available as open source (per the old &quot;shareware&quot; model), then it would seem unfair - and possibly legally questionable - that you receive the full benefit of these donations once other people are making source code contributions. However, if your Donate button is accompanied by a clear declaration that this is the case, then future donors will be making donations on that understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the donations were to cover infrastructure costs (which should be minimal, given you are hosting on GitHub), then the issue is less one of distribution and more a legal one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, you probably need to set up an umbrella organization to deal with these donations at arm's length - separating them from your own personal finances. You are probably setting yourself up for an administrative burden which will cost more than you are likely to receive in donations. You will probably need to consider the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lawyers to draft a contribution agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dealing with distributing monies - potentially in multiple currencies, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keeping the personal details of your recipients secure (payment methods etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possibly dealing with (multiple) tax law requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;coming up with a formula which determines how much each contributor receives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reporting that the monies have been distributed correctly, and dealing with auditing requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankly, unless this is likely to generate significant revenue, I would probably remove the donation button at this point and consider the money received so far as a thank you for the initial work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-08-17T13:54:41.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1600" CreationDate="2015-08-18T10:44:15.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;As advertised.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the principle of &lt;strong&gt;always be transparent&lt;/strong&gt;, you need to share out the money as you've advertised you'd share it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put some text next to the Donate button that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;all donations go to the project maintainer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then the donations go to you, and they're yours to do as you like with. That doesn't &lt;em&gt;exclude&lt;/em&gt; giving some to contributors, but it means if you want to keep it all, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; caption by the Donate button, then people have just given you their money freely and willingly, and you can do as you wish with it. It would be &lt;em&gt;ethical&lt;/em&gt;, at this juncture, to share out the money between contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sharing it out&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming up with a formula is a good way to share out money, because nobody can accuse you of bias. Perhaps a formula would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;money = (total money / 2) * (issues closed / total issues)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this, you get half the money, and the remaining half is divided between contributors according to how many issues they solved out of your total issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T10:44:15.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1612" CreationDate="2015-08-18T12:37:08.133" Score="12" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scenario is the following: a proprietary software can save files in its own file format. I want to build a free/open-source software capable of decoding those files for further processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that there is no documentation for the file format, I create a few files and reverse engineer them. After experimenting with them and after understanding the rules behind them, I write my software. Note that I only worked with the files, I didn't attempt to disassemble the proprietary software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, supposing there are no patents covering the file format, can I release my software to the public? Are patents the only thing I should worry about? Can the software license restrict what I can do with the files it produces?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2335" LastEditorUserId="2335" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T17:19:06.190" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T17:29:08.313" Title="Am I free to distribute a software for a file format that was reverse engineered?" Tags="|licensing|law|file-formats|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1600" CreationDate="2015-08-18T13:06:38.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as it's clear to whom a donor is donating, it should be fine. If you have a donate button labelled (why not) &quot;Donate to this projects maintainer, Zoidberg&quot;, you should be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel you should forward some of the donations to contributors, you are free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you label the button &quot;donate to project x&quot; then it gets trickier, because project x is (presumably) not an entity you can donate to, and it would be misleading at best if all donations go to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects (feexian for example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html&lt;/a&gt; ) have systems in place where donations are distributed for work/assignments done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monetary support is not generally a reason for people to write patches, and usually they are submitted either for fun, or for an itch to scratch. Putting a monetary value on a patch is difficult, probably more time-consuming than the actual donation is worth. I wouldn't advice going this route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T13:06:38.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1606" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-18T15:16:12.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T15:16:12.810" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T15:16:12.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1607" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-18T15:16:12.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about donating to open source projects." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T15:17:11.447" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T15:17:11.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1611" CreationDate="2015-08-18T15:40:26.883" Score="12" ViewCount="1254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently managing a project, which includes a library that is licensed under the MIT license. My current project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maintainers of the library that I am using then relicense their project to a much stronger license, the GPL. I'm not informed of this in anyway: I took the source and included it within my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am now using a library that is arguably improperly licensed, and that fails to meet the conditions of the newer GPL, I need to know a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would I be in violation of the GPL? Since the included project had been relicensed, would the MIT license still apply?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I under any obligation to then relicense my project under the GPL, despite my copy of the project includes the MIT license? Would I have to update the license file in my copy of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T15:54:12.540" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T11:03:17.787" Title="Am I in danger if a project component is relicensed?" Tags="|gpl|law|relicensing|mit|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1608" CreationDate="2015-08-18T15:54:36.893" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your options here are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pin the version of the library you use at the last point where it was licensed as MIT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fork the library at the last MIT-licensed commit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-license your own project as GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can't do is continue to use the latest GPL'd version of the library and release your project under Apache 2.0 (unless the library is LGPL and you meet the linking requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinning yourself to a specific version means you need to live with any bugs that existed at that point, and will not have access to new features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forking means you now need to fix bugs yourself (without looking at the upstream fixes), and maintain your own fork forever. I discussed some of the problems in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12/when-should-i-consider-creating-a-private-fork-of-a-suitably-licensed-project-fo&quot;&gt;my question on forking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T15:54:36.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1608" CreationDate="2015-08-18T16:58:57.803" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The important thing to know is that they (almost certainly (*)) cannot retroactively change the license of the version that you are using. They can change the license to new versions they release. So, if you want to keep using what you took when it was marked MIT, you are fine. You can even make a fork and invite other like-minded people to enhance and maintain that fork under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the (*). If they are saying that they made a mistake in the first place, and licensed content under the MIT license that they did not have the right to license, then you and everyone else will need to make other arrangements. Since you incorporated it in your Apache work in good faith, you have a lot of room to maneuver in the timing of making those other arrangements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are you in 'danger'? No, you are not in acute danger if you have not copied new source since they applied the new license. Might you need to take action to avoid legal exposure? You &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;, but only in the (*) case above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-18T22:47:11.013" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T22:47:11.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1603" CreationDate="2015-08-18T18:54:21.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: IANAL, and this strikes me as an area where the principle that 'anyone can sue anyone' might be sadly relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will depend on the nature of the intellectual property of the file format. So, let's imagine that there is proprietary software package that produces and consumes this format, and that the producers of that software considers the file format to be proprietary, and perhaps even 'trade secret'. Very likely, their license will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; permit reverse engineering. Depending on whether this license is a click-through, a shrink-wrap, or a real, signed, SLA, and depending on the jurisdiction, this lack of permission may be enforceable, or it may not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the owner is trying to prevent reverse-engineering, and you have reverse-engineered, and you make a public spectacle of that fact, you are painting a 'please sue me' sign on your forehead. Will you be sued? Who knows? It depends on how seriously the particular vendor takes this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've tried to paint the most scary scenario here that I could, since you didn't provide details. Maybe the company in question doesn't care, or doesn't exist any longer. Maybe the format is an open secret. Maybe their license doesn't try to prevent this. But the situation I described is fairly typical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T18:54:21.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1614" CreationDate="2015-08-18T19:52:19.680" Score="16" ViewCount="1036" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I make some typographical changes to the default MIT license, does it still count as the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright &lt;del&gt;(c)&lt;/del&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;©&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [year]&lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;,&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; [organisation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I changed &lt;code&gt;(c)&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;©&lt;/code&gt;, and added a comma after the year. I know it still counts as a license, but is it the MIT license or my own license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T12:17:10.453" Title="Can I make typographical changes to the MIT license?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1613" CreationDate="2015-08-18T21:37:36.997" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright line isn't actually part of the license, it's a separate entity. So changing that doesn't change the license. In fact &quot;©&quot; is the correct form, so that change at least counts as an improvement in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that though I'd stick to the canonical form of the license if there is one. The MIT license itself has many slight variants, so the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot;&gt;encourages people&lt;/a&gt; to reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit&quot;&gt;the Expat license&lt;/a&gt; instead. (The existence of variations of the MIT license as used by the MIT provides an answer to your question of course...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-08-18T21:37:36.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:27:39.190" Score="19" ViewCount="2137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other than having someone manually reading all of the code, how can you demonstrate an open-source project's reputability? i.e. it is not a virus/malware/whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not concerned with the efficiency of the program.  I just need to be able to demonstrate that the program is exactly what it says it is and is thus not a security risk to install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2349" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T11:27:50.033" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T05:54:45.630" Title="How to give evidence that an open-source project is reputable?" Tags="|software|security|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:32:44.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to do this with a static analysis, the  answer is that you can't. It is impossible to proof this for code in the general case; if you could, you could solve the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Halting Problem&lt;/a&gt; - which is mathematically impossible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A static analysis might find it if there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; problems but can never prove that there &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best you can do is allow other people to run their virus scanners on it. Basically by opening up the sources you're already allowing them to do just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are doubtful about your project, they can run it inside a VM and see what happens. Although this is not entirely a guarantee; there is at least one vulnerability &lt;a href=&quot;http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-3456&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VENOM, CVE-2015-3456&lt;/a&gt; that allowed code to escape the VM (privilege escalation).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, to put an attack in a new Open Source project is counterproductive. To pull it off, you would need an attack that isn't in the databases of the malware scanners yet - a zero-day exploit. And by putting it in an Open Source project, you're effectively publishing it. So you might as well publish your zero-day exploit in the reputable way, and make a more positive name for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="75" LastEditorUserId="75" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T14:39:59.810" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T14:39:59.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1618" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1621" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:36:09.800" Score="12" ViewCount="7103" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC0 license is GPL compatible. A component with such license can be included in GPL-licensed product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true also for CC BY license?&#xA;What is the difference between CC0 and CC BY licenses? Particularly, I am interested in such aspects of these licenses, which are related to media and their use in GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2352" LastEditorUserId="2352" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T16:03:25.987" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T17:46:55.530" Title="is CC BY license GPL compatible? CC BY vs CC0" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by|cc0|media|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-19T14:38:28.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, this is typically done with various analysis tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first phase is a standard virus check on all of the files to ensure that they are clean. This is true for any software, including open-source as well as commercial packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next step is the use of an approved &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis&quot;&gt;static analysis tool&lt;/a&gt; that includes searching for security vulnerabilities. I'm aware that some projects use HP's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/static-code-analysis-sast/&quot;&gt;Fortify Static Code Analyzer&lt;/a&gt;, but others exist as well. Some are even designed to scan binaries. Note that these tools aren't perfect, but they can provide a higher level insight into the quality and any possible issues with an application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if you're integrating an open source (or any package) into your software application, you should work with the customer to determine what is acceptable. There could be accepted or trusted sources, libraries or packages that have undergone deeper analysis, and so forth. It does depend a lot on who the end user is and what their security requirements are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T14:38:28.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:01:12.683" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same way as you know any other program is not actually a virus/malware/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might trust organization x not to publish malware pretending to be something else. You might trust that it's a well known product that wouldn't contain malware. You might perform static analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no different than with propriety software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T15:01:12.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1618" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:01:39.907" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC-BY is listed among compatible licenses near the bottom of the GPL license &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility page:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and&#xA;  entertainment works, and educational works. It is compatible with all&#xA;  versions of the GNU GPL; however, it is not recommended for use on&#xA;  software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the difference between CC0 and CC-BY is that the latter requires attribution and is not recommended for use with software while CC0 requires practically nothing and is OK for use with software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to why CC-BY is unsuitable for software, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific&#xA;  terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important&#xA;  to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many&#xA;  software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to&#xA;  software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works.&#xA;  Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major&#xA;  software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed&#xA;  work with other free software. Existing software licenses were&#xA;  designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of&#xA;  rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, with regard to CC0, the same FAQ says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T17:46:55.530" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T17:46:55.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1618" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:09:11.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discussing the compatibility of the CC-BY license and the CC0 public domain dedication with the GPL is a bit odd: The CC ones are not intended for software, and the GPL is not intended for things that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; software. While those intentions have been ignored occasionally, in most cases GPL compatibility simply doesn't come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, both are GPL compatible, as detailed by the FSF in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T15:12:00.410" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T15:12:00.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1618" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:10:53.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC0 license is intended to be a &quot;Public Domain Dedication&quot;. In jurisdictions where the public domain is non-existent: it attempts to waive all rights in order to be as close to the public domain as possible. However, be wary of how you use CC0. In some jurisdictions, there is the concept of &quot;Moral Rights&quot;, which includes attribution, which can not be revoked by the licensor. In those cases, attribution is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY license is a general, permissive license, requiring only attribution. With CC-BY licensed content, you are able to modify, re-distribute and even make commercial usage of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to take CC0 licensed content, you can re-license it under CC-BY. Therefore, to answer your question, they are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T15:10:53.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:16:50.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication is a way for authors to dedicate their work into the public domain as much as legally permitted.  If it is not legally possible to place work into the public domain, then the CC0 license falls back to a lax, permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons &quot;about cc0&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Summary of the CC0 Declaration&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T21:08:06.677" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T21:08:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-19T15:16:50.840" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Creative Commons &quot;CC0&quot; public domain dedication that allows copyright holders to place works in the public domain to the extent legally possible, worldwide" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T23:28:41.527" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T23:28:41.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-19T21:07:55.587" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that your use of the term 'reputability' is important here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source projects, like commercial products, have reputations. Many organizations make decisions based on reputation. Once in a while, as in Heartbleed, the results are not good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have said, demonstrating that a program 'does what it says it does' is a requirement for a 'provable' program. For a conventional programming language, that's solving the (unsolvable) halting problem. There are some very specialized languages/compilers used for certain critical security and reliability applications that can prove the program's behavior; I've never heard of any open source application written using one; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractionated_spacecraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;F6&lt;/a&gt; used them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you have to fall back on common sense. What kind of community produces the product? What are their coding standard and review procedures? What do their tests look like? How long have they been around? How widely used are they. In short, well, 'reputation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-19T21:14:38.863" LastActivityDate="2015-08-19T21:14:38.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1631" CreationDate="2015-08-19T23:50:53.467" Score="8" ViewCount="899" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a desktop app and i'm using &lt;a href=&quot;http://lbesson.bitbucket.org/md/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;StrapDown.js&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. My question start with the StrapDown project page. It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This project is released under the GPLv3 license, for more details, take a look at the LICENSE file in the source.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt comes with the fact that he has &amp;quot;hidden&amp;quot; the project repo (in BitBucket): &lt;code&gt;As of now, StrapDown.js does not have it own git repository. And I don't want to, because it is cleaner to let it live on http://lbesson.bitbucket.org/md.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: can I publish a desktop app in GitHub (with the original licenses)? Even the StrapDown source code? I've been reading a bit and that license seems to allow users to publish modified versions of the code/software/licensed thing, but my doubt comes because the mantainer (who forked &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/arturadib/strapdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original GitHub project&lt;/a&gt; and modified it to make (a new?) StrapDown) has not publish the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: New website of the same project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://naereen.github.io/StrapDown.js/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://naereen.github.io/StrapDown.js/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2355" LastEditorUserId="2355" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T03:46:51.200" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T03:46:51.200" Title="Is this GPLv3 licensed code &quot;publishable&quot; in GitHub?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-19T23:59:35.123" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;The converse of this question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1615/how-to-give-evidence-that-an-open-source-project-is-reputable&quot;&gt;How to give evidence that an open-source project is reputable?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The installer for my project is being picked up as &quot;Untrusted&quot; by a popular anti-virus software (in this particular case, Symatec). The scanner doesn't say that my project is a &lt;em&gt;virus&lt;/em&gt;, but really just warms that it is Untrusted because it's only seen it in the wild a few hundred times. The software is safe, but this warning is potentially scaring off new users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I either get virus scanners to trust my software, or impress upon my potential users that the software &lt;em&gt;really isn't&lt;/em&gt; contaminated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T00:21:35.893" Title="How do I make sure my installer doesn't set off virus scanners?" Tags="|distribution|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1629" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:11:58.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closed-source software is software whose source code is not published or otherwise made available to the general public.  Recipients of closed-source software can be restricted from selling or giving away the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T00:15:07.213" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T00:15:07.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1630" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:11:58.320" Score="0" Body="For questions about closed-source software and how it relates to open source." OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T00:15:12.130" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T00:15:12.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1627" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:14:06.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;An application licensed under the GPL v3 is licensed under the GPL v3. It doesn't just apply to the hosting platform where that project is hosted, the license applies to the project no matter where it exists. On the linked page in your question, there is a download link with a zip file on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL v3 is a strong copyleft license. Anything that uses the GPL v3, even if you link to it, means that the code also must be licensed under the GPL v3. Interestingly, the maintainers of the GPL project seem to violate the license themselves, by not providing a link to the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, with the GPL v3, you can go ahead and take the source code. If you make changes of it, or if you call a function/method inside that API (e.g. &lt;code&gt;StrapDown.my_method()&lt;/code&gt;), then whatever code you make has to be modified under the GPL v3 license. And yes, you can publish your code on Github, don't worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T00:14:06.270" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:29:55.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T00:29:55.003" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T00:29:55.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-20T00:29:55.003" Score="0" Body="For questions that deals with freedoms normally provided and/or guaranteed by Free and Open Software." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T00:54:15.613" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T00:54:15.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1639" CreationDate="2015-08-20T01:32:12.337" Score="3" ViewCount="1932" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble understanding Section 9 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL v3 license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can understand, I'm allowed to give copies of my GPL licensed work if I directly provide it to a peer, or a friend as mine. It seems that the license doesn't apply if they &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; it, but it doesn't look like if it applies if they link or something. Can someone tell me what this clause in the license means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2023-08-15T10:28:25.350" Title="Can I just remove the GPL license if I give something to a friend?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-20T02:33:10.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; family of licenses; however, the &amp;quot;NonCommercial&amp;quot; restriction makes this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;not an open source license as defined by this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While questions around the general philosophy of the license and/or why it is not open source may be on-topic on this site, questions which ask whether a specific action counts as &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; or not have generally been closed as off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-10-08T21:33:36.360" LastActivityDate="2023-10-08T21:33:36.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-20T02:33:10.540" Score="0" Body="The -NC licenses are not open source licenses, please ensure your question is about an open source issue." OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-10-08T21:33:36.360" LastActivityDate="2023-10-08T21:33:36.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-20T02:43:26.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons CC-BY-NC &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial&lt;/a&gt; license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T02:57:37.970" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T02:57:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-20T02:43:26.350" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) license" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T02:57:34.060" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T02:57:34.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2015-08-20T03:04:48.953" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that GPL only applies &lt;em&gt;to people who distribute copies of the code to other people&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So anybody who &lt;em&gt;receives&lt;/em&gt; the GPL'd code is not bound by the terms of the license unless they also give copies of the code to other people. And then at that point they are bound by the terms of the license (but only as it applies to the code that they distributed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that the license doesn't apply if they modify it, but it doesn't look like if it applies if they link or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's right, modifying the code is not infringing on normal copyright and also doesn't trigger GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just don't distribute your modified code to anybody without complying with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That paragraph is just stating (and clarifying) how copyright law works. I don't think it actually does anything. Under copyright law, you cannot distribute somebody's work unless they give you permission. For GPL licensed code, the only way you can get permission is if you comply with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not distributing the code, then you don't need permission to do whatever it is you're doing and you don't need to comply with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In several other places, the GPL clearly states that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; include the license in any copies you make, for example section 5.b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is&#xA;      released under this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you give a copy of the code to your friend, you must not remove the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that restriction only applies to you. Your friend can remove the license as long as they do not give that modified copy to anybody else (then they would have to put the license back in place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 9 is stating that your friend is allowed to remove the license as long as they don't make &quot;copies&quot; (where a &quot;copy&quot; is as defined under copyright law (distributing a work to somebody else), not as defined by doing &quot;cp -a&quot; or right clicking to make a copy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T20:51:21.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T20:51:21.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1641" CreationDate="2015-08-20T07:10:29.037" Score="36" ViewCount="23829" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm using a library that is licensed under GPL v3 in my project, can I license my project under the MIT license? I tried to read the GPL v3 text but I cannot understand it without your assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2362" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T17:28:55.110" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T05:10:22.633" Title="If I'm using a GPL 3 library in my project, can I license my project under MIT license?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-3|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2015-08-20T08:15:22.090" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;; incorporating or linking against GPL requires that your project-as-a-whole be distributed under GPL. But you can include &lt;strong&gt;MIT licensed parts&lt;/strong&gt; (or another GPL-compatible license) in the project. Also, it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pertinent clause is 5 (c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if GPL-licensed code ever gets included in your project, for example via linking against a GPL'd library, you must also provide your whole project under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some disagreement on whether GPL comes into play when a library is dynamically linked; GNU are of the opinion that it does, and provides the alternative license LGPL, or recommends adding exceptions to GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can still license parts of your project under MIT, you just need to make sure the MIT and GPL sections are clearly separated. SFLC have published &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html&quot;&gt;this document&lt;/a&gt; on how permissive and GPL code can be mixed in a project. This means that the MIT portions can be shared under that license, but if the whole project is distributed, it must be under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T08:15:22.090" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2015-08-20T08:46:43.280" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: No, you can't. Chances that you will be sued by the copyrightholder for unlawful distribution seem rather slim though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant phrase is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to accept the license to use the software, but you do have to accept the license to distribute the software. Giving the software to a friend &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; distributing the software, for which you have to accept the license to do legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Means that if you received to program through something like bittorrent, you automatically share the parts you already have, and for this it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required that you distribute the GPL with it. This is for practical reasons. You can't really be expected to share the GPL license text with every block exchanged over bittorrent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone would ever sue you because you copied a GPL licensed program to a friend, but omitted the license. But why would you? It's usually more of a hassle to remove the license file than to distribute it along. Furthermore, this is not a loophole. I got the software from a friend of a friend in good faith without the GPL attached is not a defense for violating the license by distributing propriety code built on that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T11:43:32.973" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T11:43:32.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2015-08-20T10:34:31.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simle reception of the code doesn't apply the license to you, hence &quot;acceptance not required&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Distribution&lt;/em&gt; does require acceptance, because under normal copyright law you wouldn't be allowed to redist, so you have to accept a license agreement that gives you the right to (i.e. the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies to anyone you distribute &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;: them receiving your distribution doesn't apply the GPL to them; then distrubuting further does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modifications are similar: if you keep them to yourself, you don't have to keep to the GPL; if you distribute them you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2363" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T10:34:31.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1627" CreationDate="2015-08-20T10:40:58.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is designed specifically to make easy the distrubution of source codes. It explicitly allows you to redistrubute the source. Since GitHub is a platform for distrubution of code, it reasons that you can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, being licensed under the GPL means that any derivatives also must be licensed the same. So, any derivative of StrapDown must be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2363" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T10:40:58.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2015-08-20T10:45:55.253" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is copyleft, meaning you have to distrubute any derivative works of the original also under the GPL. If you use a GPL library in your project, that creates a derivative work of the library, and your entire project has to be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One exception: if it's the LGPL (Lesser/Linking GPL) then dynamically linking the library does not create a derivative and you're free to license how you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One caveat: you can also license &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; work under annother license. As long as people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; get it under GPL, that satisfies the GPL requirements, and you can dual-license with MIT, for example. People can choose which license to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T10:45:55.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1608" CreationDate="2015-08-20T11:03:17.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No; you're OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's nigh-on impossible to enforce a new license on old distributions of a project, for this very fact. It was &lt;em&gt;at one point&lt;/em&gt; distributed under the MIT license, and there may be people who got their copy of it then and never heard about the license change. The best a project owner can do is to &lt;em&gt;ask nicely&lt;/em&gt; if people would mind changing to come into compliance with a difference license, but people are free to say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one exception is if the project maintainers themselves were committing (sensibly or not) copyright violation of someone &lt;em&gt;else's&lt;/em&gt; code. If so, they have to relicense to come into compliance with that. You are &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; committing copyright violation if you keep the old license, but you have a little more legroom to negotiate conditions of changing license, since you weren't the one who caused the violation, and didn't know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user366" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T11:03:17.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1648" CreationDate="2015-08-20T13:46:00.557" Score="3" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;How far I can go in order to open source the project which is based on closed/commercial project where the whole source code (assuming the access is there) has been converted into different state or programming language (either manually or automatically by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;transcompiling&lt;/a&gt;)? So for example no single line (or resource) matches the original one, then who would notice that it was transcoded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under what (if any) circumstances can such a project be released with an open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few simple examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenRA&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opentomb/OpenTomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenTomb&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opentibia/server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenTibia&lt;/a&gt;, however I'm not sure how relevant they are, as they're complete remakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="407" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T08:48:24.697" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T11:37:47.977" Title="Can I open source a closed source project by transcoding/transcompiling its source-code, so it's completely different?" Tags="|law|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1647" CreationDate="2015-08-20T13:54:50.390" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you adapt the work, you are creating a derivative work you have no license to distribute for. You can't re-license and distribute this work under any license as you don't own the full copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People noticing you break the licensing terms of a product doesn't have any influence on whether you are allowed to break the licensing terms. You are not allowed to do this regardless of anyone noticing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the examples, these are remakes; they take the underlying idea of the games, and re-implement it from scratch. This usually doesn't create a derivative work, though care must be taken other intellectual property laws (specifically trademark law) aren't violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="407" LastEditDate="2016-09-15T11:37:47.977" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T11:37:47.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1647" CreationDate="2015-08-20T13:59:04.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martijn is right: you can't transcompile, translate, transliterate, or in any other way transcribe and distribute the code of a work you don't have the rights to do so for. In most commercial proprietary ventures, you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have those rights, so you can't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; attempt to &lt;em&gt;recreate&lt;/em&gt; the software. Many people do this: there are open source clones of Photoshop, of many popular games, of Stack Exchange, around on the internet. This is possible because you're not reusing their code, you're writing your own code to come up with a similar result. Just be careful not to use any of their trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T13:59:04.527" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1652" CreationDate="2015-08-20T14:19:26.643" Score="12" ViewCount="2406" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you publish open source firmware for closed/commercial hardware (such as routers, motherboards or basically any device) without asking the manufacturer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples which seem to indicate that you can: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dd-wrt.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DD-WRT&lt;/a&gt; (a Linux based alternative OpenSource firmware), &lt;a href=&quot;https://openwrt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenWrt&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openfirmware.info/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenBIOS&lt;/a&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T21:41:19.107" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T21:41:19.107" Title="Can you open source firmware for closed hardware?" Tags="|law|hardware|firmware|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1650" CreationDate="2015-08-20T14:27:53.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firmware is nothing more than software that lives on a difficult to write to medium. Just as you can can run free software on non-free processors, for example Linux on an Intel i5 processor, you can run free firmware on non-free processors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T14:27:53.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1650" CreationDate="2015-08-20T14:31:53.203" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question with a question: &quot;Can you build the firmware without needing to violate the copyright or trade secret protection of the target hardware?' The answer to this question is the answer to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if the target hardware is 'just an ARM chip with a conventional boot process', sure, you can write new code for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One tricky part is that the most important part of your target is probably not the processor, but rather the peripherals. If you have to reverse-engineer to figure out how to communicate with the radio or ethernet or disk drive or whatever, you may be in dubious territory with respect to the shrink-wrap license you 'accepted' when you unwrapped the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T14:31:53.203" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="993" CreationDate="2015-08-20T15:47:04.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upstream/downstream is the directional term describing the flow of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in software development, when you use centralized revision control system (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SVN&lt;/a&gt;), you always commit changes upstream, in decentralized &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VCS&lt;/a&gt; (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Git&lt;/a&gt;) there is no inherent/absolute &quot;upstream&quot; or &quot;downstream&quot; in the system, but you can choose how the data flows (so the main repository is used as &quot;upstream&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most of the software development projects, the code fixed/changes are usually committed/pushed to upstream repository (towards the production: dev, test, stage, live) and the database is pulled downstream (from the production into development environment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/2739376/55075&quot;&gt;Definition of “downstream” and “upstream”&lt;/a&gt; at SO&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/71080/60532&quot;&gt;What does “downstream/upstream design” mean?&lt;/a&gt; at Programmers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T18:55:07.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="352" CreationDate="2015-08-20T16:15:52.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A pull request (PR) is a method of submitting contributions to an open development project. It occurs when a developer asks for changes committed to an external repository to be considered for inclusion in a project’s main repository after the peer review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/pullrequest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What Is A Pull Request?&lt;/a&gt; at OSS Watch&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple example is when you clone/fork the open source repository, do some changes/commits and in order to merge the changes into the main repository, you are required to send the pull request which consist all your commits grouped into one logical piece so it can be reviewed by other developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has some benefits over standard commits and pushes as you have some additional pair of eyes to check and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac#diff-3fbb47e318cd8802bd325e7da9aaabe8L351&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;avoid common/hidden issues/mistakes&lt;/a&gt; before the actual changes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See few PR examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GitHub &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/impressivewebs/HTML9-Responsive-Boilerstrap-js/pull/111&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour/pull/5/files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.chromium.org/1128143003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Chromium Code Reviews&lt;/a&gt; (equivalent to pull-request)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="407" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T16:22:10.603" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T16:22:10.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1650" CreationDate="2015-08-20T17:24:43.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1652/29&quot;&gt;bmargulies's answer&lt;/a&gt; you need to consider that firmware is a special breed of software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firmware, by it's definition, runs on special-purpose hardware. This hardware platform may have highly proprietary components (ASICs for example, or special sensors, etc). Firmware is very intimately aware of that hardware, and usually developed with access to very proprietary information such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Confidential datasheets provided to the hardware manufacturer under an NDA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encryption keys (for streaming data for example)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Access to the full schematics of the device&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knowledge of the data format for calibration tables, and how to apply them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software and/or hardware patent licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example would be a complex IC created by a third party vendor and used in the product. I have worked on systems where those chips are supplied with a combination of draconian license terms and a vendor-specific access key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you are trying to provide an open-source replacement for the existing firmware, you either need access to much of the same information - or to reverse engineer it. If you are trying to repurpose the hardware, you still need much of this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case, in order to create your own firmware, you are almost certainly going to breach the OEMs patents or copyrights, or those of various components on the target boards. You are also at risk from claims under the DMCA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the source lives in your private space, you are getting security through obscurity. The moment you publish your source, you potentially lay yourself open to lawsuits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while it's &lt;strong&gt;possible&lt;/strong&gt; to create and publish open source firmware for a proprietary platform, pragmatically it is so risky as to be highly &lt;strong&gt;improbable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T17:24:43.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1671" CreationDate="2015-08-20T18:48:57.583" Score="2" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it fine to open source a virus, exploit or any other potential dangerous software (if used in the wrong way)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, are there any limitations/circumstances when you can't? Does it depends on the country law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T13:53:34.627" Title="Can you open source a virus/exploit?" Tags="|law|software|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1656" CreationDate="2015-08-20T19:42:47.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When or whether to reveal an exploit is a security question which has been debated for a long time.  See the wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure_%28computer_security%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Computer Security&lt;/a&gt; which discusses &quot;full disclosure&quot; versus &quot;coordinated disclosure&quot; and &quot;Non-disclosure&quot;.  I've seen &quot;coordinated disclosure&quot; also called &quot;responsible disclosure&quot;, but according to the cited article that term has fallen out of favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the exploit is publicly known, or once the target has had time to react to the vulnerability (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cert.org/vulnerability-analysis/vul-disclosure.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CERT Disclosure Policy&lt;/a&gt; allows 45 days but I've had as little as 0 days) then there shouldn't be any reason not to publish the code that exhibits the exploit as &quot;open source&quot; or otherwise.  Note that CERT doesn't publish exploits; they only publish descriptions of vulnerabilities to exploits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to your question, yes it's fine to publish the exploit once the target project has had time to develop and distribute a patch.  I agree with CERT that 45 days is plenty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-20T22:46:59.917" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T22:46:59.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2015-08-20T22:51:34.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a great deal of malware out there. There are new exploits every day. From the point of view of non-technical users of computers, particularly Windows computers, it is a &lt;em&gt;good thing&lt;/em&gt; that AV systems warn them against the rare and unusual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, realistically, anyone with a new thing has a hill to climb. It's a marketing hill. What can you do? If your audience is really nontechnical people, you have to find a way to get noticed by the media. Get your program reviewed in places where potential users will read the review. If trustworthy people write 'this is a good thing, don't worry about the AV' warning, then people will install it. If enough people install it, you won't get warnings any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-20T22:51:34.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1628" CreationDate="2015-08-21T00:21:35.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, you need to understand that this isn't just you. It happens to all kinds of projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WVgxu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Symatec thinks Git is untrustworthy]&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's Git several hours after release. Symatec thinks it's not trust worthy too. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1658/775&quot;&gt;Bmarguiles&lt;/a&gt; is absolutely right that the &quot;easy&quot; way to deal with this is to have a large number of users. Then, this will magically take care of itself as the AV vendors see more instances of the software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not very practical for a young project though. That warning is scaring off the very same users you need to make that warning go away. The solution here is to start blanketing as many AV vendors as possible with Whitelist requests. Each vendor has a different process, but it generally involves filling out a form, attaching your installer, and sending them the request. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_antivirus_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a non-exhaustive list of notable AV software&lt;/a&gt; that would be a great place to get started. Settle in though, because it's a big list and you generally need to do this every time you release. At least until you have a good reputation with a consistent user base. Honestly, as often as we release our project, we just don't bother making whitelist requests, but it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be manageable if you're only releasing a few times a year. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T00:21:35.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1665" CreationDate="2015-08-21T04:52:27.437" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, if I am complying fully with the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Can I keep the name? For example if the name is Abc, my name is Abc Alphabet. Can the author require me to change it and remove any association with his work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2374" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:36:55.527" Title="Using the name of CC BY-NC 4.0 licensed material" Tags="|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-08-22T01:02:03.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1662" CreationDate="2015-08-21T05:25:22.050" Score="9" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL 3 allows adding additional clauses, such as exceptions, as long as such exceptions grant additional privileges. But if I distribute software under GPL 3 with exceptions, are those exceptions required to be preserved, or are downstream distributors free to remove those exceptions, leaving the license as GPL 3 only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exceptions are often useful to improve compatibility with non-GPL-compatible software; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/exceptions.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;for example&lt;/a&gt;, GPL-licensed software like autoconf and GCC include exceptions to prevent their output from falling under GPL, since their output includes GPL-licensed code which would normally mean anything produced by those programs also falls under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analogous situation is if I dual-license with GPL and a permissive license such as BSD. Normally with GPL only, someone else can take my software, redistribute with their own changes, and I can incorporate their changes back into my project because of the copyleft. However, since I'm also licensing as BSD, the downstream developer could potentially share their changes under GPL only, which means if I do choose to incorporate their changes, I can no longer distribute the combination under BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does the same situation apply if I add exceptions to GPL 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T06:37:10.897" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T06:37:10.897" Title="Can I preserve exceptions in GPL 3?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|gpl-3|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1661" CreationDate="2015-08-21T05:25:22.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No you cannot preserve exceptions in GPL 3&lt;/strong&gt;, so yes the same situation as your GPL + MIT analogy applies. Someone can redistribute their derivative under GPL 3 only, which means that you cannot incorporate their changes and continue to provide your exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GPL 3&lt;/a&gt; allows additional terms under section 7; these additions are treated as part of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT the same section also says that such additional terms can be freely removed when you redistribute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it. (Additional permissions may be written to require their own removal in certain cases when you modify the work.) You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, GPL 3's copyleft only serves to preserve itself; it does not extend the same protection to additional terms you add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The law firm &lt;em&gt;Morris, Manning &amp;amp; Martin, LLP&lt;/em&gt; shares this opinion in their article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mmmtechlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PLI-Open-Source-2014-Extra-provisions-of-FSF-licenses.pdf&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adding Terms to the GPL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional permissions are covered in Section 7 of GPLv3 and are defined as “terms that&#xA;  supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.” The&#xA;  GPLv3 allows the author of the work to add additional permissions to that part of the work contributed by&#xA;  that author. GPLv3 also allows a recipient of software that is licensed under GPLv3 with additional&#xA;  permissions to remove those additional permissions for subsequent distribution of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upshot of all this is, if you find GPL 3 too restrictive and wish to preserve some additional permissions, GPL 3 doesn't extend that protection, and you may need to choose a different copyleft license. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot;&gt;Linus Torvalds mentions this&lt;/a&gt; being the reason why he chose not to convert to GPL 3, because he disagreed with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot;&gt;anti-Tivoization&lt;/a&gt; features in GPL 3, and also believed that GPL 3 exceptions could not be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T05:25:22.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1664" CreationDate="2015-08-21T08:43:34.753" Score="3" ViewCount="2340" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, on OpenSubtitles, a website which offers 3.5mln subtitles we can read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/disclaimer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These files are NOT illegal warez downloads, we only offer files that we believe we are free to redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore when does creating/making open subtitles for commercial movies/TV and publishing it become illegal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it depend on the production company (if they agree or their license), format of the file (like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/faq#formats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;IDX+SUB&lt;/a&gt;) or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T09:19:09.033" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:19:09.033" Title="When is making a subtitle file for a commercial movie legal?" Tags="|law|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-08-21T13:45:04.943" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2015-08-21T09:09:06.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Subtitle files are almost never free to redistribute, as they almost always are a non-authorized derivative work of the original movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a text form of the audio of an audiovisual work creates a derivative work, and so does creating a translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need a license to allow you to do so. For non-open movies you don't have that license.* Some movies are published under a license that does permit derivative works. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy:_The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;The Internet&amp;#39;s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz&quot;&gt;The Internet's own boy&lt;/a&gt; was published under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 and does allow you to make and distribute derivative works like subtitles.**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a translation, you have a separate copyright to the translation itself, but it forms a derivative work of the original movie. You will have to meet the license requirements of the movie, which will almost never allow for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Open Subtitles claims&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These files are NOT illegal warez downloads, we only offer files that &lt;strong&gt;we believe&lt;/strong&gt; we are free to redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may be correct that they believe they are free to redistribute, but they are almost certainly wrong in that that is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In most cases. In theory, you could have an agreement with the movie studio that allows you to publish subtitles under some agreement. For the scope of this question, I'm going to assume that's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** The NC (NonCommercial) clause makes it fall shy of the open definition. Whether the non-commercial clause allows for the use of the work on a website supported with advertisements is a whole discussion on its own, but making and distributing derivative works on its own is allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:09:06.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1660" CreationDate="2015-08-21T09:36:55.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of a work is covered by copyright, and would be under the same terms of the license. Allowing you to make a derivative work of it,, so ABC Alphabet would be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be a separate trademark on the name, in which case you should also comply with trademark law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it's a bad idea to give the impression you are something you are not. I would suggest making it &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clear you are not ABC, and are not affiliated with ABC, and choosing a name that doesn't give that impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T09:36:55.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-21T09:40:05.770" Score="17" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: I'm making a YouTube commercial, which includes some music that's licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would an audio-visual work constitute a derivative work of the music used in it, and (given the music's license) would you have to license the whole commercial as CC BY-SA 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2378" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T13:51:41.230" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T12:48:08.503" Title="How can I license a YouTube commercial which includes CC BY-SA Licensed music?" Tags="|creative-commons|commercial|cc-by-sa|royalties|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1656" CreationDate="2015-08-21T10:23:37.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you write a virus, exploit, or other potentially dangerous software, there are ethical and legal considerations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems don't become larger if you publish the software under an open source license rather than another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues around disclosure in general are well described in Glenn Randers-Pehrsons answer, but the licensing doesn't change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T10:23:37.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1669" CreationDate="2015-08-21T11:48:37.453" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're living in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;freedom of speech&lt;/a&gt; community.&#xA;However when writing controversial books, are there any topics which are not allowed to write about in First World countries (even for educational purposes)? How do you know when you cross the line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Fester_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uncle Fester books&lt;/a&gt; or WikiLeaks which are the borderlines I think. Are there any other examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T12:51:40.727" Title="What are the limits of Libre when publishing open access controversial books?" Tags="|law|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-08-21T12:53:50.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1668" CreationDate="2015-08-21T12:51:40.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;FLO licenses take a legal, copyright-restricted-by-default work, and give you permission to copy, modify and/or distribute that work. They would not take precedence over criminal law in your country, including laws that criminalise or restrict publication and distribution of certain materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T12:51:40.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1666" CreationDate="2015-08-21T13:25:25.157" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons organization has a page on &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos&quot;&gt;Legal Music For Videos&lt;/a&gt; which states (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under CC licenses, &lt;strong&gt;synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music&lt;/strong&gt;, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This corresponds to the &quot;synchronization&quot; provision in section 1(a) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; (and is also included in &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; CC license, I think):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (&quot;synching&quot;) will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may not at first be obvious what level of coordination between music and video is necessary to satisfy the definition of &quot;synchronization&quot;, I believe relevant case law demonstrates that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; combination of music and video presented in a simultaneous format activates this clause. The term &quot;synchronization&quot; is used commonly in a closely-related copyright context: a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ascap.com/licensing/termsdefined.aspx&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;synchronization license&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, of which the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A synchronization or &quot;synch&quot; right involves the use of a recording of musical work in audio-visual form: for example as part of a motion picture, television program, commercial announcement, music video or other videotape. Often, the music is &quot;synchronized&quot; or recorded in timed relation with the visual images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely an accident that this is so close to the synchronization language used in the Creative Commons text. I expect the intention of the Creative Commons license is, &quot;Any use that would normally require a synchronization license from the author of a musical work is a use that generates a Derivative Work.&quot; Everything I've read about synchronization licenses indicates that they are necessary for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; simultaneous combination of video and music. It is &quot;synchronization&quot; in the most basic sense; think &quot;merely simultaneous&quot; rather than &quot;creatively coordinated&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1027973275646451729&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=20000006&amp;amp;as_vis=1&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abkco Music v. Stella Records&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the court found that synchronization rights were required &lt;strong&gt;even to synchronize music with arbitrary images&lt;/strong&gt; in a karaoke machine's visual output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...CD+G's display only the lyrics, whereas karaoke discs display some video image, such as a sun-drenched beach, behind the song lyrics. Under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq., the producers and distributors of karaoke versions of songs must acquire synchronization or &quot;synch&quot; licenses[4] from the copyright owners of the songs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Creative Commons synchronization clause applies (which it appears to do even in the most trivial of video synchronization), the entire video becomes a derivative work, and the share-alike license terms apply to the new derivative video, per section 4(b) of CC-BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, using CC-BY-SA music in a video requires you to license the entire video under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T12:48:08.503" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T12:48:08.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1656" CreationDate="2015-08-21T13:40:03.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some countries it is illegal to develop viruses and other malware. It usually does not matter if open- or closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are in such a country, you can of course release your software under an open source license anonymously to avoid legal repercussions. But considering that you have no way to legally defend your license without giving up your anonymity and facing charges yourself, your license terms can not be enforced. Also, the people who would violate your license are likely also criminals according to far more jurisdictions (&lt;em&gt;developing&lt;/em&gt; malware might not be illegal everywhere, but &lt;em&gt;using it to intentionally steal data, sabotage systems etc.&lt;/em&gt; likely is), so they have lots of other reasons to not get identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means any malware you publish is effectively public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, there is nothing which stops you. One of the most important aspects of the OSI open source definition and the FSF free software definition is that there must be no restrictions on what purposes the software can be used for. This includes illegal activity (both OSI and FSF have denied their approval for software which had terms like &quot;this software should not be used for evil&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T13:53:34.627" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T13:53:34.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1673" CreationDate="2015-08-21T14:53:26.460" Score="20" ViewCount="1191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any point in complying with the licence which comes with a project published anonymously (like the initial Bitcoin source code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, in case of breaking the rules of your license, who has the right to enforce the aspects of a license if nobody takes the ownership of the project? So basically, can you do whatever you want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T22:18:56.000" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T22:18:56.000" Title="Why are you obliged to comply with the license of an anonymous project?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1672" CreationDate="2015-08-21T15:28:35.983" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to sue you for copyright infringement, the authors need to reveal their identity. But just because they prefer to stay anonymous now doesn't necessarily mean that they will stay anonymous in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They might get deanonymized against their will. Then they have nothing to lose anymore by going after you. When you annoy them enough, they might even decide that shutting you down is more important than staying anonymous and go public. They might face the challenge to prove that they are indeed the creators after initially publishing anonymously, but there are several ways to prove authorship, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_man&amp;#39;s_copyright&quot;&gt;an unopened letter addressed to themselves with the sourcecode stamped before publication&lt;/a&gt; or having the private key with which they signed their anonymous mails and releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T21:28:50.487" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T21:28:50.487" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-21T15:52:34.367" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not right now, but in the future you'll be able to look for a badge from the just-announced Linux Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/programs/badge-program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Badge Program&lt;/a&gt;. The Best Practices Badge is a secure open source development maturity model. Projects having a CII (Core Infrastructure Initiative) Best Practices Badge will showcase the project's commitment to security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;call for feedback&lt;/a&gt; on the criteria for awarding  the Best Practices Badge, at Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now you could use those proposed Best Practices criteria to make your own evaluation of any open-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, right now you might look for a digital signature (e.g., file.tar.gz.asc, file.exe.asc) accompanying the distribution, and actually verify it if one is present. That helps ensure that no middleman has tampered with the software before you received it. Even if you don't verify it, you might find the fact that it is present comforting; see this &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.com/1181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;XKCD.com cartoon&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-22T15:34:25.400" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T15:34:25.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1676" CreationDate="2015-08-06T13:53:26.207" Score="22" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pantonprinciples.org/&quot;&gt;The Panton Principles state&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many widely recognized licenses are not intended for, and are not appropriate for, data or collections of data. A variety of waivers and licenses that are designed for and appropriate for the treatment of data are described here. Creative Commons licenses (apart from CCZero), GFDL, GPL, BSD, etc are NOT appropriate for data and their use is STRONGLY discouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? What is wrong with using Creative Commons licenses for data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" OwnerDisplayName="HDE 226868" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T20:51:46.353" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T20:51:46.353" Title="Why aren't Creative Commons licenses appropriate for data?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1675" CreationDate="2015-08-06T14:42:43.527" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this gets complicated and legal. (Caveat: I am not a lawyer.) &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot;&gt;According to Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt;, their licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, CC licenses apply to creative works and are meant to relax or waive the copyright protections automatically guaranteed to authors (e.g., by common law tradition in Commonwealth countries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The applicability of CC licenses to data depends on whether data can be copyrighted. If data cannot be copyrighted, then there is no point to putting a CC license on them because those licenses waive rights that the data creators do not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what kinds of works are protected by copyright? Though laws vary across jurisdictions (and thus make this question difficult to answer), two important principles are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot;&gt;&quot;Idea-Expression divide&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot;&gt;&quot;the threshold of originality&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In the former, only expressions of ideas can be copyrighted, while ideas themselves cannot be. In the latter, among expressions, only those that are original are protected (thus reproductions of works do not earn copyright protection &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus data only have copyright protection if they are an expression of an idea rather than idea itself and if they are not simply &quot;facts&quot; (i.e., they are something sufficiently original). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the United States, this almost universally means that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lib.umich.edu/copyright/facts-and-data&quot;&gt;data cannot be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;. A classic legal case here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which ruled that telephone number listings in a phonebook are not protected by copyright. Importantly, nothing produced by the federal government has copyright protection (all federal government works are in the public domain, but this does not necessarily apply to other levels of government).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Europe, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_Union#Database_rights&quot;&gt;databases do have copyright-like protection&lt;/a&gt;. Not all databases are protected; protection comes from &quot;qualitatively and/or quantitatively a substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents&quot;. Such rights extend for 15 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, one has to determine whether the &quot;data&quot; being discussed merit copyright on their own. It may be that &quot;data&quot; refer to works that are themselves copyrighted (e.g., original written works, such as newspaper articles). Those &quot;data&quot; are protected but not because they are data, rather because they are creative works. Someone who has compiled those works into a database in the United States has no copyright protection for the works (unless they have obtained those rights for each &quot;data point&quot; from the original author(s)). In Europe, however, the compilation of those data into a database may entitle the compiler to a limited database right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, CC licenses make sense if one has copyright protections to give away. If not, then CC licenses make no sense because the data are probably free to use anyway. If the data do merit protection (due to either satisfying European-style threshold of investment, or American-style threshold of originality, or some other national standard), then I believe the argument made in the linked webpage is purely made on the opinion that CC0/(or Public Domain, where that principle exists) are preferable to more restricted waivers of rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1143" OwnerDisplayName="Thomas" LastActivityDate="2015-08-06T15:01:10.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1675" CreationDate="2015-08-09T20:01:48.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Figshare has a FAQ that &lt;a href=&quot;https://figshare.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201953883-Why-does-figshare-use-CC-licenses-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;covers this, sort of&lt;/a&gt;.  Whether the Panton Principles were formulated using the same reasoning I do not know, but I have heard the Figshare reasoning on several occasions.  Dryad has a stronger and more lengthy explanation (click on &lt;a href=&quot;http://datadryad.org/pages/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Why does Dryad use Creative Commons Zero&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in their FAQs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fear is that since some data cannot be copyrighted, if you use something other than CC0, people may not realize that some data can be used without attribution (as it is not subject to copyright).  This reduces use of the data, which is contrary to the goals of openness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim has also been made that it might make various sorts of data aggregation difficult.  Dryad, for instance, imagines that you can competently aggregate data from 50,000 sources and asks you to envision lawsuits from not attributing the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these strike me as tantamount to saying, &quot;We are are bad programmers, and careless scientists.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientifically, you want to know where your data comes from so you can fix it if the upstream source fixes it.  You don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; messy aggregate data sources with no idea where it came from.  Yes, you have to be a good enough programmer to keep the tiny bit of metadata about where it came from (and can be used for attribution) associated with the data itself.  For instance, if you can grab data from 50,000 sources and can't &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt; manage to say who it is from, what confidence should we have in the quality of your work, analysis, conclusions, etc.?  Having licenses enforce this kind of basic good practice seems like an advantage, not a detriment, to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean that every license is appropriate for data.  Viral non-commercial licenses really limit how data can be used, as once they get mixed in to a data set, companies basically have to stop touching the data.  Contrary to the ideal of sharing, this actually poisons sharing by legally enforcing a forbidden class.  But the idea that CC0 is the only thing that's appropriate for data is not well-founded, even if it is a common view.  CC-BY is really not problematic; the requirements are minimal.  (In fact, Figshare sensibly allows CC-BY for figures and so on; last I checked, Dryad insists on CC0 for everything.  And both say you should provide attribution &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt; as good custom.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Rex Kerr" LastActivityDate="2015-08-09T20:01:48.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-21T21:34:36.983" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about practices and procedures for security of open source software and dealing with vulnerabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T21:36:40.243" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T21:36:40.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-21T21:34:36.983" Score="0" Body="For questions about security practices as applied to open source software." OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-21T21:36:44.053" LastActivityDate="2015-08-21T21:36:44.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-08-22T15:42:52.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just need to be able to demonstrate that the program is exactly what it says it is and is thus not a security risk to install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all open source licenses include language along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, with open source software there is typically &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; guarantee that the program is what it says it is or that it's free from malware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to claim that your software can be trusted will not get you very far when the license text conflicts with your claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some open source projects will provide the software under two licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one that is open source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;another that requires a payment and does have a warranty guaranteeing the software is &quot;fit for a particular purpose&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you guarantee software is good, is my having a person (or company) read the source code and say that the software is good. Involving payment adds extra legal weight on top of whatever credibility this person/company has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T15:42:52.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1603" CreationDate="2015-08-22T17:29:08.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the copyright for the files is owned by you (the project creator) or owned by the person using your software, then I believe patents are your only concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did not make a copy of the proprietary software, so nothing to worry about with regard to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your users are allowed to do anything they choose with the files, because they own them. Or if you own the file, then you are allowed to give other people permission to do things with them (providing software issues an implied license for users to use that software with your files). So again, nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was something like music or a movie or a game or a font where the user typically only has a license to use the files in a limited fashion, then the DMCA would be a concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the limited details you've provided I think you are fine. Also, keep in mind that as long as you're likely to win your court case it should be fairly easy for an open source project to get free legal help if somebody tries to file an invalid lawsuit against you. There are plenty of non-profit organisations that provide legal help to open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-08-22T17:29:08.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1688" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-23T01:28:24.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the content and placement of license, copyright, and disclaimers in an open source project, to include a license file that is distributed along with the project (use the &quot;license-file&quot; tag to ask questions that are specifically about license files), or embedded in the source files or executables, or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T01:44:47.520" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T01:44:47.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-23T01:28:24.887" Score="0" Body="For questions about the content and placement of license, copyright, and disclaimers" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T01:44:35.567" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T01:44:35.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-08-23T02:51:16.233" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Exceptions are additional statements accompanying or attached to a license that impose additional requirements, limitations, make additional disclaimers, or relax requirements and remove limitations.  For questions about additional statements that provide additional warranties, use the &quot;warranty&quot; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T08:40:38.310" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T08:40:38.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-08-23T02:51:16.233" Score="0" Body="For questions about exceptions to open source licenses" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-23T08:40:04.970" LastActivityDate="2015-08-23T08:40:04.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T00:12:43.557" Score="5" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a few open-source software projects and I'd like to run my own websites regarding them, but not claiming to own them; just make a place where information and such can be found. I believe I can do this and nobody can stop me for the following of reasons, among possibly others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's open-source, so I can host my own builds of software that I compiled myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The names of the projects are not registered, so I can use them at my own will and it's not illegal. Also, if the name is ambigious or vague, this just lends me even more leverage.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not claim to own them, but just simply want my own site about them (i.e., &quot;fan site,&quot; or maybe what is possibly known as a &quot;mirror site&quot; that may host builds but is not the &quot;official&quot; site, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not a penny is made off of any of the projects, so it's impossible for me to &quot;steal money.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want a bigger community where I can feel I have power over the questions asked about the projects, but without me claiming to be/impersonate any normal developers; hence, I am correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I plan to host builds, re-use their designs (which are not trademarked or registered copyrights) and provide my own information and testing, environment, etc., about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it's a way of deluding myself into thinking I have power, but not claiming I own them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I get traffic to my sites about projects of others, and I can point them to download links to builds on the &quot;official&quot; site but let the visitors have a pretty, fancy UI and stuff that the main doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do not wish to ask the project maintainers if they'd be okay because then I'd feel powerless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2399" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T01:05:16.337" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T22:21:40.177" Title="Could I run my own websites about projects I do not own?" Tags="|law|open-source-definition|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-08-24T00:59:40.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.It's open-source, so I can host my own builds of software that I compiled myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.The names of the projects are not registered, so I can use them at my own will and it's not illegal. Also, if the name is ambigious or vague, this just lends me even more leverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; about this? Just because the names aren't registered doesn't mean the owner doesn't have unregistered trademark protection. You better double check the license and consult a lawyer in this one. You may be able to use the name under fair use, but you'll need to make it clear that you're unaffiliated with the project. This is dangerous ground and thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I do not claim to own them, but just simply want my own site about them (i.e., &quot;fan site,&quot; or maybe what is possibly known as a &quot;mirror site&quot; that may host builds but is not the &quot;official&quot; site, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most FLO licenses give you the right to freely distribute. Double check to be sure its really a FLO license and you have the right to redistribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Not a penny is made off of any of the projects, so it's impossible for me to &quot;steal money.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's noble at least. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing that I'm aware of to stop you from hosting a mirror and creating content around someone else's project, but I fear you're wanting to do this for the wrong reasons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Basically, it's a way of deluding myself into thinking I have power, but not claiming I own them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That just sounds... &lt;em&gt;dirty&lt;/em&gt; and completely in opposition to the collaborative spirit of FLOSS. If you want power, become a politician. If you want to contribute to a FLOSS project, &lt;em&gt;contribute&lt;/em&gt;. I personally would &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; for somebody to document and promote my project. It would save me a ton of time and effort. Just contact the project maintainers and ask if they'd be interested in what you would like to do. Not only is it the right thing to do (regardless of the fact you don't &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;), I bet you make some friends doing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T18:48:05.817" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T18:48:05.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-24T02:58:28.950" Score="6" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a scientist that's a self-taught programmer. I've worked on several open source projects before, but the developers gave me a better idea on what to work on. This guy just sent me a link to github and told me to go for it. There's no README and most of the bugs are front-end (which I don't have much experience with) and checked out to him anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks really exciting, and I'm happy to help out, but I'm not sure where to start.  Looking around at the files, there's lots of things with &lt;code&gt;'initial hello world'&lt;/code&gt; as the description and several files labelled &lt;code&gt;.gitignore&lt;/code&gt;. I figure I could probably do some housekeeping but I'm not sure how to go about it, in terms of usefulness and efficiency. Also, documentation - there isn't any. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be frank, this would look awesome on a CV, so I don't want to just write it off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2401" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T09:40:09.130" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T00:39:10.100" Title="Where to start helping with a project?" Tags="|contributor|project-management|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1697" CreationDate="2015-08-24T03:10:23.397" Score="19" ViewCount="1118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in a license that says something like &quot;After the 1st of January 2020, you may distribute this work under the terms of the GPL v3&quot; (or some other open source license). I'm interested in developing software products and keeping a limited period of monopoly for commercial exploitation, but granting people open source freedoms far sooner than copyright law would put my works in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw an existing question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/420/can-i-force-my-work-to-be-open-sourced-in-the-future&quot;&gt;Can I force my work to be open sourced in the future?&lt;/a&gt;), but that question is largely about the &lt;em&gt;logistics&lt;/em&gt; of doing so (e.g. &quot;I want to add value to users by guaranteeing that the work eventually becomes free and maintainable by volunteers, even if I get hit by a bus or I go bankrupt&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question I'm interested specifically in licenses that would grant any licensee the traditional open source freedoms at a specific point in the future. I'm wondering if there are any licenses already in use, considering the oft-repeated advice to try to avoid modifying existing licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closely related question: would such a license be GPL compatible (after the open source date; obviously not before)? Or would the additional historical restrictions prevent it being combined with other GPL works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm aware that using this sort of license implies that I am actually giving the source code to someone earlier than the open source period; if I just refrain from publishing the source until I want it to be open source, then there's no need for a special license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2023-11-05T14:34:23.093" Title="Are there any existing licenses for a limited proprietary period, going open source in the future?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1039" CreationDate="2015-08-24T03:35:14.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be able to publish your source code under the GPL plus instructions for the users themselves to obtain the non-GPL work independently and compile the software themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This works because the GPL imposes no restrictions on &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; works that are not distributed. If your users create the linked program themselves then they have a work they cannot legally distribute under the GPL, but they can use it. Plus they can modify and redistribute the original package of code + instructions according to the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this means you cannot distribute your software in a form that's actually useful out-of-the-box. It's also a bit against the spirit of what people expect from open source software (something that is a complete work of software, which they can inspect and modify as they like), so you may disappoint some of your potential audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you automate the &quot;obtain the other work and compile the combined software&quot; step for user convience, at some point the automation could be seen as a form of &quot;linking&quot;, making your work a derivative of the non-GPL code and thus impossible to distribute under the GPL. After all, if you take this point to extremes dynamic linking is nothing more than instructions to find a separate binary and produce a combined work (in memory), that is carried out on the users system at the user's initiation, not by you. Would a Makefile that builds the combined program count as linking? What if it was a bash invoking the separate projects build scripts, and then calling the linker? A web page listing commands to copy and paste into a shell? I have no idea where the line &quot;really&quot; is from a legal standpoint, and to the best of my knowledge it depends on what judges will decide in court cases that haven't happened yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1120" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T03:35:14.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2015-08-24T07:39:01.190" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I'm not aware of any existing licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you don't need one. Just make a LICENSE file like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2015 Ben&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All rights reserved until 2025 after which this work is made available under version 3 of GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I grabed the last section from MIT. Including your name and the current year is optional but I'd include it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware that you have to do this in your own license file - the FSF explicitely does not give permission to distribute modifed copies so integrating dates into GPL would infringe on their intelectual property (isn't it ironic that the FSF licenses are proprietary?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure of the best way to include the GPL license text in your project without implying that the project is under GPL. Perhaps just don't include it at all, let someone else find/copy it in (or do it yourself) once 2025 arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T07:45:45.713" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T07:45:45.713" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2015-08-24T07:39:25.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you need a specific license to do this, you just need to specify how you're applying the existing license of your choice. Adapting the &quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&quot; section of the GPL version 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After midnight on January 1, 2020, UTC (2020-01-01T00:00+0000), this program is free software: after this time you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you specify this everywhere you'd normally specify the license grant (so in the license headers of your source code, and your general license documentation), then it's clear that the code is covered by the GPL starting in 2020. Before that there is no license grant so standard copyright terms apply (&quot;all rights reserved&quot; basically); you'd need to provide a separate license to any users of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the code is covered by the GPL, it is GPL-compatible; in effect it's just the same as if you'd gone in and added the license (without the date) on January 1, 2020. The date restriction isn't a &quot;further restriction&quot; since that only applies if the GPL is already applicable, which isn't the case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact on or after January 1, 2020, you could publish a new version without the date restriction, just to make things clear then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T07:39:25.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1694" CreationDate="2015-08-24T07:54:19.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attitudes may vary from project to project, but on most projects I participated in &quot;housekeeping&quot; or cleanup patches were always welcome. I'd create a &lt;code&gt;cleanup&lt;/code&gt; branch and just start creating patches that clean up those &quot;initial hello world&quot; descriptions. Once you've got your feet wet and have a couple of those under your belt, you could start on more substantial efforts, like writing the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the issue tracking system, again, it varies from project to project. On the projects I usually work on we use issue tracking to report actual issues, and accept code improvements without a tracker. Some projects require every patch to be associated with an issue tracker, so you may have to report a &quot;remove initial hello world descriptions&quot; issue and assign it to yourself. If you're unsure about the particular's project etiquette, just ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T07:54:19.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1701" CreationDate="2015-08-24T15:17:42.143" Score="13" ViewCount="1205" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question stems from discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/294459/80581&quot;&gt;a question on programmers.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the LGPL 3.0 section 4 &quot;Combined Works&quot; it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that,&#xA;  taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the&#xA;  portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse&#xA;  engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of&#xA;  the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, it seems the LGPL license is concerned with open source libraries and software that uses these libraries where a combined work would be a piece of software that includes a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to open source a standalone single file program and someone modified that and redistributed it, it would technically be a derivative work. Would the statements regarding combined works map to derivative works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more simply: Are derivative works a subset of combined works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2406" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T15:42:22.697" Title="Are derivative works a subset of combined works?" Tags="|derivative-works|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1700" CreationDate="2015-08-24T17:08:46.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two separate kinds of derived works you can create from an LGPL-licensed work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;em&gt;combined work&lt;/em&gt; that includes/uses the LGPL library (per section 4, &amp;quot;Combined Works&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;em&gt;modification&lt;/em&gt; of the LGPL library itself (per section 2, &amp;quot;Conveying Modified Versions&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To qualify as a &amp;quot;Combined Work&amp;quot;, your changes cannot be &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the library, but rather must be a separable component that uses the library as an interface. Consider the definitions from the license (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “Application” is any work that makes use of an interface provided by the Library, but which &lt;strong&gt;is not otherwise based on the Library&lt;/strong&gt;. Defining a subclass of a class defined by the Library is deemed a mode of using an interface provided by the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by &lt;strong&gt;combining or linking an Application with the Library&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, a combined work consists of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the LGPL-licensed library, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;another work (&amp;quot;Application&amp;quot;) that is not &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visually, we could represent the whole Combined Work as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; [Application] === (uses) ===&amp;gt; [Library]&#xA;|                                       |&#xA;|-------------Combined Work-------------|&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me (note: not a lawyer) that if a derived work is only a modification of the library itself, it would qualify as being &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the library. Therefore, such a work could not be part of a union that satisfies the license's definition of a Combined Work, because its non-Library component is based on the text Library, rather then using an interface provided by the Library. Instead, it would be a modification of the library, and governed by section 2, rather than section 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you modified the library's &lt;em&gt;file&lt;/em&gt; to add completely separate code that merely uses the library's interface, that wouldn't seem to be &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the library, because the two components (library and your addition) are completely separate (but merely happen to be contained inside the same file). For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;class OriginalLibrary() {&#xA;    void someInterface(int foobar) {&#xA;        return new Sys().doStuff(foobar, 18);&#xA;    }&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;int main(char** argv, int argc) {&#xA;    OriginalLibrary mylib = new OriginalLibrary();&#xA;    printf(&amp;quot;I use the library, but I'm not pat of it&amp;quot;);&#xA;    printf(mylib.someInterface(argv[0]));&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the &lt;code&gt;int main&lt;/code&gt; method is clearly not &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the &lt;code&gt;OriginalLibrary&lt;/code&gt; class, even if you put them in the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, your work could be &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; a modification and a combined work. You could first modify the library itself, and then include that modified library inside of a larger combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T12:53:30.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1692" CreationDate="2015-08-24T17:42:59.193" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing wrong ethically or legally with hosting a site that has discussion space for a particular (open source or not) software product. Nor is there anything wrong with hosting builds and and source of an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something wrong though with giving the impression that you are affiliated with some project when in fact you are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, you may not infringe on any of the trademarks of the project. You may not use a trademark to (among other things) pass off as another organization. In some jurisdictions this requires the trademark to be registered, in others it doesn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many projects wouldn't mind at all if you hosted builds, sources and forums, and might even applaud it (though your stated need to feel powerful makes me think you'd be a bad forum moderator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a site that is unaffiliated with, but about an open source project is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/&lt;/a&gt;, a website that publishes news articles about Ubuntu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a possibly more constructive way to think you have power is to realise that &lt;em&gt;you actually do have power&lt;/em&gt;. You can tailor the software to your own needs by writing patches. You don't need permission for that. You don't need permission to distribute them either, you can always fork the project (though it may be more productive to just be a contributor to the project)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T22:21:40.177" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T22:21:40.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1694" CreationDate="2015-08-24T21:16:49.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just do it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't worry about what changes you should or should not do. Pick whatever problem bothers you the most (even if it's GUI related and you have no GUI experience, and even if it's assigned to somebody else but they haven't fixed it yet) and solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project is using Git, make sure you adhere to best practices with regards to branching and pull requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a clone of their repository (in GitHub this is referred to as a &quot;fork&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a branch in your clone for each bug/feature/refactor that you work on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't merge it into master, send a pull request from your branch to the original project developer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If he/she doesn't like something, you'll be told to improve it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make those changes in your branch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He/She will merge your changes into the master branch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You pull their merge into your clone, and now it's part of your master.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above process is especially important when you're working with unfamiliar code, so that any mistakes can easily be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trust me, the project maintainer will be happy to receive any (good quality) work you send their way. Even if it's something they intended to do, they haven't done it yet so you can jump ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're only comfortable working on documentation, then do you could do that. But if something outside your comfort zone is more important, then that's a great opportunity to learn something new and (as is your primary motivation) it will be a big step up on your CV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worst case scenario is you do some terrible work and the project maintainer tells you why it's terrible, so you can fix it up. You've got yourself a golden opportunity here to learn from someone more experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-24T21:22:21.773" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T21:22:21.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1708" CreationDate="2015-08-24T14:40:39.070" Score="15" ViewCount="1006" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to release a program under an open source minimal restriction license but there are 2.73 bajillion options (give or take an order of magnitude).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically our only requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't hold our company liable for end user use or 3rd party modifications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep our company's logo and contribution attribution / website in the about / credits dialog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to allow our user-base to use and customize but deter competitors from redistributing it as their own original work by making them keep our logo if they want to copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason I say logo and/or reference in the help-&gt;about is that no one cares about licenses or readme files to look for attribution; they care if the app meets their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2406" OwnerDisplayName="Okuma.Tony" LastEditorUserId="2406" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T20:01:45.337" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T20:01:45.337" Title="Open Source License But Maintain Prominent Attribution" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1705" CreationDate="2015-08-24T14:51:49.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but the first is accomplished by ensuring there is a statement that keeps your company not liable for anything regarding the released software and that's it. &lt;strong&gt;You claim you're not even liable for the software you release in the first place.&lt;/strong&gt; (you know, bugs happen, are you gonna pay for those? NO) This then applies to successive modifications by third parties, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. GPL has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Disclaimer of Warranty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;The company logo and stuff should be guaranteed by Perl's style &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Artistic License&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; their boilerplate contains a liability waiver, too. (like pretty much &lt;em&gt;every software license or EULA everywhere&lt;/em&gt;, but those made for aerospatial and militar applications)&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24554" OwnerDisplayName="ZJR" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T15:27:28.533" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1705" CreationDate="2015-08-24T15:29:35.210" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD license(s) and the MIT X11 license are some of the simplest and most permissive Open Source / Free Software licenses. With the exception of the original (and officially obsolete) 4-clause BSD license, they are also GPL-compatible (if that is something you care about).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the MIT X11 license and the 3-clause BSD licenses require attribution. The BSD licenses list attribution for source distribution and binary distribution separately (the latter explicitly prescribing that the attribution must be in the documentation and/or other materials included with the distribution, which arguably includes packaging etc.), the MIT X11 license simply says to include both the copyright notice and the license in &quot;all copies or substantial portions of the Software&quot; without explicitly prescribing &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of the licenses explicitly mention anything about an &quot;About &amp;rarr; Credits&quot; dialog, which is not terribly surprising, considering that one was written before graphical user interfaces even existed (in the Unix world) and the other was written for one of the first ever graphical user interfaces. However, AFAIK, the MIT X11 license itself is not copyrighted, so you might be able to create a derived version which does what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, providing attribution in such a dialog is pretty much the standard way for GUI applications to abide by the terms of the MIT X11 and BSD licenses, even though it is not actually prescribed by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" OwnerDisplayName="Jörg W Mittag" LastActivityDate="2015-08-24T15:29:35.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1705" CreationDate="2015-08-25T08:40:31.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all open source licenses have a warranty disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attribution here is a problem, and - despite you say you want this - I'm not sure you would actually want this. Why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It creates a legal hazard. Your company logo and name is a trademark. When someone adapts the work, they and they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; retain the logo and company name, they open themselves up for trademark infringement suits. They may not pass themselves off as you, yet you want to enforce this possible confusion. That's not a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably want to prevent that a very bad product is distributed with your name on it. This is part of the reason trademark law exists. If nothing is stopping them from making a really bad derivative work, and you force them to put your name on it, that's probably not a situation you want to find yourself in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL suite of licenses does include the following phrasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in 7.b of the GPLv3 allows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this allows you to require attribution to be maintained (along with off course the new copyright holder) in some prominently visible place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such provisions exists for all of the GPL suite, GPL, LGPL, AGPL, versions 2 and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T08:40:31.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2015-08-25T09:19:24.060" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In practice you can't distribute your source if you want to keep it proprietary so trying to make time limited licences is nonsense. This isn't a licencing issue at all. You just need to make a will/tell people you trust where a latest copy and instructions to release it with a standard licence after a certain date/on your death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2287" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T09:19:24.060" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1722" CreationDate="2015-08-25T11:16:18.870" Score="20" ViewCount="5426" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm new to all this licensing jazz, and I've just started work on a project I'd like to one day publish as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found a couple of projects so far that have code to accomplish stuff similar to what I'd like to do, and as such I'd like to use it because it is probably more mature/tested than what I'd end up writing at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here is my problem, some of the code is written under the MIT license and some is written under the EFL (Eiffel Forum License) and some under the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked through all 3 licenses, and they seem to be functionally quite similar, differing in small ways such as copyright attribution and something about patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I, legally, combine code written under these, or any 3 (similar) licenses? How? I'm not sure if this is correct, but as I understand it, if all 3 licenses are GPL compatible I could then license my project as GPL. However, in this case, I think copyleft is unnecessary and not something I'd be very interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does public domain code combined with licensed code work the same way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what license can/should I then put my own project code and modifications under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And third, say I did one day want to go commercial and keep my software closed-source; I completely understand that if I previously released an OS version it would always remain so and people would be able to fork it and so on, but would this triple-mixing have any effect? (I assume it depends on the terms of each license here, I'm only asking if there is something I haven't considered)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2416" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T15:48:43.710" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:41:45.327" Title="Combining code written under different licenses (Eiffel Forum License, MIT and Apache), what are my options?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1711" CreationDate="2015-08-25T12:22:11.067" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL has a clause that if any component of the project is licensed under the GPL, the entire project must be licensed under the GPL. This is where license compatibility comes in to the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, there are no clauses in the licenses of your components that forbid distributing the software under &quot;mixed&quot; licenses. You can release your product part MIT licensed, part EFL licensed, part Apache licensed, part licensed to your choice (your part) without any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With public domain code you can do, barring moral rights, which have different implications in different jurisdictions, pretty much anything. Please note that there is not much public domain code available; it would be prudent to double check what you think is public domain actually is public domain (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1371/how-can-i-place-software-in-the-public-domain&quot;&gt;How can I place software in the public domain&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no additional problems with closing the source under mixed licenses, but do remember you can only close &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; IP, not anyone elses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T12:22:11.067" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1715" CreationDate="2015-08-25T19:32:23.230" Score="9" ViewCount="1957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on one npm package based on another one but with another approach, this package is licenced under Apache v2 and I want to use MIT. After some use of my package I've noticed I need to use the feature that the licenced code provides, but this package is not mantained since midyear of 2014 and a PR to this package is not an option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I modify and include this package logic into my own package and publish it without any issue? Should I add some reference to the other package? If I should refer the other project what things should I do/include on my own package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2419" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-25T21:13:11.403" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T22:20:29.550" Title="Adding feature to an Apache v2 package" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2015-08-25T22:16:39.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source Stack Exchange is a question &amp;amp; answer site for people producing, distributing, marketing and monetizing Free and Open projects. This site is not limited to software, but also covers art, literature, hardware, databases and more. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&amp;amp;A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a free and open library of detailed answers to every question about free and open culture, communities and projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T12:05:52.887" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T12:05:52.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1713" CreationDate="2015-08-25T22:20:29.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should comply with the terms of the Apache License. If you copy AL-licensed source code verbatim, you should keep that license on that source code. if you make a derived work, you can change the license, but you have to comply with the terms of the license. All that you need to know can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'VE MADE IMPROVEMENTS TO THE APACHE CODE; MAY I DISTRIBUTE THE&#xA;MODIFIED RESULT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely -- subject to the terms of the Apache&#xA;license, of course. You can give your modified code away for free, or&#xA;sell it, or keep it to yourself, or whatever you like. Just remember&#xA;that the original code is still covered by the Apache license and you&#xA;must comply with its terms. Even if you change every single line of&#xA;the Apache code you're using, the result is still based on the&#xA;Foundation's licensed code. You may distribute the result under a&#xA;different license, but you need to acknowledge the use of the&#xA;Foundation's software. To do otherwise would be stealing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think your changes would be found useful by others, though, we&#xA;do encourage you to submit them to the appropriate Apache project for&#xA;possible inclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-25T22:20:29.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1694" CreationDate="2015-08-26T00:23:18.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the absence of a link to the project, all suggestions will be vague. However, there are a number of things you need to do to get started, and they often offer opportunities to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you can make any changes, you need to be comfortable that you have some understanding of the codebase and how it's structured. So pull down the code and examine it in your favorite editor. Get a feel for which source files depend on which (the basic structure). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere in there you will usually find a small source file that has a collection of utility or helper routines used by everything else. This represents the bottom of the call tree, so you should be able to fully understand it in  isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with that file, and study the code one function at a time. When you really understand the function, document it. Add substantive, explanatory, comments. Provide examples of use for the helper functions. Basically fully flesh out all the things the original author left unsaid because they knew what they were typing at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you're done with the entire file, create a pull request and see what the project owner thinks. If it's accepted, move the the next lowest module (which probably uses the one you just documented) and start again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the following big advantages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It gives you a really strong understanding of the code, which is essential to making later substantive changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It makes &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; functional change to the existing code (i.e. you can't break anything)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It gives you a way to build a relationship with the project owner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It improves the overall quality of the code-base.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T00:23:18.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1718" CreationDate="2015-08-26T01:04:21.027" Score="90" ViewCount="19658" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody knows that you shouldn't use a CC BY-SA license on your code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Even the Creative Commons folk recommend against it. &lt;/a&gt; What I don't know or understand is &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;. I can't seem to find any information explaining this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I contribute as both an asker and answerer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Code Review Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Since SE asks us to license our contributions under CC BY-SA, I'd like to know the implications this has on code I post there. Most of my code is released under GPL3 or MIT otherwise. I know by posting it on SE I'm dual licensing, but what exactly am I agreeing to? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What implications does dual licensing have for these (sometimes quite large) sections of code have from my projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange?cb=1&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange proposed an update to their terms of service in regards to code licensing in late 2015/early 2016&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/&quot;&gt;but that change is &quot;delayed indefinitely&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="758" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T05:44:10.403" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T05:44:10.403" Title="Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|multi-licensing|cc-by-sa|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2015-08-26T02:35:26.390" Score="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC's own FAQ&lt;/a&gt; addresses the reasons, which I find satisfactory, so I'm just going to reproduce it here and expand on the key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses &lt;strong&gt;do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code&lt;/strong&gt;, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address &lt;strong&gt;patent rights&lt;/strong&gt;, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently &lt;strong&gt;not compatible with the major software licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our licenses are currently not compatible with the GPL, though the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry. We are looking into compatibility of BY-SA with GPL in the future; see the license compatibility page for more information.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Bold is mine)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, CC-BY-SA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't mention source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't mention patents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isn't compatible with major software licenses&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are these good reasons for not using CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't protect access to source code.&lt;/strong&gt;  The &amp;quot;-SA&amp;quot; part simply means, &amp;quot;I'll share this piece of work, and you can use it as long as you then share yours under the same terms&amp;quot;. But there is no mention of alternate forms; this only covers the final, publicly-available form. So someone is perfectly within their rights to take CC-BY-SA code, produce a derivative software, and &lt;em&gt;only share the binary under CC-BY-SA&lt;/em&gt;. By contrast, GPL explicitly mentions source code, and requiring the distributing source code, when you convey alternate forms such as binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't protect against patent disputes.&lt;/strong&gt; This may or may not be important, as evidenced by many software licenses also not mentioning patents, but for some use cases it is very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It isn't compatible with major software licenses.&lt;/strong&gt; The FAQ specifically mentions GPL incompatibility, that is, it's impossible to combine and distribute CC-BY-SA and GPL licensed code in the same piece of software. Since the body of GPL-licensed and GPL-compatible-licensed software is much bigger than that for CC-BY-SA, releasing using CC-BY-SA greatly limits the usefulness of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When choosing a license, you should define what you're trying to achieve with the license. CC-BY-SA provides much weaker protection than copyleft software licenses, since it doesn't guarantee access to source code, but because it is so incompatible with other licenses, it is more restrictive in practice. It's very likely that there are much more appropriate licenses than CC-BY-SA, for whatever you're trying to achieve. For example, if access to source is not an issue, try a permissive license. If you want to ensure that your code remains freely available, try a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/8546/kyll&quot;&gt;@kyll&lt;/a&gt; has mentioned that CC BY-SA version 4.0 has a one-way compatibility with GPLv3. This is specific to BY-SA content integrated in a GPLv3 project. Using CC BY-SA on still suffers from the incompatibility problem. From the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 4.0 of CC's Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T22:24:40.600" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2015-08-26T12:39:46.660" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA is a technically perfect open source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA's use is discouraged because of the &quot;license proliferation&quot; problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going into more detail on the first point, first we need to know what it means to be an &quot;open source&quot; license. OSI has a great definition of what it means to be open: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/osd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets go through each point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution – The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most important requirement for a license to be &quot;open&quot;. CC-BY-SA does not restrict selling or giving away the software and therefore it passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other creative commons licenses (such as CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA) fail here and are not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Source Code – The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA allows distribution of the source code or the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Derived Works – The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA passes here too, you are allowed to modify the work and can distribute under the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an extension of point 3, clarifying some areas where an open source license can block distribution. CC-BY-SA passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA is fine for these points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Distribution of License – The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA is fine again, you can redistribute without permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA is definitely not specific to any product - that's the whole point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software – The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just an extension/clarification of point 1. CC-BY-SA passes here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Be Technology-Neutral – No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, CC-BY-SA passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA fits the definition of open source perfectly and is therefore suited to open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, one reason to avoid using the license: The issue of &quot;license prolifiration&quot;, which OSI has explained nicely: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/proliferation&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/proliferation&lt;/a&gt; and there's a wikipedia page going into more detail: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it's bad for the community to have a bunch of licenses that may or may not be compatible with other licenses. Far better if everybody settles on a small number of licenses where the community clearly knows which licenses are/aren't compatible with other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially true for &quot;restrictive&quot; licenses like CC-BY-SA, since those are the ones most likely to have compatibility issues. Proliferation is less of an issue with &quot;permissive&quot; licenses (like CC-0) so the community generally is happy for those licenses to be used (although OSI and the FSF do not actively encourage their use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why CC-BY-SA is discouraged. But you can use it if you want, and still consider your project open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-08-26T12:47:28.703" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T12:47:28.703" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1721" CreationDate="2015-08-26T13:56:15.777" Score="180" ViewCount="99357" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some code on GitHub that I would like to use. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/organicinternet/magento-configurable-simple&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The repository&lt;/a&gt; has no public declaration of license that I can find. But this particular project has over 200 forks and is a pretty active history of public issues and pull requests. There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/organicinternet/magento-configurable-simple/issues/222&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one issue&lt;/a&gt; opened by someone else requesting a license be added, but with no useful responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository has no public declaration of license that I can find. Given the nature of e-commerce (in context), it seems likely that many are using this product in a commercial capacity. But in general, are there any safe assumptions that I can make about my right to use/modify/sell or contribute to this software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2429" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T13:36:45.637" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T00:17:30.110" Title="What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?" Tags="|licensing|github|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2015-08-26T16:38:13.853" Score="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a repository has no license, then &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;all rights are reserved&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and it is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Open Source or Free. You &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; modify or redistribute this code without &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;explicit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; permission from the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure of the legal implications of actually pulling the source local and building/using the software privately though. Perhaps someone else can chime in on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/licensing-a-repository#choosing-the-right-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub's licensing help page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. If you're creating an open source project, we strongly encourage you to include an open source license. The Open Source Guide provides additional guidance on choosing the correct license for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: If you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, according to the Terms of Service, other GitHub users have the right to view and fork your repository within the GitHub site. If you have already created a public repository and no longer want users to have access to it, you can make your repository private. When you convert a public repository to a private repository, existing forks or local copies created by other users will still exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, the only thing you can safely assume is that you have no rights to do anything at all with this code. In the particular case of GitHub, you can fork the repository and view the code, but nothing more.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being it's entirely possible that the owner doesn't realize any of this, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/organicinternet/magento-configurable-simple/issues/222#issuecomment-135201411&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I left a comment on the repo alerting them to the situation&lt;/a&gt; and pointing back to this Q &amp;amp; A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T11:27:10.497" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1711" CreationDate="2015-08-26T18:41:45.327" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best option is to create a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; (or perhaps &lt;code&gt;NOTICE.txt&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;NOTICE.md&lt;/code&gt;) file in the root of your project code containing an introduction/summary, a list of copyright holders/project names and then all three license texts one after the other. And at the top of each source code file make sure you preserve the original copyright/license notice (optionally adding your name and the current year to it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For binary distributions of the code, you must also have some way to access the license, for example in your &quot;about&quot; screen. The apache license refers to binary distributions as &quot;object&quot; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to distribute the source code at all with any of these licenses. If you only distribute binaries, not the source code, then only your binary needs to comply with the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not happy about the license requirements, you can always email the project maintainer with your reasoning. They might give you permission to skip some of the requirements or even use a different license entirely – I've had good luck with this approach in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what you're &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to do (note these restrictions apply to source code &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; binary distributions of your app!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT and EFL just require that copyright notices and the license text be &quot;included&quot; in you work. You can decide for yourself how to do this, as long as you make a good faith effort that people who want to know what copyright/license applies they can find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache has clear instructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-08-26T18:41:45.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T07:33:48.530" Score="24" ViewCount="2078" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wrote a program that embeds and uses a GNU-GPL library (&lt;em&gt;GPLv3 or at your discretion any later version&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release my program under the GNU AGPL v3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-09-28T03:26:13.413" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T03:00:29.483" Title="Can I release under AGPL a program that uses a GPL library?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T08:05:25.853" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just wrote a program and would like to release it dual-license (probably AGPL and proprietary, but I also would like to retain the ability to release it under other licenses in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to welcome patches from the future community, but merging should not compromise the goal above, so if I understand correctly I need a kind of contributor agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://selector.harmonyagreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harmony Agreement Selector&lt;/a&gt; looks like a tool designed for me, but I am stuck at the first question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eyafO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eyafO.png&quot; alt=&quot;Harmony Agreement Selector&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen in the screenshot above, there are two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright License (CLA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright Assignment (CAA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2015-08-27T08:05:25.853" Title="Difference between Copyright License (CLA) Copyright Assignment (CAA)" Tags="|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-08-27T08:27:30.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2015-08-27T15:07:54.517" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary:&lt;/strong&gt; If you can define something (say an XML file) as your &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;, then you could apply the LGPL license to your archetypes, and treat them as &lt;em&gt;software libraries&lt;/em&gt;. Your archetypes can then be modified and/or included in any work (including a proprietary work), as long as that work are distributed with a source code version of the archetype.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your primary scenario is vendor-controlled networked applications (e.g. a centralised web application) then the same argument applies to the GPL (which does not require sharing source code over a network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modifiable source requirement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like access to a &lt;em&gt;modifiable version of the source code&lt;/em&gt; of an archetype (say an XML file) is one of your requirements. In this case you  definitely want to consider AGPL, GPL (as Zizouz212 mentioned) or LGPL, rather than CC BY-SA. (CC BY-SA does not require source code access.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLOther&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLOther&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL [and by extension the LGPL and AGPL] can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Picking one of these licenses would mean that any &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; &quot;compiled&quot; from the archetype must be bundled with the original archetype file (so that it could be modified and/or &quot;re-compiled&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyleft requirement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL, LGPL and AGPL also satisfy your copyleft (share-alike) requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Inclusion in other (possibly proprietary) works&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the archetype or derivative work is going to be copied into some &lt;em&gt;independent work&lt;/em&gt; (another piece of software that is not a derivative work, but links to the archetype), and you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; want to place any requirements on that independent work, then the &lt;strong&gt;Lesser General Public License (LGPL)&lt;/strong&gt; is what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the LGPL, the independent work must still include the original archetype file and the source for any derivative work (see example below), but the independent work doesn't have make it's source available. It could be any license, including a completely locked-down proprietary one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provisos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that the second work must also include &lt;em&gt;some mechanism&lt;/em&gt; by which the LGPLed work can be replaced. (Easy examples are a DLL, if you're familiar with Windows, or a jar file, if you're familiar with Java.) This provision allows someone to take the archetype source file, modify it, &quot;re-compile&quot; it, and replace the &quot;compiled&quot; version used in the second work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am working on the conservative (risk-averse) assumption that the XML -&gt; class transformation would constitute a derivative work. If it doesn't, your vendors are under no obligation to share even that part of their software source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that it applies, but it would be remiss of me to not mention &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (an argument for preferring the GPL over the LGPL in most cases).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking at web/network applications then the same arguments apply to the GPL, and you could use that. (You do not need to share code over a network.) However, this would mean that any desktop or mobile software derived from the archetype must be GPL (this would not include a dumb client that is basically a web browser).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you define your LGPL archetype as an XML file, and vendor X uses that file as a template to create a Java class with getter/setter methods for the attributes, and basic database read/write functionality. They bundle a collection of such classes into a jar file. They develop an independent piece of software that links to this jar file, creates instances of these classes, processes and modifies them according to business logic rules, and calls the save method to store the results in a database (or to file or whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they permit me to install their proprietary work, they must give me: the jar file and the source code for the jar file (and probably the original archetype XML file too). They must provide sufficient instruction that a software developer could literally recompile the source code and get the same jar file. I am also free to inspect and modify the source code and compile my own jar file. If I break it, that's my problem. I have no access to their proprietary business logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To be clear, the functionality I have described the jar file as having is trivial, it's the business logic that matters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also free to inspect the archetype itself, use it for research or whathaveyou, as long as I share my modifications, which I believe was your original goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T09:45:56.153" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T09:45:56.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2015-08-27T15:16:05.117" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can use a GPL3 library [1] in an AGPL3 program [2]. You can also cut-and-paste GPL3 code into an AGPL3 program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both the ordinary GNU GPL, version 3, and the GNU Affero GPL have text allowing you to link together modules under these two licenses in one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you should make the code for both portions available from your AGPL program, and include all appropriate copyright notices, as you normally would with GPL/AGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you can even use an &lt;em&gt;AGPL library&lt;/em&gt; in a &lt;em&gt;GPL program&lt;/em&gt;, as long as you make the AGPL code available whenever its conditions are met (e.g. from behind a GPL-licensed content management system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Or GPL2+ library or GPL3+ library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Or AGPL3+ program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T03:00:29.483" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T03:00:29.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-08-27T18:35:46.590" Score="14" ViewCount="4064" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a mobile developer and trying to work on a mobile application which will be something like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbgames.landmarks&quot;&gt;Guess the City&lt;/a&gt; app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app will display four landmarks on one screen and the player will have to guess the city. I am planning to use pictures licensed under some Creative Commons license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a page will have to display four pictures on its small display, there is little room left for attribution. Will it be sufficient to satisfy the license to list the name of the author and license - WITHOUT linking or having a hyperlink to the original content? Having a link to the original content will defeat the purpose of the game: if I provide the hyperlink they can follow the link which may tell which place it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is it possible to have an info button for the license information at the top which will only link to the original image once the person has guessed the city?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it essential to have the picture connected to the original picture, or I can just have the author name and state the license name, and not have the hyperlinks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2446" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-08-28T14:53:08.417" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T20:17:10.820" Title="How to attribute Creative Commons images in a quiz game (mobile app)?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1729" CreationDate="2015-08-27T19:57:45.033" Score="22" ViewCount="2003" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work in a field where people (competitors?) reverse engineer things, and for this reason, there are many implementations around, all of which are open source. Sometimes in order to save time, I look up if someone figured something out already, and I read their code. Then I see &quot;aha, this format stores image data as JPEG xored with &lt;code&gt;0xFF&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (this is just an example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once gained, this knowledge cannot be lost.&lt;/strong&gt; So I proceed to code this in my program in my own way, in my own language. Then I credit the authors in my LICENSE file, even if the repository didn't use any license (= the code was copyrighted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fair use, but is it legally okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note I'm not talking about legal aspects of reverse engineering, since that's another subject altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2449" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-27T20:27:05.473" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T03:17:16.517" Title="Borrowing ideas rather than code from open source projects" Tags="|law|derivative-works|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2015-08-27T22:04:45.213" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have not copied the code directly, this sort of thing is usually OK, and exempt from copyright laws. Specifically, mathematical formulae, ideas, inventions, recipes and facts cannot be protected by copyright. So just the knowledge that a format is handled in a particular way is not a copyright issue. Clever shortcuts and time-saving algorithms are not protected either. You don't even need to give credit, but if you learnt a lot from a particular source, it seems polite to. Don't use the &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; file to give credit though, as it is not a licensing issue - make a separate &lt;em&gt;credits&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;acknowledgements&lt;/em&gt; file instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same might apply if you learn an idea from a published scientific paper, or someone's coding blog or tutorial. Sometimes the code in these resources has no clear license, so you should not use it directly, but re-using the concepts is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are ways that such things can be protected, and you could be liable for if you publish working code that includes patented material or trademarks for example. Some software development fields seem to have more problems with patents than others. Compression algorithms and compressed storage formats come to mind as one problem area. Patent-protected algorithms or formats are often not well signposted in source code, and the case law for software patents is hard to get to grips with. Patents can apply to whole algorithms, to formats or to specific optimisations of either. Having said this, the same problems can occur even if you re-invent an idea yourself from scratch, or reverse-engineer a format without the help of someone else's code as a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2346" LastEditorUserId="2346" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T08:19:26.713" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T08:19:26.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1727" CreationDate="2015-08-28T02:19:35.837" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a better question than I first thought because, whilst there's lots of guides and FAQs on this subject, they are disorganised, duplicating, and don't cover mobile apps specifically. I'll try to gather all the relevant information here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; you need to attribute&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you are using &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;, pretty much all CC licenses require attribution. The best guide I found is CC's article &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot;&gt;Best practices for attribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which provides the handy acronym &lt;strong&gt;TASL&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;Title, Author, Source, License&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no one right form of attribution, but as long as you include all four, you are good. For example, this is a very minimal attribution that still satisfies TASL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/8256206923/in/set-72157632200936657&quot;&gt;Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco&lt;/a&gt; by tvol / &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/&quot;&gt;CC BY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it includes Title, Author, Source (linked via title), and License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot;&gt;a few details&lt;/a&gt; if you want your attributions to be perfect. For example, if you have modified the original, for versions 3.0 and up you need to note as such, and for version 4.0 the nature of the modifications. On the other hand, the title is not required for version 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; you should attribute&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no specific guide on attribution in mobile apps, as these guides were written before the rise of mobile apps. There are different recommendations for online and offline attribution, the difference due to the ability to display working links. However, I'd argue that mobile apps are somewhere in between, because although you can display links, having those links be clickable may be bad UX. Let's look at the examples given in the guide &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org.au/content/attributingccmaterials.pdf&quot;&gt;Attributing Creative Commons Materials&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Books, journals and magazines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Include the relevant attribution information &lt;strong&gt;next to the CC work&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;as a footer&lt;/strong&gt; along the bottom of the work on the page that the work&#xA;  appears on; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Alternatively, you can &lt;strong&gt;list the CC works in the back&lt;/strong&gt; of the publication. If you take this option, it is best to list the works in the order in which they appear in the publication and indicate this to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Photos and images&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Provide the relevant attribution &lt;strong&gt;next to the photograph&lt;/strong&gt;, or close by&#xA;  (eg &lt;strong&gt;on the edge or bottom of the page&lt;/strong&gt;) if that is too obtrusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Slideshows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Include the relevant attribution information &lt;strong&gt;next to the CC work&lt;/strong&gt; or&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;as a footer&lt;/strong&gt; along the bottom of the work on each slide that the work&#xA;  appears on; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Alternatively, you can &lt;strong&gt;include a ‘credits’ slide&lt;/strong&gt; at the end of the&#xA;  show, that lists all the materials used and their attribution details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Film&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Include the relevant attribution information with the work &lt;strong&gt;when it&#xA;  appears on screen&lt;/strong&gt; during the film; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  If this is not possible, attribute the work &lt;strong&gt;in the credits&lt;/strong&gt;, just as you&#xA;  would see with music in a commercial film.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Podcasts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;•  Mention the name of the artist and that it is under a CC licence&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;during the podcast&lt;/strong&gt;, like a radio announcement, and provide full&#xA;  attribution &lt;strong&gt;on your website&lt;/strong&gt;, next to where the podcast is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you see there are a few common themes, which you can try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribute right next to the CC work&lt;/strong&gt;, whether that's along the edge, or in a footer on the same page. For mobile apps you want to be careful, due to the limited screen space this can be obtrusive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Add a &lt;em&gt;credits&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; page&lt;/strong&gt; in your app, where you list all the CC licensed works. Android itself provides a good example of this: if you go to &lt;em&gt;Settings &gt; About&lt;/em&gt;, there should be a section on open source licenses, and there is &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;. Note that unlike CC licenses which recommends links, typical software licenses require showing the license text in full.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provide a link to a web page with full attributions.&lt;/strong&gt; This is the least obtrusive option of the first two are unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#How_do_I_properly_attribute_a_Creative_Commons_licensed_work.3F&quot;&gt;CC's FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T02:19:35.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1727" CreationDate="2015-08-28T09:56:35.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For photos and images, Creative Commons lists in their attribution guide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Provide the relevant attribution next to the photograph, or close by (eg on the edge or bottom of the page) if that is too obtrusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &quot;relevant attribution&quot; includes title, author, source and license. You shouldn't forgo linking to the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You indicate that attribution with a link to the source is difficult because of space constraints, and because having attribution may spoil the game. That's not nessecarily so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have a link available to the source. What you could do is make the link automatically lose the round if the player wants to follow it. I imagine something like clicking the link after a guess is made would just follow a link, and before a guess is made show a popup with something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking up the source of the image before giving your answer will automatically forfeit the round. [forfeit and continue to source] [cancel]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way you won't spoil your game, and still give proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-28T09:56:35.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1734" CreationDate="2015-08-29T16:38:12.643" Score="10" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to publish a lot of documentation on programming and other similar topics I have been writing over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The documentation consist of explanations, diagrams, exercises and code examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this moment most of the content is my own, with some contributions from people who I personally know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license must be free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to accept contributions from anyone, but I don't want to maintain a big file that explicitly states every contributor, unless the contributor herself adds her to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to facilitate the integration of parts or the whole of these documentation to any other free project, no matter which license they are using.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license would be the most appropriate given these requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm looking for a &quot;soft&quot; copyleft: I want to avoid helping private projects, but I don't want to restrict others licensing choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2470" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-08-29T16:45:40.620" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T23:03:49.057" Title="Good licence for a new documentation project" Tags="|project-management|copyleft|license-recommendation|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1733" CreationDate="2015-08-29T17:30:29.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best bet seems to be the a Creative Commons Share Alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are looking for to license a creative work - your diagrams, examples, and words. Right away, Creative Commons should ring a bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; license looks good. Here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It includes a ShareAlike/Copyleft clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will require anyone who &lt;strong&gt;makes changes&lt;/strong&gt; to this to release the work under the same license. They can still include it, even if they don't make changes, and won't be subject to this clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After seeing your comment, you may perhaps be interested in dual-licensing the content, under both the CC BY-SA license, and the Gnu Free Documentation License, as you noted in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this section isn't directly related to the license, but it is something that you'll need to consider immensely so that others can follow your license: the issue of attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are accepting contributions from multiple people, many of which aren't listing their names, it could be wise to make them accept contributor agreements. These will let you place all contributions under a common name, make the project more attractive to others that are willing to use it, and will make it easier, as contributions are already copyrighted. It can be something as simple as, &amp;quot;if you make contributions, the copyright will be owned by so and so&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T23:03:49.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="652" CreationDate="2015-08-29T17:39:45.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Review and testing. That's all we got. If you want to be very careful, Review then Commit (RTC), so that someone affirmatively takes responsibility for each change as it becomes part of the main line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question uses a very broad term, sabotage. Sneaking exploits into code is only one way that someone can try to be damaging to a project. Badmouthing, for example, is a whole other area. Building a strong community is the only defense, and meaningful code review comes from either a community or a BDfL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-08-29T17:39:45.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1738" CreationDate="2015-08-30T15:00:04.107" Score="36" ViewCount="4841" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.userfrosting.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source user management system for PHP&lt;/a&gt; which is (admittedly) directed towards novice programmers.  The idea is to help familiarize &amp;quot;Cowboys from Code Canyon&amp;quot; with the tools and design techniques used by the &lt;em&gt;professional&lt;/em&gt; PHP community, while providing a useful piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that my target audience also happens to be the same audience that has trouble reading/refuses to read documentation.  I am starting to get burnt out from answering the same types of &lt;a href=&quot;http://whathaveyoutried.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unresearched, quick-fix questions&lt;/a&gt;.  Example questions include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how can I render PHP file using Userfrosting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how to do a new class public object visible to users and guest ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could anybody point me to where i could read or find tutorials regarding Twig&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all questions that could either be answered with a Google search, or they demonstrate a complete lack of understanding w.r.t. the basic software design concepts &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.userfrosting.com/navigating/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that I cover in the documentation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I need to make the documentation a little bit more &amp;quot;in-your-face&amp;quot;, perhaps with a few bold points in a popup dialog before they can download the software from the site.  I could also put this information as a step in the installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I really am skeptical that this will help, at least with the type of people whose first impulse when confronted with a problem is to ask someone else to solve it for them, rather than read the documentation and craft a specific, well-researched question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something I could be doing better, short of providing 24/7 customer support?  Should I just put a big disclaimer in the README saying &amp;quot;I will not answer these types of questions&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may also be a good UX question, but it is &amp;quot;UX for an open source project&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="484" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T07:19:49.233" Title="How can I get users to read the docs/FAQ before asking new questions?" Tags="|community|documentation|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-08-30T19:01:40.397" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a bunch of strategies that help you deal with beginner questions. Not all of them teach to RTFM, but you don't have to. Some strategies that can be very effective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mobilize your userbase for support. Have a proper real-time communication platform (IRC, commonly on Freenode, and/or Gitter) to ask questions, as well as a mailing list. Users can help each other, and not all support has to rely on you. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a question has been asked many times before, and it's in the FAQ (you have a FAQ right?), you can simply answer with that it's in the FAQ, or that they can search the mailinglist archives (you have searchable mailinglist archives right?) for their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have the API documented on your website. For many people, me included, on-line API documentation is by far the most useful form of documentation. Make sure it's good. Make sure it's complete. Make sure that if you notice many questions about a certain component, make sure you document that well on the API documentation. In order for your users to RTFM, you should have a FM. It lists it as &quot;coming soon&quot; already. You need it sooner rather than later.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have a search box right on your website that lets people find answer to their questions, if it's already documented. Making the FM easy to find and easy to search helps people to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can offer paid support. Questions that bum you out are much more fun to answer if you get paid for that. An answer &quot;you can search the mailinglist, or contact me directly to discuss the paid support options we have&quot; is by all means reasonable. If they need a lot of hand-holding (and novices generally do), paid support might be the best route for them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T19:01:40.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-08-30T21:06:35.397" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just to play devil's advocate&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you may want to consider is that your current documentation might be suboptimal - no one may be reading your documentation because it isn't useful (to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How easy is it to find your documentation in the first place? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How easy is it to find a given topic within your documentation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a clear path for a novice user to learn about your program?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the learning curve like? Is there a good progression from complete newbie to experienced user, or do you go straight from trivial examples to a reference manual dump?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have multiple ways of finding information based on different mental models/outlook? (That is, things like tutorials, FAQs, demos, reference manuals - e.g. not everyone wants to puzzle out the answer to their question from a Backus–Naur grammer, even if it is technically the most accurate way of representing the information.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; people reading your documentation? And no, &quot;because they're ungrateful, lazy schmucks&quot; is not a sufficient answer, at least not if you want to get them to change their behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specifics:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at you website, it looks like you could highlight &quot;Documentation&quot; more. On the main page, you have 'Download' 'Demo' and 'GitHub' as main buttons, but documentation gets a tiny text-only link. Documentation is &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; as important to your users as a GitHub link - why not promote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the upper right you do have a &quot;Getting Started&quot; link, but phrasing could be better. E.g. what will people who are thinking &quot;I don't need to get started - I'm already using it; I just have a question about details&quot; click? You have the &quot;Help&quot; button, but that's a bit confusing - is it &quot;I would like to help this Open Source project&quot;? &quot;Help&quot; in other sites also tends to be more &quot;about this site/contact us&quot; - to be honest, my eyes completely skipped over that link as useless boilerplate the first few times I saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when you click on the &quot;Getting Started&quot; link, phrasing the links could be better. For example &quot;navigating the code&quot;. I don't want to &quot;navigate&quot; Userfrosting, I want to &quot;use&quot; it. I guessing a fair number of users are skipping that page because they think it's an in-depth nitty-gritty code architecture page, rather than (apparently) your main documentation page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tutorials link is good ... but you only have the two. If you are getting repeated questions on the same topic, it's probably worth it to make some tutorials about that topic. This is &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; true if you're targeting the novice user. You have to expect that they'll come in with little to none of the knowledge that you take for granted. There has to be an easy (for them) way of getting that knowledge, even if it's not directly related to your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cross linking is also good. The &quot;Components&quot; link on &quot;Getting Started&quot; would be the spot to go to get an overview about the various parts of your program and how to use them, except that it has no links, making it hard to get more information about those parts. (E.g. if I wanted to know how to &quot;Control privileges for users and groups&quot;, there's no indication of where I would go to find out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;Get Help&quot; section on your main page, when I click on &quot;Using Userfrosting&quot;, I get an interstitial pop up, and if I blindly click through (which, let's be honest, most people will do) I get dumped back to the front page. That is to say, the one link that - to me - would be the most important documentation link doesn't actually do anything. (Note that this is the same reason that popups on download or steps in the installer won't work - if the popups/steps are hoops to jump through rather than things which provide immediate benefits to the user, people will skip them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you have to think about searchability. Not just &quot;how would I, as an experienced user, search for this information?&quot; but &quot;how would someone who has little to no clue about my software find this information, keeping in mind they might not know what the appropriate keywords are?&quot; First off, your website has no search box available. If I want to search your documentation, I can't do it from your site, instead I have to go to an external search engine and be knowledgeable enough to know about the site restriction syntax, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if I do a plain Google search, I'm not much better. For example, I typed &quot;render PHP Userfrosting&quot;. Even without the site restrictions on search, I do get related pages, but nothing that a quick glance tells me anything related to rendering PHP (specifically). There might be synthesizable information in there somewhere, but I have ~2,000 Google results for this search, and others from the other search terms I try. Realistically, I'm giving each search result maybe 10 seconds before I give up and go onto the next one. Is there a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; paragraph in the documentation which &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; answers this question? If so, why might I not be finding it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize that last point. Roughly speaking, if you can't answer &quot;unresearched, quick-fix questions&quot; by a literal cut-and-paste of a single paragraph from the documentation, then either your documentation isn't comprehensive enough or the questions are more complex than you're giving them credit for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's true you will get a fraction of people who will never read your documentation no matter how easy it is to use, the threshold for &quot;giving up&quot; is a range. Each person has a varying level of hassle which they're willing to tolerate. It's not just those who immediately ask others for help and those who extensively scour the documentation to ask comprehensively researched questions. Depending on how hard you make it to use your documentation, you'll get more or fewer people who will make the attempt. Your goal is to lower the hassle level for using the documentation as far as you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2483" LastActivityDate="2015-08-30T21:06:35.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1728" CreationDate="2015-08-31T05:14:13.997" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a jagged seam between the concepts that underpin copyright law, versus the reality of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law cares very much about the &lt;em&gt;provenance of the work&lt;/em&gt;: what prior works does this work derive from? The concept only makes sense in the context of a clear traceable lineage from one work to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you hint, though, that concept &lt;strong&gt;does not match the reality&lt;/strong&gt; of how we create works. Nothing in the bit stream necessarily implies what prior works this bit stream derives from; and the similarity of one work to another does not necessarily imply how, or whether, one was derived from another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what ends up happening is that disputes arise over &lt;em&gt;to what extent&lt;/em&gt; one work derives from another, and &lt;em&gt;how we can know&lt;/em&gt; whether that happened; and the similarity of the works can't decide such disputes with much reliability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, supporting evidence from outside the work itself needs to be found to support any particular assertion about the derivation of one work from another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may claim that your work Lorem does not derive from prior work Ipsum in a way that invokes a claim from Ipsum's copyright holder. What do you do if that copyright holder disagrees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To guard against claims that your implementation of Lorem is derived from work Ipsum, you can employ the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;clean room design&lt;/a&gt; tactic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have Alice decide they want to implement Lorem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have Bob maintain no communication with Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have Bob read the implementation of Ipsum, learning its algorithms and data structures and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have Bob publish a prose description of the implementation, &lt;em&gt;without including any part of Ipsum's implementation&lt;/em&gt; in that description.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Have Alice read that published description, and use it to implement Lorem &lt;em&gt;without ever seeing Ipsum's implementation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;without ever communicating directly with Bob&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since copyright is held in fixed expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves, this can be an effective way to insulate Alice from claims that Lorem is a derived work from Ipsum. But only if the actors clearly document the steps they took to maintain a clean separation between them as they worked, to the extent that it would hold up in a court of law against hostile copyright lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2015-09-06T03:17:16.517" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T03:17:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1742" CreationDate="2015-08-31T12:37:02.427" Score="9" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title suggests I'm a bit confused when it comes to licencing in the middle of development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say the following situation (for the sake of argument I'm the only contributor):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I make a project opensource without a license&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I continue contributing to it and at some point I commit a license doc and license text in the header files. &lt;strong&gt;(Is it licensed at that moment? I assume older revisions do not fall in the scope of the license?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I continue developing for it and continue committing fixes, new features, etc. &lt;strong&gt;(Is every NEXT revision licensed with the same license?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At some later stage I decide to scrap the license and I get rid of it. &lt;strong&gt;(Is this and every NEXT revision, not licensed again?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the scenario described above even realistic and if yes, can you please tell me if my assumptions are correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T15:19:39.413" Title="Licensing a project which is still under development" Tags="|licensing|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1744" CreationDate="2015-08-31T09:40:15.073" Score="12" ViewCount="2944" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine I write a piece of software, which uses some &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;-licensed library. Let's assume that I modified that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software (of which that library is part) produces some content, which I sell at a profit. I do not sell or publish my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I sell my content, do I need to include a notice &quot;This content was created using library X&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2518" OwnerDisplayName="Dmitri Pisarenko" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:22:08.570" Title="Can I modify source code licensed under MIT license without publishing my changes?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2015-08-31T13:00:25.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's step through them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I make a project opensource without a license.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then it's not Open Source. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I continue contributing to it and at some point I commit a license doc and license text in the header files.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From this point, the code is licensed under the license you put it under. Older revisions are technically still unlicensed, and still unusable under your new license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;I continue developing for it and continue committing fixes, new features, etc.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Still under the same license, nothing has changed since the previous version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;At some later stage I decide to scrap the license and I get rid of it.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;at this point it becomes important that you are the only contributor. Assuming that, that means that all &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; revisions are not available as open source. All old revisions to which the license was attached are still licensed under the old version. All open source and free licenses are &lt;em&gt;irrevocable&lt;/em&gt;. You can choose to stop distributing something, but you can't stop others that you have already granted a license (read: others that downloaded the software while the open source license was attached) from distributing it under the license your originally released it under. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is code from other contributors that was released to you under an open source license, it depends on the license what you can do to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under permissive licenses, &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; (but check your license!) if you want to continue distributing it, you &lt;em&gt;may not&lt;/em&gt; remove the license from the parts that you personally don't hold the copyright to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses like the GPL enforce that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; release all derivatives that you distribute under the GPL. You may not distribute works that derive from GPL source that you don't hold the copyright to under another license, or closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1711/combining-code-written-under-different-licenses-eiffel-forum-license-mit-and-a/1712#1712&quot;&gt;Combining code written under different licenses (Eiffel Forum License, MIT and Apache), what are my options?&lt;/a&gt; for how to handle mixed licenses in your source in the permissive case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/23/what-are-the-advantages-of-adding-a-contributor-license-agreement-to-a-project&quot;&gt;What are the advantages of adding a Contributor License Agreement to a project?&lt;/a&gt; for the CLA route around this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T15:19:39.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-08-31T13:27:48.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from the earlier suggestion to make &quot;Documentation&quot; a very prominent link, perhaps the mechanism for asking questions should enforce the &quot;search here first&quot; paradigm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions? Please type your question in the form of a Google query here :&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;give some examples of queries&amp;gt;, e.g.&#xA;&quot;Tutorials regarding Twig&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then run the search on your site and see if it returns an answer. If it does, you're done; if it does not, you might have a genuine new question. If the short question passes the &quot;no useful links found&quot; screen, the user can then expand their question and it ends up in your inbox (or on a forum where others can contribute answers too - a bit like SE...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2501" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T13:27:48.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2015-08-31T13:49:26.757" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses deal with redistribution and don't impose restrictions on merely using open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding a requirement to post a notice that you used the library, this is paraphrased from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot;&gt;GNU GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright law does not give the license grantor&#xA;any say in the use of the output people make from their data using&#xA;their program. If the user uses their program to enter or convert his&#xA;own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not to the license&#xA;grantor.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this talks about the GPL, it's relevant to any copyrighted software.  You aren't required to include a notice, if the license doesn't say so.  The MIT license imposes no such restriction, so you don't have to include a notice that you used the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T14:01:35.563" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T14:01:35.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2015-08-31T18:44:31.920" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an archetype that is used to automatically create code, it's important to note that there is no creative act in converting the archetype to the code. Therefor, the same license conditions that cover the archetype will cover the generated code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it difficult to license the generated code more restrictively than the archetypes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you want to license the generated code less restrictively than the archetypes, there are possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL obliges you to release the source code and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;  making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it could be argued that these are the archetypes. This means that if you use a GPL family license, you have to also release the archetypes under the GPL. This is something you're not sure you want to do, so let's cross that path off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither MIT nor Apache has a source requirement, so they might be more suitable for your needs. This means that you could keep the archetypes closed, and release the generated code under MIT or Apache. They differ primarily in that the Apache2 license contains a patent grant, ant the MIT license doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't really help you with the closed part of your license here. &quot;Speak to your lawyer&quot; and all that, but it should be possible to cook up something that allows for gratis distribution, but not allow re-distribution or making changes, or the &quot;in between&quot; form that does allow making changes, but not distributing those changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T18:44:31.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-08-31T19:22:23.557" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Nobody&quot; reads the f-ing manual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let me detail my answer a bit. It's statistics you see...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One only reads the manual when there is absolutely, positively nobody around that even remotely has knowledge on the subject matter. Anything, everything is better than the manual, because the manual doesn't contain THE answer to your question, it also contains answers to ALL other questions too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you are, having only one tiny little question. Of course you might have another question right after this one, but this doesn't make it two questions, as the answer to the first hasn't been found yet. No need to read the manual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Find the person who knows the answer! Find the person who knows the answer! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have another question repeat from 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One only reads the manual if you have all the questions at the same time, and in the right order. In this particular case the manual will seem magical in it's ability to not only answer each question you have BUT predict the next ones too. This is, statistically, almost impossible. No one has that many questions. No need to read the manual.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find the person who knows the answer! You found him/her. Remember that statistically impossible task at point 2... well a knowledgeable enough person will be able to answer all your questions, in whatever succession and predict you future questions. Hurray, you've found a magical living manual. No need to read the manual.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember: Find the magical living manual who knows the answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB. Are you a magical living manual? Hurray... now all you need is to ask money for your answers and you'll be consulting in no time. Ask for moderate sums, 1$ really easy, 3$ no time at all and 7$ for a good one. Start a spread sheet and keep tabs. When you hit 10$ ask for payment. Keep the sums small so that people find your services accessible, don't let tabs grow for new people, they might not pay up. For actual work done charge at 15 min intervals - 7$ this will get you decent rates and seem accessible (costs the same as a good question so if the question is hard you won't feel bad when it stretches, when 15 min pass and the question is too hard either ask for extension and more money or give up and charge 15 min instead of a failed good question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2506" LastEditorUserId="2506" LastEditDate="2015-08-31T19:31:45.573" LastActivityDate="2015-08-31T19:31:45.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-09-01T10:07:45.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a project leader, for years I have tried to answer every single question coming to the mailing list of my user-oriented software, and I have found that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many users can't read much English and don't have the skills to search/locate information efficiently&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some users won't read the documentation even under torture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some users don't really trust the documentation or their interpretation of it, and will ask just to have a up-to-date confirmation by real humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your main goals should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't burn-out. Keep enjoying the project, don't get upset to the point of getting angry, ignore questions that you don't want to answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delegate most of your tasks to other members of the community. Don't try to control everything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone has helped a few other users? Give them some moderation rights on your forum. Giving rights to people make them feel part of the community, and encourages them to keep helping. Also give them write access to the documentation wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, a Reddit community has appeared and questions pop up on StackExchange, which I think is great: helping people where they are, questions are answered by the communities there (not always great answers but usually good enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redirecting all support to StackOverflow (for a library/API) or SuperUser (for an app) or another more appropriate StackExchange site, or a dedicated subreddit, can be a solution but be sure to keep a venue for feedback which is not support questions, for instance an open bugs/enhancements tracker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T07:26:19.870" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T07:26:19.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-09-01T19:38:14.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T19:38:14.187" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T19:38:14.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-09-01T19:38:14.187" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions that ask about the difference between two or more licenses in a certain aspect. " OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-01T20:10:14.397" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T20:10:14.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2015-09-01T21:44:02.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the most general case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All common open source licenses permit any legal entity to make a private copy and to use it for their private, internal use. Some common open source license (Copyleft/Free) impose restrictions on other uses, such as distributing a derived work or running a service on the internet using the derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You framed the question as 'on what grounds,' but really the question is, 'what are permitted uses of the source code under the terms by which it was licensed.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a more specific case. If an entity &lt;em&gt;owns the copyright&lt;/em&gt; of a work, and chooses to publish it under an open source license, that entity can &lt;em&gt;change its mind&lt;/em&gt;. This does not change the status of copies already out there. So, for example, if Oracle owns the copyright of MySQL, Oracle is entitled to stop publishing MySQL under a FLOSS license, and distribute new copies in binary only -- or even not distribute it at all. That does not change the status of the previous releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-01T21:44:02.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-02T15:07:41.517" Score="48" ViewCount="4398" Body="&lt;p&gt;It happens all the time.  You come across a useful-looking project that has few or no recent commits, many long-open issues and pull requests, and nothing is changing. How do you usually ask if the project is being maintained without sounding impatient and thankless or otherwise unpleasant? Is it good form to open an issue, or is there another method?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2536" OwnerDisplayName="Troy" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T00:03:58.460" Title="What's the right way to ask if a GitHub project is maintained?" Tags="|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1753" CreationDate="2015-09-02T20:03:15.243" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of options, and I've had to do this in the past for real. But beware - you could end up a new committer for the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most straightforward is to pull the project owner's email address from the git log and send them a polite email asking about the status of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, I found there was a mailing list where the project (and others related to it) were being discussed. I sent an email to the list asking what its status was.The next day I got a notification from Github saying I had been added as a member of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other alternative, if you need something fixed, is to fork the project and fix it yourself - assuming the license allows that, and that you have the skills to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raising an issue is really only sensible if you are actually reporting a problem. But if there's been no activity on the project, then the issue isn't likely to get you very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-09-02T20:03:15.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1753" CreationDate="2015-09-02T23:44:01.613" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there are &quot;many long-open issues and pull requests, and nothing is changing&quot; then you don't need to ask - it's just assume the project is not being maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open issues aren't an indicator, maybe the project maintainers don't think they're as important as the person who opened the issue. Especially with popular projects, the issue tracker will often be swamped with more work than the team can possibly keep up with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if pull requests are being ignored, then your only viable option is to create a full fork of the project (not just a GitHub fork).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience asking wether a project is active will not achieve any useful result. You will either get a reply &quot;no, it's not being maintained&quot; or you'll get a reply &quot;yes, it's being maintained but I've been too busy lately&quot;. If you get the latter response, then it's almost guaranteed that the maintainer will continue being too busy into the future as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try asking for commit access to the project, but the developer has never seen any of your code, so they're not going to grant you access. Or if they do grant you access then that's a real warning sign: will they give access to &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt;? Do you want to be part of a project where somebody else might turn up in the future and start committing bad code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is don't waste your time contributing to a project where your pull requests aren't going to be accepted. The &quot;primary&quot; repository for a healthy project needs to be actively maintained, so go ahead and take over if you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pick a different name to the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make a new github project (not a fork).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;merge in the original repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;go through all the ignored pull requests, and merge in the good ones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for not-so-good pull requests, ask the author to improve them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact everybody who's ever contributed (including the original author)  and invite them to contribute to your fork.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T00:03:58.460" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T00:03:58.460" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1768" CreationDate="2015-09-03T00:47:34.307" Score="8" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently the sole maintainer of an API that a friend and I have written. It is currently written in Java, and is designed to make a lot of the low level interfaces high-level, to help ease the learning process of beginners learning Java. It's sole application is in my school, where other students who have never programmed before use it, to use in basic projects. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import arctic.lights.dev.FileIO;&#xA;&#xA;public class getLettersInFile &#xA;{&#xA;    String[] fileLines = FileIO.getAllLinesInFile(&quot;path/to/file.txt&quot;);&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's well documented, but we're looking to seriously expand it, and make it available to other beginner developers and schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, since it's not very active, and is only used within our school, updating and maintaining the project is easy, and not very troublesome. However, since we are expanding it, and making it available to other schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the school year coming up, my friend and I are becoming increasingly nervous about expanding, and the lack of available time to successfully maintain the project. Currently, the project is not publicly available, but we're looking to hosting it and getting a license for it. If we do make it available, our main concern is creating a backlog of requests and issues among places. With courses that start in September, we're predicting that the biggest spike in activity is going to be at that time, especially if bugs are found. Pull requests likely won't be very popular - the end users of the API don't really know much about programming...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend and I have a couple questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we be looking for an extra maintainer to alleviate a predicted backlog? As students, is it appropriate to be looking for an extra maintainer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we do end up looking for an extra maintainer, what should we be looking for in a potential maintainer? This maintainer won't likely come from our school (my friend and I are the most competent developers known), so we want to make sure that we find someone that won't try to &quot;take over&quot; the project, as it's also a learning experience for us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T01:02:53.787" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T11:50:27.280" Title="Is it appropriate for me to have multiple project maintainers in this project?" Tags="|project-management|marketing|software-development|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2015-09-03T08:02:55.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do what you need to do to keep the project running smoothly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you predict heavily increased usage over a certain period, and you don't have capacity to deal with it, then what you need to do is get another developer on board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate? It's your project, you can do as you like with it. Is it appropriate to be developing this API for your school? Only you can answer that one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you do want an extra maintainer...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two important attributes of anyone you take on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Decent developer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Team worker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't want someone who tries to take over the project because he thinks he's a better developer, nor someone who'll hold it back through not having enough skill. Choose wisely. You might be able to just admit pull requests, and choose a collaborator based on those. Alternatively, pick a volunteer you know :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T08:02:55.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1760" CreationDate="2015-09-03T11:32:12.347" Score="6" ViewCount="1951" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am about to decide on the license I can attribute to my free-libre open source software (FLOSS). I have used the Stanford Core NLP released as GPL3+. I have also used the JAXB API which, although integrated into Java nowadays (if I am not mistaken) is used by the Standford library as explicit link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come to realise that the JAXB API s released under a dual license specifying a &lt;a href=&quot;https://glassfish.java.net/public/CDDL+GPL_1_1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) v1.1 / GPLv2 + classpath exception dual license&lt;/a&gt;. Now I am a bit confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Releasing my software under a FLOSS license would not be possible as GPL2 and GPL3+ are incompatible. However, Stanford Core NLP lists, as a dependency, JAXB API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a free open source software link to a library and be published under a FLOSS that would prohibit me from myself linking to said library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="326" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-03T12:37:03.557" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T12:37:03.557" Title="CDDL1 and GPL2 + classpath exception incompatible with GPL3?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2015-09-03T11:36:46.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a maintainer of a project, it is your responsibility that the project functions as well as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noticing that you lack the time to do everything you want to be done is a very good start. Then it's time to act on it. Some projects work very well with a single maintainer. Some people work a lot better when they are a single maintainer. But that doesn't go for everybody. It is perfectly alright to have multiple maintainers, if thats how they prefer to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for your situation, it's a bit tricky because this is not a collaborative open source project yet, you are only considering to make it one, and you don't have experience in maintaining an open source project yet, so you don't really know where your strengths and weaknesses lie yet, nor do you know how to work in a collaborative project yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know you'll have too little time to be a good sole maintainer though, getting more maintainers aboard is a great idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful though, because it's easier said than done. If you don't expect people to submit pull requests, where do you plan to find your maintainer? Usually those things grow organically from people who are active in support and writing code, and get at some point commit access. You are going to try and pull one from thin air, and thin air is not known for its high concentration of high-quality maintainers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, by all means, if a suitable candidate stands up, make them a co-maintainer. But beware that it might be tricky to have a suitable candidate stand up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical note, things that may help you are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letting the community know that you may not respond timely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encouraging community reviews of pull requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could always contact someone who reviewed well if they are interested in becoming a co-maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T10:36:03.303" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T10:36:03.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1758" CreationDate="2015-09-03T11:50:16.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trick is in the classpath exception. The classpath exception says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although the library is under GPLv2, it doesn't require you to license any components or the project in its entirety under the GPLv2. The authors of the Stanford Core NLP released under GPLv3+. The project as a whole is GPLv3+, but contains parts (the JAXB API) under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a work depending on the Stanford Core NLP, your project must, in its entirety, be GPLv3+, but you are allowed to have separate parts (i.e. JAXB API) under less restrictive licenses. The classpath exception makes this less restrictive, and allows for a combined work to be created under the GPLv3+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T11:50:16.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1763" CreationDate="2015-09-03T14:09:35.817" Score="20" ViewCount="2710" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning on open-sourcing an application soon, and I've settled on either GPLv3 or the Mozilla Public License 2.0, as this application has a massive community surrounding it, and I still want other people to have to disclose source code for modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application is a standalone executable, but I can see other people porting this to other platforms (such as the App Store) in the near future, as there's pretty big demand for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possible-to-have-gpl-software-in-the-mac-app-store&quot;&gt;the GPL conflicts with the App Store's Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;, so I'm in a bit of a pickle. I can't find &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; (even a case where anything has happened) on whether the MPL is disallowed on the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, does it matter whether or not I'm the author of this application? It seems that Apple flat-out refuse to take GPL'd apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2550" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T14:06:18.733" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T14:06:18.733" Title="Is the Mozilla Public License compatible with Apple's App Store?" Tags="|distribution|mpl|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2015-09-03T14:45:22.170" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The legal incompatibilities between the GPL and the App store TOS don't apply to the MPL, but there is no saying whether Apple will allow your MPL licensed app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, what Apple allows and doesn't allow in their app store is entirely up to Apple. As far as I know, they reserve the right to refuse any app for any reason whatsoever. Therefore, it is impossible for us to guarantee that an app will not be rejected from the app store for it's license, whatever the license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the GPL goes, you can't legally distribute GPL licensed apps through the app store, because the terms of service of the app store, and the GPL are incompatible. There are restrictions in the TOS of the app store on what you may and may not do with an app you receive from the app store. The GPL disallows any such restrictions in paragraph 3 of section 10:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the&#xA;  rights granted or affirmed under this License. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it's impossible to simultaneously comply with the app store TOS and with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL doesn't have such a clause, implying that additional restrictions &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be placed on an MPL licensed work. Assuming that the app store rejects GPL licenses based on the above rationale, that rationale wouldn't go for MPL licensed apps, and there would be no problem in distributing an MPL licensed work to the app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, along with everybody else, have not read the TOS of the app store in its entirety. There may be other restrictions or reasons why legally distributing MPL licensed software through the app store impossible, but it seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I consider it likely that Apple will allow an MPL licensed app in their app store. There is really only one way to find out if they do: try it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-22T03:54:38.383" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T03:54:38.383" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2015-09-03T15:20:51.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having skimmed the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html#APPS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apple store TOS&lt;/a&gt; I found an interesting passage (emph mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. Scope of License: This license granted to you for the Licensed&#xA;  Application by Licensor &lt;strong&gt;is limited to a nontransferable&lt;/strong&gt; license to use&#xA;  the Licensed Application on any Apple-branded products running iOS&#xA;  (including but not limited to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch) (“iOS&#xA;  Devices”) or Mac OS X (“Mac Computers”), as applicable (collectively,&#xA;  “Apple Device(s)”) that you own or control and as permitted by the&#xA;  usage rules set forth in the Mac App Store, App Store and iBooks Store&#xA;  Terms and Conditions (the “Usage Rules”). This license does not allow&#xA;  you to use the Licensed Application on any Apple Device that you do&#xA;  not own or control, and except as provided in the Usage Rules, you may&#xA;  not distribute or make the Licensed Application available over a&#xA;  network where it could be used by multiple devices at the same time.&#xA;  You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, transfer redistribute, or&#xA;  sublicense the Licensed Application and, if you sell your Mac Computer&#xA;  or iOS Device to a third party, you must remove the Licensed&#xA;  Application from the Mac Computer or iOS Device before doing so. You&#xA;  may not copy (except as expressly permitted by this license and the&#xA;  Usage Rules), decompile, reverse-engineer, disassemble, attempt to&#xA;  derive the source code of, modify, or create derivative works of the&#xA;  Licensed Application, any updates, or any part thereof (except as and&#xA;  only to the extent that any foregoing restriction is prohibited by&#xA;  applicable law or to the extent as may be permitted by the licensing&#xA;  terms governing use of any open-sourced components included with the&#xA;  Licensed Application). Any attempt to do so is a violation of the&#xA;  rights of the Licensor and its licensors. If you breach this&#xA;  restriction, you may be subject to prosecution and damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This automatically means that buying an app from the store will not transfer the open source license of the app. This is incompatible with a copyleft license like GPL because those require that each conveyance of the application also conveys the copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is dual licensing the project to allow distribution on a online retailer (read: apple store) that enforces such an additional restriction provided that they also provide a version outside that online retailer under this dual license (or just GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talk to a lawyer about the specifics of how that second license should look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T08:32:24.253" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T08:32:24.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2015-09-03T15:24:20.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary reason why Apple don't allow GPL'd apps into their store is the fact that &lt;em&gt;no additional restrictions&lt;/em&gt; may be applied. As stated in both other answers so far, this includes both Apple's TOS, and the fact that the TOS effectively disallows conveying the license along with the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With GPL, the license effectively applies to the entire program - most things you do with it are governed by the license. With the MPL, your codebase is licensed, but nothing further: redistribution is permitted (including under other terms), and that's what Apple needs to legally publish your app in their store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you want to do is allow &lt;em&gt;other people&lt;/em&gt; to release your app to the app store, the best solution may be to say on your website (or primary distribution mechanism) that you'll let people do that but because of legal issues, they should contact you to sort the details out. When they contact you, you can license your app to them under any other app store-compatible license you choose, and they can distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T15:24:20.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1762" CreationDate="2015-09-03T15:25:02.840" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the copyright of the application is entirely yours, then you do have the option to use the GPL, somewhat contrary to the answer by Martijn. This is more intended as a substitute solution, but Martijn's answer clearly explains why the software may be rejected between the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you release something, you still maintain complete ownership of the copyright. The license that one uses on their application is simply a way of saying &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Here, you can go ahead and use this, but here are the rules.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. You're not giving your application away, you still maintain total ownership, which may be a misunderstanding here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you still own the copyright, you are free to do as you wish. Mostly rising from a quick discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/23859225#23859225&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, it looks like you still have the option of releasing your software under the GPL. This is how I would recommend so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make separate releases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way that you can release your app to the app store is to make two different releases: one that holds the GPL license, and the other that is completely copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Submit the copyrighted release&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyrighted release is not subject to the terms under the GPL, and you have full authority over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method is known as dual-licensing: using multiple licenses to successfully achieve multiple uses. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possible-to-have-gpl-software-in-the-mac-app-store&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, MySQL uses this same way, using the GPL as well as a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing this way will still allow others to use the program under the GPL license. In fact, you can make available the GPL release to others and they are allowed to use the software subject to the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-03T16:36:55.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1756" CreationDate="2015-09-04T11:50:27.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you're worrying about an assumed problem. You two may run out of time, get a backlog of issues ... or not. So it might not even happen that you run into problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also may simply do no maintaining at all. Nobody is forcing you or your friend. Or you could do as much as you can manage. Some people might complain if their issue isn't resolved, but in no way you can be forced to act upon it. Some open source is released without giving users a feedback-channel at all (that was more common in the past, now with internet feedback is more easy to achieve and more accepted). A possible user for such unmaintained software can use the software as it is, (s)he can leave it be if the issues are too big for you or (s)he could change the software according to own needs (the last option is possible because the software is open-source, a great thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your software in question you two could decide to always adapt the software for the needs of your own school, but ignore external requests. Again some external user has the above mentioned options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you two could do as much maintaining, as you can and want. Nobody can force you for more. In this case it may be helpful to communicate that you can only afford so much time for maintaining. Make a note on the website and pick issues you want to work on and issues you not want to work on and communicate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience many projects don't get much attention, especially at first. It may depend on the channels though, in which it is advertised. Simply putting it on github doesn't create much attention, so you get not much users (and not too much maintenance work). In your case teachers in computer science might tell teachers of other schools about the project and create attention this way. Maybe you want to control growth of the project and involve at first only a few other schools, so that the maintenance effort is manageable. After that involve even more schools and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T11:50:27.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1771" CreationDate="2015-09-04T13:03:40.680" Score="17" ViewCount="2158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the right place for this question since the software I'm developing isn't completely open source, but here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short (and for context), I'm a member of a not-for-profit organisation. I develop and maintain several pieces of software used only inside the organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these applications are built using Microsoft .NET and I'm not entirely sure how I license this software, or I'm even allowed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example. One of these applications is a collection of Powershell scripts that makes use of SQL Server Management Objects (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo.dll)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I license my software so that my own code is open sourced (so the organisation can make changes, derivations, etc. as they need to) without requiring the source for the Microsoft DLLs be disclosed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2561" LastEditorUserId="2561" LastEditDate="2015-09-06T18:38:42.417" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T18:38:42.417" Title="How do I license an open source application that uses closed source libraries?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1770" CreationDate="2015-09-04T13:10:42.653" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is no big problem at all. Many open source software depends on proprietary software. Think of all the open source running on Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big point here is, that you only license your software (you cannot license the other stuff).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you may leave out the .Net-framework from your distribution and the one using your software must install it independently. In that case it is clear your license only covers all that is in the distribution, so not the excluded framework. Or you include the framework, but make clear your license doesn't cover that part. Be it a mention (maybe in the file LICENSE you mention only the sources in src/ are licensed under license X, the stuff in lib/ isn't part of that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A special case here is, if you choose the GPL as your license. If you're the sole contributor to the software (or all other contributors agreed) you can link against the .net-framework without implications, but if you're not, the link might prevent you from using a proprietary framework. Other licenses are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the proprietary libraries/framework might have its licensing terms that prevent you from using it for open source. As far as I know this isn't the case for .net, especially as some open source for .net exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2015-09-04T14:17:34.807" LastActivityDate="2015-09-04T14:17:34.807" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-05T21:40:50.443" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to recent news the US FCC has targeted the network devices enforcing manufacturers to lock down firmwares to prevent installation custom firmwares like OpenWRT.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the whole article here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/07/27/new-fcc-rules-may-prevent-installing-openwrt-on-wifi-routers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;New FCC Rules May Prevent Installing OpenWRT on WiFi Routers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an important part of the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The new FCC rules are in effect in the United States from June 2nd 2015 for WiFi devices such as Access Points. They require to have the firmware locked down so End-Users can’t operate with non-compliant parameters (channels/frequencies, transmit power, DFS, …). In response, WiFi access point vendors start to lock down firmwares to prevent custom firmwares (such as OpenWRT) to be installed, using code signing, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And my question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Are there any manufacturers which declared they will not follow the new rules and they will be manufacturing devices with unlocked firmwares so users can install open source firmwares like OpenWRT?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Background:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I never cared about my router till I read that new regulation. Now I want to choose the company which respects the &quot;open&quot; standard and declares that. I want to buy their devices, so they can earn and stay on the market.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2577" LastActivityDate="2015-09-05T21:40:50.443" Title="Open source firmware (e.g. OpenWRT) supporting manufacturers?" Tags="|law|hardware|firmware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-09-05T21:49:48.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1775" CreationDate="2015-09-06T01:33:05.023" Score="6" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many countries on the world, where distributing products means to accept an obligatory warranty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More clearly: if you buy a mainboard, and it is bad, the seller &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; re-take it (with payback) on certain (broadly formulated) circumstances. For example, they can't sell cheaper mainboard without warranty, it is forbidden by law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But GPL (as I know, both of 2 and 3) closes out any warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean, that GPL software can't be distributed in these countries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T02:23:15.453" Title="GPL vs. obligatory warranty" Tags="|gpl|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-06T01:38:25.517" Score="40" ViewCount="21305" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I know, Linux intentionally avoids the switch from GPLv2 to GPLv3. It has the unfortunate side-effect, that it doesn't take part in the defense of the opensource world from the most recent danger, the patent manipulation by different &quot;patent broker&quot; companies or large software producers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the reason behind that? Was it Linus' decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-09-06T11:45:56.950" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:27:07.303" Title="Why does Linux still use the GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1773" CreationDate="2015-09-06T02:23:15.453" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL permits warranties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.&#xA;  EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR&#xA;  OTHER PARTIES&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the law requires a warranty, there's a warranty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if someone states otherwise for whatever reason, there's a warranty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and&#xA;  you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a&#xA;  fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when&#xA;  run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use&#xA;  in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement&#xA;  including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is&#xA;  no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that&#xA;  users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling&#xA;  the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the&#xA;  Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an&#xA;  announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print&#xA;  an announcement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-06T02:23:15.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1774" CreationDate="2015-09-06T05:09:38.563" Score="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Linux does not require contributors to assign copyright to some central person. Copyright on it is spread out among many, many people (including some who are dead, in which case much effort would be required to figure out who inherited the copyright). &lt;em&gt;Any&lt;/em&gt; of them could stop a license switch, unless someone goes through and removes all parts of their work from the kernel. Because GPL v2 and v3 are incompatible, it is illegal to release Linux under v3 with any contributions licensed under v2 only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Torvalds personally does not like GPL v3. He particularly dislikes certain provisions (like anti-tivoization), which are not restrictions he wants to impose on users of his software. As he won't release his stuff under v3, the whole kernel can't be released under v3 by anyone without prohibitive effort. But he is not the only person who could singlehandedly make it impractical to release the kernel under v3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="431" LastEditorUserId="650" LastEditDate="2016-04-07T20:13:43.267" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T20:13:43.267" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1778" CreationDate="2015-09-06T15:00:07.320" Score="20" ViewCount="8640" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understood in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does-linux-still-use-the-gplv2/1776#1776&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; wonderful answer, GPLv3 and GPLv2 code can't be used simultanously in the same product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T07:36:09.853" Title="Why is GPLv2 incompatible with GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1777" CreationDate="2015-09-06T15:09:47.643" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 have clauses that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Require the combined product to adhere to the license terms of the license of the GPL licensed component. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Require that no additional restrictions may be placed on the combined work: &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from clause 6 of the GPLv2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.  (Part 1) You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. (Part 2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 has additional restrictions over the GPLv2, specifically, a patent grant and anti-tivoisation provisions, so 1 and 2 can't hold simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent this issue, the Free Software Foundation advises people who want to license their work under the GPL to use the following phrasing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can redistribute it and/or modify [the work] under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version [x] of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, you release your work under multiple licenses; the one you name explicitly, and any possible future version of the GPL. This makes the resuser free to use the software under any future version of the GPL, and this license incompatibility becomes a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently have no statistics on how common this practice is. It is at any rate not the route Linux has chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T07:36:09.853" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T07:36:09.853" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1777" CreationDate="2015-09-06T21:45:57.593" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The creators of GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot;&gt;recommend&lt;/a&gt; licensing software under &quot;version X of the License, or (at your option) any later version&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPLv2 licensed code has been licensed as per those instructions, then GPLv2 code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; license compatible with GPLv3 code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However some projects (including the Linux kernel) do not want the FSF to be able to add/remove arbitrary license restrictions to their software at some future point, and they remove the clause making it incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you cannot mix GPLv2 and GPLv3 code because the people who chose GPLv2 decided not to allow mixing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-09-07T07:02:24.973" LastActivityDate="2015-09-07T07:02:24.973" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-08T08:18:28.570" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why shouldn't I release code under a Creative Commons License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me the CC-BY-SA sounds very nice and is quite more readable than a whole GPL license, so I would like to know why its such a bad idea to release code with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2597" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-08T19:23:17.963" LastActivityDate="2015-09-08T19:23:17.963" Title="Difference between creative commons and GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-09-08T08:51:23.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1774" CreationDate="2015-09-08T08:34:51.987" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a video of Linus Torvalds where he explains his opinion on GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;. Some excerpts from his speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here we give your version 3 and then we try to sneak in these new rules and try to force everybody to upgrade. That was the part I disliked. And the FSF did some really sneaky stuff. Downright immoral in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am thinking tivoization isn't necessarily something that you should strive for. But in my world view it's your decision if you make hardware that blocks down the software. That's your decision as a hardware maker. That has no impact on my decision as a software maker to give you the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T08:27:07.303" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:27:07.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="998" CreationDate="2015-09-09T05:30:05.550" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several open source options...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Big Buck Bunny&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Elephants Dream&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tears of Steal&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sintel&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just Google search those for current links...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2604" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T05:30:05.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1785" CreationDate="2015-09-09T06:02:47.903" Score="6" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/antr/vrr/vrr/license.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (MSR-SSLA)&lt;/a&gt; is a odd kind of &quot;Open Source&quot; licenses. FSF considers in &quot;nonfree&quot; as it does not allow commercial use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to redistribute a derived work.&#xA;The clauses of relevance to me are (as I understand it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Software includes source code or data, you may create derivative works of such portions of the Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, as provided herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does include data. Thus I may create a derivative work and distribute it.&#xA;So long and I do so only for non-commercial purposes. This is fine, ass I am doing it for &quot;academic research&quot; purposes, which is included in examples of &quot;non-commercial&quot; given earlier in the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That you will not remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were not copyright style notices on the work I received. Thus I am under no obligations from this.  However there was a readme. Which did mention the names of the creators and a request to reference a academic paper about the work. Out of good manners (and becuase it is useful), I will link back to the original when I redistribute it, and include such references to the authors and the paper in my own readme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That if any of the Software is in binary format, you will not attempt to modify such portions of the Software, or to reverse engineer or decompile them, except and only to the extent authorized by applicable law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Software&quot; is not in binary form, thus this does not apply to me. (At the start of the license &quot;Software&quot; is defined to include text files.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That if you distribute the Software or any derivative works of the Software, you will distribute them under the same terms and conditions as in this license, and you will not grant other rights to the Software or derivative works that are different from those provided by this MSR-SSLA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This says, the I must distribute my derivative work only under the MSR-SSLA not under any other license (or lack there-of). So in practice this means I must include the license file with all distributed copies of the derived work. Correct? &#xA;And it &lt;s&gt;curses&lt;/s&gt; ensures that all future derivations will be subject to the scary clause 5. That Microsoft will have full rights over any derivations (except patent rights?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That if you have created derivative works of the Software, and&#xA;  distribute such derivative works, you will cause the modified files to&#xA;  carry prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not&#xA;  receiving the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you&#xA;  have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be covered in my readme, and on the page where I am redistributing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understanding the implications of the license correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T06:54:37.533" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T16:30:24.017" Title="Redistribution of derived works under MSR-SSLA" Tags="|derivative-works|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-09-09T12:52:49.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How &lt;em&gt;trustworthy&lt;/em&gt; a project is may be reflected in its &lt;em&gt;reputation&lt;/em&gt;, but the existing user base simply not care beyond the first question of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it even try to do what it says on the tin?&lt;/strong&gt; Reviews and other evidence of an active user base such as community mailing lists will give you a hand in this area. Some critical thinking about whether you trust the reviews may be required. Inclusion in downstream packages such as a Linux distribution would be a stronger indication in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you care more than the current users you could ask a few more questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the installer/binary only include only what's in the code repository?&lt;/strong&gt; The most effective way to ensure that nothing unpleasant got injected during packaging is to build from source. If that's too high a hurdle to jump, get the installer from a trusted packager (like you Linux distro) or the project's own site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the code clean/securely built?&lt;/strong&gt; If you can't or won't review the code base in full you may be able to get a piece of software to do it for you (Fortify, Coverity, ...). This may still not be practical for many people. In which case the next best thing is evidence that the project cares about security. If the project has signed up with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scan.coverity.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Coverity Scan initiative&lt;/a&gt; they have at least looked for issues in the code base, even if the issues have not been addressed. Quick response to security issues raised by community and evidence of code review are also good signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="453" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T12:52:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1783" CreationDate="2015-09-09T14:46:37.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blanket caveat: I am not a lawyer. More importantly: I'm not your lawyer. This is no legal advice, but my understanding of the license terms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that &quot;Copyright or other notices&quot; may be broader than you interpret it - the authors in the readme could very well amount to a notice - you interpret this (non open source) license correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you indicate you are working with data, it is quite possible the entire license situation is somewhat off. Depending on the jurisdiction and nature of the data (primarily whether the selection of data contains creative elements; a top 10 list does, a phonebook doesn't) you may not need a license at all. In the US, sui generis databases (the uncreative kind) have no copyright or similar protections for example. In the EU, such databases are protected under database right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T16:30:24.017" LastActivityDate="2015-09-09T16:30:24.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-09T18:16:48.127" Score="13" ViewCount="2898" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's this web app licensed under GPLv3 that I'd like to deploy. However, the footer of each page has a copyright line, e.g., &quot;© 2015 FooBar Inc.&quot;. Is it okay to remove that line and/or replace it with one relevant to my application, e.g., replace it with my entity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2609" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-09T20:52:08.257" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T14:33:05.447" Title="Removing the original copyright line from footer" Tags="|gpl|copyright|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1794" CreationDate="2015-09-09T19:40:36.987" Score="7" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some small projects under different open source licenses (I like BSD and GPLv2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to license some new projects under an OSI approved license but make sure any other OSI-approved license can use too. Assume all the code is owned by me (or I can get the consent of all the copyright owners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it suffice for example to say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;FooBar is licensed under the simplified BSD license (2-clause). &#xA;See the LICENSE.txt file for the full description.&#xA;&#xA;You can use this under any OSI approved license.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to do any public domain dedication:  Public domain dedication does not have clear implications in some countries and does not prevent it from being used in project licensed under non-OSI-approved licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In simple terms, the question is this:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any license that I can choose which makes sure the code will remain OSI approved but does not care exactly how people use it? Something that a GPL project can simply link against, same as any project with BSD or MIT, or any other OSI-approved license? I know some of these licenses cannot be mixed with the rest, so is there any that all are happy with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2610" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T20:52:52.343" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T21:11:06.487" Title="Global donor to OSI approved licenses" Tags="|relicensing|license-recommendation|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:04:51.880" Score="9" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed&quot;&gt;Heartbleed-bug&lt;/a&gt; of the software &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openssl.org/&quot;&gt;OpenSSL&lt;/a&gt; was a security-nightmare for IT around the world. We already know the bug was caused by a patch from a german programmer named Robin Seggelmann. While he surely didn't intend it and is probably very sorry about the problem (and frankly - most programmers would have made the same error), I ask myself if he is in danger of legal repercussions. So, can anything happen to him legally (or any other programmer who makes similar errors in public software)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T20:57:37.327" Title="Can Heartbleed have legal implications?" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1788" CreationDate="2015-09-10T12:17:49.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clause 6 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/policies/openssl_icla.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;openSSL's CLA&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are not expected to provide support for Your Contributions,    except to the extent You desire to provide support. You may provide&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  support for free, for a fee, or not at all. Unless required by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  applicable law or agreed to in writing, You provide Your&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Contributions on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that he's in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/source/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license of openSSL&lt;/a&gt; also has a warranty disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE OpenSSL PROJECT ``AS IS'' AND ANY &#xA;   EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE   IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR   PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. &lt;strong&gt;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE OpenSSL PROJECT OR   ITS CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, &#xA;  SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT   NOT&#xA;  LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;   LOSS OF&#xA;  USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)&lt;/strong&gt; HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;  ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,   STRICT LIABILITY,&#xA;  OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)   ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT&#xA;  OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED   OF THE POSSIBILITY OF&#xA;  SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="64" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2015-09-10T15:58:54.637" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T15:58:54.637" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-09T21:26:29.367" Score="14" ViewCount="684" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading through the GPL FAQ I found some relevant points to the question, however it is still unclear to me if this fully applies to a public gameserver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to keep it short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a gameserver A, fully available, including source code, published under the GPL.&#xA;There is a modified gameserver B, based on server A, not available as binary nor as source code. Maintainer of modified server B however does grant access to his modified server as a public service, i.e. to play the game, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to me it is not obvious what does apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand the &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is clearly &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;release&lt;/strong&gt;[d] &lt;strong&gt;to the public in some way&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; to the &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;program's users&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; (i.e. the players),&#xA;however on the other hand it is kept as an &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;internal&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, &amp;quot;internal&amp;quot; in this context suggests, that the software can be used without publishing, if the public has nothing to do with the software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the server, and the providing of the public service in this case is not just part of something unrelated but the very core and reason of existance of the whole public project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="norad" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T20:50:28.880" Title="GPL - Does &quot;internal use&quot; apply for a public gameserver?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1790" CreationDate="2015-09-10T06:31:21.317" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On one hand the &quot;modified version&quot; is clearly &quot;release[d] to the public in some way&quot; to the &quot;program's users&quot; (i.e. the players), however on the other hand it is kept as an &quot;internal&quot; tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exposing the server, public or private, is not considered distribution according to the terms of the GPL and so the requirements of the GPL do not come into play. The only way it would, for a GPL licensed server would be if players downloaded the server software and ran instances of the server on their own computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar license, the GNU Affero General Public License, which mandates exposing the software via Remote Network Interaction to require the recipient of the software to also provide the source to the users. The way you think the GPL works, is basically how the AGPL works instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also covered in the GNU FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" OwnerDisplayName="whatsisname" LastActivityDate="2015-09-10T06:31:21.317" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1787" CreationDate="2015-09-10T19:58:35.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not help for you to add a line stating your intention to be compatible with all OSI licenses. You have to choose a license, and that license is compatible (or not) with other licenses. At worst, adding that line is 'crayon-licensing' with uncertain legal consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general view is that the MIT license is an example of a 'type O' -- a universal donor. As it does not make any statements about patents, nor impose any copyleft obligations, it's hard to see how any OSI license can pose a barrier to use of content under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-09-11T00:43:59.783" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T00:43:59.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1787" CreationDate="2015-09-10T22:20:21.397" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chart below displays the compatibility of some of the most popular licenses from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David A. Wheeler&lt;/a&gt; found via &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978511/is-there-a-chart-of-which-oss-license-is-compatible-with-which&quot;&gt;Is there a chart of which OSS License is compatible with which?&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KbiRR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KbiRR.png&quot; alt=&quot;A diagram of popular license compatibility.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this, as far as I can tell you have three options (MIT, X11, 0BSD, public domain, or BSD-new) which are compatible with most downstream licenses. From my understanding BSD &quot;simplified&quot; (2-clause) is compatible with BSD-new, BSD (3-clause) and therefore, would also be an option compatible with some of the most popular downstream licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2594" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T21:11:06.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1786" CreationDate="2015-09-11T08:29:06.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line &quot;© 2015 FooBar Inc.&quot; is a so-called copyright notice. The GPL has the following to say about notices in case you modified it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5a: The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't say explicitly that you must change this line or add to it, but changing this line would definitely make this clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to remove it per the license (but not necessarily in your jurisdiction; copyright notices may have separate laws governing them) if there are no other restrictions, but the GPL does allow additional restrictions on copyright notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7b: [you may require] ... preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a &quot;reasonable legal notice&quot;, so it is possible that the license you received requires you to keep it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, you should note near the original copyright notice that you modified it, possibly with a copyright notice of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it hasn't got such a requirement, it may be more useful to move it to a central place which lists the copyright holders - a notice file or about -&gt; copyright menu item in interactive applications for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T08:29:06.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1786" CreationDate="2015-09-11T14:33:05.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, you probably can remove because, &lt;strong&gt;you are not distributing the software so the GPL doesn't affect what you do.&lt;/strong&gt; Deploying a web app implies that your users will interact remotely with the software, as opposed to receiving a copy of the software itself, so as far as the GPL  is concerned, you are merely using the software privately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the license been AGPL instead, the answer would be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU's FAQ contains a question&lt;/a&gt; on this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A company is running a modified version of a GPL'ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources?&lt;/strong&gt; (#UnreleasedMods)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is essential for people to have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately, without ever publishing those modifications. However, putting the program on a server machine for the public to talk to is hardly “private” use, so it would be legitimate to require release of the source code in that special case. Developers who wish to address this might want to use the GNU Affero GPL for programs designed for network server use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-11T14:33:05.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1799" CreationDate="2015-09-13T10:40:36.530" Score="11" ViewCount="1155" Body="&lt;p&gt;If, I port Ruby on Rails (licensed under MIT) from Ruby to Java what license options do I have? Would I have to use MIT or a compatible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2594" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T11:22:33.433" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:40:53.577" Title="What license options do I have for licensing ported source code?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|mit|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1798" CreationDate="2015-09-13T14:40:53.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conservative position is to assume that your port is a derived work of the original. If you consult a lawyer, you might be offered a more-or-less 'clean room' procedure to try to avoid this, but since you've already read the Rails code, it's probably too late for that unless you want to hire other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you must choose a license that satisfies your obligations under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is that the MIT license is extremely permissive. I believe that you have complete freedom to choose a license for your derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even if you choose a more restrictive license, you must give notice that the original was MIT-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T14:40:53.577" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1788" CreationDate="2015-09-13T15:42:55.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is: does the project provide legal protection to its contributors? This issue is one of the major drivers behind the creation of foundations such as the ASF. These entities serve as the legal target for negligence and other legal complaints, insulating the contributors. The fact that a CLA says 'no warranty' is not an airtight protection from all possible legal problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as we say in the USA, 'anyone can sue anyone for anything.' So all of this is a question of legal opinion as to whether the OpenSSL CLA, or the ASF's release policy, or anything else, completely insulates a contributor from the effects of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-09-13T20:57:37.327" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T20:57:37.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="875" CreationDate="2015-09-13T21:03:36.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't 'work around it.' Whether you are accepting a copyright transfer, or a license, you are trusting, in good faith, that the contributor actually has the rights claimed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Apache, there is a CCLA, for 'corporate contributor license agreement'. People who want to clarify the implications of their employment obligations get their employer to execute and submit one of this -- it grants the Apache license to any IP (if any) owned by the employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no one is required to file it. If, some day, an employer were to show up and claim ownership of a contribution, the project would need to replace the code. And that's all they'd need to do, because they accepted the contribution in good faith. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-13T21:03:36.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1700" CreationDate="2015-09-14T14:03:24.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no official legal term &lt;code&gt;combined work&lt;/code&gt;. The official legal term is &lt;code&gt;collective work&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important: while the Copyright law usually forbids everything unless the owner permits it, an opensourced work that does not mention restrictions that apply to collective works always permits collective works. For this reason, e.g. even GPLv2 permits collective works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a legal point of view, collective works are usually a combination of a derived work and a collective work. This applies if you e.g. take an work under a OSS license, modify it and then use the modified work as a part for a collective work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A collective work is finally usable in case that the restrictions from all licenses do not completely disagree. The collective work is usable if you honor the sum of all restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A combination of different software that is a simple aggregation of a list of software is neither a derived work, nor a collective work unless the combination offers a significant own &lt;code&gt;level of creation&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="2562" LastEditDate="2015-09-14T15:42:22.697" LastActivityDate="2015-09-14T15:42:22.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1805" CreationDate="2015-09-14T23:41:26.933" Score="16" ViewCount="963" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if the main contributors of an open source project die?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any guarantee that someone else takes that work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do project&#xA;hosting services handle this situation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any systems that the related knowledge of main contributors inherited to new&#xA;contributor candidates?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And has this ever happened, are there any&#xA;examples you know?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2643" LastEditorUserId="2643" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T06:53:23.510" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T01:37:54.860" Title="What happens if the main contributors of an open source project die?" Tags="|project-management|contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1804" CreationDate="2015-09-15T00:24:34.010" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm playing with the wording in your question a little bit, but don't change it up because it will likely make this &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; answer invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, let's break down the question by well... question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens if the main contributors of an open source project die?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the project will die down. Likely, a lot. The key part here is that the core part of the team, the project maintainers, will still be around. In that case, there is still the leadership that a project needs in order for it to continue on. If a frequent contributors becomes inactive, or passes away, contributions will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; stop, the frequency in which they come in will diminish like the snap of a finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any guarantee that someone else takes that work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I view many open source projects as having an aim (to write good software), as well as a great collaborative tool. Generally, many open source projects have multiple maintainers, as well as multiple collaborators. There will still be people around that will still be willing to contribute. They may not take the full job, but they may step up a gear or two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's best however, is the fact that anyone can take an existing open source project, clone it, and then make it their own. This is one of the many goals of open source: to create freedom. Take the Python module &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.python-requests.org/en/latest/&quot;&gt;requests&lt;/a&gt; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her Majesty’s Government, Amazon, Google, Twilio, Runscope, Mozilla, Heroku, PayPal, NPR, Obama for America, Transifex, Native Instruments, The Washington Post, Twitter, SoundCloud, Kippt, Readability, Sony, and Federal US Institutions that prefer to be unnamed use Requests internally. It has been downloaded over 40,000,000 times from PyPI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a lot of people. But what is neat about this is that I can take this project, clone it, and it will be mine. Anyone  can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no guarantee that someone else will take the work, but it's quite likely. It's happened many times before, and you will likely find people in this community that have done this before (taken dead projects, and turned them into vibrant, active ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any systems that the related knowledge of main contributors inherited to new contributor candidates? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good projects will likely have many issues, and feature-requests that have been submitted over the course of its life. This is a good system to track how a project has moved on over the course of many years, and is normally more than enough knowledge to continue a project. There's also documentation, and many projects will likely have a set of goals, and objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And has this ever happened, are there any examples you know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure there are plenty of examples. You may be able to find a few!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beauty of Open Source projects is that they are a &lt;em&gt;collaborative&lt;/em&gt; effort: anyone can contribute, anyone can make it their own. As a sort of freelance/intermediate programmer myself, I like open source, because it's also a learning experience, where I gain experience in managing projects, working with others, and most importantly, learning to code. Have fun :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T00:24:34.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1807" CreationDate="2015-09-15T02:09:35.620" Score="15" ViewCount="1306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have implemented an RSYNC library based on the &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rsync.samba.org/tech_report/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;technical report&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras.  The library implementation does not borrow code from the official RSYNC library and does not conform to the official API.  I would like to release my library as free software on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RSYNC library itself is released under the GNU GPL, but as I am not using or modifying the library's source, I am not sure how to license my own library.  What are my licensing options, if any?  How do I attribute the technical report?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2644" LastEditorUserId="2644" LastEditDate="2015-09-16T00:07:39.420" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T04:18:50.047" Title="How to license software that implements a well-documented algorithm, but which does not borrow source from the official library?" Tags="|gpl|software|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1806" CreationDate="2015-09-15T04:36:44.940" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you have never looked at the source code, and ONLY looked at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://rsync.samba.org/tech_report/node3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;no-code very high-level description&lt;/a&gt; of the synchronization algorithm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you are free to release your implementation under any license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like SAMBA checked the API and algorithms of CIFS and released their software under the license they wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least, that was the common point of view until the Google vs Oracle lawsuit, where the &quot;structure, sequence and organisation&quot; of an API got considered a copyrighted work and therefore copying the RSYNC API would be copyright infringement. Google tried to appeal the appeal but the supreme court refused a few months ago. I'm not sure if there will be further developments, but this decision is a huge loss for interoperability and innovation so we can only hope that the judiciary will realize their mistake. (Thanks Abhi for the info)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to attribute the technical report (except if you pasted significant parts of it inside your code or documentation), but an URL is nice and safe to paste before each relevant algorithm implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you had seen the source code, the matter would not be so clear-cut, see some real-world examples with various outcomes at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design#Case_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design#Case_law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T04:18:50.047" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T04:18:50.047" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1615" CreationDate="2015-09-15T05:54:45.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-Droid&lt;/a&gt; does exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The F-Droid team:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Receives applications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually read the whole source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Discard your project if it contains any binary blob or suspect code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If evaluation was successful, your app is then added to the official F-Droid repository with &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/manual/html_node/AntiFeatures.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following metadata&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the app reports anything about the user (very strict, includes even what some might consider harmless: crash reports, service authentication)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the app contains any form of advertising&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only for Android projects unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T05:54:45.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-15T07:00:31.537" Score="8" ViewCount="1812" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have some open source project which makes use of both GPL and MIT licensed components.  The source code of my project is also MIT licensed (not copyleft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the right way to indicate this and comply with all licenses in the final (binary) distribution of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many projects just include a single LICENSE.txt or COPYING.txt file, but due to the multiple licenses I'm not sure how to apply that here without creating confusion.  The requirements are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Due to the GPL component the binary distribution must be distributed under the GPL. This has to be made clear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But I don't want to create the misconception that the project's source code is GPL licensed, as it is not (and has substantial reusable parts that do not depend on GPL'd libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license of all utilized libraries needs to be indicated, with attribution (i.e. from the MIT license: &quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the usual way to achieve this? What text should go where in the final package, to make sure I comply with all requirements and do not create confusion? This is not a GUI program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1171" LastEditorUserId="1171" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T09:50:25.277" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T23:33:30.220" Title="How to best indicate license of source code and copying terms of binary when multiple licenses are involved?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|distribution|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-15T07:50:21.743" Score="9" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, what I love about GPL is that any derivative work using GPL-licensed work also needs to be GPL licensed, which guarantees that derivative work is open-source, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;when requested&lt;/strong&gt; the source of it &lt;strong&gt;must be available&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a great concept! But is it limited to software only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I have written a thesis which explains something which may have a lot usages in engineering, computing etc. Is it possible to license it something like GPL so that everything using my thesis must be open-sourced, for example, machines using it must have a GPL-like license, make their internal structure available and other machines using those machines either and so on; or software using my thesis must be GPL licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, is it possible to apply the philosophy of GPL to non-software things and information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its answer is for non-programming, it maybe non-hardware too. Because, in short, I wonder whether I can use open-source philosophy (especially GPL) for non-programming purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, my question has a broad domain but its answer is simply &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;. If it's yes you should give me a example, if it's no you should explain me why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2643" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T16:17:37.490" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T16:17:54.943" Title="Using copyleft licenses for non-programming purposes" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-15T08:22:03.983" Score="11" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed an open source project, and people can get the community version from Github. But I also want some customers to buy an advanced version based on the open source project, the advanced version has rich features that community version does not have. When a customer buys the advanced version, I will distribute the source code to them. There is a problem: How can I prevent paying customers from distributing the source code of the advanced version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I wanted to distribute the advanced version under a proprietary license, but I need to make the source opened to them, because the project is not simple, most customers will add new features based on their own requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can I reach a balance for my open source project? I need some pay to make the business run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2648" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T22:30:27.467" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T22:30:27.467" Title="How can I protect my advanced version based on my open source project?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|enforcement|monetization|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2015-09-15T08:33:16.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Releasing a non-free version next to a free version is somewhat standard practice, and number of questions on this site cover the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can protect the sourcecode of you propriety source as every other piece of propriety code you release. Protecting your source code through legal means can be difficult. You have legal recourse to sue when a license breach is detected, and there are DRM options. All are beyond the scope of this site, since they are explicitly about non-free non open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T08:33:16.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2015-09-15T08:42:53.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your customers really need the source code of the advanced version, you should provide it to them under a license which does not permit redistribution. If you suspect they will break this license, I can't think of any good solution... maybe you could try introducing subtle differences in the source code so that at least you know who leaked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also split the advanced version between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code that your customers need to be able to modify&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code that your customers don't need to modify &amp;lt;- This one can be compiled, source not distributed, and can include a server call to check a subscription status.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think such extreme measures should be needed. Alfresco is an example of a company in your situation, my company was their customer for a few years. They provided us with CVS access to the whole source code of their premium product. The same was accessible by many other customers, and is highly valuable, but you don't see that source code being redistributed around. Maybe everyone is respectful, or maybe because it is Enterprise software so risks are high if caught. Anyway, your worse-case scenario has never happened for them, it seems. Another thing is that their product is evolving quickly, so staying up-to-date would be really hard, you would have to find leaked version every once in a while, especially when security vulnerabilities are found. Companies are not willing to play this game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to make your business sustainable can be to sell a support subscription. If your customers need to modify source code, it sounds like they could use professional support from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T09:57:30.577" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T09:57:30.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1809" CreationDate="2015-09-15T10:28:52.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without knowing more internals of the project, it is hard to give an advise. It depends on the way the different licenses are used together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you create a &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; based on a &lt;em&gt;GPLd work&lt;/em&gt;, you need to make the whole work use the GPL. Such a work is called a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; in the legal speech. It is created when you take a GPLd work and modify it or if you develop a work that calls code from GPLd code. The latter case is even disputed amongst lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you however create a &lt;em&gt;collective work&lt;/em&gt; where the GPL is just the license used by one of the works, only the restrictions from the GPL sum up to the restrictions for the whole &lt;em&gt;collective work&lt;/em&gt;. Given that the GPL has no restrictions on the licenses used for code in libraries that is called by a GPLd work, a collective work is typically created if a GPLd work calls code from a library written by a different code owner and this library may have any possible license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a &lt;em&gt;collective work&lt;/em&gt; you should describe &lt;em&gt;work limits&lt;/em&gt; in an unambiguous way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that an OS distribution is typically a &lt;em&gt;collective work&lt;/em&gt; of the parts rather than a &lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;as the creation of the distribution is a task that requires a certain &lt;em&gt;level of creation&lt;/em&gt; that makes a &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; which causes the Copyright law to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-10-08T08:39:20.407" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T08:39:20.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1816" CreationDate="2015-09-15T12:39:41.517" Score="4" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm asking particularry about the c math library cephes (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.netlib.org/cephes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.netlib.org/cephes/&lt;/a&gt;) where after I downloaded it found no file stating any licanse and the sourcecode it self has in the typical header jsut stated &quot;copyright year by name&quot; not even contact informations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does this mean for the right to use the code if it is just stated that the code is copyrighted but nothing else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2517" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-09-15T13:08:36.983" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T13:08:36.983" Title="What license type is it if it is called opensource but no specific license is stated?" Tags="|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-09-15T13:01:31.760" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1815" CreationDate="2015-09-15T12:59:21.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This means you have no rights to use, modify, run or distribute the code, but may only use it to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T12:59:21.213" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2015-09-15T22:12:26.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, make sure that anybody who makes contributions to the open source project assigns copyright to you, or else your ability to use their contributions in the proprietary version will be restricted and any copyright lawsuit will become extremely complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, make sure the &quot;LICENSE&quot; text file for your open source project is not included in the proprietary one to make sure nobody can claim the proprietary code is available under an open license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if somebody uses a pirated copy of your code, make sure they are unable to contact you for technical support and unable to receive bugfix patches in a timely fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do this by simply typing &quot;XXX pro source code&quot; into google and check if it's visible on the first page or two of results, then send a DMCA takedown notice: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rising.blackstar.com/how-to-send-a-dmca-takedown-notice.html&quot;&gt;http://rising.blackstar.com/how-to-send-a-dmca-takedown-notice.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do not take the content down in a timely manner then they are guilty of &quot;wilful infringement&quot;, and you can try to find a lawyer who's willing to work &quot;on contingency&quot;, basically you only pay them if they win the case for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure to &quot;register&quot; the copyright for your source code, it's cheap and and makes you eligible for up to $150,000 in statutory damages if somebody distributes pirate copies of your work. This will make it much easier to get a lawyer on contingency, since they know they can take a share of the $150,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people will still pirate your work, but the vast majority of your customers will choose to pay instead as long as your price is &quot;reasonable&quot; and it's somewhat difficult to pirate the source code within a day or so of an important bugfix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not possible to completely eliminate piracy, but it's also unnecessary. As long as &quot;enough&quot; customers pay, then your business will thrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-09-15T22:12:26.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2015-09-16T01:15:50.640" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...is it possible to apply the philosophy of GPL to non-software things...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer this very narrowly, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.en.html&quot;&gt;the GPL itself can be applied to any creative work&lt;/a&gt; (writing, pictures, videos, etc.) that are eligible for copyright. However, your question appears to ask about the application of copyleft principles to works outside of the scope of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To review, the source of GPL's power is &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt;. Copyright allows an author of a creative work to say, &quot;No one can share copies or derivatives of this work.&quot; The GPL is a way for the author to say, &quot;Okay, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; share copies and derivatives of this work as long as the follow these specific copyleft terms...&quot; If you didn't have the underlying restrictions of copyright, the GPL couldn't demand copyleft terms. Copyright is wall that disallows use; the GPL is a door in that wall that has very specific requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific example, you're talking about the &lt;em&gt;mechanics of a system&lt;/em&gt; described in a paper, which are outside the scope of copyright. The text of the paper itself is eligible for copyright, but the ideas contained within it are not. (See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot;&gt;idea-expression divide&lt;/a&gt; and the U.S. case &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Selden&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Baker v. Selden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.) So, the real question here is: is there some fundamental legal right (similar to copyright) that could apply to (1) systems or (2) information in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first item, patents are a good fit: if you have patented the system described in your paper, then no one can use it without your permission. It is perfectly possible to grant patent licenses to people under sort-of copyleft-like terms. For example, &quot;You can use my patent in your hardware design, but only if you make the schematics available to anyone who owns a copy of your hardware device, and allow them to use, share, and modify those schematics.&quot; Again, patent law is the wall here, and your specific licensing terms are the carefully-controlled door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For information in general, there are typically no laws that restrict the free use of information that is not covered by copyright or patent (except &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right&quot;&gt;sui generis database rights&lt;/a&gt;, in some jurisdictions outside of the U.S., which are sort of like copyright for large-scale non-creative collections of data). If there is no restriction, there can't be any copyleft-style license, because there is no protected right to license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T19:49:17.247" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T19:49:17.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2015-09-16T01:21:13.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're describing sounds a lot to me like the Creative Commons ShareAlike license. It's a non-software license designed to make a work freely redistributable and remixable, and forces all derivative works to be licensed under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an excerpt from the summary of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the general idea of a Creative Commons ShareAlike license is that anyone can redistribute the work, anyone can change the work, and any changed versions or derivatives of the work must also allow all these freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is close to what you were going for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T01:21:13.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-16T04:54:13.753" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do Open Source projects audit code to ensure it comes from ethical sources. For example, if a hacker hacks into IBM, steals some code and contributes it to the kernel, how does the kernel team ensure that it doesn't get into the kernel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2663" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T00:10:10.683" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T00:10:10.683" Title="How do Open Source projects audit code?" Tags="|law|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-09-17T00:07:22.780" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1821" CreationDate="2015-09-16T12:49:33.363" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is &lt;del&gt;they don't&lt;/del&gt; OK, &lt;em&gt;most of them&lt;/em&gt; don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longer answer is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When accepting contributions, many projects have contributor agreements. These often contain a clause that says &quot;if you submit code, you certify that you have the right to license such code to the project&quot;. If someone's committing stolen code, they don't have the right to license it, so their contribution is legally void. If IBM comes after the project maintainers for including that code, they can simply point to the agreement contract and say &quot;blame him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for projects without a contributor agreement, there is the principle of good faith. A project accepts contributions in &lt;em&gt;good faith&lt;/em&gt;; that is, they assume you have the right to license them the code you contribute. If you don't, the project can't be held liable because of this - they would have to replace the offending code, but they wouldn't be legally responsible for damages, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-09-16T22:53:08.917" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T22:53:08.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2015-09-16T12:51:22.823" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technical ideas can not be copyrighted, so copyright is not a sufficient tool to make sure that your idea is only used in ways you want. But ideas can be patented. When your thesis has technical applications, then these applications might be patent-worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you get a patent, you could vouche to license this patent for free as long as the implementors follow the conditions you outlined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T12:51:22.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1827" CreationDate="2015-09-16T12:58:38.720" Score="8" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an application for the company where I am doing my internship with Visual studio 2015, it should be connected to a Postgres server my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the company use the Postgresql 9.4 and my application wihout any legal risk?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already read the license and it says that it's for a commercial use too. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2674" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-20T21:04:05.553" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T21:04:05.553" Title="PostgreSQL Licence for professional use ( postgres 9.4 / Visual studio 2015 )" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1826" CreationDate="2015-09-16T14:04:26.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can safely use Postgresql without any legal risk because it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt;.  Freedom 0 is the freedom to use to program &lt;strong&gt;for any purpose&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also made explicit in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/postgresql&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt;, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its&#xA;  documentation &lt;strong&gt;for any purpose&lt;/strong&gt;, without fee, and &lt;strong&gt;without a written&#xA;  agreement&lt;/strong&gt; is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice&#xA;  and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all&#xA;  copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1165" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T14:04:26.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1826" CreationDate="2015-09-16T14:17:40.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL allows you to use a library (in this case the library which interfaces between your program and the PostgreSQL database server) as a dynamically linked library in any software for any purpose and distribute the program under any license, as long as you follow the attribution requirements explained in section 4 of the license text and don't change the library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did make changes to the library (I hope you didn't, because this is something a programmer should generally avoid for various reasons), you need to release your changed library together with the application under the terms of the LGPL (which means with sourcecode). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even these conditions only apply when the company you made the program for decides to sell or give away the program to third parties (or in the language of the GPL: &quot;conveys&quot; the program). As long as it is only used internally and never leaves the company, you can ignore pretty much all requirements of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-09-16T14:23:00.840" LastActivityDate="2015-09-16T14:23:00.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1832" CreationDate="2015-09-17T09:45:46.943" Score="14" ViewCount="3387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on a project for a while, and I'm almost ready to release it, but I've been more concerned with getting it to build than legal considerations, and now I'm not at all sure where I stand with licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Mercurial repository (which I plan to push to BitBucket.org) contains, aside from my own original code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A static (.a) binary of libcurl (MIT or Modified BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A static (.a) binary of libuuid from util-linux (Modified BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source code (.c and .h) copied as-is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://zserge.com/jsmn.html&quot;&gt;JSMN&lt;/a&gt; (MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source code (.c and .h) copied and slightly modified by me from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/benhoyt/inih&quot;&gt;INIH&lt;/a&gt; (New BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also dynamically links against various libraries such as libxml2 (MIT) and the curl dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not that bothered about what licence I use for my own code, though I'd prefer it to be as permissive as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question then is how can I release this project while complying with the various licence terms of the code I'm using? Note that as well as publishing the source code, I'll also be distributing compiled binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Since his was the only project which didn't have a BSD-type licence, I emailed Serge Zaitsev, developer of JSMN, to ask if he had any objections to including his code in a BSD licensed project, he wrote back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not a guru of open-source licenses, but I always pick the most permissive license for my projects (MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think 2-clause BSD and MIT are compatible licenses and are pretty much permissive.&#xA;  I personally don't see any problems with using MIT libraries in a BSD-licensed project, or GPL-licensed project, or even a closed-source one, because MIT license permits it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2684" LastEditorUserId="2684" LastEditDate="2015-09-17T10:23:45.793" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T22:51:03.440" Title="How to licence a project which includes MIT, BSD, Modified BSD, and New BSD libraries" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-17T07:16:57.260" Score="15" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open sourcing doesn't necessarily mean that you give away your source code for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering about the business model where your code is made public, free for personal/hobby use, but with a mandatory fee for commercial/company use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible, and is there any existing license (or licenses) that are made for this? I want to make sure that companies and corporate entities play by the rules; a ready-made license would presumably help with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2713" OwnerDisplayName="Harry Cover" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-18T23:39:33.570" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:19:32.603" Title="Can paid-for Open Sourcing be a viable model for a freelancer?" Tags="|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|commercial|monetization|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1830" CreationDate="2015-09-17T08:51:18.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coming from a background in open-source, your model is not that reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, open-source licenses must comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/docs/osd&quot;&gt;open-source definition&lt;/a&gt;, in particular sections 5 and 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means not restricting anyone or any entity for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you would need to dual-license your software under a custom commercial license and an open-source license. Your best bet to make companies prefer the commercial license is to use a license that requires source code of derivative works or modifications is revealed (such as the GPL) for open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in practice, no matter what your license is, a company can and will just take the open-source version at no cost to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the majority of these cases, even if your software was paid-only they wouldn't have taken it, and would keep shopping around for software they didn't have to pay for. This model can and does work, but keep in mind that enforcing it is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best route to go down is to make an open-source library. If it's popular (see FontAwesome), you can potentially make commercial versions of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2550" OwnerDisplayName="Amelia" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T08:51:18.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1829" CreationDate="2015-09-17T22:51:03.440" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD and MIT licenses are very similar, essentially they are &quot;do anything you want&quot; licenses with a single requirement to include the license text and attribution to the original author somewhere that can be found easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you've got three licenses (MIT, Modified BSD, NewBSD) you will need to include all three of those licenses as well as acknowledgment that you are using code from each project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to do this is to include a &quot;LICENSE.txt&quot; file in all distributions that contains a list of all projects and every license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way is to have a &quot;credits&quot; section somewhere in a GUI app, for example chrome's &quot;about&quot; screen this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2015 Google Inc. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Chrome is made possible by the Chromium open source project and other open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a link to chrome://credits/ where you can see a list of hundreds of open source projects, a link to their website, and a link to view the license text for that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-09-17T22:51:03.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1834" CreationDate="2015-09-17T23:08:26.940" Score="12" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst some open source projects would be too specialised and too complex, in general, are beginners welcomed into open source projects? When I say beginner I mean someone who has taken an introductory university course on programming and had a year or two of basic programming experience for scientific purposes (mainly solving problems for assignments). Basically someone who has a strong grasp of most programming concepts but may not have a huge amount of experience in code structuring, unit and integration testing, and larger projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2689" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T00:01:51.897" Title="Are beginners generally accepted into Open Source projects?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-09-19T01:30:21.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1833" CreationDate="2015-09-18T00:01:51.897" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The world of open source is, almost by definition, one in which groups of complete strangers come together to combine their talents and produce a unified result. There may well be some projects where all contributors know each other and have great experience, but in the main you will be judged on the quality of your contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think it is fair to say that beginners who submit quality contributions, who follow the project's guidelines and procedures, and who are respectful to the community of contributors would be welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, a lack of of experience does not necessarily equate with a lack of good or at least fresh ideas. Indeed there a number of people here on this site who, though lacking years of experience, are still active in the FLOSS community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the key is to follow the project's norms. If, as you say, you don't have much knowledge of structuring, or unit testing, and the project is heavily into that approach, it behooves you to study the existing code base before making a submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the existing unit/integration tests. Learn how they are written for this project. Which test frameworks do they use? How exhaustive are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at previous pull requests similar to the one you are considering (start small with a bug fix, for example). What did it include? Just the fix? A detailed commit message? Tests to ensure the bug does not reappear (without being noticed)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walk in the footsteps of those who've gone before you, and you should be welcomed with open arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An if you run into a project where you need 20 years of experience before they'll even acknowledge your existence ... skip it and move to another project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T00:01:51.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1830" CreationDate="2015-09-18T23:31:40.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could always take the &quot;pay for documentation&quot; route. Give away just enough documentation to get people started and wanting more. Then publish a book containing a deep dive into the advanced use of your project. ANTLR took this route. I've no idea how profitable it's been though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another viable monetization is paid support. Corporations pay you to prioritize bug fixes &amp;amp; features that they care about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-09-18T23:31:40.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1830" CreationDate="2015-09-20T18:19:32.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just consider that the wast majority of software is &quot;one shot&quot;, where open source or not is quite irrelevant (think e.g. of the payroll system). Making a package &quot;generic&quot; (for several different users) is &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; work, and unlikely to pay off unless the user base is large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The successful open source based models are in the line of offering the software as open source, and offer paid maintenance/support on the side. But that requires a solid user base (most will just go cheap, only a fraction will pay), and an extremely well honed support group (in-house expertise and development). Red Hat works this way, bundling software build by an army of others. Their added value is making sure it works seamlessly, and selecting and stabilizing packages. Their product is huge and they have much of the people developing critical parts of it (Linux kernel, Gnome, and others) on their payroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-09-20T18:19:32.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1841" CreationDate="2015-09-21T08:16:57.057" Score="11" ViewCount="2466" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, libstdc++ has the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;runtime exception&lt;/a&gt; that permits even &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/faq.html#faq.license.any_program&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary software to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; libstdc++&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, hypothetically, can I actually &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; a non-modified binary of libstdc++ along with a binary of my proprietary program? (Given that I make the source code for libstdc++ available to anyone that asks, and that I distribute a copy of its license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A specific example:&lt;/strong&gt; Let's say I use MinGW to compile a Windows binary. This requires libstdc++ (and other libraries, such as libgcc) to function. To make it easy for end-users to install this program, I'd like to just distribute the app along with libstdc++, libgcc etc. I'm asking of this is possible (as for it being &lt;em&gt;ethical&lt;/em&gt; is another issue; I support free software, that's why I say it's hypothetical). Also, I'm thinking about &lt;em&gt;dynamic&lt;/em&gt; linking instead of static.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2712" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-09-23T15:30:07.910" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T14:08:01.047" Title="Can I redistribute libstdc++ with proprietary software?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2015-09-21T08:41:39.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that you should. It is very convenient for most, 99.99% of the users. Those who need to customize your soruces or run them at exotic platforms, will benefit also -- they will be able to try your SW in standard platform first before undertaking their endevour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only trouble I see is the trustfulness. You must understand that one of the greatest benefits of open software is not only that you can customize it but it is availability for the public review of privacy-sensitive code. The anonymizing services, like Dark Coin, are intended to perform your transactions privately. They ensure that they achieve declared goal by exposing the source code for everybody to review. However, how can you trust them if you download the &quot;open source&quot; in the precompiled, binary form? You review one thing but download and use some obscure another thing. There appears a gap. To match the installation simplicity with trustfulness, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gitian&lt;/a&gt; is used in spyware-sensetive domain. So, instead of closing the binary download, you should simply encourage users to convince themselves with manual build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T08:41:39.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1839" CreationDate="2015-09-21T11:59:26.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grant of Additional Permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have permission to propagate a work of Target Code formed by&#xA;  combining the Runtime Library with Independent Modules, even if such&#xA;  propagation would otherwise violate the terms of GPLv3, provided that&#xA;  all Target Code was generated by Eligible Compilation Processes. You&#xA;  may then convey such a combination under terms of your choice,&#xA;  consistent with the licensing of the Independent Modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can distribute the combination of your code and the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T11:59:26.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1843" CreationDate="2015-09-21T14:49:28.873" Score="4" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a &lt;em&gt;game engine&lt;/em&gt; I am writing, I am planning to use a heavily cut down and thoroughly modified version of the &lt;em&gt;Java&lt;/em&gt; logging library &lt;a href=&quot;http://logback.qos.ch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;logback&lt;/a&gt;. Basically I am using their code for lookups and instantiation of new loggers (so, maybe some 5% tops of the code, not that it matters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: &lt;strong&gt;What does this mean for my engine; What does the LGPL license force me to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not native speaker and hence have issues understanding all that legal mumbo-jumbo which forms the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question also is specifically about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LGPL v2.1&lt;/a&gt;, as that is the license of the library I abuse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Addendum2:&lt;/em&gt; to clear some confusion; the phrase '&lt;em&gt;... 5% ... not that it matters&lt;/em&gt;', refers to the fact that it does not matter how much or how little code it is in the end, it &lt;strong&gt;still&lt;/strong&gt; is licensed code and hemce has to be treated in such a matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2724" OwnerDisplayName="dot_Sp0T" LastEditorUserId="2724" LastEditDate="2015-10-10T14:02:37.987" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T14:02:37.987" Title="Am I allowed to make use of parts of the codebase of a library that is licensed under LGPL (v2.1)" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1842" CreationDate="2015-09-21T15:35:49.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license terms of the LGPL license effectively distinguish two different models:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You make changes to the LGPL code, or you copy portions of the LGPL licensed code into your own project. In this case, the license requires you to make your code available under the LGPL or GPL license as a library that can be used by other programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You use the LGPL licensed library in your application by linking to it. In this case, you must provide a way for your users to replace the library, but otherwise you are free to choose your license terms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Providing a way to replace the library is easiest if you link dynamically to it or of you publish your code under an open source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, your best option is to create a library of the cut-down version of logback and publish that under the LGPL. Then your game can link to this new library for its logging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" OwnerDisplayName="Bart van Ingen Schenau" LastActivityDate="2015-09-21T15:35:49.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1847" CreationDate="2015-09-21T22:35:27.150" Score="13" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;p&gt;With, say, a commercial game (Kerbal Space Program in this instance) with user mods, that are themselves GPL3 licenced and have an effect on the visuals of a screenshot (e.g. art assets, images, custom displays), does a screenshot that includes these custom visuals have to automatically be licenced under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific query is regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Mihara/RasterPropMonitor&quot;&gt;RasterPropMonitor&lt;/a&gt; plugin, which manages and renders real-time HUD screens. In this case, the whole project lists itself as GPL3, so I assume that automatically covers any attached images/textures, which would then undergo transformation/arrangement by the code - and then be visible on a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can reason how the project can be allowed to be GPL3, as it is &quot;Downstream&quot; from the (closed source) base game that it links with (I assume that Unity classes as a 'System Library'), but am troubled by whether everything that touches or relates to the base mod also ends up being GPL3 - e.g. someone who provides a custom screen, is using the GPL3 mod, so that work would also have to be GPL3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2721" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T10:17:05.323" Title="Is a screenshot with GPL3 resources, GPL3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1846" CreationDate="2015-09-22T16:26:09.443" Score="6" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about an example of a popular piece of software to illustrate the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANTLRv4 is an Open Source project and provides an online documentation sufficient to get started with the project, but mastering it requires to read the ANTLR 4 Definitive Reference. The Free Software Definition on gnu.org states that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#beyond-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;software manuals should be free&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong if I claim that ANTLR cannot be considered as Free Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2726" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:06:01.073" Title="Is ANTLR Free Software?" Tags="|documentation|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1845" CreationDate="2015-09-22T18:06:01.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO the existence of a book which provides detailed guidance and instruction on the use of a tool, but which costs money, does not negate the FLOSS nature of the product itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though admittedly a weak analogy, &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; meets all the criteria for Free Software. But to really master C++ or C you will inevitably need to read some books on the subject, and many of those are not available for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see nothing, other than economics and the lack of comparable knowledge, to prevent someone else writing an excellent book on ANTLR which both competes with the Definitive Reference and is made available for free. This would not make the ANTLR software any  more 'free'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach, of providing the software for free and selling a definitive user guide, is just another approach to monetizing Open Source development. You are not forced to purchase the book in order to use the software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; invest $27 of your time in studying the subject matter and ANTLR source code to build the same level of expertise you can gain by purchasing the book ... but I doubt you'd get very far in a cost/benefits sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the author does not appear to have provided any substantive FREE documentation beyond links to the book. However the e-book is non-DRM and simply googling the book's title and 'PDF' rapidly finds many places where it is available to download. &lt;strong&gt;I don't know the legality of those sites, and I suspect none are authorized&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T18:06:01.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1844" CreationDate="2015-09-22T21:00:31.560" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Screenshots &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be a derivative work and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; need to comply with GPL (or any other open source license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The factors to determine this are extremely complicated and must be judged individually depending on the screenshot and how the screenshot is being used. They also vary greatly depending what country's laws are being applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, this is a case where you need to contact a lawyer in your local jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States most screenshots are &quot;fair use&quot; because because they are some kind of commentary or education or archival of the original work and also because when you distribute copies of a screenshot you are not causing any financial harm to the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some situations, a screenshot can also be a &quot;de minimis&quot; copy, for example if a multi billion dollar movie has a scene where for 6 seconds an actor is using Linux... that would not be fair use but it would be such an insignificant use in the scheme of things that the movie cannot be considered a derivative of the GPL'd work. If, however, the movie was &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; linux then it would not be de minimis and GPL might apply (although if it was about linux then the copy could be fair use...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If fair use or de minimis do not apply, then a screenshot &lt;strong&gt;is a derivative work&lt;/strong&gt; and you must comply with the license. Typically the best option is simply to ask for permission to distribute screenshots, but for GPL that is difficult - depending how the project is run you might need permission from every contributor going back hundreds of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair use and de minimis copying are part of US copyright law however most other countries have something similar. The specific details vary greatly from country to country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are usually only required to comply with copyright law in your own country. Again, ask a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T10:17:05.323" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T10:17:05.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2462" CreationDate="2015-09-22T20:19:38.300" Score="55" ViewCount="10507" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently some non-technical managers where I work found out that GitHub has a repository with code from &amp;quot;Hidden Tear&amp;quot; which is a ransomware application. The immediate reaction was to ban GitHub, which is something that we use extensively to get open source code. The only way to access GitHub again is by proving that the site is safe. This would be easy to do if I were convincing software developers, however I am speaking with people who have never written a line of code. I have been told that if I want to use code from GitHub or view pages on the site I need to do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Show the site is safe and will not infect our computers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create an open source policy for use when determining the safety of code found on GitHub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first step was to go through a list of companies and government organizations that use GitHub. I believe that this will start to calm fears that the site is going to infect all computers with ransomware. I will expand on this by describing what GitHub is, what it does and why it is valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I don't have much experience writing policy documents. I'm hoping to find someone with some knowledge about policy that could share some of their experiences in writing open source usage policy. From what I understand our policy should be a step by step guide to determine whether or not we can use a specific library/plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2732" OwnerDisplayName="Chris.Stover" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-06-20T04:25:06.287" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T06:05:56.383" Title="Security of GitHub.com" Tags="|project-management|github|security|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1850" CreationDate="2015-09-22T08:31:45.863" Score="14" ViewCount="1294" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, if I create a LaTeX file and license it with CC BY SA, can someone create a derivative work, but &lt;strong&gt;only publish the PDF&lt;/strong&gt;, without giving out the derived LaTeX source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this fall under the Effective Technological Measures part of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more focused on software but not mentioning source code as cleary on question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-share-if-i-include-cc-by-sa-artwork-in-my-software&quot;&gt;What do I need to share if I include CC-BY-SA artwork in my software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for video games: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/92536/is-it-legal-to-use-creative-commons-art-in-a-commercial-game&quot;&gt;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/92536/is-it-legal-to-use-creative-commons-art-in-a-commercial-game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;image vs website case: &lt;a href=&quot;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/68805/using-cc-by-sa-3-0-images-in-website-does-share-alike-affect-my-websites-lice&quot;&gt;https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/68805/using-cc-by-sa-3-0-images-in-website-does-share-alike-affect-my-websites-lice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1072" OwnerDisplayName="Ciro Santilli 六四事件 法轮功 纳米比亚 威视" LastEditorUserId="1072" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T20:06:50.590" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T20:06:50.590" Title="Does the CC-BY-SA License require that source code of derivative works be shared?" Tags="|creative-commons|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1849" CreationDate="2015-09-22T10:03:36.987" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they can publish a PDF without publishing the modified LaTeX sources. No, this is not DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA is not an open-source license. It is intended for creative works such as photographs or writings even where there might not be any kind of editable source format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license explicitly allows any licensee to change the format of the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2(a)(4): &lt;strong&gt;Media and formats; technical modifications allowed&lt;/strong&gt;. The Licensor authorizes You to exercise the Licensed Rights in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter created, and to make technical modifications necessary to do so. The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Effective Technological Measures&lt;/em&gt; are defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1(e): &lt;strong&gt;Effective Technological Measures&lt;/strong&gt; means those measures that, in the absence of proper authority, may not be circumvented under laws fulfilling obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, 1996, and/or similar international agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, 2(a)(4) allows you to circumvent any accidental DRM on a CC-BY-SA licensed work in order to (re-)use the work as you wish. This freedom to convert formats is important, as it e.g. allows a CC-BY-SA e-book to be converted into a different e-book format, or to be made accessible to blind users, even when the original e-book is “protected” by a DRM scheme. Merely converting a creative work to a format that is non-editable is not DRM – otherwise, printed CC-BY-SA books would be a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA license requires no one to publish their derived works (such as modified LaTeX files), only to license their derived works under CC-BY-SA when they share/publish them. However, they must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide attribution 3(a)(1)(A)(i). If they used your LaTeX files, they must attribute you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link to the original work 3(a)(1)(A)(v). When they used your LaTeX files, they must link to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indicate any modifications 3(a)(1)(B). They need not state what they modified, only whether they modified something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples that might clarify some aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I create a CC-BY-SA video that uses CC-bY-SA licensed music in its soundtrack. I am not required to publish the soundtrack in an un-mixed form just so that someone could mix it differently if they wanted to. However, I must link to the original music.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I publish a CC-BY-SA printed book that uses a CC-BY-SA illustration. I am not required to publish my manuscript or layout files so that someone could print the book with a different illustraction. However, I must link to the original image.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I publish a CC-BY-SA “photoshopped” version of a CC-BY-SA photograph. I am not required to publish the project file so that someone could arrange the image layers differently, or remove a special effect they don't like. However, I must link to all source images I used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not acceptable to you, you should not use CC-BY-SA for your documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on the terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" OwnerDisplayName="amon" LastActivityDate="2015-09-22T10:03:36.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2015-09-22T21:33:40.630" Score="50" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Show the site is safe and will not infect our computers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not &quot;safe&quot;. GitHub allows anonymous users to upload anything they want including malware. You could get infected by downloading/executing code or visiting anything on the &quot;github.io&quot; domain where arbitrary javascript (and therefore 0-day browser exploits) might be found (github.com is safer than github.io).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Create an open source policy for use when determining the safety of code found on GitHub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to determine the safety of source code is to go through one line at a time and carefully read every single line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With major projects, you might assume somebody else has already done this, but that's not a safe assumption. For example OpenSSL's security was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed&quot;&gt;completely compromised&lt;/a&gt; in 2011 but code reviewers failed to notice the problem until 3 years later. Criminal organisations were aware of the problem long before it was fixed and companies were compromised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Small businesses using open source Word Press plugins are continuously being hacked, we see it almost every day where I work. Smart companies avoid the problem by refusing to use random word press plugins and your company policy should be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general there are two things you need to worry about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;. The most scary is an actively malicious attack, for example in 2013 a version of phpMyAdmin was being distributed with a &quot;sync_server.php&quot; script who's entire purpose was to execute arbitrary PHP code provided in POST.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;. More common than that and your primary concern, is plain stupidity. There is a ton of open source code available online containing serious security flaws that are almost as bad as an intentional back door. Far too often these issues are not discovered until organised crime starts taking advantage of them – and they usually attack individual companies rather than the entire internet, further increasing the chances that they can attack over and over again before the bug is discovered/fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to do is make a risk/reward analysis. Outline the risks of allowing access to GitHub in detail, and then outline the rewards, and conclude with your case that the rewards outweigh the risks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developers should not be allowed to use code on GitHub (or from anywhere else) unless they understand the risk and each project's quality must be judged individually. How strict your policy is should depend on how much harm would result in a successful attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The largest and most successful corporations in the world have all decided that the rewards outweigh the risks – doing so is necessary to remain competitive. But don't pull in open source code lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T20:57:33.340" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T20:57:33.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2015-09-23T11:45:17.553" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a giant problem with the logic behind this fuss. Storing the source code of malware is not strongly correlated with being infected with malware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.metasploit.com/&quot;&gt;http://www.metasploit.com/&lt;/a&gt;. It's a tool used by people protecting against intrusion -- and also by people looking to perform intrusion. Or any number of other resources used by people who study malware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, github.com could turn out to contain active malware -- but so could anything else where arbitrary  websites are hosted. Does your management prohibit access to all of AWS? Google apps? Heroku? Sourceforge? Bitbucket? There's a list of about a million places that allow people, including bad people, to set up web sites. Does your employer really maintain a white list of only sites that they like? And what do they do when one gets broken into, and turned into a malware distribution apparatus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this has nothing much to do with open source, except insofar as github.com is a hard place to avoid if you want to use it. You could have this debate about every wordpress blog site in creation; those get compromised approximately once every five minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T11:45:17.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1857" CreationDate="2015-09-23T11:57:16.547" Score="7" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work at a small company in a small IT department. We use Visual Studio Online (the Team Foundation Server flavor of VSO) to store our source code. We're interested in deploying an open source (GPL v3) project for use here. The project is hosted on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some bugs in the project however that we will need to fix in order to use it. We're happy to do so and I've been in contact with the project's maintainer, who seems receptive to pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what's the best way for us to create our own fork to maintain? I want to make sure it's easy to pull down new versions and submit Pull Requests back upstream. It's been suggested that we keep our fork in VSO, only as a Git repository, but I'm afraid that will make it harder to keep the flow of changes open. I was thinking that it would be better to create a GitHub org and keep our fork there. Is one of these approaches better than the other? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T09:46:08.033" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T09:46:08.033" Title="How to store our own fork of a project to ensure pulling fixes and contributing back is as easy as possible" Tags="|forking|github|development-environment|version-control-systems|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1853" CreationDate="2015-09-23T13:59:55.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest simply using GitHub. Its UI and paradigm is aimed specifically at what you want to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presumably you are already fetching the original project directly from GitHub, so you have all the internal infrastructure established to continue to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simply forking it on GitHub maintains the link to the upstream original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having both your fork and the original on GitHub will facilitate pushing your changes upstream. The Pull Request mechanism simultaneously makes it easier for you to offer your changes, and for the maintainer to accept them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintaining your fork on GitHub makes it very easy to meet the requirements (and spirit) of the GPL to publish all your changes, because it is published by default.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T13:59:55.297" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2015-09-23T15:45:05.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that the OpenSource Definition lists 10 points and the &quot;free&quot; software definition lists only four is a hint that free software is a smaller subset of OpenSource and may violate the OSS rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the OSI in former times listed the GPL as a non-OpenSource compliant license before the FSF assured that the ambiguous parts of the GPL have to interpreted in a way that is compliant to the OSS definition creates the impression that the free software definition is a weaker definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T15:45:05.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1853" CreationDate="2015-09-23T17:05:43.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fork the project on github. Having a fork on github is needed for much of its infrastructure around pull requests. Having a fork on github makes everyones life easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optionally: Fork again to vso git. This way you can keep your in house development in house, and have all the issue tracking, CI, and other vso infrastructure all your other projects have as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come release, you push from your repo to github, and pull request from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T17:05:43.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2015-09-23T18:06:12.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could get access approved on a per-project basis on GitHub?  For example, say you wanted to use code from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/zopfli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google/zopfli&lt;/a&gt; you could somehow get that approved and then be able to download/use the relevant files.  Annoying, but better than having to write 100% of your code from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if they're particularly concerned about ransomware, something like first testing code in a VM that can be trashed at a moment's notice might help them to feel like it's safer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2748" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T18:06:12.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1864" CreationDate="2015-09-24T15:43:11.633" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I want to publish as an open source project, but as the creator I would like to get a head-start in taking advantage of my work for monetary gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I prevent people republishing my work, or using it for monetary gain, before a certain date? If so, what license could I use to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2765" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T17:02:07.620" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T02:46:43.897" Title="How can I get benefits priority out of my open source code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|monetization|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-09-28T08:15:59.173" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-24T15:48:26.790" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have filled a pending patent for my project in USPTO, can I still publish the source code (project) as an open source?&#xA;What about that if I had a complete patent for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2765" LastEditorUserId="2765" LastEditDate="2015-09-24T16:40:31.600" LastActivityDate="2015-09-24T16:40:31.600" Title="I have filled a pending patent, can I still publish my code as an open source?" Tags="|open-source-definition|patents|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2015-09-25T21:44:55.427" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-23T07:35:19.850" Score="8" ViewCount="1421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have build an open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiobook&amp;amp;hl=de&quot;&gt;audiobook player&lt;/a&gt; which is licensed under gpl v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday someone sent me a mail with the topic 'Violation of source code license' including a &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fibox&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to an app that seems an exact copy of my app.&#xA;Does that violate the license? How do open source projects normally react to situations like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Paul Woitaschek" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T17:11:46.803" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T17:11:46.803" Title="GPLv3: Re-Release app under different branding" Tags="|gpl|copyright|enforcement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1861" CreationDate="2015-09-23T07:52:06.860" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forking and rebranding is allowed by most open-source licenses as long as they satisfy the terms of the license like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;retain your copyright notices;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bundle the license;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;credit the contributors;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ship source for all modified components;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have modified or removed your copyright headers, avoided mentioning the contributions, only ship binaries not responding to source requests; you could take civil law action against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you perceive violations and care about it, spin up your legal team and/or the EFF and enjoy years in court. Licenses only have power if you can enforce them. Most of the time when this happens, it's in some backwater country somewhere where you cannot feasibly go to court or have very bleak chances of winning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2782" OwnerDisplayName="Lars Viklund" LastActivityDate="2015-09-23T07:52:06.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1859" CreationDate="2015-09-25T02:46:43.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Yet another question where the answer is some variant of &quot;you are the author so you can pick whatever license you want&quot; :)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can simply publish your project under a license that prohibits republication, or for monetary gain, or any activity that you don't want. You are the author so you can attach any conditions you want, even &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ludicrous ones&lt;/a&gt;, because the license is a grant of permissions under conditions you choose: &quot;you can do X with this as long as you satisfy Y. If not, tough luck: the code is owned by me so you're not allowed&quot;. Just make sure you write the license with a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, after a specified date, you release the project under a proper open source / free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that your original license is not free/open; truly free/open licenses cannot limit redistribution nor can they discriminate against endeavour such as whether the use is for monetary gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a similar use case where the transformation to open source is automatic, to guard against hit-by-bus scenarios, asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/420/175&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1695/175&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; these may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also ask: what's there to gain by releasing under a &quot;source available&quot; license? By providing the source but very few other permissions, people can study the code, and not much else. On the other hand, it also makes it vastly easier for unethical actors to copy your code and use it without your permission. Do the benefits really outweigh the costs? If not, it may just be better to keep your code closed source initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A historic example: the Doom Source License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for the engine of the popular game Doom was initially released under a non-commercial (and hence not free/open) license called the Doom Source License (DSL). You can find details and the full text here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_Source_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_Source_License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license, apart from restricting commercial use, granted a lot of other permissions, including distributing modified versions, so it enabled a lot of source ports by hobbyists. These greatly contributed to the longevity of Doom and arguably improved the commercial value of the Doom franchise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, the Doom engine was released under GPL also, a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some popular source ports are still under DSL and continues to be a trap: I've personally witnessed a few hobbyists who built games under these source ports, planning to sell their work but later discovering that many months worth of work was wasted because of the DSL. The fact that Doom is also available under GPL contributed to this confusion. DSL is GPL-incompatible so converting from one to another is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example shows a few possible dangers of releasing your project under a restrictive license first, then a less restrictive one later: if the more restrictive version persists, it can cause confusion to your project later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-09-25T02:46:43.897" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1866" CreationDate="2015-09-25T16:26:54.737" Score="6" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused about choosing a license for my project. I have read some resources like &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project is a mobile application for Android. Now, it's already on public repository. Details of technology (software or plug-in) I used on this project are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mobile application and Front-end framework are under MIT License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugins under various licenses, MIT License, Apache 2.0 License, and GPL v3 License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been thinking that GPL v3 license will fit my project because, as far as I know, we can't put my project under another license if we used GPL v3 licensed plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it very much. I just used the technologies above to support my project, I don't modify it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2316" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2015-09-25T22:31:18.853" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:39:35.350" Title="Which license should I use when my project uses plugins under various licenses?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1865" CreationDate="2015-09-25T19:57:28.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL Compatible Licenses List&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, if your project does not depend on GPL code to work, then you can use whatever license you choose. Note that plugins are not (or should not) be considered as dependencies of your project to work, as plugins add or modify functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your core dependencies are already MIT, then go MIT and add a COPY file stating which plugins and what licenses each use only to inform others what code is covered under which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;After re-reading the question, it seems like said plugins are not plugins for the resulting project, but are needed by the project to work instead. In which case yes, you are bound to make your project GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt; yoy will find various texts which might help you understand better how GPL works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2015-09-27T17:39:35.350" LastActivityDate="2015-09-27T17:39:35.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2015-09-26T17:18:14.927" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  This should not be regarded as legal advice.  If you require legal advice, I recommend you seek the counsel of a bar certified attorney, or equivalent licensed professional for whatever jurisdiction you call home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The short version of the below is that I believe at least fifty percent of Free Radical's answer is mistaken or imprecise, and the COIL fits more closely with the PD/MIT/BSD group than any of the other licenses in that list, apart from the fact the COIL comes with a patent clause protecting recipients from patent litigation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by both MSalters and Wolftune, it appears that Free Radical has made some errors of interpretation.  The COIL does indeed contain the language &amp;quot;subject to these conditions&amp;quot;, and does indeed provide for sublicensing.  Free Radical's explanation seems self-contradictory on the point of conditional licensing, in fact, where it says abiding by the license terms is not a precondition for the grant of license, just after saying that the license applies &amp;quot;provided that the user retains applicable copyright or other legal privilege notices, these conditions, and the following license terms and disclaimer.&amp;quot;  In my estimation, the &amp;quot;covenant&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;condition&amp;quot; complaint raised by Free Radical should concern you exactly as much as it does for the MIT/X11 License or the Simplified BSD License (which is to say: probably not at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern Free Radical shows for license &amp;quot;enforcement&amp;quot; is largely inapplicable, because the license is (apart from requirement for copyright and license notice requirements) composed entirely of permissions, which requires no enforcement, as Wolftune pointed out.  I further agree with Wolftune's assessment of how to classify &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;weak&amp;quot; patent terms in the context of granting permissions/license to recipients, and with MSalters' assessment in the context of the kinds of guarantees for the recipients of the licensed work.  While I have no particular objection to a patent termination clause strictly as an anti-aggression provision, I also do not think that the lack of such a thing particularly devalues the patent clause itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding GPL compatibility, it is worth mentioning that the Apache License 2.0 (AL2) is incompatible with every version of the GPL except GPLv3, and Apache License 1.0 is incompatible with all versions of GPL.  In addition, AL2 and AL1 are mutually incompatible.  Meanwhile, as Wolftune points out, COIL should not in fact be incompatible with any version of the GPL for a number of reasons, including the fact that it does not contain copyleft provisions (that is, copyright license terms affecting any parts of the work other than the parts explicitly covered by the COIL itself).  Free Radical's primary claim for license incompatibility seems to center around patent conditions, but GPL incompatibility on that, I think, would have to involve the GPL's requirement that other licenses combined with it cannot be more restrictive than the GPL, and the terms of the COIL are in every way more &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AL2 has additional problems, outside of this discussion's subject matter, that are worth investigating before you adopt it for any project.  While it is far from an authoritative resource, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wikivs.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;WikiVS&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WikiVS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; offers some comparison in its Apache License vs COIL article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the above, the COIL is also more generally applicable than the other licenses in the original question's attendant diagram, as the rest of them are software-specific, while the COIL refrains from tying itself specifically to software while still covering the categories of conditions applied to software by the other licenses, making combination of works covered under the terms of the COIL with other, non-software works (including documentation, artwork, et cetera -- issues of some concern to game development I would imagine) more predictably addressed by those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how you interpret that diagram in relation to patent clauses in your software copyright licenses, I think COIL should fit in there either between public domain and the MIT/X11 License, or between &amp;quot;BSD-new&amp;quot; (also known as Revised BSD License or 3-Clause BSD License) and the rest of the world below and to the right of it (including AL2, MPL, and various *GPL options).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I disagree quite a bit with Free Radical's assertions that COIL &amp;quot;creates legal uncertainty&amp;quot; (a statement made without meaningful support) and &amp;quot;creates license proliferation for no good reason&amp;quot; (there are very good reasons for the existence of the COIL, such as offering a &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; copyfree license with a patent clause; AL2 is not copyfree, is not nearly as permissive as some people think, and comes with some problematic clauses unrelated to the subject matter directly addressed in this discussion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2021 EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Version 1.0 of the COIL (abbreviated COIL-1.0 in the SPDX license database) has been assessed by a lawyer and fits the picture painted in these comments, except that it contradicts what Free Radical said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2792" LastEditorUserId="2792" LastEditDate="2021-11-29T06:48:30.020" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T06:48:30.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1861" CreationDate="2015-09-28T09:44:29.953" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends - on which specific license you're using, exactly how they're using your code, and exactly how they are branding or naming their software product (versus the name of your software product).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark law in most countries is subtly different than copyright or license law, in that trademarks are primarily how end users perceive the name of brand of a product and what organization they believe is providing that product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 only slightly addresses trademarks, so the license itself doesn't tell the whole story.  But typically the copying and redistribution rights that GPL and other open source licenses do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily grant any trademark rights to other users.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary purpose of open source licenses is to allow others to use your code, even to give away or sell software products based partly or completely on your code.  So it's likely OK if they are selling a new copy of your app - as long as they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; using the same brand or name for the app as you are.  It's also typically OK for them to take your whole set of source code, change the name, and build effectively the whole software product to sell.  As long as they are otherwise complying with the license (keeping the GPL and copyright notices in there, etc.), that's OK legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is almost certainly not OK is if they are using the same name (Fibox) or a very similar name to what your project is named for it's downloads.  The name of a software prodcut that you release &lt;em&gt;to the public&lt;/em&gt; is a trademark, even if you don't register it.  Even when using an open source license, you typically do have rights to prevent others from using the name/logo you used for your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source foundations have trademark policies that make this clear: it's fine to re-use our code, but you can't reuse our name/logo/brand.  See Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines&quot;&gt;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2015-09-28T09:44:29.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1873" CreationDate="2015-09-28T15:35:25.053" Score="8" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, a C repository built upon the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from a (say) JavaScript project - is it a derivative work based on the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clear things up little bit, i'd give a more detailed example;&#xA;Imagine an open source compiler written in JavaScript implements in its code base a high quality code optimization algorithm its authors have discover'd; my question is, can other works, no matter open source or not, incorporate the algorithms in their own code (which might not have been written in the same language as the code whose ideas it is using) and still not be consider'd &quot;derivatives&quot; (partially at least) of the oiginal work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T17:58:55.273" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T17:58:55.273" Title="Is a derivative work necessarily written in same language as the one it derives from?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1871" CreationDate="2015-09-29T06:35:28.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Algorthms and ideas are not elligible for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as it hasn't been patented you can create your own implementation without worrying about copyright (just make sure you copy the algorithm not the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not sure, contact a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastActivityDate="2015-09-29T06:35:28.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-09-30T01:31:41.040" Score="15" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been developing an API internally with a few friends, and hope to expand it and make it open to the broader public. I've highlighted a lot of background in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1756/is-it-appropriate-for-me-to-have-multiple-project-maintainers-in-this-project&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but to recap, it's a smaller project that has mostly been intended for educational use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're going fairly well, found a name for it (Spoiler! It's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ca/search?q=Snowdrop%20flower&amp;amp;client=safari&amp;amp;rls=en&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=912&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI_dzwlY-byAIVwT0-Ch0UAwov#tbm=isch&amp;amp;q=Snowdrop%20flower%20in%20snow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Snowdrop&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/a&gt;) and are quite impressed with the way we're going. In preparation for going public, we've been looking around, wondering if we should get a license. To give us more control on the project, we've thought about doing contributor agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, we came here. Found Harmony Agreements, but found one thing in common with many agreements: that they all need to be physically signed. Of course, this becomes a hassle: we scare off people who may want to contribute, and for those who inexperienced with open source, it becomes a hassle for them as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our combined ignorance in both knowledge and experience makes us reluctant to go out and explore (even just a little bit). To stop anything from happening to us, and to not have to go through any attribution issue or random stuff with contributors, we just figured that we would just making any contributions our own - assigning any copyright to ourselves, which is basically the equivalent of a Copyright Assignment Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're somewhat confused by this, and used an analogy between websites and the Terms of Use. Loading a webpage normally implies automatic acceptance of the Terms and Use of that webpage. Why can't any contribution imply that the copyright is assigned to us (we can place a sort of &lt;code&gt;contributing&lt;/code&gt; file, or a section in the Wiki or Website as a part of the organization or the repository)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course, the most important question here is, should we even bother in this? Are there even contributor agreements that &quot;follow&quot; the analogy that I noted above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T09:40:46.267" Title="Must contributor agreements be physically signed?" Tags="|contributor|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1884" CreationDate="2015-09-30T15:13:33.867" Score="8" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to move from MIT license to a new one, with this goals to reach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave the project free to use for individuals and small open source companies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let commercial companies pay some money for using my software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I have some questions about this plan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What license type should I choose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of monetization strategy for commercial use should I choose? One time for company with unlimited use? Each time company uses software in its projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will the license have power only for new versions of the software? Or for the old versions too?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2820" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T19:45:29.563" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T19:55:59.680" Title="Move from MIT license to a new one" Tags="|license-recommendation|relicensing|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1883" CreationDate="2015-09-30T20:09:42.557" Score="23" ViewCount="4160" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fellow Drupal developer is suggesting that we use themes from a collection of &quot;Premium&quot; paid Drupal themes downloaded from a torrent site on a shared project. It appears that most or all of these themes are derived from GPL-licensed Drupal themes such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/zen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zen&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/framework&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Framework&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since these 'pirated' themes are derived from GPL software, are they legal for use?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="946" LastEditorUserId="946" LastEditDate="2015-10-10T09:18:30.090" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T07:59:21.570" Title="Are pirated GPL-derived &quot;premium themes&quot; legal?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-09-30T20:54:31.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It all depends how the &quot;pirates&quot; got hold of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those derived themes are GPL. Whether their authors say so or not, the GPL license on the parent theme requires that derivative works are also licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being GPL software, the authors of those derived themes are required to reasonably provide the source for their work. If the pirates found the source, and compiled the theme on their own (or whatever the theme-making equivalent is - I don't Drupal), then that's legal and they're not actually pirates at all. They can then provide their own copies for free download. If you use those copies, &lt;strong&gt;that's legal&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, the pirates somehow &lt;em&gt;stole&lt;/em&gt; the theme - perhaps they figured out a way to bypass the paywall for the original download - then it gets messy. Technically, they can't have that software (not because the GPL licensing forbids them, but because other laws do), and thus they can't provide it to anyone else. In practice, though, there's no way to actually prove whether they stole or self-compiled the software (at least not without getting the theme's host involved to see the logs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be OK. If you use them, you can always claim ignorance: if you say that you thought the pirated copy was legitimately generated from source, then you have a reasonable window to cease violating the copyright that was never licensed to you without losing your right to a license. Which is an interesting concept to make sense of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T20:54:31.777" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1874" CreationDate="2015-09-30T22:40:27.493" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that by accessing source code you agreeing to the terms of use but not of contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding simply contributing to a project does not cause you to agree to the contributor agreement. However, it is my understanding that you could get them to add their name to the bottom of a license file and that can work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, a digital signature can be legally binding (Public Law 106-229, Public Law 105-277). However, to be safe you may want to have contributors electronically sign it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Before acting upon legal information found online consult a certified practitioner of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2594" LastEditorDisplayName="user2594" LastEditDate="2015-09-30T22:53:00.703" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T22:53:00.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-09-30T22:52:38.093" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a theme is GPL licensed, then you are indeed free to use it. The GPL license state that even if you receive the software from someone who is in breach of the GPL license, you can still use the software under the GPL license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to be careful though with redistribution: If you don't have the source code, and you don't know a site that distributes the theme legally, then you can't meet the GPL conditions on redistribution, so you may not redistribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the theme was created by modifying a GPL licensed theme, then someone else owns the copyright to those modifications. And you can't just take these modifications. That person &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; distribute under the GPL license, but nobody can force them to do so. Say I took a GPL licensed theme, modified it (with no intent to ever distribute it), and a thief copied it. You wouldn't have the right to use that theme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW. &quot;Claim ignorance&quot; is a bad idea. If you are ignorant of the copyright ownership of some software then you can't use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2015-09-30T22:52:38.093" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-01T03:37:39.283" Score="24" ViewCount="9602" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences#Apache_License_2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 patent clause&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that serve to protect? As Apache 2.0 isn't a copyleft license, I can license your code and re-distribute it as a proprietary patent-encumbered product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it to ensure that the original author is giving up his patent rights? Then why not put it outside the license and let the license be GPL2 compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2823" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T22:31:46.670" Title="Against what does the Apache 2.0 patent clause protect?" Tags="|patents|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1874" CreationDate="2015-10-01T06:02:31.403" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two separate questions here: &lt;em&gt;must Copyright Assignment Agreements be physically signed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;if not, will an implicit agreement suffice&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, in jurisdictions with the legal framework for recognising digital signatures - which is at least the US and EU - there appears to be nothing peculiar to a CAA that requires physical paper and physical signatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, whether an implicit licence (&quot;&lt;em&gt;by pressing the &lt;strong&gt;register contributor&lt;/strong&gt; button below, you understand and accept that you will be bound by...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) or a click-through licence (check box plus &quot;&lt;em&gt;I understand that I am bound by the project's linked terms, and that I am entering into the CAA&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) is able to substitute for an explicit version is a more open question.  Different jurisdictions give different weights to such licences; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; holds that in the US&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Few cases have considered the validity of clickwrap licenses. Still,&#xA;  in the cases that have challenged their validity, the terms of the&#xA;  contract have usually been upheld&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/jilt/1998_2/robertson/&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; in JILT noted that at the time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The doctrine of privity in English law provides that contracts are&#xA;  binding only on those party to them ...[I]t could be&#xA;  argued that the shrink-wrap licence would be unenforceable by English&#xA;  law because there is no consideration from the purchaser to the&#xA;  software company. The licence then becomes an unenforceable set of&#xA;  guidelines ... To date, no English court has addressed the question of&#xA;  the validity of shrink-wrap licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whilst merrily noting that in Scotland, the Court of Session has held that they are valid (though in an interesting way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were my project, I'd insist that all contributors start by supplying a GPG key, and requiring that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; their substantive contributions (providing &lt;code&gt;ssh&lt;/code&gt; keys for source access, commit messages, &lt;strong&gt;and of course the signing of an explicit CAA&lt;/strong&gt;) had to be done under that key.  In other words, the physicality of the CAA doesn't worry me, but it's explicitness does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am neither a lawyer nor the founder of a software project, and until someone who's both comes by, I don't think you can expect a great answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T09:40:46.267" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T09:40:46.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-10-01T08:56:35.217" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to be 100% clean (and you usually do in a commercial project), you cannot use pirated content on your site. Your defense is based on the assumptions that the authors of Premium themes (a) violated the GPL licence of the original content and (b) will be willing to redistribute their work under GPL licence if they're forced to. Both assumptions may not be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) - it is perfectly legal for the authors of the original themes to licence their work under GPL free of charge &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; also licence the very same work to a third party for a fee. Granted, a GPL violation is much more probable, but it's a guess, not a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) - even once the GPL violation will be proved for those Premium themes, there's no guarantee the premium content will be automatically licensed under GPL terms. For example, authors of the premium themes can settle to pay copyright damages to original authors, refrain from further distribution, then sue you for unauthorized use of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether GPL applies (and to what) also depends on the nature of modifications. Suppose the authors of Premium themes tweaked the JavaScript of the drop-down menu and added custom icons. If they now distribute this theme, they have to release their JavaScript tweaks under GPL, but nothing forces them to put their icons under GPL, and without an explicit license from their side you have no rights to reuse those icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T07:59:21.570" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T07:59:21.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1876" CreationDate="2015-10-01T09:01:58.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are looking for a license which forces some people to pay you but not others, you aren't looking for an open source license. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means we can not help you to find a license which does this, because that would be off-topic on this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there might be a way to reach the goal you want while still keeping the project open source: &lt;strong&gt;dual licensing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a business model used by many open source companies. Offer the software under two different licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gratis under a copyleft license like the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For money under a proprietary license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, both license models are available to anyone. But the commercial deal should include some additional perks which are important for large companies but secondary for private people and small businesses, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A support contract&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A warranty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additional components which are not GPL and help to integrate the software in a business IT infrastructure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permission to use the software in closed-source applications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact details of the deal (like pricing structure and whether to charge by use, by user, by cpu or whatever) are a business decision we can not really help you with unless we know your product and your market. Look at your potential customers and ask yourself what kind of deal would be acceptable when you were in their shoes. Also look at competing products and try to offer a slightly better deal than them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your question about older versions: The older versions are out there under the MIT license. The MIT license has no revocation clause. That means the old versions stay out there under MIT and can still be changed and redistributed. There is not much you can do about it. But you will have a great competitive advantage against them: MIT licensed code can be integrated into GPL projects, but not the other way around. That means when anyone adds any new features or bugfixes to the old MIT version, you can take them and integrate them into the GPL version. But the GPL does not allow the opposite, so they can not integrate your updates into their version (unless they also switch to the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T09:20:20.293" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-10-01T09:27:56.747" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key here is relicensing. You absolutely can incorporate BSD code to a GPL project as long as you comply with the license (giving credit where credit is due), but &lt;em&gt;under no circumstance can you arbitrarily relicense it without the permission of the original copyright holder&lt;/em&gt; like Philipp here is saying. Not only would that be illegal, it most definitely would make you a bit of a knob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The GPL&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ: What does it mean to be GPL Compatible&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It means that the other license and the GNU GPL are compatible; you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;BSD-style Licenses&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking many (perhaps even most) BSD-style licenses are GPL-compatible, thus they may be combined in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They may not be licensed the other way around! &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original 4-clause BSD license is not GPL-compatible due to a restriction about advertising, but I don't think many people actually use the original license. See more in the Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD License&lt;/a&gt; entry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Combining code does not affect their respective license statuses; all this means that BSD-code can be added to GPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Relicensing Without Permission&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should refer to your local copyright law. IANAL, but I would imagine that in most jurisdictions only the copyright-holder (and those authorized by said holder) can decide the conditions their work is distributed under. One does not &lt;strong&gt;own&lt;/strong&gt; code made by someone else even if they obtained the code legally free. While licensing code under BSD gives relatively free hands for public to do what they please with the code itself, it does not relinquish copyright to the code--quite the opposite in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2828" LastEditorUserId="4906" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T05:41:23.887" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T05:41:23.887" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1914" CreationDate="2015-10-01T13:49:21.990" Score="13" ViewCount="1169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what constitutes the issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell#Agreement_with_Microsoft&quot;&gt;Microsoft-Novell agreement&lt;/a&gt;, and why is it so important that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Version_3&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; has a special clause to address such agreements in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I understood that Microsoft is paying Novell in exchange for a joint patent agreement on Office products. Software patents are indeed evil, but I fail to see what's so special in this case. Novell also agreed to improve interoperability with MS Office by including OpenXML/ODF translator in OpenOffice, which seems perfectly normal - many OSS projects are sponsored by corporations, and sponsors naturally have a say in what features get implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't understand how these issues (if I correctly understood what the issues are) are addressed by this GPLv3 clause quoted by Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this &quot;discriminatory patent license&quot; and who will receive it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T13:58:55.410" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T04:18:20.047" Title="What exactly is the issue in Microsoft-Novell agreement?" Tags="|law|gpl-3|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:04:41.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, you have no license to use, modify or redistribute the software.  Any copyright holder is able to sue you for breach of copyright.  Where the software is 100% under the GPL, you have the implied license from the original copyright holder (I think the GPLv3 makes this explicit while GPLv2 relies more on sanity of the courts) to use, modify, and redistribute under the conditions of the GPL (which may be restricted if you are unable to redistribute including the corresponding source code because you never got it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case the qualification was &quot;derived from GPL-licensed themes&quot; so this implied that there are other copyright holders involved, and those may choose to sue you for redistributing without license.  They may or may not themselves have &quot;dirty hands&quot;: if they never intended to redistribute the modified themes but only wanted to use them internally but they got misappropriated by people hacking into their systems, they may perfectly well have obeyed the GPL to the letter but never wanted their own modifications to become public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, indeed, they might successfully sue you for breach of copyright and get a preliminary injunction ordering you to cease redistribution and/or use.  They might alternatively demand that you pay them for a license though that might end somewhat self-defeating as they would be confined to using the GPL.  So once you paid for a single license, you'd be free to redistribute an arbitrary number of copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2834" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T15:04:41.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:23:50.513" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can legally relicense under conditions compatible with the original license (meaning most forms of the BSD license will allow relicensing under the GPL).  It just carries very little meaning for an unchanged source since only one of the actual copyright holders has standing to &lt;em&gt;enforce&lt;/em&gt; the license.  So tell Theo de Raadt that you relicensed under the GPL some program copyrighted by him (in accordance to what the BSD licensing allowed you) and the recipient went ahead and ignored your relicensing, and can he please sue this recipient over breaking the relicensing you did in accordance with what Theo's license allowed you to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck with that.  Most people license under BSD-like licenses exactly because they don't want to bother with suing people.  So you better have some copyrights of your own in the software in question or your relicensing will mostly be meaningless even if there are no other copies available from other sources anymore: it would require entirely unusual circumstances to interest the copyright holders in enforcing your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2836" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T15:23:50.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1891" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:24:40.810" Score="56" ViewCount="5140" Body="&lt;p&gt;At work, we use a version of GCC provided by a vendor of a proprietary OS. The vendor has modified gcc so that it will only run if it successfully acquires one of a limited number of licenses we've purchased from our license server. This seems very much not in the spirit of free software, and it's very annoying, but is it permitted under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming it is, shouldn't I also be able to request the modified source code from the vendor, and then make a new gcc executable without the obnoxious license check? Or could that be a terrible idea for legal reasons I'm ignorant of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2837" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-01T20:43:18.727" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T15:40:20.497" Title="Is requiring a license a violation of the GPL? Can I get around it?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1881" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:25:47.673" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, this is designed to protect against using the patent system to circumvent the licence terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first clause means that if I publish anything under this licence, the users are assured that I will not sue them for breach of my patents, as an implicit licence on these is included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second clause revokes that right in case someone creates a derived work that is covered by one of their patents, and then proceeds to litigate against their users, effectively adding a fee on the use of open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(non-lawyer interpretation) It would not strictly be necessary to add the second clause, as derived works would also include the implicit grant of all related patent licences. However, in practice end users tend to cave and pay up in this case, and this clause allows upstream patent holders who might have larger coffers to enter the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T15:25:47.673" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-01T15:39:56.703" Score="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be able to request the complete corresponding modified source code to the complete application from your vendor under the GPL without additional costs in excess of the media.  If he refuses, you can contact the FSF as the copyright holder to GCC and tell them your problems with that vendor: they are the only ones who can sue for compliance if the vendor cannot be convinced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the vendor would rather prefer to stop distributing GCC with a license manager compiled in rather than distributing the source code of their license manager library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version of GCC they distribute is most likely already one distributed under GPLv3.  In that case you can alternatively ask for universal keys making this copy run.  At least that's my reading of the GPLv3 but the respective sections give me a headache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2838" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T15:39:56.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-01T20:34:06.253" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL only affects the source code of the project, &lt;em&gt;not the binaries that are distributed&lt;/em&gt;. The strong copyleft clause of the GPL affects the source code, and forces that any derivative works are also licensed under the GPL, and that the source code &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they do this? Yes, they can. As long as they respect the terms of the license, then they can do anything they want, including selling it, modifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Assuming it is, shouldn't I also be able to request the modified source code from the vendor, and then make a new gcc executable without the obnoxious license check? Or could that be a terrible idea for legal reasons I'm ignorant of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can request the modified source code, and &lt;em&gt;they will be legally obligated to provide you with that&lt;/em&gt;. Otherwise, they will be breaking the terms of the GPL license. Assuming that, you as well, follow the terms and conditions of the GPL, this is legally okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-10-01T20:34:06.253" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1917" CreationDate="2015-10-01T22:56:36.503" Score="13" ViewCount="967" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the copyright status of the source code of “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure&quot;&gt;Adventure&lt;/a&gt;” (also known as Colossal Cave Adventure)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a good record today of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html&quot;&gt;the history of Adventure&lt;/a&gt;. Specifically: The 1975–1976 Crowther and Woods &lt;a href=&quot;http://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-source-code/&quot;&gt;“350-point version” for PDP-10 Fortran&lt;/a&gt; is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the copyright status of this work? Not just who holds the copyright, but: &lt;strong&gt;What license do recipients effectively have in the work&lt;/strong&gt;? If I derive a work directly from that one, and release the result under e.g. “GNU GPL version 3 or later”, am I violating copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T08:26:31.637" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T17:25:48.843" Title="What is the copyright status of Colossal Cave Adventure?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1927" CreationDate="2015-10-02T09:26:43.457" Score="9" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is an interesting case: A company provides a free (MPL-licensed) library (called &lt;a href=&quot;http://jointjs.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;JointJS&lt;/a&gt;), and furthermore a number of proprietary extensions (called &lt;a href=&quot;http://jointjs.com/rappid/tour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rappid&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On their web server they ship a file that combines code from both parts of the library at &lt;a href=&quot;http://jointjs.com/js/joint.all.min.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://jointjs.com/js/joint.all.min.js&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/nomeata/8becad811bc018ab3bee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gist for historical reference&lt;/a&gt;), as it is quite common for JavaScript libraries. But note that this file contains only a copyright or license statement for the free JointJS part (and a few other free licenses for third-party tools). So the structure of the file is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*! JointJS v0.9.3 - JavaScript diagramming library  2015-06-26 &#xA;&#xA;&#xA;This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public&#xA;License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this&#xA;file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.&#xA; */&#xA;[Similar license header for first third-party library]&#xA;[first third party library]&#xA;[Similar license header for second third-party library]&#xA;[second third party library]&#xA;[JointJS code (likely intended to be released under the MPL]&#xA;[rappid code (when separately distributed, not released under the MPL]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So assuming I were pointed to that file only (as you are now), there is no way of knowing that parts of that code are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; intended to be licensed under the MPL license as stated. And given that fact that the actual copyright owner did that, does this imply that all parts of that file can now be used under the terms of the JointJS part itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2852" LastEditorUserId="2852" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T08:57:37.187" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T23:01:36.213" Title="Are ambiguous JavaScript concatenations by the copyright owner legally significant" Tags="|mit|license-notice|release|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="532" CreationDate="2015-10-02T16:29:51.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, a computer program whose copyright expires enters the public domain, which is largely equivalent to an all-permissive free software license without attribution, such as the WTFPL. But in practice, copyright in a computer program created since &quot;free software&quot; became a thing is unlikely to ever expire in most of the industrialized world, for reasons quite unrelated to computer programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever copyright in works published in the mid-1920s is due to expire in the United States, two organizations* lobby for a retrospective copyright term extension in an industrialized jurisdiction not subject to a rule analogous to &quot;for limited Times&quot; rule of the U.S. Constitution. Then they lobby for &quot;harmonization&quot; bills in other countries. This most recently happened in the 1990s with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive&quot;&gt;Copyright Duration Directive of 1993&lt;/a&gt; in the European Union, followed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act&quot;&gt;Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998&lt;/a&gt; in the United States. The music and film industry associations of America then proceed to push the newly &quot;harmonized&quot; term to the rest of the world through the U.S. Trade Representative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But what about copyrights in free software that have already expired?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No copyright in a computer program published after the GNU Manifesto has expired. In fact, the vast majority of works by anyone who was alive to see ENIAC run are still under copyright. (The largest exception includes U.S. works published prior to 1964 whose copyright was not renewed in the 28th year.) This leaves pretty much Ada Lovelace's programs for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* These organizations are The Walt Disney Company and Gershwin Enterprises.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastActivityDate="2015-10-02T16:29:51.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1898" CreationDate="2015-10-02T17:37:39.530" Score="8" ViewCount="1031" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any legal constraint saying that a commercial software must quote the open source libraries and public domain libraries regardless of the open source license type?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's say I develop a web application based on java servlet and I include (and use without modifications) a library licensed under Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I will sell my .war file that includes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to include a text file saying I am using it? What would/could happen if I don't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2861" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T15:15:30.327" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T15:15:30.327" Title="Commercial software using open source library: legal notice" Tags="|law|attribution|apache-2.0|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1897" CreationDate="2015-10-02T19:29:43.047" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends upon the license, and you can find out by reading the license.  Many, such as Apache-2.0 require the license to accompany binary distributions, but some certified as Open Source don't.  Some (for example zlib, libpng) ask politely for credit.  libjpeg requires attribution, but in order to get certified as Open Source they promised not to enforce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T15:07:00.290" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T15:07:00.290" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-03T02:49:12.257" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;this seems similar to Redhat Enterprise Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redhat provides binaries for 3rd party software like GCC for which you need to get licenses (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redhat.com/en/about/licenses-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.redhat.com/en/about/licenses-us&lt;/a&gt;, in particular section 5.1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they make modifications to some of those binaries (patches that are not (yet) sent upstream. here is an example of a gcc patch: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-03/msg00247.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-03/msg00247.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they also provide the source, including their patches (which is used by others to build CentOS for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we can assume that what Redhat is doing is well vetted legally, and therefore conclude that requiring a license for binaries is permitted and that providing the source code is sufficient to follow the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Redhat is not required to publish the source to everyone, but with the cost of the license not being astronomically high, someone is bound to pay the license just to get and republish the source, so they might as well just publish it themselves.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2867" LastEditorUserId="2867" LastEditDate="2015-10-10T15:40:20.497" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T15:40:20.497" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-03T10:30:38.067" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, you have the right to get the complete source of that modified GCC. But no one can enforce your receipt of the source. The 'perpetrator' always has the legal choice to &lt;em&gt;stop distributing&lt;/em&gt;, and perhaps also pay a monetary settlement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would prefer that they were compelled to distribute the source, but&#xA;the way the law is actually interpreted does not give you any handle to enforce that. What the law may achieve is that the company is enforced not to distribute the binaries anymore and to pay royalties for what has been done already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hope is that the economic value of selling the OS (or whatever) is so high that the perpetrator will chose to comply with the GPL and distribute the source rather than go out of the business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the first person who tried to enforce the GPL in court and I failed for exactly this legal constraint. The two companies I tried to sue just stopped existing after my lawyer contacted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harald Welte later succeeded just because he was able to put economic pressure on the companies that ordered hardware from China that included GPL software, and that had to pay for hardware, but could not sell the hardware as the court disallowed to sell the hardware. They complied rather than absorb that loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T22:24:41.153" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T22:24:41.153" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-10-03T13:01:06.043" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two situations to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You receive the software from someone who received it through the GPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license itself does state this, but the GNU FAQ says it even clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLRequireAvailabilityToPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could even do so &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#BitTorrent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;via a torrent website&lt;/a&gt;. If this is the case, then it's not illegal at all! (And our society probably needs more of these legitimate uses of bittorrent so that it can't demonise the whole thing.) While they could explain that this is what they are doing in the torrent description, presumably they haven't, or else you wouldn't be asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;You receive the software from someone who did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; receive it through the GPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, someone hacks the online store, or an employee of the company releases an unpublished version of the software on their personal site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation is trickier. The GNU FAQ discusses it, but does not give a black and white answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If someone steals a CD containing a version of a GPL-covered program, does the GPL give him the right to redistribute that version?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the version has been released elsewhere, then the thief probably does have the right to make copies and redistribute them under the GPL, but if he is imprisoned for stealing the CD he may have to wait until his release before doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the version in question is unpublished and considered by a company to be its trade secret, then publishing it may be a violation of trade secret law, depending on other circumstances. The GPL does not change that. If the company tried to release its version and still treat it as a trade secret, that would violate the GPL, but if the company hasn't released this version, no such violation has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you steal something which is intended to be published under the GPL but has not yet been published, you cannot convey it yourself. Until the software (or the set of patches from an earlier version of the software) have been intentionally published by the author(s), you should not actually consider the software be GPL licensed, even if the source code says it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license cannot be used to escape other legal demands. A related situation is raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license&lt;/a&gt; itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;12. No Surrender of Others' Freedom.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the exact version of the software which was stolen can be legally acquired through other means, the FAQ above suggests that it might be legal to convey it further, but it doesn't say so with certainty. Section 9 of the license notes that you do not have to accept the license in order to receive the program. This is something which may need to be tested in court for any more certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T13:01:06.043" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-03T18:43:28.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the direct question: It is not necessarily a violation of the GPL to require a license. Let me describe a scheme which I believe would comply with the terms. I have no idea if the people you're dealing with use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create, from scratch, a replacement for the gcc command line driver. Keep in mind that the hard part of gcc is in the back-end executables. The driver is a relatively simple program.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add licensing to the replacement driver.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distribute the replacement driver, together with the normal GCC backends.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Comply with the GPL requirements to provide the source of the backends as requested.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do whatever devious trick you can think of to make it inconvenient for someone to drop in the normal GCC driver and get around your licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coupling between the proprietary front-end and the GPL backends would be via command execution, and the FSF does not call this 'linkage' and does not assert that the resulting thing would be a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not trying to answer the legal variant in this question: do the terms of the GPL preclude imposing restrictions on the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of the work? My personal, NAL, belief, is that the terms of the GPL only require the distribution of source, but I'm not qualified to opine with certainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2015-10-03T19:34:35.857" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T19:34:35.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1895" CreationDate="2015-10-03T18:54:07.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;U.S. law no longer requires the use of a copyright notice, although&#xA;  placing it on a work does confer certain benefits to the copyright&#xA;  holder. Prior law did, however, require a notice, and the use of a&#xA;  notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license places no restrictions on the license of derived works. So, if someone starts with a blob of MIT-license javascript, and adds in a heap of proprietary code, they can claim copyright on the derived result, and offer it under restrictive terms. So, you really can't conclude anything from the information you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-10-03T18:54:07.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T01:28:12.300" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before publishing my reusable software source code to some online repository, I have some license requirements as follows. I need to know whether any existing free or open software source license agreement can be used or I need to create a custom license agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my requirements,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People should be able to download, modify, reuse my code in their application / program with / without any modifications for both commercial &amp;amp; non-commercial purpose , with following restrictions applied (this clause is for use of my code in their application e.g. Google using open-source WebKit in chrome, however chrome is not open-source. Or OS X using darwin open-source kernel, however its OS is not entirely open source):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) They should strictly use my code within their application in private domain e.g. restricted to a specific group of people in a project /company. (Let me clarify it more, I think, I have written this in wrong way. what I meant by this is, if they just want to use my code within their application &amp;amp; release / sell the application as whole to entire public (e.g. Google releasing chrome with webkit) it's use is not restricted to group of people. On other side, if they have modified my original code (e.g webkit modified / forked), however they do not want to publish it to general public, then they should keep the modification / bug fixes with themselves or within their organisation known to specific group of people.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) it should include, apply &amp;amp; obey my original license agreement. (what I meant is to include this license, when packaging my original code / modified or forked code. e.g. chrome includes license of webkit / blink (forked webkit) in their credits section.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) The free of charge code doesn't apply in private domain. (let me explain what I mean by this with an e.g. Suppose if Google is working on gmail server project &amp;amp; they use free &amp;amp; open-source reusable component in gmail project. Now, they employ / pay a person who modifies the Node.JS to well work well with gmail, who finally privately gives / in-directly sells unnamed forked Node.JS to Google for their Gmail server product. Thus in this case Google is not re-distributing Node.JS to public, its just used within their organisation &amp;amp; internally within their product &amp;amp; they may have pay someone to develop this forked Node.JS)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, if they want to re-publish my code, either in compiled or un-compiled form (as if it's their own code) on some other public repository / website or branch within my repository itself for re-use, then following restrictions should apply (e.g Google releasing forked Webkit i.e. Blink for public use):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) it should include, apply &amp;amp; obey my original license agreement. (what I meant is to include this license, when packaging my original code / modified or forked code. e.g. chrome includes license of webkit / blink (forked webkit) in their credits section.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;b) They must publish the modified source code, if the code (either in compiled or un-compiled form) is intended for re-usable or generic component.  in this case the code should be free of any charge. (e.g. Google releasing forked webkit i.e. Blink for re-use in public; &amp;amp; should be free of any charge.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c) The modified source is not necessary to publish, only when the code is in compiled form and is hosted as part of application or program, that is not intended for reusable software components. in case as code itself is not sold, rather it is part of application; the free of charge code doesn't apply here. (it is same thing I meant in clause 1c. please suggest if clause 1c is also obvious or does needs to be specifically mentioned in the license?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;d) The code must have some modifications done apart from just naming conventions / comments / format changes. (reason, I wanted to include this as one the clauses is, because someone might take my code, change some variable names, re-distribute &amp;amp; take unnecessary credit. instead, I would like, if people report any bugs or also necessary modifications, may it be minor variable change or major enhancement at my code repository)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;e) &lt;strike&gt;People cannot publish the modified code, with same title / heading as original. E.g. if original code is published with name / title / heading, say 'ABC Common Components' they should give either entirely different name  or prefix with some words, say 'ABC Common Components extensions'. The new title must not contain version as prefix say, ABC Common Components V2'  or …Version 2 or just …2.&lt;/strike&gt; (ok, I see from responses, that I need to use a trademark to protect my software name being reused. then if that's the solution, I can remove this clause too)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;f) &lt;strike&gt;People should not force me to incorporate their modification to my original published code trunk / branch, however they can suggest / request modifications and report bugs to my original published code.&lt;/strike&gt; (after, all your responses, it seems that, I don't need to worry about it as it's something obvious, thus we can safely remove this clause.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2877" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T14:57:01.617" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T14:57:01.617" Title="Need free / open source software licences for specific requirements" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2015-10-05T02:16:46.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T02:35:41.980" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's something I want to get started on and be able to contribute but I don't even know how or where to start. Many employers and recruiters ask if I have any experience with them, I just don't know where to start&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2878" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T02:35:41.980" Title="What's the best way to get started on open source projects" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-04T07:44:57.193" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2015-10-04T15:49:55.280" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not lock you into a provider.  You are free to hire another provider to maintain the open source version for you.  So the only &quot;lockin&quot; is the fact that whatever you paid the first vendor is sunk, and maybe the second vendor won't be allowed access to the first vendor's modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first vendor didn't modify the code, or if they sent their mods back upstream, or incorporated their mods into the open source version, this is not a problem for you, because under these conditions any subsequent support vendor would have access to code that is identical to your version of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending upon the license under which you accepted the supported code, the supported, modified version might belong to the first vendor, so the second vendor might not be allowed access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the supported, modified version belongs to you as a &quot;work for hire&quot; then you would be able to transfer it to your new vendor, or send it back upstream to bring the open source code back into sync with your private version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all depends upon what the license says; your own lawyer will have to interpret it for you, and hopefully negotiate the license terms for you before you accept them.  I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T15:49:55.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1727" CreationDate="2015-10-04T18:55:28.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I think you could treat your game as a series of slideshows (one slideshow per question), and follow the alternative rule that the answer by @congusbongus quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;• Alternatively, you can include a ‘credits’ slide at the end of the&#xA;  show, that lists all the materials used and their attribution details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider each Question and the following 'correct' or 'incorrect' screen to be a 2-frame slideshow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the &quot;alternative&quot; method, but with a separate 'credits' slide for each question, which could be the same slide where the 'correct' or 'incorrect' evaluation appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your answer was [ ] correct [X] incorrect&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The correct answer is &quot;City, State/Province, Country&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Image title&quot; (c)Photographer, CC-BY, www.hostname.tld&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T20:17:10.820" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T20:17:10.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-04T21:45:09.483" Score="7" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a web app released under the MIT license that I am forking. If I were to still keep it under the MIT from what I understand I would change the notice to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2015 [New Author]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2013 [Original Author]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to release it under a new license where would I put the text of the new license and should I keep the text of the old one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2891" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-04T21:48:47.857" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T21:48:47.857" Title="Relicensing MIT Work" Tags="|derivative-works|attribution|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-10-07T06:40:11.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-10-04T23:55:22.590" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the software is in the public domain, it is effectively free of copyright, and you are free to release a derivative work under any license you want. If it's not, you don't have a license to publish any derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest existing code for Adventure seems to be from 1976, and a lot was added in 1977. In 1976/7, the copyright act of 1976 was not yet in effect (it went in effect in 1978), so the work is still governed by the copyright law of 1905. That copyright law required all works to be published with a copyright notice for it to be governed under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was published without a copyright notice, the 1976 and 1977 files are now in the public domain. If it was published with a copyright notice, it won't be until 2072/3 until the material enters the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For later versions of adventure up to 1989 roughly the same goes, but it also retains copyright protection if it was registered within 5 years of publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen no direct indication that the original code had a copyright notice when it was first published. However, conflicting with that narrative is the fact that The Software Toolworks payed &quot;a royalty&quot; to the original authors, which suggests that they &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; believe the work was copyright protected. One would assume they checked. On the third hand, many others, among which Microsoft, have published Adventure, and according to lore never payed anyone any royalties. On would assume &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; checked as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unclear what the exact deal was between The Software Toolworks and Crowther and Woods; whether it consisted of a transfer of copyright - if there even was eligible copyright protection - or that they licensed the work to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crowther and Woods are both still very much alive, and the best way to get certainty about the whole deal is to ask them (and, obligatory, your lawyer, which I am not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-04T23:55:22.590" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1886" CreationDate="2015-10-05T04:18:20.047" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of the links from your wikipedia link, Eben Moglen, the attorney for the Free Software Foundation that created and oversees the GPL, said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you make an agreement which requires you to pay a royalty to&#xA;  anybody for the right to distribute GPL software, you may not&#xA;  distribute it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 provides an exception so that Microsoft and Novell can distribute&#xA;the software that they licensed to each other in a discriminatory manner.&#xA;The exception only applies if the arrangement was made, or the patent license was granted, prior to 28 March 2007; this date chosen specifically to match the Microsoft/Novell agreement in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;What is this &quot;discriminatory patent license&quot; is the sentence immediately prior to the restriction that you quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A patent license is “discriminatory” if it does not include within the&#xA;  scope of its coverage, prohibits the exercise of, or is conditioned on&#xA;  the non-exercise of one or more of the rights that are specifically&#xA;  granted under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular patent license(s) is Novell's and Microsoft's agreement not to sue each other over patents in Windows/Linux/Office software that they agreed to collaborate on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;who will receive it?&quot; is contained in the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would&#xA;  receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be Microsoft and Novell, who received each other's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, so please take this as a layman's interpretation of some of the publicly available literature on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T04:18:20.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-05T09:31:00.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you confirm if the license check is done in &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; itself, and not in real compiler/linker? If you can run &lt;code&gt;cc&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ld&lt;/code&gt; and friends without restrictions, you have an easy workaround:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Write Makefiles which directly use &lt;code&gt;cc&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;ld&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Port the vanilla &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; frontend using the restricted version of &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt;, then use your fronted as a replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to make a legal claim yourself, you will most probably get the company to refund you the money you paid for the OS, but it's unlikely they will give you the source code if they don't want to. I suggest you contact FSF for advice. As copyright holders, they will have a much better stand in court than you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T09:31:00.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1889" CreationDate="2015-10-05T10:20:32.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to know if they really modified code or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GCC consists of different tools: gcc.exe, cpp.exe, cc1.exe, as.exe and ld.exe (and possibly more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies distribute an unmodified gcc.exe and cpp.exe as well as a modified as.exe and ld.exe for use with a CPU not supported by regular GCC (I know about PowerPC with VLE instruction set).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These programs can be copied freely without a license check. I've also seen source code in the &quot;official&quot; GCC repository that represents the changes made by such companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cc1.exe however is completely re-written and does not contain any GPL licensed source files. Or the company made deals with all copyright holders of GPL licensed source files they used - this would also be allowed. Only cc1.exe requires a license and only cc1.exe comes without source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such cases there is of course no issue with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2015-10-05T10:20:32.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2015-10-06T01:36:44.540" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Adventure project, distributed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software under the 2-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;, reportedly has &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure/blob/master/history.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permission from Don Woods&lt;/a&gt;, though there's nothing from Don Woods himself to allow outsiders to verify that permission is granted. No other documentation about permission from other copyright holders in the work is described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no clear grant of license from all the copyright holders of Colossal Cave Adventure. I can only assume that Open Adventure, if tested on its copyright status, would have to produce clear documentation of license from all copyright holders – documentation that is not presented anywhere I'm aware of – or to rely on an argument that the work entered the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can gather at the research on Colossal Cave Adventure's history of publication (published in Digital Humanities Quarterly as “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/9/000009.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original &quot;Adventure&quot; in Code and in Kentucky&lt;/a&gt;”):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://jerz.setonhill.edu/intfic/colossal-cave-adventure-source-code/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source work&lt;/a&gt; (Fortran and data files) available today was originally published 1974 through 1977, without copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.cornell.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cornell University Copyright Information Center&lt;/a&gt;'s resource, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States&lt;/a&gt;” (January 2015 edition), works published in the USA without copyright notice prior to 1978 are now in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The US Copyright Office publishes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/title17/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Title 17: Copyright Law of the United States&lt;/a&gt;. According to its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html#304&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;§304 “Duration of copyright: Subsisting copyrights”&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;§304 (a) (1)(A) Any copyright, in the first term of which is subsisting on January 1, 1978, shall endure for 28 years from the date it was originally secured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;followed by clauses allowing term extensions, none of which appear to have been used to extend any copyright in Colossal Cave Adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So based on those resources, I think the answer is: &lt;strong&gt;the original publication by Crowther and Woods is now in the public domain&lt;/strong&gt; in the USA, and has been since 2006. Hooray!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1913/2307&quot;&gt;Martijn's answer&lt;/a&gt; laying out many possibilities and directing me to the Cornell University resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2307" LastEditorUserId="2307" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T03:38:59.043" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T03:38:59.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1921" CreationDate="2015-10-06T07:25:55.757" Score="45" ViewCount="11135" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I'm searching for a new project to start contributing to, I often check the daily email I get from GitHub that lists the most popular repositories of the day and also the repositories starred by the people I follow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, should I star my own repositories once I create them so it would appear in the daily digest for the people following me or would that be considered as a spammy way of getting the initial traction that could sometimes make a difference between a successful project and an unsuccessful one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T23:57:18.783" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T23:57:18.783" Title="Is it socially acceptable to star your own repositories on GitHub?" Tags="|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T11:01:29.543" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any good sites offering open-source tracks for use in applications or games? I've seen many, but seem to be any good... giving links to last.fm and other sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2907" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T04:24:12.463" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T04:24:12.463" Title="Sites offering open-source sound tracks/music for use in applications?" Tags="|creative-commons|media|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-10-06T11:34:19.653" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2015-10-06T12:28:08.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if there are any rules around this but I think it is a matter of choice from the user. In SE you can star your own post, but you can't upvote your own post (question or answer). However, in Reddit a post is upvoted by default by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in my projects, I starred only those that I think worth it. Something like  &quot;Hey traveler! Look especially this one and this one!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good idea would be to check the ratio of authors liking their own project in GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2908" LastEditorUserId="2908" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T14:38:55.673" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T14:38:55.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2015-10-06T13:49:51.157" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I've used a self-star as a tiebreaker to call out better projects. If two of my projects both have &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; stars, and I think one is clearly better than the other, I'll star it so that it ranks over the other one in my profile page. This is especially important if I have many zero-star repositories, because some of them may not appear on my profile page at all (since GitHub limits the list to 5 repos). I might have a zero-star repository that I'd love people to see, but it could be buried in obscurity under a bunch of other zero-star repos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think it's reasonable to use a self-star to call out what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; believe is your best work, especially since the primary place a project's star count is relevant is in ranking your own projects on your profile page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that justification make it currently &lt;em&gt;socially acceptable&lt;/em&gt;? I certainly won't judge you; I can't really say whether anybody else will. Anecdotally, though, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stars/torvalds&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-stars appear to be good enough for Linus Torvalds&lt;/a&gt;, anyway. (At the time of this writing, he has starred exactly two repos, and they're both his.) Note, however, this may simply be an artifact of when GitHub first introduced stars and automatically converted all &quot;Watch&quot; relationships to stars. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1922/50&quot;&gt;SztupY's answer&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T19:58:05.147" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1918" CreationDate="2015-10-06T17:03:38.133" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that when the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars&quot;&gt;starring feature was introduced on GitHub&lt;/a&gt; in August 2012, they converted all of your watches to stars during the initial migration. As you are automatically added to watchers to your own repository, this meant any repository you've created prior to this change would appear as starred for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me this migration choice means that it's perfectly normal that you are starred in your own repositories, as most repositories prior to this change will actually be starred by their creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="180" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T17:03:38.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1925" CreationDate="2015-10-06T20:58:35.327" Score="10" ViewCount="677" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open-source project that I originally wanted to license under MIT, but since I'm using a GPLv3 component that I can't quite get rid of (namely, the .g4 ANTLR grammar file that I'm using to generate a lexer/parser), I've been sort-of forced to distribute my project under GPLv3 as I understand anything that &lt;em&gt;touches&lt;/em&gt; anything under GPLv3 needs to go under GPLv3 - I figured the ANTLR-generated code was a derivative of the grammar file, so the lexer/parser needs to be under GPLv3. Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm distributing the project under GPLv3. And there's a [distinct] part of the project that's under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I came across a piece of very useful code on someone's blog, a modified version of some code that was originally published under CPOL, so I figure the modified version is also under CPOL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I even &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; that code? The CPOL explicitly forbids sublicensing, so I'm a bit lost as to what to do with this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All I want is to give the original authors credit for their work - why does it have to be so complicated? /rant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="575" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T07:46:04.247" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:00:19.287" Title="Can I use CodeProject code in a GPL project?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cpol|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1895" CreationDate="2015-10-06T21:05:06.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're overthinking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license preamble clearly states that JointJS is licensed under MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not say that anything else is licensed under MPL therefore the other stuff is &quot;copyright all rights reserved&quot; as per standard copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer will hinge on weather or not a developer could reasonably think the code is part of JointJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most developers would see that comment at the top, then search for JointJS and download the latest version that hasn't got any (potentially buggy) modifications. At this point it would become clear the other stuff at the end of the file is not part of JointJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, it is not legally significant. Copyright law doesn't care about engineering details of code distribution ad the code is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be confusing certainly, but as has been proven many times if you're confused that is not a valid legal defence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no different to an OS X computer having some BSD licensed components - it does not make the whole of OS X BSD licenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="436" LastEditorUserId="436" LastEditDate="2015-10-06T21:10:34.050" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T21:10:34.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2015-10-06T21:42:14.240" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;CPOL is not an open source license according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;OSI definition&lt;/a&gt;. It has a clause which does not allow it to be used for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; purpose as mandated by the GPL or MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree not to use the Work for illegal, immoral or improper purposes, or on pages containing illegal, immoral or improper material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither the GPL or the MIT license force the user to agree to this. So by putting a CPOL work under either of these licenses, you remove this restriction against the will of the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this clause is well meant, it is incompatible with any FSF or OSI approved license. That means it can not be incorporated into an open source project without making that project un-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you can do is contact the original author and ask them if they license it to you under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T08:20:53.160" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T08:20:53.160" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T22:08:08.570" Score="20" ViewCount="914" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm really unclear on this situation and what it means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form&quot;&gt;EBNF&lt;/a&gt;-based grammar file that we use for our project. &#xA;This EBNF grammar describes rules for parsing/lexing a document (e.g. some source code for a Domain-Specific language). EBNF can be thought of as a generalisation of regular expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lexer/parser generators, such as ANTLR, YACC, and Bison, take this grammar file as input, and output source code which can perform the parsing of the language described by the grammar. We are using ANTLR, it is outputting a suite of C# classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The particular grammar file we use as input is licensed under GPLv3 and we've made modifications to it.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the resulting files &lt;strong&gt;do not require&lt;/strong&gt; the grammar file after the classes are generated. Technically, there's no need to distribute the grammar file along with the project. We could keep that private and distribute everything without it and everything works just fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until now, we've been releasing our software under GPLv3 under the assumption that our project is a derivative of this grammar file, &lt;em&gt;but is it&lt;/em&gt;? I'm wondering if we're really required to release our entire project under GPLv3. We'd much prefer to release under the MIT license. &lt;em&gt;Can we do that?&lt;/em&gt; The grammar file isn't a library, but a tool that is used in conjunction with ANTLR to generate code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we create a separate distribution/repository for the modified grammar file, then re-license our core project? (We'd still like to share our modifications to the grammar, we just don't want to continue licensing ours with a viral license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="575" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T09:10:21.370" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T15:25:32.587" Title="Is the code generated from a GPLv3 EBNF grammar a derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1895" CreationDate="2015-10-06T23:01:36.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license explicitly claims to apply to the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;. A concatenation of files is not source code by the usual definition: it is not the original file that would normally be modified, but a mechanically-constructed derivative that just happens to be somewhat human-readable. Thus the text you cite does not in fact apply to the file at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; make an argument that the inclusion of the license text is misleading, and that you believed that this file was the source code. After all, how were you to know that the file was mechanically generated? (Or even granting that it was at some point, the result might then have been misguided manually.) The onus is generally on the party that writes the contract to make it clear, so that ambiguities benefit the other party. That would only fly if you'd never read this thread, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="60" LastActivityDate="2015-10-06T23:01:36.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-10-07T01:35:29.693" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a derived work of the grammar&lt;/strong&gt;. (but not of ANTLR)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Grammar file is a description of how to parse the language, written in EBNF.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code generated by ANTLR etc is a description of how to parse the language, written in Java (etc).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code was derived from the Grammar, using ANTLR.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is thus a derived work, of the Grammar (but not of ANTLR).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make very poor sense for ANTLR to try to claim that anything made using it was a derived work. Like painting is not a derived work from a paint brush, or a letter a derived work of the word processor. I won't go into that further, (I think that further details should go in another similar question with different emphasis) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The GPL uses  the term &quot;work based on&quot; rather the derivative work, but I believe though are synonymous&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Thus derivative works must be licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider translating between two main stream programming languages.&#xA;(EBNF is essentially a programming language, as is Java.)&#xA;The translated source code is clearly a derived from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a concrete example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have some source code, written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dartlang.org&quot;&gt;Dart&lt;/a&gt; I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dart2js/&quot;&gt;dart2js&lt;/a&gt; to convert it to Javascript for execution in the browser.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oxinabox.ucc.asn.au/rpg/eegen/eegen.dart&quot;&gt;My Dart source code&lt;/a&gt;, is analogous to your Grammar file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dartlang.org/tools/dart2js/&quot;&gt;dart2js&lt;/a&gt; is analogous to ANTLR -- changing one language to another&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxinabox.ucc.asn.au/rpg/eegen/eegen.dart.js&quot;&gt;Javascript output&lt;/a&gt; which I incorporate into my overall &lt;a href=&quot;http://oxinabox.ucc.asn.au/rpg/eegen/&quot;&gt;webapp&lt;/a&gt; is the Source Code, which you incorperate into your project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I released the Dart code under the GPL, and then someone else run dart2js on it and said it was a original work; well they would be incorrect, and obviously so. (NB: I have not released the linked code under GPL or any other license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code is not a derived work of &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also the non-software examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have written a play. I producted a Play script in English, and it was translated to Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The play script, is a set of instruction on how to produce the play. How to move on stage, what to say when to say it etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English playscript is your Grammar File.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Translator is your ANTLR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Russian playscript is your Source Code produced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Russian playscript is a derived work from my English original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or  I have a music score (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_music&quot;&gt;sheet music&lt;/a&gt;) it describes a song in musical notation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have my band play the song, and I record it into a MP3.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I now have a description of the song, in MP3 form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That recording is a derived work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or, say I used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_OCR&quot;&gt;OCR tool&lt;/a&gt; to convert it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicXML&quot;&gt;MusicXML&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sheet music (score) is exactly analogous to your EBNF grammar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The OCR tool is analogous to ANTLR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MusicXML file generated is analogous to your generated class files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MusicXML was derived from the score&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking one work, and using it as the bases for another work is creating a derived work.&#xA;It doesn't matter if it looks different, it is still derived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your modified grammar would still have to be licensed under the GPL if released (it is obviously derived, as given by the words &quot;modified&quot;),&#xA;as would any code generated from it, thus your whole project would have to be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short of it is: The Grammar is under a viral license, therefore anything derived from it is under that license (otherwise what would be the point in licensing it under a license that does not allow relicensing?). Producing source code is producing a work based on the grammar (like any translation). Thus the source must be under the viral licence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(But, I'm not a lawyer and I am not your lawyer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T13:42:23.440" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T13:42:23.440" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-06T00:47:34.957" Score="2" ViewCount="701" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you fork a MIT licensed project, discard the code, and keep only the name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I wanted to piggyback on top of a popular MIT licensed project name for marketing purposes, but not use any of its code. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="duckx" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-10-07T11:00:55.073" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T11:40:19.163" Title="Can you reuse a project's name, if the project is MIT licensed?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1929" CreationDate="2015-10-07T11:40:19.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You can not. The project's name is protected by &lt;em&gt;Trademark&lt;/em&gt;, which is a separate issue entirely from Copyright. The MIT license grants you, as a consumer, certain rights that would otherwise be unavailable because of the Copyright protection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep it simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright protects the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademark protects the name. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT license affects what you can do with the code, not the name. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T11:40:19.163" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2015-10-07T12:09:26.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my humble opinion, what makes the two licenses incompatible are these two snippets from the two licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;12&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Surrender of Others' Freedom. If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the&#xA;  conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions&#xA;  of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy&#xA;  simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other&#xA;  pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at&#xA;  all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a&#xA;  royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the&#xA;  Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this&#xA;  License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CPOL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. You agree not to sell, lease, or rent any part of the Work. This&#xA;  does not restrict you from including the Work or any part of the Work&#xA;  inside a larger software distribution that itself is being sold. The&#xA;  Work by itself, though, cannot be sold, leased or rented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;f. You agree not to use the Work for illegal, immoral or improper&#xA;  purposes, or on pages containing illegal, immoral or improper&#xA;  material. The Work is subject to applicable export laws. You agree to&#xA;  comply with all such laws and regulations that may apply to the Work&#xA;  after Your receipt of the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CPOL&lt;/a&gt; license adds extra restrictions to the GPL that could be considered surrendering of others' freedoms. The GPL explicitly states that anyone with a valid license is free to sell the work for profit, while the CPOL explicitly forbids it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T12:09:26.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-10-07T12:22:37.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dug into this and found some answers in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if my program is used to develop hardware&#xA;designs, can I require that these designs must be free? (#GPLOutput)&#xA;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you&#xA;any say in the use of the output people make from their data using&#xA;your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his&#xA;own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More&#xA;generally, when a program translates its input into some other form,&#xA;the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was&#xA;generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if&#xA;substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in&#xA;your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above)&#xA;would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in&#xA;this specific case.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its&#xA;output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that&#xA;copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete&#xA;that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not&#xA;have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free programs?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?&#xA;(#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF) Yes, because the copyright on the editors and&#xA;tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any&#xA;restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical&#xA;reasons—for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its&#xA;output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered&#xA;by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the&#xA;part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits&#xA;the copyright status of the input.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs.&#xA;This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison&#xA;standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We&#xA;made the decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison&#xA;which already permitted use for non-free programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine, as it's the important part of this FAQ. Because Antlr copies large parts of the grammar file into the resulting parser classes, those resulting classes are licensed under whatever license the grammar file uses. I find it interesting that another such tool (Bison) was mentioned here and given an explicit exception. I could find no evidence of any such exception for Antlr, so any code that links to the generated parser, must be licensed as GPLv3 like the grammar file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T12:22:37.840" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1926" CreationDate="2015-10-07T15:25:32.587" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: yes, the software you distribute which builds on grammar files under copyright for which you have a GPLv3 license must also be licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your software is made up of several parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ANTLR runtime (BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original grammar files (GPLv3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rest of your software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your software contains in part a machine translation of the grammar files. The US copyright office has said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the&#xA;  product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or&#xA;  random selection without any contribution by a human author are not&#xA;  registrable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning that the generated parser is not a separate derivative work as far as copyright is concerned, it is the same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANTLR also injects large parts of its own codebase in the generated parser, and links against the ANTLR runtime. This is not much of a problem as both are under the (permissive) 3 clause BSD license, which is easy to comply with in combined or derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm not sure of, and what I believe could only be tested in court, is whether grammar files themselves would be eligible for copyright protection at all. What is copyrighted is the &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of the idea the grammar describes, but one could argue there is no originality in the expression of the grammar. This would probably also depend on the grammar file itself. It might make a lot of difference if it's just BNFR rules or if there are significant code snippets or other things that are definitely eligible for copyright in the grammar files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could certainly do is make a clean room re-implementation of the grammar files, and you're not bound by the license of the grammar files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T15:25:32.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1937" CreationDate="2015-10-07T22:25:46.360" Score="16" ViewCount="6830" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;make a new github project (not a fork).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;merge in the original repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1755&quot;&gt;In this Answer&lt;/a&gt;, I was wondering if there are any rules or guidelines when to fork a project and when to create a new one. If this turns out to be just a matter of personal taste: what are the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches that one should keep in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we are talking about open source projects, I think we can assume that either both or none of the approaches are permissible by the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T09:27:52.347" Title="Rules/Guidelines about forking a project vs. creating a new one?" Tags="|forking|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2015-10-07T23:23:22.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer that you linked to spoke specifically about seemingly &lt;em&gt;inactive&lt;/em&gt; open source projects, not necessarily those that are active. I'm going to take the perspective if this were an inactive project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer that you had linked has many useful guidelines. I personally like that answer: it provides many concrete points that you should understand when finding an inactive project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there are any rules or guidelines when to fork a project and when to create a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't really any &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; when forking an open source project. All that you really need to do is make sure that you respect the terms and conditions from the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you follow the license, you're in good hands. You won't get into any legal troubles or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about guidelines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your quoted guidelines are really just steps, to form a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; general guideline. If that's still confusing, think about baking cookies. First, you get the ingredients. Then you mix them. And then you put it into the oven. Same idea here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a new repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find an inactive project, &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; fork it. Forking on GitHub was more designed with the idea that you would submit a pull request - that is, that you would make improvements, and submit them back to the original project. Since you're not doing it, there's no need to &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; it, as you will link to the original project, and you're contributions won't be measured on GitHub. By &amp;quot;forking&amp;quot;, you give people the impression that this is for yourself, and you are intending to push it back to the original project. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; are now maintaining the project, and you have full ownership of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copy the original project into your new repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when you get all the contents from the original project, and you put them into your new project. Pretty simple, eh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How does the license affect me?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm adding this part because it will likely be helpful, and of interest to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/tags/permissive/info&quot;&gt;permissive&lt;/a&gt; license, then you don't need to worry as much. These licenses give you many freedoms for your project, including assigning the project a different license. Some notable examples include the MIT and the Apache licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/tags/copyleft/info&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; license, then you're going to have to keep your project under the original license. Some notable examples include the GNU General Public License, and the Mozilla Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-07T23:23:22.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2015-10-08T06:51:25.570" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should (github) fork when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You intend on submitting pull requests back upstream. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The maintainer doesn't like your new feature set, so you decide to add them anyway, and maintain the fork in parallel, routinely merging in changes from upstream as an alternative to the main branch. (Note that you may be required to change the name due to trademark restrictions. I'm not real clear on this.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should create a new project when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a project is abandoned. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to use the project as a starting point for some other project with a completely different goal. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When your version of the project will not be regularly merging in changes from the original, upstream, branch. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's honestly just my opinion on the matter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other important thing to note here is that both of these are technically &quot;forking&quot; the project. One just remains closer to the original project and utilizes the GitHub feature of the same name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T06:51:25.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-08T10:57:10.973" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I create my own educational license for my scholar books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking in a fork of CC BY-SA-NC + educational use. What should I have in mind before write the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These is our draft for the human-readable summary of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Share – copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adapt – remix, transform, and build upon the material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.&#xA;Under the following terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NonCommercial —You may not use the material for commercial purposes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EducationCommunity — May be used solely for purposes directly related to learning, teaching, training, research or development in a qualified educational institution and shall not be used for commercial, professional or any other for-profit purposes.​ &lt;a href=&quot;https://terlicense.wordpress.com/ter-full/#EC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://terlicense.wordpress.com/ter-full/#EC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the Licensor is an intergovernmental organization or educational institution, disputes will be resolved by mediation and arbitration unless otherwise agreed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation. No warranties are given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy,&#xA;or moral rights may limit how you use the material.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I have to take care of something else?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://terlicense.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://terlicense.wordpress.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T21:30:29.553" Title="How can I create my own fork of Creative Commons license for a book - educational use" Tags="|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2015-10-08T23:16:45.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1939" CreationDate="2015-10-08T13:07:22.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of things I suggest you think about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do you define educational use? This can be tricky, almost everything with content can claim that content is somehow educational. An advertisement could claim it educates the public on some product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accreditation as an educational institution may be overly limiting and leave out educational websites that host tutorials and other such things. Furthermore some countries may not have effective accrediting bodies or none at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-free and non-open. Your license won't be OSI approved, because even if the OSI would consider your license (which is unlikely unless it proves wildely popular) it will not approve it for the same reasons CC BY-SA-NC is not approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt; list additional problems with a home-made license, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License proliferation. Yet another license that is incompatible with other resources. Your license will not be compatible with any free license, nor with CC BY-SA-NC as it imposes additional restrictions rather than additional freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're not a copyright lawyer, writing your own license that means what you want it to mean can be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also all points in the related question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T15:32:21.457" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2015-10-08T13:24:19.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't be too bothered by etiquette here if it stands in the way of your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are roughly three scenarios you can follow, each with its pros and cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The straight GitHub Fork. This gives you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Easy pull requests, with &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of tooling around it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stats gathered by GitHub, able to track your contributions in the tree graph&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A note on the project that it was forked from the original project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Web search of your fork only if it has more stars than the original project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The straight merge into your project. This gives you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Web search of your code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why not both? Your own project where the source is merged in to, and a fork you use to shuttle pull requests in/out of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All advantages of one and two, but&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Higher maintenance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could use single-use throwaway forks for this as well if you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to contribute back to upstream, it's possible and even likely that they'll accept your contribution only as a GitHub pull request. In that case you must have a GitHub fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to diverge a lot from upstream, having your own project may be worth it for the code search and the mildly unpretty &quot;forked from&quot; note on your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to diverge a lot and want to submit pull requests, you could consider a hybrid approach where maintain a GitHub fork that you sync the changes to that you want to pull-request to the upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, git and GitHub are tools for you as a developer to be useful and productive. Nobody is going to hold it against you if you use tools as they work best for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no licensing differences between the different scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-09T09:27:52.347" LastActivityDate="2015-10-09T09:27:52.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1948" CreationDate="2015-10-08T13:32:10.307" Score="9" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;I released a project under GPLv2 license on GitHub. But this project is not distributed as binary by itself. It is only available in a packaged offer along other components. As original licence owner I understand that I can also distribute my work using non Free Licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that the GPLed project is publicly available as Source Code on github but nowhere as an executable binary (even if I provide the scripts enabling to create a binary package with the source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some third party firm picked that project, made it a binary and embedded it with work of it's own. That firm added significant work of it's own and published it under GPLv3... but it is not distributing the source code of my project along their's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are practically hiding my work as if it didn't existed even if it is distributed as binary in their product. For all I know I can't even be sure my project wasn't modified and I can't see how their customer would know my project even exists inside their product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a violation of the GPL as I believe ? If it is, what is the best way to fix it ? I believe that either them publishing the source of the version of code they compiled or even redirecting customers to my project for that component could be OK. But as of their current behavior I'm feeling cheated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really I'm not even clear that publication of a source code without distribution of binaries is a transmission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone already encountered a similar case ? It looks not that uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2940" OwnerDisplayName="kriss" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-09T11:41:38.870" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T05:48:01.903" Title="Does a reseller of a GPL Licenced Software have to provide source?" Tags="|gpl|enforcement|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2015-10-08T20:17:52.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the title question, yes the seller of GPL software must make the source available. However, they do not have to make the source available to anyone that asks for it. They only have to make the source available to those people that they have distributed the binary to. If they have not given you a binary they don't have to give you the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe they are in violation of the GPL terms you should send them a cease and desist letter (you don't need a lawyer to do this). If you are not sure if they are in violation send them a nice letter outlining your concerns and see what they say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on their response you can decide what your next step is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2936" OwnerDisplayName="Craig" LastActivityDate="2015-10-08T20:17:52.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2015-10-09T12:11:01.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the GPL, they are obliged to release the source of the binary or binaries they distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand from the comments, they are distributing a binary built from your source, but they are not making the source of the binary available. That is a GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to enforce they abide to the license terms is a separate question, one that has been dealt with in, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/463/someone-is-violating-the-copyleft-license-they-are-refusing-to-give-me-the-sour&quot;&gt;Someone is violating the copyleft license, they are refusing to give me the source code even though they are required to!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most practical advice is to contact the FSF, who have &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a guide for dealing with GPL violations&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T05:48:01.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2015-10-10T15:19:42.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question would be easier to understand if you explained what these &lt;em&gt;archetypes&lt;/em&gt; actually are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;http://openehr.org/what_is_openehr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;read&lt;/a&gt; that «Within this approach, archetypes and templates are definitive models of semantics, without commitment to specific messaging or document standards, or other technologies. Instead, concrete expressions are now generated artefacts». &lt;a href=&quot;http://openehr.org/releases/AM/latest/docs/Overview/Overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Interestingly&lt;/a&gt;, «This is akin to the situation in natural language, where meaningful sentences constitute a tiny fraction of possible, grammatically correct sentences».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it would look like your archetypes are a sort of training set, or something similar to a (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;parallel&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_corpus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;text corpus&lt;/a&gt;. You could look at common licenses for such corpora (can't find a specific one in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI list&lt;/a&gt;), but a sensible one would be the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Zero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: technically not a license but a waiver, it also avoids problems with EU &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-0 is also the one and only correct solution if any of the following is true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you really literally meant «use of derived artifacts in software with &lt;strong&gt;no licence restrictions&lt;/strong&gt;» as you say in the question (bold mine);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you could accept classifying the material as &quot;data&quot; or &quot;database&quot; for some not too far fetched definition of the word;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;someone else can build similar or identical archetypes to yours, independently, given enough effort or simply out of chance (which would mean they're probably not copyrightable in the first place and they &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;definitely are not in USA&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2945" LastActivityDate="2015-10-10T15:19:42.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-11T00:00:47.200" Score="11" ViewCount="812" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/46186&quot;&gt;Since 2015-10-08&lt;/a&gt;, GPLv3 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot;&gt;listed&lt;/a&gt; as one-way compatible license for CC BY-SA 4.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] you may license your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 4.0 materials under GPLv3, but you may not license your contributions to adaptations of GPLv3 projects under BY-SA 4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means I may &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;take source code licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adapt it, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publish it under GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I may &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; take source code licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and publish it as it is (without adaptation) under GPLv3, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what exactly counts as &lt;em&gt;adaptation&lt;/em&gt; of source code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legalcode of CC BY-SA 4.0 says in &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s1a&quot;&gt;section 1(a)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &quot;based upon&quot; and &quot;arranged&quot;. Does this mean that I may take the source code and include it (&quot;arrange&quot;?) in my software/code (licensed under GPLv3) without modifying it? For example, the source code could be a self-contained function/class, a complex regular expression, or something similar which doesn’t necessarily need modification. After including it, my software would require this code to work properly, so could it be considered &quot;based upon&quot; it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T00:26:48.653" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T02:05:56.483" Title="What counts as adaptation for using code licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 in software licensed under GPLv3?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|gpl-3|cc-by-sa|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-10-11T10:34:32.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pirated&quot; is a bit of a vague term, that can lead to a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). It can mean pretty much any number of things, but is quite often used for anything that is a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the definition here, the answer is trivial through tautology. If the software is used in violation of copyright, then yes, it's a copyright violation to use it. Since that rather obvious, I'll assume that's not what your question is. Let's explore some options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, let's dispel some common misconceptions. If someone makes a derivative work of a GPL licensed work, and they distribute it, they legally must do so under the GPL. A common mistake is that people think this means that if they distribute it under another license, they may use it under the terms of the GPL. This is not true. If they violate copyright by not releasing their software under the GPL, &lt;strong&gt;this does not automatically make their work GPL as well&lt;/strong&gt; (but rather, legally undistributable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the question of &lt;strong&gt;whether the creators of the software are legally allowed to distribute it under a non-GPL license is no factor in your question.&lt;/strong&gt; If you believe this is indeed the case, you could see if you can do something about GPL enforcement (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/52/what-can-should-i-do-when-i-see-a-violation-to-gpl-restrictions&quot;&gt;What can/should I do when I see a violation to GPL restrictions?&lt;/a&gt;). The question on whether Drupal themes are required to be GPL is not in scope of this question (but would make a good and on-topic question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they chose to distribute their software under some license other than the GPL, you may not use the software under the GPL. If you received the software from someone who claimed it was the GPL, and you use it &lt;em&gt;in good faith&lt;/em&gt; that it is actually GPL, and afterwards it turns out it is not GPL, you will still have to abide by the actual licensing terms. You will not be in legal trouble for willful infringement, but you can't continue to use the software under the false terms that were offered to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't estimate whether a court in your situation would find that you were acting in good faith or not, but I'd imagine &lt;strong&gt;this is not a situation you want to find yourself in at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is however very plausible that the copyright holders of the software sell the software to others under the GPL. These others then may further re-distribute the software without any required fee. If this is the case, then &lt;strong&gt;yes, you can use the software under the GPL&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their FAQ, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF has an answer&lt;/a&gt; that amounts to that if the software is distributed to anyone under the GPL, and you receive the software from anyone claiming it is under the GPL, &lt;strong&gt;you may use it under the GPL&lt;/strong&gt; whether you can prove the chain of correct license transfers or not. They're not very definitive about it, but this doesn't seem to be a big problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T06:10:45.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1954" CreationDate="2015-10-11T11:44:27.253" Score="48" ViewCount="4161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Success can be painful for a FLOSS project. We now have nearly a thousand active users and many more people are becoming active contributors to our backlog/issue tracker. Note that while we're getting much more activity around &lt;em&gt;discussing&lt;/em&gt; bugs &amp;amp; feature requests, the number of active contributors actually submitting pull requests has remained very small. It's really still just the core team of 3 or 4 who are actually maintaining the project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the core team all have day jobs and, many of us, families. We have other responsibilities. I personally haven't been able to make a commit in several months now. I've been keeping up with monitoring the forum, but that's about it. This leaves just one developer actively working on the project at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's great that our users are getting involved. I love it, but some are honestly becoming a bit pushy about some things that they honestly don't fully understand. I've tried explaining that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What they're asking for would take a considerable amount of work in some cases, nearly impossible in others. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We do this in our very limited free time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, our project is free as in beer and I've repeatedly encouraged people to submit pull requests, reminding them that the fastest way to get their feature implemented is to write it themselves. This doesn't seem to be doing any good though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I explain to these users that it's a small dev team, working in their free time, providing zero cost software and that features &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; take a long time to get to market?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2015-10-11T11:50:25.630" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T20:05:51.007" Title="How to explain to users that we do this in our spare time?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1953" CreationDate="2015-10-11T12:43:31.900" Score="49" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it on the front page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put it in a pinned message at the top of the forum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stop worrying about it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find a way to create a marketplace where people can put up money if they care to, and someone else cares to take it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You don't owe the universe anything.&lt;/strong&gt; You and your colleagues built what you built to scratch your own itches and made a gift of code. If other people want to use it, you're delighted. But if they expect the level of support of a for-money product, they need to be reeducated. Just reeducate them. Any time someone complains about the lack of a fix or a response, and you have a moment to spare, just post a link to the boilerplate, and go back to your life. Otherwise, leave them to do the work of finding all the explanations you've already left around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they all wander away, so what? You scratched your itch, your code solves your problem. The rest of them are just along for the ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot educate the internet. Whatever you do, you will get email messages from people who are hostile, confused, or over-entitled. Don't let them worry you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T20:05:51.007" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T20:05:51.007" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1953" CreationDate="2015-10-11T19:07:01.950" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you should explain the fact that you are a small dev team, working in your free time, providing zero cost software. This is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphazise that your project is an open source project. It means that it is a zero cost software &lt;strong&gt;once it has been paid&lt;/strong&gt;. Currently, it has been paid by your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have a feature request, use your expertise to explain the tasks and associated &lt;strong&gt;time&lt;/strong&gt; to implement it. When the user knows that function &lt;em&gt;xyz&lt;/em&gt; has to be modified in file &lt;em&gt;abc&lt;/em&gt; to add functions &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt; and you estimate that it would take 40 hours (10h for new function &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt;, 15h for functions &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;), they can either start to implement it or propose to pay for your time. If asked for the progress, you can mention that you have been able to spend 2 hours programming since last time. Then ask if they have started to contribute -- &quot;what? nothing! you could have created the function prototypes at least&quot; -- then help them to get involved: link to git access documentation or write yourself prototype for function &lt;em&gt;d&lt;/em&gt; but do not proceed until they have created the prototypes for functions &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;f&lt;/em&gt;. If the person is motivated, you will get a new contributor, if not, he will shut up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time is also a barrier to entry for new contributors who do not know the code. Just pointing to the relevant file and function can save them several hours if they can hack code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2958" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-11T19:34:54.260" LastActivityDate="2015-10-11T19:34:54.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1953" CreationDate="2015-10-12T02:20:29.143" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have started utilizing BountySource. If people are hounding you about an&#xA;issue/pull request, you can edit the issue to include code similar to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;bountysource-plugin&amp;gt;&#xA;[![Bountysource][1]][2]&#xA;[1]:https://bountysource.com/badge/issue?issue_id=4807368&#xA;[2]:https://bountysource.com/issues/4807368-support-for-package-upgrade&#xA;&amp;lt;/bountysource-plugin&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Result:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bountysource.com/issues/4807368-support-for-package-upgrade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://bountysource.com/badge/issue?issue_id=4807368&quot; alt=&quot;Bountysource&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/issues/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, if people are serious about the issue, they can put money up to&#xA;support you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="676" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:43.863" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T02:20:29.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1877" CreationDate="2015-10-12T04:25:24.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The key that must be remembered is that &lt;i&gt;only SOME elements&lt;/i&gt; of a Drupal theme are subject to the GPL by default.&lt;/h2&gt; &#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images are not. CSS is not. Certain javascript elements are not. If you are working with a proprietary theme it is very likely that the copyright issue is not GPL related at all, but rather is caused by illegal use of design related elements that are excluded from the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SOURCE: From the official &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/licensing/faq#q7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drupal Licensing FAQ&lt;/a&gt; page (I put some text in bold to highlight it)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7: If I write a module or theme, do I have to license it under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal. If you distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later. You are not required to distribute them at all, however. (See question 8 below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, when distributing your own Drupal-based work, it is important to keep in mind what the GPL applies to. &lt;strong&gt;The GPL on code applies to code that interacts with that code, but not to data.&lt;/strong&gt; That is, Drupal's PHP code is under the GPL, and so all PHP code that interacts with it must also be under the GPL or GPL compatible. &lt;strong&gt;Images, JavaScript, and Flash files that PHP sends to the browser are not affected by the GPL because they are data.&lt;/strong&gt; However, Drupal's JavaScript, including the copy of jQuery that is included with Drupal, is itself under the GPL as well, so any Javascript that interacts with Drupal's JavaScript in the browser must also be under the GPL or a GPL compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When distributing your own module or theme, therefore, the GPL applies to any pieces that directly interact with parts of Drupal that are under the GPL. &lt;strong&gt;Images and Flash files you create yourself are not affected.&lt;/strong&gt; However, if you make a new image based off of an image that is provided by Drupal under the GPL, then that image must also be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you commit that module or theme to a Drupal Git repository, however, then all parts of it must be under the GPL version 2 or later, and you must provide the source code. That means the editable form of all files, as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drupal.org has had attorneys from the FSF (the creators/controllers of the GPL) involved in these discussions and as far as I know those lawyers agree that the Drupal organization's interpretation of the GPL as it related to Drupal themes is legally correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2968" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T04:31:45.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1959" CreationDate="2015-10-12T09:46:49.707" Score="47" ViewCount="4061" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I find a security issue in a Github project should I raise it in the project's issue tracker (where it's open to public scrutiny) or try to find private means to contact the repo's maintainer so that action can be taken before the issue is exposed to public scrutiny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2973" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T11:34:59.263" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T00:35:50.543" Title="Report a security issue to a project hosted at GitHub" Tags="|github|security|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1958" CreationDate="2015-10-12T10:16:44.167" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, as far as I know, currently no way to mark an issue as a security issue. That makes reporting a security issue including full details on GitHub effectively a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure_(computer_security)&quot;&gt;full disclosure&lt;/a&gt; strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different people support different ways of disclosure of security issues, and full disclosure is a valid choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you don't want to go the full disclosure route, reporting an issue on GitHub which includes full details of the vulnerability is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could choose to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Follow instructions for security vulnerabilities, if there are any&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;File an issue with your findings and a request to get in to contact&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find other means to contact the maintainer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice is yours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T10:16:44.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1967" CreationDate="2015-10-12T11:33:25.640" Score="5" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a class which inherits from one in the standard library of Python 2.7.6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to meet the conditions of the license of that code, which is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/2.7/license.html&quot;&gt;PSF LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PYTHON 2.7.6&lt;/a&gt; which (in part) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... PSF hereby grants Licensee a ... license to ... use Python 2.7.6 alone or in any derivative version, provided, however, that PSF’s License Agreement and PSF’s notice of copyright, i.e., “Copyright © 2001-2014 Python Software Foundation; All Rights Reserved” are retained in Python 2.7.6 alone or in any derivative version prepared by Licensee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about the meaning of the second &lt;code&gt;or&lt;/code&gt; in that text, which suggests that I do not need to mention that copyright claim anywhere in my own code. It is sufficient not to remove the claim from Python 2.7.6 itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I comply with the other clauses (especially clause 3, explaining my changes), then I am fully compliant and have no obligation to distribute any part of Python (in particular the license, or copyright claim) with my own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that seem a reasonable interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T17:39:47.807" Title="Do I have to include the PSF's notice of copyright?" Tags="|derivative-works|distribution|license-notice|psf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-10-12T14:48:17.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, you have to retain the notice in unmodified and modified files, and add it to any new files. The &quot;or&quot; refers to original or modified version of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the original (as can anybody who gets it from you) &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; under the conditions spelled out by the license, at least by common courtesy you have to tell downstream of those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I fail to see what you'd gain by leaving the license out. Leave it in, and interpret it widely. Unless you are trying to cheat somehow, in which case you don't have my sympathy, and you'd have to ask a lawyer for the exact wiggle room available-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T14:48:17.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1958" CreationDate="2015-10-12T16:13:10.673" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;All issues on Github are public.  So, if the issue is one that is fine to disclose publicly, you could report it via the issue tracker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a general default, I would suggest trying to report the issue privately.  I can suggest two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for a contact address for the maintainer.  Perhaps if you are lucky it will be listed on the project web page.  You can also use &lt;code&gt;git log&lt;/code&gt; to see if an email address appears there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot find a contact address, post a new issue on the issue tracker that says &quot;I have a security vulnerability to report.  How would you like me to report it?   Please provide the appropriate contact information or instructions for where to report it.&quot;  Then, wait for the maintainer to get back to you and describe how they'd like the issue to be reported.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2981" LastEditorUserId="2981" LastEditDate="2015-10-12T17:57:38.647" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:57:38.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:08:09.867" Score="5" ViewCount="1608" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a text format utility, (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par_(command)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;par&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) I would like to know if either/both of the following are permitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adjust paragraph width or center/justify text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute as a &lt;code&gt;.md&lt;/code&gt; Markdown file so as to highlight &lt;code&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; headers and/or add bullet lists to individual articles/clauses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2983" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-13T04:05:00.417" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T04:05:00.417" Title="Can I change a LICENSE file text format?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2015-10-14T12:09:08.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1964" CreationDate="2015-10-12T17:25:34.987" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you don't change the contents of the file itself, you're fine. If you change the formatting, or even the caps of the text of the license, you are essentially creating a derivative work: caps and formatting have significance in the law. One such example is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13/can-i-change-the-caps-to-lowercase-in-licenses&quot;&gt;Can I change the caps to lowercase in licenses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure why you would do this. Just leave the license in a text file in your repository and it's fine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T17:25:34.987" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="54" CreationDate="2015-10-12T18:02:44.503" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should have proper comments in source code and documentation for internals. Absence of such &lt;em&gt;sucks the fun out&lt;/em&gt; of contributing. Yes, most professional developers are fine reading other's source code. But if there is a &quot;what's going on inside&quot; page somewhere, contributing gets a lot easier. The topics that could be covered there are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to setup development environment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's responsibility of your software, exactly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the folder structure of your project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are internal APIs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When do you think a new source file should be created?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why have you chosen to implement APIs in the way you did it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which ways to extend your software are most popular? Templates, please!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any other projects that do the same thing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the potential contributor understand that you're interested in it. Make him think about the project like you do. Think of it like an author of online game. Count the people on the steps from opening the page of your project first time to contributing. Unless you decide to track with some analytics software, you can compute the numbers roughly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How many people know that your project exists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will anyone know you have documentation for developers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will everyone understand how to compile your project from sources?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will (s)he find the required place in the code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long will contributor wait until you answer his questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will the change be useful for other users enough, so that you'll accept a PR?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will the contributor be sure that his change didn't break the code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Headhunting maintainers is a perfectly predictable process. More people in, less people out, here you are: a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2977" LastActivityDate="2015-10-12T18:02:44.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1960" CreationDate="2015-10-13T17:39:47.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;or&quot; there is not intended to give you wiggle room, but is intended to differentiate between original &quot;or&quot; modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the reading of copyright by the Free Software Foundation, creating a derivative class creates a derivative work from the original work, and thus the license should be included. This definition is not universally accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you feel the license feels out of place in your repo. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just stick it in there, and make it clear what it applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'm a fan of a central file that tells you the copyright information, and several separate license files as needed. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1711/combining-code-written-under-different-licenses-eiffel-forum-license-mit-and-a&quot;&gt;Combining code written under different licenses (Eiffel Forum License, MIT and Apache), what are my options?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-13T17:39:47.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-14T08:05:17.053" Score="4" ViewCount="608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a good license-model. I am developing a framework.&#xA;These key points should be considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modify&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distribute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commercial and private use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sell it in modified/extended state &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cannot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hold Liable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sell it in original state&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sublicense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include Copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include License &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;send fixes/changes back to the author &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention is to publish and offer a web framework. Everybody can use the framework and develop own websites. The websites can be sold. But the framework should be under the original license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know an existing license or can somebody help me to write a license?&#xA;Do the key points fulfil the open source directives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best fitting license I found is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/don%27t-be-a-dick-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/don%27t-be-a-dick-public-license&lt;/a&gt;. But it seems to be a bit unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3002" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T09:35:22.997" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T09:42:30.770" Title="License for my Framework" Tags="|license-recommendation|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1968" CreationDate="2015-10-14T09:36:52.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hard criterion &quot;cannot sell it in original state&quot; conflicts with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;, thus, by definition, you won't find any open source license that include this clause. Depending on what exactly you mean with &quot;cannot sublicense&quot;, the same may go for that criterion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source definition clause 1: Free redistribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the&#xA;  software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing &#xA;  programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a &#xA;  royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest you can still get to your criteria is probably the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reciprocal Public License&lt;/a&gt; (RPL). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPL is a license that is similar to the GPL, but requires users who make changes to the software and do not publish the software to nevertheless make those changes available to the licensor: Clause 6 of the license reads (abridged)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Any Extensions that You create or to which You contribute must be&#xA;  Deployed under the terms of this License. [...] You hereby grant to Licensor&#xA;  and all third parties a world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license [...]&#xA;  to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, create derivatives,&#xA;  sublicense, and distribute Licensed Software, in any form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI considers this license an open source license, but the FSF has designated it as non-free because of this obligation, and it's not GPL compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're willing to move further from the reciprocity requirement, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Public License&lt;/a&gt; (GPL) requires users who distribute software that is a derivative work of your work to also distribute it under the GPL. This means that they are only obliged to make the source code available to you if they distribute the software (to you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T09:36:52.280" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1972" CreationDate="2015-10-14T10:17:47.193" Score="14" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company would like to make a book mostly adapted from CC-BY-SA licenced text. I understand this is legal if we distribute the adapted text under the same licence. But what if we add to the book our own copyrighted images? Can you licence the text under CC-BY-SA and keep our copyright on the images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would the situation change in the case of CC-BY licenced text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3005" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-14T10:51:08.847" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T10:51:08.847" Title="Selling a book based on CC BY-SA" Tags="|commercial|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2015-10-14T10:50:09.690" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distributing images alongside text creates a combined work, but not a derivative work, and your images are not bound by the CC BY-SA requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing the distributing of books of CC BY-SA licensed text is very much the intention of the license, and expressly legal. You are correct that the license mandates your text is available under CC BY-SA as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original text were under CC BY (not SA) there would be no requirement that your adapted text was available under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-14T10:50:09.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1923" CreationDate="2015-10-15T07:40:45.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation maintains lists of which software licenses are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free and GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free and GPL-incompatible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonfree, and therefore GPL-incompatbile&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#cpol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CPOL&lt;/a&gt; falls into the last category:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Code Project Open License is not a free software license. Section 5.6 restricts how you can use the work. Section 5.4 prohibits commercial distribution of the software by itself—and depending on how you read section 3.4, you may not have permission to distribute the software by itself at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastEditorUserId="3016" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T06:00:19.287" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:00:19.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-10-15T07:49:04.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T07:49:04.047" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T07:49:04.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1976" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-10-15T07:49:04.047" Score="0" Body="Code Project Open License - a software license by codeproject.com which is not considered an open source license according to the Open Source Initiative or free by the Free Software Foundation." OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-10-15T10:03:39.240" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T10:03:39.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1968" CreationDate="2015-10-15T09:42:30.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Martijn, any license which makes a difference between selling and giving away for free is not free or open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But looking at your comments, your intention seems to be that you do want your library to be used for building proprietary software, but don't want your library itself to become proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case you seem to be looking for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU LGPL&lt;/a&gt; (aka Lesser GPL or Library GPL). It is similar to the GPL, but allows people to use your library in a product under a different license, as long as your library is not changed. When your library &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; changed, those changes must also be made available under the LGPL. But this only applies to the library itself, not the software which uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T09:42:30.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1950" CreationDate="2015-10-15T22:46:39.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what exactly counts as adaptation of source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adaptation of the source code could be anything.... Anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if you had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Code here........*  a = 1; *More code here.......*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you took this code (assuming there is more than just a = 1...) You could change as little as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*Code here........*  **b** = 1; *More code here.......* &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that would count as adapting the work....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the code is based from someone else's work your adapting their code, therefore WHATEVER you do to change it in ANY way is a adaptation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2015-10-15T22:46:39.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="887" CreationDate="2015-10-16T07:41:22.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another contender: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html#licenseText&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zero Clause BSD License (0BSD)&lt;/a&gt;, also called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Public License 1.0.0&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC License&lt;/a&gt;, except that there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/ee86b1d8e25cb0ca9d418b33eb0dc5e7716ddc1e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no requirement to redistribute the license's text&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the original 0BSD license, as used for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.landley.net/toybox/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;toybox&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2006 by Rob Landley &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot; AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0BSD / Free Public License 1.0.0 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, but is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not mentioned by the Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hat Tip:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1794/3016&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; to a related question, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/2610/dashesy&quot;&gt;dashesy&lt;/a&gt;'s comment mentioning 0BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastEditorUserId="3016" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T11:48:50.537" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T11:48:50.537" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1981" CreationDate="2015-10-16T15:57:42.723" Score="12" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically the Symfony PHP framework, which is MIT licensed. I've read that the two are compatible, but I want to make sure that a system I develop can be released complete under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3029" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-16T23:38:03.273" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T20:22:09.280" Title="Is it possible to release a project under the GPL if it contains MIT-licensed libraries?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1980" CreationDate="2015-10-16T23:32:00.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is possible to release a project that uses MIT licensed libraries under a GPL license. The MIT license is a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; license which has &lt;s&gt;no&lt;/s&gt; very few restrictions on code that links to its binaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, you could also include actual MIT licensed &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; in a GPL project. It's very developer friendly that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is a one way compatability. You cannot do this the other way around and include GPL code in an MIT project because the GPL requires code that links to it also be licensed GPL. Once you let any GPL code or libraries into your project, you must license the whole project under the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T20:22:09.280" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T20:22:09.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1983" CreationDate="2015-10-17T13:12:22.050" Score="4" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is one of the purposes of this site, if not, please remove/move to the correct site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently bought a CX20 drone that was said to be open source.  I have not been able to find the CAD files or software anywhere.  Is there a standard location that this data is kept for open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.banggood.com/Cheerson-CX20-Opensource-Version-AutoPathfinder-Quadcopter-RTF-p-932145.html?p=US21043131592013105M&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here is a link to the product.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3035" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T01:18:45.253" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T17:04:12.040" Title="Location of Open Source Documents for CX20 Drone" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1982" CreationDate="2015-10-17T15:22:29.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no standard for publishing/archiving source code for an open source project. Many organizations use a public repository (e.g. GitHub), others provide access via a download from their site. It is also common to include the source with the install/binaries (e.g. .zip file) or on any distributed media with a product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative, the stewards of the Open Source Definition, and an internationally recognized authority in open source standards and practices, requires access to un-obfuscated source code. So if the organization distributing the software is claiming that that software is open source, they must provide you the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suggestion for your specific case would be to simply contact the company that sold it to you (as @curiousdannii mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="126" LastActivityDate="2015-10-17T15:22:29.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-18T13:39:59.100" Score="14" ViewCount="1772" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can Wikipedia written content and images be used on my website, without a direct recognition on the page it is used. Perhaps place any thanks/recognition in the terms and conditions of my page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3045" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T13:22:36.870" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T19:59:28.160" Title="Can Wikipedia content be used on my website if I attribute it on my terms and conditions page?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-18T13:46:31.300" Score="5" ViewCount="1521" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a PHP application for a PHP framework for a client, currently deciding which framework to use and the license will have a bearing on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will building it in Laravel/Codeiginter(MIT) or Zend(BSD) bring me any issues in handing over to the client, who will be paying for the script I produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3045" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-18T15:44:01.857" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T10:09:32.480" Title="What difference does a MIT and BSD license bring to my PHP framework project?" Tags="|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1984" CreationDate="2015-10-18T14:07:24.703" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use all the text, and most of the images, under some conditions, and those conditions include proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedias text is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt; (CC BY-SA 3.0). If you abide by those conditions - that is, credit the writers, and publish the text (or whatever adaptations you've made to the text) under the same licence, you can use it on your website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions entail attribution. The relevant (abridged, emphasis mine) text from the license (clause 4c) reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You Distribute [...] the Work [...], You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...] (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work [...] and (iv) , [...] in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., &quot;French translation of the Work by Original Author,&quot; or &quot;Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author&quot;). &lt;strong&gt;The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner;&lt;/strong&gt; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you are &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; required to put in a notice for every article you use. This would, if nothing else, make it entirely impractical to put it in a single copyright notice file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content&quot;&gt;guide for re-use&lt;/a&gt; hosted on Wikipedia, which gives more details on how you should attribute the material, and how to attach a license. It advices to provide a link to the articles history next to the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common sense would dictate you follow the re-use guides of Wikipedia, which stipulate you have something like the following near the text (a footer maybe?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This article uses material from the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable&quot;&gt;&quot;Metasyntactic variable&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is released under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to not follow Wikipedias guide to re-use, but dump everything in a single terms you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be good, or you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be in violation of the license, but that would be for a court to decide on; this hasn't been tested before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between the impracticality, the possibly illegality, and the fact that pushing proper attribution of the writers of the material to some backwater is a bit of a dick move, I'd really advice just going with the recommended guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The images you see on Wikipedia are partially free, under the same license or more permissive as the text, and partially non-free with a fair use defense. What counts as fair use for Wikipedia doesn't necessarily count as fair use for you. You should check per image: if you click on any image it will show you its licensing details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any image that is hosted on &lt;a href=&quot;http://commons.wikimedia.org&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt; is under a free license. This is the majority of images and other media on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of those images might still be problematic in some countries: for example, works from the US government are in the public domain only in the US. Freedom of panorama also differs significantly from country to country. Check per image if it's ok to use for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-19T19:59:28.160" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T19:59:28.160" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1985" CreationDate="2015-10-18T14:42:57.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither license will put anything in the way of your product, or your ability to sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software licenses don't put anything in the way of being able to sell commissioned software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under any free license, you are always allowed to create software built upon it, and either license it to your customer, or transfer the copyright to your customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer is not planning on distributing the software, but just wants to use it, the only license that could be problematic is the AGPL, which mandates that they must make the source available to people they let interact with the software over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer is planning on distributing the software, the GPL may be problematic because it mandates that they distribute it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a note, there are many people who mistakenly believe that anything &quot;that touches GPL code&quot; becomes GPL. This is not true, but could be a hindrance if the product were GPL, and your customer does believe that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT/Expat and BSD licenses are both permissive licenses, and poses no restrictions on distributing your propriety software based on these libraries/frameworks at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-18T14:42:57.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1985" CreationDate="2015-10-19T00:31:41.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You (as the author/owner of the copyright) can decide to sell licenses to use it to some people while giving it away to others, or distributing publicly under whatever (legally valid) conditions you like. It's your call, entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What changes if you do distribute under a open source/free software license is the exact rights you give to people getting your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T00:31:41.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1996" CreationDate="2015-10-19T13:05:37.937" Score="7" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the current version of the GPL&lt;/a&gt; to be relatively short and easy to read. However, some people seem to see a &lt;a href=&quot;http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Wall_of_Text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wall of text&lt;/a&gt; and cannot get through it. Thus &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1889/is-requiring-a-license-a-violation-of-the-gpl-can-i-get-around-it&quot;&gt;we have&lt;/a&gt; many &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/176/do-i-really-need-to-include-a-licence-file-for-common-licences-like-gpl-or-mit&quot;&gt;questions asked&lt;/a&gt; here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/35/if-i-include-some-gpl-code-in-my-project-can-i-release-it-as-bsd&quot;&gt;that are&lt;/a&gt; specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1399/can-gpl-licenced-software-be-used-in-corporate-environments&quot;&gt;addressed&lt;/a&gt; in the text. &lt;strong&gt;People don't seem to have the attention span for 14 screenfulls of text.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache license&lt;/a&gt; has a terrific summary on the webpage for the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It allows you to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;freely download and use Apache software, in whole or in part, for personal, company internal, or commercial purposes;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use Apache software in packages or distributions that you create.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It forbids you to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;redistribute any piece of Apache-originated software without proper attribution;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use any marks owned by The Apache Software Foundation in any way that might state or imply that the Foundation endorses your distribution;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use any marks owned by The Apache Software Foundation in any way that might state or imply that you created the Apache software in question.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It requires you to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;include a copy of the license in any redistribution you may make that includes Apache software;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;provide clear attribution to The Apache Software Foundation for any distributions that include Apache software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It does not require you to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;include the source of the Apache software itself, or of any modifications you may have made to it, in any redistribution you may assemble that includes it;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;submit changes that you make to the software back to the Apache Software Foundation (though such feedback is encouraged).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a similar list of bullet points compiled for the GPL or other FOSS licenses, such as MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="946" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T08:57:55.367" Title="Concise GPL requirements summary list" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-19T15:53:58.870" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this plugin&lt;/a&gt; in a commercial plugin for WordPress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T22:11:55.393" Title="Can I use Event Organiser plugin in a commercial plugin for WordPress?" Tags="|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1990" CreationDate="2015-10-19T16:46:55.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software is under an open source license, which per the open source definition guarantees you may use it for whatever purpose you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license used is the GPLv3, which is a strong copyleft license. It requires that if you distribute your software that includes this plugin, or make a derivative work based on this plugin, the entire work must be distributed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking to write a plugin based on this one to sell over the shelf, this might be difficult, because people who bought a copy of the software from you have the right to redistribute it for a lower or no fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan on making something bespoke, selling it once, to a single customer, the GPL doesn't pose any direct problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T16:46:55.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1982" CreationDate="2015-10-19T17:04:12.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cheeson violates our open source license that we have on ArduPilot and unfortunately they have not published their files. You can find out more about the original files at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ardupilot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ardupilot.com/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3065" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T17:04:12.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1990" CreationDate="2015-10-19T21:19:45.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The readme file of the project declares the project under the GPLv3. Be wary, anything that uses it is forced to be under the GPLv3 as well. This is a strong copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Warning call!&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project however, doesn't actually include a license file, thereby making the project improperly licensed, and the GPL then legally doesn't apply to the project (if I remember correctly - as there is no link or place where people can find the license). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to fix that, I've submitted &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/issues/303&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an issue&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/pull/304&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pull request&lt;/a&gt; for a license file to be merged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-10-19T21:19:45.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2005" CreationDate="2015-10-20T07:19:52.390" Score="4" ViewCount="1355" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon to see BSD developers upset that someone takes their project, does a few modifications, and then releases the resulting work under GPL, such that the resulting improvements can no longer be incorporated back upstream BSD, creating a one-way street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&amp;amp;sid=20070913014315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;From undeadly.org&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KernelTrap has an interesting article in which Theo de Raadt discusses the legal implications of the recent relicensing of OpenBSD's BSD licensed Atheros driver under the GPL. De Raadt says, &quot;it has been like pulling teeth since (most) Linux wireless guys and the SFLC do not wish to admit fault. I think that the Linux wireless guys should really think hard about this problem, how they look, and the legal risks they place upon the future of their source code bodies.&quot; He stressed that the theory that BSD code can simply be relicensed to the GPL without making significant changes to the code is false, adding, &quot;'in their zeal to get the code under their own license, some of these Linux wireless developers have broken copyright law repeatedly. But to even get to the point where they broke copyright law, they had to bypass a whole series of ethical considerations too.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed that the licence under which SSLeay was released, on which OpenSSL is based, on which LibreSSL is based, has the following addendum after what looks like a standard original 4-clause BSD licence with the advertising clause (which, I must add, is already incompatible with the GPL due to the presence of the aforementioned advertising clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bxr.su/o/lib/libssl/src/crypto/objects/obj_dat.c#52&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;From bxr.su&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *&#xA; * The licence and distribution terms for any publically available version or&#xA; * derivative of this code cannot be changed.  i.e. this code cannot simply be&#xA; * copied and put under another distribution licence&#xA; * [including the GNU Public Licence.]&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid the problem at its root:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why don't the BSD developers add back the advertising clause, to make sure that their licence is incompatible with the GPL Public Licence without saying so explicitly?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, alternatively or additionally, why don't they add an addendum as above to their own BSD/ISC/MIT/etc BSD-compatible licence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-10-24T00:14:58.103" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:28:02.993" Title="Why don't BSD developers use the SSLeay addendum if they hate GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2015-10-20T07:19:52.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of problems with the advertisement clause &amp;mdash; the most obvious one can be witnessed firsthand at &lt;a href=&quot;http://BXR.SU/NetBSD/distrib/notes/common/legal.common&quot;&gt;http://BXR.SU/NetBSD/distrib/notes/common/legal.common&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This product includes software developed by Charles Hannum.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Charles M. Hannum, by the&#xA;University of Vermont and State Agricultural College and Garrett A.&#xA;Wollman, by William F. Jolitz, and by the University of California,&#xA;Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and its contributors.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Charles M. Hannum.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Christian E. Hopps,&#xA;Ezra Story, Kari Mettinen, Markus Wild, Lutz Vieweg&#xA;and Michael Teske.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Christian E. Hopps.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Christopher G. Demetriou&#xA;for the NetBSD Project.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Christopher G. Demetriou.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Christos Zoulas.&#xA;.It&#xA;This product includes software developed by Chuck Silvers.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that only covers &lt;code&gt;Ch&lt;/code&gt;!  And doesn't even cover the extra variations like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This product includes software developed for the NetBSD Project&#xA;by Christopher G. Demetriou.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even the estimate at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd&lt;/a&gt; is probably off:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for adding the addendum from SSLeay to the standard BSD/ISC licence, I would guess that it goes in violation of the overall principles of the BSD philosophy&amp;nbsp;&amp;mdash; the BSD authors want as many users as possible to use the code in question, and the authors would rather you use a correct and open-source implementation than reinvent the wheel with an inferior solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, even though BSD developers would prefer to receive back the improvements (and most commercial companies, even the likes of Apple, Netflix and Oracle, do officially send a lot of their contributions back upstream to the BSD projects, since it decreases their own cost of maintaining their own software), officially adding such as a mandatory requirement to preclude a one-way street with some in the GPL community would be a violation of the spirit of the BSD-compatible licences and the BSD philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T07:19:52.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1989" CreationDate="2015-10-20T08:57:55.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a much more intricate license than the Apache license, and the MIT/Expat license is much simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;  of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;  furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's too short to usefully make a point by point list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is more intricate than the Apache license, which may not be as suitable for a bulleted list approach. The FSF releases &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, which is something. Some others have attempted to do this though, for example tldrlegal tries to do so for many licenses. It's overview of the GPLv3 is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a list is no replacement for the actual license text, but may give you a quick idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T08:57:55.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1999" CreationDate="2015-10-20T09:32:49.303" Score="9" ViewCount="1095" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the company I work for we are developing an app for use within the company. The company consists of numerous branches across the world, all other legal entities. For testing we would like to send a tablet with pre-installed software from the Dutch branch office to the Chinese branch office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the software has to be completely compliant with the open source software that is used in the application before sending it over? The reason for this question is that if it has to be compliant for this testing purpose, we would have to let a specialized company perform an OSS scan which is time consuming and costly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3070" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-20T22:42:34.523" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T00:42:25.753" Title="Distribution of open source software between different legal entities" Tags="|licensing|law|distribution|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2015-10-20T10:42:10.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF addresses this in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, where they say that making copies for different people within an organisation does not count as &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &amp;quot;heart&amp;quot; of the matter, I suppose, is, do these different legal entities count as &amp;quot;one organization or company&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legalistic approach probably comes down to who received the license. Is it your business unit/separate legal entity? A parent company? Can a copyright transfer be done through a parent company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pragmatic approach (and the one I'd be inclined to follow) is that nobody really cares. The copyright holders of the product insofar that isn't you, your legal entity or your parent org aren't going to mind any perceived or actual infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone were to care, however unlikely, they can't perceive the infringement. They could never know you distributed anything to your China branch. If they knew you did, they wouldn't know if you did so in violation of any terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an extremely low chance of a potentially fairly large problem (in the worst case, statutory damages in case of proven willful infringement of a violation of registered copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your company, you may want to take the risk, or defer to your legal department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T11:38:19.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2015-10-20T11:24:50.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've found yourself a bit of a gray area. As Martijn notes, the FSF have addressed &lt;em&gt;nearly&lt;/em&gt; this issue in their FAQ. The following is certainly true for single-entity companies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can make copies for internal use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can send those copies to anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as they're part of the company&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't give copies to any other entity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in your situation (with your company being a multi-entity organisation) it gets a little more confusing. It's debatable whether the same applies in your case, though I would hope that freedom-oriented organisations would come down on the side of freedom and letting you do it. Your best course of action is to consult someone who knows: ask the FSF or the OSI, or if you've got a legal team ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T11:24:50.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-20T17:22:55.600" Score="4" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of (work towards) a license with similar &lt;em&gt;freedom-preserving restrictions&lt;/em&gt; as the AGPL, which can be applied to datasets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL puts restrictions on the legally allowed uses of source code to protect &lt;em&gt;your freedom&lt;/em&gt;, that is, the users keep control over the program. The source code cannot evolve into having control over you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the same things exists for datasets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you base a service on such licensed dataset and say your service improves the dataset, you must contribute this back. If you enrich a dataset, you must license the enrichment under same license, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3074" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T09:21:04.440" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T09:21:04.440" Title="AGPL-like license for datasets" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|freedoms|open-data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2000" CreationDate="2015-10-20T19:03:33.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Datasets are difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They pose no originality, and this is handled differently in different jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions have &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights, which are handled similarly to, but distinct from copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States for example, databases are not under any protection at all. No license can be attached to it, because it holds nothing that can be licensed in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EU does recognize database rights, with a term of 15 years after first publication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different countries have different laws, and it will be almost impossible to write a license that would be effective across different jurisdictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having specific license terms that interact with database rights &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; copyright would be an even more difficult task. It would, in theory, probably be possible to draft a license that places restrictions on software that interacts with datasets, or places license restrictions on datasets that incorporate your data set that would be valid for a specific country, or for the EU, but as far as I know, this hasn't been tried. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open datasets are generally handled under a CC Zero public domain dedication. Despite there being plenty of problems with CC Zero, it least it's somewhat portable, in that it means roughly the same across jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T19:03:33.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2015-10-20T22:42:01.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the software is only for use by those within the company, then there should be no barriers to fully complying with the licenses. Even the GPL, the most extreme license, does not require you to publish your source code for the whole world to access, but only to distribute it to those who get a compiled version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it will make a difference whether it counts as distribution or not is if someone in another branch gives the software to someone outside the company. If the software is not considered distributed, then they have no right to do so, and could be prosecuted under trade secret laws. If it the software was however considered to have been distributed to them, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1902/190&quot;&gt;the GPL may give them the right to distribute it further&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that your testing policy is not very logical if programs you internally distribute would require scans if they are open source licensed but not if they use open source licenses but are themselves proprietary licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-20T23:16:30.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2015-10-21T00:42:25.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are developing the application in-house, any rights reside fully with you to do as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it uses pieces from elsewhere, you might set up some script to build up the whole for the &quot;customer&quot;. It won't matter too much if it is a real mess for a one-off use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could ask the owners of the rights for a temporary permission until the final (presumably publicly distributed) version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T00:42:25.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2015-10-21T13:46:44.573" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 4 clause BSD license is not OpenSource compliant as it contains two contradicting claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software &#xA;must display the following acknowledgement: &#xA;This product includes software developed by the University of &#xA;California, Berkeley and its contributors. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors &#xA;may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software &#xA;without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it requires advertizing and forbids it at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is no need to add a clause like the one from SSL either as the BSD license does not permit to relicense the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why you cannot relicense BSD code is that this is something that would need an explicit written permission from the Copyright owner that is obviously not part of the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, there are two options with vanilla BSD licensed code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;keep the actual source private.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;publish the actual source under the original terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: as a result from the letter from Theo de Raadt, the linux kernel sources have been modified to contain additional GPL headers only for those files where the original author did enter the code into the Linux kernel project and thus has the right to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="2562" LastEditDate="2015-10-21T15:17:05.083" LastActivityDate="2015-10-21T15:17:05.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1985" CreationDate="2015-10-23T10:09:32.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of a licence as a pre-made set of rules you want people who want to use your code have to comply to in order to be legally allowed to do so. A licence creates no obligation for the author, but for the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for actual differences between BSD and MIT licences: The main difference is that with BSD licence, the users have to include the complete licence text, including your copyright, if they use your work, which is not mandatory with a MIT licence. More about that here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/257&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/257&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you should consider Apache Software Licence, which is also a no-copyleft licence. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T10:09:32.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2010" CreationDate="2015-10-23T11:00:10.260" Score="17" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;My situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a continuous contract with a single client for &quot;IT services&quot;.&#xA;I am developing a web application that is completely custom to their needs.&#xA;As part of the agreement the application will be installed on the client premises and used internally in their company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client will receive the full source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no place to &quot;download/buy&quot; this application for the public&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is impossible for somebody else to buy this application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The application is one of many delivered to the client as part of the contract. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a Javascript library that is dual licenced under GPL/commercial.&#xA;I would like to use this library in my web app (but not modify it in any way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use the GPL version of the library in the application? Or do I need to &#xA;buy a licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3098" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T18:52:24.797" Title="Using GPL code in an application that is offered to a single client as source code" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2015-10-23T11:47:57.617" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you acquire a GPL license for this product, build upon it, make a product, and transfer it to your client, there can be two scenarios, and in neither case it is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, you write the software as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot;&gt;work for hire&lt;/a&gt; and transfer the copyright to your client. In that case, there was never any distribution as meant in the GPL. Effectively &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; created the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, you write the software and retain the ownership. In that case, when you distribute it to your client, you must do so under the terms of the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference between the two scenarios is who hold the copyright. In the second case &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are free to re-redistribute the software to others (under the terms of the GPL). In the first you are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In neither case does the GPL pose any problem. In both cases, the license requires from your client that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they choose to distribute the software (which they don't plan on doing), they have to do so under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some organisations don't want to use any GPL code (they usually make an exception for Linux) because they believe there are problems with using GPL code. This is usually FUD, but something to be aware of nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-10-23T11:59:23.903" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T11:59:23.903" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2015-10-23T15:23:39.867" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because adding that phrase turns the license into a viral copyleft license not unlike the GPL. When you add that phrase, you could just as well use the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who propose the BSD over the GPL usually do so because they intentionally want to avoid the viral nature of the GPL and instead want their work to be usable by anyone under any license. The resulting one-way relicensing road is an unfortunate drawback of this, but one which can not be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't have the cake and eat it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-10-23T15:23:39.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="887" CreationDate="2015-10-24T22:59:51.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You talk about &quot;snippets&quot;, thus presumably minimal stretches of code. Whatever you stipulate, they might fall under minimal pieces of the work under consideration, too little to be considered a &quot;substantial part&quot; triggering copyright. Besides, short snippets probably describe a way of doing something that can't be done in any other way, thus non-copyrightable to start with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and don't pretend to be one on random web sites either. To make sure, a real lawyer retained by you would have to review &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more of the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-24T22:59:51.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-26T01:04:11.893" Score="5" ViewCount="4754" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have seen a lot of open source project on GitHub. But what would happen if someone fork a project and modify &amp;amp; improve from it? For example, if an original open source project creator states that the software license is free for use only for personal or non-profit project. But someone fork the project, modify &amp;amp; improve the project and says it is 100% free to use for anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license should be followed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3113" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T07:38:05.153" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T14:40:38.657" Title="If a project is forked and its license is changed, which license should be followed?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|forking|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2015-10-26T01:21:38.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source/free software licenses work by leveraging copyright. In a nutshell, the creator of a work (or whoever paid for the development) has the right to allow (or not) others to copy the work (thus the name). One of the rights reserved is the right to create &lt;em&gt;derived works&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., create modified works based on the original. Open source/free software allows the copying under some conditions, instead of asking for payment. This whole is &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more complicated, but the preceding description will have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case described, if you publish something under the condition of personal use only, and don't give me the right to create derivatives, I can't change it. If you give me the right to create derivative works, essentially your work is yours and my modifications are mine. If you allow me to distribute derived works, your part is under your license and my part under mine. Thus open source insists that any derived works must be possible to distribute under the same license as the original (imagine the mess that could be created otherwise). By adding to the original and distributing it, you agree to those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;, also check the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/licensing&quot;&gt;view of the Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T01:21:38.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2015-10-26T02:39:44.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This clause doesn't do anything more than state what is already the fact. When code with a GPL-compatible license is included in a project under the GPL as a whole, it doesn't lose its original license (or copyright). The only cases where you can do that are when the code is public domain to begin with, or when the license itself explicitly allows relicensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="65" LastEditDate="2015-11-29T15:14:43.267" LastActivityDate="2015-11-29T15:14:43.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2015-10-26T11:32:37.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source project is a project where you receive some license that meets the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;. A license is a sort of contract* that permits you to do certain things with the work. Without a license, you are not allowed to do anything. There are many different licenses that meet the open source definition, that are all different in what you can and can't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source definition doesn't allow for licenses that discriminate against persons, groups, or fields of endeavor. That means that a project that has a license that is free for use only for personal or non-profit use is not an open source project at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wheter it is possible to re-publish some work under a different license depends on the exact license text. In the case you describe, it's almost certainly not the intention of the original author for this to happen, but if they wrote their own license, mistakes like these often creep in (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person re-distributed the software in violation of the original license, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/435/what-happens-if-stolen-software-is-published-as-open-source&quot;&gt;What happens if stolen software is published as Open Source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*There are differences between a contract and a license that for the purpose of this question I'm glossing over, because the difference is irrelevant for the scope of this question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T11:32:37.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2019" CreationDate="2015-10-26T12:29:26.580" Score="7" ViewCount="5812" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking into doing a project and instead of creating my own icons, I would like to use some from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flaticon.com/&quot;&gt;Flaticon&lt;/a&gt;. Most are made by different users and each one can be downloaded for free, but it requires that you credit the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I credit them by saying something like &quot;Icons provided by various Flaticon users&quot; or will I need to credit each person individually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="107" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-26T13:24:51.393" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T16:56:07.680" Title="Can I do a mass attribution if I got all the data from one location but different users?" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2017" CreationDate="2015-10-26T13:59:49.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to attribute every person individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears none of the authors are affiliated with each other, nor to Flaticon, so it makes no sense attributing all their icons to Flaticon. Flaticon doesn't own the copyright, the authors do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more to the point, authors choose their license, and it appears some use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cdn.flaticon.com/license/license.pdf&quot;&gt;Flaticon free license&lt;/a&gt;, whilst others use CC-BY. It's important that you follow each license. At least for these two licenses, for non-website usages, it is ok to section off the detailed attribution in a credits/acknowledgement page, and merely mention that the icons were used under those licenses. So yes, you could say &quot;Icons provided by various Flaticon users&quot;, but you must also list the attributions in full somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T13:59:49.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2017" CreationDate="2015-10-26T14:00:55.603" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Flaticon &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.flaticon.com/hc/en-us/articles/202798381-How-to-attribute-the-icons-to-their-authors&quot;&gt;requires you to attribute each author&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to use an icon you must attribute it to it's &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; author, so we will be able to continue creating new graphic resources every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Icon made by [author link] from www.flaticon.com&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    E.g.: Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From a legal perspective:&lt;/strong&gt; The icons are under copyright by their respective creators; you cannot legally use them without permission. You can't have permission unless you follow the rules the authors have laid down for reuse of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From an ethical perspective:&lt;/strong&gt; Attribution is not a punishment, or merely a way for you to admit that you didn't create 100% of the visuals in your project. It is a mechanism to &lt;em&gt;give credit&lt;/em&gt; to the authors who created the work you're using. The authors generously let you use their work for free; they only ask that their names and site links be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flaticon is a repository of work from various artists, and saying &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; you found an artist's work isn't the same as attribution. By saying &quot;Icons provided by various Flaticon users,&quot; you are not attributing the authors, but giving a hint about where a user might be able to hunt down authorship information. This is about as useful as (or perhaps even less useful than) simply putting a notice in your project like, &quot;&lt;em&gt;I found some of these icons on the Internet; if you put them into Google Reverse Image Search you might be able to find out who made them,&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and calling that sufficient attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, even if your attribution list is very long, Flaticon allows you place your attributions very unobtrusively. Their suggestions include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For websites:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Insert the attribution on the page of the icon (for example in the page footer) or on the imprint page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For printing:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Paste this attribution on the final work so the authorship is known (for instance, in the acknowledgements chapter of a book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For app's:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Place the attribution on the credits/description page of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, you are allowed to place all of your attributions in an appendix, rather than directly alongside the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If attributions are for some reason too onerous for you, and you would rather pay money than deal with attributions, you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.flaticon.com/hc/en-us/articles/202798201-How-can-I-use-Flaticon-s-resources-without-attribution-&quot;&gt;pay for a Flaticon subscription plan&lt;/a&gt; which allows you to use most Flaticon resources without attribution. (Resources licensed only under Creative Commons appear not to be covered by the for-pay plan, which appears to grant rights to works under the Flaticon Basic License.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-10-26T16:56:07.680" LastActivityDate="2015-10-26T16:56:07.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2000" CreationDate="2015-10-27T14:20:33.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Database License (ODbL)&lt;/a&gt; solve a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of your problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in use by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenStreetMap&lt;/a&gt;, and a.o. ensures coverage of the world gets more granular over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2015-10-27T14:20:33.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2025" CreationDate="2015-10-27T15:14:59.830" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/947/how-can-i-word-a-user-licensing-doc-so-a-user-cannot-justify-deleting-all-their&quot;&gt;this topic&lt;/a&gt; about users posting content to a community and not having the right to &quot;take it down&quot; later on. It got me to thinking about communities which might have a system to automatically pull in, say, images which are included in a post but hosted externally. The main reason the community might do this would be to prevent link rot and prevent holes in the discussion should the external copy of the image go away at some point in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a forum has a license grant that states that anything posted to the site is effectively licensed to the community, etc. So if someone uploads a photo, that photo is licensed to the site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that same grant also apply to external images shown (not just linked to) in a post that are physically hosted elsewhere? Say, images the user owns which might be hosted in their flickr account, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So could the community, in that instance, rightfully retrieve a copy of that externally hosted image and store it on the community's servers, and be protected against the user requesting deletion down the road, in the same way as if the user physically uploaded the file initially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3136" OwnerDisplayName="robarwebservices" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:23.397" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T15:14:55.163" Title="CC Licence and Automatically Retrieving Linked Content from a Source" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2015-10-28T00:58:39.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, I will reiterate what others have said: &quot;navigating&quot; is not the verb I think to click on when looking for documentation.  It sounds more like you're describing how to read the code that you wrote, compiled, and have posted a webpage about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have various things that fall under &quot;documentation&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White papers, general info, and misc guides&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to use your software; tutorials&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;API Documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Legacy documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should make some different categories and put your documents in them (some examples above).  To explain those categories, you could have a list of the different types with pop-ups, mouse-overs, or some other UI widget to give a brief explanation of what's what.  You could have this list under a heading of &quot;help&quot;, &quot;documentation&quot;, &quot;wiki&quot;, or something similar.  You could also/or have a Table of Contents, screencap depicting the navigation of your site, or something similar to catch people's attention and direct them to the right place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not able to find any of your documentation until I read one of the answers here where they broke it down barney-style for you.  Then I could find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3126" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T00:58:39.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2015-10-28T10:54:25.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licences are a predefined set of rules you (the creator of the software) want the users of your software to follow. And by users, I mean final users, but also people who want to use your code in their own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you change an existing software, in legal terms, you create a derivative work, which means the way you can redistribute it depends on the licence of the original work, hence, the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no definitive answer to your question. The best answer is: it depends on the licence of the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the original code is licenced under the GPL licence, your modification must be distributed under the same licence. But if the original code is distributed under BSD-licence, you can choose any licence you want for your modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T10:54:25.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2022" CreationDate="2015-10-28T15:14:55.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A post licensed to some forum that includes a link does not give the forum an implied license for the target of the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously the case for links to images or documents that are not owned by the author of the post. I can include links to all sorts of stuff, but they don't come with an implied license; I'm not even able to grant a license for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't change for links to things that are in fact owned by you. There is generally no, or not a large difference between posting links to some content, and &quot;deep linking&quot; the image where your browser displays the image hosted elsewhere from a forum web page. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is probably some way to concoct terms of use that explicitly include that any material owned by you, and linked to from a forum post grants some license to the forum (you can't effectively license anything to &quot;the community&quot; since &quot;the community&quot; is not a legal entity.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if the linked work is under an open source license, you are already free to re-use it, as this is guaranteed under the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-10-28T15:14:55.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-10-28T17:47:17.473" Score="7" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that the BSD-2 or &quot;Simplified BSD&quot; software license removes from the BSD-3 &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;some language that is no longer necessary&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Looking at the difference between these two licenses, it appears that this refers to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the name of [project] nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense is this language &quot;no longer necessary&quot;. Is this protection implicit because of some other statute or agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3148" OwnerDisplayName="raxacoricofallapatorius" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T07:35:57.200" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T10:04:23.657" Title="What's &quot;no longer necessary&quot; about parts of BSD-3?" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2028" CreationDate="2015-10-29T07:16:20.623" Score="5" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked a project which is licensed under “BSD-like” license. This goes as&#xA;the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright © 20xx Author&#xA;CopyRight © 20xx Another author&#xA;&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,&#xA;  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&#xA;This software is provided by the copyright holders &quot;as is&quot; and any express or&#xA;implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of&#xA;merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no&#xA;event shall the copyright holders be liable for any direct, indirect,&#xA;incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not&#xA;limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data,&#xA;or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of&#xA;liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including&#xA;negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software,&#xA;even if advised of the possibility of such damage.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to avoid ambiguous “BSD-like” and state that it's under BSD3 for&#xA;clarity. As I understand I should just add the following clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* Neither the name of the &amp;lt;authors&amp;gt; nor the names of its contributors&#xA;  may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software&#xA;  without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I add this clause to license of my fork? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems&#xA;that the “new” license will contain the same info &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; one more clause and&#xA;that should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3143" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-10-29T07:36:55.740" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T01:58:33.350" Title="Can I add &quot;third clause&quot; to BSD-like license?" Tags="|relicensing|forking|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2015-10-30T10:16:17.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2-clause BSD licence is generally known as the &lt;em&gt;FreeBSD licence&lt;/em&gt;, which is how it gets referred to by the FSF, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's different from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://bxr.su/o/share/misc/license.template&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenBSD licence&lt;/a&gt;, which is just an ISC licence (most famously now known as the &lt;em&gt;OpenBSD licence&lt;/em&gt;, due to various OpenBSD offshoots), whereas &lt;a href=&quot;http://bxr.su/n/distrib/notes/common/legal.common&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;NetBSD has traditionally been distributed under a 4-clause licence&lt;/a&gt;, even though that's supposedly no longer the case for code assigned directly to NetBSD Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you want more recognition, especially since Netflix has been at it recently, you should just refer to your licence as the &lt;em&gt;FreeBSD licence&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as is, a statement like &quot;&lt;em&gt;2-clause BSD licence&lt;/em&gt;&quot; should generally be already sufficiently clear enough as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the advertising clause that was subsequently withdrawn by Berkeley from the 4-clause licence, was actually clause #3, so, a 3-clause BSD licence for code not explicitly originating from Berkeley is, IMHO, not at all clearer than the other alternatives presented here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastActivityDate="2015-10-30T10:16:17.457" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2015-11-01T09:15:37.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding such a clause results in creating a new licence which isn't the BSD licence anymore. And that can create a bunch of new problems. For example, if someone wants to reuse the code in a BSD-licenced software, it wouldn't be legal. So the benefits of using an existing licence would be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="163" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T09:15:37.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T09:53:25.667" Score="4" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the good way to change the license of an opensource project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I guess it depends of the agreements of the contributors&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do i need 100% approval?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if one contributor disagree or one contributor didn't answer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about versions?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If change happens at version X, does it apply for previous versions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where should it be mentioned? On homepage at least. Also in the code? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3164" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-02T12:56:56.367" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T15:33:20.533" Title="How can i change the license of an open source project?" Tags="|relicensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-11-01T15:39:10.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2026" CreationDate="2015-11-01T10:04:23.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what sense is this language &quot;no longer necessary&quot;. Is this protection implicit because of some other statute or agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, names are (best) protected through trademarks and some name protection is implicit in some jurisdictions, which is the reason why the non-endorsement clause in the &quot;BSD-3&quot; and several other licenses (Apache) is often felt to be not needed and doing double duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for a relevant and interesting discussion on trademarks and names for free software see the Gnome Groupon story here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnome.org/groupon/&quot;&gt;https://www.gnome.org/groupon/&lt;/a&gt; and elsewhere.&#xA;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T10:04:23.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2015-11-01T10:20:35.893" Score="10" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need 100% approval of all contributors. And the best is IMHO to keep these agreement committed with the code (say save the agreement emails in a docs dir). When the Eclipse project changed its license from the CPL to EPL, it took a year+ to secure approvals and they were pretty well organized.&#xA;For more details on re-licensing approvals, see this article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html&lt;/a&gt; pointed to in a comment&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If one contributor disagrees or did not answer, you cannot change the license for their contribution. You could either move the contribution in a separate place under the original license or remove it from the code. This  becomes quickly quite hairy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Changes are never retroactive. The licenses you granted in the past are granted and cannot be taken back (at least for FOSS).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should IMHO announce it profusely and be very clear about the new license. None likes a license change in most cases, and this can impact the trust that users and contributors have put in your project. So best is to be clear, open and communicate a lot about it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would think twice about changing licenses if I were you. In particular if you are moving from an attribution-like license to a copyleft-like license, most folks would feel bad about that. In general a change towards more constraints and obligations is something that would not feel good. And would eventually impact the reputation, trust and popularity of your project and its ability to keep or attract contributors..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2015-11-02T15:33:20.533" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T15:33:20.533" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-01T14:18:24.577" Score="15" ViewCount="1154" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont/&quot;&gt;GNU Unifont&lt;/a&gt; is a fontface licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unifoundry.com/LICENSE.txt&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv2 or later with this exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license for the compiled fonts is covered by the above GPL terms&#xA;  with the GNU font embedding exception, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use this fontface in a game, does the game fulfill the definition of being a &quot;document&quot; or do I need to license the game under the GPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details about how the font is used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The game engine would use the font-face to render text on GUI elements. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I might create 2d images which include characters from that font-face and use these as textures in the game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T10:38:54.603" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T09:14:10.183" Title="Does using GNU Unifont in a game make the game GPL?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|gpl-font-exception|font|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2033" CreationDate="2015-11-01T16:18:30.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take is that a document could be understood here as anything that used the font for rendering. To be sure that is a correct interpretation ask the authors of this font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some discussion &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050425novalis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, by the author of this license exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/FAQ.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Quoting the GNU Freefont FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I use GNU FreeFont without restriction in my printed documents (reports, brochures, books, logos, etc.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license restricts only the distribution of the font itself, or&#xA;  derivatives thereof — documents printed with the font are regarded&#xA;  as output of the font, not the font itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T00:08:57.167" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T00:08:57.167" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2033" CreationDate="2015-11-01T18:04:43.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Incorporating GNU Unifont in a software means that software has to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unifont uses the same GPL exception GNU FreeFont uses. The GNU FreeFont website has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/FAQ.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a FAQ which explains this case&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I incorporate GNU FreeFont into my (proprietary/non-GPL) software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only for your own personal use, or use within your organization only. If you distribute software that incorporates elements of GNU FreeFont, the distribution as a whole must be released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-01T18:04:43.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2039" CreationDate="2015-11-02T07:06:14.543" Score="7" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the title is a bit misleading, I guess it might not be possible to release software as open source with this restriction, so the question is how I should license the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release one or more software tools (SDK etc) that has a specific purpose. One of the points behind the whole project idea, is that everyone should use the same API because that benifits the other people using the same tools. Might sound a bit cryptic, but I guess you understand the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, I want the project to be like a normal open source project (MIT/BSD license). Sharing, contributing, no problem. People can even copy the tools and modify them if they want. The only important thing is that they still use the given API for backend requests, at least in any open environment (production), having a local API for testing/developing is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to keep the benifits of using the same API, instead of anyone trying to set up their own API for the same purpose, splitting up the project and thereby the benifits for the end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sort of like if Facebook released all their frontend code, allowing people to make their own FB app, only demanding that people use their API instead of setting up their own, so the database of users are not split up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a possible licensing for a project like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no way to release an open source project with the described restriction, how about the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copy the text of an open source license (like BSD), and add a clause for the described API rule. I don't refer to the license as BSD, only use the same text as a template. In the project Readme/docs, I would of course explain that it is not a standard open source project, and refer to the license file. Would that be OK in regards to whatever case where the project license would be relevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3172" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-02T12:55:00.550" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T22:33:48.883" Title="Open source licensing with extra restriction clause" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-02T13:12:05.037" Score="8" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say an open source software project has a component which could be useful as a standalone project. Examples could include Django's event signalling framework, which could be useful for other Python projects or the client components of Postgres, which are not-quite-common with the HAWQ and Greenplum projects incubating at Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After being given a separate existence these components would then (probably) become an upstream dependency of the project they were originally part of. I have been trying to find examples of this pattern but have been unable to, maybe because I just don't have the right terms to search for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this sort of thing happened often enough that there is a term for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What notable examples are there of this being attempted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="453" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2015-11-02T13:30:34.350" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T21:03:45.670" Title="Term and precedents for pulling out a part of a software project into a new project" Tags="|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2015-11-02T13:36:01.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a license change, you need to have the voting from aprox. 95% of the total copyright. So you need to ask 20 people at most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: In European Copyright law, minor contributors are not allowed to take part in the decision-making for the way of marketing, they just need to get a fair amount of the income. Given that OSS projects do not create income from selling the source, they do not get money. The used license however can be seen as the way of marketing and this cannot be determined by minor contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, things are similar. I recommend to read this paper from Catherine Olanich Raymond (the wife of Eric Raymond): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T13:36:01.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2036" CreationDate="2015-11-02T22:33:48.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would not be open source. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt; mandates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using your software for interfacing with a competing backend service is such a field of endeavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are of course free to create an own crayon license based on the BSD or MIT license which forbids interfacing with any API not hosted by you. It's your work and you alone can decide who can use it and for what. But when you make use of your copyright in this way, please do not call it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-11-02T22:33:48.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2033" CreationDate="2015-11-02T22:58:29.687" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typefaces are generally not eligible for copyright. They aren't in the US at all, as established in Eltra Corporation v. Barbara A. Ringer, and in many other places (UK, Ireland, Switzerland and others), the use of a font does not infringe on the copyright of a font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A font file is a file that contains points along which curves are drawn to generate a character. In the US, these files have been found to be eligible for copyright protection as software in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc. So while the printed character has no copyright, the font file used to generate it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your game uses the font file to generate textures, the original expression of the font file is lost, and is not covered under copyright at all anymore in the US. This leads me to believe that in the US, the exception does exactly nothing that you weren't permitted to do already, at least for this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute the font file alongside the game as a separate or semi-separate install (you have to make clear the font is a separate product when the user installs it, but it may be part of the same installer), this doesn't count as making a combined work according to the license FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the scenario where you extract the representation from the font file, and use it in your software, then the game and the font together would most likely become a work that has to be distributed under the GPLv2+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how game engines work exactly, and how they interact with fonts. If you can install the font separately for the in-game text, you can follow the semi-separate install route. If the font somehow gets absorbed in the game engine, then you will have to distribute under the GPLv2+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typefaces can be protected with design patents as well. Because the license is GPLv2+, you can use it under the GPLv3, which removes this concern with its anti-patent clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T09:03:02.330" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T09:03:02.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-03T06:31:29.290" Score="5" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any licenses considered free by the OSI and not by the FSF and Vice Versa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both seem to further the same point, and all the licenses I saw they both agreed that it was either free or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they ever disagree?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3179" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T06:31:29.290" Title="Are there any licenses considered free by the OSI and not by the FSF and Vice Versa?" Tags="|osi|fsf|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-11-03T10:24:57.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2044" CreationDate="2015-11-03T21:38:27.723" Score="7" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a license for a small project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mathematician with my collaborators we created some C code that allows one to simulate some equations. This code is pretty simple but allows for plenty of flexibility. It contains 5 files and more or less 10/15 functions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to upload it to an online repository (like Github, maybe you could proposed something else?) so that the community can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like that anyone can use this code and modify it (the idea of the free), But we would like the chain of authors is respected! Each modifications and publications on a repository should cite the past authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this code use the Gnu Scientific Library, so it has to be compatible, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which kind of simple license is adapted?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other related question, we make a documentation of this code with the help of Doxygen. Do each file must contain authors and license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We would like to thanks our supporting institution. Does it possible to do that in compatibility with a license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-03T22:44:02.807" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T08:07:51.143" Title="What kind of license for a small code" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2015-11-03T22:41:39.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Gnu Scientific Library is licensed under the GPLv3. This means that any work based on it should also be licensed under the GPLv3 if it's distributed, so that's pretty much your only choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license does meet all your criteria (possibly apart from &quot;simple&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The documentation can be covered by this license as well, or could be separately licensed. Documentation doesn't have to be under the GPL if the source material is under the GPL. Other options are the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL), or a creative commons license, for example CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these licenses require that attribution is left intact, though for the GFDL, only the 5 most important contributors have to be listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Doxygen places no restrictions. I believe it's a good idea to list copyright information (author(s) and license name and link) on each documentation page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously you're allowed to thank whoever you like. You are allowed to do this with any license. Someone might be able to take the software, and remove your &quot;special thanks&quot; from it though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-03T22:41:39.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-04T07:16:13.857" Score="6" ViewCount="1039" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software is designed to use third-party external tools if the user wishes to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some users would like to use GPL-covered binaries as external tools (i.e. they tell my software &quot;use this dll to convert your input before feeding it to you&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they install the third-party executable themselves (i.e. I don't ship the GPL-covered program nor I link against it in any way), am I violating the GPL license somehow? I late-bind the dll told me by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky case which I suppose it's not covered by the usual &quot;GPL for commercial use&quot; paragraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3193" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T08:08:56.017" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T08:57:10.890" Title="Usage of GPL program as optional external tool" Tags="|gpl|commercial|linked-libraries|plugins|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2052" CreationDate="2015-11-04T07:42:36.407" Score="5" ViewCount="1697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just noticed this in the linux's kernel code &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/boot/main.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;main.c&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *   Copyright (C) 1991, 1992 Linus Torvalds&#xA; *   Copyright 2007 rPath, Inc. - All Rights Reserved&#xA; *   Copyright 2009 Intel Corporation; author H. Peter Anvin&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do they apply to the kernel? It seems really strange to me, also because the next line is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *   This file is part of the Linux kernel, and is made available under&#xA; *   the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3139" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T06:54:53.150" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:06:17.997" Title="How can the Linux kernel's main.c file say that one of its copyrights is &quot;all rights reserved&quot; when it's GPL?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|license-notice|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2015-11-04T08:50:41.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's exactly what it says on the tin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free and open source software is software that the copyright owners license to you (or anyone else) under a free license (that meets the Open Software Initiative (OSI) or Free Software Foundation (FSF) definition of open source or free software)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright is owned by Linus, rPath and Intel (and possibly others). They have licensed this to you under the GPLv2, which is a free software license. The GPLv2 is a license that grants you the rights to use it, and guarantees that it remains free and open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;all rights reserved&quot; simply indicates the person or entity holds the copyright, it has nothing to do with any licensing on the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T08:06:17.997" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T08:06:17.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2015-11-04T09:18:39.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is a composite work by multiple entities. The three listed entities share the copyright of the file together and have agreed to license it to each other (and to you) under GNU GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having all authors keep their copyright is a common strategy in the Open Source community to prevent works from becomming un-free in the future. It makes it impossible for one copyright holder to change the license without approval of the others. For a work like the Linux kernel which has literally thousands of contributors by now, this is practically impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T09:18:39.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2049" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" Score="0" Body="Questions about the theory, practice, and licenses where copyleft is intended to be applied to a combined work." OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T09:33:12.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2045" CreationDate="2015-11-04T12:03:42.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, this is not a tricky case at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not in any way bound by any terms in the GPL if you are not distributing software that is licensed to you under the GPL. Neither you nor your users are distributing software licensed to them under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your users are always free to use free software in any way they like. The GPL doesn't forbid - in fact, specifically allows, and was created to guarantee to specifically allow - any kind of use a user would have for the software, including being used together with propriety software in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; for any license approved by the FSF as a free license, following from freedom 0 of the free software definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't apply to you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;guarantees this use case is legal for the users of the GPL modules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-11-04T13:17:49.670" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T13:17:49.670" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2015-11-04T14:14:38.360" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright and open source are not mutually exclusive&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, most open-source licenses &lt;em&gt;depend&lt;/em&gt; on copyright in order to function properly. The GPL comes most readily to mind: you couldn't enforce the requirement to share-alike if copyright didn't let the author decide who may or may not copy the work. But even something as simple as an MIT-style attribution requirement couldn't be enforced without copyright. The Creative Commons licenses also depend on copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-copyrighted software does exist (in some jurisdictions)&lt;/strong&gt;. Such software is often said to be in the &lt;em&gt;public domain&lt;/em&gt;, and although it is usually classified alongside open-source, it works quite differently: instead of using a license to explicitly allow the sharing of software, it doesn't use a license at all. That's why Creative Commons calls CC0 a &lt;em&gt;dedication&lt;/em&gt; instead of a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; (though it includes a license for jurisdictions that do not recognize the public domain). SQLite is a famous example of public-domain software, though it does not use CC0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;All rights reserved&quot; by rPath &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a bit strange to see in an open-source product, but it is probably just standard boilerplate. The GPL renders it pretty much moot anyway; the rights &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; reserved, but then the GPL explicitly re-grants the rights that make the software open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="962" LastActivityDate="2015-11-04T14:14:38.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2054" CreationDate="2015-11-05T10:09:19.957" Score="8" ViewCount="2600" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took the &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.xiph.org/?p=mirrors/theora.git;a=blob;f=examples/png2theora.c;h=c740ad8043848738909c09b07135d7cedb9e5fff;hb=refs/heads/master&quot;&gt;C code&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;code&gt;png2theora&lt;/code&gt; example tool of Xiph.Org Theora which has a copyright header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/********************************************************************&#xA; *                                                                  *&#xA; * THIS FILE IS PART OF THE OggTheora SOFTWARE CODEC SOURCE CODE.   *&#xA; * USE, DISTRIBUTION AND REPRODUCTION OF THIS LIBRARY SOURCE IS     *&#xA; * GOVERNED BY A BSD-STYLE SOURCE LICENSE INCLUDED WITH THIS SOURCE *&#xA; * IN 'COPYING'. PLEASE READ THESE TERMS BEFORE DISTRIBUTING.       *&#xA; *                                                                  *&#xA; * THE Theora SOURCE CODE IS COPYRIGHT (C) 2002-2009,2009           *&#xA; * by the Xiph.Org Foundation and contributors http://www.xiph.org/ *&#xA; *                                                                  *&#xA; ********************************************************************&#xA;&#xA;  function: example encoder application; makes an Ogg Theora&#xA;            file from a sequence of png images&#xA;  last mod: $Id$&#xA;             based on code from Vegard Nossum&#xA;&#xA; ********************************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.xiph.org/?p=mirrors/theora.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=c8ccce4ffb5d7a7574bac87429ec1d2a7b90686d;hb=refs/heads/master&quot;&gt;COPYING file&lt;/a&gt; points is a 3-clause BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have taken the code apart into several pieces which I have rewritten in Vala code classes (so in a different programming language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wrote several vapi files to bind to the C APIs (for libtheora, libogg and libpng).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did several heavy changes to the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replaced return code based error handling by exception handling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewrote command line parsing from getopt to GLib OptionGroup&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reorganized the code into several classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replaced stdio file functions by gio classes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Added some additional error handling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have almost completely rewritten the original code, but it should still work essentially like the original tool from the user perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to release this code (preferably under an AGPLv3 license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I correctly attribute the original authors copyright / license in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3205" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-05T13:39:40.550" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T13:39:40.550" Title="How do I license code when rewriting code in another language?" Tags="|derivative-works|relicensing|bsd|agpl-3.0|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-11-05T18:11:40.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2053" CreationDate="2015-11-05T10:27:12.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under some interpretations, re-writing code to a different language constitutes a derivative work. Under others it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hold your work not to be a derivative work (in the copyright sense of the word), you're done; you don't have anything to do with the original work anymore, and you can license whichever way you like without attributing the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I you do hold your work to be a derivative work, which is the safer, and IMO correct route, you have to comply with the 3-clause BSD license. The first two are the most relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most practical way to comply in my opinion is to include the BSD notice in the project, and have a central notice that remarks it was based on the original work, link to the original work and original authors file, and then do your standard stuff for the new license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-05T10:27:12.593" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-05T18:51:16.140" Score="5" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working for a company that stores millions of newspapers articles. Subscribers can log on our site and make queries. Our search engine returns articles that match the queries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that in general, a company can use GPL Stanford software commercially as long as all their source code is available and the GPL is preserved in their distribution. The case here is that we dot not distribute any code binaries to clients. Clients only log in, make queries and get results. In this particular case, can we use Stanford NER free of charge or do we have to purchase a commercial license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3208" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-06T02:22:01.927" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T06:28:03.393" Title="Does using Stanford NER in a website count as distributing it?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2015-11-08T06:28:03.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL only requires to publish and license sourcecode when either sourcecode or compiled binaries are conveyed to another party. Any code which is executed on your own servers is not conveyed. The GPL does not apply to the output, unless it copies part of the GPL code into that output (Javascript, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T06:28:03.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2058" CreationDate="2015-11-08T14:44:50.253" Score="6" ViewCount="3645" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any &lt;strong&gt;open source licence that would allow one individual to copy, modify, share the source code of the project while preventing to share a modified copy of the project?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking that thinking about security softwares that are closed-source because of the need of 'making money' in the business model. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This trick could allow one company to have an open source software including some kind of token verification or anything else that requires a payment for the use of the software. While this can sound fuzzy because one individual could easily take the source code and modify it so as to use the software free of charge, the majority of people who don't have the skills to do so would pay for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand this can go against the &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &lt;em&gt;liberty&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;free of charge&lt;/em&gt; I do really think it could be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3221" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-11-08T15:07:36.967" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T01:23:31.350" Title="Licence to prevent sharing a modified copy of a software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|security|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2057" CreationDate="2015-11-08T16:09:19.570" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any open source license allows anyone to share modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;annotated open source definition&lt;/a&gt; clause 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Derived Works&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale: The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T16:09:19.570" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2057" CreationDate="2015-11-08T19:40:38.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has quite a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Open-source_software#/Open-source_vs._source-available&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good section&lt;/a&gt; on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the OSI definition of &amp;quot;open source software&amp;quot; is widely accepted, a small number of people and organizations use the term to refer to software where the source is available for viewing, but which may not legally be modified or redistributed. Such software is more often referred to as source-available, or as shared source, a term coined by Microsoft in 2001. While in 2007 two shared source licenses were certified by the OSI, most of the shared source licenses are still source-available only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2007 Michael Tiemann, president of OSI, had criticized companies such as SugarCRM for promoting their software as &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; when in fact it did not have an OSI-approved license. In SugarCRM's case, it was because the software is so-called &amp;quot;badgeware&amp;quot; since it specified a &amp;quot;badge&amp;quot; that must be displayed in the user interface (SugarCRM has since switched to GPLv3). Another example was Scilab prior to version 5, which called itself &amp;quot;the open source platform for numerical computation&amp;quot; but had a license that forbade commercial redistribution of modified versions. Because OSI does not have a registered trademark for the term &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;, its legal ability to prevent such usage of the term is limited, but Tiemann advocates using public opinion from OSI, customers, and community members to pressure such organizations to change their license or to use a different term.  Although the OSI definition of &amp;quot;open source software&amp;quot; is widely accepted, &lt;strong&gt;a small number of people and organizations use the term to refer to software where the source is available for viewing, but which may not legally be modified or redistributed&lt;/strong&gt;. Such software is more often referred to as source-available, or as shared source, a term coined by Microsoft in 2001. While in 2007 two shared source licenses were certified by the OSI, most of the shared source licenses are still source-available only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it boils down to the fact that quite a lot of companies have actually done the thing you were wondering about and whether the term &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; may be used to describe this behavior has been debated quite a lot and taking a position one way or another would make for an incomplete answer. The simple reality is that &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; can both mean &lt;em&gt;openly available&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;free to be changed&lt;/em&gt; depending on the context of where and with whom the term is used. In the source code world there is a whole range from 'public domain' down to 'closed source' and the best thing to realize is that it's best to just judge each license on its own merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing however is that there definitely are licenses that allow you to do exactly what you want to do, regardless of how they are called. There are however no freely-usable licenses of such type that I know of, as a license - just like any intellectual work- is by default copyrighted, so companies tend to just write their own license when they wish to make their source code view-able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-08T21:34:35.103" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2061" CreationDate="2015-11-09T00:53:16.973" Score="5" ViewCount="1296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to include two open-source libraries in my application: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/Commprod.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ghostscript&lt;/a&gt; and &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://itextpdf.com/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;iTextSharp&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 3 commercial applications that I will develop myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial software will use both above two opensource software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial software will use only iTextSharp.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial software will use iTextSharp along with another commercial software library for which I have the rights to distribute with my application. I bought the distribution license of that commercial library for US $1 just for the sake of having a legal distribution license. The owner is willing to help me use his software library in my application and distribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to open-source the parts of application that I wrote. I can forward the same license agreement in the distribution and can agree to specify the developer names etc in the software sold and willing do to anything needed to do except any payment for the opensource software libraries. Obviously I can't opensource that commercial library that I will use in the third software because I don't have its source code and I just have its distribution rights when I sell the third software which uses that commercial library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make money from the application that I wrote but can not purchase the commercial license of Ghostscript and iTextSharp because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their commercial license are very expensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am willing to open source the applications that I will write.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not sure if I will make any money from the applications that I will develop, so I don't have the means to pay for a commercial license and can not pay as of now.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, please guide me if I can make all of the three software. If not, then can I make any one or two of the three?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3227" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T12:36:41.937" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T14:36:57.560" Title="How can I include two open-source libraries in my commercial applications?" Tags="|commercial|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2060" CreationDate="2015-11-09T01:17:54.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can distribute what you develop under several licences, probably by stating that the user gets to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd advise against it, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; it is cleanly separate pieces that warrant different licenses. Please don't make life hard for downstream (it hurts yourself, in the end, if your software can't be used due to murky licensing issues, or some downstream picking one option and another the other, with the result that the branches can't be merged due to license mismatch), pick one of the standard licenses, and make sure you stay GPL compatible for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T01:17:54.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2057" CreationDate="2015-11-09T01:23:31.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source definition explicitly allows the license to forbid distributing modified versions under the same name, originally to accomodate TeX's requirement that modified versions can't be called TeX, but also for cases like the one described (i.e., some version is, say, certified, any modification would led to losing the certified status).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check the standard OSI-approved licenses (or the FSF-approved ones). But &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; stay GPL-compatible as far as possible. License proliferation could lead to forbidding useful combinations,  loss for us all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T01:23:31.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2060" CreationDate="2015-11-09T09:59:55.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL licenses of GhostScript and iTextSharp require your application to be licensed under the AGPL as well. This allows options 1 and 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3 is simply impossible without the expensive commercial iTextSharp license. You can't Open Source your whole application for the reason you already mentioned, you don't own all the IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the problem is that closed source and (A)GPL intentionally don't mix. You don't have a solid business case for your third app, but that's your problem - not iTextSharp's problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T09:59:55.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2045" CreationDate="2015-11-09T10:19:40.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The existing answer is perhaps not clear enough. A third party cannot force the GPL on you. This is not specific to the GPL. They couldn't force a BSD or closed-source license on you either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine if it was possible. Microsoft would need to create one closed-source program and have the Linux kernel run it, to close down Linux ! And vice versa you could open-source Windows by running a GPL program on it ! Obviously that's not how the world works. Software can co-exist and co-operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T10:19:40.630" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2068" CreationDate="2015-11-09T13:19:47.557" Score="10" ViewCount="1670" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am open-sourcing an OpenGL project out of a desire to share the code. However, I would like to deter anyone from compiling my project as is and publishing it with the same icon, images, and models. My application is for-profit, but I doubt I would lose significant sales to people going through the trouble of compiling it for their own use. But someone could republish my application as is as a free version that competes with my paid version, and that potentially could significantly affect sales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put the Apache 2 license in the project, and the read-me states that it covers code files only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are two things I'm unclear on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does placing the text of the license in a file in the root of my project somehow imply that it applies to all files in the project that are publicly visible?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the Apache 2 License apply to image files? It mentions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Source&quot; form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software source code, documentation source, and configuration files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no explicit mention of images. I know I could swap out all the image files for something else, but then it would not be as nice of an example for others to learn from, and I really don't want to take the time to generate alternate artwork. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I can't entirely stop cloners, but I'd at least like to be able to ask storefronts like Google Play to take down apps that are identical to mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3230" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-09T16:33:20.207" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T17:57:34.700" Title="Does the Apache 2 License cover non-code?" Tags="|apache-2.0|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2065" CreationDate="2015-11-09T17:57:34.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you make clear that it doesn't, just having the Apache2 license in your project &lt;em&gt;implies&lt;/em&gt; that it goes for everything in your project, including assets, documentation, etc., but doesn't make it explicit, and it's unclear what a court of law would say about it if challenged. Implying things and legal documents don't tend to be a good combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can lead to confusion, and cases where people will ask you for clarification at best* and people who won't use your work because they are not sure what the license refers to exactly, or people who will use your work where it wasn't your intention for them to use it under that license at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache2 license &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; refer to all sorts of things that aren't code. For example, in the case of the Spray.io project, everything including documentation is Apache2. There is no inherent problem with that. Please do realize that the preferred form for making modifications to many images is the file format you use to create the image, like the photoshop, inkscape, gimp or whathaveyou file, so if you want to have them under the Apache2 license, this is what you should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is by no means a requirement. You are free to have your assets and other non-code things under one license, and your code under another without any problems. Whatever you choose, I advice you to be very clear as to what is licensed as what. Generally, it's a good idea to state the copyright status of everything in some readme file. There you can say, for example, that everything is copyright you, licensed under the apache2 license (with a link to the apache2 license in your project). Or that everything is copyright you, all images and documentation under some license x (for example CC BY-SA if you like that, or something different entirely), and everything else under the Apache2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these things, it's always best to be as clear as possible to your re-users, so that they don't have to bug you with questions later. It never hurts to be explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that Copyright is not the only intellectual property that can help you protect your product. You can also have a trademark (registered or unregistered) on your projects name and symbols representing your project. This is, for example, the route Firefox has taken (and the reason it's called IceWeasel in some Linux distributions). Trademarks are completely separate from copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This rarely ever happens. People will usually either assume one way or the other, or walk away confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-09T17:57:34.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-10T21:40:14.053" Score="8" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person has created a repository for a open-source project with a large scope. This person has project management experience and reportedly has development experience, and is enthusiastic about creating this project (for various reasons). However, this person is not well-versed in the target language, or framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the person in question decides to &quot;recruit&quot; others to help with the project, while attempting to contribute through providing &quot;management&quot; to other contributors (via timelines, documentation, communication management - holdovers from a non-distributed, classical system). Unfortunately, the person also contributes little to no code despite owning the repository, instead depending solely on the contributors to make contributions; and so the project doesn't grow (since there are few contributors). The idea is that after the project has started, a timeline has been set, and code has been contributed, the project owner will be comfortable enough to begin to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mindset seems counter to the way projects gain momentum in the wild, where people get excited after some work has been done. Further, due to the lack of development familiarity on the owner's part, the project basically has no momentum without other contributors (which is the cause for the timelines, the documentation, and the other management tools in place; perhaps recruitment would not be necessary with a larger development skillset).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a contributor address this situation (without leaving the project or forking the original repository into oblivion)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: To clarify, this scenario occurs in a non-business, non-corporate, online environment where contributors are geographically disparate and communication is unscheduled. While there is an &quot;organization&quot;, it has been created by the repository owner and the project license would be non-restrictive. There is no compensation for contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3243" LastEditorDisplayName="user3243" LastEditDate="2015-11-10T23:11:42.687" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T21:20:30.223" Title="How to deal with &quot;project managers&quot; in an open-source project?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2076" CreationDate="2015-11-11T00:18:46.157" Score="12" ViewCount="1031" Body="&lt;p&gt;In October 2015, Red Hat acquired Ansible, the developer of the famous configuration management software &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ansible&lt;/a&gt;, apparently for a price of about $100M.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ansible, the software, AFAIK is licensed fully under the GPL. Ansible, the company, does however also develop an extension to the software called &lt;em&gt;Tower&lt;/em&gt; that, as I understand it, is basically just a web GUI to the core software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that Redhat could use Ansible for free anyway, and would, I guess, be very well capable of creating their own sort of GUI if that's what they needed, and that even if they bought the company they still have to adhere to the GPL for the core, why on earth would they spend such a huge amount of money on this acquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3096" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2018-09-29T22:09:06.750" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T22:09:06.750" Title="Red Hat acquires Ansible - why?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2015-11-11T00:30:28.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure about this one, but here I go (as in this is like a theoretical answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Redhat acquires Ansible, &lt;em&gt;Redhat also acquires the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;for their products.&lt;/em&gt; This means that they own the copyright, they can do anything that they would like with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright is fully theirs, and they have complete ownership, then it's theirs. They can do anything they would like. This includes changing the license, and stopping releases of that software, and even making it proprietary. However, older versions of the software will also be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that Redhat owns the software, they can license it under a proprietary license: thereby allowing them to impose proprietary restrictions and effectively making it closed source. By doing this, they make their business model that is one of proprietary software, similar to other companies like Adobe, Apple, or even Microsoft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's for a proprietary business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T00:30:28.180" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2069" CreationDate="2015-11-11T01:03:30.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a classic &amp;quot;do this for me&amp;quot; situation. It's very unhealthy: Imagine a school student who doesn't understand how to write a simple script. Someone else writes it for them, and this original school student now gets the complete credit for the working script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same idea here. Contributors are literally providing code to a project, where an inactive person is literally getting all the credit. I hate to say this, but you've really been doing free work for this &amp;quot;manager&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, contributors have been writing code, satisfying the needs and wants of the manager. It sounds like a workplace environment: you need to &amp;quot;do this and that&amp;quot; by &amp;quot;so and so date&amp;quot;, and that's very unhealthy. From what I understand, it looks like it's been near impossible if contributors have had interests that they wanted to have in the project. Is the &amp;quot;manager's&amp;quot; agenda going to stop that? If the manager doesn't like it, he'll say no, and you will have one unhappy contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;manager&amp;quot; is just meta-managing, and I don't see any incentive from him to start contributing anytime soon. By setting schedules and goals, he sounds more interested in the logistics of the project, rather than the code base, which means that by contributing, he'll just be a &amp;quot;newbie.&amp;quot; One that will have to be taught the base step by step so that he can start making some minor changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the comments, it looks as if the &amp;quot;manager&amp;quot; has others' approving commits, and acting like maintainers to the project. This just worsens the &amp;quot;manager's&amp;quot; position: that he has no sense of the quality or efficiency of the contributions to his project. It shows a lack of commitment and dedication to the project, in that the maintainer doesn't know the internal structures of the code base. If he were to issue a drastic change as a part of his agenda, it may not even be efficient for the contributing to try to implement such a change, as it wouldn't be efficient. Such workarounds would just dirty the code, making it unattractive, and after a period of time, unusable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that you want to make this work, and I applaud you for that. Many people would literally just give up, so this shows that you still have faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the time to reflect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is contributing to the project worthwhile? Is benefiting you?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have a sense of pride or ownership in the project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there clear communication? Are you, as well as other contributors, able to discuss segments of the agenda?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you feel like you have a voice - that you can raise your concerns and ideas without having any doubts in mind?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you answered &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; to any of the questions (especially the last), I would say that there is ground for concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, I would recommend the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Communicate with the other contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do other contributors share your concerns? What are these concerns? By collaborating and communicating your thoughts with other people involved in the project, you'll understand the feel and attitude. With people that are basically equal to you in the project hierarchy, you'll feel more at ease to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Talk to your manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figure out your manager's position? Chances are that there could be a reason as to why he doesn't contribute. Does he feel like the project is advancing? Get a feel for his point of view. This will allow you to share and think about any concerns that the two of you have. Once you feel like you've got more information, you'll be able to make more rational decisions as well. Ask him why he still maintains this project, and what his driving force is for setting goals, objectives, and timelines, as well as keeping the repository under his name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community begins to have a sense of understanding, it will improve. Open source development is something I find similar to community development: the project is a collaborative effort between people who share the same ideas and goals, and who wish to improve something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all else fails, and you (or other contributors) feel dissatisfied, &lt;em&gt;fork the project&lt;/em&gt;. This does you no harm, and you will have more of a say in how the software can move forward. There are still people involved that will be able to support the project. If you do this, I would make sure to say why, and to outline all your concerns, as well as (briefly), any efforts or attempts that you have made to rectify them. Have fun with that new project!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the action that you take, keep an open mind. Be open, think positively and think straight, and make sure that you put your best foot forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T01:03:30.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2015-11-11T01:07:19.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't the first time Red Hat buys a company (like it did with KVM) or the rights to a software package (as the Netscape LDAP server). What they did in those cases was eventually to distribute the software under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T01:07:19.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2069" CreationDate="2015-11-11T03:36:35.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Project management, whether in closed or open development projects, is a hugely valuable role. Therefore, the way you deal with project managers is simple: value their presence, and try to keep them around as long as possible. The lack of project managers in typical open source projects doesn't mean their work is irrelevant; on the contrary, due to the distributed and volunteer nature of open source projects, project management is &lt;em&gt;more important&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The activities that you attribute to this project manager: recruitment, planning, documentation, communication, are extremely valuable tasks. How can you have code contributions if no &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/54/175&quot;&gt;developers have been recruited&lt;/a&gt;? How do you make sure the right work has been done without timelines and planning? How do you expect to get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1503/175&quot;&gt;healthy stream of code contributions&lt;/a&gt; from non-core developers if you have no &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/818/175&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from the facts you've presented in your question, I don't see what the problem is. Project management in open source projects can be very different from closed source ones, because you usually don't have a bag of money to hire developers to work on whatever you tell them, and the developers you do have are volunteer and can come and go without notice. This makes project management more challenging but no less valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing wrong with a repo owner who doesn't contribute code. Linus for example basically &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2014/01/interview-linus-torvalds-i-dont-read.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doesn't read code anymore&lt;/a&gt;, let alone write them, and yet he's hugely important for the Linux project and still makes important decisions. The only requirement for a repo owner is that they are someone you can trust to either make final decisions, or defer to those who have the expertise and judgement to make them. The fact that your project manager recognises their lack of technical expertise and is holding off from making code contributions is a &lt;em&gt;good thing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only real problem that exists in your scenario is that there's a lack of code contributions, which is a problem in many open source projects regardless of whether the owner is a developer or not. The solution to that is to get more code contributions, not to find fault with the project manager and what they're not doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-11-11T03:36:35.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2015-11-11T12:11:57.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Red Hat answered the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/de/about/blog/why-red-hat-acquired-ansible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;in the Red Hat Blog&lt;/a&gt;. It is several screens long, and the jargon is mostly over my head, but this point was clear, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We believe that supporting and nurturing great open source communities&#xA;  is the only way to guarantee a continuous stream of innovation, and&#xA;  it’s what makes Red Hat so special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3248" LastEditorUserId="964" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T03:17:16.380" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T03:17:16.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2015-11-12T13:21:32.080" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, by acquiring Ansible they not only get the copyright for the software, but most importantly the workforce - the developers who developed the tool. That is much more important than the software in question. So they can in future control the direction the software takes and also use these developers in other projects if needed or useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as Zizouz already pointed out, they also becomes the owner of the intellectual property rights to the software. That seems useless in case of Open Source software - but that is wrong. Indeed everyone can use the software and even makes forks, but only the owner of the intellectual property can also use this source code in closed source projects if they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T13:21:32.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2078" CreationDate="2015-11-12T18:07:41.677" Score="26" ViewCount="4948" Body="&lt;p&gt;In another thread I started (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2070/redhat-acquires-ansible-why&quot;&gt;Red Hat buys Ansible&lt;/a&gt;), I am trying to figure out the economic value of a company transaction with respect to GPL'ed software. A few of the answers suggest that the owners themselves are not bound by the license. While they couldn't revoke the license for existing code, they could put the exact same code under a commercial license and, for example, just selectively publish new code under the GPL, if at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different from the understanding I previously had. I always figured that GPL'ed code belongs to the masses, the community, and that everyone is bound by the same rules. So I want to make sure that I understand this right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting software under the GPL does not mean abandoning ownership?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What constitutes ownership? Is it the copyright?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner is not bound by the GPL, e.g. he could change or improve the code without having to share the changes back to the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about community contributions? Whom do they belong to? If not clearly defined, what options do exist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might not even have got all the important aspects but these would be enough to thoroughly change my perception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3096" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-31T16:42:13.213" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T03:56:57.643" Title="So the GPL doesn't restrict the creator of the software in any way?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|copyright|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2077" CreationDate="2015-11-12T20:14:11.987" Score="46" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting software under the GPL does not mean abandoning ownership?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. In nations signatory to the Berne Convention, &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; is the default, which means by default only the author (or current copyright holder, if the original author transfers the copyright) may reproduce the work, prepare derivative works, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of a work may use a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; to permit other people to use the work in specific ways, subject to author-defined license-specific rules. Allowing other people to use the work via a license in no way lessens the author's copyright -- on the contrary, the author's copyright is what makes the license possible and necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(One exception to this is if you offer an &lt;em&gt;exclusive&lt;/em&gt; license to some particular person or party, meaning that you make a contractual promise not to offer licenses to anyone else, nor to exercise your copyright rights yourself. In that case you do limit your ability to reproduce your own work, but this case is quite different from offering a non-exclusive license to the public at large.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that any recipient of a GPL-licensed work can distribute and modify it. Thus, even if the author stops distributing a GPL-licensed work, the author cannot rescind the rights previously granted to existing recipients. (This claim is somewhat debated for GPLv2, and may vary by jurisdiction, but is made explicit in GPLv3.) In that sense, releasing a work under the GPL means abandoning the ability to restrict its distribution and modification under the terms of the GPL, but this is tremendously different from abandoning ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What constitutes ownership? Is it the copyright?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, copyright is a kind of &amp;quot;ownership,&amp;quot; in the metaphorical mapping of intellectual property rights onto physical property rights. That is, the copyright holder of a work has certain exclusive rights to a work. Those rights can be granted to other people in limited ways (or unlimited ways, if you're feeling generous), but ultimately the grant of those rights comes from the legal reality that those rights fundamentally belong to the copyright holder and are licensed as the copyright holder pleases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner is not bound by the GPL, e.g. he could change or improve the code without having to share the changes back to the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. The copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant! The copyright holder's rights stem from copyright law, not from a license grant. The copyright holder can legally prepare a derivative of her own work based on her rights under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people can prepare derivative works of someone else's copyrighted work only insofar as that right has licensed to them. In the case of the GPL, that means that others' derivative works &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be GPL-licensed. The copyright holder need not follow this rule, since they they do not derive their rights from the GPL license grant. Rather, they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the original source of the rights being licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about community contributions? Whom do they belong to? If not clearly defined, what options do exist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributions are creative works created by their respective authors, and the author of a contribution holds the copyright to that contribution. If a project includes copyrighted work from multiple contributors, then licensing the project requires consent from all copyright holders. In professional open-source project, this is usually handled at contribution-time by making the contributor agree to either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that grants the project owner the unlimited (or sometimes limited) right to re-license the contribution in the future to another license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copyright transfer agreement (CTA) that ensures the project only has one copyright holder, by causing the contributor to transfer the copyright of her contribution to the project owner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project includes work held by another copyright holder who refuses to re-license and has not previously agreed to a re-licensing agreement, the project may choose to remove or rewrite the portions written by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone takes your GPL-licensed project and distributes a fork with their own changes without interacting with you (which they can do as long as their changes are under a GPL-compatible license), then you are free to incorporate their changes in your own project. However, if you do so, then you are no longer the sole author of the work, and you must abide by the other author's license as long as you use the material they wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-07-01T03:56:57.643" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T03:56:57.643" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2069" CreationDate="2015-11-12T21:20:30.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your comment, you say you would like for the project to require less documentation to move faster, and more efficiently, so try to strive for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe this is holding back the project, the only thing you can do from within the project is talking, and discussing to do less of it. You could talk to them directly, or even open a bug on the issue to attract wider discussion. If you come to an agreement to do that, than that's settled, and the problem solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't come to an agreement as a project, or you're unhappy with the outcome of the agreement, forking is always an option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T21:20:30.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2081" CreationDate="2015-11-11T22:03:23.587" Score="8" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a statistical programmer. As a SAS certified programmer, I can put the SAS logo on my website. I would like to also display the R logo, because many clients want programming in R. Does anyone know where I can find licensing terms and conditions to use the R logo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The R website is here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have checked FAQs, Stack Overflow etc. The R mailing lists are dedicated to programming questions and bug reports, not licensing questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3267" OwnerDisplayName="Freda K" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T21:38:53.197" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T21:38:53.197" Title="Can I use the logo of the R statistical package on my webpage?" Tags="|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2080" CreationDate="2015-11-12T00:52:58.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From looking at the source code, most of R itself (vs the various packages) is licensed under one or other GPL variant. Certainly the logo file does not seem to have a specific license associated with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has actually been addressed in one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-January/150728.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;R mail lists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jan Wijffels wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Hi,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there are any guidelines for the use of the R logo on websites which are for commercial use? Similar to&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.python.org/community/logos/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.python.org/community/logos/&lt;/a&gt; for Python and to&#xA;    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.postgresql.org/community/propaganda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.postgresql.org/community/propaganda&lt;/a&gt; for PostgreSQL perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;It has been discussed internally, but as far as I remember no official document ever transpired. The general sentiment (still&#xA;    according to my memory) was that usage is OK as long as it doesn't&#xA;    imply endorsement by R Core or the R Foundation, or any other&#xA;    commingling with commercial products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;R and the &quot;chocolate pretzel&quot; logo are not registered as trademarks,&#xA;  but even if they were, then &quot;nominative usage&quot; (as described in the&#xA;  PSF Trademark Use Policy) should not be problematic.  In cases of&#xA;  doubt, ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;--     O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B   c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph.&#xA;  K  (&lt;em&gt;) (&lt;/em&gt;) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45)&#xA;  35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  FAX: (+45) 35327907&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that you are OK as long as you  are not implying any certification or endorsement by the project. However, a quick emal to one of the maintainers can probably clear it up for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some googling found this README at &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.r-project.org/Logo/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This directory contains the R Logo in several resolutions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rlogo-x.png has been used since approx 2000 for most purposes.  Number&#xA;  5 is currently used for web pages. The PNG versions have a transparent&#xA;  background, the JPEG has a white background. These versions can be&#xA;  distributed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rlogo.svg has been created by Tobias Wolf  in&#xA;  October 2010, Rlogo.pdf is just a PDF created off the SVG using&#xA;  inkscape. Both can be distributed under the Creative Commons&#xA;  Attribution ShareAlike license, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question you need to think  about is whether you copy the logo file to your server (and what effect that has on the entire web site) or link to it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" OwnerDisplayName="kdopen" LastActivityDate="2015-11-12T00:52:58.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2084" CreationDate="2015-10-22T22:29:10.857" Score="7" ViewCount="1582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am starting a web API for my school and I was wondering what licence would be most appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to have an open source application that can be freely shared with other school but prohibits it's use for commercial applications (basically to protect from companies who make software for schools).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application just manages tutoring assignments for tutors, students and the school administration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12596732/free-for-academic-use-license&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Free for academic use&amp;quot; license&lt;/a&gt;, but since it was 3 years old I thought it might be a good idea to ask again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3112" OwnerDisplayName="superpat" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-13T14:41:58.127" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T01:38:40.970" Title="Open Source license for school use, but not commercial use" Tags="|license-recommendation|software-use|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2082" CreationDate="2015-11-13T13:41:21.287" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source definition&lt;/a&gt; includes (point 5) &quot;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&quot; and (point 6) &quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&quot;, so such a license wouldn't be open source. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;'s Freedom 0 (&quot;To run the program for any purpose&quot;, which includes for running a school o a company) covers this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2015-11-15T11:30:09.177" LastActivityDate="2015-11-15T11:30:09.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2082" CreationDate="2015-11-13T15:32:45.473" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source definition does not allow discrimination against fields of endeavor, and you can't disallow commercial use if you want a license that meets the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An option is to go copyleft, which ensures that anyone who distributes software based on that software must follow the same license. It's possible (though tricky) to do that commercially, but your software and any published derivative works by others remain open source, and free for others to use as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well-known copyleft licenses are the GPL, AGPL, LGPL and MPL. Since you describe the project as web-based software, the AGPL might be suitable. This license requires people who let users interact with derivative software over the internet (for example through a web API) to publish their software under the AGPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-13T15:32:45.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-13T20:32:57.593" Score="8" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write a plugin for an open-source software which is not GPL, but has a GPL-compatible license (MIT/BSD). I would like the plugin to use a GPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rationale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the plugin links with a GPL library, the plugin is of course also GPL, which is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In order to comply with GPL, all the components used to produce my plugin binaries need to be open-source with a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In order to build my plugin I also need to link with the host interface library (i.e. my plugin depends on this library).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because&lt;/strong&gt; (and only because) this host interface library is also open-source under a GPL-compatible license (MIT), then I'm fine and my plugin can safely be distributed also under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this reasoning correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3269" LastEditorUserId="3269" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T23:38:24.473" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T23:38:24.473" Title="Can plugins for non-gpl open source software use GPL libraries?" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2082" CreationDate="2015-11-16T01:38:40.970" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt; (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) licence may work, because you want it to be as free as possible without allowing it to be commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3279" LastActivityDate="2015-11-16T01:38:40.970" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2089" CreationDate="2015-11-17T06:10:25.170" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our app's icon dates back to when shiny gradients were cool, so we asked users to design a new one, and about 20 different designs have been submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A particular user submitted a very nice design, and several people asked her to make slight variations, so now she has 3 very similar variations of the same icon. If we do a simple &lt;em&gt;&quot;Choose the one your prefer&quot;&lt;/em&gt; vote, then votes that would have gone to her concept will be divided by 3 (the 3 variations are evenly liked it seems), so her concept will loose, whereas without the variations her concept would probably win (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criterion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criterion&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually more complex than that: all submitters have reused ideas each other's ideas, so all icons share similarities. For instance, the icon(s) I talked about in the last paragraph have been forked and slightly edited and submitted as new candidates by other users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is great that everyone forks and that we get many variations, but this open source way of doing things means a simple voting protocol will not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/strong&gt; What &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;voting method&lt;/a&gt; would work the best in this case?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By &quot;the best&quot;, I mean the method which will result in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;choice that most voters are happy with&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage examples by actual open source projects (with the same goals) appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T06:36:18.207" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T16:02:31.393" Title="Fair voting protocol for a community choosing a new icon?" Tags="|collaboration|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2015-12-30T00:09:35.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2045" CreationDate="2015-11-17T07:44:28.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is a tricky case. ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does your program interact with GPL-incompatible code? And if so, how? If your program only interacts with GPL-compatible code then obviously you're good to go but I guess you wouldn't have asked the question if that were the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on what your software is doing but there's a risk that it's a &quot;GPL wrapper&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system.&#xA;  Can I do this by putting a “wrapper” module, under a GPL-compatible&#xA;  lax permissive license (such as the X11 license) in between the&#xA;  GPL-covered part and the proprietary part? (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLWrapper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;#GPLWrapper&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. The X11&#xA;  license is compatible with the GPL, so you can add a module to the&#xA;  GPL-covered program and put it under the X11 license. But if you were&#xA;  to incorporate them both in a larger program, that whole would include&#xA;  the GPL-covered part, so it would have to be licensed as a whole under&#xA;  the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fact that proprietary module A communicates with GPL-covered&#xA;  module C only through X11-licensed module B is legally irrelevant;&#xA;  what matters is the fact that module C is included in the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously the wording here is aimed at a case where a single nefarious person is trying to circumvent the GPL but the FSF would probably feel the same way if a separate person with good intentions wrote the intervening module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using dynamic loading doesn't change anything. The wording used in the GPL is &quot;combine&quot; which intentionally avoids naming a specific technology. The FSF doesn't address dynamic loading in their FAQ but they do mention plugins and essentially say they aren't special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the fact that you yourself don't distribute GPL'd code might not shield you from all liability. There's precedent for successful copyright infringement lawsuits when the infringement was only facilitated and not committed directly. The concept is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_liability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;secondary liability&lt;/a&gt; and the GPL specifically mentions it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind this is all just what the FSF intends the GPL to mean. We won't know much about what courts think of the GPL for a long time because there simply aren't many GPL violations being brought to court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the FSF clearly states that the GPL is not for punishing well meaning individuals who unintentionally violate its terms and their policy is to first notify and try to get voluntary compliance. The GPLv3 even added special accommodation for this case. If you want any certainty your best bet is probably to email the library author and see if they're ok with your usage. You could also try sending the FSF an email and getting this added to their FAQ since it's a good question for any software that does dynamic loading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and have no training in law whatsoever. I came up with this answer mostly based on Google searches in the last ~20 minutes. This isn't legal advice and you shouldn't believe things you read on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3288" LastEditorUserId="3288" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T08:57:10.890" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T08:57:10.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2087" CreationDate="2015-11-17T10:11:15.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't vote. Come to consensus informally through discussion, and leave the final decision to the maintainers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every voting mechanism has downsides. In general, it is impossible to have a voting system that meet the criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged (even if voters' preferences between other pairs like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W change).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;There is no &quot;dictator&quot;: no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preference.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is known as Arrow's impossibility theorem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being open source doesn't mean being a democracy. It's up to the maintainer(s) to determine what's best for the project. Endless discussions about a logo usually isn't the best way to spend your resources/time, and avoiding that can be a good choice for a maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advice to either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let the maintainers pick, possibly advised by a vote, preferably advised by a discussion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you insist on doing a vote, let the maintainers pick between the top 3 outcomes of some sort of vote. If you want to go with a consensus model, I'd go with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;approval voting&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;range voting&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All voting mechanisms are susceptible to strategic voting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T16:02:31.393" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T16:02:31.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:19:56.693" Score="1" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are all fonts considered software, or does it depend on the font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of licences do and don't make sense for fonts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T14:48:25.577" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T14:48:25.577" Title="Are fonts considered software?" Tags="|licensing|font|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-11-18T20:15:41.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2105" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:54:26.823" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused on how CDDL interfaces with other licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to modify an existing CDDL project, by introducing an extension &amp;mdash; implementing a certain feature in a new file &amp;mdash; can I affix my copyright statement in such a new file on top of a BSD licence, instead of a CDDL header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish the result as a single downloadable work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I submit such file to the original maintainer for inclusion in their project (since my licence is less restrictive than theirs), can they publish it as such, or do they have to require re- or double- licensing, in order to protect their own rights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T11:58:14.153" Title="Can a CDDL project import a BSD file without re-/double- licensing?" Tags="|license-compatibility|bsd|cddl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2092" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:54:53.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Common Development and Distribution License (&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CDDL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt; is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems based on &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/mpl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;mpl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;mpl&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T20:09:50.720" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T20:09:50.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2093" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-17T21:54:53.183" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) " OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T20:09:56.843" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T20:09:56.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2106" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:00:03.813" Score="15" ViewCount="8750" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License#GPL_compatibility_controversy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest that CDDL and GPL are incompatible, yet no one knows for sure why or how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why and how are the CDDL and GPL are incompatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T02:04:09.963" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T16:08:52.353" Title="Are CDDL and GPL really incompatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cddl|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:06:49.413" Score="-2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Circa 2006, &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.oracle.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;blogs.sun.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated&lt;/a&gt; says, in comparing EULA, GPL, CDDL and BSD, that one must &quot;use CDDL for things already under CDDL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does it mean?  Aren't you must always use BSD licence for things already under BSD, too?  As well as any other licence, as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T03:37:55.120" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T03:50:16.513" Title="What's &quot;use CDDL for things already under CDDL&quot; mean?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|bsd|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:07:31.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;End User License Agreement (EULA)&lt;/strong&gt; are generally used with proprietary software, not with open source software.  For more information about EULA, see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T14:47:40.023" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T14:47:40.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:07:31.093" Score="0" Body="For questions about End User License Agreements (EULA's) and how they relate to open source software" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T20:09:42.080" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T20:09:42.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2107" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:13:19.257" Score="2" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sun's CDDL is based on Mozilla's MPL, and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/are-cddl-and-gpl-really-incompatible&quot;&gt;expectedly incompatible with GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the MPL itself?  Is the CDDL compatible with the MPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T02:04:48.447" Title="Are CDDL and MPL compatible with each other?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mpl|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:13:46.250" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2015-11-17T22:13:46.250" LastActivityDate="2015-11-17T22:13:46.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-11-17T22:13:46.250" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Mozilla Public License (MPL), a license created and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T02:39:42.697" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T02:39:42.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2015-11-18T01:18:36.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason given by Gnu.org in their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CDDL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Various Licenses and Comments about them document&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has a weak per-file copyleft (like version 1 of the Mozilla Public License) which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer but I think that means that CDDL and GPL both require that any derivative work be distributed only under their license.  It's impossible to do both, so the licenses are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-11-18T04:15:19.640" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T04:15:19.640" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2095" CreationDate="2015-11-18T03:50:16.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CDDL is a weak-copyleft license. Anything that's a derivative of CDDL-licensed works must also be licensed under CDDL. This is in contrast to permissive licenses like BSD; you can derive a BSD-licensed work and license your changes under whatever license you wish, so long as you preserve the copyright notices (including the BSD license text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting is how this differs from a strong-copyleft license like the GPL. If you combine a strong-copyleft licensed work with another work, the whole work must be available under the terms of the strong-copyleft license, even if the combined portions are not derivatives of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to give an example scenario: suppose there's an open source software for making Neapolitan pizzas, &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt;. You extend (i.e. derive) the library so that it can make ice-cream pizzas, and call it &lt;code&gt;free-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt;. You then combine it with an unrelated piece of software you wrote that slices circular food of any kind (including cakes and pies), &lt;code&gt;free-food-slicer&lt;/code&gt;, to create a combined piece of software that you call &lt;code&gt;free-sliced-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt; was permissive (e.g. BSD), you can distribute &lt;code&gt;free-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;free-sliced-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt; under whatever license you wish, so long as the copyright notices for &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt; are retained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt; was weak-copylefted (e.g. CDDL), you must make &lt;code&gt;free-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt; available under the same license, including when it's combined in &lt;code&gt;free-sliced-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt;, but the &lt;code&gt;free-food-slicer&lt;/code&gt; portion can be whatever license you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt; was strong-copylefted (e.g. GPL), all three components - &lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;free-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;free-sliced-icecream-pizza&lt;/code&gt; - must be available under the strong-copyleft license. You can still distribute the non-&lt;code&gt;free-pizza&lt;/code&gt; portions under other licenses, but this must be in addition to the strong-copyleft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T03:50:16.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2091" CreationDate="2015-11-18T05:01:50.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to do this because BSD is a permissive license. If a permissively licensed file is included in a non-permissively licensed project (like CDDL), it is possible for that file to &lt;strong&gt;remain under the permissive license&lt;/strong&gt;. Depending on the project license, that file may have to also be available under the project license, but &lt;strong&gt;CDDL has a weak per-file copyleft, so permissive files don't have to be dual-licensed as CDDL&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, if a BSD-licensed file is included in a GPL-licensed project, that file must be available under both BSD and GPL. In the BSD-in-GPL case this is possible because BSD is GPL-compatible, but other permissive licenses may not be GPL compatible making this combination legally impossible (e.g. the original 4-clause BSD license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, this answer applies to including any permissive-licensed file in any copyleft project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SFLC contains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;document&lt;/a&gt; containing recommendations on how to include permissively licensed code in a GPL project. The same guidance mostly applies to BSD-in-CDDL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The recommended way is to keep the permissive and GPL code in separate files. The goal is to clearly separate the permissive and GPL licensed code. To that end, &lt;strong&gt;the best method is to include the short license text at the top of each source file&lt;/strong&gt;. If you're not doing this and instead using the approach of maintaining a single top-level COPYRIGHT or LICENSE file, you will need to clearly state which files are under which license, including authorship. Note that modern version control systems can help you attribute authorship, so long as it's clear which authors contributed under what license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When included on a per-file basis, the permissive licensed files remain available under the permissive license. If the project's license is a strong copyleft one like GPL, it also must be available under GPL. Where CDDL is different is that &lt;strong&gt;CDDL has a weak, per-file copyleft, so permissive licensed files in CDDL projects don't have to be under CDDL&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be very careful about future contributions to permissive licensed files; it is common for contributors to assume that all their contributions will be under the project's license, so they may inadvertently cause permissive licensed files to become mixed with non-permissive licensed code. In a mixed file, it is legally very tricky to determine which portions are under which license. Ideally the contributors should make it clear which license they wish their contributions to be under, preferably permissive also so that the file remains unambiguously permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the last point and the additional complexity introduced in any mixed-license scenario, you may face resistance from the maintainers. You could explain that this is not only legal but desirable (since the permissive licensed portions can be shared with other projects even if the project licenses are incompatible), by pointing them to this document, but they may still decline because of the hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T05:01:50.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2091" CreationDate="2015-11-18T11:58:14.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether a project maintainer will accept BSD (only) licensed files to be included in the official upstream CDDL source is not covered by licenses but based on a personal decision. So you have to ask the upstream maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you personally like to know whether you may redistribute the CDDL project together with your BSD enhancements, this is easy to answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you put the BSD code into a separate file, there is no problem&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CDDL based projects define a &quot;work&quot; limit that is file based, the CDDL only applies to those files that are already published under the CDDL or to files you put under CDDL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are the Copyright owner of the BSD code, you may or may not (this is your personal decision) dual license it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are not the Copyright owner of the BSD code, you are not allowed to add the CDDL as license for the code as the BSD license does not permit relicensing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T11:58:14.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2015-11-18T13:08:36.420" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be careful with the claims about the CDDL on the FSF website, they are wrong. Some years ago, Eben Moglen confirmed to me in a private mail that the claims about the CDDL on the FSF website are based on a false assumption on how BSD / GPL compatibility may be avowed. So the BSD text and the CDDL text on the same website both do not apply. I asked Moglen to try to encourage Richard Stallman to change this, but it seems that the attempt from Moglen to do this resulted in discord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CDDL is a license that does not try to enforce restrictions that would not stand in court but disallows relicensing of code. The fact that on the other side, the CDDL explicitly limits its scope to the files that contain CDDL'd code, allows us make our first conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code under the CDDL and code under the GPL cannot be mixed in a single file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a license that limits its scope to the so called &quot;work&quot; limit and forbids relicensing of code. This allows us to make the next conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code under the CDDL and code under the GPL cannot be mixed in a single work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we have to understand what the CDDL allows, what the GPL allows and which claims from the GPL are void because they are in conflict with the law...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the EU, we have some consumer protection laws that cause rules for &quot;terms of business&quot; that forbid some rules in contracts that cannot be set up by both parties but are dictated by one of the party. In case of the GPL, this allows licensees of GPL'd code to interpret some of the ambiguous claims in the way that gives most convenience to the licensee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, consumer protection laws are based on the construct that such unilateral contracts are not called contracts but &quot;Licenses&quot; and such a license may not enforce anything that is not explicitly listed in the US Copyright law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, both jurisdictions make the claims in GPL section 0 (where the GPL tries to defined what a derivative work is) void claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular: the claim from the GPL that tries to define that a so-called &quot;collective work&quot; is rather a &quot;derivative work&quot; is void. This is fine, as it permits to create collective works with GPL'd code being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please first read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the OSS licensing book from Lawrence Rosen: &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosenlaw.com/open-source-licensing-software-freedom-and-intellectual-property-law/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://rosenlaw.com/open-source-licensing-software-freedom-and-intellectual-property-law/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the excellent article that is specific about the US Copyright law violation by the GPL from Lothar Determann (Professor of law in Berlin and San Francisco) that gives plenty of citations: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tlavian/publications/article/Berkeley_Law_Journal_softwarecombinations060403.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tlavian/publications/article/Berkeley_Law_Journal_softwarecombinations060403.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the article from my colleague Thomas Gordon: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.osscc.net/pdf/QualipsoA1D113.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.osscc.net/pdf/QualipsoA1D113.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These all explain that you may use the GPL in collective works because GPL section 0 is void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we know that GPL section 0 is void and we know that CDDL and GPL cannot appear simultaneously in a single work, are there other possible methods to combine CDDL and GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this works because the &lt;code&gt;work&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;GNU tar&lt;/strong&gt; cannot be used alone. It needs at least &lt;code&gt;libc&lt;/code&gt; that is a different independent work. The GPL permits a &lt;code&gt;work&lt;/code&gt; under GPL to be combined with other &lt;code&gt;works&lt;/code&gt; that are under a different license if the other work is either typically part of the target platform distribution or if this other work is freely redistributable. Note that this is a statement that has been confirmed by many lawyers and the FSF that explicitly claims &quot;You are allowed to use &lt;strong&gt;GNU tar&lt;/strong&gt; together with a CDDL'd libc&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We now can make the next conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CDDL and GPL can appear together in a &lt;code&gt;collective work&lt;/code&gt; if the related single &lt;code&gt;works&lt;/code&gt; that are part of the collective work are independent from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A typical method to combine CDDL and GPL is to let a GPL'd program use CDDLd libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While all lawyers agree to permit a GPL'd program to use a CDDL'd library, there is a statement from Lawrence Rosen who claims that he believes that even a GPL'd library may be used by a non-GPL'd program (check his book, it is free).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T23:55:47.240" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T23:55:47.240" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2098" CreationDate="2015-11-18T16:06:04.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For new projects, you should avoid the MPL as it has issues with the European law system. For this reason, the CDDL can be seen as the sucsessor of the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that both licenses disallow to change the license but limit their scopt to files, you are still allowed to combine files under different licenses to make them together compile a single work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastActivityDate="2015-11-18T16:06:04.560" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2184" CreationDate="2015-11-18T20:26:31.263" Score="8" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was quite surprised to see the following in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2107/69&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt;: (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For new projects, &lt;strong&gt;you should avoid the MPL as it has issues with the European law system&lt;/strong&gt;. For this reason, the CDDL can be seen as the successor of the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that both licenses disallow to change the license but limit their scopt to files, you are still allowed to combine files under different licenses to make them together compile a single work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I was planning on using the Mozilla Public License as a licensing option for a new project that I was writing, this is a bit of a blow for me. I was planning on using it, especially since it's emerging in the 'open source market.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What part of the Mozilla Public License is an issue with the European legal system? As the Mozilla Public License and the Common Development and Distribution License are fundamentally the same, how does the CDDL rectify the legal issue with the European legal system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T18:43:37.437" Title="What issue does the Mozilla Public License have with the European Legal System?" Tags="|law|cddl|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2111" CreationDate="2015-11-18T21:41:04.230" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source C# project, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DavidArno/SuccincT&quot;&gt;Succint&amp;lt;T&amp;gt;&lt;/a&gt;, for which I wish to create a strongly typed assembly version. I plan on making the key file for this public, by adding it to the GitHub repository, in order to keep the whole thing open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious consequence of this is that someone else could modify the code in a malicious way, sign it with that key file, and naive users who think that a signed assembly somehow implies security could be tricked into using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst I'd not wish that to happen to anyone, my concern is that the affected user might try to hold me responsible. So my question is, does the MIT licence wording absolve me of responsibility in such an eventuality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3296" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T10:39:16.790" Title="Does the MIT open source licence cover making the key file, for a strongly typed assembly, public?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2109" CreationDate="2015-11-19T09:58:54.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd add instructions for somebody else to cook up their own key, and sign (and verify) with that. Also publish somewhere &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have total control the key to check the signature. The signing key should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be distributed in any way, as that just would void any protection the &quot;signed by the original developer&quot; could provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T09:58:54.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2109" CreationDate="2015-11-19T10:39:16.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's better not to sign an assembly at all than to make the signing key public. Publishing the signing key accomplishes nothing and does have downsides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strong-named assembly has as advantage over a non-strong-named assembly that you can be sure that two assemblies with the same strong name are identical. To provide this guarantee, the private key has to be just that: private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the private key leaks, all guarantees a strong-named assembly offers are lost. It effectively becomes as useful as a non-strong-named assembly, but gives a false sense of security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an open source perspective, there is nothing wrong with keeping the signing key private. People are still able to fork, and sign the assembly themselves, if they want to do so. End users lose the flexibility to dynamically link against a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; version of the assembly if the person who linked against the work used a strong named assembly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intentional. If the software that incorporates the singed assembly is open source as well, the user can change the combination themselves. If it's propriety, this may be a problem for end users, but a problem with the propriety software, not with the open-source parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, publishing the private key will not help you in this scenario. The publisher of the propriety software could just as well build and sign the dependency with their own private key, which you don't have and can't publish, leaving end users in the same predicament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-19T10:39:16.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T08:19:04.037" Score="12" ViewCount="1434" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL software is not allowed onto the Apple App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; shows how the GPL2 is not compatible with the App Store terms of service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Along the same lines, we'll be talking about GPLv2 specifically in this blog post, since that's the license at issue, but this analysis would apply to all versions of the GNU GPL and AGPL. Section 6 of GPLv2 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. &lt;strong&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added.) This last sentence is a crucial part of the strong copyleft in the GPL and AGPL: it prevents distributors from using separate legal agreements, like Terms of Service or NDAs, to take away the freedoms that the license is supposed to grant. This is the license condition that Apple is violating when it distributes GPL-covered software through the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the App Store Terms of Service, the programs that you download from the App Store are called &quot;Products&quot; (the definition is in section 4). In section 9(b), the Terms set out &quot;Usage Rules&quot; for the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;You acknowledge that Products contain security technology that limits your usage of Products to the following applicable Usage Rules, and, whether or not Products are limited by security technology, you agree to use Products in compliance with the applicable Usage Rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Terms go on to list the specific usage rules. In effect, the Usage Rules do the same thing as Apple's Digital Restrictions Management—narrowly limiting what you can do with the software—but the method is different: they work legally instead of technologically. Rules (i) and (iii) say that you are required to accept the Terms of Service to use the software, and that you may only install the software on five approved devices. These rules are exactly the kind of &quot;further restrictions&quot; that are prohibited by the GPL: they limit your ability to use and distribute the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people have pointed out that the App Store Terms of Service say that a separate license to the software is provided to you by the developer, and that's true. But the Usage Rules are imposed on you no matter how the software is licensed. The Terms themselves make this explicit this in section 9(c), which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The Usage Rules shall govern your rights with respect to the Products, &lt;strong&gt;in addition&lt;/strong&gt; to any other terms or rules that may have been established between you and another party. (Emphasis added.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's the problem in a nutshell: Apple's Terms of Service impose restrictive limits on use and distribution for any software distributed through the App Store, and the GPL doesn't allow that. This specific case involves other issues, but this is the one that's most unique and deserves explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there is a GPL2 &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; license which would require the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the program is unmodified -&gt; you can distribute it under any terms you want (don't like it? Go to www.videolan.org/vlc/ and grab a copy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify the source -&gt; you must distribute &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3308" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-13T07:05:48.387" LastActivityDate="2016-02-13T07:05:48.387" Title="Are there any GPL like licenses for Apple App Store?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|distribution|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-20T08:58:32.433" Score="9" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have modified a particular file (A LaTeX Beamer Template)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The readme says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code of the package is dual-license. This means that you can decide which license you wish to use when using the beamer package.&#xA;  The two options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) You can use the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any&#xA;  later version&#xA;    published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) You can use the LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3c or (at your&#xA;    option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't seem to find the license files I expect to be included, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might like to just license my derived work under only the The LaTeX Project Public Li­cense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do so? Or must I license it under both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T07:55:37.877" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T07:55:37.877" Title="If something is licensed to me under two (Open Source) licences, can I redistribute under only one?" Tags="|multi-licensing|redistribution|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2115" CreationDate="2015-11-20T09:11:25.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without seeing the original licence grant it's hard to be sure; the devil is in that &quot;&lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  What you've written suggests that you may choose to use (run/distribute/modify/distribute-modified) the work under either of two licences, at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: with the clarifications you have made, this appears to me to be the case.  Choose to receive the work under the LPPL, and release your modified version under that.  (In the interests of free software, I urge you to receive it under the GPL, and publish your modified version under that accordingly; but that is, of course, up to you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to accept it under the LPPL, then I think you will be fine to redistribute your modified version under that licence, provided you meet the relevant conditions (see, eg, s.6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to accept and use it under the GPL, you may not.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; says in s.2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is&#xA;  a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on&#xA;  the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; has a similar provision, in s.5(c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to&#xA;  anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will&#xA;  therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms,&#xA;  to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they&#xA;  are packaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2015-11-20T12:24:59.883" LastActivityDate="2015-11-20T12:24:59.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2122" CreationDate="2015-11-20T21:04:10.617" Score="9" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I make a post on a Stack Exchange site. That content is owned by me, but I gave the company a perpetual and irrevocable license under Creative &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot;&gt;Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0&lt;/a&gt;. As long as that content is available under CC-BY-SA, anyone can reuse it under those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I post the exact same content on a website, but license it under &quot;all rights reserved&quot; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt;. Anyone doing a Google Search will likely find the material on the Stack Exchange site where it was posted, which would include the CC-BY-SA licensing information. If that license is appropriate for their uses, then they can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA is pretty forgiving. The only thing that it requires is attribution to me, identification of changes, and release under the same license. That last one is, perhaps, the biggest sticking point for someone to reuse my content, since it discourages commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only case mentioned so far is if all of the CC-BY-SA sources stopped releasing the content under that license (for example, there were no mirrors of my content and Stack Exchange shut down and did not make the content available anymore). Then, if it's only available under the more restrictive license, that's what people have to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the exception of all sources of the CC-BY-SA content stopping distribution under that license, is there any advantage to a stricter license, such as &quot;all rights reserved&quot; or CC BY-NC-ND?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2015-11-20T21:09:52.563" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T11:32:13.200" Title="Does it make sense to license my content under a more restrictive license if it's licensed CC-BY-SA?" Tags="|creative-commons|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2117" CreationDate="2015-11-21T11:11:22.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not really much of a point licensing your content strictly more strict than the one you already licensed it under. For example, there is nothing you are allowed to do with CC BY-NC-ND that you're not also allowed to do with CC BY-SA. As you said, they can always pick up a copy from the alternative source under the different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can be reasons to still do this. For example, if you have a blog, and you have a standard (more strict) license that applies to it, it would be convenient not to change that for a single piece that's available elsewhere as CC BY-SA. This is purely an argument of convenience, the content will still also be available under CC BY-SA when they receive it from a StackExchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses are not strictly more strict, but have &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; restrictions. For example, you could license your content with a non-transferable license without the SA requirement for pay. Of you could additionally license your content under a hypothetical license that doesn't require attribution, but doesn't allow commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases it can also make sense to dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-21T11:11:22.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2133" CreationDate="2015-11-21T20:28:47.213" Score="7" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a non-trivial amount of text, image, audio, and video content that I'm licensing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)&lt;/a&gt;. I chose this license because it allows people to redistribute, use or remix the content that I produce for any purpose, as long as I am properly attributed. I hope to apply this license to a site as a whole, since it applies to the vast majority of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, mixed in with this content is software source code. Are there any special concerns that I need to be aware of, with respect to license marking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The instructions for the Apache license say to include a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in the project and a statement in the header of each source file. There's no way to include a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in something like a Gist or a web page, but the content header is achievable. However...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Including the license content or the Apache required header can be obnoxious for every code block on a CC-BY page. It's far less of a problem on a Gist page, though. There may be a way to mark a page that appropriately indicates the license of source code on the page in a good way, but I haven't found guidance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons doesn't provide guidance for marking a mixed-content page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their page for marking guidance&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I think this boils down to two closely related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I appropriately mark source code posted to something like a GitHub Gist, where it is only a single file, especially when the license recommends a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I appropriately mark source code when posting it on CC-BY page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are somewhat related to two other questions here on Open Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/504/can-i-override-a-licensing-policy&quot;&gt;Can I &amp;quot;Override&amp;quot; a licensing policy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/904/how-to-license-stack-overflow-contributions-as-permissive-as-possible&quot;&gt;How to license Stack Overflow contributions as permissive as possible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few differences, though. What I'm asking is closest to the how-to question, but unlike Stack Overflow, I don't have a profile page to use to add a disclaimer that I'm overriding a license and applying a dual-license. I'm also interested in not dual-licensing content, but applying a specific license (CC-BY 4.0) to one type of content (non-software content) and another license (Apache, BSD, MIT, etc.) to another type of content (source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T14:07:52.307" Title="How do I document licenses of code snippets on a web page with a CC BY 4.0 license?" Tags="|creative-commons|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2123" CreationDate="2015-11-22T07:19:48.257" Score="39" ViewCount="20037" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) Some Corporation&#xA;&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the MIT license follows. Now, from what I know the &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; license is one of the most permissive licenses. Is it correct to add &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved.&lt;/em&gt; in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="110" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T16:38:03.643" Title="MIT license and &quot;All rights reserved.&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|software|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2117" CreationDate="2015-11-22T11:32:13.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is &lt;strong&gt;no, it doesn't make much sense.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've posted this work on Stack Exchange, where it's licensed under CC BY-SA. I go and copy your work, use it in something I'm doing, and release it perfectly legally under BY-SA. My use case is legal, yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob sees what I've done, and sees the attribution to you. He decides he likes your work, and he wants to use it too. So he follows my link to your original, only to discover a 404 Not Found. However, he's clever enough to follow my &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; link to your website, where it's distributed under CC BY-NC-ND.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, there are two possible ways it could go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bob wants to make something based on your work and sell it. The BY-NC-ND license disallows this. Bob says to himself &amp;quot;oh well, I'll just go ahead and use it under BY-SA&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; Bob to do this, but there's no way of stopping him. Unless he was incredibly stupid about it, you can't prove that he didn't get hold of your content back when it was on Stack Exchange, and has just spent a long time making his derivative. Essentially, you can't prove you didn't license it to him under BY-SA. This is a slightly iffy use case, and not &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; legally sound (though it's pretty good), but he would likely get away with it. However, if he wants to stay entirely legally correct, there's an even easier way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bob got to your work through my work. My work was created and released when the content was on Stack Exchange. You licensed that to me under BY-SA for sure, so there's no doubt my use is legal. When the license on your work changed because Stack stopped distributing it, that didn't make my work illegal because I've already got the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob can simply use my work. I have the right to distribute that under BY-SA, and to grant him the right to do so via the license. Hence, he can make his derivative a derivative of your work &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; my work, if that makes sense. He attributes back to me, which attributes back to you. The license conditions are satisfied, and the lawyers can't complain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can dual-license under a more restrictive license if you want to - some people won't know that it was originally licensed under BY-SA, and will use it under BY-NC-ND - but just bear in mind that &lt;em&gt;once licensed, always licensed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T11:32:13.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2121" CreationDate="2015-11-22T11:36:40.767" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's correct but unnecessary. It's there for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you do some work, the default copyright position is &lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;. Nobody can do anything with your work without your express permission, or a license to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is your license to other people, to make it clear what they can do. However, any rights not explicitly granted by the license are still reserved by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the default position &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; all rights reserved, it's not strictly necessary to add that to a copyright notice - but it does make it clearer, and can help avoid scenarios where someone uses your work illegally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having the all rights reserved notice, and then a license, you're affirming it's your work and your rights, but you allow people to do these specific things with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2015-11-22T11:36:40.767" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-22T21:58:44.840" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have designed a mashup that uses open source software. A substantial part of another open source project was used and the software of that project was made available under the MIT license. There is a clause in the MIT license that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I would like to use a different license, where do I include the MIT license? Should I open a folder in which to keep all the licenses of the various open source software I used in my mashup? And how do I indicate which license is the main license (the license for my mashup)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3225" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-11-23T05:46:19.637" LastActivityDate="2015-11-23T05:46:19.637" Title="How to license a mashup?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|mit|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-11-23T12:49:25.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2136" CreationDate="2015-11-23T19:39:21.213" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is offering an Amazon Echo and and Amazon gift card for employees who develop a Skill. There are some requirements with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It must be completed during personal time (the learning and developing is not billable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It must be published using the company's Amazon account&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a promotion for getting us developers to learn how to work with the Echo and also as a portfolio for picking up Echo related work from clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how should I copyright/license my app and code so that I can &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;still use it in my own portfolio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publish it under my own Amazon account if the company decides to pull the Skill&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or I can publish my own (maybe modified) version at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any requirements for the code to be shared with the company (they are offering to let us use their private repo) though I'm not opposed to sharing so long as I can still keep ownership and do all the things listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3323" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T02:06:25.263" Title="What license should I use for an app released under my employer's account?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2155" CreationDate="2015-11-23T21:16:25.173" Score="4" ViewCount="1414" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Scenario&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to share the source code of a larger software that depends on external libraries. The directory structure of the project is as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;src/&#xA;    ... my source code&#xA;ext/&#xA;    ... external source code&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The external libraries only have few modifications and contain the original license headers. The external libraries have BSD, GPL, LGPL licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire source code will be shared and additionally provided as pre-compiled binaries for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put my code in &lt;code&gt;src/&lt;/code&gt; under a different license than the external packages in &lt;code&gt;ext/&lt;/code&gt;? Specifically, I would like to restrict usage to research/academia and prohibit commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3325" LastEditorUserId="3325" LastEditDate="2015-11-25T04:48:07.830" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T16:48:54.137" Title="Software license with external libraries" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|linked-libraries|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2128" CreationDate="2015-11-23T21:30:08.993" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've decided on using a MIT license for a software project. Now I would like to go ahead and add agreements to the front-end of a website that uses the MIT licensed software. I looked at the template agreements on Termsfeed but they are not the same as for example those on Ebay. What are the typical agreement types that a small sized open source software project would present the user with on the front-end of a website and can the different agreements listed below be merged into one grand terms of service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Front-end agreement types offered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://termsfeed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Termsfeed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Privacy policy &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terms  of service &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terms of use &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terms and conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Return and refund policy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Front-end agreement types used on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ebay.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Ebay&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;User agreement &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Privacy &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cookies &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AdChoice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3225" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T11:33:08.657" Title="Which front-end agreement types go well with a MIT license?" Tags="|mit|terminology|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2127" CreationDate="2015-11-24T11:33:08.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license you choose for the software that runs the website is orthogonal to the terms you offer to the users of your website. The license - the thing that makes it open source - deals with copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other terms have nothing to do with that, and there is no interaction between the license and other terms of use. The fact that your website runs open-source software doesn't influence any of the agreements you mentioned, and you can choose them as you would for any website that isn't under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-11-24T11:33:08.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-25T17:04:46.913" Score="3" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to include a program covered by the GNU General Public License and a GPL-incompatible program in a collective work designed for a machine that executes programs from a cartridge containing an execute-in-place parallel ROM and an MMU. The MMU divides the memory into pages and makes only one visible to the CPU at once. One or more programs can be stored in a page. The only anticipated interaction among programs is that one can launch another: the launcher launches the program that the user chooses, and then each program launches the launcher when the user chooses to quit. My intuition is that the spirit of the GPL would treat each page as a separate &quot;executable file&quot;. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a page is switched in, the CPU cannot see code or data in other pages without writing a page number to the MMU's control port. One program launches another by writing the page number and then jumping to the program's entry point, which produces semantics analogous to &lt;code&gt;exec()&lt;/code&gt; in a POSIX system. I plan to structure the aggregate such that programs with incompatible licenses never share a page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; claims that the GPL allows distribution of on the same medium:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are non-free or GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to allow inclusion of, say, both GIMP and non-free programs on the same CD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the GPL FAQ also states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/354/548&quot;&gt;Distributing an operating system DVD bundling proprietary and GNU-GPL software?&lt;/a&gt; imply that a DVD image is not an &quot;executable file&quot; in this sense, even if one can boot a virtual machine from it. But would a ROM cartridge containing independent programs in separate banks be an &quot;executable file&quot;? If so, where is the line drawn? Is it between a block memory (such as DVD or SD) and an XIP memory (such as parallel flash)? Is it use of a documented file-system-like data structure in order to allow executables to be extracted and replaced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T18:57:00.413" Title="Is a ROM image an &quot;executable file&quot; for GPL purposes?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="665" CreationDate="2015-11-25T17:24:39.613" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms &quot;copyleft&quot; and &quot;ShareAlike&quot; both refer to reciprocal licensing, in which downstream users receive the same rights to your changes that you received for the original work. But copyleft is a stricter concept than ShareAlike, adding a requirement that derivatives be made available in a form that gives downstream users the technical ability to make uses of a work that the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft licenses designed for computer programs, such as the GNU General Public License, require licensees to publish the derivative's &quot;source code&quot;, which GPL versions 2 and 3 define as &quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GNU Free Documentation License, a copyleft license for instructional works, requires licensees to publish something similar called a &quot;Transparent copy&quot;, which it defines as &quot;a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastEditorUserId="548" LastEditDate="2016-03-12T17:13:12.863" LastActivityDate="2016-03-12T17:13:12.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2761" CreationDate="2015-11-25T23:57:45.393" Score="6" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;Semi-hypothetically speaking, let's say a company creates a piece of software and then purposefully uploads the source code for that software to GitHub. You can download it, run it, etc directly from the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's assume that the license for this software is commercial. It states that you cannot use the software unless you pay for a subscription license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the developer of the software, can I reasonably expect that people using my software will pay me for it? Or more specifically, could I reasonably assume that if someone were to download and use my software without paying, I could legally force them to pay up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to the above question is &quot;yes&quot;, how would this be different than--say--a musician uploading an album to a public server and then saying &quot;you can download this music for free, but you can't listen to it unless you PayPal me $10&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in both sides of this equation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) As a consumer or a small business, can I legally make use of software licensed in such a manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) As a software publisher, can I go after people that download and use my software from GitHub if licensed in this manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3339" LastEditorUserId="3339" LastEditDate="2015-11-27T03:19:33.270" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T05:40:44.803" Title="Legality and enforceability of commercial software uploaded to Github" Tags="|commercial|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2119" CreationDate="2015-11-26T15:40:48.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;1. Single-file formats&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, as you correctly note, formats in which it's not possible to include a license file - GitHub gists are the most obvious. In those cases, &lt;em&gt;it's not essential&lt;/em&gt; - license files are actually &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; essential, just recommended for clarity of the license. In those cases, your best bet is to use a header in the source file, specifying copyright and license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/ArtOfCode-/2609146ac6e92d05ccd2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's an example of just this.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. CC BY webpages&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This boils down to a pretty simple question: are you the web admin? In other words, can you change that page as you like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. it's your website or something), then there are a number of things you could do. You can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add a note in the footer, like SE does: &lt;code&gt;content licensed under CC BY; code snippets under the MIT license&lt;/code&gt; (with links to the licenses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add a similar note, just before or just after the code, specifying the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add a paragraph in any TOS you have, specifying copyright/license status for content and code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful of saying &quot;content&quot; - it's ambiguous. My example above isn't worded too well; saying &lt;code&gt;content licensed under CC BY; code snippets under the MIT license&lt;/code&gt; could be read as my code snippets are licensed under CC BY &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the MIT license. You could instead say &lt;code&gt;non-code content licensed...; code licensed ...&lt;/code&gt; to make it clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; control the webpage where it's displayed, then your only option is to add a header in the code itself. Assuming that the entire code file will be displayed on the page, the copyright header will also be displayed - and hopefully, the webpage's design will make the scope that the license applies to obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if like on SE you have control over another part of the site (i.e. a personal profile), you can add a note covering &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; your code contributions there. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/904/how-to-license-stack-overflow-contributions-as-permissive-as-possible&quot;&gt;How to license Stack Overflow contributions as permissive as possible?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/504/can-i-override-a-licensing-policy&quot;&gt;Can I &amp;quot;Override&amp;quot; a licensing policy?&lt;/a&gt; for more information on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T14:07:52.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2129" CreationDate="2015-11-26T16:58:02.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any case law on this specific issue, but I don't think any court would find this to be a single program. The section of the FAQ you cited reads (abbridged, emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? [...] &lt;strong&gt;We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication&lt;/strong&gt; (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) &lt;strong&gt;and the semantics of the communication&lt;/strong&gt; (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The means of communication is the important part of when the FSF considers it a single program, and the single executable file description only seems to be a helper for file-system based operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you describe the means of communication between the different parts are a launcher that launches different programs that have no further internal communication, and run entirely separately, they should not be interpreted as a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a either a memory page or a ROM can be considered a file at all in the context of &amp;quot;single executable file&amp;quot; as meant in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-11-26T16:58:02.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2132" CreationDate="2015-11-27T02:03:51.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A basic equation is this: organizations with a lot of money have a lot of lawyers. Lawyers tell people to respect licenses. So, if you offer the code with a restrictive license (GPL, or some 'no commercial use license'), then those organizations will pay or not use it. Anyone, for example, can download Oracle binaries, but the use of those binaries is covered by a restrictive license. Real companies pay Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Oracle spends significant time and money communicating with  people to 'encourage' them to pay. Can you do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other other hand, note my use of the term 'organizations with lots of money.' For this business model to work, you have to have something that is attractive to this kind of customer. If you post up a product that is mostly useful to individuals or small organizations, don't start planning your second home. As a further wrinkle, the more 'crayon'-ish your license, the more likely that those large-organization lawyers are to encourage their business people to shop elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T02:03:51.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2125" CreationDate="2015-11-27T02:06:25.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only answer to this question can be, &quot;What does your employment agreement say?&quot; If it says that you own your off-the-clock work, then there is no 'best' license to use; use whatever you like. If it's &quot;all your bases belong to us,&quot; then don't ask us, ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T02:06:25.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="463" CreationDate="2015-11-27T10:42:01.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without knowing what license we're talking about we can't conclude yet that that person is necessarily infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take GPL, for example: the person is not obliged to give you the software no matter how much you ask. Unless, of course, if he/she already gave you part of the software but is not willing to give you all of it (therefore keeping you from freely using, modifying or redistributing that software in the manner that the copyleft clause entitles you to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3348" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T10:42:01.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-11-27T13:51:31.520" Score="1" ViewCount="886" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any software licence (GNU, MIT Apache etc.) that could be readily used or modified to allow to impose limitations of the specific use/modification of parts of a source code that otherwise is being distributed as open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, for example, in a collaboratively developed software package (like scientific software) one person implements a new (and yet unpublished) algorithm but wants to limit its use/modification (or publication ;-)) by others that also have access to the code. Can this be achieved by a software licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could parts of the code (that need extra protection of that kind) be accompanied by copyright notices that limit the free use/modification of the open source software as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3350" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T16:27:32.527" Title="Software licence to limit use/modification of parts of open-source code?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2148" CreationDate="2015-11-27T14:29:03.133" Score="17" ViewCount="4390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an open source Python project and we have plans to use GPLv2-licensed library &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LiuLang/python3-xlib&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;python3-xlib&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, but we will not distribute it with our library. So user can install it by &lt;code&gt;pip install our-lib&lt;/code&gt; and the pip tool will install &lt;strong&gt;python3-xlib&lt;/strong&gt; automatically. Or user can manually install &lt;strong&gt;python3-xlib&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read that 3-clause BSD license is an antidote for &quot;GPL-infected&quot; code. So is it possible to use BSD-licensed library in a proprietary solution? While it still uses GPL-licensed library as an external dependency (through Python import mechanism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an example: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/asweigart/pyautogui&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pyautogui&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; looks licensed under 3-clause BSD, but it uses &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LiuLang/python3-xlib&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;python3-xlib&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as an external dependency on Linux. So &lt;strong&gt;can I use pyautogui in a proprietary solution? Can I use it internally in a corporation for testing a proprietary software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 similar questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/35/if-i-include-some-gpl-code-in-my-project-can-i-release-it-as-bsd&quot;&gt;If I include some GPL code in my project, can I release it as BSD?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1640/if-im-using-a-gpl-3-library-in-my-project-can-i-license-my-project-under-mit-l&quot;&gt;If I&amp;#39;m using a GPL 3 library in my project, can I license my project under MIT license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both answers are no. But all OPs are asking about including GPL-licensed code into their libraries distributions. Our library distribution will not include GPL-licensed code at all. It can just use it at runtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Of course, possible alternative is to avoid python3-xlib usage. But it requires a lot of time to re-implement the subset of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3349" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T12:03:35.537" Title="Can I license Python project under 3-clause BSD while it has GPL-based dependencies" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|derivative-works|bsd|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2138" CreationDate="2015-11-27T14:32:31.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright can't protect algorithms, only a specific expression of an algorithm: &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; are not eligible for copyright. Anyone could re-implement the algorithm, whatever license you choose to publish under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be possible to patent the algorithm. Software patents are contentious and have had mixed amounts of success. They are a whole different can of worms. It will be difficult to prevent publication and/or use of your algorithm by others through any other means than keeping it secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully that answers the question you had but didn't ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the question you're asking: yes it's possible to release a program under a mix of permissive (i.e. MIT, BSD, Apache) and propriety licenses. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1711/combining-code-written-under-different-licenses-eiffel-forum-license-mit-and-a&quot;&gt;Combining code written under different licenses (Eiffel Forum License, MIT and Apache), what are my options?&lt;/a&gt; deals with that question fairly well (though the non-accepted answer is much better than the accepted answer in my opinion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T14:32:31.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2138" CreationDate="2015-11-27T16:27:32.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you need a license, it's because you're thinking of distributing it. And like Martijn mentioned, copyright does not protect algorithms or any other function of your software, so a license wouldn't do the job. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're the sole copyright owner of the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If you really want to distribute the software (source-code) while keeping parts of it confidential, you can use a Non Disclosure Agreement;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) However, if you want to distribute it to a lot of people, then you might want to &quot;hide&quot; those specific parts in object code or use other DRM techniques to the same effect (these are all technical methods, not legal), and license it (DRM included) with whatever license you want, including GNU GPL v3, without much fear that those parts will become public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3348" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T16:27:32.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2146" CreationDate="2015-11-27T20:06:11.017" Score="9" ViewCount="1803" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building my first Android app and I imported two external GitHub libraries into my project. Both of these libraries use Apache License v2.0 and the LICENSE file says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its&#xA;            distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;            include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained&#xA;            within such NOTICE file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Do I have to include the LICENSE file into my app project? And if yes, where exactly should it stay too meet the requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Link if needed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3351" LastEditorUserId="3351" LastEditDate="2015-11-30T10:35:26.067" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T17:24:28.893" Title="Android - External library license in project" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2015-11-27T21:55:17.747" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are able to license &lt;strong&gt;YOUR&lt;/strong&gt; source code, however the other code will remain under the author's license as you didn't write the code and don't have the rights to re-license it that right relies to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3352" LastActivityDate="2015-11-27T21:55:17.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-01T04:28:52.733" Score="7" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twinone.locker&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twinone App Locker&lt;/a&gt; is an Android app.  It used to be open-source, released under an Apache 2 License.  It was ad-supported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People forked it.  If I understand correctly, they tended not to make any real improvements to their forks.  All they had to do was change the name, change the icon, and the AdMob publisher ID.  Then they could put their fork up on the Google Play store and make money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frustrated, Twinone moved the app locker to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source#Microsoft_Reference_Source_License_.28Ms-RSL.29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source-viewable-only&lt;/a&gt; model and eventually to a closed-source model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way that we can prevent lazy opportunists from doing the same scummy trick to us that they did to Twinone?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Optional:) In practice, if you email the Google Play store support desk, and you ask them to take the fork down &amp;mdash; will they?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3370" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T22:25:45.820" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T08:17:56.803" Title="Preventing people from forking and profiting over minor changes" Tags="|derivative-works|forking|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2015-12-01T16:52:25.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's open source, no. Even if it were closed source you couldn't do anything about people re-implementing a clone assuming they did it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot;&gt;cleanly&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A company I worked for contacted Google and had an app taken down though the circumstances were a bit different. In this case the other app was just a wrapped version of the website. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that if the branding were changed then there's no basis for the claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, I used to do tech support for Google Play stuff. It's just a bunch of kids in a call center. You'd need to find the contact info for the legal department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3323" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T16:52:25.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2142" CreationDate="2015-12-01T17:18:24.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From section 4 sub-section a,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no requirement of where it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google's Play Music uses some Apache 2.0 licenses. They display them in Settings &gt; Open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen some apps have put a link called Legal Information on the about dialog which goes to another screen that has TOS stuff and links to all the third party (Apache 2.0) libraries that they use with copyright notices next to them (Ex. &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/&quot;&gt;Apache Commons Lang&lt;/a&gt; © 2001-2011 The Apache Software Foundation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the NOTICE, section 4 sub-section d gives some clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file...[1] within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; [2] within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, [3] within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the library has a NOTICE you need to include it in one of those three places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3323" LastEditorUserId="3323" LastEditDate="2015-12-01T17:24:28.893" LastActivityDate="2015-12-01T17:24:28.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2015-12-01T19:04:36.537" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you release software as open source, it's your intention that others can take it and do whatever they want with it — either as copyleft (where they must do so under the same license) or as permissive software (where they can choose a different license if they want to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the software, changing it (for example, by taking out ads) and sharing it further is the thing you want to happen; otherwise, why are you making it open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that taking software, changing it so that more people want to use it, and re-distributing it is scummy, then it makes me wonder why you want to do open source in the first place. It's working as intended. If you don't want that happening, the solution is not to publish open source (and there is nothing inherently wrong with that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems doubtful Google will take action against people doing things you chose to give them express permission for in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="3370" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T02:47:00.057" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T02:47:00.057" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2015-12-02T12:03:35.537" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: Some, including the Free Software Foundation (FSF, publishers of the GPL) says no, you can't do this. Others say yes, you can. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF considers a work a single program if the parts communicate through function calls. If the software you publish is created to work with this GPL module. If that's the case, then you must publish the entire work under the GPL if you publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have argued that if the parts are dynamically linked, you are not creating a derivative work, and you wouldn't have to comply with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet others claim that it is a derivative work if it was created to work with the GPL module. In that case, you are also violating the license if publish it, but not under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clearly the intention of the GPL not to allow this. If this is the actual effect remains an open legal question: this hasn't been fully tested in court. I would suggest to honor the intention of the copyright holders, just as you wouldn't like to have legal loopholes circumvent the intention of your propriety licensing. If I had to put money on the result of a lawsuit, my money is on that this wouldn't be allowed, but it could go either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T12:03:35.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2150" CreationDate="2015-12-02T12:39:53.970" Score="8" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a C++ library (that compiles to a dll that can be called in C#).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like it so that the library itself can never become proprietary but can be used in proprietary applications. If the proprietor makes any changes to the library code they have to publish only the code for the modified library and nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would be suitable for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3383" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T04:25:55.043" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T04:25:55.043" Title="License that keeps a library open, but also allows use in proprietary applications?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2015-12-02T13:28:28.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want the code never to become propriety, you can use a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to force programs that use your library also to become open source, you're looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Strong_and_weak_copyleft&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;weak copyleft&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. These licenses ensure that adaptations of the library must be published under the same license as the original library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most used weak copyleft licenses are the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt; (MPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL works on the &quot;library&quot; level. If they distribute changes to the library (stand alone or together with a program that calls functions in the library), they must do so under the LGPL, but they are under no license obligation to go open source for programs that only call the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't have to publish the program that calls the (modified or unmodified) library under the LGPL, but may do so under a propriety or permissive license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL works on a file level. If an entirely new code file is added, they are not bound by the MPL, but if they edit a file that was originally under the MPL, they do have to publish under the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that they are allowed to make changes to the library and not contribute anything back if they are not giving or selling the software to anyone. If they are only using it themselves, but nobody else receives a copy of the (compiled or uncompiled) software, they are under no obligation to publish whatever they changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your situation the LGPL seems the best fit. You can choose between &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot;&gt;version 2.1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;version 3&lt;/a&gt;. Version 3 has protection against software patents and &quot;tivoisation&quot;, which version 2.1 does not. This doesn't have any impact on the criteria you gave. Older versions are no longer relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-02T13:39:23.313" LastActivityDate="2015-12-02T13:39:23.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2151" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" Score="0" Body="For questions about the information about a project, specifically the documentation of the source code. Questions can relate to best practices, procedures, policies and more." OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T02:40:54.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2154" CreationDate="2015-12-03T07:06:11.560" Score="7" ViewCount="1310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to copy a file from a project licensed under a New BSD license. My own project is licensed under an MIT license. The file is simple batch script for locating build tools and starting the build. The file itself does not contain copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can copy the file without breaking the license? Should I include the license from the original project as a comment in the file? Should I include a notice specifying the project the file was taken from? Or maybe it is better to rewrite the script from scratch so that my project only contains my own work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3392" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-03T09:38:43.997" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T09:55:54.570" Title="Copying a file from an open source project" Tags="|bsd|combined-work|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2153" CreationDate="2015-12-03T09:55:54.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: Be as clear as you can be, to avoid confusion for re-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you take a file from one project, and inject it in to another, you are creating a combined work and/or a derivative work (depending on the amount of coupling between them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a problem. The general gist of things is answered well at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1711/combining-code-written-under-different-licenses-eiffel-forum-license-mit-and-a&quot;&gt;Combining code written under different licenses (Eiffel Forum License, MIT and Apache), what are my options?&lt;/a&gt;, especialy Abhi Beckerts answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are looking to do is to make it abundantly clear to people looking at your project what the copyright status is. In your case specifically I would include a notice file which describes the copyright situation of the entire thing. It would look something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2015 &amp;lt; you &amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt; year of copyright BSD file &amp;gt; &amp;lt; author BSD file &amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This project is licensed under the MIT license, with exception of &amp;lt; that file &amp;gt; which is licensed under the 3 clause BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I'd include a copyright notice header for the BSD licensed file, with the copyright holder and that it's under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each license, include a text file with the license text in your project (but name neither of them just plain License, as that could make people think that's the license of everything)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A notice file that describes the situation of the entire project (MIT + 1 file BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license text of each license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyright header in each file that describes the copyright situation for that specific file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone coming to your project now has very little chance to be confused about the copyright and licensing of each file and project as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T09:55:54.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2126" CreationDate="2015-12-03T16:48:54.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you are really asking: &quot;Can I restrict users' rights to my larger work (such as commercial use) if it is dependent on BSD, GPL and LGPL open-source libraries?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is: if your work is dependent on at least one library under GPL, then I can already tell you that you can't because your larger work is a derivative of the GPL software and, as a derivative, it'll have to be licensed under a compatible license which means you can't restrict the freedom of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please refer to the following answer for a great explanation of what a derivative is and why it doesn't matter whether you put your own source code in src/ or in ext/: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1579/when-is-my-project-a-derivative-work-in-an-interpreted-language&quot;&gt;When is my project a derivative work in an interpreted language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you can argue that your software &lt;em&gt;isn't dependent on the GPL code&lt;/em&gt; and you don't distribute it along with your code, then you could create a custom license (open-source is clearly not suitable for your purpose), such as an EULA, for this purpose. This tool may help you get started: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.binpress.com/license/generator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.binpress.com/license/generator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3348" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-03T16:48:54.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T08:05:21.413" Score="1" ViewCount="620" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to deploy Openbravo erp in some companies, but I am confused about it. That ERP software opensource or licencee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3406" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-04T10:25:06.190" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T00:33:31.780" Title="Openbravo ERP is Open source erp?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-12-17T17:54:24.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T08:24:39.307" Score="18" ViewCount="16688" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a dynamically linked library with GPL V2 license for adding remote support to my existing C++ application. I use the library without modifications of the library code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to use GPL license for my program or do I need only to give access to the library license and code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a possibility to create an own library using the library under GPL with another license like LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3407" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-04T21:29:52.570" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T22:27:21.850" Title="Is it allowed to dynamically link a GPL licensed library for commercial use?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2015-12-04T12:54:00.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the views of the copyright owner as to the definitions of derived work versus aggregation. The FSF themselves take a very broad view of derived work that would forbid your use case; they specifically see shared lib inclusion as creating a derived work. Other organizations have different views. It has never been litigated, so no one knows for sure what will happen if you do this for when the copyright owner shares the FSF's views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T12:54:00.683" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T21:30:07.143" Score="5" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written my first app, to process images (user photos) on the phone. It writes to the jpegs on the phone, and maybe I'll add functionality to delete selected images. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to protect myself somehow against any liability, if someone experiences unintentional loss of data, say due to some software bug/error? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, does that mean I'll need a serious software licence, e.g. GPL or Apache 2.0? I'm thinking to release a free (maybe &quot;ad-sponsored&quot;) version of the app to begin with, and maybe later release a premium version. Still, this is only a hobby project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts and advice? I'm aware of the licence chooser at &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;, but I wanted to discuss this here first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems everybody's putting apps on Google Play and the App Store... Is everybody taking all this into consideration, or is this really only a concern/worry if the app is a serious, full-time endeavor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3413" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-16T22:23:41.483" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T22:23:41.483" Title="Do I need to protect myself against liability (loss of data)" Tags="|license-compatibility|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-04T21:38:27.083" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the GPL is a license with an incredibly strong copyleft trait. That is, anything that even links to it, let alone modify it, needs to be released under the GPL. Due to this 'viral' nature of the license, some people and organizations have made exceptions. One notable one is the &lt;a href=&quot;//opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/515/what-is-a-class-path-exception&quot;&gt;class path exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, the GPL now allows people to link to the library without being forced to make their own works under the GPL. Hmm... &lt;em&gt;Sounds awfully like the LGPL!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then what difference is their between the GPL + class path exception and the LGPL? As far as I can tell, there isn't a difference. But surely, with the author of both licenses being the Free Software Foundation, you would think otherwise. Why would a license author create two different licenses that can provide the exact same thing? Aren't they just adding to the proliferation issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-04T21:38:27.083" Title="How is the LGPL different from the GPL with a class path exception?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|exceptions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2015-12-05T09:37:39.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2156" CreationDate="2015-12-05T00:33:31.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three editions, Openbravo Professional Edition (paid edition, commercial features), Openbravo Enterprise Edition  (paid edition,  commercial features, full support) and a Community Edition exists for free, with a limited set of capabilities available and without professional support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3414" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T00:33:31.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2159" CreationDate="2015-12-05T01:24:07.077" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; licenses are licenses for, well, &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt;. Your liability question has to do with binaries that you publish on an app store. Your liability exposure has to do with the contract you accept when you publish on the app store. Maybe the app store gives you some level of legal protection, and then maybe it doesn't. Even if your source code is available under a license which disclaims liability and warranty, that may not protect you from claims related to the misbehavior of a binary application. Clearly, many people think this is not worth worrying about, but perhaps the law site would be a better place to try to learn why they think that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T01:24:07.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2015-12-05T13:19:58.750" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The jury is still out on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional interpretation, and the one intended by the Free Software Foundation(FSF, publishers of the GPL), is that no, you can't do this. This position seems to have broad support. Both parts of your question are dealt with in the GPL FAQ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first, if it &quot;counts&quot; if you link dynamically has it's own &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot;&gt;section in the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. It answer is that it doesn't matter whether you link statically or dynamically, it's all governed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second, can you make an LGPL wrapper is dealt with in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLWrapper&quot;&gt;another section of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. It answers that you can't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This view is what the &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL is, and also seems to be the most common view. It's not the only view though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some claim that dynamic linking doesn't make a work that has to be licensed under the GPL, or doesn't always make a work that has to be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lawrence Rosen, General council of the OSI, argued &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366&quot;&gt;in the Linux journal&lt;/a&gt; that whether or not it's linked statically or dynamically doesn't matter, but that linking to a library does not create a derivative work, and is not bound to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that both the OSI position and the FSF position have a measure of partizanship in what they regard as what &quot;the right thing&quot; with regard to open source/free software is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as there is no case law on the subject with a definitive outcome - and there isn't any just yet - legally this is still an open question. The safe route is to take the most conservative, that is, the position the FSF takes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, two caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is for personal use, and you don't intend to distribute the result, then you can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; do this, and the rest of the answer is void. This only comes in to play if you distribute the end result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the answer, I've equated &quot;commercial use&quot; to &quot;propriety licensed&quot;. That's not completely right; you may distribute open source software commercially, but since anyone can fork and distribute the product, there are large challenges in setting up a business model for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T13:19:58.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2165" CreationDate="2015-12-05T17:05:49.347" Score="8" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to modify a license. Say I choose the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I would like to remove &lt;code&gt;publish&lt;/code&gt; and add some restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then change the name of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same question about disclaimers and terms of service, for instance, pick the Google terms of service and modify it to adapt to particular needs of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3415" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T22:41:54.687" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T22:41:54.687" Title="Are licenses licensed or copyrighted?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2164" CreationDate="2015-12-05T18:11:43.123" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a license, or terms of service, are eligible for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL itself, for example, is not available under a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is specifically about the MIT/expat license. This is a very simple license, and there are only so many ways you can express an idea in, especially in legalese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When making a new license based on another one, and you want to avoid being a derivative work for copyright reasons, the best way to do that is with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for terms of service and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said and done, there are several reasons why this may be a bad idea in the first place, detailed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-05T18:11:43.123" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2167" CreationDate="2015-12-07T03:16:22.470" Score="4" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release my WPF Media Element based on FFmpeg on GitHub. I want to be as permissive as possible. I believe that this control could be of great help to a ton of people. Here are the links to the licenses. Hopefully someone can help me out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg build by Zeranoe&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Says all builds on this page are licensed as GPL 3.0&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/naudio/NAudio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NAudio&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Ruslan-B/FFmpeg.AutoGen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg.Autogen&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;(LGPL) version 3&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can't release it under MIT please help me find out what license I should release this code under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3431" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T00:39:48.540" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T00:39:48.540" Title="What license should I release my code under? It contains FFmpeg binaries, code from NAudio and code from FFmpeg.Autogen" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|gpl-3|lgpl|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2166" CreationDate="2015-12-07T13:05:33.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ms-pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the GPL 3.0 and Ms-PL are incompatible&lt;/a&gt;, and a work that depends on both is legally undistributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FFmpeg is licensed under the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;. You will just have to find a different build, or build it yourself. The FFmpeg website has good &lt;a href=&quot;https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;guides on building&lt;/a&gt;, and external resources to help you build &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rdp/ffmpeg-windows-build-helpers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;exist as well&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make use of an LGPL build, you can distribute the product under the MIT license (and all it's parts under their respective licenses). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T13:05:33.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2168" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2169" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Microsoft Public License" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="97" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T16:00:33.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-07T20:28:27.323" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Until now, we have not had an application version strategy or version-ed our application. We are considering doing so with our next release. What are the minimum tasks necessary to transition to a version-ed application? Answers in the form of bullet points, not necessarily in chronological order would be sufficient. It's okay to keep it high level. A few examples might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine version control name convention Major.Minor.Build.YY...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revise on screen imaging or text to display current version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prepare release notes template for communicating new releases to users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We're a .Net shop using TFS if that helps. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not obvious already, I'm not a developer. I'm the solution expert/BA acting often as the project manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3435" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-07T22:01:32.110" LastActivityDate="2015-12-07T22:01:32.110" Title="Transitioning to Version Control" Tags="|software-development|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2015-12-07T21:57:37.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2172" CreationDate="2015-12-07T22:09:21.250" Score="4" ViewCount="1165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working with a formerly closed-source project whose official first release under that product name was in 1997.  Development on it slowed and was abandoned, then released as Apache 2.0 in 2012.  The copyright dates in the file headers of that open source publication said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2012 PROJECT Corp.&#xA;&#xA;PROJECT is a trademark of PROJECT Corp.&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;):&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the license...&#xA;blah blah blah&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PROJECT Corp has not really been involved in the development since the open source release, but others have.  Requests to PROJECT Corp for involvement and/or support have been largely unheeded.  I was considering changing this to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 1997-2012 PROJECT Corp.&#xA;Copyright 2012-2015 Project Open Source Contributors (see CREDITS.md)&#xA;&#xA;PROJECT is a trademark of PROJECT Corp.&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;):&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the license...&#xA;blah blah blah&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about not refreshing their copyright date to read &lt;code&gt;Copyright 1997-2015&lt;/code&gt;.  I feel it's more accurate to convey the date ranges of involvement with the source by not updating it.  But additionally, I wonder if I would even be authorized to do it on their behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to make PROJECT Corp mad--they may not even want to be associated with the derived code anyway!  But the codebase does have active developers who want to keep the file headers current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2268" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T04:11:23.880" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T14:27:09.460" Title="Refreshing Shared Copyright Dates in Apache 2.0 Licensed Code" Tags="|copyright|attribution|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2171" CreationDate="2015-12-08T01:53:33.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 4.3 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; requires you to retain the copyright notice.  In my opinion (I am not a lawyer) that would not allow you to change the copyright date from 2012 to 1997-2012, even if the latter is actually more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last part of paragraph 4 allows you to add your own copyright line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel the need to credit the original copyright owner with work prior to 2012, I suppose you can do it in some other manner, such as in a &quot;credits&quot;, &quot;acknowledgments&quot;, or &quot;project history&quot; document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some advice&lt;/a&gt; on the matter of displaying copyright years. While they were talking about GPL licenses, their advice seems to be generally applicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright notice should include the year in which you finished&#xA;  preparing the release (so if you finished it in 1998 but didn't post&#xA;  it until 1999, use 1998). You should add the proper year for each&#xA;  release; for example, “Copyright 1998, 1999 Terry Jones” if some&#xA;  versions were finished in 1998 and some were finished in 1999. If&#xA;  several people helped write the code, use all their names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For software with several releases over multiple years, it's okay to&#xA;  use a range (“2008-2010”) instead of listing individual years (“2008,&#xA;  2009, 2010”) if and only if every year in the range, inclusive, really&#xA;  is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; and you&#xA;  make an explicit statement in your documentation about this usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether that is grounded in copyright law or in FSF opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-14T14:27:09.460" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T14:27:09.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2015-12-08T09:23:23.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Svartepjotr: A general take on using different redistribution terms: Yes &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; may distribute the source and binaries even if &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; choose follow the restrictions of GPL, but the distributed source/binary still keeps the permission to distribute it further BSD-style. You may not remove that permission - you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; supply the terms of the permission given by the BSD license along with the data which you distribute. So yes you can apply GPL to your behavior, it is fully OK but you can not remove the rights granted by the original license, so your recipient will not be bound by the rules you choose for &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt;. Thus far, adding a GPL clause to otherwise &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt; BSD source is plainly illegal (as it would be a false statement about GPL restrictions, which actually do not apply to your recipient).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, you probably do not indicate to the recipient which parts of a &lt;strong&gt;modified&lt;/strong&gt; work are covered by your copyright and thus are not covered by the original license. This in practice makes it impossible to use the original free permission for the parts still being under the original copyright and license. This forces the recipients to obey GPL for the whole, to make use of your added changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; any &quot;relicensing&quot;, just two separate licenses valid for parts of the work, which are usually deliberately mixed together to make them practically inseparable (unless you specify which parts you changed and how, iow distribute your patch to the original code, such a patch would be indeed a clean GPL work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;yes you can use BSD-licensed code in a GPL-licensed project&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you can not &quot;relicense&quot; but you can add your more restrictive license to &lt;strong&gt;modified&lt;/strong&gt; files and this will &lt;strong&gt;in practice&lt;/strong&gt; void the rights granted to the BSD-licensed part, which part will still exist and bear the original license and permissions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you must of course keep the original copyright notice and the license text&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3438" LastEditorUserId="3438" LastEditDate="2015-12-08T09:42:00.617" LastActivityDate="2015-12-08T09:42:00.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2182" CreationDate="2015-12-09T22:24:44.773" Score="7" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the GPLv2. The creator of a work can allow people to upgrade to a higher GPL version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under&#xA;  the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free&#xA;  Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, &lt;strong&gt;or (at your option)&#xA;  any later version.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I modify a work with a license statement such as this, am I allowed to say that people who then further modify my distribution &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; upgrade it to a higher GPL version? Or do I have to allow them just as the original does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3453" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T17:20:47.933" Title="Can I change the license of a GPL derived work to be more restrictive regarding version upgrades?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2175" CreationDate="2015-12-10T04:08:31.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 6 of the GPL-v2 license says you cannot impose additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that the grantee (you, in this case), cannot remove the option to use a later version of the license, because doing so would &quot;impose an additional restriction&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if you follow the requirements of the GPL (or any license) to the letter, you are OK.  If you want to do something different, as is the case here, ask a real lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked a real IP lawyer this question but didn't have any money to offer.  If I get an answer I'll add it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-11T17:20:47.933" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T17:20:47.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2199" CreationDate="2015-12-10T07:39:55.413" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're trying to raise some fund for our Open Source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of companies out there selling t-shirts and stickers with Open Source projects, but they don't give a share of the profits to those projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there was any initiative out there selling merchandise who're giving a part of the profits back to the projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3459" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T18:45:40.730" Title="Is there services helping to fund a project selling merch?" Tags="|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2015-12-16T08:20:12.727" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T09:55:58.057" Score="6" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an commercial embedded device which uses linux as OS and I would like to add remote support to my commercial application on the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a dynamically linked library with GPL V2 license for adding the remote support. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I create an application under GPL, which uses the library and acts as server which communicates with my commercial program over inter process communication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3407" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-12-10T14:36:11.377" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T23:07:04.650" Title="Can I create a GPL licensed server and use it in a commercial product?" Tags="|proprietary-code|linked-libraries|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2175" CreationDate="2015-12-10T12:30:57.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of the software allow you to receive the software under the GPLv2, GPLv3, or any future higher version of the GPL at your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to receive it under the GPLv2, you are only bound to the GPLv2, and are under no requirement to release it under any later version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 6 in the GPLv2 (the one that tells you you can't impose additional restrictions) only tells you you cannot impose additional restrictions on top of the license you receive, but the document that tells you you may receive it under the GPLv2 or later isn't part of the license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T12:30:57.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-10T17:52:43.090" Score="8" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library and a tool on top of it, and I would like to release both under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL-2&lt;/a&gt;. However, the library has an optional dependency, another library which is released under GPL (not LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the result of this combination will be under GPL, but I want to allow using my library and tool under conditions of MPL-2 if GPL-ed dependency is disabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I apply to my source code and what headers should I add to my files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to release library and tool only under MPL-2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should I additionally release under GPL every file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should I additionally release under GPL only files that call functions from GPL-ed dependency?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should I additionally release under GPL my tool?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer single license (MPL-2) for all code, to keep things simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found this: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/combining-mpl-and-gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Combining MPL-Licensed files with an (L)GPL-Licensed Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program? (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#LinkingWithGPL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not exactly. It means you must release your program under a license compatible with the GPL (more precisely, &lt;strong&gt;compatible&lt;/strong&gt; with one or more GPL versions accepted by all the rest of the code in the combination that you link). The &lt;strong&gt;combination&lt;/strong&gt; itself is then available under those GPL versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand when the result of &amp;quot;combination&amp;quot; appears and when to apply GPL to MPL-ed work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I &lt;em&gt;distribute source code&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; use GPL-ed dependency?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when I &lt;em&gt;distribute binaries&lt;/em&gt; with enabled GPL-ed dependency?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when someone &lt;em&gt;builds&lt;/em&gt; my library and tool with GPL-ed dependency enabled?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when someone &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; my library and tool with GPL-ed dependency enabled?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T01:53:17.007" Title="Using GPL-ed library from code with more permissive license (MPL-2)" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|derivative-works|multi-licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2108" CreationDate="2015-12-10T18:37:38.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no idea, but I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/11/8/mozilla-public-license-almost-20-part-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; about MPL-2.0 revision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internationalization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mozilla has always tried to be a global project, but we were aware that the MPL had some clauses that made non-American users less comfortable with the license. One of these was the section on U.S. Government End Users. This was intended to protect the interests of all contributors to MPL-licensed projects, not just Americans, but to a non-lawyer (and even to many European lawyers) the meaning of the section was opaque. Our legal research, and the experience of the past 10 years, suggested it could be removed without impacting the U.S. government's procurement process, and so we did so. Similarly, we've discussed every draft with FSF Europe's European Legal Network, to help ensure that the new language works across jurisdictions, and brought the jurisdiction language into closer alignment with the practices of other open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, CDDL &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is based&lt;/a&gt; on older MPL-1.1 revision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-10T18:43:37.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2015-12-11T01:40:00.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses don't apply to individual instances of a product, but to the distribution of a product. If you don't in any way distribute or publish any GPL licensed code, then that license does not apply to you. You can design your library to work with a GPL library if the end user happens to have it, but you don't have to license yours under the GPL to do so. So you can license everything under the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T01:40:00.990" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2188" CreationDate="2015-12-11T01:24:16.873" Score="26" ViewCount="6822" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much is that &lt;strong&gt;substantial portion&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: is using half of some helper function defined in that software &lt;strong&gt;substantial&lt;/strong&gt; or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" OwnerDisplayName="Marqin" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T10:58:35.153" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T10:58:35.153" Title="How much is &quot;substantial portion&quot; in MIT licence?" Tags="|licensing|law|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2015-12-11T02:30:02.200" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Substantial portion&lt;/strong&gt; is a legal term. Its exact definition will depend on jurisdiction, be subject to interpretation and possibly including subjective analyses. When in doubt, ask a lawyer. To err on the safe side, assume that it applies to &lt;strong&gt;any portion, no matter the size&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give you a random example, here's what Wikipedia has to say for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_part_(Canadian_copyright_law)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canadian copyright law&lt;/a&gt; (neither I, nor Wikipedia, are lawyers and cannot give legal advice, obviously):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is a Substantial Part?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Copyright Act does not require that an entire work be copied in order to find that a copyright holder’s rights have been infringed. Copying a substantial part of the work will be sufficiently actionable. In determining whether a substantial part of a work has been copied, the court must exclude from consideration any part of the work not properly the subject matter of copyright under s.3 of the Act.[6] The analysis is largely fact-driven, and the courts will consider both qualitative and quantitative matters. Some of the matters that have been considered include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) how central was the element taken to the first work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) do the selected parts constitute an essential characteristic of the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) would people who see the copy recognize the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) was the part taken used in a manner that would create a substitute to the first work and thereby jeopardize its economic exploitation? [economic damages can be considered]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-11T02:30:02.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1187" CreationDate="2015-12-11T15:27:03.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cecill.info/index.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt; is a license developed to be a GPL equivalent, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cecill.info/faq.en.html#compatible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with GPL&lt;/a&gt; and French law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CeCILL is the first license defining the principles of use and dissemination of Free Software in conformance with French law, following the principles of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting moment is how they are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2-en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defining&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;contributions&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Module:&lt;/strong&gt; means a set of sources files including their documentation that enables supplementary functions or services in addition to those offered by the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internal Module:&lt;/strong&gt; means any or all Module, connected to the Software so that they both execute in the &lt;em&gt;same address space.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;External Module:&lt;/strong&gt; means any or all Modules, not derived from the Software, so that this Module and the Software run in &lt;em&gt;separate address spaces&lt;/em&gt;, with one calling the other when they are run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contribution&lt;/strong&gt;: means any or all modifications, corrections, translations, adaptations and/or new functions integrated into the Software by any or all Contributors, &lt;em&gt;as well as any or all Internal Modules.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;[...]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.3.2 DISTRIBUTION OF MODIFIED SOFTWARE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Licensee makes a &lt;strong&gt;Contribution&lt;/strong&gt; to the Software, the terms and conditions for the distribution of the resulting &lt;strong&gt;Modified Software&lt;/strong&gt; become subject to all the provisions of this Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when CeCILL authors were adapting GPL for the French law, their choice was to explicitly state that if some code is running in the same &lt;strong&gt;address space&lt;/strong&gt;, it is considered to be a &lt;em&gt;contribution&lt;/em&gt; and creates &lt;em&gt;modified software&lt;/em&gt;, which should be distributed under compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3398" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T04:28:45.000" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2191" CreationDate="2015-12-12T00:54:18.230" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend and I are making a program licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, and we would like to pull in code from one of his old projects licensed under the GPL 3.0 license, but I don't see a way to. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="719" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T04:34:11.253" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T04:34:11.253" Title="How would it be possible to distribute a GPL program with an Apache program?" Tags="|license-compatibility|relicensing|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2190" CreationDate="2015-12-12T04:29:36.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you and your friend are building upon an old project, and the original project completely &lt;em&gt;belongs&lt;/em&gt; to you, then there's no issue. Since you own the project, you own the entire intellectual property, and you are free to license it as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the issue comes in when there is code from other contributors, or when there are incompatible licensed dependencies in the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If code is from other contributors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to ask them to relicense their contributions under a license such as the Apache license. If they refuse, you'll either have to remove their contributions, or you'll have to rewrite the code yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is incompatible licensed dependencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if your project relies on an external library such as the GPL, you'll have to respect the terms and conditions of that license, likewise with any other license. If the original project has a dependency with the GPL as its license, then you've got to either remove that dependency, or respect the terms by making your new project under the GPL as well due to its copyleft clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have those two issues, then you're free to go!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T04:29:36.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2193" CreationDate="2015-12-12T05:04:48.373" Score="5" ViewCount="1260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I sell software which uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/prime31/CharacterController2D&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;someone else's code&lt;/a&gt; which is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is closed source, and aside from the borrowed code, is entirely my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-12-12T14:56:30.963" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T00:51:56.770" Title="Can I sell closed source software which uses some CC BY-NC-SA code?" Tags="|creative-commons|derivative-works|commercial|proprietary-code|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2015-12-12T14:55:20.240" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I've completely misunderstood the question, that would be violating &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; of the Creative Commons license's restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That it can only be used in non-commercial contexts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That any derivative works be licensed under the same license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't know how you thought you could use CharacterController2D in a commercial closed-source app! That's the exact opposite of what the license is for!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-12-12T14:55:20.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2192" CreationDate="2015-12-12T19:15:33.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I contacted the author directly.  They said that it is OK to use the code commercially as long as it is used as part of a compiled and closed source greater project.  It is not allowed to sell his actual code stand alone or as part of another code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the code cannot be sold, but you might be able to obtain a different license from the copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="295" LastEditDate="2015-12-13T00:51:56.770" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T00:51:56.770" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-13T12:12:07.637" Score="9" ViewCount="3427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a web application which streams videos. For the frontend I intend to use the richfaces framework for jsf. That framework is licensed under the LGPL v2. Does that mean that I have to make it possible to use different version of this framework by the user as the license indicates? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually want to understand whether running an application on a server could be referred as distribution or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3485" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T11:24:10.920" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T18:14:08.597" Title="Using GPL or LGPL licensed framework for web application" Tags="|gpl|distribution|lgpl|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2195" CreationDate="2015-12-13T15:19:07.213" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Running an application on a server is never considered distribution, and you're not bound by the terms of the LGPL for distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do note that running javascript in the browser &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; mean distribution. I'm not familiar with the framework, so I don't know if that's relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only widely used open source license which puts obligations on you when you run software on a server and let users interact with it is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-13T15:19:07.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2195" CreationDate="2015-12-13T17:28:36.173" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the LGPL, running the software under a web server of any sort does not qualify as distribution. As noted in Martijn's answer, passing JavaScript and any markup to create the webpage does qualify as distribution. Here's a small flow chart that might help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D35Bi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D35Bi.png&quot; alt=&quot;Distribution flow chart&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code running on the server is LGPL, this does not count as distribution. However, if you are sending code over a connection to the client in the web app, this does count as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're running an LGPL, or GPL licensed application &lt;em&gt;only on the server&lt;/em&gt;, then you're not distributing anything. The exception to this is the AGPL license, where running an application on the server qualifies as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="3557" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T18:14:08.597" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T18:14:08.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2180" CreationDate="2015-12-14T18:45:40.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I found out &lt;a href=&quot;http://devswag.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DevSwag&lt;/a&gt; was offering a &lt;a href=&quot;http://devswag.com/pages/selling-on-devswag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;service to help fund Open Source project&lt;/a&gt; by selling merch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract from their website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DevSwag is designed to help projects get their materials out there. While it isn't a profit-source for Tilde (even if sales would go gangbusters, we're still only talking about selling stickers and tshirts here :p), it does have costs, so we split revenues with the projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Project needs to invest the initial fund to buy the product. So it requires some initial investment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3459" LastActivityDate="2015-12-14T18:45:40.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2201" CreationDate="2015-12-15T09:02:14.380" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm extending an open source library written in Java released under the BSD License. That library has a class, let's call it &lt;code&gt;Utils&lt;/code&gt;, that exposes a lot of static methods. The common use case is to import all the exposed methods in a static import, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import static org.acme.Utils.*;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm creating new functions in my brand new open source library to extend the one from company &lt;em&gt;acme&lt;/em&gt;. I'm wondering if is lecit to do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;package org.myself;&#xA;&#xA;import org.acme.Utils;&#xA;&#xA;public class MyUtils extends Utils{&#xA;   ...&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;such that I can then use a single import&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import static org.myself.MyUtils.*;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import static org.acme.Utils.*;&#xA;import static org.myself.MyUtils.*;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3496" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2015-12-16T08:19:10.657" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T08:19:10.657" Title="Extending class that exposes static methods from BSD Licensed project" Tags="|bsd|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-12-24T23:24:16.287" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2200" CreationDate="2015-12-15T11:51:25.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as the copyright/license is concerned, there is no difference in what namespace you put things, so this is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it is a good idea for your re-users to do this is more of a question for Programmers.se, and mainly comes down to whether it is more simple for your users to understand what's going on or to write one import fewer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2015-12-15T11:51:25.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2200" CreationDate="2015-12-16T07:11:38.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licence states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted&#xA;  provided [etc...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not specify &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; you can and cannot use a specific class, function or library. All uses in &quot;binary form&quot; are the same to it. So yes, you could use a class from a BSD-licensed library like that, provided you comply with all of the license's terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T07:11:38.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2217" CreationDate="2015-12-16T18:34:15.050" Score="12" ViewCount="1999" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the definition of &quot;System Libraries&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but &lt;em&gt;which is not part of that Major Component&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it necessary, in order to protect the users' and developers' freedoms to require that &quot;System Libraries&quot; are not &quot;part of&quot; the Major Components? Could someone elaborate on the meaning of &quot;part of&quot; here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3512" LastEditorUserId="160" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T17:38:37.713" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T22:20:29.210" Title="Why is the definition of &quot;System Libraries&quot; in GPLv3 phrased the way it is?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|terminology|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-16T19:47:15.503" Score="6" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 4 clause BSD licence required that any advertised software with the code must say that a project component created by the UC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many complained that the list would be &lt;em&gt;impossibly&lt;/em&gt; long if you have too many contributors, and it was removed from newer versions of the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there is the CC BY license, which also requires attribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are there no complaints about the CC-BY (or CC-BY-SA) license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3513" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T00:12:33.613" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T00:12:33.613" Title="Why is CC BY better than the four part BSD licence?" Tags="|bsd|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2208" CreationDate="2015-12-16T22:27:53.370" Score="27" ViewCount="1084" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many other people I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/271080/301021&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;. Since I don't really understand what is at stake I became confused and worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I can legally force any organization to let me see the source code of any application touched by a questioner when I give an answer to their question? Does this mean that I open up any organization I'm associated with to this liability when I ask a question? Finally will SO be required to release identifying information so people can check if rights were violated? It seems to me that this move will induce code attribution trolls like patent law released the patent trolls. I seem to recall Oracle antagonizing Google in court over a simple algorithm in Android code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I could just put in the terms and conditions something to the effect of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The lines of code that were derived from or generated by the kind folks who contributed to the Stack Exchange network are licensed under the MIT license. Everything else is licensed under XYZ license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I would be in full compliance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some of the big ramifications that I'm not knowledgeable enough to foresee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3516" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T23:25:57.887" Title="Ramifications of the proposed new SE licensing model" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2204" CreationDate="2015-12-16T22:58:12.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first part is looking at where the licenses are applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY (and -SA) are mostly applied to creative works: things such as pictures, text, music and video. Whereas the BSD is applied to source code. The issue that you make note of is with attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So how do we attribute with both licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the Creative Commons license we simply need to provide credit. Most creative works which are licensed under this license also don't have a large string of notable contributors: it's generally a sole person that makes the work. Because these projects didn't normally have more than 3 contributors, it's never been an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any open source project will likely have many different contributors who will contribute in many different ways. Such a list is would be long. The issue with the BSD wasn't always in attribution, but when promoting anything that made use of the project. Look at this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software&#xA;  must display the following acknowledgement:&#xA;  This product includes software developed by the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;organization&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmmm... This isn't just providing attribution in the window of the program, but this includes any advertisement, or promotion of the new program. That would've been problematic: loss of space on the print. The biggest reason was that such notice wasn't even necessary: All that was needed was that the original developers got notable credit in their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the 4-clause BSD license. Newer versions of the license don't have this clause, and are commonly used in multiple projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T22:58:12.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2206" CreationDate="2015-12-16T23:08:00.357" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271083/262823&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; to the announcement post that pretty much sums up why &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of this - the exception - is a bad idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're essentially creating a crayon license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you modify the terms of an existing license, you create what is known as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.licenses.open-source.general/11857&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;. Those are a problem - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;&quot;How can a “crayon” license be a problem?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for the reasons why.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's far too easy to claim an illegal use is legal.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2122/98&quot;&gt;this answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;. Essentially, someone can get my code from somewhere I use it - perhaps in a commercial open-source product of mine - and not attribute it to me. When I chase them down on that, they can simply claim &quot;oh, I got it from Stack Overflow&quot;, and get away scot-free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;massively&lt;/em&gt; unclear how to reverse that requirement.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say I don't want to have this extra exception applied to any of my code. How do I note that? If I put a note in my user profile that all my code snippets &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be attributed properly as per the terms of the full MIT, is that enough? Do I have to add a note to &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; answer? I'd rather not have to do that, but I also don't want to be chasing people down endlessly for misusing my code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does this change mean? Let's answer some of your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I can legally force any organization to let me see the source code of any application touched by a questioner when I give an answer to their question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; The code that came from the answer (or whatever post you got it from) is under the MIT license with an SE-specific exception. That means that the code can be used in a commercial, closed-source application (as the standard MIT allows), without the original license being included (which is provided for by the exception). Some &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; attribution must be included at the request of the code author, but that doesn't have to be the full license document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally will SO be required to release identifying information so people can check if rights were violated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope.&lt;/strong&gt; There's nothing in either the license, the exception, the SE TOS, or any other pertinent laws that requires them to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or I could just put in the terms and conditions something to the effect of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I would be in full compliance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conditional &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. If none of the individual code authors asked you to attribute them, that's perfectly sufficient. However, if one of them does ask you to attribute them, you should then include their name, a link to their profile, and a link to the original source of the content. No MIT license document required, still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-16T23:08:00.357" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2015-12-17T04:10:15.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the sole copyright holder of a work (or you have signed CLAs from everyone) would dual licensing the app be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, one license that might work is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/QPL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;The Q Public License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Q Public license seems to allow free distribution of unmodified software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute the Software in unmodified form provided that the entire package, including - but not restricted to - copyright, trademark notices and disclaimers, as released by the initial developer of the Software, is distributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to distribute modified versions of the software you must make the source code available in the form of the original unaltered source code and a set of patches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may make modifications to the Software and distribute your modifications, in a form that is separate from the Software, such as patches. The following restrictions apply to modifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;a. Modifications must not alter or remove any copyright notices in the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;b. When modifications to the Software are released under this license, a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain available under these terms in addition to any other license(s) of the initial developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may distribute machine-executable forms of the Software or machine-executable forms of modified versions of the Software, provided that you meet these restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;a. You must include this license document in the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;b. You must ensure that all recipients of the machine-executable forms are also able to receive the complete machine-readable source code to the distributed Software, including all modifications, without any charge beyond the costs of data transfer, and place prominent notices in the distribution explaining this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;c. You must ensure that all modifications included in the machine-executable forms are available under the terms of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2015-12-17T04:10:15.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T10:51:13.083" Score="9" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found that FSF considers &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html&quot;&gt;proprietary software&lt;/a&gt; to be unethical (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Proprietary Software Is Often Malware&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proprietary software, also called nonfree software, means software that &lt;strong&gt;doesn't &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;respect&lt;/strong&gt; users' freedom and community&lt;/a&gt;. This means that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html&quot;&gt;its developer or owner has power over its users&lt;/a&gt;. This power is itself an &lt;strong&gt;injustice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also call it an instrument of unjust power and user-subjugating software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious to know if there is any thing that the Open Source Initiative say about proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2015-12-17T18:44:03.773" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T04:29:04.157" Title="What does the Open Source Initiative say about proprietary software?" Tags="|proprietary-code|osi|fsf|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2210" CreationDate="2015-12-17T16:19:54.140" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/definition&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; doesn't mention &quot;proprietary software&quot; explicitly, but their requirements for calling something &quot;open source&quot; seem to preclude any proprietary software from calling itself &quot;open source&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away&#xA;  the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution&#xA;  containing programs from several different sources. The license shall&#xA;  not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Source Code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in&#xA;  source code as well as compiled form […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This nugget appears somewhere on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org&quot;&gt;opensource.org home page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] the promise of open source: […] an end to predatory vendor lock-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in their &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/about&quot;&gt;mission statement&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] the promise of open source is […] an end to predatory vendor lock-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2015-12-18T14:34:25.840" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T14:34:25.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-17T16:57:46.347" Score="14" ViewCount="2296" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, all user submitted content is licensed under &amp;quot;cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&amp;quot;.  This shows up at the bottom of each page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is material that is submitted to Stack Exchange under this license compatible with the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that I ask is to clear up confusion about attribution and what seems to be something akin to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3 clause license&lt;/a&gt; (the &amp;quot;obnoxious BSD advertising clause&amp;quot;) that &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; GPL compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if the requirement to add and maintain an attribution within the source in a way that is specified by the licensor falls into the same classification as the BSD 3-clause license's endorsement.  From &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;Attribution required&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; Stack Overflow blog post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we &lt;strong&gt;require&lt;/strong&gt; that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network&lt;/strong&gt; in some way. It doesn't have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink directly to the original question&lt;/strong&gt; on the source site (e.g., &lt;code&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show the author names&lt;/strong&gt; for every question and answer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hyperlink each author name&lt;/strong&gt; directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., &lt;code&gt;http://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user756" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user756" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T07:02:40.220" Title="Is Stack Exchange's CC-BY-SA v3.0 content compatible with the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2212" CreationDate="2015-12-17T17:26:46.337" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems that this isn’t possible, because the provision (that only &quot;the last license applied&quot; has to be followed) was introduced with CC BY-SA 4.0, so CC BY-SA 3.0 doesn’t allow it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6782/138&quot;&gt;Please see Trevor’s answer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you adapt¹ content licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, you can (additionally) license your contribution under GPLv3 (but not the other way around). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creativecommons.org’s &lt;em&gt;Compatible Licenses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0 is compatible with CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(¹ See my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1950/138&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What counts as adaptation for using code licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 in software licensed under GPLv3?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-04-26T23:11:46.480" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T23:11:46.480" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-18T06:37:44.553" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm part of a programmers community over the internet. I've been struggling with the code that's shared over the site because it's licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;. I'd love to accomplish with the law and the &quot;spirit&quot; of the terms of use of the community, so in order to get a better understanding about the current situation and clarification about solutions, I had sent a couple mails and inclusively &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270014/is-copy-pasting-code-from-stack-overflow-an-infringement-to-cc-by-sa-3-0-or-is-i&quot;&gt;initiated a discussion&lt;/a&gt; about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly there's a lot of opinions among users about if the terms of use are legally valid or applicable in real life. But the good news are that the network on which this community is under, have taken a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license-clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange&quot;&gt;big step in order to solve the problem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that there's a lot of opinions about, and I'd like to know which is the best license available for code snippets considering that most people which enters the site may not be that worried as me about licensing - I'd like to be able to copy little pieces of code without attribution nor legal ambiguity into my own libre or commercial projects and share my contributions freely as well (altough I would love to give and get attribution on more sophisticated code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the whole problem could be summarized in this explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is not reasonable to require attribution for code snippets (as a matter of fact)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is absolutelly reasonable to ask attribution on actual code blocks (or simply &quot;code&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a similar situation in respect to what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.github.io/labs/2011/05/28/fsf-recommends-cc0-for-code-snippets-in-documentation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF addressed before&lt;/a&gt;, and solution could be the same. The question in that case is how to make it practical and not messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3542" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T12:42:50.793" Title="License for code snippets on programmers community" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2015-12-18T09:29:41.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've been struggling with the code that's shared over the site because it's licensed under the CC BY-SA...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you've identified that there's a problem with licensing it under BY-SA. Good: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1717/98&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA is discouraged for code.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow an infringement of CC BY-SA 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without attribution, &lt;strong&gt;absolutely yes&lt;/strong&gt;. No copy-pasta without saying where it comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to know which is the best license available for code snippets...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unanswerable because it's incredibly subjective. &lt;em&gt;Best&lt;/em&gt; depends on your situation and what you're trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to be able to copy little pieces of code without attribution nor legal ambiguity into my own libre or commercial projects and share my contributions freely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the important bit. You want to be able to copy snippets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;without attribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commercially&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and have a right to share on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without attribution is probably the hardest bit here. I don't actually recall any open-source license that allows you to do this, so you're looking at going full public domain (or using CC0, which is slightly different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-18T09:29:41.013" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2203" CreationDate="2015-12-18T12:05:07.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I emailed Yoni Rabkin at the Free Software Foundation's licensing centre, this was his reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is because the System Libraries exception doesn't refer to the&#xA;  major components, but with the low-level libraries which enable the use&#xA;  of those major components. For example, the System Libraries exception&#xA;  would apply to a library whose sole job is to permit an executable to&#xA;  use the windowing system (Major Component) of an operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can get a deeper understanding of how that language in GPLv3 evolved&#xA;  by looking at the rational documents released for the drafts of GPLv3 at&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-guide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-guide&lt;/a&gt;, specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl-rationale-2006-01-16.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl-rationale-2006-01-16.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd1to2-markup-rationale.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd1to2-markup-rationale.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-rationale.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-rationale.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3512" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T22:20:29.210" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T22:20:29.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-19T09:36:47.433" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few years ago I started working on an open-source project, but things continued and now--years later--I currently maintain my own branch of the project. The project currently resides on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project has the boilerplate MIT license and copyright on every file in the project. I have simply been copy/pasting this into every new file, and have never changed it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I include myself in the copyright (and do I need to)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I update all the current files' copyright to reflect modifications over the last X years?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3555" LastEditorUserId="3555" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T10:32:11.110" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T10:32:11.110" Title="Updating modified source code's copyright" Tags="|contributor|copyright|mit|source-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-12-21T10:06:14.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2220" CreationDate="2015-12-19T14:29:42.127" Score="11" ViewCount="3694" Body="&lt;p&gt;The case of proprietary programs linking to GPL'd libraries has been discussed thoroughly. However the inverse case - a GPL'd program is linking to a proprietary library - is rarely mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my question is: &lt;strong&gt;Can I use a proprietary library in my own GPL'd program (which I intend to distribute) without violating the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; I'm assuming the library is an integral part of the GPL'd program and the library's (non-free) license allows me to link it into the program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3556" LastEditorUserId="3556" LastEditDate="2015-12-19T14:57:55.533" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T19:23:11.063" Title="Can I use a proprietary library in my GPL'd program?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|proprietary-code|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2219" CreationDate="2015-12-19T16:45:24.037" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to modify GPL-covered programs and link them with the portability libraries from Money Guzzler Inc. I cannot distribute the source code for these libraries, so any user who wanted to change these versions would have to obtain those libraries separately. Why doesn't the GPL permit this? (#MoneyGuzzlerInc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two reasons for this. First, a general one. If we permitted company A to make a proprietary file, and company B to distribute GPL-covered software linked with that file, the effect would be to make a hole in the GPL big enough to drive a truck through. This would be carte blanche for withholding the source code for all sorts of modifications and extensions to GPL-covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving all users access to the source code is one of our main goals, so this consequence is definitely something we want to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More concretely, the versions of the programs linked with the Money Guzzler libraries would not really be free software as we understand the term—they would not come with full source code that enables users to change and recompile the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although you can &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; your combination of GPL program and proprietary license, you cannot &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;distribute&amp;quot; the GPL program without the proprietary library, unless that proprietary library is a &amp;quot;system library&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL itself defines a &amp;quot;system library&amp;quot; in words that are somewhat incomprehensible to a non-lawyer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it means libraries that the user will be able to obtain independently without a &amp;quot;vendor lockin&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2203/why-is-the-definition-of-system-libraries-in-gplv3-phrased-the-way-it-is&quot;&gt;this question and its answers&lt;/a&gt; about System Libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but just a lay person's opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2015-12-19T20:44:58.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2215" CreationDate="2015-12-20T12:42:50.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most luxorious solution would be to allow authors to pick their license terms themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an author formats a piece of their post as code,  the system prompts them for which license(s) to put it under. Users should also be able to set a default in their preferences, but still override it on a post-by-post basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-12-20T12:42:50.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2244" CreationDate="2015-12-21T11:35:25.083" Score="10" ViewCount="2757" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use the GPLv3 for my applications and the LGPLv3 for my libraries. In a similar fashion I'd like to use them for my open-source hardware projects (GPL for schematic and PCBs, LGPL for schematic symbols and PCB modules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware#Licenses&quot;&gt;Open-source hardware wikpedia page&lt;/a&gt; mentions that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rather than creating a new license, some open-source hardware projects&#xA;  simply use existing, free and open-source software licenses. These&#xA;  licenses may not accord well with patent law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me worried and I'm quite lost in the legal talk. I don't necessarily insist to the (L)GPL for open-source hardware if it's not suitable but I do insist to a share-alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the (L)GPL suitable for open-source hardware? If not, please suggest viable share-alike alternative licenses and possibly highlight their pros/cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3568" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T07:25:38.017" Title="Using the (L)GPL as an open-source hardware license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-21T16:36:21.213" Score="12" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my OSS project, is it a good idea to release the &quot;brand assets&quot; under a CC license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make it easy for people to use the logo for blogs/articles talking about the product and derivatives for forks of the project, but I also want to keep &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; restriction on it so it doesn't look like the official project is endorsing another branch/unofficial forum/paid service/etc. is clearly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; associated with the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as trademark with usage guidelines would be the best, but it's unrealistic to trademark a name for a project that I cannot guarantee success. I could, in theory, keep the copyright and license it under another license (any recommendations?) that allows the uses specified above. Is this a good idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I technically did derive the logo from a CC0 public domain image, but it has very little resemblance (it's a common icon, but the trademark &quot;identity&quot; is in the exact colors and shapes). I changed the shape, orientation, colors, and outlines; I think it's unique enough for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3548" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T15:48:42.713" Title="How should I license my project's logo?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2210" CreationDate="2015-12-21T21:06:22.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSI doesn't say anything because the OSI is not trying to persuade the world that only Free/Libre software is ethical. It's merely trying to standardize the definitions and advocate for its advantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2015-12-21T21:06:22.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-12-22T02:26:32.537" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is probably off-topic because it's really not about copyright, let alone open source. However, the reason why deserves an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, a quick primer: copyright and trademarks are different types of IP. Copyright protects creative works, and trademarks protect brand identities. Logos, being simple and recognisable, can sometimes be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so simple that they cannot be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;, but this has no bearing on whether it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jathomaslaw.com/what-is-not-trademarkable/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademarkable&lt;/a&gt;, which is determined by other facts - like whether it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generic term&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to trademark your logo, it's best that you do this with a trademark lawyer, and possibly create a trademark usage policy, if you want others to use your trademarks. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/440/175&quot;&gt;OSI for example lets other people use their logos if they meet their usage guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. If you read &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that document&lt;/a&gt; though, it would seem much more restrictive than typical open source licenses. This is because copyright is different to trademarks. A &quot;free/open trademark license&quot; is an oxymoron, since trademarks intend to protect identity, and not enforcing trademarks will often lead to them being declared invalid. It's this &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inc.com/guides/201101/how-to-protect-your-trademark-from-infringement.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use it or lose it&lt;/a&gt;&quot; property that leads to open source projects like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla to restrictively protect their trademarks&lt;/a&gt;, leading to products like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project#Iceweasel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iceweasel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical trademark licenses are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inta.org/TrademarkBasics/FactSheets/Pages/TrademarkLicensing.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite specific&lt;/a&gt;; they usually specify a licensee and the types of activities allowed under the license. For example, LEGO licenses Star Wars trademarks from Lucasfilm in order to sell specific product lines meeting Lucasfilm's requirements (and nothing else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for now, I don't feel there's any need to do anything about your trademarks. You only need to take specific action if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are large and engage in a lot of commercial activity, and therefore need to protect your brand identity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have specific licensees in mind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are an organisation like OSI or GNU, who would like their logos used by many third parties&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, if you use an open (copyright) license for your logo, it lets other people freely derive the logo, as long as it doesn't end up too similar to your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T02:26:32.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-22T06:27:30.427" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been playing around with my own router and found DD-WRT as an open source firmware alternative for this kind of device but I can't find something equivalent for modems. Can you recommend something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3573" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T14:13:33.917" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T14:13:33.917" Title="Are there any open source firmware for Internet modems?" Tags="|hardware|firmware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2015-12-22T14:15:51.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2229" CreationDate="2015-12-22T11:52:03.847" Score="4" ViewCount="612" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two libraries under &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;, that do the same thing, each with some pros and cons. I'd like to merge them, effectively reworking the public API, but keeping the underlying logic (code). The resulting library should be part of my framework that is currently licensed under &lt;code&gt;apache 2.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I license the resulting library under apache 2.0 or do I have to keep it MIT?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any problem with rebranding it as new product?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where should I keep the reference to original code? AUTHORS file in repository? Does it have to be somehow imprinted in the compiled assembly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3360" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-22T14:15:03.403" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T14:15:03.403" Title="Merge, rebrand, relicense projects" Tags="|relicensing|mit|attribution|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2228" CreationDate="2015-12-22T13:09:54.097" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I license the resulting library under apache 2.0 or do I have to keep it MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; is a permissive license which allows relicensing under other license terms as long as the original MIT copyright message is retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any problem with rebranding it as new product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the MIT license puts no further conditions besides the copyright message. Many (but not necessary all) open source products prefer to rebrand a fork as a new product to avoid confusion, as long as it doesn't actively try to hide its roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where should I keep the reference to original code? AUTHORS file in repository? Does it have to be somehow imprinted in the compiled assembly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is intentionally left vague in most software licenses to make sure it is applicable to a wide range of possible software products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common practice is to put any 3rd party copyright notices wherever you put your own. When you just have a COPYRIGHT or LICENSE text file for your own license terms, you would append any 3rd party licenses below it. If you have an elaborate credits dialog or about screen (unlikely in case of a library), you would also use it to credit the 3rd party software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-12-22T13:09:54.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1804" CreationDate="2015-12-23T01:37:54.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A healthy, active project might suffer if a central figure steps down (or leaves for whatever reason), but other collabotarors should be able to carry on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this has happened. Multiple times. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://maxima.sourceforge.net&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;maxima&lt;/a&gt; lost it's lead developer and champion a while back, but carries on. &lt;a href=&quot;https://crawl.develz.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup&lt;/a&gt; was abandoned by the original developers, and taken over by the current team.If you rummage around the various &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU projects&lt;/a&gt; (only picked because there are many, long lived projects under that umbrella) you will see that lead developers have changed, often multiple times. Not always peacefully, mind you. They even ask for interested parties to take over maintainership of orphaned packages. &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;git&lt;/a&gt;'s development was started by Linus Torvalds, who passed handling of the project to Junio Hamano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T01:37:54.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1950" CreationDate="2015-12-23T02:05:56.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Content should be adapted for use in software. Not vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What qualifies as an adaptation of code under a Creative Commons license&quot; is a hard question to answer, because Creative Commons licenses were not designed for code and are often &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1717/3016&quot;&gt;discouraged&lt;/a&gt; for that purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That may apply to the new CC licenses as well. According to Creative Commons, compatibility of CC-BY 4.0 / CC-BY-SA 4.0 with GPL 3.0 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3#Considerations_for_adapters_applying_the_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not for general use&lt;/a&gt;, but rather &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;designed to help solve a specific problem for those working in niche areas where content is adapted and melded with code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some possible examples that come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dialogue and cinema scenes in a video game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documentation that's integrated into an application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's different from applying a CC license to code itself, which isn't really the intended use of that license. Of course some people might do it anyway...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, it's a hard question. But if I had to answer, I'd probably agree with what Trevor Clarke said -- any modification, or combination with another work, qualifies as an adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-23T02:05:56.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2252" CreationDate="2015-12-24T18:30:56.177" Score="18" ViewCount="3598" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've decided to license some code I have yet to release under the GPL v3. However, OpenSSL is used quite a bit in the software and I know that the two licenses are explicitly cited as being incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to stay with my decision to go GPL but without having to refactor years of work to use something like GNU TLS instead. Doing some searching, I've found that people have combined openSSL into GPL works while adding an &quot;openSSL exception&quot;. Deluge is one such example. Excerpt from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/deluge-torrent/deluge/blob/develop/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deluge License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deluge is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 with&#xA;  the addition of the following special exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders give&#xA;  permission to link the code of portions of this program with the&#xA;  OpenSSL library. You must obey the GNU General Public License in all&#xA;  respects for all of the code used other than OpenSSL. If you modify&#xA;  file(s) with this exception, you may extend this exception to your&#xA;  version of the file(s), but you are not obligated to do so. If you do&#xA;  not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&#xA;  If you delete this exception statement from all source files in the&#xA;  program, then also delete it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are are the ramifications of this exception? Does it actually &quot;work&quot;? If the two licenses are deemed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OpenSSL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;incompatible&lt;/a&gt;, can such an exception really make them compatible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More references to this practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://curl.haxx.se/legal/licmix.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://curl.haxx.se/legal/licmix.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(May be used for SSL/TLS support) Uses an Original BSD-style license&#xA;          with an announcement clause that makes it &quot;incompatible&quot; with GPL. You&#xA;          are not allowed to ship binaries that link with OpenSSL that includes&#xA;          GPL code (unless that specific GPL code includes an exception for&#xA;          OpenSSL - a habit that is growing more and more common). If OpenSSL's&#xA;          licensing is a problem for you, consider using another TLS library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:FAQ?rd=Licensing/FAQ#What.27s_the_deal_with_the_OpenSSL_license.3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fedora Project FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These two clauses are restrictions that aren't present in the GPL and&#xA;  therefore are incompatible with the portion of the GPL that says &quot;You&#xA;  may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of&#xA;  the rights granted herein.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, we consider that the OpenSSL library is a system library, as&#xA;  defined by the GPL, on Fedora and therefore we are allowed to ship GPL&#xA;  software that links to the OpenSSL library. Treatment of OpenSSL as a&#xA;  system library does not extend to other operating systems or even some&#xA;  other Linux distributions, however, so upstreams that do this should&#xA;  definitely be encouraged to add an exception to their GPL licensed&#xA;  code that allows linking to OpenSSL. The Free Software Foundation has&#xA;  a FAQ entry on how to write such an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorDisplayName="user3570" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T13:16:35.730" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T14:46:43.493" Title="GPL V3 with OpenSSL Exception" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2236" CreationDate="2015-10-31T14:34:22.290" Score="12" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some source code for which I am the copyright holder. I want to release it under the GPL, but when it was closed source, I copied a bunch of a stuff from Wikipedia for a couple of classes and used it strictly for comments. This was just a matter of convenience, I have classes that allow you to manipulate HTTP headers and didn't feel like writing out explanations for each header when it was right there in front of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/// &amp;lt;summary&amp;gt;&#xA;/// CGI header field specifying the status of the HTTP response. Normal HTTP&#xA;/// responses use a separate &quot;Status-Line&quot; instead, defined by RFC 7230.&#xA;/// Example: Status: 200 OK&#xA;/// &amp;lt;/summary&amp;gt;&#xA;const std::string&amp;amp; Status(void);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the lines proceeded by a &lt;code&gt;///&lt;/code&gt; are the comments. When the source code is compiled, these comments are not included in the final produced product, so I never considered it an issue as closed source software. However, I'd now be publishing all of this, comments intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comments originate from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields&quot;&gt;this wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, where the footer includes a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License&quot;&gt;this license&lt;/a&gt;, which is the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to search manually for anything about dual-licensing or licensing the comments separately from the code itself, but my searches have yielded nothing. Is it possible to fulfill the creative commons license by licensing the comments, aka &quot;documentation&quot;, separately from the source code implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-12-26T07:14:02.890" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T14:12:56.037" Title="Can I use GPL v3 for source code and CC BY-SA v3 for comments?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2234" CreationDate="2015-11-01T16:15:58.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2234/can-i-use-gpl-v3-for-source-code-and-cc-by-sa-v3-for-comments/2236#2236&quot;&gt;sampablokuper&lt;/a&gt;'s answer is the correct answer. Instead of deleting this answer, I've modified it and left it to retain some complimentary information about CC-BY-SA 4.0 to GPL coversion, as described in the aforementioned answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 4.0 specifies that the work can be combined into a GPL 3 work and then the combined work can remain exclusively under the GPL. This doesn't work the other way around (one way compatibility). Further, if you actually use this, you cannot specify in your license that it is GPL 3 &quot;or any later version&quot;, because in this mixed mode the CC-BY-SA 4.0 exclusively lists GPL 3 as being compatible, not &quot;any later version&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you do combine CC-BY-SA 4.0 material into a GPL v3 work, you are encouraged to specify that Creative Commons is the proxy by which one can determine if the software can be taken under &quot;any later version&quot; of the GPL, as described in section 14 of the GNU GPL v3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FSF.org - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/creative-commons-by-sa-4-0-declared-one-way-compatible-with-gnu-gpl-version-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 declared one-way compatible&#xA;with GNU GPL version 3&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CreativeCommons.org - &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/tag/gpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 now    one-way compatible with&#xA;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CreativeCommons.org - &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0/Compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&#xA;     4.0 - Compatibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user3570" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T14:12:56.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2234" CreationDate="2015-12-25T03:12:02.837" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your work incorporating the Wikipedia material appears to be an &quot;Adaptation&quot; as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt; 1.a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Adaptation&quot; means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and&#xA;  other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation,&#xA;  derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a&#xA;  literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes&#xA;  cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be&#xA;  recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably&#xA;  derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a&#xA;  Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of&#xA;  this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical&#xA;  work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in&#xA;  timed-relation with a moving image (&quot;synching&quot;) will be considered an&#xA;  Adaptation for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now see 4.b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the&#xA;  terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with&#xA;  the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons&#xA;  jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that&#xA;  contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g.,&#xA;  Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible&#xA;  License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.b(ii) clearly gives you the right to relicense the work as CC-BY-SA 4.0 which in turn, I believe, allows you to relicense the work as GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.b(iv), at least on my interpretation, allows you to relicense the work directly as GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, you appear to have a valid route to license the resulting combined work as GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/138/unor&quot;&gt;@unor&lt;/a&gt;'s answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2213/3451&quot;&gt;FOS.SE&lt;/a&gt;, which reaches a similar conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3451" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2015-12-25T20:09:26.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2015-12-26T15:48:42.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no lawyer, and don't even play one on TV. That said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license on the logo as an image is one thing (e.g., do you allow others to take it and modify it for some other uses), and the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of said logo as a symbol for your project are two different things in my (ignorant) opinion. Clarify what you want in both lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check similar cases, e.g the logos of GNU, Red Hat, Apache, Linux or other high-visibility projects. That should give a fair idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T15:48:42.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2181" CreationDate="2015-12-26T22:13:56.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever runs &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; Linux is totally independent of its GPLv2 license. Many, many closed sites run under Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you write, that only uses Linux' public interface, is yours to license (or not) as you wish. But presumably your software doesn't run directly over the bare kernel, you have to consider the licenses of all the pieces involved. Simplest is to build on some form of prepackaged distribution by a reputable group, where you can rely on them having done whatever diligence is warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remote use of GPLed programs is allowed without distributing source to users, even if said programs are modified by you from other GPL programs, as you are explicitly allowed to make derivatives for your own use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also look for the Affero GPL, which explicitly covers the &quot;use over the 'net&quot; case. A bit more detail on what is or not allowed under different licenses can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;http://tldrlegal.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;tldrlegal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T22:13:56.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2015-12-26T22:27:21.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but then you have to abide by the GPL for the composite. I.e., give full source to whoever gets binaries, and place no restrictions on further binary/source distribution by the recipient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the conditions GPL imposes, also read the supporting/explanation documents from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-12-26T22:27:21.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2015-12-27T16:22:59.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not allowed to distribute software under terms which are more permissive than those under which you received them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone licenses a software &quot;for non-commercial use only&quot; to you, you can not remove that restriction when redistributing parts of it. When the original license allows it (it's not a share-alike license like the GPL), you can add additional restrictions to your modifications, but you can not remove restrictions placed on the original code which is incorporated in your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, this would be a huge licensing loophole. You have some restriction in your license I don't like? Then I just form a shell company, have that company change one line of code, and then license it to my real company under new terms with that restriction removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-12-27T16:28:06.077" LastActivityDate="2015-12-27T16:28:06.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2015-12-28T19:04:14.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ended up choosing the GPL / LGPL for hardware, too. I asked this question on some other sites and the following answer was spot on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I spent quite a bit of time looking into this, and there is not really&#xA;  a useful solution. For some general background try&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-hardware-and-law1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/open-source-hardware-and-law1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, GPL (and all other software licenses) rely on software&#xA;  being something that can be subject to copyright. In general hardware&#xA;  can not be copyrighted, because copyright is only granted to creative&#xA;  or artistic works, but with some weird exceptions like software, IC&#xA;  masks, yacht designs (!). &quot;Useful articles or utility works&quot; are not&#xA;  generally subject to copyright, but some powerful industrial lobbies&#xA;  got some concessions, as otherwise a software &quot;work&quot; would not be&#xA;  protected under IP laws, although specific software algorithms can be&#xA;  patented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So anyhoo, software is an oddity in copyright laws, but &quot;copyleft&quot;&#xA;  licenses can turn copyright law to its advantage. There is no such&#xA;  ability with hardware. The only way to protect a hardware design is to&#xA;  embody a patentable idea that the design relies on. &quot;Data files&quot; for&#xA;  engineering use are not software, and are not &quot;creative&quot; (in terms of&#xA;  the law), so it is unlikely they have any form of protection. That&#xA;  doesn't stop many companies attempting to claim copyright on data, the&#xA;  threat of legal action even if unfounded in law is often enough to&#xA;  scare people off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Legally, you can use copyright to protect your drawings, but you can't&#xA;  protect the actual circuit, nor the PCB layout, and therefore you&#xA;  can't insist on share-alike clauses to be followed. What we are left&#xA;  with is a &quot;social contract&quot;, i.e. a statement that a design is shared&#xA;  for general use but please be nice and share your modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are some OSHW specific licenses, such as CERN, OSHWA, OHANDA,&#xA;  these have the same drawback as GPL, copyright gives little protection&#xA;  to hardware designs. But they can be a nice way to stamp your project&#xA;  as being in the OSHW spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;tldr; use GPL or LGPL, CC-BY-SA, MIT, etc as you like, as a statement&#xA;  of intent, but realise they have little legal teeth. Other OSHW&#xA;  oriented licenses are equally ineffective to protect or control the&#xA;  use of electronic or hardware designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above answer was posted to &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.kicad.info/t/using-the-l-gpl-as-an-open-source-hardware-license/1925/2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://forum.kicad.info/t/using-the-l-gpl-as-an-open-source-hardware-license/1925/2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other useful articles on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inmojo.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSHW License Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://owiowi.net/liscense-guide-en/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Hardware License Guide v0.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Hardware Licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3568" LastActivityDate="2015-12-28T19:04:14.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-29T21:11:45.643" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;For games like minecraft it is released under &quot;LGPL 2.1 or later&quot;, does this mean that if you record Minecraft the video must also be released under the LGPL 2.1 or later? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a separate license needed or are you allowed to record and publish any game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2015-12-30T23:38:13.313" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T23:38:13.313" Title="Are YouTubers Allowed to Record any Game" Tags="|derivative-works|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-01-02T03:15:57.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2245" CreationDate="2015-12-30T00:52:21.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recording footage of gameplay and releasing it is quite a grey area. For example, Nintendo used YouTube's copyright enforcement system to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/nintendo-mass-claims-revenue-from-youtube-lets-play-videos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;claim advertisement revenue from people who recorded videos of their games&lt;/a&gt; and Sega used &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tssznews.com/2012/11/27/sega-launches-shining-force-dmca-campaign-on-youtube/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DMCA takedown notices to remove such videos completely&lt;/a&gt;. But these only went through YouTube's internal systems of handling copyright violation complaints. I don't know if these were ever challenged in a court of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2015-12-30T01:00:44.763" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T01:00:44.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2251" CreationDate="2015-12-30T21:00:01.983" Score="6" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I submitted a manuscript on a new R-package I have developed. The journal's decision was &quot;Revise and Resubmit&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor and 2 reviewers all had very helpful comments. However, I'm not sure exactly how to interpret a comment that all 3 of them had. My package uses the open source C++ Eigen library for matrix manipulations, for which I mention in both the package and the manuscript. They asked justification for &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; I used the Eigen library, and whether it was completely necessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is that it is not; R comes with matrix tools. However, using these tools for my project at the C++ level is not immediately straightforward; there are ways it can be done but given the work I have done so far, it would be &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of work for me to do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, the Eigen library uses the MPL2 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: are there are major ramifications for including the Eigen library in my open source code? If the reviewers are asking why I used Eigen &lt;em&gt;because there are huge consequences for doing so&lt;/em&gt;, then I could rewrite my work without it, although I &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; don't want to. On the other hand, if they are merely asking because why I did because it's not clear, the answer is simple: because it was easier for me to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have declared the license on my work as MPL2 as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3637" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T01:49:05.683" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T01:49:05.683" Title="Ramifications for including open source code in academic research" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2015-12-30T21:06:07.570" Score="6" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/29/google-confirms-next-android-version-wont-use-oracles-proprietary-java-apis/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; said that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“As an open-source platform, Android is built upon the collaboration of the open-source community,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “In our upcoming release of Android, we plan to move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based approach, creating a common code base for developers to build apps and services. Google has long worked with and contributed to the OpenJDK community, and we look forward to making even more contributions to the OpenJDK project in the future.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they &lt;a href=&quot;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/libcore.git/+/51b1b6997fd3f980076b8081f7f1165ccc2a4008&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;imported OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; files as a part of the project. OpenJDK is under a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What parts of android will not have to be under the GPL? What about android apps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3638" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2015-12-30T21:18:30.863" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T21:18:30.863" Title="What part of Android will now have to be under the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|exceptions|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2248" CreationDate="2015-12-30T21:17:31.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, but OpenJDK is not under the GPL. It is under the GPL &lt;em&gt;with the Classpath Exception&lt;/em&gt;. You can read more about the class path exception &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/515/what-is-a-class-path-exception&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the bulk of the exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that you are allowed to call methods and perform calls to the code covered by the GPL. But your own code will not be subject to the GPL, which is a near elimination of the 'viral copyleft' clause that the GPL is known for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, Android code is not subject to the GPL. Android Apps are also free to independently license their own programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2015-12-30T21:17:31.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2247" CreationDate="2015-12-31T00:36:42.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt the reviewers are at all concerned about the (eventual, if it ever gets shared) license of your code. They might be asking (as you somehow answer) &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you use a C++ matrix library as part of an R package, given that R has matrix manipulation built-in. Answer that question, which I understand is what they are asking. Don't try to second-guess them. If in any doubt, answer the question as given; and append a note asking for clarification, in case you believe there is something you might have misunderstood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T00:36:42.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2247" CreationDate="2015-12-31T13:47:02.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use a 3rd party library even though the standard library provides the same functionality, you are adding an unnecessary dependency to your package. Any additional dependencies are problematic because they create maintenance overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will either need to include the library as static files in your package, which means that future updates to the dependency must be applied manually. Or you will have to link it dynamically, which means that anyone building your package must also acquire the dependencies on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By keeping 3rd party dependencies to a minimum and only depending on the standard library you keep your package self-contained and easier to use and maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2015-12-31T13:47:02.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2233" CreationDate="2015-12-31T16:17:39.907" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is possible, and Deluge's approach appears to be roughly in line with the FSF's recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ has this to say on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exceptions for GPL-incompatible libraries&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holders for the program can legally release their software under these terms. If you wrote the whole program yourself, then assuming your employer or school does not claim the copyright, you are the copyright holder—so you can authorize the exception. But if you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them. You have to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To think of it another way, you license your software under a license whose terms are &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; identical to the GPL. The license is exactly like the GPL in all respects except that its copyleft provisions do not apply for the specific purpose of linking to some particular library. In essence, you sidestep the GPL compatibility problem by &lt;em&gt;not licensing your own work under the (vallina) GPL!&lt;/em&gt; You license your work under the &amp;quot;almost-GPL&amp;quot; which has additional permissions. The GPLv3 has a mechanism in section 7 exactly for this purpose, and the FSF does not appear to object to authors adding exceptions to the GPLv2, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly, adding exceptions works because you are the copyright holder, and therefore you may license your work however you please. Narrowly, this works because the FSF (and GPLv3 license text) permits you to add &lt;em&gt;additional permissions&lt;/em&gt; to the GPL's license terms when you release your work. Within the FAQ item linked above, the FSF has published &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a guide explaining exactly how to implement exceptions in your GPL license text&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the following addendum is the FSF's suggested wording to add a linking exception to the GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with [name of library] (or a modified version of that library), containing parts covered by the terms of [name of library's license], the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work. {Corresponding Source for a non-source form of such a combination shall include the source code for the parts of [name of library] used as well as that of the covered work.}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The bracket text should be removed for libraries whose source code cannot be distributed alongside your GPL-licensed work, e.g., because it is not publicly available.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that you can only add exceptions to work for which you have copyright control. If you want to include a third-party GPL-licensed library in your project, you cannot make that library  adopt the exceptions present in your project. (Only the author of the third-party GPL-licensed library can do that.) This is an issue any time you (1) include someone else's third-party code in your project (2) in a way that creates a combined work with that third-party code, and (3) the license of that third-party code does not permit you to link to the library you want to make an exception for (e.g. OpenSSL). So, for example, this not a problem if the third-party code is under a permissive license like MIT, because the MIT license does not object to having its material combined with non-free or GPL-incompatible libraries. It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an issue for third-party GPL-licensed code, because that license &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; object to being combined with GPL-incompatible code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that any downstream recipient may remove exceptions for their own derivative of your work (but in this case, that seems unlikely to happen, since it would massively diminish the usefulness of their derivative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T14:46:43.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2255" CreationDate="2015-12-31T18:59:13.270" Score="95" ViewCount="7994" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like a specific open source project and would like to contribute to it. Unfortunately &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/1620671/philipp&quot;&gt;I don't know anything about programming&lt;/a&gt;. What are meaningful ways in which a non-programmer can contribute in a meaningful way to an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T11:47:16.480" Title="How to contribute to Open Source as a non-programmer?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2016-03-10T01:35:33.340" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2015-12-31T19:24:30.863" Score="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are lots of things to do around open source projects which do not require any programming knowledge at all. Among them are things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User Documentation&lt;/strong&gt;: Programmers love writing code but hate writing documentation. And if we like to write documentation it's mostly the technical documentation for other developers. As a result, many open source projects have a user documentation which is hard to understand for non-technical users, full of gaps and in many places out of date. As an experienced user you can help to keep the documentation useful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User Support&lt;/strong&gt;: Programmers are already very busy programming, so they are glad about people who keep the newbies off their back by answering their questions. This goes hand-in-hand with user documentation, because by listening to the user's problems you learn where the documentation needs to be improved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Artwork&lt;/strong&gt;: Do you have artistic talent? Then you could work on the art assets of the project like icons or logos. Not just the software itself but also its website and promotional material can certainly benefit from your skills.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internationalization&lt;/strong&gt;: Are you fluent in a different (non-programming) language than the primary language the developers communicate in? Then you can help with translating the software and its documentation into that language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Making &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; bug reports&lt;/strong&gt;: We can only fix issues we are aware of. Unfortunately many bug reports we receive from users are of very poor quality. To fix a bug we must know exactly what steps must be taken to reliably cause the bug to happen. When you take the time to research a bug, isolate the exact conditions which make it appear and provide us with exact instructions, you can save us a lot of time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T00:36:16.347" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T00:36:16.347" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-01T00:11:30.597" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to check out e.g. Fedora's page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join&quot;&gt;how and for what&lt;/a&gt; to join. You'll see plenty of tasks for non-programmers. Some of the highly regarded members of the Fedora community don't do any programming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fedora looks for people interested in content writing (tutorials, write articles for their magazine, documentation in general), design (artwork, flyers, icons), development (programming, bug fixing, package maintenance), people contact (give talks, help recruiting new members, mentoring), translators (help with i10n in general), web development and administration (develop and keep the web presence of the project running). Those are just some of the tasks listed, and there are clearly other specialized rôles that are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll probably find similar calls elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclosure:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm a long time Red Hat and then Fedora user, currently an Ambassador for Chile, part of the &quot;people contact&quot; crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T11:47:16.480" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T11:47:16.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2219" CreationDate="2016-01-01T14:32:11.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own the whole code of the GPL program (it is your choice to offer it under the terms of GPL), you can add the licensing exception (&quot;as an exception, it is allowed to call the proprietary library X&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you cannot add such exception if you are just adapting or extending some existing GPL program you do not own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T14:32:11.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2016-01-01T14:47:59.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This means you give the software for your client under the terms of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client must receive the full source code. Also, if the client would later attempt to redistribute the program, then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client must also redistribute it with the source code,&#xA;including any changes they made in the version they distribute. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot stop the client from doing this, if you do not want. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if the client just uses the program internally and does not distribute, GPL should not require from them to share any source code or binaries on demand.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be possible to raise some doubts if the web application is accessed by the customers outside the company. While it the past it was common to assume that GPL software can be used by the end customers in places like vending machines, and this is still &quot;internal use&quot;, there are now different opinions on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T14:47:59.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-01T17:15:44.853" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;An addition to @Philipp's answer is developing User Interfaces (UI's).  A lot of programmers are absolutely terrible at designing good user interfaces, and know it.  If you are good at such things, many would likely be delighted to have a designer to plan their UI's so they just have to implement them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3666" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T17:15:44.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2262" CreationDate="2016-01-01T17:20:34.190" Score="9" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project I would like to release as an open source project in the future. In my work I'm using a number of third party libraries, either from open source projects or released to the public domain. SQLite, Log4Net, OpenJPEG and OpenSSL are four typical examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I freely distribute the required libraries with my project as long as I include the related licensing documents and how does it influence my own licensing options? I would like to use a BSD licensing model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3665" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T17:36:24.913" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T21:52:28.353" Title="How to deal with third party libraries?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-01T17:31:41.553" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the greatest assets are people experienced in web design/development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that this can be incredibly underestimated: websites are the platform for many projects to advertise. But they are also relatively underused. While some projects such as Github Pages make the job easier, it can be very hard to have a site that is both unique and attractive, while also serving its primary goal: to advertise the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many websites need a great deal of effort, and it's an effort that many developers don't want to put, or don't have the time to put. For prospecting end users of a project that may take the project themselves and use it, the website is the place where a list of features can be culminated with. No developer will look at the code base just to figure out what a project does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Website Builders&quot; such as Google Pages, Github Pages, or Wix offer templates, which can be difficult to extend with designs of your own, or with other functionality. Projects such as Django can also be difficult: it may involve learning another programming language, or familiarizing yourself with another code base, which can be very time-consuming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also arguably a project within the project. But the asset of a proper website will assist you, and others in having a clean, central place to discuss ideas, present yourselves, and to collaborate. They can host your documentation, community resources, contributor resources and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some attractive sites for various projects (you'll see the difference):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.djangoproject.com&quot;&gt;Django&lt;/a&gt; (Imagine having to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/django/django&quot;&gt;codebase&lt;/a&gt; instead!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/&quot;&gt;Requests&lt;/a&gt; (Imagine having to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests&quot;&gt;codebase&lt;/a&gt; instead!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites may arguably be better for more-used projects, but the benefits of a site can be applied for any project, big or small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-01T17:42:52.180" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T17:42:52.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2260" CreationDate="2016-01-01T21:52:28.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to make sure that &lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt; to the library doesn't introduce incompatibilities/extra restrictions. I.e., according to the FSF, just arranging for the program to link against a GPLed library forces the whole to be distributed under GPL (there isn't consensus, nor binding legal precedents). Check he licences &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt;, ask e.g. here for detailed analysis, and possibly retain a lawyer to look into the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-01T21:52:28.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2016-01-02T01:52:55.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is work for hire, i.e., you are developing the software on behalf of your client. This (in my opinion as a developer on foot, most emphatically not as someone versed in the relevant law) would legally count as work done in-house. If this is so, GPL specifically states that they (and you in their name) can use the software for in-house purposes as they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever happens, do make sure the client is on board with it. I.e., if it is as I stated, they have to be clear that if they ever distribute said program to third parties, they will have to do so under GPL, with all what that entails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T01:52:55.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-02T12:59:00.510" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's one thing that I hadn't seen proposed yet: &lt;strong&gt;ideas&lt;/strong&gt;. You might actually have some good ideas that can be discussed on the project's mailing list and end up getting implemented - the more thought over, the better. By not being a developer you're more likely to be the &quot;regular user&quot; kind of man and you can use it to your advantage by proposing things that you would like to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another activity that comes to my head is &lt;strong&gt;advertising&lt;/strong&gt;. Write a blog article and post it to Slashdot and Hackernews. Find related StackOverflow questions and make people aware of the tool if it's programming related (or do the equivalent thing if it's not). Write a Wikipedia article. All of those can help people find the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3686" LastEditorUserId="3686" LastEditDate="2016-01-02T22:32:05.597" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T22:32:05.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2016-01-02T15:39:51.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't prevent it while remaining open-source.&#xA;In general this can be seen as beneficial - it means popular projects can be maintained when the original authors are no longer active &lt;em&gt;(loose interest, get hit by a buss... etc)&lt;/em&gt; - or if its poorly maintained, others can take over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However re-releasing with insubstantial modifications to take users away from the original authors is a real concern too.&#xA;Our project experienced this, here are some suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strong branding&lt;br&gt;(logo, documentation that refers to the project by name)&lt;br&gt;They can re-brand of course, but you retain your trademark.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Periodic releases&lt;br&gt;This depends on your own pace of development and on how involved your software is - of course don't do releases &lt;em&gt;for the sake of it&lt;/em&gt;. However rolling all improvements into a release periodically means your version will be the &lt;em&gt;best&lt;/em&gt; one, and others who are releasing your work will have to play catch-up, with some delay before theirs is up to date &lt;em&gt;(depending on how dedicated they are...)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include Value Added Data/Assets &lt;em&gt;(if appropriate)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;Again this depends a lot on the kind of project, but including assets (documentation, tutorials, sample data...) adds value to your distribution, giving users a reason to choose your version over others - where someone else isn't allowed to simply re-purpose your version without removing these assets.&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;(this has some potential to be mis-used too since it moves in the direction of devaluing the all open-version, so wary of recommending this. The application should remain usable without the added content at least)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make public statements that their version is a re-release without any real improvements, not helping original developers continue with further work, ideally so on-line searches for their name links to such statements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, its understandable that a small application on an app-store may be difficult to make users &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; they're using the version released by the original author &lt;em&gt;(depends on how invested they are in the application)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160" LastEditorUserId="160" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T08:17:56.803" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T08:17:56.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2276" CreationDate="2016-01-02T20:17:53.557" Score="0" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there was a software license that has the same requirements as the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 since they do not recommend its use for software.&#xA;I looked on choosealicense.com but it seems no license fit these requirements :&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lGJCS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lGJCS.png&quot; alt=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-commons-attribution-noncommercial-sharealike-4.0-international-(cc-by-nc-sa-4.0)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some people do not consider this as open-source, but I personally consider that open-source work should not be use to generate profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT : I was almost sure I'd have these reactions (by lookings at other same-genre-topics), but please, I'd like us to talk about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;licenses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, not discuss forever about your personal opinions of what is open-source and what it should be used for. This, for me, is open-source, if you don't consider this as open-source just call it &quot;open-source-for-non-commercial-use&quot; and that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3693" LastEditorUserId="3693" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T18:44:28.293" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T18:47:31.147" Title="Source code distribution without commercial use" Tags="|license-recommendation|cc-by-nc-sa|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-02T20:54:09.447" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Testing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to be a programmer to test a program.    Use the program as it's designed to be used, but also use the program at the extremes or with &quot;corner cases&quot; to try to break it.   In either case keep detailed notes as you work so when it breaks or misbehaves you know how you got there and can make it happen again.    Conscientious programmers will love you ( I say this as a programmer) if you can give them a reproducible bug where there are clear steps on how to make it happen.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make your bug reports programmer-friendly: A clear description of the bug, a clear (hopefully simple) set of instructions on how to make it happen, a complete description of the environment (OS, versions, hardware, whatever) and any necessary files or data.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3694" LastActivityDate="2016-01-02T20:54:09.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2016-01-02T21:29:21.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ad supported&quot; is a business model which simply doesn't work for Open Source because anyone can just disable the ads and redistribute the work. If you want to monetize open source software, you need to look for a different approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more details, I recommend the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most of these business models do not fit well into the app-store ecosystem. What you can try, however, is a pay-what-you-want business model. Offer your app gratis, but ask people to pay you if they want to support your work. Either through in-app purchases (which don't actually do anything) or by offering differently priced versions which are all functionally identical. Pay-what-you-want does work on the consumer market, as can be seen with the very successful &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.humblebundle.com/&quot;&gt;Humble Bundle&lt;/a&gt; game bundles (although it is not &quot;purely&quot; pay-what-you-want with their &quot;pay more than average to also get X&quot; and &quot;pay more than $n.nn to also get Y&quot; gimmicks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should someone try to copy that model and funnel these donations to themselves while claiming that it supports the original developers (which it does not), you might want to consult a lawyer if you can press fraud charges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T11:56:46.310" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T11:56:46.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2266" CreationDate="2016-01-03T01:05:55.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Definition  and also the Free Software Foundation specifically insist that &lt;em&gt;no restrictions on use&lt;/em&gt; are allowed. The FSF even encourages making money off software, as long as the license terms are followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you describe is definitely against the definition of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T01:05:55.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2333" CreationDate="2016-01-03T10:51:36.623" Score="8" ViewCount="2551" Body="&lt;p&gt;For one of my products I plan to move from a commercial-only to a dual licensed license model: GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) or a &quot;non-free&quot; license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine two options for the license headers in the source files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;two sets&lt;/strong&gt; of source code files with different headers: the AGPL header for the open source version and a different header for the non-free version&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;only &lt;strong&gt;one set&lt;/strong&gt; of source code files, with &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; license blocks in the header&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advantage of option #1&lt;/strong&gt;: the actual license type is clearly and immediately visible in the source file. With the second option, end users (developers) and their managers or clients could be confused, because they are not able to see what license type they are actually using in their project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Advantage of option #2&lt;/strong&gt;: having only one version of the source with a dual-license header block might have advantages (for example if a patch is released, it can be applied to both versions as the code is 100% identical). If I choose this method, the actual licensing type could also be made clear to the end user by including a &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; file in the non-free release which contains license type and license holder data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I go for the first or the second option? Or is there even a de-facto standard way for source code headers in case of dual licensing models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: this is an example license header which I found in a source code file of the dual-licensed iText library. It contains the AGPL notice, followed the information about the commercial license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * This file is part of the iText (R) project.&#xA; * Copyright (c) 1998-2014 iText Group NV&#xA; * Authors: Bruno Lowagie, et al.&#xA; *&#xA; * This program is free software (...)&#xA; * You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License&#xA; * along with this program (...)&#xA; *&#xA; * You can be released from the requirements of the license by purchasing&#xA; * a commercial license. Buying such a license is mandatory as soon as you&#xA; * develop commercial activities involving the iText software without&#xA; * disclosing the source code of your own applications (...)&#xA; *&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3706" LastEditorUserId="3706" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T06:51:39.760" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T10:34:34.427" Title="License header for dual-licensed (AGPL or &quot;non-free&quot;) source code" Tags="|commercial|multi-licensing|license-notice|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2275" CreationDate="2016-01-03T14:48:49.383" Score="7" ViewCount="1184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in contributing to some open source projects in order to learn git and Python better. A lot of the projects I have looked at are fully mature, and the updates are pretty complex, requiring an understanding of large parts of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I find some low hanging fruit or moderately challenging problems to start on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3709" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T16:24:19.817" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T16:24:19.817" Title="Finding low hanging fruit on open source code" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2292" CreationDate="2016-01-03T15:19:42.760" Score="12" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jasny/bootstrap&quot;&gt;somewhat popular open source project&lt;/a&gt;. It's used by enough people to get a good number of bug reports and some pull requests per month, but not popular enough to have a development team or steady project managers or contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to a lack of time, I haven't had the time to properly maintain the project. Even though I currently have some spare time that I can spend on the project, the time that's needed to get the project up to quality looks beyond my reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I salvage this project, instead of it coming abandoned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm looking for a specific solution, preferably someone who has experienced the same issue and managed to overcome it. Answers like 'Trying asking for help' without more detail are not useful.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3710" LastEditorUserId="3710" LastEditDate="2016-01-03T20:41:52.340" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T01:09:50.437" Title="How can I prevent abandoning a project due to a lack of time?" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2273" CreationDate="2016-01-03T17:54:11.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are you interested in? Working on e.g. the Linux kernel if your interest lies in user interfaces won't cut it. Preferably something you use day to day, so you have a feel of the problems, and are in some way connected to the user community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the webpages for the packages of interest, take a peek at their developer lists and bugtracking systems. See if they advertise &quot;tasks for newbies&quot; or similar. Pick some simple tasks and work on them. Be careful to use the programming style used in the project, be it by looking at the code or check for official standards. Follow whatever style is in use for commit comments and other documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get lucky and find a mentor, but don't count on it. Mentoring is a lot of work, which might not pay off. Besides, computer geeks are a reclusive breed. You'll have to make yourself known by &lt;em&gt;judicious&lt;/em&gt; participation in the mailing lists or wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your proposed patches will just be silently ignored, you might get yelled at for others. A thick skin, and keeping cool when the flamewars start, is a must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could check the &quot;participate&quot; pages for your preferred Linux distribution (or BSD. or whatever system you like), like &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join&quot;&gt;Fedora's&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T17:54:11.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2266" CreationDate="2016-01-03T18:47:31.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can try SNCL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;CAN: Distribute, modify&#xA;CANNOT: Commercial use, hold liable, use trademark&#xA;MUST: Include copyright, include notice, include license and give credit. &lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/simple-non-code-license-(sncl)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Simple non code license (SNCL)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3719" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T18:47:31.147" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-03T20:10:15.457" Score="6" ViewCount="696" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example: If I make a python program that uses PyQt5, I have to distribute my software under GPLv3. So naturally I would include the source code of my program as &quot;corresponding source code&quot; together with building instructions (since building scripts are part of the source as by GPL's definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what else do I have to put in the package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use pyinstaller to freeze the program to an executable file and include the used librarys, the package now includes binaries of PyQt5 and Qt itself. Do I have to include the source code PLUS build instructions for PyQt5 and Qt? What if I don't know how to build it from source?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The resulting package also includes Python34.dll. Does that mean I have to include the source code of the reference implementation of Python plus instructions how to build it from source?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pyinstaller also puts &quot;msvcp100.dll&quot; and &quot;msvcr100.dll&quot; in the package, wich I can't provide sources for. I believe it's part of the &quot;Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package&quot;. Does this count as &quot;System Library&quot;, which I don't have to provide source code for under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pyinstaller also includes &quot;icudt53.dll&quot;, &quot;icuin53.dll&quot; and &quot;icuuc53.dll&quot;. Those libraries seem to be C/C++ libraries from ICU (International Components for Unicode). PyQt5's Qt build needs them. Are those &quot;System Librarys&quot;, which I can include in a package that is distributed under GPL without providing source code for that particular libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my interpretation of GPL is correct, it seems almost impossible not to violate GPL if you are not a very skilled programmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I now stumbled upon this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It states: &lt;em&gt;&quot;GPLv3 has adjusted the definition of System Library to include software that may not come directly with the operating system, but that all users of the software can reasonably be expected to have. For example, it now also includes the standard libraries of common programming languages such as Python and Ruby.&#xA;The new definition also makes it clear that you can combine GPLed software with GPL-incompatible System Libraries, such as OpenSolaris' C library, and distribute them both together. These changes will make life easier for free software distributors who want to provide these combinations to their users.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that does mean that I don't have to do point 2. (I suppose) I'm still unsure about the other points, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3720" LastEditorUserId="3720" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T05:27:17.367" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T05:27:17.367" Title="What do I have to include in the binary package as &quot;corresponding source code&quot; for GPL licensed software?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2278" CreationDate="2016-01-03T23:07:07.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your full package includes Python 3, PyQt and Qt, as I understand. The pieces from C++ are system libraries. To comply with the letter of the license, you should package up the source packages as you get them to build the whole. They include instructions for building and installing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms, give the users instructions to get and install binaries for the dependencies, and build your package on top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right, perhaps such dependencies can be considered &quot;system libraries&quot;, particularly as you did  not modify them. But that is over my pay grade as an open source enthusiast on foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-03T23:07:07.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2013" CreationDate="2016-01-04T02:09:43.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: The licence of the fork you are using. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openoffice.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenOffice&lt;/a&gt; (Apache 2.0 License) was forked into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libreoffice.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LibreOffice&lt;/a&gt; (Mozilla Public Licence v2.0/LesserGPLv3). The license to follow depends on the branch you use. In this case, OO code can be incorporated into LO (compatible licenses), but not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say A is distributed under the MIT license, gets forked and the fork  distributed under GPL as B. This is something MIT allows, i.e., the licenses are (one-way) compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use A under MIT, B under GPL. Legally, they are now independent code bases, each with it's own license conditions. That is precisely the reason why copyleft licenses insist on derivatives being distributed under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-01-04T14:40:38.657" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T14:40:38.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2210" CreationDate="2016-01-04T04:29:04.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSI, and Open Source Movement in general, views proprietary software as having its place, and able to co-exist with FOSS, and advocates for FOSS as a matter of pragmatism rather than ethics. One example of this type of pragmatic argument is the essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar&quot;&gt;The Cathedral and the Bazaar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a movement created from and in response to the FSF's antagonism towards proprietary software, OSI deliberately positioned themselves as business-friendly. The most obvious example of this position is in the labelling itself: &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt;, compared to &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't imply free-as-in-beer and anti-commercialism; while FSF is well aware of this problem, the people behind the Open Source Movement felt it was a big enough one to adopt an entirely different label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI website once had pages explaining all this. It doesn't mention proprietary software directly but its position is clear if you read between the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;How is &quot;open source&quot; related to &quot;free software&quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for &quot;free software&quot; on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have. See the discussion of marketing for hackers for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20021204155057/http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20021204155057/http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;The Marketing Case – New Territory for Techies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The case that needs to be made to most techies isn't about the concept of open source, but the name. Why not call it, as we traditionally have, free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One direct reason is that the term &quot;free software&quot; is easily misunderstood in ways that lead to conflict. You can read an extended discussion of this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the real reason for the re-labeling is a marketing one. We're trying to pitch our concept to the corporate world now. We have a winning product, but our positioning, in the past, has been awful. The term &quot;free software&quot; has been misunderstood by business persons, who mistake the desire to share with anti-commercialism, or worse, theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mainstream corporate CEOs and CTOs will never buy &quot;free software.&quot; But if we take the very same tradition, the same people, and the same free-software licenses and change the label to &quot;open source&quot; – that, they'll buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some hackers find this hard to believe, but that's because they're techies who think in concrete, substantial terms and don't understand how important image is when you're selling something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In marketing, appearance is reality. The appearance that we're willing to climb down off the barricades and work with the corporate world counts for as much as the reality of our behavior, our convictions, and our software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20021204155022/http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_hackers.php#marketing&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20021204155022/http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_hackers.php#marketing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T04:29:04.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2274" CreationDate="2016-01-04T08:29:17.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you abandon an open source project, your last duty should be to hand it over to a new maintainer to make sure it is in good hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you could try is contact anyone who contributed to the project in form of pull requests if they want to take over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your project seems to be a fork of a larger project, you also have another option which might be worth considering: Try to get it merged upstream. Consult the maintainers of Bootstrap if they would be interested in integrating your changes into the mainline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T08:29:17.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2495" CreationDate="2016-01-04T13:12:47.690" Score="4" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a follow up from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2233/3570&quot;&gt;GPL V3 with OpenSSL Exception&lt;/a&gt;, I'm curious about linking an LGPLv3 project with a GPLv3 project that has a special exception for OpenSSL. In the answer to the aforementioned question, it was stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note, however, that you can only add exceptions to work for which you&#xA;  have copyright control. If you want to include a third-party&#xA;  GPL-licensed library in your project, you cannot make that library&#xA;  adopt the exceptions present in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense, obviously I can't and shouldn't modify the License for another person's copyright. That being said, I'm curious if I could link a LGPLv3 license with a GPLv3 license that is modified with exceptions? I suppose a simple way to answer this would be to check for compatibility between OpenSSL and LGPLv3. Thus far I've found nothing, so I've posted here. Will update with any new information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user3570" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T16:37:05.530" Title="GPLv3 With Section 7 Exception Linked to LGPLv3" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-04T14:11:38.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;UI specialist: you could download the open source software and tell devs what problems you have with it (is it easy to install, etc.). You could even make a Google Survey about if users who installed or used the software have ideas on what was hard to do and what made sense to them. If you have a background in psychology or sociology UI studies will be perfect for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3738" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T14:11:38.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2144" CreationDate="2016-01-04T14:25:44.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers here are great, but just to more directly answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way that we can prevent lazy opportunists from doing the&#xA;  same scummy trick to us that they did to Twinone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned that they used the Apache 2.0 license. In this case, not much you can do. But what might help is to use the GNU GPLv3 instead, so you're still opening up your code, but you're forcing everyone who takes your code to do the same thing as well. Adding this requirement might be a deterrent, or at least aid in helping the general public become aware that it's a cheap knock-off of something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Optional:) In practice, if you email the Google Play store support&#xA;  desk, and you ask them to take the fork down — will they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you'd need to contact their legal department. But, to directly answer your question, as long as the knock-off folks complied with your license requirements, then there's nothing you can do. However, by using the GPL, due to the strong copyleft requirements, you're more likely to create a legal case for you to pursue them because there are more requirements to the license, and the odds of them missing one or getting one wrong and thus placing themselves in non-compliance are increased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not promoting the GPL as a non-commercial license by the way. I'm simply saying that the strong requirements might aide in giving a degree of control in special circumstances. I believe this business model was flawed regardless of license, but others have already touched on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, you need to understand that people are going to take your stuff and run with it, especially if you've created something very useful. That's kind of the whole point. Will some people be ungrateful? Of course they will be, but unfortunately I don't know of any legal case where a &quot;you must have good manners&quot; clause was ever enforceable. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorDisplayName="user3570" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T02:50:32.450" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T02:50:32.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2254" CreationDate="2016-01-04T18:32:46.633" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the Phoenicians invented money, one of the possible answers is clear. Many open source projects has a possibility to donate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3742" LastActivityDate="2016-01-04T18:32:46.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2291" CreationDate="2016-01-05T09:18:15.187" Score="1" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a license for my apps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This computer program is licensed under Illuze License v1.0.0 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Illuze License&#xA;  v1.0.0 [3rdDec2015]&#xA;  -Rahul2001.com&#xA;  It's simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are free to use this application in any manner as long as you aren't, in any way (directly or indirectly), hurting a living being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are free to distribute this in any manner or as many times as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are free to use the source code (if provided) in any manner but must give credit to the original source(s) or author(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are NOT allowed to sell this app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are NOT allowed to bundle it with anything that may count as:&#xA;   (i)Malware, (ii)Adware, (iii)Spyware or an otherwise undesirable application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-You are not allowed to distribute compromised versions of this app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-Any modified version of this application must also be licensed under the Illuze license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-Any application which uses this application completely, or in part, must also be licensed under the Illuze license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-The author is NOT responsible for what you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-No warranties/guarantees are provided with this application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to publish or register it anywhere for it to count as a proper license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, can anyone see any potential issues with this? I only plan to use this because other licenses are &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; long for my liking and let's be honest, most people don't even read them... Creative Commons is awesome but doesn't suit my needs and requirements...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3755" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-05T11:24:20.053" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T11:24:20.053" Title="Can I create and use my own license or do I need to publish it somewhere?" Tags="|licensing|license-creation|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-06T07:11:24.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2016-01-05T09:36:11.950" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not create your own license&lt;/strong&gt;. It will probably miss many of the legal subtleties, and end up either allowing much more than you want or much less. It will be incompatible with other licenses, leaving your work as an isolated island, useless to anybody else and abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search for &quot;choose open source license&quot; (one of the first hits is &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;). Also consider David A. Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; on open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T09:36:11.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2016-01-05T10:38:48.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Theoretically&lt;/strong&gt; everyone is allowed to create their own license. But it is &lt;strong&gt;highly recommended to contact a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, because one can make much things wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you don't need to register your license anywhere. But it has to be published with the product (for example as a &lt;em&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/em&gt; file)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3757" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T10:38:48.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2085" CreationDate="2016-01-05T10:46:44.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the license is GPL-compatible there should be no problems &lt;em&gt;(if the license has no share-alike condition)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are still unsure you could simply contact the creator of the software you want to make your plugin for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3757" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T10:46:44.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2016-01-05T10:47:33.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please please please don't use that license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your main question, no, you don't need to register a license for it to &quot;count&quot;. You just include it with the software it's licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer &quot;are there any potential problems&quot;: yes there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are not allowed to distribute compromised versions of this app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Define &quot;compromised&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are NOT allowed to bundle it with anything that may count as: (i)Malware, (ii)Adware, (iii)Spyware or an otherwise undesirable application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bundle what? This is legal stuff, be specific. Bundle.. the pig? Bundle... the software? Specify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, define (i) malware, (ii) adware, (iii) spyware, and (iv) undesirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are free to distribute this in any manner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are NOT allowed to sell this app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contradiction in terms. &quot;Any manner&quot; implies I &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; sell it; then you tell me I can't. Legal ambiguity is &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, again, &quot;distribute this&quot;. What's &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll stop picking your license apart now. Don't feel too bad about it - lots of people try to write their own licenses, and unless it's done with a lawyer, almost all of those fail. Use a license that's been professionally vetted, &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T10:47:33.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2274" CreationDate="2016-01-05T12:41:42.913" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Start by writing down a list of current issues and make sure it's easily accessible. Other contributors will then have a clear objective: they can fix issues!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continue by writing down a list of anything you would like to change long-term, in small steps. This allows new people to see what the initial thought behind the project was, and they might want to invest some time to complete these features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contacting contributors (and people who forked your project) is definitely a good idea. It's not difficult to do, takes little time, but there is a chance indeed that one of these contributors will be able to fully take over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how much time you have, create proper documentation. Contributing is a lot easier when you don't have to spend a week trying to understand the code! Make it easy for people to take the first step, and they might take a few more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you simply need to communicate to the current and future users that the project is no longer maintained, and is looking for new people to maintain the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a good chance no-one is willing to do this, but I believe -in that case- it's probably not that big of a deal when development halts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that you do not owe anyone anything, but communication is a simple act of decency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3760" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T12:41:42.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-05T15:40:31.540" Score="3" ViewCount="1660" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a short interview, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/KR0rrXMJreM?t=13m38s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Richard Stallman recommends not to put passwords on your wireless network.&lt;/a&gt; In the OS Revolution documentary he also mentions how he's disliked passwords ever since his job at MIT introduced them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? I always thought long and/or complicated passwords are good, since you keep your accounts/virtual possession to yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it have to do with his attitude towards the internet, among other things? aka share as much as possible, as often as possible? Surely there's plenty of potential security dangers in having an unprotected wireless network? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3765" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T16:32:37.387" Title="Why did Richard Stallman recommend not to use passwords?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-05T18:58:37.047" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2295" CreationDate="2016-01-05T16:32:37.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is no recommendation towards securing private or important data. At MIT everyone used a shared account, to easily share results of programming. With accounts and passwords this was a problem, so they decided to set an empty password. Similar with the network, he goes from the standpoint that the network should be a common shared resource. In germany an initiative named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Freifunk&lt;/a&gt; does that. It has nothing to do with security but with the idea of shared resources, that in consequence don't need a password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-05T16:32:37.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2274" CreationDate="2016-01-06T01:35:39.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not what you want to hear, but anyway...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't care enough for the project to continue investing (so much) effort in it, perhaps it is time for you to step back. If there is enough interest, someone will fork it and carry the torch on. If not, maybe it wasn't worth all that effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T01:35:39.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2300" CreationDate="2016-01-06T05:17:35.983" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a graduation project based on an &lt;a href=&quot;https://konato.igorsantos.com.br&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;open source system&lt;/a&gt;. As my university is more leaned towards the market instead of the academia, I wanted to know who else (if ever) is going to take my project from the campus library to read or create new work based on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to attach some type of creative-commons-like license with a special clause or similar that would require the reader/user of that document to contact me back with some lines on what they're working on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3789" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T10:51:58.953" Title="How to require a &quot;pingback&quot; when my CC-licensed material is used?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2016-01-06T07:33:26.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the Creative Commons licenses require contacting the author as a requirement. You will have to look for another license, or create your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445/175&quot;&gt;Creating your own license&lt;/a&gt; is not recommended for many reasons, one of which is that, unless you are a copyright lawyer, you will most likely run into problems and create a license that doesn't do exactly what you want. For example, what happens when you get hit by a bus - does the requirement effectively turn the project into a proprietary one? Or does a &amp;quot;good faith&amp;quot; attempt at contacting you suffice? All things that need to be clarified in legal language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing's certain if you create your own license: you cannot call it a Creative Commons license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_change_the_license_terms_or_conditions.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I change the license terms or conditions?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes—but if you change the terms and conditions of any Creative Commons license, you must no longer call, label, or describe the license as a “Creative Commons” or “CC” license, nor can you use the Creative Commons logos, buttons, or other trademarks in connection with the modified license or your materials. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll find that most licenses are like that; if you modify them by placing additional restrictions, you can no longer call it by the same name. This is to protect the integrity of those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your other option is to look for an existing license that has that pingback requirement. The only such one I'm aware of is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reciprocal Public License&lt;/a&gt;. Instead of requiring a pingback, it does require anyone to publish their extensions, regardless of whether their project is publicly deployed. Even such a requirement is unusual and controversial: RPL is OSI-approved but not an FSF-approved license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of using a custom license, I would recommend that you give your project a unique name and use a license that requires attribution. That way you can find notable users of your project by searching for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, watch out for the license of the open source system that your project is based on. If it is copyleft, chances are it will be incompatible with whatever &amp;quot;pingback&amp;quot; license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T07:33:26.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2115" CreationDate="2016-01-06T08:16:27.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing is normally used when the licenses are not compatible. In such case, demanding to match requirements of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; licenses at the same time means that the program cannot be redistributed at all. Even if you yourself are capable of following requirements of both licenses, you cannot give your users permissions to do that one license allows when another disallows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One license gives you permission and restriction set and another license gives you another permission and restriction set; you can choose the permission set you prefer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is true if both licenses apply strictly to the same content. If the package has part of content under one license and part under another, both licenses apply at the same time. In such case the licenses must be compatible, otherwise the combination cannot be legally distributed. The most typical case of this collision is an attempt to combine a GPL-licensed part with closed source part (not possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2016-01-13T13:06:20.723" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T13:06:20.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2115" CreationDate="2016-01-06T09:02:57.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key here is that you can use either license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you can decide which license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that you can &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; redistribute according to the terms of the GPL, or the LaTeX license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual license is generally used when the authors want to provide more licensing and distribution options than one license provides (in which case requiring use under both terms would be nonsensical), or when two licenses are incompatible (in which case tequiring use under both terms would be impossible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T09:02:57.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2077" CreationDate="2016-01-06T11:49:36.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you violate a license, somebody must sue you first, otherwise nothing happens. Who could sue you if you are the only owner of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the reason why organizations like FSF require to assign the ownership of the contributed code to them. Otherwise they cannot enforce the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T11:54:52.227" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T11:54:52.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2016-01-06T12:06:53.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That very much depends on the policies of your school. At least here in Chile, anything developed by students as part of their coursework and theses is legally deemed &quot;work for hire&quot;, whose rights belong to the school. You'd have to check. I doubt your school will want to enforce anything like that, but you'd need some legally binding statement to that fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once it is clear the copyright of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; work is truly yours, you have to check the licenses under which you got other pieces (if any). If you use pieces of something under GPL, GPL is the licence of the whole. If you link against a GPLed library, FSF says your work &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be distributed under GPL (some disagree, this is a murky area). If it is GPL, you can't add any further conditions (i.e., no &quot;you have to contact me&quot; allowed). There is much open source software floating around, some even with incompatible licenses. If you happened to use pieces with incompatible licenses, chances are that you aren't allowed to distribute at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; create your own license, you'll just make the use of your software unnecessarily complex for would-be users. Read also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; thread on this site. Use one of the well-known licenses, and ask users nicely to send you a message at some dedicated email address. Check &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chose a license&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; read David A. Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; on licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T12:06:53.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-06T13:32:32.323" Score="4" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a bit of a chat at work concerning an ongoing project and I wanted to ask about it to a community who knows about GPL. I’m far from being an IT specialist (and a licensing specialist also) so checking the implication of using GPL programs seemed an important point to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our company wants to modify and use a GPL 2 licenced (not LGPL) program on a standard PC that is part of the project. However, custom hardware, fully developed by the company, fetches and pushes information from the PC/program by the means of HTTP requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our clients may use either the PC or the custom hardware. Note : we have no plan to sell this equipment, which remains for use in our workshop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)  Are we legally obligated to provide and maintain a public code depository for the modified version of the program? (this is not a problem and we will probably do it anyways, but I’m curious)&#xA;My understanding is that yes, we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)  Are we legally obligated to share with publicly or on request the hardware plans and its software source code ? (obviously this is the big no-go for the company)&#xA;I would say that no, we are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)  Are we legally obligated to licence the project as GPL ? (another no-go for the company)&#xA;I would say that no, we are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we were to sell the whole project to one or several clients, would question 2 &amp;amp; 3 be modified ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3794" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T22:33:05.057" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T22:33:05.057" Title="Does modifying and using a GPL program on a single hardware makes all the project GPL?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2305" CreationDate="2016-01-06T13:52:15.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a lawyer, and don't try to play one on SE either. If you require clarity, retain a professional for advise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;programs&lt;/em&gt; are one realm, the &lt;em&gt;hardware&lt;/em&gt; a different one. Unless the hardware is somehow derived from the program (i.e., the hardware depends intimately on the programs that use it, and weren't written by you and clearly isolated from the GPL pieces), there is no reason to consider the hardware under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the machines always reside at your site, and are used remotely, GPL deems this use by &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, not distribution. You are free to do whatever you want. As I understand the legal niceties, if you install the machines at your client's, but retain full ownership, it isn't distribution either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you distribute the &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt;, GPL doesn't request anything. If you do, you have to comply with it's stipulations. It is probably easiest to just hand the customer a CD with full source whenever you hand over the code (perhaps as part of installation media), and make clear they are to comply with GPL downstream. Keeping copies around to hand out to whoever might come along asking for &quot;corresponding source code&quot; for some long-forgotten limited distribution beta version quickly gets messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;em&gt;courtesy&lt;/em&gt; to users it is certainly a nice gesture to have a public repository with the full code, including old versions and even bleeding edge development. But GPL was written before the Internet came to be, let alone remotely accessible version control systems, so it is completely silent on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-01-06T13:57:25.817" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T13:57:25.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2309" CreationDate="2016-01-06T15:13:12.767" Score="3" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to release software under GPL license but not publish one small part of it which contains data that really shouldn't be available publicly (I mean private API keys, etc.) If not, which FOSS license should I use to do so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3800" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T19:30:27.137" Title="Non-public data in GPL project" Tags="|gpl|api|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2016-01-06T15:23:56.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to release software under GPL license but not publish one small part of it which contains data that really shouldn't be available publicly (I mean private API keys, etc.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIU this is possible (but &lt;em&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to add into the released GPL code either some &quot;fake&quot; key (or other fake data, clearly labeled as fake and fictitious), or more simply a script, to be used once at &lt;em&gt;installation&lt;/em&gt; time, which would generate (or ask) these API keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T15:23:56.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2016-01-06T16:39:09.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the only author, you can even do stuff that isn't allowed by GPL for others. But for an API-key I would even see this as configurable data used by the program and that is not delivered with the software (similarily OSS e-mail-programs usually don't contain the email-login of the developer). Instead you should deliver a manual how everyone can create his own api-key and enter it to your software. But yes, from the standpoint of the license it is not needed to release the key alongside the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T16:39:09.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2305" CreationDate="2016-01-06T16:53:08.263" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, as I understand it you have a computer with the software, but don't sell the computer but offer it to customers if the walk into your business (whatever that is). Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this assumption:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) You don't distribute the software (in binary form), as the computer only is available for you. So you're not obligated to release the source code. That would change if you sell the boxes including the software, as you now distribute the software, in that case you would have to release the source of the modified software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The hardware is not affected by the program. It would be different if the hardware layout itself was derived from something that is under an copyleft or share-alike license, but as I understand the hardware is independent of the GPL-program you run on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Such obligation only can come from derivates of the GPL-program, so everything else, even other software on the same box, is unaffected by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-06T16:53:08.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-06T19:52:32.113" Score="10" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm keeping a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/notes/&quot;&gt;GitHub repository&lt;/a&gt; that contains my personal notes. While I feel comfortable with releasing most of the things in the public domain, that repository does contain some quotes, mostly from the books I liked (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/notes/blob/master/quotes/04_digital-vertigo.md&quot;&gt;random example&lt;/a&gt;), that might be considered as proprietary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I'm well aware that I could re-use these quotes (since they're just a sentence or two long) under fair use, I'm not sure if releasing them under public domain is a copyright infringement or not. If it is, what can I do to exclude the files containing the quotes from the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T14:33:37.893" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T08:45:28.080" Title="How should I release my notes under public domain if they contain quotes from proprietary texts?" Tags="|publishing|public-domain|writing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2313" CreationDate="2016-01-07T06:01:39.433" Score="11" ViewCount="8841" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you're copying open source from another project (not simply linking), how should you provide attribution in your source repo? I've copied some things into my code base that are probably not actually copyrightable (e.g., word lists), but I'd like to provide the appropriate attribution for the MIT/BSD licensed projects they were copied from. For example &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; are common for &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; project's license, but what about attribution? Also, what's the minimal amount of text required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-01-07T12:49:04.153" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T03:07:49.053" Title="How should you put attribution into your project?" Tags="|attribution|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2312" CreationDate="2016-01-07T07:45:37.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;[obvious disclaimer - I am not a lawyer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common practice I've seen is to add an additional file, e.g. NOTICE.txt with references to other projects being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/&quot;&gt;Apache Commons Lang&lt;/a&gt; (yes, I know it doesn't use the MIT license, it's just a really simple example for this practice, which holds for various licenses). It has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/commons-lang/blob/master/NOTICE.txt&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;NOTICE.txt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; file which states that it uses code from the Spring Foundation, the licensing terms it was used by, and a reference to the exact location in the code. If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/commons-lang/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/commons/lang3/StringUtils.java#L1744&quot;&gt;that location in the code&lt;/a&gt;, you'll find the complete details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T07:45:37.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2299" CreationDate="2016-01-07T10:51:58.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All Creative Commons licenses allow you to specify a URL as part of your license notice. Thus, anyone using your work must include that URL &lt;em&gt;as a link&lt;/em&gt; when they publish &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; work online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/55281?hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;perform a Google search for &lt;code&gt;link:www.your.url.com&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and find everyone who is linking to you. I am not sure if other search engines support a backlink search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More helpful re-users may invoke a literal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;pingback&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;webmention&lt;/a&gt; to your URL. You'll need something set up on your server to receive it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you could still provide academic citation details, so that a commercial entity could (if they chose) publish a white paper that references your original work. You can watch for references via CiteSeerX, Google Scholar, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a well-known license (approved by both OSI and FSF, and others) and suggesting these additional contact options (as well as plain old email) is (imho) more likely to actually get your work re-used. (Rather than using a crayon or less-popular license.) This increases your pool of potential linkbackers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T10:51:58.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2312" CreationDate="2016-01-07T19:32:56.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to put it in &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;. This file is displayed on the project page on GitHub, BitBucket, etc. Thus showing attribution to those interested in the project and source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A single line should be enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project is based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Project X&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;@developer&lt;/a&gt; for your hard work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3710" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T19:32:56.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2274" CreationDate="2016-01-07T19:45:32.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2292/3710&quot;&gt;suggestion of Stephan&lt;/a&gt;, I'm also splitting up the project into smaller parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core, which is pretty stable, will stay maintained by me. Features will now be plugins which can be maintained separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll ask developers that have contributed on a specific part of the project (which is now a plugin) to take over the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less popular and/or troublesome plugins can be dropped in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-07T19:45:32.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2319" CreationDate="2016-01-08T04:29:48.073" Score="4" ViewCount="1988" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a software for commercial release which is developed ahead on a sample code provided by MSDN &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned in the beginning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;// THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot; WITHOUT WARRANTY OF &#xA;// ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO &#xA;// THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A &#xA;// PARTICULAR PURPOSE. &#xA;// &#xA;// Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license by Microsoft states this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MICROSOFT LIMITED PUBLIC LICENSE version 1.1&#xA;  This license governs use of code marked as “sample” or “example” available on this web site without a license agreement, as provided under the section above titled “NOTICE SPECIFIC TO SOFTWARE AVAILABLE ON THIS WEB SITE.” If you use such code (the “software”), you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Definitions&#xA;  The terms “reproduce,” “reproduction,” “derivative works,” and “distribution” have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A “contribution” is the original software, or any additions or changes to the software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A “contributor” is any person that distributes its contribution under this license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Licensed patents” are a contributor’s patent claims that read directly on its contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grant of Rights&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (A) Copyright Grant - Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (B) Patent Grant - Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conditions and Limitations&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (A) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you rights to use any contributors’ name, logo, or trademarks.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (E) The software is licensed “as-is.” You bear the risk of using it. The contributors give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, the contributors exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (F) Platform Limitation - The licenses granted in sections 2(A) and 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run directly on a Microsoft Windows operating system product, Microsoft run-time technology (such as the .NET Framework or Silverlight), or Microsoft application platform (such as Microsoft Office or Microsoft Dynamics).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So am I allowed to use this code and publish my software or there is a possibility of legal actions against me for using Microsoft property?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3828" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T16:52:45.080" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T16:52:45.080" Title="Using open source sample code provided by Microsoft for commercial software" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2318" CreationDate="2016-01-08T06:14:13.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're basically asking is &quot;can I use Ms-LPL&quot; in commercial software, and the answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, but with the big caveat that you can only do this if your project runs on Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/15710049/2038264&quot;&gt;exact question on SO&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ms-LPL is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/microsoft-public-license-%28ms-pl%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ms-PL&lt;/a&gt; which is basically a permissive, free/open license similar to MIT/X11 and BSD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But there is a Windows-platform limitation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3 (F) Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) &amp;amp; 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T06:14:13.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2324" CreationDate="2016-01-08T15:51:16.160" Score="4" ViewCount="1183" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company has invested a lot in R&amp;amp;D over the past 3 years.&#xA;It led to the development of a system we can use as a base to build custom software for our customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More and more customers want their produced software to be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we use a lot of open source components ourselves, we are a bit reluctant to release the result of 3 years of investment.&#xA;Also, we currently have no other source of income and this system became our main product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think we should do?&#xA;How can my company switch to developing open source software without too much damage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3834" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-08T17:33:00.000" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T18:32:06.707" Title="How can a software company cope with more and more customers asking for open source software" Tags="|proprietary-code|publishing|software-development|finance|paid-software|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2016-01-08T16:48:30.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this is basically a question about how to change the business model. Because a software company CAN make money with open source software, but it probably cannot do it always the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first a question for clarification. You write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It led to the development of a system we can use as a base to build custom software for our customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have a basic software, but every customer orders the development of modifications to customize the software for own use? If that is the case, you already sell the software less as a product, but instead you sell your service (making modifications to the software). I assume this for my answer, if it is different you should clarify your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you already sell a service instead of a software, which risk you face if open-sourcing the software? As you don't sell the software per se, you don't lose sales. You face instead the risk of competitors that offer what so you offer: to modify the basic software for the needs of the customer. Without open sourcing the base it wasn't possible, a competitor had to start from scratch (or his own base software), but with open-sourcing your base that is easier. You can still win, if you simply know your base-software better than anyone else, but it gets important to keep this advantage up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T16:48:30.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2016-01-08T17:54:15.017" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at Stack Exchange. You don't need to. If there's demand, they'll come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you are going to look at changing your entire business model to deliver open source software, then you're obviously going to have to get your income from somewhere else somehow. There are a number of options: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/104/98&quot;&gt;my answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking users to pay for open source software is a bad business model, because someone'll just release a free version. Instead, the most often thought-of way is to add some ads to your product, which bring the income in instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T17:54:15.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2016-01-08T19:22:54.840" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spirit of GPL is that if I get the program from you, I'll be able to use it, and modify it to suit me better and use the modified version too. And also be able to pass on the original I got, and my modifications for use by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your key doesn't interfere with the above, you are (morally) in the clear. You'd have to give me instructions to create (and install for use just like yours) my own key, obviously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, the devil hides in the details. If this is in any way important, ask the FSF for clarification, or retain a professional. I'm neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-08T19:22:54.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2016-01-08T20:21:12.757" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not a Politically Correct answer for this site but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JUST SAY NO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that isn't going to be enough for your customers, you need to present a good business case for &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to continue using you even if it's not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider why the customers might be asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are afraid you will go out of business, and they will be left with a product which is no longer  supported.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They want to use someone cheaper to do future work on the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They want to be able to customize the product for future variants - beyond the one they are purchasing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to have good answers to all of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For continued support, place the source code in Escrow with a clause to release (under suitable license) to registered clients should your company fail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For them wanting to use someone cheaper: you are not in the business of enabling your competition. You need to find a way to make this palatable to the customer, but you have a right to protect your own future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For them wanting to do their own customization in future ... sell them a (more expensive!) source license - again suitably licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor are you solely selling a service, as Mnementh suggests. Your 'product' is a combination of existing proprietary technology/IP with services to customize it. You need to protect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you may lose some customers who are adamant on a FOSS solution. But others will see the advantages. If your product is better than the 'free' alternatives, clients will come, and clients will pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that's not to say you can't identify portions of your framework which are generic, and don't contain any particularly valuable IP, and open source those. Then you get the best of both worlds, as you can (hopefully) leverage the community to reduce your own maintenance costs while giving something back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2016-01-11T21:57:47.040" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T21:57:47.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2893" CreationDate="2016-01-09T06:46:50.163" Score="2" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find a single, comprehensive list of known software licenses?  If possible, it would be useful if it covered both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FLOSS licenses&lt;/a&gt; and commercial (possibly closed-source) licenses, but it would be helpful even if it only covered FLOSS licenses.  I am currently aware of the following lists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Opensource.org's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;alphabetical list of licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Linux Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPDX License List&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Various Licenses and Comments about Them&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Comparison of free and open-source software licenses&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some overlap, but also some differences between these lists, so it does not appear that any one list completely subsumes the others.  In addition, it's unclear how comprehensive they are.  (For a point of comparison, Black Duck states their knowledgebase &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/products/knowledgebase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;includes information on more than 2,400 unique software licenses&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which must be more than are contained in the lists above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information I'm looking for about each license is minimal: a name, an acronym (if there is one), a version, and a link to a page describing the license.  Licenses written in languages other than English are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In case it matters, my project is an open-source ontology effort.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3842" LastEditorUserId="3842" LastEditDate="2016-01-09T07:00:34.267" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T16:43:52.280" Title="Is there an authoritative, comprehensive list of licenses in use?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2325" CreationDate="2016-01-09T11:12:07.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a comprehensive list is practically impossible, as everyone can make up a new license without registering it somewhere. So such a list can only contain licenses the authors of the list are aware of. The lists you named in the question are already the best lists I know of, but already these don't aim for completeness but selecting the most important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T11:12:07.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2016-01-09T12:47:28.223" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you share more detail about what your customers really want when they ask if your product can be more open source? There are various open source strategies and depending on what your customers are asking for some may be mutually beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open code, Restrictive license&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;It is possible to share source code while keeping that code licensed under a commercial license so that customers can customize your product. Atlassian does this for some products. Epic Games provides full source code access for Unreal Engine. In both cases, customers must first buy the software and are not allowed to copy it. Clearly, it helps to have some money and lawyers to enforce such agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open API&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Many web companies release free, open source code libraries that make it easier for developers of other software to build custom applications on those APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open framework&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Basecamp is the best (and maybe a unique) example of a company that extracted a generic framework from its commercial applications and distributed that framework as open source (Ruby on Rails).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open tools&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and others open source tools that help run their businesses or help to make software, without releasing the specific code they make money off of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open product, Commercial service&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Wordpress is the best (and maybe a unique) example of an open product that is supported by a paid service business. As with Wordpress, hosting of complex or mission critical installations is a typical service offering. Wordpress also demonstrates two additional ways to open up a product: themes and plugins. Themes allow artists to customize software at a UI layer, decreasing work for the core team. Plugins allow developers to extend functionality. You'll find a mix of open source, closed, free and commercial themes and plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warrantee, Support, Upgrades&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Red Hat resells open source Linux, adding a warrantee and support contract and consulting services. You'd be surprised how many businesses there are that simply won't use open source without buying it from a third party. Some companies will choose an inferior product because there is a customer support representative they can call. So, while you may lose revenue from small businesses or hobby projects it is possible to retain revenue from large corporations that have a lot to lose financially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3844" LastEditorUserId="3844" LastEditDate="2016-01-09T17:24:39.380" LastActivityDate="2016-01-09T17:24:39.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2016-01-10T19:30:27.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyright, yes you can. The GPL is a document that you use to grant rights to the users of your software. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; grant &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; the right to use it if &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; follow the conditions. It cannot force you to do anything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-01-10T19:30:27.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-10T21:56:59.980" Score="2" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many IP cores especially from Xilinx have an AXI interface from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.arm.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ARM&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AXI interface standard is free for download (after registration), but I don't think it's free for implementation. So I assume Xilinx has bought an AMBA license to equip its IP cores with AXI interfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have such license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I offer AXI interfaces for my (open source) IP cores written in VHDL or Verilog?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not sure if I'm allowed to copy the license text into this question for further reading... please ask, so I can improve my question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ARM&lt;/strong&gt; is a fabless processor design house known for its ARM processors and System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions in mobile devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ARM ecosystem uses the ARM bus architecture (&lt;strong&gt;AMBA&lt;/strong&gt;) to connect the processor with its peripheral components via &lt;strong&gt;AXI&lt;/strong&gt;, AXI-Lite, AXI-Stream, APB, ... busses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IP cores&lt;/strong&gt; are ready to use components, which describe hardware. An IP core could be compared to a software class. Each core has an interface comparable to an API. They can be delivered 'open' with source code or 'closed' as a netlist or even encrypted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="3490" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T13:09:41.880" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T13:54:53.017" Title="Do I need a license to design IP cores with AXI interfaces?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|intellectual-property|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2312" CreationDate="2016-01-11T03:07:49.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I researched this for a project I recently did as well. I unofficially forked a project, rewrote it and published it with some third-party stuff mixed in as well. In the end, I found a great answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/22261/22018&quot;&gt;programmers.se&lt;/a&gt; that discusses adding in copyright notices in the right place. I followed this advice, and also added an AUTHORS file giving attribution to authors who had written code that wound up in the final source files. I put the information from their LICENSE files and a short blurb on their contribution there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For third-party items, I added a &quot;LICENSE.OTHER_PROJECT&quot; in the same directory as the third party element. For example, I included a copy of a jQuery release for doing tests in my CSS selector engine and then testing the same data in jQuery. In that directory, I added a &quot;LICENSE.JQUERY&quot; file, copying the jQuery license into it. I personally believe this is more than sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-01-11T03:07:49.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2272" CreationDate="2016-01-12T10:08:43.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would seem to me to be sensible to have &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; set of source files, with a &lt;em&gt;double&lt;/em&gt; header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duplicating the source files just so that you can have one set with one license and one with the other seems to me to be an unnecessary waste of space (both disk and amount-of-text space). It's far more conservative -and, I'd argue, therefore far clearer - to have one set with details of both licenses in the header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always use some nice text formatting to make it clear which part is which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/**&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2016, the iText project. All rights reserved.&#xA; *&#xA; * This project is dual licensed under X and Y.&#xA; * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *&#xA; * &amp;lt;insert license X text or header here&amp;gt;&#xA; * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *&#xA; * &amp;lt;insert license Y text or header here&amp;gt;&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T10:08:43.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2272" CreationDate="2016-01-12T10:34:34.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in the comments, I think it is a good idea to mention the possibility for a closed licence in the open code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever option you choose, in any case I wouldn't mention the type/name/exact text of the commercial licence explicitly in the open code. This will give you the option to use multiple closed licences (maybe for different clients). This, of course, assumes you own the copyright to the full code, otherwise you would need to confer with each copyright holder whenever you want to change the licences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something else to keep in mind is what you want to do with code contributed to the open source version. Should contributors sign a copyright transfer agreement, or do they retain the copyright on their code? This affects whether or not (and how) you can include those contributions into your closed code. I have been following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bacula.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Bacula project&lt;/a&gt; (a set of backup tools) for several years and they have &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.bacula.org/general/making-contributions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a page about this&lt;/a&gt; that maybe helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3784" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T10:34:34.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2335" CreationDate="2016-01-12T15:28:08.523" Score="1" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a person who wants to allow other people to use my code, I want to use a standard, proper license. But sometimes my code ends up being smaller than the LICENSE file that comes with it. This can especially annoying if I write a code snippet and want people to actually use it. I don't especially like the idea of copying and pasting 196 words of the MIT License, and then 30 words of the actual code itself. That just sounds absurdly wasteful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I just mention that my code is under the MIT License (or any license for that matter) and then simply give a person the link to that license, so they can look at its terms and conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-12T22:29:11.033" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T22:29:11.033" Title="Can I license my code by providing a link to the license instead of the full text?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-01-13T02:48:12.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2334" CreationDate="2016-01-12T16:13:47.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, basically it has to be very clear which license you use and the license text must be available. Usually it means that a file with the license text is put into the project and the files are marked that they use the license (a short comment like this: this is licensed under MIT License, see file LICENSE). Some tend to copying the full license text into each file of the project, which seems overkill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T16:13:47.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2115" CreationDate="2016-01-12T23:05:36.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless your changes are wide-reaching, or you have a &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; reason (i.e., legal/technical, not just &quot;I dislike the Foo license&quot;), common courtesy suggests to keep the wishes of the authors, i.e., both licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-12T23:05:36.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2274" CreationDate="2016-01-13T01:09:50.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would consinder using kanban and organize your effort in REALLY small steps but finish those small steps. Kanban is great for such a situation. It is important to publish something from time to time. Some small changes and a clear description whats happining is enough. Spend especially effort in explaining precisly how people could help -- also if they have not much time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3869" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T01:09:50.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2343" CreationDate="2016-01-13T09:37:10.267" Score="107" ViewCount="62072" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a closed source application which uses some GPL licensed libraries but don't actually distribute the software, only its output, can I keep the software closed sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I am talking about a biological data analysis pipeline. Internally, our software will be using some GPL libraries to generate its output. However, the software itself will not be distributed. Users will either receive a virtual machine with the pipeline set up which they can run locally, or submit their input data to us and access their results from a web interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the product distributed is not really the software itself but its output. If the software is calling dynamically linked, GPL licensed libraries, will I need to make the entire project GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the GPL FAQ and I think that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; may apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A company is running a modified version of a GPL'ed program on a web site. Does the GPL say they must release their modified sources? (#UnreleasedMods)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL permits anyone to make a modified version and use it without ever distributing it to others. What this company is doing is a special case of that. Therefore, the company does not have to release the modified sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is essential for people to have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately, without ever publishing those modifications. However, putting the program on a server machine for the public to talk to is hardly “private” use, so it would be legitimate to require release of the source code in that special case. Developers who wish to address this might want to use the GNU Affero GPL for programs designed for network server use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the above correctly, that means that using it internally to produce the data served by the web portal would be OK. If so, how about when I distribute the VM with the software set up? Would that constitute &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, since this has gotten quite a bit of attention over the years: the case of the VM I mention was a case where we install the system on a user's hardware (on a VM running on their hardware) but &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; control the VM and &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; have access to it, not the user. In that case, as in the main use case, the user will only have access to the results through a web interface and not ever to the binaries themselves. So we don't actually distribute the VM per se, we set it up for the user and then they use it to get their results without ever being able to run the actual binaries directly but only being able to use a web interface that uses the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3873" LastEditorUserId="3873" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T13:48:12.197" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T11:53:05.570" Title="Can I use GPL libraries in a closed source project if only the output is distributed?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2016-01-13T12:50:17.067" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an exact duplicate of this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/131264/81527&quot;&gt;here on Programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, your understanding is correct. According to GPL, having a program run entirely on a server and accessing its output from a networked client doesn't constitute &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; (or in GPLv3 language, &lt;em&gt;conveyance&lt;/em&gt;) to the client. Obviously this seems like a loophole given the philosophical goals of GPL, which is why the AGPL was created, to ensure that the copyleft clauses apply even in this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why companies like GitHub (which uses git, GPLv2) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/10369/211068&quot;&gt;StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; (which uses Wordpress, GPLv2) don't have to open source their code, as interacting with their websites doesn't constitute distribution according to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just be wary of the language used in the GPL FAQ; saying &quot;it would be legitimate to require release of the source code&quot; doesn't mean you have to release source code, only that in GNU's opinion, this would be in the spirit of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T12:50:17.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2016-01-13T13:09:17.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be careful. &lt;em&gt;Some&lt;/em&gt; uses of a program or library include parts of it in the result. Quite unlikely for a library, but a tool like e.g.&lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/bison&quot;&gt;bison&lt;/a&gt; writes a program that contains pieces of the source. In fact, bison is under GPLv3 with a special exception. Also, a compiler like &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcc&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; does something similar, and has also a similar exception to it's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T13:09:17.703" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2016-01-13T13:10:29.007" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally yes, the output is not covered by the license. However you say you will &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;redistribute the virtual machine with the pipeline setup&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, providing the virtual machine with executable binaries is the distribution of the executable binaries, so the GPL applies (i.e. you need to share source code). Just wrapping the virtual machine around does not change anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="30158" LastEditDate="2023-08-12T11:53:05.570" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T11:53:05.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2016-01-13T15:55:58.630" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distributing the Virtual Machine with the GPL-including-Software and not providing the sources (and/or the possibility to download/receive them) along with a GPL License notice is clearly a violation of the GPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore and if the Virtual Machine is based on a Linux distibution, distributing the Virtual Machine without the GPL'ed sources, i.e.: kernel and others (and/or the possibility to download/receive them) and a GPL notice would also constitute a violation of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the chaintool to recreate the binaries (you may provide your own proprietary barts as binary blobs) in the distribution must also be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A real life example which covers this case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An ADSL router manufacturer provides only a &quot;Box&quot; which takes input and produces output. The manufacturer is forced to release the sources (given almost all of the routers are Linux based) and the chaintool to recreate the firmware image. Of course some manufacturers attempt to forego the obligation, with some of them having been successfully sued.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.D.&#xA;Yes, Tivo is also a device manufacturer and found a loophole in the GPLv2 to avoid loading modified firmwares and hence the GPLv3 special provisions to close that loophole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3881" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T15:55:58.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2016-01-13T18:14:36.437" Score="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question and speaks to a lot of confusion about the GPL. The answer is mostly “yes” here, but since the GPL is frequently seen as very scary, it is important to understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you say two contradictory things in your post, first that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;don't actually distribute the software, only its output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the contradictory second statement,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users [may] receive a virtual machine with the pipeline set up which they can run locally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is addressing only the first, since that is the usual meaning of “output:” the data that emerges as a result of processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However as other answers indeed note, the second statement &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; distributing the software which processes the data into its final form, and you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need to release source code in that context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s understand why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The GPL is about ownership&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The abstract purpose of GPL software is for people to have &lt;strong&gt;full ownership of their computers&lt;/strong&gt;. What I mean is that typically, legally speaking, you (the “end user” of the computer) own the hardware of your computer: you can throw it out of a window or install whatever software you want on it. But you usually don’t own the many pieces of &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; running on your computer, which follow so-called &lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt; laws. Because of this, the authors of that software can say “Hey: you can’t peek inside of this code that’s running on your computer. You can’t mess around with that.” And I mean anyone can &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; that but in this case they can &lt;em&gt;back it up with a lawsuit&lt;/em&gt; if you don’t listen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will probably never own all of the software that you run, but on a program-by-program basis that is what GPL software is trying to provide. The GPL starts from the following ideological position: “You have this computer with these programs that you have bought, and you should be able to inspect and modify those programs, so that your computer does exactly what you want it to do. You legitimately, fully own these programs: they aren’t &lt;em&gt;on loan&lt;/em&gt; from some mega-corporation. But you can do whatever you want with that code: debug it, share it with a friend, increment all the bytes by 1 and see what that does, play it as a static-sounding symphony, or print it onto underwear.” (There is a legal corner which you &lt;em&gt;can’t&lt;/em&gt; own, which is the ability to strip the copyright and software from their lawful owners.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software licenses will either &lt;em&gt;get in the way&lt;/em&gt; of this full ownership (as proprietary ones often do) or &lt;em&gt;facilitate&lt;/em&gt; full ownership (as open-source ones often do). And when they facilitate, they might try to also facilitate &lt;em&gt;other peoples’ full ownership of copies&lt;/em&gt; (as copyleft ones like GPL do) or just &lt;em&gt;your full ownership&lt;/em&gt; (as non-copyleft ones like BSD, MIT, LGPL do). Non-copyleft licenses are particularly simple and are usually much easier to read. They generally say something like: “Here is this software. We hold the copyright. It is a condition of this license that you promise not to sue us for anything. We promise not to sue you for anything either.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses have to be a little more complicated, they have to say something like “We reserve the right to sue you if you pretend that you have the right to sue someone else over this software. You don’t have that right; don’t do that.” In this sense copyleft licenses use lawsuits defensively to try to reduce the global number of intellectual property lawsuits. They resist attempts to “re-proprietarize” their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is why you are concerned; you are worried that you might fall afoul of this if you share the output of your software. So the first thing you need to ask yourself may be, “under what circumstances do I want to sue my clients for using my software?” If you are unable or unwilling to take legal actions against your clients then you are implicitly allowing them (one might even say giving them &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt;) to do whatever they want. But let’s suppose that you really do care about suing someone if they modify how your software works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The code is the real concern&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a common misconception: the GPL emphatically does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; say “anyone who modifies the source code must release their modifications for free to the public.” In fact until very recently with the advent of GitHub, publishing software publicly was a really difficult task. It’s easier now, but publication is still in a general sense, a &lt;em&gt;barrier to your ownership&lt;/em&gt; of that software. The GPL, which hates those sorts of barriers, does not and would not ever require such a barbarous thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; it say? It says, “when you distribute the modified program to someone else, you have to give &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;, and only them, ownership of the modified source code under this license, so that they can fully own their computers just the same as you could.” There are two similarities to what most people are expecting; there are also two differences. The similarities are: (1) most people are expecting the source code to be free-of-charge; (2) most people are expecting that it does not matter whether you distribute a compiled or source-code form. But the differences are: (1) this sharing is not triggered by &lt;em&gt;modification&lt;/em&gt; but by &lt;em&gt;transmission&lt;/em&gt; and (2) this sharing is not intrinsically public (though you can’t control what the recipient does with it and the recipient can share it publicly). Notice that if you are already transmitting something to someone, then the publishing burden is offset: you only have to &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; offer to transmit the source code alongside whatever you’re originally transmitting. Also notice that while the &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; code must be free-of-charge, the transmission of &lt;em&gt;the whole package&lt;/em&gt; can cost whatever you want: the financial cost of releasing the source code to this other person is merely expected to be covered by the amount they paid you for you to hand them the software in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: if this program runs on your server, nobody else’s, and other people only interact with the program by sending packets to your server, usually &lt;em&gt;no source code release is needed.&lt;/em&gt; That code runs on your computer, nobody else’s. Since the GPL code doesn’t execute on anyone else’s machine, they cannot demand to see the source for the running program, even if it was modified. There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; minor exceptions but they consist of programs which transmit GPLed parts of their own source code to the client so that the client can run them; these snippets need to satisfy the GPL of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, when you send a virtual machine to someone, you are sending them code which they execute on &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; computers, and the GPL absolutely &lt;em&gt;demands&lt;/em&gt; that they be able to control what’s running on their computers: so you will want to release source code in such a case, even with that VM boundary making things somewhat murky. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The GPL also allows a lot of strange things&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you might still be able to distribute some mechanism to process data, without disclosing that mechanism, &lt;em&gt;even under the GPL&lt;/em&gt;. So it’s worth discussing what your options are here. How can you give someone else a computer program modified as GPL, if you are very worried about them sharing the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;First, a caution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let me say that this is usually an unreasonable fear. Bryan Cantrill has run big tech companies for years and pointed out in some public talks that Open Source has never been a problem for his companies. Heck, it’s a perk for his developers—it helps him hire great talent. If I can distill why he thinks your fears are unreasonable, I’d say that it comes down to about three surprising practical facts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your competitor companies are proud; they &lt;em&gt;would often rather die than use your software&lt;/em&gt;. They’re thinking “oh that’s &lt;em&gt;Acme&lt;/em&gt; stuff, but we’re &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than them,” even when their company is financially crashing, on fire, into the ocean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your competitor companies are often just as afraid of open-source licenses as you were before you read this. They’re thinking “If we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; improve on Acme’s software, we’ll have to &lt;em&gt;give those improvements back to them&lt;/em&gt;! We’ll be helping our competitors out!”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your competitor companies that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; big enough to take your code and then beat you on your home turf would often rather buy your company outright, so that they get your platform &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; they don’t have to lose profits competing with you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source software has the very nice property that it becomes effectively immortal while proprietary software can and will die whenever the proprietors declare “it’s no longer in our financial interests to keep developing and supporting this software; bye!” without open-sourcing that software (which can itself be a mammoth task if parts were contracted out to others). Cantrill saw this personally when his company (Sun) was bought out by Oracle. If “we” means a particular legal entity, then maybe open source sounds crazy. But think about why we form LLCs: the promise of “if someone sues us into oblivion, we can fold this company and start anew.” In that sense “we” means the people who are working at this particular legal entity, and that “we” might want to outlive the death or acquisition of the company that they happen to be working at right now. Open source allows the software to outlive that, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So usually “my competitors will get to see my code!” is an unreasonable concern, when compared to the benefits of (a) your clients sometimes fix your software for you, (b) you occasionally convert competitors into clients, (c) you can advertise open-source contributions to hire better developers, (d) “you” the people making up the company have protections against company-level disaster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But what options do you have?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can retain ownership of physical hardware. Some medical devices run a combination of proprietary and GPL software, most notably by running Linux. They make it explicitly clear that the hospital who is buying that device &lt;em&gt;is renting it out from the company&lt;/em&gt;, perhaps for a one-time fee: the device-company still owns the device and therefore they do not have to share the source code with the hospital.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can sell support. In the comments,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/3913/perkins&quot;&gt;@perkins&lt;/a&gt; suggests that you might hand over the source code but that you also might say “hey, if you DO mess with any of this code, I will refuse to support it or send you any new updates I write.” Someone might desire their working relationship with you more than they desire to use their legal freedoms. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can sell proprietary plugins. There is an isomorphism between data structures and the control structures that consume them, so very often you may see a “platform” that is GPL but there are totally-optional “plugins” or “modules” which are proprietary. This requires some up-front effort, and you may want to run it by a lawyer (I am not one) to make sure that it does not count as “linking” in the GPL sense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, these are usually &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; what you want to do and you are usually underestimating how proud your competitors are. But options do exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3886" LastEditorUserId="3886" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T13:59:58.153" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T13:59:58.153" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-13T19:18:49.210" Score="8" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to use free software libraries or parts of a free software system in proprietary software without violating the licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, can I build a system that uses some parts of a free software and release just the source code of the already free parts as free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, let's say I'm writing a new tool for programming (an IDE or something like that) and I want to keep my work as proprietary software. Could I use an open source editor as part of my tool and keep the rest of the source code under a proprietary license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3889" LastEditorDisplayName="user3889" LastEditDate="2016-12-19T11:24:34.850" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T11:24:34.850" Title="Proprietary software made of free software parts" Tags="|license-compatibility|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2344" CreationDate="2016-01-13T20:22:08.570" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the license, and also somewhat on the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the BSD and MIT licenses, this is a friendly &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Your &quot;derivative work&quot; contains a separate copyright interest from the original and those licenses did not place any requirements on your copyright interest. These are called non-copyleft licenses. They basically say &quot;to use this software, you must promise not to sue us. In return we promise that we will not sue you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL license, this is an emphatic &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. It is part of that license to use the software that any derivative work which incorporates and/or extends the software must be licensed to anyone that it is conveyed to under the GPL, and you must provide source code. This is quite by design, and is more complex to think about; basically: &quot;To use this software you must promise not to sue us. We promise that we will not sue you except in one case: if you start giving modified versions of this software to other people while keeping the source code to yourself and/or retaining the threat to sue them, we reserve the right to sue you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the first case is kind of a &quot;we're going to reduce lawsuits by both putting our hands where we each can see them,&quot; passively, while copyleft licenses attempt to use threats of lawsuits to discourage further lawsuits, actively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things, like Qt, use the LGPL, which allows you to include that code alongside other proprietary code without open-sourcing the lot of them: however you must still release any modifications you make to the LGPL code and you must have some sort of firm barrier between the LGPL and proprietary parts (different source files leading to different object files) so that the two aren't confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3886" LastEditorUserId="3886" LastEditDate="2016-01-14T16:45:26.983" LastActivityDate="2016-01-14T16:45:26.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2344" CreationDate="2016-01-13T21:00:01.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Completing CRDrost's answer, according to the FSF, just being able to link against a GPL library forces the whole to be GPL (there are dissenting opinions, and no firm legal precedents; for some GPL libraries there came to be BSD licenced workalikes, further muddying the issue). Linking against an LGPL library is allowed without effect on the other piece of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mentioned ones are just the most popular open source licenses, there are many, many others, like Sun's CDDL, the Apache and Mozilla licenses. And some use the Creative Commons licenses, which were designed for other sorts of creative works (essentially ones authored by at most a few people), for software. And then some licenses exist in legally quite different versions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overviews are given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;. You might have to drill down on the (often confusing) licensing provisions on each piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to do this for propietary use, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; retain a lawyer to sort it out. Being at either end of a copyright lawsuit is no fun, and will probably end with one part broke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-13T21:00:01.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2359" CreationDate="2016-01-15T08:10:06.183" Score="7" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-use-gpl-libraries-in-a-closed-source-project-if-only-the-output-is-distrib&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; caused me to wonder: Is it even possible to keep a GPL-licensed software internal to one company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that any employee who has access to it, would be free to distribute it, either during his employment or after leaving? And also, that GPL specifically forbids stopping such distribution by NDAs and similar means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in real world, if one wanted to keep such GPL software internal, access to it would have to be restricted to just a few individuals for have high motivation to stay loyal to the company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T16:05:42.660" Title="Is it possible to keep GPL-licensed software internal?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2016-01-15T14:13:00.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL parts stay GPL, your modification stay yours. You certainly can restrict access to said modifications at will, as copyright (used the &quot;standard&quot; way) allows. I.e., in the case mentioned, access to the modifications under NDA, extra restrictions, the whole mile you'd go for company strategic secrets if warranted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL kicks in &lt;em&gt;if/when&lt;/em&gt; the result is distributed, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; full source has to be provided. As long as it stays in-house, GPL code is yours to do as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T14:13:00.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2352" CreationDate="2016-01-15T22:31:32.180" Score="17" ViewCount="890" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if forking a repo of software I use in case the owner ever decides to remove it is a silly thing to do or whether it actually makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the repo could just disappear if the author decides to delete it and if I don't have it cloned locally, I would lose access unless I had previously made a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3938" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T08:17:40.480" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T20:20:47.947" Title="Forking repos to &quot;back up&quot; in case they are removed?" Tags="|software|forking|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2016-01-15T23:56:10.437" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oddly enough, I just did this with two repos I wanted to ensure continued access to. So no, it's not a silly idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, remember that you have now committed yourself to monitoring the upstream (original) repository, and regularly pulling any new commits to keep your fork up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also wish to put an explanation in the Description field pointing people to the original, just as I did some time ago with my clone of &lt;code&gt;json-c&lt;/code&gt; - otherwise people may think you are the authoritative copy (yes, I know it says &quot;forked from ...&quot; under your repo name, but people really don't read the fine print).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-01-15T23:56:10.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2016-01-16T00:39:26.543" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the recent demise of Google Code, I've strived to get a lot of popular repositories that I may potentially use, and host copies of them on Github, or on my own personal computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really do anything with them, nor do they get any activity. They're just... there. If people are interested, you can ask them to make a fork. I suppose you could put a little message in the Readme file saying that you just got this from this old project, and you're hosting the original project. Of course, you can continue it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no way is it a silly idea - it's actually a smart one. Once the project is deleted, it's gone for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T00:39:26.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2016-01-16T01:48:28.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suspect they are really incompatible. For example, there is &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of pressure on Linux (GPLv2) to include Sun's (now Oracle's) ZFS filesystem (CDDL license, from Solaris), as it is a more mature, tested alternative to the seemingly forever trapped in development Linux native BTRFS. There are several &lt;a href=&quot;http://zfsonlinux.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unofficial modules&lt;/a&gt; floating around, meaning the technical obstacles aren't insurmountable. And yet, even with &lt;em&gt;massive&lt;/em&gt; legal talent on hand, they refuse on the ground the licenses are incompatible, as for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official Ubuntu stance&lt;/a&gt; states. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distribution_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; even claims the CDDL license was engineered to be GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, a lawyer will &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; recommend to err in the side of caution, i.e., assume they are incompatible unless given explicit assurances they aren't. But it still makes a compelling case to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T01:48:28.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2027" CreationDate="2016-01-16T01:58:33.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; of the license is irrelevant, what is important is its contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, please &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; invent your own license. It will only end up incompatible with others, stranding your work on an inaccessible island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T01:58:33.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2016-01-16T05:35:13.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not a silly idea. It's standard practice in open source. A simple example is Linux:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Debian maintains a fork of the Linux kernel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ubuntu forks the Debian kernel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linux Mint forks the Ubuntu kernel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the primary use-case of these forks is to control kernel versioning and testing in each distro it does also serve as a security policy for example if Ubuntu goes bankrupt Linux Mint can still continue development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T05:35:13.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2358" CreationDate="2016-01-16T14:20:18.180" Score="0" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;All code posted on Stack Overflow is currently licensed under CC-BY-SA. If the code crosses the &quot;threshold of originality&quot;, you have to distribute your whole project under a copyleft license. This may be disliked by  people who don't like copyleft, and certainly impractical for proprietary  software created by large corporations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But...suppose I do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a new open-source library (&lt;strong&gt;CodeSnip&lt;/strong&gt;), licensed under the LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copy and paste all code snippets that I want to use from Stack Overflow into &lt;strong&gt;CodeSnip&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have my proprietary/permissive open-source project &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;CodeSnip&lt;/strong&gt;, thereby using all the code in CodeSnip through an API.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Legally distribute CodeSnip to the general public under the LGPL, while keeping your project under your current license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this policy be in compliance with CC-BY-SA and still allow people to use Stack Overflow code without legal complications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T09:26:07.220" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T09:26:07.220" Title="Can I use Stack Overflow code by creating a LGPL library of code snippets first and then linking to that library?" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2357" CreationDate="2016-01-16T14:47:31.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SA in CC-BY-SA stands for &quot;share-alike&quot;. It means that you can only release it under the same license conditions. That means your library would also have to be licensed under CC-BY-SA. Licensing it under LGPL would be a violation of the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if stackoverflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required?cb=1&quot;&gt;executes their plan to change to the MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, you will be able to do this. MIT is a permissive open source license which allows relicensing under other conditions. It allows you to use any code snippets in your proprietary project as long as you keep an attribution. This attribution requirement can not be removed by relicensing, so creating a LGPL library would not remove the attribution clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-01-16T15:07:47.947" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T15:07:47.947" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2016-01-16T16:05:42.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The employees are the company and as such, having access to the GPL code does not constitute distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Software is distributed externally, even to another company of the same group (different entity even if same parents) the GPL counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3881" LastActivityDate="2016-01-16T16:05:42.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2183" CreationDate="2016-01-17T01:53:17.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be careful, it could be claimed that by writing the user of the library you are using it's API, and creating a derivative work by that route. More clearly, if written e.g. in C and you &lt;code&gt;#include&lt;/code&gt; some header file under GPL, the result depends on the header file. It will be hard to argue it isn't a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T01:53:17.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2378" CreationDate="2016-01-17T11:53:14.480" Score="6" ViewCount="640" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I create an Open Source project on Github licensed under e.g. LGPL like Qt. As I understand ownership of code, if I wrote a piece of code, I am free to change the license at a later point, as long as I keep a LGPL version of the old code. This could be because I want to further develop it into a solution I want to sell, again like the Qt dual license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter a pull request. Someone commits 10 lines to the LGPL version. Can I no longer change the license, or do I essentially still own the code since it is my repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3955" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T02:36:12.283" Title="Pull request ownership, who owns the code committed?" Tags="|lgpl|ownership|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T12:39:25.527" Score="-2" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an Open Source Hardware (OSHW) board for an Artix 7 FPGA XC7A15T but couldn't find one. I would be grateful if someone from this community can guide me. I would prefer a design in eagle!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3956" LastEditorUserId="3226" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T14:38:20.303" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T14:38:20.303" Title="OSHW board for Artix 7 FPGA XC7A15T" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-01-17T14:38:40.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2362" CreationDate="2016-01-17T13:59:04.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Designing FPGA boards is not an easy task, do you have experince with such big chips?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially, the power supply is hard work. Xilinx offers evaluation boards which are also reference designs. Designers use these boards and supplied schematics to design custom boards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you should ask at &lt;a href=&quot;http://electronics.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;EE.SE&lt;/a&gt;, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="3226" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T14:04:10.567" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T14:04:10.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2361" CreationDate="2016-01-17T14:47:11.020" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the code is yours, then you can do anything that you would like with it. You can change the license, or even remove the license altogether. You don't have to keep a version licensed under the LGPL. If all the code is yours, you can do anything with it. Including dual-licensing similar to Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if some of that code is not yours, then you've got a bit of a problem. That person's code is licensed to you under the LGPL, and you can't change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've got two viable options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove any code that is theirs, and make sure that all the code in the repository belongs to you. You can then follow the steps in my first paragraph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the contributor if they will license the code under another license. If they don't, then back to point one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T15:15:32.827" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T15:15:32.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2366" CreationDate="2016-01-17T18:06:07.237" Score="12" ViewCount="3822" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, Gists on GitHub don't have a field to track the license that they are available under. You can simply choose to create a public Gist or a secret (private) Gist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the open source licenses have text that seems to indicate that you must include the full license in a distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD 3-Clause License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL, on the other hand, appears to not require you to carry the full license text, but simply tell recipients how to access the license text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For licenses like the MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0, is there an appropriate method of indicating the license without including or distributing the full license alongside the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what would this look like? Would it be similar to the recommendations for the GPL? If not, what would need to happen to allow for a short form of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T18:55:10.800" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T22:09:53.150" Title="Is it possible to include a shorter form of a license if the license would be longer than the content licensed?" Tags="|mit|software|bsd|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2365" CreationDate="2016-01-17T18:37:18.733" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can certainly &lt;em&gt;try&lt;/em&gt;. Instead of including the entire license, you could have this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Thomas Owens. All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;This work is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.  &#xA;For a copy, see &amp;lt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt; (IANAL), this should stand up in court, since you're still making it pretty obvious how the work is licensed. If someone can't access the license because of an Internet connection issue, there's still a fallback to All Rights Reserved, which isn't pretty but it protects your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind, however, that future redistributors are still legally obliged to include the full license. It's only you who doesn't have to. And yes, you could add a condition to remove this restriction, but it's a bad idea for the same reasons that crayon licenses are (it's essentially &lt;em&gt;creating&lt;/em&gt; a crayon license, actually) - the major one of those being it's not legally vetted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, if you're using something like the MIT or BSD licenses, they're not exactly &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; - I'd just include the whole text in your source file. This strategy is only really worth considering if you've got a long license document like the GPL - but something like that is more often used for longer, more complex works, in which including the file wouldn't be so much of an overhead anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-01-17T19:52:49.833" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T19:52:49.833" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2368" CreationDate="2016-01-17T18:25:42.857" Score="16" ViewCount="1508" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most source files start with a copyright header like this (from GNU ld):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* Main program of GNU linker.&#xA;   Copyright 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,&#xA;   2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007&#xA;   Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;   Written by Steve Chamberlain steve@cygnus.com&#xA;&#xA;   This file is part of GLD, the Gnu Linker.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(rest of the copyright header skipped for brevity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these headers, years of copyright are denoted. I would like to know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which years are listed there? Are only years in which changes to the software occured listed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I edit a source file, can I remove redundant copyright years? E.g. if the  FSF claims copyright 1991–2007, can I remove all years but 2007? I expect only the most recent year for each party to be relevant for copyright. What about if I'm the sole author?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I abbreviate a contiguous series of copyright years &lt;code&gt;2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;2000--2004&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it required to list years of copyright in a copyright header?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it matters, I live in German jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3672" OwnerDisplayName="FUZxxl" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T20:14:19.410" Title="How do I properly specify the year(s) of copyright?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2367" CreationDate="2016-01-17T20:14:19.410" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of the format “Copyright &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;authors&lt;/em&gt;” or similar is a &lt;em&gt;copyright notice&lt;/em&gt; which was required by US copyright law until 1989 for copyright protection to apply to a work. Under the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic, and no notice is required. However, this notice still contains the answers to two important questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When was the software published?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who are the authors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author information is necessary to determine when copyright protection expires. In Germany, this would be seventy years after the death of the last surviving author (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__65.html&quot;&gt;§65 UrhG&lt;/a&gt;). Without knowing the identities of the authors, we cannot determine when they died in order to calculate the copyright term. While there are provisions for dealing with anonymous authors (seventy years after publication), this is much more complicated since the identity of the author could be discovered after that time, which would extend the copyright term again. Example: a software is published anonymously in 1990. The copyright term would expire in 2061, and you would then be free to use it in any manner. However, in 2065 the author is identified and they died in 2053. Now, the copyright term extends to 2124 and until then you are no longer free to use the work unless it was licensed to you by the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the years noted only had to be the year of the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; publishing of the work in its &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; form, so it is not necessary to maintain a list of years. After all, a copyright notice isn't a changelog. However, it is still useful to list all years in which a modified version was first published. Contracting consecutive years is commonly understood, e.g. “1999, 2000, 2001” can be written “1999–2001”. However, there should not be any missing years in that range, “1999, 2000, 2001, 2003” can be written as “2003” or “1999–2001, 2003”, but not “1999–2003”. Also, the years record the publishing of a change, not the creation of a change, and not the mere act of publishing. Misunderstanding of these details leads to some quite dishonest copyright notices on some websites that just list the current year, even when the page was not changed. An argument in favour of listing all years rather than just the last year is that different portions of the work were published in different years, which should be reflected in the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, the year of publication determines the copyright duration when the copyright is held by a juridical person such as corporations, so the years are relevant. This applies to GNU software since the respective copyright is assigned to the FSF, but no such practice seems to be possible in Germany. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GNU software, the appearance of copyright notices is discussed in the chapter &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright Notices&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Information for Maintainers of GNU Software&lt;/em&gt;. This permits contracting copyright years as described above if this practice is explained in a README. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T20:14:19.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-17T20:51:06.073" Score="6" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the rise of much licensing debate around here on Stack Exchange, there's been a lot of arguments about having a license closest to the status quo. Initially, I would've thought that the closest license would be the GPL, but I'm struck between the major copyleft victims: The GPL, LGPL, and the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not so sure about the GPL because the Creative Commons license doesn't strike me as having a viral nature, which lead me to believing the LGPL was the closest. But after more consideration, especially after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1334/license-for-graphics-design-program&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer to a previous question of mine, I'm not leaning towards the MPL. Here's a quote from that answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have multiple image files as &amp;quot;sample&amp;quot; files that users can build upon that I hope to include within my project. These files are images that I have found online on various sites. Many of them are licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA). I'm unsure of whether the ShareAlike clause will be an issue,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can safely include these. The ShareAlike is not a problem. Each license only apply to the independent work (the image) itself, it does not require license compatibility with other images (or with code). This is because these does not depend on each other, so no derivative work is created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as the license only applies to the file, similar to what the MPL is known for: file-level copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in assuming the MPL resembles closest the CC BY-SA license that Stack Exchange employs? If not, which license does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T01:07:42.623" Title="What license for code resembles CC BY-SA most?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2372" CreationDate="2016-01-17T22:02:17.260" Score="10" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;On GitHub issue page, there doesn't seem to be a place to show that I also share this problem (e.g. upvote, +1) to let the developers prioritize this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do this? If know, how do developers know which issues affect most people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3960" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T07:20:15.383" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T07:20:15.383" Title="How to indicate that I also have an issue on github?" Tags="|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2365" CreationDate="2016-01-17T22:09:53.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The legal niceties aside, the site linked to might disapear, during the (very long!) period copyright coverage in the USA contemplates, the Internet (and URLs and all that paraphernalia) could well become a thing of the dimly remembered, quaint past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More sinister, Dr. Evil's minions could take over the webpage and replace the licence you link to with one reserving &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rights to themselves. You want to be in control over the license which applies (obviously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-17T22:09:53.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2370" CreationDate="2016-01-17T23:36:28.360" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2016-03-11&lt;/strong&gt;: What do you know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blog/2119-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub have just added a feature to add reactions to issues (and PRs and comments)&lt;/a&gt;. Among the reactions available is a +1. This will probably be the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/25792/13683303/d55b8b7e-e6ba-11e5-9b31-59a8db92e456.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/25792/13683303/d55b8b7e-e6ba-11e5-9b31-59a8db92e456.gif&quot; alt=&quot;+1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of writing, this is not possible. There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;feature request&lt;/a&gt; dating back to 2013 for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's even an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;open letter&lt;/a&gt; listing this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the standard procedure is to reply &quot;+1&quot; to the issue, which puts you on the list of issue participants. The downside is that this introduces a lot of spam - to the issue itself and to anyone subscribed to the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-11T00:09:57.527" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T00:09:57.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2369" CreationDate="2016-01-18T11:05:38.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA does have a viral nature. ShareAlike means that you need to distribute under the same or compatible license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4.b of the license&lt;/a&gt; addresses that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;There are currently no non-CC licenses that have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0, but the Free Art License and GPLv3 are compatible  with BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My initial thought would be the GPL or the LGPL. The difference is that the LGPL allows you to link a library to your software package without forcing the GPL onto your software. Since CC isn't created with software in mind, there's no consideration to source code and/or binary distributions. Other than that, they appear to meet the criteria of CC BY-SA: redistribute (source or binary), modify, extend, commercial use, attribution, and redistribution under the same or compatible license. However, the GPL and LGPL do not explicitly protect the names and trademarks of the owners of the material. This is something that CC BY-SA does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mozilla Public License isn't a perfect mapping, either. It does add the name and trademark protection into the license instead of something the creator can optionally do, but it also requires that if you distribute an executable under the MPL, you must make the source available. CC BY-SA allows derivative works to be created in any medium. Although, since CC BY-SA isn't designed for use with software, I'm not sure the difference between source code and a binary distribution would be considered a different medium or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that there is a software license that has a complete and total mapping to CC BY-SA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T11:05:38.657" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2370" CreationDate="2016-01-18T14:03:20.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your project is also on Github, create an issue on &lt;em&gt;your project&lt;/em&gt; detailing your relationship to &lt;em&gt;that dependency&lt;/em&gt;.  Link to the dependency's issue that you're blocked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github recognises such inter-issue links and acknowledges them inline with comments on the dependency's issue in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/10196&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ariya/phantomjs#10196&lt;/a&gt;, which many other projects are blocked on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOzRx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pOzRx.png&quot; alt=&quot;references in between a dependency&amp;#39;s comment thread&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives more context than a “+1” and the tags on the Closed/Open/Merged tags on the right are easy to scan when reading the issue comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3169" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T14:03:20.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2370" CreationDate="2016-01-18T18:51:54.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This feature is missing. But you can always simply open the issue and write a comment. In my opinion it's better to just write +1 than doing nothing. Think twice whether it's useful to let the maintainer know you also have the issue or are interested in a feature request or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases it might be useful to provide some additional information about your environment or the specific conditions where you run into the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never open a duplicate of the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3665" LastEditorDisplayName="user3665" LastEditDate="2016-01-22T14:57:06.163" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T14:57:06.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2016-01-18T20:20:47.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems like the repo could just disappear if the author decides to delete it and if I don't have it cloned locally, I would lose access unless I had previously made a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's correct.  Then you would be scrambling to find a copy of the software somewhere, or else you'd be unable to recreate your software accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's not OK to you, then yes, it makes sense to keep local copies of all the software you use to build your projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even projects devoted to helping developers do this.  For example, in the Perl world, all the modules are stored in the CPAN.  There's a project called Pinto that lets you make your own local mirror of the CPAN, using exactly the versions you specify, so that you always have correct copies of the software.  That way, if the version you need gets deleted, or even if the entire CPAN is down for some reason, you'll still have copies.  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://perlmaven.com/pinto-tutorial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://perlmaven.com/pinto-tutorial&lt;/a&gt; for more about Pinto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3745" LastActivityDate="2016-01-18T20:20:47.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2369" CreationDate="2016-01-19T01:07:42.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is impossible to answer unless one knows what CC BY-SA is &quot;about&quot;, as it applies to code, because the reason this proposal was brought up was because the way CC BY-SA applies to code is unclear in the first place. Furthermore, there are properties of CC BY-SA that aren't spelled out in the license itself - its implied and de facto properties - and these depend on circumstance and who you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So rather than give a single answer, I'll try to cover the major properties and ambiguities of CC BY-SA, so you can pick and choose your own interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brand name, wide compatibility&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suspect the original decision to use CC BY-SA was because it was a popular and trendy license &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even used by Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. (Interestingly, CC BY-SA version 2.5 was once known as CC-Wiki.) Being well known makes it easier for people to understand the license; being widely compatible makes it more useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a potential conflict here though: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most open source projects are permissively licensed&lt;/a&gt;. In order to accomodate these projects, to add code to them without changing the project's license, we would have to &lt;em&gt;exclude all copyleft licenses&lt;/em&gt;. If you care about closed-source projects, you would also have to exclude all copyleft licenses because they are &lt;em&gt;incompatible with closed source&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a compromise, I think the license would need to be &lt;em&gt;at least GPL-compatible&lt;/em&gt;. The various GPL licenses are the most popular copyleft licenses, by far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the license should preferably be &lt;em&gt;well known&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the popularity of licenses varies a lot depending on language and industry; for examples, MIT has outsize popularity within front-end web development, and the Artistic License is virtually unused outside Perl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Easy to use&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One major advantage of CC licenses is they are (relatively) easy to use. In most cases, simply mentioning the author and the license (e.g. &quot;Creative Commons Share-Alike&quot;) is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This property is actually pretty rare outside the CC licenses. Virtually all software licenses require &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/176/175&quot;&gt;including the full text&lt;/a&gt; when you distribute the software. Note that this doesn't mean you have to paste the entire license in your source code; you can simply include a comment like &lt;code&gt;Copyright 20XX John Smith, Foobar license&lt;/code&gt; and elsewhere in your distribution, include the full &quot;Foobar license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if even that is too onerous, there are two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shortest license possible&lt;/a&gt;, so you can just copy-paste the whole thing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a crayon license, modifying/waiving the license inclusion clause(s)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyleft?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most problematic aspect of CC BY-SA for code: what kind of copyleft it represents, with respect to &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the CC licenses address these points, and this issue has never been tested in court. CC's own lawyers probably looked at this issue, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourages using their licenses for code&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1718/175&quot;&gt;interpret&lt;/a&gt; the -SA clause is that &quot;source&quot; and &quot;binary&quot; forms are adaptations of each other, so it's perfectly fine for someone to take CC BY-SA licensed code and only distribute the binary freely. Another way to interpret it is that it's a file-level copyleft, since other files cannot be derivative of the CC BY-SA file. Another interpretation is that the whole project should be treated as a single work, so -SA is a project-level copyleft. Another interpretation is that it shouldn't be how -SA theoretically works for software, but the spirit of copyleft in general, and thus copyleft should extend to linking too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these interpretations are equally (in)valid, because CC BY-SA is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, some regard this lack of clarity as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/3655/211068&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;feature, not a bug&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. They believe CC BY-SA should be used for knowledge, not code, so the trouble with deciding whether CC BY-SA code can be copy-pasted into other projects is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which license to use?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By now it should be abundantly clear that there is no single license that is equivalent to CC BY-SA. How much a license resembles CC BY-SA depends on how you interpret the above properties. For example, I could choose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT with optional link-only attribution&lt;/strong&gt;, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is based on the most popular software license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is permissive, making it compatible with the vast majority of software projects, closed or open&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The link-only attribution makes it easy to use; it can also be used in the same manner as MIT which is also very easy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It takes an extremely liberal interpretation of &quot;-SA&quot;; since CC BY-SA doesn't explicitly guarantee access to the source, MIT spells it out so that paranoid users don't need to worry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but I'm pretty sure you'll &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/272956&quot;&gt;strongly disagree with this choice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-01-19T01:07:42.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2361" CreationDate="2016-01-20T02:36:12.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you have a project under a permissive license (like MIT). Then I can go clone it, and build a copyleft licensed package on it (say GPL). If I ask you to pull, you are getting my modifications under copyleft (GPL, in this case), and have to respect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should make absolutely clear under which conditions you accept code pulls (or any other contribution, for that matter). In thorny cases, you'll have to get the pullee to agree to give the code under your licence, or perhaps even sign paperwork (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt; or even sign the copyright over to you, as e.g. the FSF requires).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T02:36:12.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2380" CreationDate="2016-01-20T05:36:33.853" Score="6" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;We started to use an open source library in one of our projects, and now we need to do some custom modifications to this library. The source of this library is distributed under LGPL and I need some help in identifying whether we would violate LGPL terms/conditions if we follow an approach detailed below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source is open and available in Github. License is LGPL. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The built artifact is also available in the Maven central. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, in the version available in the Maven central, there are some&#xA;issues/improvements that we have identified for our need.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we plan to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a clone of this project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify the source code to meet our requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit the modifications (to keep backup) to our Git (not a public Git).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrate the building of this library into our Jenkins (via our Git).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New artifact to be made available in our Nexus (private Nexus).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We would also like to change the group id of this artifact when moving to our Git and Nexus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New artifact will be used as a dependency in internal projects via our Nexus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we violating any LGPL terms/conditions in following the above approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3989" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T08:47:49.740" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T13:50:26.033" Title="Taking a clone of an LGPL licensed source code and modifying and maintaining in a private repo" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2379" CreationDate="2016-01-20T12:46:21.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your &quot;internal projects&quot; are not being released outside of your organization, then you should be fine. Your modifications do fall under the LGPL, but if you aren't releasing your modified library in binary form to the general public, there's no one in the general public that has the right to request to see your library's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-01-20T12:46:21.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2383" CreationDate="2016-01-21T00:34:44.890" Score="3" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed and released an open-source Java library under Apache 2.0 license. In the next version, I plan to include BerkeleyDB as one of the supported storage engines. Note that the actual BerkeleyDB source and binaries will not be included in my release. I use a Maven structure, so BerkeleyDB will be declaired as one of the dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately BerkeleyDB is licensed under AGPLv3 and as far as I know it is not compatible with Apache 2. My question is does this affect the license of my software? I want to continue allowing the users to use my lib in commercial applications. Does adding BerkeleyDB support effectively forces them to open-source their projects IF they use my library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3998" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T13:24:25.437" Title="Mixing Apache 2.0 and AGPLv3 in open-source project" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2382" CreationDate="2016-01-21T02:43:32.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF insists that linking against a GPL library makes the result a derivative, and thus must be under GPL. That is not what the relevant law says (it is silent on &quot;linking&quot;). On the other hand, to use the library you need the declarations of the stuff in it, which is in a header file included in the source. Thus it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; depend on a piece of the library... and again, if that is enough to make it a derivative isn't clear cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T02:43:32.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2370" CreationDate="2016-01-21T10:24:58.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a maintainer, I have to disagree with the answers telling you to give a &quot;:+1:&quot; on the issue. We use that as a signal that the maintainers have &quot;blessed&quot; a feature, i.e, we're likely to accept a pull request that implements/fixes the issue. As was pointed out, a bunch of thumbs ups raises the noise level and makes it difficult to find relevant info when you try to work on the it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also disagree with creating a duplicate issue. There are always many more things to create/fix. Having duplicates in the backlog makes it difficult to determine what needs worked on. Imagine if dozens of people creating a new issue for the same problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one exception to this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2374/775&quot;&gt;if you have a separate GitHub project that depends on my project.&lt;/a&gt; In that case, create an issue on &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; repository with a link to the issue on my repository. The benefits are two fold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know that a fellow open sourcer can't fix their software until mine is. This makes me just a bit more likely to pay attention to it. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The item remains visible in your own backlog as something that isn't quite right. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's great, but you've not answered my question. How do I indicate that I'm having the same problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it depends. If there's only one or two other people reporting it already, or if the issue is quite old, add a comment containing a detailed bug report on the existing issue. This gives me a &quot;wake up call&quot; and alerts me to the fact that this problem still exists. It's very easy to lose track of a particular bug/feature request. I'd appreciate the reminder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the issue already has a number of people reporting it, and was recently active, I'd just not do anything. At least, not unless you have something to add to the conversation. Do you have a solid way to reproduce it? Do you have an idea about what line of the code needs fixed &amp;amp; how? Do you have a differing view point on &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it should be fixed, or do you agree with proposed plans to fix it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the things I want to know as a maintainer. I don't need or want a bunch of &quot;Me too&quot;s. What I need is people who are involved in helping us fix it by discussing it and making it dirt simple to reproduce. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T10:24:58.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-21T10:43:22.467" Score="4" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing an application which will be Open Source (code), however there are few libraries which are either paid or commercial. We have liaised with original developers/parties and agreed to distribute Uglified and/or DLL version of these libraries with our source code with appropriate link to how to buy and include these libraries in your project if you are planning to use/extend the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of our code is JavaScript (frontend), C# (backend) &amp;amp; Unity (the game). Each of these components uses combination of Commercial &amp;amp; Copyleft libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can someone educate us on which licensing template we should be using for the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4002" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T12:34:09.580" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T12:34:09.580" Title="Licensing for Open Source project which uses commercial libraries" Tags="|license-recommendation|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-02-26T20:58:26.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2382" CreationDate="2016-01-21T11:03:22.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, many insist that this linking will form a derivative work. Even if this notion isn't shared by law courts (and this wasn't really tested in court as far as i know), many people might avoid your library because they claim the licensing isn't in order (if you use Apache and linking a AGPL3 library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That usually means you should release your library also under AGPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a way to avoid it: not linking permanent. If your software compiles and works without Berkeley DB and you don't distribute Berkeley DB with your binaries or software you might use Apache. You let the user form the derivative work if needed, for instance by including a switch that - if activated - includes Berkeley DB but is disabled as default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to always use Berkeley though, you have to accept their license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: Look into discussion, especially @vonbrands comment to see a different legal view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2016-01-22T13:24:25.437" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T13:24:25.437" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2385" CreationDate="2016-01-21T11:10:13.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open-source project can use proprietary libraries if the proprietary libraries in question allow for it. For the OS-part you can use a permissive license (MIT, BSD, Apache), which is allowing to combine it with works under different licenses. As you talk about libraries even some copyleft-licenses are OK, as long as linking isn't counted as derivate work (so LGPL is ok, GPL or AGPL aren't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What confuses me a bit is you talking about C# and Unity using commercial and copyleft-licenses. Are these the libraries you use under commercial license? Or are you using them with copyleft and different libraries in proprietary license? If the second, then the copyleft-license influences your project and might prohibit the combination with proprietary licensed stuff (depending on the license in question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T11:10:13.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2389" CreationDate="2016-01-21T15:33:51.867" Score="3" ViewCount="893" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memtest86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Memtest86&lt;/a&gt;, a popular software for RAM diagnostics, was initially developed as open source (GPLv2). Version 3 was forked into a separate project, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memtest.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Memtest86+&lt;/a&gt;, also distributed under GPL terms. Source code of Memtest86 v4.3.7 is distributed inside the corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memtest86.com/downloads/memtest86-4.3.7-iso.tar.gz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;binary image&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Memtest86 v5.0 and up suddenly became closed-source software, property of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memtest86.com/license.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PassMark Software Pty Ltd&lt;/a&gt;. How could this happen? Could Chris Brady (the original Memtest86 author) somehow give them exclusive rights to the code, or did they have to re-write the software from scratch? And if they did, how could they keep the name? Am I allowed to write my own closed-source version of e.g. &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt;, and distribute my program under the same name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;It seems that &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt; is trademarked, but any name will do for the sake of argument. &lt;code&gt;thttpd&lt;/code&gt; is clear, for example, and so is &lt;code&gt;awk&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2016-01-21T16:39:57.987" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T16:39:57.987" Title="How did memtest86 transition from GPL to closed-source?" Tags="|relicensing|gpl-2|trademark|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2388" CreationDate="2016-01-21T16:01:54.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Starting from MemTest86 v5, the code was re-written to support self booting from the newer UEFI platform. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memtest86.com/history.htm&quot;&gt;MemTest86's History&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have written new code, then you own the copyright of that code and thereby the right to license that code however you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's really a question of how they can keep the name. It all depends on if the name of MemTest86 is trademarked or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the name of MemTest86 is not trademarked...then &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can use that name for their software. In the US at least, trademarks are not automatic. You have to register your trademark and then enforce it, usually by threatening and suing people who are also using your trademark. Since it cost time and effort to set up a trademark, I'm sure that most people won't really bother with it, giving you a free reign to produce software with similar names. If it got to a point where you have software that is popular and bad actors would be tempted to produce clones with similar names, then you want to start investing in a trademark (to protect your own IP).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the name of MemTest86 is trademarked, then the trademark must have been &lt;em&gt;transferred&lt;/em&gt; over to PassMark Software, allowing them to use the name to brand their own unique software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is an open-source fork of MemTest86 called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memtest.org&quot;&gt;MemTest86+&lt;/a&gt;, it is most likely that the name of MemTest86 is not trademarked at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your final question of whether you can write a closed-source version of &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt; is simple. Find out whether grep is a trademark. I recommend hiring a trademark lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-01-21T16:01:54.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2801" CreationDate="2016-01-22T10:38:00.673" Score="20" ViewCount="2446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source software project licensed under MIT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Håvard Fossli&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found some code on another repo also licensed under MIT and I want to use bits and pieces of that. The MIT license has a copyright notice on top with the name of that author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 John Snow  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should my license be updated to look like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Håvard Fossli&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Copyright (c) 2016 John Snow  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4012" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-23T00:43:54.577" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T19:44:08.587" Title="How should I assert copyright when I'm forking an MIT project?" Tags="|copyright|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2379" CreationDate="2016-01-22T13:50:26.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should consider this carefully. In time, your internal version will diverge enough from upstream to make picking up fixes hard (and need vetting changes to see how they interact with local modifications). It is just easier to dig in and work with upstream as far as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are probably deluded into thinking your modifications make a quantum leap in something. If it really was so, they would be a bad match for upstream, and write from scratch. Better have others help out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-22T13:50:26.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2397" CreationDate="2016-01-22T18:01:20.787" Score="7" ViewCount="5186" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg's Encode/AAC page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The licenses of libaacplus, libfaac, and &lt;code&gt;libfdk_aac&lt;/code&gt; are not compatible&#xA;  with the GPL, so the GPL does not permit distribution of binaries&#xA;  containing code licensed under these licenses when GPL-licensed code&#xA;  is also included. Therefore these encoders have been designated as&#xA;  &quot;non-free&quot;, and you cannot download a pre-built ffmpeg that supports&#xA;  them. This can be resolved by compiling ffmpeg yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that the downloaded binary (for windows at least) is compiled with &lt;code&gt;--enable-gpl&lt;/code&gt; and includes libx264, which is an example of piece licensed by the GPL (though it seems that x264's license is GPLv2 and ffmpeg is GPLv3 - not sure about the implications). This leads me to think that no software can be distributed in the binary form if it uses both x264 AND the all-powerful Fraunhofer FDK AAC Encoder, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that does not seem to be the case. &lt;a href=&quot;https://handbrake.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Handbrake&lt;/a&gt; binary contains both (in a static build), and &lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg-hi/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg HI&lt;/a&gt; does as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;An update&lt;/strong&gt; (2016-03-06):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control we can no longer&#xA;  include binary distributions of HandBrake which include the FDK-AAC&#xA;  encoder. Please also be aware that if you are distributing any&#xA;  previous 0.10.x you must cease doing so now due to licensing issues.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://handbrake.fr/news.php?article=36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Handbrake: News, from Feb 11, 2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3988" LastEditorUserId="3988" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T23:12:03.830" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T04:17:04.163" Title="Why doesn't FFmpeg distribute a binary with libfdk_aac enabled?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2357" CreationDate="2016-01-23T01:10:48.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they are truly snippets, they probably are below the threshold for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright concerns &lt;em&gt;copying&lt;/em&gt;, so writing said code again yourself (taking care to just take the idea behind it, not the exact wording) should put you in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As last resort, you could ask the authors nicely for permission to release their code under LGPL (or MIT, more in line with the &quot;share with everybody freely&quot; underlying theme of SE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-23T01:10:48.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2395" CreationDate="2016-01-23T02:06:57.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a messy situation created by &lt;strong&gt;software patents&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPLv3 has anti-patent clauses&lt;/strong&gt;; it explicitly forbids the licensor from using software patents to sue or limit the freedoms of licensees. This is an important difference between GPLv3 and GPLv2, the latter which does not mention patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;libfdk_aac is under a license that does not grant a patent license&lt;/strong&gt;. Users are required to obtain a patent license separately, if they haven't done so already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;NO PATENT LICENSE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PATENT CLAIMS, including without limitation the patents of Fraunhofer,&#xA;  ARE GRANTED BY THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE. Fraunhofer provides no warranty of patent non-infringement with&#xA;  respect to this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may use this FDK AAC Codec software or modifications thereto only for purposes that are authorized&#xA;  by appropriate patent licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/aac/+/master/NOTICE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/aac/+/master/NOTICE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the two licenses are incompatible. Media formats are often patent-encumbered, which is a problem that affects projects like FFmpeg, a big collection of incompatible codecs. This is why FFmpeg themselves generally refrain from distributing binaries at all, and give you options to compile a legal subset of their software for your own use (e.g. &lt;code&gt;--enable-gpl&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can Handbrake/FFmpeg HI distribute binaries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good question. While some projects like FFmpeg HI probably operate in a legal grey area, there are situations where software patents are not an issue, &lt;strike&gt;which probably describes what Handbrake is doing&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The applicability of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;software patents globally&lt;/a&gt; is very uneven. Unlike copyright which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;virtually consistent across the whole world&lt;/a&gt;, software patents either aren't recognised or are very limited in many places, such as the EU. Handbrake is hosted in France, so if you are also located somewhere that doesn't recognise software patents and download Handbrake, neither you nor Handbrake are affected by them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You probably already have a patent license for those codecs, because they are subsidised by your OS and/or hardware vendor, like Microsoft, Apple or Google (Android). Part of the money you paid for your devices went to patent holders. This also explains why many free software projects have historically suffered from poor codec choice; because these projects (e.g. FFmpeg, Linux, Firefox) are freely distributed, they cannot guarantee that their users have the required patent licenses, whereas someone distributing, say, OS X software can assume their users have licenses for the HE-AAC format via Apple's CoreAudio.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: Actually, Handbrake were unaware of the licensing incompatibility, and have removed libfdk_aac. Thanks for the update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T04:17:04.163" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T04:17:04.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-23T23:37:58.890" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certain licenses are listed as compatible with CC-SA on &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their website&lt;/a&gt;. If I have something that is CC-SA, say, version 3, can I redistribute it under CC-SA version 4, even if I made no modifications. To be clear, I would be following all the other requirements that CC-SA gives for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, how often do licenses require this? (Apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/323/can-i-redistribute-bsd-software-under-gpl-with-no-changes&quot;&gt;BSD doesn't&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask is because it is important for this Meta post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/273561/here-is-a-way-we-can-update-all-the-code-to-a-compatible-license&quot;&gt;Here is a way we can update all the code to a compatible license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4025" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-24T02:39:18.360" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T03:25:03.743" Title="If I don't modify a work, can I redistribute it under a compatible license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2405" CreationDate="2016-01-23T23:44:51.970" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to allow any usage/modification/distribution of my work except with the restriction that my work and derivatives must stay &lt;em&gt;&quot;libre&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think the right way is to publish my work under any version of several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; licenses. I hope this facilitate reuse of my work without license compatibility issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is multi-licensing a good practice in order to facilitate reuse of copyleft work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the conventions/requirements for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal notice about copyright&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multi-licensing&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2401/jpeg-comment-to-convey-copyleft-multi-licenced-copyright-notice&quot;&gt;JPEG comment to convey Copyleft Multi-Licenced Copyright Notice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2948" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T02:59:02.850" Title="Copyleft Multi-Licenced Copyright Notice" Tags="|copyleft|multi-licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2404" CreationDate="2016-01-24T00:04:32.777" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This question is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2400&quot;&gt;Copyleft Multi-Licenced Copyright Notice&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upload pictures on commons.wikimedia.org and I want to facilitate the reuse but I want derivatives stay &lt;em&gt;&quot;libre&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore I provide the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_markup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikicode&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;{{self|cc-by-sa-all|cc-sa|GFDL|FAL}}&lt;/code&gt; to multi-license them under some copyleft licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any version of CC-BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any version of CC-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/a&gt; (GFDL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Art_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Art License&lt;/a&gt; (FAL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about preventing license compatibility issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it a good practice to license work under all versions of multiple-licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Should I provide more copyleft licenses? Or should I remove unnecessary ones?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also mention these licenses within the JPEG comment. I think the text should stay short within the JPEG comment. This is my last version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 my-name (ɔ) Copyleft&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This work (photo) is multi-licensed under all versions of:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  CC-BY-SA, CC-SA, GNU-Free-Documentation-License and Free-Art-License.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Therefore recipients can choose the version and the license&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  under which they want to use/modify/distribute this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; The symbol 'ɔ' is from Unicode &lt;em&gt;U+0254 LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O&lt;/em&gt; that may be more widely available than Unicode &lt;em&gt;U+2184 LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Does this above notice meet the legal recommendations/requirements?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Should it be written in another way? Should it be more verbose/shorten? ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;  &amp;emsp;  Applying advices from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/69&quot;&gt;Zizouz212&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2404/2948&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 my-name&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This work (photo) is licensed under all versions of CC-BY-SA.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You may select the version of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2948" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T17:48:08.647" Title="JPEG comment to convey Copyleft Multi-Licenced Copyright Notice" Tags="|copyright|copyleft|multi-licensing|license-notice|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2016-01-24T00:24:30.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should add wording like &quot;You receive this work under Licence 1, or, at your option, License 2&quot; and include both licence texts in the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is advisable, best just go with one license. Less hassle downstream, nobody can take it and distribute a modified version just under Licence 1, others under License 2, and bingo, it is incompatible with itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T00:24:30.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2401" CreationDate="2016-01-24T01:23:14.913" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want anybody getting the work to get a clear notice on the license. Hidden in a comment, that next to nobody will see, doesn't really fullfill that rôle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T01:23:14.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2401" CreationDate="2016-01-24T02:49:09.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've got a couple issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, is the way you assert your copyright. Particularly this: (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 my-name &lt;strong&gt;(ɔ) Copyleft&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that the term &quot;copyleft&quot; is not a legally defined term. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; claims that the addition of this text has no legal significance whatsoever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to accomplish by offering your work over multiple licenses. Ideally, you should keep things under a sole license. The biggest reason for offering a work over multiple licenses is so that others can distribute their own modifications under other various licenses, and in the case that licenses are incompatible with each other, to provide optimum usage across the broad spectrum of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as a quick note, there is no &quot;CC SA&quot; license. ShareAlike is just a concept, that is embedded into the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY), and isn't a license in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What would I recommend?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the offering over multiple licenses provides advantages for yourself and for others that may make use of your work, you should really keep things simple, concise and to the point. Offer the work over a sole license, and the best bet would likely be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T02:49:09.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2400" CreationDate="2016-01-24T02:59:02.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is multi-licensing a good practice in order to facilitate reuse of copyleft work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multi-licensing is most often see as a business concept, and was generally seen where companies would offer code over a strong copyleft license (such as the GPL) and offer their own, proprietary license. I haven't really seen however, much of a use case of offering a work over multiple open source licenses, unless the licenses themselves are incompatible and you wish to make the work more accessible to both parties of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that common, and you should keep the licensing part concise. Only use it if you have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the conventions/requirements for the legal notice about copyright and multi-licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, assert your copyright, and make clear your intention to offer the work over multiple licenses. This should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Zizouz212.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This work is available under both the [1st license] and [2nd license]. You may choose a license in which to follow the terms and conditions at your own discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you also include a copy of the licenses that you are offering in there as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-01-24T02:59:02.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-24T22:38:46.727" Score="3" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up question from &lt;a href=&quot;//programmers.stackexchange.com/q/308233&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm allowed to delay the distribution of the binary and source code as long as I provide the source code eventually. This makes me wonder if that does not defeat the purpose of the GPLV2 completely. If that is true, I could choose an arbitrary time when I release the source. So, I might change GPLv2 code and release the source eventually, years after the binary when my program does not have any business value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question because I'm annoyed that Apple releases their open source component (some which are licensed under GPL) deliberately after their binary release. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4029" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-01-24T23:31:18.730" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T00:23:08.207" Title="When do I have to make GPLv2 source code available" Tags="|distribution|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2016-01-25T00:23:08.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember GPL is from 1985 or thereabouts, way before Internet and ubiquitous access to files. Much of it is dictated by the technology of the age, and also by even older copyright laws. You'd get programs on tape, diskettes were rarely used (and very low capacity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember that the obligations described apply &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to somebody who isn't the owner of the relevant copyright. I can put my program under GPL, distribute binaries only and give noone the source. Makes little sense, but is well in my right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can either ship source with the binaries (the idea being on the same tape) or add an offer to give the source for five years to anybody who gets the binary somehow. Today usually binaries and source are shipped over the 'net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I put up only binaries for a GPL package that I don't own, anybody can ask for source. I don't remember any time frame, but presumably taking a few weeks (or even more) would not be considered a violation by a court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T00:23:08.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-25T10:04:17.073" Score="1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a framework, and want it to be dual-licensed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free for non-commercial use; if someone improves the code, then the only way to publish it is by a pull request on Github (he cannot make his own &quot;branch&quot; and develop it basing on my code). Then all the copyrights of the modification are acquired by me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;paid for commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know maybe adequate, common licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4039" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-10T13:48:09.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T13:48:09.233" Title="Open source license not allowing to publish others changes" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2410" CreationDate="2016-01-25T10:32:28.677" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no open source license that allows you to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you're looking to prevent people modifying your software without going through you restricts some of the freedoms that are essential to open source. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the license you want isn't an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you're looking to be open source, you can't discriminate based on fields of endeavour, or commercial viability, etc. that means you can't make it free for personal use and paid for commercial use using an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T10:32:28.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2410" CreationDate="2016-01-25T14:12:40.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; software anymore, and your code is very unlikely to be often used (unless you build some way to sell it otherwise, and that requires a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of time and &lt;em&gt;money&lt;/em&gt; in marketing), see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1565/910&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. Probably, nobody will care about your framework. BTW, you are quite unlikely to get contributions if you are a commercial entity requiring a copyright assignment (notice that the FSF requires a copyright assignment, but it is non-profit, and that assignment is a big stopper to occasionally contribute to GNU projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know an example (academically interesting) of such code: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://compcert.inria.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CompCert&lt;/a&gt; project (a certified and proven C99 compiler). For academic (or personal) usage, the source code is freely available. But commercial licenses are available from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.absint.com/compcert/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AbsInt&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, INRIA folks working on CompCert never claimed that it is open source software. AFAIK they don't want (or don't care about) external contributions (except perhaps by few selected academic partners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a framework or library, I would suggest to use the GPLv3 (not the LGPL) license. It is then restricting the free software to free software projects (since a GPLv3 library cannot be &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; to a proprietary software without additional permission), but you won't own the improvements contributed by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably should hire a lawyer, and of course &lt;em&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/em&gt; (and details depend upon the country, legal system, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T07:14:14.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2410" CreationDate="2016-01-25T16:18:06.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want a closed source license, with the provision that any changes have to be shared with you giving you full copyright ownership (or at least a license to use it as you see fit). Not open source at all. Ask a lawyer expert in the relevant area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this can work. But that means you need a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; community of knowledgeable users (and a lot of handholding for those who screw up futzing around with the code, or just want to come up to speed), people doing the vetting/cleanup/integration of the patches by the community. Only very few users do go and add features, most of the time those will (at least as you get them) be extremely narrow-focused, scratch-my-local-itch type changes. It means a very diverse user base, and that in itself is a huge problem for any particular package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-25T16:18:06.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-26T11:12:15.493" Score="1" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a commercial application which contains closed source code and a script API which is open source. Currently I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt; similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/about/google-individual&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which has to be signed by each contributor to be able to make changes/updates to the script API. However I'm not quite sure under which license I should release the public script API source code? The code belongs to me (copyright) but users should be able to use the code to design and distribute plugins for free or commercially, however I would like some legal protection in case someone decides to use the script API code and turn it into something evil/illegal/copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if there already exists a license which suits my demands?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4047" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T14:35:23.987" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T22:50:52.487" Title="How should I license my source code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-02-22T02:15:18.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-26T12:13:59.060" Score="6" ViewCount="1682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing an online service that allows to share and download music from different source on the internet, this is a free service without subscription or registration, I found a perfect flag icons I will like to integrate into the website countries section, but it comes with Creative Commons license: &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm seriously confused on whether to use the flags because I am going to be running advertisements from Google and some other places to help with the financing of the web hosting and the Terms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You must give appropriate credit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really don't want to attribute any link on that page that has the logo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may not use the material for commercial purposes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does running of advert which might earn me some cash means I can't use it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4048" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T16:20:33.717" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T16:20:33.717" Title="Using CC BY-NC-ND images on website with ads" Tags="|attribution|commercial|non-commercial|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2426" CreationDate="2016-01-28T11:02:25.673" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It should be noted that this question appears to have only historical relevance now that LinkedIn has discontinued the requirement to indicate how you know a contact when adding them a while ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I have a day-to-day job, I consider my open source contributions to be a part of my professional life. I highlight them during job interviews, and accordingly, I would like to treat my contacts from the FLOSS world as a part of my professional network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I would like to add these people in my LinkedIn profile. Usually, they have no objections at all to this idea when I ask for their permission, so I happily open LinkedIn, ready to add the respective person ... just to be presented with the usual trick question that gives me headaches for almost every of my contacts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you know Tony Testcase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get plenty of options, none of which seem to fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colleague&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, yes (colleague within a given project), but I have to select one of the companies from my CV. My FLOSS contributions are not related to any of the companies I worked for, however. On the other hand, while LinkedIn allows defining contributions to &lt;em&gt;projects&lt;/em&gt;, these projects do not appear in the dropdown list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classmate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, no. Doesn't fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've done business together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, this would be my favourite. Unfortunately, once again, LinkedIn insists that I choose one of my former or current employers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Friend&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the fallback I usually choose, even though it seems rather pushy to me. While I am on friendly terms with my FLOSS contacts, most of them are far from what I would consider a &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot;. I am aware this is culturally dependent, but in my local culture (Germany), I would not even describe work colleagues who I occasionally see in my spare time as &amp;quot;friends&amp;quot;. Consequently, I find it presumptuous to ask FLOSS contacts with who I have exchanged at most a few organizational e-mails to consider me a &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot;, as I seem to be doing when I choose this option on LinkedIn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this said, this seems to be the only viable option for FLOSS contacts, as it does not require any additional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be fitting, for lack of any better options, but it seems to check whether I know &amp;quot;the e-mail address&amp;quot; of the person I am connecting to that is stored on LinkedIn. For FLOSS development, I have, on various occasions, only been in touch via Skype, or via an e-mail address supplied by SourceForge, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know Tony Testcase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too distanced by the same amount that the &lt;em&gt;Friend&lt;/em&gt; option from above is too pushy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware this is not an important problem and it doesn't &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; matter, but I try to keep my data tidy, so I wonder whether there is a best practice for this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="765" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T14:26:39.737" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T14:26:39.737" Title="&quot;Standard procedure&quot; for connecting to fellow open source developers on LinkedIn" Tags="|contributor|interpersonal-issues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T13:04:41.407" Score="3" ViewCount="741" Body="&lt;p&gt;To license a project in GitHub, can I do it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many files like src-&gt;Java, res, etc for my Android app&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to use Apache license v 2.0 for open sourcing it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So will the license apply if I use it in the header of one of my files(not all files) will it be open sourced or only that one file is open sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4068" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T14:39:58.717" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T14:39:58.717" Title="How can I open source a repository on GitHub by using Apache license in only one file?" Tags="|license-notice|apache-2.0|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2420" CreationDate="2016-01-28T14:15:33.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be sure that the entire project is licensed, you should be including a LICENSE file in the root directory of you're repository. In the README, you can make it explicit that the project is licensed under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only put the license in a header of one source file, personally I'd assume that only that file is licensed, rather than the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T14:15:33.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-28T14:27:11.633" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;The UIUC license contains the clauses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of &lt;strong&gt;source code&lt;/strong&gt; must retain the above copyright notice,&#xA;  this list of conditions and the following disclaimers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions in &lt;strong&gt;binary form&lt;/strong&gt; must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of&#xA;  conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation and/or&#xA;  other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If compiling a project that contains code from a project released under this license, from C/C++ to Javascript using Emscripten, for the purposes of the license is the output of the compilation source code, binary, or neither?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific case is using the standard library &lt;a href=&quot;http://libcxx.llvm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;libc++&lt;/a&gt; in a project, which I believe is included with clang/fastcomp that comes with Emscripten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3857" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T14:30:35.217" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T14:30:35.217" Title="Emscripten-compiled code under The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (NCSA) UIUC" Tags="|source-code|transpiling|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2422" CreationDate="2016-01-28T21:43:45.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me &lt;em&gt;binary&lt;/em&gt; form (in your context) is anything which is not &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; code is the preferred form on which &lt;em&gt;human developers&lt;/em&gt; want to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sense generated C or C++ code (which is generally unreadable) is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; source code, and generated Javascript code is also &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So broadly speaking, generated Javascript can be considered as &quot;binary form&quot; (in particular, because it is practically unreadable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is just my opinion, and IANAL. Perhaps you should ask your lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably what ultimately would matter is what is judged by some court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, it looks like you might handle generated Javascript both as binary and as source. Maybe you could copy/paste a copyright notice from &lt;code&gt;libc++&lt;/code&gt; source to generated Javascript...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, my &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc-melt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt; is somehow copying copyright comments from MELT source to generated C++ (which I feel is binary) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2016-01-28T21:55:37.610" LastActivityDate="2016-01-28T21:55:37.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2422" CreationDate="2016-01-29T00:51:05.437" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU libstdc++ is under GPLv3, with some special dispensations. The LLVM C++ library libc++ is dual licensed, under MIT and UIUC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the generated code is less than readable, and I would consider it morally binary code. If in doubt, comply with both requests, and add original source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T00:51:05.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1556" CreationDate="2016-01-29T00:59:47.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds has famously stated that his primary job when maintaining the Linux kernel was to reject patches. Unless you want to get buried in features growing each which way, and ending up with an unmaintainable mess in your hands, you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to put down your foot. But (as other answers state) make sure what kinds of contributions are and aren't welcome (roughly, you can't write down each minute detail). State e.g. programming standards, overview of configuration file formats, tools used for building, types of platforms considered for porting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As things stand today, if your project is on a public platform (and license allowing), if I post a patch and you don't like it, I can create my own fork. Time will tell if mine survives, can keep up with yours, or even become more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T00:59:47.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2419" CreationDate="2016-01-29T02:31:43.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On LinkedIn, I tend to go with 'colleague' or 'friend'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The case for colleague&lt;/strong&gt;: a lot of people I know have a pseudo &quot;developer at open-source&quot; experience, and for some of my larger open-source contributions I actually have setup a LinkedIn &quot;company&quot;. If you take that step, you can just use that to link all these accounts together. Its also important to recognise that open-source work &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; work, its just unpaid work. So saying you are both colleagues is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The case for friend&lt;/strong&gt;: Selecting friend means not having to select a company, and unless I am mistaken your connection doesn't see how you've indicated you are connected. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, I'd go for the former and have a dedicated work entry for open-source, the advantage of this is that you can also attach individual projects to this work experience as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user443" LastActivityDate="2016-01-29T02:31:43.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2416" CreationDate="2016-01-29T13:07:17.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A commercial use is one primarily intended for commercial advantage or monetary compensation. (Source: Creative commons)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you only have the adverts for financing the page it's ok, but when you are making money out of it it's not ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I really don't want to attribute any link on that page that has the logo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That isn't possible. But you could contact the author of the images to give it to you under a special license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you could link to it under copyright or tos as written in the cc wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Author if supplied and attribution parties if designated in copyright notice, TOS, or other reasonable means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3757" LastEditorUserId="3757" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T10:52:03.067" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T10:52:03.067" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2273" CreationDate="2016-01-30T08:09:26.543" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the excellent points by @vonbrand, you should try to improve whatever software you actually &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; on a frequent basis. Your experience as a user will definitely put you on a good starting position to correctly identify features missing, properly test things, write good bug reports and hopefully motivate you more than fixing some bug in $random_project just for the sake of learning how to build a class in Py.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minor side effect is that, besides benefitting you as a user, you will benefit people you're more likely to relate to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want the &lt;em&gt;low hanging fruits&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a list of some projects you find useful on a frequent basis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Narrow down based on project activity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See if there's one you like that's stalling (e.g., there are few main devs, and they accept pull requests, but haven't been committing new features or fixes themselves for a while).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you manage to find such a project, I'm sure the devs will be more than happy with the extra hand and value your effort, even if you fix only minor things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest to &lt;strong&gt;avoid&lt;/strong&gt; abandonware at the level of proficiency you seem to be, since that will basically mean you need to fork and maintain it, thus inheriting the whole project to your responsibility. It might be overkill for the time being, and usually available time is the most important currency around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4082" LastActivityDate="2016-01-30T08:09:26.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2441" CreationDate="2016-01-30T16:17:39.617" Score="3" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AGPLv3 §13 (Remote Network Interaction)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;  Program, &lt;strong&gt;your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;  interacting with it remotely&lt;/strong&gt; through a computer network (if your&#xA;  version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;  Corresponding Source of your version ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume I'd want to write a VNC server. It is clear that the user does not directly interact with the software but rather with the applications displaying on the framebuffer which is serverved by the software.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is still technically possible for the software to inject some text/information (e.g. for some seconds on the first connect) into the framebuffer being encoded that &quot;&lt;em&gt;prominently offers all users interacting ... the corresponding source&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand this requirement for the source code offer only applies if the program was modified - right?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would I have to ship this functionality (injecting a prominent message in the framebuffer) in the source so that someone who modifies the code has an easy way to activate this framebuffer overlay in order to comply with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how could someone modifying the source comply with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this overlay might be quite annoying It should not be required for users who e.g. install a debian package.&#xA;But Linux distributions normally do make modifications to source codes, hence thez would have to enable this nag screen - right ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, do modifications like security patches or other distribution specific patches (like path changes etc.) count as modifications ?&#xA;If that is the case, how would one make an exception that distribution specific patches must not trigger the &quot;prominent offer&quot; requirement ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4085" LastEditorUserId="4085" LastEditDate="2016-01-30T19:41:32.367" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T00:37:02.983" Title="AGPLv3 §13 and non-interactive software" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2442" CreationDate="2016-01-31T14:20:33.873" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a webframework hosted on a public Github repository.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same framework is hosted on a server with some customization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So how can I manage those two states developement and production?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current approach is pretty expensive: On the Server I pull the code from the repo, get merge conflicts because of the customization, have to merge it, and sometimes have to add my customization again.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't want my customization to be public, so a different branch for production is no option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4094" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T13:57:07.923" Title="How to manage opensource and customization" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2016-02-04T05:31:31.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2430" CreationDate="2016-01-31T15:19:25.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can have a &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; branch on your development machine(s). Yes, it becomes a hassle to keep it up to date. On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-on-the-Server-Gitosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gitosis&lt;/a&gt; handles private branches, public and private repositories, and doesn't need a whole lot to set up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T15:19:25.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2415" CreationDate="2016-01-31T22:50:52.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't really stop people from doing something &quot;evil&quot; with your code. However, most licenses carry a 'warranty' statement disclaiming any liability for damages that your program may cause, which may very well be caused by someone using your Script API for evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To distance yourself even further from bad actors, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD-3 License&lt;/a&gt; has this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preventing people from using your name to endorse their evil activities seem like a good way to get some legal protection as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-01-31T22:50:52.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-01-31T22:57:42.700" Score="17" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an open source project and suspect one contributor has submitted code that is not their own and is under a closed source copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know we have to remove the code.  Also I assume anyone that has examined the tainted code cannot contribute a new implementation for that feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other steps we should take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4100" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T22:49:49.287" Title="What to do when proprietary code is found in your open source project?" Tags="|contributor|copyright|project-management|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2016-02-01T02:52:22.020" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly, there is little you can do. I believe you can argue that you accepted the code in good faith, and avoid the worst. Try to collect and organize any evidence of the affair (emails, commit identifiers, ...). Keep a copy of the current version control system contents around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To replace the tainted code, you can see if you can set different objectives (more general, utmost performance, more portable) or use other techniques (use hashing instead of trees for searching, ...). Such differences &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; make the replacement different enough to avoid accusations of copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also have to go into the history in your version control system to erase the copied code. But before going to any great lengths, consult with a lawyer (or perhaps ask around at &lt;a href=&quot;http://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but check first if such a question is on-topic there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T01:36:31.460" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T01:36:31.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2439" CreationDate="2016-02-01T09:34:19.573" Score="11" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a Java project licensed under Apache 2.0, but there's a fair bit of behavior locked away in an &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; package that isn't checked into the project's repository (though the compiled files are in the release binaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without these files the project cannot even compile, and even if the compilation issues were refactored out central functionality would be missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this even really Open Source software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By bundling in a closed-source core is it violating its own license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, is there any recourse? I'm not trying to sue anyone, I just don't think it's fair to act like your project is open source, and release critically incomplete source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="984" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T02:30:13.970" Title="Is there any recourse when an &quot;Open Source&quot; project has a closed-source core?" Tags="|licensing|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2438" CreationDate="2016-02-01T10:37:50.617" Score="9" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;My most recent encounter with WebYog's SqlYog revealed that the vendor has  made their Community edition &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webyog/sqlyog-community&quot;&gt;open source, and available on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, however the product still has obtrusive ads in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clearly licensed under GPL, and although I haven't checked whether the ads are easily removable or contained in one of the included compiled libraries, I'm curious as to their motivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not something I would do; is there anything inherently wrong with publicly forking and possibly even promoting a project like this given that it is released under GPL, for the sole purpose of removing ads and bloat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question of course is not specific to SQLyog, and could extend to other projects, like Ubuntu's (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/licensing&quot;&gt;possibly not GPL?&lt;/a&gt;) Desktop variant for example, which includes links to Amazon; or FileZilla, which is distributed via SourceForge, and consequently carries all the bonuses of their much-loved downloader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4102" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T13:13:54.897" Title="Removing Ads from Open Source projects" Tags="|gpl|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-01T13:04:03.600" Score="6" ViewCount="1169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am integrating an LGPL application to my iOS application. I am modifying the LGPL application in such a way that, I am integrating a new library to it. So the flow is like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appl Code &gt;&gt; LGPL Library &gt;&gt; &lt;strong&gt;New Library&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to make the &lt;strong&gt;New Library&lt;/strong&gt; opensource? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I am planning to do to meet the license requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Make the modified  LGPL application opensource (LGPL) via github fork&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Make the other parts of the application available on demand as object files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this enough to meet LGPL requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4103" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T01:00:50.130" Title="iOS application using LGPL library" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2436" CreationDate="2016-02-01T13:13:54.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do that. The GPL gives you the right to make modifications and distribute these. But considering that this is conflicting with the business interests of the original creators, you can expect that they will see what they can do to stop you. One thing they &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; try is sue for violation of the &quot;SQLyog&quot; trademark. To protect you from trademark claims, you need to give your software a different name. This makes it harder to promote it as &quot;SQLyog without ads&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T13:13:54.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2435" CreationDate="2016-02-01T17:21:39.550" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is this even really Open Source software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts that have source code available and are licensed under an open source license are open source software, according to the OSI. The parts that do not have source code available or are not licensed under an open source license are not open source software. Since the software includes some components that fail to satisfy the definition of open source software, it is correct to say that the entire project, considered in totality, is not completely open source software. Of course, the components that do satisfy the definition &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; open-source, though they have the weakness (from a software-freedom perspective) of being subject to a problem similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.en.html&quot;&gt;the Java Trap&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., free code designed to run in a non-free environment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;By bundling in a closed-source core is it violating its own license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. There are several points the would independently be sufficient to show that there is no license violation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the same copyright holder owns both the core &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; closed-source package and the supporting open-source components, there cannot be any violation. The copyright holder doesn't need a license to do anything with their own code; they may &lt;em&gt;offer&lt;/em&gt; a license to others to perform some subset of copyright-protected actions. It's impossible for a copyright holder to violate their own license, because licenses are only offered to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the closed-source and open-source components are owned by the different people, then the only possible violation here is against the owner of the closed-source component, if it was not licensed in a way that allows reuse or redistribution alongside Apache-licensed code. If it was licensed in a way that allows reuse (e.g., if the binaries were licensed under the Apache 2.0 license), then there is no violation. If the closed-source component were licensed under the GPL, then there &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; indeed be a violation because the downstream author didn't include the source code of the upstream author's code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You probably think they might be a violation because you expect the open source license to require the totality of the project's source code to be available. However, this is only true for copyleft licenses like the GPL (not permissive licenses like Apache).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, is there any recourse? I'm not trying to sue anyone, I just don't think it's fair to act like your project is open source, and release critically incomplete source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of software may license it however they please. If they want to make the binaries freely available but only release source code for half of the files, or none of them, that's perfectly legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your complaint appears to be the author's advertising the project as open source while it includes some non-open components. The only possible recourse I can think of would be some kind of consumer protection law against false advertising, if the author makes claims that the project is open source in a way that is demonstrably false. However, since &quot;open source&quot; is a tremendously nebulous term (e.g., the OSI failed to secure a trademark on the term), I think it is unlikely such a suit would prevail, even if you could identify a relevant statute to pursue legal action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T14:07:52.117" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T14:07:52.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2429" CreationDate="2016-02-01T19:03:23.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So would I have to ship this functionality (injecting a prominent message in the framebuffer) in the source so that someone who modifies the code has an easy way to activate this framebuffer overlay in order to comply with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, no, you do not. As the original author and copyright holder, you are under no obligation to add a prominent offer of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, how could someone modifying the source comply with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may do so by adding such a feature themselves. If you feel that requiring downstream modifiers to write such a feature this unfairly onerous, then you are welcome to write it yourself. You are in no way legally required to do so, though. (Note also that such a feature would probably only need to be written once, since after the first source-offer mechanism was added to your code by a downstream project, others could just use that in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;do modifications like security patches or other distribution specific patches (like path changes etc.) count as modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, the any change that is not eligible for copyright (e.g., in the U.S., it may fail to contain a &quot;modicum of creativity&quot;) does not create a derivative work under copyright. therefore, purely mechanical changes like alterations to file paths or connection settings do not create a derivative work and do not constitute &quot;modifying the program&quot;. If you are unconvinced by this argument, you could also make the configuration option a separate data file and explicitly license it differently from the other files. This file would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;just data&lt;/a&gt; to the AGPL program, not part of the AGPL program itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Security fixes are quite another matter. Since they substantially change the behavior of the program, they are probably eligible for copyright and would constitute modifying the program. The easy imperfect fix is to push the security patch up to the original project and then receive it as a new (unmodified) version of the project. However, this requires a cooperative and responsive maintainer on the original project. Failing this option, the only possibility for a recipient is to modify the program with the security patch and write functionality to share the new source (if no such functionality already exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how would one make an exception that distribution specific patches must not trigger the &quot;prominent offer&quot; requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot think of any permission that would cleanly allow security patches without allowing general changes, because the notion of a &quot;security patch&quot; is a nebulous subset of all possible patches. You can't say, &quot;patches must not substantially change the behavior of the software,&quot; because often the entire point of a security patch is to change the behavior of the software (i.e., so that it doesn't behave insecurely anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, changes that are insufficiently creative to qualify for copyright probably already fail to trigger the &quot;if you modify the Program&quot; condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-02-01T19:03:23.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2429" CreationDate="2016-02-01T22:10:37.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll find a similar issue in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLProxy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For software that runs a proxy server licensed under the AGPL, how can I provide an offer of source to users interacting with that&#xA;  code?&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For software on a proxy server, you can provide an offer of&#xA;  source through a normal method of delivering messages to users of that&#xA;  kind of proxy. For example, a Web proxy could use a landing page. When&#xA;  users initially start using the proxy, you can direct them to a page&#xA;  with the offer of source along with any other information you choose&#xA;  to provide ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although a proxy server is quite different from a VNC server it is a perfect example to understand the license authors' intention: Use any available means to display the offer of source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as you've correctly pointed out it &lt;strong&gt;is possible&lt;/strong&gt; for a VNC server to display (actually draw) a message and therefore someone who modifies the code is obliged to use this functionality for the offer of source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is that you implement this feature in your official version and add an option (via config file) to disable this feature. Something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# This program is distributed under the terms of the AGPLv3.&#xA;# If you have modified the program, your modified version must prominently offer&#xA;# all users interacting with it an opportunity to receive the corresponding&#xA;# source of your version.&#xA;# See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13 for details&#xA;# &#xA;# YOU MUST NOT DISABLE THE FOLLOWING OPTION UNLESS YOU HAVE NOT MODIFIED THE&#xA;# SOURCE CODE&#xA;#&#xA;SHOW_SOURCE_OFFER=TRUE&#xA;SOURCE_CODE_LINK=http://link.to.your/sourcecode.tar.gz &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4107" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T00:37:02.983" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T00:37:02.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2430" CreationDate="2016-02-02T13:49:45.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try reconsidering the architecture of your application. Can you modify the open framework to allow you to implement the private changes using a plugin or theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source applications take advantage of the flexibility provided by plugins and themes. The Atom text editor and the Wordpress website framework are two examples of open source software with strong plugin and theme communities. Wordpress demonstrates how closed features can be built to extend an open framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can step beyond plugins and themes by introducing an API or breaking a large open source project into a collection of smaller projects. The Linux and UNIX communities often favor smaller, focused tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget to check the licenses of the open source frameworks you choose and make sure they allow the flexibility you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3844" LastEditorUserId="3844" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T13:57:07.923" LastActivityDate="2016-02-02T13:57:07.923" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2445" CreationDate="2016-02-02T22:03:38.880" Score="5" ViewCount="1530" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created an open-source project in github and R around financial calculations under GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I saw in the traffic graph of github that someone cloned the repository and that there was a visit from this referring site: jira.&quot;company name&quot;.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I researched a bit the &quot;company name&quot; and it seems that it is a financial technology company which sells non open-source systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is apparent that they downloaded my software and even put a link to their jira system towards it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is illegal, correct? How should I proceed so as to ask for a fee for the use of my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4115" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-02-02T22:08:11.350" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T12:13:26.530" Title="What if a company uses my open source project for a closed-source system?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2443" CreationDate="2016-02-02T23:49:26.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL3 license does not prevent people from using your code in commercial apps. It requires that they comply with the license to use your software.  As the copyright owner of the code you have the right to contact them and find out if they are complying with the terms of the GPL3.  If they aren't you can let them know that they do not have the right to use your code until they do.  The Free Software Foundation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;fsf.org&lt;/a&gt;) can help you if there is an issue with GPL compliance.  You may want to change the terms of use for your code if you don't want people using it for commercial products for free.  For example, there are Creative Commons licenses with non commercial options.  You can also dual license the code, GPL3 or introduce your own commercial terms (where they have to pay you for use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4116" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T02:09:58.610" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T02:09:58.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2443" CreationDate="2016-02-03T12:07:28.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, cloning your GIT repository into their JIRA is not yet illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the GPL only covers &lt;em&gt;redistribution&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;. When they just want to look at it (maybe to check what the competition is doing) or use it internally, this is perfectly fine and within the coditions of the GPL. They can even change it for internal use without having to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they start violating your copyright the moment they integrate your code into a non-GPL program &lt;strong&gt;and distribute&lt;/strong&gt; this program to other parties. Unless you have good reason to believe that this is happening, you have no legal basis for doing anything against it. You might still want to keep an eye on them and wait if they announce a product which sounds suspiciously similar to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-02-03T12:13:26.530" LastActivityDate="2016-02-03T12:13:26.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T10:10:09.207" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use XPCOM technology to create XPCOM components for our Firefox add-on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For creating any XPCOM component, Mozilla's XULRunner tool is needed as a development tool. XULRunner is under the Mozilla Public License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that will XULRunner's license affect the XPCOM component I created?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no , is there any official document or any justification? (I personally think no, but can't find any official justification )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about XPCOM: &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;about XULRunner: &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/XULRunner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/XULRunner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4129" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-02-04T13:08:25.550" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T18:08:29.613" Title="Are there any license limitations for my created XPCOM component?" Tags="|licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T14:56:55.043" Score="6" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder whether Open Source libraries used within firmware burnt (in flash or ROM) in an IC that is sold to customers building products with it requires the final manufacturer to give credits (attribution) to the OSS project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is better described with an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IC Manufacturer A builds a new chip that contains an Open Source SPI library licensed under the 3-clause BSD license. Manufacturer A credits the OSS project on its webpage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Product Manufacturer B buys a reel of those chips and manufactures a new toy that contains the chip on the motherboard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Manufacturer B also obliged to credit the OSS project, even though it only indirectly redistributed the SPI library in binary form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4132" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-05T02:40:47.777" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T20:07:12.667" Title="Open Source libraries inside IC firmware and attribution obligation" Tags="|licensing|attribution|firmware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2449" CreationDate="2016-02-04T17:55:25.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe they have to credit the SPI library somehow. It's not too onerous, anyway, to place a link on their webpage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T17:55:25.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2447" CreationDate="2016-02-04T18:08:29.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any licensing information on the pages. Presumably the tools are under the Mozilla Public License, which essentially says you must share changes to the code licensed under it, but do as you please with the rest of any program using said code. Thus there would be &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; effect on your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make absolutely sure, you should contact the Mozilla folks, and ask them to add your question to their FAQs, clarifying the situation for everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-04T18:08:29.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-04T20:00:20.537" Score="1" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the Volley library, provided by Google, to do some http requests on android app. The Volley library is under the &quot;Creative Commons Attribution 2.5&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to publish my app later on the Play Store, do i have something special to do to be able to use this library ? I read the license but i don't really understand if there is some restrictions/things to do to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4136" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-09T23:16:15.130" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T16:20:07.787" Title="Volley library and publish on Play Store" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-06T16:52:20.810" Score="5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downloaded few source codes for android from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.java2s.com/Open-Source/Android_Free_Code/Game/List_of_Free_code_Game.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see this website doesn't state the license of these source codes anywhere, although the title say free code game and it says open source in the url, I can't find a txt file in the apps or a line in the website stating the license for these projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to modify these apps and upload them to play store, or sell them, the problem is that I don't know if I have the right to do this or not. above this, when using libraries with apache license, I don't know if the whole app will be considered under this license or just the parts used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4155" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T02:11:31.570" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T02:11:31.570" Title="When using libraries taken from Github, where should I put the Apache license?" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2453" CreationDate="2016-02-06T22:38:25.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is answered right on their site's footer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Demo Source and Support. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line (&lt;em&gt;All rights reserved.&lt;/em&gt;) is a vague and general assertion statement which tries to assert all possible rights on the code/software to the copyright holder. This essentially means that you have ZERO rights to use the downloaded code or software besides an academic study and experimentation. If the said source-code is indeed open-source, you will typically find a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file distributed along with your source-code because most &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FOSS licenses&lt;/a&gt; have a clause that allows (or sometimes even requires in case of GPL/LGPL) the distributor to include that &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; while giving you the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, this &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file contains the usual text that grants YOU, the user, all rights to the software. The templates for these texts are usually one of the standard OSI approved FOSS licenses such as GPL (GNU General Public License), Apache, MIT, Mozilla, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="4160" LastEditDate="2016-02-07T09:00:57.920" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T09:00:57.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2433" CreationDate="2016-02-06T22:49:49.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @vonbrand suggests, try to make a separate &lt;code&gt;clean room&lt;/code&gt; implementation of the said source-code and then get rid of it. The ideal way is to give the new implementation task to a new member who doesn't know anything about the tainted code and just instruct him/her with the business-logic that needs implemented in the said module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2016-02-06T22:49:49.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2458" CreationDate="2016-02-07T09:46:45.580" Score="18" ViewCount="3333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Straight up: I've never heard of the term 'copyleft' before. The fact that I get that little red squiggle under it tells me it's not really a word. Concisely, my question is, what does it mean to you? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw it tagged on a few questions so I read the &lt;a href=&quot;//opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/copyleft&quot;&gt;tag description:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about the copyleft concept (also known as Share-Alike), a concept that promotes or enforces the use of the same or compatible license for derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page on it. My understanding is that copyleft has attributes of Share-Alike but the author must disclose any other terms alongside it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems like a bit of a useless term. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why describe it as copyleft if you need to add a licence to it anyway? Would you not be better off describing it as copyright with already-agreed-upon licenses? Otherwise it's only another word for Share-Alike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4164" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T02:34:13.273" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T01:41:07.423" Title="What is copyleft?" Tags="|copyleft|terminology|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2464" CreationDate="2016-02-07T12:02:14.170" Score="3" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish an open source program, but I am not sure which licence I should use. Here are my criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copying and modifying the source code must be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice and the license must be included in all copies of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If changes are made and published, there must be a mention that changes were made, and a pointer to the original (for example: URL to the original source code, or copy of the original source code) must be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license text is short and understandable by a normal software developer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there licenses that meet all these criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4165" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T23:01:23.053" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T02:32:30.833" Title="Short open source license that requires mentioning if changes were made" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2456" CreationDate="2016-02-07T12:56:26.883" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyleft&lt;/em&gt; is actually a term coined by Richard Stallman (also called RMS) who is the pioneer of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Movement&lt;/a&gt; which ultimately resulted in today's world where people take using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FOSS software&lt;/a&gt; so much for granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stallman originally used this term to distinguish his way of free software licensing (GNU GPL/LGPL) from the other &lt;em&gt;Copyright&lt;/em&gt; licenses which are typically designed by proprietary companies to keep the holding rights of a software to themselves by not disclosing the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, &lt;em&gt;freedom to users&lt;/em&gt; is the major objective of FSF movement and it doesn't have anything to do with &lt;em&gt;zero cost&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;free as in beer&lt;/em&gt;, it refers to &lt;em&gt;free as in freedom&lt;/em&gt;, which is more expressed by the term &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;other camp&lt;/a&gt; in the FOSS world, by contrast, prefers to use the term &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt;. This camp favors software licenses like MIT, Apache, BSD, etc. which generally grant all usage rights along with the code. This second camp also prefers the term open source to free software. The reason is that &lt;em&gt;software innovation&lt;/em&gt; resulting from source code being openly developed is a far more important objective for this camp than some liberal ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, both these camps continue to contribute their efforts in the FOSS world today and to an extent, respect each other's views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To elaborate a bit on the legal implications, whilst both permissive and copyleft licenses grant their users freedom along with the code, there is a difference between these two kinds of freedom. Permissive licenses grant freedom to do just about anything with the source code to that &lt;em&gt;one particular user&lt;/em&gt;. Copyleft licenses by contrast, tries to secure freedom to it's entire &lt;em&gt;userbase&lt;/em&gt; by restricting that particular user's ability to make said source code proprietary or closed. It achieves this by mandating that any further modification to the copyleft licensed source should be distributed on a similar copyleft license terms. This mandate usually gives the incorrect impression to the initial observer that copyleft licenses are restrictive or &quot;viral&quot; in nature, but a detailed analysis reveals that its not true. Copyleft just tries to secure maximum freedom for the entire community or the user base, not just one user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I described in one of the comments below, the difference between permissive and copyleft is similar to the one between dictatorship and democracy. Rulers in both kinds of rule usually have the freedom to do anything, but democracy has some restrictions on the ruler since it tries to secure freedom to the entire masses, not just that one dictator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT-2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above analogy, I don't want to imply any negativity about the word &lt;em&gt;dictator&lt;/em&gt; here, nor do I want to send a message that I'm in favor of copyleft licenses and against the permissive ones. In fact, &lt;em&gt;dictatorship&lt;/em&gt; itself is a neutral word in Political Science, but only due to actions of a few bad rulers, its usage has acquired a negative connotation. Dictators can be good too (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BDFL Linus Torvalds&lt;/a&gt;). Similarly, permissive licensed software, in the right hands could bring out the best for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do think GPL is a good thing because it prevents the &lt;em&gt;appleization&lt;/em&gt; of software, but Apple positively surprised us today by taking a strong stance in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;favor of its users&lt;/a&gt;. Tomorrow, it might even go ahead and open-source the OSX stack (though I don't think it that likely in the near future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="4160" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T01:41:07.423" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T01:41:07.423" CommentCount="29" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2456" CreationDate="2016-02-07T15:33:33.023" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prahlad provides an excellent answer on the origin of the term, but doesn't expand that much on the legal implications of using the term. In summary, it forces any modifications to copyleft works to also be released under the same terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First off, copyleft has no legal significance.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you were to say that a project is copyleft, it doesn't mean anything. Under the law, that statement isn't clear, and can't have any meaning, since copyleft is never defined under the law. Think of it as a term in popular culture: people use it, but it doesn't really mean much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second, there is no &quot;one-size-fits-all&quot; kind of copyleft.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a few different &quot;copyleft&quot; licences: most notably, the Mozilla Public Licence, and the GNU General Public Licence. These are both &quot;copyleft&quot; licences - what's the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple definition of copyleft is that changes will be released under the same licence. With the Mozilla licence, you can make your own projects under the Mozilla-licenced code, and your own code can be licenced under whatever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the GPL however, even if you make a function call to something under the GPL, &lt;em&gt;your code has to be under the GPL too.&lt;/em&gt; If you do something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GPL_Licensed_Code.do_something();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your code has to be under the GPL, because yo've now created a link to that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyleft and Share-Alike are basically synonyms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tag wiki excerpt, as you noted, says that the two terms are basically synonyms. We used to have different tags for both concepts, but realized that the question that the tags were applied to utilized both tags, and tried to convey the same meaning. There is a good key difference to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is used to describe source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Share-Alike is used to describe works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, copyleft was used as a term originating with the Free Software Foundation, whereas share-alike was used in the Creative Commons family of licences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, they are the same, but the two terms are applied to different works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why describe it as Copyleft if you need to add a licence to it anyway? Would you not be better off describing it as copyright with already-agreed-upon licences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we've determined that there are different kinds of copyleft, and that copyleft is not a legal term, we can now answer the overall question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licences often provide a series of different terms, generally providing rights that govern patents, to attribution, to disclaimers of warranties and liabilities. Copyleft is just a 'popular culture' term: it's just used to simplify most of this. But it can't be used as a substitute for a licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concisely, we just use copyleft to provide a general summary of a key point of the licensing terms, those affecting distribution. Aside from that, it's up to the legalese in the licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T22:21:07.867" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:21:07.867" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2456" CreationDate="2016-02-07T17:55:33.147" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is a general idea, not a specific license. It's used for talking &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; licenses. It means the general idea of using copyright to ensure open redistribution. Since copyright is usually used for the opposite of that, copyleft is copyright &quot;turned on its head&quot;, thus the punning name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why people would use that term instead of &quot;Share-Alike&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft came first, by at least 15 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use the term &quot;Share-Alike&quot; people are likely to think that you're talking about Creative Commons specifically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1062" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T17:55:33.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2457" CreationDate="2016-02-07T20:35:25.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your third requirement is a technical one, more easily fulfilled by tools like &lt;code&gt;git diff&lt;/code&gt; which can help track all changes made to a forked version. Apart from that, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of FOSS licenses and both cover your other three requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft or freedom licenses: These are GNU GPL, LGPL and Mozilla Public License. Copyleft licenses are aimed at protecting the freedom of the end-user. Whilst all FOSS licenses involve open sourcing the code, copyleft licenses protect your users' freedom by ensuring that any derived or altered work is also applied the same license. In other words, if you release your software under GPL/LGPL, then whoever modifies your work also has to release it under the same license. This ensures that no proprietary firm can just take your software and make it a closed-sourced, freedom-curbing one. Forgetting this liberal ideology for a moment, if you are a solo developer or a small firm who writes software, then this set of licenses is ideal for you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permissive or open-source licenses. These are MIT, Apache, BSD, etc. They are also called &lt;em&gt;do anything&lt;/em&gt; licenses, because they give the user of your source, essentially and practically all rights to do anything they want with it. The only difference between them is in the written legalese material, and it is a standard practice in the industry to include this material in a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, thus taking care of your fourth requirement (this practice is prevelant for copyleft licenses too). Again, forgetting about the ideology thing that drives the open source camp (innovation in software development by open sourcing), the practical matter is that &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; licenses only make sense if you are a large company like Google. If you are a solo developer or small firm, there is always the risk that a mighter contributor can just fork your code and abuse your IP. If you have used a permissive license, you can't do anything. With copyleft or GPL, you will have at least some recourse in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="4160" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T02:12:01.207" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T02:12:01.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2016-02-07T22:02:52.143" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a solo programmer, not any firm. But suppose if I were to form a small firm tomorrow and decided to write a security guideline regarding what to allow/disallow from &lt;code&gt;github&lt;/code&gt;, it will be implemented something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only allow &lt;code&gt;github.com&lt;/code&gt; domain and not &lt;code&gt;github.io&lt;/code&gt;. Reason is that the latter is a web-hosting playground where any random developer can place any random javascript to be executed like some others have said. The former, on the other hand, is from the official company and relatively safe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a policy to blacklist/whitelist downloads with certain extensions. &lt;code&gt;EXE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;DLL&lt;/code&gt; are the worst if you are on windows platform as these are arbitrary binaries that can just do anything on your machine including causing havoc. If you are as paranoid as me, you will take the whitelist approach and just ban everything except the ones that you need (for example, &lt;code&gt;.php, .py, .js, .html, .css, etc.&lt;/code&gt; if you are running a FOSS project).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a policy to install &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; from the official sources. On Windows machines, not giving admin rights to your every user should be a norm. Only personnel from IT depts should do that, so the user can't cause any damage to their systems even in the rare instance that they did end up downloading something bad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a policy to maintain a list of developers who are granted commit access to the git repositories. Don't give any commit access to the main repos unless it is absolutely necessary. If possible, include a code-review process in workflow whereby, the dev sends a pull-request and reviewer later integrates the code after a thorough check. This process will ensure that no malware gets through past your build process, either wittingly or unwittingly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a policy to revoke commit access as soon as a dev leaves the firm. This will ensure that no &quot;blame-game&quot; takes place that usually happens when a dev leaves a company.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T22:02:52.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2456" CreationDate="2016-02-07T22:49:55.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually unless otherwise stated, by default, copyright law does reserve &quot;all rights&quot; for the holder of the copyright. Copyleft is the concept of using copyright law, turning it around to being friendly for distribution rather than maximizing the control for the copyright holder. As all rights are usually reserved, also the rights to specifically (re-)direct those rights are built into copy-right. There exist many different philosophies of how this can and should be used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Creative Commons (CC)&lt;/strong&gt; is one famous initiative to encourage open distribution in various contexts. There exist many different types of CC licences. &lt;strong&gt;Attribution (BY)&lt;/strong&gt; meaning the author wants to reserve the right to be known as the author and that no one else can claim to have created the work. Share-Alike &lt;strong&gt;(SA)&lt;/strong&gt; means everyone making derivatives of the work must let those derivatives remain shareable. Non-Commercial &lt;strong&gt;(NC)&lt;/strong&gt; means anyone making money including the copyrighted material would not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;computer softwares&lt;/strong&gt;, there exist many different licenses. MIT, Berkley, Apache, GPL (1,2 and 3) are some well-known ones. The details are best learned for each of these separately. Some of the most important philosophical differences between these include the ability for a derivative work to have a new license or not. Some say license for redistribution should be required to remain the same, and some that the user should be able to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it is possible to release a work under &lt;strong&gt;multiple licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, for instance one which maximizes distribution, but does not allow commercialization for example educational and promotional purposes and one which allows licensing for commercialization but then would need to contact the author for the commercial contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4170" LastActivityDate="2016-02-07T22:49:55.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2457" CreationDate="2016-02-07T23:04:30.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, no license meets these exact criteria. Contrary to the other answer, I recognize that #3 is not a purely technical requirement [1]: If you were to license permissively, and someone took the code and incorporated it into a closed source work, there would be no way to &lt;code&gt;diff&lt;/code&gt;/whatever to see if changes changes were made to their copy of your code, unless the license explicitly had your stipulation in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also starting with the supposition that you basically understand the difference between copyleft and permissive licenses [2]. Maybe you've even looked at several licenses, and found them wanting. I'm also assuming that when you say requirement #2, you mean it the conventional way: a LICENSE/COPYING file is distributed with copies of the program and source, but not necessarily compiled into the program, nor popped up when installing [3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally: I am not a lawyer. Out of the licenses I know of, here's how they compare to your requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;GPL/LGPL/AGPL (and the few other &quot;copyleft&quot; licenses)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These meet requirements 1 and 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirement 3 is not met, but since the source must remain open to its recipients, an interested party could discern if changes were made through technical means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirement 4 is not met. The &quot;header&quot; that explains that the software is available under that license and the comes with no warranty boilerplate is typically pretty readable, but the entire licenses are much bigger and I'd say you need to know some legalese or be otherwise familiar with the license to really understand all of the details. It's revealing that most [A/L]GPL violations come from people not understanding what compliance requires (no citation off the top of my head, but I believe you can find statements to this effect from the FSF themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously these licenses come with the caveat that a user cannot &lt;em&gt;redistribute&lt;/em&gt; modifications/copies of the licenses code without keeping the same license. In the case of the [A]GPL, and possibly other copyleft licenses I'm not aware of, there's also a &quot;viral&quot; effect - the details of exactly what makes those licenses &quot;infect&quot; code that uses the licensed code are too extensive for this answer - if you go this route there's plenty of other places where this is documented in-depth: just be aware that there's enough misunderstanding out there about the details that you should really cross-reference anything you see said on this topic with multiple sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;MIT/BSD*/ISC/etc (that whole bunch of short &quot;permissive&quot;/&quot;copyfree&quot; licenses)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meets requirements 1, 2, and 4. Well, #4 is met in so far as any legalese can be readable by the average person: All licenses generally use words and phrases which have very specific meaning based in either written or case/common law, which the layperson is liable to misinterpret the exact nuances of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as a general rule, all of those licenses are pretty clear: do whatever, but all copies (whether source or binary) must also include this copyright+license. The ISC is probably both the most readable, because it omits certain boilerplate that's pretty much part of universally recognized international law (Berne Convention and other treaties which included the same provisions) - I can't say off the top of my head if that omission makes it easier or harder to people to accidentally misread the license, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have a provision preventing others from using your name/organization/whatever in marketing materials associated with their derivatives. This might be partly in line with what you're trying to do with requirement 3. For example, the 3-clause BSD has &quot;Neither the name of the  nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse...&quot;. E.g. Let's say you released some implementation of a new networking protocol with that clause: Microsoft/Google/Apple/whoever could use it, but they couldn't advertise &quot;featuring user1387866's networking code!&quot;. (They'd still have to include the copyright notice when distributing their stuff: the point of this clause is to prevent your name from being used in a way that implies you're affiliated with them, endorsed them, or worked with them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect, however, that one of the things you might want is that if they screw up your code with their changes before redistributing it, there will be more of a barrier from people associating your name with their broken variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the whole, requirement 3 is not met, although you can at least get part of the requirement in easily: since the copyright notice and license must be distributed with every copy, you can include your link-to-the-original inside the copyright notice. For example, instead of just the typical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 John Doe &amp;lt;john.doe@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;..you might do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;mysoftwarename&#xA;Copyright (c) 2016 John Doe &amp;lt;john.doe@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;https://example.com/mysoftwarename/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, as a not-lawyer, I don't know if some legal interpretation using bovine-feces-quality logic will lead someone to conclude that a given permissive license actually doesn't require that the URL get included. This still doesn't address your desire of having a boolean &quot;this copy was changed from the original&quot; noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen a license meet requirement 3. But some licenses do impose some specific requirements for redistribution, however: For example the Apache Public License v. 2.0 specifically requires that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a NOTICES file is included in the copy you got, you must include the substantial portions thereof in an easily accessible form (except note that that's my layperson rewording: the legalese in the license uses different words and for all I know has some subtle implications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, I don't think even the MPL or APL is short-and-understandable enough to meet requirement 4. Perhaps your definition of short-and-readable is more generous than mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Final thoughts&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the licenses I have any exposure to, I've never seen a license that meets the exact requirements as stated. Off the top of my head, your best bet is likely to start with one of the very short permissive licenses, and add a clause requiring the inclusion of a URL, and requiring a specific statement, like &quot;This software uses mysoftware name[, with modiciations]&quot;, at the beginning of the reproduced copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My non-lawyer intuition is that a permissive license with such an addition would be just as broadly compatible with proprietary, permissive, and copyleft code, as your other typical permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yyou might also find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;debial-legal mailing list&lt;/a&gt; useful, and especially for if you go the roll-your-own route, I recommend inquiring there as well: I've personally found it useful in considering certain licensing issues, in particular, it's a good place to check if a given uncommon/unusual/rolled-your-own open source license is likely to have pitfalls or impose burdens on libre software users/maintainers/distributions that could impede wider adoption. I suppose there's likely some BSD mailing list out there which could similarly check if your license would impose burdens on proprietary use-cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Footnotes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I don't have the reputation to comment, and there's no good way for me to suggest an edit to that answer without essentially scrapping or invalidating a lot of the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] It's best to explicitly state that in the question - those answering can better understand what level of depth you're looking for in the answer, and you have to contend with less answers which make erroneous assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] Although you may have seen Windows installers pop up an EULA-like prompt presenting the license, and a lot of GPL software has typically included a copyright notice in their help text or other program outputs: The GPL family of licenses actually includes a provision for user interfaces showing &quot;appropriate legal notices&quot;. But many licenses do not specify this explicitly, merely requiring that attribution/copyright information be included with the software in some form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4168" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-08T01:59:27.387" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T01:59:27.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T02:04:23.133" Score="11" ViewCount="765" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to contribute to a free iOS app on GitHub that was released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple people have since taken the code from that GitHub repository and released apps onto the app store based on that original code. Some of them have just released the app as is with only the name changed. Some have made extensive changes. None of them, that I'm aware of, have released the source to their changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any recourse to get them to release their changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone had any success getting Apple to remove apps from their store, from developers who similarly ignore the terms of the original code's license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4173" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T14:04:53.313" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T14:04:53.313" Title="Recourse for forks ignoring open source license on original code in App Store?" Tags="|derivative-works|forking|enforcement|mpl|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2465" CreationDate="2016-02-08T02:25:11.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the described situation, you are copyright holder (at least in part), &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you assigned the rights to your contributions to some other entity. So you are in position to take legal action. You will have to check if the stipulations of the license were followed, in MPL's case that any changes to MPLed files are public if I'm not mistaken. They might very well be acting inside the rights the license grants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It won't come cheap, and the most probable outcome is for you to go broke. Talk to your very own lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T10:29:39.747" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T10:29:39.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2435" CreationDate="2016-02-08T02:30:13.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More or less the same recourse you have for any closed source program that doesn't have published source: None whatsoever. Whoever wrote the code can do as they please with it, publishing none, half, all of it; allowing third parties to just read and gawk at the stunning genius behind it, all the way to allowing all and any use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T02:30:13.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-08T16:05:37.687" Score="7" ViewCount="1192" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I prevent the misuse of my applications and/or their source codes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe something along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are NOT allowed to bundle this application with anything that may count as: Malware, Adware, Spyware or an otherwise undesirable application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the way I see it I cannot just say 'illegal uses are forbidden' in the license since laws differ from country to country and applications are used in different places around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3755" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T00:58:32.520" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T22:53:23.913" Title="Is there a license which prevents misuse of the source code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|software-use|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2016-02-08T22:19:34.720" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely understand where you are coming from here. No one wants to hear that some of the code they've written has been used to make the leading virus of all time. Sadly, a licence with such a provision couldn't be called open source. This is actually addressed by the Open Source Initiative &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#evil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;themselves&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I stop &amp;quot;evil people&amp;quot; from using my program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too. Fortunately, there are other laws that constrain the behavior of evil people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licences have tried to stop any &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; acts, but chances are, if someone is using your software for evil, you probably won't know about it anyway. Furthermore, how would you define evil? By creating a definition, that could be unique from licence to licence, you could actually end up discriminating from groups that may not use it for &amp;quot;evil.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, such a licence would not be considered open source. I wouldn't worry about it - people wouldn't respect such a licence if they were to use it evilly, so such a clause likely wouldn't stop anything. These people clearly have no moral or ethical sanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-02-08T22:19:34.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2016-02-09T00:51:18.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.json.org/license.html&quot;&gt;JSON license&lt;/a&gt; is what you are looking for.  It has the appearance of a general permissive open license with one additional line in it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has caused numerous problems.  It has made it so that it needs a special license grant for various Three Letter Companies (&lt;em&gt;cough&lt;/em&gt; IBM &lt;em&gt;cough&lt;/em&gt;).  You can read about it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions&quot;&gt;IBM and its minions …&lt;/a&gt; in which they author gave a grant that IBM can't really be sure that their users aren't doing evil, but they'd really like to distribute JSON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course. So I wrote back – this happened literally two weeks ago – “I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also class that it was removed from Google Code back in the day because it wasn't a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar works now are more simply licensed and &lt;em&gt;suggested&lt;/em&gt;to be used for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JShrink is licensed under the BSD License. See the LICENSE file for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the spirit of open source, use of this library for evil is discouraged but not prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tedious/JShrink&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tedious/JShrink&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets look at that open source thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, no.  You can't say &quot;evil people can't use this&quot; and you can't say &quot;you can't use it for evil&quot; if you are using an open source license.  It doesn't matter what it is or if you agree with it or not - you cannot restrict the software's usage if the software is to be licensed under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user756" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T00:51:18.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2479" CreationDate="2016-02-09T15:37:55.643" Score="0" ViewCount="2927" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the development of Free Download Manager halted? The last code committed was in 2014 :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sourceforge.net/p/freedownload/code/HEAD/tree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a link to the repository.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PQJyv.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PQJyv.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sourceforge screenshot.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="703" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T00:56:24.380" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:30:35.407" Title="Free Download Manager Development [FDM]" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-02-11T10:31:20.357" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2475" CreationDate="2016-02-09T17:27:06.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes projects move around, SourceForge got a bit of bad reputation lately (and places like &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt; have nicer interfaces/offer support for distributed workflow, not just &quot;store my project&quot;). The work might continue under another name somewhere else too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should try contacting the addresses given for contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your interest? You could just pick up development (even elsewhere), if you don't find some continuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use it, I'd suggest searching for better supported alternatives. If it was abandoned, it must have been for a reason. At very least little user interest, at worst unsalvageable design or other problems. Little user interest means little real testing, thus the possibility for many bugs, even severe ones, including grievous security problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-09T17:27:06.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2016-02-09T23:52:43.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good Question! This is one of the biggest concern since the SourceForge fiasco. Like the other answers say, such provisions couldn't be made while sticking to the open source definition. However, there are some steps that you can take as the author of an open source project if such a scenario does happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firstly, report the malware link to Google specifically detailing what the said malware authors have done and how they have used your FOSS to create a malware.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondly, cry out in the entire social media (FB, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, etc.) and tell the community that your FOSS code is being misused (Precedent to this is the GIMP project in the recent sourceforge fiasco). People will become alert and no one will download the said malware. Chances are that the malware author could be bundling other FOSS too like yours, so many others will also be benefited by your action.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thirdly, perform some SEO to thwart the malware link on Google. If Google doesn't obey your request, you can use SEO as a tool to make sure that when people search for &quot;Foo software&quot; on Google, the homepage of your FOSS project called &lt;em&gt;Foo&lt;/em&gt; should appear above all others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="4160" LastEditDate="2016-02-10T01:41:18.950" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T01:41:18.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2475" CreationDate="2016-02-10T17:30:35.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Editorial: I voted-to-close this question in line with the community's decision that this type of question was off-topic. That does not mean, however, that it may not be time to reconsider that position.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little searching found the following announcement from December 24th, 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=1&amp;amp;t=17363&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=1&amp;amp;t=17363&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This forum post states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're proud to announce that the new Free Download Manager 5.1 is now available to public. After months of hard work and extensive testing, our team would like to offer you a more streamlined UI with a friendlier approach to configuration. Thanks to the revamped software engine, you will enjoy  efficient and stable multi-thread downloading as well as overall better performance and responsiveness. FDM5 features cross-platform support for both Windows and Mac OS. You're very welcome to try out the configuration capabilities FDM5 comes with and offer new ideas and options on our forum!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would appear that FDM is still alive and being actively worked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, however, the only link to source code I can find on that site brings me back to the sourceforge page you cited. I also see mention of &quot;FDM lite&quot; which suggests they may be planning to switch to a paid-software model for new releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to the license file at &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.code.sf.net/p/freedownload/code/trunc/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://svn.code.sf.net/p/freedownload/code/trunc/license.txt&lt;/a&gt; it was (originally at least) GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to checkout some source code with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/freedownload/code&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the log shows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ svn log -l 3&#xA;------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;r52 | alervd | 2014-05-16 02:29:56 -0700 (Fri, 16 May 2014) | 1 line&#xA;&#xA;+ GeckoSDK v30.&#xA;------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;r51 | alervd | 2014-05-16 02:06:25 -0700 (Fri, 16 May 2014) | 1 line&#xA;&#xA;missing files from previous commit.&#xA;------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;r50 | alervd | 2014-05-15 12:56:06 -0700 (Thu, 15 May 2014) | 6 lines&#xA;&#xA;FDM ver. 3.9.4 build 1473&#xA;New features:&#xA;[+] Brand new Google Chrome extension.&#xA;[+] Bittorrent: UPnP, NAT-PMP, Local Peer Discovery.&#xA;[+] Firefox 30 support.&#xA;[–] General bug fixes.&#xA;------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that they jumped from V3.9.4 to V5.0, and the Beta announcement talks of a 'revamped software engine' - they may have completely rewritten it to avoid the GPLv3 requirement to open source the new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2016-02-10T17:30:35.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T00:41:53.977" Score="11" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on porting a very old program (1994) that was released under the GPL. However, the only reference to that license is this text in the header of the C files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I then assume that it's version 1, and can I release it under a later version of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4215" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T01:52:26.453" Title="GPL version not specified, and actual license text not provided with the source" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T01:18:32.083" Score="6" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm dimly aware that there are differences in legal treatment of data collections (e.g. a telephone book, or map data like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org&quot;&gt;OpenStreetMap&lt;/a&gt;) as compared to, say, a novel or a program. For works like novels (and to some extent collections like Wikipedia and SE contents) the Creative Commons licenses are a good fit. For programs there is a plethora of open source/free software licenses. But I know of next to no similarly open licenses for data sets, except for the  Open Data Commons Open Database License &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl&quot;&gt;ODbl&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody share their insights, and perhaps point to some &quot;choose your license&quot; summary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-11T01:28:13.360" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T13:55:30.413" Title="Overview on licenses for data collections?" Tags="|license-recommendation|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1305" CreationDate="2016-02-11T01:48:09.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer (and not too useful): it is your project, given as a gift to the world. You can do as you please. Here &quot;you&quot; is generically the group actively participating in development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should set up some guidelines (the ones you outline in the question look fine to me), and perhaps publish them. Just make sure that nobody feels entitled to have their pet feature implemented because people pester you daily. I'd probably keep a list of new/active/interesting feature requests (say, for some drive-by party to pick up and work on), relegate others to a backburner, and even others to a list of &quot;won't happen&quot; (decorate them with a comment explaining why they won't be considered, if not just by virtue of timeout). How to triage feature requests, and when to move them between lists, is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T01:48:09.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2481" CreationDate="2016-02-11T01:52:26.453" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.txt&quot;&gt;text of the license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program does not specify a version number of&#xA;  the license, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software&#xA;  Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clause is in every version of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4215" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T01:52:26.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2465" CreationDate="2016-02-11T06:53:45.187" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It certainly sucks when people take your work and use it in ways against your permission, like copying your copyleft work without also sharing their changes. Fortunately you don't have to go straight to the lawyers, as there are a number of things you can do, and also some things to check, to be safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it worth it?&lt;/strong&gt; Copyright infringement for software is everywhere. Good projects attract lots of clones. But are these clones actually hurting you? Are they receiving significant numbers of downloads and market share compared to your own? Are they damaging your brand? Do some of the clones have useful enhancements, such that there is value in bringing their source into the free software ecosystem? If the answers are &quot;no&quot;, then working and improving your project will be a better use of energy than pursuing these clones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did they actually copy your code?&lt;/strong&gt; In your case it seems like at least some are blatant copies, but it's better to be safe especially before taking drastic measures like accusing people of copyright infringement. Are their clones so similar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bugs and all&lt;/a&gt;, that it's blatantly obvious? Did you decompile the app and find significant similarities to your own? Remember that, as far as copyright is concerned, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1728/175&quot;&gt;it's perfectly fine to copy ideas and functionality&lt;/a&gt; and write your own implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did they actually violate the license?&lt;/strong&gt; Most copyleft licenses only require you to give the source, or even just an offer of it, to &lt;em&gt;recipients only&lt;/em&gt;, not the general public. Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/media/MPL/2.0/index.815ca599c9df.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual text from the MPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.2. Distribution of Executable Form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code&#xA;  Form, as described in Section 3.1, and You must inform recipients of&#xA;  the Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code&#xA;  Form by reasonable means in a timely manner, at a charge no more&#xA;  than the cost of distribution to the recipient; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this&#xA;  License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the&#xA;  license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter&#xA;  the recipients' rights in the Source Code Form under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So depending on the specifics, some of the clones may not be violating the MPL. They could mention the MPL and provide a source code download link in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The app store page description&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a legal text dialog during the installation process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somewhere inside an &quot;about&quot; section in the app itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, there are many ways they can fulfil clause 3.2 (a) without it being obvious to people who have not downloaded and used the app.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write to them.&lt;/strong&gt; Let them know that they are violating the MPL, and tell them how they can rectify this, or (if you have rights to do so), offer alternative licensing terms. Licenses, even open source ones, aren't trivial to follow - that's why there are services like tldrlegal, and this site. Try to keep a level head and assume good intentions; it's very likely that they simply aren't aware of the license violation, for example by assuming (as many people do) that &quot;if it's free online I can do whatever I want with it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write to the App Store.&lt;/strong&gt; Go through their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/appstorenotices/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard support channels&lt;/a&gt; for dealing with stuff like this. The cloner may not care about legalities but companies like Apple sure do, and are going to be on your side if you have a legitimate claim.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Submit a DMCA takedown notice.&lt;/strong&gt; By this point things will have become serious (and expensive) for you, as you should have consulted a lawyer on the matter, because there are legal consequences for filing incorrect DMCA takedowns. It's very likely that Apple will have a fast-track process for DMCA takedowns, due to having to deal with them constantly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Send a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cease and Desist letter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Ideally you will get a lawyer to do this, so that the letter is sufficiently intimidating.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When all else fails, sue them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T06:53:45.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T09:53:52.137" Score="8" ViewCount="1728" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using LGPL binaries, as well as EPL binaries for my open source project. Is this OK? And if yes, does that mean I should license my project under LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The binaries are being used as dependencies for the project i.e. I'm just using them as-is without making changes to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4218" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-12T01:23:46.510" LastActivityDate="2016-08-22T12:06:36.903" Title="Compatibility between EPL and LGPL" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2449" CreationDate="2016-02-11T15:05:40.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you must attribute the BSD code.  From BSD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, (...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firmware contains the binary form.  The license doesn't care if it is burnt (firmware or CD-ROM), flip magnetic material (on floppy disks), or just electrical/optical signal (network), or just publish the code in a book (very seldom now to distribute binaries in such manner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T15:05:40.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-11T15:11:38.827" Score="6" ViewCount="2396" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are using Qt(5.3.2 - opensource) for one of our applications that we are going to be distributing (closed-source). We dynamically link to Qt and have made no modifications to Qt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Qt's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.qt.io/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Legal FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, they list the necessary obligations for using Qt under the LGPL. We understand and agree with their interpretation of the LGPL for all of their points except the first one, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... You will need to deliver the complete source code of Qt (including&#xA;  all modifications you did or applied) to your users/customers.&#xA;  Alternatively you need to provide a written offer with instructions on&#xA;  how to get the source code. Please also note that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this has to be under&#xA;  your control, so a link to the source code provided by the Qt Project&#xA;  or Qt Company is not sufficient&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct by LGPLv3 standards? I need to have my own host of the library's code even when there are no modifications? I cannot just point my license statement to an already hosted location?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every single application that has ever used Qt, dynamically linked without modifications, has to have a separate storage/distribution of the libraries source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is truly necessary, Is my assumption that pointing to a clone of their git repository (hosted on Github/Bitbucket/etc...) would be enough to satisfy this requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say I do self-host my applications code (open-source for this clarification) and my LGPL dependencies (as said in the FAQ). If someone else wanted to now use my code and redistribute their modifications, they wouldn't know that they needed to self-host the dependencies as it's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not written in the license&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; but only on the dependencies websites FAQ which isn't being distributed with their source! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you might fall victim to an issue of the original source location being removed, but the GPL states that you must make it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatDoesWrittenOfferValid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;available upon written request&lt;/a&gt;, which you should be able to do if/when the original location no longer hosts it and someone wants it specifically from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title might have Qt in it, but the question is broader. The license doesn't require self-hosting and as a result most (prove me wrong, please!) projects do not self-host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4226" LastEditorUserId="4226" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T12:55:06.910" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T12:55:06.910" Title="Do I need to host Qt source when compling with LGPLv3 license?" Tags="|lgpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2016-02-11T16:22:33.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general: &lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt;: you cannot modify a license (nor the copyright holder), but if the license explicitly allow you to &quot;upgrade&quot; the license (like LGPL to GPL, GPL2+ to GPL3, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;strong&gt;act&lt;/strong&gt; as if you distribute it with an other compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general upgrading code with a new license is very tedious work, and you need to have the permission of all (or most) copyright holders.  Wikipedia had a nice support of FSF with a one time license versioning trick.  Openstreetmap removed the old data (if contributors didn't explicitly agree with license change). Note: it took years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-02-11T16:22:33.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2488" CreationDate="2016-02-12T00:29:45.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qt is large, long-lived, and at one time was a propietary product that got opened up as open source. I'd take their statements on what the license requires &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; seriously, they had expert lawyers retained during the opening of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it was not required legally, it is the courteous thing to do. Your project presumably wouldn't haven gotten off the ground without Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T00:29:45.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2496" CreationDate="2016-02-12T14:00:28.367" Score="0" ViewCount="1393" Body="&lt;p&gt;Memtest86 was originally licensed under the GPL, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2389/520&quot;&gt;its entire code was rewritten&lt;/a&gt; so its owners decided to remove the GPL license on newer versions of the program. Free Download Manager is another program that was originally licensed under the GPL but then had &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2479/520&quot;&gt;its code rewritten&lt;/a&gt; so that it can become closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; to do this. After all, the people who wrote the code owns the copyright of the code and are not bound by previous licenses. And they can still reuse the same name (either because the name itself was not trademarked or they own the trademark in question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this ethical? It would seem more reasonable for a company to create a closed-source &quot;derivative work&quot; with a different name (&quot;Memtest86 II&quot; or &quot;FDM Improved&quot;) to avoid people confusing the new closed-source version with the original open-source version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T17:34:02.603" Title="Is it ethical to rewrite the code of a software to remove its license?" Tags="|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-02-18T19:37:13.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2283" CreationDate="2016-02-12T16:37:05.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized after posting this question that, due to how permissive the LGPLv3 is, this was probably a non-issue. However, I still asked the FSF for official comment, and I received the following response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once you've added the exception, you cannot link to other GPLv3&#xA;  software which do not carry such an exception. If this wasn't the case&#xA;  it would be trivial to circumvent the terms of the GPL for providing&#xA;  the complete corresponding source code for a work by just writing a&#xA;  trivial piece of bridge/wrapper/shim code, add an exception to that,&#xA;  and then link to anything you wanted through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, LGPLv3 licensed code already has a broad exception to its&#xA;  terms and shouldn't be an issue as long as you abide by the terms of&#xA;  the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hope this is of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P.S. I don't know if it's relevant in your case, but the FSF&#xA;  recommends using GNUTLS instead of OpenSSL in software you write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sincerely,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Donald R. Robertson, III,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  J.D. Copyright &amp;amp; Licensing Associate &#xA;  Free Software Foundation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Boston, MA 02110, USA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there you have it, there's no concern with GPLv3 exceptions conflicting with the LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T16:37:05.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2492" CreationDate="2016-02-12T17:34:02.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm missing something, you're either describing reverse engineering, where someone has figured out how an existing product works and has created a competing product, or you're talking about someone releasing their own code under one license and then changing it down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, I fail to see where anything can be considered unethical. In the case of someone changing the license on their own work, that's entirely their call, they did all of the work that they're freely sharing with the world. How can anyone possibly point and wag their finger at what somebody does with their own hard work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a competing product being made, isn't that a good thing that is in line with the very spirit of open source? You're not releasing open source software so that everyone in the world becomes so dependent on it that everyone must come to you to eat, you're releasing stuff freely into the wild so that it might benefit others, however that benefit works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, there are business models built around open source where, like in any capitalistic system, you'd have daydreams of the piles of cash that would result in everyone needing your software exclusively, but also like any reasonable business person in a capitalistic society, you accept the concept and challenge of competition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically to the point of open source and business, I don't see how the boundaries of what is and isn't unethical are any different than any other form of business. If Honda released a new car, but then someone realized that it was just a Honda logo cheaply plastered over top of what was actually a Hyundai car, everyone would think it's a sleazy move and it would backfire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous recent example of this in software is the Console OS accusation of wholesale copying Android-X86 without attribution. It wouldn't have been so bad if they had of been honest, but if they had of been honest it would have simply appeared to be a cash grab anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question you seem to suggest something about competing products copying the name also. While I can't comment on the legality of it, I'd say that it's unethical because it shadows the other product. If your product is so much better, it shouldn't need to shadow its competition. Shadowing is blatantly done for no other reason than to hide the original project and steal traffic/users from it. There may be exceptions where this is acceptable, such as shadowing an abandoned project (unofficially resurrecting and taking over maintenance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T17:34:02.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2037" CreationDate="2016-02-12T21:03:45.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;GTK and glib are spin-off of GIMP. I think it happens often (especially splitting toolkit/libraries from main program, or as the main project as incubator of some tools/related projects), but I don't have a term for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T21:03:45.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-12T21:32:11.957" Score="7" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to develop a computer game and the engine I have chosen is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3&quot;&gt;ioquake3&lt;/a&gt;. This engine is licensed under GPLv2. Needless to say the game's source code will itself will, in turn, be licensed under GPLv2. The game data/assets on the other hand will be proprietary. I intend to release this game as a free-to-play app across various app stores with in-app-purchases for additional game data/assets. What I would like to know is if the code for the in-app-billing logic must also be included in the published GPL'd source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4235" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T09:32:20.157" Title="What is the status of in-app-purchasing code in a GPLv2 app? [generic app store]" Tags="|monetization|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2016-02-12T22:53:23.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of a good contract or license to be 100% clear, with a bright line that both sides (and courts) are likely to agree is crossed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license that prohibits use in some vaguely-defined product category or usage scenario would be inviting a court battle over disagreement of what constitutes Malware (or whatever particular evil you are concerned with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose you could build a license that has 10 pages of legalese carefully defining Malware in an ironclad way, so there is no confusion, but nobody is ever going to agree to those license terms. In fact, even if they don't intend to produce malware, they won't bother spending the legal fees to have their counsel evaluate this long, one-of-a-kind license to determine whether they can safely adhere to it. So your software will be unused. Disuse is usually not a desired goal of open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2858" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T22:53:23.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2420" CreationDate="2016-02-12T23:31:10.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to retain the license of most files, and add some files licensed differently, you'll first have to find out if new files are in some way derived from the existing ones, in which case the original license decides if you are allowed to license your part differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are allowed to go ahead, you should then include all LICENSE files that are relevant, and at least add a list of files and licenses or state in each file which license applies. In a README or similar state that several licenses apply, and which ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be overkill, but better be absolutely clear. It doesn't cost very much to do so, in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-12T23:31:10.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-13T10:24:50.973" Score="11" ViewCount="2446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use gSOAP to generate c++ code from wsdl in some project hosted on github and I am a little lost in the license compatibilities.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly I prefer to share my work without any license constraint, respecting licenses of its dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/soaplicense.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gSOAP license&lt;/a&gt; seems to say that :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;runtime is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gSOAP Public License&lt;/a&gt; that derivated from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License Version 1.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;generator (wsdl2h &amp;amp; soap2cpp) are licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/1289441/3102264&quot;&gt;SO post&lt;/a&gt; explains that generated code is also covered by GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a Makefile that invoke the GPLv2 tools (wsdl2h &amp;amp; soap2cpp) that will generate the GPLv2 generated code and finally the GPLv2 code and my code will be compiled and linked into an executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project will not include any gSOAP material, only command to invoke generator, reference to includes and link command to librairies (that are covered by the gSOAP Public License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not provide any binaries deliveries that contains the object files compiled using GPLv2 generated code. I would like only to shared the source code letting to use it with GPLv2 or gSOAP Commercial License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I use &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unlicense&lt;/a&gt; for my code ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1083" LastEditorUserId="1083" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T10:27:53.990" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T10:27:53.990" Title="Does using a GPLv2 code generator force my project to be similarly licensed?" Tags="|gpl-2|mpl|public-domain|transpiling|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2501" CreationDate="2016-02-13T20:30:25.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; the output of a GPL program is not licensed under the GNU GPL, unless it copies substantial parts of sourcecode into the output which are complex enough to fall under copyright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q:In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: Only when the program copies part of itself into the output. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-02-14T23:48:46.450" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T23:48:46.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2488" CreationDate="2016-02-14T10:50:52.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is cheap to host source code, and probably you need such repository in future.  So do it, instead of discussing it with lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Apple, Samsung, Sony etc. do so.  There is no &lt;em&gt;&quot;shame&quot;&lt;/em&gt; on doing so, also for companies living with proprietary code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-02-14T10:50:52.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2501" CreationDate="2016-02-15T00:37:18.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the conclusion in your &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/1289441/3102264&quot;&gt;linked SO answer&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;the GPLv2-licensed &lt;code&gt;wsdl2h&lt;/code&gt; generates code that is licensed under GPLv2 also&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore you cannot use unlicense on the output. If you link said code with any other code, the whole program must also be GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't just take my, or the linked answer's, words for it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.fsu.edu/%7Eengelen/soaplicense.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gSOAP site says so itself&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gSOAP and GPL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use gSOAP under the GPL v2 to integrate parts of it &lt;strong&gt;or code generated by it&lt;/strong&gt; with your own code, then you are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only &lt;strong&gt;under the terms of the GNU GPL v2&lt;/strong&gt;. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL. These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own. These restrictions may hamper certain proprietary software development scenarios. If you do not wish for your program to be released under a GPL-compatible open source license, then an alternate proprietary software license for gSOAP which will remove the aforementioned requirement is available from Genivia Inc. The gSOAP software does not include any third-party GPL code. All software was build from the ground up. Note that the GNU Bison and Flex tools are used to generate source code for the gSOAP soapcpp2 compiler. However, the Bison/Flex-generated source code is not restricted by the GPL or LGPL terms. Non-GPL third-party contributions are included in the 'extras' directory in the package and you are free to use these contributions. Suggested changes and improvements by vendors were accepted under the public gSOAP license (not GPL), which includes support for VxWorks and Apache and IIS modules for gSOAP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the same text they mention you can obtain a proprietary license from them. This is probably part of their business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why this is the case, but not in general for GPL programs (like text editors, browsers etc.) is explained in the GPL FAQ, linked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2502/175&quot;&gt;Phillip's answer&lt;/a&gt;. The key is whether &lt;strong&gt;the program copies part of itself into the output&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some GPL programs, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bison&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt;, copy parts of themselves into the output, but their output isn't GPL licensed, because they &lt;strong&gt;provide an exception in their license&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't some weird GPL thing; even proprietary programs offer similar exceptions. For example, Microsoft Office has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/useterms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license exception&lt;/a&gt; on their document templates, so that the templates remain under Microsoft's copyright, but you can use them to create your own documents under relatively free terms (e.g. you can't &amp;quot;create obscene or scandalous works&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T03:31:11.857" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2457" CreationDate="2016-02-15T02:32:30.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd reconsider. Go to any random, reasonably active, project at e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://github.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt; and look at the many, many changes that flow into the repository. Just listing the summary of the changes and the author will soon be larger than the source itself. For what use? Better keep it in a public accessible source code control system, then changes are visible &lt;em&gt;and usable&lt;/em&gt; (for e.g. finding out which change introduced a bug). This requires a strong &quot;vanilla&quot; version, which everybody uses (at most with minor changes, and synchronizes frequently). The Linux kernel is a case in point, as are the various BSD flavors. There probably are many others. It should be clear that this doesn't come for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another take is the licence for TeX (check out &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ctan.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CTAN&lt;/a&gt;). You are allowed to get a copy, modify it and release changes, &lt;em&gt;but only as TeX changefiles, i.e., essentially differences to the original&lt;/em&gt;. And your modified version &lt;em&gt;can not&lt;/em&gt; be called the same as uṕstream. Yes, D.E. Knuth is allowed to get away with this, he stated that TeX is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tug.org/whatis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;bugfree&lt;/a&gt;, and nobody has been able to contradict him (there is a sizeable reward for anybody who finds a bug). No, you probably don't qualify for doing the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T02:32:30.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2501" CreationDate="2016-02-15T03:23:03.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should communicate with the author of gsoap. We acquired ('paid for') a separate license from him when we used gsoap in a commercial, non-open-source, project. However, the reason was not that he claimed that the GPL extended to the generated code, but rather that we wanted clarity on our rights to the runtime that he distributes. Note that the language quoted in another answer, which asserts the GPL requirement, stems from the runtime component, not from the generated code itself, since the generated code is useless without the runtime. I'm also not sure that language was there some years back when we dealt with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To talk about the general case: if the program generates code from a template, then the author of the program &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; treat the generated output as a derived work, subject to licensing terms of the template itself. If the program generates code 'from whole cloth', then I do not believe that there is a legal basis for the author of the generator to claim that the generated code is derived or otherwise her or his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2016-02-15T03:30:49.113" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T03:30:49.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2016-02-15T03:25:03.743" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can only license your own work. If you have not made any modifications, you have not made a derived work, so you have no copyright on anything, and you have no right to change the license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T03:25:03.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2488" CreationDate="2016-02-15T15:50:07.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, you are making what the LGPL calls a &quot;Combined Work&quot;. Section 4 of the LGPLv3 says that you may distribute Combined Works if you &quot;convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License... in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.&quot; Thus, distribution of a library as part of a combined work is covered by the source-distribution requirements in section 6 of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only section 6 distribution rule that applies to your case is 6(d). (The others deal with code in a physical embedded system, or on a peer-to-peer network.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. [...] If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the license allows you to piggyback on someone else's source repository seem to hinge on the semantics of the verb &quot;offer&quot;. If you have absolutely no control over the server where the source is being hosted, but you do dutifully point it out to users of your object code, does that constitute &quot;offer[ing] equivalent access to the Corresponding Source&quot;? Answering this question is probably outside of the scope of the license and would be interpreted by a judge (assuming you're bold enough and rich enough to go to court for the privilege of not hosting your own copy of the source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Qt Company has licensed the Qt library to you with the express instructions that their understanding of what constitutes &quot;offering&quot; the source code does not include merely referring to the Qt Company's own network copy of the source. &lt;em&gt;Possibly&lt;/em&gt; a court could find that interpretation incorrect, but I am not optimistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, by hosting the source yourself, you eliminate the risk of falling out of compliance if the Qt Company suddenly eliminates its public source offering or changes how it offers the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-02-15T19:44:42.303" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T19:44:42.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-15T21:25:08.243" Score="5" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can an open source project undergo a hostile takeover? That is, the current project has an active community and an active BDFL, but some individual or group wants to take over the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, does the BDFL being female or non-white or another discriminated against group affect the likelihood of such a thing happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguments about whether it's theoretically possible are good, but empirical data would be even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried googling about this, but mainly got hits about an open source game called hostile takeover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4259" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:16:02.110" Title="Can projects undergo a hostile takeover?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2016-02-15T22:32:38.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could a third party take control of the project in any meaningful way? Sure, they could try to take it over, but that would more often than not have the developers (the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; essence of the project) move elsewhere and continue their own fork. It happened with MySQL, and (in lesser way) with OpenOffice. Without developers and a vibrant user community, the original project will just wither and die off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-15T22:32:38.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2016-02-16T01:02:55.660" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. To do so, you need to fork a project (thereby becoming the BDFL of that new project) and just simply have your fork be more popular than the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not really hard at all, especially if you happen to be a large corporation that is able to dedicate a lot of time and effort into the fork (much more time and effort than the existing BDFL who is probably working on a volunteer-basis). In fact, in 2014, the Cocos2D-XNA framework was &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/253925/how-to-avoid-being-forked-into-oblivion-by-a-more-powerful-contributor&quot;&gt;forked into oblivion&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by a company called Xamarin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But forks are not necessarily bad. After all, it shows that people are interested in your project, even if they want to take it in a new direction. And, of course, the two forks can learn from each other and prosper together. To learn how to deal with forking issues, I recommend looking at this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1274/what-can-i-do-when-a-fork-of-my-project-is-out-competing-mine&quot;&gt;What can I do when a fork of my project is out-competing mine?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-16T01:02:55.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2517" CreationDate="2016-02-17T05:27:49.837" Score="-1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;All I want to know is what licensing allows me, the program author, to keep &quot;author credits&quot;(so no one can rip me off), and make all software created from this program to remain free (like Ruby License)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4268" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T12:25:37.250" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T12:58:09.537" Title="Author Credits for certain licenses" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|ruby|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-02-22T02:14:46.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2510" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:08:33.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I witnessed a hostile takeover of a project once which happened &quot;from within&quot;. At that point I was no longer very actively involved, but still had good contact with many project contributors, so I saw it happening from the sidelines without actually being involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an online game project. When the old project founder retired, the server admin who hosted most project resources (website, gameserver, IRC server etc.) became the new leader. Over time, the development team became increasingly unhappy with the new leader due to their general behavior and attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Takeover&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project team decided that they needed to part with the server-admin and elect a new project leader. But they were quite certain that the admin would likely not agree with any peaceful attempt to replace them. So they decided to do it behind their back. They found a new hoster and over night transferred all project resources to the new host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most critical part was the domain name. It was not just the domain of the official website, but also the one the game-client connected to for both updates and for getting the gameserver-list, so the players would play on the server of whoever controlled that domain. That domain was still registred by the retired project founder. They managed to contact them and they agree to the takeover and changed the DNS to point to the new server. Without the domain it likely would not have worked to overtake the identity of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Aftermath&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The server hoster was obviously very upset because of the putch behind their back. They flamed a lot, tried to incite the player community and tried to continue their project under the same name but with a different domain. But most parts of the player and development community was loyal to the &quot;putchists&quot;. The &quot;original&quot; project under the server admin didn't went anywhere while the project under the new administration continued to flourish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How could the admin have prevented this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I learned from this story is that there are two critical parts of the identity of a project: The domain name and the trademark. Whoever controls these controls the project and the userbase will follow them. The admin could have easily prevented the takeover by trademarking the project name. Control of a trademark means you can also easily gain control the domain name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T10:16:02.110" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T10:16:02.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2514" CreationDate="2016-02-17T10:19:54.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several permissive licenses which allow other people to do practically anything they want as long as they retain your original copyright notice. A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD license family&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these licenses allow to relicense the software under a non-free license. If you want to ensure that your work remains free, you should use a strong copyleft license like the GNU Public License or the Mozilla Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-02-17T12:58:09.537" LastActivityDate="2016-02-17T12:58:09.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2519" CreationDate="2016-02-18T04:38:54.597" Score="8" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to contribute to a C# project on GitHub, but the repository is missing a &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; file. I've already noticed a few code style inconsistencies, but I don't want to assume the project is using the MSDN code conventions. What is the best way to bring up this issue with the maintainer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4277" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T05:12:49.037" Title="What should I do about code style if a GitHub project is missing CONTRIBUTING.md?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2518" CreationDate="2016-02-18T05:12:49.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general advise - you should try to follow suite. If you're editing a file, follow the conventions it sets. If you're adding a new file, follow the conventions of other files in the same directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when in doubt - just ask. A live project should have a method to contact the maintainer(s) published on its page. Reach out via email/irc/whatever preferred method of communication the project publishes and ask about the style. Chances are the first contribution he'd ask you to make would be to create a &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; page yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T05:12:49.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2532" CreationDate="2016-02-18T10:53:16.387" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I published the source code for a web application under the GNU AFFERO license, some people forked it and modified it in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to modify the original version of the software, the one I published initially which only includes my own work, but I don't want to share the modifications. Is this compatible with the AFFERO license or am I obligated to publish the changes under the same license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4281" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T12:43:21.607" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T13:31:30.557" Title="License change in Affero licensed software" Tags="|agpl-3.0|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T12:11:54.423" Score="2" ViewCount="1958" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an algorithm. I'd like to publish this in an open access journal under the creative commons license. But I'm also considering a patent. How do these processes sit together? Does publishing in this way, or in any way for that matter, essentially preclude the chance of holding on to commercial rights, however these are defined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4283" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:38:13.390" Title="Relation between the creative commons license and the patent process" Tags="|license-compatibility|creative-commons|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2523" CreationDate="2016-02-18T12:49:08.490" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently been looking for open source dating software to build upon and I keep seeing things like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.skadate.com/open-source.php&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.a-dater.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;www.abk-soft.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ph7cms.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which all clearly state that they are &quot;Open-source&quot;, yet I cannot redistribute or resell anything, and I cannot have access to the source without paying minimum $200-300 in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding of open source incorrect, is the landscape shifting, or are people just using this as marketing to try and entice unsuspecting buyers to their websites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is what they are doing legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4284" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T10:38:06.680" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T10:38:06.680" Title="What truly defines open source? Can someone call something open source and charge?" Tags="|law|commercial|terminology|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2522" CreationDate="2016-02-18T14:29:10.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is what they are doing legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly seems that way. The phrase &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; is just a pair of words. Anyone can use the phrase to refer to some kind of &amp;quot;source&amp;quot; that is &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; in some respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative wrote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; (OSD), which is what most people mean when they say &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; is not a trademark&lt;/a&gt;, and is probably ineligible for trademark status, according to Eric S. Raymond:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; concept into the mainstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;Open Source&amp;quot; is not and cannot become a trademark...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, there's no legal impediment to using the phrase &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; to mean a wide range of different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practice of giving away the source but without allowing redistribution or modification is what the Open Source Initiative might call &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;source available&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; but again, there's nothing legally wrong with using &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; to mean something other than &amp;quot;complying with the Open Source Definition.&amp;quot; However, if you wish to make yourself clearly understood within the FLOSS community, please use &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;source available&amp;quot; appropriately. Obviously, these companies are not interested in making themselves clearly understood within the FLOSS community; they are interested in making sales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, requiring payment to get a copy of the software is perfectly in line with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the values of the Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;. However, OSD-compliant software would allow you to freely use, modify, and redistribute the software once you paid for it, which these software products do not allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:25:38.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2521" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:06:47.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons family of licenses are &lt;em&gt;copyright licenses&lt;/em&gt;. They license the copyrightable expression contained in your work. A creative written text can be covered by copyright, granting the author exclusive right to make copies or derivatives of the work. (That right can then be licensed to others, e.g., by a Creative Commons license.) By contrast, a novel mechanism or system can be monopolized by a patent. If you secure a patent on your system, no one else is allowed to employ the system in their device, software, etc. without your permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;idea-expression divide&lt;/a&gt; is a legal concept that separates an idea (which is not copyrightable) from its expression in a tangible form (like the text of an article, which is copyrightable). The famous case &lt;a href=&quot;https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/101/99/case.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Baker v. Selden&lt;/a&gt; spells out this distinction in U.S. case law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To give to the author of the book an exclusive property in the art described therein when no examination of its novelty has ever been officially made would be a surprise and a fraud upon the public. That is the province of letters patent, not of copyright. The claim to an invention or discovery of an art or manufacture must be subjected to the examination of the Patent Office before an exclusive right therein can be obtained, and it can only be secured by a patent from the government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright held on the text of a book is totally separate from a patent monopoly that may be held on a system described in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution license (and probably all CC licenses) says in Section 2, b(2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, therefore, when you grant a copyright license for the text of your article, that license does not impact your ability to monopolize via patent the system described in the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, you may sabotage your ability to secure a patent on your system because the publication of your article will constitute &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_disclosure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;public disclosure&lt;/a&gt;. In the United States, you have one year from public disclosure to make a patent application before your system becomes ineligible for patent. In other jurisdictions, you may have a different amount of time or no time at all (i.e., your system becomes ineligible for patent immediately upon public disclosure). Note that public disclosure occurs whenever you make your article public, regardless of how you license your article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-02-18T15:38:13.390" LastActivityDate="2016-02-18T15:38:13.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2531" CreationDate="2016-02-18T15:59:05.150" Score="1" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are my moral and legal obligations if I want to port an open source project (software library, BSD-licensed) from one language to another?  I also anticipate making some changes to suit my application better, so it feels more like a branch to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just not sure what the obligations are: I am technically writing from scratch, but it would begin as a fairly literal port so I am using the source material as more than just a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="434" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T03:04:54.093" Title="Porting open source project between languages" Tags="|bsd|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-18T16:33:16.977" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to install my first add-on to my newly acquired Bitbucket open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be setup and developed on its on branch and then imported in when approved and working&#xA;OR&#xA;Edit the files locally and then add a 1.1 tag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past before using git I have used&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 1.1 (My first add-on)&#xA;Version 1.2 (Small changes to files, change to UK language)&#xA;Version 1.3 (My second add-on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this where GitFlow comes in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4287" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T01:52:45.003" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T01:52:45.003" Title="Creating first add-on to Open Source project with Bitbucket" Tags="|project-management|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4476" CreationDate="2016-02-18T19:16:26.627" Score="4" ViewCount="2282" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question regarding commercial use of customized offical docker images (like RabbitMQ, ELK etc.).  Are there any restrictions or limitations, for example if I code run scripts for RabbitMQ or ELK and repackage it into a custom docker image.  Does that mean I have to publish the image on DockerHub to be compliant? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the images are mostly under the Apache licence. One is LGPL, and two of them are under the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not very clear and could not find anything in my searches.  Any input based on your experience would be great. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4288" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T09:22:41.723" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T16:57:48.460" Title="Custom docker images from official images license" Tags="|commercial|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-19T00:51:55.173" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some Windows shareware applications built with Delphi 7 that have not been updated for almost 10 years. I was thinking to release the source code as open source on a site like sourceforge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However most of the projects use some commercial libraries that I bought a long time ago. To compile, my projects needs these libraries as *.dcu files which I must include. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Delphi, dcu files are basically precompiled code, that is linked to the final executable (analogous to .o and .obj files that C compilers produce).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I generate these dcu files (from the commercial sources which I have and assume should not be included in the project) and include them in the project so it compiles correctly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not do I have any other options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these are libraries that have not been updated for over a decade, and most of the vendors don't even exist any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4291" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T01:00:28.213" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T17:33:19.250" Title="Want to release old shareware application as open source but uses commercial libs. Options?" Tags="|license-recommendation|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2016-02-19T01:55:08.377" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could I generate these dcu files (from the commercial sources which I have and assume should not be included in the project) and include them in the project so it compiles correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That entirely depends on that commercial entity who has developed and licensed that software. If they are around, you can go ahead and ask them directly. If they are not around, then it essentially becomes a public domain software, so it can be distributed as such in certain jurisdictions (but you should ideally either research the IT laws in your region, or consult a legal counsel so as to be absolutely certain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not do I have any other options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, if they are not around, you can use the public domain route, but if they are around and don't want to be contacted, I'm afraid there is nothing much you can do! You can't distribute these binaries in a proper and legit way unless you have some idea of the terms and conditions of these commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T01:55:08.377" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2522" CreationDate="2016-02-19T02:07:57.393" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @apsillers said, &quot;open source&quot; is just a buzzword, the fact that someone has open sourced their code doesn't actually mean that it is free to use and without any restrictions. A software can be &quot;open source&quot;, but can still place many restrictions and terms of use, and on the other hand a software can be &quot;closed source&quot;, but still its usage terms be pretty lenient in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two notable examples that come to mind of this dilemma are Oracle's Java and Microsoft's .NET. Java is open source but under Oracle's control. If you try to modify its source and build your own version, then Oracle will &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;come after you&lt;/a&gt; as it went after Google when they built Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Microsoft is a proprietary company and .NET is their closed source stack (with some exceptions), but they allowed the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mono-project.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mono Project&lt;/a&gt; to happen and are absolutely OK with it! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This example shows what kind of a farce the word &quot;open source&quot; could be in some situations. Unless you read their license terms, you can't say anything for sure, open source or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-02-19T12:39:39.263" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T12:39:39.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2016-02-19T03:04:54.093" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the original is BSD licensed, you can (almost) do whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a courteous person, you will cite the original project as the basis for your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical person, you want to be able to track upstream changes (and even better, have third parties help out doing so), add/reference any translation tools used (e.g. I'm aware of FORTRAN to C translators, TeX uses a translator for a (subset/dialect) or Pascal to C, there must be others), or state your hand-translation strategy. Clearly mark where you deviate from upstream, to guide later refreshes. Note that when I mention &quot;third party&quot;, more often than not that will be you in a few months time, completely oblivious to what you were doing today...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a step back, and carefully consider if it isn't better for everybody involved to integrate your changes upstream (if they don't want it, perhaps they have their very good reason to reject them...), or keep your own branch with &lt;em&gt;minimal&lt;/em&gt; changes (or some sort of plugin/addon?). Perhaps the best solution is adding a shim that allows using upstream in your language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T03:04:54.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2520" CreationDate="2016-02-19T13:31:30.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to do what you want with your own software. You can take it fully closed, whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is based on the idea given above, and that the owner is entitled to allow others to do something (copying, creating derivative works, ...) that is forbidden otherwise. This is a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; (fancy legalese for &quot;allow&quot;). You can allow others just because you want to (BSD style licenses) or place some restrictions (GPL doesn't allow to pass only derivatives like binaries, Microsoft gives out some code on condition it can only used on Windows, ...), you can do it for free or ask for payment, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T13:31:30.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2538" CreationDate="2016-02-19T14:46:35.110" Score="9" ViewCount="1690" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use Java libraries for a server application and one of the developers parted ways with us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it was his project he can do whatever he wants with the github repository and he chose to delete it. Now we have no source code of the original work anymore and he states we have to delete the libraries, because as a consumer of the server application he demands a copy of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the &quot;customer&quot; in this relationship? We, because we're using the libraries or the people consuming the service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: Is it possible to decompile the libraries - recompile them and offer the decompiled source code as the modified source code of the recompiled libraries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4296" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T16:28:23.750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T16:53:41.937" Title="Use of AGPL software after developer deleted repository" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-19T14:51:26.133" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just submitted a paper to an open access journal which operates with the Creative Commons license. Details here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lmcs-online.org/ojs/copyright.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.lmcs-online.org/ojs/copyright.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject of the paper is an algorithm and I may yet decide to publish it. To quote the journal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'The agreement with the journal concerns corrections and republication.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I'm sure they will not mind if I try to take commercial advantage. However, I'm unsure whether from the other side the patent process might not be affected by the fact that a paper has been published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone shed some light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4283" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T01:56:00.693" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T02:11:37.820" Title="What if I publish a paper under the Creative Commons license and still patent the work it refers to?" Tags="|creative-commons|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2542" CreationDate="2016-02-19T16:00:02.910" Score="3" ViewCount="959" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a commercial closed-source app and I need to use a library under the Cecill-B licence.&#xA;I read the licence terms &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL-B_V1-en.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and it desn't say it is mandatory to distribute the source code of the software that uses the library, or to use it only for open-source apps. So I conclude I can use the library for my app, and distribute it in any mean I want (as long as part 5.3.3 of the licence is pretty generic about the use of external modules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2238" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-20T01:05:17.450" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T12:56:49.510" Title="Can I use a library under the Cecill-B licence in my commercial closed-source app?" Tags="|linked-libraries|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2534" CreationDate="2016-02-19T16:10:17.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the basic criteria for patentability of your invention is that it must be novel at the time of submission. By publishing your invention, you are making it known to the public and therefore no longer novel. Thus, not patentable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, an algorithm is not really patentable by itself because it is merely considered an abstract idea and not an &quot;invention&quot; in the eyes of the patent system. There are other ways of commercialising your work besides patenting though: you can still use your know-how to create a product/service or to provide consultancy services, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, they have no business minding whether you take commercial advantage of your work or not because, judging by the license agreement you're celebrating with that journal, you are still its copyright owner and have not given up that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3348" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T16:10:17.803" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2541" CreationDate="2016-02-19T16:33:25.753" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;This website: &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://html5up.net/&lt;/a&gt; offers lots of HTML 5 themes using CC BY licenses. Can I create my own Wordpress theme based on these HTML 5 templates and sell on a theme market like &lt;a href=&quot;https://themeforest.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://themeforest.net/&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4299" LastEditorUserId="3426" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T14:36:41.123" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T14:36:41.123" Title="Create and Sell a Wordpress Theme based on a Template under the CC BY License" Tags="|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2533" CreationDate="2016-02-19T18:22:26.737" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but let's talk about what the AGPL requires, and how it forms derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your server uses the AGPL libraries in a way that creates a new work, then your entire work that uses the libraries is covered under the AGPL. Since, in that case, your server is a modified version of AGPL software, you must offer the source code for the entire collective work when you make the software accessible via a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for you, you don't have the source to offer. After you complete the initial physical transfer of the software, you can't compel the author to surrender the source code to you purely based on your position as a licensee of the software under the AGPL. The AGPLv3 is irrevocable, which means the licencor can't take away your &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to use/modify/distribute the code, but the licencor isn't under a continuous long-term obligation to supply the source to you again if you lose it or declined to receive it in the first place.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is addressed, in part, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#HowCanIMakeSureEachDownloadGetsSource&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ's advice to authors for making the source available&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I make sure each user who downloads the binaries also gets the source?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to make sure of this. As long as you make the source and binaries available so that the users can see what's available and take what they want, you have done what is required of you. It is up to the user whether to download the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our requirements for redistributors are intended to make sure the users can get the source code, not to force users to download the source code even if they don't want it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you received the binaries, the licencor satisfied their responsibility to offer you the source by advertising the source code's availability in the Github repository. Unfortunately, you elected not to receive the source code (or did receive it and later lost it). Now, the author has chosen to stop offering the program, and you can't get it anymore. Since they no longer offer the binaries, they no longer have an obligation to offer you the source. (This is true as long as there is no written offer involved; see the footnote for an uncommon special case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you don't have a copy of the source from when it was available, you can't fulfill the requirements necessary to offer the combined AGPL work as a network service. That does not mean you must &lt;em&gt;delete&lt;/em&gt; the AGPL binaries, but it does mean that you can no longer publicly run a network service using a program that includes AGPL components for which you cannot offer the source. You are free to continue doing things that do not require you to offer the source, such as modification, running locally for private use, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely your case. Any further consideration gets a bit murky; see below the bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7103/50&quot;&gt;offering decompiled source does not seem sufficient&lt;/a&gt; to satisfy the GPL's definition of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&amp;quot; It's certainly better than the binary, but it's certainly worse than the actual code that the original author wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;As a special exception, this is not true in the rare case that the licencor gave you a formal written offer of source code under distribution option 6(b) or 6(c). In that case, the person who issued the offer of source code must honor it for at least three years from the date of issue. Since your case deals with a Github repository, it's vastly more likely that distribution was done under option 6(d), or else was not subject to the GPL at all because it was done by the original author, who is not bound by the license.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your server's use of the AGPL libraries does not create a combined work, then your server and the plugin are separate works. In that case, you might possibly be in the clear but it's a subjective decision at what level of interaction two pieces of software combine into a single work. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the relevant GPL FAQ entry&lt;/a&gt;, but replace &amp;quot;non-free&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; and replace &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;AGPL&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I release a non-free program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. For instance, if the program uses only simple fork and exec to invoke and communicate with plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. In order to use the GPL-covered plug-ins, the main program must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and that the terms of the GPL must be followed when the main program is distributed for use with these plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the AGPL would not apply to your entire server if it doesn't form a combined work with the AGPL library, your server does not need to share its source code. For example, this is exactly what happens with MongoDB, which is AGPL-licensed but positively asserts that a program which interacts with a MongoDB database does not form a combined work with the database, so the AGPL does not apply to any program that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T16:53:41.937" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-19T18:34:20.547" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;MongoDB positively asserts that a program that uses a MongoDB database does not form a combined work with it. This is nice because my web service that uses MongoDB does not need to be licensed under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify an AGPL program and make it available to users over a network, those users are entitled to a copy of the modified source. Certainly, if I make a a modified version of MongoDB and deploy it as a public-facing network service that anyone can connect to, I need to make the source available to its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the only user directly connecting to my modified MongoDB instance is my web service, but that Web service is public-facing, do I need to make the modified MongoDB source available to the users of my web service? Again, MongoDB has asserted that my use of MongoDB in this way does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; form a combined work with my web service. Does an end-user's indirect &quot;use&quot; of MongoDB through my web service constitute &quot;interacting with it remotely through a computer network&quot; as specified in the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T22:49:33.977" Title="Do I need to share the source for my modified AGPL-licensed MongoDB instance if the user doesn't interact with it directly?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2539" CreationDate="2016-02-19T22:49:33.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, you've almost answered your own question here, with the information you've got in the post. Basing this answer off that, I'd say you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The users are not directly interacting with the database.&lt;/strong&gt; They are instead interacting with your web application, which is in turn acting on the database by proxy, on behalf of the users. That's probably enough of a distinction, especially given the theory of...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Computer user accounts represent real users.&lt;/strong&gt; This means that if your server's database user is the one interacting with the database, it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the remote user interacting with it, and thus you don't have to provide source. This line of thinking wouldn't stand up far in court, but as a method of thinking about it you're probably OK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The license hasn't changed.&lt;/strong&gt; If MongoDB say that a web application interacting with a non-modified version of MDB doesn't have to provide source, and the license conditions on your modifications haven't changed, it also stands to reason that a web application interacting with your modifications doesn't have to provide source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A reminder:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice; and this answer does not constitute an attorney-client relationship. If you need real legal advice, contact an open-source specialist lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-02-19T22:49:33.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2537" CreationDate="2016-02-20T00:45:12.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as you give the source theme the required attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T00:45:12.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2535" CreationDate="2016-02-20T02:24:01.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no lawyer, and don't even pretend to play one on the 'net. Take the following with a heavy dose of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how &quot;firstly, compliance with the principles governing the distribution of Free Software: access to source code, broad rights granted to  users&quot; (principles of the license) hint at allowing you to close it up. You should distribute the version you use, in source. Check the exact conditions for distributing changed versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it says about &quot;modules&quot; (essentially, defined as other code linked to the covered code):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;       5.3.3 DISTRIBUTION OF EXTERNAL MODULES&#xA;&#xA;When the Licensee has developed an External Module, the terms and&#xA;conditions of this Agreement do not apply to said External Module, that&#xA;may be distributed under a separate license agreement.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e., your code is yours to do as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-20T02:24:01.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-21T01:29:24.740" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am about to graduate in May and have zero experience outside of school. The only thing worth putting on resume is I have been a TA for intro Java course for a year, and a 2 semester team project robot arm which turned more into a mechanical engineering project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am a single father and have been working 40-60 hours manual labor a week since starting school, so I never had time to do an internship, or put time into anything not related to homework.  I wasn't just being lazy. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I finally have some help and have some free time to work outside of school. Now from what I have found on this and other forums was open source projects would be my best bet.  I would like to know what is the best way to start with this. I have tried to just Google this topic, and I was overwhelmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I plan on setting up a github.  Would it be a good idea to add all the small programs I have done for algorithms and AI class? Sorting, searching, ect.. If so, should I do this in multiple languages? What else should I put on github? Will I be able to add open source contributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this has been asked before, but the main thing is I have zero experience in open source, and have no idea where to start. Hoping someone could nudge me in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to anyone who can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4308" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T01:29:24.740" Title="How to start working on open source projects" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-21T01:40:20.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-21T17:02:52.383" Score="19" ViewCount="10482" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching the web for quite some time now, but the plethora of opinions/comments/articles about licensing questions make it difficult to verify how trustworthy the various sources are. Also, they often contradict common practice. All of which left me beyond confused. I'm trying to collect what I've found here for cross-checking, adding references, controversy, and discussing common practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you create a public GitHub repository with a single file &lt;code&gt;file1&lt;/code&gt;, add no license file as well as no license and copyright line to &lt;code&gt;file1&lt;/code&gt;, this file is automatically copyrighted by you, the GitHub user. As such, it's all rights reserved, with the following additional rights determined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-and-content-ownership&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub's ToS&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide&#xA;  to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.&#xA;  However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to&#xA;  allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be&#xA;  viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your&#xA;  repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems common practice to add one file, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, to a repository that should (hopefully) cover all of the repository's code. I have found very different opinions as to how this is actually true.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The common practice on GitHub is to fork a repository, fix bugs, add features, or modify the code in any other way and then sent a pull request to incorporate the changes in the upstream repository. If the repo contained a license file, then so did the fork, so I guess all changes published in the fork fall under the same license file and (if it was one of the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache licenses) this allows easy acceptance of the pull request without any license or copyright problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. That's the case for the Linux repository; it has the GPL license file, people fork, and their changes might eventually propagate back to be incorporated in the kernel repo.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Somehow GitHub tracks who submitted what part of the code anyway, and the changes that were made -- so the copyright for each part of the project should be clear anyway, no? So it's more about the licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just generally confused how even the big projects (as mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as examples for the respective licenses) seem to follow a common practice that contradicts some of the articles I've read about copyright/licensing -- there is no CLA, they merge pull requests that don't explicitly permit them to do so, they don't track all changes in the header comment of each BSD-licensed file (isn't this really just done by GitHub anyway?), they often don't have a contributing file, etc pp. So I wonder how in everyday life, people go about all the common workflow on GitHub, with a decent pragmatism but still following the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, if I commit some code to a friend's repo that only has a license file with his name, what happens to the modifications I added? (It is unlikely to ever be a problem in these cases, but what would be the proper way of dealing with it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found &lt;strong&gt;easy&lt;/strong&gt; and comprehensive best practices, let's say for the most widespread license models, GPLv3, BSD, MIT and the workflow on GitHub -- and even such big projects like Linux seem to not follow some of the legal advice I've found online (e.g. each file should contain the full GPL, etc pp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, such a document that outlines this legal stuff with close consideration of the already-established working principles on GitHub should be a highly desired information collection for any open-sourcer hanging out on GitHub :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4313" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-09-21T08:53:44.087" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T08:53:44.087" Title="Common practice on GitHub and license/copyright" Tags="|licensing|github|contributor-agreements|forking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-21T17:26:44.313" Score="8" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been searching around a little bit for statistics on how many projects are licensed with a licence file in their repository. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://wptavern.com/github-launches-licenses-api-to-help-open-source-developers-license-their-code&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; with a graph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lU5RS.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lU5RS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Percentage of repositories licensed&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The spike between 2013 and 2014 can largely be attributed to the unveiling of &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt; by GitHub.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The new Licenses API returns metadata about popular open source licenses and can detect a project’s license from the repository’s LICENSE file. Developers are welcome to preview the API while it’s still under development. Ultimately, GitHub is aiming to use the API to collect and provide more information about the open source licenses in use on the site, as well as the projects that are using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the way these statistics work is the API queries repositories for a License file, and sorts that out by attempting to find a match with an open source licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back, I found an answer of mine to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1990/can-i-use-event-organiser-plugin-in-a-commercial-plugin-for-wordpress/1993#1993&quot;&gt;question on this site&lt;/a&gt;. It highlighted whether or not a plugin could be use, which was basically whether or not it had a licence. Looking into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;repository&lt;/a&gt; for my answer, I discovered that there was no &quot;Licence&quot; file, but rather a tiny little thing in the Readme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License:&lt;/strong&gt; GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was the only mention. I later submitted an issue and a pull request adding a licence file. I got this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stephenharris/Event-Organiser/issues/303&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;response&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no legal requirement to include a copy of it - but its better to, in case someone doesn't know what GPL is. Thank you for the PR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the first statement is correct, the statistics in the graph above could largely be inaccurate (Of course, if the statement is not correct, then the statistics would obviously be correct).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder: if a project does not need a licence file, and a simple mention in the Readme is enough, then how many projects are actually licensed on GitHub? Has there been any data or research into this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T14:25:15.490" Title="Licensed Projects: How many projects are licensed without a file?" Tags="|license-notice|github|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2016-02-21T19:25:26.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be careful. You got the original (clone) under the stated LICENCE (if available). If said license doesn't allow you to create derivatives, you can't change it. The license may specify that derivatives belong to the original author (would probably need some sort of agreement by you), that derivatives are yours to do as you please (e.g. MIT license), that if you share some derivative you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; also share full source (e.g. GPL), some licenses request to contribute changes back, others (e.g. TeX's) allow redistribution under the condition it isn't named the same. As always, as long as everybody gets along happily, legalese doesn't matter. It gets critical when somebody is playing dirty or there is a falling out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are allowed to create derivatives, you are their owner. Under GPL the derivative must be distributed under GPL, but if it is e.g. MIT you are free to dictate your own terms for your changes (make them private, GPL-only, whatever). So I could subvert your MIT project into GPL by sneaking in enough GPLed changes that getting rid of them is impractical...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the upstream project should state that contributions will only be accepted under the condition that they are acceptable, i.e., add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fossbazaar.org/content/open-source-contributor-agreements-some-examples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;contributor agreement&lt;/a&gt; of some sort. Check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt; too. Just like stating the license explicitly, most don't bother (we are all a big friendly family, right?) until it is too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-21T19:25:26.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T15:12:09.043" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fan of reusing stuff where possible, ever try to start developing any piece of software I search at following websites to get related software before developing it from scratch,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GitHub&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sourceforge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone know of any other useful resource that I can put in my search list for open source projects ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific I am after a open source project which is consuming SSRS but using a custom UI, as specified in this SO question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1424925/ssrs-with-custom-web-ui&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1424925/ssrs-with-custom-web-ui&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have been searching for days, found projects that use Java or other languages but non that uses C# along with HTML etc.. consuming SSRS for reporting. I am after code to be exact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3578" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:20:26.560" Title="What strategies should I follow while searching for open source projects" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-02-25T12:54:11.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-22T15:25:49.833" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project where BSD, Apache v2 and MPL1.1 libraries were used.&#xA;Basically propietary code will link to these libraries to run the Program. Libraries were only used in binary form, though. No code combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When further distributing the Program, do i need to make the source code of those OSS libraries available in the download package?&#xA;Is telling the Licensee where he may get the Source code of such OSS, sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4322" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T21:46:49.670" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T22:25:41.217" Title="Do I need to share OSS libraries source code when I only use them in binary?" Tags="|distribution|bsd|apache-2.0|linked-libraries|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2016-02-22T16:40:10.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 and all the BSD flavors have no copyleft clause. They allow distribution without sourcecode, so it doesn't matter for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MPL Version 1.1&lt;/a&gt; only requires that you make the sourcecode for those parts available which you modified. When there are no modifications you have no obligations to convey any sourcecode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just make sure that your end-product includes the license texts and copyright notices which are mandated by all three licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-02-22T22:25:41.217" LastActivityDate="2016-02-22T22:25:41.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2549" CreationDate="2016-02-23T14:45:34.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are few other minor generic project hostings (&lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://savannah.gnu.org/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://alioth.debian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://alioth.debian.org/&lt;/a&gt; both clones of sourceforge code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most (IMHO, no citation) of the other projects are listed in language specific hosts (Perl: CPAN, Python: PyPI, R: CRAN, and many others).  But I don't know about sites on C#.  You could check if there are common links for C# in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-02-23T14:45:34.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-24T01:58:43.300" Score="6" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the Apache 2.0 license is a fairly permissive license. It seems to me as if the only difference between the Apache license and other licenses (such as the MIT license), is the inclusion of a patent clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1881/69&quot;&gt;Against what does the Apache 2.0 patent clause protect?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1088/69&quot;&gt;Interference of Software Patents with Free &amp;amp; Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;, it seems to me as if the inclusion of the patent clause does two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually let you use the patent, if any are involved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a sense of relief to the end-user, as you now have a right to use the patent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, #1 doesn't help. I'm 16 and I don't think I'll ever want to get involved with stuff like patents. #2 seems to not affect me &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt;, but creates relief for my end-users, which is beneficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, does the Apache license provide any benefits, to me, or my end users? While the Apache license is a fairly simple and trivial license relatively speaking, what about patents makes the Apache license so advantageous over other permissive licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T02:33:54.050" Title="Does the Apache license provide any benefit if I don't have any patents?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2554" CreationDate="2016-02-24T02:33:54.050" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking of this a bit more, it benefits large projects, and sort of gives a clear answer to why many companies open source projects use the Apache license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apple/swift&quot;&gt;Apple's Swift programming language&lt;/a&gt; comes to mind). The patent clause helps the health of the &lt;em&gt;project&lt;/em&gt;, not necessarily the end users, or the maintainers (which was my perspective).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many large open source projects have tons of activity. With so much activity, you'd naturally get a lot of pull requests and contributions from various users. Even if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; don't have any patents, these contributors may have patents, it gets a patent license from them as well, assisting the &quot;relief&quot; aspect that I noted in the question. This is enforced by &amp;sect;5 of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise,&#xA;  any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work&#xA;  by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of&#xA;  this License, without any additional terms or conditions.&#xA;  Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify&#xA;  the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed&#xA;  with Licensor regarding such Contributions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; contribution, unless otherwise stated, has to come with a patent license. This benefits the health of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-02-24T02:33:54.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2560" CreationDate="2016-02-24T20:17:08.240" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;We now know that Linux is famous and all, so contributing to the kernel project is the best thing to do, but my question is about the history. The version one of linux was nothing but a small program written by Torvalds to learn about OSs. The people who then started contributing code did so selflessly without any regard for money, but apparently out of academic interest and a respect for its founder, Linus. But then, Linus wasn't as popular at that time as now, was he? Nor was he a dictator whom everyone was obliged to obey. Then what made people obey him? In other words, I am trying to search that one vital ingredient that makes a FOSS project take off and survive its initial critical stage. The critical stage is very important as many FOSS projects don't take off and just wither away in this stage (Github is full of many such projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost the same thing could be said about Guido Van Rossum with regard to the Python project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="4160" LastEditDate="2016-02-24T23:44:48.597" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T01:28:28.650" Title="What makes a FOSS project survive its initial critical stage?" Tags="|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2549" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:20:26.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from GNU Savannah and Debian Alioth like the other answer states, the other possible places are www.apache.org and www.openhub.net, but your search should always start from Google. A search for &quot;FOSS alternative for X&quot; gives what you are looking for in most circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:20:26.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2016-02-25T00:30:50.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Linux' case, there was strong interest in Unixy systems, BSDs where around but heavily tainted by the AT&amp;amp;T vs UCB lawsuits. Most enthusiasts fooled around with Minix, but that was 8088 &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;, and Andrew Tannenbaum adamantly refused to consider &quot;better&quot; processors to keep it possible to use in a one-semester operating system class (and thus 64K programs, slow, very little hardware support). By the license, users could &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; share modified versions, only patches. Many different patch series, mostly incompatible, came to be. That was painful, specially when i386 patches started circulating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus wanted to learn operating systems, and use his shiny i386 to the fullest. He began writing Linux, and sharing it. Now there was a project that offered &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; version, that could be passed around as one piece (for a long time, I carried a 3.5&quot; floppy with latest kernel sources around), that you could play around with. More or less each week a new version came out, patches and discussion flew around furiously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critical was that there was a group of knowledgeable hackers interested in using (and adding to) the system (Unix had long be the standard system in Computer Science departments), userland programs were available (both the new GNU tools and lots of BSD code, most of Minix programs could also run on Linux; a subset of hackers developed Linux-specific tools to round out the offer). Linus (and soon his first lieutenants) were very responsive to patches (what better motivator than to send in a patch, and have it in next week's version), and there were no (viable) alternatives. When the dust in the BSD lawsuits finally settled some decade later, Linux had no competition anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T00:30:50.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2557" CreationDate="2016-02-25T01:07:52.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eric Raymond once wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/&quot;&gt;catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's pretty much the gist of it. Almost all successful FOSS projects began because they &lt;strong&gt;solved a specific problem&lt;/strong&gt;, whether that's an individual developer as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond&quot;&gt;ESR&lt;/a&gt; wrote, or an individual organisation. From there, these projects grew and became big because &lt;strong&gt;many people shared that specific problem, and it's easier to solve that problem together than starting out alone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how Linux grew out of humble origins. Recall the very first announcement of Linux:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello everybody out there using minix -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and&#xA;    professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.  This has been brewing&#xA;    since april, and is starting to get ready.  I'd like any feedback on&#xA;    things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat&#xA;    (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)&#xA;    among other things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;    This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and&#xA;    I'd like to know what features most people would want.  Any suggestions&#xA;    are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PS.  Yes - it's free of any minix code, &lt;strong&gt;and it has a multi-threaded fs.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;    It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never&#xA;    will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite having severe shortcomings (i.e. only usable on 386, can only use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA&quot;&gt;AT&lt;/a&gt; hard disks, &lt;strong&gt;it was already minimally useful.&lt;/strong&gt; Having bash and GCC is significant; it means people can tinker with it via the commandline, and compile and run real programs on it already. Soon enough a handful of contributors added things like more hardware support, improved modules and so on. Distributions like Slackware and Debian sprung up making it even easier for people to use Linux. Meanwhile folks in the Free Software world, notably GNU, developed a symbiotic relationship with Linux: free software made Linux more useful, and Linux was a free kernel that could run free software without having to purchase obscenely expensive UNIX licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So really the success of Linux could not be distilled down to one factor; it was a confluence of things that went right with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Writing an OS from scratch is hard.&lt;/strong&gt; At the time, perhaps less than 100 people in the world were capable of doing what Linus did. Linus was brilliant and obsessed, and had loads of spare time being a University student, but it still took him months of hard work to get to something useful. Anyone wanting to work on a free OS would have to replicate all that hard work. &lt;strong&gt;It was much easier to help Linus with Linux than to start from scratch.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linux came at a time with just the right infrastructure.&lt;/strong&gt; Linus &lt;a href=&quot;http://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html&quot;&gt;credits&lt;/a&gt; the internet and available GNU utilities like GCC as crucial for the early success of Linux. Without these, he wouldn't have had easy access to contributors to test and write new code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps most importantly, &lt;strong&gt;Linux scratched the itches of many many people&lt;/strong&gt;. At the beginning, Linus wrote Linux due to being dissatisfied with MINIX. It just so happens that MINIX had many dedicated users (the comp.os.minix newsgroup had &gt;40,000 users worldwide), who had similar dissatisfactions with it. &lt;strong&gt;The first version of Linux was released into a large and receptive userbase&lt;/strong&gt;. As more people contributed patches to Linux, it became more useful and to more people, so the whole thing snowballed. &lt;strong&gt;People who wanted to use a free UNIX could use Linux&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas other variants were either super expensive or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#Net.2F2_and_legal_troubles&quot;&gt;legally ambiguous&lt;/a&gt;. Many people in the GNU community, who were working on a free OS for a long time, flocked to Linux as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd&quot;&gt;GNU's own effort&lt;/a&gt; went nowhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now you can see why Linux is one-of-a-kind; its success would be extremely hard to replicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of FOSS projects don't grow beyond its founder for a few reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't solve a problem.&lt;/strong&gt; An obvious way to prevent this is to follow ESR's advice; make sure the project at least solves &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; problem; this guarantees that the project will have at least one dedicated user: you. But even so, the project could fail because it doesn't solve that problem well, because the problem is hard. Linux definitely fits this; writing an OS from scratch is hard, but fortunately Linus had the right knowledge and motivation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't solve other people's problems.&lt;/strong&gt; This is probably by far the biggest reason why projects fail; there is simply no demand for it. Perhaps you're the only user who has the problem, or there's so many competing solutions that no one needs to use your solution. Linux was extremely lucky in this regard; its competitors were either expensive or useless, and it inherited a userbase with voracious demand for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It solves the wrong problem than you think.&lt;/strong&gt; There's a lot of unsuccessful, minimally-useful FOSS projects out there. I suspect many were started for the wrong reasons: often these are &lt;strong&gt;vanity projects&lt;/strong&gt;; the author wants their own version just so they can say they wrote it, or the alternatives have the wrong colour or shape or whatever. If the problem is vanity, by definition, these projects can't solve other people's problems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It solves the problem too well.&lt;/strong&gt; If the problem is small and self-contained enough, there's a point where the problem becomes &lt;em&gt;solved&lt;/em&gt; and there is no need for further development. For FOSS, this means people can just take the project's code, incorporate it into their codebase and call it a day. Think about small parsers, algorithms and so on. Many of them existed as separate projects at one point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's ok to have lots of unsuccessful projects. In most cases, it's not because they did something &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; (in which case, someone could just fork it, do it &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;, and become successful). The success of projects depends so much on factors outside their control (market demand, timing, the nature of the problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2016-02-25T01:28:28.650" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T01:28:28.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2563" CreationDate="2016-02-25T12:43:49.363" Score="13" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one problem I don't have a strategy yet: I find an important bug in an open source project, contact a mailing list requesting the maintainers to fix it and after a triage, I get no response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could I do to maximize the chances of getting the bug fixed? So far I usually resort to nagging, but this seems to rarely work out well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3686" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-02-27T05:12:49.297" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T18:06:30.197" Title="How to deal with unaddressed bug reports?" Tags="|community|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-25T13:33:10.780" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that a small social network site (which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://socialof.me&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). I am actively developing this project and I am planning it to be open source. But I am confused about licensing it. In the future, if this project will be bigger, I am planning to make a company out of the project and place advertisements within the interface, so that I can make money off of it. and probably add ads to this network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've researched a few licenses; however, I'm confused about how they work. The Apache license states that you can use the software for commercial purposes. How will another company lay claims to the project? Will that company ever get claims to the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly confused as to how this works - could somebody guide me here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4344" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-26T00:42:00.437" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T03:33:48.020" Title="Can a social network site be open source?" Tags="|license-recommendation|monetization|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2561" CreationDate="2016-02-25T15:50:46.893" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, if the developers are working on the project as a labor of love, they're going to work on what &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; want to work on. You can't expect them to prioritize your issue just because you asked them to. Instead, you can try to add incentives to make it more likely that your issue is one that they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few options, depending on the particular circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patch it yourself:&lt;/strong&gt; In the event that you have the technical know-how to fix the bug yourself, you can submit a patch. Be sure to follow the project's style guide, and ensure that your patch includes tests if the project maintainers typically expect them. Of course also make sure it doesn't cause any new problems in any other parts of the project (so, don't cause any existing tests to fail, for starters). Submit your patch for integration into the project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Supply more information:&lt;/strong&gt; Even if you can't completely fix the problem yourself, try investigating the issue further. See if you can find any relevant parts of the code that cause the problem, or see if you can produce any other test cases that reveal more information or are more succinct than whatever you've already given. If you do a good job here, you can simultaneously draw renewed attention to the issue while potentially making it easier for the developer(s) to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Get other people involved:&lt;/strong&gt; If you know that lots of other people have this issue, draw their attention to your issue in the project's issue tracker and have them star/comment, depending on the features of the tracker. If it becomes obvious that the issue affects a lot of people, it will probably get higher prioritization. Obviously, if you do this all the time, or in an obnoxious way, you might just be delegating your unsuccessful &quot;nagging&quot; approach out to other people, so use this option thoughtfully.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Money talks:&lt;/strong&gt; If it's really important to you to see this issue fixed immediately, pay the developers to fix it. If lots of people have this issue, see if you can collect money from multiple sources via a crowdfunding platform like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.indiegogo.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indiegogo&lt;/a&gt;. If the developers aren't interested in your money (e.g., they simply don't have the time, and money won't change that), you can pay someone else to fix the issue, since you have the source code already. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2578/50&quot;&gt;Nikolas Raoul's answer&lt;/a&gt; for step-by-step look at the process involved in contracting a patch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T15:46:02.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2016-02-25T19:19:18.980" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be off here, but I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt; to help me decide I needed to pursue inclusion of MIT license in the github repositories we are working to publish.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision for our project was fairly simple as we wanted to legally support AND encourage developers to create derivatives of tools/samples/examples using our existing API constructs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure the site is detailed enough for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4346" LastActivityDate="2016-02-25T19:19:18.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2016-02-26T01:03:27.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why not? Most sites (even rigorously controlled ones) run on open source software. I'd be surprised if StackExchange wasn't overwhelmingly open source behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; states clearly that &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; use can be forbidden, in particular commercial use is allowed. Note that some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; licenses are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; open source licenses. But they are not recommended for programs anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T01:03:27.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2561" CreationDate="2016-02-26T01:14:19.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must also consider that what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; consider an important bug might be very low priority for the developers (for whatever reason). Yes, there have been cases where blatant security problems were dismissed as &quot;irrelevant&quot;. In the end, you'll have to make your own call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See if you can fix the bug, band together with other users willing to chip in, get more confirming reports, refine the report (see to make it reliably repeatable, smaller/simpler case exposing the bug, ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Look for workarounds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you see the project might not be serious enough about bug fixing or general development standards, you'll have to look for replacements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If worst comes to worst, fork the project (or start an alternative). But unless the itch is severe, and affects lots of people, and you can motivate the crowd of users to chip in...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added later:&lt;/strong&gt; If it is commonly packaged in distributions (in particular, it is in yours, as mentioned in a comment), perhaps the best bet is to report it locally. Your distribution's packagers are often active upstream too, or at least have more direct access to upstream developers. A bug report by the maintainer of the package in a major distribution will certainly carry more weight than one by an unknown user on foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T18:06:30.197" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T18:06:30.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2016-02-26T03:48:20.473" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses only matter if there is a conflict between programmers. If programmers don't get in any conflict or dispute, then you can be as informal as you want and everything will go fine. According to &lt;em&gt;The Federalist&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;If men were angels, no government would be necessary.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But men aren't angels, and that's why licenses exist (to serve as the &quot;law&quot; that guides the use of the code). When programmers do get in a dispute over code, that's when we start parsing the license agreement to find out what the correct course of action is. If the dispute becomes heated, we may even start bringing out the lawyers to help us resolve the dispute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the dispute can be resolved peacefully (&quot;Eh, this coder wants attribution? We'll throw his name in a README file.&quot;) But this may not happen, and the dispute has to be escalated. In the case where a person is in blatant violation of a license (say, by stealing someone's code and claiming it as their own), then the original writer of that code may file a DCMA request with GitHub to remove that code. This has happened with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271304&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;oh-my-fish&lt;/a&gt; project, since that code was found to be in violation of the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The experiences of &lt;strong&gt;oh-my-fish&lt;/strong&gt; is also a warning against the unprofessional practices of not caring about copyright/licensing. The original founders of that project were friends, and only later had a falling-out, which led one of the programmers to make the DCMA request based on  violations of the MIT License. A more professional attitude towards licensing compliance (such as requiring CLAs to be signed and tracking changes) would certainly have prevented this legal issue heads-on (although it would have added more initial up-front costs and may be rather annoying). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to you to decide whether you want to follow the easy path of doing what you want and hoping men will keep being angels, or to follow 'best practices' and end up doing way more work than is necessary (especially if your project is not &quot;important enough&quot; to justify all the legal compliance steps). Just know that &quot;common practice&quot; and &quot;best practice&quot; are never the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-02-26T03:48:20.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-26T12:46:29.033" Score="8" ViewCount="4234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the library: &lt;code&gt;com.firebase:firebase-client-android:2.4.0&lt;/code&gt; Firebase in my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library belongs this site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.firebase.com&quot;&gt;Firebase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt is whether I have to include some license from firebase like the Apache 2.0 or MIT licenses. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use a third party library, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs&quot;&gt;Material Dialogs&lt;/a&gt;. The library owner, lets anyone use it, since it included the copyrights somewhere on the application for use it.&#xA;That is, when using this library, I have to refer to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot;&gt;LICENSE.TXT&lt;/a&gt; somewhere in my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if I have to do the same for the library service &quot;Firebase&quot; and the libraries that Google provides, such as the &quot;Design Support Library&quot;, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the Firebase terms: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.firebase.com/terms/terms-of-service.html&quot;&gt;Terms of Service Firebase&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as other google libraries also have to include something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;com.android.support:design:23.1.1&#xA;com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.1.1&#xA;com.android.support:cardview-v7:23.1.1&#xA;com.android.support:support-v4:23.1.1&#xA;com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads:8.4.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4351" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T23:44:51.847" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T23:00:52.500" Title="What firebase license should I include in my app?" Tags="|attribution|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-02-27T17:10:23.747" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a java utility class from GitHub for my android project (&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tareknaj/BigFunctions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tareknaj/BigFunctions&lt;/a&gt;). I saw from here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2142/android-external-library-license-in-project&quot;&gt;Android - External library license in project&lt;/a&gt; that there is no specific place to keep the license files of the utility class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no requirement of where it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that I can show the licenses and notices through the app. Is it required for both the license and notice to be shown. Also can I actually place the LICENSE and NOTICE files anywhere I like in my project hierarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4366" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T17:10:23.747" Title="Using a GitHub Code in Android Project - Licensing Requirements" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-03-14T13:24:38.680" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2571" CreationDate="2016-02-27T22:16:25.360" Score="2" ViewCount="1387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the Python Software Foundation License permit relicensing to the GNU GPLv3 (or v2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4370" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T00:28:07.240" Title="Does the Python Software Foundation License permit relicensing to the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|psf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2570" CreationDate="2016-02-27T22:46:34.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot re-license the individual PSFL-licensed work, because you are not the copyright holder and the copyright holder has not permitted you to do so. Python will remain under the PSFL; the only way to change this is for the copyright holder to issue it under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, however, if you are merely interested in combining a PSFL-licensed work with GPL-licensed code, then you are interested in the question of whether the PSFL is &lt;em&gt;GPL compatible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation says of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Python&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python licensing for various versions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License of Python 2.0.1, 2.1.1, and newer versions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a free software license and is &lt;strong&gt;compatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. Please note, however, that intermediate versions of Python (1.6b1, through 2.0 and 2.1) are under a different license (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License of Python 1.6a2 and earlier versions (#Python1.6a2)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a free software license and is &lt;strong&gt;compatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. Please note, however, that newer versions of Python are under other licenses (see above and below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License of Python 1.6b1 through 2.0 and 2.1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a free software license but is &lt;strong&gt;incompatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. The primary incompatibility is that this Python license is governed by the laws of the State of Virginia, in the USA, and the GPL does not permit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you're not using a version of Python between 1.6b1 and 2.0 or version 2.1, your copy of Python is compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL compatibility does not allow you to simply relicense the Python interpreter in isolation, but it does mean that you can combine the interpreter with other works that are licensed under the GPL and license the entire combined work under the GPL, as required by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you can comply with both licenses' requirements simultaneously. In the particular case of the GPL, this is possible because the set of restrictions imposed by the Python license is a subset of those imposed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-02-27T23:19:00.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2573" CreationDate="2016-02-28T13:48:57.230" Score="6" ViewCount="788" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a licensing model, or common ethic agreement, prohibiting the leaking of solutions to questions contained in a textbook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was searching for solutions to a question in a very popular and internationally used textbook, and found that a solution guide is available to teaching staff whom approach the publisher and can validate that they are in fact a teacher in the field, running a current course, and mandates of students this text. The publishers website is of a very firm opinion that students must not be able to get possession of this solution guide, and it must not be distributed. Surprisingly, I was indeed not able to find a PDF for personal use through my conventional channels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is quite thick; containing approximately 1100 pages and organised into topic chapters. Each chapter is 30-60 pages, and typically 2 pages of this is exercises. If I was to write my own solution guide for every question, cover to cover, and make it open source (allowing others can contribute solutions, corrections, or content), and I was to ensure that no contribution was a direct quote from the solution guide, with the exception of 'true/false' type answers, is it possible that I am violating more than just the publishers wishes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the consensus different in cases where I quote the question prior to answering, instead of referencing the question, and minimally answering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4102" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-02-28T20:41:00.847" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T09:03:42.090" Title="Open Source Textbook Solutions" Tags="|copyright|publishing|ethics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2572" CreationDate="2016-02-28T14:33:58.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problems in textbooks are often used in homework or exams. That is the most often cited reason. Besides, having the answers gives the lecturer a (not to be dismissed) advantage in front of the class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problems themselves are copyrighted material, whatever you write up as solutions is unambiguously based on them. If this is enough to make it a &quot;derivative work&quot; under the law is something only a lawyer specializing in the area could answer. I'd guess the publisher will fight it, as your solutions will undermine some of the value of the book to the ones deciding to buy it (professors specifying it as the class text and getting the solutions as a side benefit). In any case, courtesy would require to respect the wishes of the author. If the solutions aren't available publicly, don't go against that. If no solutions are available, your idea doesn't grate (so much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a student, reading the question and looking up the answer (as the overwhelming minority will tend to do) doesn't lead to learning. Some books instead sometimes only give hints, or even extend the answer much farther than the original question. This is an effective technique with truly motivated readers, which sadly isn't exactly the norm in lower-level courses. To do any of these well is &lt;em&gt;very hard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2016-02-28T14:41:45.627" LastActivityDate="2016-02-28T14:41:45.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2577" CreationDate="2016-02-29T01:17:17.313" Score="0" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1357/can-i-link-a-apache-2-0-library-into-software-under-gplv2&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, just this time code which is licensed under Apache 2.0 gets linked into code I have written, which is under the BSD 3-clause. Both are open-source, but I wanted to give the licensed code a unique license to not confuse people as I will  put the app on github. So I would like to convert apache2.0 code-sections to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 3-clause&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Up to now I put ahead of the code first my BSD3cl header and then the Apache2.0 header which was already there. Furthermore I mark changed lines inside the Apache2.0 code, which I edited myself (this is what Apache2.0 tells me to do). So altogether I want to remove Apache2.0 and put all the code under BSD3cl. .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//BSD-3-clause template (where all the restrictions go etc)&#xA;//Already existing Apache 2.0 template&#xA;&#xA;//my code&#xA;//origianl apache code&#xA;//origianl apache code modified ( I did change this and that)&#xA;//my code&#xA;//my code&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are your thoughts on this, as I dont have experience yet with licensing in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4378" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T21:53:38.353" Title="Convert Apache 2.0 code to BSD 3-clause" Tags="|bsd|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-02-29T20:35:36.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2574" CreationDate="2016-02-29T02:43:06.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not change the license on code you did now write (more precisely, not own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you combine code distributed under different licenses, the result must be distributed under the license that is more restrictive (the one that allows less), as you must comply with both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD licenses are nearly maximal permissive, Apache somewhat less. If you can distribute the result of combining Apache + BSD, it is under Apache only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T02:43:06.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2561" CreationDate="2016-02-29T08:13:45.537" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apsillers' answer is perfect, I will just add a case study about the last paragraph (&quot;Money talks&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My open source project (1.5 million users) has had users pay third-party companies for features. I wrote the guidelines below, they are general enough to be applicable to most projects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Guidelines about sponsoring development&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you are willing to pay money for a feature or fix to be implemented, here is how you can do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find the issue in the issue tracker, or create a new issue if it does not exist yet. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add as many details as you can, describe how it could work, draw a prototype on paper, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post a comment asking &quot;If I provide a good quality patch for this feature, will it be merged?&quot; and wait for our answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Choose someone to do the job. Use any crowdsourcing platform you trust (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bountysource.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bountysource&lt;/a&gt;), or a developer friend, or a software company. Make sure they know Android and Git.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reach an agreement with the developer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agree with the developer on the conditions, defining exactly what they must implement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Insist that produced source code must be released as Open Source (not doing so would be a breach of the GNU-GPLv3 license). A common error would be to ask only for the binary (which will quickly get out-of-date and incompatible)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, make it a condition that produced source code must be merged by us before total payment. Or make it half/half. If the issue is classified as &quot;critical&quot; in our issue tracker, then the developer can be assured that we will merge it fast, if the code is good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Propose to become a tester if they need. Giving your feedback early could help. Be sure to test on different devices and in different scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary of the workflow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EdSXK.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EdSXK.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paying for open source development&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T03:41:08.707" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T03:41:08.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2016-02-29T09:30:26.787" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you run a social network, your main asset is not the software, but the community that uses your social network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to identify your competitive advantage. If your competitive advantage is not the software, then making it open source can make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Reddit is a kind of social website, it is for-profit (recently valued at $500 million USD), and the &lt;strong&gt;source code powering it is open source&lt;/strong&gt;. Nothing prevents people from taking the software and attempting to compete with Reddit, but it is bound to fail because Reddit's main asset is their community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Please comment if you have other examples)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T03:33:48.020" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T03:33:48.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2016-02-29T14:54:10.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you want to create an open source web application and want people who use it for their own website to contribute their improvements back to you, then you might want to take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Affero-GPL&lt;/a&gt;. Most other share-alike licenses only demand open-sourcing of changes when the software itself is conveyed, but not when users use the software over a network, like it is the case with a typical web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear what you mean with &quot;another company laying claims to the project&quot;. If you mean that they take your project, develop it under the same name and thus take away your control: You can protect yourself from that by trademarking the project name (like Mozilla does with Firefox, for example). This will allow people to take your software, but not your name. But they can still fork your software under a different name. If you don't want this, then you don't want to open source your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding advertisement: Open source allows commercial use and any kind of modification. So other websites running your software can remove your advertisement or replace them with their own. So you can not expect to receive any ad revenue from other users of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With any kind of social network, your number one asset is not your software. It's your userbase. People don't join a social network because it has the superior software, they join it because of the people who are already there and the content they post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-02-29T14:54:10.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2570" CreationDate="2016-03-01T00:28:07.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you get some code under the Python license, and you add some code you license under GPL, the result has to be licensed under the more restrictive license, i.e., GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, doing so is damaging. Your combination will become a pariah in the larger Python community, as it can't be included without tainting all. This is a sure recipe to have it die on the wine. The community will probably see you as disruptive, and shun you. Everybody loses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T00:28:07.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2584" CreationDate="2016-03-01T06:01:46.517" Score="5" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-redshift-utils/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;source code for a project released by Amazon.com Inc., &lt;code&gt;awslabs/amazon-redshift-utils&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an &quot;Open Source&quot;-like license is found with questionable stipulations, particularly section 3.3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use with the web services, computing platforms or applications provided by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, including Amazon Web Services, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The included &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file appears to be very similar to other Open Source licenses, however it also seems that Amazon is trying to limit usage of any and all derivative works to be used only with their own paid software products and services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal or enforceable that a company can release &quot;free&quot; software which is &quot;locked-in&quot; to that company and only to be used when it serves to increase the profit of said company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of the license &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awslabs/amazon-redshift-utils/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;may be found here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://aws.amazon.com/asl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;also here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4389" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T00:52:12.437" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T00:52:12.437" Title="Is it legal for a corporation to &quot;lock in&quot; &amp; restrict usage and redistribution of Open Source software that it has released to it's own services?" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2572" CreationDate="2016-03-01T09:03:42.090" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;have saw similar questions come up multiple times at... www.moodle.org i do not remember direct links right off, but little time searching site should bring back half dozen or more forum threads to read through, for different opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;their is a few folks their that belong to &quot;open source&quot; schools per say. and might help you find a lead if you are looking more of open source doing. so you can join in and help out vs trying to come up with something yourself from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;========&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;remember being in school, and teachers having a couple &quot;teachers books&quot; from different companies due to errors / issues with one vs another.  and their were a few times both in K-12 and in collage. teachers complaining about the &quot;agreements&quot; they had to sign. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=========&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you need to remember... it is not clear back in the olden days, when there was not internet. and students would sneak over and grab an answer sheet from the test book. and do a quick glance at it, when teacher was not in room / busy talking to other students on opposite side of them. heck students most still likely still do this :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but rather today... text books &quot;student version&quot; and &quot;teacher version&quot; are more or less exact same copies of each other within there given version. nothing random in order or questions that show up in them.   all it would take is one teachers slip up in any school. and a student could look up information online and easily cheat.  WOOPS i had this homework, WOOPS it is done, i did not actually do home work though &lt;em&gt;ughs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other words... re-phrasing of questions, different questions, even true/false questions. they need to be different. so as no easy cheating.  making it difficult enough for students to cheat. so they actually do homework and/or study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=============&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while teachers are already busy, as is, text book companies are trying to hold on to their work.  in today age of times. it could be easy for someone to grab a book and just start inputting stuff into the internet or document.  just like illegal downloading of music / videos / games and like.  books are illegally scanned in and shared across the internet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it has happened, not enough books to go around. more than likely someone forgot book, or still waiting for more books to come in (beginning of semester), and teacher just copies some pages from one student book. to hand out to remaining students.  (see illegal downloading on internet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=============&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there is only so many ways you can write up X + Y = 4.&#xA;for books and testing students actually reading the book, there may be more than a few questions that could be asked differently up to a certain point. pending on how many pages student was suppose to read. and/or trying to get student to think about how the book plays out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;moodle for example more likely able to take in 1,000's of questions about a book, and detailed about each page of the book. and randomly spit them out to the student within a range of pages student was suppose to read.  if you got your questions from a third party that you had to assign an agreement and/or questions/answers copyrighted. you are tied to that agreement / copyright.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if questions/answers from third party source are copyrighted. and you and/or others. added in additional questions and left them open source.  those additional questions i would think would be ok to keep open source. just not the questions you got from third party that are copyrighted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how ever if there was an additional agreement beyond copyright. (seems over board), but you might be limited in being able to share extra questions pending on the &quot;agreement&quot; you signed.   it would be assumed the question shared with all but answers shared among teachers only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pending on school, you may have some sort of &quot;ethics&quot; aka laws/regulations you may have to abide by.  schools are paying teachers, to teach and do there job, not mess around doing something other while being paid. and the schools most likely do not have enough funding to pay a teacher to do something else.  schools pay publishers to come up with stuff, to make it easier for teachers to teach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;=============&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while above most likely does not answer your question/s directly. perhaps gives a little huh? to long over done lawyer talk in the &quot;agreements&quot; teachers need to sign for the &quot;teacher versions&quot; of books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to note it. i am for &quot;open source&quot;, but generally it comes down to, good old fashion hard work of blood, sweet, and tears, of producing original work. that you choose to make open source, and in that not copying something else. or less it is open source, and agreeing to the &quot;open source agreement&quot; in how information can be exchanged. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4391" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T09:03:42.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2582" CreationDate="2016-03-01T09:05:48.223" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Amazon writes the code, they can release it under any licence(s) they choose, including fully-free and fully-proprietary licences, or not release it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cognitive disconnect here is that you've looked at the licence, seen that it has a lot of the &quot;&lt;em&gt;dress and feel&lt;/em&gt;&quot; of free licences, decided that the software must therefore be free, and are then surprised that there are limitations on the use of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The error is in concluding that this is free software.  The licence does not give all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;; specifically, it does not give freedom one, the right to use the software for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't free software, no matter what you think it looks like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T19:47:02.890" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T19:47:02.890" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-01T09:28:30.920" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an opensource project that I started some years ago and I still maintain it. This project is licensed under the BSD (3 clause) license and at the moment I am the sole copyright holder and contributor of the project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every source file contains this copyright info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright (C) 2009-2016, &amp;lt;my name&amp;gt;.&#xA;// All rights reserved.&#xA;// Code licensed under the BSD License.&#xA;// http://www.&amp;lt;projects_website&amp;gt;.org/LICENSE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently someone expressed his interest in contributing and I would like to know what is the best way to handle contributions so that everyone is happy. Copyright transfer agreement? Adding new copyright co-owners in files. Something else? What kind of changes I'll need to make to the license and the source files' copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4392" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-01T23:57:30.623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T23:57:30.623" Title="Handling contributions in an opensource project" Tags="|contributor|bsd|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2016-03-01T13:32:18.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to handle such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright transfer is not well seen by external developers, and with a BSD license I think it is also not worth the effort: it is anyway difficult to lock further the derivation of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the contributor will do substantial work in a file, I would add his copyright line in that file.  Some project prefer to have an AUTHORS file to put the name and copyright holder of all the modifications. Try not to mix different licenses in the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO it is important to use a control version system, so to track the contribution of the different authors. There is no need that all (or any) contributors will use it, but you should track it. In this way you will have much less work in case of splitting the project (e.g. creating a library), changing licenses, etc. [e.g. git can track who contribute every line of code].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T13:32:18.220" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2585" CreationDate="2016-03-01T19:35:27.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask the contributor to add their contribution under the same license. Nothing is lost (you still can take it as a basis for closed source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd make sure to add a CONTRIBUTING file somewhere in your version (and show it prominently) stating that only contributions under the above license will be accepted, and that contributor affirms to have the right to contribute under those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-01T19:35:27.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2589" CreationDate="2016-03-01T20:24:48.097" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about licensing, and because my legal English isn't really strong, I was hoping for a simple answer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to create a set of services, that uses command line programs which are licensed under LGPL and LGPLv3 and distribute amazon AMI for a fee. The question is should my code be also LGPL, and if not, can i charge people for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4400" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T16:22:49.613" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T16:22:49.613" Title="If I distribute amazon AMI with my service that calls LGPL software, do I have to provide source code?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2588" CreationDate="2016-03-02T01:09:46.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question is should my code be also LGPL, and if not, can I charge people for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL draws a distinction between two kinds of new work that make use of an LGPL-licensed library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modifications to the library, where the LGPL-licensed work is modified directly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &quot;combined work&quot; (or &quot;work that uses the library&quot; in v2.1), where a separate application &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, changes to the library must be licensed under the LGPL. In the second case, only the library must be released under the LGPL; the application that uses the LGPL-licensed work does not need to be licensed under the LGPL. (It must follow a few guidelines, though. Notably, it must be easy to for users to make the application use a replacement library if a user wants to substitute the LGPL-licensed library with a different version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's possible that you don't even need to follow any of these rules, if your code doesn't combine with the LGPL-licensed work into a single program in either of the above-mentioned ways. If your work is stand-alone program, and only invokes the LGPL-licensed work as a separate program, then your code not bound by any of the LGPL's rules. The distinction between one program with two parts and two separate programs that call one another is a hazy metaphysical and legal distinction; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF has some guidelines on how they feel about the subject in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. If you wish to play it safe, then assume you do form a single program and license your work accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you may charge whatever you please for the act of transferring a copy of free software, even if your software is under the LGPL. See the FSF's article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Selling Free Software&lt;/a&gt;&quot; for a robust treatment of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-03-02T01:09:46.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2016-03-03T03:07:05.540" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One particular problem is that your home-knit license is probably incompatible with everything else, and thus creates an island that is useless to everybody else, even if the intent is to be very free. Read also &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Wheeler's essay&lt;/a&gt; on the licence proliferation too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2022-09-25T23:27:02.757" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T23:27:02.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-04T01:48:05.777" Score="5" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some friends and I started up a very small business venue a while back, to make a card game. Properly registered as a partnership and all that. It was nothing serious though, just something we worked on in our spare time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've all gotten busy, and so are likely to drop it (technically I exitted 3 months ago). No one is unhappy about this, we had fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the project we spend a few hundred dollars commissioning art.&#xA;I think we ended about with 10 or so images.&#xA;Which we bought outright (not licensed, but fully purchased the copyright).&#xA;It is generally really good, we got great deals from our artists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we wanted to open source it are there any particular concerns given that we were not the original creators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2016-03-04T14:04:18.647" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T14:04:18.647" Title="Open Sourcing Commissioned Art" Tags="|copyright|commercial|art|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2016-03-04T02:34:28.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the legal owners of the copyright, you are certainly entitled to license it as you want, including making it open. But as images, you should probably look for the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-04T02:34:28.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2605" CreationDate="2016-03-04T21:47:23.190" Score="1" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to fork a repository on GitHub (let's call this A) so that I can modify a few things. If I were to try and make a pull request, I don't think it would be merged as they changed the focus of that project, and it's not active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A is registered under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt;. If I create a new repository myself, (let's call this B), will I be allowed to do that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am, will I only need to mention the name/link of the original repository and readme to fulfill the requirements of that license? I want my repository (B) to be open source. I'm wondering whether I also need written permission from the author, as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1934/rules-guidelines-about-forking-a-project-vs-creating-a-new-one&quot;&gt;Rules/Guidelines about forking a project vs. creating a new one&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure if this is entirely similar. It didn't explicitly seem to be the same issue that I am facing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4427" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T13:02:24.250" Title="Creating a new repository based on an old one" Tags="|attribution|forking|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2595" CreationDate="2016-03-05T01:42:52.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license you cite is open source, but not ideal for software. You are allowed by the license to distribute under the same terms. Read the license carefully, and ask here (or your very own lawyer) if some doubts remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the licenses recommended by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; and/of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and see if one fits your idea better, and ask the upstream if they are prepared to change the license to the one you pick. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; pick one of the overwhelmingly popular licenses, MIT/BSD or GPL, or perhaps Apache. Selecting a minority license will just create an island that is of little use to everybody else (and forbids you to take useful code from others too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T01:42:52.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1043" CreationDate="2016-03-05T02:07:37.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Working on open source does give several benefits In a large(ish) project, you are working shoulder to shoulder with professionals, doing professional work.  You'll learn how to use a suite of tools, and to work in structured relationship with coworkers (in open source, often you never even meet the colleagues). This is training that you'd otherwise acquire only in a few years of employment. Finally, but not by any means the least, your work is available to show off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it can't replace a formal education. There are lots of stuff that people working on developing software, and analyzing  its performance, and observing people interacting with it, have found out (often the hard way) are important to consider, that aren't at all easy to see in the trenches. You can pick that up on your own, but learning it in a structured way from someone showing you the way is far easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T02:07:37.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T07:13:21.947" Score="1" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like a license restricting use to non-military projects, but otherwise just like the GNU GPL. (There is obviously no point in making a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_free_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;permissive&lt;/a&gt; license like that, because editing a comment is all it takes to create a derivative work and publish it under a different license. Right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rationale&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a license will be very useful to have for authors with either of two concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Support their business model via an additional income stream&lt;/strong&gt;. In the best case there  might eventually even be an app store, where defense contractors could readily purchase an alternative license subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prevent second-hand involvement in objectionable oil wars and other conflicts where smart plump generals get to play games of turning soldiers' lives into medals&lt;/strong&gt;. (You can see I'm not a pacifist myself.) &lt;sub&gt;This seems also important now that deep learning and other AI are getting smart enough to enable research into truly horrible weapons, and it might be important to speed-limit smart weapon developments relatively to smart (and corruption-proof) surveillance ones (which is hard!)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The business model part is particularly interesting, because it avoids all the trouble with non-commercial licenses, while targeting a &lt;a href=&quot;http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?order=wbapi_data_value_2014%20wbapi_data_value%20wbapi_data_value-last&amp;amp;sort=asc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;big market segment (over 3% of GDP)&lt;/a&gt;. Also, military agencies don't hesitate on spending when it comes to software. So the ethics of this aren't as bad as it might seem at first sight. It's primarily about making the military pay for what they use. And they have the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Homework&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a new idea. In 2006, there was &lt;a href=&quot;http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/08/7511/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;some sort of an attempt by a team to add a vague non-military clause to their use of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, which is of course not allowed, as the text of the license itself has not been set free. While their text tries to restrict usage to not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed. This is Asimov's first law of Robotics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in something a lot more specific: &quot;any project being conducted by or receiving direct funding from any of the agencies in the following list&quot;. And a long list of departments of defense of various countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this seems to be a frequently asked question, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoMilitary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, and their position is clear: the GPL has nothing to do with this, end of story. No further pointers. The FSF has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/department-of-defense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a page showcasing the Department of Defense&lt;/a&gt; and its use of free and open source software, with a clever pun on being &quot;passionate about defending freedom&quot;. But that's fair enough, given DARPA's (indirect, yet crucial) involvement in FSF's roots. As nice as the idea of free (as in freedom) software is, some would rather emphasize ethics and kindness as superior ideals, whom freedom serves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://techrights.org/2013/11/01/licences-and-wars/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This article about CIA's Linux-powered killer drones&lt;/a&gt; mentions &quot;several software licenses&quot; that get criticized for being pacifist, but doesn't mention what those are. At any rate, I can't find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there actually already a license to this effect that has had proper attention from lawyers? If not, what is the best way to create it? Paraphrasing the GPL to circumvent its copyright is dangerous, because particular wording has magic meaning in courts of law. Perhaps there is a copyleft software license that allows restrictions to be added? Or is the reason why such a license doesn't already exist that there is some US legal mechanism that doesn't allow it? (But the DoD still has to honor Microsoft's EULAs, doesn't it?) If so, could the idea be worded in some other way to have a similar effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that the relationships between licenses could be like object-oriented programming. Just like patents talk about incorporating the content of another patent here by reference, I could write a short license that says &quot;refer to the text of the GNU GPL&quot;, which will be provided separately verbatim, &quot;except clauses X, Y, Z are not incorporated here, and we add clauses A, B, C.&quot; Is there any problem with this approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;P.S. Please don't reiterate what the definitions of &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;free software&quot; are in the narrow sense. I am specifically asking about what I've outlined above, not something that meets those definitions (that would be contradictory indeed). In the broad sense, however, these licenses I'm seeking are both free and open source within the civilian population.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4429" LastEditorUserId="4429" LastEditDate="2016-03-05T07:42:15.337" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T07:46:48.743" Title="Pacifist copyleft-like partially-open-source license" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|copyleft|monetization|restrictions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-03-23T11:04:02.950" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2598" CreationDate="2016-03-05T12:13:59.083" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no &quot;pacifist&quot; or &quot;non-military&quot; FOSS license that has been vetted by actual lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if you wish to use a good license of this nature, you will need to come up with your own, vetted by your lawyers. Writing a good license is hard; for a pacifist license it would be very important to clear the ambiguities. See this question for more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445/175&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, it is perfectly fine to write a new license based on the GPL, provided that you remove the preamble and do not call it the &quot;GPL license&quot;. This is to protect the GPL trademark and ensure people do not confuse your license with theirs. For more details see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/253/175&quot;&gt;What are the licensing terms of the text of the GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T12:13:59.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-05T14:11:51.743" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start one e-commerce site , for which i chose the backbone framework which is under &lt;strong&gt;permissive BSD license&lt;/strong&gt; , can i use it for commercial purpose. what are the things do i need to keep in mind. Do i require any permission from author. Or what are the requirements to use that framework in my code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4435" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T20:55:23.553" Title="Usage of permissive BSD license" Tags="|licensing|bsd|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2600" CreationDate="2016-03-05T20:55:23.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can. No you don't need permissions. The license text is pretty clear to this effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-03-05T20:55:23.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2604" CreationDate="2016-03-05T22:29:49.743" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a simple app for Android and I want to make it open source, What license should I use, how should I implement it in the project files, and is there anything else I need to take into consideration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4440" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T18:26:09.620" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T18:26:09.620" Title="What license should I use for an open source Android app that has no third party libraries outside of ones provided by the Android operating system?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-03-06T18:26:15.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2603" CreationDate="2016-03-06T01:46:08.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you can choose any license you want, it is written by you. You'd have to check if the libraries you use (or even Android as a platform) has some say in this, but I doubt it very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T01:46:08.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2595" CreationDate="2016-03-06T13:02:24.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &quot;print, publish, perform, film, or record&quot; someone else's work, you must comply with the terms of their license -- which includes any license they granted by accepting the github.com terms of service. No one knows for certain what the boundaries of those words are on the internet. Does pushing the fork button constitute a publication or a recording? Does it matter, given the github TOS? Does adding a commit (and thus making a derived work) result in a change in legal status?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; terms, copyright and licensing is all about economic considerations. Every day, thousands of people push the fork button on thousands of github repositories of uncertain licensing status. And &lt;em&gt;nothing happens&lt;/em&gt;. Unless either the original author is somehow making money off the thing you are forking, or you are planning to make money off of your copy, the chances of any legal issue are very slim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prudent&lt;/em&gt; to comply with the terms of the license if there's a license. It's reasonable to ask the author to consider an additional or other license. But it's not worth worrying about too much unless there is money involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T13:02:24.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2609" CreationDate="2016-03-06T15:23:42.160" Score="2" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my professional area some of the most advanced software tools are incredibly hard to install, build, and configure even for the teams who create the tools, let alone for less technical end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reduce the high &quot;barrier to entry&quot; this creates for many less technical peers, I have created a FOSS distribution of Ubuntu 15 with the tools pre-built and configured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have never authored and distributed a distribution before. I fear that if I distribute it, especially on a popular site like &lt;a href=&quot;http://distrowatch.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;DistroWatch&lt;/a&gt;, that I'll soon be in over my head with software components needing updates, requests for additional tools, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there's a way to get an idea of exactly what to expect, to streamline the process of continually updating software components (and checking for resulting broken configuration)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a 1-person job, or do I need a team? Is there an established platform for recruiting contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4444" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T19:34:07.283" Title="Maintaining a complex FOSS linux distribution" Tags="|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2608" CreationDate="2016-03-06T18:25:45.183" Score="3" ViewCount="1579" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a GPL v3 licensed library, that I can compile for various architectures and use in the code for a BSD licensed project. This means that I probably have to distribute the binaries with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this violate the GPL terms of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4445" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-06T18:30:04.497" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T15:57:29.653" Title="Can I distribute a BSD code with GPL v3 binaries?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|bsd|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2016-03-06T19:19:56.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not distribute anything linking against GPL code as anything other than GPL. At least, that is the FSF's position, there is no firm legal determination one way or the other. In case of doubt, use GPL if you don't want to volunteer for the fun of being at the center of the lawsuit deciding this. Maybe there are non-GPL alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T19:19:56.097" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2606" CreationDate="2016-03-06T19:34:07.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Building a distribution is a lot of work. Perhaps instead of trying to create a full distribution it is better to just maintain the package(s) for Debian or Ubuntu, or offering to help out if it is already being done. In any case, search for other interested parties, having colleagues gives people with whom to discuss issues or which can take over the work if you are on vacation or otherwise unavailable. Another option would be to start e.g. a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spins.fedoraproject.org&quot;&gt;Fedora spin&lt;/a&gt;, a collection of software for a specific purpose (I don't know if Ubuntu has something similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I'd find it strange if you don't find it already packaged in Debian at least. Debian has a tendency to package up anything that compiles, as long as it is legal to do so (more precisely, agrees with their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;). If the software isn't already available, chances are it is not legal to distribute (in which case you can land in uncomfortably hot water) or is severely broken (in which case it is better to abstain and look for alternatives, or bite the bullet and work with upstream to fix it first). Rummage in the bug reporting systems or packaging discussions (trusty Google the name of the package and distribution name should lead you there) to get a clearer picture on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T19:34:07.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2598" CreationDate="2016-03-06T19:55:59.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a license would definitely not be &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; (6: No discrimination against fields of endeavor) nor approved by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; (Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale for not allowing such restrictions is that defining exactly what should be allowed or forbidden will lead to a quagmire. In your particular case: Is use in computing the payroll of the military allowed? The police? Why only for civilians? What if it is used as part of a medical device, which incidentally is also used in military hospitals? If it is used in veteran care? In a civilian facility? Can it be used by UN peacekeeping forces? By the military for disaster relief? Can it be used in a research project funded by the military, even if it has nothing connecting it directly to military use (say in operations research in general)? Is use in GPS allowed, which was developed for (and is used by) the military, but has lots of civil uses too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-06T19:55:59.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2612" CreationDate="2016-03-06T21:42:02.290" Score="29" ViewCount="4786" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I'm maintaining a GPLv3 project on GitHub with a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, code headers and all. Now, a few folks made some code enhancements and sent me a pull-request. Does that automatically mean that they agree to contribute under GPLv3 terms, or, do I have to do make some kind of separate agreement with each contributor? The latter is not only cumbersome, but practically impossible as projects become large. What is the usual practice in this regard for projects like WordPress, Drupal, Debian, Linux kernel, etc.? Do they all make formal agreements with the devs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2546/common-practice-on-github-and-license-copyright&quot;&gt;this recently posted question&lt;/a&gt; which explored this same area, but didn't answer this exact question I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, if today I accept someone's pull-request, can they come back five years down the line saying, &quot;Hey, I didn't intend this to be GPLed all those years ago, so I want to assert my rights now.&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T08:59:37.747" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T21:03:21.947" Title="When folks send me pull-requests on GitHub, what are their copyright/licensing terms by default?" Tags="|licensing|github|contributor-agreements|pull-request|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2611" CreationDate="2016-03-06T23:57:56.773" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some GPL projects require explicit copyright assignment, not merely licensing, of contributions. Copyright assignment is a bigger deal that licensing, and perhaps can't be arranged by an Apache style 'if you contribute it you are X'ing it' clause, where Apache fills in 'license' for X and a hypothetical alternative fills in 'assign'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Assign page&lt;/a&gt; at gnu.org, the reason is that it permits the project owner/master/community to actually take legal action against violations of the license. Only the copyright holder can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that when someone makes a derived work (a patch), they are required under the GPL to license it under ... the GPL. So as far as straight licensing is concerned, you're fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2016-03-08T23:32:32.000" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T23:32:32.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2611" CreationDate="2016-03-07T01:52:06.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case of doubt, you should state clearly that you only accept contributions under GPLv3 (or whatever license you select), and that the constributor must make sure they are allowed to contribute under the given terms. If it is redundant, it does no harm; if required, you need it to avoid getting into hot water. For a detailed example see e.g. the Linux document &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Documentation/SubmittingPatches&lt;/a&gt;. Probably any large software project has something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="10543" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T04:26:32.110" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T04:26:32.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2617" CreationDate="2016-03-07T09:36:40.223" Score="5" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized/&quot;&gt;&quot;How can a large open source project be monetized?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; already addresses many ways to make money with open source development. However, in the context of game development, most of these points don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corporate sponsorship? Games are targeted at consumers. No company would see a strategical benefit in throwing money at a game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-game advertisement? Breaks immersion, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2144/preventing-people-from-forking-and-profiting-over-minor-changes&quot;&gt;the community can just patch them out&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Support contracts? Gamers are used to asking for help on message boards rather than contact the developers directly. Nobody would pay just for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Customization services? Any game which is customizable attracts a modding community of people offering customization for free. Also, no player will be willing to cover the cost for a feature only they want all alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a business model which generates enough revenue to fund the development of a game and benefits from keeping it open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T22:52:23.970" Title="How could the open source business model work with games?" Tags="|monetization|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2618" CreationDate="2016-03-07T13:23:42.053" Score="6" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I need a piece of functionality and there is a library on GitHub, licensed under Apache 2.0, that provides that funcionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of use cases that can occur that I would prefer to just copy-paste a certain part of the library instead of the whole thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written for Eclipse, and I am using Android Studio and I don't want to go through the trouble to convert it to a gradle project, so I want to just copy the meat of the project and paste it into a new package/module in my project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library provides more functionality than needed and I only need a part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to heavily customize the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the general rule in these cases? Can I just copy the files I need? Should I mention the author in the code? Should I add a reference to the library in the final product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4451" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T13:39:23.357" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T13:39:23.357" Title="Can I take a few classes out of a library and use it in my project or should I always use the entire library?" Tags="|derivative-works|attribution|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2016-03-07T13:29:05.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general you should fulfill the license of every code you use, so if you are distributing a GPL library or a modified form of it (e.g. as binary), you need to fulfill the GPL license, which has some requirements on the final &lt;strong&gt;package&lt;/strong&gt; redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About linking: this is a gray spot. Some judges have ruled that also API is copyright-able, OTOH some people think that simply linking doesn't make a project derivable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, if you code some functionalities around a library, your code is also derived from such library.  If you link to a generic library, and then you change the library, it doesn't make it derivative (assuming: you are distributing separately the two things, the generic library is not derived from the other library [e.g. a stripped down version]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T13:29:05.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2614" CreationDate="2016-03-07T16:13:53.553" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of software is focused on solving a particular problem (e.g., performing calculations, handling point of sale transactions, visually rendering and editing pictures/graphs). In those cases, the software is a means to an end: the end user has a need, and they use the software to fill that need. In such cases, there is often an obvious path to monetization: pay to add new features to fill unmet needs, pay to get better guides on how to use the software to meet users' needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a video game context, using the software &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the end goal. There's no deeper objective external to the software, other than to be entertained. This cuts out a lot of monetization options. Furthermore, it's often &lt;em&gt;inherently fun&lt;/em&gt; to create modifications to a game (versus making modification to, say, a point-of-sale program or a spreadsheet program), so you'll have a lot of hobby-based competition for implementing features. You could still possibly do it, if your for-pay modifications have a reputation for being head-and-shoulders above your hobbyist competitors, but it's still difficult to convince people to shell out for your mod when there's an extant gratis alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main options I can see are &lt;strong&gt;pre-release crowdfunding&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;non-free game content&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can create sufficient pre-release hype for your game, either by attractive marketing or by a proven history of previous good games, then you can get people to pay for your game before it comes out. You can gather funds from a crowdfunding website to pay for development of the game. In this case, you don't get any residual income after the game is released. People pay for the game to exist and be released into the wild; after that happens, you lose monopoly leverage over the game to monetize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to release the source code of the game's engine under a free license, but keep the content under a non-free license. When you sell the game, you're really selling the content for the levels, since the open-source executable game is probably available elsewhere for free. It's a bit of a cheat to call this an &quot;open source business model&quot;, since you entire game isn't really open source: you've merely divided it into free and non-free components and charge for the non-free part. Still, this gets you many of the benefits of open source: notably, others can fix bugs in your engine and you can pull back downstream improvements (provided downstream changes make their source code available). As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://indiegamebundle.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Humble_Bundle_open_source_games&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;several games sold through the Humble Bundle&lt;/a&gt; have employed this model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a less viable third option, if you're really big, you might be able to get away with leveraging your trademark and selling merchandise. As a far-fetched example, if Valve chose to release the next Half Life game under an open source license, they could still sell a lot of Half Life branded t-shirts, etc. As a less far-fetched example, if the developers for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tremulous.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source first-person shooter Tremulous&lt;/a&gt; chose to release a limited-edition run of branded stuffed animals modeled after the game's aliens, I might buy one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-03-07T16:26:45.827" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T16:26:45.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2016-03-07T16:22:27.880" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source allows you to create derivative works. That means you can create a derivative work which reduces the functionality to those parts you consider essential. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But remember that you need to comply with the license terms of the library, even when you only take selected parts of it. Almost all open source licenses have an attribution clause, including Apache 2.0. so you will have to give attribution to the original author, even when you only copied a single function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-03-07T16:22:27.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2016-03-08T15:57:29.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answer suggests, linking against a GPL library by non-GPL code is not a legit way. There are precedents where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Legal_status&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt; has been legally enforced in the past. So basically, here are your options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try and see if the BSD-licensed code has any GPL alternative. If possible, ask the author if you can create a GPLed fork out of it. Though the BSD license terms are liberal enough that you can do it yourself, its still better to ask if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, try and see if the GPL library can be additionally licensed under LGPL. &lt;strong&gt;Unlike GPL, LGPL licensed libraries can be dynamically linked to by non-GPL code&lt;/strong&gt;. If you go this route, you should obviously take care not to link it statically from your BSD licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2016-03-08T15:57:29.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-08T22:55:33.060" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am permitted to mix not open-source code with GPL code on my computer if I don't distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is deploying it to a VM on a remote server considered distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4473" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T01:55:34.750" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T02:57:24.567" Title="Is deploying a program to a virtual machine not on my hardware count as &quot;distribution&quot;?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2625" CreationDate="2016-03-09T00:09:01.337" Score="6" ViewCount="1693" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on open source tool for which I want users to not remove or change product logo. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had originally asked my question &lt;a href=&quot;//stackoverflow.com/questions/35861123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here at Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; but it was recommended that I  ask here as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4475" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T02:43:50.367" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T12:39:05.780" Title="Is it possible to stop the removal/modification of my project's logo?" Tags="|attribution|enforcement|trademark|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2016-03-09T01:49:30.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to use trademark law for this, not copyright. To register the logo as a trademark, and enforce it isn't misused, you'd need to consult a real lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It being otherwise open source, users are certainly allowed to remove the logo, change the name and sail away into the sunset. It happened with Firefox and other Mozilla products, which restricted the use of the name and logos only to officially sanctioned changes. Debian replaced them (Iceweasel and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Red Hat goes one step further, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution is under GPL, except for a set of packages containing logos and other material under trademark, they give instructions to replace them. to create your own rebranded distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T12:39:05.780" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T12:39:05.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2016-03-09T01:55:18.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to do so, but consider the convenience for your users to just plug in a new (presumably bug-fixed) version of the library instead of having to hunt for the replacement code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it does make a significant enough difference to you, probably not. And it all obviously depends on how widely used your package will be (yes, we all dream it will have Linux' success, but let's be realistic, shall we?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T01:55:18.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2016-03-09T02:08:06.947" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are the copyright holder, you are allowed to license however you wish&lt;/strong&gt;. An example of a license you can use is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_Attribution_License&quot;&gt;Common Public Attribution License&lt;/a&gt;, which contains this clause (paraphrased):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] the Original Developer may include […] a requirement that each time an Executable and Source Code or a Larger Work is launched or initially run […] a prominent display of the Original Developer's Attribution Information […] must occur on the graphic user interface employed by the end user to access such Covered Code […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with that license, you can require that anyone using your code must display your logo if they make a program with a GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more interesting question is &lt;strong&gt;whether such licenses are open source / free software&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virtually all open source licenses have an attribution requirement of some sort, most are very lenient and easy to satisfy, but there have been examples of requirements so egregious that they've challenged the idea of whether the requirement is still open source. Attribution clauses that require prominent displays of product logos have been derisively called &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/243841/&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;badgeware&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It arguably began with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SugarCRM&quot;&gt;SugarCRM&lt;/a&gt;, who initially released their products with a license based on MPL but with a so-called &quot;badgeware clause&quot;. The software displayed a &quot;Powered by SugarCRM&quot; logo on all its pages, and the license stipulated that this logo cannot be replaced or removed. This caused a significant amount of community backlash, with many arguing such a requirement wasn't free/open, but it's not clear how - there weren't any clauses in say the Free Software Definition or Open Source Definition that explicitly ruled out badgeware clauses. It could be argued both ways: either it's simply a type of attribution requirement, or badgeware is a burden excessive enough to breach freedoms to derive or to use without discrimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, OSI essentially threw the question back at the community and approved a &quot;badgeware&quot; license, the CPAL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The APL was not a widely used license, I suspect because of its complexity. Let's give attribution requirements another chance in a simpler license. If such a licensed software does not achieve the Open Source effect, it will put the issue to rest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, &quot;we'll call it open source but if nobody uses it then that's that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SugarCRM on their part also dodged the debate by releasing their software under GPL later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's where we've been left today. Whether &quot;badgeware&quot; is open source / free software is an open question. CPAL itself is OSI- and FSF-approved, but interestingly not approved by Debian. What can be said though is that &lt;strong&gt;such licenses are highly unpopular.&lt;/strong&gt; Just as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_.28original_.22BSD_License.22.29&quot;&gt;original BSD license&lt;/a&gt; fell out of use due to its &quot;advertising clause&quot;, you may find that people will steer clear of your project if it uses a &quot;badgeware&quot; license, even if it is technically open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T02:08:06.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2016-03-09T02:34:05.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congusbongus's answer provides excellent information on what I believe to be the removal and inclusion of a project's logo. However, I want to focus more on another part: &lt;em&gt;changing the logo.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dives a little more into copyright and trademark laws, the latter of which falls out of reign for most popular licenses: they come with no mention, or generally an explicit exclusion of a grant. One that famously comes to mind is the Apache license: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trademarks.&lt;/strong&gt; This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, your logo can count as a trademark. Trademarks are automatic like copyright: you don't have to register them unlike systems such as patents. We use the (tm) symbol to represent an unregistered trademark, and (r) for registered trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you retain full rights to your logo, others' are not allowed to modify it. If you have a well known logo - other people can't attempt to profit by using your logo as a device. This stops them from making a simple change, such as rotating the image, or even the logo in it's original form, to use it for their own benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be made clear however, that these don't stop other people from removing the logo outright. Nor does it stop other people from adding trademarks on their own, and exercising their rights on their respective trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T02:34:05.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-09T09:52:23.860" Score="13" ViewCount="2008" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that some groups or organizations convey the GPL software without the source code. Such examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/serbian2014/files/Download/&quot;&gt;https://sourceforge.net/projects/serbian2014/files/Download/&lt;/a&gt; as Serbian GNU/Linux &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/trios-linux/trios/tree/master&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.com/trios-linux/trios/tree/master&lt;/a&gt; (pure, if any source), again as some kind of Serbian GNU based on Linux&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them, that I have asked, said, &quot;we copied it from Debian/other operating system and look for sources there&quot;. But that is by my opinion not in accordance with the GPL licenses. For example kernel of GNU operating system, Linux, is licensed by the GNU GPL Version 2 and by reading it, I understand that every distribution of software shall give the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4480" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T05:00:33.820" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T21:37:03.090" Title="Why do some GNU distributions with a Linux kernel convey GPL software online without providing source code?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2016-03-09T10:04:51.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of operating system may be authored as the group or author likes it. Some have created Red Hat Linux, some SuSe, and there are hundreds of such names of operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original name of the operating system that is today often by mistake called &quot;Linux&quot; is GNU: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/&lt;/a&gt; - and GNU compiler was used to compile Linux. GNU is the full operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When based on Linux kernel, one may refer to it GNU/Linux. When based on NetBSD kernel, one may refer to it GNU/NetBSD. But there is freedom to name it what you want. One shall never forget that Linux kernel was NOT intended to be free software. The author of GNU operating system is Dr. Richard Stallman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the Kernel alone, regardless if Linux or any other, does not make you &quot;operate&quot; with your computer. Thus Linux as kernel is certainly not &quot;operating system&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he was making speech in Finland, Mr. Linus Torvalds, at that time, understood the free software philosophy and has decided to license the Linux kernel by the GNU GPL software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there on, Linux kernel became part of the GNU operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people don't have father or mother, and some don't want to think of the father of the mother. There may be many reasons for that. But the fact is that even such people have fathers and mothers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the analogy to the naming of the operating system as &quot;Linux&quot; by the kernel. It does not give proper credit to the original operating system, though there is freedom for everybody to call it as they want. See example of GNU system distribution: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the origins of GNU operating system, whatever distribution it may be, helps and encourages people to program, study the source code, respect the authors and enjoy the freedom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4480" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T10:04:51.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2016-03-09T10:09:42.220" Score="19" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but that is [in] my opinion not in accordance with the GPL licences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you.  The GPL has always been pretty clear that you need to supply source if you're propagating binaries, and various authorities have opined that pointing to someone else's repository is not sufficient, eg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html#x1-120004.1.3&quot;&gt;companies who redistribute software packaged for them by an upstream&#xA;  vendor cannot merely pass along the offer they received from the&#xA;  vendor; they must provide their own offer or corresponding source to&#xA;  their distributees.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, it is far from the worst violation of the GPL you'll see out there.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html&quot;&gt;Some people make very significant changes to GPL codebases like the Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt; and sell the resulting binaries without releasing major parts of their codebase at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the only people who have standing to use the law to rectify this are the copyright holders themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If GPL violations like these trouble you, and you'd like to do something about it, one positive step you can take it to support projects that assist the rights holders in taking legal action to compel compliance.  This includes projects like &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org/&quot;&gt;http://gpl-violations.org/&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot;&gt;the Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-03-09T10:22:27.197" LastActivityDate="2016-03-09T10:22:27.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2638" CreationDate="2016-03-09T13:58:15.217" Score="9" ViewCount="1628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the scenario. Alice crafted a compression library and published it under GPL. Bob crafted a font processing library which uses pieces of code from Alice's library and ... let's call it &lt;em&gt;overly optimistically&lt;/em&gt; ... published his combined work under MIT license. This is a problem for people who want to use Bob's library because having Bob's library means they will also have pieces of Alice's code and would have to release their source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice's code is not that precious and can be replaced with some new code (perhaps using another MIT-licensed library). Carol is willing to take Bob's (labeled as MIT-licensed) code and rewrite it such that it no longer contains Alice's code and then publish the result under MIT license and use the result under MIT license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Carol's rework of Bob's code result in code free of GPL publication requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1096" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T06:50:04.327" Title="Does physically removing GPL code relieve combined work from GPL publication requirements?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|mit|combined-work|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2016-03-09T15:11:35.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of them, that I have asked, said, &quot;we copied it from Debian/other operating system and look for sources there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it's &lt;strong&gt;PERFECTLY LEGAL&lt;/strong&gt;. Note that wording changed between GPL v2 and GPL v3 but from 6.b about &lt;em&gt;Conveying Non-Source Forms&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; license (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) &lt;strong&gt;access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should provide a &lt;strong&gt;written link&lt;/strong&gt; to that repository (license requires an access with a reasonable effort for end-user). Note that when 6b doesn't apply then they are in case described by 6d and same reasoning is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example kernel of GNU operating system, Linux...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True. Note that kernel is licensed under v2 (exactly 2.0, not any other) and things are little bit different in wording (because v2.0 is an &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; license when network availability was not so wide. From 3.b you know that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[source code] to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that generic wording &lt;em&gt;&quot;...medium customarily used for software interchange...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Nowadays Internet access is absolutely a medium customarily used for software interchange. Also note that again is required a &lt;strong&gt;written&lt;/strong&gt; note about where you can get source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't download those ISOs but I'd &lt;em&gt;guess&lt;/em&gt; they include required information. &lt;del&gt;I'd define this behavior &lt;em&gt;sloppy&lt;/em&gt; but not &lt;em&gt;criminal&lt;/em&gt; (because license violations are criminal acts.)&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As final note please do not forget that inside Debian distro there are software distributed with many different licenses (not only [L]GPL), that's a good reason to keep license information (it's pretty important) inside ISO where individual licenses can be addressed correctly. A real-world example of this? If you have an Android device you know...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd suggest is to simply contact them and explain your perplexity about license terms. I think it may be &lt;em&gt;ethical&lt;/em&gt; to provide required information in a more prominent place but legally speaking (however note that I'm not a lawyer) they're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next paragraph isn't an answer to your question and it's just my very personal opinion about this topic. I guess it will be unpopular but that's it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;rant&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;Open Source licenses are made to protect your rights to access source code, change it and improve your knowledge. To be useful they must be &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; and compatible with real-world. Sadly there are many serious violations - not always in &lt;em&gt;bona fide&lt;/em&gt; - however tilting at windmills doesn't help and it may be counterproductive.&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/rant&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4481" LastEditorUserId="4481" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T08:15:38.623" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T08:15:38.623" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2016-03-10T00:31:45.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU project was started in the 80ies to create a &quot;free Unix clone&quot; under the name GNU (acronym of &quot;GNU is No Unix&quot;). A lot of userland utilities got cloned, a capable C compiler and C library were written. They adopted a hodgepodge of freely available pieces as part of the &quot;GNU system&quot;, like TeX (base of their texinfo documentation system). But the kernel still is &lt;a href=&quot;http://xkcd.org/1508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;nowhere in sight&lt;/a&gt;. Note that perfectly capable Unix userland is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bsd.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt; systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds started Linux &quot;to learn how to program my i386&quot; (dissatisfied with Minix, a very simple system for 8088 for classroom use, for which patches were distributed separately due to licensing restrictions). He soon adopted GPLv2 as the license which most closely described what he wanted. Many GNU programs where ported early (they had been used on many different Unix systems for quite some time, easing this job). A variety of organizations picked up Linux (the kernel), some GNU packages, lots of homebrew code and created a variety of &lt;em&gt;distributions&lt;/em&gt;. They also include huge amounts of code from other sources, like the X Windows system for graphics, complete languages like Perl and Python, graphics environments like KDE and XFCE. In any Linux distribution the GNU tools form the traditional Unix command line interface for users, almost all the system administration commands are Linux own, and (except for the Gnome environment, which associated itself with GNU) the graphical environments are not GNU. Each distribution has it's own idiosyncratic installation system and management tools, none part of GNU. A Linux distribution is overwhelmingly not GNU. Just singling out one of the very many contributors (even an important one) is hypocritical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the history, the GNU tools were often used as replacements of the clunky tools that came with proprietary Unix systems in university settings, and very little else. The compiler was managed mostly by a company specializing in development toolchains for embedded systems, and was quite successful in it's niche. It was even adopted as the official C compiler in Data General's DG-UX. Other than that, GNU was marginal. When the lawsuit of USG vs BSDi rolled along around 1994, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; Unix mostly used was some form of BSD. That came to a screeching halt, the formerly freely used code became tainted by possible licensing hassles. Linux was just becoming usable, and Linux distributions started to fill the void for hobbyists and soon &quot;for real use&quot;. When the dust settled with a resounding defeat for AT&amp;amp;T's landgrab, Linux had taken over. I.e., much of GNU's success was Linux' accomplishment (and sheer dumb luck), not the other way around. If it hadn't been for USL vs BSDi and Linux, nobody would know what GNU is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T00:31:45.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2016-03-10T00:40:13.623" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alice sues Bob for violating the terms of the GPL.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming here that Bob is linking to Alice's GPL library and using it for his project, but has decided to keep his own project under the MIT. The problem here is that the Free Software Foundation believes that linking to a GPL library is enough to make your project a &quot;derivative work&quot; and thus will require you to place your own project under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that is the Free Software Foundation's own interpretation of the GPL, and you could argue that this interpretation has no basis (as the law is silent on whether linking actually causes a project to be a &quot;derivative work&quot;). But that's why you need a court case to resolve the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice wins the lawsuit, then Bob has to relicense his code under the GPL, and we deal with the repercussions of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Bob wins the lawsuit, then Bob is free to keep his project licensed under the MIT. This is clearly uncharted legal territory here (as it opens a major loophole that could render the GPL toothless), but it may render Carol's attempt to rework the project unnecessary. If Bob is able to still use GPL code while keeping the MIT License, then &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; (including closed-source codebases) can use GPL code in their project. There's no reason to remove the GPL code then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that if Bob wants to actually produce permissive software without taking on unnecessary legal risk, he should either find a different compression library under a more permissive license OR do a clean-room implementation of Alice's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T00:46:48.827" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T00:46:48.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2621" CreationDate="2016-03-10T02:57:24.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law cares about legal entities, not computers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless AGPL is involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter how many different real or virtual computers are involved -- the question is, did you make it available to a different legal entity -- did you meet the legal definition of 'publication'. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/publication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the actual definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for AGPL, the question will be whether you created a service open to the public -- again, completely independently of how many computers, real or virtual, were involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T02:57:24.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2016-03-10T08:48:40.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: consider this answer a work-in-progress. After nice debates in comments and chat I see there is needing to provide references and explanations to many assertions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr/&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Carol has the right to do it and &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; font processing library can have a single MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little bit longer answer: according to &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; law (note that even if GPL is a &lt;em&gt;contract&lt;/em&gt; this distinction is - almost always - not applicable). &lt;strong&gt;Knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; (seeing original GPL source code) &lt;strong&gt;does not make your code derivative work&lt;/strong&gt;. It's an absolute &lt;strong&gt;undebatable point&lt;/strong&gt;; ad absurdum imagine if after working for company X you can't write similar software for company Y because you &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; X's source code. That's exactly your &lt;em&gt;market value&lt;/em&gt; for company Y and any legal action against this is a severe infringement of  &lt;strong&gt;labour's rights&lt;/strong&gt; (of course patented - not just copyrighted - code can't be rewritten). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more simple terms, imagine you're a CS student in University and you extensively study Linux (or Minix) source code in your OS design course. You finish university and you decide you want to write your own (even closed-source!) kernel. For sure you will use concepts you learned studying Linux source code (concepts, not code). If those concepts are not patented (and I can't think about any patented code in Linux) then what you're doing is perfectly (and obviously) legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Easy and reasonable? There are few obscure points (and jurisdiction matters)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/t_agm0_e.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights&lt;/a&gt; (TRIPS) agreement member states have to ensure that certain minimum standards are implemented into their national laws. Article 9(2) states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to US point of view about copyright (even if even in US there have been cases against this rule) where same &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;concept is described&lt;/a&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EU approach (in directive 91/250/EEC) is that a computer program is original if it is the author's own intellectual creation. The work must not be trivial – the author must have expended some skill, labour, judgement, knowledge in creating it. Note that knowledge is associated to &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; and it's not a result because it's the important point of above paragraphs. US copyright law defines &quot;derivative work&quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“derivative work” is a work based upon one or more pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said there are however obscure points. For example Pumfrey J. (UK High Court judge) in an April 1999 case (CFI vs. Tradition) said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems to be generally accepted that the &quot;architecture&quot; of a computer program is capable of protection if a substantial part of the programmer's skill, labour and judgement went into it. In this context, &quot;architecture&quot; is a vague and ambiguous term. It may be used to refer to the overall structure of the system at a very high level of abstraction...The term &quot;architecture&quot; may also be used to describe &quot;program structure.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This decision has very big implications because (unless otherwise stated) copyright owner is employer (and not employee). It seems pretty unreasonable (to me) and against traditional concept of copyright, for example another 1992 UK sentence (John Richardson Computers) decided in the other way. It's still a controversial topic because it's against traditional copyright concept (developed in US courts, with few exceptions). Eric S. Freibrun well expressed this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While a patent can protect the novel ideas embodied in a software program, a copyright cannot. Copyright protection extends to the particular form in which an idea is expressed. In the case of software, copyright law would protect the source and object code, as well as certain unique original elements of the user interface [...] In contrast with patents, independent development of a copyrighted work is a defense to an allegation of copyright infringement. Imagine, though, how unlikely it would be for the same thousands of lines of code to be created independently by one not engaged in unauthorized copying. Unlike patents, copyright law affords no protection to the ideas underlying the program. Ideas and concepts are fair game for competitors to the extent they are not protected by patents or trade secrets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that Freibrun introduced a fundamental point: trade secrets. They're (one of) the reason IBM won its copyright legal battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because judgment is so often discretionary (at least in some countries) we have tools like CRD (but big companies can still push you in endless expensive legal actions). The point is that it has to be judged case-by-case in the light of the skill and labour in design and coding of source code to be &lt;em&gt;copied&lt;/em&gt;. It is not determined by its importance or size nor by the amount of use in the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short the question to answer is: &quot;can you write such code by yourself even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you didn't see (this doesn't imply you really didn't) Alice's code?&quot; If answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt; (no matters code &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;) then it can't be considered copyright infringement even when law is unclear (like in UK or in US when big companies are involved.) If you used &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; end &lt;em&gt;methods&lt;/em&gt; then - in some countries - it may be controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4481" LastEditorUserId="4481" LastEditDate="2016-03-25T06:50:04.327" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T06:50:04.327" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2016-03-10T09:45:29.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rewrite&lt;/strong&gt; it such that it no longer contains Alice's code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really depends on how how such rewrite is done. Translations are considered derived work, also in the case there there no common &quot;&lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;&quot; between the two implementations.  So a &lt;strong&gt;(strict) rewrite&lt;/strong&gt; is a derivation of original code, but a &lt;strong&gt;reimplementation&lt;/strong&gt; is not (an implementation not inspired from original code and not copying the internal structure, API, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: API could be copyrightable (Oracle vs. Google on Java), and this will complicate things, but a simple interface with &lt;code&gt;compress()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;decompress()&lt;/code&gt; should not be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T09:45:29.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2641" CreationDate="2016-03-10T16:29:35.447" Score="6" ViewCount="1395" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT license states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I make a modified version of an MIT-covered code and publish it, does it have to be under an MIT license because the notice is copied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4489" LastEditorUserId="64" LastEditDate="2016-03-10T16:36:49.517" LastActivityDate="2022-05-14T20:00:54.350" Title="Does the MIT license propagate?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2632" CreationDate="2016-03-10T18:22:10.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the GPL code is a clean, defined, module, and you remove every scrap of it, and replace it by some unrelated code, you're fine. People do it every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-03-10T18:22:10.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2639" CreationDate="2016-03-10T18:35:08.123" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Code that you write&lt;/em&gt; does not need to be licensed under the MIT license. The original code that you received under the MIT license must remain under the MIT license. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2644/50&quot;&gt;Or, maybe not&lt;/a&gt; -- but this is certainly true for most licenses, which do not include &amp;quot;sublicense&amp;quot; as a permission. The ambiguous &amp;quot;sublicense&amp;quot; permission complicates this; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2644/50.&quot;&gt;Does the MIT license&amp;#39;s right to &amp;quot;sublicense&amp;quot; allow me to change the license of someone else&amp;#39;s work?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you must preserve the MIT license and copyright notice as long as you have someone else's MIT-licensed work in your project. Fortunately, the MIT license is very permissive, so it does not stop you from licensing &lt;em&gt;your code&lt;/em&gt; (or someone else's differently-licensed code) under other terms alongside the MIT-licensed code, as long as those other terms do not positively conflict with the requirement to include the notice. There are no popular software licenses that would cause such a conflict; such a license would need to have absurdly extreme terms like, &amp;quot;When including this software in a derived work, you must not include notices for any other software included alongside this software.&amp;quot; The one category of license I can think of that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; cause a conflict is any Creative Commons license with a &amp;quot;No Derivatives&amp;quot; provision, which disallows combining a work with &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; else (but that license is explicitly not intended for use with software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of clarity, you should clearly indicate in a README which components are MIT-licensed and which are not. The terms of the MIT license don't explicitly require this (unlike, e.g., the Apache license), but if you don't do this, then recipients of the code will not know which parts are covered under which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2021-07-25T14:35:55.800" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T14:35:55.800" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2643" CreationDate="2016-03-11T13:47:22.563" Score="22" ViewCount="750" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a creator posts content to any Stack Exchange site, they grant Stack Exchange a Creative Commons Attribute Share-Alike license to use (and display and share) the content. This is irrevocable - even if you choose to delete your post, or a moderator deletes your post, Stack Exchange still has a license to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Exchange has chosen to allow users with 10k reputation, site moderators, and some staff to view deleted posts. That means that this class of user can, potentially, receive a CC BY-SA license to all content ever posted on a given site and use it, under the CC BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons provides the following rules for providing attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the requirements is &quot;a link to the material&quot;. Since the content has been deleted, it is no longer accessible to people who do not fit the criteria who can view it. However, the post still does have a URL (should it ever become undeleted, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would linking to a deleted post (while providing the other required information) be considered proper attribution under the Creative Commons rules? If not, what would proper attribution to a deleted Stack Exchange post look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this does not consider the ethics of using a deleted post. I have received the post and have the right to use it. For a cultural/ethical discussion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/276787/should-i-be-using-deleted-content-from-posts-on-the-stack-exchange-network&quot;&gt;see this post on Meta Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T10:32:17.297" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T15:41:33.363" Title="What is considered proper attribution for a deleted Stack Exchange post?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2642" CreationDate="2016-03-11T15:41:33.363" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 4(c) of &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; it is defined how attribution has to be provided. For the work’s URL, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if a work’s page no longer exists, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the page is about something different now, or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the page does not (or never did) contain the information that the work is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you don’t &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to provide the URL in your attribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; still do so, and I think it can be beneficial: it allows others to find the work in Web archives; maybe the page comes back online again; it can be relevant to know under which domain the work was originally hosted; etc. If you decide to provide the URL, it might be a good idea to add a note that it no longer works (and, perhaps, to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/links.html#link-type-nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;nofollow&lt;/code&gt; link type&lt;/a&gt;, in case of HTML).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think that this does not apply to &quot;deleted&quot; posts from Stack Exchange sites. These pages still contain the relevant information (they are still about the work, and they still contain the licensing information), it’s just that they are (currently) not accessible to unregistered and many registered visitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These posts are still &quot;available to the public&quot; (from CC BY-SA 3.0’s definition of &lt;em&gt;Distribute&lt;/em&gt;), similar to a book that’s for sale, a performance that requires an admission ticket, a Web video that can only be streamed from a specific country, or a newspaper article behind a paywall. In the case of Stack Exchange, an account with 10k reputation or moderator privileges is required. If at some point only Stack Exchange employees would be able to access &quot;deleted&quot; posts, then I’d consider these to no longer be available to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T15:41:33.363" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-11T16:44:02.040" Score="11" ViewCount="3735" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that, generally speaking, you may not issue a license on a copyrighted work if you do not own the copyright to that work. Licensing is an exclusive right of the copyright holder. Instead, you may prepare a derivative your other people's work, and license your own changes under some license. Recipients of your derivative may then exercise whatever freedoms over the combined work that are permitted by both licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; includes the right to &quot;sublicense&quot; the work, which suggests I may be able to offer the MIT-licensed work to others under different licensing terms. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T08:50:31.303" Title="Does the MIT license's right to &quot;sublicense&quot; allow me to change the license of someone else's work?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2016-03-11T16:44:02.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not. While I have not been able to find any definitive reading of what the intent of the &quot;sublicense&quot; permission is, it appears to merely mean that you may pass the rights you receive on to others when you share the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and there may be a more airtight way to arrive at the same conclusion, but the possibility of changing the license appears to be naturally precluded by the license's requirement that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and &lt;strong&gt;this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license does not allow you to remove the text of the MIT license from MIT-licensed software, so it seems unlikely that you could sensibly change the terms of the license while unable to lexically remove the license from the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T16:44:02.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2016-03-11T23:44:44.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you post your distro . You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This also applies to organizations (including companies); an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in any manner, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain terms and not in others; but the decision to distribute looking at you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4500" LastActivityDate="2016-03-11T23:44:44.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-12T12:08:08.040" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Philosophy of the GNU Project&lt;/a&gt;, there is one page &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Why we must insist on free software&lt;/a&gt; which states the importance/significance and advantages of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know what OSI states/shows the importance &amp;amp; advantages of open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see at the mission statement at about page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is higher quality, better reliability, greater flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm looking for the (demonstrating) topics like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How open source is better?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How open-sourcing is important? or Why open source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-13T15:43:41.163" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T13:33:10.807" Title="What significance &amp; advantages does the OSI say about open source?" Tags="|osi|fsf|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2678" CreationDate="2016-03-14T13:43:19.740" Score="2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to use as optional dependency a GPL dependency in a commercial product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to ask the user when installing my product if he wants to install a GPL dependency. Is it possible to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4514" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-03-14T14:33:38.480" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T17:07:51.733" Title="Ask user to install external GPL dependencies when installing commercial products" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-14T15:43:12.423" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has always bothered me that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the MIT license&lt;/a&gt; uses the word “conditions” but only seems to list one condition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted […] to any person obtaining a copy of this software […] to deal in the Software without restriction […] subject to the following &lt;strong&gt;conditions&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.) Is the last paragraph considered to be a condition pertaining to the granting of permission? If not, why isn’t the singular “condition” used instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4516" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T09:46:36.903" Title="Are there really multiple “conditions” given in the MIT license?" Tags="|mit|terminology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2657" CreationDate="2016-03-14T17:58:36.167" Score="6" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a GPL v3 application. I've found some graphics on www.flaticon.com that I would like to use in the application. The application will be distributed as binary, but with the resources as-is in a subdirectory of the binary. As well as the binary distribution, the application (including resources) will also reside on a publicly accessible repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, flaticon (owned by Freepik) states that all graphics are free to use for web usage and software applications and such, &lt;em&gt;as long as you credit the author.&lt;/em&gt; This is fine and no problem, which is why I went ahead with the project in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reading the license more closely, it states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What you CAN NOT DO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sublicense, sell or rent any contents (or a modified version of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Distribute Freepik Contents unless it has been expressly authorized by&#xA;  Freepik. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Include Freepik Contents in an online or offline database or&#xA;  file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Offering Freepik Contents designs (or modified Freepik Contents&#xA;  versions) for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full license can be seen here (about half a page): &lt;a href=&quot;https://profile.freepik.com/license/free&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://profile.freepik.com/license/free&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm not well-versed in legalese, I would be grateful for help/clarification on the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I violating their license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is their license somehow incompatible with GPL, or does that only extend to program source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would it ever be possible to include resources such as theirs, without redistributing in some sense (even on the web)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I actually have contacted them with the same question, but it seems they're not responding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4517" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T13:53:08.560" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T20:06:18.447" Title="Including resources with ambiguous license for GPL application" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|media|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2016-03-15T06:19:15.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an additional condition below the warranty clause in the X11 license , so I think that the &#xA; &lt;em&gt;SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is also interpreted as a condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: according wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&lt;/a&gt; there are many MIT licenses, so it also could be a copy past error, on deriving the most famous MIT license (Expact License) from other MIT licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-03-15T06:19:15.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T09:40:45.687" Score="11" ViewCount="685" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question is utterly silly for a developer, but apparently the legal dept. is getting paid to have a common sense that's ... different from ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is my question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What license governs the files that are automatically generated by Visual Studio?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And I don't refer here to things that are added as Nuget packages. Those have a (relatively) clear license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer to the trivial files, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;web.[debug|release].config files for web projects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;global.asax(.cs)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AssemblyInfo.cs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XxxForm.designer.cs (for Winforms projects)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For some context: I have to comply with a tool called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www2.blackducksoftware.com/products/protex&quot;&gt;Protex&lt;/a&gt; that scans source files and finds pieces that may be part of OSS projects.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The general idea is sane - we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; want to comply with the requirements of the OSS libraries we use, and this tool helps check if there's anything we missed.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The problem is, it also finds positives in (unmodified) files like &lt;code&gt;web.debug.config&lt;/code&gt;, probably because there are a zillion OSS projects out there that have used the same VS Web Project template containing the same scaffolded files.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4519" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-03-16T01:11:59.517" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T22:22:26.270" Title="What is the license of the scaffolding files Visual Studio generates automatically?" Tags="|licensing|development-environment|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-15T20:12:46.613" Score="5" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repository (a website) available on Github which contains code, media and texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is freely available (either on the website or via the code on Github). I want to let the code available under an open source license (MIT, for example), but I don't want the license to apply on media and texts. These are my company's properties and cannot be redistributed or modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to change the license to explicitly say that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use a license for the code and another (or nothing) for the rest?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a license already offer that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I can remove the license and just state that the project is unlicensed (even if visible on Github), but I would rather open source the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4525" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-03-19T09:22:23.127" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T00:48:54.913" Title="Open source license that only affects code" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|source-code|exceptions|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2016-03-16T11:51:22.637" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, the question of whether artwork forms a combined work with software that displays has been addressed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-share-if-i-include-cc-by-sa-artwork-in-my-software&quot;&gt;What do I need to share if I include CC-BY-SA artwork in my software?&lt;/a&gt;. If your art does not make a derivative work with your code, it's okay if the licenses are not compatible (but it's not completely clear under what circumstances code and art make a derivative work). If indeed your project includes an aggregation of two separate parts (code and data) that are not a combined work, then the GPL could stop at the code only, and the data could be separately licensed. (When the GPL-licensed code consumes the data for display, it would likely be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;just data&lt;/a&gt; and not necessarily part of the GPL work.) If you do this, include a LICENSE file that clearly indicates which parts are licensed which way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that the standard Freepik license does not allow distribution, which makes it unsuitable for any works that you plan to distribute. &lt;a href=&quot;https://profile.freepik.com/license/free&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The page you've linked to&lt;/a&gt; is not the full license. The last line says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The complete content of licenses can be consulted on the Terms of Use, that will prevail over the content of this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to refer to section 7 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freepik.com/terms_of_use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freepik Terms of Use&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;APPLICATION END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT&quot;. These terms not only appears to be clearly incompatible with the GPL, they also appear to expressly forbid redistributing any Freepik images under any circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three particular permissions granted are (emphasis mine, here and following):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FreePik grants the User a non-transferable, limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license for the duration of the relevant rights; to &lt;strong&gt;download&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; FreePik Content, in a device the User owns or controls and only for the purposes and uses allowed in these Terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permission to &quot;use&quot; is tremendously ambiguous, so you might assume it includes the right to redistribute, but the license's list of restrictions says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The User may use the FreePik Content provided that it: (i) does not involve collective use, [...] (iii) the FreePik Content is not used or included in a database or archive in such a way that could prevent or limit future visits or downloads from the Website (iv) &lt;strong&gt;does not resell, assign, transfer or sublicense the FreePik Content or any derived work from a FreePik Content&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prohibition against redistribution is reiterated in a later paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The User does not acquire any right as a result of the use of the FreePik Content. In particular, &lt;strong&gt;the User is not authorized to distribute, resell or rent any FreePik Content&lt;/strong&gt; (or any modification of any FreePik Content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the only rights being licensed in the text of the actual license are the rights to modify Freepik images (but not distribute those modifications) and to display Freepik images (and derivatives) in a way that does not cause distribution, for example, inclusion in a physical art display or use in a presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, since Freepik said elsewhere that you may use their images in contexts that do require distribution like on a Website or in software, they would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/estoppel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;estopped from denying you that right&lt;/a&gt; for such use, provided you followed all other conditions, but I would be very concerned that such use is expressly contrary to the text of the formal license grant in the Terms of Use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T15:33:12.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2659" CreationDate="2016-03-16T13:54:24.167" Score="13" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia (and any other Wikimedia product) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;change to a dual licence since 01/08/2009&lt;/a&gt;. As I understand, that implies they redistribute GFDL licensed text in CC-BY-SA without asking every author (wich would be impossible, because many are anonymous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I'm not against the change, but &lt;strong&gt;I don't completely understand, legally, how it works&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It said something about &quot;GFDL clause allowing the re-licensing to occur has now expired&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in another projects and most common licenses? Who and how it is determined if re-licensing is allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4529" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-09T16:22:57.237" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T16:22:57.237" Title="How does re-licensing without the approval of authors work (eg, wikimedia case)?" Tags="|relicensing|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2658" CreationDate="2016-03-16T14:54:55.100" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that re-licensing virtually always requires the permission of the copyright holder. This was a rather exceptional case. All material on Wikipedia used to be under the license &lt;em&gt;GFDL v1.2, or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next version released by the FSF, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GFDL v1.3&lt;/a&gt;, contained a provision that allowed any licensed material included on a wiki (below, &amp;quot;MMC&amp;quot; material on an &amp;quot;MMC site&amp;quot;) posted prior to November 1, 2008 to be re-licenced under CC-BY-SA 3.0 by the wiki operators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An MMC is &amp;quot;eligible for relicensing&amp;quot; if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why on earth did they do that?&lt;/em&gt; Largely, this was done exactly so that sites like Wikipedia could relicense their content to CC-BY-SA, because they felt that the GFDL presented practical difficulties (e.g., requiring a copy of the full license text any time part of an article was reproduced). The FSF explains their decision in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GFDL 1.3 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the rationale behind these changes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 11 has been added to allow wikis like Wikipedia to use FDL-covered works under the terms of CC-BY-SA 3.0 if they choose to do so. They have told us that they would like to explore this option, and adding this provision gives them a clear path to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, these sorts of licensing decisions can and should be handled by the copyright holder(s) of a particular work. However, because Wikipedia has many copyright holders, the project needed some alternative way to accomplish this, and we've worked with them to provide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause allowing this has expired, because the license text explicitly only allowed it until August 1, 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally, projects have &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/186/84&quot;&gt;unilaterally relicensed without permission form all copyright holders&lt;/a&gt;, including Mozilla Firefox, but this appears to simply be &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; illegal. In those cases, the projects (1) worked very hard to contact all contributors, and (2) did not encounter any active refusals to the change from contributors (or else removed any parts from contributors who did refuse). After a thorough effort to contact everyone, they proceeded with the change, possibly armed with some obscure legal principles or possibly with the belief that any legal fallout would small enough to be manageable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-16T15:31:36.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2655" CreationDate="2016-03-19T12:23:18.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/eula/net_library_eula_enu.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license for Asp.Net MVC&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/microsoft.aspnet.mvc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuget&lt;/a&gt;. It reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a.    DISTRIBUTABLE CODE.  In addition to the .js files described&#xA;  above, the software is comprised of Distributable Code. “Distributable&#xA;  Code” is code that you are permitted to distribute in programs you&#xA;  develop if you comply with the terms below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i.      Right to Use and Distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         You may copy and distribute the object code form of the&#xA;    software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         Third Party Distribution. You may permit distributors of&#xA;    your programs to copy and distribute the Distributable Code as part of&#xA;    those programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ii.    Distribution Requirements. For any Distributable Code you&#xA;  distribute, you must&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         use the Distributable Code in your programs and not as a&#xA;    standalone distribution;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         require distributors and external end users to agree to&#xA;    terms that protect it at least as much as this agreement;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         display your valid copyright notice on your programs; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Microsoft from any&#xA;    claims, including attorneys’ fees, related to the distribution or use&#xA;    of your programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;iii.   Distribution Restrictions. You may not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         alter any copyright, trademark or patent notice in the&#xA;    Distributable Code;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         use Microsoft’s trademarks in your programs’ names or in a&#xA;    way that suggests your programs come from or are endorsed by&#xA;    Microsoft;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         include Distributable Code in malicious, deceptive or&#xA;    unlawful programs; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;·         modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable&#xA;    Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An&#xA;    Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use,&#xA;    modification or distribution, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;·         the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;      &#xA;      &lt;p&gt;·         others have the right to modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I take that to mean that you're in the clear. This is the standard .Net Library license and I can't imagine Microsoft would make the folly of creating core libraries that developers can't use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I couldn't find any info on Assembly.cs or auto generated code behinds, but I seriously doubt that there's an issue here. If your lawyers are this concerned about it, they should contact Microsoft directly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found something else that may be helpful, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/legal/dn877550.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Visual Studio 2013 EULA&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DISTRIBUTABLE CODE. The software contains code that you are permitted&#xA;  to distribute in applications you develop if you comply with the terms&#xA;  below. (For this Section the term “distribution” also means deployment&#xA;  of your applications for third parties to access over the Internet.)&#xA;  Distribution Rights. The code and text files listed below are&#xA;  “Distributable Code.” REDIST.TXT Files. You may copy and distribute&#xA;  the object code form of code listed on the REDIST list located at&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=313603&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=313603&lt;/a&gt;. Sample Code, Templates&#xA;  and Styles. You may copy, modify and distribute the source and object&#xA;  code form of code marked as “sample”, “template”, and “Simple Styles”&#xA;  or “Sketch Styles”. Image Library. You may copy and distribute images&#xA;  and animations in the Image Library as described in the software&#xA;  documentation. Third Party Distribution. You may permit distributors&#xA;  of your applications to copy and distribute the Distributable Code as&#xA;  part of those applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T22:22:26.270" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T22:22:26.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2016-03-19T17:33:19.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could publish your sources with an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can publish the binary (which will not be open source) or also a package with with some non open source parts.  There is no problem.  Just the result it is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in this manner, if one really care about open source, and find useful your code, it could rewrite the missing part, with a open source license. But other users could use your program without problems (if you can distribute the external code / compiled modules / binaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: you don't need to follow open source license, because the code is your, so also a &quot;viral&quot; license could be used. (but it will create problem to forks, until all code is really open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T17:33:19.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-19T16:51:44.860" Score="5" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a fancy software &quot;foo&quot; that may be considered the derivative work of a GPLv3 library. &quot;foo&quot; is GPLv3 itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 1&lt;/strong&gt;: I install the foo binary on my company's laptop, go to a customer's premise, run the software in front of them and let them interact with the graphical interface of foo. Sounds like I'm not propagating nor conveying according to GPLv3, so no need to bring up the source code. Correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Now, let's say I leave the same laptop to the customer premise, for them to use and evaluate for the next few weeks. The foo binary starts at boot. The customer can interact with the GUI, but doesn't have direct access to the binary, nor the source code itself obviously. Still no conveying, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 3&lt;/strong&gt;: Same as above, but now they also have a user account to the laptop and a shell, where they could in principle touch and copy the foo binary. Would this become &quot;conveying&quot;, so the source code provision of GPL kicks in?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the answer of this question is to get an attorney, but I'm just trying to have a good understanding of terminology and legal precedents, and where the line is typically drawn, based on previous experiences and other people opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Bob" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T15:12:24.010" Title="Would this scenario be considered &quot;propagation without conveying&quot; according to the GPLv3 terminology?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|law|software|distribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2662" CreationDate="2016-03-19T21:41:46.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob, so you created software that is derived from GPL licensed software. (What is &quot;derived&quot; is usually very, very clear, so your 'may be considered a derivative' most likely is irrelevant). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You either are Ok with giving your source code away to everyone who asks, or you are not. If you are Ok with it, give them your source code. If you are not Ok, or if you absolutely don't want to give the source code to anyone, that's Ok. But in that case I highly recommend that you don't start playing any games but stear clear away from anything that &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; create an obligation for you. And nobody who could give you proper legal advice will do so here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2016-03-19T21:41:46.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2662" CreationDate="2016-03-20T00:39:01.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably you let customers play around with it because you want them to use it, and they are interested. So it makes absolutely no sense to play around with &quot;I give it to you, but you don't get it&quot; games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps not legally, but morally you should come clean and tell them it is GPL, and what that means. Maybe they have their own rules, and a GPL program isn't acceptable under them. Or they might be thrilled to have you (and others) help out evolving it, even for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T00:39:01.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2656" CreationDate="2016-03-20T00:48:54.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to add a file stating exactly what files are available under which conditions if you provide all. You'll have to ask the company lawyer for exact details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to replace the non-distributable/non-changeable files with some sort of replacement or at least a mockup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes little sense to share the software unless there is a way to replace those pieces by a would-be-user. Please give some description of restrictions they have to fulfil (format, contents, size, whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-20T00:48:54.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2668" CreationDate="2016-03-20T19:53:02.203" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to open-source a server-side Python library from my pet project. It strictly depends on another Python library, which is distributed under the GNU GPL v2. Am I legally correct to put my library under some permissive, e.g. MIT license? Would the end user of my library need to obey GPLv2 regardless of the license I'll pick?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4567" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-03-31T06:14:20.263" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T18:11:09.637" Title="Picking a license for library" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2666" CreationDate="2016-03-21T00:36:38.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to licence your code as you want. It might have to be GPLv2 if you include pieces of the other library, or use it's API extensively (that is the FSF's position with respect to &lt;em&gt;binary&lt;/em&gt; libraries, at least; but that isn't exactly unanimous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing it under anything that isn't compatible with the other library (GPLv2) will clearly create unnecessary friction. MIT would be fine in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T00:36:38.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2662" CreationDate="2016-03-21T15:12:24.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is likely going to come down to what constitutes &amp;quot;possession&amp;quot; of the object code in your jurisdiction. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#v3VotingMachine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ addresses a similar case&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does GPLv3 require that voters be able to modify the software running in a voting machine?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Companies distributing devices that include software under GPLv3 are at most required to provide the source and Installation Information for the software to people who possess a copy of the object code. &lt;strong&gt;The voter who uses a voting machine (like any other kiosk) doesn't get possession of it, not even temporarily, so the voter also does not get possession of the binary software in it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for the relationship between possession and source availability. However, it's not clear in which of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; cases transfer of possession occurs. Such a subtle question is vastly outside of the amateur legal knowledge of most FLOSS aficionados, and would likely vary between jurisdictions. Consult a lawyer for a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-21T15:12:24.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2671" CreationDate="2016-03-21T18:27:09.957" Score="8" ViewCount="2278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://isotope.metafizzy.co/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;jQuery Isotope plugin&lt;/a&gt; and I want to use it on my website. I was wondering if it was OK to use it without a licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's licensed under either GPLv3 as an open-source license, or there's a commercial license available if you want to keep your code proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not gonna sell the plugin or claim its mine.. I just want to view a couple of images and categories to my clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this OK? Will they sue me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-03-22T21:57:11.540" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T21:57:11.540" Title="What happens if I use a GPL licensed jQuery plugin without a licence on my website?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2016-03-21T19:03:55.513" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a copyrighted work in a way that is normally an exclusive right of the copyright holder (redistributing the work, creating a derivative work, etc.), and your use has not been licensed by the copyright holder, then you are committing copyright infringement. The decision of whether or not to sue you for copyright infringement is entirely up to the individual copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you've downloaded the open-source version of the code, you have &lt;em&gt;already been granted a license&lt;/em&gt; to use the work under the terms of the GPLv3. If you don't want to pay for a commercial license, then &lt;strong&gt;you must follow the terms of the GPLv3&lt;/strong&gt;. If your use correctly obeys the GPLv3, then your use is licensed and you cannot be successfully sued for such use. (Note that they could still file suit against you -- anyone may do so at any time, for more or less any reason -- but their suit will almost certainly not prevail, because it would be completely baseless.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use violates the GPL, then you would be operating outside the scope of the license grant and you would be liable for infringement. For example, if you do not also make your work available under the GPL (or a GPL-compatible license) when you distribute it, and appropriately make your human-readable source code available, then distribution of your code combined with Isotope would violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are selling the code you write to your clients, and they do not wish to abide by the terms of the GPL, I would suggest you (or your client(s)) purchase a license to relieve them of the requirement to make their source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-03-22T12:49:10.450" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T12:49:10.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2673" CreationDate="2016-03-21T23:15:37.093" Score="10" ViewCount="1199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a library that I use in closed-source project. After a short discuss with my boss we have decided that this library can be useful for many others and we made this library open source under LGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I still use my own code of this library in our closed-source project? Can I change it without making changes public under LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that I've made the general code of the library public (and it is working as-is), but some specific and confidential features like encryption algorithm I want to remain in our closed repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am a little it confused: on one hand this code is under LGPL now and every modifications must be public under LGPL. On the other hand - I am the author of this code and I want to use my own code without making it all public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not bad projecting of module. Let's say I want to delete 'encode();' and 'decode();' lines from public repo and keep them in out private one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I want to synchronize them. Can I use code commited by others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it is worth changing licence to BSD just not to have this headache?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4575" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T00:17:21.763" Title="Own LGPL code in proprietorial project" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2672" CreationDate="2016-03-22T00:16:39.303" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the owner of the copyright, you can do what you want with your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;strong&gt;others&lt;/strong&gt; who are bound by the licence(s) under which you distribute the code, because they accept those licences when they receive the code (strictly, when they do something for which they have no permission if they don't accept the licence).  You yourself can do what you like with your code; issue it under many licences, or none; sell it or give it away, or do both.  It's up to you (or, if your employer owns the copyright (as is usual), up to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you want to incorporate code contributed by others into your codebase, what you can do with the resulting product will depend on what license the &lt;strong&gt;other&lt;/strong&gt; contributors decide to use.  If you have distributed the code under only one licence, then usage of their work will likely be on those terms, and you must honour them in turn when it comes to the codebase that incorporates their changes.  If you have distributed under many, then you will need to clarify with contributors, either through an explicit licence, or through a copyright assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T00:16:39.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2672" CreationDate="2016-03-22T00:17:21.763" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your code is your own, you can use it in closed products while giving away copies under e.g. LGPL. Just be clear that if I take your code and modify it under LGPL (e.g. to fix bugs) you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to take my changes (under LGPL) and use it in the closed product. You might ask everybody to write over their rights to their changes to you, but that'd very much make me (and many others) think thrice before touching the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T00:17:21.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-22T08:28:17.127" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a startup building a desktop application using Python &#xA;targeting schools. Morally we want to Open up the source. But we are concerned how we will restrict others downloading for free there by impacting our business. Conventional business strategies of looking other avenues of revenue like support seems limited. Any ideas how we may go open source but still be able to protect the business?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4579" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T08:28:17.127" Title="Selling OS Software" Tags="|business|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2016-03-22T10:14:36.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2670" CreationDate="2016-03-22T11:45:01.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the previous question does not make it clear, IMO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isotope is Javascript. You distribute it as part of the Javascript on your website. That means your website is a Derived Work, and must itself be licensed under the GPLv3 (or under the commercial license terms, which in this case is an alternative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can still charge your clients for configuring &amp;amp; testing that it works as they want it. GPL doesn't prevent you from making money, you just have to abide by the GPL rules when doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T11:45:01.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2651" CreationDate="2016-03-22T17:07:51.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closest example I have seen is with installing Audacity. Though Audacity is also open source the mp3 encoder used by it (lame) is of a non compatible license and requests user to manually install and provide path to it. As mentioned in the comments as long as it is not linked you should be fine to request the user to install any library. I feel the exception might be in the case of AGPL license. I am not sure about that. But that will really impact if it is a online application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4579" LastActivityDate="2016-03-22T17:07:51.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-24T05:43:42.250" Score="5" ViewCount="1073" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of the gems that I'm using in my rails backend are MIT licensed and I do want to go commercial with this app - that being said the MIT license requires that I include the copyright and license with any distributions correct? So do I have to package the copyright and license with my mobile app or just somewhere in my backend (seems pointless since noone will see the code)?? If so, what's the correct way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any legal differences between a backend (SaaS) app that a front-end communicates with VS. a redistributed package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the license was GPL on a gem? Must I then disclose my entire backend source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, my goal here is to keep my code private given the nature of my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4600" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-03-24T08:44:34.873" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T12:30:59.220" Title="Front-End vs Back-end vs Redistributions - Must I disclose my source?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|ruby|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2679" CreationDate="2016-03-24T12:30:59.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the program, GPL's requirements don't come to play (unless you are talking AGPL). So in your SaaS you don't have to hand out source. If the front end only runs on your system (and it isn't downloaded by the users, as e.g. JavaScript or Java applets are), you are also in the clear. If a part of the system is meant to run on user's systems, if it contains GPL pieces it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have to be licensed under GPL. Details on when all of it is under GPL and when only the originally GPL part is GPL, or even if some other split applies, are quite murky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Big fat warning:&lt;/strong&gt; I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; your lawyer (or any type of lawyer in fact), and I certainly haven't looked into the complete details of your case, so I might be grievously mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-03-24T12:30:59.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2016-03-25T00:49:24.097" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT-license is a permissive license which allows sublicensing under new conditions. This allows you to put MIT-licensed software into a proprietary product. You can even change MIT-licensed code and then redistribute it with a new restriction that it must not be redistributed!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(e.g. Unreal engine's license has such a restriction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can only &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; conditions, you can not &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; any of the conditions the MIT license already places on it, which means however you sublicense it, you must retain the original MIT copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T08:50:31.303" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T08:50:31.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2683" CreationDate="2016-03-24T22:06:41.797" Score="1" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source for the Linux kernel v0.01 can easily be found online, however it does not seem to contain a license or any redistribution rules. Is it, therefore, safe to assume that this code is in the public domain? Or have I missed something, and in fact it is licensed under some kind of license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4608" OwnerDisplayName="Joe" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T03:51:45.710" Title="Linux Kernel v0.01 source code licensing" Tags="|linux-kernel|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2682" CreationDate="2016-03-25T03:51:45.710" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/2768/mark-plotnick&quot;&gt;Mark Plotnick&lt;/a&gt; notes, version 0.01 of Linux was released under its own, fairly liberal &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445/175&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;. The only problem with it is that it prohibits any distribution fee, which would make it GPL-incompatible. Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This kernel is (C) 1991 Linus Torvalds, but all or part of it may be&#xA;redistributed provided you do the following:&#xA;&#xA;- Full source must be available (and free), if not with the&#xA;  distribution then at least on asking for it.&#xA;&#xA;- Copyright notices must be intact. (In fact, if you distribute&#xA;  only parts of it you may have to add copyrights, as there aren't&#xA;  (C)'s in all files.) Small partial excerpts may be copied&#xA;  without bothering with copyrights.&#xA;&#xA;- You may not distibute this for a fee, not even &quot;handling&quot;&#xA;  costs.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, in version 0.12, he chose to use GPLv2 instead. You can read a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Linux_under_the_GNU_GPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overview of this licensing history&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it, therefore, safe to assume that this code is in the public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; In the absence of any license, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/175&quot;&gt;the default is &lt;em&gt;all rights reserved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-03-25T03:51:45.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-26T17:00:25.120" Score="7" ViewCount="1736" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just curious about, what license should i use for app(android), i have written in my free time. I am using some libraries, which have this licenses on it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Affero General Public License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 Question: if i use this libraries, should my app be open source? I have no problem with making it open, but just not sure if i should do it. And if yes, what is the best of doing it? Just say it is open source, and that everyone can contact me for the source code? Or do i have to upload it somewhere (sourceforge, github)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 Question: if i use this libraries, am i able to sell my app? If not, am i able to make in app purchases to donate to me? As much i know the biggest problem would be the AGPL license. I use the library to create PDF files (iText). How should it be handled? Or can i make some features paid, but not that one, which are from the AGPL licensed library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 Question: what is the best license to use with my app in that case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4613" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-14T05:20:53.620" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T03:04:10.440" Title="Monetizing and licensing with AGPL libraries" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|apache-2.0|monetization|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2684" CreationDate="2016-03-29T08:33:55.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is, just like the original GPL, a so-called &quot;Viral License&quot;. When your program uses an AGPL library, then your whole program must be licensed under the AGPL. That means you must publish the sourcecode and you must give people permission to create and distribute derivative works under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q: If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: Yes, because the software as it is actually run includes the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(technically this FAQ entry is about the GPL, not the AGPL, but the AGPL is an even stricter version of the GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sourcecode does not need to be part of the app, but when it is not, you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically the AGPL does not prevent you from selling your app. Open source licenses do not forbid any money from changing hands. But unfortunately everyone who buys your app has the right to also sell your app or even give it away for free, so they can put your app onto the app store for free and there is nothing you can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voluntary donations, on the other hand, can be a viable monetization model for open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-03-29T08:36:10.637" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T08:36:10.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2690" CreationDate="2016-03-29T11:35:56.757" Score="34" ViewCount="7642" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/314125/is-open-source-really-open-if-compilation-process-is-unclear&quot;&gt;a recent question on programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;, it was asked whether a project is open source if it provides some source code but doesn't make it clear how to actually compile it. Consensus is that it's not required for compilation to be &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt;, but that raises the question where to draw the line between &lt;em&gt;non-obvious&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume a company sells a program written in, say, C, including some code taken from third-party, GPL-licensed sources. They provide both a binary of the program, as well as all their own C source code used in that project, but no e.g. Makefile or build scripts. Or, only scripts which assume the presence of some particular (possibly non-free, in-house) compiler. It turns out the project can not just be compiled with a simple setup of the usual implicit rules (like &lt;code&gt;.c&lt;/code&gt;+&lt;code&gt;.h&lt;/code&gt; &amp;rarr; &lt;code&gt;.o&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*.o&lt;/code&gt;&amp;rarr;&lt;code&gt;a.out&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the company violating GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm not asking about the specific program discussed in the linked question (which, apparently, is actually not that hard to compile unless you happen to use Windows), nor any other particular project.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T22:52:49.133" Title="Do you violate the GPL if you provide source code that cannot be compiled?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2016-03-29T13:21:21.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, but I would believe that the copyright owner of a GPL-ed software cannot thus violate the GPL, since legally GPL is based upon copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular the &lt;em&gt;copyright owner&lt;/em&gt; can use or release (and sell) his code under some other, non-free or non-open source, license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License violation is a legal concept (ultimately judged in court). It is not a matter of &amp;quot;intents&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;being nice&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that GPL code explicitly states that &lt;em&gt;there is no warranty&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disclaimer of Warranty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue that the company is violating the spirit of the GPL, but probably not the letters of that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the fact that a code is difficult or impossible to compile is a &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; issue... (so is a &amp;quot;defect&amp;quot; of the source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would believe that making a &lt;code&gt;git commit&lt;/code&gt; of any GPLv3 software on &lt;code&gt;github&lt;/code&gt; is probably &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;releasing&amp;quot; that software. And it does happen in practice that (by human mistake, not malice) a commit sometimes does not even compile. If your interpretation was correct, that would be a legal violation of the GPL, then I'm sure that lawyers of competitors companies would have tried to sue big companies in such cases, and I never heard of such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, IANAL, since I am simply a free software developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At last, source code can be viewed as addressed to human developers. It is their responsability to compile or use it (and code written in Python is generally &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; compiled, because Python implementations are interpreters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;a thought experiment.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine that I am working in the richest computer science lab (or IT corporation) in the world. So I have access to the most powerful Linux computer on Earth (e.g. the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; computer on Earth with 16 terabytes of RAM, addressable by a single processor). I'm coding a program which (like my &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc-melt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt; thing, or my &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/manydl.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manydl.c&lt;/a&gt; program) is metaprogrammed: it is a C program &lt;code&gt;basile.c&lt;/code&gt; which generates another C program &lt;code&gt;/tmp/generated.c&lt;/code&gt; (and need 15Tb of RAM to generate that) and forks a compilation &lt;code&gt;gcc -O -fPIC /tmp/generated.c -shared -o /tmp/generated.so&lt;/code&gt; then &lt;code&gt;dlopen&lt;/code&gt; that &lt;code&gt;/tmp/generated.so&lt;/code&gt;. Let's suppose that the &lt;code&gt;/tmp/generated.c&lt;/code&gt; code is so weird (e.g. it has a &lt;em&gt;single&lt;/em&gt; C function of a hundred millions lines) that any reasonably optimizing C compiler (both &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;http://clang.llvm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clang/LLVM&lt;/a&gt;...) needs 16 terabytes of RAM to compile &lt;code&gt;/tmp/generated.c&lt;/code&gt;. In that hypothetical situation, I am the only person in the world able to compile and run that entire thing (because nobody else has access to a 16Tbyte RAM computer). IANAL, but I hope that if I publish that code under GPLv3 license, I won't be prosecuted for GPLv3 violation. People would be able to read the code -assume I also documented it nicely- and perhaps even improve it (so that it could be compiled and run on a simple powerful PC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To makes things even more funny, imagine that &lt;code&gt;basile.c&lt;/code&gt; has &lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;generated.c&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; and I am releasing/publishing under GPLv3 both files. People could still modify that to make it compilable, even if they could not compile the original code without accessing my hypothetical 16terabyte computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-29T14:31:06.957" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2688" CreationDate="2016-03-29T14:02:49.813" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but I believe the answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes, you violate GPL.&lt;/strong&gt; If you distribute binaries, then GPL requires that you also distribute all the files necessary to rebuild that same binary, and to make modifications. GPLv3 has the specific term &amp;quot;corresponding source&amp;quot;, which you must convey in addition to, and in a similar manner to the source code. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Under section 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means &lt;strong&gt;all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities&lt;/strong&gt;. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this generalised definition, the following will be included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Makefiles (needed to generate object code from source code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Installation scripts (needed to install object code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Program data files (needed to run the object code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; also has a similar clause, in section 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, &lt;strong&gt;plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable&lt;/strong&gt;. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone distributes binaries and source code but does not provide compilation instructions (e.g. Makefiles), they may be violating the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the goals of the GPL is to protect users' freedom to modify software. These clause are meant to serve that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised that among the voluminous GPL FAQ questions, none address this point. But gpl-violations.org (not GNU affiliated afaik) &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL demands that as soon as you distribute GPL licensed software in executable format you make available the &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;complete corresponding source code&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. The GNU GPL also contains a definition of this term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, &lt;strong&gt;plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a quite precise definition. &lt;strong&gt;For a typical C program, this translates into all the source code (.c files) plus header files (.h files) plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SFLC also publishes an article, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which contains a section relevant to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.2.2 Building the Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you must include “scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable” and/or anything “needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities”. These phrases are written to cover different types of build environments and systems. Therefore, the details of what you need to provide with regard to scripts and installation instructions vary depending on the software details. &lt;strong&gt;You must provide all information necessary such that someone generally skilled with computer systems could produce a binary similar to the one provided&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Sometimes, however, scripts were never written (e.g., the information on how to build the binaries is locked up in the mind of your “build guru”). In that case, we recommend that you &lt;strong&gt;write out build instructions in a natural language as a detailed, step-by-step &lt;code&gt;readme&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what you offer, &lt;strong&gt;you need to give those who receive source a clear path from your sources to binaries similar to the ones you ship&lt;/strong&gt;. If you ship a firmware (kernel plus filesystem), and the filesystem contains binaries of GPL’d programs, then you should provide whatever is necessary to enable a reasonably skilled user to build any given GPL’d source program (and modified versions thereof), and replace the given binary in your filesystem. If the kernel is Linux, then the users must have the instructions to do the same with the kernel. The best way to achieve this is to make available to your users whatever scripts or process your engineers would use to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; All of the above only applies if you are &lt;strong&gt;distributing a binary&lt;/strong&gt;. If you &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; distribute source code, there is no requirement to distribute all your changes, or for these changes to be even compilable. See section 6 of the GPL v3, or term 3 of the GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/4657/sleske&quot;&gt;sleske&lt;/a&gt; for the corrections to GPLv2 applicability.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T22:52:49.133" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2695" CreationDate="2016-03-29T19:05:33.847" Score="8" ViewCount="3121" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL v3 Project, MIT (ExPat) file/directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;myproject&#xA;├── LICENSE (GPL v3)&#xA;├── ...&#xA;├── gpl_licensed_file&#xA;├── mit_licensed_directory&#xA;│   └── mit_file1&#xA;└── mit_licensed_file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So If I were looking at this project, I would have on way to know that &lt;code&gt;mit_licensed_directory&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mit_licensed_file&lt;/code&gt; were not under the primary License declared in &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do I denote when a file or directory is not using the same license as the rest of the project?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4370" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2021-12-28T17:16:36.170" Title="How to denote certain files are under a different license?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2692" CreationDate="2016-03-30T04:02:37.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no hard-and-fast rules on how to show this information. The bottom line is to &lt;strong&gt;make sure recipients can easily figure out which files are under which license.&lt;/strong&gt; You also need to &lt;strong&gt;preserve copyright notices, where required.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a common requirement of many licenses, but most licenses do not dictate &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; those notices are kept, only that, again, recipients can easily figure out which files correspond to those copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd like to refer to best practices instead. There's a good article provided by the SFLC which covers this, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Managing copyright information within a free software project&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Best practices for maintaining license information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License information can also be maintained in individual files, in a central location, or in some combination of both. Most projects use a hybrid approach, placing the primary license in a top-level COPYING or LICENSE file, and also including some license information in each file’s header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the two approaches are (and most projects use both):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Information in individual files (i.e. &lt;code&gt;Copyright 20XX Jane Hacker under Foobar License&lt;/code&gt; at the top of files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a central location, usually a top-level &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all best practices, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; requirements. For example, you do not have to have a top-level &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, the same information could be in the readme. Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/176/175&quot;&gt;some licenses require that you provide the full text of the license&lt;/a&gt;, but again that doesn't have to be named &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article does recommend the central location approach though, as it makes it easy to know the full licensing information at one place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many situations, a semi-centralized approach will work best. Consider a GPL-licensed project whose codebase contains a number of permissively-licensed libraries with custom modifications. While the license of the resulting program will be GPL, because of GPL’s copyleft provision, the source for the libraries can be maintained under their individual licenses. In this scenario, it makes sense to keep license information for the individual libraries at the top level of the directories they’re kept in, as well as in the license information for the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintain a top-level file describing the licensing of the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; project, i.e. which parts are under which licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under each directory that contains a sub-project under a different license, maintain a file there describing the licensing of that sub-project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your example project might look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;myproject&#xA;├── LICENSE&#xA;├── GPLv3.LICENSE&#xA;├── ...&#xA;├── gpl_licensed_file&#xA;├── mit_licensed_directory&#xA;│   ├── LICENSE (MIT)&#xA;│   └── mit_file1&#xA;└── mit_licensed_file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the top-level &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file contains something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;myproject is licensed under GPLv3, except for &lt;code&gt;mit_licensed_directory&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mit_licensed_file&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T04:02:37.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2697" CreationDate="2016-03-30T11:38:47.350" Score="0" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a video player and I want to use vlclib for android for better codec support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some questions in mind regarding use of the library in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would I violate anything if I use vlclib in my closed-source android&#xA;app?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to open-source my app in order to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any provisions I need to comply with for using the library&#xA;    in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4662" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T07:03:28.293" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T07:03:28.293" Title="Would I violate anything if I use vlclib for android in my closed-source app?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2696" CreationDate="2016-03-30T11:55:28.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.videolan.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the project's legal page&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most pieces of software from VideoLAN are licensed under the GNU&#xA;  General Public License Version 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to take your question by parts, and bearing in mind that IANAL/IANYL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you would violate the GPL;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes; specifically, your app must be licenced under either GPLv2 or a licence which is at least as permissive (referred to as a compatible licence) - in my opinion, your life will be simplest if you pick GPLv2 also;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you need to comply with all the provisions of GPLv2 with respect to the vlclib codebase, and all the provisions of the licence you choose (see part 2) with respect to the other parts of your product, assuming you wrote them all, and retain the copyright thereto.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this analysis presumes that linking with a library creates a derivative work, and this has not yet (to my knowledge) been ruled on by a court.  I wouldn't bet my house on it not doing so, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-03-30T12:01:27.663" LastActivityDate="2016-03-30T12:01:27.663" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-03-31T20:59:12.937" Score="2" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to develop commercial software product that will include a few open-source libraries licensed under different licenses (licenses for different libraries different):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache Software License,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zlib license,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SIL Open Font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am researching on these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I legally sell the binaries of this product?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I legally sell the source-code of this product?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understood in short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I attache a file to my distribution that will list all these libraries with the appropriate license texts - this should be enough in order not to violate these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have another understanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4676" LastEditorUserId="4676" LastEditDate="2016-04-01T17:17:53.083" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T17:17:53.083" Title="Commercial software that includes open-source libraries under different licenses" Tags="|mit|distribution|commercial|bsd|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T03:11:52.057" Score="1" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the Telegram API (licensed under GNU GPL) to integrate chat services within my own application. The developer of Telegram asks to -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Please remember to publish your code too in order to comply with the&#xA;  licences.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a nutshell, my question is: Do I need to open-source my entire application or whether I need to open-source only the part wherein I'm using the chat functionality with Telegram?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link 1 to GitHub page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://telegram.org/apps#source-code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link 2 to GitHub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4678" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T05:37:57.377" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T05:37:57.377" Title="GNU GPL question: Do I need to open source my entire app?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|api|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2016-04-01T07:28:25.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your app then: yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it has to be the same GPL Telegram uses with the implication of publishing your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47032/can-i-use-gpl-software-in-a-commercial-application&quot;&gt;this post in Programmers.SE&lt;/a&gt; and its answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T13:04:38.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2699" CreationDate="2016-04-01T08:34:03.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If all that was done was to use the API without including any of Telegram's code (not even header files) in the application, traditionally the answer would have been that nothing needs to be published since nothing subject to the GPL would be included in the application. Depending on rulings in the Oracle v. Google case, that answer may change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If actual code from Telegram is included in the application, then yes the entire application would have to be distributed under the terms of the GPL unless the copied code can be isolated to an external program that's merely used by the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a slightly grey area when it comes to only having included header files (function and data structure definitions without any implementation code present) in the application. The grey depends on whether those header files are considered simply facts about the API (not eligible for copyright) or a creative work in and of themselves (eligible for copyright). This is usually more relevant when using software libraries, and since that usually means the application would be linked against the library and thus would include it the answer usually ends up being yes the application needs published under the GPL. For a network API such as Telegram's, a simple description of the data format was usually considered more factual than creative and depending on the language used for the client the issue might not even come up if the headers couldn't be used directly. Again, depending on the final rulings in the Oracle v. Google case this area may be subject to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-01T08:34:03.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-01T17:36:34.233" Score="6" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have MIT licensed code.&#xA;There was a bug in this code and I fixed this bug - i.e. changed the originally licensed sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any specific format I should use to specify what changes I made to this code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good practices/examples of doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4676" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T22:33:43.787" Title="How should I specify changes in MIT licensed code?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-02T01:56:04.163" Score="3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL says that if you use program A, you agree that if you make a program B that relies on program A, program B must be GPL (otherwise, you violate the GPL and therefore lose the right to use program A.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how much does program B need to rely on program A for this to take effect. For example, if program A is linux, and program B is a program running on linux, program B does not need to be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if program A is a library, and program B imports it, I think its generally agreed upon that that means program B needs to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is the line though? One interesting edge case is WordPress themes. A WordPress theme consists of php and css files. Most of the theme is usable without WordPress, but some key functions require interloping with WordPress (fetching content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the line for when GPL requires something to else to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4025" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T06:11:17.540" Title="How much does code have to interact for the GPL to take effect?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2016-04-02T06:11:17.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The big problem with telling you where the line is, is that nobody really knows.  The remedies for licence violations are legal ones, so the terms of a licence mean what a court says they do - and I am not aware of any legal authority to date laying out a clear set of rules for when one work is a derivative of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the problem is that copyleft is fairly new.  Copying was first restricted in 1662, by restrictions on presses introduced by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662&quot;&gt;Licensing of the Press Act&lt;/a&gt;, and a formal copyright system first came into being under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne&quot;&gt;Statute of Anne&lt;/a&gt; in 1710.  So we've had about three hundred years of precedent (both binding and advisory), legislative clarification, harmonisation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot;&gt;international treaties&lt;/a&gt;, and so on, to the point where, although the balance of power between creator, publisher and consumer isn't entirely a happy one, it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; fairly well-understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#History&quot;&gt;was first published&lt;/a&gt; in 1989.  So although we have three hundred years of courts clarifying how to use copyright to &lt;strong&gt;stop&lt;/strong&gt; people copying, we have less than a tenth of that history of the courts clarifying how to use copyright to &lt;strong&gt;help&lt;/strong&gt; people copy, provided that they share likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the areas where the water is still very murky is a bright-line test for a work being derivative of another, and it is the engagement of derivation that enables the control of a subsequent work via copyright, thus in turn engaging the GPL.  Until courts and legislatures start to lay down bright-line tests, or failing that, until precedent starts to accrete around the matter, noone really knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you take someone else's code, and make changes to it, provided those changes aren't &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt;, I don't know anyone who would argue that the result isn't a derivative work.  I think, as you say, that it is generally agreed that binary linking and shared address space constitute derivation, but this is not universally agreed.  As apsillers kindly points out, &quot;&lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is thought by nearly no-one to involve the creation of a derivative work.  The kind of interaction you ask about - Wordpress themes - are even less clear-cut, and I don't understand Wordpress well enough to begin to know where to put it on that sliding scale.  But the thrust of my answer is that since there is no binding agreement on the stops and data points on that scale, it would be pointless to do so.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T06:11:17.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2708" CreationDate="2016-04-02T11:33:57.600" Score="6" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm giving myself a headache just thinking about this, so would appreciate anyone else with an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First, off, a note:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;I'm absolutely aware that my current code is a 'derivative work' - That's not in question. The implications of this are giving me a headache though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is as follows:&#xA;I wanted to parse TGA images into a .Net bitmap.&#xA;I did some digging, and came up with the following code: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31702/NET-Targa-Image-Reader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31702/NET-Targa-Image-Reader&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is covered under the CodeProject open-source license. &#xA;I then took the original code, and re-wrote completely, thus creating what I'm reasonably certain at this point is a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then started thinking about the implications of the licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TGA is a fixed file format, with a standard specification.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In order to parse this, you need to read the footer first to determine the version plus various offsets, then the header &amp;amp; extension tables, followed by the image data itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using standard C# tools, I can't see any 'other' easy ways to do this than the standard BinReader.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I can juggle around the order things are called in, but ultimately assuming that any given image conforms to the specifications laid down by Truevision ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dca.fee.unicamp.br/~martino/disciplinas/ea978/tgaffs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.dca.fee.unicamp.br/~martino/disciplinas/ea978/tgaffs.pdf&lt;/a&gt; ) , the number of bytes needed to be read can always be determined programatically, and will never be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; TGA parser I write is now 'contaminated' by CodeProject license, as I've gained knowledge from it, or have I just opened a can of worms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-04-06T17:03:03.130" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T17:03:03.130" Title="If I create a derivative work of code that follows a protocol, am I still bound by its license?" Tags="|derivative-works|relicensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2016-04-02T14:19:38.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically, to avoid any contamination, you have to do &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a Clean Room implementation of this code&lt;/a&gt;. In my interpretation of it, this would mean not having any memory of the exact syntax of the code and that you have rewrote the program from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T14:19:38.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2016-04-02T20:14:52.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that the CPOL is like the GPL in that it is &quot;viral&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is based on &lt;em&gt;original creations&lt;/em&gt;. To infringe a copyright, you have to copy the original work - simply &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/copyright_myths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;creating a new work from the same principles is not infringement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The TGA standard can be considered to be the principle on which you design your software, and thus you can design it without infringing the copyright of the first work you studied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as you mention, it will be difficult for you to prove &lt;em&gt;beyond the balance of probability&lt;/em&gt; that you didn't copy the work. This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2988797/Marvin-Gaye-s-family-wins-7million-Pharrell-Robin-Thicke-Blurred-Lines-lawsuit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;happened last year&lt;/a&gt; - Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were ordered to pay $7 million to the family of Marvin Gaye because it appeared that they had copied the latter's work. Nobody can tell whether they did or not, but Thicke's having listened to the work while writing his new song led the jury to believe that there was sufficient evidence of copying for there to be infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; apply to you - it's not possible to say for certain, as every case is different. In the end, there are arguments for your position and arguments against, and you're going to have to make a judgement about which route you want to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T20:14:52.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2702" CreationDate="2016-04-02T22:23:39.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please send bugfixes to the current maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many maintainers have a FAQ that mentions their preferred format.&#xA;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;unified diff&quot; format -- the Linux Kernel &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://kniggit.net/ancient-misc/linux-journal/contributing-linux-kernel-diff-patch/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;unified diff&quot; format -- OpenWrt &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/devel/patches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;c&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;unified diff&quot; format -- Gimp &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimp.org/bugs/howtos/submit-patch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;d&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;unified diff&quot; format -- FreeBSD &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/slow-patch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;e&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &quot;unified diff&quot; format -- Python &lt;a href=&quot;http://bugs.python.org/issue1623153&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;f&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="979" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T22:23:39.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2702" CreationDate="2016-04-02T22:33:43.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A secondary point-&#xA;Please provide details of what you've done, and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;This is covered in the links above, but nothing is worse than getting a patch through, that changes variable X to variable Y with no explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst you've probably spent time finding and fixing the bug, remember that whoever reviews your patch may well not know anything about it.&#xA;Hence, a code lump with minimal or no documentation attached is a massive pain in the neck to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-04-02T22:33:43.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2713" CreationDate="2016-04-03T09:11:36.613" Score="10" ViewCount="2645" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the shortcomings of CC0 in comparison with Public Domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for author of work?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for users?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for those who modify/extend/change license of original work?    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4695" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2016-04-23T18:23:01.213" LastActivityDate="2016-04-23T18:23:01.213" Title="What are the limitations of CC0 vs Public Domain" Tags="|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2016-04-03T12:35:53.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could give somebody the format specification and ask to implement the functionality for parsing the file. That way you should be completely in the clear regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-04-03T12:35:53.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2711" CreationDate="2016-04-04T07:58:21.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think CC0 has any shortcomings compared to Public Domain. After all, CC0 was created with the explicit goal of fixing shortcomings of the simple method of writing &quot;this is released to the Public Domain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the main problem with the concept of &quot;Public Domain&quot; is that it has different implications in different jurisdictions. In particular, some jurisdictions have certain &quot;inalienable&quot; rights that the creator of a work cannot legally disclaim. For example, in Germany the right to be identified as the author cannot be legally disclaimed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore there was some concern that a simple &quot;this is public domain&quot; notice might not be fully valid in all jurisdictions. The CC0 license was created to address this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible&#xA;  for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before&#xA;  applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any&#xA;  jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws&#xA;  vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are&#xA;  automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be&#xA;  voluntarily relinquished. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0/&quot;&gt;About CC0 — “No Rights Reserved”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4657" LastActivityDate="2016-04-04T07:58:21.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2725" CreationDate="2016-04-04T15:54:26.180" Score="8" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was advised by users over on the Law Stack Exchange to ask this here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created a piece of software that converts a proprietary format from the database blob of a large, well known commercial software company into the equivalent open source data type. The large commercial software company states the following on their copyright and trademarks page &quot;This work is protected under United States copyright law and other international copyright treaties and conventions.&quot; and links to the DMCA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to create the software because most details of the format were published in a post on their support forums and the rest I reverse-engineered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now wish to open-source my software so others can use it. My question has two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I open-source this at all without getting sued?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I refer to the trademarked product the file format came from in my software and documentation? (I'm assuming I can't use it in the name of my software)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in the UK. The large software company is in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The data in the database is user created GIS data, inputted via the commercial program, it's just stored in a way that makes exporting difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4710" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T20:06:21.530" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T20:06:21.530" Title="Can I open source software to convert data from a proprietary format?" Tags="|dmca|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T04:02:20.773" Score="4" ViewCount="1002" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was asked a question in my law class: is it possible for open source software to exist without copyright protection? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the absence of copyright, could software still exist that satisfied the open source definition and/or the four freedoms? Would existing open source licenses still work in a copyright-free world?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alternatively, would the absence of copyright make &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software functionally satisfy the open source definition (or at least make it much harder &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to satisfy the definition)? Could proprietary software still exist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4718" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-04-07T13:41:22.190" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T14:14:33.610" Title="Can open source exist without copyright?" Tags="|copyright|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T14:24:21.673" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is: where lies the border for a programmer to copyright new software when in GNU/linux basically everything is released on very restrictive licences that force you to copyleft your work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing i need to know the most right now is:&#xA;Bash is licensed under GNU GPL v3+, if I write a software with it do i hold the right to copyright my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I'm actually very fond of open source project, since if I'm here today as a &quot;programmer&quot; is thanks to countless of people who work for free every day, but I wish to know more on this subject to avoid screwing up when making software that i wish to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4722" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-04-05T23:49:51.623" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T19:15:36.550" Title="Open source licences and copyrighting" Tags="|gpl|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-05T16:16:21.983" Score="4" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using an R package, for example in a commercial application, it seems to me that it is not sufficient to check the licenses of the package's imports, but also the licenses of the imports' imports (and so on). For example, &lt;code&gt;dplyr&lt;/code&gt; imports &lt;code&gt;assertthat&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;dplyr&lt;/code&gt; has an MIT license, whereas &lt;code&gt;assertthat&lt;/code&gt; is GPL-3. If I understand correctly, this means that I cannot use &lt;code&gt;dplyr&lt;/code&gt; without following the requirements of GPL-3. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does this also apply to dependencies (&lt;code&gt;Depends&lt;/code&gt;) and suggestions (&lt;code&gt;Suggests&lt;/code&gt;)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4723" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T17:27:32.530" Title="Using R packages in a commercial application" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2718" CreationDate="2016-04-05T17:27:32.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory is that you should only have to check the licenses of your own direct imports and dependencies. By checking the licenses of the entire dependency tree, you've uncovered a GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that any program using the covered software also be conveyed under the terms of the GPL&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;. So, if &lt;code&gt;assertthat&lt;/code&gt; is GPL, then &lt;code&gt;dplyr&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; also be licensed under the terms of the GPL - and given that, so must your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest you get in contact with the developers of &lt;code&gt;dplyr&lt;/code&gt; and point this out to them. They must change their license to the GPL, or be liable for copyright violation charges in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; The LGPL has an exception which allows for packages that only &lt;em&gt;dynamically&lt;/em&gt; link an LGPL package to be licensed differently. That does not apply in this case, as the software is GPL not LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T17:27:32.530" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2715" CreationDate="2016-04-05T23:21:10.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what is under said restrictions is the database blob, and they can make the case that the conversion &quot;removes a copyright protection measure&quot; (or however the law states it) you can certainly land in very hot water for encouraging or providing tools to do just that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2016-04-05T23:21:10.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2715" CreationDate="2016-04-06T00:43:00.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be a little more precise on the above response:&#xA;Take two different scenarios as follows-&#xA;1. A database containing proprietary data which you cannot generate yourself.&#xA;2. A database generated from user inputs in your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your database generally speaking conforms to #2 (Accounting software, sales etc.), then in the most general of terms you are likely to be able to do this.&#xA;How this will be received is another thing altogether- Many companies will aggressively attempt to shut you down, whether or not you are completely legal.&#xA;I also don't know exactly what was posted on their forums, or for that matter what the TOS of the forums was- If the TOS of the forums states that you cannot use data posted here to reverse-engineer etc. then you may have problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, as the previous answer notes, if the contents of the database are what is proprietary, then you could &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; land in trouble.&#xA;Again though, this is by no means certain. It very much depends on the terms of the license agreement that you signed when installing the program initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably one where you'll need to consult a lawyer, as I suspect there's a good chance that they may take of fence whether or not you are 100% legal, and being able to point them in the direction of a concrete legal opinion is far better than what you're going to get here.&#xA;Either way, we need far more details to be of any use to you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T00:43:00.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2717" CreationDate="2016-04-06T07:57:46.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are just using tools for software developmemnt like development environments, editors etc. which are licensed as mentioned above, this does not affect the legal terms under which you wish to license your software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4593" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T07:57:46.413" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2734" CreationDate="2016-04-06T08:23:35.173" Score="4" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I require clarity on using a Reciprocal Public Licensed (RPL) assembly in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use a RPL c++ code-assembly in my .net application. &#xA;I plan to make no changes to the RPL assembly itself, but only link said assembly to my .net application to call its methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does my proposed usage require that I make all my .net applications&#xA;source code available publicly ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and does the RPL license have any&#xA;commercial limitations with my proposed usage of the RPL assembly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4730" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T02:14:08.753" Title="Reciprocal Public License - Usage in App, Commercial Limits" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2715" CreationDate="2016-04-06T22:50:34.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based upon your followup, I see no real legal issues other than those mentioned in my first post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please remember that I am not a lawyer, and hold no liability for this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are a reference to unique, non-copyrightable place references.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are user generated, not generated by the makers of the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are multiple uses for a point on a map, over and above the specific functionality of the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are multiple GIS software packages- Providing a converter between them probably comes under interoperability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the company decides that they don't like what you are doing, the onus will be on you to prove that what you are doing is legal and above board, not the other way around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need to think about how you might prove this, and if this looks like getting serious, I'd again urge you to get into touch with a lawyer, as the law is very easy to trip yourself up on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You especially need to be wary of the differences between American law and British law- Whilst I know some about British law, I know nothing about American law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-04-06T22:50:34.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2727" CreationDate="2016-04-07T06:59:23.157" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a software I would like to release for free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be published on the AppStore at first and at the same time, the source code will be released on GitHub for those who would like to build the software by themselves, or have concern about privacy issues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't want to allow these people using the code to distribute/sell their own build with their own name somewhere else. It should be for a personal purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, MIT is the most suitable licence for that. But I'm a bit lost... What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4745" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-04-07T20:14:06.050" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T08:02:47.110" Title="Looking for the right licence to use" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2726" CreationDate="2016-04-07T07:12:52.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, MIT is definitely the wrong licence, as it doesn't prevent people from making and selling their own &lt;em&gt;closed&lt;/em&gt; build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stronger &quot;copyleft&quot; licences won't prevent people from making their own build either, but at least they can't close their version; they would need to redistribute under a comparably-open licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with your question is that the right to distribute modified versions of the code is one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the four freedoms of free software&lt;/a&gt;, and that includes the right to sell a modified build.  If you don't want to permit that, then whether or not it is zero-cost software, what you're making is not free software, and so this may not be the best place to ask for guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T07:12:52.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2716" CreationDate="2016-04-07T14:14:33.610" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses operate by &lt;em&gt;licensing&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;rights&lt;/em&gt; that exist under copyright. If those rights did not exist (just as they cease to do when a copyright expires), then any terms imposed by the license are moot: recipients of the work can do largely whatever they please with it, because there are no copyright rules telling them they can't. This is mildly crippling to permissive licenses (they can no longer require attribution, but otherwise they were giving most rights away anyway) and massively crippling to copyleft licenses, since they derive their power from the default restrictions of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, open source &lt;em&gt;licenses&lt;/em&gt; couldn't exist (because there's no copyright rights to license), but software could still satisfy (or fail to satisfy) the definition of open source. The bulk of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; specifies what permissions must exist on open source software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The license must allow modifications and derived works...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The license must not discriminate against any person...&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the loss of copyright means the loss of ability to impose restrictions via licensing, all of these permissions naturally exist in the absence of copyright. But that doesn't mean that all software is suddenly open source. You need to satisfy the critical second requirement: source code! If an author releases a binary but doesn't publish their source code, then the binary can be freely distributed, but the lack of copyright does not force the author to release their source code. If they choose not to release their source code, then obviously their work is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that patents would still be relevant in a post-copyright world, so licenses that include a patent grant (such as the Apache License) would still be relevant in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T14:14:33.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2666" CreationDate="2016-04-07T18:11:09.637" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to license your source code under any compatible license, however any &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; your source code must comply with the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to form a convincing argument over what license applies to &lt;code&gt;.pyc&lt;/code&gt; files. However, since that practice is not common in the Python infrastructure, ineffective for obfuscation purposes, and incompatible across versions, just don't do that and you'll be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even though your users must comply with the GPLv2, there are still valid reasons to ship &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; source as MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some other (either later, or competing) compatible implementation of your dependency may become available under a different license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone might be interested in copying small pieces out of your source code that do not depend on the GPLv2 library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="650" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T18:11:09.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2731" CreationDate="2016-04-07T20:12:23.277" Score="9" ViewCount="1312" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the repository owner owns the app, publishes the partial source code, and creates few tasks supported by some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bountysource.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bounty&lt;/a&gt; to write some new components (such as new functions, classes, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the main factors deciding whether the owner of repository owns the new code which is merged into the main repository&lt;/strong&gt; (code which is sent by a separate author), so that the owner can do whatever they want with the new code (e.g. changing the licence or applying their own copyright)? Does it matter if the code is brand new or modified, or whether the author was paid to write it (and is the ownership transferred with it)? Or, does it depend on the service being used, the agreement or the licence of the code which was merged into?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In other words, how does the copyright apply in this case?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current understanding is that it's owned by the original code owner/company, because the developer who completed the task could be treated as a subcontractor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T09:43:03.150" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T09:43:03.150" Title="Who owns the copyright to code which the author was paid to write?" Tags="|licensing|law|copyright|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2730" CreationDate="2016-04-07T23:20:39.153" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question touches a lot of different copyright issues; here's the basic overview (under US law) followed by how I think it applies: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1) The author owns the copyright.&lt;/strong&gt; If it's a work made for hire, then the employer owns it. A work made for hire is (1) a work an employee prepares OR (2) certain special types of works as long as the parties agree, in a signed writing, that the work is a work for hire. Here's a good summary of the work for hire doctrine: &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf&quot;&gt;http://copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) The copyright code requires that all transfers be in writing and signed by the owner.&lt;/strong&gt; Under US law, there has to be a signed written agreement in order to transfer copyright. So if the work for hire doctrine doesn't apply, the person who wrote the code owns the copyright. This is true even if you paid that person to write the code. No writing, no transfer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3) There's some case law stating that a click-through agreement is enough to transfer ownership.&lt;/strong&gt; At least one federal court of appeals (4th Circuit) has indicated that this requirement of a writing might be satisfied with a click through agreement. The case is &lt;em&gt;Metropolitan Regional Info Sys. v. American Home Realty Network&lt;/em&gt;, 722 F.3d 591 (4th Cir. 2013). That might make it a little easier to comply with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(4) Derivative works.&lt;/strong&gt; When a person creates a new work based on someone else's work, that's called a derivative work. The author of the original material is the only person who can authorize another to create a derivative work. But the copyright in the derivative work is separate - the author of a derivative work (not the author of the original) owns the copyright in the derivative work. Good information on that here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.aspx?news=9cbb473b-f87b-47eb-8d4b-0202ad56343a&quot;&gt;http://www.finnegan.com/resources/articles/articlesdetail.aspx?news=9cbb473b-f87b-47eb-8d4b-0202ad56343a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So getting to the scenario you laid out: The contributor is probably creating a derivative work by taking the original code and adding new material. Assuming there's no written agreement to the contrary, the contributor owns the copyright in the derivative work. Doesn't matter if money has changed hands, doesn't matter that the original author owns (and continues to own) the rights in the original work - the contributor owns the rights in the derivative work they created unless there's a written agreement to the contrary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to change that result, the &lt;em&gt;Metropolitan Regional&lt;/em&gt; case gives you something; if you have a click-through agreement stating that the contributor is transferring ownership, that might be enough to put the copyright back in the hands of the original author.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2016-04-07T23:20:39.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-08T02:52:00.713" Score="7" ViewCount="2593" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been a hobbyist programmer for a long time, and only recently have I been writing code I've thought others might benefit from. Here's my conundrum: I'm a big supporter of the GPL, and I understand the arguments against attaching non-commercial clauses to otherwise &quot;free&quot; software. However, I can also think of legitimate use cases for wanting a more permissive license. What I don't want is someone bundling my code with their proprietary code in a binary, and then selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I've been considering dual-licensing my code: the first being GPL, the second being a more permissive license that is only applicable for non-commercial use. The problem is, I haven't seen (and can't find) anything like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a bad idea? Are there any examples of such a copyright arrangement? Are there any legitimate (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt;, legally sound) non-commercial permissive licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4752" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-04-10T01:13:10.877" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T16:30:35.240" Title="Combining GPL with non-commercial license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|multi-licensing|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2016-04-08T07:11:08.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your main concern is to prevent someone selling something based on your code than GPL is actually to weak already. It only requires the publishing of the code of the derived work (and that it is also GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opensource licenses protect the information no monetary concerns. &#xA;There are licenses that try to accieve the combination you are looking for,&#xA;but they are not free, SPDX, OSI or FSF approved.&#xA;And really hard to enforce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Different Licenses for different use cases are achieved with dual licenses. You could have a look at what oracle did with glassfish. The separate commercial and non commercial use cases. The license is &quot;CDDL-1.0 OR GPL-2.0 WITH Classpath-exception-2.0&quot;, url: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://glassfish.dev.java.net/nonav/public/CDDL+GPL.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://glassfish.dev.java.net/nonav/public/CDDL+GPL.html&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &#xA;But if this works because Oracle and its lawyers are behind it or the dual license itself I can't tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2016-04-09T12:46:16.667" LastActivityDate="2016-04-09T12:46:16.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2723" CreationDate="2016-04-08T16:14:00.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Reciprocal Public License defines the notion of an &quot;Extension&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Extensions&quot; means any Modifications, Derivative Works, or&#xA;  Required Components as those terms are defined in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also specified what &quot;Derivative Works&quot; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Derivative Works&quot; as used in this License is defined under&#xA;  U.S. copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant section in the requirements of the RPL, section 6.1, states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must make available, under the terms of this License, the Source Code of any Extensions that You Deploy, via an Electronic Distribution Mechanism...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, under U.S. copyright law, your larger work is indeed a derivative work of the code you're linking to, then your larger work is an Extension. Whenever you Deploy it (i.e., any distribution, and virtually any use within an organization, even privately), you must make your source code available (apparently to the public at large; I could not find clarification on who must be given access to the source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license forbids charging for distribution of the source code of Extensions beyond actual distribution costs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not charge a fee for the Source Code distributed under this Section in excess of Your actual cost of duplication and distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, you could charge for the binaries, but you'd also be required to publicize the existence of the free-of-charge source code at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-04-11T16:58:31.670" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T16:58:31.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4206" CreationDate="2016-04-09T11:28:44.563" Score="18" ViewCount="1760" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently writing my master thesis, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://miede.de/#classicthesis&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;classicthesis&lt;/code&gt; template&lt;/a&gt; we're supposed to use is licensed GPLv2+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the GPL, this makes my written thesis a derivative work, and would imply that the thesis (both the LaTeX source and the resulting PDF) is also licensed GPLv2/3. As the finished thesis will probably be uploaded to some public repository, it will also be &quot;distributed&quot; in the sense of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understanding this specific case correctly, i.e. do I have to put a notice into my thesis that it is GPLv2/3-licensed and include the LaTeX sources in the distribution / make them available as per the GPL? Or does this not count as a derivative work (and why)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2023-01-24T20:48:47.683" Title="GPL-Licensed LaTeX template - implications for resulting work?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2732" CreationDate="2016-04-10T16:30:35.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might also want to look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. It's somewhere between the permissive licenses like BSD/MIT and the strong copyleft of the GPL. Someone else can use your library, but they have to make available your code and any modifications they have made to it. On the one hand, they can use your work to make money and they don't have to release all of their own proprietary code, but they can't do so without giving you proper credit and without giving back to you and the community any improvements they've made to your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can dual-license the library. It's GPL for everyone, but if you want to use it in proprietary code you have to purchase a commercial license from the copyright holder; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MySQL&lt;/a&gt; for example does this. You can then tailor the commercial license as you see fit; this may of course require you to engage the services of an expensive lawyer, but c'est la vie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible that neither of these options appeals to you, but it's at least something worth looking at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4765" LastActivityDate="2016-04-10T16:30:35.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2738" CreationDate="2016-04-11T09:22:16.273" Score="17" ViewCount="2171" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using a program that was compiled from open source code by a 3rd party and not by yourself directly, how is it possible to check that the binary program is well built against an exact source code version ? Or perhaps it's just impossible and you have to trust the 3rd party compilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4773" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T13:37:51.853" Title="Is there any way to assert that a source code correspond to a compiled code?" Tags="|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2737" CreationDate="2016-04-11T13:30:29.683" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The naive answer is, of course, to build it yourself and verify that your built binary is identical to the binary supplied by the other party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for the theory. In practice, this can be tremendously difficult, because a body of source code can be validly compiled into an unbounded number of valid binaries, influenced by what compiler you're using, what compiler options you use, what versions of supporting system libraries you have, etc. One hands-on account of recreating binaries from source is Jos van den Oever's article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/19/really-source-code-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is that really the source code for this software?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which compares self-built binaries with binaries from the repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions. Some binaries were massively different, and even binaries that were almost identical still had differing time stamps, differing function offset values, and varying levels of debug code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LWN.com also has an excellent summary by Jake Edge, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/555761/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verifying the source code for binaries&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. A key quote there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only reliable way to reproduce a binary is to build it in the exact same environment (including time stamps) that it was originally built in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article also notes that systems that care very deeply about verification, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-cyberwar-and-global-compromise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tor&lt;/a&gt; and Bitcoin, deliberately create reproducible builds. The article references a method called &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitian&lt;/a&gt; wherein a distributor packages that source code inside a complete virtual environment that includes the exact tools needed to reproduce a particular binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also be aware of &quot;Trusting Trust&quot; attacks (named after Ken Thompson's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reflections on Trusting Trust&lt;/a&gt;&quot; speech) on your compiler. The short version is: if you can't trust your compiler (because some malware is interfering with it) it is tremendously difficult to verify &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;, including your compiler itself. (If you're &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; interested, you can also read about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David A. Wheeler's double-compilation defense&lt;/a&gt; to this attack, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Schneiner's write-up on the subject.&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-04-11T13:37:51.853" LastActivityDate="2016-04-11T13:37:51.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2849" CreationDate="2016-04-11T14:28:17.117" Score="7" ViewCount="888" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking to override a class in rt.jar with my own version (to guarantee that existing legacy code remains unbroken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Oracle's JDK, &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/windows/java.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it says the following for the -Xbootclasspath/p:path option&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not deploy applications that use this option to override a class in rt.jar, because this violates the JRE binary code license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I switch to use OpenJDK, will I be faced with this same limitation?  That is, would I be violating a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4775" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-04-12T13:29:35.233" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T05:21:26.960" Title="License violation for OpenJDK and -Xbootclasspath/p:path?" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2723" CreationDate="2016-04-12T02:14:08.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From reading the RPL, probably the most you might have to make available would be the wrappers and adapters needed to make the library's C++ interface available in C#. You will want to get the opinion of a good lawyer who deals with open-source licenses, though, because the RPL's written in a way that suggests it's intended for applications, servers or frameworks and the intent is that you can't add additional functionality to the covered software and not make them available to everybody else who uses the covered software. That makes the language fit badly when applied to a library where it's on the other end of the &quot;extension&quot; idea from what the license text seems to assume. That ambiguity should be enough reason to avoid the library until you can get a better evaluation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial use doesn't seem to be a problem in itself, the license doesn't treat commercial use differently than non-commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-12T02:14:08.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2751" CreationDate="2016-04-13T10:04:23.857" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a pre-alpha software for preview. I do not want to put the code in an open repository like GitHub yet because it is just a prototype and I intend to re-design parts. The package I am releasing contains the HTML/JS source which is bundled in a single file and is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; uglified/minified. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I definitely intend to launch it as open source (I am thinking a combination of MPL for core and MIT for modules). Ideally I would like to put the code out in a phased manner with a separate repo for each component as they mature a bit (not a single repo that is a big dump containing everything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best possible (if nothing else, at least the simplest) licence to use at this stage? Also, What other considerations should I take into account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per request to include more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is my project like? What am I trying to license?&#xA;I am developing a client side HTML/JS program hosted in NWJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What third-party resources are included in my project?&#xA;All third party resources are open-source, afaik MIT, BSD and Apache 2.0 components used. The only exception are a few proprietary files that come with NWJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who's your audience? What do you want them to be able to do with it?&#xA;I have a few groups in mind, like Academics, but the software can be used by anyone. The only restriction I want to place is that change to the software itself are reciprocated back. I do not mind if people were to use my code in larger works, in fact, I would encourage that and would not insist on the larger project being open-source itself (as long as my code is open-source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the status of your project?&#xA;Experimental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4801" LastEditorUserId="4801" LastEditDate="2016-04-16T01:40:53.127" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T07:58:30.127" Title="Licensing for a pre-alpha software which is intended to be eventually released open source" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T12:40:59.090" Score="6" ViewCount="656" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Eclipse Public License and the GPL (2 or 3) are &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#GPLCOMPATIBLE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not compatible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ ... ] you &lt;strong&gt;may not combine EPL and GPL code&lt;/strong&gt; in any scenario &lt;strong&gt;where source code under those licenses are both the same source code module.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon the position of the Free Software Foundation, &lt;strong&gt;you may not combine EPL and GPL code&lt;/strong&gt; in any scenario &lt;strong&gt;where linking exists between code made available under those licenses. The above applies to both GPL version 2 and GPL version 3.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Emphasis mine, obviously.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://enwp.org/Clojure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clojure&lt;/a&gt; programming language is licensed under the EPL (unfortunately), and it also links with Apache 2.0 libraries. I use GPL3 for all my other hobby software, and I'd like to license a project in Clojure  under the closest thing I can find to GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That closest thing seems to be the LGPL. However, after a lot of googling, it also seems that everyone is ambivalent about compatibility between LGPL and EPL. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/5393873/4532996&quot;&gt;this SO question&lt;/a&gt; has two &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; different answers, neither seeming more reputable to the layperson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the LGPL is not compatible with the EPL, what's the GPL-est I can get? Apache, or Modified BSD? Are there other options that are closer to GPL3 than BSD, while staying within EPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2486&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks about EPL/LGPL compatibilites for &lt;strong&gt;binaries only&lt;/strong&gt;. That's not what I'm asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3125" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T03:31:48.333" Title="What's the closest to GPL3 I can get while staying compliant with the EPL and APL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|gpl-3|lgpl|epl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-13T15:31:48.003" Score="11" ViewCount="6085" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am having a GitHub open-source repository, licensed under the MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to document the software on a website with a logo and usage examples, hosted open-source on GitHub&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to prevent others from re-publishing the website or use my logo anyhwere else, but want to allow contributions (edits/forks) of the website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my point of view it is impossible to host the website inside a &quot;gh-pages&quot; branch and disallow re-publishing and at the same time. A fork will always mean the website will be copied and re-published under a different origin too (user.github.io/repo). The only solution I see so far would be to create a spearate repository for the website. Thereby the website contents will be forked, but not published under a different origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it would be necessary to use a separate repository for the project itself and for its website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my questions is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should the footer of the website and the LICENSE file in the websites repository look like, to make clear that you can use the related project (MIT license) and you can fork the website when sending changes as a pull request, but you are not allowed to re-publish the website or its content nor use the logo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4805" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T06:52:08.437" Title="How to license website hosted on GitHub?" Tags="|license-notice|github|license-file|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2746" CreationDate="2016-04-14T06:52:08.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really about a practical problem caused by the way GitHub's forking works, together with how the &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; branches automatically creates a public page. If you believe that this arrangement makes it far too easy&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; for users to accidentally republish your website against your wishes, then by all means &lt;strong&gt;look for a different hosting arrangement&lt;/strong&gt; as you've suggested. However the question of licensing or how to display that info is orthogonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are the original author, &lt;strong&gt;you can license your works in any way you want&lt;/strong&gt;. This includes mixed licenses, or having different parts of your project under different, even incompatible licenses. Git branches, GitHub forks etc. are all technical details that do not affect your rights as the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also no requirement on how you display your website's copyright info. You don't need a website footer containing copyright information, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/307/175&quot;&gt;almost all works have automatic copyright the moment they're published&lt;/a&gt;. So if you're concerned that people will mix up your website's and your project's licenses, or if they'll assume &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/175&quot;&gt;the absence of a copyright means they can do anything with it&lt;/a&gt;, or if they assume that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1150/175&quot;&gt;something being on GitHub automatically means it's open/free&lt;/a&gt;, then it's up to you to educate them, which is a UX problem. Usually that's what footers are for: look at the SE one: &lt;code&gt;site design / logo © 2016 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/code&gt;. That's one way you can do it: just say so in the footer. If you think using a different repo or web host altogether will also help, then by all means go with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The only practical concern, as you've mentioned, is that if someone wants to work on your open source project, they can't avoid also publishing a copy of your website if it's under the &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; branch. I haven't tried myself, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/8587321/2038264&quot;&gt;according to folks on SO&lt;/a&gt;, the website creation isn't automatic, but occurs when you perform a push, or specifically a push to the &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; branch. Technically &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1154/175&quot;&gt;their only right is to fork&lt;/a&gt;, and they can't push to &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; if you don't give permission, but still it's far too easy to do this by accident, since many git clients may be set up to push all branches by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-04-14T06:52:08.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2749" CreationDate="2016-04-15T10:27:55.783" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in the title I have created a software that contains a library that has FOSS license..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) can I distribute my project with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;proprietary license&lt;/a&gt; (either sell it or give it for free) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If not, what should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This is the software license.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4813" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-04-17T10:25:37.957" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T10:25:37.957" Title="What happens if I use a FOSS library and distribute my program with the proprietary license?" Tags="|licensing|floss|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2748" CreationDate="2016-04-15T14:49:38.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;wikipedia says of the MPL&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike strong copyleft licenses, code under the MPL may be combined&#xA;  with files under any license in a &quot;larger work&quot;, so long as conditions&#xA;  for the MPL are still met for &quot;covered&quot; components (Section 3.3 of the&#xA;  license). The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary&#xA;  between MPL-licensed and proprietary parts, meaning that all or none&#xA;  of the code in a given source file falls under the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is handy in one respect, which is that, given that you aren't modifying this MPLed library, we don't have to take a position on whether linking to a library creates a derivative work of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read it, if your code links in a library covered under MPL, you can release the resultant executable under any licence you like, including a proprietary one.  You would need to make the source of the MPL'ed library itself available, on the MPL's terms, to those to whom you conveyed the executable.  This comes from section 3.2 of the MPLv2, which requires that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code Form,&#xA;  as described in Section 3.1, and You must inform recipients of the&#xA;  Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code Form by&#xA;  reasonable means in a timely manner, at a charge no more than the cost&#xA;  of distribution to the recipient&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but as long as you comply with that, I don't think it mandates restrictions on the licence for your code, which is linked in with this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-04-15T14:49:38.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2743" CreationDate="2016-04-17T14:46:45.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would endorse @curiousdanni's comment: &quot;Just use whatever license you want to use when it is finished.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are afraid people are going to use your project before it is fully complete, don't be. People will not even &lt;em&gt;hear&lt;/em&gt; about your project until you start promoting it. Placing your code onto GitHub will not bring it automatically more attention, and so you can redesign the parts to your heart's content without fear of people being dependent on bad code. When you feel like it's ready, then make it ready.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if someone does accidentally stumble upon your code, and decide to use it, well, so what? They'll just use the old version of the code then instead of your redesigned version. The code still works, right? Let them take advantage of it. If they like it, they could even help you with the redesign process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason I would recommend making it open source now though is that you don't know &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the redesign process will actually occur. Real life can sometimes intervene to make the redesign process difficult. So releasing the code now means that people can start using it now (and using it doesn't &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; mean actually using your application, but also reading your code and learning from it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main suggestion is to make sure you have a good README that tells people about the program, how to use it, and how much of the code is planned to be redesigned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2016-04-17T14:46:45.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-18T04:55:13.673" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any rough estimates of the total number of person-hours that have been spent on writing FLOSS software? (paid and volunteer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4830" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T07:41:40.953" Title="Total number of person-hours spent on writing free software" Tags="|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2850" CreationDate="2016-04-18T05:34:33.387" Score="7" ViewCount="649" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently building a generic rest framework and using Jersey and Grizzly as frameworks to build upon. Originally I planned to release (for commercial or public/private use) it under MIT license as I don't care who use it and how they use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I happen to use library and framework under GPL license like Jersey and Grizzly I am wondering should I have to stick with GPL as well? Any idea? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also is including License text on each source file is sufficient to say the software is under specific licensing like MIT ? or do I need to get permission or license from OpenSource community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am sorry if it's too simple and should have understood but after searching all over the place I am still not sure about these things ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note I am not modifying any of dependent library/framework and just using it as is !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4832" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T00:02:21.730" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T05:25:47.677" Title="For Software based on GPL library should I have to release software under GPL license or can I use MIT" Tags="|licensing|gpl|derivative-works|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2752" CreationDate="2016-04-18T06:35:52.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2000, David Wheeler &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat62-v1/redhat62sloc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;made a serious attempt to enumerate the total amount of code in a representative distro&lt;/a&gt; (Red Hat 6.2), finding that it contained around 17 million source lines of code.  Using the Constructive Cost Model, he estimated that that represented about four and a half thousand person-years of development time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/redhat71sloc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;repeated the exercise&lt;/a&gt; a year later for Red Hat 7.1, finding 30 million lines of code, representing eight thousand person-years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That work stimulated other analyses using the same logic, and the tools Wheeler developed, which are documented &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.james.rcpt.to/2012/02/13/debian-wheezy-us19-billion-your-price-free/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;most recent of them&lt;/a&gt; counted the code in Debian Wheezy, in 2012, finding around 420 million lines of code, and a total equivalent development cost of USD19bn.  He uses a typical annual developer wage of USD72,533, which I calculate to be 263,000 person-years.  This article also breaks down the figures for some individual projects, including SaMBa, apache web server, and PHP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no central repository of free software, so I doubt a definitive number can ever be reached, but there are some attempts to reach a lower bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-04-18T07:41:40.953" LastActivityDate="2016-04-18T07:41:40.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2756" CreationDate="2016-04-18T19:17:44.813" Score="2" ViewCount="872" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache License, Version 2.0 is not compatible with GPL version 2, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; websites. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worry is it possible to make Android projects under GPLv2 license, &#xA;because, Android SDK, support libraries and most of android libraries are under Apache v2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a lot of popular GPLv2 Android projects that uses at least support library, do they violate GPL v2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way, how to link GPL v2 library to Android Project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4835" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T13:40:38.210" Title="Is it possible to link GPLv2 libraries for Android project" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2755" CreationDate="2016-04-19T13:10:30.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the licence of the Android SDK isn't material, as generally speaking software created with the use of other software is not seen as a derivative work of that other software, and so the licence obligations don't transfer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, when you make a derivative of a work covered by GPLv2, s2 requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when you distribute [...] a work based on the Program, the&#xA;  distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you use a GPLv2 library (and you are happy that linking creates a derivative work, which is not a settled issue), you must release your binary under GPLv2.  The importance of compatible licences is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program&lt;/a&gt;.  Since, as you say, Apache v2 is not compatible with GPLv2, you could not incorporate Apache-v2-licensed code into your GPLv2 binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can release it to run on a system which uses Apache v2 system libraries, because of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;system library exception&lt;/a&gt;, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the GPL-incompatible libraries you want to use meet the criteria&#xA;  for a system library, then you don't have to do anything special to&#xA;  use them; the requirement to distribute source code for the whole&#xA;  program does not include those libraries, even if you distribute a&#xA;  linked executable containing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely how other GPLv2-covered binaries are released for Android, which as you say is quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-04-19T13:10:30.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-19T15:26:32.910" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a website that will allow users to enter preferences for certain things (we'll call them cars), and get suggestions for other &quot;cars&quot; that they may be interested in. Finding similarities between the &quot;cars&quot; requires a very large data set on the characteristics and features of &quot;car&quot; models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've collected a significant amount of this data, much of which is public domain. I intend to use it in a proprietary, commercial project, which is fine so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of the data sets I'd like to use is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. I've read through the license, and I'm unsure how its terms about &quot;modification&quot; and the like apply to this situation. I don't really want to modify the original document (the data), I just want to read it and process it as part of a larger project. I'd certainly be happy to re-distribute the data freely as part of my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowable under the GFDL terms? Would my new project have to be GFDL? Would that even make sense since it's a software project, not a documentation project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hazy on the difference between modifying the data, redistributing the data, and writing an algorithm that leverages the data to do other things...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4844" LastActivityDate="2016-10-22T09:55:08.423" Title="Proprietary Software Leveraging GFDL data?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gfdl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2812" CreationDate="2016-04-19T16:24:03.033" Score="11" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many projects have a list of contributors, either as a platform-agnostic &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; text file, or in some way included in the project description metadata of the programming framework in use. When should users be added to that list, and who should add them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible solutions that come to my mind or that I've heard or read in the past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone contributing code should be listed, i.e. the moment the pull request gets merged the one initiating the merge should ensure that the contributor gets mentioned. If the contributor thought of doing this already, that's all for the better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors who want to be named should add themselves as part of the pull request. If they don't it's their problem, and not much of a problem at that. If they later request being added, that request has to be honored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The list of contributors should contain the &lt;em&gt;core&lt;/em&gt; authors only, those responsible for the overall direction of the project. It's up to those core authors to decide when to admit some frequent contributor or new designated maintainer to their ranks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't matter; in the days of GitHub, any such information as part of the working directory content is superseded by the git history anyway, and therefore should be ignored, or perhaps even deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly is a spectrum here, and certainly different projects will want to handle things differently. But are there any established guidelines applicable to many projects? Are there any legal requirements for or against one of these approaches? Any moral arguments to rule out one of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T00:30:11.683" Title="When to list contributors" Tags="|contributor|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2762" CreationDate="2016-04-20T04:33:59.180" Score="6" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on a side project for fun that I originally wanted to release and commercialize.  I've realized recently that while I think my work is great and would be fun to share I am not ready to commit to working on it full-time.  I'm afraid that the work I've done is going to be for naught if I don't do anything with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering open sourcing the entire project so that others can learn from many aspects of it including code style, application structure, etc... but I'm worried that someone will take the ideas of my work and either patent it or use/fork it directly to commercialize it on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking in to various licenses that would allow me to open-source this project so that the code can be analyzed by others for learning purposes, but it seems that all the licenses I've found allow for commercialization.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any license that I can release the source under to allow learning and contributing but preventing others from commercializing what I've been working on?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus points for follow-up - would releasing it under a license like this prevent me from also commercializing it later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4848" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T08:11:14.340" Title="Opening the source of my project so others can learn" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2132" CreationDate="2016-04-20T05:40:44.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr version: As a consumer or small business, you can legally make use of the software &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you follow the terms of the commercial license.  The software publisher could go after people who download the code for copyright infringement and possibly breach of contract if they exercised a right protected by copyright without complying with the terms of the commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an argument that the company in your hypothetical has agreed to grant a license to copy and prepare derivative works based on the GitHub &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#f-copyright-and-content-ownership&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;, particularly section F.1.  There are a couple of issues with this related to the language &quot;agree to allow&quot; and the fact that these are not all the rights someone may want or need, depending on what they want to do with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your hypothetical also says the company attaches a commercial license to the code with restrictive terms.  These terms likely would override whatever rights are granted by the GitHub Terms of Service because they would be more specific. As a consumer or small business, you would be risking copyright infringement if you did not abide by the terms of the commercial license and made use of the code.  If a court decided you had accepted the license by your actions, then you may be liable for breach of contract as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, as a software publisher, you could go after people who download your code from GitHub and violate the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4853" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T05:40:44.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2016-04-20T07:39:19.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but here are some comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Open Source/Free Software license will allow you to disable commercial use of the code. (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoMilitary&quot;&gt;OSI's FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.) Open Source licenses protect users – with a non-commercial clause, in the case you would abandon the project or turn it against users, no one else could take the free version farther than a hobby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are licenses that block commercialization. The most popular are the Creative Commons NC varieties, but those are not suitable for code.&#xA;Other such licenses were used for code (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Microsoft_Shared_Source_License&quot;&gt;MS &quot;Shared Source&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Scilab_License_Old&quot;&gt;old SciLab license&lt;/a&gt;). But don't expect help from the Open Source community when it comes to enforcing these. Your best bet might be to ask a lawyer to write a license that would suit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, consider that if anyone wanted to commercialize your code, it would be in their best interest to hire the person who originally wrote it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the follow-up: unless you explicitly transfer copyright to someone else, you can distribute your code under any license you like, even after you've released it under a different license. (But it must be &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code, so if you include contributions from other people, you need to take into account what license these contributions were under.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4854" LastActivityDate="2016-04-20T07:39:19.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-20T17:34:36.660" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In its anatomy browser &lt;a href=&quot;https://human.biodigital.com/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BioDigital&lt;/a&gt; has a feature where the website displays text that it doesn't license under CC BY-SA. At the end of that text the user can click on &quot;Read more&quot;. If he does an inline popup appears showing information from Wikipedia mobile. This popup refers at it's end to being licensed CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it in compliance with the CC BY-SA license to use content this way? Can they show CC BY-SA licensed content from Wikipedia while showing on the same screen content that they don't license under CC BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="486" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-04-22T00:25:04.527" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T00:25:04.527" Title="Is BioDigital's usage of inline Wikipedia textboxes in complience with CC-BY-SA" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2766" CreationDate="2016-04-20T22:02:21.453" Score="1" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to distribute binary files using any open source or Creative Commons license? In particular, I have several Flash videos (.swf files) whose sources (.fla files) are not available/lost. These videos need to be shipped with an open source project. I am looking for possible ways to address this situation. An option would be to recreate them using Flash or JavaScript, but that would be very costly in terms of effort, and therefore, does not seem feasible. I saw that BSD license has something related to &quot;object code&quot;, but not sure if that is applicable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4866" LastEditorUserId="4866" LastEditDate="2016-04-21T07:19:11.017" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T07:19:11.017" Title="Distribute SWF (binary) files with open source license?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2016-04-21T01:05:22.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can; you are the copyright holder so you can apply whatever license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I recommend that you avoid the licenses designed for source code (such as GPL, BSD and so on) and choose a more general-purpose license. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons licenses&lt;/a&gt; are an excellent choice; they have been used for books, photographs, music, movies and many more things. Flash videos are surely no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with source code licenses is that they can cause confusion, and worse, some like the GPL may not even work since they &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2690/175&quot;&gt;require access to the source code for binary distributions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you want to integrate these files with an existing open source project, it's important to make sure that the licenses will be compatible. Fortunately most licenses do not consider binary files (like videos, images) as critical parts of the software, so most licensing choices should be safe. For example, people have licensed projects composed of GPL source code + proprietary assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T01:10:33.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2764" CreationDate="2016-04-21T05:52:58.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usual caveat: IANAL/IANYL, but as far as I can determine, it's fine.  Displaying two things side-by-side on a web page no more makes either a derivative work of the other than putting two pieces of content on a DVD, and giving &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; to you, does.  In the latter case, the GPL (v2, in this case) refers to this as &lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;, and notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mere aggregation of another work [...] with the Program [...] on a&#xA;  volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other&#xA;  work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, as long as all content is clearly labelled with its licence, so you can determine which content is free and which is proprietary to the publisher, no further licensing issues are implicitly engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T05:52:58.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2016-04-21T15:51:33.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While no FOSS license will &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; forbid commercial use, there are licenses which make it sufficiently impractical to sell your work without putting in serious own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strong copyleft license like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt; allows everyone to use it however they see fit (including commercially) but with the caveat that whenever they give the program (or a program based on it) to someone else, they have to do that under the same license conditions. That means anyone who buys a copy can also sell copies or give them away for free. Most common software business models simply don't work under that condition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding patents: A patent can only be used to cover a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; invention. You can not patent something someone else published before. This is called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Prior art&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  When I would try to patent an idea from your software, one would just have to point out that you published software with that idea before and the patent is invalid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-04-21T16:03:27.680" LastActivityDate="2016-04-21T16:03:27.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2760" CreationDate="2016-04-22T08:11:14.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many corporations have explicit rules against incorporating GPLv3 code into products they distribute.  In addition, GPLv3 includes a grant of patent rights to any &quot;essential claims&quot; of someone distributing GPLv3 code.  These provisions and lack of clarity about what code will be subject to &quot;copyleft&quot; obligations generally reduce the likelihood of someone using your code commerically if you release it under GPLv3.  And if they do, you will get the benefit of their modifications under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want no commercial use, then you could draft your own proprietary license that grants the specific rights you want to grant for non-profit and educational uses and prohibits commercial use outright.  You would want to think through whether or not the non-commercial users get ownership of their derivative works and whether or not they should have to provide those derivative works to everyone else.  This should not be difficult or expensive for a good licensing lawyer.  Anyone seeking to use it commercially would need to ask your permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you feel strongly about how your code is used, whichever license you choose, you should register the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office.  It's not very difficult or expensive.  Otherwise, it will be harder to get anyone to comply with your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4853" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T08:11:14.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2016-04-22T08:33:54.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should have a lawyer experienced with software licensing assist you with your customer agreement for the proprietary advanced version.  The agreement would include license terms describing exactly what they can do with it, who owns any derivative works, and their obligation to maintain confidentiality.  If the customer breaches a well drafted agreement, you could go after them for copyright infringement, breach of contract and trade secret misappropriation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And registering your code as mentioned above would be a very good.  If you do it before the infringement or within 3 months of publication, you can get attorneys' fees from the infringer in addition to the statutory damages described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4853" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T08:33:54.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2773" CreationDate="2016-04-22T21:34:20.330" Score="4" ViewCount="1239" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my GPL open source software I use LGPL-based libraries. I recently found a very useful NVIDIA SDK which I would like to use for my software. NVIDIA is using its own license, and I have difficulty understanding if it is OK to use the license with my GPL project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone tell me if I can use the license for my GPL project? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is the copy of the license file which I found at the corresponding SDK folder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2011 NVIDIA Corporation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BY DOWNLOADING THE SOFTWARE AND OTHER AVAILABLE MATERIALS, YOU&#xA;  (&quot;DEVELOPER&quot;) AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE FOLLOWING TERMS AND CONDITIONS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The materials available for download to Developers may include software&#xA;  in both sample source (&quot;Source Code&quot;) and object code (&quot;Object Code&quot;)&#xA;  versions, documentation (&quot;Documentation&quot;), and other materials&#xA;  (collectively, these materials referred to herein as &quot;Materials&quot;).&#xA;  Except as expressly indicated herein, all terms and conditions of this&#xA;  Agreement apply to all of the Materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as expressly set forth herein, NVIDIA owns all of the Materials&#xA;  and makes them available to Developer only under the terms and conditions&#xA;  set forth in this Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License:  Subject to the terms of this Agreement, NVIDIA hereby grants to&#xA;  Developer a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to possess and to use the&#xA;  Materials.  The following terms apply to the specified type of Material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source Code:  Developer shall have the right to modify and create&#xA;  derivative works with the Source Code.  Developer shall own any derivative&#xA;  works (&quot;Derivatives&quot;) it creates to the Source Code, provided that&#xA;  Developer uses the Materials in accordance with the terms of this&#xA;  Agreement.  Developer may distribute the Derivatives, provided that&#xA;  all NVIDIA copyright notices and trademarks are used properly and the&#xA;  Derivatives include the following statement: &quot;This software contains&#xA;  source code provided by NVIDIA Corporation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Object Code:  Developer agrees not to disassemble, decompile or&#xA;  reverse engineer the Object Code versions of any of the Materials.&#xA;  Developer acknowledges that certain of the Materials provided in Object&#xA;  Code version may contain third party components that may be subject to&#xA;  restrictions, and expressly agrees not to attempt to modify or distribute&#xA;  such Materials without first receiving consent from NVIDIA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Government End Users: If you are acquiring the Software on behalf&#xA;  of any unit or agency of the United States Government, the following&#xA;  provisions apply. The Government agrees the Software and documentation&#xA;  were developed at private expense and are provided with RESTRICTED&#xA;  RIGHTS. Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to&#xA;  restrictions as set  forth  in  DFARS 227.7202-1(a) and 227.7202-3(a)&#xA;  (1995), DFARS 252.227-7013(c)(1)(ii) (Oct 1988), FAR 12.212(a)(1995),&#xA;  FAR 52.227-19, (June 1987) or FAR 52.227-14(ALT III) (June 1987),as&#xA;  amended from time to time. In the event that this License, or any part&#xA;  thereof, is deemed inconsistent with the minimum rights identified in&#xA;  the Restricted Rights provisions, the minimum rights shall prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No Other License. No rights or licenses are granted by NVIDIA under this&#xA;  License, expressly or by implication, with respect to any proprietary&#xA;  information or patent, copyright, trade secret or other intellectual&#xA;  property right owned or controlled by NVIDIA, except as expressly provided&#xA;  in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Term:  This License is effective until terminated.  NVIDIA may terminate&#xA;  this Agreement (and with it, all of Developer's right to the Materials)&#xA;  immediately upon written notice (which may include email) to Developer,&#xA;  with or without cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Support:  NVIDIA has no obligation to support or to continue providing&#xA;  or updating any of the Materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No Warranty:  THE SOFTWARE AND ANY OTHER MATERIALS PROVIDED BY NVIDIA&#xA;  TO DEVELOPER HEREUNDER ARE PROVIDED &quot;AS IS.&quot;  NVIDIA DISCLAIMS ALL&#xA;  WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION,&#xA;  THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR&#xA;  PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LIMITATION OF LIABILITY:  NVIDIA SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO DEVELOPER,&#xA;  DEVELOPER’S CUSTOMERS, OR ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY CLAIMING THROUGH&#xA;  OR UNDER DEVELOPER FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, INCOME, SAVINGS, OR ANY&#xA;  OTHER CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, DIRECT OR INDIRECT&#xA;  DAMAGES (WHETHER IN AN ACTION IN CONTRACT, TORT OR BASED ON A WARRANTY),&#xA;  EVEN IF NVIDIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.&#xA;  THESE LIMITATIONS SHALL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING ANY FAILURE OF THE ESSENTIAL&#xA;  PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY.  IN NO EVENT SHALL NVIDIA’S AGGREGATE&#xA;  LIABILITY TO DEVELOPER OR ANY OTHER PERSON OR ENTITY CLAIMING THROUGH&#xA;  OR UNDER DEVELOPER EXCEED THE AMOUNT OF MONEY ACTUALLY PAID BY DEVELOPER&#xA;  TO NVIDIA FOR THE SOFTWARE OR ANY OTHER MATERIALS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3207" LastActivityDate="2023-08-29T08:06:51.993" Title="Can this NVIDIA licence be used for GPL open source product?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2772" CreationDate="2016-04-22T22:27:24.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is 'viral' and under the FSF's current interpretation, simply statically linking code to GPL stuff means that it must have a GPL compliant licence. (That's a debatable position in itself, but the FSF are the best placed to comment on the implications)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nvidia licence is going to be nowhere near GPL compliant, as it's restricting you from decompiling the object code they provide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC you may also have issues with the trademarks clause, but would have to check that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence stinks anyway- They can terminate without cause simply by sending you an email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-04-22T22:27:24.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2777" CreationDate="2016-04-23T16:33:21.997" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, we are trying to write library in java which will make it easier to work with images, etc. &#xA;It's something like university project, so we have 15 people in our team. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't want anyone to have power to remove his code from our library after we end our project. &#xA;Let's say Peter wrote 7 classes, but something happens and he wants to remove his contributions from our library and because it's his 7 classes we have to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would prevent such things? Maybe it's Apache License 2.0 or GPL?&#xA;Sorry for bad english.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4901" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T16:18:18.617" Title="Which license can be used when I want to protect contributions to my program?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T04:32:04.230" Score="5" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at some &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_flags_of_LGBT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;highy geometric flags used by the the extended LGBT community&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these are not able to be copyrighted (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_on_emblems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikimedia&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Because the consist only of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choice of Color&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geometric Shapes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and these factors do not contribute to the creation of an original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the flags I am looking at. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sXQIZs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sXQIZs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Agender Flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;     &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SdUyUs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SdUyUs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Genderfluid Flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;        &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/osQGXs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/osQGXs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Genderqueer Flag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agender_pride_flag.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agender&lt;/a&gt;      &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genderqueer_flag-pride.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genderfluid&lt;/a&gt;,       &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genderfluidity_Pride-Flag.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genderqueer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of which are listed on Wiki-Commons as are licensed under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they are not (AFAICT) copyright-able. &#xA;Are these licenses thus void?&#xA;And so can I include it into my own open-sourced work without issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the validity of the license stem from the validity of the original copyright?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T08:48:14.663" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T08:48:14.663" Title="Can I completely ignore the license for graphics that are ineligible for copyright?" Tags="|creative-commons|copyright|art|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2853" CreationDate="2016-04-24T04:42:44.750" Score="5" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am putting together some code that will use the Steinbergs VST3 specification and it has occurred to me that it would make a nice open source project. Most that exist are a bit old and are based on VST2 and have dependencies on Steinbergs SDK - which is not open source. Steinberg are not onerous in their requirements by the way - but they do control IP as perhaps they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to know is whether a binary compatible interface to a propriety spec is proprietary. VST3 in particular but am interested in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More explicitly:  If I write some code using none of the Steinberg SDK other than function names and parameters is it legal to then publish this as an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a more general example: If Fred Nurk Corp defines an interface standard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;class IFredNurkInterface&#xA;{&#xA;  public:&#xA;     virtual result GetSystemInfo(Parameter x)=0;&#xA;     virtual result SetSystemInfo(Parameter x)=0;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then I write a concrete implementation of the standard without even deriving from IFredNurkInterface&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;class MyReinventTheWheelClass&#xA;{&#xA;  public:&#xA;     virtual result GetSystemInfo(Parameter x){&#xA;        //get something based on x&#xA;        return something&#xA;     };&#xA;     virtual result SetSystemInfo(Parameter x){&#xA;         //do something with x&#xA;         return something&#xA;     };&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be able to publish MyReinventTheWheelClass as lets say a MIT compatible project? - assuming of course I am complying with all the branding requirements and not misrepresenting myself or my affiliation with Fred Nurk Corp etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4905" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T20:50:11.507" Title="Is a binary compatible interface to a proprietary spec proprietary" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2774" CreationDate="2016-04-24T16:18:18.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need an irrevocable license, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;version 3 of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;. With such a license, barring other termination clauses, the author can't retroactively revoke your rights to use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some legislations, moral rights might apply too; these could give the author a say in what can be done with his/her code. It would be up to courts to decide though, and the fact that the code was licensed in a certain way would presumably come into consideration regardless of the author's subsequent change of mind (but I am not a lawyer). A copyright assignment might help reduce uncertainty, although legislations with moral rights generally don't allow them to be assigned away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-04-24T16:18:18.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-24T17:38:00.760" Score="4" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use an image in the cover page of a paid book.&#xA;The image is first published in Wikimedia and it is &lt;em&gt;licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to self-publish the book. Should I change the license of the whole book to the same as the image or just put an attribution to the image in a credit page? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4908" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-04-24T18:07:29.750" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T09:22:26.857" Title="Using CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported image in a book" Tags="|creative-commons|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2781" CreationDate="2016-04-25T04:00:07.147" Score="4" ViewCount="3510" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about what is allowed license-wise in the use of Neo4j Community Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i use it in closed-source commercial applications ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i'm allowed to do with the community edition in production ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4912" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T16:06:51.587" Title="Using Neo4j Community edition in commercial applications" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2775" CreationDate="2016-04-25T12:50:42.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; there is no copyright, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; open source licenses generally do not bind you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there is copyright in this case is a legal question, for your (company's) lawyer(s).  You should not assume this is the case, if it at all matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T12:50:42.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2779" CreationDate="2016-04-25T16:01:18.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neo4j Community Edition &lt;a href=&quot;http://neo4j.com/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is licensed&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking about &quot;commercial&quot; vs. &quot;non-commercial&quot; when it comes to GPL software is very misleading, because the GPLv3 does not make a difference between doing things for money and doing things for free. However, its copyleft conditions might not work well with &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; particular business model. You are not revealing what that business model is, though, so we can only speculate if the license would work with it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 only covers &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt;. That means when the product only runs internally on your company servers, the GPL does not interfere with your business at all. It only gets relevant when your application is distributed to end-users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also explained in the article I linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you’re building a database application that will run inside your organization (or for your personal use), then you are free to use Community Edition, whether or not your software is closed source. A very close analogy is MySQL®, which is also licensed under the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-04-25T16:06:51.587" LastActivityDate="2016-04-25T16:06:51.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2788" CreationDate="2016-04-26T01:26:29.033" Score="9" ViewCount="5107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;CHANGELOG&lt;/code&gt; files in Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the situation: I based my work on an Apache 2.0 licensed project. I did some minor changes (compared to the original work). It seems that I have two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to the Apache 2.0 license, I have to include &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file if it was in the original work. The problem is, that the notice file in the original work was probably never updated and is possibly incorrect as it does not include notices about library dependencies. Do I have to fix this myself or is it enough to just add the dependencies that were introduced by my changes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license also requires that I state changes. The original work did not have any &lt;code&gt;CHANGELOG&lt;/code&gt; file and changes were tracked in git (which I guess is not sufficient for the needs of the license). How and in what detail do I state the changes in this situation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Bonus question) Because my work will most likely never be merged back to original project git repository I would like to be stated as one of the authors if possible. I suppose, that I add the mandatory license header to the files that I added to the project, but what about the changes in the files that I only modified? Should I add myself to the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file? I am not sure how would this look like so any example would be appreciated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I will not distribute it in binary form. Only the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, that this has already been discussed, but I am not sure what to do in a situation like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As suggested, this is the project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Please see comments under Thomas' answer if you need more clarification :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4918" LastEditorUserId="4918" LastEditDate="2016-04-26T15:14:14.987" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T15:14:14.987" Title="Apache 2.0 license - NOTICE, CHANGELOG" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-26T01:47:04.810" Score="15" ViewCount="2264" Body="&lt;p&gt;So if I had a microservice architecture and one of my services relied on a piece of AGPL software, and that service wasn't customer facing, but a service that communicated with it was, would I be required to open source all of those services? or any of them? How does this license impact this architecture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T13:46:44.950" Title="How does AGPL affect Microservices?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2016-04-26T12:52:51.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's break this down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the Apache 2.0 license, I have to include NOTICE file if it was in the original work. The problem is, that the notice file in the original work was probably never updated and is possibly incorrect as it does not include notices about library dependencies. Do I have to fix this myself or is it enough to just add the dependencies that were introduced by my changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to continue to carry a NOTICE file. Section 4d allows you to include the attribution notices in a NOTICE file, within the source or documentation if it is provided alongside the derivative work, or within a display generated by the derivative work. Specifically, the last sentence of 4d allows you to add your own attribution text alongside (by modifying the NOTICE file) or as an addendum to the NOTICE text (putting both in the same file, within another document, or in a display generated by the derivative work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're stating that the original NOTICE file is wrong, I would consider doing an addendum by either adding a second NOTICE file that is fully correct, by using one file and calling out which was the NOTICE from the original project and which content is related to your derivative work, or in a display and calling out which was the original NOTICE text and which was your NOTICE text. Regardless - make sure that your NOTICE text is fully correct and don't modify the original project's NOTICE text at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license also requires that I state changes. The original work did not have any CHANGELOG file and changes were tracked in git (which I guess is not sufficient for the needs of the license). How and in what detail do I state the changes in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CHANGELOG is not required by Apache. The only mention of requirements related to changes is in 4b, which states that if you modify a file, that file must carry a prominent notice that the file has been changed. Typically, in a project that is using the Apache License (at least those released by the Apache Software Foundation), the top of each file will contain &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#apply&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the boilerplate header&lt;/a&gt;. The method used to state that a file was changed is to add a new copyright line under the original one. If you are applying a new license to the changes, you would indicate this in the boilerplate header section as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the initial commit to your git repository was the original work and every revision was your contribution to a derivative work, I think that this is sufficient. You are meeting the requirement of 4b by stating that a file has changed. There is no requirement to further identify changes beyond a file level, but your version control repository would allow for that, if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because my work will most likely never be merged back to original project git repository I would like to be stated as one of the authors if possible. I suppose, that I add the mandatory license header to the files that I added to the project, but what about the changes in the files that I only modified? Should I add myself to the NOTICE file? I am not sure how would this look like so any example would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you modify the boilerplate header, you would add your name. If you are keeping the Apache License for your work, you don't need to do anything else. If you are going to apply a different license, then you do need to identify the license for your contributions to mark off what is Apache License and what is under the other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NOTICE file is only used for attribution to other people. For example, if you are including other projects in yours, the NOTICE file or NOTICE text somewhere else, clearly identifies these other projects and the license that they are under. Modifying the NOTICE file to point back to the original project that yours is a derivative work of would also be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-04-26T12:52:51.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2783" CreationDate="2016-04-26T20:02:33.807" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the the services together form a derivative work under copyright, then the AGPL source-sharing provisions apply to the entire work, and you must share the source code for the entire work. If they do not form a new work (i.e., they are considered independent program-works that merely happen to interact with one another), then the source-sharing provisions apply at most to the AGPL work only, and only if you have modified it in a way that qualifies as a derivative work under copyright. Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;determination of when two programs interact with sufficient closeness to form a new single program-work is a subjective determination&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the AGPL service is indeed a separate work from the rest of your code, then if &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the user interacts with the service in a way that satisfies the AGPL's standard of &quot;interacting with it remotely through a computer network,&quot; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have modified the service in a way that produces a derivative work under copyright law&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you must make the source code available to your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any case law about what level of network interaction is necessary, but if the AGPL service is a utility used by another service that the user actually interacts with (e.g., an AGPL database used by a Web service that the user &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; sends packets to) then it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;probably does not satisfy that condition&lt;/a&gt;. (However, note that in my parenthetical example, the database/Web service combo could be a modified work of the AGPL work and the AGPL may apply to both, in which case source-sharing would be necessary for the whole thing, as mentioned in the first paragraph.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-04-27T13:46:44.950" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T13:46:44.950" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2791" CreationDate="2016-04-27T04:23:17.573" Score="7" ViewCount="2838" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused by copyright licenses. Specifically whether or not I am permitted to use derived code from W3Schools in my production code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a bit of context I have a contract to build a website. The particulars of the website don't really matter, except for the fact that I was searching for code that I could hack to develop a vertical drop down navigation pane. I came across a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3schools.com/w3css/demo_sidenav.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wonderful example on W3Schools&lt;/a&gt; that did what I wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, before I copied the code I started to do some research to make sure I wasn't violating copyright laws. According to the W3Schools copyright statement,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All pages and graphics on this website are the property of the company Refsnes Data. Pages, code or other content from W3Schools may not be redistributed or reproduced in any way, shape, or form without the written permission of Refsnes Data. Failure to do so is a violation of copyright laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, later on, they state that copying for profitable or commercial use is not a favorable use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that seems pretty clear, that I can't use this code without written permission from Refsnes Data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However here is where I am confused - as I reviewed the source code for the HTML in question I noticed their CSS File and browsed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the third line down they attribute around 25 lines or so to another developer project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/necolas/normalize.css&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Normalize.css by Nicolas Gallagher and Jonathan Neal&quot;&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the MIT license for the project tells me that in order for W3Schools to make use of this code in the CSS file they must release their code with the same license and include the license statement (which they didn't do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is W3Schools in violation of the MIT License as they do not include&#xA;a reference to the license in their code? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to use the  W3Schools CSS file as it is a derivative of the Normalize.css and&#xA;therefore automatically licensed the same way? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to use&#xA;the W3Schools HTML file as it is an implementation of a derivative?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I overthinking this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4929" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T16:23:59.553" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T11:39:20.603" Title="Confusion about derived works from an MIT License" Tags="|derivative-works|copyright|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2790" CreationDate="2016-04-27T05:25:24.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is a permissive license, which allows you to do anything you like with the licensed code, including using it in a proprietary code-base. Derivative code isn't automatically MIT-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only requirement is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W3Schools are complying with this by including the normalize.css copyright notice. Their own work isn't reusable as you discovered yourself; all that you're allowed to do is reuse normalize.css as provided originally (and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; W3Schools' derivative).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answers to your questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T05:25:24.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-27T09:26:15.563" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently modified software code licensed under EPL v1.0. Can I remove the original copyright and add my own copyright ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4932" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2016-04-27T13:01:32.187" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T13:01:32.187" Title="Copyright on derived software under EPL license v1.0" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2792" CreationDate="2016-04-27T09:45:05.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you replaced all the original code, the original copyright remains. You can add your own (assuming your changes are non-trivial), but you must preserve the original copyright; something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright © ... original holder&#xA; * Copyright © 2016 Anveshak&#xA; *&#xA; * This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the&#xA; * terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 which accompanies this distribution,&#xA; * and is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3 of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL&lt;/a&gt; makes this explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributors may not remove or alter any copyright notices contained within the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each Contributor must identify itself as the originator of its Contribution, if any, in a manner that reasonably allows subsequent Recipients to identify the originator of the Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-04-27T09:45:05.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-28T06:53:26.543" Score="4" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a library implementing a specific protocol for my favorite programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found one, but noticed that it started out as a straight port of another project. However, in each code file the author have replaced the original copyright with his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opened an issue and pointed out that the copyright can't just be replaced. He asked me what he should have done. And that's why I'm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start a port it is quite similar. But then the projects probably will diverge depending on the direction they take. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how should the copyright be handled in these cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4942" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:04:44.487" Title="Project port (to another language), dealing with copyright notices when using Apache license" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2794" CreationDate="2016-04-28T09:04:44.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each copyright notice should remain intact (the old one, and the new one). Each person still owns copyright to their own contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, down the track, it can be proved that the project has diverged enough that none of the original author's code remains, that author's copyright notice could conceivably be removed. However, I generally would still retain it, if not for legal reasons (if the code could not be considered an original work) then for ethical ones (the project still benefited greatly from the original author's work so it's nice to acknowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T09:04:44.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-28T14:46:00.023" Score="5" ViewCount="562" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a library on GitHub (now Zlib/Libpng licensed) that is a fork of a library that was originally released under the Boost software license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legitimate/legal to relicense boost software under the zlib license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the Boost license doesn't explicitly deny nor explicitly allow relicensing as far as I can tell, so I thought it was worth a question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lyeh/units&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/r-lyeh/units&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4947" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T18:57:48.843" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T18:57:48.843" Title="Can software released under the Boost software license be relicensed under the Zlib/Libpng License?" Tags="|license-compatibility|relicensing|bsl|zlib-libpng|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2796" CreationDate="2016-04-28T15:01:47.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Boost license&lt;/a&gt; specifically states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including&#xA;  the above license grant, this restriction and the following disclaimer,&#xA;  must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and&#xA;  all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative&#xA;  works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by&#xA;  a source language processor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, you can't relicense code under the Boost license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project in question is rather confused about its license though; the top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lyeh/units/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; still says it's licensed using the Boost license, as does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lyeh/units/blob/master/units.hpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;library's code itself&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You could argue that the project as a whole uses the Zlib license, and includes Boost-licensed code, which is valid — but the code in question constitutes the entirety of the project...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-04-28T15:01:47.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-29T07:31:31.740" Score="2" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;So what I'm planning to do is to create a script which one part calls (via Python's subprocess) external open source script licensed under GPL-2.  To make it easier for users I'd like to distribute the GPL-2'ed script with with my own so that call could be easily done on the correct version of software. (I want to use the specific version of it). Does this scenario affect the license of my script? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm slightly confused as I'm not &quot;using&quot; any code of it, my script just wants to call the open source script in order to perform one step. If this was denied would it change a situation if my script tried to download the open source script during the execution? (So it wouldn't be distributed with mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4956" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T08:49:35.567" Title="Bundling GPL script with closed source script" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2799" CreationDate="2016-04-29T07:58:41.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this can be a confusing point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL's main concern with this is whether your work could be considered derivative of this script. In the end, whether it is or not comes down to interpretation, so the best we can do without legal precedent is to go straight to the source - GNU themselves - and see what their opinion of their license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU have a great (but long!) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ page&lt;/a&gt; that outlines the spirit behind the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer relevant to your situation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system. The goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, understand, and modify a program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered software into a non-free system, it would have the effect of making the GPL-covered software non-free too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't copied the entire answer; you can &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read it here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, GNU would consider your script to be derivative of the other script if it is integrated so much that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calls are made back and forth and data structures are shared&lt;/a&gt;. If however your script &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; interacts in an API-like fashion with the other script, then you're in the clear (but make sure you don't copy any code from the other script!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end this is a value judgement on your part (unless of course you find a lawyer to decide for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes down to it, this is usually pretty clear: you're either using it in API fashion or not. If you're not sure after thinking it through, then in my experience it's usually due to trying to find a justification when deep down you already know :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you might be able to clear up the derivative status, but then there's the distribution. Things get a bit more murky if you actually distribute this GPL script with yours. You could require users to download it themselves, which would free you up quite a bit. But if you distribute it (or download it automatically - there's really no difference, you're still distributing it), you need to be careful that you make it &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; clear the programs are separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the same question I linked to above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs—but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; sure that you provide the source for the GPL program (or a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesWrittenOfferValid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;written offer for it&lt;/a&gt;), as required by the GPL as a condition of redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell, your options at this stage would be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consider your script and the GPL'ed script as separate, and distribute them together clearly separated and explained; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license your program under GPL as well (this is, after all, the intention of the GPL - to force you to also open source your program); or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find an alternative, more permissively licensed script; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact the author of the script and ask them to release it to you under another license (they may want to know why you don't want to GPL your own program)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aaaand as always, IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T08:49:35.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2391" CreationDate="2016-04-29T11:22:42.730" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's exactly how you should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, in the future, you happen to have written out any code by the original contributor, then you could (if you wish), remove their name - but you'd have to be sure none of their code remains of course :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T11:22:42.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2802" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2803" CreationDate="2016-04-29T15:08:59.037" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if anything I say is a bit stupid or out of context, I'm really new to Open Source licensing, so please don't be too mean ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have wrote a software framework which I want to distribute as open source but restricting it's commercial use a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First restriction is, if you're an individual developer or the usage is for an open source project use is completely free, but if usage is by a company with more than one programer then it must be licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, anyone can modify the source code, but the modified code cannot be redistributed unless it will be upstreamed to the main project or used in an open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, derived software cannot be another framework for the same usage (basically, you can't create a framework for the same usage, not sure if this really makes any sense, what I don't want is someone to grab our code, modify it and then redistribute it as another product).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, the real question, is there any license which will fit these restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read some licenses (MIT, Apache, GLP, LGPL and so on), but on some parts I just got lost so I'm not really sure if there's any existing license which matches these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no license which matches these requirements, how should I write a license like this? or is there any place which helps to create a custom license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4962" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T16:39:51.140" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T16:39:51.140" Title="Which existing license would fit those requrirements (or how to write our own license type)?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2802" CreationDate="2016-04-29T15:24:59.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your restrictions are incompatible with open source licenses according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;, so you won't find an OSI-approved license which meets your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your first restriction discriminates users and/or usages, which goes against terms 5 and 6 of the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your third restriction discriminates usages, which goes against term 6 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of your second restriction matches strong copyleft requirements, so if we ignore the first part you're OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might find it useful to look at the way &lt;a href=&quot;http://itextpdf.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iText&lt;/a&gt; is licensed; it has a dual license, either AGPL or commercial, so end-users can use it for free as long as they satisfy the AGPL's requirements (which are quite demanding), or purchase a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/proliferation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;please don't write a new license&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T15:24:59.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-04-29T17:04:14.787" Score="3" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of dependencies of a game engine that I'm using has an LGPL license. If I, for some reason, forget to upload the license file, do I lose rights to my own part of the code that isn't GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, if someone reverse-engineers my game (which I would like people to do), how are they going to comply with the LGPL if they change the portion of code that belongs to the LGPL program? Will they be unable to use my program again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, does removing the LGPL part of the program solve the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4963" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T11:03:59.117" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T11:03:59.117" Title="What exactly is terminated by the breach of LGPL?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2804" CreationDate="2016-04-29T17:18:47.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first case, you wouldn't lose any rights to your code. What you'd lose would be the right to copy and distribute the LGPL'd code, or more precisely you wouldn't be granted that right in the first place since you didn't comply with the license and it's grant is conditional on that. That would then allow the author of that code to sue you for copyright infringement for copying and distributing their code without a license to do so. The easiest way to avoid any problems here is to either distribute the original dependency package or to simply note in your documentation that the dependency is licensed under the LGPL and provide a link to wherever you got it from. If it's a standard package on the platform, eg. any of the LGPL'd software in Debian Linux, you needn't even distribute it, just note it as a prerequisite and require the user to install the packages before installing your program (most packaging systems let you automate that by declaring the dependency and letting the packaging system automatically do the installation of any required packages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, if they just change the code it won't make any difference. It's only if they start distributing their modified version that they'd run into the same issue of copyright infringement that you'd run into in the first case. This shouldn't involve your code at all, you said the dependency was LGPL so it's a separate shared-object library or something similar and (aside from the small bits of declarations and constants) the code's entirely in it's own files not physically part of your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T17:18:47.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2807" CreationDate="2016-04-29T20:11:56.657" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an application A. It uses the GPL license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is another application B that takes all of A's code and improvises it. In its repo, both GPL and LGPL license can be found.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We are building an application C, which is open source and uses all of application A's code, much like B did. However, we take the enhancements from B and credit it duly. What license should be given to C?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T20:28:25.270" Title="What license to use while using GPL/LGPL source code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2806" CreationDate="2016-04-29T20:28:25.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license which applies to the combination of A and B depends on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the precise versions of the GPL and LGPL involved&lt;/a&gt;. The enhancements present in C, when they take the form of new source files, can in theory be placed (by the copyright holders) under any &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible license&lt;/a&gt;. The license applicable to the whole of C will be whichever version of the GPL applies to the combination (with potentially the option to pick a later one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-04-29T20:28:25.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2809" CreationDate="2016-04-30T01:18:06.643" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an installer for some softwares, and wish to make the installer stand-alone, i.e. everything baked into a single executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the softwares that are installed has GPL 3, built from un-modified sources. The other softwares have a different license which allows them to be redistributed like this, without the need to make the source-code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The installer itself uses the &lt;a href=&quot;http://qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Qt framework&lt;/a&gt; licensed under LGPL 3, and has to be statically linked since it will be a stand-alone installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that the softwares and the installer are each and all separate issues, and thus that the only things required of me is that I make the installer LGPL 3, and include a written offer of the source-codes of the installer and the GPL 3 software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4789" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T18:24:45.810" Title="Complex mix of licenses for stand-alone installer, and the softwares it installs" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|lgpl|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2808" CreationDate="2016-04-30T01:34:17.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would almost certainly be correct. The last paragraph of section 5 of the GPLv3 (applicable in this case because the LGPLv3 incorporates the GPLv3 by reference and then modifies it) covers this sort of situation where several works are aggregated without interacting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T01:34:17.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2016-04-30T17:29:13.567" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your project's just written in Clojure, it doesn't modify the Clojure compiler or runtime system, you can simply license your project under the GPLv3. You would only need to worry about Clojure's license if you were distributing the Clojure compiler/runtime itself or code which modified or integrated into it to a greater extent than merely running on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-04-30T17:29:13.567" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2016-05-01T01:15:01.423" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the FAQ of gnu.org they provide the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.en.html#why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.en.html#why&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do you call it GNU/Linux and not Linux? (#why) Most operating&#xA;  system distributions based on Linux as kernel are basically modified&#xA;  versions of the GNU operating system. We began developing GNU in 1984,&#xA;  years before Linus Torvalds started to write his kernel. Our goal was&#xA;  to develop a complete free operating system. Of course, we did not&#xA;  develop all the parts ourselves—but we led the way. We developed most&#xA;  of the central components, forming the largest single contribution to&#xA;  the whole system. The basic vision was ours too. In fairness, we ought&#xA;  to get at least equal mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See Linux and the GNU System and GNU Users Who Have Never Heard of GNU&#xA;  for more explanation, and The GNU Project for the history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why is the name important? (#whycare) Although the developers of&#xA;  Linux, the kernel, are contributing to the free software community,&#xA;  many of them do not care about freedom. People who think the whole&#xA;  system is Linux tend to get confused and assign to those developers a&#xA;  role in the history of our community which they did not actually play.&#xA;  Then they give inordinate weight to those developers' views. Calling&#xA;  the system GNU/Linux recognizes the role that our idealism played in&#xA;  building our community, and helps the public recognize the practical&#xA;  importance of these ideals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How did it come about that most people call the system “Linux”?&#xA;  (#howerror) Calling the system “Linux” is a confusion that has spread&#xA;  faster than the corrective information. The people who combined Linux&#xA;  with the GNU system were not aware that that's what their activity&#xA;  amounted to. They focused their attention on the piece that was Linux&#xA;  and did not realize that more of the combination was GNU. They started&#xA;  calling it “Linux” even though that name did not fit what they had. It&#xA;  took a few years for us to realize what a problem this was and ask&#xA;  people to correct the practice. By that time, the confusion had a big&#xA;  head start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the people who call the system “Linux” have never heard why&#xA;  that's not the right thing. They saw others using that name and assume&#xA;  it must be right. The name “Linux” also spreads a false picture of the&#xA;  system's origin, because people tend to suppose that the system's&#xA;  history was such as to fit that name. For instance, they often believe&#xA;  its development was started by Linus Torvalds in 1991. This false&#xA;  picture tends to reinforce the idea that the system should be called&#xA;  “Linux”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many of the questions in this file represent people's attempts to&#xA;  justify the name they are accustomed to using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we always say “GNU/Linux” instead of “Linux”? (#always) Not&#xA;  always—only when you're talking about the whole system. When you're&#xA;  referring specifically to the kernel, you should call it “Linux”, the&#xA;  name its developer chose. When people call the whole system “Linux”,&#xA;  as a consequence they call the whole system by the same name as the&#xA;  kernel. This causes many kinds of confusion, because only experts can&#xA;  tell whether a statement is about the kernel or the whole system. By&#xA;  calling the whole system “GNU/Linux”, and calling the kernel “Linux”,&#xA;  you avoid the ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4973" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-05-01T15:06:54.447" LastActivityDate="2016-05-01T15:06:54.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2758" CreationDate="2016-05-02T17:19:07.677" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it matters, and everyone should be listed, and I think the reasons are almost entirely moral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Limiting the list to the core team fails to acknowledge major contributors.  Leaving contributors out because their contributions are small or infrequent is rude.  After all, a contributor list is a form of 'Thank you' and perhaps offers a little encouragement to those who have not yet contributed.  Maintaining a correct contributor list shows that you care about everyone's contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributors who provide patches will have their email listed automatically in the history, otherwise I think simply their name/handle should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="197" LastEditorUserId="11515" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T00:30:11.683" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T00:30:11.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2016-05-03T05:57:54.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The short answer is yes&lt;/strong&gt;, in my opinion and interpretation (IANAL), you will have to license your thesis under the GPL, version 2 or later (or another compatible license, if you can find one!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The longer answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using the classicthesis template, then in my opinion you are correct, your work is going to be a derivative of that template. The only way to avoid this is to create your thesis from scratch without using the template. It'd be pretty difficult to argue that your work isn't deriviate of it if it has indeed started from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a clear disagreement on this stance, so in the end you're going to need a make a decision where you stand personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide that your work is a derivative, you will then need to comply with all of the GPL's requirements. If the template is licensed under 'GPL2 or later', you can choose to do the same, &lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt; specifically license it as either 'version 2' &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; 'version 3', &lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt; license it as 'version 3 or later' - the option is entirely up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd then need to clearly license your thesis as such, and either provide the LaTeX source when you distribute it or include in the PDF a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatDoesWrittenOfferValid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;clearly written offer to provide the source&lt;/a&gt; if asked (that written offer provision may suit you well in this case, it'll save you having to worry about distributing the source unless specifically requested!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; has more information about how to apply the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-11T23:21:20.473" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T23:21:20.473" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2820" CreationDate="2016-05-04T12:19:15.583" Score="8" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently planning to launch an alpha version of the software as a representative of an &lt;a href=&quot;http://prasadnr.wix.com/traquad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unregistered company&lt;/a&gt;. We (currently I'm the only person on the team) do not have any patents and are not planning to apply for it until we are cash-flow positive. Open-source licenses like that of Open Source Foundation and Free Software Foundation typically allow only free softwares which even include commercialization in the clause. (Even Apache and GPL have similar issues) But, we would like to have a complete control over the aspect of commercialization. (While it is a great opportunity to be helping each other and helping fellow students like us make money, we would not like unhealthy businesses spurring up and ultimately ruining the entire market; If that is the case, then they can either build software from scratch or pay us for commercialization. This is the major intention behind non-commercialisation and attribution. The concerns raised in Lady-Ada's website are similar; But, the solutions are unsatisfactory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to have something like OpenCV’s non-free modules. While Creative Commons license looks like a perfect fit, the (very) website disclaims the use of it for softwares. Some more people may join in the business and we are planning to update our softwares over the next couple of months. Can you let me know if ‘versioning’ is possible and if multiple licenses are necessary and also if it is wiser to use Creative Commons or modify the existing licenses with exceptions (including Creative Commons)? (and why?) If such licence is not available, it is ok for me to use AGPL or RPL provided that they do not interfere with non-commercial terms (it is ok (although not intended) even if people do not publish source code as long as they use it only for non-commercial purposes; We do not like to annoy them with licence terms and would like to promote the non-commercial adoption as the world needs our software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional note: If there are license terms which would allow us to make our software completely free after some time, then that is desirable. (If I make money and gain traction to get into a great university, I wouldn't mind making it free)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[This question is a follow-up of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37024944/possibility-of-non-commercial-open-source-and-attribution-based-licence#_=_&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question; Sorry, but the number of links has been restricted to two. However, the original question has links. Sorry for the inconvenience]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T15:20:00.587" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T15:20:00.587" Title="Possibility of non-commercial ‘open-source’ and attribution based licence" Tags="|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-04T12:23:45.660" Score="7" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2114/are-there-any-gpl-like-licenses-for-apple-app-store&quot;&gt;GPL is not compatible with the Apple App Store&lt;/a&gt; due to the differences regarding Apple's ability to impose further restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this also affect fonts bundled with the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words - can one use fonts that are licensed under GPL-FE (font exception) with an iOS app? (both from the GPL and Apple's perspective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T19:46:54.300" Title="GPL-FE (font-exception) on Apple App Store?" Tags="|gpl|apple-app-store|gpl-font-exception|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2016-05-05T14:58:49.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A slightly peripheral addition:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/issues/123/gpl-suitable&quot;&gt;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/issues/123/gpl-suitable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author's opinion is that if you use the LaTeX template to create another document (e.g. PDF) and aren't running the LaTeX code directly and make no modifications to the original code, then it's no longer covered by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that in general terms that is a debatable point given the FSF's stance on the viral nature of the GPL, but in this case the author is clearly giving you the option to licence the final output of your thesis as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-05-05T14:58:49.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2825" CreationDate="2016-05-06T10:38:13.303" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background: In the audio processing world, most programs to compose and mix music in (collectively called DAW's from now on) are commercial and closed source. These programs can extend their functionality using some common plug-in specifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one common 'free' and cross-platform specification that is widely supported (Steinberg's VST specification). There are several others, most commonly Apple's AudioUnit and Avid's RTAS- and AAX specifications. AudioUnit, RTAS and AAX are locked in to the companies' proprietary DAW platforms (Logic and Pro Tools).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For whatever reason these specifications were developed, they are nearly completely identical. However, Pro Tools and Logic refuse/don't support loading plugins from any open specifications except their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These specifications are so identical that creating a wrapper around all of these specifications is trivial and possible. This, then, has created a mess in which developers of audio plug-ins must separately distribute a lot of permutations of their plugins, but it has become common practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation: I created a meta-plugin/wrapper, that allows to identify itself as any format (specification) and load any format (such that you can load VSTs in Logic, for instance). The plugin is free and licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It works completely on its own. But it can, at run-time optionally load any end-user provided plug-in, or, optionally, save an emulated 'copy' of the loaded plug-in disguised as any other format. This last feature allows the unsupported format to be loaded seamlessly in any other locked-in proprietary host (but under the hood, it is still wrapped through my plug-in, just statically (not it terms of linking) and invisibly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is&lt;/strong&gt;, whether this is in violation of the GPL, when the end-user provided library loaded in my GPL program is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; GPL-compatible (proprietary or closed source, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that, the GPL program Audacity allows the same functionality - it can for instance load any VST-plugin, that may or may not be proprietary. I can even, through creative audio system routing, simulate the exact situation using a project in Audacity that can be routed through something like Logic, emulating the wrapped plug-in situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the question can be boiled down to: Can GPL hosts support loading of optionally provided non-GPL plug-ins in this specific situation, where the GPL host imitates the non-GPL plug-in in what effectively seems like &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; plug-in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4517" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T17:03:28.467" Title="Hosting (potentially) non-GPL plugin's" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2815" CreationDate="2016-05-06T11:48:42.090" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to restrict your software to not be used for commercial purposes, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;it is not open source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; release it under multiple licenses - such as the GPL and a commercial license (where a user can choose one or the other, obviously having to pay for the latter) - but it seems from your question that you're not considering the GPL either. The GPL &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; allow commercial use, but requires software derivative of it to also be licensed in a similar way, so this keeps it free (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software&quot;&gt;as in libre&lt;/a&gt;), thus preventing it from becoming proprietary. However, it doesn't prevent people from making money from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons, as you've discovered, is not recommended for software; it was drafted more with art forms in mind (such as photography and sound recordings). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like what you're really after is a proprietary license that will allow you to control how your software is used. I would recommend having a lawyer with appropriate expertise draft this for you, however you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; attempt to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.binpress.com/license/generator&quot;&gt;create a license online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally to answer your last question, yes you can choose to release your software under a free/open-source license at a later date. You can always license your software as you see fit, at any time. What you can't do is revoke a license from someone that has already received it; but there's nothing stopping you from re-releasing under a new license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why there is no commercial license freely available online: companies go to considerable expense to draft their licenses. These licenses would generally be copyrighted by those companies: what's in it for them if they open up a license to be used by anyone? All they'd be doing is giving their competitors an advantage in not having to do their own legal research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason we have licenses that are free for us to use is that the open source community has created them in order to benefit the entire open source community. As far as I know, no-one sees any benefit in creating a license at their own expense to be freely used by another party to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; the use of their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-05-07T01:23:29.373" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T01:23:29.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-06T18:40:00.680" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched all over the Internet but I was not able to find if anyone has raised this issue. I want to edit some files in an open source sample project provided by Google (change some methods and the package name of all the files), and then deploy the app on the Play Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I can, do I need to keep any license declaration in my app, or do I need to open source my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: I know that the Google samples are licensed under the Apache License 2.0. But I am not able to find the answers to my questions in the licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5014" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-05-07T11:15:39.157" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T17:47:17.853" Title="Can we edit Google Android sample project and create app" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2843" CreationDate="2016-05-07T15:41:45.897" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;A repository owner on GitHub transferred me &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Alhadis/language-viml/issues/6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ownership&lt;/a&gt; of a project he abandoned some time ago. I noticed the year in the license file is outdated (2014), and the original author's name is still included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is MIT, but I know I can't reattribute the work to myself. Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the year updated and continue crediting him, even if I'm now the one maintaining the codebase?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leave the license as-is?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask for permission to modify the license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All things considered, the author's probably not that hung-up on this matter, but I am and I'd prefer to know what the recommended procedure for transferal of ownership is... I didn't, after all, pen the original code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Just to confirm, I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2391/&quot;&gt;the question&lt;/a&gt; regarding forking an MIT-licensed project. This is different, because it's not forking somebody else's work, it's having it handed over to you in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T13:59:42.793" Title="How should a codebase's original author be credited after they've transferred ownership of it?" Tags="|attribution|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2822" CreationDate="2016-05-07T18:30:41.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to determine a &quot;right&quot; way is to imagine you were the original author.&#xA;What would YOU consider as the better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most likely you would like your original copyright to be kept. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most likely you would have no objections to the new maintainer copyright being added on top as long as there is some new work that was done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most likely you would appreciate to be contacted for this but would not care too much if this was not the case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T18:30:41.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2819" CreationDate="2016-05-07T18:40:55.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMHO your question boils down to: can a piece of GPL-licensed code load arbitrary code under non-GPL or other licenses assuming it does not know about any of this other code ahead of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing that comes to mind would be an OS user space such as the Linux user space. Linux does not know anything ahead of time about your program. Does its GPL license extend to your program? &#xA;Since this can be a grey area for some, Linus made it clear that the GPL does not extend to user space programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the same context applies here. For the sake of clarity if you want to allow or disallow the loading of non-GPL-licensed plugins by your framework, you should make this explicit such that there is no source of confusion for your users. An explicit GPL exception would be the thing I would do if it was for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T17:03:28.467" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T17:03:28.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2821" CreationDate="2016-05-07T18:50:36.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If I can, do I need to keep any license declaration in my app, or do I need to open source my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to keep the original Apache license texts and notices as well as some minimal tracking of the changes you did. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/apache-2.0/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/apache-2.0/#license-text&lt;/a&gt; for some details of the requirements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4. of the Apache license is fairly clear on this and quite simple to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to make your project open source or Apache-licensed as a whole (though I would strongly encourage this)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-06T17:47:17.853" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T17:47:17.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2816" CreationDate="2016-05-07T19:04:34.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is ultimately an answer for Apple to provide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-FE allows it use in documents without much obligation.&#xA;If I were you I would create a minimal app with very explicit and clear embedding of the font under GPL + GPL-FE including license and notices and post that to the app store to see if Apple bans it or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-07T19:04:34.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2016-05-07T22:04:20.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&lt;/a&gt; I found all these apply to the case of classic thesis template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the GNU GPL will require that all the released improved versions&#xA;be free software. This means you can avoid the risk of having to&#xA;compete with a proprietary modified version of your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any&#xA;part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately,&#xA;without ever releasing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the&#xA;GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the&#xA;program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output&#xA;people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your&#xA;program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output&#xA;belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its&#xA;input into some other form, the copyright status of the output&#xA;inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its&#xA;output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that&#xA;copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete&#xA;that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not&#xA;have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright&#xA;on the code of the program. So the license of the code of the program&#xA;does not apply to the output, whether you pipe it into a file, make a&#xA;screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a programming language interpreter is released under the GPL, does&#xA;that mean programs written to be interpreted by it must be under&#xA;GPL-compatible licenses?&#xA;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no. The&#xA;interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software&#xA;license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data&#xA;you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted&#xA;program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about&#xA;licensing that data to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can apply the GPL to any kind of work, as long as it is clear what&#xA;constitutes the “source code” for the work. The GPL defines this as&#xA;the preferred form of the work for making changes in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in short: if you modify and want to distribute a derivative of classicthesis.sty or the whole template, you're only allowed to do it under GPL license. This applies only to the code, not the data (that you own) you run through the code. You're most likely to remove all text provided with the template and replace it with your own text. The output in the form of a PDF belongs to you only, and you're free to do with it whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5024" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T10:53:53.777" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-08T16:58:54.117" Score="3" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking at the web articles, and following statement seems to be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When there is an application source code which just uses some GPL library, but does not contain any part of the library within the codebase, the developer of the application still needs to publish the application in GPL (if he/she is to publish the source code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference, for example,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/317284/licensing-on-github&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/317284/licensing-on-github&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given my assumption is true, here's my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which part of the GPL License (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;) claims and enforces the library users to do so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I think the to-be-published source code is not &quot;translated&quot; or in anyway interacted with the GPL library per se (as it is merely a source code), so I'm wondering how the above restriction gets logically deduced from the License statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5027" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T19:59:14.273" Title="Which statement of GPL enforces publishing source codes that uses GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4579" CreationDate="2016-05-08T18:53:09.593" Score="8" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot;&gt;GPLv3 License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It states that when I modify the Program and distribute it, I need to meet the condition of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified&#xA;it, and giving a relevant date.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's say I found a GPLv3 source code on the web and want to put it on the GitHub and start making modifications on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be the required works to be done against this source code? Do I need to write down the cloned date? What about the subsequent changes I make to the repository? Do they also have to be written down somewhere on source code each time I make modification?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5027" LastEditorUserId="5027" LastEditDate="2016-05-08T19:42:39.710" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T09:47:46.753" Title="Required works to put existing GPLv3 source code on GitHub, with respect to modification dates" Tags="|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2829" CreationDate="2016-05-08T19:59:14.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant section is GPLv3 s5, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program [...] provided that you&#xA;  also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this&#xA;   License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether linking to a library is enough to produce a derivative work of that library, and thus engage the GPL, is an open one.  The FSF believes that dynamic (and static) linking does produce a derivative work, and therefore that code that uses a GPLed library &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;must therefore be released under the GPL&lt;/a&gt; (or a less-restrictive, but compatible, licence).  Others have different beliefs; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a fairly well-referenced summary of various different points of view that people have held on the subject&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until a court of significance rules persuasively on the issue, we simply don't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T19:59:14.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-08T20:37:34.080" Score="13" ViewCount="2930" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a javascript module (file), which contains two functions, and I would like to modify it under the terms of its BSD license. I'm happy for the resulting source file to be declared derived work and to keep the same BSD license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 1)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't want the second function so I remove it, do I (or can I) say that it's derived work even if it's only been deleted from and not added to?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 2)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I make changes to parts of the first function.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, do I just add a second copyright line with my own details to the existing one and keep the rest of the terms of the license there or how do I actually indicate this for BSD?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: the original author has not indicated a copyright year but only the full date of last modification of v2 of the module... do I use that as the copyright year for his copyright line? (yes, he only mentioned &quot;BSD&quot; in the module but didn't include the full text of a BSD license or copyright year)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5029" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T08:44:05.737" Title="Derived work of BSD licensed software, how do I indicate this?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|bsd|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2830" CreationDate="2016-05-08T20:54:39.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that adding your own copyright statement for the portions that you modify, alongside the existing copyright statements, should be sufficient: it identifies the portions you've modified, with a date, and is as prominent as the license grant which indicates that the GPL applies in the first place. If the program you're modifying follows the usual GPL practice (as recommended in the license itself), this will involve&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyright statements in the various source files you modify;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whatever copyright statement is made visible when the program is run;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyright statements in other files in the source distribution (&lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; potentially).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a typical GNU-style piece of software you would also add yourself to &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt;, and as you make changes, document them in &lt;code&gt;ChangeLog&lt;/code&gt;, and add user-visible changes to &lt;code&gt;NEWS&lt;/code&gt;. But that's just maintenance of the documentation, not (as I understand it) a licensing requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-05-08T20:54:39.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2016-05-09T08:44:05.737" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you adapt a file, you have to satisfy the licensing requirements for that file, whatever your changes and whatever the licensing requirements. If the module only specifies &lt;code&gt;Copyright ...&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;BSD&lt;/code&gt;, I'd start by seeking clarification from the original author, since there are different versions of the BSD license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two-clause&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-clause&lt;/a&gt; and the obsolete four-clause): ideally you want to know exactly which one applies. While you're at it, ask the original author to specify a complete copyright line...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your first case, I believe the notion of derived work involves some measure of creativity, so deleting a function wouldn't produce a derived work — but you still need to follow the original licensing requirements. (You can look at this this the other way round: you're extracting the BSD-licensed first function only.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your second case, you're creating a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, since the BSD license allows you to modify the code and redistribute the modified copies, you can perform the changes you envision; in the second case, this makes you an additional copyright holder on the resulting work, so it follows that you should add a corresponding copyright line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result should look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright © original year, original author&#xA;// Copyright © 2016, Paolo Marini&#xA;// All rights reserved.&#xA;//&#xA;// Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;// modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;// met:&#xA;//&#xA;// 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;//    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;//&#xA;// 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;//    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;//    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;//&#xA;// THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS&#xA;// &quot;AS IS&quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;// LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR&#xA;// A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT&#xA;// HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,&#xA;// SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;// LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,&#xA;// DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY&#xA;// THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;// (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE&#xA;// OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(assuming the two-clause form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-05-09T08:44:05.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-10T13:14:08.307" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;GNU Classpath exception says I can &lt;em&gt;link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this library&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wording. It sounds like I can take the library code as a whole, compile it into a separate module and then link my code to that separate module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I don't need the whole library code? Am I allowed to take only parts of the library (only some functions), compile those parts into a separate module and then link my code to that separate module and distribute the resulting executable on my terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1096" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-10T19:28:10.947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T07:31:41.227" Title="Does GNU Classpath exception allow me to take parts of the library, link with them and distribute the resulting executable on my terms?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2822" CreationDate="2016-05-10T13:59:42.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the exchange you've had with the previous repository maintainer, the previous maintainer never transfer ownership of his copyright. This situation is virtually identical (from a copyright and licensing perspective) to forking someone else's freely-licensed repository without coordinating directly with them. The original owner holds copyright on the original code, and you have permission to make your own modifications, which will be under your own copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference here appears to be that the Github repository has been mechanically transferred from being listed under the previous owner's account to being listed under your account. This by itself appears to have no copyright transfer implications. It is merely an easy way for the previous maintainer to signal, &quot;I don't care about updating this project anymore, but this guy does.&quot; Having the repo listed under your account doesn't mean anything in copyright terms -- the license text always allowed you to copy the code and post a new copy under your own Github account, which is nearly identical to what has happened here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the previous maintainer has explicitly authorized a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/copyright-research/ownership-and-transfers/#what_is_a_transfer_of_title&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transfer of title&lt;/a&gt; making you the new copyright owner, you do not have the right to remove the copyright notice. If you would like to do so (and if you would like the unambiguous ability to completely re-license the entire work in the future) you should ask for the maintainer to completely relinquish copyright to you, which he may or may not wish to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; participated in a transfer of title and you are now the new copyright owner of the entire work, then, yes, you can remove the copyright notice. this is trivial to see, because the previous copyright holder no longer has any legal standing to take legal action against you, since only the current copyright holder (who is now you) can take legal action against misuse of a work. This hardly seems like a &lt;em&gt;polite&lt;/em&gt; thing to do (versus simply &lt;em&gt;adding&lt;/em&gt; your own copyright notice as an addition to his), it appears to be a legally valid thing to do, assuming you own the copyright on everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that outside of the U.S., some jurisdictions have &quot;moral rights&quot; that can never be surrendered, and those moral right may include the right to be acknowledged as an author of a work. It's possible that removing an old copyright notice may run afoul of this moral right in certain jurisdictions, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-05-10T13:59:42.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-10T15:40:19.673" Score="7" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on an EPUB project in which I'll embed a font licensed under OFL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/ofl-1.1/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second point in the &lt;strong&gt;PERMISSION &amp;amp; CONDITIONS&lt;/strong&gt; section&lt;/a&gt;, the font &quot;&lt;em&gt;may be bundled&lt;/em&gt; (...) &lt;em&gt;provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice &lt;strong&gt;and this license&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no problem to include the &quot;copyright notice&quot;, which can be easily integrated into &lt;code&gt;title-page&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;colophon&lt;/code&gt; XHTML files, but what about the license &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; file itself? What is the better way to include this kind of file within an EPUB structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5047" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T19:58:42.993" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T20:30:18.010" Title="How to properly include a license file within an EPUB?" Tags="|license-notice|font|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2844" CreationDate="2016-05-11T07:17:17.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd add an appendix to the book with the relevant license text copied there. As far as I understand, there's no restriction on what format you redistribute the license by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2016-05-11T07:17:17.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2854" CreationDate="2016-05-11T09:13:15.563" Score="4" ViewCount="2122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not good at Licensing issues. So my question -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my program is using these libraries (only linking like -ludev, -lblkid, -lcrypto, -lssl, -fopenmp) -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;libudev (LGPL version 2.1 of the License, or any later version).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;libblkid (LGPL version 2 or any later version).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;libcrypto and libssl (part of OpenSSL, and OpenSSL stays under a dual license- OpenSSL license and Original SSLeay License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;fopenmp (part of GCC, but GCC is a compiler with GPL 3+)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I make my code closed source? Or Do I have to make it open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of these has a problem to make my program closed source then please suggest me alternative libraries for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5045" LastEditorUserId="5045" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T09:52:06.233" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T07:49:26.857" Title="Is it possible to make closed source code while using the following libraries?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-11T21:24:44.890" Score="5" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a user contributes under pseudonym or even anonymously, how does this affect CLAs? Does it help anything if he signs a CLA with that pseudonym?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-05-11T21:44:56.293" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T13:41:42.887" Title="Contributor License Agreements and anonymous/pseudonymous contributors" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2016-05-12T05:32:03.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were you I would always keep detailed pointers to the origin of any third-party content and their license and author details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not fair use applies, you are not licensing the third-party quotes IMHO, but your aggregate collections of notes and your original content as well as its organization which in itself is an original copyrightable work IMHO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T05:32:03.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2739" CreationDate="2016-05-12T05:36:15.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I switch to use OpenJDK, will I be faced with this same limitation? That is, would I be violating a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such limitation in the OpenJDK licensing which is a combo of CDDL and GPL with classpath exception. Run with it without fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, there is no good reason to use the Oracle BCL-licensed JDK. In fact reading its ever changing license terms, you can barely use it for development and that is about it. &#xA;The OpenJDK is always a better alternative IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if the class I'm modifying is covered by the &quot;Classpath Exception&quot; to the GPL, then does your answer change at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. To the contrary: the BCL does not give any permission to modify code.&#xA;The GPL with Classpath does allow that alright. You still have to obey the GPL for the code you modify of course and -- unless you enter the grey area of derivative work -- your code using this modified code would not be subject to the GPL's requirements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T05:21:26.960" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T05:21:26.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2753" CreationDate="2016-05-12T05:44:43.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since I happen to use library and framework under GPL license like Jersey and Grizzly I am wondering should I have to stick with GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jersey and Grizzly are not under the GPL. They are under a choice of CDDL or GPL with Classpath exception. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://jersey.java.net/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://jersey.java.net/license.html&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;You can release your own code using any license you please: MIT, commercial, etc. It is not impacted by the Jersey/Grizzly license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And also is including License text on each source file is sufficient to say the software is under specific licensing like MIT ? or do I need to get permission or license from OpenSource community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You own your code: you can license it as you please, no permission needed from anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also note I am not modifying any of dependent library/framework and just using it as is !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just as a side if you redistribute these deps, you will to attach need some attribution docs/notices/licenses to your redistribution. And possibly explain how to obtain the source code of these deps if they use a copyleft license. FLOSS tools like AboutCode and ScanCode can help there (disclaimer: I maintain them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In same context, say if i use the dependent source code as is vs I modify the code. Based on your answer and few blogs seems like as long as I put license terms/disclaimers in source code i am free to choose any but my confusion is what should i choose if i modify the dependent code and redistribute. Am I still free to choose ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to modify the code of your dependencies (assuming they are under a choice of CDDL or GPL + classpath) there are a couple things to consider as you would likely also redistribute these deps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you will need to comply with the licenses of these deps, meaning for instance producing attribution credits, notices and licenses; document somehow the changes you made; make the source code of these deps available&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the nature of your changes are small (such as a small bug fix) this is likely all there is to it. I would strongly suggest to submit these patches to the upstream project&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the nature of your changes are bigger, there is likely a level when you are entering the grey territory of derivative works. &#xA;I would consult a lawyer&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what should i choose if i modify the dependent code and redistribute. Am I still free to choose ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear: in general you cannot (or should not) modify the original license of code you modify. So if you modify code and redistribute the modification would be under the original license terms. And in most case you can still pick your license of choice for new code within reason. See above.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T05:25:47.677" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T05:25:47.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2652" CreationDate="2016-05-12T06:00:21.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.) Is the last paragraph considered to be a condition pertaining to the granting of permission? If not, why isn’t the singular “condition” used instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph is a warranty disclaimer. Singular vs. plural in &lt;code&gt;condition&lt;/code&gt; does not matter whether or not you consider this disclaimer as a condition or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW a few MIT variants also float around using &lt;code&gt;condition&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;conditions&lt;/code&gt;. And IMHO no sane lawyer or judge would consider the plural vs singular here as having any significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use the MIT and be happy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T06:00:21.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2437" CreationDate="2016-05-12T06:04:11.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this enough to meet LGPL requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside staic vs. dynamic linking, it depends if your &quot;New Library&quot; becomes a work &quot;based on the library&quot; e.g. are you creating a derivative work?&#xA;This is a grey area and a legal determination. &#xA;My take in general is that &quot;New Library&quot; would become a derivative work in most cases and be subject to the LGPL terms. But YMMV. Consult a lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T06:04:11.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2776" CreationDate="2016-05-12T06:10:30.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I would like to know is whether a binary compatible interface to a propriety spec is proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a topic that is under consideration by US courts at the moment... So there is no easy answer.  In the Oracle vs. Google case, US Federal judges stated that APIs are copyrightable.  So it would mean that you would require an explicit license to create/use the binary API. But this is being tried again since yesterday to determine if fair use applies. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/jury-is-picked-for-9-billion-oracle-v-google-showdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jury is picked for $9 billion Oracle v. Google showdown&lt;/em&gt; on Ars Technica&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://qz.com/680837/a-legal-battle-about-the-klingon-language-could-affect-the-future-of-computer-programming/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A legal battle about the Klingon language could affect the future of computer programming&lt;/em&gt; on Quartz&lt;/a&gt; for some related pointers and discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were you, I would ask for an explicit permission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="8" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T20:50:11.507" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T20:50:11.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2016-05-12T06:17:05.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I make my code closed source? Or Do I have to make it open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general if you use unmodified LGPL-licensed libraries and dynamically link with them, you can use any license you want for your own code. If you redistribute these LGPL-licensed libraries then the LGPL applies to these libraries of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no issue with linking with OpenSSL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For OpenMP, if this is code that is part of the GCC runtime, then this is likely not GPL-licensed, but rather would likely be using the GPL with the GCC exception which is essentially equivalent to the LGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead this is plain GPL and you are calling it from your code, I personally would consider the GPL to extend to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I only included omp.h in my program [...] omp.h states that &quot;This file is part of the GNU OpenMP Library (libgomp)&quot;, which is GPL 3. Then in next line it mentions- &quot;Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.&quot; The 3rd post in this link openmp.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&amp;amp;t=474 also confirms it. So can I use it as LGPL then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use it under the the terms of the &lt;code&gt;GPL 3.0 with GCC Runtime Library Exception, version 3.1&lt;/code&gt;, not as LGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But IMHO the GPL with this exception is a better license than the LGPL. For instance, it is clearly allows for any kind of linking: the LGPL makes a distinction between static or dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would go for it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T07:49:26.857" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T07:49:26.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2842" CreationDate="2016-05-12T06:22:34.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if I don't need the whole library code? Am I allowed to take only parts of the library (only some functions), compile those parts into a separate module and then link my code to that separate module and distribute the resulting executable on my terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO yes. And you would still need to attribute and redistribute the corresponding source code of this library subset: the GPL still applies to this subset of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a grey area in some cases: are you only removing parts or making other substantive mods? Some level of modification make be such that you enter derivative work territory. Consult a lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T06:22:34.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-12T10:40:27.357" Score="2" ViewCount="618" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dalvik was licensed under the ASL on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_%28software%29#Licensing_and_patents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;premise&lt;/a&gt; that it was reverse engineered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licensing and patents Main article: Oracle v. Google&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dalvik is published under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.[18]&#xA;  Google says that Dalvik is a clean-room implementation rather than a&#xA;  development on top of a standard Java runtime, which would mean it&#xA;  does not inherit copyright-based license restrictions from either the&#xA;  standard-edition or open-source-edition Java runtimes.[19] Oracle and&#xA;  some reviewers dispute this.[20]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is, or will be, the license for ART (Android Runtime)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2248/5058&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; was intending to ask, but the question wasn't exactly clear enough, perhaps.  I hesitate to edit that question at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T18:52:48.787" Title="What is the licensing for ART (Android Runtime)?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-05-12T10:47:33.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-05-12T10:47:33.287" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T10:47:33.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-05-12T10:47:33.287" Score="0" Body="For questions about or relating to the Java language, platform or virtual machine.  See the JVM (Java Virtual Machine)." OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-24T13:25:07.293" LastActivityDate="2024-02-24T13:25:07.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2844" CreationDate="2016-05-12T20:30:18.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, thank to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/50/apsillers&quot;&gt;apsillers&lt;/a&gt; for the comment and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/327/mureinik&quot;&gt;Mureinik&lt;/a&gt; for the answer. They have substantially helped me to find a suitable manner to integrate the license into the &lt;code&gt;.epub&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is no type for &lt;code&gt;appendix&lt;/code&gt; (and no one for &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; too) in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.idpf.org/epub/20/spec/OPF_2.0.1_draft.htm#Section2.6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPF guide specifications&lt;/a&gt;, I have finally opted to use the &lt;code&gt;copyright-page&lt;/code&gt; guide element to create the &lt;code&gt;ofl.xhtml&lt;/code&gt; file, such as :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;reference type=&quot;copyright-page&quot; title=&quot;Copyright page&quot; href=&quot;Text/ofl.xhtml&quot;/&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;code&gt;title.xhtml&lt;/code&gt;, I have formatted a link in the notice this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;../Text/ofl.xhtml&quot;&amp;gt;Open Font License 1.1&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, I have found another question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/q/6485/6569&quot;&gt;Where should font licenses be embedded?&lt;/a&gt;) related to this problem, but the suggested implementations cause error when checking the file with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sigil&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/flightcrew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FlightCrew&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Error XML child not recognized: the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;licence&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element is not an allowed child of the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;metadata&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;at this time&lt;/em&gt;, it appears that the solution of a kind of appendix (a copyright page in this case) seems to be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5047" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-12T20:30:18.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-13T08:27:52.093" Score="8" ViewCount="1429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Icon sets are often released under software licenses. For example, I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numixproject/numix-icon-theme&quot;&gt;Numix icon set&lt;/a&gt;, which is GPLv3, on my laptop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wanted to use these icons to create a derivative non-software artwork, such as an illustration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licenses can I apply to the artwork? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must it be GPL (which to my understanding is not really meant for non-software works), or is there a license that is suitable for non-software work and is compatible with GPLv3? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I have to release the derivative artwork as GPLv3, what licensing restrictions apply if I include it in a larger piece of work -  does this mean that if e.g. I put the illustration inside a book, the book is &quot;infected&quot; by GPL and must also be GPLed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5062" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T11:55:43.127" Title="How do you use GPLv3 icons in non-software artwork?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-3|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2016-05-13T09:11:28.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, your question accepts that you have created a derivative work of the input icon set, which is handy, because it means we don't need to address that whole thorny issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that derivative work be released &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;under the GPL &lt;strong&gt;or a more-permissive licence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  So you could release the whole work under GPLv3.  Or, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the FSF say that CC Attribution 4.0 is GPLv3-compatible&lt;/a&gt;, you could release the derivative work under those terms.  The FSF regard this as &quot;&lt;em&gt;a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and entertainment works, and educational works&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so that might meet your requirements (&quot;&lt;em&gt;a license that is suitable for non-software work and is compatible with GPLv3&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).  As you know, what you can't do is redistribute your derivative work under &lt;em&gt;more restrictive&lt;/em&gt; terms than GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include your derivative work (the illustration) in a book, we re-engage the derivative works issue.  I don't know if the book is then a derivative work of your illustration, or merely an aggregation of your illustration with a lot of other content.  I don't think anyone else really knows, either, because I don't think any higher courts have ruled on the issue.  If pushed, I would lean towards an &lt;em&gt;aggregation&lt;/em&gt; approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the book is a derivative work, and you picked a copyleft licence for your illustration, then the book, too, must be distributed on the terms of the licence you choose.  If this is GPLv3, the FSF says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;anyone publishing the book on paper would have to either include&#xA;  machine-readable “source code” of the book along with each printed&#xA;  copy, or provide a written offer to send the “source code” later&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one reason why the FSF doesn't recommend using GPLv3 for books.  If the book is mere aggregation, then this analysis applies only to your illustration.  If you picked a non-copyleft licence for your illustration, then the book's publisher need only honour the terms of that (which for CC-BY 4.0, aren't onerous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that whatever licence you pick, and however you decide the derivative/aggregation issue, you would still need to honour the requirements of GPLv3 with regard to the conveyance of the Numix icon set.  Anyone attempting to convey verbatim or modified copies of your illustration, or the book, would need to do likewise (unless (a) you had chosen a non-copyleft licence, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; (b) the modifications had completely removed the GPLv3'ed material).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-05-13T09:28:20.713" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T09:28:20.713" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2016-05-13T12:05:00.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you consider your artwork to be a derivative of a GPL-licensed icon set, then the rules are quite simple: the derivative work, as a whole, must be licensed under the GPL. This is explicitly stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequiredToClaimCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I required to claim a copyright on my modifications to a GPL-covered program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to claim a copyright on your changes. In most countries, however, that happens automatically by default, so you need to place your changes explicitly in the public domain if you do not want them to be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you claim a copyright on your changes or not, either way you must release the modified version, as a whole, under the GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;if you release your modified version at all&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FAQ regarding license compatibility&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean to say a license is “compatible with the GPL?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that the other license and the GNU GPL are compatible; you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All GNU GPL versions permit such combinations privately; they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 is compatible with more licenses than GPLv2: it allows you to make combinations with code that has specific kinds of additional requirements that are not in GPLv3 itself. Section 7 has more information about this, including the list of additional requirements that are permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the proviso: &amp;quot;they also permit distribution &lt;strong&gt;provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This continues to apply to further derivative works. Placing the illustration in a book probably &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; make the book a derivative work though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you may license your own modifications using any license compatible with the original work; for the GPL, this includes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible software licenses&lt;/a&gt; and licenses for other works highlighted in green in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's list&lt;/a&gt;. CC-BY 4 is compatible and seems quite appropriate. If it makes sense, this would allow recipients of your work to replace the original work (icon set) with another, which may result in a different license for the new combined work. This possibility applies to you in any case since you're the copyright holder of your own modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your specific circumstances, things are a bit more complicated because the exact licensing situation of the Numix icon set is unclear. I haven't looked into it in detail, but I did notice that the icon set includes the Humanity icons, which are licensed under the GPLv2 (only); if the combined work is considered a derivative, then there's a problem, because versions 2 and 3 of the GPL are mutually incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a different way of analysing things though: you stated that your artwork is a derivative of the icons, but if you're integrating the icons into an illustration, the resulting work may be an aggregate rather than a derived work. Depending on the importance of the icons in the illustration, it's possible that fair use may come into it, and that you don't actually need a license to use the icons — in which case the icon set's license wouldn't have an impact on your licensing possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, I'd seriously consider consulting a specialised attorney (or your book's publisher's legal department, if you have a publisher lined up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-13T12:15:30.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2016-05-13T12:51:06.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make a derivative work of a GPL work, then the one downstream licensing requirement that the GPLv3 makes of you is in 5(c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the entire &lt;em&gt;[modified]&lt;/em&gt; work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that -- regardless of whatever else you do -- you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; make your derivative work available under the GPL. You may also, separately, license your own contributions to the derivative work under some other GPL-compatible license(s), so that if the GPL components are completely and cleanly removed (such that the work is no longer a derivative of the GPL components) then the GPL no longer has any effect on the work, and only your license remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that section 5 of the GPL requires you to include the &quot;preferred form for making modifications&quot; (i.e., the &quot;source code&quot;). If you used image-editing software like Photoshop or the GIMP (or even PowerPoint), this requirement probably compels you to include a copy of the original file when distributing the finished product. This can get a bit awkward if you're distributing actual physical prints of the image, but in that case your distribution appears to be &quot;in, or embodied in, a physical product&quot; under section 5, and you can accompany the work with either the source files &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; a written offer for the source (but note that this compels you to honor requests for the source code for at least three years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether a book that included such an image would need to be licensed under the GPL, this comes down to whether the use creates a derivative work or a collective work, and whether copyright law allows the license of the smaller work to place any restrictions on the larger work in this particular context. Unfortunately, the GPL has limited case law, so there are quite a few unknowns about what boundaries its copyleft provisions can and cannot cross. If I wanted to do this, I would certainly consult an experienced attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address MadHatter's answer, section 5(c) of the GPL says &quot;This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way&quot; which seems to suggest that if your work has a GPL component, you must license it exclusively under the GPL -- to do otherwise appears to be operating outside of the license. The license says that &quot;it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it,&quot; but this almost certainly refers to case where you receive the original work under more than one license: if you receive a work under the GPL and then later under the BSD license, this clause merely clarifies that your more permissive BSD-granted rights are in no way affected by having previously received a separate GPL license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am wrong, and you can in fact license the modified work under another more permissive license concurrently with the GPL, then the fact remains that a downstream recipient of your work who wants to redistribute it further must &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; include the GPL in the list of licenses she distributes it under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: Alice downloads a GPL-licensed work &lt;em&gt;Foo&lt;/em&gt; and uses it to create a derivative work &lt;em&gt;Bar&lt;/em&gt;. GPLv3 5(c) (or GPLv2 2(b)) requires that she license the entire work under the GPL and include the source code (the &quot;preferred from for making modifications&quot;, which may or may not be the normal work itself, for an image) when distributing the work, per section 5 of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MatHatter's argument here is that Alice could &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; license the work under a more permissive license like the MIT license. I suppose that's true, based on my reading of the license text. However, there is a substantial catch; read on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob receives Alice's modified work &lt;em&gt;Bar&lt;/em&gt; and wants to distribute it further. Normally, under a dual-licensing scheme, Bob can choose to receive &lt;em&gt;Bar&lt;/em&gt; under either the MIT license or the GPL. However, because &lt;em&gt;Bar&lt;/em&gt; is a work derived from &lt;em&gt;Foo&lt;/em&gt;, the GPL on &lt;em&gt;Foo&lt;/em&gt; requires him to license the modified work &lt;em&gt;Bar&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL (in addition to, I suppose, whatever other GPL-compatible licenses he likes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, licensing a work derived from a GPL-licensed work under anything other than the GPL is not much different from licensing your component contributions under a GPL-compatible license and letting the entire work be under the GPL only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-05-16T11:55:43.127" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T11:55:43.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2860" CreationDate="2016-05-14T09:31:51.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is intended &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; as a software license. However, it is worded so that it can apply equally well to non-software works such as icons&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. From the definitions section of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&quot;The Program&quot; refers to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;any copyrightable work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; licensed under this License.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license refers to the covered work as &quot;the Program&quot;, but that doesn't necessarily mean &lt;em&gt;computer program&lt;/em&gt; - it can equally mean the icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also cover discrepancies about &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;The &quot;source code&quot; for a work means the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;preferred form&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; of the work&#xA;for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;making modifications&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to it.  &quot;Object code&quot; means any non-source&#xA;form of a work.&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again, they're not limiting the license to actual computer code; the source code of a covered work is simply the form in which the work is easiest to modify. For images, that may well be the images themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how do you use GPL icons in non-software artwork? In the same way you'd apply GPL to a derivative program, you must apply GPL to any derivative artwork you make, whether it has to do with software or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; This does not necessarily make it a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; choice; there are much better licenses for artwork around, primarily the CC licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T09:18:25.520" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T09:18:25.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2867" CreationDate="2016-05-14T09:33:08.620" Score="11" ViewCount="6168" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Comparison_with_free_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, it states that EULA is different from OSSL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike EULAs, free software licenses do not work as contractual extensions to existing legislation. No agreement between parties is ever held, because a copyright license is simply a declaration of permissions on something that otherwise would be disallowed by default under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit confused about the Open Source Software License (OSSL) and EULA. In my understanding, Open Source Software License seems to be covering a wide area of aspects, including both users and developers, as mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MITULA%20for%20Open%20Source%20Software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...without limitation the rights to &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt;, copy, &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt;, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while EULA seems to be applying only to the end-user who is going to use the software. So the idea of EULA is more or less already included in Open Source License. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a project that is licensed under MIT license (or possibly other Open Source Software Licenses), Do I still need to provide an End-user License Agreement when distributing the software to protect myself? Is there any contradiction between them? Or asking the user to understand and agree to the MIT license before installation would be sufficient to avoid any liability issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5072" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T06:30:12.970" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T06:30:12.970" Title="Does Open Source Software need an EULA to protect the developer?" Tags="|license-notice|eula|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2865" CreationDate="2016-05-14T10:05:44.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An EULA and what you're referring to as an Open Source Software License (which I'm going to call OSSL, for disambiguation) are &lt;strong&gt;the same type of legal document&lt;/strong&gt;. They're both a license agreement, which grant certain rights to various parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EULA's are (generally) used more on proprietary software. They're usually custom-written by the company's lawyers and tailored to the purpose of the software and the rights the company wants to grant. They're generally more focused on protecting the &lt;strong&gt;company&lt;/strong&gt; from unauthorised use of its software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSSL's are usually more general documents. They're written once (or a few times - looking at you, GPL), and are intended to be applied to many different types of software. The only thing the different software projects have in common is that they're open source. OSSL's are more focused on protecting the &lt;strong&gt;consumer&lt;/strong&gt; from the author suing for copyright infringement, and they explicitly grant rights to this end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only need to - and only should - apply &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; of these documents to your software. If you want to have a permissive open source project, a license such as the MIT license would suit. This grants consumers the right to use, modify, and re-distribute your work as long as your copyright notices are kept intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T10:05:44.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2865" CreationDate="2016-05-14T14:00:31.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Free software and open source licenses&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software and open source licenses seek to grant additional rights, beyond those granted by copyright law. Strictly speaking, such licenses cover the acts of distributing and modifying software, not directly the act of using it. Copyright law controls who can distribute and modify software; if you obtain software from a legal distributor, you may use it even if you don't accept the license under which it is distributed. This is made explicit in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;, section 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or&#xA;  run a copy of the Program.  Ancillary propagation of a covered work&#xA;  occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission&#xA;  to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance.  However,&#xA;  nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or&#xA;  modify any covered work.  These actions infringe copyright if you do&#xA;  not accept this License.  Therefore, by modifying or propagating a&#xA;  covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the trigger: you accept the license by modifying or propagating the software, not by using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses, such as the MIT license you quote, explicitly grant the right to use software, but this isn't necessary — you already have that right, assuming you obtained the software legally. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software definition&lt;/a&gt; itself didn't mention it initially, but it was later added as freedom 0; having it explicitly mentioned in the definition helps clarify that licenses may not limit the uses of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software licenses also protect the developers by limiting the provided warranty; &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; in the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;End-user license agreements&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End-user license agreements generally seek to remove rights granted by copyright law, and to re-define the ownership of software. They are triggered at the latest by running the software, but more typically they are triggered during installation or even by the act of opening the physical container containing the installation media (this was common for software on floppy disks; the disks were shipped in envelopes, and tearing the envelopes open was taken as signifying acceptance of the EULA). There is some debate as to the validity of click-through licenses (or tear-open licenses), but that's beyond the scope of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common feature of EULAs is to state that software is licensed, not owned, so the user doesn't own a copy of the software but only a license to use it. (This removes the rights granted by copyright law to legitimate owners of an artifact.) They also generally forbid modification and distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this clarifies the differences. You don't need a EULA to protect yourself as a developer; if you're particularly worried about some types of protection, you can look at the different open source licenses in existence and see the kinds of protection they grant, in particular with regards to patents. In fact, if you do try to enforce a EULA, you'll find that most (if not all) authorities in the matter would consider your software to be non-free (not open source), regardless of the license under which it is distributed: your EULA is only enforceable if you deny the right to remove it, which means restricting the types of modifications that can be made to your software...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T14:00:31.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2865" CreationDate="2016-05-14T18:24:14.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most legislations, software is copyrighted with the act of creation. The initial copyright holder is/are the developer(s), who may either transfer it or waive it altogether, placing it in the public domain (though the latter may not be possible in some legislations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the copyright holders have waived their copyright, any copying, modification or usage requires a license from the copyright holder, and the terms of the license determine the rights and obligations of both parties. This goes for both proprietary and FOSS software – what differs is the name given to the license agreement and the rights of its parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EULA is the term commonly used in connection with proprietary software. It is a &quot;contractual extension to existing legislation&quot; in that it is the kind of licensing agreement lawmakers originally had in mind: the licensee may use the copyrighted work subject to the terms and conditions of the agreement, and the copyright holder explicitly reserves all other rights. With commercial software licenses, the licensee typically receives a right to receive the software, but not to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer it. Beyond that, most EULAs limit the liability of the copyright holder for any damage arising from the licensee's use of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreements allowing viewing code, modification, redistribution etc. of proprietary sources do exist (typically between companies), but these are typically separate from the general EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOSS licenses work in a different way. Open-source licenses explicitly grant the licensee the right to use, redistribute, examine the source code of, and modify the software, thus effectively eliminating the &quot;all (other) rights reserved&quot; part and covering not only the scope of the EULA but also that of the specialized licenses mentioned before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free (or &quot;copyleft&quot;) software licenses have two additional requirements over open-source licenses: distribution of executable binaries is only allowed under the condition that source code is also provided, and any modified versions of the software must be placed under the same license (some exceptions may apply, such as allowing other licenses of a similar spirit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are more than just &quot;contractual extensions to existing legislation&quot;: with an open-source license, the developers waive most (or all) of their exclusive rights. Free software licenses additionally use copyright as a vehicle to prevent works derived from the original software from being placed under a commercial license – neither of these was originally intended by the creators of copyright law, but these constructs are nonetheless possible and have since been tested in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like an EULA, both free and open-source licenses frequently exclude liability. Unless the license states that certain uses (such as mere usage of the software) do not require acceptance of its terms, they effectively replace the EULA in governing the legal relationship between the copyright holder and the end user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from copyright, product liability issues need to be considered. Details depend on legislation, but eventually a FOSS developer cannot rule out being someday be held liable in some part of the world for their software malfunctioning. Therefore, the license would either need to include a liability exclusion that applies to end users even if they do not intend to modify or redistribute the software, or the developer would need to add an extra agreement which excludes liability to end users (note, though, that adding an extra agreement may not be compatible with the requirement of free software licenses to redistribute the software under the same license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3776" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T18:24:14.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2856" CreationDate="2016-05-14T18:45:16.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The current license is Apache 2.0 overall. And it will likely stay the same way in the future. The Oracle vs. Google dispute has no bearing on irrevocable licenses already granted by Google to Android users IMHO.&#xA;Anything else is pure speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if/when Google includes OpenJDK code, then additionally the terms of the OpenJDK will apply for these parts. As far as I know it is not clear yet if only the class library or other parts of the OpenJDK would be re-used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-14T18:52:48.787" LastActivityDate="2016-05-14T18:52:48.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2871" CreationDate="2016-05-15T04:31:00.547" Score="3" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little background: I have a library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/romariorios/rubberband&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt; which I put under the LGPL v2.1. However, I have two applications inside the project tree using the library. It would be somewhat inconvenient to make these two small applications have their own license, so I figured I could just use the LGPL for all the code in the tree, including those applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to have an application under the LGPL? What would change when compared to, e.g., the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5074" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T19:36:04.923" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T19:36:04.923" Title="Does it make sense to have a program under the LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2870" CreationDate="2016-05-15T13:43:35.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot;&gt;LGPL v2.1&lt;/a&gt; is specifically designed for libraries; in particular, it allows distribution of modified versions of the library only in certain circumstances (section 2), including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The modified work must itself be a software library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can distribute your library and its associated programs under the LGPL, because section 3 of the LGPL allows it to be upgraded to standard GPL (version 2 or later). Thus a recipient making changes and wishing to redistribute them can do so either under the LGPL or the GPL, whichever is appropriate. (After distribution occurs under the GPL though, further distribution of modified works on top of that can only use the GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that, using two licenses within your source code isn't all that complex: all you need to do is include both the LGPL and the GPL, and make sure the source files' headers indicate which license applies to them (as explained at the end of the license documentation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="5074" LastEditDate="2016-05-15T15:24:24.107" LastActivityDate="2016-05-15T15:24:24.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-15T15:51:06.373" Score="16" ViewCount="1781" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the document &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“How to use GNU licenses for your own software”&lt;/a&gt;, the FSF says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For software with several releases over multiple years, it's okay to use a range (“2008-2010”) instead of listing individual years (“2008, 2009, 2010”) if and only if every year in the range, inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you make an explicit statement in your documentation about this usage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve added emphasis to the last clause, which seems like overkill to me. Is this motivated by any real legal requirement or is it just a belt-and-braces approach to specifying the copyright years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4516" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T00:41:16.673" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T14:15:02.573" Title="Why does the FSF make this recommendation about ranges of copyright years?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|license-notice|fsf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4940" CreationDate="2016-05-15T18:09:51.313" Score="3" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/scsl-1-1-149938.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/scsl-1-1-149938.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions about what I am allowed to do to stuff under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forking&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what I'm generally allowed to do is to download the source code from Oracle (that part makes sure I'm a licensee) and modify it locally. And I'm not allowed to publicly post it to everyone. But what about a private repo at, say, bitbucket? If that's possible, then by the below, I don't seem to be able to even add contributors to it, unless I make sure they are licensees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source code availability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may also post Error Corrections and Shared Modifications on a&#xA;  web-server of Your choice; provided, that You must take reasonable&#xA;  precautions to ensure that only Licensees have access to such Error&#xA;  Corrections and Shared Modifications.  Such precautions shall include,&#xA;  without limitation, a password protection scheme limited to Licensees&#xA;  and a click-on, download certification of Licensee status required of&#xA;  those attempting to download from the server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I setup a web page that has the required notice from Attachment A-2, and doesn't give the link until the user agrees. It also mentions a password protection scheme limited to Licensees. How am I supposed to set that up? Doesn't it mean I have to make sure the user logs in to Oracle's site, and then give him the links? I can't imagine a way to know if he has actually logged in to Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Executable redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may distribute Executable version(s) of Covered Code to Licensees&#xA;  and other third parties only for the purpose of evaluation and comment&#xA;  in connection with Research Use by You and under a license of Your&#xA;  choice, but which limits use of such Executable version(s) of Covered&#xA;  Code only to that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That part I simply fail to understand. What is the actual requirement for sharing the executional with the third parties? And who are they anyway? Anyone who's not a licensee? What about distributing to third parties just for non-profitable personal use? How do we make sure they only evaluate and comment, but not actually personally &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it? And what about the license of my choice? Do I apply that license to the executable? It all just mixes together in my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patch redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way GnuPoc does it. However, am I allowed to redistribute patches that contain the code surrounding the parts being edited? Maybe it's disallowed to even have the original lines I'm be patching publicly visible? What about binary patches for an executable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5080" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-05-16T22:58:38.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T07:48:31.523" Title="Sun Community Source License" Tags="|licensing|redistribution|scsl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2872" CreationDate="2016-05-15T23:28:39.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, that paragraph means absolutely nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright ranges are used to indicate that new versions of the work were made or released, and to indicate the years when those changes were made (and effectively copyrighted). To explain through example, I have a blog. I've posted on that blog for six consecutive years. In my copyright statement, I could write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2011-2016 Zizouz212. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's known as an assertion of copyright. Even though copyright is automatic in many jurisdictions, and is more or less uniform across the world (thanks to the Berne Convention), such as providing evidence that the work was obviously copyrighted, and that a violator of copyright must've known that, but that's more of a court/trial related matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no relationship between assertion statements and documentation, in the Berne convention, nor in any worldwide copyright law that I know about. I find this &quot;instruction&quot; in the document to be ridiculously odd. What statement could possibly be expected? This really is just nonsense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using the GPL to licence your software, the steps in doing so are incredibly simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the licence file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a copyright statement that states what terms the software is distributed under&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="4516" LastEditDate="2016-05-21T14:15:02.573" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T14:15:02.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2872" CreationDate="2016-05-16T10:38:41.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because something doesn't make sense to us laypeople doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense in a court of law, which is where these types of details are decided &lt;em&gt;in fine&lt;/em&gt;. The FSF presumably has good reason to write this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point to remember is that documenting copyright years serves to determine the date at which works fall out of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Berne Convention leaves &quot;implementation details&quot; up to individual countries. In the US (which is the relevant country for FSF documents), copyright notices are defined by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Title 17, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;; for &quot;visually perceptive copies&quot; (which includes software), they take the form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;© year name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;© is specifically that symbol (not &quot;(c)&quot;, which has no legal value), and can be replaced by &quot;Copyright&quot; or &quot;Copr.&quot; (§ 401(b)(1)),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;year is the year of first publication of the work, or the year of first publication of the compilation or derivative work if relevant,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;name is the name of the owner of the copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What counts is years of &lt;strong&gt;publication&lt;/strong&gt;; for software this is generally considered years in which the software is released. So if you release a piece of software in 2014, and release it again in 2016 without making changes in 2015, the years of publication would be 2014 and 2016, and the copyright notices would be &quot;© 2014&quot; in the first release and &quot;© 2016&quot; in the second release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice new software releases are considered similarly to derivatives, so the copyright notices accumulate; and when the name of the owner doesn't change, notices are merged, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; &quot;© 2014, 2016&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;© 2014-2016&quot; doesn't correspond to anything documented in Title 17 (as far as I can see), which is why its use needs to be explained. To avoid this use being open to interpretation later (when it comes up in court...), it should be documented at the time of use, alongside the use. If it's not documented, it isn't clear whether the notice gives only the years of first and most recent publication (and you don't consider intervening publications as important), or if it specifies that the work was published only in these two years, or if it specifies that the work was published in every year in the range. Hence (I think) the FSF's recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that other communities document different approaches. For example, the Eclipse Foundation uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/copyrightandlicensenotice.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Copyright (c) date owner&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, where &quot;date&quot; can be a single year or the first and last years of publication separated by a comma: &quot;Copyright (c) 2014, 2016&quot; (with no representation as to years of publication in the meantime).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The US Copyright Office's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;circular 3&lt;/a&gt; has more information on all of this, albeit only single-year forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In practice, these instructions are rarely followed, and copyright notices often have incorrect dates.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T07:04:06.447" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T07:04:06.447" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-05-16T22:59:59.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-05-16T22:59:59.690" LastActivityDate="2016-05-16T22:59:59.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-05-16T22:59:59.690" Score="0" Body="The Sun Community Source License, a non-Free/Open software license formerly promoted for Java development" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T00:09:09.563" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T00:09:09.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2879" CreationDate="2016-05-17T03:12:22.063" Score="4" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pololu/l3g-arduino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an open-source software project&lt;/a&gt;, and its license contains verbatim text from the MIT license, although without directly mentioning that it is the MIT license (I know separately that the projects intends to use the MIT license). Are there any consequences to using the text of a license without accompanying it with the name of license or other form of attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a question of plagiarism, or a rather broader copyright question actually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4644" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-17T11:49:29.287" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T17:36:04.013" Title="Using open source license text verbatim without attribution" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2878" CreationDate="2016-05-17T06:51:36.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the license!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses' texts specify what can be done with them; &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; starts with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies&#xA;of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're allowed to copy the whole document, which includes its title. And the application instructions of the GPL specify that the license should be named in the files it covers (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/202/should-i-include-license-text-in-a-single-file-or-all-source-files&quot;&gt;Should I include license text in a single file or all source files?&lt;/a&gt; for further discussion of this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license doesn't carry any such provision. (It does specify that the license must be reproduced in derivative works, as-is, but that's valid once it's been chosen for a work.) In fact &amp;quot;MIT license&amp;quot; is a name given after the fact to licenses used at MIT, which had slight variations themselves. (The version in common use is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat license&lt;/a&gt;.) The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; added a title to the license in their page describing it, but that isn't part of the text used even by the original authors of the license...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it is nice to name the license used by a project, it isn't always necessary, and you'll find lots of projects which don't name their license (especially when it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-style license&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat license&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gzip.org/zlib/zlib_license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib license&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ISC license&lt;/a&gt;) — people aren't necessarily all that concerned with cataloguing license usage, just with granting rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T06:51:36.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2881" CreationDate="2016-05-17T09:44:31.220" Score="1" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using portlet-api.jar within my maven project, but I can't find any hint on an applicable license. Is it public domain? And if so, is it written down somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;javax.portlet&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;portlet-api&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;version&amp;gt;1.0&amp;lt;/version&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5089" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:32:57.560" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:32:57.560" Title="What license is portlet-api.jar in version 1.0?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2880" CreationDate="2016-05-17T12:06:29.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer isn't all that obvious. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://central.maven.org/maven2/javax/portlet/portlet-api/1.0/portlet-api-1.0.pom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;portlet-api&lt;/code&gt; 1.0 POM on Maven Central&lt;/a&gt; contains a link to the original download URL, which is that of &lt;a href=&quot;http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr168/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSR-168&lt;/a&gt;, the portlet spec. Downloads there are made available pursuant to the acceptance of a software license agreement which is typical of JSRs and not open source. Further, the archive you get then contains a &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; file which doesn't grant any rights, and the source code is marked as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2003 IBM Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use is subject to license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is however &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/portals/portlet-spec/trunk/portlet-api_1.0_spec/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an Apache 2.0-licensed repository&lt;/a&gt;, hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. Given that the Maven Central JAR was built by Emmanuel Venisse of the ASF (as documented the manifest in the JAR), it's quite likely that it is effectively Apache-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the history of the code is, so you may take all this with a pinch of salt. The ASF are careful about the code they host though, so the risk is minimal; Debian uses that to build its own &lt;a href=&quot;https://tracker.debian.org/portlet-api-2.0-spec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;portlet-api&lt;/code&gt; JARs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T12:06:29.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2016-05-17T18:23:52.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple great sites for that. In both you answer a few very simple questions and you get your templates with standard clauses and in several formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Project Harmony&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://contributoragreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ContributorAgreements.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastActivityDate="2016-05-17T18:23:52.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2886" CreationDate="2016-05-18T00:06:56.780" Score="5" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating the documentation for a small FOSS project of mine. I intend to release such documentation under GNU FDL version 1.3. I have one question, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone else has made a graphic art that I intend to put on the cover of the user's manual and also use as a logo for the project. This image doesn't yet have any licenses attached to it. Can I publish the documentation under FDL v1.3 but the image under another license? Case yes, what would be a common license for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the elementary question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T05:29:55.747" Title="Image copyright in GNU FDL-licensed documentation" Tags="|license-compatibility|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2885" CreationDate="2016-05-18T00:30:27.467" Score="4" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Mozilla Firefox Add-on licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;MPL-2.0&quot;&gt;MPL-2.0&lt;/a&gt;, and just got asked by a user if I have a version for Google Chrome.  I'd like to say yes and accommodate this request.  However, before investing the time and energy to learn a new environment, or getting user hopes up prematurely, I need to know if the MPL-2.0 license is compatible with the Google Chrome Web Store Agreement or License or whatever they call it.  Although I just had found something which seemed pertinent, I was not sure if it was the right document, and I can't seem to easily find it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not the original creator of this add-on, but am in communication with the creator, who has given me full developer access on the AMO site, posting privileges on the Facebook page, and is likewise open-source aware and friendly, and supports my efforts to revive his project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary objective is to develop this as free software for Mozilla Firefox, and leave behind code that others may learn from or contribute to.  My secondary interest is to expand platform coverage to other browsers to meet user needs.  My third wish would be to allow for possible monetization in the form of voluntary contributions of a user-selected amount with a developer-selected minimum that is reasonable (i.e. to cover cost of transaction and leave some behind).  Any donations would probably go to expansion of online presence or some incentive or compensation to others who provide a service outside my core area of expertise (i.e. legal fees - if any, hosting, graphic design, SEO, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not strictly compatible, can I expand my options with licensing flexibility?  I.e. if I can make the case to the creator and he agrees, perhaps dual-license the project, a separate license depending on the platform, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5094" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-18T00:49:55.437" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T16:53:04.177" Title="Is the Mozilla Public License 2.0 compatible with the Google Chrome Web Store?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2884" CreationDate="2016-05-18T16:53:04.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/terms#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/terms#license&lt;/a&gt; I cannot fathom a reason why MPL 2.0 or any open source license would not be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are basically granting Google some rights so that they can publish your app. The MPL allows this alright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in this agreement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5.2 You grant to the user a non-exclusive, worldwide, and perpetual license to perform, display, and use the Products and any content contained in, accessed by, or transmitted through the Products in connection with Google Chrome. If you choose, you may include a separate end user license agreement (EULA) in your Product that will govern the user’s rights to the Products in lieu of the previous sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means that your &quot;EULA&quot; (cough, cough) will be the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you are now comfy with all this, ask a question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-apps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-apps/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T16:53:04.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2883" CreationDate="2016-05-18T16:57:02.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I publish the documentation under FDL v1.3 but the image under another license? Case yes, what would be a common license for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, the GFDL is a rather complex and inflexible license, but this is your choice: if you understand it fully, go for it. My brain hurts when I read the invariants parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you can license your image under another license or dual license it under the GFDL and another license. This is your stuff, you can do whatever you want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to look at the Creative Commons licenses for documentation and images in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be possible for me to &quot;detach&quot; the image licensing from the license of the rest of the documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. This is a common case in Linux distros (and in Mozilla too I think). For instance, as far as I know, RedHat logos included in their Linux distro are under a different license than the rest of the distro.&#xA;Which means that when someone creates a derivative distro from RHEL (such as CentOS or Oracle Linux) they cannot reuse the image branding in their own distro and need to replace this first. Ubuntu does the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now again, my advice is to keep things as simple as possible. The more complex your licensing, the harder you make it for you potential users to consider using or contributing to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-19T05:29:55.747" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T05:29:55.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2878" CreationDate="2016-05-18T17:36:04.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name of the license does not matter as long as its text is there (unless the name of the license is part of the license text of course but this is rarely the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matter in attribution  is to &quot;attribute&quot; e.g. name the persons or orgs you are attributing this too. For an MIT license this is typically in the form of a copyright notice and the license text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-18T17:36:04.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2016-05-19T13:41:42.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For books: publishing as anonymous is permitted, but the editor needs to know the author real name, or when needed, the author is required to proof his authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret that a CLA is some kind of agreements to the &quot;editor&quot;, so I think you should disclose your real name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: a truly anonymous contributor cannot enforce his own rights (of copyright), so as alternative, you can publish the work in public domain, which usually avoids CLA requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-05-19T13:41:42.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2892" CreationDate="2016-05-20T07:29:52.127" Score="10" ViewCount="3059" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maven allows several licenses in its license block e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;licenses&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;license&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;GPL-3.0&amp;lt;/name&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;/license&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;license&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;name&amp;gt; Beerware&amp;lt;/name&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;/license&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/licenses&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does mean :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the user can choose ? (or)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has to follow both licenses ? (and)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not defined by maven ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&#xA;   The answers so far confirm my suspicion that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* maven does not define a semantic&#xA;* most people setting 2 licenses also do not know really what it implies&#xA;* most people using such a dependency will pick and choose (i.e. 'or')&#xA;* the defensive approach would be to assume 'and' as user of such dependency&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect it means that a licenses block with more than one license is so unclear that the user of such artifact better look elsewhere for license information (e.g. the source, web pages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2:&#xA;After looking at many artifacts that either use 2 license blocks in a pom or directly declare &quot;lisense1 and license2&quot; I must conclude that always a logical 'or' is meant. When 'and' is used then in the same way people say &quot;I bought apples and oranges&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have yet to find project were the logical &quot;and&quot; was meant and made sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T13:07:08.643" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T06:41:50.023" Title="What is the meaning of two licenses in a maven pom?" Tags="|multi-licensing|maven|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2016-05-20T08:10:22.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not explicitly defined by Maven anywhere I can find. In practice, however, I would expect it to be an OR constraint. AND constraints are very difficult to follow entirely correctly with many licenses, due to the myriad incompatibilities between each license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I specify both CC BY (which is a terrible idea for code) and GPL in my licenses section, then it's unclear what people will be able to do with it. CC BY is incompatible with the GPL, because CC BY requires that the work is available for commercial and closed-source use, while the GPL mandates that the resulting work be open-source. An AND constraint on these two licenses would be legally messy because of that, and would likely see the project not used for fear of legal issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An OR constraint, on the other hand, is fine - again using CC BY and GPL, anyone who wants to use my software can choose which license they want to follow. Followers of the free software movement will likely choose the GPL; people who just need the software to develop on will likely choose CC BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T08:10:22.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2016-05-20T13:46:50.550" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maven allows several licenses in its &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;licenses&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; block and its meaning is &lt;a href=&quot;http://maven.apache.org/ref/3-LATEST/maven-model/maven.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defined as a choice&lt;/a&gt; as @Tordanik explained here correctly. (This not undefined as I originally mentioned):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If multiple licenses are listed, it is assumed that the user can select any of them, not that they must accept all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, this is not something that is explicit and obvious, therefore I would not rely on the author having read this. Hence, the only prudent approach is to consider that &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; licenses likely apply, at least if you consider ONLY the POM data to get license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the recourse to fix this would include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for you: you can scan the code for actual license terms, ideally both the sources and binaries. This way you may be will find out more about the licensing and determine which licenses apply and how. You can use the scancode tools for this. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for the upstream author: Using SPDX license expressions in the POM would allow to express clearly what the licensing is. This would mean using only a single &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;license&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in the POM. These are example of such expressions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT or GPL-2.0+&#xA;LGPL-2.1 AND BSD-3-Clause&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;code&gt;Appendix IV: SPDX License Expressions&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf#page=80&amp;amp;zoom=auto,-46,28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf#page=80&amp;amp;zoom=auto,-46,28&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPDX license ids and expressions are supported in NPM and RubyGems for instance and a few other package managers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of SPDX and a co-author of ScanCode)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T06:41:50.023" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T06:41:50.023" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-02-24T13:47:05.283" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2325" CreationDate="2016-05-20T16:43:52.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most comprehensive list of open source licenses and notices I know of is the one that I helped and help compile continuously for ScanCode &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/tree/develop/src/licensedcode/data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/tree/develop/src/licensedcode/data&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;It also contains the SPDX and opensource.org licenses. This is an open data set :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The information I'm looking for about each license is minimal: a name, an acronym (if there is one), a version, and a link to a page describing the license. Licenses written in languages other than English are acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These data are available as YAML files in ScanCode. The texts are plain texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(In case it matters, my project is an open-source ontology effort.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is awesome! If you are still working on it, this is something that could eventually make sense in ScanCode proper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note you state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Black Duck states their knowledgebase &quot;includes information on more than 2,400 unique software licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, they are listing not actual unique licenses but several minor variations of MIT and BSD as distinct licenses.&#xA;In ScanCode these variations are listed as &quot;rules&quot; or examples of notices if you prefer, not as licenses proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of SPDX and a co-author of ScanCode)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T16:43:52.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-20T16:55:18.747" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing some research about Contributor Licensing Agreements (CLAs) and I was wondering if they are not an overkill. I will probably end up using them in the project I work with because I prefer to be safe than sorry, but I would like to know about examples of projects that have had any kind of legal problem with contributors claiming rights over their contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:42:18.650" Title="Example of open source project that has had legal problems with contributors claiming any kind of right over their contribution?" Tags="|law|contributor-agreements|problem-contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2894" CreationDate="2016-05-20T17:42:18.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vaguely related because Apache contributors are under a CLA, a long time ago there was some feud between JBoss and Apache Geronimo, ... a very long time ago...&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=22337&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=22337&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are very rare events and IMHO a CLA is a strong deterrent to contributions. As an anecdote, I was asked once by Google to submit a CLA for a 2 characters documentation typo patch: that was quite ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid a CLA if you can. Some licenses such as Apache 2.0 have the CLA baked in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or use a simpler approach like Linux and &lt;a href=&quot;http://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://developercertificate.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No need for a complex CLA process in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:42:18.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="668" CreationDate="2016-05-20T17:48:46.510" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;And of course the Linux &lt;a href=&quot;http://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://developercertificate.org/&lt;/a&gt; the simplest and best of all IMHO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-20T17:48:46.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-21T12:20:24.913" Score="3" ViewCount="1007" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering licencing my projects under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unlicence licence&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure if this is allowed when I have dependencies. For example if my project depends on a GPL or Apache or BSD project, does my licence cover them too, or because they're dynamically linked are they not covered. Can I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is intended for Python projects pulling dependencies from PyPi, but answers can also include other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a possible duplicate but the other one did not fully answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastEditorUserId="5121" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T06:21:54.083" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T06:21:54.083" Title="Licencing my project while considering dependencies" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2897" CreationDate="2016-05-21T13:00:40.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can release your project under the Unlicense if you are using GPL, Apache, and BSD licensed libraries as dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license that you can apply does depend on your dependencies. For example, you mention that one dependency is a GPL-licensed project. The GPL does not differentiate between static and dynamic linking and requires you to release your software under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;a compatible license&lt;/a&gt;, which the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unlicense is&lt;/a&gt;. The other licenses that you mention don't levy additional requirements on how you license linked code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your license only applies to your project code and not to the other libraries. If you were to distribute the binary form of the libraries or make modifications to the libraries, the licenses would explain what you are required to do with respect to making source available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-05-21T13:00:40.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2901" CreationDate="2016-05-21T23:55:11.867" Score="5" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've a proprietary program which is using OOP classes which I want to publish as FOSS (only the classes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which FOSS compatible license I can choose for the classes which will work with my proprietary program which I'm selling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about GNU GPL, but if I understand correctly, I've to distribute my entire proprietary program as GNU GPL (since it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/335/407&quot;&gt;build on top of it&lt;/a&gt;, or maybe other way round), so it doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would you recommend for these open-source OOP classes, so they may be compatible with my proprietary code (which is including them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T23:13:25.037" Title="Licence for open-source code which is part of proprietary code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|proprietary-code|floss|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2900" CreationDate="2016-05-22T07:45:19.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which FOSS compatible license I can choose for the classes which will work with my proprietary program which I'm selling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author of your code (or more accurately the copyright holder), you are free to release under any license you like including multiple licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was thinking about GNU GPL, but if I understand correctly, I've to distribute my entire proprietary program as GNU GPL (since it's build on top of it, or maybe other way round), so it doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same code could be used by you under your proprietary license or by others under the GPL. This is commonly called a &quot;dual license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the important decision on your part is about receiving contributions on these FOSS-released classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept contributions under the GPL, then read this thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1459/proprietary-software-using-gpl-modules&quot;&gt;Proprietary software using GPL modules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you could use a CLA. See for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/23/what-are-the-advantages-of-adding-a-contributor-license-agreement-to-a-project&quot;&gt;What are the advantages of adding a Contributor License Agreement to a project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which license would you recommend for these open-source OOP classes, so they may be compatible with my proprietary code (which is including them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were in your shoes, my personal goal would be to make it easy for others to contribute and reuse my code. I would likely use a permissive or weaker copyleft license and accept contributions under that license. For instance a GPL with exception, an LGPL, or a BSD, MIT or Apache. In doing so, I would accept contributions under the same terms and would possibly reuse the improved code in my proprietary application under these same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T07:45:19.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2903" CreationDate="2016-05-22T07:57:38.470" Score="2" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to understand how the GPL license extends based on this practical example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an android port for doom called D-Touch &lt;a href=&quot;http://beloko.com/?page=game_doom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This link&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Doom itself is licensed under GPLv2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the license extend to the port?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more general terms if the GPLed software is left untouched and the additional code is only a 'wrapper' that calls the code. Will GPL extend to the 'wrapper'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5129" LastEditorUserId="5044" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T10:36:24.213" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T10:36:24.213" Title="Doom port on android. Does copy left apply?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2902" CreationDate="2016-05-22T14:29:09.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If D-Touch is effectively a port as either a translation in another programming language or a modification of the original such that it can run on Android, then the original Doom license would apply whether it is GPL or anything else (in the sense that this is the original code or clearly a derivative work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If D-Touch is a complete rewrite just using ideas of Doom, it may still be considered a derivative work. This is for a court to decide, but think about this: say you write a novel from scratch that is a sequel to Harry Potter. Or you write a comic book on the X-men. In both cases, say this is stuff that you wrote entirely yourself. Nevertheless it could still be considered as a derivative work (and therefore eventually infringing on HP or XM copyrights). And the respective author would quite likely be on your number. And then drawing a parallel with D-Touch, copyright may be infringed  even if the code is not actually &quot;copied&quot; (whatever the original license was, this is not GPL-specific).  This definitely would need the review of a lawyer as the parallel between a book and source code may not apply at all.... I am NOT a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I can read this note at the bottom of beloko.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All ported games from Beloko Games are based on the GPL License and fully complient with its regulations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they claim to be &quot;complient&quot; meaning that source code is likely available. I cannot discuss whether it is indeed &quot;compliant&quot; but I can see source released here &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emileb/OpenGames&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/emileb/OpenGames&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emileb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/emileb/&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;And if this is not satisfying to you, you could contact the author to request the corresponding sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In more general terms if the GPLed software is left untouched and the additional code is only a 'wrapper' that calls the code. Will GPL extend to the 'wrapper'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends what is the wrapper and how it interacts with the GPL-licensed code. There are several QA on this topic already. The way things interact could create a &quot;combined&quot; or &quot;derivative&quot; work or be just plain side-by-side distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of Doom (likely in C/C++) and Android (likely called from Java code by a native layer of sorts such as NaCL or JNI or JNA) my take is that the GPL would extend to such a Java wrapper if this is really how these things work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T14:29:09.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2906" CreationDate="2016-05-22T16:32:25.377" Score="5" ViewCount="5325" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have decided to make a project of mine free and open source under the MIT licence. This project uses Oracle's JDBC driver. My question is am I able to include ojdbc in my Github project and if so, how do I handle licencing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/distribution-license-152002.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Here is&lt;/a&gt; the official licence document, but even after reading it I am still not sure whether I can include it in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5132" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T12:09:30.500" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T15:25:03.897" Title="Can I use Oracle's JDBC driver in an MIT licenced project?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2547" CreationDate="2016-05-22T17:24:22.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder: if a project does not need a licence file, and a simple mention in the Readme is enough, then how many projects are actually licensed on GitHub? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge there has been only limited studies beyond posts made by Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think that the data of the article and Github graph you mention is not entirely correct based on a few factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the way a license is detected for the article is fairly basic (using their Licensee tool).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Github is used for many things and not all repositories are equal: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.1 take for instance a repo that contains the work of a computer science student following some assignment. Before Github, it would not have been posted publicly, with Github it is posted. In most cases does it matter if it is licensed or not? For me, I do not care. In most cases the code is of little to no value and not reusable. No explicit license does not matter to me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.2 take another case: research software. Based on a small subset  analysis of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.arfon.org/open-source-licensing-of-research-software-on-github&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Licensing of Research Software on GitHub&lt;/a&gt; they state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the face of it, ~63% of Zenodo-archived code doesn't sound very good but this is actually significantly higher than the ~17% of public repositories on GitHub that have a detectable open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said there a few sources of opinions and studies, beside the previous postings or talks from Github staff: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2013/lcs-slides-aaronw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Licensing of Software on Github: A Quantitative Analysis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/7/23/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Licensing in a Post Copyright World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/13/8/github-poss-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Post open source software, licensing and GitHub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://readwrite.com/2013/07/16/githubs-wild-west-approach-to-licensing-has-hidden-costs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub’s Wild West Approach To Licensing Has Hidden Costs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.wm.edu/semeru/data/EMSE15-licensing/files/ICPC15-Licensing.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;License Usage and Changes: A Large-Scale Study of Java Projects on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.wm.edu/~denys/pubs/ICSME&amp;#39;15-LicensingSurvey-CRC.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;When and Why Developers Adopt and Change Software Licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, we could &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; such a study :P ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T05:30:28.370" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T05:30:28.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2016-05-22T17:28:25.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The JDBC drivers from Oracle are using a proprietary license and I would avoid redistributing any of their binaries on principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside its proprietary nature one of the most onerous terms is this IMHO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prior to distributing the programs you shall require your end users to execute an agreement binding them to terms consistent with those contained in this section and the sections of this agreement entitled  ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is practically impossible to enforce for FLOSS... Say you put your project on Github in a public repo: how would you be able to enforce the execution of a &lt;em&gt;binding agreement&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T08:08:48.313" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T08:08:48.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-22T18:04:34.463" Score="23" ViewCount="31313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I'm the only one uploading code to someone's private repository, do they own the copyright to the code? Or do I own the copyright to the code since I wrote it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would adding a license stating that I own the code and the terms of usage suffice in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4600" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T23:32:10.537" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T23:32:10.537" Title="Does the owner of the github repository own the copyright to the code?" Tags="|copyright|github|ownership|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2907" CreationDate="2016-05-22T18:55:29.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Say I'm the only one uploading code to someone's private repository, do they own the copyright to the code? Or do I own the copyright to the code since I wrote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author (or copyright holder) of the code &quot;owns&quot; the code, meaning you do. Where the code lives does not have much impact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if this is work you did &quot;for hire&quot; as an employee or contractor then in general the payer &quot;owns&quot; the rights. Code you created &quot;for hire&quot; becomes the property of the person that paid. This becomes a commercial or employment contractual matter, not an open source one per se, unless your agreement means that you are contributing code you have been paid to write under an open source license. This is not un-common case such as when companies are sponsoring FLOSS development. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would adding a license stating that I own the code and the terms of usage suffice in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, having an explicit license and copyright notice is always a good thing and it avoids confusion. I would also make sure that the owner of this private repository you are contributing to is well aware of the terms of your contribution, again to avoid confusion and misunderstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T14:14:45.383" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T14:14:45.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2907" CreationDate="2016-05-22T19:09:53.300" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you put code on GitHub, you retain all the copyright to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you do grant GitHub a license to host the code, and you also allow GitHub users a set of rights - namely the ability to look at, and fork your repository. These are terms that you have accepted when accepting their Terms of Service when creating a GitHub account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when you upload code to someone else's repository (such as via pull request), you still own the copyright to that code, unless you have signed a copyright assignment agreement. You own the code, but you may be providing the code when uploading the code to the repository. For example, if you upload code to an Apache licensed repository, you submit your contributions under the Apache license as well. This gives others rights to your code, but you still retain the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would adding a license stating that I own the code and the terms of usage suffice in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is used to &lt;em&gt;grant&lt;/em&gt; rights to other people. If you want to explicitly assert copyright to your code (which is recommended, but not necessary as all copyright is automatic), then you can use the following header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright © 2016 Riptyde4&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2016-05-22T19:31:42.840" LastActivityDate="2016-05-22T19:31:42.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2743" CreationDate="2016-05-23T07:43:22.330" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT License allows code to be utilized for other platforms and open source works. while giving it a as is state. great for learning and sharing.&#xA;Apache license is similar to MIT license except has features for trademarks and other stuff. it's the most liberal license (MIT) if you want to force people to share use GPLv2 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5135" LastEditorUserId="5135" LastEditDate="2016-05-23T07:58:30.127" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T07:58:30.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2726" CreationDate="2016-05-23T08:02:47.110" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use GPLv2. it forces people to share code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5135" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T08:02:47.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2016-05-23T08:07:51.143" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;the MIT license is more liberal and allows everybody to utilize it but give you credit. while GPLv2 forces users to share modified works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5135" LastActivityDate="2016-05-23T08:07:51.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2486" CreationDate="2016-05-24T07:30:39.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm using LGPL binaries, as well as EPL binaries for my open source project. Is this OK? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if yes, does that mean I should license my project under LGPL? The binaries are being used as dependencies for the project i.e. I'm just using them as-is without making changes to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No: this is common for Java-based project to depend and re-use as-is pre-built packages (typically provisioned through Maven) that are under the EPL or the LGPL. The EPL or LGPL does not extend to your own code in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you redistribute these dependencies, as long as you are respecting the terms of the licenses of these deps, this typically does not impact the license you can use in your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple way to respect the terms would be to do this for each dep:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include all licenses and notices (or create them if they are missing), include some doc to give credit and display these licenses and notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide the corresponding source code for these deps&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be more than needed in some cases (for instance unmodified redistribution of EPL-licensed code does not require exactly source code redistribution) but this is simple and easier to apply (and automate) and ensure a decent compliance across the board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also apply the same approach to other packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-24T10:14:29.573" LastActivityDate="2016-05-24T10:14:29.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T07:59:35.020" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say there is a multiplayer game (or radio station, BitTorrent tracker, etc) that would (at least threaten to) ban users if they are using a modified client. And the official client is released using GPL. Does it work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively it isn't that free as the GPL intended. But some problems are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software could be released by a 3rd party, who doesn't seem to be able to forbid the service from using it as the official client.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't disallow you from running the software. It just disallows you from connecting to the service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in the game case, the software might have no useful functionalities if it couldn't connect to the service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="464" LastEditorUserId="464" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T08:24:43.987" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T17:12:46.117" Title="Is GPL compatible with services that disallow modifying the client?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2919" CreationDate="2016-05-25T14:30:10.910" Score="3" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm helping a medicine student to build a Linux distribution which should include some imaging processing tools. The aim is give to the other students a bootable USB stick to be used for their researches. Nothing new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each processing tool comes with a specific license, and we will contact the authors if an authorization is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: with which kind of license should we release the distribution? Should the license be the more restrictive between the ones of the included packages or the distribution maintains its original license and each package refers to its own license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5155" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-05-25T14:43:04.317" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T15:26:51.800" Title="License of a Linux distribution" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-25T15:24:15.370" Score="3" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking forward to building an online store and nopCommerce seems like the right way to go. I would like to make my own theme and extend the code to handle some requirements specific to my store's domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nopCommerce is released under a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nopcommerce.com/licensev3.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;variation of GPL-3.0 license&lt;/a&gt; and as I understand it, all code linked with GPL 3.0 source code must be disclosed under a GPL 3.0 compatible license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions is: Do I have to make the source code of my store available to everyone? And by &quot;code of my store&quot; I mean, custom themes, pages and code that handles specific domain requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5168" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T11:49:26.080" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T11:52:53.283" Title="nopCommerce GPL-3.0 license and online store's domain specific code and themes" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2917" CreationDate="2016-05-25T15:26:51.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every program is &quot;independent&quot; (or it communicate with other programs with standard methods). So it is considered a mere aggregation, and the license of one piece is independent of the license of the other piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debian solved the problem creating the *Debian Free Software Guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&lt;/a&gt; , which guarantee a minimum freedom. Every license must be compatible with it, to be included in the main part of Debian, and so people who copy Debian should care only about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: linking, dynamic libraries, compiling (compiler generated code) are things to take into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-05-25T15:26:51.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2918" CreationDate="2016-05-25T15:31:11.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since nopCommerce is a hosted application under the GNU GPL, accessing the software over the network does not mean the user has received the software. The GPL applies when you convey your software and someone receives it. Specifically, the license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have to license your changes and extensions under the GPL, but you would not need to distribute your source code to users. If you distributed your binaries or source, however, recipients would get it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; was created to close this &quot;loophole&quot; in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-05-26T11:52:53.283" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T11:52:53.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2778" CreationDate="2016-05-26T09:22:26.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The image is first published in Wikimedia and it is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should IMHO put the image in the credits and add the CC notice to your book and provide a link to a place you control where the (possibly modified) image is available too in a proper modifiable format.&#xA;This may go above and beyond some of the CC requirements but that should cover it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would consider your book to be a collection of your work + &#xA;that image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take is that the Share Alike clause only applies to to that image, not your book as a whole. But I am not a lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T09:22:26.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2915" CreationDate="2016-05-26T09:25:32.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you control the remote service you could do whatever you want to restrict certain types of access. This has nothing to do with the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could not restrict what the recipients of the GPL-licensed client do with it, including trying to circumvent your blocks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in doing so, they may breach your terms of service or other laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all a very hypothetical of course as is your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-05-26T09:25:32.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2568" CreationDate="2016-05-26T09:40:56.993" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I redistribute some third-party library in your Android app, I need to comply with its license terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For free and open source licenses, the terms usually include at least to provide some credits, notice and include the license texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this firebase library, this is commercially licensed. So I need a commercial agreement first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/firebase/firebase-client-android/2.5.2/firebase-client-android-2.5.2.pom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its Maven POM&lt;/a&gt; I can see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;license: Commercial&#xA;url: https://www.firebase.com/terms/terms-of-service.html&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this library is proprietary but it also contains disclosed FLOSS code under MIT and Apache license as you I see in the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE_firebase_android&lt;/code&gt; file found in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/firebase/firebase-client-android/2.5.2/firebase-client-android-2.5.2.jar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jar&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will need to make sure to carry these over in my app proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-11-22T23:00:52.500" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T23:00:52.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-05-26T16:33:53.867" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to redistribute a work licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND 3.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I’m &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/965/138&quot;&gt;not allowed to omit parts of the work&lt;/a&gt;, I’m &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#When_I_release_my_work_under_a_CC_license_in_one_format_.28e.g..2C_.pdf.29.2C_can_I_restrict_licensees_from_changing_it_to_or_using_it_in_other_formats.3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;allowed to change its format&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I release my work under a CC license in one format (e.g., .pdf), can I restrict licensees from changing it to or using it in other formats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. CC licenses grant permission to use the licensed material in any media or format regardless of the format in which it has been made available. This is true even if you have applied a NoDerivatives license to your work. Once a CC license is applied to a work in one format or medium, a licensee may use the same work in any other format or medium without violating the licensor’s copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I wonder how much freedom I have in changing the format. &lt;strong&gt;Is it allowed to make one file into several (and vice versa)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the work is published as a collection of HTML files, may I concatenate these HTML files and publish them as a single PDF file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the work is published as a single PDF file, may I publish it separated into several HTML files (e.g., a HTML file per PDF page or per chapter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that’s allowed, may I also do this if the format does not change? For example, a single PDF into multiple PDFs, or multiple HTML files into a single HTML file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T05:52:15.920" Title="When changing the format of a work licensed under CC BY-ND, may I change the number of files?" Tags="|creative-commons|distribution|redistribution|file-formats|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2935" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:00:45.227" Score="9" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently started my first &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/xXXIMMATTHEWXXx/phpCMS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source project&lt;/a&gt;. I want people to contribute their ideas and to help grow this project. I don't know how I should spread it. I have a guide on how to contribute, a todo list and I even offer to vouch for them in the future if they contribute. It has a guide on what needs to be done and even a step by step tutorial on how to download the source and start editing things. I have commented the code so it should be &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; easy to learn the code and get started. I just don't know where to start. Do I post about it in different places? I don't have friends who code so I can't tell them. So my questions are: Do I post about it somewhere? If so, where? How can I make people want to contribute? How do I make it get 10+ people contributing? What are some open source basics that I do not have in the repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5193" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-05-29T21:16:36.367" LastActivityDate="2016-05-29T21:16:36.367" Title="How can i grow my open source project?" Tags="|contributor|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="811" CreationDate="2016-05-27T16:39:40.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would highly recommend &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.firsttimersonly.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.firsttimersonly.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's dedicated to helping people who have never contributed to open source before contribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2016-05-27T16:39:40.660" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-05-28T08:21:08.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2933" CreationDate="2016-05-28T08:02:03.527" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an open source contributor to more than one projects. Why do I contribute to a project? Because &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used that project in some way and I feel that I should be a contributor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used the project and I felt that even though it's awesome, something is missing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm a student with my study focussed on a particular field of computer science. The project does cutting edge work in that area, and contributing to it helps me have a contact with brilliant people in the field&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To learn industry level coding practices which most universities do not teach directly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I feel you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is you project useful? If yes, try looking for a forum which had people who can use it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a blog post illustrating the applications of your project. Post it on medium/Hacker News (ShowHN)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Managing a project sounds easy, but it isn't. Try looking for an umbrella organisation with similar projects and see if they can help you manage it (funds/contributors/etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several universities (I can vouch for mine) have students who are interested in contributing to open source but don't know how to. There are coding clubs and societies that tie up with some open source organisations and do a two-way thing for both students and the organisation. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google Summer of Code. Get in, it'll guarantee contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try integrating tools like slack/gitter, CI, etc with your project. Makes it easier to manager with loads of developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="66" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T08:02:03.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2933" CreationDate="2016-05-28T12:11:33.000" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your question boils down to &quot;How can I market my WidgetMaker5000 with zero budget?&quot;. It's not easy, but it can be done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Build something useful.&lt;/strong&gt; Nothing else you do will matter if your software doesn't solve a common problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Write great user documentation.&lt;/strong&gt; It doesn't matter how useful the WidgetMaker5000 is if no one knows how to use it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bundle an installer.&lt;/strong&gt; The average end user isn't going to build your project themselves. Go through the effort to make sure installation is a series of mindless clicks. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Find your user base.&lt;/strong&gt; Different types of users will be found in different places. You built a neat new way to analyze data? Seek out Excel &amp;amp; Matlab and power users. Built an awesome new code review tool? Find out where quality obsessed programmers hang out. Figure out what hashtags people who would love your product follow. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Start Evangelizing.&lt;/strong&gt; Right now, nobody knows the WidgetMaker5000 exists. You need to tell them about it. Set up social media accounts for your project. Then, get a blog up and running.  There are lots of free ones out there. Write about your product and the problems it solves and &lt;em&gt;be excited about it&lt;/em&gt;. (If the guy who wrote it isn't excited, why should I be?) Share these blogs on your social media accounts (don't forget to use the right hashtags!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what it is you've built, you may even be able to find actual IRL (in real life) user groups that you can present and demonstrate too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's possible to provide an interactive demo on a website (and you've got the resources/know how to make it happen), provide one on a site for the project. Nothing makes me want to download and install software like getting to play with it a bit first. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't forget to have fun.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't get discouraged if it doesn't take off. It's taken my project 2 years to gather up several thousand users and a few dozen contributors &lt;em&gt;and it's a successful project.&lt;/em&gt; Very few projects gather that kind of attention. The vast majority of Open Source projects have a user base of 1, the developer, &lt;em&gt;and that's ok&lt;/em&gt;. Even if no one else every uses the WidgetMaker5000, you've had fun building it, learned something in the process, and solved a problem in your life. That's a win, don't forget it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some specific advice about your project:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I followed the link to your GitHub repository. I have &lt;em&gt;no idea&lt;/em&gt; what your software actually does. It's a &quot;Company Mgmt System&quot;... okay... &lt;em&gt;what's that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On GitHub, your ReadMe is the project's landing page. It needs to quickly tell me what it is that the project accomplishes. What problem does it solve? Compare your landing page to &lt;a href=&quot;http://rubberduckvba.com/&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ckuhn203/Rubberduck.Winforms/blob/master/README.md&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. Notice how those landing pages instantly show you what the software does? If you don't quickly and efficiently communicate your product's core functionality, people will wander off before the page has even finished loading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2016-05-28T12:24:09.053" LastActivityDate="2016-05-28T12:24:09.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2939" CreationDate="2016-05-31T12:45:42.747" Score="9" ViewCount="2128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read lots of discussion on shipping commercial products that link against GPLv2/3 libraries, and products that include code from GPLv2/3 software. But I haven't been able to satisfactorily answer my question about shipping a commercial product that uses GPLv2/3 binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'd like to bundle a modified version of TexLive with my commercial product. My software uses some of the TexLive binaries for interpreting and rendering LaTeX that the user writes. The way my software uses these GPL'd binaries is by executing them and reading their output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem adding a notice to my software that it uses a modified version of TexLive, and pointing the users to where they can find the TexLive sources. The users will be free to build their own version of the appropriate TexLive binaries and configure my product to use them instead. (This is easy to ensure, since my product simply invokes the executables at the configured path).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed by the GPL? Or does this require me releasing my entire product under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T09:34:08.837" Title="Shipping GPL'd binaries in commercial product" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|commercial|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3957" CreationDate="2016-05-25T10:49:33.930" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently adjusted a function from an existing package in R, which is licensed under GPL (&gt;=2). If I now put the adjusted function in a package, so that other people can use it, do I have to put GPL (&gt;=2) in the license field? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the document on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&lt;/a&gt; and if I understand it correctly, you can adjust software that was licensed under GPL and the GPL license directly transfers from the original software to the software that you adjusted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this really all I have to do? I would think that you would have to contact someone in order to get your software licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5315" OwnerDisplayName="Moar data" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-05-31T21:08:18.313" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T06:17:27.217" Title="License when building a package in R: adjusted function from an existing package" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2937" CreationDate="2016-05-31T22:00:48.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This will be partly down to interpretation, and IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this is how I'd read it: that you can indeed distribute in the way you have described, because all you're doing is executing and reading the output. I wouldn't consider this dynamically linked - you're not calling functions back and forth, you're essentially integrating &quot;at arms length&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FAQ answer&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/50/apsillers&quot;&gt;apsillers&lt;/a&gt; linked to in a comment deals with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From how you're described the way your program works, I'd interpret it to separate programs. But, crucially, others may differ, and as the answer notes, judges will decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one thing you implied though that certainly would be a problem: not distributing the source code for your modified version. I'm not entirely sure from the way your question was phrased what your plans are here, but for clarity's sake, it's not enough just to link people to the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; source if you have bundled a modified version. You must provide the source of your modified version (or at least, include a written offer to provide it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-05-31T22:06:08.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2942" CreationDate="2016-06-01T08:36:54.697" Score="3" ViewCount="1491" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an abandoned project on Sourceforge that I want to change. I downloaded the source files but there was no license files and the source files did not contain license headers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Sourceforge have a license for code unaccompanied by a licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T10:02:36.190" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T10:10:34.380" Title="Does Sourceforge have a default licence?" Tags="|license-notice|unlicensed-code|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2940" CreationDate="2016-06-01T08:36:54.697" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/userfaq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the software you provide free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The software hosted on our site is both free and Open Source. Each&#xA;  project is expected to provides their own Open Source License which&#xA;  contains any restrictions on the use of the software or code. If a&#xA;  project is not free, does not provide source code, or does not contain&#xA;  a valid Open Source License: please report it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However look at the project summary page on sourceforge as the license should be posted there.  The binary download may also include the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5223" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T08:36:54.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2940" CreationDate="2016-06-01T09:47:19.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, just because the software is hosted on SourceForge does not mean that it is open source. In the United States (and many other countries), works are protected by copyright and the author must grant specific licenses. A work that is uploaded to SourceForge without a specific license granted is protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, unlike GitHub, SourceForge requires that source code uploaded is released under an OSI-Approved License. They ask users who encounter a project that is not clearly released under an OSI-Approved license to report that project (likely so it can be removed until it comes into compliance with the terms of service).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find a project on SourceForge that does not have an explicit license, you should not treat it as open source, but &quot;all rights reserved&quot;. It's the safest thing to do. You can't assume a given open source license, since there are drastic differences between MIT, GPL, and LGPL as three examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://slashdotmedia.com/terms-of-use/&quot;&gt;SourceForge Terms of Use&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you submit, post, upload or otherwise provide Code to&#xA;  SourceForge.net, you must designate promptly the software license&#xA;  pursuant to which licensees, including Slashdot Media, obtain rights&#xA;  with respect to such Code. Except as otherwise expressly permitted by&#xA;  these Terms, any Code submitted to SourceForge.net must be licensed to&#xA;  Slashdot Media and other licensees under a license that is: compliant&#xA;  with the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”)’s Open Source Definition&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd&quot;&gt;http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd&lt;/a&gt;) or certified as an “OSI-Approved&#xA;  License” (&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;). Please note that Slashdot&#xA;  Media is not affiliated with the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/userfaq/#free&quot;&gt;SourceForge FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the software you provide free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The software hosted on our site is both free and Open Source. Each project is expected to provides their own Open Source License which contains any restrictions on the use of the software or code. If a project is not free, does not provide source code, or does not contain a valid Open Source License: please report it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2016-06-01T10:10:34.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-01T10:10:34.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2944" CreationDate="2016-06-01T12:33:49.637" Score="9" ViewCount="1118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to embed some telemetry functions in an open source project or is it considered spying or privacy violating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to connect my open source app to &lt;a href=&quot;https://azure.microsoft.com/services/application-insights/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Application Insights&lt;/a&gt; to understand how and when the end users use my app, but I'm not sure it is a good practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4090" LastEditorUserId="4090" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T12:22:14.090" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T12:22:14.090" Title="Telemetry in open source software?" Tags="|law|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2943" CreationDate="2016-06-02T05:34:06.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software is considered &quot;open source&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as long as it satisfies at least one of the widely-accepted definitions, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt; etc. It's possible for a piece of software to both spy on its users / violate their privacy and still be open source; the two properties are orthogonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may find that among the open source communities, a disproportionate amount are concerned with privacy, and consider telemetrics as spyware and unethical. The FSF is a notable example of this; one of their raisons d'etre is that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-surveillance.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary software violates users' freedoms, such as privacy through spyware&lt;/a&gt;. The argument goes, even if such spying exists in open source software, it can be easily removed by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked whether &quot;it's OK&quot; to have telemetry in open source. It's clearly legal, as there's nothing stopping you from using an open source license on whatever software&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. The answer will depend on who you ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the telemetry in question are ok (e.g. some people consider opt-in, anonymised telemetry ethical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether any telemetry is ok (some consider all telemetry unethical)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether being open source is all that matters (i.e. caveat emptor; if you don't like it then change the source)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: free software, libre, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: as far as copyright law is concerned. There may be other laws governing the legality of software, such as patent law, or restrictions on encryption and national security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2016-06-02T11:55:28.607" LastActivityDate="2016-06-02T11:55:28.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2946" CreationDate="2016-06-02T17:03:40.210" Score="7" ViewCount="1187" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a small group of developers who are looking to base a product we have in development on a OSL 3.0 licensed Project (OroCRM).  I have been having trouble understanding the exact terms of the OSL 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the product we are developing will be a commercial product, and we will sell access to it as SAAS, will we be required to open source all of our code that we develop and allow access to anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Rosenlaw I find this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSL 3.0 Approach To Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OSL 3.0 is far simpler, with the entire copyright and copyleft bargain&#xA;  stated in a short § 1 that echoes the provisions of 17 USC 106 and&#xA;  similar copyright laws. Section 1(a) authorizes licensees to make&#xA;  &quot;copies [of the Original Work], either alone or as part of a&#xA;  collective work&quot;, and § 1(b) authorizes licensees &quot;to translate,&#xA;  adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the Original Work, thereby&#xA;  creating derivative works (&quot;Derivative Works&quot;) based upon the Original&#xA;  Work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then § 1(c) requires any copies of that Original Work and any&#xA;  Derivative Works that are distributed to be distributed under OSL 3.0&#xA;  and, for those works, the Licensor promises to provide Source Code [§&#xA;  3]. In this way, the OSL 3.0 license remains with the work and all its&#xA;  subsequent versions, and that software always remains open source.&#xA;  That's reciprocity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this means that if we distribute our product, that we must use the OSL license, however if we never plan to distribute the code, but only sell access to the product we develop, will we still be required to open up our source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5234" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2016-06-03T00:36:32.380" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T23:52:20.890" Title="Does OSL 3.0 require user access to source if I sell access to it as SAAS?" Tags="|derivative-works|copyleft|distribution|osl-3.0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2016-06-03T00:41:19.833" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; OSL 3.0 is a copyleft license that also applies if you provide network access to the output of your software, as in SaaS. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the source&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;External Deployment Defined&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OSL 3.0 requires that the External Deployment of software be treated the same as a distribution. The effect, of course, is that copies of the Original Work or Derivative Works that are externally deployed (i.e., that are used in-house to provide services to third parties) must be distributed reciprocally under OSL 3.0, just as if those third parties had received actual copies of the Original Work or Derivative Works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to what AGPL does; even if you don't distribute binaries, if you provide access to the output of your software, you are still bound by the license terms and must provide source under the same license. If you continue reading the Rosen Law page, they make the comparison with AGPL too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a version of GPL, the Affero GPL or AGPL, that also plugs the external deployment loophole, but that license brings along all the other baggage associated with the GPL that I've already criticized. The two-sentence External Deployment provision in OSL 3.0 [§ 5] plugs the loophole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/OSL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual text from the aforementioned clause #5 in the license&lt;/a&gt;, which says pretty much the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5) External Deployment. The term &quot;External Deployment&quot; means the use, distribution, or communication of the Original Work or Derivative Works in any way such that the Original Work or Derivative Works may be used by anyone other than You, whether those works are distributed &lt;strong&gt;or communicated to those persons or made available as an application intended for use over a network&lt;/strong&gt;. As an express condition for the grants of license hereunder, You must treat any External Deployment by You of the Original Work or a Derivative Work as a distribution under section 1(c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(bold is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T00:41:19.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3955" CreationDate="2016-06-03T12:11:58.923" Score="11" ViewCount="848" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I ran into a GPL license related problem and I heard many people claiming many different things. I made this post to get this cleared up for myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Situation&lt;/strong&gt; There is a program which is licensed under GPL V3. This program has an API, which is also licensed under GPL V3. This program can load external jar files (plugins) which depend on the public GPL V3 API. So, the program actually &quot;starts&quot; my program (my plugin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says to following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;GPL-compatible license? (#IfLibraryIsGPL)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, because the software as it is actually run includes the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;So, if I include a GPL library into my project, I have to license my project under GPL as well. However, I am not including any code from the GPL V3 API. I am calling code from the API, but I have not copied any code of the API into my own project. Neither is any code shaded into the jar. Do I have to license my project under GPL as well? Or may I choose my own license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5248" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T05:41:39.243" Title="Am I forced to release my project under GPL, even though no GPL source is included?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1421" CreationDate="2016-06-03T14:25:06.710" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To review, the issue here is that Google used the &lt;em&gt;structure of the Java API&lt;/em&gt; when implementing their own software. The appeals court found that the structure of an API is eligible for copyright protection, so Google's implementation was considered a derivative work of that API structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The API structure is part of both Oracle's propietary JDK and Oracle's GPL-licensed OpenJDK. Therefore, Google &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have made a derivative work using OpenJDK's GPL-licensed API structure. There are at least two issues with this, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1422/50&quot;&gt;Free Radical's answer&lt;/a&gt;, here are differences between the proprietary JDK and OpenJDK. If Google used any Java APIs that did not exist in OpenJDK, then obviously they could not cite a license grant for OpenJDK, since the infringing material didn't exist in OpenJDK.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if Google limited themselves to OpenJDK APIs, Google could not claim they were operating under the GPL, for several reasons (as noted in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/11/q-on-dec-4-oracle-v-google-android-java.html#opensource&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fosspatent.com's article&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They did not &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to be bound by the GPL, for fear that its copyleft provisions may have required them to license other parts of Android under the GPL as well (and they wished to keep some component proprietary).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They did not follow the requirements of the GPL, because their downstream derivative work itself was not GPL-licensed. (It did not include a copy of the license, nor require further downstream works to also be under the GPL, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google was opposed to the idea that the structure of an API could be copyrighted, so they claimed they did not use &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; copyright material (since, they claimed unsucessfuly, an API structure is not eligible for copyright). They could not claim their use was licensed under the GPL's copyright license, because they already claimed that the parts they used were uncopyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T14:25:06.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2943" CreationDate="2016-06-03T17:39:21.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not in opposition to the FSF Free-Software definition, or the Debian Free-Software definition, and probably the OSI open-source definition. And many software has this, but user configurable. e.g. Debian's software package management system (it asks would you like to be part of the … survey). Or Firefox. But note both ask, if you want this on. If you do not ask, then I suspect that people will use the freedoms that the licence gives, to remove these features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2016-06-03T17:39:21.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3977" CreationDate="2016-06-04T11:12:38.407" Score="2" ViewCount="1079" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking for a &lt;code&gt;.ttf&lt;/code&gt; font, where almost all of the unicode characters are created. Then I've found the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Unifont&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://unifoundry.com/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application I am working on cannot be open sourced (not my choise). It is not just closed-source, but commercial also. Am I allowed to use &lt;code&gt;GNU Unifont&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5250" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T21:46:08.240" Title="Am I allowed to use GNU Unifont in a closed source application?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|gpl-2|closed-source|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-04T19:46:55.047" Score="3" ViewCount="2093" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have had a fairly popular Android business app on Google Play a while now. It is available as a free version and a version with features targeted to bigger businesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently in the process of building the next major version of the app and intend to release the source code of the free version on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read through the licenses but feel a bit uncertain how GPL, LGPL or MPL would affect building different product flavours off of the publicly released version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the freedom to have a &quot;pro&quot; product flavour but are a bit uncertain whether this would be considered derivative work (which, according to the GPL, would require me to release the source code for the pro version also).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do personally not care if people would build other apps and publish them based off of the source code, but I like the idea that people have to contribute back if they change the core version, hence ASL/MIT/BSD are ruled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The versions that I thus feel most comfortable with right now are LGPL or MPL as they &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; to cover the aforementioned cases, but as everyone knows... Assumption is the mother of all... well, you know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5254" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T02:13:17.533" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T14:35:10.147" Title="GPL, LGPL or MPL for open source app with closed source Pro flavour" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|multi-licensing|proprietary-code|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2955" CreationDate="2016-06-04T22:35:02.637" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to licenses and don't really understand the difference between the license choices on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you license your own work under the GNU General Public License, does this mean you wouldn't be able to use the code again in a closed source commercial product you own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T14:45:54.633" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T14:45:54.633" Title="Can you use your own work in a closed source product if it's licensed under the GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2016-06-04T22:50:30.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own the code, you can do what you like with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you can absolutely licence under GPL and implement it into a commercial product you own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only real gotcha is that if you use &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; you've not written to implement your code, then if this uses a licence such as GPL, this could potentially contaminate your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A decent explanation is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-06-04T22:50:30.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-04T23:17:45.903" Score="6" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to licensing and want to clarify something. Do licenses (such as Apache, MIT, GNU General Public etc.) apply to the source code or the (compiled) program? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it applied to the source code, but after reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the GPL&lt;/a&gt; I am a little unsure. They speak of &quot;software&quot; and to me the source code itself isn't software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T14:52:44.933" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T06:29:48.213" Title="Do licenses actually apply to the source code or product itself?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2016-06-05T00:44:12.870" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own the code, you can dual-license it, or do whatever you want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just be sure you own all of it - i.e. that you haven't incorporated someone else's copylefted code into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you write code, you automatically have the copyright on it. It's then up to you how you license that for use by others. The only restriction you really have is that you can't &lt;em&gt;revoke&lt;/em&gt; a license once you have issued it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T00:44:12.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2947" CreationDate="2016-06-05T05:41:39.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a difficult, and often-asked, question. IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially it comes down to how closely linked your code is to this API. If it is clear that they are two completely separate programs, then you're ok. If your program makes calls back and forth and shares &quot;data structures&quot;, then they could be considered the same program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2937/shipping-gpld-binaries-in-commercial-product/2939#2939&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2799/bundling-gpl-script-with-closed-source-script/2800#2800&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; recently which both touch on this topic. I'm sure there are plenty others around here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to consider is what GNU say on this topic themselves, particularly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this FAQ answer&lt;/a&gt;. In the end it's going to be down to interpretation - that of judges if it ever goes to court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I would recommend in your instance is just getting in touch with the authors of Bukkit. Tell them what you want to do and how you're doing it. If their interpretation is that the programs are not connected, great - you've pretty much got a green light. But if they interpret it differently, then - legalities aside, ethics at the very least - would say that you would need to also GPL your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T05:41:39.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2924" CreationDate="2016-06-05T05:52:15.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I'd read this is that the answer to all three of your questions is: &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the FAQ answer you quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once a CC license is applied to a work in one format or medium, a licensee may use the same work in any other format or medium ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you correctly stated, you can't omit parts of a work under an ND license. So as long as everything is intact, you can put it in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; format you like. You can print it, bind it, post it online, put it in a PDF... there is no restriction. Post a PDF work in multiple HTML files if you like - just make sure everything is still clearly linked and 'together' as part of one work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, no matter what format you put the work in, make sure you still make it clear what license the whole work is under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, IANAL :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T05:52:15.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2938" CreationDate="2016-06-05T06:17:27.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/98/artofcode&quot;&gt;ArtOfCode&lt;/a&gt; posted in a comment: &lt;strong&gt;yes, that's all you have to do&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You own the copyright to your contributions, and this is always automatic. You wrote it, and it's yours. You can - if the code is all yours - license it however you choose. This isn't like applying for a license from a government entity: as the code is yours, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are the one issuing the license to whoever comes across your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; own the copyright to the portion of code you used that was written by someone else. You've been given a license to do certain things with it. The GPL allows you to use the code for whatever you like, to make changes, etc. - it gives a lot of freedom. But one key restriction it does place is that you can't remove those freedoms from other downstream users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if your code is based on this existing code in any way, you have to also license it under the GPL to ensure that these freedoms remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU has a page explaining &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how to apply the GPL licenses to your project&lt;/a&gt;. Essentially you just need to include a copyright notice, and the license text. Don't forget to include the copyright notice of the person who wrote the code you built upon as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-05T06:17:27.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3965" CreationDate="2016-06-05T15:17:03.823" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read about FSF plugin policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a &lt;em&gt;shared address space&lt;/em&gt;, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine). Now there are environments where only one address space exists, such as the real-mode operating system FreeDOS. On FreeDOS you can think of each application/driver as a DOS plugin with that definition (only one address space means everything is in that address space). Can I distribute a proprietary game together with FreeDOS? Can I run it? Or will the distinction in that case be something else (in case of DOS, whether or not it is a TSR program)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5031" LastEditorUserId="5031" LastEditDate="2016-06-05T15:38:08.277" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T13:43:49.573" Title="&quot;Primitive&quot; GPL:ed OS and proprietary programs and address spaces" Tags="|linked-libraries|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2954" CreationDate="2016-06-06T01:12:57.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as copyright law is concerned, source code and object code (i.e. the compiled program) are equivalent. So even if a license talks about one and not the other, or only mentions &quot;software&quot;, the same protections apply to both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the license will mention both. For example, GPL has sections defining &quot;source code&quot; and &quot;object code&quot;, because one of its conditions is that if you distribute &quot;object code&quot; you must also provide &quot;source code&quot; - a mechanism that's an integral part of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion that source code and object code are equivalent is not that obvious. In fact object code was once not afforded copyright protection&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, but cases such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; lead to the situation today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Computer Copyright Law: An Emerging Form of&#xA;Protection for Object Code Software After Apple v.&#xA;Franklin, 5 Computer L.J. 233 (1984)&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Anderson L. Baldy III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While source code programs 10 have&#xA;  consistently been accorded copyright protection, object code programs&#xA;  1 have only recently been deemed copyrightable. 12 Further,&#xA;  the exact boundaries of the protection granted to object code programs&#xA;  as an alternate or supplement to trade secret protection 13 have not been delineated by the federal judiciary. 14 The recent decision&#xA;  in Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.15 merely&#xA;  provides that some object code is copyrightable subject matter regardless&#xA;  of its embodiment medium, in that case Read Only Memory&#xA;  (ROM) chips. Thus, Apple stands for the proposition that the embodiment&#xA;  of object code in a ROM does not preclude copyright protection,&#xA;  but does not provide guidelines for determining what&#xA;  constitutes a copyrightable ROM-embedded program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T06:29:48.213" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T06:29:48.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3964" CreationDate="2016-06-07T01:57:30.440" Score="10" ViewCount="1033" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say a part of the JavaScript which is provided to the client's browser is under GPL. Does this mean that server-side code also has to be made public under GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole&#xA;  or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part&#xA;  thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties&#xA;  under the terms of this License.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that since the whole web app will not be complete without the client-side code, it can be considered to &quot;contain&quot; the client-side code, and thus the server-side code is also a part of the whole &quot;work&quot; defined here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4826" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-07T14:27:48.137" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T14:27:48.137" Title="If a part of the client-side code is licensed under GPL, does the server-side code have to be under GPL as well?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3963" CreationDate="2016-06-07T02:49:20.400" Score="4" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been starting to put my code on Github. I added the GNU Public License to most repos. Am I allowed to add spinets of code from the internet that doesn't have a license? For example if I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sanfoundry.com/java-program-check-connectivity-graph-using-dfs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this reference&lt;/a&gt; to implement depth first search and copied some of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is I found a good pretty_print function on a website with no license. While I can change the names of things, the idea remains the same. Can I include the pretty_print function in my own code with the GNU Public License? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I at least try to change the code in someway so it's not an exact copy? Should I add the URL where I got it from? What if it's just some random wordpress website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T10:35:44.427" Title="Including (small portions of) code copied from the internet, in a project with GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3961" CreationDate="2016-06-07T10:35:44.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to add snippet of code from the internet that doesn't have a license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No license means no license meaning you are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; licensed to use it beyond looking at it in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example if I used this reference to implement depth first search and copied some of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site you are linking to links to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sanfoundry.com/copyright/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Copyright&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The content may not be redistributed or reproduced in any form without &#xA;the written permission from Sanfoundry. However, if you are linking the&#xA;content from our website, you can use a short description (no more than&#xA;25-30 words) from our website with the content in quotes plus you must&#xA;provide a link to our original article or post.&#xA;&#xA;You cannot use the content (either whole or partial) for any commercial&#xA;purpose.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it has a clear license that does not allow you to do much and would be conflicting with the terms of the GPL. Contact the author for a proper license compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example is I found a good pretty_print function on a website with no license. While I can change the names of things, the idea remains the same. Can I include the pretty_print function in my own code with the GNU Public License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same answer as above: you are not licensed by default and the lack of an explicit license means you have no rights. By default all rights are mostly reserved. Masquerading the code by doing some renaming would be even worse. Do not do that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T10:35:44.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3960" CreationDate="2016-06-07T10:40:04.873" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lawyers have told me than in most cases the GPL of a JavaScript library running in the browser does not impact the code running on the server side.... within reason: for instance if you use something like meteor where the code runs either on the server or the client, this may not apply. Or for instance if you modified the JS library to interface with your custom back-end, this may not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T10:40:04.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3958" CreationDate="2016-06-07T10:48:46.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional way to think of a &lt;em&gt;shared address space&lt;/em&gt; is when you have a process that isolates memory regions.  This of course would not apply to an OS that does not have a notion of a process. But would not FreeDOS allocate separate memory regions to each of the TSR? Actually the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Open_source_software#FreeDOS_and_open_source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeDOS wiki&lt;/a&gt; is quite clear and explicit on this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, distributors must share any changes they make under the same open source software license. For example, if someone adds native FAT32 support into the FreeDOS kernel, and shares that new kernel, then those changes also fall under the GNU GPL. However, if they add FAT32 support via an add-on TSR program and simply bundle it with the rest of FreeDOS, then the GNU GPL does not apply to that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to protect open source software and its authors. No one else should be able to take their code and misrepresent it, or worse, turn open source software into proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is your answer: an application or a TSR running on FreeDOS does not have to be GPL-licensed in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-07T13:43:49.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4037" CreationDate="2016-06-07T11:49:52.113" Score="6" ViewCount="2701" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write an R package and release on &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CRAN&lt;/a&gt;. But I have concerns about &lt;strong&gt;legal issues:&lt;/strong&gt; licensing and authorship/ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code of some functions in the package will be derived from or based on posts in websites like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33288075/from-matlab-to-r-capture-named-fields-with-regular-expressions-to-a-dataframe&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/danielmarcelino/8209cfdf2cd993eeb1b3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this code&lt;/a&gt; for function 1;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ropensci/plotly/issues/273#issuecomment-217982315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; for several other functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I legally use these codes as I can't find any license they are under? I.e. Are there any legal restrictions at all to include code &lt;strong&gt;from forum websites&lt;/strong&gt; in a package? Who is the owner of copyright licenses in this case, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any legal differences in cases where:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;) the initial piece of code was written by me and then other forum users corrected/updated it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;) I just asked a question and got an answer (a piece of code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question about how to attribute authors when their real names are unclear is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3970/r-package-includes-code-based-on-answers-on-forum-websites-authorship&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T02:01:26.960" Title="Can I legally use code I found on a forum?" Tags="|licensing|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T19:39:19.350" Score="7" ViewCount="699" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I open source my project under Apache 2 if it uses a LGPL3 library without modifying it? I'm not planning to distribute the LGPL3 library along with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that LGPL3 allows this type of use, but I'm not sure if Apache 2 allows this, on the other hand since no other open souce code is actually distributed with this project, can Apache 2 prevent merely linking/referencing against LGPL3 library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5281" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T11:08:04.100" Title="LGPL3 library in Apache 2.0 licensed library" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-07T23:18:53.087" Score="0" ViewCount="1817" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a developer, certain app markets for Android (Amazon or some manufacturers) require to list all open source libraries used (name , author, license etc.) accessible offline. I've created a page &quot;open source licences&quot; in my apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However on some commercial apps, I don't see any open source licence listing. I find hard to believe developers haven't used any GitHub project (most libraries on github are on Apache 2.0; some may be GPL).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;EDIT : Most apps have this page in  Settings &gt; open source. I talked to several developers of 500,000+ commercial apps, they weren't aware of publishing the libraries used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the risks of prosecution for the author's app in the following cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The app has never listed the open source libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The listing was done, but is not up to date and new libraries were used in the meantime&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is in relation to Android/iOS apps, but most websites are also built on top of open source libraries. As a followup question, why isn't there a page on most websites to list the 3rd party libraries it uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2016-06-08T06:15:58.647" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:14:29.583" Title="Risks of not showing open source libraries used" Tags="|distribution|enforcement|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4021" CreationDate="2016-06-08T16:23:13.917" Score="6" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write an R package and release on &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CRAN&lt;/a&gt;. But I have concerns about &lt;strong&gt;legal issues:&lt;/strong&gt; licensing and authorship/ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code of some functions in the package will be derived from or based on posts in websites like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33288075/from-matlab-to-r-capture-named-fields-with-regular-expressions-to-a-dataframe&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/danielmarcelino/8209cfdf2cd993eeb1b3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this code&lt;/a&gt; for function 1;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;B. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ropensci/plotly/issues/273#issuecomment-217982315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; for several other functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What authors/contributors should I include in my R package as I only know nicknames of people who wrote the posts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question about what license this code comes under is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/r-package-includes-code-based-on-answers-on-forum-websites-general-concerns-abo&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T13:33:29.647" Title="How do I attribute authors if I don't know their real names?" Tags="|attribution|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-08T22:42:02.203" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could licences be chosen to allow this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, how are things done with paid addons with Prestashop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T15:26:39.477" Title="How can a paid/proprietary module be combined with an open-source platform?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|paid-software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3975" CreationDate="2016-06-09T01:32:32.507" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say a vendor has both a community version of their software and a more proprietary one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be done in licensing terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can code be ported either way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the appropriate practises if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-09T01:45:53.877" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T07:35:04.687" Title="Can open and closed source versions of software exist in parallel and can code be ported either way?" Tags="|multi-licensing|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3974" CreationDate="2016-06-09T07:35:04.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing is easily enough done, because licences do not inhere in code; they apply to the conveyance of code, so different conveyances may be done under different terms.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia has a fairly good entry on it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can code be ported either way?  As curiousdanii has noted in response to your &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3972/how-can-a-paid-proprietary-module-be-combined-with-an-open-source-platform&quot;&gt;other, similar question&lt;/a&gt;, it depends on the &quot;open source&quot; licence used; in addition, it depends on who owns the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For movement from free to proprietary code, this is broadly impermissible under &quot;strong copyleft&quot; licences such as the GPL, and permissible under weaker free licences such as BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For movement from proprietary to free code, this is entirely at the whim of the copyright holder, so projects that wish to have a dual-licensed model may well require copyright assignment.  As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adventuresinoss.com/2010/01/08/more-on-copyright-assignment/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this writer noted&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MySQL had a policy that any code contributed to the project required&#xA;  that the author assign the copyright to to the MySQL corporation. This&#xA;  gave them full control over the application, including the ability to&#xA;  publish it under different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what &quot;&lt;em&gt;appropriate practices&lt;/em&gt;&quot; you might be referring to, so I can't answer the last part of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T07:35:04.687" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3981" CreationDate="2016-06-09T07:57:53.730" Score="5" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many products / artifacts point to a webpage to declare their license.&#xA;e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.antlr.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.antlr.org/license.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content of the webpage can change at any time.&#xA;Does that mean that already published products also change their license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: In the case of antlr the license actually did change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Artifact foo:1.0 is released on 2016-01-01, the license is via reference to &lt;a href=&quot;http://this.is.a.license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://this.is.a.license&lt;/a&gt;. This webpage says it is GPL-2.0&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;on 2016-03-01 the webpage is change to say it is LGPL-2.1 and a new version foo:1.1 is released&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;on 2016-04-01 a build download version 1.0 to my local maven repo and I check the license &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Is it is correct to assume license for version 1.0 is LGPL-2.1 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T08:54:11.330" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T14:50:55.880" Title="Does the license of a released product / artifact change with the content of a webpage?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2950" CreationDate="2016-06-09T13:58:14.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the website: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The precompiled fonts are released under the terms of the GNU GPL&#xA;  version 2, or (at your option) a later version, with the exception&#xA;  that embedding the font in a document does not in itself bind that&#xA;  document to the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it would be not legal to use GNU Unicode (including the fonts) on any closed-source application, per copyleft licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in your situation, I would strongly recommend that you make use of the open and permissive DejaVu ttf Fonts (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dejavu-fonts.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dejavu-fonts.org&lt;/a&gt;) within a font rendering library under a permissive license, on your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there's a GPL exception concerning the use of fonts, made for permitting the non-GPL compatible code to read and write documents and templates that embed the GNU font, as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://unifoundry.com/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the licensing terms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These font files are licensed under the GNU General Public License,&#xA;  either Version 2 or (at your option) a later version, with the&#xA;  exception that embedding the font in a document does not in itself&#xA;  constitute a violation of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5220" LastEditorUserId="5220" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T21:46:08.240" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T21:46:08.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4087" CreationDate="2016-06-09T14:04:54.753" Score="0" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there maven-plugins that should not be used in opensource projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because their license restricts that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because they add code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: Is it save to ignore the plugins when looking for license restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&#xA;bmargulies's answer is what I feared but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Is there an actual plugin that I could not use in a non-open project distributed to customers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T12:40:32.370" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T19:45:01.360" Title="Are there maven-plugins with licenses that prevent their use in open source projects?" Tags="|licensing|maven|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-09T15:49:25.260" Score="5" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;When software is diffused under an open-source licence I imagine that a project becomes the &quot;intellectual property&quot; of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not clear about &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2194/5290&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; in that an author agrees that code can be part of a compiled and closed source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is specifically possible with creative commons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does a &quot;copyright holder&quot; (the project initiator?) have the possibility of diffusing software under a second licence as Madhatter seems to be saying in a comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/3975/5290&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:05:22.660" Title="Under what conditions can someone dual licence existing works?" Tags="|licensing|multi-licensing|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3979" CreationDate="2016-06-09T16:18:14.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When software is diffused under an open-source licence I imagine that a project becomes the &quot;intellectual property&quot; of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incorrect. Unless copyright has been reassigned, the content creator owns their contributions to a work. As a copyright holder, you can freely choose what rights you want to grant to other people, including different rights to different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example that you linked to, the copyright holder gave permission to use the work in a manner that is different than the rights specified to people who receive it under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. That is their prerogative as the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-06-09T16:18:14.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2016-06-09T17:37:04.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, a future change to the code's license does not impact the license under which you received the code. If you validly received some code under the MIT license, and later the author stops offering the code under the MIT license (and offers under the GPL instead, or stops offering it altogether), that does not change the fact that the author granted you free use of the work under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did not receive a copy of the license text when you received a copy of the work, you still have permission to use it under that original license grant. However, you may have difficulty proving it, if the owner destroyed all evidence that they used to offer the code under a different license in the past. Determining whether you recieved the code under a particular license would be a matter of evidentiary fact-finding by the court, if legal action ensued. If the court found that the author really did offer you a particular license, then you are free to operate under those license terms, whatever they were at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By linking to a license page, the author can easily say, &quot;I am currently offering the code under whatever the license text on this page says.&quot; This makes things easy for the author, but more difficult for users who want to verify the exact terms of their license (as the current posted license terms may change to differ from their received license). If the software doesn't include one, users should save a copy of the license grant they received at the time of download, if they wish to refer to it in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be possible for the copyright holder to proactively revoke a license grant to some user. I am not sure exactly how to do this, but I imagine the copyright holder would need to directly contact license recipients and inform them that their license grant is terminated. Whether this is a legally valid thing to do probably depends on the exact relationship between the licensor and licensee (is there payment or a contract involved?), how the licensor offered the software (did they explicitly say they reserved the right to revoke the license?), and the exact terms of the license (e.g., the GPLv3 is explicitly irrevocable). There is U.S. case law that strongly indicates that software under an open source license offered to the public at large can be (and may often be) irrevocable by default; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;Are licenses irrevocable by default?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, revoking a license is very different from merely changing the license an author offers to future recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-29T14:50:55.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3983" CreationDate="2016-06-09T19:50:21.377" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Analysis documents can be useful to see how a project has been designed from a more abstract point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, would there be any potential downsides on packaging these along with some software on, say, GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, would there be any valid reason for keeping these separate and hosted on a personal website or on SlideShare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-06-11T19:29:36.983" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T19:29:36.983" Title="Should project analysis documents be packaged along with software?" Tags="|licensing|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3982" CreationDate="2016-06-10T06:53:46.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's often just a matter of manageability. A lot of developers like to keep their source control &quot;lean and mean&quot;, which only the relevant project files there, and leave the &quot;fluff&quot; pieces, such as guides, documentation and analysis documents to be hosted elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it's important to remember that such analysis can be performed by third parties who aren't part of the project's community and have no interest in committing their work to the source tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T06:53:46.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-10T08:48:32.227" Score="6" ViewCount="2277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created my first open-source project a few weeks ago. I have never done anything like that and have no idea, how to license and how to use licensed stuff. I researched a bit and found that it would be okay to use the MIT license for my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project uses a few other nuget packages. One of the nuget packages is SignalR, which is licensed under Apache License 2.0. I haven't edited any code, I just use their nuget packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to include the license into my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to keep anything else in mind, when using their nuget packages in terms of credits or licensing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5299" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T15:40:52.820" Title="Referencing nuget packages that are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3984" CreationDate="2016-06-10T12:05:01.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to include the license into my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are redistributing code from SignalR, yes. Or at least a NOTICE if it exists. This is rather well explained in the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to keep anything else in mind, when using their nuget packages in terms of credits or licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to give credits is explained in the Apache license and this is mostly about the NOTICE. I would personally always go above and beyond this and give credit to every third-party package in an About page, pop up, etc, wherever I credit mylself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T12:05:01.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3984" CreationDate="2016-06-10T15:40:52.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you are actually redistributing any licensed code - either source or binaries - in your actual product, then yes, you need to follow the license.  The simplest way to do this is to include a copy of the Apache License somewhere in the release, and include a NOTICE file that tells people your product includes other software product(s) that might have different licenses.  A good sample NOTICE file for an Apache project is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/example-NOTICE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/example-NOTICE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache License 2.0 provides specific guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congrats on being open source!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T15:40:52.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3976" CreationDate="2016-06-10T15:50:48.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Virtually all &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI-approved licenses&lt;/a&gt; grant you a copyright license to the software you downloaded &lt;strong&gt;at the time&lt;/strong&gt; you downloaded it.  So even if the copyright holder later changes the license, you can still keep using the software you previously downloaded under that same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright holders can change their license at any time as long as they make it clear to users, which is then the new terms that anyone can then download software or products from their site.  Obviously, if you get updates or new downloads, those bits of software are now provided under the new license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, you need to evaluate the specific license that you originally downloaded the software under to make any other statements.  For many popular licenses, as long as you &lt;strong&gt;continue to follow the terms&lt;/strong&gt; of the license from when you downloaded the software, the original copyright holder can't &quot;take back&quot; the license from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T15:50:48.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3979" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:05:22.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder for code (or other IP) can &lt;strong&gt;choose&lt;/strong&gt; to apply one or more licenses to their work.  That is, the person (or perhaps their employer, depending on their employment agreement) who actually wrote the code owns the copyright, and they can choose to provide it to you under a specific license.  They can also provide it to someone else under a different license, or not license it to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;community&quot; does not directly matter.  However in an open source project, where many different people are writing software together, it depends on the license and the project.  Some projects require copyright assignment to the Foundation that runs the project; then the Foundation can choose which licenses it provides. Otherwise, every individual contributor owns their own copyright, and typically the &lt;strong&gt;software as a whole&lt;/strong&gt; is provided to everyone under the same open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get more detailed than that you need to provide a specific example of the code, licenses, and rights you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that software on github that does not have a LICENSE file is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; licensed to you, only provided under the GitHub terms of service, which only allows you to &quot;to allow others to view and fork your repositories&quot;, not otherwise redistribute them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:05:22.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:14:29.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what software they are including and what the licenses are.  Many OSI-approved open source licenses have NOTICE or license redistribution requirements that are the specific steps that redistributors have to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The risks depend on if the organization redistributing the bundled software anywhere (not just the app store) is providing any notice at all, what the license is, and what the policies the original software creator - i.e. Apache, some GPL project, whatever - have about pursing legal action.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Licensing &amp;amp; Compliance team&lt;/a&gt; that actively works to ensure that people follow the GPL for their software packages, and they have sued non-compliant redistributors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get a better answer, we need to know what packages and licenses you're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:14:29.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:23:45.270" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some useful resources about trademark law for developers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fossmarks.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FOSSMarks&lt;/a&gt;, an introduction to trademark law for developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://modeltrademarkguidelines.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Model Trademark Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, a sample trademark policy you can copy for your project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;trademark resources&lt;/a&gt; from the ASF branding team.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastEditorUserId="2803" LastEditDate="2016-06-11T19:29:44.047" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T19:29:44.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3993" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:23:45.270" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to law or registered trademarks of software projects. When asking a legal question, be sure to make note of the relevant legal jurisdiction in your question." OwnerUserId="2803" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-11T19:30:13.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T19:30:13.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:25:39.583" Score="10" ViewCount="1726" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all popular open source licenses require derivative works to give attribution to the original author(s).  The only exceptions I'm aware of are the nearly-public-domains ones (CC0, WTFPL, Unlicense).  Even very permissive licenses like MIT and BSD require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there legal reasons why most licenses include attribution requirements?  Or is it just a case of &quot;most people want to be attributed&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="536" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T10:19:19.563" Title="Why do almost all open source licenses require attribution?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2016-06-10T16:29:51.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no: In most cases yes, your logo is covered under that permissive license, but also no, you still (may) retain trademark rights for use of that logo in conjunction with your software product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks != copyright, and most open source licenses are only copyright licenses.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#trademarks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; is the clearest license, because it makes explicit what is actually legally implicit (even if it's not obvious to non-lawers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark law in almost all countries is about &lt;strong&gt;actual use&lt;/strong&gt; of the name/logo by an organization (you) to refer to a specific product that you're providing to the public.  As long as you are consistent about using this specific logo to refer to your software, you can call it your trademark.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to register a trademark; merely continuing to use a consistent name/logo for the same product is enough.  However registration (in each country; they're all different) does give you significantly more rights and ability to prevent others from using your logo as their trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus: people can copy and modify the logo under the permissive license.  But they can't use it as their own trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T16:29:51.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3998" CreationDate="2016-06-10T17:52:08.580" Score="1" ViewCount="978" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been searching a lot recently about open licenses, because of college work, but now I want to release some personal stuff and I want to know just what can be licensed with a MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most licenses are about software, but a website lists the MIT license to release open source hardware, by modifying the &quot;obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;)&quot; part to &quot;obtaining a copy of this hardware, software, and associated documentation files (the &quot;Product&quot;)&quot;. Does that mean I could release other products under the MIT license by making the appropriate changes, like pictures, music, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5158" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T16:40:02.230" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T16:40:02.230" Title="What kinds of products can I release under a MIT License?" Tags="|mit|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2016-06-10T18:07:39.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but you should leave the license as-is, since it's far more likely that others will be willing to use something under the MIT license - which has been reviewed and re-used by a &lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt; of people - rather than under some one-off custom license that no-one has heard of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you need to read the license and understand exactly what it means.  In particular, will you actually be selling/distributing hardware, i.e. physical computers? Or are you really only distributing software or information that makes up a hardware design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to look up the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Open Source Hardware Association&lt;/a&gt; or related groups, who have already done a lot of work in figuring out how to write sensible licenses for hardware designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2803" LastActivityDate="2016-06-10T18:07:39.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3996" CreationDate="2016-06-11T03:42:58.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; - You shouldn't use a software license for non-software, and you shouldn't change an existing license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to know just what can be licensed with a MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; is a software license, so in general, that's all it should be used to license. There's no inherent restrictions on your licensing something else with it... but as you've already found, there may be inconsistencies with exactly what parts of your non-software work it covers. These might become a problem in a court of law and could be open to wide interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that mean I could release other products under the MIT license by making the appropriate changes, like pictures, music, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not really. Because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't call it the MIT license if you change it,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you might not be able to change it anyway,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even if you do, it adds to the license proliferation problem, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your changes might not be legally sound.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, if you change the license, &lt;strong&gt;it's no longer the MIT license&lt;/strong&gt;. Calling it that would be confusing, because the MIT license is well-known and refers to the specific words of the license that have been written, copyrighted, and legally tested. As well as being confusing, MIT won't take kindly to you using their name in a license they have not written :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, you can &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; change the license although I personally think this might be a legal grey area. Unless stated otherwise, the actual &lt;em&gt;text of the license&lt;/em&gt; would &lt;strong&gt;automatically be copyrighted to MIT&lt;/strong&gt;, and unless they've given you permission to change it, you would most likely be breaking their copyright by doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, it's unlikely that they'll have too much of a concern with this, as long as you use a different name for your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another problem though: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license proliferation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, by writing your own license, you are burdening people who may choose to use your product because they have to read your license, understand it, consider it, and possibly even get legal advice on it. With a standard license, they would have already done this once to cover them for hundreds of products... so the easiest thing for them to do in this case might just be to skip over your product and use one with a license they know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you're ok with all this, there's another big whammy: &lt;strong&gt;how will you know your changes are legally sound&lt;/strong&gt;? Open source licenses have gone through a long vetting process and have been considered by countless lawyers, software developers, and others with knowledge and interest in the process. By using an open source license, you're benefitting from this combined knowledge pool. Unless you're a lawyer - or have access to one - a license you write yourself is unlikely to be as legally sound as one of these licenses and as such, you could find out later that there are loopholes you, or those who use your product, hadn't considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In summary:&lt;/strong&gt; you shouldn't use a software license for non-software, and you shouldn't change an existing license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-11T03:50:15.690" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T03:50:15.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2016-06-11T11:22:12.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Templates and licensing, oh joy.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;classicthesis.sty&lt;/code&gt; (package/software) defines the layout of the final result. Usually, LaTeX package files are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://latex-project.org/lppl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LPPL&lt;/a&gt;. Classicthesis is under GPL, because using the GPL seems to be cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classicthesis (template, example) also provides an example file, with some dummy text. You are replacing the example text with &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; ideas, the content is yours. You can license your stuff in any way you see fit. The final result is a pdf (or a printed version), not software. No GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify the files and make them publicly available, for example as code examples in your document, then the content is not yours and you have to obey the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course i agree, that this whole template business is confusing. The term template for LaTeX isn't even defined. &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/309614/what-is-a-template&quot;&gt;What is a LaTeX template?&lt;/a&gt;. If you are interested, you can read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/johannesbottcher/templateConfusion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my confusion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/82713/is-a-pdf-output-from-a-latex-document-a-derived-work-from-the-lppl-standard-p&quot;&gt;How about all this with  the LPPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5306" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:36:12.237" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T11:22:12.160" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3994" CreationDate="2016-06-11T20:43:42.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is because it help enforcing the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holder can enforce the license, so you need to know who are the authors. Attribution help keeping the authorship clear and know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license you listed are &lt;em&gt;&quot;unlicenses&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, so there are no requirements, they just assure you that there will be no enforcement of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-06-11T20:43:42.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-12T00:33:43.980" Score="-3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;All open-source projects I have come across so far appear to be cross-platform, such as VLC, GIMP, and OpenOffice. All of this software is able to be run on multiple devices, including Windows and Mac OS X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do open source projects always run on multiple platforms and architectures? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Can open-source projects be not cross-platform?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5312" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-12T18:32:04.560" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T17:26:08.920" Title="Cross Platform Open Source Projects" Tags="|source-code|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4001" CreationDate="2016-06-12T08:20:42.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, open source projects can be platform-constrained. Look at the various &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedos.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FreeDOS&lt;/a&gt; projects for some examples; many of them only work on DOS PCs. There are many other examples of Windows-only projects, Linux-only projects (even Linux-only projects that work on a single architecture), AmigaOS-only projects...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course with a free software license there's nothing to stop people from porting projects to other platforms!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-06-12T08:20:42.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T06:07:07.280" Score="5" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still unclear about licensing. If I have a project on Github that's licensed under GPL and found pseudocode on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20555779/try-to-check-if-tree-is-maximum-heap&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow question&lt;/a&gt;, must I now dual license my code on Github and GPL as Creative Commons? The idea conveyed in the pseudocode is good yet simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I think this is because Stack Exchange is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Share Alike&lt;/a&gt;, which is a viral licensing scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T08:49:28.987" Title="Must CC BY-SA be included for ideas and code taken from Stack Overflow?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4004" CreationDate="2016-06-13T08:42:20.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering this same thing not too long ago. I ended up finding that CC-BY-SA 3.0 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239079/317795&quot;&gt;one way compatible with CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one way compatible with GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you can relicense what you find at StackExchange under GPLv3. This helps immensely in including SE-found code in a GPL project, because you won't be able to dual-license that project back into CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; There's one (small) caveat to this: according to the license text, you can't just relicense it willy nilly, you must adapt it first. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1950/what-counts-as-adaptation-for-using-code-licensed-under-cc-by-sa-4-0-in-software&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for more information (thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/138/unor&quot;&gt;unor&lt;/a&gt; for pointing this out). However, including the source code in a larger project would be classed as adaption, IMO - just don't try to relicense &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that source code you've found, verbatim, with nothing else along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT 2:&lt;/strong&gt; If the code isn't copyrightable at all - i.e. it's an idea; it's not original enough etc. - then do what you like without restrictions! &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/271559/317795&quot;&gt;This answer on meta&lt;/a&gt; covers the options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that some people on StackExchange apply non-viral licenses (such as MIT, or even public domain dedication) to their posts in their profiles, which gives you more freedom for their code too (providing it is their original code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others may happily give you permission if you ask them. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should still all be done at your own risk though, because you don't actually know for sure where code posted on StackExchange has originally come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T22:46:16.140" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4014" CreationDate="2016-06-13T13:19:26.657" Score="10" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;What defenses does an Open Source project utilizing the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4) have against unknown developers who may have intentions to merge malicious (but not immediately recognizable as such) code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:16/&quot;&gt;http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:16/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general answer will suffice but to learn more about my specific reasons for asking this please read these dev logs:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://getmonero.org/2016/06/05/overview-and-logs-for-the-dev-meeting-held-on-2016-06-05.html&quot;&gt;https://getmonero.org/2016/06/05/overview-and-logs-for-the-dev-meeting-held-on-2016-06-05.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5318" LastEditorUserId="5318" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T13:30:44.817" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T16:54:32.933" Title="How to stop/mitigate damage from abuses of the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4)" Tags="|collaboration|github|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4011" CreationDate="2016-06-13T15:09:48.420" Score="7" ViewCount="1612" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've developed a little software that use &lt;strong&gt;FFmpeg&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;command line mode&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further clarify: My software launch several times ffmpeg.exe that is stored inside the same folder as my .exe.&#xA;User never interact with it and never see it. It's only copied inside my software folder and is launched it in background by my program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a very newbie to software developing, and also with licencing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FFmpeg is distributed under &lt;strong&gt;LGPL Licence&lt;/strong&gt; (from what I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Now that my software is completed I want to release it to everyone for &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; (Maybe including some sort of optional donation) but I want to retain some sort of domain onto it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably I will also release it in some kind of open-source licence but I didn't have decided which one it's the best, so temporarily this option is out of my mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I don't understand clearly if I can &lt;strong&gt;distribute FFmpeg with my software&lt;/strong&gt; (and for that I mean including it into my installer and use it in form of command-line use inside my software logic) without have to release my software under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a legal question that I don't understand clearly: What does it mean &lt;strong&gt;&quot;including&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; a LGPL software? Isn't inside my software, only inside an installer that copy it onto clients PC with my software, that will launch it in background. My software don't &quot;include&quot; (inside their code) any library of the software neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software it's small but valuable (I think :D ), I don't want to release onto a licence (LGPL) that doesn't convince me 100%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do to distribute my software 'with' FFmpeg?&#xA;Distribute under LGPL it's the only option or I'm &quot;free&quot; because I use it in command-line mode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5320" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T06:53:05.913" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T06:53:05.913" Title="Can I use/distribute LGPL command line software in mine that isn't LGPL?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|lgpl|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-13T16:32:26.247" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: this was migrated to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/10945/would-the-oracle-v-google-lawsuit-imply-that-any-api-can-be-re-implemented-inc&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/10945/would-the-oracle-v-google-lawsuit-imply-that-any-api-can-be-re-implemented-inc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understood that the lawsuit implies that APIs are not copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardware &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CPU ISAs&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. x86 and ARM) are an API (?), and could have different implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are precedents where CPU developer companies have sued / &quot;cease and desist&quot;ed re-implementors, e.g. ARM v. Amber: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&amp;amp;doc_id=1287452&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&amp;amp;doc_id=1287452&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would the lawsuit mean that ISAs can also be re-implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I expect the answer to be no and that it is just my lack of understanding of the case. How is the Java API different from an ISA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This video claims that companies managed to re-implement the &quot;retractable pen&quot; hardware &quot;API&quot; to avoid patent infringement: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/MhVw-MHGv4s?t=247&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/MhVw-MHGv4s?t=247&lt;/a&gt; , how are ISAs different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ReactOS&lt;/a&gt; is a project that comes to mind back to software land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1072" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:25.783" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T12:48:23.183" Title="Would the Oracle v. Google lawsuit imply that any API can be re-implemented, including hardware CPU ISAs?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2016-06-14T00:43:32.763" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4073" CreationDate="2016-06-13T17:23:53.910" Score="4" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a code project which I have released under the GPL3+, which you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shadowk29/CUSUM&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I would like to implement a section of code that would use the lmfit nonlinear fitting library, provided &lt;a href=&quot;http://apps.jcns.fz-juelich.de/doku/sc/lmfit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The lmfit library is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license, which appears to be compatible with the GPL3+. My question is how to bundle them together. I would like to include the lmfit source code inside my git repo. What is the proper way to handle the licensing? Do I simple leave the BSD license in the lmfit files that I use and leave the GPL clause in my own source code? Does the presence of the BSD license in the repo affect files that I have licensed under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: on further reading, it seems that I can release FreeBSD software under the GPL. SO my question is about how to actually do this properly. Do I include both licenses in the source code? Obviously I have to keep the copyright and BSD licenses intact in those sections of the code, but do I also add the GPL so that the source for lmfit in my git repo would now have two licenses inside it? Do I add my own copyright like I have in my other source code (I am guessing no).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5321" LastEditorUserId="5321" LastEditDate="2016-06-13T17:36:20.117" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T22:26:13.447" Title="Using FreeBSD licensed code in a GPL3+ project" Tags="|license-compatibility|relicensing|gpl-3|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4008" CreationDate="2016-06-13T19:12:10.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like your work is a completely spearate work from FFmpeg. You work and FFmpeg are two different works that happen to interoperate. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's GPL FAQ says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I release a non-free program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. For instance, if the program uses only simple fork and exec to invoke and communicate with plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're directly invoking the program, that sounds like your case. Simply include or make obviously available the source code for FFmpeg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am wrong, and your code actually interacts more closely with FFmpeg, then your work (plus FFmpeg) could qualify as a &amp;quot;combined work&amp;quot; under the LGPL. Under the LGPL v2.1, a combined work consists of an LGPL-licensed library, and an application that uses it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “Application” is any work that makes use of an interface provided by the Library, but which is not otherwise based on the Library. Defining a subclass of a class defined by the Library is deemed a mode of using an interface provided by the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by combining or linking an Application with the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your work is indeed a combined work, then the LGPL requires that you offer the source code of the LGPL library (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; your own code external to the library) and that you perform the combination in a way that allows users to easily replace the library with a modified version. In this case, it seems clear that you're already doing the latter: if the executable file is simply adjacent to your script and invoked directly, then it's trivial for a user to drop in a modified FFMpeg. As for offering the source, that's something you need to do anyway, whenever you distribute an LGPL-licensed work under most circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-13T19:12:10.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4013" CreationDate="2016-06-14T00:07:53.947" Score="29" ViewCount="6109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some FOSS licenses explicitly mention that they are irrevocable (as long as their conditions are met) and others are silent on this point. Does this matter? Are the licenses that don't mention it revocable at-will? Is the irrevocable term redundant? Or is it affected by other things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a few licenses that don't mention whether they are irrevocable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/about/&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some that explicitly mention irrevocability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;...and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;...a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to...&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T08:02:44.970" Title="Are licenses irrevocable by default?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4012" CreationDate="2016-06-14T02:54:37.317" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;A non-exclusive copyright license (such as most FOSS licenses) can be revoked at any time only if there was no consideration involved. The United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeal took this on in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17776182574171214893&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=6&amp;amp;as_vis=1&amp;amp;oi=scholarr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacobsen v. Katzer in 2008&lt;/a&gt; and ruled that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; consideration exchanged in the use of FOSS by a licensee. This indicates that an FOSS license that's silent on revocation is likely revocable only for violation of it's conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T23:00:37.520" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T23:00:37.520" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4006" CreationDate="2016-06-14T16:54:32.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on what I read the safety is that the process happens in the dev branch not master. Essentially no harm is done as long as someone spots the problem within a reasonable time period:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for i = 1 to 180 days               # 6 months of 30 days each, this is a magic for loop that knows when a day passes&#xA;{&#xA;1. new PR gets eyeball review&#xA;2. PR is merged to dev branch&#xA;3. if merge == crap, new PR made to address crap, goto 1. elseif, goto 4&#xA;4. if i == 180, merge to master. elseif, goto 1&#xA;}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/2556/c4-discussion&quot;&gt;https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/2556/c4-discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system allows ample time for review but is not perfect. Backdoors are always possible and commits from new contributors should always be looked at carefully even as they are assumed to be trustworthy IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal is to be seen as welcoming to new contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5331" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T16:54:32.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-14T20:18:16.923" Score="10" ViewCount="1162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know of a guide that walks you through the choosing of a licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastEditorUserId="5290" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T21:07:05.113" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T21:07:05.113" Title="Is there a one-stop guide to choose a licence?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-15T19:40:56.457" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4015" CreationDate="2016-06-14T20:26:18.890" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be GitHub's &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot;&gt;Choose a License tool&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wizard will let you choose what you're most concerned about - be it giving maximum freedom to your users, preventing patent claims, or ensuring that downstream developers can't remove user freedoms (i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, there's 7 main licenses which this tool will help you compare. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/non-software/&quot;&gt;non-software options&lt;/a&gt; that it links to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-14T23:37:34.667" LastActivityDate="2016-06-14T23:37:34.667" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2016-06-15T01:13:21.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You most likely want to use a rather permissive licence for your logo, and handle the rest through trademark law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If things go well, your logo is going to be used in various places to refer to your project, and the licence needs to allow that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, a print magazine writing about your project and using the logo is a derivative work, even if your &quot;contribution&quot; is only minimal. The logo will be converted from the colorspace it was designed in to the colorspace used for printing (most likely, some CMYK, but could also be Hexachrome or something else), which is a modification that would most likely invalidate the &quot;mere aggregation&quot; clause in the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you really want other people to be able to create derivative works of your logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark law comes in because you want the logo and name to be used to refer to your project, and your project only. This is something that copyright law cannot adequately handle, because e.g. a visually similar but independently designed logo would not be considered infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T01:13:21.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4015" CreationDate="2016-06-15T01:31:52.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a few charts on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/162136/192046&quot;&gt;Programmers Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CZIoa.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chart one&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dOMMF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Chart two&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GitHub and Creative Commons licence choosers have their downsides. The CC chooser looks at non-software licences. The GitHub licence chooser isn't necessarily interactive - and only included a bunch of pre-selected &quot;featured&quot; licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; interactive licence chooser developed by OSS Watch, published by the University of Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T01:31:52.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3970" CreationDate="2016-06-15T05:26:13.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;How do I attribute authors if I don't know their real names?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this has wider applicability to just this case, so I'll attempt to answer with future visitors in mind. I'm also intentionally avoiding the issue of licensing but just focusing on author attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing I would do in this case - although not necessarily required - is &lt;strong&gt;contact the author&lt;/strong&gt; if possible, and ask how they would like to be attributed. Some may be happy to give you their full name, others may prefer their nickname, or others may even be happy to say '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;do whatever you like!&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(When I post code snippets I've written, I'm always happy for it to be used in any way, but if people want to attribute me then that's awesome. I know many other SE users (not everybody though!) apply a similar attitude to their posts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't contact the authors or don't hear back from them, then - assuming you already have the implicit permission to use the code - I would &lt;strong&gt;attribute them based on their nickname, and include their profile URL&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still a suitable default method of attribution, as it unambiguously identifies the person (maybe even more so than their full name on its own, actually!). In the case of StackExchange, including the user URL is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution guidelines&lt;/a&gt; (point 4) when including SE content on another website, and in any case, it allows a future user of the code to see who was behind it, easily locate the context of it, and possibly even contact the user. This would be suitable for both your StackOverflow and GitHub examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if a user then contacted you later and asked you to change the way you're attributing them, then you should follow that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-26T02:04:28.757" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T02:04:28.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4015" CreationDate="2016-06-15T05:55:43.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only one serious free libre and open source license wizard picker to pick a license and this is the work of &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/dbentley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dan Bentley&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/therealfitz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian Fitzpatrick&lt;/a&gt; : &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wtsmh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wtsmh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Which open source license?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T05:55:43.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T08:52:48.243" Score="11" ViewCount="7937" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed the GNU GPL v3 license created by Github is very different than the one created by Netbeans. One of the differences is the first line in Netbean's is &lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2016 hotwisp&lt;/code&gt; Must the GPL include the real name or pseudonym (e.g. username) of the copyright holder or author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could the GPL be different between Netbeans and Github? Here is the rest of the license added by Netbeans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (at your option) any later version.&#xA;      This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the   GNU&#xA;  General Public License for more details.&#xA;      You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License   along with this program.  If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would include Github's but it's over 600 lines long! Is the GPL licnece itself copyrighted? For example are you free to modify it as seen fit, and that's what Github or Netbeans did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastActivityDate="2022-05-08T05:51:26.793" Title="Must author's name be included in GNU GPL v3?" Tags="|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4023" CreationDate="2016-06-15T09:02:08.390" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The file added by Github is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;text of the GPL itself&lt;/a&gt;, which is © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc., and may not be modified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short text added by Netbeans is the license grant, described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL&lt;/a&gt; after the terms and conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't add your own copyright notice to the GPL itself, but the license grant should bear your own notice, not the FSF's, and be reproduced in the header of every source file. (The GPL itself traditionally goes in a file called &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; at the root of your project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-15T09:02:08.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4039" CreationDate="2016-06-15T11:07:55.200" Score="4" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard the term &lt;em&gt;GPL leakage&lt;/em&gt; mentioned very recently in a presentation from a well qualified speaker from MongoDB at an event for developers &amp;amp; integrators in the cloud computing market.  I've never heard this term anywhere else, but the audience seemed to follow what he was saying, suggesting this might be an institutional issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context was that cloud computing providers might be providing database implementations to include MongoDB (itself open source, AGPL v3.0) as well as their own software.  I can imagine some of the legal implications of this, but only vaguely... so would appreciate generally what's meant by this term and/or whatever institutional problem it suggests: preferably with an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5346" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T12:06:25.270" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T09:04:17.597" Title="What is GPL leakage?" Tags="|gpl|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4043" CreationDate="2016-06-15T11:10:12.500" Score="11" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;JUnit is licenced under Eclipse Public Licence which, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_Public_License#Compatibility&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, is incompatible with GPL. So does this mean if you’re working on a project licenced with GPL you can’t use JUnit? It's too bad as JUnit is quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-15T12:08:32.517" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:47:51.910" Title="Can software licenced in Eclipse Public Licence be used in a project with GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-15T12:09:08.160" Score="7" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make something that is to be used by something with a restrictive license (but not actually included in your work) can your work still have any license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4026/can-software-licenced-in-eclipse-public-licence-be-used-in-a-project-with-gpl&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks about restrictive licensed software being included in a GPL project. It got me thinking, any code you create is your own and you can license it anyway you want, correct? It doesn't matter if your code is intended to be used with something else with an incompatible license. For example Junit's license isn't GPL compatible, but if you make code to be used by Junit, it still can be licensed anyway you want. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T07:04:44.283" Title="Can source code that is intended to be used with something with a restrictive license, still be licensed anyway the author wants?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4180" CreationDate="2016-06-15T15:06:56.720" Score="10" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did a google search and read through some license information, blog etc. here and there but I'm just not sure whether I can use CC-BY/CC-0 Music in my OpenSource Project no matter what license I use for that.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I use a software license that is compatible with the music I use or look for music that is compatible with whatever software license I am going to use (in case they are not compatible)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To answer the question about changing the music: It doesn't have to be changed, if the license doesn't allow it that'd be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5349" LastEditorUserId="5349" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T09:47:37.160" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T09:47:37.160" Title="What License can I use in my project if I use CC-BY/CC-0 Music?" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by|cc0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4028" CreationDate="2016-06-16T02:16:58.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This kind of discussion arises with plugins too: can I license a plugin under the GPL if it's designed to work with something GPL-incompatible, even including close source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO what matters is distribution, so I'd have no problem with such a situation as long as they two components are distributed separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are benefits to open sourcing the code even in such a situation. It would allow others to contribute improvements to the code. It would allow the plugin to be ported for another app, perhaps one that is FLOSS licensed. And it would allow parts of the code to be extracted and used in other apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T02:16:58.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T07:55:04.257" Score="13" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m learning about the Eclipse Public License. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_Public_License&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, it “requires that anyone distributing the work grant every recipient a license to any patents that they might hold that cover the modifications they have made”. I don’t understand what “&lt;strong&gt;license to any patents&lt;/strong&gt;” mean. Is it talking about how in viral licensing schemes there may be a restriction on what kind of licenses derivative works can have, and it’s explicitly saying that there is no such requirement in the Eclipse Public License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/epl&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; states EPL grants “patent rights from all contributors to use and make available the code”. I thought code can only be copyrighted, not patented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5255" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T11:28:38.040" Title="What does it mean to license a patent to software?" Tags="|terminology|patents|epl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4032" CreationDate="2016-06-16T08:46:15.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought code can only be copyrighted, not patented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be the misunderstanding.  It is more generally agreed that &lt;strong&gt;algorithms&lt;/strong&gt; can't be patented, but (sadly) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#Jurisdictions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;various jurisdictions allow patents on inventions implemented entirely in sofware&lt;/a&gt; to varying degrees, and similarly to varying degrees on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;business methods&lt;/a&gt;, if such are implemented in the distributed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent grant in the EPL makes it explicit that anyone who (a) receives code under the EPL, and (b) makes modifications which they either choose or are obliged to release to the community under the EPL, cannot later claim that any patents they hold that relate to their modifications permit them to prevent the EPL-licensed redistribution of those modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#section11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3 s11&lt;/a&gt; has comparable language, again to handle the issue with patent rights being used to frustrate license-granted freedoms.  Until software patents are finally disavowed by legislatures, I feel we are likely to see more such language in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T08:46:15.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4032" CreationDate="2016-06-16T11:30:56.633" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;A practical example of the difference between software and patent licenses is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg&quot;&gt;FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt;. FFmpeg has support for many audiovisual codecs, many of which are covered by software patents in some countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to obtain a copy of the source code of FFmpeg and you were somewhere without software patents, like say Antarctica, then you could use it completely freely. But if you lived in the US, it would be a very different matter. As a private citizen you can generally use FFmpeg without any fear of reprisal, say by using VLC, but if you wanted to make the next competitor to YouTube, you can be sure that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA&quot;&gt;MPEG LA&lt;/a&gt; will send their lawyers to you to demand you pay up. This is not because of copyright infringement, there are no issues with that because FFmpeg is licensed under the LGPL/GPL, but because the person or website you obtained the software from does not own the patents and so cannot give you a license to them. If you live in the US you might be able to legally share the sourcecode to FFmpeg, but be unable to legally run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By licensing both the copyright and patents of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM&quot;&gt;WebM&lt;/a&gt; users can have confidence that they can use it safely, free from the threat of a patent infringement lawsuit. (Or at least theoretically - there's the chance that some company may try to claim that WebM does infringe on one of their patents. Patent's aren't fun!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T11:30:56.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-16T13:55:07.113" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the biggest difference between a BSD-2-Clause license and an MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the pros and cons of each?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5331" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T01:29:50.370" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T01:29:50.370" Title="BSD-2-Clause vs MIT" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-16T18:46:20.273" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4023" CreationDate="2016-06-16T20:25:16.507" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the GPL license itself copyrighted? Are you free to modify it as seen fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes it is, and no you aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the full, copyrighted text of the GPLv3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which should be exactly the same as what you saw on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you scroll right to the bottom, you'll see the heading &lt;em&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/em&gt;, with a shorter summary of the license. This summary should be exactly the same as what you saw on Netbeans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shorter summary is also copyrighted, and is provided for use where including the full license text would be prohibitive - eg. at the top of every source file. There's also a shorter version there for outputting to the terminal when a command is run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the these two shorter cases, the full license text should also be provided as part of the program, usually in a file called LICENSE. Otherwise, it's always available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at the GNU website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must the GPL include the real name or pseudonym (e.g. username) of the copyright holder or author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note here that the copyright notice you saw in the Netbeans license is not part of the GPL - it's the copyright notice for the actual program. That copyright notice is then followed by the GPL notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to make a program copyright, this copyright line is most certainly recommended (no matter which license you use, or whether you use a license at all), and the copyright line should include something that distinguishes the author. I would usually use my real name, but a program is still under copyright if a pseudonym is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be slight downsides to using a pseudonym - for more information on this you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20210428165628/https://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl101.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this PDF from copyright.gov&lt;/a&gt; which says in part &amp;quot;An author of a copyrighted work can use a pseudonym or pen name&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;If a copyright is held under a fictitious name, business dealings involving the copyrighted property may raise questions about its ownership&amp;quot;. The copyright for pseudonymous works may also be linked to a standard timeframe rather than the author's life + 70 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-05-08T05:51:26.793" LastActivityDate="2022-05-08T05:51:26.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3966" CreationDate="2016-06-16T21:00:51.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're essentially asking here:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Can I legally use code I found on a forum?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is 'it depends'. And by the way, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IANAL/TINLA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the code is eligible for copyright,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what license the content of the particular forum is under, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what additional license (if any) the individual contributor has put it under.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code you've linked to comes from StackOverflow, a GitHub Gist, and a post in a GitHub issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing you need to consider is &lt;strong&gt;whether the code is copyrightable at all&lt;/strong&gt;. Quoting from a comment made by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/4689/leezer3&quot;&gt;leezer3&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4005/4763&quot;&gt;another post&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;In order to be copyrightable (under UK/European law at least) the work must not be a simple mathematical algorithm, and must have unique properties.&quot; In other words, there needs to be something &lt;em&gt;creative&lt;/em&gt; about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's simple enough, you can use it - no problem (I'd usually still include a comment linking to the post it came from though). If it's more complex, can you take the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of the solution and &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; rewrite it &quot;in your own words&quot;? If so, you now own the copyright on it (when doing this I still tend to comment with the original post as a sort of 'hat tip', but that's not required).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not simple and you can't/don't want to rewrite it, then you need to consider &lt;strong&gt;how it's licensed on the website or forum you found it on&lt;/strong&gt;. In the case of all StackExchange sites, scroll to the bottom where you'll see a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;. You are free to use and change &lt;em&gt;any content&lt;/em&gt; (code or text) that you find on SE sites, as long as you give credit and as long as you continue to share in the same manner any changes you make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as giving credit, &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; (also linked from the footer of every page) explains how StackExchange would like you to give that attribution. This post is written for websites who use SE content wholesale, so I tend to take a slightly different approach in code: I just ensure that I link in a comment to the original post so it's clear where it came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as sharing any adaptions in a like manner, this is where it can get a bit murky and where it's probably better to just rewrite what you find anyway. Depending on the license of your final product, you might be able to relicense your adaptions - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4005/4763&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for a path to license CC BY-SA content under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of GitHub Gists and Issues, anything posted on GitHub is owned by the original contributor and is not covered by a blanket license. So, it is automatically theirs unless they've given you a specific license to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I would assume someone posting code in a Gist or Issue would be happy for you to use it, to be safe you really need to ask them for permission. They might license it to you under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; or they might just say you can do whatever you like with it. Either way, crediting them with a comment linking to the Gist/Issue is the appropriate thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, one additional consideration is &lt;strong&gt;whether the contributor has put their code under any additional license&lt;/strong&gt;. On StackExchange, some users say in their profile that their code is also available under the Apache or MIT licenses, or released into the public domain. On GitHub, look for a comment or message to a similar effect on the user's profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, you can try to contact that user directly and many will be happy to give you additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your additional questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any legal differences where ... the initial piece of code was written by me and then other forum users corrected/updated it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly. Going back to whether the code is eligible for copyright, if the updates were wholesale contributions that are copyrightable on their own, then technically the user who made those changes owns the copyright, and you would need to apply the guidelines I went through above if you want to use those contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any legal differences where ... I just asked a question and got an answer (a piece of code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Whether or not you asked the question and got a piece of code in response makes no difference to any copyright and license that may or may not be on that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final consideration: if you use code you find on a public forum, you are still responsible for ensuring you are using it correctly. You'll want to be very sure that the person who posted code you use is really the copyright owner of the code, and that they didn't just copy it from somewhere else. Because of this, to be safe, you might want to just take most forum posts as 'suggestions' and use the ideas to write the code yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-16T21:00:51.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4029" CreationDate="2016-06-17T15:29:21.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are compatible with almost everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using CC-0 you have the right to do everything and when using CC-By you just need to give credits to the creator and point out changes. For example in the Readme.md&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3757" LastEditorUserId="3757" LastEditDate="2016-06-17T19:04:39.577" LastActivityDate="2016-06-17T19:04:39.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4025" CreationDate="2016-06-18T09:04:17.597" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This term's current unavailability on Internet search suggests it was improvised by the speaker according to a negative association with the GPL that listeners would have recognised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viral license&lt;/a&gt; (marked as pejorative by Wikipedia) is discouraged because it focuses on the vulnerabilities rather than the protection offered by open source licensing agreements.  Yet it is probably the best short synonym (part of speech aside) for &quot;leakage&quot; and refers to this licensing quality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... allows derivative works only when permissions are preserved in modified versions of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which provokes the worry over software vendors' own additions to GPL software also being freely redistributable under the GPL license.  MongoDB is a good test case of this idea because of practical licensing situations for which they &amp;amp; others discuss some problems and solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl-what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant&quot;&gt;AGPL - what you can do and what you can't&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.mongodb.org/post/103832439/the-agpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB: The AGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which provide specific examples as requested by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5346" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-06-18T09:04:17.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-18T10:16:12.920" Score="12" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there data on the frequency of Open Source License type by software industry type (eg. video editing, malware scanning, word processing, cryptocurrency, VPN, file encryption, etc)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data for any and all types of Open Source Licenses would interest me, but the following common license types are most relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 3-Clause &quot;New&quot; or &quot;Revised&quot; license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 2-Clause &quot;Simplified&quot; or &quot;FreeBSD&quot; license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU General Public License (GPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Library or &quot;Lesser&quot; General Public License (LGPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Common Development and Distribution License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eclipse Public License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5318" LastEditorUserId="13187" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T06:19:52.763" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T06:19:52.763" Title="Is there data on the frequency of Open Source License type by industry?" Tags="|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4042" CreationDate="2016-06-18T20:59:07.040" Score="14" ViewCount="2249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine, I published a page on the web. It contains some javascript code, which uses open source library. Is it in general considered redistribution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, it's a redistribution. You put code on the web, and it's distributed to the user's browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand it's not. You don't distribute code out of your server, and usually the client part is meaningless without the server part, so downloading can be considered a part of process of using this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think if this is redistribution or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T05:56:24.287" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T13:48:24.547" Title="Is putting a page with javascript in it considered a redistribution" Tags="|distribution|relicensing|redistribution|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4041" CreationDate="2016-06-19T09:47:35.430" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every lawyer I consulted with always gave me the same answer: JavaScript in web page is code redistributed to whoever loads this page in their browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So yes, this is unambiguously redistribution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to answer the underlying question that you did you ask: yes, you have to comply with any specific FLOSS licensing requirements for this piece of JavaScript code, mainly attribution and code redistribution if the license requires it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to continue answering more unasked underlying questions, if the JS code is minified and the license requires corresponding source code redistribution, you would also need to make the un-minified version of that code available for redistribution. Think of minified JS much in the same way as a compiled binary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, you can check this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nexb.com/healthcaregov_case_study.html&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; about a BSD-licensed JavaScript used without proper attribution in a web page and a detailed technical analysis of the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, this create some interesting and funny challenges when it comes to licensing requirements... Say you use a GPL-licensed bit of JavaScript code that is 100 lines and about 1KB of code. &#xA;You would technically need to include the text of the GPL to be in full compliance which may be ~ 40KB... or 40 times bigger than the code itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now practically, the GPL text would need to be available but it does not have to be available inside the JavaScript or the pages embedding that JS: it can be provided separately much the same way that a GNU Bash executable does not contain the GPL text but only a reference to it and the text is provided separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T11:37:56.473" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T11:37:56.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4026" CreationDate="2016-06-19T10:55:02.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a high level, this question is about how licensing flows between pieces of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume here a grossly simplified view that calling GPL-licensed code means that the copyleft applies to the calling code. (Things are much more nuanced in practice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 1. Non-GPL-licensed code calling GPL-licensed code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under my simplifying assumption, calling GPL-licensed code could only be done from code that is under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license. Think of it as if the license terms flow backwards from the called code to the calling code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 2. GPL-licensed code calling non-GPL-licensed code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically you cannot/should not make your GPL-licensed code depend on code that is not under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But details matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say you are creating a piece of GPL-licensed software designed to run on a proprietary OS and calling its proprietary API such as Windows. Can you do this? I think yes: generally speaking what is infrastructure and OS code does not have to be GPL-licensed. There are specific terms in the GPL about this as these are considered &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;system libraries.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say your GPL code calls OpenSSL? can you do this? The OpenSSL/SSLEay license is explicitly saying no. See at the bottom of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/gpl-2.0-openssl/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;license text&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The licence and distribution terms for any publically available version or derivative of this code cannot be changed.  i.e. this code cannot simply be copied and put under another distribution licence including the GNU Public Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note the typo &quot;publically&quot; is in the original license text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what GPL projects that are using OpenSSL do typically is to release their code with &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/openssl-ssleay/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;an exception to the GPL&lt;/a&gt; allowing the use of OpenSSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now let's get back to your actual question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can GPL-licensed code call the EPL-licensed JUnit library? The case 2. applies and this very similar to using OpenSSL. Therefore technically, you could/should not apply the bare GPL to your test code. And you should provide your test code calling JUnit under the GPL with some exception in the same way GPL-licensed code using OpenSSL typically uses such an exception. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now practically (unless you are building a test framework based on JUnit) none may really cares about the licensing of your test code: JUnit is open source and may not be GPL-compatible. Its license requirements do not flow backward. So every GPL project that may call JUnit does that without much ceremony even if technically they should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference you can also check these entries in the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&lt;/a&gt; where there is a discussion of using exceptions to the GPL &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Can I write free software that uses non-free libraries?&lt;/a&gt; where there is a discussion on why the FSF thinks you should not do this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T19:47:51.910" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:47:51.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4032" CreationDate="2016-06-19T11:28:38.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the skinny of how I understand patents and copyrights as a programmer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;copyright == how the code is written&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;patent == what the code does&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright is for the code&lt;/strong&gt; itself as an expression of instructions &quot;fixed on some tangible medium&quot; say a file on disk or a piece of paper. This is about how the code is organized and written. Copyright protection is implicit in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patents are for the ideas&lt;/strong&gt; that this code may implement, literally what the code does. Patent protection is not implicit and requires to obtain a Patent from some government in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you could write a different program doing the same thing as another and not infringe copyright. But irrespective of how it is written you may infringe a patent that covers what it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can license both if you own both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now getting back to you EPL question...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... when you grant a right to use code in an FLOSS license, my take is that you implicitly grant a license to any patent you may hold. The EPL and a few other licenses make this explicit to avoid any ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your code under the EPL and also have been granted a patent about what this code does then you also license this patent explicitly. Otherwise you would not be allowed to use the code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/IANAL /TINLA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T11:28:38.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4041" CreationDate="2016-06-19T13:48:24.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you are asking an ambiguous question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1: You have copied and pasted JS code from some library onto your page. Clearly, here, you are redistributing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2: you are loading a library of JavaScript from someone's CDN, and calling it. Now, the legal question becomes more complex. Essentially, is your page a derived work of the JavaScript library? The sort of logic that says that, for example, Drupal plugins are derived works of Drupal would say 'yes'. Other logic might say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T13:48:24.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4048" CreationDate="2016-06-19T15:02:28.643" Score="14" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that if someone chooses not to upgrade their software they are free to retain all license benefits of their existing software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please assume the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XYZ software version 1.0 has an The MIT License &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XYZ software version 1.1 has a LGPL-3.0 License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XYZpro software version 1.0 has a LGPL-3.0 License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XYZ software version 1.1 is identical to XYZpro software version 1.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;XYZ software version 1.0 continues to work as always but requires a change to a LGPL-3.0 License in order to upgrade to version 1.1 and take advantage of new features. Does a user who upgrades from XYZ software version 1.0 to version 1.1 have identical licensing rights as someone who downloads XYZpro software version 1.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I am asking if a license change upon upgrade would still retain any benefits (or restrictions) associated with the features contained in the previous version of the software before it was updated? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear that XYZpro software version 1.0 has a LGPL-3.0 License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does XYZ software version 1.1 still retain any MIT License benefits for features not altered during the upgrade from XYZ software version 1.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5318" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T21:43:52.127" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T10:26:13.150" Title="Impact of accepting a new open source licence type when updating software" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4046" CreationDate="2016-06-19T19:44:15.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would and would not. All code in XYZ 1.1 would be under the LGPL-3.0 including the code from XYZ 1.0. However, if you can isolate code that came only from XYZ 1.0 without any XYZ 1.1 code at all, that code would still be covered by the MIT license. That's the general case, however it's advisable to go back to XYZ 1.0 and get the code directly from it because of the exception case of a license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the release of XYZ 1.1 was by the owner(s) of the copyrights and/or with authorization for a license change from all the copyright owners, the release can change the license terms on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the code. In that case even the code in 1.1 that came from 1.0 is completely under the LGPL-3.0 in the 1.1 release. This doesn't, however, change the license terms on the 1.0 release itself, it remains under the MIT license and you can take code from it without involving the LGPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-06-19T19:44:15.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4046" CreationDate="2016-06-19T20:00:41.587" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does XYZ software version 1.1 still retain any MIT License benefits for features not altered during the upgrade from XYZ software version 1.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is attached to a specific set of code hence to a specific version and eventually a specific distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can continue to use the older MIT-licensed version under the MIT license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the newer version is LGPL-licensed as a whole, the LGPL apply to this whole version irrespective of the fact that some of the same code was under MIT in the previous version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, take MySQL: it is available from Oracle under the GPL or a commercial license. These are different builds of the same code. However, the same code can have different licenses and that fact does NOT make the rights from the license of one of the distributions flow to another distribution of the same code under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T10:26:13.150" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T10:26:13.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4050" CreationDate="2016-06-19T21:30:37.687" Score="13" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;From brief and rather humorous text of WTFPL license it seems like I can just take the code, slap GPLv3+ sticker on top of it and live happily ever after. Is this really so? Am I missing something? What if somebody else takes the same code and use it in proprietary product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5380" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-19T21:39:45.213" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T12:49:49.257" Title="Relicensing WTFPL code under GPL" Tags="|gpl|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4049" CreationDate="2016-06-20T03:02:41.043" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you could do that. GPLv3+ is much more restrictive than a WTFPL license so if someone else had an interest in the WTFPL license code you copied they would be much more likely to use it instead of the GPLv3+ re-licensed code you create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WTFPL is meant to be freely used by anyone (almost public domain). Your best defense is to make important substantial changes to your re-licensed GPLv3+ code so that a copycat using the original WTFPL code will be not be able to use all of your improvements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5374" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T03:02:41.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T11:52:02.097" Score="13" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode#s2a5B&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; about applying DRM (or other &quot;Effective Technological Measures&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No downstream restrictions.&lt;/strong&gt; You may not […] apply any Effective Technological Measures to […] the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder when exactly the &quot;exercise of the Licensed Rights&quot; is restricted in case of &lt;em&gt;CC BY&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s say Alice creates a song and uses a sound effect that is licensed under &lt;em&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/em&gt;. She sells this song, so she has to give attribution for the sound effect. She does not offer the sound effect in a &quot;separate&quot; form (i.e., she offers no download of the sound effect only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May Alice apply DRM to the song as long as the attribution for the sound effect can be accessed (&quot;DRM-free&quot;) by the recipients? Or have the recipients the &quot;Licensed Right&quot; to access (&quot;DRM-free&quot;) the song because it contains &lt;em&gt;CC-BY&lt;/em&gt;-licensed material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if Alice modifies the sound effect (i.e., Alice creates &quot;Adapted Material&quot;)? In the first case one could argue that recipients could extract the &lt;em&gt;CC-BY&lt;/em&gt;-licensed sound effect from the song, but in the second case the original sound effect is no longer part of the song (i.e., recipients are not allowed to use the modified sound effect under &lt;em&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T14:56:26.430" Title="DRM and &quot;Licensed Rights&quot; for works that contain material licensed under CC BY 4.0" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by|drm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4049" CreationDate="2016-06-20T12:42:12.627" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I just take the code and slap a GPLv3+ sticker on top of it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is covered in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can’t you change the wording? It’s inappropriate / childish / not corporate-compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The WTFPL lets you relicense the work under any other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, Word of God says you can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if somebody else takes the same code and use it in proprietary product?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing. The WTFPL does not transfer copyright. The copyright stays with the original author, who gave both of you a non-exclusive permission to &amp;quot;DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO&amp;quot; with their code. You can't violate each others copyright because none of you owns it in the first place. Both of you are just using it under permission of the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T12:49:49.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-20T19:41:14.613" Score="15" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently forked a small github project to work on an open issue regarding the program's execution speed. I've achieved a substantial speedup, and I'm ready to submit a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the upstream has shown very little activity in the last 2-3 years. There is a backlog of unaddressed issues and PRs, and I have some doubts that the owner would be receptive to my work in any case. So I'm inclined to put my fork aside and set up a brand new, independent repository for this and future work. (This would not be a complete rewrite, so I'd add my name and the present year to the copyright line and otherwise leave the license intact.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it advisable that I reach out to the upstream owner before doing this? Should I choose a totally different name for my project, or would the same exact name or a small variation be appropriate? Finally, in reaching out to people who showed an interest in the original project some time ago, should I communicate in private, or would comments on the upstream's wiki or issues page be acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5389" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T16:39:55.950" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T16:39:55.950" Title="Starting (not forking) a new project based on a seemingly dead one" Tags="|github|forking|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4053" CreationDate="2016-06-20T19:46:50.167" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forking and starting your own repo and submitting a PR to the current repo are not mutually exclusive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could do both and decide which branch to keep working on based on the action or inaction of those who have been involved in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think public communication would be preferable. Since there has been no activity in 2-3 years, your public question/comments could attract new or renewed interest from those who are interested but show no public activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5331" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T19:46:50.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4062" CreationDate="2016-06-20T20:39:07.430" Score="11" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 3.3 of the Mozilla Public License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3.3. Distribution of a Larger Work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may create and distribute a Larger Work under terms of Your choice,&#xA;provided that You also comply with the requirements of this License for&#xA;the Covered Software. If the Larger Work is a combination of Covered&#xA;Software with a work governed by one or more Secondary Licenses, and the&#xA;Covered Software is not Incompatible With Secondary Licenses, this&#xA;License permits You to additionally distribute such Covered Software&#xA;under the terms of such Secondary License(s), so that the recipient of&#xA;the Larger Work may, at their option, further distribute the Covered&#xA;Software under the terms of either this License or such Secondary&#xA;License(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; makes this comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to understand that the condition to distribute files under the MPL's terms only applies to the party that first creates and distributes the Larger Work. If it applied to their recipients as well, it would be a further restriction and incompatible with the GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the recipients of a Larger Work which is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under Secondary Licenses can freely violate the MPL's terms for the MPL-covered files, such as removing copyright notices or combining proprietary code with MPL code in the same file, and distribute the program as if the MPL had never been applied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T23:00:57.463" Title="What is required of a party who receives a Larger Work under the Mozilla Public License?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4053" CreationDate="2016-06-20T20:56:46.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the original owner has abandoned their project, they might be quite glad about someone wanting to take over. You definitely have nothing to lose by trying to contact them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking over the name without their consent would be inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-06-20T20:56:46.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4061" CreationDate="2016-06-21T17:07:22.807" Score="34" ViewCount="28514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused as to what this license really means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I have a large piece of software I plan on selling and keeping closed source. It makes use of several small resources that are under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I just have to copy paste each MIT license with their names in it into the source code? That seems pointless since it will remain closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software is distributed by a service like Google Play which only takes a .apk file there's no way to distribute the license with the software, if that's what you're supposed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case would using those small resources licensed under MIT not be allowed? Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in the license text, what does &quot;substantial portions of the Software&quot; mean? Which software? The software that is licensed under MIT? Or any other new software using this MIT licensed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite confused as you can tell, so it would be nice if someone could clarify some of this for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Additionally, how would someone be able to tell what parts of the code were licensed under MIT? If they are able to tell that somehow, how would they be able to tell which person made that specific portion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5400" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T00:08:37.153" Title="What is the point of including the MIT copyright text if you use someone's code licensed under MIT?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="625" CreationDate="2016-06-21T21:15:06.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index&lt;/a&gt; has language use history.  It does not, however, specify the compiler.  Still, very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5403" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T21:15:06.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4058" CreationDate="2016-06-21T21:59:04.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you perfectly sure that you will never want to transfer this code to someone else? If you ever want to sell it, or license it, or have a change of heart and make it open source, you'll need to be able to document the provenance. If you throw out all the copyright and license information, you'll be up a creek. If you work for a company, the company should have a policy of this kind just in case the whole place gets sold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-06-21T21:59:04.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4058" CreationDate="2016-06-22T00:08:37.153" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a misconception with how to comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the relevant sentence, and only condition in the license apart from the warranty disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can include the license text in your source file. If you do, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; if you distribute your software as source code only, as some OSS do, the license text is automatically visible and right there with the MIT-licensed code. But if you distribute binaries, the license text (typically) gets compiled away, therefore you are no longer fulfilling the single condition in the license. What you need to do is include the license with your binary distributions, maybe as a text file, or embedded in the program's about dialog. For most distribution channels, there's some way of including the source code license(s). For an Android example, look at Settings &gt; About &gt; Legal Information &gt; Open source licenses and enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what &quot;substantial portion of the software&quot; means, it refers to the MIT-licensed code. See this question for what &quot;substantial portion&quot; means: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2187/175&quot;&gt;How much is &amp;quot;substantial portion&amp;quot; in MIT licence?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, how would someone be able to tell what parts of the code were licensed under MIT? If they are able to tell that somehow, how would they be able to tell which person made that specific portion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't follow the MIT license, you are violating copyright. It's true that it's hard to prove copyright violation if you don't have access to source code, but a court can compel you to divulge your source code so that a judgement can be made. If you've genuinely and blatantly violated copyright, it will be very easy to prove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T00:08:37.153" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4056" CreationDate="2016-06-22T12:01:12.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the recipients of a Larger Work can freely violate the MPL's terms for the MPL-covered files, such as removing copyright notices or combining proprietary code with MPL code in the same file, and distribute the program as if the MPL had never been applied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be misreading the (rather convoluted) wording of the MPL-2.0, but none can blame you there ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It simply means this: &lt;strong&gt;you have a choice of either the MPL-2.0 or the secondary licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, if their terms are not incompatible. These secondary licenses are typically the GPL and LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three things you cannot escape: death, taxes ... and licenses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are essentially the same terms as in the Mozilla tri-license notice choice used before the MPL-2.0 in Firefox for instance where you could pick either one of the MPL-1.1, GPL or LGPL. But in the MPL-2.0 this is expressed in a generic way and baked into the license text as opposed to be in an external notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in a larger work, you can pick any license for your work but you still have to comply with the MPL. And you can use a secondary license choice (LGPL/GPL) if this is not incompatible with your own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that the Larger Work is not under any Secondary Licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the MPL 2.0 and only the MPL 2.0 applies IMHO&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of clarity if I were in your case I would state explicitly that only the MPL-2.0 applies there, but the MPL may already contains this in its own martian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If recipients of a Larger Work not under Secondary Licenses are not required to comply with the MPL, as noted by the FSF, can the recipient simply remove the MPL from the covered files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, unequivocally. This only applies to secondary licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let me restate one more time: the MPL 2.0 is essentially a choice of license. You can keep things under the MPL, a choice of MPL or secondary licenses or a secondary license. Period. Nothing else.&#xA;You cannot escape the licensing terms of at least one or all of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link you provide to the FSF commentary on the MPL 2.0 are &lt;strong&gt;in the context&lt;/strong&gt; of the secondary (copyleft A/L/GPL) licenses and not for any other licenses. Do not misread this as related to other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T23:00:57.463" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T23:00:57.463" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4051" CreationDate="2016-06-22T15:46:35.527" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY 4.0 essential terms are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what this means is that these additional terms ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... effectively make the CC-BY 4.0 some kind of limited copyleft license and not a pure attribution type license IMHO:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an attribution/permissive license such as a BSD or Apache, the rights to further modify the software may not flow down automatically: I can redistribute a binary for a BSD-licensed piece of code and I am not obliged to give you the rights to further share or adapt this binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, if I read this correctly, when I include CC-BY 4.0 material everyone downstream receives all the rights of the CC-BY license, including the right to share and adapt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to me essentially similar to limited copyleft terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as you point it, it makes remixing something that is eventually borderline impossible when two pieces of works are effectively mixed and intertwined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic is complex enough that if I were in your positions I would either stay away from using an CC-BY 4.0-licensed things unless they are unmodified or I would consult a lawyer. FWIW, CC-BY 3.0 is essentially the same&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T09:45:53.480" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-22T18:45:55.757" Score="3" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an HTML5/JavaScript app (A) with a closed-source license, into which I wish to import data from third-party program (B). I wrote a library to read (B)'s data files, but as it is a derivative work, this library is also released under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the freedom to dual-license a portion of (A) with the AGPL as well, so as to create a self-contained AGPL component/script/plugin which can read (B)'s data files, and manipulate them for use by (A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is:  What degree of separation must/ought I maintain between my core program (A), and the (B)-to-(A) converter/importer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that nobody here is a lawyer (or if you are, you can't give me legal advice anyway), so I'm looking more for guidelines.  What is &quot;clearly okay&quot;, what is &quot;clearly not okay&quot;, and what lies in the middle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Models I've considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A completely stand-alone data converter. Users visit a URL, or run a local executable, which takes (B)'s input format, and spits out a file that can be read by (A).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I host a converter on a separate server, which (A) knows how to talk to.  A user provides a data file from (B) to (A), and (A) hands it off to the convertor, which responds with data (A) understands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I write a conversion plugin, which a user may install into (A), and then upload data files from (B) for the plugin to convert to (A)'s native format on demand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I write a library which converts from (B) to (A), and I load it in a separate  tag, from a separate server, in my app. If successfully loaded, (A) exposes the option to the user to import data files from (B). If not successfully loaded, that functionality remains hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Same as #4, but the script is hosted on the same server.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect (1) should be perfectly permissable, as there's no question that (A) is an independent program from the converter, running on a completely different machine (or at least hosted on a different machine) than (A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coupling gets tighter as I move down the list. Is there any point where a line is clearly crossed?  Or even in #4, is (A) sufficiently decoupled, and non-dependant on the conversion plugin to be within the spirit of the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3557" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-22T19:23:21.420" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T20:17:57.147" Title="How can I structure my program to honor the AGPL and a proprietary license scheme?" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4064" CreationDate="2016-06-22T20:17:57.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are reading too much in the constraints of the AGPL.&#xA;If you reuse and modify AGPL-licensed code to convert data from one format to another (leaving aside any issue about the licensing of the data themselves) then you will need to make your source modifications available somehow per the AGPL, even if this happen over the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, the AGPL is not much different from the GPL. The way you combine your own code and the AGPL-licensed code would be roughly subject to the same approach as if it were GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my general rules: I would consider two pieces of code to be coupled enough for the GPL to apply to both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if linked or running in the same process&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the GPL part is significantly modified and running separately but with some intimate communication, especially if the modification involves changing the API to suit my needs and support this intimate communication.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of these, I would consider that in 1 &amp;amp; 2 the copyleft would likely not extend to A, but in 3, 4 &amp;amp; 5 this is a grey area.  Though there is no difference IMHO between 4 &amp;amp; 5. And if 3 is the only plugin in your app that would be weird. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said to be cool, I would contact the authors of the piece of AGPL code I were to fork to explain what I want to do and what is their take on this. I would consider the interpretation --even if faulty-- of the author as something important and to respect eventually. This is to avoid any possible frustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and even if I were one, I would not be your lawyer anyway. So take this with a pinch of salt. This is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-22T20:17:57.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-23T00:11:10.050" Score="2" ViewCount="1264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I having a few issues understanding how sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://gpldl.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;gpldl.com&lt;/a&gt; can call themselves legal. This is basically a site where they purchase themes/plugins from developers such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WooThemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iThemes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gravity Forms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WPML&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WPMU DEV&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elmastudio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elegant Themes &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site then states that since their plugins/themes are licensed under GNU General Public License, they can then share them with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the WooCommerce Plugins are kind of expensive and is it possible that these could in really be &quot;free&quot; excluding the support from the developer? Basically, my question is, is this actually legal to use? Can I download plugins and themes from this site and use them legally on a commercial project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="887" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T01:53:40.927" Title="Are all GPL Licensed projects free to use for commercial use?" Tags="|gpl|law|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-06-23T13:27:08.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4066" CreationDate="2016-06-23T01:53:40.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question in your title, &lt;strong&gt;yes, GPL projects can be used commercially.&lt;/strong&gt; From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLCommercially&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, such a requirement usually puts a damper on business models based on selling copies of GPL-licensed software, since there's nothing stopping someone else distributing the same GPL software for free and undercutting the seller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not just GPL, but all FOSS licenses allow commercial use, as non-discrimination against field of endeavour is a key principle of FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question specifically about GPLDL, their tagline specifically mentions WooCommerce Extensions &amp;amp; themes, so that's probably the important part of the value proposition. Inclusion of GPL-licensed software would just be for convenience. From their website (bold is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Download the most popular GPL-licensed Premium WordPress Themes &amp;amp; Plugins &lt;strong&gt;and WooCommerce Extensions &amp;amp; Themes&#xA;  worth thousands of US$&lt;/strong&gt; for FREE!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T01:53:40.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-23T06:07:41.813" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;PortableApps.com Launcer stated that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License: Free / Open Source (GPL) with exceptions for freeware and free open source. Commercial use by contacting PortableApps.com&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://portableapps.com/apps/development/portableapps.com_launcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://portableapps.com/apps/development/portableapps.com_launcher&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All apps from portableapps.com is made by portableapps.com launcher, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/ultradefrag-portable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/ultradefrag-portable&lt;/a&gt; stated that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source Code: PortableApps.com Launcher, UltraDefrag &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My intention is to use application bundled from portableapps.com on corporate or bussiness environtment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does it mean that any application bundled from portableapps.com is prohibited in commercial usage without contacting PortableApps.com?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, PortableApps.com Installer also stated that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License: Free / Open Source (GPL) with exceptions for freeware and free open source. Commercial use by contacting PortableApps.com.&#xA;  http:// portableapps.com/apps/development/portableapps.com_installer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is different from this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4066/are-all-gpl-licensed-projects-free-to-use-for-commercial-use&quot;&gt;Are all GPL Licensed projects free to use for commercial use?&lt;/a&gt; because of the license statement &quot;Commercial use by contacting PortableApps.com&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5419" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T07:40:11.280" Title="GPL software with commercial use exception" Tags="|gpl|commercial|freeware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-06-27T11:04:35.687" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-23T07:03:00.470" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is regarding the legal aspect of including free open source 3rd party libraries in my commercial software. As an example, I have used the c# library MySqlBackup.NET to be able to backup and restore a MySQL database from my C# app. The license page of the 3rd party library website states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or&#xA;distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled&#xA;binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any&#xA;means.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the license can be read &lt;a href=&quot;https://mysqlbackupnet.codeplex.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Is it correct that I must have a reference of this is my own Terms and Conditions? If so, what is the correct way to go about this? Perhaps as an Appendix at the end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5420" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T07:27:53.270" Title="Including 3rd party libraries in my code" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2016-06-23T07:27:53.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license in question is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;. You don't have to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to make a note of where you got it from, just so that whenever someone comes across this code later and wonders who wrote it. But that's up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T07:27:53.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4072" CreationDate="2016-06-23T09:49:34.490" Score="3" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;An enterprise utilizes the source code of a network software product licensed under the AGPL v3. It modifies the source code but does not share the changes with the original developer and copyright holder, and keeps the changes private. It then hosts the modified version within its servers, but does not distribute the source code as a bundle to any third parties. It allows a closed group of its authenticated customers (not the general public) to interact with this modified product - via web services - fronted through a web portal of the enterprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the enterprise violating any of the terms of the AGPL v3? If so, which exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5421" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-23T23:52:58.117" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T23:52:58.117" Title="Using AGPL v3 software in an enterprise deployment without sharing the changes" Tags="|software|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4071" CreationDate="2016-06-23T10:12:31.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company in question has to follow the terms of the AGPL, in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that any (authenticated) user accessing the service must be able to obtain the source code, including modifications, of any modified component licensed under the AGPL &lt;em&gt;or the GPL&lt;/em&gt; (the AGPL extends to the GPL when GPL works are combined with AGPL works). Not only that, but the web portal must prominently notify the users of this possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T10:12:31.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4010" CreationDate="2016-06-23T22:26:13.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you found, you can indeed include BSD licensed code in a GPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way to do this is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License your entire project under the GPL, with the LICENSE.txt reflecting this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the BSD licensed code within the repository, with the BSD license and original copyright notice intact within it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clearly indicates that, together, the entire project is GPL, but on its own this file can be taken out and used under its existing license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course only do this one-way: a GPL project couldn't be combined into a BSD project as you would be effectively re-licensing the GPL code under more permissive terms than it allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T22:26:13.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="226" CreationDate="2016-06-23T22:40:34.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately most of the answers to this question so far are largely incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt; you can include CC-BY-SA 3.0 content in a GPL project, providing you've adapted the content and the project is GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4037/4763&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; deals generically regarding using code posted on any forum. It answers some of the side issues and other things to think through when taking public code (such as whether it is copyrightable at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4005/4763&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2213/4763&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; cover the specific CC-BY-SA 3.0 -&gt; GPLv3 path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-06-23T22:49:48.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-25T00:45:17.900" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software is a double edged sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to add a clause to encourage ethical use or a licence that exists in this respect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concerns are in terms of avoiding harm to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5290" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T16:25:30.110" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T16:25:30.110" Title="Encouraging a piece of software to be used ethically" Tags="|licensing|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4075" CreationDate="2016-06-25T01:17:57.387" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;No - because then it wouldn't be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative defines one of its essential freedoms as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/definition&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation also requires a similar freedom in any license it considers to be open source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essentially means you cannot restrict how someone will use your program, including their ethics or morals for doing so. If you do, you wouldn't be able to use an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Stallman has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;written an article&lt;/a&gt; on this exact subject where he concludes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/319385/117353&quot;&gt;great answer&lt;/a&gt; over at Programmers.SE which goes into this in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, to require your users to &quot;avoid harming someone&quot; could - depending on how you legally word it - be extremely broad and open to wide interpretation. For example, does this refer to physical harm only, or emotional harm too? What about harm through loss of sales if the program successfully competes against a proprietary product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what your software is, governments might want to use it too. Would policies that do end up causing - even unintended - harm to people therefore mean the use of the software to design, develop or write the policy was against the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, it inevitably comes down to the fact that everyone is going to have a different opinion, and with restrictions on what software can or can't be used for it would unfortunately make open source software not very open at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T01:30:07.357" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4078" CreationDate="2016-06-25T11:31:01.590" Score="8" ViewCount="4230" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Legal_aspects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is licensed explicitly only under version 2 of the GPL, &lt;strong&gt;without offering&lt;/strong&gt; the licensee the option to choose &quot;any later version&quot;, which is a common GPL extension. There was a debate over how easily it could be changed to use later GPL versions such as version 3 and whether this is even desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I've visited the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;COPYING&lt;/a&gt; file and that doesn't mention it. So, considering the following text in the file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) &lt;strong&gt;any later version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can Linux be released under GPLv3? &lt;br&gt;(or say I want to know can GNU release linux-libre under GPLv3?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T23:21:43.933" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T08:23:53.360" Title="Can the Linux kernel be released under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4077" CreationDate="2016-06-25T12:34:52.440" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;When this question was asked, the kernel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; file started with the following comment (second paragraph):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel&#xA;is concerned is &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; particular version of the license (ie v2, not&#xA;v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays it says, more succinctly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with references to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/plain/LICENSES/preferred/GPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-2.0&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/plain/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux-syscall-note&lt;/a&gt; files, the latter of which carries the first notice above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of the kernel are licensed with &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/input/joydev.c&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;joydev.c&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), but many files only mention version 2 (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/input/apm-power.c&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;apm-power.c&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). So the kernel as a whole is licensed under version 2 of the GPL only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;famously unhappy with version 3 of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, so even if it were feasible (which it isn't, given the number of copyright holders), as long as he is &amp;quot;in command&amp;quot; there's little chance the kernel would be licensed under any later version of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part you quoted (which can still be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/plain/LICENSES/preferred/GPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the renamed file&lt;/a&gt;) is part of the “How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs” section of the document, and explicitly comes after the “END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS”. It can’t be construed as applying to the code in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the detailed kernel licensing rules&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T08:23:53.360" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T08:23:53.360" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4080" CreationDate="2016-06-25T16:19:35.600" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on creating a open source software that will be hosted at github. In that software I would like to use another open source component available at codeplex under Ms-Pl license. My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to contact the author of that component at codeplex to use it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will have to make some changes in original component to make it compatible with my application. Am I allowed to do that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5429" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-25T16:25:06.893" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T23:07:49.560" Title="Modifying/Using an open source software to use in my open source application" Tags="|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4079" CreationDate="2016-06-25T23:07:49.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I need to contact the author of that component at codeplex to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope. This can be a nice thing to do, but not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will have to make some changes in original component to make it compatible with my application. Am I allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If the license allows it (all open source definition &quot;compliant&quot; licenses allow it), you are allowed to do it.&#xA;The MsPL is a fairly permissive license as you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/ms-pl/#license-requirements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with rather simple and readable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-06-25T23:07:49.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4077" CreationDate="2016-06-25T23:46:42.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The part of the COPYING file which says this is in the &lt;em&gt;appendix&lt;/em&gt; which gives GNU's recommendations for how to apply the license. Just because they recommend that authors use that text and allow their software to be licensed under future versions doesn't mean all authors have to do so! Linus Torvalds decided he would not, and so the kernel is licensed &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; under the GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-26T06:36:42.503" LastActivityDate="2016-06-26T06:36:42.503" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-26T15:09:03.823" Score="7" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposed I have written a server in Node.js that I licensed under AGPLv3. Now, if somebody takes my code and modifies it, this is a derivative work. So far, so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposed my server has the ability to load &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; files from disk and run them, e.g. to provide something like a plug-in interface. The interface is designed in a way that the files do not require anything from the server, the binding is only the other way round: The files only contain functions that are being called by the server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this make the additional &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; files a derivative work, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this question quite hard to answer because all the stativ-vs-dynamic-linking-and-binding does not apply here, because the server as well as the additional files are just &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; files laying around on disk, and their connection is only established at runtime by the Node.js engine, because the server simply calls &lt;code&gt;require&lt;/code&gt; on the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as said: Does this make the additional &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; files a derivative work, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that while &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1181/does-a-host-applications-license-apply-to-plug-ins-written-for-it&quot;&gt;Does a host application&amp;#39;s license apply to plug-ins written for it?&lt;/a&gt; is definitely helpful, it doesn't answer my question, since it leaves the main part of my question unanswered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find this question quite hard to answer because all the stativ-vs-dynamic-linking-and-binding does not apply here, because the server as well as the additional files are just .js files laying around on disk, and their connection is only established at runtime by the Node.js engine, because the server simply calls require on the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO JavaScript and Node.js are different here, as you publish and distribute the code always only as source, never as binary. So the term &lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt; here does not make too much sense, except at runtime (what also means that you don't really have a choice on how to link).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5437" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T05:14:55.873" Title="AGPL and Node.js" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4086" CreationDate="2016-06-26T15:49:30.987" Score="12" ViewCount="2956" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposed I have a server that I have licensed under AGPLv3. Let's also assume that this server has a REST interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I access this REST interface via a JavaScript script file from a client, does this make the script file and / or the client a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5437" LastActivityDate="2022-05-17T07:43:31.467" Title="Does accessing the REST interface of a AGPL-licensed server make the client a derivative work?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-26T21:24:31.923" Score="7" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on an open source collaborative project, and I am still confused regarding licenses, and weeks of research didn't really help me pinpoint my particular case. Let me expose it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My aim is to release my project on GitHub, for free and with a license as permissive as possible -- as far as I am concerned, all my contributions could just as well be in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project is a collection of articles and source code examples for a specific programming language, and it's build in the form of a website: I use a static flat-file CMS that builds from markdown files into a website. It will be released on GitHub in different ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main repo will contain the source markdown docs, and also some SASS libraries, JS script, NodeJS libs, and open fonts (which come in different licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;compiled&quot; project will also be available as a browsable website in GitHub pages (here the SASS/NodeJS libraries will no longer be included).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &quot;HTML compiled&quot; version of the project will be available under releases, for offline browsing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Central to the project is a book which the author has declared CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 when he decided he would no longer update the book, and explicitly wished others will take on the task of upgrading it with new releases of the language it deals with -- and so it has been, with all the code being corrected to match newer versions of the language, and some chapters retouched here and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What confuses me here is the SHARE-ALIKE aspect. I see my project as a collection of articles and examples, taken here and there with authors' explicit permission or in accordance to them being open source. Does it mean that the CC BY-NC-SA applies only to the book and its code examples, or it means that my whole project will have to be released under CC BY-NC-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, it's a case similar to CDs which come with computer magazines: they contain different softwares, each with its own license. Even if my project is a single project, to which I need to declare a license for it, is it correct to understand that each different chapter and its code examples are indipendent of each other and could have each one a different open source license, without conflicts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, it would be difficult for me to reconcile the license of every single element included in the project (open fonts, sass and NodeJS libs, JS scripts, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried some research on this topic, but didn't find clear answers because most of what I've found was talking about &lt;strong&gt;merging&lt;/strong&gt; source codes together into a single derivative work -- were licenses might conflict because not all of them could be satisfied together. Also, I see this project more as an encyclopedic work, were code is just there for examples (as it would be in a book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone could advice me on how to go about it? As I said, I'd like to keep the project's license as permissive as possible, but also preserve the license of individual contributions to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-27T03:26:35.797" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T14:26:36.817" Title="Documentation project containing articles and code examples with different licenses" Tags="|github|website|documentation|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4083" CreationDate="2016-06-26T21:47:31.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interacting over HTTP never makes anything a derivative work, no matter what the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would count as a network user, so you would have to make the source code of your server available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T10:26:36.420" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T10:26:36.420" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4083" CreationDate="2016-06-26T23:20:18.193" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Short Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Long Answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The derivative definition is based on copyright law and not a license, and I can't see how a remote web services interface could ever be construed as anything other than separate from the server involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are interacting with a service, not including it in your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A service provider MAY be able to constrain you (and your code) with a CONTRACT, but this is a LICENCE, and it shouldn't be able to re-licence your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An API (may) have patentable components, but the implementation of a REST service means that any code could interact with it, so it doesn't depend on copyrightable things like Java interfaces etc (or a non-trivial YML).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although due to a recent court case between Oracle and Google over Android, an API (probably doesnt matter if it is over a remote interface) can be copyrightable, thus the service provider can constrain your actions with respect to that API. Particularly if they introduce complexity in order to force copyright infringement in order to use the interface. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Update: This ruling was reversed by the Supreme Court on April 5, 2021.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;evil-design&amp;gt;&#xA;All remote access&#xA;to this software must always&#xA;include this haiku.(c)&#xA;&amp;lt;/evil-design&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From memory, AGPL is about forcing the re-licencing when a derivative of the source code is offered as a service, but I couldn't follow the wording of license when I tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3 Licence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note: IANAL and my memory is shaky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked again at the AGPL Licence, and I don't see the constraining language myself, except in the preamble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional Thought&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a report written against a AGPL licenced library (such as iText):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require the database structure (usually remote) to be licenced as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that include the data?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="13151" LastEditDate="2022-05-17T07:43:31.467" LastActivityDate="2022-05-17T07:43:31.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3978" CreationDate="2016-06-27T11:09:57.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really possible to answer the question about the existence of a maven plugin, somewhere, in some repository. Not all Maven plugins are even on Maven central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A maven plugin could, certainly, plop a lump of IP into your project with a license that is incompatible with your needs. And no protocol in Maven forces a plugin to announce this in any obvious way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absolute worst case, some jerk could hide some proprietary content in a plugin and deposit it &lt;em&gt;in binary&lt;/em&gt; in your output, and then later come around and claim that what you've built is a derived work and you owe, you owe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, you're never &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; safe in the land of open source unless you, well, &lt;em&gt;read the source&lt;/em&gt;. If you are going to use a Maven plugin that is not from one of the mainstream sources, you would be well-advised to take a gander at its source even if you aren't worried about some sort of unpleasant IP implant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a sort of trivial example in the form of the maven-archetype-plugin. It generates source code from templates licensed under the terms of the Apache License. Someone could claim that this makes the generated code into a derived work of the template, and subject to the terms of the AL. Or, worse, someone could push a template with some troublesome license, and nothing in the archetype plugin warns you when you select an archetype as to what the licensing is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastEditorUserId="554" LastEditDate="2016-12-26T19:45:01.360" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T19:45:01.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3978" CreationDate="2016-06-27T13:22:26.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The archetype plugin creates sources from an apache-licensed template. from an extreme viewpoint, that is an examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T13:22:26.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2016-06-27T15:04:27.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Must you must distribute source of the advanced version? The GPL's requirement to distribute source does not apply to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; -- you own the copyright. Assuming, that is, that you require other people who contribute to assign copyright to you, and that you haven't incorporated other people's GPL libraries. If you own the copyright on the whole thing, you can choose to distribute advanced version sourcelessly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have the option to distribute it sourcelessly, you have to depend on contract law to prevent leakage. The general principle is this: if your product is expensive enough to be worth bothering to sell, you are selling it to the sort of corporate customer who does not run around violating contracts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-06-27T15:04:27.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4101" CreationDate="2016-06-27T22:16:10.113" Score="9" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcide.gnu.org.ua/&quot;&gt;GCIDE&lt;/a&gt; is a GPL v3'd English dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was to release it bundled with a closed-source application, would loading that data count as &quot;linked source code&quot;, and therefore be a violation of the GPL? Lots of the GPL discussions I've found assume that the GPL library is code, not data, and I'm not sure if it makes a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about if I modified the GCIDE, release the changes, and then continue to use it in a closed-source program? Is &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; a violation?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T23:46:14.773" Title="Can my closed-source software load GPL v3 data?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4215" CreationDate="2016-06-28T11:28:14.137" Score="18" ViewCount="2067" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposed I have written a software that I offer using a dual-license model, using AGPLv3 as OSS license, and a proprietary one as commercial (closed) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's assume somebody wants to contribute something to the software. What do I have to watch out for if I want to be able to use the contribution for the AGPL as well as for the proprietarily licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: What should I point out in my CLA? Do I need any other contract with the contributor? What are the typical pitfalls to watch out for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5437" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-29T00:12:50.073" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:32:40.143" Title="How to accept contributions for AGPL / proprietary dual-licensed projects?" Tags="|gpl|contributor|proprietary-code|agpl-3.0|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-28T14:49:50.720" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written some software based on publicly available research papers that other people have written. I know that the authors of the research papers have filed for patent for their work. I do not want to assert any copyright on the software that I have written, but it is possible that other people own IP to the ideas that the software implements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: what is the most permissive license that I have the legal authority to grant for the software that I have written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5455" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T20:09:56.627" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T22:29:15.843" Title="Open sourcing software that I do not own IP to" Tags="|license-recommendation|software|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4098" CreationDate="2016-06-28T19:30:19.073" Score="2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikidata is a database licensed under CC-Zero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Wikidata would include CC BY content with Wikidata properly labeling the source, would that be okay? Or do third-parties that want to reuse the Wikidata database without attribution get in trouble for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="486" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T19:44:24.920" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T00:03:13.667" Title="Can Wikidata which runs under CC-Zero incorporate CC BY content?" Tags="|license-compatibility|creative-commons|cc-by|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4093" CreationDate="2016-06-28T22:23:53.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright and patents are tangential things. If all of the code in your software is your own then you can give it any license you like, including fully proprietary. However if the research article included code or pseudocode which you adapted your code from, then your code might be considered a derivative work. To determine whether it is you would have to engage a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of patents is fairly basic, but if the concepts have already been published then they shouldn't be patentable anymore. They would only be able to file for patents on the ideas they haven't explained in the article. If you've been able to figure out those ideas from reading the article, then if you publish your software it might count as prior work, invalidating the patent. Again, engage a lawyer to be certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-06-28T22:29:15.843" LastActivityDate="2016-06-28T22:29:15.843" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2016-06-28T23:46:16.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with Wikidata, but I don't think this would be ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:NewItem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;create an article on Wikidata&lt;/a&gt;, you're met with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By clicking &quot;Create&quot;, you agree to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;terms of use&lt;/a&gt;, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons CC0 License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing there about contributing content that is licensed by others. It must be &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; own &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; content. So, no CC-BY content, no GFDL content, no all rights reserved content, nothing - unless it's written and owned by you, or already in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the exact problem they're aiming to avoid is the one you stated: they want third-parties to be able to use the Wikidata content without fear of getting sued (having said that, there's still a risk if the person who originally contributed the data lied about where it came from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though CC-BY isn't share-alike, you still can't release CC-BY content under CC0, because by doing so you would be nullifying any requirements for &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;attribution to the original author&lt;/a&gt; - something you don't have the right to do. The original author still retains all copyright on their creation, and absense of a share-alike clause doesn't allow you to change the license on their work - it just frees you to not have to release &lt;em&gt;your changes&lt;/em&gt; in a similar manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that CC0 may not hold under some jurisdictions anyway due in part to the inability to revoke moral rights. As mentioned by Zizouz212 in the comments, this includes Canada and Germany, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-07-06T00:03:13.667" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T00:03:13.667" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-29T02:20:35.383" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a program under the CeCILL version 2. It permits relicensing to the GPL, and I'm okay with that. However, version 2.1 permits relicensing to the European Union Public License, and I don't want to allow that, because (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EUPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;as the FSF notes&lt;/a&gt;) it permits relicensing to licenses with weaker copylefts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that one is allowed to distribute a program under &quot;any later version&quot; of the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;12.3 Any Software distributed under a given version of the Agreement may&#xA;  only be subsequently distributed under the same version of the Agreement&#xA;  or a subsequent version, subject to the provisions of Article 5.3.4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French version of 12.3 says the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that a Licensee can choose to distribute the software under version 2.1 of the license and use that as a justification to relicense the code to the EUPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the final clause might give the answer as no, but I'm not sure. Article 5.3.4 is the one that allows relicensing. It reads as follows in version 2.0; version 2.1 adds &quot;the GNU Affero GPL, and/or the EUPL&quot; to all occurrences of &quot;GNU GPL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Licensee can include a code that is subject to the provisions of one&#xA;  of the versions of the GNU GPL in the Modified or unmodified Software,&#xA;  and distribute that entire code under the terms of the same version of&#xA;  the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Licensee can include the Modified or unmodified Software in a code&#xA;  that is subject to the provisions of one of the versions of the GNU GPL,&#xA;  and distribute that entire code under the terms of the same version of&#xA;  the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T13:10:01.310" Title="Does the CeCILL permit relicensing to licenses named in later versions of the license?" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4099" CreationDate="2016-06-29T13:10:01.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interpretation would be that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read 12.3 as saying the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code has been released under CeCILL v2, it may &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; be released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a subsequent version of the CeCILL is released which does not retain the GPL compatibility clause, you still have the rights granted to you by Clause 5.3.4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want strong copyleft, I'd very much advise sticking to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4689" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T13:10:01.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4091" CreationDate="2016-06-29T23:46:14.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking for a legal opinion, for that you need to pay a lawyer, and I am not one.  However, as a long-term friend of RMS and many of the FSF folks, what you are proposing is exactly what they intend the GPL to prevent.  So, doing that is certainly a violation of the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the license.  If you do find a lawyer who is willing to argue that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; legal, I'm sure the FSF lawyer would like to hear the argument, so he can produce GPLv4 to deal with it. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-06-29T23:46:14.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-06-30T07:55:33.010" Score="8" ViewCount="3485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a useful class in a project that is licensed under Apache 2.0. Can I copy it to a project licensed under MIT license? Add the library as dependency is not an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally the answer should quote the corresponding paragraph of the  license (MIT and/or Apache 2.0) that describe this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5466" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T07:55:33.010" Title="Can I copy code licensed under Apache 2 to a project licensed under MIT?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2016-06-30T20:14:39.817" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4108" CreationDate="2016-06-30T12:19:07.547" Score="6" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would sell somes computers, each computer: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contains a MariaDB database (GPL v2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some web applications under apache/php (GPL v2 and/or GPL v3). These applications use MariaDB.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find an precise answer  about if I can sell theses computere despite the applications licences I use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My english is fair, I'm afraid miss important subtleties when I read the GPLv2/GPLv3 descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I sell computers to differents peoples with a GPL-v2 database and somes applications in GPL-v2 and GPL-v3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I sell computers to differents peoples with a GPL-v2 database and only somes applications in GPL-v2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read I must give the source code to my buyer. Are there other &quot;constraint&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me and link official text sources if it's possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5467" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T19:18:18.347" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:45:25.293" Title="Selling computers with GPL licensed applications pre-installed" Tags="|gpl|distribution|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4115" CreationDate="2016-06-30T17:48:54.310" Score="6" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this post concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4075/encouraging-a-piece-of-software-to-be-used-ethically&quot;&gt;the ethical use of software&lt;/a&gt; and it brought another question to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to release software with an open source license, and someone were to use it in a manner that is illegal, what affect might that have on me? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, am I able to be held responsible for illegal use of my open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5474" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T18:19:14.443" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T23:15:24.317" Title="Ethical Open Source Protection" Tags="|law|community|ethics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4107" CreationDate="2016-06-30T19:41:43.217" Score="11" ViewCount="2733" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question was originally posted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/90691/marcgg&quot;&gt;marcgg&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/1394623/1982136&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; (second link might be visible to 10k+ only), but was removed there due to being off-topic. It has been preserved here in light of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/327056/can-we-rescue-the-information-in-this-question-somehow/&quot;&gt;this Meta Stack Overflow request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use a tool (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ffmpeg&lt;/a&gt;) that is under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2&lt;/a&gt; for some components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, I only call it in my software as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;System.Diagnostics.Process p = new System.Diagnostics.Process();&#xA;p.StartInfo = new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo(&quot;lgplSoftware.exe&quot;, myParams);&#xA;p.Start();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not change it, I only use a built version of the software for windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A key dispute related to the GPL is whether or not non-GPL software can be dynamically linked to GPL libraries. The GPL is clear in requiring that all derivative works of code under the GPL must themselves be under the GPL. While it is understood that static linking produces derivative works, it is not clear whether an executable that dynamically links to a GPL code should be considered a derivative work (see Weak Copyleft). The free/open-source software community is split on this issue. The FSF asserts that such an executable is indeed a derivative work if the executable and GPL code &quot;make function calls to each other and share data structures,&quot; with certain others agreeing (e.g. Jerry Epplin), while some (e.g. Linus Torvalds) agree that dynamic linking can create derived works but disagree over the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am really confused by all this legal things. I would have made my project LGPL as well and released the source, but this is not up to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is: can I use it like I'm doing right now or will I be executed by an army of lawyers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T09:25:32.013" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T09:25:32.013" Title="Can I dynamically call a LGPL/GPL software in my closed-source application?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4106" CreationDate="2016-06-30T19:41:43.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This answer was originally posted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/25507/josh-kelley&quot;&gt;Josh Kelley&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/1394867/1982136&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; (second link might be visible to 10k+ only), but was removed there due to being off-topic. It has been preserved here in light of &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/327056/can-we-rescue-the-information-in-this-question-somehow/&quot;&gt;this Meta StackOverflow request&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linking&lt;/a&gt; has a specific meaning in computer programming. You're not linking GPL'ed or LGPL'ed code at all, you're only spawning a GPL'ed or LGPL'ed binary, and the GPL and LGPL permit this. Your users are free to use that binary themselves for its authors' intended purposes and are free to download and compile the source themselves, so all of their freedoms are preserved, and you're not in violation of the GPL or LGPL. (This is what the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is talking about by &quot;communicat[ing] at arms length.&quot;) This doesn't even violate the spirit of the LGPL and GPL; they tolerate the existence of proprietary software and assume that at some point proprietary programs will spawn free programs and vice versa. (Otherwise, we couldn't run any GPL'ed software under Windows.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does require that proprietary and GPL'ed programs &quot;are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&quot; If your program is completely dependent upon GPL'ed executables, such that it wouldn't be usable without them even though it is a standalone binary, then that might place you on shakier ground. (And it's probably time to consult your lawyer to find out for sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, although you didn't specifically ask about this, keep in mind that distributing GPL'ed or LGPL'ed software with your software means that you're required to include a copy of the license with your installer and to also distribute the source code. For example, if you package up your application in an installer and include copies of GPL'ed or LGPL'ed executables in the installer, then you're distributing LGPL'ed or GPL'ed code and must make copies of the source code available (either online, by mail-in offer, or by CD, depending on how you distribute your app). Including a link to the upstream project is not sufficient (at least for version 2 of the GPL). Read the GPL and LGPL for exact details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:41:43.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2016-06-30T19:45:25.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can sell computers to different people with software under GPL2 and/or GPL3. For example, as far as I know, there is no problem to sell a computer with Debian preinstalled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second question, I don't understand if when you say &quot;... only somes applications in GPL-v2 ... &quot; you intend that you have some GPL-v2 application and some proprietary application. I think the answer is yes anyway, provided that you have the right to sell the proprietary application(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only constrain that I remember are that you must include a copy of the license and that you must provide, at least, a clear indication on where the source code is, a link to github for example, or a link to a downloadable zip file, since of course not everyone is interested to obtain the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T19:45:25.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4105" CreationDate="2016-06-30T19:58:15.230" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically no, you should not be held responsible for the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of your software. But the law is complex and I imagine it depend heavily on the country you live and what your software do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that a software that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used to make some illegal acts it is probably border-line and can incur in some problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update to address the comment&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; of a software and the &lt;strong&gt;copyright&lt;/strong&gt; of a software are two different things. Jason specifically ask if he can be held responsible for the illegal use of his open source software, which means that he has the copyright of the software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But the copyright don't address how somebody can use a software, but only the property of it (well, sometime the copyright try to address also how you use the software, but since we are speaking of opensource, this not apply)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example can be a password cracking program: I can write one (for various reasons, let's say to learn something about rainbow table and thread programming) and release under GPL. Now, if someone use it to crack a password to gain unauthorized access to a system, can I (the author of the software, which has the copyright) be held responsible of  this illegal use of my software ? Question to which I answered above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastEditorUserId="5475" LastEditDate="2016-07-04T23:15:24.317" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T23:15:24.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2016-06-30T20:24:20.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tough question. I'd say that if the the plug-in does not use code from your software, then it is not a derivative work &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; a good lecture can be this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/about/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.drupal.org/about/licensing&lt;/a&gt;, where there is a good explanation (Drupal call the plugin &quot;module&quot;) about the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T20:24:20.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4113" CreationDate="2016-06-30T21:01:06.960" Score="5" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have an open source project with a permissive license (MIT or Apache);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This project builds two targets:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A library object code file that other, dependent programs would link to;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An executable unit test suite that other programs would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; link to;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unit test suite links to a GPL-licensed library;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The library object code that other object code programs would link to does not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unit test's source code is embedded in the same source files as the main library code, albeit it's clearly delimited as separate modules from the main library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could my project be considered a derived work of the GPL library even if I only use the latter in the test suite?  Some details that might be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My library is a collection of random number generators, and it obeys a standard external interface specified by my programming language;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL library in question is one that is written for testing random number generators generically (can be used to test any random number generator).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could trivially write a separate, &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; program that links both my MIT library and the 3rd party GPL one and runs the latter's tests with the output from the former.  What linking to the GPL library from my library's unit test suite would do is just &lt;em&gt;automate&lt;/em&gt; this and make the process more convenient.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5476" LastEditorUserId="5476" LastEditDate="2016-06-30T21:06:48.973" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T21:23:34.593" Title="Using GPL library in unit test suite of open source library?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4112" CreationDate="2016-06-30T22:41:42.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you say that the test code is embedded in the same source, but in different modules, I'm assuming that you mean either they have their own files in the main library or their own classes in the same files of the main library. Either way, they get compiled and released along with the rest of the main library. This means &lt;em&gt;the entire library&lt;/em&gt; falls under the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easy (and much more sane &lt;em&gt;code wise&lt;/em&gt;) solution is to split your tests into a separate library that references both the GPL library and your main lib. This way, you don't have to distribute the tests along with your main lib when you publish the binaries. This will allow you to leave the main lib under whichever license your choose to release it under  and your tests get released under the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2016-06-30T22:41:42.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4105" CreationDate="2016-07-01T01:01:01.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's what the big shouty all-caps warranty disclaimer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/13/175&quot;&gt;that many people seem to dislike&lt;/a&gt;, is doing. Here's an example from the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually two sentences; the first is the warranty disclaimer - I don't guarantee this software does what you think it does - and the second part is the &lt;strong&gt;limitation of liability&lt;/strong&gt; - I'm not responsible for whatever happens when you use the software. Usually it's the first sentence that is controversial; it usually comes up whenever a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software flaw&lt;/a&gt; causes significant damage and some people start calling for programmers to be held responsible. The situation that the second sentence addresses does come up too, though. If you pay attention to news and politics, you can probably find examples of where a product is used unethically, but people want to hold the manufacturers of that product responsible. Think about examples where the product is perceived to facilitate unethical use - hacking/cracking, copyright infringement, trading of illegal goods etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore you should use standard open source licenses, which are vetted by real lawyers and may have also been tested in court. Such licenses usually have limitations of liability in them, to provide some protection for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already listed the MIT example, but it also exists in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt; (similar wording, also all caps), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; (clause 16, also all caps), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; (clause 8, surprisingly not in all caps), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL&lt;/a&gt; (clause 7, not in all caps but amusingly highlighted in yellow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T01:01:01.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4084" CreationDate="2016-07-01T03:01:40.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the CC BY-NC-SA applies only to the book and its code examples, or it means that my whole project will have to be released under CC BY-NC-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I read the &quot;copyleft&quot; terms of this CC license I would consider this to apply only to the book and its code examples that were originally licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even if my project is a single project, to which I need to declare a license for it, is it correct to understand that each different chapter and its code examples are independent of each other and could have each one a different open source license, without conflicts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general yes. In particular I could license this collection of mine under a license which is different that the (possibly many) licenses of each parts be they code or articles from various sources. That is if this collection is sufficiently original to be copyrightable in the first place.&#xA;And if each part is indeed under some license allowing redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T03:01:40.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4112" CreationDate="2016-07-01T03:12:08.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could my project be considered a derived work of the GPL library even if I only use the latter in the test suite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Your test code may be considered as a derivative of your GPL testing library, but not your main code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as @RubberDuck suggested, the best way is to make this clear in your code structure that the tests and the main source code are clearly separated and that the dependencies for each are also well separated. Which is not entirely trivial at times in some languages promoting static linking such as Go or Haskell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-07-01T21:23:34.593" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T21:23:34.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4106" CreationDate="2016-07-01T03:23:43.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So the question is: can I use it like I'm doing right now or will I be executed by an army of lawyers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I can use it this way in software that I redistribute.  My own software can use any license I want, open source or not. And this is a rather common pattern to use FFMpeg this way by spawning its executable in a process such that it does any transcoding I need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to comply with the L/GPL for the FFmpeg binaries of course including attribution and eventual source code redistribution to the recipients of the binaries (and which license applies may depend on which build options I activate when building FFmpeg).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T03:23:43.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-07-01T04:32:05.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-07-01T04:32:05.450" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T04:32:05.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-07-01T04:32:05.450" Score="0" Body="Questions about the linux-kernel, a popular kernel of GNU/Linux operating system." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2016-07-01T15:52:43.630" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T15:52:43.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4084" CreationDate="2016-07-01T14:26:36.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt; has three requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution (BY)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NonCommercial (NC)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike (SA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution is very easy to fulfil. ShareAlike is a copyleft-like mechanism but only activates if you perform an &lt;strong&gt;adaptation&lt;/strong&gt;, that is if you modify the work. If you are including code examples verbatim then you aren't adapting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real problem is the &lt;strong&gt;NC clause&lt;/strong&gt;. You cannot use it for any commercial purpose, adaptation or no. In practical terms, your entire book falls under a non-commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that if your use qualifies as fair use, then you may be exempt from all these terms. But your use doesn't sound like it will qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If making the whole book non-commercial is out of the question, one work-around is to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlinking_and_framing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;normal hyperlinks to link to those examples&lt;/a&gt; instead, which most countries don't consider copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T14:26:36.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4123" CreationDate="2016-07-01T15:24:25.247" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I convince conventional colleagues to venture out into the open source domain? I have worked in large private companies, many are reluctant to adopt any&#xA;open source libraries for any level of service. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have for years endeavoured to introduce open source libraries as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an external modular “package” that provides an array of features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an efficient and up to date numerical computation approach to data &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;social friendly manner to evolve company's products, services and capabilities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interface to other groups of users who can result in inter-disciplinary collaborations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;decentralising control.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the I have received the following list of negative feedback about open source, some of which is true but delving further into them, it appears to me that some of these points are found in closed source software. The major perogative in closed source was making money through patent royalties, licensing etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is insecure and has no guarantees&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is creates confusion in interfacing legacy libraries with open source libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is appallingly &quot;buggy&quot; with no support or updates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is incompatible with the target hardware&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;products and services that are free are misleading and cannot be trusted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5460" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-07-03T02:13:56.660" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T02:13:56.660" Title="How can I convince conventional colleagues to venture out into the open source domain?" Tags="|collaboration|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4122" CreationDate="2016-07-01T16:25:07.343" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I cannot help to convince your colleagues, I can offer some of the answer I give to (more or less) the same objections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is insecure and has no guarantees&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is inherently true also for closed source software. No software is secure. The main advantage is, basically, that sometime you can fix an open source software yourself, while you cannot with closed source software. As for the guarantees, well, also closed source software comes without a warranty, if you read the license agreement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is creates confusion in interfacing legacy libraries with open source libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That can be true, but I think it is very dependent from the your code, if it is difficult to interface with an external library, the fact that the library is open or closed is irrelevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It is appallingly &quot;buggy&quot; with no support or updates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply false. Or better, it can be that a library after some time is no more actively developed, just as any closed source product. Again, the advantage is that with a open source library you can both take over the development or have a easier transition to anther library since you can fix some critical bug while migrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;it is incompatible with the target hardware&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be. It is the only point where there is no solution, if you must use that hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;products and services that are free are misleading and cannot be trusted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose that none of them use gmail or facebook or twitter or instagram or any other &quot;free&quot; service, right ? ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While your colleagues can be right to not blindly trust an open source library, they should not blindly trust any closed source library/product they use in their code and then test boths to validate them anyway.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastActivityDate="2016-07-01T16:25:07.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-07-02T07:20:06.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wrote all the software (as opposed to incorporating other open source code), then &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are not bound by the license.  The license is an instrument that you issue describing how those who use that copy are allowed to use it.  If you release a copy of your code with (for example) a GPL license, you still have the right to do anything you want with the original, including releasing it to others with a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some background: I have practical experience of this.  When I was an employee at MIT, I wrote a nice application and wanted to put it on the FTP server (this was in the days before the WWW) with the GPL license.  After a small amount of discussion and other back and forth (including the MIT lawyers emailing me a question, which I hand carried up to the FSF, and they called &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; lawyer to get an answer), the MIT lawyers decided that releasing a copy with the GPL did not restrict them from selling the source to another party, with a different license (essentially the standard &quot;do whatever you want, just don't hold us responsible for the result&quot; license that MIT uses when licensing MIT IP to others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in case it's not evident: IANAL, TINLA.  While I did talk to the MIT lawyers, I am not a lawyer.  The discussion above is my &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; interpretation of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastEditorUserId="5406" LastEditDate="2016-07-02T07:42:38.933" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T07:42:38.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-02T14:03:10.130" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one web application A that generates some logs files. The application A may have a GPL-v3 or GPL-v2 license.&#xA;I want to create a custom application B to read logs of the application A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, must the application B be licensed with GPL-v2/v3 or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5467" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T18:23:45.993" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T00:03:57.740" Title="GPL-v3/v2 application logs, use log with another custom application do this application become GPL-v3/v2?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2016-07-02T23:36:31.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL on Application A refers (usually, you should probably check) &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to the program, and not to any data it produces.  It is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that the data files are covered, but in that case there would have to be notice of that &lt;em&gt;in the data file&lt;/em&gt;.  If there isn't, then (my understanding is) that you (or whoever &quot;owns&quot; the copy of A that wrote the log) is the producer and thus the copyright owner (per Berne).  If all that applies, then you are allowed to do whatever you want with the log files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual: IANAL, TINLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-07-02T23:36:31.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2951" CreationDate="2016-07-03T14:35:10.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you the sole author of this code? Or, if not, have the other authors transferred copyright to you? If you have the copyright, you can apply whatever license you wish, and at the same time do whatever you wish with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not control the copyright, then you need to reach an agreement with the other creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming for the moment that you do have control, the question of license selection is a business question. Is your goal maximum adoption of the free version, or maximum revenue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal to get the widest possible adoption of the free version, you might consider a non-copyleft license. Some people will choose to avoid your free version if it is copylefted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to maximize licensing revenue, using a copyleft license will force people who can't or won't abide by the GPL to pay you for an alternative license even for the free version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (some of) your goals are ideological, and you simply want to use a copyleft license because that's your chosen approach, then stick to MAP's answer, which offers a more detailed explanation of the licensing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="554" LastActivityDate="2016-07-03T14:35:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-04T18:53:58.770" Score="2" ViewCount="1739" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say an android app is hosted on Github, it has beautiful UI elements that I &lt;del&gt;introduced within&lt;/del&gt; copied into an app of my own. Now I am getting requests from users/customers to show them how to implement those UI elements in their apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Github project's license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Public License Version 2 1991&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; (adding some points to clarify the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not a contributor, neither the author of the original Github project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due the number of requests from users/customers/developers, I'd like to 'sell' those UI elements (also called widgets in Android).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5509" LastEditorUserId="5509" LastEditDate="2016-07-05T21:15:00.773" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T20:45:23.887" Title="Can I make money from a &quot;piece&quot; of open source software?" Tags="|gpl|monetization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4131" CreationDate="2016-07-04T20:49:09.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is not really clear. It is open to three interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the users/customers want that you teach them how to implement these UI elements: not really a problem to be paid to teach them how to do them&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the users/customers want that you implement these UI elements in their app: no problem here, you are basically doing some paid development&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the users/customers want to use these UI elements in their apps: you can try to ask for some compensation (maybe as donations to continue the development), but there is no guarantee: after all your source are on  Github and they can just fork them, and be bounded by the GPL at least (if I remember correctly) if the distribute it. I seem to remember that, while bounded by the license, you have no obligation to share the code if you don't distribute the software, for example an internal only utility. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you ask the question, I think you are in the (1) option, so you are not really monetizing from the code itself so the GPL is, in my opinion and in this situation, irrilevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastActivityDate="2016-07-04T20:49:09.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4134" CreationDate="2016-07-05T07:57:05.993" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the only developer working on an open source project (MPL v2.0 license, not sure if it does matter) and I have a single-person LLC I use for some consulting works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the pros and cons of copyrighting the code under my own name vs the name of the company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4227" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:54:58.773" Title="Copyrighting open source code using a business name vs as an individual" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4133" CreationDate="2016-07-05T08:54:58.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that you are the sole owner of your LLC, and depending on how liberal the open source license is, the difference isn't meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tax&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is developed for the LLC as a work-for-hire, that is your LLC pays yourself, it may be classed as an R&amp;amp;D expense, which may be advantageous to do. Consult your local tax laws or your accountant. If you write the code yourself, your LLC will just be using a free resource, which has no tax implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Business ownership transfer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever sell your LLC, or it goes bankrupt, and the LLC is the copyright holder, the code is considered the LLC's property and will be transferred along with it, which effectively means you lose ownership of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rights&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain rights that copyright holders have that typically aren't granted by open source licenses, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/33/175&quot;&gt;relicensing&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/270/175&quot;&gt;closing the project later&lt;/a&gt;. If you ever need to do something not allowed by the license, technically one of the entities (you, your LLC) needs to give permission to the other. It doesn't really matter unless you sue yourself, say for insurance purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expiration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright expiration is different depending on whether the author is human or not (anonymous, pseudonymous, work-for-hire). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typically, and for the US&lt;/a&gt;, it's author's life + 70 years, or 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation whichever is shorter. Given that these terms are stupendously long the difference isn't meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-05T08:54:58.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4176" CreationDate="2016-07-05T16:59:27.653" Score="5" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would you license an open source service (server with frontend) which is a tool let's say to monitor software applications. I'd like to find a license which allows companies to adopt it and use it for their commericial products. They can modify look and feel, add or remove functionality. They can distribute it along with their software to customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I'd like to restrict is that they can get paid for the service itself, say by adding a multi-tenancy feature and then make a cloud version where customers pay money to use the service. That is something I'd like to reserve for myself :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/creative-commons-attribution-noncommercial-(cc-nc)&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC&lt;/a&gt; lincense in mind. do you think that works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5519" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T14:22:57.513" Title="How to license open source service for commercial projects but restrict it to backend usage" Tags="|license-recommendation|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T10:18:38.127" Score="7" ViewCount="629" Body="&lt;p&gt;In another &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4094/can-wikidata-which-runs-under-cc-zero-incorporate-cc-by-content&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; I asked Tim Malone suggested that &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication&lt;/a&gt; might be incompatible with German law. What's the exact status of CC0 under the eyes of German law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't think that the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2711/486&quot;&gt;What are the limitations of CC0 vs Public Domain&lt;/a&gt; investigates this issue in enough detail, so I'm asked this question to get more detail about the legal status.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="486" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T04:26:28.583" Title="What's the status of CC0 under the eyes of German law?" Tags="|law|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4349" CreationDate="2016-07-06T12:23:05.397" Score="3" ViewCount="1194" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar question already asked here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/159023/can-cc0-code-use-a-gpl-library&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/159023/can-cc0-code-use-a-gpl-library&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;but my question is a little bit different, perhaps more accurately.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use/apply a public domain license to my program while my program uses the GCC library or uses GPL libraries (link or runtime use or...)?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;main.cpp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;gpl_licensed_library&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;my_library&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now can i say:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;code is licensed under the &lt;code&gt;CC0&lt;/code&gt;. and i use &lt;code&gt;gpl_licensed_library&lt;/code&gt; library that released under the &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;AND&lt;br&gt;&#xA;if answer is NO, then What &lt;code&gt;license compatibility&lt;/code&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5524" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T08:38:34.980" Title="Can Public Domain use GPL licensed library/program?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|linked-libraries|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4139" CreationDate="2016-07-06T16:30:48.953" Score="2" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one question with regards to MaxMind API license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the MaxMind's &lt;code&gt;GeoIp2&lt;/code&gt; Java API:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-java&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to use this library in a commercial application you are required to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a copy of the license in any redistribution you may make that includes Apache software;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide clear attribution to The Apache Software Foundation for any distributions that include Apache software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2-developer-package&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We include a license for redistribution of our API code with your&#xA;  commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean with regards to the above &lt;code&gt;GeoIp2&lt;/code&gt; Java library? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5527" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T17:08:39.493" Title="API license question" Tags="|commercial|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4138" CreationDate="2016-07-06T17:08:39.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've said, the GeoIP2 Java API is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. MaxMind has clearly granted you a license to distribute and modify the software under those terms. The terms of the Apache license are quite permissive and primarily only require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement by MaxMind that their &quot;GeoLite2 Developer's Package&quot; includes a license to include their Java API in a product does not in any diminish the fact that they have &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; given you a license to do exactly that, via the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would they include this? For one, it lets them add another marketing item to make the developer's package sound more attractive. For another, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite-commercial-redistribution-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the license grant included with the paid package&lt;/a&gt; does not carry attribution requirements or the requirement to include a copy of the Apache license. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-java/commit/ff4ddb35c72a06893ebfebd2b89760c016e8554d#diff-9879d6db96fd29134fc802214163b95a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;prior to Jun 5, 2013, the API was licensed under the GNU GPL&lt;/a&gt;, which is not a permissive license. (I don't know if they even offered a paid alternative in 2013, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note, though, that the paid package's license grant includes the requirement to assign copyright for your modifications to MaxMind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have the right to modify the Named MaxMind Products and redistribute the software with the changes; however, any such changes must be relayed back to MaxMind, and copyright in them assigned to MaxMind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, you could keep copyright in your changes by electing to modify the API under the terms of the Apache license instead, but you would then need to include attribution and the license text in your application. The other components (database, etc.) appear to only be available under the paid option, however, so you have no choice in terms for those works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-07-06T17:08:39.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-06T23:24:43.243" Score="7" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started using an open source library for a project I'm working on. Let's call it &lt;em&gt;Dasypus&lt;/em&gt;. It's an established library that's been around for a number of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I got to know Dasypus better, I found some missing features from the API. These features would be easy to implement and wouldn't upset the existing API very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I convince the author that these changes are worthwhile? Is there a place where I can reach out to people using it? Set up a poll or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little more about Dasypus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is developed/maintained by a single author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;250,000+ downloads&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not on GitHub, there's no mailing list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T19:17:36.707" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T04:13:54.667" Title="What's the best way to convince an open source library to change their API?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-07T07:07:59.530" Score="1" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create an open source custom home page and I need to use logos (such as Google's) to link to their sites. Can I use them freely, or should I check individually, and if it is the latter, how do I check, and does licensing an open source project differently affect this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5530" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T21:36:38.677" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:36:38.677" Title="Using company logos in open source projects?" Tags="|copyright|trademark|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4143" CreationDate="2016-07-07T09:46:56.067" Score="6" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend and I developed a software which we would like to be &lt;strong&gt;free as in freedom&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like our software to be available to anyone for no money, but we would like to sell the source code to those interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal then is :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone has access to binary &lt;strong&gt;gratis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone who wants the source from our version &lt;strong&gt;pays a fee&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it still be a FOSS ? If not, what could be an alternative ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT : to be clearer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is not to be the sole vendor of the software. I'm aware that once the sources are bought by someone, then this person can distribute it, modify it and sell it without restrictions. My hope is that while my sources are still being updated, it would be better for someone to get the &quot;official&quot; version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, &lt;strong&gt;my main concern is&lt;/strong&gt; there are still functionalities to be implemented, I'm eager to have some user feedback, but I don't want to accept merge requests from outside our team and I'm a bit afraid of someone forking and doing a better/faster job at implementing new functionalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5531" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T06:20:43.617" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T21:09:22.690" Title="Can I give the software gratis but charge for the source (and still be FOSS)?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2016-07-07T10:21:20.787" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you want to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make compiled (non-source) software available &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;, without the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;charge money for access to the source code, and (I think)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;be the sole vendor of the source code&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately these terms do not meet the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1+2 limits freedom 1 (&amp;quot;the freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish&amp;quot;). Simply put, you cannot give someone compiled software without giving them the source (and still call it free).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 is not inherently a problem. You can charge for free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;3 limits freedoms 2 and 3 (redistribution of original or modified source code).&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Business models for free software include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide the source libre and gratis, charge for access to compiled binaries. Users with the ability to compile themselves can choose to do so, rather than pay you. They are also potential competitors, contributors or employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Provide source and compiled binaries libre and gratis. Charge for support and private modifications. Private modifications are still libre, your clients are again potential competitors, contributors, partners or employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Charge for access to compiled binaries, and either include source code with compiled binaries, or give it, at no additional charge, to anyone who has bought compiled binaries and requests the source. Your clients are again potential competitors, contributors, partners or employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, free software business models must replace monopoly of the source code with some other value-add, typically convenience, support, service or hardware resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2023-04-24T22:18:25.237" LastActivityDate="2023-04-24T22:18:25.237" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4140" CreationDate="2016-07-07T10:41:10.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Submit a patch. (Or multiple patches.) Note in your submission that the patch makes breaking changes, so the maintainer can &lt;a href=&quot;http://semver.org/&quot;&gt;increment the version number&lt;/a&gt;, or whatever signal they use to notify downstream users of such changes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a fork with a different name (&lt;em&gt;DasypusNG&lt;/em&gt;). Host your fork somewhere accessible to collaborators (GitLab, GitHub...) and somewhere accessible to users (PyPI for Python, RubyGems for Ruby...).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes forks fizzle, sometimes they co-exist, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2013-March/020126.html&quot;&gt;sometimes they merge (even after a very long time)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/3.3.x/about.html&quot;&gt;sometimes more accessible forks succeed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T10:41:10.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2016-07-07T12:36:25.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote the software, so you can distribute it however you like.  The question is &quot;&lt;em&gt;can you then honestly refer to it as FOSS&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that you can, provided that you distribute it - whether you charge for it or not - under a FOSS licence.  If, for example, you distribute the binaries under the GNU GPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; are not bound by the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, so you are not obligated to convey the source to anyone getting the binaries, and the FSF are clear that you may charge for the source (or for any other part of the program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The catch is that &lt;strong&gt;if you are distributing the source under the GPL, you will probably only ever sell one copy&lt;/strong&gt;.  The GPL gives the right to redistribute the source to anyone in possession of it, and you cannot restrict &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; without losing the ability to honestly describe it as FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T12:36:25.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4140" CreationDate="2016-07-07T13:08:03.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are rather vague about the missing features in the exiting code base, that you claim to add. If you have discovered a better implementation to what is currently implemented, you could perhaps, fork your own branch from the main and submit your patches to your local branch. If your patch does not break any existing API then it would be welcomed by the author and the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5460" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T13:08:03.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4156" CreationDate="2016-07-07T15:13:52.860" Score="9" ViewCount="5090" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume that someone is working on a government project either as a government employee or a contractor working on a site which will be delivered and then subsequently maintained by a government agency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question: Can the project make use of software which is free use for non-commercial purposes, such as e.g. under the Creative Commons licence &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC 3.0&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://shop.highsoft.com/faq#Non-Commercial-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Highcharts FAQ&lt;/a&gt; section regarding this issue, they are rather explicit about the use of their software on websites owned by governmental or intergovernmental organizations. Highcharts does not consider such use to be covered by a non-commercial licence. My question is not about Highcharts which has been very explicit about the matter, but rather  about other software which is under that licence and is not explicit about whether government organisations are considered non-commercial or commercial (an example of such software would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fancybox&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastEditorUserId="5534" LastEditDate="2021-07-13T11:46:50.253" LastActivityDate="2021-07-13T11:46:50.253" Title="Is a government organisation commercial or non-commercial?" Tags="|creative-commons|non-commercial|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4151" CreationDate="2016-07-07T17:29:54.330" Score="12" ViewCount="3144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/a&gt; on one of my projects. Apache 2.0 recommends putting a boilerplate header in each code file right before module level documentation in it's Appendix section (bottom)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all well and good, but I can't find an answer on whether I should include the Appendix within the LICENSE file in the root of the project or take off the Appendix. Should I leave the license exactly as it appears on choosealicense.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification, I'm talking about this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;APPENDIX: How to apply the Apache License to your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To apply the Apache License to your work, attach the following&#xA;    boilerplate notice, with the fields enclosed by brackets &quot;{}&quot;&#xA;    replaced with your own identifying information. (Don't include&#xA;    the brackets!)  The text should be enclosed in the appropriate&#xA;    comment syntax for the file format. We also recommend that a&#xA;    file or class name and description of purpose be included on the&#xA;    same &quot;printed page&quot; as the copyright notice for easier&#xA;    identification within third-party archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright {yyyy} {name of copyright owner}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;    You may obtain a copy of the License at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;    distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;    limitations under the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5081" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T18:13:49.000" Title="Include Appendix of Apache 2.0 in LICENSE file?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4131" CreationDate="2016-07-07T19:31:21.537" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you distribute a work that includes components covered under the GPL, the GPL requires you to offer the source code to anyone who receives a copy of the binary program. Therefore, you must already offer the complete source code for your application, including the UI elements and how they are integrated into your program. If you are not already doing this, you should begin doing so immediately, because you are in violation of the GPL and are exposing yourself to legal liability for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free, of course, to offer to &lt;em&gt;teach&lt;/em&gt; users how to intergate those UI elements into their own programs, and you are welcome to provide such a service for a fee. The fact that you are not the author of the UI code does not preclude you from tutoring users about its use for a fee. You may also perform freelance work to modify their software to include these UI components. The users are welcome to take the source code you already gave them and try to figure it out for themselves, or they can come to you for paid explanation/work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would personally suggest you make it clear to users who pay for an explanation that using this UI component in their own application will carry the copyleft requirements of the GPL. If they choose to distribute their application with this component, they (like you) will need to also distribute the compelte source code for the application. You of course &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; include the GPL license and make it explicit that the GPL applies, but it would also be polite (and possibly more thoroughly limit your liability for fraud) to roughly explain what the GPL requires in plain English at the time you give paid instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T19:48:04.110" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T19:48:04.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4149" CreationDate="2016-07-07T19:53:48.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may freely omit the Appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof [...] provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) &lt;strong&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/strong&gt;; and...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from section 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;License&quot; shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction, and distribution as &lt;strong&gt;defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the Appendix is outside the stated scope of &quot;Sections 1 through 9&quot;, the requirement in 4(a) that &quot;You must give any other recipients... a copy of this License&quot; does not include the Appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T20:03:00.407" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T20:03:00.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4155" CreationDate="2016-07-07T20:11:15.233" Score="6" ViewCount="9162" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4149/include-appendix-of-apache-2-0-in-license-file&quot;&gt;previous question about the Apache 2.0 code header&lt;/a&gt;, I mentioned having the code header which is recommended by the Appendix of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However there are two fields that information can be placed in regarding copyrights/licenses for a standardized Python boilerplate header for a module.  The two fields are &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; as specified by &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1523427/what-is-the-common-header-format-of-python-files&quot;&gt;this relevant answer on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about what information should go where, should I include only my name and copyright year in the &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; field and then have the &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; field be the full text of the Apache 2.0 license? Should the &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; field duplicate the copyright line with my name and the year?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively could have the full text of the license in the &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; field and then simply list the license name in the &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; field as &lt;code&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/code&gt; as the &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; field is more commonly used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly worried about preserving the Apache 2.0 header's use without having to split it up but I'm also worried about duplicate information in a header. (Containing copyright year and my name in both &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; fields.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently I was thinking the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;__copyright__ = &quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&#xA;    Copyright 2016 &amp;lt;MY FULL NAME&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;    You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;    distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;    limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;__license__ = &quot;Apache 2.0&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5081" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T09:36:14.413" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:36:14.413" Title="Placement of copyright and license variables within Python source?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4141" CreationDate="2016-07-07T21:29:01.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, these things are usually &lt;em&gt;trademarked&lt;/em&gt;, if not copyrighted as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a lot of the larger, more major companies provide to people various guidelines that allow people to use their trademarked, but they are often covered by various restrictions. Google, as an example, has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.ca/permissions/trademark/our-trademarks.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;comprehensive help center for trademark guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. Although these may be points, they are not definite and final. It is your responsibility to make sure that you respect Google's trademarks, and that you do not infringe on any of their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided that you have a license or permission to use a logo/trademark within an open source project, then the logo should be fine. Open source licences often only affect source code and compiled object forms of the source code, so I don't see many clashes here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside, as an alternative, you may have luck finding a few things in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://design.google.com/icons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Google Material Design Icons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T21:29:01.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4152" CreationDate="2016-07-07T22:05:55.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full text of the license is a lot to format cleanly in a text variable, and actual variables in every single module may be overkill. One solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; contains the copyright line (copyright owner, date and boilerplate text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; contains the copyright line plus the short text that would go at the top of each source-code file (what appears in &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; in the question). It can also be a short name or standard abbreviation for the license if the package will be handled by an automated system that automatically extracts license metadata from this variable or if you want the license name along with the copyright text and don't want or need the more verbose short text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of the license is included as package data or a data file, accessed via &lt;code&gt;pkg_resources&lt;/code&gt; and displayed via a button in the About dialog or a menu item under the Help menu for graphical applications. Plain text and HTML are convenient formats for the license text for this purpose. Not only does this avoid huge chunks of text in source-code files, it avoids having duplicate full license text in the source code and in a file in the documentation directory with the README and related files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastEditorUserId="4557" LastEditDate="2016-07-07T22:12:46.573" LastActivityDate="2016-07-07T22:12:46.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4152" CreationDate="2016-07-08T01:21:43.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some licenses, like Apache 2.0 as you noted, recommends including a copy of the license, or some shortened version, in each file. It's best if you can follow these recommendations, but as long as it's clear what file falls under what license, you don't need to follow any convention. The reason why some licenses recommend this is often because they operate on a per-file basis, as opposed to per-project licenses like GPL. Note that a lot of these conventions were established before widespread use of version control software, so people had to manually track authorship. See this question for more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/202/175&quot;&gt;Should I include license text in a single file or all source files?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is tangential to the &lt;code&gt;__copyright__&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;__license__&lt;/code&gt; variables. They are part of certain Python coding styles, which are supported by certain Python tools like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epydoc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epydoc&lt;/a&gt;. What you put in these variables depends on your project's coding style, and whether you use tools like epydoc. If none of these apply, it's up to your personal preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T01:21:43.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4147" CreationDate="2016-07-08T06:11:54.220" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It depends.&lt;/strong&gt; The type of user itself doesn't matter, at least according to Creative Commons. It is how you use it that matters. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC's NonCommercial (NC) licenses prohibit uses that are &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot; This is intended to capture the intention of the NC-using community without placing detailed restrictions that are either too broad or too narrow. Please note that CC's definition does not turn on the type of user: if you are a nonprofit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could still run afoul of the NC restriction, and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term. Whether a use is commercial will depend on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their definition of &amp;quot;NonCommercial&amp;quot; can still be pretty fuzzy. This is a big weakness in Creative Commons Non Commercial licenses (and perhaps non-commercial licenses in general). CC have not clearly defined what &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; means, leaving it up to individual courts to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How ambiguous can it be? Try this out: would you consider the following non-commercial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Used by a public/government, not-for-profit entity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On a website for free&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without advertising or sponsorship&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Verstoss-gegen-CC-Lizenz-Deutschlandradio-muss-zahlen-2151308.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German court interpreted this as &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently they drew on German law's definition of &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot;, which is something more like &amp;quot;private use&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if you must use CC's non commercial licenses, it's a good idea to explicitly define what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; mean by &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot;, with the aid of a copyright lawyer. This looks like what Highcharts is doing in their FAQ. If you want to use something that's under a non-commercial license, you have to be very careful, and preferably seek permission from the author directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T06:20:18.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4147" CreationDate="2016-07-08T06:57:28.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please check &lt;a href=&quot;https://shop.highsoft.com/faq#Non-Commercial-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Highcharts FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Governmental organizations are &lt;strong&gt;not regarded as non-commercial&lt;/strong&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;will require a license&lt;/strong&gt; to be in line with our terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you work on a government project with Highcharts' products you should buy a license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5539" LastEditorUserId="5539" LastEditDate="2016-07-08T07:04:02.120" LastActivityDate="2016-07-08T07:04:02.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4163" CreationDate="2016-07-08T20:55:41.563" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sections 3.1 and 3.2 of the CeCILL, edited and with emphasis added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1 The Licensee shall be deemed as having accepted the terms and conditions of this Agreement upon the occurrence of the first of the following events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(i) loading the Software by any or all means, notably, by &lt;strong&gt;downloading from a remote server&lt;/strong&gt;, or by loading from a physical medium&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2 One copy of the Agreement...has been provided&#xA;to the Licensee prior to its acceptance as set forth in Article 3.1&#xA;hereinabove, and the Licensee hereby acknowledges that it has read and&#xA;understood it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a distributor, be it the Licensor or a Licensee, simply offers a download link to CeCILL-licensed software without first directing the user to the license, have they done anything wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T03:44:17.410" Title="Is a CeCILL distributor/licensor legally obligated to show the user a license before download?" Tags="|cecill|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4159" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-07-08T21:00:23.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three different proliferations of the CeCILL (the original plus the CeCILL-B and CeCILL-C), and two common versions of the original (2.0 and 2.1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="5392" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T20:54:56.660" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T20:54:56.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-07-08T21:00:23.080" Score="0" Body="The CeCILL (CEA CNRS INRIA Logiciel Libre) is a copyleft free software license having official English and French versions, with the goal of international enforceability while maintaining GPL compatibility." OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="5392" LastEditDate="2016-07-10T23:04:59.113" LastActivityDate="2016-07-10T23:04:59.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2016-07-09T21:05:12.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you read the Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;essay on selling software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As other commenters have noted, restricting source code to non-commercial use is incompatible with the ideals of Free Software and Open Source. If you object to people &quot;changing a tiny bit and earning money with that&quot;, many free and open-source licenses have strong attribution requirements that would point users to your original software. The GPL itself states that &quot;the work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:ArtisticLicense2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Artistic License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; section 4 allows users to distribute modified versions only if they give you their modifications, ensure that the modified and unmodified versions can be run at the same time, or re-license it to a copyleft license. It's pretty permissive as far as licenses go, but it's one to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're willing to shed GPL-compatibility (and by choosing CC-BY-NC it appears you are), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.socialtext.net/open/cpal_license_in_wikitext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Common Public Attribution License&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:LPPLv1.3a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LaTEX Project Public License&lt;/a&gt; both have stringent attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-09T21:05:12.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4147" CreationDate="2016-07-10T21:15:43.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-NC-4.0 license contains a definition of noncommercial in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Section 1.i&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards&#xA;  commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this&#xA;  Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other&#xA;  material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital&#xA;  file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no&#xA;  payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-NC 2.0 and 3.0 don't include this definition of Noncommercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could write a license with a different definition of NonCommercial, but you wouldn't be able to call it CC-BY-NC, or, in fact, you wouldn't be even able to call it &quot;open source&quot;.  Note that the Highcharts FAQ mentioned in the question explicitly states that it is not &quot;open source&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL so maybe I'm missing something, but that does appear to me to say that government use is a noncommercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-07-11T00:27:20.490" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T00:27:20.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4158" CreationDate="2016-07-11T03:44:17.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A licensee depending on the license to permit their distribution of the software would be, but it's strictly a matter of their having violated their license. The copyright holder would have to take action against them for copyright infringement for it to matter. The copyright holder themselves could offer a download link without providing the license because they can't infringe on their own copyright, but it's inadvisable to download software without knowing the license terms first (due to the risk that the software may &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be licensed for distribution and downloading a copy would technically infringe on it's copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-07-11T03:44:17.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-11T03:58:35.697" Score="4" ViewCount="754" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to publish an open source tool at github under MIT license. This tool itself uses another tool published at codeplex under Ms-Pl license. What is the proper way of giving appropriate credits (either in my application or source code) about using other tool from codeplex? Do I need to create any readme type of file that should mention other tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5429" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-07-14T03:56:57.040" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T17:21:16.840" Title="Proper way of mentioning credits to other open source tools used in my application" Tags="|licensing|mit|attribution|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4164" CreationDate="2016-07-11T16:14:35.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Microsoft Public License requires that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which should be self-explanatory. Also, giving an attribution notice to the author in your README can't hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more important clause is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By itself, this seems to be a GPL-like copyleft, but the Microsoft Reciprocal License has such a clause, which allows us to interpret the Ms-PL in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A) Reciprocal Grants- For any file you distribute that contains code from the software (in source code or binary format), you must provide recipients the source code to that file along with a copy of this license, which license will govern that file. You may license other files that are entirely your own work and do not contain code from the software under any terms you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this clause, we can note immediately that the Ms-PL doesn't require a licensee to publish the source code of executables it distributes, and allows linking from other licenses. So one option might be to distribute executables only, and link to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do choose to publish the source code, on the other hand, it must be under the Ms-PL. But unlike the Ms-RL, the Ms-PL makes no claims to your code. I gather that you are allowed to circumvent the weak copyleft (which, indeed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ms-pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF notes is weak&lt;/a&gt;) by making modifications. &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ms-PL is listed as a Copyfree license&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one standard of Copyfree&lt;/a&gt; is that there must be no conditions that apply to derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Free Modification and Derivation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyfree license does not place any restrictions on the modification of -- and derivation from -- the licensed material external to the license itself, and protects recipients of the material from such restrictions except insofar as explicit individual contractual agreements may be concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think your safest choice is to license your entire program under the Ms-PL, in which case you have nothing to worry about in distributing either the tool's source code or binaries. You state that you want to use the MIT License. The Ms-PL is about as permissive as the MIT License, but it also protects users against patent treachery in section 3(B). And, as we have noted, the weak copyleft can probably be easily circumvented, so the licenses should have the same practical effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More good answers &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/185072/microsoft-public-license-vs-mit&quot;&gt;at this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-12T14:39:16.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4168" CreationDate="2016-07-13T12:19:28.997" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to use the code from &lt;a href=&quot;http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/progressive_morphological_filtering.php#progressive-morphological-filtering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this Point Cloud tutorial&lt;/a&gt; (or similar) in a commercial program, do I have to attribute to the author? Although PCL is licensed with the BSD license (so no problem), the webpage with the tutorial (so the actual work) is hosted and licensed under a Creative Commons license (one that allows for commercial use, as it says on the site). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, should I include the author/source attribution, and if so, then where? In the direct source code of my program? In some file that goes along with it? Are parts of the code, especially those that are tutorials, even understood as copyrighted material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="5573" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T10:14:17.293" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T10:14:17.293" Title="Giving attribution to tutorial" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4167" CreationDate="2016-07-13T14:52:21.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are parts of the code, especially those that are tutorials, even understood as copyrighted material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the Berne convention anything put in a preservable form is automatically copyrighted, so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to attribute to the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as that's the entire point of the license, yes. If you are publishing the work, then the legal code puts it clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution (&amp;quot;Attribution Parties&amp;quot;) in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) the title of the Work if supplied;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., &amp;quot;French translation of the Work by Original Author,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a statement satisfying all those would be &amp;quot;This product includes code from a tutorial by pointclouds.org, available &lt;a href=&quot;http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/progressive_morphological_filtering.php#progressive-morphological-filtering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-13T14:52:21.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-13T16:17:00.927" Score="17" ViewCount="5582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in need of a desktop PC made only of Free and Open hardware components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could be sure that such a thing is possible, I'd even be willing to build it myself; however, I can find no guides on Google on how to determine if this motherboard is open, or if that adapter released its firmware source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in hardware that does not impede my ability to install my own firmware. Open hardware schematics are not necessarily a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you go about accomplishing this task?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5577" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-07-13T21:49:07.903" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T02:25:59.250" Title="Is it possible to build free open hardware desktop PC?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4171" CreationDate="2016-07-13T22:05:53.173" Score="5" ViewCount="909" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a userspace driver which requires some modifications to the Linux kernel to function.  The modifications expose new functionality by the &lt;code&gt;sysfs&lt;/code&gt; interface.  I understand that the modifications to the Linux kernel have to be licensed under the GPLv2, but is the userspace software (which relies on the modified kernel to function) considered a derivative work of the kernel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T06:58:48.760" Title="If software requires a modified (linux) kernel to function, is it considered a derivative work of the linux kernel?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4170" CreationDate="2016-07-14T06:58:48.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your kernel modifications pretty clearly create a derived work of the kernel, so they will almost certainly need to be distributed under GPLv2.  In addition, deciding to do so helps the analysis in the next paragraph enormously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your userspace software, it is certain that proprietary software, public domain software, and other non-GPL'ed software makes use of the regular kernel all the time without being covered by the kernel's licence.  Since that is true for a GPL'ed, stock kernel, it will also be true for your modified, GPL'ed kernel, &lt;em&gt;because it is the same licence that covers both works&lt;/em&gt;.  I believe that your userspace software can be distributed under any licence you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T06:58:48.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4174" CreationDate="2016-07-14T22:56:40.973" Score="3" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused on the licensing for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xamarin.com/studio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xamarin Studio&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.monogame.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monogame&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xamarin.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xamarin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I develop a game in Xamarin Studio using Monogame and want to release it for iOS and Android which uses Xamarin can I do so for free? Do I need to attribute anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monogame is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mono/MonoGame/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Xamarin's license can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xamarin.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5594" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T16:40:06.763" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T16:40:06.763" Title="Monogame mobile licensing with xamarin studio" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4169" CreationDate="2016-07-14T23:13:16.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest taking a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;EOMA68 computer cards&lt;/a&gt;. They're expected to receive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RYF&lt;/a&gt; certification, and you can order a desktop housing kit to go with yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5113" LastActivityDate="2016-07-14T23:13:16.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4172" CreationDate="2016-07-15T02:42:51.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Xamarin's side of things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an individual working on your own applications to sell or for any other purpose, you may use the software to develop and test those applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you're good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From MonoGame's side of things, the Microsoft Public License is a rather permissive license. You are, as permitted by all FOSS licenses, free to use and redistribute the software (section 2). Section 3 places some conditions on these rights, of which the following are relevant to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you rights to use any&#xA;contributors' name, logo, or trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don't go saying that you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; MonoGame or using their logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all&#xA;copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the&#xA;software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you will be distributing part of MonoGame with your game, you would be best advised to include a copy of the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file from their repository, which includes their copyright notice. Also, don't go into any of their source files and remove copyright notices from them. Maybe the library prints out a copyright notice every time it's initialized; don't remove that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are not required to publish the source of an executable you create based on MsPL code, so if you don't want to make your game open-source, you're free to do that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license does not impose itself on things that merely &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; to the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were copying source code from the project into your game, that would be a different story, but as it stands you need only distribute MonoGame under the MsPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't use MonoGame's name or logos&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of their &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can license code that you own and your program as a whole under almost any terms you choose, but MonoGame must remain under the MsPL if you distribute it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combined copyright notice would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Game files (c) StackNinja and licensed under [whatever license you choose]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MonoGame (c) the MonoGame team and licensed under the Microsoft Public License&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distribute your game under the GNU General Public License; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ms-pl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the two are incompatible&lt;/a&gt;. You are free to do so as the copyright holder, but if you did, recipients would face a conflict of restrictions. The GPL demands they redistribute the entire source of the program under its terms, but the MsPL demands that the source of the MonoGame libraries be distributed under the MsPL. The only way they could comply would be not to redistribute your game at all, thus losing an important freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T02:42:51.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-15T17:08:21.160" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written an R package whose source code requires several libraries, whose source is therefore included in the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These libraries are licensed Boostv1, MIT-style, and public domain. I am happy to release my source code which ties all of this together as Boostv1, MIT, or any other such license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the package as a whole must have a single, standardized FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CRAN reviewers have suggested GPL-3, but this adds copyleft restrictions that none of the components individual possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good license for the package as a whole, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5599" OwnerDisplayName="Richard" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T00:25:35.640" Title="What license to use on a package containing MIT, Boostv1, and public domain?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2016-07-15T17:29:14.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are essentially trying to ensure you get some kind of a commercial monopoly on your software when sold as a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best license for this use case is the AGPL IMHO. It is not exactly what you are looking for, but no free and open source license would prohibit commercial licensing and offering services. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not restrict commercial usage and does not restrict creating and selling software as a service, but it provides a strong incentive for commercial free riders to share back in this context: &quot;performing&quot; the software over a public network essentially triggers the AGPL copyleft clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example of its usage would be MongoDB. In their case, they go one step further by providing drivers under the Apache license, and the back-end DB under AGPL, therefore making it easy to integrate in commercial and floss software with limited obligations. &#xA;In their context, unmodified usage typically does not trigger the AGPL copyleft. Modified usage would. Offering MongoDB as a service commercially using the unmodified version would be fine without much restrictions. Modifying it would require the service provider to redistribute its changes. &#xA;If I were in your context with your parameters, AGPL would be my license of choice. (I am not you and I may not use AGPL, but this is not relevant here ;) ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I consider that the CC-NC family of licenses are a poor choice for software in general. You would be better off using a plain commercial license with &quot;visible&quot; sources. The CC licenses were designed for content and not for software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-07-18T05:12:48.283" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T05:12:48.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4175" CreationDate="2016-07-15T17:37:31.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would pick either Boost or MIT for my own code and the overall license of my package, selecting one vs. the other using the one that represents the largest chunk of third-party code I include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if the embedded Boost-licensed code is 5000 lines and the MIT-licensed is 1000 lines, I would go for Boost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rationale is a matter of courtesy (and ethics): when I embed significant chunks of third-party code in my own projects, I tend to reuse the same license as these projects. If anything, it would allow the original author of the embedded code to eventually reuse any of my improvements in their own code, should they wish to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But licensing a combination of MIT and Boostv1 code with either the MIT or Boostv1 license is alright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I would be licensing my overall package for instance as Boost, including all my new additions. Existing code under the Boost or MIT license would stay under their original licenses and carry with them their original copyright and license texts and notices.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In your hypothetical situation, aren't you violating the MIT license by requiring that &quot;The [MIT] copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; Your hypothetical situation would definitely be a copyright violation if we were talking about the GPL v3 rather than the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. I would still keep the bit originally under MIT or Boost under their original license. Only the overall license for my package and the license for my additions would carry the license I picked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-07-16T00:25:35.640" LastActivityDate="2016-07-16T00:25:35.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4175" CreationDate="2016-07-15T20:16:35.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I basically agree with Philippe Ombredanne's answer, but I have a slightly different take on it which would not fit in a comment to his answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, each library needs to include its own license language. This is not just out of courtesy, it's required. The Boostv1 license looks a lot like the BSD license. Both the MIT &amp;amp; Boostv1 permit any use, with no redistribution requirement, so as long as you include the license language in the appropriate directories / documentation, you're good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license for &lt;em&gt;your own code&lt;/em&gt; can be either more liberal or more restrictive than the included libraries. Note well: this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the case if the libraries are using GPLv2 (in most cases) or GPLv3 (in any case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're feeling generous, then you can use BSD/MIT/something similar. If not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; so generous, then GPLv2. I'm not so fond of GPLv3, but it's your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: Draw a clear line between what is covered by your license and what is covered by other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5602" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T20:16:35.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4169" CreationDate="2016-07-15T23:48:11.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just discovered the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF Guide on Free Hardware&lt;/a&gt;. It appears to provide just enough information to make some informed decisions on hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5577" LastEditorUserId="5577" LastEditDate="2016-07-15T23:53:21.547" LastActivityDate="2016-07-15T23:53:21.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4029" CreationDate="2016-07-18T06:41:40.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without knowing more details about the software you want to build I would argue, that the music is only data used by your program. As such neither your program is a derivative work of the music, nor the other way around. This would mean, that you can freely chose the Free Software license you prefer for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2016-07-18T06:41:40.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4205" CreationDate="2016-07-19T01:39:19.930" Score="8" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the enforcing of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us suppose I am creating an IoT device using custom software linking/modifying GPL software. We assume that the software running in the IoT device is not accessible via conventional ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case 1:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client loans the IoT device. In that case, should I disclose the source code I developed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The  example I found closest to this case is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LaptopLoan&quot;&gt;Laptop Lending&lt;/a&gt; section in the GPL FAQ. In that case, the device is still mine, and thus my own software runs and my own device and I do not need to release my source code. Is my understanding correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Case 2:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We sell the device to the client. In that case, I think we should disclose the source code the same way as television manufacturers using Linux as an OS disclose their sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5623" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T09:38:24.183" Title="Lend/Distribute IoT device containing GPL software" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4181" CreationDate="2016-07-19T07:32:00.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think both answers are correct. As long as you own the device (case 1) you don't have to pass on the source code and the rights guaranteed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you sell the device you have to add a copy of the license and the source code. Instead of the source code you could also add a offer to provide the software on request. But typically this means more work for you so I would distribute the source together with the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, that you don't only have to distribute the source code of the GPL program you use. But also license all modifications on the program as GPL and everything which is a derivative work of the GPL program. For example a program you wrote which depends on (links to) the GPL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastEditorUserId="1154" LastEditDate="2016-07-19T07:37:57.413" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T07:37:57.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4191" CreationDate="2016-07-19T15:54:37.437" Score="14" ViewCount="1601" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just a couple years of experience in software development and in the past few months have been dipping my toes in the water of making open source contributions. It was very exciting when my first patch was accepted! Recently I've opened pull requests to a couple projects and have gotten no response from maintainers. In one case it's been 3-4 weeks and in the other about a week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases it isn't clear to me how actively the projects are being maintained. There have been commits in the last few months but in both cases I can see that I am not the only person to submit a pull request or open an issue and not get a response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do in a situation like this? I could fork the repositories and use my own versions of the software but then I don't feel like I'm contributing. Also, is there a path for me to express interest in helping out with maintaining the original repos? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5630" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T15:22:47.607" Title="What should I do if maintainers are unresponsive/how can I become a maintainer?" Tags="|contributor|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4189" CreationDate="2016-07-19T17:18:52.860" Score="9" ViewCount="6531" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the linux kernel, several symbols are exported with &lt;code&gt;EXPORT_GPL_ONLY&lt;/code&gt;, and as a result are only available if your kernel module contains &lt;code&gt;MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;.  Do either of those have any legal meaning?  Can I create a proprietary kernel module that uses gpl-only symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-19T21:37:13.987" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T06:30:27.700" Title="What legal meaning do GPL symbols hold in the linux kernel?" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4188" CreationDate="2016-07-19T18:59:03.163" Score="7" ViewCount="1006" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to put a song licensed under a Creative Commons license that does not allow derivatives (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 3.0&lt;/a&gt;), am I allowed to programmatically loop (or apply effects) to the song when it is being played in my game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky question because things like ROM hacking are technically legal because they do not distribute derivatives; they distribute a tool that lets you modify your copy of a ROM. The only difference here is that I have rights to distribute the song in my game, along with the game itself, which would act as a tool to &quot;modify&quot; the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am most likely not going to release my game's source, if that has any relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5633" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T01:49:57.400" LastActivityDate="2022-05-17T05:33:41.840" Title="Does programmatically looping a song in a game qualify as a derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|cc-by-nd|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2016-07-19T19:48:59.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that if you add effects to the song by manipulating the original file you create a derivative work which is not allowed by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Playing the song multiple times in a loop should be OK because you don't modify it, so it is not a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A interesting scenario is, if you add effects not by manipulating the song but by just playing the effect in parallel to the original song. In this case it looks like a derivative work for a observer but if you look at the technical details it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not that much experience in this area of copyright, so no final answer but I thought it might be useful to add my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-19T21:06:27.767" LastActivityDate="2016-07-19T21:06:27.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2016-07-20T01:47:43.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is not legal advice. You shouldn't be trusting legal interpretations from an unqualified, Canadian secondary school student. I advise you to seek professional advice from a qualified person.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you've asked here, is whether programmatically looping a song results in a derivative. The question at stake is a general one: when does manipulating a work result in a derivative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first, we need to figure out what a definition of a &quot;derivative work&quot; is. The license of the work you are using says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Adaptation&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (&quot;synching&quot;) will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ooh. Fun stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this, there's a bit of a conflict here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license, in it's last sentence in its definition of &quot;Adaptation&quot; states that the concept of playing music with an image qualifies as an adaptation of the work. But when is a musical work &quot;in sync&quot; with a visual display? Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any case law that touches upon this, but, in my opinion, it could be reasonably interpreted that the musical work must be synced to play at specific points in relation to the animated display. While a musical work may be played at the start of the animation of a display, it is no longer in sync if either work does not change based on the status of the other work. In other words, if the position of playback for the musical work doesn't depend on the animated display, or vice versa, than it's not an adaptation. But of course, that conclusion is not definite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conflicting part here is that an adaptation includes the definition of a &quot;derivative work.&quot; The license doesn't really define the term, and naturally, we'd look on to statutes and legislation to find a definition. However, does programmatically looping a musical work qualify as a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Supreme Court of Canada thinks not. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1973/index.do&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Théberge v. Galerie d'Art du Petit Champlain inc.&lt;/a&gt;, they wrote (and I quote):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[73] I should note that while there is no explicit and independent concept of “derivative work” in our Act, the words “produce or reproduce the work ... in any material form whatever” in s. 3(1)  confers on artists and authors the exclusive right to control the preparation of derivative works...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That, along with most of the judgment, brings us to the conclusion that for a derivative work to be made, there must be a reproduction. For this to take place, the work must be reproduced in a material form. However, no new material work is produced when looping a musical work, meaning that programmatically looping a song does not qualify as a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this apply to the United States? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is repeated many times in the Canadian judgment that the American definitions are much more expansive and broad. Again, I'm not largely familiar with American case law, but I would imagine that the results be similar, the work was never transformed in any way, but rather just played repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since no new work is being transformed, it is my opinion that there is no derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T02:03:41.793" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T02:03:41.793" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4185" CreationDate="2016-07-20T04:58:41.030" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to what Linus says his lawyers say, this is a means of &quot;codifying the intention in the code itself&quot;, so it does have legal significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, you should read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/154602/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LWN.net article&lt;/a&gt; itself, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/154603/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linus's response&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kernel modules depend on Linux's internal symbols to work, and it's uncertain whether they count as a derivative work of Linux, and therefore must be offered under a GPL-compatible license. The various &lt;code&gt;EXPORT_SYMBOL&lt;/code&gt; macros are a way of signalling what a majority of kernel developers consider the boundary. So what does this  mean in practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can certainly circumvent this macro, for example by modifying Linux code and renaming all &lt;code&gt;EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;EXPORT_SYMBOL&lt;/code&gt; and use the symbols in your GPL-incompatible kernel module, but then it would be easy to argue that you wilfully infringed on copyright, and will be liable for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;treble damages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversely, if you only used the non-GPL symbols and were somehow taken to court, it will be easier to argue that you were given implicit permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T04:58:41.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4135" CreationDate="2016-07-20T14:22:57.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another alternative is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Reciprocal License v1.5&lt;/a&gt; (RPL). It's also OSI approved but is not GPL compabitble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that AGPL do not require that the derived code is made available publicly if the application is used privately while RPL requires that all changes must be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.alxndrsn.com/post/3702000191/rpl-vs-agpl-license-differences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.alxndrsn.com/post/3702000191/rpl-vs-agpl-license-differences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4942" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T14:22:57.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4184" CreationDate="2016-07-20T14:42:12.333" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The primary way to contribute is by pull requests, just like you said. If your pull requests aren't accepted and you do not get any comments the project might as well be abandoned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I would open an issue/ticket and ask if you can participate as an maintainer. If you do not get a reply, create your own fork. Write a comment in your issue and say that you maintain an active fork so that other people can find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything wrong with that. You tried your best to contribute to the main repos. The github issue is great approach, since it prevents multiple new forks, which in turn would make the application diverge and thus make it harder to find the new main repository or combine the development effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4942" LastEditorUserId="4942" LastEditDate="2016-07-20T18:43:03.833" LastActivityDate="2016-07-20T18:43:03.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4195" CreationDate="2016-07-20T16:56:50.207" Score="5" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1881/against-what-does-the-apache-2-0-patent-clause-protect&quot;&gt;what I've read about the Apache 2 license's patent grant clause&lt;/a&gt;, it's intended to protect users of Apache-licensed software from software patents.  How does that work if the contributor doesn't own the relevant patents, and thus can't grant the patent license required by the patent grant clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that person A obtains a license to use person B's software patent, and writes some code that uses it.  Can person A then distribute that code under the Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that person C then uses that code.  Who's responsible for obtaining the patent license from person B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T12:55:48.177" Title="How does the Apache 2 license's patent grant interact with third-party patents?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4196" CreationDate="2016-07-21T03:23:40.440" Score="3" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Up to now, I've mainly been programming for fun projects on a small scale. Now I am planning the release of a larger iOS application in which I use BSD licensed code. I've know this is one of the simplest licenses and should be easy to implement, but the restrictions still leave me puzzled on how I should implement them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, I need to include a copyright message and the restrictions in the application. How do I do this practically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it sufficient to add a comment in one of the information menus saying &quot;copyright author XXX&quot; and repeat the restrictions, or should I implement this differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this probably is a stupid question, but licensing is new to me and I have trouble finding references on how I can implement it (or examples). I hope someone is able to help me! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5642" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T03:35:10.873" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T17:38:55.810" Title="Practical implications of using bsd licensed code" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4192" CreationDate="2016-07-21T12:55:48.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, &lt;strong&gt;where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor&lt;/strong&gt; that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bold is mine. The way I interpret that is, the Apache license only means person A grants patent licenses that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A can legally grant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That are necessary to use A's contribution, either alone or as part of the whole work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it will still be necessary for C to obtain a license from B. But the license assures C that she won't be sued by A by using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T12:55:48.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4193" CreationDate="2016-07-21T17:38:55.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You typically add credits in the &quot;About&quot; section in the menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how Spotify do it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ySreM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ySreM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H056u.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H056u.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AmZ5e.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AmZ5e.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4942" LastActivityDate="2016-07-21T17:38:55.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-21T21:19:52.610" Score="4" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a video were to include media released under a Creative Commons share-alike license, would the final video also need to be released under a similar license since it is a derivative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5627" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-21T22:15:33.080" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T05:59:31.857" Title="Are derived videos of ShareAlike licensed material subject to CC BY SA?" Tags="|derivative-works|copyleft|movie|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4197" CreationDate="2016-07-22T05:59:31.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&#xA;The CC BY SA is pretty clear on the topic. Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the conditions in Section 3(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I read this is you can use the SA license or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible license&lt;/a&gt;. For the CC-BY-SA 4.0 this includes the GPL-3.0 (which would a tad weird for a video IMHO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the key legal question which I cannot answer is when does my video becomes a derivative work? For instance, if I were to include to a properly attributed SA-licensed a one-minute sound clip or a picture displayed in 200 frames in a 2-hours video, would my video as a whole be subject to this license? Only a lawyer could tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T05:59:31.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4185" CreationDate="2016-07-22T06:30:27.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the linux kernel, several symbols are exported with EXPORT_GPL_ONLY, and as a result are only available if your kernel module contains MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;). Do either of those have any legal meaning? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Every lawyer I consulted with on the topic were mostly consistent on their interpretation and with the excellent answer from @congusbongus &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of any other license statement, I would interpret the MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;) macro as: &lt;code&gt;this code is available under the GPL&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of any other indication, a symbol exported as GPL-only is something I would interpret as: &lt;code&gt;by using this symbol, I agree that my code is derived from GPL-licensed code and should be under released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license: I state my agreement by having to explicitly create the proper MODULE_LICENSE macro.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I create a proprietary kernel module that uses gpl-only symbols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general LKMs should be licensed under a GPL or GPL-compatible license. And very few lawyers would support a theory that LKMs can be proprietary. And when they do so, this is usually only for very specific cases. And in these few cases where they may consider it sometimes acceptable, they would consider using GPL-only symbols in an exceptional proprietary module a strict no-no as this would be a rather conflicted position to support.&#xA;If a lawyer would have another take, I would seriously question their understanding and knowledge of the domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is also a problem faced by FLOSS kernel developers such as for the AFS (Andrew File System) which is CPL-licensed (and they can hardly relicense it for several historical reasons).  The actual non-GPL symbols available to their open source project is limited (and as a side note eventually shrinking as the trend is towards more GPL-only symbols).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal advice: when I create kernel modules, I would use the GPL or a dual GPL/BSD, especially for the user-space headers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to create proprietary code (which I would not in this context) that would be in userspace, not in kernel space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, use the GPL for LKMs and be happy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T06:30:27.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-22T14:33:15.773" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an open source project is it OK to modify the original &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file from  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&lt;/a&gt; and also the source file headers to use &lt;code&gt;https&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;http&lt;/code&gt; for the links to the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want my users to accidentally follow non-https links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5662" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T07:51:11.150" Title="Is it OK to change url scheme for the links to Apache 2 license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-file|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4140" CreationDate="2016-07-23T03:55:13.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IMO&lt;/strong&gt; if there are 250k+ downloads and several years of existence but still no established place to communicate with the developer then it's safe to say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;community, if present, is self-established;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;community is based around a lack of better alternative;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are many more features besides what you want implemented that are missing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's more or less safe to &quot;hijack&quot; community with a fork or lead it in some direction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to &lt;em&gt;convince the developer&lt;/em&gt;, then probably the best way would be to offer an implementation of what you want added with a reasoning behind it. User voting would help, but the place where to hold it really depends on the project. Sometimes social networks like Reddit are a better way to communicate even though there's an official site/forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was unsure where the majority of community hangs out, I would start asking around on possible locations or hold a vote on interested subject on all of them at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-07-23T04:13:54.667" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T04:13:54.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4204" CreationDate="2016-07-23T05:29:43.593" Score="6" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several open source projects and now I really got to a question of choosing a license. They all are somewhat licensed, but in a noob way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I'll find something meeting all of the criteria, but maybe I can find something extensible (unlike CC, for example), so I can separately state my conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to license both source code and non source code materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow private use without most of the restrictions. If somebody is using/forking for themselves (or a small closed group, if you can legally formulate that), then I'm OK if they don't state the changes/don't publish the source code/use it in proprietary product. Most likely they would use it like that anyway, but it's better to allow them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow commercial use, but with a default share-with-me clause. Yea, I can state that the project is for non-commercial use only and that I can relicense it on personal conditions, but I want to make it somewhat easier. Make money on it if you can &amp;amp; give me 5% or, if you don't like that, spend some time &amp;amp; contact me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get notifications about other projects using mine (out of curiosity, self-importance and because it would be a good point in stuff like portfolio). If somebody is using my project (or a meaningful part of it, if you can legally formulate that) in another public project, then I want them to notify me about that (like post/email/PM).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow relicensing for commercial use. I don't think I want somebody to take my project and close the code for themselves, but if they are sharing with me at the same time, then why not. Keeping of these conditions on a derivative project is optional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I also want my credits all over derivative projects, but that's a usual condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably all of these conditions are more of requests then requirements to a license, but that's how I'd like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T02:18:48.997" Title="Choosing a license based on conditions or an extensible license" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2016-07-23T07:10:56.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, this is not a material change IMHO. You could also contact the Apache Foundation on the legal-discuss list to discuss this change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for practical purposes, changing an original license text even if just for a single character is not a great idea. You could instead create your NOTICE with the proper HTTPS url. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side and funny note, the bare link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://apache.org/&lt;/a&gt; is reported as not having a proper SSL certificate in FF. ;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T07:10:56.023" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4202" CreationDate="2016-07-23T07:23:59.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents is that you are after too many conflicting requirements at once.&#xA;Compulsory share-back-with-me and notify-me type of licenses would likely not be what I call free, libre or open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your parameters, I would pick some kind of well known copyleft or limited copyleft license such as as the LGPL, GPL or AGPL: this would not meet all your requirements though. Yet a limited copyleft license would probably strike the best balance where you want to allow all usage including proprietary usage and want to grant some freedom to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask for reuse notification, but I would shy away from demanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T07:23:59.607" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4181" CreationDate="2016-07-23T09:38:24.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that in both case the GPL would apply without any ambiguity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A commercial loan is different than lending a laptop to a friend. I would consider this as conveying hence redistribution, etc. An IoT is nothing special in this regards: the FSF GPL FAQ you reference talks about personal loans, not commercial ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in all cases disclosure and attribution would be needed too even if this becomes challenging on tiny devices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL talks about redistribution and conveying. Whether this was through selling or lending does not matter in most cases IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is a precedent in this domain: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linux-kernel.2935.n7.nabble.com/freebox-possible-GPL-violation-td46017.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;French ISP free.fr&lt;/a&gt; used to argue about ~ 10 years ago that the set tops and DSL freebox CPEs they provided to their customers were lent and not sold hence the GPL copyleft terms did not apply. In 2008, There &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.universfreebox.com/article/10731/Free-vs-GPL-v2-contentieux-autour-des-sources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;was&lt;/a&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsffrance.org/news/article2011-09-14.fr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lawsuit&lt;/a&gt;. Free.fr could not hold their positions and they settled in 2011. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They now redistribute the &lt;a href=&quot;http://floss.freebox.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;copyleft source code&lt;/a&gt; included in &lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxfr.org/users/mat_/journaux/freebox-et-gpl--2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their devices&lt;/a&gt;, albeit in a fairly subdued and the most minimalist way they could. It does not look like they do this in a happy way :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that I once met a similar case where a commercial company was lending devices for trial. The lawyer involved at the time was quite clear that in this case the GPL did apply all right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Several articles I linked to are in French.... Use a translation web service!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T09:38:24.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2016-07-23T13:10:31.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: GPL is viral. Any derived work has to be licensed as GPL. GPL forces to make the source available. Thus, the tex source of the generated PDFs have to be made available, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This following argumentation is based on the circumstance, that &lt;code&gt;classicthesis.sty&lt;/code&gt; is offered and &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/src/241fc1002e6466b4f7a51c1ae128be8b0e5de039/Examples/classicthesis-article.tex?at=master&amp;amp;fileviewer=file-view-default&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;included via&lt;/a&gt; &lt;code&gt;\usepackage[nochapters]{../classicthesis}&lt;/code&gt;. If it is distributed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/src/241fc1002e6466b4f7a51c1ae128be8b0e5de039/ClassicThesis.tex?fileviewer=file-view-default&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;.tex file&lt;/a&gt; only, the discussion is similar. See &quot;What if the template is distributed as tex file?&quot; below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go step by step.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is &lt;code&gt;pdflatex&lt;/code&gt; a compiler?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. &quot;A compiler is a computer program that translates computer code in one programming language (the source language) into another language (the target language).&quot; (copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Compiler&amp;amp;oldid=956616311&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). The source language is &quot;LaTeX&quot;. The target language is &quot;PDF&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overleaf also talkes about &quot;Compiler&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Choosing_a_LaTeX_Compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The other possible compiler settings are pdfLaTeX (the default), XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. You can usually go with pdfLaTeX, but choosing a compiler depends on each project's needs. &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is classicthesis.sty a library?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;classicthesis.sty&lt;/code&gt; can be considered as library: It is used in the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file and cannot be easily replaced by something else. Thus, we do not have the loose coupling as in the case with binary drives and the Linux kernel. See for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_blob&lt;/a&gt; for a discussion on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does that mean, the whole tex source where classicthesis.sty is used is covered by the GPL?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then let's look at the FAQ of the GPL. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/a&gt;. The answer clearly states that if the library is in GPL, the whole source (including the text written by the author) is GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus, the whole tex source is also covered by the GPL.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do I need to ship the tex source with my PDF?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's look at the compiled pdf. The compiled &lt;code&gt;pdf&lt;/code&gt; is the result of the compilation of the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt;. Thus, it is comparable to the binary resulting from a compilation using a &quot;typical&quot; C compiler. The FAQ is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifiedJustBinary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I release a modified version of a GPL-covered program in binary form only?&lt;/a&gt;. The answer states that the source code the PDF is resulting from also has to be made available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus, if you provide anybody the PDF, you also have to provide the tex source.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, this might be a good thing to achieve open access to the edge: All publicly available PDFs are also having their tex source attached. This means that everyone can learn about tex practices etc. On the other hand, if, for instance, one wants to publish a book, one also has to provide the tex source of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is the PDF really a product of the tex source?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is questioned whether the PDF is a compiled output or not. I assume that the tool &lt;code&gt;pdflatex&lt;/code&gt; gets &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;sty&lt;/code&gt; files as input and produces &lt;code&gt;pdf&lt;/code&gt; as output. This is backed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Basics#Compilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX compilation section at wikibooks&lt;/a&gt;. In general, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compiler&lt;/a&gt; transforms something from a source to another language. That language is often a binary, but it doesn't need to be. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XSLT&lt;/a&gt;, which may transform to XML and other documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;code&gt;pdflatex&lt;/code&gt; is not an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interpreter&lt;/a&gt;, because pdflatex does not run during viewing the PDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 states: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/a&gt;. Thus, even if one regards the PDF as some sort of view, it is NOT the preferred form for modifying it. As a consequence, the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; source has to be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who can enforce this?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, only the authors of classicthesis can enforce this. Thus, if one author contributed to the classic thesis style demands the source for your thesis PDF, you have to provide him the source. IMHO, no one will do that, but if, one has to be prepared for such a case. - This also means that not a third party can say: Hey, person X has licensed his work under GPL and you violate it. Correct it! This can only be done by X. - For a long discussion on this, I would recommend the German book &quot;Open Source Software Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen der Freien Software&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beck-shop.de/Jaeger-Metzger-Open-Source-Software/productview.aspx?product=14503508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.beck-shop.de/Jaeger-Metzger-Open-Source-Software/productview.aspx?product=14503508&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does it help to have example/demo files published using another license?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it does not help to license the example/demo files under a different license. The GPL &quot;infects&quot; these files too and thus the GPL is &lt;em&gt;additionally&lt;/em&gt; in place - with all consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Really? Even if the GPL applies to one file used and not to the main file?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Even if the &lt;code&gt;sty&lt;/code&gt; file is not the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file you are compiling. As tried to express above: GPL is viral. Thus, the license of the &lt;code&gt;sty&lt;/code&gt; file also applies to the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file even if you did not explicitly declare the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file as GPL. You gave the agreement to the (additional) GPL license when you are using the &lt;code&gt;sty&lt;/code&gt; file. Otherwise, you would not be allowed to use the &lt;code&gt;sty&lt;/code&gt; file at all. By using the file, you agree to GPL and all consequences (see also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beck-shop.de/Jaeger-Metzger-Open-Source-Software/productview.aspx?product=14503508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the open source software book&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Really? GPL really applies to all derived works?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, even if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;above cited FAQ&lt;/a&gt; doesn't convince you, read on about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strong copyleft&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1179/5671&quot;&gt;the difference to weak copyleft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL is really viral&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What if the template is distributed as tex file?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case the template consists for one or more &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; files, the GPL applies to each &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file. If one modifies the &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; file, the modification is also GPL licensed. If one adds an additional &lt;code&gt;document.tex&lt;/code&gt; file, which references the template, that &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; is also subject of GPL. Reason: &lt;code&gt;document.tex&lt;/code&gt; is a derived work and cannot stand without the original template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Really? Does that apply to any template?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on the license of the template. If there is NO license given, NO modifications may be made! See &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/no-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/no-license/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if there is a license, you have to follow it. For instance, if the template is licensed under LPPL, only the changes to the template itself have to be published. The LPPL is not a viral license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also depends on the interpretation of the term &quot;derived work&quot;. I assume that any creator of a template assumes a document based on the template not being a derived work. However, another template based on the original template is really a derived work. With a strict interpretation, however, any change of the template is a derived work. Even when adding content only. For instance, this is the implication of the viral property of the GPL. All derived works have to be licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Further thoughts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;May tex code be licensed under GPL after all?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. See FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I use the GPL for something other than software?&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;code&gt;tex&lt;/code&gt; can be interpreted as source code and PDF as the resulting object code. &quot;Object code&quot; is defined as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;any non-source form of a work&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What does the Free Software Foundation say?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;We recommend that you license your templates under simple permissive terms.&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there similar issues with fonts?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is considered as complex issue. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#FontException&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Quick overview on the GPL&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a quick illustration of the GPL see &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other license options&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I agree with others that say that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/latex-project-public-license-v1.3c-(lppl-1.3c)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LPPL&lt;/a&gt; is more suitable for style files. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/82719/9075&quot;&gt;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/82719/9075&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5671" LastEditorUserId="5671" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T20:47:29.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T20:47:29.777" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4202" CreationDate="2016-07-23T15:31:50.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I might recommend Perl's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Artistic License&lt;/a&gt;. Section 4 will be of particular interest to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4)  You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source (either gratis&#xA;  or for a Distributor Fee, and with or without a Compiled form of the&#xA;  Modified Version) provided that you clearly document how it differs&#xA;  from the Standard Version, including, but not limited to, documenting&#xA;  any non-standard features, executables, or modules, and provided that&#xA;  you do at least ONE of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(a)  make the Modified Version available to the Copyright Holder&#xA;  of the Standard Version, under the Original License, so that the&#xA;  Copyright Holder may include your modifications in the Standard&#xA;  Version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(b)  ensure that installation of your Modified Version does not&#xA;  prevent the user installing or running the Standard Version. In&#xA;  addition, the Modified Version must bear a name that is different&#xA;  from the name of the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(c)  allow anyone who receives a copy of the Modified Version to&#xA;  make the Source form of the Modified Version available to others&#xA;  under&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(i)  the Original License or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(ii)  a license that permits the licensee to freely copy,&#xA;    modify and redistribute the Modified Version using the same&#xA;    licensing terms that apply to the copy that the licensee&#xA;    received, and requires that the Source form of the Modified&#xA;    Version, and of any works derived from it, be made freely&#xA;    available in that license fees are prohibited but Distributor&#xA;    Fees are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this satisfies your criteria. Either the user must give their modifications to you, give proper attribution, or make their code FLOSS as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are building a library, you should probably take note of Section 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(8) You are permitted to link Modified and Standard Versions with&#xA;  other works, to embed the Package in a larger work of your own, or to&#xA;  build stand-alone binary or bytecode versions of applications that&#xA;  include the Package, and Distribute the result without restriction,&#xA;  provided the result does not expose a direct interface to the Package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So people can freely embed a modified version of your library in proprietary works, but if all they are doing is distributing a modified version of the library, then section 4 applies. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_2_0_notes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Perl Foundation's notes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're totally free to embed Perl inside your software in a way that doesn't allow users to access Perl. On the other hand, if you embed it and users can nevertheless do things like running Perl scripts, then you really are distributing Perl and need make sure that your distribution fits one of the use cases in (1)-(7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T02:18:48.997" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T02:18:48.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2016-07-23T18:54:29.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost every section of the GFDL has something prohibiting this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;2. Verbatim Copying&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either&#xA;  commercially or noncommercially, provided that...&lt;strong&gt;you add no&#xA;  other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which you plan to do in your proprietary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;1. Applicability and Definitions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;Modified Version&quot; of the Document means any work containing the&#xA;  Document or a portion of it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;4. Modifications&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under&#xA;  the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, &lt;strong&gt;provided that you release&#xA;  the Modified Version under precisely this License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your database will likely be a work containing the Document or a part of it, so this section comes into play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;5. Combining Documents&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may combine the Document with &lt;strong&gt;other documents released under this&#xA;  License under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified&#xA;  versions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combination just refers back to sections 1 and 4, so it doesn't help you either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;6. Collections of Documents&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other&#xA;documents released under this License...&lt;strong&gt;provided that you follow the rules&#xA;of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all&#xA;other respects.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And collection just refers you back to section 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;7. Aggregation with Independent Works&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate&#xA;  and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or&#xA;  distribution medium, is called an &quot;aggregate&quot; &lt;strong&gt;if the copyright&#xA;  resulting from the compilation is not used to limit the legal rights&#xA;  of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not&#xA;  apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves&#xA;  derivative works of the Document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You intend to include the GFDL data in a proprietary work that limits users' rights to the rest of the data contained therein, which this section does not permit. The implication of this section is that the license must apply to the other works if the collection cannot be defined as an &quot;aggregate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm sorry to say that you'll have to do without that data unless you want to release your entire program under the GFDL. Unless you want to face section 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document&#xA;  except as expressly provided under this License.  Any attempt&#xA;  otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute it is void, and&#xA;  will automatically terminate your rights under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-23T18:54:29.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T00:20:28.967" Score="4" ViewCount="1060" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a MATLAB package I've made which makes use of some work which is made available under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The piece of work I'm using is &lt;a href=&quot;http://colorbrewer2.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ColorBrewer&lt;/a&gt;, which consists of several curated colour palettes. I am repackaging these colormaps so they have a MATLAB interface, along with the additional feature of interpolating them to make colormaps with arbitrarily many colours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ColorBrewer is available under &lt;a href=&quot;http://colorbrewer2.org/export/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;, which includes some additional requirements on top of the Apache license. I include their LICENSE.txt file here, verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Apache-Style Software License for ColorBrewer software and ColorBrewer Color&#xA;Schemes&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2002 Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State&#xA;University.&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;); you may not&#xA;use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of&#xA;the License at&#xA;&#xA;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, WITHOUT&#xA;WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the&#xA;License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under&#xA;the License.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;1. Redistributions as source code must retain the above copyright notice, this&#xA;list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;&#xA;2. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any, must&#xA;include the following acknowledgment: &quot;This product includes color&#xA;specifications and designs developed by Cynthia Brewer&#xA;(http://colorbrewer.org/).&quot; Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the&#xA;software itself, if and wherever such third-party acknowledgments normally&#xA;appear.&#xA;&#xA;4. The name &quot;ColorBrewer&quot; must not be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;derived from this software without prior written permission. For written&#xA;permission, please contact Cynthia Brewer at cbrewer@psu.edu.&#xA;&#xA;5. Products derived from this software may not be called &quot;ColorBrewer&quot;, nor&#xA;may &quot;ColorBrewer&quot; appear in their name, without prior written permission of&#xA;Cynthia Brewer.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of their distributions come with a NOTICE file (or infact a copy of the Apache 2.0 license, which it is supposed to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having neither licensed under Apache 2.0 before, nor released a derivative work, I have a couple of questions about what I need to include in my package to be compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is only RGB values and not code which I am taking from ColorBrewer and Apache 2.0 is not copyleft, could I distribute my code under a different license, whilst indicating the Apache 2.0 applies to the RGB values? NB: These values will be contained in their own file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I include the boilerplate content (with current year and my name):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in every &lt;code&gt;.m&lt;/code&gt; source file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the docstring which will be returned to the user with &lt;code&gt;help PACKAGE&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I place Cynthia Brewer, et al.'s boilerplate and extra distribution conditions? It certainly can't continue to be called LICENSE.txt, since I have to include the full Apache 2.0 license in a file called LICENSE to be compliant with its terms!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt;? This seems to me to be in the spirit of Apache 2.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;everywhere I include my own boilerplate?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the code will be distributed in source form, but it is possible that somebody could turn it into a binary (&lt;code&gt;.mex&lt;/code&gt;) file in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5673" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T09:04:22.013" Title="Packaging Apache 2.0 derivative work" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4200" CreationDate="2016-07-24T07:02:08.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you get the same result for either URL &lt;strong&gt;right now&lt;/strong&gt; it shouldn't be a violation of their license (as determined by following that URL &lt;em&gt;at this time&lt;/em&gt;).  However, as far as I know the question of having substantive parts of the license contained in a document referenced in this way has never been tested in court, and there are a substantial number who question the applicability.  This is because you are allowing a third party, that is not a party to the license, to change the license terms &lt;em&gt;at any time, without notice&lt;/em&gt;.  Usually doing that is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T07:02:08.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4209" CreationDate="2016-07-24T09:04:22.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] could I distribute my code under a different license, whilst indicating the Apache 2.0 applies to the RGB values?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Some licenses may be incompatible with the Apache-2.0 but very few. The FSF considers the GPL-2.0 incompatible and the GPL-3.0 compatible for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where should I include the boilerplate content (with current year and my name):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in a NOTICE file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in README.md?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a good place. This counts as end-user documentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in every .m source file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but only for every source file originally Apache-licensed or your own files that you license with an Apache license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in the docstring which will be returned to the user with help PACKAGE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a good place. This counts as end-user documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where should I place Cynthia Brewer, et al.'s boilerplate and extra distribution conditions? It certainly can't continue to be called LICENSE.txt, since I have to include the full Apache 2.0 license in a file called LICENSE to be compliant with its terms!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a minor inconsistency of the Apache license. Calling it LICENSE.apache-2.0 or something similar would be fine IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in NOTICE? This seems to me to be in the spirit of Apache 2.0.&#xA;      everywhere I include my own boilerplate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well only for code that would be originally Apache-licensed. Not everywhere. Unless you release it all under and Apache license (which might be simpler ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in README.md?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a good place. This counts as end-user documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the ColorBrewer license is a tad funny as it mixes an Apache 2.0 notice and statement of license with the partial terms of an Apache 1.1 license... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T09:04:22.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2482" CreationDate="2016-07-24T11:03:12.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendefinition.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OpenDefinition&lt;/a&gt; is a good source for this and deals specifically with data and content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Open Definition gives full details on the requirements for ‘open’ data and content. Open data are the building blocks of open knowledge. Open knowledge is what open data becomes when it’s useful, usable and used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they provide a list of licenses that &lt;a href=&quot;http://opendefinition.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;conform with their definition&lt;/a&gt; including the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) beyond the CC licenses and the ODbl you mentioned. Several other licenses are listed with some commentaries that should guide in picking the best one for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T11:03:12.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4219" CreationDate="2016-07-24T11:15:40.597" Score="1" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I recode WordPress or another CMS and then sell it as my own? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I encrypt the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5674" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-07-25T17:05:09.887" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T12:32:28.487" Title="Can I sell my own CMS based on another CMS (e.g. WordPress) and encrypt the source code?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|commercial|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2016-07-24T11:25:56.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot answer to the status with respect to German laws but there a few interesting precedents and commentaries that would let me think this may be a perfectly OK license for Germany (and this in contrast with a bare PD dedication which may be problematic in Germany as far as I have heard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The German Wikipedia uses CC0 to dedicate data into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_use_for_data#German_National_Library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;public domain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the German National Library, announced in 2012 they were using the CC0 for &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2012Jan/0181.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliographic data&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dr. Till Kreutzer, a German lawyer published &lt;a href=&quot;https://rd-alliance.org/sites/default/files/cc0-analysis-kreuzer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; on the CC0 where he examines if the CC0 would be valid under German laws for bibliographic metadata, likely in the context of the above or a similar one. It provides an extensive analysis. This is a dense document. Here is one of his conclusion's last statement: &lt;code&gt;Against this background the CC0 is under German law an effective means to release bibliographic metadata into the commons and to allow for their maximum usability by the general public.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of these and given the fact that both Wikipedia and a German Federal Agency considers it OK for them, I would think that it may be a valid license in Germany. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="6007" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T04:26:28.583" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T04:26:28.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4092" CreationDate="2016-07-24T11:34:13.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other words: What should I point out in my CLA? Do I need any other contract with the contributor? What are the typical pitfalls to watch out for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to offer both licenses, you would need to be and stay the primary or sole copyright holder. You would effectively need a CLA where contributors grant you enough rights to relicense using both licenses or assign the copyrights to you. You would not be able to accept contributions under the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/legal/contributor-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB CLA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, this would create some really weird asymmetry and might be a strong deterrent to any community contribution. Something that I would likely not use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T11:34:13.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T15:55:19.927" Score="9" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;The infamous &amp;quot;DRM clause&amp;quot; of the GFDL reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not use&#xA;technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further&#xA;copying of the copies you make or distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A criticism of this language is that it is too broad, because it applies to private copies made but not distributed. This means that a licensee is not allowed to save document copies &amp;quot;made&amp;quot; in a proprietary file format or using encryption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2003, Richard Stallman said about the above sentence on the debian-legal mailing list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you cannot publish them under DRM systems to restrict the possessors of the copies. It isn't supposed to refer to use of encryption or file access control on your own copy. I will talk with our lawyer and see if that sentence needs to be clarified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, sending GFDL-licensed material over HTTPS/SSL/whatever is definitely not your &amp;quot;own copy&amp;quot;; you are merely obstructing unscrupulous individuals from reading the copy as it travels through the network, but it is obstruction nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I just noticed that the GPL has a requirement that could potentially be interpreted similarly. Section 6, final paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding Source conveyed, and Installation Information provided, in accord with this section must be in a format that is publicly documented (and with an implementation available to the public in source code form), and must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T16:02:15.497" Title="Does the GFDL forbid sending licensed material over a secure connection?" Tags="|security|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4012" CreationDate="2016-07-24T21:58:26.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been sitting idle for a while, but I came back upon it just now and happened to notice a similarity among the organizations listed in the Q. I would have just made it a comment, but it's too long.  And having converted it to an answer it got even longer for completeness.  Maybe it does help you understand what's being asked about, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the WTFPL which doesn't talk about revocability because they are basically a wordy way of saying &quot;This is Public Domain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two organizations that don't say anything about revocability have large staffs of lawyers, who write all their legal stuff; usually for B2B licenses.  The others have 0 or 1 lawyer and are mostly concerned with end-user (i.e. consumer) licenses.  I understand why this distinction between them results in the different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That understanding comes from having worked as support staff at MIT and having talked to one of the MIT licensing lawyers about some code I wrote to do my job and my desire to distribute it with a GPL license.  At one stage the MIT lawyer was all set to allow it but with one final question, he had no idea what the phrase &quot;TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW&quot; (which at the time only occurred once and in all caps, now there are several variants in several places) was there for.  To his mind having it there meant that the reverse might be true without it.  But you obviously can't grant something in the license that is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;permitted by applicable law&quot;.  So what was it saying?  Well, the answer (from FSF's lawyer) was that this was standard required boilerplate in licenses to &lt;em&gt;consumers&lt;/em&gt; who are not expected to realize this exemption and have lawyers to research it for them, whereas the MIT lawyer and all the company lawyers he deals with are such lawyers.  There was case law (in the consumer realm) that a license without that disclaimer can be dismissed wholesale as an illegal license.  Or more accurately chopped into little bits and discarded that way.  And, since I was putting it up for FTP (it was pre-web) publicly on the net meant that the consumer oriented text was the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect there is a quite similar story behind the correlation between the irrevocable terminology and the organizations that included it.  It may well be one of those case law in the consumer realm but never in B2B licenses differences.  In fact, there may be a strong correlation in licenses that have one phrase also having the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-07-24T21:58:26.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-24T22:29:36.700" Score="3" ViewCount="1436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Figuring out how YouTube uses Creative Commons was hard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When uploading a video on YouTube, all you see as an option is &quot;Creative Commons Attribution&quot; (which could be any CC license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When seeing a random YouTube video released under CC (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZAsUxlyKzo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;) all you see is &quot;Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)&quot; (again, applies to all CC licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When clicking on a license, you get redirected &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and find out that your only option is CC BY.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you actually click on a &quot;CC BY&quot; text, you get redirected to the Creative Commons site, showing full version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is, why 3.0? It's not an international version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T01:28:25.993" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T17:13:08.973" Title="Why is YouTube using 3.0 version of CC BY?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4213" CreationDate="2016-07-25T11:48:15.823" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I recode wordpress or another CMS and then sell it as my own?  recode for specific purposes. I'm going to remove needless code, add my own and customize CMS for myself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the license allows it yes. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wordpress license&lt;/a&gt; is the GPL-2.0. The GPL allows modification, redistribution and commercialization all right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it also has some obligations that I need to follow if I make such modifications. At a high level I would need to do all of these leaving aside some details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;document the changes I made and keep all the original notices, license texts, etc and ensure that my customers know about these terms &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep the code, these changes and my additions under the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make the modified source code available to my customers in a form that is the preferred form for modification under the GPL which would mean plain source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I encrypt source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I surely can encrypt the source code of a modified GPL-licensed project! But I would still need to make this source code including my modifications available to my customers in a form that is the preferred form for further modification. Under and per the GPL, this would mean that I would have to also distribute the source code unencrypted making the encryption rather moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/HTH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T12:32:28.487" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T12:32:28.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4218" CreationDate="2016-07-25T18:18:50.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire point of YouTube's feature to programatically mark a video as under Creative Commons is to allow programmatic use of that video in YouTube's video editor. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;YouTube page on Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Creative Commons licenses provide a standard way for content creators to grant someone else permission to use their work. YouTube allows users to mark their videos with a Creative Commons CC BY license. &lt;strong&gt;These videos are then accessible to YouTube users for use, even commercially, in their own videos via the YouTube Video Editor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By limiting all input to the YouTube editor to video licensed under CC-BY 3.0, YouTube has eliminated the need for the editor to compare the compatibility of licenses on input videos when deciding the license of the output. YouTube has taken a very simple approach: CC-BY 3.0 goes in, CC-BY 3.0 comes out. If they changed it so new videos were under 4.0, it might require either (1) retroactive re-licensing of already-submitted videos (which might not be legally possible under their terms of use, or might cause complaints form users who dislike some provision in 4.0) or (2) handling the complexity of differently-licensed input in the video editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can license your videos however you want. If you want to license them under CC-BY 4.0, or CC-BY-SA 3.0, or anything else, you can do that; just state a license grant so in your video description. YouTube is simply giving you a box to tick that says, &quot;Do you want to license this video under CC-BY 3.0 (possibly in addition to any other simultaneous license grants)?&quot; If you tick that box, users can use your video in YouTube's video editor. You could also license your video under CC-BY 3.0 &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; ticking that box (e.g., by saying so in your video's description), and it would effectively be identical to ticking that box, except YouTube wouldn't programmatically know it was safe to use as input for the video editor tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also explains why they don't work particularly hard to clarify what version of the license used is. YouTube wants you to create more video &lt;em&gt;within YouTube&lt;/em&gt;. They want to make it easy and legally safe for you to use YouTube's video editor to make more videos &lt;em&gt;on YouTube&lt;/em&gt;. The ability to take a CC-licensed YouTube video and use it outside of YouTube is an ability that certainly exists, but it is outside the business interests of YouTube to emphasize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the chose CC-BY 3.0 specifically: CC-BY is the simplest Creative Commons license, and 3.0 may have been the latest available license at the time they rolled out the video editor feature (or at least 3.0 may have been the latest version that YouTube's legal team had vetted as safe to use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As why it's not an &quot;international version&quot;: it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; an international version. Version 3.0 of the Creative Commons suite includes versions that are &quot;ported&quot; to particular jurisdictions, and an &quot;unported&quot; version of each license type, which is intended to be applicable to all jurisdictions. YouTube links to the CC-BY 3.0 unported license. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Version_3#Further_Internationalization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&quot;Further Internationalization&quot; section of the CC 3.0 writeup&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-07-26T17:13:08.973" LastActivityDate="2016-07-26T17:13:08.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-27T01:27:33.263" Score="21" ViewCount="4424" Body="&lt;p&gt;From time to time, I come across a website that is clearly selling my MIT-licensed, FOSS project verbatim to unsuspecting buyers under an alternative name.  Of course, they do not acknowledge the fact that the entire codebase &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; support is available for free.  They may or may not include a copy of my license &quot;in all copies or substantial portions of the Software&quot; - how would I know unless I coughed up the money to their paywall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this seems to be crossing the line - using a product that I and my team worked very hard on to essentially rip people off.  Practically and legally, how can I prevent this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear, I'm &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; trying to prevent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General commercial use of our project.  I don't mind, and in fact the software is designed, for someone to quickly build web applications for their businesses and organizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage in SaaS products (in this case they would be selling the service, not the software itself).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't even necessarily mind if someone adds substantial features, and then sells those features bundled with my product - &lt;strong&gt;so long as it is advertised that way.&lt;/strong&gt;  I want sellers to make it clear to buyers that their product is &quot;Based on the free, open-source _____ project&quot;, and that you are paying for certain premium features (ideally, these would be listed explicitly).  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that a seller would have to give full disclosure so that buyers would know which features of the software they are actually paying for, versus what they can already get for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that addresses this?  Or, is there any precedent that the MIT license already covers this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out that this project isn't a library, which would be used as a component in a larger application.  It is a fully-functioning, standalone application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="484" LastEditorUserId="484" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T16:43:22.187" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T21:42:12.213" Title="How can I forbid shady resale practices?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4221" CreationDate="2016-07-27T02:32:26.597" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like you need a little &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/#WhatIsCopyleft&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/a&gt; seems perfect for you. A relevant clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the Combined Work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a license that's a little more permissive and less complex, then I would recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License version 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;). Two relevant clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;3.1 Distribution of Source Code Form&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... You must inform recipients that the Source Code Form of the Covered Software is governed by the terms of this License, and how they can obtain a copy of this License. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;3.2 Distribution of Executable Form&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;a. such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code Form, as described in Section 3.1, and You must inform recipients of the Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code Form by reasonable means in a timely manner...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the LGPL, the MPL does not require that non-standard features of the library be documented exactly, only that the MPL parts of the combined work be named and made available as source, so it's not ideal. It draws a lesser boundary for the code its copyleft claims than the LGPL (the source code file), but does so very clearly and strongly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/legal/license.pdf&quot;&gt;Artistic License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; may be another option, in turn more permissive and less complicated than the MPL. Of particular interest is Section 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source...&lt;strong&gt;provided that you clearly&#xA;  document how it differs from the Standard Version, including, but not limited to,&#xA;  documenting any non-standard features, executables, or modules&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 8 seems perfect for your situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are permitted to link Modified and Standard Versions...and Distribute the result without restriction, provided the result does not expose a direct interface to the Package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You stated that people are bundling your library &quot;verbatim&quot;, and section 4 will ensure they give you proper credit if they add features to your library and distribute the result (since that is a direct interface), but if they're incorporating it into web applications then they won't be required to publish the source to those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if you don't want to resort to copyleft at all you could use the infamous &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD_4Clause&quot;&gt;original BSD license&lt;/a&gt;, which includes this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this&#xA;      software must display the following acknowledgement: This product&#xA;      includes software developed by the University of California,&#xA;      Berkeley and its contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you would replace the University of California name with your own. However, this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html&quot;&gt;not recommended&lt;/a&gt;, and I advise you against it as well. It will make your program GPL-incompatible and causes practical problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what you choose, you should be aware that FLOSS licenses cannot be revoked, so you may still see people packaging older versions of your software after you relicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T02:32:26.597" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4221" CreationDate="2016-07-27T02:37:49.957" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Changing the license at this point can't help you, they already got their copy under the original license.  But, if it really is the MIT license, it has a clause in it about attribution.  So, if they really aren't meeting that clause you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have a case to sue them for any and all moneys they've collected.  But, to do that you will need a lawyer, which is also what you need to find out what you can actually do.  Needless to say I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-07-27T20:22:32.803" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T20:22:32.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4221" CreationDate="2016-07-27T07:56:05.107" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to need to know three things:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether the MIT license was meant to be used the way those people did&lt;/strong&gt;. I think they did nothing wrong (since you say there is a chance they did include the MIT license in portions of the software. Facts needed though) because the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nrecursions.blogspot.in/2014/05/a-simplified-reference-to-various.html&quot;&gt;short form&lt;/a&gt; of the MIT license is:  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Massachusetts Institute of Technology license (MIT): You are allowed&#xA;  to use, modify and distribute copies of the software as long as you&#xA;  allow the same rights to the person to whom you distribute the&#xA;  software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether there is any other license you could've used&lt;/strong&gt; for &quot;The idea is that a seller would have to give full disclosure so that buyers would know which features of the software they are actually paying for, versus what they can already get for free.&quot;:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Well, the MIT license already covers that. There's also the LGPL, BSD, Apache license and Mozilla Public License that do what you want.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More to browse here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://nrecursions.blogspot.in/2014/05/a-simplified-reference-to-various.html&quot;&gt;http://nrecursions.blogspot.in/2014/05/a-simplified-reference-to-various.html&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. What to do if there are violations of the license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nrecursions.blogspot.in/2014/04/conference-open-source-for-startups.html#helpinghands&quot;&gt;Who can help&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can contact the:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Open Invention Network&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Software Freedom Law Center&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - GPL violation foundation (might not apply to your case, but they&#xA;   might provide some pointers)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Software Freedom Conservancy  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Who can help&quot; link will take you to links for all the bulletted points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5698" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T07:56:05.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4221" CreationDate="2016-07-27T11:05:18.713" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's examine the MIT licence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holders]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard copyright string&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence the recipient can do nearly anything with the Software, provided that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice (the &quot;Copyright (c)&quot; line) and the remainder of this notice is included &quot;in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; - see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A standard disclaimer of liability&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what does that condition (&lt;em&gt;'The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.'&lt;/em&gt;) mean? It means simply what it says, that the copyright notice and the licence texts needs to be included (somehow) in all copies of the Software or substantial portions of the Software. If someone therefore produces a derivative work, they need to include this text. That's what it says, no more and no less. Unlike the GPL which specifies &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the text has to be included, this merely says &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; it needs to be included. There is no word like &quot;prominently&quot; describing how it has to be included. A common route is simply a text file somewhere within a binary tar-ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the MIT licence not specify a greater degree of prominence? Apart from the fact MIT presumably felt they did not need or want that, two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This would restrict what the recipient can do. An early predecessor of the GPL says the message should be displayed &quot;on start up of the program&quot;. How would that work in a SaaS environment for instance? If a program is composed of (inter alia) 100 MIT licensed modules, would you want 100 licenses displayed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The purpose is (I believe) in the main to provably assert copyright (so the recipient cannot claim they did not know code was not in the public domain) and ensure the disclaimer of liability was effective (which it might not be were it omitted).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a license that addresses this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven't explained what 'this' is. Is the issue that you aren't getting credit, or that people are selling the software and making money in a 'shady' way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the issue is that you aren't getting credit, there are licenses (e.g. the GPL) which require more prominent attribution. However, even these may not be sufficient for you. For instance, it's quite possible to distribute products containing GPL software and not make this particularly prominent. Consider how many appliance routers etc. contain Linux. Sure, the good guys will (somewhere) mention the GPL licence, perhaps in page 98 of their click-through licence, and offer the source, but there's nothing to make them give credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is nothing to prevent people selling GPL licensed software either. Look at (e.g.) RHEL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's thus not evident what precisely you want to do. Perhaps you want to permit only non-commercial use of your software without some pre-arranged prominent attribution (I'm taking it that's the 'shady' you are referring to). That's fine, but that's not an open source licence (or at least not an OSI compliant licence). See for instance the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/509/how-can-i-start-an-open-source-project-and-keep-people-from-taking-it-and-sellin?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, particularly the bit mentioning that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Absolutely. All Open Source software can be used for commercial&#xA;  purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell&#xA;  Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the fact your current software is released under the MIT licence means that they can always use that version of the software under the MIT licence. This doesn't give them the right to future versions (derived works) under that licence though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, is there any precedent that the MIT license already covers this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence permits the behaviour you complain of, providing they include the licence text including the copyright string somewhere. They only have to include it in copies of the software, and have every right to put it behind their 'paywall', whether you like it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5700" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-07-27T18:42:33.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4227" CreationDate="2016-07-28T02:34:52.547" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently created a small project and pushed it to GitHub. I now plan on applying an open-source license. &lt;strong&gt;Once I choose a license and commit it to the project, are the older versions subjected to that license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5717" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T02:44:23.453" Title="Do unlicensed commits to a project acquire an open source license?" Tags="|licensing|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4226" CreationDate="2016-07-28T02:44:23.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have previously released versions of your software to the public, you generally can't &lt;em&gt;revoke&lt;/em&gt; any license you have already released it under (doing so would cause massive issues for anyone who has already made use of the software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as the copyright owner, you retain the exclusive right to &lt;em&gt;re-license&lt;/em&gt; (including dual licensing) any version of your software at any time (providing of course you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the sole copyright holder, or that you continue to comply with the licenses of any other software you include).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case I'm assuming you have not specified any particular license on your project thus far. That means that until now, the project is effectively 'all rights reserved'. Once you apply a license, it applies to the state of the project at the time of that commit. If someone comes along and forks your repository, then reverts to a previous commit, it is technically no longer licensed to them and they cannot use it in any meaningful fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to, you could of course just specify that 'any commit is covered by this license', or, you could even include for clarity that 'this license applies only from commit abc123 forward'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a general answer to a general question, as I'm unclear on your exact intentions, but I'd be happy to clarify further if you want to add more specifics to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T02:44:23.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4229" CreationDate="2016-07-28T03:37:14.553" Score="3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/calebreister/mbed-make&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;small project&lt;/a&gt; with the primary purpose of demonstrating the use of a Makefile. The file in question may be useful for me in the future, but I don't want to be forced to distribute every version of it. Here are the criteria...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone (including myself) should be able to use, modify, and redistribute it as their own, for either private or corporate use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The file should to be usable in any open-source project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like the license to be as &lt;em&gt;simple&lt;/em&gt; and possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution is not required, since drastic changes may be necessary in order to make it work for a particular platform&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should probably have a NO WARRANTY clause&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I am thinking of using either Apache v2.0 (the license used by mbed), MIT/X11 License, or licensing it as public domain. If public domain is the answer, please explain how to specify that the project is public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5717" LastEditorUserId="5717" LastEditDate="2016-07-28T03:43:19.803" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T04:40:14.640" Title="Licensing a small project so that anyone can use/modify it without redistribution" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4228" CreationDate="2016-07-28T04:01:31.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't want to be forced to distribute every version of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone (including myself) should be able to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common misconception. You are the copyright holder of the work, so you can do whatever you want with it. Only those to whom you distribute the work will be bound by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For you, I would recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons' Public Domain Dedication&lt;/a&gt;. It's not as simple as the MIT or Apache Licenses, but it's about as permissive as you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on OP's comments, I would instead recommend the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. It does not require attribution, has a &amp;quot;NO WARRANTY&amp;quot; clause, and prevents people from &amp;quot;modifying the work slightly, copyrighting it, and then preventing others from using it&amp;quot; by requiring that modifications to MPL-covered source code be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T04:40:14.640" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4231" CreationDate="2016-07-28T10:34:14.427" Score="7" ViewCount="1706" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall this definition seems to focus a lot on compiled code, but does not really consider interpreted code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I read from the above is, if it's a single executable/library, it's one program. If it's many executables/libraries communicating (but not directly linked together) it's not. Now my question is regarding PHP. PHP itself is an interpreted language which means code written in PHP is not compiled and executed, but rather is interpreted. In addition, all PHP code is typically ran under a webserver meaning all PHP code is ran under a shared resource pool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is where is the line between a PHP website which incorporates GPL libraries and therefore needs to be released under the GPL and a PHP website which merely calls upon another PHP service to do the same. As a more concrete example, assume PHP library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as a practical example consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mrclay/minify&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Steve Clay's minify&lt;/a&gt; and assume that the authors had made the decision of relesing it under the GPL (they did not but for the sake of argument assume they did).&#xA;This library in particular is not generally directly included in any other PHP script, bit is added in a PHP project's list of &amp;quot;dependencies&amp;quot;. The functionality of this library is accessed via e.g. &lt;code&gt;http://example.com/min/?f=script.js&lt;/code&gt; and this URL is added as an &amp;quot;external script source&amp;quot; in a website. My question is, in this case would using this library require the project which includes it to be licenced under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T08:17:18.877" Title="The GPL and PHP code" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4230" CreationDate="2016-07-28T14:54:46.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, Minify takes in other JavaScript on your website and modifies it to be smaller. This seems like data generation, and GPL-covered programs cannot force the data they generate to be under the GPL unless they copy part of themselves into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would also appear that Minify does not share any data structures or even communicate very much with one's other code. Yes, it shares a memory pool in the PHP runtime, but every one of the GPL programs we run shares a memory pool (that of our entire system) with the non-GPL programs. This seems like a case of an interpreter running two different programs on the same computer. The syntax to call them is unusual, and you are calling one program on the source code of another, but I think it's just that case in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, I do not think using a GPLd Minify would force your entire website to be under the GPL. However, as the FAQ notes, if you were linking to Minify, using its functionality in running code on your site, etcetera, that would require at least the parts of your site that depend on it to be under the GPL, and possibly the whole site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-28T14:54:46.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4233" CreationDate="2016-07-29T00:57:32.067" Score="4" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it a GPL-only thing or can I use this formulation with any license, like &quot;MPL 2 or later&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it mean that in case versions 1, 2 &amp;amp; 3 of license are available, &quot;version 1 or later&quot; effectively licenses the project under all 3 of them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I formulate it so only the latest version of license would apply at any given time? Does it change with the condition of including license text?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-07-29T01:21:39.790" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T03:13:34.637" Title="Licensing under &quot;version X or later&quot;" Tags="|licensing|gpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4232" CreationDate="2016-07-29T01:36:29.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adding a statement of &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; to your license notice effectively dual-licenses your project, so yes, in general, you can do this. But Technik Empire raised a good point that future versions of the license may not be compatible. For example, if your GPL v2 code depends on some other GPL v2-only code, then you couldn't upgrade yours to GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you would want to when you don't know the terms of future versions is another question. Licenses sometimes change in substantial ways. The GPL-3 has changes which many people care a lot about, and later Creative Commons licenses change how attribution must be made. If you're happy enough with a license to choose it, then I'd recommend just sticking with it. You can always reevaluate and explicitly dual-license your project if the license is revised in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeah that's right, it is dual- (or multi-) licensed under all those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't change the license of something which has already been distributed. If someone received it under version 2 and wants to use it under that license and not version 3, they can. If you want to publish something only under the latest license, then don't publish under a &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; clause, instead just update the license when a new version is released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-07-31T03:13:34.637" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4240" CreationDate="2016-07-29T05:35:44.993" Score="5" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago I released some code into the public domain, using CC0.&#xA;I am now thinking, that I would like to extend that work, but have it under the MIT license -- the extensions at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind that the existing work remains in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible?&#xA;I would assume it is since public domain is the most permissive state possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T02:34:21.737" Title="How do I turn a public domain project into a MIT project" Tags="|mit|relicensing|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-21T20:35:23.297" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;A client of mine wants to static link its proprietary commercial work to a library that is licensed under LGPL that is sold by VMime in France.  VMime's website purports to explain that the purchaser does not need to comply with LGPL Section 6 even if statically linking.  From my understanding this is not allowed, to contract around provisions of the LGPL and still license the library under LGPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to their public 'Commercial License' overview: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vmime.org/licensing.html#commercial-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.vmime.org/licensing.html#commercial-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="ShortLegalGroup" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T14:46:25.220" Title="Contracting Around LGPL" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4236" CreationDate="2016-07-22T00:51:38.077" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source code repository clarifies the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kisli/vmime/blob/master/AUTHORS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;author&lt;/a&gt; and copyright holder of the software.  This author is also the owner of the website that distributes this software according to a dual license principle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As he is the owner of this software, he can licenses it with the terms and conditions that he wants (as long as he doesn't infringe copyrights of others). The fact that he licenses the software for free since 2003 under the terms of the GPL doesn't prevent him to license it also according to another license schemes.  And the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; doesn't allow the change of the license document doesn't prevent the copyright holder to grant you an LGPL-based license with exceptions stated elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deal that the author offers is simple and seems very fair:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you enjoy the software for free but you release your work as open source as well, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or you pay a license fee and you get license conditions that allow for proprietary software.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your customer want closed source he'll have to pay for the commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt; This is not legal advice. This is my personal opinion as IT professional.  For legal advice you should contact a lawyer or an authorized  legal expert of your jurisdiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" OwnerDisplayName="Christophe" LastActivityDate="2016-07-22T03:13:28.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4236" CreationDate="2016-07-29T14:46:25.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 section 7 begins with the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lesser GPL is simply the GPL modified by exceptions under section 7. The first point listed in the VMime link you provide is not an interpretation of the LGPL, but an additional permission, allowing static linking to the VMime code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point is simply a paywall. Copyright holders, and anyone who distributes FLOSS, are permitted to charge as much as they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third point states &quot;You may NOT relicense the VMime code to anyone.&quot; If we interpret this as prohibiting you from distributing the software, this effectively creates a &quot;frankenlicense&quot; from the GPL. Luckily, the GPL has you covered in section 7 paragraph 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I wouldn't advise you to do so unless you're willing to test the GPL in court, but know you have the right to ignore point 3 and redistribute the library code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-29T14:46:25.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4235" CreationDate="2016-07-30T00:07:42.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: You can do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the original author of a work, you have the right to do anything with it[1].  Whether you gave it away under some license before doesn't matter.  You can release it under a different license, if you want to, whether you modify it or not.  If you released it under some &quot;cannot sell&quot; license you could still sell it.  The license you gave other people with their copy doesn't affect &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, only the people who got it from you with that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if something was released into the public domain, that means that anyone is allowed to do anything (including all of the things above), not just the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Unless it was written as a &quot;work for hire&quot; and the contract had specific legal restrictions to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastEditorUserId="5406" LastEditDate="2016-07-30T02:34:21.737" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T02:34:21.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-07-30T11:58:03.110" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;h3&gt;What I have done&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's PHP tool which uses Bitbucket API to deploy code on environments without Git etc. It's licensed under GPLv2 or any later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bitbucket API is shifting from v1 to v2, and it's impossible to achieve same thing with API v2 just by design - it doesn't allow to get code of individual files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created my own workaround version, added features, cleared up &lt;em&gt;spaghetti&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;WET&lt;/em&gt; code etc, So ending up heavily rewriting original code - only 40 lines of two helper functions have stayed intact and even then those two functions maybe was found online as examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The thing is I want to release it as my project (complying with original licence)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would it be fair if I rewrite &lt;code&gt;readme.md&lt;/code&gt; stating it's my own, but referring that was inspired by what original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I keep doing it on forked project or should I take down fork and release it new clean repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it o.k. if I continue original versioning with new major version, or should I start everything from zero?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5745" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T15:43:26.873" Title="Licensing derivative work of forked code base" Tags="|derivative-works|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4241" CreationDate="2016-07-30T15:13:01.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 would certainly consider your actions as requiring that the project remain under the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work&#xA;  in a fashion requiring copyright permission&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 doesn't define modifications except including translation among them. But your work is a derivative work in any case and must remain under the GPL. Perhaps you were aware of this, but it seemed there was an implicit question over whether you could license it however you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be fair if I rewrite readme.md stating it's my own, but referring that was inspired by what original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you mention the original author's copyright over the original work, saying something like &quot;This project is a fork and by-and-large a rewrite of [other project], copyright [year] by [other project's author]&quot;. It can't hurt to reproduce the original readme as well; attribution is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it o.k. if I continue original versioning with new major version, or should I start everything from zero?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you keep the version control history of the old project intact, as this aids with the attribution requirements of GPLv2 section 2a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;      stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and GPLv3 section 5a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified&#xA;    it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-07-30T15:13:01.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-02T10:49:33.080" Score="2" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me and several collegues of mine are working on open sourced framework (licensed under GPL) in the mobile field. Our code depends on the Android SDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking into the license of the SDK itself you can read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/studio/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;following license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand Android is open sourced with most of classes licensed under Apache 2 (few of them under GPL and maybe some other licenses). Thus everyone is free to checkout the code and compile it as &lt;a href=&quot;http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;described here&lt;/a&gt;. If I go down the compilation route would I not get binary of the SDK with a license that will allow my open sourced framework to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5764" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T14:54:04.950" Title="Can I use Android SDK binary in a framework I develop?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4248" CreationDate="2016-08-02T13:53:10.510" Score="2" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Json license has an appendix where it says:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to use a library with the Json license am I forced to add this quote to my license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Changed the title so that its question and text ask the same question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T07:23:21.070" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T07:23:21.070" Title="Is every project using a Json licensed library forced to add &quot;use it for good, not evil&quot; statement to its license?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4247" CreationDate="2016-08-02T14:41:35.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, assuming that it is reasonable to interpret &quot;this permission notice&quot; as the whole of the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL-compatibility for permissive licenses like MIT and BSD relies on the doctrine of sublicensing; you may give downstream recipients fewer rights than you received, but not more. In this case you never had the right to use the software for evil, which means you cannot possibly give it to recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T14:41:35.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4245" CreationDate="2016-08-02T14:54:04.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.5 Use, reproduction and distribution of components of the SDK licensed under an open source software license are governed solely by the terms of that open source software license and not the License Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I would try to ensure that you can compile the necessary parts of the SDK from source, because as best I can tell the GPL's &quot;System Library&quot; exception does not apply to the Android SDK and would prevent users from redistributing your framework. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I go down the compilation route would I not get binary of the SDK with a license that will allow my open sourced framework to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/SDK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Replicant SDK&lt;/a&gt;, a fork which is not subject to those terms of use and avoids any trouble with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;framework (licensed under GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it based on someone else's GPL framework? If it isn't, you can license the code however you want. If you want to allow proprietary applications to use your framework, you should use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Lesser GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-02T14:54:04.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T02:47:50.607" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm getting this whole thing right, each time I'm changing something in a &lt;em&gt;published licensed&lt;/em&gt; project, I'm licensing it independently from any other edition of it. Each version/commit from legal perspective is an independent set of data licensed on it's own conditions. Each new version gets its own license and each previous version can be relicensed. All this assuming it's my personal work and I'm free to license it as I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is it possible to automatically expand license on previous/past editions of data it was applied to? If yes, which licenses are known to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.G.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I license a software under X and it is applied for the whole lifespan of that software. Even if I change license to Y in the future version, that future version would be dual (X &amp;amp; Y) licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I license an image under Z. All previous editions of that image are made multilicensed under Z.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T13:59:27.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T13:59:27.247" Title="Cases of license applicability to previous/next versions" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-03T04:10:22.130" Score="4" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come across a JavaScript library which is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0 (US)&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only restrictions of the license is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know for a JavaScript library, what is the correct way of attribution? Do I have to list the library title, author in every page of the website? Or as long as I keep the license term inside the JavaScript source file then it will be fine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5774" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-08-03T13:20:44.877" LastActivityDate="2016-11-01T18:51:24.623" Title="Meaning of Attribution in CC BY 3.0 for a JavaScript library" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|source-code|cc-by|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4252" CreationDate="2016-08-03T05:02:25.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are using this library to help run the Web Site?  Then the web pages that you send are output from something that uses the library.  From my understanding (I am not a Lawyer, just someone who has been hanging around the Free and Open Source communities for more than 3 decades), you only need to include the attribution if you are redistributing the source (with or without modification).  But, you aren't.  The only consumer of the software is thus you.  So, you don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That having been said, it might be a nice gesture if you did mention them on a &quot;Credits&quot; or &quot;About this Site&quot; page, or even in a section at the bottom of the page.  On my web site, I have a little banner section at the bottom of every page with logos for the tools I use, that link to their pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And needless to say, I am not a Lawyer and This is not Legal Advice.  You may need to get a legal opinion, in that case you need to talk to a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T05:02:25.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4302" CreationDate="2016-08-03T09:26:32.413" Score="8" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I start with an example: I use currently SystemJS for Angular2 Applications, it is a great tool, works properly and free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see the contributors &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/systemjs/systemjs/graphs/contributors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and the work, what already has been done, I've thought: What kind of great job, but who pays for all this work? Sometimes I also try to help, but I've limited time and have to pay my everlasting bills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can such of libraries can come into existence? The idea (which is already great) alone is not enough. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Karma&lt;/a&gt; would not also be the real reason, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do these talented programmers invest amount of time of creating free libraries? What research has been done into why so many programmers invest their time in FLOSS projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5776" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T00:32:02.803" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T17:21:02.680" Title="What research explains why so many programmers invest time in creating free libraries?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4252" CreationDate="2016-08-03T17:01:40.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no &quot;correct&quot; ways to do attribution and no one polices it. The libraries should already have their own in-tact license statements. You can consider providing a credit and link on an about page, on a credits page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not cluttery, I've taken to putting the credits in the footer of my GitHub powered pages, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BdaMt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BdaMt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5780" LastActivityDate="2016-08-03T17:01:40.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4258" CreationDate="2016-08-03T17:40:46.557" Score="5" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a project that I am working on, I would like to use the GNU GPL software license, but I also don't want to have any possible problems distributing my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, there were some reports that GNU GPL apps were removed from the Apple App Store because the GNU GPL is not consistent with their terms of distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to preempt such a possibility, I am planning to dual-license my code under two licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU GPL v2, or later at your discretion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-ND 4.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thought process is, if some platform decides &quot;for some obscure legal reason, GPL software is not allowed&quot;, I can say &quot;fine, I will distribute this release of the code to you under CC-BY-ND&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this also doesn't weaken my commitment to free-software, because if someone wants to fork the project, they have to use either GNU GPL, or retain the dual licensing. If they retain only CC-BY-ND, then they can no longer make modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this make sense? Will this work the way I think it does? Is there a simpler or better way? Note that if this &quot;works&quot;, then I would prefer it to using MIT / BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do any other projects pursue a similar strategy? I don't know of one, and I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Clarification based on comment discussion below&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's quite possible that I misunderstand what the issue was with Apple and GPL. But I thought the issue was that, Apple imposes terms like &quot;When you buy the app, you can only install it on one device&quot;, and this is considered to run afoul of GPL which says &quot;No downstream restriction&quot;. IIUC, GPL software can be sold -- they can decide to sell or not sell, and then they distribute or they don't. But when they decide to distribute, they can't put further restrictions on use of the software. IIUC, CC-BY-ND allows any downstream restrictions, its just no one can make modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that I want is, an escape hatch that allows people to impose downstream restrictions when they distribute, provided they give up the right to make further modifications. Since I think that's basically still consistent with free software. It's possible that I shouldn't want that, I don't really know. But that's what makes sense to me at the moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4411" OwnerDisplayName="Chris Beck" LastEditorUserId="4411" LastEditDate="2016-08-05T18:53:32.597" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T18:53:32.597" Title="GNU GPL dual license with CC-BY-ND?" Tags="|gpl|cc-by-nd|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4257" CreationDate="2016-08-03T19:19:38.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commons does not recommend applying their licenses to software&lt;/a&gt;. You seem like you might know this already, but it's worth linking again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if some platform decides &quot;for some obscure legal reason, GPL software is not allowed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes you worry about the GPL specifically? What is there to say that the platform will say &quot;CC-BY-ND is not allowed&quot;, or the same for any other license you might choose? Really, this doesn't make much sense. It's fine if you want to dual-license the work, but your reasoning behind it seems too obscure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you yourself planning to sell the application on the app store? VLC's solution was to license the iOS version under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. The MPL has a weaker copyleft than the GPL's but draws a clear boundary for it at the source code file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit based on OP's comment below&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of dual licensing, you could add it as an additional permission under GPLv3 section 7. In your copyright notice file, say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2016 Chris Beck&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;      the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;      (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional permission under section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may sublicense the work and impose further restrictions on recipients' rights granted herein provided that you not modify the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="5392" LastEditDate="2016-08-04T02:44:07.597" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T02:44:07.597" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4251" CreationDate="2016-08-04T09:55:52.207" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. You cannot expand a license (or change it) on a previous, already licensed version of something: once you have licensed version A of your software/data/whatever under a certain license, version A will retain its license also if you change the license in version A+1.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical example is an open source software that became proprietary: the last released open version remain open, irregardless of the new license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T09:55:52.207" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4554" CreationDate="2016-08-04T15:04:58.740" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use an email template licensed under a Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License&lt;/a&gt;, specifically MailChimp's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mailchimp/email-blueprints&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Email Blueprints&quot;&gt;Email Blueprints&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states that attribution must be given in a way that is &quot;reasonable to medium, means, and context.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd prefer that the license information not be rendered in email clients, but be available in the source as a comment. Is there a requirement for attribution to be visible in the media under this license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5792" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T21:01:20.947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T21:01:20.947" Title="How to properly give attribution for an email template?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4263" CreationDate="2016-08-04T15:20:09.503" Score="5" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am soon launching an Android app that uses some code and APIss from other developers or public domain etc, I believe they all have a public domain or similar public license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/simplenlg/simplenlg/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SimpleNLG License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby/mwords.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby/mwords.html&lt;/a&gt; (dead link, verified on 31.12.2020).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordnet.princeton.edu/license-and-commercial-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License and Commercial Use of WordNet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these feature a similar type of statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and database and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you agree to comply with the following copyright notice and statements, including the disclaimer, and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software, database and documentation, including modifications that you make for internal use or for distribution.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand I don't owe anyone money or royalties from profits off my app (it's a paid app, if that's relevant), but do I cite these code sources anywhere? The part that confuses me is the &amp;quot;and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software&amp;quot;. Am I supposed to have a copyright or reference to this domain or Api somewhere in my code or in my app? Do I just leave my app how it is and not worry about anything because it's license allows me usage or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5793" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2020-12-31T15:01:17.537" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T15:01:17.537" Title="Should I cite anything in my app for public domain/license?" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4262" CreationDate="2016-08-04T15:50:31.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tremendous difference between public domain and the broad (nebulous) category of what you call &quot;public licenses&quot;. Public domain means there is no copyright on the work, and you may deal with it virtually without restriction. An open-source or free-software license means that copyright does exist on the work, but the copyright owner will allow you to use it in specific ways. Use of the work outside that terms specified in the license is illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, the MPL 1.1 is a weak copyleft license, meaning that if you modify any of the files in that project, your changes must also be licensed under the MPL. Because MPL has a weak copyleft, this does not extend to the rest of your project, though. If you use any component has a &lt;em&gt;strong&lt;/em&gt; copyleft, like the GNU GPL, then &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would require that your &lt;em&gt;entire project&lt;/em&gt; be licensed under that license (e.g., the GPL, or whatever copyleft license it is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to have a copyright or reference to this domain or Api somewhere in my code or in my app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is exactly correct. For instance, if you use Chrome, which is built on loads of open source software, you can see all their required notices in the &lt;code&gt;chrome://credits/&lt;/code&gt; URL. You need not obnoxiously force these notices onto your users every time they start up your app, but you must make them accessible somehow (e.g., via menu option).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;critically&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the Moby Words projects states in the README,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This documentation, software and/or database was developed&#xA;  and copyrighted by Grady Ward and is licensed, not sold, to&#xA;  you on a non-exclusive, non-transferable basis. The documentation,&#xA;  software and/or database and derivative works of this database&#xA;  may not be copied in whole or part except for archival purposes&#xA;  as provided by law. If you have purchased the commercial license,&#xA;  Grady Ward explicitly grants you the limited right to create and&#xA;  market data structures or knowledge bases derived this work&#xA;  without further payment of a license fee, as long as the purpose&#xA;  and effect of that data structure or knowledge base is other than&#xA;  re-distributing that Grady Ward data structure or database...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have purchased the commercial license, this seems quite clear that you are not allowed to redistribute the work within your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-08-04T15:50:31.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4268" CreationDate="2016-08-05T21:50:54.937" Score="6" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some points I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors own copyright over their contributions, which means the author (= the owner of the repo and original author) cannot re-license the code (= change the license of the code) without asking every contributor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's why some companies require you to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; which - easily said - transfers your rights to them, so that they can do what they want with the code (relicense, make proprietary, ...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When making changes to another repo (you've forked) do you release your changes under the license (usually a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or similar) of that repo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so there is one abnormality: If contributing to an MIT licensed project means you release your changes under the MIT license, this still does not mean the contributor has to be attributed in the new code base, but this is a requirement of the MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I fork a (MIT licensed) project where contributors contributed to it does this really mean I fork one project which is licensed under &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; MIT license or does it rather mean I fork one project licensed under &lt;em&gt;multiple&lt;/em&gt; MIT licenses of all contributors? So is this rather splitting of a cake or can I consider the project a big block of a license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a step-by-step explanation (from forking the repo until the Pull Request is merged) would be useful.&#xA;Bonus points for any kind of metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question has been cross-posted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/13162/how-does-conributing-to-a-floss-project-work-from-a-legal-perspective&quot;&gt;law Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; as it overlaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5802" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T20:05:47.267" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:41:49.597" Title="How does contributing to a FLOSS project work from a legal perspective?" Tags="|attribution|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4267" CreationDate="2016-08-05T23:03:14.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When making changes to another repo (you've forked) do you release your changes under the license...of that repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You aren't required to unless your changes fall within the domain of the license's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/#WhatIsCopyleft&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt;. If the repository you forked is Apache 2.0-licensed (or some other permissive license), you can release your modifications under whatever license you want, even full copyright, provided that you follow the license's terms. If it is under the Mozilla Public License, you have to release whatever modifications you make to the MPL source files under the MPL, but separate files that are entirely your own work can be under the terms of your choice. If it's under the GNU General Public License, all your changes must be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you give your contributions back to the copyright holders, it is best that you do keep your changes under the same license that they use, for simplicity's sake. It's annoying if you have one file under the MPL and another under the MsPL and you can't static link with that module because it's under the LGPL...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I fork a (MIT licensed) project where contributors contributed to it does this really mean I fork one project which is licensed under one MIT license or does it rather mean I fork one project licensed under multiple MIT licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great question! You fork one project licensed under multiple MIT licenses (unless of course the contributors assigned copyright to some central entity). Each contributor owns the copyright to part of the work, and they have all granted you rights to use the code. The project as a whole is considered to be under the MIT license because all contributors agreed to license it that way, but projects don't have to be all under one license. Copyright holders can dual-license their works so recipients can use the work under the license of their choice; the MPL has a GPL-compatibility mechanism that causes files to be dual-licensed. If you're a Firefox user, just go to &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt; for an example of lots of licenses governing one work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think a step-by-step explanation (from forking the repo until the Pull Request is merged) would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's much easier than you think. All you have to do is say in your pull request &quot;I agree to release these contributions under the MIT license&quot;, or something to that effect. If you don't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to release your contributions under the MIT license (say, you want to be a jerk by releasing them under the GPL and thus forcing the entire project to be under the GPL), that's another story, and the project will probably reject your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-05T23:03:14.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4270" CreationDate="2016-08-06T23:23:42.097" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been researching the GNU and GPL licenses and I can't find a straight answer to a question I have. If you are going to use a Programming IDE that is distributed under a GNU GPL does the software made have to be covered under the the GNU  GPL licenses or can it be sold? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this is not an improved version of the IDE this is a new software sold to a different target market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5806" LastEditorUserId="5806" LastEditDate="2016-08-06T23:28:23.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T23:28:23.247" Title="Using a GNU licensed software to make new software to be sold" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4269" CreationDate="2016-08-06T23:28:02.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation's GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons—for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs. This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We made the decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison which already permitted use for non-free programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-06T23:28:02.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4272" CreationDate="2016-08-07T09:55:10.777" Score="1" ViewCount="911" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the answer written here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2865/does-open-source-software-need-an-eula-to-protect-the-developer&quot;&gt;Does Open Source Software need an EULA to protect the developer?&lt;/a&gt;, the use of the software is not covered by the open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what would be a simple eula for open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, is there a bank of eula samples on internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5807" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T15:57:50.920" Title="What would be an EULA for an open source software?" Tags="|eula|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-13T06:43:26.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4271" CreationDate="2016-08-07T15:57:50.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very answer you linked states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You don't need a EULA to protect yourself as a developer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, it's understandable that you're worried that a user could gain a copy and not accept the disclaimers of warranty and liability. I don't know if this would hold up in court if they did sue you under one of those things, but I can suggest a few licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647676.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License&lt;/a&gt; begins with the preamble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software,&#xA;  you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the&#xA;  software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could license your work under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. It states after its disclaimer of warrany in Section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This disclaimer of warranty constitutes an essential part of this License. No use of any Covered Software is    authorized under this License except under this disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2.1-en.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.1 The Licensee shall be deemed as having accepted the terms and&#xA;  conditions of this Agreement upon the occurrence of the first of the&#xA;  following events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(i) loading the Software by any or all means, notably, by&#xA;  downloading from a remote server, or by loading from a physical&#xA;  medium;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(ii) the first time the Licensee exercises any of the rights&#xA;  granted hereunder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The rights granted hereunder&quot; includes the right to use the software (Article 5.1). So they can't even receive a copy without accepting the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, some non-licensing solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could just provide an installer with an &quot;I accept&quot; button forcing the user to accept the FLOSS license. Admittedly, there's nothing to prevent them from hacking the installer if they really don't want to accept that, but how many people are going to do that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could license pre-built executables under a proprietary license and provide the source code free of charge. This is a mean and extreme measure, but it will protect you wholly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-07T15:57:50.920" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-08T17:02:24.757" Score="8" ViewCount="2826" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many licenses you have to (or can?) state who is the author of the project, which is the one who &quot;owns&quot; the intellectual property (= the copyright holder). In the MIT license it e.g. is said like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) %year% %copyright holders%&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I use &lt;code&gt;%&lt;/code&gt; here as a indicator for a variable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which of the following &quot;copyright holders&quot; is valid and if not, why not?&#xA;(To have a complete list I also included the usual copyright statements. They should be easy to answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The complete way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%first name% %second name% &amp;lt;%mail address%&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;%second name%, %first name% &amp;lt;%mail address%&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paul Speer &amp;lt;paul-speer@mail.example.com&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Speer, Paul &amp;lt;paul-speer@mail.example.com&amp;gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The simple way using your full name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%first name% %second name%&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;%second name%, %first name%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paul Speer &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; Speer, Paul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only using your first name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%first name%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using a pseudonym, which is rarely used (so not something generic such as &quot;softwaredeveloper&quot;) and can be assigned to you (because you also use it on GitHub, ...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%pseudonym%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pspeer7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using a pseudonym, which not so rare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%common pseudonym%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;softwaredev&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using a name of a company registered in the US:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%registered company%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Acme Corporation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional question: As this company might not be registered in non-US countries might mean the license is only valid in the US?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using a name of a company not registered anywhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%unregistered company%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MyStrangeCompany (MSC) Corporation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Referring to a author file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%refer to author file%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;see AUTHORS &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; see AUTHORS.txt &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; see AUTHORS.txt file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;AUTHORS(.txt)&quot; file a list of contributors is added in a way you consider valid. So the authors are e.g. listed in one of the above ways per line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I have often seen this in addition to a &quot;usual&quot; copyright holder as listed above. (so it might be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;%first name% %second name% and other contributors, see AUTHORS file&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Referring to the contributors in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%refer to contributors%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paul Speer and contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I have seen this used &quot;in the wild&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Referring to the contributors in general &lt;strong&gt;in addition to a valid author&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;%copyright holder% and %refer to contributors%&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All %project name% contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just leave it out and only state &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) %year%&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5802" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T01:10:29.783" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:49:43.930" Title="Which author/copyright holder &quot;type&quot; is allowed in the MIT license? Pseudonym, Company name, ...?" Tags="|attribution|copyright|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4273" CreationDate="2016-08-08T18:19:29.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of those ways would be considered valid. The first-name and pseudonum forms, along with completely omitting any copyright holder, should not be used, they don't provide enough information to confirm the identify the author. Referring to another file without naming any primary copyright holder should be discouraged, it's bad form to not have at least some identification of the copyright holder directly in the copyright notice. Email addresses are good for making contact with the copyright holders easier and so should be encouraged but they aren't required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as company names go, the legal name of any entity which can hold the copyright can be used in the copyright notice. That the company's registered outside the US makes no difference. However, using the name of an entity that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; hold the copyright should be avoided (eg. don't use a company name if you wish to hold the copyright personally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastEditorUserId="4557" LastEditDate="2016-08-08T19:16:29.080" LastActivityDate="2016-08-08T19:16:29.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4277" CreationDate="2016-08-09T10:19:17.940" Score="5" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a Firefox extension and put its code on GitHub. The code includes the logo of my extension for use as its icon. I created the that logo myself.&#xA;I want to build my portfolio and thus want to add an Open-Source Licence to it. But I also want to retain my rights to that icon.&#xA;Is it okay if I just put the MIT Licence in the readme.md file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5818" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T13:12:31.133" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:06:56.133" Title="Do I retain right to my extension's logo if I use MIT Licence in my Firefox extension?" Tags="|mit|logos|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4276" CreationDate="2016-08-09T10:58:39.333" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you explicitly want to exclude your logo from the license, you can write so in the copyright file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not uncommon for larger open source projects to trademark their logos and names. This is not completely uncontroversial in the open source community (it's why Debian is shipped with &quot;Iceweasel&quot; and not &quot;Firefox&quot;) but still quite common. While the open source license gives away control of your program, trademark law means you still retain control of the brand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T10:58:39.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4293" CreationDate="2016-08-09T14:09:50.757" Score="7" ViewCount="1136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a code that is dynamically linked to a GPL library. When I distribute my code in binary form, I do not distribute it with the GPL library, and provide instruction for the user to acquire this external library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my code required to be GPL ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the topic is debated (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&lt;/a&gt;), but I wanted to know wether bundling the GPL library during distribution is a relevant factor or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5823" LastEditorUserId="5823" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T14:28:14.290" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T13:36:41.450" Title="Dynamic linking, bundling, and GPL" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4280" CreationDate="2016-08-09T14:42:24.287" Score="4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am distributing a free, closed source Java application which includes some unmodified third party jar files in the package (under a lib folder). These third party jar files follow one of BSD2, Apache2, MIT licenses. I have copied the respective licenses as well in the package. Now I have to include one license for my product as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt is, should my license cover the entire software product, including the third party libraries. Or should I write it in such a way that my license applies to only my own set of files and mention that the third party content is covered under the respective license files included in the package? Basically, what should be the &quot;Software Product&quot; in my license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the first option, I believe that I will not be able to include explicit terms for my own binaries (eg: no commercial redistribution), which may violate the license of included libraries. If it is the second option, are there possibilities of ambiguity about the accountability of the software's actions as a single whole product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5825" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T15:05:43.753" Title="Should a software product license cover third party content included in it" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4279" CreationDate="2016-08-09T15:05:43.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do either. Apache and MIT both explicitly give you the right to sublicense the work provided that you comply with their terms, so &quot;including terms that deny commercial redistribution&quot; will not violate those libraries' licenses. (Don't forget Apache 2.0 Section 4d about the NOTICE text file!) BSD isn't as clear, but I think that's implied. You could just package everything up as proprietary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the libraries are sufficiently separable from your software, you don't have to do that. There shouldn't be any questions about the software's actions as a whole because all three of the licenses you describe disclaim warranty and liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T15:05:43.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4278" CreationDate="2016-08-09T16:02:29.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your code is required to be under the GPL. The rights of distribution and the GPL's copyleft are unrelated mechanisms. That you are distributing the libraries separately is irrelevant; your code is still a derivative work of the GPL library and is therefore subject to its copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, when in doubt, you will never be in the wrong to license your work under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-09T16:02:29.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4283" CreationDate="2016-08-09T16:50:59.383" Score="12" ViewCount="945" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started an open source project in 2013, with the LGPL license. I've been regularly working on it for the last four years. Each file includes the standard copyright notice that include the copyright year.&#xA;Obviously not all files were modified every year so some of them reports &quot;Copyright 2013&quot; some &quot;Copyright 2014&quot; or &quot;Copyright 2015&quot; and only a few &quot;Copyright 2016&quot;. &#xA;The project is a library so it has no welcome or splash-up screen where to report the current copyright date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct practice in this case? Should I update yearly every file updating the notice to the current year, even if this is the only midification to the file. Is it even better the whole range of years (Copyright 2013-2016)? Or should I leave the copyright year untouched, with the meaning of the year of the file creation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5827" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:04:50.347" Title="Copyright notice must be regularly updated while the project is active?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4282" CreationDate="2016-08-09T16:58:37.673" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you're using the LGPL, I suggest you follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU project's recommendations&lt;/a&gt;: your copyright notices should look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 cannatag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you should simply update them all at the start of every year, assuming you're publishing every year (if your source code is publicly available during development, that could be construed as counting as publication). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL howto&lt;/a&gt; clarifies this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice should include the year in which you finished preparing the release (so if you finished it in 1998 but didn't post it until 1999, use 1998). You should add the proper year for each release; for example, “Copyright 1998, 1999 Terry Jones” if some versions were finished in 1998 and some were finished in 1999. If several people helped write the code, use all their names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to play it safe and avoid any accusation of over-reaching in your copyright notices (I have no idea how much of a risk that is), you might instead want to update the years only when you make non-trivial changes to the relevant files; so you'd end up with a variety of copyright notices depending on when each file was edited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2013, 2015 cannatag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2014, 2016 cannatag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2016 cannatag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other projects have different recommendations; thus the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/copyrightandlicensenotice.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Foundation&lt;/a&gt; recommends mentioning the first and last year of publication in each file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2013, 2016 cannatag&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even that is subject to interpretation, and for example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opendaylight.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenDaylight&lt;/a&gt; we use the Eclipse form, per-file: each file has a copyright notice with the year it was created in and the last year it was updated in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2875/118&quot;&gt;avoid ranges&lt;/a&gt; though, they don't have a definition in US copyright law at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the variety of practices out there I can't see the details actually having an impact &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/300/118&quot;&gt;beyond documentation&lt;/a&gt;; when it comes to courts, it seems to me that actual copyright is decided based on more than the notices themselves (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-code-similarity.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conservancy's analysis of Christoph Hellwig's contributions to the kernel&lt;/a&gt;). (Of course I am not a lawyer and you should consult one if this is troubling you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T09:04:50.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T19:15:25.940" Score="8" ViewCount="628" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it useful to have a CLA when you e.g. use an MIT license for your project?&#xA;I am just asking this, because when you use the MIT license you are already granted to sublicense it, so is a CLA necessary and/or useful in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is not a CLA only useful when you use copyleft licenses such as the GPL, because the MIT license can be changed anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I do not want to have a list of advantages or disadvantages. I only want to know whether it makes sense in this particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5802" LastEditorUserId="5802" LastEditDate="2016-08-10T15:48:15.167" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T14:58:37.837" Title="Is a CLA only useful for copyleft licensed?" Tags="|licensing|mit|contributor|copyleft|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-09T19:17:42.930" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that GPL requires linking application to be licensed under GPL. Some database lisense covers data usage. I'm sure there's something for API too. But from the comments here on OSSE I also know that there seems to be no consensus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general rule for these aspects?&#xA;Should I check each license each time or can I assume something from the opensource fact? Is there something like TLDRLegal.com which covers specifically these points? Are they considered distinct? Is there a general rule which specifies what is what? Are they even a part of an application or rather a product of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some bonus questions to further describe my confusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is web API considered linking over net?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or is it only data usage?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do I use API if I'm only sending a request but do not check for response?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I know that I &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; read licenses but this question is more about general coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-08-09T19:23:58.953" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T13:19:28.087" Title="Linking vs API vs data" Tags="|linked-libraries|api|open-data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-10T04:34:59.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really is no specific answer, there has not been enough (any?) case law to solidify these details.  That is why you can't find consensus on the details.  However, the general outline of what is &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; for each license can be made.  But, standard IANAL/TINLA disclaimer: I am not a Lawyer, and this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; Legal Advice.  To get a legitimate legal opinion, you need a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common thread to all your questions, and that is they are about a new work that somehow utilizes something else with some FOSS license.  But, all the licenses vary in the approach they use for defining how the license applies to derived works.  That's both in how they define a work as being &quot;derived&quot; and what rules apply to it in that case.  So, if you are using &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; with a FOSS heritage, you really need to know which licenses apply to which parts, and understand how those licenses impact your intended use.  If you have questions about specific licenses, you may get some help here, but there really is no way to make a global evaluation that covers all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2016-08-10T04:34:59.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4315" CreationDate="2016-08-11T09:53:52.707" Score="16" ViewCount="6640" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could I best explain software dependencies to a non-software, non-tech person? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are software dependencies, such as package dependencies or linking dependencies? And why does it matter to know about these dependencies in the context of free, libre and open source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T04:23:29.283" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T14:45:47.483" Title="What are software dependencies, and what are the implications of FLOSS dependencies for other projects?" Tags="|copyleft|dependencies|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4292" CreationDate="2016-08-10T16:13:13.823" Score="69" ViewCount="43339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been using MS VS Code since a while now and I am I really loving it.&#xA;Although the other day I was having a discussion regarding editors with my mentor where he pointed to me this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mentioned in the product license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the complete license here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.visualstudio.com/License&quot;&gt;https://code.visualstudio.com/License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the product is released under a different license and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode&quot;&gt;the source code&lt;/a&gt; is published under MIT license. I wonder why is that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quickly looked up a couple of popular open source editors to find that they are released under one MIT license (Product and sc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atom: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Atom is MIT licensed and the source is freely available from the atom/atom repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brackets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Brackets is released under the MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be possible that I'm not understanding something here, but I was surprised to know VS code had different license for product and scource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a well-known business reason why Microsoft would offer the binary and source under such vastly different licenses? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it appropriate (within the norms of the open source community) for Microsoft to brand their proprietary-licensed binary as &quot;Open Source&quot; since it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; based on a fully-buildable open source code base?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5841" OwnerDisplayName="rahil471" LastEditorUserId="29752" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T06:21:38.537" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T06:21:38.537" Title="Is Microsoft VS Code really open source?" Tags="|licensing|software|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2016-08-10T18:10:43.650" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source doesn't mean &quot;free to use as you please&quot; it means that you can view source code of a product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said product can be sold commercially by its creator even though it's open source and nobody is allowed to copy / redistribute / sell it without explicit permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EDIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I so knew I would get down voted for this, but truth must be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5840" OwnerDisplayName="Reygoch" LastEditorUserId="5840" LastEditDate="2016-08-11T15:36:35.287" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T15:36:35.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2016-08-11T08:01:45.150" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source comes with a license.  You can change it as you please by definition.  If you release that version to other people as a compiled work then you have to release your source as well.  You are free to provide your code back to the original author as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above of course is based upon the license the copyright holder chooses to release code under.   Gpl lgpl or bad Unix style licenses or creative Commons. It is varied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ken" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T08:01:45.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2016-08-11T14:30:06.900" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The binaries distributed by Microsoft are non-free. The source code, being released under the MIT license, is free software (or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) as poorly called. If you downloaded and compiled the source code from GitHub, the resulting binary would be free. The binary's license doesn't matter so long as the source code carries the fundamental freedoms and provided that you can compile it to a binary with all the same functionality as the one that is being distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate license for the binaries and source code is a common way for free software projects to make money: they release the source code under a free license and charge access for the binaries or prohibit their commercial use. &lt;a href=&quot;http://geogebra.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GeoGebra&lt;/a&gt;, for example, publishes its source code under the GPL but forbids commercial use of its binaries unless you pay a fee. Debian and Ubuntu users (at least) receive a copy of it compiled from that GPL source, and they may use it for commercial use without paying a fee. However, this practice is pointless in the case of VSCode, because they're giving it away anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T14:30:06.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2016-08-11T16:18:10.900" Score="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is explicitly addressed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/supporting/faq#_licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Visual Studio Code FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does Visual Studio Code have a different license than the vscode GitHub repository?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;To learn why Visual Studio Code, the product, has a different license than vscode, the open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub repository&lt;/a&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue #60&lt;/a&gt; for a detailed explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that issue, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a vscode developer explains&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we set out to open source our code base, we looked for common practices to emulate for our scenario. We wanted to deliver a Microsoft branded product, built on top of an open source code base that the community could explore and contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We observed a number of branded products being released under a custom product license, while making the underlying source code available to the community under an open source license. For example, Chrome is built on Chromium, the Oracle JDK is built from OpenJDK [...] Those branded products come with their own custom license terms, but are built on top of a code base that’s been open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then follow a similar model for Visual Studio Code. We build on top of the vscode code base we just open sourced and we release it under a standard, pre-release Microsoft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how it works. When you build from the vscode repository, you can configure the resulting tool by customizing the product.json file. This file controls things like the Gallery endpoints, “Send-a-Smile” endpoints, telemetry endpoints, logos, names, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot; build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The built version released under Microsoft's EULA, then, is a specific configuration of the open source code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Microsoft says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Visual Studio Code is open source.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what they appear to mean is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Our offering of Visual Studio Code is built using an publicly-available code base that is licensed under an open source license. With the exception of branding and configuration values, this open source base is identical to the built software product we offer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only changes they make when building the binary (according to their claims above, anyway) is to utilize existing configuration options to add Microsoft branding and have network-based components within the editor use Microsoft network endpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-11T16:18:10.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4278" CreationDate="2016-08-12T05:38:36.017" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;EMBLEM writes as if the matter were definitively resolved, but the honest answer is that noone knows.  &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; dynamic linking makes a derivative work, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; you are indeed required to publish your code under the GPL.  &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; it doesn't, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; you may publish your code under any licence you like; moreover, you may distribute the GPL library along with your application as &lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;, provided that you comply with the GPL's obligations with respect to the GPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether dynamic linking makes a derivative work is, of course, the important question.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2831/458&quot;&gt;My earlier answer here&lt;/a&gt; addresses the question in more detail, but the upshot was - and remains - that until courts of significance start ruling on this issue, we don't know for sure what constitutes a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FAOD, let me be clear: I think the GPL is a good licence, and you will certainly simplify your position - and enrich humanity - if you decide to licence your work under the GPL also.  But whether you are &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to do so is not yet as cut-and-dried as some would have you believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T05:44:10.127" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T07:21:53.330" Score="3" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a natural language processing model that I've compiled from several gigs of text data. The format of the model does not contain in itself any of the input copyrighted material, it has been reduced to simple words and named entities with weights and categories to put it simply, in case that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I can't release the original input documents as the &quot;source&quot; to build this binary, but I can release the compiled model as my copyrighted material and I'd like to do just that. I'd like to release this binary model under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, will the AGPL apply the way it was intended to? This model is technically content that the software (the NLP library) can function without, but when combined with this loaded content, produces unique program output that relies explicitly on the input model to generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the AGPL apply correctly? It's a binary that isn't directly executable code, making it more like content, but when combined with the software it's meant to be used with, acts more like a shared library (dll, so etc) which provides unique program functionality and output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After writing this question I believe the fact that I can't release something that fulfills the role of the &quot;source&quot; code, that I'm not able to license the binary under the AGPL or GPL. I'm seeing if it's possible to decompose the binary form back into an editable format like JSON which can be edited and then turned back into a binary model to satisfy this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3570" LastEditorDisplayName="user3570" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T07:48:04.747" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T23:59:52.560" Title="Release binary content under AGPL" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4276" CreationDate="2016-08-12T09:06:56.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is somewhat common for project to handle graphical assets and code differently, and you can release your code under the MIT licence, but not your logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to differentiate between &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;trademark&lt;/em&gt;. Both are forms of intellectual property&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright protects the artistic expression of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark protects the association of expression with some entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the CocaCola Company has a trademark on the name CocaCola. You may not use name CocaCola to refer to your drink. It also has a trademark on its logo. You may not use their logo for your drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you may use their name and their logo to refer to them. There is no possible confusion arising from you using the labels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that many logos are not eligible for copyright in the US and many other jurisdictions at all: geometric shapes and logos that consist entirely of letters in some font for example are often not. That doesn't change your situation much; attaching a copyright license to something that's not eligible for copyright effectively does nothing, it'll neither help nor hurt you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you licence your code under the MIT license, you have a choice to license your logo under the MIT license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independent of that choice, you may have trademark rights on your logo, and you may have registered that trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also want to retain my rights to that icon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's pedantry time, and ask which rights to that icon you want to retain exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want anyone using it, you should not provide a copyright license for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't mind people using it, but want to keep it as a trademark, connecting you to that image, you can release it under the MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, you can use and defend it as a (registered or unregistered) trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, you want to mention in a notice or readme file what the copyright status of the entire project is. What the MIT license in your project refers to exactly - the code, some/none of the graphical assets, and explicitly (not) the logo - and who the copyright holders are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:06:56.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4294" CreationDate="2016-08-12T09:09:02.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. What do you mean by &lt;em&gt;apply correctly&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that any form of the GPL will require you to release source code, should you be asked for it. However, as far as I am aware, it does not require you to release source material that is not code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that to generate this model, you wrote some code to parse and process the original texts, and put the resulting data together into a model. &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, you can release&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the model as a precompiled binary object form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the generation code as the source code which generates new binaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you'll satisfy the requirements for source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T09:09:02.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-12T10:30:45.317" Score="7" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a nice and useful piece of software, published under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Code Project Open License&lt;/a&gt; which is quite permissive - similar to MIT or BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the code, as I examined it, contains files/libraries with the GPL license - and one LGPL as well. This is a violation of the GPL and &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; LGPL (not sure, but probably).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website doesn't unfortunately contain the e-mail of the author but it has the option to ask questions on the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I modify the software to remove the problematic libs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I ask the author a question? (I already asked one yesterday, so far unanswered)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I contact the problematic software authors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I simply extract the permissive (BSD style) software from the software and do nothing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be an ethical solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-13T06:45:41.493" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T10:46:37.100" Title="What to do if I found someone broke someone elses' license" Tags="|gpl|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4294" CreationDate="2016-08-12T22:23:16.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I get you right, what you want to release isn't software in the general sense and thus shouldn't be licensed as such. To me it looks like more of a database - they are also often required and affect program execution, but contain only data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO more proper way would be to license it as non source code content (with CC licenses for example). Or you could go the complicated way if you can convert it to another database format - certain databases specifically cover data usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="5636" LastEditDate="2016-08-12T22:34:54.390" LastActivityDate="2016-08-12T22:34:54.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4297" CreationDate="2016-08-13T00:25:24.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;If you're asking what you should do to fix the situation:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first step should be to assume innocence (or in this case, ignorance) until proven guilty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately many developers don't understand licensing - or even realise that its a problem. In this case, I would first &lt;strong&gt;contact the author of the &lt;em&gt;infringing&lt;/em&gt; software&lt;/strong&gt; (it's not clear from your question &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; author you have already contacted - the infringing or the infringed?), and let them know that they are infringing the copyright of the GPL-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful to do this in a kind, 'just-letting-you-know' sort-of manner - don't accuse them of anything; just assume at first that they're not intentionally ignoring the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also want to &lt;strong&gt;suggest some appropriate paths to remedy&lt;/strong&gt;. These might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;removing the GPL licensed code,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replacing the GPL licensed code with an alternative permissive-licensed library if a suitable one exists, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relicensing the project under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also point out - as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/5392/emblem&quot;&gt;EMBLEM&lt;/a&gt; mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4297/what-to-do-if-i-found-someone-broke-someone-elses-license#comment11370_4297&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt; - that the Code Project license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#cpol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;not free/open source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get a favourable reply and changes are made, great - and well done for doing your part!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next step to take really depends on what happens next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you don't get a reply&lt;/strong&gt; after a suitable amount of time (say, a week or two), assuming the code is on a service such as GitHub, you could consider submitting a pull request to apply a different license. If you didn't get a reply to your question this is unlikely to be accepted, but for a busy developer who doesn't have time to consider a reply, a pull request of this nature &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be just what is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't necessarily submit a pull request to remove the problematic code - unless of course you can also add a more permissive replacement. Just removing the problematic code will of course break the project, which is not really what a pull request should do (even if you are trying to make it compliant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Finally:&lt;/strong&gt; if your message has not been replied to; has been replied to negatively; your pull request with a more appropriate license has not been accepted; or the situation has otherwise not been resolved after you have tried your best, I would contact the authors of the infringed software. Document everything, and tell them each step you have taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, &lt;strong&gt;the owner of the copyright on the infringed software is the only person who can take any further action&lt;/strong&gt; if they choose to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; Another option might be to advise &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gpl-violations.org&lt;/a&gt; of the alleged infringement. See their &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Violations FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more information and an e-mail address to contact. They might not be able to do a lot on their own, but they might be able to help contact the author of the original software, and even help &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; with compliance action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If you're asking what you should do if you want to use this software:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you're not really going to be able to use this software as it sounds like it currently stands. I did originally suggest seeing if you could license your project under the GPL (which would be tough anyway given the need to also comply with the CPOL), but as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/5636/zerounderscoreou&quot;&gt;ZeroUnderscoreOu&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/69/zizouz212&quot;&gt;Zizouz212&lt;/a&gt; pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4297/what-to-do-if-i-found-someone-broke-someone-elses-license/4299#comment11380_4299&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, the software you want to use is rendered unlicensed by the fact that its own license violates another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means by making use of the software, which is effectively unlicensed, in your own project, you will yourself be infringing both the direct author's copyright, and the copyright of the original author of the GPL'ed portions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, you are able to get somewhere contacting either of the authors. Otherwise, I would start the search for an alternative package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T10:46:37.100" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4284" CreationDate="2016-08-13T14:58:37.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is best answered by people who distribute a software under MIT license and require their contributors to sign a CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Github Inc. distributes &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/linguist&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguist&lt;/a&gt; under MIT but still requires contributors to sign a CLA. They give their reasons here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How does a CLA protect a project?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the owner of a contribution decides that they don’t want the contribution to be part of the project or in any given distribution, the law is on their side. The project, contributors, and users may be subject to legal action. This may require payment of damages and could prevent further usage or contributions until the matter is resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when there is no legal pursuit, too much ambiguity can jeopardize or doom a project by preventing those that can’t risk legal action from getting involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T14:58:37.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4184" CreationDate="2016-08-13T15:22:47.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although @jgauffin is giving you good general guidelines, I would add that it is important not to jump to conclusions too quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, you say that you haven't received any response for a few weeks but that there were commits to the projet in the last few months. To me it looks more like a project that is still maintained but not very actively. While it may feel kind of rude to be ignored, given how lots of other project maintainers reply very quickly, it really depends much on the way the maintainer is organized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have a look at the history of issues / pull requests to see if it's common that a contribution receives a reply but only after some time. In some cases, you can also look for other users of the software and ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using the software and you want to improve on it, the standard way of doing that on Github is anyway to fork the repository and then submit a pull request. While you are waiting for a response you can very well use your own compiled version of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you have several improvements to be made. Do each of them in a separate branch to be able to submit them as distinct pull requests and use your own master branch to merge all of these changes for your own use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-08-13T15:22:47.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4254" CreationDate="2016-08-13T16:07:45.917" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course there is no single answer to this question. The motivation can change over time and over individuals but I will try to list a few common reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;For ideological reasons&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who invented free software (RMS et al.) did it originally for very ideological reasons (&amp;quot;all software should be free&amp;quot; - that is, respect four fundamental freedoms) and this was motivation enough to start the GNU project. For reference, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/11/business/business-technology-one-man-s-fight-for-free-software.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 1989 NYT's article&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original GNU manifesto&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Because it's a free-time activity&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lots of people like to program so much that they do it even during their free time. When absolutely no financial benefit is to be expected from a software (either because you don't think it is worth much or because you don't want to spend time selling it), it can be seen as natural to share it as free software (it will help others and could even contribute to your own reputation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Because it's a job&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many companies profit directly or indirectly from free and open source software (RedHat but also Google, Facebook and Microsoft) and consequently pay people to contribute to it. The most famous person to be paid for writing free software full-time is probably Linus Torvalds but there are lots of examples of people whose job is to develop proprietary software part of the time and to contribute to open source part of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github's founder and former CEO Tom Preston-Warner has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very good entry on his blog&lt;/a&gt; on why it pays for a company to have its employees contribute to open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to dive more into motivation issues, &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=carrots+and+rainbows+motivation+and+social+practice+in+open+source+software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is an academic article&lt;/a&gt; talking about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update:&lt;/em&gt; And &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.10291.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a 2021 academic article&lt;/a&gt; revisiting motivations of open source developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T17:21:02.680" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T17:21:02.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4305" CreationDate="2016-08-13T18:19:10.337" Score="9" ViewCount="1079" Body="&lt;p&gt;My research into the topic suggests that the differences between the GPL and AGPL licenses only matter for code that runs on the server.  When executing JavaScript in the browser, &quot;distribution&quot; occurs, in both cases, when the page is loaded, and as such there is no difference between the AGPL and GPL. Is this an accurate understanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically: When writing code to execute in the browser, if I use an AGPL-licensed library, do I have additional requirements or limitations over a GPL-licensed library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3557" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:23:06.240" Title="Is there any difference between the GPL and AGPL for code executed in the browser?" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4328" CreationDate="2016-08-14T00:21:38.443" Score="10" ViewCount="1209" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I redistribute the binary form of someone's LGPL code compiled with a proprietary compiler which is not included in the operating system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL 2.1 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For an executable, the required form of the &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it. However, as a special exception, the materials to be distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It may happen that this requirement contradicts the license restrictions of other proprietary libraries that do not normally accompany the operating system. Such a contradiction means you cannot use both them and the Library together in an executable that you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to redistribute the proprietary compiler, too? Of course, I don't have a permission to redistribute the proprietary compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5862" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-14T00:30:08.350" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T01:41:44.900" Title="Redistributing LGPL 2.1 code compiled by a proprietary compiler" Tags="|distribution|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4303" CreationDate="2016-08-14T00:23:06.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the licenses would apply identically, as in both cases the program is being conveyed to the end user. The AGPL's additional clause only applies when the user &lt;em&gt;interacts with&lt;/em&gt; but does not &lt;em&gt;receive&lt;/em&gt; the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would note that both the GPL and AGPL define &quot;source code&quot; as &quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it&quot;. This means that if you distribute compressed/minified Javascript code that it does not count as the source code, and you must make available the original unminified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T00:23:06.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2016-08-14T02:11:14.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd describe software with library dependencies as like a car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make your own car, you can do it from the ground up, or you can produce only the body and purchase, say, the engine/wheels/gears separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to embed them into your car and it's still your car, but parts' manufacturers still have their rights to those parts (like, you can't claim those parts are produced by you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T14:45:47.483" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T14:45:47.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2016-08-14T02:17:43.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As curiousdannii notes in the comments, this restriction is not in LGPL3. If the project specifies &amp;quot;LGPL 2.1 or later&amp;quot;, you can chose LGPL version 3 and avoid this clause entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a compiler counts as &amp;quot;data and utility programs&amp;quot;. The keyword there is &amp;quot;utility&amp;quot;. A compiler is not something like a shell script or a build settings file, it is the core mechanism of software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MustSourceBuildToMatchExactHashOfBinary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;states in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Does the GPL require me to provide source code that can be built to match the exact hash of the binary I am distributing?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete corresponding source means the source that the binaries were made from, but that does not imply your tools must be able to make a binary that is an exact hash of the binary you are distributing. In some cases it could be (nearly) impossible to build a binary from source with an exact hash of the binary being distributed — consider the following examples: a system might put timestamps in binaries; or the program might have been built against a different (even unreleased) compiler version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last clause is of special relevance to us. I think the spirit of the (L)GPL is that you must allow users to build an executable that produces the same behaviour and outputs to yours given the same inputs and states. With both this FAQ and the initial point in mind, I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; you are in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not sure of this answer. I would strongly advise that you write to the FSF and ask for their clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T02:17:43.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4340" CreationDate="2016-08-14T06:22:08.283" Score="5" ViewCount="1077" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider myself an amateur and the following is based on my limited understanding. I also live in Germany, but copyright questions would probably cross borders anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Situation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I developed and released my (yet to be created) application for commercial purposes and used the LGPL version of QT and linked to it dynamically. Complying to the LGPL licence should be possible without releasing the code of my application core.&#xA;Futhermore I decide that the LGPL version of QT is too restrictive (e.g. no static linking) and subscribe to use the commercial version QT. Any releases of my application would then be without QT source code and statically linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Problem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only problem I see here is that statement in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/faq/#_Toc453700698&quot;&gt;faq entry 2.13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I have started development of a project using the open source version (LGPL), can I later purchase a commercial version of Qt and move my code under that license?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not permitted without written consent from The Qt Company. If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue. If you are unsure of which license or version to use when you start development, we recommend you contact The Qt Company to advise you on the best choice based on your development needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the &lt;em&gt;QT Company&lt;/em&gt; really deny using the commercial version of QT in combination with my propriatary application core code? I read (part of) the licence text, but I cannot answer this question specifically. What really baffles me is that even when using the LGPL version of QT (as a library) I retain the exclusive rights to the application core and never have to release the source under any licence (when properly done, of course).&#xA;To rephrase: In what way can the commercial licence force me to obtain my own source code &lt;em&gt;not using the LGPL version of QT&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5863" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T11:14:47.053" Title="Changing QT library licence for application from LGPL to commercial" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-14T10:23:17.267" Score="1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;On many (if not all) open source licenses there is a copyright notice which shows who the copyright holder is, e.g:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For legal reasons, do I actually have to include my &lt;em&gt;Full Name&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;code&gt;[fullname]&lt;/code&gt; field or can I substitute my online alias?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5865" LastActivityDate="2016-08-14T10:23:17.267" Title="Can I use an alias instead of my full name when licensing my code?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-08-14T11:44:33.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4312" CreationDate="2016-08-15T01:24:50.807" Score="5" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL&lt;/a&gt; reads (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.7. “Larger Work”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means a work that &lt;em&gt;combines Covered Software with other material, in a separate file or files&lt;/em&gt;, that is not Covered Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.3. Distribution of a Larger Work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You may create and distribute a Larger Work under terms of Your choice&lt;/em&gt;, provided that You also comply with the requirements of this License for the Covered Software. &amp;lt;...&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my project contains more then 1 file,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I accept contributions only to 1 file at a time,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I require licensing contributions under MPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then I can freely relicense my project with all contributions as my project would always be a larger work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more, if I just add an icon to whatever project, it would cover both points 1 &amp;amp; 3 as it would be more then 1 file &amp;amp; hardly anyone would contribute to an icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T01:49:10.430" Title="Can Mozilla Public License be used as a contributor license agreement?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T01:36:12.757" Score="6" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;This clause is section 4(c) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt; and 4(d) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be a restriction on how you can use the work. Does that make these licenses non-free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T02:19:02.063" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T18:23:05.097" Title="Does the mutilation clause make CC-BY and CC-BY-SA non-free?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4310" CreationDate="2016-08-15T01:49:10.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy to misunderstand the intent of Section 3.3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4056/what-is-required-of-a-party-who-receives-a-larger-work-under-the-mozilla-public&quot;&gt;I did, too.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is &lt;em&gt;not exactly&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;The work as a whole, and its executables&lt;/strong&gt;, may be under the terms of your choice. The MPL-covered source files whose object code is being distributed must always remain freely available under the MPL, meaning their recipients would be free to fork the project back into an MPL-licensed version. Bear in mind Section 3.1: &quot;You may not attempt to alter or restrict the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form.&quot; Each Contributor is not only a Contributor, but a licensee (&quot;You&quot;) to the Contributions of other Contributors, so this section will apply to you as the theoretical project lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T01:49:10.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4311" CreationDate="2016-08-15T02:01:16.270" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is a legal answer. This is not legal advice. You shouldn't be trusting legal interpretations from an unqualified, Canadian secondary school student. I advise you to seek professional advice from a qualified person.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause is basically saying, that, &lt;em&gt;if you create a derivative work, you must not change the work in such a way as to be harmful to the original author, be it honour, reputation or the like.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, that's preserving the author's moral rights. There are some jurisdictions, where moral rights can be assigned, waived, revoked, etc. This seems to be a way to explicitly say that no moral rights are waived, in whatever way whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's a moral right in law? Moral rights are the mechanism for an author or creator to have some integrity in their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So does the clause make it non free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the clause didn't exist, then the laws in some jurisdictions would themselves make the license non-free, because the law doesn't permit it. Moral rights are always there. Fun stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, let's see the clause more carefully: (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other &lt;strong&gt;derogatory action&lt;/strong&gt; in relation to the Work which would be &lt;strong&gt;prejudicial&lt;/strong&gt; to the Original Author's &lt;strong&gt;honour or reputation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;prejudicial&quot; and &quot;derogatory&quot; can be incredibly difficult to define. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Canada, there's a bit of a rather infamous case involving moral rights: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/snow-v-eaton-centre-ltd-1982-70-cpr-2d-105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Snow vs The Eaton Centre Ltd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Sorry, I can't seem to find any actual judgment from the case)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have heard of The Eaton Centre in Toronto, which is quite a large downtown shopping centre. Within it, is an artistic work - birds that hang down from the ceiling. It's known as the &quot;Flight Stop&quot; sculpture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case involved the Eaton Centre adding ribbons to the birds necks, in celebration of Christmas. Snow however, challenged this, saying that this was infringing on his moral rights, even though the Eaton Centre had full commissioned Snow to create the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ontario Court judge agreed, and stated that this was an infringement, saying that the added ribbons did distort the work. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/virtual-museum/snow-v-eaton-centre-ltd-1982-70-cpr-2d-105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;This legal article states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snow clearly believed that his honour or reputation had been affected by the defendants' acts. This view, being “shared by a number of other well-respected artists and people knowledgeable in his field”, was “reasonable under the circumstances”. Accordingly, O’Brien J. was prepared to give considerable weight to the artist’s views on this question, so long as they were “reasonably arrived at”. In other words, a breach of s 12 (7) could be satisfied by the artist’s own perception, supported by some credible testimony from members of the public or the art community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prise_de_parole_Inc_v_Gu%C3%A9rin,_%C3%A9diteur_Lt%C3%A9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Another Canadian case supports this&lt;/a&gt; (and again, I can't find any judgment -_-), which supported the former view. It held the following when determining infringement (if Wikipedia can be considered reliable for this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Court noted that prejudice must first be determined on a subjective standard based on the author's opinion. Second, it must also be determined on an objective standard that is based on public or expert opinion in order to establish that the author's opinion was reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt this is the case in many other jurisdictions around the world however, particularly the United States. I'm not familiar with any law in other places, so I won't comment on those jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm talking too much :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the clause doesn't make the license non-free, as it is simply an explicit statement saying that no moral rights are waived, assigned, or transferred. Even if such a clause didn't exist, it would still exist in copyright law, in various jurisdictions around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T18:23:05.097" LastActivityDate="2016-08-15T18:23:05.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-15T09:25:27.933" Score="2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downloaded a project that has Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), can I edit the source code and sell it to customers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5874" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-15T14:19:40.707" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T15:03:38.810" Title="Can I edit and sell Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) licenced projects?" Tags="|monetization|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4287" CreationDate="2016-08-15T14:09:06.240" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Software dependencies: A not-too-technical introduction&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programs depend on other programs, often with many deep levels of indirection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Million of packaged FLOSS programs are available through public repositories for easy dependencies download and installation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How dependent programs relate to and interact with each other can be more or less intimate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each program's license FLOSS requirements and obligations vary based on the relationship and interaction between dependent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole chain of program or package dependencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The purpose and use of each program or package in that chain (test, tool, runtime)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which dependent are shipped and redistributed with your product, application or library vs. which may be installed by your user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license of each dependency in this chain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How software is built&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Larger software systems and products are commonly assembled from software components.  Each component is some collection of programs. And components frequently re-use other components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each component is usually delivered as a package. A package is typically an archive that contains the programs. A package also commonly contains information about the component name &amp;amp; version, what it is about, who wrote it, sometimes its license, etc. And also what other components may be required by this component: this is called a dependent component or a &amp;quot;dependency&amp;quot;. In formal terms, I would define a package as the set of exact software programs and files that are distributed or used for a given component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Dependencies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program may require one or more other programs to run (the &amp;quot;dependency-ies&amp;quot;). The dependencies can be recursive potentially creating very deep relationships. Sometimes the dependency is only for testing or &amp;quot;building/compiling&amp;quot; the program - i.e. a development or &amp;quot;dev&amp;quot; dependency. Sometimes it is needed to run the program or sometimes it can be optional to provide extra  features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some dependencies for a program may be rather generic and sometimes implied. At a top level many programs can have a dependency on the operating system, an application server, a database server, etc.  These type of dependencies are often not stated explicitly. For example a Java program requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to run and the fact a program is written in Java implies this and is not explicitly stated by most Java packages as many/most Java programs will not depend on a specific version of that JVM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dependency management is the approach practiced by software programmers to specify, provision/download, install, update and generally manage the set of dependent code that their product or application relies on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Managing dependencies is evolving to be rather sophisticated and several tools and public package repositories are helping programmers dealing with eventually large volume of dependencies. A large number of these dependencies are for free, libre and open source-licensed (FLOSS) components and their packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Package dependencies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each operating system / language / framework tends to have its own (eco) system for FLOSS components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documenting dependencies in one or more configuration or &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot; files,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downloading (aka. provisioning) the dependent components from a public FLOSS or private repository of pre-built or pre-packaged programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provisioning may occur at build-time or run-time; for instance when JavaScript code is fetched from a remote repository or CDN when you load a web page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These systems are common in Linux distros, Java/Maven, JavaScript, Ruby, Python. And there are millions of these FLOSS packages readily available for download and installation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these repositories and tools include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JavaScript - NPMs for NodeJS,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruby - GEMs from RubyGems,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python - Wheels from Pypi,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Java - JARs from Maven,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linux packages such as RPM and Debian,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and many more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dependencies are often weakly defined and variable: A dependency statement may include a range of possible versions for a dependent package and if a dependecy is &amp;quot;required&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;optional&amp;quot;. Package systems compute (aka. &amp;quot;resolve&amp;quot;) a list of concrete dependencies when you provision packages using these definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dependency relationship between two programs may be more or less &amp;quot;intimate&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At arm's length, when the programs are entirely separated and may only communicate by writing or reading files, or by network interaction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At a handshake level - where the programs call each other's subroutines (aka &amp;quot;functions&amp;quot;) directly and exchange data directly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or extremely intimate when merged or combined into a single larger (executable) program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Program dependencies: programs can be compiled and combined&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often programs are compiled: the text of the programs source code is transformed in a binary code that the machine can understand and execute. For instance programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Go require this &amp;quot;compilation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not always: some programming languages are executed directly from the source code when you run them and do not require pre-compilation (or are compiled on the fly when you run them). For instance JavaScript, Python, Ruby or Perl code does not require ahead-of-time compilation, though it is sometimes &amp;quot;compressed&amp;quot; or minified or pre-compiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the compilation process, several programs can be &amp;quot;combined&amp;quot; into larger (binary) programs. Combining programs together this way is often called &amp;quot;static linking&amp;quot; when things are &amp;quot;merged&amp;quot; into a larger binary program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Free, libre and open source licensing and dependencies&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many software licenses have different requirements for source code and binaries (BSD, MIT), have specific terms about the implication of how programs are combined and depend on each other (L/GPL).  Limited Copyleft and Copyleft licenses impose some constraints on how other (proprietary or not) programs can be combined or interact with copyleft code. For instance, the LGPL explicitly discuss static vs. dynamic linking. These are concepts originally defined in compiled languages such as C and C++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not always translate well to other &amp;quot;dynamic&amp;quot; languages and this require some adjustments to apply these terms in these other language contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses typically impose few constraints on how you can combine programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Copyleft licenses, how (proprietary- or non-Copyleft- licensed) programs and Copyleft-licensed programs are used together, how they depend and interact with each other is the &lt;strong&gt;essence of what triggers the Copyleft clauses&lt;/strong&gt; of the GPL and LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the relationship between programs and their dependencies can be more or less intimate: Arm's length, Handshake, Merged. Copyleft licenses may impact proprietary or non-copyleft code based on the nature of the dependencies and interaction between programs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any Handshake or Merged relationship with a GPL-licensed program implies that GPL becomes the primary license for that combined program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any Merged relationship with LGPL-licensed programs implies that LGPL becomes the primary license for that combined program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm's length is similar to &amp;quot;independent process&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;command line&amp;quot;, Handshake is similar to &amp;quot;dynamic linking&amp;quot;, Merged is similar to &amp;quot;static linking&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relationships may flow through the Dependency chains and the related licensing requirement may also follow through.&#xA;What if a  proprietary program depends on a program that depends on a program that depends on a program that is GPL-licensed? It depends!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the type of relationships at each step?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the license of the intermediate programs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the GPL license may flow up or down to the proprietary program for an &amp;quot;Handshake&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Merged&amp;quot; style of relation, unless some licenses have exception to stop this flow (e.g. such as the Linux in user space exception to the GPL license) or the nature of the interactions changes through this chain. (such as when a dependent program is used at &amp;quot;Arm's length&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An approach to handle dependencies and license compliance&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To properly handle dependencies -- whether you write proprietary or FLOSS-licensed code -- my recommended approach would be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evaluate the likely dependencies for a new component or package during selection / evaluation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Confirm actual dependencies when you build for your product, application or library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure that you consider the whole chain of dependencies, both direct and indirect and at full depth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider the purpose of each program or package in that chain (test, tool, compilation, runtime, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine which dependent are used only at development time, which redistributed with your product, application or library vs. which may be installed by your user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Determine the license of each dependency in this chain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evaluate what licensing requirements flow up or down this chain and determine what actions are required to comply with licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these elements you can define a policy for which relationship may be acceptable or not in your context and what are the obligations derived from using dependent packages or programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T07:24:11.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T11:08:37.400" Score="7" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning on selling software which is licensed under GPL 3. I have gone through the terms and conditions listed in the GPL 3 license. However, I would like to know if any of the following scenarios will violate the GPL 3 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I charge the customer for software? This includes selling the&#xA;software as well as charging for technical support? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the software is known by name 'ABC', can I change the name of software to 'xyz'.This may include changing the logo, name on the UI?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide the copy of source code voluntarily? I am fine to provide the source code if some body asks for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to publish the modified source code if I host it in the cloud?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5891" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-08-21T23:35:34.923" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T14:19:43.417" Title="Marketing GPL 3 software" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|marketing|trademark|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4325" CreationDate="2016-08-16T14:21:44.483" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a little question about ORMLite and its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found &lt;a href=&quot;http://ormlite.com/javadoc/ormlite-core/doc-files/ormlite_9.html#License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this document&lt;/a&gt;. Is this the true license of ORMLite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand it correctly, I just need to copy the license into my final jar, for example in &lt;code&gt;/third-party/ORMLite/license.txt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to include ORMLite as a dependency into my open-source project and I want to use the Maven-Shade-Plugin to copy all its classes into my Jar.&#xA;Finally, I want to distribute that Jar for public download - am I allowed to do so, if I include their license file as stated above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5894" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T06:47:16.393" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T06:47:16.393" Title="Can I shade ORMLite into my Jar via Maven and distribute that Jar?" Tags="|mit|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4318" CreationDate="2016-08-16T14:33:33.070" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I charge the customer for software? This includes selling the software as well as charging for technical support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can sell software that is licensed under the GPL v3. Section 4 addresses distributing verbatim copies. You must keep the copyright notices and licenses and give all recipients a copy of the license. When selling the software, you can choose to charge a fee for distribution, provide warrantees, or offer support packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the software is known by name 'ABC', can I change the name of software to 'xyz'.This may include changing the logo, name on the UI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your changes would be a derivative work and covered by Section 5 of the GPL v3. You must add notices that you have modified the software and you must license your derivative work under the GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide the copy of source code voluntarily? I am fine to provide the source code if some body asks for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 of the license addresses this. If you do not distribute the source code with the executable object code, you must provide the license and a written notice about how to obtain the source code. There are some caveats as to what is acceptable if you are providing the software as part of a commercial offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to publish the modified source code if I host it in the cloud?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Usage over a network does not count as distribution, and you only need to provide the source code to people who receive your executable object code. This &quot;gap&quot; led to the creation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot;&gt;GNU Affero General Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T14:33:33.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-16T16:39:02.833" Score="5" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;A development package I'd like to use is provided as Linux binaries for a single platform. I'd like to build and run it on another platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The manual, available on the developer's site but not included in the package, contains the following text (product/project names redacted):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Warranty and Copying&#xA;* This document is part of [shortname]:&#xA;* [longname]&#xA;* [project url]&#xA;*&#xA;*    [shortname] is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;*    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;*    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;*    (at your option) any later version.&#xA;*&#xA;*    [shortname] is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;*    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;*    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;*    GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;*&#xA;*    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;*    along with [shortname].  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This manual is slightly older than the current binary package. The developer now says “As the copyright holder, I can do what I want with my copy and updates … including changing the license … The current published binary version is not GPL”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything I can do to suggest to the developer that their approach is not appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5895" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T15:23:02.687" Title="Does GPL v3 compel the author to provide source?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4326" CreationDate="2016-08-16T17:15:09.477" Score="9" ViewCount="1782" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm building &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Wysaard/fucked-up&quot;&gt;this Brainfuck interpreter&lt;/a&gt;. I want to add some people's programs as test cases. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Rsgm/fizzbuzz&quot;&gt;this program&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program I want to add to my repository is MIT licensed in this case, but if possible I'd like to get an answer not specific to this license. My question is basically: /what is the conventional and correct way to make note of his license such that I can just take the file and put it in my repo? I know his license allows for it but I'm not sure what I should do. (I could copy his file, but what would be 'correct' way to note to which files it applies?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extra difficulty here is that it concerns brainfuck code, in which there are no normal comments. So I can't just take the license and put it at the top of the copied file either, which is what I would do otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5456" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-16T20:01:56.927" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T20:57:54.563" Title="How to add a licensed piece of code to my own repository? (Brainfuck)" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4321" CreationDate="2016-08-16T17:46:00.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing that is suspicious to me is that, according to the GPL v3, the distribution is required to contain the text of the license. Section 6 covers distribution of binary packages, and refers the reader to Sections 4 and 5 for additional requirements. Section 4 requires notices regarding the license and terms be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference in terms between the license information provided in the binary download and the documentation should be corrected. I would suspect that the license information distributed with the binary is more correct. If no license was distributed with the binary, then that is also a concern since there's no information about how you can use what you've just obtained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author is indeed the only copyright holder, then he is correct that he can choose to change the license at any point in time. However, a change would not be retroactive. If you can find someone who has a version of this package that was released under the GPL, they can redistribute under the terms of the GPL to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T17:46:00.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4321" CreationDate="2016-08-16T18:26:18.670" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author is correct. As the copyright holder, he is not bound by the GPL and can do whatever he wishes with his &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty&quot;&gt;intellectual property&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. However, FLOSS licenses are irrevocable, so if he has released past versions of the software and its source under the GPL, you can build them from source and distribute them under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course contact him and tell him that he's inhibiting the cause of FLOSS by not releasing newer versions under the GPL, but that's unlikely to change anything. It would be better to request that he update the manual to indicate that the software is no longer under the GPL (and to document any changes he has made in newer versions) but that past versions were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T18:26:18.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4319" CreationDate="2016-08-16T18:39:02.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is the true license of ORMLite, and yes, you can do so. ORMLite's license is known as a &quot;permissive&quot; or &quot;copyfree&quot; license, meaning it imposes no restriction on the license of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying it into the final JAR would indeed work. Or you could include a file indicating the copying terms for all the code used in the project, which you might put at the top directory of your distribution, or in an &quot;About box&quot;. If you use Firefox, go to &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt; for an example. Yours would look something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This program is (c) 2016 by Annotated.&#xA;&#xA;License notice for ORMLite [list the ORMLite files or directories here]:&#xA;Permission to use...&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;...&#xA;The author may be contacted at...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be warned that it's not always as simple as that. Some licenses require that you license your whole work under the same license, in order to preserve others' freedoms. This is called &quot;copyleft&quot;. For a quick explanation of the license spectrum, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GitHub's Choose-a-License&lt;/a&gt;. For a thorough look at the ecosystem of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) licenses, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the Free Software Foundation's list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T18:39:02.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4322" CreationDate="2016-08-16T19:56:10.273" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One solution is to include the license files and mention them in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This code is licensed under the MIT License&#xA;&amp;lt;code here&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another brainfuck-specific solution is to include the license terms inside of a loop at the beginning of the program (which will not execute, because the value at the start of the tape is 0, so the loop will be skipped):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[This code is licensed under the MIT License. blah blah blah license terms, blah blah blah more license terms.]&#xA;&amp;lt;code here&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can use an &quot;umbrella&quot; license file, which states the license(s) that each file is/are licensed under (assuming you have a directory in your repo containing all of the relevant licenses):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;foo.bf and bar.bf are licensed under the [MIT License](Licenses/MIT).&#xA;baz.bf is licensed under the [Apache License](Licenses/Apache).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, because you are using Git, you can use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/docs/git-submodule&quot;&gt;submodule&lt;/a&gt; in your repository pointing towards the other repository, with its own licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is assuming that the licenses are compatible, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3068" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T19:56:10.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4322" CreationDate="2016-08-16T19:57:37.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always note the fact that, when the pointer points at a zero cell, the while loop skips its contents. So, if you know for a fact that the current cell is zero, you can include a comment like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[This is a &quot;cat&quot; program, which outputs all of its input.]&#xA;,[.,]&#xA;&amp;gt;&#xA;[This program expects 0 to be returned on end-of-input.]&#xA;[Do note that the brackets [have to be] balanced for this to work correctly.]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When worse comes to worse, and you do not know if the current cell is zero, you can resort to &quot;restricted comments&quot;--comments without any of &lt;code&gt;+-&amp;lt;&amp;gt;,.[]&lt;/code&gt; in them. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;,       gets initial input char&#xA;[       starts a loop&#xA; .       prints the previous input char&#xA; ,       and gets new input&#xA;]       if the input is 0x00 then the loop closes and we reach EOF&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you must have your punctuation in there, you can always use &quot;verbose punctuation&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is a sentence COMMA but looks rather odd DOT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've seen this approach myself a few times, but I remember not where.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5897" LastEditorUserId="5897" LastEditDate="2016-08-16T20:57:54.563" LastActivityDate="2016-08-16T20:57:54.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4304" CreationDate="2016-08-17T13:54:29.667" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked FSF the same question. This is the FSF's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NonFreeTools&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NonFreeTools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hope this is of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, a proprietary UNIX includes a proprietary compiler.&#xA;  I can redistribute the executable of someone's LGPL program&#xA;  without redistributing the proprietary compiler because LGPL&#xA;  allows it as a 'special exception'. And, users can reproduce the&#xA;  executable with the proprietary compiler which is included in the&#xA;  OS.  I think the FAQ mentions about this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LGPL ensures users can reproduce a functionally same executable.&#xA;  But, for example, if no compiler is included in the operating&#xA;  system, users can't reproduce the executable.  LGPL requests to&#xA;  redistribute any data and utility programs needed for reproducing&#xA;  the executable.  Do I have to redistribute the proprietary&#xA;  compiler in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the executable can be compiled with a different compiler, for&#xA;  instance one which is free software such as GCC, this shouldn't be an&#xA;  issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5862" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T13:54:29.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4333" CreationDate="2016-08-17T15:51:20.057" Score="8" ViewCount="1324" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is zlib license no-waranty no-liability clause enough to not get sued in European Union and United States of America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zlib license no-waranty no-liability clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied&#xA;  warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages&#xA;  arising from the use of this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little concerned, because this is how it in looks popular MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or in FreeBSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS&#xA;  &quot;AS IS&quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;  LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR&#xA;  A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT&#xA;  OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,&#xA;  SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;  LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,&#xA;  DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY&#xA;  THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;  (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE&#xA;  OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation&#xA;  are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing&#xA;  official policies, either expressed or implied, of the FreeBSD&#xA;  Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3472" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T23:17:34.900" Title="Is zlib license no-waranty no-liability clause enough for US and EU law?" Tags="|warranty|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4334" CreationDate="2016-08-17T16:00:58.593" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a non-commercial and academic GPL v3 program and want to know if it is ok to load an unspecified/unnamed closed-source &#xA;license like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Licence&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BASS is free for non-commercial use. If you are a non-commercial entity (eg. an individual) and you are not making any&#xA;  money from your product (through sales/advertising/etc), then you can&#xA;  use BASS in it for free. If you wish to use BASS in commercial&#xA;  products, then please also see the next section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, BASS IS PROVIDED&#xA;  &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED,&#xA;  INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY&#xA;  AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE AUTHORS SHALL NOT BE HELD&#xA;  LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MAY RESULT FROM THE USE OF BASS. YOU USE&#xA;  BASS ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usage of BASS indicates that you agree to the above conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All trademarks and other registered names contained in the BASS&#xA;  package are the property of their respective owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.un4seen.com/doc/#bass/bass.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;please, click here for the full README&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2999" LastEditorUserId="2999" LastEditDate="2016-08-17T16:48:37.233" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T20:42:44.950" Title="Can my GPL v3 software load unamed licensed libraries?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4330" CreationDate="2016-08-17T17:13:11.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am writing a non-commercial and academic GPL v3 program and want to know if it is ok to load an unspecified/unnamed closed-source license like this one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is perfectly OK as on the face of it you seem to be a non-commercial person per this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can use this with my GPL code alright anyway I want.... BUT can I redistribute this with anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would likely not be able to redistribute that proprietary, non-commercial library and my GPL code being unable to run without it may (big may?) be  violating the GPL if redistributed. Commercial usage is one of the freedoms that cannot be prohibited per the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would use it but I would likely refrain from sharing or redistributing my own GPL code. And since this would then be my own private usage code, the license would not matter much, as I would be the only user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big &lt;code&gt;may&lt;/code&gt; may need more clarification though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T17:13:11.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4329" CreationDate="2016-08-17T17:19:14.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is zlib license no-waranty no-liability clause enough to not get sued in European Union and United States of America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never heard of anyone being sued of the zlib license WARRANTY disclaimer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I have never heard of anyone ever being sued anywhere on the sole basis of any open source licenses WARRANTY disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being a lawyer and short of a real legal analysis by a real lawyer this is probably as good as an answer you could get here. FWIW, there could be countries where some warranty disclaimers may not apply or may not be legit. But these law are likely moot for gifts of code and made for products you bought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T17:19:14.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4329" CreationDate="2016-08-17T18:44:34.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that Bruce Perens was evaluating the zlib and libpng licenses for Open Source Certification when he coined the term &quot;crayon license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The zlib license and the libpng license were developed at almost the same time (March 24, 1995 and March 28, respectively). The libpng license had MIT-like disclaimers while the zlib had&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The authors are not responsible for the consequences of use of this    software, no matter how awful, even if they arise from flaws in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which was changed several days later to the separate disclaimer mentioned in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any lawsuits with regard to either license, so both seem to be adequate so far (note, IANAL and this is not legal advice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The UCITA law, enacted in two US states in 2000, declares that implicit&#xA;waivers are insufficient, and if the following waiver, or words to that&#xA;effect, do not appear in the license then these things are implicitly&#xA;warranted by the grantor.  So I had to amend the libpng license accordingly, to add this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no warranty against interference with your enjoyment of the&#xA;  library or against infringement.  There is no warranty that our&#xA;  efforts or the library will fulfill any of your particular purposes or&#xA;  needs.  This library is provided with all faults, and the entire risk&#xA;  of satisfactory quality, performance, accuracy, and effort is with the&#xA;  user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know specifically what is the risk to the grantor, but, not being a lawyer, and residing in one of those states (Maryland and Virginia), I preferred to not assume those risks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See SUBTITLE 4: WARRANTIES, paragraphs 21-401 through 21-409, on pages 40-48 in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://mlis.state.md.us/2000rs/bills/sb/sb0142e.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Maryland UCITA law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-09-27T23:17:34.900" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T23:17:34.900" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4330" CreationDate="2016-08-17T20:42:44.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF provides two great FAQs on precisely this subject, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In a nutshell, you can do so as the copyright holder of the GPL work, but users will not be able to use the GPL's rights to its fullest extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, I would recommend a license with a weaker copyleft, which does not require that recipients license the whole work under its terms. Depending on your needs, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2.1-en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MPL&lt;/a&gt; may be appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-17T20:42:44.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4336" CreationDate="2016-08-18T03:58:39.757" Score="6" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a short module, which is directly based on the &lt;code&gt;netrc&lt;/code&gt; module in the Python standard library. It's the same module, with some alterations and extensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct that I need to include all the default Python licenses? The PSF one, the BEOPEN one (for Python 2.0), the CNRI one (Python 1.6.1) and the CWI one (versions 0.9.0 to 1.2).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And that the new module is automatically licensed under the standard PSF license? Or is there a way to relicense the module for derivative works, while keeping the old licenses (the four above) with the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the original module from the Python 3.5.2 source, so I assume it would have to include this exact license version. As seen here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3.5/license.html&quot;&gt;https://docs.python.org/3.5/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5910" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T10:48:36.503" Title="License for Python module derived from standard library module" Tags="|derivative-works|psf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4335" CreationDate="2016-08-18T08:57:46.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct that I need to include all the default Python licenses? The PSF one, the BEOPEN one (for Python 2.0), the CNRI one (Python 1.6.1) and the CWI one (versions 0.9.0 to 1.2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The text is unfortunately a rather monolithic big text. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/python/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/python/#license-text&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states in section 2.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;provided, however, that PSF's  License Agreement and PSF's notice of&#xA;copyright, i.e., &quot;Copyright (c) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006&#xA;Python Software Foundation; All Rights Reserved&quot; are retained in Python&#xA;alone or in any derivative version prepared by Licensee. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And that the new module is automatically licensed under the standard PSF license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PSF &quot;licenses&quot; are a tad on the complicated side so these licenses would apply IMHO and may likely not be &quot;sub-licensable&quot;. For instance in section 2. of the BEOPEN sub-section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;however, that the BeOpen Python License is retained in the &#xA;Software, alone or in any derivative version prepared by Licensee. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or is there a way to relicense the module for derivative works, while keeping the old licenses (the four above) with the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, though that would not be the right thing to do IMHO: when forking I prefer keeping the original licenses as-is.   Based on the text above I would tend to say that you cannot re-license using another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T10:48:36.503" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T10:48:36.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4338" CreationDate="2016-08-18T09:54:33.663" Score="5" ViewCount="2717" Body="&lt;p&gt;as the title implies, I've installed some npm packages - all of which I've knowingly installed and requested are published under MIT, ISC, Apache 2, or other permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some of these packages, which I require in the &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;, require other packages with less permissive licenses, such as &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-4.0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use the packages I required in a project for commercial use. What are my obligations regarding the licenses? Are there any, as I've not required the non-permissive licensed modules directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5915" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-18T10:44:25.693" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:49:00.360" Title="NPM - can I use module with MIT license, even if it requires submodule with CC-BY license?" Tags="|mit|cc-by|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4337" CreationDate="2016-08-19T11:01:28.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to use the packages I required in a project for commercial use. What are my obligations regarding the licenses? Are there any, as I've not required the non-permissive licensed modules directly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you redistribute NPM packages (or any package) you need to consider the chain of dependencies at full depth &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all the way down&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I provided a comprehensive &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;overview of dependencies here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You therefore have to consider and &lt;strong&gt;comply with any and all the licenses of the packages&lt;/strong&gt; whether these are direct or indirect dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not comfortable with the licenses of some packages in that tree you could either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact the authors to ask for an other license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fork or patch the packages to remove the deps you do not like and replace (or rewrite) with something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, the CC-BY licenses are rather permissive with only a few  more requirements than an MIT. They are also pretty poor licensing choices for software. Ask your lawyers if they are comfy with this or not in your context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, I understand that I have to comply also with the CC-BY license. Would it be enough to mention the author somewhere on an 'about' page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely to be enough, for the CC-BY 4.0, the short non-legal code states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the&#xA;license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any&#xA;reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor&#xA;endorses you or your use&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then in slightly more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution&#xA;parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and&#xA;a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require&#xA;you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other&#xA;slight differences.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we are going to use a lot of different node modules [...] would it be sufficient to dedicate one page to these attributions? On that page, each of the modules would be properly attributed - with the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may depend on the license as some license may require a more prominent attribute, though in practice that should suffice and this is a common way to these things. You would also want to ensure that the source code of copyleft-licensed modules (such as LGPL, MPL, etc) is provided or available. If you do not minimize your code and use them as-is, then this comes for free with node_modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, there are a few node/npm utilities to help with this and also AttributeCode (which is in Python and that I co-maintain)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:49:00.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3967" CreationDate="2016-08-19T11:08:04.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I open source my project under Apache 2 if it uses a LGPL3 library without modifying it? I'm not planning to distribute the LGPL3 library along with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be OK with this. This is a common pattern. My Apache-licensed code can depend on an unmodified LGPL-licensed library when it dynamically links with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My understanding is that LGPL3 allows this type of use, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be OK with this too. My LGPL3-licensed code can depend on an Apache-licensed library. In this case, my Apache-licensed code may be subject to the LGPL3 terms in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but I'm not sure if Apache 2 allows this, on the other hand since no other open source code is actually distributed with this project, can Apache 2 prevent merely linking/referencing against LGPL3 library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said above, I am able to link to an LGPL3-licensed library from my Apache-licensed code that can stay Apache-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T11:08:04.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4308" CreationDate="2016-08-19T11:14:47.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can the QT Company really deny using the commercial version of QT in combination with my propriatary application core code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a commercial company and this is about a commercial contract. They can do whatever they want in their contracts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what way can the commercial licence force me to obtain my own source code not using the LGPL version of QT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, in a commercial contract -- and if you agree to it-- they can do whatever they want which may or may not be entirely legit under some jurisdictions, but a contract becomes the law between its parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take here is that QT wants to ensure that they always have full control of how its software is combined with copyleft-licensed code as their business is based on the full ownership of the code and dual licensing which that can only achieve if they control the code fully&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T11:14:47.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2498" CreationDate="2016-08-19T11:21:00.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I would like to know is if the code for the in-app-billing logic must also be included in the published GPL'd source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends how this billing code interacts with the rest of my GPL-licensed app. I provided a comprehensive &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;overview of dependencies here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general if my billing code is not linking with the GPL-licensed code and interacts at arm's length such as in a separate process it may not be subject to the GPL. The devils is in the details. Best will be to get an advice from a FLOSS-savvy lawyer. Heather Meeker has an excellent &lt;a href=&quot;http://heathermeeker.squarespace.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book on the topics&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T11:21:00.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4321" CreationDate="2016-08-19T13:07:03.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you mention in comments that program link to several other GPL libraries (some of which are FSF), then the resulting binary must be released as GPL too (or stop linking to those binaries, or stop being distributed at all). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because FSFs work is involved, it is probably best  you contact them so they can take the most diplomatic approach to resolve the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T13:07:03.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4278" CreationDate="2016-08-19T13:36:41.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the MadHatter does have a point, please make note of two important factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;being (at best) grey area is not so much different (from legal liability standpoint) from outright breaking the license. That is, only way to proceed safely is if there is no doubt whatsoever that it is completely legal. The burden on determining beyond doubt that it is completely legal (and/or legal consequences of failing to do so) is on you as a distributor. Even &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; doubt in legality of it is in practice almost as bad as fully knowing it is illegal (note you could claim not being sure or not knowing in either case, with same results)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;good way to determine if something is derived work is to ask yourself &lt;strong&gt;&quot;could I have built this same binary with same funcionality if I never had any access to any part of library code (including headers, &lt;code&gt;.so&lt;/code&gt; files, etc.) but just docs?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; If the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, you're most probably not infringing. If the answer is &quot;no&quot;, there is very very big chance your code is derived work (at least in most jurisdictions), and you thus have to licence accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T13:36:41.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4347" CreationDate="2016-08-19T14:20:52.430" Score="24" ViewCount="1322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming a copyright license (I'll reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, but that's an example only) that allows derivations, at what point are those derivations so extensive that the Apache license no longer applies? If every line of code is replaced, classes refactored, packages renamed, moved, merged, and split, to the point that every character has, at one point or another, been replaced, and code structure and flow has been changed, does the Apache license still apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about with copyleft licenses? If there were numerous small changes, then, obviously, each change would have to be licensed under the original copyleft license, so the degree of deviation is irrelevant. But, if there was one big update that changed everything, would it still count as a &quot;derivative&quot; and the copyleft license still apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not concerned with what is &lt;em&gt;provable in court&lt;/em&gt;; assume the history of the code can be proven without doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't know the reference, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot;&gt;Theseus' Paradox&lt;/a&gt; is a thought experiment that goes as follows: if the &lt;em&gt;Argo&lt;/em&gt; (the ship of Jason and the Argonauts) has had every single wooden part replaced, is it still, fundamentally, the same ship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5924" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-19T21:31:01.093" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T23:35:14.313" Title="Theseus' Paradox applied to code copyright" Tags="|derivative-works|law|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-19T14:40:23.097" Score="12" ViewCount="2199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I occasionally see claims that the Apache license makes it difficult to incorporate your code into other projects.&#xA;See for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/668&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;example&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's awfully disconcerting news, considering the difficulties involved in AL2 management in derived works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what exactly are the difficulties?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking at selecting an appropriate license for an open source project.&#xA;For why this matters consider the community wiki answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1396191/what-should-every-developer-know-about-legal-matters&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What should every developer know about legal matters?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best contenders so far seem to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apache License v2.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tesla COIL License&#xA;(Copyfree Open Innovation License (&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/licenses/coil/license.txt&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I selected these as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they include clauses to protect against threats of patent infringment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyleft is not appropriate here as it would restrict incorporation in commercial software&#xA;(saying that the LGPL could possibly work)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;references&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some differences however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1453/copyfree-open-innovation-license-compatibility&quot;&gt;Copyfree Open Innovation License compatibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_License_vs_COIL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_License_vs_COIL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular both of the latter mention (concerning the Apache license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A book-keeping clause (Section 4, Subsection 2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A project organization clause (Section 4, Subsection 4)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the actual text of the license though (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/rejected/apache2/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/content/standard/rejected/apache2/license.txt&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;it is not clear which clauses this actually refers to. &lt;em&gt;What constitutes a section or subsection?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which part is the &quot;project organisation clause&quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37781587/what-should-i-note-when-i-want-to-change-apache-license-2-0-code&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What should I note when I want to change Apache License 2.0 code?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; almost but not quite answers it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the book-keeping clause is item 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This provides explicit protection of attribution. &lt;strong&gt;Why would this be a bad thing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; (via &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7569978/forking-an-apache-license-v2-open-source-project-and-copyright-notices&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) provides some common sense guidelines which when followed ought to make it less of a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main differences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;COIL is copyfree and effectively places the software in the public domain (as far as possible)&#xA;while the Apache license retains each contributor's copyright and grants a permissive license to use etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;COIL can be used beyond just software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license includes a clause for automatic attribution of patches under the same license.&#xA;This sounds like a useful property lessoning the need to get contributers to provide an explicit waiver.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copyfree.org claims that the Apache license 2.0 is not copyfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF does not list COIL as GPL Compatible (i.e. you can include the code in new software under the GPL)&#xA;but I believe that any copyfree license must be (please comment if you can argue otherwise).&#xA;It does list Apache License 2.0 as compatible as does the Apache foundation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand what do you lose by going with a &quot;public domain&quot; license rather than a permissive open source one&#xA;(i.e. waiving your copyright)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case specifics will help answer the question suppose your project is&#xA;a file format or a protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wish to foster wide adoption and provide reference implementations in popular languages.&#xA;In the unlikely event the format or protocol is really popular (e.g. JSON, HTTP) you want to allow your project to be used&#xA;as a basis for standardisation by W3, IETF, ISO or whoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make a difference if the project is started or maintained by a company or an individual?&#xA;i.e. is it easier to get a company to sign stuff over under a permissive license than a copyfree one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Muddying the waters further (the whole area is a minefield) the W3 license almost sounds tailor made for this scenario.&#xA;It is also rejected by copyfree.org due to a book-keeping clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update&lt;/em&gt; I think I have given too much weight to the COIL license. Although it looks professional to the untrained eye, I can find no evidence of it being drafted by a lawyer rather than whoever wrote it, or that it is used widely. There are no such details on it website and no contact details whatsoever. &#xA;So it looks as if the alternative choices are MIT (with no patent clause) or MPL (weak copyleft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:50:51.677" Title="What if anything is wrong with the Apache License 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4345" CreationDate="2016-08-19T15:12:08.830" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license used, is actually completely irrelevant. The question lies purely in copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to figure out, is whether your changes will constitute a derivative work. Derivative work means that the new code is derived from the existing code. Generally, a good way of thinking of this is asking yourself the following question: Can my work effectively exist had the old code not existed (assuming you did not write your own code from scratch)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theseus' Paradox is interesting here: If you replace every wooden part of the ship, and you show the new ship to a third-party, they may say it is still the old ship. The ship may be new, but the old idea lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where a fundamental difference kicks in: &lt;em&gt;ideas cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since ideas can't be copyrighted, the rebuilt ship would be considered a completely different ship. Rewritten code would be considered a new library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-08-19T15:12:08.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2498" CreationDate="2016-08-19T20:20:34.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;General advice&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 2.b of the GPL 2.0 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later sections 2 also reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this is saying is that by making a game that incorporates an engine under GPL 2.0, then the full game must be distributed under the same license. That is the full thing, including the billing logic, and &lt;strong&gt;also including the assets&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general consequence, you should avoid game engine under GPL if you want to develop proprietary games. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that this does not seem to be the opinion of the authors of the engine since the README states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This does NOT mean that you cannot market this game commercially. The GPL does not prohibit commercial exploitation and all assets (e.g. textures, sounds, maps) created by yourself are your property and can be sold like every other game you find in stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also not technically inaccurate, this paragraph is misleading. It would probably be a good idea to ask them why they don't license their engine under LGPL 2.1, 3.0 or MPL 2.0 if it is their intention to let people make proprietary games with their engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;To keep some assets proprietary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can keep some assets proprietary if you make sure that they appear as &quot;independent&quot; from the game itself. It would not be the case of an image that is needed to navigate the game menu. But it could be the case of a game level depending on the way this is encoded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make an analogy a GPL music player may be distributed with some example tracks. These tracks are clearly an independent work from the music player even though a music player is useless without any track to play. Thus they can be distributed under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the game levels can be contained in files that make them similarly independent of the game software itself, then these would not need to be distributed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;To keep part of the code proprietary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to keep part of the code proprietary is to create two independent programs which can talk to each other via files or pipes or similar &quot;arm's length&quot; communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, in the case of your billing logic, it could be an independent application which would be there to download or unlock new levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you say that you distribute your game through an app store. I don't know if app stores allow in general the distribution of two programs in the same package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T09:32:20.157" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T09:32:20.157" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4137" CreationDate="2016-08-19T20:38:34.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to release the whole program under GPL. But nothing prevents you to release the additional source code that you wrote under CC0 as well (it is your code, you can give as many permissions on it as you wish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you distribute a binary for your software, it can only be distributed under the GPL to meet with the conditions of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to your situation would be a US government employee contributing to a GPL software. Their contribution is automatically in the public domain but the full software continues to be licensed under GPL. See this reference : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLUSGovAdd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLUSGovAdd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also, from the GNU FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CombinePublicDomainWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a program combines public-domain code with GPL-covered code, can I take the public-domain part and use it as public domain code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do that, if you can figure out which part is the public domain part and separate it from the rest. If code was put in the public domain by its developer, it is in the public domain no matter where it has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What compatibility means&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compatibility is understood one way: public domain code can be included in a GPL software, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T08:38:34.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4352" CreationDate="2016-08-20T00:54:56.357" Score="6" ViewCount="1322" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full text of GNU GPL includes this advice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest&#xA;  possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it&#xA;  free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these&#xA;  terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to&#xA;  attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state&#xA;  the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the&#xA;  “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper&#xA;  mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short&#xA;  notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;program&amp;gt;  Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.&#xA;This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hypothetical commands &lt;code&gt;show w' and&lt;/code&gt;show c' should show the&#xA;  appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your&#xA;  program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would&#xA;  use an “about box”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm publishing my program's code on Github, with the license included in its root directory in a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, is including these messages in every source file and making them printable via a command line option mandatory for my program to be licensed under GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5926" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T00:58:18.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T08:49:54.663" Title="Applying GNU GPL and messages printed by a program" Tags="|gpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4354" CreationDate="2016-08-20T03:27:30.300" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;While answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4297/4763&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it was pointed out to me in the comments that software that is improperly licensed (in that case, by violating another license) causes its own license to be cancelled out, thus rendering it practically unusable until fixed by the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of the question was a project licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CPOL&lt;/a&gt; that infringed on GPL code by including it despite the CPOL's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#cpol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no-commercial-use&lt;/a&gt; (and thus, non-free/libre) restriction - thereby not complying with the GPL's copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first assumption in that case was that one could still use the CPOL-licensed project if they removed the GPL-code from it. I now believe that assumption was incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: if I want to include in my code an open-source project (project A) that infringes on the license of another project (project B), am I still infringing the copyright of project A if I &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; the code belonging to project B? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T15:49:34.373" Title="Am I infringing copyright if I use an improperly licensed project?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4350" CreationDate="2016-08-20T08:15:48.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is just a recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear: without a license default copyright laws apply and people are not authorized to do much with your software. Thus, even if the license is not obvious to someone it is not theoretically risky for you as they are supposed either to look for a license or go see elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that on Github, most people do not understand copyright law and tend to assume that a file put there is in the public domain. Thus adding a notice to each file would remind beyond doubt to each programmer reading it that this is free software but not public domain and that they are limited in what they can do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notice in the terminal is less important because, as the text of the license reminds, acceptance is not necessary to merely use a copy. See section 9 of the GPL 3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or section 5 of the GPL 2.0 (which reads easier IMO):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the binary distribution should still carry the text of the GPL &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T08:49:54.663" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T08:49:54.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4351" CreationDate="2016-08-20T11:25:39.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;no, you're not infinging&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; infringes on &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; which it includes, then they do not have a right to distribute combined work and combined license on &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; is null and void. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all other (noninfringing) parts of &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; are still legal to distribute under &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;s license, so you can take just those noninfringing parts and use them under &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;s license (or include them in your code, whose license is compatibile with &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;s license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T11:25:39.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4285" CreationDate="2016-08-20T11:36:56.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a Lawyer, and this is not Legal Advice. My opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, using API is not derived work. The easy test to see if something is derived work is to ask yourself a question &lt;strong&gt;Could I have produced this exact binary of mine if I have never had any access to any part of the code (including headers) of potentially infringing sub-code, but just to documentation?&lt;/strong&gt; If the answer is &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;, you are most probably in the clear. If &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, get a lawyer, this is almost certainly derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that API itself might be available under NDA, there might be usage restrictions that apply to you when you signed up etc - that is unrelated contract law at work. Beware what you agree to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, you should check every license before you use that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data outputted by some API might be (or might not) derived work. That will be spelled in &lt;em&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/em&gt; or related documents you must agree to (and where you usually waive most of your exclusive copyright rights and grant them to Service). For example, if some service takes your uploaded picture, and adds another artistic graphic elements to it, that resulting image now has now both of you as authors (or often, just THEM, as you've given up your rights as part of the process, so they can license to you what you can do with the result image).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastEditorUserId="5923" LastEditDate="2016-08-20T13:19:28.087" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T13:19:28.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4351" CreationDate="2016-08-20T15:49:34.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Matija provides the answer for when you remove code from the project, and it addresses the situation for non infringing parts of the project. In the open source world, fixing it immediately often won't cause problems. Even in the event that a violation is found, I wouldn't be surprised if licenses already have some &quot;procedure&quot; for handling such violation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt; (although not strictly open source), includes the following clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Section 6 – Term and Termination.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) This Public License applies for the term of the Copyright and Similar Rights licensed here. However, if You fail to comply with this Public License, then Your rights under this Public License terminate automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Where Your right to use the Licensed Material has terminated under Section 6(a), it reinstates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;automatically as of the date the violation is cured, provided it is cured within 30 days of Your discovery of the violation; or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;upon express reinstatement by the Licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 6(b) does not affect any right the Licensor may have to seek remedies for Your violations of this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few interesting things here. When you violate the license, it is terminated, but may be reinstated when you resolve the violation. However, I want to focus on the last part of this clause, which is what I had in mind when I commented on your question - liability for before you took restorative action to fix the violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... We've got a few things to consider here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the license at &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; point infringed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the infringement &lt;em&gt;wilful&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make a more intense example, let's imagine the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; has full copyright on his code. He has never released it under any license, except proprietary licenses. Person &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; finds some code, releases it as part of another project, and licenses it under a very permissive license - the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You find Person &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;'s project. You think it's great, it's easy to use, moderately active (a couple of issues/pull requests a month) and all. Best of all, you can make money easily off of it! You do some due diligence, and you're happy that the project is fine, and there are no violations that you can see. You make a project, and it's pretty well off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's ask the above two questions for yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, the license is definitely infringed. You can't license someone else's work, and you can't use an improperly licensed project. The MIT license is nil and void. All rights reserved are what the terms and conditions are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definitely not. You've done your due diligence, and you never deliberately infringed someone's work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's continue with our example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A year passes by. Your project becomes pretty successful. Now... Person &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; finds Person &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;. In the course of find Person &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;, he finds &lt;em&gt;you too.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; sends you a notice, advising you to remove all his work. He informs you of his full copyright on the work, and that he never licensed it to you, or under the MIT license. As a result of this, you remove all his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean you are in the clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, no. Your use, and sale of his work, caused him damages, which you are liable to. However, the situation changes, if you were never wilfully infringing. Even though you fixed the situation upon receiving notice from the copyright holder, you still did infringe copyright at some point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to get into the notion of damages here, since there are so many factors to consider, statutory damages, actual damages, license fees, and all that. &lt;em&gt;If you're ever in this situation, get a lawyer, and get real legal advice, because I'm not a lawyer, and nothing in this post is legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, you infringed copyright, even if you did fix it after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-08-20T15:49:34.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-21T07:50:42.350" Score="5" ViewCount="3245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project, a big portion of which can be released as LGPL, but there are still some portions that must keep a more restrictive license. I'm not sure what exactly is allowed. The intent is distributing the whole package with source code, but allow redistribution and modification beyond personal use only for the LGPL portions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can a proprietary program link to an LGPL library? Yes, that's the main point of LGPL, I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the link be static or dynamic? Yes to dynamic, for static linking a way to link to a later version must be given. I assume this is subject to &quot;later versions&quot; being compatible, and providing the source code (and necessary build elements) is enough, even if the source code is not redistributable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can an LGPL program link (dynamically or statically) to a non-free library? In this case it would be an &quot;optional&quot; feature, a way to get some enhanced functionality, but the core of the program would work fine without the library.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the build system for the LGPL code dynamically (and optionally) fetch non-free code and compile it? Say I distribute the LGPL source code, everyone is free to use it, compile it and redistribute it; but those with an &quot;extended&quot; license get access to additional non-free code which they can compile together with the LGPL portions, and they are not allowed to redistribute this part. Would that be fine?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the authors and copyright holders agree, can the LGPL license be modified to add an exemption that allows linking to other proprietary portions of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5933" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-21T16:19:13.733" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T16:19:13.733" Title="How can LGPL and proprietary licenses be combined?" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4357" CreationDate="2016-08-21T11:28:21.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me first specifically answer each of your questions, and then I will give you my real advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are right to think that the difference between dynamic linking and static linking is to allow users to upgrade the library. So you can link statically if you provide the full source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, by default a LGPL program cannot link to a proprietary library. LGPL is basically GPL + an exception allowing proprietary programs to link to it. So the general guidelines on what is possible inside GPL programs still apply. If you want to do such linking, the FSF recommend adding an exception to the license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;So now, you have the GPL with two exceptions: one to allow linking from proprietary, one to allow linking to proprietary!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as far as I can see that would be fine because you are distributing the two parts separately and the user makes the linking. In that case, it would even be fine with a GPL license. The restrictions apply only when you redistribute, not to personal use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, see the answer to (3). However, multiplying exemptions is generally risky as you are basically creating &quot;a new license&quot; less well-known with no existing court cases to rely on to interpret it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My advice&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you aware of the philosophy behind the GPL and LGPL? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&lt;/a&gt; It was not created for such a use case. See in particular this piece on the LGPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It so happens that another weak copyleft license has been created by people who really wanted hybrid software with an open source part and a proprietary part to be possible. It is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, it is compatible with (L)GPL and it is much simpler to use. Its principle is very simple: it applies to each file independently. Those files where it applies are open source and protected by copyleft but they can be combined in whatever way with proprietary files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T11:28:21.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4321" CreationDate="2016-08-21T15:23:02.687" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, like any license, derives it's power from the copyright, which is why rights holders issue licenses (though the GPL grants additional rights of distribution). If the author of the work is the sole contributor and all libraries have permissive enough licenses, then he can issue new versions under a different license, but cannot withdraw any existing version and the license on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you have a binary from the GPL releases, then the GPL must be honoured to release the code.  If you have a more recent binary that was not issued as GPL then that's out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have, however, also stated in comments to other answers, that the binary is compiled with modules or uses libraries which are only released as GPL as well and not dual released as LGPL (or multi-licensed with other permissive licenses).  If that is the case then you should report this to the FSF and any other project affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, every time I've queried someone over a project with a GPL vs. whichever license they prefer clashing it's pretty much always been a case of not realising that module X was licensed that way and fixed pretty quickly.  Usually by finding alternative libraries and sticking with their preferred license.  Mind you, all those cases involved projects where the code was released and done so under a permissive license like MIT, 3-clause BSD or Apache 2.0 (and others).  You may find the psychology of those who release binaries only to be a little different, treating their projects more like personal fiefdoms, but it will vary entirely from case to case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-21T15:23:02.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-22T15:27:34.823" Score="17" ViewCount="7226" Body="&lt;p&gt;When searching for &quot;gpl javascript&quot; in Google, I currently find these five first results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A piece by RMS warning about how we are using more and more web apps and that we should care whether these apps are free software as much as we care whether our &quot;traditional&quot; software are free software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A question on Stack Overflow (No 1239470) regarding the consequences of using a GPL'd library on one's website. Unfortunately this question was closed as off topic and all the answers which were given at that time are pretty bad. In particular, the first answer is horrible but it still has 13 upvotes (after my own downvote). This is pretty sad given that the question was viewed 12645 times. I am not linking to the question to avoid giving it more pagerank that it already has.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT: Can I encourage anyone who has the privilege to downvote on SO to downvote this answer as well?&lt;/strong&gt; I know I shouldn't be asking this, but I feel that it needs some action from people who know better. It is now the first result that appears when searching for &quot;gpl javascript&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A similar question on Programmers SE with a more reasonable answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A short blog piece &lt;a href=&quot;https://hroy.eu/posts/gpl-js-bs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hroy.eu/posts/gpl-js-bs/&lt;/a&gt; which explains clearly that using a single GPL'd component on a website does not require open sourcing the whole website. But if you build your web app on top of some GPL'd component then the whole web app should be GPL'd as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A very good FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;http://greendrake.info/content/nfy0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://greendrake.info/content/nfy0&lt;/a&gt;, which is quite recent (Sep 2015) and which I recommend, anwsering most questions that people may have on using GPL'd client-side code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this site has a few questions on some of these aspects as well. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3960/if-a-part-of-the-client-side-code-is-licensed-under-gpl-does-the-server-side-co&quot;&gt;If a part of the client-side code is licensed under GPL, does the server-side code have to be under GPL as well?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1427/what-copyleft-license-should-i-use-for-html&quot;&gt;What copyleft license should I use for my website&amp;#39;s HTML/CSS/JavaScript?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2195/using-gpl-or-lgpl-licensed-framework-for-web-application&quot;&gt;Using GPL or LGPL licensed framework for web application&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this site should have its own general question on the implications of licensing a JavaScript library under GPL, to dedramatize further, but also to clarify what is well understood so far and what is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is a list of sub-questions (some which are already addressed in the references I gave, some which are not):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use a GPL'd component on my website, is the content of the website affected?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use a GPL'd component on my website, is the design (CSS) of the website affected?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use a GPL'd component on my website, are other JS components affected (if each of the component is loaded in a different &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use a GPL'd component on my website, are other JS components affected (if all the components are loaded from the same main JS file)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I build a web app and it uses a GPL'd component/library, does it mean that the full web app should be released under GPL (at least the client-side part of it)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the design (CSS) of the web app also affected then?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that not all of these sub-questions have necessarily a well-defined answer. Feel free to answer even only partially to the ones you feel comfortable answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T05:41:47.313" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T05:41:47.313" Title="What are the implications of licensing a JavaScript library under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2757" CreationDate="2016-08-23T09:51:28.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are just using the knowledge of this database &lt;em&gt;without presenting part of the content to the user&lt;/em&gt;, it should be fine IMHO. Bare-knowledge is not copyrightable, only its creative expression is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how Google uses tons of knowledge it gathers on the web (images for instance) to train its machine learning/AI algorithms. As long as it does not mean presenting any copyrighted content to a user, this is perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T09:51:28.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4364" CreationDate="2016-08-23T13:06:15.953" Score="2" ViewCount="2010" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose we have this scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are 4 Free softwares (under GPL version 2); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a man puts them in a Stack and codes some glue-tools and a GUI to wrap them all together;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;now the stack is a Platform, provided in a bundle; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the man writes a program, which uses other softwares under GPLv2, he must release his code, as well under GPLv2, so the glue-scripts and the GUI are &quot;Derivative Works&quot; and he's not allowed to Dual License neither the tools, nor the GUI. As far as I know, Dual licensing is possible only when he writes his code from scratch, but not when he's basing it on some GPLv2 programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something, such as particular exceptions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about it, because I found similar real cases and I'm not so sure they're following the rules. I'm just curious about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5950" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T06:29:09.650" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T06:29:09.650" Title="GPL-2 Derivative works" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4365" CreationDate="2016-08-23T16:04:15.053" Score="3" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I took the linux kernel, rewrite it and changed the order and file names and some other stuff, and destroy the original linux kernel, will the new kernel be subject to the terms of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: If I rewrite the linux kernel, change almost every line while keeping the same computation and delete the original kernel will the GPL apply to the new kernel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4345&quot;&gt;Theseus&amp;#39; Paradox applied to code copyright&lt;/a&gt; as that is modifying the source without rewriting it. As far as I am aware the GPL has anti-circumvention measures for this too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T18:13:09.573" Title="Can I rewrite the Linux kernel by hand and modify it to escape it from the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-23T21:38:16.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4362" CreationDate="2016-08-23T16:06:07.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The glue code and GUI code are original works by their author. When considered in isolation from any other code, they likely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; derivative works under copyright law. They don't include any of the GPL-license code; they merely use its API or invoke it as a separate process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is certainly free to dual-license the work. The fact that he is distributing the work as part of a larger GPL work merely means that he must license the work in a GPL-compatible way whenever he does so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recent rulings in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oracle v. Google&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in the U.S. about the copyrightability of an API suggest that possibly the use of the GPL software's API could make it a derivative work, but considering that Google's complete re-implementation of the Java API still qualified as fair use, some tiny &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; (not even re-implementation) of some software's API is not likely to cause the creation of a derivative work of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the glue code is an original work of authorship, the author may license it however he pleases. Obviously, when he chooses to distribute a GPL-licensed work in combination with his own work, he must abide by section 2(b) of the GPLv2 and release the whole combination under the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this requirement is immediately qualified by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as the glue code and GUI are &amp;quot;not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves&amp;quot; then the author may license them individually without regard to the GPL, whenever no actual GPL code is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When GPL code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; involved, the author must include source code for his component, if the combination forms a derivative work under copyright law. If the combination is not a derivative (i.e., the new work &amp;quot;uses&amp;quot; the GPL work &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot; but does not become part of the GPL work), then the GPL requirements do not apply to the new work. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ has a good overview of the FSF's position on the issue&lt;/a&gt;, which is quoted in part below (but I recommend you read the whole thing!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot; and other kinds of &amp;quot;modified versions&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot; consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are non-free or GPL-incompatible. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T00:39:48.643" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4363" CreationDate="2016-08-23T16:14:51.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could write your own kernel and license it in any way you like since you would be the author, but it wouldn't be the Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in your question you seem to say that you would be following the source code of Linux closely. If you do so and claim copyright on it, then you could be accused of plagiarism and sued for copyright infringement, exactly as when making a movie or a book that borrows too much from an existing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Not relevant any more: As for your initial opinionated comment, it should be removed from the question. But while it is still there, let me answer that the people who put work into building the wonderful system that Linux is gave it to the world on their own terms. If you don't like these terms, nobody forces you to use it but don't pretend it is not free, because it is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-08-23T18:13:09.573" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T18:13:09.573" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4345" CreationDate="2016-08-23T23:35:14.313" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the United States, a determination of copyright infringement is based on two broad considerations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the author's access to the original work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the new work's similarity to the original work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to re-implement some software without ever viewing its source code, then you can nullify the first consideration and avoid infringement (provided you can successfully prove the negative of never having seen the source code). This is the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room&lt;/a&gt;&quot; approach to re-implementing software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; looked at the original work, though, we must examine the second consideration. What makes one written work &quot;similar&quot; to another in copyright terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright applies to creative expression. Ideas are ineligible for copyright, per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;idea-expression divide&lt;/a&gt;. This is closely related to the &quot;merger doctrine&quot;: if an idea can be expressed in a very limited number of ways, then the idea and it only possible expression are considered &lt;em&gt;merged&lt;/em&gt; -- the expression &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the idea. For example, describing the rules of a game in a purely mechanical way (&quot;Draw one card, then play one card that matches a color on the board...&quot;) can only be done in a few reasonable ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know, then, that some aspects of a work are not copyrightable (i.e., those on the &quot;idea&quot; side of the divide), and other aspects are copyrightable (on the &quot;expression&quot; side). A naive hope would be that a complete removal of all original code would eliminate all derivative copyright concerns, but a work can be derivative without actual lexical similarity. That is, the elements of a work that are protected by copyright extend beyond the exact words, or lines of code, or chords of a song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that literary characters are protected by copyright, and the creation of a new work that uses a copyrighted character -- even absent any infringing text from the original work -- can be infringement. While I am not aware of any relevant case law, there may be analogous considerations for the creative decision-making that goes into writing a computer program. The structure of a program, or the organization of code into files and classes might be sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here, I suppose, is that it's all a bit murky. In my understanding, if you could theoretically identify all the copyrightable elements of a program and remove them and replace them with your own work, you'd have a work that is no longer a derivative of the original. That is, if you logically strip the program down to its barest idea-from and then build it back up with your own expression, then you have freed yourself from the original copyright. I think this sounds difficult to do feasibly, but it is an approach that might possibly pass in a court of law if you could do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there exists a later work, down a chain of derivatives, that contains &lt;em&gt;no trace&lt;/em&gt; of copyrightable elements from the original (including non-literal copyrightable elements), then probably the downstream work is no longer legally a derivative of the original, since it fails the similarity test. I am not prepared to say whether it would be possible to create such a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-08-23T23:35:14.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T00:01:38.447" Score="6" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;In relationship to my other question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4346/what-if-anything-is-wrong-with-the-apache-license-2-0&quot;&gt;What if anything is wrong with the Apache License 2.0?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a license certified to by copyfree (i.e. listed on copyfree.org) sufficient weight to consider it more than a &quot;crayon&quot; license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think an important point of a copyfree license is you are saying &quot;it doesn't matter how you use my code&quot; so unlike a copyleft license you don't need to enforce it but nonetheless it needs to provide some legal weight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been doing a lot (too much!) of research trying to select the right license for a new project. I came across some articles about the GPL being enforced (both &lt;a href=&quot;https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/10437.html?thread=302277&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;good and bad&quot;&gt;good and bad&lt;/a&gt;). Are there any good examples of copyfree licenses coming under legal fire and being either effective or ineffective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T01:25:36.930" Title="Is a copyfree license a &quot;crayon&quot; license?" Tags="|enforcement|crayon-licenses|copyfree|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-08-24T00:43:45.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Official website: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Copyfree Standard Definition&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;list of &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Copyfree Licenses&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;rejected licenses&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Copyfree Policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-08-24T00:55:57.437" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T00:55:57.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-08-24T00:43:45.690" Score="0" Body="A &quot;copyfree&quot; license conforms to the requirements of the &quot;Copyfree Standard Definition&quot; (CSD), which is maintained by the Copyfree Initiative (copyfree.org)." OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-08-25T03:01:28.553" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T03:01:28.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T00:50:55.397" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;So when I tried to signed the CLA for my company, it failed and Google told me that &quot;Please have an authorized executive sign this document. ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it's not quite clear their definition of authorized executive. How do I get autorized if I am the only employee or I am the boss. By default, Google use Docusign for digital signature and I just signed the default signature (which is generated by Docusign automatically)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here's my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do you signed it? It would be really great if someone has experience on this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a required field &quot;title&quot; which is unclear to me. What kind of information should I fill in this field. ( I filled in &quot;Mr&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?domain=DOMAIN_GOOGLE&amp;amp;kind=KIND_CORPORATE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?domain=DOMAIN_GOOGLE&amp;amp;kind=KIND_CORPORATE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5953" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:09:18.317" Title="Google voided Corporate Contributor License Agreements" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T01:02:23.223" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a hypothetical question, that has not happened, so please no advice. If I publish some code on GitHub with the GPLv3 license, then want to use that code in proprietary software that I will also own. Do I have the rights to use it for monetary purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5954" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T04:22:34.287" Title="Do I own GPLv3 code that I wrote?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-08-24T04:44:14.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T01:03:08.887" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a comment on my question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4346/what-if-anything-is-wrong-with-the-apache-license-2-0&quot;&gt;What if anything is wrong with the Apache License 2.0?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;someone (Zimm) reminded me that its considered bad practice to use a less widely known license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How wildly known is the COIL license?&#xA;How wildly used are copyfree licenses in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeff Atwood's recommendation of the WTFPL license in &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.codinghorror.com/pick-a-license-any-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.codinghorror.com/pick-a-license-any-license/&lt;/a&gt; is perhaps the highest profile recommendation of a copyfree license I can find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you go about answering the question of how widely known is wide enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are too broad for an easy answer so what I'm looking for is some pointers on how to going about getting a good enough answer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T08:07:56.890" Title="Using a less common license" Tags="|license-recommendation|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4373" CreationDate="2016-08-24T01:03:08.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would be good reasons to not use code just because of a less common license? I can't imagine a developer doing that, so it must stem from considering the legal aspects. So I guess it comes down to whether its percieved as a &quot;crayon&quot; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criteria for deciding that could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;was it drafted by a competent lawyer or legal team?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is it recognised by any respected licensing bodies (osi, fsf, copyfree)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please improve on my answer if you can.&#xA;For less popular licenses that information can be harder to come by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The COIL license looks like it was drafted by a lawyer but there is no proof on its website (&lt;a href=&quot;http://coil.apotheon.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://coil.apotheon.org/&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Its too new or too rare for the OSI and FSF to have bothered with an opinion on it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T01:03:08.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4368" CreationDate="2016-08-24T07:50:49.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I do not think that this website offers any legal guarantee on the licenses it certifies. To back this claim, here is what I found on this page &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/policy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not the policy of the Copyfree Initiative at this time to use its certification process as an endorsement or review of the legal quality of a given license draft, nor any other standards of judgment beyond simple conformance with the principles embodied in the Copyfree Standard Definition. Plans are underway to establish recommended guidelines for license selection for interested parties, but these plans are not at present reflected in, or intended to be inferred from, any content of the Copyfree Initiative site. We hope that the presence of both the certified license list and the rejected license list serve your purposes for choosing licenses that conform to your general licensing policy preferences, though further information should be sought from other sources such as qualified legal professionals where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat like the list from the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&lt;/a&gt; they comment lots of software licenses and say whether they deem them to be free or not. See for instance their comment on the WTFPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lax permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not recommend this license. If you want a lax permissive license for a small program, we recommend the X11 license. A larger program usually ought to be copyleft; but if you are set on using a lax permissive license for one, we recommend the Apache 2.0 license since it protects users from patent treachery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they mean by &amp;quot;lax permissive non-copyleft&amp;quot; license is precisely what you are looking for: a &amp;quot;copyfree&amp;quot; license. They still agree that this is a &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; license but they discourage its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the list &lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses&lt;/a&gt; it contains both licenses which can be considered &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; licenses such as the WTFPL (still quite a popular license) and the Beer-Ware license, and licenses which are very fine, and very recommended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC-0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIT/X11 license (best known as the MIT license but referred to as the X11 license by the FSF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simplified BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Unlicense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-0 and the Unlicense are public domain dedications while MIT and BSD require attribution. I would definitely recommend that you choose one of these four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the FSF argues for CC-0 over the Unlicense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Unlicense is a public domain dedication. A work released under the Unlicense is dedicated to the public domain to the fullest extent permitted by law, and also comes with an additional lax license that helps cover any cases where the dedication is inadequate. Both public domain works and the lax license provided by the Unlicense are compatible with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0. CC0 also provides a public domain dedication with a fallback license, and is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T17:19:32.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4373" CreationDate="2016-08-24T08:07:56.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in an answer to your other question, while &quot;copyfree&quot; is not a widely used term, some &quot;copyfree&quot; licenses are very much used: CC-0, the MIT license, the Simplified BSD license, the Unlicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make this answer based on my own experience of checking the license of each software I come accross (I have personnally never seen the COIL license) and based on the recommendation of the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&lt;/a&gt;, the OSI &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&lt;/a&gt; and Github &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ways to make statistics on the usage of various licenses but this usually starts by choosing a reference database. Whether this database is Sourceforge or Github, it will bias the data towards GPL or towards MIT/Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-08-24T08:07:56.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-24T23:38:35.967" Score="7" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are an employee, work you do in the course of your job (as opposed to in your spare time) is&#xA;a &quot;work for hire&quot; and the copyright is by default owned by the company you work for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you go about getting permission to open source any of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are questions about how to go about opening a formerly closed project&#xA;For example - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/113/how-should-i-approach-open-sourcing-a-library-from-work/123#123&quot;&gt;How should I approach open sourcing a library from work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a large organisation that hasn't done it before it is a significant hurdle to legal permission&#xA;to open source a body of work regardless of size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case most commonly discussed it the one where the company makes a strategic move to open&#xA;source an entire product or a significant body of work that relates to it (e.g. star office or facebook's folly libraries).&#xA;But what about the on the small scale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need sign off from someone with the legal authority to sign for the company, as the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally the legal department would approve a copyright license or waiver the way they would draft a standard contract for a supplier.&#xA;You could draft a waiver yourself but the legal department would still need to review it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That potentially costs money. The legal department may have no experience or understanding of open source either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any bodies that would or could step in from the outside to help?&#xA;I'm thinking along the lines of the software freedom conservancy (&lt;a href=&quot;http://sfconservancy.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://sfconservancy.org&lt;/a&gt;) but&#xA;rather than (or in addition to) litigating against infringers they might provide free advice in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine there is a company which provides services via a data processing system (e.g. market research) but does not view itself as a software company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of work on the data processing system an employee has an idea that might be beneficial to the wider software&#xA;community but is not in itself profitable (think along the lines of file formats &amp;amp; software protocols which require adoption&#xA;as an open standard to be any use).&#xA;The company has no direct interest in developing it. The employee/inventor promotes it and works on it internally when it is&#xA;relevant to work they are doing on the data processing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The employee is willing to devote time outside of his or her day job and does not require any help from the employer.&#xA;However, the employer is the copyright holder because it is a &quot;work for hire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That company is owned part by a larger umbrella company whose legal team tend to get involved mainly for mergers and acquistions.&#xA;The company itself has a very small legal team and tends to out source legal work. It can cost $1000s per hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only two people with the power to legally sign things off are the CEO and the chief financial officer. They are very far&#xA;removed from the day to day work on the data processing system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hurdles to overcome are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;convincing them there is no risk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selling them on the idea of open source (easier as they use a lot of it themselves)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoiding expensive legal bills&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chances of success seem slim. What can be done to improve them?&#xA;Are there any examples of where this has or hasn't worked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T01:39:03.867" Title="Help with getting permission to open source a small piece of software" Tags="|copyright|publishing|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4378" CreationDate="2016-08-25T00:44:30.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my personal experience, where I convinced management at my company (small biotech) to allow me to open source a software package, there are a few points that you need to sell to make your argument convincing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Giving away your software does not give away any competitive advantage.&lt;/strong&gt;  Basically, you need to assure management that your competitors are not going to use this software to put you out of business.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have more to gain from giving away the software than to lose.&lt;/strong&gt; For OSS, the argument generally is that the contributions of the community will outweigh the extra time you will have to take to support it.  Your time is your employer's money, you need to show them that it will not be wasted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open sourcing the software will not cost the company anything or make it liable for damages caused by its use.&lt;/strong&gt; Most of the popular OSS licenses explicitly state that the author is not responsible for damages caused by the use of the software.  The onus is on you, however, for making sure that you are not in violation of the terms of any of the software packages your software uses. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than these three points, you can help your cause by picking an appropriate license and handling all of the other responsibilities of releasing your software.  It is also handy to lay out the best and worst-case scenarios for releasing your software as well, and explain how you might handle these situations.  Given all of this information, if management trusts you or anyone vouching for you, there should be little reason for lengthy legal consultations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="734" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T00:44:30.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4360" CreationDate="2016-08-25T09:06:31.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About JS&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/template-diagram.png&quot; alt=&quot;GPL JS exception&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GPL, any HTML file which merely makes function calls to this code, and for that purpose includes it by reference shall be deemed a separate work for copyright law purposes. In addition, the copyright holders of this code give you permission to combine this code with free software libraries that are released under the GNU LGPL. You may copy and distribute such a system following the terms of the GNU GPL for this code and the LGPL for the libraries. If you modify this code, you may extend this exception to your version of the code, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if I read this right, &lt;strong&gt;in case of presence of such a note&lt;/strong&gt; it's a definitive no to points 1, 2 &amp;amp; 6. With 4 you'd probably have to release JS under LGPL. Absense of this note most likely means the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About combination:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aggregation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this, JS libraries in most cases may be cosidered separate programs, not binding each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL linking&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL libraries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL modules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can give additional permission for the use of your code. You can, if you wish, release your program under a license which is more lax than the GPL but compatible with the GPL. The license list page gives a partial list of GPL-compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is contrary and would mean requirement to release under GPL-compatible license (&lt;em&gt;in case of modules not necessary GPL itself&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it really depends on what you consider JS to be and open to argument until GNU provides a specific point of view, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About minified/obfuscated JS:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition (barring the quotes) is the same both for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html#section3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 2&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3&lt;/a&gt;, making GNU's stance the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/#minified-js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla's&lt;/a&gt; - minified/obfuscated JS (which is common for libraries) is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; source code, thus you must follow only distribution requirements (in most cases - providing a link to a library's page you used yourself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note, that I'm not a GPL specialist and just quoted some of the FAQ. Someone with a better knowledge of the license may provide a better answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T11:18:57.390" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4387" CreationDate="2016-08-25T17:42:15.877" Score="10" ViewCount="7269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't find any definite answers on the web so I'm asking for a definite answer to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to sell software that was written completely by myself except for the ZXing library (licensed under Apache License 2.0) and the Material Icon Collection by Google (also licensed under Apache License 2.0) as long as I include attribution to the authors of both packages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what do I have to do to be allowed to sell my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5968" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-08-26T09:22:00.587" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T09:22:00.587" Title="Sell software that uses libraries licensed under Apache Licence 2.0" Tags="|apache-2.0|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4386" CreationDate="2016-08-25T18:17:51.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are allowed to sell your software that is based on other software licensed under Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache has a good abstract for the license here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5969" LastActivityDate="2016-08-25T18:17:51.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4393" CreationDate="2016-08-26T00:20:10.593" Score="6" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have taken the lead to start a new open source group for the hardware description language VHDL. There are many existing (open source) projects out in the world and many are hosted on GitHub. On the other hand the IEEE working group marked some proposed language changes as &quot;move to open source&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we discussed that we start a new open source group. The idea is to upstream many duplicate code parts to a more &quot;global&quot; core library (which does not yet exist for that language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at first I managed to get the VHDL username from an existing GitHub user, so I could register VHDL as an organization. The I started a little wiki to collect existing open source projects for VHDL and to collect proposed functions / packages, which should be part of a &lt;em&gt;Core Library&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a maintainer for a open source VHDL repository by myself, but I don't want to contribute all our code to the new child! (It's just too much for the start)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to contact other authors and projects. I invite them to participate in the new group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My road map looks like this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get each other to know / list existing projects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gather proposals for what should be included in a VHDL “Core Library”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will have (recorded?) presentations of existing projects 10-15 minutes + 10-15 minutes for questions&#xA;If possible a live-demo is recommended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Talk about proposals and unifying interfaces if duplicates exist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set up a testing infrastructure (VUnit or Cocotb might be good candidates)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the coding + propose pull requests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run tests on the new code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merge it, tag it, release it !!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I missed important things? What should I do in another way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-08-26T09:21:23.627" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T00:24:13.603" Title="How should I structure a new open source group" Tags="|project-management|github|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4392" CreationDate="2016-08-26T19:08:44.840" Score="5" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a program which gets certain info off the net, makes calculations, then sends the info to the net again. I don't program the 'taking off the net' and 'sending to the net' parts though; instead I use a script to issue commands via a CLI that someone else built. Now here's my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this application a derivative work off the CLI? One might argue that the only change is that the calculations are now done by the pc instead of a brain. But what's actually happening is that the program I write simply issues some commands to the original, unmodified program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this program's license calls for derivative works to use the original's license, would that in my case mean I have to use the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: The CLI I'm talking about is included as a (git) submodule, so I'm just linking to it. The license in question is the OSL 3.0. Would anything change if I didn't even include it as a submodule, but I simply listed it as a dependency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5456" LastEditorUserId="5456" LastEditDate="2016-08-26T19:28:20.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:51:33.113" Title="When does a dependency imply a derivative work?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|dependencies|osl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4391" CreationDate="2016-08-26T19:58:05.940" Score="5" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a game where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source code is licensed under a free (libre) open source license, e.g. GPL, MIT, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assets such as images and music are licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct that making the assets available non-commercially &lt;strong&gt;only prevents&lt;/strong&gt; other parties from distributing the whole package (i.e. executable w/ assets) &lt;strong&gt;for a price&lt;/strong&gt;, but those other parties could still undercut the creators' attempts to sell it traditionally (e.g. distributing it for a price) by distributing it &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt;, since they could legally obtain everything needed to rebuild the game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would dropping just the assets' CC license and instead retaining full rights for them under Copyright make it illegal for other parties to distribute the full package?  This would be assuming no one had obtained a copy of the assets while they were under the CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question was inspired by the &quot;required proprietary parts&quot; section of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software#Selling_of_required_proprietary_parts_of_a_software_product&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on OSS business models.  It describes this exact scenario for the&lt;/em&gt; Steel Storm &lt;em&gt;game, however for the reasons above I wouldn't expect this example to actually be viable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5977" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:22:16.143" Title="Is OSS with CC-NC-licensed assets effectively impossible for the creator to sell traditionally?" Tags="|creative-commons|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4390" CreationDate="2016-08-26T20:22:16.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it correct that making the assets available non-commercially &lt;strong&gt;only prevents&lt;/strong&gt; other parties from distributing the whole package (i.e. executable w/ assets) &lt;strong&gt;for a price&lt;/strong&gt;, but those other parties could still undercut the creators' attempts to sell it traditionally (e.g. distributing it for a price) by distributing it &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt;, since they could legally obtain everything needed to rebuild the game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, contents distributed under CC-NC can be re-distributed for free. Since the binaries are distributable under a &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; license, the complete package can be re-distributed for free, so &quot;other parties&quot; could undercut the original developer by giving the game away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if the CC license doesn't allow adaptations to be re-distributed, then any identifying elements in the assets can't be removed by the other parties; that may make it less interesting to undercut the original author in this way (at least for the other parties; recipients only looking to get the work for free presumably won't mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would dropping just the assets' CC license and instead retaining full rights for them under Copyright make it illegal for other parties to distribute the full package? This would be assuming no one had obtained a copy of the assets while they were under the CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a big &quot;if&quot;! If anyone obtained the assets under CC, then the previous situation still applies, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-happens-if-the-author-decides-to-revoke-the-cc-license-to-material-i-am-using&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC licenses are irrevocable&lt;/a&gt;; as long as a recipient doesn't lose the license by violating its terms, the game can be distributed for free. (I'm guessing you know this since you stipulated the assumption.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one has the assets under a CC license, no one but the copyright owner can distribute them, and we end up in a similar situation to many of id Software's games: the engines are free, but no one can re-distribute the full games without an appropriate (commercial) license from id (or Bethesda nowadays).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your main question, I'd argue that this type of scenario doesn't make the assets &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; to sell, &quot;merely&quot; difficult. There can be value in other aspects of distribution, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; presence on Steam for a game, or a physical package...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:22:16.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4389" CreationDate="2016-08-26T20:51:33.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSL defines &quot;Derivative Works&quot; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the&#xA;      Original Work, thereby creating derivative works (&quot;Derivative&#xA;      Works&quot;) based upon the Original Work;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would  on the face of it seem to permit linking by omission. A little further research confirms that in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20110511180751/http://www.rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mirror&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The definition of Derivative Works in § 1(b) is particularly important. For one thing, that defined term includes no reference whatsoever to linking or to any other technical manner of making programs interoperate. The verbs used in § 1(b) [&quot;translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange&quot;] reflect the kinds of activities that we generally do to create derivative literary or other expressive works, and those things—not functional linking—create Derivative Works as defined in this license. As a result, linking an unchanged Original Work with another independently-written work does not, absent more, create a Derivative Work subject to § 1(b); such an act is merely the incorporation of a copy of that Original Work into a collective work, authorized by § 1(a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is code-level linking that is permitted. From the sound of it, your program just runs a shell script on the OSL-covered software, which is even less of a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-08-26T20:51:33.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4388" CreationDate="2016-08-27T00:24:13.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have not already, read through &lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/&quot;&gt;Producing Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/&quot;&gt;The Open Source Way&lt;/a&gt; - they have lots of good information about all of the things that people tend to forget when running an open-source project (that is, everything other than the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I don't see mentioned in your list at all is the subject of licensing.  This is likely to be the subject of much argumentation now, but if you try to consolidate licensing &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; you've brought in a bunch of projects, it'll be a huge pain in the ass.  And if you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; have it handled, most corporate users won't be able to use your project.  Decide on a license now, and anything that isn't compatible will have to be re-implemented to be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think it's very helpful to decide on goals up front for the project.  Are you trying to include everything possible, or a small subset to avoid bloat?  Are things included if they're useful, or only if they meet certain quality standards?  Do you accept libraries without an active maintainer on the core team?  Getting your core team on the same page as to your goals creates a much better product, and publicizing them allows users to easily ascertain whether your project is right for them or not.  For instance, compare &lt;a href=&quot;http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#what-is-rails-questionmark&quot;&gt;Rails' philosophy&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/misc/design-philosophies/&quot;&gt;Django's&lt;/a&gt;; &quot;convention over configuration&quot; and &quot;explicit is better than implicit&quot; are at odds with each other, and so each framework is better off by choosing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-08-27T00:24:13.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-27T10:52:06.203" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had some experiencing working on open-source software with many active users, our policy for the issue tracker was not to allow end-users to create feature-requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this wasn't a popular choice among many users we did this because the scope of the application was already wide and we found it difficult to find the time to respond to regular bug reports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, there are solutions such as user-voice (and &lt;a href=&quot;http://alternativeto.net/software/uservoice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;similar services&lt;/a&gt;), which we experimented with (and kept our issue tracker for software errors, or design-tasks assigned to design teams and developers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This worked well for us, because every issue had a clear outcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintainers of an area are responsible for resolving.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Issues have a clear outcome.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then I've been spending some time on a project on github which is also and end-user application in the field of graphics/sound/animation (not middle-ware or server code), and &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; users are making random &lt;em&gt;wouldn't-it-be-nice&lt;/em&gt; feature requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would likely be the case for other productivity software (applications people use for their job, spend all day in and may be greatly impacted by available features - office/image/video-editor/animation/CAD/code-IDE's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm not the owner of this project, I don't feel like setting policy on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while there is some potential value in any given feature request, my impression is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users ask for fancy features from their favorite application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very few of the requests are likely to be implemented within the next few years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developers aren't engaging with users and the requests are mostly ignored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically user expectations and developer capabilities differ so much, that many requests are wishful thinking, and only loosing someones time to have to categorize, reply to, de-duplicate... etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe I'm reading the situation incorrectly here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, for popular end user software with &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; more users than developers, what is a reasonable policy for defining what is/isn't acceptable to keep open as an issue on github/gitlab and similar services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do many projects on github for example disallow feature requests in their issue tracker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(would be interested in answers from anyone who's been involved with large active projects who've had to make a decision on how to handle feature requests)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160" LastEditorUserId="160" LastEditDate="2017-05-19T04:32:51.467" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T05:54:48.530" Title="Policy for feature request in the issue tracker of widely used applications" Tags="|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4396" CreationDate="2016-08-27T20:45:18.170" Score="12" ViewCount="1842" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have open-source contributors ever been sued &lt;em&gt;or threatened with a lawsuit&lt;/em&gt; for patent infringement in their contributions? What was the outcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, there is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;experimental use&quot; defense&lt;/a&gt; against infringement, but frequently, open-source software developers benefit from their contributions directly or indirectly (publicity, donations, grants, etc.), so the experimental use defense would be difficult to apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5988" LastEditorUserId="5988" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T21:06:09.463" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T09:12:33.397" Title="Have open-source contributors ever been sued or threatened with a lawsuit for patent infringement?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4395" CreationDate="2016-08-28T09:35:52.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have open-source contributors ever been sued for patent infringement in their contributions? What was the outcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know of any direct case where a contributor was sued for its contributions for patent infringement, but there are likely quite a few cases where users of supposedly infringing FOSS code were sued. The best example that comes to mind would be Microsoft vs.TomTom about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._TomTom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux FAT support&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/10/5/total-victory-patent-lawsuit-against-open-source-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also a case where Red Hat&lt;/a&gt; (and may be Novell/Suse) were sued of a workspace switching feature, likely related to either Gnome and/or KDE that both Suse and Red Hat have heavily contributed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, some of the patent wars that involved Android adopters vs other mobile device manufacturers where at least in part related to FLOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that patent situations are often settled... It is quite possible that MPEG-LA is demanding licensing fees from users of FFmpeg for instance, and you would never hear about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my understanding is that patents are about ideas and their usage: I would tend to consider (but I am likely a misguided non-lawyer) that the mere fact to release FOSS software that may implement a patent may not be infringing. Instead, if I were to start using this FLOSS code, then I might be infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-08-27T09:12:33.397" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T09:12:33.397" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2016-08-29T01:51:56.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firefox/Mozilla is an example.  It has hundreds and hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of users.  There is no disallowing of feature requests through their issue tracker (bugzilla). In fact, one of the bug categories is &quot;enhancement&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't have a role in deciding how to handle feature requests in firefox, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smaller projects with thousands to millions of users, but only a few (one or two, not more than five) active developers that I'm involved with include pngcrush, libpng, ImageMagick, and GraphicsMagick.  None of those open-source projects forbid (or even discourage) requests for features.  On the other hand, we don't always act on them right away; some have languished for a decade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T01:30:05.887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T01:30:05.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4405" CreationDate="2016-08-30T09:35:08.743" Score="8" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimpshop.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GIMPShop.com&lt;/a&gt; which distributes an installer for GIMP bundled with some kind of adware:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gimpshop.com is distributing the original unmodified software,&#xA;  obtained directly from GIMP's repository website, and does not modify&#xA;  it in any way. These installers comply with the original software&#xA;  manufacturer's policies and terms &amp;amp; conditions. DownloadAdmin™ is an&#xA;  install manager, which manages the installation of your chosen&#xA;  software. In addition to managing your download and installation,&#xA;  DownloadAdmin™will offer free popular software that you may be&#xA;  interested in. You are not required to install any additional software&#xA;  to complete your installation of your selected software. You can&#xA;  always completely remove the programs at any time in Windows'&#xA;  Add/Remove Programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &quot;GPL&quot; page on the site:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimpshop.com/gpl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and as far as I know the installation will include this as required. I have not attempted to request the source code from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems to me that it conflicts with the terms and conditions page:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimpshop.com/terms-and-conditions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GIMPShop T&amp;amp;Cs page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Use License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. You can only download one copy of the information or software on&#xA;  Gimpshop.com. The download should be for personal, non-commercial&#xA;  transitory viewing only. This is not a transfer of title, however it&#xA;  is the grant of the license. If you have this license you may not: i.&#xA;  Modify or copy the materials...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, presumably they are referring to their installer here and not to GIMP itself, but it seems very vague to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a violation that I should report?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6003" LastEditorUserId="6003" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T22:16:30.247" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T22:16:30.247" Title="Distributor T&amp;Cs appear to conflict with GPL. Is this a violation?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4402" CreationDate="2016-08-30T15:38:52.237" Score="11" ViewCount="1313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize in advance for what is probably a dumb question, but I'm trying to do this the right way from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm putting together a coding tutorial site, and my main question boils down to this: &lt;strong&gt;how do I allow &quot;good guys&quot; to use my code for whatever they want, but prevent &quot;bad guys&quot; from copying my entire site, slapping a new name on it, and making millions of dollars from it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to put non-commercial or share-alike restrictions on it, because that will overly restrict good guys. Want to copy some code that ends up in a closed-source, paid app? Cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to prevent somebody from, for example, scraping my website, rehosting everything, and adding a tiny footnote somewhere sorta-kinda attributing my site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I know in reality this is not a concern&lt;/strong&gt;, but I'm curious about any standard approaches to what seems like a common problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2144/preventing-people-from-forking-and-profiting-over-minor-changes&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but the answer seems to admonish the OP for not &quot;really&quot; wanting open source. I &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; want open source, specifically so students and teachers can freely use my code for whatever they want, including paid or closed-source projects. Similarly, the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4221/how-can-i-forbid-shady-resale-practices&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; say to use a copyleft license, but I don't want to do that for the reasons outlined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other things I'm considering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to allow other people to submit tutorials. I'd like to guarantee that I can use those tutorials without becoming a bad guy myself. For example, I could see maybe collecting the tutorials into an ebook or something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are multiple components to the site: the code (and its resources like image files), and the text (and screenshots of the running code), plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/500/does-being-open-sourced-mean-others-can-use-my-logo/3995#3995&quot;&gt;logos&lt;/a&gt; and whatnot. Maybe I should use a different license for different resources? That seems confusing though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm using GitHub pages, which introduces its own copyright requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be neat to make my site compatible with Stack Overflow's new &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/documentation&quot;&gt;Documentation&lt;/a&gt; feature. My tutorial site is set up with similar ideas: a tutorial on a topic followed by a bunch of examples of that topic. It would be cool if I could kill two birds with one stone and upload my tutorials and examples to the Documentation site. If I choose a license that requires attribution, how does that work? Maybe this deserves its own question (maybe on meta?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm leaning towards either using &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/cc-by-4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. I've also considered writing my own license, but I know that ends up being more trouble than it's worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: how do people usually handle the above concerns? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6012" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T19:10:20.260" Title="Choosing a License for a Tutorial Site" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|mit|github|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4400" CreationDate="2016-08-30T19:10:20.260" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Things like this happen all the time. Stack Overflow, Google Devs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First off, we need to look at ways to license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stackoverflow.com&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; works by licensing all content, text &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; code, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/ios-sdk/marker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Developers&lt;/a&gt; works by licensing all code under the Apache 2.0 license, and all other content under the Creative Commons Attribution license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We kind of see two models here. Single licensing everything (the Stack Overflow model), and selectively licensing everything (the Google model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second, we need to figure out who the audience is.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's make a table:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;People Type |      Code     |      Text     |&#xA;            | Read  | Copy  | Read  | Copy  |&#xA;&#xA;Good Guys   |  Y    |   Y   |   Y   |       |&#xA;&#xA;Bad Guys    |  Y    |   Y   |   Y   |   Y   |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your good guys are the people looking to learn. They will read the text, but likely won't copy it. As for the code, they may look at it, copy it, or modify it. The code is the main interest to the good guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your bad guys are copying everything for the sole purpose of making money. That's a given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third, we need to figure out what to restrict.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, we want to stop the bad guys from doing the bad things they do. But we want to let the good guys pass freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to restrict any activity whose direct intention is to profit off of your work. This would include activities such as scraping, re-hosting... etc. Fun stuff. To restrict that, would mean violating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, as well as hampering the good guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using the information above,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is to incorporate the Google model. This is what I recommend going forward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License all code under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (or similar) license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License all other content (e.g. text, images, media) under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Apache and CC BY-NC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the bad guys copy non-code content. The CC license stops copying of that content, while letting good guys use everything freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good guys will be able to copy code, and use it in any application. Since they don't use textual content, they don't violate any license. Note however, that use of textual content is still governed by various legal doctrines, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair Use&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/page-9.html#h-26&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair Dealing&lt;/a&gt;, permitting uses such as research, education, commenting, and private study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bad guys will be able to copy code, however, they can't copy any text for &lt;em&gt;commercial&lt;/em&gt; purposes. It puts them in an infringing position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for your considerations (and how they would work with my proposed model):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to allow other people to submit tutorials. I'd like to guarantee that I can use those tutorials without becoming a bad guy myself. For example, I could see maybe collecting the tutorials into an ebook or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; work, but there are some additional implications that you need to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you need users to license contributions to you. Not a big deal, can be solved with a ToS (Terms of Service) agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, is that you can't go after the bad guys. I'm shaky on this: I'm not familiar with legislation on these matters (most important would be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digital Millennium Copyright Act&lt;/a&gt;). Here's the baseline though. To take action on any infringement, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be the copyright owner, or an agent of the copyright owner. The problem with user contributions is that you are no longer the copyright owner. Assigning copyright is horrible - people will resist, and you require a physically signed paper. Therefore, you'd need to figure out a way to make yourself an &quot;agent&quot; (probably through the ToS). But I'm not completely sure how this works. It would be helpful to figure out how Stack Exchange deals with this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are multiple components to the site: the code (and its resources like image files), and the text (and screenshots of the running code), plus logos and whatnot. Maybe I should use a different license for different resources? That seems confusing though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I proposed this above! It's not as confusing as it looks :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm using GitHub pages, which introduces its own copyright requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the implications of GitHub pages only extend to what is included in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1154/how-does-githubs-forking-right-cope-with-an-all-rights-reserved-project&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; post, then you're fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be neat to make my site compatible with Stack Overflow's new Documentation feature. My tutorial site is set up with similar ideas: a tutorial on a topic followed by a bunch of examples of that topic. It would be cool if I could kill two birds with one stone and upload my tutorials and examples to the Documentation site. If I choose a license that requires attribution, how does that work? Maybe this deserves its own question (maybe on meta?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow contributions are licensed under the CC BY-SA license. That's cool, but it isn't cool if you put forward contributions made by other users (which, assuming the model above, would be licensed under CC BY-NC, an incompatible license). Of course, if the only things you send to Documentation are your own work, then you can do it. You can do whatever you would like with your own work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd note that even if you did send users contributions properly (i.e. user contributions were licensed with CC BY-SA), it would properly be unethical to do so, and you're somewhat becoming your own definition of a bad guy there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Your Post Is Tooo Long!!!! I didn't read...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License code under Apache 2.0, or another similar permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License media under CC BY-NC or CC BY-SA, depending on your needs, and your way of dealing with infringers of content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2016-08-30T19:10:20.260" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2121" CreationDate="2016-08-31T02:59:16.563" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; was used to reserve, or hold for one's own use, a copyright. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buenos_Aires_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buenos Aires Convention&lt;/a&gt; in 1910 required the use of that phrase for the purposes of establishing a copyright. At that time, there wasn't as much of a need to distinguish between ownership and license. Book publishing houses purchased manuscripts from authors and wanted to prevent rogue printing houses from selling pirated (physical) copies to the public. In that time in history, an iron-clad denial of license combined with a copyright claim was desirable and became the norm. The Buenos Aires Convention could not have anticipated the complexities of modern software licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;100% globally obsolete&lt;/a&gt; for the purposes of establishing copyright but continues to be used due to convention alone. While the phrase makes little difference in situations where no license is granted (other than to perhaps make it very clear no license is granted), the phrase can make a tremendous difference in a license agreement that expressly grants certain rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To emphasize my previous point: Many people argue using the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; has no meaning since it is obsolete for the purposes retaining copyright. They are correct on that point. However, what these people fail to realize is there is a difference between ownership of copyright and exercising that copyright through licensing of a work. &lt;strong&gt;While the words &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; may have no meaning in terms of retaining ownership, they certainly can and do have a lot of meaning in terms of licensing. The words &quot;all,&quot; &quot;rights,&quot; and &quot;reserved&quot; do not stop having meaning in a license agreement just because they have no meaning in establishing copyright.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reserve all rights implies you refuse to license any right. You are saying, &quot;this is mine, you cannot do anything with it.&quot; It becomes contradictory then if in the next sentence you start talking about what someone can actually do. The phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; in a license creates ambiguity &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/2263/what-happens-if-two-clauses-in-a-contract-come-into-conflict&quot;&gt;which is not good to have in a license agreement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial software often has phrases to the effect of &quot;all rights reserved except as delineated below&quot; to reserve all rights except those expressly provided in a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where the Problem Began&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; in open source licensing originated in the BSD license created by the Regents of the University of California who wanted a way to license the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berkeley Software Distribution&lt;/a&gt;. Their attorneys had to work under duress because there were tremendous legal conflicts at the time related to Unix and they needed a license that would satisfy the many stakeholders involved in the disputes while keeping the University of California system out of legal trouble. I believe that in their haste, they added the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; without considering the meaning of those words in a license agreement. They may have also just been following decades-old convention that preceded software licensing without considering its impact on a software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This Problem Mainly Exists in the BSD Licenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, other than the BSD license (and Apple's derivative), no other major open source license includes the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;. I've taken the time to prove this with the following list that includes a link to each license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the open source license include the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple Public Source License (APSL)&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artistic License&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beerware&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost Software License (BSL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD Licenses&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)&lt;/a&gt;: No &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License (EPL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License (GPL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) License&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License (MPL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MS-PL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License Ms-PL&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What the F--k Public License (WTFPL)&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://zlib.net/zlib_license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zlib License&lt;/a&gt;: No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, it is very uncommon to include the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; in the context of open source software licensing. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boost.org/users/license.html#FAQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost Software License (BSL) FAQ&lt;/a&gt; goes as far as to expressly forbids using the phrase &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The MIT License Does Not Include &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific to the OP's question, this is the actual MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;year&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License beings at the copyright line, not after it. The license allows for the insertion of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;year&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, and nothing else. If someone inserts the (contradictory) clause &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;, you are no longer dealing with the MIT License but a variant. &lt;strong&gt;It would not be fair to call a license with the words &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; the MIT License.&lt;/strong&gt; The MIT License has built up trust and credibility over decades and that cannot be extended to a variant that reserves all rights in contradiction to the rest of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maybe We Should Say &quot;Some Rights Reserved.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons took an interesting approach with their old slogan &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. While this is certainly not part of any Creative Commons license, their explanation of the idea explains the dilemma they were trying to solve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright grants to creators a bundle of exclusive rights over their creative works, which generally include, at a minimum, the right to reproduce, distribute, display, and make adaptations. &lt;strong&gt;The phrase &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot; is often used by owners to indicate that they reserve all of the rights granted to them under the law.&lt;/strong&gt; When copyright expires, the work enters the public domain, and the rights holder can no longer stop others from engaging in those activities under copyright, with the exception of moral rights reserved to creators in some jurisdictions. &lt;strong&gt;Creative Commons licenses offer creators a spectrum of choices between retaining all rights and relinquishing all rights (public domain), an approach we call &quot;Some Rights Reserved.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stop Trying to Justify &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; is a historic relic that is not relevant today for establishing copyright (the ownership part). In terms of licensing, it is detrimental to modern software licensing. The phrase has very specific, absolute meaning in the English language and can open up ambiguity in software licensing if it contradicts the rest of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I suggest using the actual MIT License or my personal favorite, the ISC License, as is used by the OpenBSD project and others. &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; should have never made it into a major open source license and rather than continuing its use, we need to break from the now-incorrect tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5126" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user5126" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:25.783" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T16:38:03.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-31T09:34:33.690" Score="4" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a 3rd party lib in Java which has the LGPL license. E.g. jasperreports (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sf.jasperreports/jasperreports/6.3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sf.jasperreports/jasperreports/6.3.0&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license is relevant for me as a consumer of that 3rd party library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) the direct license of the 3rd party library or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) the &quot;most limited&quot; license of one of the 3rd parties dependency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6018" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T18:27:57.193" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T18:50:33.003" Title="Licensing of 3rd party libraries" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4399" CreationDate="2016-08-31T09:51:41.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, and IANYL.  That said, they seem to be pretty close to legal.  I think it likely that your reading of their non-free license is correct; that is, it applies only to their installer (though I agree they don't go out of their way to make that clear).  Under the &lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt; doctrine as I understand it, an installer wrapped around GPL software would not itself need to be GPL, so that's not a violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GIMP is distributed under GPL3 (or later versions), so as they distribute electronically they are required to make source available &quot;&lt;em&gt;in the same way through the same place&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as they make their download available.  On &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimpshop.com/downloads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GIMPSHOP's download page&lt;/a&gt; there is a pretty clear link to the GIMP source on the GIMP project's FTP site.  Sadly, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gimp.org/downloads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the GIMP project makes clear&lt;/a&gt;, they&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;had a server move a while back that caused us to lose our existing&#xA;  mirrors (moved from physical to virtual server and to an environment&#xA;  that doesn't allow FTP access)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so the link doesn't and won't work.  That &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a GPL3 violation, but it's also fairly easy to remedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think what they're doing - wrapping GPLed software in a non-free adwared installer - is lame, but with the easily-remedied exception related to their broken link, I think they're in compliance with the GPL as regards GIMP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, they also be out of compliance on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gimpshop.com/gpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;their GPL page&lt;/a&gt;, which shows something they call &quot;&lt;em&gt;the GIMPSHOP General Public License&lt;/em&gt;&quot; that looks &lt;strong&gt;remarkably&lt;/strong&gt; like GPL2 with the original copyright notice filed off, and GIMPSHOP's inserted instead.  As apsillers points out below (many thanks!) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the FSF permits modfications of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, but has certain requirements that GIMPSHOP have overlooked.  That could be remedied, but at the moment it's clearly in violation of the FSF's copyright in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T12:36:11.467" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T12:36:11.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4404" CreationDate="2016-08-31T16:32:53.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper Reports appears to be licensed under the LGPL.  They are giving you their project, including anything they've built upon, under that license.  This is all you should generally be concerned with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was a more restrictive license (e.g. GPL) used in a component, then this project would be improperly licensed - that is, they &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; provide their software under the LGPL.  You probably don't need to look into this, unless your company lawyers are particularly distrustful of others' ability to license their software correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-08-31T16:32:53.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4410" CreationDate="2016-08-31T17:31:57.293" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I have licensed under the GPL3. In it, I have a section of code which implements a bessel filter, which I ported from the python scipy implementation. I'm unclear on how scipy code is licensed - is it OK to simply include that code in my GPL project, or do I have to add something additional since it was derived from a python library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5321" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:40:54.470" Title="Porting python library code into GPL project" Tags="|gpl-3|porting|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-31T18:44:55.567" Score="9" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use a GPLed image to illustrate a blog post, does that make the text of the blog post part a derivative work, thus &quot;infecting&quot; it with the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do only changes made to the image itself count as a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, I suppose the most likely answer is: It depends.  So, on what does it depend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3557" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T10:45:03.210" Title="Does a GPL image &quot;infect&quot; my blog post?" Tags="|gpl|writing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-08-31T21:54:46.183" Score="8" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat inspired by this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4408/does-a-gpl-image-infect-my-blog-post&quot;&gt;Does a GPL image “infect” my blog post?&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://design.google.com/icons/&quot;&gt;Google Material Design Icons&lt;/a&gt;. The latter is a very well known project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question deals with a picture licensed under the GPL. The material design icons hosts a series of icons licensed under the Apache 2.0 license - this was changed a couple weeks ago. It was formerly CC BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An image can in no way have a true &quot;Source&quot; or &quot;Object&quot; form, so it feels somewhat awkward. Images just aren't code, which is what the aforementioned licenses primarily cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have a couple arguments which &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/issues/417#issuecomment-242928357&quot;&gt;I've encountered&lt;/a&gt;, especially when considering the Material Design Icons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a more familiar license for developers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows a project to host code related to the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Against:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a media focused license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The terms used may not properly apply to media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a familiar license for media artists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that so many projects use software licenses for media? What are the arguments for doing so, especially when there are families of dedicated licenses, such as those by Creative Commons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note that I'm in no way questioning the licensing decision made by Google, and I don't want anyone to start anything as a result of this post. Decisions made by people are their own, and should be respected.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-08-31T22:27:48.520" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T09:19:00.800" Title="Media: What are the arguments for using a software license?" Tags="|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4407" CreationDate="2016-09-01T10:17:42.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scipy proper has a clear &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;BSD license&lt;/a&gt; so there is not un-clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When porting code, I prefer to keep the original license of the code in all cases (even if the license may not require it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would typically port the files in files that match more or less the ported files structure and keep these clearly under their original license. To avoid confusion and meet the BSD requirements I would also copy the Scipy license in a header comment in these files together with some notes explaining that this is port, available under the original ported code license and eventually describing some of the changes. Not all of this is required, but this is to me the right thing to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T10:17:42.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-01T10:26:21.373" Score="4" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say my FOSS program generates or collects and then outputs data that are eventually of sensitive nature: it could be personal data, financial data, healthcare-related or legal-related. An improper usage or reliance on the data may cause harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the FOSS license for my code, if I require to accompany the data generated or collected by my program with a warranty disclaimer about the suitability of this data for any purpose, etc, would this make my program &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;non-free&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;non-open source&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T21:34:53.347" Title="Warranty disclaimer and notice on sensitive collected or generated data" Tags="|license-compatibility|open-data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4408" CreationDate="2016-09-01T10:45:03.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I use a GPLed image to illustrate a blog post, does that make the text of the blog post part a derivative work, thus &quot;infecting&quot; it with the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, GPL does not &quot;infect&quot; anything. This is not a virus. That important point being cleared, I would consider reusing an image in a blog post as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;side-by-side redistribution&lt;/a&gt;. Only the image has GPL obligations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the GPL is a poor choice for media in general as this was devised for code more than for data. I therefore may have some challenges to meet the GPL obligations for an image. I would consider a comment with credits to the author and a link to the GPL to be good enough for me and the author in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do only changes made to the image itself count as a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, in light of my comment above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, I suppose the most likely answer is: It depends. So, on what does it depend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot fathom how it would depend on anything else assuming my blog post is HTML'ish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T10:45:03.210" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4409" CreationDate="2016-09-01T12:25:59.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use of a software license for media should be discouraged in general but it really depends on how the software license is written. Considerations about specific licenses follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;GPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 0 of the GNU GPL 3.0 license contains a definition of &quot;The Program&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The Program&quot; refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this&#xA;  License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Section 1 defines the &quot;source code&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;source code&quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work&#xA;  for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains why the GNU FAQ clearly states that the license can be used for something other than software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I use the GPL for something other than software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can apply the GPL to any kind of work, as long as it is clear what constitutes the “source code” for the work. The GPL defines this as the preferred form of the work for making changes in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of an SVG image, or a PNG image having vectorial source, this license choice can make a lot of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Apache&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I said for the GPL is even truer for the Apache 2.0 license. Indeed, it contains the following definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Source&quot; form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications,&#xA;  including but not limited to software source code, documentation&#xA;  source, and configuration files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Object&quot; form shall mean any form resulting from mechanical&#xA;  transformation or translation of a Source form, including but&#xA;  not limited to compiled object code, generated documentation,&#xA;  and conversions to other media types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Work&quot; shall mean the work of authorship, whether in Source or&#xA;  Object form, made available under the License, as indicated by a&#xA;  copyright notice that is included in or attached to the work&#xA;  (an example is provided in the Appendix below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the Apache license is specifically designed to be applicable beyond software (other media types are even mentioned) whereas the choice of terms throughout the preamble and the rest of the GPL clearly demonstrates that the license was designed for software even though it can still be applied to some other works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;MIT&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, the MIT license defines the &quot;Software&quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a copy of this software and associated documentation files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the MIT license would lose its meaning completely in case it was applied to media which isn't documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;BSD&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD licenses (2 and 3-clause) do not contain any definitions but mention &quot;source code&quot;, &quot;binary form&quot; and &quot;THIS SOFTWARE&quot;. Thus, similarly to the MIT license, it should not be used for anything else than software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Final consideration&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally if a software contains media, it makes sense to license the whole software, including media, under a software license, but in this case authors would be well advised to dual license the media alone under a Creative Commons license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-02T09:19:00.800" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T09:19:00.800" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-01T13:26:03.790" Score="13" ViewCount="3752" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've built an R package that uses a mix of libraries licensed under GPL-2 and GPL-3. From what I've read, because of this dependency, my package will also have to be GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license? &#xA;  Yes, because the software as it is actually run includes the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confusingly, one can find R packages under MIT, even though they depend on a package under GPL. For example, memoise is MIT even though it depends on digest (which is GPL-2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/memoise/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/memoise/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right about my having to use GPL and does it matter if I choose GPL2/3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6032" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T23:42:18.430" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T08:37:08.653" Title="If my R package uses GPL packages, does mine automatically inherit GPL?" Tags="|license-recommendation|derivative-works|copyleft|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2016-09-01T18:43:03.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While a package running on top R could use any license, when using GPL-licensed R libraries that my code depends on I would consider that the GPL would apply also to my code, regardless how removed that dependency might be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The R community has the tendency (which is IMHO a tad unfortunate) to release libraries using the GPL when the LGPL or a GPL with a linking exception could have been more suitable for a library-style usage.&#xA;You can also check this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;question and answer&lt;/a&gt; (of mine) on dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About choosing GPL 2 or 3: it depends on the license of these dependent libraries: if one is GPL 2-only, it technically would not be compatible (per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLv2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF&lt;/a&gt;) with the GPL 3.  Is this devilishly weird or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2019-10-01T08:37:08.653" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T08:37:08.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4414" CreationDate="2016-09-01T20:22:11.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are technically allowed to distribute your own package under any license because you are distributing your code only. However, it would not be fair to the users of your package who might not realize that they have to abide to the terms of the GPL license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These users include yourself as soon as you start producing a full program using your library. The program as a whole needs to be under GPL 2.0 or 3.0. And as Philippe notes, these two versions are mutually incompatible so you cannot distribute a program that would depend on libraries under both licenses. To solve this hurdle, the best way is probably to write to the authors of the &quot;GPL 2.0 only&quot; packages and ask them to license their libraries under &quot;GPL 2.0 or later&quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T20:22:11.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4407" CreationDate="2016-09-01T21:40:54.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Philippe notes, scipy is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license.  The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;believes this to be a GPL-compatible license&lt;/a&gt;, which means you should have no problems incorporating it into your project and licensing the result under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-09-01T21:40:54.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4411" CreationDate="2016-09-02T08:56:03.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is non-free, and it probably wouldn't work as you intend to anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See section 12 on &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&lt;/a&gt;, especially items h and m.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's address some of the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data that is output by a program is  not part of the program itself, except in rather rare cases where the program outputs its own source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A text written using Libreoffice is not part of Libreoffice, and doesn't fall under the copyright of the Libreoffice authors. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A program compiled using GCC is not part of GCC, and doesn't fall under the copyright of the GCC authors. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Statistics gathered by a web crawler are not part of the web crawler itself, and do not fall under the copyright of the web crawler's authors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction is very important. Copyright law works by granting the author some exclusive rights over their work. Other people are not allowed to exercise these rights unless they have the author's permission. However, as surprising as this may be, &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; of a software program is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; one of those exclusive rights. A user does not need the author's permission to use a program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also called &quot;fair use&quot;. The exact details of what is considered &quot;fair use&quot; and what is not vary from country to country, but this is not important for this discussion. I am pretty sure that running a program and publishing the output is considered fair use everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Barak's FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is referring to when it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are certain rights granted to anyone who is in lawful possession of copy of a work, even when that work is under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Under US copyright law it's not clear that it is even possible to restrict use, once someone has a legal copy.) We can only consider restrictions on distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; also tries to clarify this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even more explicitly here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Fair use” is use that is allowed without any special permission. Since you don't need the developers' permission for such use, you can do it regardless of what the developers said about it—in the license or elsewhere, whether that license be the GNU GPL or any other free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that just because this is from a DFSG FAQ and the GPL, that does not mean it only applies to the Debian project and the GPL. This is how copyright law itself works, so it applies universally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#restrict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program? No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if copyright law doesn't give you the right to decide how other people use the data generated by your program, how can you still restrict that use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a F/OSS license, you can not. F/OSS licenses only grant the user some additional rights which they do not have by default, and then they usually place some restrictions on &lt;strong&gt;these additional&lt;/strong&gt; rights. But they do not ask the user to give up a right which they have by default. This is also why you never need to make sure that the user agrees to an F/OSS license (clickwrap). The user is free to refuse the license, in which case they just fall back to their fair use rights, which the F/OSS license doesn't try to take away, so there is no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to use an EULA to get the user to agree to give up their right of publishing the data without the disclaimer. However, there are problems with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At least in some jurisdictions, such clauses are only effective if the user actively indicates that they accept them, so you need a clickwrap, and then you obviously also need a clause in your license prohibiting removal of the clickwrap. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AFAICT, it only binds the person installing the software. If someone happens to find themselves in front of a legally obtained installation of the software, presses &quot;run&quot; and then publishes the data without including your &quot;mandatory&quot; disclaimer, I don't see how you could do anything about that at all. Well, maybe you could &quot;clickwrap&quot; the &quot;run&quot; button.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am sure that such a license wouldn't be considered F/OSS-compliant. Neither by Debian, nor the FSF, nor the OSI. In their FAQs, they all write explicitly that compliant licenses can only restrict distribution, not use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another note: Please do not add additional clauses to well-known F/OSS-Licenses. It only causes confusion. There is a reason why Debian, the FSF and the OSI all publish catalogs of &quot;known good&quot; licenses, and not a single one of these licenses includes any restriction whatsoever on use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best course of action really is to just include a standard disclaimer for the software &lt;strong&gt;itself&lt;/strong&gt; and stop worrying about what other people do with &lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt; data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#restrict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt; again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that nearly all Open Source licenses also state that there is no warranty: you can't sue if it blows up your computer or destroys your data, even if it was the program's fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the AGPL also does this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part of the AGPL reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this only applies if someone modifies and distributes the program, not if they merely use it. The user of an AGPLed web-based text editor is not required to include a link to the editor's source in the texts they write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6040" LastEditorUserId="6040" LastEditDate="2016-09-03T21:34:53.347" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T21:34:53.347" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4420" CreationDate="2016-09-02T10:37:55.393" Score="5" ViewCount="3179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I changed a class which is under the license &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License Version 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. According to the license - for redistribution of the changed version I should specify changes in a class.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notification of changes should be stored in block with a copyright? &lt;strong&gt;How it should look like?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6041" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T19:22:28.353" Title="APLv2: How to specify notices of all changes in a class?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4419" CreationDate="2016-09-02T19:22:28.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notification of changes should be stored in block with a copyright? How it should look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;apache license&lt;/a&gt; is both clear and a tad vague and not very prescriptive for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the&#xA;   Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;   modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You&#xA;   meet the following conditions:&#xA;   [...]&#xA;  (b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;      stating that You changed the files; and&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here if I modify the sources.... a notification comment would not end up in compiled Java class files or course: I would need to handle both source and binaries somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this, I would do the following to meet both the spirit and the letter of the license (and this may be a tad more than strictly needed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the source, I would add a note in the header comment stating that I modified the code, with a rough date and possibly a high level description of the modification. Doing that in a header comment at the top would be rather prominent to me. (Stating a date and the nature of the modification is not strictly needed, but I feel this is the right thing to do). It can look like anyway you want: the license does not say anything on the format (which is a good thing IMHO).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the source did not had an Apache notice, I would add one as a comment header too. (even though this is may not be clear in the license, if the copyright/notice was missing I would add this for clarity and avoid any ambiguity) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there was a NOTICE, I would mention there that the code was modified by me too, so this would be even more prominent. (even though this is may not be strictly needed by the license). If there were none, I would create one, so I could bundle it with the source and binaries. (even though this is may not be strictly needed by the license if there was no notice in the first place)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally I would ensure the license and notice file both end up in my sources and binaries redistributions (if I were to redistribute them).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-02T19:22:28.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4422" CreationDate="2016-09-02T21:59:29.163" Score="9" ViewCount="1751" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an audio library that optionally uses a GPL sub-library for computing the FFT (FFTW3). At compile time, I can disable FFTW3 and use another FFT implementation (which is slower than FFTW3, but with a more permissive license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I release this audio library under GPL, everything would be very easy.&#xA;Nevertheless, I also want to let the users of this library to deactivate FFTW3 and then make commercial softwares, without the need to open any modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of a dual license Apache2.0|GPLv3 for this audio library.&#xA;Users who want to create a GPL-based software can then use this library with the GPLv3 and activate the GPL sub-library FFTW3.&#xA;Users who want to create closed source development can also deactivate the FFTW3 and enjoy the audio library with the Apache2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FFTW3 is also an example, I suppose there might be other interesting GPLed sub-library to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense ? Is it over-complicate ? Do you see a simpler solution for this situation ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6045" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-09-05T11:23:05.013" LastActivityDate="2022-09-06T07:56:04.613" Title="Dual license Apache2.0 GPLv3 for a library with optional GPLed code" Tags="|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4421" CreationDate="2016-09-03T08:36:27.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#new-compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Apache Foundation&lt;/a&gt; both consider the Apache 2.0 license as compatible with the GPL 3.0 but not with the GPL 2.0.&#xA;But the Apache foundation also considers that L/GPL-licensed code is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;not suitable for inclusion in Apache products&lt;/a&gt; as released by the foundation. Yet most lawyers I conferred with consider acceptable to use unmodified LGPL-licensed libraries and Apache-licensed libraries in some product under many licenses, including proprietary licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage, my head wobbles and your eyes spin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can release my code using the Apache license and when combined with a GPL-3.0-licensed library it could be treated as GPL-licensed overall and this would eschew the need for dual licensing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;at least per the FSF&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;One lax license, Apache 2.0, has patent clauses which are &#xA;incompatible with GPL version 2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To also provide compatibility with version 2 of the GPL, and to maximize compatibility I could either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;choice of Apache 2.0 or GPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (or later).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OR license under a license that would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;treated as compatible&lt;/a&gt; with the Apache license (such as a BSD or MIT) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#new-compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;L/GPL&lt;/a&gt; v2 and v3 both inside and outside of the FSF and the ASF.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OR license under an LGPL license that would be treated as incompatible with Apache at the ASF, but considered OK outside, including for inclusion in commercial products and would be treated as GPL-compatible by the FSF. And to maximize compatibility this would likely be an LGPL 2.1 or later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These would be my options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid my head to hurt too much, I would look at all this options as if these were code dependency issues between various versions of libraries: I would picture each of these licenses options as various combinations of versions of header files and function signatures some of which compile and work, some other that work sometimes but not always, some that result in a segfault and coredump badly unless I do &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;two triple back-flips on a bike&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I might provide some build configuration options and documentation similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt; such that when my code is built with FFTW3 it is quite explicit to my users when GPL-code is mixed in or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T08:36:27.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4411" CreationDate="2016-09-03T16:42:16.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a restriction would make the license non-free, because the user lacks the freedom to do whatever they wish with the program's output. Suppose that a user &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; want to offer a warranty or liability on the data the program output; what then? True, such a choice would only be shooting themselves in the foot, but it is a freedom that you have prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You yourself need not worry about such an event in the first place, because all FLOSS licenses disclaim warranty and liability on your part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-09-03T16:42:16.927" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4425" CreationDate="2016-09-04T13:17:00.627" Score="11" ViewCount="2771" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can LICENSE file be removed from 3rd party BSD project that is merged with GPLed code? There are license headers in each file, but files will be modified, so BSD license in them will no longer be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6053" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:19:09.430" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T13:34:24.470" Title="Remove BSD LICENSE file while importing code into GPL project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|relicensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4424" CreationDate="2016-09-04T14:06:52.070" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no. You cannot remove a BSD license notice, otherwise you are no longer licensed per the BSD (many variants) that all share the essential requirement to retain the copyright and license/notice texts in source and/or binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_.28original_.22BSD_License.22.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD variant text from wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you combine BSD-licensed code with GPL-licensed code, you could possibly assert a GPL license for your modifications, but you cannot remove the LICENSE. And when you use BSD-licensed code in conjunction with GPL-licensed code, the source code redistribution requirements of the GPL would apply. But you could also still use the BSD-licensed code alone without the copyleft requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer to keep things clean and keep the BSD parts under BSD and the GPL parts under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license notice still stays in every file, so the copyright with conditions is retained, but the main license for the project is now GPL, so the LICENSE file was removed.&#xA;  [...] I will need a separate answer how to properly merge those LICENSE files. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways you could consider to provide a efficient notification to my users. Some of these include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could create a top level LICENSE or COPYING file that would explain at a high level the various licenses in use, and keep separate files for each licenses, either in a top level dir or a doc or licenses dir, and point to these in my top level file. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could merge it all in one big file (which could become somewhat hard to read and grok)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could use a more structured approach like in Debian copyright files, or my own &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/attributecode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nexB/attributecode&lt;/a&gt; tool using a structured yaml or yaml-like description of the various licenses used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Following onto the question of &quot;merging&quot; (came here via this question ): In general, if the Copyright and license text is in every individual source file, can these be deleted and then merged into a single, separate LICENSE.txt file? Here's an example. It seems even disingenuous/misleading to leave a &quot;Copyright Google&quot; header from demo code on my customized (and perhaps poorly coded!) project, started from their tutorial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well if this customized code is derived from copyrighted code, whether you feel it is &quot;disingenuous/misleading to leave a Copyright Google header&quot;  does not matter. This is this the right thing to do, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T13:34:24.470" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T13:34:24.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4424" CreationDate="2016-09-04T21:53:51.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only adding on Philippe's answer here: you could for instance edit the LICENSE file to add your own copyright and license notice on top and specify that the following copyright and BSD license notice only applies to the original code from ... which can be found unchanged at ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But in no circumstance you can remove the original notice:&lt;/strong&gt; the license text states very clearly that you must keep it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-04T21:53:51.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4424" CreationDate="2016-09-05T08:52:50.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot remove the BSD license because the BSD license prohibits it. You can, however, add your own license to the file that covers your contributions. You can also add a notice that your contributions are not offered under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who wishes to distribute your file must comply with the BSD license with respect to those elements licensed under that license. And they must comply with your license with respect to those elements you added. You must also comply with the BSD license to continue to distribute the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that everyone who lawfully possesses a copy of your file will receive a BSD license for every protectable element placed under that license directly from the original authors of those elements. You cannot change this. So the BSD license will still be valid, it just will not extend to any protectable elements that you added. (Were this not so, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; could not distribute the file to them!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, of course, offer them whatever license you like for those protectable elements that you added to the files. You can also use a shrink-wrap agreement, clickthrough, or EULA to impose whatever additional terms courts are willing to enforce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T08:52:50.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4424" CreationDate="2016-09-05T15:44:50.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Richard Stallman's page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;combining licenses&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&quot;In a combination of programs under lax licenses, each part carries the license it came with. When the code is merged to the point that the parts can't be distinguished any more, that merged code should carry all the licenses of the merged parts. Since all the licenses are lax anyway, this causes no practical problem except that the list of licenses gets long.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of how the code might be &quot;merged to the point that the parts can't be distinguished&quot; is the making of an executable. So for instance, we cannot redistribute a GPL-ed program, supplying the users with the source code to the GPL-ed parts and give them only &lt;code&gt;.o&lt;/code&gt; object files for the BSD parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, when it comes to the mingled form of the work, all the licenses applies, and the most restrictive one &quot;wins&quot;. Meaning: in a compiled program with a mixture of BSD and GPL modules, the whole thing falls under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, users can still pick the BSD parts out of the source code, including any modifications unique to that program, and use them in accordance with just the BSD license that occurs in their respective comment headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However, actually, in an executable, we can distinguish machine code that clearly originates from a BSD-licensed module, such the image of a specific function; it's almost certain lifting out that piece of machine code and using it in any way permitted by the BSD license doesn't infringe on the GPL-ed program. If a BSD-licensed &lt;em&gt;inline&lt;/em&gt; function is integrated with GPL-ed code, then of course that is not true.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stallman also defines license compatibility, which is required in the first place if we want to create a combined work with differently licensed pieces: &lt;em&gt;&quot;In general we say that several licenses are compatible if there is a way to merge code under those various licenses while complying with all of them. The result, often, is a program with parts under various different compatible licenses—but not always.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original BSD license (with the &quot;obnoxious advertizing clause&quot;) wasn't  GPL compatible. Stallman &lt;em&gt;&quot;mostly eliminated this problem by convincing a dean, Hal Varian, to arrange for UC Berkeley to publish the “modified BSD license” (without the advertising clause) and rerelease the code of the Berkeley System Distribution under that&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, thus giving rise to the new BSD license without the clause, which is why now you can easily use BSD-licensed pieces in your GPL-ed code. Stallman cautions us not to actually talk this way about the BSD license; that is to say, to speak of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; BSD license as if there were one. In this Q&amp;amp;A, it's clear we are referring to one of the new ones without the troublesome clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastEditorUserId="6066" LastEditDate="2016-09-05T16:14:15.083" LastActivityDate="2016-09-05T16:14:15.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4434" CreationDate="2016-09-06T08:55:38.680" Score="7" ViewCount="2510" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been developing an open-source software under the GNU GPLv3 license for 3 years (as part of my PhD thesis) and I am releasing the source code to the public. Now I am planning to write a plug-in for that software and distribute the plugin commercially without disclosing the plugin's source code. I was wondering if this is allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I know that GPLv3 is a copyleft license and any modifications to the code must also be made available under the GPL. But here, I am not touching the source code and I am making a plugin that connects to the GPLv3 code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6072" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T08:30:30.117" Title="Making a commercial plugin for a GPLv3 software without releasing the plugin's code" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4435" CreationDate="2016-09-06T10:30:51.157" Score="5" ViewCount="1018" Body="&lt;p&gt;I implemented a little console application in C# (tool) that can go through the web pages on the site and get information, links, files from them. I used Selenium for this purpose. Two nuget packages &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Selenium.WebDriver/2.53.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;WebDriver&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver/2.23.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ChromeDriver&lt;/a&gt; (the last is unlicensed). But WebDriver has Apache 2.0 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually understand very well how we can use projects under this license. My tool will be just pushed to github (private repository, because it is for my company) and used only locally, on my computer, or someone else. This tool is just for our company, it is not for sale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do or, probably, add to the code, to abide the law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6073" LastEditorUserId="5392" LastEditDate="2016-09-07T04:22:50.897" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T04:22:50.897" Title="Using Apache License 2.0 library inside a company" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2016-09-06T11:51:28.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the program invokes its plug-ins. If the program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license for the main program makes no requirements for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. This means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it really depends on what &amp;quot;plugin&amp;quot; means in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you say that you are the author of the original software. As this was part of your PhD work, you may need to clarify who is the copyright owner for the software you wrote (often, the university is the copyright owner). If you are considered to be the copyright owner, then the GPL license doesn't restrict you in any way (supposing you are not depending on any GPL'd library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question also seems to indicate that you are not completely done with your PhD. If you are still in university, you might have the power to change the license of your software (you need to check this with your supervisor / university staff). You could then just add a specific exemption from the GPL for linking with plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T11:51:28.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4433" CreationDate="2016-09-06T12:04:13.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You shouldn't need to do anything (except maybe make clear within your company that this tool is not to be redistributed outside the company).&#xA;All open source licenses allow private modification and private use without any restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second package, you say that it is unlicensed but I can read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;chromedriver.exe&quot; is licensed under the New BSD License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess it is actually free software as well and the same considerations apply. Otherwise, putting it online like that looks like at least a permission for private use anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-06T12:04:13.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2016-09-07T01:07:44.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We allow anyone to open an issue and make feature requests. We try very hard to respond to actual issues quickly, but obviously can't always fix everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bugs are bugs, but feature requests are the killer. We get a ton of really interesting feature requests. Unfortunately, most of them are either barely related to what our project does, or simply too difficult to implement in limited spare time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that the core team has to play the benevolent dictator. Any one of the core team members have the right to deny a feature request, without question. One of us will simply make a polite reply that, &quot;While this is a great idea, it's just not in the realm of what our software does.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose our policy could be summed up as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We trust the other members of the core team to approve or deny feature requests at will. Approval of a feature does not imply that it is a priority to implement, merely that we would like to implement it &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2016-09-07T01:07:44.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4440" CreationDate="2016-09-08T11:54:42.410" Score="26" ViewCount="2511" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked a project with an MIT license on GitHub:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2012 Some Name&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'd like to do some changes and publish the project as a bower package (different name than it is published at the moment). Do I have to/am I allowed to change the Copyright in the licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One the one hand it's not the original author who is responsible for the published code, on the other hand it's the original author who did most of the work and deserves the credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6092" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T06:38:09.627" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T06:38:09.627" Title="How to deal with licences after forking a project?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|relicensing|license-notice|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4439" CreationDate="2016-09-08T12:20:07.547" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you are not allowed to &lt;strong&gt;change&lt;/strong&gt; the copyright notice. Indeed, the license text states pretty clearly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you are allowed to &lt;strong&gt;add&lt;/strong&gt; a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep the MIT license, which is what I would advise you to do, you only need to add a single line to the license file, before or after &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2012 Some Name&lt;/code&gt; with your own copyright notice. The final &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file will look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2012 Some Name&#xA;Copyright (c) 2016 Your Name&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4424/remove-bsd-license-file-while-importing-code-into-gpl-project&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which is pretty similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T12:20:07.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-08T16:04:29.847" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, Zizouz212 I will try to reformulate my question making it as clear as I can. I have a tool that is not open source but allows you to define plugins that have to follow a set of interfaces, all of them on a DLL. I also want to offer the source code for a plugin I developed as an example of how to implement those interfaces. I want to release the source code for those interfaces in C# so that people can use it as documentation on how to build the plugins. Which open source licence do you think I should use for both the interfaces and the example plugin? If you think my question is still unclear, please feel free to lead me in the right direction!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6085" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T16:04:29.847" Title="Open Source Licence Reformulated" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-09-08T18:07:55.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4443" CreationDate="2016-09-08T18:15:23.327" Score="8" ViewCount="1726" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a web app that I sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a Java REST service with an AngularJS front end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use a Javascript library that is licensed under the AGPL but I don't understand the implications or if it is OK for me to use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I don't understand the modifying/linking/usage parts and how it applies and what it applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not modifying the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am distributing the library inside my webapp rather than via a full url (external web access is not always available in this case)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My javascript code that calls the library is minified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the AGPL mean I have to distribute my source code that is using this library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to include the source code of the Java part or just the Javascript part?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the user can see my Javascript in the browser does that count as distributing my source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it still count if it is minified since it doesn't match the source code in my repo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a matrix anywhere giving a short summary about what the common licences mean in different situations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6088" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-08T19:34:24.180" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T19:34:24.180" Title="How Does The AGPL Apply To Javascript Libraries?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4442" CreationDate="2016-09-08T19:25:52.373" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of your questions already have answers so I will just link to them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4303/is-there-any-difference-between-the-gpl-and-agpl-for-code-executed-in-the-browse&quot;&gt;Is there any difference between the GPL and AGPL for code executed in the browser?&lt;/a&gt; For code in the browser, there is no practical difference between GPL and AGPL 3.0. &#xA;So yes, you have to distribute the JS source code when using this library.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3960/if-a-part-of-the-client-side-code-is-licensed-under-gpl-does-the-server-side-co&quot;&gt;If a part of the client-side code is licensed under GPL, does the server-side code have to be under GPL as well?&lt;/a&gt; You don't have to distribute the Java part (the server part) as the two are generally considered distinct works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4041/is-putting-a-page-with-javascript-in-it-considered-a-redistribution&quot;&gt;Is putting a page with javascript in it considered a redistribution&lt;/a&gt; As you are mentioning, you are indeed distributing the library (but not as source code) thus you need to comply with the terms of the license (and distribute the non-minified version as well).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, such a matrix exists: &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/appendix/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-08T19:25:52.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-09T09:36:21.760" Score="3" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering how much of the Canon SDK I am allowed to distribute with applications I build on top of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canon's SDK for remote operation of DSLR cameras (generally known as EDSDK) is free to download, but asks you to go through some hoops to get to the download. After that point, you get binary libraries and header files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;LICENSE. Canon grants Developer a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Software in object code format according to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. Title to the Software shall at all times reside in Canon. Developer may not use, reproduce, sublicense, distribute to any third party or dispose of the Software, in whole or in part, other than as permitted under this Agreement. Developer may distribute the Software, in object code format, only as part of the Developer Software Package in Europe without payment of royalty to Canon, provided that Developer abides by the provisions of this Agreement. Developer shall distribute Developer Software Package elsewhere at its sole risk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Developer Software Package = the thing you make)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it states &quot;object code format&quot; I presume this means compiled binaries. It sounds like I'm allowed to distribute the compiled binaries but it's not clear about the header files. Do you think this license expressly disallows me from distributing the header files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important for me since my project is open source and I would like to distribute all components which are required to build it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6100" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T06:30:49.827" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T06:30:49.827" Title="How to read the license for EDSDK?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4444" CreationDate="2016-09-09T10:05:50.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the face of it, I cannot redistribute sources. And I cannot even redistribute binaries outside of Europe or else I will have to pay Canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could unlikely use this as part of (as in embedded) in open source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;headers do not seem to be redistributable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the objects are redistributable only in Europe, which is practically impossible to enforce for any open source project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license even in this very restrictive form is not transferable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on the face of it this looks like a trial software agreement to entice buying a commercial license or a redistribution license with royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would ask Canon for another license compatible with open source usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T10:05:50.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-09T11:59:20.000" Score="4" ViewCount="1134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a C++ tool and I am the full copyright owner of the code. However the tool is dynamically linked to a gpl library. The whole source code of the tool is hosted on a virtual machine. In the virtual machine there are two users: root-user and standard-user. The source code is located in the root user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to distribute the tool in a commercial way. The distribution model is the following: people can download the vm image for free, and use the tool in two ways: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you don't pay the license fee you are a standard-user and you can execute the code but you can't see the source code of the tool.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you pay the license fee, you are a root-user and hence you can read, execute, write, modify or recompile the code of the tool.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to distribute the vm in this way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6101" LastEditorUserId="6101" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T12:07:42.620" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T15:11:49.193" Title="Distribute virtual machine image with gpl code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|distribution|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4446" CreationDate="2016-09-09T12:58:48.677" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the GPL requires that you must make the sourcecode available to everyone who receives a copy of your program. The GPL defines sourcecode as &quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it&quot;. So providing it in a form the user can not access is not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The virtual machine with the application preinstalled is a software product. When you give the VM image to someone, you are conveying the program. So you need to also provide the sourcecode. The GPLv2 says that you must offer the sourcecode &quot;for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution&quot;. The GPLv3 even goes a step further and allows reimbursement only for &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; products. When the software is downloaded, you must also provide a gratis download of the sourcecode to everyone who downloaded it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-09-09T13:25:55.317" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T13:25:55.317" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4446" CreationDate="2016-09-09T15:11:49.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is what I can say with absolute certainty: you must obey the terms of the GPL for the GPL library you are distributing (and for any other GPL code in your VM, e.g., any GPL-licensed GNU or Linux components of the VM's operating system). This means that you must offer to all recipients of your VM the source code of all GPL-licensed components. You are, of course, free to decide who is a recipient (e.g., you may limit it only to customers who pay you one thousand dollars), but as soon as you make a person a recipient, you have an obligation to offer them the source code of all GPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significant question here is whether the dynamic-link relationship between your tool and the GPL library imposes a requirement that your code also be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Dynamic linking has been legally murky territory for a long time due to an absence of case law. Is dynamic linking a case of two separate copyright works that programmatically inter-operate, or is it a single combined work under copyright? I am unaware of extant case law (but if you are, please commnent below!), but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF is unambiguous in their opinion on the matter&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the FSF's opinion indeed holds up in court in your jurisdiction, then the copyleft provision of the GPL applies to your tool, due its combination with a GPL-licensed library. As such, you must license your tool-and-library combination under the GPL, which means you must offer the source code of your tool to everyone who receives a copy. You are not permitted to conditionally give the source to the recipient of a GPL-licensed work. Either offer them both the object and source code, or neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-09T15:11:49.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-10T03:16:13.697" Score="45" ViewCount="9127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hacking and cheating in online multiplayer games (that use the typical client-server model) is not uncommon. For example, in some first-person shooters there are &quot;aimbots&quot; that allow the player's character to hit a target every time, &quot;triggerbots&quot; that fire whenever a player's cursor passes over an enemy, and &quot;wallhacks&quot; that allow one to see other players through walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is all without the source code available! Suppose that someone writes a game that uses on the typical client-server model, and wants to release it as free and open-source software. In a libre game, the players would have the right to modify their client and put all these things and worse into place, and even distribute those modified clients. Any client-side anti-cheating mechanism — for example, Valve Software's Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), which permanently bans the player's account if it detects software hijacking the client — could be removed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What strategies could the server use to ensure that everyone is playing fairly, and exclude modified clients? Could the game even be considered libre software if the server did not allow modified clients to connect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T02:31:13.287" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T21:38:49.950" Title="How can cheating be prevented in a FLOSS multiplayer game?" Tags="|gaming|code-signing|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-10T05:45:36.450" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much of this is done at levels below that of the source code. Wall hacks, for instance, often work by manipulating the video card so it displays a wireframe rather than textured surfaces. Having the source code doesn't really affect this kind of cheat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideal solution is to only send the client what the player can see/know. If he can't see an enemy, don't send data about that enemy. If the client doesn't have the data, no cheat can act on it. As for triggerbots and aimbots, behavioral analysis on the server side can spot them. There's an inherent error in aiming manually just because of limited pixel resolution and human reflex-speed variation. If the server spots a player hitting with more accuracy than their hardware should allow, let them shoot but ignore the shots. The same for an excessively high occurrence of firing just as the mouse cursor crosses a target's edge. Or generalize it and look for any behavior that's repetitive within closer tolerances than should be humanly possible. For instance a navigation bot will follow a straighter line and stop more precisely at a defined location than a human would be able to, so when you see a player who always nails a position mark with no error every time you're looking at a bot and not a human player. Ditto for an aimbot that always hits within a tiny tolerance of the same spot on the target's collision box no matter who/what the target is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would allow modified software, but make the server so that all players had to accept the same set of allowable modifications or they wouldn't be allowed to join the game. Then it's up to the players to decide what's allowable, not the game author, yet players can still exclude cheats by saying they won't accept any modifications to the client. I wouldn't do it on a specific-modification basis, more along the lines of &quot;the players on this server will only accept clients with a minimum aiming error tolerance identical to that of the standard client&quot; vs. &quot;minimum aiming error of no less than X&quot; vs. &quot;allows 0 aiming error&quot;. Then use that for your checks: if the players agree to a minimum aiming error of X, any player exhibiting consistent aiming error of less than X is breaking the agreement and can be kicked. You don't even have to bring cheating into it, it works just as well for players saying &quot;We have a certain skill level and we don't want to be steamrolled by players who're so good they can wipe the map with us without breaking a sweat.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4557" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T05:45:36.450" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-10T10:42:05.527" Score="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took part in the development of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.themanaworld.org/&quot;&gt;a FOSS online game&lt;/a&gt; myself. An MMORPG, to be precise. We didn't even try to prevent modified clients from connecting. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be against the philosophy of Free Software. Part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot;&gt;the Free Software Philosophy&lt;/a&gt; is that users should have the right to modify the software they use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a great way to save work. The GPL license meant that we could take the improvements the community came up with and merge them into the mainline. Outlawing client modifications on the official server would have meant to discourage community members from making such modification and even more from admitting that they made them and publishing the sourcecode. In fact at one point we even abandoned the main branch of the client and declared an unofficial community-improved fork the official one. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a great recruitment tool. The guy who maintained that unofficial client then became one of the most active members of the dev team. And he was not the only one who caught our attention by toying with the client sourcecode and subsequently could be convinced to contribute to the development officially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can't prevent it anyway. There is no bulletproof anti-cheat technology. There can't be, because whatever runs on the users machine is under their control. So whatever we could have tried, it would have be in vain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But how do you deal with clients which give the player information they are not supposed to have?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By not sending it to the client in the first place. This is easier in an MMORPG than a first person shooter where part of the player's skill comes from spotting people hiding in concealed places and where visibility calculation is a far harder problem. Yes, that meant we had to make some concession and scrap some features which were simply impossible to implement without the clients cooperation. But there are still a lot of game mechanics which work just fine even when you have to mentally merge player-knowledge and client-knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;And how do you deal with automation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, the bots. The greatest bane of our game. But not just of ours. Almost every MMO is plagued by them, including proprietary ones. One stop-gap measure is a human one: Write a TOS policy which clearly defines what forms of automation are forbidden, recruit a team of game masters from the community and have them ban all the violators by hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But actually, botting is usually a symptom of a far more essential problem of your game: When players feel the need to automatize some aspect of the game, that means it is so boring that they don't feel it's worth their time and so simple to do that they can program a machine to do that. Looking at which parts of your game players automatize gives you a hint to which parts you need to make more interesting and more mentally challenging. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But how about aimbots?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about automation which doesn't take away the dull things but assist the player in tests of reaction and dexterity which gives them an unfair advantage? I honestly know no solution to that form of cheating, except a game design solution: Just don't have such elements in your game. Design your game around tactical and strategic decision making instead of tests of dexterity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T19:32:34.883" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T19:32:34.883" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-10T15:22:40.817" Score="5" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I write a server-based application that I wish to release under the AGPL and expose publicly. What concrete steps do I need to take in order to satisfy &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clause 13&lt;/a&gt;? Is it enough to add a valid link to a public &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; repository on an &quot;About&quot; page? Does the link have to appear on every page of the application? Does it need to be a direct download, rather than a link to a &lt;code&gt;github&lt;/code&gt; project or similar? Are there other things I need to be careful about the design of the server to prevent it from accidentally violating the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6117" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T13:58:58.887" Title="AGPL In Practice" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-10T20:36:47.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way you can reliably prevent cheating in your scenario is keep as much information and processing as possible on the server.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any anti cheat solution implemented on your game's client can be defeated by the client without your knowledge.  For example, a system that tries to verify that a client hasn't been modified relies on the client sending a truthful response, which can't be guaranteed.  That's not to say such systems are useless; a well implemented anticheat, keeping the client closed, obfuscation, etc can dramatically slow down and prevent cheating attempts.  It's important to recognize, however, that these ultimately will be defeated if your game gets popular or if the wrong person or group gets interested in your game and decides develop cheats for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common security paradigm is that you should never trust the client.  In your context, envision a connected client as a black box you don't can't look into or control.  Assume every piece of information you send is being used by a cheater for naughty purposes, and that every byte you receive from the client has been modified somehow by it.  This mindset should help you identify where your design will be problematic for cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6118" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T20:36:47.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2900" CreationDate="2016-09-10T23:13:25.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may use the &lt;em&gt;Lesser GPL&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;) which permits use of the library in proprietary programs as oppose to the ordinary &lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt; which makes a library only available for free programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example GNU C library is using &lt;em&gt;Lesser GPL&lt;/em&gt; since there are plenty of proprietary software which are using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Releasing library or software under GPL is limiting its use only to free programs which can be advantage to give a community boost and makes sure application program which are using it are free software as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library&lt;/a&gt; at GNU.org&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If developers are already using an established alternative library released under a nonfree license or a lax pushover license, then we recommend using the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;How to choose a license for your own work&lt;/a&gt; at GNU.org&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full LGPL licence, please read: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastActivityDate="2016-09-10T23:13:25.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-11T00:47:57.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's another approach: split the client in 2 parts, one that controls the core gameplay and the other one that is literally chrome around it. Distribute the first one using a typical distro mechanism in the form of signed shared libs -- the code is open and but the server will only accept control using a shared lib with a known signature. The other part of the app is chrome (settings, macros, toolbars, menus, icons, whatever) and leave this open so that the community can improve on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combine this with another approach at the philosophy level: let the game have 2 modes, one competitive mode that is locked down and one open mode which is free to tinker. StarCraft II for example is a good model with a public repository of mods in multiplayer mode; in solo campaign I can play in god mode for extra ludicrous fun but that disables the achievement system (fair enough). Let the community come up with alternative gameplays and if one stand out incorporate it in the official next release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6121" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T00:47:57.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-11T03:13:14.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What strategies could the server use to ensure that everyone is playing fairly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Define unfair play: What would you consider unfair play of the following examples?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your player is using some tool/modification to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help him aim and shoot at things (aim bot in a FPS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;help with your characters skill rotation (in a RPG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;predict/guess your opponents cards based on which cards he played (in a TCG)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;show you your opponents cooldowns and available attack moves (no genre in particular)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give you access to normally unavailable functionality (e.g. flying or creative mode in Minecraft)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are blatantly unfair, but some (like the rotation helper) are really subtle. For example, a rotation helper might even improve the gaming experience for people with some impairment, but with some form of automated decision making it could make some boss fights trivial or allow &quot;superhuman&quot; reflexes in a PvP setting. Okay, rotation helpers are disallowed because of their abuse potential. Now, what about healer interfaces?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could spend days discussing all the nuances of game altering modifications/tools and their in-game balance effects. But, there is a simple rule that is fair for everybody: &lt;em&gt;Disallow any modification!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... and exclude modified clients?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the hard part, and so far, I know of no one who could reinforce this under all conditions. It is just too hard. (Basically, your server tries to be an interrogator in a turing test.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best approaches in your case (no client side anti-cheat program) are (in order of difficulty):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;verify that every client packet sent to the server contains valid values&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;limiting what information is available to a client (e.g. positions of players that cannot currently be seen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;try to detect patterns in a clients behavior&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the first point should be obvious. But I think it warrants extra mention here, because it frequently gets skipped, either because of performance considerations, or because of some sort of blind trust into the client software (&quot;Why yes, we are the only ones capable of communicating with our server.&quot; - No, you are not, especially not once someone reverse-engineered your network protocol).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one is also rather obvious, but can be tricky to get right in a latency tolerant fashion. Most game servers already use this in some way to save on bandwidth - but it can double as a way to make cheating more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings us to the last point: pattern recognition. While it is rather easy and feasible to do some easy detections this way (&quot;that player wanted to go to those exact coordinates on X different occasions&quot;), it can get quite hard and time consuming if the bot writers get smart about how their bots operate. To continue on the &quot;exact coordinates&quot; example: what prevents the bot writer to pick a coordinate in a specified area around that exact coordinate? Set a radius, add a call to &lt;code&gt;rand&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sin&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;cos&lt;/code&gt; and suddenly you have a circle of points instead of a single coordinate. Now add varying radii on different coordinates (depending on terrain etc), and suddenly it gets a lot harder to match that pattern. (Yes, in this case it's still possible to detect that pattern - but if you additionally vary the paths a bit, you come very close to matching human behavior).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for all this, please keep in mind that you are trying to run a game server - you have limited CPU time and memory, and, depending on your game, you normally have tight constraints regarding latency (and maybe bandwidth). Just because some operations are possible, it doesn't have to mean they are possible while running an efficient server under those constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, employing GMs to monitor players and identify bots will also help, but they (as humans) have limited uptime - and who monitors the monitors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you could design your game in a way that prohibits modifications from having any real influence, e.g. think about a game like go: All information is readily available to all players, and fast reflexes don't give you any advantage, so this basically makes the major cheats unavailable. On the other hand, since go is &quot;that simple&quot; (not really, but still), moves can be precomputed to some level which might swing the odds in someones favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could the game even be considered libre software if the server did not allow modified clients to connect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As said earlier, with enough sophistication, it gets nearly impossible to even detect a modified client. So how would you enforce this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the anti-cheat software is basically a rootkit (or something close to that): It tries to take the control over the client's computer. While this approach might prevent simple tinkering (e.g. by comparing checksums), it still has to communicate those results to some server. And if someone is able to hijack that communication, you're back to zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that all of this is oblivious on the fact that, in your case, the source code is freely available (it just sets the hurdle higher for closed source games). Also, as mentioned in the answer of @Todd Knarr, for some kinds of exploits, you don't even need to modify the executable itself - some configuration for the graphics card or a manipulated asset can be enough to allow for some simple cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: With enough sophistication, you cannot rely on any information sent by the client, and trying to match patterns will a) cost good amounts of server CPU time and b) increase in difficulty once the bot writers learn the limits of that pattern matching algorithm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6122" LastEditorUserId="6122" LastEditDate="2016-09-11T03:32:04.923" LastActivityDate="2016-09-11T03:32:04.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-11T06:11:28.023" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;PS3&lt;/a&gt; modder and work in low level involving these mods. Here is how I would go about protecting a game from my methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You cannot prevent everything&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any data that the client has, they can manipulate. This involves angles, player coordinates, etc. It is virtually impossible to prevent everything, but you can make it hard to do certain things with a few tricks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tricks I learned while modding GTA V&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GTA V does not give you a lot of client information. By that I mean stuff like buttons being pressed, rendering on their screen, etc. The downside of GTA is that all data is managed through one host, so you can do a bunch of other things very easily. My point is, I cannot easily control other players' coordinates or render stuff on their screen. Their client is virtually untouchable in many ways because of the &lt;strong&gt;lack of data about clients I receive.&lt;/strong&gt; If you simply don't tell me things, I cannot do it. In GTA, the further you go away, the less data your game sends to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tricks I learned while modding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Call of Duty&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost every aspect of call of duty can be controlled if you are the host. I can render text on peoples' screens and teleport them and everything. The way you should prevent this from happening is by making the host on the &lt;em&gt;Call of Duty&lt;/em&gt; servers rather than using a player as the host. If the code is held on the server you can filter packets being sent and make sure players don't magically change coordinates too far and stuff like that. Also, stuff like aimbot only takes a few simple things. 1. Find your players' rotation and coordinates (which can generally be found easily) 2. Find other players' coordinates. If the server does not check changing rotation then you can easily do some math to calculate the rotations to look to. To block this I would check to make sure the player isn't turning too fast on the server side and kick them if they did.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tricks I learned while modding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Minecraft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Minecraft&lt;/em&gt; is one of the best games when it comes to modding protection. When on a server, all data is basically checked on the server side. You cannot modify your health or coordinates because it is all checked through server side. That is the ideal goal for a game.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make it confusing. Reverse engineers like to use already built-in functions to do stuff like check if a player is visible. If you manage to make that function hard to call or don't have a function for it at all, it may take ages for the best modders to fully reverse it and get it working. At least it will give you a safe game launch.&#xA;Also as a general sum up, the best thing you could possibly do is make  frequent checks on the server side to make sure they are not changing values too often or other miscellaneous things. Also, learn how to, and try modding your own game. If it is easy for you to figure out it is probably easy for other people to figure out. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6128" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T21:38:49.950" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T21:38:49.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4462" CreationDate="2016-09-11T06:24:01.163" Score="6" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's consider a GNU-GPLv3 desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not dual-licensable at all, for instance because a lot of code has been contributed as GNU-GPLv3 by people who can not be found anymore, so changing the license is not an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt;: Can this app be uploaded to the Windows Store?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions/ankidesktop/19409-publish-anki-on-windows-store&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;real-world case&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T00:38:27.583" Title="Can a GPLv3 app be uploaded to the Windows Store?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-11T10:36:23.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What strategies could the server use to ensure that everyone is playing fairly, and exclude modified clients? Could the game even be considered libre software if the server did not allow modified clients to connect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would consider two different aspects: the &lt;strong&gt;server software&lt;/strong&gt; proper AND the &lt;strong&gt;service that I offer&lt;/strong&gt; to the community and runs this server software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the server software can use or be free or open source software and make this available in source form alright. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the service I offer to the players community can be subject to terms of service (TOS), such as prohibiting accessing the service with modified software that would give the players unfair advantage and would be considered cheating. That service could enforce this eventually using any mean I like including crypto for instance to ensure that modified clients are banned from accessing my service, but that would likely be hard or impossible: hence, I would likely eschew this complexity and stay with the TOS.  The TOS could be a good enough way to offer a fair gaming experience and healthy community environment. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB: the same could apply to the client code if any)&#xA;These two are not conflicting: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;someone could take my server code and start a new service and remove the anti-cheat provisions alright if they like. Or if there is no anti-cheat provisions, the service they would provide is not subject to my TOS anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;someone could modify the client, but if they try to access my service, then even though the modification is allowed by the open source license attached to the code , their usage of this modified code with my service would be a violation of my TOS. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To recap: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can have both &lt;strong&gt;software under a FOSS license AND restrictive TOS for the service&lt;/strong&gt;. These are not conflicting.  I could enforce in code that only authorized clients can interact with my service, though this is likely very complicated or borderline impossible and the TOS is likely enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T14:31:32.523" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T14:31:32.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4460" CreationDate="2016-09-12T00:38:27.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/Windows-Store-and-the-GPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; linked by Philipp, Microsoft's store allows app developers to specify any terms they desire for their application, and makes specific allowances for OSI-approved licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL's disclaimer of warranty/liability protects auxiliary distributors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS &lt;strong&gt;AND/OR OTHER PARTIES&lt;/strong&gt; PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some other free software licenses do not, so they may not comply with the requirement that you disclaim Microsoft from warranty in addition to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-09-12T00:38:27.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4452" CreationDate="2016-09-12T08:07:20.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose I write a server-based application that I wish to release under the AGPL and expose publicly. What concrete steps do I need to take in order to satisfy clause 13? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author of the application, I can incorporate any or NO mechanism that would trigger the requirements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL section 13&lt;/a&gt;. So there are no specific steps I need to take. I am the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that the onus is on a user that would modify and redistribute or perform publicly my application. My application may not contain any such built-in mechanism to download the corresponding sources yet if a user modifies my code, then they would have to meet the requirements of section 13 nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can include nothing or anything. If I include something I could include anything I like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a valid link to a public git repository on an &quot;About&quot; page&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the link may appear on every page of the application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it can be a direct download&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it can be a link to a Github project or similar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I can include nothing at all. I am the author and I can do as I please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I include some or any of the above, a user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may not remove any of these,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if they modify my code, they may need to update the mechanism (such as update the link, or the code that creates a tarball or else) such that this points to &lt;strong&gt;the current code with their modifications&lt;/strong&gt; rather than to my original unmodified code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this excellent related &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/791/947&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/50/apsillers&quot;&gt;@apsillers&lt;/a&gt; who contacted the FSF on a similar topic (this is small excerpt):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, if you use an unmodified AGPL application that doesn't have download-source functionality, you are not required to add one or otherwise offer the source to users. If you do modify the software, of course, you are required to add a mechanism to allow users to download your modified source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T13:58:58.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-12T15:20:28.100" Score="5" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using &lt;strong&gt;Javassist&lt;/strong&gt; within my free open-source project (Javassist is included as pre-built .jar file which has been downloaded from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jboss-javassist/javassist/releases&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Releases section on their page&lt;/a&gt;, no source code). I'm now wondering if I need to include something beside the used .jar (e.g., some &lt;code&gt;Javassist.license.html&lt;/code&gt; or similar) when publishing my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://jboss-javassist.github.io/javassist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Javassist's homepage&lt;/a&gt; states the following regarding their license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Javassist version 3.20.0-GA is available (June 25, 2015).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version is distributed under the triple license of the MPL, the LGPL, and the Apache License. The distribution includes the jar file, the sources, some samples, the API manual, and a tutorial. The binary is also available from the central repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jboss-javassist/javassist/blob/master/License.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following license document on their github&lt;/a&gt;, yet I am no expert on software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long question short&lt;/strong&gt;: Do I have to redistribute further files (license text, ...) when using a &lt;strong&gt;Javassist&lt;/strong&gt; .jar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6148" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T09:57:32.587" Title="Javassit: What has to be distributed when using the pre-compiled .jar?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|lgpl|mpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4466" CreationDate="2016-09-12T17:17:24.080" Score="5" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to install an old version of a software that was free but not anymore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 1 was free, I use it for a year. Version 2 is not free anymore. Can I install (into a new environment) the version 1 or is it illegal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;Firefox is free, but tomorrow (not true) they change to software with commercial license. You still have the old version of the EXE for installing the version when it was free It looks legal as long as you do not update to the last version. &#xA;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6155" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T13:08:36.130" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T13:08:36.130" Title="Is installing an old free version legal, if the new version is not free anymore?" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4465" CreationDate="2016-09-12T19:02:36.947" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were given software under some Foo License, you may copy, distribute, and modify the software under the terms of the Foo License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the distributor of that software stops giving out new copies under the Foo License, that does not change the fact that you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; receive a copy of it under the Foo License. As long as the licensor does not actively revoke your copy of the license, you cannot lose the rights granted to you. (Furthermore, many FOSS licenses are explicitly irrevocable. Furthermore still, there is legal precedent that simply making a work available under a FOSS license may often grant the licencor economic consideration, which would also make the license irrecoverable, or maybe at least not revocable without some kind payment to you, the licensee.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may need to take pains to prove that distribution did truly and legitimately happen under that original license, but you are legally in the right to continue operating under the specific license that was originally offered to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, it's probably even simpler. If the author is still distributing Version 1 somewhere (e.g., in a &quot;Releases History&quot; page), then you don't even need to take pains to prove anything: if anyone complains about your continued redistribution of Version 1, you can very easily point to the place where Version 1 is &lt;em&gt;still publicly available&lt;/em&gt; under the free Foo License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-09-13T12:05:51.580" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T12:05:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-13T09:24:18.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to do the traditional model where you distribute a binary and avoid people hacking it, you can do that easily in a FLOSS setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FLOSS means that you give out the sourcecode together with your binary. Nobody keeps you from compiling it, distributing the binary (together with the sourcecode) and then &lt;em&gt;trying to make sure that only this binary can connect to your server.&lt;/em&gt; FLOSS does not require you to open up the API to just everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highlighted part in the previous paragraph is no different for FLOSS than non-FLOSS. You work with whatever mechanism you can think of - certificates etc.; it gets slightly harder because attackers have your source code, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; having the source code has never kept any attacker away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use any of the existing protection schemes with your FLOSS binary. Say, you distribute your binary via Steam - the fact that it is open source does not change anything about whatever binary protection Steam has. An attacker modifying and recompiling your source is no different at all than an attacker disassembling your binary and modifying it with a low level editor (ignoring effort).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take it further, FLOSS does not even keep you from taking money for offering the game servers. It does not keep you from having your game assets (graphics, map design, music, sounds, stories, quests - whatever) under a more restrictive or even closed license. This means you can easily make a great FLOSS source base for client/server MMOs or whatever, and still give everyone the opportunity to a) recuperate the cost of running the servers etc. and b) make it possible for games to charge money in general (for example, to pay a staff to create content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T09:24:18.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4469" CreationDate="2016-09-13T12:55:09.520" Score="1" ViewCount="2528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use FFmpeg in commercial software using its LGPL licence without enabling the GPL add-on. However, the libavformat library allows decoding for a lot of codecs straight out of the box. These are third party codecs so probably won't be the same LGPL licence. Are these embedded codecs ok to use in my application to keep it LGPL compliant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6161" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T19:12:26.287" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T19:12:26.287" Title="FFmpeg LGPL licence and embedded codecs" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4468" CreationDate="2016-09-13T14:50:33.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are third party codecs so probably won't be the same LGPL licence. Are these embedded codecs ok to use in my application to keep it LGPL compliant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I configure FFmpeg to use third-party codecs that are GPL-licensed, then FFmpeg &quot;declares&quot; itself as GPL-licensed as a result of activating these configuration options, either GPL 2 or GPL 3 depending on the third-party codecs. The same applies for built-in extensions that would be subject to the GPL. And if there is no GPL-licensed extensions, FFmpeg declares it self as LGPL-licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This configuration process is not guaranteed to be foolproof and I should check for any third-party codecs I depend on (for instance by inspecting the generated config or by checking the required shared objects in the build Elfs using readelf) and checking their actual license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple rule I apply is that the copyleft of the GPL flows up to my code when I build or use code that depends on GPL-licensed code (at least when linking is at play). More details on dependencies and licensing are  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc/4315#4315&quot;&gt;explained here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, irrespective of the resulting (and verified) license of a certain configuration of FFmpeg, I need to consider eventual patent licenses for using certain codecs for some purposes, in particular if I project to use this in a commercial software product. This needs to be reviewed codec-by-codec and I would handle this with the assistance of a lawyer. This involves possibly contacting several patent holders such as Mpeg-LA and can be a long and painful process. FFmpeg does not hold these patents and therefore cannot licenses these to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally and for reference, FFmpeg publishes a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;decent FAQ&lt;/a&gt; including a &quot;License Compliance Checklist&quot;: its first two items are the most important wrt building an LGPL-configured FFmpeg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; 1. Compile FFmpeg without &quot;--enable-gpl&quot; and without &#xA;    &quot;--enable-nonfree&quot;.&#xA; 2. Use dynamic linking (on windows, this means linking to dlls) &#xA;    for linking with FFmpeg libraries. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-13T14:50:33.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4464" CreationDate="2016-09-13T14:58:43.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This version is distributed under the triple license of the MPL, the LGPL, and the Apache License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... means that I can chose anyone of these three licenses (but not all of them).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Long question short: Do I have to redistribute further files (license text, ...) when using a Javassist .jar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all three cases, there is some least common denominator that I need to respect. To make things simple I would redistribute the license text and any notice together with the Jar for the license I select (even though technically not all three licenses require exactly the same thing) and I would mention usage of this Jar in my documentation of about page if present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this credit requirement, If I elect for the MPL or LGPL, I need to be able to redistribute the source code (though this is more relaxed for MPL) which would be an extra requirement that the Apache license-code does not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, older versions of Javassist were using choice of only two licenses: either LGPL or MPL. And the common understanding was the LGPL would apply when Javassist was used as a dependency for an LGPL-licensed library (such as JBoss or Hibernate) and that the choice of MPL or LGPL would apply otherwise.  This is something I keep in mind when I use Javassist as it may guide my choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-09-14T09:57:32.587" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T09:57:32.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-13T23:16:35.827" Score="10" ViewCount="834" Body="&lt;p&gt;A (hypothetical) company owns two webservers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;server &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;,  runs &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;GPL licensed software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;server &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;, runs &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;roprietery software and acts as a reverse&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;roxy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now server A is blocked from the public and only responds to requests from server P.&#xA;Server P is public and echo's web requests to server A. Then serves the response from A to the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Server P sometimes changes or enhances the pages, sometimes serves them as they are, and may serve some pages on its own (without depending on A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the company makes changes to the AGPL software on server A,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it then legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the company need to release the changes it made back to the community?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've searched and so far only found &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/50118/avoid-gpl-violation-by-moving-library-out-of-process&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which is somewhat analogous, but very different.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6191" OwnerDisplayName="CodeKid" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T07:32:00.247" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T14:23:16.160" Title="AGPL violation using reverse proxy?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4449" CreationDate="2016-09-14T04:51:09.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's almost impossible to verify that the client is not lying to you.  Existing client-side cheat-detection systems have a limited lifetime against determined hackers.  (It's like an arms race.)  The only way I think it might be possible would be to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;DRM&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to execute secret code on the client (and pass secret hashes) that cannot be emulated (faked) by a cheater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you aren't going to take that route, there are still some things you can do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Track unique players and demand investment&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Require an initial investment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from the player, such as a unique Facebook or Google account, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;captcha&lt;/a&gt; and email address.  Require them to always use that account to play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you later find them to be cheating, you can &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;ban that account&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and they will lose any items, experience, stats and reputation associated with it.  They would then have to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;start from scratch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with a new initial investment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, all brand new (0-day) players can be considered low-trust until they have &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;invested some time/effort&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in playing.  Low-trust players could have certain limitations (e.g. reduce spammers by limiting messages per second).  StackOverflow uses a similar mechanism: privileges increase as reputation/experience builds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This won't stop all cheaters immediately in their tracks, but it will increase the costs/risks associated with cheating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Segment players according to their ranking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Track players to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;establish their skill level&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and have them play in arenas with players of a similar ranking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bots&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with unrealistically high performance will simply &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;end up playing each other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This won't prevent the cheaters from using your server, but it will keep them away from the regular players.  (Or at least indistinguishable from regular players.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One side-advantage of this is that new players will not have to face up against strong players until they have learned the game and their skill level has improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's a disadvantage if you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; strong and weak players to play side-by-side or against each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3948" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T04:51:09.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4471" CreationDate="2016-09-14T10:33:15.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, there is no such reference to proxy/proxying being mentioned in the AGPL, so whether or not a proxy is used in the chain that allows an external user to access features of an AGPL-licensed package does not make much of a difference to me. For instance network traffic will likely go through several routers and proxies even if I am not using a fronting proxy myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this legal [when used unmodified]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is no reason why this would not be OK. But I guess the implied question may be &lt;strong&gt;what should I do then to comply with the AGPL?&lt;/strong&gt;. If there is any notice or link or mechanism in the original software that ends up in the packets that I proxy, I would keep these and make these available to my end users in a way that is equivalent to a non-proxied access. I would also (though it is not a clear requirement when the code is used unmodified) provide some credits notice and the license text of the AGPL in the UI of my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the company makes changes to the AGPL software on server A,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Is it then legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.Does the company need to release the changes it made back to the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was OK before and it is still OK now: proxying does not have any impact IMHO. But the modification of the AGPLv3-licensed code will likely trigger the extra requirements of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Remote Network Interaction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[...] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all&#xA;users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version&#xA;supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source&#xA;of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network&#xA;server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating&#xA;copying of software.[...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, and again IMHO irrespective of proxying, I would notify my users of the modifications (in addition to what I was doing without the mods as explained above) and I would provide them with a mechanism to get access to source code that includes my modifications, most likely with a link to download an archive of the corresponding source code. Here I would not worry about the community at large (though it would be a nice thing to do) but instead ensure that my users have access to this download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as a follow up. In the Preamble of the AGPL it is said: Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version. Since in this example server A is not publicly accessible, wouldn't allow this the hypothetical company to keep it's changes for itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL &amp;quot;Preamble&amp;quot; is not part of the T&amp;amp;C but is not something to ignore entirely. Yet this is a different context we have here: say I use a modified version of MongoDB strictly internally in my organization: I have no special obligations IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this becomes available externally outside my organization, such as to a customer this is no longer internal use, even if this is not &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; use in the sense that only my customers can access it and not the &amp;quot;general public&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T14:23:16.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2016-09-14T10:49:45.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the most concise unambiguous way to represent dual licensing of a work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be using the SPDX &quot;license expression&quot; syntax as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf#page=81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPDX 2.0 spec&lt;/a&gt; in &quot;Appendix IV: SPDX License Expressions&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A common example is when software is offered under a choice of &#xA;one or more licenses (e.g., GPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would use this way and ideally use this with SPDX license &lt;a href=&quot;http://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;identifiers&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders of SPDX.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T10:49:45.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2527" CreationDate="2016-09-14T11:04:43.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the images are mostly under the Apache licence. One is LGPL, and two of them are under the MIT licence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not make a confusion between the license of the Dockerfile and the license of the resulting images/image layers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Dockerfile can use any license, the resulting image license will be likely more complex and based on the actual code that a whole exported image archive contains: you need to consider the whole stack of layers in that image, irrespective of the license of the Dockerfile and you cannot look only at the license of the top layers of your images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if your image is based on Debian image and that you redistribute that image, you effectively redistribute a whole Linux environment in (mostly) binary form. The licenses in play are many and each have different requirements and will likely include L/GPL 2 and 3, several variants of BSD and MIT, Apache and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect, when you redistribute a Docker image archive, you become a Linux distributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most licenses, you would need to provide some credits: while this is typically well handled by Debian distros, you are still obligated to ensure this is comprehensive and correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any copyleft-license that require source code redistribution, you will need to ensure that you offer and can redistribute the &quot;corresponding source code&quot; including and not limited to the Linux kernel, the userland, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any layer contains only code using permissive licenses (say if a layer contains an ELK stack that you verified to be all Apache-licensed) you only need to comply with the requirements of the licenses of that layer for that specific layer, but you still need to comply with the license terms for the whole image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you publish that image on the Docker hub or if you redistribute this image privately to your customers, your obligations stay the same (though their visibility is higher when published on the Docker hub). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, to conform to the licensing agreements, is it as simple as packaging a license document with the image or is there another method?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a high level there are two things you need to do to comply with open source licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;attribution and credits composed typically of the notices, copyrights and license texts&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;redistribution of source code for code that use a copyleft license (such as L/GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including 1. in the image makes a lot of sense and is the simplest way. You need to be careful though as some &quot;official&quot; images are stripped from the original notices and license texts to make the image smaller (as for instance the CentOS images... (tst, tst) that used to be until recently missing even a basic GPL license text (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CentOS/sig-cloud-instance-images/issues/34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this ticket for details&lt;/a&gt; and the code that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CentOS/sig-cloud-instance-build/blob/69b7a7279398ab8f35e4816b2e0f63eaf94dcb54/docker/centos-6.ks#L81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deleted licenses here&lt;/a&gt;). You could also include in the image and other docs how to get the corresponding sources (for 2.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For 2. including the sources in the image is likely to be problematic size-wise. You could instead carefully inventory all the open source packages and code that are included in &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; layers of your images and then carefully collect the corresponding source code for all of these and make these available as a separate tarball, ideally at the same time a user would download my custom images. And eventually you could automate this process such that it happens on each re-build on your images. To make things simpler you could include the source code of &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; open source third-party code used in your images, even if some do not require source code redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T16:57:48.460" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T16:57:48.460" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4471" CreationDate="2016-09-14T11:18:48.300" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll first discuss the case that the proxy is a transparent proxy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not prevent you from running AGPL software behind a proxy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proxy is completely independent from the AGPL software, and they do not form one combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, users that make requests to your servers do interact with the AGPL software, even if their requests go through the proxy. If you modify the AGPL software, the AGPL section 13 comes into effect and you have to offer the Corresponding Source to all users (= end users) of your system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network […] an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source […] from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In your case, the proxy isn't a transparent proxy.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its ability to route requests either to the AGPL server or to the internal web server is unproblematic, and does not seem to change the setup significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your proprietary “proxy” may also manipulate the requests and responses to/from the AGPL server. We now have to consider whether these manipulations mean that the proprietary server is “linked” or “combined” with the AGPL software, in which case this setup would violate the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simple transformations of the content such as compression are certainly OK.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Simple changes to the content such as injecting tracking codes or ads are possibly OK, since these changes do not depend on the AGPL software – they would work just as well with any other server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this would be start to be unethical from a FSF-perspective. This would infringe on the user's freedom to study the software. Given the AGPL server's Corresponding Source, the user would be unable to understand how the server response they got had been created since changes were performed by the proprietary server. Of course, this ethical aspect is not part of the actual AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires further consideration. I think this usage is likely to be compatible with the AGPL, but that the user is still interacting with the AGPL software, thus triggering the AGPL section 13 provisions as soon as you make changes to the AGPL server.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Substantial changes to the content or extra interaction between the proprietary server and the AGPL server make your setup appear as a single application to an end user. It is unlikely that the proprietary software performing these changes would be useful without the AGPL software, opening up the possibility that it is somehow “linked” to the AGPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires a lot of further consideration. I think this depends on how much the proprietary server does. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2783/1212&quot;&gt;How does the AGPL affect Microservices?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the proprietary server effectively offer an independent application? In that case, it's OK if it uses the AGPL server as a data source or service. Since any communication between the two servers happens over HTTP requests, they operate “at arms length” and do not form a single program. This setup seems compatible with the license. Example: a web app using the AGPL-licensed MongoDB database on their backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the proprietary server just a thin layer over the AGPL server? Does the proprietary application embed parts of the AGPL application in itself, or embed itself into the AGPL application? This effectively still allows direct communication between the end user and the AGPL software. In that case, I would argue they form a single application that must be made available in its entirely to the end user under the AGPL, even if the back end consists of multiple processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that the GPL licenses do not apply to the output of a program, but they do apply to user interfaces offered by a program. Combining user interfaces therefore creates a derivative work. For web applications, there may be some wiggle room since the front end running in the end user's browser and back end running on your servers are separate processes. E.g. it might be possible to create a combined front end which remains covered by the AGPL, but which communicates with both the proprietary server, and the AGPL server through the proxy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each of these distinct cases (transparent proxy, minor changes, derivative user interface, independent application) you'll have to sort out which case applies to which aspect of your setup. Preferably with legal counsel. you will have to think about the functionality of your proprietary server very carefully. It's not problematic that your setup has multiple of these aspects, as you can manage licensing for each case separately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-14T11:18:48.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-14T12:13:31.063" Score="2" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each generated java file has this header comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// This file was generated by the JavaTM Architecture for XML Binding(JAXB) Reference Implementation, v2.2.8-b130911.1802 &#xA;// See &amp;lt;a href=&quot;http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxb&quot;&amp;gt;http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxb&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt; &#xA;// Any modifications to this file will be lost upon recompilation of the source schema. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whole scenario: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; xml schema(input) -&amp;gt; jaxb library -&amp;gt; java class(output) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jaxb generates java class files based out of the input given to them via xml schema file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generated class file has the above mentioned comments on the top. Rest of the lines contains normal java code that is generated as per the inputs defined in the xml schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no comments related to license apart from the above mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jaxb has dual license cddl + lgpl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether the license of jaxb applies to my generated files as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6181" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-30T20:11:52.860" LastActivityDate="2016-10-30T20:11:52.860" Title="Does the license of jaxb apply to the java class files it autogenerated?" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4482" CreationDate="2016-09-15T01:49:47.893" Score="11" ViewCount="1591" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, choosing GPL licence for library does not permits use of it in proprietary programs as opposed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So releasing my library (or code classes), I'm forcing people to use them only in free programs, is that right? Is it including myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, as owner of the libraries, can I break these requirements/terms of the licence and use it in proprietary programs against the GPL terms and sell the proprietary program which is using my own GPL libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2900/407&quot;&gt;Licence for open-source code which is part of proprietary code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is not exactly duplicate, since this question is very specific about GPL and whether you can break you own terms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1459/407&quot;&gt;Proprietary software using GPL modules&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="407" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T12:56:36.057" Title="As owner of GPL library, can I break the licensing terms?" Tags="|gpl|multi-licensing|proprietary-code|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4481" CreationDate="2016-09-15T07:52:42.940" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes indeed, as the sole author (copyright owner) of a library, you are not bound by the terms you choose to license it to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus you can use it in your own proprietary programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why you can dual-license, re-license the work or sell commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you must be very careful that you really are the sole copyright owner. As soon as you accept contributions, these contributions are licensed to you under the GPL license and you must respect the license to use the version of the library that contains such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be able to continue using the library with external contributions without following the terms of the license you need to require your contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which will contain specific wording describing what you can do with their contributions. In this case, you will be bound by this agreement instead of the license. But be careful how the CLA is written: it could scare off some contributors; and if it is not written with the help of a lawyer, it might not do what you want...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T07:52:42.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4489" CreationDate="2016-09-15T14:35:29.667" Score="5" ViewCount="1171" Body="&lt;p&gt;My programm is using the java drivers of mongodb which are licensed with AGPL 3. I heard there are some licenses which aren't compatible with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use some libs which are licensed with GPL or LGPL, can I use them in the same project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which licenses can I use for the project itself if some libs are licensed under GPL, LGPL &amp;amp; AGPL? Are there any compatibility problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6190" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-09-18T18:56:42.120" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T18:56:42.120" Title="Which licenses can I use?" Tags="|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4484" CreationDate="2016-09-15T15:43:36.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use both LGPL and AGPL code, provided that you &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; to them. The GPL and AGPL both include exceptions allowing linking to code under the other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the LGPL specifically aims to allow linking. As long as you're not copying code (and assuming all the projects can be distributed under (A/L)GPLv3), the project as a whole will be under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this table&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastActivityDate="2016-09-15T15:43:36.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4487" CreationDate="2016-09-16T07:50:49.843" Score="0" ViewCount="1620" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently building a website for a small, local soccer club. I'm building it, based on a template of &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;html5up.net/&lt;/a&gt;. As far as I know, their only requirement for doing so is that I give them credit. I do that, at the bottom of every page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was wondering which license I should add to this website, to be safe? I was thinking about &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;? If I remember correctly, it allows others to use my code, so long as their products are open source and use the same license. Do I need to mention this license somewhere specific on the site, or is a README file on GitHub sufficient? If possible, I'd rather not clutter the site with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what do I do with the copyrights disclaimer? On default, the template of Html5up says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;© Untitled. All rights reserved&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I replace Untitled by my own name? Or the one of the soccer club? I would like my own name to be credited, to be perfectly honest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3765" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-16T11:56:07.013" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T20:40:01.783" Title="What license to use and how to handle copyright disclaimer?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4486" CreationDate="2016-09-16T08:37:59.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what you mean by &quot;to be safe&quot;, but assuming that you mean safe as in using the templates without violating the license under which they are available to you, you can pick any license you want for your own work as long as you credit HTML5 UP as stated here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://html5up.net/license&lt;/a&gt;. I believe you doing this on the bottom of every page is quite enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright line in the templates is for you to add your own copyright statement. Unless you have some agreement with the soccer club forcing you to use their name for any work you do for them or something like that you can use your own name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use GPL for your website source, here's how to do it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T08:37:59.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4484" CreationDate="2016-09-16T09:31:40.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Which license can I use?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When modifying a code under AGPL 3.0, or including it into a larger work, the resulting code must be distributed, as a whole under AGPL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Are there compatibility problems?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends under which version of the (L)GPL the libraries you want to use are licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL and GPL 3.0 are essentially the same license (plus an additional exception in LGPL) and, as remarked by @EMBLEM, they contain a provision which allows combination with AGPL code: the resulting combination is then governed by the terms of the AGPL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a library is licensed under the GPL 2.0 (and not &quot;at your option, any later version&quot;), then any modified code or larger work must remain under the terms of this license. Thus, it is not compatible with AGPL code. But the FSF reminds (in the text of the license itself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a library is licensed under the LGPL 2.1  (and not &quot;at your option, any later version&quot;), then it contains a provision to relicense code under GPL.&#xA;To use the library in your program, you must follow this provision to relicense it under GPL 3.0 and then you can use it in your larger work as mentionned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T09:31:40.550" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4486" CreationDate="2016-09-16T20:40:01.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The templates available on HTML5UP &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;are licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0 License&lt;/a&gt;. That means that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can use the templates for any purpose, including personal and commercial ventures;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can modify the templates however you need to;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can sublicense the templates to users of your modified work;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must give appropriate attribution to HTML5UP - this means a visible text blurb saying that your work is based on X template from HTML5UP, with a link back to the template.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're free to choose whatever license you wish to. I would suggest the &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; for your code, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; licenses for your textual content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the copyright statement, you should replace &lt;code&gt;Untitled&lt;/code&gt; with the name of &lt;strong&gt;whoever owns the copyright&lt;/strong&gt; to the resulting work. If you designed, built and wrote the website without being under contract to the soccer club, that's you. If you did the work under any type of contract, you may find that the contract stipulated that the copyright in the final work would be owned by the club. In that case, you would need to put the soccer club's &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; entity name. Ask someone at the club to tell you what this is, if you don't know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a lawyer and cannot dispense true legal advice. If you require advice on legal matters, don't trust random strangers on the Internet - consult a copyright or open-source lawyer for your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-09-16T20:40:01.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-16T21:56:00.133" Score="7" ViewCount="2046" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m using Maven to package my JavaFX project for distribution. Since JavaFX is licensed under LGPL, I need to allow users of my project to replace its DLLs by newer or compatible versions. But I don’t understand where the DLLs are placed in the resulting folder or how a user of my package can replace the DLLs. I use the terminal commands &lt;code&gt;mvn clean compile&lt;/code&gt;  and &lt;code&gt;mvn package&lt;/code&gt; which creates a folder of jars at &lt;code&gt;target/app&lt;/code&gt; but no DLLs are found, just library jars (program executes fine). I’ve added the DLL’s to maven’s local repo using &lt;code&gt;mvn install:install-file -Dfile=C:\jacob-1.18-M2-x86.dll -DgroupId=jacob -DartifactId=jacob-dll  -Dversion=4.2 -Dpackaging=dll -DgeneratePom=true&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are no DLLs found, and how can users &lt;em&gt;freely switch&lt;/em&gt; them for new versions, which is required for my program to fulfill the terms of LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7120" OwnerDisplayName="JimJim" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T19:22:09.857" Title="How to comply to LGPL with Maven/JAR packages?" Tags="|java|lgpl|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1196" CreationDate="2016-09-18T14:20:47.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is a bit convoluted and I don't claim to understand all of the subtleties.  I think the answer is, essentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, you cannot copyright clothing designs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you can copyright design patterns, as they are pictures or design files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/register/va-useful.html&quot;&gt;copyright.gov&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A “useful article” is an object having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. Examples are clothing, furniture, machinery, dinnerware, and lighting fixtures. An article that is normally part of a useful article may itself be a useful article, for example, an ornamental wheel cover on a vehicle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object. Thus, a useful article may have both copyrightable and uncopyrightable features. For example, a carving on the back of a chair or a floral relief design on silver flatware could be protected by copyright, but the design of the chair or flatware itself could not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some designs of useful articles may qualify for protection under the federal patent law. For further information, contact the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, P.O. Box 1450, Alexandria, VA 22313-1450 or via the Internet at www.uspto.gov. The telephone number is 1-800-786-9199 and the TTY number is (571) 272-9950. The automated information line is (571) 272-1000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright in a work that portrays a useful article extends only to the artistic expression of the author of the pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. It does not extend to the design of the article that is portrayed. For example, a drawing or photograph of an automobile or a dress design may be copyrighted, but that does not give the artist or photographer the exclusive right to make automobiles or dresses of the same design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/can_you_copyright_clothing_designs&quot;&gt;New Media Rights&lt;/a&gt; has an article discussing the core issue, which is whether the object in question has a &quot;utilitarian function&quot; or not.  If it does, such as clothing, then (afaik, for the most part) it is not eligible for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, as the above article from copyright.gov and New Media Rights suggest, other works surrounding the clothing object might be subject to copyright.  For example, the &quot;design files&quot; in the form of a PDF or picture of the patterns used to create the clothing object can fall under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source Hardware has this same issue, as electronic circuits themselves cannot be copyrighted but all of the design files, tutorials, code, etc. surrounding it can be.  The Open Source Hardware Association has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oshwa.org/definition/&quot;&gt;definition of what constitutes &quot;open source hardware&quot;&lt;/a&gt; that discusses these points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the empirical issue of whether there are actually any clothing design files that exist in the wild that would be considered &quot;open source&quot; (e.g. copyleft), as Glenn Randers-Perhson points out, there is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.silverseams.com/opensource/&quot;&gt;silverstream's plush sewing patterns&lt;/a&gt; but I've had a hard time finding any other resources.  I can only speculate as to why free/libre/open/copyleft ideas don't seem to be as prevalent in the fashion industry as some others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastActivityDate="2016-09-18T14:20:47.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4494" CreationDate="2016-09-19T06:33:05.227" Score="8" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a D-Link DIR-816 router that runs a 'trimmed-down' version of BusyBox v1.12.1 running a linux kernel version 2.6.36 (linsongdeng@gj222d.gj.com) (gcc version 3.4.2) #35 Wed Sep 23 17:23:58 CST 2015&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say 'un-modifyable' and 'trimmed-down' because amongst other that aren't present, there is no way (that I can see) in which I can install other programs or modify anything other than configurations. This is because it does not have a package manager (dpkg, rpm etc.) or any of the make utilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is that in any way a violation of GPLv2 ? If not, is it one under GPLv3 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6220" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T09:47:00.787" Title="Is an 'un-modifiable' linux a violation of GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4493" CreationDate="2016-09-19T08:18:54.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the main differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is the so called &quot;anti Tivoization clause&quot;, meant to prevent &quot;Tivoization&quot;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tivoization: Some companies have created various different kinds of devices that run GPLed software, and then rigged the hardware so that they can change the software that's running, but you cannot. If a device can run arbitrary software, it's a general-purpose computer, and its owner should control what it does. When a device thwarts you from doing that, we call that tivoization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the relevant part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;GPLv3 license itself&lt;/a&gt;, from section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Installation Information&quot; for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the question: No, the router software being un-modifiable is not a violation of GPLv2 (you should still have access to the source code, of course) while it could be a violation if Busybox and/or the Linux Kernel were GPLv3 licensed. In this hypothetical GPLv3 case the router manufacturer would violate the GPLv3 if they could modify the software of your router while you couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T09:47:00.787" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T09:47:00.787" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4497" CreationDate="2016-09-20T15:15:31.573" Score="7" ViewCount="5431" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the implications of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;glibc&lt;/a&gt;? The library is installed on most GNU/Linux systems (and maybe others, don't know). The thing is it is supposedly licensed with LGPL, but I am not sure which version (their website, unlike other free software projects, is ambigous about it). Anyways I have am slightly worried about the implications of it. Firstly: the LGPL supposedly allows commercial projects. It places however some restrictions on the programs that use it. Since every program written in C uses standard library functions (or not every but most), then it would mean that somehow linking the program with the library makes the program bound by LGPL license. What if glibc had LGPL v3 license, at least for some files. In this case, would my program be susceptible IN ANY WAY to the restrictions against &amp;quot;tivoization&amp;quot;? I hope my understaning of this issue is wrong and LGPL does not apply to any part of my program whatsoever, even if I use standard C lib functions in my software. I would be glad for clarification of this issue, even if it seems stupid for some of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T08:30:37.373" Title="What are the implications of glibc (GNU C Library)" Tags="|lgpl|gnu|operating-system|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2016-09-20T18:05:27.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the normal circumstances that your question present (i.e. dynamic linking to a library assumed to exist on the user's system and thus not distributed with the program) the following part of the license text will save the day for any program using glibc: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a “work that uses the Library”. Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2016-09-20T18:11:24.353" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T18:11:24.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-20T20:58:20.770" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a closed-source project. I am the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I incorporate parts from my closed-source project into an open-source project without running into legal issues commercially using my closed-source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the part incorporated into the open-source project would be a derivative of a small part of the closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2220" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T22:56:16.357" Title="Incorporating closed-source derivative into GPL code" Tags="|gpl-3|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4498" CreationDate="2016-09-20T22:56:16.357" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole author of the entire closed-source project, then nothing prevents you from extracting a part of the project and releasing that under another license, either as a new standalone project or incorporated into another project.  This would have no effect on the licensing status of your closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standard IANAL/TINLA disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2016-09-20T22:56:16.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4360" CreationDate="2016-09-21T01:29:03.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is the answer I got from FSF, with small edits. Answer was provided by a volunteer with &lt;strong&gt;&quot;[this] is not legal advice&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;GPL-ed JS is used with other JS without cross calls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Javascript software licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL is served&#xA;from the same document alongside an independent Javascript work is may&#xA;be the case that the two would be considered in mere aggregation (see:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;). Whether or&#xA;not this is the case would be a matter of looking at particulars; it is&#xA;impossible to provide you with a blanket statement that would cover all&#xA;conceivable cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms of the GNU GPL require that the source code for an executable&#xA;be made available in one of the ways the GPL permits. If the Javascript&#xA;is minified or obfuscated the GPL would require that the corresponding&#xA;source code be made available. This is also very useful in cases where&#xA;multiple Javascript libraries are being served minified and concatenated&#xA;into a single document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF has written a guide to releasing your Javascript as free&#xA;software, available here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;GPL-ed JS extends the DOM/core functionality; extended functionality is used, but no direct calls are made.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the template code on the server and the Javascript are specifically&#xA;designed for each other they may be considered mutually derivative&#xA;works. The FAQ explains this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;GPL-ed JS is called by other JS, from within HTML file or separate script; does the origin of calling JS makes difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same rules apply in this situation as when one body of code makes a&#xA;function call into another. Javascript is capable of making such calls&#xA;as well as any other language. Whether or not they would produce a&#xA;derivative is a matter of how the software was designed and what it is&#xA;doing exactly when it makes the call (see the &quot;mere aggregation&quot; link&#xA;above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;GPL-ed JS is used in web page without any calls; is HTML/CSS bound by GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to write Javascript code which is strongly bound to a&#xA;particular HTML document. The Javascript code in this case would have&#xA;hard-coded references to parts of the HTML document and would rely on&#xA;that document's particular structure to work. This would be a strong&#xA;indication that the Javascript and the document should be considered a&#xA;single work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is also possible to call generically written Javascript from a&#xA;document and pass information to that Javascript using a&#xA;well-established public API. This would be an indication that the works&#xA;may be considered separate. The answer would be dependent on an analysis&#xA;of the particular case at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does FSF's point of view coincides with Mozilla's in that minified/obfuscated JS is not source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF's view is codified in the terms of the GNU GPL. The GPL defines&#xA;source code as the preferred form for making modifications to the&#xA;work. This obviously excludes all forms of obfuscated or unreadable&#xA;code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also recommend reading:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T01:29:03.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4496" CreationDate="2016-09-21T08:30:37.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever the glibc license is, it implements, as you note, standard C lib functions. That is, it implements a standard API. Consequently, a program which uses functions from the library (without modifying the library) cannot be considered a derivative work of the library (because you could replace the library by any other implementation of the same standard API).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you bundled the library along with your program and distributed the whole, you would still be bound by some of the terms of the license, but if you just assume the user's system has a standard C lib and dynamic link to it (as suggested by @MansGunnarsson), then you are not bound by any of these terms (whatever they may be). So the question of the license being LGPL, GPL or proprietary does not matter anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T08:30:37.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:06:21.947" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a company wants to use an application that is the BSD licence with this text below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;  * Neither the name of the &amp;lt;organization&amp;gt; nor the&#xA;    names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;    derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &quot;AS IS&quot;&#xA;AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE&#xA;IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&#xA;ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt; BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;&#xA;LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial company wants to use the source code in binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have understood correctly based on the text above and my question is:&#xA;*Do you need to contact the author in order to use the source code, in binary form, for a commercial product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6238" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T22:20:49.283" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T22:20:49.283" Title="Usage of the previous BSD in a commercial product?" Tags="|distribution|commercial|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-11-10T18:45:07.450" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4628" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:26:51.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you do not need to contact the author. You automatically have a license to use the software in commerical products as long as the three conditions listed are met. Those conditions do not say anything about contacting the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2016-09-21T12:28:16.887" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:28:16.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T15:28:34.253" Score="4" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a product includes a firmware written by my company, and this firmware makes use of an open source product, licenced under Apache 2.0 license, and this product is finally to be sold on a broad market (households), ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Am I oblidged to give a copy of the license to the end customer? If yes, in what form? Written paper delivered together with the device, on the LCD display during FW runup, ... ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) What about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that &#xA;You changed the files&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means, I would have to inform the end-customer about changes I did on the original software files? The customer doesn't get the changed files, just the final product, including object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6243" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T15:41:07.290" Title="Apache 2.0 Licence" Tags="|apache-2.0|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4504" CreationDate="2016-09-21T15:41:07.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I oblidged to give a copy of the license to the end customer? If yes, in what form? Written paper delivered together with the device, on the LCD display during FW runup, ... ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Section 4 states that when you distribute a work that is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, you must give the recipients a copy of the license. It doesn't matter how you distribute the licensed work (as source files, a compiled binary) or if you have made modifications to the Apache-licensed source code. You also need to carry along any copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the license and make those visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the license does not specify the format of providing the license. For example, looking at some Android apps, they have a &quot;credits&quot; screen that allows the user to see the various open source components they use, the author name(s), and licenses. Some desktop applications do this, too. If your product doesn't have user interactions, you could include this information in the box on a user's manual or flash it to an output screen on boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing that you'll find to guidance is Section 4.d. If the source form has a NOTICE file, you need to carry along the information in the NOTICE file. That may be in a NOTICE file as well, or it could be &quot;whereever such third-party notices normally appear&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would have to inform the end-customer about changes I did on the original software files? The customer doesn't get the changed files, just the final product, including object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your source files need to have a notice that the original files were licensed under Apache License 2.0 and have been modified by you (or, since it's likely that your company holds the copyright to the modifications, by your company). If you aren't distributing your source files, then your customers will never see this notice, and that's OK. It's for people who have source code access to understand that parts of the software are Apache licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T15:41:07.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4508" CreationDate="2016-09-21T16:01:25.053" Score="10" ViewCount="886" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I'm handling licenses and could use some guidance in this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have developed a piece of Java software where parts of the code is derived from different classes licensed with the MIT license but different copyright holders. The plan is to upload it to GitHub as open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I apply to my software? Am I bound to use the MIT License when parts of the code is derived from MIT licensed software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is one of the MIT licenses from where I have derived code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2004-2010, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Kohsuke Kawaguchi,&#xA;  Eric Lefevre-Ardant, Erik Ramfelt, Michael B. Donohue, Alan Harder,&#xA;  Manufacture Francaise des Pneumatiques Michelin, Romain Seguy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the MIT license, should I add the names from the copyright in the above license into my new license? I feel I should acknowledge the use of their code in some way, so is having my name + their names in the copyright enough or should I do it in some other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6242" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:33:10.633" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T12:52:46.427" Title="What license do I apply to my software if parts of its code is derived from MIT licensed open source software?" Tags="|copyright|mit|combined-work|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4506" CreationDate="2016-09-21T18:22:49.927" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license doesn't &quot;bind&quot; you to use the MIT license for your application, but it's a simple way to comply with the license if you haven't got pressing reasons to use another license.  Yes, all you need to do is to add your own copyright line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The MIT License&#xA;&#xA; Copyright (c) 2016 Preyfix&#xA; Copyright (c) 2004-2010, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Kohsuke Kawaguchi...&#xA; Permission is hereby granted...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have only incorporated some small amount of code from another MIT project, you could write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; The MIT License&#xA;&#xA; Copyright (c) 2016 Your Name&#xA; Portions Copyright (c) 2014 Snippet Author&#xA; Permission is hereby granted...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see any mention of the phrase &quot;Portions Copyright...&quot; in US copyright law, but Google turns up nearly a million instances of the phrase, so it's commonly used.  I've also seen a few (about 300) instances of &quot;Significant Portions Copyright...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-09T12:52:46.427" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T12:52:46.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4513" CreationDate="2016-09-21T21:22:06.570" Score="3" ViewCount="3907" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan on creating a new project under Apache 2.0 license, and I want to use js, css, fonts, and image files in the public folder of this repository (which is under Apache 2.0): &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache license directs me to keep original copyright notice in files, but I am not sure what to do when there isn’t one already. The js and css files in public folder, as well as fonts and images, do not contain copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean I cannot use these files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can use those files, should I include the copyright notice myself, copying over from other files that do contain one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6249" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T09:28:09.560" Title="Can I use code under Apache 2.0 license that does not originally contain copyright notice?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-22T02:37:41.823" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a web app that is currently open source (MIT) and I would like to keep it that way. To date it's been a hobby thing but I'd like to be able to spend more time on it (I have a 1 year old) so I'd like to find a way to fold it into the consulting business at which I'm a worker &amp;amp; owner.&#xA;How do I make the case to my company that this is a worthwhile investment? I'm curious in particular about the open source piece (I know that getting traction with an app is not easy but that's a separate discussion). What if we release the app and it takes off, but then some folks decide they don't want to pay and they set up their own instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are real costs involved in supporting and maintaining a web app. But support and maintenance are different than funding new feature development, and this is what I'm curious about. Feature dev costs a lot of money. We are not interested in rent-seeking (earning more than the cost of the services we provide plus a modest profit), but we don't want to get undercut and lose our shirt either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say it legitimately costs $1k/month to just keep the app running and answer customer questions. Then let's say we need to spend $5k/month on feature dev. If we charge our users enough to cover the $1k + $5k + a modest profit, what's to stop someone else from setting up their own instance (open source!), charging just enough to cover the $1k in support costs, and simply slurping up every new release our people push to master?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this why folks like GitLab are &quot;open core&quot;, but keep certain feature sets proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do folks like Discourse, who are totally open source, make it work? In fact I see that there is discoursehosting.com which sells instances starting at $20/mo while Discourse themselves charge $100/mo. Why does anyone pay the $100? I am baffled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6250" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T06:42:15.360" Title="How to build a business around an open source project?" Tags="|monetization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-09-30T11:36:17.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4516" CreationDate="2016-09-22T05:50:13.243" Score="3" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;MPL &amp;amp; CC-BY-SA both allow putting only a small license statement to place I deem fit. But both of them use &quot;this&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This&lt;/strong&gt; Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This&lt;/strong&gt; work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not risking rephrasing the notes because I don't know if it's allowed (in MPL case it seems hardcoded), even though I want to. Is it OK to put it all into a &lt;strong&gt;separate&lt;/strong&gt; file stating something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For source code: [MPL note]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For non source code: [CC note]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;implying that MPL is for all source code files and CC is for the rest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-09-22T07:10:08.473" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T22:11:00.760" Title="Is it OK to put license note that uses &quot;this code/file/work&quot; into a separate file?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-notice|license-file|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4514" CreationDate="2016-09-22T06:29:32.463" Score="8" ViewCount="4164" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the exact format to combine multiple LICENSE notes from different projects into a single file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific project is Python binding for OpenCV. The binding itself is MIT licensed, OpenCV is BSD and there is OpenCV dependency on FFMPEG, which is LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6053" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:33:30.597" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T13:33:30.597" Title="How to combine multiple LICENSE notes into single file?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|combined-work|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4509" CreationDate="2016-09-22T07:50:46.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From reading the documentation on the site it seems that the author intends everything to be Apache 2.0 licensed, so if you agree with that conclusion you can use the files even if they lack an explicit license header. I would suggest that you, in the documentation/license information of your own project, clarify that you are using file x, y and z from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe something not too far from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project uses source code from the files x.js, y.js and z.css from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversation-simple&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;copyright someone YYYY&lt;/em&gt;, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Followed by the whole Apache 2.0 license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T07:50:46.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2016-09-22T08:57:28.840" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no &amp;quot;exact format&amp;quot; as most licenses let you free in how to organize their notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common pattern is to concatenate the different LICENSE in your own LICENSE file, starting with your own license information and an explanation that the following are the license notices of the various dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also something that you see a lot in About sections of applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another solution, if you are keeping each dependency separate in their own folders, is to leave the LICENSE files there and just list the dependencies in your main LICENSE file with a note to look in the various folders for each license notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Some examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft's Visual Studio code keeps every third-party notice in a specific file: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/ThirdPartyNotices.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/ThirdPartyNotices.txt&lt;/a&gt;. They clearly mark the limit between each notice and add some additional legal wording on top. You really shouldn't need to do as much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Github's linguist keeps all third-party licenses in a specific directory: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/linguist/tree/master/vendor/licenses/grammar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/linguist/tree/master/vendor/licenses/grammar&lt;/a&gt;. To each, they only add some metadata at the beginning. They do not otherwise change the content of the notice (see this funny example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/vendor/licenses/grammar/atom-language-clean.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/vendor/licenses/grammar/atom-language-clean.txt&lt;/a&gt; where &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Your name here&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; still appears). Additionally, the README contains the following notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language grammars included in this gem are covered by their repositories' respective licenses. grammars.yml specifies the repository for each grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other files are covered by the MIT license, see LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have Firefox, you can go to &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt;. It starts with the following:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Binaries of this product have been made available to you by the Mozilla Project under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL). Know your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the source code to this product is available under licenses which are both free and open source. A URL identifying the specific source code used to create this copy can be found on the build configuration page, and you can read instructions on how to download and build the code for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, most of the source code is available under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL). The MPL has a FAQ to help you understand it. The remainder of the software which is not under the MPL is available under one of a variety of other free and open source licenses. Those that require reproduction of the license text in the distribution are given below. (Note: your copy of this product may not contain code covered by one or more of the licenses listed here, depending on the exact product and version you choose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then they give the list of notices and to which files they apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T09:17:46.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4509" CreationDate="2016-09-22T09:28:09.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conditions of the Apache license are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't intend to modify the files that you are using, you don't need to worry about clause (b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, as it is the case here, there is no specific copyright, patent, trademark or attribution notice, then you do not have to worry about clause (c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, as it is the case here, there is no NOTICE file, you don't have to worry about clause (d).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all you have to do is keep the LICENSE file. Since you intend to release your software under Apache 2.0 anyway, you already have this license file. I would still (as suggested by Mans) add a link to the original repository, mentioning that you are depending on some of the files there (which are also licensed under Apache 2.0), wherever you plan to put your own copyright notice (for instance in the README).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T09:28:09.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4511" CreationDate="2016-09-22T09:52:11.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;MPL license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The recommended way of applying the MPL license to your source code is to include Exhibit A in the headers of your source files. However, because it is not always a good solution (some languages do not allow comments for instance), the MPL license contains the following advice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not possible or desirable to put the notice in a particular file, then You may include the notice in a location (such as a LICENSE file in a relevant directory) where a recipient would be likely to look for such a notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your prefer, you do not need to add a header to every source file. You could instead add a LICENSE file in your src/ directory if all source code is located there. You would start the LICENSE file with Exhibit A, possibly a statement of your copyright ownership, then the text of the license itself. You could also put the exhibit in your README instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that Exhibit A is part of the text of the license itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4. “Covered Software”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means Source Code Form to which the initial Contributor has attached the notice in Exhibit A, the Executable Form of such Source Code Form, and Modifications of such Source Code Form, in each case including portions thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What do you risk by not putting the exhibit in every source file or using a different license notice?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally you are not at risk, even if you license your software improperly, because your are the owner but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many uninformed developers tend to confound unlicensed source code (published on Github for instance) with public domain source code. These developers will typically reuse your code without respecting the terms of the license unless you make it very explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Corporate developers will typically shy away from reusing code if their lawyers do not think that the applicable license is clear enough. If that happens, they are most likely to contact you, asking that you change the wording a little so that they can reuse your code. If they ask you to add a header in a particular file, it will be up to you to do so or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Creative Commons license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will remark that notices that a work is published under CC-BY-SA can vary greatly from one source to another but they will generally include a canonical link for the license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the license does not restrict you in any way on how to apply the license to your work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensed Material means the artistic or literary work, database, or other material to which the Licensor applied this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should just use a clear statement and include it somewhere where people are likely to look for it (a README, LICENSE or About page). Example of such statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non source code content of this application is licensed under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Example of such a double notice&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of a project distinguishing between source code and non source code (granted they use MIT, not MPL 2.0): &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/README.md#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/README.md#license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The content of this project itself is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/deed.en_US&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt;, and the underlying source code used to format and display that content is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T11:02:48.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4506" CreationDate="2016-09-22T13:54:32.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not in any way bound to use MIT license, you can use any opensource or even closed source or commercial license. As far as I know you need to put some kind of attribution and the MIT license itself to the corresponding parts of the code (but not sure how exactly, please read about it. Other than that you are free to do whatever you want, but consider the differences between licenses, as they are quite big (especially between &quot;permissive&quot; like MIT and &quot;copyleft&quot; like GPL). Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastActivityDate="2016-09-22T13:54:32.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4529" CreationDate="2016-09-22T16:37:26.007" Score="2" ViewCount="1836" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have looked all over and can't find clear answers to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I write code in PHP or Python that uses GPL MySQL connectors for PHP or Python - which license applies to my code? That of PHP or Python, or GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I run my PHP or Python code on a server and offer commercial services without the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I bundle my PHP code in an application and distribute it commercially without the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6253" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T07:02:12.017" Title="How does the FOSS exception for MySQL connectors apply to code written in PHP or Python?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-23T06:51:25.660" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is regarding the Eclipse Icons which are part of the code generated using Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF). These Eclipse Icons are not part of the input model provided by the developer, but is inserted by the EMF blueprint. Mr. Ed Merks (developer of EMF) has already clarified here (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t116081.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t116081.html&lt;/a&gt;) that EPL terms would not be applicable to code generated by EMF. The confusion is regarding the Eclipse icons which are part of such auto-generated code. These Icons can be downloaded from the Eclipse Icons repository and is licensed under the EPL. Could anyone provide clarification regarding the ownership of such Eclipse icons which are part of EMF auto-generated code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6229" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T19:12:09.273" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T19:12:09.273" Title="Ownership of Eclipse icons in EMF Autogenerated code" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4512" CreationDate="2016-09-23T13:02:25.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you need exact wording, here is an example that shows how I dealt with this in Mozilla's copy of libpng by inserting three additional paragraphs to the libpng LICENSE file (IANAL/TINLA disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;media/libpng/LICENSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This copy of the libpng notices is provided for your convenience.  In&#xA;case of any discrepancy between this copy and the notices in the file&#xA;png.h that is included in the libpng distribution, the latter shall&#xA;prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COPYRIGHT NOTICE, DISCLAIMER, and LICENSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify libpng you may insert additional notices immediately&#xA;following this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pnglibconf.h and moz.build are distributed under the Mozilla Public&#xA;License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this&#xA;file, You can obtain one at &lt;a href=&quot;http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This modified version of libpng code adds animated PNG support and is&#xA;released under the libpng license described below. The modifications&#xA;are Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Andrew Smith, Copyright (c) 2008-2016 Max&#xA;Stepin, and are delimited by &amp;quot;#ifdef PNG_APNG_SUPPORTED / #endif&amp;quot;&#xA;directives surrounding them in the modified libpng source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This modified version of libpng code adds Intel-SSE support and is&#xA;released under the libpng license described below. The modifications&#xA;are Copyright (c) 2016 Google, Inc., and consist of the source files&#xA;in the &amp;quot;sse2&amp;quot; subdirectory and added code in pngpriv.h delimited by&#xA;#ifndef PNG_INTEL_SSE_OPT / #endif directives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This code is released under the libpng license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;libpng versions 1.0.7, July 1, 2000 through 1.6.25, September 1, 2016&#xA;are Copyright (c) 2000-2002, 2004, 2006-2016 Glenn Randers-Pehrson,&#xA;are derived from libpng-1.0.6, and are distributed according to the&#xA;same disclaimer and license as libpng-1.0.6[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[remainder of LICENSE file omitted]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T13:02:25.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4523" CreationDate="2016-09-23T15:59:33.900" Score="9" ViewCount="684" Body="&lt;p&gt;A device I own uses BusyBox. BusyBox is licensed under GPLv2, hence, the software in my device must have a GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the company says they make the source code available, but for a charge, plus the shipping cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal? Can they charge to distribute the source codes for a software which I bought the binaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6157" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T17:25:04.147" Title="Is it legal to charge for distributing the source of a software which uses GPLv2 components?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4522" CreationDate="2016-09-23T17:25:04.147" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  The terms are described in the GPLv2 license (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of&#xA;  Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1&#xA;  and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, &lt;strong&gt;for a charge no more than your cost of&#xA;  physically performing source distribution&lt;/strong&gt;, a complete machine-readable&#xA;  copy of the corresponding source code,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2016-09-23T17:25:04.147" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-24T19:39:48.760" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I develop a program which has a client which uses a framework which is licensed under GPLv3 and this client would interact with a (paid) back-end service would this be compliant with the GPLv3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would release the source code of the client but not the back-end service&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users could modify the client all they like and use the back end service (if they paid)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6270" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T19:35:26.453" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T19:35:26.453" Title="GPLv3 in a client - server program" Tags="|gpl-3|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-09-25T18:39:17.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4532" CreationDate="2016-09-25T19:12:57.277" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a piece of software, which I am licensing to a company, moreover the license is exclusive in some specific fields of use.&#xA;I am currently thinking about publishing the said piece of software as open source, under a license which would only allow non-commercial research use. The publishing is motivated by the fact that I have recently written an article about a technology contained in said software and would like other researchers to be able to use it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is permissible, is there a particular license you would suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6278" LastEditorUserId="6278" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T19:20:19.563" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T07:52:28.950" Title="Can I open source a piece of software that I am already licensing to someone?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2016-09-25T20:01:04.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quick answer to the question in your title is yes, there is nothing stopping you from relicensing software - only what the current licensees think, paying for something they could have got for free ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, you could always give additional rights under a commercial license. As the copyright holder of your software, you can license it (including dual-licensing) as you see fit. MySQL is a popular example of this: for those who don't wish to follow the GPL's requirements, they can pay for a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in regards to your question about which license to apply, if you're restricting the license to be for non-commercial research use only, it is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From point 6 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt; The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or similarly, freedom 0 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot;&gt;The Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, there is no free/open source license you could apply to this software, with that restriction - you'd need to have a lawyer draft up a specific license that restricted the use as you wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T20:01:04.163" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2016-09-25T20:34:19.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the CDDL announcement &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/114840/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lwn.net/Articles/114840/&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like the MPL, the CDDL is not expected to be compatible with the GPL,&#xA;  since it contains requirements that are not in the GPL (for example,&#xA;  the &quot;patent peace&quot; provision in section 6).  Thus, it is likely that&#xA;  files released under the CDDL will not be able to be combined with&#xA;  files released under the GPL to create a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &quot;patent peace&quot; provision supposedly is a &quot;further restruction&quot; not permitted by the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;according to the creators of the CDDL&lt;/strong&gt;, the two licenses most likely are incompatible. One license requires you to do A, and the other does not allow adding such requirements; therefore you cannot comply with both at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CDDL has a similar requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not offer or impose any terms on any Covered Software in Source Code form that alters or restricts the applicable version of this License or the recipients' rights hereunder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able to find a term in the GPL license terms that &quot;alters or restricts the recipients' rights&quot; in a way that the CDDL does not, and then the two licenses are likely incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses are usually only compatible if at least one is a very permissive license, and you are essentially only bound by the other license. E.g. GPL + Public Domain. Since public domain doesn't add restrictions, the combination is good as long as you obey the GPL terms (and the public domain terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it is possible to create copyleft licenses that are combinable without either A) one being a subset of the other, or B) one explicity having an exemption for the other (i.e. it must permit the additional requirements of the other license; or must allow switching to the other license). It is not possible to allow arbitrary restrictions to be added; the licenses need to be &quot;sealed&quot; (e.g. one could add the restriction 'source code must only be made available to Bill Gates').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6279" LastEditorUserId="6279" LastEditDate="2016-09-25T21:03:36.123" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T21:03:36.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4519" CreationDate="2016-09-25T21:47:46.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the icons are originally under the EPL the fact that they are further included in some generated EMF package does not change their license and the icons would stay under the EPL. Exactly in the same way that if your EMF model is used generate some code, the license of the code is that from your EMF model and not that of the EMF code generator itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T21:47:46.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4518" CreationDate="2016-09-25T22:03:45.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If I write code in PHP or Python that uses GPL MySQL connectors for PHP or Python - which license applies to my code? That of PHP or Python, or GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my code is released (in source) using one of the of FOSS licenses listed in the MySQL Exception then that license applies. Otherwise the GPL would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I run my PHP or Python code on a server and offer commercial services without the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as I run my code is a service: for instance Facebook and Google are known to use MySQL on the backend of some of their commercial services.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I bundle my PHP code in an application and distribute it commercially without the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can, but then my PHP (or Python) code would be subject to the GPL when it depends at runtime on MySQL. This is the quid-pro-quo to entice you to buy a commercial license. As a side note, if I ever buy a commercial license of MySQL for redistribution, the terms (last I saw them) did prohibit to mix the commercial MySQL with the open source GPL-licensed MySQL, and these are different binaries anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's say there is a wrapper for MySQL connector in Python that has been released under Python license (as is allowed by the FOSS exception) - and my code uses this wrapper. Am I not bound by the Python license instead of GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At rest, my source code does not interact nor embed with anything and is not subject to the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at runtime, this Python connector is unlikely to have implemented the raw wire protocol for MySQL and likely links with the MySQL GPL-licensed headers and libraries (at least all the Python drivers I know of do): therefore at runtime, I consider that the GPL terms would extend to the Python driver and from there to my application.  See this article for a gentle introduction on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;dependencies&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said what can I do in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not use MySQL and use PostgreSQL, SQLite, etc. This is what I do. Personally I also find PostgreSQL to be a superior technical choice in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider alternative MySQL &quot;implementations&quot; such as MariaDB. MariaDB has furthered the old MySQL LGPL-licensed drivers to bring them up to date with the latest protocol. There used to be also a BSD or MIT-licensed driver called libdrizzle, but I am less clear about its status. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the MariaDB driver would replace my proprietary-&gt;GPL interaction by a proprietary-&gt;LGPL dynamic linking interaction which I and my lawyers may consider OK, though this is a grey area because of the lawsuit-happy Oracle commercial interests being bypassed in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T07:02:12.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4511" CreationDate="2016-09-25T22:11:00.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Motive is to avoid inclusion of a license notice in each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents: explicit is better than implicit. To make it easier and clear to my users, I find it is always best to put explicit notices in the source file themselves and eventually in the binaries too. Anything else would be a source of confusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are ways like using a short &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.spdx.org/view/Technical_Team/SPDX_Meta_Tags#SPDX-License-Identifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;SPDX license identifier&lt;/a&gt; to make this statement short and that could be combined with top level notices. This is an approach used by &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2013-July/159395.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Uboot&lt;/a&gt; for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-25T22:11:00.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4533" CreationDate="2016-09-26T02:02:01.733" Score="5" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a program which uses the BSD 2-Clause license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Myself&#xA;All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;[BSD 2-Clause boilerplate here]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens to use a library, in some foo/ subdirectory which contains&#xA;exactly the same license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Other Dev&#xA;All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;[Identical BSD 2-Clause boilerplate]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While keeping this &lt;code&gt;foo/LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file where it is, can I just add Other Dev to my top-level license file? For instance like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Bar Program:&#xA;  Copyright (c) 2016 Myself&#xA;  All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;Foo Lib (foo/ subdirectory)&#xA;  Copyright (c) 2016 Other Dev&#xA;  All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;[BSD 2-Clause boilerplate]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Myself&#xA;All Rights Reserved&#xA;Copyright (c) 2016 Other Dev&#xA;All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;[BSD 2-Clause boilerplate]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we factor out the &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Myself&#xA;Copyright (c) 2016 Other Dev&#xA;All Rights Reserved&#xA;&#xA;[BSD 2-Clause boilerplate]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who exactly wrote what is covered in the individual source file copyright headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If  someone borrows code which is mine (not under &lt;code&gt;/foo&lt;/code&gt;) will they understand that they may remove the Copyright lines mentioning Other Dev from the LICENSE, including only copyright notices that pertain to the material being taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:32:18.577" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T13:32:18.577" Title="Can I combine multiple 2-Clause BSD LICENSE files into one?" Tags="|bsd|license-file|combined-work|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4525" CreationDate="2016-09-26T07:45:07.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question in your title really depends on the previous licensing agreement. For instance, any non-exclusive agreement would allow you to license your software as open source to the general public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, as soon as it grants &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; exclusivity, you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; license it as open source without violating the previous agreement because no open source license will allow any usage restriction to apply. It is up to you to try to renegotiate the previous license agreement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you were thinking of a non-commercial, research only license. Some projects are distributed under such terms but &lt;em&gt;are not open source&lt;/em&gt; (example of such project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;). CC-BY-NC is not a good candidate because any non-profit could use your project for any purpose (and this license it is not suitable for software). Only a lawyer could help you draft such license and check that this is compatible with previous agreements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-26T07:52:28.950" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T07:52:28.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4531" CreationDate="2016-09-26T08:41:29.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD 2-clause license is really permissive. The only condition which applies to distribution of source code is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three parts of the license (the copyright notice, the list of conditions and the disclaimer) must all be retained but they are listed separately, not as a block, so there really is no restriction which would prevent you from &quot;merging&quot; several BSD-2-clause LICENSE files into one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, all the solutions you propose are fine. I would personally go with the last one because it is the simpler. (Note that &quot;All Rights Reserved&quot; is traditionally part of BSD licenses but serves no special purpose: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4403/5858&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4403/5858&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would bet that if someone borrowed your code (and not the dependency), they would not understand that they can remove the copyright notice of the other dev. That would not really be a problem however (a factually incorrect copyright claim does not void other, factually correct, copyright claims). If you want to be sure that they understand which copyright notice applies to which part of the work, just keep the original notice in the subfolder and do not reproduce it at the root. The license does not force you to do that. (I would then add a note in the README telling about the dependencies but this is just good manners.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-09-26T08:41:29.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4548" CreationDate="2016-09-27T12:29:45.177" Score="17" ViewCount="18064" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a public repository for an open source project on GitHub.  It's main &lt;strong&gt;goal&lt;/strong&gt; is to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make this code available to anybody (including myself) who may what to use it, for free, for all the time, with no future possibility of suing them (or me) for anything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make the process of contribution to this code as easy as possible, while maintaining the first requirement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In two words&lt;/strong&gt; - I'd like to give away all the copyright for it (not sure if public domain is the correct word here, I'm not a layer, but that's what comes to my mind) and force any other contributors to do the same with less efforts.&lt;/s&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;UPDATE&lt;/em&gt;: as others correctly mentioned, these &quot;two words&quot; were incorrect, they didn't correspond to my goal, because giving away copyright does not give the protection from being sued. So lets just stick to the goal - make software &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;easy to contribute to&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;disclaimer&lt;/em&gt; in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I've chosen the MIT license as the most suitable and added a &lt;code&gt;LICENCSE&lt;/code&gt; file with it inside to the root folder of the project. Also I've added a link to it to the &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; file (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2420/how-can-i-open-source-a-repository-on-github-by-using-apache-license-in-only-one/2421#2421&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;).  But the following &lt;strong&gt;questions&lt;/strong&gt; arise when I try to set up everything correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright info part in the main &lt;code&gt;LICENCSE&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no company or any other name for the group of people that are contributing to this project. And I hope more and more will join, so it looks like a pain to maintain the list of contributors. Is there a way to just drop this line or to call them, say &lt;code&gt;MyProjectName developers&lt;/code&gt; not to update it later on?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/strong&gt;. Ideal case will be when the fact that file belongs to the project source immediately mean that it is under MIT license and copyright is no more important. Is it possible or valid from jurisdiction point of view? I'm using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clahub.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA Hub&lt;/a&gt; to verify that every contributor has signed corresponding CLA. Is that enough?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License header per source file in this project&lt;/strong&gt;. Is it really necessary to include some kind of link to the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file to each source file? According to answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/202/should-i-include-license-text-in-a-single-file-or-all-source-files&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; - yes. But is there any exception for exact MIT license? Can I just say something like &lt;code&gt;This license apply to each file of this project&lt;/code&gt; at the end of the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright info in the header per source file in this project&lt;/strong&gt;. This is similar to the first question - is it ok not to add it or add some general name for copyright owners like &lt;code&gt;MyProjectName developers&lt;/code&gt;. Otherwise maintaining this up to date is even more pain - I have to track every file in every commit and pull request. I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/292/should-i-include-a-copyright-line-in-every-file&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but it mostly says that it is necessary to &lt;em&gt;apply&lt;/em&gt; copyright later (either in form of re-license or in any other). But I want to make it not relevant (see item 2.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other things I may be missing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any easier way to achieve this goal? &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2546/common-practice-on-github-and-license-copyright&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; was asked for some best practice and in this part it is very similar to mine, but it was not properly answered.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6198" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T12:39:30.047" Title="How to apply MIT license in the GitHub repo for fully free project?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|mit|github|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4534" CreationDate="2016-09-27T14:22:35.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no license or copyright status that will do &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what you want to do. These things are incompatible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give away copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;force makers of derivatives to do likewise&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoid lawsuits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving away your copyright is, as you guessed, dedicating your work to the public domain. You retain no copyright in the work; anyone is free to do as they wish with the work. The catch with this is that you have &lt;em&gt;no more rights&lt;/em&gt; than anyone else does; you can't force future modifiers to also dedicate their work to the public domain, nor can you forbid commercial or proprietary uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid lawsuits, you need to use a license that includes a disclaimer of responsibility and warranty. The MIT license includes this: it's the big all-caps block that essentially says &quot;I'm not responsible and you can't sue me if everything goes terribly wrong.&quot; A public domain dedication does not include this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To force future contributors to also open-source their work, you need a &lt;em&gt;copyleft license&lt;/em&gt;, such as the GPL. That ensures that (a) your work and all future modifications to it will always be open, and (b) you're free of lawsuits (the GPL also includes the necessary disclaimer), &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; you're not giving people as many rights as you possibly can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's more important to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's giving away copyright no matter what the consequences, go ahead and dedicate your work to the public domain. The world will thank you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's avoiding lawsuits, but giving people &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of rights, use the MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses (the major difference is that Apache includes a patent clause; if you don't have any patent rights to the software, use the MIT license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's avoiding lawsuits, but making sure that future derivatives are also open, use the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2016-09-27T14:22:35.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2016-09-27T18:05:19.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a struggle that I am going through my self.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where are you in the cycle?  Are people actually using the application?  Have other developers contributed on your Open Source.  What is the app - after all it is Open Source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for funding then don't limit yourself to the company you work for and have a solid business plan and some free loaders to prove the market.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fairly common model.  Most of the web sites today are open source (e.g. Drupal and Wordpress).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand is there is no protecting your Open Source.  Under the MIT license you must attributed (to my understanding).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (and others) can still charge for the code, maintenance, and enhancements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Open Source  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capital&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Attorneys (contracts, licenses, enforcement) are expensive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Marketing is expensive - a lot easier to get someone to try something for free  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other developers will contribute  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Test&#xA;Free testers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Lots of people that would not pay but they will use it free  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Risk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Customers are getting smarter about risk and realize if you go under the product continues&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The have been burnt by a discontinued product&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They are starting to trust this thing called the Cloud&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Cloud goes with Open Source as on site install and support is expensive  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any time you can stop making enhancement to the Open Source and create a commercial product with more features.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even get people to pay for enhancements that go back into the Open Source.  That way you are not supporting multiple version and the customer can stay on the main code line with bug fixes and other updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pay $100 / month for piece of mind they have support is nothing to someone that does not want to take on support.  Hopefully you have a target customers that don't have programmers on staff.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6294" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-09-29T06:42:15.360" LastActivityDate="2016-09-29T06:42:15.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4510" CreationDate="2016-09-28T00:16:35.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways your company can make money producing open-source software, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling support (RedHat)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling custom development (Varnish)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling permissive licensing (PyQT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling derivative closed-source software (Nginx)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling it as a service (Wordpress)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling compiled binaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Donations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As advertising for other products or services&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T00:16:35.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-28T14:33:26.323" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a scenario with three products. X, A and B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X belongs to my company and is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A is also not open source, but they have free version and paid version with different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;B is under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0 US&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A uses B, and thus, it has to attribute B, which they do on their website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now X buys the paid version of A, so it gets a commercial redistribution license, which as per our understanding, does not require attribution to A given the product A is unchanged while being used in product X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Product X is a paid, non a distributive product, but its services are used for others, but still not &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is that do production X have to attribute to B, publicly? They clearly don't have to attribute to A publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/32598531#32598531&quot;&gt;asked this question on TNB&lt;/a&gt; and some discussion happened there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my specific case, product A is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MaxMind GeoIP2&lt;/a&gt; (scroll down for attribution to product B) and product B is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geonames.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geonames&lt;/a&gt; and the commercial license of paid version of A, MaxMind GeoIP2, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite-commercial-redistribution-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. But this question can be useful for anyone facing similar situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6302" LastEditorUserId="6302" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T19:27:02.727" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T19:35:49.820" Title="Multi level license attribution problem" Tags="|licensing|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2016-09-28T16:17:46.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just my opinion: Because &quot;You ... publicly digitally perform the Work&quot; of B, you must attribute B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do that either by &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explicitly atributing B in your documentation, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by attributing A, even though that's not required, thereby implicitly attributing B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd do (2) but it's your call.  IANAL/TINLA (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should keep the copyright and original licensing intact in your source code, even though you are not distributing it, just in case you sell it or your company some time in the future.  Since you are not distributing source, you will have to provide the attribution to your clients in any reasonable manner (such as your web site as your example A provided the code to you, documentation that accompanies your product, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-09-28T19:35:49.820" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T19:35:49.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2016-09-28T17:13:12.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A attributes B publicly because A is openly available and thus distributed publicly. A is available to everyone so the attribution to B must also be available to everyone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to attribute B from X to everyone you distribute X to. If you only distribute X to a limited number of customers and not openly, you do not need to attribute B from X openly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T17:13:12.217" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4539" CreationDate="2016-09-28T17:14:12.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use A, which includes B, you need to follow the license of B insofar as you redistribute B as part of A. The authors of A can't legally give you the authority not to attribute B when you distribute A (unless A's authors worked out a separate licensing arrangement with the authors of B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for X, no attribution is necessary as long as no distribution occurs. Attribution requirements only apply when some copyrighted part of B is distributed to another party. If the company that owns X never distributes any part of B or any work that is a derivative of B under copyright law, then B's attribution requirements do not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-are-creative-commons-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Creative Commonas FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of our licenses require that users provide attribution (BY) to the creator &lt;strong&gt;when the material is used and shared&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY 3.0 U.S.&lt;/a&gt;, the attribution requirement in 4(b) states (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work&lt;/strong&gt; [...] or any Derivative Works [...] or Collective Works [...], You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties [...] for attribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attribution requirement only applies to distribution or public display of the work, or of a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T17:14:12.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4544" CreationDate="2016-09-28T19:38:07.673" Score="9" ViewCount="1496" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the MIT software license itself copyrighted? What about the BSD license? Could a person copy parts of the license or significantly alter the license for their own use? I've searched but wasn't able to find a source one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Oaktree" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T09:53:35.297" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T16:29:37.213" Title="Is the MIT license itself copyrighted?" Tags="|copyright|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4543" CreationDate="2016-09-28T21:08:34.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything anybody writes is automatically copyrighted (there are exemptions, but I don't think they apply in this case). Therefore, yes, the MIT License is copyrighted, and you can't copy or modify it, regardless of whether you change the name or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysis: is the MIT License copyrighted? It needs to be a work (check) of authorship (check) that is original … originality can for example be measured by whether or not there are multiple different ways of phrasing the idea. If there is only one possible way of expressing the idea, then the expression is not copyrighted (ideas can't be copyrighted, only their expression), however, if there are multiple ways of expressing it, then the mere fact of choosing one of those ways constitutes a creative act of originality. And even though legalese is a pretty formalized and restrictive language, there are still multiple ways of expressing the ideas embodied by the MIT License, so the MIT License is original and thus copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysis: can you copy and modify the MIT License? In order to use the MIT License &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; copy it into your code. So, clearly, there is an implicit license allowing you to do just that. However, at least in the jurisdictions I am familiar with, such implicit licenses are generally interpreted very narrowly by the courts. So, the license allowing you to copy the MIT License allow applies to copying it into your source code verbatim in order to apply it to your own code. It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; apply to copying it in order to base your own license off of it. And it certainly does not give the right to create a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one other thing that you didn't ask about, that I want to mention: the MIT License has been carefully crafted, analyzed, reviewed, re-reviewed, and re-re-reviewed by MIT's copyright lawyers to make sure that there are no unintended freedoms nor unintended restrictions, no hidden side-effects, loopholes, or surprises of any kind. I urge you to hire not one but several copyright lawyers to subject the changes you want to make to the same scrutiny, lest you fall victim to some unforeseen interactions, side-effects, or loopholes your changes or additions might accidentally create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV. Copyright Law is tricky business, you should really consult a lawyer first, a) about the legality of copying the license, and b) even more importantly about any modifications you make to the license, to ensure that you don't accidentally rip a huge hole into it that you don't intend to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" OwnerDisplayName="Jörg W Mittag" LastActivityDate="2016-09-28T22:12:37.660" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4551" CreationDate="2016-09-29T20:50:12.430" Score="1" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to write a C library that contains the major and most useful functions from Apache Commons IO's Java package. I will rewrite in C a lot of functions contained in Apache Commons. What do I need to do when licensing my library? Do I have to write something about intellectual property? I'd like to use a BSD 2-Clause license for my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6315" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T15:04:24.683" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T15:27:12.590" Title="Licensing a derivative work from a project" Tags="|derivative-works|java|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4547" CreationDate="2016-09-30T02:21:18.053" Score="5" ViewCount="2447" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I start with code that is &lt;code&gt;(c) 2014 Struvious Featherstone&lt;/code&gt; and licensed according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 3-clause license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I make some changes for my employer Zippety Duda, Inc. and I want to publish them, with my employer's permission. What does the resulting license have to look like? Is it still required to say &lt;code&gt;(c) 2014 Struvious Featherstone&lt;/code&gt;? Or does Zippety Duda Inc. replace that? Or does the code now have to contain both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how can I determine this by looking at the BSD license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2865" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-09-30T07:26:42.280" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T07:52:42.483" Title="BSD 3-clause: how to update with modifications?" Tags="|derivative-works|bsd|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4546" CreationDate="2016-09-30T06:28:51.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removing somebody else's copyright notices is usually a big no-no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first condition of the BSD 3-clause license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;(c) 2014 Struvious Featherstone&quot; is the &quot;above copyright notice&quot; in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a normal practice to add your own copyright notice by the existing one, but this is not a license obligation. It does however make it very clear that your modifications are also released under the terms of the BSD 3-clause license. If you add your own copyright notice, somebody who modifies the software that you have modified would then need to keep your notice as well as the original one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2016-10-01T07:52:42.483" LastActivityDate="2016-10-01T07:52:42.483" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4534" CreationDate="2016-09-30T09:30:18.100" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not true that a public domain dedication won't protect you, for instance the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; is a public domain dedication but still includes a limitation of warranty. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub's choosealicense.com list of suggested licenses&lt;/a&gt;, this is the only license that is more permissive than MIT. The only difference with MIT is that no attribution is required (people can effectively use your code without saying where it comes from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: the Unlicense is not officially open source because it is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;, although it respects the definition of open source IMHO. It is free software because it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;approved by the FSF&lt;/a&gt; but they recommend to use CC-0 instead. I think that the choice of GitHub to recommend the Unlicense over CC-0 is because the latter was not written specifically for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1381/5858&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which defends the point of view of the OSI. I do not agree with it. Using &quot;public domain&quot; would be a bit dangerous because it is not defined in every jurisdiction but the Unlicense is technically a license (very similar to MIT but with no conditions) which contains a public domain dedication (third paragraph). The second paragraph explains already pretty clearly the rights of the licensee before saying anything about public domain. The problem of moral rights is not specific to public domain dedications. It can also interfere with the right to modify the software which is granted by every FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's answer your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Copyright part of the license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to use the Unlicense, there is no copyright part of the license so you don't need to worry. If you rather choose to use MIT, you could use &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Your name and contributors&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. It is quite common to see. You could also maintain a separate list of contributors (also quite common). But in any case the absence of such notice or its imprecision does not void the copyright of each contributor so it is not very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Contributor license agreement&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A contributor license agreement is a really good idea to prevent future lawsuit as much as possible because you can typically ask for a patent grant in it, for all the users of your software. It is something that is not included already in very permissive licenses such as MIT or the Unlicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite like Github's CLA &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com/agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com/agreement&lt;/a&gt; and they give reasons to justify it as well &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you need to be aware that asking people to sign a CLA will make contributing a tiny bit more difficult but given your concerns, I would still encourage you to use one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I am not a legal expert but I believe that digitally signed documents are valid contracts in most jurisdictions, in particular the United States. I can't guarantee anything about CLA Hub however, because they do not give much guarantee themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. License header&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No a license header is not necessary, at least for MIT and the Unlicense. Some other licenses encourage you to add such a header but that is not the case of these two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The list of licenses I was mentioning earlier&lt;/a&gt; includes instructions on how to apply each license. For MIT and the Unlicense, it is just to copy the text of the license in a LICENSE file at the root of your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. Copyright header&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of each copyright owner in each file is not necessary as well, and even projects which do maintain such headers generally forget to update them at every change. Fortunately a version tracker such as git is much more efficient to know precisely who added what to the software and even if it does not mean that they are the author (as they could have included a dependency), it means (if you use the same CLA as Github) that they are responsible of knowing the source and the licensing implications of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5&amp;amp;6. Missing stuff and best practices&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make contributing to your project as easy as possible, I would encourage you to include a CONTRIBUTING file which explains the process for that (how you handle issues, pull requests, the fact that contributors will need to sign a CLA, presenting the code, the dependencies). Also include details instructions on how to compile the code. None of this is legal recommendation, just technical recommendation to make contributing as easy as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you project grows, another good thing to have is a CODE OF CONDUCT to make everyone welcome. Have a look at examples of such codes here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?q=code+of+conduct&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/search?q=code+of+conduct&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, even if contributors are supposed to do that, always check that new dependencies are properly licensed and not incompatible with your own license (typically, not GPL). If you need to include the dependency in your repository, try to put it in a specific subfolder with its own original license notice and list the dependencies somewhere in your README. If possible, do not even include the dependencies in your repository if they can be installed with some standard package manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T12:39:30.047" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4543" CreationDate="2016-09-30T13:38:53.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;These texts are likely not entirely original and may be remotely copyrightable. But the question I would rather ask would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I copy parts of the license or significantly alter the license for my own use, can someone object to this copying and sue me for copyright infringement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be the license terms that apply to these license texts?&lt;/strong&gt; the license terms would apply to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who could have the ground to sue?&lt;/strong&gt; The original author, possibly indirectly the UC Regents or the MIT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be their incentive?&lt;/strong&gt; they have absolutely nothing to win there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The likeliness that someone would sue me is zero.&lt;/strong&gt; And if they would, I would assume that any sane judge would dismiss this as frivolous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now say I am really worried about this and I am truly paranoid: in the worst case the BSD or MIT license would also apply to their own terms. Hence I could  modify the license text and also keep the original text to state that this applies to my modified text. (but I would not do this, this would be only for the crazy and the paranoid). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, both texts date from the late &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BSD_licenses#Date_of_BSD_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;80's&lt;/a&gt;. Both contain similar sentences and both have been used as the base for many other licenses and variants such as the Apache license(s). Both texts also likely have been based on pre-existing legalese boilerplate. Both texts are unlikely truly original themselves, and surely derived from other ancestor texts. All this would make claiming any copyright on these short texts rather difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T13:38:53.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4545" CreationDate="2016-09-30T13:51:35.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;sublicenseable&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can therefore create a derivative work of Apache-licensed code under any license I please BUT I still must abide by the terms of the Apache license itself, including keeping notices, license texts, change tracking, etc and both license terms will apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, sublicensing using a BSD is a rather moot point and I would rather instead keep thing under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have to include in my source directory the NOTICE and the LICENSE of Apache Commons and I have to write in my NOTICE file that my work is a derivative from another Apache licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and a little more: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#redistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 4 of the Apache license&lt;/a&gt; is clear and explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T15:27:12.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4478" CreationDate="2016-09-30T14:15:42.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the license of a tool does not affect the license of the things you create using that tool. A GPL-licensed compiler doesn't mean the binaries it creates are GPL. A GPL-licensed editor doing some refactoring doesn't make the refactored code GPL. And in this case the code generation facility of jaxb doesn't affect the license of the sources it generates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some situations which would be better described not as “a tool transforming some input” but rather “a licensed template file modified according to input”. One prime example here would be compiler generators. The parsing logic these tend to contain can amount to a significant part of the generated output. Taking GNU Bison as an example, its output explicitely states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception &lt;em&gt;[to the GLP]&lt;/em&gt;, you may create a larger work that contains&#xA;     part or all of the Bison parser skeleton and distribute that work&#xA;     under terms of your choice, so long as that work isn't itself a&#xA;     parser generator using the skeleton or a modified version thereof&#xA;     as a parser skeleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further explanation of this is given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the manual&lt;/a&gt;, highlighting how without this exception the generated code would be covered by GPL since the skeleton file from which it was derived is covered by GPL. The amount of verbatim copying appears to be a major point for this decision. I don't see jaxb doing much verbatim copying. The comment at the head of the file probably doesn't count. IANAL, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T14:15:42.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4346" CreationDate="2016-09-30T15:18:06.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://copyfree.org/standard/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://copyfree.org/standard/&lt;/a&gt; currently contains a section titled “Copyfree Standard Compliance” which highlights typical problems. In particular it describes “Bookkeeping Clause” and “Project Organization Clause”, quoting the corresponding sections of AL2 as examples, and discussing at length why these requirements do not agree with the goals of copyfree licensing. I'll try to summarize that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A book-keeping clause (Section 4, Subsection 2)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating&#xA;      that You changed the files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you can't modify the sources any way you like, you have to follow certain rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A project organization clause (Section 4, Subsection 4)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no clue why you would consider this item 7, but perhaps you got some strange formatting of the license somehow. Anyway, this could lead to conflicts in situations where there are multiple such files, or files with this name used for some other purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll not go into the large number of other questions you asked at the end of your post, since most of them would be independent questions in their own right. Let's keep this focused here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T15:18:06.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4261" CreationDate="2016-09-30T15:46:02.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the legal document&lt;/a&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the templates &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; contain a client-rendered copyright notice, then you must keep that in the same form. If they do not, then I see no reason you should have to add them: if the author wanted that information rendered for every client, they could have included said notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is “reasonable” for an email? I'd say anything which takes up too much space in the rendering may not be reasonable. But I'd also not use comments, since some automatic transformation steps may remove these. Instead I'd go for &lt;a href=&quot;https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-meta-element&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;meta&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags&lt;/a&gt;, as conveying this kind of information is one of the main purposes of meta tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i) the name of the Original Author […]; (ii) the title of the Work[…]; (iii) […] the URI […]; and (iv), consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., &quot;French translation of the Work by Original Author,&quot; or &quot;Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That lists &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; you have to include. The URI should go in a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;link&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag, not a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;meta&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you include your own name or the name or the projectas part of the template (as opposed to a signature, which I would consider part of the textual content but not of the template), then you have to name the original creator or project as prominently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can avoid a lot of worries by simply asking the original author which form of attribution they'd like to see, or whether they agree with your preferred form (be it comments or &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;meta&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags). Chances are they will be delighted to see someone making use of their liberally licensed content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T15:46:02.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4216" CreationDate="2016-09-30T16:02:15.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the GPL is affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say you &lt;em&gt;convey&lt;/em&gt; the source by placing it on a web server and allowing others to obtain it from there. Individuals downloading it do not convey the source themselves, nor is each such transfer to be seen as a separat act of you conveying the software. And while it is true that due to the nature of SSL, each transfer does require a key, I'd say that this is not a &lt;em&gt;special&lt;/em&gt; key since any visitor is free to negotiate a key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the same kind of rationale in the case of GFDL, I'd say there is one copy on the server, which you access to create a second copy on your computer. The network transfer would be part of that copying process, and anyone interested would not be obstructed from obtaining their own copy as long as the origin server is freely accessible. Obtaining the document from an authentication-only server would probably be a different matter, but in that case the person offering the document would be to blame, unless special permission by the copyright holder (which might be the same person) gave him permission to do so. In which case that same permission probably extends to the transfer to clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has me more worried is that I must not obstruct others from reading any of the copies I made. So is the fact that my user account is protected with a passwort an obstruction which prevents others from reading the files I downloaded? This would be a weaker case than that of an encrypted home directory or proprietary file format. And again fall under &quot;own copy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T16:02:15.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-30T23:32:23.243" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be a simple question, but when using libraries that are licensed under GPL, I'm not sure what part of the license applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two separate libraries in a JAR file that I'm using that I'm distributing with my software. Neither libraries came with a LICENSE file. I modified one of the libraries by removing some of the files from the JAR (examples, tests, etc). My software is also open source but is not licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything else I need to do to abide by the GPL license of the libraries I'm using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6326" LastActivityDate="2016-09-30T23:32:23.243" Title="Using libraries with GPL license" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-10-01T07:13:34.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2016-10-01T13:35:22.043" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I'm using a library that is licensed under GPL v3 in my project, can I license my project under the MIT license? I tried to read the GPL v3 text but I cannot understand it without your assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, I can use the MIT license. This is my own code and I can use any license I please.&lt;/strong&gt; (I assume I am not copying any GPL-licensed code in my MIT-licensed library). Furthermore, the MIT license is considered by the Free Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as compatible&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL&lt;/a&gt; and LGPL licenses (all versions). There are plenty of examples of MIT-licensed code used in combination of GPL-licensed code, for instance in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/drm_agpsupport.c?id=refs/tags/v4.8-rc8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Kernel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I would need to consider what happens in these two cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;at rest, my source code is MIT-licensed (assuming there is no GPL-licensed code copied in it). As long as I do not run nor build the code there is no GPL in play.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;when built or at runtime my code eventually interacts with the GPL library I depend on. What happens is technology specific here: it may be C code that is statically or dynamically linked with the GPL-licensed library. Or is could be Java, Ruby or Python code that imports or requires the GPL-licensed package.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is how my code does interacts and depends on the GPL-licensed library at build and/or runtime. I can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (disclosure: I wrote it) for some background on interactions and dependencies. &#xA;If I redistribute binaries and my code is combined with the GPL-libraries in a certain way, my code may be subject to the GPL source code redistribution requirements. The same would apply to user of my source code: when they build it, the combined binary may be come subject to the GPL terms for instance if my code is itself a library, the GPL may extend at runtime through my library to my users' code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in the end what matters is eventually running code (vs. source code at rest) even though my code may be MIT-licensed, I would clearly state to my users that when built the code is combined by default with GPL-licensed code and that the GPL terms may apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively a user could replace or remove the GPL-licensed library dependency from my code and it would not be combined with the GPL-licensed any more and only the MIT would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical example of a project with such a policy consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt;. It's overall license is the LGPL (and not the MIT, but from the point of view of the GPL the results are the same). Depending on how FFmpeg is built and which parts are used when effectively building and running FFmpeg binaries (as opposed to just considering the source) the resulting licensing may be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FFmpeg is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or later. However, FFmpeg incorporates several optional parts and optimizations that are covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later. If those parts get used the GPL applies to all of FFmpeg. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T13:31:54.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-02T13:08:07.663" Score="-4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;regarding using/developing, reporting issues (bugs/usability issues) or requesting new feature, &#xA;what are the obstacles in front of users to let their voice be heard? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what mechanisms and communication channel you wish to have?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6336" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-02T16:44:01.423" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T16:44:01.423" Title="user communication with open source" Tags="|project-management|collaboration|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-10-04T13:36:04.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4558" CreationDate="2016-10-02T15:55:55.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the obstacles are much less than you'd encounter with a closed-source project.  For the ones I'm involved with, the main obstacle is that the user needs to subscribe to a mailing list, a forum, or to sourceforge or github to communicate bug reports and feature requests (when we allowed anonymous requests we just got a huge amount of SPAM and the legitimate submissions got lost in the noise).  But we watch things like Stack Exchange and even Twitter as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2016-10-02T15:55:55.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4564" CreationDate="2016-10-03T08:23:42.243" Score="5" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt; requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Redistribution.&lt;/strong&gt; You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to contribute to some AL2-licensed project on GitHub. I create a fork of their repository, so I'm distributing a copy. Then I modify said files, turning the plain copy into an derivative work with modified files. But usually I only include relevant code changes as I intend for my modifiecations to be merged into the upstream project after some code review. I don't add a notice about “I modified this file” to each of them. How does this agree with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the git log enough of a “prominent notice” to satisfy this requirement, even if the information isn't included in the text of each affected file, and even if GitHub allows downloading the code as a ZIP without history information?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't see my personal fork as a Derivative Work, but instead as a proposed contribution to the original Work. Is this distinction of any legal significance?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot;&gt;the GitHub terms of service&lt;/a&gt; somehow address this scenario? I couldn't find anything that sounds like it would apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything else to prevent me from getting sued by an upstream developer, apart from that developer using common sense?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4845" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T15:30:52.617" Title="GitHub workflow and Apache License" Tags="|contributor|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-03T12:06:06.360" Score="1" ViewCount="2593" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a work released under a FOSS license, can I revoke this FOSS license and release the work under some proprietary license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what happens to copies of work already under circulation under FOSS license? Can those be used to make and distribute further copies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="396" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T10:55:46.257" Title="Can the license of a work with open source license be revoked?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-10-04T13:36:20.313" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4560" CreationDate="2016-10-03T15:30:52.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not consider these patches as a &quot;Derivative Work&quot;. They are instead considered a &quot;Contribution&quot; under the Apache 2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Contribution&quot; shall mean any work of authorship, including the original version of the Work and any modifications or additions to that Work or Derivative Works thereof, that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner or by an individual or Legal Entity authorized to submit on behalf of the copyright owner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#contributions&quot;&gt;therefore&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I submit a patch to an upstream project, I consider that the patch is enough of a change notification under the Apache-license and this is not a derivative work, even if not accepted. While working on my patch, I consider the act of forking to be enough of a notification until I make an actual submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore none of your concerns are warranted and your sub-questions are moot IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-10-03T15:30:52.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4562" CreationDate="2016-10-04T10:55:46.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it was indeed possible to revoke a FOSS license at will nobody in their right mind would dare to rely on open source for their business. So while some licenses, such as the Apache License version 2.0, explicitly state that the licenses granted are perpetual I'd say it's reasonably safe to assume that this applies even where not stated for any situation where the author simply changes their mind about the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do if you change your mind about the licensing of your work is to release any future updates under a different (proprietary or FOSS) license. However, already released versions can still be used in any waý the license under which they were released permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-10-04T10:55:46.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-04T19:07:00.867" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project on Github that works with some external API.&#xA;I don't want to publish my key so it's taken from config that is not made public.&#xA;However, I want to use Travis to run end-to-end tests. Basically I'll encrypt my API key - and maybe something else - then Travis will decrypt that and use the result in running my tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, someone could just write a piece of code and keep source closed and distribute only the binary - or encrypted script that requires a key to be executed - without providing the actual source. That looks both questionable and somewhat similar to my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do any major open-source licenses discourage my case?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Travis part better be open-source - because they provide free services for open-source projects. As of now, I am the only contributor and license is MIT so I don't see my particular case being a trouble. I'm more interested in case where license requires more from authors and/or users and where saying &quot;we use WTFPL for Travis and %another_license% for everything else&quot; is not an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only small test-related piece is getting encrypted, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; something end users are supposed to ever interact with (however, that is not stated anywhere).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6151" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:21:52.463" Title="Encrypted behaviour/API keys for continuous integration (Travis)" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T05:18:55.277" Score="8" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I own the Google Play account under which an open source app is published, and I no longer have any interest in owning personally the Google Play account for that app. Development is as active as ever, with developers joining and leaving at a fast pace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an established foundation to which I can donate my app's Google Play account? The foundation's role would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everytime the app's F-Droid APK or metadata is changed (by the app's current maintainer or another member of the current app dev team), mirror the change to the app's Google Play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there ever happen to be a big security vulnerability and F-Droid disable, then disable it from Google Play too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If in the future a fork takes over and becomes clearly more maintained than the original, then switch to syncing from that fork's F-Droid item. Such a decision must only be taken after following a well-defined and open procedure (for instance: public announce of intention, feedback, decision of the foundation's board).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publish Google Play's statistics, for instance by running &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nicolas-raoul/publish-my-google-play-statistics&quot;&gt;this script&lt;/a&gt; once in a while.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not absolutely necessary, but allowing the current project manager to access Google Play's with the permissions &quot;Reply to reviews&quot; and &quot;Manage Alpha &amp;amp; Beta APKs&quot; would be wonderful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus if the foundation has FOSS as its core mission (unlike Sourceforge), is long-established (like Debian), is financially secure (like Ubuntu), and is generally trusted by the FOSS community (like FSF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Donating&quot; my app would mean transferring the app from my developer account to the foundation's developer account, so it would be transparent for users, for instance existing users would continue to receive APK updates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That would solve four big risks that threaten open source apps on Google Play:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The owner of the app's developer account becomes evil and adds spyware/advertisement (that happened to TuxPaint).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The owner of the app's developer account transfers the app to a well-meaning person who just has a different idea of what is best for the users and publishes updates that include non-open source code, or even rewrites the app from scratch and publishes it without making it open source.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The owner of the app's developer account suddenly dies or otherwise becomes unable to update the app.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The owner of the app's developer account can not find a trustable new maintainer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T11:52:01.243" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T11:52:01.243" Title="Where to donate my Android app's Google Play account, they just need to keep in sync with F-Droid" Tags="|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-05T09:22:05.337" Score="7" ViewCount="1918" Body="&lt;p&gt;My application needs some classes of &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many sources converge to say that one cannot redistribute tools.jar from Oracle JDK without redistributing the whole bundle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the case of OpenJDK's &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; is less clear. (the answer of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22305686/is-it-safe-to-distribute-tools-jar-along-with-a-java-application-bundle&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22305686/is-it-safe-to-distribute-tools-jar-along-with-a-java-application-bundle&lt;/a&gt; is quite ambiguous)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; may know better whether one can redistribute OpenJDK's &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; in a bundled application or on Maven central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6362" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2019-10-07T08:20:11.963" Title="Can we redistribute OpenJDK tools.jar?" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4567" CreationDate="2016-10-05T10:21:52.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK Travis, like GitHub, says &quot;free for open source&quot; but actually never checks that the project is licensed under an open source license. What they mean is free for anything that is public (open source being one very common special case). It's their problem to control that there is no abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically anyone could use GitHub to distribute their binaries, even if the code is not shared (or if shared, without an open source license; and lots of people do that: you can very easily find repositories without a license on GitHub). Anyone using a public GitHub repository could then use Travis' services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if your actual question is &lt;em&gt;Is there any major open source license forbidding to just distributing the binary and not the source under that license?&lt;/em&gt; then yes, there is. The GNU GPL license explicitly states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it does not restrict what the original author of licensed work can do (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4481/as-owner-of-gpl-library-can-i-break-the-licensing-terms&quot;&gt;As owner of GPL library, can I break the licensing terms?&lt;/a&gt;). It restricts what &lt;em&gt;recipients&lt;/em&gt; can do &lt;em&gt;when modifying/distributing&lt;/em&gt; the work further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As whether any open source license restricts what the &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt; can do, no: such license would not be free or open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-05T10:21:52.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4612" CreationDate="2016-10-05T13:20:54.497" Score="9" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heavily used open source software for several years, but now that I'm finally ready to dive in as a developer, I found myself not even knowing this very basic thing: what do maintainers do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As their name suggests, maintainers probably maintain software by fixing problems, bugs, etc. They are also often project or sub-project leaders, and do the official release builds, etc. However it seems some maintainers also add new features besides just &quot;maintaining&quot; old ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the general things that open source software maintainers do? Is it just another word for project leaders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3966" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T22:35:31.610" Title="What do open source software maintainers do?" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2016-10-06T08:29:33.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a look at slide 6 of the talk I gave yesterday at the &quot;Opportunity of Open Source&quot; event in Ghent: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slideshare.net/blowagie/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized-66599367&quot;&gt;http://www.slideshare.net/blowagie/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized-66599367&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I reach slide 5, I tell the audience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're a developer. You have created software in your spare time, and you want to offer this software for free. You have invested time (and time equals money), but you don't really care about &quot;losing&quot; that money. However, if you're successful, there will be implications...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software isn't successful, there are no implications: nobody is using your software, hence you don't have any further investments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is successful, you will have to maintain it if you want to keep it alive. Maintaining software involves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing (and updating!) documentation,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fixing bugs,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing (and updating) unit, integration, and regression tests,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Educate users on Warranties, IP, and the implications of the open source license you chose,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the software if a specs gets updated. For instance: I wrote a PDF library; if the PDF spec is updated, users expect me to update the software so that the new spec is supported,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Answer a wide variety of questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a list of things I had to do once my open source project became successful. It was so much work that the core development suffered from it. Especially the legal aspects took a lot of time and money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, we have a company, and we have different employees who take care of maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a QA engineer: he makes sure the developers writes tests. He is responsible for &quot;maintaining&quot; the code repositories on GitHub and GitLab, for keeping Jenkins (continuous integration) up and running, SonarQube, etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Support engineers: they answer questions on the closed ticketing system (JIRA) and occasionally on Stack Overflow (if time permits),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R&amp;amp;D engineers: they go to ISO committee meetings where the new PDF specifications are developed. They submit new features to the PDF specification and report back to the development team about new features in the spec that need to be implemented,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copywriters: I am the main source of documentation, but we hire other people to port the examples and tutorials I write from Java to .Net. We also hired people to port the iText 5 examples to iText 7 (the latest iText release is very different from the previous releases).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the job of &quot;maintainer&quot; isn't a job of a single person once your project gets larger. You need different people with different qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastActivityDate="2016-10-06T08:29:33.280" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-07T02:03:41.587" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a project licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;, and I find a snippet of code I want to integrate into my project, also licensed under MIT, &lt;strong&gt;how do I fulfill the conditions of the project the snippet originated from?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project has a license file in the root of the source code, as required by the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt; under &quot;How to apply this license&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Create a text file (typically named LICENSE or LICENSE.txt) in the root of your source code and copy the text of the license into the file. Replace [year] with the current year and [fullname] with the name (or names) of the copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to incorporate someone's MIT licensed snippet, do I need to replace the license file? Do I need to add a license file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6377" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-07T13:31:31.023" LastActivityDate="2016-10-07T13:31:31.023" Title="How to fulfill the conditions of the MIT license for a code contribution" Tags="|licensing|mit|collaboration|combined-work|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-10-07T15:18:20.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4576" CreationDate="2016-10-07T22:16:25.500" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a game developer and while searching for assets to put in my game I stumbled across this website. I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.animatedimages.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; and the FAQs were not clear on whether or not I can use the assets for my game. There wasn't a license said on the website. Here are my reasons for both sides:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can use the assets for &quot;your business,&quot; meaning I can put them in my game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am allowed to use them for Websites, Blogs, Forums, Social Networks, and Guest Books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This website did come when I searched for &quot;animated fire gif cc0.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not allowed to use them in &quot;image archives&quot; or &quot;image collections.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not allowed to use the use the graphics &quot;commercially through reproduction.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6382" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T17:55:11.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T17:55:11.553" Title="Am I allowed to use these gifs for my game?" Tags="|license-notice|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4575" CreationDate="2016-10-07T22:51:12.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider most anything to be copyrightable and therefore copyrighted as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images are copyrightable and therefore you cannot use these images without a proper license. If the license is not clear and explicit and allows the type of usage you plan in your game, you cannot use these images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.animatedimages.org/help.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.animatedimages.org/help.htm&lt;/a&gt; animatedimages does seem to grant some usage right that I could interpret as some open source license of sorts. At the same time, they (the animatedimages site) may not even have clear rights to some images as they state on their help page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do your graphics come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All graphics offered by us have either been provided by our users or they were created or collected by our team. For images uploaded by our users, we have no control over the content. This applies both to the text and the graphics. If certain graphics or greeting cards infringe copyright laws or fail to meet our internal guidelines, please send us a quick note via mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you are a bit between a rock and a hard place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could ask animatedimages for a clear open source license to some animated images to use in your game. But at the same time, they may not have clear rights to these and no ground to license these to you if they do not &amp;quot;own&amp;quot; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best course of action would be to contact them and/or consider an alternative source of media assets for your game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:04:58.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4582" CreationDate="2016-10-08T08:20:14.640" Score="21" ViewCount="13607" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require attribution, but can be supplemented to do so, as stated in the additional terms (7. b) of the terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; states, under the additional terms that additional terms can be removed from any part of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning, the requirement of attribution can be added, but also &lt;em&gt;removed&lt;/em&gt; by any derivative works, meaning that attribution cannot be enforced by GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in my understanding of GPLv3? I'm especially curious because there are posts&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; as well as upvoted comments&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; on the network, and statements on blog posts&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; that seem to confirm my beliefs, as well as posts&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; and upvoted comments&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; that seem to imply differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/170188/181912&quot;&gt;Is requiring attribution GPL-compatible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/170188/is-requiring-attribution-gpl-compatible#comment326353_170188&quot;&gt;Is requiring attribution GPL-compatible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://tommcfarlin.com/give-proper-gpl-attribution/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Do You Give Proper GPL Attribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/3994/6377&quot;&gt;Why do almost all open source licenses require attribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/713045/best-open-source-license-for-those-wanting-attribution#comment1236215_713045&quot;&gt;Best open source license for those wanting attribution? [closed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6377" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T09:33:31.223" Title="Does GPLv3 require attribution?" Tags="|attribution|gpl-3|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2830" CreationDate="2016-10-08T17:34:47.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright notices&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reply I received from &lt;code&gt;licensing@fsf.org&lt;/code&gt; (the compliance lab) suggested a copyright notice in the modified file is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a copyright notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2011, 2012, 2014 Ernest Thornhill (themachine@sub.nyc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to note about the dates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For software with several releases over multiple years, it's okay to use a range (“2008-2010”) instead of listing individual years (“2008, 2009, 2010”) if and only if every year in the range, inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; and you make an explicit statement in your documentation about this usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something to consider is that  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequiredToClaimCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you are not required to claim a copyright on your changes.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this case it seems like you need some other prominent notice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2014/SFLC-Guide_to_GPL_Compliance_2d_ed.html#gplv2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Law Center&lt;/a&gt; states for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Section 2(a) requires that all modified versions be so marked, with basic indication of the modifications made, the date of modification, and some identification of the modifier. Compliance is achieved by any markings in source code that contain this information in a reasonable form. Not all the information available from a source code version control system need be provided, nor is the requirement a substitute of the project-level ChangeLog or similar file. Appropriate compliance assists a programmer using or reviewing any particular source file to know from what version of a project or program that source file comes, and to trace the history of recent substantive modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GPLv3 that article states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...with the additional requirement to provide notice of modification, date and some identification of modifier as under GPLv2 §2(a), above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it seems like they consider it the same for GPLv2 and GPLv3&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(confirmed via &lt;code&gt;licensing@fsf.org&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that description, I imagine something like a simplified ChangeLog entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;// 12-22-1999 Ernest Thornhill (set_date): switched to 4-digit years&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... directly below the warranty disclaimer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors, date and note &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.doxygen.nl/manual/commands.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doxygen commands&lt;/a&gt; for a function you just edited&lt;br&gt;&#xA;might also be considered prominent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ChangeLog&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it might not be a requirement, a GNU coding standard is to keep a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ChangeLog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is for describing all the changes made to the source files.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/NEWS-File.html#NEWS-File&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NEWS&lt;/a&gt; file contains a list of user-visible changes worth mentioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that emacs contributors write the extended commit description&lt;br&gt;&#xA;like it's the body of a ChangeLog entry.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then they use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/build-aux/gitlog-to-emacslog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;script&lt;/a&gt; to convert the git log to a ChangeLog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2452" LastEditorUserId="13909" LastEditDate="2018-12-28T09:47:46.753" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T09:47:46.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4577" CreationDate="2016-10-08T19:21:13.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it does, in every way of conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4, conveying unmodified sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you &lt;strong&gt;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty&lt;/strong&gt;; and &lt;strong&gt;give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5, conveying modified sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noting that, from the definitions in section 0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that provision must definitely be applied to the executable, because no source code can have Interactive User Interfaces. Section 6 &amp;quot;Conveying Non-Source Forms&amp;quot; simply requires source code disclosure, in which case one of the previous applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T03:05:24.693" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4577" CreationDate="2016-10-09T12:50:35.520" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that GNU GPLv3 does not require attribution, [...] Am I correct in my understanding of GPLv3? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, the GPL-3.0 always requires attribution composed at the minimum of a copyright statement, a notice and the GPL license text.&#xA;Attribution examples are provided at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the bottom of the license text&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;what is attribution?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider that &lt;strong&gt;attribution is the essence of free and open source licensing&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume my code contains third-party code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At heart attribution is about &lt;strong&gt;communicating to my users the licensing&#xA;terms&lt;/strong&gt; of this third-party code I redistribute. Therefore all bona fide&#xA;FLOSS licenses require some type of attribution, if anything to communicate&#xA;the licensing terms to the recipients of the code. Attribution is also about&#xA;&lt;em&gt;giving due credit to the authors&lt;/em&gt; of the third-party code that I leverage (which may or may not be required by a license): this is the &lt;em&gt;right thing&lt;/em&gt; to do and the thing I would appreciate users of my code to do when my code is reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Attribution&lt;/em&gt; can take several forms and some licenses are very prescriptive about attribution requirements stating which forms it should take, where and when it should be provided or displayed, whether it is required or optional, or applies to source code and/or binary code redistribution, should be present in the documentation, in the UI, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its minimal form it requires &lt;strong&gt;at least&lt;/strong&gt; to communicate the original license terms as a notice and in many cases the whole text of the license. To be correct and complete, I should also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specify &lt;strong&gt;who this attribution is for&lt;/strong&gt;: the simplest form would&#xA;be a copyright statement. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specify &lt;strong&gt;which code this attribution applies to&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a proper copyright statement, an attribution would be moot and meaningless as the recipient would not know who I attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a proper statement of which code the attribution is for, an attribution would have not much substance as the attributed code would be undetermined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;With these basics set, what are the attribution requirements of the GPL-3.0 license?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 license is rather clear and explicit on that topic. I added to the text excerpts some emphasis and cross links to make things clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitions section&lt;/a&gt; explains  what are the &quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, this definition is reused in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] An interactive user interface displays &quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&quot; to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;appropriate copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt; explains what attribution means when I redistribute unmodified copies of the source code:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;appropriate copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I redistribute an unmodified copy of a GPL-3.0-licensed program I would need to &quot;attribute&quot; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a conspicuous copyright statement and notice, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep existing notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copy of the GPL license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider this to be the absolute minimal attribution of the GPL. Any other type of redistribution has additional requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt;, when I redistribute modified source code, I have these additional attribution requirements:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with this, clearly establishing that these are extras requirements on top of section 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code &lt;strong&gt;under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then goes on to explain what these new requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, &#xA;  and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under&#xA;  this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement&#xA;  modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I redistribute a modified source copy of a GPL-3.0-licensed program I would need to additionally &quot;attribute&quot; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a tracking of the changes I made, with prominent modification dated notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if needed, I shall update (or create) notices to state that this code is under the GPL. If program(s) is missing a copyright of the original author, I should add a copyright statement. If program(s) is missing a GPL notice, I should add a GPL notice: for this I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is some user interface, I need to update the code to display a notice following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 0&lt;/a&gt; and I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 6&lt;/a&gt;, when I redistribute binaries (aka. non-source), I have these additional attribution requirements:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with this, clearly establishing that these are extras requirements on top of section 4 and 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sections 4&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;and 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I provide the source code with the binaries then I have no new requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I do not provide the source code with the binaries I have a few extra requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) [...] accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that&#xA;  product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source [...], or (2) access to copy the&#xA;  Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written&#xA;  offer to provide the Corresponding Source. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, my new attribution requirement boils down to provide or explain how to get the source code: the license covers several possible approaches and constraints. My preferred way and the simplest is to provide the source with the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other requirements under Section 6 for &quot;user&quot; products and re-installation doc. These are not strictly part of attribution so I will not discuss these here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other sections of the license (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section7&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;are not relevant per se&lt;/strong&gt; for attribution as they are for special cases and &quot;Additional permissions&quot; cannot weaken the attribution requirements that came before in the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, at the end  and past the &quot;terms and conditions&quot;, the license provides &lt;strong&gt;guidelines and an example on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: this clarifies what a source code and displayed notice should look like if something was not clear to me before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the GPL 3.0 always requires &quot;attribution&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I may not be convinced yet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens if you want to use (modify) a GPL work that misses a copyright notice? (am I correct to think this is a possible scenario?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's still not clear to me what an &quot;appropriate copyright notice&quot; as mentioned in section 0 is. I mean, if the source I receive has 2016 (c) Philippe Ombredanne, does that mean if I modify the source, I need to keep that verbatim? What part of the license exactly is it that disallows me from just replacing it with 2016 (c) Amani Kilumanga&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I stated above, in addition to the attribution requirements for unmodified source code, if I modified source code I have these &lt;strong&gt;additional&lt;/strong&gt; requirements per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-a) I need to notify of my changes with a date&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-b) I shall update (or create) notices to state that this code is under the GPL. If program(s) is missing a copyright of the original author, I should add a copyright statement. If program(s) is missing a GPL notice, I should add a GPL notice. For this I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;For my changes I can also add my own copyright statement. I shall not/never remove anyone else copyright or notice. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-d) if there is some user interface, I need to update the code to display a notice following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 0&lt;/a&gt; and I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I modify source that had &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Amani Kilumanga&lt;/code&gt; I shall not remove that copyright statement. I can add my copyright statement &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Philippe Ombredanne&lt;/code&gt; and I must state that I modified the source when and how.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance I could add this change notice: &lt;code&gt;2016-10-01: Update the interactive streamline nosql to supply strategic users&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the source code was missing a proper GPL notice, I shall add it and I would use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; as a template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in all cases, the modified source code would start with something more or less like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Amani Kilumanga&#xA;Modifications Copyright (c) 2016 Philippe Ombredanne&#xA;2016-10-01: Update the interactive streamline nosql to supply strategic users&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a command line program notice could end up looking like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016 Amani Kilumanga&#xA;Modifications Copyright (c) 2016 Philippe Ombredanne&#xA;This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'banana foo'.&#xA;This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;under certain conditions; type 'banana bar' for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-09T18:09:48.780" LastActivityDate="2016-10-09T18:09:48.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4569" CreationDate="2016-10-09T17:30:42.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original OpenJDK (and NOT any pre-built Java download from java.net) is licensed primarily under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 2.0 with Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/assembly-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPENJDK ASSEMBLY EXCEPTION&lt;/a&gt; also applies to some parts of the code. The net effect of this licensing is that the GPL applies to the &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; but does not extend to code that would link and use &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if I bundle the OpenJDK &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; (assumed to be un-modified) in some of my software I would:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;comply with the GPL 2.0 attribution requirements for &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt;, adding the  exceptions texts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redistribute per the GPL the corresponding source code of the classes and binaries included in &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are rather simple requirements: yet you should refer to the GPL for the exact details of what these two items mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no longer a Java expert but I think that the source code should be available &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/langtools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Oracle does not make available pre-built binaries for the OpenJDK &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt;  but instead only provide JDK binaries using another license than the GPL (a limited proprietary license called the &lt;code&gt;Oracle BCL&lt;/code&gt;), I would not use any pre-built binaries provided by Oracle. Instead I would compile from source the &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; myself. Or, if this is available as a pre-built Jar in Maven central, before using this I would verify that this was indeed built from sources and that the exact corresponding source code is available me to redistribute alongside with my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2019-10-07T08:20:11.963" LastActivityDate="2019-10-07T08:20:11.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2016-10-10T06:51:42.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the general things that open source software maintainers do? Is it just another word for project leaders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just another word for project leader. You have been using open source software for several years, therefore your are a seasoned software developer. What you would do is no different that what a project leader would do for an internal application or a commercial software product.&#xA;With the caveat that when you are starting a project, you are starting with a clean slate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will therefore write code of course, first and foremost. Everything else is optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way you can think about it is what you came to appreciate in existing and successful projects you have been consuming so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create documentation for usage and development&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publish releases, eventually with pre-built binaries and installable packages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create and run tests, ideally using a CI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide support (via tickets, mailing list, forums, SO, IRC, etc) and diligently answering requests, replying to bugs, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fix bugs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publish your plans and if possible do what you said you will do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;get the word out and make your project known with blogs posts, articles, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gently usher in contributions if and when you receive any&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you will basically do everything.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T09:08:17.913" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T09:08:17.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4568" CreationDate="2016-10-10T07:15:04.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say --entirely hypothetically-- that you have created a successful Android app such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ankidroid&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ankidroid&lt;/a&gt; ... ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have built not only a decent user base but also there are several contributors that help further the code on a regular basis. Until now you may have been continuing to handle the actual releases on app stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want to pass the baton. What are your options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately there is no such thing as a &quot;foundation&quot; that would effectively do any work on your behalf. Doing work is something that you will need to handle yourself or delegate to one or more person your trust. Since you have built a community of trusted contributors you should find one person in that roster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure that the project has some more formal structure there are however two &quot;foundations&quot;-like structures that can help you and provide a framework around your project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://spi-inc.org/&quot;&gt;Software in the Public Interest&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;hosts&quot; projects such as Debian, FFmpeg, LibreOffice and Jenkins.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;hosts&quot; projects such as Boost, Git, busybox, Homebrew and Mercurial.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases these are non-profits (SFC is also a not-for-profit). In all cases these will not substitute for you and the team organizing the project governance and doing all of the work: instead think of it as a neutral corporate place to ensure a long term community viability of the project.&#xA;They may for instance &quot;hold the keys&quot; to the app store accounts, but they would not actually do anything for you with these keys: someone will have to use these and do the work, not them. So they may not be what you are looking for exactly but this may be close enough that it might work out OK for you and your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should contact both and discuss your options. Best of luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T07:15:04.743" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4491" CreationDate="2016-10-10T09:56:31.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First JavaFX is not using the LGPL but partly under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/faq-1446554.html#4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-2.0 with Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; when built from source code for some parts under the moniker &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJFX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/faq-1446554.html#10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle Binary Code license&lt;/a&gt; when provisioned from Oracle for the rest including the all important runtime&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net effects is that JavaFX as a whole is not open source. Instead this is using a proprietary &quot;trialware&quot; license (the Oracle BCL) with some UI parts under the GPL + classpath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/faq-1446554.html#4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At this time, the JavaFX UI Controls source code has been contributed to the OpenJFX open source project; other JavaFX components are expected to follow in multiple phases. The code is available under the GPL v2 with Classpath Exception license, similar to other projects in OpenJDK. The Oracle JavaFX runtime and SDK implementations will continue to be released under the Oracle Binary Code License for the Java SE Platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you can build everything in OpenJFX from sources and everything has been released by Oracle, you could build this and use these builds. I have not enough understanding of the JavaFX code nor what has been really released under &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJFX&lt;/a&gt; to draw any conclusion. If everything is available under the GPL+classpath, you can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4569/can-we-redistribute-openjdk-tools-jar/4583#4583&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to understand what would be your obligations under this license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;otherwise, you cannot use much of JavaFX beyond the limited rights granted by the Oracle BCL, and you likely will need to buy a commercial license from Oracle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional answer elements:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like after all there is a GPL+classpath version of the JavaFX runtime that has &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/openjfx/8u-dev/rt/file/3f274b21f7b6/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;landed in mercurial&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;So what you could do is redistribute an OpenJDK and build yourself this JavaFX from sources as well as the libraries. If you rely on the pre-built binaries provided by Oracle as part of the BCL-licensed Java runtime, you are subject to the vagueness of the BCL and the fact this is not licensed for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;function specific&quot;&lt;/a&gt; usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of Software in systems and solutions that provide dedicated functionality (other than as mentioned above) or designed for use in embedded or function-specific software applications, for example but not limited to: ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you opt for the BCL you will likely subject yourself to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; kind of audit as Oracle can consider as function specific whatever  it wants... And the word on the street and that it surely uses and abuses of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4854/is-it-legal-to-bundle-openjdk-hotspot-with-a-closed-source-application/4855#4855&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4863/is-java-for-server-runtimes-like-jboss-eap-wildfly-still-free-to-use/4867#4867&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4824/is-it-legal-to-bundle-oracles-jre-with-an-open-source-program/4826#4826&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer related to the BCL and Java and why it cannot be used for redistribution with free and open source software as well as commercially licensed software, &#xA;unless you either get a truly open OpenJDK (eventually building it yourself) or you buy a commercial license from Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T14:58:33.980" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3994" CreationDate="2016-10-10T10:19:19.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider that &lt;strong&gt;attribution is the essence of free and open source licensing&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also an important part of the FOSS bargain: I give you my free code and in exchange I get credited for this gift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other practical aspects to attribution. Let's assume first that my code contains third-party code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At heart attribution is about &lt;strong&gt;communicating to my users the licensing&#xA;terms&lt;/strong&gt; of the third-party code that I redistribute. Therefore all bona fide&#xA;FLOSS licenses require some type of attribution, if anything &lt;strong&gt;to ensure that I communicate the licensing terms&lt;/strong&gt; of third-party code to the recipients of this code including the all important warranty disclaimers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated above, attribution is also about &lt;em&gt;giving due credit to the authors&lt;/em&gt; of the third-party code that I leverage (which may or may not be required by a license); this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;part of the bargain for me receiving free code &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;right thing&lt;/em&gt; to do &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the thing I would appreciate others to do when they reuse my own code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Attribution&lt;/em&gt; can take several forms and some licenses are very prescriptive about attribution requirements stating which forms it should take, where and when it should be provided or displayed, whether it is required or optional, or applies to source code and/or binary code redistribution, should be present in the documentation, in the UI, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its minimal form it requires &lt;strong&gt;at least&lt;/strong&gt; to communicate the original license terms as a notice and in many cases the whole text of the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be correct, complete and do the right thing, I would also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specify &lt;strong&gt;who this attribution is for&lt;/strong&gt;: the simplest form would&#xA;be a copyright statement. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specify &lt;strong&gt;which code this attribution applies to&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a proper copyright statement, an attribution would be moot and meaningless as the recipient would not know who I attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a proper statement of which code the attribution is for, an attribution would have not much substance as the attributed code would be undetermined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the requirements are rather simple and easy to comply with and some licenses like the GPL are more &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4582/947&quot;&gt;prescriptive and explicit&lt;/a&gt; in their requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I copied and adapted part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4582/947&quot;&gt;my answer to this other question&lt;/a&gt; here as I felt it was relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T10:19:19.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4589" CreationDate="2016-10-10T13:46:59.207" Score="20" ViewCount="3325" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have published the first version of my software on my company's git repo and some other developers outside of our company have shown interest in contributing to our work. We are releasing our software under the LGPL license. How can we prevent these external developers from claiming copyright on their contribution in future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we make sure that the external developers/companies do not claim copyright on the source they contributed to our project? What we want to avoid is a situation where a company comes and asks us to re-license our product (for example for the purpose of commercial application) and the external developer/company has to agree to the terms of the re-licensing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6402" OwnerDisplayName="hsalimi" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T20:26:09.297" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T17:54:57.673" Title="How to prevent contributors from claiming copyright on my LGPL-released software?" Tags="|contributor|lgpl|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2016-10-10T13:51:30.663" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a legitimate issue that's come up various times in the past on various open source projects.  The way it's typically handled is by not accepting external contributions into your repository unless they sign an agreement either transferring their copyright interest to you or, at the very least, explicitly waiving their right to disagree with your future non-LGPL licensing choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the nature of an open source license means that they're still free to fork the code and merge in their own changes, and there's nothing you can do about that.  But a having a contributor's license agreement means that the code under &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; control doesn't end up entangled with external copyright interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="503" OwnerDisplayName="Mason Wheeler" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T13:51:30.663" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2016-10-10T15:14:54.713" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have run into this problem in libpng.  We addressed it by putting any contributions that insist on keeping their own copyright, or are under a different open source license, into a &quot;contrib&quot; directory, which has its own README.txt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This &quot;contrib&quot; directory contains contributions which are not&#xA;  necessarily under the libpng license, although all are open source. &#xA;  They are not part of libpng proper and are not used for building the&#xA;  library, although some are used for testing the library via &quot;make&#xA;  check&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subdirectories in the contrib directory have their own LICENSE, README, etc., or the files have copyright/license statements embedded in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Libpng isn't under LGPL (it's under the libpng license) but that's irrelevant; we were still concerned about contributors possibly taking control of our license, as you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have on occasion moved a contribution out of the &quot;contrib&quot; directory into libpng proper, once the contributor had agreed to relinquish copyright on the contribution to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-10T21:49:57.940" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T21:49:57.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2016-10-10T18:22:59.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've thought about this before, and considered the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributions to the project must themselves be licensed under the MIT license (or a similarly permissive license). MIT-licensed software can be safely included in (L)GPL projects and proprietary projects alike. The only requirements is that the copyright notice and the license terms be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is that the contributors retain their copyright (thus not requiring signing a contract to transfer copyright, a significant barrier to entry), while giving you the freedom to do with their contributions what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, however, not a lawyer, and I'm not sure where the pitfalls - if any - lie with this approach. I don't think I've seen it used in the wild, but I can only speculate why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6406" LastActivityDate="2016-10-10T18:22:59.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2016-10-11T08:37:53.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Contract&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we prevent these external developers from claiming copyright on their contribution in future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the only way to achieve the quoted is to not just take in any pull requests, but only do so when you get a written, signed contract from that external developer which clearly transfers the copyright to you for those changes (have them include the commit hash in the contract). If you do that, I do not see how there could be any problems whatsoever (that your lawyer couldn't handle). Of course, you will want to make sure that there is a spotless track record of your version of the repository, so you can prove in court that you only added commits that were from either your company or properly contracted external developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be on the save side, you would also formulate your contract so that it is the external developers obligation to prove that he actually holds the copyright (that he transfers to you) in the first place, i.e., they cannot include 3rd party code in &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; code or will be held liable if they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Compartmentalization&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What we want to avoid is a situation where a company comes and asks us to re-license our product (for example for the purpose of commercial application) and the external developer/company has to agree to the terms of the re-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, let's focus on what you mean by &quot;a company comes and asks us to re-license our product&quot;. Do you have any concrete idea why a company would do that (this is not a rhetorical question). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you have some part of your library that is excessively clever that you want to keep secret? Trade secret? As soon as you LGPL and distribute the library, you can forget about secrecy anyway, people can fork it and there is nothing whatsoever you can do against it, neither technical nor by law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some cryptography involved? Forget about keeping that secret by closing the source at a later date - or by closing at all; security by obscurity does not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you do come up with a good reason (for yourself - you don't need to tell us), then the easier solution, (easier than the contract variant), would be to put the &quot;special&quot; code in its own library and do not put it in the same repository. Release it separately under some license that is open source but firmly keeps your interests in mind - especially, never accept merge requests by external contributors. Then you can have your &quot;free&quot; parts really free (as in freedom), and just trust the (L)GPL; and you can keep the sensitive parts to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="6142" LastEditDate="2016-10-11T10:41:14.003" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T10:41:14.003" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4594" CreationDate="2016-10-11T13:51:28.810" Score="7" ViewCount="2434" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the Android kernel is GPL. Doesn't that mean that if I buy an Android tablet the manufacturer has to make the kernel source available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no source on their website and their customer support doesn't understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your tablet doesn't have this GPL feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I add to my emails to make them understand any legal requirements that they might have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6088" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2016-10-12T00:52:30.787" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T14:23:09.317" Title="How do I get the kernel source for my Android tablet?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|operating-system|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2016-10-11T23:17:58.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't that mean that if I buy an android tablet the manufacturer has to make the kernel source available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly right. The relevant text is section 3 of GPLv2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&#xA;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&#xA;c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise that you say something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear [company],&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your devices, you are distributing executable copies of the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2). Under section 3 of this license, anyone who distributes executable form of the software must provide the users with the complete source code to the software on request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reproduce section 3 of the GPL here]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thus request that you fulfill the license's terms by providing the source code of my tablet's kernel to me. Please be advised that failure to comply with the terms of this license results in permanent termination of your rights to modify and distribute the Linux kernel under section 4 of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[perhaps reproduce section 4 here]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, I would recommend you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2485/5392&quot;&gt;this excellent answer&lt;/a&gt;, which is intended for developers and the MPL but could apply to anyone dealing with a FLOSS license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-11T23:17:58.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4596" CreationDate="2016-10-12T00:03:30.830" Score="-1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a tool that uses another tool to convert a file from format#1 to format#2. And currently, my tool works only if it is given the file in format#2 as input, and so, it depends on that format#2. And to convert from format#1 to format#2, I modified converter tool and made those changes public as well through GitHub. The converter tool has Apache 2.0 License but when I had downloaded it, it had Lesser GPL license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to make my tool open source. Can I use Affero GPL or LGPL or GPL license for my tool or should I stick to Apache License only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6422" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T07:53:38.953" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T07:53:38.953" Title="What open-source license should I use for my tool?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|lgpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4595" CreationDate="2016-10-12T09:16:07.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The converter tool you modified&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you downloaded the tool it was under LGPL. So, normally you should have published your modifications under that license. But you say that it is now available under Apache 2.0. Are all versions of the tool now also licensed under this new license or is it just new versions? If it's just new versions, you should make sure that your modifications apply to a version whose code is currently released under Apache 2.0 before publishing your modified version under this license as well. Otherwise, you could have published them under the original LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also quickly check that the license change seems legitimate. Typically, if the converter tool was the work of one single author, then it's probably legitimate. In other cases, that can be more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The converter tool you created&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can publish this one under any license you wish as it is your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The combination of the two converter tools&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &quot;whole work&quot; can only be published under a license which its dependencies are compatible with. Whether the converter tool you modified should have been licensed under Apache or LGPL does not change much to the game because both of these licenses are compatible with AGPL 3.0 and GPL 3.0. So feel free to use one of these for the whole work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T09:16:07.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4601" CreationDate="2016-10-12T11:22:32.930" Score="4" ViewCount="1462" Body="&lt;p&gt;We plan to ship an application together with the required dynamic-libraries (SO/DLL), we link dynamically against one of these libraries, which uses the others libraries.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; requires us to provide the libraries-sources. I assume I can provide the sources in a second package from our server, servers of the original projects or using the possibility to offer the code for three years (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6, GPL&lt;/a&gt;). At the moment I tend to use that &lt;strong&gt;three year clause&lt;/strong&gt; from Section 6, Paragraph B of the GPL. Because literally nobody will replace the libraries and if they want, the will likely use newer versions of the library which we don't use. Furthermore, we don't have to maintain the downloads on ourselves, just keep a backup of the library-sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you now a good example of a closed-source application, which comes together with LGPL-Libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://get.adobe.com/de/flashplayer/download/?installer=FP_11.2_for_other_Linux_64-bit_(.tar.gz)_-_NPAPI&amp;amp;sType=2718&amp;amp;standalone=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libflashplayer&lt;/a&gt;, but that is a bad example. Adobe just includes a copyright notice and the LGPL. Which is probably okay, because they don't deliver the LGPL-Libraries on their own and assume they are available. I can't, because we target also Windows and have to provide our stuff in a complete package.&#xA;Thankfully we can build our work on the libraries and the LGPL, but it is weirdly written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally asked this question on Stack Overflow, but wasn't able to move it here, so I opened here this question again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;// update:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;We're linking against libmicrohttpd* which is using the LGPLv2.1 or at option any later version. Furthermore we running the executable on a regular IBM compatible personal-computer and not shipping it on a device or appliance. As far as I know, we are not building up on any patented-stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I can really recommend this project, the people are helpful and friendly. I should spend some euros for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6425" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T19:58:31.240" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T19:58:31.240" Title="Provide closed-source application with LGPL-Libraries" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4613" CreationDate="2016-10-12T12:49:07.330" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a game in that requires the CSFML libraries. I've downloaded the libraries from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://dsfml.com/downloads.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://dsfml.com/downloads.html&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't understand these things, the license doesn't explain much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I only want to distribute the files in the lib folder, can I? Not the whole package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I can, where do I put the license.txt? Given that the files will be put in the &lt;code&gt;/lib&lt;/code&gt; directory in the FileSystem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S: I downloaded the 32 bit Linux package from that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6429" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-10-14T11:06:50.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T11:06:50.797" Title="How am I supposed to distribute the file licensed under this license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4602" CreationDate="2016-10-12T12:49:13.963" Score="-1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;Free Software Definition&quot;&gt;&quot;Free Software Definition&quot;&lt;/a&gt; says that that a piece of software can be classified as free if it meets The Four Freedoms. The first of these is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While most of the real licences classified as free software licences contain &lt;strong&gt;some limitations&lt;/strong&gt;, f.e. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; title=&quot;MIT Licence&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; requires this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if we wrote a piece of software that breaks this licence? For example, we could write a spamming app that distributes itself without including the copyright notice. This would break the licence. So the MIT Licence, and any other licence that provides some bounds and limitations can be disclassified as free software licence by breaking the freedom 0, thus not allowing the program to be run in order to break those bounds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6428" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:16:36.577" Title="Freedom 0 licencing issue" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4597" CreationDate="2016-10-12T12:52:05.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a written offer to provide the library source code on a medium suitable for software exchange (for LGPL 2.1 this would be something like a DVD) at a cost covering your expenses is one of the options you have. You do not need to host the source code on a web server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be able to find plenty of examples of this kind of commercial use with any Android device manufacturer (Samsung, Sony, Motorola, HTC, etc) as Android devices are normally shipped with several LGPL licensed libraries installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T12:52:05.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4600" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:16:36.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Freedom 0 applies to &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; the software: you can run it for any purpose, in any way you want. The limitations you mention in free software licenses apply when you modify and/or redistribute the software, not when you run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL makes this even more explicit; in section 9 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;version 3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T13:16:36.577" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4593" CreationDate="2016-10-12T14:23:09.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before jumping to any conclusions about GPL violations, I suggest that you start up the tablet and check Settings -&gt; About device -&gt; Legal information -&gt; Open Source licenses (or something along those lines). In many cases you will there find a written offer to provide you with the source code. The details on how to contact the manufacturer for this purpose should be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishing the source code on a web server is neither required nor alone sufficient to comply with the GPL version 2.0. The written offer (assuming that the manufacturer makes good on it), or bundling the source code with the device is. You might find that you need to contact the manufacturer via snail mail and that you will have to cover their costs of handling, shipping and the media itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T14:23:09.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4605" CreationDate="2016-10-12T12:03:28.107" Score="6" ViewCount="2160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked a messaging app on github and added my modification on top of it and it started to build an audience in my country because of the unique ad-on feature I have added. The app acts as an SMS gateway to country xyz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything I have added on top of the original code will be on github as an open-source project except my SMS API/server details. Because that is what I understand with GPLv3 you need to give also the source code for free if you want to distribute the derivative project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now - will I break the GPLv3 if I distribute/publish on Android market the modified code with ads on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6431" OwnerDisplayName="mboy" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T11:07:18.660" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T11:07:18.660" Title="Can I put ads on a GPLv3 project and upload it to Google Play?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4604" CreationDate="2016-10-12T19:11:27.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not prevent you from including ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: since you have to publish the GPL code of the app, you cannot prevent someone else from forking &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code, removing the ads, and publishing as well. Which of the two versions are users likely to prefer: the ad-supported or the ad-free version, if both are free? Since many users find that ads degrade their user experience, you might find that some users switch apps. That in itself is not a problem since little revenue is still more than no revenue. However, you might also lose some reputation when moving to an ad-supported model. As a result, most open source software does not show ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is slightly complicated by your statement that the “server details” are not published. I assume you mean some sort of access key that authorizes the client to use your server. This would be a technical measure preventing others from creating a usable fork of your app. Whether such a measure is consistent with the GPL is not immediately clear, and would probably be worth another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2016-10-12T19:11:27.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4607" CreationDate="2016-10-12T20:54:42.783" Score="6" ViewCount="5606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSXGraph&lt;/a&gt; JavaScript library in a website project.  The library is covered by the LGPL and MIT licenses.  I'm new to licensing and am trying to answer the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I build a subscription-based website that allows users to buy monthly access to the site.  Users would be served proprietary content and be able to interact with dynamic widgets built on JSXGraph.  What responsibilities do I have to customers or the license holders themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if instead of a website, I build a mobile app that serves the content and dynamic widgets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6448" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Littig" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T19:12:19.947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T19:12:19.947" Title="Implication of LGPL and MIT licenses for commercial use (of JSXGraph library)" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4606" CreationDate="2016-10-13T09:17:22.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the project website is not that clear, the README on GitHub is much clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JSXGraph is free software dual licensed under the GNU LGPL or MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual licensed means that you can choose which license applies to you. For commercial use, you will be better off choosing to follow the MIT requirements only: it is less complicated to comply with MIT than with LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only condition of the MIT license is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that your app (whether web app or mobile app) should contain an About page (or a Licenses page, or something like that) where you reproduce &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jsxgraph/jsxgraph/blob/master/LICENSE.MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;this notice&lt;/a&gt;, preferably with a link to the project page as well (but that is not part of the requirement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T09:17:22.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2016-10-13T09:36:24.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distributing only the files in the &lt;code&gt;lib/&lt;/code&gt; folder is technically to &quot;alter it&quot;. Thus, you should include the License.txt file in the &lt;code&gt;lib/&lt;/code&gt; folder as well, but including a first line explaining it was altered. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This folder contains part of the DSFML library. This library is licensed as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T09:36:24.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4611" CreationDate="2016-10-13T18:08:29.000" Score="6" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a well-known GPL3 game on Google Play called Pixel Dungeon by watabou (which includes a game engine by watabou called &quot;noosa&quot; which is also GPL3), and it accepts donations in the app. The game has been forked by many programmers, in particular by Nyrds to &quot;Remixed Pixel Dungeon&quot;, where they added unlockable perks for donating, as well as advertisements and IAP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been working on my own version forked from RPD, and I plan to make it more significantly different from its forerunners than any of the variants I've found online. I started from RPD rather than PD because RPD added a number of features I wanted to cannibalize. I've removed the ads and IAP, but I'm leaving the donation option in and possibly some donation perks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making a lot of changes to the system, and for my own sanity I've been refactoring the entire structure of the code base: it no longer uses same the directory structure watabou or Nyrds set up, so at a glance it isn't obvious anymore from the structure of the code alone 'who did what' exactly. I understand enough about GPL3 that I know I need to provide users with a link to my own code (which I'll keep on github), and that's not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: how much trouble do I need to go to in order to properly credit watabou and Nyrds for what they've already done? Is it sufficient for me to mention them both, knowing that the forks on Github allow them to be located by anyone who visits my personal code source, since the trail of forks leads back to both of them? Or do I need to provide and maintain a set of links to the authors' and their work, which might require upkeep on my part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hope is that absorbing others' code into my own directory structure (rather than keeping it in com.watabou.*, etc.) isn't going to cause me a legal headache. I just prefer being able to organize the code as I see fit, and toss the bits that I never plan to use, since I can always access it again through Github if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6445" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T20:27:28.643" Title="How much access to the &quot;original&quot; code of a GPL-sourced project do I need to provide, personally?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2016-10-13T19:19:10.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any requirement to credit previous authors, aside from keeping their copyright notices intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest you copy &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; notice of rights, and the warranty disclaimer to your LICENSE file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;  (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;  GNU General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing to be careful about is whether or not they include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of courtesy you could add the following to your LICENSE file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the program's name and version number when you forked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;their copyright notice from the code (this also gives a date)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some appropriate link&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The original code&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could note the latest commit ID (e.g. &lt;code&gt;ca458a2&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then you could offer the ability to browse or directly download the original code:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/watabou/pixel-dungeon/tree/ca458a2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/watabou/pixel-dungeon/tree/ca458a2&lt;/a&gt; (browse)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/watabou/pixel-dungeon/archive/ca458a2.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://github.com/watabou/pixel-dungeon/archive/ca458a2.zip&lt;/a&gt; (direct download)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2452" LastEditorUserId="2452" LastEditDate="2016-10-15T20:27:28.643" LastActivityDate="2016-10-15T20:27:28.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4571" CreationDate="2016-10-13T22:35:31.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be easier to think about this in a negative sense, i.e. what are the responsibilities of someone who contributes to a project but isn't a maintainer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I submit a patch to someone else's project and that patch gets merged in, I am an author of the project.  However, I may never look at the project ever again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintainers, then, are the people who do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; beyond that.  What they specifically do depends on the project, their interests, and their schedule, but generally speaking they are &lt;em&gt;responsible for&lt;/em&gt; anything that needs to be done (even if they don't do the actual work and just ensure that someone else does it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-10-13T22:35:31.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4599" CreationDate="2016-10-14T09:00:41.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CSFML library is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Jebbs/DSFML/blob/master/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;licensed under&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/zlib/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;ZLIB license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When redistributing binaries, the zlib requirements are ... minimal. In fact there are no requirements in that case beside not claiming that I wrote this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I do not need to do anything special and in particular I do not need to include the license text in a binary-only redistribution. The zlib license has no such requirement for binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the right thing do is to meet also the suggested requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgement in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would include in my product documentation and/or credits page some acknowledgement for that library. Since I want to do the right thing and I may also include several other open source libraries in my product, I would also include the [copyright notice and license text&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Jebbs/DSFML/blob/master/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; for good measure even if this not strictly required here: this way I would just treat this as the other libraries and include all the license and notice texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T09:00:41.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4606" CreationDate="2016-10-14T09:33:33.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;JSXGrpah is distributed under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jsxgraph/jsxgraph/blob/71b07acf107711324e8ea72da8307d473579a1b5/COPYRIGHT#L16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choice of licenses&lt;/a&gt;. The use of an &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsxgraph.uni-bayreuth.de/wp/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;LGPL AND MIT&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on their home page is a bit misleading as I could be led to think that both licenses apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JSXGraph is released under the LGPL – Lesser GNU General Public License – &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jsxgraph/jsxgraph/blob/71b07acf107711324e8ea72da8307d473579a1b5/COPYRIGHT#L16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual COPYRIGHT&lt;/a&gt; file included in the repository is more explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JSXGraph is free software dual licensed under the GNU LGPL &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OR&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT License [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that I can select one license or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yet, in all cases some portion of the code are always under the MIT license as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jsxgraph/jsxgraph/blob/71b07acf107711324e8ea72da8307d473579a1b5/COPYRIGHT#L43&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I can see here&lt;/a&gt;. The code &amp;quot;UTF-8 Decoder by Bjoern Hoehrmann&amp;quot; was itself originally under a choice of BSD or MIT license. Since only an MIT license has been reproduced in the JSXGraph COPYRIGHT file, I assume that the JSXGraph authors elected to use the MIT alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a summary &lt;strong&gt;I can select either the LGPL3.0 or later or the MIT license, plus the MIT license for third-party inclusions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses allow unrestricted usage. The LGPL has extra requirements including source code redistribution and change tracking when modified. Using one over the other is a matter of taste and legal policy. For a proprietary application, the permissive MIT license has fewer constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I build a subscription-based website that allows users to buy monthly access to the site. Users would be served proprietary content and be able to interact with dynamic widgets built on JSXGraph. What responsibilities do I have to customers or the license holders themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JSXGraph looks like a frontend JavaScript library to me and therefore its code is redistributed to the user of my web application. In all case I would need to provide some &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3994/why-do-almost-all-open-source-licenses-require-attribution/4587#4587&quot;&gt;attribution&lt;/a&gt;: assuming that I select the permissive MIT license choice, I would ensure that the original license notices and copyrights is included in my web app (ideally in the code of JSXGraph) and/or reproduce somewhere in my application this notice.&#xA;I would also signify my choice of license by stating that I elected to use the MIT choice: This would be an extra statement that I would add to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jsxgraph/jsxgraph/blob/71b07acf107711324e8ea72da8307d473579a1b5/COPYRIGHT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notice&lt;/a&gt; I reproduce or it could be part of some additional documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if instead of a website, I build a mobile app that serves the content and dynamic widgets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license requirements do not change in this case. But the LGPL 3.0 license requirement may change. For instance, since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt; is an exception to the GPL 3.0, I may have additional requirement related to user products in a locked-down mobile application context (though these are unlikely to be an issue for a JavaScript library like JSXGraph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I pick the permissive MIT license, then the requirements are essentially limited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3994/why-do-almost-all-open-source-licenses-require-attribution/4587#4587&quot;&gt;attribution&lt;/a&gt; and the same as they would be for a web application frontend as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T09:33:33.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4588" CreationDate="2016-10-14T09:54:34.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we make sure that the external developers/companies do not claim copyright on the source they contributed to our project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is commonly handled with what is called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; or CLA. These come in several shapes or forms and their purpose boils down to terms such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ensuring that contributions are original or have a well defined provenance and licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in many cases assigning or licensing the contribution rights to the project or organization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CLA may be very simple and automatic such as the Linux Kernel &lt;a href=&quot;http://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or they can be full featured &quot;contracts&quot; that require signature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most handle the cases (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have a variant&lt;/a&gt;) when contributions are made on behalf of your employer or as part of your employment. There is even an open source project to provide standardized &lt;a href=&quot;http://harmonyagreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA templates&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses such as the Apache 2.0 have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#contributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA-like terms&lt;/a&gt; built-in to ensure that contributions to an Apache-licensed project are automatically received under the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some practical examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;major open source foundations such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/cla-corporate.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute#Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenStack Foundation&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/ecafaq.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Foundation&lt;/a&gt; typically require that a CLA is in place before accepting significant contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/legal/contributor-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-914911&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software&lt;/a&gt; companies distributing product under a dual copyleft/commercial or &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;releasing open&lt;/a&gt; source &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.facebook.com/cla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projects&lt;/a&gt; need or prefer a CLA: to ensure that they can carry on this dual licensing scheme they need to hold the rights to the code such that they can relicense it commercially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="11348" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T17:54:57.673" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T17:54:57.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4610" CreationDate="2016-10-14T11:28:56.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much access to the “original” code of a GPL-sourced project do I need to provide, personally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have to provide any access to the “original” code of a GPL-sourced project I forked and I modified. I have however several obligations to document the origin and license of the code and provide proper attribution. And I need to make my modified source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at what I should do in details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is this: how much trouble do I need to go to in order to properly credit watabou and Nyrds for what they've already done? Is it sufficient for me to mention them both, knowing that the forks on Github allow them to be located by anyone who visits my personal code source, since the trail of forks leads back to both of them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First almost all open source licenses require &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3994/why-do-almost-all-open-source-licenses-require-attribution/4587#4587&quot;&gt;some form of attribution&lt;/a&gt;. In particular the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution/4582#4582&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0 always&lt;/a&gt; requires attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do I need to provide and maintain a set of links to the authors' and their work, which might require upkeep on my part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I would require to do some work. Is this case I am dealing with several aspects of the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am redistributing modified sources on my Github repo. Hence section &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 5&lt;/a&gt; of the GPL apply and explains what I need to do to attribute when I redistribute modified copies of the source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would need to under Section 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a conspicuous copyright statement and notice, such as in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep existing notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a copy of the GPL license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And additionally under Section 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-a) I need to notify of my changes with a date, for instance as a comment. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-b) I shall update (or create) notices to state that this code is under the GPL. If the upstream program are missing a copyright from the original author(s), I should add a copyright statement. If the upstrea programs are missing a GPL notice, I should add a GPL notice. For this I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; available at the bottom of the GPL.&#xA;For my changes I can also add my own copyright statement. I shall not/never remove anyone else copyright or notice. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;per 5-d) if there is some user interface, and there is one for sure in my game, I will need to update the code to display a notice following the description &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 0&lt;/a&gt; and I can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; for this too. This last point applies to the binary app itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside this, I always need to provide the &quot;corresponding source&quot; code to the recipients of the binary application per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The section 6 is rather complex and handles many different scenarios. The simplest for an open source mobile app is likely to use the 6 a):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean that I would likely:&#xA;- include a link to download the source code on the app store web page for my app. This way any downloader would have the opportunity to get the source code at the same time as getting the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inside my app, also include a link to download the source code on the app store web page for my app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hope is that absorbing others' code into my own directory structure (rather than keeping it in com.watabou.*, etc.) isn't going to cause me a legal headache. I just prefer being able to organize the code as I see fit, and toss the bits that I never plan to use, since I can always access it again through Github if need be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no special additional requirements if I change the directory structure per se, the requirements apply to modifications in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T11:47:08.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4639" CreationDate="2016-10-12T13:13:53.783" Score="3" ViewCount="1090" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say there is a hardware appliance which a company would like to rent out to customers for use e.g. during trade fairs. The appliance is fed image data, analyses it and displays the results on-screen. Some GPL-licensed libraries are being used, without any modifications to them, to do image transforms etc. (think &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;VIPS&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sachinchoolur/lightgallery.js/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;lightgallery&lt;/a&gt;, not the actual libraries we are using). The source code of the software running on the appliance cannot be accessed, copied or viewed by the customers. There are no pre-compiled binaries which might contain any of the libraries' code, as only interpreted languages are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the appliance is not sold, the GPL-licensed libraries are not compiled as part of the product and are not modified, it is not possible for anyone who is not company-internal to access the software source-code nor any binaries, does this constitute &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; in terms of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a list of used GPL-licensed libraries contained in the appliance need to be contained in the software or manual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other considerations to take into account before offering such a product to be rented out by potential customers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: We are talking about LGPL and GPL-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6499" OwnerDisplayName="Riley" LastEditorUserId="6499" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T16:17:04.177" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T09:07:18.757" Title="GPL - is it distribution to use libraries in an appliance loaned to customers?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2016-10-14T15:33:33.817" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting situation, I will admit.  Certainly anything &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;L&lt;/em&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;'d would be fine to run on your appliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; (which removed the term &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt;, in favor of &lt;em&gt;Propagate&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Convey&lt;/em&gt;), it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “&lt;em&gt;propagate&lt;/em&gt;” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, &lt;strong&gt;except executing it on a computer&lt;/strong&gt; or modifying a private copy. [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you stick to your &quot;&lt;em&gt;libraries being used, without any modifications to them&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then you are &lt;strong&gt;NOT propagating&lt;/strong&gt; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “&lt;em&gt;convey&lt;/em&gt;” a work means any kind of &lt;em&gt;propagation&lt;/em&gt; that enables other parties to make or receive copies. &lt;strong&gt;Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/strong&gt; [again, emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm sure you could get a shill lawyer and argue the HDMI interface between your appliance and the tradeshow flatscreen constitutes a network, or a myriad of other legal trickery.  But I doubt you'd need to, as there's a lovely section (section 6 is his name) which &lt;em&gt;grants you the right&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;convey&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;non-source forms&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, section 6 a states: (that you may...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, just include a CD/DVD, etc with the appliance rental contract, it only needs to have the source code of the GPL libraries on it, nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usual disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, pay a real lawyer if you really care, yada yada&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6452" OwnerDisplayName="Tersosauros" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T15:33:33.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2016-10-14T18:11:44.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you need to dive deep into any legal quagmires to find an answer. Consider this: The company is making money by renting out a device. The device contains GPL licensed libraries. The device wouldn't function for this purpose without the libraries. The GPL doesn't allow any special exception for a time limited distribution, such as a rental. The company is making a binary distribution of GPL licensed software to its customers and needs to follow the license requirements for that situation. How the device is then used by the customers is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T09:03:30.590" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T09:03:30.590" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4621" CreationDate="2016-10-15T22:47:09.110" Score="2" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an (as of yet) small project, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://rightbrace.github.io/mdwg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wallpaper generator&lt;/a&gt; that overlays SVG images like stencils on solid backgrounds, and I am unsure of how to properly go about licensing the art (largely under the Free Art License 1.3). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The section that is troubling me is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have the right to distribute copies of this work; whether modified or not, whatever the medium and the place, with or without any charge, provided that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;attach this license without any modification to the copies of this work or indicate precisely where the license can be found,&#xA;  specify to the recipient the names of the author(s) of the originals, including yours if you have modified the work,&#xA;  specify to the recipient where to access the originals (either initial or subsequent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later summarised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– How to use the Free Art License? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To benefit from the Free Art License, you only need to mention the following elements on your work:&#xA;  [Name of the author, title, date of the work. When applicable, names of authors of the common work and, if possible, where to find the originals].&#xA;  Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License &lt;a href=&quot;http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I'm generating the images client side, using a simple &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;canvas&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; element, I cannot include this information in the png Description line, or anything like that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting it in the corner of the wallpapers would be unseemly; so I am wondering if it would be enough to give the information in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the source of the web app and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the application itself, say in a 'Licensing/Attribution' tab (this is how the art section of the GNU site appears to do it)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qOMK0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image on GNU site&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help that can be offered is greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6465" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T11:31:27.190" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T14:56:34.860" Title="Free Art License Proper Method Of Attribution For An Image" Tags="|licensing|attribution|artistic-works|art|free-art-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2016-10-16T05:56:51.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a copyleft license because any larger work that includes part of the work you received must be released, as a whole, either under the same license or under a similar license that meets stated criteria. Please don't use it for software...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeArt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeArt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; or CC-BY-SA.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An example of attribution can be seen on &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P4_hull.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also place the information in a README or LICENSE file,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;which is in the same folder as the art.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would also add the information to the equivalent project level file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2452" LastEditorUserId="2452" LastEditDate="2016-10-16T07:21:47.790" LastActivityDate="2016-10-16T07:21:47.790" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4620" CreationDate="2016-10-16T14:40:49.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues, licensing your application and licensing the images that it generates.  I think your question is about the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd embed the license information in the image.  PNG supports textual metadata, which you put in a tEXt, zTXt, or iTXt chunk.  If you are writing GIF or JPEG images, you can embed the license information in &quot;comment&quot; metadata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as your software license is concerned, see Honest Abe's answer.  And I agree that it's a good idea to also put the licensing info in a LICENSE file.  But either way, there's a good chance that the image will get separated from a LICENSE file and also a good chance that the person reusing the image will strip the metadata from it; there's not much that can be done about that.  In the next release of pngcrush I'll add a caution about removing such text, and I'll suggest that ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T14:56:34.860" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T14:56:34.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4627" CreationDate="2016-10-17T14:03:28.293" Score="-1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preamble&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Since this question is behind each second question concerning 'free software', please don't vote to close it. I don't want to discuss it with philosophers or economists or ask it on Yahoo. I want to discuss it with you, fellow programmers, puzzling your head about Open Source or Free Software and its implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Let's assume I like to build houses out of trash. The only cost is my time to build them. They look beautiful. And they feel great to live in. &#xA;I just build them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't do support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't guarantee for anything. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't wait for a ngo to pay me for what I do. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't build the living-room and let me pay for building toilet and kitchen as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps tomorrow I will stop building houses and start building boats or planes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning &quot;buying food&quot; I don't care in which way free software cares to be free. I want to be free. &lt;em&gt;Not free like beer&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not free like free speech&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;but free like somebody who does what he likes most&lt;/strong&gt; and makes a living with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can free software give me this freedom? Or is it only proprietary software, a huge legacy or a Basic Income giving that freedom to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6474" LastEditorUserId="6474" LastEditDate="2016-10-17T16:08:39.473" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T21:49:47.937" Title="Free like free to do what I know and like best - write software?" Tags="|monetization|free-software-definition|freedoms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-10-26T22:45:52.880" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-14T07:12:13.573" Score="7" ViewCount="4444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've a project in which I would like to use an LGPL licensed library, in this case FFmpeg without changes. I've run through questions and answers regarding LGPL in commercial products with conclusion that it should be possible to use such licensed library in closed commercial product. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here comes the question - as far as I've understood, I've to use dynamic linking for libraries (in case for example user wants to replace the libraries), Windows Store ap comes as a closed package which runs in sandboxed environment, I can put dll's as content in package, but user won't be able to get to them (at least without jailbreaking the device) - how to deal with that? How to comply with the license for Windows Store apps? Or maybe I understand something wrong? - those licenses can be quite confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6480" OwnerDisplayName="Romasz" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T12:49:40.510" Title="Dynamic linking LGPL library and licensing in Windows Store app" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2016-10-14T14:27:36.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;that is one corner case of the LGPL.  The spirit of the LGPL is such that a user of your app should be able to drop in a replacement of his own without needing to access your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem to me that if a process outside your app locks down this ability your app is in fact going against the spirit of the licence, indirectly yes, but the end result is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best bet here would be to consult an actual lawyer who specialises in these questions.  No advice you get online on some site, however reputable, will hold out in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6479" OwnerDisplayName="Newtopian" LastActivityDate="2016-10-14T14:27:36.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4623" CreationDate="2016-10-17T14:19:39.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess my question is based on a misunderstanding I got aware of writing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if &lt;strong&gt;I think that I earn money by putting effort in building houses&lt;/strong&gt; - it is not, is it? I would like it to be like that because that would seem fair to me, but in reality it's not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is paying me is not the effort I spent, but the limited amount of people that can live at the house at a specific time. &lt;strong&gt;The limited resource is paying me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since there are no limits for software (unless we build up some artificial ones) there is not such a kind of mechanism. &lt;strong&gt;No limit, no pay!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes free software a corner stone of changing paradigms: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays the pardigm is often &quot;How do I earn the maximum amount of money with it?&quot;. The paradigm of free software is: &quot;How do I program this software to optimally fulfill its purpose, in a collaborative way?&quot; So it perhaps helps to make society care less for profit and care more for purpose (like Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So the answer could be:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If you build software to solve a problem, free software will help you to solve this problem better (and perhaps even earn money with it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't interested in a specific purpose, why not simply get employed by somebody who has a specific purpose (and lets you develop the software under a free license)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6474" LastEditorUserId="6474" LastEditDate="2016-10-17T23:37:26.577" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T23:37:26.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4623" CreationDate="2016-10-17T18:58:08.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free software is a movement concerned with software that respects the user's freedom. A particular piece of software is either licensed in a way that respects the FSF's four freedoms, or it is not. Whether or not the author of that software makes a living doing what he pleases is a separate concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to ask, &amp;quot;How do I make a living writing software that complies with the four freedoms, but not by charging for support, selling warranties, finding a co-aligned charity/business to pay me for what I already do, or having software with some subset of non-free features?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the most basic level, people will pay you if you do something that supplies value to them. The catch, of course, is that what another person finds valuable may not align perfectly with exactly what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll paraphrase a bit from an answer given by Richard Stallman which I heard in person and can't give a direct quote for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developer effort is an abundant resource, but the ability to &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; developer effort is a limited resource. Developers are writing free software all the time, right now. But if you're a business, it might be that all of the software that exists in the world right now doesn't solve exactly the problem you need solved. You could, of course, wait (or ask nicely) for that tireless legion of free software developers to produce exactly the software you need, but odds are, they won't. They'll keep working on whatever they'd like to work on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you offer &lt;em&gt;money&lt;/em&gt; to those developers to redirect their energy into writing the software features that your business needs, then you might get somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Apologies if I've misrepresented Mr. Stallman's viewpoint in any way above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if a company offered you a chance to redirect your efforts from working on your own your perfect dream of ideal programing projects to prioritizing the specific features that they need, maybe you'd consider this a failure to meet the requirement of doing &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what you want. To such a response, I can only say: this is a fundamental economic difficulty that must occur anytime people with money have different goals from people who want money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also say -- even if the tasks the business needs closely align with your own wishes -- that this is a violation of your prohibition against (analogously) &amp;quot;waiting for an NGO.&amp;quot; But again, I submit that since economic transactions must involve two willing parties, you must necessarily wait until you can find a buyer for your services. This is no different from getting a job (you must wait until someone accepts your application) or selling a good (you must wait until a buyer will give you money).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-17T23:06:13.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-09-21T11:37:47.330" Score="2" ViewCount="671" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a company wants to use an application that is distributed under the BSD license with this text below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;  * Neither the name of the &amp;lt;organization&amp;gt; nor the&#xA;    names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;    derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &quot;AS IS&quot;&#xA;AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE&#xA;IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&#xA;ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt; BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;&#xA;LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial company wants to use the software in binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you need to contact the author in order to use the software, in binary form, for a commercial product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6238" OwnerDisplayName="What'sUP" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-18T08:00:27.487" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T08:00:27.487" Title="Do you need to contact the author to use a BSD-licensed software?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4628" CreationDate="2016-09-21T12:56:00.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything in the license that says that. It simply says that someone who uses the code in binary form &quot;must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer&quot; with their product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6207" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Columbia" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T12:56:00.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4628" CreationDate="2016-09-21T13:05:16.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the BSD license, there is no need to contact the author for permission or approval to use or include a binary of the software.  If you package or use the binary of this software in your product, commercial or otherwise, you must include their license along with your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Java, much of this software is packaged in modules that already contain the license so you are compliant with BSD simply by including the dependent modules within your package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the  nor the&#xA;      names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;      derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically saying that if Linus Torvalds is the author of a library you are using in your commercial application, you cannot go and make a commercial advertisement claiming that Linus Torvalds endorses your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the BSD text just is legalese absolving the authors of the software of any responsibility to you, even if you choose not to modify the source code of the software you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29914" OwnerDisplayName="maple_shaft" LastActivityDate="2016-09-21T13:10:24.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2016-10-18T08:29:33.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let's imagine what the situation would be like if your app was open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user cannot modify the app on the store in any way (they cannot change the libraries it uses) but say the app provides a link to the code. Then they can modify the code (change the dependencies for instance), recompile it, republish it as their own app on the store. So, the user is not actually limited to use or distribute a modified version (even if they cannot modify the version that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; distribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's come back to your problem. LGPL does not force you to use dynamic linking. You can instead, for instance, provide object files for your software that the user will be able to link (statically) to any version of the library. Thus, suppose that the user wants to build this alternative version. You could make the object files available on the internet; or if you want to sell the app through the store, you could include a written notice that if someone has bought your app, they can request for the object files. The user won't be allowed to republish your app with alternative version of the library on the app store. But at least in the case of Windows apps, there is a developer option that allows you to run these apps without going through the store (mostly for testing). The user could use this mode to run their alternative build of your app and that would not contradict the terms of LGPL in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the same applies to Google Play (a similar developer mode exists) but not to Apple Store (where you have to pay a fee to Apple to use such a mode). Thus, you cannot use a LGPL library in an iPhone app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: let me add some more details to convince you that I'm not merely giving an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the relevant part of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;4. Combined Works.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, I'm not inventing my claim. LGPL is often known as the license which allows dynamic linking but all too often it is thought as the license which forces dynamic linking. This is not correct and an alternative solution is possible (solution (0)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, from the GNU FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the LGPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the purpose of complying with the LGPL (any extant version: v2, v2.1 or v3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) If you statically link against an LGPL'd library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) If you dynamically link against an LGPL'd library already present on the user's computer, you need not convey the library's source. On the other hand, if you yourself convey the executable LGPL'd library along with your application, whether linked with statically or dynamically, you must also convey the library's sources, in one of the ways for which the LGPL provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T12:38:51.777" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T12:38:51.777" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4623" CreationDate="2016-10-18T21:49:47.937" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's assume I like to build houses out of trash. The only cost is my&#xA;  time to build them. They look beautiful. And they feel great to live&#xA;  in. I just build them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't do support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't guarantee for anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't wait for a ngo to pay me for what I do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't build the living-room and let me pay for building toilet and kitchen as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Perhaps tomorrow I will stop building houses and start building boats or planes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's great, but who's going to pay for your bills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we translate this into software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's assume I like to build software.  The only cost is my time to build it.  It works well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't do support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't guarantee for anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't wait for a customer to pay me for what I do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I don't build one part and charge for add-ons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Perhaps tomorrow I will stop programming and start building boats or planes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same question arises:  who will pay your bills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us require some sort of income to survive.  The standard way to gain income is to provide products or services to people, for which they provide money in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this software you're creating is free software is almost entirely unrelated to this problem.  The only way it matters &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; is if the set of people who will pay you money for proprietary, unsupported, unguaranteed, unmaintained software that does X is different than the set of people who will pay you money for open-source, unsupported, unguaranteed, unmaintained software that does X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are very few people in the world who are able to just do whatever they want and not worry about their income.  Even those of us who enjoy our jobs still generally have to do certain things that we don't necessarily want to do, still have to show up to work reliably, etc. and that's the reason we get paid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-10-18T21:49:47.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-19T11:45:05.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Art License is a copyleft license intended for use with creative works.  The Free Software Foundation lists it among &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;Licenses for Other Works&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FAL 1.3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T00:56:53.487" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T00:56:53.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-19T11:45:05.040" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Free Art License (a copyleft license for creative works)" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T00:56:56.420" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T00:56:56.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-10-19T12:39:30.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-10-19T12:39:30.807" LastActivityDate="2016-10-19T12:39:30.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-10-19T12:39:30.807" Score="0" Body="Questions specific to stackoverflow.com should be asked on meta.stackoverflow.com. " OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T00:56:42.010" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T00:56:42.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1994" CreationDate="2016-10-19T23:21:44.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to offer some insight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it seems odd for developers to be more concerned that their work is being forked under the GPL, where they can look at the code, and replicate the features freely, as long as they don't copy the exact changes, than they are concerned that their code would be forked as proprietary, where they can't even see the changes to begin with. So right off the bat, I'm going to say that any developers with this concern do not understand what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they exist, and there are lawyers at big companies who had the same irrational fear of the GPL, so they developed weird licenses, like the CDDL, where you had to license your source code under the CDDL, but you could license your object code under any (proprietary) license you wanted to license it under. Of course, this is very incompatible with business models that license source code, but it's also incompatible with the GPL. Eventually, though, they realized that this only made it harder to combine the open source packages they wanted to use, and didn't help them in any real way at all. The CDDL is number 15 on Black Duck's list: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/top-open-source-licenses&lt;/a&gt;. Above it is the MPL, which the CDDL is based on, except it explicitly added GPL compatibility. So yeah, the whole &quot;manually make this GPL incompatible&quot; thing didn't really work out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you asked why people don't use the old 4-clause BSD license for these purposes. Well, this license is not only incompatible with the GPL, it's also incompatible, even more so than the GPL, with business uses. I don't want to shove five hundred acknowledgements onto every magazine ad I use for my software! That's insane! As explained above, clauses 3 and 4 are also pretty inconsistent, and there are a few other sloppy issues with the license... Whether or not it's GPL compatible, the license itself is just a poorly written proprietary license, and there's no good reason to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your software to be used by businesses, without restriction, you should probably license it the same way those businesses license it -- under Apache 2.0 (or, if you're Facebook, some douchey hodgepodge of a 2-clause BSD and weird patent grant, but don't do that, Facebook patent licensing is a whole different mess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastEditorUserId="6501" LastEditDate="2016-11-15T18:28:02.993" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:28:02.993" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4617" CreationDate="2016-10-20T09:07:18.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, if I were you, I would not take the chance of getting the definition of distribution wrong and possibly violating the license, when it is actually quite easy to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two answers from the GNU FAQ should be of interest to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I downloaded just the binary from the net. If I distribute copies, do I have to get the source and distribute that too? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#UnchangedJustBinary&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The general rule is, if you distribute binaries, you must distribute the complete corresponding source code too. The exception for the case where you received a written offer for source code is quite limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to distribute binaries via physical media without accompanying sources. Can I provide source code by FTP? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DistributeWithSourceOnInternet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#DistributeWithSourceOnInternet&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 3 of the GPL allows this; see option 6(b) for the full details. Under version 2, you're certainly free to offer source via FTP, and most users will get it from there. However, if any of them would rather get the source on physical media by mail, you are required to provide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what this all means is this: you can distribute the appliance without accompanying source; you should have a notice which explains that the appliance contains this and that software from this and that author, under GPL/LGPL, with a copy of the license; additionally, this notice could contain a link to the original source (and to most users it will be sufficient) but the notice must also contain a written offer to get the source on physical media (possibly, for a fee covering the costs of burning the DVD and shipping it). It won't cost you anything to add this offer and it won't probably be used. If it were used it still wouldn't cost you anything because you could charge the user for that. Just to be on the safe side, download and save the source of the software you distribute in case they were subsequently withdrawn from the internet (which I must admit is completely unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T09:07:18.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2016-10-20T12:32:49.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as far as I've understood, I've to use dynamic linking for libraries (in case for example user wants to replace the libraries), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FFmpeg has several build configuration flags: depending on which flags and codecs are activate, the resulting license may be one of LGPL 2.1 or LGPL 3.0 or GPL 2.0 or GPL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will assume that I use a build configuration that results in binaries being either LGPL-2.1 or LGPL-3.0-licensed. And that I use FFmpeg unmodified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my configuration is LGPL-2.1 or LGPL-3.0 I do not &lt;strong&gt;have to&lt;/strong&gt; use a dynamic library, but if I link FFmpeg statically with my proprietary code then I would have to somehow make available to my users a static library of my proprietary code with build instructions (together in any case with the FFmpeg sources) such that they can modify FFmpeg and relink my application with their modified FFmpeg. If I link dynamically with FFmpeg I do not have to provide a source or object form for my own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Windows Store ap comes as a closed package which runs in sandboxed environment, I can put dll's as content in package, but user won't be able to get to them (at least without jailbreaking the device) - how to deal with that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my config is LGPL-2.1 there is no requirements that the relinked app be reinstallable on the device. But there is such a requirement if I use an LGPL-3.0 config of FFmpeg. In this later case I would consider that if I provide enough of my binaries and build instructions and scripts such that a new app can be created with a modified FFmpeg and then reinstalled then I have fulfilled my obligations (with my user eventually using the app store as the installation vehicle if this is the only way to reinstall).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement in the LGPL 2 or 3 to ensure that code can be modified in place without any reinstall so supporting a reinstall with a modified FFmpeg should be enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reference I would check this &lt;a href=&quot;https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/1229&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;thread on FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt; (which is about the Apple App store but the context is the same). And this blog post from MSFT &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/06/05/using-ffmpeg-in-windows-applications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;announcing support for FFmpeg&lt;/a&gt; on Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T12:49:40.510" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T12:49:40.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-20T16:07:30.003" Score="4" ViewCount="4836" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a third party software C-library &quot;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; commerially in a product &quot;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (in fact a firmware, running on a device).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third party product &quot;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is subject to &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2 license&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;That means, I have to give a notice to the user of the final product &quot;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; about using this open source library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have a third library &quot;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; from a company (in fact it is a driver for a part of a microcontroller. We are allowed to use &quot;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; internally for developing &quot;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. We are not allowed to give away &quot;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; to anybody else, beside of the object code generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to make adaptations of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; in a way to call functions of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; within &quot;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do not need to make our changes of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; public, but can there be a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6505" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-10-24T12:10:27.030" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T12:10:27.030" Title="Combining Apache 2.0 with closed source" Tags="|derivative-works|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4641" CreationDate="2016-10-20T18:05:38.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are allowed to do what you describe. There are no restrictions against commercial use and the Apache 2.0 license is not reciprocal like, for instance, the GPL version 2.0. It's totally possible and not at all uncommon to combine Apache 2.0 licensed software with proprietary software. The proprietary software will stay proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-10-20T18:05:38.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-20T18:39:14.497" Score="3" ViewCount="1093" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a Java project which uses a couple of libraries licensed by LGPL-2.1 and uses MongoDB which is licensed by AGPL-3.0 as its database. We don't modify any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our legal team claims we should provide source and build/install instructions for these Open Source Libraries/Software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think only AGPL-3.0 requires build/install instructions according to the following links. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v2.1-(lgpl-2.1)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v2.1-(lgpl-2.1)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6507" OwnerDisplayName="Lee" LastEditorUserId="6507" LastEditDate="2016-10-20T18:51:41.367" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:21:48.610" Title="Do I need to provide build/install instructions for LGPL-2.1 or AGPL-3.0 licensed libraries?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-20T23:55:44.493" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Working on software with no official license and one large customer.  It's currently managed in a public git repo.  Want to ensure continued funding to maintain and enhance the software.  There are concerns about keeping it public, jeopardizing the intellectual-property and continued funding.  For example, say another institution copies the software, rebrands it and then wins bids from this large customer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2762&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer, it sounds like adding restrictions on commercial use of the software is not generally accepted by the open source community.  One reason cited is to protect the users from software being abandoned.  In our case, it's possible that the users, who are not the same as the customer, would actually suffer if funding went to someone else who commercialized the software but couldn't maintain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an example of a license that allows the source to remain public, but not commercialized by another institution?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6508" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-21T16:14:46.930" Title="Licensing for niche software (single customer) to ensure continued funding" Tags="|license-recommendation|monetization|support|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4643" CreationDate="2016-10-21T08:27:27.020" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I think only AGPL-3.0 requires build/install instructions according to the following links.[...] &lt;code&gt;[and not the LGPL-2.1]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These links are not &lt;strong&gt;the license&lt;/strong&gt; proper. Just commentaries about it (and based on what I can see incomplete commentaries). You should rely on the license text instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our legal team claims we should provide source and build/install instructions for these Open Source Libraries/Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL 2.1 text&lt;/a&gt; explains in Section 0 what is &amp;quot;Source Code&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Source code&amp;quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For a library, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must redistribute the source code of LGPL-licensed libraries to your users and therefore this includes build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text explains further in Section 6 (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an executable, the required form of the &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it.&lt;/strong&gt; However, as a special exception, the materials to be distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is &lt;code&gt;must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it&lt;/code&gt;. What this means is that you would need to provide the source code alright and either the build scripts and/or alternatively build instructions if there is no such script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a Java library, the most likely case is that the upstream library source code already comes with a Maven POM of sorts or some gradle/ivy/ant/sbt script. So if you collect the original source code for that library from upstream as you should, chances are that these will contain everything that is needed to build both in terms of scripts and instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, in the case of a Java library, you would not include the Java compiler. The end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 6 of the LGPL 2.1&lt;/a&gt; explains why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a special exception, the materials to be distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you used a certain version of Java to compile, you could state this in your instructions and point to where this could be fetched but in general I would not include a JDK itself in my redistribution, nor would I include major build tools such as Maven or Gradle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Owens furthered asked in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have a citation to support this? I agree that the intent is to ensure that the source code can be rebuilt, but the use of &amp;quot;data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it&amp;quot; can be ambiguous - some people may not interpret &amp;quot;data&amp;quot; as also including written build instructions, if the build process is not automated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point is that the recipient should be able to rebuild from sources.  Without the build instructions (as doc or as a script) the user will not be able to rebuild the sources and your re-distribution would not be compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As explained above the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL 2.1 text&lt;/a&gt; explains in Section 0 what is &amp;quot;Source Code&amp;quot; very explicitly and it includes build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some extra references if this is not enough to get you convinced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On FFmpeg &lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Libav does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libav.org/legal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain how you compiled FFmpeg, for example the configure line, in a text file added to the root directory of the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the GPL2 FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#DistributeExtendedBinary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DistributeExtendedBinary section&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you must supply the source code that corresponds to the binary. Corresponding source means the source from which users can rebuild the same binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider this FAQ entry to apply equally to the LGPL. Without build instructions you would likely be unable to rebuild the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond, Cisco's Suppliers guidelines state &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1361470/000095012313002140/filename10.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in an SEC filing&lt;/a&gt; that they require the provision of build instructions for L/GPL (Section2 Publication Archive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with the Publication Archive, you must provide a file named “README” at the root of the Publication Archive which contains instructions (such as an ordered list of Unix shell commands) for building the source code into installable object code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:21:48.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4647" CreationDate="2016-10-21T16:11:51.660" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some #hacktoberfest issues in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sm-react/storybook-addon-material-ui/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20is%3Aopen%20label%3Ahacktoberfest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;my project&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;All of them are occupied by users but mostly nobody made PR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should I wait until the end of #hacktoberfest or may I ask them about theirs plans to finish it? how to do it so as not to seem rude?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if other contributors would like to participate but they see that all busy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6516" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-10-23T04:17:07.710" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T05:33:40.687" Title="How long to wait until the contributors will make a PR" Tags="|contributor|project-management|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4646" CreationDate="2016-10-22T08:44:53.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting together a PR may take time, especially if this is the first time someone contributes to this project (or to open source at all, for that matter!). I'd give a grace period of at least a week or two, but after that, you should reach out proactively. Not only is it not rude, but if you phrase your communication properly it will come off as encouraging, not nagging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey @JohnDoe, how are you doing?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  You self-assigned this issue more than two weeks ago (on October 8th). I was just wondering how things are going with it, and whether you need any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-10-23T05:33:40.687" LastActivityDate="2016-10-23T05:33:40.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4671" CreationDate="2016-10-24T00:54:56.553" Score="24" ViewCount="6021" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a client who sent me his source code for me to review. It was a non-paying job. His source code was clearly a &lt;strong&gt;heavy&lt;/strong&gt; modification from a popular GPL-licensed software which I part-authored. I can see the original code (including GPL license headers) everywhere in the project. We didn't have any contract or agreement, simply email exchanges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His application is commercial and he charges few dollars per download. However, he never stated his project is GPL, so nobody had asked him for the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: I have a copy of his application (I'm also his customer). Can I enforce GPL and distribute the application and source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm 100% sure the seller isn't going to acknowledge his GPL commitment.  It's a commercial software and he's selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I partly owned some of the original code (that was how I recognized the code) but I won't sue anything. It's just a tiny iOS app, I don't have time and money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6533" OwnerDisplayName="Student T" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T18:48:18.823" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T12:01:52.297" Title="Can I use my client's GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-24T01:05:48.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a customer, whatever you got through a purchase may be redistributed per the terms of the GPL. Make sure the seller acknowledges it is GPL licensed before you do so, to ensure you aren't mistaken about it being GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for redistributing code that you got for review, that is a definite fuzzy ground that isn't a clear answer to, and is beyond the scope of this site's capacity to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" OwnerDisplayName="whatsisname" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T01:05:48.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-24T05:22:15.953" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;If he's distributing software derived from GPL code, one of the following &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The derivative work is licensed under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's using the GPL code under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot;&gt;some other license&lt;/a&gt; from the original author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's violating the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's the second or third possibility, then you have no license to redistribute his changes to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; If he's violating the GPL, his violation doesn't automatically put his code under the GPL.  But as a copyright holder of the GPL code he modified, you could demand that he either license his version under the GPL, or stop distributing it.  Or you could propose licensing the original version to him under different terms, if your co-authors agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="782" LastEditorUserId="782" LastEditDate="2016-10-24T05:43:54.363" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T05:43:54.363" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-24T07:03:14.997" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can distribute the code, but I think you can sue the guy. You're the copyright owner (&quot;you&quot; meaning you and your co-authors), and he's a licensee, under the gpl. He violated his license agreement, and that gives you a civil cause of action against him. But I'm not a lawyer (though my father, brother, ex all are), so you might want to check with the free software foundation about exactly how to go about all that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by the way, stop calling the guy your &quot;client&quot;. He's an acquaintance for whom you're doing a favor, reviewing his code. For him to be a bona fide client, there must exist a contract between the two of you. And you said he's not paying you. One of the requirements for a contract to exist is called &quot;consideration&quot;, an &lt;strong&gt;exchange&lt;/strong&gt; of goods and/or services. But you got nothing in return for your code review service. Hence, no contract and no client, period. And you have no professional obligation to the guy, period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T07:03:14.997" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-24T08:02:23.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a client who sent me his source code for me to review. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a &quot;client&quot;, then this means I have likely some commercial contractual relationship with this company. And if this client sent me the source code for review, there is likely some trust and strong relationship in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I will consider both the open source aspects and my business relationship in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a non-paying job. His source code was clearly a heavy modification from a popular GPL-licensed software. I can see the original code (including GPL license headers) everywhere in the project. We didn't have any contract or agreement, simply email exchanges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we did not have any agreement in place either explicit or implied, I am wondering how this could be a client of mine in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His application is commercial and he charges few dollars per download. However, he never stated his project is GPL, so nobody had asked him for the code.&#xA;  Q: I have a copy of his application (I'm also his customer). Can I enforce GPL and distribute the application and source code?&#xA;  NOTE: I'm 100% sure the seller isn't going to acknowledge his GPL commitment. It's a commercial software and he's selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is rather unclear: I do not seem to be sure that I am the customer of this business or that this business is my client, or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, I can do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do the right thing: I could advise my client about this possible GPL compliance issues they are likely facing. I would not assume anything about their willingness to comply. I would contact them and alert them to the facts I have noted and tell them I want to ensure that I can use the rights granted my by the GPL. &#xA;From experience most companies want to do the right thing and are just unaware about the fact there are things to do to be compliant. I would also note that there are no conflicts with the software being sold: this is fully allowed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do the mean thing: I could ignore anything about any relationship I have with my client and I can use the rights granted to me by the GPL license and redistribute the application and source code. Doing this without a discussion would likely be rather irresponsible though. It is likely to be illegal as pointed by MSalters. This is likely to draw me in unwarranted problems and conflicts and damage my relationship with this client or customer. So unless I have a strong reason to enter such a conflict, I would take the high road and use approach 1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, your question is missing a rather important point that you only mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4648/can-i-use-my-clients-gpl-software#comment12205_4650&quot;&gt;a comment to another&lt;/a&gt; answer so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;@StudentT Are you also a copyright holder on the original code? (You are by default unless it was a work for hire or you assigned your copyright to someone else.) – Kevin Krumwiede&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm the secondary author. I licensed it out the source code with GPL. I partly own the original code, but not the new modification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am after all the original author or a significant author. If I am the original author, then things are rather different. The first thing I would do is contact the culprit in all cases as explained in 1. above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the other important thing is which version of the GPL is used. With a GPL 2.0, the license terminates immediately with no easy way to reinstate it. With GPL 3.0, there is a bit more flexibility and no immediate termination. What really happens/can happen depends a lot on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility to consider could be that in conjunction with 1. I could thank my client/customer for their contribution back to my GPL-license codebase and say I will integrate this in future releases...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T08:43:27.300" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4655" CreationDate="2016-10-24T10:39:47.420" Score="6" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy to search for images published under a creative commons licence in search engines, I just have to fine-tune my search options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how do I get my images with their licence on the web ? Is the licence in the meta data of the image or do I have to construct my website in a way it'll tell search engines what licences goes with the image ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6542" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T11:32:19.303" Title="How do search engines read image licence?" Tags="|creative-commons|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4654" CreationDate="2016-10-24T11:32:19.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple ways how the licensing can be made machine-readable in HTML documents. A consumer (e.g., a search engine) might support only some (or none) of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two popular ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Link type: &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HTML5 defines the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/links.html#link-type-license&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; link type&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This always specifies the license for the &lt;strong&gt;main content of the document&lt;/strong&gt;. So it’s not possible to use this if only parts of the main content are licensed, if different parts have different licenses, if the whole document should be licensed (not only the main content), or if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/grouping-content.html#the-main-element&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt; element&lt;/a&gt; can’t be used (then it’s not clear what belongs to the main content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;external license&quot;&amp;gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Creative Commons’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot;&gt;Choose a License&lt;/a&gt; form creates this markup for you by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;RDFa &amp;amp; CC REL&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdfa&quot;&gt;RDFa&lt;/a&gt; is a syntax that extends HTML, &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/ns#&quot;&gt;CC REL&lt;/a&gt; is a vocabulary from Creative Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows you to specify the license of every part (image, paragraph, sentence, table, …) in the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Creative Commons’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot;&gt;Choose a License&lt;/a&gt; form creates this markup for you if you provide additional details in the &quot;Help others attribute you!&quot; step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant pages from creativecommons.org: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_REL&quot;&gt;CC REL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://labs.creativecommons.org/2011/ccrel-guide/&quot;&gt;CC REL by Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_Works_Technical&quot;&gt;Marking Works Technical&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Metadata&quot;&gt;Metadata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/RDFa&quot;&gt;RDFa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T11:32:19.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4663" CreationDate="2016-10-24T14:32:21.837" Score="6" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free/Libre GNU/Linux distributions always talk about how to avoid non-free binary blobs when using Wi-Fi cards which pretty much means using only Atheros chipsets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about other devices like hard drives, wired Ethernet cards, DVD ROMs.. Don't they mind using them even if they contain proprietary firmwares?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference I know between the devices above and Wi-Fi cards, is that usually, the Wi-Fi card device driver needs to push the firmware to the Wi-Fi chipset RAM at load time. For the other devices, the firmware is just burned into their ROM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6546" LastEditorUserId="6546" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T01:38:06.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T05:15:06.037" Title="Why do free/libre software advocates tolerate proprietary firmwares in just about every computer components except Wi-Fi cards?" Tags="|philosophy|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-24T15:49:11.100" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Customers will often pay me to setup a website for them which occasionally involves using themes from Themeforest which are GPL Licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Reselling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I &quot;Resell&quot; the Theme to this customer in the scenario mentioned above? We buy the theme, modify it, set it up on our server (occasionally theres).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.&quot; (Which we are not technically transferring) and it says &quot;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what if the fee were not for &quot;reselling&quot; per se' but for the &quot;setup&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Tracking Changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license says &quot;You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&quot; Has anyone actually done this? If so, can you give me an example of what this looks like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="MLcode" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T19:52:49.780" Title="GPL (v2) License Compliance Question" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4657" CreationDate="2016-10-24T17:00:20.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&lt;/a&gt; for clarity. It is the basis for all gpl licences. An extract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that &lt;strong&gt;the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.&lt;/strong&gt; Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to keep these freedoms, you must keep your side of the contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T17:00:20.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2016-10-24T17:10:56.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different organisations attempt to determine the terms &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;free software. The defintions are often similar in basic spirit but differ in the details and interpretations and are not a strict superset or subset of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And none of these orgnaisation have a monopoly over the english language. So individuals may use the terms in ways that differ from what any of the well known organsiations say. Particulally those outside the &quot;free software community&quot; may use &quot;free software&quot; to reffer to software that is free of charge but may be heavilly incumbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T17:10:56.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2016-10-24T17:13:10.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firmware in rom is easy to &quot;rationalise away&quot;. The user can rationalise it as &quot;just part of the hardware&quot;. The operating system distributor can rationalise it as &quot;i'm not shipping it so it's not my problem&quot;. The advocate can rationalise it as &quot;something the user already has&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loading firmware through the driver brings the problem to the forefront. Now rather than passively using nonfree firmware that is already there the operating system must actively participate in the distribution and loading of the nonfree firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T17:13:10.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-24T18:14:27.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you did not receive his code under the understanding it is licensed under the GPL, you have no right to redistribute it.  Period.  Not even if you are one of the original copyright holders (as you explain in comments rather than the original question: please update the question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your acquaintance has every right to use GPLed software for &lt;em&gt;internal&lt;/em&gt; use (including running publicly accessible servers unless we are talking the Affero GPL in particular) without making sources accessible.  The point when he is &lt;em&gt;selling&lt;/em&gt; or otherwise distributing software to &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; parties is where the GPL kicks in and demands that he gives the recipients the source code or access to the source code of the whole, modified software under the conditions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you describe it, he is in breach of this requirement of the license he received the source code under.  The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; legal consequence of this is that the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; license holders (apparently including you) can sue him to cease and desist distributing copies in violation of the license he can avail himself of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were no copyright holder yourself but noticed this, the only option would be to contact one of the copyright holders and inform him of the breach and leave any further action to him.  This would be a breach of confidentiality and you'd have to judge what that means for your business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; one of the copyright holders, this particular worry does not apply to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the person in question would be abysmally stupid not to notice your name in the license notices and still ask you for changes, so what is up with that?  Are you sure you are an actual copyright holder in a sense that is strong enough to make your legal claim stick well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, you don't seem like the sole copyright holder anyway.  You might ask the FSF's copyright clerk for some advice on how to proceed: the FSF has particular experience in getting people to comply with the GPL &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; dragging them to court.  This saves time, money, bad blood.  And particular in your situation, you might want to get the issue resolved in as professional and amicable manner as possible if there is any chance since it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; talks about your professional behavior and how you behave in business matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6548" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T18:14:27.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4657" CreationDate="2016-10-24T19:07:53.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's simple. You can charge any amount, totally unlimited, to provide your software. Since you are using GPL licensed software, you are obliged to provide the source code. For the source code, you can just charge your reasonable cost of providing the source code. Burn the source code on a CD, put it in an envelope, write an address on the envelope, you can charge a few dollars for that. And since you are using GPL licensed software, you are obliged to make your software available under the GPL license, with not a penny charged for the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you can charge: Software = $1,000,000. Source code = $10.00. GPL license = $0.00. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2016-10-24T19:07:53.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2016-10-25T02:15:32.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation has said&lt;/a&gt; that if you can't install software on it, it's not a computer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ethical issues of free software arise because users obtain programs and install them in computers; they don't really apply to hidden embedded computers, or the BIOS burned in a ROM, or the microcode inside a processor chip, or the firmware that is wired into a processor in an I/O device. In aspects that relate to their design, those things are software; but as regards copying and modification, they may as well be hardware. The BIOS in ROM was, indeed, not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T02:15:32.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4668" CreationDate="2016-10-25T09:15:37.443" Score="6" ViewCount="981" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as I understood a piece of code is data for the interpreter and thus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;according to this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; an R script is not automatically licensed under GPL. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I make an R script for a project and use different packages that are under GPL, I can still license my R script under a separate terms and conditions statement which does not allow the customer to modify it or use it in another projects. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing is very confusing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6553" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T09:44:14.873" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T09:44:14.873" Title="License for R scripts" Tags="|gpl|commercial|proprietary-code|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-25T11:43:09.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: &#xA;The OP said in some comment that he does partly own the copy-right of the code questioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;NOTE: I'm 100% sure the seller isn't going to acknowledge his GPL commitment. It's a commercial software and he's selling it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry but this does not make any sense. Note that selling the software this is allowed under GPL&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Probably it is worth reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But it is of course bad style not share the money he is making and moreover, not even paying you for code review.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is does he ship his software under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said it is some app. I do not know how this then works. But putting the code (with license) in some online repository (could be only accessible to the paying customer) and linking to it should be allowed. At least I saw this with other GPL'ed apps (although I am no lawyer).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question, are the GPL licenses headers in every file he sent you?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there maybe even the GPL copy right text as a file in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is both true then I see no problem, the code is under GPL and you can use it. If the license file is missing then this is bad style, but it should still be under the GPL (but again I am no lawyer). Tell him he needs to put license file in. &#xA;Both of the answers to the last two questions are negative,&#xA;then he does violate the GPL. You should tell him to get the copy-left right. &#xA;And then resend you the files. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he refuses then sue him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6556" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2016-10-25T18:45:33.820" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T18:45:33.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4666" CreationDate="2016-10-25T12:42:27.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You first paragraph is correct. The interpreter license does not imply how you should license your scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the second part is not. If you are relying on packages, this likely means that you are relying on other R scripts which are going to be interpreted as well. Your program, by relying on these scripts is a derivative of them. Thus, you need to license your whole program (the packages you rely on + the part you wrote) under GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-10-25T12:42:27.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T07:58:24.080" Score="2" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, must be included with a project regarding how to compile it, to be fully GPL v3 compliant? For example if I'm using Netbeans and simply use it to compile and run the code, what kind of documentation would be required? The code is intended to work without any special compiler instructions (unless so desired).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T09:42:39.437" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T18:04:11.700" Title="Including compile instructions for GPL" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4669" CreationDate="2016-10-26T10:00:37.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way is to think this way: &lt;code&gt;If I receive this code, which concise and accurate instructions would I need to be able to re-build the binaries from sources?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should not assume that the recipient knows nothing about software and nothing about Java in this case. Instead I should provide the simple and good enough instructions that a basic software developer could understand and follow to rebuild from sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This becomes much simpler: I can simply state in a README that I used Netbeans Vx.x (and may be provide the Netbeans project files) or that I compiled the code with Maven (and provide a pom file) with Java 8 (and provide a link to fetch an OpenJDK 8).&#xA;If this was built on Linux, I may also provide a list of required packages to install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-26T18:04:11.700" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T18:04:11.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4648" CreationDate="2016-10-26T17:42:55.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll be refering to Version 2.0 from here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But it should apply to 3.0 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following facts things are important here, and my answer is based on those:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code was sent to the Author on purpose (he didn't gain access to the code illegaly).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code contains GPL headers. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless if you bought it or not, the important part is that the code was &lt;em&gt;received&lt;/em&gt;. Paragraph 1 of GPL clearly states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's&#xA;  source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you&#xA;  conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate&#xA;  copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on top of that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that they broke the GPL does not void your rights (See Paragraph 4).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They couldn't even restrict you from redistributing it even if they thought of it! (see paragraph 6).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to buy the GPL code to be bound by the licence, you're bound by GPL every time you download Linux for free. The important part is &lt;em&gt;receiving&lt;/em&gt; the code, by any legal means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the moment you've received the code (you don't even have to buy it!) you've been granted all the rights given to you by a licence. Congrats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the rights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make copies of the application and resell them (Paragraph 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can resell your application. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publish the application for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize: &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. You can do anything you want with it. You can publish it for free, you can sell it compile (as long as you keep GPL terms from paragraph 3), it's irrelevant how you've received GPL code, or if you've paid for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. One last gotcha, and as usual the devil is in the details.&#xA;As some of the other answers stated the fact that he's breaking GPL does not automatically license his code as GPL. &#xA;So again it all comes down to: Does the file and/or project have GPL licence/headers. If the project you've received include GPL licence and in README for example it's stated that project (as a whole) is under GPL, then you're good. If it does not it's more tricky. It can be assumed that if the file was modified and in the header there's a GPL licence then the modifications were bound by GPL, however new files without the header, are not, and you cannot redistribute them unless given permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6569" LastEditorUserId="6569" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T12:01:52.297" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T12:01:52.297" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-26T21:41:09.897" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heavily modified GPLv3 software running on my system. If hire someone external for code-reviewed, will this be automatically a re-distribution of software? Hence I would need to provide the external code-reviewer the software under GPLv3 or are there any contracts which would avoid this. What if make this guy an employee (for a month)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6570" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T13:10:45.617" Title="Is external code review re-distribution of software" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4675" CreationDate="2016-10-26T23:38:48.593" Score="3" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finishing a web application and I want to release it as open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot compete with my SaaS/Cloud solution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are able to use the software, even commercially, for free. As long as you don't sue me if it breaks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use, modify and redistribute the software, as long as it is open-source, you give attribution and you don't change the license, specially the first&#xA;clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've being studying and it seems like AGPL. Except for the first clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I license it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6576" OwnerDisplayName="andrerpena" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T00:32:13.977" Title="I want to release my software as open-source but prevent people from competing with my SaaS solution. Which license should I pick?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4673" CreationDate="2016-10-26T23:46:28.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There aren't any existing open-source licenses that I know of that allow you to dictate monetary or commercial terms.  That notion would run counter to the very spirit of open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL says &quot;If you use this AGPL code as part of your application, all of your code must be distributed under the AGPL.&quot; But the AGPL has nothing further to say about the &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; in which the code may be used.  You can make money with it, run a marathon with it, or call &lt;code&gt;DestroyBaghdad()&lt;/code&gt;, and the AGPL couldn't care less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not allow you to change its terms.  If you do, it's not the AGPL anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only material difference between the AGPL and the GPL is that, under the AGPL, running a website or webservice using AGPL'd code constitutes distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2731" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Harvey" LastActivityDate="2016-10-26T23:53:15.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4673" CreationDate="2016-10-27T00:32:13.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such Open Source License. Specifically, your non-compete clause is fundamentally incompatible with the basic definition of Open Source: any license that would enforce your clause #1 would &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; not be Open Source, any Open Source License would &lt;em&gt;by definition&lt;/em&gt; not restrict #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an Open Source License that enforces your clause #1 cannot possibly be exist. It is a contradiction in terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Straight from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Open Source Definition 1.9&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is elaborated further in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#restrict&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;FAQ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The freedom to use the program for any purpose is part of the Open Source Definition. Open source licenses do not discriminate against fields of endeavor. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freedom 0 (the most important one) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is very similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is elaborated further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the &lt;em&gt;user's&lt;/em&gt; purpose that matters, not the &lt;em&gt;developer's&lt;/em&gt; purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish means that you are not forbidden or stopped from doing so. It has nothing to do with what functionality the program has, or whether it is useful for what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T00:32:13.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4680" CreationDate="2016-10-27T03:15:54.620" Score="4" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example, the real time operating system &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freertos.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FreeRTOS&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freertos.org/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FreeRTOS Open Source License&lt;/a&gt; which is based on a modified GNU GPL, the modification taking the form of an exception. The GNU GPL is approved by the Open Source Initiative, but not the FreeRTOS Open Source License. If I use FreeRTOS in my software, and the rest of my software is released under an approved Open Source licence, would I be wrong to call my software Open Source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#avoid-unapproved-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;OSI FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I call my program &quot;Open Source&quot; even if I don't use an approved license?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Please don't do that. If you call it &quot;Open Source&quot; without using an approved license, you will confuse people. This is not merely a theoretical concern — we have seen this confusion happen in the past, and it's part of the reason we have a formal license approval process. See also our page on license proliferation for why this is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source stamp is important to me and I like using FreeRTOS but I also want to call things what they are. I am not 100% sure about this one that is why I prefer to ask here. I asked the question in a generic way so it can also be useful to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6546" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T11:57:02.493" Title="Is it wrong to call a software Open Source if it is using a license based on GNU GPL?" Tags="|gpl|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4689" CreationDate="2016-10-27T06:19:17.350" Score="22" ViewCount="4962" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the GPLv2 FAQ. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. Can I do this?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since, any typical Linux distribution base image contains a variety of GPL-licensed libraries and utilities. And, it is packaged inside a docker image with other code/software in inseparable format. Does this mean that all docker images are free to redistribute (i.e. under the GPLv2 licensing rules)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, there is no way one can enforce proprietary licensing on them (i.e. the docker images?) I.e. there is no way to distribute proprietary software in Docker images!?!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6572" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T09:22:22.083" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T09:22:22.083" Title="Are all docker images free (i.e. GPL)?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|proprietary-code|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4672" CreationDate="2016-10-27T11:18:54.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we believe this answer from the GNU FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#InternalDistribution&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then yes, giving a copy to a contractor is considered distribution but if you hire the person to make them a short-period employee, then it is not distribution anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if a court would follow this logic though. It could be considered that in some specific cases, hiring a contractor is equivalent to employing them. You could check what your lawyers think about that or, to be on the safe-side, you could just employ the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T11:18:54.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4676" CreationDate="2016-10-27T11:51:25.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for you, the FreeRTOS license is fundamentally broken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any FreeRTOS &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;, whether modified or in it's original release form, or whether in whole or in part, can only be distributed by you under the terms of the GNU General Public License plus this exception.  An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on FreeRTOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the exception contains in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FreeRTOS may not be used for any competitive or comparative purpose, including the publication of any form of run time or compile time metric, without the express permission of Real Time Engineers Ltd. (this is the norm within the industry and is intended to ensure information accuracy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contradicts the terms of the GPL which contain in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this may sound confusing as the GNU FAQ page contains tons of references to &amp;quot;exceptions&amp;quot; that can be added to the GPL. And indeed there are tons of existing such exceptions. The most well known is nothing less than LGPL (which is just GPL + an exception). But what all those exceptions have in common is that they do not add any further restrictions. They just grant more rights! And in particular, any person is allowed to distribute the program further under GPL without the exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What if the exception had been acceptable?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the exception to the GPL had been an exception in the usual sense, then by using GPL + exception, you would &lt;em&gt;a fortiori&lt;/em&gt; be distributing your program under GPL, and thus, you would be distributing it under an approved open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What about calling your program &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; anyway?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to distribute the program you wrote under an open source license but it has a non-open source dependency, then you could just make sure that people understand that when you are saying &amp;quot;my program is open source&amp;quot;, you are talking about the program itself and not the dependencies. It is still interesting to people: they can replace the dependency by something else if they want and make the whole program open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T11:57:02.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4672" CreationDate="2016-10-27T11:59:15.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Say that some folks wrote some app1 and released it under the GPL-3.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Say this app1 further embeds a GPL-3.0-licensed third-party library lib1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Say that I further take the code of this app1 and lib1 and create a new enhanced app2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Say that I contact or contract one of the folks that authored app1 and send them code of app2 for review.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens then? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a complex interplay between open source licensing and private contract terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is such a complicated situation and this is unlikely to be resolved without proper legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are surely GPL terms in play. In all cases, the terms of the GPL will surely apply to the app1 and lib1 code. In most cases the terms of the GPL would likely apply to the app2 code and I have to meet these obligations especially if I already redistributed app2 on some app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the specific topic of whether sending code for review constitutes redistribution under the GPL 3.0 this &lt;a href=&quot;http://illinoisjltp.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Gue.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; (page 118 &lt;code&gt;Does Outsourcing Trigger Copyleft?&lt;/code&gt;) provides some detailed commentary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is unclear whether outsourcing triggers copyleft, although the answer is  likely  no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;section 2&lt;/a&gt; of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast the GPL FAQ talks about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;contractors differently&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it boils down to interpreting use vs. convey and whether I have whole control over the copyrights of app2 which I have not and the nature of the contractual relationship between me and the app1 folk which is private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I surely need to get legal advice but the GPL likely applies in may ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-10-27T13:10:45.617" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T13:10:45.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4685" CreationDate="2016-10-27T14:56:31.503" Score="2" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on building a proprietary application that I would like to release as PGP-signed Debian packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard I might be forced to release the source to my proprietary application simply due to the fact that it would be signed by GnuPG, which is covered under GPLv3 containing the &quot;Tivoization&quot; clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true?  It is my understanding that the license for GnuPG would enforce disclosing any modifications to GnuPG itself, not the &lt;em&gt;use of&lt;/em&gt; GnuPG to apply a signature to an arbitrary &quot;object&quot;.  Saying that the object I'm signing with GnuPG is now also open source makes no sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6579" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T09:07:01.413" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T09:07:01.413" Title="Is GPLv3 violated by releasing proprietary code as a GnuPG-signed package?" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-27T15:59:04.730" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm preparing to open source an XCode project I've been working on privately, on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am planning on using Github's &lt;code&gt;release&lt;/code&gt; feature and and tag the initial release as 0.1.0. This much I know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have one question: What's the best practice for the version number and build id of the XCode project itself going forward? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to update the version/build-id every time raise a version on Github?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should these numbers be synchronized?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6581" LastActivityDate="2016-10-27T15:59:04.730" Title="Best practices for versioning an XCode project for open source?" Tags="|github|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2016-11-03T18:50:57.517" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4682" CreationDate="2016-10-27T16:22:50.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the GPL does not affect the output of a GPL-licensed program. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program?For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is sufficient to show that the output of GnuPG is not automatically licensed under the GPL, so distributing such output within another work does not impose GPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, there is a further reason that a signature would not impose GPL requirements: I sincerely doubt that copyright law could ever recognize a cryptographic signature as a creative or derivative work. Cryptographic signing (which, as one of its steps, includes hashing) is a massively lossy transformation that completely destroys the original content of the work and is not designed to be reversed. As such, even &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the GPL applied to the output of a GPL signing program (and again, &lt;em&gt;it does not&lt;/em&gt;, per the FAQ item above), the output would not be eligible for copyright, so any copyright license such as the GPL would have no effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, tivoization only applies if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are distributing a GPLv3-licensed program, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the program is intended to run on a specific hardware device, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the hardware of that device refuses to run an incorrectly signed executable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as you've described your situation, absolutely none of those criteria apply to your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-22T16:01:10.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-28T02:43:05.837" Score="11" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the release of Firefox 48 on 2016-08-02, Mozilla Firefox will not run any add-on that has not been signed and verified by Mozilla. This means, for example, that a user cannot modify an add-on and run it for personal use without first submitting it to Mozilla's approval. There is no option to override this behavior in vanilla Firefox, but it can be disabled in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/&quot;&gt;Firefox Developer Edition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anything in this situation violate the Free Software Definition or Open Source Definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-10-29T13:38:51.237" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T16:48:50.907" Title="Can any Firefox add-on be free software now that add-on signing is required?" Tags="|open-source-definition|mpl|free-software-definition|code-signing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4656" CreationDate="2016-10-28T03:49:21.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the goal is to eliminate proprietary software, effective Free Software activists understand that their time is valuable and limited, so prioritise working on the problems that will yield the most benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard drive firmware is rarely updated and doesn't communicate with the outside world. We would love hard drives to run free software, but this is a much lower priority right now than freeing BIOS or WiFi firmware, which affect who your computer trusts (often the manufacturer and not you) and how it communicates with the outside world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software movement has always taken a very practical, rather than ideological approach to its long-term goal of allowing everyone to do all their computing with free software. When the GNU project was formed in 1983, the priority was writing free alternatives to proprietary programs on top of existing proprietary Unix systems. Eventually the movement progressed to where freeing the entire desktop operating system was feasible. Today some of most important work is freeing drivers, BIOSes old older devices, communication tools and mobile apps. Soon it will be possible to buy brand new systems with free BIOSes out of the box, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop&quot;&gt;EOMA68 Computer Card&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation/&quot;&gt;Talos Secure Workstation&lt;/a&gt;. Hopefully hard drive firmware will be feasible to replace one day, but until then, it's a matter of investing our energy wisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6582" LastEditorUserId="6582" LastEditDate="2016-10-28T05:15:06.037" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T05:15:06.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4686" CreationDate="2016-10-28T13:05:06.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks very much like &quot;tivoization&quot; to me, except that instead of being the firmware of a piece of hardware (e.g. Tivo) that requires a signature, it is a software (Firefox).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] many products containing computers check signatures on their executable programs to block users from installing different executables; only one privileged company can make executables that can run in the device or can access its full capabilities. We call these devices “tyrants”, and the practice is called “tivoization” after the product (Tivo) where we first saw it. Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source and free, are open source but not free. Many Android products contain nonfree tivoized executables of Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue you mention could still make the piece of software Open Source but not free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6546" LastEditorUserId="6546" LastEditDate="2016-10-28T13:22:57.657" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T13:22:57.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4677" CreationDate="2016-10-28T13:26:22.450" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linux (the Kernel) uses the GPL 2.0 with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING?id=refs/tags/v4.9-rc2&quot;&gt;extra statement&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;   services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;   of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &quot;derived work&quot;.&#xA;   Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software&#xA;   Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux&#xA;   kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel&#xA;   is concerned is &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; particular version of the license (ie v2, not&#xA;   v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this the userland (including the important commonly-used C libraries) with which a userspace program interacts primarily and directly is either LGPL-licensed (or BSD/MIT licensed with some alternative C libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full Linux image (be it a VM or container image) or a full Linux distro may contain a complex combination of code under the GPL, LGPL and many other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can for instance add my proprietary programs to run in userspace to that image and redistribute it. I need to comply with the obligations of each and every licenses. A recipient may have certain rights with regards to the open source and free software code in that image but may not have right to my proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;code&gt;Does this mean that all docker images are free to redistribute (i.e. under the GPLv2 licensing rules)?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Some parts may be redistributable and some may not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;And, there is no way one can enforce commercial licensing on them (i.e. the docker images?) I.e. there is no way to distribute commercial software in Docker images!?!?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes there is a way. Including proprietary and GPL-licensed programs on the same filesystem or archive is typically &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot;&gt;considered&lt;/a&gt; &quot;side by side&quot; redistribution or &quot;mere aggregation&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T13:26:22.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4686" CreationDate="2016-10-28T13:52:26.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Definition (from the FSF) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see there isn't anything about plugins. Indeed, most programs won't even allow any plugin. If you want to change the software, you can, but you need to go back from the sources. In a sense, this will be the same with Firefox. Nothing will prevent you to modify the source and remove this restriction and run any plugin. So Firefox is still free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I must say that @olliebulle's reasoning is appealing. You could consider that the Firefox released binary is, as a platform, and in some specific sense, nonfree. But the very fact that you can duplicate the platform very easily because it is software whereas you cannot when it is hardware is why tivoization is only a problem in the latter case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-10-28T13:52:26.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4692" CreationDate="2016-10-29T16:26:21.177" Score="8" ViewCount="3669" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a java library released by someone else having an AGPL3 license. I'm not modifying their library, but I do link to it using&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import com.theirlibrary.methodABC;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in one of my java classes (e.g. &lt;code&gt;MyClass1.java&lt;/code&gt;). Thus, I assume the compiled java class is AGPL obligated, and if I use it, I must make it public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how far does the AGPL3 obligations extend into my web application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My application file structure is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;myapplication&#xA;    WEB-INF&#xA;        web.xml&#xA;        FLEX&#xA;            remoting-config.xml&#xA;            services-config.xml&#xA;            messaging-config.xml&#xA;            proxy-config.xml&#xA;        CLASSES&#xA;            COM&#xA;                MYCOMPANY&#xA;                     MyClass1.java  (uses AGPL3 library)&#xA;                     MyClass1.class (uses AGPL3 library)&#xA;                     MyClass2.java&#xA;                     MyClass2.class&#xA;                     SERVLET&#xA;                         MyServlet1.java&#xA;                         MyServlet1.class&#xA;                         MyServlet2.java&#xA;                         MyServlet2.class&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;web.xml&lt;/code&gt; file includes java servlets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;servlet&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;servlet-name&amp;gt;MyServletA&amp;lt;/servlet-name&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;servlet-class&amp;gt;com.mycompany.servlet.MyServlet1&amp;lt;/servlet-class&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/servlet&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;servlet&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;servlet-name&amp;gt;MyServletB&amp;lt;/servlet-name&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;servlet-class&amp;gt;com.mycompany.servlet.MyServlet2&amp;lt;/servlet-class&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/servlet&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;remoting-config.xml&lt;/code&gt; file looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;service id=&quot;remoting-service&quot; class=&quot;xxx&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;&amp;lt;destination id=&quot;myDestination1&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    ...&#xA;    &amp;lt;properties&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;source&amp;gt;com.mycompany.MyClass1&amp;lt;/source&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;scope&amp;gt;application&amp;lt;/scope&amp;gt; &#xA;    &amp;lt;/properties&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/destination&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;destination id=&quot;myDestination2&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;    ...&#xA;    &amp;lt;properties&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;source&amp;gt;com.mycompany.MyClass2&amp;lt;/source&amp;gt;&#xA;        &amp;lt;scope&amp;gt;application&amp;lt;/scope&amp;gt; &#xA;    &amp;lt;/properties&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/destination&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that only &lt;code&gt;MyClass1.java&lt;/code&gt; depends on the AGPL3 library. Also, each class and servlet is completely independent of each other (they don't call each other or depend on each other's existence to function). A separate code base running in the client browser calls these classes and servlets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it sufficient to only make &lt;code&gt;MyClass1.java&lt;/code&gt; public? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, do I need to make &lt;code&gt;MyClass2.java&lt;/code&gt; public as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the servlets? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about my code sitting in the client's browser, which calls the classes and servlets depending on the user's choices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How far into the application do I need to make public with AGPL3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6590" LastEditorUserId="6590" LastEditDate="2016-10-30T19:48:12.930" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T00:09:59.270" Title="Java and AGPL 3: how far does license extend into web app?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4691" CreationDate="2016-10-30T10:54:47.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First there is no such thing as &amp;quot;infection&amp;quot;. A bona-fide piece of FLOSS software is NOT a virus. There are only license obligations and requirements. Therefore a proper question should have been instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, how far does the AGPL3 obligations extend into my web application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general theory is that when my program calls a function of a library using an A/L/GPL license, I am creating a work &amp;quot;based on the program&amp;quot; e.g. a derivative work and therefore the copyleft obligations (including eventual source code redistribution) extend to my program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL licenses provide an exception to this when the library is used unmodified and the call is done through some dynamic linking.&#xA;Some exceptions to the GPL (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/Classpath-exception-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt;) have the same effect and address specific linking (be it dynamic or static).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of such an exception, the copyleft would extend to the code that calls functions of copyleft-licensed code. Read also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc/4315#4315&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; more details on how copyleft terms and dependencies relate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now copyleft is &lt;strong&gt;triggered by redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;. Running a public web backend app on some private server does not typically constitutes redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the AGPL has a specific and somewhat unique &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt; that extends what is considered redistribution to certain public networks deployment such as a public web application:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.[...]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as I do not modify the library, this paragraph has no impact on my web application as long as I do not redistribute the code for this web application and I am just merely running it: here the effective impact of the AGPL is not different from the impact of using GPL-licensed code on the server-side private backend of a public web application and I do not have specific source code redistribution obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional answer elements, based on comments to this answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) MyClass1.java is a &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; work and copyleft obligations extend to my program; (2) these obligations get triggered when MyClass1.java is redistributed; (3) hosting MyClass1.java on a public web backend app on a private server is not considered redistribution in AGPL3 unless I modify the source code in the original AGPL3 library; (4) merely using the original AGPL3 code using java import does not quality as modifying the AGPL3 java library; (5) I have no code redistribution obligations for AGPL3. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's my take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at different companies explanation of AGPL3 with their software, and I can't find confirmation regarding &amp;quot;unmodified&amp;quot; derived software being allowed to serve from public web app in private server. [...] makehuman.org/license_explanation.php [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps more clearly stated, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27867400/is-itext-java-library-free-of-charge-or-have-any-fees-to-be-paid&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can not use iText in a web application without making the full source code of your web application available through that web application. This is why people often refer to the AGPL as a viral license: all the software that touches an AGPL library such as iText needs to be free too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways to interpret licenses. I simply refer to the text of the license. The AGPL is rather simple and clear on this topic and the key trigger of its extra copyleft terms is modification. I can appreciate a different interpretation, but modifying is rather explicit and consistent in the way it is defined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; and in other FSF licenses such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt; (where the terms are identical):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling an existing library in Java redistributed as its own Jar is &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; and it can be neither &lt;em&gt;copying&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;modifying&lt;/em&gt; in anyway I can reasonably fathom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I see an interpretation of an FSF license markedly different from the what the text says, there are two possibilities to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I consider this interpretation --&lt;em&gt;how flawed it may be&lt;/em&gt;-- to be part of the license and respect and comply with this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can ignore a flawed interpretation if I am confident of what its flaws are and may eventually seek legal advice to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, several (but not all) companies using a dual licensing scheme with AGPL and commercial licensing often suggest that any network usage even if unmodified is redistribution and triggers the AGPL copyleft. I can appreciate the quid-pro-quo to entice the purchase of a commercial license but I think this is wishful thinking not grounded in any sane interpretation of the license text. I also personally think this is contrary not only with the letter but also with the spirit of the extra network-related terms of the AGPL that thrive to ensure that modifications are eventually shared but that unmodified usage without redistribution is not restricted otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all companies using a dual licensing scheme agree with a flawed approach that unmodified network usage is a redistribution. Take for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;instance MongoDB&lt;/a&gt; reading of the AGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our goal in selecting the AGPL v3.0 as our open source license is to require that enhancements to MongoDB be released to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is consistent with the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-02T00:09:59.270" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4700" CreationDate="2016-10-30T17:18:32.403" Score="9" ViewCount="2672" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using an AGPL v3 licensed software within a public-facing web application hosted on a private server, you are obligated (section 13) to share your code if you modify the original AGPL code. Many companies providing AGPL code also provide a commercial offering that is not AGPL licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if I'm a software developer and I simply &quot;use&quot; the AGPL code without modification (again, in a public facing web application hosted on a private server), such as by linking a library (e.g. java &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt;), to create a derived work, then provide a web service for the public to access the derived work, how would the original AGPL author upon seeing my service and output, know that I did NOT modify the original AGPL3 code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or conversely, from the other point of view, if release software with an AGPL3 license andlater observe someone is distributing a derived work without an AGPL license via a web app, how would I know whether or not this derived work DID modify my original code licensed as AGPL3 (to determine if they're infringing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply redistributing a derived work without AGPL license (again, in a public web app hosted on a private server) does not mean one is infringing on the original AGPL license, because the derived work needs to MODIFY the original AGPL code. So, in practice, how does one determine infringement? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do lawyers actually contact companies out of the blue and demand to see their code in all its detail (can they do that?), then get programmers to pour through the code line by line to see if the original AGPL code was modified? Otherwise, it seems impossible to know. But, this doesn't seem practical, and can waste a lot of resources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this play out in practice? Is my understanding of AGPL correct here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6590" LastEditorUserId="6590" LastEditDate="2016-10-31T16:21:56.890" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T16:02:31.807" Title="AGPL v3 licensing: How does external party determine if modifications were made?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|agpl-3.0|floss|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4696" CreationDate="2016-10-30T18:09:00.973" Score="1" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a somewhat complicated situation, and I have trouble finding a Creative Commons license that is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I want the license to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Others should be able to redistribute my exact artwork, but only non-commercially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, they can do whatever they want commercially with the derivative works they produce, including allowing others to use their work commercially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be allowed to make derivative works from the derivative works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I try to find a CC licence that is suitable for this, I end up in a contradiction. Here is the logic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To comply with my condition number 1., I have to include &lt;strong&gt;[non-commercial]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also by condition number 1., I can &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; include &lt;strong&gt;[no-derivative]&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; I include &lt;strong&gt;[share-alike]&lt;/strong&gt;, they must use the same license, including the &lt;strong&gt;[non-commercial]&lt;/strong&gt;. That contradicts my condition number 2. &lt;strong&gt;Dead end&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then, I can &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; include &lt;strong&gt;[share-alike]&lt;/strong&gt;, but then they are free to apply &lt;strong&gt;[no-derivative]&lt;/strong&gt; to their derivative work, contradicting my condition number 3. &lt;strong&gt;Dead end&lt;/strong&gt; as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conditions are reasonable (perhaps a little too restrictive, but that is another discussion), so it should be possible to cover them with a licence. Writing your own license is not recommended, so what should I do in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5143" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T16:51:49.463" Title="Is it possible to have a non-comercial license, while allowing commercial use of derivative works and further modification of the derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|copyleft|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-10-30T18:46:59.450" Score="9" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux&quot;&gt;According to Richard Stallman:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Likewise, in 2006 we learned through the GPL version 3 commenting process that downloading binaries of GPL-covered programs with BitTorrent violated GPL version 2, because with BitTorrent every downloader also redistributes. I included terms in GPL version 3 to explicitly permit this, thus authorizing BitTorrent distribution of binaries for all programs released under &quot;GNU GPL version 2 or any later version&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 only, and is distributed in every Linux ISO that is torrented. Does that mean that everyone who has ever distributed these ISOs has &quot;permanently los[t] the license to distribute that program&quot; according to the same article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that this might be covered under GPLv2 3(c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since ISOs contain information about how to get the source code, it would seem torrenters are saved, but I can't be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastEditorUserId="6523" LastEditDate="2016-10-30T21:21:30.137" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T09:40:57.260" Title="Does GPLv2 prohibit torrenting Linux ISOs?" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4694" CreationDate="2016-10-31T04:23:10.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your conditions, as you have noted but not quite grasped, are self-defeating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that the license you desire exists, and you create a picture &quot;A&quot; and release it under that license. Suppose then that Person B makes a change, for example, drawing a mustache into the picture. Let's call this picture &quot;B&quot;. Because the picture is a derivative work, by your hypothetical license Person B can distribute it commercially. Suppose that through their distribution Person C obtains a copy of picture B. Person C, due to their right to create derivative works, removes the mustache from the picture. Now Person C has a picture that is equivalent to A, but has the right to distribute it commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must either grant commercial use to all, deny commercial use to all, or write your own license that specifies that if a derivative work is equivalent to A it may not be distributed commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Adapted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ReleaseNotOriginal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;FSF's GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastEditorUserId="6523" LastEditDate="2016-10-31T16:51:49.463" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T16:51:49.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4699" CreationDate="2016-10-26T14:32:42.567" Score="4" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I contribute code to a project that is under the GPL (or similar), can I still use my code (without any other parts that were contributed by other people) in a closed-source app? If yes, can I also allow others to use my code without publishing the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6603" OwnerDisplayName="baruch" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-11-20T02:11:31.767" LastActivityDate="2016-11-20T02:11:31.767" Title="Do I still own code I donated to GPL project?" Tags="|gpl|contributor|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4698" CreationDate="2016-10-31T12:04:40.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends. Did you sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot;&gt;Contributors License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;? These agreements usually clarify if the contributor keeps their copyright and just licenses the code to the project or if the contributor transfers copyright. In the first case, the contributor is usually still free to do whatever they like with the code because they still own it (except for revoking the license, of course). In the latter case, the project now owns the copyright and can usually deny the original author to use it. Projects often prefer the latter variant, not because they want to screw their contributors but because it allows them to change the license terms later without having to ask every single contributor to agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a CLA? It appears to me that the general consensus among the open source community seems to be that no license transfer took place and the original author still owns their copyright. Contributors license their work to the open source project under an open source license (&quot;inbound = outbound&quot;). But should the situation go to court it's kind of a word-against-word situation if a copyright transfer took place or not. I am not a lawyer, so I can't tell how a court would rule under what circumstances in your jurisdiction. It might be important though if you did your work for free (as implied by &quot;donated&quot;) or received compensation. In the latter case it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get interpreted as work-for-hire which often includes automatic copyright transfer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-10-31T13:19:28.137" LastActivityDate="2016-10-31T13:19:28.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4693" CreationDate="2016-10-31T16:22:57.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 13 of the AGPLv3 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when do you modify the program? The license text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the central question is whether your combination of new code plus unaltered AGPL-licensed code creates a derivative or combined work under copyright law, such that you would need to permission from the copyright holder to prepare it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, you must make the source code of your entire work (which comprises your work and the AGPL-licecnsed work) available to network users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, and your work is actually separate from the AGPL work under copyright law, then you do not satisfy the criteria in Section 13 and the AGPL does not impose its source-sharing requirement on you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the linkage or interaction between the two works will create a derivative work is not an exact science. The FSF's opinion is captured in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication [...] and the semantics of the communication [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second part of your question, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7484/50&quot;&gt;How do I detect an AGPL violation?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically determining if a particular web service uses AGPL-licensed code in a way that the license would require source availability: this, too, is an inexact science. To a limited degree, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2737/50&quot;&gt;the same problem exists in non-networked software&lt;/a&gt;: how do you determine if closed-source software A secretly and illegally includes work from copyleft-licensed software B? In that case, we can do reverse engineering on the binary, but it can be extremely difficult, especially if the closed-source project deliberately obfuscated their use of the copyleft code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, this is very difficult practical problem, and it could be very hard (harder than it is &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; for non-network software) to prove infringement. In general, you might have a reasonable case if you can demonstrate an uncanny similarity (e.g., it has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same bugs as your software&lt;/a&gt;) or if the service provider outright admits using your AGPL-licensed software. The degree to which a court could demand to examine the source code or development correspondence of such a potentially-infringing service surely varies by jurisdiction, and is possibly untested is some jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are seriously concerned about this, you may want to speak to an experienced intellectual property lawyer in your jurisdiction who might tell you your options and how a court would go about judging the merits of such a copyright infringement case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T16:02:31.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4686" CreationDate="2016-11-02T03:27:07.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a Firefox add-on that I wanted to modify, and after some digging, the answer appears to be &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;. But my results seem counterintuitive, and I would like other people to verify them, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is the documentation for building Firefox add-ons&lt;/a&gt;. I found it easy enough to get up and running but would be happy to help anyone through the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Firefox 49.0.2, Xubuntu 16.10, I was able to modify an add-on and install it in Firefox without signing it, even with &lt;code&gt;xpinstall.signatures.required&lt;/code&gt; set to true in &lt;code&gt;about:config&lt;/code&gt;. I did have to manually install one of its dependencies with NPM. If that doesn't work for you, you may have to create a free developer account with Mozilla, &lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/api/key/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generate signing keys from that account&lt;/a&gt;, and sign your add-on manually. I was able to do this as a &quot;man off the street&quot; figuratively and get a signed add-on. Still, the fact that you have to go through Mozilla to get the signing key might make the software non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/max-tabs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is the add-on that I modified&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cheeaun/max-tabs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;). If someone could modify, compile, and install the add-on to verify that this isn't just some anomaly on my system that'd be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zimm i48 has since verified that the user can change the setting to require signing, even though the developers said it would be gone entirely in later Firefox versions. So no problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastEditorUserId="6523" LastEditDate="2016-11-04T16:48:50.907" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T16:48:50.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-02T09:52:54.923" Score="2" ViewCount="2386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a template for a company and fetching all vendor libs and selfmade code together to one minified style.css and script.js.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to you is: Is this following license header legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*!&#xA; * FooBar Company Template (https://foobar-company.xyz)&#xA; * Copyright 2016 FooBoar Company&#xA; * Unauthorized copying of this template, via any medium is strictly prohibited.&#xA; *&#xA; * Vendor resources&#xA; *&#xA; *  Font Awesome 4.6.3 by @davegandy - http://fontawesome.io - @fontawesome&#xA; *  License - http://fontawesome.io/license (Font: SIL OFL 1.1, CSS: MIT License)&#xA; *&#xA; *  Open Sans by Steve Matteson&#xA; *  Licensed under Apache License 2.0&#xA; *&#xA; *  Bootstrap v3.3.7 (http://getbootstrap.com)&#xA; *  Copyright 2011-2015 Twitter, Inc.&#xA; *  Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE)&#xA; *&#xA; */&#xA;[here follows minified CSS stuff]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license header for my minified JS file looks similiar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After reading your response my final source header looks like this&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/****************************************************************************&#xA; * FooBar Company Template v1.0.0&#xA; * Copyright 2016 | FooBar | https://foobar.xyz&#xA; *&#xA; * This template integrates components from the following projects&#xA; *&#xA; *  Font Awesome 4.7.0 by @davegandy | fontawesome.io/license (Font: SIL OFL 1.1, CSS: MIT License)&#xA; *  Open Sans by Steve Matteson | Apache License 2.0&#xA; *  jQuery v3.1.1 | (c) jQuery Foundation | jquery.org/license&#xA; *  Bootstrap v3.3.7 | Copyright 2011-2016 Twitter, Inc. | MIT License&#xA; *  Bootstrap Modalizer v1.0.0 | (c) 2016 Jonathan Nessier, Neoflow | MIT License&#xA; *  Menu Icon v1.0 | (c) Neoflow | MIT License&#xA; *  Hammer.JS v2.0.8 | Copyright (c) 2016 Jorik Tangelder | MIT License&#xA; *&#xA; ****************************************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6621" LastEditorUserId="6621" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T06:30:42.103" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T06:30:42.103" Title="License header for CSS/JS resources" Tags="|license-notice|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-03T16:41:52.833" Score="1" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use a software (a forum) written in PHP run on a single webserver. We modified the original software itself and applied software around it, e.g. using parts of the origin code in our own code. The whole package can only run as one thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every file of the origin software has the following header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/**&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * Simple Machines Forum (SMF)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * @package SMF&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * @author&#xA;  Simple Machines &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplemachines.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.simplemachines.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * @copyright 2011&#xA;  Simple Machines&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * @license&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplemachines.org/about/smf/license.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.simplemachines.org/about/smf/license.php&lt;/a&gt; BSD&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  * @version 2.0.1&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  */&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the license-link brings us to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2011 Simple Machines. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Developed by: Simple Machines Forum Project&#xA;  Simple Machines&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simplemachines.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.simplemachines.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Neither the names of Simple Machines Forum, Simple Machines, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to allow others to work with us on the code. We could use a closed repository as in the past and that would be fine. Nevertheless, to remove any hesitations to help us, we would publish the code as open source on GitHub, so everyone can contribute, who is willing to help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license should have our own code? Usually I prefer MIT but I don't see, that it's possible to merge both codes. And are we able to publish the code to invite others to help to work on our very own special version of SMF? Especially, the third point in the license let me think, that's not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="721" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-11-05T14:21:21.767" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:36:34.307" Title="We worked with BSD-license software and modified it and now want to allow others to help us" Tags="|license-notice|software|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2016-11-04T08:38:24.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD and MIT licenses are very permissive and very similar. You could use MIT for your own code but for the sake of simplicity I advise you to continue using BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is very important is that you keep the original notices, to which you could add your own copyright statement (without removing any other copyright statement). See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4546/bsd-3-clause-how-to-update-with-modifications&quot;&gt;BSD 3-clause: how to update with modifications?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-04T08:38:24.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-04T18:48:04.757" Score="-1" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to open source, and I'm working on my first Java application, which will be released with the MIT license. I'd like to use Berkeley DB for object persistence. That product uses the GNU Affero General Public License. There seems to be a license incompatibility here, but as a non-lawyer newbie, I don't know how to proceed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6635" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T11:31:21.600" Title="Can an open-source Java application with the MIT license use Berkeley DB with Affero license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2016-11-05T11:31:21.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two licenses are well-known to be compatible. What this means is that you can take codes under both licenses and combine them into a larger work. It does not mean that you are not limited in how you can license the larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, nothing prevents you from releasing your own code under the MIT license but the whole program (which combines the part that you wrote and the library under AGPL) will need to be released under AGPL only (since AGPL is strictly more restrictive than MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4137/can-public-domain-use-gpl-licensed-library-program&quot;&gt;Can Public Domain use GPL licensed library/program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-05T11:31:21.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4711" CreationDate="2016-11-06T23:31:58.893" Score="2" ViewCount="1287" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created an unofficial OSGeo addon, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pmcgover/24dev-demo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;24dev-demo&quot;&gt;24dev-demo&lt;/a&gt; for a student's &quot;Software Digital Portfolio&quot; via github.com. A student may add or modify the software with their own code. Below is an example of a modified MIT license header they could use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Original work Copyright (c) 2015 John David Doe&#xA;&#xA;Modified &quot;appName&quot;, Added &quot;appName&quot; Copyright 2016 Mary Carol Doe&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper/best way for a developer to &quot;publish&quot; their modifications/additions to the original MIT copyright license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6654" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T12:01:12.843" Title="Displaying MIT license modifications" Tags="|copyright|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4712" CreationDate="2016-11-07T03:18:06.393" Score="3" ViewCount="834" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a GNU-GPLv3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAR_(file_format)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I want to make it available to people who use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Maven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maven&lt;/a&gt; build script (pom.xml)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to do?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the pre-requisites?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2016-11-07T03:51:49.527" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T19:21:18.907" Title="How to publish my open source library to Maven?" Tags="|distribution|java|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4709" CreationDate="2016-11-07T12:01:12.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the license file of a &quot;template&quot; project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gmalecha/coq-plugin-template/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gmalecha/coq-plugin-template/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the README contains this instruction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7) Update the LICENSE file by completing the line for your copyright claim or add your own license statement if you don't want to use MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT license doesn't require anything more (no need for instance to list the modifications that were made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T12:01:12.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4710" CreationDate="2016-11-07T19:21:18.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard way is to use sonatypes procedure: &lt;a href=&quot;http://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is basically 2 steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;setup an account with them (free, but you need to tell them about a page you own or belong to)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;setup some basic things in your pom or its parent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my projects I create a parent-pom in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openCage/pfabulist-parent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/openCage/pfabulist-parent&lt;/a&gt;. branch v1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use it just copy stuff in your pom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a maven deploy will send your artifact to sonatype.&#xA;They test some points and then send it to maven-central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, to check whether your GPL3 license fits to the dependencies you are using there are several options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philippe Ombredanne tool: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nexB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mine as java dependency: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openCage/loracle-maven-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/openCage/loracle-maven-plugin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastActivityDate="2016-11-07T19:21:18.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4714" CreationDate="2016-11-08T12:52:01.270" Score="27" ViewCount="56039" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a project that will be commercialised. One of the library I use is licensed under Apache v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, if I modify the library, I need to give the source of the library with the changes highlighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the project itself? Do I have any obligation that arise from it, ignoring the obvious &quot;This project use library X under Apache v2&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6661" OwnerDisplayName="user7327" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T10:56:33.160" LastActivityDate="2024-01-29T08:41:28.100" Title="Can I use a Apache v2 licensed driver for a commercial project without revealing sources of the project?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4713" CreationDate="2016-11-08T13:18:10.700" Score="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, if I modify the library, I need to give the source of the library with the changes highlighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you have no such obligation. The Apache 2.0 license does not contain any copyleft requirements that would require you to share your modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Must-Contribute&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I HAVE MADE CHANGES TO AN APACHE PACKAGE AND I WANT TO DISTRIBUTE THEM. DO I NEED TO CONTRIBUTE THEM TO THE APACHE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You can keep your changes a secret if you like. Maybe your modifications are embarrassing, maybe you'll get rich selling those improvements. Whatever. But please seriously consider giving your changes back! We all benefit when you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only obligations you have when redistributing the binaries of an Apache-licensed project are detailed in Section 4, subsection a, b, and d:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: [...] within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sections (a) and (d) are clear enough: preserve the license text and any NOTICE file to downstream recipients. You may include the NOTICE text within the application itself or in a separate file. I am not sure whether or how to indicate changes in a binary-only distribution, as apparently required by section (b), but I suppose you could include that information in an &amp;quot;About&amp;quot; screen in your application. (e.g., &amp;quot;This executable includes software licensed under the Apache License 2.0, modified by John Smith.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-08T13:32:24.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4716" CreationDate="2016-11-08T16:17:38.477" Score="6" ViewCount="877" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using diverse module under the MIT license in my project. The project consist of a webserver, which will be closed source, commercial, and will not be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the MIT license, if I were to distribute the code, I just need to keep the license in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I will not distribute the code, so am I just free to do as I see fit? Do I need to include &quot;About&quot; section that give you the MIT license alongside which project I used internally? Or is there other obligations I missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6661" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T00:50:38.833" Title="I am using a MIT licensed module in a closed source project. What are my obligations?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4715" CreationDate="2016-11-09T01:09:02.773" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are coding a webserver, even if the webserver itself will not be redistributed you still need to consider JavaScript and related assets that are effectively redistributed to your users' browsers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is strictly backend code using an MIT license, you have no special obligations beyond &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are many variants of the MIT license but most are just minor variations and this attribution requirement will be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will not distribute the code, so am I just free to do as I see fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I need to include &quot;About&quot; section that give you the MIT license alongside which project I used internally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, though it would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or are there other obligations I missed?`&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="6764" LastEditDate="2016-11-23T00:50:38.833" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T00:50:38.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4725" CreationDate="2016-11-09T04:07:53.867" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using icon sets provided by third party in a closed source project which might be distributed depending on the needs. All the icons will be bundled to the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per my understanding, as long as I won't modify default downloaded PNGs, I'm good to go (As long as I provide a copy of license and attribute the author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is that assumption is correct? or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6666" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T05:39:40.217" Title="Using CC BY ND 3.0 licensed icons in closed source project" Tags="|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4721" CreationDate="2016-11-09T09:03:50.150" Score="10" ViewCount="5699" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if selling a hardware product which runs a firmware is considered as conveying that firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I want to use a GPLv3 library statically linked with my own code, I am required to inform the costumers that buy my products that they are running GPLv3 software? And licensing also my code as GPLv3? In such case, how I must inform them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the product firmware can be updated using the programming tools of the microcontroller, which loads the software into the microcontroller's flash memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about a different but similar case: if I decide to employ uCLinux (a linux version for embedded products), can I ship the product with close source programs, which will run over the uCLinux OS, and offering the source code of uCLinux only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6667" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T19:00:10.357" Title="Hardware with GPL firmware" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|firmware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4718" CreationDate="2016-11-09T13:40:21.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is certainly distribution (i.e., what the GPLv3 defines as &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular you are conveying the software &amp;quot;in, or embodied in, a physical product&amp;quot; so your options for required source distribution are described in 4(a) and 4(b), so you may either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accompany your device with a piece of computer media that contains the source code, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accompany your device with a written offer for the source code, valid for anyone who possesses the object code, and valid for at least three years and not less than the commercial-support lifespan of the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full relevant text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by the Corresponding Source fixed on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF's opinion is strongly that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;static linking creates a modified work&lt;/a&gt;, and the GPL's copyleft requirements apply to the whole combination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, whatever code you statically linked to the GPL code would need to be included in the source you distribute with your product, and the combination needs to be licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the uCLinux case, it is a generally understood that userspace code is not affected by the GPL on the kernel. The mere fact that a piece of userspace software makes system calls to the GPL-licensed kernel does not impose GPL requirements on that software. If you include your own kernel modules (which is a very different case from ordinary userspace code), however, those likely &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; a modification of the kernel and need to be included in the GPLv3 work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T19:00:10.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-09T14:57:38.927" Score="2" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question is: I have developed a software which extends an open source project licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. The original open source project has been bought from another company which gave me the possibility to modify, extend, and sell the code. Now I wanna build a cloud service based on this software allowing users to use it thru a web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have any limitation with the license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I forced to give away the source code of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6101" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T02:19:29.843" Title="webservice using source code under apache 2.0 license" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4718" CreationDate="2016-11-09T17:59:30.113" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to know if selling a hardware product which runs a firmware is considered as conveying that firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; The binaries are inside the device and are therefore redistributed with the device aka. conveyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, if I want to use a GPLv3 library statically linked with my own code, I am required to inform the customers that buy my products that they are running GPLv3 software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes,&lt;/strong&gt; notification is the essence of most open source licenses including the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And licensing also my code as GPLv3? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes,&lt;/strong&gt; when linking code (statically or dynamically) with GPL-licensed, the copyleft of the GPL would typically apply to my code and should be made available under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license and treated as GPL-licensed. You can also find more details on dependencies in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc/4315#4315&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;For Copyleft licenses, how (proprietary- or non-Copyleft- licensed) programs and Copyleft-licensed programs are used together, how they depend and interact with each other is the essence of what triggers the Copyleft clauses of the GPL and LGPL.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the GPL, I consider any linking as an &quot;intimate&quot; relationship where the copyleft would apply and extend to the caller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In such case, how I must inform them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can take several forms such as notifying in the UI (if my device has such a thing) or the documentation. It should contain at least a notice and the text of the GPL. See also this answer (of mine) on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution/4582#4582&quot;&gt;Does GPLv3 require attribution?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And about a different but similar case: if I decide to employ uCLinux (a linux version for embedded products), can I ship the product with close source programs, which will run over the uCLinux OS, and offering the source code of uCLinux only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, if my closed source code runs in userspace, this is considered a normal usage of the OS and I can use any license I please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux (the Kernel) uses the GPL 2.0 with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING?id=refs/tags/v4.9-rc2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extra statement&lt;/a&gt; per this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4689/947&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel&#xA; services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA; of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of &quot;derived work&quot;.&#xA; Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software&#xA; Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux&#xA; kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, if my closed source code runs in kernelspace, then the consensus is that this code should be licensed under a GPL or GPL-compatible license and treated as GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course my device would typically combine both userspace and kernelspace code so a bit of both may apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-11-09T17:59:30.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4720" CreationDate="2016-11-10T02:19:29.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have any limitation with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I forced to give away the source code of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mere internal usage (including as a backend webservice) of Apache-2.0-licensed code does not have specific obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still would document my changes in the source and keep intact all the notices though if I ever redistribute code in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T02:19:29.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2016-11-10T02:28:42.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this following license header legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot say if this is legal, but it sure does not look complete or correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses may have specific requirements that I would not properly meet unless I included the full text of the license, for instance for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses may NOT be sub-licensable (as is the MIT) for instance the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web&amp;amp;_sc=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL OFL 1.1&lt;/a&gt; and this may conflict with a proprietary notice that would essentially re/sub-license the code under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole,&#xA;  must be distributed entirely under this license, and must not be&#xA;  distributed under any other license. The requirement for fonts to&#xA;  remain under this license does not apply to any document created&#xA;  using the Font Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional answer elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After reading your response my final source header looks like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/****************************************************************************&#xA; * FooBar Company Template v1.0.0&#xA; * Copyright 2016 | FooBar | https://foobar.xyz&#xA; *&#xA; * This template integrates components from the following projects&#xA; *&#xA; *  Font Awesome 4.7.0 by @davegandy | fontawesome.io/license (Font: SIL OFL 1.1, CSS: MIT License)&#xA; *  Open Sans by Steve Matteson | Apache License 2.0&#xA; *  jQuery v3.1.1 | (c) jQuery Foundation | jquery.org/license&#xA; *  Bootstrap v3.3.7 | Copyright 2011-2016 Twitter, Inc. | MIT License&#xA; *  Bootstrap Modalizer v1.0.0 | (c) 2016 Jonathan Nessier, Neoflow | MIT License&#xA; *  Menu Icon v1.0 | (c) Jonathan Nessier, Neoflow | MIT License&#xA; *  Hammer.JS v2.0.8 | Copyright (c) 2016 Jorik Tangelder | MIT License&#xA; *&#xA; ****************************************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks fine to me with some caveats: the licenses texts would need to be included somehow if not in the code itself, at least side-by-side with your code and accessible from that code , e.g. possibly linked. The Apache-licensed packages may also have specific NOTICEs that may need to be reproduced too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-14T11:12:22.243" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T11:12:22.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4728" CreationDate="2016-11-10T04:58:10.223" Score="10" ViewCount="1427" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;download page of Fedora&lt;/a&gt;, one finds this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By downloading Fedora software, you acknowledge that you understand all of the following: Fedora software and technical information may be subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (the “EAR”) and other U.S. and foreign laws and may not be exported, re-exported or transferred (a) to any country listed in Country Group E:1 in Supplement No. 1 to part 740 of the EAR (currently, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan &amp;amp; Syria); (b) to any prohibited destination or to any end user who has been prohibited from participating in U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government; or (c) for use in connection with the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or rocket systems, space launch vehicles, or sounding rockets, or unmanned air vehicle systems. You may not download Fedora software or technical information if you are located in one of these countries or otherwise subject to these restrictions. You may not provide Fedora software or technical information to individuals or entities located in one of these countries or otherwise subject to these restrictions. You are also responsible for compliance with foreign law requirements applicable to the import, export and use of Fedora software and technical information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would appear to be a &quot;further restriction&quot; within both versions of the GPL. Does this mean Fedora is not being legally distributed? What impact does that have on the users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6523" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T13:48:43.777" Title="Do Fedora's export restrictions violate the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4717" CreationDate="2016-11-10T05:39:40.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Commons Deed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&lt;/a&gt; you just need to give credits and point out changes. But if you change the it, you may not redistribute it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're correct &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3757" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T05:39:40.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4727" CreationDate="2016-11-10T06:45:43.183" Score="5" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we are loading a closed source - dll dynamically in the source code which comes under three clause BSD license then is it mandatory to change license of my closed source dll to three clause BSD License? Also is it compulsory to publish this closed source dll code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6673" LastEditorUserId="3657" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T14:53:05.523" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T14:53:05.523" Title="Using dynamically linked library with BSD 3-clause License" Tags="|bsd|linked-libraries|closed-source|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4726" CreationDate="2016-11-10T13:07:58.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you do not need to change the license of your dll and you do not need to publish any source code. In contrast to a strong copyleft, non-permissive license like the GPL the BSD licenses are instead non-copyleft and permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft basically means that any modifications you make to a piece of copyleft-licensed software have to be released under the same conditions as the original software. If you make a modification to a program licensed under the GPL the modification also needs to be GPL. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.html&lt;/a&gt;. This is not the case with the BSD license family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive is just what it sounds like. You're less restricted in what you are allowed to do with software under a what is considered a permissive open software license than what is allowed by a non-permissive license. You still have some obligations, such as attributing the authors, but a permissive license is generally easier to comply with than a non-permissive license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2016-11-10T13:23:01.813" LastActivityDate="2016-11-10T13:23:01.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4724" CreationDate="2016-11-10T16:22:27.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;These kinds of notices are broadly addressed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ExportWarranties&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ entry about export restrictions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some distributors of GPLed software require me in their umbrella EULAs or as part of their downloading process to “represent and warrant” that I am located in the US or that I intend to distribute the software in compliance with relevant export control laws. Why are they doing this and is it a violation of those distributors' obligations under GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is not a violation of the GPL. Those distributors (almost all of whom are commercial businesses selling free software distributions and related services) are trying to reduce their own legal risks, not to control your behavior. Export control law in the United States might make them liable if they knowingly export software into certain countries, or if they give software to parties they know will make such exports. By asking for these statements from their customers and others to whom they distribute software, they protect themselves in the event they are later asked by regulatory authorities what they knew about where software they distributed was going to wind up. They are not restricting what you can do with the software, only preventing themselves from being blamed with respect to anything you do. Because they are not placing additional restrictions on the software, they do not violate section 10 of GPLv3 or section 6 of GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, this very issue came up &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-list/2007-August/msg01883.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 2007 on the Fedora mailing list&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Correct me if I wrong - this statement seriously violates GPL - I read&#xA;  it and find no mentions about Cuba and Iraq.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-list/2007-August/msg02326.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;final message in the thread&lt;/a&gt; links to a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis/FSF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fedora wiki page with a response from the FSF&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&gt; &gt; Fedora as a distribution is affected by export control regulations as&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt; any software subjected to US laws from the legal perspective.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download/ExportRegulations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download/ExportRegulations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt; Clause 8 in GPL mentions that such regulations are compatible with the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &gt; &gt; license but can you confirm FSF's viewpoints on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Section 8 of GPLv2 doesn't make the sort of sweeping policy statement&#xA;  you're suggesting here.  You'll note that we took this clause out of GPLv3&#xA;  -- but you're not suddenly going to get into export restriction trouble&#xA;  because of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question to ask is: what requirement of the GPL does the law prevent&#xA;  you from fulfilling?  When it comes to export restrictions, the answer is&#xA;  none.  If you comply with local export restrictions, you will not run afoul&#xA;  of any requirements in the GPL.  Therefore, there's no conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Export restrictions limit who you can give the software to.  The GPL has no&#xA;  problem with you being picky about who you give the software to: if you&#xA;  want, you can decide that you'll only distribute to paying customers, or&#xA;  people with blue hair.  So the fact that you also decide not to distribute&#xA;  to Iranians and Syrians is no problem as far as the license is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, it seems the FSF understands such an export-restriction notice as this as merely an informative statement about laws that may exist in your jurisdiction. Furthermore, the export restriction laws are not strictly in conflict with the GPL: you can follow both export law and the GPL simultaneously.  Certainly, export laws narrow some of the rights you would otherwise have under the GPL, but the GPL can't ever give you meaningful permission to take actions that are outright illegal in your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems right to me (not that my legal opinion counts for anything) since the language used at the top of the notice is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fedora software... &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such conditional language like &quot;may&quot; does not sound like language that actually imposes a restriction, but rather sounds like language that warns about a restriction that might exist elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T13:48:43.777" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T13:48:43.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-12T08:25:18.767" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeing a range of possibilities here. E.g.,[0]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nothing special needs to be done, based on [1] (and UFL being close to OFL), [2], and an opinion stated under Use an Open Font[3].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps such font licenses can be mentioned in package descriptor (.opf) file, &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;using elements like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;link rel=&quot;cc:license&quot; refines=&quot;#cover&quot; href=&quot;http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;link rel=&quot;cc:attributionURL&quot; refines=&quot;#cover&quot; href=&quot;http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Fieldhouse&quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- cover meta element included for 2.0 reading system compatibility: --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;meta name=&quot;cover&quot; content=&quot;cover&quot;/&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(that can be seen for a cover image in [4]) (but in this case, the license won't be seen by the user unless they extract the epub's contents (which would not be straight-forward if the epub is DRM-protected)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other end of the range, perhaps a link to OFL and/or UFL license could be included on the sites on which the epub will be distributed. E.g., something like the following on the e-book's page on kdp.amazon.com:&#xA;&quot;A UFL[5]-licensed font XYZ is used in this e-book.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include a sentence (or several of them) with a link as in approach 3), but inside the human-readable content of the e-book, such as on a copyright page (without the quotes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A UFL[6]-licensed font XYZ is used in this e-book.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AND/OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;An OFL[7]-licensed font ABC is used in this e-book.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like 4., but instead of linking to &lt;a href=&quot;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL_web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL_web&lt;/a&gt;, it could link to a page inside the e-book that contains the entire contents of such an external license page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Variations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.1. The linked page could be NOT included in any nav or ToC elements, but available within the e-book if clicked on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.2. The linked page could be NOT included in the book ToC, but included in EPUB2 guide (e.g., [8]), or perhaps EPUB3 equivalent landmarks element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.3. The linked page could be in the appendix, and included in book ToC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these or other approaches would be &lt;strong&gt;the easiest (minimalistic) and legally safe&lt;/strong&gt;? E.g., is approach 1) OK as most opinions I have come across claim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Perhaps more specific sentences could also be used, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A UFL[6]-licensed font XYZ is used in this e-book for (such and such content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An OFL[7]-licensed font ABC is used in this e-book for (characters from such and such language/script).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although that probably wouldn't be a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. Approach 4 would be quite similar to what Google Fonts does on font pages, which also include a link to the UFL (or another applicable license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.P.S. Approach 5) would end up adding 2-3 e-book pages per license, and could be considered a contamination of the e-books with unnecessary content. It would also entail English license pages in books in other languages, which could be confusing to many readers. And frankly, I think almost nobody has used such an approach for an e-book (or printed book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[0] In URLs, replace &quot;// &quot; with &quot;//&quot; when applicable, as the site doesn't let me include more than 2 links. Also, note that my question is whether any steps are required at all, &amp;amp; which approach is &lt;strong&gt;the minimally legally sufficient&lt;/strong&gt; one, which is different from a couple of related questions which ask how[8] and where[9] to include font licenses. This licensing-heavy question wasn't considered relevant on Stack Overflow, so I'm asking it here, in the hope of nailing the &lt;strong&gt;minimally legally sufficient&lt;/strong&gt; approach for OFL/UFL-licensed fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#36914bf6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#36914bf6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#709ec8bb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#709ec8bb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/epub-3-best/9781449329129/ch04.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/epub-3-best/9781449329129/ch04.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IDPF/epub3-samples/blob/master/30/wasteland-otf/EPUB/wasteland.opf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/IDPF/epub3-samples/blob/master/30/wasteland-otf/EPUB/wasteland.opf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] &lt;a href=&quot;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&lt;/a&gt; (if the site allows it, [5] part would be replaced with a hyperlink pointing to the same URL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] &lt;a href=&quot;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://font.ubuntu.com/ufl/&lt;/a&gt; ([6] part would be replaced with a hyperlink surrounding the license abbreviation and pointing to the URL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[7] &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL_web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL_web&lt;/a&gt; ([7] part would be replaced with a hyperlink surrounding the license abbreviation and pointing to the URL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[8] Note that guide is deprecated in EPUB3: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2844/how-to-properly-include-a-license-file-within-an-epub&quot;&gt;http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2844/how-to-properly-include-a-license-file-within-an-epub&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[9] &lt;a href=&quot;http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/6485/where-should-font-licenses-be-embedded&quot;&gt;http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/6485/where-should-font-licenses-be-embedded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6683" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T18:55:39.283" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T18:55:39.283" Title="Any steps required to satify OFL/UFL license terms for a font embedded in an (possibly DRM-protected) e-book (e.g., epub file)?" Tags="|licensing|drm|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-12T14:37:11.673" Score="6" ViewCount="2204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to modernize a current microcontroller solution with a new one based on embedded Linux (Debian), running on Allwinner A10 chips. I plan to make a Linux app doing all user-interface stuff, and a few drivers to communicate with the rest of the hardware doing all time critical stuff (communicating with other MCU-s, etc...). The plan is to make the user-interface app run at system start-up, preventing user do anything else except using functionalities this app provide. Peripherals for which a driver is going to be made, a customer will never have a chance to buy it separately, as they are unique parts for this solution only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have a few questions about Linux license. As I plan to sell this solution as a whole, do I have to publish sources of my Linux app or kernel drivers I have made, or deliver it upon request to the customer? Do I even have to make my UI-app and drivers under any GPL license? Do I need to tell the customer what Linux distribution I am using for this my solution, as he will never be able to interact with Linux itself, or use any of its functionalities directly (running terminal, or any other app)? &#xA;What freedoms I have to change this Linux distribution (remove parts that I don't need for current use)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Alexander" LastEditorUserId="3873" LastEditDate="2016-11-12T15:16:49.863" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T19:47:45.907" Title="Legal issues about embedded Linux" Tags="|gpl|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4733" CreationDate="2016-11-13T05:38:52.803" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I and a group of developers that met online have come up with an idea for a website we would like to create. I am struggling to see how our idea would survive with an open source business model. How can we get the best of both worlds? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we structured the business as a non-profit, could we still invite volunteers to make contributions to our code base? If we are successful these are the outcomes I predict:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Success while we are still open source would force us to suddenly close our code off. This is the drug dealer business model and Id like to avoid this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Success while we are closed means we have volunteers that helped us become profitable. We offer the core team salaried positions and continue business as usual. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6688" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T14:00:52.860" Title="Proprietary Software Developed by Non-Profit Volunteers" Tags="|github|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4732" CreationDate="2016-11-13T13:44:24.900" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fail to imagine any situation where a non-profit project could fail because its sourcecode is non-free. But I will give you the benefit of a doubt and assume that it somehow is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's sometimes surprising how much time and effort people are willing to invest into projects they believe in. However, when you make your project closed source, you are erecting some additional barriers for new volunteers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People are shy. They won't ask if they can help you when they aren't sure they actually can help. When someone notices a bug or misses a feature and the sourcecode is available, they can check it out to see if they understand it well enough to help you. But without seeing the source beforehand, they won't be so sure if they can actually do it and will be more reluctant to offer help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open Source greatly reduces onboarding time for new volunteers. In a closed-source project you need to get into contact with them, you need to give them access to your version control system and you somehow need to convince them to not leak your sourcecode to the public. Volunteer initiatives of any kind usually have a very high turnover rate, so this administrative overhead might become considerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an open source project they just need to do a checkout of your public repository. With websites like Github they can branch your project with one click and send you a pull request with another.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without an open source license, people might be afraid that you will one day turn your project into a for-profit project and exploit their hard labor without paying them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and by the way: &quot;Open Source&quot; and &quot;For Profit&quot; are not necessarily contradictory. See &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized/&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for details. In my opinion community-driven websites are perfect for monetizing as open source project, because the asset with the most commercial value is usually their user community, not their sourcecode. People can't fork the code and expect the community to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-11-13T14:00:52.860" LastActivityDate="2016-11-13T14:00:52.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4735" CreationDate="2016-11-13T14:48:48.737" Score="3" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized/&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt; mentions open source SaaS. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once you are successful enough in one of the above, you can afford giving away your software for free (as in free beer). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can a startup whos core product is SaaS safely grow until youre &quot;successful enough&quot; if you are Open Source? Couldnt someone with bad morales and good timing fork our minimum viable product and own us by simply running a better launch campaign?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6688" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:38:53.730" Title="Can a SaaS product by successfully developed as Open Source?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4734" CreationDate="2016-11-14T11:11:42.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideas don't get stolen until they have proven to be successful&lt;/strong&gt;. People will not take your software and compete with you on the SaaS market for it until you have built a community which makes it worth it. At that point you will already have enough momentum to be able to keep a dominant market position.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You own the brand&lt;/strong&gt;. As the company which invented the product, you already have a reputation advantage which is hard to compete with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You control the development&lt;/strong&gt;. That means you can optimize the software for your own SaaS setup. Well, the competition could fork your project and optimize it for their purposes, but forking drives up their maintenance cost and would mean that they would lose even more brand recognition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example of a company which does this business model in practice and is very successful with it, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://automattic.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Automattic Inc&lt;/a&gt;. They made &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordPress&lt;/a&gt;, the most used blogging CMS system on the web and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.com/#plans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;they make a ton of money with hosting instances of it&lt;/a&gt;, even though it is free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-11-14T11:22:00.520" LastActivityDate="2016-11-14T11:22:00.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4737" CreationDate="2016-11-14T19:01:44.567" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;To become better Python programmer I decided to start contributing Python FOSS. I would like to start by contributing to smaller modules I use myself and this raises a question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just fork the project and create a pull request with small explanation what I did and why or should I contact the author first? I am asking because these smaller projects tend to be missing any contribution advice documents or sometimes documents altogether.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6698" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T08:35:14.857" Title="How to start committing to small opensource Python modules" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4736" CreationDate="2016-11-15T00:06:44.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your goal is to contribute something back, then I would likely use this approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;submit a ticket with a feature request or bug&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;then mention that you intend to work on this and ask for advice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if available, contact the author(s) on IRC or a mailing list to further discuss your approach&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;work out a patch and eventually submit a pull request referencing the key points of the discussions above (and at least a #ticket number)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T00:06:44.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4736" CreationDate="2016-11-15T08:35:14.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, no project which allows pull requests (PR) should take umbrage if you submit a PR without talking to them first. However you need to know that not all developers handle PR in the same way. Some will merge it very quickly with a &quot;Thanks!&quot;, some others will let it sit aside for a while before deciding to do anything, and some others will tell you &quot;Good ideas, but let me write that differently.&quot; before committing their own patches and then closing your PR as obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, it is never a bad idea to write some code and submit a PR if you are in one of the two following cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need this code badly and are ready to use your own version of the software / module, instead of the official one. (After all, this is the spirit of free software: make the changes &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; need.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Writing the code will take you less time than discussing the changes you want to introduce.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all other cases, I would recommend to follow @PhilippeOmbredanne's advice as you could feel hurt if you spend time contributing a PR and it gets ignored or never merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T08:35:14.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4734" CreationDate="2016-11-15T18:38:53.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to share some links that might be helpful in answering this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/reddit/reddit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/reddit/reddit&lt;/a&gt; (ads) (warning: some proprietary JS blobs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/download/source/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wordpress.org/download/source/&lt;/a&gt; (They offer a hosted product that you can pay for)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master#README&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master#README&lt;/a&gt; (again, they essentially offer hosting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Wikipedias-code-not-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Wikipedias-code-not-open-source&lt;/a&gt; (nonprofit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are mostly companies (and a nonprofit) that wrote their own code. Some other companies, yet, offer support for existing open source projects, write custom builds of those projects for unique usage scenarios, sell related hardware, or do God knows what. (See RedHat, RackSpace, etc.) Exclusivity is really not required to make money. At all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T18:38:53.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4731" CreationDate="2016-11-15T19:47:45.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As I plan to sell this solution as a whole, do I have to publish sources of my Linux app?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, if I assume that this is a typical userspace app, then the terms of the Kernel GPL license would not apply (though I still may combine my userspace app with copyleft-licensed otherwise and a copyleft may apply then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4718/hardware-with-gpl-firmware/4721#4721&quot;&gt;other answer&lt;/a&gt; of mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my closed source code runs in userspace, this is considered a normal usage of the OS and I can use any license I please.&#xA;Linux (the Kernel) uses the GPL 2.0 with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING?id=refs/tags/v4.9-rc2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extra statement&lt;/a&gt; per this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4689/947&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel&#xA; services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA; of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of &quot;derived work&quot;.&#xA; Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software&#xA; Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux&#xA; kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my closed source code runs in kernelspace, then the consensus is that this code should be licensed under a GPL or GPL-compatible license and treated as GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or kernel drivers I have made?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. if some of my closed source code runs in kernelspace, then the consensus is that this code should be licensed under a GPL or GPL-compatible license and treated as GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or deliver it upon request to the customer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I have several options to deliver source code. One of them is to deliver source code on request.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I even have to make my UI-app and drivers under any GPL license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above: it depends. Typically the GPL would not apply to a common userspace app just based on it being a userspace app. The LKM/drivers should always be treated as GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I need to tell the customer what Linux distribution I am using for this my solution, as he will never be able to interact with Linux itself, or use any of its functionalities directly (running terminal, or any other app)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to disclose and attribute. Attribution is important in general (and license notification is an essential part in the GPL in particular).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL always requires attribution composed at the minimum of a copyright statement, a notice and the GPL license text. Attribution examples are provided at the bottom of the license text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also these &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3994/why-do-almost-all-open-source-licenses-require-attribution/4587#4587&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution/4582#4582&quot;&gt;mine&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What freedoms I have to change this Linux distribution (remove parts that I don't need for current use)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have full freedom to change an Linux distribution (assuming this is a true open source distribution) including adding, changing or removing. Yet, in doing so I may have extra obligations. A typical distro contains 1000+ packages beside the Kernel and each may have a different license and specific obligations. Some licenses require source redistribution, some do not. Most require some form of attribution. Some require change tracking. A few may prohibit certain changes. Some distros may also include packages that are proprietary and/or not redistributable directly such as Ubuntu and RedHat branding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-11-15T19:47:45.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-15T22:08:33.027" Score="1" ViewCount="1763" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I program a website and use a JS plugin (&lt;a href=&quot;http://responsiveslides.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://responsiveslides.com/&lt;/a&gt; for example), which is licensed under MIT. Does this mean I have to put the MIT-license somewhere in my directory. If so, where do I put it and does the user of the website have to be able to see it somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6709" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T01:20:33.960" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T08:40:52.183" Title="MIT license, do I need to include it?" Tags="|mit|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-11-18T00:53:22.110" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-16T02:40:46.600" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I start an open source project today and volunteers start to contribute, what do I need to consider tomorrow when the project makes money? If we establish a core team that receives a salary, are we put into a position where we would have to either remove outside contributions or pay for them? Is it a common scenario for an open source project to have a core paid team while still accept outside contributions? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the open source license I choose matter?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6688" LastEditorUserId="6688" LastEditDate="2016-11-16T03:01:32.320" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T20:50:45.457" Title="What must I consider when accepting outside contributions to an Open Source project that has a salaried core team?" Tags="|law|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4741" CreationDate="2016-11-16T08:40:52.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is not clear in this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best place to put the license is, I would say, in a comment in the code of the JS plugin itself. It is short enough so that it won't be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you minify the source before distributing it, you should make sure that the minified version still contains the license (preferably at the top, with some explanation on what it applies to). So yes, the user will be able to see it, by dispaying the source of the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anything forces you to have an About page to acknowledge the use of this library, although this is nice to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T08:40:52.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4745" CreationDate="2016-11-16T18:48:05.503" Score="11" ViewCount="3391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/announcements/microsoft-fortifies-commitment-to-open-source-becomes-linux-foundation-platinum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft has become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Linux Foundation website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/members/corporate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists various companies&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;Platinum Members&quot;, &quot;Gold Members&quot;, &quot;Silver Members&quot; and &quot;Affiliates&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the difference between these different membership levels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T08:30:40.307" Title="What's the difference between different membership levels in the Linux Foundation?" Tags="|community|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4744" CreationDate="2016-11-16T19:35:48.807" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;(disclosure: I am a supporter and my company is a silver member of the Linux Foundation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: Higher levels of membership pay bigger fees and have more say in the running of the Foundation with Board of Directors seats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yearly fee for Platinum is $500K+, Gold is $100K, Silver is $5K to $20K. Individual supporters pay $99 and Student  get in for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question you did not ask and that I shall dare to answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could Microsoft use its LF membership to impede Linux progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no. The LF bylaws have several checks and balances built-in. And the kernel contributors are contributing independently of the LF anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/bylaws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LF bylaws&lt;/a&gt; Section 3.2 - Membership Qualifications and Section 3.3 - Affiliates here are the classes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following shall be the requirements for membership in each membership class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) Platinum Members. The Platinum Members shall be individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Gold Members. Gold Members shall be individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies.  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) Silver Members. Silver Members shall be individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies.  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Affiliates. The Board of Directors may establish one or more classes of individuals or entities associated with this corporation.  Such individuals or entities shall be referred to as “Advisors,” “Affiliates,” “Associates,” “Contributors,” or any other title as the Board of Directors deems appropriate (collectively, the “Affiliates”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The membership &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/bylaws#schedulea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fee&lt;/a&gt; schedule is&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Platinum&#xA;    US$ 500,000&#xA;Gold&#xA;    US$ 100,000&#xA;Silver&#xA;    US$ 20,000 (employee size greater than 5,000)&#xA;    US$ 15,000 (employee size between 500 and 4,999)&#xA;    US$ 10,000 (employee size between 100 and 499)&#xA;    US$ 5,000 (employee size &amp;lt;100)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/members/individual-supporters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;individual supporters&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Individual $99&#xA;Student Free&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The membership class influence who is on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/bylaws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;board&lt;/a&gt; per Article V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each platinum member has a seat on the board&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all gold members have three seats jointly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all silver members have one seat jointly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore a platinum has more influence on the directions of the LF and has as much influence as all the silver members taken together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="15577" LastEditDate="2023-12-21T08:30:40.307" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T08:30:40.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4742" CreationDate="2016-11-16T20:50:45.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, it's a very good idea to have a contributor license agreement. Depending on your project license, the contributors might explicitly or implicitly be giving you a license to the code they contribute, but you want to be extra explicit there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies just use what is called a DCO, or Developer Certificate of Origin, like this one, to make sure that the contributor is really authorized to make the contribution: &lt;a href=&quot;http://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://developercertificate.org/&lt;/a&gt;. But a CLA usually includes similar  terms, so use the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2016-11-16T20:50:45.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4748" CreationDate="2016-11-17T10:01:09.863" Score="4" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;We (as in &quot;a bunch of friends&quot;) are creating a text-based RPG online game. For sake of simplicity let's end it at that. We want to build it using open-source tools and technologies and we are fine with that. We were thinking about using MIT licence at the start. BUT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way we can (kinda) assure that someone won't just grab the code, deploy on their server and stick a different name on it instead of contributing back to our project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to enforce (or promote) helping with the main project instead of splitting it (and the playerbase) into thousand little forks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any legal/licence advice? Or someone with practical insight/experience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6723" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T16:48:08.333" Title="How to protect a web game with open-sourced code?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4747" CreationDate="2016-11-17T16:48:08.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your concern is that others may modify your code and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't license their modified client-side code under a free/open license, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;don't even publish their changes to the server-side code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...then you want to publish your code under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero GPL (AGPL)&lt;/a&gt;. A copyleft license like the GPL will take care of the first point, since the downstream author would be distributing a modified work, and the GPL requires modified works to remain licensed under the GPL. The second point is not covered by the GPL alone, though, since the GPL only covers distribution, and running private server-side code doesn't involve distribution to the users. The AGPL contains a requirement that if the software is modified and made available through a network, then the modified source code must be made available to the users of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL will allow you to get access to the server-side content of forked versions. However, if your real concern is that such forks will &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; attract users away from your game, even if you have access to their forked source code, then you need to reflect a little more about the difference between your &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; and your &lt;em&gt;service&lt;/em&gt;. For instance, the software that powers the popular discussion site reddit.com is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/reddit/reddit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;publicly available under an open source license&lt;/a&gt;. Anyone is free to make their own Reddit-like site with minimal effort, but reddit.com has such a huge community that the clone site isn't likely to do well if it doesn't have any substantial advantages over the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for your game: multiplayer games are fun because of the other people you play with. If you do a good job building a strong community of players, then when a fork pops up, it will need some amazing improvements to make me abandon your existing player community in favor of this new game. (Plus, if your code is AGPL-licensed, you can pull in those changes as well, since the fork will be required to publish its source.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2016-11-17T16:48:08.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T11:00:08.590" Score="2" ViewCount="1472" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the title, I don't master the subject enough to find a clear one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that free licenses come with a &quot;same license&quot; and &quot;disclose source&quot; mentions, like stated &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I have some software code under the GNU GPL v2 license on GitHub.&#xA;If some evil developer want to steal my code and use it in a closed-source software, how could I be aware of it, and how could I prove it since I don't have access to his source code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6730" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T07:45:41.827" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T13:23:13.507" Title="Finding open source in closed-source code?" Tags="|source-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T13:31:40.647" Score="3" ViewCount="1608" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have my own GPLv2 licensed application. It uses GPLv2 library (it has many authors, including me). In addition, I link to my application another proprietary library (I am the only author) in which I store UI controls what I don't want share with others. Whole main functionality is stored in the application and in a GPLv2 library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it compliant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6734" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T06:27:52.400" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T06:27:52.400" Title="Can I use non-gpl library in GPL2 application?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2016-11-18T14:45:07.197" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not compliant with the GPLv2. If I'm reading this correctly, you are attempting to link both a GPLv2 library and a proprietary library into the same application. This makes the proprietary library GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T14:45:07.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-18T14:48:43.360" Score="3" ViewCount="2230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if I copy someone else's software and make some design changes and try to make money from it. Is it legal?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Which licenses provides a facility for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6732" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-11-19T10:17:09.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T10:17:09.323" Title="Is it legal to monetize from someone else's software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4753" CreationDate="2016-11-18T15:07:17.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any license approved by the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative allows the software to be sold for profit by anyone, or used by anyone without restriction on purpose, including for monetary gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you still must obey the terms of the license when selling other people's free/open software. The license will likely require that recipients must have the same resale and redistribution rights that you have, and it may require you to give your customers a copy of the source code as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU project has an article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;selling free software&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, any FSF-approved free license necessarily allows for-profit resale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; clearly lays out the right to monetize open-source software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-18T15:07:17.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4751" CreationDate="2016-11-19T10:42:29.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@airfishey's answer is correct but let me explain a bit more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, a proprietary license cannot be compatible with GPL because the whole work would need to be redistributable under GPL, and for that the proprietary license should allow what the GPL allows (reading the source, making modifications, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what the GPL's FAQ has to say about using a library under an incompatible license (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that. Below are two example license notices that you can use to do that; one for GPLv3, and the other for GPLv2. In either case, you should put this text in each file to which you are granting this permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holders for the program can legally release their software under these terms. If you wrote the whole program yourself, then assuming your employer or school does not claim the copyright, you are the copyright holder—so you can authorize the exception. &lt;em&gt;But if you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them.&lt;/em&gt; You have to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of the answer is what will prevent you from doing what you want. Using libraries means including other's code in your program, thus you are not the sole copyright holder, and thus you cannot add such an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's remark that what you are trying to do is in fact to avoid the restrictions placed on you by the GPL license. Your program, even if it depends on GPL libraries couldn't be shared anymore because it would also use a proprietary library. You need to understand that the GPL license has been carefully crafted to prevent such strategies. As soon as your program includes a GPL component, unless this component already provides an exception, the whole program must be GPL as well, always!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-19T10:47:42.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4853" CreationDate="2016-11-20T18:21:27.623" Score="9" ViewCount="4879" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am totally confused by these tons of copyright licenses that protect the libraries. I noticed that a lot of libraries are using the Apache License 2.0 and obviously I took a look at the license but I could not even understand a single word. (1. I am not a lawyer + 2. English is not my first language)&#xA;Then I found an FAQ page with the question &quot;I am not a lawyer - What does that all mean?&quot; I went through this section, but I still do not completely understand the things that I have to do.&#xA;The section was about &quot;Apache softwares&quot;, and my interpretation of that word is &quot;software made by the Apache Foundation&quot;.&#xA;So, what do I have to do when it comes to libraries, that are using the license but are NOT made by Apache, for instance the GSON library for Java?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, the questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license says that I have to include a copy of the license in the project when I used an Apache-licensed library. If the library already contains the license, do I still have to copy and include it into my project file? If yes, where do I have to paste it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license says that I have to write down which libraries are licensed by the license. Is there an official form for doing that or is it enough to just write a short notice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do Apache-licensed libraries also count as &quot;Apache softwares&quot;?*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6747" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T12:45:23.900" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T20:58:04.343" Title="Requirements for using an Apache-licensed library" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-20T19:17:14.490" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been developing a Django app for my work (scientific stuff), and I'm planning to release it on GitHub very soon. But I do have licensing questions to be sure to do it right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This work is modular, and made of three parts :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Django app. The plan is to use the GNU AGPL v3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a python library called by the Django app. Plan is LGPL v3&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a C shared library used in the python library. Plan is to also use LGPL v3, but this part is actually the tricky one, since that's a repackaging of a standalone which is under &quot;GPL v2 or any later version&quot;. If I understood correctly, LGPL v3 is indeed considered &quot;GPL v2 or any later version&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct about that ? If so, is my plan ok, or is there something illegal ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional question : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On GitHub, do I need to put license headers in every files, or just configure the project with the proper licence ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6748" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:02:58.250" Title="Licensing questions" Tags="|lgpl|agpl-3.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4759" CreationDate="2016-11-21T07:05:54.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your main question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a C shared library used in the python library. Plan is to also use&#xA;  LGPL v3, but this part is actually the tricky one, since that's a&#xA;  repackaging of a standalone which is under &quot;GPL v2 or any later&#xA;  version&quot;. If I understood correctly, LGPL v3 is indeed considered &quot;GPL&#xA;  v2 or any later version&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incorrect - LGPL is more permissive than GPL v2 so you will need to contact the original author for a waiver or for re-licencing of the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On GitHub, do I need to put license headers in every files, or just&#xA;  configure the project with the proper licence ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepted best practice for &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; Open Source distribution, &lt;em&gt;not just on github&lt;/em&gt; is to put a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;brief&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; licence &amp;amp; copyright statement in &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; file &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;code&gt;LICENCE.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sometimes LICENCE.md, just plain LICENCE or COPYING,&lt;/em&gt; file in the distribution with full licence details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T07:05:54.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4764" CreationDate="2016-11-21T08:23:17.613" Score="2" ViewCount="9815" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is very sensitive about using open source software. A small team started to group licences in three categories: green, yellow, red. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/flutter&quot;&gt;Flutter&lt;/a&gt; is a library to create native apps for ios and android. At GitHub flutter lists this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;. Since Flutter is written in dart the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/PATENTS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patents&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dart-sdk&lt;/a&gt; might also be relevant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the right course of action to get an idea which license might be relevant if someone uses flutter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://haacked.com/archive/2006/01/26/WhoOwnstheCopyrightforAnOpenSourceProject.aspx/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phil Haack blogged about Who Owns the Copyright for An Open Source Project&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wired.com/2012/02/cloudera-and-apache/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wired article Open Sourcers Drop Software Religion for Common Sense&lt;/a&gt; points out that certain license can be the poison in the tree. An article from july 2016 pointed out that your &lt;a href=&quot;http://react-etc.net/entry/your-license-to-use-react-js-can-be-revoked-if-you-compete-with-facebook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reactjs license can be revoked&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://react-etc.net/entry/react-patents-facebook-license-faq-adoption-by-apple-and-microsoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;update&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12108158&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion on hn&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fb faq&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The articles linked above and the comments here point out that the dependencies of a flutter app have to be considered as well. &#xA;So although the flutter license may be permissive enough other rights (patents, copyright, license of dependencies) may still pose a legal risk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any additional information about &quot;the licencse and right tree&quot; of the dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Update 2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the reply from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/5858/zimm-i48&quot;&gt;user zimm i48&lt;/a&gt; i would like to elaborate my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/solutions/compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as soon as you are using an open source software you have to consider every dependency of the tree&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for instance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  flutter   (?bsd 2 or 3?)&#xA;     flutter library &#xA;        material-design-icons (Apache License Version 2.0)&#xA;     dart sdk (?BSD-2 clause?)&#xA;       dart io (no license file in github)&#xA;       dart collection (as above)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far at least these licenses are involved &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause?&lt;/a&gt; or BSD-3? for dart-sdk and flutter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License Version 2 for material-design-icons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i am looking for is the whole license tree for every dependency of flutter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6754" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T15:17:39.167" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T15:17:39.167" Title="Flutter licence and involved dependencies" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2016-11-21T13:51:07.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To check whether you can use a software and on which conditions, you must check not only the license of the software but also of the dependencies. More on this here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc/4315#4315&quot;&gt;What are software dependencies, and what are the implications of FLOSS dependencies for other projects?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As noted by @curiousdannii, the license of the language itself does not matter. It is not considered a dependency. On the contrary, the standard library of the language could be a dependency. In that case, its license matters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license you've shown us for Flutter is a 3-clause BSD license. This is the kind of license most businesses will like because it does not impose many conditions. However, it does not contain a patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if the license &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; contain a patent grant (as with the Apache license), or if a patent grant came along, it would only grant you rights on patents filled by contributors of the software, not on patents possibly held by other people (who did not contribute).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unless one can easily find patents which could be violated when using the software (as would be the case with audio/video codecs), or unless one has strong suspicions that the software developers hold patents which they are going to use against you if you use their FLOSS software (unlikely), the best strategy concerning patents is generally not to worry too much about them. There is &lt;em&gt;no way&lt;/em&gt; you can be absolutely certain that by using a software you won't infringe on a patent so just use it until someone tells you to stop doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The case of Facebook's ReactJS is a bit peculiar. The open source license cannot be revoked. But they have patents and they grant you a license for these as well. The latter license (patent grant) can be revoked if you sue them for infringing &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; patents. If your company does not hold any patents, you can use ReactJS without fear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T13:51:07.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4759" CreationDate="2016-11-21T14:02:58.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your C library is a derivative of a GPL v2 or later library, thus you can only publish it under a GPL license (to your choice one of the four possibilities: v2, v2 or later, v3, v3 or later). I would recommend keeping GPL v2 or later, but GPL v3 (or later) would be fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Python library depends on the C library, thus it needs to be similarly GPL-licensed. You cannot license it under LGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Django app can very well be AGPL-v3-licensed (thanks to the &quot;or later&quot; clause of the original licensing statement; indeed GPL v3 is compatible with AGPL v3 whereas GPL v2 isn't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-11-21T14:02:58.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4761" CreationDate="2016-11-21T19:15:18.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The file mentioned in that answer was generated by writing a script that actively seeks out every license in the source tree including all the dependencies. If you want to check out work (please do!) you can see the script here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter/buildroot/tree/master/tools/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/flutter/buildroot/tree/master/tools/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script goes really deep. It literally unzips every last jar file, for example, even those nested inside other archives. It includes the license for things like the standard C library that we use, which is often forgotten by people writing license crawlers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3rd party edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ian gave an answer at stackoverflow as well. Here is his content from over there: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an API you can use to find the list of licenses you need to show in your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a Drawer, just stick an AboutDrawerItem in it:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/AboutDrawerItem-class.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/AboutDrawerItem-class.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't but still use the material layer, call showAboutDialog or showLicensePage:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/showAboutDialog.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/showAboutDialog.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/showLicensePage.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/material/showLicensePage.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to roll your own, you can get the raw licenses from the LicenseRegistry:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/foundation/LicenseRegistry-class.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/foundation/LicenseRegistry-class.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your actual question seems to just be about what the actual list is. Flutter is split into two parts, the engine, which is shipped as a dynamically linked binary, and the Dart framework, which is shipped as a separate binary loaded by the first. The engine uses a lot of code with a wide variety of licenses, the complete list of which is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flutter/engine/master/sky/packages/sky_engine/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flutter/engine/master/sky/packages/sky_engine/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The framework is entirely self-contained and so its license list is much shorter (just one license):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, any Dart packages you use may have their own licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, most of the code used by Flutter's engine is the same code as has previously been used by Chrome, Dart, and Android. The list is quite long mostly because the code is so mature that it has copyrights from many years and we have been advised to include each such copyright with a separate copy of the applicable license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6760" LastEditorUserId="6754" LastEditDate="2016-12-04T14:47:05.097" LastActivityDate="2016-12-04T14:47:05.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4768" CreationDate="2016-11-23T06:45:33.733" Score="9" ViewCount="4215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have submitted a pull request on GitHub and the organization asked me to sign the CLA before they can merge the pull request, who currently has the red label 'cla-required'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I do this? There is a lot of information about the contributor licence agreement on the web but no one is concerned about how to complete CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the link of the CLA on GitHub but there is no explanations about how to agree them: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com/agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com/agreement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The developer who asked me to complete CLA to can merge my pull request gave me the link of this tool: &lt;a href=&quot;https://pandoc.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pandoc.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5824" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T19:52:18.707" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:52:18.707" Title="How to complete CLA on GitHub" Tags="|github|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T07:49:31.853" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Data sets and databases that lack a relevant component of originality are not protected by Copyright in the EU. However, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:31996L0009:EN:HTML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Directive from 1993&lt;/a&gt; establishes what became known as Databases rights, protecting databases for the material and human efforts invested in their creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 3 of Article 7 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The right referred to in paragraph 1 may be transferred, assigned or granted under contractual licence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this means that an open source licence can be applied to a data set under Databases rights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6773" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T10:48:29.760" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T21:06:34.330" Title="Can a dataset protected by Databases rights be licenced?" Tags="|law|open-data|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4766" CreationDate="2016-11-23T10:18:43.917" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to ask the maintainers of the project you want to contribute to what exactly they expect from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different organizations have different standards regarding what they consider a legally binding agreement to a CLA. It can range from writing &quot;I am OK with that&quot; on an IRC channel to printing out the CLA, hand-signing it and sending it by snail mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2016-11-23T10:18:43.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-23T15:32:50.747" Score="5" ViewCount="1280" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This license provides an express grant of patent rights from the contributor to the recipient.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6732" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T01:45:49.717" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T17:24:21.927" Title="Meaning of patent clause in licenses" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4772" CreationDate="2016-11-23T21:01:30.020" Score="4" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making an opensource project and I would like to cover it with the GPL3 license. I also plan to use a library that is released under EPL license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/forge/roaster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/forge/roaster&lt;/a&gt;). Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details: source code of my project and its resources would be covered with GPL3 license, but I would also like to include this EPL licensed library and some libraries under Apache 2 license and one library with BSD 3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6777" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T10:45:08.333" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T15:20:40.720" Title="GPL3 project with EPL library" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-3|apache-2.0|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4771" CreationDate="2016-11-23T22:11:00.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU Project lists the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#EPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL as a GPL-incompatible license&lt;/a&gt; which means that you cannot take EPL-licensed code and combine it in the same work as a GPL-licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you are the author of the GPL work in question, you may license your work under the GPLv3 with exceptions. Section 7 of the GPLv3 allows you, the author, to introduce additional permissions, including the permission to link to specific libraries under GPL-incompatible licenses. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ has a tutorial on how to do this in a legally sound way&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, you may include the EPL in your work licensed under the GPLv3-with-exceptions, and others may use, modify, and redistribute it without fear of legal complications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two important caveats about GPL exceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4771/gpl3-project-with-epl-library/4772#comment12494_4772&quot;&gt;a comment below&lt;/a&gt;, the GPL-with-exceptions license you create by this process is itself incompatible with the regular GPL. This means that you cannot include anyone else's GPL code (nor can anyone else's GPL project include your code), unless the author of that code includes an identical exception to match yours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any downstream recipient who modifies your code is free to remove the exception, at the cost of reintroducing incompatibility with the EPL component, but with the potential benefit of making the code compatible with the vanilla GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2016-11-24T15:20:40.720" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T15:20:40.720" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4767" CreationDate="2016-11-24T10:53:03.753" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this means that an open source licence can be applied to a data set under Databases rights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. With the caveat that these database rights may not be recognized everywhere and therefore may be problematic to apply internationally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T10:53:03.753" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4769" CreationDate="2016-11-24T17:24:21.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The patent grant in the Apache-2.0 license (paragraph 3) is much more voluminous than your one-line summary.  It says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor&#xA;  hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide,&#xA;  non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated&#xA;  in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to&#xA;  sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such&#xA;  license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such&#xA;  Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s)&#xA;  alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to&#xA;  which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent&#xA;  litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim&#xA;  in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated&#xA;  within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent&#xA;  infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this&#xA;  License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation&#xA;  is filed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what does all that mean?  IANAL and TINLA, but it seems to me to mean that if the license grantor has used patented material in the software, the grantor allows you to use the software, including the patented components, freely -- but if you sue anyone over this use of patented material, then your license is nullified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2016-11-24T17:24:21.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4777" CreationDate="2016-11-25T08:16:17.340" Score="-4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an independent software developer and thus have little to no knowledge about licenses or general software law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could someone list the most common licenses and what they mean in layman's therms.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6784" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T06:17:26.583" Title="Common licencing types" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2016-11-26T07:10:23.157" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4778" CreationDate="2016-11-26T01:51:52.263" Score="3" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sdg-mit/gitless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitless&lt;/a&gt; offers a binary release as well as the source code. Since I've had difficulty with installing from source (one of the dependencies won't build), I downloaded said binary and copied it to &lt;code&gt;/usr/local/bin&lt;/code&gt;. However, I'm uncertain - where should I put the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; included with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that from a practical point of view nobody's going to check for the presence of a license on open-source software on my personal computer, and the README is redundant in this case since it's mostly install instructions and it's all on the Github. Practicality isn't the point here; I want to do this properly. Where does the license (and any documentation that isn't compiled in as a &lt;code&gt;--help&lt;/code&gt;) go for an installed binary? Usually I either install via a package manager or from source, and any manpages and such are thus presumably handled as the developer intended without my input, so I haven't actually run into this before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6791" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T15:35:41.000" Title="If I'm installing a binary, where do I put the license?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4775" CreationDate="2016-11-26T06:17:26.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try this site &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oss-watch.ac.uk/apps/licdiff/&lt;/a&gt; It's a Licence differentiator of various Free &amp;amp; Open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or try this for the difference between most commonly used Open source licenses.&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T06:17:26.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4776" CreationDate="2016-11-26T09:09:42.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't really relevant for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Open Source Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, but as far as the installation of documentation on a Unix-style system goes, I'd simply adapt the &lt;a href=&quot;http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04s11.html#specificOptions15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FHS location for documentation&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;code&gt;/usr/local&lt;/code&gt;: install the documentation in &lt;code&gt;/usr/local/share/doc/gitless&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/50/apsillers&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;apsillers&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (as a user) don't need to keep a copy of the license along with the binary. It is helpful to keep a copy of the corresponding source archive for future reference though, as a general rule (not particularly for licensing reasons) — you'll need it if you ever want to give a copy to someone, and more importantly, it might come in handy a few years in the future (nothing on the Internet is permanent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-11-26T15:35:41.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-26T23:47:48.890" Score="7" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an open-source software project, GPL2 or 3, is it legal to use code snippets from Microsoft Knowledge Base articles - the ones that used to be called something like Q1234567, nowadays called just by the number, say 1234567?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6795" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T06:27:22.247" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T06:27:22.247" Title="Is it legal to use code from Microsoft Knowledge Base Article in an open source software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|law|multi-licensing|microsoft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-27T03:27:32.703" Score="4" ViewCount="892" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a program for automation under a license that is incompatible with GPLv2 (it's dual-licensed: GPLv3/Proprietary). Let's call it &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And there is third party &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; that supports plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to write and distribute a remote control plugin under GPLv2 license for &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; that adds ability to this program to be controlled via websocket protocol. It links as &quot;*.dll&quot; file with it. As I understand I'm allowed to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But am I allowed then to make &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; to control this &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; via websocket protocol (thanks to the plugin)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both programs run separately and can do their jobs not relying on each other. For example, &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; does many other things, but communicating with &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; gives it additional feature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My automation program&lt;/strong&gt; will be able to communicate with few other programs with functionality similar to &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plugin to the &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; will allow it to be remotely controlled with any other program using my API, not only with &lt;strong&gt;My automation program&lt;/strong&gt;. And it will be useful for the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My automation program&lt;/strong&gt; will most likely communicate with &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; not over the network, but on the same machine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6798" LastEditorUserId="6798" LastEditDate="2016-11-27T15:10:31.320" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T16:17:21.780" Title="Can license-incompatible program communicate with GPLv2 program via websocket?" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|plugins|proprietary-code|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4779" CreationDate="2016-11-27T08:58:00.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me take a practical example with this article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/303974&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to recursively search directories by using Visual C#&lt;/a&gt; that contains some sizeable code snippets. Is there any indication of what I can do with its code snippets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the article there is an explicit copyright notice &lt;code&gt;© 2016 Microsoft&lt;/code&gt; and a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/copyright/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms of Use (TOU)&lt;/a&gt;. In particular the section &amp;quot;Personal and Non-Commercial Use Limitation&amp;quot; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless otherwise specified, the Services are for your personal and non-commercial use. You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from the Services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find anything else that would specify otherwise in the TOU or the article. Therefore I cannot do much if anything: these terms are conflicting with most open source and proprietary licenses in general and the GPL in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the TOU page, the &amp;quot;Intellectual Property&amp;quot; menu bar has a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/permissions/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another Copyrights/Permission page&lt;/a&gt; that essentially restates the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for KB articles, the answer is: &lt;strong&gt;No, I cannot reuse code snippets for inclusion with any software: only some personal limited use is kind of allowed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc300389&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MSDN web site TOU&lt;/a&gt; are different and called &amp;quot;Microsoft Developer Services Agreement&amp;quot;. They have an explicit open source license grants for code samples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft Limited Public License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license governs use of code marked as “sample” or “example” available on this web site without a license agreement, as provided under the section above titled “NOTICE SPECIFIC TO SOFTWARE AVAILABLE ON THIS WEB SITE.” If you use such code (the “software”), you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I may be able to reuse MSDN code samples under this license... but this license is not a true free or open source license because of some restriction and probably other terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(F) Platform Limitation - The licenses granted in sections 2(A) and 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license only applies to Windows-based software so it is as bad as a proprietary agreement for use in any open source-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would the answer here change in any way if the said article were an old one, no longer updated by Microsoft, as in &amp;quot;This article has been archived. It is offered &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot; and will no longer be updated&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's again take a concrete example with &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/218861&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article has been archived. It is offered &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot; and will no longer be updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact it is no longer updated has no impact for now until the copyright expires in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_lengths&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;100 years or so&lt;/a&gt; e.g. 50 to 70 years after the author (Microsoft? or one of its employees?) dies... :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most countries, the duration of copyright is dependent on the duration of the author's life. After he dies, his estate can exercise the copyright for at least 50 more years. In most countries, the term is even longer: 70 years after the author's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this statement has no practical impact for the time being. If I feel very strongly about this code snippet I could contact Microsoft to ask them for different license terms. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T22:12:32.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-11-27T16:07:18.933" Score="2" ViewCount="3681" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am distributing the binary of a software that I derived from a MPL-licensed source. I only reskinned the software. How do I conform to my obligations regarding redistribution of source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I just give a link to the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can it be a link to the original repository and not my modified version?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6732" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-11-28T11:40:58.047" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T11:57:20.250" Title="How to disclose source of a software with mozilla public licence?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4782" CreationDate="2016-11-28T11:57:20.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental question to ask is whether you have modified MPL-licensed source code. It can be generally checked easily because files under the MPL license are signaled with the typical header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public&#xA; * License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this&#xA; * file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a file that you have modified is not MPL-licensed, you have first to clarify under which alternative license it was made available to you. It could be under a more permissive license such as MIT. In this case, you would not be obligated to share the modifications, provided that you respect the conditions of the alternative license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, you do not have to share any source file that you entirely created yourself. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/#virality&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;new files containing no MPL-licensed code are not Modifications, and therefore do not need to be distributed under the terms of the MPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have modified MPL-licensed files, then you must share the modifications. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q9: I want to distribute (outside my organization) MPL-licensed source code that I have modified. What do I have to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see the complete set of requirements, read the license. However, generally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must inform the recipients that the source code is made available to them under the terms of the MPL (Section 3.1), including any Modifications (as defined in Section 1.10) that you have created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must make the grants described in Section 2 of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must respect the restrictions on removing or altering notices in the source code (Section 3.4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q10: I want to distribute (outside my organization) an executable program based on MPL-licensed source code that I have modified. What do I have to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must make available the MPL-licensed portions of the source code as described in the previous question, and inform the recipients how they can obtain such source code (Section 3.2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, yes providing a notice with a link to the source code is sufficient. Whether it is the original source code or the source code of your modified version depends on the question above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-28T11:57:20.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6481" CreationDate="2016-11-28T20:36:07.913" Score="4" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take the DOCX vs. ODT format for example. They are both open source and assumably have no clear advantage over each other, but DOCX was created to compete with ODT, which had been existed many years before, to help Microsoft take control the market. Though technically the DOCX is open source, Microsoft confuses the users by not supporting completely ODT format in MS Office, as well as making other open suits unable to read DOCX properly with their patent thicket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's the problem of the MS Office, not the DOCX format itself. From another viewpoint, the DOCX format is already widely used, backed by the wealthy creator and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/3943/why-does-writer-offer-two-options-for-saving-in-docx-format/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;will be fully support by LibreOffice in the future&lt;/a&gt;, it seems obvious to me that it would gain more benefit for everyone if we focus our energy into DOCX. I feel like people who refuse to use DOCX are either just hating Microsoft and not accept that its ecosystem is richer, or not being aware of the situation (usually not knowing that DOCX is open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is using DOCX actually helping the community in the long term, even with the cost of advertising MS Office for free as well? What happens if LibreOffice cannot support the format completely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6810" LastEditorUserId="6810" LastEditDate="2023-11-29T17:33:49.170" LastActivityDate="2023-11-29T17:33:49.170" Title="An open file format initially created to tie users to a closed program. Would using it over other open formats help the open source community more?" Tags="|software|file-formats|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4911" CreationDate="2016-11-28T23:06:54.520" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a city and want to start releasing our projects with CC0 Public Domain license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we use other bits of code (dc.js, jquery, plugins for leaflet.js, etc) that are not CC0, is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there some other sort of wording that says CC0, except for bits that have a more restrictive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it ok to use CC0, since the compilation of code we are using is CC0, we are not copyrighting the building blocks of code (libraries) used to make our site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6812" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T08:56:23.243" Title="Creating Public Domain CC0 project that uses plugins/libraries with different licenses" Tags="|licensing|cc0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4785" CreationDate="2016-11-29T08:12:59.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is potentially a &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt; question but the short answer is &lt;strong&gt;it depends&lt;/strong&gt; - basically if the other components are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Licenced in a manner that is not aggressively copyleft, &lt;em&gt;i.e. allow other uses&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Used unchanged&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not being &lt;strong&gt;distributed&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;just used&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Correctly attributed on your site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in my &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;non-expert&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; opinion you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be OK &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; collect the licences of the packages that you plan to use then get the cities legal department to look them over complete with the licence for your site &amp;amp; a clear statement of your planned usage - they may well insist on consulting with a specialist in the legal requirements of Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T08:12:59.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4796" CreationDate="2016-11-29T10:40:01.663" Score="5" ViewCount="1045" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I recently released a FOSS software with a GNU/GPLv3 licence and just realized that the software can be used to produce pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the pictures to be free (as in freedom) in any case and derivative work.&#xA;Is a CC-BY-SA appropriate for this use ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that legally oblige derivative of the software to release their pictures in CC-BY-SA ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the attribution part work ? Do users have to cite which software was used to create pictures ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT : to be clearer, what I wan't is to make the output of the program free (as in freedom) for anyone. What if someone produces a picture and does not allow others to freely share it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5531" LastEditorUserId="5531" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T16:32:14.520" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T19:06:41.237" Title="Software is under GNU/GPLv3, which licence to chose for pictures taken from it?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|creative-commons|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4787" CreationDate="2016-11-29T11:36:40.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you release your software under a certain license users will have the rights to use the software under that particular license. An image created from some software is most likely not going to be considered a derivative work of the software, so unless you create a new license which is similar to the GPLv3 but with the added exception that any images created with the software are licensed in a particular way they will not be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use GPLv3 for your software, then you get GPLv3. Not GPLv3 + some other stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T11:47:47.943" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T11:47:47.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4787" CreationDate="2016-11-29T11:46:19.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is attached (usually) to source code, and it cover only distribution, modification and derived code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Output of a program is in general not covered by GPL, so there is no restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: programs could output some code or text from own files. So in this case the output could have additional copyright (and restrictions). Usually such program should choose carefully license for such parts (very liberal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; addition taking into account your reply in comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematical output is not human generated, so no copyright. If there is not really artistic work on creating files to generate the graphs, I would also assume that there is no copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Labels and numbers are printed (usually) with a copyrighted font. Check that you can distribute it (but it should be the case if you don't explicitly added commercial font).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would in any case add somewhere that you don't claim copyright on output of your program (note: this is not related to the GPL, so in theory you can claim any license for output, if you think it is enough artistic and human to claim copyright). [Check &lt;em&gt;gcc&lt;/em&gt; for an approved disclaimer on outputs]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastEditorUserId="4224" LastEditDate="2016-11-29T11:54:43.523" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T11:54:43.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4794" CreationDate="2016-11-29T11:58:51.473" Score="3" ViewCount="1473" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should my webapp be licensed as AGPL if it runs ImageMagick linked with GhostScript (which is AGPL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user submits a PDF file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My webapp receives it and stores it on a HDD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The webapp runs ImageMagick &lt;code&gt;convert&lt;/code&gt; to convert the first page to JPG.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I send the JPG file back to the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6817" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T14:38:35.323" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:38:35.323" Title="Should my webapp also be AGPL if I use ImageMagick linked with GhostScript?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4780" CreationDate="2016-11-29T13:58:24.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The method of communication is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't modify the GPLv2 program, and your proprietary program is developed independently from the GPLv2 program, there is no derivation work, so you can use the GPLv2 program without restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify the GPLv2 program, things are grey. On both side you will have to code the communication part, and so on both side very probably you have &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; code (I would side both side are derived with the other side). So linking one side will give problem with GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To overcome to the problem, you can use a well know protocol to communicate both parts (but not only the outer layer), or you can create a very generic communication layer, which can be used for many other purpose. But I see that it is very difficult to have a non-grey area (e.g. to prove the no code linked on GPLv2 program is derived to the proprietary code, and the other way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T13:58:24.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4779" CreationDate="2016-11-29T14:05:07.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very short snippet (especially if you modify it, to prove that you copied the idea not a code that you don't understand) and idea are not copyright-able, so you can reuse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for larger code, you cannot use the code (see the other answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: once you find the solution, you can look for other sites which use similar code (on non Microsoft sites, with better licenses), or just apply the idea you just learned (maybe after a day, without looking again the original site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T14:05:07.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4791" CreationDate="2016-11-29T14:31:50.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;ImageMagick isn't necessarily &amp;quot;linked&amp;quot; with GhostScript.  It can use gs as a &amp;quot;delegate&amp;quot; (separate program) that converts to and from PostScript, PDF, and EPS.  See &amp;quot;config/delegates.xml&amp;quot; in the ImageMagick distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within ImageMagick's &amp;quot;coders/ps.c&amp;quot;, the actual interface looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ExecuteGhostscriptCommand(command,status);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the same deal with GraphicsMagick; see config/delegates.mgk in the GraphicsMagick distribution.  In GM, the interface is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;status=InvokePostscriptDelegate(image_info-&amp;gt;verbose,command,exception);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ImageMagick itself claims to be under the Apache-2.0 license and GraphicsMagick itself claims to be under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now IANAL and TINLA, but I believe that either of these allows you to license your webapp however you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick was built with libgs, then it is definitely linked with Ghostscript, and doesn't use the &amp;quot;delegate&amp;quot; mechanism.  Further muddying the waters is the fact that there are both GPL and AGPL plus commercially licensed releases of GhostScript that you (or a downstream user) might use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the position of Artifax, the owner of Ghostscript:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.artifex.com/page/licensing-information.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artifax licensing information&lt;/a&gt;, which includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your application (including its source code) is not licensed to the&#xA;public under the AGPL, you are not authorized under the terms of the&#xA;AGPL to ship AGPL Ghostscript or AGPL MuPDF with your application, or&#xA;to allow your users to remotely interact with AGPL Ghostscript and&#xA;AGPL MuPDF along with your application, if any one of the following is&#xA;true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your application contains a copy of some or all of AGPL Ghostscript or AGPL MuPDF;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your application is derived from, is based on, or constitutes a revision of some or all of AGPL Ghostscript or AGPL MuPDF;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your application includes one or more functions that use some or all of AGPL Ghostscript or AGPL MuPDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two cases are not true of ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick, but I'm not sure about the last one.  You'll need to ask your lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything in the Affero license itself that supports Artifex' position.  In fact, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the&#xA;unmodified Program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but if you run the unmodified program via another program such as ImageMagick, Artifex threatens to terminate your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Affero license does say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your&#xA;version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the&#xA;Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some&#xA;standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This&#xA;Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any&#xA;work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is&#xA;incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't think that paragraph comes into play here, because we are talking about running an unmodified copy of the Affero-licensed GhostScript program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question came up on the ImageMagick &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?t=17842&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourse server&lt;/a&gt; a few years ago and the response was &amp;quot;its incumbent upon the user to decide if they are complying with the licenses of the software they use.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T14:18:51.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4780" CreationDate="2016-11-29T16:17:21.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; is communicating with the &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; via a socket, &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; shouldn't need to link against the &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact that a GPLv2 program communicates with a another program does not necessarily make the other program GPLv2 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would attack this problem by creating a header file that defines the format of how the &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; will communicate over the socket. Then both the &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2 program&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;my automation program&lt;/strong&gt; can include the header file without affecting their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Stallman, himself, said in the Linux Kernel Mailing List that including simple GPLv2 header files does not make a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone recently made the claim that including a header file always &#xA;  makes a derivative work. &#xA;  That's not the FSF's view. Our view is that just using structure &#xA;  definitions, typedefs, enumeration constants, macros with simple &#xA;  bodies, etc., is NOT enough to make a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.1/0362.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.1/0362.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T16:17:21.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4787" CreationDate="2016-11-29T19:06:41.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the output of a program running on input I provide is not a derivative work of the program.  It might contain pieces belonging to others (e.g. clipart, canned boilerplate code) that are subject to their own licensing, but the overall work and the pieces derived from my input belong to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, then, do you suppose that providing a useful tool gives you any moral authority to restrict what other people do with their own property?  As @leftaroundabout remarked, that's the opposite of freedom, and I myself find it borderline offensive.  It's also specifically contrary to the FSF's view on free software.  As you observe, the GPL does not impose a limitation such as you seek, and that's &lt;strong&gt;intentional&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you nevertheless want to pursue what you describe, then the first thing to do is immediately stop distributing your software under the GPL.  Any copies distributed under that license are free of the constraint you want, including any that have already been distributed.  The GPL does not permit you to make &lt;em&gt;post hoc&lt;/em&gt; license changes to copies you've already distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll then need to devise your own license that places the restriction you want on licensees, and henceforth distribute the software only under that license.  It will be an open question whether the terms pertaining to licensing of the program output would stand up in court if you ever try to enforce them, or what remedy a court would be willing to grant if you prevail in such an effort.  Nevertheless, the mere presence of those terms might be enough to mostly achieve your aim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, if I were considering using software licensed as you describe, the license terms would be a deal killer.  I'd sooner accept restrictions on redistributing the program, and maybe even closed source, than I'd accept restrictions on what I can do with the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6415" LastActivityDate="2016-11-29T19:06:41.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4800" CreationDate="2016-11-29T21:49:43.157" Score="1" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some applications made by commercial companies employ a paid/community model for their software, meaning that you can use the open-source &quot;community&quot; version with less features, or you can purchase a license to use the &quot;paid&quot; version, which is based on the community version and includes more features. (Think IntelliJ IDEA Community vs IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering that if the source code for the community version is freely available and licensed, why don't users just fork the community version and implement the &quot;ultimate&quot; features on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5633" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T12:13:43.950" Title="For applications using the paid/community model, why not just fork?" Tags="|licensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2016-11-30T01:29:53.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am wondering that if the source code for the community version is freely available and licensed, why don't users just fork the community version and implement the &quot;ultimate&quot; features on their own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes they do. Other times they decide it would take too much time and effort. They company selling the ultimate version have to pick the right price so that they are providing value for money, just like all other business decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T01:29:53.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4797" CreationDate="2016-11-30T11:49:27.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paid features can sometimes be burdened by patents or other legal issues which makes it impossible to clone them as free software. But the value in the paid version is often not just the additional features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paid versions often come with a support contract. You can of course often also get a separate support contract for the community version, but that contract will rarely cover any issues with the 3rd party modules which replicate the functionality of the paid version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes the license conditions of the paid version allows stuff the community version does not. For example, make and distribute modified versions which don't need to be open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paid version might have various certifications the community version does not. From a technical standpoint this might sound of questionable value. After all, if the paid version is certified to be &quot;compatible with system  XY&quot; and/or &quot;compliant with government regulation ZY-343-2012&quot;, then the same will apply to the completely identical community version. But there are certain industry sectors where such formalities are mandatory for one reason or another. Paying the paid version can be cheaper than getting your own certification for your deployment of the community version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2016-11-30T12:13:43.950" LastActivityDate="2016-11-30T12:13:43.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4801" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-11-30T14:37:23.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works, specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network server software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T13:24:10.573" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T13:24:10.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-11-30T14:37:23.727" Score="0" Body="For questions about the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T13:23:55.913" LastActivityDate="2016-12-03T13:23:55.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4807" CreationDate="2016-11-30T17:34:40.677" Score="3" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have one class named Count.java and is independent, not using any eclipse libraries.&#xA;I am trying to create a &lt;strong&gt;runnable&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;jar&lt;/strong&gt; out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While doing so I see that following eclipse package is created&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;(org\eclipse\jdt\internal\jarinjarloader)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so basically the output jar contains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Generated x.jar file structure is&#xA;&#xA;com&#xA;  |_din&#xA;     |_util&#xA;         |_Count.class //Not a derivative work of eclipse.&#xA;&#xA;META-INF&#xA;  |_MANIFEST.MF&#xA;&#xA;org        //autogenerated by eclipse &#xA;  |_eclipse&#xA;     |_jdt&#xA;        |_internal&#xA;            |_jarinjarloader&#xA;                 |_JarRsrcLoader$ManifestInfo.class&#xA;                 |_JarRsrcLoader.class &#xA;                 |_JIJConstants.class    &#xA;                 |_RsrcURLConnection.class&#xA;                 |_RsrcURLStreamHandler.class &#xA;                 |_RsrcURLStreamHandlerFactory.class    &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the generated eclipse package is covered under &lt;strong&gt;eclipse public license 1.0&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;and &#xA;Clearly my code is not a derivative work of eclipse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release my overall license of the jar as my own proprietary jar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closest references found is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#PROPPROD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#PROPPROD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other closest reference are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#MODULEDIST&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#MODULEDIST&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding derivative work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#DERIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#DERIV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#LINK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#LINK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#EXAMPLE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#EXAMPLE&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6181" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T12:49:35.683" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T12:00:05.277" Title="Will the EPL license apply to my runnable jar (my independent code + auto genarated eclipse code)?" Tags="|license-compatibility|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4806" CreationDate="2016-11-30T20:36:44.170" Score="9" ViewCount="7526" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a library which helps me implement something for a company:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openmuc.org/sml/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openmuc.org/sml/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its license is LGPL. Unfortunately, I'd like to use this library for an Android project and there I have to use a different SerialPort-API. This means I had to change some lines of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I use &quot;my&quot; modified version of the code. What do I have to do to include it in a commercial (and proprietary) product? Is it just fine if I release the library on GitHub with LGPL? Or are there other side effects for the company which uses this library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6827" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-01T08:51:39.567" LastActivityDate="2022-12-06T12:37:02.817" Title="Modifying an LGPL library and using it in a commercial product" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2016-12-01T11:17:01.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I think that in the modern world it SHOULD be acceptable to fulfill the source-disclosure requirement by releasing your library on GitHub it probably isn't. You either need to provide the source code along with the product or, again along with the product, provide a written offer of providing the source code on physical media on request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you need to make sure that it's possible for the end user to rebuild and install the library in the actual product. If this is not possible for whatever reason, such as the firmware needing to be signed by you, you could be in trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-12-01T11:17:01.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2016-12-01T17:25:20.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;jSML license is the LGPL 2.1 or a later version based on the source code notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jSML is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 2.1 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying question that was not asked directly is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the impact and obligations attached to including a modified LGPL-licensed library in a proprietary product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside the standard LGPL obligations of providing credits, license text, redistributing the source code, &amp;quot;re-buildability&amp;quot; when static linking is used, there are extra requirements related to modifications in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 2.&lt;/a&gt;  provides details for this case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not entirely clear to me, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it only the new modified library that becomes a &amp;quot;work based on the Library&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or, is it the whole software system that uses the modified library that becomes a &amp;quot;work based on the Library&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this later case, then eventually the LGPL copyleft could be interpreted to apply to the whole software using the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular Section 2.c would apply and might be problematic for a proprietary or commercial usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of section 2. goes on to further elaborate on the topic of &amp;quot;based on the library&amp;quot; and what it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Library, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net effect is that the copyleft of the LGPL 2.1 may be quite far reaching when the library is modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I would seek legal advice to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, another avenue could in this case to contribute your changes upstream such that they are incorporated in the jSML library. If this happens I could then use the library unmodified with relaxed requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the entity that authored jSML seems to also provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openmuc.org/services/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial licensing&lt;/a&gt; and it may not be in their best business interest to incorporate such changes (but this is just speculation on my part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2022-12-06T12:37:02.817" LastActivityDate="2022-12-06T12:37:02.817" CommentCount="6" CommunityOwnedDate="2016-12-14T10:43:45.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4803" CreationDate="2016-12-01T17:49:04.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand the context correctly, I used the Eclipse IDE to create a Java project and used Eclipse's &lt;a href=&quot;http://help.eclipse.org/neon/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fref-export-runnable-jar.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Runnable JAR File Exporter&quot;&lt;/a&gt; to export my project as a self-runnable Jar. As a result of this process, the exported Jar contains both my own original code and additional Eclipse binary code injected by Eclipse to support the self running feature. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://git.eclipse.org/c/jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui.git/plain/org.eclipse.jdt.ui/jar%20in%20jar%20loader/org/eclipse/jdt/internal/jarinjarloader/RsrcURLStreamHandler.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; of an example of injected code is licensed under the EPL-1.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is then: what are my obligations in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EPL is generally considered as a &quot;limited copyleft&quot; license with fairly simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/epl-1.0/#license-requirements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;requirements&lt;/a&gt; as detailed in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3&lt;/a&gt; in particular Section 3.iv:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;iv) states that source code for the Program is available from such Contributor, and informs licensees how to obtain it in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of it is that a redistribution of unmodified compiled object code (e.g. the class files injected in the Jar) would just require you to provide some credits, disclaimers and a link to were to get the corresponding source code, in this case from the upstream Eclipse project(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further understand the spirit of the EPL, here is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/epl-discuss/msg00107.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commentary&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/staff.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Executive Director&lt;/a&gt; of the Eclipse Foundation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the EPL 1.0 was always intended to be a weak copyleft license. It was drafted such that anything which is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work could be offered under whatever terms the copyright holder desired. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here having some unmodified EPL-licensed classes included in a Jar is clearly something I would consider as a side-by-side redistribution and not a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-07T12:00:05.277" LastActivityDate="2016-12-07T12:00:05.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4833" CreationDate="2016-12-02T09:09:07.410" Score="6" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seed projects, in my understanding, are commonly meant to help quick-start an application development by taking away the boilerplate, redundant work, and maybe provide an initial architectural direction to go forward from. Thus, most of the original code is meant to be modified and changed, probably drastically over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've ran across a few of these with the MIT license. I understand this basically means you can do whatever, but you don't own the original work and the author is not responsible for whatever happen. I have a concern about this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At which point is it &quot;OK&quot; to not have this, given that the file(s) are modified drastically?&#xA;Most of the projects only have this in the &quot;LICENSE&quot; file, are we free to change the LICENSE file? If so, how do we maintain credit for the original work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6845" OwnerDisplayName="phandinhlan" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2016-12-03T04:27:24.627" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T04:07:34.740" Title="At which point does your work stop being a derivative of a seed project?" Tags="|derivative-works|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4828" CreationDate="2016-12-04T06:03:37.343" Score="3" ViewCount="682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building an app and willing to post it on play store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As common when build the app specially for the beginners like me, I used to ask questions at the web specially Stack Overflow about how to implement some methods, listeners,etc.. (not libraries) and got replies from different users. Now I don't now if my android app contains those techniques of implementing different methods and classes which I do not know whether it belongs to someone or not. From other side I also share some of my techniques to others when I got issues solved by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm using openCSV library in my app, do I need to declare it in the license? and how?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6848" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2016-12-06T21:49:11.993" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T11:41:00.730" Title="How to declare a license usage in android app" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-04T22:44:00.650" Score="4" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started playing around with Hugo (a static site generator) and came across a theme I wanted to use. At the root of the theme, there's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kishaningithub/hugo-creative-portfolio-theme/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. My confusion comes from a file inside of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not trying to subvert the license terms, just trying to understand what's going on)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kishaningithub/hugo-creative-portfolio-theme/blob/master/layouts/partials/attribution.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/kishaningithub/hugo-creative-portfolio-theme/blob/master/layouts/partials/attribution.html&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| Template by &amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://bootstrapious.com/free-templates&quot; class=&quot;external&quot;&amp;gt;Bootstrapious.com&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- Not removing this link is part of the licence conditions of the template. Thanks for understanding :) --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;amp;amp; ported to Hugo by &amp;lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kishaningithub&quot;&amp;gt;Kishan B&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since kishaningithub gave his code an MIT License, am I obligated to include his attribution line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;amp; ported to Hugo by Kishan B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original template has these license conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are completely free to use this template for your personal use or as a work for your client as long as you keep the link at the template footer pointing to us and our partner.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  NEW If you would prefer removing the backlink from the theme footer, please donate to support further themes development.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  However you cannot redistribute the template or its derivatives - neither for free or commercially (e.g. selling it on template marketplace).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thank you for understanding and respecting the license conditions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean kishaningithub is in violation of the original license conditions because he did in fact &quot;redistribute the template or its derivatives&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I obligated to respect the original theme's license condition of leaving in the backlink?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6852" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T11:35:10.440" Title="MIT License of ported theme vs Original theme license" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3972" CreationDate="2016-12-05T08:01:08.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the GNU Licenses FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and I quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think you can combine it with proprietary as long as it's in an arms length.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For eg, &lt;strong&gt;Plugins/Add-ons,&lt;/strong&gt; but make sure the core working of your program is not completely depended on that plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Open source licenses such as MIT or BSD does allow you to sub-licensing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Again it depends on what license is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer: I'm just a programmer, not a laywer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastEditorUserId="6767" LastEditDate="2016-12-05T15:26:39.477" LastActivityDate="2016-12-05T15:26:39.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-05T20:04:34.827" Score="3" ViewCount="700" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find information on which license information I should include in the About section of my application that I build with PyInstaller and distribute in binary form. I've already included the PySide LGPL license and PyInstaller GPL license (with the bootloader exception information). Now I'm wondering about the CPython version (and its standard library) that is also embedded into the executable as well as the Windows redistributables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does someone know if this license information has to be included at all, or what parts of it exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6863" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T13:43:29.903" Title="License information included with distributable PyInstaller binary" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4817" CreationDate="2016-12-05T23:13:02.607" Score="8" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a program in python that simulates an ideal quantum computer. It is on GitHub, and while it is not anywhere near complete yet, I don't know how much documentation I need to include, and where to put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, do I need to include information about how the code itself works? About how to use the program? How in-depth does it need to be? I also have no idea where to put this on GitHub - I guess in the readme file, but I didn't know if there was a better place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6866" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T11:43:18.077" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T11:43:18.077" Title="Where do I put documentation? How much is necessary?" Tags="|github|documentation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4814" CreationDate="2016-12-06T07:13:52.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's really no standard; it's all up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, do I need to include information about how the code itself works? About how to use the program? How in-depth does it need to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally write documentation primarily for &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;. That means including information on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What problem this solves (&quot;Why would I use this?&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to install it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to use it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program is sufficiently large that it's not easy to get into as a new developer, then you might want to also include developer information, like an architecture diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also have no idea where to put this on github - I guess in the readme file, but I didn't know if there was a better place to put it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a great place, because it's one of the first things they'll see. Another good option is a website that's listed as the project link in GitHub - GitHub Pages and Read the Docs are good options for this, but really whatever is easiest is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T07:13:52.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4804" CreationDate="2016-12-06T07:20:26.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL provides the standard GPL provisions, but only extends the viral clause to the modifications you make to the library itself, not anything else you link to it. The terminology surrounding linking is closely tied to the specifics of C, but is generally understood to mean any sort of library import.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you would need to make the source code to your modified version of the library available, but it should not affect the licensing of the rest of your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T07:20:26.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4814" CreationDate="2016-12-06T07:40:41.607" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of it this way: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how much documentation would I like to be available when I visit an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: a lot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how much documentation is enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: there is never enough documentation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now there are several things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Making a great first impression matters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this you want to have a clear one liner that describes your project and a good README. These will be the first documentation that a user will see. On Github this means using markdown or ReST to create a concise and comprehensive README with several questions that I would expect to find answers about your project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain why this project exists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what does your code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to use it in a minimal way? and how does it works at a high level?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is the code stable and tested? if you have a CI running your tests, put CI badges in that README. Tests serve also as documentation for your code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to download and install it including URLs to its home page, repos?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how can I get support? (e.g. tickets, mailing lists, IRC, etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what is the license for this code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;URLs to more detailed documentation (when this is ready... you may not it have right at the start)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are alternative projects that do the same thing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I contribute to your project? Do you accept pull requests? Patches by email? What do you expect from a patch in terms of coding standards, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a lot but I would expect this. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a minimal not comprehensive one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bastikr/boolean.py&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bastikr/boolean.py&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a more comprehensive one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yet another comprehensive one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: I am involved with these projects and I do not claim their README is perfect, far from it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Built-in UI &amp;amp; CLI documentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next you want making your code as easy to use as possible. If you have a UI or a command line interface, make sure that this contains as much built-in usage help and documentation as needed. If this is a library, make sure that your functions are documented using your language conventions (e.g. this would be docstrings for Python).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tests are documentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next you want tests: test code serves as a great documentation especially for libraries and beside that they are kinda useful...&#xA;Running the tests on Travis, Appveyor, Circle and similar is important of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Formal manuals and documentation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next is actual formal documentation. The convention is to store this in a &lt;code&gt;docs&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;doc&lt;/code&gt; top level directory. On Python, most folks use ReST for writing docs. You would want to cover a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a usage guide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an installation guide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if needed a troubleshooting guide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some FAQ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an API documentation: if your project is also a library you should generate an API documentation based on the documentation present in the code. For Python, this would mean using something like Sphinx to generate the doc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should publish that documentation on a web site. &lt;a href=&quot;https://readthedocs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://readthedocs.org/&lt;/a&gt; is a great resource for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few decent examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pyahocorasick.readthedocs.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://pyahocorasick.readthedocs.io/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://click.pocoo.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://click.pocoo.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://booleanpy.readthedocs.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://booleanpy.readthedocs.io/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps for a start!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-06T17:50:24.713" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T17:50:24.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4813" CreationDate="2016-12-06T10:36:09.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to ask myself this question instead: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When someone reuses my code in their project, would I appreciate to receive credits? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is obviously a clear yes for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would always provide some credits for all pieces of third-party software that is included in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I explained in this other &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4577/does-gplv3-require-attribution/4582#4582&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; (this was in the context of the GPL-3.0 but this excerpt applies in general) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I consider that &lt;strong&gt;attribution is the essence of free and open source licensing&lt;/strong&gt;. [..]&#xA;  At heart attribution is about &lt;strong&gt;communicating to my users the licensing terms&lt;/strong&gt; of this third-party code I redistribute. Therefore all bona fide&#xA;  FLOSS licenses require some type of attribution, if anything to communicate the licensing terms to the recipients of the code. Attribution is also about&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;giving due credit to the authors&lt;/em&gt; of the third-party code that I leverage (which may or may not be required by a license): this is the &lt;em&gt;right thing&lt;/em&gt; to do and the thing I would appreciate users of my code to do when my code is reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though not all free and open source licenses require attribution or/and communication of the license terms, providing attribution and license information in all cases is the right, simplest and easiest thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that settled, the answer become simple: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does someone know if this license information has to be included at all, or what parts of it exactly? [and in particular for CPython since some of it is included by Pyinstaller in a built installer]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the CPython license information should be included. And beyond the motivation explained above, this is a Python license &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/python/#license-requirements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;requirement&lt;/a&gt; as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.6/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] provided, however, that PSF's  License Agreement and PSF's notice of copyright, i.e., &quot;Copyright (c)  2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Python Software Foundation; All Rights Reserved&quot; are retained in Python alone or in any derivative version prepared by Licensee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-06T13:43:29.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-06T17:11:32.030" Score="2" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use the Android Geofencing API on a custom hardware running Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Geofencing API itself holds an Apache 2.0 license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-play-location/tree/master/Geofencing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-play-location/tree/master/Geofencing&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, the API comes as a part of Google Mobile Services for which one must pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing the API Licensing condition, can one use it without GMS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T10:24:37.887" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T15:33:27.493" Title="Can one use the Android geofencing API witout GMS?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4819" CreationDate="2016-12-06T17:55:54.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in the Apache license that would restrict the usage of the API code. For instance, this means you could use this API code and possibly substitute GMS for another service. Whether this is technically possible or not is not the point (and I do not know the answer to this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T17:48:08.247" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T17:48:08.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-07T09:01:53.460" Score="10" ViewCount="1246" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/23334/example-of-a-backdoor-submitted-to-an-open-source-project&quot;&gt;very hard to sneak in malicious code via commits to an open source project&lt;/a&gt; with a public repository. However, what about closed source projects that get open sourced and start with a large code dump, and where the temptation may be fairly high to leave in, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2943/telemetry-in-open-source-software&quot;&gt;telemetry code&lt;/a&gt; and not disclose it in the documentation? Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/04/joomla-plugin-constructor-backdoor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source code can be subtly obfuscated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there known cases of open source projects found to contain unwanted code (backdoors, phoning home) that was there from the very first release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="447" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T07:49:55.850" Title="Malicious code in open source software planted before open sourcing" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4822" CreationDate="2016-12-07T11:07:05.253" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  The first such occurrence I know of is sufficiently old that it precedes the terms &lt;em&gt;open-source&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; software, dating back as it does to a time before people had realised that software could have monetary value independent of the computer on which it ran, and therefore tended to share &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Compiler_backdoors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the Wikipedia article on backdoors&lt;/a&gt;, Ken Thompson implemented an attack described by Karger and Schell in 1974 by modifying the C compiler distributed as part of UNIX (which &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; got from him, he being one of the original authors).  The attack came in three parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The maliciously-modified compiler recognised when it was being used to recompile the UNIX &lt;a href=&quot;https://linux.die.net/man/1/login&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;login&lt;/a&gt; programme, and inserted a backdoor login known only to Thompson.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moreover, the compiler recognised when it was being used to compile &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, and inserted the vulnerability into the compiler executable so produced; thus it was not possible to detect or remove the vulnerability merely by inspecting the source code for the compiler.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, the malicious compiler also modified on compilation the binary disassembly tool supplied with the system, so that anyone using the standard tools to examine the executable forms of these programmes would also miss the vulnerability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thompson revealed this in his 1983 Turing Award acceptance speech, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reflections on Trusting Trust&lt;/a&gt;.  Although he only wrote the code as a proof-of-concept, Wikipedia notes that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is believed ... that a version was distributed to BBN and at&#xA;  least one use of the backdoor was recorded. There are scattered&#xA;  anecdotal reports of such backdoors in subsequent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2016-12-08T07:49:55.850" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T07:49:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4826" CreationDate="2016-12-07T21:58:26.437" Score="10" ViewCount="3919" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to bundle Oracles JRE together with the binaries of a (non commercial) open source program (GPLv3)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6884" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T07:00:52.460" Title="Is it legal to bundle Oracles JRE with an open source program?" Tags="|gpl-3|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-08T03:24:50.707" Score="7" ViewCount="993" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking to write a new open source library (at &lt;code&gt;github.com/me/my_lib&lt;/code&gt;, say). Rather than starting from scratch I would like to begin with a copy of the code from an existing project (&lt;code&gt;github.com/them/their_lib&lt;/code&gt;). Although &lt;code&gt;their_lib&lt;/code&gt; is an active project, &lt;code&gt;my_lib&lt;/code&gt; needs to be independent because its goals are quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect that by the time &lt;code&gt;my_lib&lt;/code&gt; sees its first release, I will have removed about 1/3 of &lt;code&gt;their_lib&lt;/code&gt;'s code, and re-written another 1/3. The two projects will therefore have about 1/3 of the original code (on the order of 10,000 lines) in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I structure my git repository/ies to ease both the development of my project and, where possible, two-way sharing of code between the two libraries (e.g. bug fixes)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I start &lt;code&gt;me/my_lib&lt;/code&gt; as a fork/clone of &lt;code&gt;them/their_lib&lt;/code&gt; (i.e. including the full history), or would I be better off just importing the latest release of &lt;code&gt;them/their_lib&lt;/code&gt; (perhaps leading to a tree structure &lt;a href=&quot;http://happygiraffe.net/blog/2008/02/07/vendor-branches-in-git/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;like that illustrated here&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To share code in the &lt;code&gt;their_lib&lt;/code&gt; =&gt; &lt;code&gt;my_lib&lt;/code&gt; direction, how should I keep up to date with changes in &lt;code&gt;them/their_lib&lt;/code&gt;? In the opposite direction, will I need a separate fork &lt;code&gt;me/their_lib&lt;/code&gt; to use for pull requests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6886" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T20:39:34.720" Title="How to structure git repository for a new project based on an existing one?" Tags="|github|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4824" CreationDate="2016-12-08T09:11:30.533" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. The Java (JRE and JDK) binaries provided by Oracle come so many strings attached that they are practically unfit for any usage or redistribution with proprietary or open source-licensed software including GPL-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sane alternative is to consider the &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; which is using a combo of licenses and is primarily under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8u/jdk8u/file/d15b51f1149b/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8u/jdk8u/file/d15b51f1149b/LICENSE#l326&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; which is typically considered suitable for any open source or proprietary usage. See below for some pointers to OpenJDK pre-built binaries or build it yourself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oracle JREs and JDKs (i.e. NOT the OpenJDK) are released under a proprietary license called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle Binary Code License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license has evolved quite a bit over the years from its start at Sun to the point that it is barely usable for internal development and probably not much more. Oracle wants you to buy a commercial license instead for most usages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular as one of the many issues in this license, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;field of use restrictions&lt;/a&gt; have evolved to be so vague and far reaching as to make you wonder if any usage is allowed (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;General Purpose Desktop Computers and Servers&quot; means computers, including desktop and laptop computers, or servers, used for general computing functions under end user control (such as but not specifically limited to email, general purpose Internet browsing, and office suite productivity tools). The use of Software in systems and solutions that provide dedicated functionality (other than as mentioned above) or designed for use in embedded or function-specific software applications, for example but not limited to: Software embedded in or bundled with industrial control systems, wireless mobile telephones, wireless handheld devices, kiosks, TV/STB, Blu-ray Disc devices, telematics and network control switching equipment, printers and storage management systems, and other related systems are excluded from this definition and &lt;strong&gt;not licensed under this Agreement&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kind of restrictions would not fly much with any open source redistribution and with the GPL in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes essentially any &quot;LICENSE TO DISTRIBUTE&quot; grants in section C and D moot in most cases. You may have a very narrow use case that may fit in these restrictions but all the lawyers I have consulted with on this license are quite uncomfortable with its terms for most practical cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sane alternative is to consider the &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; whether for use in conjunction with FOSS or proprietary software. This is weirdly enough essentially the same codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OpenJDK project itself does not redistribute binaries and building an OpenJDK can be a rather engaged process. Linux distros have packages for this. For other OSes, there are some pre-built available for instance from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Azul&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2016-12: Actually the latest news is that Oracle is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4824/is-it-legal-to-bundle-oracles-jre-with-an-open-source-program/4826#4826&quot;&gt;enforcing commercial licensing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-starts-to-audit-java-customers-2016-12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial audits&lt;/a&gt; if you do not use an OpenJDK.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-19T21:55:19.957" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2016-12-08T09:21:38.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want any kind of two way sharing of the code, you should start by discussing with the original project IMHO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to fork a project of mine then modify a third and remove another third of it, I would be quite unlikely to accept any changes back as the effort to review these changes would be immense. I would likely politely decline or ignore. So the problem is not how to structure your code, but rather how to engage in a discussion with the upstream library your are forking and whether any code sharing would be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all case starting with a fork and documenting all your changes in small coherent bitesized changet sets maintained in different branches is always a better way to go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T09:21:38.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4810" CreationDate="2016-12-08T11:41:00.730" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were instructed by others on &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; to write the code in your app, the app code itself is still an original work by &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; and no license is necessary.  Even if they offered you 'snippets' the functions still originated by your hand.  If they have &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; notified you of their own license on code they shared, then any assistance given to you is covered under Stack Exchange's license, which is printed and linked at the bottom of this page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It basically says what I just stated... &#xA;&lt;em&gt;&quot;All the content contributed to Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange sites is cc-wiki (aka cc-by-sa) licensed, intended to be shared and remixed. We even provide all our data as a convenient data dump, seeded by us...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is a license that is required to be included when using the openCSV library&lt;/strong&gt;...it is listed in their repository: &lt;a href=&quot;http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opencsv.sourceforge.net/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did not mention what language you are coding in, but pay attention to that as well... if your IDE is not including licensing for you, your language of choice could possibly have its own and/or others' licenses due to included libraries, frameworks, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congrats on your published app!  :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-shel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6890" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T11:41:00.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4825" CreationDate="2016-12-08T20:39:34.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, are you sure you want to do this? I have had this experience, starting a project by forking another one whose objectives were different. I thought I would be saving time this way. It turned out I lost an incredible amount of time instead and was always constrained by an architecture that was not the one I would have built if I had started from scratch. Now, this is just my experience and yours could turn out differently but think twice before taking this path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Structure&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's say there are good reasons for doing this anyway (for instance, the 1/3 of code you won't touch is not something you would be able to build yourself). Then try to isolate what you change. It would be good if, for instance, you could extract the files you are interested in keeping as a library your new code would depend on; and if you could keep the original structure as much as possible in these files. This way, if you fix a bug in the part that you didn't touch, it will be easier to try to apply the same patch to the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;git history&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly don't know about this one. My gut feeling would be to keep the history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Contributing back&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need either a special fork for that, or at least a special branch that you keep synced with the original repository. This way, you will apply your patches (bugfixes) to their code, and test it on their code, before doing any pull request. It will make reviewing much easier for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Importing updates&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how different the two projects look like, it might be very difficult to follow updates from the original repository. One solution to make your life easier would be to convince the original project owners that the sub-library that you extracted makes sense to be maintained separately (or at least as a well identified sub-block of the original project). This way you could update this sub-library specifically much more easily (it would just be a dependency of your own project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2016-12-08T20:39:34.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4989" CreationDate="2016-12-09T11:49:05.380" Score="3" ViewCount="654" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dear fellow open sorcerers,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to host a site on GitHub pages that shows examples of a JavaScript library I'm working on. The examples should of course use the latest version of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;code&gt;index.html&lt;/code&gt; to be able to use the library, I need to ship something like &lt;code&gt;mylib.dist.js&lt;/code&gt;, just as I would on any site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, &lt;strong&gt;is there a way of doing this without checking &lt;code&gt;mylib.dist.js&lt;/code&gt; into the repository&lt;/strong&gt;? Is it best practise to have &lt;code&gt;gh-pages&lt;/code&gt; be completely different from &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; and contain all kinds of compiled output?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A solution would be something like start scripts, configured in some file, kinda like &lt;a href=&quot;https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs#define-a-procfile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how Heroku's Procfile works&lt;/a&gt;. However, I haven't found any docs on such a feature on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For others that are as (perhaps irrationally) reluctant as me to source control dist bundles, do you have good alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6895" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:58:50.497" Title="Is it possible to host a code bundle on GitHub pages without checking it into the repository?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4832" CreationDate="2016-12-10T16:23:29.677" Score="1" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are planning to use an Open Source GNU GPL License software for distribution also with the hardware we sell. We will make several changes to GP, software to make it work with our device and are ok to make derived source code open source. However below situation do exist for us in order to complete the whole package. I will be grateful is someone can answer below question for us and suggest alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do have other Open source component that we would need to integrate with original GPL software in order to achieve our goal. Is it permissible under GPL&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do have few proprietary DLLs provided by our vendors that we need to integrate but we do not have source code for them. Will this still satisfy GNU GPL requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have a licensing module which derives the licensing logic for this application. This is a DLL but the source code is owned by us. Do this source code have to be made public?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We have plans to submit derived software along with our medical devices for FDA approvals? Is GPL ok with it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We license our software as permanent as well trial version. Trial version expires after certain period. Can this cause any problem with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license is also controlled by a hardware dongle which is again provided by outside vendor. Is this ok with GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we have to package source code with every media (CD, USB) we distribute? Will adding a statement for availability of source code on demand or from a public location acceptable for GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We plan to add a few module such as apps for android and iOS. This will not be linked to derived software but will only use data and images collected by derived software from end users. Do we have to make source code of those apps also under GNU GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6906" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-26T09:53:38.763" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T09:53:38.763" Title="GNU GPL Licensing" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4831" CreationDate="2016-12-10T17:23:47.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a lot of questions, and should perhaps be split into several different questions. But I'll answer what I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do have other Open source component that we would need to integrate with original GPL software in order to achieve our goal. Is it permissible under GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the other licenses are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt;, yes. You will have to offer them under the terms of the GPL as well; the compatibility list contains licenses that the FSF believes can be met while also meeting the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do have few proprietary DLLs provided by our vendors that we need to integrate but we do not have source code for them. Will this still satisfy GNU GPL requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not for the GPL, no; any derivative software, including the entire package that has your vendors' libraries, must be offered under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not stuck with the choice of license (that is, you're just deciding this yourself, and aren't forced into it via modification of a GPLed project), then you may wish to use the LGPL, which has an exception for things that are linked in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have a licensing module which derives the licensing logic for this application. This is a DLL but the source code is owned by us. Do this source code have to be made public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the GPL, yes. Under the LGPL, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have plans to submit derived software along with our medical devices for FDA approvals? Is GPL ok with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, there's no restriction in the license about whether you can submit it to a government agency. If you are providing a modified version, the FDA has the right to ask for the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We license our software as permanent as well trial version. Trial version expires after certain period. Can this cause any problem with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of the four &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;essential freedoms&quot; of free software&lt;/a&gt; is the right to run the software however and whenever you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 had a loophole that lead to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tivoization&lt;/a&gt;, where the user could technically run modified versions of the software, but the hardware would refuse it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; is designed to prevent this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if section 2 prevents a license of the type you talk about; you should consult your legal counsel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways, users are allowed to modify the source code, so they could dig in and remove the code that requires a valid license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license is also controlled by a hardware dongle which is again provided by outside vendor. Is this ok with GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsure, see previous point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we have to package source code with every media (CD, USB) we distribute? Will adding a statement for availability of source code on demand or from a public location acceptable for GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 covers the full range of options. In summary, providing it in a public location or in response to specific requests is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We plan to add a few module such as apps for android and iOS. This will not be linked to derived software but will only use data and images collected by derived software from end users. Do we have to make source code of those apps also under GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Files generated by the program are not considered part of it for licensing purposes (this would otherwise be a major issue in using gcc). Other programs that communicate with it via a network API also do not trigger the viral licensing clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-10T17:23:47.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4808" CreationDate="2016-12-11T03:56:39.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd certainly keep some kind of reasonably detailed revision history with the source, thereby permanently crediting the original work. As for license legality, copyright notices, etc, that can &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; become a can of worms. If you just do whatever it is you want, and nobody challenges you, then what you did is &quot;okay&quot;. But if somebody sues you for infringement, files an injunction, or whatever, then the courts will decide whatever they decide, for whatever reasons cross their minds, based on whatever precedents, pro and con arguments, etc, are presented to them at the time, etc, etc. Nobody can tell you for sure, but a high-priced copyright attorney can probably study your situation in detail, and then draft a better guess than any advice (including mine) you're likely to get here for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless lots of money is on the table, just behave reasonably and reasonably ethically, erring on the side of the original authors when you're in doubt and when it doesn't really, really make that much difference. In fact, email the original authors, point them to your fork, explain exactly what you're planning to do, and ask if that's okay with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when I gpl'ed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/gifsave89.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.forkosh.com/gifsave89.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;that's exactly what I did. Lines 24-27 of the listing (click the listing link under &quot;Related Pages&quot; on the above page) say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  24:  * Purpose:   o gifsave89 generates gif images in memory.&#xA;  25:  *              It's based on the original gifsave&#xA;  26:  *              by Sverre H. Huseby,&#xA;  27:  *                http://shh.thathost.com/pub-unix/#gifsave&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which he'd licensed without any restrictions at all, and which I separately copyrighted under my name with the US Copyright Office, and released under the more restrictive gpl. But I emailed Sverre first, and he said, &quot;Fine, go ahead.&quot; Most gpl-type people will be fine with anything in the gpl ballpark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="6534" LastEditDate="2016-12-11T04:07:34.740" LastActivityDate="2016-12-11T04:07:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-13T20:09:19.343" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've started a couple of small free open source software projects and am working on the technical infrastructure that supports communication, project planning, source code hosting, etc for these projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking around I've found some software which would be useful for supporting the projects, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.mattermost.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mattermost&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.list.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Mailman&lt;/a&gt;, but i havn't found a good way to use them in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a developer (not a system administrator) and would like to spend my time on programming, rather than on setting up these systems on my own webserver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could use proprietary software (like google groups and slack) but would rather use free open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is: Is there any organization that provides &lt;em&gt;hosting for the technical infrastructure&lt;/em&gt; for supporting open source projects, and &lt;em&gt;where the software that they host is itself open source?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a place where a whole package of technical infrastructure could be hosted, including communication, project planning, source code hosting, bug tracking, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am ready to pay a small amount (max 5 euro/month) if necessary and if multiple projects are supported&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grateful for help and with kind regards,&#xA;Tord&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6670" LastEditorUserId="6670" LastEditDate="2016-12-23T22:09:01.187" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T22:09:01.187" Title="Organizations providing hosting for the technical infrastructure for FLOSS projects where the software hosted is itself FLOSS?" Tags="|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4834" CreationDate="2016-12-13T23:27:31.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, there are a bunch.  Some are better than others for certain things, and some omit features that you may or may not need, so there's no one direct answer.  But here are a few useful things to look into:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a variety of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software forges&lt;/a&gt;, and some services that will host them for you, too.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sourceforge&lt;/a&gt; is probably the most well-known, but there's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitLab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitbucket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitbucket&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Savannah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;, and a few others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://librelist.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Librelist&lt;/a&gt; and Google Groups provide free mailing list hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://freenode.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freenode&lt;/a&gt; has been the IRC network of choice for open-source software for a long time.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitter.im/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitter&lt;/a&gt; is a more modern alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bintray.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bintray&lt;/a&gt; is a nice service for hosting binary downloads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-13T23:27:31.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T01:14:37.830" Score="2" ViewCount="771" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I come across Project X on the Internet, which is released under the GNU GPL. I want to compile Project X into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wd40t7ad(v=vs.110).aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strong-named .NET assembly&lt;/a&gt;, which is a type of cryptographically signed binary, and then distribute this .NET assembly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do this, am I required to also distribute the private key that I used to sign the binary, or can I keep the private key private?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T21:50:30.707" Title="Can I distribute signed binaries of someone else's GPL'd code without distributing the private key?" Tags="|gpl|redistribution|code-signing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-14T01:55:05.500" Score="11" ViewCount="1349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I come across Project G, an open-source project licensed under the GNU GPL, and Project M, an open-source project licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat license&lt;/a&gt; (also called the MIT license). I want to distribute a modified version of Project G which includes the entirety of Project M.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individually, each of the following statements seems to be true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I distribute this modified version of Project G, then I am required to license the entire modified version of Project G under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By licensing the entire modified version of Project G under the GPL, I am also licensing each component of the modified version under the GPL. This means that I am licensing Project M under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Licensing Project M under the GPL would mean that anyone is permitted to distribute Project M without including a copy of the Expat license (as long as they obey the GPL in doing so).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Expat license does not allow me to grant other people permission to distribute Project M without including a copy of the Expat license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am, somehow, permitted to distribute the modified version of Project G.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these statements are mutually contradictory. &lt;strong&gt;Which of my statements here is wrong?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T06:13:54.203" Title="How is the Expat (MIT) license compatible with the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|relicensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4837" CreationDate="2016-12-14T02:56:21.837" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I've found the answer for the GPL version 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 7 of the GPL says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sole requirement which the Expat license imposes is for &quot;preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions&quot;. Therefore, when I distribute my modified version of Project G, I simply have to supplement the GPL by stating that the terms of the Expat license apply to Project M.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is that both of these statements are half wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;By licensing the entire modified version of Project G under the GPL, I am also licensing each component of the modified version under the GPL. This means that I am licensing Project M under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Licensing Project M under the GPL would mean that anyone is permitted to distribute Project M without including a copy of the Expat license (as long as they obey the GPL in doing so).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first bullet point is half-wrong because I'm actually licensing Project M under a supplemented version of the GPL. The second bullet point is half-wrong because this supplemented version of the GPL does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow people to distribute Project M without the Expat license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T02:56:21.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4836" CreationDate="2016-12-14T03:56:12.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires you to distribute the source and &quot;must require no special password or key for unpacking, reading or copying&quot;. However, merely signing a binary does not prevent someone from using it without the corresponding private key (or public key, for that matter). And the private key should not be considered part of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T03:56:12.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4841" CreationDate="2016-12-14T10:36:14.690" Score="5" ViewCount="2265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in a situation where I'm considering using a GPL V3 library in a module of an Android application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application will be published to Google Play and will be available for free download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: does using/including the GPL V3 library in my application's source code, obligates me to disclose the whole source code of the application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6932" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T11:13:51.927" Title="Using a GPL V3 library in a Android app published on Google Play, do I need to release the application's source code?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|source-code|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4840" CreationDate="2016-12-14T10:58:44.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends how you are using this GPL library. If you are calling functions from this library in your code, then in general the GPL would apply to the calling code and therefore your calling code would be subject to the GPL terms, including source code redistribution per this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc/4315#4315&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For Copyleft licenses, how (proprietary- or non-Copyleft- licensed) programs and Copyleft-licensed programs are used together, how they depend and interact with each other is the essence of what triggers the Copyleft clauses of the GPL and LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are instead running this as an independent unmodified tool such as a command line that would be spawned in its own process (I am not sure this is possible on Android FWIW), then you may be using the program (as oppsoed to be based on the program) and only doing a side-by-side redistribution: the GPL would apply to the GPL-licensed library and may not extend to your code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T11:13:51.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4837" CreationDate="2016-12-14T11:05:06.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is the Expat (MIT) license compatible with the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily because the &lt;a href=&quot;http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT/Expat&lt;/a&gt; license is &lt;strong&gt;sub licensable&lt;/strong&gt; (beside any other GPL compatibility considerations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;   without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;   distribute, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;, [...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as long as you keep up with the simple MIT license requirements (e.g mostly preserve the original notices and copyright) you can re-license MIT-licensed code under any other license including the GPL, any version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-14T11:05:06.030" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-15T01:45:23.200" Score="-3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;i am developing android app , which contain some content related to a hollywood SEASON &lt;code&gt;Friends&lt;/code&gt; , it's basically a video file / GIF type thing , Does google allow this ? or is there any change my application get copywriter suspension ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S:This is my First question in this community hope i am asking right question in right place , with right information , if not please let me know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T15:31:58.147" Title="Can we share Season or movies based GIF's in Mobile Apps?" Tags="|movie|google-play|google-code|dmca|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-12-21T21:28:09.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4843" CreationDate="2016-12-15T15:31:58.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question could boil down to IMHO: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I reuse copyrighted media in some FOSS software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point is to determine whether or not you are authorized in general to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you mean that this app is likely open source itself but it does not matter much. The format of the media does not matter either (it could be a Gif, mp4 or else).  And in fact it could be an Android app or anything else: Android does not matter here. And the fact the app is distributed on some app store does not matter too: Google is unlikely to allow unauthorized redistribution in any case but what matters is whether you are authorized in general irrespective of Google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So if the copyrighted material has some explicit FOSS license that allows redistribution, then yes. This is quite unlikely for a TV series like Friends.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But if this is a small excerpt that could be considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;fair use&quot;&lt;/a&gt; it may be acceptable in some cases. That determination is not really easy and may not be valid in all countries. I would shy away to claim fair use unless I get real legal advice on that very specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, the answer is a &lt;strong&gt;clear NO&lt;/strong&gt; unless you get permissions to do so. Here, this would require some kind of commercial licensing deal with the owner of the Friends TV series. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-15T15:31:58.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-15T21:06:18.680" Score="8" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a website that I really like which is licensed under CC-BY-SA. I've always thought it would work really well as a physical book too, and so I've decided to try to make it happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning on selling copies afterwards, not because I'm aiming to make a huge profit but just because it will take a bit of an investment from me to convert it, and I'd like to recoup some of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this is permissible by CC-BY-SA provided that I license my printed copies as CC-BY-SA also, as well as providing attribution. What I'm not so sure about is how far I have to go to comply with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it sufficient for me to just notify readers that they can scan or photocopy the book, or do I have to distribute the PDFs that I used to print it? I'm going to use an automated process to do much of the conversion, do I also have to release my code under CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6952" LastEditorUserId="3557" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T11:02:16.333" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T11:02:16.333" Title="Do I have to distribute intermediary formats of my adaption?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-10-05T09:31:06.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4848" CreationDate="2016-12-15T22:05:51.437" Score="5" ViewCount="1296" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having some confusion with the BSD-3 license language.  I am going to close source a bsd-3 project and make modifications to it.  I will not be redistributing the code.  It will be used as a SaaS.  Users will pay to use the updated software and for support, but will never get the actual source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If attribution is required, where do I put it?  I know the codebase has the license already in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6953" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T16:16:26.713" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T23:54:27.883" Title="BSD-3 Closed Source Attribution" Tags="|licensing|bsd|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4847" CreationDate="2016-12-16T00:28:05.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only attribution required by BSD is to maintain the copyright/license statement within your sources, but if you aren't distributing the code you don't even need to do that (although you should, in case years from now you or your heirs want to transfer the software to someone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Philipe Ombredanne pointed out, redistributions of BSD-3 licensed software in binary form must reproduce the copyright notice, license and disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.  This would not apply if you aren't resdistributing the software.  If you distribute documentation, it would be good to include this information in it, but you would not be required to.  But before omitting the licensing information, check with your own lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2016-12-17T22:39:59.943" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T22:39:59.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4850" CreationDate="2016-12-16T08:22:29.073" Score="2" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a chat bot based on Alice AIML set providing here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/aiml-en-us-foundation-alice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/archive/p/aiml-en-us-foundation-alice/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to edit this AIML set and expand it by adding new phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the license of this AIML set is GNU Lesser GPL, which is, from what i know, not allowed to edit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use the edited one(with some new content added) for my paid application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6956" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T13:04:52.697" Title="Can I edit software under GNU Lesser GPL for my paid app" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gnu|apple-app-store|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2016-12-20T17:59:14.073" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4849" CreationDate="2016-12-16T13:04:52.697" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're most certainly allowed to edit it. That's one of the cornerstones of all free and open software. However, you must also make your edited version available as source code under the same terms as the original library. That's one of the cornerstones of copyleft licenses (such as the Lesser GPL). Use the software in a free manner, and in return give any modifications/improvements back to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Alice seems to be a library, and assuming that you will use your modified version of it as a library, you can likely license the rest of your application in any way you like. See section 4: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSS licenses do not (normally? ever?) restrict you from charging money for the software. But you do sometimes have to provide some or all of the source code for free (and under a particular license) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T13:04:52.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4852" CreationDate="2016-12-16T20:42:04.087" Score="8" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed an application, a commercial plugin, and an open source plugin, each part distributed separately. The application dynamically loads each plugin, and function calls are bidirectional. My open source plugin will statically link the library I decide to use, and I am considering one licensed under the GPL. Here is a diagram of the relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            Application (MIT)&#xA;             +             +&#xA;             |             |&#xA;             |             |&#xA;             +             +&#xA;Plugin (commercial)   Plugin (MIT)&#xA;                           +&#xA;                           |&#xA;                           +&#xA;                      Library (GPL)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gut feeling is that this violates the GPL, because the application &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;forms a single program&quot;&lt;/a&gt; with the commercial plugin and thus the &quot;combination of the GPL-covered plug-in with the non-free main program would violate the GPL&quot;. But who violates it? Are users violating the GPL upon loading the GPL library along with the MIT plugin? Suppose different people develop each part---does the commercial plugin developer violate the GPL, even though they have no knowledge of the MIT plugin, perhaps because it was not developed yet? Does the MIT plugin developer violate the GPL, simply because a commercial plugin exists, despite that MIT is compatible with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6993" OwnerDisplayName="Vortico" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T14:37:49.433" Title="GPL library in an open source plugin in an open source application using a commercial plugin" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4851" CreationDate="2016-12-16T23:44:19.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My gut feeling is that this violates the GPL, because the application &quot;forms a single program&quot; with the commercial plugin and thus the &quot;combination of the GPL-covered plug-in with the non-free main program would violate the GPL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends what you mean when you say &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; violates the GPL.  Creating such a system does not violate the GPL -- you can freely use software licensed to you under the GPL to create proprietary software.  That's one aspect of freedom.  The licensing issue only arises when you then want to &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But who violates it? Are users violating the GPL upon loading the GPL library along with the MIT plugin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is indeed the crux of the question.  Again, however, it is not forming a work combining GPL and proprietary code that violates the GPL, so end users who only load both plugins into the program do not thereby violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose different people develop each part---does the commercial plugin developer violate the GPL, even though they have no knowledge of the MIT plugin, perhaps because it was not developed yet? Does the MIT plugin developer violate the GPL, simply because a commercial plugin exists, despite that MIT is compatible with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but I am fairly confident that one independent group's actions in developing a plugin for your software does not place any obligations on you or on other independent plugin developers, regardless of the license under which any of the independent groups distribute their software.  There are still some ways you might run into trouble, however, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one or more of the plugin-developer groups are not really independent of you or of each other.  If there is any kind of agency, sponsorship, or other special relationship there then at best the situation is shady.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your own group (re)distributes one or more of the plugins, whether together with or separately from the main package.  That might be construed as distributing the combined work, which would be a GPL violation if the combination is not licensed in a GPL-compatible way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your licensees need to obtain one or both plugins in order to use your software for its ordinary purposes.  In that case it really is a combined work, and attempting to avoid licensing obligations via distribution tricks is at best unethical.  On the other hand, this would also suggest that there is indeed some kind of special relationship between you and the other groups involved, as discussed earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are likely other potential pitfalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6415" OwnerDisplayName="PellMel" LastActivityDate="2016-12-16T23:44:19.253" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4758" CreationDate="2016-12-17T20:58:04.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license says that I have to include a copy of the license in the project when I used an Apache-licensed library. If the library already contains the license, do I still have to copy and include it into my project file? If yes, where do I have to paste it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a third-party library already contains a copy of the license you do not have to copy yet another of the license text, though it is fine if you do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license says that I have to write down which libraries are licensed by the license. Is there an official form for doing that or is it enough to just write a short notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a simple list in a text file bundled with your software would be enough. If you have a GUI, having some mention in an About page of sorts is not required but a nice thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library has a NOTICE file, then this NOTICE should also be included (especially if it was not included in the library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do Apache-licensed libraries also count as &quot;Apache softwares&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all the libraries using the Apache license are from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). So in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache FAQ&lt;/a&gt; the ASF references their own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a library is not from Apache (say for instance Google GSON) the same terms apply but the author is Google not Apache and you can likely substitute the &quot;Apache software&quot; references by the &quot;Google GSON software&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-17T20:58:04.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4855" CreationDate="2016-12-18T12:19:08.770" Score="10" ViewCount="5284" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per my understanding, OpenJDK itself is licensed under GNU General Public License, version 2, with the Classpath Exception which should be no issue for bundling with closed source application. However, HotSpot is licensed under GPLv2 without any linking exception (see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/groups/hotspot/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;footer of the page&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be at risk of any legal repercussion from Oracle if I bundle OpenJDK (with Hotspot by default) with my closed source commercial application? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6971" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-12-20T08:34:58.293" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T08:42:59.210" Title="Is it legal to Bundle OpenJDK + HotSpot with a closed source application?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|closed-source|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4854" CreationDate="2016-12-18T23:30:58.033" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge Hotspot and most of the JVM code (mostly C/C++ native code) in the OpenJDK is released under &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/hotspot/file/9b0ca45cd756/ASSEMBLY_EXCEPTION&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL 2.0 with Assembly Exception&lt;/a&gt; and not a &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; GPL. This is in addition to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/jdk7/jdk/file/9b8c96f96a0f/LICENSE#l326&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; to the GPL that applies mostly to the runtime library code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links I provided here are for OpenJDK 7, but there has not been changes in newer versions as far as I know (though I did not check this ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net effect of these combined exceptions is that I would usually consider OpenJDK a perfectly valid Java runtime to redistribute in conjunction with any application be it open source or proprietary as long as it used as-is and unmodified and of course that you comply with the GPL for the OpenJDK itself including credits, attribution and source code redistribution. (But these requirements would not apply to the app itself merely using this OpenJDK to run a a Java application).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would go as far as saying this is in fact the only sane Java runtime provided by Oracle that you can use in conjunction with any open source or proprietary application short of buying a commercial license from them as I explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4824/is-it-legal-to-bundle-oracles-jre-with-an-open-source-program/4826#4826&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; at least for now and the foreseeable future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Java (JRE and JDK) binaries provided by Oracle come so many strings attached that they are practically unfit for any usage or redistribution with proprietary or open source-licensed software including GPL-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sane alternative is to consider the OpenJDK which is using a combo of licenses and is primarily under the GPL 2.0 with Classpath exception which is typically considered suitable for any open source or proprietary usage. See below for some pointers to OpenJDK pre-built binaries or build it yourself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2016-12: Actually the latest news is that Oracle is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4824/is-it-legal-to-bundle-oracles-jre-with-an-open-source-program/4826#4826&quot;&gt;enforcing commercial licensing&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-starts-to-audit-java-customers-2016-12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial audits&lt;/a&gt; if you do not use an OpenJDK.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-12-20T08:42:59.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4871" CreationDate="2016-12-20T14:02:30.953" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering using a library licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; which states...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you link other code with the library, you must provide complete&#xA;  object files to the recipients, so that they can relink them with the&#xA;  library after making changes to the library and recompiling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of protecting my IP, are there any concerns in supplying the Object Code along with the application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6988" LastEditorUserId="6988" LastEditDate="2016-12-22T13:21:37.060" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T13:49:49.520" Title="What are the disadvantages of distributing my commercial application along with Object code as per LGPL licence?" Tags="|lgpl|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4866" CreationDate="2016-12-20T18:44:46.040" Score="3" ViewCount="2154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it OK, &lt;strong&gt;patent-wise&lt;/strong&gt;, to use FFMPEG (for transcoding and video trimming) in a commercial application, be it free of charge or pay per install, on &lt;strong&gt;Android&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;iOS&lt;/strong&gt; considering that both &lt;strong&gt;Google&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Apple&lt;/strong&gt; already pay royalties to &lt;strong&gt;MPEGLA&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6991" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-21T10:57:38.357" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T10:10:22.130" Title="Using ffmpeg in comercial application?" Tags="|law|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T09:53:05.720" Score="-1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a team of Web Developer and Graphics designer and work on Website themes  for Ragnarok Online.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our designer use characters, backgrounds from other sources eg;google etc like other graphics designer of Ragnarok, FLYFF other gaming web developers do. But Most of the works are released by Gravity and we credits on footer by mentioning ( &lt;strong&gt;All Registered Trademarks belong to their Respective Owners and Gravity Co.LTD.&lt;/strong&gt; )  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the license available this kind of work or what i can mention on my license to avoid any trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6995" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:04:22.010" Title="What kind of license to issue for themes development?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2016-12-26T09:53:21.197" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-21T12:52:19.870" Score="5" ViewCount="2298" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Oracle starting to collect license fees from different customers for using Java SE I've asked myself if the usage with a server runtime is still free. I'm no lawyer and all these licenses are more confusing than ever. There are BCL, GPL and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I read this the use of Java for software development and desktop / server systems is free. License fees seem to relate to the use of Java in embedded devices and some (which?) parts of Java SE – not the runtime itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there anything we have to check for license related issues with Oracle when running a JavaEE application in a server environment?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We mainly use JBoss EAP which we licensed to Red Hat (we are Red Hat partner). We also use 3rd party frameworks like iText with separate licenses. But do we need some commercial license for using the Java runtime with our application servers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Andreas Floemer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://t3n.de/news/java-lizenzen-oracle-rechnungen-778411/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java-Lizenzen: Oracle verschickt plötzlich saftige Rechnungen an Kunden und Partner&lt;/a&gt;, t3n, 19.12.2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oliver Diedrich: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heise.de/ix/meldung/Java-SE-Oracle-will-angeblich-kassieren-3574258.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java SE: Oracle will angeblich kassieren &lt;/a&gt;, heise online, 18.12.2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gavin Clarke: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun&lt;/a&gt;, The Register, 16.12.2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6998" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T10:24:35.877" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T10:24:35.877" Title="Is Java for server runtimes like JBoss EAP / Wildfly still free to use?" Tags="|licensing|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4861" CreationDate="2016-12-21T16:04:22.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mentioning with &quot;All Registered Trademarks&quot; is not giving credits, and trademarks don't matter in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to have the permission to copy and distribute graphics, code etc. made by other people (with few exception, but not in this case). Credits are not sufficient. So you should check if such permission is given by a license, or you need to get a license from authors (maybe paying him). You need also to be careful about modifying such images. The license should permit it, or you cannot modify images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2016-12-21T16:04:22.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4860" CreationDate="2016-12-22T10:10:22.130" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that Apple or Google pay royalties to MPEG-LA does not mean that you are covered and that you do not have to obtain a license yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patent-wise, irrespective of which software is used (be it open source or commercial) you may have to acquire a patent license and pay royalties for certain usages  (for FFmpeg or any similar software). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding which are these usages is a complicated matter...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what are the codecs used, and is this for encoding or decoding? In several cases, decoding may be OK, while encoding may require a patent license from MPEG-LA and/or other patent pools.&#xA;In the case of FFmpeg, the configuration options determine which one can be used and can be verified by checking the &quot;strings&quot; of the built binaries objects/shared libraries. But as always with patents, using is what matters most afaik: building and not using a codec is different from using.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what is the type of usage? personal, free? or more commercial, enterprisey? Some codecs are OK to use for some personal non-commercial purpose, especially when only used for decoding.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is complicated, in some ways fubar. This is in all cases a long winding road to contact and obtain a license from these patent pools. Just figuring out which codec is patented and who to contact is already a complex task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as you may guess, I have been involved somewhat with this kind of things, good luck!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an alternative which consist in buying commercial codecs that would bundle proper patent license(s). One &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fluendo.com/en/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;company&lt;/a&gt; provides such a pack as far as I know but for use with GStreamer and not FFmpeg. In any case reading about their offering is interesting because you can learn about which codec is from which patent holder, something that is everything but self-evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T10:10:22.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4863" CreationDate="2016-12-22T10:13:40.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that eventually Oracle may consider any kind of Java usage as &amp;quot;function specific&amp;quot; be it server or desktop-based and therefore not licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sane thing is to use the OpenJDK and never use any BCL-licensed JRE/JDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this closely related answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4826/947&quot;&gt;Is it legal to bundle Oracles JRE with an open source program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: No. The Java (JRE and JDK) binaries provided by Oracle come so many strings attached that they are practically unfit for any usage or redistribution with proprietary or open source-licensed software including GPL-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sane alternative is to consider the OpenJDK which is using a combo of licenses and is primarily under the GPL 2.0 with Classpath exception which is typically considered suitable for any open source or proprietary usage. See below for some pointers to OpenJDK pre-built binaries or build it yourself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as far as using JBoss and Wildfly is concerned, using anything but an OpenJDK is likely to ask for troubles from Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which should not be an issue on Red Hat that is involved in the OpenJDK development and uses that Java runtime in their distros and even goes as far ass making a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Windows build available&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything we have to check for license related issues with Oracle when running a JavaEE application in a server environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is a clear yes: make sure you DO NOT use a pre-built Java runtime or SDK provided by, or downloaded from Oracle and licensed under the Binary Code License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Instead make sure you use a bona fide OpenJDK and nothing else. Either get it prebuilt from a Linux Distro, Azul, RedHat or else build it yourself from sources.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T15:15:56.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4869" CreationDate="2016-12-22T10:14:45.310" Score="14" ViewCount="4386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been checking out the different licenses and I came around &lt;strong&gt;WTFPL&lt;/strong&gt;. I understand the basic intention of the license. But how much appropriate is this license to use for any work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it also mean that the potential user can sue me for something happened because of the software I've written? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get this doubt because one more liberal license I came across was &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;. And it clearly mentions this scenario, So does &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. But I cannot see any of these in WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6666" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T17:47:16.640" Title="What is the use of attaching a license like WTFPL?" Tags="|mit|cc0|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2016-12-22T10:21:25.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the WTFPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Why is there no “no warranty” clause?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The WTFPL is an all-purpose license and does not cover only computer programs; it can be used for artwork, documentation and so on. As such, it only covers copying, distribution and modification. If you want to add a no warranty clause for a program, you may use the following wording in your source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to&#xA; * the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it&#xA; * and/or modify it under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want&#xA; * To Public License, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See&#xA; * http://www.wtfpl.net/ for more details. */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T10:21:25.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4872" CreationDate="2016-12-22T13:47:36.820" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to install Ubuntu or Debian Desktop on a PC from our company which is in the European Community. I was told that the company should pay for this license, because in EU they must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know anything about this? I think the company does not have to pay,  only if they want support assistance or if Ubuntu Enterprise is installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7008" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-12-23T17:48:52.953" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T12:39:12.890" Title="Linux license in a European company" Tags="|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4858" CreationDate="2016-12-22T13:49:49.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. All you have to ensure is to either don't modify the library you where linking to or to complete redistribute your changes on the library. In both cases you have to ensure that the user is able to remove your shipped object files and replace them with by-his-own-compiled ones (same version, compatible binary format…)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this will be difficult (to you) if you only distribute static linked binaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2016-12-22T13:49:49.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4870" CreationDate="2016-12-22T18:42:21.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, let me give you my Paypal account. I am the sole receiver for Linux license payments for Europe.... Just kidding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More seriously, while you can buy support subscriptions for Linux from Ubuntu or RedHat, you can typically download and use freely these distros (at least Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and OpenSuse) as well as Debian which is the hallmark of freedom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-25T12:39:12.890" LastActivityDate="2016-12-25T12:39:12.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-23T12:53:40.840" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read this book that has tips on how to live healthy. Forget the fact that there are many like it out there, that's not the point, and it's not about specific book. Now I am just curious how does that process work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to create an app that uses principles from that book, or any other for that matter, would that be infringing on the book? I mean could the writer of that book be able to sue and stuff like that?&#xA;I know that would 100% happen if I were writing a book but does it cover wide variety of things like apps? I am not saying that I want to write in the app that those were my principles, not at all; just use those principles to calculate things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, in millions of apps today no-one is likely to notice it, but I would like to know is this considered illegal or do book copyrights even cover apps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7015" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2016-12-24T15:07:59.810" LastActivityDate="2016-12-24T15:07:59.810" Title="Can we use principles from a book to create an application?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2016-12-27T22:35:46.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4873" CreationDate="2016-12-23T15:09:11.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question with no easy answer and a complicated matter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing is that in general with copyrights, when something is a &quot;derivative or derived&quot; work, then the original author or rights holder may have some rights. And if the author has some rights, you may not have full rights and full latitude to do what you want to do, be it in an open source or proprietary app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a few hypothetical cases: Say you create a new movie that is a sequel to Star Wars or Harry Potter. Would this be a derivative of the original series? Would you infringe on the copyright of Mr. Wars or Sir Potter? The answer seems a clear yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the other end of the spectrum say you create an app on dieting that describes a new way to loose weight. Is this a possible derivative work of existing diet books? If yours is truly original, it is quite unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you borrowed ideas, some words and the weird method that this diet offers to compute and limit the amount of food you eat based on the number bites you grab times the teeth on your fork? Is this now a derivative work? It or may not be. This could be a grey area based on the specific context and what you have effectively reused. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grey areas are not a good place to be in: so my suggestion would be either to get legal advice to clear things up and/or contact the original diet book author(s) to get their permission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-23T15:57:22.553" LastActivityDate="2016-12-23T15:57:22.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4877" CreationDate="2016-12-25T11:01:01.367" Score="59" ViewCount="89461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could really use some help picking the right license for my project. The project is already released on github under the GPLv3 license but I have been made aware that this prevents uses that I want to allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My requirements are like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project is a native windows library that will, due to it's nature, always be linked dynamically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to allow the use of this lib in source or binary form for any not-for-profit use (open-source, closed-source, educational, company-internal is all fine to me) putting as little restrictions on the application license as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to ensure that if someone makes changes to the lib or forks it they have to release those changes under a &quot;similar&quot; open-source license as mine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone contributes to my project (say via pull requests in contrast to a fork) I'd like to maintain control over the license of the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case there is demand for commercial for-profit use (that is: a company want to sells software that has my library as an integral component), I want to be able to dual-license for that with different conditions, but I'd rather cross that bridge if/when I get there - which is probably never anyway. And I wouldn't then want to have to consult anyone who has ever contributed a 2-line diff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use Qt (which seems to work similarly) as a model? (LGPL for non-commercial use, contributor agreement to maintain ownership of the whole project, separate commercial license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7028" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T07:36:04.643" Title="Open-source license to prevent commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|commercial|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-05-18T14:23:24.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4878" CreationDate="2016-12-25T16:34:10.823" Score="2" ViewCount="1833" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first, I always developed commercial projects only, so I bad know GNU licenses. Now, I want to make my library available for other developers. And maybe to find co-developers. So, I chosen GNU GPL v3... &lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I didn't get how does this license apply to me?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use own GNU GPL v3 library in my commercial projects? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use own GNU GPL v3 library in my commercial projects if some&#xA;developer modified its sources too?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7030" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T14:47:19.863" Title="Can I sell my project using GNU GPL v3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|commercial|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4875" CreationDate="2016-12-26T13:17:18.217" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for is, I think, the common practice of selling exceptions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an organization or a company is the sole copyright owner of a software, or have a permission to do so from all copyright owners, they may offer  simultaneously the software under a free copyleft license (such as GNU GPL) and under a more permissive proprietary license. In your case the proprietary license would allow use in not-for-profit proprietary derivatives. And you could also sell the right to create and distribute for-profit proprietary derivatives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that the software will only be used to create and distribute derivatives which are either free or not-for-profit, or for-profit proprietary derivatives by companies which have bought the commercial license. As some will remark, this won't prevent people selling free software derivatives since free software licenses never prevent selling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practice of selling exceptions is very common. Examples include Qt (just after TrollTech switched to GNU GPL), OCaml and many others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To follow this path, you must ensure that you have rights over the complete code: either it was developed by you or your employees, or it was developed by someone who signed a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) which allows you to relicense their contributions under a proprietary license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that this won't satisfy your third requirement: forks which do not contribute back will be allowed to make their derivative GPL-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a discussion on selling exceptions by RMS see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2016-12-26T13:30:43.157" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T13:30:43.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4876" CreationDate="2016-12-26T14:47:19.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use own GNU GPL v3 library in my commercial projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as you own the rights to your own code, you could license it to other under the GPL for free or commercially for a fee. For instance this is the business model of MySQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use own GNU GPL v3 library in my commercial projects if some developer modified its sources too?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as you as you own the rights to this code which may require a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contributor-agreements&quot;&gt;contributor license agreement&lt;/a&gt; such that external contributions rights are licensed to you in a way that would allow you to relicense under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T14:47:19.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4695" CreationDate="2016-12-26T15:11:34.520" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/bittorrent-dd2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; published while the GPL 3.0 was drafted (and mentioned by apsilers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have made two changes that recognize and facilitate distribution of covered works in object code form using BitTorrent or similar peer-to-peer methods. First, under new subsection 6e, if a licensee conveys such a work using peer-to-peer transmission, that licensee is in compliance with section 6 so long as the licensee knows, and informs other peers where, the object code and its Corresponding Source are publicly available at no charge under subsection 6d. The Corresponding Source therefore need not be provided through the peer-to-peer system that was used for providing the binary. Second, we have revised section 9 to make clear that ancillary propagation of a covered work that occurs as part of the process of peer-to-peer file transmission does not require acceptance, just as mere receipt and execution of the Program does not require acceptance. Such ancillary propagation is permitted without limitation or further obligation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, section 6e of the GPL 3.0 is now quite explicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;about peer-to-peer transmissions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e) Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then what about the GPL 2.0 especially in the light of the comment you made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I think this is rather artificial to treat a peer-to-peer redistribution any differently than a regular distribution by download.&#xA;In particular, if I host download at a hoster, I would not consider the hoster to be responsible for the redistribution, nor any of the many internet and network segments providers where the bits did transit.&#xA;As an analogy, I would not consider the peers and seeders participating in a p2p transmission as responsible for the redistribution of these bits proper. They are in both case just instrumental IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who would be responsible for the redistribution and eventually responsible to provide eventually the corresponding sources? Whoever initially created the torrent, e.g. the first seed would the redistributing party IMHO and should therefore ensure that the corresponding source code is available in one of the many ways that the GPL 2.0 supports, such as at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3 of the GPl 2.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which could be in the form of another torrent for source code, or any suitable mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the torrent should also contain instructions and pointers on how to obtain the corresponding sources either directly in the main ISO or as an additional README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as you pointed out, most &lt;code&gt;ISOs contain information about how to get the source code&lt;/code&gt; and therefore regardless of how they were provisioned they would be compliant be it through a p2p or http download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T15:11:34.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2452" CreationDate="2016-12-26T15:25:21.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Volley's license is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/volley/+/master/src/main/java/com/android/volley/Request.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt; like most of the Android codebase.&#xA;So what you have to do is to comply with the Apache license. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#redistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt; is quite an easy read and I did cut short some points in the excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or &#xA;Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and &#xA;in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;   a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a &#xA;      copy of this License; and&#xA;   b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating &#xA;      that You changed the files; and&#xA;   c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You &#xA;      distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices&#xA;      from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not&#xA;      pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&#xA;   d) If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution,&#xA;      then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable&#xA;      copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file [...]&#xA;&#xA;    You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;    provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;    reproduction, [....]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-26T15:25:21.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2016-12-28T01:45:59.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention?wprov=sfla1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;, of which most of the world is a signatory, states that copyright is assigned automatically to the creator upon the work's creation. Thus, if I create a piece of software, unless I specify otherwise, no one else is allowed to do anything with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the time, this isn't what we want. Open-source licenses provide many freedoms to other people for our software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most licenses are long and difficult to understand (which is why licensing is by far the most common topic here). The WTFPL exists to bypass the restrictions of the Berne Convention as simply as possible. That is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it also mean that the potential user can sue me for something happened because of the software I've written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the faq&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;By the way, with the WTFPL, can I also…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh but yes, of course you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;But can I…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Can…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T01:45:59.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5080" CreationDate="2016-12-28T05:42:25.850" Score="2" ViewCount="1464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just scratching the surface for VoIP with Elastix.  I notice that Elastix 2.x is &quot;open source&quot; but 5.x is proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking into licensing from the manual on Elastix brings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.3cx.com/phone-system/edition-comparison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.3cx.com/phone-system/edition-comparison/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to get entangled with some sort of lock-in.  Rather, the flavor of lock-in I prefer has GPL attached to it.  Elastix is, or has, moved away from GPL?  The version I'm on uses CentOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Right now I'm running Elastix 2.x remotely, just wondering whether it's the best choice or will be a licensing dead-end.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia reports the licensing&lt;/a&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License   GNU General Public License(2.5) Proprietary (5.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elastix 2.5 is free software, released under the GNU General Public&#xA;  License. Elastix 5.0 is Proprietary released under the terms of the&#xA;  3CX license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;furthermore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 2016 the Elastix project was acquired by 3CX. With this acquisition&#xA;  the Elastix Distro versioned at 5.0 was switched to a branded Debian&#xA;  install with the 3CX platform&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="5058" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T06:17:09.083" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T15:20:37.243" Title="how did Elastix move from GPL to proprietary?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|proprietary-code|gpl-2|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-28T10:57:59.507" Score="0" ViewCount="600" Body="&lt;p&gt;The git repository for an existing open source library looks something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A/              B/              C/&#xA;D/              E.txt           F.txt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to create a new repository for a new library, beginning with a copy of a subset of this code. For example, I might want my repository to contain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A/              B/              E.txt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, I want the new repo to contain the &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; directories (with their contents) and &lt;code&gt;E.txt&lt;/code&gt; unchanged. The new library has no need for &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;F.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see two ways to do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt; the existing repository, then &lt;code&gt;git rm&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;D&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;F.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;git init&lt;/code&gt; a new repository, then &lt;code&gt;git add&lt;/code&gt; the latest versions of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;E.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the first approach is that there will be significant history in the repository for the items which have been removed. This history is irrelevant for the new library. OTOH, the second approach leads to a repository with no history at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these approaches is preferable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might it be better to create my new repository that contains only the relevant files and only the history for those files? Can this be done (perhaps with &lt;code&gt;git filter-branch&lt;/code&gt;)? Would this indeed be better than either of the above approaches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6886" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T17:58:32.830" Title="Create a new git repository which includes part of an existing one?" Tags="|derivative-works|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4890" CreationDate="2016-12-28T12:58:24.520" Score="8" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following line in my BSD (new, 2 clause) open-source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright (c) 2003-present, Jodd Team (http://jodd.org)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously, I've used a real year (e.g. &lt;code&gt;2003-2014&lt;/code&gt;). However, updating &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of files every January just to update the year is PITA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is above copyright statement correct for BSD license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Btw, I saw this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/src/renderers/art/ReactART.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebooks&lt;/a&gt; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7048" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T13:30:42.217" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T13:30:42.217" Title="Copyright until the present year in BSD license?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4889" CreationDate="2016-12-28T14:26:12.933" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example is there any servers with photos with Creative Commons licence? And not only some general photos but, with concrete objects (people, buildings, pictures etc.). &#xA;And if I find a picture on a site (for example search in Google) how can I find its licence? I am interested especially in photos or famous people, but not only that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7049" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T16:23:26.677" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T16:23:26.677" Title="Where to find pictures for Wikipedia?" Tags="|creative-commons|website|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4888" CreationDate="2016-12-28T15:23:42.413" Score="4" ViewCount="1453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Matlab itself is not open source (commercial software and Matlab language can only be used within the Matlab environment), is it OK to put my Matlab code on github under open source license, e.g., MIT or GPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3207" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T08:44:01.553" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T14:54:53.313" Title="Is it appropriate to use open source license with Matlab code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2016-12-28T15:48:00.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes it is fine to release your Matlab code under a FLOSS license, althought not GPL but you can use LGPL, Apache 2.0 or BSD licenses. Choose depending on your purposes for the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation advises to use LGPL for libraries which will be used along with nonfree software or Apache 2.0 if for some reason you don't require strong copyleft protection on your code or if it is a very small program. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's license recomendations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathworks for example requires BSD licensing for code to be released in their File Exchange. Read Mathworks' &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/termsofuse.html#filex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TOS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T15:48:00.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2016-12-28T17:12:30.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If not stated differently, websites contents (this including photos) must be considered copyrighted by the owner/maintainer of the website and you can't use them straight away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is always a good (and nice) thing to ask the owner/maintainer for licence term and/or permission to share that photo on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google allows to filter the results based on the licence (append to the URL the following &lt;code&gt;&amp;amp;tbs=sur:f&lt;/code&gt; ) but also stated &quot;Images may be subject to copyright.&quot; so you shouldn't exclusively rely on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T17:12:30.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4885" CreationDate="2016-12-28T17:35:20.033" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is very wide, because it depends on the Laws of the Country you're referring to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep a long story short the above copyright statement is incorrect for any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take it as a general discussion that will probably protect you in many countries, I suggest you to update the year as soon as you update that source file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If allowed by the Law, you can specify an interval, which would mean you continuously authored that file between year X and Y; where Y is not last year of validity of your copyright, which often - depending on the country - lasts 75 years after the death of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some countries using &quot;present&quot; would mean &quot;right now&quot;, which is the exact moment when you write that, and it'll put you in a very weak position would you go in a court because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you're clearly lying because you did not wrote it &quot;right now&quot; in a court;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that won't prove that you wrote that piece of software &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; somebody else but, on the contrary anybody else can claim you copied it as you declared that you authored it &quot;right now&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastEditorUserId="6919" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T11:17:45.477" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T11:17:45.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4884" CreationDate="2016-12-28T17:58:32.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Version history is incredibly useful; I would never throw that away unless forced to, and thus would always start with a clone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say, you can do some heavy rebasing (with filter-branch or otherwise) to remove the other components from the repository. I wouldn't do this for a couple of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It makes it much harder to pull in updates from upstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It makes it harder to contribute patches upstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I rarely just browse through the history directly. I usually am looking through the history of a particular file to see why a certain piece of code is the way it is, and if a commit that contains a change there also contains changes to other files no longer in the repo, that's useful context; if it doesn't, then it's just the same as if you had pruned the history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception I would make is if the parts you don't need make the repository itself much larger, for instance by including a bunch of binary files. In that case it might be a worthwhile trade-off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T17:58:32.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4886" CreationDate="2016-12-28T18:01:15.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most photos on Wikipedia (or Wikimedia Commons) are either created for that purpose, and thus licensed appropriately, or are found from Flickr, which allows and encourages users to add Creative Commons licenses to their photos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-28T18:01:15.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-29T03:59:34.243" Score="9" ViewCount="3313" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project is a fork of a project that comes with the MIT license and nobody wants to change the license that applies to the software. However, some of the content that is also stored on GitHub is not freely available. We have permission to use some of the photos for this project only. If they were to show up in a fork someplace, the photographer should be able to enforce his copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I add an extra line to license about the photographic content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7053" LastEditorUserId="7053" LastEditDate="2016-12-29T04:35:03.703" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T00:11:20.393" Title="How can I use an MIT license for code but protect the copyright of photos in my repository?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2016-12-29T06:23:31.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exciting news for the Elastix community. We’re releasing a new version&#xA;  of Elastix powered by 3CX instead of Asterisk. 3CX is an open&#xA;  standards PBX and has built a strong following with frequent updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elastix 5 will be bundled in a special free version of 3CX which&#xA;  includes 8 sim calls (approx. 25 extensions). Integrated into 3CX,&#xA;  free of charge are also smartphone and desktop clients as well as&#xA;  WebRTC-based video conferencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3CX has also committed to investing in the Elastix community with free&#xA;  certification, training and forum support. In addition, 3CX is&#xA;  planning on announcing a rewards program for active Elastix community&#xA;  members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Edgar Landivar, CEO of Palosanto said:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    “We were considering a telephony engine switch for some time now. The 3CX PBX is easy to use, open standards and feature rich. With the&#xA;    recent advent of its Linux version, as well as the free PBX edition,&#xA;    it is the perfect choice to power Elastix. The 3CX WebRTC Video&#xA;    conferencing engine is particularly impressive. I believe Elastix&#xA;    users are best served by this decision”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;per: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.elastix.org/blog/latestnews/elastix-5-powered-by-3cx/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.elastix.org/blog/latestnews/elastix-5-powered-by-3cx/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guess they just took some of the most important GPL components.  Weird.  I would've assumed someone else would pick up 2.x and fork it.  Guess not enough demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T02:08:19.843" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T02:08:19.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4898" CreationDate="2016-12-29T07:25:14.603" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have been searching for a Html editor for couple of days, we have visited some editors too, but nothing fits our requirement, and then someone suggested us to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://getcontenttools.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ContentTools WYSIWYG editor&lt;/a&gt;, which is really an excellent editor, we are even open to use paid version, but we can't see anything to pay for it, now we just want to confirm, if we integrate this editor in our pages, do we need to take care anything related to licencing, or any other legal issue. Our portal will not distributing this product(Editor) directly , but as our core business model, we sell ads on portal and making money in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7055" LastEditorUserId="4629" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T13:32:48.373" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T13:32:48.373" Title="Licence issues using ContentTools WYSIWYG editor" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4899" CreationDate="2016-12-29T09:17:13.420" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://nerdvittles.com/?p=14183&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;following situation&lt;/a&gt; with FreePBX standard for VoIP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why Not Use FreePBX 13? Glad you asked. Despite the freepbx.org&#xA;  facelift1 and the eternal message that “The ‘Free’ Stands for&#xA;  Freedom,” it turns out the business practices haven’t changed much&#xA;  since the Sangoma takeover. If your idea of “freedom” is a closed&#xA;  source VoIP platform with no way to emulate the repository used to&#xA;  manage and upgrade the “GPL” components in FreePBX 13 and no way to&#xA;  install the FreePBX 13 GUI or its “GPL” components other than&#xA;  switching to the proprietary FreePBX Distro, then FreePBX 13 may be&#xA;  just the ticket. If you’d prefer a RealGPL platform that lets you&#xA;  choose which components you’d like on your server, then keep reading.&#xA;  And drop the Sangoma and Digium honchos a note and let them know how&#xA;  you feel about FREEDOM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relation to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4883/5058&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; about Elastix VoIP.  Because Asterisk is under the GPL was inferring that the various systems built on top were also open source -- apparently not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Randomly, after David posted his answer, I'll add that PIAF (PBX In A Flash) has this friendly message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;root@arrakis:~ $ &#xA;root@arrakis:~ $ passwd-master &#xA;&#xA;passwd-master - 2.0.5 released on 052613&#xA;CentOS release 6.4 (Final) - 32 Bit&#xA;**********************************************************************&#xA;* In order to run this free and compiled program you must agree to   *&#xA;* the following:                                                     *&#xA;*                                                                    *&#xA;* 1. I agree to honor the terms of use set out below                 *&#xA;* 2. I agree not to reverse engineer any of the binaries             *&#xA;* 3. I agree not to request the source code for this program         *&#xA;* 4. I agree to only run this program on a PBX in a Flash system,    *&#xA;* 5. I agree that this program is an 'independent and separate work' *&#xA;* 6. By typing Y, I agree that this act constitutes my legal         *&#xA;*    signature and agreement to all of these terms and conditions    *&#xA;*    of use.                                                         *&#xA;* 7. I agree that no warranty is expressed or implied for this       *&#xA;*    program including any warranty of fitness for any purpose.      *&#xA;*                                                                    *&#xA;* IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THESE TERMS OF USE DO NOT USE THIS PROGRAM*&#xA;*                                                                    *&#xA;* Tap the Y key to agree to these terms or ENTER to exit             *&#xA;**********************************************************************&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-03T11:24:22.610" Title="How open or proprietary are the various PBX systems?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|proprietary-code|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4893" CreationDate="2016-12-29T09:23:13.637" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, wherever you're mentioning the license (in the README, a file named COPYING), just include the various licenses and briefly describe what they apply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All images are copyright Joe Smith and used by permission for this&#xA;  project only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All code is copyright 2016 Example Project Authors under the MIT&#xA;  license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;license text&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a rather complicated example of this sort of piecemeal licensing, see &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt; in Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T09:23:13.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4895" CreationDate="2016-12-29T09:31:14.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That software &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GetmeUK/ContentTools/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uses the MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. It is very short; here it is in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2014 Getme Limited (&lt;a href=&quot;http://getme.co.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://getme.co.uk&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you can do whatever you would like, as long as any copy of the software mentions that the editor is available under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T09:31:14.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4896" CreationDate="2016-12-29T11:48:31.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking some examples from GPLv3 (which clarified something that were considered ambiguous in previous versions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered word with other separate and independent&#xA;  works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,&#xA;  and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,&#xA;  in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an&#xA;  “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not&#xA;  used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users&#xA;  beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work&#xA;  in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other&#xA;  parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mere act of communicating with other programs does not, by itself, require all software to be GPL; nor does distributing GPL software with non-GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; clarifies when an aggregation should be released under GPL or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mere aggregation of two programs means putting them side by side on&#xA;  the same CD-ROM or hard disk. We use this term in the case where they&#xA;  are separate programs, not parts of a single program. In this case, if&#xA;  one of the programs is covered by the GPL, it has no effect on the&#xA;  other program. Combining two modules means connecting them together so&#xA;  that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by&#xA;  the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL—if&#xA;  you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal&#xA;  question, which ultimately judges will decide.&lt;/strong&gt; We believe that a&#xA;  proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec,&#xA;  pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and&#xA;  the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are&#xA;  interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;  definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;  linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;  combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;  communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;  So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;  separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;  intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;  could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if a program consists only of own original custom software, or is&#xA;  combined with source code from other software components, then the own&#xA;  custom software components need not be licensed under GPL and need not&#xA;  make their code available; even if the underlying operating system&#xA;  used is licensed under the GPL, applications running on it are not&#xA;  considered derivative works. Only if GPLed parts are used in a program&#xA;  (and the program is distributed), then all other source code of the&#xA;  program needs to be made available under the same license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if they included GPL parts in their application, they should release those changes, if they're communicating with those applications they are not forced to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T11:48:31.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4893" CreationDate="2016-12-29T12:04:23.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence only applies to the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;software and associated documentation files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all together defined as the &quot;Software&quot; (in accordance with the US laws as well), and the copyright notice and the permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of software may vary between countries due to different laws; however in the USA (I'm now referring to US laws as MIT is in the States) Software is legally defined as &quot;Computer programs that comprise a series of instructions, rules, routines, or statements, regardless of the media in which recorded, that allow or cause a computer to perform a specific operation or series of operations&quot;, and associated documentation files. Only photos of the boards taken during design meetings are considered part of the Software and are covered by the Software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As those photos are artwork of an artist are not be considered software themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would update the README stating that your fork is using external resources that are not licensed under the MIT, inviting to double check the COPYING file for further information; and update the COPYING file as follow: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of the photos of this project have been made available to this&#xA;  project by John Doe and are copyrighted; any other use must be&#xA;  authorized by the photographer which holds all the rights for those&#xA;  photos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any other file of this project is available under the MIT license as follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright [YEAR] [COPYRIGHT HOLDERS]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastEditorUserId="6919" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T00:11:20.393" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T00:11:20.393" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2016-12-30T00:03:57.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, log data files written by one application irrespective of its license can be read by software using any other license. The same way you can write a DOCX document with LibreOffice and open it with Microsoft Word and that would not have any impact on the licensing of Microsoft Word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is, must the application B be licensed with GPL-v2/v3 or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T00:03:57.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4903" CreationDate="2016-12-29T15:12:35.960" Score="18" ViewCount="945" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a simple plugin in JavaScript and I want to put it on GitHub for people to download and use it freely. I saw many people include MIT licence in a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I obtain the MIT licence? Do I have to go to &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org&lt;/a&gt; to apply/register or do I just need to paste the declaration on top of my source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Benjamin W" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T07:39:54.677" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T07:39:54.677" Title="Obtaining MIT licence for own plugin" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4902" CreationDate="2016-12-29T15:16:11.023" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;You just include the licence in your software, no registration needed. Your software is always copyright protected, you state the terms of use through a licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7007" OwnerDisplayName="Erik Landvall" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T15:16:11.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4902" CreationDate="2016-12-29T18:19:21.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing as you mentioned GitHub specifically, it's worth noting that GitHub includes several features to make software licensing easier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When creating a new repository, you'll be shown the option to add a license at the same time you configure the other settings. Just select a license from the &quot;Add a License&quot; dropdown and the appropriate file will be added to the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A license can easily be added to an existing repository by adding a file through GitHub, naming it &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;, and selecting the license type from the dropdown that is displayed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/adding-a-license-to-a-repository/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://help.github.com/articles/adding-a-license-to-a-repository/&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the MIT license, once the license file is in the repository, you're done; the license will apply to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licenses might recommend taking additional steps, like adding a license header to each of your source files. Be sure to do your research so you know the license is being applied properly. That said, to my knowledge there are no licenses which require you to register your application or do anything more complicated than add the appropriate license and notifications to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;, which is managed by GitHub includes more information about some common licenses and how to apply them to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="connor-bracewell" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T18:19:21.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4902" CreationDate="2016-12-29T19:47:50.703" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't &quot;obtain&quot; a licence. It's not a licence like a driver's licence that gives you permission to do something; rather, the license you apply to your software is &lt;em&gt;you giving permission&lt;/em&gt; for other people to do something. So, just like your driver's licence is the government saying, &quot;You have our permission to drive a car, as long as you behave in certain ways&quot;, the license you apply to your software is you saying &quot;You, the user, have my permission to use this software, as long as you behave in certain ways.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, all you need to do is just include the licensing statement in your software. But, as others have said, do have a look at the other licences available and make sure you understand what rights you're giving people by your choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15271" OwnerDisplayName="David Richerby" LastActivityDate="2016-12-29T19:47:50.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2016-12-30T08:29:00.210" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The post is actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/16115/10311&quot;&gt;migrated&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been looking that many books published with copyright notice like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © by [abc] publication.&lt;br&gt; All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long this copyright last or sustain?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I check if copyright is expired or not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can books used as in public domain after expiration of copyright?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a book doesn't have any copyright notice, then &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; it be used as if it were in the public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: my concern is for scanned versions of books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-01T12:18:45.113" Title="Copyright expiration and public domain of books" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|public-domain|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2016-12-31T00:00:55.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4907" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2016-12-30T08:35:34.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T08:35:34.827" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T08:35:34.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2016-12-30T08:35:34.827" Score="0" Body="For questions about open source books and related materials." OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T19:06:49.773" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T19:06:49.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4906" CreationDate="2016-12-30T12:03:55.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The duration of copyright varies according to different laws; however &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Expiration_of_copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally copyright lasts for 70 years&lt;/a&gt; after the death of the author(s), and you can check if the author died on Wikipedia or on the internet. Once copyright expires, books are considered public domain and you don't need permission to reproduce or copy etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By default books, as well as any other IP, are protected by copyright even if not explicitly written, and if an edition would miss that statement you need the permission of the copyright owner to copy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that is generally accepted to make a copy (often referred as backup copy) of a work protected by IP for you own benefits. That means that if you bought a printed book and you want to read on your e-book reader, you could scan it and store on your device. However you must keep in mind these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's meant for your personal use;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't share it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You'll be considered responsible if somebody else gets a copy of that book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore in some countries, laws explicitly forbidden to scan the whole book without the permission of the copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth to ask the publisher for permission to scan it if you want to read on you e-book reader for personal use. Some publishers offers digital copies of their book (either for free or for a very small charge) and you'll get a better copy than what you could scanning the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastEditorUserId="6919" LastEditDate="2016-12-30T16:37:30.217" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T16:37:30.217" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2873" CreationDate="2016-12-30T19:14:10.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My 2 cents: this is a very restrictive proprietary license. To meets its requirements you practically cannot do much anything. Stay away from this if you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you obtain a commercial license from Oracle for these (e.g. midp2.0 and cldc), there is not much you can do in terms of serious work with the SCSL: you can do &quot;research&quot; whatever this means. This is really not an open source license. If you really want to use this, consult a lawyer or contact Oracle top buy a commercial license. Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2016-12-30T19:14:10.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4785" CreationDate="2016-12-31T08:56:23.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By choosing a license for your project (here a public domain dedication), you effectively make a promise to your users about not only your own code but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4315/947&quot;&gt;all the dependencies&lt;/a&gt; for your code and the licenses of these dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In making a promise, you should be clear about your policy for these dependencies: are they all under the same terms (e.g. CC0) or do they use other licenses? If they do, they you should disclose this upfront as the combination of these deps may impose additional requirements on your re-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance if you depend on leaflet, its main license is a BSD, but it has plugins that you may use that themselves under other licenses and so on (here at least some MIT and Apache license at the first level of deps). And this all the way for the full dependency tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the mere inclusion of a CDN URL you are also &lt;strong&gt;redistributing&lt;/strong&gt; IMHO (the fact this is transferred from a CDN is irrelevant IMHO there, as you are the one triggering the effective reuse) and with redistribution you have obligations (in this case and per the license terms you would need to include somewhere at least the text of the leaftlet license and this text is inconveniently not included in the CDN itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would be clear in my README that there are other licensed components that are deps and what are the licenses. And I would include in my app proper some about page that lists all these and includes the corresponding license texts (and comply with anything else in terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3994/why-do-almost-all-open-source-licenses-require-attribution&quot;&gt;attribution&lt;/a&gt; and/or redistribution)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(side note: to help find out which licenses are used and what is the tree of deps you could check out my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scancode&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2016-12-31T08:56:23.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2016-12-31T16:56:50.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no legal requirement [in the USA] that the CC0 license and authorship information be retained. The only risk that I know of for claiming someone else's CC0 material as your own is that you might be publicly shamed for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an experiment, I (&quot;Alice&quot;) released &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39459644/how-to-convert-a-png-to-bgr-565-format-using-imagemagick/39461115#39461115&quot;&gt;some code&lt;/a&gt; under CC0 on Stack Overflow several months ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the license as I applied it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/* rgbtobgr565 - convert 24-bit RGB pixels to 16-bit BGR565 pixels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Written in 2016 by [Alice &amp;lt; alice@host.domain.tld &gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the extent possible under law, the author has dedicated all&#xA;  copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the&#xA;  public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any&#xA;  warranty.   See &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I simply waited to see what would happen.  Until now, nothing happened.  Today, I found that the same code just with some minor changes and with all the CC0 license information removed and replaced with a GPL license and a &quot;Written by [Bob]&quot; line that claims authorship by another individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't see a problem with the relicensing nor with removing the attribution.  But claiming authorship is problematic. In some jurisdictions and in most academic circles, that's frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I should not be surprised how it has turned out so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOLLOWUP: After a little discussion, this particular case ended satisfactorily.  &quot;Bob&quot; has added a one-line attribution, not legally required but a nice thing to do, within the body of his code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// This part was under CC0 Licenses and was written by [Alice]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T15:10:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4917" CreationDate="2017-01-01T13:36:21.527" Score="5" ViewCount="2196" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have been looking for a while for a License which permits basically everything but gives me credit for the original work, I have had a look at the ISC, BSM, zLib and GPL license but am not sure if I understand them correctly. In short I want a license which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gives me credit for the original work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does not hold me liable for any damages, indirectly or directly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is provided as-is and comes with no warranty. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allows modification of the original source code/binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allows the sale of modified and unmodified source code/binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allows redistribution of any kind, even under different licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you are free to do as you like with my code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I want my code to be open source too, so open-source licenses are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7084" LastEditorUserId="4763" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T05:50:23.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T08:48:24.863" Title="What license permits everything but gives credit?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4914" CreationDate="2017-01-01T16:30:22.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you think about the BSD Licence? Or the MIT Licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;New BSD License&quot; or &quot;Modified BSD License&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from&#xA;  this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;  THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &quot;AS IS&quot; &#xA;  AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,&#xA;  THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR&#xA;  PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR&#xA;  CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL,&#xA;  EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,&#xA;  PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR&#xA;  PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF&#xA;  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING&#xA;  NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS&#xA;  SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&lt;/a&gt; for an explanations of all the BSD licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7082" LastEditorUserId="7082" LastEditDate="2017-01-02T08:48:24.863" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T08:48:24.863" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4914" CreationDate="2017-01-02T00:27:09.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the many permissive licenses the ISC or MIT is one of the only that fits all you criteria. In particular &lt;code&gt;Allows redistribution of any kind, even under different licenses.&lt;/code&gt; which translate in explicit legal terms as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;sublicense&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few other licenses have this spelled out explicitly. In particular the BSD (2 or 3 clauses) do not have an explicit &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sublicensing&lt;/a&gt; permission (though the opinion of many is that it is implied).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-02T00:27:09.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-02T21:31:00.697" Score="6" ViewCount="2145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to apply the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; to all artifacts of an open source software project, i.e. its full source code, but also its resource data such as graphics or localized string lists that are embedded into or deployed along with the compiled application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously, my belief was that for this to happen, it would be sufficient to declare that my project is subject to the terms of the MIT License, put a respective license text file into my repository and in the releases, and add a license header at least into those of my individual files whose format allows such free-text info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be confirmed by the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/318777/mit-license-vs-creative-commons-for-images-and-other-assets&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;MIT License vs. Creative Commons for images and other assets&lt;/em&gt; on Software Engineering SE&lt;/a&gt;, as the answer in that question contains statements such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is nothing in principle that would make the MIT License inapplicable to images&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also mentions applying the MIT License to HTML or XML files (in general, not necessarily ones that express or contain any executable semantics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, as an example of a non-program project that uses the MIT License, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/sid/fluid-soundfont-gm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fluid (R3) General MIDI SoundFont&lt;/a&gt; uses that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/6919/david&quot;&gt;user &lt;em&gt;David&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; provides a much more restrictive interpretation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4900/765&quot;&gt;his recent answer&lt;/a&gt;. He points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The MIT licence only applies to the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;software and associated documentation files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and explains that at least under U.S. law, &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Computer programs that comprise a series of instructions, rules, routines, or statements, regardless of the media in which recorded, that allow or cause a computer to perform a specific operation or series of operations&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He specifically makes a case that this means graphics other than those directly related to the executable code (application design diagrams, presumeably also screenshots of the source code) are excluded from the scope of the MIT License by the very license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is accurate, it seems to mean that no non-executable resources could be covered by the MIT License. Bummer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any toolbar icons, lists of translated UI texts, message sounds, etc., that have been created for and published as a part of the project would not be redistributable by others because the MIT License declared for the project does not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even explicitly stating the localization and image files are subject to the terms of the MIT License would&#xA;be without effect, as those files are neither executable insyructions, nor a part of a documentation, and thus are simply out of scope for the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; replace or expand the mention of &quot;software&quot; in the license text that I supply along with my project. However, while I am not changing the terms of redistribution itself, wouldn't I still be creating a crayon license like that, with many of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;problems crayon licenses may cause&lt;/a&gt;? (In particular, I am thinking here about downstream developers ending up with a hodgepodge of MIT Licenses from upstream components, each of which covers and/or excludes different portions of the upstream components.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, my question is: &lt;strong&gt;How do I properly apply the MIT License to a whole project, not just the executable portion of it? Is it possible at all?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T09:34:16.407" Title="How to apply the MIT License to a program including its embedded resource data?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4922" CreationDate="2017-01-03T22:18:54.693" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about publishing a text with pictures where the text and most of the pictures are my own, while some of the pictures are by others. Those others have agreed with the inclusion of their pictures. Ideally, I would like to publish the result under a licence of the CC family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that to do this, I would need the copyright holders of the different pictures to release there work under the specific CC license. Which I will never obtain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My alternative plan was to include a copyright statement in the style&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All text and the pictures where no photographer is indicated are my own work and available under the CC-whatever license. For other pictures all rights belong to the photographer and his permission is required for any use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a viable approach or does this approach have dangers that I am ignoring? Is there maybe a better approach to make the result as open as possible? And am I correct that in this scenario the resulting work would be closed and not available under any specific license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="356" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T16:03:06.870" Title="CC text with copyrighted pictures" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4927" CreationDate="2017-01-04T04:07:52.997" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Title says it all: when was BSD-2 published? Everywhere I've looked has no information about when the BSD-2 &quot;Simplified&quot; license was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5081" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T13:30:53.007" Title="When was the BSD-2 Clause license published?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4920" CreationDate="2017-01-04T10:15:12.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot publish the whole product under a blanket Creative Commons license, nor under any license that the copyright holders have not agreed with - either explicitly, or via any license that they have released their pictures under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for you, assuming you wish your work to be re-used, then becomes one of keeping the licensing easy to understand by potential users. Exceptions to a general license need to be clearly signposted, it is not safe for a potential user to have any confusion - in that case anyone who wants to follow copyright rules may just give up on attempting to re-use your content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do depends on the relative usefulness of the text and pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following variation of your suggestion works if the text is independently useful from the images - e.g. the images are improving the presentation, but not core content. In that case, you can show that by entirely separate copyright statements regarding text and image. E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All text (c) ptityeti, released under Creative Commons [blah] license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Images (c) respective original artists, please see individual descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an end user, I would prefer this kind of statement, as it is clear up-front what work I would need to do to use text vs images. It is only different in a minor way form the statement in your question, but by separating concerns clearly, and identifying specific work required to comply with copyright, it sends a clearer message to your target audience (potential re-users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be helpful with your own images, then I suggest provide a way to get a list and/or download of all the CC images from your product in a single place. Or maybe even better, a CC version of the product with placeholders for images that you cannot share under CC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2346" LastEditorUserId="2346" LastEditDate="2017-01-04T16:03:06.870" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T16:03:06.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2017-01-04T14:06:39.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD-2 Licence is also known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_.28.22Simplified_BSD_License.22_or_.22FreeBSD_License.22.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeBSD Licence&lt;/a&gt; and the first time it was published in the FreeBSD project was on &lt;a href=&quot;https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&amp;amp;revision=124033&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;31st December 2003&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastEditorUserId="6919" LastEditDate="2017-01-05T19:39:02.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-05T19:39:02.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2017-01-04T14:36:33.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are reading too much into what software means here and David is reading between the lines. If you apply an MIT license to a project of yours, assuming that all the files are yours for the sake of the argument, then this license applies to all files. Any image, media, assets and so on is either something that is part of your software or the documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot fathom anyone disputing that claim seriously. David's argument is a red herring and incorrect. Use the MIT and be happy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-04T14:36:33.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4932" CreationDate="2017-01-05T15:40:23.117" Score="1" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the one of the many (confusing) cases related to GPLv2/3 licensing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My company is developing an application for mobiles which will connect to servers and provide services to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here's the scenario:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Server&lt;/strong&gt; - uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenSIPS/opensips&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSIPs-GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/processone/ejabberd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ejabberd-GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;(modified source code)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Client(Android, BB10, iOS)&lt;/strong&gt; - uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BelledonneCommunications/linphone-iphone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linphone-GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WhisperSystems/SignalProtocolKit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Signal Protocol-GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went through lot of readings available on net, still have some queries like:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commercial Purpose&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Charge for services and distribute client apps through respective stores for free for internal use, others can download but can not login to access services&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[my company will be responsible for installing and maintaining servers for customer companies, and publishing apps]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Charge for services and distribute client apps &lt;strong&gt;internally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[my company will be responsible for installing and maintaining servers for customer companies, and distributing apps]  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internal Use Only&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In-house server, distribute apps through respective stores for free for internal use, others can download but can not login to access services&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[my company is subsidiary of beneficiary company]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In-house server, distribute client apps &lt;strong&gt;internally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[my company is subsidiary of beneficiary company]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, beneficiary company means it's employees are going to use the app internally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;In the above 4 cases, when should I have to publish the source code?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internal&lt;/strong&gt; means distributing apps through our own servers or emails instead of publishing to respective mobile stores. And here it is sure that only legal employees will be getting the application to download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. Consider three companies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;D- developing company&lt;br&gt;&#xA;P- parent company of D&lt;br&gt;&#xA;C- any other company which is customer of D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, D is developing app described above and will be using for following purposes:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Commercial-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Installing services on C's in-house server and Distributing client apps to employees of C through  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mobile app stores&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Internal distribution&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free for parent company-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Installing services on D's in-house server and distributing client apps to employees of P through  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mobile app stores&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Internal distribution&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*distributing through mobile app stores means Play store, Apple app store etc. In this case any one can download app worldwide but only intended users(employees of respective company) can login and use the services.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7100" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T08:03:10.293" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:00:34.257" Title="Distributing App for free which uses GPL'ed code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4921" CreationDate="2017-01-05T19:01:59.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest date known so far is Feb 6, 1997.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there is unlikely anything official and formal with the first use of this license. Someone at some point just took its knife to cut the 3rd and 4th clauses from the BSD original text (e.g. &amp;quot;four clauses&amp;quot;). The trick is to find who did it first and when. Here is some of my research towards this going progressively backwards in time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/51651f6176040ca8232c50f9afd13030371d65c3/COPYRIGHT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commit&lt;/a&gt; from December 31st, 2003 shows the license appearing as the top-level primary license for the FreeBSD Project and is referenced  as the &amp;quot;compilation copyright&amp;quot; in the commit comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Update the COPYRIGHT file to include FreeBSD's compilation copyright&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But this &amp;quot;two clause&amp;quot; BSD license as used in FreeBSD today as the top level license appeared well after the fourth clause of the &amp;quot;four clause&amp;quot; BSD (the advertizing clause) was &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/b8bc348fd4e3660c853b749f2d22f8c040567c95/COPYRIGHT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;rescinded&amp;quot; by the UC Regents&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;July 22, 1999&lt;/a&gt;. Before that the fourth clause was still applying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/19990429093111/http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wayback machine&lt;/a&gt; tells us that as early as April 29 1999 this BSD variant was already in use on the main project web site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/ea783268e73e47b0c3012339d1e278e7045e2305#diff-9fa582ac22bf1b2b86ada556c0cbef87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commit&lt;/a&gt; on Sep 26, 1998 shows it was used already at this stage for specific subsets of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And a tad before this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/acc786c1a9d03d7454add7273eb38964c95880c9#diff-6d9985c2d30b6dfa35591789a0ac899f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commit&lt;/a&gt; shows that on Feb 6, 1997 it was already there used for some &lt;code&gt;/etc&lt;/code&gt; files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may have been in use before and elsewhere though.... I &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/51651f6176040ca8232c50f9afd13030371d65c3#commitcomment-20377200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have asked&lt;/a&gt; the committers for details ... and I will continue to dig now and then and update the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T13:30:53.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4931" CreationDate="2017-01-05T23:39:23.960" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using multiple libraries in a project I plan to release and distribute in both source and binary form. In my project, I use a few other open-source projects, and modified the source-code in a few of them. I am managing the source-code of my project on GitHub, and maintaining forks of the modified projects on GitHub as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The projects use the following licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/java-native-access/jna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java Native Access&lt;/a&gt; - LGPL v2.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ben-manes/concurrentlinkedhashmap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java ConcurrentLinkedHashmap&lt;/a&gt; - Apache v2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/protonail/leveldb-jna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LevelDB JNA&lt;/a&gt; (Modified) - MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/msteiger/jxmapviewer2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JXMapViewer2&lt;/a&gt; (Modified) - LGPL v3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/protolambda/blocktopograph-lib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blocktopograph-Lib&lt;/a&gt; (Modified) - AGPL v3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be including both the licenses and notices for each project when releasing the binary form, and in the case of modified projects, in the forked project's repository on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually prefer to release my code under the MIT license when I have the choice. However, because of the AGPL v3 library, I'm wondering: do I have to release my project under AGPL v3 as well, and if so, would my project be compatible with the other project licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7105" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T08:42:01.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T17:08:19.023" Title="Licensing a project which uses numerous other modified projects under different licenses" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2017-01-06T01:14:40.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to apply to MIT license to a whole project, and to do that you should specify that the license &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;applies to all of the files of this project&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I reckon it worths to further elaborate, but it's safe to skip it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/318777/mit-license-vs-creative-commons-for-images-and-other-assets&quot;&gt;&quot;MIT License vs. Creative Commons for images and other assets on Software Engineering SE&quot;&lt;/a&gt; correctly states that there is nothing in principle that would make the MIT License inapplicable to images&quot;, and also suggests to specify that such licence applies to all file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is the definition of Software. Simplifying: previously, in the USA, software was considered as anything intangible (as opposite to hardware) and according to that definition images should be considered software. Lately a law provided a definition of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which definition applies to a specific case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the authors want to release all of their work under the MIT they can surely do that and in that case software should be interpreted as synonym of file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4893/how-can-i-use-an-mit-license-for-code-but-protect-the-copyright-of-photos-in-my&quot;&gt;&quot;How can I use an MIT license for code but protect the copyright of photos in my repository?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the user (which isn't the author of the photos) had been granted permission to use those photos only for that project, and cannot pass that permission to others; thus I suggested to specify that photos can't be used without the permission of the author, and aren't covered by the MIT licence, which in her case covers everything else. In that case software couldn't be interpreted as synonym for all of the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized that my answer could be interpreted as very restrictive about the meaning of software, where I usually don't interpret it in that restrictive way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I reckon that it costs nothing to specify in the readme that the licence &quot;applies to all of the files&quot;, whichever would be the licence. That should prevent different interpretation or a different application of the licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could further specify that &lt;code&gt;Software refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this license.&lt;/code&gt; (as done in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;), even if I wouldn't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T01:14:40.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4933" CreationDate="2017-01-06T06:57:22.817" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I develop a parametric 3D mesh creation tool and license it under GPL (because it is dependent on some geometry libraries also under GPL), can I sell 3D mesh data for use with the tool and would these be subject to the GPL? Would the generated custom meshes be subject to the GPL too for the customers that bought these data and created/generated meshes from it using the tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7109" LastEditorDisplayName="user7109" LastEditDate="2017-01-06T08:50:21.140" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:46:09.017" Title="Can I sell my primitive material which is intended to be processed in a factory software under GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4928" CreationDate="2017-01-06T08:09:02.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you agree that the copyleft of the AGPL flows to the calling code in Java (which is effectily &quot;linking&quot; with the AGPL library it calls) and because of the special provisions related to modifications of both the LGPL 2.1, 3.0 and AGPL 3.0, then the effective licensing of your combination is some kind of AGPL 3.0, irrespective of your own overall license and as long as your own license is considered as compatible with the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the projects you list are either under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;an LGPL 2.1 or later or LGPL 3.0 or later, both that you could evolve to an LGPL 3.0 or later. That you can then evolve to a GPL or AGPL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIT and Apache are considered compatible with the AGPL 3.0 too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, since you modified some of the deps, one theory is that you have created a work &quot;based on the libraries&quot; and therefore their copyleft flows to your own code. the LGPL and AGPL have special terms that apply in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;at rest your own source code can be under any license you want as long as it is considered compatible with the AGPL. The MIT would work OK there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;but at runtime, the AGPL terms would apply to your code... meaning users of your code would inherit from its rights and obligations too, including eventual source code redistribution for the whole combo.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. someone could reuse your own code and remove the AGPL and modified LGPL deps and not be subject to the LGPL/AGPL copyleft. But for a user reusing your code as-is, the  LGPL/AGPL copyleft would be apply to the runtime combo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to avoid entirely the AGPL-licensed dep (modified or not in this case) and the modification of LGPL-licensed code, then the MIT could stand both at rest and runtime IMHO (the LGPL would still apply to the LGPL-licensed deps of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-07T17:08:19.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-07T17:08:19.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4925" CreationDate="2017-01-06T14:00:34.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether or not you're charging money is irrelevant as far as the GPL is concerned, so you can take any notion of commercial versus internal out of your consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is all about protecting the freedoms of users. Therefore, what it requires is distribution of the source code to users of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first major impact this has is that all of your server-side code never needs to be distributed. Technically users of your app never use the server-side code - they just use data that it produces. This is the reason for the AGPL's existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your client code, however, must be distributed to anyone who uses it. If you giving the app to an external customer, then you must also provide them with the source of the app (upon request). This source may not be useful to most people, if it requires login credentials to your service, but nonetheless you must provide it; the idea behind the license is that someone who &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have credentials and normally uses the app can make modifications to it (say, to fix a bug, or change how something works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, you do not need to publicly release the source code of your server app, but you do need to release the source code of your client app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:00:34.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4930" CreationDate="2017-01-06T14:46:09.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, data that you read and write with a software tool (including GPL-licensed software) is not impacted by the license of the tool.&#xA;For instance, if you edit your own document with LibreOffice it is not subject to the licensing of LibreOffice. So here, assuming that the mesh data you sell are yours, the custom generated meshes from that data would be subject to whatever term you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-06T14:46:09.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4939" CreationDate="2017-01-06T22:26:11.333" Score="6" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I write a run-time environment based on some GPL'ed libraries&#xA;and separately write an program interpreter which is passively used by the run-time environment, can a program (which is intended to be interpreted by the interpreter used in the run-time environment to perform some task) be under any license without restriction by the GPL?  (sorry for my poor English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It confuses me that &quot;Does the fact that the interpreted program indirectly using the GPL'ed tool cause it be restricted under GPL?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/397/can-i-have-one-license-cover-part-of-a-software-and-another-covering-the-other-h&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt;.  The asker of that question is the copyright holder in his scenario.  Conversely, I can not be the copyright holder of the software (the run-time environment in this question) because it contains the code which is written by someone else and released under the GPL.  )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:33:15.887" Title="Can an interpreted program be under any license without restricted by its GPL'ed run-time environment?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-09T04:48:24.750" Score="9" ViewCount="2934" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I use a x-library which I've found in GitHub and it uses MIT license. Sure, I could give attribution to it in my apps in the About &gt; Licenses page. But what about the libraries that x-library uses? Is it my job to give attribution to it or is it x-library's job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7121" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T15:26:44.187" LastActivityDate="2023-07-02T12:45:19.993" Title="Should you give attributions to the libraries your library uses?" Tags="|attribution|dependencies|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4936" CreationDate="2017-01-09T09:50:48.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that x-library only depends on libraries that are licensed under MIT as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only requirement of the MIT license is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a very light way to require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did not say which kind of programming language all of this was written in, but let's assume that this is some kind of interpreted language like Python or Javascript. Then if you use the library without changing it, you are already complying with the requirement because your copy of the software does include the copyright and permission notice of the library (even though it is not easy to access for users). Notice that if the library you rely on complies with the MIT licenses of the libraries it depends on, then you are also automatically complying with them (because the LICENSE files will already be included in the source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in the case where there is some kind of compilation (including minification of Javascript sources), then the various licenses might disappear during this process and it is your job to put them back (all of them, not just the one of the library you are directly depending on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it is usually advised to make the attribution more prominent than what I describe, in some kind of About page. In this case, I would advise putting every dependency of your software there, not just the direct dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What to remember:&lt;/strong&gt; you have to comply with the licenses of all the dependencies, not just the one you are directly using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4315/5858&quot;&gt;Software dependencies: A not-too-technical introduction&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="30457" LastEditDate="2023-07-02T12:45:19.993" LastActivityDate="2023-07-02T12:45:19.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4936" CreationDate="2017-01-09T13:45:34.707" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what about the libraries that x-library uses? Is it my job to give attribution to it or is it x-library's job?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you redistribute libraries with you app --whether or not they are your direct, first level deps or deps of deps at full depth-- you are responsible to ensure that you comply with each licenses, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;all the way&lt;/a&gt;. It is always your job even if and especially if the libraries you redistribute did not properly comply with the terms of the code they reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T13:45:34.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4934" CreationDate="2017-01-09T17:33:15.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The interpreter would be GPL since it is using GPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interpreted program is most likely not required to be released under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL]&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a programming language interpreter is released under the GPL, does that mean programs written to be interpreted by it must be under GPL-compatible licenses? (#IfInterpreterIsGPL)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about licensing that data to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:33:15.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2873" CreationDate="2017-01-10T07:48:31.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That licence is far away from the four essential freedoms of the GPL and only allows to share with licensee and students of your research (as defined in the licence itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer to your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source code availability&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To allow download the user must click on a button after this statement (as per the attachment A-2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;By clicking the 'Agree' button below, You certify that You are a Licensee in good standing&#xA;under the Sun Community Source License, midp 2.0 and cldc(1.0.4-1.1) (&quot;License&quot;) and that &#xA;Your access, use and distribution of code and information You may obtain at this site &#xA;is subject to the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It also mentions a password protection scheme limited to Licensees.&#xA;  How am I supposed to set that up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have plenty options, such as storing the archive with sources in a password protected page or set a password when you compress it and show that password once the user certified (with that statement) he/she is a Licensee in good standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Doesn't it mean I have to make sure the user logs in to Oracle's site,&#xA;  and then give him the links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the user certify it by herself clicking on the Agree button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Executable redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the actual requirement for sharing the executional with the&#xA;  third parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, in effect it's a bit cucumbersome. It means that you can investigate and study the source code in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. eg: you could recompile it with your own compiler and share it with third parties, only and exclusively to show that it's faster. They will not be allowed to use it on a regular base or in a commercial environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And who are they anyway? Anyone who's not a licensee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence says &lt;strong&gt;anyone&lt;/strong&gt;, but for Research Use only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about distributing to third parties just for non-profitable&#xA;  personal use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do we make sure they only evaluate and comment, but not actually&#xA;  personally use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can't.&lt;/strong&gt; You must provide them the licence which specify what they can do or can't do. If they use it for any other use they're infringing the licence. Not your fault, nothing you can really do to avoid. They'll be personally responsible of their infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what about the license of my choice? Do I apply that license to&#xA;  the executable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must choose a licence that will specify that they can't run it for anything else than Research or Comment. In your case it would be easier to use the same SCSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patch redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;am I allowed to redistribute patches that contain the code surrounding&#xA;  the parts being edited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only to licensee and students of your Research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe it's disallowed to even have the original lines I'm be patching&#xA;  publicly visible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can't&lt;/strong&gt; share their code with third parties that aren't licensee or students of your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about binary patches for an executable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can't&lt;/strong&gt; share their code with third parties that aren't licensee or students of your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T07:48:31.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-09T15:28:52.080" Score="7" ViewCount="10464" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is so much confusion regarding this simple question it's driving me crazy. The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/16886580/4594511&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there is no difference between JavaFX and Java licence now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/206697&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says that we don't have to release our source code that uses JavaFX due to the GPL + Classpath exception. The post &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/14703496/4594511&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As of February 2013, JavaFX is partially open source and should become almost fully open source over the next few months. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://fxexperience.com/2013/02/february-open-source-update/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post here&lt;/a&gt; lists many of JavaFX's projects that have been open sourced, including &quot;javafx-common&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to use JavaFX freely in my commercial applications or not? Do all of my above posts relate to OpenJFX not JavaFX? I have developed using JavaFX, not OpenJFX. Is this a massive mistake? If so, how easy is it to transition from JavaFX code to OpenJFX?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm so confused and just want a simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7120" OwnerDisplayName="Mathomatic" LastEditorUserId="2270" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T00:20:31.807" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T00:20:31.807" Title="Can I use JavaFX in a Commercial Application for Free?" Tags="|commercial|java|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4941" CreationDate="2017-01-09T17:40:12.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it is an Oracle product, the definitive answer for JavaFX should be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/overview/faq-1446554.html#10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle's website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JavaFX is available under the same &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; and business model as Java SE. This includes the ability for third party developers to distribute the runtime libraries with their application(s), subject to the terms and conditions of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part of &quot;the license&quot; appears to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oracle grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to reproduce and distribute those files specifically identified as redistributable in the README File (&quot;Redistributables&quot;) provided that: (i) you distribute the Redistributables complete and unmodified, and only bundled as part of Programs, (ii) the Programs add significant and primary functionality to the Redistributables, (iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to supersede any component(s) of the Redistributables (unless otherwise specified in the applicable README File), (iv) you do not remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices contained in or on the Redistributables, (v) you only distribute the Redistributables pursuant to a license agreement that: (a) is a complete, unmodified reproduction of this Agreement; or (b) protects Oracle's interests consistent with the terms contained in the Agreement and includes the notice set forth in Section H, (vi) you agree to defend and indemnify Oracle and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or expenses (including attorneys' fees) incurred in connection with any claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are in any doubt, you should of course consult Oracle and/or a lawyer as appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="calum_b" LastActivityDate="2017-01-09T17:40:12.033" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4945" CreationDate="2017-01-10T15:36:01.547" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume I want to change an open source library and use it in more than one project, e.g.&#xA;company C uses library L version 1.0 with license apache-2. &#xA;The company actually uses a fixed version of it. &#xA;They send the fixes to the original developer of L but want to use the fixed version before there is an official public version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license should allow this. &#xA;But which version number to use on the temporarily fixed L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.1?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.0.1?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1.0.temp.1?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or something different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that there is eventually an public new version and the company should be abel to use it by just changing the version number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T05:17:35.967" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T05:17:35.967" Title="Which version number scheme to use when temporarily extending an open source tool?" Tags="|version-number|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-01-10T18:21:02.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would go with 1.0.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the answer depends on the versioning scheme used by the upstream library L maintainers and your package manager (e.g. RPM, Debian, etc), if you are using one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the upstream library maintainers use the versioning scheme a.b.c, then I would add an additional field to make it a.b.c.D. That way you will never have a local version conflict with an upstream version. Also take into account, if applicable, how your package manager determines which version is greater. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yoctoproject.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yocto Project&lt;/a&gt;, which helps build embedded Linux distributions, seems to typically add a dash and version at the end for downstream changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the upstream package/library version is 1.0. You patch the package wit Yocto and update the version from 1.0 to 1.0-1. In the case of Linux library file names, I would name it &lt;code&gt;/lib/yourlibname.so.1.0.1&lt;/code&gt; since dashes in library file versions is not very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-10T18:21:02.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-01-11T10:47:46.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would rename the package for internal use. Maybe ourL or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way is what someone else did: A friend of mine patched mpg123 in a time it was only barely maintained and called his fork mpg123-thor. He included everything from upstream but with his own patchsets. Now these patches are all in the current mpg123. His patchset based on mpg123-0.59r he called mpg123-0.59r-thor6 (sixth version of the patchset).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thomas.orgis.org/mpg123-thor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://thomas.orgis.org/mpg123-thor/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="55" LastEditorUserId="55" LastEditDate="2017-01-11T10:53:00.167" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T10:53:00.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-01-11T14:31:04.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't want to have any conflict or confusion about the version, thus you should use a number that won't cause any. And you can achieve that adding a further sequence to version numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg:&#xA;If the project numbers the version based on &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;two sequences (eg. 1.0, 1.1), I would number it 1.0.1;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;three sequences (eg. 1.0.2, 1.2.0), I would number your version as 1.0.2.1;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;four sequences (eg. 1.0.3.2, 1.2.4.2), I would number your version as 1.0.3.2.X, where X is one or two letters not among A (alpha), B (beta), F (final), R (release), RC (release candidate), a dash and a number. You could use for example IR (internal release) or SP (submitted patch) or CP (candidate patch).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing prevents you to add a sequence even for an existing four (or n-th) sequences versioning schema, however you should try to make it easy to use it, and allow people share that information cleanly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T14:31:04.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4766" CreationDate="2017-01-11T22:36:09.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it's been a while for this answer, but I found myself in the same situation for jquery. If anybody is looking for that one specifically here is the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.js.foundation/jquery/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.js.foundation/jquery/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7140" LastActivityDate="2017-01-11T22:36:09.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4766" CreationDate="2017-01-12T07:19:08.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Microsoft CLA, there is the link : &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla2.dotnetfoundation.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla2.dotnetfoundation.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes just a minute to complete (complete explanation here : &lt;a href=&quot;https://adrientorris.github.io/github/how-to-sign-microsoft-cla-on-github.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://adrientorris.github.io/github/how-to-sign-microsoft-cla-on-github.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5824" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T07:19:08.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4943" CreationDate="2017-01-12T13:30:42.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally use this approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I check what is the versioning scheme used by the project I patch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I collect the version number I am patching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I check what is (or what will be) the likely next version number after the one I will patching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I create a new version using the scheme used by the project such that it will be resolved as a version after the current and before the next version, eventually tagging it as being a &quot;patched&quot; version with a &quot;patch-1&quot;, &quot;patch-2&quot; trailing qualifier if this works out ok for the project versioning scheme&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I am not renaming the project packages nor their namespaces otherwise to ensure that --if and when-- my patch is integrated in a future version I can just use again the standard version without any code changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... unless I want to release this patched version on a public package repository (e.g. Maven, Rubygems, Pypi, etc) in which case I keep the code and namespaces as-is and I create a new package name typically by prefixing or suffixing the package name with my name, project, company or something differentiating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the Apache 2.0 allows this but also requires tracking changes as described in section &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4) Redistribution&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T13:30:42.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4941" CreationDate="2017-01-12T13:35:02.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;See my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4586/947&quot;&gt;this closely related question&lt;/a&gt;. The gist is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot use the BCL-licensed JavaFX as provided by Oracle as pre-built for much anything beyond some evaluation and development&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use the GPL+Classpath exception-licensed JavaFX runtime and open source libraries with an OpenJDK runtime for pretty much anything including commercial applications. You need to either build it yourself from sources or find a pre-built one (and this is NOT provided by Oracle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-12T13:35:02.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T03:41:42.337" Score="6" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I wanted a certain functionality that can be difficult to implement due to many special cases and subtle details in technical specifications. So I did a websearch and quickly found existing implementations. One of them said in the header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I place this code in the public domain (CC0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fine. But further, the header said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This code is nearly the same as in [some other open source library]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the &quot;other library&quot;, I saw that it was published under the 3-clause-BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is responsible for code being in the public domain?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the question is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about who is &lt;em&gt;&quot;responsible for the code&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It is about who is responsible for the fact that the code is available under a certain license. Particularly, I could now copy the code that was said to be in the public domain, without any attribution - and ignore the fact that it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been copied from a BSD-licensed software without proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, one could trivially say: The first person who omitted the BSD header, and stated that the code is in the &quot;public domain&quot; is responsible here. Others, who have copied this &quot;public domain&quot; code &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; be held responsible for this, because they had to rely on the statements of the other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder how this should work in practice. Someone could copy arbitrary code, remove the license information and declare it as public domain. Others could then use the code without attribution - or worse, may even suggest that &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; wrote it, and publish it under a more restrictive license, with &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; name in the copyright statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once such a Pandora Box of public domain is opened, it is basically impossible to figure out who was the culprit. And eventually, this would lead to the question of whether there is any reasonable way to withdraw code that was once placed into the public domain - be it erroneously or intentionally by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Side notes:&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I slightly reworded the statements from the header. I do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; want to accuse anybody in particular, and I do not even want to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; that any particular author might have done something wrong. I just wanted to set the stage for my question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I know that one has to be careful with the wording here, and that things like &quot;copyright&quot; and &quot;license&quot; are only remotely related. To my understanding, the border between them is blurred in the public domain / CC0 case, but I am not a lawyer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7158" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T09:50:12.440" Title="Who is responsible for code being in the public domain?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4951" CreationDate="2017-01-14T09:50:12.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can never assume that the software that you receive is properly licensed. It is your responsibility to check that you are indeed allowed to use it under said license. Therefore if someone put someone else's code in the public domain without authorization, the public domain license would be void and you would be infringing the rights of the original author by using the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not many people check this of course, but large companies such as Intel do. They have both lawyers and technical tools to do so. In particular, they try to identify all the contributors to some code in the same way that a university will try to analyze an essay for plagiarism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, does putting something in the public domain allow someone to claim that they wrote it? I don't think so. Could you claim that you wrote Shakespeare's plays? No, but they are in the public domain. As for countries which define a moral right, this is inalienable and it includes paternity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T09:50:12.440" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4954" CreationDate="2017-01-14T18:35:54.113" Score="6" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I decided to write a compiler as a learning experiment.&#xA;I first started by following some random tutorials here and there and built something that I called by naive implementation. (Since there's a lot of guessing that went into it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then decided to buy a book that treated the subject (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0470177071&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0470177071&lt;/a&gt;). The book provides a very &quot;step by step&quot; way of building such software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to learn from it, and to not do a direct rewrite of what is written in it (because it pretty much gives you an implementation), I decided to read the intro parts, and then try to build something from there, and if I was stuck / couldn't go forward I would read the suggested code and then implement it. Throughout the code, I comment on why some parts interact with other parts, I reference my &quot;naive implementation&quot; and compare the two solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happens that the compiler showed in the book and the compiler I wanted to build treated the same language. (I didn't know this at the moment of purchase). Which makes it a little harder to make it very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside the general framework (packages layout, interfaces), my code is pretty much different that the one provided in the book, but many ressemblances can be found, and obviously some parts are almost identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of open sourcing the result of the code I have written, and explaining that it is sort of my journey through the book. I wanted to licence it as MIT, but since it is derived work from the book, is it OK to do so? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7162" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-14T19:55:16.183" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T08:16:10.890" Title="Open sourcing code derived from a book" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4953" CreationDate="2017-01-14T19:55:03.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For clarity, let me focus only on the parts that you did copy or derive from the book (as in copy-then-modify). Parts of code that are your own original creation are yours and you can therefore license these under any terms you please including the MIT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you copy code from a book, what you copy is subject to a license whether explicit or not. And you cannot reuse significant elements from a book without the proper permission from the author or publisher (e.g. whoever owns the rights). In this case, Ronald Mak has a web site where the source code of this books is also available for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apropos-logic.com/wci/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;download&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the files have a copyright from Ronald Mak and one seems to have been written while he was working at NASA Ames Research Center. There are no specific rights granted in the code, documentation or on the web site beside this statement found in the code: &lt;code&gt;For instructional purposes only.  No warranties.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of other rights granted by the author, you cannot do much with this code (or its printed version) and certainly you are not allowed to include significant chunks of it and relicense this using an MIT license: you do not have a license in the first place that allows you to do this. If I were you I would contact Mr. Mak to ask for a permission (if he actually own this and not his publisher.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T08:16:10.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T08:16:10.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-14T23:18:35.657" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a suite of software tools (for commercial use) to be used by medical professionals in their daily practice. This will require that I utilize information published in medical journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, there is a questionnaire that was validated (verified that it measures what it is intended to measure) by researchers; and the questionnaire was published in a medical journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for me to adapt it into a software tool, I will need to use the specific language that the validated questionnaire uses. If I change the language, it will invalidate the questionnaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: What legal concerns should I have regarding the use of published research to create commercial use software? Is creating a citations page within the application that the end-user can view sufficient protection?  Do I need to seek a license or written permission even though the information is published in a journal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7163" LastEditorDisplayName="user7163" LastEditDate="2017-01-14T23:40:31.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-14T23:40:31.453" Title="Plagiarism? What are the requirements to Modeling/adapting published research for software development?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|software-development|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-01-18T07:39:18.720" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4957" CreationDate="2017-01-15T11:43:11.890" Score="2" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to release a software under GNU Lesser GPL (not sure yet if v2 or v3 should be used). But I would also like to state a requirement that whenever my software is used commercially the company needs to provide a reference so I could put this information on a website. Can it be done with GNU Lesser GPL or should I switch to different existing open source licensing or should I create my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7165" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:20:35.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T11:00:55.843" Title="GNU Lesser GPL with additional requirement for customer reference" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4956" CreationDate="2017-01-15T20:10:10.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such provision to &lt;code&gt;provide references when using commercially&lt;/code&gt; in the LGPL 2 or 3 and adding such provision may be contradicting the license terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are provisions for attribution and credit though that are rather extensive and these may likely be more than good enough for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will only reference the newer LGPL 3.0 and focus only on the attribution and credit requirements (leaving aside doc and source code related requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before I dive in the details, I think that while no true free or open source license may achieve what you want (e.g. force a commercial user to provide back a reference or notification of their usage) the LGPL has pretty decent attribution and crediting requirements when redistributed (such as a in commercial product). But these requirements only have to be met with the customer the code is redistributed to, not to you proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What are the attribution requirements of the LGPL-3.0 license when redistributing your library in a product or application?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL-3.0 license includes the GPL 3.0 by reference and all and any attribution and crediting requirements of the GPL 3.0 apply too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses are rather clear and explicit on what and how to provide attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In the GPL 3.0 the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitions section&lt;/a&gt; explains  what are the &quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, this definition is reused in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL section 5&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 7&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] An interactive user interface displays &quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&quot; to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;appropriate copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt; explains what attribution means when you redistribute unmodified copies of the source code:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;appropriate copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when someone redistribute an unmodified copy of your LGPL-3.0-licensed program they would need to &quot;credit&quot; you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with a conspicuous copyright statement and notice, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep existing notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copy of the GPL license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The LGPL 3.0 has additional requirements in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the Combined Work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. [...]&#xA;  c) For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under the LGPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt;, there are these additional attribution requirements for &quot;Combined Libraries&quot;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Give prominent notice with the combined library that part of it is a work based on the Library, and explaining where to find the accompanying uncombined form of the same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are yet more requirements when there are modifications. These are mentioned mostly in the GPL text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt;, if a user redistributes modified source code, they have these additional attribution requirements:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with this, clearly establishing that these are extras requirements on top of section 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code &lt;strong&gt;under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL section 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then goes on to explain what these new requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, &#xA;  and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under&#xA;  this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement&#xA;  modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a user (commercial or not) redistributes a modified source copy of your LGPL-3.0-licensed program they would need to additionally credit you with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a tracking of the changes they made, with prominent modification dated notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if needed, they shall update (or create) notices to state that this code is under the LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if there is some user interface, they need to update the code to display a notice following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL section 0&lt;/a&gt; and they can use the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL section 6&lt;/a&gt;, when a user of yours redistributes binaries (aka. non-source), they have these additional attribution requirements:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with this, clearly establishing that these are extras requirements on top of section 4 and 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL sections 4&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;and 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they provide the source code with the binaries then they have no new requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they do not provide the source code with the binaries they have a few extra requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) [...] accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that&#xA;  product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source [...], or (2) access to copy the&#xA;  Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written&#xA;  offer to provide the Corresponding Source. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, their new attribution requirement boils down to provide or explain how to get the source code: the license covers several possible approaches and constraints. The simplest way is to provide the source with the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, at the end  and past the &quot;terms and conditions&quot;, the GPL license provides &lt;strong&gt;guidelines and an example on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: this clarifies what a source code and displayed notice should look like if something was not clear to a user of yours before and these can be used too for the LGPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:27:43.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:27:43.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4959" CreationDate="2017-01-15T22:29:57.930" Score="9" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do most open source projects use licenses instead of simply releasing the code into the public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7157" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T21:44:56.903" Title="Why use licenses? Why not release open source code to public domain?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|public-domain|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2017-01-15T22:52:49.970" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is actually pretty complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Public Domain isn't a thing everywhere&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be surprising, but in many jurisdictions, the concept of the public domain doesn't exist. Even for jurisdictions where it does exist, it varies. Some jurisdictions enforce the right to attribution, even for works in the public domain. Some governments might even charge people to use works in the public domain, most notably Norway. Simply put, there's no one-size-fits-all definition for the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Source != public domain&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of argument, let's just assume that the public domain is similar to Canada or the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source simply doesn't cut it for the public domain. Many licenses include disclaimers of warranty and liability, others with the attribution clauses, others that grant patent/trademark rights, and then there's also the entire concept of copyleft. Simply put, open source is much more complex than the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source is also a &quot;third party&quot; thing, in that its definition and control is not in the governments hands. Anybody can grow open source, but the definition of the public domain falls to elected parliamentary officials. With the control of open source in the hands of the people, it is also able to evolve as time passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can dedicate code to the public domain, and be open source. Licenses such as CC0 dedicate code to the public domain. But for people who wish to bring additional open source restrictions, such as copyleft, it wouldn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If open source was public domain, then open source wouldn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just touching the brink of it. There are also many other factors, but the two above are probably the biggest ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2017-01-15T22:52:49.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4970" CreationDate="2017-01-16T07:28:35.657" Score="8" ViewCount="1949" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing in a team of OSS developers and currently my name is specified in all LICENSE files or copyright headers. But, as it's a teamwork instead of writing &quot;Copyright (c) 2017 MY Name&quot; I would like to write &quot;Copyright (c) 2017 The Team Name&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this acceptable from a legal point of view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4805" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:25:37.250" Title="Can a team be the copyright holder (MIT)?" Tags="|mit|copyright|github|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4960" CreationDate="2017-01-16T08:43:00.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will be better to write the name of the organization / company / Individual who is the legal owner of the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term TEAM is a temporary setup in an organization and there is nothing specific a team does which is not owned by the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7169" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T08:43:00.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4960" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:48:31.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally the copyright claim &quot;Copyright (c) 2017 MY Name&quot; is not needed for Copyright to apply. So it's not a problem if the claim you make here is not legally binding. The authors wouldn't lose their copyright. It would be good anyway if you have a document defining &quot;The Team Name&quot; if you are using this in copyright statements (I'm thinking of an AUTHORS file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T09:48:31.287" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2017-01-16T09:57:16.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;instead of simply releasing the code into the public domain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4959/5858&quot;&gt;Zizouz212's great answer&lt;/a&gt; let me add that there is no way to &quot;simply release code in the public domain&quot;. When you put some code in a public repo on GitHub for instance, you do not give many rights to the people who find the code because copyright applies. To put some code in the public domain, you also have to use licenses (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T14:54:58.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2017-01-16T13:27:18.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers so far assume that it is definitely unmoral to not attribute work published with CC0 and it will be seen as such at court (given appropriate jurisdictions). I assume we are only talking about relicensing the work and not about using it as part of e.g. a thesis where you have to assure that it is your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I absolutely agree it is stupid to relicense the work unmodified and &lt;em&gt;should not be done&lt;/em&gt;, the CC0 is not a CC-BY with attribution to &quot;the public&quot;. And I certainly do not want that someone has a bad feeling about not attributing my work published as CC0 when using it as part of a larger work, because I actually wanted to enable this use case and do not want to force an attribution (otherwise I would have used a CC-BY).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very difficult to decide about moral, but there are always corner cases not prevented by your license that might or might not be seen as moral. Another example: It is definitely within the terms of the CC0 to use the work in commercial products (otherwise one could have used a CC-NC). So why should it not be allowed to sell this commercial product and become a millionaire (and not you)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to restrict every case that is unmoral in your eyes (or even in the eyes of most people), you will also restrict many use cases that you want to allow. You probably do not want a license that sounds like &quot;You can use it for whatever you want, but include an attribution unless you added at least 100 lines of code yourself and do not use it in commercial products to become a millionare, but if it helps you to get food that is ok...&quot; It would be a nightmare to maintain large open source code bases and would certainly restrain the growth of the open source software community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When working with open source it is not unusual to find someone who is taking advantage of work you have done (for prestige or money) without explicitly giving you anything back. But that is the whole point with open source: Not to pay for every small piece of work someone has done, but working together for increasing the overall well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7171" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T13:27:18.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2017-01-16T21:38:21.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you hear &quot;license,&quot; think &quot;permission.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can Bob give you permission to use something that you already have permission to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, but you didn't really need his permission, so it's pretty pointless, now isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T21:38:21.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4958" CreationDate="2017-01-16T21:44:56.903" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the legal convenience of very explicitly listing out the rights...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source developers wouldn't mind getting acknowledged for their work, and very few people and corporations mind giving them credit. Everybody likes a nice, permissive license -- they don't really have downsides. I particularly like Apache 2.0, as it includes an explicit patent license!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T21:44:56.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4960" CreationDate="2017-01-16T22:49:57.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the team a legal entity? Is it, like, a corporation, partnership, LLC, or something like that? You can just set up a partnership by verbal contract, so maybe that's the right option for your team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're just a loosely associated group of people, then... who are you trying to say owns the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T22:49:57.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4969" CreationDate="2017-01-17T02:08:00.480" Score="15" ViewCount="990" Body="&lt;p&gt;After launching an upgrade of XCode on a MacOS Sierra, calling &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; in a&#xA;terminal suprisingly results in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;$ git&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges,&#xA;please re-run as root via sudo.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the command quits. This happens no matter what option git is given, including none or &lt;code&gt;--version&lt;/code&gt;. The command used to work normally before this upgrade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how it's legit to do that. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;git README&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Git is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License version 2&#xA;  (some parts of it are under different licenses, compatible with the GPLv2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This git binary is located in MacOS &lt;code&gt;/usr/bin&lt;/code&gt;, so it's from&#xA;Apple as far as I can tell.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: once the license is agreed upon, &lt;code&gt;git --version&lt;/code&gt; confirms it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git version 2.10.1 (Apple Git-78)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that forcing users to accept an incompatible license to be able&#xA;to use a GPL software contradicts the GPL, for instance section 2b or section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in&#xA;    whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any&#xA;    part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third&#xA;    parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the&#xA;  original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to&#xA;  these terms and conditions.  &lt;strong&gt;You may not impose any further&#xA;  restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted&#xA;  herein&lt;/strong&gt;. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third&#xA;  parties to this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that Apple has technically tied &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; (and I believe other free-licensed command line tools) to its &lt;code&gt;Xcode&lt;/code&gt; closed-source product (which I&#xA;don't really know or use directly, I develop with Qt which depends on it), in a way that you can't use them until you accept the license of what they see as the &quot;main product&quot;, the container.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does that practice effectively violate the GPLv2?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://apple.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/206199/git-is-broken-agreeing-to-the-xcode-ios-license-requires-admin-privileges-ple&quot;&gt;git is broken: “Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/93002/how-to-properly-update-git-on-mac&quot;&gt;How to properly update git on mac?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About &lt;code&gt;strings&lt;/code&gt; applied to the binary&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;code&gt;strings /usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt; on MacOS curiously doesn't produce anything, but the &lt;code&gt;strings&lt;/code&gt; commands from linux &lt;code&gt;binutils&lt;/code&gt; extracts  94 lines from it, which are mostly related to Apple and licensing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those that consist of readable text are essentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;com.apple.git&#xA;com.apple.git&#xA;Apple Inc.1&amp;0$&#xA;Apple Certification Authority1&#xA;Apple Root CA0&#xA;Apple Certification Authority1301&#xA;*Apple Code Signing Certification Authority0&#xA;https://www.apple.com/appleca/0&#xA;Reliance on this certificate by any party assumes acceptance of the then applicable standard terms and conditions of use, certificate policy and certification practice statements.0&#xA;*Apple Code Signing Certification Authority0&#xA;Apple Inc.1&#xA;Apple Software1&#xA;Software Signing0&#xA;)http://www.apple.com/certificateauthority0&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that this binary (which is very small: 18KB) is only about checking the license stuff, and then it launches another binary which would be the real &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt;. I could not &lt;code&gt;dtruss /usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt; (permission problems), but there's a 1.8MB &lt;code&gt;/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt; that seems to be the real thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7173" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:30.883" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T13:59:00.893" Title="Can Apple require users to accept the Xcode/iOS license to use git?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2017-01-17T08:29:37.940" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apple is generally very good at being on the verge of legality regarding open source / free software. And they have enough lawyers so that I would be really surprised if one found a clear violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be aware that section 2b that you cite talks about derivative works but does not prevent &quot;mere aggregation&quot; in a collection of software. It could very well be that when you are calling the command &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt;, you think that you are calling the program that you are used to but in fact are calling some command developed by Apple which asks you to agree with the license of the Xcode/iOS collection before effectively calling the real software. This would not be a modification of git and therefore would not be a violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: this seems to be confirmed by the information you added to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that this binary (which is very small: 18KB) is only about checking the license stuff, and then it launches another binary which would be the real git. I could not dtruss /usr/bin/git (permission problems), but there's a 1.8MB /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/git that seems to be the real thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could try to add &lt;code&gt;/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/&lt;/code&gt; in the front of your &lt;code&gt;$PATH&lt;/code&gt; to confirm that you can use the real command without agreeing to any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;END OF EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for section 6, I am sure that Apple complies with this by providing all the required information somewhere (on your machine). It does not effectively imposes further restriction on the use of the software because they very likely provide the source somewhere and you can compile this source yourself and use it without agreeing to any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this is not really related to this question but I think you can also install git in various other ways on a Mac. For instance via homebrew I suppose (but I'm not a Mac person).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T09:20:00.497" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T09:20:00.497" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4960" CreationDate="2017-01-17T08:45:38.323" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is perfectly acceptable and this is a common practice when you want to establish a shared copyright. For instance this is commonly used (with a BSD license) for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller/blob/d16a68c1b885f679ae1266a9eeee66e69c12e67c/javatests/org/chromium/distiller/OpenGraphProtocolParserAccessorTest.java#L1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chromium&lt;/a&gt; that uses a copyright notice of &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) The Chromium AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt;. Several other projects are using &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?l=C&amp;amp;q=Copyright%20authors%20MIT&amp;amp;type=Code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a similar approach&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the definitive advantage of simplicity as each contributor does not feel compelled to add its own name to any file that is touched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the VCS history and/or an &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; file can be used to track actual contributors if need be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also makes parsing copyright notices much simpler rather than handling some long, stacked, multilines and multiholders copyright statements (even for more advanced parsers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/185675bdec39156c6dad34098774d64b1146ed31/src/cluecode/copyrights.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mine&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this means brief and clear copyright statements which is a good thing for your project team and your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T12:25:37.250" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:25:37.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4988" CreationDate="2017-01-16T19:18:12.283" Score="8" ViewCount="2778" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently looking at implementing a file sharing solution for a customer.  I'd like to base it on one of the many currently-available solutions, many of which are AGPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've found these AGPL applications tend to be dual-licensed as commecial software, and the AGPL edition has license terms seemingly designed to discourage use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at Pydio as an example.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com/forum/f/topic/kindly-help-me-to-edit-footer-text/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;They insist&lt;/a&gt; that the main interface has the text string &quot;Pydio Open Source File Sharing - Free / Non-Supported Edition&quot; on every page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not allow any other method of crediting them, either via different phrasing (the term non-supported scares customers), or a different location (say, a license info window that pops up when you click &quot;Pydio Community Edition&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is requiring this specific text an AGPL compatible license term? &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pydio/pydio-core/blob/develop/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Their license is here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so must all derivative works credit in the exact manner the author requests?  Even if they only make use of a portion of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7178" OwnerDisplayName="Scotch" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-01-17T16:41:26.303" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T17:37:36.793" Title="What are the attribution requirements of the AGPL license?" Tags="|attribution|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4971" CreationDate="2017-01-16T19:58:56.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's look at Pydio as an example. They insist that the main interface has the text string &quot;Pydio Open Source File Sharing - Free / Non-Supported Edition&quot; on every page.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's &lt;em&gt;Pydio's requirement,&lt;/em&gt; not the FSF's.  They do that for exactly the reason you stated: to discourage its use.  The AGPL itself has no attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The AGPL does not allow modification of its terms&lt;/strong&gt;, especially those that would restrict the freedom of its users, so adding the attribution requirement makes it &lt;strong&gt;no longer an AGPL license,&lt;/strong&gt; though they can certainly create their own variation of the AGPL and call it something else, like &lt;em&gt;The Pydio Open Source File Sharing - Free / Non-Supported Edition License.™&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further Reading&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0) from tldrlegal.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I modify the GPL [or AGPL] and make a [customized] license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2731" OwnerDisplayName="Robert Harvey" LastActivityDate="2017-01-16T20:35:33.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4992" CreationDate="2017-01-17T18:49:27.237" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if the subject involves the MIT licence, my question is not strictly limited to that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Working for a private company, I found in their private repository some projects apparently licensed under the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the configuration files for those project I had the impression that most part of them are the output of a generic initialization script or pasted from a quick-start found on the Internet; some fields have not been tailored to the project as it's reasonable to expect; one of those fields specify, as licence, MIT; nowhere in the project there is the text of the MIT licence (nor any other licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That company never released open source code; the person that wrote those projects has left the company and is not currently reachable for comments; people working with that person at the time of the development guess that those source code were never publicly released and his contract probably didn't allow to use an open source licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until he can comment on the code he wrote:&#xA;1) how should be treated that code (open or closed source)?&#xA;2) what if confirmed that his contract didn't allow to use an open source licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it change something if he would say he didn't want to use the MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6919" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T11:32:31.907" Title="How to manage source code if there are doubts about the licence?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2017-01-17T20:46:13.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your company has a hard road ahead, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they want to legally release any product based on this code.  When you don't know the provenance of some code, you have to either throw it away and write it again, or find the Open Source original (with the license it has) and go from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if this is for entirely internal projects within the company, then you are probably safe.  Possibly not fully legal, but the exposure is small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5406" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T20:46:13.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4986" CreationDate="2017-01-17T23:29:44.480" Score="8" ViewCount="4008" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all you need to know, that I've made a research on Internet and I've read dozens of topics. Moreover I asked another programmers about this issue. I still don't know what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem has occurred when I decided to publish my software written in Python. I would like to publish it on GitHub. I know that one of the most popular license on this website is the MIT license. My program uses the &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; library. I checked its license and it looks like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scipy.org/scipylib/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD (3-clause)&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover I know that the MIT and BSD licenses are compatible which means more or less that one of them doesn't limit the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How the program uses the &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt;? My script only imports different modules from the library and calls functions that I need. That's all. Moreover, I don't want to distribute source code nor binary file of the &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; library. Ok, but the license tells us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, as I understand it means that I have to add this license to my project because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) use in source (...) without modification (...) = import module or call functions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the FAQ on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq#What_about_using_third_party_Python_modules_that_aren.27t_part_of_the_Python_distribution.3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python Wiki&lt;/a&gt; recommends to rely on licenses. Unfortunately this implies some doubts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License multiplication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thousands of one-license software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where are previous license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad.1 If we follow the above quotation, it means that license compatibility doesn't make sense, because we always have to add a license of the next generation, even if both are the same level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad.2 I saw many projects on GitHub which were only licensed under the MIT license. In particularly there were Python programs and some of them used &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt; and similar libraries. I didn't see additional licenses. Some of projects are very popular. It means that their authors should add licenses to own software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad.3 According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1825857/how-much-of-numpy-and-scipy-is-in-c&quot;&gt;topic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NumPy is mostly written in C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked one of the most basic library of C &lt;code&gt;stdio.h&lt;/code&gt; which contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to such distribution (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't find this text in the &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; documentation. Ok, maybe &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; developers didn't use &lt;code&gt;stdio.h&lt;/code&gt; but I expect that not only this file contains a such license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm wrong, I hope so. I hesitated to start this thread, because perhaps I don't have a basic knowledge, but this &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/234511/what-is-the-best-practice-for-arranging-third-party-library-licenses-paperwork&quot;&gt;topic&lt;/a&gt; confirms that my doubts can be reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7182" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T12:39:19.380" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:23:07.787" Title="Do programmers use licenses properly?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2017-01-17T23:46:18.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible that they consider their terminal to be part of xcode, and that they want you to agree to their license before you use their terminal in certain ways. They cannot condition your use of Git on agreement to any other kind of license, but they don't need to provide you the terminal that git runs on, or the operating system beneath that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-01-17T23:46:18.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-17T23:28:14.857" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching for an open source license to use for my project. There are many little things i would like to have but only one thing that truly matters - I don't want anyone to use my projects libraries or the project itself to build something that they can then patent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because the project is a charity about supplying free services if they are deemed essential or a basic human right. So it will not do if a third party creates, for example, a medical tool that they charge for, and then prevents us building a free alternative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we do want a third party to do this if they themselves are looking to give their service for free as it reduces our work load. I could talk you through licenses I have considered thus far but perhaps its better to let you answer free of influence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="opensourceGuest" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:19:48.390" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:27:59.867" Title="A licence that lets anyone do anything! Except patent" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|patents|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4979" CreationDate="2017-01-18T00:34:48.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hire a lawyer to draft a licence that does exactly what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a suggestion, start with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org.au/know-your-rights/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; Attribution-Share Alike and add a proviso that you must be given a perpetual, non-repudiable, royalty free licence to any patents that utilize your software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27862" OwnerDisplayName="Dale M" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T00:34:48.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4979" CreationDate="2017-01-18T00:48:42.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Using copyrighted material to build something patentable&quot; doesn't describe a concrete prohibition. In reading your source code, the other guy might gain insight into how to automate a widget-press, which could in principle be patentable. Copyright law allows you to restrict how others copy your code, but does not allow you to protect underlying ideas. In a sense he has used your product to build something, and in another sense he hasn't – you would need to describe the prohibited uses with greater precision. The question of whether something is &quot;patentable&quot; is pretty much determined after the fact – if a patent is granted, it was patentable. Perhaps you have in mind something like &quot;if you use it, and get a patent, then you grant us permission to make a competing object that we will distribute for free&quot;, which pretty much obliterates the point of a patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't use copyright law to restrict manufacturing. Some manufactured goods contain actual software, in which case you can prohibit copying your code into the device. A non-commercial license would do that, and more (it would also prohibit incorporating your code in a non-patentable program). If you want to get more complex than that, you need to hire an IP lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6726" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T00:48:42.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4984" CreationDate="2017-01-18T07:33:52.083" Score="3" ViewCount="2829" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I sell my software based on OSL v3.0 code source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I open the source code only for my customers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I limit the my changes to original source code, that is, a customer can't sell, modify or redistribute this changes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. I want create own shop system based on PrestaShop, but with many modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7184" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T09:18:09.410" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:18:09.410" Title="OSL v3.0 - Can I sell my software based on OSL v3.0 code source?" Tags="|licensing|osl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4979" CreationDate="2017-01-18T09:05:07.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no free or open source license that would prohibit patenting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would go against the spirit of open source in general and would be a restriction in usage which would make the license non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are however several licenses that speak about patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some licenses provide for an explicit patent licenses such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some licenses are muted on the subject and may provide implicit grants (such as the BSD licenses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and licenses some contain &quot;patent non-assert&quot;-like terms and non-assert terms like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want your code to be licensed under a mainline, well-known and community-accepted license, you should consider using an existing licenses such as the Apache 2.0 or the A/L/GPL 3.0 licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you could create your own non-free, proprietary license with the risk that none will ever consider using your software because of its uncommon terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T12:27:59.867" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:27:59.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4982" CreationDate="2017-01-18T09:16:31.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSL 3.0 is a rather uncommon, less used open source license. It is in spirit similar to the AGPL licenses in that a usage in &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm#_Toc187293088&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;external deployments&quot;&lt;/a&gt; may trigger the license copyleft terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a nutshell, yes you can build a commercial software that is derived from OSL-licensed software and yes you can sell it. But as a derivative work, the software will still be subject to the OSL at large and in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you will have to redistribute the source code per section 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;customers that do an &quot;external deployment&quot; per &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/OSL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt; will have to redistribute the code &quot;to the public&quot; per section 1.c of the OSL 3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;customers will have the right to change and redistribute your changes under the OSL for free, or modify further or sell these per section 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T09:16:31.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4956" CreationDate="2017-01-18T11:00:55.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot add additional restrictions to the LGPL, and it would make the licensed software incompatible with the LGPL and the GPL, defeating the purpose of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the licensing notice (but not the LGPL itself), you can add a &lt;em&gt;request&lt;/em&gt; for referal.  A request is not an additional restriction, and placing it outside of the LGPL/licensing text itself makes that sufficiently clear.  You are also free to place whatever conditions you want on any added &lt;em&gt;services&lt;/em&gt; you might provide in connection with the software, just not on redistribution of the software/code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole author of the software without any use of LGPLed or GPLed third party software, you are of course free to license your software under any terms you like, including LGPLed with added restrictions, which amounts to no redistribution right at all (since any redistribution would have to be under the LGPL without added restrictions).  However, it would be extremely misleading to label such terms as &quot;LGPL&quot;.  And if you wanted to take people to court over not heeding your licensing terms, they'd have quite a good case for claiming good faith, which would mean that you'd be left without damage compensation and with at least your own court costs to bear: all you could hope for is that the redistribution stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are much better off &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; trying to wrap your referal request into the licence proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7185" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T11:00:55.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4975" CreationDate="2017-01-18T11:21:47.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your MIT-licensed code calls a BSD-licensed library but you do not redistribute this BSD-licensed library yourself, there is no specific need to attribute nor reference this library beside mentioning it as a dependency (typically for a Python package this would be in your &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you do not have to include the &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; license nor the &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt; license in your project proper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast if you were to redistribute as part of your project any of &lt;code&gt;SciPy&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt; then and only would you need to include their license for attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;for more details&lt;/a&gt; on dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the topic of includes in C/C++, the same applies with a twist: a source redistribution of &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt; does not contain these includes. They are part of the standard C library and will be only &quot;included&quot; at build time. Technically redistributed binaries (assuming they are dynamically linked for now) do include effectively these includes. But the community approach is that in this case for standard libraries attribution for the license of an infrastructure-like &quot;System Libraries&quot; is not required and this is even spelled out explicitly in some licenses (such as L/GPL family).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If binaries were to be redistributed and statically linked with the C library then attribution would be required, for instance if a pre-built static &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt; binary was redistributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T12:23:07.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4971" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:37:36.793" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a detailed analysis, but note that I am not a lawyer, cannot give you reliable advice, and am only looking at the terms of the AGPL, not at relevant law in your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Companies that publish a “community edition” under the AGPL routinely interpret that license more restrictively than sensible. This is understandable since they are protecting their revenue model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is Pydio asking you to do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their LICENSE file only includes the AGPLv3 but no additional terms. The source code includes no obvious notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com/en/docs/faq&quot;&gt;Pydio FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, they ask that the copyright notice be kept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Can you explain me the AGPL V3 licensing ? Can you validate my use of your AGPL Software ?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we can not give legal advice on AGPL licensing. We suggest you to seek legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Can I modify and/or integrate Pydio inside my open-source software?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As long as your software license is compatible with the AGPL, that the modifications are contributed back to the community, and that you leave the Pydio copyright link on the user interface, yes you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Can I use Pydio for free on my website, as a company?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As long as you do not modify Pydio deeply (modifications like theming or little tweaks are not taken into account), and as long as you leave a link to the source code (i.e. to this website, except if you want to host the source code on your own website) on the user-interface (this is the particularity of AGPL against GPL), yes you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, if you change the logo of the splashscreen (using the gui.ajax plugin options) and let the « Pydio Community - Free non supported version © C. du Jeu 2008-2016 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com&quot;&gt;https://pydio.com&lt;/a&gt; » mention, this will be ok. If you want to remove this reference, you should contact us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the forum thread you linked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com/forum/f/topic/kindly-help-me-to-edit-footer-text/#post-59711&quot;&gt;an author advises an user&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the AGPL license, please leave this mention untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com/forum/f/topic/how-to-update-the-bottom-right-corners-details/#post-60958&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not supposed to remove the copyright mentions, nor the “by Pydio”. It’s part of the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another post, someone who seems to be involved with Pydio &lt;a href=&quot;https://pydio.com/forum/f/topic/community-edition-license-text-change/#post-107951&quot;&gt;tells&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is my understanding, that removing a copyright mention is infringing on copyright, especially since our Enterprise license exists to give you the right to do exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Analysis of their claims&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPLv3 defines the concept of an Appropriate Legal Notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays &quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&quot; to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems Pydio is relying on this mechanism to enforce the presence of their notice. It:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mentions the copyright,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clumsily mentions the lack of warranty (“non supported version”), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very indirectly points to the source code and license by providing a link to the project homepage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are not directly informing users of their rights under the AGPL. The Pydio home page doesn't even mention the license. The only directly user-visible mention of the AGPL seems to be inserted by some JavaScript code related to some progress bar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pydio/pydio-core/blob/6ab4db731abdcfdbf76f410f7ec87ee9c1658737/core/src/plugins/gui.ajax/res/js/ui/prototype/class.AjxpBootstrap.js&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;/core/src/plugins/gui.ajax/res/js/ui/prototype/class.AjxpBootstrap.js&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), and that isn't even a link. As such, I'd contest whether this constitutes an Appropriate Legal Notice that would be protected from user-edits.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They ask that the notice is not removed, even though the AGPL explicitly allows supplying the notice through a menu item. This restriction to keep the notice in the footer of each page definitively goes beyond the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, Pydio does not ask you to keep the notice &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;, they just ask you to keep the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While copyright notices are not required to assert copyright, it is probably correct that they should not be falsified or changed to wrongfully claim copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What does the AGPL actually require?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify Pydio or create a work based on Pydio (a “covered work”), this covered work will also have to be AGPL-licensed. This includes your complete website. Section 13 makes it clear that &lt;strong&gt;the AGPL likely requires you to make your website source available to all users:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, this offer would be grouped with other legal information on a separate page or in a settings menu. However, for a website I'd recommend that this offer is mentioned on every page (ideally, you are always just two clicks away from the source code or the license). A short text that links to the separate page would be appropriate in every footer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2017 your-organization. All rights reserved. Source code available under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, note that the source code powering a website, the content of a website, and the look and feel of a website might be copyrighted/licensed/trademarked differently. For example Stack Exchange (which is in the reverse situation: proprietary engine, proprietary look and feel, but open user contributions) makes this very clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;site design / logo © 2017 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pydio copyright notice does not have such distinction and could erroneously invoke the impression that they would own copyright to the contents of your site. It is perfectly understandable and within your rights that you want to avoid this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your website would be based on Pydio, the corresponding source for your website would include Pydio. This also applies to the case where you modify or fork Pydio. By notifying your users in accordance with the AGPL that your website is AGPL-licensed, you satisfy the requirement of notifying your users that Pydio is AGPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since we must make the source code available, this involves “conveying modified source versions” and section 5 applies. There are some requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to &quot;keep intact all notices&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point a) could actually be understood as a &lt;em&gt;requirement&lt;/em&gt; to update that copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also raises two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any Appropriate Legal Notices that must be displayed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there “applicable section 7 additional terms”?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is not entirely clear, I would rather be careful. For the sake of the argument, I'll consider the copyright string they insert into every page as an Appropriate Legal Notice and would therefore recommend to continue displaying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I see no reason to keep the manner in which they are displaying the notice. In fact, such a copyright notice on every page would be confusing. It would be better to list it together with other licenses in a dedicated page. This is similar to how most programs deal with open source licenses (e.g. in Firefox, the “About Firefox” dialogue links to about:license, which lists all libraries with their copyright notices and licenses. This seems to be compatible with putting the Appropriate Legal Notices into a menu item).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does Pydio come with additional terms? Additional terms to the AGPL may be additional permissions, which is not relevant here. Alternatively, the relevant copyright owner may add terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating where to find the applicable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of these points do not apply here, but b) allows terms to be added “requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;the Pydio LICENSE and source code does not contain or mention any such extra terms. Any references to the requirement of maintaining that weird copyright string are either hidden in the project FAQ or in forum discussions. They would not be apparent when only looking at the Pydio source.&lt;/strong&gt; The claim that the AGPL in itself requires you to allow the Pydio copyright notice to be injected into every page is most likely false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also questionable whether that specific string would qualify as an appropriate legal notice or a reasonable legal notice or an author attribution in the sense of the AGPL. After all, some additional terms may conflict with the AGPL in which case they may be ignored – the list quoted above is an exhaustive list of allowed additional terms, as far as they aren't exceptions to other requirements in the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would therefore be &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; OK to move that copyright notice to a less intrusive place, but it is clearly against the author's intention – it seems they accidentally misapplied the AGPL with regards to this notice and forgot to specify any additional terms under AGPL section 7. Instead, the only license specified is AGPL, without any additional terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow the license as-is and exercise your right to remove the string, you will run into two risks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;legal action against you by the copyright holder, which is expensive and annoying for you and your client even if you did not violate the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lack of support by the Pydio community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may therefore be wise to respect this wish anyway, or to at least move their notice to a more convenient but still well-visible place in your page layout, since that would satisfy the &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; of the Pydio notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How would I add additional terms to an AGPL-licensed project?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the &quot;copyright&quot; line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as&#xA;published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the&#xA;License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU Affero General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This note, not the document containing the AGPL full text, is the relevant license of the program! To add extra terms, append them to this license note, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Additional terms under GNU AGPL version 3 section 7:&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;extra terms&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should go without saying that these extra terms should be written by a copyright lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such extra terms are common in C or C++ libraries that make an exception for header code, since the code in headers is compiled into dependent programs. Adding extra terms is rarely seen, since complying with extra terms requires substantial additional effort by licensees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T17:37:36.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4830" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:58:50.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do this by &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/creating-releases/&quot;&gt;creating a release&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/about-releases/&quot;&gt;attaching a binary to the release&lt;/a&gt;. Briefly, you do this by clicking the &quot;Releases&quot; link on the repository's main page and clicking the button to &quot;Draft a new release&quot;. From there, look for the section to attach binaries to the release. (See the links in the first sentence for a detailed tutorial.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Binaries are not part of your Git repository, but are stored separately by Github. Once you create the release, simply view it and copy the link to the binary you want to refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:58:50.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4998" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:58:56.353" Score="2" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study CS at university and obviously do a lot of programming for my course. I'd like to be able to release my source code to show employers and such, but the university is understandably concerned about plagiarism from students that are given the same or similar tasks in subsequent years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an open source license that allows for a restriction on academic usage, so I can cover my back legally if a student were to take the code to use in their own assignments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T15:05:46.960" Title="Is there an open source/free license that allows for restrictions on academic usage?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|restrictions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:41:09.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright line that appears in almost all open-source licenses covers your back.  It establishes that you wrote the code (or claim to have written the code).  You don't need to say anything about plagiarism; that's already covered by the university's rules pertaining to academic usage, whether the material be computer software or passages from a book.  So feel free to use MIT, BSD, CC0, or whatever license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:52:51.240" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:52:51.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4973" CreationDate="2017-01-19T16:37:19.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until he can comment on the code he wrote: 1) how should be treated that code (open or closed source)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite common for boilerplate texts to slip in when you use project templates, project generation tools or else (such as cookie cutter, autotools, etc).  Short of any other clues that the code has a foreign origin and if the company policy is not to redistribute code as open source, you should therefore consider first that this was just an honest mistake. You can further research a possible origin (first with a scan such as with my scancode-toolkit, then check the version control history for clues then eventually search the web, Github, searchco.de, etc. for clues that it may come from a thirdparty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) what if confirmed that his contract didn't allow to use an open source licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the most likely case is oversight rather than any wrongdoing. And since you have an employment contract, in most countries these would cover proper assignments of the rights of the software created by employees to the employers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it change something if he would say he didn't want to use the MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may or not, but this does not matter too much IMHO here as I think the most likely case is one of a mistake or oversight. (because I saw this happen several times). In any case if the code is your employer's, then that person unlikely had authority to decide on the licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If after research you determine that this person reused code from a third-party origin and that this code is indeed MIT-licensed, then this is not a big deal either as this one of the most permissive license with very few requirements and is furthermore sublicenseable including under proprietary terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T11:32:31.907" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T11:32:31.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T16:41:12.780" Score="6" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering whether or not XenServer is truly open source. The project has seen quite some back and forth in its history. It was first released in 2006 as a proprietary extension of the Xen hypervisor, called XenEnterprise, by XenSource Inc. Later it became XenServer released by Citrix, still being a proprietary extension of the Xen hypervisor, until Citrix open-sourced it in 2013 and shifted it's business model towards XenServer support. But the information available is confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2013/06/25/xenserver-6-2-is-now-fully-open-source/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this announcement&lt;/a&gt; by Citrix, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;XenServer 6.2 is now fully open source!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;http://de.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/xpus13-pavlicek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this slideshow&lt;/a&gt; by two Citrix employees which contains some graphics that show everything is open source now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is the this &lt;a href=&quot;http://xenserver.org/2013-05-22-15-48-11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XenServer developers page&lt;/a&gt;, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are a small number of XenServer components which are not able to be open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These components include the Citrix license server daemon and &quot;various&quot; system drivers and user tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, open source always meant, that you can download and recompile 100% of the source code on your own and don't have any forced linkage to proprietary software. Is this a misconception of mine? How can this project, that is such strongly interwoven with commercial mixed/closed-source components, be called &quot;fully open source&quot;? Where is the statutory border in calling something &quot;fully open source&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7194" LastEditorUserId="7194" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T10:32:50.667" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T10:32:50.667" Title="Can XenServer really be treated as open source software?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:04:22.807" Score="4" ViewCount="1159" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license (I pick GPLv3 as an example) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or &lt;strong&gt;general-purpose tools&lt;/strong&gt; or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's not clear to me what constitutes a general-purpose tool. Should it be commercially available at the time of licensing? For how long? Should it be available from an independent vendor, or could it be available only from me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, imagine I've built a compiler which doesn't quite respect the language standard (e.g. makes no difference between single and double precision, or treats &lt;code&gt;1+2*3&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;(1+2)*3&lt;/code&gt;). I could then take a GPL program, modify it to be compatible with my compiler and distribute the binaries along with the source code. Only the source code would be useless, as anyone trying to build it with a standard compiler would not be able to produce a working program. I could even make my compiler commercially available if I have to. Either way, my evil goal is achieved: you will be unable to modify a GPL program, or will have to pay me for the privilege of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this how GPL works, or am I missing something in my argument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T21:38:58.983" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T01:14:18.580" Title="Can I distribute GPL software built by a custom compiler?" Tags="|gpl-3|closed-source|development-environment|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2017-01-27T08:34:05.643" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2017-01-20T07:05:34.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the latest update to your question and the research you made, it seems that &lt;code&gt;/usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt; is NOT an executable from git proper but a wrapper created by Apple that would then likely call and spawn the real git at &lt;code&gt;/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This git wrapper seems to be a signed executable and it asks for some Xcode license acceptance. This is perfectly OK to do this and this should not preclude you to execute the real git at &lt;code&gt;/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reckon this is weird, impractical and byzantine, but from the face of your facts gathering this does not seem to contradict any of the GPL terms for git.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T11:33:29.157" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T11:33:29.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-01-20T08:08:49.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have clarified that your concern is that your university's policy punishes both the creator and the re-user of plagiarised content, and you want an open licence that will prohibit that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but I don't think you are going to find one.  Copyleft licences generally specify what kind of re-use may &lt;em&gt;lawfully&lt;/em&gt; be made of content you so license.  But your university's policy has made it clear that there are &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; lawful kinds of re-use, from a plagiarism standpoint.  So &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; someone were to reuse some of your licensed content, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; your university were to take against this, then (from what you've told us) pointing out that when you distributed your content to the whole world, you did so in a manner that made it clear that you weren't allowing them to do &lt;em&gt;something which they were already forbidden to do&lt;/em&gt; probably won't help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your university's policy makes some kind of explicit exception for content that people were forbidden to re-use, which you have not told us is the case, it might be possible to craft such a licence.  But software so conveyed wouldn't be free/open, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first of the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software is &quot;&lt;em&gt;the freedom to run the program for any purpose&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  A restriction on academic reuse would violate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T08:08:49.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-01-20T09:29:49.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree with the two answers posted so far, I would like to add that publicly posting solutions to programming &lt;em&gt;exercises&lt;/em&gt; you were assigned as part of your coursework is something that your university could legitimately blame you for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, posting programming &lt;em&gt;projects&lt;/em&gt; which are necessarily quite different from student to student, and for which most of the creative ideas came directly from you, is perfectly legitimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction is the same as posting the solution to a knowledge test vs sharing the essay you wrote for some class. If some students were to reuse your essay in the future, it couldn't be held against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course, you should wait for the end of the semester to post anything. And probably also ask your teachers first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T09:29:49.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2017-01-20T09:51:58.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're probably not going to ever find an exact definition of what a general purpose tool is. But I think you're answering your own question. If nobody is ever going to be able to modify the software without your blessing it is simply not free and cannot possibly be GPL compliant regardless of any word-wrangling you may attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the first statements in the GPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee&#xA;  your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make&#xA;  sure it remains free software for all its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T09:51:58.967" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4993" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:44:40.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe your understanding of being able to download and recompile 100% of the source code is the ideal one when concerning open source projects. I would agree with you that not having the source for the system drivers is certainly not &quot;fully&quot; open source. However, when you are integrating with code that somebody else wrote, you often may not have a choice when it comes to open sourcing their code. It sounds like this is the case for some of the XenServer system drivers &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Third-party components which Citrix does not own&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not uncommon to have mixed licensed projects. With most open source licenses, it is perfectly legal to mix proprietary and and open source components as long as they are not linking against each other or borrowing snippets of the other component's code. One common way to do this is to compile the components independently (without sharing code) and have one component &lt;code&gt;fork()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;exec()&lt;/code&gt; the other component's executable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T23:44:40.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5002" CreationDate="2017-01-21T19:44:32.800" Score="6" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a software project, and have created a repository for it on GitHub for backup reasons (I don't actually want to publish it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began doing a little refactoring, and as an experiment added some open source pieces of code I found (I later intend to replace that code with my own code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the code I'm experimenting with has a GNU General Public License, and my project currently has no licensing at all (as it is still &quot;under construction&quot;). As I read on the Internet, no license means &quot;fully copyrighted&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this seems like a violation of the GNU General Public License. Isn't it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really know what to do now. Can I still push my commits to Github? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I don't push them and keep them on my PC until I replace the temporary code pieces. Is it legal to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7202" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-02T22:23:55.407" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T22:23:55.407" Title="GitHub with temporary code under 'GNU General Public License'" Tags="|licensing|github|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5001" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:43:12.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1150/458&quot;&gt;we have already addressed&lt;/a&gt; the question of what licence applies to GitHub-hosted content in the absence of a specific licence declaration, and the prevailing (though not the only) opinion seems to be that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &quot;&lt;em&gt;fully copyrighted&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, I presume you mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (even GPL'ed code is fully-copyrighted, that's why the GPL works).  But it's clear that some rights &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; given away by the mere act of publishing on GitHub.  In that sense, GitHub is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a very good backup medium, and you should make better arrangements immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that enough to comply with the GPL?  You don't say which version applied to the code you're working on, but let's assume it's v3.  Section 5(c) of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says that you may convey modified source versions but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That given, and noting that IANAL/IANYL, putting a work on GitHub looks to me like conveying it, which means that you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; license the work under GPLv3 (and comply with its other obligations).  If you do not convey your modified code, and instead you keep copies only on your own computer(s), and until you do convey it to some other party you may keep and tinker with it to your heart's content without any further obligations.  Similar arguments apply if the original code was licensed under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T08:38:32.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5004" CreationDate="2017-01-21T23:35:36.480" Score="21" ViewCount="12271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a Java program designed to run server-side with a plain HTML web interface: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My app is based based on Apache Tomcat and I wrote a bunch of servlets.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am reusing and I have integrated in this app one single third-party library that is licensed under the AGPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This library performs some file transformation and report creation of sorts using data that I feed it with when I call its methods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This library is not part of code producing any of my web UI, though its output can be made available to users for download in my web app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use this library as-is and &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt; fetched straight from Maven Central: I am merely calling its methods in my own code. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This library &lt;strong&gt;does not have a corresponding source code download mechanism builtin&lt;/strong&gt;  (e.g. there is no mechanism as defined in the AGPLv3 Section 13 or in the AGPLv3 &quot;How To&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of the following cases, would I have to &lt;strong&gt;redistribute the source code of my own application and of this library&lt;/strong&gt; per the AGPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I run this application on a private company network and its is only available internally to my company employees?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I run this application on a public web site on the open internet?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I redistribute this application as a packaged software product to possible customers?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if in my case 2. the author of the library insist that the copyleft is triggered even if I am using the library unmodified and that I must redistribute the whole source code, including my own? [note: this is an addition following answers and comments] &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T17:42:49.030" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T09:56:56.627" Title="AGPLv3 source redistribution: when does it apply to my code for a server-side Java app using an AGPL-licensed library?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|source-code|redistribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5003" CreationDate="2017-01-21T23:35:36.480" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several Q&amp;amp;A about the AGPLv3 on this site and some answers are sending vague or mixed signals. &#xA;Here is a (hopefully) clear and definitive answer with references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First the AGPLv3 is essentially the same license as the GPLv3 with the addition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 13&lt;/a&gt; as you can see in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/pombredanne/2a8d85da552dfab9b8173f771b6a4f98/revisions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;side-by-side diff&lt;/a&gt; of the two license texts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of this new section is spelled out clearly in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#preamble&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;preamble&lt;/a&gt; (bold emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU General Public License permits making a &lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt; and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the &lt;strong&gt;modified source code&lt;/strong&gt; becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the &lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt; running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a &lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt;, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the &lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at which parts of the AGPLv3 are triggered in your four cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Modification&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using an unmodified &lt;code&gt;exact copy&lt;/code&gt; of this library. Therefore this definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 0&lt;/a&gt; is relevant. You are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; using a &lt;code&gt;modified version&lt;/code&gt; if you are using an &lt;code&gt;exact copy&lt;/code&gt; (bold emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, &lt;strong&gt;other than the making of an exact copy&lt;/strong&gt;. The resulting work is called a &quot;modified version&quot; of the earlier work or a work &quot;based on&quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 2&lt;/a&gt; in all three cases (bold emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt; Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And therefore since you did not modify it, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt; is not triggered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Propagation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case 1, you certainly do not &quot;propagate&quot; the work: you are instead &lt;code&gt;executing it on a computer&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case 2 you may be &quot;propagating&quot; the work as you are somehow indirectly &lt;code&gt;making it available to the public&lt;/code&gt; by running your public web server. Yet this is not 100% clear as you are not distributing a copy. I take a prudent point of view that you may be &quot;propagating&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case 3 you are clearly &quot;propagating&quot; the work as you [re]&lt;code&gt;distribute&lt;/code&gt; the code. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 0&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;propagate&quot; a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conveying&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are clearly only conveying in case 3. In case 2, you are propagating but not conveying as there is &lt;code&gt;no transfer of a copy&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 0&lt;/a&gt;) (bold emphasis is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;convey&quot; a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. &lt;strong&gt;Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your further mention that as such this library does not have a built-in mechanism to offer a download of its corresponding source code as explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 13&lt;/a&gt;. Since this library does not have a built-in mechanism to self-download its corresponding source code, your propagation does not &lt;code&gt;enables other parties to make or receive copies&lt;/code&gt;. Which further reinforces the fact that you are not &quot;conveying&quot; in case 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention that this library takes your data and create some report format. I will assume that therefore the output is not subject to the license of the library itself and this part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 2&lt;/a&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not apply&lt;/strong&gt; in your case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in all cases your application is combined and depends on the AGPL-licensed library and I would consider that its copyleft extends to your own source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when is the copyleft effectively triggered in these cases? (and of course the copyleft requirement to eventually redistribute the source code of your own application?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are using the library unmodified, the key is whether you are either propagating or conveying or both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. when I run this application on a private company network and its is only available internally to my company?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you are using the library internally unmodified, without neither conveying nor propagating:&#xA;And per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program. [...]&#xA;  You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all I have to say about your case 1: &lt;strong&gt;you do not have to make any source code redistribution&lt;/strong&gt; of your own code using this library and of this library in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. when I run this application on a public web site on the open internet?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using the library unmodified, and there is no built-in Section 13 corresponding source code download mechanism. In this case you are propagating but not conveying. Therefore &lt;strong&gt;none&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 5&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 7&lt;/a&gt; apply here. In this context, the AGPLv3 is not different from the GPLv3. This is like running an unmodified GPLv3 program that you call from your own code on a publicly accessible web server backend. The &lt;strong&gt;copyleft is NOT triggered&lt;/strong&gt; in the sense you do not have to make any source code redistribution of your own code or of this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. when I redistribute this application as a packaged software product to possible customers?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using the library unmodified and there is still no built-in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 13&lt;/a&gt; corresponding download mechanism (but that mechanism would not matter much in this case). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you are propagating AND conveying. Therefore the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4&lt;/a&gt; applies. In this context, the AGPLv3 is still not much different from the GPLv3. You are redistributing an application that is based on the unmodified AGPLv3-licensed library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;strong&gt;copyleft is triggered&lt;/strong&gt;: you have to make a redistribution of the corresponding source code of both your own code and this library. In this case, this could also cover Tomcat, though Tomcat may also be treated as a &quot;System Libraries&quot; per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 1&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. What if in my case 2. the author of the library insist that the copyleft is triggered even if I am using the library unmodified and that I must redistribute the whole source code, including my own?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this special case you &lt;strong&gt;should never ignore this interpretation&lt;/strong&gt; (even though it looks clearly incorrect based on the facts I presented here) and you have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could consider that short of proper &lt;code&gt;Additional Terms&lt;/code&gt; compliant with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 7&lt;/a&gt; of the AGPL, the author is trying to make a modification to the AGPL which is not OK under this license as the first statement says &lt;code&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/code&gt;. You could discuss this with the author and if you want to take the high road involve the FSF in a private discussion at first to resolve the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or you could take this author assertions and comments at face value and treat this as if it were part of the license. This is usually my approach. E.g in this case and if you do not want to redistribute your source code when using the library unmodified in your case 2. you could just pass using this library entirely if anything because of its possibly incorrect and unclear licensing. Or use it and adopt its author's interpretation of the AGPLv3 -- even if not based on license text facts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally let me provide some additional quotes supporting this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From Jeffrey Kaufman in his article &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/article/17/1/providing-corresponding-source-agplv3-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Do I need to provide access to source code under the AGPLv3 license?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is often misunderstood is that the source code requirement in AGPLv3 Section 13 is triggered only where the AGPLv3 software has been modified by &quot;you&quot; (for example, the entity providing the network service). My interpretation is that, so long as &quot;you&quot; do not modify the AGPLv3 code, the license should not be read as requiring access to the Corresponding Source in the manner prescribed by Section 13. As I see it, many unmodified and standard deployments of software modules under AGPL simply do not trigger Section 13, although making the source code available even if not required under the license is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From @apsillers who relates his exchange with the Free Software Foundation in his answer to a very similar question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/791/947&quot;&gt;Do I have to offer the source of an AGPL (v3.0) licensed Web app even if I didn’t modify it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wrote to the FSF's licensing team about this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[...] Does this [section 13] mean that if I run a *completely unmodified* AGPL-licensed program as a network service, I am *not* required to offer the source code to network users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I received this response (bracketed phrase added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[...] If you haven't modified the software then you are not required to add that functionality [i.e., to download the source]. Of course, if the functionality to download the source is already in the unmodified software, it will already be there for everyone to enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This exchange with the FSF is consistent with the Free Software Foundation article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why the Affero GPL?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]Suppose you develop and release a free program under the ordinary GNU GPL. If developer D modifies the program and releases it, the GPL requires him to distribute his version under the GPL too. Thus, if you get a copy of his version, you are free to incorporate some or all of his changes into your own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But suppose the program is mainly useful on servers. When D modifies the program, he might very likely run it on his own server and never release copies. Then you would never get a copy of the source code of his version, so you would never have the chance to include his changes in your version. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and (with my additions in brackets):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If D runs his version &lt;strong&gt;[e.g. the version that he modified]&lt;/strong&gt;  on a server that everyone can use, you too can use it. Assuming he has followed the license requirement to let the server's users download the source code of his version, you can do so, and then you can incorporate his changes into your version. (If he hasn't followed it, you have your lawyer complain to him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heather Meeker makes this consistent comment in her the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://i2.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2BbdUrr5TL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Open Source for Business&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on page 134 after quoting the AGPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that these requirements only exist if you modify the software. Mere users need not make the source code available. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And she further makes related comments in her article &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.blackducksoftware.com/agpl-out-of-the-shadows&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL: Out of the Shadows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]Not surprisingly, AGPL3 has been slower to propagate than GPL3; if GPL3 has gained acceptance slowly, AGPL3 has been tagging along behind like a younger sibling. But the license is not as scary as it seems. The network interaction provision only triggers source code offer requirements when you modify the Program. In fact, most open source software is used without modification from community versions.[...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And yet another comment in her article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/66/125&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gift that Keeps on Giving – Distribution and Copyleft in Open Source Software Licenses&lt;/a&gt; that highlights what &quot;convyeing&quot; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Clear Case in the Clouds &#xA;  [...]&#xA;  Ultimately, this variation was removed from GPLv3 and memorialized in an alternative form of the license known as the “Affero GPL.” The basic form of GPLv3 makes clear that ASP or SAAS use does not trigger copyleft requirements. In GPLv3, copyleft is triggering by “conveying” rather than distribution, and “To ‘convey’ a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.”&#xA;  Under US law, distribution requires actual transfer of a copy, in whatever form. Therefore, under US law, SAAS use – which involves the access of software without transfer of a local copy to the user – does not trigger copyleft requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Miriam Ballhausen in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/103/191#a__AGPL-3_0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSaaS: Using Free and Open Source Software as Software-as-a-Service&lt;/a&gt; makes this comment, with a point view of Germany (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Section 13 AGPL-3.0 the SaaS provider - as the person who offers his users to remotely interact with a program via a computer network - &lt;strong&gt;is obliged to license any modifications to software licensed under AGPL-3.0 also under AGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, he must give all users (but not all third parties) the opportunity to obtain the corresponding source code of the software version made available via SaaS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T01:27:29.740" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T01:27:29.740" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5003" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:29:16.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your answer isn't complete. I will try to explain why using simple language (no legalese) and a specific example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that you are using the AGPL library iText to create PDF documents. iText is a library that allows people to create PDF documents (in general) and you are using the iText jar to create PDF invoices (a very specific use case). By doing so, you have created a derived work. If you take away iText, your code doesn't make sense anymore: it no longer creates invoices. If you replace iText with something else (e.g. PdfBox), it doesn't work anymore either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you need to disclose your own source code?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CASE 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that you are using your application in batch. Every day, you create all the invoices of the previous day, and you store them on a server. People who want to see their invoice can go online and get their invoice from that server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you can use iText without the AGPL kicking in, because you are using the library in a completely isolated way: you are not distributing it at all, so there is no source code to distribute either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CASE 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't create the invoices in batch, but you create them &lt;em&gt;on-the-fly&lt;/em&gt;: e.g. whenever a user buys something, he triggers a process that creates a PDF. That process involves iText code to be executed. If iText were GPL, you wouldn't have to distribute your code, because you are not distributing a copy, but since iText is AGPL, copyleft applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyleft gives every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your derived work (e.g. creating PDF invoices) is an adaptation of iText (creating PDFs) and your work is bound by the same copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarized:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In court, a judge will look at the involvement of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the user doesn't trigger the copyrighted software in any way, you don't have to disclose the source code of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the user triggers the execution of the copyrighted software, the license applies. In case of the AGPL, you have to disclose your source code to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not my opinion, this is how it has been taught to me by different lawyers such as (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crealaw.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crealaw&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stibbe.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stibbe&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://portelio.be/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portelio&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for instance the following slides by CreaLaw:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is covered by copyright law. The GPLv3 grants rights to users if they meet specific conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROAtD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROAtD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely running GPLv3 software doesn't &quot;activate&quot; the conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqtOD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqtOD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: integrating GPLv3 software into an application, distributing,... can only be done if the GPLv3 is accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vnknz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vnknz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: the copyleft kicks in, and the AGPL makes the copyleft kick in even if the application runs on a network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFuxm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFuxm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you must distribute your application under the (A)GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBFB5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBFB5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is inherent to the concept of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that what I wrote wasn't true, then it would be possible for AGPL software to become part of closed source software. That goes against the spirit of the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T15:34:55.587" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T15:34:55.587" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5007" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:54:31.980" Score="3" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the current open source I'm working on I need to create a Python package (that I'll be using as dependency) that wrap an existing C++ library released using Boost license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be shipping this Python wrapper/package using pip, so I need to define a &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; file.&#xA;&lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; should contain informations about author name, support email and licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I report as author and licensing in &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7206" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T18:54:22.610" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T18:54:22.610" Title="Licensing a wrapper library" Tags="|licensing|python|setup.py|bsl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5006" CreationDate="2017-01-22T14:48:12.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your redistribution combines Boost-licensed code and your own source code in one source or binary package you will need to provide licensing for both. In the simpler case where you would elect to license your own code to be using the Boost license, then there is only one license and possibly multiple copyright statements. You can add these alright in the &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; metadata field. A great practice would be to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX license identifiers&lt;/a&gt; (if needed as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.spdx.org/view/LicenseExpressionFAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license expression&lt;/a&gt; if you use more than one license) for the &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; field. You can also add a proper license classifier in the &lt;code&gt;classifiers&lt;/code&gt; list field of your &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; if there &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is one&lt;/a&gt; that applies well ... But I could not find a Boost license classifier even though this is an &lt;code&gt;License :: OSI Approved&lt;/code&gt; license...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And typically you would also add a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file at the root for clarity, ensuring that it is included in the build source package with a proper entry in the &lt;code&gt;MANIFEST.in&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan to also ship pre-built wheels you should also consider creating a &lt;code&gt;setup.cfg&lt;/code&gt; with these lines to ensure that your &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file is also included in the built wheels:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;[metadata]&#xA;license_file = LICENSE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; point of view, if you are clearly the author of the wrapper then you should add yourself in the &lt;code&gt;author&lt;/code&gt; field. If you are merely packaging the C++ code without much of new code addition you could be the &lt;code&gt;maintainer&lt;/code&gt; and the original author the &lt;code&gt;author&lt;/code&gt;. Your call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T14:48:12.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T20:24:34.307" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start an OpenSaaS software company for a software say WordPress. Something like Wordpress.com. Do I need to mention which software is being used behind the site, and what are the other requirements to get started?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7210" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T08:23:13.813" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T09:06:36.517" Title="Does an OpenSaaS company need to mention which software they are using for it?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5013" CreationDate="2017-01-23T01:24:28.533" Score="4" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have cloned &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/electron/electron-quick-start&quot;&gt;electron-quick-start&lt;/a&gt;, which is licensed as CC0 1.0 (Public Domain). It's purpose is to help new users to learn Electron. I used it as a scaffolding to make a utility app that I'm using for live debugging.  I would like to make this available others to use, but want to make sure I'm doing it in the right way.  The changes I've made don't necessarily contribute to the intent of the original repo, so I don't feel like I should be forking and making a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I just delete the old repo history, rename everything, and put it on Github with a mention of where it came from?  Should I at least preserve the git history?  What should I do in this situation to preserve history and attribution, yet completely rebrand it as a utility app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7213" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:58:49.870" Title="What is the proper etiquette for modifying a repo, then publishing it for an unrelated use?" Tags="|licensing|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5014" CreationDate="2017-01-23T05:20:59.387" Score="7" ViewCount="3600" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question and answer were created as a clarification to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5003/agplv3-source-redistribution-when-does-it-apply-to-my-code-for-a-server-side-ja&quot;&gt;AGPLv3 source redistribution: when does it apply to my code for a server-side Java app using an AGPL-licensed library?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to create a closed source server-side application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to use an AGPL library X in this application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL library X contains a bug that no one is fixing, but that makes my closed source application useless as long as it isn't fixed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppose that I  don't want to share my own code, but I want the bug to be fixed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I pay a middleman to publish an AGPL library Y, based on library X, that contains the bugfix, so that I can keep my application closed source by using the unmodified code of library Y released by the middleman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T16:14:22.710" Title="Can I use the middleman loophole to reduce AGPL to LGPL?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5010" CreationDate="2017-01-23T05:30:57.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/947/philippe-ombredanne&quot;&gt;Philippe Ombredanne&lt;/a&gt;, one can use an &lt;em&gt;unmodified&lt;/em&gt; AGPL library in a closed source web application. I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot fathom how you could consider that &quot;Software that is based on/is linked with/uses an AGPL library is considered software that modifies the software&quot; is a possible interpretation any way I look at it. If there are no modified bits, then how can you claim that it has been modified? Say I use the verbatim sha1-identical iText Jar you published on Maven Central and I use it as-is in an application (internal or public): How could using be considered a modification? If this assertion is true, then I am modifying every software I use or run which does not make any common sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That interpretation goes against common sense because it would cause a middleman loophole that make all AGPL software that is used on a server act as if it were LGPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL only requires changes made to the library and not changes made to the whole work using the library to be made open source. A narrow interpretation of &lt;em&gt;unmodified&lt;/em&gt; would have the same effect: a middleman could publish a modified version of the original AGPL software. The middleman could meet all the requirements of the AGPL. If Philippe Ombredanne is right, that &quot;new&quot; AGPL library could then be used in a closed source web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not correct. It was never the intention when the AGPL was created: the AGPL was created to close a loophole, not to create a new loophole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of view of the FSF in all of this? The page explaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;why not to us the LGPL&lt;/a&gt; explains why a narrow interpretation of modification goes against the spirit of free software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary counterparts. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The middleman loophole can only be used if modification is interpreted in a very narrow way. That's not the way of the free software developer as it would make it possible to use AGPL in non-free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summarized:&lt;/strong&gt; No, the middleman loophole can't be used to make AGPL behave as LGPL, because the &quot;unmodified&quot; premise you used was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, people are claiming that no attorney is joining this conversation, to which I replied by referring to a video that explains when the copyleft kicks in. I was asked to make the content of this video available to people can't (or do not want to) watch the video. To meet this request, I am copy/pasting some of the slides that are presented in the video:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software is covered by copyright law. The GPLv3 grants rights to users if they meet specific conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROAtD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ROAtD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely running GPLv3 software doesn't &quot;activate&quot; the conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqtOD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IqtOD.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: integrating GPLv3 software into an application, distributing,... can only be done if the GPLv3 is accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vnknz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vnknz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: the copyleft kicks in, and the AGPL makes the copyleft kick even if the application runs on a network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFuxm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HFuxm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you must distribute your application under the (A)GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBFB5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kBFB5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is inherent to the concept of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted answer quotes the AGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work&#xA;  in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of&#xA;  an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &quot;modified version&quot; of&#xA;  the earlier work or a work &quot;based on&quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Schwartz doesn't accept this argument, and in the comments he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, when you color in a coloring book, you are arguably&#xA;  creating a derivative work. But it won't be treated as one because it&#xA;  was a necessary step in using the coloring book in the ordinary,&#xA;  expected way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't agree with this argument, so I asked my lawyer if the law would agree. He gave me this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recruiters use tests to assess candidates for a job. An example of such a test is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://foursightonline.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foursight Thinking Profile&lt;/a&gt; test. This test comes as a series of questions that need to be answered by a candidate. These questions can be asked orally, or they can be distributed on a paper form that needs to be filled in. The candidate answers the questions, and either the candidate or the recruiter calculates a score that corresponds with a &quot;thinking profile.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This test is copyrighted. The recruiter can fill it out himself or herself as many times he wants without violating the copyright, but every time the recruiter presents the test to a candidate, he or she has to pay a small copyright fee. Note that the recruiter doesn't change the form. If he changed a question, he would make the test useless because not the test as such is important, it's the resulting thinking profile based on the data filled out by the candidate that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to software: a software library is like that test. If you use a library for your own purposes, you are making normal use of the copyright. However, if you use a library to get a result based on an action of another user, you need permission to use the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms what I said earlier: if you'd use an unmodified AGPL PDF library to create PDFs without any interaction of another user, you don't have to accept the AGPL. However, if you use an unmodified AGPL PDF library in an application that creates invoices based on a user request, the AGPL kicks in, and you have to disclose your own source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:03:02.320" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5008" CreationDate="2017-01-23T08:50:57.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's a general answer to this question: it will depend entirely on the obligations placed one you by the licence(s) that apply to the software you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of wordpress, this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;as I read it&lt;/em&gt; (and IANAL/IANYL) does not require you to announce that you're using the software as part of your SaaS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: in the case of sentrifugo, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sentrifugo.com/download&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their website&lt;/a&gt; says that's under GPLv3, which also (again, IANAL/IANYL) I do not read as requiring that you announce your usage of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to use software published under, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Affero GPL v3&lt;/a&gt;, and you were to modify it in order to provide your SaaS, the licence would oblige you not only to notify your users, but to make the modified software available to them (and the rest of the world) for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of proprietary software, there are generally no such obligations.  I have been involved with any number of big websites built with Oracle as a backend, and our obligations to Oracle began and ended with us giving them about 3.2 metric wheelbarrows full of money (and sending more of the same every so often).  But again, you should read the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So once you know exactly what you intend to do, read the licences (or better still, pay for qualified legal advice on the licences) and then honour any obligations you believe that you have.  Whether you have a &lt;em&gt;moral&lt;/em&gt; obligation to credit the software on which you are building your business, especially if it was provided to you with free-software freedoms and at no cost, is not within the remit of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T09:06:36.517" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T09:06:36.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5009" CreationDate="2017-01-23T12:15:58.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First rule, do not fork. Forking is only used on GitHub to contribute changes back (which shouldn't be the case for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, at your preference, decide to clone the repo and keep the history, which won't be a problem if your project becomes big as the original repo only has a short history of 92 commits. Or choose to just take the code and create a brand new history. In that second case, the first commit could be &quot;Import code from github.com/electron/electron-quick-start.&quot; or something along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; do anything else to preserve attribution as it is not required by the license. However putting a link back from your README would be a nice thing to do. More importantly, as remarked by Glenn Randers-Pehrson, by keeping track of where you got the code, it also establishes your own right to use or convey the code to others (i.e, establishes provenance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T14:58:49.870" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:58:49.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5010" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:58:39.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does cover non-modified use of the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; a work means to copy from or &lt;strong&gt;adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission&lt;/strong&gt;, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &amp;quot;modified version&amp;quot; of the earlier work or a work &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text taken from the license itself. Bolding mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice here you are still &lt;em&gt;adapting&lt;/em&gt; even if you use the entire unmodified library in your project. Because you are making a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; as would be mentioned in the GPL, and because you are adapting the code by writing code to interface with it, you still must abide by the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on this license is that since the AGPL simply adds some conditions to the GPL, anything linked to a piece of AGPL software must also be AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some questions with widely differing opinions on other SE sites:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl-what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/232131/use-of-unmodified-agplv3-lib-am-i-agpl-too&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4691/java-and-agpl-3-how-far-does-license-extend-into-web-app&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some software authors' opinions on the matter: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scylladb.com/opensource/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scylla&lt;/a&gt; does believe in the loophole, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.makehuman.org/license_explanation.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MakeHuman&lt;/a&gt; does not. Quoted below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We promise that we will not seek to enforce the copyleft provisions in the AGPL v3.0 against you if your application (a) does not link to the Scylla database directly but exclusively uses Scylla drivers, and (b) you have not modified, added to, or adapted the source code of the Scylla database in a way that would result in the creation of a “modified version” of or a “work based on” the Scylla database as such terms are used in the AGPL v3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to link to MakeHuman as a library in my non-gpl -licensed application.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't. AGPL stipulates that any derivate or aggregate has to be licensed AGPL too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side-note this is the functional difference of LGPL and GPL/AGPL. LGPL does allow linking without forcing the end result to adopt the LGPL license. But MakeHuman is licensed AGPL, not LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gray area around this is such that I would recommend a lawyer for any questions involving commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7219" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T20:53:28.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4990" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:05:46.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether or not there is a legal way to do this, you also might consider not open-sourcing the code. If all you want to do is show potential employers, you can also remember that the code is still yours to do what you like with. If you want to show employers, go right ahead! You do not need to open up the source to show them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7219" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T15:05:46.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5010" CreationDate="2017-01-23T16:27:00.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure the title of your question matches its body so I see two questions here: one in the title and one in the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I use the middleman loophole to reduce AGPL to LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what is the middleman loophole but what is sure that the AGPLv3 has no provisions to be toned down to the LGPLv3. What it has instead is a section 13 that allows to combine &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3 code with AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; (and the GPLv3 has similar reciprocal terms in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own section 13&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;There is not much more I can comment on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I pay a middleman to publish an AGPL library Y, based on library X, that contains the bugfix, so that I can keep my application closed source by using the unmodified code of library Y released by the middleman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can surely pay a middleman to do this, but in doing so &lt;strong&gt;I do not see any difference between doing this with a middleman and you modifying this library directly. This middleman is just an extension of you and would likely be treated as if it were you&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore every terms of the AGPL that are triggered by you using this middleman &quot;modified&quot; version would apply to you. And eventually if &quot;you&quot; do not share back these modifications you would be in violation of the AGPLv3 terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be very clear in this case if you &lt;code&gt;keep my application closed source by using the unmodified code of library Y released by the middleman&lt;/code&gt; then you would be in violation of the AGPL and eventually not licensed. Whether or not anyone can prove it is another matter. In my own experience, this type of evil behavior is rather quite rare: folks are usually more likely to be ignorant than evil doers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let me play a little &lt;em&gt;What if?&lt;/em&gt; and be the devils advocate (though for the sake of clarity I am not trying to escape copyleft obligation myself nor would I ever condone anything or anyone that would try to do so. As I mention below, I think this would be a clear violation of the AGPL terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if you establish a secret covenant with your middleman such that none can ever know that you have paid a middleman to perform this modification on your behalf?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not change the facts that this middleman is essentially the same as you though it would be hard or impossible for an external party not aware of this covenant to prove that the middleman is in fact just you in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would therefore not be licensed under the AGPL if you do not share back your fixes, though none could prove this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if another party P finds the public release made by your middleman with your modification and is not privy to your secret covenant with your middleman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If P is in good faith reusing this unmodified (e.g P is reusing the unmodified version made by your middleman that incorporates the modifications paid secretly by you), then the AGPL terms for unmodified use apply alright as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5004/947&quot;&gt;my related answer&lt;/a&gt;. From the standpoint of P, this middleman version is used by P unmodified and there is nothing specific in the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 that would preclude this, to the contrary: the spirit of the AGPLv3 as explained in the its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#preamble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preamble&lt;/a&gt; is to ensure that &quot;modifications&quot; are shared back and in turn each shared modified version becomes a new unmodified version from the point of view of the user at the end of the reuse chain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and here again because the middleman shared the modifications and because P is not you and reusing without knowledge of your secret covenant, all is well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would anyone care about someone using an unmodified version if that unmodified version corresponding source code is available from its distributor publicly already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not care in this case. What the AGPL cares for is for modified versions as it should and clearly states in its text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:40:21.517" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5018" CreationDate="2017-01-24T01:34:27.657" Score="4" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it permissible to use a LaTeX template for writing a Curriculum Vitae (CV)/résumé, licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA, in order to gain paid employment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of such templates can be found, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latextemplates.com/cat/curricula-vitae&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (Some of the templates there occasionally seem to engage under dubious licensing practices, like reusing resources under incompatible licenses, but that's out of scope for this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing the CV would presumably be considered as the sharing of adapted material, which according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode#s2a1B&quot;&gt;§2a1B&lt;/a&gt; is allowed for &quot;NonCommercial purposes only&quot;. §1k states that &quot;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation&quot;. Arguably, aiming to obtain a paid job is intended towards commercial advantage, so it would run afoul of this condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principal counterargument is that the intention of the authors was evidently not to prevent other people from using the templates (even applying for a paying job at a charity would not be permitted, leaving only a very small range of possible uses). However, the original intention does not necessarily mean much from a legal point of view, even if it makes it exceedingly unlikely that in actual fact one would be sued for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7228" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:21:45.057" Title="Use of a CC BY-NC-SA licensed LaTeX CV template" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2017-01-24T07:21:45.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you point out, it is not entirely clear if a CV would be NON-COMMERCIAL in this case. I would tend to think that the intent of the author of this template is to prohibit commercial copycats of the web site templates on another template web site but this is not made clear on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latextemplates.com/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, this website is designed to make LaTeX easy for the beginner as well as for the expert by providing heavily commented, easy to understand, templates for a diversity of document types. It is my hope that this website will decrease frustration, increase the use of LaTeX and provide a generally useful service to all who are interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in earnest, it is not clear either if applying a LaTeX template is making the generated document subject to the license of the template if you are NOT redistributing the template itself but only using it to produce a document based on your content (e.g your life redux in a CV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance one moderator of the site (presumably the author?) provides &lt;a href=&quot;http://latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=95583#p95583&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you give away the sources of your CV, i.e. the tex files, you have to include the license.&#xA;Your final output, generated with the plasmati style, is yours and yours alone. No need to mention the template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing for templates is quite a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be treated as a rider to the licensing making it clear that the CV would be yours, but this is a very specific comment on one template in a forum. A more comprehensive clarification would be better IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the same web page has a contact email and an IRC channel at #LaTeXTemplates on irc.latextemplates.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were you, I would contact the author by email or IRC to ask permission and suggest they make it clear on their web site that using these templates in a commercial context (such as CV or else) other than to publish a template web site is not an issue under the CC-BY-NC-SA licensing and would not make the resulting document subject to the CC-BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also need to contact the actual original author of your template too as it is not clear who exactly has actual rights between the site owner and the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:21:45.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T10:36:06.877" Score="-3" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do some real time vendors license Linux when it is already open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had a hard time finding licensing models for companies/distributions like Wind River Linux and RedHawk Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7232" LastEditorUserId="7232" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T00:08:54.297" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T00:08:54.297" Title="Linux Licensing Questions" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:46:26.867" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically vendors such as RedHat, WindRiver, SUSE Enterprise, etc. license support for Linux. The packages they provide will be licensed under open source license such as MIT, GPLv2, BSD, etc. just like a typical Linux distribution. For licenses that require source distribution, e.g. GPLv2, these vendors certainly will comply and give you the full source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is entailed in the &quot;support&quot; that vendors supply? Security updates, newer versions of the packages, and debugging the software they provide. They sometimes might even help you debug applications you write on top of the software they support or debug their software running on your custom hardware. If you've ever tried to debug a kernel oops or a user-space application that you didn't write, you know it's not always the easiest to find the problem in somebody else's code. This is where the Linux vendors excel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not just selling you the free software, they make the individual software components work together, debug your setup, and provide updates for both security and new features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Note that Linux can become preemptive with the preempt-rt patch set and a kernel configuration option, so I geared my answer towards general commercial Linux. It is worth noting that not all commercial Linux vendors may support the preempt-rt flavor of Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T19:16:52.047" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T19:16:52.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5022" CreationDate="2017-01-24T16:29:41.633" Score="4" ViewCount="1432" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the most recommended OSI approved license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's&lt;/a&gt; the list) closest to our current license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commonns Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International&lt;/a&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, why aren't the Creative Commons Licenses OSI approved? OSI itself is licensed by  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7235" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T05:30:02.673" Title="OSI approved License similar to CC BY-SA 4.0" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|osi|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5021" CreationDate="2017-01-25T05:30:02.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons licenses aren't approved simply because they weren't designed to operate on code.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Software has different components, especially source code and compiled code, which the Creative Commons licenses weren't exactly designed for (CC licenses are primarily designed for media).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're probably wondering why the content of the OSI site is under CC. Simply put, it's the most appropriate license to place - a licensed designed for text. Yeah, Apache and others &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; work, but the best is CC, and it's used there. Just because the OSI maintains a list of &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; licenses doesn't mean that they must use one on their site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest license to CC BY-SA is probably the GPL or LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. An application was made for CC0 to be declared open source compliant, however, CC eventually withdrew their application due to the immense debate with certain issues of the license&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T05:30:02.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T10:25:24.887" Score="1" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to build my custom library for eye detection, tracking, blinking, smile etc. I am using below open samples instead of reinventing the wheel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-vision/blob/master/visionSamples/googly-eyes/app/src/main/java/com/google/android/gms/samples/vision/face/googlyeyes/GooglyEyesActivity.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GooglyEyesActivity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-vision/blob/master/visionSamples/barcode-reader/app/src/main/java/com/google/android/gms/samples/vision/barcodereader/ui/camera/CameraSource.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CameraSource&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-vision/blob/master/visionSamples/barcode-reader/app/src/main/java/com/google/android/gms/samples/vision/barcodereader/ui/camera/CameraSource.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CameraSource.Builder&lt;/a&gt; is tightly coupled with Detector like below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;public Builder(Context context, Detector detector)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I prefer to accept &lt;code&gt;Detector&lt;/code&gt; as a separate setter method - thay makes my life happier when it comes to testing. Also, I would like to modify open source code a little bit and package it in my existing custom SDK/library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to modify it i.e renaming package, adding new methods etc. Off course I put same &lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) The Android Open Source Project&lt;/code&gt; text on top of my new class. Does it causes any issues, when I commercialize my custom SDK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7242" LastEditorUserId="7242" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T12:19:23.827" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:30:35.847" Title="Am I allowed to modify CameraSource.Builder of Android vision package?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5023" CreationDate="2017-01-25T12:47:53.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From below link, I got some details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;  modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a.  You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works&#xA;  a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b.  You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;  stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c.  You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that&#xA;  You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution&#xA;  notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that&#xA;  do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d.  If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its&#xA;  distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;  include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within&#xA;  such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any&#xA;  part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places:&#xA;  within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&#xA;  within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the&#xA;  Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative&#xA;  Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The&#xA;  contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do&#xA;  not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices&#xA;  within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an&#xA;  addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such&#xA;  additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the&#xA;  License. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;  provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;  reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such&#xA;  Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;  distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;  in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7242" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T13:30:35.847" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:30:35.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5026" CreationDate="2017-01-25T14:18:36.723" Score="2" ViewCount="1642" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to create an AGPLv3 project which uses an underlying framework which is MIT-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The framework offers some source code which needs to/can be modified to make the framework bend to the users' needs. When I modify those files, can I convert them to AGPLv3 (while keeping required copyright notices of course) or should they stay under the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I just overthinking this and a simple notice such as &quot;This project uses the FooBar v1.2.3 framework which is MIT-licensed&quot; in a README would be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For clarifications, I'll describe the project structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project and all libraries are written in the PHP language. I have the framework installed via a package manager (Composer), which creates a vendor directory where the framework's &quot;core&quot; is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The installation also creates some bootstrapping for me to use (config files, application bootstrap sequence, some baseline MVC pattern goodies). These will be the base of my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things that are installed into the vendor directory are not shipped with the project source but are required for operation and are installable via the package manager. Files and other components are linked from the vendor area by using a simple file &lt;code&gt;include&lt;/code&gt; feature of the language, and are not modified in any part of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I convert the bootstrapping code to AGPLv3 while the contents that are living under the vendor directory stay as MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most PHP frameworks operate on this principle and 99% of projects are done this way. I just want to be sure that I'm legally on the right grounds when licensing the project itself and writing about copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7243" LastEditorUserId="7243" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:21:46.153" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T23:27:28.187" Title="AGPL v3 project with MIT licensed framework" Tags="|mit|copyright|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-01-26T15:34:25.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@ojrask It's not clear what the relationship is between the framework and the AGPLv3 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but here's my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the AGPLv3 project is linking (either dynamically or statically) against the MIT-licensed framework, then both the project and the framework will need to be licensed under AGPLv3. The source for both the framework and the project will need to be distributed. This is true regardless of whether or not you modify the MIT framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no linking involved between the framework and the project, then you are allowed to license them independently (MIT framework and AGPLv3 project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some links showing the X11 (MIT) license is compatible with the AGPLv3:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;The requirements for the MIT license are a subset of the AGPLv3 requirements. Assuming that the bootstrapping code that you mention is also is MIT-licensed, then I believe as long as you keep all of the copyright notices, you should be okay to &quot;convert&quot; (as you call it) to AGPLv3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T23:27:28.187" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T23:27:28.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5028" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:36:17.163" Score="2" ViewCount="1683" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a Java program designed to run server-side with a plain HTML web interface: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am reusing and I have integrated in this app a bunch of third-party libraries that are licensed under the GPLv3. Some are pure Java, some are a combo of C/C++ and Java. I am calling their methods from my Java code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These libraries do not contribute directly to the UI of my app, but rather perform utility functions on the back-end, though some output can be made available to users for download in my web app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use all these libraries as-is and &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt;: I use only the pre-compiled binary Jars as provided by the projects. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of the following cases, when would I have to &lt;strong&gt;redistribute the source code of my own application and of this library&lt;/strong&gt; per the GPLv3? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. when is the copyleft triggered for my unmodified usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I run this web application on a private company network and its is only available internally to my company employees?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I run this application as a public web site on the open internet?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When I redistribute this application (including the GPLv3 libraries) as a packaged software product to a third party?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity: none of these libraries have a GPL exception: they are using the full GPLv3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T08:43:17.967" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T08:43:17.967" Title="GPLv3 redistribution: when does it apply?" Tags="|gpl-3|java|website|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5027" CreationDate="2017-01-27T00:39:04.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I run this web application on a private company network and its is only available internally to my company employees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I run this application as a public web site on the open internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Neither of these cases is an example of &quot;conveying&quot; (or &quot;distribution&quot; as it used to be called in GPLv2): &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoDistributionRequirements&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoDistributionRequirements&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I redistribute this application (including the GPLv3 libraries) as a packaged software product to a third party?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. The FSF view on this issue is that your application will be a derivative work of the libraries you are linking with, and therefore the whole program must be released under GPLv3. If you can successfully argue that the bundle is a mere aggregate, however, you may be able to get away without open sourcing your application, and only providing sources for the GPLv3 libraries. Expect to get a lot of flame if you go this route, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, check for linking exceptions in the libraries. Many GPL libraries have linking exceptions that explicitly allow proprietary programs to link with them. In this case, you are free and clear as long as you distribute the sources of, and any modifications you make to, the &lt;em&gt;libraries&lt;/em&gt; themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7252" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T00:39:04.683" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2017-01-27T01:14:18.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think a compiler is a general-purpose tool. In fact, I would say a compiler is the ultimate general-purpose tool as you're supposed to be able to compile any kind of program with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could then take a GPL program, modify it to be compatible with my compiler and distribute the binaries along with the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the source code would be useless, as anyone trying to build it with a standard compiler would not be able to produce a working program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't be useless. Any cool features you added just need to be ported back by adding parentheses to control order of operations or specifying single- vs double- precision floating point as required for compilation with a standard compiler. This will be a lot less work than developing those features from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you didn't add any cool features, why would anyone care about your version at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Either way, my evil goal is achieved: you will be unable to modify a GPL program, or will have to pay me for the privilege of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure we will be able. You've put a few minor roadblocks in place, but then GPL doesn't say you have to make your modified work &lt;strong&gt;easy to adapt by others&lt;/strong&gt;. You just can't hide your contribution to a GPL program in an obfuscated form like object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7252" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T01:14:18.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5030" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Python is a dynamic programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" Score="0" Body="For questions that relate to the Python programming specifically" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T08:51:12.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5032" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; is the file used to document and build packages with the Python programming language. It is used to create and publish open source packages in a the Python Pypi open source package index. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/setupscript.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.python.org/2/distutils/setupscript.html&lt;/a&gt; for details&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5033" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" Score="0" Body="For questions that relate to the `setup.py` Python packaging script." OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T08:57:56.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Versioning is an important part of releasing free and open source software. Version numbers are typically attached to a release to help users identify precisely the corresponding code of a released package and to determine which one is older or newer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" Score="0" Body="For questions that relate to open source programs and packages version numbers and versioning." OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T09:00:20.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5037" CreationDate="2017-01-27T09:30:07.930" Score="1" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker is a rather popular open source project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the problems it is solving (around code isolation and environment reproducibility) are not new and have been solved before with many other techniques such as virtual machines, chroot jails, virtual hosts and environments, static linking and bundling of packages, or distros such as Nix and Guix, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what would be the reasons that made Docker so popular? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it do differently from a technical or community perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not looking for opinions but rather for facts properly supported with references when possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T09:52:12.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T11:05:26.877" Title="Why is Docker so popular?" Tags="|community|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-01-27T20:27:11.167" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5036" CreationDate="2017-01-27T11:05:26.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking as someone who doesn't like docker (or containerisation in general) and thinks it gets wildly overused in places it doesn't belong, I also have to say it's very impressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;chroot&lt;/code&gt; jails give you filespace separation, but not network namespace, PID space, or any of the other separations that full virtualisation brings.  Full virtualisation gives you near-total separation from other instances running on the same hardware, but you have to set aside a kernel's-worth of memory (and to a lesser extent, CPU) for each VM spun up.  Containers in general give you a higher level of separation than anything before (save virtualisation) offered, but unlike full virtualisation they're so light that any old desktop can accommodate tens of them without pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Docker in particular adds to that copy-on-write file systems and thereby the ability to quickly and cheaply sandbox any number of different code changes, before deciding which to keep and bake into the FS image, and which to discard and roll back.  Though I am not a developer, I can dimly see how powerful a technique this must be for ultra-rapid prototyping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven't asked about the problems, so I won't start into my production-sysadmin rant.  But even as someone who doesn't like some of the ways these tools are used, it seems very clear to me why they've spread so rapidly, and become so popular.  If I had to do what developers do, I think I'd find them a superb tool, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T11:05:26.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5039" CreationDate="2017-01-28T23:25:05.503" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to change an old Android app that is under GPLv3. I will do some refactoring of existing code, add some new functionalities and publish it as commercial app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What part of code I must publish as public? Only those parts that was in original project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I add new files (java classes, resources, etc.) under other licence and don't publish them even if whole project didn't compile &amp;amp; work without new files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7263" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T11:55:46.833" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T11:55:46.833" Title="Maintaining old Android app under GPLv3" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-3|android|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5038" CreationDate="2017-01-29T01:08:49.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your new app clearly builds on the old GPL code. Without the old GPL code you would have needed more resources to deliver the same app quality. You have extended the old code and you must also publish everything, the unmodified old code and everything you have changed or added under the same GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must also acknowledge your app is a GPL project.&#xA;This is just the way how GPL works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6533" LastEditorUserId="6533" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T09:44:15.333" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T09:44:15.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5038" CreationDate="2017-01-29T09:33:08.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't change a word in Student T's excellent and efficient answer, save that to note that you are only obligated to publish (and, moreover, freely-relicense) your changes if you give or sell copies of your modified software to other people.  That is, you incur licence obligations not when you modify the original code, but when you convey copies to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you want to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you will then be obligated to publish your changes along with the original code, it's because you will have conveyed &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; copies of the original GPLv3 work.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s0 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that given, GPLv3 s5 says that when &lt;em&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T09:48:49.477" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T09:48:49.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5054" CreationDate="2017-01-29T13:53:33.360" Score="15" ViewCount="11279" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I review a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/pombredanne/2a8d85da552dfab9b8173f771b6a4f98/revisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;side-by-side diff&lt;/a&gt; of the GPLv3 and  the AGPLv3 the only significant change seems to me to be this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;addition in the section 13&lt;/a&gt; of the AGPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later -after the &lt;code&gt;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&lt;/code&gt; line- this recommendation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/a&gt; is different in the AGPLv3 and points back to its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;If your software can interact with users remotely through a computer network, you should also make sure that it provides a way for users to get its source. For example, if your program is a web application, its interface could display a &amp;quot;Source&amp;quot; link that leads users to an archive of the code. There are many ways you could offer source, and different solutions will be better for different programs; see section 13 for the specific requirements.&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to state that the main difference in the terms and conditions is therefore limited to Section 13? or are there any other textual differences that should be considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct, would it be correct to consider that the interpretation of the AGPLv3 can be based on any interpretation of the GPLv3 that I could make plus whatever interpretation I can do for this addition to the AGPLv3 in section 13?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If 2. and 3. are correct and that I use &lt;code&gt;unmodified&lt;/code&gt; code licensed under the AGPLv3, would it be correct to consider that the terms of the GPLv3 and the terms of the AGPLv3 are then essentially the same in this &lt;code&gt;unmodified&lt;/code&gt; case? And that therefore any guideline or interpretation of the GPLv3 terms and conditions for this case would apply equally well here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-12-21T08:29:58.323" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T08:29:58.323" Title="Of the differences between the GPLv3 and the AGPLv3 texts: what to make of them?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5041" CreationDate="2017-01-29T14:32:32.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In this correct to state that the main difference in the terms and conditions is therefore limited to Section 13? or are there any other textual differences that should be considered?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If this is correct, would it be correct to consider that the interpretation of the AGPLv3 can be based on any interpretation of the GPLv3 that I could make plus whatever interpretation I can do for this addition to the AGPLv3 in section 13?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 is basically GPLv3 with additional conditions, when using the software through a server/API/network as mentioned in section 13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If 2. and 3. are correct and that I use unmodified code licensed under the AGPLv3, would it be correct to consider that the terms of the GPLv3 and the terms of the AGPLv3 are then essentially the same in this unmodified case? And that therefore any guideline or interpretation of the GPLv3 terms and conditions for this case would apply equally well here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something I'm not familiar with but you can read the GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and you can find the term &quot;covered works&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources : &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Disclaimer: I'm just a programmer, not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastEditorUserId="6767" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T12:02:54.967" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T12:02:54.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5045" CreationDate="2017-01-29T21:45:20.600" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I want to release a program, written in Java, that is a sort of encyclopedia containing data about a game. This program would contain images from the game, obtained via screenshot, and some of them processed in a program like GIMP. The purpose of these images would be to illustrate about stuff that exists in the game, and not to be a part of the interface of the program (like the appearance of the interface's controls). I would like to license this program with the MIT License (Expat).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible? If not, can I release these images in some other way and make my program load them from the outside?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for the answer on Google was nigh impossible (or I don't know the correct search terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5158" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:15:40.063" Title="Can I license a program containing data from a video game?" Tags="|licensing|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5043" CreationDate="2017-01-30T09:15:40.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These images would be clearly copyrighted. But would it be fair for you to use them nonetheless? At least in the US there is something called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aoeiii-cover.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia image&lt;/a&gt; is a low res image of a game box and contains this fair use related statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This image is cover art for a video game, and its copyright is most likely held by the game's publisher or developer. It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of game cover art&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;to visually identify the game in question&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;on the English Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;constitutes fair use under United States copyright law. Other uses of this image may be copyright infringement. For more information, see Wikipedia:Non-free content.&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is therefore whether or not your planned usage would be fair use or not.&#xA;A few illustrative images may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A database with 100 or 1000 screenshots may not and therefore you would be &amp;quot;infringing&amp;quot; of the game developers/authors/owner copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best course of action is to ask for an explicit written permission to the game developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4575/am-i-allowed-to-use-these-gifs-for-my-game&quot;&gt;Am I allowed to use these gifs for my game?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T09:15:40.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T11:52:33.590" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the AGPLv3 text -after the &lt;code&gt;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&lt;/code&gt; line- there is this recommendation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/a&gt; which rather terse and states that there are &lt;code&gt;many ways&lt;/code&gt; to offer source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;If your software can interact with users remotely through a computer network, you should also make sure that it provides a way for users to get its source. For example, if your program is a web application, its interface could display a &quot;Source&quot; link that leads users to an archive of the code. There are many ways you could offer source, and different solutions will be better for different programs; see section 13 for the specific requirements.&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the section 13 it points back to does not provide much more guidance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are actual mechanisms implemented by AGPL-licensed projects for users to get the corresponding source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a web application with a UI?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for an application with no UI and only a REST API?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a command line application?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T10:10:19.413" Title="Built-in mechanisms to fetch the corresponding source code for AGPLv3-licensed projects" Tags="|agpl-3.0|source-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5051" CreationDate="2017-01-30T13:19:50.593" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say we have a piece of software which is licensed under the GPL. There are no binaries; it's a framework of groups of services and libraries of Python code running on a server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can understand, private persons can modify GPL code and run it privately without having to disclose anything. They're not distributing anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if a corporation/entity is using this software in question, or other libraries/software that simply runs on a server or in the &quot;cloud&quot; as a backend without distributing anything, do they need to disclose their modified source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software in question here does let users interact with it through a web interface. You can also use a binary to communicate with the backend software through a CLI client program. Apart from that, everything takes place on a server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users of this software are not the public per se, but let's say for example students/employees at a college/university or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main question here is: Can the original authors of the software demand to see the modifications? Can the end users? If neither is true, what license other than the GPL would be appropriate? Would Affero GPL cover only the latter group, and not the former? Can the former group even be covered here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7273" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:42:50.887" Title="Modifications of server software under GPL, with web/CLI interface" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5050" CreationDate="2017-01-30T13:50:20.370" Score="2" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case I'm about to use an image from Wikimedia Commons (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sa-warthog.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sa-warthog.jpg&lt;/a&gt; for example), what exactly does &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mean? There is hardly ever any exact formulation that the autor requires except for the generic CC block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be sufficient? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Image &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sa-warthog.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sa-warthog.jpg&lt;/a&gt; is part of Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7274" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T16:18:47.923" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T16:18:47.923" Title="What exactly does &quot;attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor&quot; mean in case of CC-BY-SA" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by-sa|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5053" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:20:17.297" Score="3" ViewCount="1703" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a piece of software that I have chosen to license under the GPL. Its configuration is technically also code. Are any run-time configuration files also licensed under GPL? Do I have to disclose them if someone asks for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The configuration is in a separate repository from the main code, but is imported (&quot;linked&quot;, I suppose) in the code. There is confidential information in the config files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7273" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:29:26.837" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:29:26.837" Title="Licensing of configuration files that are technically code" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5048" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:24:34.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons wiki best practices page&lt;/a&gt; suggests that a good attribution includes the title, author, source and license of the material. If there is no format specified you can't miss if you follow those basic rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case the title is: &quot;A soiled Warthog relaxing during a hot day at San Diego Zoo, California, USA&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The author: &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sanjay_ach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sanjay_ach&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The source is the link you provided&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And the license is CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T14:29:52.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:29:52.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5047" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:42:50.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a corporation/entity is using this software in question ... without&#xA;  distributing anything, do they need to disclose their modified source&#xA;  code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5040/458&quot;&gt;I discuss in more length here&lt;/a&gt;, the obligations to free your modified software are generally triggered when you &lt;em&gt;convey&lt;/em&gt; a copy.  At the risk of oversimplifying, for an individual, this means copying it to another person (legal or otherwise); for an organisation, it generally means copying it outside the organisation.  In short: no, they do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can the original authors of the software demand to see the modifications? Can the end users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once copies are conveyed, the recipients of those copies have the right to get GPL-licensed source along with anything else they get.  They may then distribute further copies to whomsoever they wish, but they are not &lt;em&gt;obliged&lt;/em&gt; to do so.  In short: neither group can (well, they can, but their demands can be ignored).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If neither is true, what license other than the GPL would be appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt; is a licence which grants to remote interactive users the right to get freely-licensed copies of the source.  That would certainly be a candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would Affero GPL cover only the latter group, and not the former? Can the former group even be covered here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL covers &quot;&lt;em&gt;all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  That certainly includes your latter group (the end-users).  As I read it, it doesn't immediately include your former group (the original authors), but they can join the latter group by interacting with the software over a network.  Again, as I read it, this can be as simple an interaction as, say, loading a front page in a web browser; the AGPL doesn't specify any particular depth or complexity to that interaction.  At that point, they too are entitled to freely-licensed copies of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:42:50.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T20:55:36.673" Score="8" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used an AGPL-licensed library for a data study, and am hoping to release and link to a Jupyter Notebook with my methodology. I was hoping to learn what license, if any, I would need to include with my notebook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The notebook imports a forked version of an AGPL tool (the fork only differs by three lines of code meant to catch an exception, which is currently an Open PR to the original repo.) This fork is in a repo separate from my notebook.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The notebook relies heavily on methods from the AGPL fork, but does not copy or modify source code from it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The notebook will be published standalone, in its own/separate repo, with a comment linking to the forked repo above the relevant import statement in the notebook.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, the AGPL fork automatically inherits the AGPL license from the original repo. But I then am unsure about what happens when I import this fork into a notebook and publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my notebook imports a fork of an AGPL library, but I don't make any changes or copy source code from the fork into my Jupyter notebook, can I release a notebook that imports/makes heavy use of this library without needing to license the notebook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My end goal is to link to the notebook in a data study post on a company blog so readers can see my methodology. I just want to make sure I am correctly licensing my study/providing proper attribution for this AGPL tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7279" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:30:47.763" Title="Do I need to license a Jupyter Notebook that uses a forked AGPL library?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-notice|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5049" CreationDate="2017-01-31T11:51:35.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, if you have created the software yourself you are not bound by the GPL in any way even if you have chosen to distribute it under the GPL. You own the software, you don't need a license to use it, and you can do anything you want with it. You do not need to disclose anything. The rest of my answer is only relevant for users bound by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the configuration files, if they are required to build the software, they are decidedly a part of the &quot;corresponding source&quot; mentioned in Section 1 of the GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &quot;complete source&quot; in Section 3 in the GPLv2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as your software can be built and used without the configuration data itself, the configuration data doesn't belong to the complete/corresponding source. The configuration template files probably do though, but that's no issue I assume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T11:59:23.087" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T11:59:23.087" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5041" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:20:36.767" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In this correct to state that the main difference in the terms and conditions is therefore limited to Section 13? or are there any other textual differences that should be considered?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, your analysis of the text is correct. The FSF says of the AGPL (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. &lt;strong&gt;It has one added requirement&lt;/strong&gt;: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the fact that Section 13 is the only difference, and the FSF summarize the AGPL as having only one difference from the GPL, it is correct to understand the AGPL as otherwise identical to the GPL, outside of the addition of section 13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If this is correct, would it be correct to consider that the interpretation of the AGPLv3 can be based on any interpretation of the GPLv3 that I could make plus whatever interpretation I can do for this addition to the AGPLv3 in section 13?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that sounds basically correct. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt; includes the note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each place that the matrix states GPLv3, the same statement about compatibility is true for AGPLv3 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can certainly know that compatibility within the xGPL family is identical for GPLv3 and AGPLv3. As for its compatibility with other licenses, the only case I can think they would differ is: if there were some hypothetical license that was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;almost GPLv3-compatible, except&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it imposes a requirement identical the requirement in AGPLv3 section 13&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then such a license would be GPL-incompatible but I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it would be AGPL compatible, since such a requirement would be additional to the GPL's terms, but not additional to the AGPL's terms. As far as I know, no license like that actually exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If 2. and 3. are correct and that I use unmodified code licensed under the AGPLv3, would it be correct to consider that the terms of the GPLv3 and the terms of the AGPLv3 are then essentially the same in this unmodified case? And that therefore any guideline or interpretation of the GPLv3 terms and conditions for this case would apply equally well here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph in Section 13 begins with a conditional: &quot;&lt;em&gt;if you modify the Program...&lt;/em&gt;&quot; If you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; modify the program, then that paragraph is not relevant to your use of the software. I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/791/50&quot;&gt;written to the FSF licensing team and had this reading confirmed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only case that would be different (as  far as this layman can tell) would be cases concerning downstream recipients who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; modify the software. So, if you aren't a downstream recipient who modifies the software, then your obgligations under the AGPLv3 would be the same as under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:20:36.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5060" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:30:52.553" Score="5" ViewCount="1639" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the general clause contained in most licenses that reads as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;  copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of the libraries in use are MIT and BSD. There are some additional packages with other licenses which I have explicitly documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the documentation of the project do I need to individually reference each packages license in my package.json file or am I covered by just allowing NPM to download the licenses contained in the packages own repositories when the user goes to build the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three embedded libraries which are redistributed with the library, those licenses I have explicit copies of in my documentation. The libraries in use that are imported by NPM are the ones I am not sure about how to properly follow the licenses. They are used in their 'binary' form in one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7285" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T07:55:01.190" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:55:01.190" Title="Do packages listed in a package.json file need to be documented individually?" Tags="|licensing|mit|bsd|documentation|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5063" CreationDate="2017-02-01T08:07:26.453" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a new project today, am I allowed to license my software using the older version of licenses such as &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2&lt;/strong&gt; (vs. GPLv3), or &lt;strong&gt;BSD 4 clause&lt;/strong&gt; (vs BSD 3 clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I only allowed to use the latest version of these licenses instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T07:36:41.477" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:36:41.477" Title="Using older versions of licenses in new projects" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5056" CreationDate="2017-02-01T08:58:18.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by new you mean new from scratch you are free to choose any license (or &quot;version&quot; of a license) that suits you. But try not to think of it as versions but rather just different licenses. For example, the GPLv3 and the GPLv2 are not even compatible with each other and are quite different from several aspects. The GPLv2 is still a logical choice for many projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some sort of rule of thumb I would suggest that if a license is NOT found among the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI approved licenses&lt;/a&gt; you need to have a very specific reason to use it for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are creating a new project based on somebody else's work you need to choose the same or a compatible license for your project. For BSD and other similar non-copyleft licenses this is normally no issue as they can mingle with each other happily, but for reciprocal licenses like the GPL a single contradictory term between two licenses means that they cannot be mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T10:20:07.157" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T10:20:07.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5061" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:45:57.933" Score="4" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a project I am thinking about open sourcing but I am concerned about the licensing issue of what exactly is trivial code. I am concerned because if I did not know how to do something I would just look online or in books for examples. If I was looking to learn how to implement some logical concept like a merge sort I would translate some pseudo-code into C or on the other hand if I was looking for the syntax form I would look at code snippets that does a certain operation i was interested in such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;int copyfile(char *sourcepath,char *destpath)&#xA;{&#xA;    int dest_fd;&#xA;    int source_fd;&#xA;    int errorcode = 0;&#xA;    if((source_fd = open(sourcepath,O_RDONLY)) &amp;lt; 0)&#xA;        return 1;&#xA;    if((dest_fd = open(destpath,O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC,0755)) &amp;lt;0)&#xA;        return 1;&#xA;&#xA;    char *buf[4096];&#xA;    ssize_t readval;&#xA;    while((readval = read(source_fd,buf,sizeof(buf)) &amp;gt; 0))&#xA;    {&#xA;        if(write(dest_fd,buf,readval) &amp;gt; 0)&#xA;           errorcode = 1;&#xA;    }&#xA;    close(source_fd);&#xA;    close(dest_fd);&#xA;    return errorcode;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would something like this cause me an issue in licensing my project? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addendum:&#xA;I have a follow up question in the same vein and I thought that I should add it to this one over creating a whole new question. If this an incorrect conclusion let me know in the comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the project im working on in my spare time to learn the in's and out's of a POSIX compliant system and the POSIX C library is basically reading the Single Unix Specification documents and trying to clean room re-implement them with the eventual goal of having a small fully compliant POSIX system capable of boot strapping itself without the dependency of the GNU tools and under a single license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this endeavor I've started to read classic UNIX and C works like the K &amp;amp; R book in which they explain fundamental concepts of the C language creating examples that are stripped down versions of Unix utilities and C stdlib function and more importantly some of the algorithms behind these functions as well as some what in my mind seem to be fundamental concepts of computer science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breaking this into two subquestions one dealing with what I would describe as fundamental concepts and the other dealing with well known algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a&#xA;What is the delineation point between basic logical concepts and copyrighted code.&#xA;Giving a few examples: (also these are off the top of my head from what I remember not directly copied just in case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a.1&#xA;The standard library function strlen which returns the length of a string minus the null can be described like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;int strlen(char *string)&#xA;{&#xA;    int i;&#xA;    for(i = 1;string[i] != NULL;i++)&#xA;        ;&#xA;    return i;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also I know strlen is of type size_t in the stdlib) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;void swap(char *old,char *new)&#xA;{&#xA;    char *tmp = old;&#xA;    old = new;&#xA;    new = tmp;&#xA;    return;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1.a.1 when boiled down to a simplistic child like definition is count each position until x is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1.a.2 basically swap x with y and y with x.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extracting the idea to the world of the physical my examples are respectively, count up a set number of items until you run out then stop leaving the last number said / though as how many items you have, and take one item and swap places with a second item. Which describe two skills / concepts a young child can understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus dove tailing back into my first subquestion. At what level does something go from programming something that is so fundamentally logically simplistic to something licensable. Would using a commonly used loop variable name like i or logical names like temp / tmp for temporary storage  or string / str / s for string cause an issue or are these things so simplistic that it is classified as what someone in the comments below mentioned de minimis or the merger doctrine ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This second subquestion falls under the category of seeing example implementations of basic algorithms I.e the type of things taught first or second year students in a principles of algorithmic design 101 class such as quick sort or binary search of which there are a very finite number of ways in which to go about implementing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7295" LastEditorUserId="7295" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T09:03:03.053" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T09:03:03.053" Title="What is defined as trivial code when licensing a project" Tags="|licensing|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5055" CreationDate="2017-02-01T16:22:27.777" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The theory is that if you redistribute all the deps (and least for all embedded deps) then you would be responsible to comply with their license (including attribution, etc). And this is for all the direct deps and deps of deps, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;all the way down&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the deps you do not distribute but would be installed by a user of yours at build time, you do not need to attribute... Yet I suggest providing some high level information for these anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale is that it would be best if you provide the least possible surprise to your users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say your project is GPL-licensed and somewhere down the dependency chain is a package that is not GPL-compatible... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies if your package is under a permissive MIT-style license and somewhere down the dependency chain is a package that is GPL-licensed, eventually impacting the whole chain with its copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases as a user I would like to be informed by you about what I am getting with your project. It does not have to be detailed but at least list the few components if any that would have significantly different licensing: e.g copyleft or limited copyleft if permissive,  non-copyleft compatible if copyleft, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a minimalist and useful documentation of third-party deps, openstack provides their Python requirements files &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/requirements/tree/global-requirements.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with license comments&lt;/a&gt;. These files are more or less the equivalent of the deps section in a &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; and in this case they &quot;resolve&quot; them at full depth first (with a &lt;code&gt;pip freeze&lt;/code&gt;-like command).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine an npm-shrinkwrap or yarn.lock file with similar comments or attributes for an NPM deps tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note you could use my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scancode-toolkit&lt;/a&gt; to help collect the license information of your deps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:54:39.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5059" CreationDate="2017-02-01T16:44:54.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html#section3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license texts&lt;/a&gt; provide some indication of what would be considered &quot;trivial&quot; amount of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, or small macros, inline functions and templates (ten or fewer lines in length)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, Oracle and Google have argued in US court over &lt;code&gt;a nine-line rangeCheck function&lt;/code&gt; being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copied&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this context, I personally consider that anything should be properly attributed as licensed and documented (including of course complying with the license) in particular code snippets from StackOverflow, books and man pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StackOverflow content has a clear CC-CY-SA license. Books code examples are either licensed under an open source license or are not licensed for reuse unless you obtain permission of the publisher. Man pages usually have a license, typically -but not always- the same license as the license of corresponding software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of doubt and a clear license, I do always contact the author to obtain a clear and explicit permission: If anything out of fairness to the author that made the gift to publish their code in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some consider that 3 lines or less is game for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;. It could be that this is fair use and if this were the case it would still require proper credits and attribution (such as with comments) to document the provenance of the snippet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;code&gt;Would something like this cause me an issue in licensing my project?&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no issue per se, but you should track what the license and author is for this snippet and properly credit this snippet (ideally adding some link too) and comply with whatever its license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license terms are missing, or unclear and the author cannot be reached for clarification, I would stay away from reusing this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T05:57:01.533" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T05:57:01.533" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5056" CreationDate="2017-02-02T08:28:27.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can use any version of any license you please.&lt;/strong&gt;  You are the author. You do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No FOSS license could say something to the contrary, including no such license could restrict you to use other licenses or other version of a license for your original work .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically each new &quot;version&quot; of common FOSS licenses is in itself a new license. Most &quot;versioned&quot; licenses have terms that may allow to use a newer version of a license for code using a previous version, but not always. This is a permission in all cases, never a restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases such as the GPL family the relationships between all these versions can start being .... &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html#new-compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's complicated!&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T16:36:39.480" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:36:39.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5065" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:56:33.350" Score="5" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n#Kopimi&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n#Kopimi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I'm looking to release a piece of software as &quot;Kopimi&quot;. I want to release it into the public domain so there is nothing stopping someone from using my work. However, can I still be held liable, since it doesn't explicitly release the author from liability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7305" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T01:10:50.827" Title="Releasing software as Kopimi" Tags="|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5064" CreationDate="2017-02-02T18:26:03.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article you linked to notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While Kopimi may appear to be a radical free content license, in effect similar to Creative Commons Zero, no one associated with Piratbyrån ever called Kopimi a license, instead describing it as a symbol of certain ideas. The website of Kopimi contains no terms or legal text. The Open Source Initiative, Free Software Foundation, or any other organisation within the open-source movement, does not list Kopimi as an approved license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kopimi symbol is just a symbol. People sometimes use it to mean, &quot;Please use this however you like and I promise not to sue you,&quot; but it's not clear to me if a court would enforce such a vaguely implicit promise against you, the author, if you changed your mind and &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; decide to sue someone. This isn't a condemnation of the Kopimi symbol by any means, but merely my opinion that the Kopimi symbol is not a license (nor an acceptable substitute for one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to license your work freely, then &lt;em&gt;actually attach a license to it&lt;/em&gt; to promise a clearly-defined set of permissions to all your recipients. If you want to impose no restrictions on downstream distirbution and modification, I highly recommend CC0 (combination license and public-domain dedication) which is recommended &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0&quot;&gt;by the FSF&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot;&gt;by Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; for use on software. The CC0 license/dedication includes a disclaimer of liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that CC0 does not license any patent rights you may have in the software. CC0 is only a copyright license. If you want to license your patent rights, to assure recipients that you will never hold them liable for infringement of one of your patents, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; is a permissive license that grants patent rights. However, it still requires attribution, which may be more restrictive than you want your absolutely-free license to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T01:10:50.827" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T01:10:50.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5068" CreationDate="2017-02-03T16:19:24.697" Score="3" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a library released under a license incompatible with the GPL. That library adds some critical feature to the GPL program that I want to modify. And I also want to make the result available to the public, but without releasing the source of the resulting executable (only the original one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have in mind right now is releasing a binary patch &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; the executable compiled from the legit GPL source. Say, I compile the original GPL code to exe, then I compile the modified one, that adds my incompatible library's functionality, then I do binary diff and only release the file that contains bytes that should be written to the original exe, and where one should put them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a patch doesn't have a single piece of code that the original GPL program has, so it's not a derivative work. It isn't designed to work along with that program either. It just changes some bytes, and it's hard to tell what those bytes do, what they internally are, and what's the source of the library that was added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this approach get covered anywhere in the official docs about GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5080" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T07:34:14.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:34:14.213" Title="Binary patches to a GNU GPLv2-licensed executable" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5067" CreationDate="2017-02-03T16:43:58.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless the diff you plan to release is useful without the GPL binary, you cannot possibly claim that it is not designed to work with the GPL binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL faq&lt;/a&gt; at gnu.org (strong type added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, &lt;strong&gt;that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T16:49:19.947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T16:49:19.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T17:51:47.500" Score="6" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a proprietary library whose API I want to re-implement, which is provided to the users with specification, and its use is limited by its license to &lt;strong&gt;internal evaluation&lt;/strong&gt; (to develop programs that will be ran by that library) and &lt;strong&gt;independent implementation&lt;/strong&gt; of the given spec (which means it should not derive from/contain any source code or binaries of the provided library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say, before deciding to make my own independent implementation, I searched the web and found some programs that seem to have already made such implementation, and are open source. My initial wish is to go ahead and fork them, but I want to make sure those implementations are indeed independent and aren't stolen from the copyright holder (directly or by decompiling the binary, which is easy for Java, for example). Is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5080" LastEditorUserId="5080" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T17:09:25.163" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T17:09:25.163" Title="Re-implementation of a proprietary API" Tags="|proprietary-code|api|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T22:19:26.473" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering about copyright matters on projects built using an MIT-licensed project skeleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/symfony/symfony-standard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symfony-standard&lt;/a&gt; contains a MIT license but obviously, at the end of a proprietary project, this license drops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nobody minds. The &lt;code&gt;symfony&lt;/code&gt; command (&lt;code&gt;symfony new &amp;lt;project&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;) doesn't even create a LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it legal? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;giving project attribution (which is the only MIT restriction) to Fabien makes no sense when the project is built (especially for proprietary ones)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;we may want to create GPL projects&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMO (I'm not an expert though), a project skeleton should have the most permissive license, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, else that's very ambiguous. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7314" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T07:28:55.800" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:28:55.800" Title="symfony-standard is an app skeleton, can I change/remove LICENSE?" Tags="|licensing|mit|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5070" CreationDate="2017-02-04T09:44:31.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But is it legal? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope. Why would you remove attribution? This is essentially the only thing the MIT is about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can relicense under any license you please because the MIT grant explicit rights to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sublicense&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, &lt;strong&gt;sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can therefore license you code under the GPL and relicense this code under a GPL or proprietary license and anything. You cannot remove the MIT license or &lt;strong&gt;else you would NOT be licensed&lt;/strong&gt; to do anything with this code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T09:44:31.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5069" CreationDate="2017-02-04T09:58:34.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is something that has been decided in US courts at least, and has been discussed in several places &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/762/what-are-the-implications-of-the-google-vs-oracle-case-on-the-state-of-public-a&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2776/is-a-binary-compatible-interface-to-a-proprietary-spec-proprietary/2853#2853&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APIs are copyrighted but in some case using them can be fair use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whichever way you go and end up building some piece of software that implements this API you may end at some level infringing on the copyright. It does not matter IMHO if you got the API details from the API author or from some independent reimplementation (even if it was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_software_engineering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room&lt;/a&gt; implementation): if there is a license that does not grant you the proper rights to do so, you cannot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could claim fair use, but this is a legal determination best done by a lawyer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very unfortunate but this is it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T18:16:10.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5075" CreationDate="2017-02-04T21:29:28.493" Score="4" ViewCount="3720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering since the Linux kernel in Android is under a free license while the other software is under Apache license. In which license we can say Android is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, according to the GNU project website, Google should have made a copyright infringement by combining free software with code under Apache license, why  hasn't this raised any illegal issues between Google and GNU the same way it did between Google and Oracle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall we say that Android is an open-source OS in that case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7321" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T22:32:54.783" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T22:32:54.783" Title="What's Android license? (If it's not free)" Tags="|licensing|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5074" CreationDate="2017-02-05T13:04:18.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was wondering since the Linux kernel in Android is under a free license while the other software is under Apache license. In which license we can say Android is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Android is using multiple licenses and the overall collection is primarily under the Apache license but not only. Some parts are GPL, some BSD and some Apache (and many other FOSS licenses). The Linux Kernel itself is using the GPL for kernel space and practically any license you please when running a program in user space on top of the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, according to the GNU project website, Google should have made a copyright infringement by combining free software with code under Apache license. why this hasn't raise any illegal issues between Google and GNU the same way it did between Google and Oracle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you redistribute a GPL-licensed kernel and a mostly Apache-licensed user space is fine and there is not a conflict there. This is the normal usage of the kernel. Several other user space tools are independent and therefore there is no intertwined code nor licensing in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The confusion raises from the fact that the Linux kernel in Android is under GPL v2.0 which is not compatible with Apache&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be correct in the general case (yet always depends on how GPL and Apache-licensed interact and whether or not they end up being &quot;separate programs&quot;), but again -- this is something that has been explained and debated at great lengths by Linus and the community-- This is perfectly OK to run code on Linux in user space under &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; license, including proprietary ones. The kernel space copyleft does not bleed in user space in 99.999% of the cases. There are a few rare cases where it would bleed (e.g. if you would access kernel through a &quot;non-standard&quot; interface) but this is not a case here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T08:07:12.060" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T08:07:12.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5069" CreationDate="2017-02-07T15:11:14.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you asked a couple of years ago, that would have been fine. Some US courts have explicitly decided that APIs are not copyrightable, and a lot of longstanding copyright precedent supports that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, recently, in Oracle v. Google, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided that APIs are sometimes copyrightable. Now, that's only an issue if you find yourself in that court's jurisdiction, but... It's actually insanely easy for a plaintiff to sneak into that court, so for practical purposes, you probably need permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Java, specifically, since Oracle offers an Open Source version of Java, you can work from that. But to build off that example, Apache Harmony was an open source fork of proprietary Java, but they never had permission to make it -- so when Google copied it, they had Apache's permission, but not Oracle's. So Oracle could still sue, and did. You need to get permission from the copyright holder, not some random schmuck off the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the existing open source project is going strong, and the copyright holder hasn't sued them yet, it might be &lt;em&gt;relatively&lt;/em&gt; safe to go ahead and fork that open source project. There's some risk of getting a cease and desist, but... Well, it's up to you if you want to take that risk or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T15:11:14.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2017-02-07T15:20:37.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, let's break down the possibilities here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elastix owns some of its own code. It gives you permission to use it under the GPL, but it isn't bound by the GPL itself, because it owns the code. It can do whatever the hell it wants with that code. It can license it to you under the GPL, and sell it to me under a proprietary license, and then stop offering it under the GPL, or whatever. The versions they already offered under the GPL are irrevocably licensed, but they don't need to keep giving that code out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, you have contributors' code. I'm not sure if Elastix took any external contributions -- if they didn't, then this section doesn't matter -- but assuming they did, they really had two options. One, get permission to use those contributions, or two, don't use them. This holds true no matter what their outbound license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of GPL projects will take contributions under the GPL. Since the contributions are under the GPL, those projects are stuck using the GPL as long as that code is there. If they want to use a different license, they have to get rid of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some GPL projects will have Contributor License Agreements. Those agreements can kind of say anything. They can say &quot;all contributors grant us a license but we are required to always offer the project under the GPL.&quot; Or, &quot;all contributors grant us a license but we are required to always offer the project under some open source license. Our board of directors will pick the license.&quot; Or, they might say, &quot;all contributors grant us a license and we can do whatever the fuck we want with their code.&quot; They might even say &quot;all contributors pass their copyright over to us.&quot; I'd be willing to guess that Elastix went with option three here -- that's relatively common among CLAs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T15:20:37.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5086" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:39:58.730" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://source.android.com/source/brands.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, Android™ is a trademark that should only refer to compatible versions of Android as described &lt;a href=&quot;http://source.android.com/compatibility/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. My confusion is that the Android Open Source Project's name &lt;em&gt;contains the word Android&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to build the AOSP and make no modifications to it, and did not go through the compatibility process, what would I legally have the right to call what I have compiled? Can I call it &quot;Android Open Source Project,&quot; or must I rename it? What do I call AOSP if I have made no modifications to it? Renaming it would cause confusion, while not renaming it would also cause confusion. I can imagine someone going, &quot;Where's the app store?&quot; I'm so confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more careful reading shows that this restriction only applies to &quot;hardware, packaging or marketing materials of device.&quot; So in my case, I was fine. I was making a spreadsheet comparing computing platforms' support for various communication protocols. But this still leaves the question of what I call AOSP if I were to sell a hypothetical line of phones running a stock build of AOSP that did not comply with the compatibility specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: This question was originally posted on the Android Enthusiasts section, but I have relocated it due to being its being off-topic there.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7347" LastEditorUserId="7347" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T01:32:18.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T07:49:17.183" Title="How do I refer to the AOSP specifically, instead of compatible versions of Android, without breaking trademark law?" Tags="|trademark|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1143" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:47:14.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before you start contributing to an open source project make sure doing so is something you want to do and aren't doing because you think you need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andre Arko has three questions you should answer before diving into an open source project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cloudcity.io/blog/2017/01/25/is-contributing-to-open-source-right-for-you/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cloudcity.io/blog/2017/01/25/is-contributing-to-open-source-right-for-you/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If answering the questions, open source is a fit for you, dive into Andre's 15 minute a day plan for going from newbie to core contributor on an open source project: &lt;a href=&quot;http://andre.arko.net/2016/11/12/how-to-contribute-to-open-source/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://andre.arko.net/2016/11/12/how-to-contribute-to-open-source/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7346" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T00:47:14.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5084" CreationDate="2017-02-08T07:49:17.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trademarks are a complicated matter and eventually something quite important in the FOSS world as branding is essential to some projects whether they are commercially backed or not. For instance, the branding elements of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/licenses/GLOBAL_EULA_RHEL_English_20101110.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Hat®&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubuntu®&lt;/a&gt; distro are what makes these --otherwise free-software-based distros-- eventually non-redistributable in some cases. Or they are the subject of many debates or feuds such as when GROUPON™ reused the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=76368848&amp;amp;caseType=SERIAL_NO&amp;amp;searchType=statusSearch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNOME®&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnome.org/groupon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brand&lt;/a&gt; incorrectly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case, there is no easy way out of this. I would likely stay in the clear by calling things &lt;a href=&quot;http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&amp;amp;state=4807%3Avlixlz.1.1&amp;amp;p_search=searchss&amp;amp;p_L=50&amp;amp;BackReference=&amp;amp;p_plural=yes&amp;amp;p_s_PARA1=&amp;amp;p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA1%24LD&amp;amp;expr=PARA1%20AND%20PARA2&amp;amp;p_s_PARA2=aosp&amp;amp;p_tagrepl%7E%3A=PARA2%24COMB&amp;amp;p_op_ALL=AND&amp;amp;a_default=search&amp;amp;a_search=Submit%20Query&amp;amp;a_search=Submit%20Query&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;AOSP&quot;&lt;/a&gt; which is not something that is trademarked as far as I know, but it could. Or create my own branding. But reusing anything with the word &quot;android&quot; in it is likely a problematic at some level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in the case of a document (such as a spreadsheet) you can call a cat a cat, and reference what is Android™ as being Android alright (like I am doing right now and like you did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T07:49:17.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-08T08:00:13.360" Score="6" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to use these simple tests to determine if the copyleft terms of a third-party project apply to the calling/reusing code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the calling code is linking (statically or dynamically) with GPL-style licensed code, then the copyleft of the callee applies to the caller because the calling code is then a &quot;derivative work&quot; of the GPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the calling code is (statically and not dynamically) linking with LGPL-style licensed code, then the copyleft of the callee applies to the caller because the calling code is then again a &quot;derivative work&quot; of the LGPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are simple tests and they seem to be generally accepted in the community. They are easy to apply and to understand technically. Or are they? And I wonder if these are correct tests. Especially linking is something that is well understood for code compiled to native binaries... but what does it mean for interpreted dynamic languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is linking a proper proxy to determine that calling code is &quot;based on&quot; or a &quot;derived work&quot; of the copyleft code being called and that therefore the copyleft flows to the caller?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T08:32:57.990" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T16:49:19.210" Title="Is linking a correct proxy for derivative work determination in (copyleft) FOSS licenses?" Tags="|derivative-works|copyleft|linking|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5096" CreationDate="2017-02-08T08:04:07.350" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does a Java package published on Maven documents the provenance (origin and license) of an open source project packaged and published in such a public repo? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular what can I do to document and how should I document my code when I am the author and publisher of a package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what if this is a package (possibly modified) that I have not authored but that I only publish as Maven Central Jar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:20:40.140" Title="How does Maven help in documenting the provenance for Maven jars?" Tags="|maven|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2017-02-08T09:49:32.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linking is a common proxy for whether or not something is a derivative work of a copyleft licensed software project, but in the LGPL case, it doesn't matter whether the linking is static or dynamic - mere linking does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you have to make modifications to the source code of the LGPL project itself for it to be counted as a new derivative work, and hence trigger the copyleft provisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7349" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T09:49:32.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2017-02-08T12:43:55.900" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No-one knows.  It's not the licence, nor the FSF, that determines what constitutes a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; - it is copyright law.  Since no higher court has (to my knowledge) taken a position on this, we simply don't yet know.  There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;persuasive arguments that it does&lt;/a&gt;; there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat?rq=1&quot;&gt;persuasive arguments that it doesn't&lt;/a&gt;.  Until courts start to rule on the issues, are appealed to higher courts, and both local and international legal consensus emerges, I don't think &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can say for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address a possible misconception, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; dynamic linking with GPL'ed code creates a derivative work, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; the same is true of dynamic linking with an LGPL'ed work.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old LGPL&lt;/a&gt; was pretty clear about this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library,&#xA;  but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked&#xA;  with it, is called a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[L]inking a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library creates an&#xA;  executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains&#xA;  portions of the Library), rather than a &quot;work that uses the library&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No distinction is made there between static and dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T12:43:55.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5103" CreationDate="2017-02-08T17:36:44.693" Score="10" ViewCount="1793" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like publishing my software completely open source with no limitations (no contribution required, etc). I thought about using the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;, but it lacks an MIT-like disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;  AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;  OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;I would really like to merge the WTFPL with the upper part of the MIT license so I have a license as permissive as the WTFPL but also with a disclaimer that I am not responsible for any use of it. I would modify the disclaimer so it doesn't contain the term &quot;copyright holder&quot; (as I don't want to hold any copyright). Would this be legally okay? In other words: Am I allowed to take parts of the MIT license, modify them and add them to the WTFPL license?&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other licensing possibilities do I have to guarantee complete freedom (&lt;strong&gt;without required attribution or anything&lt;/strong&gt;) while making sure I'm not responsible for anything someone else does with my code (e.g. security issues that damage a companies infrastructure, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Okay, obviously people don't like random new license texts. However, I would really like to know what alternatives exist that suite my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" OwnerDisplayName="Benni" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T12:06:51.103" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T19:01:29.387" Title="License as permissive as WTFPL but including a warranty disclaimer" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T01:51:02.360" Score="0" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make an app game in which I make use of a code that is licensed under the EUPL. The code will probably make up about 10 to 20 percent of the game's entire code (the rest will be original work). Will I be required to make the whole game open-sourced if I use that EUPL code? Are there any factors that would limit my ownership rights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7354" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:33:50.347" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T20:38:31.440" Title="Can I make a closed-source game if part of it utilizes a EUPL-licenced code?" Tags="|derivative-works|proprietary-code|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5093" CreationDate="2017-02-09T13:43:31.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your game is a derivative work (which it likely is unless you're very sure it isn't) of the EUPL software it will also have to be released under the EUPL. See section 5 in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/eupl1.1.-licence-en_0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyleft clause: If the Licensee distributes and/or communicates copies of the Original Works or Derivative Works based upon the Original Work, this Distribution and/or Communication will be done under the terms of this Licence or of a later version of this Licence unless the Original Work is expressly distributed only under this version of the Licence. The Licensee (becoming Licensor) cannot offer or impose any additional terms or conditions on the Work or Derivative Work that alter or restrict the terms of the Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T20:38:31.440" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T20:38:31.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5088" CreationDate="2017-02-09T14:40:33.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand your question correctly, you can simple add this information to your POM file. The following is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://maven.apache.org/pom.html#More_Project_Information&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example from the Maven POM reference&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;licenses&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;license&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;Apache License, Version 2.0&amp;lt;/name&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;url&amp;gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&amp;lt;/url&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;distribution&amp;gt;repo&amp;lt;/distribution&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;comments&amp;gt;A business-friendly OSS license&amp;lt;/comments&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/license&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/licenses&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;project xmlns=&amp;quot;http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0&amp;quot;&#xA;  xmlns:xsi=&amp;quot;http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&amp;quot;&#xA;  xsi:schemaLocation=&amp;quot;http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0&#xA;                      https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  ...&#xA;  &amp;lt;organization&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;Codehaus Mojo&amp;lt;/name&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;url&amp;gt;http://mojo.codehaus.org&amp;lt;/url&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;/organization&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/project&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your last question, I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but I would say point the URL to your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:20:40.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5100" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:35:39.487" Score="6" ViewCount="2070" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I asked this question in softwareengineering.stackexchange.com but it was pointed out to me that it is better suited to be posted here. I deleted the original thread in the other subforum.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the specific question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is it allowed to incorporate MIT licensed work in closed-source projects thereby practically bypassing the necessity to deliver with the new work an extra file (or link to a site or something like that) stating a copyright hint of a portion of the code which is licensed under MIT?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually the MIT license reads like it is not that ambiguous at all. It states &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found these threads on this site, most notably:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/264709/262045&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/264709/262045&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;even though you legally claimed ownership of the code (as explicitly permitted by the MIT license), you should include a notice to the effect of &quot;portions of this code were originally created by such and such&quot; and state the date of their claim to copyright. But you don't necessarily have to do so since you've re-licensed their project and assumed liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but also:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4716/7359&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4716/7359&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;begs the question is attributing the same as including a copyright notice?&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They read as if I can just just &quot;legally claim ownership&quot; and don't &lt;strong&gt;have to&lt;/strong&gt; state their claim to copyright (doesn't mean I want to strip them of it which I know is not possible by law, just not stating it, the reason being to not give the competition - which is quite strong in my market - a headstart how to just come up with and sell basically the same product. I customized and added to the MIT code heavily, but still the more competitors are out there the higher possibility that at some point someone will be able to reproduce what I made).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand there are enough sources that state the (for me perceived) different conclusion, like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4061/7359&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4061/7359&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you distribute binaries, the license text (typically) gets compiled away, therefore you are no longer fulfilling the single condition in the license. What you need to do is include the license with your binary distributions, maybe as a text file, or embedded in the program's about dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further complicating the issue, what about if the author of the MIT licensed work answers an email from me saying: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, the code is free to use (and modify). There is a LICENSE file with MIT license [..describing where to find it..]. A short acknowledge note would be appreciated (but it's not required).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again raising the question whether he means attribution or the absolute legal necessity to include the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most confusing me is the answer by GlenH7 in the above stated thread in &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/264709/262045&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/264709/262045&lt;/a&gt; when comparing it to all the evidence to the contrary. He seems credible though and as I cannot comment on his answer not having 50 rep my question is, &lt;strong&gt;do I understand him wrong or IS there a indeed quite glaring ambiguity to the MIT license with respect to this matter?&lt;/strong&gt; And finally, if there is no way to not include the copyright notice under normal circumstances, does the author mailing me these words change that fact in any meaningful and legal way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T03:08:11.773" Title="MIT license ambiguity about copyright?" Tags="|derivative-works|mit|copyright|attribution|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5092" CreationDate="2017-02-09T16:07:29.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could license your software under the Free Public License 1.0.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/free-public-license-1.0.0#fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/free-public-license-1.0.0#fulltext&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also possible would according to your description be this license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to-but-it&amp;#39;s-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-(wtfnmfpl-1.0)#fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to-but-it's-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-(wtfnmfpl-1.0)#fulltext&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;although I don't know how established/legally sustainable it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7359" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T16:07:29.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5092" CreationDate="2017-02-09T18:11:21.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. It does &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not require users credit you&lt;/a&gt;, only that the license text and any associated copyright marks be maintained. That is &lt;em&gt;no burden&lt;/em&gt; for users, and a minimal burden for anyone redistributing your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember also that you can always re-license something you own the copyright to in the future, so if you discover the MIT license is a burden for any of your users (hint: you won't) you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;work with them to select a different license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world of software licenses is complicated enough already, and crafting your own &quot;clever&quot; license just burdens your users - they have to carefully read your license now to make sure there aren't any issues, whereas if you simply &lt;a href=&quot;http://ben.balter.com/2016/08/01/why-you-shouldnt-write-your-own-open-source-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use a standard license&lt;/a&gt; it's immediately clear whether their intended use case will be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="984" LastEditorUserId="984" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T22:16:38.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T22:16:38.197" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2017-02-09T20:02:37.630" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;even though you legally claimed ownership of the code (as explicitly permitted by the MIT license), you should include a notice to the effect of &quot;portions of this code were originally created by such and such&quot; and state the date of their claim to copyright. But you don't necessarily have to do so since you've re-licensed their project and assumed liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attribution to the original creator is not about liability, it's about recognition. You &lt;strong&gt;do necessarily&lt;/strong&gt; have to retain copyright notices regardless of liability since this is part of the license obligations. If you do not fulfill the license obligations you no longer have a license to distribute the software and could be infringing on someone's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you distribute binaries, the license text (typically) gets compiled away, therefore you are no longer fulfilling the single condition in the license. What you need to do is include the license with your binary distributions, maybe as a text file, or embedded in the program's about dialog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also need to include any copyright notices, not just the license text. Regarding where this is best displayed, anything reasonable works. As part of the documentation or in an about box of an application are good options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, the code is free to use (and modify). There is a LICENSE file with MIT license [..describing where to find it..]. A short acknowledge note would be appreciated (but it's not required).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming he means that you need to include the LICENSE file (which in turn I assume includes the copyright notices and the MIT license text) but that anything beyond that is not required but nice. While this might suffice, you actually only have to include any copyright statements and the MIT license text. If there is anything beyond that in the LICENSE file, you are free to exclude it. You also do not have to keep this information in a file named LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to incorporate MIT licensed work in closed-source projects thereby practically bypassing the necessity to deliver with the new work an extra file (or link to a site or something like that) stating a copyright hint of a portion of the code which is licensed under MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to incorporate MIT licensed work in closed-source projects, but you still need to include the copyright notices and the MIT license text in a place where a user of your binary distribution can find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T20:24:42.693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T20:24:42.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5102" CreationDate="2017-02-09T20:41:18.207" Score="4" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that i have licensed under the GPL, and I would like to start working on parallelizing parts of it using OpenMP. To do this on windows using GCC, I apparently have to include the winpthreads license in my project, per the discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mailman/mingw-w64-public/thread/5238F91B.7010602@tdragon.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license itself has an advertising clause similar to the 4-clause BSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...&#xA; *  * Neither the name of Lockless Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be&#xA; *    used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without&#xA; *    specific prior written permission.&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is not compatible with the GPL. Is there any way to include this in my GPL project while still using the GPL, or am I out of luck if I want to use GCC/OpenMP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5321" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T14:09:38.813" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T14:09:38.813" Title="winpthreads license in a GPL project" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5101" CreationDate="2017-02-09T20:47:09.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problematic clause in 4-clause BSD when it comes to GPL compatibility is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: &#xA;  This product includes software developed by the organization . &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not the one you provided. So as long as the license is similar to the 3-clause BSD license in all other aspects as well it is compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&lt;/a&gt; for more about GPL compatible and incompatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T20:50:12.743" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T20:50:12.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5092" CreationDate="2017-02-09T22:44:34.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It usually a bad idea to create a new FOSS license as this will create a new island of oddity and will most likely not help your project being more successful, to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license itself is often called the ISC license and it has many many variants. So many that the actual authorship fades to grey in the darkness of times. It is also the result of the evolution of older licenses from which it borrowed part of its text. As such it is likely a collective work with not clearly defined authorship and an impossible to determine licensing for its own text. If you want to adapt it you can do so safely and none of these undefined authors may be ever blame you for that. But I will blame you for the reasons I explained above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What other licensing possibilities do I have to guarantee complete freedom (without required attribution or anything) while making sure I'm not responsible for anything someone else does with my code (e.g. security issues that damage a companies infrastructure, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://enterprise.dejacode.com/license_library/Demo/zlib/#license-text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib license&lt;/a&gt; which does not even require attribution and only requires to keep the license text in the source code only. It has a minimalist disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with even fewer conditions, consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;: it has a proper disclaimer unlike the WTPFL and is really a proper public domain dedication that is even acceptable in countries that do not have such concept like Germany. But it does not have an explicit or implicit patent grant (nor do the zlib or bsd licenses IMHO)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T00:04:33.380" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T00:04:33.380" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-10T02:29:33.917" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I write a Java class transformer that transforms code from a project licensed under CC BY-NC-ND, is that legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not actually distributing a modified copy of the project, but while a specific class of that project is loading, I transform part of that dynamically at runtime. Is this legal or a violation of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7365" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T02:33:26.290" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T02:33:26.290" Title="If I write a class transformer for a project licensed under CC BY-NC-ND, may I distribute that transformer?" Tags="|creative-commons|java|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5111" CreationDate="2017-02-10T08:40:18.673" Score="5" ViewCount="925" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to show the interface of a GNU GPL licensed piece of software being used in a TV movie? I'm not in the US, so &quot;fair use&quot; and similar applications do not apply unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7366" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T21:44:43.340" Title="Can I show a GNU GPL licensed software in a TV movie?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5107" CreationDate="2017-02-10T10:01:09.037" Score="11" ViewCount="3905" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I distribute someone else's unmodified GPLv2 software as a part of my product, what obligations do I have regarding source code distribution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to host the source independently and provide it on request, or can I simply include the copyright notice from the software in question (which explains how to obtain the source code from the original author) and be done with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T04:59:08.417" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T04:59:08.417" Title="Can I distribute unmodified GPLv2 binaries without the source code?" Tags="|distribution|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5106" CreationDate="2017-02-10T10:11:19.837" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is covered in section 3 of the GPL, version 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,&#xA;  under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of&#xA;  Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable&#xA;  source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections&#xA;  1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three&#xA;  years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your&#xA;  cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete&#xA;  machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be&#xA;  distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium&#xA;  customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer&#xA;  to distribute corresponding source code.  (This alternative is&#xA;  allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you&#xA;  received the program in object code or executable form with such&#xA;  an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you qualify for section 3c, then you can just forward the offer to distribute source code that you yourself received along with the binary you're using. Otherwise you need to take care of distributing the source code yourself (or keeping it available to satisfy users taking up your written offer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that by forwarding users to the original author's copy of the source code, you're tying your ability to distribute your software to the continued availability of that copy. It seems safer to me to just distribute the source code along with the binary and be done with it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T10:11:19.837" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="843" CreationDate="2017-02-10T10:19:11.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to define your own license to do that, as you won't be able to use a popular FOSS license like GPL. GPL (both v2 and v3) specifically forbids you to charge more for source code distribution than you charge for binary distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place &lt;strong&gt;at no further charge&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is reiterated in their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL allow me to charge a fee for downloading the program from my distribution site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You can charge any fee you wish for distributing a copy of the program. If you distribute binaries by download, you must provide “equivalent access” to download the source—therefore, &lt;strong&gt;the fee to download source may not be greater than the fee to download the binary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T10:19:11.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5114" CreationDate="2017-02-10T15:15:32.417" Score="50" ViewCount="55868" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users on the GitHub website are able to &quot;star&quot; other people's repositories, thereby saving them in their list of Starred Repos. Some people use &quot;stars&quot; to indicate that they like a project, other people use them as bookmarks so they can follow what's going on with the repo later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub Stars are an easy metric to keep track of, and I've used them to measure how popular an open source project is. I admit to sometimes even using Stars to determine how battle-tested a repo is, under the assumption that a repo that has received more Stars must have received more use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are three limitations I noticed with GitHub stars (which makes my current approach to handling them pretty &lt;em&gt;dubious&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is easy to create fake accounts on GitHub that can star repos. This can allow you to boost your metrics pretty easily, although you do not want to be obvious when doing them, lest the accounts get detected and deleted. (You can google for &quot;buy GitHub stars&quot; for those that are lazy technically). While you can use fake accounts to star your own repos, you may also want to star other people's repos to avoid leaving a paper trail. And since you don't want to be running all these fake accounts manually, you want to create bots and...you get the picture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GitHub Stars may be &quot;juiced&quot; by media attention, which is temporary and not actually based on sustained popularity. This is from personal experience -- after publicizing a fork of an my open source repo on Hacker News, I received some stars, but no corresponding increase in use of my fork. It's possible that a few people were interested in my repo, starred it, and then either never found an actual use case for my fork or promptly forgot about it later on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can star a Repo for any reason. GitHub doesn't care. It merely notes that someone pressed the Star button and that's all. You can guess why it's starred (someone likes it or wants to look at it later), but other reasons are equally plausible (they are bored at work and like starring random repos, they want to star a repo of a friend of theirs).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that metric means something. I'm not sure &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; though. What do GitHub Stars measure, and how should I use them to better understand the vitality/success/popularity of an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any answer to this question should be either evidence-based or research-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastEditorUserId="520" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:14:29.207" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T18:44:04.993" Title="&quot;GitHub Stars&quot; is a very useful metric. But for *what*?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5105" CreationDate="2017-02-10T21:44:43.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your problem is largely equivalent to the licensing of screenshots, and that problem has a definitive answer: A screenshot of the user interface of some software is a derivative work of that software, and is therefore restricted by the license of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not seem to consider screenshots, but it mentions program output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly assume that a graphical user interface “constitutes a covered work”. However, data displayed with the help of this program is not covered. For example, let's consider a spreadsheet calculator. The user interface with menu bars and widgets would probably be covered by the copyright. However, a screenshot that is cropped to only display data in the spreadsheet would be OK: you provided that data, so you have the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation (which wrote the GPL) interprets this very differently. According to their FAQ, screenshots and videos are free – but that's not actually part of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright on the code of the program. So the license of the code of the program does not apply to the output, whether you pipe it into a file, make a screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text and/or art that comes from the program. Then the copyright on that text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as video games, would also fit into this exception. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed game. In such cases, the license on the artwork/audio would dictate the terms under which video/streaming may occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that e.g. Wikipedia meticulously tracks the license of all screenshots. For screenshots of non-free programs Wikipedia uses fair-use exceptions in U.S. law, for free programs it keeps the license of the program for the screenshots. The Wikipedia therefore seems to not share the FSF's interpretation of the GPL in this matter. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Software_screenshots&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia:Software_screenshots&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons:Screenshots&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While German copyright law does not have a concept of fair use, it does allow for copyrighted content to appear under certain conditions. The most important exception is citation law (see §51 UrhG). That would be a viable route if your TV movie can be classified as journalism or art, but probably not if it's a commercial entertainment production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T21:44:43.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-11T06:07:07.597" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may have the chance to write software programming tutorials for my community college, and be paid for doing so. If they agree, I would like to release them in a very permissive license, such as CC0 or Public Domain, where my college can then take the work I create and use it as their own, without giving me credit. (I do not want to have my college keep ownership of my original documentation, because I would like to be allowed to use it in the future for my own purposes without having to cite my college).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused about how CC0 interacts when I use others' ideas, or others' work, in my own work. For example, here are some ways I will use others' ideas or others' work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is an original idea that I did not think of myself (such as using country names as function names to help demonstrate how program execution will &quot;travel&quot; from one place to another in the program), I will use different country names, but give credit that this was not my idea, by using a citation or a footnote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I may quote passages from textbooks (and cite them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be doing this for both publicly available works (such as textbooks), but also for works that aren't available to the public (such as notes I write myself from lectures I have attended (some of which are copying text and code from the blackboard), or from lecture slides that are only available to people from my community college).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC0 FAQ says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even though are you not making any warranties of copyright ownership&#xA;  under CC0, keep in mind that you are still responsible to any third&#xA;  parties who may have existing rights in your work when you distribute&#xA;  the work. &lt;strong&gt;For example, if your work contains another person’s work&#xA;  made available under a CC Attribution license, you will need to&#xA;  identify that work separately, attribute the author and provide the&#xA;  license. Likewise, for any other license(s), you will need to ensure&#xA;  that you are in compliance before distributing the work.&lt;/strong&gt; Of course, if&#xA;  you do not have permission to distribute a work belonging to someone&#xA;  else, you will need to seek appropriate permission from the copyright&#xA;  owner before you use CC0.&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#Can_anyone_use_a_work_that_is_distributed_under_CC0.3F&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#Can_anyone_use_a_work_that_is_distributed_under_CC0.3F&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that unless I contact every single person whose work I was inspired by or whose work I quoted and get their permission, that I cannot release my tutorials under CC0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7377" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T01:06:36.583" Title="How does CC0 interact with others' work that I cite?" Tags="|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5112" CreationDate="2017-02-11T13:33:01.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideas themselves are not copyrighted, thus you can use them without any problem but it is always good of course to cite the source, and even if it is not compulsory from a legal standpoint, it is from an academic standpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second part, you can invoke fair use to cite very short quotes from textbooks and your course notes. Beyond that, you would need to ask permission. A better solution would be to reformulate the content to make it your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T13:33:01.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2017-02-11T17:16:38.637" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stars are exactly what you said they are. Some indication that someone (or maybe a bot) clicked on a button and taken in abstraction of anything else there is not much more that you can infer from that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could assume that everyone is using stars for the same purpose but as you pointed they could be used to show your appreciation of a project as well as for bookmarking it and therefore they are either some form of feedback to a repo as well as some form of bookkeeping for the star maker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Star counts are still routinely used by researchers as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.00431.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proxy&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;http://issel.ee.auth.gr/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/User-Perceived-Source-Code-Quality-Estimation-based-on-Static-Analysis-Metrics.pdf#page=2&amp;amp;zoom=180,-90,531&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;project popularity&lt;/a&gt; though while it may correlate OK for the most popular projects this likely does not hold for the vast number of other projects in the long tail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some may interpret it as a proxy for popularity but in in the end this likely a weak proxy. Combining the number of forks, watchers, issues, commits, etc. might be better in the end but still only a proxy and will never be an unbiased metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are in search of metric to determine if a project is popular, a better approach might be to determine who is reusing what. Which is another complex problem of its own especially since reuse may be private and hidden. And you could lace in other metrics but as always with a pinch of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate this, take this ranking of users for &lt;a href=&quot;http://git-awards.com/users/search?login=pombredanne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my self&lt;/a&gt;. This correlate OK with my skills and interests in general but it does not know a little fact about me: I use forking as if these were bookmarks. So any metrics based on forks would be in my favor whether I care or not because of my personal and unique way to treat a fork. And in doing so, I also introduce a bias in any fork metrics for the projects I fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T08:01:28.787" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T08:01:28.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5117" CreationDate="2017-02-12T07:20:13.337" Score="11" ViewCount="4629" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have cloned a repo under the Apache 2.0 licence and am changing content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;under section 4 of the licence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. You must cause any modified files to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;You must retain, in the Source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. You &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am understanding this correctly, my modified file will look like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2017 My Example Company&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;NOTICE: THIS FILE HAS BEEN MODIFIED BY &amp;lt;MY EXAMPLE COMPANY&amp;gt; UNDER COMPLIANCE WITH THE APACHE 2.0 LICENCE FROM THE ORIGINAL WORK &#xA;OF THE COMPANY &amp;lt;EXAMPLE PREVIOUS COMPANY&amp;gt;. THE FOLLOWING IS THE COPYRIGHT OF THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2016 Example Previous Company&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. Is this correct?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. What should I name the original copyright notice? If I should keep it the same name, what should I name my new copyright notice if it differs?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. In the same way, what should the NOTICE file be called?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7381" LastEditorUserId="7381" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T00:42:22.750" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T00:42:22.750" Title="Rules for appropriate editing of copyright notices in cloned, Apache-2.0-licenced, opensource repositories" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5115" CreationDate="2017-02-12T16:12:11.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes this is correct but you do not need to duplicate the same Apache notice twice. Instead you could use this simpler and more useful form IMHO:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2017 My Example Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2016 Example Previous Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;  you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may obtain a copy of the License at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This file has been modified by My Example Company to add support for foo and get faster baz processing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 &amp;amp; 3. Why would you want to rename files there? Juts keep them the same name and add your stuffs to these if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T16:12:11.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2017-02-13T07:14:41.843" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently I don't have enough reputation to comment. Mad hatter is not right.  A clear distinction was made between dynamic and static linking.  That text in the &quot;old&quot; LGPL seems like a big deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;[L]inking a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a &quot;work that uses the library&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's a distinction.  With static linked code you are actually handing out copies of the GPL work in question. It's in there as part of the executable as described right there. You're distributing someone else's program, and you need permission to do that. With dynamic linking you are distributing work that is 100% your own (well, with a possible question regarding header material).  The user then combines them, and in dynamic linking I'm not even sure you can say that there ever becomes one &quot;executable&quot; that &quot;contains&quot; the GPL code.  That depends what an &quot;executable&quot; means in the context of RAM.  But that's a very different question anyway.  The argument used in &lt;em&gt;this particular quote&lt;/em&gt; is about actually containing the GPL code, and with dynamic linkage that argument at best becomes a question of what the user does with it, and maybe what the provider intends the user to do with it, but certainly not about someone else's work being contained in the distributed to the user.  It's a huge difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like if I sell i-phone covers.  Yes, it's useless without an iphone (often not the case with software that needs a library. It loses some functionality but isn't always useless).  I guess it's &quot;derived&quot; from the &quot;interface&quot; of an iphone, directly designed literally its physical interface (shape), but the cover was not made by Apple and it exists and is distributed without Apple. Can apple distribute a license with their phone that says I can't make covers for their phone without those covers being distributed under their license? This is what GPL zealots want to think they should be able to do. And they think if I don't like it I shouldn't make the phone covers.  Do they get to tell me what kind of phone covers I'm allowed to make? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, but cover doesn't use the phone, the phone uses the cover. I'm adding functionality to apple's product not using their functionality.  Well ok, except that argument doesn't fly with GPL.  They are unwilling to let that slippery slope be opened either for fear it will slide too far.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My program is my program.  It may be useless without something else, just as the phone case is.  You may need other programs to make it useful for you. You can re-implement those other programs yourself if you want.  But my software is 100% mine and GPL doesn't tell me  where I can send it. They've got nothing to do with me. The fact that they say otherwise doesn't make it true.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Mad hatter was probably right that none of this is well defined by courts. But I think common sense says they clearly have a right to limit static linking, and in my opinion clearly don't have a right to limit dynamic linking. It just needs the right lawyer to make the case for code &quot;accessories&quot; not &quot;derived works&quot;.  An accessory is useless by itself but is not a derived product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7391" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T07:14:41.843" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5122" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:29:02.810" Score="17" ViewCount="7922" Body="&lt;p&gt;Case: I developed a software and uploaded it to Github with MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To apply the license, I created a LICENSE file with MIT license preamble (as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody cloned(not by forking) my repository, modified the LICENSE file to remove my name and added his instead.&#xA;He then re-uploaded the project to Github under his name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this legal to do such modification ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I do as a owner of the repository ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7394" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T22:14:07.650" Title="What if somebody removed my name from MIT license" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-notice|github|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T15:46:33.427" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to take a Linux distribution (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) and distribute their provided ISO verbatim, would I be required to provide the respective source code for all GPL software on the said ISO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding of the GPLv2, simply stating that the software source code may be acquired from the respective Linux distribution organization would not be sufficient; rather a request for GPLv2 source code must be explicitly fulfilled by the distributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct? What occurs if I perform a software upgrade before distributing the distro (e.g. apt upgrade) -- would the source code correlating to the updated software versions be required rather than the source code for the software versions on the ISO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2629/why-do-some-gnu-distributions-with-a-linux-kernel-convey-gpl-software-online-wit&quot;&gt;Why do some GNU distributions with a Linux kernel convey GPL software online without providing source code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7396" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:46:33.427" Title="Distributing a Linux distribution" Tags="|gpl|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-02-16T13:31:34.490" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2017-02-13T16:10:32.000" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this legal to do such modification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New question: Can you do anything against this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On court: Yes, if you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#automatic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;registered it&lt;/a&gt; or at least send a postal copy to yourself.&#xA;Actually it could be that the person intends to register copyright on his/her own and even sue you for copyright infringement... &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On GitHub directly:&#xA;Yes: File a DMCA takedown notice (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I do as a owner of the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beforehand: make sure to have a good position to claim your copyright later (as written before).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this issue happened: Contact the changing person politely and ask for his/her intentions. If I'm not wrong GitHub repos have automatically an Issue tracker which you should use, providing links to your repo.&#xA;It &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be that the person doesn't &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; you have an online repo (e.g. was given the source somewhere) and it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be that the person want to do changes that you want to include. Therefore it would be good to think about how you want to accept contributions and make this clear within your README.md or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case I'd suggest to kindly ask to recreate the repository with a fork (showing the ancestry and making it more easy to share changes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After&lt;/strong&gt; you did this or if there is no response within some days (I won't wait longer than 2 weeks) you can file a &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/guide-to-submitting-a-dmca-takedown-notice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;File a DMCA takedown notice at GitHub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7397" LastEditorUserId="7397" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T08:27:33.733" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T08:27:33.733" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2017-02-13T21:20:17.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this legal to do such modification ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I do as a owner of the repository ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should follow GitHub's &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMCA process&lt;/a&gt;. This involves sending a complaint to Github. The infringing user will be given the opportunity to fix the problem or to contest your claim. But if they do not, then GitHub should remove their repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T21:20:17.213" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5128" CreationDate="2017-02-14T14:03:01.567" Score="2" ViewCount="2112" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a few library plugins that we want to open source on GitHub, but we want to preserve the author credit for us when our libraries are used by others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of different open source licenses like Apache 2.0, MIT, GPL etc. What should be the best to use in my case? I am not that good with all this TL;DR stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My primary goal is we preserve author credit for source and versioning both. In addition, if someone wants to use this in commercial products they pay us a little fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7446" OwnerDisplayName="Alok" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T22:59:24.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T20:09:19.337" Title="Best open source license to preserve author credit?" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T00:35:03.710" Score="8" ViewCount="3323" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been working on a project that is hosted on GitHub in a private repository.  The repo has three directories, call them &lt;strong&gt;frame&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;private1&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;private2&lt;/strong&gt;.  The &lt;strong&gt;frame&lt;/strong&gt; directory is framework code used by &lt;strong&gt;private1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;private2&lt;/strong&gt;, which both contain image assets and html content that make use of the code in &lt;strong&gt;frame&lt;/strong&gt;.  Currently, after a build process, &lt;strong&gt;private1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;private2&lt;/strong&gt; are deployed as publicly viewable websites.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to change this GitHub repo from private to public, making &lt;strong&gt;frame&lt;/strong&gt; (and some other files) reusable under MIT license, but retaining copyright protection on &lt;strong&gt;private1&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;private2&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this related question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4893/how-can-i-use-an-mit-license-for-code-but-protect-the-copyright-of-photos-in-my&quot;&gt;How can I use an MIT license for code but protect the copyright of photos in my repository?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I create a LICENSE file in the root directory of the repo with the following content, would this be a correct solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This code repository contains some open source and some copyrighted content.&#xA;All of the content under the directories named private1 and private2 &#xA;has been made available to this project by XYZ Corp and is copyrighted;&#xA;permission to use those files is not granted. All other parts of this &#xA;repository are made available under the standard MIT License:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2017 XYZ Corp&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7409" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T05:59:50.007" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T05:59:50.007" Title="I want to make my private GitHub repo public; can I put part of it under MIT license, and keep the rest protected?" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T08:55:07.477" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a java app with my hands and feet. I intend to share it with people and it may become commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He who knows can write it all down in notepad but I have been using Eclipse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing Eclipse did without me understanding what it did exactly was when I updated the &quot;build path&quot; to add a non standard java library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This library is from LGPL licenses domain. The Eclipse license EPL and LGPL exclude each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean exactly and how can I get around the EPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you can add a new library to a project as a new dependency within a framework such as Maven or Spring but i'm not yet familiar with how and why to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7415" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T08:55:07.477" Title="&quot;Free&quot; licenses understanding and workaround for a simple java app" Tags="|lgpl|java|epl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5124" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:45:47.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially all open source licenses cover your author credit requirement. None will allow restrictions for a certain use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll either have to dual-license your software by releasing it under both, say, the MIT license (which is widely used and very simple) and a commercial license as an alternative or look beyond open source. As you can't prevent commercial users from simply using the MIT version you'd have to add something of value to the commercial version, such as premium support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T20:06:40.383" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T20:06:40.383" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5126" CreationDate="2017-02-15T10:14:24.383" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no legal problem doing that, but it is confusing, and it's almost inevitable that some people will think the MIT license will apply to the whole repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a situation where a git submodule would make sense - split out the MIT licensed code into its own repository, and link to it with a submodule. Your local folder structure won't have to change, and the main repository could even remain private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T10:14:24.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T17:03:39.773" Score="8" ViewCount="671" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a LGPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1&lt;/a&gt;) licensed library in my Java project I'm soon about to release. In order to solve a bug in this library I have copied a particular class from the source code, modified it, and made it a part of my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Breakdown:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Library A is available in binary form at central nexus repo. This library A is also available as source code and licensed with LGPL 2.1. Library A contains class B that is buggy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Project C built in Java and Maven depends on library A. In order to solve the bug in class B, B is copied to a new class D and stored as a part of project C source code. The bug is then fixed in D.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Project C's source code is about to be released and available for others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; What must project C contain, license-wise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for another answer than answers like: &quot;In order to follow LGPL 2.1, you must implement the things listed in license LGPL 2.1&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7417" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T17:23:09.373" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T17:23:09.373" Title="What exactly do I need to do license-wise when using LGPL 2.1 licensed code" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5132" CreationDate="2017-02-15T18:58:19.903" Score="0" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is currently evaluating several open source projects to help build out a new Software as a Service Platform (historically we never used anything open source) and we were wondering if we needed to disclose Open Source Notices on our actual website, i.e. under footer links  for terms /conditions or  legal or trademarks.  Specifically, we are going to be using an open source project that falls under the Apache 2.0 license and the Apache 2.0 license states &quot;(a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&quot;.  We also noticed that several companies, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.netflix.com/legal/notices?locale=en&amp;amp;docType=notices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Netflix&lt;/a&gt;, do disclose all open source projects used.  We've also come across some other websites that do the same, however, it appears the majority of sites don't disclose on their website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any guidance / thoughts would be much appreciated! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7419" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T16:49:02.650" Title="Open Source Notice on a Commercial Website" Tags="|apache-2.0|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-02-18T10:51:58.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5131" CreationDate="2017-02-16T16:49:02.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some licenses only require notice for code that is distributed, and allows you to use the code on your own machines however the hell you want. Actually, the GPL is one of those licenses! However, you have to remember tricky things, like which licenses are which, the fact that your client-side code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; being distributed, and what counts as a &quot;derivative work.&quot; Since providing notice is generally pretty easy, and everybody is happier when you give credit where credit is due, I'd personally recommend that you err on the side of more notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T16:49:02.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5130" CreationDate="2017-02-16T18:23:24.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main thing to note is that the conditions for distributing modified copies are a hassle and basically amount to having to maintain your personal fork with carefully marked modification and a distribution channel for it.  You want to get rid of that hassle as soon as possible, so you should try getting your bug fixes accepted upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that advice, I don't think the gist of your request &quot;what do I have to do to heed the conditions of the LPGL?  Please don't ask me to read the conditions of the GPL&quot; makes a lot of sense.  You have to read through and understand a set of conditions anyway, so why not read the original rather than something regurgitated by someone whose reading is legally irrelevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7422" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T18:23:24.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2017-02-16T18:38:30.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is pretty much the only thing you cannot do with something licensed under the MIT license: basically the only condition is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice [(c) year by author] and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Removing the copyright notice is a breach of the licensing conditions.  It may also constitute fraud if there have been no substantial changes to the software and the author tries to claim to be the copyright owner to substantial parts of the software for which he made no recognizable contribution: basically a form of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the MIT license is classified as &quot;permissive&quot; and that guy might have just thought it to be the same as &quot;public domain&quot;.  So he may consider himself &lt;em&gt;entitled&lt;/em&gt; to his actions.  Pointing out his mistake in a manner likely to make him wish to correct it is the art of license enforcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going before court is the last step.  In general you want to avoid that since your options are getting him prosecuted for criminal copyright violation (for which it is not easy to get the prosecution interested), or sue for civil damages.  With a permissive license, proving actual damage may be very hard.  So you basically are down to &quot;cease&amp;amp;desist&quot; and all lawyering costs on your side will likely not get reimbursed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7424" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T22:14:07.650" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T22:14:07.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T00:03:04.500" Score="4" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused about how compiled executables are licensed vs the source code that built it. I'm in the situation where I am creating a Docker image of my application. My application itself and the Dockerfile that creates the image I have licensed using MIT (and the source code is freely available). But what about the compiled image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the Docker image is created (and hosted on dockerhub for example), it contains a lot of GPL binaries like the Linux Kernel and Bash. Does that mean that the resulting image is GPL? And then wouldnt it follow that all Docker images or virtual images or Linux CDs/DVDs would have to be GPL? Or am I reading the GPL incorrectly. Does this come down to differentiating between bundling and linking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to keep my project MIT licensed, not GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7428" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T14:25:18.123" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:25:18.123" Title="GPL license and Docker image images" Tags="|gpl|docker|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-02-21T09:51:22.000" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5145" CreationDate="2017-02-17T17:05:36.283" Score="5" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am outlining the dependencies in the documentation for a small open source package I would like to release. My package depends on an unmerged branch of scipy that has some special functions that I need. To install it myself, I just cloned this unmerged branch and installed it from source (everything works fine). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just asking about the proper etiquette for this situation. I want to give proper credit to this person who added these unmerged changes. I am new to open source development so any advice is helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7437" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T17:55:48.337" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:30:19.477" Title="How to release code that depends on an unmerged branch" Tags="|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5141" CreationDate="2017-02-17T18:39:17.973" Score="3" ViewCount="1631" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the LGPL license, you must release your source code if you statically link a library. Here's an excerpt from tldrlegal.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the software is statically linked (i.e. compiled into) your work, you must release object code or source code such that the user can modify the library. If otherwise (dynamically linked), you must make the source for the library available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that installing a package from npm and compiling it into a client-side JS bundle without releasing source code would violate LGPL? It seems like a license that wouldn't be as relevant to a language like JavaScript, but we've found a library that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7439" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T13:52:49.723" Title="Does compiling a JS bundle with webpack/browserify violate the LGPL license?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5139" CreationDate="2017-02-18T13:52:49.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you are statically linking, you must release source code &lt;em&gt;or object code&lt;/em&gt; such that the user can change the version of the library which is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Javascript, source code has to be understood as the source on which the programmer will make modifications, i.e. the non-minified source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compilation process is not going to produce a binary but a minified version of the code that should be considered &quot;object code&quot;. Bundling the work using the library with the library and compiling the whole should produce about the same result as minifying each part independently and bundling the two in one single JS file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you can respect the terms of the license by releasing &quot;object code&quot; (the minified version) of the work using the library without the library itself. You could just put a link somewhere in your application so that users can download it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T13:52:49.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5161" CreationDate="2017-02-20T08:18:30.273" Score="12" ViewCount="9366" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated in the tile, I want to know how should one mark code(functions or pieces of code smaller than 50% of the source file) copied from non copyleft sources (e.g Apache) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T10:34:38.473" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T22:12:46.323" Title="How to mark a copied Apache v2 piece of code?" Tags="|apache-2.0|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5160" CreationDate="2017-02-20T12:50:30.597" Score="3" ViewCount="1559" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of libraries, that have LGPL or permissive licenses, depends on FreeType, that have multi-licensing (FTL/&lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt;). My question is: if FreeType can be used under any of these licenses, can someone juridically oblige to open the source code of the proprietary product, that distributed in binary form, using the &quot;permissive&quot; dependency, that uses FreeType?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5889" LastEditorUserId="5889" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T13:27:14.670" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T09:19:47.150" Title="Is it safe to use FreeType inside a proprietary closed-source software?" Tags="|gpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5138" CreationDate="2017-02-20T14:30:19.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order for your release to remain stable, you're going to need to fork that unmerged branch yourself. Otherwise, that branch may disappear, rendering your package unusable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned in the comments, it would be best if you kept an eye on that branch so you can update your documentation and kill your fork if &amp;amp; when it gets mainlined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T14:30:19.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5159" CreationDate="2017-02-20T17:02:49.863" Score="6" ViewCount="1640" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the source code of the most .NET Core components is licensed under a MIT License, the binary files of the .NET Core runtime and other supporting libraries on NuGet are released under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/net/dotnet_library_license.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a more restrictive license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii. Distribution Restrictions. You may not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;alter any copyright, trademark or patent notice in the Distributable Code;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use Microsoft’s trademarks in your programs’ names or in a way that suggests your programs come from or are endorsed by Microsoft;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;include Distributable Code in malicious, deceptive or unlawful programs; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use, modification or distribution, that&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;others have the right to modify it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the above text from that license, it seems that GPL is an &lt;code&gt;Excluded License&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can't distribute a .NET Core project under GPL, or I've misunderstood something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7462" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T22:07:38.823" Title="Distributing a .NET Core project under GPL" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5148" CreationDate="2017-02-20T18:20:45.140" Score="0" ViewCount="1341" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking into using Nodemailer in an application of mine and was wondering when isn't it free and requires a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nodemailer.com/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nodemailer.com/about/license/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried reading over the doc but all the legal stuff goes over my head. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nodemailer.com/about/pricing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the pricing page they have this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nodemailer is available under a more restrictive license without a fee, so you are free to test Nodemailer before actually buying anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But don't really list the restrictions that I can find so not sure what they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T00:42:13.790" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T02:42:35.003" Title="When is Nodemailer not free?" Tags="|licensing|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5147" CreationDate="2017-02-20T20:59:43.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading their &lt;a href=&quot;http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/eupl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; (EUPL 1.1), it's a copyleft license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According  to  its  article  5,  the  EUPL  is  also   copyleft    in &#xA;  order    to    avoid    any    exclusive     appropriation of the&#xA;  software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#EUPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confirms&lt;/a&gt; that it's a copyleft license incompatible with, but convertible to, GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's a dual-licensed product, and if you don't wish to distribute your software under EUPL or GPL, you need to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T02:42:35.003" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T02:42:35.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T01:58:08.847" Score="1" ViewCount="1541" Body="&lt;p&gt;So from what I understand a product under GNU General Public License needs to stay under GNU General Public License (with references to the previous copyright owner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you sell it then the full project included code goes to the buyer. But I don’t want that my buyer get all the power to sell my customizations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a website under GNU General Public License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you make it your property and hold all the code private, if you don’t sell the full like in question 2.&#xA;Can you ask for money to use it? (user License).&#xA;Can you ask the future user for money for to customize it? (the hours that I spend changing the customization).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7465" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T09:51:10.577" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:54:21.773" Title="Can you commercialize a GNU General Public License product?" Tags="|licensing|law|website|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5151" CreationDate="2017-02-21T17:14:48.603" Score="1" ViewCount="1477" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written for the purposes of my PhD some very short Python code (110 lines) which I believe could be useful to others. Hence I would like to spread it (e.g. on GitHub) but want to prevent anyone who would use it to make a patent out of it. Thus I found that the Apache 2.0 Licence would be appropriate. So I went on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt; webpage and read in particular the &quot;APPENDIX: How to apply the Apache License to your work&quot;. This seems to indicate that there is nothing else to do but copy/pasting the 10 lines of Copyright at the beginning of my code to apply the Apache 2.0 Licence. But I cannot understand how copy/pasting 10 lines of text would give any legal protection to my work.&#xA;Sorry for the silly question, but I do not know much about copyright and was not able to find a clear answer on the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7472" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T08:26:55.897" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:06:45.597" Title="I want to apply the Apache 2.0 Licence to my code. Should I submit it to someone?" Tags="|apache-2.0|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5150" CreationDate="2017-02-21T18:50:32.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright is automatic when you write the work - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#automatic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright.gov&lt;/a&gt; for the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can license that work to others or not as you wish.  The Apache license doesn't give you copyright protection, it lets others use your work without getting sued by you for violating your existing copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for your case, just add those lines.  You may want to distribute the license as well in a LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="109" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:06:45.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5154" CreationDate="2017-02-21T21:27:01.363" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I own a startup company that manufactures PCB's. We decided to release them under the GPLv3 license to eliminate the hassles of patents and so forth. Another factor is that we use code on the microcontrollers that comes from the open source community worldwide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is : Is it legal to sell a GPLv3 licensed PCB to a company that has strict distributor territories ? Strict distributor territories meaning a companies distributor cannot sell to another distributors customer, no matter the circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6742" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:52:45.387" Title="Manufacture PCB's using GPLv3 license" Tags="|gpl-3|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5149" CreationDate="2017-02-22T09:40:28.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, and foremost, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, as I understand this question, you have been asked by a third party to do some commercial website development, the website to be hosted on drupal, and the work to include some modifications to the drupal system itself (yes, I know you said &lt;em&gt;... or wordpress&lt;/em&gt;, but let's assume a stationary target).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/docs/8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, drupal 8 (the current version) is distributed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.  This gives us three separate issues: content you create for publishing via your modified drupal system, your modifications to the drupal core itself, and drupal modules you create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly&lt;/strong&gt; as I understand it, content you create for your client is not covered by drupal's licence.  The basis on which this work is available to your client is up for agreement between the two of you.  If you don't want your client to be able to sell it on, and you want to be able to reuse it yourself, you will need to ensure the agreement conveys only a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use a single copy of this content.  In some jurisdictions, you may need to address the issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;works for hire&lt;/a&gt;.  Frankly, you should get a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly&lt;/strong&gt; any modifications you make to the drupal core are pretty clearly covered by the core's licence.  GPLv2 section 2b says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of&#xA;  it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute&#xA;  such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above,&#xA;  provided that you also meet all of these conditions: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part&#xA;  thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties&#xA;  under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;distribution or publishing&lt;/em&gt; happens when you give your core modifications to the client.  As I understand it, drupal is written in PHP, which is an interpreted, not a complied language.  If you give your core modifications to the client, to run on his/her own server, you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; license the new, modified drupal core under GPLv2, and (s)he may then modify, copy and distribute it as long as (s)he also obeys the obligations of GPLv2.  If you can persuade the client to pay for modifications which you host in perpetuity, then I think you may keep them secret; but I also think your client would be an idiot for signing such a contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thirdly&lt;/strong&gt;, modifications you make to drupal by way of custom modules are difficult.  Even if drupal were a compiled product, the licence status of code that is linked into GPLed code remains an open question; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;some say&lt;/a&gt; that it constitutes a derivative work, and therefore the GPL covers your modifications, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat?rq=1&quot;&gt;others say&lt;/a&gt; that it doesn't.  That drupal is an interpreted, not a compiled, product certainly doesn't make things simpler, and may complicate them more.  My personal feeling is that you are on safest ground assuming that your module is covered by drupal's licence; therefore you should treat it the same as modifications to the core, and either give it to the client under GPLv2, or host it yourself - but that is just my uninformed feeling on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:40:28.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5152" CreationDate="2017-02-22T09:52:45.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This shouldn't be a problem. You are granting more rights per the license to your customer than the law gives them. They won't be able to use some of the rights which you granted them because the law will prevent them to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether distributing the design under GPL v3 will eliminate the hassle of patents, this is a complex question but we can say a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By publishing the design you are preventing others to patent it (theoretically) but you could still be hindered by pre-existing patents, and some patents could still be granted (wrongly) after the publication and only a lawsuit would be able to cancel them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you accept contributions, you will be granted a license to the patents which are owned by the people who contribute and which you need to be able to use their contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T09:52:45.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5150" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:56:51.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot understand how copy/pasting 10 lines of text would give any legal protection to my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well this is simple: by adding a notice stating that your code is licensed under the Apache license, you effectively grant a license with conditions. These conditions are the Apache conditions. Therefore any use of your work that would not respect these conditions would not be licensed by you and therefore &quot;infringing&quot; on your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T13:56:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T11:18:38.803" Score="2" ViewCount="1160" Body="&lt;p&gt;If software artifact is patented and then licensed under Apache Software License 2.0 what are the limitation due to the patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the patent be used for non derived works. Independent (better) reimplementation of the software? Can a similar product be developed? What level of overlap can there be? What would be the implication if you use some or onthe other hand none of the code from the original product? What about reusing design, architectural and visual aspects but not the code? If the rewrite is done in another language hence you cannot use the original code? What would be the implication of the patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3192" OwnerDisplayName="Suminda Sirinath S. Dharmasena" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T21:58:30.883" Title="How does ASL 2.0 licensed software interact with patents or patent pending" Tags="|licensing|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5149" CreationDate="2017-02-22T14:54:21.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The previous answer is correct, though I'd suggest a refinement about &quot;content&quot;. I.e. for anything that you &quot;configure&quot; via Drupal's admin interface. As a sample, think of using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/rules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rules&lt;/a&gt; module, which is like a GUI to implement business logic in a language that looks like a macro language, and the results of that are stored in your Drupal database. If you want, you can export anything you created with this module, and eventually also import it again in another site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same applies for all sorts of other things, such as custom reporting (using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/views&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Views&lt;/a&gt; module), or all those other fancy Drupal modules that are &quot;entity based&quot;, and which come with import / export facilities: Group, Message, Flag, etc ... And even things like content types and field definitions can be considered like that also. In the end, probably anything that is supported via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drupal.org/project/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Features&lt;/a&gt; module (to move configurations between 2 sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all the above things, IMO that is all to be considered as variations of &quot;content&quot;, whereas somebody has the know-how to click together whatever it takes, and uses the Drupal UI (and/or any of its modules) to get those things stored in the Drupal database. But whatever you can import/export is to be considered as something for which the GPL does not apply. Because if it would, how would that differ from using (eg) MS Word or Libre Office to create a .DOC file (ie: who is the owner of the .DOC file? the author of the .DOC I'd think!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hosted solution as an alternative&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A solution that you could use as an alternative, where you avoid 100% of all the typical GPL obligations that you don't want, is to package what you're offering as a hosted solution ... Similar specs for the Drupal site to be created, but you agree (upfront!!!) with the customer that they will get access to it via some sort of hosted solution, where you are in charge of hosting it for your customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crucial difference here is that you do not have to &quot;&lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt;&quot; any Drupal software to your customer, while using GPL software also implies that nobody can force you to distribute (or disclose) any customizations you made to a GPLed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you distribute such software 1 time to somebody (eg your customer), then &quot;you&quot; are not allowed by the GPL license to impose a restriction to that like &quot;that somebody is not allowed to distribute the distributed version to anybody else&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="211" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T14:54:21.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5156" CreationDate="2017-02-22T21:58:30.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If software artifact is patented and then licensed under Apache Software License 2.0 what are the limitation due to the patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would depend if you are the patent holder and if you are the licensor or a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are both the patent holder and either the licensor or a contributor then per &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#patent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 3&lt;/a&gt; you are eventually granting a patent license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are neither of these and are just the recipient, then this patent is licensed to you but this is a limited license. Again per section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...[ where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is limited to the scope of what the software does which could be quite limited depending on how you read a given patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license granted per section 3 again states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret &lt;code&gt;make and have made&lt;/code&gt; as a license that would allow to create &quot;infringing&quot; work in other languages. The case of doing modifications does seem implied there too, but this is just a wild take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always with patent, you should consult an attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T21:58:30.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5146" CreationDate="2017-02-22T22:07:38.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have understood things correctly: the GPL and copyleft licenses are explicitly targeted here without naming them. So you cannot redistribute things in a way that would make Microsoft software subject to a copyleft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these are system libraries, you would likely not redistribute them and should not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you are saying that this license is for pre-built binaries and that the sources are MIT-licensed, then use the sources, do not reuse the binaries and be happy. The MIT is considered as compatible with the A/L/GPL licenses. And you could released binaries built from these sources combined with your copyleft-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T22:07:38.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2017-02-22T22:09:55.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it safe to use FreeType inside a proprietary closed-source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if FreeType can be used under any of these licenses, can someone juridically oblige to open the source code of the proprietary product, that distributed in binary form, using the &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; dependency, that uses FreeType?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is no. The thing about the FreeType license is that you are required to make an explicit choice among the licensing options. Document the choice you made and you should be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional details based on @Raphael10 comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can choose between FTL compatible with GPL version 3, and GPL version 2. In both cases, as far as I understand, FreeType is not that compatible with closed source (propetary) sw. Is it correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FreeType license at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freetype.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.freetype.org/license.html&lt;/a&gt; states that there are these choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FreeType comes with two licenses from which you can choose the one&#xA;which fits your needs best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FreeType License (FTL) is the most commonly used one. It is a BSD-style license with a credit clause and thus compatible with the&#xA;GNU Public License (GPL) version 3, but not with the GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. Use it for all projects which use the GPLv2 also, or which need a license compatible&#xA;to the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice we are discussing here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/blob/master/docs/FTL.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeType License&lt;/a&gt; option which is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scancode-licensedb.aboutcode.org/freetype.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive&lt;/a&gt; license and can be used alright when combined with proprietary code. We are NOT talking about the GPL option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T09:19:47.150" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T09:19:47.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5143" CreationDate="2017-02-22T22:12:46.323" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do it this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I add a proper Apache notice and copyright at the top of the file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I document in comments where I took the code from and what I took&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I document in comments any changes I did&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I add a copy of the Apache license to go with the code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if originally present, I copy and carry with the code any NOTICE-like file that was with the original code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T22:12:46.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-23T14:18:44.097" Score="5" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are full terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3.0&lt;/a&gt; already covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3.0&lt;/a&gt; section 5 under the terms of an &quot;aggregate&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent&#xA;  works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,&#xA;  and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,&#xA;  in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an&#xA;  &quot;aggregate&quot; if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not&#xA;  used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users&#xA;  beyond what the individual works permit.  Inclusion of a covered work&#xA;  in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other&#xA;  parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as far as i can tell, doesn't this cover the terms of the LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the point of the LGPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7480" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T05:35:18.767" Title="Are the terms of LGPL 3.0 already covered by GPL 3.0 aggregate definition" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5162" CreationDate="2017-02-23T14:51:12.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a library, let's call it &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt;, which you receive under GPLv3.  If you write code that links to &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt;, the position of the FSF is that the resulting executable, the combined work, is a derivative work of &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt;.  Under GPLv3 section 5c, if you convey this work to anyone else, you must license &lt;em&gt;the entire work&lt;/em&gt; under GPLv3 - your code as well as &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt;'s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider a library, &lt;code&gt;libbar&lt;/code&gt;, which you receive under LGPLv3.  If you write code that links to &lt;code&gt;libbar&lt;/code&gt;, and you convey the resulting executable to others, then although you have several obligations with respect to &lt;code&gt;libbar&lt;/code&gt; under LGPL, you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; obliged to license the combined work under GPL, and you may keep your code secret should you choose to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the difference, and the point of LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage you quote above would not apply to such a work.  Firstly, because it does not use &lt;em&gt;compilation&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &lt;em&gt;a thing a compiler produces&lt;/em&gt; but in the sense of &lt;em&gt;mix tape&lt;/em&gt; - a collection of unrelated works on a single medium, such as a GNU/Linux distro DVD containing many different pieces of software covered by many different licences.  Secondly, what you quote above only applies to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a compilation of a covered work with other [...] works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An executable resulting from linking your code to &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt; fails that second test on its face, and (under the FSF's interpretation of linking) the first test also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T14:03:07.540" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T14:03:07.540" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5190" CreationDate="2017-02-23T15:22:48.827" Score="9" ViewCount="859" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one has an open source project that is deployed somewhere in the cloud via a continuous delivery pipeline, how can the programmatic credentials needed for the CI/CD to deploy the application remains private?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally in a private project on a private repository, one could lazily place those credentials in the pipeline steps code in order for the machine to be able to deploy the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; solutions to hide credentials somewhere else than in the code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fugue/credstash&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;credstash&lt;/a&gt; is a good example as it store your creds on AWS and you access them with your AWS user private access key. This key can be store on your AWS account and used on your computer. All of this making them live outside of your repository. But the point is that in order to have those hidden credentials &lt;strong&gt;on your CI/CD build machine&lt;/strong&gt;, you have to somehow give your build machine a way to get to them. Meaning giving it creds that will end up in the repo again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are we supposed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7490" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T18:19:44.077" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:16:39.390" Title="How do Open Source projects manage continuous delivery credentials?" Tags="|github|software|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5167" CreationDate="2017-02-23T16:50:39.380" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most objectively strong points of free/open source is the community storage of library code, where code can be scrutinized, compatibility can be maintained, and duplicated effort can be reduced. Great examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://crates.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://crates.io/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CRAN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first learned hardware description languages, I wasn't completely aware of this, and didn't think about it, but is there such a storage network for HDLs like VHDL and Verilog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7493" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:10:00.037" Title="Are there any FOSS/community library registries for hardware description languages?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5164" CreationDate="2017-02-23T18:40:29.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You manage them as you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; manage the credentials for any project, open source or not: by the principle of least access. The development team don't need access to the deployment credentials, so they live in a separate area to which fewer people have access. To take an example: even on the closed source projects I work on, we try very hard not to give any contractors access to anything like deployment keys, just because that means we don't have to worry about re-securing things every time a contractor leaves. You can do exactly the same on an open source project, with only (e.g.) the project owners getting those credentials - most people need access to the artifacts produced by the CI/CD pipeline, not access to reconfigure the pipeline itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T18:40:29.783" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2017-02-23T22:01:57.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only site that I've heard mentioned before is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opencores.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opencores.org/&lt;/a&gt;. I've never used it personally, but it's the only one that I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T22:01:57.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5169" CreationDate="2017-02-24T05:34:58.910" Score="15" ViewCount="7395" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to keep this as short as possible... In a VM, to test a problem of someone else, I installed a fresh Linux Mint 17.3 and opened Firefox. The search bar (right of the address bar) didn't include Google as an option, as I'm used to. Proceeding to the option to add search providers, I finally found it, along with a &amp;quot;reason&amp;quot; it wasn't there by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UALDA.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UALDA.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little put off by that, but not too worried about it, (they need money too, right?) I found the link for Google and enabled it. Now it was available, and all was good. Except that it wasn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, as I type in the search box I get suggestions that lend themselves to what's been typed so far. Often this shortens my typing significantly. Now, it wasn't doing that. I switched back to Yahoo, and it work as normal. Back to Google, no such luck. Not unfamiliar with &lt;code&gt;about:config&lt;/code&gt; I poked around, then dug around, and did some comparisons with settings between Yahoo and Google. No dice, can't find what triggers the difference in behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ok,&amp;quot; says I to self, I'm just go to the repository and drop the Mint custom version, and install the Mozilla original version. Into software manager and drill down to Firefox. No options to upgrade, downgrade, switch versions, or anything else, just &amp;quot;Remove&amp;quot; which, after doing that, only gives the option to &amp;quot;Install.&amp;quot; Shows what version will be installed, but no options to change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a Mint user, so I don't know if there's other options for controlling software or not. I'm sure that a source install is likely to be available somehow. But.. Is that the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand &amp;quot;Free&amp;quot; software, it's about choice, and not having someone, disto author in this case, dictate what I can use. The option to add Google seemed to fulfill that promise, until I found it only half-worked. Making it difficult, maybe prohibitively so, to replace the restrictive version with an unrestricted version was the icing on the cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;So, Linux Mint, Linux kernel and all, is, or is not, Free software? BTW: The source is available, so it's probably &amp;quot;Open source&amp;quot; at least.&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper question relates only to the version of Firefox, firefox_51.0.1+linuxmint1+rosa, supplied in the repos of Mint, not to the distro itself, or to any other package in the disto, including the kernel. As such, the question should have been, &amp;quot;Does the version of Firefox supplied with Linux Mint 17.3 comply with the MPL and is it still free within the FSF concept?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In re: the &amp;quot;crippling&amp;quot; of the software: I don't know how long I've been using Mozilla products, or Firefox in general, but as their product have evolved, and as I've moved from one distro to another, between OSs, and between platforms, I have become accustomed to features behaving consistently across them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll not argue, here or in comments, as to whether or not that version is &amp;quot;crippled.&amp;quot; I do know that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; modified, and that it does not work the same as every other release of Firefox that I have available to me for testing. The modified source code is available, to anyone who wants it, and according to the accepted answer, modified or not it does comply with the FSF's four freedoms. That was the question, and that is the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been replying to comments that go beyond the scope of the question, and I probably shouldn't have been. By my rep, even across SE as a whole, you can see that I'm learning the Stack Exchange way. Comments about the real question will be replied to, while my crippled phrase, my improper scope to include the distro, and related debates won't be fueled by me. Further insights, or explanations that are germane to the OS topic are welcomed and encouraged. That's how others like me can learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7180" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T01:22:33.873" Title="Is Linux Mint's version of Firefox really Free software? Is it compliant with the MPL?" Tags="|mpl|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5168" CreationDate="2017-02-24T07:16:30.600" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software is &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;What is free software?&quot;&gt;defined by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;) if it gives you the four freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have bad usability, it could have bugs, it could spy on you, it could technically restrict browsing to certain sites or installation of certain software, it could intentionally delete your music – as long as it gives you the four freedoms, it qualifies as &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to these freedoms, you are allowed and enabled to change the things you don’t like, and to share the changed software with others. Note that this doesn’t mean that you need to be able to change it e.g. within the GUI, or that is has to be easy – it just has to be allowed (legally) and possible (source code provided).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue you mention doesn’t affect whether or not Linux Mint is free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it free software? Well, this depends on what is meant with &quot;it&quot;, as a GNU/Linux distribution consists of many different parts, and could come with separate but pre-installed software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we talk about the ISO that can be downloaded (so not taking any packages into account that can be installed from their repository): According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxmint.com/faq.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Mint’s FAQ &lt;em&gt;Does Linux Mint include proprietary drivers?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it doesn’t contain any proprietary software (but note that this applies to the current release; it seems that this was not the case for older releases). So yes, Linux Mint is free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T07:16:30.600" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2017-02-24T15:01:50.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing yet. Why?&#xA;Well why did these package repositories such as CRAN, crates, NPM, Pypi, Rubygems, Maven, etc. came to life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is natural evolution. And a succession of needs and actions. Some are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the programming languages started to be used reasonably widely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;several FOSS libraries were released&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the emerging community felt that it was difficult to find and install these good libraries in a consistent way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone who felt this pain more acutely decided to scratch the itch and started creating a package manager, defining conventions and specs for building, installing, publishing, finding, etc. packages. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it felt good and caught up with the rest of the world. Or not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not know where you would stand for VHDL and Verilog designs, but it could well be that you have reached &quot;level 3&quot; and that you could be the &quot;someone&quot; to start &quot;level 4&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T22:10:00.037" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:10:00.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5173" CreationDate="2017-02-24T15:07:02.193" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to use the following library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift&lt;/a&gt;. For this library a convenient license is displayed on the front page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue I see is that when I go inside the project (e.g here &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift/tree/master/Sources/CryptoSwift/AES.swift&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift/tree/master/Sources/CryptoSwift/AES.swift&lt;/a&gt;) a copyright notice is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: which license applies to the code ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T07:26:00.633" Title="License Text Coverage" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5171" CreationDate="2017-02-25T03:41:23.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The issue I see is that when I go inside the project (e.g here &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift/tree/master/Sources/CryptoSwift/AES.swift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/CryptoSwift/tree/master/Sources/CryptoSwift/AES.swift&lt;/a&gt;) a copyright notice is displayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fine. It is usual for the author to retain the copyright while &lt;em&gt;licensing&lt;/em&gt; the work under to others under a permissive license. The fact that the code has been licensed does not undermine the author's copyright ownership in any way; for example the author is free to license the code under other a proprietary license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/a&gt;&quot; does not contradict the licensing of the software. In the past this phrasing was required to claim copyright in some jurisdictions; today it has no legal effect because copyright is automatic in most legal jurisdictions. Thus at most this phrase means that copyright is being claimed, not that that particular file is not being licensed under the project license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, the &quot;rights&quot; that are being &quot;reserved&quot; are the property rights in the copyright itself. It's a little confusing because without knowing the legal history a layperson might well assume that &quot;all rights reserved&quot; means something like exclusive distribution; it does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7252" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T07:26:00.633" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T07:26:00.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4254" CreationDate="2017-02-25T06:28:58.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's a portfolio&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you'll excuse me for not citing, because both Stack Overflow and Github offer job boards, whose leverage is predicated on the idea of &lt;em&gt;&quot;free&quot; content as a portfolio&lt;/em&gt; (notably, SO's &quot;developer story&quot; sources Github repository details for this purpose). I have been hired on the basis of SO's magic internet points before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has parallels in the graphic design community, which has similarly monetized sites in the form of Behance and Dribbble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a degree of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;debate&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ethics&lt;/a&gt; of this, but it's fair to say that that ship has sailed. I work to get hired, and &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; I work on things I want to accomplish. Throughout that, other people profit from what I write (or not?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7493" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T06:28:58.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5365" CreationDate="2017-02-26T00:41:23.123" Score="9" ViewCount="1247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I include a library licenced under LGPL 2.1 in an MIT-licenced project without any legal problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it's not a compiled language, I would provide the full untouched source code of the library (including the copyright notice) in a sub-directory of my project. My classes would then use some of the library's classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;text of the licence&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library's complete source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and distribute a copy of this License along with the Library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that what I want to do is legal? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7523" LastEditorUserId="7523" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T16:09:48.867" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:27:00.167" Title="Including untouched LGPL library in a MIT-licenced project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|law|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5168" CreationDate="2017-02-26T00:45:34.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Software&lt;/em&gt;: refer to the non-physical part of the computer system in the form of encoded information that controls its&#xA;behavior. A collection of computer programs, libraries and related data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Computer program&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Source code&lt;/em&gt; is any collection of computer instructions, possibly with comments, written using a human-readable programming language,&#xA;usually as ordinary text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users actually read the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; to understand the &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; that runs in their computers and is distributed to them in form of &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; (with data, config files, documentation, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users can know the &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; (what the computer does) by reading the documentation or trying the features but they can not understand the encoded information that the machine actually runs (are just numbers) therefore they can not modify the program directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a user read the the &lt;em&gt;FSF definition of free software&lt;/em&gt; he might be tempted to feel like anything can be made with the software but it is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program is a pre-established sequence of instructions by the &lt;em&gt;programmers&lt;/em&gt; who make it. In the precise moment that you modify the sequence of instruction you are creating another &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt;. (one new version is actually another program with the same name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even when they say...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom&#xA;0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the user has a limited degree of freedom. The program would never give you the freedom to do something it was not designed to do. Nevertheless, the user has a certain pre-designed amount of options to drive its behavior through configuration parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we are clear that you are actually using &lt;em&gt;another version&lt;/em&gt; of firefox. Can they distribute it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others&#xA;(freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance&#xA;to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a&#xA;precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes clear that they have the right to modify Firefox and distribute it. What is not clear is whether they can use the same name or Artwork for the software, given the precedence that Debian seems to be forced to use different ones in their fork named &lt;strong&gt;Iceweasel&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find more if you put this into your firefox's URL address bar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;about:rights&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;. It is GPL compatible (in the sense that is not contradictory), but it allows that some parts of the software are not &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; if it is properly remarked. Check the sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1.12. “Secondary License”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1.5. “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3.3. Distribution of a Larger Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;10.4. Distributing Source Code Form that is Incompatible With Secondary Licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exhibit B - “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses” Notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the way to check this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Locate the source code of the version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Check the &lt;strong&gt;Exhibit B&lt;/strong&gt; of the license there. Otherwise not stated there the GPL also applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; under the section: &lt;em&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions&lt;/em&gt; you will see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it,&#xA;and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that seems to be precisely the notification that your screenshot shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, is &lt;strong&gt;free software&lt;/strong&gt;, at less you locate the &lt;strong&gt;MPL&lt;/strong&gt; license accompanying the source code with their modifications and note it states the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7524" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T20:17:35.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T09:18:53.733" Score="3" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an open source web application, there should be documentation. Keeping such documentation in a Wiki seems to be an desirable approach because various users can easily contribute to it, explaining their use cases and how they get them done. However, a small number of users have their instances running on an intranet not connected to the internet. So it should be possible to build in a hardcopy of the current wiki state into the application, as read-only fall-back, to provide links from the web application into the wiki (to the public wiki normally, but configurable to a local copy as well). These users should not require do do a complicated set-up of a wiki web application. They must not get hold of the password hashes of the public wiki of course, so copying a database dump around (without whatever kind of post-processing it) isn’t a sensible solution. For community reasons (mainly German) the wiki should support translators (like notifications to editors of an article, if another translation of the same article changed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kitodo/kitodo-production&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The web application&lt;/a&gt; is in Java / Tomcat (currently 7), and requires a MySQL database, so these requirements are already provided and do not create additional work to be set up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there approaches in the open source community have proven their worth to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide an easily, for everyone editable documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which can simply be shipped as offline copy with a web application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and support some translation feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7532" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:35:52.200" Title="How to ship a documentation wiki with an OS web app" Tags="|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T10:40:13.993" Score="3" ViewCount="2116" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I easily determine a project's dependencies' licenses? For example on my GitHub repo which includes multiple open source softwares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7534" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T04:10:06.457" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T07:32:14.883" Title="Finding license dependencies from GitHub repo" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T19:25:35.880" Score="2" ViewCount="1897" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to start by stating that I've read (almost) all the posts related to the AGPL license. Unfortunately it's not yet clear. Most of the posts refer to libraries while I use it as an application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My use case:&#xA;Use pm2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://libraries.io/npm/pm2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://libraries.io/npm/pm2&lt;/a&gt;) to manage (proprietary) services on a server &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; modifying the source code (so start, restart etc.).&#xA;The users would interact only to the services that are managed by pm2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to make public anything ? (if yes, what exactly?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T15:25:32.867" Title="Can one use AGPL application without copy left effects?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2017-02-27T19:29:49.683" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/otale/tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see it here：&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hEpyQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/otale/tale/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/otale/tale/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7539" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T19:29:49.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2017-02-28T09:07:03.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were heavy debates on the extent of AGPL on this site that were not really clearly solved, but as you said they concern mostly the use of AGPL software as a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the page you linked, we can read in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PM2 is made available under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 (AGPL 3.0). If you use the PM2 API contact us for a possible LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they mean to say (clumsily) is that they consider that as soon as you are using the PM2 API, you are producing a derivative work (a &quot;modified&quot; version of the software) and thus you are bound by the terms of the AGPL license. In that case, they offer (probably for a fee) to license the software to you under a more lax license (even though, it won't exactly be the LGPL, unless they are a bit dumb, because if it were the LGPL, then you could redistribute their software under LGPL to anyone else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; using the API but only using the software through scripts / command-line / pipes / sockets, then this is what is generally considered arm-length interaction, and the FSF has repeatedly claimed that this should probably not be considered modification in the case of GPL, thus it should not either in the case of AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T09:07:03.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5199" CreationDate="2017-02-28T14:09:37.410" Score="5" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taken from section 1 LGPL v3.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work under sections 3 and 4 of this License without being bound by section 3 of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3 of GPL v3.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't section 1 of LGPL v3.0 provide exception to section 5 of GPL v3.0 instead? Section 5 of GPL speaks about conveying modified source versions, which is what is covered by sections 3 and 4 of LGPL v3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7543" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:12:55.560" Title="Shouldn't LGPL v3.0 provide exception to section 5 (instead of section 3) of GPL v3.0?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5192" CreationDate="2017-03-01T13:07:40.497" Score="1" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a video game with importable custom characters. My characters have a special license that forbids pornography and blasphemy in derivative works. It is viral in itself to prevent such acts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if someone puts a ShareAlike character such as one from Club Penguin or Floraverse into my game, does it force my game to be licensed under ShareAlike? If so, then is it illegal to mix my viral license and ShareAlike? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, are my characters doomed to never again be in a crossover with Floraverse characters or Club Penguin characters? Is there an exemption that I could ask from the Creative Commons license makers or the creator of Floraverse/Club Penguin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;A viral license is a license that forces all derivative works to be licensed under that same license.&lt;br&gt;A stained program is a program that has to be licensed under a viral license because it is &quot;stained&quot; by the content licensed by the viral license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4963" LastEditorUserId="4963" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T20:59:31.260" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T20:59:31.260" Title="If I include a ShareAlike/GPL/viral-licensed character in my videogame, is my videogame stained?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5182" CreationDate="2017-03-01T17:58:43.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and I was not involved in drafting any GPL license, but below is my common-sense reading of the licenses, starting from an assumption they are legally sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't section 1 of LGPL v3.0 provide exception to section 5 of GPL v3.0 instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: No, because section 5 contains a permission, not a requirement. The permission &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; requirements, but to eliminate section 5 would be to eliminate the permission altogether. By contrast, section 3 is entirely a requirement, which as a special exception does not apply while you exercise your permissions to combine and share the library under LGPLv3 sections 3 and 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL contains a set of &lt;em&gt;permissions&lt;/em&gt;. The LGPLv3 is a set of additional permissions on top of those present in the GPLv3. You assume that the more lax LGPL would need to limit the restrictions present within the permission to convey modified versions in GPLv3 section 5, but this is not the case. Instead, the LGPLv3 simply adds a new permission to share modified versions that stands alongside the more limited permission in the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, an LGPLv3-licensed work includes permissions such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify a copy of the Library, and, in your modifications, a facility refers to a function or data to be supplied by an Application that uses the facility (other than as an argument passed when the facility is invoked), then you may convey a copy of the modified version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) under this License...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; includes (i.e., inherits from the GPLv3) the completely separate permission&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to distribute the work, you choose which permission you'd like to exercise: you are free to choose to exercise a more limited GPL-supplied permission, or you may instead do so under a more lax LGPL-supplied permission, if your distribution meets the LGPL's preconditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To highlight another issue with your interpretation (as far as I understand it), LGPLv3 section 1 only applies to sections 3 and 4 of the LGPL. It does not apply to section 2, which would also need to have the requirements of the GPLv3 held back, if your interpretation were correct that GPLv3 requirements always apply to redistribution unless the LGPL explicitly exempts them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, LGPLv3 section 1 really does seem to eliminate the requirements of section 3. That is, downstream redistributors who share the library in the ways allowed by LGPL sections 3 and 4 may assert that their work is subject to effective technological measures -- i.e., if your software uses an LGPL licensed library, you may still take legal action against users who circumvent DRM in your software, if such circumvention violates laws against DRM-circumvention. Without this permission, section 3 would bar you from taking such legal action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T17:58:43.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5189" CreationDate="2017-03-01T20:37:23.223" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Situation&lt;/strong&gt;: A commercial product, using a locally modified GPLV3 licensed library. GPLV3 clearly requires to disclose source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Which source code are we talking about about ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) The complete commercial product - including the modified library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) The modified library only. The commercial product can remain closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it (a) or (b) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think the answer is (b). The modified library has to be released as another GPLV3 licensed product. A fork of the original product as it were. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, management in my company is banning GPLV3 altogether because there is a risk the complete product should be released as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7554" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T08:07:41.630" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T18:14:20.517" Title="Use a modified GPLV3 library - what code should be made public?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5191" CreationDate="2017-02-28T11:58:46.537" Score="4" ViewCount="1901" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I bundle a piece of &lt;strong&gt;compiled&lt;/strong&gt; software &lt;em&gt;(in this case, FFMPEG)&lt;/em&gt; which is licensed under GPL 2, with my own commercial software (which is not licensed under any form of open source license), does it affect the license that I have to apply to my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the GPL 2 licensed component does not affect my software if it is compiled/built - it would affect it if I was including some/all of the source code in my own project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to bundle a built (.exe) copy FFMPEG, which is licensed under GPL 2, with my own software...But I don't want to have to open source my software project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7559" OwnerDisplayName="Ben Hayward" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T09:50:29.217" Title="Software: If I bundle built (compiled) GPL 2 licensed software with commercial software package how does it affect my software license?" Tags="|software|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5187" CreationDate="2017-03-02T04:57:55.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are actually planning on doing something like this, instead of just &lt;em&gt;thinking about&lt;/em&gt; doing it, you should always ask your company's lawyers and do as they tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;takes the view&lt;/a&gt; that separate processes are different programs and code running in the same process is one program:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. &lt;strong&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the FSF's view is correct, then the whole program, commercial code included, is one big derivative work of the original library.  That means you have to license the whole thing under the GPL.  Whenever you distribute binaries of a GPL'd program, you must also distribute source that can be compiled into those binaries.  In other words, &lt;strong&gt;you must distribute all of the source, not just the modified library&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T18:14:20.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5164" CreationDate="2017-03-02T09:29:41.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one has an open source project that is deployed somewhere in the cloud via a continuous delivery pipeline, how can the programmatic credentials needed for the CI/CD to deploy the application remains private?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really depends on which CI/CD you use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I use Travis and Appveyor. Both support to encrypt &quot;secrets&quot; in their manifests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance in this build &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pombreda/thirdparty/blob/803b2f2134dc704d3fdcd37bb34b0c78397629b7/appveyor.yml#L36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;loop&lt;/a&gt; I build Python wheels on Appveyor and they get uploaded to bintray, which would be a minimal Ci/CD-like pipeline of sorts.  The same applies &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pombreda/thirdparty/blob/803b2f2134dc704d3fdcd37bb34b0c78397629b7/.travis.yml#L53&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with Travis (for Linux and Mac).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This other &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pombreda/thirdparty-manylinux/blob/e004f3b925316496819f6c9ce4e8504dc5f68a54/.travis.yml#L28&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;loop&lt;/a&gt; has the same approach but also uses Docker and things end in bintray too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to deploy for instance a web app to a live server, I would likely use exactly the same approach. e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if my build is successful and is for a tag ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... encrypt as secrets the deployment credentials as shown above ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and have my CI handle the decryption and do the actual deployment proper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the point is that in order to have those hidden credentials on your CI/CD build machine, you have to somehow give your build machine a way to get to them. Meaning giving it creds that will end up in the repo again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing here is that my regular credentials to the Ci (which are NOT in the repo) are what is used by the Ci tool to encrypt and decrypt at build time my encrypted secrets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the Ci knows how to decrypt these credentials. But an attacker would need to have control of the Ci/CD and of their eventually also encrypted auth DB to compromise my &quot;secrets&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a home grown or internally deployed Ci/Cd such as a Jenkins of sorts, you could use the same approach. For instance, use a GPG key or some other mechanism and give the Ci/CD the way to decrypt at runtime.&#xA;In all cases, at some level you need to trust some of the machines in the pipeline... You could make it more complex by adding intermediaries each with their own credentials too for making it harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T13:16:39.390" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:16:39.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5188" CreationDate="2017-03-02T09:50:29.217" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First FFmpeg can be built with different licensing depending on the build config resulting in binaries that are LGPL or GPL-licensed, but not always GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if you link with and call the libav* libraries from your proprietary code, the general community opinion is that you may eventually create some kind of derived of the library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library is GPL-licensed then then GPL copyleft terms would flow back and apply to the calling code.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library is LGPL-licensed then then LGPL copyleft terms would flow back and apply to the calling code is you use some static linking and would not apply if you use dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, the details of which L/GPL version is in play and how you interact with FFmpeg matters a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say you use FFmpeg as-is, unmodified and call its command line tool in a subprocess, then in most cases neither a GPL nor an LGPL copyleft would back to the code that spawns the subprocess. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the GPL 2 licensed component does not affect my software if it is compiled/built - it would affect it if I was including some/all of the source code in my own project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not sound a correct assumption to me, but there is not enough specifics in your question to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to bundle a built (.exe) copy FFMPEG, which is licensed under GPL 2, with my own software...But I don't want to have to open source my software project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So based on all I said above, it depends on how you interact with FFmpeg.&#xA;And in all cases whether using the GPL or LGPL regardless of how you call FFmpeg you will need to redistribute the source of FFmpeg proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, there are also codec patents to consider wrt. FFmpeg especially when used in a commercial software package. You must take these into consideration too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T09:50:29.217" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5184" CreationDate="2017-03-02T10:20:50.843" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main question you should be asking yourself is: is the game a derivative of the various characters that can be imported in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand your question, the game is programmed independently and has a feature for importing characters. Characters are data. The game can work without any specific character and does not depend on any specific feature that one character is bringing. In such case, the game is not a derivative of the characters and thus its license is unaffected by the license of the characters. &lt;em&gt;A fortiori&lt;/em&gt;, the various characters are unaffected by each other's licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it becomes a different question if you are distributing the game with the various characters bundled in some compiled form. Then, the game (characters included) is a derivative of each of the character, and it must as such be distributed under a license which respects the various conditions imposed by each license (and you might be in a case where no such license exists because of incompatible requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;All this being said, and even if I understood your question correctly and you are satisfied with my answer, I very much encourage you to edit your question to make it clearer what exactly you are asking (cf. Philippe's comments).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T10:20:50.843" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T23:56:38.533" Score="18" ViewCount="2583" Body="&lt;p&gt;This recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10_e20170301-tg.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; tends to say that the new &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub TOS&lt;/a&gt; make most open source projects at odds to comply with both their FOSS licensing and the TOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anything copyleft (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, CC-&lt;em&gt;-SA) or requiring attribution (CC-BY-&lt;/em&gt;, but also 4-clause BSD, Apache 2 with NOTICE text file, …) are affected&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T07:22:07.183" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T07:22:07.183" Title="Are the new GitHub Terms of service a kiss of death for open source projects?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-03T02:45:16.860" Score="6" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating an open source project, I also write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;my name&amp;gt;  &#xA;Licensed under &amp;lt;the license&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several problems with that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My future self might use the copyright to continue development as proprietary software. I am the only person in the world who has this dangerous power: Others can fork but their forks will need to remain open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least the community might fear that. We have seen many examples of that happening in the past.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, could I instead write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright Free Software Foundation  &#xA;Licensed under &amp;lt;the license&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would make me unable to continue as proprietary, as the copyright is not mine. If the community ever want to switch to another license, they will have an easier time talking with the FSF rather than with dead me or my hypothetic anti-OSS heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could that work in principle?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it OK to assign copyright to the FSF without their knowledge?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, is there another foundation that accepts that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="199" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T10:11:17.090" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T13:17:09.793" Title="Assigning copyright to a foundation rather than to me" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5200" CreationDate="2017-03-03T07:51:02.777" Score="3" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work as academic researcher in software engineering. We have an agreement with our university that we can release source code under EPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I work on two interrelated research projects (both released under EPL):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FTSRG/ingraph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;ingraph&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an incremental graph query engine supporting Cypher graph queries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FTSRG/codemodel-rifle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;codemodel-rifle&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a static analysis application for JavaScript source code repositories, which uses Cypher graph queries for defining &lt;strong&gt;well-formedness rules&lt;/strong&gt;. This project has a number of external dependencies, including some ASL- and MIT-licensed external libraries, and also uses Cypher-compliant query engine (Neo4j or &lt;code&gt;ingraph&lt;/code&gt;) in a client-server setup, talking through a driver with REST or &lt;a href=&quot;https://neo4j.com/blog/neo4j-3-0-language-drivers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;REST-like&lt;/a&gt; calls. A key component of this project is the &lt;strong&gt;parser&lt;/strong&gt; that transforms the source code to a graph representation - this requires considerable implementation efforts. The parser has talks to the query engine to build the graph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are planning to collaborate with &lt;a href=&quot;https://jqassistant.org/gplv3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;jQAssistant&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is GPLv3-licensed framework for static analysis, also using Cypher graph queries. jQAssistant currently runs as part of the build process, so it uses process calls instead of REST calls (e.g. it uses an embedded version of the GPLv3 Neo4j graph database).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, &lt;code&gt;codemodel-rifle&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;jQAssistant&lt;/code&gt; cannot use each other's code as &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#GPLCOMPATIBLE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL and EPL are incompatible both ways&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can request a new license from the university for future projects. In this case, we could re-implement the &lt;code&gt;codemodel-rifle&lt;/code&gt; application (&lt;code&gt;cr2&lt;/code&gt;) and re-release it under a different license. However, I am not sure which license to choose. &lt;code&gt;cr2&lt;/code&gt; would still depend on &lt;code&gt;ingraph&lt;/code&gt; (which is fully EPL-licensed), so we cannot use GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the collaboration would be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;share the parser component,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;share the well-formedness rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potential workarounds seem to be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reimplement &lt;code&gt;codemodel-rifle&lt;/code&gt; in GPLv3, and also implement an ASL-licensed driver to use &lt;code&gt;ingraph&lt;/code&gt; in a client-server setup.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Introduce an ASL-licensed common project that can use &lt;code&gt;codemodel-rifle&lt;/code&gt; and can be used by &lt;code&gt;jQAssistant&lt;/code&gt;. In this case, we still cannot use our &lt;code&gt;jQAssistant&lt;/code&gt;'s original code, but can jointly develop the common project. Our partner does not necessarily need &lt;code&gt;ingraph&lt;/code&gt; to run the analysis, as they can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://neo4j.com/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neo4j&lt;/a&gt; (which is GPL-licensed), so they could release their software under GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any better options for collaborating under these conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7566" LastEditorUserId="7566" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:39:41.923" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:39:41.923" Title="Licensing for research collaboration between EPL and GPL" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5194" CreationDate="2017-03-03T10:23:00.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could that work in principle?&#xA;  Is it OK to assign copyright to the FSF without their knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. This would not work IMHO. e.g. you are eventually trying to assign your copyright to someone else.  That someone would need to be aware of it somehow! So unless there is some agreement in place this would be likely moot and without effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine this: say you assign your copyright to me without me knowing. Then later on someone sues me for copyright and patent infringement... How long do you think a judge would wait to actually redirect the case to go after you rather than me? I guess the best of a few seconds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not only this NOT ok, but in doing without my knowledge you could hurt me which is neither ethical nor what you are likely trying to achieve, correct? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not want to hurt me, do you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If not, is there another foundation that accepts that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to have agreement in place with that someone else.&#xA;Some orgs are setup to receive copyrights such as the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation or the Eclipse Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside these, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://spi-inc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software in the Public Interest&lt;/a&gt; are examples organizations that are more general purpose &quot;holdings&quot; for free and open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main point in all cases is that what you are trying to achieve may not work out the way you think. Even if you assign your copyright somehow, you may in most case still be able to take that same private or relicense it under another license. And if your project community does not trust you or you do not trust yourself... you have IMHO another issue to solve first! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way that you could consider and is much simpler: do not use your name in a copyright statement. Use instead &quot;XXX Authors&quot; or &quot;XXX Project&quot; or similar where XXX is your project name. Large projects like Chromium do this routinely. No need for assignment and this makes clear that the copyright is distributed among the project contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consider using &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX&lt;/a&gt; license identifiers rather than &quot;Licensed under &quot; as a better and cleaner shorthand. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/sites/cpstandard/files/pages/files/using_spdx_license_list_short_identifiers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; for some details.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;please write well structured copyrights that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I can parse&lt;/a&gt;! Rather than &quot;Copyright The project authors&quot; use &quot;Copyright (c) YYYY-YYYY The project authors.&quot; eventually ending with  &quot;All rights reserved.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Even if you assign your copyright somehow, you may in most case still be able to take that same private or relicense it under another license&quot;: Very interesting, as you say that's the main point (and most important part) of your answer. So would you mind detailing how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the majority of the cases you are never assigning all your copyright rights. You are instead granting an unlimited license to your contributions to the so called &quot;assignee&quot;. Therefore you are still free to relicense as you please these parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T13:12:36.907" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T13:12:36.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5194" CreationDate="2017-03-03T11:23:20.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your profile says &quot;IT consultant in Tokyo.&quot; If you were in the USA, I'd think your best bet would be to set up an account at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.copyright.gov&lt;/a&gt; and then officially register the copyright using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.copyright.gov/forms/formtxi.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.copyright.gov/forms/formtxi.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (or, even more easily, directly online with no physical paperwork) which specifically allows you to assign the copyright to a third party, or as a &quot;work for hire&quot;. I have no idea what your Tokyo situation might be, but would guess there's always some official/bureaucratic way of unambiguously accomplishing that same purpose in any country that recognizes the &quot;rule of law&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as &quot;without their knowledge&quot; is concerned, and with respect to US copyright law, I think you're okay. I always, always register copyrights of my own programs, works-for-hire or not, with the US copyright office.  And when programs are works-for-hire, I declare them as such, and assign the copyright to my client. And that's typically been without their knowledge. They don't know, and (I'm sure) don't really care. But the matter's never come under dispute, i.e., nobody (to my knowledge) has ever infringed any of these copyrights. If that ever did happen, I have no idea what the legal upshot might be, how courts might interpret these copyright registrations, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="6534" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T04:37:36.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T04:37:36.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5182" CreationDate="2017-03-03T11:33:41.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think @apsillers' general conclusion is correct - that one does not have to license the entire work under GPL v3.0 - but I have a bit different understanding as to why. After reading through the licenses again, to my understanding, there is no language in the licenses that would allow one to &quot;choose a permission&quot; to apply. Following the text of the licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses begin by some definitions. From GPL v3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From LGPL v3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The Library” refers to a covered work governed by this License, other than an Application or a Combined Work as defined below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An “Application” is any work that makes use of an interface provided by the Library, but which is not otherwise based on the Library. Defining a subclass of a class defined by the Library is deemed a mode of using an interface provided by the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by combining or linking an Application with the Library. The particular version of the Library with which the Combined Work was made is also called the “Linked Version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, work that meets the definition of a &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt; (LGPL) also meets the definition of a &lt;code&gt;covered work&lt;/code&gt; (GPL). In other words, all works meeting the definition of a &lt;code&gt;covered work&lt;/code&gt; (GPL) form a (strict) superset of all works meeting the definition of a &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt; (LGPL). Section 5 of GPL v3.0 gives one a permission to convey a &lt;code&gt;covered work&lt;/code&gt; (and thus any &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt;), but with some restrictions - one of them being the requirement to license the entire work under GPL v3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the &lt;code&gt;Program&lt;/code&gt; one's work is based on is licensed under LGPL v3.0 and the entire work also meets the more restrictive definition of a &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt; (LGPL), one can convey such work (taken from section 4 of LGPL v3.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;under terms of your choice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what overrides the restriction of point c), section 5 of GPL v3.0 (requirement to license the entire work under GPL v3.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer my original question and correct my initial understanding of the language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, LGPL v3.0 should not provide an exception to section 5 of GPL v3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, one does not have to license the entire &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt; (LGPL) under GPL v3.0 due to section 5 of GPL v3.0 upon conveying&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7543" LastEditorUserId="7543" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:12:55.560" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:12:55.560" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5196" CreationDate="2017-03-03T15:32:42.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the communication between all the EPL and GPL-licensed components is done over Cypher calls via REST APIs, then these are independent programs. Both side could eventually use any license without impacting what the license of the API caller would be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were making function calls the situation could be different. As you describe it, each component seems to be running in its own independent process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:32:42.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4750" CreationDate="2017-03-04T10:08:37.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For instance, I have some software code under the GNU GPL v2 license on github. If some evil developer want to steal my code and use it in a closed-source software, how could I be aware of it, and how could I prove it since I don't have access to his source code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot and you should not care.  The ransom of success is that you may get a few unethical abuses and a lot of free riders. That's OK: free software is about freedom. If someone evil is breaking the law secretly in this case eventually this will come back to bite them. Or not. You cannot deal with unethical behavior that you do not know about and should not waste time on this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T10:08:37.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4750" CreationDate="2017-03-04T11:01:46.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For instance, I have some software code under the GNU GPL v2 license on github. If some evil developer want to steal my code and use it in a closed-source software, how could I be aware of it, and how could I prove it since I don't have access to his source code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a case like this there is really no way to find out where your code is used other than actually inspecting the suspected software, perhaps with a tool like this one: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.binaryanalysis.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.binaryanalysis.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T11:01:46.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2017-03-05T11:00:25.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely not. They look like sensible ToS for what Github needs to function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the ToS essentially require authors to give Github a license to display uploaded code outside their original licenses, such as without attributing it to the authors by name, and without displaying the license. Github has already been doing this for years in their search service. I would guess that they previously thought it was acceptable under fair use, but their lawyers have told them to make it explicit through the ToS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're the author of the code you're uploading to Github, then these new ToS make no new restrictions on the licenses of code you can upload, because as the author &lt;em&gt;you always have the right to distribute your code under another license&lt;/em&gt;. The new explicit licenses are directed to Github the company (to use and modify the code as needed to run the website) and to Github's users (essentially the right to clone repositories, bringing further clarity to the question of users' rights over all rights reserved repositories, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1154/190&quot;&gt;as discussed here previously&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the blog post is wrong to say that Copyleft or licenses which require changes to be published only as patches aren't welcome at Github. They are welcome! But if I'm understanding the ToS correctly, they can only be uploaded by the original copyright authors. What these new more explicit ToS make clear is that if you're uploading someone else's code you need to be able to give Github a license that will allow them function. As most FLOSS licenses grant you a license to redistribute the code only with attribution intact, this means that to be safe you should only upload your own code, code in the public domain (or WTFPL), or code you have permission from the author to upload. As most code on Github is from the original authors and unaffected by these restrictions they are definitely not a &quot;kiss of death&quot;. And realistically, I expect most people to ignore them. These ToS are to protect Github from liability, and will be ignored as most site's ToS are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T11:00:25.723" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5194" CreationDate="2017-03-05T13:17:09.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if it was considered OK to assign your copyright to someone else without their permission (in the US, it might be, but I'm pretty sure it's not OK in some other jurisdictions), then by doing so, you lose the rights to license your code to the general public. That would be the job of the foundation you assigned the copyright to to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have another solution: create a foundation / organization specific to your software and assign your copyright to it; state in its statutes what rules about licensing it must respect, and make sure that sufficiently many of your users / co-developers are members of this organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T13:17:09.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T17:32:07.837" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/faif/python-patterns/issues/143&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an issue&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/faif/python-patterns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;python-patterns&lt;/a&gt;' GitHub repo. Where it was asked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Really? I mean, these are simple snippets showing design patterns for learning purposes, none of this code is usable as it is on a production environment... do we really need to license this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which made me wonder if there is an Open License which restricts the permitted translations of the source code. For a document-generating, educational project like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/faif/python-patterns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;python-patterns&lt;/a&gt; it would be beneficial to not license derivatives capable of being executed, and only those capable of being read as docs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that that restriction violates either of the OSI's discrimination clauses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It says nothing about who may use the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documents are used in all fields of Endeavor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found no licenses yet that even mention such a restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to the possible drafting problems for &quot;capable of being read&quot;, it might also work to license only to anyone those who fully warranty any use outside people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hear if you know a reason it'd never work, or any current Open license with similar clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="243" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T17:20:13.737" Title="Is there a license that restricts interpretation of the source except to documentation?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|documentation|osi|restrictions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5205" CreationDate="2017-03-05T21:20:06.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that would be a clear violation of the first freedom of the Free Software Definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSD and OSD are essentially the same, so we use the clearer language here to interpret the OSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T21:20:06.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T22:10:33.233" Score="8" ViewCount="2214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project whose source code I intend to release on GitHub, but I might also like to sell the binary on an app store. I would like to prevent others from simply copying my code and distributing/selling it without major modification to undercut my own sales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if someone were to view my source code and reuse parts of it or use it as inspiration for their own independent project, I don't see a need to prevent them from selling their own work in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any well-known licenses which work this way? Is this even a common/sensible mindset for &quot;open source&quot; code, or are there good reasons &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to try to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7582" LastActivityDate="2023-11-12T11:03:23.490" Title="Are there licenses which restrict sales/commercial use of software in UNmodified form?" Tags="|license-recommendation|commercial|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-11-12T11:22:35.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5213" CreationDate="2017-03-06T06:38:37.593" Score="2" ViewCount="847" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to use data (for machine learning purposes) that specify that they can only be used for &quot;research-only&quot; purposes (or &quot;non-commercial&quot;) in an open source product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is it okay to take donations from my open source product, or would that be considered as a &quot;commercial&quot; purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: using face recognition &quot;research-only&quot; data for an open source face recognition model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7593" OwnerDisplayName="miguel.martin" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T16:37:31.987" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T10:06:24.397" Title="Legal to use &quot;research-only&quot; data in an open source product?" Tags="|commercial|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2017-03-06T14:15:59.667" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's two steps to answering this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there actually a credible legal issue here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that legal issue going to be a practical impediment to open source code on Github?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is there really a legal issue here? What is it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue described here is that if Bob posts Alice's open source code to Github, Github requires specific rights to the code that Alice may not have granted in her open source license. For example, Alice might license her code under the GPL and then say, &amp;quot;You granted rights to Github that I never gave you the right to grant (like to reproduce my code without attribution or reproduce it without necessary downstream GPL requirements); I'm suing you or issuing a DMCA takedown.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Github now requires a license grant that is outside of the scope of what is required by the open source definition (or free software definition), so many open source licenses do not offer sufficient permission to allow someone other than the copyright holder to ensure that these rights can be offered to Github. Possibly these rights could fall under fair use or &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; or some other justification, but they are certainly outside the explicit grant of many open source licenses, so this sounds like a legitimate legal concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preconditions of legal trouble speculated in the article are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice, the original author of a project, grants some rights to her project to Bob under an open source license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob uploads that project to Github (as-is, or modified, or included inside another porject)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Github requires rights outside the scope of the license that Alice granted to Bob; Bob wrongly affirms his ability to grant those rights by accepting the terms of service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice decides to take legal action against Bob&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such legal action did take place, I cannot begin to speculate how a court would rule on it, but it's a credible concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an issue for an original author like Alice, assuming she holds copyright on all of her code. Also, it's plausible (though I cannot say for sure) that if Alice has her code on Github already, then Bob &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; offer the rights Github requires (or perhaps does not need to offer them) since Github has them already via Alice. However, I cannot say for sure, and you certainly shouldn't rely on this barely-armchair analysis as legal advice if you're planning to put someone else's work on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/do-githubs-updated-terms-of-service-conflict-with-copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF has a statement about the new Github terms&lt;/a&gt; saying that at worst they may be read in a way that is incompatible with the GPL, but hopefully not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But licenses like the GNU GPL already give the necessary permissions to make, use, and modify local copies of a work. Are the new GitHub ToS asking for more than that? It's not fully clear. While the grant language could fit within the scope of the GPL, other words used in the section like &amp;quot;share&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;distribute&amp;quot; could be understood to mean something that wouldn't line up with the GPL's terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's highly unlikely that GitHub intended to destroy their business model and user base, we don't read the ambiguity in the terms as granting or requiring overly broad permissions outside those already granted by the GPL. It would be inconsistent with changes they made last year on choosealicense.com to treat copyleft better. The relevant sections of the ToS seem to be just restatements of typical free license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is this legal issue a serious threat to the reuse of open source code on Github?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is now pure crystal-ball speculation, but &lt;strong&gt;probably not&lt;/strong&gt;. Looking at the legal analysis above, you'll see that Alice the author has to actually &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; the code to be gone from Github. In general people release code under an open source license because they want to share it. That's exactly what a downstream reuser like Bob is doing, so I'd expect that in the overwhelming majority of cases, there's no issue: Alice wanted her code to be shared and reused, and Github's terms of service don't materially interfere with that goal in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concessions that Github asks for -- to reproduce snippets of the code in a search feature, or reproduce the entire repository as part of the fork feature -- are so trivial that it's hard to image why Alice would go to the trouble of even doing so much as a DMCA takedown (never mind a full blown lawsuit). The most likely cases I would expect are that Alice has a vendetta against Bob or Github for some reason, or she doesn't like having code under the GPLv3 anymore (but it's explicitly irrevocable) and is trying to remove Bob's code in a fit of licencor's remorse. These don't seem like common cases; overall, open source development on Github will continue as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is speculation, not legal advice, so don't come crying to me when you get sued (but do let me know -- I'd be interested in updating this answer). &lt;code&gt;:)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T12:16:42.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2017-03-06T14:22:35.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you are using java project build by maven than&#xA;  add &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openCage/loracle-maven-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/openCage/loracle-maven-plugin&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;into your pom.xml.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It checks whether all licenses of all dependencies (direct and transitive) are &#xA;declared and fit together with your declared license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;note: my project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T14:22:35.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T14:46:02.957" Score="4" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Citing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philosophy of the GNU project&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Free &quot;software&quot; does not mean &quot;noncommercial&quot;. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is &lt;strong&gt;no longer unusual&lt;/strong&gt;; such free commercial software is very important. &lt;strong&gt;You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software does not mean non-commercial software. So a software that can be shared for free can also be sold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why isn't this definition contradictory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted, person A could take an open source project and sell it to some dummy person B that knows nothing about free-software. It seems that the definition above favors person A and somehow tricks person B, which unfortunately does not have the time to learn everything about free-software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user698" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T14:57:59.130" Title="Contradiction: Free &quot;software&quot; does not mean &quot;noncommercial&quot;" Tags="|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5211" CreationDate="2017-03-06T14:57:59.130" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have stumbled, like many others, across a basic ambiguity in English which does not exist in many other languages; the word &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; has more than one meaning.  The important thing about free software is that it is &lt;strong&gt;free as in speech, not as in beer&lt;/strong&gt;.  That is, it is about freedom, not about zero-cost.  Often it is zero-cost as well, but that is a side-effect, not a design requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who are free, are free to behave badly as well as to behave well, and you are right that nothing stops someone from selling free software to an unsuspecting person who has not bothered to educate themselves about their purchase before they make it.  But commercial software can be sold to people who really shouldn't be buying it, as well; most of us have had to deal with software that was sold by an overenthusastic salesperson who perhaps didn't bother to tell the purchaser that his purchase wasn't really going to solve his problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software is designed to ensure that all its users have the freedoms to run their software for any purpose, to copy their software, to study and modify it to suit their particular purposes, and to distribute modified copies if they wish.  It is not designed to solve all human ills, including dishonest salespeople and wilfully ignorant customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T14:57:59.130" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2017-03-07T07:22:56.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the details you give in comments, we can consider that your software would most likely be a derivative of the original research-only / non-commercial data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question is what the license has to say about derivatives? Does it even allow them? If it does not explicitly allow them, you are most likely not authorized from publishing any software based on this data, under any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If derivatives are allowed, under what conditions? In the case of a CC-BY-SA-NC license, you would have to keep the license for any derivative that you distribute, and this is not an open source license. But it could also be more lax, in which case maybe an open source license would be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: it all boils down to exactly what is written about derivative works in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T07:22:56.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T03:01:56.950" Score="14" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;From reference, page 4, &lt;em&gt;The official ubuntu book&lt;/em&gt;, Eighth edition,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As computer’s became cheaper and more numerous in the late 1970’s, producer’s of software began to see value in the software itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Producers of computers began to argue that their software could be copyrighted and was a form of intellectual property much like a music recording, a film, or a book’s text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They began to distribute their software under licenses and in forms that restricted its users’ abilities to use, redistribute or modify the code.&#xA;  By the early 1980’s, restrictive software licenses had become the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stallman, then a programmer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, became increasingly concerned with what he saw as a &lt;strong&gt;dangerous loss of the freedoms that software users and developers has previously enjoyed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Richard M. Stallman created the concept of free software in 1983.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before coining free software concept(in 1983), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the software(before 1970's) released with free source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7594" OwnerDisplayName="overexchange" LastEditorUserId="7594" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T01:02:21.840" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T21:15:16.190" Title="Software licensing - Pre 1970's" Tags="|licensing|software|source-code|free-software-definition|gnu|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2017-03-07T06:32:43.620" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the quoted statement says, the value of software was only recognized later so it was more not-an-issue than free. It was just unthinkable one could build a business (or hurt the hardware manufacturer's business) by writing software for a couple of multi-million dollar machines in the world that were typically programmed by their owners already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pattern is universal to technology. First the money is made with hardware, then with services and finally with content, as each of these progressively gets cheaper (= less valuable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Martin Maat" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T06:32:43.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2017-03-07T07:22:09.487" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was the software(before 1970's) released with free source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there was surely software released with and without free source, and lots of machine code software where the distinction was of minor concern, but I guess the point is the majority of software was released without &lt;strong&gt;a written license&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, don't forget at that time there was no internet, even 8 inch floppy disks came to the market after 1970, the typical form of distribution of software was on a physical data medium like a tape, a punch card, or it was directly released together with the hardware. So actually the act of copying software took a lot more time and effort than it takes today. I guess the question of rights to copy software, allowing or preventing this on a legal basis, just started to become a concern at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" OwnerDisplayName="Doc Brown" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T13:33:10.947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T13:33:10.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2017-03-07T08:56:48.950" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is very unclear and confused, but the simple answer is: before the 1970s, software wasn't copyrightable in the US, so the very idea of &quot;licensing&quot; doesn't apply. You cannot put a copyright license on something that isn't copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, companies started to argue that computer program source code was protected as a literary work, and judges slowly started setting precedent, until protection of computer program source code was explicitly added to 17 USC §101 in 1980 by Congress. In other countries, the process was similar. Nowadays, the TRIPS treaty requires all member states of the WTO to protect computer programs as literary works as defined by the Revised Berne Convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" OwnerDisplayName="Jörg W Mittag" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T10:18:27.150" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2017-03-07T11:31:51.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering this is a bit like trying to nail jelly to a wall as it depends on what software we're talking about and the definition of &quot;free&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the timeframe you describe, the sheer number of machines was far lower than it is now. Coupled with this is the fact that a lot of the software was bespoke to the business or closely aligned with the machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As machines became more plentiful and software more transferable (through media) and portable (via 3rd generation languages) did the concept of software having &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt; appear. Once the hare was set running, there was naturally pressure the other way that some software &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, the concept of free (as in beer) software didn't exist as the concept of massed produced (or distributed) portable &lt;em&gt;paid for&lt;/em&gt; software didn't exist as it does now. Software was bundled with the hardware at considerable cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't to say that software wasn't passed around without charge (free as in speech). I remember working with a retirement age COBOL developer when I was starting out 20 years ago and he mentioned that it wasn't uncommon for programmers to tweak the source and liaise with the supplier with a view to including it in the next release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7599" OwnerDisplayName="Robbie Dee" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T12:48:23.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5205" CreationDate="2017-03-07T17:20:13.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That'd probably be in violation of OSD 2 (&quot;must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form&quot;), as you'd likely be prohibiting compiling it at all. It'd probably also violate OSD 3 (&quot;must allow modifications and derived works&quot;), which must be read fairly broadly (otherwise, wouldn't a C program that allowed you to change &lt;code&gt;long int&lt;/code&gt; to/from &lt;code&gt;long&lt;/code&gt; as the only modification allowed qualify?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 taken together should be read as a fairly strong: you must let others do whatever they want with your work. You're allowed to do things like require them to share alike, to mark their changes, to preserve credit, etc.—but they must be free to achieve the functionality they desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the hypothetical license would likely fail the Debian Free Software Guidelines for similar reasons, and clearly fails the FSF's definition (as curiousdannii points out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be OK, and should be sufficient to protect you, would be a warranty disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T17:20:13.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2017-03-08T09:27:47.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nope, I don't think it was all free, nor always with source, even in the late 1960's. I recall a program called Mulreg (for multiple regression) that ran on our System 360's (first /30, and later /40 and 50). This was at NYU's School of Commerce, and we got it free from the University of &quot;I-don't-remember&quot;, where it was written, because of our educational status. But I believe commercial users had to pay, and even we never had Mulreg's source. Aside: you could always tell when Mulreg was running because of the distinctive pattern of tape rewind noises it made munging through data. Also, on the /30, the console lights displayed a distinctive blinking pattern when running Mulreg. But the /40 and 50 ran much faster, and their console lights were always just a continuous blur. Googling mulreg is getting me a few hits, but only of much later programs using the same name. I'm not able to google anything on the entire internet about that original program I'm talking about here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides Mulreg, there was another even more comprehensive statistics package in the same late 1960's timeframe whose name is slipping my mind at the moment, and that I don't think was free. But there was lots and lots of free stuff, like IBM's Scientific Subroutine Package, which still has lots of google hits (in fact, I just stepped away for a minute to dig up my original paper copy of its &quot;Version III Programmer's Manual&quot;, Fifth Edition, August 1970).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as copyright, per se, is concerned, I'm not personally sure, but preceding answer seems to nail that down. However, I am personally sure that some software was commercial. And OS's didn't really count one way or the other in that regard, since IBM and other manufacturers rented rather than sold (until the courts forced them to sell) their machines. And rental included OS's and on-site software support for them. Aside: as I recall, if you're curious, our 360/30 rental was $10,000/month, and that was 1968 dollars, for a machine that was roughly equivalent to an original IBM 8088-based PC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt; University of &quot;I-don't-remember&quot; mentioned above is, I think, U of Wisconsin. So, okay, I've got to ask: does anybody here personally recall Mulreg and similar programs from that period? It's remarkable, at least to me, that google can't find one single reference anywhere on the internet to that original Mulreg program. Feel free to contribute some additional stuff below here, including corrections to anything I've mis-remembered above (please don't edit any above mistakes, just leave them as-is and add corrections below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T00:20:06.817" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T00:20:06.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5223" CreationDate="2017-03-09T10:54:54.493" Score="7" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is having a repository on GitHub considered &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Description&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some repositories on GitHub. Now I modified a file for a project. The file was licensed under Apache 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is for an online course from Udacity to learn Android development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is the following. If I distribute the file then I have to comply with the license in the sense that I have to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include the copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;state the changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my thinking is since I keep my repository public on GitHub, is it considered distribution, and thus I have to state the changes and include notices, etc. ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7612" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T02:21:34.767" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T02:21:34.767" Title="Is having a repository on GitHub considered distribution?" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5222" CreationDate="2017-03-09T15:40:54.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is considered redistribution. If not what would?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T15:40:54.897" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5225" CreationDate="2017-03-09T17:57:07.323" Score="7" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to have software that is licensed as open source (under some OSI scheme), but only for personal/non-profit use, while alternatively charge a fee for enterprise/for-profit use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to a dual-license, I believe, but not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7617" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T13:21:03.450" Title="Distribute as FOSS for non-profit use, and charge for profit use?" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5224" CreationDate="2017-03-09T19:14:51.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See clause 6 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;annotated version&lt;/a&gt; adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the clause explicitly prevents what you want to do. If it’s open source software (as defined by the OSI), for-profit use is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T19:14:51.897" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5360" CreationDate="2017-03-10T01:36:47.827" Score="10" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are open source projects growing faster (in terms of the number of users and developers) relative to closed source ones? Are there any metrics measuring this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7157" LastEditorUserId="7157" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T16:45:58.220" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T16:45:58.220" Title="Are open source projects growing faster relative to closed source ones?" Tags="|closed-source|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5228" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:45:28.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Metrics are difficult here.&#xA;Many closed projects are unclear, popular or not.&#xA;Many open projects are clear but not just the popular ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So lets look at survival. &#xA;Money can motivate people to advance a project they would normally never touch.&#xA;But if a company does not like to put more money into a project the project dies rather quickly. &#xA;An open project can be overtaken by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example lets look at java projects. It is effectively impossible to write a good project without using open source projects.&#xA;i.e. here open source is overwhelmingly popular.&#xA;e.g. &#xA;* Maven, Ant, Gradle to build&#xA;* many apache, google libs&#xA;* jboss, spring ...&#xA;I have never seen a popular java project (closed or open) without open source tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my opinion is that it is unclear what makes them grow faster, open or closed.&#xA;But the survival is better for popular open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="4642" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T10:23:12.627" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T10:23:12.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5224" CreationDate="2017-03-11T06:53:50.680" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think @unor's answer demonstrates that what you're asking for isn't bona fide &quot;open source&quot; any longer. But it certainly seems like a reasonable thing some programmers might want to say -- i.e., &quot;Hey, if you're making money off my hard work, then I want my fair piece of the pie.&quot; So, one way to accomplish that might be to just write your own license terms in a comment block at the top of your code, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/**********************************************************&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2017, Your name here. All rights reserved.&#xA; * Released to the public domain only for use that is both&#xA; * (a) by an individual, and (b) not for profit.&#xA; *&#xA; *********************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so that's probably a bit too terse, but you get the idea. And to repeat myself from above, I'm surprised that, judging from the above answer, there's not already a more formal not-so-open-source license embodying your request. Seems completely reasonable to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T06:53:50.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5233" CreationDate="2017-03-11T10:21:16.450" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the author of a open source library for websites that is licensed under LGPL. To make this library easy to use for non-developers I plan to create a simple to use UI-component based on the library which is free, but not open source. To make the difference between the two parts clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My library can read and render particular file formats in the browser. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My component is a visual control that can be used by end-users easily. It consists of a special layout, a menu, settings that can be adjusted, a toolbar and the most important thing for me a logo with the product name. Clicking on the logo will show a small about box containing further attribution as required by licenses (name of the component, link to the component website, LGPL info, CC logo etc). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My case is comparable with a PDF library. The library for rendering PDFs is open source, but the full-blown PDF viewer component is only freeware under CC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since open source licenses tend to allow rebranding and removal of logos I plan to release this component as &quot;freeware&quot; under a CreativeCommons license. People should be allowed to use and redistribute the component but do not change it by modifying the source code or removing the logo and about box. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I planed to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International&lt;/a&gt; for my component but the ShareAlike part does not directly prohibit the removal of my logo as long as the attribution is done appropriately. Am I safe with this license or do I need to go for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International&lt;/a&gt;? Without derivatives there would not be the possibility to create a version which does not contain the logo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7629" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T14:16:50.277" Title="Does CreativeCommon ShareAlike allow logo removal or rebranding" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5232" CreationDate="2017-03-11T14:16:50.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to disallow modifications, you certainly want to use a NoDerivs license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, CC BY-SA is just as permissive as plain CC BY-SA, with the exception that downstream changes must remain under CC-BY-SA. Neither CC BY or CC BY-SA prevents modification (indeed, allowing modification is a large part of the point), and they do not contain any special considerations for preservation of branding or trademarks. (In fact, if a downstream users does modify the work, they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; remove any trademarks, or else run the risk of misusing your trademark for a version of the work that you didn't approve.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 is GPLv3-compatible&lt;/a&gt;, so you must be prepared for the possibility that someone will modify your CC BY-SA work and license the modified work under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T14:16:50.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5246" CreationDate="2017-03-11T14:35:56.663" Score="3" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is legal if I edit an open source app with GPL license and make it open source again with GPL license but for doing some tasks it opens another app that is not open source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: GPL app sends a word to a dictionary app to show meaning and then returns to GPL app, and if it doesn't exist, opens Google Play to buy that app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the user didn't buy that app he/she can not see the meaning of that word because he / she didn't buy the dictionary app so it can't send data to dictionary to show the meaning of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7630" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T17:12:35.617" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T17:12:35.617" Title="Android GPL app that opens a closed source app" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|google-play|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5235" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T16:11:08.690" Score="1" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arista.com/assets/data/pdf/EOSWhitepaper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EOS&lt;/a&gt; (the industry-leading, Linux-based network operating system) runs across the entire portfolio of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arista.com/en/products/eos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arista&lt;/a&gt;’s network switches as well as in a virtual machine instance (vEOS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EOS operating system being one customisation of Linux kernel used for &lt;strong&gt;commercial&lt;/strong&gt; reasons, I would like to understand the license aspect of EOS (Linux derivative) in terms of,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Installation rights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Customisation rights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution rights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Support&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arista.com/en/support/product-documentation/eos-feature-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is EOS distribution model&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arista &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/arista-creates-containerized-open-version-eos/2017/03/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also distributes&lt;/a&gt; open source EOS that can run on hardware other than Arista switches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux kernel is under GPLv2 distribution model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shamhub/Books/blob/master/Veda/Veda/code-2.6/kern-prog/modules/mod1.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This code&lt;/a&gt; shows that any new linux kernel module has to include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MODULE_AUTHOR(&quot;TEAM XYZ&quot;);&#xA;MODULE_DESCRIPTION(&quot;FIRST MODULE&quot;);&#xA;MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;); /* This line */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Which party hold the responsibility to support/resolve the bugs of Linux kernel when EOS is in production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Does Arista (vendor) suppose to distribute EOS (commercial product) with source code or as closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) What is the significance to mention &lt;code&gt;MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;)&lt;/code&gt; in every Linux kernel module?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7594" LastEditorUserId="7594" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T18:54:43.757" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T01:58:09.193" Title="EOS - How to understand license agreement of Linux kernel derivative?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|gpl-2|linux-kernel|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T18:34:12.250" Score="-1" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what the different revenue sources for open source projects developers are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, can one live by working only on one or more open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit : For those interested on the topic I have stumbled on very interesting articles on the topic :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platforms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.linux.com/news/how-make-money-open-source-platforms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hbr.org/2013/01/yes-you-can-make-money-with-op&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hbr.org/2013/01/yes-you-can-make-money-with-op&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do not answer completely my question but are a good basis for discussion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2 : It seems indeed that this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/88/7631&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; has very well documented answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7631" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T17:15:31.043" Title="How do open source developers earn money?" Tags="|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-03-12T13:49:18.147" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5236" CreationDate="2017-03-11T21:51:12.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three ways would be &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Support - Some users may need support. Could be installation, hire you to design the deployment, disaster recovery methods other things that may come up, administer their deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Custom development - Could be that the companies needs a specific feature. I've seen bounty/sponsorship for feature requests in the past. They company need reports or some other thing that the software doesn't do, but that you could implement for them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Work at a company that needs the software and allows you to develop it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7634" LastEditorUserId="7634" LastEditDate="2017-03-11T22:28:23.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T22:28:23.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5240" CreationDate="2017-03-12T12:38:26.523" Score="3" ViewCount="977" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some python projects which I release on GitHub.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some of them binds actions to some DLLs, and some are purely reinventing the wheel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I choose MIT license for these kind of projects, then I found BSD licenses which seems appropriate too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have a bigger project, dealing with a lot of conversions.&#xA;I plan to make some graphical interfaces too when the low level will be up &amp;amp; working.&#xA;Yet, this package could be used as a library in higher level projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can mention that I only use numpy in this package (which is licensed under BSD-3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat lost in choosing a proper license for this kind of project.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;GPL seems too constraining in my taste, as MIT or BSD seems a little too permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there some licenses that falls in between?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I found that there is Python Software Foundation License.&#xA;It seems this license is for contributing to Python itself, but I'm not totally sure what it means and implies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does anyone have some pieces of answers regarding this matter too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7638" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T08:41:43.943" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T08:41:43.943" Title="Python projects &amp; licensing choice" Tags="|license-recommendation|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5239" CreationDate="2017-03-12T15:38:32.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm somewhat lost in choosing a proper license for this kind of project.&#xA;  GPL seems too constraining in my taste, as MIT or BSD seems a little too permissive.&lt;p&gt;&#xA;  Are there some licenses that falls in between?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there isn't really a linear scale of permissiveness, you might be looking for the weak-copyleft class of licenses. In short, they require modifications to your software to remain under the same license but still allow combining it with software of different licenses, including proprietary. MPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;) could be a good choice if that's what you're looking for. You could also have a look at LGPL, but imo MPL is a bit more user friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't care about copyleft at all you'll need to be more specific on what you find lacking in MIT and BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, I found that there is Python Software Foundation License. It seems this license is for contributing to Python itself, but I'm not totally sure what it means and implies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Does anyone have some pieces of answers regarding this matter too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the license the Python distribution is released under. It's a permissive license that requires you to briefly explain what you have changed in case you want to release a derivative work. This license only comes into play if you want to release something based on the source code in the Python distribution, not if you release a program written in the python language and depending on the Python distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T15:53:37.153" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T15:53:37.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5243" CreationDate="2017-03-12T16:48:10.290" Score="7" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;I commited some work on GitHub under the MIT license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it possible to move from MIT license to BSD-3 or 4 clauses for some of the projects? And as an extent, to any other license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, is there a particular thing to do other than changing LICENSE and upgrading files headers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same question could apply with GPL. Can I (somewhat say) 'downgrade' some work to BSD for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To be more concise, I use the terms upgrade/downgrade in terms of copyleft.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7638" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T21:47:34.067" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T21:47:34.067" Title="Is it possible to move from MIT to BSD?" Tags="|mit|relicensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5241" CreationDate="2017-03-12T18:47:55.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is your own work your can relicense it however you like.  The only thing you cannot do is to renege on the original license with respect to copies that have already been conveyed to others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T18:47:55.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5241" CreationDate="2017-03-12T21:20:09.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is more complex than some other analyses would have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you receive a work created by some other person(s), A, and you make changes, B, leading to C (which is a derivative work of both A and B), there are a number of licences to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence under which you received A continues to apply to A, when distributed simply as A; you have no power to vary that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may licence B under whatever terms you please, provided that they don't cause C to be under a licence which conflicts with the licence terms on A as regard derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C, being a work in its own right, is also covered by a licence.  The choice of this licence may be constrained by the licences on A or B, or it may not be.  Unless so constrained to be, it is possible that C's licence will not be the same as either that on A or B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if A is covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X11 license&lt;/a&gt; (the FSF note that the term &quot;&lt;em&gt;the MIT license&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is ambiguous, as there have been many), you may release B under the X11 license, and C will then very likely be under the X11 licence, unless you arrange otherwise.  You may release B under the GPL, in which case C will also need to be under the GPL (&lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; GPL2 s2b or GPL3 s5c, as appropriate).  You may release B under either 3- or 4-clause BSD, in which case you will need to clarify what licence C is released under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If A is covered by the GPL, you may release B under the same version of the GPL, or under a less-restrictive licence compatible with the GPL in question (which includes 3-clause BSD, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; 4-clause BSD).  C will need to be under the GPL (see previous para).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this analysis is currently thought to be persuasive in England and Wales (ie, I have taken legal advice that the line of analysis is likely to find favour with a court).  I have no idea whatsoever if it would find favour in other jurisdictions, but you don't say where you're based.  IANAL/IANYL, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T21:20:09.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5248" CreationDate="2017-03-12T22:12:28.040" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the early concept and planning stages of a large-ish interactive installation. The installation is a one-off for a large client; think a mix between science museum interactive stands/kiosk-type devices and product showroom where visitors are guided around. Lots of networking, AV, lighting control, custom electronics, etc. etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setup will likely include a motley assortment of tech from Windows PCs to Raspberry Pis, to *nix servers. A lot of closed-source custom software will be written for all this, but run on a variety of platforms, likely encompassing all sorts of licenses. There are no plans to modify any FOSS source code, only to build a somewhat complex stack out of various building blocks, but that stack is in effect part of the product in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So since setting up, say, a MySQL server (unmodified) on a dedicated/purpose-bought piece of on-site hardware could be part of the complete &lt;em&gt;system&lt;/em&gt; what would the licensing implications be? Would that for instance call for a commercial MySQL license or is it arguably &quot;internal&quot; still? Or would the use of a GPL Linux distro (again unmodified) on that hardware somehow impact everything else (esp. the closed-source apps at the very top of the stack) since it's part of the complete &quot;product&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should note that while the software written specifically for this installation will be closed-source, the code will be held in escrow, so the client can get that too, pursuant to certain terms. And of course it's no problem to provide the client with any open source stuff used in the setup; that's as free to them as it is to us, we'd just be setting it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7639" LastEditorUserId="7639" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T10:18:54.460" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T18:02:06.543" Title="Open source components in a larger one-off system setup" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-13T03:51:46.640" Score="10" ViewCount="2793" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the &quot;big deals&quot; in FreeBSD these days is ZFS. The issue is that ZFS is under a non-compatible license and has patents preventing clean-room re-implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is for how much longer will these patents be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7641" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T07:08:18.250" Title="What are the ZFS patents and when do they expire?" Tags="|licensing|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5234" CreationDate="2017-03-13T10:53:02.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, non-free software and GPL software can be &quot;combined&quot; if the combination forms an aggregate instead of being a single software deriving from the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned in section 5 of GPL v3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model that you describe seems to fit in this description and thus would be legal indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T10:53:02.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5249" CreationDate="2017-03-13T17:13:14.710" Score="12" ViewCount="2762" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen in multiple places project owners choosing to stick with GPLv2 to prevent the FSF from releasing a license that the project owners don't agree with but I've never seen reasoning beyond the claim that the next GPLv4 could be disagreeable. Are there any real licensing dangers associated with this ability to seemingly change your project's license at will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the FSF were to release &quot;GPLv4&quot; and it's just the exact text of the MIT license what would happen to projects that are licensed under GPLv3+? Could they be licensed under the terms of &quot;GPLv4&quot;? Are there restrictions within the GPLv3 that prevent this from happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5081" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T04:06:49.233" Title="If a project is released under GPLv3+ and GPLv4 is less restrictive what happens?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2017-03-13T18:02:06.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try to summarize in this answer what has already been said in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, as noted by @RubberDuck:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your company's lawyer is the best person to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you are bringing a machine with software on it to your clients. This is generally considered distribution of the software, and thus you have to comply with the terms of the software license regarding distribution. For strong copyleft licenses like GPL, they include giving a copy of the license and an offer to the source code (on a physical medium, because the software was physically distributed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, the question of being bound or not by the software license terms regarding modification depends whether your product is a derivative of each of its components or not. Putting various software on a machine and making them work together is generally considered aggregation, not distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf. (in section 5 of the GPL v3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T18:02:06.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5247" CreationDate="2017-03-13T22:14:46.883" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, if the FSF were to release &quot;GPLv4&quot; and it's just the exact text of the MIT license what would happen to projects that are licensed under GPLv3+? Could they be licensed under the terms of &quot;GPLv4&quot;? Are there restrictions within the GPLv3 that prevent this from happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is precisely the idea. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#VersionThreeOrLater&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FAQ about GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From time to time, at intervals of years, we change the GPL—sometimes to clarify it, sometimes to permit certain kinds of use not previously permitted, and sometimes to tighten up a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those projects could then be used and distributed under the terms of either GPLv3 or GPLv4. The original author of the projects has at some point chosen this by going with the &quot;or any later version&quot; option and there is of course no possibility for the GPLv3 license to somehow prevent the author from doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't think that you will automatically agree with FSF on what is actually an improvement to the license that you chose today it seems a bit risky to go with the &quot;or any later version&quot; option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T22:14:46.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5247" CreationDate="2017-03-13T22:35:48.867" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 14 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would argue that a GPLv4 can't be a MIT-like license. Further I would say that &quot;similar in spirit&quot; means that every new version needs to be again a strong copyleft license which only &quot;differ in detail to address new problems or concerns&quot;. That's also what we saw with GPLv3, it does the same as GPLv2 adjusted to the technical and legal changes to make sure that the GPL will continue to be a strong copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would highly recommend to keep the &quot;or any later&quot; part or chose one of the other options described in section 14 like for example a proxy. This is crucial for long-term maintainability of the legal side of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T22:35:48.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5247" CreationDate="2017-03-14T09:42:07.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your concern is a legitimate one. When you are licensing a software under GPL v2 or later, or under GPL v3 or later, you are basically trusting the FSF for the future licensing of your software. They can very well use this for very specific purposes and it happened in the past: the GFDL license was updated to allow Wikipedia to switch licenses from GFDL to Creative Commons (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when licensing a software under MPL 2.0, the license contains a provision relative to later versions (this provision does not really let the choice to the licensor, whereas the GPL does):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may distribute the Covered Software under the terms of the version of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software, or under the terms of any subsequent version published by the license steward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion is that when choosing to distribute your software under a license of the FSF with the clause &quot;or any later version&quot;, or when choosing to distribute your software under MPL 2.0, you have to trust the foundation which authored the license (FSF in one case, Mozilla foundation in the other).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T16:41:41.053" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T16:41:41.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5253" CreationDate="2017-03-14T12:33:33.017" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have built a framework that has the core modules: module1, module2, module3, module4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have also build module5 that uses the core modules and also derives classes from the module1. I want module5 to make it proprietary and sell it as binaries and keep the the ownership of the code for module5.&#xA;The rest of the 4 core modules can be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be done with Mozilla Public License? Or is there a better license for what I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7655" OwnerDisplayName="Chelaru Viorel" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T01:48:36.553" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T01:48:36.553" Title="Mozilla Public License for core open source modules but proprietary modules?" Tags="|license-recommendation|proprietary-code|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5252" CreationDate="2017-03-14T19:01:33.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This can surely be done with the MPL license. At a high level, the MPL is a weak, limited copyleft where the copyleft applies on a per-file basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific section that would allow your use case is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#distribution-of-a-larger-work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3.3. Distribution of a Larger Work&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may create and distribute a Larger Work under terms of Your choice, provided that You also comply with the requirements of this License for the Covered Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T19:01:33.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5257" CreationDate="2017-03-15T10:34:28.670" Score="6" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to code a mobile app that uses an opensource server liscenced in GPL. So my app will make webservices call to that server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I be obliged to publish the code of my mobile application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7661" LastEditorUserId="7661" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T13:52:53.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T13:52:53.080" Title="Will my app be copylefted if it uses the webservice of a GPL server?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5193" CreationDate="2017-03-15T13:20:22.027" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;FSF has published an answer now: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/do-githubs-updated-terms-of-service-conflict-with-copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/do-githubs-updated-terms-of-service-conflict-with-copyleft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GitHub's updated terms caused a great deal of concern, but while they are confusing, they do not appear to be incompatible with copyleft. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), though, still recommends using other code hosting sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, it appears as if this is not a kiss of death for oss projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T13:20:22.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5254" CreationDate="2017-03-15T15:47:42.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not at all. Calling a web service will unlikely ever be considered as either copying or creating some derivative work of the web service you call. This is contrast if you were to run and call GPL-licensed code in the same process from your mobile application. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T15:47:42.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5235" CreationDate="2017-03-16T02:23:08.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) Who did you buy a support contract from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If they are using GPL software (ie, the Linux kernel) then they must give you the source if you ask for it, and there should be an offer made for it in your documentation, etc.  HOWEVER... they may be using binary blobs to keep some things proprietary.... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) This is Linus' policy for submissions made to the main kernel tree.  Should the kernel panic, you'll see a message about the kernel being &quot;tainted&quot; or not. This means tainted with non-free code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T02:23:08.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5260" CreationDate="2017-03-16T05:54:52.830" Score="4" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to publish an open source game, but I want to retain all copyrights on the used characters.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A use case would be that another party downloads the code and makes a new game with it, but the other party is not allowed to name the game &quot;Captain Holetooth&quot; or use the character art from the original game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give me advice on which license I need to apply?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I was looking into Apache 2.0, but I'm not sure if it is the right choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7672" OwnerDisplayName="Hirnbix" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T22:58:19.323" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T01:22:43.060" Title="How can I protect the rights on character names or imagery in an open source game?" Tags="|license-recommendation|trademark|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2017-03-17T01:22:43.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way I know to protect further character names or imagery in an open source game (or for any open source project) would be to use trademarks e.g. if you explicitly mention that the names and images are trademarked by you (and eventually register all of them), then you will enjoy this protection for your names and marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common for several licenses such as the Apache and BSD licenses to contain some explicit language about non-usage of names and non-endorsement but to the best of my knowledge this is not necessary because these licenses do not grant rights to reuse these names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is common for several open source projects (and foundations) to register their names and marks, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&amp;amp;state=4810:ww6imv.3.23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNOME&lt;/a&gt; which allowed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnome.org/groupon/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;protect the IMHO abusive reuse&lt;/a&gt; attempt by &lt;a href=&quot;http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&amp;amp;state=4810:ww6imv.3.41&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Groupon&lt;/a&gt;, or Eclipse that also provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;detailed guidelines&lt;/a&gt; for limited and proper reuse. Linux distributors such as Ubuntu and Red Hat also use trademark protections in addition to the (eventually complex) FOSS licensing of their distributions. In these later cases, redistributing a whole distro may be OK from an open source license standpoint but may not be OK from a trademark standpoint (in which case a solution is to remove the marks and graphics like CentOS did with Red Hat distros).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in recap, the trademark protection and the free and open source licensing protection are orthogonal and both can apply and both are commonly used in conjunction by both commercially-backed FOSS projects and purely community-driven projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since trademarks themselves are beyond the scope of most open source licenses, you should seek legal help and do some research to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve there. God speed! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T01:22:43.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5245" CreationDate="2017-03-17T01:35:33.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;ZFS is a big deal not only on FreeBSD but also on Linux. It is a fine file system and the issue has been as far as I know as much about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts#tbm=pts&amp;amp;q=ZFS%20oracle&amp;amp;*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the patents&lt;/a&gt; that about the license of ZFS itself:its license is not compatible with the GPL which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;problematic&lt;/a&gt; in the context of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Kernel file system driver&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]difficulties arise for Linux distribution maintainers wishing to provide native support for ZFS in their products due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL license used by the ZFS code, and the GPL license used by the Linux kernel. To enable ZFS support within Linux, a loadable kernel module containing the CDDL-licensed ZFS code must be compiled and loaded into the kernel. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents are threats to any software endeavour. In the case of ZFS there are issues at multiple levels: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a significant number of patents &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/?tbm=pts#tbm=pts&amp;amp;q=ZFS%20oracle&amp;amp;*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Oracle/SUN&lt;/a&gt; that would need extensive reviews to understand their scope and life span.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;possible challenges of these patents by other patent holders with secret &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dismiss/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;settlements&lt;/a&gt; and unclear impact on the FOSS status of ZFS:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] NetApp and Oracle have agreed to dismiss their respective lawsuits against each other without prejudice. ZFS-using companies such as Coraid and Nexenta can now go ahead free of the threat of NetApp interference. The dismissal terms between the two companies are confidential.[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is not an answer to your question proper. But answering it would require a significant amount of work that cannot be accomplished here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T07:08:18.250" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T07:08:18.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5235" CreationDate="2017-03-17T01:58:09.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question reads at first like an advertising... That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Which party hold the responsibility to support/resolve the bugs of Linux kernel when EOS is in production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a vanilla kernel, you can submit bug report to the LKML for sure. NONE has a responsibility to do fix your bugs. Someone may help. This is a gift, not an obligation.  If this is a patched kernel with proprietary LKMs it will likely be dismissed and ignored politely or with fracas by the kernel maintainers.&#xA;The commercial distributor may offer most likely a support contract and may accept such responsibility otherwise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of this, none but YOU has the responsibility to support free and open source you use. Anything else is a courtesy and a gift from the project authors, maintainers and any willing good soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) Does Arista (vendor) suppose to distribute EOS (commercial product) with source code or as closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A commercial distributor of a Linux kernel and distro that contains GPL-licensed code has obligations to provide the corresponding source code to &#xA;the parties they redistribute binaries to. I am sure that this vendor does this alright like the vast majority of Linux distributors do and like the vast majority of device vendors that bundle a kernel do as well. If they sell this distribution as they are entitled to do so, their redistribution of source code can be limited to their paying customers that received the binaries. The same applies if they sell devices that contain a Linux kernel. They have no other general obligation. And certainly no obligation beyond the recipients of the binaries, such as making source code available to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) What is the significance to mention MODULE_LICENSE(&quot;GPL&quot;) in every Linux kernel module?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag informs the kernel (and in particular through the use of the &lt;code&gt;insmod&lt;/code&gt; and other kernel module loading utilities) that this module declares itself as GPL-licensed and in return the kernel grants access to this module to kernel symbols exported as GPL-only and to kernel internals. As such it could interpreted either as weak indication of licensing and not much more that than. And as an indication that this module may depend on and require access to GPL-symbols exported by the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T01:58:09.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5265" CreationDate="2017-03-16T21:35:52.763" Score="4" ViewCount="1347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a weak copyleft license, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;allows you to distribute the sources, as long as they are under the same license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;allows you to do pretty much what you want if you do not distribute the sources&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem I have with the LGPL is that if I'm not mistaken you have to dynamically link it to your project, and I do not want this requirement: as far as I'm concerned, you can just compile it inside your main project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking at the MPL and maybe that's more or less what I'm searching for, but I'm not sure I fully understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the MPL match my requirements, or is there any other license available that does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7677" OwnerDisplayName="GSsfL" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T23:54:32.970" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T23:54:32.970" Title="An even lesser LGPL-like license that allows static linking" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2017-03-16T22:00:26.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: this answer only looks at options with the LGPL, it doesn't go into other licenses.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would highly recommend seeing &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/10179181&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; in depth-answer first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech11.html#x14-10400010.8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft tutorial&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnu.org&lt;/a&gt; states - with regards to the LGPL - that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the LGPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purpose of complying with the LGPL (any extant version: v2, v2.1 or v3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you statically link against an LGPL'd library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format&lt;/strong&gt;, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you dynamically link against an LGPL'd library already present on the user's computer, you need not convey the library's source. On the other hand, if you yourself convey the executable LGPL'd library along with your application, whether linked with statically or dynamically, you must also convey the library's sources, in one of the ways for which the LGPL provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that you are permitted to statically link with the LGPL'd library, but must then release enough of the application code to allow end users to modify how the code links with the library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Shazamo Morebucks" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T22:00:26.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:49:39.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main problem I have with the LGPL is that if I'm not mistaken you have to dynamically link it to your project, and I do not want this requirement: as far as I'm concerned, you can just compile it inside your main project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL (Mozilla Public License) 2.0 does indeed allow static linking without complicated technical requirements contrary to LGPL. It is IMHO much easier to understand than LGPL. Maybe you would benefit from reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm a bit concerned by this requirement of yours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you to do pretty much what you want if you do not distribute the sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if people fork your library and make it closed-source you don't care, but if they fork it and switch to an alternative open source license then you mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is really what you are asking for, then you might have better luck with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MS-PL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T16:49:39.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5263" CreationDate="2017-03-17T18:23:11.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is your second requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;allows you to do pretty much what you want if you do not distribute the sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can be used to defeat the first requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;allows you to distribute the sources, as long as they are under the same license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose person A compiles your code with a compiler that includes so much debugging information that 1:1 copy of the source can be recovered. Because you want this compiled form to be distributable without restrictions, person A can give this binary to person B without restrictions, and person B can decompile it to recover the source, which can then be redistributed without restrictions because B got the compiled binary files without restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want a license that restricts the right to distribute the source code, it is going to have to have provisions that restrict the rights to distribute binaries as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between LGPL and MPL is that LGPL stipulates that a combination with proprietary components must have a way to relink the LGPL parts, while MPL requires only disclosure of the source for the MPL parts, but does not require a practical way to relink. Certainly neither allows binary distribution without releasing the source for the copyleft part of the combined application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7252" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T18:23:11.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5268" CreationDate="2017-03-17T20:36:57.203" Score="0" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want use babylon glossary in an open source (GPL) dictionary app.&#xA;They don't have any license in them. Can I use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about glossaries of commercial dictionaries like oxford, longman, …? Ccan I use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7630" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T23:53:12.577" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T06:56:07.383" Title="Use babylon glossary in an open source (GPL) dictionary app" Tags="|gpl|copyright|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5267" CreationDate="2017-03-18T06:56:07.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't say what the app is, exactly, nor how it uses the glossary.  I'm assuming that the glossary is used as a words list, which is then served up by the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the case, then the app's GPL status has no effect on your ability to use the glossary.  If this glossary is transmitted to you under terms that allow you so to use it, then you can; if it doesn't, you can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the three glossaries you ask about (babylon, oxford, longman), the first has no licence attached.  Copyright law's default position is clear; assuming that a work is eligible for copyright protection at all, it acquires such protection by the act of its creation, so you can do &lt;em&gt;next to nothing&lt;/em&gt; with it without violating that copyright.  You certainly can't make a copy of it, for use with your app or otherwise.  The other two are known to be commercial glossaries, and it is unlikely that they will be supplied to you under licence terms that permit their reuse in that way (that could be wrong, but you won't know until you read each licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl; dr&lt;/strong&gt;: it depends on the licences on the glossaries, and on very little else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T06:56:07.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5270" CreationDate="2017-03-16T04:20:23.680" Score="7" ViewCount="1275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm beginning work on a web application at the moment which ideally I'd like to dual license under the terms of the AGPL and the CPAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would mean that anyone using the code in their own web application would have a choice of either distributing the source code to users (under the AGPL), or giving attribution to me for writing the code (under the CPAL), if I understand dual licensing correctly.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible with these two licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that AGPL is based on the GPL and CPAL is based on MPL, and GPL and MPL are not compatible, but does that apply in a dual license situation?  And if so, how would I do it? Just include both licenses and note that it's dual licensed under both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7703" OwnerDisplayName="Danny M" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T01:21:24.040" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T01:21:24.040" Title="Can I dual license my code under the AGPL and the CPAL? If so, how?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|cpal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5269" CreationDate="2017-03-16T07:12:35.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;License compatibility matters when you want to use someone elses code that was published under one license in your code base under a different license. For code that is written entirely by you, you own the copyright and can issue licenses however you wish. This includes dual-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing is quite common: some web apps use a AGPL/commercial dual license, and the Perl interpreter is dual licensed under the GPL and Artistic License. If the two licenses were somehow compatible, there would be no need for dual licensing: you could just choose the compatible license and get the other implicitly (e.g. dual-licensing under MIT and GPL doesn't make any sense since you'd just use MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To apply a dual license, I'd write a LICENSE file that offers receivers of this software a choice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;project&amp;gt; - &amp;lt;description&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;authors&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This is free software. You may use, modify, and distribute it&#xA;under the terms of either the &amp;lt;license-1&amp;gt; or the &amp;lt;license-2&amp;gt;.&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;how to find the full license text&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;disclaim liability&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept changes to your code from other authors, you have to make sure that they are providing these changes under &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of these licenses, and didn't choose one of the licenses for their contributions. For that reason, dual-licensed projects commonly include a &lt;em&gt;contributor license agreement&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not be able to issue your intended licenses if you do not own the full copyright of the software. In particular, this could be the case if you adapt code from other projects, or if you rely on a framework of which your code is effectively a derived work. In such cases, you are bound by the licenses of the original projects or of the framework, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" OwnerDisplayName="amon" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T07:12:35.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-20T01:23:26.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T01:23:26.720" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T01:23:26.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-20T01:23:26.720" Score="0" Body="Common Public Attribution License (CPAL)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T01:30:22.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T01:30:22.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5279" CreationDate="2017-03-20T14:57:01.260" Score="5" ViewCount="1587" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a Python module X is licensed under GPL and a Python script or module Y imports X, does it make Y necessarily GPL also?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2024-04-04T11:10:52.670" Title="GPL and Python import statement" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5276" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:37:16.567" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we distribute our software both GPL and under a commercial license, do we have the right to incorporate third party patches into the commercial version of our software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:02:22.717" Title="Incorporating GPL patches into commercial version of our software" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5275" CreationDate="2017-03-20T15:44:42.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the terms under which the patches were conveyed to you.  If they were conveyed under, say, a modified-BSD (or other weak copyleft) licence, then yes, you may.  If they were conveyed under GPL or another strong copyleft licence, then no, you may not.  If the copyright was assigned to you, then you may distribute them under any terms you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you'll have to ask the author of the patches what he or she intended, assuming (s)he has not already made this clear.  And, of course, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T16:02:22.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:02:22.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T16:17:43.427" Score="4" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;Continuing &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5275/7699&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want a license L which is generally like GPL, but allows us to do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License our software under both L and a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Require that every patch (or more generally, every change, or at least publicly distributed change) by a third party is both available to general public as L and available to us to license it commercially as a part of our commercial version of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not prevaricate: The main purpose of this project is to earn money (however the money are used to support other more generous free projects). But it would be nice also to create useful OSS software under this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want this option: The license L should be compatible with GPL in the sense that GPL software can incorporate L-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, well, it seems for me that the &quot;option&quot; contradicts to my other requirements: If it can be incorporated into GPL software, then it can have GPLed patches and we cannot incorporate these patches into our commercial version. So, is it possible to do it with the &quot;option&quot;? Well, I don't expect that people would often change the license from our OSS license to GPL when making patches. So it (the &quot;option&quot;) should work in practice even if it is not required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh well, it is also required that if a Python module licensed under L, then every Python script or module importing it is also licensed under L. (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5274/7699&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, Mozilla Public License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that our product is a Python library. Please provide any advice you can on licensing such libraries. Particularly, if we want it to be wide-spread among FOSS community, do we need to license it under GPL? Which other licenses are good choices for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T19:55:19.267" Title="License similar to GPL, but allowing to incorporate into the commercial version" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5277" CreationDate="2017-03-20T20:13:39.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short of writing your own licence, which you are advised not to do, the usual way to proceed (as I said in the answer to the other question) is a contributor licensing agreement, in which contributors explicitly permit you to release their contributions under other terms than the default ones.  With that in place, you can license these contributions how you wish (eg, GPL for the GPL version, commercially for the commercial version).  This really is the usual route for dual-licensed projects; for MySQL, contributors must complete &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oca-405177.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Oracle CLA&lt;/a&gt;, and most other dual-licensed projects will have similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside is that a CLA is often a big turn-off for contributors.  They may ask themselves why they should volunteer their work into your project knowing that you're going to turn round and sell it, and that question is at the root of the problem here.  The sort of people that are likely to contribute to a GPL'ed project are often the sort of people who like to see their work stay free to help as many others as possible, and they may not wish to enable you to do what you want, whether that is achieved via a licence, a contributor agreement, or via some other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:51:51.430" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:51:51.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5274" CreationDate="2017-03-20T21:47:01.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes eventually the GPL flows to the calling/importing code at runtime. At rest the import statement has no impact per se. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:47:01.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5277" CreationDate="2017-03-21T19:55:19.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first statement of the problem (every change...is both available to the general public as L and available to us) is not possible as stated with any open-source software license that's available on the market, for the simple reason that you are &lt;em&gt;demanding&lt;/em&gt; publication of every modification, and that is a very unusual demand which probably contradicts the very definitions of &quot;open-source&quot; and &quot;free&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be tangentially aware of this when you state that you might exempt things which are available to the general public, but note that &quot;available to the general public&quot; is a very difficult condition to state legally; e.g. if I state at the bottom of a blog post discussing how we patched our system &quot;email me if you want the patch-file&quot;, does that count? You'd have to hire a copyright lawyer to get the legal phrasing right. For example, Creative Commons has to define &quot;Share&quot; as &quot;provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can potentially restrict this condition to something which might be more friendly to open source, &quot;every patch that &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; can get &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; grubby little hands on,&quot; so that Alice's decision to share her patch with Bob does not matter until, say, Bob shares that patch back with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the easiest way is to use a file-based copyleft license which allows distribution with noncovered code, and the clearest example that I know of for such a license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CDDL&lt;/a&gt;. The idea is that the &quot;core&quot; of your product is released open-source under CDDL but allows for a mechanism where &quot;plugins&quot; of some form offer advanced functionality. So you distribute a bunch of plugins with the proprietary version, and they remain proprietary. Someone else who develops new plugins may choose &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to release them under the CDDL to you, but at least any modification you find to the files that you originated can be merged back into those files, and you can bundle in CDDL plugins, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from something very niche like that, I think you're facing a very difficult attempt to fit a square &quot;proprietary&quot; peg into a round &quot;open-source&quot; hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3886" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T19:55:19.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2790" CreationDate="2017-03-21T21:09:20.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Andrew, I also wanted to use w3schools CSS file in my commercial website and was stuck at the copyright statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on w3.css download page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_downloads.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_downloads.asp&lt;/a&gt;) they state that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W3.CSS is free to use. No license is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use W3.CSS, just add a link to &amp;quot;w3.css&amp;quot; in your web pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or download w3.css and run it from your own web site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a clear permission to use the code, also for commercial websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7712" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T09:43:23.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-22T17:43:06.213" Score="0" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add a copyright disclaimer in all my &lt;strong&gt;code/scripts&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. not software), which I share in my website. These are for many languages, like Matlab, R, Stata, Julia, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license should I use? GNU GPL or CC-0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The GNU GPL license seems to be the standard, but it mentions the word &quot;software&quot;. I don't think a script classifies as software, and so it feels a bit odd to have it there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T07:23:17.750" Title="Should I use GNU GPL or CC-0 to distribute scripts?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-03-25T05:19:00.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-03-22T18:27:33.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC by 0 means Creative Commons which any person can use/share/edit the script without providing a link (attribution) to you. Whereas with the GNU GPL it is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want the credit, you can use CC-BY-SA or MIT. Many libraries like jQuery use MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7384" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T06:03:10.233" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T06:03:10.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5286" CreationDate="2017-03-22T17:19:22.970" Score="4" ViewCount="1679" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the situation that you know your code was used as reference to write other code (e.g., you had a conversation with said person who referenced your work as the structure to follow when they were writing their library, and you've recently found out that they are distributing their library), are they obligated to include the MIT license crediting you in their derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I say &quot;used as reference&quot; in opposition to &quot;copied and modified.&quot; So, I'm asking in the case that the code was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; copied and modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the MIT license is as follows (emphasis added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;  of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to &lt;b&gt;use&lt;/b&gt;, copy, &lt;b&gt;modify&lt;/b&gt;, merge, publish, &lt;b&gt;distribute&lt;/b&gt;, &lt;b&gt;sublicense&lt;/b&gt;, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;  furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;  copies or &lt;b&gt;substantial portions&lt;/b&gt; of the Software.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;  AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;  OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7734" OwnerDisplayName="Patrick Roberts" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T11:35:23.653" Title="Is MIT license invoked when code is used as reference to write other code?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5285" CreationDate="2017-03-22T18:15:34.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a lawyer so I could be completely wrong but to the best of my knowledge it depends on the &lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt; used, just as when creating an open source implementation of a proprietary, closed source, program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When moving from proprietary to open source it is considered OK if you write your own code based on the &lt;strong&gt;public&lt;/strong&gt; API and by reverse engineering - i.e. characterising and comparing behaviour but not OK if you get a copy of the existing source code or use a decompiler to get something directly based on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguing from that, with the directions reversed, if someone has the source code open all of the time while they are creating their own version they are creating a derived work but if they simply refer to the &lt;strong&gt;public&lt;/strong&gt; API and characterising the behaviour they should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some, serious, companies or teams that are involved in this sort of thing will use two teams, one that performs the reverse engineering and another, with no access to the original project, is passed a specification &amp;amp; test suite that they have to pass. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that it would be nice to give at least attribution for the inspiration and personally would try to ensure that that was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real guys to ask are the Free Software Foundation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;, note I am an ordinary member, &lt;em&gt;read supporter&lt;/em&gt;, of the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is my &lt;strong&gt;personal opinion&lt;/strong&gt; and does not reflect the opinion of my employer or any other organisation that I am affiliated with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" OwnerDisplayName="Steve Barnes" LastEditorUserId="4659" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T06:15:38.857" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T06:15:38.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5285" CreationDate="2017-03-22T22:07:14.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes if you use the someone code which has MIT license then your code is MIT licensed and you can protect your application using LGPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was at Linuxcon, opensource community, mentioned its not encourageable to create new licenses, I have seen many just creating ton lots of license I just bewildered what to pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;, info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7720" LastEditorUserId="7720" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T11:35:23.653" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T11:35:23.653" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5290" CreationDate="2017-03-23T10:16:11.060" Score="4" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project under Apache license on GitHub. I want to add some non-text stuff into repository (logo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use Apache license for an image?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, what CC license is most 'aligned' with Apache license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I release source code under Apache, and image under some CC license, how should I write copyright file? Special clause? Two files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7727" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T11:41:10.400" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T13:42:47.110" Title="Combining software and image licensing in the same repository" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|creative-commons|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5291" CreationDate="2017-03-24T05:36:04.150" Score="8" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&lt;/a&gt;, we can see that there are a number of licenses that provide patent troll protection, and there are also a few licenses that that do not require attribution (CC0, Unlicense, WTFPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there does not seem to be any licenses that I can find (on that list or elsewhere) that both protect against patent trolls &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; doesn't require attribution.  does anyone know if such a license exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there some reason why the two are necessarily incompatible with each other such that no license could possible exist that provides both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are mutually exclusive, is there any reason I wouldn't be able to dual-license my software under Unlicense and Microsoft Public License (to effectively create a scenario where no one needs to provide attribution, but the code is also offers protection against patent trolls?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a software engineer, I want a way to create projects that have the &lt;em&gt;lowest&lt;/em&gt; barrier possible, for any type of user.  However, when using CC0/Unlicense/WTFPL I have found that some companies are unable to use my software because it doesn't provide patent protection.  I would like to use a license that offers that protection while also not requiring that users go through the burden of attribution (which can be a bit of a pain when you &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; follow through with it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7737" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T01:11:11.020" Title="Is there a license that both provides patent protection and does not require attribution?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5288" CreationDate="2017-03-24T06:04:02.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache license are not intended to be used for an image(logo)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Use this &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;link&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to find out the suitable license depending on your permissions.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I think it would be better if you could create a license file in the folder where the logo is saved and mention the copyright attribute in the &lt;strong&gt;README.md&lt;/strong&gt; file that displays the logo and says,&#xA;&lt;br&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Logo licensed under CC-* License&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm just a programmer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastEditorUserId="6767" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T13:42:47.110" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T13:42:47.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5289" CreationDate="2017-03-24T07:30:53.707" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;By patent troll protection, I take it you refer to what the linked site expresses as &quot;&lt;em&gt;This license provides an express grant of patent rights from the contributor to the recipient&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  It is going to be very difficult to craft a licence that provides that protection but does not even require attribution, because of the problem of derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that A makes a piece of software, Z, which (s)he releases under such a licence to B, who removes A's attribution and makes a derivative piece of software Z2, which (s)he releases to C under that same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does C still benefit from A's patent covenant?  C will want that to be the case, as if Z needed that covenant to be usable, it is very likely that Z2 will also.  But Z2 contains no record of A's covenant, and if A's patents are later acquired by a troll who then files suit against C, good luck in persuading a court that this piece of software that makes no mention of A or his/her covenant can somehow nonetheless benefit from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your clients desire patent protection, then in order for that protection to be meaningful, they are likely to need a licence that imposes &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; other obligations on them, even if only the obligation to keep the covenant intact.  Oh, and IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T07:30:53.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5283" CreationDate="2017-03-24T09:27:59.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Wiktionary definition of software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Encoded computer instructions, usually modifiable (unless stored in some form of unalterable memory such as ROM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, scripts obviously classify as software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the only difference to you between GPL and CC-0 is the one you described, then you have &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt; to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, GPL used indeed to be the standard. It is not really &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; standard anymore, just one of the most common choices. MIT is also a very common choice. These two licenses are very different in what they allow, with MIT one of the most permissive and GPL one of the most restrictive. Apache 2.0 is also a common choice (see some recommendations here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For short scripts, GPL is generally not recommended (even by the FSF):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if the work is not very long? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(#WhatIfWorkIsShort)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a whole software package contains very little code—less than 300 lines is the benchmark we use—you may as well use a lax permissive license for it, rather than a copyleft license like the GNU GPL. (Unless, that is, the code is specially important.) We recommend the Apache License 2.0 for such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preference for very short scripts goes to &lt;strike&gt;CC-0&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; because I want people to be able to reuse them in every way they want, without needing to attribute me. &lt;strike&gt;If this is also what you want, then go ahead and apply CC-0 to your work as detailed here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: as discussed in the comments, CC0 is not recommended for software by the FSF and the OSI. The Unlicense is a popular and recommended alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2023-05-23T07:23:17.750" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T07:23:17.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5294" CreationDate="2017-03-23T15:11:16.340" Score="0" ViewCount="1252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to take a small stand-alone part of an open-source Python project (one class from a relatively big project), enhance it, and release it as separate project on PyPI so that I can use it independently. I will fully credit the project where the code is taken from originally. Below is the full license of the original project. &lt;s&gt;As far as I can tell it does not use one of a standard open-source licenses such as MIT.&lt;/s&gt; As pointed out in comments, this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-Clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) {years} {author name}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions&#xA;  are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA;  the documentation and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;  distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote&#xA;  products derived from this software without specific prior&#xA;  written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS&#xA;  OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;  WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&#xA;  ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL&#xA;  DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE&#xA;  GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS&#xA;  INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER&#xA;  IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR&#xA;  OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN&#xA;  IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if Im legally allowed to do that. And if yes, under what license would I be able to release it under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7753" OwnerDisplayName="miki725" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T13:26:03.240" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T13:26:03.240" Title="Can I redistribute a modified part of an open-source project under 3-clause BSD license" Tags="|derivative-works|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5293" CreationDate="2017-03-23T19:43:28.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the comments, it was clarified that original license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-Clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source SE site contains answers related to that license and my question. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4704/we-worked-with-bsd-license-software-and-modified-it-and-now-want-to-allow-others/4705#4705&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4704/we-worked-with-bsd-license-software-and-modified-it-and-now-want-to-allow-others/4705#4705&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4546/bsd-3-clause-how-to-update-with-modifications&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4546/bsd-3-clause-how-to-update-with-modifications&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that changes could be distributed as long as original copyright notice is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7753" OwnerDisplayName="miki725" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T03:10:19.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5300" CreationDate="2017-03-26T02:28:50.870" Score="2" ViewCount="777" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BlockMen/cme/tree/v2.3.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt;, the README says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Code(if not stated differently):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) Copyright 2015-2016 DeveloperOne; modified zlib-License see &quot;LICENSE.txt&quot; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And zlib license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied&#xA;  warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages&#xA;  arising from the use of this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,&#xA;  including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it&#xA;  freely, subject to the following restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this&#xA;  software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation&#xA;  is required.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I relicense the new code under another license if I maintain the actual notice plus the new notice?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ex:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2015-2016 DeveloperOne (modified zlib-license for code, if not stated differently)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2017 DeveloperTwo (new license for code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;zlib notice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do&#xA;  eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;new license notice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do&#xA;  eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7761" LastEditorUserId="7761" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T15:27:41.880" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T11:58:26.377" Title="Can I relicense software under the modified zlib licence?" Tags="|relicensing|zlib|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5295" CreationDate="2017-03-26T05:42:56.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This notice may not be removed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;or altered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; from any source distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty sure that 'notice' in this context refers to the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7634" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T05:42:56.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T21:00:03.637" Score="2" ViewCount="1771" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering using a nontrivial Regex expression example I found online in a commercial product. The original page has no info on licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess a regex is arguably executable code (or a court instance could be persuaded in this direction). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know any examples of copyrighted regex expressions (or any counter-example to regexes being covered by a license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4519" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T12:23:35.353" Title="Can a Regex expression be licensed?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-03-30T01:05:28.790" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5297" CreationDate="2017-03-26T21:22:19.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &gt;&gt;idea&amp;lt;&amp;lt; of the regex can't be copyrighted (though it could conceivably be patented, but that's real unlikely to be the case), only its particular &gt;&gt;expression&amp;lt;&amp;lt; (its particular syntax). And there's usually more than one way to construct a regex that does the same thing. So if you're really concerned, just use the idea and rewrite it a little differently, e.g., to rewrite or not to rewrite, that is the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T21:22:19.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5297" CreationDate="2017-03-27T05:43:30.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of things to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have you contacted the original author(s) to ask them if you can re-use it and under what terms? - &lt;em&gt;They may just say yes, ask for attribution, ask for a fee that you would be willing to pay or agree to release it under an Open Source licence that is also compatible with commercial use. Many of us are just happy to see clever things that we came up with re-used.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How hard would it be for you to come up with your own version, &lt;em&gt;not by changing theirs but possibly by testing against theirs&lt;/em&gt; given that you know it is possible to do this by a regex. &lt;em&gt;Keep this in mind if you end up negotiating on price/use.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the original page &amp;amp;/or site assert &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; of licence, copyright, confidentiality or patent on the regex, or code, on the site? - &lt;em&gt;If it did not then they cannot patent in most places as they have already published. If they published it without asserting copyright then technically they have released it into the wild with default copyright and licence which I am told is &quot;all  rights reserved&quot;.&lt;/em&gt; It is worth a thorough look at the site that you found the code on as you &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; find that there is a default licence applied to all content on the site as there is for all code on the Stack Overflow site(s) for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.B.&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a lawyer or legal expert in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; country, let alone wherever you are - the above is my personal opinion based on past experiences and reading.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastEditorUserId="4659" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T12:23:35.353" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T12:23:35.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5295" CreationDate="2017-03-27T11:58:26.377" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can relicense this software. The LICENSE.txt file in the repository you link to is the notice referred to. You can modify this file to add your own copyright statement and your own license statement, as long as you preserve the current contents. Indeed, by doing so, you would be respecting all the conditions of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T11:58:26.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-27T15:13:57.247" Score="-1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;We’re two information systems students at Uppsala university, Sweden, currently working on our bachelor’s thesis. The aim of our paper is to investigate usability in open-source software and conduct a qualitative study on the subject. To do this in a satisfactory manner we hope to examine a couple of open source projects and interview it’s main developers with the intent of gaining knowledge about development within the context of usability in open-source software. The interviews will be done via e-mail and all participants are anonymous. The software itself will be heuristically evaluated and the result will be analyzed together with the answers from the interviews. Our time span is quite limited and our goal is to have completed the interviews within 1-4 weeks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would be a good place to look for these developers to interview?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you and best regards,&#xA;Robert &amp;amp; David&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7772" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T15:14:45.260" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T15:17:46.870" Title="Where to find interviewees for questions about user experience in open source software?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-06T03:21:45.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5301" CreationDate="2017-03-27T15:17:46.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could contact the developers of active open source projects directly. Any serious project shouldn't make it hard to find contact information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good website to find active open source projects is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/explore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T15:17:46.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5308" CreationDate="2017-03-28T00:20:31.013" Score="7" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the author of a program that outputs its own source code (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quine&lt;/a&gt;) makes it open source, can others just distribute it as binaries? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it matter which popular open source license he used, say GPL vs MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7776" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T15:17:56.947" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T09:03:24.660" Title="Can a quine be distributed as binary only and be open source?" Tags="|software|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T04:37:50.653" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's true that big outfits like Github aim to be around for at least the next decade or so, so arguably it's not a big deal for repos to just sit in user accounts. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/549/are-you-legally-allowed-to-use-abandoned-projects&quot;&gt;other questions&lt;/a&gt; make clear that even if the project is abandoned, the copyright remains with the ostensible owner attached to that account. And anyway, in that case the account has to stay up to serve as an access point for the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't able to find any information on Github, Archive Team, or Archive.org about where repos could be donated under some blanket surrender of rights. Are there any such orgs either within one of these sites or elsewhere to which a repo can be transferred?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7493" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T07:23:34.323" Title="Are there any places for abandoned repos to be transferred?" Tags="|source-code|ownership|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5304" CreationDate="2017-03-28T07:23:34.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the copyright remains with the ostensible owner attached to that account&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not quite, the copyright remains with the owners of the &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; (the copyright owners). In fact, if the software is under an open source license, you are perfectly within your rights to mirror the software elsewhere, even if you’re not the copyright holder. (This is what makes GitHub’s forking features legal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can push any open source project to another repository. There are a number of candidates for long-term storage, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; (in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/open_source_software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source collections&lt;/a&gt;), or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwareheritage.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Heritage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as transferring rights goes, that’s a bit more complex. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; has processes in place to allow developers to assign their copyrights to the Foundation, but they might not do it for any project; likewise, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; accepts copyright assignments and has the legal frameworks to do so in a number of countries, but again that might just be for certain projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T07:23:34.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T09:32:12.320" Score="2" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a common convention to include the full license text in a file named COPYING (or LICENSE) in the root folder of a repo. Sometimes, the developer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does nothing more (no copyright byline in the README or anywhere else)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only includes a copyright line in the README (&quot;Copyright 2010 R. Hacker&quot;), but no paragraph explicitly saying &quot;or any later version&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the developer has done this, and the COPYING file contains the full text of GPLv2 or GPLv3, does this mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the repo is covered by GPL-version-X-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the repo is covered by GPL-version-X-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the situation is ambiguous (cannot be determined from the repo alone)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T18:33:46.733" Title="Is a repo with just a COPYING file GPL-X-only or GPL-X-or-later?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|relicensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5306" CreationDate="2017-03-28T17:34:29.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licensing of a copyrighted work involves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a set of permissions (the license) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an association between a particular work and the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case you clearly have item #1 (the GPL is certainly a license) but the scope (indeed, the existence) of item #2 is unclear at best. In this case, it seems clear to me that there is no real case for seeing an implicit &quot;or any later version&quot; clause, since it isn't even obvious that the files (or which particular files) are licensed under the version of the GPL that is being provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The salient legal question here is: if an author released code alongside a license like you describe, would they prevail in suing a downstream distributor/modifier who acted in a good-faith belief that one or more of the files were licensed under the GPL, based on the license's inclusion alongside the code? For the case where the downstream user claims the work was licensed under exactly GPL version X, it sounds like a pretty strong defense, and the suing author will fail. For the case where the downstream user claims the work was licensed under some later version as well, it sounds like a pretty weak defense, and the author will probably win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related interesting case is the inverse of this, in which a copyright holder declares that a work is licensed under the GNU GPL without a version number. In that case, you may choose any version of the GPL, since every version of the GPL states, &quot;If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.&quot; I can't say how a no-version GPL declaration within the program would interact with the program being placed along side a specific GPL license, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T18:33:46.733" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T18:33:46.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5303" CreationDate="2017-03-28T19:11:15.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is categorically fine under the MIT license (as long as you follow basic attribution and license-preservation requirements), since the MIT license allows you to distribute the work (and modified forms) in binary-only format if you wish. If the binary happens also to produce source code, that's fine too, but it doesn't have to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL, this is probably not allowed. The binary does produce the source code when you run it, so at first glance it appears to satisfy the GPL's requirement to accompany the binary with corresponding source code. However, the ability to see the source code is contingent upon the ability to run the binary, which is a requirement that the GPL does not allow you to impose. This is a nontrivial imposition, too, since one prominent benefit of having source code is the ability to port or recompile a program to run on a new platform. In the case of quine-provided source code, users would not be able to do this unless they first had access to the binary's original platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, the ability to read the source code in any digital media format requires the execution of some executable -- you must run an operating system of some kind to read a USB drive or download source code from a network server -- but specifically requiring execution of the exact binary file whose source code you want to read seems substantially different and less easy to satisfy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T19:11:15.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5303" CreationDate="2017-03-29T06:20:57.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for the sake of completeness, the requirements listed @aspillers's answer do not apply to the copyright owner. So if you are the sole author of the work, you can decide to license it to others under GPL while only distributing the source code. Normally this wouldn't make sense because to be able to convey it further, recipients need to distribute the source code as well (which they wouldn't be able to do if you didn't give it to them, in the case of a normal software). For this peculiar example, they should execute the program, get the source, and make sure that they distribute it with the binary (or provide a written offer to get it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T06:20:57.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5325" CreationDate="2017-03-29T14:12:23.773" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stack Exchange review system for post creation, editing and removal is quite sophisticated and somehow steered by discussion on meta networks (Stack Exchange and others) which are &quot;user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required&quot;. Is that aspect of steering sufficient to be able to implement a similar review process (let's say for torrents of FLOSS Linux distributions on a Java EE web platform) and licensing it under Apache 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would the required attribution end up in the projects &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; and the source file headers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6658" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T20:05:15.577" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T20:05:15.577" Title="Can I take over the Stack Exchange review system in an Apache 2.0 licensed web service?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5318" CreationDate="2017-03-29T14:34:50.550" Score="11" ViewCount="5800" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the sense of GPL, is a Web application running on a private server without exposing its code considered &quot;released&quot;? (or is the word &quot;distributed&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if a GPL component is used in a Web application running on a private server without exposing its code, does this make the copyright holder of the application obliged to release its source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T05:00:14.180" Title="Is a Web application &quot;released&quot; in the sense of GPL?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5316" CreationDate="2017-03-29T17:43:13.800" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed today that the GPL has a copyright notice that reserves copyright AND disallows modification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand maintaining the copyright and allowing verbatim distribution but what is the argument (legal or otherwise) for disallowing versioning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically could they not allow for modification provided that the new derivative license does not call itself the GPL and does not make references to the FSF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7792" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T19:07:17.107" Title="Why is the GPL itself unmodifiable?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-03-29T20:15:54.630" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2017-03-29T18:13:14.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can create a license based on the GPL by asking for permission to the FSF. IMHO this will likely be denied and would be misguided as we have enough FOSS licenses as it is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T18:13:14.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2017-03-29T19:00:17.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF does give that exact permission&lt;/a&gt; in the GNU GPL FAQ, though in the same breath they urge you not to use such permission, which would contribute to the already-overwhelming problem of license proliferation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I modify the GPL and make a modified license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is possible to make modified versions of the GPL, but it tends to have practical consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can legally use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to  for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified license in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it. Such a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL, and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism offered by GPL version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, they permit reusing and modifying the terms of the license as long as you change the name and remove any association with the GNU project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the reason that this right is not offered within the license text itself is so that the FSF can rescind or modify the terms of this permission in the future. That is, if the FSF decides to change how or whether they offer the right to make modified forms of the GPL, they do not want to have to issue a new version of the GPL just for that change! (Similarly, if they wanted to make the permission more restrictive, there would be no legal mechanism to say, &quot;Sorry everyone, that part of the license is wrong; we retroactively eliminate the version of the GPL that allowed you to make changes from existence.&quot;) Therefore, the license itself offers no rights to make a modified version, and any such rights are offered via an external channel, such as the GPL FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T19:07:17.107" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T19:07:17.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5313" CreationDate="2017-03-30T00:49:12.093" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;0. Definitions.&quot;&gt;GPLv3’s &lt;em&gt;Definitions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; section (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. &lt;strong&gt;Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;2. Basic Permissions.&quot;&gt;basic permission&lt;/a&gt; applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that this doesn’t apply to parts of the Web app that run on the client side (e.g., JavaScript). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For AGPLv3 it would be a yes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/650/138&quot; title=&quot;Do I have to offer the source of an AGPL (v3.0) licensed Web app even if I didn’t modify it?&quot;&gt;if the software is modified&lt;/a&gt;), which is exactly why it was made. While it contains the same definition as quoted above from the GPLv3, its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#preamble&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3’s &lt;em&gt;Preamble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it’s again stated that this is not the case for GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T00:49:12.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5347" CreationDate="2017-03-30T07:20:31.543" Score="3" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a library that is dual licensed:  library is licensed to you under your choice of the Academic Free License version 2.1, or the GNU General Public License version 2 (or, at your option any later version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that I can chose to use the library under the AFL and just by removing the GPL license text one must fulfil only the AFL license conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct ? If not what are the best practices in this case ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am asking about this specific case as when a library has a dual license — open source / commercial it's easier to distinguish) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: License Text : &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/COPYING&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T13:24:26.727" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T14:17:54.837" Title="Dual Licensing - AFL/GPL" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5352" CreationDate="2017-03-30T14:36:16.620" Score="6" ViewCount="3408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache v2 specifies on point 4a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one uses an Apache v2 library in a commercial product must one deliver the Apache license text together with the product? (if the product can't display the text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be enough to display the link to the Apache license in the product documentation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should it display the whole text on the product webpage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T13:00:11.827" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T06:47:34.087" Title="Apache v2 - How to properly fulfill the license in a product" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T15:36:04.343" Score="3" ViewCount="7429" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have using angular material for quite few days. Now I am planning to develop a commercial software using angular material (&lt;a href=&quot;https://material.angularjs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://material.angularjs.org/&lt;/a&gt;). While going through the license section of the product (&lt;a href=&quot;https://material.angularjs.org/latest/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://material.angularjs.org/latest/license&lt;/a&gt;) it says - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not getting the meaning of the above statement. Does it mean that some/all of my source code should have the above license as well (Whereas my product license will definitely be proprietary) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, let's say I have one JavaScript file where I am using the angular material components. Is it necessary to add that license there ?&#xA;However, the license declaration of the actual angular material components (which are provided by angular material) are intact and not modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7800" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T15:26:20.390" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T12:47:02.117" Title="Can I use angular-material in any commercial project ? Is there any cost for that?" Tags="|mit|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-31T01:27:26.587" Score="2" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am comparing two types of products, a commercial product and a commercially supported opensource product and comparing the cost over a certain period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial product cost includes maintenance fees, disaster recovery site, CPU costs, cost/user. The open source product only has subscriptions fees according to CPU and users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth knowing that both of these products package-based/'off the shelf', but are two different categories of it. Maintenance fees could be referred to as OPEX costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What additional costs should I take into consideration to work out with more precision the cost over a time period? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g  hardware cost for the production and disaster environments- since two products have different hardware needs as variations of application users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very similar definition to the open source package can be found here &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8/96615-seven-principles-for-selecting-software-packages/fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/8/96615-seven-principles-for-selecting-software-packages/fulltext&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7805" LastEditorUserId="7805" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T12:39:47.280" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T12:39:47.280" Title="Costs of commercial vs open source" Tags="|commercial|project-management|finance|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2017-04-18T15:32:56.550" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:13:21.873" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know what kind of licensed software (e.g. MIT, Apache, GPL) that I can use in such a project without any sort of violation. If this were 4.0, it'd be fairly straightforward as that has GPLv3 compatibility. The issue is that the work MUST be published under a 3.0 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons site lacks any sort of information on this particular question, other than that no compatible licenses exist. However, this only seems to apply to attempting to re-license CC BY-SA 3.0 work under a different license, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7806" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T02:42:12.237" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T02:42:12.237" Title="What software licenses can be used in a CC BY-SA 3.0 work?" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5312" CreationDate="2017-03-31T14:11:41.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideas themselves are not copyrightable, only their expression is. So as remarked by @curiousdannii the license of the content of the SE sites has no impact here (unless you also want to reuse part of the content that can be found on these sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas cannot really be patented either but industrial processes can and this notion has been twisted a lot so you end up with software companies having a lot of patents, whose validity is often questionable, but which represent a threat nonetheless. I don't know if Stack Exchange Inc. owns any patent but this is something that you can research since patents are public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as you say, a lot of the ideas which power these sites were first posted by contributors on the meta sites and this alone prevents patenting (to be patentable an invention must be original, non trivial and useful). For more information on patents, you should rather go to Patents SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T17:01:38.460" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T17:01:38.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5313" CreationDate="2017-04-02T05:00:14.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the sense of GPL, is a Web application running on a private server without exposing its code considered &quot;released&quot;? (or is the word &quot;distributed&quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget for a second about the GPL and licenses entirely and let me focus on the parts of a typical web app: you will have a backend and a frontend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The backend may connect to some database, do some heavy processing, business logic, etc. It may generate dynamically web pages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frontend is whatever ends up being downloaded in a user's web browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume also that you are running this server privately and exposing the web application on the public internet. The private server for private use is not interesting here as no external redistribution is taking place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in this context, what software is being redistributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obviously everything in the frontend is redistributed to the web browser of every users. The HTML and JavaScript code is physically transferred and copied to their browsers. So there is a &lt;strong&gt;transfer of a copy&lt;/strong&gt; of some of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The backend is in general not copied or transferred to your users, though there is a greyer area: &lt;strong&gt;if the frontend is generated by some backend code&lt;/strong&gt; (say you generate JavaScript on the fly, or you generate some HTML pages or you minify some JS or transpile Coffeescript to JS, etc), then the corresponding source code of the frontend code that is redistributed may be in fact some of the backend source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, if a GPL component is used in a Web application running on a private server without exposing its code, does this make the copyright holder of the application obliged to release its source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the context I outlined above, things become much clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, the frontend code is redistributed and the GPL applies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some cases -and this is a grey'ish area- some backend corresponding source code may be redistributable as the corresponding source code for the frontend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T05:00:14.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5333" CreationDate="2017-04-02T11:26:46.927" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) My closed sourced software calls the GPL software on the command line like so: GPL.exe file. GPL produce output to stdout with the result. My closed source software reads the GPL output. Can I distribute them in the same installer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If that is not possible (without releasing my code). Is it possible to build a downloader in the installer which downloads the GPL/CECILL software from the authors site and installs it on the customer machine? Which will then be argued that I did not distribute the GPL software, the user have downloaded it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7819" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T13:27:48.290" Title="I have a CECILL and GPL software together with my closed-source software. Can I distribute them together?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|cecill|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5331" CreationDate="2017-04-02T12:36:31.820" Score="6" ViewCount="1298" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project about to launch to public. So I'm preparing open source credit notice page. Since my project is developed in JavaScript, there's lots of &lt;code&gt;node_modules&lt;/code&gt; in the development directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's question. Could I reference the packages only if I directly deepened in my &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;? My project referenced only 25 packages in &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; but there's 300+ packages in my &lt;code&gt;node_modules/&lt;/code&gt; directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some packages like &lt;code&gt;gulp-*&lt;/code&gt; is referenced as devDependencies and clearly not included in the final dist of my project. So I think I could omit credit for these packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about indirect referenced packages. Let say package &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; depends on package &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; and my project depends on only &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;. In this case my dist contains both &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;. Could I omit credit for package &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7820" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T09:52:39.053" Title="Should I credit indirect depended package in my open source credit notice too?" Tags="|license-notice|dependencies|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-04-03T13:32:25.160" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5330" CreationDate="2017-04-03T03:58:42.613" Score="-2" ViewCount="1661" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a software that I want to release under a proprietary license with some flexibility for the customer and I need your help to find a license that fits my requirements since I am not sure all the common and popular licenses would fit like LGPL, CC, MIT, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain the context, the software would be sold with a perpetual license for the current version (+ one year of support and fix updates). After that year the customer can continue to use the software freely, but if he wants to get the new features he would then need to buy a new license for another year. This is somewhat close to the JetBrains Intellij IDEA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What the license must ALLOW :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The use of the software or a modified version of it (modifications made by the customer for the customer himself)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The modification of the software (eg: to allow customer to add its own features)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What the license must DISALLOW :&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The distribution of the software (modified or not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The selling of the software (modified or not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The selling of a service build on top of the software (modified or not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license would reassure the customer about using and improving the software with or without me, as if it was it's own software but only for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7824" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T15:51:35.813" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T15:51:35.813" Title="Which OpenSource License for a proprietary software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-04-18T14:58:48.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5329" CreationDate="2017-04-03T08:23:33.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All open source licenses allow the things you want to allow. I can't think of one that disallows the things you want to disallow. Allowing re-distribution (or selling) of the modified or un-modified software or something built on top of it is key to the whole idea of open source. While you can probably license your software to your customer under virtually any terms you like, it won't be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Initiative has formulated a number of criteria for open source licenses: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most commonly used open source licenses are OSI approved which means that they conform with the definition. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T15:17:18.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T15:17:18.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5328" CreationDate="2017-04-03T09:52:39.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You added this important comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's frontend project. So packages are bundled and minimized then redistributed to end user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I credit indirect depended package in my open source credit notice too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... &lt;strong&gt;is a clear YES.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are redistributing your code with directs deps, and with deps of deps, and with deps of deps of deps and ...... you have to comply with the license requirements of all the packages &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I explained in this other &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4315/947&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; some of the specifics of dealing with package dependencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole chain of program or package dependencies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The purpose and use of each program or package in that chain (test, tool, runtime)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which dependent are shipped and redistributed with your product, application or library vs. which may be installed by your user&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license of each dependency in this chain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that would not be redistributed (e.g. devDependencies in the case of npms) does not have to be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is any code using some copyleft license you may have also source code redistribution requirements. And depending on the licenses and the way you integrate with these copyleft-licensed packages this requirement may extend to the tools used for minification and to possibly your own source code or other packages in the dependencies tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T09:52:39.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5321" CreationDate="2017-04-03T12:47:02.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple answer; yes, you can. And there is no cost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT is one of the more permissive licenses available. You can use code written using it in projects with other licenses, including other open source licenses and commercial projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You merely have to say you used X and that X is licensed under MIT, and made by Y. One advice would be to have this on an about page. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And no, you don't need to include the license in any files which are merely calling the library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/103273/can-i-use-mit-licence-plugins-in-my-commercial-web-site&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7826" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:45:56.767" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T12:47:02.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5327" CreationDate="2017-04-03T13:22:45.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this should be possible. The use you are describing likely falls under the &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; category. See this part of section 5 of GPL v3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this answer in the GNU FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights that each program's individual license would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what you are asking about the CeCILL software but the answer should basically the same: the FSF's viewpoint on this is ground in copyright law. Nobody should be able to prevent such kind of redistribution from the moment they do allow redistribution. (Of course, IANAL and this is subject to interpretation of what is a derivative work in copyright law, but the FSF interpretation on the distinction between a derivative work and an aggregate is generally well accepted, at least nobody defends a stricter interpretation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T13:27:48.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5342" CreationDate="2017-04-03T15:12:08.370" Score="2" ViewCount="1345" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in using data distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC-By-SA) license. A subset of it can be extracted, which will fall under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC-By) instead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be using this data for commercial, closed-source software.  Only data will be used, and there is no software that will be depended on by my software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I will not be modifying or distributing the data (consumers of the software will not be able to view the data), but will only use it to automatically perform data analysis and modify another dataset that I own, what conditions would be applicable to my usage of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: to clarify, the use of the data would result in my software being different than if it didn't use the data&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7827" LastEditorUserId="7827" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T01:19:10.497" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T07:05:58.517" Title="Can I use data licensed under Creative Commons for closed source propriety software?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5003" CreationDate="2017-04-03T18:40:43.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer only point 2 because this is the core of the question. Basically the question is: &lt;strong&gt;if I am building a public facing Java app on a private server and this app uses an AGPL library &lt;em&gt;unmodified&lt;/em&gt;, am I impacted by section 13 of the AGPL license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section starts with &quot;if you modify the Program&quot; so it boils down to deciding whether use of a Java library inside a Java app counts as modification of the library. Your interpretation is that this is not modification because the library itself was not modified. I think this is an incorrect interpretation which is caused by the use of the term &quot;modify&quot; while section 5 of (A)GPL talks about &quot;a work based on the Program&quot;. However these two must be interpreted exactly in the same way because they are defined in the same paragraph of section 0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &quot;modified version&quot; of the earlier work or a work &quot;based on&quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequently, the usual consideration about what it means for a work to be based on another work applies and you very well know that the FSF's interpretation of this includes linking to a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll conclude by saying that Google probably agree with this answer because they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a special page dedicated to AGPL&lt;/a&gt; where we can read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using AGPL software requires that anything it links to must also be licensed under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T18:40:43.450" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5358" CreationDate="2017-04-04T02:50:05.657" Score="1" ViewCount="1105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to release my copyright (essentially put it in the public domain) but still have the software licensed under the GNU GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T12:53:17.887" Title="Does the GNU GPL imply that I hold copyright?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|public-domain|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-04T06:48:33.980" Score="7" ViewCount="1853" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was searching for better fonts and icons and ended up on Google Fonts. I was able to download the fonts for free which were under OFL. According to the included license file, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot be released under any other&#xA;  type of license. The requirement for fonts to remain under this&#xA;  license does not apply to any document created using the fonts or&#xA;  their derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Questions, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I'm using this for a commercial web application project, I &lt;em&gt;need not to&lt;/em&gt; mention the font source and/or the license as well?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it advised to use OFL fonts in commercial projects &lt;em&gt;with custom licenses&lt;/em&gt; which are not open-source?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6666" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T12:00:25.337" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T09:07:41.053" Title="using Open Font License (OFL) in commercial project" Tags="|license-compatibility|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5339" CreationDate="2017-04-04T11:07:16.843" Score="-1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) For example, if I upload a GPL binary to google drive and then provide a link for everyone. Does it mean that GOOGLE should now provide the sources for the binary if anyone requests them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) What happens on a scanning service of files, whereby, I requested it to downloads a file, scan it and then allows me to download it after scanning? Because they downloaded the file, scanned it, and gave it to me. Are they now liable to provide the sources of the GPL Binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) What happens if I receive an email to my gmail, the email contains a GPL Binary in an attachment. I download the file. Can I now request the sources from GOOGLE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7819" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T13:03:28.740" Title="What happens to Cloud providers, if I download a GPL Binaries from cloud storage service?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2017-04-04T13:17:01.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... &lt;em&gt;I upload a GPL binary to google drive and then provide a link for&#xA;  everyone&lt;/em&gt; ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the distributor here, Not Google. Also Google's Terms and conditions mentions scenarios like this, and here's an excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do not claim ownership in any of your content, including any text,&#xA;  data, information, and files that you upload, share, or store in your&#xA;  Drive account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, YOU are the distributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;...  scanning service of files, whereby, I requested it to download ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still you are the distributor. Even they might have additional terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;... &lt;em&gt;receive an email to my gmail, the email contains a GPL&lt;/em&gt; ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the answer for first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6666" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:17:01.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-04T21:50:08.277" Score="-2" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;h1&gt;1 Context&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; finds &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductA&lt;/strong&gt; online. &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductA&lt;/strong&gt; is made under a BSD License.  Now &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; wants to monetize &lt;strong&gt;SofwareProductA&lt;/strong&gt;, so it makes non-trivial adjustments to &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductA&lt;/strong&gt; to create &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt;.  The way that &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; wants to make money with &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt; is to distribute it as a free and open source product, but to use it as a platform for other monetary apps (for example, &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt; might be something like the Android OS, with the Android App store being the indirect monetization strategy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2 Problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; wants to distribute &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt; as a free and open-source product, it wants to protect itself from competitors. For example, it wants to prevent other companies from taking &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt;, incrementally changing it into &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductC&lt;/strong&gt;, and then monetizing it either indirectly as a platform or directly through licensing fees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3 Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license can &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; use to best protect &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt; from competitors in this way? Is there a license which allows &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;BusinessCorp&lt;/strong&gt; to monetize &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductB&lt;/strong&gt;  (either indirectly as a platform or directly through licensing fees) and its derivatives, but to still keep it open-source for hobbyists to tinker with? And how does the original BSD license that &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareProductA&lt;/strong&gt; was written under affect all of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7834" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T07:25:29.757" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T09:26:30.780" Title="How Can One Convert BSD Licensed Software into Protected, Monetizable Software (That's Still Open Source)?" Tags="|bsd|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5336" CreationDate="2017-04-05T04:24:46.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. As per dannii's comment, somebody (or some legal entity &quot;somebody&quot;) has to hold the copyright. Check out &quot;copyright basics&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf&lt;/a&gt; and copyrights for computer programs &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf&lt;/a&gt; and Form-TX &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formtx.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formtx.pdf&lt;/a&gt; which is what you have to submit for copyright registration. It's simply not possible to put the copyright itself in public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, by the way, you should &gt;&gt;always&amp;lt;&amp;lt; register the copyright. In principle, you automatically own the copyright to anything you write the moment it's on paper. In practice, should the matter ever come under dispute, the courts look &gt;&gt;very&amp;lt;&amp;lt; favorably on you for demonstrating your intent by registering the copyright before infringement occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="6534" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T04:31:19.043" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T04:31:19.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5334" CreationDate="2017-04-05T07:05:58.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, as was said in the comments, your software will &quot;contain the data in a hidden way&quot; or be better because the data was used to train it. Thus, your software will be a derivative of the data and if this data is licensed under CC-BY-SA the share-alike clause applies, whereas if you use the subset which is licensed under CC-BY, you only have an attribution requirement when making a derivative work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T07:05:58.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5340" CreationDate="2017-04-05T09:26:30.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even though BusinessCorp wants to distribute SoftwareProductB as a free and open-source product, it wants to protect itself from competitors. For example, it wants to prevent other companies from taking SoftwareProductB, incrementally changing it into SoftwareProductC, and then monetizing it either indirectly as a platform or directly through licensing fees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simply a contradiction. Free and open source and not allowing certain users or use cases doesn't mix at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a somewhat similar question with the same answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5329/which-opensource-license-for-a-proprietary-software&quot;&gt;Which OpenSource License for a proprietary software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T09:26:30.780" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5374" CreationDate="2017-04-05T16:06:21.693" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/web/tools/starter-kit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's Web Starter Kit&lt;/a&gt; in a project of mine, but I don't know what exactly I need to do to abide by the license. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include another copyright notice in addition to the Google one at the bottom of the license? If so, how should I do that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I license the project as a whole under a different license if I'm using the starter kit or do I need to license it under the same license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7837" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T20:39:51.923" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T12:59:13.217" Title="Google Web Starter Kit licensing" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5346" CreationDate="2017-04-06T10:18:36.800" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I and a few others are designing yet another open instruction set architecture(ISA). Open ISA is thought by us as &quot;free to see, and implement(even when selling it)&quot;. But we want to make this specification more than just &quot;free&quot;, able to co-develop next versions in true open-source fashion(or just grant companies to make their own modified sets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we want to keep this under zlib license, highly permissive but still making the second developers to give credit for original developers.&#xA;But is it possible to make just specification like ISA under a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7841" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T12:14:55.807" Title="Can a specification, for example ISA, be under open-source license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5345" CreationDate="2017-04-06T12:14:55.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, because a specification is just a text document and it is protected by copyright under as a literary work (like software). However, the zlib license is not appropriate for works which are not software (because it says &quot;this software&quot;). You should rather use a license which was specifically designed for non-software works such as CC-BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T12:14:55.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5319" CreationDate="2017-04-06T14:17:54.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would double check there aren't parts of the code licensed under GPL and other parts licensed under the AFL. Based on the FAQ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-faq.html&lt;/a&gt;), I would say you indeed have the option to pick one of the two licenses for the entire library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what are the best practices in this case ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be extra careful, I would remove references to the license that you don't want from ALL files in the dbus source. Most source files should have a copyright notice in block comment at the top of the file. An example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cgit.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/tree/bus/activation-helper.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cgit.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/tree/bus/activation-helper.c&lt;/a&gt;. If you want to use the AFL license, remove the GPL stuff from this comment header. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T14:17:54.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5351" CreationDate="2017-04-06T19:25:58.627" Score="3" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of you may be familiar with the collaborative fiction site &lt;a href=&quot;http://scp-wiki.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SCP&lt;/a&gt;. Their content is licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Suppose I am trying to create a game based on this. Under the ShareAlike part of that license, I'd need to also license my game under the same license. However, I'm not very clear on what exactly the requirements would be for source code availability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is creating a game based on this classified as a 'Derivative', therefore requring me to share under the same license? &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, would my code need to be made open-source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I feel I should add that the reason I'd like this to be closed-source is not to turn a profit, or anything of that kind, rather this is a game based on exploration, and I would like to avoid people trying to cheat that part of the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7845" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T01:10:37.460" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T20:09:56.797" Title="Creating a game based on a story licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0" Tags="|derivative-works|source-code|cc-by-sa|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5354" CreationDate="2017-04-06T21:33:51.840" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I produce some work, and I want all derivative works released before the year 2030 to be open source under the same license, but during and after the year 2030 I wish to allow derivative works to be released with merely an attribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I want a license that becomes more permissive over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a license exist? If not, are there any reasons why a license like this could not exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7844" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T23:16:01.160" Title="Is there a temporary copyleft license?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-07T04:29:01.253" Score="4" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have our own proprietary software that we are developing for commercial business. We want to sell the software and we do not have any problem in distributing the source code to our customers. Due to the lack of good build infrastructure and complexity of the software, it has become difficult to manage and has lost its readability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy way to manage this is by making use of Kbuild as is done in Linux and U-Boot. This means using (and customizing) Kbuild and Kconfig specific files (and few modified Makefiles) to compile our software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went through all the FAQs for GPL v2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html&lt;/a&gt;) but I'm not able to make what implications would be of using Kbuild infrastructure in my proprietary software. Can anyone help me in understanding them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7846" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T06:33:05.077" Title="Implications of using Linux's Kbuild infrastructure in proprietary software" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|gnu|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5348" CreationDate="2017-04-07T17:01:30.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For point #1, I'd say generally that yes, your game is a derivative, and would need to be licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 as well. Fictional characters are protected under copyright, and reuse of those characters in another work requires copyright permission as a derivative work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for point #2: Creative Commons licenses are not &quot;software-aware&quot; as it were, and don't place requirements about alternate forms, like source code. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code&quot;&gt;Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?&lt;/a&gt;) Instead, &lt;em&gt;anything you choose to distribute&lt;/em&gt; that is a derivative must be CC-BY-SA, but the license does not require you to distribute anything you don't want to. This is different from the GNU GPL, which explicitly requires you to distribute source code whenever you distribute a binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, alanogously, if you were shooting an SCP movie. The movie you release to the public would need to be under CC-BY-SA, but you would not need to release whatever movie-editing &quot;source material&quot; went into producing the final cut of the film. (By contrast, if the original work was under the GPL, then the GPL &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; require you to release the version of your movie that is the &quot;preferred form for making modifications&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T20:09:56.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2017-04-08T10:43:29.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one uses an Apache v2 library in a commercial product must one deliver the Apache license text together with the product ? (if the product can't display the text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. This can be as part of your commercial license agreement, documentation or in the product or else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be enough to display the link to the Apache license in the product documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would not be enough. Put the whole text instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or to display the whole text on the product webpage ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that there is can also be a notice. And you should also produce the notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for an attribution to be complete you should also mention who and what you are attributing: e.g. typically at least the project name and copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T10:43:29.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5350" CreationDate="2017-04-08T10:51:54.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not able to make what implications would be of using Kbuild infrastructure in my proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why you are not able to make what the implications would be is there &lt;strong&gt;are absolutely no implications whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;. The Kernel build system is under the same license as the Kernel e.g. the GPL, but the fact that it is GPL or else does not matter here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the Kbuild scripts -- or any other build script -- to build any kind of software has no bearing on the software being built in 99.99% of the cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analogy would be using a text editor to write programs: the license of Microsoft Word does not impact the license of a document you write with Word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the EPL license of the Eclipse IDE does not impact the license of any code written with Eclipse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-05-16T06:33:05.077" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T06:33:05.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5349" CreationDate="2017-04-08T11:12:16.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few FOSS or FOSS-like licenses with time-based conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the more common was the &lt;a href=&quot;http://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/mpl/MPL/NPL/1.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Netscape Public License&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V.2. Other Products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Netscape may include Covered Code in products other than the Netscape's Branded Code which are released by Netscape during the &lt;strong&gt;two (2) years following the release date of the Original Code&lt;/strong&gt;, without such additional products becoming subject to the terms of this License, and may license such additional products on different terms from those contained in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. certain special terms apply only for the first two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another license with a time provision is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zooko/tgppl/blob/master/COPYING.TGPPL-v1.rst#transitive-grace-period-public-licence-tgppl-v-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TGPPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute or communicate shall be licensed under this Transitive Grace Period Public Licence n&lt;strong&gt;o later than 12 months&lt;/strong&gt; after You distributed or communicated said copies;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. the license comes into force only after 12 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, time-based evolution is the essence of copyright protection and therefore the essence of FOSS copyright-based licenses (at least in the US) and the copyrights do expire after a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Duration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;period&lt;/a&gt;. (increasing longer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons also had a license e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Founders copyright&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; to effectively make a copyright expire after 14 or 28 years and therefore let the work &amp;quot;fall&amp;quot; in the public domain. It was used by O'reilly &lt;a href=&quot;https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20051001130813/http://creativecommons.org:80/projects/founderscopyright/oreilly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for a short while&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, I would advise against creating a new license.&#xA;Instead what you could consider is picking a license and adding an extra notice stating that your copyright claim will expire at some date and that the work will then be in the public domain. You likely want the help of a lawyer to draft this properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T23:16:01.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T06:47:55.350" Score="2" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a static website with HTML, CSS, &lt;em&gt;minimal&lt;/em&gt; JS, images, and lots of research content for a school project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that Creative Commons licenses are &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not meant for software source code&lt;/a&gt;, but my website is more like media content rather than an application. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1427/what-copyleft-license-should-i-use-for-my-websites-html-css-javascript&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. However, I want the license to cover my content, as well as allow only noncommercial reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be appropriate to license this website under a Creative Commons license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7857" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:32.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T07:08:08.520" Title="Could I license my static website under Creative Commons?" Tags="|creative-commons|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5356" CreationDate="2017-04-09T07:08:08.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming all the content is your original creation, I think it would be very appropriate.  If you want to encourage its reuse, giving a single link that automatically tar/zips up the entire site for download would be helpful.  IANAL/IANYL, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T07:08:08.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5336" CreationDate="2017-04-09T12:53:17.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extract from licence (gpl3): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, ”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above it is clear, that you need to hold copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T12:53:17.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5338" CreationDate="2017-04-09T13:03:28.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would depend on what the law says if the software was proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it says they are not liable, then they are not liable in this case.&#xA;If it says that they are liable, then it is a bit more complex in this case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google will have the option to accept the licence or not.&#xA;If they do not accept the licence, then it is the same as in the proprietary case. If they do accept it, then you need to read the licence, and see if they are in breach of contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the proprietary case, they can also choose to accept the licence. However this is not, often, the best cause of action.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T13:03:28.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5228" CreationDate="2017-04-09T15:31:26.363" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This totally depends on the dynamic of user base (both users and contributors) as the project evolves. Also it depends on dynamic of bazaar, technology, sponsorship, rivals, etc. So consider this case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let's consider two projects (one close and one open source) but both have same financial support and management (hence same dynamics regarding outer environment for growth). In this particular case, the open source project generally have faster growth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the notion of &lt;strong&gt;growth&lt;/strong&gt; in a project is multi-factored and being closed or open source is just one. However if you fix all other factors (aka control the dynamics of project evolution) we can say being open source helps growing faster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with counter-hypothesis, The fact that growth of software project depends whether on open or closed source has been noted in [1]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This paper investigates the hypothesis that open-source software grows more quickly, but does not find evidence to&#xA;  support this. The project growth is similar for all the projects in the analysis, indicating that other factors may limit growth. The&#xA;  hypothesis that creativity is more prevalent in open-source software is also examined, and evidence to support this hypothesis is found&#xA;  using the metric of functions added over time. The concept of open-source projects succeeding because of their simplicity is not&#xA;  supported by the analysis, nor is the hypothesis of open-source projects being more modular. However, the belief that defects are&#xA;  found and fixed more rapidly in open-source projects is supported by an analysis of the functions modified. The paper finds support for&#xA;  two of the five common beliefs and concludes that, when implementing or switching to the open-source development model,&#xA;  practitioners should ensure that an appropriate metrics collection strategy is in place to verify the perceived benefits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which basically indicates that how rapidly a project evolves is multi-factored and being just open source isn't enough. However it should be noted the reference [1] doesn't isolate the factors and just based its empirical study on general case i.e. whether open source projects, in general, have faster growth or not. However the question OP asks is about the impact of openness in growth which is not the case in the above paper. For example in [2], with investigating the case of APACHE and compare it with some other &lt;em&gt;selected&lt;/em&gt; commercial projects, the above hypothesis has confirmed, with a caution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although we picked several commercial projects that are reasonably close to APACHE, none is a perfect match, and the reader should not infer that the variation between these commercial projects and APACHE is due entirely to differences between commercial and OSS development processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper has provided some factors such as the core developer are not larger than 10-15 and write 80% of the code. or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This observation stems both from the &quot;many eyeballs implies shallow&#xA;  bugs&quot; observation cited earlier [15], and the way that fixes are&#xA;  distributed. In the &quot;free&quot; world of OSS, patches can be made available&#xA;  to all customers nearly as soon as they are made. In commercial&#xA;  developments, by contrast, patches are generally bundled into new&#xA;  releases, and made available according to some redetermined schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the key reasons for &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; quicker evolution of F/OSS projects. The model used in [1] regarding growth can be challenged by empirical evolution models presented in [3]. From [1]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The majority of the open-source and closed-source projects&#xA;  analyzed have a similar growth rate with respect to the&#xA;  increase of the total lines of code, the total complexity, and&#xA;  the total number of functions when analyzed using a linear&#xA;  approximation. A linear model was chosen based on an&#xA;  analysis of several different models [10] and provides a&#xA;  reasonable approximation of the growth for project&#xA;  comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In [3] it's been shown how the model for evolution of software should be modified for F/OSS project usually in favor of faster growth at least for significant portion of the F/OSS group: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most interesting fact is that while in the mean the growth rate is linear or decreasing over time according to the laws of software evolution, a significant percentage of projects is able to sustain super-linear growth. There is a positive relationship between the size of a project, the number of participants, and the inequality in the distribution of work within the development team with the presence of super-linear growth patterns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of license for software project (and hence open or closed) has real impact on software development [4]. However we're more curious about whether being open sorced foster rapid growth in comparison to closed source or not. While I tried to reflect different aspects of the question it should be noted that there are significant body of evidence (based on my point of view and my search through academic papers in this regard) which shows positive correlation of F/OSS development model with growth in comparison to closed source development. However how rapid a software project develops is a multi-factored and complicated problem and clearly there is great opportunity regarding researching this topic to come with new/better models explaining software evolution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Paulson, James W., Giancarlo Succi, and Armin Eberlein. &quot;An empirical study of open-source and closed-source software products.&quot; IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 30, no. 4 (2004): 246-256.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Mockus, Audris, Roy T. Fielding, and James Herbsleb. &quot;A case study of open source software development: the Apache server.&quot; In Software Engineering, 2000. Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on, pp. 263-272. IEEE, 2000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] Koch, Stefan. &quot;Software evolution in open source projects—a large‐scale investigation.&quot; Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice 19, no. 6 (2007): 361-382.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] Stewart, Katherine J., Anthony P. Ammeter, and Likoebe M. Maruping. &quot;Impacts of license choice and organizational sponsorship on user interest and development activity in open source software projects.&quot; Information Systems Research 17, no. 2 (2006): 126-144.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] Scacchi, Walt. &quot;Understanding open source software evolution.&quot; Software Evolution and Feedback: Theory and Practice 9 (2006): 181-205.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;p.s. In my answer I frequently use &lt;strong&gt;evolution&lt;/strong&gt; for project development which can be investigate further on references such as [5].&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*p.s. The &lt;em&gt;Bazaar&lt;/em&gt; is used referring to paradigm elaborated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;the cathedral and the bazaar&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*p.s. I provide more emprical/academic resources based on @Zimm i48 comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7858" LastEditorUserId="7858" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T15:46:54.970" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T15:46:54.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T21:26:52.123" Score="7" ViewCount="13977" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a software in python programming language which uses libraries licensed under BSD-3 clause. Is it necessary for me to show my source code to users? Also can I restrict the distribution of the binaries that I provide to the user like other proprietary software (Ex:Windows office package)?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7860" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T20:12:15.780" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T20:12:15.780" Title="Use of BSD-3 Clause license and python software license for proprietary use" Tags="|commercial|bsd|proprietary-code|closed-source|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5361" CreationDate="2017-04-10T08:30:37.960" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD-3 clause is a very permissive license that does not require you disclosing your source code or the source code of the open source libraries. You are not required to allow your users to re-distribute the binaries either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are required to display any copyright statements from the BSD licensed libraries, and you are required to display the BSD license text somewhere as well. If your software is an application, this kind of information is usually shown in some kind of &quot;About this software&quot; dialog. The documentation is another place where it is commonly found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T08:30:37.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5175" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:27:00.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I include a library licenced under LGPL 2.1 in an MIT-licenced project without any legal problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Your only LGPL requirements apply to the LGPL library and not to your MIT-licensed code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since it's not a compiled language, I would provide the full untouched source code of the library (including the copyright notice) in a sub-directory of my project. My classes would then use some of the library's classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you are making no modifications to the LGPL-licensed code, you are doing the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:27:00.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5052" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:30:47.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would consider a notebook as a combo of code and data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As data, the notebook itself (assuming it does not include snippets of AGPL-licensed code) can be under whatever license you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As code, if executed it depends on your modified AGPL-licensed library that you make otherwise available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you intent is to publish in some blog post, you are imho staying in the realm of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would accompany the post with some comments explaining the dependency and its license if someone would want to reuse the code and its dependency for something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:30:47.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5177" CreationDate="2017-04-10T15:35:52.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there approaches in the open source community have proven their worth to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide an easily, for everyone editable documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which can simply be shipped as offline copy with a web application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and support some translation feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be called wikipedia, would it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there is a project called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dokuwiki.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dokuwiki&lt;/a&gt; that might be more appropriate from a smaller scale wiki and was originally designed AFAICR for software documentation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T15:35:52.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5372" CreationDate="2017-04-11T10:22:56.937" Score="7" ViewCount="9231" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a nice &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0-licensed&lt;/strong&gt; project that already implements the foundation of a way more elaborate product that I intend to sell as proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like the &lt;strong&gt;70%&lt;/strong&gt; of the code will be modified or rewritten, so it's not really like I'm including it as a module or library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I &lt;strong&gt;cannot release the sources&lt;/strong&gt; of the final product as OSS, but it is possible to add credits and acknowledgements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7868" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T03:45:42.903" Title="Can I fork and sell a modified Apache 2.0 licensed project?" Tags="|derivative-works|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-15T09:43:46.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5370" CreationDate="2017-04-11T20:15:13.257" Score="-1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/afiore/arboreal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arboreal&lt;/a&gt; library in my new project, I am made some changes and now working to change it to npm module and use Grunt, because it not available from npm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have a problem, when I start editing the &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file. Here's what I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;  &quot;name&quot;: &quot;arboreal.js&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;description&quot;: &quot;Javascript tree traversal and manipulation library&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;author&quot;: &quot;Andrea Fiore&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;version&quot;: &quot;0.0.2&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;contributors&quot;: [&#xA;    {&#xA;      &quot;name&quot;: &quot;Nenad V. Nikolić&quot;,&#xA;      &quot;email&quot;: &quot;me@shonzilla.com&quot;,&#xA;      &quot;url&quot;: &quot;http://shonzilla.com/&quot;&#xA;    },&#xA;    {&#xA;      &quot;name&quot;: &quot;Vasiliy Altunin&quot;,&#xA;      &quot;email&quot;: &quot;skyr@altunin.online&quot;,&#xA;      &quot;url&quot;: &quot;https://github.com/vasiliyaltunin&quot;&#xA;    }&#xA;  ],&#xA;  &quot;dependencies&quot;: {},&#xA;  &quot;devDependencies&quot;: {&#xA;  },&#xA;  &quot;engines&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;node&quot;: &quot;&amp;gt;= 4.0.0&quot;&#xA;  },&#xA;  &quot;license&quot;: &quot;MIT&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;main&quot;: &quot;./lib/arboreal&quot;,&#xA;  &quot;repository&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;type&quot;: &quot;git&quot;,&#xA;    &quot;url&quot;: &quot;git+https://github.com/vasiliyaltunin/arboreal&quot;&#xA;  },&#xA;  &quot;scripts&quot;: {&#xA;    &quot;test&quot;: &quot;jasmine-node test/specs&quot;&#xA;  }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well I did not finish with it, yet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main problem is &lt;code&gt;author&lt;/code&gt;. Now it &lt;code&gt;&quot;author&quot;: &quot;Andrea Fiore&quot;,&lt;/code&gt;, but i forked it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shonzilla/arboreal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; repo. And the owner of that repo seems to do much work to improve and bugfix this code. But the problem is that I am going to put it inside npm under my account and in this case I am must set author to my name: &lt;code&gt;&quot;author&quot;: &quot;Vasiliy Altunin&quot;,&lt;/code&gt;, but in this case the original author is never mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best practice to solve this problem, so all authors respected and all npm descriptions will be right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7873" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T14:38:55.970" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T14:38:55.970" Title="GitHub source to npm js module set author correctly" Tags="|licensing|mit|github|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5369" CreationDate="2017-04-11T22:11:54.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the best practice to solve this problem, so all authors respected and all npm descriptions will be right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no absolute best practice but here is what I would do. This is the same I would expect someone to do with my code and I would consider this a good to great practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ensure I change the name of the package, to avoid any confusion with the original upstream package and avoid &quot;name squatting&quot; their package name in the registry.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Set my name as the author as the NPM registry demands it&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Update the contributors with the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shonzilla/arboreal/commits/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;primary committers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;update the description to explain the provenance of the code who wrote it, who I forked it from and what are my additions&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;add and update the same in the README.md file and eventually update accordingly the code file headers with similar information&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;possibly add the copyright of the main authors beside the original one in the MIT-LICENSE.txt&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ping the authors to inform them about what I am doing as a courtesy&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If possible I would try to avoid all of this stuff and instead work out with the upstream  developers to get my patches included and work with them to release it all in the registry, making all of the above moot. This would be my first choice in most cases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this goes well above and beyond what would be essentially needed, but this is IMHO the &lt;strong&gt;right and courteous thing&lt;/strong&gt; to do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T22:11:54.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5373" CreationDate="2017-04-12T00:10:11.813" Score="8" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lead/contribute to several open source projects, primarily Python libraries available on PyPI.  I know that the code is getting used, but I have no data regarding number of users, number of installations, or usage frequency.  I'm looking for ideas about how to collect such data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I've considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Github stars or Flattr/Patreon contributions.&lt;/strong&gt; These require logins for those services, which may not apply in my case. In addition, I don't want financial rewards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mailing list messages and issue tracking activity.&lt;/strong&gt; Both of these seem like poor proxies for the desired stats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phone home UDP pings.&lt;/strong&gt; Users (and I) typically dislike tracking. Unfortunately, this does seem like the best way to get the data I want.  (I would be happy to provide a kill switch for concerned users.)  Also, it would be nice to have a reliable receiver with analytics, and I don't want to build that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;User satisfaction services.&lt;/strong&gt; UserVoice, UserResponse, GetSatisfaction, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-alternative-to-uservoice-to-get-and-manage-customer-feedback-for-a-website&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etc&lt;/a&gt; are overkill for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question: What do other open source projects do?  I'm particularly interested in the case of a Python package that's used by other tools, but this would apply libraries in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7875" LastEditorUserId="7875" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T21:40:24.840" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T08:01:24.530" Title="What are good ways to get usage data and feedback for open source projects?" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5368" CreationDate="2017-04-12T03:45:42.903" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a caveat. If this is critical, you should consult a lawyer and explain exactly what you're doing - this answer isn't legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're describing is allowed under the Apache license. You will still need to comply with the conditions such as providing attribution and including a copy of the license. The best source of information is the license itself; however, the Apache Foundation does provide a nice summary in its FAQs here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T03:45:42.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5371" CreationDate="2017-04-12T12:34:36.177" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like you've already listed most solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Firefox has analytics (which the user can turn off);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;programming projects use mailing lists, chats, and bug trackers (because developers tend to use these services);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;larger companies use user satisfaction services (not limited to FOSS).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you didn't say was what kind of open source projects you are talking about: the best solution depend on the kind of users you have, and the users depend on the nature of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T12:34:36.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5344" CreationDate="2017-04-14T12:59:13.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do I need to include another copyright notice in addition to the Google one at the bottom of the license? If so, how should I do that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For anything licensed with the Apache 2 license, you must keep all relevant original copyright and attribution notices. You must also keep the NOTICES file, if there is one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no NOTICE file, you don't need to worry about that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can I license the project as a whole under a different license if I'm using the starter kit or do I need to license it under the same license?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the text of the Apache 2 license, you can license your modifications, or your whole project, any way you like, but you can't change the license for the original code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text of the Apache 2 license&lt;/a&gt; for more information, especially section 4 (&quot;Redistribution&quot;).  Note that I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T12:59:13.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5376" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T18:47:13.663" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making an open-source software product (that runs natively on a user's machine) and I'm interested in how often the software is being used. What I'd like is: If the software is used for more than X minutes (with X being really high), ping a server somewhere to increase an anonymous tally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that stuff like this is done all of the time with proprietary products (not to mention web apps), but does doing something like this in an open-source context violate unwritten norms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7834" OwnerDisplayName="George" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-04-15T05:48:42.517" LastActivityDate="2017-04-17T20:49:49.393" Title="Does tracking users violate open source license?" Tags="|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5376" CreationDate="2017-04-15T05:33:17.643" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't violate normal free software licences, and it's not unheard of.  The email client &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washington.edu/alpine/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alpine&lt;/a&gt;, released under Apache v2, on first invocation (and, if memory serves, after major upgrades) displays this message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPECIAL REQUEST: This software was originally created and maintained&#xA;  as a public service by the University of Washington until 2009;&#xA;  updates are made available as a public service of the Alpine&#xA;  community. It is always helpful to have an idea of how many users are&#xA;  using Alpine. Are you willing to be counted as an Alpine user?&#xA;  Pressing Return will send an anonymous (meaning, your real email&#xA;  address will not be revealed) message to the Alpine developers for&#xA;  purposes of tallying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that they are very up-front about what they're doing, and the notification is opt-in - that is, the user must take an affirmative action to permit it.  If you're not very clear about what you're doing and why, or you don't provide an easy opt-out, you may well find that your software gets recompiled without the tracking option in it - which free software is specifically designed to permit - and that the non-treacherous version quickly becomes more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-04-15T05:33:17.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-15T09:49:24.927" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, I am allowed to link a eclipse licensed jar to an LGPL or Apache 2 licensed open source project, without to change the projects license.  Correct me if I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, may I take only a part (classes of one package instead of all) from the EPL jar and pack it together in the targets jar file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only a matter of target projects size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7894" OwnerDisplayName="wumpz" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T05:08:07.297" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T05:08:07.297" Title="Usage of a part of a EPL library in LGPL or Apache 2 project" Tags="|apache-2.0|lgpl|linked-libraries|epl|package|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-16T17:01:58.867" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to be able to sign an application on macOS an organisation needs a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/support/D-U-N-S/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DUNS&lt;/a&gt; number. At the same time not all open source projects are done by a single lead developer and not all open source projects are registered organisations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One open source project, that I am helping out, is facing the requirement to have a DUNS number, since the core developer team can vary, so tying signing authority to a single user can be an issue. The open source project is not part of a registered organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any entities that an open source project can register with to be able to sign on their behalf or any other suggested approaches to this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the need to protect users from rogue developers, but at the same time it would be good to find a solution that avoids legitimate open source projects from being penalised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7898" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T22:37:53.533" Title="DUNS &amp; signing open source application?" Tags="|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5380" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5388" CreationDate="2017-04-17T15:49:32.457" Score="3" ViewCount="1150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know there are already many other questions asked about LGPL requirements, but none of those did match my case  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a free application which uses a LGPL-licensed library (Qt)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I linked statically, do I have to supply the sources with the application? If yes, is a link to a repository (GitHub) enough?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And where should I mention the application is LGPL-licensed? Is a simple &quot;About&quot; window with the default snippet enough? Or do I have absolutely to include a LICENSE file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7920" OwnerDisplayName="westernCiv" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T05:11:11.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T16:31:36.690" Title="LGPL static linking" Tags="|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-17T21:13:26.090" Score="8" ViewCount="954" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Situation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two software packages for which I need to choose a license and I'm not sure if they get along with the PyQt licensing schema (which uses the GNU GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Package A&lt;/strong&gt; uses PyQt in a sense that it subclasses several of its components. It does not provide any means for direct interaction with a user interface based on PyQt. Whoever uses this package would need to write their own applications which in turn can use the classes of this package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Package B&lt;/strong&gt; subclasses components of PyQt as well as provides a script for running a user interface which is based on &lt;code&gt;PyQt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Intention&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't care how Package A is used, that is I want to be as permissive as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I care very much about the source code of Package B and any derived works to be freely available forever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not intend to distribute the packages as commercial applications nor do I want to close their source code. I also do not intend to distribute PyQt itself. Whoever receives a copy of the packages need to install PyQt by themselves in order to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I release Package A under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I release Package B under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Research done so far&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/license-faq&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Riverbank's license FAQ&lt;/a&gt; as well as scanned through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. My best hints were the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, because the program actually links to the library. As such, the terms of the GPL apply to the entire combination. The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OOPLang&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OOPLang&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In an object-oriented language such as Java, if I use a class that is GPL'ed without modifying, and subclass it, in what way does the GPL affect the larger program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Subclassing is creating a derivative work. Therefore, the terms of the GPL affect the whole program where you create a subclass of a GPL'ed class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two pointers are from the GPL FAQ and sound like I have to license my packages under GPL itself. That would exclude the possibility for the BSD license for Package A but in case of Package B I'm still not certain as the Affero GPL also comes from the GPL family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/235846&quot;&gt;This answer at softwareengineering.stackexchange&lt;/a&gt; mentions that if you don't distribute PyQt itself but only source code which uses it then there are other licensing options. However I couldn't find the mentioned &lt;code&gt;GPL_EXCEPTION.TXT&lt;/code&gt; in the source code of my PyQt version (which is &lt;code&gt;PyQt4_gpl_x11-4.12&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T07:25:31.817" Title="Under what licenses can I release open source software that uses PyQt?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|gpl-3|bsd|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5386" CreationDate="2017-04-17T22:00:15.673" Score="6" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5395/does-the-agpl-help-to-protect-against-closed-source-if-the-application-is-run-on&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt; of which this question is by no means a duplicate. It refers to a related but separate scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'*m about to release an application and yet need to choose a license for it. I care very much about the source code of the application and any derived work to be freely available forever. The GNU GPL family seems to provide good options. Now the application is special in a sense that the users don't need to interact with it directly but only need to provide some input and they receive some output in return (as it is the case for an image converter for example). If someone now modifies the application, hosts it on a remote server and provides a user interface for receiving input and providing output then I want to require them to publish their source code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This summary&lt;/a&gt; about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt; sounds like it could help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Users who interact with the software via network are given the right to receive a copy of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However while scanning through the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; if found the following pointer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In AGPLv3, what counts as “interacting with [the software] remotely through a computer network?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If the program is expressly designed to accept user requests and send responses over a network, then it meets these criteria. Common examples of programs that would fall into this category include web and mail servers, interactive web-based applications, and servers for games that are played online.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If a program is not expressly designed to interact with a user through a network, but is being run in an environment where it happens to do so, then it does not fall into this category. For example, an application is not required to provide source merely because the user is running it over SSH, or a remote X session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This really sounds like the opposite. My program is not designed to be operated over a network but this can be easily done by developing a corresponding user interface which feeds the input to the program via its standard interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the actual benefit of the  AGPL for my application would be. Can anybody clarify on this topic and explain whether the GNU Affero GPL would require someone, who hosts the application on a remote server and provides a separate user interface for input/output, to publish the source code of the (modified) application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastEditorUserId="7904" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T21:47:40.430" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T21:47:40.430" Title="Does the GNU Affero GPL help to protect against closed source if the application is run on a remote server?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5384" CreationDate="2017-04-18T06:24:02.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say you want &quot;&lt;em&gt;the source code of the application and any derived work to be freely available forever&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Firstly, thank you; good for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you're considering using the AGPL.  You note that your &quot;&lt;em&gt;program is not designed to be operated over a network&lt;/em&gt;&quot; but also caution that &quot;&lt;em&gt;this can be easily done&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL3 s13 provides that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while s5c provides that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program [...] provided that you also meet all of these conditions&#xA;  [...]&#xA;  You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as I read it, if you choose the AGPL3 for your program, then because it currently cannot be interacted with over a network s13 is ineffective, and for practical purposes users may use it as though it were under straight GPLv3.  &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt; if someone else were to receive a copy of your source and turn it into a program that &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; support such interaction, then they would have to continue to license it under AGPL3 (s5c), and this would provide network users of that modified version the right to receive copies of the source (s13) which would also be licensed under AGPL3 (s5c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is what you want, save that once copyright protection expires in whatever jurisdiction a future user is located, the copyleft protections go with it; at that point the work enters the public domain in that jurisdiction and you can no longer require people there to behave in a certain way in order to copy/use/modify/convey it.  You'll be long dead by then, though, so that's probably OK.  IANAL/IANYL, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T06:24:02.483" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T14:52:20.637" Score="-1" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just curious to know, why are the programs shotwell and VLC media player released under LGPL? Maybe because that they are written just not for Linux, but for other proprietary operating systems too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which opens new questions to me: Can I assume, that any software that is due to be released for windows should be LGPLed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I am not able to understand the LGPL quite correctly - especially this &#xA;line (from Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the latter allows the work to be linked with (in the case of a library, &quot;used by&quot;) a non-(L)GPLed program, regardless of whether it is free software or proprietary software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of the above is: A proprietary software can only use LGPL programs/ libraries and not GPL programs/libraries. But then, how can Microsoft include bash (GPL) in their release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7914" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T18:11:42.490" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T18:11:42.490" Title="LGPL license for shotwell, VLC media player" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5380" CreationDate="2017-04-18T16:31:36.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Assuming I linked statically, do I have to supply the sources with the application? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If yes, is a link to a repository (GitHub) enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be if this is the LGPL 3 and the link is provided at the same time as the the application is downloaded and the links point to the exact version of the corresponding source code for your app and QT and that it is under your control. Otherwise it may not be enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And where should I mention the application is LGPL-licensed? Is a simple &quot;About&quot; window with the default snippet enough?  Or do I have absolutely to include a LICENSE file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have to include the license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T16:31:36.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-18T21:28:39.970" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little context for this question: I'm building an alternative stock exchange (ATS) named &quot;Ritchie&quot;. It is based on &quot;The Open Source Way,&quot; and I'm trying to decide on the proper license.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ritchiestockexchange.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ritchiestockexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exchange is designed for algorithmic trading and exposes an API. Traders will execute buy and sell orders through said API using proprietary algorithms--and this is where the licensing question comes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish the code under the most permissive license possible. The actual exchange code can be freely downloaded off of GitHub, and those who wish may compile the code set up their own exchange, but there is a real concern for intellectual property regarding client algorithms. As I understand it, some licenses are &quot;viral.&quot; Any code using or including code published under a viral license must also be made public and open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a viable option. If someone invests the time and cost to write a profitable quantitative algorithm, they cannot be expected to make their code public. For this reason, I have published under the LGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you agree that this is this the best option? The &quot;Limited&quot; part of the LGPL permits traders to retain ownership of their algos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7915" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T16:02:03.100" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T16:02:03.100" Title="Proper License for Ritchie Stock Exchange, Proprietary Algorithms, and Algorithmic Trading?" Tags="|gpl|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5389" CreationDate="2017-04-19T03:53:03.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer depends on your objective. The LGPL is indeed less restrictive than the GPL; however, it is still a technical license, can be ambiguous and hard to apply, and imposes some significant obligations. Even the LGPL is 'viral' in certain situations. There are plenty of attorneys who are nervous about approving LGPL code in proprietary applications. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your goal is really to use &quot;the most permissive license possible,&quot; I'd recommend you use the MIT license, BSD license, or Apache 2.0. These are more permissive than the LGPL, and most lawyers and community members with some familiarity with open source licensing recognize them as such.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T03:53:03.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5393" CreationDate="2017-04-19T11:33:47.057" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a piece of software that will be available under AGPL license. It is a webpage intended to be used by different fandoms to track interviews with their favorite author/creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite certain that the content handled by the software (pictures from meetings, recorded interviews etc.) is not &quot;infected&quot; by the websites AGPL license and different copyrights apply to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd like to know, if someone wants to use a background image on this webpage, let's say a painting he or she made, would this image become AGPL licensed too? If so, is there a way to prevent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would giving the webpage administrator a way to upload images to be used as backgrounds create enough separation from the software, that the license wouldn't cover those backgrounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what I want to ask, is how to define a safe border to stop AGPL propagation over pieces of a website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7919" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T14:12:44.813" Title="Having a copyright protected image on AGPL website" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5389" CreationDate="2017-04-19T14:06:54.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What kind of API is it? If this is an API over a network (clients execute their trading algorithms on their own machines and communicate with your server), then there is no way copyleft licenses (also improperly named &quot;viral&quot; licenses) can affect the proprietary trading algorithms. In this case, you can even consider using a strong license such as AGPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case when your clients wouldn't be concerned by the copyleft aspect of your license, would be if they execute your software with some of their code on their own machines and do not re-distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the choice of the license should really depend on what you want people to be able to do with your code. If the answer is &quot;anything&quot; then, a more permissive license such as MIT should be preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T14:06:54.207" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5391" CreationDate="2017-04-19T14:12:44.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone changed the background image on the webpage, it would be pretty likely that a court would consider this to be separate enough from the AGPL software so that the background image is not concerned by the license. But where is the frontier then? What if I start tweaking other bits of CSS? In the end, this shows that this is a blurry issue (where does &quot;making a derivative work&quot; start?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution that you are proposing is indeed the best one. As soon as you can make it clear that the background image is to be considered as data, it won't (for sure) be affected by the license of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T14:12:44.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T21:44:59.810" Score="12" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5384/does-the-gnu-affero-gpl-help-to-protect-against-closed-source-if-the-application&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt; of which this question is by no means a duplicate. It refers to a related but separate scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long question title, I'll just go with an example. Suppose I developed an image converter program. It takes the filename of an image as input and produces the converted image as output. Now someone modifies my program (by adding functionality to it for example). Instead of distributing the modified version they host a file upload service on a remote server and make this upload service available to the public. What happens on the server is that each uploaded image gets passed as an input to the modified version of my program and the converted image is provided to the user as a download via a corresponding URI. The point here is that while my program has been modified, all (direct) user interaction goes through a &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; (upload) service. This service then interacts with my program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand the sole purpose why users interact with that separate service is to use the functionality of my modified program which also is producing all output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is does the GNU Affero GPL require them to make the source code of the modified program publicly available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 13 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.de.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the AGPL&lt;/a&gt; states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In AGPLv3, what counts as “interacting with [the software] remotely through a computer network?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If the program is expressly designed to accept user requests and send responses over a network, then it meets these criteria. Common examples of programs that would fall into this category include web and mail servers, interactive web-based applications, and servers for games that are played online.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If a program is not expressly designed to interact with a user through a network, but is being run in an environment where it happens to do so, then it does not fall into this category. For example, an application is not required to provide source merely because the user is running it over SSH, or a remote X session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like the AGPL would not require to publish the source code in this case. However I also can't believe that this scenario is considered private use of the program. Thus I would like to clarify this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you believe that the AGPL doesn't help here I would be happy to learn about alternatives which might be effective for this scenario instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T08:41:04.953" Title="Does the AGPL help to protect against closed source if the application is run on a remote server and proxied by a separate service?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyright|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5398" CreationDate="2017-04-19T22:19:23.760" Score="4" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a very nice quote by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_V%C3%A1zquez-Figueroa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa&lt;/a&gt; (Spanish writer and inventor) which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;El éxito o el fracaso de un invento no depende de a quien beneficia,&#xA;  sino de a quien perjudica.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alberto_V%C3%A1zquez-Figueroa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which translated into English means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The success or failure of an invention does not depend on who&#xA;  benefits, but on whom it harms.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly agree with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that somewhere in the world there is a company called Acme. This company invests resources to develop and maintain a tool A that offers a certain functionality X. This tool is proprietary, and brings revenue to the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine that a developer or a group of developers decide to build a tool B that offers the same functionality X. They decide to release this tool as open source or free software, so that everybody could benefit from it and be more productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/435/6602&quot;&gt;stealing intellectual property&lt;/a&gt; or anything illegal/malicious, but the total opposite.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this new scenario, any individual would be able to use tool B for free instead of paying for tool A. Even worse, other companies that are in direct competition with Acme could use tool B in their workflow at zero cost, and even modify the source code to include new functionality and resell it as their own product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the outcome for Acme? Would building an open source alternative like tool B put Acme at risk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this ever happened in the real world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6602" LastEditorUserId="6602" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T12:34:35.660" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T12:34:35.660" Title="Can an open source/free alternative put a company at risk? Has this ever happened?" Tags="|derivative-works|proprietary-code|monetization|history|philosophy|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2017-04-20T04:30:55.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a software simply being open source doesn't destroy proprietary softwares. It's a matter of quality and​ getting productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an open source alternative software can offer more useful features, then most organizations would prefer it instead of proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T04:30:55.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5396" CreationDate="2017-04-20T07:19:56.677" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A company would be &quot;put in risk&quot; if it's entire offering is compromised, and it can't adapt to a changing market. This has less to do with the existence of open source alternatives to a product and more with poor management.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could make the argument, though, that revenue loss due to open source alternatives happens all the times. Every time someone installs Linux on their home computer, that's a sale that Microsoft (or Apple) didn't make. Every time someone uses Open Office or Libre Office, that's a sale Microsoft didn't make. Every time someone chooses PostreSQL or MariaDB as their RDBMS, that's a sale that Oracle (or Microsoft) didn't make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T11:53:13.980" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T11:53:13.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T09:56:32.593" Score="1" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to put a BSD license in some code. I use part of code that doesn't have license information but it belongs to other people who I don't know. It was given to my from other privates but the code it self doesn't have a copyrigth claim. I want to put BSD license to my part of the work. How can I put my BSD license? Is the 2 terms bsd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7928" LastEditorUserId="7928" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T12:23:20.773" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T14:37:58.860" Title="Derivative work BSD license when not known original work" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5399" CreationDate="2017-04-20T12:38:18.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that this is the answer but you can't just put your code under BSD license (or whatever license for that matter, be it open source or proprietary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that you got this code from a third party who wasn't the author and the original author licensed no rights to you on this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually considered OK to run the code for private use as long as you got the code lawfully (which could be false if the third party did not get it lawfully, or did not have permission to distribute it). Private modification should also be OK as long as you do not distribute the resulting work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for distributing further a work that is clearly a derivative of an original work, you really need permission from the original copyright owner (even if it's only your modifications that you want to license under BSD-2). Your only solution at that point would be to reach out to the third party you got the code from and ask them who the original copyright owner was, or if they have a license to redistribute it further from them. If you can talk to the copyright owner, then you can ask them permission to release your derivative under BSD-2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the copyright owner is not necessarily an individual, nor the original developer. E.g. if the third party was the employer of the person who developed the code, then it maybe that the third party (or its company) is the copyright owner and you could ask them permission directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T12:38:18.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5399" CreationDate="2017-04-20T14:37:58.860" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not know the license of the original code. And &lt;strong&gt;no license&lt;/strong&gt; means .... &lt;strong&gt;no license&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no such thing as an implied license as far as I know. Therefore you cannot relicense something since you are not licensed in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T14:37:58.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T17:45:14.913" Score="5" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/965/138&quot;&gt;Can I leave out parts of a CC BY-ND licensed work when distributing it?&lt;/a&gt;, it’s not allowed to distribute only parts of a work licensed under CC BY-ND &lt;strong&gt;3.0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In CC BY-ND &lt;strong&gt;4.0&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode#s2a1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it says&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;em&gt;License grant&lt;/em&gt; (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a […] license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; […]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this little addition (which doesn’t seem to exist in 3.0) really mean that distribution of parts is allowed in 4.0? Or is there some catch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, is there evidence why they changed something &quot;serious&quot; like this for 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T23:57:25.963" Title="Does CC BY-ND 4.0 allow distribution of parts?" Tags="|distribution|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5405" CreationDate="2017-04-20T18:41:28.603" Score="-2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on a project related to georeferenced analysis of entomological and epidemiological data of Dengue fever. The project aims to help a public institution and it's supposed to be completely free because they don't want to incur in extra expenses yet. I'm sorry if it feels as if I'm lacking effort, I'm just not confident enough I understand these licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flask 1.2 (BSD)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rpy2 (GPLv2+)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pandas (BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Numpy (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.numpy.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.numpy.org/license.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Docker (Apache License 2.0) (The same as above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AngularJS 1.5 (MIT License)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bootstrap (MIT License)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MongoDB 3.2 (GNU AGPL v3.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R 3.2.2 (GPL-2 | GPL-3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7930" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T14:44:08.633" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T07:07:07.310" Title="Which of these licenses are free for an enterprise?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T18:46:41.080" Score="3" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been wondering about the copyright issues faced by software named after people or brands. As a Python developer, I wonder if there was any issue in Guido Van Rossum naming Python after the Monty Python Flying Circus group? Or the Django developers naming their software after Django Reinhardt? I was reading about the trademark usage requirements on the Python Software Foundation page:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They state that using Python for any software that is based on the programming language is acceptable if it is free and open source. For commercial uses, you might have to ask permission if the application is not directly linked to the programming language. Also, they would not like the name Python associated with something unrelated to Python to avoid confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To name a software Python or Django might be acceptable as these are just names but they state openly that the software is named after the person or group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7932" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T16:29:01.833" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T16:29:01.833" Title="Naming a software after a person or a brand" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5403" CreationDate="2017-04-21T06:00:54.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You ask only about &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the software; that is, you don't intend to &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; it.  Your primary concern is &lt;em&gt;cost&lt;/em&gt;.  That said, BSD, Apache, and MIT licensed software should be fine for you and your end-user to use without payment or any other (significant) obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL2/3 are both trickier, because you are not the intended end-user of the software.  When you convey the software to the end user, you will incur the obligation to provide them with sources.  They, provided they do not convey it outside their organisation, will incur no further obligation.  No one should incur cost, save the costs associated with providing sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL is trickier still.  Although no payment is required in order to use it, the source obligation of GPL applies to the conveyance from you to the organisation.  Furthermore, if your use includes a web service which can interact with users, the operator of the service will incur the obligation to create a mechanism by which users can get copies of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Numpy I am not going to consider.  It is now well-understood in the community that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;crayon licenses&lt;/a&gt; are a bad idea, not least because they require much more detailed study to properly understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: as Bart points out below, and I am grateful to him for so doing, the Numpy licence is 3-clause BSD with the serial numbers filed off, as it were.  So you should be fine on that score, too.  But the Numpy developers still deserve a slap for &lt;em&gt;not simply using 3-clause BSD&lt;/em&gt; - licence proliferation is still a bad thing, even if they're all the same licence with lots of different names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ever, IANAL/IANYL.  Philip Kendall is right that lawyers should be consulted if there is doubt; you might not have any, but the public institution should, and it needs to properly understand its obligations in order that it may fulfil them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T07:07:07.310" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T07:07:07.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5402" CreationDate="2017-04-21T19:18:41.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the license still says you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;may... not Share[] Adapted Material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as your isolated part is Adapted Material of the original, it is forbidden to share. If your isolated part is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Adapted Material, then it is allowed to be shared. Looking at one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/a/ad/BY-ND_%28compare_d4v1_and_d4v2%29.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;final drafts of CC BY-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt; (which is not legally binding, but may help understand intent), we see the phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Licensor hereby grants You a [...] license to [...] reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, &lt;strong&gt;in whole or in part&lt;/strong&gt;, including for commercial purposes, &lt;strong&gt;provided You do not produce Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of this late draft is obviously that partial reproductions are allowed, but only if they are themselves not Adapted Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is a verbatim except from a work Adapted Material, or not? The definition of Adapted Material isn't perfectly clear on this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think it really matters: if your isolated part is Adapted Material after all, then it would not have been allowed under version 3.0. If it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Adapted Material, then it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have been allowed under version 3.0. In light of this, regardless of the correct way to understand extracted parts on an ND work, it seems that there are no practical differences between 3.0 and 4.0 on this point, unless these is some subtle change in how 3.0 and 4.0 define adapted works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal mechanics of this would probably be that the right to prepare derivative works and the right to reproduce the work verbatim are separate rights. In some jurisdictions, in some circumstances, reproducing an excerpt doesn't satisfy the legal definition of a derivative work, and so the right to prepare a derivative isn't needed; instead, only the right to reproduce the work is in play, which CC BY-ND does grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T23:57:25.963" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T23:57:25.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-22T19:04:32.543" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release come kind of computation engine as an open source project. For the whole source and usage, I am fine with the content of the GPL but what I want to make sure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There should be a restriction for: Each computation is allowed on a maximum of 4 cpu’s / threads / parallel processes at the time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important: Nobody except us may have the right to extend or remove or revoke this restriction without our explicit agreement and confirmation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to use a multi license for that project, so that anybody can get in touch with us to ask for a higher license to change the restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am aware of that this kind of restriction is just limited in a legally respect and not technically.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make sure, if someone would like to run a paid service or whatever under the restriction just use 1 CPU - they are allowed - this is not something I am interested to prevent. I just want be safe when someone is doing a real business out from this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked via mail at FSF to check wether it is possible to handle this restriction via Chapter 7 of the (A)GPL. The answer was given by a volunteer: &lt;strong&gt;Section 7 lists all of the A/GPL-compatible further terms. The restriction you propose would be incompatible, and would have the effect of making the software nonfree and proprietary.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7944" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-05-11T05:12:59.550" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T05:12:59.550" Title="Open Source (A)GPL(2|3) but limit resources or business for others without a paid license" Tags="|gpl|commercial|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-04-23T01:02:20.387" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5407" CreationDate="2017-04-22T20:55:43.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. No bona-fide FLOSS license including and in particular the AGPL and GPL have a usage restriction, or can accommodate a restriction on usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T20:55:43.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5416" CreationDate="2017-04-23T10:47:57.060" Score="-2" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to sell a custom piece of Hardware with my own company's name with an Ubuntu Server 16.0.4 LTS on it. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to run on this server an Apache 2.0 licensed or AGPLv3 licensed software and I want to customize the GUI of that software and change the logo of the software. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to give two years warranty on that hardware. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7948" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T16:53:54.177" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T22:20:31.813" Title="Use Apache 2.0 license or AGPLv3 licensed Software" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|hardware|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T17:52:44.710" Score="-1" ViewCount="865" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have non-commercial Qt license, but I need a static compilation option because as I know, my program needs many DLL files and I want to have the possibility of running my program on another machine without problems with unfound DLLs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is: can I change my non-commercial Qt license in an existing Qt Project to LGPL or GPL? And then will I have static compilation option, without any DLL needs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if so, then what I must do to legally use Qt in that license? I know that I have to give code modification possibility to other people, so can I simply upload my project to Github?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7955" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T19:01:57.590" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T19:01:57.590" Title="Can I change my Qt project license?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5411" CreationDate="2017-04-24T22:11:20.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want static compilation, but you don't want to release the source to your program, then it looks like you must purchase the commercial license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/licensing-comparison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/licensing-comparison/)&lt;/a&gt; I am not a lawyer, but I imagine Qt probably has some guidelines on if/how you can migrate from Qt free to Qt commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to stick with the free license and use static linking, then you will have to release the source for both Qt and the program that you have developed. How you deploy your program determines your options for distributing the source code. For example, if you deploy your program via some website, it is probably acceptable to add a hyperlink to the source on the same webpage that you can download the compiled program. If you are delivering the program inside of some embedded device, then you should probably either (1) Show the required [L]GPL notifications (show notification on paper or electronically) and give them the opportunity to request the source via some physical medium in the mail (e.g. USB drive, DVD, CD, etc) or (2) Ship a copy of the source along with the embedded device (e.g. ship a CD containing the required source)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T22:11:20.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T02:54:34.523" Score="-5" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a software using a game engine that can cross compile the result for different targets (HTML, Android, IOS). I'm planning to release the software under an open source licence. Eg. modified version of GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can I modify the licence in a way to it prohibits use/compilation/publication/distribution on IOS devices or devices made by the Apple company?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to prevent that someone grabs my open source licence and uploads it to the Apple store (for free or for charge) or makes it otherwise available to Apple devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning for this requirement is quite complex and shall not be discussed here. But the essential goal is to provide less software and so less customer satisfaction to the customer base of the excluded hardware or OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7956" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T16:06:04.120" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T10:14:59.193" Title="How can I exclude a target platform from an open source licence?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|gpl-3|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2017-04-25T06:27:15.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can’t. A license that allows this restriction can’t be a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, as far as the use of the software is concerned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would violate &amp;quot;freedom 0&amp;quot; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;em&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/em&gt;, see the FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#restrict&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both definitions also don’t allow such a restriction when distributing the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That doesn’t necessarily mean that others are allowed to distribute your software specifically in Apple’s app store; for possible problems with this platform, see our tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/apple-app-store&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;apple-app-store&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;apple-app-store&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T06:27:15.683" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5387" CreationDate="2017-04-25T16:31:22.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just curious to know, why are the programs shotwell and vlc media player released under LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software author has the right to choose which license they want to use. It's possible VLC uses other open source software components/libraries which may limit the number of software licenses they can use. For example, if VLC loads another GPL library, then it would have to have a GPL-compatible license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which opens new questions to me: Can I assume, that any software that is due to be released for windows should be LGPLed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You cannot assume all Windows software is LGPL. You will have to check on a program by program basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL vs LGPL - You can load LGPL libraries at runtime (dynamic linking) into proprietary programs. You cannot load GPL libraries into a proprietary/closed source program at runtime. You cannot statically link (e.g. compile directly into your program) a GPL or LGPL library into a closed source program. The difference is the LGPL allows you to dynamically link against a library without affecting the license of the program that is doing the linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Forgot to answer the last question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can microsoft include bash ( GPL ) in their release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think Microsoft uses bash with it's proprietary operating system. Yes, it ships it for users, but Windows doesn't need it to run. Essentially, it's there if you want to use it, but the Windows OS can function fine without it. Windows does not link against it statically or dynamically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T16:38:41.967" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T16:38:41.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5410" CreationDate="2017-04-25T22:20:31.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to sell a custom piece of Hardware with my own company's name with an Ubuntu Server 16.0.4 LTS on it. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general yes, but Ubuntu® has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific branding guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and in some case you may need some additional OEM licensing agreement from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to run on this server an Apache 2.0 licensed or AGPLv3 licensed software and I want to customize the GUI of that software and change the logo of the software. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As MadHatter mentioned in a comment, yes this is allowed &quot; provided you honour the obligations that the licences of the software involved place upon you.&quot; This is even IMHO one of the tenets of FLOSS: having access to the source code and being able to modify software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have of meet the license requirements and AGPL and Apache are quite different. In the case of AGPL-licensed, this may be considered a modification and this has specific implications in terms of your obligations and which conditions of the license are triggered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to give two years warranty on that hardware. Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The warranty you provide on hardware is your problem and your choice and has nothing to do with the software. You may also provide warranty on the software, but there since mots FLOSS-licensed code disclaims all warranties, you would have to bear the warranty burden alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i have no clue at all &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's OK... there are excellent resources on this QA site to help you! I would also strongly suggest that once you are familiar with the gist of open source licensing you contact a lawyer to help you make the right choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T22:20:31.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5383" CreationDate="2017-04-26T08:29:58.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doing further research lead me to the following sources which I consider relevant for answering the questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Package A&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/archives/3.3/faq.html#5-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt FAQ&lt;/a&gt; covers the following aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I make software with the Qt Open Source Edition and release it under the GNU GPL, BSD, or Artistic license?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Yes. The GNU GPL, GPL-compatible licenses, or any other approved open source license will do. The FSF.org and OpenSource.org web sites list approved software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me this reads as it was possible to release Package A under the BSD license. On the other hand the BSD doesn't require open source so if further derivative works are conveyed then they don't contain a corresponding clause which is however required by PyQt's license; this seems like a contradiction to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Package B&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.de.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt; of the AGPL states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means it is possible to release package B under the AGPL however the PyQt part will remain governed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T08:29:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5395" CreationDate="2017-04-26T08:41:04.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doing further research I realized that the AGPL even covers this topic in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Why the Affero GPL&quot;&lt;/a&gt; under the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] The GNU Affero GPL does not address the problem of Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  SaaSS means that users use someone else's web server to do their own computing. This requires them to send their data to the server, which does their computing for them and sends the results back to them. [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We don't see any sensible way to address the SaaSS problem with license conditions on particular programs. Even to write a legal condition to distinguish between SaaSS use and non-SaaSS use would be a challenge, and if we had that, we don't see anything that the program's license might require in the SaaSS case that would correct the inherent wrong of SaaSS. Thus, our solution to the problem of SaaSS is simple: refuse to use services that are SaaSS.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If a program is meant specifically and only for SaaSS, you shouldn't write it. But many programs are useful for a variety of kinds of services, including some that are SaaSS and some that are not. It's useful to write and release these programs so people can set up non-SaaSS services with them, and good to release them under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like there is no licensing option that helps protecting against this case but the FSF recommends releasing software which is eligible for usage as a remote &lt;em&gt;service&lt;/em&gt; under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T08:41:04.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T09:25:52.450" Score="1" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make DLLs of my code (not the source) publicly available for any type of usage, but the code depends on a GPL-licensed DLL and a 3-clause BSD licensed DLL. What license should I use? And is this even allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T15:44:01.913" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T19:51:06.863" Title="GPL and 3-clause BSD together" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|bsd|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5419" CreationDate="2017-04-26T14:43:51.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you will be loading the GPL-licensed DLL from your code? If that is the case, it is considered dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I believe you will have to use a license that satisfies all of the GPL requirements. For example, if the DLL is GPLv2, and you are dynamically linking with this DLL, you should probably also license your code under GPLv2. If the DLL is GPLv2+ (GPLv2 or any later version), you could pick GPLv2 or GPLv3 for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license is more permissive, so the BSD DLL doesn't play as much of a factor as the GPL-licensed DLL in deciding which license you can choose for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is this even allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the BSD 3-clause license is compatible with the GPL. This means you are allowed to use both DLLs that you mentioned in the same program, so yes, that is allowed. You could not load a proprietary DLL from this same program because it is not license-compatible with the GPL DLL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:43:51.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5423" CreationDate="2017-04-26T17:41:06.550" Score="6" ViewCount="3297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a library that is under the MIT license. I never used a library that I needed to include the license before, so I have no idea where to add them. I read that I should add them in my file, but the thing is my project is a site constituting of php files, is there a certain file that I need to add the license to or all the files? Also what should I add? The project came with a LICENSE.txt file and contains text.&#xA;The project I am using is &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsmodal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;jsModal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7966" LastEditorUserId="7966" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T17:52:59.780" LastActivityDate="2021-11-12T18:09:17.467" Title="Using an MIT licensed library in my project" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5422" CreationDate="2017-04-26T18:57:58.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but here are my recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main requirement of the MIT license can be found on the  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsmodal.com/license.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;jsModal license page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is a website, you should state that you are using jsModal that it is licensed under the MIT license. You need to make the entire text of the  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jsmodal.com/license.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;jsModal license page&lt;/a&gt; (including the copyright information) available directly on your site. I do &lt;b&gt;NOT&lt;/b&gt; think a simple hyperlink the the jsModal page is sufficient. The text must be a part of your web site.&#xA;If the web site is the only place you are using jsModal, you do not need to add any licensing information to any other files. A single page stating you are using jsModal with the entire text of the MIT license is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;You should make sure that this license/copyright information is visible to the end user. Typical users won't look at your code comments, so code comments by themselves are not sufficient. You only need a single page for this license &amp;amp; copyright information. You don't need to add it to every page of your website. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T20:05:28.037" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T20:05:28.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-27T19:01:42.657" Score="20" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob develops patches for Linux. Because Linux is licensed under the GPLv2, these patches are also licensed under GPLv2. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob distributes these patches only to people who have a contract with him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob threatens: &lt;em&gt;If you distribute the patches, I won’t renew your contract.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So users have the right (thanks to GPLv2) to distribute the patches, but they might refrain from doing so, because they would face disadvantages (i.e., not getting updates or new patches anymore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there anything in the GPLv2 that would prevent Bob from threatening this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Background: &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/06/msg00020.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;RMS Responded - GRsecurity is preventing others from employing their rights under version 2 the GPL to redistribute&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Stallman thinks this might be a violation, but I’m not sure if he read the full details, or if he only answered the subject line, which says &quot;preventing&quot;, which doesn’t seem to be accurate.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T18:19:55.887" Title="Threatening with non-renewal of contract when users distribute the GPLv2-licensed software" Tags="|distribution|gpl-2|contracts|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2017-04-27T22:00:29.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of old articles from lwn.net talking about RedHat and Sveasoft doing the same sort of think as GRsecurity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/432012/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RedHat trading support for GPL rights&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/178550/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sveasoft and GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To some, it looks very much like Sveasoft is attempting to add restrictions to the GPL-licensed software it uses for its products. It is, in essence, imposing a penalty on anyone who redistributes its products. In the end, however, challenges to this model have not gotten far, and the Free Software Foundation has stated that Sveasoft is in compliance with the GPL - at least, with regard to its support agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T22:00:29.933" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2017-04-28T05:59:08.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but this looks like an open-and-shut case to me.  GPL2s6 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. &lt;strong&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and further notes in s5 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear to me that the threat of the loss of the general ability to enter into a particular contract constitutes a restriction, at least unless Bob has already been very choosy indeed about who's allowed to enter into one of these contracts.  If GRSecurity decide to impose restrictions on the redistribution of code they received under GPL2 and then modified, then I can't see how they retain their right to make and distribute modified versions thereof going forwards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sveasoft link in airfishey's answer isn't very helpful, because following it back to see what the FSF actually said links to a generic &quot;buy Sveasoft stuff&quot; page that makes no mention of the issue.  The internet archive's Wayback machine has &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20040803155858/http://www.sveasoft.com/modules/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2823&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no meaningful record&lt;/a&gt; of the content, and everyone else I can find who refers to it links back to Sveasoft.  In the LWN article comments &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/178692/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;contemporaneous doubt is expressed&lt;/a&gt; as to whether the FSF were blessing what Sveasoft apparently claimed they were blessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RedHat case is even murkier, since they &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; distributing sources without restriction on redistribution.  It was only sources expressed in a particular form that attracted a restriction (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/432012/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;the broken-out patches that used to come with the kernel source RPMs are evidently being made available to Red Hat customers, but only if they don't distribute them further on pain of losing support going forward&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;).  The GPL is pretty clear that people are entitled to unencumbered sources, but less prescriptive about how they should be formatted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at least to me, it's pretty clear that in the scenario above, Bob has just forfeited his right to distribute the Linux kernel, modified or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T05:59:08.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T14:02:48.550" Score="6" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a program that uses some public domain code (or a permissive license) from netlib.org under the LGPL license. Since the licenses (or lack of it) are compatible, there should be no problem distributing the bundle in source or binary form, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I should add a copyright and license header to every source file. For those files I took from netlib.org, I cannot add a copyright (not on my name, for sure, and sometimes I don't know the original author or I can't add a copyright to a file that has none), but is it OK to add the license header (basically, &quot;This file is part of Foo. Foo can be distributed under the terms of the LGPL&quot;)? I find that at least morally I should add a further notice saying &quot;This file comes from netlib.org and is public domain/whatever&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is that I shouldn't add the header in such a file, would it change if I merge two files, one written by me, one public domain, and add the header to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5933" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T15:46:57.497" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:46:57.497" Title="Using public domain code in an LGPL program" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1443" CreationDate="2017-04-29T04:23:22.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, a court will not enjoin a violator of terms of the GPL or other copyleft license to disclose proprietary source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, as Free Radical pointed out, injunctive relief is not a remedy for breach of contract. So a court will not enjoin a disclosure of proprietary source code for violating the terms of an agreement (assuming the license is interpreted as creating contractual obligations). The remedy under contract law will be limited to damages only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, regarding copyright law, and as Free Radical points out, an injunction &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a remedy available for copyright infringement. However, where Free Radical gets it wrong is that the injunctions available are limited to preventing further infringement. That's the case at least according to U.S. law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Any court having jurisdiction . . . may . . . grant temporary and final injunctions on such terms as it may deem reasonable &lt;em&gt;to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; 17 U.S.C. § 502(a). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the injunction available under copyright law will be limited to preventing or restraining infringement. The company in violation will be prevented from shipping any product that incorporates the copyrighted open source code, it may have to pay damages and attorneys' fees, and it will incur the costs of reforming its product, but it won't be forced to disclose its proprietary code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the German case that Free Radical cited, &lt;em&gt;Welte v. Sitecom Deutschland GmbH&lt;/em&gt;, it appears that the court granted an injunction barring the defendant from continuing to infringe the plaintiff's copyright, but did not order it to disclose its proprietary code. (Unless I'm mistaken about the facts. I'm just going by summaries found online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7984" LastEditorUserId="7984" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T04:30:40.813" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T04:30:40.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-29T11:48:17.147" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed a suite of tools, and put it on GitHub under AGPL license.&#xA;All gravitate around a new/original file format which is key to the functionality of the tools, and is documented in the included README.md.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the file format automatically under the AGPL license, or I need to add some specific wording?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what I would want is: if some dev/company want to make use the file format in a closed source commercial project/product, we should reach some kind of agreement with a different licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible/does it makes sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7989" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T00:24:24.617" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T08:26:49.410" Title="Does AGPL cover a new/original file format too?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5432" CreationDate="2017-04-30T08:26:49.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that -entirely hypothetically and for the sake of a practical example- we are talking about a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MarcoPon/SeqBox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;single file container/archive that can be reconstructed even after total loss of file system structures&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; .... This code is licensed under the AGPL and written in Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what I would want is: if some dev/company want to make use the file format in a closed source commercial project/product, we should reach some kind of agreement with a different licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or said in another way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone take this idea and reimplement it for instance in Ruby and would this implementation be subject to the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The quick answer is that anyone can likely reimplement this file format under any license they like&lt;/strong&gt;, assuming no code is borrowed from the original implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your code and the specification for this file format are AGPL-licensed alright... but nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that the idea of a novel file format is not in the realm of copyright protection but instead this is in the realm of patent protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore only thing that might grant you some monopoly on this idea is a patent. Copyright only grants you a monopoly on the expression in a &amp;quot;fixed medium&amp;quot;, e.g. on the source code and/or binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some supporting references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blplaw.com/expert-legal-insights/articles/copyright-protect-data-file-formats&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generally speaking&lt;/a&gt;, copyright protects the expression of an idea but it does not protect the underlying idea itself. Applying that rationale to computer programs, copyright in computer programs typically does not extend to the functionality, operational interfaces or the programming language of the program, although it can protect the source code, object code and preparatory design materials of the program. Accordingly, developing and using a program that has the same or similar functionality and operational interfaces of another computer program would not of itself usually amount to copyright infringement, but copying the underlying source (or object) code would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/1166/5657&quot;&gt;For the European arena&lt;/a&gt;, there is recent authority in SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Limited that the format of a program's data files are not protected by copyright when reverse engineered without the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a graphics &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fileformat.info/mirror/egff/ch08_09.htm#CH08-DMYID.8.3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;file be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A graphics file itself cannot normally be copyrighted under United States copyright laws (although the rulings of some judges may disagree). The specification of a format and the &amp;quot;contents&amp;quot; of a graphics file, however, are subject to copyright. In other words, your secret barbecue sauce, or its recipe, can win a blue ribbon at the county fair but not the jar you put the sauce in, or the paper you wrote the recipe on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T08:26:49.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2017-04-30T20:17:04.507" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that if a person P comes into contact with a distribution of a binary version of a program from someone S, then P has the right to request and obtain the source code from S, plus the source code of the entire product or work distributed by S (the 'virality'). For example, if S is selling 'set top boxes' containing binaries that contain Bob's driver software, then S is distributing a binary and is required to provide source to P. So, Bob may well condition his provision of support to his customers S on their holding back the source, but S's television watchers P have the right to obtain the source anyway from S. Bob's attempt to hold back the source fails. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7995" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T20:17:04.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5379" CreationDate="2017-04-30T22:37:53.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only work around we could think of this point, without registering as a legal entity is to have one developer on the team sign the code and be considered as the release manager. This developer would need to be part of the core developers and a trusted member. If the release manager leaves then another developer from the core developers would be selected, and they would sign the binary with their certificate. At each point ensuring the release manager is a trusted member of the team is crucial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this approach, we figured only public releases would be signed and any time a release is made a public record would be made, indicating which certificate was use to sign that release. This would act as an audit log if anyone wanted to ensure the release they have was using the right certificate, much like some sites publish SHA1 checksums for binary downloads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know whether this would pass muster with Apple, but we really haven't found any other options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7898" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T22:37:53.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5458" CreationDate="2017-05-01T02:29:48.147" Score="33" ViewCount="32292" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.docker.com/2017/04/introducing-the-moby-project/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;introduced&lt;/a&gt; the Moby project, which Docker is now based on, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which is free software (Apache 2.0)&lt;/a&gt;. But the instructions to install &lt;a href=&quot;https://store.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-server-ubuntu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Docker CE&lt;/a&gt; don't mention Moby at all, and they don't mention free or open source software. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docker.com/docker-software-end-user-subscription-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms and conditions&lt;/a&gt; linked to from that page look proprietary, and only make generic references to open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I followed &lt;a href=&quot;https://store.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-server-ubuntu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the instructions&lt;/a&gt; to install Docker CE, would I be installing fully free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7998" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T11:27:29.257" Title="Is Docker still free and open source?" Tags="|licensing|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5440" CreationDate="2017-05-01T13:20:09.763" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a web application that allows users to program single-file scripts. These scripts are sandboxed and executed in the same application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to release the source of my application under the AGPL. Would my users need to release their code under the AGPL as well? If so, how do I enforce this? Is a checkbox labeled &quot;I hereby release this code under the AGPL&quot; on the code submission page sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8001" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T19:21:38.583" Title="AGPL and sandboxed user code" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5426" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:38:46.350" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 section 6 says to those who redistribute another person's GPL-licensed work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central question, then is whether threatening non-renewal of a support contract, based upon distribution of the GPL-licensed program, constitutes a &quot;restriction&quot; on distribution. It is not obvious to me that it would be, but I cannot rule out the possibility entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the recipients of the GPL-licensed code have 100% of the rights detailed in the license, and the set of restrictions upon the recipients' right to redistribution is strictly those requirements imposed by the GPL. The distributor has erected no additional legal barrier for those recipients to exercise their right to distribute their copies of the GPL-licensed code.  If the recipients choose to redistribute the work, the upstream company (e.g., Red Hat) does not have the ability to take any legal recourse, nor have they ever claimed the ability to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have, however, threatened to take &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; recourse by refusing to renew a support contract. Their right to do so stems from the existing support-contract between the two parties, not the licensing relationship. The question is: when a contract includes a term that is activated by the exercise of a licensed copyright right (where the license grant itself is external to the contract), will a court view that as, in fact, a term applying to the scope of the license? This sounds like a very nuanced legal question, and even if we could get an answer, it may vary by jurisdiction, depending on the legal norms of contract law and licensing law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T18:19:55.887" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T18:19:55.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5441" CreationDate="2017-05-02T16:42:46.330" Score="-1" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few contributors and I are working on a large-scale Ethereum app called the Decentralized News Network (&lt;a href=&quot;http://dnn.media&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://dnn.media&lt;/a&gt;), or DNN. The application itself will be entirely open source and we are trying to figure out where to gain more interest from the open source community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone knows of where we can enlist support from the open source community, it would be appreciated greatly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;: I updated the phrasing of my question. I apologize if the original wording seemed to come across too much like an announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8010" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T14:25:10.837" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:25:10.837" Title="Where to find people interested in contributing to an open source project?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5437" CreationDate="2017-05-02T19:06:56.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may need to treat these user-supplied contributions more or less as if you were hosting your code on a public repository and these users were contributors. However, this is not to say that these contributions &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be part of the AGPL work, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like these user contributions are basically plugins to your application. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF offers some guidance&lt;/a&gt; about how to decide when a plugin is or is not part of its parent program:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When are a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here, there are two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the relationship between your program and user-supplied plugins falls into one of the &amp;quot;separate programs&amp;quot; cases, the licensing of user submissions is unrelated to the licensing of your main program. You should make your users understand and agree to how their submissions will be used and made available to other users (just as you might in the terms of service of any web service), but compatibility with the AGPL is not a concern. The plugins are not part of the AGPL work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the relationship between your main program and user-supplied plugins falls into a &amp;quot;combined&amp;quot; case, then you are effectively allowing users to modify the code of your web service. The AGPL requires that you supply all users with the current source code of your service, including the modifications and additions that you allow users to make via their submissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users must license their submissions to you under an AGPL-compatible license (AGPL, or a permissive license like MIT, or, in this case, optionally the GPL). You really just need to notify users that their submission will be licensed to you in a particular way. As a case study in this practice, scroll to the bottom of this web page and see that the text of your question on this web site has been licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. You should mention it in your terms of service at minimum, and have users agree to it when they sign up or when they make a submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T19:21:38.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5439" CreationDate="2017-05-02T22:28:57.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question should be the other way around: How does people interested in Open Source development find you and your projects? My answer would be: be visible and provide easy ways to get engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being visible means to have a good homepage which explains the project as good as possible, write about it on blogs, news pages, social networks, go to conferences, etc. Release early &amp;amp; release often. Also it is important to work in the open. Even if you are alone. Have a public repository right from the beginning, make pull requests so that people can see the code, the work and the workflow. This makes it more likely that people will join you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing easy ways to engage means to have public mailing lists, maybe a forum, issue tracker and an IRC channel. I would also recommend to focus on open and free communication channels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if people find you, you need to start to build a community. Response to emails, forum entries, issues, etc. Tell people how they can help. Review pull requests in time and guide the people to other issues by asking them to review your or other pull requests. Trust people by giving them merge rights as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this contain some useful tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T22:28:57.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T08:06:51.857" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently in the process of open sourcing a university work project on GitHub. The project is a Java library which depends on a couple of open source libraries which are licensed under different permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our library is supposed to be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. The libraries which the project depends on are licensed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eclipse Public License 1.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my first time open sourcing a project and dealing with licensing, so i want to make sure i get everything right. If i researched correctly, all of these licenses are compatible with the Apache 2.0 license we are aiming at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What i am struggling with is what i have to do in order for my dependencies to be used in the project. Do i create a top-level folder that contains all of the licenses besides Apache 2.0? Do i need to create some kind of list with all the libraries that i used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I did not alter any of the dependencies source code. I found the phrase &quot;derivative work&quot; a lot on the web. Is it also a derivative work if i only depend on the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8025" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T08:06:51.857" Title="Open sourcing a project that depends on libraries with various permissive licenses" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5445" CreationDate="2017-05-04T12:07:14.933" Score="-1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found errors in multiple sets of man pages for open source packages.  I want to submit patches but I can't find the source for them, only the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they maintained with the project?  Is this project specific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, where is the source for the virtualenv or ejabberdctl man page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8029" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T17:38:00.180" Title="Where are project man page contents maintained?" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5444" CreationDate="2017-05-04T16:00:22.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is project specific, although there are some standard locations.  Look in the makefile for the project and track down the make command for the man pages or whatever documentation the project provides, and there you'll find what you seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects separate it out, ejabbedctl is part of ejabberd and the docs for ejabberd are on a separate github repository, specifically the folder containing ejabberdcrl is content/admin/ejabberdctl/ in the docs.ejabberd repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For virtualenv, the project is python so they're using sphinx, which pulls a lot of the documentation straight from the source (much like doxygen, javadoc, et al) and converts sphinx code into several formats (html, latex, man, text, et al).  If you look at it in github, it looks like it's the finished product because github knows how to display .rst files. The docs directory in the virtualenv source has things like the userguide, etc. You may find what you're looking for there.  Since it could be embedded anywhere, I'd recommend pulling down the source and using grep to find the erroneous text, it could be literally anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8031" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T17:38:00.180" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T17:38:00.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T18:20:06.000" Score="2" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a dependency on GPL-licensed library in the library I maintain.  My library is BSD and must remain as such.  Wondering if I can automate the download and installation of the GPL dependency in the cmake configuration for my program without impinging on my library's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No changes to the GPL code at all, I just want to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8035" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-05-05T09:29:47.223" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:51:18.420" Title="Automated GPL download and installation in BSD project" Tags="|gpl|bsd|dependencies|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T20:15:33.533" Score="3" ViewCount="2143" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're planning to develop an Windows application which simulates an embedded system containing 2 applications (that communicate through OS messages) and sell it as a whole package&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appication &quot;F&quot;: we are provided with a non-intel/Windows binary, we don't have the source code (but we pay royalties to the company who does for using it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;application &quot;I&quot;: we develop that, and have the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both applications are co-existing in real-time OS engine (that we developped) to run both. Both applications must be provided to the engine (windows executable) as DLLs, dynamically loaded by the OS simulator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real-time OS engine complies to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARINC_653&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ARINC 653&lt;/a&gt; norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't have the source code for partition &quot;F&quot;, only the executable (using a different CPU than the host), but we found an emulator/VM that seems to fit our needs, provided we trim it down (a lot) and add features so it connects to the OS engine, also creating a DLL embedding the emulator/VM &amp;amp; some &quot;glue&quot; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our modifications to emulator/VM would allow anyone using a A653-compliant OS  and the same CPU architecture to run their programs (maybe with some further adaptations)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CPU emulator/VM is GPL, and we're planning to distribute the simulated system to clients as a whole (both applications). I'm aware that- according to the GPL V2 terms - we'll have to provide source code for the tweaked emulator/VM part (and that's not an issue), but does that extend to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the simulated OS engine (our IP) which implements &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARINC_653&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ARINC 653&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;application &quot;I&quot; (our IP, which we rebuilt for the host from its sources)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;application &quot;F&quot; (a third party delivery, no source code, and we have to emulate the machine code instructions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we still use &amp;amp; distribute the modified GPL emulator/VM in the DLL without having to provide source code for the OS simulator and application &quot;I&quot;? (the emulator doesn't link to the simulated OS or application &quot;I&quot;: those are separate DLLs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the case the whole project would have to comply to GPL V2, is there a way to get an agreement with the author(s) of the emulator to get a different license for us (like Qt paying licence) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8041" OwnerDisplayName="Jean-François Fabre" LastEditorUserId="8041" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T14:22:25.760" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T11:19:55.827" Title="To which extent GPL license contaminates my project?" Tags="|copyright|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5446" CreationDate="2017-05-05T18:51:18.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your library has a linking dependency on a library  (e.g. dynamic linking at runtime or statically linking it into your library at build time) and that dependency is licensed under the GPL, then your library must also be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your project is just a collection of scripts that downloads and installs the GPL-licensed library, then you can probably continue to license your project under BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T18:51:18.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5436" CreationDate="2017-05-06T18:12:17.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker is built with Moby, but you don't need Moby to install the built version.  It is still open source, and still free.  In the terms and conditions you linked to, definitions 1.5 and 1.6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.5 “Licensed Software” means the Docker software identified on an Order Form (other than Open Source Software) and licensed to Customer pursuant to the terms of this Agreement, e.g., the “Docker Hub Enterprise” software or other licensed software from Docker that is identified on the Order Form (excluding any Open Source Software included therein).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're being careful to exclude the open source version of Docker as &quot;licensed&quot;, and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.6 “Open Source Software” means Docker or third party software identified at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docker.com/components-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.docker.com/components-licenses&lt;/a&gt;, that is distributed or otherwise made available as “free software”, “open source software” or under a similar licensing or distribution model..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're making sure that Docker is acknowledged as open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the proprietary look is that they're trying to use one license to cover both the open source and the subscription products. It would be clearer if they split the licenses in two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8031" LastEditorUserId="7998" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T01:02:01.720" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T01:02:01.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5453" CreationDate="2017-05-07T10:40:00.563" Score="0" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it ok if I put an email address in &quot;About&quot; of application, and every user who asks for the source code emails me and I send him/her by email?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s an Android application and I will distribute it using the Play store and other similar stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7630" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T17:34:39.333" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T14:36:01.670" Title="Is it possible to distribute source of gpl3 Android app with email?" Tags="|gpl-3|distribution|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5463" CreationDate="2017-05-07T17:21:49.880" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently used &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ARCANEDEV/SEO-Helper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ARCANEDEV/SEO-Helper&lt;/a&gt; to build a SEO Bundle for Symfony 2.8 at my company.&#xA;It was a bit painful as the Symfony standards weren't followed by ARCANEDEV (it's a Laravel library) and there were conflicts between the dependencies (Laravel shares Symfony dependencies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To feel better about this, I contacted the author of the SEO-Helper and he said it was okay for me to use some of his ideas to create a Symfony bundle.  So after work, I built a new bundle to manage SEO tags without the ARCANEDEV dependency. I also added a lot of new functionalities compared to the original company bundle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to open source my code, but the original idea belongs to my company. Also, some of the code of my bundle is similar to the company's code as I am the author of both, but nothing is copy/pasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish this bundle code under the MIT license ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I'd like to ask my boss only if I legally have the right to publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8051" LastEditorUserId="8051" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T18:41:26.763" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T21:52:48.650" Title="Open source project from an idea at my job" Tags="|mit|law|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2017-05-07T23:42:03.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common goal of OS emulators is to run as many programs as possible, with no or only minor changes to such programs. This requires that the emulator is similar to the real thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By observing your two apps, you can find omissions, mistakes, etcetera in the emulator. The legal status of the two apps which leads to such observations is completely irrelevant to these observations. And if you develop patches from these observations, they too would not depend on the legal status of the two apps. Copyright simply does not make these patches &quot;derived works&quot;, and Open Source is still based on Copyright law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T23:42:03.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5450" CreationDate="2017-05-07T23:52:05.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically it might be allowed, but &lt;strong&gt;only if&lt;/strong&gt; you distribute your application by email. While email isn't a generally allowed form of source code distribution, using the same distribution method for both binaries and source is allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The logic is simple: if you emailed the binaries, the customer obviously has email, so you may rely on further email distribution. You can't assume the user has email when he downloaded the binaries via a play store. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; valid to include the source code directly with the play store download. Also, &lt;strong&gt;extra&lt;/strong&gt; download methods are always allowed: &quot;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, &lt;strong&gt;in any medium&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; [Emphasis mine]. Email isn't banned; it just cannot be the only method. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastEditorUserId="485" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T14:36:01.670" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T14:36:01.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2017-05-08T07:04:41.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not really on topic but it's in the same area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GPLv2, here is a nice document:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/research/practical-gpl-compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/research/practical-gpl-compliance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 4 we can see what &lt;strong&gt;giving&lt;/strong&gt; the license means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you distribute GPL code as binary or source code, you need&#xA;  to ensure it is accompanied by a copy of the GPL license. This is the&#xA;  easiest and quickest part of any GPL compliance engineering process.&#xA;  You can include a copy of the GPL license as physical or digital&#xA;  media along with a product. Some examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Smart televisions that come with a copy of the GPL physically&#xA;  printed at the back of the instruction manual along with&#xA;  other legal notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Smartphones that come with a copy of the GPL under the&#xA;  Settings &gt; Legal menu or similar location.&#xA;  The important objective is to ensure that the license is easily&#xA;  discoverable by an interested party.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T06:47:34.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T06:47:34.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2017-05-08T12:42:35.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that has an hypothetical example that you use QEMU for CPU emulation which is overall under a GPL 2 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key question is whether or not your own code and the product as a whole is a derivative work of the emulator or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I would think of a vanilla QEMU is as if it were a CPU. It you use it without modification, then its license should have no impact on the OS that runs on top of it and any embedded application in the RTOS itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing becomes more complicated if you start to make modifications and enhancements to QEMU itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you are unlikely to be able to secure an alternative commercial license for QEMU: they use a shared DCO-style copyright approach like the Linux Kernel. So no single person may be able to grant such an alternative license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then if your modification to the emulator seems is specific to your RTOS, rather than generic for some emulated hardware, then it could be that you are making the modified emulator dependent on your proprietary RTOS and this may subject the RTOS to the GPL. And so on, eventually, depending how things interact (linking static or dynamic has no bearing here, the way things interact is what matters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, if your modification to QEMU are not dependent at all on your RTOS, but are emulating some new piece of embedded hardware, my suggestion would be to contribute these to QEMU such that they become part of the standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reach that, then you would be using QEMU as-is, and running a proprietary RTOS on top that executes some other proprietary application alright which would put back in my QEMU-is-like-a-CPU analogy above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;/HTH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T12:42:35.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T15:12:50.453" Score="0" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to roll some OSS in the public domain into a larger code base to distribute myself. I have a few concerns however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code released into the public domain may at the discretion of the author be placed under any other more restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Public domain is not cleanly recognized across jurisdictions (e.g. in the EU I understand that it gets a little bit messy)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my thinking is this: &lt;strong&gt;I live in the U.S. - Even though I did not write the software myself, can I re-license it as CC0, effectively keeping it in the public domain while still declaring a more effective 'license'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit (2017-06-12):&lt;/strong&gt; I'm getting some downvotes on this question, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think the reason is that some of the nuance to which I'm asking is unclear.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this case the origin of the code does not matter. What matters is how the jurisdiction in which it will be distributed interprets the license. (Please correct me if I am wrong!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the answer linked by @unor, there does not seem to be a clear consensus about what ultimately applies. The most upvoted answer concludes that no one can stop someone from re-licensing, but what no one addresses is whether or not the new license will hold any water.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help all, &lt;strong&gt;I'm still convinced that I have a unique question so if you think that there is a problem, please help me reconcile it!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8059" LastEditorUserId="8059" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T16:02:24.753" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T16:02:24.753" Title="Re-licensing software in the public domain as CC0" Tags="|licensing|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-05-31T01:12:40.087" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5456" CreationDate="2017-05-08T19:17:53.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the work is the public domain, you are free to do as you please, including re-licensing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="520" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T19:17:53.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5436" CreationDate="2017-05-09T00:37:31.800" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker Community Editions are products from Docker built on- and assembled from open source components. Some Docker Community Editions are based solely on open source projects (like Docker for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and other open Linux distributions). Some Docker Community Editions incorporate components that are not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We try to let the openness of the underlying infrastructure guide the openness of the corresponding Docker Edition. Docker Editions for open, community-oriented Linux distros are also fully open, while Docker for Mac and Windows (for example) may incorporate some non open source components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Moby-related changes are still in progress, so stay tuned for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8063" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T00:37:31.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5496" CreationDate="2017-05-09T09:33:04.617" Score="1" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am struggling with this question about a GitHub project of mine (MIT license). A client wanted me to customize it in a certain way and sell him the customizations (the customizations do not work without the base code though). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He will not be disclosing the source code, but he doesn't want to include any attribution or license information either, while still being allowed to legally use, sell and modify. Of course, I, on the other hand, don't want to take responsibility/give any guarantees/be liable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some research and came up with the Unlicense &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/#unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/#unlicense&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 questions in direct connection with this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As far as I understand it, he would be allowed to distribute the source code under this license as well, is that correct, and if so, can I limit that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the Unlicense a good fit for the described purpose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any fitting alternative licenses/agreements?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is me emailing him the code he bought together with the chosen License as textfile enough to complete the deal and make it legally bulletproof beyond a reasonable doubt?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7359" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T04:10:24.047" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T04:10:24.047" Title="Most fitting software license for customized client work?" Tags="|license-recommendation|mit|relicensing|software|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T10:23:04.043" Score="-2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have spent some time working on a python code - which is about ( 60 )% of it complete - before i realize that another opensource framework with similar functionality and with more features already exist in GitHub. To be honest i am a bit frustrated , but it was a greate experience that i wouldn't get it if i hadn't codeed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall i quite completing my code or shall i proceed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it bad if i complete my code and publish it on GitHub too ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8065" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T08:45:27.947" Title="My code is similar to an opensource framework that has more features" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-05-12T23:05:20.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5447" CreationDate="2017-05-09T11:19:55.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a GPL program processes some data, the output of the GPL program is not bound by the GPL. This is particularly important when the data is another program. You may execute non-GPL programs with a GPL emulator, virtual machine, or programming language implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can therefore execute program F in the GPL emulator without any problems&lt;/strong&gt;, as long as this is permitted by the license of F.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more difficult question is whether you can integrate the GPL emulator into your system. Any changes you make to the emulator also fall under the GPL. It does not matter whether these modifications are for compatibility with proprietary systems or whether these changes would also be useful for other people. If you distribute binaries of the patched emulator, you also have to offer the source code of the patched emulator under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But can you integrate your application I with the emulator, whether you applied any changes or not? This is the subject of some debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position of the GPL is that generally, &lt;strong&gt;using GPL code in a work makes the whole work subject to the GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. The LGPL variant provides an explicit exception to this, where you can use LGPL code in a proprietary application. But that doesn't apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the GPL work and the proprietary work communicate “at arms length”, they can be considered separate works&lt;/strong&gt; and the GPL does not affect the proprietary program. What that precisely means is again the subject of some debate. At a minimum, the two programs should run in separate processes. They can then communicate over an IPC mechanism like pipes. Two programs do not communicate at arms length if they share any data structures. This means that directly using a GPL library (e.g. loading the emulator as a DLL) does not provide sufficient separation between the library and your application I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an &lt;strong&gt;opposing view&lt;/strong&gt; that argues that the GPL license cannot apply to code that you wrote, because the authors of the GPL licensed program do not own the copyright over your code – your code is not derivative of the GPL code. If this argument is correct, this would mean that the GPL and the LGPL licenses are effectively equivalent. I understand this line of thought, but think it is a flawed argument because the authors of the GPL software are not required to allow you to use their software unless you abide by the license. Any work that is “based on” the GPL work is considered a covered work by the terms of the GPL. This also depends on the precise version of the GPL we are talking about. I'm assuming the GPLv3 here. Since this legal theory is untested and contradicts the spirit of the GPL, I would be very wary of building a business on a probable GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To conclude:&lt;/strong&gt; It is unlikely that you can use the emulator directly in your application I. This might become possible if you re-architect your system so that application I and the emulator communicate only at arms length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of listening to random people on the internet, this is probably important enough to your business that you should draw up a clear schema illustrating the communication of the GPL part with the rest of the system, including clear boundaries between subsystems. The better isolated the GPL part is, the better. You can then consult a lawyer with experience in open-source license compliance to give you an informed opinion. We can't do this since we are neither lawyers, nor do you have explained the communication between the various systems very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T11:19:55.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5451" CreationDate="2017-05-09T21:52:48.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The circumstances under which you can publish privately (i.e. not in your role as employee) depend on your employment contract and on your jurisdiction. It is not uncommon to have a clause that requires you to ask your employer for permission before you may publish anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, your employer does not have any rights to works that you create on your own time, with your personal resources. And companies are generally interested to have “expert” employees – if I'm looking for a job and see that my future coworkers have published open source code, that's a big plus (assuming the code is decent). However, there are circumstances where an employer has a legitimate interest in not letting you publish privately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The work to be published would disclose trade secrets or internals of your employer. If any competitors would get an advantage from looking at your publication, maybe it's not a good idea to publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The work may have technically been produced outside of the employment, but was clearly inspired by experiences within the employment.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The work would reflect badly on the employer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By publishing the work, you would compete with your employer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishing open-source code is not fundamentally different from publishing a book with respect to employment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your proposed work might be relevant in one of these ways to your employer, it is correct to ask your boss whether they have any objections – ideally before you start any serious work on the project. Reactions may include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a cease and desist letter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a request to please not publish this&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a request to state that this is your personal opinion and not that of your employer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a request to mention your employer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a go ahead, with a request to review the work before it is published&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a go ahead, and wishing you lots of fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an offer to create the work as part of your employment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly you are permitted to do, what your employer is permitted to do, and what you are required to do, depends on your local laws and on the contents of your employment contract. If your employer says “no”, this may or may not be legal – but it would usually be unwise to strain your employment relationship over this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like contributing to open source, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the section about IP in the contract for your next job. If possible, it may also be sensible to do any open-source work with a different tech stack and in a different problem domain than within your employment – that way it's absolutely clear that your employer has no rights over this work, and you won't get the feeling that you're doing unpaid work for your employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-09T21:52:48.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5468" CreationDate="2017-05-10T11:46:27.640" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a project to validate objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's influenced by a fairly known project called FluentValidation by Jeremy Skinner which has an Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both projects do the same, provide an API for validating objects (C#).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both projects present the API in almost the same manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's under the hood that things change a lot, in terms of workflow and going about validating the objects. I did use some of the techniques in Jeremy's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's his project on GitHub : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JeremySkinner/FluentValidation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/JeremySkinner/FluentValidation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's mine : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JMPSequeira/JPSoft.CoreValidation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/JMPSequeira/JPSoft.CoreValidation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about leaving an issue on his GitHub but that would, IMHO, seem a bit freeloading the success of his project to advertise mine and I can't find any other way of contacting him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8079" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:16:58.990" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:16:58.990" Title="Is this copyright infringment?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|derivative-works|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-10T14:58:00.230" Score="2" ViewCount="1614" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a program containing only one file: main.cpp. I copied there a few lines of code from LGPL licensed file (from an LGPL licensed library). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What copyright notice should I put at the top of my main.cpp? Does LGPL  notice still makes sense considering the derivative work (main.cpp) is not a part of any library and is not used to produce a library? Should it be GPL notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright notice from the file where a few lines of code were copied from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;*  ------ copyright holders --------------&#xA;*  This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;*  modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;*  License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;*  version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;*&#xA;*  This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;*  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;*  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU&#xA;*  Lesser General Public License for more details.&#xA;*&#xA;*  You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;*  License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA;*  Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8081" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T14:07:10.197" Title="Copied code from LGPL library to my executable (what copyright notice should be? LGPL or GPL?)" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5475" CreationDate="2017-05-10T21:43:07.823" Score="-2" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fabric.io/kits/android/crashlytics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fabric.io Crashlytics&lt;/a&gt; is a service for watching number of daily users, log of crashs and ... . Can I use fabric.io Crashlytics in GPL Android app? If the answer is yes, should I publish the API key with source? Or can I hide it in published source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  I communicate with this library through a library they provided for us and watch the number of users and crash logs through my dashboard in &lt;a href=&quot;http://fabric.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fabric.io&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The library is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7630" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T19:59:13.823" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T19:59:13.823" Title="use fabric.io crashlytics in gpl android app" Tags="|gpl|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2017-05-11T10:02:33.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of whether this is copyright infringement depends on whether your software is a derivative work of his software.&#xA;It is generally considered OK to reproduce some software ideas / API (although the recent Oracle vs Google case shows that there might be some copyright questions on API too).&#xA;This helps people, in particular, create open source clones of proprietary software. To ensure that the new software is not a derivative work of the old software, the developers are generally bound to one rule: do not look at the code (of the old software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem in your case is that you looked at the code and took some inspiration from it. It is more delicate thus to claim that your work is not a derivative from the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even assuming that this is a derivative work, there is a very easy way to not be infringing copyright: just follow the obligations of the Apache license of the original work. In your case, since you're publishing your code on GitHub, I would even go further and advise you to license your code under the same Apache license (although &lt;em&gt;you don't have to&lt;/em&gt;) and include the original copyright notice (this is your real obligation), adding a remark saying that your code is inspired by this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-05-11T10:02:33.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5474" CreationDate="2017-05-11T11:57:35.177" Score="2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a server side software(running as a service) with no direct interaction with the user but nevertheless commercial. This software contains open source components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the open source licenses require at least to display a copyright notice (or even attribution or full license text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can one display this if there is no user interface ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T11:03:37.733" Title="Fulfilling license conditions on server applications" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5476" CreationDate="2017-05-11T17:35:50.717" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say you have an app that prides itself on open source technologies and the full codebase of your app being open source is what attracts users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you guarantee your users that your open sourced code is what's actually being used in production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8090" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-05-13T01:14:07.493" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T01:14:07.493" Title="How can you guarantee someone that your open sourced code is what's being used in production?" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5466" CreationDate="2017-05-12T07:00:25.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use LGPL code, you may use it under either the LGPL or the GPL, at your choice. This is because the LGPL is the same as the GPL plus some extra permissions. You can always decline those extra permissions and use the more restrictive GPL instead. You can't go the other way and add extra permissions to a work you don't own the rights to. Therefore, the combination of an LGPL work with a GPL work has to be licensed under the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you prefer more permissive licenses or more viral licenses is up to you. However, using the LGPL for an application (not a library) only makes sense if you expect some parts of it to be reused later in a library and are fine with that library being LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you keep the LGPL code in a separate library and abide by the terms of the LGPL, then you do not need to use the GPL or LGPL for your application, and may instead use any license of your choice or even no license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T14:07:10.197" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T14:07:10.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5460" CreationDate="2017-05-12T08:45:27.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are different motivations for creating open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you need to &lt;strong&gt;solve a problem&lt;/strong&gt;, and can't find an existing library or tool to solve that. So you create your own. When you later stumble upon a software that solves your problem or can easily be adapted to solve your problem, then it's probably easier to stop wasting your time on duplicating this effort, and use the existing library instead – if it's been around for a while, it is probably better tested and more stable. But why was it so difficult to find? Consider spreading the word with a blog post or a tweet or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes other libraries turn out to be an unusable broken mess. Maybe the library has some bug that is difficult to fix or work around. Maybe it isn't flexible enough to support your use case. Then it might be a good idea to go back to the project you started, and continue working on it – with the new experience of how &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to solve this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A completely different motivation for open-source work is &lt;strong&gt;building a portfolio&lt;/strong&gt;. You want to show what you are capable of. In this case, it's completely OK to build something that already exists. For web designers, it's a common exercise to take an existing site like Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia, and create a new design or theme. Who cares if this has already been done a thousand times? None of those were done by &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, and if you can provide an elegant solution to this problem, you can also solve whatever problem someone would hire you for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a portfolio project, its important to do the best that you can. Good design, clean code, great documentation, test coverage. This can take a lot of effort, but at the end you have something that you can be proud of. Don't stop because you weren't the first – few projects are truly novel. A portfolio project isn't on your portfolio until you publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects are started to &lt;strong&gt;learn something, or try something new&lt;/strong&gt;. Building something in another programming language, getting acquainted with some framework, experimenting with a design pattern, or building a cool little app. Most of my personal projects are in this category, and most will never be finished. And that's perfectly OK! It's not about getting something done, it's about &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; something. You get the most experience long before the project is “completed“.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these projects die because more urgent things are happening in life, sometimes they just stop being fun. One time I had to abort a project because I realized I would have to dive into the theoretical background first. If you find an existing project with a similar goal, that shouldn't discourage you. It might be interesting to compare how they solved some problem you encountered. But if you want to stop, then stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T08:45:27.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5469" CreationDate="2017-05-12T11:03:37.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most open source licenses allow you to run the program for any purpose, and only require you to reproduce the license or copyright statement when you pass on a copy of the program, whether in source or binary form. The details depend on the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you run the open-source software only on your servers and do not give a copy of your software to other legal entities, these licenses do not impose any restriction. Concrete examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;GPLv2&lt;/strong&gt;: “Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Apache v2  License&lt;/strong&gt; does likewise not restrict your ability to run the program. It also gives you a copyright license to “publicly perform” the program, and a patent license to use the work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these licenses do not oblige you to display any notices about the open-source components used by your server-side code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open-source license that is notably different is the &lt;strong&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/strong&gt;. It “explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program” and to “make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey”. However: “if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source”. If your system has a client side user interface, the user interface can display these acknowledgements together with other legal notices. In other cases, this is more tricky and should be covered in another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T11:03:37.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5467" CreationDate="2017-05-12T13:56:07.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that you are accessing such service is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you need to use a proprietary library. Generally speaking it is not possible to combine proprietary code and GPL code into a single app. The main exception is when the people who wrote the GPL code provided explicit permission to combine with certain proprietary libraries. If you can get such permission from the copyright holders of the GPL code, then it should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This question in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; contains information on what kind of provision copyright holders can make to let people link their code with specific GPL-incompatible libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T16:43:33.103" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T16:43:33.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5470" CreationDate="2017-05-12T19:22:27.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For security sensitive open-source projects, it is desirable to provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reproducible builds&lt;/a&gt;. Given the same source code, a reproducible build will always create bit-identical output. That way users can take your source code and check whether the binaries you provided were tampered with, e.g. used a patched source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is not executed by users but e.g. on your server as a SaaS offering, no good trust mechanism is possible. One way to handle this is to implement client-side/end-to-end encryption. That way, it is less important whether the server contains a backdoor since the server never sees plaintext data. However, this is not feasible for most applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T19:22:27.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5481" CreationDate="2017-05-13T20:05:06.050" Score="5" ViewCount="966" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a game and want to release the code under a copyleft license (GPL 2 or 3).&#xA;So far, so good, but there are multiple MIT-licensed library dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I still release my code under GPL? Is the restriction that the MIT code itself is not part of the repository (e.g. separate download)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8096" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:58:34.660" Title="Release code with MIT dependencies under GPL" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5483" CreationDate="2017-05-13T05:47:09.800" Score="17" ViewCount="3080" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my knowledge, open source software is free to use and distribute, and if the program is modified it should be distributed under the same license - but what if someone is using only the output of the program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an example, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharelatex.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sharelatex&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overleaf&lt;/a&gt;. They are well known online LaTeX editors. While compiling LaTeX code they use  &lt;code&gt;pdflatex&lt;/code&gt;, which is open source. Now, as they are web-based they are not redistributing it, but they are using output of the program. It is fine till here, but when it comes to revenue. Do they have to pay royalties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be great if someone can concentrate on lppl at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latex-project.org/lppl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.latex-project.org/lppl/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8103" OwnerDisplayName="aaryan khurana" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-09-29T09:06:10.453" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T09:06:10.453" Title="Is the output of an open source program licensed the same?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-13T23:11:33.980" Score="16" ViewCount="11215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that for many years, C# was proprietary, and it's always been focused on Windows. Then I started hearing about Microsoft releasing component after component of the language's framework as open-source. For many years Wikipedia said that the Common Language Runtime was proprietary, but now &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's open source too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much of the language is open source now? Are there any necessary proprietary components? Could I bootstrap it given all the code that Microsoft has released? How do Microsoft's patents factor in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5392" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T01:42:32.123" LastActivityDate="2022-07-04T12:27:58.277" Title="How much of the C# programming language is open source?" Tags="|microsoft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5482" CreationDate="2017-05-14T11:52:04.640" Score="7" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I manage a project with a very long open source history - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zikula.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zikula&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zikula/core&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/zikula/core&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zikula grew out of PHPNuke and PostNuke. Most of the oldest code is long gone, but some legacy remains. Early documentation states &quot;Zikula is free software released under the GPL license!&quot;. Most files within the project have a header which directs to a copy of the GPL or LGPL and there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zikula/core/blob/1.5/src/docs/NOTICE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NOTICE&lt;/a&gt; which discusses the mixture of licenses within. Additionally, we depend heavily on Symfony which uses MIT and contributions since beginning on Github in March 2010 are tagged as MIT. We also have many vendors within the project of various licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zikula/core/issues/2305&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ticket&lt;/a&gt; requesting some clarity on the licensing and I am unable to answer. First, because of the information above and second because of my lack of understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I would prefer Zikula be licensed with a permissive license like MIT or LGPL (as I believe they are?). The GPL seems to be too restrictive for our case, but likely was the dominant option at the time (15 - 20 years ago?). From what I understand the GPL is &quot;infections&quot; and subjugates other licenses within the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I straighten out this spaghetti? I'm a coder, not a lawyer. How do I audit the current code base and know what was contributed under what licensing and how do I ensure compliance in the future? How to I mix these licenses together or change and relicense as MIT/LGPL or similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8098" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T05:35:19.457" Title="How to Audit licensing of old project?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-compatibility|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5477" CreationDate="2017-05-14T12:58:34.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can release your code under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is compatible with the GPL: you can combine MIT-licensed code with GPL'ed code, as long as the result is licensed under the GPL. This is possible because the MIT license explicitly allows you to sublicense the code (i.e. republish with a completely different license), and only requires you to keep the copyright and license notice intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licences such as the MIT license or Apache v2 license are often used for code that is intended to be available as widely as possible, with as few restrictions as possible for direct users (i.e. other programmers). Such code can be incorporated in proprietary and copyleft projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T12:58:34.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5480" CreationDate="2017-05-14T15:15:56.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to be long, because changing the license from the GPL to a more permissive license is really complicated for a project that is big, old, and has many contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Which license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open-source license should not be chosen because it is popular, but because it is aligned with your goals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Strong copyleft licenses like the GPL (and for web apps: the AGPL) try to maximize freedom for end users of any application using this code. This limits how other developers can use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Weaker copyleft licenses like the LGPL don't ensure end-user freedoms for the complete application, but only to those components subject to the license. This allows developers to incorporate such code into proprietary projects under certain conditions, but does not allow them to turn the code proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses like the MIT license and Apache License 2.0 try to maximize freedoms for developers at the expense of end users. Developers can create and distribute modified versions without having to publish their source code. For new projects, the Apache License 2.0 should probably be strongly preferred since it includes a contributor patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The license change proccess&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license change is a social problem. You will need buy-in and agreement of your community. If the idea of a license change is received positively, you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stop accepting contributions unless the contributors explicitly agree to relicense their changes to the new license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contact all copyright holders of all past contributions, and ask them to license their contributions to your project under the new license. &#xA;You should keep a permanent record of their consent to this license change. Ideally you get a signed letter. In practice, I guess using GitHub issues would be OK. You can ping contributors in an issue with &lt;code&gt;@example&lt;/code&gt; mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the contributors don't always personally hold the copyright to their contributions, e.g. if the copyright belongs to their employer. You would then have to get permission from their employer at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wait for the responses to roll in. This may take multiple months. Remember that contributors may be on a vacation, may have shifted their focus away from open-source contributions, or may be dead. You can try to follow up if they don't respond in a reasonable time frame.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If everyone agreed, you can change all license headers and publish the project with the changed license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A note on licensing new contributions differently in a GPL project&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see your pull request template specifies the MIT license. This is a great step to give you maximum flexibility during this relicensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since your current license is GPL, any contributions are derivative of existing GPL code in the project and therefore also have to be GPL-licensed. Your contributors do not have the right to issue them under the new license unless you can give them the code under the new license, which requires that all previous contributions have been relicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These changes are therefore not MIT-licensed, but the contributors have given you the option of relicensing them later under the MIT license or a compatible license. If a contributor has given you this option for all their contributions, there is no need to contact them about the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Dealing with code where consent to license change could not be obtained&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not everyone agreed to the license change, this becomes more complicated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silence is not consent! If someone does not respond, you have to assume that they oppose the license change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a contributor died, note that their copyright term extends for 70 years after death in most jurisdictions. You can try to contact the current copyright owners, most likely the deceased contributor's estate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, relicensing is exceedingly difficult and I won't discuss that here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a contributor only made very minor contributions that do not pass the “threshold of originality”, then these contributions are not subject to copyright and you do not need their permission to relicense the project including these licenses. Where this threshold is set depends on the case law in your jurisdiction. This threshold does not give you a right to use these contributions, but just a possible legal defence when accused of copyright violation in respect to these changes. I would be uncomfortable relying on this for anything more substantial than typo fixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can track the license status independently for each file or component. The possible statuses are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The file or component still includes GPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All past and present contributors agreed to license change, but the file or component directly or indirectly depends on GPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All past and present contributors agreed to license change, and the file or component has no dependencies on GPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only in the last case can you update the file to display the copyright/license header for the new license. This might allow you to immediately relicense some components, if your project has a suitable architecture (a win for decoupling and inversion of control!). But while even one piece of GPL code is still present in the project, the project as whole remains subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the remaining GPL files, you can try to rewrite them so that they no longer include GPL parts. This is quite tricky because the GPL is a copyleft license: although the other authors of the file agree to the license change, their contributions are derived from GPL code so they can only license their changes under the GPL, not under the new license. It is therefore not sufficient to just rewrite any lines touched by a contributor who didn't agree to the license change. You will have to rewrite the complete file or component from scratch, preferably as a clean-room implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional difficulty, GPL code may have been copy–pasted within the project. Again, the pasted code and any code derived from the pasted code may not be relicensed until the original author has agreed to the license change. Auditing for this might be very difficult, unless the problematic contributions are fairly recent and comparatively minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your goals, resources, and community, this might be over fairly quickly, or be a long process that extends across multiple months or even years. And it could be the case that significant authors do not agree with the license change, thus requiring unreasonable effort to eliminate their contributions. In that case, you may want to accept that the project has been locked in to the GPL, and clarify your documentation to reflect this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T15:15:56.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5478" CreationDate="2017-05-14T17:35:40.347" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the license of the software used to create a file doesn't have any influence on the possible licenses you can distribute that file under. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you use Microsoft Word to write a document, or gcc to compile a program,  then the license of Word/gcc doesn't affect the license you can use for the document/program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that the license of a program usually doesn't affect the license of the output is because the output normally doesn't contain anything that can be seen as a copy of part of the program that created the output.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The same holds for the LaTeX programs mentioned in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T17:35:40.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5488" CreationDate="2017-05-15T06:25:52.320" Score="21" ViewCount="25155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say i used a MIT program as a base for a new project, and modified about 50% of the program files. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should i specify that the program is a derivative work? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do i need to keep track of every file i modified and explicitly say the changes made?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If i use a portion of two MIT licensed programs in the same file, alongside with a modification, how should i specify that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8105" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T15:29:34.067" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T15:35:49.830" Title="How to use MIT license in a project?" Tags="|derivative-works|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5487" CreationDate="2017-05-15T11:54:20.520" Score="2" ViewCount="2035" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a non commercial or open source project uses a technique which some can argue is covered by a particular patent, what would be implications be. Do you have to pay royalties. If project does not generate any money what would be the effect? Also what is the best way to get use of the license while being open source? What is the implication of using a patent and being open source? The patent relates to a closed source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3192" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T14:40:42.353" Title="Non commercial project which might be using a patent" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2017-05-15T12:45:14.810" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an invention is patented, the patent owner has exclusive rights to use that invention for the duration of the patent term, within the jurisdiction where the patent was issued. In general, there isn't any special exception for non-commercial usage. However, patent law is a national affair, and there might be such rules in some countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source projects cannot use patented techniques unless the patent owner issues them a royalty-free license. If there were a per-copy royalty fee, you would no longer be free to distribute copies of the open-source project, or to distribute your modifications. If software has such restrictions, it can't be considered open source software. Additionally, open source software must be free for any kind of usage. If a software may only be used for non-commercial purposes, that doesn't meet the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many modern open source licenses (GPLv2, GPLv3, Apache License 2.0) include an automatic patent grant, though they differ in some important details, e.g. what happens when the patented technique is only patented in some countries but not in others. What is an automatic patent grant? If I own a patent and create a software that uses this patent and license the software under one of those licenses, I automatically grant all users of this software the necessary patent licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, some licenses like the MIT license do not have such a patent grant. If I own a patent and create a software that uses this patent and license that software under the MIT license, I could later sue the users of this software for a patent violation. MIT-licensed software therefore has a higher risk for users than other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the other licenses do not guarantee that the software is patent-free. If I create a software and publish it as open-source, and it later turns out that it relies on patents from someone else (even if I didn't know about the patent and invented the patented technique independently), then the software can no longer be used and I am probably liable for patent infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is clear from the onset that a software relies on patents and the patent owner will not grant a free license, then the only way is to wait the 20 years until the patent expires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T12:45:14.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5484" CreationDate="2017-05-15T15:35:49.830" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is so simple, you should be able to find the answer to your questions by just reading it. It has only one requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you have no obligation to specify that a program is a derivative work, nor to track the modifications that you made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For merging several MIT licensed software, you just have to copy the various notices (that is copyright statement + text of the license). If the license texts are exactly the same (the authors did not alter the original MIT license), then it is acceptable to just put the text of the license once, after the various copyright statements. E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2017 Your Name&#xA;Copyright (c) 2015-2016 Previous Developer's Name&#xA;Copyright (c) 2014-2016 Other Project Developer's Name&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T15:35:49.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5478" CreationDate="2017-05-15T19:15:34.063" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your &quot;knowledge&quot; in the first paragraph is not correct. Only some Open Source licenses require that modifications of the software must be also licensed under the same license. These licenses are often referred to as &quot;copyleft&quot; licenses; GPL, MPL, and EPL are examples of such licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On your second paragraph, you specifically mention pdflatex and the LLPL.&#xA;As you yourself write, the online LaTeX editors do not distribute the software; therefore there are no obligations spelled out in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there is commercial activity (or &quot;it comes to revenue&quot;, as you put it), has no significance. One of the basic principles of Open Source is that the license allows &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; use of the software; therefore restrictions on commercial activity would automatically render the license non-Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8117" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T19:15:34.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5479" CreationDate="2017-05-16T01:40:44.307" Score="19" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C# language specification&lt;/a&gt; is publicly available, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/blob/master/spec/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright of Microsoft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/master/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Roslyn compiler is licensed under Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, so that's open source. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could I bootstrap it given all the code that Microsoft has released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The Roslyn compiler has been written in C# and is able to compile itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that pretty much covers &lt;em&gt;the language&lt;/em&gt; itself. The spec is Microsoft copyright, but the ECMA officiates the spec. Microsoft's compiler implementation for that spec is open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus round, because I have a feeling this is what you really want to know. What about the runtime and standard library? Are those open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, some of it is. Particularly, .NET Core is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoreCLR (Common Language Runtime)&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed under MIT&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So is the standard library, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/corefx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoreFx&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as far as I know, the Windows (desktop/classic) runtime and framework are still closed source. I suspect this is because they're tightly tied to the operating system itself. This also means that Winforms, WPF, &amp;amp; UWP (the desktop UI frameworks) are closed. However, much of &lt;a href=&quot;https://referencesource.microsoft.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the .NET framework is &lt;em&gt;source available&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Über bonus round: There are several other open source Microsoft projects listed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The .NET Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and don't forget F#, it's libre too. All in all, Microsoft has done a wonderful job of opening its stack and inviting the community to contribute over the last few years. Despite a few missteps along the way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2020:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WPF is now open source&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/wpf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dotnet/wpf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so is WinForms&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/winforms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dotnet/winforms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2020-02-24T22:14:50.557" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T22:14:50.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T03:11:50.827" Score="2" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.clahub.com/pages/why_cla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.clahub.com/pages/why_cla&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170518031139/https://www.clahub.com/pages/why_cla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mirror&lt;/a&gt;) claims that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A CLA should also contain personal information about the person that signs it, such as a complete name and mailing address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) have to contain  the complete name and mailing address of the person that signs it? Isn't having the contributor's GitHub username enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking as I use the GitHub CLA management bot &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla-assistant.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla-assistant.io&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170518031224/https://cla-assistant.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mirror&lt;/a&gt;) for my projects, and it only records the contributor's GitHub username:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z1j6O.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z1j6O.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T03:11:50.827" Title="Does a CLA have to contain the complete name and mailing address of the person that signs it? Isn't having the contributor's GitHub username enough?" Tags="|github|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-19T15:52:45.993" Score="7" ViewCount="2540" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been through a lot of the LGPL questions here but haven't found this specific question. This is probably the closest to my situation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4624/dynamic-linking-lgpl-library-and-licensing-in-windows-store-app&quot;&gt;Dynamic linking LGPL library and licensing in Windows Store app&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm building an application (free to download, but not open-source, in a fairly niche area of engineering) and would like to make use of an LGPL library (a Java library in this case). I'm not modifying the library in any way. The issue is that I need to release the application as a single statically linked executable using a proprietary third-party build tool. My understanding of the LGPL is that I need to be able to allow users to replace that library should they so wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I could provide the &quot;object code&quot; to my application, in a compiled form, but then a user would need to obtain this third-party build tool in order to rebuild the full application. As it happens there is a free-for-personal-use version of this build tool (free as in cost, not license), but I don't think that would properly comply with the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a solution, I could provide a &quot;LGPL friendly&quot; version of my application that just loaded the jar file from a directory at startup - I am assuming this would be compliant since the user can then replace the library jar with their own version. But there would be a performance loss (although functionality would be identical).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two binary builds of my application - identical functionality, but only one variant would allow replacement of the LGPL libraries used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this solution be considered acceptable? Are there any examples of this out there?  Any pointers to documents that discuss this further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;apsillers answer is very informative, and helped me clarify my question a bit (I think)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library I'm dealing with is licensed under LGPL2.1, and section 6 states (in the context of being able to use a modified version of the library) :-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the required form of the &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, I deliver my application as a single .exe file (call this build A). In order for the user to re-link with a modified library and produce a new single exe they would need to download a closed-source tool &quot;X&quot; from a third-party vendor (and register with them in order to qualify for a free personal use license). &quot;X&quot; is not a general-purpose tool, nor included with any operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with &quot;build A&quot; I could also provide the same application as &quot;build B&quot;, configured to load LGPL libraries from separate files. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Build &quot;B&quot; would be LGPL-compliant, but build &quot;A&quot; would not be. And I don't think that simply providing the two builds would migitate against A being a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I need to try and keep the library jar outside my exe if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8148" LastEditorUserId="8148" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T07:07:22.277" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T07:07:22.277" Title="LGPL and static linking when third-party tools are required - providing an alternate version that can accept a replacement LGPL library" Tags="|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5494" CreationDate="2017-05-19T17:20:07.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you statically link against an LGPL'd library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you already understand this, but you are concerned specifically about the user's ability to &quot;relink the application&quot; while relying on a proprietary build tool. I do not think you need to be concerned about this -- let's look at the what the GPLv3 says (and therefore the LGPLv3 also says, as an extended form of GPLv3) about build tools:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. &lt;strong&gt;However, it does not include&lt;/strong&gt; the work's System Libraries, or &lt;strong&gt;general-purpose tools&lt;/strong&gt; or generally available free programs &lt;strong&gt;which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not perfectly clear whether your build tool is a &quot;general purpose tool,&quot; but in my opinion, this definition requires you to include configuration files for use in your build tool, not the build tool itself. Indeed, it is not customary or required to include build tools like &lt;code&gt;make&lt;/code&gt; with your distribution, even when they are under a GPL-compatible license and including them could create no licensing issue whatsoever. Include build instructions and build scripts for your object-form software; if those instructions include the use of a freely-available proprietary build tool, so be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While free-software purists might balk at being required to download a proprietary build tool in order to build your software, it doens't look like a GPL violation to me. Free-software purists &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;also looked askance at Java programs in general&lt;/a&gt; (whether GPL-licensed or not) before there was a free-software Java implementation, and at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/for-windows.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;software written for a non-free operating system&lt;/a&gt;. (&quot;&lt;em&gt;Using free software on Microsoft Windows (or any nonfree operating system) is the first step towards freedom, but it does not get you all the way there.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) This may impact your software's popularity, but not its legality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect this may be a controversial answer and welcome other opinions in the comments (or as fellow answers, please. &lt;code&gt;:)&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T17:20:07.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5459" CreationDate="2017-05-20T10:38:26.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not common to use open-source licenses for consulting work. Instead, the contract would contain a license from you to the client which covers whether and under which conditions the work may be used, modified, distributed, and sublicensed. The client may also want to own the copyright of the changes they paid for, in which case the contract would include a copyright transfer agreement. In any case, the contract will also cover topics such as liability. All of these details need to be negotiated with your client prior to the work. But this is about consulting, not about open source. &lt;strong&gt;Under all circumstances, ask a lawyer to draft a contract for you.&lt;/strong&gt; That is the cheapest option in the long-term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright owner of the open-source project, you can do with the code as you wish, including granting separate licenses to clients. The existing MIT license to the public is not relevant here, because it is not an exclusive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have accepted contributions from other persons, you do not own the complete copyright of the project and have to comply with the project license, even for your own use. Since the MIT license requires that you keep the copyright statement and license intact for each file, you may not remove this attribution. This doesn't prevent you or your client from selling or modifying the code, it just means that the source code must still include the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot relicense MIT-licensed code under the the Unlicense, since you may only use MIT-licensed works if you keep the notice intact. The Unlicense does not ensure this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T10:38:26.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5498" CreationDate="2017-05-21T13:06:12.273" Score="2" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a master thesis and want to use software on BSD License to carry out my calculations. As I understand, I can use it freely since it's not even a commercial use. Just need somebody to confirm it. Also, should I disclose information about the license in my thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8155" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T19:40:27.873" Title="Use of a BSD License software in a thesis" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2017-05-21T19:39:09.737" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, BSD-licensed code is free for anyone to use for any purpose.  You don't need to disclose the license in your thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @MadHatter pointed out, if you were to include the source of the program in your thesis, say as an appendix, you would need to include the license in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should of course give credit as you would for any resource that you use, but that's an academic issue not a licensing issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T19:40:27.873" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T19:40:27.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4394" CreationDate="2017-05-22T05:38:56.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question is &quot;it depends&quot; ... on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the scope of the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ratio users to developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where the project fits in the software stack.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The issue tracker is to help with the development of the project,&lt;br&gt;if developers don't have time to respond to requests and users are ignored, then allowing the requests to begin with is just adding noise to the issue tracker and false-hope for users that their suggestions will considered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When issues in a tracker are getting ignored this isn't good practice and may be off-putting to users and prospective developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chances that feature requests can be handled on a single purpose command-line program (for example) is much higher compared to (for eg) a game-engine which has a &lt;em&gt;huge&lt;/em&gt; potential scope (platform support, 3D-rendering-backends, ai, scripting languages, shaders, physics, networking, streaming data, image/mesh/audio formats... etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also some difference between an end-user application &lt;em&gt;(where users are likely to request features from the application they're migrating from)&lt;/em&gt;, compared to middle-ware - which is likely to only be used by developers who are aware of the scope of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is up to each project to decide if they can effectively handle requests in their issue tracker or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some policy options besides all or nothing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enhancements may be acceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only if a developer accepts the task and plans to work on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only if their is a bounty to develop the improvement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a fixed time-period, then closed if no action is taken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on a separate site, where users can collaborate before proposing well planned tasks to developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prevents the issue tracker overflowing with unhandled topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz/issues/1207&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See further discussion on this topic for the OpenToonz project.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160" LastEditorUserId="160" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T05:54:48.530" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T05:54:48.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5503" CreationDate="2017-05-23T06:50:41.390" Score="2" ViewCount="7349" Body="&lt;p&gt;can I use FFmpeg.exe video recording feature for commercial use?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ffmpeg.exe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8077" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T07:30:04.727" Title="can i use FFMPEG video recording in commercial use?" Tags="|commercial|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5502" CreationDate="2017-05-23T07:30:04.727" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the project itself says&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;FFmpeg License and Legal Considerations ... are a constant source of questions and confusion&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  They go on to note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FFmpeg is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or later. However, FFmpeg incorporates several optional parts and optimizations that are covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later. If those parts get used the GPL applies to all of FFmpeg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are simply bundling the executable alongside your program, and your program invokes ffmpeg through userspace, you likely aren't making a derivative work, so you need only honour the licence terms on ffmpeg with respect to ffmpeg.  If you are making a derivative work of ffmpeg, for example by linking your application to it, things are more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you trigger the GPL, your commercial application will have to give all users &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, which is likely to make it non-viable as a commercial application.  If you can keep your software to being a derivative of ffmpeg-under-LGPL, then you will only need to distribute the source of ffmpeg, and not free up your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;project's page&lt;/a&gt; lists the things the project thinks you must do in order to keep ffmpeg under LGPL, which list &lt;em&gt;starts&lt;/em&gt; with (but is not limited to)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Compile FFmpeg without &quot;--enable-gpl&quot; and without &quot;--enable-nonfree&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use dynamic linking (on windows, this means linking to dlls) for linking with FFmpeg libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distribute the source code of FFmpeg, no matter if you modified it or not. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; their advice, it is likely that you can use ffmpeg in your derivative work without having to free the whole work.  Note also that on the subject of patents the project adds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ever, IANAL/IANYL, so you should get proper legal advice before relying on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T07:30:04.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5536" CreationDate="2017-05-23T09:47:29.607" Score="4" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our application currently has a licence which is not compatible with AGPL. We need to use a library licensed under AGPL (currently the best one for the job and the client would like us to use it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We thought about creating a web service using this library and we would license it under AGPL. Our application would directly depend on it to function properly. We wanted to create two svn repositories, one for the main project and one for the web service AGPL. To install our application, one would need to retrieve the code from both repositories, compile and run the applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that count as a derivative work? Both source codes are open and publicly available. The main project needs to keep its license and cannot be licensed under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web service can work as-is. One can just use it without the other project, it is just kind of useless since the web service validates metadata with rules only valid for the main project. The web service has default config files valid only for the main project but they can all be replaced by something completely unrelated. The main problem is that the web service contains default files which make me think that it is potentially a derivative work and if my main project uses this web service, it will be forced to be AGPL to be able to use the web service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe that makes a different but the library AGPL is only used and not changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have an idea if I can use this AGPL web service and keep my license on the main project? If that's not the case, I will need to create another web service with a compatible license and keep the AGPL web service for internal use only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8167" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-05-23T17:59:14.943" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T17:59:58.023" Title="Web service licensed under AGPL - distribution" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5520" CreationDate="2017-05-23T12:56:17.753" Score="2" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional expectation for contributions to a free software project are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;inbound=outbound&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1#contribution-policies-and-free-software-tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/contributor-agreements.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]. That is, if the project is under license X, contributions are made under license X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd like to make a simple statement about this in my README, just for clarity. I don't want to say &quot;inbound=outbound&quot; because that phrase is opaque without a lot of prior knowledge. Is there a well-established / recognised phrase for stating this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm looking for a standardised phrase for a human reader, not a legal solution which might be license dependant [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5508&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5512&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5513&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;].)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T13:32:57.420" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T13:32:57.420" Title="Is there a standard way to declare inbound=outbound?" Tags="|collaboration|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="474" CreationDate="2017-05-24T09:42:10.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another benefit that's not been mentioned so far is covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/questions/215405/can-you-help-me-with-my-software-licensing-issue/215584#215584&quot;&gt;this ServerFault question and my answer thereto&lt;/a&gt; - you don't have to worry about licensing audits.  This may seem trivial, but if you read some of the other answers you'll start to see how time-consuming that can be, especially in an enterprise of any size - often a full-time person is required just to track all the intricacies of what is licensed and where, to prevent completely-accidental but potentially-expensive violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, as I do, eschew all proprietary software, dealing with audits and license renewal takes about 30 seconds a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T09:42:10.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5511" CreationDate="2017-05-24T10:25:09.147" Score="7" ViewCount="1728" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that a simple way to manage contributions was to add &quot;and contributors&quot; to the copyright byline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Foo project &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Copyright 2017 J. Hacker and contributors &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shared under the Libre License version 4 or later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion was that this meant that any changes made by contributors were implicitly shared under the same license. I have forgotten where I originally read this, but here's a real-world example of someone doing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clarify copyright: &quot;... and contributors&quot;. Contributors don't have to assign me the copyright to their contributions; they only have to agree to release their contributions under the same license as the rest of the clang-ctags source code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags/commit/dbba978ced602d63f425d7c30635db3c5357cc51&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags/commit/dbba978ced602d63f425d7c30635db3c5357cc51&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true and are there any other implications? (I'm not looking for legal advice, but I am looking for a reliable citation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T11:54:16.233" Title="What does &quot;and contributors&quot; in the copyright byline imply?" Tags="|collaboration|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-24T13:38:04.350" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an idea for a modern compiler project which will involve, at least at the start:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A driver program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A set of libraries that implement the compiler, much like LLVM/Clang.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A runtime library that users can link with to enable the various features of the language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to achieve here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to stop anyone (or company) taking the project and slapping it under a more restrictive licence and saying that it's all GPLv3 including all the libs unless you pay them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to allow the user to statically link with the runtime lib, i.e. iOS originally only allowed static linking, also embedded devices use static linking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to allow the linking to the compiler libs to create new tools and not to restrict the distribution of said tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to enforce the sharing of contributions back to the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been talking with a few people and someone brought up the issue of CLA's and that he would never sign one because it means the company controlling the project would basically get free work and they would profit by then doing whatever they wanted with it. I kind of agree with that sentiment and would like to do this without requiring the CLA, much like &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/698452/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linus&lt;/a&gt; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which licence(s) should I choose? Should I dual licence? What would be the implications of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking at MPL 2.0 initially, but I'm not sure if this would cover this project enough. Maybe some form of dual licencing, GPLv3 (with linking exception) and BSD or Apache 2.0 or MPL 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I forgot to mention one thing about the GPL runtime exception that is one reason for starting this project in the first place, the rule of the IR from GCC. One thing I want to do is to produce SPIR-V as a target, which is an IR. As this would not be using GCC, this should not apply, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T18:00:07.067" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T18:00:07.067" Title="Keeping contributions and allowing free use of libraries. i.e. Complex licencing issue" Tags="|license-recommendation|gpl-3|apache-2.0|multi-licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5508" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:54:16.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; A copyright notice is just the list of the copyright owners. It does not give magic licensing powers. The “… and contributors” is a truism: each contributor keeps their copyright unless they sign it away. This is the same as the absence of any copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyright notice is not required, but is strongly encouraged. If you have a copyright notice, it should list the correct copyright owners. If a project was started by a single author who later incorporated contributions by other authors, the primary author does not own sole copyright. For projects with lots of small contributions by many people, it would be unfeasible to list all actual authors in the copyright notice. Instead, it is common to list the &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt; of authors as the copyright owner(s), or to explicitly list the primary authors and note that additional authors exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; The &amp;lt;project&amp;gt; authors&#xA;&#xA;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;primary authors&amp;gt; and contributors&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complete list of authors could perhaps be in an AUTHORS or CREDITS file, or implicitly in the version control history. But as far as I know, keeping a list of copyright owners is not required, it's just a very good idea to ensure traceability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright notice would only list the primary authors, this would indicate they own the complete copyright for the project. In the example you cite, the copyright notice was amended to clarify that this is not the case: every contributor keeps their copyright. That is the default. If copyright were to be transferred, this would require an explicit contract (copyright assignment, usually as part of a contributor license agreement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some jurisdictions separate copyright from moral rights. Then, copyright only covers economic aspects: the copyright owner may issue licenses. Moral rights cannot be waived in some jurisdictions, and e.g. cover the right to attribution. I.e. even if I sign away my copyright to a contribution by accepting a CLA, I may have a right to be credited as a contributor. The copyright notice is not the place for such a credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A specific formulation of the copyright notice does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; affect how contributions are licensed.&lt;/strong&gt; Instead, this would be covered in a contributor license agreement or in the license itself. Notably, the Apache License 2 contains a CLA, and copyleft licenses such as the GPL family limit how derivative works (and therefore contributions) may be licensed. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GitHub terms of service contain a default CLA&lt;/a&gt;, but that only codifies the expectation that contributors issue an implicit license when they explicitly submit contributions to a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T11:54:16.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5515" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:13:42.513" Score="5" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional expectation for contributions to a free software project are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;inbound=outbound&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1#contribution-policies-and-free-software-tradition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/contributor-agreements.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]. That is, if the project is under license X, contributions are made under license X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this apply to a project released under Apache 2.0 with no additional CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T13:22:24.177" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T09:11:04.993" Title="Does inbound=outbound apply to Apache 2.0 without a CLA?" Tags="|apache-2.0|collaboration|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5539" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:22:01.350" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional expectation for contributions to a free software project are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;inbound=outbound&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/11/7/trouble-harmony-part-1#contribution-policies-and-free-software-tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;http://producingoss.com/en/contributor-agreements.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]. That is, if the project is under license X, contributions are made under license X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this apply to a project released under any/all of the following licenses with no additional CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL v2-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v2-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL v2-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v2-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL v3-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v3-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AGPL v3-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL v3-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v3-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AGPL v3-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not concerned with compatibility beyond that, just that in each case that contributions are &quot;by default&quot; the same GPL-variant as the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T12:33:47.687" Title="Does inbound=outbound apply to GPL-family without a CLA?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|agpl-3.0|collaboration|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5518" CreationDate="2017-05-26T08:58:06.600" Score="3" ViewCount="4092" Body="&lt;p&gt;Highcharts is supposed to be an open source chart project that is free for personal use and for non-profit organisations. For non-profit organisations and individuals it is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://Creative%20Commons%20(CC)%20Attribution-NonCommercial%20licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial licence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm in a situation that I am a software developer, developing software for an eligible organisation (non-profit, non-government since highcharts does not consider government organisations to be covered). Now as I understand it, this organisation does not need a licence for Highcharts and if I was an employee of this organisation I could just use highcharts to develop a Highcharts enabled website for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is my previous assumption that if an in-house team develops the organisation's website then a licence is not required correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I am not an employee of of that organisation but I am just contracted &lt;strong&gt;as an individual&lt;/strong&gt; to create and deliver a Highcharts enabled website for them, do I need to purchase a licence for Highcharts?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I belong to a for-profit company which is contracted to develop a to create and deliver a Highcharts enabled website to a non-profit organisation, is a licence required in that case and if yes, what kind of licence (assuming that Highcharts is not generally going to be used by that company in any other projects or services)? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5534" LastEditorUserId="5534" LastEditDate="2017-05-26T09:09:18.167" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T15:59:36.957" Title="Do I need a highcharts licence if I'm developing software for a non-profit" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-nc|contracts|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5512" CreationDate="2017-05-26T09:11:04.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, submissions to an Apache 2.0 licensed project are themselves Apache 2.0 licensed. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#contributions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5 of the license text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. Submission of Contributions.&lt;/strong&gt; Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T09:11:04.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T09:35:49.163" Score="3" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish my application with the GPLv3 licence, as the used libraries are also published with the GPLv3 licence. So far so good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But besides this my application needs a further software to be installed to be run correctly. In my case this is an instance of R, which would be so far no problem, as it is also published with the GPLv3 licence. But would it be a problem, if the required software, that will not be shipped with my application, would have a licence that does not fit with a GPLv3 licence? Or is this no problem as long as I do not ship the software with my application and give the advice to install this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T00:05:32.123" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T20:47:21.837" Title="Consider licence of third party software that is required to be installed?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2017-05-26T12:04:01.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-NC 3.0 license has this to say about non-commercial/commercial use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC 3.0&lt;/a&gt; section 4.b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So contrary to the Highcharts FAQ it is not relevant what the &lt;em&gt;identity&lt;/em&gt; of the user is: the actual license makes no distinction between individuals and organizations, or between non-profits, government agencies, and companies.&#xA;The relevant part is the &lt;em&gt;manner&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; with which the work is used. In particular, non-profit organizations sometimes do commercial things like fundraising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly non-commercial use means is left intentionally vague in the CC-BY-NC license. The Creative Commons Wiki has a page on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NonCommerical Interpretation&lt;/a&gt; but that is not part of the license. For cases that are not clear you'll have to ask the licensor, though in this case they might be biased towards interpreting usage as commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my subjective understanding that an organization may use a CC-BY-NC work if their use is clearly not primarily commercial, e.g. as part of an awareness and information campaign. This looks different if the “awareness campaign” is actually an advertisement for a product or for a fundraiser. If an otherwise informational web page gets a “donate now!” button, that would look commercial to me. Similarly, I would interpret use as part of internal accounting software as commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the use of the non-profit organization may be non-commercial, this does not mean that your use as part of developing the work is also non-commercial. If you are selling a web page to the organization, that looks commercial to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this answer is purely about the concepts of the CC-BY-NC license. I am not a lawyer and cannot advise on the licensing scheme of any concrete product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T12:04:01.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2017-05-26T12:06:44.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons says&lt;/a&gt; that the NC licence prohibits uses that  are &quot;&lt;em&gt;primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  They go on to note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC's definition does not turn on the type of user: if you are a nonprofit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could still run afoul of the NC restriction, and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to question one seems to me to be that it depends what the non-profit, through its development team, is using the software &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;.  If it's serving the non-profit's charitable purpose, then I suspect that is a lawful use under CC BY-NC.  If it's fundraising, this is arguably not lawful (&lt;em&gt;primarily intended for ... monetary compensation&lt;/em&gt;).  My church rents its rooms out as a commercial proposition, and that activity would almost certainly not be lawful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions two and three seem easier: your primary purpose in question two, and your company's in question three, are to make money, so the use under CC BY-NC is not lawful and in both cases a commercial license will need to be purchased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, CC advises that &quot;&lt;em&gt;you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excellent illustration of why non-commercial-only licences are not considered free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T12:06:44.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T12:20:11.947" Score="4" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making contributions to a GPLv3-only project. I want to make it clear now that, when the time comes, I am happy for my contributions to be used in any later version. This way, if the maintainers choose to relicense the project under GPLv4-only or GPLv4-or-later, they do not need to contact me to do so. How can I make this clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was imagining add my own section to the headers of any files I modify as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Foo project &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Copyright 1984-2017 Original authors &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Shared under GPLv3 only...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional contributions &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Copyright 2017 J. Hacker&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Shared under GPLv3 or, at your option...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a solution that would work for both GPLv2 or GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T15:16:53.060" Title="How do I make GPL &quot;or later&quot; contributions to a GPL &quot;only&quot; project?" Tags="|gpl-3|contributor|gpl-2|collaboration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2017-05-26T13:26:31.767" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not found an already-established phrase used to express this. I'm going with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional contributions under the same terms are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T13:26:31.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2017-05-26T13:59:18.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now as I understand it, this organisation does not need a licence for&#xA;  Highcharts and if I was an employee of this organisation I could just&#xA;  use highcharts to develop a Highcharts enabled website for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL. But&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) the licensee would normally be the organisation rather than its employers or contract workers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) the organisation does need a license. That's why Highcharts has provided one: specifically, the CC-BY-NC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) I don't think there's a distinction between employees and contract workers. If the organisation has a license to do X (and it appears they do) then they can ask you to do X on their behalf, whether you are an employee or not, unless the license defines explicit constraints, which it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) If this license ever gets tested in court then the lawyers are going to have a field day and the outcome is highly unpredictable. It's therefore highly unlikely that anyone will risk suing anyone unless it's a flagrant breach. If what you are doing seems fair to you, then it's unlikely to be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3774" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T13:59:18.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5514" CreationDate="2017-05-26T15:59:36.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No answer seems to have told you this already so let me highlight that Highcharts is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open source nor free software! On their website they are very careful not to use these terms. Instead they say that they are &quot;Free for non-commercial&quot; (this means at no cost) and &quot;Open&quot; (which is vague but is basically about trying to benefit from the advantage of open source without fully committing to it). Indeed, they are developed in the open, on GitHub and anyone can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, I wouldn't venture in giving definite answers to your questions because the interpretation of the non-commercial clause might very well vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So I cannot advise you in any way except to tell you that you should either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Talk to a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask to Highcharts themselves in writing, and hope that they give you a clear answer (this should help you to defend yourself in court if they later change their interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T15:59:36.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2017-05-27T00:03:33.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you are contributing a huge amount of code, modifying the headers in such a way is generally not a good idea. What you could do instead is simply to ask the owners of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T00:03:33.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5525" CreationDate="2017-05-27T09:20:14.073" Score="2" ViewCount="1158" Body="&lt;p&gt;While applying AGPLv3 I discovered the following statement on the GNU website's page titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to use GNU licenses for your own software&lt;/a&gt; about 10 paragraphs in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are releasing your program under the GNU AGPL, you only need to include the text version of the GNU AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I interpret that statement in the context of other GPL licenses it seems to indicate the traditional GNU license headers are not required under AGPLv3. Under the GNU Afferno General Public License, is it true one only needs to include the text version of the &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastEditorUserId="8188" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T09:23:57.017" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T09:23:57.017" Title="Are license headers required under the AGPLv3?" Tags="|license-notice|agpl-3.0|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5524" CreationDate="2017-05-27T10:42:59.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a misunderstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous paragraphs talk about the requirements for the GPL and LGPL. Since the LGPLv3 is written as the GPL plus a set of extra permissions, you need to include both COPYING for the GPL and COPYING.LESSER for the LGPL additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the AGPL is independent from the GPL and is contained in a single license text. So for an AGPL project you must not include the GPL license, and only the AGPL license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “text version” in all cases means that the license should be included as a plaintext file, not in any markup format such as HTML, and not in any document format like ODT that would require special viewer software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per-file copyright + license headers are not required in any case, but probably still a good idea regardless of license. The value of these headers is that an independent file can be traced back to a project, and that essential license information is repeated in the file itself. However, the GPL licenses apply to a software &lt;em&gt;as whole&lt;/em&gt; and not only to individual files, so as per my understanding only project-level license and copyright information is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T12:23:08.453" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T12:23:08.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5504" CreationDate="2017-05-29T06:15:57.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;We ended up implementing our own things and license it with EUPL license so now we are good and we don't have to distribute any source code licensed under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8167" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T17:59:58.023" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T17:59:58.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T10:12:01.407" Score="5" ViewCount="3730" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am customizing a  particular software developed by Company X and distributed with Apache 2 license. I expect to use my customized version for commercial  purpose. The original software comes with a user interface and it has the copy write notice with company name as bellow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;X security manager | ©2017 X inc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Apache 2 license allow removing above line and add anything else ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8198" LastEditorUserId="8201" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T01:09:33.270" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T01:09:33.270" Title="Removing copyright notice in UIs of Apache 2 licensed software" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5528" CreationDate="2017-05-29T17:05:47.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general (not just with Apache) you should (or with many licenses, &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;) preserve the existing copyright line, but you can add your own copyright line.&#xA;This requirement to preserve the copyright notice is usually included in the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T17:05:47.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1893" CreationDate="2017-05-29T17:16:20.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This game has been released as open source by Eric S. Raymond, claiming that he has permission of the authors. It's on &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gitlab.com&lt;/a&gt; as announced today in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://games.slashdot.org/story/17/05/29/0632250/esr-announces-the-open-sourcing-of-the-worlds-first-text-adventure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; on slashdot.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T17:25:48.843" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T17:25:48.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5528" CreationDate="2017-05-29T18:06:10.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must not misrepresent the copyright ownership of the software. Therefore, you cannot remove a copyright notice, or replace it with your name. The original authors still hold the copyright to their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you make changes to the software, the copyright of the software is shared between you and the original authors. You can therefore add a notice for your copyright, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2017 Your Name&#xA;Copyright 2017 Original Authors&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you should not remove copyright notices that are shown in the user interface, you can change how these notices are displayed. A menu item called “Help &gt; About this software” is a good place in GUIs, so you could move them there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; has a couple of terms that are relevant to your scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must keep any copyright notices intact in the &lt;em&gt;source files&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. as part of the copyright headers in each source code file (see 4.c). This suggests (but doesn't explicitly state) that you are not required to keep copyright notices intact in non-source forms of the software, e.g. as part of a GUI. I would still advise against removing existing copyright notices if that would create the fraudulent impression that you would be the sole copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Adding a copyright notice is explicitly allowed in 4.d: “You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original contains a NOTICE file, you must display it in the user interface, “if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear” (from 4.d again). For a GUI, that would probably be an entry in the help menu. Again, adding your own notices is allowed: “You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work” (ibid.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget to give your users a copy of the license (see 4.a).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T18:06:10.350" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5537" CreationDate="2017-05-29T21:39:28.870" Score="5" ViewCount="3403" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently started using GitHub, as I was told that it is a good thing to do. However, I am wondering how to upload a certain project that uses external libraries. This project, made using Visual Studio 2017, uses some external libraries (SDL 2, GLEW and GLM) stored in a &quot;dependencies&quot; folder inside the solution. This folder contains the header files, .lib files and the .dll files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I upload these to GitHub as part of my project, in order for it to run, without getting any legal issues from the creators of these libraries? Do I have to credit them somewhere, just let the user manually install them, or is there something that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8213" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T14:54:45.827" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T14:54:45.827" Title="External libraries on GitHub" Tags="|github|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5552" CreationDate="2017-05-30T15:00:27.390" Score="7" ViewCount="542" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project that used to be under the GPL licence (now it has no licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this repository I had many short stories. My intention was for the code to be open source but the stories to be our copyright. When I made the commit I had not considered this. Once I realized that this might be an issue I removed the license for all future versions of the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am concerned about now is what licence do people have with these stories? Can they do whatever they want with them under the terms of the GPL? If (hypothetically) somebody wanted to write a book or a movie based on these stories would they be allowed to? If they wanted to make a complete copy of the website with all of the stories in it, can they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue I have is that I would like to make the code open source again under the GPL or potentially some other licence. If I do this will all the code in-between the 2 versions which are open source, be under any license? For example after I removed the license the first time I continued to add more stories and text that I would not like people to be able to do whatever they want with. Now these are all in a database and not part of the source code. But if I make the project open source will they be able to use that content as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8209" LastEditorUserId="8209" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T17:19:33.990" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T15:10:13.827" Title="Is the text in my open source project under the GPL?" Tags="|copyright|gpl-3|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5504" CreationDate="2017-05-30T18:47:13.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume a technical trick (like your web service idea) to avoid the intent of the license wouldn't work. But your assumption about compatibility is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EUPL (you stated in your answer that that is the licence your project is under) has statements of compatibility that work with the AGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EUPL v1.1 states compatibility to CeCILL v2.0, which states compatibility to GPL v2 or later and GPL v3 states compatibility to AGPL v3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EUPL v1.2 states compatibility to AGPL v3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only need to comply with both licenses, not change your projects license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both EUPL and AGPL licensed code were distributed together a potential licensee may discard the AGPL code if they wish to only comply with the license of the rest of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not convert AGPL to EUPL, i.e. you are not allowed to distribute a combination and tell your licensee only about the EUPL. The EUPL states how to do the conversion to other licenses via the compatibility mentioned above. What I called conversion here is an additional step that you don't need to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7581" LastEditorUserId="7581" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T07:41:26.753" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T07:41:26.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5534" CreationDate="2017-05-30T19:08:15.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't recommend uploading static binaries and header files to GitHub. A better approach might be to create a script that is executed before compilation that downloads these dependencies. Alternatively, you could use what is already installed on the machine, if that is applicable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to upload the external libraries to GitHub, you must comply with all of the terms and conditions of their licenses. For example, you must show the full copyright notice for some of these libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nigels-com/glew/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nigels-com/glew/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libsdl.org/license.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.libsdl.org/license.php&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://glm.g-truc.net/copying.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://glm.g-truc.net/copying.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the licenses for your external dependencies are fairly permissive. However, I'll give you an example of might happen if you chose to upload a GPLv3 binary. If you uploaded a GPLv2 binary, you would be required to provide the source code for this binary as well as all instructions to configure, compile, and install the binary. If you don't comply with these requirements, you could lose your rights to continue using the binary or be sued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to credit them somewhere, just let the user manually install them or is there something that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the external libraries you are using require attribution if you choose to upload static binaries to GitHub. See the URLs to the licenses that I linked above. From the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe you have to do any sort of attribution if you let the user manually install the dependencies. However, the same sort of attribution would be required if you are statically linking your these libraries into your program, and sending the resulting binary to somebody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T19:08:15.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T01:24:51.467" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PocketC.H.I.P.&lt;/a&gt;, I assumed that it comes with FLOSS only, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their page advertises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source Hardware and Software mean you can do almost anything!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.getchip.com/pocketchip.html#faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Their FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is PocketC.H.I.P. Open Source?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, and you can get the hardware files at our &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NextThingCo/PocketCHIP-PCB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github repo&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I guess that these statements only apply to a subset of the product, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pico-8.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PICO-8&lt;/a&gt; (which is proprietary) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.getchip.com/pocketchip.html#applications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pre-installed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there anything else? Or does it become a fully free/libre/open system (software-wise) after &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/article/17/2/pocketchip-or-pi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;How does the PocketCHIP compare to the Raspberry Pi?&quot;&gt;uninstalling PICO-8&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not only worried about applications (PICO-8 would be in this category), but also about firmware/drivers (e.g., for the WiFi, the GPU, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T01:24:51.467" Title="Proprietary software pre-installed on the PocketC.H.I.P.?" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5513" CreationDate="2017-05-31T12:33:47.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, submissions to a GPL codebase remain under the same GPL variant. This is specifically because of the copyleft mechanism. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#section10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from section 10 of the GPLv3 license text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies to all listed variants of the GPL (version 2/3, only/or-later clause, A/L/GPL variant). Specific modifications to the license terms are sometimes allowed (for example, by the &quot;or later&quot; clause), but &quot;by default&quot; the terms remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T12:33:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5543" CreationDate="2017-05-31T15:43:33.593" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most commercial projects use open source, they do have an obligation to distribute with copyrights and licence . Not doing so is violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the sanctions for violating copyright ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if copyrights were omitted ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The commercial project was&#xA;intentionally distributed without copyrights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Juridiction: The company is in EU ( France and Germany) . The open source used are spread across US California, UK, Germany, France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5280" LastEditorUserId="5280" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T08:03:42.727" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T08:03:42.727" Title="Sanctions for not including the copyrights and licences" Tags="|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5542" CreationDate="2017-05-31T17:22:18.630" Score="1" ViewCount="793" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use images available in a GitHub repository that is marked with GPL3 license. If I proper reference it, can I use and modify it without author's explicit consent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is it still valid for MIT and GPL2 licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8222" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T06:25:13.737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T06:25:13.737" Title="Can I use images and resources available with GPL3 code?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5541" CreationDate="2017-05-31T18:06:07.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but unless stated elsewhere in the repository, it seems reasonable to assume the image is GPLv3 if the repository, as a whole, is marked as GPLv3. If I were you, I might attempt to do some investigation (e.g. look through commit history) to the origin of the image to double check that it is indeed GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I proper reference it, can I use and modify it without author's explicit consent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct, you do not need to get the author's consent to use a GPLv3 image. However, you should include any relevant copyright information from the source of the image (look for copyright in the git repository).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so, is it still valid for MIT and GPL2 licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it is not valid to include a GPLv3 image in a MIT or GPLv2 licensed project. GPLv3 is not compatible with either of those licenses. However, you could do the reverse. You could use a &quot;GPLv2 or any later version&quot; licensed or MIT licensed image in a GPLv3 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source license compatibility chart: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#/media/File:Floss-license-slide-image.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#/media/File:Floss-license-slide-image.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure to comply with &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of the requirements (not just the copyright requirement) of the GPLv3 if you choose to use that license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T20:39:55.600" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T20:39:55.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5540" CreationDate="2017-05-31T22:44:46.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that you're asking about other (weak) copyleft licences, but the text above is so clear, and the point so general, that I thought it worth quoting.  &lt;strong&gt;If you are only permitted to reproduce someone else's work if certain conditions are met, and you fail to meet them, then you have no right to reproduce their work, and if you do so you're infringing their copyright.&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 licence&lt;/a&gt; includes the grant that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the&#xA;        Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;        modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You&#xA;        meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works&#xA;            that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and&#xA;            attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,&#xA;            excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of&#xA;            the Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's pretty simple.  By removing others' copyright notices you fail to meet that condition, and by then redistributing their work (in source, object, or binary forms) you're committing copyright infringement.  Depending on the jurisdiction you're in, legal remedies for that include injunctive relief (where a court orders you to eg stop distributing your derivative work, and/or to recall and destroy any copies already distributed), compensatory damages (where a court estimates how much money the plaintiff would have made if you'd had to buy licences for the work you copied, and makes you give it to him/her), punitive damages (where a court makes a public example of you by giving a lot of your money to the plaintiff), and may include other remedies.  In some jurisdictions imprisonment is a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence that the infringement was deliberate (your part two above) may make certain of these penalties more likely to be applied, but it will all depend on local law (and you don't tell us your jurisdiction), and in any case IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's crazy to risk that.  Free software gives you so much for little in return: just honour the licences and all will be well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T22:44:46.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5551" CreationDate="2017-06-01T05:51:28.503" Score="7" ViewCount="1052" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.octave.org/FAQ#Licensing_issues&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Octave's FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Code written using Octave's native plug-in interface (also known as a&#xA;  .oct file) necessarily links with Octave internals and is considered a&#xA;  derivative work of Octave and therefore must be released under terms&#xA;  that are compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program that embeds the Octave interpreter (e.g., by calling the&#xA;  &quot;octave_main&quot; function), or that calls functions from Octave's&#xA;  libraries (e.g., liboctinterp, liboctave, or libcruft) is considered a&#xA;  derivative work of Octave and therefore must be released under terms&#xA;  that are compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, 'terms that are compatible with the GPL' appears repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I thought that it can be any license in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of GPL-compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, the part of &quot;... is considered a derivative work of Octave and therefore must be released under terms that are compatible with the GPL&quot; confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, derivative work of GPLed one should follow GPL itself, not compatible one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are 'terms that are compatible with the GPL'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8226" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T08:19:25.830" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T15:45:00.713" Title="What does 'terms that are compatible with the GPL' mean?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5547" CreationDate="2017-06-01T08:17:39.387" Score="2" ViewCount="682" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone clarify these claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This module is free software you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. Copyright (C) year Some Author. All Rights Reserved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like terms are the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;free you can...&lt;/em&gt; - mean - I can do what I want,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;All Rights Reserved&lt;/em&gt; - means - only he can do what he wants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8227" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T10:11:05.663" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T10:11:05.663" Title="Understanding a Perl module license" Tags="|licensing|copyright|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5550" CreationDate="2017-06-01T09:41:28.967" Score="0" ViewCount="1248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a library, currently under GPLv3 because I do not want my lib to be linked with a non open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine is writing a program under the MIT X11 License and needs my library. GPLv3 does not allow that: if my friend links my GPLv3 lib with his MIT program, this gives a combination that should be released under terms that are compatible with the GPL, so it cannot stay under the MIT X11 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the license of my library for a LGPLv3 would do the trick, but it would also allow dynamic links with closed-source programs, and I do not want that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8229" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T00:23:59.453" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T12:23:52.243" Title="copyleft licenses allowing dynamic linking with open-source program only" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5545" CreationDate="2017-06-01T10:09:04.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the customary license for Perl modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“All rights reserved” is just a reminder that someone holds the copyright for this code. By default, only the copyright holder may distribute copies of the program, or publish modified versions of the code. This is the “default license” for any code you see on the internet. You can't really do anything with it unless you get explicit permission.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, the copyright holder has given you a license: “you can redistribute and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself”. This is a rather vague statement, but currently the Perl license is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perl is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) the &quot;Artistic License&quot; which comes with this Kit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Perl documentation contains a copy of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://perldoc.perl.org/perlgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv1&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://perldoc.perl.org/perlartistic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artistic License&lt;/a&gt;. Larry Wall, the original author of Perl, has given a &lt;a href=&quot;http://dev.perl.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-standard interpretation of the GPL&lt;/a&gt; which makes Perl's usage of the GPL effectively very similar to the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to use the module under the license terms of either the GPLv1 (or later) or the Artistic License. The Artistic license gives you substantial flexibility to use the module even for commercial purposes, but has a number of unusual restrictions that apply when you modify the module.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Free software” doesn't mean you are free to do anything you want. However, free software culture tries to ensure as much freedom as possible for users, in contrast to proprietary software where EULAs try to give you as few freedoms as possible. The Free Software Foundation has published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By calling the module “free software”, the module author signals their intention to respect these freedoms. However, the term has no legal significance. The legally relevant part is the content of the license text, as discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T10:09:04.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5544" CreationDate="2017-06-01T10:50:05.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;License compatibility means that code licensed under one license can also be used under another license. This is a bit confusing because this compatibility usually only goes in one direction: if A is compatible with B, that doesn't imply that B is compatible with A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility list&lt;/a&gt; you mentioned mostly discusses which licenses can can be changed to GPL, not which licenses the GPL can be changed to. The text and not the colour coding is relevant, in particular since the colour coding does not distinguish between different versions of the GPL (e.g. GPLv2 is &lt;em&gt;not compatible&lt;/em&gt; with the GPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses can be implicitly compatible. I can take software licensed under A and use it under the terms of license B if B doesn't given me any additional permissions that A doesn't include, and if by complying with the B license I also satisfy all requirements of the A license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. we can relicense software under the MIT license to the GPLv3. This is possible because the MIT license explicitly allows sublicensing, as long as the copyright+license notice is kept in tact. The GPLv3 allows you to require such notices to be kept intact by adding additional terms under 7.b), so this license transition is compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reverse is not true: you can't move from the GPL to the MIT license because the MIT license supports none of the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses can also be made compatible explicitly by mentioning this in the source license. E.g. the GPLv3 explicitly allows software under the GPLv3 to be combined with AGPLv3 software. The GPLv3 is also compatible with later versions of the GPL iff the copyright holder “activates” this feature. This is the case for GNU Octave:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GNU Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (at your option) any later version.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(from the GNU Octave README)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the GPL does state that modified versions must be licensed under the GPL, we can use the GPL-licensed software under the terms of a compatible license and are then bound by that license instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems there are three kinds of possible licenses for GNU Octave plugins or programs embedding GNU Octave:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keeping he GPLv3, which is the current license of GNU Octave.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using a later version of the GPL. As of 2017, no later version exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;using the AGPLv3, though I don't think this is possible for plugins, only for programs embedding GNU Octave.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T10:50:05.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5544" CreationDate="2017-06-01T13:03:03.123" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a genuinely subtle point here.  It's easy to misunderstand - I am on record myself around these parts misunderstanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you combine work of your own with an existing, copyrighted work, you create a new, combined thing: a derivative work.  There are at least &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; licences involved in this: the licence on the original work, the licence on your work, and the licence on the derivative work.  The derivative work must be seen through all three licences, and if any of them requires something that another forbids, you have a licence incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, one source work is Octave, which is under GPLv3. As you point out, this requires that the licence on any derivative work is GPLv3 (or, optionally, a later GPL).  The derivative work must therefore be under GPLv3 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; work may be under any licence you like, as long as it doesn't conflict with the requirements of GPLv3 including the requirement that the licence covering the derivative work be GPLv3 (or later).  That is what is meant by a licence's being &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your work is simply a set of changes to Octave, it won't make any sense for you to distribute them separately.  But if your work were (say) a plugin &quot;&lt;em&gt;written using Octave's native plug-in interface&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then it might stand as a work in its own right, and you could choose to distribute it &lt;em&gt;on its own&lt;/em&gt; under eg Apache 2.0.  Someone who received a copy of your work under those terms and re-combined it with Octave would still, of course, have to release that derivative work under GPLv3, as would you if you were to redistribute the derivative work.  But someone who, say, received a copy of your work under Apache 2.0 and used it to create a standalone work in C would not be so obliged, and could release &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; combined work, including their changes, under eg Apache 2.0, if they so chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T15:07:05.090" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T15:07:05.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5546" CreationDate="2017-06-01T13:30:13.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, your friend still wants to release his program under the MIT X11 license, and you still want to prevent your library from being linked into proprietary, closed-source programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any licenses that are both compatible with the MIT X11 license, yet prevent the linking into closed-source programs. A derivative of your friends MIT licensed program would be allowed to be later converted to a closed-source program, and I believe this is where the problem lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may try creating a special interface and granting an exception for using this interface with non-GPL compatible software as outlined here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert on the exception mechanism of GPLv3, but maybe it's possible that you may use the Additional Terms section (section #7) of the GPLv3 to allow your friend to use your library. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T13:30:13.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5544" CreationDate="2017-06-01T15:45:00.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This advice from the Octave project is in line with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU project's own FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not exactly. It means you must release your program under a license compatible with the GPL (more precisely, compatible with one or more GPL versions accepted by all the rest of the code in the combination that you link). The combination itself is then available under those GPL versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This FAQ item directly applies to your case, but doesn't fully answer your question by itself, so I'll explain further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL imposes a particular set of requirements on the distribution of derivative works. Importantly, a few of those requirements include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;downstream derivatives must, as a whole, be licensed under the GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the licensing terms of downstream derivatives may not impose any additional requirements beyond what is required by the GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your own creative work may be licensed under any terms that do not cause issue when they are &amp;quot;upgraded&amp;quot; to the terms of the GPL as part of the combined work (original GPL work + your work) that you distribute. In other words, you may license your work with terms that are a subset of the GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visually, we can show how the terms of your work (left) combine with the GPL terms of the original work (middle) to create the combined terms (right):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FMB65.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FMB65.png&quot; alt=&quot;permissive subset fits inside GPL requirements, proprietary terms do not&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case where your works is licensed under a subset of GPL terms, there is no issue complying with the requirement that the combined work be licensed under GPL terms. Your work's terms are &lt;strong&gt;GPL-compatible&lt;/strong&gt;. In the second case, where your work is licensed under terms that are not a subset of GPL terms, some rogue term(s) will exist in conflict with the GPL's requirement that the combined work be licensed under the GPL, which cannot include any additional non-GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T15:45:00.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5535" CreationDate="2017-06-01T16:34:31.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is directly addressed in the GPL FAQ item, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is it enough just to put a copy of the GNU GPL in my repository?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just putting a copy of the GNU GPL in a file in your repository does not explicitly state that the code in the same repository may be used under the GNU GPL. Without such a statement, it's not entirely clear that the permissions in the license really apply to any particular source file. An explicit statement saying that eliminates all doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] lawyers and courts might apply common sense and conclude that you must have put the copy of the GNU GPL there because you wanted to license the code that way. Or they might not. Why leave an uncertainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the past:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is whether your GPL grant did in fact apply to the stories, even though you didn't mean for it to apply. This may come down to exactly what you said in your project (e.g., in your README, code headers, and any other license grant you might have specified external to the project) and possibly how the poject was structured (e.g., were the code and stories in separate directories? where was the text of the GPL, relative to these files?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely placing a copy of the GPL alongside a creative work without explanation doesn't license that work under the GPL. Or does it? It is exactly this kind of legal ambiguity the FSF hopes programmers will avoid by including an explicit license grant within each file of a GPL-licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone did create a derivative work based on your stories, and you sued them, would the court rule that you did in fact license your stories under the GPL, or would they rule against the downstream recipient and say that you didn't license your stories under the GPL after all? I don't have a working knowledge of relevant case law (if any exists), so the answer to this question is not clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you have indeed ceased distributing anything under the GPL, so only recipients of the old, possibly-GPL-licensed version of your work can make any argument that they have a GPL-licensed version of the stories. Certainly no one can correctly say, &amp;quot;You used to distribute this under the GPL in the distant past, so I'm going to pretend that my recently-downloaded copy is as well.&amp;quot; However, people who genuinely do have an old GPL-licensed copy can legally distribute the GPL-licensed parts (whichever those may be) without issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the future:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply be explicit about what parts of your project are licensed in what ways. Have a README or LICENSING file that says something like, &amp;quot;Files under the &lt;code&gt;foo&lt;/code&gt; directory are under the GNU GPL, version 3 or (at your option) any later version. Image files under &lt;code&gt;foo&lt;/code&gt; are also available under the MIT X11 license. Files in the &lt;code&gt;bar&lt;/code&gt; directory are made available only for personal reading and are all rights reserved.&amp;quot; Now there's no confusion at all about which files are under which licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF also strongly suggests that you notate each individual file with what license it is under](&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoticeInSourceFile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoticeInSourceFile&lt;/a&gt;), since a README file can be separated from the licensed files, e.g., when someone reuses a particular file in a separate project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T15:10:13.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5566" CreationDate="2017-06-02T00:32:03.453" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have built upon software that is released under GPLv2 (with the 'at your option, a later version' addition), and am now conveying that software to my client under GPLv3. Of course, I provide the full source code with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also assigning the copyright of the work to the client. The client may or may not decide to publicly distribute this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; publicly distribute the software, would I still be considered to have been 'conveyed' the software, and thus I could still make use of it in line with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, since I assigned copyright to the client, do I also have to destroy my copies of the software and wait for them to convey it back to me (or publicly release it) before I can use the software again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T18:31:42.940" Title="Re-assigning copyright on GPL licensed software - does the assigner still have a copy?" Tags="|copyright|gpl-3|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5573" CreationDate="2017-06-02T02:41:10.867" Score="9" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;A client has sent me GPL'ed code to work on for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This code has not been publicly released, so there is no way for me to obtain it -&#xA;other than directly from this client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this considered distributing/conveying the work to me? i.e. do I automatically obtain a license to use the code myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4763" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T17:10:14.860" Title="If a client sends me GPL'ed code, has it been distributed/conveyed to me?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5553" CreationDate="2017-06-02T03:54:10.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If You reassign Copyright you don't have any rights.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at this from a corporate perspective, a consultant or employee doesn't retain the right to code created on a &quot;Work for Hire&quot; basis (at least in any jurisdiction I am aware of). Of course they would be hard pressed to complain of a copy retained for reference purposes (on a work computer for the employee or contractor), but not necessarily for deployment purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So ask for a personal distribution copy with the agreement that you don't distribute it within a year or something, be creative. And find out what their issues might be and address those issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just don't give them any (justified or not) reasons for regretting using GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T03:54:10.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2017-06-02T07:54:37.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to think of a patent is a time-limited monopoly granted for the usage of some patented &quot;idea&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an open source projects produces code that implements some patented stuff, there is no usage involved yet. For instance, FFmpeg may implement some patented media codecs, but you only &quot;infringe&quot; on the patents if you use these codecs... e.g. the code in of itself is not &quot;infringing&quot; at rest, only when you run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there is no such as fair use of this monopoly: the patent holder has exclusive rights, and the fact that you do not make money out of it has no bearing AFAIK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the net effect is that any users of your code may need to acquire a patent license of sorts for using your code. What it entails is going to be very specific for each patent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T14:40:42.353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T14:40:42.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5546" CreationDate="2017-06-02T12:23:52.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can often find people releasing their software under permissive licenses such as MIT or BSD* complain that they can't use any GPL library and that it's unfair since their software remains open source.&#xA;Sure it's open source but their software is distributed under a license that grants  permission to integrate it into proprietary software (as remarked by @airfishey). Wanting to include GPL software in it is self-contradictory if you wish to continue to follow the requirements of both authors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIT/BSD-licensed software author wish to grant permission to integrate their software into proprietary software; but they want to use a library under GPL...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;...and GPL-licensed library author wants to prevent their software ever being integrated into proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the will of the GPL-licensed software author is followed, then it defeats the purpose of the MIT/BSD license. In this case, what use would there be to keep the software under a permissive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, why can't your friend just use GPL for their software as well?**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I use generic terms such as GPL and MIT/BSD instead of giving version numbers, etc, because there is nothing specific to one particular version of a license here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;**My guess is because they have the (well spread) feeling that somehow the GPL license is wrong. There is nothing wrong with it. It used to be the standard, now MIT is more fashionable, but there is nothing wrong continuing to publish software under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I prefer to use more permissive licenses as well but if I need to use a GPL library, I don't hesitate to switch to a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T12:23:52.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T04:20:12.293" Score="6" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often run into various licenses for commercial software, and large part of that software has a different text saying the same thing. With license proliferation being a known thing in OSS, are/were there any attempts to fight it in commercial sphere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, &lt;strong&gt;what are the unique concerns within the FLOSS community&lt;/strong&gt; that made deproliferation desirable there, but not in the domain of proprietary software? (Or if there has been such an effort that I haven't heard of, what distinguishes FLOSS such that the FLOSS deproliferation effort been so much more visible?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" OwnerDisplayName="ZeroUnderscoreOu" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T13:27:34.163" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T14:11:35.527" Title="Commercial licence deproliferation attempts" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5558" CreationDate="2017-06-02T14:49:13.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are attempts to create some standard or templates in other areas, but none that I know in commercial licenses agreements. If there were, not every contract would end up being different!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of related effort is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/commonform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common form&lt;/a&gt; for contract &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonform.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standardization&lt;/a&gt; and it may contain some licensing-related terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the thing is that proliferation is rather small in the FOSS world... there are about a 1000 significant license variations (and 5 to 10 times more variations on notices..) .... whereas there are likely 10 or 100 times more variants of commercial license contracts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the price to pay to paying: each license you pay for is also likely to be a whole new shiny thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You later asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what are the unique concerns within the FLOSS community that made deproliferation desirable there [...]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With FLOSS, one goal is to facilitate and foster reuse. Yet every package is also licensed and there are subtle license compatibility issues. If every package had a different license building complex system from FLOSS would be a nightmare (it is hard enough as it is) so naturally communities around a programming language, platform or framework have evolved to use similar or the same licensing: this makes reuse much simpler. For instance a lot of Perl project use the &quot;Same as Perl&quot; license, several C/C++-based userland utilities use a combo of LGPL for the library and GPL for the command line tools, several Java-based packages built on or reusing Apache-provided packages use the Apache license, some foundations or larger orgs even enforce this for simplicity and sanity such as the Apache or the Eclipse Foundations. Also FLOSS license terms are not negotiable: you either take it or pass. So there is usually no possibility of per-user variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the goal of commercial software is not only to maximize usage but to maximize the financial gain. Since every contract needs some transaction (e.g. some signature or agreement and some money transfer) there is not much incentive per se to facilitate these transactions across vendors. Furthermore, each contract is eventually negotiable and customers may want special terms which further increase the number of variations. Yet, some vendors (such as Atlassian at least historically) have always used very standard, non-negotiable licensing terms that apply across all their product lines to avoid license proliferation across their customers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T10:28:12.857" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T10:28:12.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5561" CreationDate="2017-06-02T16:42:14.330" Score="2" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at working on improving an app that has not been updated for several months, add some features etc. In the description of the app on google play it says that the app is open source and links the github, and in another forum it says the same thing (with no proof on the forum that they are the creator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on github there is no license and it does not say it is open source. It does have a link on the github readme to the google play page where it says that the app is open source but it doesn't say on github page that it is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, can I fork the app? I am not aware of the legal rules, can I use it on my phone and give it to a few friends? Can I share it larger than that or could I even put it on google play? I have tried contacting the creator of the app in multiple places with no response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8237" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T18:43:29.880" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T18:43:29.880" Title="Open source code with no license" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-03T16:29:28.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5560" CreationDate="2017-06-02T16:59:48.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the GitHub Terms of Service, yes, you can fork the project on GitHub using GitHub's fork functionality. Specifically, section D5 of the GitHub Terms of Service state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and &quot;fork&quot; your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of your Content in repositories they control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to access your Content through the GitHub Service, and to use, display and perform your Content, and to reproduce your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality. You may grant further rights if you adopt a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your rights are limited to the keeping the product on GitHub. Without a license grant, you can't use, modify, distribute, or any of the other good things that you can do with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, although you can make a copy of it on GitHub, you can't do much with that copy. You can't compile it and submit it to Google Play, you can't compile it and load it onto your phone (or your friends' phones), and you can't make modifications or derivative works of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there's no explicit license grant, the work is considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;all rights reserved&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, except for the few rights that were required to be granted in order to use the GitHub service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T16:59:48.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5569" CreationDate="2017-06-03T09:34:16.233" Score="3" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that means free usage of source code or its parts, free use of the product for personal or any commercial purposes, but the license obliges the user to place an advertisement of origin in products if they use parts of the licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean exactly advertising. For example a requirement to place a clickable ad banner, hyperlink with some specific keywords etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8243" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T15:56:46.107" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T15:56:46.107" Title="Is there a &quot;free use with advertisement&quot; license?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2017-06-03T13:53:18.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, there once was a licence very like this, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original, aka four-clause, BSD licence&lt;/a&gt;.  It contained the requirement that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software&#xA;     must display the following acknowledgement:&#xA;       This product includes software developed by the University of&#xA;       California, Berkeley and its contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some people&lt;/a&gt; referred to as &quot;&lt;em&gt;the obnoxious BSD advertising clause&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  The FSF's position about that clause and freedom is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your requirement is somewhat stronger: you don't merely intend to control the content of the end user's adverts, you mandate that they advertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that software under such a licence would almost certainly not be able to be combined with GPL'ed code, and might well be regarded as non-free by honourable people like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Debian Project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T13:53:18.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5571" CreationDate="2017-06-03T14:48:40.677" Score="7" ViewCount="1137" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are currently writing a piece of software. In it, we want to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Disconnect.me tracking services list&lt;/a&gt;. The list is licensed under the GPLv3. Our code will generally only run on servers, but we plan on releasing it under the MIT license. The tracker file will not be distributed with the software, but the setup script will automatically download it from the official source. It is then read and parsed in our software, and used to match URLs against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the issue that licensing datasets under the GPL is discouraged (since it was not our decision), what are the consequences for our final code? Since the file in question is a JSON data file, I am not sure how the different forms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking vs. fork-and-exec&lt;/a&gt; apply to it. Is this &quot;modularized enough&quot; that this use would be acceptable, or does this use already make the whole system a combined work and thereby require licensing the whole thing under the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T22:55:38.823" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T06:28:23.433" Title="Using GPL-covered dataset in non-GPL code" Tags="|gpl|mit|open-data|combined-work|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2017-06-03T16:28:40.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but the license oblidges the user to place an advertisement of origin in products if they use parts of the licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, several popular licenses have this restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And other parts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that most companies will find it easy to comply with these requirements without making them too obvious; for instance, Chrome puts them all hidden away at chrome://credits .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T16:28:40.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5553" CreationDate="2017-06-03T18:31:42.940" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you can't reassign &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright on the work. You can only reassign the copyrights that you actually own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you always keep the rights you received through the GPL on the original work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rights you have on your modifications after the reassignment of the copyright, that depends on your contract and jurisdiction. It is safest to assume that the work was not conveyed and that you don't have any rights to it until your client decides to publicly release it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T18:31:42.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5207" CreationDate="2017-06-04T07:22:11.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;I think&lt;/em&gt; as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, what you're trying to do is explicitly not open source. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt; includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate&#xA;software distribution containing programs from several different&#xA;sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such&#xA;sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rationale: By constraining the license to require free redistribution,&#xA;we eliminate the temptation for licensors to throw away many long-term&#xA;gains to make short-term gains. If we didn't do this, there would be&#xA;lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of a common open source license that restricts resale of the software. This is not to say that I think what you're trying to do is bad, I'm just not sure it's considered open source. I think I remember seeing the term &amp;quot;shared-source&amp;quot; used to describe something like what you're going for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I don't know of a generally available license that meets your needs, but what you could do is find some sample licenses of other software products that restrict their usage, and hack together your own license. What comes to my mind is something like the &lt;a href=&quot;http://download.microsoft.com/Documents/UseTerms/Office%20Home%20and%20Student_2013_English_7b1a2465-4ca6-48c3-bb9f-8551a18289cc.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Office Student edition license&lt;/a&gt; (pdf download), which already limits the use of the software and just change the limitations to meet your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find several different software licenses that each restrict usage, you can probably get a sense of the important / common themes from them and create a license that works for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4771" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T07:22:11.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5558" CreationDate="2017-06-04T08:27:53.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I can't directly answer your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the commercial sphere I'm not sure there's an economic&#xA;motivation to fight license proliferation. Most people don't read&#xA;software licenses (and don't understand what's in them). It seems&#xA;like this can only benefit companies (they can slip things past&#xA;their users). I certainly don't see it hurting companies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would argue that, when viewing the Open Source Initiative's website, one can see an active effort on their part to curb OSS license proliferation. Specifically, the way the licenses are grouped, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listing some as redundant&lt;/a&gt;, as well as their choice to only list popular licenses on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;main Licenses Page&lt;/a&gt;, will both have the effect of guiding people towards a smaller subset of popular OSS licenses (and hence helps curb license proliferation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4771" LastEditorUserId="4771" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T10:05:47.310" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T10:05:47.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5562" CreationDate="2017-06-04T12:34:14.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems no free software licenses exist that enforce advertisements. Such a requirement would seem to clash with the spirit of free software, namely the freedom of using the software for any purpose, including competing with the original author. We would also get the weird result that given such a license, every contributor could add their own ads. And users wouldn't have the freedom to clean up this ad-infested software. That does not seem desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of licenses do have a mechanism to protect parts that must not be modified. However, these can generally only be used to protect disclaimers or legal notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT license family requires the copyright + license notice to be kept in all source files. But this requirement extends only to the source code, not to any user interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache License 2 allows you to write a NOTICE file which must be included in all modified versions, must be part of the documentation, and must be displayed in any user interface that would display such notices. While the NOTICE file is intended “for informational purposes only” and would typically be only used for legally relevant information, there is no hard restriction on its contents so you could include an advertisement. But you can't require this ad to be displayed prominently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPLv3 has a mechanism to add extra terms to the license, but restricts what kind of terms may be added. Section 7 has the full list. For example, additional terms can be added for “preservation of specified reasonable legal notices”. Additional terms that do not fit one of the categories in the list are invalid, and users may remove them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL 1.3) has a concept of “Invariant Sections” that may not be modified. However, this can't be done to lock down arbitrary parts but only a “section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject”. This is useful for legal notices, or for statements of opinions. Of course, the FDL is unsuitable for software and is only intended for text documents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CC-BY-ND licenses are non-free and not suitable for software, but they do prevent ads from being removed – by disallowing all modifications (other than format-shifting).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I think that the Apache License 2 could be abused to include adverts, unsurprisingly no major free software/open source license could require ads to be displayed prominently. Instead, you would have to go to a lawyer and get a Shareware license drafted in order to reach your goals. However, it seems exceedingly unlikely that source code encumbered by a custom license would be of any use to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T12:34:14.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5572" CreationDate="2017-06-04T23:50:27.423" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a GPL owner decides to make their code close sourced, say to make a &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; work for themselves (maybe commercialize), what steps should they take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they need to &lt;em&gt;rewrite&lt;/em&gt; their code, what &lt;strong&gt;qualifies&lt;/strong&gt; as rewriting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8249" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T09:09:12.760" Title="GPL copyright owner copyleft" Tags="|gpl|commercial|copyleft|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-06-09T07:36:39.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5564" CreationDate="2017-06-05T06:28:23.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a difference between &quot;mere aggregation&quot; - distributing multiple pieces of software together on the same media - and a single program that depends on multiple parts. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ&lt;/a&gt; admits that this difference is fuzzy and may depend on the interpretation of a court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you can stay relatively clear from this by separating the dataset from the non-GPL code as far as possible. Some possibilities include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making your code function without the dataset&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributing separately, e.g. separate download links on your website for your software and the dataset&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only hard requirement is that you do not further restrict user rights on the GPL part, that is, make sure the GPL part is always available under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, since your code is under a GPL-compatible license (MIT), you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release the whole thing as GPL, and simultaneously,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release your code, sans the GPL data, as MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T06:28:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5570" CreationDate="2017-06-05T09:09:12.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you, and only you, own the copyrights on a piece of code, then you can do with that code whatever you like. For the choices that you have, it makes very little difference if you have, at some time in the past, released the code to the public under a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The condition that you must solely own the copyrights means that you can not have any contributions from others in the code (unless they legally signed over their copyrights to you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restrictions that limit your options are that once you have released a version to the public under a FLOSS license, you can not retract that version, nor can you restrict people that have that version from exercising the rights they received under the FLOSS license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; free, however, to bring out a new version under a completely different license, even a closed-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that you also see in practice is dual-licensing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;With dual-licensing, a program (or more often a library), is released under multiple licenses and the recipient can choose which license terms they want to conform to.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A common combination of dual-licenses is GPL and a closed-source license. The GPL version can then be used in open-source projects, while people that want to use the code in a closed-source project can buy the closed-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T09:09:12.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5554" CreationDate="2017-06-05T16:00:44.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;GPLv3&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPLv3, no, you do not have the right to distribute the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 allows the distribution of a GPL work without the normal full freedoms, in the narrow case that the distribution is done explicitly for the recipient to make modifications. The exact language is in section 2, which applies to contractors who modify the software and to remote execution environments (e.g., &quot;cloud&quot; providers like Amazon Web Services do not get GPL rights when you give them a copy of GPLv3 software to run):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale for this change was addressed in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd4-rationale.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;release notes for the GPLv3 final discussion draft&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4 Conveying to Outside Contractors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Large enterprise users of free software often contract with non-employee&#xA;  developers, often working offsite, to make modifications intended for the&#xA;  user’s private or internal use, and often arrange with other companies to&#xA;  operate their data centers. Whether GPLv2 permits these activities is not&#xA;  clear and may depend on variations in copyright law. The practices seem&#xA;  basically harmless, so we have decided to make it clear they are permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GPLv3 now gives an explicit permission for a client to provide a copy of&#xA;  its modified software to a contractor exclusively for that contractor to modify&#xA;  it further, or run it, on behalf of the client. However, the client can only&#xA;  exercise this control over its own copyrighted changes to the GPL-covered&#xA;  program. The parts of the program it obtained from other contributors must&#xA;  be provided to the contractor with the usual GPL freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This permission is stated in section 2. It permits a user to convey covered&#xA;  works to contractors operating exclusively on the user’s behalf, under the&#xA;  user’s direction and control, and to require the contractors to keep the user’s&#xA;  copyrighted changes confidential, but only if the contractor is limited to&#xA;  acting on the user’s behalf, just as the user’s employees would have to act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The strict conditions in this provision are needed so that it cannot be&#xA;  twisted to fit other activities, such as making a program available to users or&#xA;  customers. By making the limits on this provision very narrow, we ensure&#xA;  that in all other cases the contractor gets the full freedoms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;GPLv2&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the above release note indicates, the situation is complex for GPLv2. The situation as it exists outside the GPLv3's special excpetion is addressed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (take note of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; paragraphs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company &quot;distribution&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this client is distributing someone else's GPL-licensed work (or a derivative) they are only permitted to do so under the GPL. Does your case qualify as distribution? This FAQ item certainly presents the unambiguous opinion that off-site distribution to a contractor (or any non-employee) constitutes distribution. This basically reduces to the question of &quot;Are you an employee or a contractor?&quot; If you're an employee, you are an agent of the company, so the code isn't moving outside the company's possession. If you're a contractor, then your receipt of the code is external to the perimeter of the company, and it is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you're not convinced, this case is very unambiguously covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another FAQ item&lt;/a&gt; (note the final paragraph, which I have emphasized):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes. For instance, you can accept a contract to develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else unless the client says ok. In this case, too, no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA, or under any additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version.&lt;/strong&gt; In this scenario, the client will probably choose not to exercise that right, but does have the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your client &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; place a restriction in your contract about when you may (or may not) release your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; changes, but they cannot legally tell you when you may or may not release &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; code that they distributed to you under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, even if there is no legal impediment to distributing your client's code without their say-so, that sounds like a very efficient way to demolish your trustworthiness as a contractor. They can't sue you, but they are free to hire someone else for future work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T17:10:14.860" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T17:10:14.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5581" CreationDate="2017-06-05T21:24:25.577" Score="5" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an original work is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY &lt;strong&gt;4.0&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;, can an adapted work (i.e. derivative work) be made from it and published under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY-SA &lt;strong&gt;3.0&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3451" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T22:16:08.360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T06:50:46.157" Title="Can CC BY 4.0 content be adapted into a CC BY-SA 3.0 work?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5580" CreationDate="2017-06-06T14:19:09.163" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source library X has an MIT license. It contains files from another (GPLv2) project, which I will call library Y. Library X states explicitly (in the license notes, a chapter of the readme.md file located in the root) that authors of library Y granted permission to redistribute these files under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The files itself have a GPLv2 copyright header, ending with a message stating that permission has been granted to redistribute these files under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no communication included in library X where this permission grant is explicated. I would expect some email or link to a web document sourced in library Y website or some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to worry as user of library X that my (proprietary) software license is endangered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8260" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:22:23.110" Title="Copyright license grants of GPLv2 in MIT project" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5579" CreationDate="2017-06-06T16:22:23.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the author(s) of library Y really did license library Y to the author of library X under permissive MIT X11 terms (and assuming Y doesn't retroactively try to deny that they did so), then you have nothing to worry about: the author of X really does have the rights to share Y under permissive terms with others. The fact that there are GPL headers in the code doesn't diminish the fact that project Y has dual-licensed their code under your option of the GPL or MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The troubling case is if Y's author did not really grant X's author a permissive license to redistribute Y. Without an official statement from Y's author, you are relying on the secondhand report from the X project. It is possible that the author of X did communicate with Y, but misunderstood what Y was saying, or (less likely) that the author of X is telling a baldfaced lie. Since you haven't seen the actual communication, you don't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would happen if X was wrong, and Y denied having made the permissive license grant? Your software would indeed be in hot water, since your software does include Y, and you could only legally use Y on GPL terms. You would have been (unknowingly) committing copyright infringement for unwittingly violating the GPL. It's not likely Y will sue you: that's against the norms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Software Freedom Coservancy's guide to GPL enforcement&lt;/a&gt;, and furthermore since your past infringement would count as &quot;innocent infringement&quot; (in the U.S.), the court could significantly reduce or eliminate the penalty for your past infractions. However, even in the best case, you would either need to (1) immediately stop distribution of your software or (2) come into compliance with the GPL, including releasing your complete source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can you avoid this entire headache? Contact the author of library Y to ask if they will publish a definite statement that their software is dual-licensed under both GPL and permissive MIT, or ask if they will privately make such a statement to you via email. If you can't get in touch with them, you could also go to the author of X with your concerns and see if they will forward any email communication with Y's author that shows clearly that library Y was permissively licensed to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T16:22:23.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5574" CreationDate="2017-06-07T06:50:46.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, because CC-BY 4.0 is a &lt;strong&gt;permissive license&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses in general are much easier to redistribute, usually all that's required is that you preserve the copyright notice. In CC-BY 4.0's case, you just need to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#how-do-i-properly-attribute-material-offered-under-a-creative-commons-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;provide attribution in one of many ways&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's why not just CC-BY 4.0, but many permissively-licensed works can be included in proprietary ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing you cannot do is take away the attribution requirement, for example by distributing under an even more permissive license, such as CC0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T06:50:46.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5583" CreationDate="2017-06-07T14:42:09.950" Score="2" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project on GitHub released under GPL3. I want to re-license it under GPL2. 99.9% of the program is written by me, only few lines of code is written by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I re-license it again under GPL2? I mean, when someone sends me a pull request via GitHub, what is the &quot;official agreement&quot; between us on the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8269" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T03:34:10.247" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T03:34:10.247" Title="Relicensing from GPLv3 to GPLv2" Tags="|gpl-3|github|relicensing|gpl-2|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5582" CreationDate="2017-06-07T18:31:43.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since others have written code for the project, I believe they also have a small claim in the copyright of the project as a whole. Without a consensus of all copyright holders, I don't believe you are allowed to change the license of the project to GPLv2 because it is not compatible with GPLv3. However, if the other developers  signed a contributor license agreement (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com/&lt;/a&gt;), assigning the copyright to you, then you should be allowed to re-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T18:31:43.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5582" CreationDate="2017-06-07T18:42:09.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When receiving contributions to a project, the default assumption is that the contribution is under the same licence as the project itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main exceptions are when the contribution explicitly mentions a different licence or if it is of such a trivial/mechanical nature that the contribution doesn't qualify for copyright protection. The last reason will apply only very rarely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have accepted contributions to your project, you don't own all the copyrights and you can't change the license without explicit permission from the other contributers to the project.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T18:42:09.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5588" CreationDate="2017-06-08T01:08:56.797" Score="7" ViewCount="1949" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are benefits to CLA for some licenses (as well as drawbacks and tradeoffs), however the Apache 2.0 License already has section 5 stating the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming pull requests are accepted through public channels, what benefit does a CLA actually provide beyond what is provided for in this license clause? More to the point, what sort of legal issues or court cases could arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many CLAs require a lot of personal information that is a burden on the contributor and the licensor (contributor may want to stay anonymous and licensor may not want to deal with PII storage requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the project could be made up of unidentifiable users contributing code directly to the project and that the license would cover this. Why would the provenance of code ever need to be called into question or a CLA explicitly signed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would the contributor or their estate ever be allowed to back down from clause five and if they did why would having previous record of their real identity be necessary? The contributor would need to appear in court as a real entity to bring their case. If they can't prove in court that they are the anonymous contributor, then they do not have a case to begin with and if they can prove that link then it should be reasonable for the licensor to prove that any contributor was or should have been aware of the contribution guidelines which already act as a passive CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, can an Apache 2.0 licensed project without CLAs change it's license in the future? It seems like clause five combined with the sub-licensing allowances in the license would make this legally allowable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that from a lawyer's perspective, the more legal body armor the better, but I can't think of an actual example in which the CLA as well as contributor PII collection would somehow end up being necessary in court (once again given Apache 2.0 clause five as well as public channels for pull request review). Do courts ever ask someone to provide a record of all copyright holding contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8272" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T15:45:49.747" Title="Benefits of a CLA when using Apache 2.0 License" Tags="|apache-2.0|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T12:09:33.540" Score="0" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I correct to assume that I can copy Ethereum's source code, modify it to create my own blockchain and issue my new currency, without any problems provided that I follow GPL and LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8280" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T18:39:44.877" Title="Ethereum's source code" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5558" CreationDate="2017-06-08T14:11:35.527" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the FOSS world, the main incentive for license deproliferation is the ability to reuse code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one project wants to use another project’s code, it is bound by the license under which the other project released its code. If the project later wants to incorporate code from another source with an incompatible license (i.e. such that both licenses cannot be satisfied at the same time), it cannot do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course every license is issued at the sole discretion of the copyright holder, who can then choose to re-license or dual-license their code. This is “only” a matter of negotiation if the copyright holder is a single person or organization, which is why some projects have Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) under which contributors transfer copyright for their contributions to the maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a project has no such agreement in place (plenty of projects don’t), its copyright is distributed across its contributors, and the license terms can only be changed if all of them agree—which is usually impractical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is an issue if all projects involved are under the same license (or at least compatible license): they can be freely combined, and the resulting code stays under the same license (or the sum of all requirements from all licenses involved). Therefore most FOSS projects choose one of the standard licenses to make their life easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the commercial world, things are a bit different: The code is usually works-for-hire, with the copyright holders being companies rather than individuals, and there are hardly any practical barriers to an interested client company negotiating individual license terms with the vendor of a particular piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shared copyright usually happens because of one company licensing a piece of software from another and incorporating it into their own. Here the borders tend to be clearer than in the FOSS world (one copyright holder per component), and parties to the contract usually have each other’s contact information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Because individual negotiation of license terms is easier in the commercial world, there is less incentive to have standardized licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3776" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T14:11:35.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2017-06-08T15:00:36.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you don't need a CLA. The general assumption when someone contributes to an open source project is that they accept to license their contribution under the license of the project. The clause you mentioned in Apache 2.0 just makes this explicit as explained here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5512/does-inbound-outbound-apply-to-apache-2-0-without-a-cla?rq=1&quot;&gt;Does inbound=outbound apply to Apache 2.0 without a CLA?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore, can an Apache 2.0 licensed project without CLAs change it's license in the future? It seems like clause five combined with the sub-licensing allowances in the license would make this legally allowable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, an Apache 2.0 licensed project without CLA can change its license to a compatible license in the future since this is allowed by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, such a project cannot be relicensed to e.g. GPL v2 which is not compatible. Depending on the terms, a CLA could allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, CTAs (Copyright Transfer Agreements) can be also useful to enforce copyright. At least this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what the FSF argues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: @LarryGritz's answer made me think about something else that a CLA can be used for: getting a declaration from the contributor that they are the copyright owner of the code their produce or, if they reused existing open source code, that they checked the conditions for including / re-licensing it were met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T15:45:49.747" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T15:45:49.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5586" CreationDate="2017-06-08T18:39:44.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL allows you to create incompatible forks and to compete with the original implementation, so no problem there. However, you can't pass your changed version off as the official Ethereum implementation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you publish your modified version, it “must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it”. (GPLv3 section 5.a)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If “Ethereum” is a trademark, there may be restrictions on your usage unless you remove all branding, but that is outside of my expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T18:39:44.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5590" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T21:25:26.883" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've &lt;em&gt;heard&lt;/em&gt; that it is against US Government policy to require registration in order to download US Government-developed Open Source code.  But I couldn't find definitive answer via 15 minutes of internet search. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if this is true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8283" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T19:49:48.170" Title="Can the US Government require registration to obtain government-developed code?" Tags="|law|floss|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5594" CreationDate="2017-06-08T21:57:08.763" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have read you can modify and use the Linux kernel if you do not distribute the binary of that modified version. The confusion that I have is that, suppose that if AWS were to provide a kernel modified version of Linux in their Linux VMs, does that count towards the distribution of a modified binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8284" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T15:53:57.723" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T15:53:57.723" Title="Renting out remote access to VMs with a modified GPL kernel" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|linux-kernel|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5590" CreationDate="2017-06-08T23:11:20.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;US Government-written code is by law public domain and not subject to copyright; however, like any government document it isn't necessarily publicly releasable.  Various restrictions exist, such as DoD-only, government-only, government-and-contractors only, US nationals only, export controlled information, etc., and such restrictions can be managed by requiring registration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T19:49:48.170" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T19:49:48.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5591" CreationDate="2017-06-09T07:20:27.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does allow you to distribute modified binaries, but only as long as you also offer the source code. For the GPLv2, this is discussed in section 3: Either you distribute the binary together with the complete source code, or you distribute the binary together with a &lt;em&gt;written offer&lt;/em&gt; for the complete source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship between GPLv2 licensed software and PaaS providers like Amazon is a bit complicated because the GPLv2 does not contain a definition of the term “distribution”. (In contrast, the GPLv3 contains definitions for “propagating” and “conveying” a covered work.) I think with respect to PaaS, the relevant distinction is who runs the GPL'ed work: the provider or the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the client rents a bare VM and then installs a GPL'ed operating system on the VM, the client must have received a copy of the operating system in order to install it. So the software has been distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the client rents remote network access to a VM with a pre-installed GPL'ed OS, it is arguably the provider and not the client running the GPL'ed software. In this case, the software wouldn't have been distributed to the client.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the specific case of Amazon AWS, I do not know the legal structure of the  client–provider relationship. However, Amazon's Linux distro available on AWS does seem to provide a command to get the “reference source”. If this reference source is a derivative work of GPL software and is distributed to clients via such a command, then the client would necessarily receive the source under the GPL and would be free to use it according to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T09:10:57.047" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T09:10:57.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2017-06-09T18:37:10.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I am the manager of open source projects that are pretty strict about CLAs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My $0.02 is that while there may not be much of a legal benefit as far as the PROJECT is concerned -- you could make a good argument that the act of submitting the PR is implicitly a statement that the author believes the code is unencumbered and they have the right to contribute it, enough to protect the project and its other members from liability -- that doesn't mean that there isn't a big benefit of having CLAs in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially in the case of a &quot;corporate CLA,&quot; the signed CLA document may be an important protection for the contributor, with regard to their employer. Many employers have very broad IP assignments as part of their employment agreement, that can make it seem that even work done on an employee's own time and equipment belong to the employer. Many employees don't even realize the breadth of the agreements they quickly signed when they started their jobs. The employer signing a CLA will preclude possible later disputes about whether the employee was authorized to submit the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And maybe even an employee signing the individual CLA might be prompted to think more deeply about any contradictory agreements they may have signed (for example, with their employers), whereas merely submitting a PR in the excitement of sending a patch might not prompt them to as carefully think through whether they really have the rights necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2858" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T18:37:10.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5598" CreationDate="2017-06-09T19:29:06.730" Score="4" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I start a GPLv3 licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take care of pasting all the license text is in the LICENSE.txt and set up a reference to it on top of every source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not exhibit any CONTRIBUTING.txt or a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in any form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I merge a few large pull requests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to double-license the code (take my project's GPLv3 code and sell it under a commercial license while keeping it under GPLv3 for non-customers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I breaking GPLv3?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought so, but when you read the paragraph 11 of GPLv3 it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks an awful lot like a CLA embedded in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this mean I can double-license? Or do I need all contributors' permission?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;Very clear, thanks everyone!&#xA;FYI I have decided to rewrite my project from scratch in another language because I can't get the contributors to sign anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7868" LastEditorUserId="7868" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T06:26:40.933" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T06:26:40.933" Title="Double licensing my GPLv3 project without having a Contributor License Agreement" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5597" CreationDate="2017-06-09T21:02:41.947" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paragraph you quoted is only about the &lt;em&gt;patent&lt;/em&gt; grant, this is mostly unrelated to copyright issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot dual-license the project without obtaining permission from &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; contributors, because you are no longer the sole copyright owner. What happened is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You created a project. As you wrote everything, you were the sole copyright holder. You licensed it to the public under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A contributor modified the project. The modifications are copyrighted by that contributor. But since they received the code under the GPL license, they may only publish their changes under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You merged the contributor's changes. The project copyright is now shared between you and the contributor. Because the contributor was only able to publish these changes under the GPL, you received their modifications under the term of the GPL license and are bound by that license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you received the modified code under the GPL, you can't just publish it in violation of the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is possible is to get all copyright owners to agree to relicense the project. If they don't have a strong stance on copyleft licensing, they might agree to relicense to a permissive license (e.g. Apache License 2 or X11 (MIT) license). But what is in it for them? They don't have any particular reason to let you have less restricted access to their work. And if even one contributor says no or doesn't respond, you cannot proceed with the relicensing. Or you can perhaps find an older version where all contributors leading up to that version agree to the relicensing, and then reset your project to that version. But that means any progress since then stays under the GPL and is lost to your relicensing effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still monetize GPL software. You can't reasonably sell it (because they could just get the code for free), but you can sell services around this code: implementing customizations, training, hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T21:02:41.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5634" CreationDate="2017-06-10T07:08:14.620" Score="6" ViewCount="4387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm rewriting my entire GPLv3 project in a different language to sidestep angry contributors that don't want me to make money on their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want for my project is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people can use it and contribute like GPL, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you want to embed it in some proprietary solution, you pay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically it's an enforced donation to the project for whom intend to make money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a &lt;strong&gt;standardised license&lt;/strong&gt; that fits my use case? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, is there an &lt;strong&gt;existing project&lt;/strong&gt; you know of I can use as a template?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7868" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T16:10:22.943" Title="Any successful &quot;dual license&quot; OSS project I can use as template?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5599" CreationDate="2017-06-10T15:06:27.223" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to your question about whether there is an existing project that permits dual-licensing as GPL and as commercial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;gregbook&quot; contribution to libpng is dual-licensed, GPLv2+ and BSD-like.&#xA;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/blob/libpng16/contrib/gregbook/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; file in libpng16's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/tree/libpng16/contrib/gregbook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrib/gregbook&lt;/a&gt; directory. &quot;License 1&quot; specifically permits commercial applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T00:22:58.457" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T00:22:58.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5602" CreationDate="2017-06-10T21:27:15.420" Score="9" ViewCount="1814" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/docopt/docopt.rs/commit/11b5ff3d3939b7d4ba0e09e457f802a37bb5c5dc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;docopt.rs&lt;/a&gt; is dual-licensed under the MIT and Unlicense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the software be both copyrighted and in the public domain? Is this an example of invalid licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T13:42:13.597" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T13:42:13.597" Title="Can software be both MIT licensed and in the public domain?" Tags="|mit|multi-licensing|public-domain|unlicense|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5601" CreationDate="2017-06-11T05:08:25.580" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, no it's not invalid at all. It's always valid to dual or multi license a product under many licenses, even completely contradictory licenses. When you dual license something the recipients get to choose which license they will accept the work under. They only choose one, so it doesn't matter if another license would give them contradictory rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of docopt.rs have probably done this because in some jurisdictions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Dedicating_works_to_the_public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is difficult or perhaps even impossible to put a work in the public domain&lt;/a&gt;. By dual licensing with the very permissive MIT license they solve that problem by providing a license which is valid everywhere. If you are somewhere where public domain dedications are questionable, or if your company's lawyers are uncomfortable with you using something published under the Unlicense, then you can use the safe option of the MIT instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T05:08:25.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5601" CreationDate="2017-06-11T14:49:36.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are the original creator of a piece of copyrighted work, whether this is a book or code, then you can release that under as many licenses as you desire. It may not make much business sense, but as the copyright holder you have that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens all the time. For example a photo that is exclusively licensed by a newspaper for a certain number of weeks. Then again sold after that period to many magazines at the same time, and lastly followed by releasing it in the public domain when it's commercial value has dwindled but it's use by others may have marketing value. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three times the same object is made available under different contract terms/ license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8294" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T14:49:36.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5621" CreationDate="2017-06-11T22:24:11.417" Score="-1" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a collection of artwork licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. I want to include some code licensed under GPL. Can I include all of it under CC BY-NC-SA? If not, what should I use? The situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software A enables greater use of pre-included artwork in Software B. I am modifying Software A to be able to use my artwork. Software A is licensed under GPLv3. Can I license my artwork + my modifications under CC BY-NC-SA, should I use GPL instead, or Should I license the artwork and modifications separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8295" LastEditorUserId="8295" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T19:39:47.693" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T13:13:01.000" Title="Can I license my artwork and GPL code under cc-by-nc-sa?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5606" CreationDate="2017-06-12T05:58:00.233" Score="8" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is mostly for understanding the lifecycle and governance of open source projects. &#xA;I wonder, if any large and well-known open source project has ever lost its leader / &quot;benevolent dictator for life&quot; (BDFL) due to any act of nature (e.g., death, serious illness). If so, how did the project and its community handle the loss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8296" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T09:42:49.160" Title="Did it ever happen that an open source project's leader (BDFL) died? If so, what happened to the project?" Tags="|collaboration|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5605" CreationDate="2017-06-12T11:44:02.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;My colleague at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Muuss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mike Muuss&lt;/a&gt;, leader of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://brlcad.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BRLCAD&lt;/a&gt; project (also well-known as the author of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(networking_utility)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ping&lt;/a&gt;&quot; network testing utility), was killed in an automobile accident.  The BRLCAD project successfully continued as others picked up the reins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;ping&quot; continues in use as a standard tool on most platforms, but I'm not aware of a centralized &quot;ping&quot; project for maintaining it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T23:12:25.187" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T23:12:25.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T18:37:42.013" Score="2" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a SaaS product is created using the code from a GPL project and is fully maintained by that company, what would happen if that GPL project has its license updated from GPL to AGPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the AGPL only effect all future work or does that also screw you over with all the past code you used from before that project added AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8301" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T23:09:04.870" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T23:09:04.870" Title="Cloud and AGPL question" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5608" CreationDate="2017-06-12T20:57:53.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company is free to stop offering new copies of their software under a particular license. Whether they can retroactively &lt;em&gt;revoke&lt;/em&gt; a license already granted to someone is a very different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 is explicitly irrevocable, so if the software was licensed under the GPLv3 (or GPLv2-or-later), the company cannot revoke any of their old licenses. Under the GPLv2, the situation is more complex and jurisdiction-specific, but the answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;Are licenses irrevocable by default?&lt;/a&gt; has some helpful guidance: in the United States, a license can only be revoked if there was no &quot;economic consideration&quot; exchanged for the license grant. However, &quot;economic consideration&quot; is much broader than mere payment; it can also include, e.g., economic benefit from publicity gained by offering a free-of-charge FOSS product. In that sense, you may have already granted an economic benefit to the licensor when you downloaded the software, diminishing the licensor's ability to revoke the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if neither of the above condition apply (explicitly irrevocable license or economic consideration) and the license &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; revocable, this would only impede your ability to further share the software and prepare derivative works. Your ability to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; software you have obtained is not something copyright law can deny you (at least in the U.S.), similar to how copyright law cannot disallow you from reading a book. (Contract agreements might place limits on how you can use the software, but you never agreed to any contract with this company; they freely offered you the GPL'd software with no terms on how you may or may not run it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T11:20:52.267" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T11:20:52.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5605" CreationDate="2017-06-13T09:42:49.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been some projects in the TeX world (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX4ht&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tex4ht&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biblatex&lt;/a&gt;) where the original author suddenly died or otherwise vanished. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LPPL&lt;/a&gt; has a mechanism for taking over maintenance of such projects. In the extreme case you have to either fork the project or deal with the heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="964" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T09:42:49.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T03:01:12.657" Score="10" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Penn Treebank tokenizer is fairly widely used. It is a solid tokenizer, that is based only on regex.&#xA;For example, it is a word tokenizer in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/tokenize/treebank.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NLTK&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NLTK does not make mention of it in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;But they don't mention much there, so they may have attribution somewhere else in their documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original source for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130804202913/http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Etreebank/tokenizer.sed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tokeniser is on the waybackmachine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by Robert MacIntyre, University of Pennsylvania, late 1995.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If this wasn't such a trivial program, I'd include all that stuff about&#xA;no warrantee, free use, etc. from the GNU General Public License.  If you&#xA;want to be picky, assume that all of its terms apply.  Okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really problematic, AFAICT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, one has two choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do not be picky:&lt;/strong&gt; then this has no license and so can not be incorporated into any open source project. All rights remain with Robert MacIntyre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Be picky:&lt;/strong&gt; this is &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; under &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; version of the GPL, it can be incorporated only into things that can incorporate GPL works. Since this work is from 1995, it means it is either GPL 1, or GPL 2, is intended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems counter to intuition: being not picky puts you under even more restrictions than being picky would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1.&lt;/strong&gt; Is this right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2&lt;/strong&gt; If so, how is NLTK using it?&#xA;NLTK is Apache 2.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neither GPL2 nor GPL3 can be incorporated into an Apache 2 project.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I'm not sure about GPL1,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q3.&lt;/strong&gt; What do &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; have to do to incorporate it into my own open-source current project?&#xA;I'd prefer not to change my own license to GPL, but I think I might have to if I want to use this tokenizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T10:58:06.580" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T10:58:06.580" Title="What are the requirements of the crayon license for the Penn Tree Bank Tokenizer" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-14T20:36:26.560" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose on GitHub one has a BSD project. If people make changes and and then request for you to pull them, are those changes also BSD licensed by default?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7834" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T23:08:05.733" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T06:48:40.647" Title="Are Pull Requests to a BSD project also BSD?" Tags="|github|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-06-20T16:44:48.187" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5624" CreationDate="2017-06-15T02:47:31.793" Score="3" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache Software Foundation page on GPL compatibility&lt;/a&gt; says that&#xA;Neither GPLv2 nor GPLv3 can be incorporated into an Apache 2 project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't directly make a statement about GPLv1.&#xA;But in does make a indirect statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite our best efforts, the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as &lt;strong&gt;restrictions not present in the older GPL license&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct then in my understanding then that GPLv1 is compatible, as it does not the restrictions that were added in GPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-06-18T06:50:25.803" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T06:50:25.803" Title="Can an Apache 2-licensed work be derived from a GPLv1-licensed work?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T06:20:06.287" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) I find the source code for a program that is GPL licenced (ie, a video player, which supports playing videos at 16k resolution! [joke]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) I wanna play a video on it, but it doesn't offer an interface to receive requests from external programs (like listening on a port, and the executable doesn't accept passing arguments on creation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I go on and modify the source code, add an interface so that I can connect my propietary software to that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a safe with this approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My program remains proprietary (I don't need to share the source code with anyone).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I know I need to make available the source code of the modified &quot;GPL&quot; program, and it must remain in GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address&#xA;  space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;  communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;  So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;  separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;  intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;  could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ on GNU.org doesn't make things clear, at least for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8316" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T15:43:35.040" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T19:29:49.257" Title="Propietary software + GPL source code modified to work with my propietary software" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T16:59:34.307" Score="4" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;It struck me why almost every open source project which holds an IRC channel does it on FreeNode. IRC is a multi-server protocol and thus I would expect that reasonably big part of OSS community would be scattered over different services. Are there some (perhaps historical) reasons for such polarization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit there are exceptions, like Mozilla hosting own server, or some projects using Gitter, but, as I said, these are exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="272" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T02:06:14.820" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T09:46:16.703" Title="Why most projects are on Freenode?" Tags="|community|communication|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5617" CreationDate="2017-06-15T18:41:13.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key thing here is that in order to ensure that the two parts of the solution are to be considered separate, that they should be distinguishable separate. In this case if you created an JSON/REST interface in the GPL code and your Proprietary application exchanges messages with the GPL application then this is clearly considered two distinct applications in the meaning of GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about a GPL class in a proprietary application. Does it 'poison' the commercial code? No, it doesn't need to, as even a class has a clear internal interface and if kept in a separate file in it's own directory it can be clearly distinguished as well, even it the communication channel may be more obscure. However, any change to GPL Source means that it can only be released under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if you plan your future on the commercialization of your application that uses Open Source licensed code, please involve a specialist so that the foundation of your venture is solid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8294" LastEditorUserId="8294" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T18:30:45.017" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T18:30:45.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5604" CreationDate="2017-06-16T00:17:27.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the GNU GPL license and any of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses are incompatible. The Non-Commercial licenses meet neither the Free Software Definition nor the Open Source Definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC-BY-NC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL License Compatibility list&lt;/a&gt; says about  CC-BY-NC:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license does not qualify as free, because there are restrictions on charging money for copies. Thus, we recommend you do not use this license for documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, it has a drawback for any sort of work: when a modified version has many authors, in practice getting permission for commercial use from all of them would become infeasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if all you're doing is bundling the two together (for example, in a zip file) for ease of distribution, then you can do that, but the CC-BY-NC-SA and the GPL parts need to retain their licenses. You won't be able to say that the bundle as a whole has only one license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T13:13:01.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5623" CreationDate="2017-06-16T07:39:09.140" Score="-2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;We want to make our software free for using with free RDBMS (and commercial for using with commercial RDBMS). What is the best way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We haven't found any public well-known license for that, so, the way I see it, we have 2 options:&#xA;1. Write our own license (which is not good because everyone should read it, and not everyone would do that).&#xA;2. Use some free license without right to modify software (and not including support of commercial RDBC in the distribution package under that license). Also we want to make our software open-source in time. But the problem is that we also have not found any public well-known for that (i.e. free or free open-source license without (!) right of modification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe someone can suggest something? Maybe we are missing something simple in that situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8326" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T00:13:52.693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T00:13:52.693" Title="Licensing software that should be free for using with free RDBMS" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5622" CreationDate="2017-06-16T08:02:54.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will find no free licence that doesn't permit modifications: two of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; are the freedom to change the program, and the freedom to distribute modified copies; if the users can't do that, the software is not free.  Restrictions on commercial usage are also non-free, as the first freedom is to be able to run the program for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons' &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; licence mostly fills your needs, if I understand them, but even CC notes &lt;em&gt;this is not a free culture license&lt;/em&gt;, so you will face pushback if you try to describe your software as free when it is so licensed.  Also, the CC licences are not thought to be well-suited to software, and your definition of &quot;non-commercial&quot; (zero-cost when used with free RDBMSs, but non-zero-cost when used with commercial RDBMSs) doesn't exactly match CC's definition of &quot;non-commercial&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be reduced to drafting your own licence, which (as you note) isn't a good idea.  I might suggest that you rethink what you wish to permit, or just make a piece of commercial software, and release it as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T08:02:54.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5615" CreationDate="2017-06-16T16:57:29.127" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;License compatibility is a one-way street, so we ought to phrase statements about license compatibility very precisely: So for two licenses X and Y, we are interested if “X-licensed code can be used in Y-licensed software”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I use GPL-licensed code in Apache-licensed software?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all versions of the GPL and the Apache License: GPL-licensed code cannot be used in Apache-licensed projects. This is because the GPL is a &lt;em&gt;copyleft license&lt;/em&gt; that requires the resulting work to be published under the same license as the original work. So it is impossible to base an Apache licensed work on a GPL-licensed work (any version). For the GPLv1, this is clear from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-1.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 2.b)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may [distribute modifications], provided that you also do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) cause [any work that partially or completely contains the Program] to be licensed […] under the terms of this General Public License […].&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you cannot take GPLv1 code, modify it, and publish the modified version under any different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I use Apache-licensed code in GPL-licensed software?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other direction is a bit more differentiated. Because the Apache licenses are &lt;em&gt;permissive licenses&lt;/em&gt;, they can be used with any other license that satisfies the terms of the Apache license. However, the Apache License 2 contains a patent license that complicates things. That is what your quote is about: according to the FSF, Apache-2-licensed code cannot be used in GPLv2-licensed projects. If it were possible to use Apache-2 code under the GPLv2, that would “forget” about the Apache-2 license's patent terms which is not possible. With the GPLv3 this point has been made compatible by adding relevant terms, so you can use Apache-2-licensed code in a GPLv3-licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear about the understanding of the quote: it talks about the “patent termination and indemnification provisions” of the Apache-2 license, and “the older GPL license” refers to the GPLv2. So you can't use Apache-2-licensed code because the GPLv2 does not contain equivalent terms to the Apache 2 license. It makes no statement about the GPLv1. The patent terms were not added in the GPLv2, but in the GPLv3 and the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T16:57:29.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-17T11:28:24.087" Score="5" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking the repository &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ladislav-zezula/StormLib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ladislav-zezula/StormLib&lt;/a&gt; and it's using the MIT license, so far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the following file &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ladislav-zezula/StormLib/blob/master/src/pklib/explode.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ladislav-zezula/StormLib/blob/master/src/pklib/explode.c&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;static char Copyright[] = &quot;PKWARE Data Compression Library for Win32\r\n&quot;&#xA;&quot;Copyright 1989-1995 PKWARE Inc.  All Rights Reserved\r\n&quot;&#xA;&quot;Patent No. 5,051,745\r\n&quot;&#xA;&quot;PKWARE Data Compression Library Reg. U.S. Pat. and Tm. Off.\r\n&quot;&#xA;&quot;Version 1.11\r\n&quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be using a compression algorithm that is patented. It probably was obtained using reverse engineering techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use StormLib?&#xA;Can I use PKLib?&#xA;Neither?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the term for patents is 20 years, so I'm good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8316" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-03-08T16:00:51.123" LastActivityDate="2024-03-08T16:00:51.123" Title="May I use this GitHub library that is using a patented data compression?" Tags="|copyright|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5625" CreationDate="2017-06-18T06:41:05.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_(file_format)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The .ZIP file format was released into the public domain in 1989.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the patent side may be OK, but there may be a bigger problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;PKWARE Data Compression Library for Win32&lt;/code&gt; is as far a I know a &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.pkware.com/pkzip/dcl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary commercial product&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would contact the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ladislav-zezula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stormlib&lt;/a&gt; for clarification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2024-03-08T15:07:42.903" LastActivityDate="2024-03-08T15:07:42.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5614" CreationDate="2017-06-18T06:48:40.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per Github &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TOS&lt;/a&gt; help page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributions Under Repository License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supercede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't this just how it works already? Yep. This is widely accepted as the norm in the open-source community; it's commonly referred to by the shorthand &amp;quot;inbound=outbound&amp;quot;. We're just making it explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes on Github, contributions are under the project's license (e.g. BSD-licensed in your case), unless stated otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T06:48:40.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5612" CreationDate="2017-06-18T07:00:24.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is really problematic, AFAICT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you nailed it. You should file a ticket with NLTK to discuss this further. The key question is whether there is any code of the original sed-based tokenizer that was used there or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T07:00:24.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8253" CreationDate="2017-06-18T11:24:51.027" Score="10" ViewCount="791" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking through Wizards of the Coast &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Game License 1.0a&lt;/a&gt;, and reading around it, it seems it is a weak copyleft license, where anyone can distribute content that derives from OGL content, provided the original OGL content used is included and clearly marked. Decision to further license the derivative works is up to the author/distributer. I suspect is probably not considered a proper &amp;quot;Free&amp;quot; license, although it clearly tries hard to be like one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am hoping to build and publish a small software library which would use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D&amp;amp;D 5E rule system&lt;/a&gt; and data/content. In my case, this won't be a game, or even a utility to help gamers, but instead a machine learning tutorial/demo using role playing game content. However, I think similar issues will apply as if I were writing a D&amp;amp;D &amp;quot;Rogue-like&amp;quot;, because some of my content will implement the written rules in software. It appears that writing such a game is considered OK by the publishers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20211122085557/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq/20040123i&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to this FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, and provided no &amp;quot;product identity&amp;quot; is used - that's some monsters, famous NPCs and of course branding material. No problem there for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for choosing D&amp;amp;D is that it can be used to quickly construct an interesting range of reinforcement learning challenges, which will save time and effort - in theory. If it turns out this causes a big headache in licensing I may need to look elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to host my project on GitHub and publish it under a free, open-source license. I am considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; for my own work, but I'm not strongly committed to it, and am willing to be driven by whatever makes things simplest when combined with using the OGL license in places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of compliance with OGL is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OGL content is intended to be accessible to game players (not software engineers), so software derivations of rules need to be distributed with a written version of the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am intending to simply include the whole SRD and refer to pages in that for code that implements specific game rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anything derived from or extending OGL content can be licensed as I wish, although all I can license is the work that has gone into the adaptation - in effect two licenses might apply where code builds over SRD rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am wondering whether it will be cleaner to apply OGL to a utility library that implements D&amp;amp;D rules, separately to the rest of my code, in order to avoid possible clashes between licenses if both might apply to the same file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When distributing using OGL, I am free to describe content that is covered and not covered by the OGL, provided I don't mis-represent the true OGL content. I.e. I cannot re-license or alter the copyright of the D&amp;amp;D 5E SRD, but I can have a file in the same folder that I authored licensed under Apache 2.0, or even have a file with sections licensed differently depending on provenance, provided everything is clearly marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyone using my work and further distributing will have to decide whether to comply with the OGL parts, and if necessary remove anything derived from OGL content. This is a realistic prospect, since the D&amp;amp;D specific code will be less generally applicable than the machine learning parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is another reason to separate code that simulates D&amp;amp;D rules from code that implements machine learning algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty of hobby programmers write stuff for D&amp;amp;D without care for licensing, and I could too, because I have no intent for this work to become popular. However, I want to do this as correctly as possible for my own peace of mind. So my main question is: Have I interpreted this correctly, or are there additional rules/restrictions I need to account for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2346" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-05-26T08:02:44.310" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T08:02:44.310" Title="Creating an open-source project that includes Open Game License 1.0a content" Tags="|license-compatibility|software-development|open-game-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-18T18:17:44.563" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Gaming Foundation: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Game License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T01:19:42.350" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T01:19:42.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-18T18:17:44.563" Score="0" Body="for questions about the Open Game License (OGL)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T01:19:44.957" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T01:19:44.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5617" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:53:49.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your second point is entirely correct: The modifications you make to the GPL program must also be released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first point (my other program can remain proprietary) is where stuff gets muddled a bit. This entirely depends on how intimate the communication between the two programs is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, if you design the communication such that your proprietary program (P) can only communicate with the modified GPL program (M) and it is very hard to impossible for other programs than P to use the modifications you made to M, then it can be argued that even when they execute on separate machines, they are really parts of the same work. In that case, the GPL would also apply to P.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you designed the interface such that P can use any back-end player that can be invoked with &quot;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;program&amp;gt; &amp;lt;file&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&quot; (or some equally simple network command) and any program can easily use the new capabilities of M (without even knowing of the existence of P), then the two programs are separated enough that they are clearly separate works for copyright and program P can be/remain proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the middle ground between these two is where the lawyers get fat paychecks to argue whether the GPL applies to P or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T13:53:49.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5599" CreationDate="2017-06-19T14:13:56.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As there are no &amp;quot;standard commercial&amp;quot; licenses (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5558/commercial-licence-deproliferation-attempts/&quot;&gt;Commercial licence deproliferation attempts&lt;/a&gt;), there is also no standard license combination for a OSS+Commercial dual license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know of at least one successful project that uses a OSS+Commercial dual license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Qt project&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;From their licensing page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt for Application Development is dual-licensed under commercial and open source licenses. The commercial Qt license gives you the full rights to create and distribute software on your own terms without any open source license obligations. With the commercial license you also have access to the official Qt Support and close strategic relationship with The Qt Company to make sure your development goals are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt for Application Development is also available under GPL and LGPLv3 open source licenses. [...] The Qt open source licensing is ideal for use cases such as open source projects with open source distribution, student/academic purposes, hobby projects, internal research projects without external distribution, or other projects where all (L)GPL obligations can be met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using a OSS+Commercial dual license, it is usually best to choose a copyleft license for the OSS side, because that ensures there is no (or less of a) loophole for commercial users to use the product without paying for the commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T14:13:56.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T14:25:10.430" Score="6" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Background&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own project is a module for Python (without GUI, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1832/982&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; does not fully apply). It’s licensed with a three-clause BSD license which resides in a separate file (say &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt;), and only there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this project, I want to use code from NumPy’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/numpy/random/mtrand/randomkit.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;randomkit.h&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/numpy/random/mtrand/randomkit.c&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;randomkit.c&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is modified and strongly reduced for my specific needs. This is the only external code in my project and it resides in its own file (say &lt;code&gt;random.c&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;License of the employed code&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Randomkit files contains the following in its license/copyright statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An MIT license¹ as the main license (extended by the following), stating amongst others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quoted as the license for parts is a the three-clause BSD license¹, stating amongst others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also included are some further acknowledgements which are part of the copyright notice mentioned by the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;¹ I didn’t compare those word by word.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Actual question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which are valid or best-practice ways to mention those licenses? I can think of the following (in order of increasing obnoxiousness):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add Randomkit’s license to &lt;code&gt;random.c&lt;/code&gt; mentioning my own modifications and add a sentence to &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt; along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The file &lt;code&gt;random.c&lt;/code&gt; is based on NumPy’s Randomkit; see that file for its copyright and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add Randomkit’s license to &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt;; add a sentence to &lt;code&gt;random.c&lt;/code&gt; along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This file is based on NumPy’s Randomkit. See the file “License” for its copyright and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add Randomkit’s license to both, &lt;code&gt;random.c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="982" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T11:45:37.303" Title="Valid locations for propagated MIT/BSD licenses?" Tags="|mit|bsd|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5638" CreationDate="2017-06-19T17:50:29.387" Score="4" ViewCount="1455" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a project I licensed under AGPL. I modified a file from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;microhttpd GNU library&lt;/a&gt;, adapting it to my project. The file I use is one of the provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnunet.org/git/libmicrohttpd.git/tree/src/examples/fileserver_example.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;file server example&lt;/a&gt;s. The repository &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnunet.org/git/libmicrohttpd.git/tree/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is licensed under LGPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I just get rid of LGPL license ? (I think I can't)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I change the file header to AGPL ? (I have no idea)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where is the right place to mention that my code is a modified version of LGPL code, and link the microhttpd page ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5430/using-public-domain-code-in-an-lgpl-program&quot;&gt;Using public domain code in an LGPL program&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6739" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:14:04.327" Title="Use LGPL code in an AGPL project" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-notice|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5637" CreationDate="2017-06-19T19:07:27.590" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a little tricky because the LGPL and AGPL are not strictly compatible. For LGPL code that is &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; to AGPL code, compatibility is not required, because LGPL-licensed can be linked to anything, even proprietary software, without causing a licensing issue. However, for LGPL code that is fully transplanted into a larger software project, such that it becomes a part of that larger project (instead of merely &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; by it as a library), compatibility is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a path forward, though: you must distribute your changed LGPL files under the GPLv3, and then you may combine those GPLv3 files under the AGPLv3. This is described in brief in a footnote in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LGPLv2.1 gives you permission to relicense the code under any version of the GPL since GPLv2. If you can switch the LGPLed code in this case to using an appropriate version of the GPL instead (as noted in the table), you can make this combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2.1-to-GPL reliciensing permission is described in LGPLv2.1 section 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upgrading from LGPL2.1 to GPLv3 is important because GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are one-way compatible. You can include GPLv3 work within an AGPLv3 work, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the exception in AGPLv3 section 13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, &lt;strong&gt;you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work&lt;/strong&gt;, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, for any parts of microhttpd that you incorporate directly into your AGPL project (directly, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; used as a library), you must change their licensing headers to state their licensing as GPLv3. This change in licensing is allowed because the author has specifically allowed it under the above permission in LGPLv2.1. You do not need to mention that those files were formerly under the LGPL, since the upgrade process is explicitly detailed in the license and does not require any such notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, let's address your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I just get rid of LGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the files you directly incorporate into your project, you must replace the LGPL with the GPLv3. For other parts of the LGPL library that your work uses indirectly &lt;em&gt;as a library&lt;/em&gt;, no change is necessary. Those can remain safely under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I change the file header to AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you change microhttpd's LGPL license to GPLv3, you can make &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; changes under the AGPL. In that case, include a notice that some parts are licensed under the GPL, and some parts are licensed under the AGPL. Do your best to describe which parts are licensed which way, and include notices for both licenses in your header. For simplicity, you may wish to license your changes to that file under the GPLv3, but according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt;, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make your version of the file licensed under the AGPLv3 as a whole, with some GPLv3 parts (even if those GPL parts make up a majority of the work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where is the right place to mention that my code is a modified version of LGPL code, and link the microhttpd page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to link to the microhttpd project, though doing so would always be a polite thing to do. You are only required to preserve license and copyright notices, along with a notice explaining how you changed the files. You can include the how-you-changed information in any reasonable place, either in the individual file headers, or in your project's README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T19:14:04.327" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T19:14:04.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5644" CreationDate="2017-06-20T04:59:51.713" Score="5" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a pull-request on GitHub repository whose last activity is half a year ago. But I am not sure whether this patch would be reviewed by developer. I do want this patch be applied to the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought some way to notify the patch to the developer, but I am wondering which of these is the most effective way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tweet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GitHub comment&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mail&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you tell me the effective way to notify patch to developer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8346" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T14:19:38.647" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T14:19:38.647" Title="How to let developer get a look on pull-requests" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T06:09:56.537" Score="-3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any problems with using X11Vnc in my proprietary software stack? I am very new to this licensing stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8350" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T14:10:38.703" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T14:10:38.703" Title="Is it possible to use x11vnc in proprietary software?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5640" CreationDate="2017-06-20T07:33:46.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11vnc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, x11vnc is released under the GNU GPL, so unless you can get the agreement of the author(s), you may not make a non-free product derived therefrom.  You would probably be able to include x11vnc as a standalone part of a commercially-released product provided that (a) your product interacts with the x11vnc components solely through userspace (restrictions include, but are not limited to, a prohibition on linking your non-free code to x11vnc's libraries) and (b) you honour the GPL's obligations regarding source code with respect to x11vnc as you ship it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T07:33:46.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2017-06-20T08:37:22.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most effective way is usually to ping on the PR itself. Beside this, you could try a direct email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside this you can maintain your own fork alright. That's the strength of FOSS after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T08:49:02.217" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T08:49:02.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5639" CreationDate="2017-06-20T13:14:28.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A @ping on the PR itself seems the most &quot;polite&quot; to me. Alternatively, GitHub recently introduced a &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-request-reviews/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reviewers feature&lt;/a&gt;, so adding the relative developer there may also be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If neither generate any response, I'd go for a private &lt;strong&gt;polite&lt;/strong&gt; email. Using a tweet seems to me like publicly declaring that someone isn't properly maintaining their open-source project. I very much doubt that would get you the response you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T16:47:01.690" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T16:47:01.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5647" CreationDate="2017-06-20T15:59:42.793" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would submit a pull request updating a library or a language.  I would do so even if there are breaking changes (ex. Python 2 -&gt; Python 3).  I would submit a pull request that adds a new library if it is relevant to the functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am struggling with the acceptability changing the implementation language via a pull request, so would like to hear community's thoughts on: is it acceptable to change the implementation language via pull request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an concrete example, there are lots of little packages on &lt;code&gt;npm&lt;/code&gt;, and there are lots of type definitions hand-rolled on &lt;a href=&quot;http://definitelytyped.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DefinitivelyTyped&lt;/a&gt;.  For some projects it would be a trivial matter to add type annotations (making the file TypeScript) so it generates always-up-to-date definitions and nearly identical JavaScript (whitespace differences), but I hesitate because that would be a language switch and I question if that is socially acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the simple solution would be to open an Issue asking about it first, but I find often times that can lead to too long of feedback loop because maintainers are busy and may take a week or more to reply, so for small things will often create a PR directly eliminating the first feedback cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8368" OwnerDisplayName="vossad01" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T06:33:09.657" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T06:33:09.657" Title="Is it acceptable to change the implementation language in a pull request?" Tags="|etiquette|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5646" CreationDate="2017-06-20T20:59:40.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know the simple solution would be to open an Issue asking about it first, but I find often times that can lead to too long of feedback loop because maintainers are busy and may take a week or more to reply, so for small things will often create a PR directly eliminating the first feedback cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think opening an issue is the correct way to go even if it takes a while for maintainers to address it. Issues are the correct place for discussion about whether switching languages is the correct choice, and it's a good place for you to state your case for why you think it's an important change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel like it you can immediately submit a PR against the issue so the maintainers can see the impact of the changes, and they may be more open to changing languages if it means no additional work for them. I think this is perfectly socially acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're going to have to wait for somebody to address your PR, so I don't think that's a reason not to create an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need changes to an open source library for a project you're working on immediately, you should make them in a fork and publish to a private (or local) repository so you can use your changes immediately while your PR goes through the review process and gets released eventually. You shouldn't try to rush the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Samuel" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T21:22:58.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5649" CreationDate="2017-06-21T17:22:44.087" Score="4" ViewCount="1396" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a project which I'm planning in the not too distant future to open source on GitHub. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I have is regarding how open source projects are released if they have encryption keys. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the project consists of an Android app (not being open sourced) and a PHP API. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PHP API can potentially send/receive confidential information such as authentication details. Obviously, the API should be run under HTTPS to offer some security, but on top of that, the Android app, will encrypt all the data, then once encrypted and it sends the request to the PHP API. The PHP API decrypts the request and then generates a response, which is then encrypted and the response is sent back to the Android app to decrypt and process. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The encryption between the Android app and the PHP API has a hard coded encryption key (I'm using 256 AES encryption). It doesn't seem right that this key is kept in the open source code as then if someone managed to find a way to do a man in the middle attack between the app and the API, they have the key, potentially exposing the user authentication details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the recommended way for doing this? Should I just not offer encryption, and just rely on the user using HTTPS, and if they don't, it's their problem or is there an alternative method I could use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8364" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T05:50:51.430" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T05:50:51.430" Title="Open Source projects with encryption keys" Tags="|software|source-code|api|security|cryptography|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5648" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:05:40.983" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should not include keys in your open source project. You should include a &lt;em&gt;file location&lt;/em&gt; where your code &lt;em&gt;expects&lt;/em&gt; a key, and the user (or an included utility) creates or copies their own unique key into the expected location. Imagine a thousand people download your project and stand up their own versions of your open-source server -- what's the point of having encryption if all of those servers are simply using the same key?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including one specific encryption key is like drawing up a blueprint of a house that includes the specific tooth-sizes of the lock and key to the front door. It's completely the wrong approach: whenever a builder constructs a house from your blueprints, the builder should grab a totally new, unique lock and key and put that in the front door. It's not necessary that your blueprints specify an exact lock in your blueprints. It's merely important that the house &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; a lock; each separate construction project will supply its own lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own deployment of your open source server will have its own unique key, just like all other deployments that you don't control will have their own unique keys. The public, open-source project itself should have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; key, because the entire point of a secret key is to keep it local to a particular deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, using encryption within HTTPS seems unnecessary. HTTPS is sufficient to keep the user's traffic private and unaltered -- that's the exact scope what HTTPS was designed to do. As for &quot;if they don't [use HTTPS] its their problem,&quot; simply &lt;em&gt;don't offer an unencrypted HTTP service&lt;/em&gt; on your server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you hoping to implement this as a kind of DRM to keep the traffic secret from the original user? If so, this will work about as well as any DRM, which is to say: it will work well enough for users who don't care about it, and not well enough to keep out tech-savvy users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:05:40.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5646" CreationDate="2017-06-22T08:46:46.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is it acceptable to change the implementation language via pull request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is &quot;acceptable&quot; for you to propose... but not everything may be accepted. If you were to submit a PR to one of my project that support Python2 and 3 and that your PR makes it support Python 3 only, I will very unlikely merge your PR unless I am ready to abandon Python 2 support. In most cases I may just politely decline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more so for TypeScript where the change would have even more impact (as a new compilation/transform would be needed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you surely need to discuss this on a ticket and/or on a case by case basis. Any such change will likely raise eyebrows and make a discussion around merging more involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel strongly about it, fork and maintain your own forks and packages: that's the beauty of FOSS after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T08:46:46.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5652" CreationDate="2017-06-23T01:12:52.347" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several questions surrounding this topic, all related: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any security issues with creating an open source project that will run on a website that you host? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do you host a website for an open source project? Who pays for the server fees? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it considered unethical in any way to display a webpage that was developed via Open Source on a domain that I own personally? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8380" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T10:27:10.337" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T10:27:10.337" Title="How common is it to run an open-source project on GitHub that will render on a website?" Tags="|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5651" CreationDate="2017-06-23T02:06:00.297" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Are there any security issues with creating an open source project that will run on a website that you host?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not any that wouldn't be a concern for any other site. You should be extra careful to keep sensitive data (API keys, passwords, etc.) out of the source repository though. It's public, so more of a concern than closed source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;How do you host a website for an open source project? Who pays for the server fees?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same as you'd host any other site. If you're running the site, you pay for hosting, domain, etc. If there's a &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; active community, you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; get enough donations to cover it, but there are lots of low cost options. I self host and my site costs me about $80 a year, including server, domain, and tls cert. Having someone else host will cost you more, but you don't need to worry about much. There are also free options like Github Pages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it considered unethical in any way to display a webpage that was developed via Open Source on a domain that I own personally?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please check the license, but the whole point of Open Source is to allow others to use your code. For what it's worth, I host a personal instance of Wekan. It's an open source web app and I have a copy of it running and available on the net. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, and answer to the title question, I made my website &lt;em&gt;source available&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rubberduck203/theupsyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rubberduck203/theupsyde&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a FLOSS project I used to be heavily involved in made our project site's source open. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rubberduck-vba/RubberduckWeb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rubberduck-vba/RubberduckWeb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it common? I don't know, but I seem to have made it a habit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to note is that neither of these sites are very interactive. They're both &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; static content. There are no logins, no need for authentication/authorization, and the code does not make up the core IP of either project, so there's no big security benefit from keeping the source closed. There's nothing (to my knowledge!) that could be exploited by virtue of having access to the code. If either of these had security sensitive code, I would keep it closed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T02:19:44.050" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T02:19:44.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5656" CreationDate="2017-06-22T08:21:03.663" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;My context: I live in the Netherlands and I have written Apache 2 licensed software that is used globally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created a UDF (User Defined Function) for a piece of closed source software (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nielsbasjes/yauaa/blob/master/udfs/platfora/src/main/java/nl/basjes/parse/useragent/platfora/AbstractAnalyzeUserAgent.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nielsbasjes/yauaa/blob/master/udfs/platfora/src/main/java/nl/basjes/parse/useragent/platfora/AbstractAnalyzeUserAgent.java&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (Java) interface needed to build this software is provided by this company to all of their customers as part of the tool installation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interface is trivial and does not contain any code, it is just a single, very simple interface. The online documentation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://documentation.platfora.com/webdocs/#reference/expression_language/udf/write_udf_java_program.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://documentation.platfora.com/webdocs/#reference/expression_language/udf/write_udf_java_program.html&lt;/a&gt;) gives enough information to recreate this interface from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have indicated that they do not want to publish this interface to maven central (in this case simply because the product is end of life).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like that anyone can build my software from source without having to download and install extra stuff (i.e. this interface).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extend am I legally allowed to recreate this interface from their documentation and make it part of my source tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8422" OwnerDisplayName="Niels Basjes" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T08:50:10.210" Title="Including a limited published Java interface in an opensource project?" Tags="|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5618" CreationDate="2017-06-23T16:44:52.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IRC is a multi server protocol in that you can use multiple servers to run one IRC network, consider it like load balancing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as to why the majority of projects are on there is not a question with a simple defined answer. First of all, there are other IRC networks which host projects too, OFTC being the other big one. &#xA;Why are the majority on Freenode? probably because it is one of the bigger longer running IRC networks and if it has the majority of users then you want to have your project channel hosted where the largest number of users are, hence Freenode.&#xA;Perhaps the project creators were already users of Freenode and for ease of use continue to host their channels on Freenode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hosting maintaining and moderating an IRC network is no small task and for the majority of smaller projects, the time lost to chasing these issues would be better spent working on the project itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8378" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-06-24T09:46:16.703" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T09:46:16.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5653" CreationDate="2017-06-24T09:56:24.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To what extend am I legally allowed to recreate this interface from their documentation and make it part of my source tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately IMHO there is rarely such thing as a no-code, trivial interface in general. At least in the US, the recent Oracle vs. Google debacle on the Android APIs resulted in a confirmation that APIs are copyrightable. In all cases their documentation is copyrighted, and creating an API based on this could be considered some derivative work of sorts subject to their copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation would therefore be to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write your interface&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contact platfora to get an explicit approval to whatever you are doing and document this approval clearly in your code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do not agree to license the interface to you under terms compatible with your own license (e.g. Apache or some permissive license, possibly from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache category A list&lt;/a&gt; since your seem to be connected with the ASF) then I would not do it and not include this interface at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T08:50:10.210" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T08:50:10.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5658" CreationDate="2017-06-24T12:05:21.610" Score="7" ViewCount="1816" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am about to start developing an iOS app which will be published on Apple App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While developing this app, I am thinking to push all the code to &lt;strong&gt;GitHub public&lt;/strong&gt; repository; pull requests from open-source contributors will or will not be taken.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even if it's going to be public then still I want to keep all the copyrights of that code to be with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it doable/allowed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If yes, which license should I use for code on GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I am aware that GPL's v3 is not compatible with App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7100" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T04:37:46.043" Title="Can I publish my iOS app store app code to GitHub under MIT/GPL" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|github|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5657" CreationDate="2017-06-24T20:49:42.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; is a default choice for many projects, and it allows you to retain copyright. In fact, most open source licenses do. Only public domain licenses such as CC0 or Unlicense release your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub has created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website to help people choose a license&lt;/a&gt;. You might find it helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T20:49:42.830" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T09:38:40.973" Score="-2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the definition of &quot;commercial use&quot; very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this commercial use when using OSS library only in develop environment?&#xA;I don't use the OSS library in production environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8346" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T19:42:44.413" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T19:42:44.413" Title="Is this commercial use when using OSS library only in develop environment?" Tags="|commercial|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5659" CreationDate="2017-06-25T10:54:05.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; describes the fundamental values of open source software. One of these values is that Open Source software may be used for &lt;em&gt;any purpose&lt;/em&gt;, including commercial usage. So it is not important for an open-source license whether you are using a library in development or in production. This is in contrast to some proprietary licenses which often do make such a distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the details depend entirely on the exact license of the library, so please do read the license terms. If the project doesn't have a license, you have no right to use. But you may freely use code under one of the  MIT, Apache, or GPL licenses for any purpose, including a production or development environment. The terms of these licenses only start kicking in if you copy the software outside of your organization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A handful of Open Source licenses also have terms that apply during the use of the software, without making copies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The BSD 3-clause license has a minor restriction regarding advertisements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache 2 and GPLv3 licenses prevent you from suing for patent infringement under certain circumstances.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL triggers not only when passing on copies of the software, but also when providing access to the running software over a network. This makes webapps more like ordinary applications from a user perspective.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T10:54:05.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5662" CreationDate="2017-06-25T19:42:13.427" Score="13" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone helped with progress upstream at an open source project I really rely on. He basically did what I was not capable of and now I am waiting for his pull request to be merged and included in future releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, this repository requires him to sign an CLA what he never did for reasons (like not having a Google account required for this process). Now his pull request is stale, can't be merged due to the missing CLA and other users can't resubmit the contribution without either doing this work on their own (probably from scratch) or by copy-pasting his code (and probably causing legal issues).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository is licensed with &lt;em&gt;Apache License&lt;/em&gt; (Version 2.0, January 2004) and the CLA is to be signed with Google (they maintain the codebase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my question is, can I resubmit his pull request if he does not sign CLA? I would keep his copyright notice in tact, so this shouldn't be of any issue regarding the APLv2. But I'm bypassing the CLA, can I do this?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T11:15:56.803" Title="Can I resubmit someone else's pull request if he does not sign CLA?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|github|contributor-agreements|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5661" CreationDate="2017-06-26T00:53:54.777" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends in part on what the CLA requires, but it may be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Do you have the ability to reuse the submission at all?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it's understood that contributions to an open source project are offered under the same license as the project at large. In particular, the text of Apache License 2.0 makes this explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. [...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Contribution&quot; shall mean any work of authorship, including the original version of the Work and any modifications or additions to that Work or Derivative Works thereof, that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner or by an individual or Legal Entity authorized to submit on behalf of the copyright owner [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this pull request fits the definition of a Contribution (a modification of the original work, intentionally submitted to the copyright holder for inclusion in the work), the terms of the Apache license section 5 have caused this pull request to be licensed by its author under Apache 2.0 as well. Therefore, you are entitled to use the content of the abandoned pull request in your own pull request, under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. This is roughly the same as making a contribution that includes some borrowed Apache-licensed code from elsewhere (only in this case, the borrowed code is 100% of the submission), which is to say it's legally okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can you sign your own CLA and submit someone else's code?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, the CLA is in place to deflect any legal complication away from the project back to the contributors. In particular, the CLA probably requires you to assert that your contribution does not infringe anyone's copyright, and that if it turns out that it does, that's &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; problem, not theirs. This could bite you if it turns out that the original pull request included infringing material from some other place. If you are comfortable assuming legal responsibility for the non-infringing status of this contribution, then you may submit it yourself under a CLA that you sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the CLA requires that you assert genuine copyright ownership of your submission, because the maintainer needs you to agree to the possibility of relicensing  -- something like, &quot;I agree that my submission may be offered by the repo owner under different licensing terms in the future, like GPLv3, instead of its current Apache license&quot; -- then you can't agree to that, because your right to reuse the pull request comes from the Apache 2.0 grant, not your original copyright ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T11:15:56.803" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T11:15:56.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T01:12:17.760" Score="24" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the ToS of Stack Exchange sites, under the section &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal#3SubscriberContent&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Subscriber Content&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first sentence states that my submitted content is licensed (to Stack Exchange) under CC BY-SA 3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the second sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You grant Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store such Subscriber Content and, except as otherwise set forth herein, to allow others to do so in any medium now known or hereinafter developed (“Content License”) in order to provide the Services, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by You.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this sentence just summarize what the consequences are of licensing (to SE) my content under CC BY-SA 3.0? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does this sentence state that I’m licensing (to SE) my content under a second license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: &lt;strong&gt;Is my content multi-licensed (to SE), under CC BY-SA 3.0 (as defined in the first sentence) and under a custom license (as defined in the second sentence)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T13:36:26.287" Title="Do Stack Exchange’s ToS mean that the user-generated content is double-licensed to them?" Tags="|multi-licensing|cc-by-sa|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5756" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:26:54.587" Score="12" ViewCount="7915" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF claims that GPL v2 is incompatible with Apache 2.0 and that linking to a library generally creates a derivative work of this library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the linking exception of the LGPL allows linking from an Apache 2.0 software to a LGPL 2.1 library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without entering in the debate whether FSF's interpretations are correct, would the converse, linking from a LGPL 2.1 software to an Apache 2.0 library, be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T06:29:50.033" Title="Linking from LGPL 2.1 software to Apache 2.0 library" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|apache-2.0|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5668" CreationDate="2017-06-27T20:44:37.863" Score="7" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand when do the GPLv2 spreads from a program to its extensions and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything I've read seems to say that if you use a module (shared library or any other &quot;tightly coupled&quot; interaction) under the GPLv2, then your program has to be under GPL v2 and vice versa: a module for a program under the GPLv2 has to be under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I understand from a theoeretical point of view. However, it appears that VirtualBox, which rely on KVM and therefore has to be -and actually is- under GPLv2, also has a proprietary Extension Pack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what in the nature of this Extension Pack makes it possible for Oracle to &lt;strong&gt;distribute this Extension Pack under a proprietary licence&lt;/strong&gt; considering that &lt;strong&gt;this package heavily interacts with VirtualBox&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8409" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:43:30.163" Title="GPL v2 and proprietary extensions" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T17:34:19.690" Score="4" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I write a Matlab script and place it under the GPL. The question is whether the result can be considered free software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the script itself is clearly free. On the other hand, if one cannot run the script without having access to Matlab, it seems to make nonsense of the notion of freedom in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="149" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T16:52:26.630" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T16:52:26.630" Title="Can software that depends on proprietary software be free?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5666" CreationDate="2017-06-28T17:59:56.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5665/8416&quot;&gt;GPL v2 and proprietary extensions&lt;/a&gt; question you can get to the conclusion that if the proprietary software you depend on to create a script does not allow to do so(license modules/scripts/extensions as GPL or other open license), you will not be able to make your script free form the start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The holder of the software patents/rights can on its EULA enforce how a derivate plugin/script/customization can behave and what license is imposed.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if your software provide does not states clear to forbid scripts to be free, this is exactly the same thing that happened with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java Trap&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;April 12, 2004&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your program is free software, it is basically ethical—but there is&#xA;  a trap you must be on guard for. Your program, though in itself free,&#xA;  may be restricted by nonfree software that it depends on. Since the&#xA;  problem is most prominent today for Java programs, we call it the Java&#xA;  Trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software if its users have certain crucial freedoms.&#xA;  Roughly speaking, they are: the freedom to run the program, the&#xA;  freedom to study and change the source, the freedom to redistribute&#xA;  the source and binaries, and the freedom to publish improved versions.&#xA;  (See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&lt;/a&gt;.) Whether any given&#xA;  program in source form is free software depends solely on the meaning&#xA;  of its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...And...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sun continues to develop additional “standard” Java libraries, and&#xA;  nearly all of them are nonfree; in many cases, even a library's&#xA;  specification is a trade secret, and Sun's latest license for these&#xA;  specifications prohibits release of anything less than a full&#xA;  implementation of the specification. (See&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/JSPA2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/JSPA2.pdf&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr129/j2me_pb-1_0-fr-spec-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr129/j2me_pb-1_0-fr-spec-license.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  for examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime ago, a lot of features from Java were not free, creating this trap where even if you have developed a GPL software with Java, you will still be bound to restrictions of the software infrastructure required(that is nonfree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a comparsion with this Java specific case, best thing you can do is also find a good opensource implementation that could replace Matlab and also make use of your scripts. But this is just an advice and there is no much that can be done if your software requires nonfree software to be able to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you ever tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU/Octave&lt;/a&gt;? Maybe it can be a good alternative for drop-in compatible with many Matlab scripts as their site advices, and you could also help the development team by reporting issues you could face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer:&lt;/strong&gt; It depends if the software rights holder specifies if this extension/script can be created on opensource license. Even if this company/person does not deny you from creating free software scripts that depends on this proprietary software, you will still be in a trap because they can change this terms whenever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8416" LastEditorDisplayName="user8416" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T11:02:35.813" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T11:02:35.813" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5665" CreationDate="2017-06-28T18:29:53.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First topic: Virtualbox does not rely on kvm to get stuff done. They have different source base, and even if they exchange patches, that does not makes them a derivate work of kvm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second point is that Oracle owns VirtualBox brand, so they can pretty much deal with licensing of &quot;chunks&quot; of that software(base, extensions, plugins, etc) the way they want. This allow them to keep virtualbox opensourced while develop a module that is proprietary. And if you take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licencing FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, this is pretty much what they state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is VirtualBox licensed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The VirtualBox base package (i.e., everything but the VirtualBox&#xA;  Extension Pack) contains the full VirtualBox source code and platform&#xA;  binaries and is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version&#xA;  2. You can distribute and modify the base package, provided that you distribute all modifications under the GPLv2 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The VirtualBox Extension Pack is available under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox_PUEL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VirtualBox&#xA;  Personal Use and Evaluation License&lt;/a&gt;, which is a free license for&#xA;  personal, educational or evaluation use, or an Enterprise License,&#xA;  which is for fee license that covers most other business uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More information about the Oracle VM VirtualBox Enterprise License for&#xA;  the VirtualBox Extension Pack can be found on the  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/virtualbox/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle VM&#xA;  VirtualBox pages&lt;/a&gt;, which also contains a link to the  Oracle Store&#xA;  where you can directly buy licenses. Please contact Oracle for&#xA;  additional information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oracle states clear that only the base package is GPLv2 and Extensions are nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why projects have a Development agreement on projects they create, or take ownership when they want to be the ones to centralize all issues, so they can &quot;own&quot; the code that you have contributed, but the trick here is that they have the power to change the license if they want. This is a trust relationship between the developers and the company/entity that now owns the code. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/contributors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canonical Contributor license agreement&lt;/a&gt;: In this case you have a company that wants to best centralize all ownership to better deal with contribution and licensing problems. You have to TRUST them when you develop code and give to them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF software ownership&lt;/a&gt;: In this case, you have a foundation that owns code for best interest of all, the same way they can change licenses whenever they want, it's up to them to ENFORCE GPL on derivated projects that are not compliant with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is not uncommon that some companies dual-license its products. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.artifex.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artifex&lt;/a&gt; does the same thing with &lt;code&gt;ghostscript&lt;/code&gt;. If you will develop a free software program AND you will not profit from it, you can use the GPL version of &lt;code&gt;ghostscript&lt;/code&gt;. If you want to make proprietary software with ghostscript, you need to pay for a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/981029/a-federal-court-has-ruled-that-an-open-source-license-is-an-enforceable-contract/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Federal Court decided&lt;/a&gt; that using a software that has a license is the same than accepting its terms(enforceable contract).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8416" LastEditorDisplayName="user8416" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T18:43:30.163" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:43:30.163" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5672" CreationDate="2017-06-29T10:25:58.900" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since codeplex hub is disappearing, some projects have not been moved by their owners to other places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the process of moving someone else's project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8424" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T12:53:40.447" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T12:53:40.447" Title="How to copy a project from codeplex to GitHub" Tags="|github|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6396" CreationDate="2017-06-29T16:32:54.907" Score="4" ViewCount="685" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a research paper with a couple of related numerical algorithms I would like to use as part of an open-source project of mine. The paper itself includes plenty of pseudo-code-snippets, but the authors have also written a full C++ implementation which is available publicly. I would like to include their work into my own library, which is written in a different programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I straight-forward port their code to my language, it would of course be a derivative work so I would be stuck with their license (modified BSD). This would be a hassle because the rest of my project usese the Boost-license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could start from their paper (i.e. pseudo-code-snippets) and implement everything from scratch in my language. But given that I have seen their C++-code, I am worried that I have been influenced sufficiently that anything I write would still be considered a derivative work, even though I wrote every line of code myself. Am I right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the suggested course of action here? I am kinda confused about the line between an abstract algorithm (which is a non-copyrightable idea AFAIK) and actual code (which is under strict copyright by default). On which side of the spectrum does pseudo-code fall that can easily be converted into actual code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The algorithm in question is the &quot;double-double&quot; and &quot;quad-double&quot; floating-point types described here (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jaist.ac.jp/~s1410018/papers/qd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.jaist.ac.jp/~s1410018/papers/qd.pdf&lt;/a&gt;) and implemented here (&lt;a href=&quot;http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://crd-legacy.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8426" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T04:02:25.537" Title="Using code from research paper under different license" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-29T22:14:28.120" Score="3" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make use of the OpenSSL library in a project, but I do not understand its license well, Then I would like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the OpenSSL license have copyleft?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I give some attribution and if so how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8428" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T20:48:29.443" Title="OpenSSL license questions" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5669" CreationDate="2017-06-29T23:30:11.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will need to check the software License. If it is some of the opensource licenses that will enable you to make a fork, is just a matter of importing code on github. Depending on the license, you can relicense, or you will be forced to change the name of your new forked project(maybe someone owns the &quot;brand&quot; of this software, like Linux is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://lmi.linuxfoundation.org/programs/legal/trademark/attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark of Linus Torvalds&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since creating a step-by-step on how to import code on github is off-topic, I suggest you to take a time to read the documentation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/importing-source-code-to-github/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github Importer Tool&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-importer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt; gives more details on what source control software is supported. From here, it is just a matter of set the Codeplex url on your new Github repo and execute the import.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer can also apply to other repository management tools, if they use the same Version Control Source tools that are supported by github. You can even use &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/source-code-migration-tools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;external tools&lt;/a&gt; to make the source code migration if using github importer is not an option for any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8416" LastEditorDisplayName="user8416" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T16:32:19.837" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T16:32:19.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5675" CreationDate="2017-06-30T06:41:10.110" Score="-3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the creator of a software which is licensed under GPL v3. But now I want to sell the software for &quot;commercial use&quot; like Fancybox (&lt;a href=&quot;http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/3/#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/3/#license&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a real noob in licensing. So my question: Has anybody some good license-text examples which I can customize and use it as a digital product to sell (e.g. as PDF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6621" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T19:45:56.693" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:45:56.693" Title="Need sellable license-text for &quot;commercial use&quot; of GPL v3 software" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-29T15:37:33.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5673" CreationDate="2017-06-30T07:19:19.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license text is a legal document. As such, it is advisable that the text gets written by a qualified lawyer to ensure that the license actually says what you intend it to say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would strongly recommend that you ask a lawyer with knowledge of copyright law to draft the license for you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T07:19:19.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T08:51:19.163" Score="1" ViewCount="1662" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just getting started with software development and open source and I'm really excited about contributing to a real world project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't understand how to find bugs in projects as most blogs and videos tell me to do. On GitHub, what is the most straight forward way of finding something that I can fix? Is it using the &lt;strong&gt;Issue tracker&lt;/strong&gt;? But it always seems like people are already discussing about a particular Issue and are already working on it which discourages me from taking it up as I won't make it faster than them anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One obvious answer might be to work on enhancements to the projects but given that I'm just getting started, suggesting improvements is something not really I can do right away without any experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8431" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T06:54:15.530" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T17:06:40.193" Title="How do I (a beginner) find a bug in a project on Github?" Tags="|github|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5676" CreationDate="2017-06-30T12:35:04.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most straightforward way to search for issues of a project is to access the issues tab and use the filters available &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/using-search-to-filter-issues-and-pull-requests/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the documentation&lt;/a&gt;. Using as an example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mmatyas/pegasus-frontend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pegasus retro gaming frontend&lt;/a&gt; cause it has just a little amount of issues opened, if you access the Issues tab and type &lt;code&gt;is:issue is:open label:feature&lt;/code&gt; you will find all issues that are opened, and are improvements to this project. In this case, label is something that is configured by repo owners, and each project can have it's own labels. If you remove &lt;code&gt;is:open&lt;/code&gt; from your search, the number of issues will increase. Access the repo and do your homework ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is just basic. You will need to dig through documentation an see the potential of the filters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a developer and you know a little about &lt;code&gt;REST&lt;/code&gt;, you can retrieve information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github's api&lt;/a&gt; with some scripts or even using &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.github.com/changes/2014-02-28-issue-and-pull-query-enhancements/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you browse github a little, you will find interesting repos &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/marcelkornblum/21be3c13b2271d1d5a89bf08cbfa500e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this one&lt;/a&gt; that have a python script to export issues into csv file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8416" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T12:35:04.583" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5676" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:31:35.637" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most useful open source contributions come from people who actually use the project they are contributing to. So I'd suggest to you first, to use free software as often as possible, and possibly to develop your own projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you find something that you think you be fixed or improved in an application or a library that you use, then it may be time to look into making a contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, you need to find the source code and the contribution model (if you're lucky it's on GitHub and contributions go through pull requests).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel the code is easy enough to understand, you might have a go at making a patch and submitting it. If not, you might just open an issue / a bug report. This is already by itself a useful contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:31:35.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T02:59:06.090" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fellow developer friend of mine and myself have been working on an iOS app for the last months. We have put a considerable amount of work into it, utilizing GitHub for source control. We share our code through GitHub, but kept the project public since we are not willing to pay the fee to host private projects on Github. Now we don't have any problems with people looking through our code. In fact, that is one of the other reasons why we kept our project public. We want to be able to share our code to the world once we launch the project to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we are concerned that someone could steal our code before we public it to the Apple App Store. We are worried that someone publishes or submits our app as their own to the app store before we do. How can we make sure that this is not allowed? What kind of license would allow an open-sourced project to be protected in a way that the owners maintain those publishing permissions? What kind of suggestions do you have for open-sourced projects that still want to maintain ownership of their projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Pablo" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T19:33:17.310" Title="Open-sourced project license" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2017-06-30T16:44:52.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that you and your coworker have other problems to solve first that are not license related&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to look for an answer where you can open your code to public to avoid paying fees on a private github repo, at the same way you want to keep things closed and benefit from &quot;free code hosting&quot;, using the excuse that you are acting in a good will and in a &quot;near future&quot; you will release the source code to all... Pretty much a proprietary software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at this answer that is posted at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource.org FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can Open Source software be used for commercial purposes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Absolutely. All Open Source software can be used for commercial purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell&#xA;  Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, note that commercial is not the same as proprietary. If you receive software under an Open Source license, you can always use&#xA;  that software for commercial purposes, but that doesn't always mean&#xA;  you can place further restrictions on people who receive the software&#xA;  from you. In particular, copyleft-style Open Source licenses require&#xA;  that, in at least some cases, when you distribute the software, you&#xA;  must do so under the same license you received it under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, every Opensource software can be forked, and you can only trully enforce name change and make the license be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8416" LastEditorDisplayName="user8416" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T17:01:46.353" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T17:01:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5680" CreationDate="2017-06-30T19:33:17.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but kept the project public since we are not willing to pay the fee to host private projects on Github&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is tangential to the rest of the answer, but there are numerous services that allow free hosting for private git repositories, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitbucket&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab&lt;/a&gt;. Github is great for project visibility and accessibility, because so many people are on it already, but if your goal is to &lt;em&gt;reduce&lt;/em&gt; accessibility (i.e., privacy) then that factor has minimal (perhaps even negative) weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we are concerned that someone could steal our code before we public it to the Apple App Store. We are worried that someone publishes or submits our app as their own to the app store before we do. How can we make sure that this is not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If haven't licensed your code to anyone, then no one can legally republish it. If someone &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; illegally republish it, then you can issue a DMCA takedown notice to the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of license would allow an open-sourced project to be protected in a way that the owners maintain those publishing permissions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a license could not satisfy the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;. Under an open source license, everyone must have rights to republish the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Derived Works&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in restricting how downstream recipients can republish your work, then you are not interested in licensing your software at open source as the OSI (and FLOSS community at large) defines the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of suggestions do you have for open-sourced projects that still want to maintain ownership of their projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to use an open source license, you may exercise trademark control over your project's name, so that no one else can republish it with the same (or a confusingly similar) product name. Your project is &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt; and trademark gives the legally ability to have your unique work recognized as yours, but if you license your software under an open source license, there is, by design, nothing to stop someone else from forking your software and calling it by a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T19:33:17.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5690" CreationDate="2017-07-01T09:37:00.627" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a library and want to release it under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among other functions, this library has to emulate the internal behaviour of std::unordered_set from libstdc++ (precisely -- determine the number of buckets by the number of elements). In order to do it I read the source code of libstdc++ and implemented the similar thing in my library. Also, there is a configuration file in libstdc++: a hard-coded list of 256 prime numbers which are potential hashtable sizes. It is not possible to emulate what I need without this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that libstdc++ sources are released by GPL, which is not compatible with MIT this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) is it possible to put this hard-coded list into my code? Maybe I should claim that I produced it by interacting with unordered_set like a black box (it is possible) without looking at the source code explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) is the part &quot;I didn't copy your sources, I just implemented mine which do the same thing but do not share a line with yours&quot; violating the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8442" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T19:45:59.207" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T19:45:59.207" Title="Copying GPL-licensed config into MIT-licensed library" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5671" CreationDate="2017-07-01T20:48:29.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The handwritten license is indeed confusing. Based on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/653135/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt;, it is not copyleft. Points 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the OpenSSL License describe how to give attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgment: &quot;This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openssl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.openssl.org/&lt;/a&gt;)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following acknowledgment: &quot;This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openssl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.openssl.org/&lt;/a&gt;)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bright side, OpenSSL is currently in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2017/03/22/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;process of being relicensed under the Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, which is not copyleft and requires only the preservation of the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T20:48:29.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5687" CreationDate="2017-07-02T11:39:18.537" Score="-3" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been wanting to make my own open-source project under the GPL. However, I was thinking of making a paid &quot;professional&quot; version that adds features that are closed-source. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edit: Am I allowed to charge a small fee for the compiled source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8451" LastEditorUserId="8451" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T12:27:50.563" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T21:47:40.840" Title="Can you commercialize your own GPL product?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-05T00:06:59.417" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5663" CreationDate="2017-07-02T12:30:40.270" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this sentence just summarize what the consequences are of&#xA;  licensing (to SE) my content under CC BY-SA 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or does this sentence state that I’m licensing (to SE) my content&#xA;  under a second license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not just summarize the CC-BY-SA license. You are indeed dual licensing your content to Stack Exchange. By posting to a Stack Exchange site, you are licensing that content to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; (including Stack Exchange) under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. &lt;em&gt;In addition to that&lt;/em&gt; you're agreeing to SE's terms of service, which grants them specific rights to that content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, all of the things you're agreeing to would be covered by the Creative Commons license as well, but they are two separate agreements none the less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T13:36:26.287" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T13:36:26.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5685" CreationDate="2017-07-02T18:42:36.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own copyright to all of the code in your project, then yes, you may grant other licenses, to another enhanced version or even to the exact same code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you've made your project GPL, then once you have accepted a patch from anyone, then that contributor also owns a part of your code and would have to concur in the &quot;professional&quot; license, or else you would need to refrain from pulling the contribution into the other version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These points are well covered in @apsillers' thorough &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;answer to this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge any fee you like for your &quot;professional&quot; version, and in fact you may charge any fee for the GPL version, too, according to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequently Asked Questions&lt;/a&gt; about the GNU Licenses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T21:47:40.840" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T21:47:40.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5691" CreationDate="2017-07-03T07:15:32.080" Score="-1" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a library in JavaScript and chose the ISC license for its terseness, permissibility and likeness to the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add some conditions to my software to limit specific uses without introducing a verbose license. If I switch to MIT can I add my own specific conditions to the software? Is it possible for me to simply update the ISC license to add my own conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example condition:&lt;/strong&gt; Wrappers for Magento, WordPress and Drupal upon request only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With help from commenters and others in this thread I learned the Free Software Foundation calls this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#Non-CopyleftedFreeSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noncopylefted free software&lt;/a&gt; and defines it like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noncopylefted free software comes from the author with permission to redistribute and modify, and also to add additional restrictions to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the selected answer, this kind of software may not be considered &quot;open&quot; nor &quot;free&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastEditorUserId="8188" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T05:40:16.463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T05:40:16.463" Title="Adding conditions to a terse, permissible open source license" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5683" CreationDate="2017-07-03T09:36:46.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) is it possible to put this hard-coded list into my code? Maybe I should claim that I produced it by interacting with unordered_set like a black box (it is possible) without looking at the source code explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific context, the list in question is a list of prime numbers. In general I do not think such a short list of numbers would be eligible for copyright protection. Furthermore, based on the comments you posted, your &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ifsmirnov/jngen/blob/df4e920454d60aae2b3a4caddc8ba7884f87a76c/gcc_primes_list.h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own&lt;/a&gt; list is not copied from GCC but generated form a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ifsmirnov/jngen/blob/df4e920454d60aae2b3a4caddc8ba7884f87a76c/util/generate_prime_rehash_policy.cpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;utility of yours&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the libgo subsystem in GCC is BSD-licensed and there is a mention that the same primes list &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/e440a3286bc89368b8d3a8fd6accd47191790bf2/libgo/runtime/go-new-map.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been copied from the GCC&lt;/a&gt; i.e. from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/86506bced1df38694695afd3711c35df31e06e1d/libstdc%2B%2B-v3/src/shared/hashtable-aux.cc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same file&lt;/a&gt;. This is a potential, weak hint that Google and the Go developers may not consider this list of numbers as eligible for copyright protection (though they still slap their own license and copyright on top of their copy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) is the part &quot;I didn't copy your sources, I just implemented mine which do the same thing but do not share a line with yours&quot; violating the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore in light of the above comment I think that you are fine in this context. That said if you still have concerns, the right thing to do would be to post a mail on the GCC mailing list to ask for further opinions about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T08:46:47.410" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T08:46:47.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5689" CreationDate="2017-07-03T12:45:55.277" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could base yourself on the ISC license to create a new license but you should call it differently. Adding conditions to an existing license while keeping the same name is only creating confusion and you should not be surprised then that people do not respect the additional conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore you shouldn't use the term &quot;open source&quot; or &quot;free software&quot; to describe your code anymore as what you are describing (adding restrictions on the uses) is not something that is compatible with the open source and free software definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, be aware that juridic wording is a difficult art, so adding new terms without the advice of a lawyer may simply result in a license which is non-enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T12:45:55.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5703" CreationDate="2017-07-05T21:06:48.193" Score="8" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project on GitHub that is currently under the MIT license. The &quot;project&quot; is actually a README file containing information on a variety of new language and library features, complete with examples, on C++. Think of it as a cheatsheet or a small book on C++.  With this in mind, I have a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I have a LICENSE file, but now I decide I want to include the license text in the README itself also, does this mean people who create derivative works cannot change the license text in the README? Or does this only apply to the LICENSE file? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is MIT even appropriate for projects of this type?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8474" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T04:59:09.460" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T04:59:09.460" Title="MIT-licensed project that only consists of a README file" Tags="|mit|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5702" CreationDate="2017-07-06T00:03:57.103" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I take a photograph of software code, in what way(s) am I allowed to use/distribute that photograph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming copyright code hangs somewhere between fair usage and copyright infringement, but for free to reuse code such as MIT, can I assume I am free to use/distribute it, and if I distribute it what license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8475" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T10:54:05.623" Title="License of photos of code?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5699" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T04:06:15.690" Score="13" ViewCount="1542" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL has been pertinent to several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Legal_status&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;court cases&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;We know it is strong because it has been &quot;battle-tested&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the same be said to be true for the MIT license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="775" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T00:07:03.413" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T09:00:20.443" Title="Has the MIT license been &quot;Battle tested&quot; in court?" Tags="|mit|law|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T03:15:43.363" Score="5" ViewCount="6962" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if we use &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT-licensed&lt;/a&gt; code in our propietary software?  Is it considered stealing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw some software that was packaged with MIT licensed code in the installation directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people think that I'm stealing.  Is it true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8462" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T14:02:07.057" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:02:07.057" Title="Is using MIT-licensed code in non-open source code considered stealing?" Tags="|mit|law|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5700" CreationDate="2017-07-07T07:01:47.083" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;For all software libraries, copyright law applies, and you must read and follow the license in order to use it legally. For a MIT licensed code library, if you &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the resulting package, you must also distribute it with a copy of the license including the original copyright notices. Failure to do so is &quot;stealing&quot; or more technically a copyright violation, which you should address. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; has one major requirement you must follow to comply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid confusion that your whole product is covered by the same license, it is good practice to include the whole original source of the MIT part and license in a separate folder, and provide this along with the rest of your package. Otherwise someone might think that your proprietary software may be freely distributed. However, MIT license is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; in any way, so code you write yourself as part of a combined package may be distributed under any other license you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That includes closed source and even commercial use where a customer must pay to have a copy of your software installed. However, even though such a customer may be entirely uninterested in having a copy of the MIT-licensed source files and the license itself, you must still supply them bundled with whatever distribution mechanism you use, in order to be compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license and Apache 2.0 license are similar (although the terms and license text you need to include are different). They are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive licenses&lt;/a&gt; because they are compatible with many types of re-use including being part of non-open-source software, provided the terms are followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2346" LastEditorUserId="2346" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T15:38:44.080" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T15:38:44.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5698" CreationDate="2017-07-07T10:54:05.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you create a photograph in which software code is a prominent feature, then your photograph will likely be considered to be a derived work of the software and you will have to comply with the copyright license of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the photograph is more than a mechanical reproduction of the source code, then the photograph itself is also protected by copy rights, which you hold as being the photographer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the source code is licensed under a permissive license, like the MIT license, then you are completely free in your choice of license for the photograph.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To comply with most permissive licenses, you will have to mention somewhere (probably in the metadata of the photo) that the code shown is licensed under license XYZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T10:54:05.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5697" CreationDate="2017-07-07T20:18:32.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I would recommend against having the full text of the MIT License in both the README and LICENSE files. Just like with real code, duplication can be a maintenance hazard. If you feel that you must talk about the license in the README, I would just state the copyright and that the project is licensed under the MIT License and leave it at that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does this mean people who create derivative works cannot change the license text in the README? Or does this only apply to the LICENSE file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT/X11 License makes no restrictions on where the license text must appear for a given project. I think one would be free to change the text of the license within the README as long as an unmodified version of the text is intact somewhere within the project (e.g. the LICENSE file). Would this be confusing to have two different wordings of the license? Absolutely! However, I don't think you are prevented from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is MIT even appropriate for projects of this type?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, it's appropriate, but what are you trying to accomplish with your license? If your goal is to protect your copyright on README, then it seems like a reasonable choice. However, others may add their copyright to the README if they make modifications/additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T23:12:21.140" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T23:12:21.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5945" CreationDate="2017-07-08T23:55:34.870" Score="0" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to upload a SVG document with a CC BY-SA 3.0 license to an online wiki with a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will these licenses conflict with each other, or can they coexist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8497" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T14:45:15.650" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T00:33:07.500" Title="Including a CC BY-SA licensed SVG in a CC BY-NC-SA licensed wiki?" Tags="|license-compatibility|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2017-07-09T17:02:53.383" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can, and indeed it has been done. You can write the novel in Markdown or LaTeX and upload it to GitHub. Why not? You will have to choose a Creative Commons license, which are not included by default when you create a GitHub repo, but that's all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8500" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T17:02:53.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-10T17:04:43.567" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to work in software developing by myself and I'm not sure what is the correct way to handle licenses, so far I'm working on a java project using maven (google json simple and junit pugins). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maven and its plugins are under Apache2 license, as I'm nor editing java or anything like that from what I have read theres no need to include any license from it and my own code would go under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I have seen the license of the project go usually inside a &quot;Lincense.txt&quot;, that's where I put the GPL3 but I'm unsure of the correct way to handle the Apache2 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: making the question more clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have maven and some plugins for it under apache2 license, where should I put the apache2 license and what clarifications should I add?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8508" LastEditorUserId="8508" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T17:33:44.093" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T17:33:44.093" Title="How to correctly handle software licenses?(code under GPL3 making use of code under Apache2)" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5715" CreationDate="2017-07-11T15:04:03.470" Score="5" ViewCount="6027" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to start a project and make it 'open source' cause I really like it, and would fit perfectly my project spirit. The project is divided in 2 parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main application, whose anyone could contribute with code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The database, built by users entry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I want to release code on GitHub, so anyone can see how it's made and eventually contribute on any of the many parts it's composed, and all data in my database freely visible on my website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The problem&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/8477/legal-help-needed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;My favorite open source project has been attacked in a very simple but effective way&lt;/a&gt;, and I fear that I could fall it the same kind of trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6fv3k3/a_tale_of_dmcas_and_borderless_gaming_in/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another pretty popular application I know had make a very different but problematic issues with licensing.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worse of all I fear that anyone (a single person or a company) could take my code and make a proprietary version of my software, or fork it and make another separate version that develop separately, making it not contributing on my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time I want to retain maximum copyrights on project's destinations and data/code, in a way that I could make deal with partners/make a separate donators version or something like that. Summing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make code/data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;totally open for view&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;totally open for editing/contributing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free to use/free to download, in any fields&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;retaining copyrights on ALL code/data (= hold copyrights on my and user's contributions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give me the power to monetize in some kind of way, if I want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoid developing of separate project using my project's code/data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I know it sound a kinda dictatorial, but I fear that someday I could lost power to decide the future of the app or make me battle against a derivative of my own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideas&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could license the projects in this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Data (on my site) - Creative Commons BY-NC-ND-SA (So anyone could use it for various personal project, and make it free to view/use without having to worry about stealing of using in a commercial way, letting me monetize it in any way I like)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code (on GitHub) - ? (What license respect all the premises I've done?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to make something free for all, retaining in the same way the power to lead the project in the best direction for all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5320" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T23:59:39.610" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:12:32.927" Title="How to retain complete copyright on a GitHub open source project" Tags="|license-recommendation|github|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T16:28:27.297" Score="4" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm author of a Python package released under BSD license. This work was published in a GitHub repository. Someone forked my repository. Did some improvements and published code under MIT license with his name as author (removing mine as author). Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8514" LastEditorUserId="8514" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T16:59:25.133" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T16:48:13.350" Title="Is it possible to move from BSD to MIT without author consent?" Tags="|licensing|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5710" CreationDate="2017-07-11T19:04:23.723" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the other person was not allowed to remove the BSD license from your code. All forms of the BSD license say &quot;Redistributions [...] must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&quot; If the downstream author has failed to include these components, then they are in violation of your license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the other person is allowed to licence their own improvements under the MIT X11 license (or really any license, since code under 3- and 2-clause BSD licenses may happily stand alongside other code that is under virtually any license). However, they must obey the conditions in the BSD license grant on your original code, per the previous paragraph. In practice, I'm not really sure why the downstream author didn't just keep their changes under BSD as well, since it is more or less identical in effect to MIT X11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of removing your name as author of the project: the license requires that downstream use of your code preserve your copyright notice, which includes your name. However, the BSD license does not impose further requirements about attributing you as the author (unless you've chosen the long-disused 4-clause BSD license). How prominent the downstream author should advertise your status as (co)author is purely a question of good manners, not legality.  If you need to contact the author to rectify any missing copyright notice and BSD license terms, you might also kindly ask for a mention in the project README (or CONTRIBUTORS file, or other documentation) at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T16:48:13.350" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T16:48:13.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T03:40:37.137" Score="3" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Amx Mod X is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AMX Mod X is a versatile Half-Life metamod plugin which is targetted toward server administration.&#xA;  It has a wide array of scripting capabilities so people can write &quot;plugins&quot;, or files which add on to a mod's functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Plugins can take form in administrative services (adding new admin commands), statistics generation (StatsX), fun additions (godmode, etc), gameplay changes (WC3, CSDM), and much, much more!&#xA;  You can also write modules to expand the functionality of AMX Mod X and add to the scripting language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its license can be found on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/alliedmodders/amxmodx/blob/master/public/licenses/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/alliedmodders/amxmodx/blob/master/public/licenses/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AMX Mod X is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3, or (at&#xA;  your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the AMX Mod X Development Team gives permission to link&#xA;  the code of this program with the Half-Life Game Engine (&quot;HL Engine&quot;) and&#xA;  Modified Game Libraries (&quot;MODs&quot;) developed via the Half-Life 1 SDK as full&#xA;  replacements for Valve games. You must obey the GNU General Public License in&#xA;  all respects for all other code used other than the HL Engine and MODs. This&#xA;  extension, at your option, may also be granted to works based on AMX Mod X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find some information about licensing it on the internet, but I could not find anything arruring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=298648&amp;amp;highlight=gpl%20license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License plugin on web address&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=296734&amp;amp;highlight=gpl%20license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licensed Plugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=291465&amp;amp;highlight=gpl%20license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SourcePawn samples and GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=285067&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Official AMXX Plugins on a Repository + License?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, an AMXX (Amx Mod X) plugin follows the C syntax as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;amxmodx&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;#define PLUGIN  &quot;New Plug-In&quot;&#xA;#define VERSION &quot;1.0.0&quot;&#xA;#define AUTHOR  &quot;Author&quot;&#xA;&#xA;public plugin_init()&#xA;{&#xA;    register_plugin(PLUGIN, VERSION, AUTHOR)&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file does not include a license clause, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; copyright granted by law to the plugin owner? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or this plugin is under the open source GPL v3 as it is an &lt;code&gt;derivative&lt;/code&gt; work from the AMXX &lt;code&gt;API&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I create &amp;amp; publish derivative works from it, i.e., add new functions as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/**&#xA; * Extended the plugin - 12-07-2017&#xA; */&#xA;#include &amp;lt;amxmodx&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;#define PLUGIN  &quot;New Plug-In&quot;&#xA;#define VERSION &quot;1.1.0&quot;&#xA;#define AUTHOR  &quot;Author&quot;&#xA;&#xA;public plugin_init()&#xA;{&#xA;    register_plugin(PLUGIN, VERSION, AUTHOR)&#xA;    server_print( &quot;Registered&quot; )&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plugin owner can prosecute me by violating the &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; copyright granted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt; law and take all my money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="6733" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T17:08:13.963" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T17:49:13.190" Title="Are Amx Mod X plugins under GPL v3 license?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|gpl-3|gpl-2|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T04:21:53.730" Score="2" ViewCount="1040" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/1739223/half-of-github-code-unsafe-to-use-if-you-want-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Half of GitHub Code Unsafe To Use (If You Want Open Source)&lt;/a&gt; you can find a recipe to getting rich:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Post it on Github&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Make everyone think it's free to use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Sue everyone you can get your hands on who do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Profit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the package &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools&lt;/a&gt; has no explicit licence (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;) and has hundreds of forks on GitHub, and several of them pushed commits to their forks, as we can see on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools/network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools/network&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by this project being on GitHub, I am allowed to fork it by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub ToS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However if I create derivative works from it (pull requests, new commits to my fork, etc.) can Sublime Text prosecute me and everybody by violating the &quot;All rights reserved&quot; copyright granted by Berne Convention law, and start getting rich?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning that, to contribute to that project LaTeXTools is pure danger of getting prosecuted, as I am violating their copyright by adding new commits to my fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T06:32:39.093" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T06:32:39.093" Title="Is it possible to get rich prosecuting GitHub users of an unlicensed fork?" Tags="|licensing|github|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T06:48:06.040" Score="3" ViewCount="805" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/op-ed-oracle-attorney-says-googles-court-victory-might-kill-the-gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Op-ed: Oracle attorney says Google’s court victory might kill the GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not figure out why would it kill GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T14:27:34.917" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:27:34.917" Title="Why Google’s court victory might kill the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|law|api|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5709" CreationDate="2017-07-12T08:18:28.267" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The three freedoms you say you want to give (totally open for view, totally open for editing/contributing, free to use/free to download) are not contentious, so I'll focus on the restrictions you want to add: how to implement them, and whether or not they stop your software being considered free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Retaining copyrights on ALL code/data (= hold copyrights on my and user's contributions)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is achieved by requiring any contributors to your codebase to complete a &lt;em&gt;copyright assignment&lt;/em&gt;.  The practice isn't unheard of; the FSF requires that contributors to GNU software &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/contributing/copyright_assignment.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;assign the copyrights to the Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.  Some people have issues with copyright assignments, so you may well find that the pool of contributors to your project is reduced; but requiring one doesn't make your software non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Give me the power to monetize in some kind of way, if I want&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is achieved by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual-licensing&lt;/a&gt; your code, which you can do as copyright holder (see above).  You allow others to use your software without the obligations that traditionally attach to strongly-copylefted software in return for money.  It is possible to dual-license weakly-copylefted software, but since a weak copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use without obligations there's no real incentive for anyone to buy your commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid developing of separate project using my project's code/data&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the problem one.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software include the freedom &lt;em&gt;to study how the program works, and change it as you wish&lt;/em&gt;, and the freedom &lt;em&gt;to distribute copies of your modified versions to others&lt;/em&gt;.  Note that if you try to constrain those freedoms, you can't claim you are giving them; they must be unfettered for your claims to be taken seriously.  So saying &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;everyone can contribute to my project, but only through my organisation and after assigning copyright to me&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; will not satisfy the definition of freedom one, and although you can certainly do it, people will not regard your software as free if you require this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is no free software license that will achieve your goals.  Although their licences are not felt to be good for software, the Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-ND&lt;/a&gt; license comes pretty close to doing what you want, and you might find it sufficient for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T14:12:32.927" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5714" CreationDate="2017-07-12T12:19:50.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fair use&quot; is the legal doctrine in the United States that says sometimes use of copyrighted material without permission is &quot;fair&quot; and allowed. The author of this op-ed is concerned that Google had a very weak fair use case, but won the case anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google won a verdict that an unauthorized, commercial, competitive, harmful use of software in billions of products is fair use. No copyright expert would have ever predicted such a use would be considered fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thesis here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Google's narrative boiled down to this: because the Java APIs have been open, any use of them was justified and all licensing restrictions should be disregarded. In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This author is concerned that anyone will be able to use this case a precedent to defend any use whatsoever of publicly-available source code, even if that use ignores requirements like those imposed by the GPL. People can just reuse GPL-licensed code however they want, says this author, and if they get sued they can just defend their use under fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I don't find this argument very convincing. I do agree that the fair use finding in &lt;em&gt;Oracle v. Google&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat surprising, since fair use looks unfavorably at commercial use in general (with notable exceptions). However, in this case, the use under consideration was Google's reimplementation of Oracle's Java APIs. That is, Google didn't reuse any part of Java code -- they instead used the API specification (function names, arguments, return values) to write their own brand new code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oracle v. Google&lt;/em&gt; was the landmark case that decided that the structure of an API was protected under copyright. Google argued that API structure was purely functional and not part of the creative work protected by copyright, but lost that argument. Immediately following this loss, there was another case to decide if Google's unauthorized reuse of the Java API was protected by fair use. The jury in that case decided that it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that this was the first-ever case to consider the application of fair use to API structure, I don't think we can draw any sweeping generalizations from it. As one counterargument, perhaps future case will acknowledge that API structure is covered by copyright, but it constitutes so small a part (and so functional a part) of the work that it will be relatively easy to defend unauthorized reuse of an API. If such a legal future came to pass, that won't have much bearing on any other kinds of reuse outside of API reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T12:19:50.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5714" CreationDate="2017-07-12T12:25:57.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL is a very strong copyleft license. Part of this strength stems from the claim from the FSF that mere linking  (even dynamic linking) with a library creates a derivative work of the library and thus the GPL restricts the licensing options for this derivative. This allows the FSF to propose a distinct lighter license  (the LGPL) that allows this kind of linking more broadly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This claim has been contested a lot over time and this is yet another blow against it as use of an API that was shared publicly (as with a GPL library) could be considered fair use and wouldn't allow the author of the API to impose restrictions on the resulting product, making thus the GPL actually not very different than the LGPL. The same issue could arise with the AGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to emphasize though that I have no legal training and wouldn't take a bet in the final outcome of this (and we might not know for years because a court ruling on this particular issue would be needed to give a definite answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly the counter-opinion from Pamela Samuelson linked at the bottom of the article you shared says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Annette Hurst, one of Oracle's lawyers, has recently argued that Google's victory will be harmful to open source developers. I have a great deal of respect for her as a lawyer, but this claim is not just greatly exaggerated—it's wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then goes on making an argument on why it is good that an API can be copied (which most free software developers would approve) but doesn't defend against the aforementioned issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also interesting to note the difference in vocabulary: one says free software and talks only about the GPL, the other says open source and makes no specific claim about the GPL. Oracle's lawyer wants to appeal to FSF / Richard Stallman's supporters while Google's lawyer wants to appeal to the larger crowd of open source enthusiasts who care about free reuse but less about copyleft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T12:42:18.423" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T12:42:18.423" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T14:22:56.627" Score="1" ViewCount="834" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a project under the MIT license. Among the source files there is a png with the company logo. I would like to specify that that logo cannot be included in any of the derivative works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8524" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:12:25.537" Title="Company logo in an MIT licensed project" Tags="|mit|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-13T07:21:15.210" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T16:06:45.470" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use content I wrote on SE as part of an internal blog. However, I would like to avoid directly linking my SE profile to my RL person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I quote material from an SE post written by me, what are my obligations as far as citing go? Can I implicitly allow myself to use my content (which is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under my real name or otherwise clearly identified to my IRL identity) without attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SE content is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;SE terms and conditions&lt;/a&gt; clauses here apply &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to content &quot;with the exception of content entirely created by You&quot; so I am only concerned with the actual license implications.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2508" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T20:07:24.527" Title="What are my obligations when citing myself on an SE site for an internal company blog?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5712" CreationDate="2017-07-12T17:49:13.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but here is my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the GPLv3 strongly recommends that you include a comment header declaring the license and the copyright information in each individual file, I don't believe it's required. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless stated otherwise in individual files, I would say the project as a whole is likely licensed under the GPLv3. The license file you reference states this in the last paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some components of AMX Mod X use a license other than the GNU General Public&#xA;  License. You must also adhere to these additional licenses in all respects. See&#xA;  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.txt for further details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is any uncertainty about a specific file, it is usually easiest to contact the copyright owner (or owner of the GitHub repository) directly, asking for clarification on its license. However, the owner of the GitHub repository may not be the copyright owner for a particular file, and hence, they may not know all of the appropriate licensing information. You, personally, are solely responsible for complying with licensing and copyright laws, regardless of if your source is in compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask about the Berne Convention in regards to regular copyright laws, which seems to be a duplicate from your earlier question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5713/is-it-possible-to-get-rich-prosecuting-github-users-from-a-non-lincesed-fork&quot;&gt;Is it possible to get rich prosecuting GitHub users from a non-lincesed fork?&lt;/a&gt;. I'll refrain from any conversation around that topic since you've already dedicated a thread to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T17:49:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5719" CreationDate="2017-07-12T17:54:28.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest answer is that you are the copyright holder, and Stack Exchange's license to your work is not exclusive, so you have unlimited rights to use your own work however you please. You cannot go wrong republishing your own work, since you are still the copyright holder of the work and never promised an exclusive license to anyone (e.g., as you might if you were a professional writer submitting a piece to a magazine or newspaper).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you technically have no obligations to yourself or to Stack Exchange. The interesting question here is how things would go if you staunchly refuse to identify yourself as the author of the Stack Exchange post, even privately to Stack Exchange. What could Stack Exchange do, in response to this apparently-unauthorized (but really in secret, self-authorized) reuse of Stack Exchange content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as Stack Exchange doesn't hold copyright on the post, they can't take any action against you for copyright violation. Furthermore, even if they wanted to treat it as some kind of terms-of-service violation, Stack Exchange can't prove that your license to use the post didn't come directly from the original author (e.g., maybe this reposter is a friend of the author and has never even heard of Stack Exchange), or that the reposter is in fact the original copyright holder (as is the case here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an academic context, you may sometimes have an obligation not to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism#Self-plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-plagiarize&lt;/a&gt;, but this is an academic ethical concern, not a legal issue. (Nor does it appear to be relevant in this particular, non-academic scenario.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T20:07:24.527" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T20:07:24.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5718" CreationDate="2017-07-12T18:12:25.537" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and it might be best to consult with your company's legal department (if they have one) about this before releasing the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your company's logo is a registered trademark, I don't think there is a lot to worry about. A good practice would be to explicitly state in the LICENSE or COPYING file that the logo is a registered trademark of CompanyXYZ and its use is not permitted in any derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T18:12:25.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T01:04:32.953" Score="1" ViewCount="1316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project with &lt;code&gt;GPL v3&lt;/code&gt; license. And it has git submodules with the &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Apache v2&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;All Rights Reserved&lt;/code&gt; due &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I violating copyright having public git submodules with &lt;code&gt;All Rights Reserved&lt;/code&gt; license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried search and found these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4389/when-does-a-dependency-imply-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;When does a dependency imply a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5126/i-want-to-make-my-private-github-repo-public-can-i-put-part-of-it-under-mit-lic/5129#5129&quot;&gt;I want to make my private github repo public; can I put part of it under MIT license, and keep the rest protected?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4893/how-can-i-use-an-mit-license-for-code-but-protect-the-copyright-of-photos-in-my&quot;&gt;How can I use an MIT license for code but protect the copyright of photos in my repository?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am still not sure whether they are allowed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T12:34:08.900" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T12:34:08.900" Title="Can I add a git submodule with an All Rights Reserved license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|github|proprietary-code|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5723" CreationDate="2017-07-13T04:18:28.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Git repositories and submodules are just ways of organising and tracking changes to files. I doubt that any FLOSS license would have anything relevant to say whatsoever about including differently-licensed submodules in a Git repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does matter is when projects of different licenses are compiled together. Normally GPL and ARR are not compatible. But that incompatibility exists whether the projects are submodules, included in the main repo, or in completely disconnected version control systems (or even if they aren't in a VCS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your question is not so much about the compatibility, but whether you are allowed to include a submodule of proprietary code which you don't own, it depends where the code comes from. If it is from another Github repository, then Github's Terms of Service allow you to - public Github repositories are in effect not allowed to truly be All Rights Reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T04:18:28.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T08:35:52.503" Score="1" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just received a notification about the following issue from a project I contributed in the past: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools/issues/1175&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can it be a open source project?&lt;/a&gt; (Since the source code is already open, I think the title should be &lt;em&gt;Can it be a free software project?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised by the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By this project being on Github, I am allowed to fork it by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github TOS&lt;/a&gt; (Terms Of Service). However I am not allowed to create derivative works from it (pull requests). Meaning I cannot fork this repository, change its code and perform pull requests without the danger/liability of being prosecuted by violating the &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; copyright granted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;berne convention&lt;/a&gt; law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reads quite concerning. Does this mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if someone creates an open source repository on Github without license information, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and I blindly contribute by forking, modifying and creating a pull request&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... does this mean, I am violating copyright? I'm mainly confused about the &lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; copyright granted by the berne convention law, what does this exactly mean in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6846" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T08:35:52.503" Title="What happens if I do not add a license to my open source project on Github?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|github|forking|pull-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-07-14T12:36:08.387" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5731" CreationDate="2017-07-13T12:12:14.603" Score="1" ViewCount="1594" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use PyQT5 and QT5 to create an -internal- application for a friend and his company. I would like to use PyQT GPL license and QT LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respect these licenses, I need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give him the source code when the application is done;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create a msgBox that defines what QT is, with links to their licenses;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a copy of the GPL license;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct? Do I forget something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8531" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T07:53:47.570" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T07:53:47.570" Title="Licenses PyQt and QT" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|license-notice|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5713" CreationDate="2017-07-13T16:26:43.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, creating derivatives of a copyrighted work is generally the exclusive right of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder has not licensed this right to you, you don't have the right to create or distribute a derivative. You only have rights that the author is required to offer you under the Github terms of service, which does not include the ability to prepare derivatives. Largely, Github only requires rights necessary to protect themselves from legal action (e.g., rendering someone else's code on their website, indexing contributions in a search database, making sure their &quot;Fork&quot; button does not cause a copyright violation, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether or not you could &quot;get rich&quot; on pursuing such violations depends on how your jurisdiction awards damages for copyright violations, versus the cost of hiring a lawyer. It's generally &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; easier to just get infringing content taken down, rather than dealing with the time, paperwork, and expense of engaging with the judicial system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a legal principle called &quot;estoppel&quot; which means that if someone has made it clear you were allowed to do something, they can't sue you for doing it. If the owner of a copyrighted work says, &quot;Everyone, please submit bug fixes to my repo,&quot; then they can't successfully sue you for doing that, even if they haven't formally issued you a license to prepare derivative works. This is a little dangerous to rely on, since what is and is not allowed is not formally specified. (For example, in my sample quote, bug fixes are allowed, but where is the line between &quot;bug fix&quot; and &quot;new feature&quot;?) If any authors have encouraged you (or the public at large) to make derivatives, then they would be estopped from suing you for your derivative of that work. However, offering read-access to the code by itself does not constitute encouragement or permission to make derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T17:45:23.180" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T17:45:23.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5664" CreationDate="2017-07-14T07:30:10.413" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the last sentence as build LGPL2.1 software by using an Apache 2 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is the right reading then: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&lt;/a&gt;, quote &#xA;&quot;Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As GPL3 is much more exclusive LGPL and this the official Apache site the answer is a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T07:30:10.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5737" CreationDate="2017-07-14T08:04:09.107" Score="4" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I publish my C++ game on GitHub under MIT using art and libraries under others licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish my code on GitHub, but I have some troubles with licensing.&#xA;In my game I use GLEW (Khronos License or Mesa 3-D license), GLFW (zlib/libpng license), GLM (MIT or The Happy Bunny License) and I would like to use art package under Creative Commons CC0 license. It's all distributed under different licenses and I'm doubting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish my project under MIT now? What should I do to comply with all copyrights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8539" LastEditorUserId="8539" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T18:13:58.487" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T02:39:30.197" Title="Can I publish my C++ game on GitHub under MIT using art and libraries under others licenses?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|creative-commons|github|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T19:04:15.977" Score="6" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AFL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academic Free License 3.0&lt;/a&gt; explicitly allows distributing copies of the work &quot;under &lt;em&gt;any license of your choice that does not contradict&lt;/em&gt; the terms and conditions, including Licensor's reserved rights and remedies, in this Academic Free License&quot; (emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the many common licenses around, which of them fulfil this criterion? In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prestashop.com/en/blog/interview-lawrence-rosen-author-open-software-licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt;, Lawrence Rosen (the author of the AFL) replies to this question: &quot;Apache License, GPL licenses, MPL, EPL, etc., etc. The AFL license is very permissive.&quot; However, the FSF classifies AFL as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#AcademicFreeLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-Incompatible&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html#comparisons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This document&lt;/a&gt; says it is GPL-compatible, but it's dated 2002 and AFL-3.0 is 2005, so it probably refers to AFL-2.0 or earlier.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am to believe both Mr. Rosen and the FSF, I could say that AFL and GPL are incompatible (I cannot distribute a program combining code under both licenses), but I can &quot;change&quot; the license of the AFL code to GPL and then distribute everything under GPL. Is that so? If not, I repeat the first question: what are other licenses that do not contradict AFL-3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5933" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T16:20:02.600" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T15:08:12.320" Title="Which licenses do &quot;not contradict the terms and conditions&quot; of AFL v. 3.0?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|afl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5726" CreationDate="2017-07-15T00:48:09.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;provide a copy of the GPL license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You not only need to provide a copy of the GNU GPL, but you also need to release the internal application under the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a small chance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility issues between different versions of the GPL and LGPL&lt;/a&gt; that you should consider as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T00:48:09.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5732" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5735" CreationDate="2017-07-15T09:54:35.440" Score="3" ViewCount="1434" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on writing some eclipse plugins. I host the code in Gitlab repository. For these plugins I used some icons from this &lt;a href=&quot;http://eclipse-icons.i24.cc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;. Here it says that these icons are licensed under Eclipse Public License which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have to include it in my repository if I want to use these icons. The question is where to put it in project structure? I can put it in the root of the repository but Gitlab will link it as it's license for the whole project and I don't want to license my whole project under EPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be correct to have a separate folder for third party licenses where I will put this one and some other licenses(if I ever use some third party software in the future) and to have a separate license of my choosing for the whole project in the root of my git repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8545" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T10:13:49.267" Title="How to handle third party licenses in git repository?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5733" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-15T16:22:20.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AFL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Academic Free License 3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Free_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academic Free License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T19:25:17.183" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T19:25:17.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5734" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-15T16:22:20.017" Score="0" Body="for questions about the Academic Free License" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T19:25:12.927" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T19:25:12.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5732" CreationDate="2017-07-16T10:13:49.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to put the license of your plugin to the root. This way Gitlab displays the correct license and everyone knows directly the license of your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For 3rd party libs or data I would suggest to create appropriated sub-directories and put the licenses next to them in the same directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T10:13:49.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5738" CreationDate="2017-07-16T20:39:02.157" Score="12" ViewCount="1437" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20170316-tg.htm#e20170316-tg_wlog-10-tg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog post&lt;/a&gt; claims in passing that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SQLite is illegal, at least in Germany, but potentially worldwide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is tacked onto another mostly-unrelated claim that GitHub's terms of service are incompatible with the GPL, which we &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5193/532&quot;&gt;have previously discussed&lt;/a&gt;.  This unrelated claim appears overblown to me, so I am ignoring it except to note that the author may not be a reliable source of information on open source and the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I Googled &quot;SQLite is illegal in Germany&quot;, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1371/532&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which does seem to assert that SQLite's public domain status may be in doubt in some countries including Germany.  Hwaci &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;apparently sells licenses&lt;/a&gt; (at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;$6,000 USD&lt;/a&gt; a pop!) to users in such countries, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sqlite.org/copyright-release.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their CLA&lt;/a&gt; does not appear to include any copyright assignment (it purports to dissolve copyright entirely).  As a result, it's not clear to me that they actually own the copyrights they are supposedly licensing.  But it might not matter, because these &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/sample_license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenses&lt;/a&gt; include a warranty of title, so if Hwaci is licensing code they don't own, that's their problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can SQLite be fairly described as &quot;illegal in Germany?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T20:20:03.587" Title="&quot;SQLite is illegal in Germany&quot; - really?" Tags="|copyright|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5729" CreationDate="2017-07-17T02:39:30.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is possible and very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can choose any license to cover your own source code, period. But your license does not apply to the libraries and art, since you do not own their copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to distribute libraries and art in a package, you need to make sure you are not violating their licenses. But the Knronos/Mesa, zlib/libpng, MIT/Happy Bunny, and CC0 all allow you to distribute them in any way, provided you include their own license texts in the package. I personally include a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; for my own source code's license and a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE-dist.txt&lt;/code&gt; for all the libraries I am including in the distribution. For CC0, you don't even need to do this, but I would do it anyway to avoid questions about their licenses, and because it's ethical to credit them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6993" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T02:39:30.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5736" CreationDate="2017-07-17T11:30:29.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;illegal&quot; is not quite the right word (but it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in a quick parenthetical, so I don't expect perfect precision). I think the intent here was that SQLite not legally safe to use in Germany, since the original copyright holders have not correctly given rights to downstream recipients according to German law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SQLite contributor Alice &quot;went rogue,&quot; for example, and starting suing Bob who distributes work that includes SQLite, how successful would she be? The concern is that a German court might say, &quot;Well, Alice only ever said that her work was 'dedicated to the public domain' but we don't recognize that as a legally meaningful phrase, so Bob was never actually granted any rights. We award judgement to Alice.&quot; I don't live in or have knowledge of this jurisdiction, so I can't begin to speculate how plausible this is in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the concern the Hwaci might not own the copyright it is licensing: on the one hand, the SQLite licensing pages says that Hwaci is &quot;the company that employs all the developers of SQLite&quot; so Hwaci probably does hold the copyright (as much as they haven't been dissolved) to most of SQLite. On the other hand, however, they appear to accept outside contributions, so they likely do not have copyright for those contributions, but instead rely on the dissolution of copyright for those submissions. For jurisdictions that don't recognize that, a contributor could still prevail in suing someone for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T11:30:29.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5743" CreationDate="2017-07-17T15:59:22.690" Score="3" ViewCount="2841" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project in which I included libraries of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bootstrap&lt;/strong&gt; v3.3.7 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://getbootstrap.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://getbootstrap.com&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;Licensed MIT&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jQuery&lt;/strong&gt; v1.11.2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jquery.org/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jquery.org/license&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;Licensed MIT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jQuery UI&lt;/strong&gt; v1.11.2 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://jqueryui.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jqueryui.com&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;Licensed MIT&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jQuery Validation Plugin&lt;/strong&gt; v1.11.1 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jzaefferer/jquery-validation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jzaefferer/jquery-validation&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;Licensed MIT&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tingle&lt;/strong&gt; v0.11.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/robinparisi/tingle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/robinparisi/tingle&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;Licensed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;MIT&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Font Awesome&lt;/strong&gt; 4.7.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://fontawesome.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fontawesome.io&lt;/a&gt;) Font: &lt;em&gt;SIL OFL 1.1&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;CSS: &lt;em&gt;MIT License&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am considering making the source public in a Bitbucket repo. But the question is: can I use the MIT license for my project? (All of them are MIT but the fonts of Font Awesome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8557" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T17:29:44.313" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T17:29:44.313" Title="Can I use the MIT license if I use Font Awesome (SIL OFL)?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|mit|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5742" CreationDate="2017-07-17T16:44:34.127" Score="3" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a &lt;strong&gt;commercial project&lt;/strong&gt;, I need to add the support of the HEIF images (Nokia High-Efficiency Image File Format). I found a SDK provided by Nokia that seems to do the job. However I'm in trouble with the license agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the license&lt;/a&gt;, it is said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nokia Technologies Ltd (“Nokia”) hereby grants to you a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this license) license, under its copyrights and Licensed Patents only to, use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification), and copy the Software within the Licensed Field. For the avoidance of doubt the Licensed Patents shall not include Codec Patents. Codec Patent licenses are neither granted, implied nor otherwise conveyed hereunder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems to indicate that the source code may be used inside a commercial project. However, the term &quot;Licensed Field&quot; refers to this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licensed Field means the non-commercial purposes of evaluation, testing and academic research in each non-commercial case to use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification) and copy the Software to (a) generate, using one or more encoded pictures as inputs, a file complying with the Specification and including the one or more encoded pictures that were given as inputs; and/or (b) read a file complying with the Specification, resulting into one or more encoded pictures included in the file as outputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems to indicate the exact opposite of the first paragraph above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright issues are not my strong point, so can somebody point me if the code relative to this agreement may be used in a commercial project or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8558" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T23:46:20.113" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T02:58:23.303" Title="Can the code source under a HEIF License be used for a commercial project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5736" CreationDate="2017-07-17T20:20:03.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; It's used in e.g. Firefox, Android and Safari - all of which are used in Germany by millions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;public domain&lt;/em&gt; means different things in different jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="964" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T20:20:03.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5740" CreationDate="2017-07-18T02:58:23.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IANAL/IANYL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first license except you provided it says you can &lt;em&gt;only to,use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification), and copy the Software within the Licensed Field.&lt;/em&gt; Then, you continue with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which seems to indicate that the source code may be used inside a commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a justification for that assertion. It says &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; .. &lt;strong&gt;in the Licensed Field.&lt;/strong&gt; Without knowing what &lt;em&gt;Licensed Field&lt;/em&gt; means you cannot assume anything. Knowing that, the license includes the second excerpt you provided, which says what &lt;em&gt;Licensed Field&lt;/em&gt; means. Doing substitution results in the following &lt;em&gt;created&lt;/em&gt; condition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;only to, use, run, modify (in a way that still complies with the Specification), and copy the Software within &lt;em&gt;non-commercial purposes of evaluation, testing and academic research&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems to pretty much rule out &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; commercial purpose completely. It even rules out most non-commercial purposes except &quot;evaluation, testing and academic research.&quot; That seems to even rule out using it to display your family photos on your personal (non-commercial) website since it is not evaluation, testing, or academic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: Find a different SDK, or get a commercial license from Nokia to use their SDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7180" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T02:58:23.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5739" CreationDate="2017-07-18T07:29:09.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL OFL license&lt;/a&gt; grants you permission to redistribute those fonts. Remember, when you license your code (e.g. by placing a LICENSE.txt file in the root directory), you are only licensing &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code of which you own the copyright. You do not own the copyright on any of the other libraries. Those libraries and fonts allow you to distribute them as you wish but are not giving you ownership of their copyright. To comply with their license, you must include each of their copyright notices in your repo (e.g. inside their respective folders or in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file, clearly stating which folder is covered by which copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6993" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T07:29:09.427" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5747" CreationDate="2017-07-18T08:45:58.437" Score="-2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use NativeScript in my project, what licence agreement and documentation should I use and include?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, I'm using an open source tool to create mobile apps. Should I include the Apache licence? This was always confusing to me. It's not very clear that I have to include C# licence related documentation if I use it in my projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8568" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T14:17:01.260" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T14:17:01.260" Title="Nativescript Licence documentation" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5746" CreationDate="2017-07-18T12:01:15.150" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;MariaDB server is &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/licensing-faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I plan to use it on a server, unmodified, for let's say an online shop.&#xA;The users would have a GUI and through this GUI they would add products to a cart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be considered distribution (and trigger the GPLv2 license conditions) or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T12:56:50.620" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T12:56:50.620" Title="Using MariaDB on server" Tags="|distribution|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5745" CreationDate="2017-07-18T14:45:50.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you never distribute the code to anyone else and you never change anything GPLv2 is not triggered by your usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8572" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T14:45:50.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5744" CreationDate="2017-07-18T14:53:36.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nativescript.org/faq#how-is-nativescript-licensed?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NativeScript FAQ page&lt;/a&gt; (which was in the first Google search result) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The core of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NativeScript is licensed under the Apache 2.0 software license&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, you can do what you like with the software, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as long as you include the required notices&lt;/a&gt;. This permissive license contains a patent license from the contributors of the code and is very business friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I think you should include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any copyright information from the creators of NativeScript (Examples: &quot;Copyright 2017 Ty Coon&quot;, &quot;Copyright 2005 Mo Nopoly&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The full text of the Apache 2.0 license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List any modifications you made in the files. Adding a comment header to every file that you modify might be appropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A NOTICE file with any additional attributions (Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/example-NOTICE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/example-NOTICE.txt&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T14:53:36.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5749" CreationDate="2017-07-18T18:22:32.150" Score="-1" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a developer (startup) and I'm working in a few healthcare projects, I prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.highcharts.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Highcharts&lt;/a&gt; for data visualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; Why does one purchase a license when one can use Highcharts for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2.&lt;/strong&gt; I will be one among 1,000,000 people using Highcharts, so how does Highcharts (company) spot me as a person violating their laws/terms of service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8574" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T22:16:43.963" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T22:16:43.963" Title="How do companies spot when a person is violating their terms and conditions?" Tags="|creative-commons|enforcement|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-07-21T13:12:33.183" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5748" CreationDate="2017-07-18T19:07:57.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://shop.highsoft.com/faq#Non-Commercial-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a free version of Highcharts&lt;/a&gt;, but it primarily pertains to personal (non-commercial) use.  The most obvious answer to your first question is: &lt;strong&gt;because it's the law&lt;/strong&gt;.  Highcharts licenses their software for certain entities to use, so without obtaining the necessary license, you would be in violation of the applicable law.  (I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second question, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you used their software without the correct license, they would probably only find out if someone informed them.  The license requires neither a key nor activation, so there's no real registering of your usage of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would strongly recommend purchasing the necessary license, rather than trying to use the software illegally for free.  The &quot;High-five License&quot; is a very affordable option, but being a startup, if you &lt;a href=&quot;https://shop.highsoft.com/contact&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contact their sales team&lt;/a&gt;, they may be able to work with you on pricing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T19:07:57.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5751" CreationDate="2017-07-18T19:31:23.067" Score="0" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a desktop application with a login where data users are loaded from a PostgreSQL database in a server on the web. This server has a website where the user can create an account and buy a license for the desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I required to share the desktop application source code for free in order to use PostgreSQL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PostgreSQL license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8577" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T22:15:48.253" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T22:15:48.253" Title="Can I use PostgreSQL on a server for users to access a desktop application without sharing my source code?" Tags="|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5750" CreationDate="2017-07-18T19:54:29.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming your desktop applications does not use any open source projects other than PostgreSQL, &lt;b&gt;you are not required to release the source code&lt;/b&gt; of your desktop application. However, you are required to provide the following text along with your Desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2017, The PostgreSQL Global Development&#xA;  Group&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Portions Copyright (c) 1994, The Regents of the University of&#xA;  California&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its&#xA;  documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written&#xA;  agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice&#xA;  and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all&#xA;  copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY&#xA;  FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES,&#xA;  INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND&#xA;  ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN&#xA;  ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES,&#xA;  INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE&#xA;  PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF&#xA;  CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT,&#xA;  UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: If your desktop application doesn't include any PostgreSQL software (i.e. all PostgreSQL software is on the server side), then you are not required to give attribution or licensing information. It might be polite to mention your server is using it, but it is definitely not required in this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T20:08:33.540" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:08:33.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5664" CreationDate="2017-07-19T16:58:17.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a gray area of sorts: let me first reformulate the question a bit to support my points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can copyleft-licensed code depend on non-copyleft-licensed code that is using a license that is deemed incompatible with a given copyleft license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, now this new question is much easier to answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, say I am writing an LGPL library in C/C++ to run on Windows and therefore depends on some non-free Windows-based framework libary and APIs. I am ignoring entirely here if the Windows licensing allows this or not (there many MSFT licenses that may restrict this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF GPL FAQ is clear&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I write free software that uses nonfree libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do this, your program won't be fully usable in a free environment. If your program depends on a nonfree library to do a certain job, it cannot do that job in the Free World. If it depends on a nonfree library to run at all, it cannot be part of a free operating system such as GNU; it is entirely off limits to the Free World.&#xA;So please consider: can you find a way to get the job done without using this library? Can you write a free replacement for that library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the FSF consider this to be OK but not something they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, for instance in the Java world, it is quite common to have an LGPL-licensed package that depends on Apache-licensed packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;further&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&#xA;If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though the LGPL is not the GPL, I would say that the best way to do this would be to follow the guidelines provided at the FAQ and license your LGPL library with an exception stating that this does not extend to the Apache-licensed dependencies. Something similar to OpenSSL exceptions commonly found in several places such &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/openvpn-openssl-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what if the LGPL-licensed library is not yours and you cannot grant such exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is OK. This falls in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; case I mentioned above. Not great but OK. As an example this somewhat popular &lt;a href=&quot;http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dbunit java library&lt;/a&gt; is LGPL-2.1-licensed without any exception and depends &lt;a href=&quot;http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/dbunit/dbunit/2.5.3/dbunit-2.5.3.pom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly&lt;/a&gt; on Apache-licensed libraries such as Apache Ant and other. This is not great but nobody would object. When I am confronted with such cases I make sure that the dependents are all open source and that when I redistribute I bundle the source code for both the LGPL and its dependencies at full depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T18:15:31.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5664" CreationDate="2017-07-20T12:47:41.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;License compatibility is a one-way street. If A-licensed software can link to B-licensed software, this does not imply that linking in the reverse direction is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL-2.1 has one-way compatibility with the GPL-2+:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can therefore only license code under the LGPL-2.1 if you can also license it under GPL-2+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incompatibility of Apache-2 and GPL-2 is well documented. If your software is a combined/derivate work with/of Apache-2 software, you cannot license that software under the GPL-2 and therefore cannot license it under the LGPL-2.1 either. I wish the LGPL would have made this relationship clearer, and the LGPL-3 does clarify this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the LGPL-2.1 is permissive only with regards to software that uses this library, which is defined as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot;.  Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. this permissiveness only applies to downstream works, not to upstream works like an Apache-2 library that your software uses: the upstream dependency is neither derivative of your library, nor was it designed to work with your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ item &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?&lt;/a&gt; mentioned by Philippe Ombredanne discusses that you can provide an exception to the GPL-2 for linking with incompatibly-licensed upstream libraries, provided that you are the copyright holder. It is reasonable to believe that this can also be done for LGPL-2.1 licensed software, and that these exceptions would not affect the GPL-2 compatibility in section 3: the exceptions would survive the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright owners of an LGPL-2 licensed software explicitly add an incompatible dependency, this could be interpreted as an implied license exception. However, you should avoid relying on implied licenses since they might not be accepted in all jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the interpretation that absent an explicit exception, you could add an incompatible dependency without being the sole copyright owner.&#xA;You do not have the right to issue an explicit or implied exception since you are bound by the terms of the LGPL-2, so you cannot add an incompatibly-licensed dependency.&#xA;If there are examples existing libraries that have done this, these do not provide a precedent that would allow you to ignore the terms of the LGPL-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T12:47:41.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5404" CreationDate="2017-07-20T23:01:42.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I am not an expert in immaterial or name law.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark law basically states that you may not use someone else's trademark to free-ride on their reputation. The key issue is if the inappropriate use is &lt;em&gt;confusable&lt;/em&gt; with the owner's name, brand, product or service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is never anything as a simple law: There are several international treaties as well as national laws governing brands, trademarks and names, so I will only speak in broad terms reflecting on the Swedish implementation of the EU regulations, to the best of my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let's start talking about what is a Trademark:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Trademark can be anything that can be visualized - a letter, word or glyph. Most commonly, brands are considered Trademarks. There is a distinct difference between a regular Trademark (TM) and a Registered Trademark (R). To get a Registered Trademark, one have to file with the appropriate patent/trademark organization and get approved. On the other hand, anyone can put a (TM) next to whatever they want to or simply stating &quot;HüllårFøllör is trademark by ACME Music Inc.&quot; BUT: it will not explicitly forbid anyone to use the trademark. The (TM) or statement is merely an indicator that the &quot;owner&quot; of the trademark will probably go to court if you try to free-ride on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the &quot;owner&quot; win? It depends on how &lt;em&gt;well-known&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; the Trademark is &lt;em&gt;within its target audience&lt;/em&gt; for its &lt;em&gt;domain&lt;/em&gt;: For example, HüllårFøllör(TM) might be a Trademark within the music domain but not within a car domain, because petrolheads don't know that HüllårFøllör is the name of the coating used on certain guitarstrings made by ACME Music Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ok, on with some real examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Nobel Prize&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is (R), so making a programming language called NobelPrize will definitely get you into trouble, but making a program called NobelPrizeLaureatesLister which lists laureates most likely won't - it's fair use of the &quot;Nobel Prize&quot; trademark (I guess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it worse, the Japanese camera manufacturer &lt;a href=&quot;http://global.canon/en/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canon Inc.&lt;/a&gt; holds the Trademark for the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Canon&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; name. But, Canon has a lot of other meanings as well, such as a title of certain Christian priests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would your fictitious language Canon violate the Trademark of Canon Inc.? It depends on which kind of Canon your Canon language is named from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generic words can not be trademarked: It is not possible to trademark the word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;hello&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; as such. However, when combined with other generic words in order to specialize the words, such as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;glue&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Hello Glue&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; can be trademarked.  But ... you can trademark a logotype consisting of the word &quot;hello&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefor, a language can be called &lt;strong&gt;Python&lt;/strong&gt; (since it is a generic word), or &lt;strong&gt;Monty&lt;/strong&gt; (since it also is a generic word or a name), but not &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Monty Python&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, since that can be a specialization, especially in the domains of comedy, music, film and theater. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it even harder, a Trademark owner must also enforce it. Bayer AG lost its trademark of Aspirin, since it didn't attack competitors that produced and sold other pain-relievers under the name Aspirin. Hence, &quot;aspirin&quot; is now considered a generic word, free for use in several countries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what about homage to persons?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's name our language Ericsson, after Lars Magnus Ericsson (namesake for the international telecom company &quot;Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson&quot;, most commonly known as &lt;strong&gt;Ericsson&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is perfectly fine according to Swedish trademark and name-law, since it is not possible to trademark a commonly name unless it is &quot;distinct and unique&quot;. Which Ericsson certainly isn't in Sweden. BUT: It is illegal to use a &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt; (such as Lars Magnus Ericsson himself, had he still been alive) to promote and advertise your language, unless he agrees to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, &quot;Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson&quot; does not own a trademark on the name Ericsson - but the Ericsson &quot;three sausages&quot; logo which consist of the ///-symbol and the word Ericsson written below it, is trademarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, naming your language &lt;strong&gt;Nobel&lt;/strong&gt;, in homage to Alfred Nobel is not allowed according to Swedish name law, since Nobel is a &quot;distinct and unique&quot; name. The Nobel Foundation can (and will) go to court in case you try to use Nobel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then again, you might think that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;grape&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is a generic word for something that can be pressed and fermented into wine, so you want to use &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Kicking grape&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; as the trademark for your wine? Not so, because Grape is a &lt;em&gt;distinct and unique&lt;/em&gt; family name in Germany and Sweden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these languages, countries and laws... Things aren't meant to be easy, are they? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way I've dealt with the issue, is to simply check if &lt;strong&gt;myintendedname&lt;/strong&gt; is registered as a .com domain. If not, it's probably free for use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8596" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T23:01:42.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5761" CreationDate="2017-07-21T04:17:12.510" Score="0" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on creating an online localized wiki about Linux programs. I am hosting the documents files on GitHub and I would like to choose an open source license for it. The problem is that I don't understand the nature of users' contributions to the repository and whether it's considered like software or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when a user sends me a pull request on GitHub and if the license of my documents was CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Does that mean that everybody won't be able to use the documents for commercial purposes including me? Or I would be the only one allowed to use it however I like even after someone sends me a pull request and I accept it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question is whether taking those documents and putting them in a nice way on a website with installing Google AdSense script is considered to be a commercial use of those docs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8269" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T15:15:39.570" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T15:42:23.387" Title="Using advertisements on my wiki licensed under CC BY-NC-SA" Tags="|commercial|documentation|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T11:11:48.890" Score="6" ViewCount="1402" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project, written in Python, which has lots of different functionalities. I will sell this project to third parties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm calling a GPL3 licensed Python program via a &lt;code&gt;subprocess&lt;/code&gt; call in parts of the program, and I'm using its output for some other functionalities in my software. My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I open source all of my main program?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I need to open my source code, can I do code obfuscation?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I get permission from the developer of GPL3-licensed third party code?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8600" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T15:53:41.213" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T15:53:41.213" Title="Code obfuscation and GPL3" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|source-code|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5759" CreationDate="2017-07-21T13:28:03.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but here is my two cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)Should I open source all of my main program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the only interaction between your program and the GPL3 program (or any other open source program) is via a Python subprocess call, then I don't believe you are required to open source your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright on the code of the program. So the license of the code of the program does not apply to the output, whether you pipe it into a file, make a screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text and/or art that comes from the program. Then the copyright on that text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as video games, would also fit into this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your somewhat limited description, it sounds like your code and the GPL3 code you are using are two separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2)If I need to open my source code, can I do code obfuscation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is kind of a gray area, but in general, I would say that you should not obfuscate your code.&#xA;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the &lt;strong&gt;preferred form of the work for making modifications&lt;/strong&gt; to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you typically develop with the obfuscated code (i.e. make modifications to your source code), then delivering obfuscated source code is fine. However, if you typically modify the un-obfuscated code and later obfuscate it prior to source distribution, then this would be considered a little dishonest. Whether or not somebody can prove that you don't develop in obfuscated code is another story, but being in this legal gray area is non-ideal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3)Should I get permission from the developer of GPL3-licensed third party code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to get permission in order to use GPL3-licensed code, as long as you are using it in compliance with the license. However, if your usage violates the GPL3, then you can reach out to the copyright holder asking for an exception. Whether or not the copyright holder grants you an exception is their decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please remember that if you are distributing the third-party GPL3 program with your code, then you are required to provide source (and follow all of the other requirements of the GPL3) for that third-party program as well, even if your main program is closed-source. If that third-party is already pre-installed on the end user's device, then you don't need worry about providing source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T13:44:21.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5758" CreationDate="2017-07-21T15:42:23.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Note that CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an open source license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users contribute (pull requests) to a work (your wiki) licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, they convey: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You can use this contribution under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, if you share their contributions, you may not do this in a commercial way. You can only ignore the license if you are the sole author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the advertisements result in a commercial context (see below), you have three options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only show advertisements on pages that don’t include any contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get the permission from your contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the license to one that allows commercial use, e.g., CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is it a NonCommercial purpose?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do advertisements result in a commercial context? Unfortunately, the license doesn’t define this explicitly. Some argue that it’s only commercial if you gain a profit, some argue that any kind of advertisement makes it commercial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Common’s FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Common’s wiki page &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NonCommercial interpretation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be on the safe side, don’t show advertisements for content that contains contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T15:42:23.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:47:01.230" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on different open source projects, to which I'm contributing code which sometimes overlaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this count as multi-licensing (and if so, do I have to make note of this explicitly)? Or do I have to structure it so that at least one of the projects depends on the other, including license copying etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I'm not planning to sue myself, but if the copyright of one of the projects ends up out of my hands somehow, I don't want it to affect the other!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8603" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T08:35:37.403" Title="Using my own code fragments in multiple projects: does this count as multi-licensing?" Tags="|licensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5762" CreationDate="2017-07-22T08:35:37.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, if you are the copyright holder of the code, then you have the right to provide that code to multiple people/projects under different licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As each project gets the code under a single license, they can't choose which license applies and this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; multi-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T08:35:37.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5765" CreationDate="2017-07-22T18:58:43.963" Score="3" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a runtime environment for Squirrel that includes embedded functions for basic I/O needed in games. The idea is that it would just run Squirrel files (&lt;code&gt;.nut&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;.sq&lt;/code&gt;) or its own format for multiple packed scripts. Basically, the RE contains all the functions for drawing, getting input, handling sound, loading resources, etc., but doesn't actually do anything on its own. The Squirrel scripts have all the game logic and tell the RE what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the code is available under GPL3, but someone who recently got interested in the project tells me that GPL3 is a bad idea because it'll force anyone who makes a game with it to open source their game as well. This confuses me, because unless they're actually modifying the runtime itself to make a game out of it, why would this happen? The scripts it runs aren't actually part of the runtime, so shouldn't whoever writes them be able to determine their own license for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, since the Squirrel scripts aren't actually part of the runtime, and could possibly even be run by another program altogether, assuming they used the same names in their embedded functions, then the license of the runtime shouldn't apply to the programs it's being used to run. Of course, I don't know if this is right or not, which is why I'm here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I make a runtime with a GPL license, does that license apply to programs that are intended to be run in it but not actually a part of it? Or are they separate and people making games with it shouldn't worry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in case anyone is wondering, the libraries I'm building it with are all either X11/MIT or ZLib licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://squirrel-lang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Squirrel&lt;/a&gt; is a scripting language. It's been used in games like Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, GTA 4 and 5, and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head. Someone else made a game development kit for it, too, but it's specifically designed for Android/iOS. I want to make one that's for PC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8612" LastEditorUserId="8612" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T18:34:47.250" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T11:30:45.523" Title="GPL in a runtime environment" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|zlib|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5764" CreationDate="2017-07-23T05:01:54.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the GPL license does not necessarily apply to the &lt;em&gt;input&lt;/em&gt; of a program. For example, the GNU &lt;code&gt;bash&lt;/code&gt; interpreter is GPLv3 licensed, but &lt;code&gt;bash&lt;/code&gt; scripts are not all GPLv3 licensed, and some people make proprietary scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it could be a gray area if your program and its input are &lt;em&gt;intimately&lt;/em&gt; coupled (and that notion is not easy to define). You might need to ask a lawyer (which I am not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ question&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a programming language interpreter is released under the GPL, does that mean programs written to be interpreted by it must be under GPL-compatible licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the same FAQ tells&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But read more about that issue. If there are &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; interpreters of Squirrel you are on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. I have &lt;em&gt;absolutely no idea&lt;/em&gt; about what Squirrel is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T05:14:17.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5764" CreationDate="2017-07-24T11:30:45.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is this: is the runtime environment a separate program that processes the scripts, or is it a a library that is linked with the scripts? Or perhaps a combination of both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The input and output of a program are not subject to the GPL license of the program. It isn't important whether the input or output is another program. For example, the GPL'ed GCC can be used to compile non-GPL'ed programs, and the GPL'ed OpenJDK/HotSpot JVM can be used to run non-GPL'ed programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking a program to a library means that the program makes function calls into the library and shares data structures with it. The program and library then form a combined work. If one part of this work is subject to the GPL, then the combined work may only be published under the GPL license. It is irrelevant how the library is linked, or whether non-GPLed alternatives to the library are available. This combination can happen very late when you replace a library with a GPL'ed library at runtime via dynamic linking. It can also happen very early when the code is being written to take advantage of a GPL'ed library, i.e. when you write function calls into the GPL'ed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a software is not subject to the GPL just because it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be linked with a GPL library. If the scripts are fully functional on a non-GPLed runtime, then running them with a GPL'ed runtime will not taint them. They are still linked, but this linking is is done by the user at run time, and the result of the linkage is not published. But if the script depends on features only provided by the GPL'ed runtime or makes special arrangements for being linked with the GPL runtime, then they clearly are linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The separation between compiler/interpreter and a runtime library is not always simple since they can only offer a complete runtime environment in tandem. Compilers like GCC do insert code fragments and the resulting programs depend on a runtime library (usually glibc), programs running on a JVM do need a Java standard library implementation. To allow themselves to be used with non-GPLed programs, the glibc (for GCC) and OpenJDK (for HotSpot) runtime libraries contain an exception to the GPL. Without this exception, the programs would be subject to the GPL because they are linked with the runtime libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for your scenario, a GPL'ed interpreter would not be a problem, but a GPL'ed runtime library is more difficult. &lt;strong&gt;Users of your runtime library do run the risk of making their scripts subject to the GPL unless the users take care to not use any unique or incompatible features of your runtime library, or unless you can offer an GPL exception for the runtime library&lt;/strong&gt; (which requires the explicit consent of all copyright holders of the runtime library). Additionally, embedding the GPL'ed runtime into a game would make the whole game subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T11:30:45.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5783" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:40:36.170" Score="-1" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what to be careful about using Ubuntu for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Ubuntu MATE (Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS), some packages, and applications I created. I only use my applicaton on my own system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if I install a package whose license is GPL and I use for my application, then I have to publish my source code of my application openly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to publish openly in the case where I do not use a package but it is installed default in the distribution (Ubuntu MATE)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8621" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T09:15:15.203" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T09:15:15.203" Title="License of Ubuntu MATE for commercial use" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T10:56:16.990" Score="11" ViewCount="2117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the jQuery plugin &quot;Fancybox&quot; has a peculiar &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fancyapps/fancybox/blob/master/dist/jquery.fancybox.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing note in its header&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Licensed GPLv3 for open source use&#xA;// or fancyBox Commercial License for commercial use&#xA;//&#xA;// http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/&#xA;// Copyright 2017 fancyApps&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get what the author is trying to achieve. They want to allow non-commercial use for free and charge for commercial use. I have been looking for a way to do just that for some of my code as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, can you really restrict the GPLv3 (or MIT for that matter) to a set of conditions (open-source/non-commercial) when GPLv3 itself explicitly &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;permits commercial use&lt;/a&gt;? This seems to be a bit of a conflict. Not to mention that someone could fork the code and release it under GPLv3 without those restrictions, if I'm not mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there be a better alternative to achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8625" LastEditorUserId="586" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T18:42:34.150" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T18:42:34.150" Title="Is it possible to restrict GNU GPLv3 to non-commercial use only?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5771" CreationDate="2017-07-25T11:02:27.237" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The natural interpretation of such a license declaration is that they are dual licensing their work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can use and distribute it under the terms of the GPL3, which because it is a copyleft license means that your derivative work must also be licensed under the GPL3, so you must make your source code available etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or, you can buy a commercial license which does not require you to openly license or publish your work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both options allow you to sell your software. The difference is whether you have to do so under the GPL or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they had said &quot;GPLv3 for non-commercial use&quot; you would be right that there would be a conflict. But the way they have written it is perfectly in line with how the GPL is intended to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T11:02:27.237" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5791" CreationDate="2017-07-25T14:39:38.693" Score="4" ViewCount="1048" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know under which license fall the templates generated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Studio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android Studio&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code examples that one can find on the Android development site (provided by Google) is Apache v2 - clearly specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when creating for example a new activity based on a template, it is generated without license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the Terms and Conditions but there are no details there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T20:05:04.213" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T21:55:33.050" Title="What is the license of the code generated by Android Studio?" Tags="|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7084" CreationDate="2017-07-25T19:02:43.730" Score="3" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company's legal team is currently worried about how to move forward with some app releases intended for our enterprise customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the gist of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We have many products referred to as &quot;apps&quot;, which each contain one or more (usually many) subproject modules (in the form of Java jars).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of these apps are made of free and open source code, with the LGPL license contained at the head of each source code file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For our subscription enterprise customers, we offer &quot;private&quot; versions of the apps that contain additional modules whose source code is not made publicly available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our customers want to have access to the source code of our private modules for their own development and troubleshooting (and we want to give it to them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, each app is just a big collection of .jar files. The current plan is to start bundling the -sources.jar files along with the compiled class jars. Right now, all of our code contains the LGPL license. My solution was to simply change the license in the source code files of our private source to our private enterprise license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, our legal team insists that there are issues with bundling jars that contain the LGPL license with jars that contain our enterprise license. Instead, they want to use a script to search/replace the license in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the jars that go into a private version of an app (including the public modules that are available in the public version of the app) and then repackage the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might sound confusing, so I'll try to provide a simple example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our public app:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;foobar.app&lt;/code&gt; (simple zip archive containing the following)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;abc.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;def.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ghi.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;abc-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;def-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ghi-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our private app:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;foobar-private.app&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;abc.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;def.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ghi.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;xyz.jar&lt;/code&gt; (private module)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;abc-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;def-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ghi-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;xyz-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the above example, just because of the presence of &lt;code&gt;xyz-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt; (which of course contains our enterprise license), legal says we need to replace the LGPL license in &lt;code&gt;abc-sources.jar&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;def&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;ghi&lt;/code&gt; when we build &lt;code&gt;foobar-private.app&lt;/code&gt;. I'm not a legal expert by any means, but to me this seems ridiculous. All of this code is our own, so we're not infringing on any third party's rights, and I don't think this violates the text or spirit of LGPL. Is there really some reason we can't simply apply whichever license we want on a module-by-module or even file-by-file basis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8629" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:10:59.910" Title="Are there legal issues with bundling one's own LGPL-licensed code with proprietary code?" Tags="|license-compatibility|law|lgpl|proprietary-code|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5777" CreationDate="2017-07-26T05:41:13.183" Score="15" ViewCount="2701" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-Profit Open Software License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/non-profit-open-software-license-3.0-(nposl-3.0)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tl;dr Legal&lt;/a&gt; says this about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A variant of the Open Software License 3.0, this license requires that the organization using it is a non-profit and that no revenue is generated from sale of the software, support or services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to refer to clause 17 (a) in the license text, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Licensor represents and declares that it is a not-for-profit organization that derives no revenue whatsoever from the distribution of the Original Work or Derivative Works thereof, or from support or services relating thereto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Does it mean only not-for-profit organisations can use NPOSL code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But doesn't this go against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, which says &quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&quot;? Why is this license OSI-approved - it is listed on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of approved licenses&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T05:41:13.183" Title="Why is the Non-Profit Open Software License (NPOSL) OSI-approved?" Tags="|open-source-definition|non-commercial|osl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5776" CreationDate="2017-07-26T05:41:13.183" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;NPOSL is an Open Source license; you've made a common reading error with the license text. It's the &lt;strong&gt;licensor&lt;/strong&gt;, not the &lt;strong&gt;licensee&lt;/strong&gt;, that needs to be a non-profit. In other words, a non-profit could publish code under the NPOSL, but everyone else can use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NPOSL is a variant of the OSL; the OSL's author &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosenlaw.com/OSL3.0-explained.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explains the license on their website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a new Non-Profit OSL 3.0, identical to OSL 3.0 except that: &lt;em&gt;Under Non-Profit OSL 3.0, Licensor disclaims certain warranties and limits liability from certain types of damages&lt;/em&gt;. Those differences are summarized in § 17 of the Non-Profit OSL 3.0, a section that does not appear in OSL 3.0 or AFL 3.0. Because of § 17(a), only non-profit distributors may use the Non-Profit OSL 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reduced Risk For Non-Profit Organizations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licensors are non-profit organizations that derive no revenue whatsoever from the distribution of the Original Work or Derivative Works, or even from support or services associated with those works. As a simple economic matter, these organizations have no revenue stream and they cannot afford to offer any warranties, even a simple Warranty of Provenance. For those licensors, there is now a Non-Profit OSL 3.0 that doesn't include that warranty and that disclaims liability even for direct damages. The differences between OSL 3.0 and Non-Profit OSL 3.0 are detailed in § 17 of the Non-Profit OSL 3.0 license. Section 17 includes Licensor's representation that it is actually a non-profit organization. Note also that once an Original Work is distributed by a Licensor who cannot make that non-profit representation, the license reverts to OSL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr if you redistribute NPOSL code and you are not a non-profit, the license reverts to OSL (clause 17 (d)). The license is designed to protect non-profits, who by law cannot provide some warranties that the normal OSL requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T05:41:13.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T13:12:26.590" Score="9" ViewCount="4802" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource.org&lt;/a&gt;, the first line of the license reads,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt; &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the development goes across January 1, or a repository consists of sources written in different years, can I substitute something like 2013-2017 for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I add sources to the repositories in later years, will I have to update each license of each repository every year, or will all licenses &quot;expire&quot; on midnight, Jan 1 if I don't?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8636" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T14:49:36.017" Title="Why do licenses such as the MIT License specify a single year?" Tags="|mit|copyright|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5778" CreationDate="2017-07-26T14:29:31.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The year is part of the &lt;em&gt;copyright notice&lt;/em&gt;, not the license. It's important to understand that copyright notices are not very important now, after the widespread international ratification of the Berne Convention. Per the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic when a work is created. You cannot accidentally remove or invalidate your copyright by incorrectly marking your copyright. It &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; serve a function (described below), but that function is very different from creating or ensuring your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, a copyright notice should be made in compliance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 U.S. Code § 401&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) Form of Notice.—If a notice appears on the copies, it shall consist of the following three elements:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(1) the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright”, or the abbreviation “Copr.”; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) &lt;strong&gt;the year of first publication of the work; in the case of compilations, or derivative works incorporating previously published material, the year date of first publication of the compilation or derivative work is sufficient.&lt;/strong&gt; The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying text matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful articles; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(3) the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While 17 USC 401 says that you should include a single year, the FSF (whose advice has presumably been vetted by at least one lawyer) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recommends that for software with multiple releases, you include all applicable years&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice should include the year in which you finished preparing the release (so if you finished it in 1998 but didn't post it until 1999, use 1998). You should add the proper year for each release; for example, “Copyright 1998, 1999 Terry Jones” if some versions were finished in 1998 and some were finished in 1999. If several people helped write the code, use all their names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For software with several releases over multiple years, it's okay to use a range (“2008-2010”) instead of listing individual years (“2008, 2009, 2010”) if and only if every year in the range, inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; and you make an explicit statement in your documentation about this usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this advice, it is perfectly valid to include multiple years to represent that the work includes work released during multiple years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what does a copyright notice actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the modern purpose of the copyright notice is to nullify a claim of innocent infringement. An infringing distributor cannot successfully claim they didn't know that the work was under copyright if it was marked by a prominent, correctly-formed copyright notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) Evidentiary Weight of Notice.—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy [...], then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what's the worst that could happen if you failed to correctly identify all the release years that apply to a copyrighted work. Possibly, it could be easier for someone to claim innocent infringement in the United States (SPECULATION: especially if the incomplete date(s) given would suggest an expired copyright). Other possibilities may apply in other jurisdiction. However, in most nations (i.e., all that signed the Berne Convention), this would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; negate your copyright in any way, since the Berne Convention makes copyright apply instantly, irrespective of any copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T14:49:36.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2017-07-26T15:01:13.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, going from GPLv3 to GPLv3+ is a license change, perhaps legally as important as going from GPLv2 to GPLv3. However, GPLv3 and GPLv3+ are &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your contributions are small, that is some patch of a few dozen lines, they should go into some &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; source file, and I guess that you legally cannot change the license of that existing file without asking formal permission by all copyright owners and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your contributions are significant, and you can arrange most of them to go into &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; source files, you could license your new source files under GPLv3+ and keep the other (patched) source files with the same old license (e.g. GPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm implicitly thinking of some free software code written in a language using source files (e.g. most of the languages I know, such as C, C++, Python, Java, Ocaml, JavaScript). If you code in a language without a clear notion of source file &lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; (or of &quot;translation units&quot;) things might be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could be very wrong (because in some way, I'm making the implicit assumption that a license apply to a source file, not to a free software; perhaps that is a mistake).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5523/910&quot;&gt;advice by Zim i48&lt;/a&gt; of contacting the other authors is probably the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, don't do anything without asking (or at least seriously trying to contact other authors). Such a license change might be considered as important by some authors, and if you change it without permission these authors would at least be pissed off (and if paranoid could perhaps even sue you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note *. Some weird implementations of Smalltalk are only modifying some &quot;system image&quot;, then the notion of source &lt;em&gt;file&lt;/em&gt; has no sense (and the entire source code is embedded inside that whole system image).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2017-07-26T15:16:53.060" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T15:16:53.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4543" CreationDate="2017-07-26T16:29:37.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You need a license permitting you to fork the MIT license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Governing what can be copied or copied and modified is what this and other types of licenses is for. It follows directly that no license can license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT wrote this license. They are the Copyright holders of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If MIT has not released the text under another license permitting copying and modification, it falls under the implied automatic copyright enforced by law in most countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you hold a license to copy and modify, or just copy verbatim, the MIT License file, you are violating this automatic Copyright that MIT holds for having written it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the text's impact on the industry, a lawyer could convincingly claim it a work of significance, and most of those working in said industry would a) lack the funds to find a defense lawyer better than MIT's, and b) lack the time and money appeal to higher court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a joke. If MIT did not provide a license to copy, let alone copy and modify, the license text their lawyers missed a trick. And without it the question is logical as well as understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8636" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T16:29:37.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5767" CreationDate="2017-07-27T09:08:41.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You only have to make the source code available if you &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; your software. For example: offering it for download, sending it per email, selling it on CDs, installing it somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case for all FLOSS licenses (but some differ in what counts as distribution if servers are involved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not this happens in a commercial context isn’t relevant. FLOSS licenses don’t differentiate between commercial and non-commerical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T09:08:41.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T09:30:38.207" Score="7" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found an open source project (MIT-licensed) that I really loved the idea and the project code base itself, however it seems to be abandoned and people are doing their own forks from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did that too, but then I realized I can continue working on this project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I don't want it to look like stealing code or anything. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8650" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T18:07:20.280" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T23:24:05.700" Title="How should I continue work on an abandoned open source project?" Tags="|mit|forking|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-28T13:45:34.760" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the topic &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1549&quot;&gt;Appropriate licence for later merging back&lt;/a&gt;, one of the desired criteria was,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;I want to be capable to merge any derivatives back [...] from somebody who made modifications [...].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It attracted answers like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't believe any FLOSS license requires you to publish all changes (i.e., forbidding private derivatives), if that's what you mean. If you're talking about published derivatives, then &lt;strong&gt;any copyleft license would require those derivatives to be published under a license that would allow you to merge them back in&lt;/strong&gt;. But note that they retain copyright for their own changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something similar in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/210&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to a different topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you have to avoid Being forked into oblivion by a more powerful contributor, so only a license with a strong copyleft makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is related to these, maybe a bit simpler. Assume the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I write some software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I publish it with a license (e.g. GPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone else takes the software, modifies it, and distributes it to their customers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I (the original author) have any right to see the modification? Am I even notified that there is a notification? Would I have to be one of their customers (which might be too expensive) to see their modification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading of the GPL implies that I would have no right to see their changes, because it says ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but doesn't say that the original author/licensor is entitled to come into possession of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not the GPL, is there any way to license software (especially, is there any standard license) such that the original author &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; entitled to see any changes that are made or used or released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, is there any license intended to guarantee that the original author (and not just users of the modified software) is one of the people who has access to subsequent changes, the latest and greatest copy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8652" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T11:00:25.417" Title="Can the original author see other people's modifications?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5785" CreationDate="2017-07-29T10:30:34.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.  And it's not a good idea anyway since the whole idea of Free Software is to support a proliferation of authors and consequently rightholders, and their rights are inheritable and transferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if Free Software is supposed to remain manageable, any duties of the user/distributor must be meetable by dealing with the tangible copies appropriately &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; having to identify and/or contact every author.  If you try to make a license dial home, you immediately get into the problem that for a &quot;Public&quot; license (where the original authors don't hold special rights over additional authors) the requirements bog down the software as it garners new contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8660" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T10:30:34.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5785" CreationDate="2017-07-29T11:00:25.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something like this may be a (partial) solution: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collective Code Construction Contract (C4)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is GPL but there's a &quot;contract&quot; that people will develop it in github (i.e. on a common &quot;platform&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that, with the software being GPL, people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; create a hidden fork of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for people who &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to collaborate, the &quot;C4&quot; provides a protocol for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that e.g. WebKit might be similar: i.e. that people can have private forks of it. I'm not sure what the disincentive is (i.e. what the incentive is to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have a private fork) -- I think the incentive might be that, if you own  a private fork, then it's your burden to merge every latest and greatest change into your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8652" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T11:00:25.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5793" CreationDate="2017-07-29T18:58:00.643" Score="0" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project uses some libraries, which are licensed by BSD. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put my project under zlib license or do I have to follow BSD and put my project under BSD as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8663" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T03:26:29.507" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T07:11:03.903" Title="Can I put my project unter zlib, when I use BSD libraries?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|bsd|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5792" CreationDate="2017-07-29T21:15:55.390" Score="-1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/osd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I author an open-source app and sell it to customers, would point 6 from the &lt;em&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/em&gt; allow other businesses to do the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8664" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T03:04:49.537" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T03:05:37.910" Title="Does point 6 of OSI's definition allow other businesses to sell my app?" Tags="|commercial|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5773" CreationDate="2017-07-29T21:18:30.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Content License&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This documentation, including any code shown in it, is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, the preferred license for all parts of the of the Android Open Source Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Restrictions section, it states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of sample source code provided in the SDK or shown in this documentation is subject to the conditions detailed in the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be safe in assuming that the templates generated by Android Studio are released under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further confirm this, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googlesamples/android-ndk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android NDK samples for Android Studio&lt;/a&gt; are explicitly licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T21:18:30.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5790" CreationDate="2017-07-29T22:43:02.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Point 6 is pretty much irrelevant, because Point 1 already allows anyone to sell or give away a copy of your app:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away&#xA;  the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution&#xA;  containing programs from several different sources. The license shall&#xA;  not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 6 deals more with not allowing restrictions forbidding use of the app in warfare, commercial products, harming animals, immoral purposes, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T03:05:37.910" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T03:05:37.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5789" CreationDate="2017-07-30T07:11:03.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD licenses&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; are permissive licenses. The terms of the license apply to the code that is explicitly put under the license, but the BSD licenses do not try to put any restrictions on code that is not explicitly licensed with that license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that if you are using a library under a BSD license in your project, then the BSD license does not try to influence how you can license your own code. Thus, you can choose any license you like for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1: There are multiple different licenses that are referred to as BSD license. This answer applies to all of them.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T07:11:03.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5806" CreationDate="2017-07-30T08:31:19.657" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are building a display-less system, which interacts with the user only through an audio interface (and some buttons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our system is based on Linux, and as such we are using several GPL/LGPL components. Now, the licenses explicitly say that a copy of the license should be provided with the program (which we are effectively distributing with the device we are building), but in our case the license text cannot be shown to the user. Morevoer, we did think of printing the license texts, but in that case this would hinder us when delivering updates to the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our current idea is to reproduce, using a TTS, the license text to the user, do you know if there's some other way to achieve compliance with the license terms? What if we didn't have an audio interface either?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8665" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T18:09:47.213" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T17:40:14.320" Title="Providing license text on a display-less system" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T12:14:15.060" Score="1" ViewCount="1205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have announced in devRant that I will start an [**]open source project  and I give out the link. And the announcement itself at least has 50 views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after a few weeks, I still don't know what my contributors could help me with. So I haven't assigned any goal or job details. And, I still don't have any contributors, and there is still no fork of my project. At the moment, I want to turn it into closed source instead and continue its development privately. So, I turn the repo page into a private repo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, is this change effective? Like, do I have the right to do that?&#xA;And, is this change legal? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, &#xA;To maintain my trustworthiness and make people feel good about me, do I need to update my original announcement again to say it is closed source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, conventionally,  if the first announcement make some peeple shows  high interest and excitement to contribute, then how should we properly turn it into a closed source project without looking too bad and disappointing? Do I need to say sorry to those replying me they are interested to contribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: [**] Open source here mean source available. The project is using Apache v2.0 license. Under the license, I believe it does not actually require me to make the source code available. I decided to make the source available just because I wanted to speed up the development process and to gain popularity / reputation faster&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8668" LastEditorUserId="8668" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T15:11:49.183" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T19:08:26.353" Title="Turning a project from open source to closed source in the early stage of development" Tags="|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5804" CreationDate="2017-07-30T13:08:09.490" Score="14" ViewCount="1281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the following in &lt;a href=&quot;http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ØMQ - The Guide&lt;/a&gt; (in Chapter 6, in the section &lt;em&gt;Licensing and Ownership&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All patches are owned by their authors. There SHALL NOT be any copyright assignment process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we come to the key reason people trust their investments in ZeroMQ: it's logistically impossible to buy the copyrights to create a closed source competitor to ZeroMQ. iMatix can't do this either. And the more people that send patches, the harder it becomes. ZeroMQ isn't just free and open today—this specific rule means it will remain so forever. Note that it's not the case in all GPL projects, many of which still ask for copyright transfer back to the maintainers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the last sentence: how can a GPL project ask for copyright transfer back to the maintainers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you give any example[s] of [a] GPL project[s] which do[es] that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a contributor's incentive to make such a copyright transfer to &amp;quot;the maintainers&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this topic (a requirement for copyright assignment) inevitably caused by the maintainers wanting to dual-license the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T03:53:46.953" Title="Projects which require copyright assignment from contributors?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2017-07-30T13:44:09.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Like, do I have the right to do that? And, is this change legal?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that anyone who downloaded it with the then open source license is allowed to keep what they downloaded under that license (and can continue to redistribute it according to that license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you retained your own copyright in your software (as well as publishing it with an open source license), I think you can also decide at any time to cease publishing your software as open source, and to release any subsequent changes of yours only as closed source (but you couldn't do that including open source contributions made by other people).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8652" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T13:44:09.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T13:56:14.347" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;May I use images made from NES game screenshots (Mario, Pac-Man) in an Open Source Project?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. these are for &lt;em&gt;&quot;Error happened&quot;&lt;/em&gt; events:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43eA3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/43eA3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mario jumps on a hedge&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j25Lc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j25Lc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Pacman eats mushroom&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pac-Man seems to be not from a game screenshot, but a reproduction (couldn't find the source).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not sure about whole screenshots too — may I, in example, use screenshot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://images.google.com/?q=pacman%20error&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pac-Man bug&lt;/a&gt; as a page background? As an accompanying picture on the page/blog post?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8669" LastEditorUserId="8669" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T16:33:42.903" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T16:35:34.787" Title="May I Use Graphics From Proprietary Games in FOSS?" Tags="|copyright|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5798" CreationDate="2017-07-30T16:04:21.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even if your work pretends to be collage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remixes will inevitably encounter legal problems when the whole or a&#xA;  substantial part of the original material has been reproduced, copied,&#xA;  communicated, adapted or performed – unless a permission has been&#xA;  given in advance through a voluntary open content license like a&#xA;  Creative Commons license, ...&#xA;  Generally, the courts consider what will amount to a substantial part&#xA;  by reference to its quality, as opposed to quantity and the importance&#xA;  the part taken bears in relation to the work as whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix#Copyright_implications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix#Copyright_implications&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this quote concerns using whole screenshots too (see question)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8669" LastEditorUserId="8669" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T16:35:34.787" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T16:35:34.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5803" CreationDate="2017-07-30T16:31:53.540" Score="7" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apple releases their XNU kernel source code for macOS with each minor release of the Operating System covered under the APSL Version 2 at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.apple.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their open source website&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.apple.com/apsl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license terms can be found here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it would appear that apple has released the full source code for their kernel, the power management subroutines from the production kernel are missing entirely from the source tree. There are references made in the production kernel to an &lt;code&gt;xcpm&lt;/code&gt; directory in the source tree which would include code for a family of &lt;code&gt;xcpm_*&lt;/code&gt; subroutines used for power management, however, no source directory or source code for these routines exist in the open source version of the kernel which apple releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, a family of subroutines dealing with HWP, or intel hardware controlled performance states, exist in the production kernel but are absent in the publicly released source tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Open-Source license with which this code has been released, this does not appear to be legal. It is in direct violation of sections 2.2 (c) and section 2.3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As per section 2.2 part c, if modifications to covered code are deployed to users or made publicly available, source code &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be made available to either the users of the program or to the general public. This is not done with the macOS kernel sources.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As per section 2.3, if covered code is deployed externally deployed in executable form only, as it is in macOS, a notice must be distributed with the executable which states that the source code of the program is available with instructions of how to obtain said code. No such notice can be found within macOS.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question, then, is how is it that Apple can do this without any action being taken against them? Why is the license the code is distributed under not being enforced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should additionally apply to any of the publicly available Apple code available under this license which is used in iOS as well as macOS. For instance, the source code for the ARM port of the XNU kernel should additionally be available, no?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8670" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T17:25:47.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T17:53:48.903" Title="Why doesn't Apple release full kernel source code?" Tags="|licensing|apsl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5801" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-30T17:27:52.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.apple.com/apsl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;License: APSL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple Public Source License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T03:49:59.373" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T03:49:59.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5802" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-30T17:27:52.693" Score="0" Body="for questions about the Apple Public Source License (APSL)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T03:50:04.163" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T03:50:04.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5800" CreationDate="2017-07-30T17:53:48.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I have no knowledge about the software in question; this answer is solely based on reading the APSL as a legal layperson. I’m also ignoring the aspect that the author of the software could have the full copyright, in which case the author wouldn’t have to follow the license to begin with.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sections 2.2 and 2.3 are about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Covered Code&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which is defined under section 1.3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Covered Code&quot; means the Original Code, Modifications, the combination of Original Code and any Modifications, and/or any respective portions thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In section 1.5, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Larger Work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is defined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Larger Work&quot; means a work which combines Covered Code or portions thereof with code not governed by the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And section 4 makes clear (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Larger Works.  You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Code with other code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the Larger Work as a single product.  In each such instance, You must &lt;strong&gt;make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered Code or any portion thereof&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to be possible to have a program where only parts of it are licensed under the APSL, no matter how these parts technically interact with other parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;FSF&amp;#39;s Opinion of the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 2.0&quot;&gt;FSF seems to confirm&lt;/a&gt; this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T17:53:48.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5796" CreationDate="2017-07-30T18:38:01.163" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many projects do this, typically with the help of a CLA (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible reasons for doing this (there might be more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project owner can change the license without having to ask every contributor for permission. This includes multi-licensing. And it would even be possible to make it proprietary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project owner can legally enforce the license without having to coordinate with, and involve, all affected contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example FSF’s reasoning: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many different forms of CLAs. You don’t necessarily have to assign/lose your copyright, and you could exclude certain things (e.g., to prevent that the software becomes proprietary). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example FSFE’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fiduciary Licence Agreement&lt;/a&gt;, Canonical’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://harmonyagreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Harmony&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://contributoragreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;contributoragreements.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T18:38:01.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T13:53:04.663" Score="2" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently I am developing a product based on microcontroller application. The product consists of 2 microcontrollers, the first one contains a GPL'ed binary code with some modifications, and the second microcontroller communicates with the first microcontroller using serial communication, and it sends it some commands to control it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want the whole product to be sold without declaring the source&#xA;code of the second microcontroller (the code should be proprietary).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Will it be enough to make it available to download the modified GPL'ed code of the first microcontroller?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have read somewhere, that a proprietary software can use GPL'ed&#xA;kernel of Linux, is my case similar to this? And if not, how can I&#xA;make any workaround to comply with GPL license, and in the same time&#xA;to keep the code of the second microcontroller to be proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8681" OwnerDisplayName="Mostafa Ahmed" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T20:04:45.330" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T20:04:45.330" Title="GPL code inside microcontroller" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5794" CreationDate="2017-07-31T17:40:14.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You not only have to provide the license, but also the source code itself (in the preferred form for making modifications to it). Even if it would be allowed to provide the license as audio (not sure if it is), this wouldn’t be the case for the source code (as it’s not the &quot;preferred form for making modifications&quot;). You should bundle the source and the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6 of the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; describes how you can provide the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When selling a device (on which the software runs), you can either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enclose a &lt;strong&gt;physical medium&lt;/strong&gt; that contains the source (6.a), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enclose a &lt;strong&gt;written offer&lt;/strong&gt; saying that you can give out such a physical medium or that the source can be downloaded from a server (6.b).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the software updates, 6.d applies (unless they come on a physical medium, in which case also 6.a/6.b apply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically the easiest way would be to offer everything for download on your server. When selling a device, enclose a paper with the URL (+ username/password, if you prefer) for the page where you upload the software and its source of the version initially installed as well as of all updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you could of course also provide a TTS menu point in your software, which explains which licenses apply, where the licenses can be read, and where the source can be downloaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T17:40:14.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5824" CreationDate="2017-08-01T13:31:50.420" Score="2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache Trademark Policy page&lt;/a&gt;, I can use Apache feather logo in my slides without asking permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You needn't ask us for permission to use the Apache feather logo (the version published by us here ) on your own website solely as a hyperlink to www.apache.org or to an appropriate Apache project, or in other materials, such as presentations and slides,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, there is another rule for Apache Foo software. It does not include  &quot;presentations and slides&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You needn't ask us for permission to use Apache's graphics logos (the versions published on individual project's websites) on your own website solely as a hyperlink to the specific Apache project website or to www.apache.org. All other uses of Apache Foo (and similar) graphic logos must be approved in writing by VP, Apache Brand Management, member of the Brand Management Committee, or the relevant Apache projects' VP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I contact them to use logos in my presentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8686" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T11:30:31.627" Title="Can I use Apache software logos without explicit permission in my slides?" Tags="|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5795" CreationDate="2017-08-01T19:08:26.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to stop offering the source code at any time, though people who have received a copy of the source code already may choose to exercise their right to distribute the code under the terms of the Apache 2 license. The Apache 2 license is explicitly irrevocable so you cannot take away license grants already made to existing recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be a bad tactical decision to stop offering the old source because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's bad optics in general, especially if people expressed interest in contributing. Even if you don't &lt;em&gt;intend&lt;/em&gt; to be unkind, it can feel (to them) like you're slamming a door in their face.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If people already have the source code, someone probably will make a fork, or at least a public duplicate of the original, so you won't have achieved anything in terms of keeping the current source secret.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A marginally better strategy, in terms of project PR, is to keep old source code public and make &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; source code private, either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;marked out by a new version number (&quot;Yes, legacy v0.9 has source code available, but v1.x is now closed-source.&quot;), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;via proprietary modules (&quot;Yes, the base engine is open source, but new modules Foo and Bar are closed source, only available in my official distro.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what you do at this point (other than choosing to keep all your source code open), you might see a fully-open competitor to your closed-source version based on your old open code.  This might not be a serious (or likely) problem, though, considering that contributor activity has been low or nonexistent in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T19:08:26.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5814" CreationDate="2017-08-02T00:00:35.933" Score="-3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in the early stages of building a software with a team to design websites, kind of like WordPress. You download the system on your website, and go on from there. People can be allowed to expand the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about licensing and copyright, so about the GPL license, I just state the authors and put the license text in the software release? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8693" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T19:46:38.580" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T20:30:57.990" Title="GPL licensing a web app software" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5823" CreationDate="2017-08-02T07:59:39.540" Score="1" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software is a static analysis tools for old languages. I'm currently writing new tests and I wanted to use some files from open-source projects on GitHub. However, I'm kind of lost with licenses compatiblity in my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software is licensed under Eclipse Public License. I wanted to use files from project using MIT and GPL v3 licenses. My software will not execute the piece of codes from other project but just read it when testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to distribute the test on my GitHub project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use some random files under theses licenses or is it incompatible with mine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8698" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T14:39:13.093" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T08:27:40.793" Title="Licenses compatibility with EPL" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|gpl-3|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T12:22:35.360" Score="6" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering creating a product which has 2 parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Client (video screengrabbing)&lt;/strong&gt; - which makes use of an existing (GPL licenced) screen grabber and uploads video + metadata to …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Server (video post Processing)&lt;/strong&gt; - … receives video from (1) and does clever things with the video + metadata.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would be a REST API on the server which the client uploads to.  I was considering open sourcing the &lt;em&gt;1. client&lt;/em&gt; part because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client isn't doing anything particularly novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can make use of an existing screencasting tool (released as GPL) to speed up development.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the clever stuff is happening in the server which receives the video e.g. slowing / speeding up video, change detection etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to have a product of 2 parts where one is open sourced (because it makes use of a existing screen-casting application with a GPL licence) and the other is closed source (where communication between the 2 parts is via a REST API).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this is OK, I'm assuming the license of the open source client must be GPL also (because it's using an existing GPL program) - mostly likely to be forked on GitHub and modified slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: The 2 parts can live completely independently of each other e.g. if server REST API isn't available then it could simply save screencast / metadata to local disk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update 15 Nov, 2023&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone is interested, my product is Video First - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.videofirst.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.videofirst.io&lt;/a&gt; or sign up at &lt;a href=&quot;https://app.videofirst.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://app.videofirst.io&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8701" LastEditorUserId="8701" LastEditDate="2023-11-15T14:23:32.287" LastActivityDate="2023-11-16T10:44:17.850" Title="Ok to mix open source with closed source?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5810" CreationDate="2017-08-02T20:30:57.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(For web applications, you might want to consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; instead of the GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the whole software was created by your team, you should follow these steps to license the software under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a &lt;strong&gt;copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt; to each source file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a &lt;strong&gt;copying permission statement&lt;/strong&gt; to each source file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add the &lt;strong&gt;full license&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plain text file&lt;/a&gt; to your project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to use GNU licenses for your own software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, you might want to state that the software is licensed under the GPL in other places, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mention it in the &lt;strong&gt;user interface&lt;/strong&gt; of the software. For example, under &quot;Help → About&quot; or in similar places. It’s likely that not all users read the source files, and sometimes users end up using your software without having installed it themselves – these people might not be aware that it’s free software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mention it on your &lt;strong&gt;website&lt;/strong&gt;. Ideally on your homepage, as feature, next to the download link etc. It can be a big advantage, and many people won’t even consider using software unless it’s free/libre.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Many web applications that create websites also include the software name/link and the license information in the &lt;strong&gt;footer&lt;/strong&gt; of the created websites, acting as some kind of advertisement. But it might be nicer to make this opt-in instead of opt-out.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T20:30:57.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T02:49:32.087" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ item on non-software works&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can apply the GPL to any kind of work, as long as it is clear what constitutes the “source code” for the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says that it must be &quot;clear what constitutes 'source code' for the work,&quot; so how do you go about clearly defining &quot;source code&quot; for work that is not purely software; work that is a mix of text and images served on a website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to avoid Creative-Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/741/with-gpl-what-does-source-code-mean-for-non-software&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; recommended in comments even before posting this question. It goes to explain the difference between &quot;source code&quot; and &quot;object code&quot;. It does not answer my question of how to change or set a new definition for the terms &quot;source code&quot; and &quot;object code&quot; of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8706" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T13:36:38.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T14:55:17.533" Title="How do I specify particular &quot;source code&quot; for a non-software GPL'd work?" Tags="|gpl|creative-commons|website|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5818" CreationDate="2017-08-03T08:55:45.680" Score="14" ViewCount="3776" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a public repository on GitHub. Some of the code was copy-and-pasted into another repository without keeping Licence headers and without any other back-linking to the original repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to deal with that? I can imagine it happens all the time (on GitHub). What is the &quot;usual&quot; way to react? How can one enforce correct &quot;copy-and-pasting&quot;, that is, at least keeping license and author information in place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of the project is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8710" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:10:52.703" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:10:52.703" Title="How to deal with copyright infringement on GitHub" Tags="|copyright|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5817" CreationDate="2017-08-03T12:36:47.230" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;One clarifying point: there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; usually a legal obligation to keep original copyright notices with original license headers and texts. There is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; usually a legal obligation to &quot;link back&quot; -- this doesn't generalize to projects that aren't distributed online, and would impose ambiguous obligations if the project moved network locations, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first recourse is &lt;em&gt;ask nicely&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps a polite message that communicates why the license header and copyright notice are important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello {Downstream Author},&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that you're using code from my software project {Foo} in your project {Bar}. I'm really glad that you found it useful. I put it under the Apache License exactly because I wanted projects like yours to use it freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I did notice, though, that you left out a few important pieces that the license requires. These are important but fortunately they're really easy to fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Each file that uses code from {Foo} should preserve the original license header -- this is important so that other people down the line also know they have the right to modify and/or redistribute my software, just like you did. Your project should also include a copy of the Apache 2 license with the full license terms in your project, in case recipients have legal questions about their rights. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;) If your own code is licensed differently from Apache 2, you can state exactly which functions are licensed which way in each file.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Each file that uses my code should include my copyright notice, so the people know who the original author was. If a file includes work from both you and from me, it should have copyright notices for each of us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can see an example of what the header should look like at {&lt;a href=&quot;https://myrepo/myproject/somefile.c&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://myrepo/myproject/somefile.c&lt;/a&gt;}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to take care of it, that would be great; otherwise, I can send you a pull request with the header fixes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the downstream author doesn't respond to this, then do send a pull request. If the author doesn't respond (or responds negatively) to your pull request, you can send a more firmly-worded message stressing the particular potential harm of not having license headers and copyright notices (namely, confusion for recipients and stripping you of credit for your contribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; doesn't work, then you have a hard decision to make: you would be legally in the clear to submit a DMCA takedown notice, since the downstream author is in violation of your license grant and is committing copyright infringement. This is &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; going to hurt some feelings, and may make you look like the bad guy to some people. (Though if the downstream author is rebuffing your polite request for authorship credit, there may be some bad feelings there already.) Weigh this possibility against your desire to bring the project into compliance and do whatever you think is best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T13:15:53.200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T13:15:53.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T17:49:15.333" Score="4" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release all the LaTeX source files (*.tex), when I publish my thesis. I do &#xA;not want to just release the PDF. So everybody can build my thesis with a LaTeX compiler from its source code. Can my thesis source files contents be under GPL v3? Or they need to be under LPPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use a template with the license LPPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;%% abtex2-modelo-trabalho-academico.tex, v-1.9.6 laurocesar&#xA;%% Copyright 2012-2016 by abnTeX2 group at http://www.abntex.net.br/ &#xA;%%&#xA;%% This work may be distributed and/or modified under the&#xA;%% conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3&#xA;%% of this license or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;%% The latest version of this license is in&#xA;%%   http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt&#xA;%% and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX&#xA;%% version 2005/12/01 or later.&#xA;%%&#xA;%% This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.&#xA;%% &#xA;%% The Current Maintainer of this work is the abnTeX2 team, led&#xA;%% by Lauro César Araujo. Further information are available on &#xA;%% http://www.abntex.net.br/&#xA;%%&#xA;%% This work consists of the files abntex2-modelo-trabalho-academico.tex,&#xA;%% abntex2-modelo-include-comandos and abntex2-modelo-references.bib&#xA;%%&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/82713/is-a-pdf-output-from-a-latex-document-a-derived-work-from-the-lppl-standard-p&quot;&gt;Is a PDF output from a LaTeX document, a “derived work” from the LPPL standard packages? &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/69007/the-gpl-and-latex-packages&quot;&gt;The GPL and LaTeX packages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/82300/license-in-latex-document-packages-and-answers&quot;&gt;License in LaTeX document, packages and answers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/179370/how-can-i-license-my-tex-files-for-open-source&quot;&gt;How can I license my .tex files for open source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/163128/can-i-license-my-package-under-creative-commons&quot;&gt;Can I license my package under Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/101439/what-license-for-releasing-latex-templates&quot;&gt;What license for releasing LaTeX templates&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4091/can-my-closed-source-software-load-gpl-v3-data&quot;&gt;Can my closed-source software load GPL v3 data?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4876/can-i-sell-my-project-using-gnu-gpl-v3&quot;&gt;Can I sell my project using GNU GPL v3?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2947/am-i-forced-to-release-my-project-under-gpl-even-though-no-gpl-source-is-includ&quot;&gt;Am I forced to release my project under GPL, even though no GPL source is included?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4330/can-my-gpl-v3-software-load-unamed-licensed-libraries&quot;&gt;Can my GPL v3 software load unamed licensed libraries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2735/gpl-licensed-latex-template-implications-for-resulting-work&quot;&gt;GPL-Licensed LaTeX template - implications for resulting work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4930/can-i-sell-my-primitive-material-which-is-intended-to-be-processed-in-a-factory&quot;&gt;Can I sell my primitive material which is intended to be processed in a factory software under GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2234/can-i-use-gpl-v3-for-source-code-and-cc-by-sa-v3-for-comments&quot;&gt;Can I use GPL v3 for source code and CC BY-SA v3 for comments?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4023/must-authors-name-be-included-in-gnu-gpl-v3&quot;&gt;Must author&amp;#39;s name be included in GNU GPL v3?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1640/if-im-using-a-gpl-3-library-in-my-project-can-i-license-my-project-under-mit-l&quot;&gt;If I&amp;#39;m using a GPL 3 library in my project, can I license my project under MIT license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2233/gpl-v3-with-openssl-exception&quot;&gt;GPL V3 with OpenSSL Exception&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2607/can-i-distribute-a-bsd-code-with-gpl-v3-binaries&quot;&gt;Can I distribute a BSD code with GPL v3 binaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/165/what-restrictions-can-i-place-on-a-device-whose-software-is-licensed-using-gpl-v&quot;&gt;What restrictions can I place on a device whose software is licensed using GPL v3?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2607/can-i-distribute-a-bsd-code-with-gpl-v3-binaries&quot;&gt;Can I distribute a BSD code with GPL v3 binaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/165/what-restrictions-can-i-place-on-a-device-whose-software-is-licensed-using-gpl-v&quot;&gt;What restrictions can I place on a device whose software is licensed using GPL v3?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4934/can-an-interpreted-program-be-under-any-license-without-restricted-by-its-gpled&quot;&gt;Can an interpreted program be under any license without restricted by its GPL&amp;#39;ed run-time environment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4321/does-gpl-v3-compel-the-author-to-provide-source&quot;&gt;Does GPL v3 compel the author to provide source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4840/using-a-gpl-v3-library-in-a-android-app-published-on-google-play-do-i-need-to-r&quot;&gt;Using a GPL V3 library in a Android app published on Google Play, do I need to release the application&amp;#39;s source code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5535/is-the-text-in-my-open-source-project-under-the-gpl&quot;&gt;Is the text in my open source project under the GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5673/need-sellable-license-text-for-commercial-use-of-gpl-v3-software&quot;&gt;Need sellable license-text for &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; of GPL v3 software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/323/can-i-redistribute-bsd-software-under-gpl-with-no-changes&quot;&gt;Can I redistribute BSD software under GPL with no changes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5657/can-i-publish-my-ios-app-store-app-code-to-github-under-mit-gpl&quot;&gt;Can I publish my iOS app store app code to GitHub under MIT/GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:13:11.423" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T12:11:22.830" Title="Can my thesis LaTeX source files contents be under GPL v3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|lppl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5820" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-03T20:14:25.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The LaTeX Project Public License&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX Project Public License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:18:07.900" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:18:07.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5821" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-03T20:14:25.597" Score="0" Body="for questions about the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:18:10.320" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:18:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5816" CreationDate="2017-08-04T03:00:11.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may be confused by the &quot;as long as it is clear&quot; langauge of that FAQ item. The FAQ item isn't saying that you must &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; it clear what the source form of a work is, but rather it is saying that there should be a &lt;em&gt;naturally obvious&lt;/em&gt; source form of the work. The GNU GPL defines &quot;source code&quot; in its definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;source code&quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to clarify what you believe to be the source form of a work, but you might be incorrect. If you said &quot;These compiled &lt;code&gt;*.o&lt;/code&gt; object files are the source form of my executable, since they can be linked to form my executable&quot; that would be wrong -- the source form of your executable is the original source written in a human-readable programming language. The object files are not the preferred from for making modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your webpage case, since raw HTML is the preferred form for making modifications to a webpage, the webpage is its own source. (This is similarly true for most software written in interpreted languages.) If a downstream distributor obfuscates the readability of the page's HTML (e.g., for compression) then the GPL's source code requirement requires the distributor to make the unobfuscated version of the HTML available to everyone who receives that obfuscated version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are thinking about a complete web &lt;em&gt;application&lt;/em&gt; with server-side code, you must understand that the GPL does not place requirements on works that are not distributed. If users receive a GPL-licensed webpage in HTML, and that webpage happens to interact with a network service, there is no GPL requirement to share the code of the network service. (The Affero GPL (AGPL) is a license that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; impose such a requirement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to apply a different meaning for &quot;source code&quot; than the one that the GPL already supplies, &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/253/what-are-the-licensing-terms-of-the-text-of-the-gpl&quot;&gt;you can make a modified version of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, though you should not do this without a very good reason (since it will be likely incompatible with the GPL) and you should seek the advice of a lawyer (since otherwise you may draft a license that has unintentional effects or unenforceable requirements). You could also create a GPL exception to the effect of &quot;When you distribute this work in object form, instead of sharing the source code (e.g., preferred form for modifications) as normally required in section 6, you may instead share [something else].&quot; I am unsure why anyone would want to do this, since such an exception undermines the primary distinguishing feature of the GPL and strongly suggests you really are not really interested in using the GPL at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T14:55:17.533" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T14:55:17.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5811" CreationDate="2017-08-04T08:27:40.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say for instance you use either the proprietary Microsoft Office or the FOSS LibreOffice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you read any document regardless of the document license (some of which have a CC license, some GPL, some MIT, some confidential/proprietary) and process and print it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, sure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And will this impact the licensing of the proprietary Microsoft Office or the FOSS LibreOffice tool you use to read these files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will these files keep their original licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in you case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can use test data files under any license that allows redistribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this does not impact the licensing of your code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each test data file stays under its original license and you should document their origin and license properly (including adding copyright, license notice and texts as needed) for each file. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For clarity to your users, you can provide a note explaining that these files are test files and use multiple licenses, as documented and are not part of the primary code of your tool. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T08:27:40.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5808" CreationDate="2017-08-04T08:36:20.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You missed this important part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trademark Policy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike ASF's word trademarks (such as &quot;Apache&quot; and &quot;Foo&quot;), our graphic logos are also licensed to the public under the Apache License. That license permits you to create derivative works of those logos, as with any other Apache copyrighted work. However, trademark law does not allow you to apply any &quot;confusingly similar&quot; derivative logo to software if a relevant consumer would likely be confused by that use of that derivative logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore you can use the logos in your slide deck under the Apache license alright without asking for permission. You could just add an Apache notice and a link on a trailing slide alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T11:30:31.627" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T11:30:31.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="741" CreationDate="2017-08-04T12:01:39.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL includes the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;source code&quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the preferred form for making modifications? You might deduce what your project's source code is by going through the following sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider the work that is supplied to the recipient.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider a range of possible changes that recipient might want to make: move images around, give a character different movements in an animated movie, alter text, change the order of sections in a document, bring obscured background elements to the foreground unobstructed, change a single instrumental track in an audio file, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What format of the work would make those editing tasks easiest?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the answer will be obvious: it's the layered Photoshop or GIMP file you used to create your finished image, or the word processing document you use to create your PDF output, or the multi-track audio-workshop file you compressed down into only a two-band stereo output. For a web page with images, the source code would be non-obfuscated HTML and the most-easily editable versions of the images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes (I'd guess &lt;em&gt;rarely&lt;/em&gt;) the answer is not obvious. For example, the Battle for Wesnoth community has had &lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?t=21082&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a non-trivial discussion about whether MIDI or OGG constitutes the preferred form for making modifications&lt;/a&gt;, because MIDI is closer to editable &quot;source&quot; but exactly how a MIDI will render to a proper sound file will vary by MIDI environment. Aside from strange edge cases like this, it should be obvious what document format is most appropriate for making modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other noteworthy cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the work has always been in a form that is not friendly to making modifications (e.g., a complex image made in a simple Paint-style program without layer information, or a binary executable written by hand by a very clever hacker with a hex editor) then that is the best &quot;source&quot; that exists and is sufficient: that &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, apparently, the original author's preferred format for creating and modifying the work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversely, if the project has always been in a format most conducive to making modifications (e.g., human-readable HTML for a website), then the work is composed entirely of source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the simple-image-in-Photoshop hypothetical, if the Photoshop file has metadata what would make it easier for a person to perform edits, that should be preserved: e.g., if you specified gradients/regions for color alterations and that information is available as separately-editable layer-like feature, then certainly that would be preferred for making modifications. If the transformation you did merely altered pixels and has no associated metadata or layer information, then the Photoshop file affords no advantage over the raw image in terms of ease of modification. However, unless I were absolutely sure that no such editing-friendly metadata existed, I would err of the side of caution and distribute the PSD file as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T12:01:39.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5831" CreationDate="2017-08-04T23:18:55.033" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started developing a commercial web application that uses spaCy – a MIT-licensed library for natural language processing. In order to use this library, one needs to initialize a processing pipeline by pointing to one of the language models – data files distributed under the CC BY-SA-3.0 license. The model, in an unaltered form, gets loaded and then the application interacts with the library through its API, not directly with the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve read the license (CC BY-SA-3.0) but it’s hard for me to determine whether my application should be considered a derivative work or not. On the one hand the application only indirectly uses the model (doesn’t improve/modify it in any way), but on the other hand, such a model is indispensable for the application to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what’s crucial for me is this. Let’s assume that my application constitutes a derivative work. Does this mean that I have to release the application’s source code under the CC BY-SA-3.0 license, even though the application runs only on my servers and users can only interact with it through a computer network? Does it work similarly to the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really appreciate any help you can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T16:26:24.040" Title="CC BY-SA – Do I need to open source my app if I don’t really distribute it?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|creative-commons|commercial|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T01:06:32.760" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice writes a poem and licenses it under any 3.0 Creative Commons license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Bob copies the poem and publishes it on his blog (with correct attribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice is &lt;em&gt;Original Author&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Licensor&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;strong&gt;Is Bob a &lt;em&gt;Licensor&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition says for all 3.0 licenses (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Licensor&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means the individual, individuals, entity or entities that offer(s) the Work under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is &quot;offer&quot; meant here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If Bob is not a &lt;em&gt;Licensor&lt;/em&gt;, how could he become one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T16:24:07.583" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T02:38:25.213" Title="Do you become a &quot;Licensor&quot; if you redistribute a work licensed under a CC 3.0 license?" Tags="|creative-commons|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5830" CreationDate="2017-08-05T02:12:48.963" Score="9" ViewCount="11597" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to include a pod that I found on cocoa pods and its an animation of a button. It is licensed under MIT licence:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://cocoapods.org/pods/DynamicButton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cocoapods.org/pods/DynamicButton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the licence it states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I include this in my code or do I have to dedicate a specific view to it, in settings or something of the sort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8724" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T03:32:06.280" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T16:08:18.733" Title="Where would I give credit to an MIT licensed project, in an iOS app?" Tags="|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5828" CreationDate="2017-08-05T13:47:39.313" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To satisfy the legal requirement you only need to keep the license in your source code, such as in a LICENSE file or as a comment block in the source code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be nice, you can also display the license information somewhere that users can see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you display the license information to users too verbosely, you might be called &quot;an unmitigated jerk&quot;, as I have been, in the case of my &quot;pngcrush&quot; application (which I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/pmt/news/?source=navbar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recently modified&lt;/a&gt; to be less verbose by default).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-08-05T16:08:18.733" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T16:08:18.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5826" CreationDate="2017-08-05T16:26:24.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the last question first, interaction with a program using a remote connection is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; considered distribution of the program and will not invoke the terms of the license unless the license explicitly states otherwise.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To my knowledge, only the AGPL has such terms. As such terms are specifically designed for software, the CC-BY-SA licence won't have them, as it is not recommended for software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the other question, if the software can load any correctly formed language file and not just the CC-BY-SA ones, then it can be seen that the software can't be a derived work of the language file.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In general, a program and the files it reads are considered to be independent works for copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-05T16:26:24.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5833" CreationDate="2017-08-06T01:16:57.513" Score="15" ViewCount="4339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Android Game I've written that I released under the MIT license. Recently, there have been several people who have downloaded the source of my application, added ads and uploaded it to the Google Play store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this irks me, there's nothing legally wrong with what they are doing since my project is licensed under the MIT license. In order to stop this however, I'd like to relicense my application under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entirety of the code in its current state was written by me (minus ~3 lines or so that can be easily removed), however, the app has been translated into a few different languages by users, who have added their translations through GitHub pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is relicensing my project under the GPL an good way to stop people from reuploading it as proprietary software with ads?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I decide to relicense my project under the GPL, do I need to track down everybody who has modified the translation files and get their permission? I know that this is the case when it comes to the code, however I'm not sure how this works with non code assets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8731" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T05:59:35.717" Title="Relicensing an MIT licensed project under the GPL that has non code contributions from others" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5832" CreationDate="2017-08-06T02:31:18.060" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just like everyone can take your MIT-licensed software and make it proprietary without having to ask all of its authors for permission, you can take your MIT-licensed software and license it under the GPL without asking the contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT-licensed software can be integrated/made into GPL-licensed software.&lt;/strong&gt; The other way around is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF curates a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of GPL-compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt;, which includes the two licenses often called &amp;quot;MIT license&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;X11 license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] is a lax permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you change the license to the GPL, and make changes to the software so that it differs from the version that is (and always will be) licensed under MIT, no one may distribute this new version as proprietary software without asking all authors for permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this doesn’t stop someone from including ads in the software, but they would have to follow the terms of the GPL when distributing it (i.e., providing the source code and licensing it under the GPL, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T02:31:18.060" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5827" CreationDate="2017-08-07T22:05:56.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 8.a of the license seems to clarify that the original Licensor [Alice], not You [Bob], is the Licensor to the recipient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work or a Collection,&#xA;  the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same&#xA;  terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You [Bob] would become a licensor if You Adapted the Work, similar to what happens in CC-BY-SA but without the restriction that you must use the same license for your Adaptor's License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-08-15T02:38:25.213" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T02:38:25.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-08T16:07:08.363" Score="4" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to put the source code of a game out there with the stipulation that people are not allowed to use any of its art assets commercially.  I'd also require attribution.   Mods distributed for free would be OK.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering if anything like that already exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8754" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T01:42:56.380" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:28:12.083" Title="Software license that says &quot;you can use this source code commercially as long as you don't also use any of the included art assets&quot;?" Tags="|license-recommendation|non-commercial|assets|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5835" CreationDate="2017-08-08T17:33:13.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The easiest approach is to license the source code under one license and art assets under another license. The code can be under an open source license, and the art under a non-commercial license like &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons BY-NC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. CC BY-NC requires attribution, as will any mainstream open source license you choose for your code (unless you choose a niche ultra-permissive license like CC0 or the WTFPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very close to how several other studios have open-sourced their game's engine without releasing their whole game under a free license. Almost all of the games included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Humble_Bundles#2010&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first Humble Indie Bundle&lt;/a&gt; did this: namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_(video_game)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gish&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaria_(video_game)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aquaria&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra:_Overture&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penumbra: Overture&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugaru&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lugaru&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose a copyleft license like the GPL for your code, you may want to make explicit in your licensing documentation that the code's copyleft requirements do not extend to the project's art assets (otherwise, people couldn't distribute your project at all, since CC BY-NC is incompatible with the GPL). This also means that GPL copyleft requirements would not apply to any substitute assets that downstream users supply. It is a nebulous legal question whether art assets are part of the work as a whole, or whether the code-work consumes and displays the (separate) art-work as data, so it doesn't hurt to make this division explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that CC NC licenses are non-free and functionally a hair's breadth away from being all-rights-reserved: there is so much uncertainty (among users and licensors alike) about whether a particular action counts as &quot;commercial&quot; -- distribution on a site with ads, use in a professional portfolio, use to solicit donations for a charity, use by the government, etc. -- that some people will stay away from modifying or redistributing it altogether. For an alternate approach, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5840/50&quot;&gt;Anony-Mousse's answer&lt;/a&gt; which advocates using a copyleft license, instead of a noncommercial license, to control downstream distribution of your assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T14:28:12.083" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:28:12.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-08T21:52:04.520" Score="5" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;What prevents the following situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice writes Alice's Great Open-Source Program and releases it under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bob creates the derivative work Bob's Great Open-Source Program With Racing Stripes, which is just Alice's program with racing stripes on it, and dual-licenses it under the GPL and another license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charlie creates Charlie's Closed-Source Program With Racing Stripes based on Bob's program and releases it under a closed-source license only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything in the GPL v2 preventing this. Particularly, I see a requirement that Bob release his program under the GPL, but I don't see a requirement that he not also release it under any other licenses. (Now that I've checked the GPL v3, I can see that version has a sentence saying &quot;This License gives no permission to license the [derivative] work in any other way&quot;. Not sure how much legal effect that has, but it's there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Does it matter if Bob's modifications are more substantial than just racing stripes?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8757" LastEditorUserId="8757" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T22:10:15.200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T13:10:19.700" Title="What stops anyone from taking a derivative of a derivative of a GPLv2-licensed work closed-source?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5838" CreationDate="2017-08-08T22:23:58.320" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your error is in step 2, when Bob licenses the &lt;em&gt;whole work&lt;/em&gt; under a permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob's derivative is composed of Bob's work and Alice's work. In general, Bob can't change the license on Alice's work (unless Alice has allowed him to do so). Alice has only allowed anyone to use her work under the terms of the GPL, so Bob can't offer Alice's part of the combined work under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't so much a restriction written in the GPL as it is the normal operation of copyright law. In legal terms, a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; is a granting of some rights you have. You can't offer rights you don't have. If you're not the owner of a work's copyright, you can't license the rights that exist in that copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob is free to offer &lt;em&gt;his own contributions&lt;/em&gt;, under a more permissive, GPL-compatible license, but when he creates a compilation with any portion of someone else's GPL-licensed work, then the GPL-licensed part must always remain under the GPL (and therefore the work as a whole must also be GPL licensed, though it may include more permissively-licensed GPL-compatible components).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T13:10:19.700" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T13:10:19.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5835" CreationDate="2017-08-09T09:11:35.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual approach would be to separately license the code and the assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beware that a non-commercial use license will disallow the inclusion on e.g. DVD of free software e.g. with a magazine or probably even the download from Ubuntu. So most likely, Linux distributions will not include such assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that &quot;commercial&quot; use is a very broad term. If a website has advertisements, it is usually considered to be commercial. Github is commercial, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you rather &lt;strong&gt;choose a strong copy-left license instead&lt;/strong&gt;. I.e. if someone distributes this commercially, then only as part of other copy-left material. It then cannot be mixed with &quot;non free&quot; material, but it can be legally distributed on web pages with ads, DVDs with magazines, or by companies such as Ubuntu and Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. you can make your code LGPL or Apache licensed (allowing commercial modifications and use) but make your data assets GPL. So when used with your data assets, the entire package is GPL licensed, and commercial users must share their modifications of the entire thing. You could also use CC-BY-SA (as some people argue the GPL should only be used for software, not art, but others disagree). But I'm not sure it will provide the same level of protection: one may consider each image/texture/audio as separately licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6279" LastEditorUserId="6279" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T09:31:17.493" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T09:31:17.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5838" CreationDate="2017-08-09T12:55:02.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't see anything in the GPL v2 preventing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing that grants such permission either. Since no permission is granted and &quot;all rights [are] reserved&quot; in general with copyrights, there is no need for an explicit &quot;prevention&quot;, only explicit permissions. The GPL does not allow re-licensing under another license... so step 2. is a violation of the GPL (either v2 or the more explicit v3) and the buck stops there: Bob is no longer licensed when violating the GPL conditions. So 2. and 3. are hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; 2.b says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 is clear on the topic too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; Section 5. says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. [...]  This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T12:55:02.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5845" CreationDate="2017-08-10T12:29:14.757" Score="4" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to work on a library which uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/clojure/clojure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clojure&lt;/a&gt; as a dependency. I'm planning to add it as a Maven dependency so I won't modify anything in Clojure, I'll just use the binary as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#USEEPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states than I &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; use EPL to distribute my code but I'm more interested in the opposite: can I use MIT or Apache license for my OSS project (non-copyleft) if I have an EPL binary dependency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8768" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T00:46:36.950" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T00:46:36.950" Title="Can I distribute my software using a license other than EPL if I use an EPL dependency in the project?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T15:01:02.360" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;OSIsoft, LLC publishes an &lt;a href=&quot;https://techsupport.osisoft.com/Documentation/PI-AF-SDK/Html/1a02af4c-1bec-4804-a9ef-3c7300f5e2fc.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SDK&lt;/a&gt; with their PI System, to which I wrote a python adapter. At this point it is for internal use in our company only, but I think it is potentially useful to other users of the OSIsoft PI System. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adapter is pure python code that loads the .NET libraries from their installation directory, and so does not include the SDK itself. Under the assumption the company has no objection to publishing the code, is it legal to publish this under an open source license, and are there open source licenses that are incompatible with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some links to license information of the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://techsupport.osisoft.com/Documentation/PI-AF-SDK/Html/c3205f09-1ffb-4dd9-a9a9-b98ba26386ce.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright notice from AF SDK documentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pastebin.com/7dc9NZpT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;C:\Program Files\PIPC\AF\LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8769" LastEditorUserId="8769" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T04:54:04.037" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T04:54:04.037" Title="Is it legal to publish an open source adapter to a closed source SDK?" Tags="|publishing|software-development|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5843" CreationDate="2017-08-10T17:14:18.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The EPL isn't a copyleft license. The EPL license doesn't claim to apply to program modules that are linked to the EPL code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can choose any compatible  license you like for your own code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Apache and MIT licenses are both compatible with the EPL, but the GPL isn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T17:14:18.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5849" CreationDate="2017-08-10T18:42:54.563" Score="2" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a project on GitHub, and I need to choose a licence. I want it this license to follow something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Permissions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It can be edited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;edited&lt;/strong&gt; version of the project can be distributed. The project itself can   &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; be distributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both private use, patent use, and commercial use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conditions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License and copyright notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modifications should use the same licence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any license that would make a good fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8773" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T01:00:16.073" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T16:15:01.427" Title="License that only allows distribution of edited versions" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T19:46:50.610" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working on a proof of concept prototype for my company. The libraries for the board I've been using are licensed under the LGPL. We've been happy enough that we're now considering using this hardware in production. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the LGPL does not require me to release all of my application's source code. However anyone must be free to modify and compile against whatever LGPL licensed code I am using. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remain compliant, can I simply create a wrapper library for the LGPL code, call the LGPL code from my portion with the wrapper, and distribute the used LGPL code as its own library? And possibly provide headers that would allow you to modify the LGPL portion and recompile? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8774" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T01:05:14.607" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T01:05:14.607" Title="Creating a wrapper library for LGPL code and distribute the used LGPL code as its own library?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5846" CreationDate="2017-08-11T16:15:01.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a license would not be a free or open source license (as defined by the FSF and OSI, respectively), since it does not allow distribution of verbatim copies. You will not a find a license that meets your requirements in any list of FSF- or OSI-approved licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the restriction no-verbatim-distribution restriction, it sounds like the GNU GPL would otherwise be a satisfactory license for you. Its copyleft provisions require that modified versions are distributed under the same license, and that downstream binary distributions also include corresponding source code (which you didn't explictly ask for, but may be something you want, or can at least tolerate). It also includes patent provisions, allows commercial use (as all FLOSS licenses must), and requires preservation of your copyright notices (as most FLOSS licenses do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The no-verbatim-distribution requirement is also trivial to circumvent, either intentionally or accidentally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Original author A licenses a work under your proposed license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello world! It's a beautiful day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downstream author B distributes a modified work based on A's work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello world! It's a beautiful HELLO SURPRISE ANNOYING SHOUTING day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downstream author C gets a copy of B's work (and may not even know about A's original work), and thinks it would look better without all that all-caps shouting. He makes a change and distributes a work that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello world! It's a beautiful day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C has met your license's requirement to make a change before distributing, but C's work A's original work are identical, so your no-verbatim-distribution requirement hasn't achieved anything meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carefully consider why you feel the need to impose such an unusual requirement. You're not concerned about people sharing or modifying your code. What is the worst possible scenario that could occur if you didn't impose a no-verbatim-distribution requirement? How is it practically different from a scenario where someone makes the smallest possible change and distributes a nearly-identical work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest you reconsider this requirement, since it only seems to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make your work annoying to distribute for downstream users (but in no way impossible for any determined redistributor),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cut you off from a wealth of legally-vetted FLOSS license choices, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not afford you any practical advantage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T16:15:01.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5854" CreationDate="2017-08-11T17:56:04.780" Score="-3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a UI theme that is licensed as &lt;strong&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International&lt;/strong&gt; for a commercial website after I edit and customize it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any copyright issue to be worried about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8783" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T01:11:19.213" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T19:45:18.940" Title="Can I customize a CC BY-ND 4.0 theme and use it for a commercial website?" Tags="|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-12T02:20:53.030" Score="3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/abntex/abntex2/blob/master/doc/latex/abntex2/examples/abntex2-modelo-trabalho-academico.tex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this .tex file&lt;/a&gt;. I need to edit it so it becomes my thesis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the LPPL license, I need to change its name, and state from what name I am renaming. But what do I do about this part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;%% This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.&#xA;%% &#xA;%% The Current Maintainer of this work is the abnTeX2 team, led&#xA;%% by Lauro César Araujo. Further information are available on &#xA;%% http://www.abntex.net.br/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I change his name to mine. So the full new header should be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;%% Copyright 2017 **My Name**&#xA;%% Copyright 2012-2016 by abnTeX2 group at http://www.abntex.net.br/&#xA;%&#xA;%% This work may be distributed and/or modified under the&#xA;%% conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3&#xA;%% of this license or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;%% The latest version of this license is in&#xA;%%   http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt&#xA;%% and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX&#xA;%% version 2005/12/01 or later.&#xA;%%&#xA;%% This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.&#xA;%%&#xA;%% The Current Maintainer of this work is the **My Name**. &#xA;%%&#xA;%% This work consists of a bunch of files. But originally there ware 3 files&#xA;%% which are renamed as follows:&#xA;%%&#xA;%% On 11/08/2017:&#xA;%% Renamed the `abntex2-modelo-references.bib` to `modelo-ufsc-references.bib`&#xA;%% Renamed the `abntex2-modelo-include-comandos` to `Capitulos/01/CH01.tex`&#xA;%% Renamed the `abntex2-modelo-trabalho-academico.tex` to `modelo-ufsc-main.tex`&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6733" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T19:18:25.207" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:09:12.487" Title="Can I change a LPPL licensed LaTeX file (template) license?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|relicensing|lppl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5855" CreationDate="2017-08-12T08:44:31.370" Score="10" ViewCount="2729" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GitHub repository which its license is GPL. Although of this, in the &quot;about&quot; window of my program, I mentioned that I own the copyright (like this: © My name, 2017). And I added the GPL text too there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if a contributor sends me a pull request via GitHub and I accept it, does that mean he's now qualified to be a copyright holder? Can he also put his name like (© His name, 2017)? What are the legal consequences of this? Isn't ok to just list his name in the authors list of the program, instead of saying &quot;copyright ©: someone..&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8269" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T13:59:01.947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T09:23:58.277" Title="Do Contributors Own Copyright After Sending Contributions?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|github|contributor|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5850" CreationDate="2017-08-12T19:45:18.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes there is. The copyright license does not allow you to make any changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T19:45:18.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5853" CreationDate="2017-08-13T09:23:58.277" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The common understanding is to consider that contributions are made under the same license as the project these are contributed to (unless stated otherwise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On GitHub, this is made explicit in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/site-policy/blob/1263bf0164cfe60d0900e70ba9126855c7c23c6c/Policies/github-terms-of-service.md#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isn't this just how it works already? Yep. This is widely accepted as the norm in the open-source community; it's commonly referred to by the shorthand &quot;inbound=outbound&quot;. We're just making it explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you accept a contribution, two things happen:&#xA;1. the contribution is under the existing project license&#xA;2. the copyright of this contribution is that of the contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the copyright of the codebase as a whole is now shared between you and the contributor. (Though in practice there may be subtle things that have a legal meaning: for instance if I contribute a one-character typo fix, I do not have much a copyright ownership if any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can therefore either add the copyright of these authors or keep an authors file as you see fit to document this. A common practice is to use a &quot;Copyright (c) the XXX authors&quot; (or contributors) and list authors or not separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now even though this documentation may have some legal meaning, even if not present the shared copyright is still there nonetheless. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T09:23:58.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T12:06:37.870" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a BSD-licensed piece of code, and I would like to integrate some code licensed under the Boost software license directly in the file, for reasons of portability. The file contains the full BSD 3-clause license in a header at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I explicitly state the origin of the Boost-licensed code, where it starts and ends in the file, and that it's covered under the boost software license, as well as including a full copy of the Boost license in the code itself, do I need to make any changes to the BSD copyright header (e.g.: stating that it's not all under BSD/that it's all under the BSD license except where explicitly mentioned), or anything else? Or should I include the Boost licensed code in a separate file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4608" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T18:48:43.893" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T18:48:43.893" Title="Can I distribute Boost-licensed code inside a BSD-licensed file?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|bsd|redistribution|bsl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5857" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T18:50:52.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History, Rationale, FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T03:31:15.963" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T03:31:15.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5858" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T18:50:52.867" Score="0" Body="for questions about the BSL (Boost Software License)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T09:26:40.627" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:26:40.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:00:57.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the zlib/libpng license, use the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/zlib-libpng&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zlib-libpng&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zlib-libpng&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: &lt;a href=&quot;http://zlib.net/zlib_license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://zlib.net/zlib_license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T03:31:37.967" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T03:31:37.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:00:57.813" Score="0" Body="for questions about the zlib license" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T09:26:20.257" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:26:20.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5861" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:04:12.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the zlib license, use the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/zlib&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;zlib&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;zlib&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: &lt;a href=&quot;http://libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libpng_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libpng License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T03:31:53.017" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T03:31:53.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5862" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T19:04:12.893" Score="0" Body="for questions about the zlib/libpng license (aka. libpng license)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T09:26:37.010" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T09:26:37.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T00:31:28.197" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a little C++ wrapper around a C lib that uses the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zlib.net/zlib_license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose I have to include this license in my wrapper's files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But what about the other files? I was planning on making a shared library.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Overall, what license should my shared library be released on?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8793" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T14:30:51.720" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T14:30:51.720" Title="Licensing C++ wrapper of C shared lib" Tags="|license-file|zlib|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5866" CreationDate="2017-08-14T21:26:57.897" Score="9" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are creating a repository of resources so that people can build software or create videos or artwork using our material as their basis. We are making a virtual Moon colony and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.moonwards.com/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website of related material&lt;/a&gt;, and inviting others to use that to make games or shows that take place in the colony, use our library to create objects or events that are placed within our hosted version of the colony as a 3d environment, write stories that draw on our material, et cetera. To facilitate that, all our libraries are open source and copy left. Currently they use GPL-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, people who go to the effort to make things using our libraries are likely going to want to hold copyright on the derivative work, including making the source code closed. I would like to make it a license condition that they add models, textures, animations, and other similar component pieces they make to our libraries. But I am fine with it if they want to put a different license on their work as a whole so they can charge for it. I seriously doubt we will have many takers using our libraries otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that if we change the license on the one folder in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/briligg/moonwards&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;our GitHub repo&lt;/a&gt; that has 3d content, the one called 'blenderstuff', this might be achievable. I am the sole copyleft holder on all that material so I can make that change easily right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is at an early stage and I know very little about this realm. I just want to help people make cool stuff and educate the public about space. When it comes to legalities, I need a lot of help navigating it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8798" LastEditorUserId="8798" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T21:32:19.723" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T17:32:23.300" Title="Can we keep the components of a derivative work open source, but allow the work as a whole to be closed?" Tags="|license-recommendation|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5865" CreationDate="2017-08-15T17:32:23.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can dual-license your project under a GPL3 license and a non-free license. Or you can add an exception to the GPL3 license as per section 7 (Additional terms) of the license (the two solutions would achieve the same result).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-free license / additional exception to GPL3 would contain language to indicate that &quot;using the library in closed-source works is allowed provided that new models, textures and animations are contributed back through pull requests on [URL of your repo]&quot; (don't say &quot;and similar&quot; because this would only create juridical uncertainty and this is bad for users of your library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Side note:&lt;/em&gt; Of course this means that people could still use your library and not contribute back new textures if they chose to keep the resulting work GPL3. Moreover, if they do so, you couldn't take their new textures (even if they share them publicly) and add them to your repository because you wouldn't be able to grant a similar exception on these new textures. But this is only a small risk as most people who value free and open source software are generally happy to send their contributions to the original repository, under the original terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T17:32:23.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5844" CreationDate="2017-08-17T11:16:09.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a lawyer and this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first link you gave is the license for the documentation, not the SDK itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second link has copyright information on the SDK iself and several components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SDK itself does not have any particular license according to the document, just this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This product is developed and copyrighted by OSIsoft, LLC. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The components have MIT, Apache 2.0 and &lt;em&gt;MICROSOFT SOFTWARE SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS&lt;/em&gt;. None of them prohibits distribution of software which does use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="952" LastEditorUserId="952" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T12:20:11.327" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T12:20:11.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-17T18:36:58.210" Score="2" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a native application which calls a PHP Script by using POST-requests. The PHP script interacts with a MySQL Community Server which is under the license GPL. It reads, inserts and deletes data from a MySQL database just on the server where it is installed and returns results to the native application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to publish the PHP code for the web app which interacts with MySQL because of GPL? That would be a security risk because the whole database structure and access would be visible. Or do I not have to publish the code of the web app because it is not the part of the application that would be distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The native application will be distributed (for free) but the whole project would not be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8825" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T13:36:31.463" Title="Using MySQL with PHP and GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5884" CreationDate="2017-08-18T22:33:18.650" Score="4" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just about to release a few software projects under the Apache Open Source License 2.0.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While creating the projects I have purchased the legal rights to royalty-free images which I use in the project.  A specific example is the image I use as an icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the original license doesn't allow others to use those images (for derivative products) as they like, since the future users haven't paid the royalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to include the royalty-free images along with the Open Source project on GitHub (for example)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a proper way to indicate that certain resources (images, sound files, etc) are not included in the Open Source code itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know many of these answers may require exact detailed information.  I'm just attempting to get a general idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8838" OwnerDisplayName="raddevus" LastEditorUserId="8838" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T20:06:09.010" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T11:03:02.743" Title="How do I exclude some items from an Open Source software project (such as resource images) even though they are required by the project?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:11:38.310" Score="4" ViewCount="5199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a website that I plan to release as open source, and also publish it to a web host so that people can actually use it. The website uses Angular, and I used Angular CLI to create it. In order to install Angular CLI, I used npm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm at the point in development where I want to host the website, but I want to make sure I comply with the licenses. It seems that when I use &lt;code&gt;ng build --prod&lt;/code&gt; Angular CLI creates a &lt;code&gt;dist&lt;/code&gt; folder where it puts the build files. It automatically creates a file called &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt;, which I assume is some attempt to collect the licenses for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems that the automatically generated &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; is missing some libraries. For example, if I do &lt;code&gt;npm ls --prod&lt;/code&gt;, the &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; only contains about half of those. For example, I'm pretty sure that rxjs is a dependency of Angular, but it isn't listed anywhere in &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt;. Other libraries that I installed through npm are also missing (even though they show up in package.json).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still new to npm and js, so maybe I am missing something, but does this mean that the only way to make sure you list all the licenses is to manually go through all the repositories and their dependencies and copy the licenses over each time? This seems like a very time consuming step and I'm guessing that other people must have run in to a similar workflow issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8840" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:55:36.407" Title="How do you know what licences you used in an Angular project?" Tags="|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5872" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:55:36.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going through them manually is one way, but you could also try a tool such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt; which scans all files in a software project to determine the licenses. It is both a command line program and accessible through a web interface that displays the results of a scan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned that your automatically generated &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; was missing some licenses. This tool is specifically designed for accuracy in detecting licenses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nomos is one of FOSSology's license scanners. Nomos does license identification using short phrases (regular expressions) and heuristics, e.g. a phrase must be found in (or out of) proximity to another phrase or phrases. This helps to eliminate false positives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not used this tool, but it seems to be what you are looking for. Judging by the screen shots and this &lt;a href=&quot;http://studylib.net/doc/9551565/a-review-of-fossology---ryan-arnold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;methodical review&lt;/a&gt; (starts on page 18), which found 100% accuracy in three test cases, it seems to be accurate indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:55:36.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2017-08-20T12:02:09.620" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no longer any need to guess the meaning from GitHub's Terms of Service. GitHub explains it themselves pretty well on their own choosealicense.com website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find software that doesn’t have a license, that generally means you have no permission from the creators of the software to use, modify, or share the software. Although a code host such as GitHub may allow you to view and fork the code, this does not imply that you are permitted to use, modify, or share the software for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ask the maintainers nicely to add a license.&lt;/strong&gt; Unless the software includes strong indications to the contrary, lack of a license is probably an oversight. If the software is hosted on a site like GitHub, open an issue requesting a license and include a link to this site, or if you’re bold and it’s fairly obvious what license is most appropriate, open a pull request to add a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don’t use the software.&lt;/strong&gt; Find or create an alternative that is under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Negotiate a private license.&lt;/strong&gt; Bring your lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/no-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose A License article: No license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8844" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T06:16:07.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5871" CreationDate="2017-08-20T16:00:29.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I can download those images because you put them somewhere where I can download them, then you committed copyright infringement. So don't do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could replace these images with some hand-drawn images, make a list of those images, and some documentation where I can get the good quality images and how to get a license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you could hire someone to create images that you can use freely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T16:00:29.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2017-08-20T16:10:08.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is complicated. If your PHP code was released under one of the open source licenses on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/foss-exception/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL FOSS License Exception&lt;/a&gt; list, you would not need to release it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FOSS License Exception permits use of the GPL-licensed MySQL Client Libraries with software applications licensed under certain other FOSS licenses without causing the entire derivative work to be subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that is a problem since your project is not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are similar questions that I researched:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13441901/mysql-and-gpl-recommendation&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13441901/mysql-and-gpl-recommendation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/620696/mysql-licensing-and-gpl&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/620696/mysql-licensing-and-gpl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/24144117/7691151&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the second question describes the situation well. It all depends on how you communicate with the MySQL server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, how can your program speak the MySQL protocol? One possibility is using the official MySQL client library (connector), which is GPL'd. If you do this, you are statically linking your program to a GPL'd library, and thus you need to release your software under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can link against a third party client library, with a different license. For example you can use the MariaDB Client Library, which is LGPL'd (and is thus compatible with proprietary software) and provides the same API of the original MySQL client library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T16:10:08.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5869" CreationDate="2017-08-21T13:36:31.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, if you are developing an application with a server in PHP+MySQL, you are normally not distributing the server part. Therefore, this is considered as private use and you don't have to release any of your server code. The client part is a different program altogether so isn't affected by MySQL license either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T13:36:31.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5883" CreationDate="2017-08-21T19:24:21.637" Score="5" ViewCount="1273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a software and I will publish it for free. But this software includes the following programs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The app is developed using Electron (License: MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electron uses Chromium (It is combined with different licenses)&#xA;NOTE: Once the application is packaged, automatically Electron and Chromium license files are included in the root folder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;node.js (&lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nodejs/node/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nginx (&lt;a href=&quot;https://nginx.org/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;) - Also there other license files (zlib, openssl etc) in the downloaded package&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PHP (License: PHP License) - Also it includes other license files of other apps it includes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fet Scheduler (License: GNU AGPL v3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laravel (License: MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My files are &quot;Laravel&quot; Controllers, Models and Views. Once the app is started, first nginx and PHP start and then my PHP website is displayed in a chromium browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these apps included in one setup file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be the correct license for this app? A single license file or multiple license files in their folders (PHP, nginx etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8853" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T13:23:18.700" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:11:31.337" Title="What must be the license of a software including other apps with different licenses?" Tags="|licensing|mit|relicensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T02:43:37.973" Score="7" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a downloadable digital web product for sale. I want to use an open-source third-party library for my product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This third-party library has two licenses available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've three scenarios to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First scenario:&lt;/strong&gt; If I include this library in my product with GPL license, my product must also be released under GPL (which I don't want).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second scenario:&lt;/strong&gt; If I use 'commercial' license of this library, I can release my product under whatever license I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third scenario:&lt;/strong&gt; My product needs this third-party library to &lt;em&gt;extend&lt;/em&gt; its capabilities but it does not necessarily need to be &lt;em&gt;bundled&lt;/em&gt; with my product source code. I can program my product in such a way that when a customer installs my product, it'll ask the user to install that third-party resource &lt;em&gt;afterward separately&lt;/em&gt; (from some open-source GitHub repository).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This third-party library installation procedure would automatically be done via my product after user confirmation. It will be installed in a separate folder from where my proprietary code is located and my product will then interact with that third-party library via its API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; In the third scenario, do I still need to buy a 'commercial' license, despite the fact that third-party library is not included in source code of my product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8855" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T15:02:09.373" Title="Using GPL resource (with separate installation) with &quot;commercial&quot; product" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5880" CreationDate="2017-08-22T11:43:25.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are trying too hard to find a work around the GPL IMHO. If your product is commercial, use the commercial license. If you are installing the GPL library at install time, there is no real difference with bundling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T11:43:25.337" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5878" CreationDate="2017-08-22T11:49:25.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First all the licenses apply. So you can create a massive top level aggregated license or just use the ones provided by each package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the questions is what would be the resulting overall licensing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the various package licenses are eventually compatible and how the packages interact together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a complex question with no simple answer that may need some deep technical and legal review.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular in general the strongest copyleft licenses may apply depending on how packages and code is combined, which could be the AGPL for Fet Scheduler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, there are many more subtleties to the licenses of Electron and Chromium than just the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a follow up question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Can I create my own license for the Controllers, Models and Views I created in Laravel&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My general understanding of fet is that this a standalone application. It would impact the overall licensing if you link to it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T03:11:31.337" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:11:31.337" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5871" CreationDate="2017-08-23T11:03:02.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to include the royalty-free images along with the Open Source project on GitHub (for example)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on the exact details of the license under which you can use the images and in particular if the license terms are automatically transferred to someone who obtains a copy of the image.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If the license is not transferable, then you should not put the images in a publicly accessible repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you put the images in a publicly accessible repository, then you should also put a text file in there with the license of the images and you should make it clear in the documentation that the code and the images live under different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could place two LICENSE files in the root folder of your repository:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This license applies only to the code in this repository. &#xA;Images and other assets are explicitly excluded.&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;license text for your code license...&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;LICENSE-images.md&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This license applies only to the images in this repository. &#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;license text for your image files...&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T11:03:02.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5886" CreationDate="2017-08-24T12:48:16.447" Score="10" ViewCount="8304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing software which I later want to distribute. The software itself is open source and makes use of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here is the problem: I use one library which is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause&lt;/a&gt; and requires me to include the relevant copyright notice. Unfortunately I couldn't find out what this actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to include the entire license in my GitHub repository? Do I have to credit the developer in my README? If so, do I have to credit only the main dev or the whole team? In the case of me distributing the software commercially, can the developer take back my rights to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8874" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T06:13:50.447" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T06:13:50.447" Title="How does the BSD 2-Clause License copyright notice work?" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5885" CreationDate="2017-08-24T14:03:33.833" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's always a good idea to include copyright information when using someone else's work. I'm not a lawyer, but here is my understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to include the entire license in my GitHub repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends. If you upload the source or binary of this third party library into your GitHub repository, then the answer is yes. If you are not uploading this third party library to GitHub, then you do not have to include their license in your repository. If you end up distributing the combined overall work (their library and your project), then the 2-clause BSD License says you must list the copyright information and the terms and conditions of the license. This information is usually found in a &quot;COPYING&quot; or &quot;LICENSE&quot; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to credit the developer in my README?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't specifically have to credit the developer in a &quot;README&quot; file, but you must include their copyright information somewhere if you decided to send that third party library (in either source or binary form) to somebody else. In that case, I would suggest putting all copyright information in a file named &quot;COPYING&quot; or &quot;LICENSE&quot;. Note that providing this copyright information is essentially giving them credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If so do I have to credit only the main dev or the whole team?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute their work, you should credit everyone that has worked on the project, unless they have explicitly forfeited their copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of me distributing the software commercially, can the developer take back my rights to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe the developer can take back your rights to distribute the software that they licensed under the BSD 2-clause. However, they could choose to change their license (e.g. make it proprietary) on any future modifications/releases of their software. This doesn't mean that you must stop using the software you already have, but it could mean that you might not have the permissions/rights to any future updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T14:03:33.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-24T15:00:45.477" Score="3" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just found out that in some countries in Europe, one can't use public domain libraries in commercial software (e.g. Germany).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of the Linux libraries come under public domain (e.g. files from glib-2.0). Does this mean that all commercial devices using Linux should not be on the market?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the same question goes for WTFPL and The Unlicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170612/09194237572/multiple-german-courts-rule-photos-public-domain-works-are-not-public-domain.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170612/09194237572/multiple-german-courts-rule-photos-public-domain-works-are-not-public-domain.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T11:13:18.267" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T07:42:43.270" Title="Public domain software in Europe" Tags="|licensing|public-domain|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5895" CreationDate="2017-08-25T00:44:57.633" Score="11" ViewCount="947" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the Facebook BSD+Patents licence compatible with the GPL (GPLv3), in the sense that one could:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use code licensed under BSD+Patents, as part of a project, the rest of which you write yourself (own its copyright), and release the project under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;combine code licensed under BSD+Patents, with external GPL-licensed code, in a single project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if &lt;em&gt;2.&lt;/em&gt; is possible then so is &lt;em&gt;1.&lt;/em&gt;, but not vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Facebook's stance&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Facebook &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, as has always been the case, you may distribute BSD + Patents licensed code with other popular open source licences, such as BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't think that a statement in a blog post is really legally binding. On the other hand, it suggests that Facebook intended the licence to be GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;1.&lt;/em&gt; Writing your own GPL program, using code under BSD+Patents&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3, §7&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question is whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/83393bc2be12dfcc449fd4c1d0bf86260215e76f/PATENTS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Patent Grant&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is considered a restriction, or not. If it's not, then there is no problem and &lt;em&gt;1.&lt;/em&gt; is probably possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it is, then it would seem that by licensing the entire program under the GPL, (including the parts licensed under BSD+Patents), I'm giving permission to users/redistributors of my program, to remove the &quot;Patent Grant&quot; restriction. I'm obviously not allowed to give this permission, so in this scenario I can't release the program under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible saving grace could be if I just use the BSD+Patents licensed code as a library — e.g. I use the React library, as a library, without changing it. In that case, I could perhaps distribute my program without React, but grant users the additional permission to combine the program with the React library — similarly to the OpenSSL linking exception. I have no idea, though, how the concept of linking transfers to the JavaScript world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;2.&lt;/em&gt; Combining with existing GPL code&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;§10 of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, we're again faced with the question of whether the &quot;Patent Grant&quot; is an additional restriction. If it is, then I'm not allowed to combine an existing GPL code-base with code under BSD+Patents, while if it's not, then again, there's probably no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Is the &quot;Patent Grant&quot; an additional restriction?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the crucial issue and also the most uncertain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/83393bc2be12dfcc449fd4c1d0bf86260215e76f/PATENTS#L1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first line&lt;/a&gt; of the &quot;Patent Grant&quot; is &lt;code&gt;Additional Grant of Patent Rights&lt;/code&gt;, suggesting that the grant is in addition to the BSD license and just gives you additional rights, not restrictions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the BSD license already permits the use (and redistribution) of the software, under the set of three standard conditions, all of which are considered acceptable by the GPL, and none of which is linked to initiating Patent Assertions against Facebook, so the revocation of the patent license to use (etc.) the software, if you initiate a Patent Assertion against Facebook (et al.), might be considered an extra restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7228" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T10:29:31.250" Title="Is the Facebook BSD+Patents licence (aka &quot;The React Licence&quot;) compatible with the GPL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|bsd|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5894" CreationDate="2017-08-25T16:50:49.273" Score="11" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand it correctly, when I develop a program that depends on a GPL library, it becomes a derivative work of the library and the GPL license also aplies to it. But what happens if I develop a new version of the program which doesn't need the library anymore? Am I still obligated to use the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one point of view, the old version was GPL and this is clearly a derivative work of it, so it needs to be GPL too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a different point of view – this is nonsense! I'm not using the library so nothing is forcing me to use GPL anymore! Right?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8884" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T12:21:48.510" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T12:21:48.510" Title="What happens if I stop using a GPL library?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5890" CreationDate="2017-08-25T16:54:48.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what happens if I develop a new version of the program which doesn't need the library anymore? Am I still obligated to use the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not at all: how would the copyleft of non-existent code flow back to your code that does not use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T16:54:48.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5893" CreationDate="2017-08-25T19:23:44.813" Score="5" ViewCount="1399" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I write some software which links against a GPL licensed component (i.e. my software is a derived work) and install (copy across a public network and deploy) that software onto a customer's (external party) remote machine does that count as 'distribution' with respect to the GPL license (GPLv2 for example)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was assuming distribution to mean making the software down-loadable from a publicly visible website as opposed to installing it onto a customer's remote machine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8885" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T19:48:48.827" Title="GPL and distribution" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5892" CreationDate="2017-08-25T19:48:48.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is distribution. It is not widespread distribution, but it is distribution. When you give the binary to your customer, you are required to offer that customer the corresponding source and accompanying GPL rights to redistribute and modify them both. If a person receives a GPL work without source code (or an offer of source code) and accompanying GPL rights for the work, then a GPL violation has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you do not need to offer the source or GPL rights to any other people beyond the actual recipients of your distribution. Your distribution is directed to some set of people; it is to those people your distribution obligations apply. (This is exactly the same as public widespread distribution, but in that case the set of recipients can grow unbounded as new people get the software from you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, your customer has a business interest in &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distributing the source further, so the legal obligation to grant them GPL rights does not present a business hardship for you anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &amp;quot;customer&amp;quot; here is actually an employee of the same company as you, and transmitting the software is done as a transaction between agents of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DistributeSubsidiary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the same company (or of two companies with a subsidiary relationship)&lt;/a&gt;, then distribution has not occurred, since the work never exited the perimeter of the corporation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5554/50&quot;&gt;GPLv3 makes two important exceptions&lt;/a&gt;, which likely don't apply here (since you use the word &amp;quot;customer&amp;quot;). If either applies, then your distribution (or &amp;quot;conveyance&amp;quot;) does not require the normal grant of the GPL rights or source-sharing obligations. Those exceptions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distribution to a contractor for the exclusive purpose of making modifications to the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distribution to an execution environment over which you have exclusive absolute control who runs the code exclusively for your benefit (e.g., a cloud services provider like Amazon)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those cases, you do not need to offer &lt;em&gt;your own work&lt;/em&gt; under the terms of the GPL, though you do need to comply with the GPL as it applies to modules that you didn't write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of this exception is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T19:48:48.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5890" CreationDate="2017-08-26T12:08:32.873" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on who you accepted contributions from while the code is under the GPL license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't accept contributions from others and you are the sole copyright holder, then you can change the license to any license you want once the dependency on the GPL licensed code is removed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did accept contributions from others, then those contributions are likely to be under the GPL license themselves. You can't change the license without explicit consent from all  the other contributors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T12:08:32.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5889" CreationDate="2017-08-26T15:15:14.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the patent grant is not an additional restriction (and therefore React code can be used in a GPL software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license itself does not include a patent grant. This means that even if you have the right to use, modify and distribute the software per the license, doing so may infringe on someone's patents. With this (admittedly unusual and controversial) patent grant, Facebook is giving you additional permission to use its patents when required for running the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the license, you could remove the patent grant, and distribute React under BSD only. The problem would then be that recipients would not have received permission from Facebook to use their patents (but Facebook would likely apply to these recipients the same grant as to primary recipients).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license is compatible with the GPL license, and thus you can include React in a GPL software. The patent provisions of the GPL v3 license wouldn't apply to the React code because Facebook did not choose to license their code under GPL v3. Similarly to the case where you would redistribute React under BSD only, you have no obligations to redistribute the patent grant from Facebook with your code. However, once again users of your software may be sued by Facebook for the use of their patents if they do not comply with the patent grant restrictions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, is it a good idea to use React given how controversial this patent grant is? This is a question for you to answer. However, the answer should be about the same whether your software will be GPL licensed, BSD licensed, or proprietary...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T15:15:14.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5915" CreationDate="2017-08-27T08:31:28.780" Score="4" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a French newspaper from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/209143/article/2017-08-26/quelles-terres-restent-explorer-dans-notre-systeme-solaire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sunday the 27th of August&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;La voix du Nord&lt;/em&gt;, a picture from &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1389/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;xkcd&lt;/a&gt; is reproduced in an article on page 39.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only the author is not quoted, which is an obvious violation of the BY clause. But I wonder if the NC clause is respected or violated in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The news paper is not free of charge. Is it a commercial activity to publish something in an article? Are news papers exempt of the non-commercial clause of CreativeCommons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5531" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T14:53:50.580" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T10:45:37.187" Title="Is a newspaper a commercial activity in regard to CreativeCommons NC clause?" Tags="|non-commercial|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5907" CreationDate="2017-08-27T11:18:41.350" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Elixir project, I want to license the software under AGPLv3. The code have module attributes that's doc strings used to generate the documentation. Then, can the documentation (and then the doc string content only) be under CC-BY 4.0 in same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elixir is a programming language to run in Erlang virtual machine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doc string is a module value used to generate documentation, it's not a comment but it's in the code, but even the syntax is different than a comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With that module attributes other software like ExDoc can generate HTML documentation, for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To more context see Elixir module attributes where explain about &lt;a href=&quot;https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/module-attributes.html#as-annotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doc annotation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5391" LastEditorDisplayName="user5391" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T22:27:40.273" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T14:54:05.207" Title="AGPLv3 for the code and project in general but CC-BY only for doc strings documentation?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5890" CreationDate="2017-08-27T13:48:51.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL only applies if you use a GPL library or source code. As long as you own the source code for you closed source project (e.g: you replace the GPL library with your own implementation), you don't have any GPL obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6533" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T13:48:51.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5887" CreationDate="2017-08-27T14:44:09.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are mistakenly interpreting the German Law. What it does prohibit is when a work is in public domain (such as a sculpture or painting) but you take a picture of it, you may not use the picture, since (very stupidly, but nonetheless) the court determined, that if you take a picture of a public domain work, the supposed creative process of taking the picture is enough to give all ownership of the photo to the photographer. It also states, that when an art piece is in the museum, by it's mere display there, the photographs taken of them are no longer in public domain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, there is nothing about software in the link you provided. Even if you tried to apply the German Court Interpretation to Software (it should be noted, that likely, in software, a new interpretation should be required), then still public domain code COULD be used in commercial works - however, if you added one line of code to the public domain code, nobody would be able to use the modified (even slightly) code. Again, this is speculation, since I don't know of any such Court decisions. Regardless, you can use public domain work in commercial projects. Beside, software is usually regulated by some international copyright deals, which could possibly ensure that public domain can of course be incorporated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, much less a German lawyer, and this does not constitute professional legal advice. If in doubt, please refer to licensed law professionals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8888" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T14:44:09.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5887" CreationDate="2017-08-27T19:14:11.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the provided link, there are two statements regarding copyright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A derived work of a work in the public domain is itself not in the public domain. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A display of public domain artwork is itself protected by intellectual property rights. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second statement is not relevant to software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The first statement is actually not that special and is a prerequisite if you want copyright protection on your code while using some public domain code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T19:14:11.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T16:31:45.257" Score="0" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a portion of an existing project that is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;. MIT seems to state that I must include their license in my work, but I don't want to use any license for my own work (i.e. unlicensed). Merely copying their license into my project makes it look like they wrote my entire project instead of just a portion of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct way to integrate someone else's open source license into my project such that I am compliant with the requirements of their license, acknowledging their contribution, but remain able to license my own project a different way, including without explicitly putting a license on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8897" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T02:20:20.017" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T02:20:20.017" Title="How can I integrate open source licenses, such as MIT, into my own open source project when my code is unlicensed?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5901" CreationDate="2017-08-28T20:33:45.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT requirement is no problem for you.  Simply include the MIT license in the code that you got under the MIT license.  That doesn't affect your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to license your own work (i.e. not permit anyone to copy or use it), just put an overall statement: &quot;Copyright 2017 Quolonel Questions, all rights reserved.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do want others to have unrestricted use of your code, you could apply the Creative Commons CC0 public declaration to your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T20:33:45.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5906" CreationDate="2017-08-29T12:48:47.850" Score="0" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;For scientific publications, ideally a permanently archived version of code should be available, for a couple of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner of a repository, such as a GitHub repo, could delete it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will know exactly which version of code to use. (I know tags could do this too).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I make a permanently archived version of an open source code available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastEditorUserId="72" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T10:51:08.480" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T10:51:08.480" Title="Permanently archive a specific version of open source code for a scientific publication" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5905" CreationDate="2017-08-29T12:48:47.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is good practice. I know of two ways of doing it that also have the benefit of giving your archived code a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.doi.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;digital object identifier&lt;/a&gt; (doi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.figshare.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Figshare&lt;/a&gt; - Mozilla Science Lab has made &lt;a href=&quot;https://mozillascience.github.io/code-research-object/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an import tool for this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zenodo.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zenodo&lt;/a&gt; - follow these &lt;a href=&quot;https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github guide instructions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="72" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T12:48:47.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5897" CreationDate="2017-08-29T14:54:05.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elixir docstrings (which are similar to Python docstrings and JavaDoc comments) are part of the code. Having part of the code under a license and part of the code under another license is a rather complicated setup and this would mean further that two incompatible license co-exists in the same file which does not make sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could release the whole generated documentation files under another license if you feel like it, but then anyone could regenerate that same documentation and the original code license would apply (e.g. AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice would be to keep things simple and since your documentation and code are combined, use a single license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T14:54:05.207" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5905" CreationDate="2017-08-29T15:09:52.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hardest part of your question is IMHO not archiving but archiving &lt;strong&gt;permanently&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Any service alone will not be able to provides this guarantee for the long term. Therefore to increase the likelihood your code will be avialable almost permanently, I would suggest using multiple places simultaneously to have multiple independent mirrors such as a combo of GitHub, BitBucket and Sourceforge as well as Figshare and Zenodo (that you mentioned in your asnwer) where each would contain a copy of the code (and possibly the corresponding publication) and cross-reference each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T15:09:52.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T15:48:54.710" Score="9" ViewCount="1903" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are quite similar. They differ only by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an additional requirement in the AGPL that makes a network service powered by a modified AGPL-licensed work operates like conveyance of the work (and therefore imposes source-sharing requirements)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an additional permission in the AGPL that GPLv3-licensed work can be included in an AGPL-licensed work &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has put much work into determining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility of various licenses&lt;/a&gt;, but no obvious work into compatibility for the AGPL. (This makes sense, since the GPL is much more popular, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I safely assume that any given license's compatibility with the GPL and its compatibility with the AGPL will be the same?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, under what circumstances would they differ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Within the GPL family of licenses&lt;/a&gt;, GPL compatibility and AGPL compatibility are identical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each place that the matrix states GPLv3, the same statement about compatibility is true for AGPLv3 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely due to the explicit coordination in the section 13 of the AGPL and GPLv3 itself. In any case, I am interested in how &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; licenses have differing or identical compatibility between the GPLv3 and AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T15:54:48.833" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T22:16:33.943" Title="Is every license that is GPLv3-compatible also AGPLv3-compatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5905" CreationDate="2017-08-29T20:19:23.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're doing that with libpng. Every time we release a tarball, we make two copies (a current copy and an archive copy) on the libpng ftp/http site &lt;a href=&quot;http://libpng.download/src&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(libpng.download/src)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; libpng16/libpng-1.6.32.tar.xz&#xA; archive/libpng16/xz/libpng-1.6.32.tar.xz&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then when we make a new release (e.g., 1.6.33), we remove libpng16/libpng-1.6.32.tar.xz and then repeat the above, creating&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; libpng16/libpng-1.6.33.tar.xz&#xA; archive/xz/libpng16/libpng-1.6.33.tar.xz&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this operation, the archive directory contains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; archive/xz/libpng16/libpng-1.6.32.tar.xz&#xA; archive/xz/libpng16/libpng-1.6.33.tar.xz&#xA; and all previous versions back to libpng-1.6.0.tar.xz&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other branches (libpng00, libpng10, libpng12, libpng14, libpng15, and libpng17) that contain the complete 22-year history of libpng releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we release a &quot;beta&quot; tarball, the process is similar, except&#xA;that a copy goes into the &quot;beta&quot; subdirectory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; beta/libpng16/libpng-1.6.33beta01.tar.xz&#xA; archive/xz/libpng16/libpng-1.6.33beta01.tar.xz&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you prefer another format, you can use &quot;7z&quot;, &quot;zip&quot;, or &quot;gz&quot;&#xA;in place of &quot;xz&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you prefer to get your source out of the &quot;git&quot; repository,&#xA;that's taken care of by &quot;tagging&quot; every release, so you can&#xA;extract any particular release by means of its tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't trust us to maintain the historical copies, you can always&#xA;download the particular version you want to save and archive it on your own host or web site.  Since libpng is open source, nothing prevents you from doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T20:34:33.157" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T20:34:33.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5913" CreationDate="2017-08-29T22:04:42.043" Score="175" ViewCount="33686" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a software utility I released freely as GPL on a separate machine some ten years ago.  But the machine I wrote it on is lost, and I can't find the source code on any of my backups.  I am still searching for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two people have contacted me asking for the corresponding source (and one of them specifically mentioned they are exercising their rights granted by the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I properly reply to these people?  And more seriously, am I in legal trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program was standalone, written from scratch by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8909" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T18:37:36.890" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T15:21:05.887" Title="I lost the source code for programs I released as GPL. What to do?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-08-29T23:14:14.350" Score="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just tell them that you've lost the sources.  You are not in legal trouble because you as the original sole author (license grantor) are not subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your code was subject to GPL because you incorporated another person's GPL'ed code, you're not in trouble if you released your code more than three years ago.  GPLv2 says (emphasis mine): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of&#xA;  Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, &lt;strong&gt;valid for at least three years&lt;/strong&gt;, to give any third party, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You&quot; in this case is anyone (the licensee) who received the GPL'ed code directly or indirectly from the author.  The author (license grantor) of the code (presuming that they are the sole author and copyright owner, and didn't incorporate any other person's GPL code in their code) did not receive the code under a GPL license (or under any license) and therefore are not subject to its terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license grantor is not required, among other things, to offer source code to anyone.  Unfortunately the GPL license text doesn't point out this fact, nor does anything I could find on the FSF site (EDIT: but see Mick's answer which points to an item in the GPL FAQ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T01:07:10.083" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T01:07:10.083" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-08-30T03:33:08.590" Score="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;wrote the program&lt;/em&gt; yourself (as opposed to having modified somebody else's program or incorporated parts of somebody else's program(s)) and simply licensed it to others under the GPL, then you are &lt;em&gt;in no way obligated to do anything by the GPL&lt;/em&gt;. It's unfortunate that you're missing the source and that others who want it are unable to obtain it, but it's not a legal matter. The GPL governs what others who redistribute or prepare derived works of your program must do in order not to infringe your rights under copyright law; it does not impose requirements on you as the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T03:33:08.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5887" CreationDate="2017-08-30T07:42:43.270" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that in Germany &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; original creations are copyrighted. Therefore the public domain and other similar licenses are not recognized as they don't contain this information.&#xA;Legal advice would be recommended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T07:42:43.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5896" CreationDate="2017-08-30T10:45:37.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The article you reference obviously is lacking proper crediting at the minimum.&#xA;You should contact them so they can fix this alright. You should aslo alert them that they may need a proper authorization (which they may have already) from xkcd for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial usage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T10:45:37.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-08-31T03:41:35.670" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the FAQ on gnu.org:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the developer of a GPL-covered program bound by the GPL? Could the developer's actions ever be a violation of the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt; (#DeveloperViolate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the GPL is a license from the developer for others to use, distribute and change the program. The developer itself is not bound by it, so no matter what the developer does, this is not a “violation” of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the developer does something that would violate the GPL if done by someone else, the developer will surely lose moral standing in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in other places it appears that under the GPL developers should (or are expected to) either distribute the source with the binaries or make the source available in some other way, either by separate download or even with an &amp;quot;source available on request&amp;quot; note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as others have also said, GPL doesn't require you to keep sources and binaries forever. Suppose you wrote something in gw-basic or turbo pascal? Suppose you uploaded everything to some repository which no longer exists? Suppose you no longer have the hardware, software nor the desire to maintain the code? 10 years is a long time in dog years as well as in software years. As the developer you can choose to stop supporting and distributing whenever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8949" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T03:41:35.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5905" CreationDate="2017-08-31T07:39:33.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your best option is to clone the VCS repository. This will download every version of the source that has ever been published in that repository and save it on your local machine. Then keep your local copy with any other archived files accompanying your publication (you might want to tarball the local copy to keep it contained, and make sure that you include any hidden directories used by the VCS when you copy or archive it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep track of which version to use when referring to the code, take a note of the relevant commit identifier. VCS systems have a way to identify a specific commit (git uses a commit hash, some other systems might use timestamps or sequential indexes). Later you can restore this specific commit from your local repository and you'll have a copy of the code exactly as it was at the point in time when that commit was made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Clone the repository and take note of the commit corresponding to the version of the code that you want to refer back to later. For a git repository (including GitHub), use &lt;code&gt;git clone &amp;lt;repository URL&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to clone the repository and &lt;code&gt;git checkout &amp;lt;commit hash&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to restore your local copy to a specific commit (the files in your local copy will change to match the chosen commit but git will keep every version in the hidden &lt;code&gt;.git&lt;/code&gt; directory). For other version control systems, the commands and terminology will differ so consult the documentation and make sure that you're downloading the actual repository, not just a snapshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8950" LastEditorUserId="8950" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T08:52:30.927" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T08:52:30.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5922" CreationDate="2017-08-31T08:11:35.603" Score="-1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to buy a responsive HTML5 template on Envato market. They sell the &lt;em&gt;Regular Licence&lt;/em&gt; for some cash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Regular Licence, it allows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use, by you or one client, in a single end product which end users are not charged for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I download the template, how would they know how I use it? Are there technical methods for controlling the usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8951" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T18:10:20.957" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T18:10:20.957" Title="HTML5 template regular licence" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2017-09-01T00:43:14.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5921" CreationDate="2017-08-31T09:13:46.180" Score="2" ViewCount="511" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a copyright holder of a GPL licensed project grant permission to allow another project to use it under the terms of a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU/GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License]&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the copyright owner of a project under a GPL license could grant permission to a project that uses a license such as MIT or BSD to distribute their work (in whole or in part) under that more permissive license. If this is allowed, are there any caveats to doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8745" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:32:09.260" Title="Can a copyright owner grant additional permission for another project to use under a different license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2017-08-31T13:18:21.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can release your intellectual property to different people under different license conditions. This is not just permissible, it is a common business model commonly known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multi-licensing&lt;/a&gt;. It is not uncommon to release a GPL-licensed version of a software gratis, but also offer a paid version under a license which allows to distribute derivative works under proprietary licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This business model works well for frameworks, middleware, libraries and other software which is usually used as a base to develop other applications. With the GPL-version, those other applications must also be GPL-licensed, which limits the monetization options. But when you buy the proprietary license, you have far more options, including pay-by-install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD are rarely a good choice for this business model, though, because they allow redistribution under the same terms. So anyone you sell a BSD or MIT license to would then be able to underbid you. A paid license for an open source project usually does not allow to relicense the sourcecode of the derivatives to other parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, you see software multi-licensed under GPL, MIT and/or BSD. So if you don't feel like taking sides in the endless discussion about which open source license is the most free one, you can simply let people choose under which software license they prefer to use your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T13:32:09.260" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:32:09.260" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5918" CreationDate="2017-08-31T14:13:55.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limitation is probably based on trust/honor. If all they are selling you is an HTML file, there's no inherent way for them to track your usage. They could theoretically scour the Internet for any usage of their template, then try to trace that usage back to particular users, but I doubt that would be worth their time or effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the HTML file includes any code, or any &lt;code&gt;script&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;link&lt;/code&gt; elements, they could be using a tracker or some sort of pinging system to track your usage. You should be able to look over the template and see if that's the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple examples of what tracking code &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Analytics tracking code (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://analytiksapp.com/blog/google-analytics/install-tracking-code/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AnalytiksApp.com&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rmhTG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rmhTG.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;StatCounter sample tracking code (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.statcounter.com/2008/12/using-html-to-format-a-statcounter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StatCounter&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCGJK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCGJK.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T14:46:55.263" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T14:46:55.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5927" CreationDate="2017-08-31T16:45:04.480" Score="5" ViewCount="784" Body="&lt;p&gt;An organization is considering changing the license of an OSS repo on GitHub. For the purposes of this question, assume that organization has the legal rights to change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is currently licensed under MPL 2.0, and we need the extra freedom of Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One proposal is to dual license the code (assuming all contributors agree) as &quot;MPL 2 || Apache 2.0&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have suggested simply relicensing as Apache 2.0 and dropping MPL 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no value in the proposed dual license, as I would expect most people to opt for the Apache license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone see an advantage to dual licensing MPL/Apache vs simply relicensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T11:37:09.133" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T03:34:15.267" Title="Dual license or relicense when the new license is more permissive?" Tags="|apache-2.0|relicensing|proprietary-code|multi-licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-08-31T16:53:56.790" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote the program, and it's not a derivative of someone else's program. This means, you are not in trouble, and you can actually stop reading now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unfortunate that you lost the sources, but that is it. You may tell those people that you're sorry but you lost the source code (in lack of a time machine, what else would you say!). End of story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can read on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnu.org&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that the GPL, and other copyleft licenses, are copyright licenses. This means that only the copyright holders are empowered to act against violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder(s), &lt;em&gt;that's you&lt;/em&gt;. So nobody but yourself could act against your &quot;violation&quot;. I'm rather sure you won't sue yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note the wording of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each licensee is addressed as &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means none more and none less than &quot;you&quot; in the GPL refers to the licensee, not &lt;em&gt;you, the author&lt;/em&gt;. Apart from the fact that the original author (with very few exceptions) automatically holds the copyright and originator-right (and cannot even transfer the former in some countries, except under very specific conditions), that should also be evident from the fact that many GPL-licensed programs are dual licensed while the GPL states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense [...] except as expressly provided under this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ouch! That would mean every company dual-licensing their software would place themselves in serious legal trouble. Surely, someone would have gotten the idea of sueing Oracle for GPL violation in the mean time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if you cannot be pursued for the violation, is it strictly a violation in the first place? I daresay no. The GPL is a license where you document your goodwill intent of releasing your software as &quot;free&quot;, which among many other things means people should have access to the source code. A number of possibilities how this could happen is given in the license, but it is only compulsatory to those redistributing your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's assume (hypothetically) the obligations of the license &lt;em&gt;did indeed&lt;/em&gt; apply to you as well. It is entirely reasonable to assume that you acted in good faith, and that you indeed &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; send them the source code if only you could. Alas, you lost the sources. That's an accident, not a violation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sure, the net effect is that &lt;em&gt;something was promised&lt;/em&gt;, and you can't deliver, but the spirit of the GPL is not to place silly obligations and liabilities on the authors, but to prevent someone from taking away the rights of the users, and to protect the authors.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But accident or not, you &lt;em&gt;are failing&lt;/em&gt; to comply with the terms, so you possibly owe someone damages? No. The very license that you've chosen, and which is the only base for the user's right to obtain the source code explicitly denies warranties of any kind (paragraph 11 in v2 / 15 in v3) and damages (paragraph 12 in v2 / 16 in v3). This includes implied warranties and (explicitly) denies damages due to the inability to use the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine that someone might construct a (weak) case against you if you dual-licensed the program and had charged them money for the software together with the promise of getting access to the source code. In that case, they might argue having paid for the source code, which you now owe them (though after over 10 years, it's fair to assume the right has forfeited). Paragraph 17 of GPLv3 basically says the same thing, backwards, too (&quot;unless... in return of a fee&quot;). &#xA;Well, you &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; do that. No fee, no sweat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="509" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:53:56.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-31T21:21:09.547" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a binding project (using a library/framework built on Swift and binding for Xamarin/C#) which includes some sample apps/programs adopted from Swift to C# (means class, func and even variable names are almost identical). The original License for library/framework and the demos is APL 2.0, but I would like to use MIT/X11. So, my question is what shall I include in the source header files of the samples and the binding source (declaration file), in the AUTHORS file and in the LICENSE file? Thx, in advance for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original Header file includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2016-present the [ORIG COPYRIGHT HOLDER]. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original AUTHORS file includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# This is the list of [OFIG COPYRIGHT HOLDER] for copyright&#xA;# purposes.&#xA;[ORIG AUTHOR1]&#xA;[ORIG AUTHOR2]&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original License file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The normal APL 2.0 license file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what the following should contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivative Header file:?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright (c) 2017 [which copyright holder here? the original, new or both?].&#xA;// All Rights Reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivative AUTHORS file:?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# This is the list of [COPYRIGHT HOLDER] for copyright&#xA;# purposes.&#xA;[ORIG AUTHOR1?]&#xA;[ORIG AUTHOR2?]&#xA;[new author?]&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivative project LICENSE file:?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT/X11, APL 2.0 or both?&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8975" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T10:26:42.947" Title="Clarification for a permissive licensing of a derivative work by example" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|apache-2.0|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T08:14:04.263" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I got a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/milasudril/midiconstants/issues/2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright question&lt;/a&gt; on my GitHub repo for my MIDI SDK. I want to know how free software projects handle such problems. In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to list all constants except the General MIDI 2 program names that way, given that I make it clear that this is not the official MIDI reference?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same question, but for the General MIDI 2 program names.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to both of these questions are negative, how do Libre MIDI software cope with these issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought MIDI would work in a similar way as OpenGL, and my SDK is very similar to GLEW. But it looks like I may be wrong on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5031" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T14:34:04.437" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T10:00:55.090" Title="MIDI in free software" Tags="|distribution|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5923" CreationDate="2017-09-01T09:43:52.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can anyone see an advantage to dual licensing MPL/Apache vs simply relicensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, some actual users may feel strongly about the MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the MPL 2.0 offers compatibility with v2 of the L/GPL family (thanks to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;secondary licenses terms&lt;/a&gt;) ... while the FSF considers the Apache 2.0 not compatible with these v2 licenses (but compatible with the v3 licenses) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T09:43:52.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5925" CreationDate="2017-09-01T09:50:43.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original License for library/framework and the demos is APL 2.0, but I would like to use MIT/X11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a port and as you mentioned this &lt;code&gt;means class, func and even variable names are almost identical&lt;/code&gt; ... then I doubt you can relicense this under another license unless the original license explicitly allows such thing. Assuming that your APL 2.0 means Apple Public Source License v2.0 there is no possibility offered to do such thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T09:50:43.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-09-01T11:50:28.710" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is your programme, you are not obligated to do anything - this is just common sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8983" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T11:50:28.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T22:48:06.447" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume I have a python script that runs a GPL library binary through command line (through os.system('GPL call') and then analyze the output (which comes from the terminal). Is that a collaborative work? If so, does the GPL library apply as the all code? Or is it considered linking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8998" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T08:01:41.483" Title="Collective work using a GPL library" Tags="|gpl|linked-libraries|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-09-02T04:02:00.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And more seriously, am I in legal trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  If the code was written from scratch by you with no other participation, then you can't be bound by the Gnu General Public License as it was your copyright.  Only a copyright holder can enforce the GPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you wrote the code from scratch with no contributions from anyone else, you're fine.  If that's not correct (e.g. someone else contributed code to the project), then please better describe the situation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I lost the source code for programs I released as GPL. What to do?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are still distributing the binary, ask if anyone else has the source.  I'm guessing that you probably distributed it to someone at some time.  Just explain that you lost the source and want to distribute it again.  Also, then people won't bother you for the source.  You may also want to remove any GPL claim and just distribute the binary as freeware.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the whole point of open source.  You shouldn't be the single point of failure here.  If you distribute the source, then other people have it.  You don't need to provide it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why it is often better to distribute the source through something like Github.  Then you can just point people to your repository and you'll never lose the source.  They have a program where they host open source programs for free.  So then it's no longer your worry.  It's in source control and the source is always available.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why it is often better to bundle the source with the binary.  If you bundle the source with the binary, bunches of people have it and you have no GPL responsibilities.  That's true even if your program has external contributions.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;:  it sounds like you are legally fine.  However, there are things you can do to be covered better in the future.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T04:02:00.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5936" CreationDate="2017-09-02T20:13:37.577" Score="8" ViewCount="877" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing something on GitHub. I would like to keep it open source; however I want to make sure in no way am I liable for any issues, and that my code cannot simply be copied and claimed as someone else's. For this it appears the MIT license is good; maybe a different one can be suggested?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My actual questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would I go about licensing my work? Do I have to apply or register with some kind of group or organisation to be able to use a license given in the list of GitHub templates, or can I just slap a template on my work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another thing I noticed is that the MIT license template sticks a Copyright notice on the work. Do I have to apply for this copyright in any way, or is slapping it on once again enough for it to be valid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lastly, is the Full Name given under the Copyright notice valid if I use my internet name, DevelopedLogic, or do I have to apply my actual, real-life name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9009" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T20:05:31.543" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T15:47:20.173" Title="Licensing code on GitHub in a valid way" Tags="|licensing|github|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-09-02T22:27:14.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others said, everything is legally safe because you are the only copyright holder, because only the copyright holder can sue you, and you are not going to sue yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For developers who are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the sole copyright holder, because they took some GPL licensed code and adapted it, there is a simple method to avoid all future problems: Never give the code away, &lt;em&gt;unless you accompany it with the source code&lt;/em&gt;. For example, you might create a zip file with your application or library and the source code, and only distribute that zip file, never the application or library on its own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the three methods how you can legally distribute GPL licensed code (accompanying ever single copy that you distribute with the complete source code), and if you do it that way, you have no other obligations whatsoever. And therefore you have no problem if you lose the source code (except that you lose your ability to distribute the code following GPL rules), or if you can't be bothered to give people copies of the source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastEditorUserId="454" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T23:44:36.937" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T23:44:36.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5934" CreationDate="2017-09-03T00:15:17.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to make sure in no way am I liable for any issues, and that my code cannot simply be copied and claimed as someone else's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want a license that includes a disclaimer of liability (often in ALL CAPS) and requires maintaining attribution. Virtually any mainstream open source license will include both of these. The MIT license is perfectly suitable and doesn't contain any other baggage, either. You might also be interested in the Apache 2.0 license, which is quite similar but licenses patent rights as well as copyright rights. (This is helpful for recipients, since they know you won't sue them for patent infringement later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to apply or register with some kind of group or organisation to be able to use a license given in the list of GitHub templates, or can I just slap a template on my work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any open source license you see is free to use; you will not encounter any legal trouble if you use any mainstream OSI-approved license. The texts of these licenses are, I guess, technically copyrighted, but their authors deliberately offer them to the public exactly so that you can include them in your projects. Please do that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another thing I notice is that the MIT license template sticks a Copyright notice on the work. Do I have to apply for this copyright in any way, or is slapping it on once again enough for it to be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 172 nations that are signatories of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;, copyright automatically applies to a work at the moment it is fixed in a tangible form. Your work &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have copyright rights attached because it is an original, tangibly expressed creative work. You are entitled to say so via a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in some jurisdictions there are benefits to officially registering your copyright. In the United States if someone infringes your copyright on a work, you can only seek actual damages if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office at the time the infringement took place (i.e., you lost X dollars of potential sales and are demanding it back). If the work &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; registered during the infringement, you can seek statutory damages (i.e., punitive money that may be higher than the amount of actual money involved in the infringement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly, is the Full Name given under the Copyright notice valid if I use my internet name, DevelopedLogic, or do I have to apply my actual, real-life name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;U.S. law &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/10911/84&quot;&gt;does not require real names on copyright registrations&lt;/a&gt;, so I assume it wouldn't require them on copyright notices either. You may make things more difficult on yourself if you need to legally enforce your license, though, since you will need to take the extra step of associating your real identity with the pseudonym for the court proceedings. If, on balance, you think the small likelihood of that legal headache actually happening is less worrying than revealing your real name on the Internet, then go ahead and use your pseudonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T15:47:20.173" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T15:47:20.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5940" CreationDate="2017-09-03T04:21:27.923" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an open source project, such as one typically found on GitHub, there are users who can submit pull requests and users who can merge them. It is my understanding that &quot;contributor&quot; is the term for the former group. What is the term for the latter group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2523" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-03T17:03:54.733" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T17:03:54.733" Title="What is the term for a user who can merge pull requests?" Tags="|contributor|terminology|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5931" CreationDate="2017-09-03T08:01:41.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL, and the whole question of derivative works is still somewhat unsettled by courts around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;addresses this issue&lt;/a&gt; with respect to plugins, and since copyright law makes no explicit mention of plugins as being special, the analysis can be applied to other questions of derivative works.  They write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though they also note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if this is honest fork-and-exec, that is if your program invokes the GPL program through a system call &lt;em&gt;and no additional complex, programme-specific structure is passed around the back&lt;/em&gt;, then the two works are separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T08:01:41.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5938" CreationDate="2017-09-03T13:06:24.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Committers&quot; is a common (and unsurprising) name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects make the distinction between &quot;Maintainers&quot; (who are responsible for participating in decisions about the project's direction and ultimately reaching consensus about them) and &quot;Committers&quot; (who actually merge, or &lt;em&gt;commit&lt;/em&gt; patches), while some projects use them interchangeably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T13:06:24.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T23:06:04.600" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I will describe the situation in a language-agnostic manner, but if you are interested in some specifics I will supply them at the bottom of the question.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few open source libraries that have their documentation hosted by the the same service that hosts the packages for downloading. This hosting platform is going through some major changes, and one of those changes is that they are dropping support for hosting documentation and are advising users to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://readthedocs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ReadTheDocs&lt;/a&gt; instead. In itself this is not an issue, but here are some facts that complicate matters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Uploads to the old documentation hosting platform have been disabled&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Automatic redirects to the new hosting service are not possible (both because we cannot upload our own and because the service does not support it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Old documentation currently on the old hosting platform &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be deleted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has created the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old documentation is now out of date because I have released new versions since uploads have been disabled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any link on a website out of my control to the old documentation will go dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 out of 5 of the top Google hits for my projects point to the old documentation hosting platform, so I am not excited about deleting the old documentation.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a test, a few weeks ago I deleted the old documentation for a less-used library, and for this package some of the top hits point to ReadTheDocs, but there are also still links to the old documentation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of adding a conspicuous note at the top of the README on the GitHub page that documentation hosting has been changed, but that does not seem like enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I bite the bullet and delete the old documentation and hope that the internet will &quot;heal itself&quot; with time? Or is there a better solution to take that will lead to a smoother transition for documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those interested, the ecosystem here is Python and the hosting platform that is reaching end-of-life is &lt;a href=&quot;http://pythonhosted.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pythonhosted.org&lt;/a&gt;. Removing documentation hosting has been part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/509&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a roadmap for some time&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems that only #1 and #5 of the roadmap were actually implemented. This has caused issues where people such as myself want to make redirects but cannot (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/2183&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/issues/2224&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for relevant GitHub issues).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8999" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T02:03:10.653" Title="How to smoothly handle migrating documentation between hosts when redirects are not possible?" Tags="|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-09-04T08:47:00.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole author, you are in no obligations to anybody.  There were ample explanations about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is: where do you go from there?  You obviously had some intent behind releasing your software under the GPL, and all the recipients are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to redistribute it without offering access to the source.  So your program is no longer redistributable, and that seems clashing with your original intent.  So you might want to consider telling the recipients what conditions for redistribution you want to hold, given that the GPL can no longer be met even in the light of lots of handwaving, and what that would mean if somebody were to reverse-engineer the source, or you were to rediscover the original on some backup media after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think it sounds like you don't want to be bothered either way.  In that case it might make sense to use something like the MIT license: if somebody is going to reverse-engineer the software, good for them.  The GPL does not currently make a lot of sense since &quot;the preferred form for modification&quot; is only a hypothetical right now, and if you want to infer some other preferred form for the case of lost original source, you are walking on rather thin ice which does not make sense if you don't actually want to invest further energy into that project.  Or if you do, it would make more sense to do it by rewriting the source (you probably still are the most capable person for that alive) rather than trying to invent new case law for rules not intended for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9031" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T08:47:00.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5784" CreationDate="2017-09-04T20:45:42.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forking implies a few things which may answer your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the original author - by using a free/libre license - authorized you to fork, for whatever reason. You cannot &quot;steal&quot; something what has been explicitly offered for you to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When forking, you keep the (preferably full) list of the original authors, giving them their credit. Since you do the same free licensing, there's nothing stopping them to integrate back your changes, or to join the two projects. Or others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it's worth a try to contact the original people since they may be more familiar with the code, but abandonware authors rarely want to touch it again after decades. On Github there's a feature which shows you the network of forks, which sometimes cannot even display the network due to the large amount of forks around, so I may say forking is really commonplace activity nowadays and you need not to worry about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project is a useful one you will see plenty of people who will come to you and help you, or ask for your help. By forking and working on it you make the world better, more diverse (for better or worse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T23:24:05.700" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T23:24:05.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5430" CreationDate="2017-09-04T20:57:00.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the legal standpoint a licence defines your rights or restricts them. &lt;strong&gt;Public domain&lt;/strong&gt; (and CC0, WTFPL and similar &quot;no rights reserved&quot; licenses) generally mean that you can do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; with the property, including locking it any way, licensing it any way, abusing it any way (within the limits of other, related rights, like personality, trademark or similar rights); so you may license them however you please, you have no obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the ethical aspect you should include the information about the source (even if it's not legally required, it's always nice to give the credit due) and about their possible more liberal usage, since it may not matter to some but may be important for others. But it's your decision and taste, not a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;em&gt;&quot;whatever&quot;&lt;/em&gt; part - when it's not &lt;strong&gt;Public Domain&lt;/strong&gt; - it may depend on the specific license terms, or the country you want to apply it; you should ensure that if it's not a PD but a very liberal license then the license terms grant you the spcific freedom you seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T20:57:00.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5704" CreationDate="2017-09-04T21:16:09.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;em&gt;curiousdannii&lt;/em&gt; said licenses do not apply to the original author since they are defining the terms of the &lt;strong&gt;re-use&lt;/strong&gt; of the creations. The author always able to release (or re-release) his/her own work using any license, or no license, or no permissions at all. (But when something is released under a non-revokable license then the author have no way to forbid the usage within the said license terms, but have the right to release it again under a different, more or less restrictive license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other aspect is when there is a document licensed using License-A (by its original author who is not you) and you want to use it in a project using License-B. There is two sides of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot (easily) include it into the project if License-A is more restrictive than B, since A won't allow you to release it under terms not supported by the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may include it in the project if B is more restrictive than A, since B permits it to be used there; however ShareAlike states that the project have to keep the license intact and include it with the artwork, so people using it are informed of its specific license and able to utilise their rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is generally true when it's a collection, like a package of otherwise intact and separate works: the whole collection does have a license but its parts may have more liberal ones. The collection isn't allowed to restrict the more liberal licensing of its part but may utilise its restrictive license to the collection as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Wikipedia does the opposite, which is also possible, but much harder to ensure: they include some more restrictive licensed works and explicitly and visibly state that their license is different from the collection's. This is legal but it's very hard to ensure that for every possible way of use the end-user is properly informed about the restrictions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T00:33:07.500" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T00:33:07.500" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5911" CreationDate="2017-09-05T02:11:34.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A copyright license is about &lt;em&gt;granting&lt;/em&gt; permissions to &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people to do things that normally only the copyright owner would be allowed to do. Such licenses can be &lt;em&gt;conditional&lt;/em&gt;, and impose obligations on the other people in exchange for the permissions they are granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the GPL, the permissions &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are granting other people include the freedom to make and distribute copies of your work (or derivative works thereof), and to further grant anyone else they wish the same permissions. The obligations include that they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; also grant the same permissions (and obligations) to anyone they distribute your work to, and that they must also distribute the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are not a licensee of your own copyright. You don't need anyone to grant you permission to distribute your own work. When you license your work to somebody under the GPL you are obligating &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to distribute the source code along with any further distribution of your work. By giving them a copy of your work under the GPL you are not obligating &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt; to distribute the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically if you wanted you could license someone a binary distribution of your work under the GPL, without ever giving anyone the source. This would be weird since the legal effect would be that they couldn't distribute the work at all, which is much the same situation they would be in if you simply distributed it without any license at all. But there's nothing stopping you doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course many works distributed under the GPL incorporate at least some code that is under somebody else's copyright, meaning you need to have a license to distribute it - usually also the GPL. If that is the case here, your license grant &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; that copyright holder obligates you to distribute your source code, but technically your license grant over your own copyrighted additions &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; other people still does not impose any obligations on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1120" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T02:11:34.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5954" CreationDate="2017-09-05T08:40:16.310" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;mplayer&lt;/code&gt; is a &lt;code&gt;GPL v2&lt;/code&gt; license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a program called &lt;code&gt;a.out&lt;/code&gt; that calls mplayer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The a.out source code is shown below.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;stdio.h&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;void main(void){&#xA;&#xA;        system(&quot;mplayer test.mp4&quot;);&#xA;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, a.out uses mplayer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do I need to provide a.out source code in accordance with GPL v2?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I understand that a.out does not follow the GPL when running as a &lt;code&gt;command line&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I know that you do not have to provide a.out source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Am I correct understanding?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9025" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T06:00:44.573" Title="Do programs that run mplayer have to provide source code according to the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5949" CreationDate="2017-09-05T11:24:18.260" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL point 3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public&#xA;      License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library.  To do&#xA;      this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so&#xA;      that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,&#xA;      instead of to this License.  (If a newer version than version 2 of the&#xA;      ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify&#xA;      that version instead if you wish.)  Do not make any other change in&#xA;      these notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for&#xA;      that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all&#xA;      subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of&#xA;      the Library into a program that is not a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can one take a LGPL library and use it as GPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T15:49:23.927" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:49:23.927" Title="What does LGPL point 3 mean?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5948" CreationDate="2017-09-05T11:36:11.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can one take a LGPL library and use it as GPLv2 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, use it, modify it and redistribute it as GPL v2 (or later).&#xA;This is a form of explicit extended LGPL -&gt; GPL compatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T11:36:11.273" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5952" CreationDate="2017-09-06T02:33:02.487" Score="2" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created a personal project and licensed it as GPL3 (I'm a fan of the open source movement). The source code is posted publicly on GitHub. I'm planning on submitting it to the Siemens Competition, a science/engineering fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All was fine and dandy until I discovered the following in the Siemens rules manual:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I cite my source code?&lt;/strong&gt; You need to place the code in a&#xA;  repository , for example GitHub , and link to your GitHub account in&#xA;  your references (please also list the log - on information) . Keep in&#xA;  mind a ny sites you post to must be anonymous . There is usually a&#xA;  name associated with the account, so you would need to name the&#xA;  account “ Competition Entrant ” to avoid being disqualified for&#xA;  personally identifiable information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it looks like I'll have to make a copy of the repository somewhere, using an anonymous account, and share that with my paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do that, am I in compliance GPL? Isn't one of the clauses of GPL that source code must cite the original author? How does it work if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; am the original author, but am posting it anonymously or under a pseudonym somewhere? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt there's any risk of litigation, and I don't think there's anything immoral about this arrangement; but I'd like to stay in the clear for GPL as a matter of principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="592" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T09:42:44.630" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T09:42:44.630" Title="How to anonymously submit GPL licensed source code to a science fair?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|github|copyleft|publishing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2017-09-06T08:25:14.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of the software, you can never be in-violation of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the FAQ on gnu.org:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the developer of a GPL-covered program bound by the GPL? Could the developer's actions ever be a violation of the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt; (#DeveloperViolate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the GPL is a license from the developer for others to use, distribute and change the program. The developer itself is not bound by it, so no matter what the developer does, this is not a “violation” of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the developer does something that would violate the GPL if done by someone else, the developer will surely lose moral standing in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is assuming the software is indeed entirely written by you and you own the copyright on it.&#xA;Vs say if it was GPL and not in some way a derived work of say a GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general you own the copyright, you can more or less do what you want.&#xA;The GPL has no terms that really refer to your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for some reason you wanted to tangle though the idea of treating “Competition Entrant” as a separate person from you.&#xA;Then the sensible thing to do would be to  grant another license exclusively to “Competition Entrant” that does not have the GPL clauses about crediting the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That policy is rather silly.&#xA;Asking you to create a fake account on Github is pretty dubious, and an unnecessary amount of work.&#xA;If the entry date is soon then comply (maybe using a service other than Github), and afterwoods complain about it.&#xA;If it is a while away, then complain now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming there is a general need to submit things online (like the write-up), then they should be allowing you to submit a zip file full of code.&#xA;This is what CS and Engineering research conferences do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T08:25:14.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2017-09-06T09:46:42.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking you do not have to have an identifying copyright notice with your GPL-licensed code... yet a copyright license (which is what most consider the GPL to be) somehow begs for such an identifying copyright notice, does it not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, you can still use a GPL without a copyright notice: this is weird but you are entitled to do this alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the whole idea of posting to a public, non-anonymous-site such as GitHub that also should be non-identifying is rather silly. If you have to go through this, do it. You could always add back a proper copyright notice once the competition is over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that irrespective of the GPL, you may also be granting some &lt;a href=&quot;https://siemenscompetition.discoveryeducation.com/project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license of your submitted code to the organizing body&lt;/a&gt; and this may weaken your GPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Research Reports and findings are the property of the students. You agree to permit the Siemens Foundation and Discovery Education to utilize and share the reports, including any parts and any other documents or corroborating materials (in any form or medium) submitted to supplement the original report, with third parties as it deems appropriate in their respective sole discretion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T09:46:42.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5947" CreationDate="2017-09-06T10:04:14.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;code&gt;system&lt;/code&gt; is spawning mplayer in a new process. The GPL and its FAQ are rather clear on this topic e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;mere aggregation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you use &quot;command line arguments&quot; to launch mplayer so I would say that mplayer and your own program are separate. And separate programs means that they can have different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This not different from launching a tool from a shell or a file manager: the tool license does not impact the licensing of the shell or file manager used to launch the tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide a.out source code in accordance with GPL v2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know that you do not have to provide a.out source code.&#xA;  Am I correct understanding? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you redistribute mplayer itself, side-by-side with your code, then of course the GPL still applies to mplayer's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T06:00:44.573" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T06:00:44.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5941" CreationDate="2017-09-06T10:10:23.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://pythonhosted.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://pythonhosted.org&lt;/a&gt; is owned by the Python Software Foundation.&#xA;You should contact the sysadmin for Pypi and the PSF to discuss with them if they can setup some redirect to your new doc site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively or in addition to this, you could setup an &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/5411567/302521&quot;&gt;HTML meta redirect&lt;/a&gt; in your docs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;meta http-equiv=&quot;refresh&quot; content=&quot;0; url=http://example.com/&quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T10:10:23.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2017-09-06T19:23:19.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Publishing something under a pseudonym does not mean you don't have copyright. There are just two problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to sue someone for violating your copyright, you don't just need to prove that they are violating the license of the work, but also that you are the one behind the pseudonym.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hiding your true identity makes you less trustworthy. So it might be more likely that someone doubts that your work is actually yours and that you have permission to put it under GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T19:23:19.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T16:57:31.150" Score="3" ViewCount="5567" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a simple shell in C. I started my work when I had an OS lab. I did this as an assignment. I tried to implement cd, pipe, I/O redirection, background process, jobs, running system binaries, exit etc. Now, I want to open a project on my shell in GitHub so that anyone can contribute and beginner students can get help to start.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I don't want anyone to copy my code for his/her assignment. Is there any license that prohibits copying the code for assignment? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8889" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T14:36:21.403" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T15:48:45.773" Title="Is there any license that prohibits copying the code for assignment?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2017-09-07T17:40:27.773" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like you want the legal power to bring a lawsuit against any student who uses your code in any capacity related to schoolwork. I think this is a bad idea for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: this would not a FOSS license: it violates Freedom 0 (&lt;em&gt;&quot;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) and point 6 of the OSD (&lt;em&gt;&quot;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) It will be incompatible with any copyleft license like the GPL and only add to license proliferation. There are existing licenses that will meet your needs without FOSS-incompatible terms (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second: I understand you want to discourage plagiarism, but schools and universities &lt;em&gt;already have&lt;/em&gt; academic honor codes and cultural norms that strongly prohibit plagiarism. It is not your responsibility to enforce this, and any anti-academic licensing terms will likely only cause harm by disallowing innocent cases: what if a course instructor &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; students to build off of your work for an assignment so they can learn how to read and extend existing code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, virtually any FOSS license will require redistributors to preserve your original copyright notices. If a student removes those in an attempt at plagiarism, then they will be in violation of the license anyway. There is no need for you to target plagiarism specifically. (And if the student &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; remove those copyright notices, then I suspect the instructor will have a lot of questions about why someone else's name is on the project!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:47:09.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T17:47:09.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5966" CreationDate="2017-09-08T07:12:46.647" Score="5" ViewCount="5385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I download an open source project from GitHub and modify the code further. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I patent this code and restrict others to reuse my &quot;modified&quot; code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9096" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T00:33:25.467" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T19:09:10.343" Title="Can I patent open source project?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5957" CreationDate="2017-09-08T10:09:35.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Overview&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't like that someone copy my code for his/her assignment.&#xA;  Is there any license that prohibit copying the code for assignment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to conflate &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; with the overlapping but distinct concept of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Briefly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;plagiarism&lt;/strong&gt; is the act of presenting someone else's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knowledge work&lt;/a&gt; as one's own;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;copyright infringement&lt;/strong&gt; is the act of making unlicensed copies of a given knowledge work, in breach of copyright law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A given act can be plagiarism, copyright infringement, both, or neither. Here is a Venn diagram showing the intersection between the two concepts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     /-----------\  /--------------\&#xA;    /             \/                \&#xA;   /              /\                 \&#xA;  /              /  \                 \&#xA; /              /    \                 \&#xA;|  Plagiarism  | Both |  Copyright      |&#xA; \              \    /   infringement  /&#xA;  \              \  /                 /&#xA;   \              \/                 /&#xA;    \             /\                /&#xA;     \-----------/  \--------------/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your purposes, preventing plagiarism is all that you need. For the sake of a complete answer, however, I will also discuss the prevention of copyright infringement. This will allow you to take a &quot;belt and braces&quot; approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Preventing plagiarism&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/50/apsillers&quot;&gt;apsillers&lt;/a&gt; already indicated, any &lt;em&gt;reputable&lt;/em&gt; educational institution will have policies against plagiarism and will enforce those policies. Any student who cheats by submitting your work as though it were their own &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be caught and punished (e.g. by having their grade for that assignment reduced to zero).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, preventing students from committing plagiarism in their assignments is a responsibility that rests with the students and the school, not with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Preventing copyright infringement&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most countries&lt;/a&gt;, copyright exists in any sufficiently original work that has been placed into a fixed form (e.g. written down). By default, this legally bars people other than the copyright holder (e.g. the author, or the entity that commissioned the work) from copying or adapting that work for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; purpose except for the very limited purposes of &quot;fair use&quot; or &quot;fair dealing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to give people greater access to (copies of) that work, the copyright holder must typically license the work in some way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proprietary software licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With proprietary software, this is done with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EULA&lt;/a&gt;, which typically grants very limited rights to the licensee, such as the right to perform (run) the work, for some limited purposes. I personally would not recommend the use of such a license in general, and especially not in your case, as its restrictions would be excessive. Many free software licenses (see below for examples) would meet your needs just as well, and would be more beneficial to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a student to submit proprietary software as though it were their own would typically be an act of plagiarism &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; of copyright infringement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Free software licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With free (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libre&lt;/a&gt;) software, this is done with a license that upholds the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Free_software&amp;amp;oldid=799237832#Definition_and_the_Four_Freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Freedoms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these freedoms allows a recipient to claim authorship or copyright in the original work. As such, most popular free software licenses (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Version_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ALv2&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2-, 3-, and 4-clause BSD licences&lt;/a&gt;, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;) are suitable for satisfying a copyright holder's wish that a recipient should not be able to claim authorship or copyright of the work. I would suggest you use one of these licenses: preferably one of the first three, as they are the ones that best account for edge cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a student to submit free software (i.e. software provided to them under such a license) as though it were their own would typically be an act of plagiarism &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; of copyright infringement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Public domain: a special case of freedom&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most permissive possible license is a public domain dedication. This waives the right of the author or copyright holder to the fullest extent permitted by law. In the context of software, you could view this as meaning that arbitrary additional freedoms are granted in addition to the Four Freedoms above, i.e. as a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; permissive form of free software licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still quite rare, but you can do it if you want to, e.g. by applying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a student to submit a public domain work as though it were their own would typically be an act of plagiarism, &lt;strong&gt;but not&lt;/strong&gt; of copyright infringement.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A note about GitHub&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When publishing code to GitHub, you &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#d-user-generated-content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grant GitHub a license to use that code in certain ways&lt;/a&gt;. This license exists in addition to any other license (e.g. the GPLv3) that you might have applied to the work, and has been the subject of &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/716372/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;debate in the free software community&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you publish your work to GitHub, other GitHub users are in turn licensed to fork that work on GitHub's website, regardless of any other copyright restrictions on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unlikely to affect your concern about plagiarism, for the reasons given earlier. Even so, as you stated you hope to publish to GitHub and expressed concerns about copying of your work, it seemed appropriate to mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3451" LastEditorDisplayName="user3451" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T15:48:45.773" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T15:48:45.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5960" CreationDate="2017-09-08T12:45:19.297" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot patent code. The US patent office is delivering patents for &quot;algorithms&quot; but even the validity of those is contested, and they won't be enforceable in many countries. Furthermore, to be eligible for a patent, a work must be novel and non-obvious. If you start from an existing project and your modification of its algorithm nature is not significant enough, then your work won't be eligible for a patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't describe them here, but modern licenses (in particular GPL v3) have some terms preventing patent abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T12:45:19.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5965" CreationDate="2017-09-08T18:10:38.760" Score="2" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend is building a website for a school newspaper and we were considering using &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/instant-press/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Instant Press&lt;/a&gt; for the stories to show up. Instant Press is licensed with the GPL 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use Instant Press, will we have to put all the HTML code on GitHub? Or since it's HTML, it's already open for everyone to see so it seems like it's not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9102" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T00:39:08.630" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T00:39:08.630" Title="Do I have to open source a website if I use GPL-licensed blogging software?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5964" CreationDate="2017-09-08T20:07:38.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, the product of running a GPL code does not have to be GPL-licensed. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T20:07:38.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5960" CreationDate="2017-09-08T22:14:30.510" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not patent code. You can only patent an &lt;em&gt;invention&lt;/em&gt; which is implemented in your code. An invention is a new and unique way of doing something. Most of all, it must be something nobody did before. If anyone used the same technique which you describe in your patent, that's called &lt;em&gt;prior art&lt;/em&gt; and invalidates your patent. So trying to get a patent on something somebody else invented and implemented in code would be futile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; do is try to get a patent on the stuff you added, if it by itself is patent-worthy. For example, if you invent a new and innovative approach to encoding videos, you could get a patent for that video codec and create a fork of VLC Media Player with an implementation of that codec built-in. That VLC fork would be licensed under GPLv2, but would also be affected by your patent. You could demand patent fees from anyone who distributes it in a country which recognizes software patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually contrary to the spirit of Open Source, which is why many of the newer open source licenses have special clauses regarding software patents. For example, the Apache License 2.0 and the GPLv3 say that the licensor also grants a patent license for any patents which apply to the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T17:54:04.507" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T17:54:04.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5964" CreationDate="2017-09-09T04:18:50.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you're not modifying the source code of the software you won't need to publish the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;InstantPress is a CMS software similar to WordPress&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T04:18:50.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5951" CreationDate="2017-09-09T08:35:33.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intent of the clause is to prevent yourself being unfairly selected or judged over any other participant. If personally identifying information isn't available beyond an email address that people who havn't interacted directly with you it's probably fine. Would every entrant really go through this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the GPL as long as it's your code, and you have taken no other contributions without a contract changing ownership, then you are free to relicense it however you wish, and ascribe copyright to any relevent pseuodym&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9103" LastEditorUserId="9103" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T01:10:39.740" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T01:10:39.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-09T08:42:50.207" Score="-1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any Agile workflow that a team that don't necessarily have sprints, set hours, with varying amounts of time, that are able to be implemented? Ideally I'd like to be able to contain a minimum viable amount of features after a release, in order to keep releases happening on a regular schedule. At the moment everything stays on bleeding edge, and never gets polished to the stage where a release would work, or stays stuck in a pull request bit rotting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9103" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:16:03.383" Title="What are Agile methodologies of project management that work on open source projects?" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-09-19T15:06:33.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5208" CreationDate="2017-09-09T10:06:24.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely you may not use the data. Open Source software explicitly allows usage of the software for &lt;em&gt;ANY&lt;/em&gt; purpose(including commercial, do not mistake it for closed software). To give others a right to use something for any purpose, you have to have this right in the first place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;only for research&quot; clause explicitly restricts your usage to only research use, not for all purpose. Thus, almost certainly you may not use it in an Open Source project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate issue is if the license gave you the right to use the data for any purpose. Even then I am not sure if it would also allow for modification and redistribution (keep in mind GPL has all of these activities mentioned)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8888" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T10:06:24.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5972" CreationDate="2017-09-10T01:01:43.343" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I live in the Dominican Republic where there Open Source isn't contemplated in the Constitution. I want to make Open Source hardware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I go about this? Should I get a patent and license it or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9109" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T21:29:28.940" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T21:29:28.940" Title="Open Source licenses in the Dominican Republic" Tags="|licensing|law|patents|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5971" CreationDate="2017-09-10T10:17:59.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be misunderstanding a fairly fundamental point about open source licenses: they are just a license to use something, like any other license. The default position (at least in any country which is a signatory to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;, which includes the Dominican Republic) is that only the copyright holder can make use of a piece of intellectual property. The license then lets other people use that intellectual property. Some licenses (e.g. your license from Apple to use iOS) are pretty restrictive in what you can do. Others (BSD, MIT, GPL, ...) are less restrictive - but they're all fundamentally based on copyright law. There doesn't need to be a specific bit of legislation enabling &quot;open source&quot; licenses, because they're just another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that patents are almost the antithesis of open source, being an exclusive right to use something. (I'm aware they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used defensively, but the vast majority of patents aren't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T02:19:55.753" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T02:19:55.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-11T06:59:06.273" Score="2" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on Open Source Java library. I don't want to waste time writing classes that Spring framework already has. I want to copy single files from Spring Framework and refactor it to cut dependencies from whole Spring and connect it with my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should I do with copyright information at the beginning of each copied file and comments about authors? Because this files will be refactored, information about authors will be obsolete in future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I put information about borrowing files from Spring Framework and original authors in the main LICENSE.txt file?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8814" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:08:52.783" Title="Copyright on files copied from other Open Source project to my Open Source" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5997" CreationDate="2017-09-11T08:47:11.853" Score="5" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a font licensed under Apache License 2.0 (without a NOTICE file and without additional provisions) in my web project. &#xA;For this end, I made a package of webfonts based on a subset of the font in question (I use an online tool to generate .woff and .eot versions of the font selecting only some Unicode blocks to make the files lighter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I want to distribute the source files of my project (so basically my PHP scripts, CSS stylesheets, and MySQL database, but I also need to include the fonts so that everything works fine, because I work with data in that is not displayed correctly in standard system fonts) under a free license. I am currently considering the MIT License and the copyleft &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/eupl/og_page/eupl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union Public Licence 1.2&lt;/a&gt;, which is explicitly &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl/eupl-compatible-open-source-licences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;upstream compatible with Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. &#xA;I will include a file describing the changes I made to the fonts as required by the Apache license. And I will retain the text of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK if I retain the original name of the font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license states that &quot;This License does not grant permission to use the […] product names of the Licensor&quot;. Does this mean that I have to rename the modified font contained in my project (just like one has to rename the fonts licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL license&lt;/a&gt; when subsetting them for web distribution)? Or am I fine with the original name, because it is only a component used in my project, and my project itself has a totally different name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two further concerns are: Is it fine that I do not include the source codes of the fonts (because I technically do not work with source codes when I subset fonts using a webfont generator, and I cannot myself edit the source files accordingly) within a project to be distributed under a copyleft license? And is it fine to include Apache licensed fonts in a MIT-licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9114" LastEditorUserId="9114" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T15:15:18.417" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:35:20.673" Title="Redistribution of modified fonts, originally licensed under Apache 2.0" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|font|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5977" CreationDate="2017-09-11T13:41:10.040" Score="6" ViewCount="812" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to deploy OpenSSL, curl and perhaps other libraries as shared libraries in my package. I am a little worried that the someone may replace them with his own and &quot;read&quot; all my data, therefore I thought perhaps signing them would be an idea.&#xA;Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I've read their licenses but there is no specific mention about this, so better to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7398" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T15:58:50.170" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:45:34.630" Title="Is it allowed to sign open source binaries?" Tags="|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2017-09-11T16:24:09.287" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When copying a file from another project, you must always keep the copyright and license statements intact. At the most, you could change a phrase like &quot;this file is part of project X&quot; into something like &quot;this file was copied from project X and is now part of project Y&quot; and if the copyright statement does not list the names of people, make it clear that the reference is related to project X.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you make (non-trivial) changes to a copied file, then you could add your name to the copyright statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code is not distributed under the same license as the Spring Framework, then you must make it clear (this could be in the main LICENSE.txt file) which parts of the code are under which license. There is no need to refer to the original authors here, as that information should be kept in the source files themselves, if it was mentioned there initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T12:08:52.783" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:08:52.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5975" CreationDate="2017-09-11T18:33:35.953" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A signature is a non-reversible (but verifiable) cryptographic transformation on some input data. Signatures are not copyrightable since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they do not require any creativity to produce (their creation is completely mechanical) and they do not contain any creativity themselves (it's just an arbitrary numerical value), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any copyrightable elements (indeed, any identifiable properties at all) from the input are completely and deliberately absent in the output of a signature algorithm (this is in contrast to compilation, which is purely mechanical but preserves the copyrightable, creative elements of its input)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, anything a copyright license has to say about what the copyright holder allows you to do does not pertain to the creation of a cryptographic signature. In copyright terms, its analogous to the creation of a cryptographic hash. (And in case you're wondering if copyright can disallow you from distributing a hash: no, it cannot; you are always allowed to do that under copyright.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether or not you are allow to &lt;em&gt;attach&lt;/em&gt; a signature to a binary (as opposed to keeping it separate), that's perhaps a slightly different legal question. That might or might not create a derivative work (even though the signature itself is devoid of copyright, some jurisdictions might view such an alteration as a derivative), but even if it is, any open source or free software license will allow you to make and distribute such an alteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you are concerned that your production of a signature might misrepresent you as the author of the work, that's usually not what signatures are for. In most environments, signatures just say, &amp;quot;Entity X had access to this work and asserts its contents are Y.&amp;quot; After a recipient verifies the cryptographic validity of the signature and sees that the contents of the file are indeed still Y, the recipient can be sure it has not been changed from how it looked when Entity X had it, even if it first passed through the hands of Entities W and Z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this paradigm, no one ever asserted that Entity X was the author of the file. We can only be sure that Entity X had access to the file and chose to make a cryptographically unforgeable assertion about the state of the file at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that you might sign some kind of certificate document that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; convey semantics that, e.g., you are the original author or copyright holder of a work. Obviously, it is not legal to make such an assertion if it's not true. But a signature, as a cryptographic tool, is agnostic to such an assertion and, furthermore, such an assertion is different from how signatures are used, practically, in code-execution contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-01-19T13:45:34.630" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:45:34.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5979" CreationDate="2017-09-11T19:05:30.550" Score="9" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per user recommendation, this question is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46156242/is-it-ok-to-upload-someone-elses-code-to-npm?noredirect=1#comment79274216_46156242&quot;&gt;an SO question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/backspaces/asx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASX&lt;/a&gt; is a cool library I use for some of my projects, but it is not available on NPM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I filed an issue on the GitHub repo asking to make it available on NPM, but I'm curious in theory what if the issue just sits there or is rejected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific library is under the GNU GPL if it matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my machine's NPM profile shows I am the author of packages I upload, is it unethical to upload someone else's code? Or is it sufficient to credit them in the package description?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the NPM docs you can have multiple owners and supposedly there is only one level of access, but on the module page these people are listed as publisher and collaborators. This part is not clear to me from the publish docs... Is publisher the most recent publisher or is it the original publisher and everyone else is a collaborator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9120" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-09-11T21:18:19.743" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T21:18:19.743" Title="Is it OK to upload someone else's code to NPM?" Tags="|gpl|publishing|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5978" CreationDate="2017-09-11T21:15:59.607" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.npmjs.com/policies/conduct&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;conduct page&lt;/a&gt; of the npm docs says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Packages must not contain illegal or infringing content. You should only publish packages or other materials to the Service if you have the right to do so. This includes complying with all software license agreements or other intellectual property restrictions. For example, redistributing an MIT-licensed module with the copyright notice removed, would not be allowed. You will be responsible for any violation of laws or others’ intellectual property rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So publishing someone else's package  would be permitted as long as you comply with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;publisher&quot; is whoever uploaded the last version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-09-11T21:15:59.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6939" CreationDate="2017-09-12T06:49:00.063" Score="3" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at the exception to the GPL v2. The exception is &quot;classpath exception&quot; and &quot;GPL linking exception&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&lt;/a&gt; also has a classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;classpath exception&quot; and &quot;GPL linking exception&quot; have the same meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9025" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T10:01:24.120" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T19:43:31.773" Title="Is the classpath exception and the GPL linking exception the same thing?" Tags="|gpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5969" CreationDate="2017-09-12T12:16:03.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that open source is irrelevant, but a team distributed by space and time is relevant. Test first would be a good thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Test first has the attitude that you are never more than a few seconds away from a release. No polishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not done until it passes all tests. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are told it is done, but just needs debugging, then it is not done. This methodology spends over 80% of its time in the debug stage. You never know how much progress you have made, and are always late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With test first, &lt;strong&gt;when it is done it is done&lt;/strong&gt;. With an automated set of tests you can also avoid regressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T12:16:03.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5987" CreationDate="2017-09-12T11:26:41.890" Score="4" ViewCount="1759" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is about to launch a commercial product, said product consists of an embedded Linux computer running custom software and talking to custom hardware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the GPL license that Linux and other aspects of our system are licensed under requires us to make the license text and any GPL licensed source code available to our customers should they request it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incredibly unlikely to happen (given the industry we work in) and we haven't made any changes to the Linux kernel or any other OSS we use in the product. &lt;strong&gt;Is adding the following text to the box manual enough to meet our obligations under the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[PRODUCT] utilises some software components released under the GNU&#xA;  GPL, GNU LGPL and other open source licenses, for details on licenses&#xA;  or to be send a copy of source code please contact support@[company]&#xA;  with your request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if someone was to contact us then we'd send them the necessary information/source code as required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9126" OwnerDisplayName="RobbG" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T15:58:03.543" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T18:54:37.250" Title="Is it sufficient for using GPL-licensed code to add a note that the source can be requested via email?" Tags="|gpl|license-notice|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5985" CreationDate="2017-09-12T18:00:49.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding the text you propose to the manual is not sufficient to meet the requirements of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this text, you must also reproduce the text of the GPL license (and I would recommend the other licenses as well). This can be as an appendix in the manual or as a separate leaflet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independent of how you phrase the offer to provide the sources, you must also honor requests for the source code based on this written offer for at least 3 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T18:00:49.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5985" CreationDate="2017-09-13T07:27:59.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many cases it will be easiest to just put them on a web server and give the URL so that people can &quot;self service&quot;. E.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://products.sel.sony.com/opensource/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to print the source code offer / display the GPL license somewhere. E.g. on an Android phone check settings, about this phone, legal, open-source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also good to organize a compliance process in your company. Make a repository with a clear name (e.g. GPL compliance) and for every product, make a &quot;public&quot; folder with the relevant sources and a clear indication that the contents are OK to give out and not confidential. Then support can easily answer such a request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6279" LastEditorUserId="6279" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T18:54:37.250" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T18:54:37.250" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T10:19:46.197" Score="2" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble working out some license issues with a Sass project I'm working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've created an HTML documentation template, and the CSS part is build with Sass. I'm using third party Sass modules/libs, all of which are MIT licensed except for one, which is GPLv2. Each modules is kept in a folder of its own, inside the &quot;&lt;code&gt;/vendors/&lt;/code&gt;&quot; folder, along with its original &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I've understood correctly the GPLv2 license terms, the presence of the GPLv2 module makes the whole project fall under the same GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions and doubts on the issue are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok if I license all the project files &lt;em&gt;which I coded&lt;/em&gt; as MIT (so others can reuse them under MIT terms) even if the whole project will be licensed under GPLv2, and even if these files use some functions imported from the GPLv2 module?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm confused about here is where the &quot;derivate work&quot; line is drawn — ie: if the mere presence/use of functions defined in the GPLv2 module implies that the file becomes a GPLv2 module derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the final compiled CSS stylesheet need to fall under GPLv2 too? ie: is it to be considered a derivative work of all the Sass modules used to create it? Or am I free to license it as I wish when I distribute it without the Sass code that produced it? NOTE: the final CSS will not contain any parts of the GPLv2 module because this module only manages colors-maps and functions, so its output in the final CSS will just be hex color values defined by me&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The theme project also contains a &lt;code&gt;/fonts/&lt;/code&gt; subfolder with some SIL licensed fonts (again: each font in a folder of its own, along with license files). Does this pose a problem? Or is it enough to duly mention them in my copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I wish to keep as much code as possible under the MIT license terms even though the final Sass project will have to be GPLv2 licensed --- I'd like people to be free to reuse as many parts of it as possible under MIT terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5438" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:20:47.820" Title="Sass project with modules licensed under MIT and GPLv2" Tags="|mit|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T12:40:20.883" Score="7" ViewCount="1300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a docker image with the following &lt;strong&gt;dockerfile&lt;/strong&gt; and then pushing it to an &lt;strong&gt;AWS ECR&lt;/strong&gt; repository:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;FROM openjdk:8-jdk&#xA;RUN  [&quot;mkdir&quot;, &quot;/opt/mycompany&quot;]&#xA;COPY [&quot;myapp.war/&quot;, &quot;/opt/mycompany/myapp.war/&quot;]&#xA;WORKDIR /opt/mycompany&#xA;CMD  [&quot;java&quot;, &quot;-classpath&quot;, &quot;myapp.war/WEB-INF/classes:myapp.war/WEB-INF/lib/*&quot;, &quot;com.mycompany.myapp.Startup&quot;]&#xA;EXPOSE 8080&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, my Docker container includes the &lt;strong&gt;openjdk:8-jdk&lt;/strong&gt; Docker container (pulled from Docker Hub) plus my WAR archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Docker container is intended as a means of distributing a &lt;strong&gt;commercial&lt;/strong&gt; product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do that?  I'm concerned over the &lt;strong&gt;openjdk:8-jdk&lt;/strong&gt; Docker container which includes a &lt;strong&gt;Debian GNU/Linux 9&lt;/strong&gt; image which uses a &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9133" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:37:59.847" Title="Distributing commercial Docker container image with openjdk:8-jdk" Tags="|gpl|commercial|java|linux-distribution|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5993" CreationDate="2017-09-13T15:31:37.830" Score="5" ViewCount="636" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you do if you discover that some part of &lt;em&gt;your own&lt;/em&gt; open source project infringes copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following hypothetical situation. An open source project's maintainer finds code in his Github project which infringes copyright. i.e., There is code which he was responsible for which wasn't legally copied into the project. What should be the procedure to remedy it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T03:17:41.740" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T22:23:07.053" Title="Handling copyright infringement in your own open source project" Tags="|licensing|copyright|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5990" CreationDate="2017-09-16T07:02:24.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you find, or are notified, that you are infringing on the copyright of someone else, you have a few options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the infringing code is under a copyright license that is compatible with the rest of your code and that has terms you can agree with, then you could re-add the copyright and license statements that were erroneously removed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In all other cases, our only option is to remove the infringing code from your codebase. This will likely remove some features or break the application in other ways, but that is a consequence you will have to pay. However, you are allowed to add the features again, as long as you don't copy code without the proper permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T07:02:24.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T10:07:20.247" Score="2" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm programming a desktop application that's proprietary. On my server, it will run application with the AGPL (Affero General Public License). Server app will process the data that will come through the API (part of the server application) and return the modified data using JSON. I do not plan to edit the server application anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to ask whether it is possible to develop a proprietary desktop application that will work with server API, do not break the license? It's necessarily publish the source code of my desktop application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9157" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T11:00:16.220" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:49:59.360" Title="Proprietary desktop application that works with AGPL-licensed server application" Tags="|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T20:49:07.083" Score="2" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In software licenses, what does this clause exactly protect the licensor against?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the author nor the names of its contributors may&#xA;  be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software&#xA;  without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9159" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T15:34:16.813" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T15:34:16.813" Title="In software licenses, what does the &quot;endorsement&quot; clause exactly protect the licensor against?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5974" CreationDate="2017-09-18T04:46:14.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it OK if I retain the original name of the font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#trademarks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6 of the Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; is specifically about trademarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such there is nothing in the license that would mandate you to rename things such as files, functions or for that matter font names.&#xA;So as long as you do not promote this font ass your product using the original font name, you are not IMHO making use of any trademarks or service marks. So renaming is not required and you can retain the original name of the font. If this is meant to be further integrated by your users with other fonts (and possibly the original unmodified fonts) it could be nice to rename it to avoid confusion. But only nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it fine that I do not include the source codes of the fonts (because I technically do not work with source codes when I subset fonts using a webfont generator, and I cannot myself edit the source files accordingly) within a project to be distributed under a copyleft license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not consider the .woff and eot formats that you redistribute as the &quot;Source form&quot; of the fonts and therefore if I read the EUPL (which is not a very common license) I guess you would likely still need to get the source code somehow to meet the EUPL copyleft condistions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And is it fine to include Apache licensed fonts in a MIT-licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no issue I can think of there, both are permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And additionally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So am I right if I would for instance use GPL3 instead of EUPL (which claims to be GPL3-compatible), I would surely be obliged to provide font source files? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a good analogy to understand the effects of the copyleft here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I'd rather only use the MIT license to avoid the trouble. (My only reason to use EUPL was that it is adapted to European law). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EUPL is a rare but comprehensive license that has been created specifically for this purpose. I personally thinks it may make sense for the EU public sector. It may be less useful, less relevant and a tad too arcane otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T16:35:20.673" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:35:20.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5996" CreationDate="2017-09-18T06:25:15.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free software licenses generally don't allow you to restrict who uses a piece of software distributed under such a license (see, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#evil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I stop &quot;evil people&quot; from using my program?&lt;/a&gt; is the OSI FAQ). This clause allows you to separate your own identity from the software's, so that usage of the software can't be considered as a personal endorsement of some agenda you may not want to be associated with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a hypothetical extreme example. Suppose you've authored a message board system that's licensed under such a license. You can't prevent the local Nazi party from using it, but this clause prohibits them from claiming that you support Nazism simply because they're allowed to use the message board system you've authored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T06:25:15.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6002" CreationDate="2017-09-18T13:34:56.940" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a software in which I use Weka software to train a model (classifier) just once (without any modification) and save the model somewhere. Then, our customer gives a document to the program and gets the result back based on evaluating the saved model on the given document. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What our customer does is just sending a request to the server through the website and getting the results back. Does it mean that we are distributing the code according to GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I don't want to make our code under GPL license, can't I use Weka?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9162" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T15:31:49.853" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:46:45.347" Title="Is sending requests to a server (which uses a model trained by GPL-licensed software) distribution according to the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T15:53:06.493" Score="-3" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use their sound in my app? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can use their sound and not violate copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9164" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T08:01:11.427" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T13:29:06.823" Title="I want to make an Android app like Calm/ Meditation Music/ Study Music. May I use their sound?" Tags="|copyright|media|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-10-01T10:09:57.323" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6000" CreationDate="2017-09-18T16:20:33.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the sound is available from the copyright holder under a free or open source license (likely a Creative Commons license, for a sound file), or if the work is in the public domain (e.g., copyright on the work has expired), then you may use it in your app, provided you follow any requirements imposed by the license on the work (at minimum, this will include showing a license notice and showing original authorship information in your app). You can check if the app you want to borrow from has a &quot;credits&quot; screen that might contain licensing information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise: because the sounds are covered by copyright, using them without a license from the copyright holder would be a copyright violation. Doing so makes you liable for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T13:16:20.037" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T13:16:20.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5999" CreationDate="2017-09-18T16:46:45.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Running GPL-licensed programs and in particular here calling a GPL-licensed through a network interface (a website) would not be considered redistribution under the GPL (it may in some cases under the AGPL but not under the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you do not redistribute your code and the Weka code that evaluates a doc on a saved model, you are not redistributing but only merely using and running the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:46:45.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5995" CreationDate="2017-09-18T16:49:59.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I want to ask whether it is possible to develop a proprietary desktop application that will work with server API, do not break the license? It's necessarily publish the source code of my desktop application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are separate programs. The server-side may need source code redistribution in some cases (at least when modified). The desktop application would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T16:49:59.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:02:12.500" Score="10" ViewCount="1498" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an open source library which I would like to add to my own software repo. However, it is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 which does not allow derivative works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not modify the library's sources in any way, I just include them in my project, and would like to host them in one repository. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does using a library already constitute a derivative work, meaning I would not be allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9166" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T18:49:06.130" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T11:34:42.653" Title="Is use of CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 library in open source project a derivative work?" Tags="|linked-libraries|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6004" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:33:19.090" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does using a library already constitute a derivative work, meaning I would not be allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merely using an unmodified library would generally not be considered creating a derivative work but the devils is in the details! For instance, calling a GPL-licensed library may subject the caller to the GPL copyleft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the CC-BY-NC-ND is a rare, complicated and non-open source license choice IMHO and therefore the author may have a strong opinion on what derivative means ... and this should not be discounted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to contact the author for some alternative open source friendly licensing terms. I would personally shy away from using such library in any context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:33:19.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5989" CreationDate="2017-09-18T18:37:59.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do that? I'm concerned over the openjdk:8-jdk Docker container which includes a Debian GNU/Linux 9 image which uses a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes you are allowed to do that alright. Assuming you are redistributing the Docker image(s) you are also responsible to comply with the licensing conditions of every FOSS package included in the images (including attribution and corresponding source code redistribution for copyleft-licensed code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, your own proprietary Java code that runs on top of the OpenJDK would not be subject to source code redistribution though, pretty much the same if you were to install it in a Linux plain userland (and not as part of a container image). The OpenJDK uses the GPL with various exceptions allowing to run proprietary code on top of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T18:37:59.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6004" CreationDate="2017-09-19T07:32:06.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; license allows you to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means, you can surely add it to your repository as long as the license stays intact. That means that your repository cannot be a pure open source repository anymore. Please make sure you associate the right parts of it with the right licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ask Creative Commons how they &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use-considered-an-adaptation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;define an adaptation&lt;/a&gt; they tell you it depends on the applicable copyright law (therefore depends on location). It may be hard to determine the status for code, since CC is not thought to be used with code. I would argue that the usage of the library should be allowed, so linking to it must be allowed too but there are still some problems. For example your own open source licenses code using this library might require also the library to be open source. However, you as the author, are not bound by your own licenses and can do whatever you wish, but others may not. It could become a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The likely intention of the author of the library was to keep some control. However, that also makes it more difficult to use their work in meaningful contexts. I personally do not think that use of such a library constitutes a derivative work but rather constitutes use of the library, but you also have to check that the licenses of the other work in your repository are compatible with this. CC licenses should, in general, not be used with code. Just to be on the safe side I recommend to avoid using of CC licensed code if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T11:34:42.653" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T11:34:42.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-19T22:58:57.260" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following hypothetical situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project was open sourced. There were a number of external contributions but not too many. Imagine, the owner wants to change its license. Is it possible to do it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask author of patches for a license change&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove all patches by contributors who don't want a relicensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewrite missing part&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change a license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it be legal? Are patches applied after the first non relicenseable contribution considered a derivative work if there were no functional or code copying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T07:58:56.987" Title="Relicensing open source project" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6017" CreationDate="2017-09-20T12:28:14.080" Score="8" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was a bit puzzled when I read the description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://notepad-plus-plus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notepad++&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notepad++ is a free (as in &quot;free speech&quot; and also as in &quot;free beer&quot;) source code editor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to give room to the possibility that there is free (speech-type) software that might not be free (beer-type). Is this the case for instance of all those open-source software which offer a subscription service with more features or with customer support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T21:12:33.603" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T22:47:05.687" Title="Can a free software (as in free speech) be not free (as in free beer)?" Tags="|commercial|freedoms|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6018" CreationDate="2017-09-20T15:25:07.770" Score="4" ViewCount="3062" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a code that use a library release under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, if I cite them and release the source code as well with my code I can charge money for my work. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8998" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:04:17.543" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:04:43.087" Title="Can I sell charge a code that link/use a library released as Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0?" Tags="|commercial|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2017-09-20T15:36:18.140" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;What freedoms you provide to a recipient of a piece of software is orthogonal to what price you charge to transfer a copy of that software to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's position on selling free software&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they go on to note that after initial distribution, the software could move freely without money changing hands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With free software, users don't have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, it usually only makes sense to charge a distribution fee when either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You expect to make only one, initial sale (e.g., the &quot;ransom model&quot;), possibly via crowdfunding, and then the software will move freely to new recipients. You price your initial sale accordingly high.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are distributing the software to parties who do not &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to distribute it further: e.g., a corporation who buys customized GPL software does not want their competitors to also get their hands on that software. The fact that the recipient has the freedom to distribute it is irrelevant, because they will not choose to utilize that freedom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far more common is selling support or manuals. In this case, the software probably is likely free of charge; the distributor merely happens to raise money by offering non-software goods or services for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:06:11.627" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:06:11.627" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6016" CreationDate="2017-09-20T15:51:53.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may charge money for your software, though you must distribute your software under CC BY-SA 4.0 terms to anyone who buys it. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial (NC) licenses prohibit commercial use or sale, but CC BY-SA is not an NC license (vs. BY-NC or BY-NC-SA, which are NC licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code&quot;&gt;Creative Commons licenses are discouraged for code&lt;/a&gt;. I understand that you did not choose the CC BY-SA license on the library, but you may license your work as a whole under the GPLv3, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible into GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible with the GNU GPL version 3: this means you may license your modified versions of CC BY-SA 4.0 materials under GNU GPL version 3, but you may not relicense GPL 3 licensed works under CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 is a much more suitable license for software, so if you are comfortable doing so, please license your finished product under the GPL and share the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that if you choose to keep the CC BY-SA license, you do not need to distribute the source code of your application. Strictly speaking, in order to comply with the BY-SA terms on the library, you can choose to distribute only the binaries under CC BY-SA 4.0 and choose not to distribute the source code. This is exactly one reason why &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons expressly discourages the use of CC BY-SA (or virtually any Creative Commons license) on software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-20T16:04:43.087" LastActivityDate="2017-09-20T16:04:43.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2017-09-21T20:26:39.060" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free as in the question asked generated a desire in me replying, generating a series of events quite energy costly, to formulate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in you'll end up caring and having a consideration placed on you:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;With free beer you typically get attracted to the bar and then you end up buying beer. &#xA;Some even become alcoholics and you should see the amount of money going out of such pockets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in open source:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Apart from that, anything open source typically comes with a little error here and there; resulting is you learning to fix them and likely ending up contributing in one way or the other - no magic draining needed for that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in imagine the amount of suffering for this to be formulated:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Look at taking a breath; it's quite costly, takes a lot of energy for your body, after all the lung is a muscle. Yet your body generates greater surplus through that breath than it takes - it's a sustainable investment of energy. &#xA;As is open source in my opinion. Albeit not quite on the same level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in temptation:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Now imagine a piece of software that locks you into a need or a perceived need resulting in ending up paying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in I am contributing due to having used way to much unnecessary software, and you reading this is not exactly free in having to factor in the opinion:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Now imagine something much worse; non-fair trade software that comes to be in horrible ways. The cost is quite large; simply the words used has an affect on what you connect to, what you associate with something and which words you use to search for things online. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in you'll want to do your part in personal interest:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;(resultingly what you find, what text you find, what events you are able to see, the software you find, the money you are able to access and the microbiology you connect with (...))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in freedom:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;However please don't get scared; you know the saying &quot;no good deed goes unpunished?&quot; - it's self-defeating in saying that typically being one of those &quot;good deeds&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in word-revealing and possible annoyance from groups:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Freedom, in Danish &quot;Dom&quot; means judgement, meaning free judgement or in my opinion and personal experience; judged to have to live with kinds of freedom you are not necessarily able to handle, due to for example not having other freedoms, dependency on limitation or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free as in you'll know to do your part, be inspired how to and carry interesting knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;With every comment, thought, good idea you have on a piece of software, programmers are moved in the direction of making something akin to it or being inspired by it on deeper levels. It's just nice to be vegan, minimalist, not eating sugar/salt/oil, fair trade, electronics-fair trade-activist, non-substance-user and so forth... Whether a programmer or not, you typically get used when you use others - it's a connection more than an absolute mirror-like effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9201" LastEditorDisplayName="user176" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T22:47:05.687" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T22:47:05.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6024" CreationDate="2017-09-22T05:49:28.770" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;We keep hearing about the ungrateful job of OSS maintainers and the arrogant users with a huge sense of entitlement demanding slave work for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do sympathise with this sentiment, there are 2 cases from my recent past that I may have been one of the jerks. Yet, when I look back, I can't see what I would have done differently, other than not engage with this product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases, &lt;strong&gt;what could I have done to avoid or de-escalate the conflicts?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a better way to think about the mind (and schedule) of a project maintainer to help my approaches be received more favorably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A company is providing a hosted version of their static analysis tool gratis for OSS. The documentation is scarce and the instructions are not working for my project. I spend a few evenings trying things and finally send to the support email address a detailed summary of the problem and what I have done so far, plus link to live project, asking for help. I don't get any response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few weeks later, I post the question on Stack Overflow. A developer from the said company replies within a day or two, and after few days of back and forth, we resolve the issue. Turns out there were a number of undocumented &quot;known issues&quot; (a.k.a. &quot;you are doing it wrong&quot;) and a few easy changes that would have prevented my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I summarize the conversation and recap the factors that led me astray, suggesting that they get fixed or featured prominently in the docs. Around this time a person who is actually working on the OSS Support for the said product joins the conversation, rejects all feedback and starts behaving indignantly after I make a note that they are late to the party and haven't contributed much to the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we exchange a few comments on how I am not the only user and I can't expect special attention, while I counter with &lt;em&gt;&quot;I am the only user that has documented in public the root cause of the problem and the solution&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  (I saw a number of people on SO had the same problem, but there was only one half-assed solution, with major hole in it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, all parties go away disgusted. I only wanted to be helpful -- what went wrong here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another company, another tool, integrating with a build tool I use. All of a sudden integration breaks because of a third party thing. I fix it by doing it right and submit them a snippet for including in the readme. They demand that I actually do the change and do a pull request. I do. They request I fix my readme pull request. I see no value in this back and forth and close the pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same company, few months later - I find a trivial bug. File an issue with line-number and description of the fix. They suggest a pull request. I counter that for such a trivial change I don't see the point and I am not going to spend time on it. They downvote the comment (assume they are offended), but fix the bug (yay!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what would you think is the right course of action in these 2 situations? I want to make the world a better place, I am prepared to do some work, but I appreciate appreciation and don't like wasting my time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9205" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T18:36:49.527" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T20:19:06.473" Title="How can I mitigate or avoid clashes with project maintainers over my bug report(s)?" Tags="|contributor|issue-tracking|problem-contributor|interpersonal-issues|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6023" CreationDate="2017-09-22T14:05:10.117" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing an editor that will implement syntax highlighter for a rather specialized language. I had already found a vim highlighting file that I rather liked the style of, and while I can't use code from it directly - since my project is in Qt/C++ - I would like to use the syntax structure/design they used (i.e. the groupings of what gets highlighted how).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm simply using the design of their code, rather than any actual code itself, do I credit them in my syntax highlighting code? If so, how would I do that? My gut says that I do, but I thought I should ask here because I'm an rather new to all this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code I would like to base from is licensed under an MIT license, and my project uses GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9207" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T21:56:14.033" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T21:56:14.033" Title="Using information from MIT licensed code" Tags="|gpl|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6022" CreationDate="2017-09-22T18:48:37.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are just reusing design ideas, you do not have the legal obligation to give credit (but morally, you should still give credit in a manner that you deem appropriate) and you do not have to follow the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are translating parts of the actual code, then you are creating a derivative work and you have to follow the license terms, that is keep the MIT license notice in your code (this doesn't prevent you to license your software under GPL v3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T18:48:37.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6021" CreationDate="2017-09-22T19:24:08.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least two competing interests in how open source maintainers run their projects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a desire to foster and accept outside contributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;developer bandwidth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developers have limited time to review outside contributions, especially if the project isn't a full time job (but even if it is). Combine this with the occasional entitled user, and some open source maintainers might assume the worst about contributions until proven otherwise. Even if the users aren't being rude or entitled, they can formulate their messages or changes in a way that makes things unnecessarily hard for developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the Linux kernel, which is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; strict in what they require of patches and pull requests, and failure to meet those standards is not kindly received. They have enough activity (and busy enough devs) that they would rather create compliance-by-fire than waste time coddling everyone learning to submit feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case #1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpersonal exchanges can be quite difficult over text, especially when submitting critical feedback. Consider that the maintainers may be bombarded by requests far ruder than yours, and if you don't take pains to demonstrate politeness, it's very easy to assume the worst whenever interacting with anyone who has a complaint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it would might be in their best interests to neutrally collect feedback from anyone who has any to offer, but obviously they didn't do that in this case. Consider also that they may have enough fully-formed contributions for their consideration coming in to fully utilize their development bandwidth, so that a suggestion or bug report without a complete code or documentation change simply doesn't merit much consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is your information about usability a net gain for the project? Of course. But it's a message that, like it or not, comes with an implicit work order: &quot;This needs to get done.&quot; If you don't immediately follow this up with an offer to do the work yourself, it's easy for a developer to take this the wrong way. In particular, if your feedback is not especially concrete (&quot;It should be more clear that in order to do X you need to click buttons Y and Z first&quot; -- it should be made more clear &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;?) then your message places the onus of figuring out how to make the fix on the developer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your incomplete contribution does provide value to the project, but how you present even a very helpful contribution can provoke a bad reaction. Every maintainer is different, but in the future, you could approach the act of giving usability advice with a greater awareness that you're essentially creating heaping new work onto the developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case #2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case #2 is different from #1: for #2, there are technical and procedural reasons why they require a pull request. If a project has a protocol of accepting outside changes via pull request, then not using a pull request is about as frustrating as submitting code that doesn't conform to a project's coding standards. That is to say, it's still &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt;, but done in a wrong enough way that it ties up developer time -- and the entire point of the policy is to save developer time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pull requests are valuable for tracking statistics about outside contributions (size, frequency, how often they are accepted vs. rejected) as well as providing a standard platform for the internal team to agree on whether to accept each outside change. If a project asks you to use a pull request, then you should either do it, or be prepared for your contribution to be treated as less valuable, just like a contribution that ignores code format standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way: you think it would have been trivial for the developer to take the description of your change and implement it. If that's so, then you could do it yourself. You might point out that the developer could have implemented the fix faster than you could have learned to formulate a pull request. However, the developer isn't looking at this from a cold utilitarian perspective about how to minimize net effort between the two of you. The developer just sees something that you could have done yourself and didn't. (Also, taking the term to learn and do things the right way makes you a more valuable contributor in the future, so you could view this insistence on doing things the right way as an investment in you as a project contributor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T20:19:06.473" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T20:19:06.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6010" CreationDate="2017-09-23T07:58:56.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ask author of patches for a license change&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, You are allowed to do that, But the author/contributor has to agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remove all patches by contributors who don't want a relicensing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rewrite missing part&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but make sure it's not copy/paste&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Change a license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you meant, but you can change the license of your code that is compatible to the contributors license.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt; If all your contributors use MIT and you change your code to GPLv3, that would be compatible cause MIT licensed software can be integrated into GPL, but not the other way around.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Disclaimer: I'm just a programmer, not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T07:58:56.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6015" CreationDate="2017-09-24T17:36:21.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you need a new feature for Notepad++? Do the Notepad++ developers ignore your pleas? Do you lack the expertise to hack it yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that is the case, I can create a Notepad++ fork for you with the feature you need. I will license it to you under the GPL, because the original Notepad++ license leaves me no other choice. That means you are free to give it to anyone else under the same conditions, if you feel like it. And when we don't want to work together anymore, you are free to hire someone else to maintain the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I expect to be paid for my services. That means that custom Notepad++ fork will be free as in freedom to you, but not free as in beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T17:36:21.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T12:24:08.670" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but still to do that should you add notes or anything above or below in the licence or readme files to make it clear your not affiliated with the creators of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I add clarification above the original notice to say my changes I'm also putting under MIT licence and I'm not affiliated with the previous creators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just sounds like if I don't add any clarification it may seem like I'm distributing it on behalf of the original creators which I don't want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor modifications by myself also under the MIT licence.&#xA;As of writing this, I am not nor have ever been affiliated with the creators of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original copyright notice in licence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;  of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;  furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;  AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;  OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9259" OwnerDisplayName="red squirrel" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T09:06:57.127" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T15:34:45.993" Title="Should you add any notes to sell copies of a 3rd party MIT licenced software?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6028" CreationDate="2017-09-24T20:16:51.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can if you want but the licence doesn't require it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27862" OwnerDisplayName="Dale M" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T20:16:51.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6032" CreationDate="2017-09-25T13:18:14.447" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on license plate recognition software. I have found following project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr&lt;/a&gt; The project itself is under AGPL-3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of this project is trained data for Tesseract OCR engine. I would like to use their trained data for my own application. But I'm not sure what are the conditions of using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read through the AGPL-3.0 and to me it seems that using the binary data, without modifying it means, there is no restrictions on the use of the data. The AGPL talks about source code, and object code form, but the trained model is neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any problem with admitting I used the data and providing the AGPL-3.0 license along with it. What I cannot do, is to provide source code of my own application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9226" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T16:41:26.707" Title="What are the restrictions on using pretrained binary model under AGPLv3" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6030" CreationDate="2017-09-25T15:52:54.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ is clear in several places that when a program reads and acts on GPL-licensed input, it does not create GPL obligations for the program reading the input. Most notably:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a programming language interpreter has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, can I run GPL-covered programs on it?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InterpreterIncompat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#InterpreterIncompat&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is yes. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; the GPL doesn't restrict what tools you process the program with. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a trained model and an interpreted program are different things, this seems like a case where the model is similarly &amp;quot;just data,&amp;quot; so (A)GPL copyleft does not extend to an processing program merely because it reads (A)GPL-licensed data as part of its operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you use any AGPL-licensed executable code that links or combines with your code in a way that creates a derivative work, then your code will have to be distributed (or served over a network) in compliance with the AGPL. See the full FAQ item for more information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T16:41:26.707" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T16:41:26.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6036" CreationDate="2017-09-25T16:56:01.607" Score="19" ViewCount="15604" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a Python library which is distributed under the GPL license. I would like to use that library in my program, that I may eventually want to distribute under non-GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library itself is not pure-Python: parts of it core functionality is written in C/C++. The Python interpreter calls those C parts an &amp;quot;Extension&amp;quot;, compiles as dynamically-linked library (.so or .dll), and loads during the runtime when I'm importing the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern arises from reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InterpreterIncompat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, where they state the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a programming language interpreter has a license that is incompatible with the GPL, can I run GPL-covered programs on it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is yes. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; the GPL doesn't restrict what tools you process the program with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the interpreter is extended to provide “bindings” to other facilities (often, but not necessarily, libraries), the interpreted program is effectively linked to the facilities it uses through these bindings. The JNI or Java Native Interface is an example of such a facility; libraries that are accessed in this way are linked dynamically with the Java programs that call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if these facilities are released under a GPL-incompatible license, the situation is like linking in any other way with a GPL-incompatible library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find these remarks not exactly, but quite similar to the situation that I am in. So my question is: am I safe to use this GPL library or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T21:34:42.173" Title="Can a non-GPL python program use GPL Python module?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6035" CreationDate="2017-09-25T17:12:36.197" Score="6" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to include a file with GPLv2 license in my project (which is also GPL, so there are no worries there). The file starts with a copyright line, and the license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'll be making significant modifications to that file, and I imagine I need to indicate that the file has been changed from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also as far as I know, the copyright of the code I add to that file will be mine whereas the original code will belong to original author.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I indicate those 2 points above inside the source file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9231" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T19:01:05.400" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T19:01:05.400" Title="How should I mark a source file with GPLv2 as a derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|license-notice|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6034" CreationDate="2017-09-25T19:24:35.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but here is what I believe should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the original copyright line (You should keep the original author's copyright since you are claiming that your contributions make a derivative work.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the license information (It's still GPLv2 since it is a derivative work.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mention where the original file was obtained. A URL to a Github repository with a specific revision would be helpful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add your copyright information. Remember to include a date in your copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Optional, but recommended) Give a brief summary of what you added/changed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of shared copyright over the file is in line with my understanding. The original author owns the copyright over the unmodified (before you change it) file. You will own the copyright over your additions to the file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality, the copyright might be &quot;shared&quot; as you make modifications to the original author's work. Say you insert one line of code in an existing function. Sure, you can claim that the one line of code is &quot;yours&quot;, but it's much harder to prove a single line of code was &quot;stolen&quot; without the larger context of the entire function. It's easy for a single line of code to end up in multiple projects without any of the projects having stolen from the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T19:24:35.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6033" CreationDate="2017-09-25T19:56:45.603" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm importing the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importing the library essentially  means you are linking to the GPL library. Hence, your program must also be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your use case, there may be a way to use the library without licensing your entire project under the GPL. For example, you could create a wrapper for this library and then have your main program execute the wrapper via a python &lt;code&gt;os.system()&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;subprocess.Popen()&lt;/code&gt; call. In this case, you would be required to release the wrapper under the GPL, but the main program could be released under a license of your choice (assuming no other licensing restrictions by the software stack you are using). Remember not to &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; your wrapper or the third party library in your main executable if you go this route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2021-06-22T21:34:42.173" LastActivityDate="2021-06-22T21:34:42.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T10:05:00.027" Score="1" ViewCount="2200" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.qt.io/qtinstallerframework/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt Installer Framework&lt;/a&gt; (QTIFW) is part of the Qt Framework which is available under the LGPL3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.qt.io/licensing-comparison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; lists the components that are available under each license. Unfortunately it doesn't list QTIFW but if you download the open source version of Qt you can install it so presumably it is available under the LGPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So next the question is, can I package closed source software into a binary installer if the license of the installer source code is LGPL3? Does packaging a program in an installer make it a 'Combined Work'? The LGPL3 mainly talks about linking with libraries, not bundling in installers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an official position from The Qt Company about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.qt.io/blog/2013/03/27/qt-installer-framework-1-3-released/#comment-553386&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; from a Qt employee) there is an exception in the license that does allow including a closed source program that is dynamically linked with Qt inside a QTIFW installer (that is statically linked with Qt). However there is no specific license for QTIFW in the Qt installer so it is presumably licensed the same as Qt (GPL3 or LGPL3) and I can't find any relevant exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I downloaded the old QTIFW 1.3 it did present a &lt;strong&gt;Digia Qt LGPL Exception Version 1.1&lt;/strong&gt; license with the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Digia Qt LGPL Exception version 1.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an additional permission to the GNU Lesser General Public License version&#xA;  2.1, the object code form of a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; may incorporate&#xA;  material from a header file that is part of the Library.  You may distribute&#xA;  such object code under terms of your choice, provided that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i)   the header files of the Library have not been modified; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ii)  the incorporated material is limited to numerical parameters, data&#xA;            structure layouts, accessors, macros, inline functions and&#xA;            templates; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(iii) you comply with the terms of Section 6 of the GNU Lesser General&#xA;            Public License version 2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover, you may apply this exception to a modified version of the Library,&#xA;  provided that such modification does not involve copying material from the&#xA;  Library into the modified Library's header files unless such material is&#xA;  limited to (i) numerical parameters; (ii) data structure layouts;&#xA;  (iii) accessors; and (iv) small macros, templates and inline functions of&#xA;  five lines or less in length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Furthermore, you are not required to apply this additional permission to a&#xA;  modified version of the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it seems this exception is a) only applicable to the LGPL2.1, b) no longer used, and c) not really relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9232" LastEditorUserId="9232" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T13:05:28.120" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T13:41:21.253" Title="Can I use the Qt Installer Framework in a commercial product?" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6028" CreationDate="2017-09-26T15:34:45.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are selling an unmodified copy of the software, adding yourself to the license text is the wrong thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are selling access to a copy of the software, not a licensing permission.  Without substantial modifications, you don't own copyright to the software.  Adding your name to the license text would be misleading, and you are not in a position to sue for copyright infringement either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean that you cannot sell a copy of the software for pricing and conditions of your liking and sue over &quot;breach of contract&quot; when the conditions aren't kept.  But suing for &quot;breach of copyright&quot; is not in your toolbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9235" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T15:34:45.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T16:36:38.010" Score="2" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does learning some advanced, non-trivial coding technique from exiting GPL code (or code with viral license in general) turn my own work into a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any widely accepted guidelines or criteria to base such a judgment upon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Rationale&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes a solution can be derived from first principles. Yet most engineering achievements are based on pre-existing &lt;em&gt;knowledge how to do it.&lt;/em&gt; When building upon an example of a &lt;em&gt;non-trivial and non-obvious&lt;/em&gt; technique, it is inevitable that the new work will resemble the concrete expression of the source example very closely: it will express similar concepts with the same words and terminology (used in variable and function names) and it will combine the same language constructs in essentially the same way as the original. Because the whole point of building upon existing knowledge is not to reinvent the wheel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't this mean that picking up concrete practical knowledge (as opposed to principles and general skills) from viral information inevitably turns my own achievements into derivative works and thus &quot;infects&quot; them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ramifications&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;building upon a solution from Stack Overflow (CC-By-SA). If the solution and the problem is substantial, it is inevitable that your code will closely resemble the original expression of the solution. Wouldn't this render a GPL2+ licensed project, which incorporates GPL2 (only) code, as a whole illegal (since CC-By-SA 4.0 is only one-way compatible with GPL3)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from a moral POV, giving credit is prudent -- but doesn't this specific problem here imply that giving credit to the source endangers your own work of being exposed of copyright infringement and breach of license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I am not interested in the question if viral licenses are good or evil. I am interested in principles, guidelines and criteria how to draw the line of distinction: where does &lt;em&gt;learning&lt;/em&gt; end and &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9234" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T17:07:07.530" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T17:07:07.530" Title="learning from GPL infects code" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2017-09-26T18:30:17.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In copyright law, expression is copyrightable, and ideas are not copyrightable. In particular, expression is copyrightable only insofar as that expression is distinct from the idea is expresses. This is closely related to the &quot;merger doctrine,&quot; which states that when an idea can only be expressed in a limited number of ways, then expressions of that idea are not copyrightable: that is, the idea and the expression are inextricably &quot;merged&quot; with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can prove that the algorithm or system that you have imitated can only be sensibly expressed in ways that are very similar to the work you have imitated (or that your work is only derivative of those pieces of expression that are &quot;merged&quot; with the idea of the system), then you may succeed in proving to a court's satisfaction that your work is not a derivative of the original. You should hire a very good lawyer who is accustomed to making such finely tuned arguments in the domain of copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test&lt;/a&gt; for how U.S. courts have judged the similarity of non-literal infringement in software in the past. Note that it is difficult to prove the negative, &quot;There is no other way I could have sensibly implemented this algorithm,&quot; but that is exactly what a merger-doctrine defense requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T16:12:52.360" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T16:12:52.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:09:37.767" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;My GitHub repository is licensed with CC BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people suggest PRs, and I accept them, do they automatically fall under the same license as the rest of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how can I ensure the right licensing for PRs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9243" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T08:55:58.993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T08:55:58.993" Title="How to ensure the license for GitHub PRs?" Tags="|licensing|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6042" CreationDate="2017-09-27T08:38:48.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a service &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla-assistant.io&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla-assistant.io&lt;/a&gt;, recommended by &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.github.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla.github.com&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Makes a hook to ensure every contributor signs the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks good so far. Will try and see how it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9243" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T08:38:48.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6045" CreationDate="2017-09-27T10:26:05.683" Score="1" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;My application has two parts GUI and a backend algorithm module. I have used a library under GPLv3 to write my GUI. In the GUI we can create a workflow of different digital signal processing units so I thought to share this GUI to the community under GPL, but I wish to keep my some algorithm modules as proprietary, what are the possible approaches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MDHzs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MDHzs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Application Interaction diag&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9248" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T09:27:14.383" Title="Mixing GPL v3 and Proprietary library" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|proprietary-code|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6044" CreationDate="2017-09-27T14:44:01.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's easy. Make sure you don't compile your GUI and your algorithms together statically as a single executable. If you do that, you don't have any GPL obligation for your algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run your algorithms as a command-line tool and use inter-process communication in your GUI. This is a very common implementation in computer chess engines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run your algorithms as an internal web server and use internal web connection&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example from computer chess (use process communication):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/136434/how-can-i-use-gpl-software-like-stockfish-chess-engine-in-my-unity-game&quot;&gt;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/136434/how-can-i-use-gpl-software-like-stockfish-chess-engine-in-my-unity-game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6533" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T09:27:14.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6057" CreationDate="2017-09-27T20:21:20.697" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a benchmark that compares several open-source implementations of a particular functionality. Some of those implementations carry a GPL license, while others are more open: Apache, MIT, BSD-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The benchmark itself is relatively simple: prepare data, run the function in a loop, measure time/memory footprint, repeat for every implementation. Even though I can run this on my own computer and publish just the results, it is considered a good practice to also provide the source code for the benchmarks. Assuming that I'm only allowed to publish the benchmarking code as Apache v2, what options do I have? The code that I'm testing has to be modified slightly in order to ensure uniformity of interfaces across  all implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claim fair use exception and include GPL code into the benchmark? It is my understanding that GPL is copyright-based, and the &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; doctrine specifically exists to allow reuse of small portions of copyrighted text in reviews (which benchmarking essentially is).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the GPL code, but have it commented out, with instructions saying that whoever wants to benchmark the GPL implementations will have to manually uncomment and recompile? In this case the GPL code would be propagated, but without being included in the &quot;final product&quot; - would this count as distributing an &quot;aggregate&quot; (from GPL standpoint)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not include the GPL code at all, stating that the terms of GPL license prevent me from doing so? Accompanied by a link where one can download this code on GitHub, and an explicit instructions how to incorporate it into the benchmarking framework.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T05:00:30.493" Title="How to benchmark GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-29T05:59:16.677" Score="0" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just came across a &lt;a href=&quot;http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/com.lowagie/itext/2.1.0/com/lowagie/text/pdf/fonts/cmap_info.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; which talks about the licensing part for using the Adobe fonts in Acrobat Reader PDF:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Note: The font software contained in this package is being licensed&#xA;  to you solely for use with Adobe (R) Acrobat (R) Reader (R) software&#xA;  (&quot;Acrobat Reader&quot;) and is subject to the terms and conditions of the&#xA;  electronic End-User License Agreement accompanying Acrobat Reader.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This explains why iText doesn't ever embed a CJK font in the PDF file.&#xA;  These fonts have to be downloaded and used in the context of Adobe&#xA;  Reader; you can not use them with iText to produce a PDF document that&#xA;  has these fonts embedded (as you would do with other fonts) so that&#xA;  they can be viewed in other readers; unless you have a license from&#xA;  Adobe to use these fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understood we can't use the Adobe fonts in Acrobat Reader without license, but how about using the Google NOTO fonts in Acrobat Reader? Do we need the license for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9263" LastEditorUserId="9263" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T13:48:38.947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T16:04:27.100" Title="Do we need have a license for using Google NOTO fonts in Acrobat Reader?" Tags="|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6050" CreationDate="2017-09-29T10:08:50.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you need a license to use Google NOTO fonts (unless you are the creator of those fonts), but that license is automatically given to you when you download the fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Google NOTO fonts are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL Open Font License&lt;/a&gt;, which is an open-source font license that allows you to use and embed the font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T16:04:27.100" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T16:04:27.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T02:59:08.083" Score="-1" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;RGSS1/RGSS2 is a game engine for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/products/programs/rpg-maker-xp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RPG Maker XP&lt;/a&gt; and RPG Maker VX. The binary of them consist of two files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Game.exe&lt;/code&gt; ... It's about 100KB and seems to be a mere loader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;RGSS104J.dll&lt;/code&gt; ... It's about 800KB and seems to contain the actual RGSS code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RGSS1/RGSS2 consists of three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The core part of Ruby 1.8.1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A special C extension.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruby code embedded on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is: &lt;strong&gt;Ruby 1.8.1 contains &lt;code&gt;regex.c&lt;/code&gt; from GNU and is licensed under LGPL 2.1&lt;/strong&gt;. This is mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/v1_8_1/LEGAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;LEGAL&lt;/code&gt; file in the distribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although newer Ruby versions contain LGPL-free regex libraries (Oniguruma or Onigmo), a simple experiment (matching &lt;code&gt;あ&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;/\w/&lt;/code&gt;) suggests that RGSS1/RGSS2 doesn't backport the newer library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect &lt;code&gt;regex.c&lt;/code&gt; is linked in &lt;code&gt;RGSS104J.dll&lt;/code&gt;. Assuming this, is there a chance that I can obtain the source code for &lt;code&gt;RGSS104J.dll&lt;/code&gt; from the author of RPG Maker (Enterbrain)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9267" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T10:56:19.623" Title="Can I obtain a source code for RGSS1/RGSS2, assuming it contains LGPL part?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6068" CreationDate="2017-10-01T09:12:56.893" Score="2" ViewCount="940" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Java application that uses some Apache common libraries (Apache 2.0 license). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to distribute it as a single fat jar (maven builds a single jar with dependencies packaged in a single jar) with my classes along with the OSS classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any issues in doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9276" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-01T11:41:31.547" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T12:10:44.713" Title="Maven jar-with-dependencies - any violation of distribution license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|distribution|java|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T00:54:09.740" Score="12" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been looking at some minecraft mods.&#xA;Minecraft mods often include in the readme or on the download page various restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributing only if you contact author and get permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rarely even: &quot;no modifications&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are also often open source licensed.&#xA;Normally under the LGPL or GPL because I guess these are just the most well-known licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ArmorPlus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/2686011-armorplus-is-based-on-exploration-killing-building&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notice (under FAQ)&lt;/a&gt;: No uploading to websites, no reuse of textures/artworks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/TheDragonTeam/ArmorPlus/blob/1.12/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;: LGPL-v3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Astral Sorcery&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/astral-sorcery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notice (under mod pack&#xA;policy)&lt;/a&gt;: No making money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/astral-sorcery/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;: GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AbyssalCraft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mods.curse.com/mc-mods/minecraft/abyssalcraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notice (under REDISTRIBUTION RULES &amp;amp; COPYRIGHT)&lt;/a&gt;: No making money, no redistributing on websites without permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Shinoow/AbyssalCraft/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;: LGPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Applied Energetics 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ae-mod.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notice (under copyright)&lt;/a&gt;: restrictions on distribution, no making money, no modifications &lt;sup&gt;(in this case I think the website is just out of date; but as an example it works well)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AppliedEnergistics/Applied-Energistics-2#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;: LGPLv3 (mostly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to get bogged down into the details of these particular cases,&#xA;they are more or less selected randomly, and I'm sure I could have dug up dozens of examples of other unrelated software with similar terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to tell the authors of such projects that these notices are not consistent with the licenses?&#xA;That they can't with one hand offer me GPL-style rights to redistribute the program, and also say that I can't redistribute the program except if I also do X,Y and Z?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I raise it as an issue on their GitHub?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Send a private email?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What wording should I be using? I don't really want to get in a long fight of &quot;Someone is wrong on the internet.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I highlight that it is already too late to change to a closed-source license for there past releases, but that they potentially can for future releases, if they have full rights over the work currently. Or is that going to far in explaining and I should leave them to learn themselves / tell them to go find an actual lawyer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T05:18:58.620" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T05:18:58.620" Title="Telling authors that they can't have it both ways: Restrictions in readme, and an Open Source license" Tags="|restrictions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6046" CreationDate="2017-10-02T02:18:42.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Communicate at Arm's Length&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is communicate only with the open-source licensed code &quot;At arm's length&quot;.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communicating at arm's length, e.g. via command-line call, ensures that rather than your work being a derivative of the software you are benchmarking, it is simply code distributed along side it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, most code you want to benchmark won't have a suitable commandline interface for your purposes.&#xA;That is fine.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;You create for each package a boiler-plate that is licensed the same as that package, and which provides a command-line interface.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you create your benchmarking framework that triggers each of the boiler-plates in turn, over the command line (eg python's &lt;code&gt;popen&lt;/code&gt;, julia's &lt;code&gt;run&lt;/code&gt;),&#xA;and reads back in the key data.&#xA;They run in a seperate process, and the framework only interacts with the boiler-plates like a user would.&#xA;So the framework is not a derivative of the boilerplate, so you can license it however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your overall benchmarking suite, comprised of Framework + Boilerplate, is not under any one license. It is not a derivative (though parts of it are), it is a collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now depending on the exact situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how similar each boilerplate is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how much has to be done in the same process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how much should be done in the framework  (e.g graphs, data-gen etc)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to generate the boilerplates eg with a templating language.&#xA;The licensing on that feels a bit weird, but it should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you could have the common functionality shared by all the boiler-plates into another library which you license as CC/0 (compatible with everything), and then each of your boilerplates just &lt;code&gt;import benchmarkcommons; runbench(loaddll(&quot;SOFTWARE.so&quot;))&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2018-01-24T05:00:30.493" LastActivityDate="2018-01-24T05:00:30.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T09:08:15.557" Score="7" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Is stub code generated from an IDL file or a protobuf definition file a derivative work?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has come up recently in a &lt;em&gt;developer&lt;/em&gt; discussion between several partner companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Background:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use a CORBA IDL file with omniORB, and the file itself has license X from a german company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also use a protobuf &lt;code&gt;.proto&lt;/code&gt; definition file, and this file has license Y from a german company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The omniORB IDL compiler states in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/omniorb/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/omniORB/src/tool/omniidl/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All parts of omniidl are licensed under the GNU General Public&#xA;  License, available in the file COPYING.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... we do not consider the output of the back-ends we distribute to be&#xA;  derived works of those back-ends. You may therefore use generated&#xA;  stubs with no restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protobuf compiler states in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Code generated by the Protocol Buffer compiler is owned by the&#xA;  owner of the input file used when generating it.  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as far as I can see, both tools &lt;strong&gt;seem to&lt;/strong&gt; waive any copyright to the files they directly generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question that is still unclear now is &lt;strong&gt;whether the generated source processing/messaging stubs are to be considered derivative works of the corresponding input IDL / message definition files&lt;/strong&gt;, and what copyright license they fall under wrt. to the original &lt;code&gt;.idl&lt;/code&gt;/ &lt;code&gt;.proto&lt;/code&gt; files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the other answer here - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1926/is-the-code-generated-from-a-gplv3-ebnf-grammar-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;Is the code generated from a GPLv3 EBNF grammar a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt; - it &lt;strong&gt;seems&lt;/strong&gt; the US copyright office would assign the same copyright to the generated output source code than the input definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;For Europe&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we operate in the EU, and most companies in this group are from Germany: Is there any known ruling/rules wrt. generated source code for the EU / Germany?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, one developer actually asked their company lawyer, but &lt;em&gt;I don't&lt;/em&gt; believe the answer, because this lawyer stated that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the output of the &lt;code&gt;omniIDL&lt;/code&gt; generated files is &quot;owned&quot; by the &lt;em&gt;generating&lt;/em&gt; entity, because the IDL compiler states &lt;em&gt;&quot;use generated stubs with no restriction&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but the output of the protobuf compiler is &quot;owned&quot; by the owner of the &lt;code&gt;.proto&lt;/code&gt; file, because the proto-compiler license states &lt;em&gt;&quot;is owned by the owner of the input file&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Motivation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case is that the group would like to open-source (MIT-style) a few tools based on the mentioned definition files, because that would ease collaboration quite a bit. We're now trying to determine whether the input files would also need to be under an MIT-style license to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2231" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T17:28:12.053" Title="Is code generated from an interface definition file a derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6056" CreationDate="2017-10-02T14:22:45.873" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Should I raise it as an issue on their github?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer an issue on the GitLab instead of a private email since there will be a public record of the problem if the author decides not to fix it, but an email would be fine too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What wording should I be using? I don't really want to get in a long fight of &quot;Someone is wrong on the internet.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the main thing to focus on is the &lt;em&gt;potential for confusion&lt;/em&gt;. They want to share their software; that's great! Let's make sure that people who receive that software are given a clear, consistent set of rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the author really didn't want to use a FLOSS license. Tell them that the use of a FLOSS license alongside FLOSS-incompatible terms makes it very unclear (and legally unsteady) what terms actually apply to the project. This doesn't need to be a controversial discussion: simply point out that they clearly want to restrict commercial use or derivative works, but the license file they've chosen allows both of those things! Their project contains a README that says one thing and a license file that says another; these should be put into agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In particular, you can point them to the GNU Project's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;selling free software&lt;/a&gt; to demonstrate clearly that the GPL allows commercial reuse. You can also point to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is free software?&lt;/a&gt; to show that all FLOSS licenses allow derivative works.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the README terms and license-text terms are in conflict, the author ought to choose which they actually want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems like they would be much happier with a NC- or ND-clause Creative Commons license. That might not be a perfect fit either, since they may want a copyleft source-sharing requirement (based on their choice of the GPL). Creative Commons has a ShareAlike clause, but that doesn't require sharing the source code (i.e., a downstream distributor can choose to share only a modified binary under ShareAlike terms and keep the modified source private).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you could try to talk the author out of the need to restrict commercial reuse or derivatives, and simply let their software be normal FLOSS. Instead of a no-modification rule, why not rely on the GPL's requirement that modifications must be shared when distributing the software? It's a win for the author, since they can get improvements from others for free. Instead of a no-commercial rule, understand that the GPL is already a natural damper for traditional commercial resale, since competitors can immediately get changes from one another and incorporate them into their own version of the product. Why would someone buy the mod when an identical version is available for free?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1464/50&quot;&gt;Are licenses affected if the author adds conflicting clauses alongside?&lt;/a&gt;, the GPL explicitly gives downstream redistributors the ability to strip further restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also inform the author of this, as further evidence that the GPL isn't the license they meant to use (unless you convince them that their additional restrictions aren't necessary after all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sample bug report:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I noticed that this project has a notice in the README that [commercial reuse/modification] isn't allowed. I'm happy you you chose to publicly share your mod (thanks!) and I'm willing to follow those terms, but it's confusing to me that you included a copy of the [L]GPL, which is license that explicitly allows [commercial reuse/modification]. (See [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selling Free Software&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is free software?&lt;/a&gt;] from the author of the [L]GPL for more information.) Since the [L]GPL is a widely-used license with well-understood terms, I'm concerned that your inclusion of this license can cause confusion alongside when placed alongside the terms in your README that conflict with the GPL's well-known mechanics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You might not think this a big deal: it's probably clear to you what you meant. But it might be confusing enough to other users to cause serious confusion about what people are and aren't allowed to do with your software. In particular, the text of the GPL says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&gt; If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That means that by placing the GPL alongside your restrictions against [commercial reuse / modification], you're actually giving people the legal right to strip away those restrictions! I'm sure that's not what you meant to do(!), but that's the legal reality of how the licensing of your project stands right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think there's two fairly easy fixes to choose from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License your software under a Creative Commons license with a [Non-commercial / NoDerivs] license. Creative Commons licenses are widely-used, legally-sound licenses written by lawyers, and the [CC-BY-NC] license or [CC-BY-NC] license might suit your needs more precisely that the GPL. However, Creative Commons explicitly discourages use of their licenses on software, since it's often not compatible with other popular software licenses (making it difficult to reuse code with yours) and it doesn't require sharing source code on derivatives like the GPL does. You can use a CC license with a ShareAlike clause (like CC-BY-NC-SA) but still doesn't require sharing the source code -- it only requires share-alike terms on whatever the downstream distributor choses to share, which could be only the compiled binary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you might think about fully embracing the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[Commercial resale of [L]GPL-licensed code isn't very likely anyway, since it's freely available from you, and any modifications a downstream seller makes you can immediately pull back into your own project, making the seller's paid version only as good as your own version.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;[If you're worried about modifications, don't be: since the [L]GPL requires people to share their modified source when they share a modified version of your mod, you can use those modifications yourself. In other words, allowing people to make changes to your [L]GPL software is essentially a way to get improvements for free.]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which path you choose is up to you, but I strongly recommend fixing the conflict in terms between your README and license text. Someone could easily use your software in ways that you did not intend due to the confusing conflict of terms. You can avoid this by making sure there isn't any such conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm happy to answer any questions you have. Thanks again for sharing your mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T17:37:45.353" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T17:37:45.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6046" CreationDate="2017-10-02T16:54:48.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are using a GPL library in your product, the main requirement is that the product as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the code you write, this can be accomplished most easily by using the GPL license as well for your own code, but that is not a requirement. The only requirement is that your license is &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Apache license is compatible with the GPL, you can put the benchmark code itself and any &quot;adapter code&quot; that is needed to benchmark the GPL library, under the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the GPL library itself and the corresponding &quot;adapter code&quot; is not part of the same distribution as the benchmark framework, then the framework as a whole can be distributed under the Apache license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Only if the GPL library, or code closely dependent on it, is included do you need to distribute the complete package under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T16:54:48.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2017-10-02T17:28:12.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The question that is still unclear now is whether the generated source processing/messaging stubs are to be considered derivative works of the corresponding input IDL / message definition files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take is that the files generated are derived (and generally considered derivative works) of the input used for generation. Which generator you use has little bearing on this (unless there is also significant addition to the output as part of the generation process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the case when you compile a binary from source code. Compiling some alternative format through some other generator would be the same be it IDL or else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would treat the output of such generation to be under the same license as its input in the general case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T17:28:12.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6063" CreationDate="2017-10-03T17:28:46.517" Score="22" ViewCount="9437" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I created a project containing hundreds of source files under the MIT License (most of which I wrote myself for this project). Now I want to add a GPL library to the project, that will be called from one of the source files (&quot;File A&quot;). A few other files call functions in &quot;File A&quot;. The program is otherwise pretty indepedent of the library, meaning its core functions don't rely on it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the library will be neatly packed into the executable, I'm pretty sure I have to make the whole project available under the terms of the GPL, which is fine because the MIT License is compatible with the GPL. So far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't quite understand is how it affects individual source files vs. the project as a whole. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says about including a GPL library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I make the project available under GPL terms, then of course all parts of it are available under GPL terms (which they can be if they are under compatible licenses). But does that mean that all individual files &quot;become&quot; GPL (as in, add a GPL license header)? Is there a difference between individual code being licensed under GPL and the whole project being made available under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to put the file that directly communicates with the GPL library under GPL? And then put all files that are somehow connected to that one under GPL as well? Or can I keep them as MIT (as they've always been) and just make the whole project available under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep it simple, I would like to keep all my source code under MIT License and then put the whole project under GPL in a centralized notice. I'm just not sure if I'm approaching this correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9228" LastEditorUserId="9228" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T11:44:24.230" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T11:44:24.230" Title="Using GPL library with MIT licensed code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6062" CreationDate="2017-10-04T05:53:47.693" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL, and the question of what makes a derivative work in law is still very much an open one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you are right that the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly permits&lt;/a&gt; the use of more relaxed (compatible) licences on your contributions to a GPLed codebase.  You are also correct that the GPL requires that the derivative codebase be covered by the GPL in its entirety (eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;s5c GNU GPL v3&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I struggled with how this might work for a while, until I gave up and asked a barrister with a speciality in intellectual property law.  His analysis, which is specific to England and Wales but might well find favour in comparable jurisdictions, was based on land law.  In land law, you may purchase a number of adjacent lots, each with its own &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictive_covenant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;restrictive covenant&lt;/a&gt;, and group them into a single lot for sale, to which you apply a further restrictive covenant.  Any given piece of land therein is now covered by the restrictions of &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the covenant that applied to it individually &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the covenant that you have applied to the whole package, so the future uses of any given piece of land therein must abide by &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the applicable restrictions thereon.  If a later purchaser were to split his purchase back into the original smaller lots, that would not magically remove the restrictions you had applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when you convey the resulting codebase forth, later users of any part of it must abide by the conditions of both the GPL and MIT licences which covered it as they received it.  But you may still continue to make your contributions available &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; to them, and that conveyance may continue to be under MIT only, even though you were required to convey your modifications as part of a work under a blanket GPL.  Anyone who liked your contributions and wished to use them under MIT-only could come to you for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that at any given time more than one licence may apply to a piece of code within a larger codebase, and that the restrictions of all relevant licences apply thereto, my feeling (and this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; qualified legal opinion) is that you should &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; a GPL declaration to each file so included, without disturbing the MIT declaration that was there.  The presence of the former will warn later users that they can't strip this code out of the codebase and use it under MIT-only, but let them know that it is likely available from its original authors under MIT-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T06:36:22.110" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T06:36:22.110" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T08:52:05.707" Score="3" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have an open source image. I create a larger image by pasting it together with a load of other images that I own. Now I use a computer program to calculate a number, which represents the average level (brightness) of the combined image. Does that number count as a derivative work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intuitively this seems ridiculous, as almost no information contained in the original image is transmitted to the number, and therefore there is no &quot;copy&quot;. The letter of the law though seems to say that it might be derivative. Thoughts? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to write a report which documents the computer program, but I'm worried that because it uses such numbers as part of the analysis, I'll have to open source the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9308" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T05:56:31.207" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T05:56:31.207" Title="Is analysis a derivative work?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T08:52:22.197" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company manufactured a MIPI CSI2 camera and I have developed a camera driver for that camera. The driver is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/boundarydevices/linux-imx6/blob/boundary-imx_3.14.52_1.1.0_ga/drivers/media/platform/mxc/capture/ov5640_mipi.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NXP camera driver&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have changed all the function names and variable names to my camera name in the driver etc. Now can I say my driver is licensed under GPL and it's open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have mentioned the following statements in my driver:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; /* Copyright (C) 2017 XYZ Private limited, Inc. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;   */&#xA;&#xA;  /* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;   * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;   * the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or&#xA;   * (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;   * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;   * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;   * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;   * GNU General Public License for more details. &#xA;       */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9309" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T05:53:39.187" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T06:17:40.220" Title="GNU GPL license for my camera Linux driver" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6065" CreationDate="2017-10-05T09:40:50.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, and to answer the question you asked, you have published your driver under the GNU GPL v2+ and clearly indicated this in the headers, so you may certainly say it is licensed under GPL, and you can therefore definitely claim (at least to me) that it is open-sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question you &lt;em&gt;haven't&lt;/em&gt; asked, this driver is pretty clearly a derivative work of the driver you link to.  The normal thinking about replicating software without creating derivative works is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;, which crucially requires &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; or more people, one of whom looks at the existing software and writes a functional specification based thereon, and the other of whom writes code that implements that functional spec.  You didn't do that: you just changed variable and function names, which is unlikely to be enough to stop your driver being a derivative work.  You have also said above that your code is based on the earlier driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that it's good that you chose to publish your driver under GPL v2+, because you are &lt;em&gt;obliged&lt;/em&gt; to do so.  It also means that when you (or your employer) distribute the driver, you/they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; follow the GPL's obligations, including (but not limited to) those with respect to source access.  It also means that you should not have removed Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.'s copyright notice, but instead &lt;em&gt;added&lt;/em&gt; your own, above theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T06:17:40.220" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T06:17:40.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6070" CreationDate="2017-10-05T10:39:07.283" Score="1" ViewCount="2576" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Qt Open Source Licensing &lt;a href=&quot;https://info.qt.io/download-qt-for-application-development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obligations&lt;/a&gt; contain the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must make “open” consumer devices&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? I know about the linking mechanism required by LGPL, and that part of the application can remain close sourced as long as the end user can modify and re-link the Qt libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but what about the hardware? Does an open consumer device mean open hardware (with published schematics, etc.)? Or does it mean that we must allow (and provide support for) the software to run on a different hardware the user has built?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3718" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T21:40:38.397" Title="What is the difference between an open and closed consumer device?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2017-10-05T12:10:44.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you preserve the NOTICE file(s) when distributing your binary, what you're doing is OK per the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/commons-lang/blob/master/NOTICE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this is the NOTICE file&lt;/a&gt; for the current Commons Lang.  You would need to ensure its contents are available to the consumer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9312" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T12:10:44.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6067" CreationDate="2017-10-05T13:11:01.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably a reference to GPLv3's anti-&quot;tivoization&quot; terms. That is, the GPLv3 requires that recipients of embedded GPLv3 software must be able to deploy modified versions of the software in the device, if the device supports that capability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product... the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this disallows cases where a device will only run software updates that have been signed by an authoritative key held by the device manufacturer. Instead, if you have a device that comes with GPLv3 software (or, more generally, if you have GPLv3 software intended for use in a particular device), the GPLv3 requires the distributor to offer you the necessary keys and instructions to update that GPLv3 software inside the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, if the device can receive software updates, the user must have the ability to install any modified version of the GPLv3 software, whether that modified version was published by you, or directly edited by the user, or created by any third party. It must not ever be the case that the user has in hand a modified version of the GPLv3 software for your device but is forbidden from installing it on the device. You cannot maintain the exclusive ability to install software on the device by means of secret keys or secret installation protocols. You are welcome to charge money for a copy of updated software for your device, though if the software update is under the GPL or LGPL, you must give the user a copy of the source code under that same license so they can share it with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, there is no requirement the device must allow the user to &lt;em&gt;extract&lt;/em&gt; already-loaded software &lt;em&gt;out of&lt;/em&gt; the device, but this doesn't really matter. You are always required to give the user human-accessible, buildable source code when you give the user GPL-licensed binaries, whether by download, on media, or embedded in a device. The device doesn't need to give the user access to its source code, because you already gave the user source code alongside the device or downloaded software update.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the LGPLv3 is an set of additional permissions on top of the GPLv3 (which do not interfere directly with these requirements), this applies equally to the LGPLv3. However, as you might expect from the LGPL's weaker copyleft, you only need to supply the instruction to update the LGPL library, not the entire software on the device. Exactly how to provide an update mechanism that limited to updating to a single library seems like a strange technical problem, but it is legally allowed under the LGPLv3's more narrow scope of this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T11:41:51.290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T11:41:51.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2017-10-05T14:08:23.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most open source and free culture licenses (such as the GPL licenses or the Creative Commons licenses) are based in copyright law. They cannot prevent uses that do not violate the copyright of the original work. Copyright only protects a particular &lt;em&gt;creative expression&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A work is a derivative work if it contains the creative expression of the original work in parts or in whole. E.g. your image that is a collage of multiple images is a derivative work of all source images. You cannot publish your image unless you have a suitable license for all source images, or are eligible for a copyright exemption under your local laws (e.g. &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; in the U.S.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, facts and ideas are not protected by copyright. They may be protected by other legal constructs (e.g. trade secrets, patents, database laws, sui generis rights, or private contracts), but open source/free culture license do not include such restrictions. Without such non-copyright restrictions, you are free to use any information from copyrighted works. So given an image, you are allowed to state facts about it (e.g. “white background”, “280px wide”, “depicts a donkey”) and are allowed to create your own work that references the image (e.g. publish a video inspired by the image, or write an in-depth analysis of the composition and artistic techniques used in the image).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm pretty certain that publishing an analysis of the average brightness of an image violates neither the copyright of the original image, nor the copyright of the computer program used to perform the analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T14:08:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T17:16:22.147" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about donations to an open source project that is based on an old strategy game from 90 years (they have own developers and own big publishers and even sells in Steam now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we are doing this open source project, it's basically a port to a new engine, with some new features and ability to add mods, where the new engine will use (import) graphics and sounds from the original game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can developers accept donations for own work on such project&#xA;completely legally not violating any laws of intellectual property (in particular, making a profit from someone else's intellectual property)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what can be done so that developers can accept donations completely legitimately in this situation (maybe choose some license type etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Donation of course will be not mandatory, not binding and can not impose obligations on anyone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9313" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T06:04:54.313" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T03:02:10.390" Title="Donations for an open source project that is based on other strategy game" Tags="|copyright|law|porting|donations|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T18:33:14.667" Score="-2" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like the old question, but IT IS NOT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD and MIT licenses are simple and straight forward, but are they safe against terrorist groups?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any terrorist can use our code against us. Can't they? If anyone has the will to do something, they'll do it, whether we prevent them by a law or not. How can we trust the Freedom we have in BSD license or GPL or MIT License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ethical and moral prevention are in those licenses to imply the feeling that &quot;you're not allowed to do harm by this code to anyone and if you will to do harm write a new code yourself&quot;. Look beyond money and capital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having all this in mind, which license is the better choice? What shall we do? I have seen evil people, they use GPL and BSD license software, yet they do the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9314" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T06:08:57.133" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T06:08:57.133" Title="License that is safe against terrorist groups" Tags="|license-recommendation|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6072" CreationDate="2017-10-05T19:18:01.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two important initial considerations that would make the rest of the answer unnecessary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the game is 90 years old are you sure any copyright still applies? Copyright expires after a set amount of time (though the timelines are complicated, based on what the laws were at the time the work was published, and whether the copyright holder renewed the work's copyright, if that option existed) so the work, or some previous version of it, may be in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A general rule about copyright is that it pertains to creative works, and not to rules and systems. If you only copy the mechanics of the game and manage not to replicate copyrighted written and visual aspects of the original, then your work might not infringe on the copyright of the original. (But I'm not a lawyer, nor have I reviewed the specifics of your particular case.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If neither of those apply, read on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, a work's status as an open source work and/or its author's decision to make money from it typically have no application to a finding (or not) of copyright infringement. Either work is too similar and it is infringement, or the work is not similar to the original, and there is no infringement. Whether your project makes money from the work or not does not change its infringing status. Analogously, if you trespass on someone's private property, whether or not you do so in an attempt to make money, you're still trespassing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some jurisdictions, such as the United States, have a mechanism to defend what would otherwise be &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; infringement by claiming that your typically-infringing use is somehow &quot;fair&quot;. The factors of how you used the work and whether you collected money &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; then come into play if your lawyer decides to formulate such a defense. Some jurisdictions limit these types of exceptions exclusively to particular domains, such as news reporting of academics, while the United States has a set of four factors, and it can be extremely difficult to predict in advance how a court will weigh your case in light of those factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assmuing that your project is &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; infringement, it is very far from clear that your project would be defensible even if you gave your work away, unconditionally, for free. If you then solicited donations, your project would become slightly more difficult to defend than before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T19:18:01.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6073" CreationDate="2017-10-05T19:40:00.743" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A free/libre license must not limit how the software is used. Note that it is nonsensical to forbid actions in a license that are already illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it is problematic to bind the license to behaviour that the author deems ethical. There is no universal system of ethics, and morality is highly dependent on the personal viewpoint. Software licensing is not a good place for philosophical discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free/libre licenses do express values through their terms and conditions (and in the preamble of the GPL), but these values have no legal significance beyond the terms in which they are expressed. For example, permissive licenses like MIT value the freedom to do whatever you want with the source code, whereas the copyleft GPL values the freedom of end users to examine and tinker with the software they use. Those different goals are furthered through the specific conditions in the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a license that explicitly touches on ethics, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://json.org/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSON license&lt;/a&gt; is basically MIT + the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not only meaningless and legally unenforceable, it also renders the license non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the free/libre licenses is “better” than the other. The MIT, BSD, and GPL licenses all include no restrictions on how the software may be used. If you publish open source software, you will have to tolerate that the software may be used in ways that you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T19:40:00.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6078" CreationDate="2017-10-06T03:09:43.683" Score="4" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've started to consider how I want to license a project of mine, and I want people to be able to read, modify and distribute the source code. However, I also want to be able to monitise the project, and GPL and similar licenses aren't ideal for doing that. My concern is that someone will take my project, and either be able to distribute it for free, or sell it themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there's a way to allow people the benefits of modifying and distributing source code, but disallow them to distribute binary versions, modified or not (meaning that if someone modified the source code, the only form they'd be allowed to distribute it in is as source code, not as a binary). This ideally would allow me to be the exclusive seller/distributor of binary copies/derivatives, but allow anyone to distribute it in the form of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A follow up question: If this sort of licensing is possible, is there a way I could allow specific people/websites rights to the distribution of binaries (for the case where I want to work with a third-party distributor in the future)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9316" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T06:14:19.503" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T06:28:40.650" Title="Is it possible to be open source but restrict distribution of compiled binaries?" Tags="|license-recommendation|distribution|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6079" CreationDate="2017-10-06T05:21:49.687" Score="8" ViewCount="1057" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am adding support to allow the use of GUI languages other than English (American) with a large GPL project that uses some MIT/3-Clause BSD libraries and I was wondering whether I should produce localised versions of the licences of those third party items so that non-English users understand the details of what they can do with the product.  I am aware from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF themselves&lt;/a&gt; that only English versions of the GPL are considered to be &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; but does the same apply to those other licences - and if not where can I get known &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; translations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I note that the Free Software Federation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.fr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; language page&lt;/a&gt; only has links to English versions of those licences.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the libraries that are being used in my product came with English language licence texts I suppose I have to retain the text exactly as given {or see if there are &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; language versions with identical functionality and version numbers} but I do wonder how non-English speakers comprehend the details of the licensing of FLOSS application/libraries when they have to use licences written in a language that is not their native tongue... on the other hand I suspect that many of the main-stream coding languages have a bias towards a part of the World that was quite happy to use just an ASCII character encoding (although that perception may also be due an observation bias on my part)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3722" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T05:32:01.050" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T07:59:42.277" Title="License details in languages other than English (American)" Tags="|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6076" CreationDate="2017-10-06T06:28:40.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, the only halfway house I can think of is the path that Red Hat have taken with access to RHEL.  If you want to get precompiled binaries (of other people's GPL'ed software) from them, you have to sign a contract that says you will not redistribute those binaries.  However, anyone may get the source from them (which, it being some third party's GPL software, they are obliged to provide).  And anyone with that source may build their own binaries from that source, which they may in turn redistribute so long as they do not in the process commit some other offence (eg, trademark infringement) - hence CentOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you intend to permit recipients of your source to compile it for themselves, and one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software is the freedom to redistribute copies (with no limitation as to format), you're going to find it hard to stop people from getting your source, compiling it, then distributing the resulting binaries, without making your program non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, as RH and Ubuntu do, prevent them from claiming it's your software, possibly by registering a trademark and requiring that that trademark be removed from those binaries.  But I don't think you can go further than that and still be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T06:28:40.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6077" CreationDate="2017-10-06T11:19:34.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms of these licenses generally require you to provide the copyright notice and license terms that you received. They will be in English language, so you will have to use the English-language terms even for non-English users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translations of the licenses may be helpful for understanding, but are not a legally relevant document. If an official translation exists you could additionally link to that. You should not write or commission a translation of your own. That exposes you to unnecessarily liability if you mistranslate something, and it may actually violate the license of the license. E.g. in the GPL v3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A translation would be a derivative work, and not a verbatim copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notable license family with official translations is CC 4.0 which translates the same text into multiple languages, and the CC ported licenses which translate the ideas of the license into the legal context of a particular jurisdiction, with the license then being written in the language of that jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language barriers are an important problem: how can a user exercise their freedoms to use free software when they can't read the license? However, licenses are legal documents that need to be unambiguous and precise. I cannot with good conscience agree to an English license if that means I also agree to a Chinese text which I cannot read. On balance, it is better and safer if the license is expressed as a single document, even though that means some users will not be aware of their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that most open-source licenses are copyright-based. They do not restrict users, but only grant additional permissions that would otherwise be forbidden by copyright laws. The GPL v3 states explicitly: “You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.” So as far as these licenses are concerned, you do not have to ask users to agree to the license of your software, but only inform users that these licenses apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do business in a jurisdiction, local laws may require you to state your terms in an official language of that jurisdiction. How that meshes with open source licenses may be an interesting legal question, but would be a matter for local lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T11:19:34.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6067" CreationDate="2017-10-06T17:59:25.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but what about the hardware? Does an open consumer device mean open hardware (with published schematics, etc.)? Or does it mean that we must allow (and provide support for) the software to run on a different hardware the user has built?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can only guess what QT means by this. As common with companies that provide a choice of FOSS and commercial licensing, FAQs and commentaries are often a tad cryptic and sometimes lack clarity to entice you to buy a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that this is unlikely about the hardware being &quot;open&quot; (with published schematics, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also unlikely about asking to provide support for other hardware, such as a user-built hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO what could this be about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most recent QT licensing is based on a primary combo of GPL 3.0 and LGPL 3.0. Neither the licenses nor the FSF FAQ make any reference to &quot;open consumer devices&quot;... but they refer instead to &quot;User products&quot; and &quot;Consumer products&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, they (QT) likely conflated the terms open &quot;consumer device&quot; with the &quot;User products&quot; and &quot;Consumer products&quot; L/GPL definitions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my guess is this likely is about this: If a &quot;consumer&quot; device is provided with QT binaries, then it should be possible for the recipient of this device to reinstall the (modified or updated) QT software (rebuilt from sources) on such a device. And re-installation documentation should be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The L/GPL 3 licenses are clear on this topic as explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T17:59:25.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6102" CreationDate="2017-10-07T08:23:34.700" Score="28" ViewCount="13500" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a piece of embedded software for a consumer device. For a small part of the software, we are using a third-party library that is licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the MIT license states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the question arose if we have an obligation to mention the MIT license and/or our use of the third-party library in the documentation that comes with the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not distributing the source code to anybody, but we are obviously distributing the binaries as part of the consumer device. And as the device is not capable of showing texts to the user, it is not possible to physically keep the license text with the binaries and show it on the device itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T07:30:26.003" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T10:38:17.757" Title="I am using a MIT licensed module in a closed source consumer device. What are my obligations?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2021-08-13T07:45:42.967" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2017-10-07T11:36:12.987" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've answered your own question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you don't need to disclose your source code, you'll need to mention/acknowledge the MIT software. It's simple, copy the MIT license for the library to your distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6533" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T11:36:12.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2017-10-07T19:56:50.650" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual way to satisfy the obligation that the license and acknowledgements be included &lt;em&gt;in all copies&lt;/em&gt; of the software, if the software is interactive, is to display it in an &quot;About&quot; page or a startup message. That way the license notice is inseparable from the software. Including it in separate documentation is also seen, but may not be absolutely correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1062" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T19:56:50.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-08T01:58:18.263" Score="-1" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating set of open-source boilerplates and, possibly, other instances of code.&#xA;What kind of license should i use if I need these conditions to be applied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;code can be used at no cost for open source only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if anyone want to use it for commercial needs, he must contact owner and buy license or some kind of permission from my company.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This repos will be modified by multiple people, mostly my employees. So, wast majority of the code will be written using money that I'm paying to developers. The rest will be modified by people who I yet intend to hire (as a test task).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9327" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T17:16:12.487" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T13:26:00.973" Title="An open-source code license: zero-cost for open-source only" Tags="|license-recommendation|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6084" CreationDate="2017-10-08T08:16:19.863" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disallowing commercial use is a restriction that open-source licenses are not allowed to have. Any license that doesn't allow you to use the software for commercial purposes is not considered to be an open-source license by both the FSF and OSI, which are the two organizations that essentially define what the term &quot;open source&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common route in such cases is to provide a &quot;community edition&quot; under a (strong) copyleft license, like GPL, and the &quot;commercial edition&quot; under a non-free paid license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The idea here is that companies that want to make money from using your boilerplates don't want to distribute their own code under an open-source license (because that would allow a competitor to buy a copy and re-distribute that for free), and copyleft licenses do have that condition in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T13:26:00.973" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T13:26:00.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6090" CreationDate="2017-10-08T18:42:15.920" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've almost completed a Blender Add-on that allows a user to upload a video to Youtube. It has just come to my attention that embedding your app's credentials from the &lt;code&gt;client_secrets.json&lt;/code&gt; file into an open source application &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.googleblog.com/2014/11/subject-changes-to-google-apis-terms-of.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;violates the Google TOS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking developers to make reasonable efforts to keep their private keys private and not embed them in open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason behind this according to an inside source is to prevent &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/28109307/1956178&quot;&gt;impersonating a trusted app&lt;/a&gt; by using its credentials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are, however, allowing them to “impersonate” you in Google’s eyes. [...] Moreover, you’ve been granted whitelisted access to APIs that are not available to the general public (and, in all likelihood required agreeing to a separate Terms of Service) and are sharing access to anyone who wants it. There is no doubt that is a violation of those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that &amp;quot;APIs that are not available to the general public&amp;quot; isn't quite true since I could make a new account just for this in 3 minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an existing python program &lt;code&gt;youtube-upload&lt;/code&gt; that is included in pip and it ships with a &lt;code&gt;client_secrets.json&lt;/code&gt;. This makes me question how seriously this is enforced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at some larger OSS projects LibreOffice and OpenShot both ask the user for a username and password to authenticate. While that works for them, no one including myself would trust a small-time application with their login info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; answer seems to be to require the end user to create a &lt;code&gt;client_secrets.json&lt;/code&gt; file themselves. While I think the average Blender user would be capable/tolerant of handling that, how would less technically oriented applications do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaning towards initially prompting for a username and password with the option of using OAuth if they want to create and download a &lt;code&gt;client_secrets.json&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have continued to research this and was looking into logging in a user with a username and password. That functionality was called ClientLogin and was removed from the Youtube API in 2012. OpenShot's Youtube upload does not work for me when I tried it as it used ClientLogin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a way to ship an open source application that uses the Youtube API without the need for a user to generate an API key? That seems like an unreasonable step for an average user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9330" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:33:22.303" Title="Create an OAuth2.0 Application that doesn't violate Google TOS?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2017-10-09T08:40:54.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my Android phone, I use a piece of free software called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/martykan/forecastie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forecastie&lt;/a&gt;, which gets weather data from &lt;a href=&quot;http://openweathermap.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Weather Map&lt;/a&gt;.  It ships with a default API key.  This is in keeping with that provider's &lt;a href=&quot;http://openweathermap.org/appid#use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;policies&lt;/a&gt;, but it also means the app is nearly-broken as it ships: about eight or nine of each ten times when I went to get weather data, I got a &quot;request limit exceeded&quot; error instead.  The app made it easy for me to enter my own API key, once I'd worked out I needed one (though it didn't do much to help me get one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly reasonable for YouTube to require an API key, and reasonable for them not to want you to ship a generic set that can be easily extracted from the app.  YouTube doesn't allow anonymous uploads of video; they use the API key as part of a programmed exchange to identify the entity behind a request, rather than the piece of software they're using to do it, so all their policies are designed to assist in enforcing that.  If that means that your app ships in a state where it can't function until the user has gone through a series of steps designed to create a personal set of API credentials, and populate the user's copy of your app with those, &lt;strong&gt;that is a reasonable thing for YouTube to require your app to support&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's precedent that other free software apps that need API keys tend to ship with something that is nearly- or completely-nonfunctional.  You will need to inform a new user that they need to generate their own API key, and allow them to enter it for storage in their copy of the app.  If you're feeling helpful, you might have code that fires up on first execution, walks the user through getting their own API key from YouTube, and embeds it in their copy of the app.  If the user chooses not to generate their own key, then it's reasonable that the software not function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T08:40:54.130" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6089" CreationDate="2017-10-09T12:11:55.167" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an icon for an Android app with the tool &lt;a href=&quot;https://romannurik.github.io/AndroidAssetStudio/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android Asset Studio&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/romannurik/AndroidAssetStudio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code of this tool&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under Apache 2.0. But I cannot find any copyright info on generated icons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they automatically also licensed by Apache 2.0 (not what I would assume) or am I free to use them however I like (e.g. under the GPL-license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be precise: I &lt;strong&gt;did not include any of their code&lt;/strong&gt; into my project, I only &lt;strong&gt;used the tool&lt;/strong&gt; to generate an icon, which should be part of my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9332" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T12:48:49.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:58:06.447" Title="Generated content protected as well?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6088" CreationDate="2017-10-09T14:10:45.940" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;item describing this case&lt;/a&gt; (which has applicability to copyright law in general, not just the GPL):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the icon is not composed of pre-existing material whose copyright is held by someone else, the copyright of the brand-new icon belongs to you, and you may license it however you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that even if some part of the icon was copyrighted by someone else and given to you under the Apache 2 license, the Apache 2 license is compatible with the GPLv3. In that case, you could license your part (and the compilation as a whole) under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:58:06.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2017-10-09T17:33:22.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to violate Google's terms of service, your options are either to include the key in binary-form only, or not include the key at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you offered your source code without the API, you could possibly offer a built binary version of your application that does include the key. This would not violate Google's terms, but I find it questionable whether you could consider the no-key source code the &quot;corresponding source&quot; for the binary that does include the key. This is significant if you're using anyone else's copyleft code, since recipients will not be able to rebuild the binary application given your no-key source.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; If you use permissive licensed code, there is no issue, since it allows you to keep modified source private anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose not to offer the key in binary format, there are two avenues that do not require you to share key at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make each user get their own key.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stand up a private network service that holds your API key and acts as a gateway to the API itself. You could also offer the source code for this network service, and if people want to run their own copy of the service (e..g, to make modifications, or to protect their privacy), I think it's very reasonable to have them get their own API key as part of the setup steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the drawback of needing to pay for network infrastructure to run the network service, though there are plenty of VPS providers that will give you a low-power server with high quantity of network traffic for $5 per month or less, and you can use the server for multiple projects at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1. I leave open the possibility that a court might rule that the inclusion or exclusion of an arbitrary, non-copyrightable authentication string doesn't actually change the copyright-significant potion of a work, for the purposes of copyright law, so a copyright license might not be able to disallow this. Even if that were true, this could be outside the spirit of the GPL, though it seems a borderline case, especially when when considered in the context of an AGPL network service.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:33:22.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6112" CreationDate="2017-10-10T08:13:18.400" Score="-1" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've checked couple dozens popular boilerplates (react, react-native, nodejs) and neither of them are forks from other boilerplates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am i missing something? why are people writing them from scratch instead of forking?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Say, i want to create own boilerplate, because other are not specialized enough for needs of my company. This boilerplate will be maintained by my employees only (or &quot;almost only&quot;). This boilerplate will remain open-sourced. Do i have to start from scratch reinventing this wheel, or i can just fork existing repo and build on top of it? are there any sort of limitations in such approach?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;i don't like &quot;Forked from&quot; sign, because in vast majority of cases it means &quot;forked, added couple of commits and that's all&quot;, which is not the case for me - it will be modified quite a lot. So, is it ok, if i'll &lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt;, change repo address and put it to own repo?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;may be i can remove the whole &lt;code&gt;.git&lt;/code&gt;, delete all references to original developers along with the part of this code that doesn't suit my needs and publish the result as my own boilerplate? That doesn't sound fair though. Anyways, is this allowed for MIT-licensed repos? i'm confused, because this is the explicitly suggested &quot;way to go&quot; to start build on top of many repos.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9327" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T22:17:54.733" Title="Why boilerplates are created from scratch, not forked?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6718" CreationDate="2017-10-10T13:18:42.920" Score="4" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a central application (AGPL3+) that will control and/or provide access to multiple secondary applications, mostly on other servers. It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-agpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trivial&lt;/a&gt; for me to provide the source for the central application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide the source for the secondary applications? (This would be tricky since I don't package them, but I can probably provide a best-effort link.) If not, is there a &quot;rule of thumb&quot; for determining when a secondary application is not secondary, and actually a component of my AGPL application? (Or is it exactly the same as determining dependency/linkage with the GPL?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Illustrative examples&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it true that in each of the following scenarios I am not obliged to share the source of the secondary application:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I decide serve the central application with a web interface, using an IIS/Windows stack (proprietary license) plus a custom library I made (my contribution/modification).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The central application adds accounts to a Prosody chat server &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/source/stable/prosody&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Expat/MIT license)&lt;/a&gt; that I have modified, and reports on the volume of chat data you have generated. (Users access the Prosody server with the XMPP client of their choice.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The central application adds accounts to a fictional password manager (GPL3+ licensed) that I have modified, and reports on the number of passwords you have stored. (Users access the password manager via its own web interface.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the central application interacts with some other AGPL3+ application that I have modified, here I am obliged to share that source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T17:10:07.040" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T10:59:55.787" Title="Under AGPLv3+ do I need to provide the source for secondary applications?" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|copyleft|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6094" CreationDate="2017-10-10T13:38:46.143" Score="1" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan using this library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/endlessm/epson-inkjet-printer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/endlessm/epson-inkjet-printer&lt;/a&gt; in a commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing conditions for it are the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is distributed under GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1. &#xA;  This program links the object codes which are distributed under the conditions of &#xA;  SEIKO EPSON CORPORATION SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it's not clear if it is allowed to be used commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/endlessm/epson-inkjet-printer/blob/master/COPYING.EPSON&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/endlessm/epson-inkjet-printer/blob/master/COPYING.EPSON&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T16:40:46.773" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T16:40:46.773" Title="Is the Epson license Open Source?" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2017-10-10T14:14:53.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, combining (L)GPL software with other software into a single program makes that program subject to the (L)GPL. However, the copyright holder to the (L)GPL part can issue an exception to the (L)GPL that allows their software to be linked with software that would otherwise not be (L)GPL-compatible. The resulting program is not subject to the (L)GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the open source project uses the LGPL 2.1 license. You may use that that code freely for commercial or non-commercial projects, in accordance with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once you also link to the Epson binaries you have to accept their license, which seems to be non-free. Notably, it does not allow sublicensing.&#xA;Since it is not a free license a discussion of its terms and conditions would not be on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems clear that you cannot publish a software that includes the Epson blobs. Your options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;using the open-source code in a way that does not rely on these blobs, in which case you have no restrictions beyond those specified in the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;publishing a software that may depend on the Epson blobs, but is not yet linked to them. How you may do that depends on the Epson license. For example, you may be allowed to create a tool that asks the end user to accept the Epson license, then downloads and links the blobs for them. Again, whether this is allowed at all and specifically for commercial software depends entirely on the Epson license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the open-source library itself seems to fall under this case since it is published under the LGPL which allows commercial use and distribution with commercial software. The library already includes tooling to link with the Epson blobs if they are installed on the system (which requires their license to have been accepted). However, it does not assist with installation of the Epson blobs. So at the very least you seem to be able to offer a commercial software including the LGPL component if it links to the Epson blobs on the end user's system, not before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T14:14:53.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5878" CreationDate="2017-10-11T04:28:52.253" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given you plan to publish your software for free and unless you expect it to become wildly popular I wouldn't stress too much about the details. Liscenses are created for lawyers, not people. If you feel licenses are holding you back from creating something innovative that's a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, you need to be aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt; and do the best you can to respect the existing authors' wishes. It's unlikely you will ever have a problem, but if you feel like you may then it's a good time to go back and revisit the license files—and hire an attorney or use an organization like &lt;a href=&quot;http://blackducksoftware.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Duck&lt;/a&gt; to help you figure it all out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TBH, sometimes ignorance is bliss. And if you don't have a malicious intent you shouldn't let the complexities of licenses hold you back unless you know what you're doing is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T04:28:52.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6105" CreationDate="2017-10-11T09:07:07.000" Score="2" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following apllication software setup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A numerical simulation &quot;engine&quot; = OpenModelica (which in open source, released under GPL v.3), used to simulate e.g. hydraulic systems;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A proprietary GUI (e.g. an Excel sheet with VBA macros, a Python script, a Windows .NET application, ...) that interacts with OpenModelica via its APIs to: load a model, set parameters, run the simulation, get the results. The GUI provides a dedicated user interface to set parameters and visualize the results.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OpenModelica source code has not been modified in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this combination an &quot;aggregate&quot; according to GPL v.3, thus allowing me to distribute in a &quot;bundle&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OpenModelica as FLOSS, according to GPL v.3;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the GUI as a proprietary copyrighted software,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or would the combination be a &quot;larger program&quot;, forcing me to distribute everything under GPL v.3 conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9345" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T10:30:21.760" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:59:40.977" Title="Proprietary software calling OpenModelica (GPL v.3)" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T05:06:57.437" Score="8" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap version 4 is under MIT license. Bootstrap version 3 and earlier ones were under Apache license 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap version 4 probably inherits some source code from Bootstrap version 3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if I contributed the modified program inherited from Bootstrap version 3, would Bootstrap core team deal with my contribution as the one under Apache license 2.0? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And subject to Apache license 2.0, do my company and its affiliates have to grant patent license to Bootstrap core team and users relevant to my contribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YQpwL.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YQpwL.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Fujion" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T07:24:18.623" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T00:39:51.517" Title="How does Bootstrap v4 (MIT) deal with contributions made under v3 (Apache 2.0)?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6097" CreationDate="2017-10-12T06:58:33.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap relicensed itself with release v3.1 (Jan 2014). Leading up to that, previous contributors were contacted to relicense their changes (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twbs/bootstrap#2054&lt;/a&gt;), and new contributors had to agree to dual-license their code under both the MIT and Apache 2 licenses for a period of time. As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054#issuecomment-30894685&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twbs/bootstrap#2054 (comment)&lt;/a&gt; they did have to revert some Apache-only commits in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/11927&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twbs/bootstrap#11927&lt;/a&gt; and rewrite the needed changes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/11928&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twbs/bootstrap#11928&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. from their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/v3.0.3/CONTRIBUTING.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;v3.03 &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With v3.1, we're moving from the Apache 2 to the MIT license for the Bootstrap code (not the docs). We're in the process of collecting permissions from all Bootstrap contributors with code still part of the project to make this happen. For details, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/2054&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#2054&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contributing your code, you agree to dual-license your contribution under the Apache 2 and MIT licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Bootstrap v4 contains 100% MIT-licensed code (the docs are licensed separately). Some components may have previously been subject to the Apache License 2.0, but their copyright holders have since agreed to relicense them under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you publish MIT-licensed code you do not issue a patent license in the same sense that the Apache License 2.0 does. In particular, you do not benefit from the protection of the retaliation clause. (Under the Apache License 2, if someone sues you for patent infringement with regards to the licensed work, their license to the patents through that work is terminated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by releasing your code into the public with an open-source license you are demonstrating an intent for others to use this code. If that is only possible with patents that you own, that might be an &lt;em&gt;implied patent license&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T00:39:51.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6101" CreationDate="2017-10-12T15:33:51.257" Score="-1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a &quot;fair use&quot; open source license. By this I mean that I want anyone to be able to browse the source code and take bits and pieces as they please, and be able to inspect my source code to establish trust with my business and look for security vulnerabilities, but they may not take the entire site and change the domain name and create a competitor to my business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than writing such a license myself, is there already a license that fits these requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9349" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T07:00:44.500" Title="&quot;Fair use&quot; open source licence" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6100" CreationDate="2017-10-12T16:19:22.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are asking cannot be a free/open-source license because it does not grant users the freedom to pass along copies, or to use the software for any purpose, or to publish modified versions – see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what you describe is very close to the default copyright, if you do not issue any license. When you publish the code, it is automatically protected via copyright. People may obviously read the code that you published. But they do not have the right to redistribute your code, or publish their own changes to the code. People may use parts of your code under a copyright exemption of their applicable jurisdiction, for example under the fair-use doctrine in the U.S., or if the used part is too trivial to be protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One risk with this is that many people mistake “published copyrighted work” for “it's on the internet, so that's basically public domain”. But even formal licenses don't solve the problem of people ignoring copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not the first to have this problem. It may be worth looking into Microsoft's non-free “shared source” license family. E.g. The MS Reference Source License includes a non-transferable license to reproduce the code and a non-transferable patent grant, but both only for reference use. Note that you can probably achieve your goals without giving similar permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T07:00:44.500" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T07:00:44.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2017-10-13T17:44:30.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For cases where it's not practical to display anything when the software runs, I think it's widely understood/practiced that putting an acknowledgement in the user manual is best in keeping with the spirit of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wherever you mention YOUR copyright of the software or device, also mention something like &quot;Package XYZ (c) John Smith, MIT license see &lt;code&gt;http://my.url&lt;/code&gt; for details&quot; and then at that URL you can provide pointers to the OSS software and its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2858" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T17:44:30.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6096" CreationDate="2017-10-14T19:50:31.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is covered under the GPL Plugins section of the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By simply running the GPL software in a child process with parameters determined by your GUI and displaying the output, you are not creating a derivative work, so your GUI does not need to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3068" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:50:31.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6096" CreationDate="2017-10-14T19:59:40.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether non-GPL, proprietary software can communicate with GPL software depends on the communication mechanism used. The key question is whether the softwares are independent creative works. As an indicator of this, the authors of the GPL suggest that they form a single work if the softwares share an address space, i.e. are loaded into the same process. However, communication “at arms length” is OK, e.g. inter-process communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If communication happens by using a command line interface, this is usually OK: the GPL code is executed in a separate process.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If communication happens through CORBA, that should be OK because the GPL code runs in a separate process. However, this may be approaching the limits since the proprietary program depends on the exact data structure layout offered by the GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If communication happens through function calls into an ordinary library (like importing a module in Python), then the software is certainly linked to the GPL software. The combined software can then only be distributed under the terms of the library, i.e. here that would be the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need details about understanding one of these communication mechanisms, please ask a specific question focussed on that mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the proprietary software and the GPL software communicate in a manner that does not make them a combined work, then you can distribute the GPL software alongside the proprietary software in accordance with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T19:59:40.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6109" CreationDate="2017-10-15T08:35:20.383" Score="-1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to reuse some descriptions from &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/docs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://git-scm.com/docs/&lt;/a&gt; in my own Git instructions manual. This manual will be used commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found a license for the &quot;Pro Git&quot; book &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-By-NC-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; but this is different content than the Git command line reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:34:08.393" Title="What is the license of the documentation at &quot;https://git-scm.org/docs&quot;" Tags="|commercial|documentation|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-10-24T16:08:28.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6108" CreationDate="2017-10-16T03:09:39.837" Score="-1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license for the OpenJDK class libraries is &lt;em&gt;GPL-2.0 with Classpath exception&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is there any issue with regard to Oracle Corporation and copyright if the class libraries were ported to another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If an equivalent library is made with the same class names and methods - same API - but without looking at the OpenJDK source code, is that considered a port and must be under the same GPL license as OpenJDK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4840" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T03:15:33.987" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:31:17.867" Title="Porting Java class libraries" Tags="|java|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6107" CreationDate="2017-10-16T03:31:17.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Is there any issue with regard to Oracle Corporation and copyright if the class libraries were ported to another language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No issue to me: a port would be considered a derivative work of sorts almost universally and the original &quot;GPL-2.0 with Classpath exception&quot; license would apply to the port in the other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) If an equivalent library is made with the same class names and methods - same API - but without looking at the OpenJDK source code, is that considered a port and must be under the same GPL license as OpenJDK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the same API, either you have looked at the OpenJDK (may be only the docs and not the sources) or you have super divination powers. This would be considered a port in most cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On APIs in general and the Java APIs in particular, the Oracle vs. Google case has been discussed at great length with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1421/how-is-oracle-suing-google-for-copyright-infringement-when-java-is-open-source&quot;&gt;How is Oracle suing Google for copyright infringement when Java is Open Source?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/762/what-are-the-implications-of-the-google-vs-oracle-case-on-the-state-of-public-a&quot;&gt;What are the implications of the Google vs. Oracle case on the state of public APIs?&lt;/a&gt; in this forum: Software APIs are copyrightable the US for sure. Building a re-implementation of an API is likely subject to copyright and therefore in the code of the OpenJDK class library, the re-implementation would be subject to the OpenJDK licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything except a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cleanroom re-implementation&lt;/a&gt; is likely to be considered a port/derived/derivative work and subject to the original license and one could argue that anyone having used Java once has knowledge of the API and should therefore barred from involvement in such cleanroom development. This is a complicated process with a high level of ceremony which is unlikely something you want to pursue in most cases. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cleanroom design&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia definition is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design. Clean-room design is useful as a defense against copyright infringement because it relies on independent invention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:31:17.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6106" CreationDate="2017-10-16T03:34:08.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The man pages of Git are under the same license as Git, e.g. GPL 2.0 (and v2.0 only: this is the same as the Linux kernel license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T03:34:08.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T11:52:45.613" Score="15" ViewCount="5589" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT license can be used for &quot;software and associated documentation files&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a few big open source projects licensed under MIT (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/core#licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dotnetcore&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/reactjs/reactjs.org/blob/master/LICENSE-DOCS.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reactjs&lt;/a&gt;), explicitly use Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 for documentation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any particular reason to license docs with CC BY 4.0 rather than MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9365" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T18:28:45.777" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T18:31:06.030" Title="Is there any particular reason to license docs with CC BY 4.0 rather than MIT?" Tags="|mit|cc-by|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6110" CreationDate="2017-10-17T10:23:51.380" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any particular reason to license docs with CC BY 4.0 rather than MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license was originally designed primarily for software code (and its related documentation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC licenses family was originally designed for content such as books, music, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this history, it happens that some projects use two different licenses: one for the code and one for the documentation using the most appropriate license for each &quot;content type&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;rant&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that using different licenses for code and doc is an unfortunate trend that was likely started by the FSF and their Free Documentation Licenses (vs. their A/L/GPL &quot;code&quot; licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that at a high level, the MIT and CC BY are somewhat similar (but CC licenses are more complex with some non trivial terms) making this mostly moot. IMHO, it also is misguided and overkill in the vast majority of the cases and just makes it harder for users of such package: you now have to deal with multiple licensing terms depending on the usage context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I think that there is no good reason to do such thing: in most recent cases this is a side effect of large company, usually late open source contributors (such as MSFT and Facebook that you referenced in your question) and their lawyers being too involved and caring too much about accurate vs. practical FLOSS licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;/rant&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T18:31:06.030" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T18:31:06.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6091" CreationDate="2017-10-17T10:38:47.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am i missing something? why are people writing them from scratch instead of forking?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No idea. This may be something specific to the JS realm. Python boilerplate projects tend to be forked heavily&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Say, i want to create own boilerplate, because other are not specialized enough for needs of my company. This boilerplate will be maintained by my employees only (or &amp;quot;almost only&amp;quot;). This boilerplate will remain open-sourced. Do i have to start from scratch reinventing this wheel, or i can just fork existing repo and build on top of it? are there any sort of limitations in such approach?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do as you please! that's the beauty of FLOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i don't like &amp;quot;Forked from&amp;quot; sign, because in vast majority of cases it means &amp;quot;forked, added couple of commits and that's all&amp;quot;, which is not the case for me - it will be modified quite a lot. So, is it ok, if i'll &lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt;, change repo address and put it to own repo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure thing. Whatever works for you is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;may be i can remove the whole &lt;code&gt;.git&lt;/code&gt;, delete all references to original developers along with the part of this code that doesn't suit my needs and publish the result as my own boilerplate? That doesn't sound fair though. Anyways, is this allowed for MIT-licensed repos? i'm confused, because this is the explicitly suggested &amp;quot;way to go&amp;quot; to start build on top of many repos.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;remove the whole &lt;code&gt;.git&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot; history is fine and allowed for MIT-licensed repos and all open source licenses I can think of.... You do not have to keep history but not keeping it is an heresy from an engineering point of view IMHO. Note that some licenses (such as the Apache or L/GPL licenses) demand some change tracking: having a clean history is always useful for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;delete all references to original developer&amp;quot; would be an absolute NO-NO and a likely violation of the terms of many licenses, including the MIT. This has nothing to do about fairness, but respecting the license terms if you want to be licensed for the code you reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;the explicitly suggested &amp;quot;way to go&amp;quot; to start build on top of many repos.&amp;quot;... you can do as you please, as long as you comply with thhe original licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T22:17:54.733" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T22:17:54.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-16T12:04:09.907" Score="5" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing software for a &quot;closed&quot; embedded device. I want to use fonts licensed under the Apache 2.0 license in it. I know it's legal to do that, but I'm stumbling over this text from the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about hosting the license on our company's website and print a link to our copy of the license in the paper user's guide we distribute with the hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9373" OwnerDisplayName="Stefan Monov" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T18:21:23.420" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:01:30.700" Title="How do I comply with the &quot;bundle the license text&quot; requirement of Apache 2.0 for embedded software?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-17T20:35:28.980" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at figuring out how to deal with C# projects in open source sanely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visual Studio is both backwards and forwards incompatible, so everybody in the project has to use the same version, if somebody uses a newer version, it breaks support in the project file for everybody else on older versions. The project file generally has to be included in the repository under (a)GPL, because it almost always includes build info, settings, etc., so it counts as a build script or configuration file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other viable IDEs that can manage building and installer bundling and the whole nine yards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to make Visual Studio less of a pain and more compatible with older/newer versions of Visual Studio as well as other operating systems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there is a way to decouple the build chain from Visual Studio to make it easier for developers in other toolkits or older versions of Visual Studio to develop and build and even package test installers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I'm looking to reduce how dependent a few C# projects I have management over are on certain development workflows. In my mind, an open source project should be accessible to anybody able to write code. How they write it, what program they write it in, should not be relevant, but C# and the Microsoft way seems to be running counter to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9369" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T00:36:26.967" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T16:01:51.260" Title="How does one structure a C# OSS project to be accessible to wide ranging group of developers?" Tags="|gpl|project-management|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6091" CreationDate="2017-10-17T22:54:34.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ownership of the base is the main reason. Many people like to create things from their own mind and imagination and are proud of the efforts they involve in doing so. The main way to express yourself and your hard work would be to write your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no shame in Forking and using someone else's base for a platform to build your own. It saves a lot of framework development time. It is always nice to give the base engine developer credit in your project and they appreciate it when you do. In fact, it is a requirement in almost all cases...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what OpenSource is all about, a collaborative design where we all have learned something from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9370" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T22:54:34.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6117" CreationDate="2017-10-18T07:39:15.690" Score="0" ViewCount="805" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use django-ckeditor in a commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Django-ckeditor is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/django-ckeditor/django-ckeditor/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the BSD 3-clause license, but in CKeditor's official website it says that I've to buy a license to use it in a commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm very confused, do I really have to buy a license from CKeditor's website to use django-ckeditor in my commercial project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8314" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T15:26:48.347" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T08:34:14.637" Title="Can I use django-ckeditor in commercial projects without buying a CKeditor license?" Tags="|commercial|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6116" CreationDate="2017-10-18T09:30:09.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;CKEditor is available as a commercial license at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ckeditor.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ckeditor.com/&lt;/a&gt; or a choice of GPL/LGPL/MPL at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ckeditor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ckeditor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gist of its terms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensed under the terms of any of the following licenses at your choice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU General Public License Version 2 or later (the &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1 or later (the &amp;quot;LGPL&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 or later (the &amp;quot;MPL&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to, but if you want to explicitly declare the license you have chosen to be bound to when using, reproducing, modifying and distributing this software, just include a text file titled &amp;quot;legal.txt&amp;quot; in your version of this software, indicating your license choice. In any case, your choice will not restrict any recipient of your version of this software to use, reproduce, modify and distribute this software under any of the above licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as @apsilers commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for the OP's benefit: the weak copyleft options (LGPL and MPL) mean that distributions that include CKEditor as a library only need to include the source of CKEditor itself, not the entire application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T08:34:14.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6126" CreationDate="2017-10-18T16:38:07.970" Score="21" ViewCount="3984" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll pick &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coryhouse/react-slingshot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the most popular React boilerplates&lt;/a&gt; as an example here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume I've forked it (the commits history till the fork date remains intact). According to the text of MIT license, the only thing that I have to keep is the license itself. So, does it mean I can change whatever I want in this repository and remove/replace whatever references to the author (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coryhouse/react-slingshot/blob/master/package.json#L31&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;package.json author&lt;/a&gt;? Except one thing - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coryhouse/react-slingshot/blob/master/LICENSE#L3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference to original author in the LICENSE file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, also, I should replace &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coryhouse/react-slingshot/blob/master/LICENSE#L3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this line&lt;/a&gt; on top of the LICENSE file with this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright for portions of project [Original project name] are held by [original author, year] as part of project [New project name]. All other copyright for project Foo are held by [new name, year].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these assumptions correct? Where can I find authoritative explanation of such details of the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9327" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T07:44:47.777" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T07:44:47.777" Title="Forking GitHub repository (MIT): what references to the original author should remain intact?" Tags="|mit|github|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T22:16:46.790" Score="2" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently downloaded some source code that is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND, but contains code licensed under GPLv3 that it is dependent on. Which license am I granted the rights of? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this software therefore effectively dual-licensed, allowing me to choose between CC BY-NC-ND or GPL, even though the author does not explicitly state such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that an error here has been made by the author of the project and that they are in fact violating the original creators GPL. But what rights do I have (as the author of neither project)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is made particularly more confusing for me, since the project licensed under CC BY-NC-ND actually has many public contributors, myself included. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9380" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T03:28:06.557" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T02:52:41.513" Title="CC BY-NC-ND project containing GPL-licensed work" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6184" CreationDate="2017-10-19T04:38:25.727" Score="20" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since I registered my project on &lt;a href=&quot;http://up-for-grabs.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Up For Grabs&lt;/a&gt;, I get a lot of novice volunteers, which is great as I like both the ideas of 1) improving the app 2) introducing novices to open source collaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have a management+social+technical problem, illustrated by this example today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MgNpR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MgNpR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, one after the other, 3 volunteers have taken the issue under their responsibility then become silent, with a month's interval between each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are volunteer novices, so the problem is not them. I fully expect that they might give up, and hold no grudge against them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the technical side, GitHub is not helping, as I can not assign an issue to someone who is not a member of the project. And I don't think making them a GitHub project member is a good idea at this step (or is it?). I created the &quot;assigned&quot; label to work around this problem, but it is not optimal as it does not say to whom the issue is assigned. I want to continue to use GitHub for issue tracking, though, as it has become a de facto standard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I hesitate between spending more time spoonfeeding newcomers, or spending less time so that I dedicate my time to other aspects of the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before we had a policy of &quot;First pull request wins&quot;, that lead to frustration as we had some real cases of novices posting nearly the same pull request at the same time for something non-trivial that they that obviously had dedicated a lot of time to. Not a pleasant situation, and a very traumatic first experience for some of them, which is something I really want to avoid.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I improve my handling of the situation? Be it via behavior, project guidelines, technical solutions, or anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T04:21:48.683" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T13:28:30.037" Title="How to handle a pattern of GitHub volunteers wanting to work on an issue then disappearing" Tags="|github|project-management|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-19T07:08:08.277" Score="3" ViewCount="941" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GPLv3 code inside the container which I am planning to distribute. I also have a proprietary code in the same hardware where the GPLv3 code inside the container runs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean I have to publish my proprietary code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9383" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T03:31:19.260" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T06:39:57.970" Title="Will there be any obligation if I distribute GPLv3-licensed software inside the Docker container?" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2017-10-19T08:46:57.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In all cases you need to comply with all the licenses of the third-party  code included in the Docker images.  And you need to comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4677/are-all-docker-images-free-i-e-gpl&quot;&gt;L/GPL for the L/GPL-licensed code&lt;/a&gt; in particular, and this for &lt;strong&gt;all the layers&lt;/strong&gt; of the Docker image you redistribute (which will typically include the base image and layers and all the base OS packages) and anything using a third-party license. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your proprietary code has some &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4287/what-are-software-dependencies-and-what-are-the-implications-of-floss-dependenc&quot;&gt;intimate relationship&lt;/a&gt; with GPL-licensed code you may also need to make your code available under a GPL-compatible license. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details and specifics matter a lot here: it really boils down to how you interact with the GPL-licensed code and if you have modified it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T08:46:57.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6121" CreationDate="2017-10-19T09:57:31.880" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! The problem you face is a common one for a popular open source project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, beginners should above all learn to communicate!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you could explain in your CONTRIBUTING file what a simple process would be when someone wants to work on a ticket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there are multiple aspiring contributors I make sure that each is aware that others may be working on this too and that they should coordinate on the ticket to avoid duplicate work if they feel like it... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or agree or understand that they might submit competing patches if they want or are ignoring the discussion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, as a rule if someone is committed to provide a patch and does not provide anything within a few days or a week, and does not discuss nor communicate on progress, then this can and should be ignored by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I cannot arbitrate anything seriously until there is actual code posted: so coordination though the discussions is as good as it gets... and there is no real alternative that to let the best PR win (and IMHO not the first PR).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub and most similar issue trackers would be weak to provide proper tooling to help you with this... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a complicated human coordination problem where appropriate tooling would be hard to get right beside a proper discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T11:11:41.630" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T11:11:41.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6120" CreationDate="2017-10-19T20:23:17.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask the project's author to correct the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your description, he seems to be violating the GPL. However, that doesn't give you the right to use the project's code. Violating the GPL doesn't void the CC-BY-NC-ND license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T20:23:17.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6119" CreationDate="2017-10-20T05:44:31.057" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your assumptions are mostly correct but you can make things a tad simpler...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are de-facto creating a new package, so you should update your &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; such that it is clear it is something different and a new package. Your users will be thankful for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license requirements are quite minimal: just keep a copy of the copyright and license with the code at all times. For this you simply can carry the original LICENSE file ... And/or add such notice or a simplified &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/sites/cpstandard/files/pages/files/using_spdx_license_list_short_identifiers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-License-identifier&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and copyright to every file: that's likely overkill but this is something I personally like as it is an affirmative statement of origin that is inside the files as opposed to external. Note that using SPDX license ids is already part of the NPM &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;spec&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid fancy copyright statements if possible. The common approach is just to slap your own copyright statement on top of the previous one e.g. something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2017 stkvtflw&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2015 Cory House&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reason why you want to avoid things like your suggested new notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright for portions of project [Original project name] are held by [original author, year] as part of project [New project name]. All other copyright for project Foo are held by [new name, year].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is that one day I or someone will scan your code for license and copyrights with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my tool&lt;/a&gt; ... and this new copyright form of yours would unlikely be detected correctly and would require me to update &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/blob/e66db9636d6b4679ba2f84146925082873ff6f48/src/cluecode/copyrights.py#L641&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my code&lt;/a&gt; to add yet another copyright statement style variation in my copyright parser grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other copyright detection tool will likely have the same issue ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So be gentle and make it easy for others to mechanically discover your licensing and copyright information by keeping things simple and as &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; as possible. IMHO if it is detected by &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scancode&lt;/a&gt;  then this is quite likely standard and common enough ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T15:41:10.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6114" CreationDate="2017-10-20T06:50:09.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach is NOT to commit any IDE settings and setting files, and use for instance with &lt;a href=&quot;https://cmake.org/overview/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cmake&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/395169/using-cmake-to-generate-visual-studio-c-project-files&quot;&gt;generate&lt;/a&gt; these and setup a Ci for building with Cmake (to keep things in check and avoid drift of your Cmake config).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://cognitivewaves.wordpress.com/cmake-and-visual-studio/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CMake produces Visual Studio solutions seamlessly. This post will map CMake commands to the Visual Studio IDE with an example which makes learning much easier. It is primarily intended for a C++ developer using Visual Studio. Most references here is based on Visual Studio 2010 but will apply equally well to other versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T06:50:09.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6129" CreationDate="2017-10-20T15:46:27.100" Score="9" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you deal with attribution of a work that is derived from a work that is itself derived from an original work protected under CC BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we're at it, let's push it further: Let's call the original work &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Work0&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and its author &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Author0&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, the first derivative &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Work1&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and its author &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Author1&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;strong&gt;Author&lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, to whom should I give attribution? All the previous authors? Only the one before me, &lt;strong&gt;AuthorN-1&lt;/strong&gt;? Or only the original &lt;strong&gt;Author0&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9404" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T04:35:42.117" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T04:35:42.117" Title="Attribution for a &quot;2nd generation&quot; derivative work" Tags="|derivative-works|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6128" CreationDate="2017-10-20T16:30:03.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a license requires attribution of the original authors/copyright holders when you create a derived work, then that means you need to give attribution to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Jane creates Work0, which is then adapted to Work1 by Alice, then the copyright of Work1 is &lt;strong&gt;shared&lt;/strong&gt; between Jane and Alice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that, if the work is under a CC-BY license and Bob uses Work1 to create a derived work Work2, then Bob needs to attribute both Alice and Jane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T16:30:03.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6120" CreationDate="2017-10-21T02:52:41.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author has chosen to distribute some portion of someone else's GPL-licensed work as part of a larger work. The author has also chosen to distribute some of their own work under CC BY-NC-ND. As you might expect, this causes a GPL violation, since the author is violating the GPL by offering a derivative of the GPL code under the GPL-incompatible CC BY-NC-ND license. I don't think it invalidates the author's copyright or license grant on their own CC BY-NC-ND work (though I'm not a lawyer and copyright on unauthorized works can be surprisingly complex).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a GPL violation simply means that the author of the GPL-licensed code can take enforncement action (i.e., some kind of legal action to punish the author for the violation or at least halt distribution). Including GPL material does not mean that the entire project &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; suddenly GPL-licensed; it means that the project is &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be GPL-licensed as a whole, and the distributor's failure to do so is a legally-actionable GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and other contributors whose code is included in the distribution but who do not actually perform distribution might not be in trouble (i.e., you might be immune from legal action by the author of the GPL work, though this is not legal advice). However, you could assist the distributor by making it clear that you are open to licensing your contribution under a GPL-compatible license, so that the project can come into compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T02:52:41.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6133" CreationDate="2017-10-21T15:18:40.600" Score="9" ViewCount="5061" Body="&lt;p&gt;In which of the following situations can I use a GPL component in my website without having to GPL or disclose the source code of my entire site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The component is a JavaScript library that goes into one page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The component is an executable program called by the backend via something like &lt;code&gt;System.run(&quot;component.exe&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The component is a dynamic link library invoked at runtime by the backend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The component is a static library linked at build time with the backend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I only intend to use the GPL component to support the features in my site, not to modify or distribute the GPL component for others to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9409" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T04:30:49.233" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T17:59:29.723" Title="Can I use a GPL component in my site without having to disclose the sources of my site?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6132" CreationDate="2017-10-21T15:41:22.920" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL only triggers when you distribute a program that is derivative of the GPL'ed program, e.g. by linking to it. You are free to run a GPL-licensed program without having to accept the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL'ed program is client-side JavaScript, then you are distributing the GPL'ed code and possibly derivative code to your visitors. You are only allowed to do this in accordance with the GPL. Whether your website is a derivative work of the GPL'ed code depends on what this code is and how you are using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple example: you have a single-page web-application. Your JS code uses a GPL'ed widget or library. Therefore, your SPA falls under the GPL and you are required to make your source code available in accordance with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are calling a separate executable where that executable is subject to the GPL, you are very likely not creating a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Your server invokes the GNU &lt;code&gt;wget&lt;/code&gt; command line tool to archive some web page. Since this is an entirely independent program from your code, your server code is not affected by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are linking with GPL'ed code dynamically or statically then you can run this combined work, but may only distribute/publish it under the terms of the GPL. Deployment to servers under your control is not distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: Your server-side code builds upon a GPL'ed library. Therefore, your server-side code is a derived work of the GPL'ed code. If you publish your program, you can do so only under the terms of the GPL. Running a publicly available server is not the same as publishing the server program, so you have no further restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the GPL contains a family of licenses. Different versions of the GPL have different specific details and terminology. But they all share the same spirit. The LGPL licenses are a more liberal variant of the GPL, e.g. they allow you to link to LGPL'ed code under certain circumstances. The AGPL license gives end-users of web applications similar freedoms to end-users of normal applications. When running AGPL'ed software this answer does not apply as you are subject to additional requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T15:41:22.920" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6135" CreationDate="2017-10-21T18:45:36.030" Score="15" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is considered by most to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lingua franca&lt;/a&gt; for the developer community.  From time to time issues written in another language are opened on GitHub projects that I manage, which I personally cannot read.  I must then waste a lot of time trying to decipher Google's machine translation of a potentially complex and technical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I want to be as inclusive as possible, but deciphering the (often vague) issues from someone who is new to software development or the open-source community is difficult enough already, without the language barrier.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time (but not always), a non-English-speaking developer will run their text through Google Translate before posting.  However this does little more beyond saving me a click, as I still have to attempt to decipher the machine translation.  In fact this is not always successful, and I usually have to say something like &quot;sorry, I do not understand what you are trying to say&quot; and close the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I have a policy on this? The way I see it, I have a few options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No policy (current paradigm)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require all issues to be in English, using machine translation when necessary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require all issues to be written in &lt;em&gt;intelligible&lt;/em&gt; English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prefer English, but encourage a subset of widely-used non-English languages to encourage more efficient communication with other speakers of those languages.  &lt;strong&gt;Forbid machine-translated content.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it, the last option is actually &lt;strong&gt;preferable&lt;/strong&gt; to the current paradigm of machine-translating everything into English (and then presumably back into peoples' native languages).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;widely spoken languages&lt;/a&gt;, there is a good chance that another speaker of that language could find their issue and help them (note that Stack Overflow itself now has dedicated Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Japanese language communities).  I could even add language labels where appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="484" LastEditorUserId="484" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T19:25:58.230" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T21:28:27.057" Title="Should I require that new issues be written in English?" Tags="|github|project-management|collaboration|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6134" CreationDate="2017-10-21T20:19:19.280" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open-source maintenance is often volunteer work. As a volunteer, you do not owe your time to anyone and can always say “no”. So it is absolutely legitimate to close any issue that is not comprehensible, ideally with a polite message in simple English that has a good chance of surviving machine translation. I would consider such a response to be more polite than leaving the issue open but ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the conversation on a GH issue is not locked when the issue is closed. Should (other) community members be able to successfully clarify the problem it can always be re-opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the desire to be welcoming to everyone. To some degree that is certainly possible, but this approach doesn't scale. It is reasonable to expect that people who bring their problems to a community do their share of the work and present the problem in a manner that can be answered effectively. There needs to be a balance of two forces: limited capacity by experts who are interested and able to answer these problems, and a reputation of helpfulness in the wider community. If you set the bar too high and close issues due to formal problems, the project may get a reputation for toxicity. But trying to answer everything may lead to burn out, and loss of interest in the project. Excessive helpfulness may also attract help vampires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that asking for comprehensible English language is a reasonable requirement. While language barriers are really unfortunate, you cannot single-handedly solve them. Do not create a policy that would make anyone feel obliged to decipher non-English issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This problem will only solve itself if your project becomes so popular that national/language-specific communities appear with their own help resources. E.g. my initial exposure to web development was through German-language resources. Consider also the history of the Ruby programming language, where it took some time for a non-Japanese community to form. But before something like that happens, you'll have to be content with the many English speakers on this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T20:19:19.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6134" CreationDate="2017-10-21T21:28:27.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my eyes the best option is indeed the last option. You could use labels to indicate the language of the issue and encourage other people to translate these issues.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some issues can be translated by a machine, but others cannot. You don't want to miss out on the issues made in a foreign language. Denying all not English issues will give you less information about issues in the application. Adding 'language_name' and 'needs translation' labels to the issue will give a possibility that these issues will be translated by a community member. If it won't you don't really have a loss, and when it will be translated you just gained a helpful issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen some repositories that do it like this in the past. About five times I translated an issue from Dutch or German to English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR&#xA; - Encourage people to write issues in English&#xA; - Encourage people to translate the issues not written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9411" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T21:28:27.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6138" CreationDate="2017-10-22T04:34:58.457" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to publish a very meticulously designed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sketchapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sketch&lt;/a&gt; kit on GitHub. Though, I wish anyone who would use it in their open/closed source projects to be obligated to have my company's title mentioned somewhere in the designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9327" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-10-23T12:50:54.233" LastActivityDate="2017-10-23T12:50:54.233" Title="License for Sketch template with branding" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6137" CreationDate="2017-10-22T07:16:20.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your wish is problematic in several ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are licenses with a similar requirement (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_.28original_.22BSD_License.22.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;, which requires that you mention the licensed product/library in all advertising material), but these licenses are considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;problematic by the open-source community&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clause was objected to on the grounds that as people changed the license to reflect their name or organization it led to escalating advertising requirements when programs were combined together in a software distribution: every occurrence of the license with a different name required a separate acknowledgment. In arguing against it, Richard Stallman has stated that he counted 75 such acknowledgments in a 1997 version of NetBSD.[5] In addition, the clause presented a legal problem for those wishing to publish BSD-licensed software which relies upon separate programs using the GNU GPL: the advertising clause is incompatible with the GPL, which does not allow the addition of restrictions beyond those it already imposes -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_.28original_.22BSD_License.22.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would expect that the artists using your Sketch pad would object violently to such a requirement, as it would probably be considered a defacement of their artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The content you create using a program is not constrained by the copyright license of that program, unless the output actually contains portions of the program that are eligible for copyright protection. In the large majority of programs, that is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that whatever you state in the copyright license of the Sketch pad, this has no effect on the license of the artwork created using the Sketch pad. As a consequence, if someone did follow your wish, you can't require that the attribution stays in the artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T07:16:20.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6114" CreationDate="2017-10-22T13:16:59.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only useful approach for this I could find is to agree on a specific version for the &quot;core team&quot; of developers, and require anyone else to stick to that version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; imply that everyone has to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the same VS version, but that the project files committed to the repo need to be in a specific file format version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, a developer who uses a different VS version can create copies of the project files in their local working copy, convert these to the file format version compatible with their IDE and work with them. Before committing their changes, they only have to copy their changes to the project file copies to the project files in the common format version. Unless they have significantly restructured projects, that should be rather easy to do manually in the Xml sources of the project files, as it is usually just a matter of adding a few file references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I would like to comment on a part of your premise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there is a way to decouple the build chain from Visual Studio to make it easier for devs in other toolkits or older versions of Visual Studio to dev and build and even package test installers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, this is already done. In general, the notion of a &quot;Visual Studio project format&quot; is a mistaken one - VS does not have any proprietary project format for C# projects (in the sense that it's reserved and internal to VS). Visual Studio uses MSBuild files for projects, with MSBuild being the default build system for .NET. And this brings us back to your question: The &quot;build chain&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; already decoupled from VS, in that the tool chain is a separate thing known as &quot;MS Build Tools&quot;, which can be downloaded independently of Visual Studio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T13:16:59.797" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6141" CreationDate="2017-10-22T18:59:48.867" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested into modifying &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=onion.chat&amp;amp;hl=es&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chat.Onion&lt;/a&gt; software to build an application on my own, I guess it's some type of free software as its source code can be accesed, but on the other hand on its &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/onionApps/Chat.onion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github page&lt;/a&gt; I can't see anything that shows its license, I thought that maybe all projects in github were under some standard license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but it looks like every person that submits a project can choose one&lt;/a&gt;, there doesn't seem to be any way to contact the developers (I even tried to enter its .onion link and I can't access it), I could maybe open an issue in github and contact the author about this, anyway it would be out of place and in any case the author doesn't seem to be answering the issues that have been writthen there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way to know the license of this software? Maybe I'm missing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, in the case it didn't have one, would I be able to freely copy and modify the software as I wished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9421" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T19:14:15.490" Title="Cannot find the license of a software (if it has any)" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-10-23T07:35:25.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6140" CreationDate="2017-10-22T19:14:15.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author has allowed you to download the software in source form. If there is no license, they have not allowed you to distribute the software further or prepare derivative works, which are by default exclusive rights of the copyright holder only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are welcome to open an issue requesting that the author license their work under a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, since the software is focused on the goal of unbreakable privacy, it looks to me like the author has exposed the source code so that paranoid users can inspect the software's source code and build their own known-safe copy of the software. This does not require a traditional grant of free-software rights, and the author has chosen not to make their software free software (but they might, if you asked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T19:14:15.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6143" CreationDate="2017-10-24T22:16:37.103" Score="5" ViewCount="7210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly this didn´t really answer my question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3359/when-including-libraries-licenses-do-i-need-to-include-the-libraries-dependenc&quot;&gt;When including libraries licenses, do I need to include the libraries&amp;#39; dependencies&amp;#39; licenses too?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use Library A which is MIT and Library A needs Library B which is also MIT, do I need to provide the texts for both Libraries in my UI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other question does not answer my question if I need to provide a copy of the license texts in my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9440" OwnerDisplayName="whymatter" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T15:56:49.333" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T18:06:09.167" Title="Include library dependencies licenses as well?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6142" CreationDate="2017-10-25T15:56:31.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the code that you received must have it, and all you need to do is leave it intact, if only in the source code, when you redistribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are only distributing binary code, then include all of the licenses you are using (i.e., both of the MIT licenses) in your LICENSE.txt or whatever documentation you distribute along with your code.  But note that (unlike the BSD licenses) the MIT license does not contain an explicit requirement to do anything other than maintaining the copyright and license in the &lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt; code, and makes no requirement to say anything to users via the UI or a LICENSE.txt document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T18:06:09.167" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T18:06:09.167" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6081" CreationDate="2017-10-26T10:38:17.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are not distributing the source code to anybody, but we are obviously distributing the binaries as part of the consumer device. And as the device is not capable of showing texts to the user, it is not possible to physically keep the license text with the binaries and show it on the device itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could assume that you do not have space so constrained that you cannot include a few extra 100 characters of text somewhere in the device. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking the MIT does not require to make the MIT text accessible, but only to include it. So if you want to be extra strict you could:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for strict compliance you &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; include the copyright and license text in your device. It may not be user accessible and may be kinda silly but this would mean applying the license terms strictly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for good measure, you &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; add the text in the doc or related material. This is not strictly needed though as 1. would be enough to comply IMHO. Your doc itself would not be a &lt;code&gt;substantial portions of the [MIT-licensed] Software&lt;/code&gt; you are including. A documentation inclusion requirement would be with a BSD license, not the MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T10:38:17.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6053" CreationDate="2017-10-26T10:56:19.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could surely reach out to them for this if you care really strongly about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they actually statically link with Ruby and its LGPL-licensed code, they would have some redistribution obligations there but these may not be exactly what you think (e.g. you may not receive the source of the game under the LGPL license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preamble states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you link other code with the library, you must provide complete object files to the recipients, so that they can relink them with the library after making changes to the library and recompiling it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you may be entitled to receive a static object library for their own code and the sources of Ruby but not much more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing really as exciting as you likely expected I guess!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T10:56:19.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6147" CreationDate="2017-10-25T21:21:52.143" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to make some origami crease pattern drawing software. Now this will be mainly based on an existing piece of software (Oripa 3.5) which is under the GNU GPL 3 license. The author mentioned you are also allowed to see it under a higher version if wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to build this piece of software I use a number of tools/libraries. More specifically, the electron.js framework (under MIT license), vue.js framework (under MIT license) and the d3.js library (BSD 3 license). Moreover, electron.js uses node.js (MIT license). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of license is possible for this piece of software? Is it possible to commercialise it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9448" OwnerDisplayName="Simon Marynissen" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T20:02:08.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:02:08.323" Title="License for origami crease pattern drawing software" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6146" CreationDate="2017-10-26T05:31:45.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Short Answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your work probably has to be released under the GPL and you probably won't be able to commercialize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Long Answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's get the MIT- and BSD-licensed dependencies out of the way.  Those don't impose any restrictions on how you &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; your work, but they do have other requirements attached (such as attribution).  I'm assuming those requirements aren't a problem for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the GPL.  The big question is whether your work is &quot;based on&quot; a GPL-licensed work to such a degree that it is legally considered &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; from it.  If you're just duplicating functionality or taking inspiration from the user interface, then it's probably not derived, and you can license your project however you want.  On the other hand, if you're forking the original project's source code, your project is almost certainly derived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your work &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; derived from the original work, then you need to release your work under the GPL too.  After all, that's the whole point of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Can a GPL work be commercialized?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on your business model.  The GPL doesn't forbid you from selling your software – actually,&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF encourages charging distribution fees for fundraising&lt;/a&gt; – but it does make earning a profit very difficult.  You will have to provide corresponding source alongside every binary distribution, and anyone who has the software will be able to redistribute it to anyone else.  If you think you can make that work, go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Another Option&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could always try negotiating directly with  whoever owns the copyright to the GPL work you want to derive from.  If they themselves are not bound by GPL-licensed dependencies, they might license their work out to you under different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9442" OwnerDisplayName="Maxpm" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T05:31:45.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6150" CreationDate="2017-10-26T19:42:57.047" Score="1" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the BSD 3-clause and MIT licenses are functionally equivalent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I take BSD/MIT-licensed code and use it in a project which I then release under CC0, the Unlicense, or similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I don't have any particular projects in mind at the moment, this is more of a &quot;could I do this if I wanted to&quot; question.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5496/9449&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, you cannot, because of the notice requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9449" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T17:56:20.393" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T17:56:20.393" Title="Can I use BSD / MIT licensed code in a public-domain equivalent project?" Tags="|mit|bsd|public-domain|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6149" CreationDate="2017-10-26T23:14:23.447" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot license the work as a whole under CC0. You do not have the ability to commit other authors' work to the public domain or remove an author's requirement that distribution of their work includes attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; release your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; code under CC0, and include that code in a derivative work that also includes MIT/BSD-licensed code from other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T23:43:32.453" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T23:43:32.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6152" CreationDate="2017-10-27T00:51:28.887" Score="-1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a commercial application, but I want to make a significant portion of my back-end open source. It applies some really interesting math that I want people to learn from, but I don't want others to take that back-end code and start selling it. As a result, I'd like to license that back-end code under either the GPL or RPL (I'm not sure which one yet). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These licenses prevent people from distributing software using code licensed other these licenses without making its code open-source. I don't want to make my entire program open-source, just that part of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does licensing part of my own software force me to release the rest of my software under the GPL/RPL? If it does, will anyone actually enforce it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9453" LastEditorUserId="158" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T17:19:40.810" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T17:19:40.810" Title="Does the GPL/RPL Apply to me as Well?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2017-10-27T22:17:31.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6151" CreationDate="2017-10-27T10:41:51.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These licenses prevent people from commercially distributing software using code licensed other these licenses without making its code open-source. I don't want to make my entire program open-source, just that part of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no commercial redistribution restrictions in the GPL and in any license that would be considered truly open source: this would an incompatible restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest, read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2078/947&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; by @apsilers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant! The copyright holder's rights stem from copyright law, not from a license grant. The copyright holder can legally prepare a derivative of her own work based on her rights under copyright&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T10:41:51.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T14:22:07.967" Score="3" ViewCount="1239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m using an AGPL library in an internal tool. We don’t redistribute the tool to anywhere. We don’t expose the tool over a network either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tool produced a data file, namely a PDF document, that I’d like to include in a proprietary application. The “producer” PDF field in the document says “iTextSharp AGPL-version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How contagious is AGPL, does it contaminate PDF files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; That another answer says “The GPL describes rules about the use of the source code, not rules about the use of products of the application itself.” However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; does limit the use of products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25009" OwnerDisplayName="Soonts" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-27T23:31:12.973" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T09:42:44.477" Title="Can I use AGPL component to create a data file for commercial application?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6153" CreationDate="2017-10-26T14:58:13.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is no different from the GPL in this regard: the license only applies to the software, not the output created with the software. An AGPL compiler for example can be used to produce proprietary software of any license, and likewise any PDFs you create with an AGPL software are not required to be AGPL themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you are going to use a negative verb &quot;contaminate&quot; to describe an AGPL software licensing, perhaps you should find a different library where you won't disparage its authors despite trying to benefit from their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" OwnerDisplayName="whatsisname" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T14:58:13.663" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-28T15:46:57.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Official website: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lillicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://lillicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version 1 of the Lil License: &lt;a href=&quot;http://lillicense.org/v1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://lillicense.org/v1.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-10-30T04:28:19.997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-30T04:28:19.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-28T15:46:57.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-28T15:46:57.973" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T15:46:57.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4784" CreationDate="2017-10-28T20:20:49.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to know what &quot;helping the community&quot; means. With Galtungs definition of peace: &quot;mutual and equal benefit&quot;, then does &quot;helping&quot; mean it's benefit to everyone in the community equally?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here is an input of mine: &lt;a href=&quot;http://hintjens.com/blog:68&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hintjens.com/blog:68&lt;/a&gt;. Specifically, I would like to know which license the docx specification is under.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12).aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12).aspx&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that I cannot remix this specification (please prove this wrong as it is an essential part of the following argumentation). With this, I apply what I understood from the blog post: Once docx pushes out odt, Microsoft can create a new standard which is a derivative of docx, keep others from implementing that and use that to take over more market share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer 1) I can not deduce that a non-peaceful future is impossible so this leaves me at no clear answer: Microsoft can opt for mutual and equal benefit but they can also take something because they just can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I hope that I gave you some inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastEditorUserId="6810" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T15:44:04.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T15:44:04.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7349" CreationDate="2017-11-01T15:30:30.643" Score="2" ViewCount="1877" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard someone saying that the concepts &quot;open source&quot; and &quot;open format&quot; (in the context of file formats) should be distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;By file formats (extensions) I meant for example to ODT, RTF and so forth.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always thought that open formats are part of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the essence of difference between the two concepts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing this could help me understand if the statement is correct. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9491" LastEditorDisplayName="user9491" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T09:09:36.563" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T18:19:35.893" Title="Difference between Open source and Open format" Tags="|file-formats|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T18:44:43.050" Score="-3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know how can I prevent users to download the code from Git Hub for example, search in the code for a &lt;code&gt;premium&lt;/code&gt; variable or something similar and change it to &lt;code&gt;true&lt;/code&gt;, rebuild the project and boom, premium plan without paying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking on making requests to a server with a token given to premium users but this also can be deleted from the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app is an Electron webapp with free plan and a premium with more features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9494" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T05:17:06.410" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T05:17:06.410" Title="How to prevent users to jump to &quot;premium&quot; plan in a web-app" Tags="|github|commercial|software|source-code|monetization|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6164" CreationDate="2017-11-01T23:27:13.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free/Libre Software and Open Source refer to the actual implementation of a software project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Format refers to the specification of a file format which has been licensed freely so that anyone can make their own software which understands or produces the format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can have FLOSS software which produces a non-open format. Often software that implements someone else's format is highly unreliable (compared to the original producer of the format), or only able to read/write a subset of the format. You can also have FLOSS software which is the original producer of a format, but the code is so convoluted that it's very difficult to understand the format, making it hard to re-implement in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also have non-FLOSS software which produces an open format, such as Microsoft Word. If you get into trouble when you implement the format, it's hard to know if it's a bug in your code, or an error in the specification, because we can't compare our software to the reference implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also publish an open file format without any implementation at all. But without any software that uses it no one will care about your file format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T23:27:13.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6169" CreationDate="2017-11-03T12:41:41.660" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;While job searching I thought it'd be nice to get a leg up on the hiring process for this particular company by contributing to the their open source projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signing a CLA makes sense, however I just wanted to make sure this doesn't bar me from employment with them to some degree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9512" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T17:02:36.987" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T18:08:55.297" Title="Does a Contributor License Agreement prevent future employment with that company?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6167" CreationDate="2017-11-03T18:08:55.297" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course not. A CLA says (paraphrased) &quot;code I write belongs to you&quot;. Employment contracts say (either explicitly or implicitly) &quot;code I write belongs to you&quot;. No problem there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(What might be a problem is having a CLA with Company A and then going to work for Company B in the same field. But there would be ways to sort it out).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T18:08:55.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6165" CreationDate="2017-11-04T18:01:13.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's even worse: An open source license would allow anyone to not just make that change for their own use but in fact release the premium version for free on their own website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that check you are considering could be dummied out just as easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pay-per-install business model simply doesn't work for open source software. For alternative business models which might work for you, check out the question &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-large-open-source-projects-be-monetized/&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also make only the free version open source and the premium version proprietary. The free version would then simply lack the sourcecode of the premium features. But that's of course only possible when every part of the software is either your own intellectual property or used under non-copyleft open source licenses. In the context of web applications you can implement crucial parts of the premium-exclusive features as webservices on the server and only allow paying users to access them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2017-11-04T18:19:28.127" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T18:19:28.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6165" CreationDate="2017-11-06T10:38:31.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have pointed out, the secret here is to keep your proprietary source proprietary. What no one has mentioned is how. You'll need a plug-in architecture to achieve this properly. Make your proprietary code a plug-in to the open source code base. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T10:38:31.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6173" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6174" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T16:12:52.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6176" CreationDate="2017-11-06T17:00:47.910" Score="20" ViewCount="1973" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a .mp3 file licensed under CC-BY-ND 4.0 and I want to reencode it (without changing the content within) in the Ogg Vorbis format for sharing, but I do not want to violate the CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7347" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T12:18:21.713" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T12:18:21.713" Title="Is re-encoding an audio or video file permitted under CC-BY-ND?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|cc-by-nd|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6175" CreationDate="2017-11-06T17:31:24.210" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt; says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode#s2a4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 2(a)(4)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Media and formats; technical modifications allowed.&lt;/strong&gt; The Licensor authorizes You to exercise the Licensed Rights in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter created, and to make technical modifications necessary to do so. The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures. For purposes of this Public License, simply making modifications authorized by this Section 2(a)(4) never produces Adapted Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent here is quite clear: the ND limitation against producing adaptations does not extend to modifications made purely to prepare the work unaltered in a new technical format. A transformation from MP3 to Ogg seems to match the intent of this section perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T17:46:28.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T17:46:28.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6178" CreationDate="2017-11-07T07:27:00.380" Score="3" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a closed source software written in C# that we sell. All of our assemblies are signed. We want to use a third party assembly, that is published under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1&lt;/a&gt;. As all our assemblies are signed, we need the third party assembly to be signed.&#xA;Are we allowed, to compile the library and to sign it, so we can use it in our signed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9538" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:32:10.743" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T12:46:13.510" Title="GNU Lesser General Public License with signed C# assembly" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|dependencies|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6177" CreationDate="2017-11-07T12:39:05.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, and this is important, IANAL/IANYL.  If you are betting a business on this idea, you had better get some proper legal advice, and not rely solely on postings by random strangers on internet fora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the interesting point here is the code signing.  One of the major differences between &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; (I know your question is about LGPL; bear with me) is the anti-tivoisation language in GPLv3, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product [...] the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Installation Information” for a User Product means any [...] authorization keys [...] required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such language were in LGPLv2, it would strongly suggest that you'd need to include code-signing keys.  However, no such language is to be found in LGPLv2, so as far as I can tell you may ship your signed binary-only application, along with a signed object-code version of the LGPL'ed library (&quot;&lt;em&gt;the library&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), provided that you also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above) and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable &quot;work that uses the Library&quot;, as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library (GNU LGPL v2.1 s6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, you need to provide the source of the library, and your code in object form, ready for re-linking (there are other s6 obligations you could fulfil instead, but they seem to me to amount to the same thing except 6b, which you can't go for because you're distributing a custom (signed) copy of the library).  The fact that the user cannot run this modified executable because it is unsigned doesn't seem to present a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T12:46:13.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T12:46:13.510" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6181" CreationDate="2017-11-07T17:17:02.783" Score="10" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question probably has a simple answer, but I haven't found it anywhere. I know various Markdown implementations are licensed, but is the Markdown language itself licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I'm asking is to figure out whether the Markdown syntax (&lt;code&gt;``&lt;/code&gt; for code, &lt;code&gt;* *&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;_ _&lt;/code&gt; for italics, etc.) is itself subject to a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T22:10:47.640" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T22:10:47.640" Title="How is Markdown licensed?" Tags="|file-formats|specifications|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6179" CreationDate="2017-11-07T18:17:44.043" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Original Specification&lt;/a&gt; by John Gruber has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licence statement&lt;/a&gt; plus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7764&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 7764&lt;/a&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 7763&lt;/a&gt; may help to clarify this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it reads very similar to BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-10-07T07:34:52.683" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T18:17:44.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6179" CreationDate="2017-11-07T19:09:52.040" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The syntax of a language is not usually licensed, just the specific implementation of the interpreters and compilers. Programming languages are used to build software like natural languages are used to (let's say) write poems. Specific software implementations could be licensed, like specific poems could be, but the language itself couldn't be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular case of Markdown the language is not licensed. And its reference implementation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markdown&lt;/a&gt;, a Perl script that implements the parser and HTML generator, is licensed with a 3-Clause BSD &lt;a href=&quot;https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a related question on Software Engineering if you want to read more details:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/178776/what-constitutes-a-programming-language-and-how-does-one-copyright-a-programming&quot;&gt;What constitutes a programming language and how does one copyright a programming language?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9535" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T12:57:53.150" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T12:57:53.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T18:41:48.843" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that is currently licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, and I would prefer, going forward, to switch to the Apache 2.0 license. I plan on contacting the original contributors to see if they are willing to relicense their old code, but I am not counting on the majority of users doing so. However, this is not a major problem, since BSD and Apache 2.0 are compatible, so long as I retain the original copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what's the best way to include the original copyright notice? Currently I have a single &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file that includes the BSD 3-clause license. I'm planning on adding an &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; file that will list all the contributors and which license their contributions are under (though this can also be inferred from the git history, if they haven't relicensed). The three obvious options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; files - &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;LICENSE_OLD&lt;/code&gt; (or something like this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A single &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file containing both the Apache 2.0 and BSD license with a notice about which applies to which parts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file containing the Apache 2.0 license, plus an &lt;code&gt;included_licenses/&lt;/code&gt; folder (or equivalent) that contains the BSD license (plus any other copyright notices necessary if I include code from other permissively licensed projects).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preference would be #2, but my main worry there is that when you use standard boilerplate, it's easier for GitHub or other programs to automatically categorize your project, and I fear that combining two licenses may cause problems down the line. #3 is fine but it does add a bit of clutter to the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are any of these approaches more standard than others? Are there any known tricky legal issues with any of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9045" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T21:30:11.483" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T21:30:11.483" Title="License file organization when moving from one permissive license to another?" Tags="|license-notice|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6182" CreationDate="2017-11-09T03:49:52.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you really needed to change your license terms, I would say have your &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file contain the Apache license. Make it a definite cut - this version is BSD - this version is Apache - the change is just a part of history. Present the project as an Apache licensed project, while the necessary files contain varying license info as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blender&lt;/a&gt; project, it is presented as a GPL project. You will also &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/release/text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;find 6 license files&lt;/a&gt; in the repo, while other licenses, such as zlib and  BSD are also in effect for certain files throughout the repo. A few years ago a portion of it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.blender.org/2013/08/cycles-render-engine-released-with-permissive-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;re-licensed under the Apache license&lt;/a&gt;, but as a whole, it is still considered and promoted as a GPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your file changes, alter the license header in the files you can and leave files you can't with the BSD license, then in the readme or the license section of your docs, state that the project is released under the Apache license and contains portions that are copyright xxx and available under the BSD license and that previous versions were released under a BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, I would suggest that if it is just for your preference, don't bother changing the license. If you have a legal reason, then go and change the license on as many files as you can. You may want to consider splitting some of your files that are in dispute, &lt;code&gt;foo/file_a.c&lt;/code&gt; is BSD code while &lt;code&gt;foo/file_b.c&lt;/code&gt; is Apache code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T03:49:52.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6121" CreationDate="2017-11-09T09:51:02.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;EDIT: while the content of this answer may still be interesting, the limitation of GitHub that is discussed is no longer relevant, as this is &lt;em&gt;now possible to assign an issue to anyone who comments it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the technical side, Github is not helping, as I can not assign an issue to someone who is not a member of the project. And I don't think making them a Github project member is a good idea at this step (or is it?). I created the &amp;quot;assigned&amp;quot; label to work around this problem, but it is not optimal as it does not say to whom the issue is assigned. I want to continue to use Github for issue tracking, though, as it has become a de facto standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While agreeing completely with Philippe's answer, I will try to answer to the technical sub-question here: indeed GitHub does not make it easy to assign issues to new contributors but there are workarounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is part of an organization (and only in this case), you may create a team in your organization (call it &amp;quot;External&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;New contributors&amp;quot; for instance) and give it &amp;quot;Read access&amp;quot; to your repository (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theozimmermann.net/images/teams-github.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this screenshot&lt;/a&gt; of the repository settings). When your repository is already public, giving read access basically amounts to giving no privileges, but it will allow you assigning issues to people in the team (they have first to accept the invitation though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use this to assign issues to newcomers, you should have a clear rule in your contributing guidelines that not communicating for a week (or any other predefined period) amounts to losing the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of this answer is drifting away from the original question but it might still be of interest to you: you can use &amp;quot;Write access&amp;quot; as the next level of privileges for people who have already contributed usefully a few times. If, at the same time, you protect your branches &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; activate the &amp;quot;Review requested&amp;quot; feature &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; restrict merging to a subset of contributors (possibly only administrators), then &amp;quot;Write access&amp;quot; will mean privilege to label / milestone / close / reopen / assign issues (and edit / delete comments), to mark a pull request as approved, but not to commit anything directly to a branch nor to merge pull requests. Then the next level of privilege can be permission to merge approved pull requests (leaving pushing on branches directly or merging unapproved pull requests to repo admins only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2022-04-12T13:28:30.037" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T13:28:30.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6191" CreationDate="2017-11-10T09:41:40.287" Score="6" ViewCount="5172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently received a &quot;surprise&quot; email asking a question about one of my GPL'ed projects, and referring to code downloaded from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/icaoberg/mimetex/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/icaoberg/mimetex/&lt;/a&gt; That was the first I ever heard about that GitHub project! Moreover, that code's now out-of-date compared with the code that I've been maintaining (ever since I originally wrote every single line of it) at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rereading the GPL, as best I can interpret it, I don't see it prohibiting that GitHub project... But I'd like to prohibit it! That is, you can use my code for your own purposes, under the GPL license restrictions, but I don't want you simply re-releasing it as your GitHub (or any other similar repository) fork or project. Especially not when your fork just lies there and gets stale. But really not at all: I'll be the maintainer of my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So How do I say that, license-wise? Right now, my code has a GPL comment block at the very top that looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/****************************************************************************&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright(c) 2002-2017, John Forkosh Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.&#xA; *           http://www.forkosh.com   mailto: john@forkosh.com&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; * This file is part of mimeTeX, which is free software. You may redistribute&#xA; * and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License,&#xA; * version 3 or later, as published by the Free Software Foundation.&#xA; *      MimeTeX is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA; * WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, not even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY.&#xA; * See the GNU General Public License for specific details.&#xA; *      By using mimeTeX, you warrant that you have read, understood and&#xA; * agreed to these terms and conditions, and that you possess the legal&#xA; * right and ability to enter into this agreement and to use mimeTeX&#xA; * in accordance with it.&#xA; *      Your mimetex.zip distribution file should contain the file COPYING,&#xA; * an ascii text copy of the GNU General Public License, version 3.&#xA; * If not, point your browser to  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&#xA; * or write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,&#xA; * 59 Temple Place, Suite 330,  Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; * etc */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I modify that to incorporate these desired ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-------&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt; As per comment to Steve Barnes, below...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I should have made my objections clearer. The fork didn't bother me, per se. Indeed, it would be flattering if other developers picked up my code and kept working on it. But this guy just copied it to GitHub and never touched it, not then and not later. So it got stale. If you're going to fork a project, you should actually intend to do something, not just leave it for other people to unknowingly download years-old stale code, leaving the original developer to explain the problem. Why should I have to do more work because of his laziness, not even bothering to keep his own fork up-to-date?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T03:01:28.423" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T12:07:47.807" Title="How do I license, &quot;Use my code as per the GNU GPL, but don't put it on GitHub&quot;" Tags="|gpl|github|restrictions|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2017-11-10T13:05:28.803" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you use open source your wish is impossible.&#xA;Actually it is essential part of open source to allow the easy access and publish ability of the source code.&#xA;Todo so without notifying the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The are some limitations, e.g. changing the license, using in combination with some other licenses, switching the author ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have no right to let this version on github removed. But just ask the guy publishing to add a line to README to add you as author and the age of it, were the actual current code is. You can also ask to remove it. But the later is actually non open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T13:05:28.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6190" CreationDate="2017-11-10T14:49:23.517" Score="4" ViewCount="6190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent an hour looking for an answer to this question, although I would think a quite common situation, I did not get a totally clear answer to my specific case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am selling a (P)roduct which is distributed as binary. As a library to enable certain features I would like to make use of an (A)pache License Version 2.0-licensed code written by a 3rd party within that binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do that if I specifically state that I am using (A), include all copyright notices and include the Apache License 2.0 with reference to (A)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I made modifications in (A), does this change anything, am I still allowed to publish as a binary, and if so, am I obligated to state which modifications I made in (A)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7359" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T22:45:43.810" LastActivityDate="2022-01-21T07:23:33.487" Title="Apache License 2.0-licensed code included in commercial closed source software" Tags="|apache-2.0|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2017-11-11T05:37:34.183" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob wrote a GPL-licensed media player that I really liked, FooPlayer v1.0. Then Bob &quot;updated&quot; FooPlayer to 2.0 and decided to put ads in the software. He stopped offering the original 1.0 altogether. I didn't like that, so I found an old copy of 1.0 I had downloaded last year and uploaded it to GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What part of this process do you want to prevent? What you want simply isn't an open source license. As a licensee of an open source project I expect (and, indeed, am required to receive, per the Open Source Definition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the right to post an older version of the code that I like better,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the right to publicly archive the project in case it disappears, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be free from the onus of updating my mirror of a project if it happens to fall out of sync with mainline development (and if the project experiences a major fork, which branch am I supposed to sync with anyway?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to write a license that doesn't grant these rights, but you will not find a FLOSS license that suits your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to ask the maintainer of a clone of your project to please keep it up to date, or link to the &quot;mainline&quot; origin the you personally prefer, or to take down the out-of-date repo if it serves no purpose but to cause minor confusion. The maintainer of the copy is free to refuse. If your request is reasonable to them, they'll probably help you out. If instead the maintainer refuses your demands, seriously consider that they may have good reasons, and the license is operating exactly as intended -- after all, I am very proud to be hosting the ad-free FooPlayer 1.0, despite Bob's request that I take it down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T05:37:34.183" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6188" CreationDate="2017-11-11T06:20:12.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFAIK if you are simply linking to an Apache Licence 2.0 library your only obligations are to include attribution, copyright notices and disclaimer and you &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; modify the original code as long as you state that you have done so &lt;em&gt;not necessarily including details of what your modifications are&lt;/em&gt;. You don't even &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to release your modifications in source form &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; if your changes are fixing bugs or adding widely missed features it is considered good manners to at least offer them back to the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T06:20:12.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2017-11-11T06:31:05.790" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once you have Open Sourced some code other people can, and probably will, place it on other hosting services and there have been many times when everybody has been grateful for this because the original maintainer has moved on, lost interest or otherwise stopped maintaining the code and their original hosting has stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find an out of date copy of your code on GitHub simply raise a ticket to point people to the maintained copy or better yet fork their GitHub project to one of your own and double push your changes to your normal location and to your GitHub one. When people see a branch that is years later and 100s of pushes in advance of their one they will mostly use it. The additional benefit is that you might get some PRs from your GitHub repo that reduce your own maintenance effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To reduce your efforts&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I would also look at setting a mail auto-responder/rule that looks for the URL of the stale branch in the body of any message and automatically replies with something along the lines of &quot;If you are reporting a bug found in the code at httt.... please try the current, up to date code at .... before filing bug reports at .....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastEditorUserId="4659" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T07:21:16.560" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T07:21:16.560" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6196" CreationDate="2017-11-11T21:37:58.877" Score="9" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;When contributing to some of their projects, the FSF requires you to assign the copyright to your work to the FSF. As I'm German, I'm interested in whether this is compatible with German law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German copyright laws states (§ 29 Urheberrechtsgesetz):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Das Urheberrecht ist nicht übertragbar, es sei denn, es wird in&#xA;Erfüllung einer Verfügung von Todes wegen oder an Miterben im Wege der&#xA;Erbauseinandersetzung übertragen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Zulässig sind die Einräumung von Nutzungsrechten (§ 31),&#xA;schuldrechtliche Einwilligungen und Vereinbarungen zu&#xA;Verwertungsrechten sowie die in § 39 geregelten Rechtsgeschäfte über&#xA;Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This roughly translates to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The copyright is nontransferable, except via inheritance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Concession of usage rights, agreements under the law of&#xA;obligations, agreements to {utilization, exploitation}¹, and the legal&#xA;transactions about personal copyright rights ruled by § 39 are&#xA;permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§ 39 is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Der Inhaber eines Nutzungsrechts darf das Werk, dessen Titel oder&#xA;Urheberbezeichnung (§ 10 Abs. 1) nicht ändern, wenn nichts anderes&#xA;vereinbart ist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Änderungen des Werkes und seines Titels, zu denen&#xA;der Urheber seine Einwilligung nach Treu und Glauben nicht versagen&#xA;kann, sind zulässig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It roughly translates to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The bearer of a usage right may not modify the work, its title, or&#xA;author's designation unless agreed upon differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Modifications of the work and its title to which the author cannot&#xA;deny agreement in good faith are permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you cannot give your copyright away whilst still alive. And even if you die, you can only give it to people you can bequest stuff to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this situation, does the FSF not accept contributions by Germans? Does it apply any legal trick? Does it still require copyright assignments, hoping to be able to enforce them in different countries, even though the German contributors were not actually legally able to give their copyright away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One legal dodge I came up with is to just not tell the court or the entities they sue who the original author is, just that they got their copyright. But this would likely not work as the court or the entity they sue could request the copyright assignment signed by the author which states their name, letting the defendant know the author's nationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Idk how to translate this. It's a bit more than utilization. It's what media companies and publishers of books do with the songs, movies, or books they control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T12:40:33.960" Title="Copyright assignments in Germany" Tags="|copyright|law|contributor-agreements|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6195" CreationDate="2017-11-12T01:37:45.913" Score="3" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used the gpl3 license for a telegram bot.&#xA;I later realized that maybe it's not the best license since if someone forks my project, he is not distributing it, but it runs his own instance of the bot on his server and users contact the bot on telegram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I have read maybe the a-gpl license should better fit this case.&#xA;Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like that if someone forks my bot to create his own instance usable for users on telegram, he is forced to release the code and also to credit my project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9582" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T10:41:46.460" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T09:36:00.917" Title="gpl-3 vs agpl for a telegram bot" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6194" CreationDate="2017-11-12T08:00:18.123" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If that's what you want, then yes, the AGPL would be better. The GPL makes no restrictions on those who don't distribute the software but only make it available to interact with over a network. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T08:00:18.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6193" CreationDate="2017-11-12T08:33:07.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://script-ed.org/article/drafting-options-contributor-agreements-free-open-source-software-assignment-nonexclusive-licence-legal-consequences-comparative-analysis-german-law/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; &quot;Drafting Options for Contributor Agreements for Free and Open Source Software: Assignment, (Non)Exclusive Licence and Legal Consequences. A Comparative Analysis of German and US Law&quot; specifically deals with this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that copyright licenses and usage right can still be licensed in Germany with effects essentially similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of assignments, German law offers a number of ways an author or the owner of exclusive rights may authorize others to use and exploit a specific work: the granting of usage rights pursuant to s 31 of the Copyright Act and merely contractual agreements (see s 29 para 2 of the Copyright Act).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this I strongly encourage to read the full paper which covers the topic at great length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T08:33:07.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-12T13:05:45.523" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to calculate the inverse of a 4x4 matrix in a JavaScript application.  This goes well beyond my math capabilities, and doing some &quot;research&quot; (read: Googled it) I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/1148405&quot;&gt;Stack Overflow answer&lt;/a&gt; which works perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poster mentions that this particular implementation is from the MESA implementation of GLU, which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/glu.git/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The file containing the function starts with the following license notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA;* SGI FREE SOFTWARE LICENSE B (Version 2.0, Sept. 18, 2008)&#xA;* Copyright (C) 1991-2000 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;*&#xA;* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a&#xA;* copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;),&#xA;* to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation&#xA;* the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,&#xA;* and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the&#xA;* Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;*&#xA;* The above copyright notice including the dates of first publication and&#xA;* either this permission notice or a reference to&#xA;* http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/&#xA;* shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;*&#xA;* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS&#xA;* OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL&#xA;* SILICON GRAPHICS, INC. BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,&#xA;* WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF&#xA;* OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;* SOFTWARE.&#xA;*&#xA;* Except as contained in this notice, the name of Silicon Graphics, Inc.&#xA;* shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or&#xA;* other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from&#xA;* Silicon Graphics, Inc.&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of this license is that I'd need to include this license both with any source and &quot;binary&quot; (it is JavaScript after all) distributions, and in theory, the mentioned Stack Overflow answer should also include it.  Is this correct, or am I misinterpreting its requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've additionally made small changes to it, to make it parse as JavaScript and to remove a temporary variable.  Would I need to identify these changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;function InvertMatrix(from, to) {&#xA;    /* This is based on the MESA GLU source, as originally seen at https://stackoverflow.com/a/1148405. */&#xA;    /*&#xA;    * SGI FREE SOFTWARE LICENSE B (Version 2.0, Sept. 18, 2008)&#xA;    * Copyright (C) 1991-2000 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;    *&#xA;    * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a&#xA;    * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;),&#xA;    * to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation&#xA;    * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,&#xA;    * and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the&#xA;    * Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;    *&#xA;    * The above copyright notice including the dates of first publication and&#xA;    * either this permission notice or a reference to&#xA;    * http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/&#xA;    * shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;    *&#xA;    * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS&#xA;    * OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;    * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL&#xA;    * SILICON GRAPHICS, INC. BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,&#xA;    * WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF&#xA;    * OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;    * SOFTWARE.&#xA;    *&#xA;    * Except as contained in this notice, the name of Silicon Graphics, Inc.&#xA;    * shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or&#xA;    * other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from&#xA;    * Silicon Graphics, Inc.&#xA;    */&#xA;&#xA;    to[0] = from[5] * from[10] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[5] * from[11] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[9] * from[6] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[9] * from[7] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[13] * from[6] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[13] * from[7] * from[10];&#xA;&#xA;    to[4] = -from[4] * from[10] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[11] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[6] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[7] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[6] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[7] * from[10];&#xA;&#xA;    to[8] = from[4] * from[9] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[11] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[5] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[7] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[5] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[7] * from[9];&#xA;&#xA;    to[12] = -from[4] * from[9] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[10] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[5] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[6] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[5] * from[10] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[6] * from[9];&#xA;&#xA;    to[1] = -from[1] * from[10] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[1] * from[11] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[9] * from[2] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[9] * from[3] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[13] * from[2] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[13] * from[3] * from[10];&#xA;&#xA;    to[5] = from[0] * from[10] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[0] * from[11] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[2] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[3] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[2] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[3] * from[10];&#xA;&#xA;    to[9] = -from[0] * from[9] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[0] * from[11] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[1] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[3] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[1] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[3] * from[9];&#xA;&#xA;    to[13] = from[0] * from[9] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[0] * from[10] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[1] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[2] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[1] * from[10] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[2] * from[9];&#xA;&#xA;    to[2] = from[1] * from[6] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[1] * from[7] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[5] * from[2] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[5] * from[3] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[13] * from[2] * from[7] -&#xA;        from[13] * from[3] * from[6];&#xA;&#xA;    to[6] = -from[0] * from[6] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[0] * from[7] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[2] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[3] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[2] * from[7] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[3] * from[6];&#xA;&#xA;    to[10] = from[0] * from[5] * from[15] -&#xA;        from[0] * from[7] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[1] * from[15] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[3] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[1] * from[7] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[3] * from[5];&#xA;&#xA;    to[14] = -from[0] * from[5] * from[14] +&#xA;        from[0] * from[6] * from[13] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[1] * from[14] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[2] * from[13] -&#xA;        from[12] * from[1] * from[6] +&#xA;        from[12] * from[2] * from[5];&#xA;&#xA;    to[3] = -from[1] * from[6] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[1] * from[7] * from[10] +&#xA;        from[5] * from[2] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[5] * from[3] * from[10] -&#xA;        from[9] * from[2] * from[7] +&#xA;        from[9] * from[3] * from[6];&#xA;&#xA;    to[7] = from[0] * from[6] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[0] * from[7] * from[10] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[2] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[3] * from[10] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[2] * from[7] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[3] * from[6];&#xA;&#xA;    to[11] = -from[0] * from[5] * from[11] +&#xA;        from[0] * from[7] * from[9] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[1] * from[11] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[3] * from[9] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[1] * from[7] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[3] * from[5];&#xA;&#xA;    to[15] = from[0] * from[5] * from[10] -&#xA;        from[0] * from[6] * from[9] -&#xA;        from[4] * from[1] * from[10] +&#xA;        from[4] * from[2] * from[9] +&#xA;        from[8] * from[1] * from[6] -&#xA;        from[8] * from[2] * from[5];&#xA;&#xA;    var determinant = from[0] * to[0] + from[1] * to[4] + from[2] * to[8] + from[3] * to[12];&#xA;&#xA;    if (!determinant) throw &quot;Failed to invert a matrix&quot;&#xA;&#xA;    determinant = 1.0 / determinant;&#xA;&#xA;    for (i = 0; i &amp;lt; 16; i++)&#xA;        to[i] *= determinant;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(moved from &lt;a href=&quot;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/posts/180218&quot;&gt;https://codereview.stackexchange.com/posts/180218&lt;/a&gt; by request)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9585" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T19:17:17.813" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T19:17:17.813" Title="Using a &quot;paraphrasing&quot; of a function from MESA's GLU" Tags="|license-notice|sgi-b|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-12T19:19:32.177" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T19:19:32.177" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T19:19:32.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-12T19:19:32.177" Score="0" Body="for questions about the SGI Free Software License B (SGI-B-1.0, SGI-B-1.1,  SGI-B-2.0)" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T12:42:04.370" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T12:42:04.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6201" CreationDate="2017-11-12T21:08:39.227" Score="4" ViewCount="797" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm working on a GPLv3-only project, and find some code licensed as GPL3+. Can I incorporate that code freely in my software without changing my license? If a hypothetical GPL v4 is released, does that mean that my program is suddenly both GPL v3 and GPL v4 compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9574" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T22:12:26.200" Title="Is GPLv3-only compatible with GPLv3+?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6200" CreationDate="2017-11-12T22:12:26.200" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual text of a GPLv3+ grant is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License...; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The option is &lt;em&gt;yours&lt;/em&gt; as the redistributor. The &quot;either&quot; language means that you may opt to distribute the work under the GPLv3 only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The virtually identical case of GPLv2+ code into GPLv2-only project is marked OK &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt;, with the annotation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must follow the terms of GPLv2 when incorporating the code in this case. You cannot take advantage of terms in later versions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T22:12:26.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T04:23:03.720" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that is a resume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resume, and the data contained within it are the heart of the project and written in a data format (XML).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also, however, a style sheet written in XSLT that transforms the XML data into a graphical output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release the whole project under one license and since the heart of the project is the resume data, which is not at all software, it seems like Creative Commons would be the correct approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is some software process involved in the project and it is impossible to separate out just the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I use a software license for this or a Creative Commons license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainly I am just interested in the larger distinction between a &quot;Software&quot; license, such as the MIT license, and a creative works license which are &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly not for software&lt;/a&gt; however, the only restriction I care about is attributions. I just don't want someone able to pass the project or data contained as his or her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9587" LastEditorUserId="9587" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T06:11:20.810" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T15:58:43.383" Title="What license should I use with a project that is primarily data?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6214" CreationDate="2017-11-13T09:26:49.417" Score="1" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm working on a PHP application and I want to integrate some PHP packages like TWIG. Using Composer or some other automated management or code assisting technologies is irrelevant here. All included packages will have the MIT license, plus a couple of packages with the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I'm gonna have my own folder structure for allocating third-party packages. For this example, it will be &lt;code&gt;/libraries&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A regular installation of TWIG looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/doc&#xA;/lib&#xA;/src&#xA;/test&#xA;.editorconfig&#xA;.gitignore&#xA;.php_cs.dist&#xA;.travis.yml&#xA;CHANGELOG&#xA;LICENSE&#xA;README.rst&#xA;composer.json&#xA;phpunit.xml.dist&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to do is to have the &lt;code&gt;src&lt;/code&gt; folder contents allocated in &lt;code&gt;/libraries/twig&lt;/code&gt; or even &lt;code&gt;/libraries/twig/twig&lt;/code&gt; (if I want to mimic the package naming convention onto the folder structure, so I could integrate the TWIG extensions package into something like &lt;code&gt;/libraries/twig/extensions&lt;/code&gt; and so on...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't know if I must retain ALL files and folders (like Composer does when you add &lt;code&gt;twig/twig&lt;/code&gt; as a dependency) or just the bare minimum (maybe the bare minimum plus the LICENSE file). I'm not going to modify any of the source files, just use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible or does this conflicts with the licensing terms for the package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9589" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T23:53:12.790" Title="can I remove files and folders in a PHP package without violating its license?" Tags="|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6205" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6207" CreationDate="2017-11-13T13:12:52.577" Score="0" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to understand rules that I only read but never understood completely. I'm asking here some clarifications.&#xA;I read that GPLv2 licence imposes that a developer, developing a software using codes with GPLv2 licenses, must release it with the same GPLv2 licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a user asks a developer to create a software for a system (machine) using different licence types. What type of licence will have the developed codes? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if the developer uses just some libraries with GPLv2 licences, is he obliged to make public the whole code for this system? And what about, if the user wants to sell several of these systems? Should the developer release the code mandatory or can he release only the executable?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I know that a software with a GPLv2 licence running on a OS, does not oblige that OS to be with GPLv2 licence. But what about if I create a SaaS using software with GPLv2 licence? Also all the software developed to make my Saas on the server has to be with a GPLv2 licence? For example, I know &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rollapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.rollapp.com/&lt;/a&gt; that make a lot of GPLv2 applications run directly on the browser. Are these guys obliged to make their code with GPLv2 licence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the last two concerns, but with another type of licence, like MIT licence, or BSD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, could you suggest a method on how to manage all these type of information when you face different libraries with different licences?         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9590" LastEditorUserId="9590" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T13:51:49.427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:19:59.680" Title="Explanation about open source codes and licences" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|mit|gpl-2|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-12T13:47:34.793" Score="-1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to publish a software, which tests are written with googletest framework. I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/googletest/blob/master/googletest/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;googletest license&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not going to publish the source code or any modifications of it, or compiled binaries from it, just the test code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just using parts of googletest on my own and publish the test code so everyone can use these parts in the same way. What does my license have to consider?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Daniel Hammerl" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T06:53:47.770" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T06:53:47.770" Title="What do I have to consider if I'm publishing software, where parts of it are written with another software under BSD license?" Tags="|bsd|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6205" CreationDate="2017-11-13T16:10:24.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking several questions at once. I will try to answer them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a client hires a developer to create something for them, meaning that there is a contract between the client and the developer (or the developer's employer) to create something, then the only obligation of the developer is to provide the product and all source code contained therein to the client. This is independent of the copyright licenses involved and generally the developer doesn't have the right to provide the code to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a product contains code licensed under the GPLv2 license and that product is distributed to third parties (either as a downloadable package/executable, on a storage medium or as part of a physical product), then &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software in that product must be licensed under a GPLv2-compatible open-source license and it must be possible for people that have the product to obtain a copy of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;From the GPLv3 and later, you are required to include the information and/or security keys that are needed to update the software on a physical device. With GPLv2, this is not needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the product is not distributed (for example, it is only use in-house or only made available as SaaS), then there is no requirement to provide any source code or to license your own code in a particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD licenses are more permissive than the GPL license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you only use MIT and/or BSD licensed libraries in your product that you distribute, then your only obligation is to mention that you are using those libraries and which license they use. You are not required to use a particular license for your own code and you are not required to provide your code to anyone either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:19:59.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:19:59.680" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6206" CreationDate="2017-11-13T16:21:11.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Test is released under the 3-clause BSD license, which is a permissive license that does not try to impose any license restrictions on projects that use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your project is &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; Google Test and not modifying it in any way, you are completely free in your choice of license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:20:42.283" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:20:42.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6215" CreationDate="2017-11-15T17:19:20.117" Score="2" ViewCount="1268" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open source version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/shiny-server/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shiny Server&lt;/a&gt; is released with AGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along my interpretation of the AGPL, this means that all the code that is deployed on the Shiny Server has to be released with (A)GPL v3, and whoever interacts with the code has to have access to the source as well. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I presume my code would run in the same process as the AGPL code,&#xA;hence it would make a combined program. Is this correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, I have the obligation to convey it, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9605" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T05:53:33.043" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T05:53:33.043" Title="Interpretation of AGPL with Shiny Server" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6213" CreationDate="2017-11-15T18:30:28.107" Score="1" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently producing an application for a client, where I'm writing all the source code myself from scratch. The client is paying me a one-off fee for development work. The plan is for the client to receive the source code along with the compiled application as the application has a long expected lifetime and the client may need to modify or refer to the source code in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I specifically want to permit the client to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify the source code for their own use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transfer the source code (modified or unmodified) or compiled application to someone else under an open-source license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I specifically want to prohibit the client from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transferring the source code or the compiled application to someone else under a proprietary license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transferring the source code and selling the modified source code or resulting compiled application to someone else under a proprietary license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't care if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client is able to distribute the source code or compiled application to the public under an open-source license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client is able to modify and distribute the source code without returning the modified code to me (in fact I'd prefer it if they didn't have this restriction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In plain English, what I want is &quot;you can modify this source code as you require for your own use without giving it to anyone else, if you give binaries to someone else then you have to provide the source code and if you give source code to someone else then the person you give it to must be bound by the same restrictions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me it seems that the GPL fits here quite nicely. Is there a more appropriate license that I should use rather?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I also be able to re-use the source code that I have written under another license later on? My understanding is that the GPL refers specifically to the receiving party, so if someone receives source code under the GPL then they are bound by the same license if they distribute or transfer it to anyone else (modified or unmodified) meaning that they themselves have to provide the source code under the GPL, but as the original producer of the source code I am not bound by the GPL. So I am free to re-use the code later in another way and distribute it under another license, because I did not receive it under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8950" LastEditorUserId="8950" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T18:35:57.453" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T22:17:55.750" Title="Is this an appropriate use of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6212" CreationDate="2017-11-15T19:18:18.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, I think the GPL fits your needs precisely.  I do exactly the same thing myself, in my own consultancy business; point 4(ii) of my &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gatekeeper.ltd.uk/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms and conditions&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright in all original code, configuration files, documentation and copy is and remains the property of the Company, and these are provided to the Client under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (or, at the Client's discretion, any later version). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clients do occasionally cavil at this, but I'm not flexible on the point; I refuse to be bound from re-using work I've done if I find I can later usefully do so.  Most clients who do balk reverse their positions when I point out I may be able to solve their problems considerably more quickly and cheaply because I'm lawfully re-using work that I've done for some other client, earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would I also be able to re-use the source code that I have written under another license later on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to which the answer is yes; as long as you retain copyright in what you create you may always &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;re-license it as you choose&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: in answer to your question below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;doesn't the GPL have a requirement to return modified source to the original distributor &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this is not a requirement.  If you receive software under the GPL and modify it, but you do not convey your modified software to anyone else, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you do not have to release your source modifications&lt;/a&gt; to anyone at all.  If you do convey it, you must disclose source (and build tools, etc.) to whomsoever you convey it to, but there is still no obligation to contribute those changes to the original author.  The recipient is of course free to do so if you don't, but you are not obliged to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T22:17:55.750" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T22:17:55.750" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6204" CreationDate="2017-11-15T21:57:06.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both MIT and the (Lesser) General Public License explicitly allow modifying the software. So if you want to remove files, rename or rearrange them, you are allowed to do this. Treat your changes the same as any other modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not going to modify any of the source files, just use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modification means reproducing something other than an exact copy. This means renaming, removing, or changing the directory structure of the project is a modification, since the result is no longer an exact copy. From the General Public License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work&#xA;  in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of&#xA;  an exact copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T23:53:12.790" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T23:53:12.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6211" CreationDate="2017-11-15T22:05:17.613" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a server program is licensed with an Open Source license, the license terms apply to the server software itself, not to your own files that you host using that server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the Affero GPL, your obligations are the same as for the GPL unless if you modify the server software. The relevant part of the AGPL is as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, &lt;strong&gt;if you modify the&#xA;  Program&lt;/strong&gt;, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting &#xA;  with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports&#xA;  such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source&#xA;  of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a&#xA;  network server at no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I presume my code would run in the same process as the AGPL code,&#xA;  hence it would make a combined program is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hosting an executable file with a server does not make that executable file and the server program a combined work. The GPL refers to this situation as an &quot;aggregate&quot; (empasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent&#xA;  works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,&#xA;  and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,&#xA;  in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an&#xA;  “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not&#xA;  used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users&#xA;  beyond what the individual works permit. &lt;strong&gt;Inclusion of a covered work&#xA;  in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other&#xA;  parts of the aggregate&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T07:48:40.563" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T07:48:40.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6216" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T01:41:52.380" Score="8" ViewCount="871" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was considering porting some code into a new language.&#xA;I got as far as opening the file and seeing the header which referred to some licensing situations that I am not comfortable with (a crayon license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several people have written documentation for this code, summarizing what it does.&#xA;When they made their own ports (in ignorance of the licensing situation).&#xA;Thus those docs are almost certainly written by people who have seen the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clean room design&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be re-implemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case the docs written by prior ports are the specification.&#xA;I assert that for this particular case the docs can clearly not contain copyright material (because they only refer what the existing code does, not how it does it), so the lawyer step can be skipped,&#xA;Which thus leaves me as the person re-implementing the specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T05:58:41.360" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T05:32:13.937" Title="Can I cleanroom code by myself, if public specifications already exist?" Tags="|specifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T13:35:31.217" Score="3" ViewCount="863" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I’m using an official cordova plugin licensed under Apache License Version 2.0 in my commercial product, am I allowed to sell it (the source code of my product to another party) under two different licenses (my license + Apache v 2.0 license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, I developed and designed a mobile app which uses Camera and Contacts plugins both licensed under Apache License Version 2.0. However, I did not modify the code of any of the said plugins, so it's not a derivative work according to Apache License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I'm building a wrapper around the plugins, but I don't interefere in their original code. I know that the license allows me to even sell such a plugin without modifications as long as I do it under the Apache License Version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that I could modify the source code of the plugin and then sell these modifications under my own license, but I'd still have to provide license and attribution for the original code that hasn't been altered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'd like to know is if I'm allowed to sell the product where one license would refer to the code that's completely separable from the cordova plugins that would be subjected to the Apache License Version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9612" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T09:05:16.637" Title="Private license and Apache License Version 2.0 in one commercial product?" Tags="|apache-2.0|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6221" CreationDate="2017-11-16T17:07:13.150" Score="4" ViewCount="1378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a little project, and I consider making it open source (GPLv3). But there is one little problem: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few lines of code I don't want to show off to the public because of a security reason. The reason is because the contents of the function could 'give away' secret keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I do something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;void aFunction&#xA;  {&#xA;    //Hidden because of security reason&#xA;  }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without this function, the program complies but doesn't fully work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8247" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T05:46:21.070" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T18:53:25.073" Title="Can I hide a few lines of code because of security reasons?" Tags="|gpl-3|software|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6219" CreationDate="2017-11-16T18:55:34.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two different issues here: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a legal &quot;May I...?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a technical &quot;Should I...?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the legal side, there is one major case where this would not be allowed. If your project uses someone else's code that is under the GPL (or other copyleft license), then the terms of the GPL require your code to also be licensed as a whole under the GPL when you choose to distribute it. If you choose to distribute the code in binary form, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; an issue arises, because the GPL requires that you accompany distribution of GPL'd binaries with their full corresponding source code. Omitting &lt;code&gt;aFunction&lt;/code&gt; in the program's corresponding source would be a GPL violation, since you distributed a derivative of someone else's GPL-licensed code in binary form but failed to share the complete corresponding source of the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole author of the code, or distribute the incomplete source only, or are not using a copyleft license that requires corresponding source alongside binaries, then you do not have this issue. For example, the permissive MIT/X11 license requires &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; corresponding source to accompany a binary, so if you choose to share almost everything except one function, you're going above and beyond what such a permissive license requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the technical side, the fact that you feel the need to do this strongly suggests some kind of inferior &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;security through obscurity&lt;/a&gt;. This is captured in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kerckhoffs's principle&lt;/a&gt;, which may be summarized as, &quot;The security of a system should depend entirely on the secrecy of a random key value. It should not be a problem if an attacker learns how the system operates.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a security system that relies on its operation remaining secret rather than on a random key value, it probably is not a very strong security system. (All serious modern cryptographic systems are designed with this principle in mind.) When distributing your source code, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; keep the key secret, but simply provide users a way to generate or provide their own key(s). The key is not code within the software system; it is a configuration value provided to the system. (I have a related answer for the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5649/50&quot;&gt;Open Source Projects with Encryption Keys&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if your secret system is a system for flagging bad behaviors (e.g., Stack Exchange bans users after a they match a secret pattern of bad behavior) and you keep it secret to keep users from skirting the line, I still think configurable-values are the way to go. Don't write you system to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;after 3 bad actions, ban the user for 24 hours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;after &lt;em&gt;N&lt;/em&gt; bad actions (which is the set of actions in {&lt;em&gt;A&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,...}), ban for &lt;em&gt;H&lt;/em&gt; hours&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where N, {A}, and H are values specified by the administrator running the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T18:55:34.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6219" CreationDate="2017-11-16T21:16:57.893" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not generally required&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; to release any secret keys necessary to make an application run. Instead, users can obtain their own key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, redacting your source code is not a suitable approach, for the primary reason that this is inconvenient and risky for you. When you publish a new version of the code you have to make sure to always redact it. If you are publishing via a version control system such as Git, you have to make sure that no published version in the whole history of the project contains these secrets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of redacting that code, make it configurable. Store the secrets in a configuration file or in environment variables (both have different risks). It is easier to prevent a config file from being checked into version control than to prevent only the contents of a single function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to redact behaviour rather than data such as keys, then this becomes more complicated, both legally and technically: you could extract the sensitive behaviour into plugins of your application. However, that may be problematic if you accept outside contributions to your software and if you would like to distribute these plugins, since in-process plugins to a GPL system must also be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]: If you are embedding GPLv3 software in a “User Product” and you are able to update the software of such a device, then you must also give recipients of the software the means to update the device with their modifications. This may involve providing keys, e.g. for signed bootloaders.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T18:53:25.073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T18:53:25.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6216" CreationDate="2017-11-17T14:01:28.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A clean room design is a &lt;em&gt;preventative defence strategy&lt;/em&gt; in anticipation of copyright infringement claims. The idea is that a new creative work cannot infringe on the copyright of an earlier work if the new work's authors did not view the earlier work. A clean room design process implements this isolation by having different people handle reverse-engineering of the earlier work and creating the new work, with the two groups only communicating via a spec that can be more easily reviewed for non-infringement. If the two works have any similarities that would otherwise look like infringement, this process demonstrates that those similarities might merely be a consequence of the nature of the problem, and not a copied creative expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it is a preventative defence strategy, the value of clean room design manifests itself only when someone claims infringement against you. If that is unlikely to ever happen, you might feel comfortable with a bit of risk without taking further steps to mitigate it. Note that even with a clean room process, you can never entirely eliminate the risk of being sued for infringement and the risk of losing such a trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you already have some kind of specification then sure, you can work from that. However, your claim that documentation of the earlier work may represent a non-infringing specification for the earlier work is highly dubious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several people have written documentation for this code, summarizing what it does. […] So in this case the docs written by prior ports are the specification. I assert that for this particular case the docs can clearly not contain copyright material (because they only refer what the existing code does, not how it does it), so the lawyer step can be skipped&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first problem is that there is a potential chain of infringement here. From the earlier work other (potentially infringing) ports were written, from which (potentially still infringing) documentation was created, on which you would base your reimplementation. It is entirely feasible that the other ports are not infringing, but basing your work on other ports does not necessarily isolate you from infringing the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem is that you argue that documentation of a software system cannot infringe on the copyright of that software system itself. However, copyright doesn't just protect implementation details. It protects creative expression, which may also manifest itself in the design of the software system, for example in user interfaces or the structure and organization (and naming) of APIs. If those are covered by the documentation, then reimplementing the documented design may very well infringe. Documentation is often more like a design document than a specification. And in any case, documentations, design documents, and specifications can all be creative works and therefore subject to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a third point, you suggest that this were “clearly” non-infringing and therefore “the lawyer step can be skipped”. This misses the point of a clean-room process, which is to reduce as far as possible your risk of getting your newer work ruled as infringing. Getting your your process and various documents within that process review by legal experts is a core part of that.  Clean-room reimplementation isn't a cargo-cult dance to please the copyright gods, but a legal strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it is difficult to implement a clean-room design on your own, and unlikely that your proposed process would stand up to scrutiny. This does not mean that you cannot reimplement the earlier work, or that you should ignore all practices of a clean room process. If you believe you can reimplement the earlier work without infringement then you can do that in good faith with or without a clean room process. But you may still value the future ability to testify before a court that you didn't look at the earlier work's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T14:01:28.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T19:03:35.627" Score="3" ViewCount="1866" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I take MIT licensed code, modify it, then use the modified code, is it still neccesary to attribute it to the original author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this change if the project using the modified code is licensed under other licenses besides MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of special way of doing this if so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9624" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T10:07:36.723" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T07:42:58.390" Title="Is it still necessary to attribute MIT code if it has been modified?" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|attribution|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6225" CreationDate="2017-11-17T19:14:34.443" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a new MIT-licensed OSS project and use other software with different licenses (MIT, GPLv3, no license), what is the best way to create a compliant repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We thought of adding a LICENSE.md with the MIT license and LICENSES.md with a collection of the used projects and links to their licenses or to the repo/gist if no license present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for the copyright, is it enough to include it in the included source files themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a Ethereum project and therefore no binaries are declared as dependencies, but the source files have to be included themselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9625" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T10:06:33.177" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T10:06:33.177" Title="Using OSS of different licenses in MIT-licensed software" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6224" CreationDate="2017-11-17T21:02:30.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a software system uses components under different licenses, then it must satisfy the requirements of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; licenses. This can be impossible since some licenses contain contradictory terms. I recommend you read each license you use, though the GPL is admittedly rather long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few pointers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No explicit license means “all rights reserved”. You cannot use unlicensed software unless you're the copyright holder yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that any code using the GPL'ed code can only be published if it is also licensed under the GPL. Therefore, an MIT-licensed project that depends on GPL-licensed components &lt;em&gt;cannot be published&lt;/em&gt;. The reverse (a GPL licensed project depending on MIT components) would be perfectly possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your mentioned license combination (MIT depending on GPL and depending on unlicensed software) it is not possible to publish that project. To achieve compliance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You would have to obtain a suitable license for the unlicensed software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to use GPL components, you have to publish your code under the GPL. If that is not possible, you need to find another library for that functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with the Ethereum execution model. This may influence how you can use GPL software, which may add further complications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You automatically have copyright for any creative work (incl. computer programs) that you create. You should state your your copyright at least in a LICENSE and/or README file. Many people recommend that you start each source file with a license header that includes a copyright statement, the project it belongs to, and indicates the license (in case of MIT, you can put the whole license in each file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to have a compliant system, a project with dependencies usually need not display the licenses of dependencies. However, most licenses require that you do display the license if you distribute the dependencies as well, e.g. when you compile your system to a binary or when you package your system as a self-contained source code bundle. Since the licenses of dependencies are part of your system's license, you could put all copyright and license information into a LICENSE file. Having both a LICENSE and LICENSES file would be confusing. If you store the licenses of dependencies separately, do note that in your LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T21:02:30.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6223" CreationDate="2017-11-19T07:42:58.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No license allows you to take copyright ownership away from an author, all authors of the source code should always be attributed. As you contribute to the project, your name can be added to the list of authors and will be included along with the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some source files contain a list of contributor names at the top of each file with the license. Some projects maintain a list of contributors separate from the code, this may be in a specific file or part of the documentation. After contributing, your name can be added using whichever method is used by the project. In either case, it is common to use the version control software to record who contributed which specific part of a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are merging a portion of an open source project into your own project, then the original authors names and licenses must stay intact. To comply with licensing terms, you may need to add some documentation stating - &lt;code&gt;Portions of the project have been copied from projectX and is copyrighted by yyyy under the terms of the zzz license.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T07:42:58.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6218" CreationDate="2017-11-19T08:29:20.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license is a permissive license and is considered commercial friendly. It allows you to include the code in a commercial product without having to release your code or the changes you make to the Apache licensed code, though it is encouraged and considered polite to share any changes you do make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you are correct in that your project is not a derivative work of the project, but you are still bundling the project with your distribution so you still need to give attribution within your documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T08:29:20.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6232" CreationDate="2017-11-20T19:02:44.867" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are using some of my pre-existing, personally copyrighted open source software libraries at my employer. Recently they have asked me to &quot;fix&quot; the copyright so that it is theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no objection to them owning a version of the code, i.e. that they own the copyright to, however, I want to retain the ownership and copyright of the original code as it existed before I came here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reasonably painless way to achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9636" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T15:57:44.703" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T09:03:09.713" Title="Can I assign a 2nd copyright to my employer" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6230" CreationDate="2017-11-21T09:55:25.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, you have in the past written some software which you have taken into and used at your current job.  Your employer has paid you to make certain changes to it for them, and they now wish to own the copyright to the resulting program.  You wish to retain it, and are curious how to address the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the copyright in the original program, and there is the copyright in any changes made since you brought the code into your place of work.  The current program is therefore something with two copyright interests in it.  Any given copyright can be owned by only one entity, so abandon any idea that you can both own either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You own the copyright in the program you wrote before you started work for your current employer, assuming (if you were at that time in work for someone else) that you did it in your spare time and that your then-contract of employment didn't have one of those nasty &lt;em&gt;we-own-everything-you-do-while-in-our-employ&lt;/em&gt; clauses.  Depending on the law in your jurisdiction, it is likely that the copyright in the changes made by you in the course of your current job are owned by your employer, as a work-for-hire.  So the program as-is is fairly heavily entangled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could leave your current job and redo the work you did to bring the program to its current state, but that would be a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; way from a cleanroom reimplementation of the program, and your employer could at a later time bring an action asserting that your new changes violated their copyright on your old changes.  Essentially, neither of you owns anything useful on its own: you own an old work that you can't bring up-to-date without putting yourself in jeopardy, and they own a shiny new set of changes that only make sense when applied to something they don't own.  No wonder they want to sort this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best outcome I can see for you is that everyone keeps what they have now, but you agree to &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt; the original program to them under the terms of the GNU GPL, in exchange for them giving you a copy of the current program under those same terms.  They are then free to use the program as they wish within the enterprise without needing to own the copyright; this is well-understood.  Any copies they transmit outside the enterprise, including the one they give to you, must be licensed under the GPL.  You'll have an unencumbered copy that you can copy / develop / reuse as you would wish, as long as it stays under GPL.  You won't be able to relicense the work, but &lt;em&gt;you don't have the right to do that now&lt;/em&gt; (see above) so no loss there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next-best outcome is that you agree to transfer copyright in the old work to them, in exchange for a copy of the current work under the terms of GNU GPL.  That leaves you the same as in the previous example, but they now have the right to relicense the work (though not the copy you have, which is irrevocably under GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see many cheery outcomes apart from those two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T09:03:09.713" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T09:03:09.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6240" CreationDate="2017-11-21T17:16:00.427" Score="33" ViewCount="7750" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say some company is developing a software component licensed under GPLv2. The company never intends to release the software to the public because they are only installing it on their internal servers, which are not exposed to people outside of the company. Hence, the software is never &quot;distributed&quot; in the conventional GPLv2 sense (notice I am not referring to the AGPL here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would happen if an intruder hacked into the company, found the software, and exposed it to the public? Would the public be allowed to accept the terms of the GPLv2 and use, modify, and distribute the software in compliance the terms and conditions outlined by the GPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T06:49:05.100" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T15:31:29.767" Title="Is illegally obtained GPLv2 software still subject to the terms and conditions of the GPL?" Tags="|law|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6237" CreationDate="2017-11-21T17:52:14.857" Score="35" ViewCount="11353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish code for an application under an open source license like BSD, MIT, or Apache 2 which allows for changes and derivative works to be contributed back to the open source project or kept fully proprietary if the developer wishes, but where the code or derivative works can never be re-licensed under a GPL/Copyleft license. My concern is some group taking my code, relicensing it as GPL/copyleft, and then amassing enough momentum behind their GPL fork to dilute the momentum of the proprietary-able, commercial-friendly open source version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, users/companies may:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute binaries without the source code (proprietary product)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute source code with or without their additions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Submit changes back to the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But may &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take code from the project and re-license it as GPL or any other form of license which COMPELS a user or company to distribute the source of their derivative works, making it untenable for use in corporate environments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license or generally accepted clause that could be added to the BSD or Apache 2 license to accomplish this intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9645" LastEditorUserId="9645" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T14:02:20.497" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T19:07:53.260" Title="Is there a generally accepted &quot;anti-copyleft&quot; clause or license?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyleft|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2017-11-21T17:57:24.840" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem here is at a more fundamental level than the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not force you to publish your code under the GPL. It is still the right of the copyright holder to decide &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; the software shall be published at all. But if the software is published, it can only be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intruder never lawfully obtained a license to the GPL program, therefore they are unable to distribute it under the GPL. While the source code may have the GPL license attached, it was never published under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 does not address this point explicitly, since in this scenario local laws would likely take precedence over provisions in the GPL. In contrast, the GPLv2 allows you to “distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium”. But my take is that the license would not have taken effect and such terms would be inapplicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 section 4 is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This protects downstream license recipients from having their license terminated if an intermediary &lt;em&gt;violates&lt;/em&gt; the license, e.g. starts distributing the software in a non-compliant way. But in this scenario, the intruder &lt;em&gt;never received&lt;/em&gt; a valid license and therefore never had the ability to issue licenses to downstream recipients. I would therefore assume that any use of the stolen software would be a copyright violation, regardless of the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T17:57:24.840" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2017-11-21T17:59:11.367" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual caveat: IANAL/IANYL.  That said, a statement of intent is not usually considered a binding undertaking, and stolen goods are stolen goods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A licence does not inhere in software, it is associated with it through the act of conveyance (as defined in GNU GPL v3).  One receives a piece of code under GPLv3, or MIT, or CDDL, or whatever licence it is conveyed under, and thereafter the recipient of that copy is bound by those obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were not so, then the same program could not be conveyed by its copyright holder to different individuals under different licence terms, as happens with (eg ) MySQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the GPL is not associated with that software until it is lawfully conveyed, with the blessing of the copyright holder, and that has not happened in this case.  The software is stolen goods, pure and simple, and you should not have a copy if you can avoid it.  Even less should you be thinking of modifying and propagating further copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: David Schwarz is making an interesting argument in the comments that is a bit long for a comments field, so I address it here.  If I understand aright, he claims that a licence must inhere in software because otherwise you could not e.g. bind and permit the recipient of GPLed software to themselves be obliged, when they convey it, to convey it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unpersuaded.  When I buy a house, I am obliged to pay the previous owner a sum of money in order to possess the house lawfully.  This requirement is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; inherent in the house, otherwise (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) a given house would have only one price, at which it would be exchanged until demolished.  The requirement is instead solely in the &lt;em&gt;conveyance&lt;/em&gt; of the house: as part of this conveyance, I agree to give the seller a certain amount of money on a certain date, and (s)he agrees to let me take freehold possession of the house, usually on that same date.  An open-ended forward requirement can form part of this, eg I can undertake never to paint the house pink, and to require a similar consideration of any future purchasers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My contention is that the GPL functions similarly: when I convey the software to you, you agree to be bound by certain conditions (one of which is to perform further conveyances under GPL) in exchange for certain considerations (in brief, the four freedoms).  There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a complication in that unlike a house purchase it's not a contractual arrangement between two parties, it's a licence offered to anyone who wants to accept it.  But the nature of your acceptance is made very clear in both GPLs (v2 s5, v3 s9), and it is through this acceptance that you take on board the obligations.  I repeat my assertion that licences do not inhere in software any more than prices inhere in houses; you acquire the obligation (redistribution must be under GPLv3, must pay Mrs. Smith £100,000 on 25th inst.) by accepting the licence or the contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note a claim in comments that US law explicitly forbids permission to relicense open-endedly, but no authority is quoted, which makes it hard to comment upon.  Also, I'm in England and Wales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T12:10:25.657" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T12:10:25.657" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:21:32.963" Score="37" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the code or derivative works can never be re-licensed under a GPL/Copyleft license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, I think the best practical strategy to accomplish this is to license your work under a (very weak) copyleft license that is incompatible with other existing copyleft licenses. Your proposed terms are not &quot;permissive&quot; as the term is used in FLOSS parlance: much like the mechanics of the GPL, you want your license to say, &quot;Everyone may use this however they like, except for this set of restrictions that may never be removed.&quot; Your set of restrictions happens to forbid &quot;licensing under conditions that compel downstream source disclosure&quot; instead of the GPL's restrictions that require source disclosure. In other words, whereas the GPL's opponent in employing copyleft is non-free licensing terms, your opponent in employing copyleft will be copyleft terms (except for your own copyleft terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The like-minded folks in Redmond are prepared to aid you: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:MsPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)&lt;/a&gt; is a reasonable choice to accomplish this goal. The MS-PL imposes copyleft terms on source distributions only, while binary distributions carry only the minimal requirement that they be licensed under &quot;a license that complies with this license&quot;. Since the Ms-PL does not impose any particular requirements for binary distributions beyond attribution, this compatibility is quite easy to satisfy. (It is my guess that Microsoft deliberately engineered this license to be as permissive as possible while remaining incompatible with the GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a strategic note, I advise you to consider this decision carefully, for the practical reason that GPL compatibility is a valuable asset in a license. Without it, downstream authors will be unable to make use of GPL'd code and your own code in software they distribute: you force them to choose between GPL options and your own offering. Using a simple permissive license allow anyone to use your code in proprietary projects just as you would like, though it will also allow for a future when some downstream modifications of your project (authored by some other person) might not be available to authors of proprietary software. Weigh your dissatisfaction of such a possible future against a possibly loss of interest in your project for its GPL incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:21:32.963" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:23:52.137" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge there is no such license. Note that this license may not be considered an open-source license. In no case would such a license be a permissive license that could be compatible with MIT or Apache 2 projects. Any wording to exclude copyleft licenses would probably also exclude any other open source licenses, so that your software would only be usable either in projects using the same license or in closed-source projects. That seems undesirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, permissive open source licenses and copyleft open source licenses both try to maximize freedom. They generally have the same intention, but take different avenues. It is important to recognize that both approaches have merit, even if you prefer one of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permissive open source licenses try to maximize freedom for immediate users of that code, i.e. developers. E.g. code under the MIT can be used freely in open source and closed source projects. This freedom comes at the expense of user's freedom, who may not be able to view and modify the code if they received the software as closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft open source licenses try to maximize end user freedom, so that everyone who receives a copy of the software can read and modify the source. This is only possible by restricting how that code may be used, i.e. only in a manner that does not strip end users of their freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motivation for copyleft is not a sense of fairness that modifications should be contributed back to the community, but a sense of end-user freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are licenses that try to find a balance, for example the LGPL: this restricts the copyleft properties only to the LGPLed component, but does not affect the whole software system in which such a component is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to create a license that would exclude copyleft licenses, this fails to be a permissive license because it does restrict how the code can be used. You are much closer to copyleft ideas: in order to protect the freedom to freely decide whether modifications can be published as closed-source or under the same license, you sacrifice compatibility with other open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:23:52.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2017-11-21T22:56:48.913" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation thinks not.  From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If someone steals a CD containing a version of a GPL-covered program, does the GPL give the thief the right to redistribute that version?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the version has been released elsewhere, then the thief probably does have the right to make copies and redistribute them under the GPL, but if the thief is imprisoned for stealing the CD, they may have to wait until their release before doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the version in question is unpublished and considered by a company to be its trade secret, then publishing it may be a violation of trade secret law, depending on other circumstances. The GPL does not change that. If the company tried to release its version and still treat it as a trade secret, that would violate the GPL, but if the company hasn't released this version, no such violation has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in other words, the FSF believes that you can redistribute stolen software &lt;em&gt;if it was already published,&lt;/em&gt; but (probably) not if it was an unpublished trade secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, Federico Poloni quite correctly points out that the FSF could be mistaken.  They wrote the license and employ quite a few lawyers who are well versed in copyright law generally and the GPL in particular, so they are probably in at least as good a position to answer this question as anyone else.  But only a court can determine the answer to this question with absolute certainty (and then only with respect to a particular jurisdiction).  To my knowledge no such case has yet arisen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:17:16.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-22T00:12:44.027" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you release your code under a permissive license, it is not possible for anyone to &quot;relicense&quot; it under a less permissive one like the GPL. By issuing a permissive license, you grant everyone the right to use your code in any way you choose. If someone, say, adds your code to a larger GPL'd product, that does not in any way affect your original license: everyone can still use &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code in any way &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; license permits, even if they happen to find it as part of something with a more restrictive license like the GPL. You have granted them the right to use your code--but you have &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; granted them the right to control anyone else's use of it. That right remains with you. If your code is included in a GPL'd product, that product's license &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; add restrictions on the use of your code, only on the larger product as a whole. Even if its license &lt;em&gt;claims&lt;/em&gt; to apply to your portion of the larger product, such words are legal hot air. You, and you alone, control who uses your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the popular licenses allow mixing and matching of software products that work together without affecting each other's individual licenses. Android, for example, is Apache licensed, but requires the Linux kernel (GPL) and SQLite (public domain) to operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T00:12:44.027" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T11:08:03.553" Score="-1" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I build a smart bomb with Linux inside, is it enough to put the GPL text in the firmware to comply with the GPL if I drop the bomb?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reckon that when I sell my bomb to the military, they are entitled to the source code alright, per the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the unwilling recipient of the exploding ordnance? Would any survivor be entitled to receive the corresponding sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be using the GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds as a silly question but I still found it fun to ask: it talks about the important lack of restrictions in the field of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I do not build any bomb. And I never intend to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T15:07:29.970" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T15:07:29.970" Title="If I build a smart bomb with Linux inside, is it enough to put the GPL text in the firmware to comply with the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:40:11.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OpenSSL license is also a major headache in terms of GPL incompatibility, to the extent that there are LGPL replacements to remove the legal uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is still used though, as there is a common interpretation that the incompatibility was not intended and the copyright holders are unlikely to enforce this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a deliberate incompatibility and communicate that this is intended, expect nobody to even look at your code. The OpenSSL license situation has already eaten up several man-millenia of volunteer work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is absolutely certain that no Linux distribution would include it, as a legal requirement for inclusion is license compatibility with all other packages. You would get a friendly request to fix your license, and if you refuse as this would violate your intention, your package would become blacklisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, keep in mind that the C library on many distributions is LGPL licensed. Unless your license permits linking (= creating a derivative work) under these license terms, it also becomes illegal for you to provide binaries on your own web page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, it's a bad idea that has absolutely no useful purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T13:40:11.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:45:20.787" Score="3" ViewCount="1389" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a question about the GNU General Public License v2 license. More specifically, I'm using a library with a GNU GPL v2 license. I'm merely importing it in Java through Maven, I'm not redistributing ANY code and no code is modified either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What rights does this give me to my code? Is my code forced to have the same (or higher, v3) license of GNU GPL, or am I free to do with my code whatever I want to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, I'm using the Bukkit &amp;amp; CraftBukkit (through SpigotMC) library owned by Mojang licensed with GNU GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9665" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T16:02:22.063" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T06:22:37.210" Title="GNU GPL v2 - Using libraries?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6243" CreationDate="2017-11-22T15:43:46.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make a device and use it yourself, you have no obligation to share the code and documenting your changes in the code would be your only obligation. If you give the device to someone else to use, then sharing the code and displaying legal notices comes into play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gplv2 states -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for gplv2 the firmware will at least need to contain legal notices for display. It doesn't have to be the full gpl text, you can give instructions on where to read the full license, similar to the short per file gpl header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if there is no UI, say the device only responded to commands recieved wirelessly, then you may be able to not include legal notices on the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that - for this particular use, it will be a matter of can you be prevented from complying with the license? Those that want you to share the code will not care for legalities and those that care for legalities will be preventing you from complying with the gpl and the gpl terms will be the least of your concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="9558" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T00:05:02.337" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T00:05:02.337" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-22T16:46:42.447" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD license basically already does what you're asking for, or at least effectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL-ed programs sometimes use BSD modules. When they do that, they obey the BSD license which says that the license is to be preserved in source code redistributions. Users of the GPL-ed program are free to take a BSD source code module from there and use it under the BSD terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A BSD-licensed module doesn't become GPL-ed when it is used in a GPL-ed program. That is a misunderstanding. Each piece of the program retains its respective license. What is legally required is that &lt;em&gt;all the licenses in the combination must be compatible&lt;/em&gt;.  A piece of BSD-licensed code can be combined with GPL-ed code because it is compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An article on license compatibility on the GNU website&lt;/a&gt;, written by Richard Stallman explains it thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In a combination of programs under lax licenses, each part carries the license it came with. When the code is merged to the point that the parts can't be distinguished any more, that merged code should carry all the licenses of the merged parts. Since all the licenses are lax anyway, this causes no practical problem except that the list of licenses gets long.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who take BSD code and then alter the license with additional GPL-like restrictions are acting in bad faith and should be called out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license doesn't exactly say that it must be preserved verbatim, but rather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, the strict, cautious interpretation of this is: hands off; do not add additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could contemplate making a small modification to the BSD license which clarifies that no new restrictions may be added to the reproduced copyright notice, conditions and disclaimer. Even if that is found to make no effective difference, it would raise enough uncertainty that it's not worth it compared to using the standard license that large numbers of people and organizations understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastEditorUserId="6066" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T20:00:08.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T20:00:08.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6250" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:16:25.090" Score="6" ViewCount="1488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does everybody writes the copyright notice on the top of a source file? Isn't LICENSE file in the root of the package enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:45:14.660" Title="Why copyright notices in source files?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6249" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:34:57.550" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Files and authors can have many-to-many relationships: a file may have many different authors. I suppose you could enumerate the list of copyrights of each and every file in a master list somewhere, but that sounds like a lot more work than simply keeping each list of copyright notices within its respective file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the case of a single author, this also has the benefit of ease of extraction and transplantation into a new project. Virtually all FLOSS licenses require attribution, so if you want to lift a file from Project A and place it into Project B, you'd need to dig into another file with a master list of copyright information, look up the file(s) you want, and then move that information into the file or into Project B's master copyright list. That's a lot more work than simply copying the file as-is with copyright headers included!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate, related issue is license information in headers. This is important because simply including a copy of a license in a project doesn't rigorously indicate that all or any of the project is actually under that license. For example, maybe the code is under one license and art assets are under another license. Or maybe a GPL project has included files from another project that are GPL-compatible but under a different license. Including licensing information on a per-file basis eliminates confusion about which files are licensed which way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T18:45:14.660" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:45:14.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:51:05.977" Score="2" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project is licensed under GPLv3. However, I want some files to be dual licensed under GPL and Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. in the header comment of the file licensed under Apache License 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. in the files (such as LICENSE) in the package source root directory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T02:29:22.683" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T02:29:22.683" Title="Dual licensing of a file" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|license-notice|multi-licensing|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:55:35.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add my 5¢, I agree with the great answers above that suggest an Open Source license such as BSD might be what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to be as far as possible from copyleft (which might be a wrong choice), then there is a &quot;license&quot; that suits your goal well. The strongest &quot;anti-copyleft&quot; is called &lt;strong&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/strong&gt;: a proprietary, traditional copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one can stop you from redistributing your proprietary source code publicly, if you wish to. You can still redistribute binaries and charge money. You can even sub-license the sources to some commercial companies under even more convoluted terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, your software wouldn't be Open Source. No Open Source distribution would include you code, neither source, nor binary. Are you okay with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might get into mixed distros, like nVidia drivers years ago were. There was a binary blob with no source code, and people used it anyway, because everybody loved to use their accelerated OpenGL. But to pull this off your program needs to solve a very special problem, extremely well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly, such behaviour provokes a rewrite from scratch under GPL. Think about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU userland&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9680" LastEditorUserId="9679" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T16:02:15.087" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T16:02:15.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-22T19:20:41.493" Score="7" ViewCount="2501" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that it's possible to use a GPL game engine that interprets/loads/JITs a so-called Game Pack which contains all the important game files such as sprites, sounds, music, levels, missions, scripts, game entity code, etc., all while having those Game Pack elements under such a license that the game could be commercial and released under a GPL-incompatible license along with the assets not being copyleft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is true. People keep telling me that id Software has done it with &lt;em&gt;Doom&lt;/em&gt;, but I'm not sure about that because they are the owner of the code so they can decide, but I'm not the owner of the GPL'd engine so I don't know what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a proof that someone used a GPL engine and GPL incompatible game assets and distributed them commercially without GPLing the assets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4963" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T02:32:57.053" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:49:34.823" Title="Can a video game have a GPL licensed engine and GPL-incompatible licensed assets? What about scripts?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gaming|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-22T20:47:42.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question is &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, there is no generally accepted open source license that is used by people who are specifically antithetical to copyleft. A person could make a custom license like that, but you should ask yourself &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; you are doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original question mentioned a valid concern that an open source project might be relicensed under a different copyright and then compete with the original. But, that's an argument &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; copyleft, not against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was there in the 1990s when people realized that Microsoft had taken BSD code and relicensed it in their proprietary (closed source) products. In particular, Microsoft &lt;a href=&quot;https://everything2.com/title/BSD+Code+in+Windows&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lifted the TCP/IP stack from BSD&lt;/a&gt; so they could compete with this &quot;Internet&quot; thing that UNIX had. Some BSD-license proponents claimed Microsoft's action was a &quot;win&quot; because their work would be used widely. I saw it as a loss and many developers (including me) switched to using the GNU General Public License (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;). The GPL defends developers by preventing companies from taking without giving back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make an open source project, but you're worried about someone stealing your project's momentum by making something that competes with you, then copyleft isn't the problem, it's the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9679" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T20:47:42.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6251" CreationDate="2017-11-23T00:54:34.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to use the same license for every file in your project, but I would recommend not using two open licenses for the same file as it will only add confusion. That confusion will only prevent your code being used by others and be a place of contention with any legal proceedings related to the files in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep your project as a GPL project but want a portion to be more freely available then you can make that portion available under the Apache license. The project as a whole will still be covered by the GPL but the portion of it covered by the Apache license can be extracted and used by another project. You can find a precedence of this in the blender project, where the code used for the cycles render engine was &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.blender.org/2013/08/cycles-render-engine-released-with-permissive-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;re-released under the Apache license&lt;/a&gt; while the project as a whole remains under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the files you want covered by the Apache license, you just need to have the Apache header info instead of the GPL header. Leave the projects COPYING/LICENSE file containing the GPL text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find many large GPL projects contain files that have other licenses, often these are files extracted from other projects. Again the blender project can be an example of multiple licenses affecting different parts of a project, using it as an example, the extra license files are &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/release/text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contained in the source tree&lt;/a&gt; and copied as part of the installation process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note, that if you have any other contributors to the files in question, you will need to get their approval for the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T00:54:34.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2017-11-23T13:21:16.247" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, no right exists, &lt;em&gt;unless an act of &quot;distribution of a copy&quot; took place by the valid licensee to the taker&lt;/em&gt;. But that could quite possibly have happened in many situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analysis follows (Note IANAL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Full relevant text of GPLv2:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I've removed anything related to side-issues such as modification, and split sections 4 and 7 into sub-points for ease&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;0) This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed&#xA;  under the terms of this General Public License. Each licensee is&#xA;  addressed as &quot;you&quot;. Activities other than copying, distribution and&#xA;  modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its&#xA;  scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, provided that you give any other recipients of&#xA;  the Program a copy of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3) You may copy and distribute the Program under the terms of Section 1 above provided that you also do one of the following:  a)&#xA;  Accompany it with the source code; or, b) Accompany it with a written&#xA;  offer to give any third party the source code; or, c) Accompany it&#xA;  with the information you received as to the offer to distribute the&#xA;  source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4.1) You may not copy, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy,&#xA;  sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically&#xA;  terminate your rights under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4.2) Parties who have&#xA;  received copies, or rights, from &quot;you&quot; &lt;em&gt;[means &quot;any licensee&quot;, see s.0]&lt;/em&gt; under this License will not have&#xA;  their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full&#xA;  compliance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5) You are not required to accept this License. However, nothing else grants you permission to distribute&#xA;  the Program. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept&#xA;  this License. Therefore, by distributing the Program you indicate your&#xA;  acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions&#xA;  for copying or distributing the Program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6) Each time you &lt;em&gt;[means &quot;any licensee&quot;, see s.0]&lt;/em&gt; redistribute the Program, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy or distribute&#xA;  the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You are not&#xA;  responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7.1) If, as a consequence of a court judgment &lt;em&gt;or for any other reason [emphasis added]&lt;/em&gt;, conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or&#xA;  otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not&#xA;  excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot&#xA;  distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this&#xA;  License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you&#xA;  may not distribute the Program at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7.2) If any portion of this section&#xA;  is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance,&#xA;  the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a&#xA;  whole is intended to apply in other circumstances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;12) In no event &lt;em&gt;unless required by applicable law [emphasis added]&lt;/em&gt; will any copyright holder, or any other party who may&#xA;  redistribute the program as permitted be liable to you for damages,&#xA;  including any damages arising out of the use or inability to use the&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Legal analysis:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a bona fide member of the public who sees the code and its full and correct GPLv2 information on a website and (not knowing it was illicitly obtained) makes use of it, and then redistributes it as they believe GPLv2 allows them to do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note these are slightly out of order to make the argument flow better&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 2 is irrelevant (deals with modifications only) and the clause in section 12 &quot;agreed in writing&quot; is plainly irrelevant (they haven't done so).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The term &quot;copy&quot; would be legally important here. Has the legitimate user &quot;copied&quot; it by merely having it on one or more servers for internal use? Or in context (&quot;copy and distribute&quot;) does it refer only to copying in the context of distribution?&lt;br/&gt;That would be important legally, because it determines whether the legitimate user was required to keep the notices with the software when only used internally without plans to distribute, or whether that was also a &quot;copy&quot; and section 2 required them to keep it &quot;as [they] receive[d] it&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 0: the notice on the software, as obtained by the legitimate user, was &quot;placed by the copyright holder&quot;. So the license applied to the software that was illicitly taken. The original author voluntarily chose a license that applies to all members of the public, so whether the license inherits or some terms do, in the hands of the bona fide re-user, is down to the rest of GPLv2. The last sentence does not distinguish copying/distribution with or without permission, or even with/without intention, so that's irrelevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sections 1+3: does not impose any restrictions. On the surface seems to say that anyone may copy or distribute, again without reference to any permission being needed. The only relevant requirement is section 3 which is complied with, so that's not an issue either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 5: forbids all use and distribution unless user has &quot;accept[ed] the license&quot; and complies with it. The license cannot be accepted if it has not been validly offered. Therefore we need to consider whether anything constitutes a valid offer of license to the bona fide re-user, in law, because if not, &quot;Nothing else grants you permission&quot; and &quot;these actions are prohibited if you do not accept the license&quot; - and you cannot &quot;accept&quot; what has not been offered. I think this is a crucial point.&lt;br/&gt;If the bona fide user [was offered a license and] can legitimately accept the license, then they have the rights in it, so they are safe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 4.1: mostly irrelevant because s.5 says it all anyway.  If the bona fide user [was offered and] accepted a license this allows them to distribute, if they don't then this doesn't apply to them anyway. So the issue above, from section 5, governs and overrides this clause. But 4.1 does underline s.5 and that is crucial too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 4.2: irrelevant for same reason - if the bona fide user [was offered and] accepted a license then they are &quot;any licensee&quot; (see section 0) so this grants them full permission and they are safe. If they don't have a valid license then under section 5+4.1 they have no rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 7.1: seems irrelevant. Any attempt to claim an implied term about legally obtaining the software seems to be overruled by the actual wording of the GPLv2 which governs, the fact that GPLv2 is clearly drafted with a view to widest possible distribution and avoidance of later discovery of inadequate grant, and has no stated need to check validity, and that anything due to earlier illicit activity would not be a &quot;condition &lt;em&gt;imposed [emphasis added]&lt;/em&gt; on you&quot;. Again, if you could validly accept the license then all is well, if not then everything is forbidden. Section 5+4.1 therefore governs this as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 7.2: irrelevant. Nothing seems likely to be affected by this, or likely to be &quot;held invalid or unenforceable&quot; in the context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 6: This (along with sections 5+4.1) is crucial. It determines when a license is validly created, and therefore how section 5+4.1 will work in the context.&lt;br/&gt;But section 6 starts by saying &lt;strong&gt;Each time you [an existing valid licensee] redistribute the Program...&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br/&gt;On the face of it, the illicit taking of the program did not invoke this, because the valid licensee did not actually &quot;distribute&quot; the software to the taker, and cannot be deemed to have done so. It was copied off their server without any implied or actual consent. &lt;em&gt;So therefore they did not actually &quot;distribute&quot; the program&lt;/em&gt;, which would be a wilful, deliberate, act of intention and volition (this would be like a thief who enters an open door claiming they were &quot;given&quot; the item by the owner or that it was implicitly &quot;given&quot; because the door was open and the item unprotected) - and in the first instance that is the answer to the question.&lt;br/&gt;Because the valid licensee did not &quot;redistribute&quot; the program, the taker did not &quot;receive a license&quot; under section 6 when they obtained the code, no matter what GPLv2 text was included with it. Because the taker did not have a valid license, they could not validly offer a license to the bona fide user, because in copyright law, offering a license is a right that requires permission from the author, and the only such permission is contained in GPLv2 (which expressly excludes all other sources of permission in s.5+4.1) or through individual consent by the author. They couldn't have accepted GPLv2 because the prerequisite of &quot;distribution&quot; by an existing licensee was absent, and they don't have personal consent of the author. So they have nothing.&lt;br/&gt;By exactly the same reasoning, the taker cannot have offered a license to the bona fide user, so the bona fide user cannot have &quot;accepted&quot; what wasn't offered, either.&lt;br/&gt;They may have a defence of good faith belief in an actual litigation, but that's different - &lt;em&gt;what they do not have is an actual license&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the absence of an act of &quot;distribution of a copy&quot; by the valid licensee to the taker, there is no license or other right acquired by the taker, the bona fide re-user, or anyone subsequent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 requires an act that legally constitutes, in some form, a &quot;distribution&quot; to the taker, because only then could the taker have &quot;accepted&quot;.  So it all hinges on whether the valid licensee did something that would be deemed to create a &quot;distribution&quot; of a &quot;copy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing more is required under GPLv2 than the mere act of &quot;distribution&quot;, to create a legally valid license to the recipient. This is the wish of the copyright holder, and the condition under which the valid licensee was allowed to use the software in the first place.  So the valid licensees wishes/intentions are &lt;strong&gt;irrelevant&lt;/strong&gt;. If &quot;distribution of a copy&quot; took place, the recipient didn't have to do more than use the software to be deemed to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The taker might be liable for breach of contract, but the terms of section 6 (and therefore section 5+4.1) would be met, and the act of &quot;distribut[ing] a copy&quot; would have taken place to the taker by the valid licensee, even if they did not mean the taker to do as they did once distributed to (which GPLv2 explicitly says they can).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not the whole story. There are three other issues to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1) Impact of legal meaning of &quot;copy&quot; and &quot;distribute&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the valid licensee or taker didn't (or couldn't legally have) created a license in law by doing some act that was &quot;distributing a copy&quot; then the &quot;recipient&quot; couldn't &quot;accept&quot; it, so section 6+5 govern as above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted, these are legal terms, and a court would decide if an act of &quot;copying&quot; and/or an act of &quot;distribution&quot; had been undertaken by the valid licensee in any case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might, in theory, include copies made internally or automatically. Just by downloading the software from the author's website or placing it on some computer internally might be deemed to be &quot;distributing&quot; or &quot;making a copy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For example, child porn images are captured under a law that forbids &quot;distributing&quot; and/or &quot;making a copy&quot; under various UK and US laws even if the &quot;copy&quot; was merely a cached copy in a browser or server cache, or even just temporarily placed in RAM, rather than a deliberate &quot;for actual use&quot; copy. So there is precedent for wide meaning for these terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the valid licensee placed a copy of the software on a computer given to an employee for work purposes, or gave an outside party a copy to review, they may be deemed to have &quot;distributed a copy&quot; to that person. That is all that s.6 requires to create a full GPLv2 license to the recipient, and intent to license is not required.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as stated, intent to license is irrelevant. An act that counts as &quot;distribution&quot; by the valid licensee to the taker is everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2) If the illicit taker had in fact acquired that right under GPLv2, in which case....&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the taker could claim there had been an act of distribution, then s.6 would be satisfied, and therefore so would s.5+4.1. In that case the taker, and therefore the bona fide user and anyone subsequent, would indeed be able to claim they had a licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be deemed to have happened in many &quot;real world&quot; scenarios, as described above. It might happen if, for example, the taker is an in-house employee of the valid licence holder, with permission from the valid license holder to have a copy of the program (for development) or its binary code on their laptop (for business use), or something similar. It could even be that they implicitly &quot;distributed a copy&quot; because the taker is a service agent who manages their system backups, or was given a disk with it on, to be destroyed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it hinges on whether the valid licensee had &quot;distributed a copy&quot; in some way to the taker, even if only the binary code, in any way that invokes GPLv2. if so - &lt;em&gt;even if they did not intend further distribution or if it was a breach of contract that the taker did so&lt;/em&gt; - then the GPLv2 license chain is satisfied according to s.0+5+4.1+6 (even if the valid licensee did not wish the taker to then pass it to others) -- because that is basically the entire right that GPLv2 is created to enforce: the right of any valid licensee to pass the code to any other person under suitable terms set by the author, and not restricted by previous licensees in the &quot;chain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3) Validity of section 12's upstream protection:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same reasoning as section 6 above, section 12's usual protection would not apply either, to the valid licensee, the taker, the bona fide re-user, or any subsequent user if a valid license didn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 12 protects the &quot;copyright holder&quot; (the author) and &quot;any other party who may redistribute the program as permitted&quot;. But as no &quot;distribution&quot; took place by the valid licensee, they aren't within any category protected by section 12's wording. In any case the taker and the bona fide user and anyone subsequent, are not licensees so section 12 doesn't bind them, as they don't have a license agreement containing such a clause (or any license agreement whatsoever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be an unexpected gap in GPLv2. It means that in theory at least, the bona fide user and anyone subsequent would not be excluded by GPLv2 from suing the valid licensee (for example on spurious grounds of &quot;You didn't protect your servers and if you had, I wouldn't have been able to be offered this software and invested £30,000 making a business only to find the license didn't cover me as it should have done&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastEditorUserId="9696" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T14:20:07.840" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T14:20:07.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6253" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:49:34.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a program is licensed under the GPL, this license affects whether the program can be combined with other creative works (yes, if the combined work will also be licensed under the GPL). However, if the combination does not produce a combined creative work, the GPL license is irrelevant. In particular, the GPL does not extend to data you are processing with that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a simple example, I can use a GPL-licensed word processor to write a novel without having to license my novel under the GPL. But note that a screenshot of the word processor with my novel includes both GPL parts (the picture of the user interface), and parts to which I own the copyright (the excerpt of my novel visible in the screenshot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a more tricky example, a GPL licensed language interpreter can execute non-GPL programs without any problems. However, things start getting hairy if the program calls into GPL-licensed libraries provided by that interpreter runtime system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A game engine has properties similar to both these cases. The input and output of the game engine (e.g. models, textures, rendered frames) are not subject to the GPL. The output (e.g. screenshots of a rendered scene) &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be subject to the GPL if it shows GPL-licensed assets or other media that were somehow generated by the engine authors. (A similar case is discussed in the GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: “Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed game.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scripts executed by the game engine would usually be subject to the GPL because they will call into APIs provided by the game engine. This can be avoided if the authors of the game engine explicitly issue an exception to the GPL requirements. The GPLv3 includes a specific, well-defined mechanism for issuing exceptions to the GPL. The LGPLv3 license is in fact implemented as such an exception. As an alternative, the game engine can offer merely a language and not an API. This is in many cases entirely sufficient, but could mean that the engine implements its own domain-specific language, rather than adding APIs to a known scripting language such as Lua or Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Games_using_CC_licensed_assets&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software games&lt;/a&gt; that use a GPL engine and CC-BY-SA assets. This is generally done because the GPL is not a good fit for non-software creative works. Using a CC license for assets addresses that. However, CC-BY-SA 4.0 is explicitly compatible with the GPLv3 with the resulting combined work being governed by the GPL. Therefore this combination would be possible even if the engine's GPL would extend to the assets. And since the CC-BY-SA is a copyleft license, this doesn't exactly demonstrate that non-copyleft assets are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:49:34.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6259" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:42:42.517" Score="-3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I am downloading a file with SourceForge, and also from many other sites, I'm getting a count down and I am wondering what is the reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2tmgg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2tmgg.png&quot; alt=&quot;download delay&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about storage sites like rapidgator, etc that are trying to promote their premium services, but free sites like SourceForge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9705" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T01:51:44.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T01:51:44.140" Title="Delay when downloading with SourceForge and many other sites" Tags="|distribution|monetization|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6258" CreationDate="2017-11-23T23:37:49.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Advertising, to pay for the free service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the right of the &lt;code&gt;Downloading in....&lt;/code&gt; message you will also find &lt;code&gt;Mirror Provided by:&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Scanned by:&lt;/code&gt;, while I doubt these are paid ads, it would be in return for providing the mirror/scan service, underneath you will find paid ads under the &lt;code&gt;You may like:&lt;/code&gt;. Then under that, you have other top projects in the same category so that you may keep looking and download something else, to get more ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making you keep the page open for a few seconds, they have time to display ads that might get your attention and increase the chance of revenue from you clicking an ad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T23:37:49.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2017-11-24T00:36:18.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to publish code for an application under an open source license like BSD, MIT, or Apache 2 ... but where the code or derivative works can never be re-licensed under a GPL/Copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Any&lt;/strong&gt; additional restriction you place on the licensee usually renders the license a &quot;non-free&quot; license.  This is an example of that happening.  If you put such a restriction into a license, it would become a non-free (ie, proprietary) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that work? Because it would be impossible for anybody redistributing your code to do so under &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; open source license, whether permissive (BSD, MIT) or copyleft (GPL etc).  They would &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be able to re-license it under your proprietary license or a compatible proprietary license.  The point of free software is binary: that there are no restrictions (except so called &quot;reasonable&quot; restrictions, like the requirement to preserve copyright notices), and that it can be re-licensed under widely-used open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you may as well just license it under a completely proprietary license where they cannot redistribute at all.  Claiming that your code is &quot;free software&quot; or &quot;open source&quot; would really just be dishonest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That said&lt;/strong&gt;, there is really no reason for you to do so.  You can simply just license the code under a permissive license like BSD or MIT, and achieve all of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensees can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute binaries without the source code (proprietary product) ✔️&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute source code with or without their additions ✔️&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Submit changes back to the project ✔️&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And assuming that they are using the code in a proprietary product, licenses cannot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take code from the project and re-license it as GPL or any other form of license which COMPELS a user or company to distribute the source of their derivative works, making it untenable for use in corporate environments. ❌&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, simply by including your code in a proprietary product means that they already are prevented from re-licensing it as GPL.  Licensees could &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; re-license your code as GPL if they included it in a fully GPL licensed project, which would also mean that none of the rest of their code would be proprietary-friendly either.  A company wishing to create a proprietary product is still welcome to use it under a permissive license by obtaining it directly from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="798" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T00:36:18.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6245" CreationDate="2017-11-24T05:48:35.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any code linked to a GPL library (or an object module with GPL license) should be GPL licensed. Please &lt;strong&gt;read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL in proprietary systems&lt;/a&gt;). What matters is not &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; the library (or some binary linked to it), but distributing (or conveying) a software using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write a library and wants it to have a license permitting linking it in proprietary (and redistributed, e.g. sold) program you need to give another license, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just run (without any kind of distribution) a software (e.g. on some Web server that you own) using a GPL library it makes a different question (and AFAIK you can do that, but I am not a lawyer). Read about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You really should look at things the other way and read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy of the GNU project&lt;/a&gt;. Ask also yourself how you can actively contribute to it. And remember that you are not obliged to use any GPL software, but if you do use one, you should obey its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any doubt, consult a lawyer (and pay it for that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T06:22:37.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T06:22:37.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6263" CreationDate="2017-11-24T15:27:08.207" Score="12" ViewCount="2566" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, what is the exact purpose of the phrase &quot;or (at your option) any later version&quot; that usually accompanies GPL-licensed software? I get that it's supposed to be to allow future freedoms to be granted, but why is this particularly an issue with the GPL such that everyone includes this phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, does this not also work in reverse? So if for example version 4 removes the restriction for modified source code to be supplied alongside the binaries (hypothetical example) then that would mean that people would no longer be obliged to provide the source code, even for older software (because they could choose to redistribute under version 4 instead of version 3). So this phrase not only allows the removal of &quot;bad&quot; restrictions from later users, but also retroactively applies the removal &quot;good&quot;/&quot;important&quot; restrictions so that later users are no longer bound by the same terms that the original developer intended. It surprises me that no one seems to be concerned about effectively licensing their software under a license that doesn't exist yet and that they have no control over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, what would be the implications if I were to remove/omit this phrase when distributing my software, and how exactly can I ensure that this part is completely removed/not applied to my software? Is omitting this part generally frowned upon and if so why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8950" LastEditorUserId="8950" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T13:52:14.450" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T14:29:13.617" Title="What is the purpose of &quot;or (at your option) any later version&quot;? What if I don't want this?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6262" CreationDate="2017-11-24T16:26:45.687" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct to note that “or (at your option) any later version” is a double-edged sword.  If you license code under such a clause, you are placing a lot of trust in the Free Software Foundation that future licenses will be compatible in spirit to the previous GPL versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, licenses have bugs and incompatibilities. By giving the user a choice of licenses, incompatibilities can be removed in future versions. Additionally, a project under such a license already has explicit permission from all contributors to move to a newer GPL version which makes license upgrades much easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a bug in GPLv2, consider Tivoization: GPLv2 software can be embedded in a device without giving users the ability to run modified versions, which violates the intent of this license. With GPLv3, such a workaround is forbidden under certain circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 is also incompatible with the Apache 2 license because Apache 2 contains a patent retaliation clause. The GPLv3 contains a compatible clause, so that Apache 2 licensed software can be used in GPLv3 licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, these changes made the GPLv3 incompatible with the GPLv2. E.g. the Linux kernel remains under the GPLv2. But if software had been licensed under GPLv2 &lt;em&gt;or later&lt;/em&gt;, then GPLv2 and GPLv3 software can be combined, with the combination being governed by the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 section 14 discusses future license versions. The “or any later version” clause must be explicitly stated if desired. That will permit all future GPL versions. However, the license may also state a &lt;em&gt;proxy&lt;/em&gt; that can decide which future versions of the GPL can be used. The GPLv3 does not describe this proxy any further, except that they shall issue a public statement of acceptance of a GPL version. I would like to point out that specifying a natural person as license proxy is very risky since that person may pass away. Using a license proxy only seems viable for mature projects that can denote a role or committee as license proxy, with a clear succession plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not using any “or any later version” clause is perfectly fine. It is your decision whether you want to gift a license to your code to the public, and it is your decision what license you will use. By not using such a clause you do limit how your software can be used due to license incompatibilities, and future license upgrades become more difficult (e.g. if you want to protect future versions of your software from being exploited under a Tivoization-like loophole). However, allowing only a single GPL version gives you more legal certainty and it is perfectly understandable that you might want this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T17:08:13.117" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T17:08:13.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6267" CreationDate="2017-11-25T22:42:12.427" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use a Raspberry Pi as a controller of a rather complex medical machine. For several reasons, most prominently safety reasons, it is out of the question, that we could give the source code to anyone (the machine can kill patients). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we still install &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspbian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raspbian&lt;/a&gt; together with our software and then sell the machine like that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it must be possible, but I can't find any definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10000" OwnerDisplayName="Andreas Ferenczi" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T06:20:02.757" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T06:20:02.757" Title="Raspbian as OS of a controller module of a machine" Tags="|gpl|operating-system|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2017-11-25T23:11:29.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is claimed usually on a per file basis as it relates to a program. This license disclaimer usually looks something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The following program is under the GPL&quot; or &quot;This file is licensed under the GPL&quot; or &quot;The code in the directory myprogram is licenced under the GPL except for icon.png which is license on CC-BY-SA. You can find these licenses in the file COPYING&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further GPLs copyleft nature applies to derivative works of what was claimed in the disclaimer which at least so far in the copyright world hasn't meant things that run or use the program. The GPL does claim that linking a program creates a derivative work that includes both the program the linked libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further source code and compiled programs in itself doesn't constitute a derivative work just because its sitting on a file system with other works no more than putting a painting on your wall makes a derivative work if its placed next to another painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while the software is GPLed USING the software as part of a system doesn't invoke copyleft. Only the act of combining code together to make a greater program does (add source code to the file or link code together when compiling to make a single program etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume open source helps you make sure your system is secure and free of most bugs. You can use GPL internal to an organization but if you're selling you have to provide the source code publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept where you agree to a contract or license as part of your USE of a program is called an End User License Agreement (EULA). Free software is the diametric opposite of this as it grants users of that software the rights to use for any purpose. Further EULAs aren't necessarily invoked by copyright and are usually instead enforced by &quot;click-wrap.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute GPLed software however you have obligations to provide the sourcecode of THAT software. That wasn't asked in your question but it dawns on me you might miss that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9361" OwnerDisplayName="jdwolf" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T23:28:00.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6266" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:18:40.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your taking a hardware device and pre-installing an OS and then your software before selling it as a final package. Provided you comply with the terms of each software package you install, by providing access to the source code as needed and the licensing of your program doesn't conflict with other licenses you should be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial programs can be installed onto linux systems without having to be open sourced but some software may not be &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; with open source software. For legal reasons you may need to distinguish between the tasks you perform, eg. the invoice will be for the purchase of the hardware, a copy of your software, plus a setup fee for you installing the software and configuring the machine for the customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing whether to open source your program is a different issue, it isn't your software (ignoring bugs here) or access to it's source code that can harm a patient, it is the user, anyone can pull the power cord or press buttons to harm a patient, that is a different issue than accessing the code for the software controlling the machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T08:18:40.587" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6270" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:46:45.793" Score="4" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I received the email, reproduced below, requesting a new feature in one of my gpl programs, which this company would then build into one of their &lt;strong&gt;closed-source&lt;/strong&gt; products (see the email for details). And note that they offered to pay me (what I imagine would be a pittance) for the implementation, which I'm guessing is their attempt at a sly way around the gpl. That is, rather than being constrained by their gpl license, once they pay me a single dollar, it's a whole new contractual ball game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I'm not interested, and my reply (top-posted on that email) re-asserts the gpl. So, is this the right/best approach to the situation? In particular, any better wording, or anything else I should have added? And secondly, is there any gnu.org email address I could cc such an email to, simply to establish that they've been explicitly advised that their intended use is prohibited?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, in case they proceed anyway, it's not like I have the wherewithal to sue them, or anything. But, if gnu.org is experienced at such things, I'd be more than happy to sign over all my compensation rights to them for one dollar (just to satisfy the &quot;consideration&quot; requirements of contract law). Just seeing this in the email might make the company think twice, but I'm not finding anything on gnu.org relevant to this kind of tactic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the email...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2017 03:11:38 -0500 (EST)&#xA;From: John Forkosh &amp;lt;john@forkosh.com&amp;gt;&#xA;To: &quot;[iso-8859-2] A&quot; &amp;lt;a********@company.net&amp;gt;&#xA;Cc: &quot;john@forkosh.com&quot; &amp;lt;john@forkosh.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Subject: mimetex development - new parameter for breaking the line&#xA;    (noautoreply)&#xA;&#xA;A,&#xA;&#xA;Incorporating mimetex into a closed-source product would be&#xA;a violation of your gpl license...&#xA;&#xA;Mimetex is licensed to you under the gpl, version 3 or later,&#xA;   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&#xA;as clearly and explicitly discussed on its homepage&#xA;   http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html?gpl&#xA;Mimetex's copyright was registered by me, its sole author, with the&#xA;US Copyright Office. Effective Date of Registration is Nov. 12, 2002,&#xA;certificate number TX 5-567-446.&#xA;   You may use mimetex and its documentation in any way that complies&#xA;with all the terms and conditions of the gpl. Any other use, not&#xA;compliant with the gpl, is prohibited.&#xA;John  &amp;lt;john@forkosh.com&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;On Fri, 24 Nov 2017, A wrote:&#xA;&amp;gt; Hi John,&#xA;&amp;gt; &#xA;&amp;gt; Recently we exchanged some email (from my personal&#xA;&amp;gt; address a***********@gmail.com).&#xA;&amp;gt; Now I'm writing from my company mailbox.&#xA;&amp;gt; &#xA;&amp;gt; We would like to implement Mimetex in our product -&#xA;&amp;gt; software for design and analysis of civil structures,&#xA;&amp;gt; see [website of product] We want to use it for mathematical formulas&#xA;&amp;gt; rendering in our outputs - structural caluculation protocols.&#xA;&amp;gt; &#xA;&amp;gt; The biggest obstacle we currently see is that sometimes formulas&#xA;&amp;gt; rendered by mimetex just flows out of the page width because they&#xA;&amp;gt; are too long. I'd like to ask you whether you could adjust mimetex&#xA;&amp;gt; so that it would break the line based on the width we would give you&#xA;&amp;gt; as some new parameter? For example we would call mimetex with really&#xA;&amp;gt; long fomrula and send you that the rendered picture cannot be widder&#xA;&amp;gt; that 190mm and in this case you would find the last equal symbol &quot;=&quot;&#xA;&amp;gt; and break the line in this place. It means that rendered picture would&#xA;&amp;gt; have more rows and the width would be smaller than value of the new&#xA;&amp;gt; parameter. Of course we would pay you for this effort. What you think?&#xA;&amp;gt; &#xA;&amp;gt; Best regards, A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T17:12:10.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T17:12:10.510" Title="How to best deal with email suggesting an attempted/pending gpl violation" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6269" CreationDate="2017-11-26T09:18:09.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Incorporating mimetex into a closed-source product would be a violation of your gpl license” – not necessarily. GPL software may be distributed alongside other software, if that distribution conforms with the GPL (e.g. v3, sections 4–5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, […] is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are free to run your GPL software from a closed-source software, as long as they don't combine the softwares into a single work. I don't understand why you think they are trying to circumvent the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they reported a defect with your software,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they asked you if you could fix that defect,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they offered to fund this development effort.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the ideal behaviour for commercial users of open-source software: if they need a feature, offering to pay for that development. Everyone benefits: the company, you, and other users of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, you would have responded by addressing the defect (this behaviour may be by-design or a legitimate issue), then stating whether you would be willing to fix that defect, followed by an estimate for this effort and your hourly rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the developer of this software you are probably the most competent individual to add features to this software, so it is natural that they would ask you first. Since you seem to have rejected that offer and responded with unnecessary threats, now they will have to look for other software or ask another, less experienced developer to add the required features to your software in exercise of their rights under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T09:18:09.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6273" CreationDate="2017-11-26T14:05:01.643" Score="15" ViewCount="5154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a program written in a shell language that consists of several shell script files. Some of these files execute external commands that have been licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to release my shell scripts under GPL? Some sources I have read say no, because the external programs are &lt;em&gt;external&lt;/em&gt; (separate) programs. However, I use the programs similarly to libraries in other programming languages. I know that there are eg. Java libraries that do the exact same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use many external programs, and most of them do file processing, eg. parse data and transfer it to a form that can be easily processed using shell scripts. Some of these external programs are also shell scripts, other are native programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9736" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T20:12:36.537" Title="Calling GPL'd programs from a shell script" Tags="|gpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6271" CreationDate="2017-11-26T14:33:11.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notice that shell scripts need (technically) to be released in (nearly) source form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK you can write such a program (even some script) which uses GPL programs without being obliged to make your program GPL-ed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular what matters is if the GPL program is tightly coupled to yours (generally not). This would be the case if it is practically meaningless to use that program without your script (which is unusual)  .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, the doctrine is that a GPL program A is tightly coupled to another program B if it does not make sense to use A outside of B or B without A. In that specific case B should be GPL-licensed too. In other words, coding willingly a GPL wrapper around/for a proprietary program (or vice versa) is considered &quot;cheating&quot; the free software license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(IIRC, Sun  tried such dirty tricks in  the 1990s with an optimizing proprietary code generator above some patched GCC compiler, and that made the FSF and other free software enthusiasts angry. I forgot the legal details, and I am sympathetic with the FSF view).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is well known that GPL libraries (there are few of them, a good example is &lt;a href=&quot;http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;readline&lt;/a&gt;; many free software libraries are using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; license, different of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; license) can only be used from GPL compatible free software. And the doctrine is not that only a technical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linker_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking&lt;/a&gt; (in the Unix &lt;code&gt;ld&lt;/code&gt; sense) is relevant, but more generally some tight &quot;binding&quot; or &quot;coupling&quot;. So you cannot cheat by replacing that linking with a tight and specific RPCJSON protocol (to &quot;mix&quot; a proprietary program with a GPL library called from a serializing GPL-ed program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, I use the programs similarly to libraries in other programming languages. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you are safe in using GPL programs from proprietary code when these GPL-ed programs can be meaningfully used &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; your code, which is generally the case. You are cheating if you write &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt; some easy GPL program (e.g. forking some prior GPL software, or calling some GPL-ed library) to circumvent GPL obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you'll find quite easily many proprietary programs (e.g. IDEs) using &lt;a href=&quot;http://git-scm.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;git&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt;, because the same &lt;em&gt;unmodified&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;/usr/bin/git&lt;/code&gt; GPL-ed program (or &lt;code&gt;/usr/bin/gcc&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;/usr/bin/g++&lt;/code&gt;  ....) can be meaningfully and easily used on the command line, or by other free software programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you wrote a small GPL program which gives a specific JSONRPC protocol to call &lt;code&gt;readline&lt;/code&gt; routines from your proprietary program using that protocol, the court (and the FSF, and me) is likely to consider that as an abuse of the GPL license of &lt;code&gt;readline&lt;/code&gt;. You would be safer if you documented properly that protocol (which becomes some &quot;public&quot; or &quot;common&quot; good or knowledge) and wrote a meaningful GPL program using it (hence validating the idea that your protocol and your GPL program using that protocol have sense independently of your proprietary program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A concrete example of (large, proprietary) shell scripts using GPL programs is provided by installers of proprietary graphics drivers for Linux from NVIDIA (or from ATI in the past). I was so pissed off by such proprietary drivers that I now &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;boycott&lt;/a&gt; NVIDIA and use only AMD graphic cards with their free software drivers (even if the performance is slightly lower).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of these external programs are also shell scripts, other are native programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;executable&lt;/a&gt; file is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ELF&lt;/a&gt; format or is some shell (or other) script is irrelevant (also, the programming language used is not relevant). What matters is the (free software) license of the program or software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;IANAL&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;. Feel free to ask one, or to ask some free software organization and read more carefully the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and take more time to understand the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy&lt;/a&gt; of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T08:59:29.810" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T08:59:29.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6271" CreationDate="2017-11-26T14:34:14.823" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is generally interpreted in a manner that licensing your scripts under the GPL &lt;strong&gt;would not be required&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 states that you have to license your code under the GPL if it were a “work based on the Program”, which is defined “to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission”. When a copyright violation would occur depends on your local jurisdiction. It is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opinion of the Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. the authors of the GPL, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file [or] are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So normal shell scripting is entirely OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (amateur) opinion is that this interpretation by the FSF is extremely conservative, and tends to over-estimate how coupled two programs would be. If you follow the quoted interpretation, you are likely to be on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, you are never required to release your software under the GPL.&#xA;You are always allowed to make private modifications that you do not distribute.&#xA;However, if you wish to release a software that is based on GPL software, then you can only release it under the GPL, no other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T14:34:14.823" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6276" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:48:03.553" Score="5" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/zstd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zstandard&lt;/a&gt; library and it says that it is dual licensed, BSD and GPLv2. What does it mean? If I use libraries in a non open source program will the license be GPL or BSD? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the source files I can see this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you may select either version 2 of the GNU General Public License (&quot;GPL&quot;) or BSD license (&quot;BSD&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I can use the code and just apply the BSD license to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9739" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T06:04:59.770" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T08:30:58.703" Title="What does the Zstandard dual license mean?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1445" CreationDate="2017-11-26T23:58:51.687" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;An important part of the BSD license is the warranty disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might think it's a breath of fresh air and entertaining to the users to apply something like the WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you wind up being sued because someone lost some data and they are blaming that software, arguing that its documentation amounts to some sort of guarantee about what it will or won't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could happen in a jurisdiction in which a warranty disclaimer is held valid and provides protection against that sort of thing. (Thus in such an event it had been foolish not to have one in place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving something away for free doesn't disrobe the giver of liability arising out of its use.  E.g. if someone receives a free electrical appliance, and it starts a fire, the giver is just as liable as a seller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastEditorUserId="6066" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T17:40:34.030" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T17:40:34.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6274" CreationDate="2017-11-27T08:30:58.703" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I can use the code and just apply the BSD license to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is means exactly this. This is somewhat redundant since the 3-clause BSD they use is already considered as &amp;quot;compatible&amp;quot; with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a user, you can elect to use either license, therefore you can pick the BSD license and ignore the GPL alright if you wish to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Offering a choice of license is a somewhat common approach. And choice is good within reason, though it can be abused to absurd (or funny) levels, such as in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dchest/pyblake2/blob/0fffd1d8b833c9a4db2748a04163253cfddfc4bf/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;8-way choice&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PYBLAKE2 IS OCTUPLE-LICENSED UNDER THE FOLLOWING LICENSES&#xA;(choose one or several at your own discretion):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC0 Universal 1.0 - &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unlicense — &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;WTFPL Version 2 - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.wtfpl.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apache Public License 2.0 - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;OpenSSL License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/source/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openssl.org/source/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIT License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The BSD 3-Clause License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ISC License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T08:30:58.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6282" CreationDate="2017-11-27T08:40:49.143" Score="5" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I've been working on this java project for over a year, and it's necessary for this project to reference a GNU GPL licensed software library somewhere in there, then the whole thing suddenly poof has to be GNU GPL.&#xA;I get it.&#xA;Software that references GNU licensed software has to be GNU as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if this jar file has two functions. What if it can be loaded in via a classloader in external software, or executed.&#xA;Loading it in via classloader by external software will run the source that references the GNU GPL protected libraries, and therefore that software is GNU GPL.&#xA;Say it outputs a file called bob.txt and inside it says &quot;Hi, I'm Bob&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, executing the jar file starts up a whole different package of code that never once references any of the GNU protected code.&#xA;It's a program all its own. But say it can also generate a file called bob.txt, or load in an existing bob.txt, and it gives you a nice GUI for modifying all the information about bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the classloader accessed packages of the software be licensed under GNU GPL and the executable accessed packaged given its own more restrictive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to that is yes, does that answer remain the same if you distribute the software compiled into a jar?&#xA;Keeping in mind that a jar is really not much different than a zip?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9744" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T18:53:03.827" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T18:53:03.827" Title="Splitting a project into copyright and copyleft" Tags="|gpl|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6279" CreationDate="2017-11-27T12:52:25.190" Score="4" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all paid programmers in North America (and probably the whole world?) have signed an agreement with their employer which assigns all inventions, copyright, patents, and intellectual property they create to that employer, whether such creations happen on the clock or not (see this article by Stack Exchange co-founder Joel Spolsky: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that premise, it would stand to reason that all contributions from paid programmers who have signed such an agreement, and who don't have a specific signed release/permission to contribute to the open source project in question, are illegally contributed and cannot validly carry a Free or Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gets to the title of this question: &lt;strong&gt;Do Open Source/Free Software projects require submitters to submit proof of authorization to contribute?&lt;/strong&gt;  If not, it seems certain that the legal status of their openness is on very questionable legal grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9645" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T12:45:13.977" Title="Do Open Source/Free Software projects require submitters to submit proof of authorization to contribute?" Tags="|licensing|law|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6278" CreationDate="2017-11-27T13:31:47.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Virtually all major open source projects require contributors to agree to a contributor licensing agreement that includes language asserting that their contributions are able to be legally contributed to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache's Individual Contributor&#xA;License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You represent that you are legally entitled to grant the above&#xA;  license. If your employer(s) has rights to intellectual property&#xA;  that you create that includes your Contributions, you represent&#xA;  that you have received permission to make Contributions on behalf&#xA;  of that employer, that your employer has waived such rights for&#xA;  your Contributions to the Foundation, or that your employer has&#xA;  executed a separate Corporate CLA with the Foundation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You represent that each of Your Contributions is Your original&#xA;  creation (see section 7 for submissions on behalf of others). You&#xA;  represent that Your Contribution submissions include complete&#xA;  details of any third-party license or other restriction (including,&#xA;  but not limited to, related patents and trademarks) of which you&#xA;  are personally aware and which are associated with any part of Your&#xA;  Contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?domain=DOMAIN_GOOGLE&amp;amp;kind=KIND_INDIVIDUAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's Individual Contributor CLA&lt;/a&gt; has virtually identical language (only the corporate names are changed). Other major open source entities probably have very similar terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a defense mechanism for the project: if someone sues the project for copyright infringement, they can easily deflect legal responsibility to the specific responsible contributor(s). Of course, despite this protection from legal liability, any infringing parts will still need to be removed or rewritten, or a compatible license must be acquired from the actual copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &quot;proof&quot;, though, &lt;em&gt;proving&lt;/em&gt; the negative that a creative work does not infringe any copyright is an intractable problem. Not only does it require comparisons against the entire set of all copyrighted works (many of which are not publicly available), but the one-to-one comparison to decide that one work is a derivative of another is itself intractable. This problem is not unique to open source; it is a general problem with copyright law. Any time anyone offers you a creative work, for free or at cost, under FLOSS or non-FLOSS terms, you have no way to reliably determine that the distribution of that work does not infringe copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in some jurisdictions (at least the United States) there is a legal notion of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2013/12/innocent-infringement-intent-and-copyright-law/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;innocent infringement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which may reduce or (rarely) eliminate liability for an infringer who had no reasonable expectation that they were committing infringement: for example, by distributing a contribution in an open source project from a contributor who had formally asserted that their work was not infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;proof&quot; you mean something like, &quot;Contributor prompts their employer to assert that the contributor has permission to make contributions,&quot; I don't expect this to produce substantially better results than making the contributor sign and submit a legal document that asserts the same, and that plan would require a great deal of extra effort. It would be trivial for a bad or lazy contributor to say they have no employer, so this plan does not afford perfect protection, and the level effort involved (requiring both a cooperating contributor &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a cooperating employer, even when no broad IP agreement even exists between employer and employee) would scare off even more potential contributors than requiring a signed CLA already does. Furthermore, it would allow an employer to unfairly block an employee's contributions in jurisdictions where broad employment IP assignments are not enforceable: the project would be waiting for the employer's say-so in accepting the contribution, but the contributor's local contract/IP law would not require them to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you underestimate (or I overestimate) the responsibility of contributors in making arrangements with their employers. I have signed a similar agreement, but my company has a well-defined exemption process, which I have used every time I made open source contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many projects offer corporate CLAs (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?domain=DOMAIN_GOOGLE&amp;amp;kind=KIND_CORPORATE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is Google's&lt;/a&gt;) so that a company can authorize all its employees to contribute to particular open source projects. In the particular case of open source contributions done by the employees major corporations for major open source projects (e.g., consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extensive list of the corporate Linux Foundation members&lt;/a&gt;) where a corporate CLA exists, this is a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T17:03:42.247" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T17:03:42.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6271" CreationDate="2017-11-27T14:07:21.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I write the following short script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#!/bin/sh&#xA;&#xA;cat -n &quot;$1&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The POSIX standard does not define the &lt;code&gt;-n&lt;/code&gt; option for &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt;, but it is supported by GNU &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt;. Does that mean I am using GPL code in my script? No. BSD &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; provides a &lt;code&gt;-n&lt;/code&gt; option that behaves exactly the same, and as the user of your script I could ensure that &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt; refers to the BSD version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, your shell script does not include, provide, or even require GPL code; it just relies on behavior that is provided by, but is not exclusive to, a GPL implementation of &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9750" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T14:07:21.950" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6278" CreationDate="2017-11-28T12:45:13.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do Open Source/Free Software projects require submitters to submit proof of authorization to contribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many projects have such requirement to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) or a DCO; some licenses such as Apache have this baked in. The latest GitHub terms of service even go further as the license is implicitly the same as the project license you contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But only some organizations require to submit a &quot;proof&quot;. Apache and Eclipse do. The Linux kernel relies on the simpler &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DCO&lt;/a&gt;. I do the same on my projects and this works fine in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T12:45:13.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6277" CreationDate="2017-11-28T20:26:37.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Software that references GNU licensed software has to be GNU as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not exactly true always, but in the case of a Java app calling code from a GPL-licensed Jar in the same process, that would likely be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could the classloader accessed packages of the software be licensed under GNU GPL and the executable accessed packaged given its own more restrictive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this runs in the same JVM process, no classloader trick would work to try to escape the GPL, especially if this is shipped in a single JAR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you have an app bundled as a Jar that requires some class named Foo with a function named bar, then you could very much have two JARS versions of this Foo.bar and setup your classpath to use either one at runtime. When you bundle the GPL version, the whole code is eventually subject to the GPL, otherwise it may not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again in the case of the JVM, the key test for me is &quot;same JVM process or not&quot;. And furthermore there is a presumption that this runs in the same process and is designed to so when bundling in the same JAR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They utilize separate JVM processes and do not interact with each other during runtime, but the classloader accessed code that references GPL licensed software is bundled within the same jar as the separate executable accessed code. Given this: gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/… Would you say the statement here presumes that they share a JVM, and the fact that in my circumstance they do not makes it an exceptional case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though there is no such think as static linking in the JVM, I would consider bundling GPL-licensed and proprietary code similar to static linking (or LGPL-licensed code for that matter with not so different implications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in your cases you run two processes each with their own isolated JVM, therefore  my advice is to have a clear separation of concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;one JAR that embeds GPL-licensed code and only GPL-compatible code and is treated overall as GPL-licensed&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;another JAR without any GPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And run each on their own spawned in two separate processes, e.g. two different command line runs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T14:19:00.900" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:19:00.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6284" CreationDate="2017-11-30T20:46:39.987" Score="6" ViewCount="1180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read some of the GPL questions on here that seem relevant, but I haven't found an understandable answer for my particular case. I'll note them here for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4389/when-does-a-dependency-imply-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;When does a dependency imply a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5188/software-if-i-bundle-built-compiled-gpl-2-licensed-software-with-commercial-s&quot;&gt;Software: If I bundle built (compiled) GPL 2 licensed software with commercial software package how does it affect my software license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6034/how-should-i-mark-a-source-file-with-gplv2-as-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;How should I mark a source file with GPLv2 as a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4780/can-license-incompatible-program-communicate-with-gplv2-program-via-websocket&quot;&gt;Can license-incompatible program communicate with GPLv2 program via websocket?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which seems relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this is not a duplicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Background&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a project that's mostly written in C with many dependencies. Many are MIT, some ISC, some custom, and some GPL with special exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the project to have a permissive license. I'd like to be able to allow people to use parts of my project for proprietary applications without being affected by things like GPL. To do that, my thought was to decouple invasive dependencies such as GPL from select parts of my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is comprised of multiple components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;MyLib (author: me)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A custom library that can be shared OR static depending on platform.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It only depends on projects with permissive licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It implements a REST API that takes in (and returns) data types of its own definitions which don't depend on any restrictive licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;MyServer (author: me, but depends on a GPLv2 project)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A server application that depends on a GPLv2 networking stack.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have not made modifications to the networking stack source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The network stack source is compiled directly into the server program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The server also uses MyLib as a dependency, but this dependency does not utilize any of the facilities from the network stack. The reverse is also true. Instead, it is the server application's responsibility to transform data from the networking stack into primitive data types that can be consumed by MyLib without exposing any implementation details of the GPLv2 project, and vice-versa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;MyClient (author: me)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A web client with no dependencies which talks to MyServer and utilizes the REST API as defined by MyLib.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned before, the logic and data structures for the REST API is defined in MyLib which is agnostic to the server implementation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that the server implementation could use ANY framework and the client/library on each end wouldn't care. The middleman is completely opaque to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I have a separate, more permissive license for MyLib and MyClient?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does static linkage between MyLib and MyServer change how the GPLv2 license applies to distributed binaries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if I or some user of this project &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; modify the GPLv2 network stack?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would the following project structure comply with the GPLv2 license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;    my_project_repo/&#xA;      server/&#xA;        LICENSE.txt - GPLv2&#xA;        server.c - MyServer which includes network.c and abitrarily links to MyLib &#xA;      client/&#xA;        LICENSE.txt - Whatever&#xA;        index.html&#xA;      lib/&#xA;        LICENSE.txt - Whatever&#xA;        mylib.c - MyLib&#xA;      extern/&#xA;        network_project/&#xA;          LICENSE.txt - GPLv2&#xA;          network.c - Networking stack&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intuition says that this situation is making myself the user of a dependency I made. This means the same rules apply to my other permissive dependencies. That is, it doesn't make sense to say a project with the zlib license becomes GPL just because someone out there compiled it into a project that also includes a GPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this means that MyServer becomes treated as the &quot;default&quot; server implementation. The restriction on users who wish to use a server component for proprietary purposes would be that they need to reimplement the server using MyLib and a different networking framework to evade the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a correct assumption?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9809" LastEditorUserId="9809" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:19:35.887" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T18:43:04.100" Title="How can a GPLv2 dependency affect licensing of adjacent components that form an aggregate project?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6283" CreationDate="2017-11-30T21:55:19.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I have a separate, more permissive license for MyLib and MyClient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely, you said they dependencies of MyLib have permissive licenses. I assume you are referring to the MIT &amp;amp; ISC license types here. For these two licenses you just need to convey the copyright and license information to be compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does static linkage between MyLib and MyServer change how the GPLv2 license applies to distributed binaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If you are distributing a binary in which MyServer has statically linked (would also apply to dynamic linking too) in MyLib, then the combined work is licensed under the GPL2. Hence, you would have to treat both MyLib and MyServer as licensed as GPLv2 if you are distributing the binaries of the two things linked together. If you are only distributing the source, you are free to license MyLib under a license that is compatible with the permissive licenses that it depends on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens if I or some user of this project does modify the GPLv2 network stack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute the binary that has included a modified GPLv2 network stack, then you must also distribute the source that includes these network stack changes. It's important to note which files you have modified if you care about your copyright. Supplying the modifications via a patch file would be an appropriate way to convey your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would the following project structure comply with the GPLv2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, that structure could comply with the GPLv2 terms and conditions, but you run the risk of licensing cross contamination by placing differently licensed software in the same repository. Just be careful that MyLib doesn't accidentally start using headers and other source files from MyServer. If MyLib starts using components from MyServer, you may end up having to license MyLib under the GPLv2. I think your structure is fine as long as you have the diligence to make sure your permissively licensed software isn't using the code from the more restrictive GPLv2 components. Personally, I would make it a configure time option to specify which library MyServer links to, if that is applicable in this case. That makes it a little more clear that MyServer and MyLib are distinct components. Putting them in separate repositories may also help prevent any confusion or contamination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UDPATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MyServer compiles server.c and network_stack.c into an executable. [note: depends on a GPLv2 project] This executable uses headers from MyLib and links to it. On MacOS builds it links statically. On Windows and Linux it links dynamically. MyLib is irrefutably a distinct component. It's still very confusing what the distinctions are between GPL compliance as a project that's broken into several components, and creating a binary release of the project. Does the GPL &quot;infect&quot; MyLib even if someone rips it out and uses it in a separate project, or only if they're building/releasing MyServer with MyLib as a component?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: there is no &quot;infection&quot; in the GPL. There are permissions and conditions instead. The same way that when you buy a commercial license for a proprietary ware, this does not &quot;infect&quot; your wallet: it only makes it lighter ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things are therefore simple: whether this is dynamic or static linking does not matter to the GPL. Whether MyLib shared library is build as a distinct component does not matter either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters is that MyServer and MyLib collectively depend on a GPL-licensed component that will run in the same process at run time and therefore the GPL applies to this runtime combo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When used separately and without this GPL dependenency, the GPL does not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T18:43:04.100" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T18:43:04.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5699" CreationDate="2017-12-01T11:33:42.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no court cases I ever heard of, as of this date, involving the MIT license. I am not sure there is anything on BSD either (short of the Berkeley vs. AT&amp;amp;T feud over Unix, last century, maybe). This BSD issue &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.weeklystandard.com/obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-for-copyrighted-software/article/763666&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;came&lt;/a&gt; out close but never went to court. In fact things rarely end up in courts with FLOSS licensing and are mostly resolved amicably, as they should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T09:00:20.443" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T09:00:20.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4811" CreationDate="2017-12-01T11:35:10.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a case of clearly confusing and conflicted licensing. Based on your research, you should contact the authors to clarify this mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T11:35:10.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5635" CreationDate="2017-12-01T11:40:02.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Add and/or keep existing notices is the best way to go at the file level and a top level summary helps. More is best e.g. 3. such that you can cover the case of source and binary redistribution more easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also consider using SPDX-License-Identifier in the files and keep only a top-level notice. This is something that I am helping with in the Linux kernel for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, for a Python project, the &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; license arg and the trove classifiers are a way to start. You could also include all this narrative in your top level &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file: if you build a wheel, and if your licensing file is named LICENSE, put this in your &lt;code&gt;setup.cfg&lt;/code&gt; to include the license in the built wheel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[metadata]&#xA;license_file = LICENSE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would get belt and suspenders this way. And extra credits for being nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T11:45:37.303" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T11:45:37.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-01T13:14:33.690" Score="3" ViewCount="1313" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I include this in the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for an open source project I'm doing:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(the following is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache's individual CLA&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of&#xA;  this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Foundation and to&#xA;  recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual,&#xA;  worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable&#xA;  copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,&#xA;  publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your&#xA;  Contributions and such derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(a CLA dictates under what terms someone contributes source code to the project)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, can I change the copyright license of my open source code project, to something else? (after other people have contributed.) For example, GPL, MIT, or even proprietary, closed source, commercial? (Current license: AGPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can do that, right? Because the contributors grants me a copyright license with all permissions, including to sublicense it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do I need something like this: (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghost's CLA&lt;/a&gt; which I think originally is from an old version of jQuery's CLA)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contributing your code to Ghost you grant the Ghost Foundation a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicenseable, transferable license under all of Your relevant intellectual property rights (including copyright, patent, and any other rights), to use, copy, prepare derivative works of, distribute and publicly perform and display the Contributions on any licensing terms, including without limitation: (a) open source licenses like the MIT license; and (b) binary, proprietary, or commercial licenses. Except for the licenses granted herein, You reserve all right, title, and interest in and to the Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: I'm developing open source software. It's licensed under the AGPL. But later on I want to change to a more permissive license, like the GPL (or possibly MIT or Apache 2). And I also want the possibility to sell the software to companies under some commercial license, if they aren't okay with the GPL license. — Just above the actual CLA text, I tell everyone about these my thoughts about the future. So everyone knows I'll change to GPL or MIT later on, and maybe want to sell to companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9828" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T13:05:45.633" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T13:05:45.633" Title="Can I change the copyright license, with this text in the CLA?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|relicensing|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6288" CreationDate="2017-12-01T17:32:51.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right to change the license is one of the intellectual property rights that are commonly referred to as copyrights.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The basic idea with copyrights is that all rights belong to the author of a work and that author can grant licenses to others to exercise a sub-set of the rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first CLA fragment (from Apache), the right to change the copyright license is not included in the rights you receive, so after you accept a contribution from someone else, you can only change the license with their express permission.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the second CLA fragment (from Ghost), the right to change the copyright license is explicitly included and you are permitted to change the copyright license without asking further permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a note of caution, with a CLA that allows you to change the license at will, also to a permissive or closed-source license, you may find that people may not want to contribute to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, there is a large cultural divide between the proponents of (strong) copyleft licenses and the proponents of permissive licenses. One of the major reasons for wanting a (strong) copyleft license is the guaranteed freedom it gives to end-users that they can see and modify the code. One of the basic ideas behind strong copyleft licenses, like GPL and AGPL is that the code under such a license can't be used in a product together with closed-source code. Many advocates of strong copyleft licenses are strongly opposed to the idea of closed-source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For ideological reasons, such people will not be willing to contribute to your project and they may go as far as giving your project bad reviews because of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And in the same vein, proponents of permissive licenses may also not be comfortable to provide their contributions initially under a strong copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, your desire to change the license at a later date, and even sell the software, gives me the impression that you want to make money off the work that I provide to you without any reward. That can be large off-putting factor for many potential contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T17:32:51.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:17:21.560" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a young programmer who is interested in many many different types of projects and often start my own projects which are far too large to complete by myself so I went out and tried to find a project which matched my skill level, was using a technology that I enjoyed using, and was a product I found meaningful.  After doodling around on various projects I ran across an open source program that I loved as a child and began to fix bugs as I found them or they were reported and got all of my PRs denied.  I asked the admin why and they responded that they prefer that I only fix bugs with a certain label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really would like to continue helping this project. Is there any general rule of etiquette on GitHub or open source projects in general that I don't see?  This is my first major project I helped with and I spent a large number of my free time working on it recently so am slightly angry to be told this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6547" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T15:07:57.727" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T15:07:57.727" Title="I was told by a project that they only want my help on a few things" Tags="|github|software-development|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6290" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:01:12.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, help is very welcome. But every project has its own culture. Sometimes it's spelled out explicitly as a “Contributing” guide, sometimes it's implicit and you'd have to learn by lurking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is best not too invest too much effort at once. One reasonably-sized pull request at a time. This helps you to become familiar with the conventions of the project, and helps the project members to start trusting you. Reasonably sized means that you don't swamp the project with many irrelevant small changes, but that your PRs are still small enough to be reviewed easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every pull request is helpful. For example, far reaching changes, introducing a new dependency, or implementing functionality that is out of scope for a project are not generally received well. Those have to be discussed first. In general, PRs are most useful not when they expand the project, but when they fix a small problem you've encountered while using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some issues are not an invitation for a pull request. It is unusual that you would only be “allowed” to tackle specially tagged issues, but it is common that an issue requires discussions and design work rather than a bunch of code.&#xA;It could also be the case that someone is already working on that issue.&#xA;The maintainers might want to work on some issues themselves if these issues are very important: it is often easier to do something yourself, than it is to manage others to do that thing in the manner you wanted. Wanting to mentor other people is not the main reason why many people maintain open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you present code, make sure that it fits in with the rest of the project: that it adheres to the same coding conventions as the surrounding code, and that all tests continue to pass.&#xA;If you are unsure about some decision in your code, explain that in the pull request so that this concern can be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these steps won't guarantee that your PRs get accepted, but they might help. And while open source contributions are nice, they're not the only way to grow as a programmer. For example, answering questions on Stack Overflow or posting a program you've written on Code Review are approaches I've used to “level up” as a developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:01:12.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-02T07:06:24.377" Score="7" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the Author of a small Open Source nuget package (EnumStringValues, if you care: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Brondahl/EnumStringValues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GitHub&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/EnumStringValues/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;nuget&quot;&gt;nuget&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's C#, .NET. Written in VS, hosted on GitHub.&#xA;I've been the only contributor, and it has ~250 downloads.&#xA;The scope of the package is relatively small, and thus I've done no work on it since completing initial development and releasing it, 2.5 yrs ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday (presumably prompted by 24PullRequests?) I received a PR which makes a couple of useful changes.&#xA;In amongst those changes, is the change to upgrade the .sln to VS 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only have VS2013 at home and don't expect to upgrade anytime soon, and I assume (but will check) that this will render me unable to open the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Is it considered appropriate to reject this aspect of the PR? As Author and current sole-contributor, is it considered reasonable to say &quot;my ability to open the project is a requirement&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the changes are dependant on the newer version of VS? (i.e. because they are about .NET framework support (.NET Standard 2.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the etiquette norms here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9860" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T05:42:50.057" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T05:42:50.057" Title="Visual Studio compatibility of Open Source project" Tags="|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2017-12-02T07:35:28.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The harsh-reality answer: You are the project maintainer. Contributors may not like it, but technically, you can reject PRs for any prosaic reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;My ability to open the project is a requirement&quot; seems like a reasonable requirement to me, but I'd rephrase it so it doesn't focus on you, but on all users and contributors - &quot;EnumStringValues supports VS2013, and changes requiring newer versions of VS or the .net standard will be rejected&quot;. If you really want to be polite, you could add something like &quot;this decision may change in future versions, but will hold for the duration of the 2.x releases&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T07:35:28.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6290" CreationDate="2017-12-02T07:39:34.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to @amon's answer - another consideration may be the timing. Some projects use strict development cycles (or sprints). For example, a certain development sprint may concentrate only on improvements to feature X and during that sprint changes to Y are rejected. Another example could be that a project is nearing a release and is now focusing on stability. During this phase, only bugfixes (or even only fixes to severe bugs) are accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T07:39:34.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6292" CreationDate="2017-12-02T12:35:03.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's your project, you should make sure it actually works. Whilst you can't &lt;em&gt;check&lt;/em&gt; that some proposed change works (and doesn't introduce anything malicious), you should only pull it if you know the author well already and trust them. That's the only thing I'd consider &amp;ldquo;ethically mandatory&amp;rdquo; here. &lt;strong&gt;If the PR is a risk factor, don't pull it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I find it generally rather annoying if project maintainers bog their code down with old standards. So first of all I'd just give it a shot: pull that change, but to a separate branch of your repository, not to &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt;. Then try if you can actually work on that branch with your old version of VS; perhaps this actually works, I don't know anything about &lt;code&gt;.sln&lt;/code&gt;. If it does work, then just go ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it does not work, it might still be sensible to try it: check the project out on a machine that has a suitable version installed (perhaps using a CI service like Travis). If you can confirm that the change is valid but you just can't personally work with it anymore, than my advice would be to &lt;strong&gt;pull it in the master branch, but do all your own work on a seperate branch&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;legacy/VS2013&lt;/code&gt; that has an extra commit reverting the &lt;code&gt;.sln&lt;/code&gt; file to a version you can work with. After every change, you'd than rebase that commit back on top and reset your &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch to incorporate the relevant changes but not the legacy revert. Goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git checkout master&#xA;$ git pull contributor/proposedChanges&#xA;$ git log&#xA;...   # Look for the SHA1 of the commit that changes the .sln file&#xA;...   # Let's pretend it's 1234abc&#xA;$ git checkout -b legacy/VS2013  # make new branch and switch to it&#xA;$ git revert 1234abc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point you should be able to normally work on your legacy branch using VS2013, while the Github repo is officially at the new standard. If you now make some changes on your branch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git commit -m $'Some new change of my own'&#xA;$ git commit -m $'Some other new change'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then you first need to &lt;em&gt;rebase&lt;/em&gt; that work so update the &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git rebase -i HEAD~3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will give you an editor view like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick cba4321 Revert update to VS2015&#xA;pick 8820444 Some new change of my own&#xA;pick ffe5519 Some other new change&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Change the order to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick 8820444 Some new change of my own&#xA;pick ffe5519 Some other new change&#xA;pick cba4321 Revert update to VS2015&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and save&amp;amp;quit the editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, &lt;code&gt;git log&lt;/code&gt; should also display the new order, i.e. the revert comes last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To publish your changes without the revert, you now just update the &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch accordingly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git checkout master&#xA;$ git merge legacy/VS2013^  # penultimate commit on that branch&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then update the online repo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git push origin&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and switch back to your own branch for further work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git checkout legacy/VS2013&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a broader thing... if updating is such a problem you might want to consider to switch to an entirely different development environment in the future, preferrably something free like Mono.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T12:56:32.197" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T12:56:32.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6290" CreationDate="2017-12-02T18:45:18.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I really would like to continue helping this project. Is there any general rule of etiquette on GitHub or open source projects in general that I don't see? This is my first major project I helped with and I spent a large number of my free time working on it recently so am slightly angry to be told this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general: they are the owners of the project, not you. That means they are responsible for determining what the project &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, how it acts, what problems it tries to solve, how the community around it works, etc. They are the ones that users will scream at if it corrupts their data. They are the ones that will get blamed if it's difficult to implement a feature because of past architectural decisions. There is a lot more to software development than just programming, and they're responsible for all of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to deal with any of that, which is great! But that means you need to ask them when doing any work, because they have a larger picture. (This is the case in most businesses as well.) My general rule of thumb is to only ever preemptively do work if I'm ok it never getting used - otherwise, I talk to the project leaders &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T18:45:18.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:25:48.623" Score="3" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a specific example relating to my question, I offer &lt;a href=&quot;https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VisIt&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing information&lt;/a&gt; for VisIt, it is stated that it is BSD-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, looking over the &lt;a href=&quot;http://visitusers.org/index.php?title=High_level_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libraries&lt;/a&gt; used in VisIt, it can be seen for instance that Qt is used for VisIt's GUI. It is my understanding that Qt was never BSD-licensed, or, ever as unrestrictive as a BSD-license, and currently you can use Qt in terms of LGPL or commercial licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how can VisIt, which distributes via both &lt;a href=&quot;https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/executables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;binary&lt;/a&gt; still be considered BSD-licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, in the source distribution of VisIt, it includes the GPL and QPL license file for Qt, suggesting an even more restrictive license propagation setup, suggesting that VisIt should be released as GPL and not BSD, as it currently is. (I noticed in the About area in VisIt, they display the QPL license, but, as I understand it, that was dropped many Qt versions ago, and yet VisIt 'distributes' in both the source and binary sense, versions of Qt above v4 and v5.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am asking such specific questions regarding VisIt is that I was going to utilize VisIt as the visualization component for a simulation program that I have written. Seeing as how it was BSD-licensed, I thought, 'great', but, in looking at the libraries that VisIt is utilizing, it makes me wonder how it could be BSD-licensed as a whole package. If it was for instance GPL-licensed, then I would not be using it in my 'potentially' commercial future for my simulation program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in general then, does someone intending on using any given software (not written by you) in a commercial application have to scour the library dependencies for said software looking for a GPL-licensed piece of software that might 'force' you to GPL-license your application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9877" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T07:59:55.953" Title="If some software states it is BSD-licensed, how can it be distributing itself with GPL/LGPL components?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|commercial|bsd|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6299" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:08:11.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is commonly advised to use the GPL license if your code depends on third-party GPL code, there is no actual requirement to do so. The only requirement is that you use a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indeed means that if you want to use a third-party library in your (commercial) GPL-incompatible project, you need to recursively check the dependencies if they have a license that is incompatible with your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a package like Qt as a dependency, which is multi-licensed, the situation becomes more complicated and you can see that it is actually a good thing that you don't have to take over the most restrictive license of your dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a project is multi-licensed, it is made available under multiple licenses and users of the project can choose which of the licenses they want to have applied to themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt is licensed under GPL. LGPL and commercial licenses. If Vision had chosen to use the GPL license itself, users of Vision would be forced to choose a non-commercial license for Qt as well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, as Vision is licensed with a permissive license that is compatible with any of the Qt licenses, they have left all options open for you to choose under which license you would use Qt.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For commercial applications, either the LGPL (if you link dynamically to allow end-user updated of Qt) or commercial options of Qt are viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:08:11.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6304" CreationDate="2017-12-04T00:09:57.890" Score="-2" ViewCount="1218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Android app using two libraries (GPLv2 and APLv2). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that GPLv2 and APLv2 are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will show which open source libraries I've used and tell the reader which licenses the libraries are under in my app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean my license &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be one where both licenses are compatible? Do I need a license at all if I reference to the libraries I've used? I don't care so much about my app but I don't want any legal issues when I publish it on Play Store. Plus my app will be free if that matters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9881" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T01:59:29.017" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:00:01.797" Title="Do I need a license when I use licensed libraries in my app?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6305" CreationDate="2017-12-04T01:24:39.990" Score="32" ViewCount="7274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to choose which open source license I should use in my app, and in the description for one of the licenses, it says the license provides an &quot;express grant of patent rights from contributors to users&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone be able to explain to me what this means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license that this is from is the Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8817" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T21:06:41.357" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T09:28:52.527" Title="What does &quot;express grant of patent rights from contributors to users&quot; mean?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5988" CreationDate="2017-12-04T13:37:41.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is only GPL licensed code in the Sass project's vendors modules. The frontend (HTML, Javascript, etc) only uses MIT or public domain code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, assuming that the GPL v2 code is back end only and not redistributed, you can use all the GPL 2 you want without having redistribution obligations for that. The front-end code would require attribution where needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T13:37:41.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6301" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:00:01.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you just create an app for personal use and you are not providing it to others, then you don't need to license your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to provide your app to others, you need to make it clear what the others are allowed to do with the code you wrote. Informing people about their rights and obligation is done by means of licensing, which is nothing more than adding a license text to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are using multiple libraries in your project, then you need to make sure that all licenses of the various libraries and your own code are compatible with each other. If the licenses are not compatible with each other, then you can't meet all the obligations that the licenses place on you and you are not allowed to distribute your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses (like MIT, BSD and Apache) are generally compatible with each other, if only because they place few requirements on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses, like GPL, have more compatibility issues, because they place requirements on a complete application, even if only a small library is actually licensed in such a way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because copyleft licenses extend their requirements to the complete application, it is generally advised to use the GPL license for your own code if you use a GPL-licensed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 license is indeed incompatible with the Apache license due to some patent-related clauses in the Apache license that are not allowed under the GPLv2 license, and the GPLv2 license requires that the whole app adheres to the terms of the GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL-library is actually licensed as &quot;GPL version 2 or later&quot;, then not all hope is lost. The GPLv3 license &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; compatible with the Apache license, and the &quot;or later&quot; part on the GPL license allows you to treat the library as if it was originally released under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:00:01.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6302" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:31:16.630" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two, completely independent, forms of intellectual property rights that can be used to protect software against unwanted copying/modification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright protects the &quot;expression of an idea&quot; and applies to the source code that gets written. Copyright protection is granted automatically at the moment that the code is written. Copyright protection means that only the author is allowed to make copies of or changes in the code, unless the author explicitly gives this right also to others by means of a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents protect inventions and need to be explicitly requested. When a patent has been granted to you, you have the exclusive right to make use of that invention or to give a patent license to others.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Patents can be broader that copyrights, because if someone else makes the same invention that you have a patent on, then you can force them to stop using the invention or to buy a patent license from you. With copyright, however, it is possible that multiple people independently write very similar code and each has their own copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache License 2.0 is primarily a copyright license that gives people the right to use the code written by the person granting the license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, contrary to many other copyright licenses, the Apache license also takes patents into consideration and includes a license to use the relevant patents  that the person holds who released the code under the Apache license. That is what the phrase means that you quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-30T15:51:21.937" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T15:51:21.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6310" CreationDate="2017-12-04T23:03:55.820" Score="1" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using an open source library to develop an application. The library is under the Apache 2.0 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license says you need to put a copy of the license and of the copyright into the software the library is going into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the library I cannot find the copyright, what should I do? The library I'm using is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IBM-Swift/BlueSocket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BlueSocket&lt;/a&gt; which is on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8817" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T18:09:30.173" Title="What to do if I can't find the copyright when using an open source library" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6313" CreationDate="2017-12-05T13:02:39.500" Score="3" ViewCount="1196" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that I have an open-source plugin, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/limonte/sweetalert2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sweetalert2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I get the list of &lt;strong&gt;all open-source projects&lt;/strong&gt; (on GitHub) with &lt;code&gt;sweetalert2&lt;/code&gt; dependency in &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BrUkc.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was similar functionality in &lt;a href=&quot;https://libraries.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://libraries.io/&lt;/a&gt; but I can't find it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9912" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T03:56:36.923" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T03:56:36.923" Title="Get the list of projects which depend on given library" Tags="|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6309" CreationDate="2017-12-05T16:09:34.773" Score="1" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my case I'd like to use an open-source music program to make some music for an android app. When I later want to publish this app on the app store, this does mean I cannot use a normal copyright license right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've understood that I cannot distribute any open-source software with another license than what the open-source program is licensed to.&#xA;Is it all about the program itself or does this include the content created with the program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say the mp3 file made with the opensource program, do I own that? I'm using samples coming with the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this comes down to is, will my whole app lay under a license so everyone can copy my material? Even though I have other content created with normal licensed programs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9914" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T03:55:34.857" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T03:55:34.857" Title="Using partially open source program/s and non open source programs, together in a project to be commercial?" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6308" CreationDate="2017-12-05T17:33:05.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For copyright, a program and the output from a program are completely independent works. The copyright license under which you receive a program has no bearing at all on the licenses you can use for the work that you create by using the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the GCC compiler is licensed under the GPL license, but there is no problem in using it to create closed-source commercial applications. Also, MS Word is licensed under a closed-source license, but there is nothing stopping you to write an open-source novel with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception here is if the output of the program contains not just (a mechanical transformation of) your input but also copies of parts of the program itself. The most well known examples of such programs are parser generators like Bison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you create an MP3 file, the ownership and copyright status depends on how you created the file.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you start out with one (or more) samples from someone else, which you then modify to create your MP3 file, then your file is a derived work of the source samples. In this case, the copyright of the final MP3 lies with both you and the creators of the original samples and the license that you can use to distribute your MP3 under depends on the license under which you received the original samples.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you create the MP3 file from scratch, by recording your music or creating it yourself, then the copyright is entirely yours and you are completely free in your choice of licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When publishing an app that also includes music/artwork and either of them falls under an open-source license, then it is recommended that you use separate licenses for the app itself and the artwork and/or music. The reason for this is that all open source licenses are either written for use with software (and they generally use terms that don't have a well-defined meaning outside the context of software), or they are written for use with artistic works. By using separate licenses, you don't get into the situation that the license contains terms that are not really suitable for half the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T17:33:05.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6306" CreationDate="2017-12-05T18:09:30.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The project has no clear license file&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project does not have a file that clearly spells out under which terms the project can be used, then you must assume that the default copyright protection applies. This means that only the author of the code is allowed to make copies, make changes or do anything useful with the code. In short, you can't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is in a public repository and there are statements from the owner of the repository indicating that the code is intended to be open-source, you can inform the owner that the license and/or copyright status is unclear and that it can't be considered open-source until that has been resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The project does have a clear license, but no clear copyright information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation is somewhat unusual, but it can happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the license file typically &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; contain copyright information. The license itself wasn't written by the author of the code (I would hope), so he can't put his copyright on it, and for all the major licenses it is accepted practice that they are used without a copyright statement of the license author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, at first glance, there is no copyright statement in sight, I would first double-check all the files in the repository, starting with the source files and excluding the files that appear to be third-party dependencies that were copied. Source files are the most likely files to contain a copyright statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there really is no copyright statement in any of the files (excluding third-party dependencies), then it is time to file a bug report against the repository asking the owner to clear up the copyright status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mean time, if the repository has a public record of the changes that were made (or the pull requests that were merged), you can assume that the copyright is shared between all the persons that have contributed to the project. If the project has more than a handful contributors and you need the information just for a proper acknowledgement in your project, I doubt that anyone has a problem with an acknowledgement in the form of &amp;quot;the contributors of &amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T18:09:30.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-05T19:12:03.427" Score="0" ViewCount="1837" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the BSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) , All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,&#xA;  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an open source project and want to use other open source code, published under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as far as I understand this, the license requires me to mention these open source libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I have to mention it? Do I mention it in the readme? Do I mention it in the part where I import the external libraries/use the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9915" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T16:27:39.857" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T16:27:39.857" Title="Where do I mention copyright when using BSD-licensed open source code?" Tags="|bsd|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6311" CreationDate="2017-12-05T20:58:47.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't necessarily. The key phrase here is &quot;redistributions &lt;strong&gt;of source code&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Redistributing Source&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're redistributing the source code if you take the library's code, copy it into your project (maybe in its own directory or package), and publish your project's code. Git submodules are a good example of this - having a Git submodule in your public GitHub project is a redistribution of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is what you're doing, then you must leave any licenses in the library's code untouched. This includes license files (&lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; etc) as well as notices in source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This does not apply if&lt;/strong&gt; you're only redistributing &lt;em&gt;binaries&lt;/em&gt; of the library, such as DLLs or executables. These are object code, not source code, so they don't count as source redistribution and you don't have to leave the copyright notice. There may, however, be other requirements surrounding distribution of object form - check the full license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Not Redistributing Source&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not redistributing the code of the library (for example, your code depends on the library but specifies its dependency in a requirements file - &lt;code&gt;pip&lt;/code&gt;'s &lt;code&gt;requirements.txt&lt;/code&gt; convention or a &lt;code&gt;Gemfile&lt;/code&gt; are good examples of this), then you don't have to follow the requirements above. Including a kickback to the library is still a good thing to do, though, especially if it's a major part of your project. You're free to choose the format of this, though a link in your README is a pretty widespread method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T21:48:37.303" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T21:48:37.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6307" CreationDate="2017-12-05T22:43:21.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;npm will show you any packages which depend on another package. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended/sweetalert2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's what it says for sweetalert2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that won't include dev-dependencies, or projects which haven't been published to GitHub. GitHub itself however &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/limonte/sweetalert2/network/dependents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also has a list of all public repositories which depend on your package&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T22:43:21.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-06T07:13:32.803" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to make my small open-source web project for training purpose and put it on GitHub. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to use frame from the existing game, but I don't know if I will have any issues from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the screenshot from the game (&lt;em&gt;Icewind Dale 2&lt;/em&gt;) and below the frame I would like to use in my home-made project, just to wrap the text in the box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that many fan Websites are using graphic from games, my Project is used only for learning purposes but i want to store it on github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/60k3A.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/60k3Am.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3zTRH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3zTRHm.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9924" LastEditorUserId="9924" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T15:19:25.307" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T16:41:57.887" Title="Can I use small part of graphic in my GitHub project?" Tags="|copyright|gaming|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-12-07T06:43:05.877" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6314" CreationDate="2017-12-06T16:41:57.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you can find the license for this program, you must assume the copyright holder(s), which is likely the company or developers of the game, have not granted you permission to use the graphic outside of the game. Hence, you would not be allowed to use the graphic in your GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft explicitly allows you to post in-game footage of their games via a license agreement: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/rules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/rules&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are likely a similar set of rules for this game. However, I would be cautious and do not assume this to be true without any evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T16:41:57.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-07T04:49:39.447" Score="10" ViewCount="2660" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNkq0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNkq0.png&quot; alt=&quot;Now, Github will help potential first-time contributors discover issues labeled with &amp;quot;help wanted&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;good first issue&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a project with 200 open issues (many more closed), and I want to encourage more people to join and fix issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently GitHub is showing me this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Label issues and pull requests for new contributors&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, GitHub will help potential first-time contributors discover issues labeled with &quot;help wanted&quot; or &quot;good first issue&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand the merits of the &quot;&lt;em&gt;good first issue&lt;/em&gt;&quot; label and use it already, my question is about the &quot;help wanted&quot; label.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want help on ALL issues.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I apply the label to the 200 open issues, and to all new ones (a few per day)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably a balance between the time taken applying the label, and the visibility it gives to the issues, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the actual merits of applying the label? Does it advertise the issues somewhere, or make them somehow easier to find?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to efficiently apply the label, for instance a &quot;Help wanted for all issues&quot; setting, or a bot?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2018-09-22T22:07:15.413" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T22:07:15.413" Title="GitHub's &quot;Help wanted&quot; label: What if I want help on all issues?" Tags="|github|contributor|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6299" CreationDate="2017-12-07T07:59:55.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  Secondly, any answer must address the question of whether dynamically linking code B to code A creates a derivative work of both A and B.  We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;arguments that it does&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat?rq=1&quot;&gt;arguments that it doesn't&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5090/458&quot;&gt;no-one really knows&lt;/a&gt;; for the rest of this answer I will assume that dynamic linking does create a derivative work, but &lt;em&gt;that is only an assumption for the purposes of the answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite what other answers here say, if you distribute a derivative work of a body of GPL code (which this answer assumes is true if your code dynamically links to GPL'ed code), the derivative work must be distributed under GNU GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL3&lt;/a&gt; s5c, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL2&lt;/a&gt; s2b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Qt &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/08/20/adding-lgpl-v3-to-qt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is available&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL3&lt;/a&gt;, which does not require this (see, eg, lack of comparable requirement in s3).  If Qt were only freely-available under GPL, then the Visit executable would indeed be required to be distributed under GPL, and its components under compatible licences; but this is not the case, so it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T07:59:55.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6340" CreationDate="2017-12-07T13:55:14.033" Score="3" ViewCount="595" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write a plugin for a software that will not be licensed with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However as this plugin needs to communicate with OPC, I wanted to use the .net standard &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OPCFoundation/UA-.NETStandard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPC stack&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;This 'program' is licensed with GPL V2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether my plugin which is a new C# Assembly can use the GPL licensed DLLs while not affecting the main program's license. (The plugin itself can be distributed with GPL V2 if needed to, but we would not prefer that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main application would load the DLL and use the data it gets from there (unknowing which DLLs it really uses and without access to those GPL licensed DLLs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already found this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure if this is a clear case and I can continue to implement this way, or if I should organize a professional to check it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Sorry if my question was not clear but confusing to you.&#xA;-The main application should be non-GPL and it will load the plugin dll which in turn loads the GPL dll. My question is if the main application is now influenced by this. It may be possible to have the plugin dll GPL also but not the main application.&#xA;The main application will resolve the plugin dll with dependency injection and therefor the plugin will reference some core dll that holds interfaces for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9937" LastEditorUserId="9937" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T08:13:39.507" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:24:39.540" Title="Plugin (consuming GPL V2 licensed binaries) for main application (not GPL)" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-08T06:25:05.587" Score="18" ViewCount="8447" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD_3Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD license&lt;/a&gt; says that derivative works may be distributed under the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;strong&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;strong&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA;      the documentation and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;      distribution.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3)The name of the author may not be used to&#xA;      endorse or promote products derived from this software without&#xA;      specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL(v2)&lt;/a&gt;[1] says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. &lt;strong&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/strong&gt; You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's say I write software, use some GPL code and some BSD code, and publish the result under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL, I'm not allowed to have my resultant code require any further conditions than imposed by the GPL. For example, I'm not allowed to charge $1000 for a copy of source code. The thing is that while the BSD seems to be a fairly light license, it does require some things which the GPL doesn't: Clause 1 and 2 require that derivative works &lt;em&gt;have to&lt;/em&gt; have an attached BSD license/warranty disclaimer, and 3 requires that I may not use the original author's name to promote my work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now my derivative work has to pass on the following requirements to my end-users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they want to redistribute my code, they may do so under the GPL (from the GPL code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they want to redistribute my code, they must put &quot;a bunch of words&quot; and agree not to say that the original BSD authors helped out my code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does 1. and 2. work together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/304/can-i-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl?rq=1&quot;&gt;Can I take BSD licensed code and distribute it under GPL?&lt;/a&gt; , but the FSF definitely holds that the three clause BSD is GPL compatible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]. GPLv3 explicitly solves this problem in Paragraph 7. But GPL2 doesn't contain these clauses there (to the best of my knowledge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9943" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T06:48:24.773" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T08:53:43.190" Title="How is the BSD GPL-compatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6319" CreationDate="2017-12-08T08:44:54.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only is requirement one not in conflict with the GNU GPL, the GPL requires it also.  See, eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL3&lt;/a&gt; s4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice [...] keep intact all notices stating that this License [applies ... ] keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL2 has similar language in eg s1.  The requirement to &quot;keep a copyright notice, keep a disclaimer, tell future users they need to keep both&quot; is thus entirely in keeping with the GPL.  If the list you had to keep intact contained more than that then it would indeed not be compatible, as the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertising-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; licence was not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the GPL will fulfil requirement 2 by insisting that the source is included with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; binary distributions, thus reducing it to requirement 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirement 3 is interesting.  The GPL contains similar language (this from GPL3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one could argue that the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL is in keeping with a no-claimed-endorsement requirement.  But my main argument is that you're not allowed to do that &lt;em&gt;anyway&lt;/em&gt;: I mustn't claim that that tiny electric toy car I'm selling is endorsed by Elon Musk, because it isn't.  So this isn't an &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; requirement on users, just a reminder that they may not do it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T08:44:54.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6319" CreationDate="2017-12-08T08:53:43.190" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two licenses are compatible if it is possible to satisfy both licenses at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this it may be argued that further restrictions are allowed if they do not limit recipient's rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1st and 2nd BSD clauses (retaining notices and disclaimers in source and binary forms) are a subset of the GPL's requirements. In particular compare GPLv2 section 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies […], provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And section 3 explains that the section 1 requirements also apply for binary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it is reasonable to expect the GPL license to be retained, it is also reasonable to require that the BSD license is retained when a GPL software contains BSD-licensed parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 doesn't apply here, but &lt;em&gt;clarifies the intent&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL authors. It offers a mechanism that further terms can be added to the license, if these terms are not restrictions. Adding a term that requires legal notices to be preserved is explicitly allowed by the GPLv3. I take that as an indication that such terms would be implicitly allowed by the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mention this clause of the BSD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it is important to distinguish between the many different versions of the BSD license. It exists the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; 4-clause BSD which &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; acknowledgement in advertisements, the &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; 3-clause BSD which keeps this anti-promotion clause, and a even a 2-clause BSD with none of these clauses (the FreeBSD license). Your question seems to be about the 3-clause BSD. While &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF considers the 4-clause BSD license incompatible&lt;/a&gt; it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;does allow the 3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; which includes the clause quoted above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that this clause does not contradict the GPL. The GPL has never given recipients the right to use the author's names to endorse or promote a product. The BSD merely affirms explicitly that no such right is granted. Within the original BSD this clause was important because the license requires &lt;em&gt;acknowledgement&lt;/em&gt; in advertising material, but this acknowledgement must not look like an endorsement. Without the advertising clause, this anti-endorsement clause seems just a generic disclaimer, and could be removed as well (which was done in the FreeBSD license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the 3-clause BSD contains language that looks like a restriction but actually maintains the legal status quo, then this cannot be a restriction on rights received through a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T08:53:43.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-08T09:52:17.233" Score="5" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a bit of GPLv2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/6/865&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archaeology&lt;/a&gt; for some work I do to help clarify the Linux kernel licensing. In doing so I found at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pombredanne/gpl-history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six versions&lt;/a&gt; of the GPL 2.0 texts published by the FSF over the years. There are likely several more as the one used in Linux is yet another version... and I did not even look at the HTML versions (ignoring tags and formatting of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, what can I make of the requirement to reuse and distribute the GPL text &quot;verbatim&quot;? which version GPL 2.0.1 or GPL 2.0.6? or any version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I reckon that the minor typo, date and address changes are not material, the change of &quot;Library&quot; to &quot;Lesser&quot; measn that some versions of the GPL 2.0 reference different versions of the LGPL (2 == library and 2.1+ == lesser) and that is material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here is the history of the GPLv2 file changes I &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pombredanne/gpl-history/blame/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebuilt&lt;/a&gt;. And a narrative of the sequence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&amp;amp;m=151128700907253&amp;amp;w=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;changes&lt;/a&gt; could be summarized this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.4 v5. The most recent one was published after the GPL 3.0 publication &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20070716031727/http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;. It refers to the &lt;code&gt;Franklin Street&lt;/code&gt; address and to the &lt;code&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/code&gt; top and bottom&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.3 v4. Slightly after the HTML publication of the new address in v3, the address was changed in the text version &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20050511030123/http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;: It refers to the  &lt;code&gt;Franklin Street&lt;/code&gt; address and to the &lt;code&gt;GNU Library General Public License&lt;/code&gt; top and bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.2 v3. The previous one in force before the publication of the GPL 3.0 came about the time of the FSF office move on May 1, 2005 to Franklin Street &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20050507090312/http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt; In this HTML version, it refers to the &lt;code&gt;Franklin St&lt;/code&gt; address and uses the &lt;code&gt;GNU Library General Public License&lt;/code&gt; at the top and &lt;code&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/code&gt;  at the bottom with a conflicted opinion on which one of the LGPL 2 or 2.1 version to use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.1 v2. Around December 2003, a variation was published &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20031202220858/http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt;. It also pre dates the move to Franklin and it refers to the &lt;code&gt;Temple Place&lt;/code&gt; address and the &lt;code&gt;GNU Library General Public License&lt;/code&gt; at the top and &lt;code&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/code&gt;  at the bottom. Still split on confused about which LGPL version to recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.1 v1. The one true and only original GPL 2.0.... the oldest cached version &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/19980119061851/http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9&lt;/a&gt; predates the move and it refers to the &lt;code&gt;Temple Place&lt;/code&gt; address and the &lt;code&gt;GNU Library General Public License&lt;/code&gt; throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL-2.0.0 &quot;the one&quot; [...] In digging further, I found the ONE true original GPL with a file&#xA;  time stamp on June 2 1991, 01:50 (AM?, PM? unknown time zone?)  ! in&#xA;  an old GCC archive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T11:28:28.100" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T11:58:21.453" Title="The GPL states that its text should be reproduced verbatim. What does this mean?" Tags="|gpl|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6318" CreationDate="2017-12-08T11:41:30.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a tad confused by your question wording, but I think you say: &lt;strong&gt;I want to write a non-GPL-licensed plugin for a GPL-licensed framework.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short generic answer is that this &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; be done, unless there are exceptions in the framework GPL licensing that would allow this explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T11:41:30.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6316" CreationDate="2017-12-08T11:44:40.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want help on ALL issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't we all want help on everything? Actually, I don't. See my rationale below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I apply the label to the 200 open issues, and to all new ones (a few per day)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure this is worth it and tagging becomes useless when applied to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is probably a balance between the time taken applying the label, and the visibility it gives to the issues, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the actual merits of applying the label? Does it advertise the issues somewhere, or make them somehow easier to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some sites that use these tags to help new comers find issues:&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &quot;awesome&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/corylanou/oss-helpwanted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;- sites dedicated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://up-for-grabs.net/#/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;newbies&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a way to efficiently apply the label, for instance a &quot;Help wanted for all issues&quot; setting, or a bot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can select all issues and apply labels at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here is what I do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get a new contributor coming in to contribute something to our projects almost on a daily basis. Most of them need some handholding to get started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.rst&lt;/code&gt; file that explains the basics on how to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I selectively tag issues with &quot;good first issue&quot; and &quot;easy&quot; to point newbies instead: this make it clear that some issues are best to get your feet wet and is IMHO better than blanket labelling&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I selectively tag some issues beyond these with &quot;help wanted&quot;. I can tell you that there are some issues that I absolutely want NOT external volunteer help on: they may be complex or require some deeper core knowledge. Seasoned committer will pick these if they feel like it anyway, therefore a blanket &quot;help wanted&quot; is not needed&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a nutshell, I tag with &quot;help wanted&quot;, &quot;easy&quot; and &quot;good first issue&quot; selectively to help and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to help new contributors pick something they can clinch their teeth on easily. Seasoned contributors do not need this anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would avoid blanket labelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T02:12:34.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T02:12:34.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6322" CreationDate="2017-12-08T11:58:21.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;These changes are not material: The license document and the license are different entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 &lt;strong&gt;document&lt;/strong&gt; has the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name and version of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright and a license for the license document: “Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A preamble that explains free software philosophy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL terms and conditions, including a disclaimer of warranty. This is the actual license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An appendix on how to use the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these sections, only the Terms and Conditions form the legally relevant part of the license. The rest is explanatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the changes you found show non-presentational changes within the terms and conditions. So all of these versions contain precisely the same license. This license was merely embedded into different documents. This document was updated over time to point to correct external resources, such as the FSF's address and the related LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the license document is copyrighted, no one except the FSF may make such changes. You may distribute any of these versions verbatim. When the license states that you must “give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program”, this likely refers to the document version present in the source code. (The license in the source code cannot be the license without the preamble/appendix since extracting only the terms would be a derivative work of the document, which is not allowed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the document to different published document version seems unnecessary. But since all document versions contain the same license, it seems unlikely that using an updated document version would violate the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T11:58:21.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6330" CreationDate="2017-12-08T14:26:40.313" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are discussing if it would be a license breach to post / distribute GPLv3 licensed material on Facebook (of course with attribution to the origins of the material and the owner)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say if you are the owner of the repository you can spread it via Facebook, and if you only do have a fork you cannot do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to agree to &quot;IP-Licensing&quot; for all content you post on Facebook. This gives Facebook &quot;non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post&quot; and so would override GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is allowed to share and modify GPLv3 licensed content if you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add a license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add the origin of the document&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add the owner of the copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Facebook will not do this if they are allowed to use parts of posted IP content. It can be they use GPL content and ignoring added information as listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9949" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T14:55:47.627" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T14:55:47.627" Title="Is it a license breach to post GPLv3 content to Facebook?" Tags="|gpl-3|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-09T00:14:28.603" Score="4" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've spotted the library (library M) where developers took some source files from GPL with Classpath Exception licensed library (library G), included them in their project and changed namespaces and accessibility on classes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are licensing it under MIT license. But the question is: can they really do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether developers modified this library G is irrelevant, because Classpath Exception is still there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keeping Classpath Exception allows them to merge their's modified (or not?) version with their's library M and publish it under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When dealing with the source code I should distinguish between MIT licensed code and GPL Classpath Exception licensed code. Or maybe I should consider whole as GPL licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When developers will provide me with binary (dll) of their's library M I should consider it to be fully MIT licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can a library be considered executable?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I should provide additional details so you can better address my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Library M has a structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folder1 (Library M files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folder2 (Library M files) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folder3 (Library M files, in one of the files there is is a call to Library G function) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Folder4 (some files from Library G, unmodified in general,&#xA;but namespaces and class accessibility has been changed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes in Folder4 in my opinion are hardly a derivative. Files are literally copied from library G, no modifications were made in the &quot;creative&quot; part that is methods that actually do something remain unchanged, files keep original GPL with Classpath Exception notice. There is no class inheritance in Library M files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is where things get shoddy. I doubt that changing namespace or class accesibility is really a copyright issue. In the end, it is organizational matter, not about doing any kind of creative work. The same goes with copying only some files. But I can never be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real, final and most important question is: can I consider binary of Library M, that is the result of compilation of source files structure described above and provided by developers to be fully MIT Licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9950" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T06:01:52.210" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T06:01:52.210" Title="Can library that took parts of library licensed under GPL with Classpath Exception be licensed under MIT?" Tags="|gpl|mit|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6327" CreationDate="2017-12-09T02:15:24.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the MIT license is GPL-compatible, an author is certainly allowed to license their own work under the MIT license and combine it with a GPL-licensed work. In this case, the work as a whole is GPL-licensed, though the author offers some parts of the work under the MIT license as well. The parts that are GPL-licensed by someone else must remain licensed under the GPL; the later author has no legal right to remove the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the GPL with Classpath Exception raises the question of whether the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL, or if the MIT-licensed portions are completely free of the GPL's copyleft requirements. (Even if this is so, the GPL-licensed parts from the upstream author still must remain under GPL license.) The relevant legal question here is whether the MIT-licensed code is an &quot;independent module&quot; according to the terms of the exception. If so, the downstream author's work may be MIT-licensed without being part of the &quot;whole&quot; that the GPL's copyleft applies to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms, this means that if someone compiled the two modules into a binary executable, the GPL with Classpath Exception would only require that the corresponding source of the GPL-licensed module be shared, while the MIT-licensed module could be excluded from the distributed corresponding source. In this regard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1410/what-is-the-difference-between-gpl-classpath-exception-vs-lgpl&quot;&gt;the GPL with Classpath Exception is quite similar to the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author doesn't mention that any part of the work is GPL licensed, that is a serious failure in their licensing documentation. If the repo no longer includes a copy of the GPL and/or GPL license headers in the files, that's probably a GPL violation, and you should alert the original author(s) of the GPL work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T13:00:46.453" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T13:00:46.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6327" CreationDate="2017-12-09T08:21:11.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rewritten the answer based on the new information in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the question, I understand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The authors of library M have copied some classes from library G&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After copying, some small modifications were made in the namespaces and access modifiers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The authors of library M have kept the copied files in a separate folder (-structure) within their project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole of the project of library M builds into a single binary module.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For determining if library M can legally be distributed under the MIT license, the only points that are really relevant are 1 and 4.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Folder structure is not a consideration for copyright and the act of copying a file is sufficient that you are bound by the copyright license of the original. There is no need to make changes of any kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classpath exception to the GPL license states (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to &lt;strong&gt;link this library with independent modules&lt;/strong&gt; to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As library M contains a copy of some classes from library G and not links to library G itself, the classpath exception does not trigger.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means that library M contains some code that is under the GPL+classpath license and which must remain under the GPL with or without classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current situation, the entire library M must be considered to be GPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be able to release library M under the MIT license, two options are possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The classes copied from library G are removed from M and M starts linking to the original library G.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The classes copied from library G are moved into a separate library that is independently licensed under the GPL with classpath exception.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, the classpath exception can be used to license library M properly under the MIT license, as long as every recipient can also exercise his rights on the GPL-licensed code, which effectively means he is able to replace the GPL-licensed code with a different version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-12-10T09:50:07.323" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T09:50:07.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6326" CreationDate="2017-12-09T13:20:12.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were to post a GPL work on some service such as Facebook, the difficulty arises that we may only convey this work under the terms of the GPL. In particular, GPLv3 section 4 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you [state the license, keep intact all licenses, notices, and disclaimers, and include a copy of the license].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we view the service only as a distribution medium, this would be fine. For example, the GitHub terms of services are crafted so that they have just enough rights to perform their service, but e.g. don't have any right to prepare derivative works. As such GitHub will comply with the GPL, and it is possible to post GPL works on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Facebook terms of service are very different, and you issue a broad license grant when you post any content. This license has three important properties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license is sub-licensable, i.e. they can issue licenses to the work to other people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license is a “license to use any IP content”, without explaining what “use” means.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license is not restricted in purpose, such as “in order to display your content to other users”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sublicensing is a problem because a GPL-covered work may only be conveyed under the terms of the GPL. If they were to sublicense the work, it would probably be under a more restrictive license, thus stripping the recipient from their GPL-granted rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vague permission to “use” the content clashes with the GPL because the GPL allows some uses only under certain conditions. Notably, derivative works may only be created if they are also licensed under the GPL. This would not have been a problem if they had restricted themselves to specific uses, such as creating (unmodified) copies of the work and displaying the work, which are allowed almost without restrictions under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they had limited this license grant to a specific purpose, it would have been possible to argue that they would only be a distribution medium, not a license recipient under the GPL – similar to how you do not grant a GPL license to your internet service provider for GPL works that you transmit via their connections. Confusingly they do concede a limitation that this license grant is bound by your privacy settings, but it is unclear from their terms of service how this works with that very broad license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of how this license grant would subvert the GPL if you were to publicly post GPL-covered works on Facebook, consider that they would receive the very broad permission to “use” these works. That goes beyond the rights you would have received via the GPL, so you can only post these works if you are the (sole) copyright holder. Without any limitation on uses, a possible use would be to incorporate any artwork or code into their apps. It is unlikely they would do that (e.g. because they also promise to delete the posted contents under some conditions). But unlikely is not good enough: this appears to make it &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to strip the GPL from works you posted to FB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a quick note, you suggested that “&lt;em&gt;Some say if you are the owner of the repository you can spread it via Facebook, and if you only do have a fork you cannot do this.&lt;/em&gt;” It doesn't matter who “owns” the &lt;em&gt;repository&lt;/em&gt;, but who holds the copyright of the &lt;em&gt;contents&lt;/em&gt;. In particular, a repository may hold contributions by multiple people, which all hold the copyright to their contributions. The repository owner would then still be bound by the GPL for the contributions, and would be unable to grant rights that go beyond the permissions they received through the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T13:20:12.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4051" CreationDate="2017-12-09T14:56:26.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In non-legal language, the terms of the CC-BY 4.0 are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are free to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these terms, creating a song that includes a CC-BY licensed sound effect exercises the Adapt right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For adaptations, the only requirements are that the adaptation must include an attribution to the author of the original work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Adaptations are not restricted in the license terms that they use, except that they must not prevent recipients from following the attribution requirements imposed by the CC-BY license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;downstream restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; clause mentioned in the question applies to re-distributions of works that are licensed under CC-BY 4.0. When doing a re-distribution, of the sound effect itself, you may not use DRM techniques that would prevent others from making an adapted work or a further re-distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T14:56:26.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6338" CreationDate="2017-12-09T16:54:09.043" Score="6" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 6 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) You may Distribute a Modified Version in Compiled form without the Source, provided that you comply with Section 4 with respect to the Source of the Modified Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you look at Section 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Distribution of Modified Versions of the Package as Source&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source (either gratis or for a Distributor Fee, and with or without a Compiled form of the Modified Version) provided that you clearly document how it differs from the Standard Version, including, but not limited to, documenting any non-standard features, executables, or modules, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) make the Modified Version available to the Copyright Holder of the Standard Version, under the Original License, so that the Copyright Holder may include your modifications in the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) ensure that installation of your Modified Version does not prevent the user installing or running the Standard Version. In addition, the Modified Version must bear a name that is different from the name of the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) allow anyone who receives a copy of the Modified Version to make the Source form of the Modified Version available to others under&#xA;(i) the Original License or&#xA;(ii) a license that permits the licensee to freely copy, modify and redistribute the Modified Version using the same licensing terms that apply to the copy that the licensee received, and requires that the Source form of the Modified Version, and of any works derived from it, be made freely available in that license fees are prohibited but Distributor Fees are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording at the beginning is &amp;quot;You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; Distribute&amp;quot; - does not distributing the source of the Modifed version also mean that you are complying with Section 4?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the wording in Section 6 imply that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; distribute the source of the Modified Version, and that distribution should comply with Section 4?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9081" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T12:07:04.860" Title="Sections 4 and 6 of the Artistic License 2.0" Tags="|license-notice|artistic-license-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6415" CreationDate="2017-12-09T13:24:27.630" Score="5" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/307943/165698&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; software licenses that assert some form of copyright should include a year/author or they may not be recognized in the case of a future dispute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the same thing apply to CC0? The CC0 FAQ recommends it, but doesn't require it and it isn't accompanied by a &quot;Copyright ©&quot; so it obviously isn't the same thing as in the answer linked above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is required, does it have to be set in stone forever? So if I use my GitHub username and then change that username later (or change my contact e-mail) am I allowed to change it in the author note? Or does this void the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9951" OwnerDisplayName="Wingblade" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-10T01:17:33.617" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T15:16:32.817" Title="Does CC0 require a year/author line the same way other licenses do?" Tags="|cc0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6341" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:21:21.837" Score="6" ViewCount="5881" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a website and I'm using a library that is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where should I place the notice? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I create a file named &lt;code&gt;Notice&lt;/code&gt; in the root of the website? Or add it as a comment in every webpage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9952" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-10T01:40:47.570" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T04:06:16.160" Title="How to include a license and copyright notice into a website" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-10T01:49:09.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FSF: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ArtisticLicense2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OSI: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License#Artistic_License_2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License#Artistic_License_2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T00:35:18.500" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T00:35:18.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-10T01:49:09.887" Score="0" Body="for questions about the Artistic License 2.0" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T00:34:56.437" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T00:34:56.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6332" CreationDate="2017-12-10T08:15:44.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, as I read it, s6 requires that if you choose to distribute the modified version binary-only, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; comply with s4.  As you have observed, s4 does not require anything of you &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you distribute your modified version in source form.  The net effect as I read it is that you may distribute your modified version binary-only, and you have no further obligations if you do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's as if I sell you a beat-up car with a contract that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) You will pay me for my car, and obey paragraph b, then it's yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) If you later crash it, you have to fix it up like new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I see the car later and you haven't crashed it, should I expect you to have fixed it up?  I think not: paragraph a obliged you to honour paragraph b, &lt;em&gt;but paragraph b's requirements didn't cut in unless a certain thing happened, and it hasn't&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the suppositious bit: what I &lt;em&gt;suspect&lt;/em&gt; the authors to have intended was a s6 that read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(6) You may distribute a modified version in compiled form without the source, provided that you comply with at least one of the provisions 4a, 4b and 4c with respect to the source of the modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's only guesswork.  If I were writing a little project that depended on a third party's artistically-licensed code I'd assume reading two, honour 4.ii.c, release the whole thing under GPL3, and make the world a more-free place.  If I were betting a company on it, I'd assume reading one - but I'd also get qualified legal advice, and not rely on random internet postings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, the whole thing makes me angry with Yet Another Bloody Crayon Licence.  What is the point?  If you want strong copyleft, use GPL3+ (unless you're Linus, in which case carry on with GPL2).  If you want weak copyleft use&#xA;3-clause BSD, or Apache 2.0 if you care about patent treachery.  Anything else even vaguely copylefty you're trying to achieve is probably so close to one of those outcomes that the distinction is not worth the hassle of uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T08:20:44.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6332" CreationDate="2017-12-10T12:07:04.860" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Artistic License has two goals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure that the original author has some control over the further development of their work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be an extremely permissive license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is commonly used in the Perl ecosystem. It is not generally recommended outside of that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have correctly noted that it is allowed to distribute modified versions in compiled form without distributing the source forms of the modified version. In this respect, the license is very permissive, and allows such software to be embedded into proprietary systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is somewhat unclear on whether (4) and especially (4.b) also applies to compiled modified versions, i.e. the requirement that installation of the modified version must not prevent use of the standard version and use a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the license so that distributing modified versions in compiled form under (6) requires you to to also satisfy the requirements under (4). The sub-points of (4) are choices, and you only need to comply with one of these options. If you do not wish to distribute the source under (4.a) or (4.c) this only leaves (4.b) for compliance: you need not distribute the source if you're not interfering with the standard version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wording of paragraph (6) was also flagged as unclear during the OSI license review process. One of the license's authors (Allison Randal) responded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It means what it says: you can distribute compiled forms as long as your distribution (or lack of distribution) of the  source code complies with Section 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– Allison Randal, in an &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2007-March/012622.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;email to the license-discuss list&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171210120425/http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2007-March/012622.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;permalink&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under section 6, all binary versions (compiled versions, etc) must comply with section 4. And under section 4 you must either contribute your changes (as source) back to the original project, change the name, or release your source code under the Artistic License or a copy-left license. Distribution is distribution, whether it's binary or source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– Allison Randal, in an &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2007-March/012628.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;email to the license-discuss list&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171210120608/http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2007-March/012628.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;permalink&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits my above interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that quite a lot of software is distributed only in source form, e.g. scripts and most Perl modules. But even running a minifier over the source would be a compiled form in the sense of the Artistic License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T12:07:04.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6333" CreationDate="2017-12-10T19:38:11.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright and the license are two different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Placing &lt;code&gt;(c)2017 Joe Blogs&lt;/code&gt; in a document is stating that you own the copyright of the work and are claiming the rights related to the copyright. If you don't openly display your copyright ownership then you may later need to offer proof that you created and published the work in any dispute and may even be asked to provide a compelling explanation as to why you didn't openly claim copyright at the time of publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the owner of a copyright you have the ability to license the work to others. This gives you the power to choose and enforce the terms the work is licensed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for usernames, &quot;Joe Blogs&quot; is the legal copyright owner. Authors can use pen names and have those names displayed in copyright notices so the same &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; apply to online usernames. Using an online name for copyright purposes could require further proof that you used that name at the time of publishing the work, which would need to include the old and new usernames to prove that both usernames were used by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While formal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_registration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright registration&lt;/a&gt; has been voluntary for some time, it can be useful for some works such as art or photos to help prove ownership at a later time. For most works it is common practice to display &lt;code&gt;(c)2017 Joe Blogs&lt;/code&gt; as a claim of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T19:38:11.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6318" CreationDate="2017-12-11T17:24:39.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You said the main application will&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;load the plugin dll which in turn loads the GPL dll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As implied by the DLL name (dynamic-link library), loading a DLL file is dynamically linking. We can determine the licensing propagation by working our way backwards from the GPLv2 DLL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your Plugin DLL + GPLv2 DLL Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your plugin is dynamically linking against the GPLv2 DLL, the combined work (your plugin + GPLv2 DLL) is also subject to the terms and conditions of the GPLv2. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Main Application + (Your Plugin + GPLv2 DLL) Analysis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you said the main application loads your plugin's DLL, which is also dynamic linking. Once again, this dynamic linking makes the combined work of main application + (Your Plugin + GPLv2 DLL) governed under the terms and conditions of the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is whether my plugin which is a new C# Assembly can use the GPL licensed DLLs while not affecting the main program's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no, you cannot do this with your current architecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may or may not be possible to re-architect your plugin strategy to achieve your licensing goals, but that depends on what the plugin framework allows in terms of spawning additional processes or interacting with external processes. However, that warrants a new and separate Stack Exchange question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:24:39.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6334" CreationDate="2017-12-12T12:53:55.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Better to create a file named &lt;code&gt;Notice&lt;/code&gt; in the root/homepage of the website. At least that's what I did after researching the situation. See the top of my homepage &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.forkosh.com&lt;/a&gt; where it says &quot;...and &lt;code&gt;Terms and Conditions&lt;/code&gt; enumerates your conditions of use&quot;. You can then click that &lt;code&gt;Terms and Conditions&lt;/code&gt; link on my homepage to read all the legal gobbledy-gook on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forkosh.com/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.forkosh.com/terms.html&lt;/a&gt; (By the way, feel free to use any of that terms-and-conditions gobbledy-gook you like. At the time I wrote it, in the late 1990's, I did some research trying to establish appropriate terms-and-conditions of use while simultaneously avoiding any possible liabilities myself. And while I'm no lawyer, my father, brother and ex all are, so I know a lot of lawyer-types.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T12:53:55.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-11T16:42:30.980" Score="31" ViewCount="21940" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a freelance web developer building a site for a client. I found some code I'd like to use on CodePen which uses the MIT License. As far as I understand the license, I can use the code freely on my client's project so long as I reproduce the MIT License with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code I'm using is comprised of a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code, which would all reside in different files. How do I include the license in this case? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see three ways, which I'll list in order of my preference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comment out the license before each section of relevant code in their respective files. The drawback of this is it isn't obviously visible to the public, so I'm not sure if that is enough. You would need to look at the source code to see it, which not many people do unless you're a developer. This would be most desirable for client as it would be &quot;behind the scenes&quot; so to speak.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create an acknowledgements page with the license referring to the specific code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write the license on the page in which the code appears.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if any of these, is the most appropriate location?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Tom" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T21:45:16.040" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T03:33:55.180" Title="Where to put license for MIT licensed code on website" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6342" CreationDate="2017-12-12T05:56:17.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're licensing source code, it would make sense to code the license into the source, which anyone can view with a simple browser command, right? You would also be well advised to reference (if not also reproduce) the license in displayed text, perhaps referencing the details to be found in the source of that page, or wherever you have encoded it, if not also a link to its source (as required in CC-BY licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15943" OwnerDisplayName="Upnorth" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T05:56:17.717" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T04:30:51.633" Score="1" ViewCount="1496" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/wordpress-licensing-the-gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordPress Licensing &amp;amp; the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, themes on the official WordPress theme directory should be &lt;strong&gt;100% GPL&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you wish to submit your creation to the free theme repository on&#xA;  WordPress.org, it must be 100% GPL compliant, including CSS and image&#xA;  files. Because the freedoms spelled out in the GPL are at the heart of&#xA;  WordPress, we encourage developers to distribute their themes with a&#xA;  100% GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then as I know I can sell the themes after modifying. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9967" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T09:04:25.370" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T09:04:25.370" Title="Can I modify and resell themes which are on WordPress official theme directory (100% GPL)?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5289" CreationDate="2017-12-14T01:11:11.020" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First things first, I know almost nothing about law, so don't follow my advice blindly and check with someone who does know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you dedicate some work to the public domain, I assume you can not claim patent rights to the covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure that all contributers to the code does the same, e.g. Unlicense recommends and SQLite enforces that all contributers accompany all patches with a phrase that dedicates that patch to the public domain. With extra requirements from employees contributing in capacity of some formal organization. SQLite requires that a written a copyright release signed by a company officer is mailed to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase used by them is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dedicate any and all copyright interest in this software to the public domain. I make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of my heirs and successors. I intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further more SQLite offers to sell a license for a hefty fee if someone still insists on something more tangible. My guess is that they only offer this option since they have written consent from all contributers that everything is dedicated to public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/#unlicensing-contributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org/#unlicensing-contributions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9974" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T01:11:11.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6344" CreationDate="2017-12-15T14:21:50.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can resell modified themes alright. And you will need to redistribute the modified source for these themes under the GPL. And someone can then redistribute these freely or take and resell them as they wish, as long everyone complies with the GPL, including modified source redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T14:21:50.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6342" CreationDate="2017-12-15T18:58:11.893" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised this question doesn't come up more often. It's a tricky issue, and one that is highly open to interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not a lot of specific guidance on this issue, but a well-researched overview of the topic was published by The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, titled &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ifosslr.org/index.php/ifosslr/article/view/47/102&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source licensing notices in Web applications&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that page, the author (Arnoud Engelfriet) discusses different means of satisfying license clauses for open source licenses, and some consequences if it's not done correctly. With respect to the MIT license and its requirement to be displayed, Engelfriet has this to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement makes it hard to comply without actually including the verbatim text of the license in the Javascript file. We could follow the same approach as with the BSD license and interpret “shall be included” as “must not be removed” but the use of the active verb ‘shall’ makes this a harder interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author draws this conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very real desire to not include full open source license texts in Javascript files when those are downloaded by browsers. For distributions of Javascript projects in original form (with source code, documentation etcetera) this issue is less apparent, as the overhead of a single license file is small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virtually all projects that use open source and Javascript in practice simply refer to the license text as hosted on their own website. I found no project that actually copied an open source license text in a Javascript file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most open source licenses do not provide obstacles against this practice. As long as the license is identified and available by URL, one may consider this as adequate notice. I therefore conclude that authors of Javascript files can license by including a reference to the license and a URL where the license text can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He ends the article by providing sample text for a possible short form and long form attribution notice, to be included in the file header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this article and on other Stack Exchange questions about the same subject, I would say (in my non-lawyerly opinion) that if you can reasonably accommodate it, the first option you listed in your question is the best one. However, if you went with option #2, you would &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; be fine, as it seems others have taken that same route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T03:33:55.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6114" CreationDate="2017-12-16T16:01:51.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Visual Studio is both backwards and forwards incompatible, so everybody in the project has to use the same version, if somebody uses a newer version, it breaks support in the project file for everybody else on older versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hasn’t been true since 2015. Since then the project format has been &lt;em&gt;forward&lt;/em&gt; compatible. You can open a 2013 csproj in 2015 (but not a 2015 in 2013). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only important matter is that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; set the language version for the project. When left to default, it will take the latest version of the lang &lt;em&gt;for the editor you’re currently working in&lt;/em&gt;. This means that if the maintainers are using 2013 for dev, contributors using 2015 can accidentally introduce language features from newer versions that won’t compile in older versions. It’s best to be explicit about which C# Lang version the project uses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for other editors, there is JetBrain’s Rider IDE. It supports the same csproj format as VS. In reality though, people can use what ever editor they like. They just have to download the appropriate version of the MSBuild Tools and compile from the command line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T16:01:51.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6351" CreationDate="2017-12-16T17:06:07.213" Score="3" ViewCount="1092" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realize this may be an extremely basic question, but I'm confused about the legal issues that come with starting a blog and using a theme. I want to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BlackrockDigital/startbootstrap-clean-blog-jekyll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clean Blog&lt;/a&gt; theme (by BlackrockDigital). This has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BlackrockDigital/startbootstrap-clean-blog-jekyll/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; in the repository and a copyright logo on the bottom of the live demo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use this theme, do I have to keep his license or make my own? Can I put my own copyright logo on the bottom, because technically my content is original although the theme isn't? (It's a blog, after all.) Or am I supposed to use their copyright? Lastly, I know an MIT license means that this should be &quot;free of charge&quot; -- does that include ads on a page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9995" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T08:05:21.250" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T08:05:21.250" Title="How to legally use Jekyll themes by others?" Tags="|mit|copyright|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6350" CreationDate="2017-12-17T03:09:03.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I use this theme, do I have to keep his license or make my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would have to keep his license -- the MIT license -- for the theme you are using, but that doesn't apply to your content (unless you want to use the MIT license for your content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I put my own copyright logo on the bottom, because technically my content is original although the theme isn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You own the copyright to your content; you just have to include the license to show correct attribution for the theme you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly, I know an MIT license means that this should be &quot;free of charge&quot; -- does that include ads on a page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license allows for usage of the licensed software free of charge; that does not mean you can't display ads.  It only means you can are licensed to use that theme without having to pay for the right to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T21:42:35.450" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:42:35.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4836" CreationDate="2017-12-17T21:50:30.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can fined on their web site, it depends on your intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's only signing to verify that the user got your version, then no, you don't have to give up the key.&#xA;GPLv3 FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GiveUpKeys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GiveUpKeys&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is &quot;Tivoization&quot;, i.e. signing a modified version the software is required to run the modified version of the software. Then yes, you have to provide the signing key. GPLv3 FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TwoPartyTivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TwoPartyTivoization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9974" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T21:50:30.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6357" CreationDate="2017-12-17T22:08:44.237" Score="-1" ViewCount="2355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what is the difference between these two licenses? I have looked around for GPL but in some places they say you have to post your code to public and in some places they say you don't have to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to release my code if I make some changes to it and do I have to let the author know about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is there any difference between commercial use and personal use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10003" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T09:01:08.060" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T08:54:28.243" Title="Difference between GNU-GPL and BSD?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2017-12-17T23:12:35.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way to prevent this is to not make your project open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, really. What do you think open source &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T23:12:35.123" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6334" CreationDate="2017-12-18T04:06:16.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If people can view the source code of the website, include the entire text of the license with the rest of the library files. Having a comment on every web page would be excessive. Instead, you can link in the footer to a single page that lists the external libraries and their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASF Source Header and Copyright Notice Policy&lt;/a&gt;, the NOTICE file is for people developing software for the Apache Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This document describes how Apache committers and PMC members should handle source file licensing and copyright notices.&#xA;  It does not apply to developers outside the ASF who are applying the Apache License to their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think it also does not apply to people using a library that is licensed under the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7644" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T04:06:16.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6359" CreationDate="2017-12-18T13:48:59.507" Score="-3" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know if an/any algorithm is patented or not. If it is patented then where can I find its details. Please explain with an example for both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10005" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T17:08:14.850" Title="How to check if an(y) algorithm is patented/copyrighted or not" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2017-12-30T00:26:25.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6353" CreationDate="2017-12-19T09:09:01.717" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to release my code if I make some changes to it? [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes for the GPL, as explained below. But only if you redistributed the code and not as a general public release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] and do I have to let the author know about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but that's a nice thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also is there any difference between commercial use and personal use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. There is a difference between mere use and actual redistribution (of source or binaries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have looked around for GPL but in some places they say you have to post your code to public and in some places they say you don't have to!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to post your code publicly. If you are redistributing source or binaries, you need to share your source modifications with everyone that you shared binaries with, only these, not anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's dive a bit in the details... The two key points of the GPL are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it allows any usage without restriction&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it ensures that any user can modify the code and shall share its modifications forever when sharing the code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, mere usage and modifications without sharing is not restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If sharing or redistributing, you must notify the user you are sharing the source or binaries with; and make the modified source code available per and  under the GPL. You do not need to share this in public (though this is encouraged) but only with the person that received source or binaries from you. That person in turn inherits from the same rights and obligations, and so on all the way down: This effect is commonly called &quot;copyleft&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about the BSD? Like the GPL, it allows usage and modification without restrictions. But when sharing the code (for instance as a binary) there is no requirement to share the corresponding source code modifications. Only a requirement to provide credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, there is no requirements to &quot;share&quot; or &quot;credit&quot; things with the general public: only with the persons you share code with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T08:54:28.243" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T08:54:28.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2273" CreationDate="2017-12-19T12:22:41.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although not all open source projects use GitHub, it's popular and prominent enough to mention here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, GitHub suggests two standard labels, &lt;code&gt;help wanted&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;good first issue&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/helping-new-contributors-find-your-project-with-labels/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helping new contributors find appropriate issues&lt;/a&gt;. Combining these with the ability to search according to language (in this case, Python), makes it pretty easy to find issues that you could [relatively-]easily work on. E.g.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;amp;q=label%3A%22good+first+issue%22+language%3Apython&amp;amp;type=Issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;label:&quot;good first issue&quot; language:python&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T12:22:41.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6356" CreationDate="2017-12-19T17:08:14.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patent are a complicated matter and even more complex for open source. The only sane way to check if an algorithm is patented is eventually to hire a patent attorney. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short of this, Google &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patents&lt;/a&gt; is a decent spot to search. &#xA;Some hints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you know who is the algorithm author(s)S or inventor(s) search for their name&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;search for the name of other implementor names&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;search for similar algorithms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language used in patterns is unfortunately Byzantine and obfuscated (MO on purpose) and it is difficult or even practically impossible to assert than there are no patent on an algorithm and this makes it really difficult for FOSS projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software patents make me &lt;em&gt;sigh&lt;/em&gt;, not of relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T17:08:14.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-20T22:38:25.553" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an open source software (BSD-licensed) for my company, developed during business days and hours. The copyright belongs to my company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for some reason my company is no longer interested in maintaining the software. I would like to fork it, and start contributing on it on my spare time, with new code having my own copyright. Eventually, I would like to reach a point where all the original code has been replaced with new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: when all the original code has been replaced, &lt;strong&gt;can I drop my company's copyright notice?&lt;/strong&gt; I know that this would be permitted with a rewrite from scratch, but what about an &lt;strong&gt;incremental rewrite&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10028" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T22:38:25.553" Title="Getting rid of copyrighted work with incremental rewrite" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2017-12-21T16:43:57.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-21T13:42:58.363" Score="1" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://julialang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julia&lt;/a&gt;, a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing that has some dependencies. One of them is GMP, an external library that has a GPL2+ license. In that case, can I make proprietary software with Julia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10033" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T04:52:43.183" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T04:52:43.183" Title="Can I make proprietary software with Julia?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-22T12:00:38.110" Score="4" ViewCount="8659" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the app, which uses the code, released under GPL3 license, however, the app itself isn't open-source. For the last two days tried to find a reasonable answer but couldn't find any. Might it be illegal or I am missing some data here? I always thought that if GPL3 code is used within the app then the app should also fall under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10041" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T00:23:29.713" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T03:35:07.957" Title="Is it legal to use GPL3 licensed code without open-sourcing the app itself?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2017-12-22T21:31:56.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will preface this by saying your question feels like it belongs in a legal advice section, so please understand that I do not come from a legal background but a software background. I disclaim any personal liability from my advice given. My advice may be entirely incorrect and very likely is at least partially incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the prior commenter MadHatter pointed out, this is not a cookie-cutter thing you're seeking, which is likely also why your searches didn't give you the answer you hoped for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dealing with open source in general, the rules differ between each license - sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot so it's good that you at least know to ask regarding GPLv3 specifically. Having said that, it's important that you understand each licensee has the freedom to provide exceptions and clauses, so just because something is labeled as GPLv3, you need to still look at the license agreement for exceptions and mixed licenses - for example, some of the code base being in a different license than the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding contribution, the GPLv3 license essentially requires that you make available any source code changes you have made to that code, and you also release it under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that if the parent application uses code that is licensed under GPLv3 but the app itself is not licensed that way, they must do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute the GPL license with the GPL licensed code when it is distributed (in other words, if it is distributed with the app, they have to also distribute the license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make available all modifications to the GPLv3 licensed code (if any), and those modifications must be released under the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes must be documented&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is of course much more to the GPL than this, but this is my attempt at summing up the important part you were asking about. So as I understand it if the source code was not modified/adapted to work with their product, and the license is distributed with it, then they have not violated the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10044" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T21:31:56.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2017-12-22T22:27:06.903" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the app is &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; to other users and contains GPL-covered code, its source must be published under the same (or compatible) license.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; This is one of the basic principles of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also applies to source code that contains/links &lt;em&gt;unmodified&lt;/em&gt; GPL-covered code.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; (This is different in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser GPL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If however the entire app runs on server or is only used internally in an organization, it doesn't have to be open-source. (This is different in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using an unmodified GPL-covered compiler/editor/tool to compile/write another program without open-sourcing it is legal.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10045" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T22:27:06.903" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2017-12-23T04:41:56.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the GPL allows you to freely share the code, no part of the GPL &lt;em&gt;forces&lt;/em&gt; you to make the source code publicly available. If you sell a binary program that uses GPL code, then you either have to provide a copy of the code with the program or give the user instructions on how to get a copy of the code. Only a user of the binary program &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; get access to the source code, providing access to any other person is at the discretion of the developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they are selling a GPL based program and not providing users with access to the source code then they would be in violation of the GPL. It may be that you won't know this unless you purchase a copy of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From GPLv2 -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,&#xA;  under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of&#xA;  Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable&#xA;  source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections&#xA;  1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three&#xA;  years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your&#xA;  cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete&#xA;  machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be&#xA;  distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium&#xA;  customarily used for software interchange;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another consideration is how they use GPL code. If the program uses a GPL library and they only share the library code, then they could get into a grey area depending on how the program is packaged with the GPL based code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="9558" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T03:35:07.957" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T03:35:07.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6368" CreationDate="2017-12-23T13:04:50.633" Score="4" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if I can reuse an &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/webrtc/apprtc/master/src/web_app/images/apprtc-16.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;icon&lt;/a&gt; that is inside a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webrtc/apprtc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repository&lt;/a&gt; licensed under BSD 3-clause for a project that I release under unlicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that all files that are in a repository (I don't see any restriction in readme or other files) are covered by the BSD 3-Clause license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was wondering if I can pick up the file and put it in my repository ? Maybe icons are different from source code file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1083" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T09:10:00.030" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T09:10:00.030" Title="Is an icon covered by the same license than the repository it belongs to?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6367" CreationDate="2017-12-23T15:18:54.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding is correct that, unless indicated otherwise, all files in a repository are covered by the same license (3-clause BSD in this case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license allows you to copy and modify the project (which includes adding it to your own project and then throwing everything out except the icon you want) on the condition that you keep the copyright statement and BSD license intact for the portion you copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you must make it clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that you copied the icon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;who owns the copyrights to the icon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the icon is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that this differs from the copyrigh and license on the rest of your project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T15:18:54.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6371" CreationDate="2017-12-27T05:54:36.310" Score="4" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we use the famous &lt;code&gt;package org.apache.commons.lang3&lt;/code&gt; library and modify it as below jarjar configuration;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;'rule org.apache.commons.lang3.** com.sample.internal.org.apache.commons.lang3.@1'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this violate the &quot;AS-IS&quot; term of the license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we include an additional modification note for it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the included lang3 apache license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/javadocs/api-3.6/src-html/org/apache/commons/lang3/StringUtils.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10069" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T04:12:51.093" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T04:12:51.093" Title="jarjar package renaming and Apache 2.0 license violation" Tags="|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6370" CreationDate="2017-12-27T07:22:45.513" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are misinterpreting the &quot;as-is&quot; clause. &quot;As is&quot; does not mean you cannot modify the code (such a clause would, in fact, go against both the spirit and the letter of the Apache License). &quot;As is&quot; is a clause that states that the code you're using is what it is, and you need to execute your own due diligence when you use it. E.g., you cannot sue the Apache Foundation if a bug in Commons Lang crashes your application. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_is&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article&lt;/a&gt;, while not a legal source, explains this concept quite nicely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As is is a legal term used to disclaim some implied warranties for an item being sold. Certain types of implied warranties must be specifically disclaimed, such as the implied warranty of title. &quot;As is&quot; denotes that the seller is selling, and the buyer is buying an item in whatever condition it presently exists, and that the buyer is accepting the item &quot;with all faults&quot;, whether or not immediately apparent. This is the classic &quot;buyer beware&quot; situation, where the careful buyer should take the time to examine the item before accepting it, or obtain expert advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By renaming the package, you are creating a &quot;Derivative Work&quot; of Apache Commons Lang. Section 4, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#redistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Redistribution&lt;/a&gt; of the APL-2 clearly states what you need to do in such a case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Redistribution.&lt;/strong&gt; You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  B. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  C. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  D. If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T11:31:08.270" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T11:31:08.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6361" CreationDate="2017-12-27T11:41:33.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possile if you add &quot;USE_GPL_LIBS = 0&quot; to the make.user file. By this way it will not include GPL dependent libraries during compilation. For more detailed discussion refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.julialang.org/t/is-julia-suitable-for-the-development-of-proprietary-derived-softwares/7912/22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10033" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T11:41:33.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T13:45:43.277" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use AGPL to licence my project. But I need learn AGPL compatibility with these 3 licences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Android Software Development Kit License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fabric Software and Services Agreement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crashlytics Terms of Service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use Fabric library (Fabric Software and Services Agreement, Crashlytics Terms of Service) and com.google.android.gms:play-services (Android Software Development Kit License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&lt;/a&gt;. But I could not find an information about the compatibility of these 3 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these 3 licenses comply with AGPL? If incompatible, will the project license be invalid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10102" OwnerDisplayName="Muhammed GÜNEŞ" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T12:16:24.237" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T12:16:24.237" Title="AGPL 3.0 compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T18:00:40.170" Score="2" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would I need an FFMPEG licence for an application that I am building? It plays back mp4 videos but I can’t get my head around the lingo in the licences. I don’t need to edit video or convert anything just simply playback mp4 videos. I am aware that I can use it without a licence if my software is open source, it is not though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10074" OwnerDisplayName="Marley" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T06:51:59.860" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T06:51:59.860" Title="Would I need an FFMPEG licence?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T00:11:04.657" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making some software that will need to play back mp4 videos (a small part of the application). The software has a mechanism built in so that I can unlock features after payment . The mechanism works in house and contacts no servers, the user simply puts in a key that is generated server side on a website after they put in their unique code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how can I hide my protection method (so people can’t make their own key gens) whilst still being “open source” and complying with the free FFMPEG licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10074" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T00:34:31.633" Title="How do people hide protection methods for payed for open source software?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6375" CreationDate="2017-12-28T00:34:31.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't. As the code is open source, all I need to do is to replace the implementation of &lt;code&gt;isRegistered()&lt;/code&gt; in the code with &lt;code&gt;return true;&lt;/code&gt;. No need for key gens or anything like that, just remove the check entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try to obfuscate the code, but that will only allow me down a bit, not stop me. And because the code is open source, I can distribute my modified version I've I've done that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, you just can't do what you're trying to do with open source software. Either find another library to use, or cough up the licensing fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T00:34:31.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T14:15:00.117" Score="7" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are running a web-based photo processing service, the architecture is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Web backend -(photo to process)-&amp;gt; [task queue] --&amp;gt; worker -(processed photo)-&amp;gt; Object storage&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task queue is only exposed to our web backend program. To be specific, we plan to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://dramatiq.io/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dramatiq&lt;/a&gt; which is (EDIT: &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt;, as they changed it to LGPL in 2018) licensed under AGPL. Do we need to open source our program in this case? If so, which part of our code should be open-sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10081" LastEditorUserId="10081" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T12:39:53.713" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:39:53.713" Title="Do I have to open source our website if using an AGPL task queue?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T19:24:52.377" Score="8" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use a package of Apache-1.1 license and a package of Apache-2.0 license and distribute the resulting package under Apache-2.0 license?  Is there a conflict between Apache-1.1 and Apache-2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10083" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T18:48:16.023" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T09:14:32.807" Title="Apache-2.0 and Apache-1.1 compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|apache-1.1|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6380" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T04:43:50.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T04:43:50.857" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T04:43:50.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6381" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T04:43:50.857" Score="0" Body="The Apache 1.1 license is a license created by the Apache Software Foundation. Use this tag when the item in question relates to this license. The requirements of this license can be found at https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T09:18:53.233" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T09:18:53.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6383" CreationDate="2017-12-30T15:33:30.407" Score="5" ViewCount="721" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am following a series of programming articles. In order to understand them better, I type in the code examples and play around with them - sometimes I change the code, sometimes I don't. I also like to comment some lines with quotes from the original article. I cannot find any licensing or attribution information in and around the articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to put the project with the examples and the quotes up on GitHub. If I had written all the code from scratch I would have used a BSD or an Apache license. I do mention and link to the original articles in the &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is an appropriate approach to licensing and attribution in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10093" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T15:23:09.937" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T15:23:09.937" Title="Guidelines for licensing and attribution for code from an article/blog post" Tags="|licensing|attribution|publishing|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6382" CreationDate="2017-12-30T16:52:48.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So you want to distribute parts from an article which has no license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the parts are &lt;strong&gt;eligible for copyright protection&lt;/strong&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not allowed to distribute these parts at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the parts are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; eligible for copyright protection&lt;/strong&gt; (or something like &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; etc. applies):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to distribute these parts. You don’t &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to attribute (but it would be polite to do so). You can choose any or no license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not necessarily clear whether something is not eligible for copyright protection; apart from obvious cases, better assume that it is. Quoting small parts from the article (using quotation marks and providing the author name and article URL) will most likely be fine, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way is to ask the author for permission. The author could give you a personal permission to distribute these parts (specifying how you should attribute, if at all), or the author could decide to license the article under a specific license for everyone (in which case the license’s conditions apply to you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T16:52:48.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="510" CreationDate="2017-12-30T17:11:40.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cost effectiveness and use of resources.  Let's use your example of a DB system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You still need hardware to run it all on.  That's a &quot;fixed&quot; cost.  Using F/OSS won't really change it. You still need a sysadmin/db admin to install/configure/maintain it - that is a &quot;fixed&quot; cost.  A fastastic *nix+Postgres guy might cost a little more than a fantastic Windows+MSSQL guy, but not that much different.  You still need developers to write code for your product(s) that use your DB system.  &quot;Fixed&quot; cost again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can pay Microsoft for a license for SQL server, Windows Server to run it on, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can use Linux or BSD with Postgres, Mongo, MySQL, etc. at no license fee/cost. No per user, per cpu, per server, etc.  If the CxOs say &quot;but what about support&quot; there are quite a few businesses out there that will do short term (implementation/migration) or per-incident support contracts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the intangibles - no forced upgrades, no worries about product discontinuation, freedom to easily move out of that system and into another, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T17:11:40.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6386" CreationDate="2017-12-30T17:28:47.287" Score="3" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wish to stream some coding/programming sessions on Twitch, is it still possible to license the produced code in some open-source flavor, while still being compatible with Twitch terms-of-service ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My usecase&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to stream my computer screen while coding, for instance to show some techniques, tutorials, or simply discovering of programming languages / frameworks, I would want to distribute the produced code available freely, for instance on some public git server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the terms implicitly prohibit this (unless there is any written arrangement) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extracts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/terms-of-service/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitch Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; (enphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;User Content Twitch allows users to distribute streaming live and pre-recorded audio-visual works, to use services, such as chat,&#xA;bulletin boards, forum postings, wiki contributions, voice interactive&#xA;services, and to participate in other activities in which you may&#xA;create, post, transmit, perform, or store content, messages, text,&#xA;sound, images, applications, &lt;strong&gt;code&lt;/strong&gt; or other data or materials on the&#xA;Twitch Services (“User Content”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. License to Twitch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) Unless otherwise agreed to in a written agreement between you and Twitch that was signed by an authorized representative of Twitch, &lt;strong&gt;if you submit, transmit, display, perform, post or store User Content using the Twitch Services, you grant Twitch and its sublicensees an unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, fully sub-licenseable, nonexclusive, and royalty-free right to (a) use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such User Content&lt;/strong&gt; (including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Twitch Services (and derivative works thereof)) in any form, format, media or media channels now known or later developed or discovered; and (b) use the name, identity, likeness and voice (or other biographical information) that you submit in connection with such User Content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any open-source license that is compatible with that ? Has anyone here some experience about a similar situation who could share some insights ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10094" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T18:05:18.867" Title="Streaming coding sessions on Twitch, is it possible to license the code as open-source?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6385" CreationDate="2017-12-30T18:05:18.867" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You as the copyright holder of the code that you write can issue multiple non-exclusive licenses independently from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three different ways to allow someone else to use your copyrighted works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can transfer your copyright in certain jurisdictions, in which case you have no further rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can issue exclusive licenses, in which case you may not exercise the rights you licensed away. So you cannot issue further licenses. However, an exclusive license can be limited in scope or duration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can issue non-exclusive licenses, in which case you can continue to exercise your rights, including issuing more non-exclusive licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license from you to Twitch is &lt;strong&gt;nonexclusive&lt;/strong&gt;, so it does not limit you in any way. All open-source licenses are also non-exclusive, so there is no conflict. However, some contributor license agreements require copyright transfers or exclusive licenses. But if you didn't sign any of those, this doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above applies to works where you hold the copyright, i.e. for code that you wrote. But when dealing with open source code, you might also have included works from other people where you do not hold the copyright but only a (non-exclusive) license. Whether you can display such code depends on the terms of the license you received. Since the license grant to Twitch is very broad, only a few &lt;em&gt;permissive open source licenses&lt;/em&gt; would grant you the necessary rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is a very narrow reading of the situation. In nearly all jurisdictions, copyright laws have exceptions for quoting other works or including small snippets without copyright infringement. In the U.S., this might fall under &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt;. In practice, you will not have a problem if you focus your streams on your code and on your commentary, and not on reproducing other people's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T18:05:18.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6379" CreationDate="2017-12-31T09:14:32.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache-1.1 and Apache-2.0 licenses are both fairly permissive open-source licenses. Neither of them tries to extend their influence beyond the code that is explicitly licensed with either license and neither contains requirements that is incompatible with the other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the two licenses are compatible with each other and it is possible to have code licensed under Apache-1.1 together with code that is licensed under Apache-2.0 in a single project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-1.1 license does not allow sub-licensing or changing the license to a later version, so if you create a package that contains a mix of Apache-1.1 and Apache-2.0 licensed code, then you must keep the Apache-1.1 licensed code under that license and you must make it clear that different copyright licenses apply to different parts of the package.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is especially important for the Apache-1.1 license, because it has specific acknowledgement requirements that users of your package should be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T09:14:32.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6392" CreationDate="2017-12-31T13:17:28.430" Score="3" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I own a website and 3 people are writing articles on the site including myself. My question is whether I can use a GPL license for the articles I write?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if I write an article and I state that it is licensed under GPL for example? Does this mean that the site itself or the other articles become licensed under GPL? How does this work in this kind of environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8768" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T10:05:24.380" Title="How does GPL work for articles on a website?" Tags="|gpl|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6393" CreationDate="2018-01-01T01:03:33.393" Score="15" ViewCount="5975" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that it is about to be or already is 2018, I now notice I have a few open-source projects licensed with MIT, where each one of them states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;years&amp;gt; &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this have to be updated annually? Is this license void in the future? What are any other consequences if it is not updated? Does this apply universally to all licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10100" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T17:43:54.233" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T18:47:45.767" Title="How do the years specified in a copyright statement work?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6389" CreationDate="2018-01-01T04:47:20.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not necessary to update the license annually if you haven't modified the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software was created on 2016 and you modified the software in 2017 and 2018, It is recommended that you preserve the created year and current year in the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could add something like for example:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Copyright (c) 2016 - 2018 (name)&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6767" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T09:54:36.160" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T09:54:36.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6388" CreationDate="2018-01-01T09:59:37.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; licences are generally thought to be better for non-code forms of expression, because the distinction between source and executable form (which the GPL uses a lot) doesn't exist for simple written materials.  Before the CC licences were created, the FSF made the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation Licence&lt;/a&gt; specifically to cover written content (some of my earliest photos submitted to Wikipedia were submitted under the GFDL).  Before that (2000), people used to use the GPL for non-code content all the time, because there were no alternatives.  It wasn't great, but I'm not aware that it ever led to disaster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can [I] use a GPL license for the articles I write?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, you can use any licence you like on content you create &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;That said, there is no bar on using the GNU GPL for your non-code material, should you wish to, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; is designed to achieve the same ends in a less confusing manner.  The FSF regard CC-BY-SA-4 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one-way compatible&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL3, so your choice wouldn't prevent people from later reusing your content as part of a GPL3-covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens if I write an article and I state that it is licensed under GPL for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means people can use, copy, modify, and distribute modified copies, of your material, subject to the conditions laid out in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the site itself or the other articles become licensed under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, no, it doesn't.  This is one of the really misunderstood things about the strong copyleft licences, and leads people to use strong words like &lt;em&gt;viral&lt;/em&gt; to describe them.  &lt;em&gt;Au fond&lt;/em&gt;, strong copyleft terms on content means that if you use that content as part of a work you're creating &lt;em&gt;in a way that makes your work a derivative work of the content&lt;/em&gt;, you must distribute your work under those strong copyleft terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works that happen to share a common distribution platform are not derivatives of each other, so the question doesn't arise.  The code that forms the distribution platform's engine is not a derivative of the content it distributes, so the question doesn't arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T10:05:24.380" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T10:05:24.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6389" CreationDate="2018-01-01T18:47:45.767" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The year in the copyright notice refers to the &lt;em&gt;year of first publication&lt;/em&gt;. Nowadays copyright notices and the year in the copyright notice are no longer very important, since copyright starts automatically when a creative work is created, and typically extends for a variable amount of time unrelated to the date of publication. This wasn't always the case. Especially, U.S. copyright law changed dramatically during the 20th century, and did require copyright notices in specific formats for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though not required by law, there's no good reason to omit these notices either since they serve as a clear record of authorship. In particular, they serve as a reminder that the work is under copyright protection and therefore &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Reasons_to_include_an_optional_copyright_notice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deter copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many licenses do require such a copyright notice. And if there is a notice, it should be kept up to date (as discussed below). In particular, you must not remove or falsify any existing notices. Additionally, many licenses require preservation of existing notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of open source projects, the year in the copyright notice should be updated only when a new version for the project is first published. Publication isn't just the &lt;em&gt;release&lt;/em&gt; of a version, but e.g. also pushing a commit to a publicly visible version control repository. It would be misleading to automatically update the copyright notice each year, unless there actually are new changes that are relevant for the purpose of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a common convention that the notice lists all years where new versions were published. This reflects that different parts of the project were published at different times. Since the list of years can get rather long, it is common to collapse consecutive years to a range: “2016, 2017, 2018” is often written as “2016–2018”. If in doubt, always use the most recent year. So “2018” would also be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other reason to update these notices is if there are new authors. Typically, this is done by adding a new copyright line for each set of authors, with the most recent on top. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2016–2018 George&#xA;Copyright 1999, 2007–2016 Fred&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a new line is sensible since many open-source licenses require that existing copyright notices are kept intact – so you must not update them in any way. And in the above example, adding George to Fred's copyright notice would be misleading since George did not publish any of their work in 1999 and Fred didn't publish in 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, tracking all authors in all copyright notices is quite cumbersome. Instead, often only the original author is credited here even when copyright is shared with additional contributors. A more reasonable approach is to credit all authors collectively, e.g. as “the FooProject contributors” or “Original Author and others”. However, I am not sure whether that results in a valid copyright notice as the copyright holders must be clearly recognizable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T18:47:45.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6397" CreationDate="2018-01-02T13:44:41.677" Score="7" ViewCount="1655" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a GPL v2 licensed library(&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/espertechinc/esper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;esper&lt;/a&gt;) for commercially distributed non-GPL softwares but I need to make sure non-GPL software not violate GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use this library indirectly using a wrapper service(can be a windows service, web service, rest api etc.) ? This wrapper service will provide a generic interface to utialize this library and will be licensed with GPL. Any commercial software can communicate with this service using its plugins.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets explain through the figure below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zukvq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zukvq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternative image link : &lt;a href=&quot;https://ibb.co/nRjxr7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ibb.co/nRjxr7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt; is GPL licensed library that is I want to use. It is not modified in any way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; is my GPL licensed service that using &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt; and running independently of &lt;strong&gt;A/B&lt;/strong&gt; . Any client software can use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; are my commercial web apps that will use &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; over adaptors. &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; can work without &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;. So there is not strong dependency for &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;.  A, B and C are not running in the same process. They can work even on different machines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adaptor A&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; will call &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; over tcp/http. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; service will provide generic operation interfaces. Adaptors will use the data contracts that provided by &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;. So, Adaptors needs to know what data models are supported on &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; operations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this scenario appropriate? Is there any proper way to achive my problem ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I distrubute &lt;strong&gt;Adaptor A&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; ? Are they need to be GPL licensed ( &lt;strong&gt;A/B&lt;/strong&gt; distrubuted with an .exe file to installation without containing adaptors)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, what is the way of I distributing &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; and mentioning in my commercial applications to tell users to install it and integrate with other applications. (I can specify with a description that explains how to utilize C service for the A/B users. Also I can make &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt; program source and installation file available on my server for download.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10104" LastEditorUserId="10104" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T08:18:14.663" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T08:18:14.663" Title="Using GPL licensed library over a service for non-GPL softwares" Tags="|gpl|commercial|gpl-2|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5819" CreationDate="2018-01-03T03:45:37.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can release the &lt;code&gt;.tex&lt;/code&gt; files that you authored using whatever license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LPPL license covers the LaTeX project itself, such as the compiler. If you do not distribute that, you don't need to follow its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T03:45:37.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5670" CreationDate="2018-01-03T04:02:25.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you port the modified-BSD-licensed code and release that, you would need to follow the modified BSD license. This does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean you have to license your code under the modified BSD license. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tldrlegal&lt;/a&gt;, you must: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all. For more details check out: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1829/175&quot;&gt;How to licence a project which includes MIT, BSD, Modified BSD, and New BSD libraries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are licenses where you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have to license derivative works under the same license; such licenses are often called &lt;strong&gt;copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; licenses. Modified BSD license is an example of a &lt;strong&gt;permissive&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T04:02:25.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6394" CreationDate="2018-01-03T08:50:36.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, the devil, as usual, is in the details, and you don't give us much information about how these &lt;em&gt;adaptors&lt;/em&gt; work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for example, the B-C adapter is a piece of software that works by linking against libraries that form part of B, and also against libraries that form part of C, then you've created a single, large, derivative work of both B and C, and you have a big licensing problem on your hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, instead, the adapter uses userspace as a mediating tool (eg, B puts files on the file system, then the adapter moves them into C's bit of filespace and calls C through fork-and-exec to deal with them, or C runs as a daemon that periodically checks whether there are new files to deal with), then B and C are separate works for copyright purposes, and you don't have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one about your obligations with respect to C is pretty well covered elsewhere, but in brief, if you &lt;strong&gt;tell&lt;/strong&gt; your users that they must download and install it, and you make both source and executable available from the same place on your website, that would suffice.  If you &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; C directly to them, your obligations with respect to source provision are a bit more extensive, but not much so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you have clarified that both A and B adapters will interact with C via HTTP.  &lt;strong&gt;Provided they do this using RFC-standard HTTP operations&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;code&gt;POST&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;GET&lt;/code&gt;, etc.), that seems likely to me to be at arm's-length enough to make them separate for copyright purposes; certainly my web browser doesn't need to know about the GPL status of the web servers with which it interacts.  If they're thus separated, then A and B adapters can be proprietary software which you distribute along with A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still a bit nervous about &quot;&lt;em&gt;Adaptors will use the data contracts that provided by C. So, Adaptors needs to know what data models are supported on C operations&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, because I don't understand what you mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;: given your subsequent clarification, it depends on how knowledge of the structures is acquired.  Generally, if there is a separate written specification, and you implement this &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; in your code, all is likely to be fine (there has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America%2C_Inc._v._Google%2C_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least one attempt&lt;/a&gt; to claim that an API can be copyrighted, but it wasn't hugely successful).  If there is no separate written specification, and you read (in your example's) Amazon's library code to work out what the API is, or worse still, use their code as a basis for your own, there is a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that you have yourself written C, wrapping it around the pre-existing GPL library E.  That puts you in a position to write that specification, &lt;strong&gt;but not to implement it&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clean-room practice&lt;/a&gt; is that person A reads the &quot;contaminated&quot; code and writes the functional spec, and a person B implements that spec, without any further reference to person A.  You cannot be &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this whole analysis assumes that linking creates derivative works, and as we note elsewhere, this is not yet a certainty; arguments can be made both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat?rq=1&quot;&gt;against&lt;/a&gt; the issue.  It is generally accepted, however, that interaction-through-userspace keeps two programs far enough apart that neither is entangled by the other from a copyright point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T11:33:15.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T11:33:15.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6403" CreationDate="2018-01-04T19:38:20.383" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for advice in regards to licensing. I started coding an application in my free time for some months now. It began as coding practice, but as time progressed it got more serious and there are others developers involved now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Development has moved to a private GitHub repo and I eventually want to make it open source with its first release. I want to help the project grow, but I'm concerned about which license would be the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is financial in nature and it offers a competitive advantage. I'm not planning on making a commercial application, I'd rather keep it as a hobby project and allow others to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the license to be permissive enough, to let it be used by other open source libraries/applications, so if someone finds the app useful, it's more beneficial to contribute to the project, than make private modifications. I also want to prevent it to be used by closed source, commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best option right now looks to be GPL 3.0, I've also been looking at other licenses like AGPL, but I'm not sure at this point I need that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main concern is that there is no liability for using the app, use at own risk. The application uses other open source libraries under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10125" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T08:32:22.380" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T09:38:36.593" Title="Licensing concern for an application?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6401" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:39:22.850" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is in the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional question for the case if I do have to ask the contributors for approval: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the owner of my project, what can I do in advance to get the exclusive rights to change the license without asking all of the contributors for approval in case when I would want to change the license in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10124" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T00:09:01.087" Title="I am about to put an Apache License on my project. Can I change it to another license later without asking contributors?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6400" CreationDate="2018-01-05T00:09:01.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only entity that can change the license of a work is the copyright holder. Hence, you would need to be the copyright holder of the entire work in order to change its license. This can be accomplished by getting any contributors to explicitly assign the copyright in their contributions to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... unless you have a lot of standing in the community, the chance of most contributors doing that is pretty much zero - once copyright has been assigned to you, there's nothing stopping you from taking the code, closing it off and stopping any distribution of any future modifications you make. What value are you offering that means that I or anyone else contributing to your project take that risk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T00:09:01.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6421" CreationDate="2018-01-05T06:01:58.370" Score="1" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m planning to release my code under LGPLv3 license but I can’t find answers to several question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Let me describe my situation:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I’ve created library and want to use LGPL v3 license for this code;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Library has references to proprietary packages (it has dependencies from packages which were installed to the library): a) EPiServer.CMS.Core package (&lt;a href=&quot;http://nuget.episerver.com/en/OtherPages/Package/?packageId=EPiServer.CMS.Core&amp;amp;packageVersion=9.0.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nuget.episerver.com/en/OtherPages/Package/?packageId=EPiServer.CMS.Core&amp;amp;packageVersion=9.0.0&lt;/a&gt;). License for this package is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.episerver.com/eula/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.episerver.com/eula/&lt;/a&gt;;  b) EPiServer.CMS.Core package has dependency from Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc/&lt;/a&gt; ) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My library can be linked only with EPiServer application (proprietary product) and can’t work as independent application. So every  EPiServer application (with my library or without it) owner has to buy license from EPiServer;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My library provides additional functionality to EPiServer application and uses only public available API from proprietary packages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Every user has possibility to get those proprietary packages from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nuget.org&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://nuget.episerver.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://nuget.episerver.com&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to FAQ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt; ) I have to include Additional permission section to the license notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I’ve created license notice with copyright disclaimer:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2017 Pavel Shumihai&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This file is part of Epi.Dds.Manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Epi.Dds.Manager is free software: you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;  modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as&#xA;  published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the&#xA;  License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Epi.Dds.Manager is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA;  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU&#xA;  Lesser General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;  License along with Epi.Dds.Manager.  If not, see&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional permission under GNU General Public License version 3&#xA;  section 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or&#xA;  combining it with EPiServer.CMS.Core 7.5.409 (or a modified version of&#xA;  that library), containing parts covered by the terms of  END USER&#xA;  LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR Episerver CMS, COMMERCE, FIND (ON-PREMISES), &#xA;  RELATE AND SUPPLEMENTAL PRODUCTS, the licensors of this Program  grant&#xA;  you additional permission to convey the resulting work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;I have several questions according to this text:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can’t provide source code to EPiServer and MVC libraries. FAQ&#xA;contains following information: “If not everybody can distribute&#xA;source for the libraries you intend to link with, you should remove&#xA;the text in braces; otherwise, just remove the braces themselves.”&#xA;Does it relate to the next text: “{Corresponding Source for a&#xA;non-source form of such a combination shall include the source code&#xA;for the parts of [name of library] used as well as that of the&#xA;covered work.}”?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I insert ‘Lesser’ word before General in the section header:&#xA;‘Additional permission under GNU General Public License version 3&#xA;section 7’? I’ve found information about similar situation in “The&#xA;license notices” part of document which you can find by&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&lt;/a&gt; (quote: When using the&#xA;Lesser GPL, insert the word “Lesser” before “General” in all three&#xA;places.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My library depends from 'EPiServer.CMS.Core' and 'EPiServer.CMS.Core'&#xA;depends from 'Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc'. Should I include additional&#xA;permissions only to direct dependency ('EPiServer.CMS.Core' in my&#xA;case) or for all children dependencies as well ('Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc'&#xA;in my case)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I do something with situation when I allows to use my library&#xA;with 'EPiServer.CMS.Core' and that library can be used with different&#xA;versions of MVC library? (e.g. Developer can use&#xA;'Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc 4.0.30506' with MS-EULA License and&#xA;'Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc 5.2.3' with MS-.NET-Library-JS License)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I include library version to the additional permission?&#xA;(7.5.409 in my situation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does ‘or a modified version of that library’ from license notice&#xA;allows to link 'EPiServer.CMS.Core' 9.0 version?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10128" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T14:02:07.163" Title="How to write additional permission for LGPLv3 license" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6399" CreationDate="2018-01-05T09:38:36.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If others have started contributing code and/or documentation to the project, then the copyright of the project is shared between all contributors and if there is no explicit license, then technically you are in violation of each other's copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technical copyright violation is not a problem on the short term (although it would prohibit you from making a public release), but it does indicate that now is the time to discuss with everyone what license should be used for the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When changing the license (and that includes moving away from the &quot;all rights reserved&quot; status if there is no explicit license), &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; copyright holders need to agree on the new license. As not everyone has the same motivations for contributing to the project, this can lead to the need for a compromise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going by your preferences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to let [the project] be used by other open source libraries/applications&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be satisfied by any open-source license, but it also depends on what license terms appeal to the developers of that other library/application. They might want a less restrictive license than what you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if someone finds the app useful, it's more beneficial to contribute to the project, than make private modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Completely private modifications, as in changes that are not distributed at all, can't be prevented by any license. There is no license in existence that forces distribution of changes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The best you can get is that modifications are shared under the same license as the original app, when they are shared. This is achieved by using a copyleft license, like LGPL, GPL or AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also want to prevent it to be used by closed source, commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a huge difference between closed-source software, where you don't have the right to change, build upon or even see the source code, and commercial software, where the software is used by someone to make money.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All open-source licenses allow the software to be used to make money, but it may require a different business model than just simply selling copies of the same software over and over again, because the open-source license grants that same right of selling to those who buy from you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For protection against inclusion in closed-source software, you again need to turn to the copyleft GPL licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The LGPL can be used in projects that also used closed-source parts, as long as the recipient of the larger project is able to replace the LGPL-licensed code with a different version (potentially one that they modified themselves).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL license requires that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; code in the complete project is subject to the freedoms that open-source gives you. Any recipient of the project must be able to modify any part of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL license is specifically designed for SaaS situations to give users of a SaaS service the right to obtain a copy of the (source code of) application that provides the service. In all other respects, it is the same as the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T09:38:36.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6406" CreationDate="2018-01-06T19:32:22.147" Score="7" ViewCount="2071" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an MIT-licensed (in plans, currently it's not published) project. And I've found an implementation of the required algorithm in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/srdja/Collections-C/blob/master/src/list.c#L1821&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-licensed project&lt;/a&gt;. Am I allowed to include that code in my project? And if so, how exactly do I state that code is copied from that file? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10137" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T08:40:04.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T09:23:31.007" Title="LGPL-licensed code reuse in MIT-licensed project" Tags="|licensing|mit|lgpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6405" CreationDate="2018-01-07T08:39:42.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, it seems to me that &lt;strong&gt;yes, you may&lt;/strong&gt;, provided you conform to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU LGPL&lt;/a&gt;'s obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief those seem to me to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That you license the modified LGPL work under LGPL (or GPL3, but that would interfere with your desire to distribute the rest of the work under an MIT licence)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That you include copies of the GPL and the LGPL with the work&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other obligations seem automatically fulfilled by your distributing the rest of the work as source.  The easiest way to handle the code and its copying seems to me to be to keep all the LGPL-derived code in separate source file(s), which clearly state at the top the original authors' and your copyrights, and that the files are licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code as written displays any kind of copyright notice at runtime, you must also &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;include the copyright notice for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note in passing that one of the main ideas of distributing something under an MIT licence is to permit later use in proprietary software.  In the case of your project, such later use will be made much more difficult by the presence of LGPL'ed content (it's possible, but complying with the LGPL gets more onerous when there's no general source distribution).  This makes the choice of MIT a bit perplexing; do consider, however briefly, distributing your project under GPL3 instead, as you could then relicence the LGPL-derived content under GPL3 (LGPL s2b) and the whole project would be under a single licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the amount of code you're taking is too small to be independently copyrightable, you may be able simply to reuse it.  I would advise getting a real legal opinion before you do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T09:23:31.007" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T09:23:31.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6410" CreationDate="2018-01-08T06:15:30.337" Score="-4" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask whether SharpDevelop and MVS (community edition) are free to use by companies or in companies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to buy them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10146" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T06:38:35.467" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T13:06:28.877" Title="Is SharpDevelop free to use by companies or in companies?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6411" CreationDate="2018-01-08T11:35:23.827" Score="-4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;if hypothetically I have developed special software, and I only want author recognition for it (leaving money aside) can i choose to distribute my creation as open source without other people usurping my work saying that they were its creators? I only want recognition as an author and be able to share it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;example: c++ was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup, but some guy wants to say that he designed c++, not Bjarne Strostrup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10149" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T13:24:22.147" Title="choose between open-source or close source" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6407" CreationDate="2018-01-08T13:06:28.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SharpDevelop&lt;/a&gt; is an open source application that is free for anyone to use, it is released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MVS - (Microsoft Visual Studio) - is a different matter, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the licensing page&lt;/a&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an &lt;strong&gt;individual&lt;/strong&gt; working on your own applications ... you may use the software to develop and test those applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an &lt;strong&gt;organization&lt;/strong&gt;, your users may use the software as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test applications released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved open source software licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test extensions to Visual Studio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test device drivers for the Windows operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Any number of your users may use the software to develop and test your applications as part of online or in person classroom training and education, or for performing academic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-If none of the above apply, and you are also not an enterprise (that is &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;250&lt;/code&gt; pcs or users and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;$1M&lt;/code&gt; annual revenue), then up to 5 of your individual users can use the software concurrently to develop and test your applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you are only using it to develop open source projects, device drivers, MVS extensions or for educational purposes, then you are free to use it. Otherwise, a company can use it free for up to 5 concurrent developers, more than that and you need to purchase a professional or enterprise license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T13:06:28.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6409" CreationDate="2018-01-08T13:24:22.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All open source licenses allow the author to maintain copyright ownership and require other users and contributors to honour and attribute that ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can't stop anyone from copying it and saying it is theirs, by releasing your work with any open source license you get a legal standing against anyone who doesn't honour the licensing terms you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T13:24:22.147" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T18:11:17.557" Score="9" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears most open source projects are headed by men; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists 29 men in charge of open source projects.  Considering the famous contributions in the history of computer science and software engineering by people like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and countless others, that seems a little unlikely or disappointing.  Are there any well-known open source projects where a woman is in charge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="33" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T11:06:23.433" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T16:01:56.833" Title="Are any well-known open-source projects helmed by women?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-09T07:21:07.333" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know nothing about GPL before, and I am living in a country that doesn't have much care about licenses either. I am studying this GPL thing today and I came to know that when I am using a GPLed library (no modifications to it) in my application and I am going to distribute this to others, then I am also obliged to distribute the source code as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one thing I don't understand is, how will other people know that I am using GPLed libraries in my application? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can get a GPLed library, then that means I am able to get its source code. If I just copy pasted the source code to my application without nobody else knowing, how can others tell that I am using a GPLed library in my application then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10152" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T20:43:47.017" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T20:43:47.017" Title="How could other people know that I'm using GPLed libraries in my application?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6412" CreationDate="2018-01-09T10:58:14.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coccinelle&lt;/a&gt; project (see also on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coccinelle/coccinelle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;)  was started by &lt;a href=&quot;https://pages.lip6.fr/Julia.Lawall/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julia Lawall&lt;/a&gt;, and she's still one of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/people.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;core developers&lt;/a&gt;.  She's also considered authoritative on what it can and can't do; see eg this from &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/743265/d734556f570dd148/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LWN's coverage&lt;/a&gt; of the linux kernel community's response to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some developers have suggested using Coccinelle, but Julia Lawall, the creator of Coccinelle, has &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/743287/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;concluded&lt;/a&gt; that the task is too complex for that tool. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T16:01:56.833" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T16:01:56.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6333" CreationDate="2018-01-10T00:03:24.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since CC0 is essentially a way of waiving copyright, you don't need to add a &#xA;&quot;Copyright (C) ...&quot; line.  I generally replace that with a &quot;written by Joe Blogs 201x&quot; to allow subsequent users/distributors to keep track of the code's history&#xA;but that is not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T00:03:24.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T01:39:03.413" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an Android app that I plan on uploading to the Play Store as a paid listing. I also want to make it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm perfectly fine with people building it for personal use, but I want to try to prevent re-distribution, at least on the Play Store and XDA. I was thinking about using the MIT license and modifying it to add the condition, but I've learned this is called a &quot;crayon license,&quot; and that it's not a good way to do things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSS licenses aren't exactly my forte, and I was directed here for help. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fine with modified builds being distributed anywhere the author likes, just as long as it's more than changing the app name and/or colors. Someone pointed out the app &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/siacs/Conversations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conversations&lt;/a&gt; which is licensed under GPLv3, paid and OSS. Is this the way to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6010" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T20:45:50.337" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T20:45:50.337" Title="License that prevents re-distribution at least on Play Store and XDA" Tags="|license-recommendation|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6416" CreationDate="2018-01-10T07:20:21.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're okay with people publishing your code as their own apps, then you the tool you want to use is a trademark, rather than a crayon copyright license. Lots of projects allow their code to be used freely, but the name, logos, and other branding cannot be. Trademark law also assists you for people who &lt;em&gt;haven't&lt;/em&gt; used any of your code but are trying to make a very similar sounding and looking app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T07:20:21.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6419" CreationDate="2018-01-10T10:53:44.867" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am finding it very hard to decide if I should offer commit access to the main repository to contributors (make them collaborators) for a project or if I should restrict the access to myself. Given that i trust the contributors, is it beneficial to offer them commit privilege for the main repository ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping that by giving commit privilage the contributors may be motivated to devote more time for the project. But, I am also worried that at some point this policy might back fire in terms of loosing direction for the project and maybe other potential problems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a good way to decide when I should start offering commit privilege for the contributors and more importantly when I should &lt;strong&gt;stop&lt;/strong&gt; offering it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8782" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T10:24:11.877" LastActivityDate="2024-02-29T22:51:33.787" Title="Finding the optimal number of collaborators for a project" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6418" CreationDate="2018-01-10T16:38:36.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the best you can do is write down the direction and culture you want to develop/preserve in the project's community (values, goals, modes of operation, criteria for granting collaborator status, etc.) and spread out the responsibility to maintain this culture to as many people as possible — which implies being generally liberal with the attribution of commit rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Decentralizing the project governance this way has several advantages: you reduce the chances of any individual or group taking control of the project's direction; you make the project more resilient against the natural variations in availability of the maintainers (including you); you boost the sense of ownership and collaboration; and you reduce the risk of burnout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it useful to think of granting collaborator status not as a reward for work done, but as a practical measure to reduce barriers for future contributions. After all, lack of manpower is a much more common (and serious) problem for open source projects, than governance disputes — especially since the latter can always be mitigated with good policies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-02-29T22:51:33.787" LastActivityDate="2024-02-29T22:51:33.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6424" CreationDate="2018-01-10T13:38:34.500" Score="5" ViewCount="618" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question in a nutshell&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi! Together with a team of brilliant engineers we've been building a software project (&lt;a href=&quot;http://luna-lang.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://luna-lang.org&lt;/a&gt;) for the last two years and now we want to release everything as an Open Source project, completely free of charge for everyone. We are authors of the whole code and use only MIT licensed libraries, so we can freely choose our license model now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good Open Source project have a strong team of full-time contributors. It happens naturally if there is a commercial company behind the project. As a young, small company we know that we will survive only if we find a proper revenue model. That's why we want to build a commercial software on top of the project, but in the early days we want to keep a strong competitive advantage. That's why we would like to choose the AGPL license initially. However, as a long-term Open Source community members, it is just against our feelings – we want to make it as open and free as possible. That's why we would choose AGPL now if and only if we will be sure it would be possible to switch to Apache v2 / MIT in the future. The question is – is it possible taking in consideration the constraints below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important software specification&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our project is a software allowing you to build new software. Technically, it is a compiler and graphical editor of a new programming language. Thus releasing it as AGPL project do not affect the majority of users – they can build commercial, closed source software using it. The difference is only if somebody would like to use our compiler as a back-end to build some kind of competitive graphical data processing interface (or SaaS) – then we want to be sure it will not be a commercial, closed source application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Constraints&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We would like to build a community around the project and accept contributions. The contributions have basically 2 forms: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Libraries for the language and plugins for the gui – they are NOT affected in any way by the license of the project, because the compiler / gui is just an &quot;editor&quot;, a &quot;build tool&quot;, so users can choose any license they want for their libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributions to the source code of the project (compiler / GUI). Here we've got copyleft.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We would like to use our software (backend and gui) as a base layer for building closed source commercial SaaS. As the only authors of a AGPL-licensed code we could do it, but we would also like to be able include community contributions in it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We do not want to force our contributors to neither sign any printed documents nor request them to have a special electronic signature. It just makes the whole process over-complicated for the vast majority of open source developers. We are looking for a solution to allow contributors to just just agree upon &quot;something&quot; when submitting pull request (preferably by clicking a checkbox or a button or just by a sentence that if you submit pull request you agree for some terms).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We would like to move the project from AGPL to MIT / Apache v2 in the future without the need to ask every contributor if we can make this change. We can of course ask about it upfront when submitting pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any simple way to accomplish this task?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10165" OwnerDisplayName="Wojciech Danilo" LastEditorUserId="10165" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T17:56:03.287" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T07:39:27.970" Title="Moving project from AGPL to Apache v2 / MIT license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|apache-2.0|software|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6402" CreationDate="2018-01-11T14:02:07.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've discussed this situation with senior analyst from 'Open Source Vulnerability department' and she described that I was looking at it from the wrong side. Library owner/developer shouldn't worry about resolving possible conflicts with licenses which will be selected for products with this library. Developer should just select license which he wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Correct flow to resolve and select license:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developer creates library for proprietary soft. Library can use API&#xA;from linked proprietary libraries (EPiServer and Microsoft in my&#xA;situation). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code owner select license for his code/library (LGPLv3) and should&#xA;add notes to the README file that the library uses proprietary products&#xA;(EPiServer);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proprietary libraries must be dynamically linked (&lt;strong&gt;not statically&lt;/strong&gt; by including code) to LGPLv3 library;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone who is developing application by using proprietary technology&#xA;(EPiServer) can use such library but they must resolve possible&#xA;conflicts with licenses (e.g. they have to buy license for EPiServer).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Application owner have to select appropriate license for the end&#xA;product which won't violates other licenses (LGPLv3, EPiServer and&#xA;Microsoft licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible because LGPLv3 was designed specifically for shared components (like libraries) and it can't be used for application (I could be wrong). Also library can't work without application so the application owner have to buy license for the proprietary products&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10128" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T14:02:07.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6423" CreationDate="2018-01-11T19:37:22.353" Score="6" ViewCount="1592" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a software that comes bundled with JDK. I am planning to use JetBrains OpenJDK for this purpose as it comes with swing support for HighDPI monitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JetBrains OpenJDK can be found in this repository: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JetBrains/jdk8u&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/JetBrains/jdk8u&lt;/a&gt;. It is covered by GPL-2.0 with Classpath Exception. I plan to use their precompiled version of JDK found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://bintray.com/jetbrains/intellij-jdk/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bintray.com/jetbrains/intellij-jdk/&lt;/a&gt;. The extracted archive would be located in the JDK subdirectory of the installation of my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would distribution of my software which is covered by the custom license and is closed source be legal if I distribute JetBrains JDK with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6777" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T20:14:11.827" Title="Bundling JetBrains OpenJDK in closed source software" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|distribution|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6422" CreationDate="2018-01-11T20:14:11.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your software does not fall under the GPL because you benefit from the Classpath exception. But you want to distribute an unmodified OpenJDK alongside your software. What license does this bundle (your software + OpenJDK) fall under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL v2 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: if you bundle OpenJDK with your software, the GPL will not apply to the bundle as whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your bundling should make it clear that the GPL software is independent. This OpenJDK installation should be independently usable. If your bundle contains any EULAs or other license information, they should make it clear that these only apply to some parts of the bundle, and that the OpenJDK is free software under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute a GPL software, you will have to comply with the GPL for that distribution. This is simple for verbatim copies of the source code. If you distribute binaries you'll have to conform with section 3. This requires you to give access to the source. (a) You can either include the whole OpenJDK source in your bundle, which is probably impractical. (b) You can include a written offer to send a copy of the source upon request. (c) You can pass on such a written offer that you received, but ONLY for noncommercial distribution. Since your distribution seems commercial in nature, that only leaves option (b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough to point to the JetBrains Github repo? I don't think that satisfies the license because that repo is not under your control and may be deleted. Forking that repository may be sufficient, though it's still your responsibility and not Github's to keep the source available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safest way to satisfy the license is to offer the source code in the same way that you offer your bundle which includes OpenJDK. E.g. if you have a web page with a download link for your bundle, offer a download with the OpenJDK source code on the same page. This download must not be access protected. Then keep that website running while you offer that bundle &lt;em&gt;plus at least three years&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL says explicitly that offering a separate download for the source next to the download of the executable is OK:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T20:14:11.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6420" CreationDate="2018-01-12T07:13:43.900" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've clarified that you're worried about people incorporating the code of your compiler into closed-source web-accessible products before you're ready (hence AGPL for now) but that at some future time you will be ready, and want to change licences to one that permits that (MIT) without at that time consulting all contributors.  You also want to be able to use community contributions in your own closed-source product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That naturally leads us to contributor licensing agreements (CLAs), which are a pretty well-established feature of life in the free-software world, and about which much has already been written on this site.  Your wrinkle is that you don't want to formally require a (digitally or manually) signed CLA from contributors, but instead have a &quot;click-through&quot; warning that all contributors accept a linked agreement by the simple act of submission, or failing that, an  &quot;&lt;em&gt;I accept the CLA&lt;/em&gt;&quot; checkbox that must be ticked on each submission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1874/must-contributor-agreements-be-physically-signed&quot;&gt;have already discussed&lt;/a&gt; the validity of the different forms of CLA; my layman's opinion remains that you should at the very least go with a checkbox.  You may find this interferes with workflow, because (in my experience) most distributed-source-management tools don't make it easy to click a checkbox on each submission.  I note also that while printed CLAs are a bit &lt;em&gt;passe&lt;/em&gt;, there are definite advantages to having registered GPG public keys for each of your contributors (not least because &lt;em&gt;proving&lt;/em&gt; the provenance of contributions becomes easy) and if you're going to require those, having digitally-signed CLAs is nearly no extra effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're open to something a little heavier-weight which is still short of full-on, there are CLA sites (eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla-assistant.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla-assistant.io/&lt;/a&gt;) that integrate with public development repositories like github and handle the business of having a given github user formally agree to a CLA that a particular github repo has been configured to require.  This workflow is also pretty well-understood by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl; dr&lt;/strong&gt; the barrier to contribution represented by formal electronic acceptance of a CLA, however that is accomplished, is small compared to the barrier represented by a CLA allowing commercial exploitation.  So if you're determined to require a CLA, go electronic and don't sweat the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I have no relationship with cla-assistant.io.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T07:39:27.970" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T07:39:27.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-14T12:57:00.357" Score="3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a custom set of playing cards and I want to use Wikimedia Commons pictures released as CC BY-SA 3.0 DE as illustration on the cards. Every card uses one picture. The pictures are not touched up, though I may do some cropping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I want to do is to be able to keep copyright on my own design &amp;amp; text separate from the pictures (on which I have no copyright). Is this possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched for previous questions and there was somebody who wanted to use CC BY-SA text with their own copyrighted pictures (so the other way around):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1971/selling-a-book-based-on-cc-by-sa&quot;&gt;Selling a book based on CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There, users said that it was possible to keep the licenses separate. Does this also apply to my playing cards?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am partially confused because the relevant info says that if I &quot;remix, transform, or build upon the material&quot; that it also falls under CC BY-SA. As I am not creating a collage where the pictures are indistinctive anymore, this should be OK or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional info&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example picture:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_141-2497,_Flugzeug_Me_262A_auf_Flugplatz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_141-2497,_Flugzeug_Me_262A_auf_Flugplatz.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pictures use this CC BY-SA 3.0 license&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10191" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T22:28:30.913" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T12:52:16.493" Title="Using CC BY-SA images in commercial print" Tags="|copyright|commercial|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6428" CreationDate="2018-01-15T10:06:12.323" Score="14" ViewCount="7865" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading up on Open Source licensing, but there is this one term that I think needs clarification: &lt;strong&gt;when is work derivative?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have an image viewer that accepts a ZIP file and I decompress it with an open source library under Creative Commons licensing, then I see two possible interpretations of the terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adaptations that I make to the ZIP file library should be shared with the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to share my entire application with the world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before answering with &quot;copyleft owns all&quot; or marking this as a duplicate, I would like to stress that the point of the question is that the remainder of the application is not attempting to solve a ZIP problem. The domain changes. &#xA;It is assumed that if I have to solve some ZIP bugs in the original library, then those bug fixes should be shared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, here on Stack Overflow, every submitted code is licensed under Creative Commons license. However, if I have a problem and then get a response containing code, but find that I have to tweak it a bit in order to properly &lt;strong&gt;solve the stated problem&lt;/strong&gt;, I think it would be practical that the &quot;ShareAlike&quot; caveat be solved by me sharing the end result in the same thread.&#xA;Not my entire application, but the best possible answer to the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think clarification of these terms is the key question regarding open source licensing, and I can't see it addressed anywhere. If I use a matrix transformation math library and I expand upon it and then use it in a biology categorization algorithm, I would say that my extension to the matrix library is &quot;building upon&quot;/&quot;derivative&quot; work (and subject to licensing terms), whereas the biology code isn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I missed somewhere where this specific question has been addressed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10198" OwnerDisplayName="Tormod" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T17:36:04.977" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T17:36:04.977" Title="What is derivative work? What is &quot;build upon&quot;?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2018-01-15T11:22:03.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of a derivative work isn't a software concept, nor a Creative Commons one - it's fundamental to the idea of copyright, preceding the invention of programmable computers by many years.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_1911&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imperial Copyright Act of 1911&lt;/a&gt;, for example, reserved (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) to composers the sole right of adapting their compositions for use upon mechanical instruments, which to me is a clear example of control of derivative works.  The question of what constitutes a derivative work is also not one with a single, settled answer, as it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and it varies over time as case law helps to nail down the edges.  Also, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's reasonably clear and well-accepted that if you start from someone else's codebase to build your code, or you include a substantial chunk of someone else's code in your code, your work &lt;em&gt;in its entirety&lt;/em&gt; becomes a derivative of theirs.  You will need permission to do this, and if you get that permission by means of a copyleft licence, you may need to fulfil certain conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write code that forms part of an executable program by statically linking into someone else's library, the question of whether your work is a derivative of theirs is less clear-cut.  If the linking is dynamic, it is even less clear; we have summaries of the arguments &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;against&lt;/a&gt;.  But if your work is a derivative of theirs, then it is so in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask whether you create derivative works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if I use a matrix transformation math library and I expand upon it and then use it in a biology categorization algorithm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that your improved library is very likely a derivative of the original library code, but since you don't say &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; you would use it in the biology algorithm (by which I assume you mean an &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt; of an algorithm, since algorithms themselves probably aren't copyrightable) it's impossible to speculate about derivative status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T12:25:42.483" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T12:25:42.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2018-01-15T12:51:13.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with all those different Creative Commons license variants,  but usage of CC &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is actually discouraged for software&lt;/a&gt;. So most open source libraries I know of, where the term &quot;derivative work&quot; or &quot;build upon&quot; is relevant, are under GPL or LGPL, and since your question is probably not meant to be for CC only, I think you might be interested what your case means in context of those two licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In laymens terms, if your image viewer links against a library, then &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the lib is under some &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; license, your image viewer needs to be under GPL as well (or a GPL compatible lincense, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). This apparently counts as a derivative work in the sense of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the lib is under some &lt;strong&gt;LGPL&lt;/strong&gt; license, your image viewer does not have to be open sourced, only changes to the lib itself&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is actually &lt;strong&gt;the most important difference between those two license categories&lt;/strong&gt;, and that is why lots of people (including myself) do not make any use of GPL libs for closed source software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are ways which allow to circumvent the viral aspect of the GPL under some conditions (for example, by not linking directly against the lib in stake, but by using or creating a wrapper program which then communicates with the using program &quot;at arms length&quot;). Have a look into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this section of the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T10:42:41.390" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T10:42:41.390" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-01-15T12:52:16.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really tricky question that can be argued both ways. The important distinction is: are your playing cards a &lt;em&gt;Abwandlung&lt;/em&gt; (adaption) of the images, a &lt;em&gt;Sammelwerk&lt;/em&gt; (collection), or is this just &lt;em&gt;Vervielfältigung&lt;/em&gt; (reproduction)? The CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE defines these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. Der Begriff &quot;Abwandlung&quot; im Sinne dieser Lizenz bezeichnet das Ergebnis jeglicher Art von Veränderung des Schutzgegenstandes, […]. Das kann insbesondere eine Bearbeitung, Umgestaltung, Änderung, Anpassung, Übersetzung oder Heranziehung des Schutzgegenstandes zur Vertonung von Laufbildern sein. Nicht als Abwandlung des Schutzgegenstandes gelten seine Aufnahme in eine Sammlung oder ein Sammelwerk und die freie Benutzung des Schutzgegenstandes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. Der Begriff &quot;Sammelwerk&quot; im Sinne dieser Lizenz meint eine Zusammenstellung von literarischen, künstlerischen oder wissenschaftlichen Inhalten, sofern diese Zusammenstellung aufgrund von Auswahl und Anordnung der darin enthaltenen selbständigen Elemente eine geistige Schöpfung darstellt, unabhängig davon, ob die Elemente systematisch oder methodisch angelegt und dadurch einzeln zugänglich sind oder nicht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;f. &quot;Vervielfältigen&quot; im Sinne dieser Lizenz bedeutet, mittels beliebiger Verfahren Vervielfältigungsstücke des Schutzgegenstandes herzustellen, insbesondere durch Ton- oder Bildaufzeichnungen, und umfasst auch […] die Übertragung des Schutzgegenstandes auf einen Bild- oder Tonträger oder auf ein anderes elektronisches Medium, gleichviel ob in digitaler oder analoger Form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English phrasing of these sections in the unported CC license variant differs substantially in many details from the German version, so I'll not reproduce it here. In particular, the unported license sees an adaption if you “base upon” the creative work, whereas the German license explicitly expects an “Veränderung” (change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think your usage would be an Abwandlung since you will include the images verbatim. If you do change the images (e.g. retouching or cropping the pictures) then that is an Abwandlung and the appropriate terms apply to that changed image. But I don't think this Abwandlung applies to your playing cards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also do not think your playing cards constitute a Sammelwerk since your playing cards are playing cards, not primarily a collection of independent images. This can be argued differently, but I don't think the distinction is important as the license conditions for simple Verfielfältigung und Sammelwerke are very similar. (The primary difference is that the act of curating creating works into a Sammelwerk results in an independent copyright for that collection, whereas Verfielfältigung does not create a new copyright.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore think that your use case is best described as Verfielfältigung (reproduction) of the images on your playing cards. The playing cards are certainly a valid medium for these images. According to 3.a you have the right to this use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Den Schutzgegenstand in beliebiger Form und Menge zu vervielfältigen, ihn in Sammelwerke zu integrieren und ihn als Teil solcher Sammelwerke zu vervielfältigen;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… as long as you fulfil the conditions in section 4. These are the usual CC conditions such as crediting the author, providing a link to the license, keeping copyright notices intact, and not hindering recipients from exercising their rights by imposing DRM or similar restrictions. The terms in 4.b that would require you to license your playing cards under the same license only apply to Abwandlungen, i.e. don't apply in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T12:52:16.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2018-01-15T16:47:43.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of what legally counts as a single derivative work, as opposed to a collection of separate works, is in fact mostly a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;red herring&lt;/a&gt; in this case.  The reason for this is that, as long as your software includes &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; part that has been created by another person, or recognizably derived from something created by another person, you will need that person's permission to distribute it.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, in the Open Source world, that permission will come in the form of a written license &amp;mdash; and the license will specify the conditions that you must abide by, in order to be allowed to distribute your software (or, rather, the parts of your software whose copyright belongs to the licensor and is covered by the license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license requires you to credit the original author of the code, you must do so, or not distribute the code covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license requires you to release some of your own code under the same license, you must do so, or not distribute the code covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license requires you to release &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your own code under the same license, you must do so, or not distribute the code covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license requires you to translate your documentation into Lojban and post it on Usenet, you must do so, or not distribute the code covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the license requires you to stand on your head for 5 minutes every Friday, while meditating upon the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;foobar&lt;/em&gt;, you must do so, or not distribute the code covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, some of those demands are more reasonable than others, but the person who holds the copyright to the code you're using is allowed to make any of them,** as a condition of allowing you to redistribute their code (or a derivative of it).  Your options, meanwhile, are basically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hobson's choice&lt;/a&gt;: take it or leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original author has released their code under multiple alternative licenses, then of course you only need to comply with (at least) one of them.  And even if they haven't, you do always have the option of contacting the copyright holder (or their heirs, should they have become, um, permanently unreachable) and asking to negotiate a new license agreement with terms you find more agreeable.  Of course, they always have the option of saying no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*) The main exception to this is that, if your use of the other person's work is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt; or other similar permissions granted directly by applicable law, then you're not actually infringing the other person's copyright, and therefore do not need their permission.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;**) Depending on local laws, a court might rule some requirements in a license to be illegal or unenforceable.  For example, I'm pretty sure that a license that only allowed e.g. white heterosexual males to use and redistribute the software would fall foul of anti-discrimination laws in many if not most jurisdictions.  What actually would happen at that point is a complex matter of local law, license wording and judicial discretion, but basically, while it's possible that the court would simply strike out the offending restriction, it's just as likely that they might rule the &lt;em&gt;whole license&lt;/em&gt; to be void, thereby preventing &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; (except the original author) from legally distributing works licensed under it.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Copyleft&quot;, &quot;ShareAlike&quot; or &quot;viral&quot; licenses, which require your work to be released under the same license terms as the original work you've used as part of it, generally define more or less explicitly how broadly this requirement is meant to be interpreted.  For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; contains the following wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&#xA;  [&amp;hellip;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&amp;hellip;]&#xA;  A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not actually explicitly define what counts as a &quot;work&quot; (and no such explicit definition appears elsewhere in the license, either), but the last paragraph does explicitly exempt &quot;aggregates&quot; of independent programs from the Copyleft aspect of the GPL, which strongly implies that the authors of the GPL did intend it to cover any combined works that include a GPLed component and which do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; meet the definition of an &quot;aggregate&quot; quoted above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IANAL&lt;/a&gt;, I'm fairly sure that the &quot;separate and independent&quot; and &quot;not combined with it such as to form a larger program&quot; clauses are enough to disqualify your image viewer from being an aggregate as defined by the GPL.  Thus, using a GPLed zip library (with or without modifications) in your image viewer would force you to abide by the terms of the GPL (including, but not limited to, its Copyleft requirements) when distributing your image viewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; also includes some relevant statements (which, while not actually part of the license, a judge might well take into account in interpreting the intent of its authors), including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”? (#MereAggregation)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights that each program's individual license would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, some people may find this requirement of the GPL too onerous, specifically in situations like yours.  For that reason, the FSF also created the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;, which is a modification of the GPL that explicitly permits linking an LGPLed software library with other code (under specific conditions) without requiring the other code to be (L)GPLed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the zip library you were using was released under the LGPL, you could release your image viewer using it under any license terms you wanted, provided that you still followed all the requirements that the LGPL does impose on you, such as&#xA;1) to release any actual modifications you made to the zip library under the (L)GPL and make their source code available,&#xA;2) to include the copyright notice of the library among any such notices displayed by your program, and&#xA;3) to make it possible for users to re-link your software with modified versions of the library (e.g. by using dynamic run-time linking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Creative Commons licenses, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the legal text of the CC-By-SA 4.0 Unported license&lt;/a&gt; defines &quot;Adapted Material&quot; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the specific case of synching audio with video, this definition seems to mostly punt the question back to local law, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use-considered-an-adaptation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as the Creative Commons FAQ confirms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;When is my use considered an adaptation?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether a modification of licensed material is considered an adaptation for the purpose of CC licenses depends primarily on the applicable copyright law.&#xA;  [&amp;hellip;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically means that no globally valid answer can be given without considering the details of every country's copyright law (and relevant precedents in case law).  And even then, the answer in many cases would likely be that it would be up to the judge to decide, were the issue to ever come before one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. Curiously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the earlier version 3.0 of CC-By-SA&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; explicitly exclude &quot;Collections&quot; of independent works, as defined in section 1 of the license, from being &quot;Adaptations&quot; (to which the ShareAlike license element applies).  Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0/ShareAlike&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC 4.0 draft pages on the Creative Commons wiki&lt;/a&gt; (specifically, in the collapsed sections on Drafts 1 &amp;amp; 2), it seems that this definition was deemed redundant and unnecessary, and thus removed from the CC 4.0 licenses.  In any case, this does not seem to constitute a substantive change between the licenses, nor to have been intended as one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="998" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T18:32:30.150" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T18:32:30.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6434" CreationDate="2018-01-15T18:14:10.650" Score="4" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the CC BY-SA license prevent additional restrictions being placed on derivatives? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, if I release a work under BY-SA, can someone else create a derivative and license it under BY-NC-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10199" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T18:50:20.943" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T18:50:20.943" Title="Can derivatives of CC BY-SA works be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA?" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6432" CreationDate="2018-01-15T18:45:28.347" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it’s not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;CC BY-SA 4.0&quot;&gt;license summary page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No additional restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For Licensed Material (i.e., the unmodified work):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No downstream restrictions.&lt;/strong&gt; You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For Adapted Material (i.e., a modified work):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, Adapted Material that restrict exercise of the rights granted under the Adapter's License You apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt; for CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA. If it were allowed, it would be listed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T18:45:28.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6427" CreationDate="2018-01-16T01:07:18.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A derivative work is a concept under copyright law. Whether or not a work is a derivative work determines whether another work's license applies to it at all, so it cannot be set out in a license. Licenses don't set their own scope, the law does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derivative work is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A work. That is, it must contain protectable expression in a fixed medium.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new work. That is, it must contain some protectable expression that is not found in a prior work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Derivative. That is, it must contain sufficient protectable expression from a prior work such that distributing it without the permission of the author (or rights holder) of the prior work would violate their copy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that do not create a derivative work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copying a work -- does not create a new work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compiling a work -- does not contain new protectable expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compiling and linking other works -- no new protectable expression as compilers and linkers can't hold copyright and the protectable expression from the two works must be creative combined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things that do create a derivative work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing a sequel to a novel using its world or characters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modifying a program such that the resulting program contains sufficient protectable expression that is new and sufficient protectable expression that is taken from the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Writing a program that is specifically designed to work with another program, so long as sufficient protectable expression from that other program is in the new program. Note that including a header file cannot do this because then the combination occurs in the compiler or linker and so there is no creative combination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even if your work is not a derivative work, it may still be an aggregate work and you may still need permission (or comply with the license) to create or distribute it. For example, if I tape a DVD of The Phantom Menace to a DVD of my family Christmas, that is not a derivative work (no creative combination). But I certainly can't copy and distribute it without permission from whoever holds the rights to The Phantom Menace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T01:07:18.653" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6445" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:40:18.923" Score="-3" ViewCount="1577" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like the build upon the Libertine Open Fonts Project under SIL OFL 1.1, a permission&#xA;that &lt;strong&gt;seems&lt;/strong&gt; to be intended by the authors. However, several issues / irregularities crop&#xA;up in the wording of their license. These quotes are from various README and LICENCE files&#xA;in two versions - the &lt;strong&gt;JAIST&lt;/strong&gt; version (ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/CTAN/fonts/libertine) and&#xA;the &lt;strong&gt;SourceForge&lt;/strong&gt; version (sourceforge.net/projects/linuxlibertine/)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original opentype fonts were created by Philipp H. Poll (gillian at&#xA;  linuxlibertine.org) and are licensed under the terms of the GNU General&#xA;  Public License (Version 2, with font exception) and under the terms of&#xA;  the Open Font License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;strong&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; mean that both licenses must apply? I have heard that GPL and SIL OFL are incompatible, and that opinion seems valid (to me) because the reserved name clause of OFL would constitute an additional restriction, disallowed by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;either GPL &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; OFL, at my choice&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? I suspect that this is the intent of the authors of the license declaration, but taking &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;or&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is quite a stretch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our fonts are free in the sense of the GPL.&#xA;  ...&#xA;  Further information about the GPL (licence text with font exception see GPL.txt in this package).&#xA;  Additionally our fonts are licensed under the Open Fonts License (see OFL.txt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Additionally&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;either GPL &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; OFL, at my choice&quot;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other issues ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The JAIST LICENSE refers to OFL.txt, but that file is not in the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The SourceForge LICENSE refers to OFL.txt, but the file is named OFL-1.1.txt.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The LICENSE statement has the terms in two languages? Which is binding?&#xA;(German and English are included in the LICENSE.txt file of both JAIST and SourceForge.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for so many questions ... I'm really just trying to clear this font for further development under SIL OFL 1.1. These all seem to be stumbling blocks ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10206" LastEditorUserId="10206" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T09:21:54.520" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T09:21:54.520" Title="Font licensed as GPL *and* OFL ... Can I use under OFL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-01-18T08:02:54.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:05:32.473" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where is OS software required to be available at?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I didn't want to use GitHub or Bitbucket, can I simply put it on my website?  Where does the code have to reside in order to meet OS licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it required to be hosted at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7455" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T17:37:16.167" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T11:19:32.957" Title="Where is an Open Source repository required to be hosted?" Tags="|distribution|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8617" CreationDate="2018-01-16T14:30:01.193" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;[This question is an expansion of the question &quot;Meaning of OFL &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; GPL&quot; because of&#xA; limits on the number of characters in comment-responses].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure of the meaning of the terms &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;additionally&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in a license when they&#xA;connect two named OpenSource licenses (GPL v2 +FE and SIL OFL 1.1, in this case).&#xA;This pertains to the Libertine Open Fonts Project, whose license appears to have&#xA;a number of issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean that both licenses must apply? I have heard that GPL and SIL OFL are incompatible, and that opinion seems valid (to me) because the reserved name clause of OFL would constitute an additional restriction, disallowed by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;either GPL &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; OFL, at my choice&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? I suspect that this is the intent of the authors of the license declaration, but taking &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; to mean &lt;em&gt;&quot;or&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is quite a stretch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it stands, neither I nor anyone else can make use of the font as appears to be intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working with the &lt;strong&gt;JAIST&lt;/strong&gt; version of Libertine (ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/CTAN/fonts/libertine)&#xA;as well as the &lt;strong&gt;SourceForge&lt;/strong&gt; version (sourceforge.net/projects/linuxlibertine/).&#xA;Both appear to be version 5.3.0, and both have font files stamped with version 5.300&#xA;and a creation date of July 1, 2012, but the two packages have different contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;JAIST&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The JAIST variant has a README file at the root level indicating&#xA;&quot;version 5.3.0 (2018-01-03)&quot; which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original opentype fonts were created by Philipp H. Poll (gillian at&#xA;  linuxlibertine.org) and are licensed under the terms of the GNU General&#xA;  Public License (Version 2, with font exception) and under the terms of&#xA;  the Open Font License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The JAIST variant's /doc/LICENSE.txt file states (in part):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our fonts are free in the sense of the GPL.&#xA;  ...&#xA;  Further information about the GPL (licence text with font exception see GPL.txt in this package).&#xA;  Additionally our fonts are licensed under the Open Fonts License (see OFL.txt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The JAIST variant's /doc directory contains a GPL.txt file for v2+FE, but &lt;strong&gt;no OFL.txt file&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;SourceForge&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SourceForge variant has a /ttf/README.txt file that states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We publish our fonts under the terms of the GPL (see GPL.txt) and OFL (OFL.txt)&#xA;  -&gt; see also LICENCE.txt!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SourceForge variant has a /ttf/LICENSE.txt file that matches the&#xA;JAIST /doc/LICENSE.txt file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Additionally our fonts are licensed under the Open Fonts License (see OFL.txt).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SourceForge variant's /ttf directory contains a GPL.txt file for v2+FE,&#xA;and an OFL-1.1.txt file for SIL OFL 1.1..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what my position is regarding using these fonts under SIL OFL 1.1.&#xA;In particular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the connector &lt;em&gt;&quot;and&quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean between two licenses? (As used in the JAIST&#xA;variant's README file and also the different text in the SourceForge variant's README.txt.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the conjunctive adverb &lt;em&gt;&quot;Additionally&quot;&quot; mean in the LICENSE.txt file of&#xA;both variants? (&lt;/em&gt;&quot;Additionally our fonts are licensed under the Open Fonts License ...&quot;_.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What happens when a licence references a file that is missing from the distribution?&#xA;(As in the JAIST version's OFL.txt file) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What happens when a license referenes the wrong file name? (The SourceForge variant&#xA;references OFL.txt, but the file is OFL-1.1.txt.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What if a license statement has the terms in two languages? Which is binding?&#xA;(German and English are included in the LICENSE.txt file of both variants.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for so many questions ... I'm really just trying to clear this font for further development under SIL OFL 1.1. These all seem to be stumbling blocks, but mostly the first or second issue ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10206" OwnerDisplayName="Clint Goss" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T17:42:25.463" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T12:24:58.080" Title="Meaning of &quot;and&quot; and &quot;additionally&quot; connectors with two Open Source licenses" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6437" CreationDate="2018-01-16T17:28:29.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different licenses have different requirements, but those requirements typically fall in these categories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No requirement to distribute the source code. This is most common in permissive licenses that allow the code to be used in closed-source projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A requirement to provide for a mechanism to download the source code from the same site where the binaries were obtained from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A requirement to provide the source code via &quot;channels commonly used for that purpose&quot;. These common channels are, for example, github, bitbucket, sourceforge or a publicly accessible repository, but that is not spelled out explicitly to avoid having to rewrite the license text when a new service becomes popular/available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A requirement to provide the source code upon request. This request could be fulfilled by sending a DVD in response to a request by email.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses require different forms of source code distribution depending on how the binaries are distributed. In most cases, the requirements for source code distribution can also be met by including the source code in the same distribution as the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the binaries are available for public download, then it is common to have a similar download link for the source code, or to provide a link to a publicly accessible repository for obtaining the source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The last option is mostly used with consumer electronics that contain open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T11:19:32.957" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T11:19:32.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6437" CreationDate="2018-01-17T00:19:45.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder:&lt;/strong&gt; You don’t have to distribute the source code at all. Even if the license you chose says that the source code must be provided to people that received the application, this requirement doesn’t apply to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you aren’t the sole copyright holder:&lt;/strong&gt; You must follow what the license says. Each license can have different requirements. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6440/138&quot;&gt;Bart van Ingen Schenau’s answer&lt;/a&gt; lists some typical cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE - Version 3, 29 June 2007&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: This license requires to offer the source code if distributing the binary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.&quot;&gt;Section 6&lt;/a&gt; lists five options how the source code may be offered. If providing the binary as download from a website, option d) applies (tl;dr: can be hosted on your own or on someone else’s server). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it’s not required to provide access to a &lt;em&gt;repository&lt;/em&gt; (with change records). But it’s required to provide the source code of each version ever distributed, not only of the most recent one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Apache License - Version 2.0, January 2004&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: This license doesn’t require to offer the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T00:19:45.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6437" CreationDate="2018-01-17T08:32:37.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP has clarified that (s)he means &quot;&lt;em&gt;if I start my Open Source project, is there somewhere in particular I have to host it in order for it to lawfully be Open Source&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and that seems a question worth answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is no.  In these days of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) there are lots of sites that will provide the hosting engine for you.  Most will provide at least some of the associated infrastructure also - mailing lists, IRC fora, licence clarification, vanity domain hosting, and so on - and of course they come with a community, so it's arguably more likely your project will be found by other people if it's on one of them.  But your decision about hosting should be driven by what's right for you and your project.  There are no other rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it required to be hosted at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is an interesting question.  You are by no means required to distribute it, since you wrote it, but if you don't it's not meaningfully &quot;open source&quot; as no-one else can copy / distribute / modify it.  In order for other people to get it, they'll have to get it from &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;, and that will require &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T08:32:37.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6436" CreationDate="2018-01-17T22:31:32.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no difference whatsoever between these two things. Licenses only grant you privileges subject to restrictions on those privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of your questions don't really make sense because you seem to think licenses can impose restrictions. They cannot. &lt;em&gt;A license cannot impose a restriction&lt;/em&gt;, it's legally impossible for them to do so because a restriction can only be imposed on someone who agreed to that restriction and these licenses don't require your agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses grant you rights you didn't already have if, and only if, you comply with their requirements. If you don't, you don't get that right from that license. If you need that right, you can also perhaps get it some other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is not &quot;You may not go to the movies unless you do your homework&quot; because a license cannot take rights away. How could it -- you've never agreed to it. A license is &quot;You may go to the movies if you do your homework.&quot; That is, it gives you one or more rights you didn't already have in exchange for you complying with its conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) You may go to the movies if you first do your homework.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2) You may go to the movies if you first clean your room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no difference between an AND and an OR of these two things. Each is an independent grant of permission conditional on meeting a requirement. Once you have permission from someone authorized to grant it, no other document can take it away unless it's a contract, which a license isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So look at a question like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does &quot;Additionally&quot; mean &quot;either GPL or OFL, at my choice&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It means that everyone gets both licenses. Your only choice is how you want to get whatever rights you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does &quot;and&quot; mean that both licenses must apply? I have heard that GPL and SIL OFL are incompatible, and that opinion seems valid (to me) because the reserved name clause of OFL would constitute an additional restriction, disallowed by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, both licenses always apply. The GPL puts no restrictions on other licenses an author can grant. Since both licenses apply, you can obtain any rights you need from either license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T22:36:44.343" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T22:36:44.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-18T22:08:32.367" Score="10" ViewCount="1260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to release a website that uses &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of open source software. There are likely 30-100 packages, and those probably include more packages. I've made sure none of them are the type of restrictive license that requires my own software to be open source. We've contributed to open source projects along the way, but ultimately we want our website to remain closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, most licenses have something like the MIT clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of my code is webpacked when it's delivered to the browsers. Any comments containing licenses are likely ripped away; and not everyone includes their license in comments. Most do it via a &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are you expected to reproduce these licenses? Do I need to have a &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; link on the website that then has a reproduction of the hundreds of licenses? How would I go about compiling such a reproduction? I don't want to manually copy/paste licenses from each library. I've found npm libraries like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/legally&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legally&lt;/a&gt; that tell you &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; licenses are in use, but they don't reproduce them in any form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is everyone reproducing licenses on their website? Is there a standard way? Do people just generally not reproduce licenses and hope they don't get into legal trouble? That seems wrong. But if people are reproducing licenses, you'd think there would be some kind of software that compiles them all into one giant document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10232" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T03:25:43.197" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T03:25:43.197" Title="Reproducing all npm package Licenses" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-notice|npm|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6453" CreationDate="2018-01-19T14:22:32.050" Score="-2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have an unreleased product i believe to be of great commercial value due to its algorithms. in the future, i intend to do four things in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;release the source of the software to customers without conveying any freedoms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;release the source of the software publicly without conveying any freedoms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relicense the software so that other people's derivative works may be published without restriction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relicense the software so that other people's derivative works may be sold without restriction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the software is a video game and the valuable algorithms involve original work on AI. i looked over patent and trade secret law and concluded that patenting the algorithms would only stifle quality derivative works in patent-relevant jurisdictions, while doing nothing against ripoffs like the many Minecraft competitors in existence. (however, it seems that Minecraft has not lost many sales to any game but Terraria.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there are historical cases of these four liberations on this page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code&lt;/a&gt;. i looked through these briefly and concluded that none of these are games that were selling well at the time they were open-sourced and open-licensed, so they do not answer the question &quot;how much will open-sourcing hurt the height of sales for a product?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10241" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T16:40:35.920" Title="if I include source code with my commercial software, how much will that hurt the height of its sales?" Tags="|commercial|software|restrictions|freedoms|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6452" CreationDate="2018-01-19T15:12:17.673" Score="7" ViewCount="5077" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently noticed that some of the userapi linux kernel headers are declared under the GPL. However, I'm pretty sure that you can include linux uapi headers in your code without your project inheriting the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/linux/input-event-codes.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/uapi/linux/input-event-codes.h&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK for a project to have #include for GPL headers without becoming GPL ? The header in question doesn't contain any &quot;code&quot; so to say, only defines, typedefs and structs. So there is no actual bytecode associated with this header that would be shipped in the final project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10242" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T04:17:22.320" Title="Using a GPL header in a closed source program?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6451" CreationDate="2018-01-19T16:14:22.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under normal circumstances, using a header file from a GPL-licensed project in your own project means that your code is considered to be a &quot;derived work&quot; of the GPL-licensed code and that you must use a GPL-compatible license when distributing your project, because the two projects are not communicating &quot;at arm's length&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case of the Linux kernel, the &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file with the license contains an important addition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;   services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;  of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &quot;derived work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it clear that, as an exception to the normal GPL rules, using kernel facilities in a user application is not intended to make the terms of the GPL extend to that application. This means that applications written to work on Linux can still be closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T16:14:22.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6450" CreationDate="2018-01-19T16:40:35.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is impossible to answer the question of how much your sales will be impacted by making the source of your game available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a number of consequences that can be linked to the steps you intend to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making the source code available, even without any freedoms, means that competitors can easily reconstruct your innovative algorithms and re-implement them in their own games. This reconstruction can be done without violating your copyrights, even if you don't give away any freedoms, by doing a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.c2.com/?CleanRoomImplementation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;cleanroom implementation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many people have the mistaken idea that if they have access to the source code, that they also have the right to modify it and publish their changes. Unless you have a way to verify that the recipients of the source code understand what the can and can not do with the code, publishing source code without open-source freedoms is an economically hazardous operation, because you will be constantly fighting against illegal copies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making commercial software open-source means that you effectively can no longer make money by charging an X amount for each copy of the software, but you have to think of other ways of making money. If your game uses a central server for (part of) its operation, you could think about monthly fees.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T16:40:35.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-20T18:08:33.253" Score="2" ViewCount="1031" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a project that has not been updated for 3 years, there is no license file there. How can I copy and develop it independently, making my own changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is better, to make a fork or create a new repository with the original repository code for further rework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found some similar questions here, but there were other conditions. In the repository I need, there is no license or contributing file. Also I'm not sure that the author of the original repository will update it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10250" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T22:09:19.047" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T22:09:19.047" Title="How to revive an old GitHub project without license?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-01-22T23:59:07.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6454" CreationDate="2018-01-20T19:08:48.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you haven't received a license, you do not have the rights to publish your own versions. Therefore, you CANNOT continue this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, contact the author and ask them to give you a license (e.g. suggest the short and permissive MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they haven't published contact information (email addresses, Twitter handles, …), note that each commit also contains an email address of the comitter. Once you've cloned a repository, you can get a list with this command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git shortlog --summary --email&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T19:08:48.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6454" CreationDate="2018-01-20T19:29:45.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a public GitHub project without license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to fork the project on GitHub.¹&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to copy the project’s content into a new GitHub project, nor to any other place.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to edit the content in your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Copyright doesn’t even allow forking the project, but GitHub’s Terms of Service allow this (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1154/138&quot;&gt;How does GitHub's “forking right” cope with an “All rights reserved” project?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T19:29:45.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T08:49:06.777" Score="2" ViewCount="1350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/themes/primer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a WordPress theme developed by GoDaddy&lt;/a&gt; (license: GPL-2.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footer of all pages has this copyright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Primer WordPress theme by GoDaddy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to remove it, is it allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made modifications to the theme, should I write that I have done these modifications? If so, where should I write this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10256" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T07:29:11.670" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T07:29:11.670" Title="Removing copyright from the footer of a website theme" Tags="|copyright|attribution|gpl-2|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6458" CreationDate="2018-01-22T07:20:09.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL License&lt;/a&gt; this theme links to explicitly states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, you may not remove this notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you perform your own original modifications, you should probably list bost authorship statements together. e.g.: &quot;Original Primer WordPress theme by GoDaddy; Additional modifications [possibly, list them] by Darroosh.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T07:20:09.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-22T17:27:15.340" Score="2" ViewCount="2267" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LibreOffice is made available subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License v2.0 which is reproduced below. It is based on code from Apache OpenOffice made available under the Apache License 2.0 but also includes software which differs from version to version under a large variety of other Open Source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked up the LICENSE file of LibreOffice and found that it included software which are licensed under GPL v2 (e.g. libatomic-ops, poppler, MySQL Connector/C++).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't that make LibreOffice, as a whole, a GPL software too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10266" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T01:18:57.537" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T17:10:03.357" Title="What is the license of LibreOffice?" Tags="|gpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T07:18:48.450" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use Stanford-nlp in my project to implement some search. But it is under GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;if your company ever make changes to the software and want to distribute it, it must be distributed with full source code&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does distribution mean distribute every thing I use in my website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If that is the case, should I need to distribute my App Server logic also? (since I use my app server for some validation)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or selling the implemented search? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We sell the complete Business logic, but the search is a small part of it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please explain the MIT and Apache V2 license for these cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it better to use OpenNLP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10263" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:08:01.900" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:08:01.900" Title="What does “distribute with full source code” mean in GPL?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6474" CreationDate="2018-01-24T16:55:13.660" Score="16" ViewCount="24116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a C# application that I want to convert over to Qt/C++ 5.10.0 but I am having an issue with QT licensing.  This application is given away for free, but it has a service that the user can upgrade to gain more features but it's not mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My application is closed sourced, meaning that we don't share the source code of the product because this would lead to hacking and people stealing the service. Or worse competitors figuring out what took me years to develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Scenario #1 - Open Source - Dynamic Linking&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I can develop the closed source application as long as I dynamically link against the framework, meaning that the customer can change the framework of QT if they choose.  This makes the software hackable because they can change the QT Framework to include hacks that reveal almost anything and to include changing the function of the main developed program.   Also if I made any changes to the Qt Framework I would need to make those changes open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is so much discussion on this matter. I am not sure if I have to open source my product or just provide links to QT Framework and cite my program is built on Qt.  If I have to open source my program it's not worth even starting to build with Qt since I can't protect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Scenario #2 - Commercial License - Static Linking&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To combat this, I thought this would mean I needed a commercial license.  With a commercial license, we could statically link against the framework and have everything in the .exe,  I know this is not hack proof, but it makes my application a lot harder to hack and that's the goal.  In this scenario, I could make all the changes I wanted to the QT framework without having to share anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I bought a license for the commercial version I discovered that I can't use static linking because one of the main components uses WebEngine and it does not support static linking after Qt version 4.7.  So I am back to Dynamic linking again as the only option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What License Can I use with these options?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't plan to make any changes to QT Framework. If I did I would submit changes and provide source code for the changes, with no problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want to provide source code to my actual program, but it can be easily hacked anyway if I use dynamic linking anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't mind providing a link to Qt or showing the logo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't mind buying a commercial license but I feel a little heartbroken because I can't use any of the features of a commercial license to protect my code.  If I am reduced to dynamically linking I prefer to use the open source (free) version.  If only the WebEngine was able to statically link, this question would be a no-brainer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to protect my source code in some way to make it difficult for hackers.  I want the extra level of protection, so I can sleep at night knowing that while my application is not hack proof, it's a bit harder for a script kiddie to decompile the application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software is given away for free but it does have an option to upgrade and use additional services from our main server.  Most of the heavy lifting is actually done on our server.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We actually make less than $5,000 a year.  We do not see our software grossing over $50,000 anytime soon since it's a very tight niche market.  This is our hobby project that has grown over the years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What are my options if I wanted to continue to use QT 5.10.0+ ?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an effort to try to lead the questions on what can and can't be done and what's actually hearsay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I can do can do in the open source version.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consult a lawyer. There are so many twists and turns only a lawyer may understand it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Support from QT Support Team, you're on your own.  You may gain help from other users in the forum of QT which is still pretty good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can develop a closed source project but you must link dynamically, where anyone can reapply different modified/open QT Framework versions for relink.  You may statically compile the open source version as long as you provide full source code so others may also compile your complete code.  No private code allowed if you do this option.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As long as you don't make changes to the QT Framework you do not have to provide any source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify the QT framework you must submit the changes to QT and provide your software and the QT framework as open source, because your software is not relinkable until the changes are made public.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can code sign your own private program and the QT bindings, DLL/LIB and other sources, but you are not allowed to modify your private code to prevent modified versions of the QT Framework to dynamically relink with your code.  Your private code has to remain open and relinkable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't have to display the Qt Logo, but it's highly recommended by QT.  You may not hide file names that would allow anyone to find out you're using QT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;I must have a commercial version if I wanted to do this.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No lawyer needed it's pretty cut and dry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You get limited support if you're an INDIE user and full support if you're not a INDIE user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I must have a commercial version for a closed source for profit to link statically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make all the changes you want and keep everything private.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have to dynamically link because you need modules such as WEBENGINE, you can code sign DLL/LIB and other resources and if the code sign changes, you can prevent your software from running.  You can restrict QT Framework versions from Modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Displaying the QT Logo is optional, you can hide all aspects that you're using QT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.qt.io/terms-conditions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www1.qt.io/terms-conditions/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/01/11/protecting-qt-application-device-hacking-part-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/01/11/protecting-qt-application-device-hacking-part-1/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.qt.io/qt-licensing-terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www1.qt.io/qt-licensing-terms/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10279" LastEditorUserId="28844" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T17:09:46.173" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T17:09:46.173" Title="In 2018 if I use C++ Qt 5.10.0 to build a closed source application requires open source or commercial license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6496" CreationDate="2018-01-25T12:32:30.047" Score="4" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to open source software used in commercial products sold in different countries.&#xA;Is fulfilling the license obligations described in the license text enough or there are also local laws that must be taken in consideration ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LE: I guess the question is too generic, therefore I would focus on L(GPL)v2 Licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T07:40:16.960" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T23:01:23.710" Title="Is the applicability of Open Source Software Licenses the same in all countries?" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6467" CreationDate="2018-01-25T14:02:58.600" Score="-1" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using the javax.activation package in a project that is deployed as a monolithic jar. The mentioned package is licensed under CDDL 1.0 and up to now part of the Java distribution but is now deprecated in Java 9 and will be removed from Standard Edition in later versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be future-proof, I'm including the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/javaee/activation#javabeans-activation-framework-jaf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standalone replacement project&lt;/a&gt; as dependency in my projects Maven configuration and would include the compiled code in my jar as not to introduce an obstacle to the intended users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The javax.activation package license was no problem until now, because my jar only linked to the code in the Java distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm not able to release the source of my application, what are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the external code in my jar file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bundle my jar with the dependencies jar and distribute both as a zip file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only distribute my jar and let the users cope with getting the right dependencies themselfes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Force the users to stay with up to Java 8&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The package version on Github actually uses CDDL 1.1, while on mvnrepository.com it's listed as CDDL 1.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10289" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T03:38:54.220" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T08:51:54.007" Title="License considerations with Java 9 deprecations" Tags="|licensing|java|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6466" CreationDate="2018-01-25T17:21:10.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CDDL 1.1 license does not require you to release your own source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the license, if you include the &lt;code&gt;javax.activation&lt;/code&gt; package in your distribution, you should mention in your documentation that you are using the &lt;code&gt;javax.activation&lt;/code&gt; package, which license that package is under and where people can obtain the source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You can just include the package in your monolithic jar file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if you make changes to the &lt;code&gt;javax.activation&lt;/code&gt; package itself or if you physically copy code from that package to other files are you requires to make source code public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T08:51:54.007" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T08:51:54.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6470" CreationDate="2018-01-26T02:04:31.123" Score="0" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there's an open source license like GPL but lets you sell a program/product for a specific amount of time. Then, after a reasonable amount of time, say 1 year after product release, convey the source code for that product with the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10292" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T03:40:08.700" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T03:40:08.700" Title="1-year time delay open source license" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6451" CreationDate="2018-01-26T04:17:22.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That a header only contains &quot;defines, typedefs and structs&quot; is not important, the content of the file is covered by the terms of the GPL license. Headers are a part of the source code and can contain compilable code, such as inline functions, full C++ class/template definitions, a define can also be composed of defines from other headers which may add code and can be easily overlooked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the distinction here is that reading an installed header file during compilation is not the same as copying the header into your project. If you copied the header file into your project you would then still have to adhere to the GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by Bart &quot;accessing Linux kernel system calls&quot; is not considered a derivative work. This is specific to the Linux kernel, other projects may not have this exemption, which is why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; was created which specifically adds that &quot;an Application may incorporate material from a header file that is part of the Library&quot; so that headers may be used without enforcing the GPL terms onto the end project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T04:17:22.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6468" CreationDate="2018-01-26T05:19:04.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that is a matter of steps that you take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finish your product and sell it, while keeping the source to yourself. Once you want to make it open source you then make the source available under whichever license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the sole copyright owner you have no restrictions in this regards. If you have other contributors, they will each need to agree to this. I expect that legally it would be best if you added any open source licensing terms to your code at the time you release it under those terms and have no more than a copyright notice while you are releasing it as a closed source program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are incorporating code from another project, then you will need to adhere to any of their licensing terms from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T05:19:04.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T08:22:54.583" Score="-2" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've paid for a software under GPLv3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I redistribute it &lt;strong&gt;for free&lt;/strong&gt; (on GitHub) or even (just for my knowledge) &lt;strong&gt;charge&lt;/strong&gt; for it? With or without any changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10295" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T03:34:03.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T03:34:03.450" Title="Can I (commercially) redistribute copies of software under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|commercial|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6487" CreationDate="2018-01-26T08:29:20.283" Score="-2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to modify &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/ldrawboxer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this program&lt;/a&gt; and compile it using Free Pascal compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above program is licensed under GNU General Public License version 3. I know little about Free Pascal, and reading the FAQ leaves me confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freepascal.org/faq.var#general-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.freepascal.org/faq.var#general-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Applications created by the compiler and using the runtime library (RTL) come under a modified Library GNU Public License (LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a conflict here? Why or why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8497" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T03:37:30.373" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T03:50:30.617" Title="Free Pascal and LGPL" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6471" CreationDate="2018-01-26T13:42:46.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may distribute someone else's GPL-licensed software, modified or unmodified, for free or at cost, even if you originally paid for it. If you received the software under the GPLv3, then your further distribution must also be under the terms of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any time you distribute the software, you may charge whatever price you like (or no price). The upstream licensor may not force you to set any particular price nor can they collect any portion of your fee for distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;addressed in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, from the point of view of the original distributor who may not collect royalties for downstream distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to require that anyone who receives the software must pay me a fee and/or notify me?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. In fact, a requirement like that would make the program nonfree. If people have to pay when they get a copy of a program, or if they have to notify anyone in particular, then the program is not free. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of free software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a free software license, and therefore it permits people to use and even redistribute the software without being required to pay anyone a fee for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can charge people a fee to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get a copy from &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You can't require people to pay you when they get a copy from &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T13:59:14.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6463" CreationDate="2018-01-26T15:27:55.090" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you choose to use the Qt library under the open-source LGPL license, you may either statically or dynamically link it. However, both of these approaches come with requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you statically link the library, then you are probably creating a derivative work of the library and would need to release &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your source code that is linked to the library. (Note that when and whether static linking creates a derivative work is a controversial legal topic, but the most conservative reading is certainly that safest.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you dynamically link the library, you do not need to share any of your source code, but you must make it easy for the user to replace the LGPL library with a modified version. If you modify the library, you have to share your changes to the library, but not all your application code.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These requirements also apply if you statically link, but would be automatically fulfilled by sharing your complete source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to meet either of those requirements, then you should use a commercial license instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've also stated that even if you bought the commercial license, there is a a &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; reason why it cannot be statically linked. If that is the case, then the open source version likely has the same problem, and static linking simply isn't possible at all. However, with the commercial version, you could try to make re-linking difficult (via some kind of obfuscation, perhaps) which the LGPL's &quot;easy re-linking&quot; requirements would disallow. (Consult the commercial license terms to ensure that you can actually do that, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T12:41:51.383" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T12:41:51.383" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6480" CreationDate="2018-01-27T12:08:19.140" Score="0" ViewCount="1007" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written my own license recently which &lt;a href=&quot;https://pastebin.com/NbpgXVkc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be found here&lt;/a&gt;. If I applied my licence to my work (in the same way I'd apply the MIT license on a GitHub repo for example) would my license be valid and enforceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, are there any issues or big loopholes or missing part issues with my license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if I were to use my online alias DevelopedLogic rather than my real name, would the license become invalid and unenforceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9009" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T19:02:08.750" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T19:02:08.750" Title="Is a custom license enforcable?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-02-09T23:46:02.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6478" CreationDate="2018-01-27T14:06:56.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deciding whether or not a license contains any legally invalid terms (or terms whose practical semantics differ from your intent) is an incredibly difficult problem. This is a job for a skilled copyright lawyer. You wouldn't ask strangers on the internet, &quot;Do the schematics for this rocket I'm building look like they'd be able to escape Earth's gravity and withstand re-entry into Earth's atmosphere?&quot; Neither should you be asking a layman for careful legal consideration of your license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carefully examine the issues raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt; to see what can go wrong when drafting your own license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without addressing the legal validity of the terms, I see several practical issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Seven out of nine in your license related to tedious bookkeeping of lists of files and don't actually relate to what copyright rights are being licensed. In practice, virtually all free and open source licenses solve this problem by simply marking the files themselves with a comment along the lines of &quot;This file is under [license X]&quot; or using a separate mapping file if the files themselves cannot be marked (e.g., for non-text files like images). You're adding a ton of extra complexity; I do not see what benefit you get from this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license terms themselves are not FLOSS terms, since they forbid redistribution of the work expect when included in a larger project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider using a legally-vetted open source license instead. Not only will &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; will have certainty that you license legally operates as intended, but also &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; who uses your licensed work will automatically understand a baseline of what is allowed and what is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T14:06:56.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4784" CreationDate="2018-01-27T14:14:36.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is using docx will actually helping the community in long term, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Certainly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6158/910&quot;&gt;good answer from &lt;code&gt;User&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, look in your favorite Linux distribution, for &lt;code&gt;.doc&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt; files in the system (outside of e.g. &lt;code&gt;/home/&lt;/code&gt; or directories used by applications, such as &lt;code&gt;/var/www/&lt;/code&gt;) and supplied by distribution's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_manager&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;packages&lt;/a&gt;. You could use &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/locate.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;locate(1)&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/find.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;find(1)&lt;/a&gt; (perhaps with &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grep.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grep(1)&lt;/a&gt;) to find such files (you probably want them to be under &lt;code&gt;/usr/&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll discover that &lt;strong&gt;most &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt; don't have any &lt;code&gt;.doc&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt; files&lt;/strong&gt;, except perhaps as some &lt;em&gt;examples&lt;/em&gt; related to free software trying to process such files (e.g. testcases for such software, for example &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/texmf/doc/fonts/tex-gyre-math/test-word-texgyre_bonum_math.docx&lt;/code&gt; on my Debian/Sid, part of &lt;code&gt;fonts-texgyre&lt;/code&gt; package).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;not knowing that docx is open source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;docx&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, as the format output by recent MicroSoft Word, &lt;strong&gt;is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open source&lt;/strong&gt; (it is not &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OOXML&lt;/a&gt;, but OOXML with &lt;em&gt;proprietary&lt;/em&gt; extensions). It is still a &lt;em&gt;proprietary&lt;/em&gt; format, not an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open format&lt;/a&gt;. The evil is in the details (that is, the &quot;exceptions&quot; and &quot;additions&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12).aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentioned&lt;/a&gt; in that other &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6158/910&quot;&gt;good answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is precisely why &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt; is practically unused&lt;/strong&gt; in Debian (and related distributions, like Ubuntu), and probably on most other common Linux distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping (probably naively) that MicroSoft will commit patches to e.g. LibreOffice for better support of &lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt; by it. Or that the default output format of Word becomes &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; ISO/IEC 29500, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OOXML&lt;/a&gt; (without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; proprietary extensions). That won't happen soon. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/document/complex-singularity-versus-openness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; about inconsistencies in MicroSoft OOXML. By the way, &lt;strong&gt;that OOXML specification is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; complex&lt;/strong&gt;, and I guess people need &lt;em&gt;years of work&lt;/em&gt; to understand it, and they need even more work to understand how MicroSoft is violating it, and become &quot;bug-compatible&quot; with MicroSoft software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I didn't use Word since the previous century, but I heard that MicroSoft Word cannot even be configured to emit &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; according to OOXML standard; please tell me if I am wrong)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and if that happens, LibreOffice or OpenOffice will soon become &lt;em&gt;fully&lt;/em&gt; interoperable with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Word&lt;/a&gt; products. Today, that is not the case (even if they are &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; interoperable in practice; but when you work on the same document with partners having to use Word, these differences hurt a lot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My belief and opinion is that &lt;strong&gt;writing a documentation in &lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt;  for some new &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt; is practically a sure method to kill any chance of success&lt;/strong&gt; of that free software (because that &lt;code&gt;.docx&lt;/code&gt; format will rightly refrain packagers to incorporate my free software in their Linux distribution, and forbid, or discourage, or slow down other free software developers wanting to contribute to &quot;my&quot; new free software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T09:53:37.817" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T09:53:37.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6483" CreationDate="2018-01-28T03:32:20.847" Score="5" ViewCount="3083" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a legal question.&lt;/strong&gt; It might touch the legal aspects around Open Source licenses but I need general help understanding how they work and what the usual procedure is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 1 of my question: I don't need to do anything if I don't redistribute or copy the MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed work, right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD-2-Clause License has a paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the MIT License has a paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to assume that when there is no redistributing or copying of the MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed work, there is no need to retain a copyright notice or include the corresponding license text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 2 of my question: What do you do when you use (not redistribute or copy) MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed work within your project?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vvvmax/unitegallery/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unite Gallery&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/not-an-aardvark/snoowrap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;snoowrap&lt;/a&gt; are MIT licensed and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/praw-dev/praw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PRAW&lt;/a&gt; is BSD-2-Clause licensed. (These projects are only chosen as exemplary projects for the HTML5/Node.js/Python snippets below. I'm looking for a general answer regarding MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed code.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project might be linking to MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed code hosted in an open CDN via &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;...&lt;/code&gt; in HTML5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/unitegallery/1.7.40/js/unitegallery.min.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or via &lt;code&gt;require(...&lt;/code&gt; in Node.js&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;var snoowrap = require('snoowrap');&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or via &lt;code&gt;import ...&lt;/code&gt; in Python&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import praw&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, even though one didn't modify the licensed source code or add any files from the licensed source code to one's project, is it still &lt;em&gt;redistributing of the licensed source code&lt;/em&gt; (paraphrased from MIT quote above) or &lt;em&gt;copying of the Software&lt;/em&gt; (paraphrased from BSD-2-Clause quote above)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What am I obligated to do? What's the usual procedure?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advance. I think this is an important topic because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I might use MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed work in my projects and want to understand what I have to do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I might license my work under the MIT or BSD-2-Clause License and I want to understand what others have to do when they might want to use my work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I couldn't find information on this. All the questions I found were about the case where someone put the (sometimes even modified) licensed source code into their project, bundled it as a whole and published it to GitHub for example. This seems to be a distinctly different case to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10308" LastEditorUserId="20142" LastEditDate="2020-08-07T11:55:34.280" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T11:55:34.280" Title="What's the usual procedure when using MIT or BSD-2-Clause licensed source code with something like `&lt;script src=&quot;…`, `require(…` or `import …`?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6482" CreationDate="2018-01-28T08:12:37.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD-2-Clause License has a paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the MIT License has a paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In non-legal terms, these quotes from the MIT and BSD licenses mean: Do not remove the license and copyright text, and if you copy a part of the code to another project, you must copy the license and copyright text along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the individual (source) files don't contain a comment block with the license text or a reference to the license, then you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to change that, even if there is a chance that users of your project only download individual files of the external dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the second part of your question, referencing a third-party library/package is not considered distribution of that third-party library/package and there is nothing that you are required to do to comply with the MIT or BSD license of the third-party software. It is considered polite to mention in your documentation (for example, readme file) that you are using the package/library and what license it uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simple terms, copying means just that: taking (a portion of) the code and storing it somewhere else.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And distributing only happens when you actively send code to someone else or if they can (legally) download it from a server or account that is controlled by you (as in, you decide what is made available).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an HTML file with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/unitegallery/1.7.40/js/unitegallery.min.js&amp;quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then that is neither copying, nor distribution from your side (unless you are cloudflare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="20142" LastEditDate="2020-08-07T07:05:18.723" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T07:05:18.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6485" CreationDate="2018-01-28T15:06:03.780" Score="2" ViewCount="2598" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source licences are hard to read and understand for non-native English speakers because it sounds more like a constitutional text (at least I'm having problems to understand them and that's why I am asking this question). That makes it hard to choose a license for a piece of code I developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I have developed some code (let's call it &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt;) and I want to make it open source with some limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage limitations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any software that &lt;strong&gt;uses&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; state that it uses &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any software that &lt;strong&gt;uses&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; state where it is obtained from (GitHub repo, package manager etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any software that &lt;strong&gt;uses&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; state the author of &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; (by either GitHub account or email address specified in &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example statement for a software that confirms to usage limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software uses &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; developed by&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ramazanpolat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ramazanpolat&lt;/a&gt; and obtained from&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ramazanpolat/magiccode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ramazanpolat/magiccode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modification limitations:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any &lt;strong&gt;modification made to&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;magic-code&lt;/code&gt; source code &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be available publicly as it must include the whole code (modified and non-modified).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The publicly available modified code is also subject to &lt;strong&gt;Usage limitations&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any existing Open Source licence that covers these limitaions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10312" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T18:50:55.010" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T18:50:55.010" Title="Open Source license that needs to include reference to original work and author" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6484" CreationDate="2018-01-28T15:57:36.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two different licensed I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any software that uses magic-code must state that it uses magic-code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that even MIT falls under this: You need to include the license with, quoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any software that uses magic-code must state where it is obtained from (github repo, package manager etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL/GPL and other share-alike licenses like CC-BY-SA - these require to provide the source code. Where it is provided from is not really included: The place of development may change, can be on your local computer, ... .&#xA;If you include it in the header of the MIT license with a link, this will be copied with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is obtained&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a passive formulation. You want the user to know where this one copy is stored? Or where it is developed? Whether it is in the cache? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any software that uses magic-code must state the author of magic-code (by either github account or email address specified in magic-code code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the Creative-Commons licenses and specify links and name and what you like to have included in the license notice. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this provice an overview? Maybe you are satisfied with AGPL or CC-BY-SA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T15:57:36.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-28T20:42:41.830" Score="-2" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a license that allows to make copies of a file and distribute them BUT NOT to make changes to the file, or cut parts of the text and distribute only them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, that might be a good license for a CV/résumé file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10313" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T02:44:43.027" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T06:46:33.040" Title="License that allows to make copies of a file and distribute them BUT NOT to make changes to the file" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6472" CreationDate="2018-01-29T03:50:30.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LDraw Boxer project is licensed under the GPLv2 which allows you to modify the code to make your own variation, as you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Pascal compiler is a program that reads the source code and generates the binary code that your computer understands. The output of a compiler does not fall under the licensing terms, it is considered your work. The compiler does however link a small runtime library into your program that provides basic functionality needed to make your program work, with Free Pascal this rtl library is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://svn.freepascal.org/svn/fpc/trunk/rtl/COPYING.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt; and as stated after the quote you have shown -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the runtime library (RTL) come under a modified Library GNU Public License (LGPL). This license does not impose any kind of license on the created applications. It is therefore possible to create closed source or proprietary software using the Free Pascal Compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 are compatible licenses and a project can combine work covered by both. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility listing here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Free Pascal compiler does not add any licensing restrictions to your project, the use of the LDraw project does and those terms are the one you need to comply with. Note that you can modify, build and use your own version as you wish, the GPL comes into play if you share your modified program with others, they must also get access to your modified code used to build the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T03:50:30.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6486" CreationDate="2018-01-29T14:15:21.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of licenses that disallow modifications of a creative work in whole or part. The intention of these licenses is to prevent misrepresentation. This is especially suitable for works that express an opinion, or for legal notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “nobody can change this document” requirement is very close to the &lt;em&gt;default license&lt;/em&gt;: all rights reserved. So the only right you want to license is the right to make copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, the CC-BY-ND license family is the best license for creative works that you don't want changed. This license explicitly allows some changes that you might want to permit, e.g. format-shifting. As it is a copyright-based license, it cannot prevent adapated/changed works, but it does not allow them to be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 license text is itself under a short license that may suit your needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is a very good license. If you use a similar phrasing, remember to replace “license document” with an appropriate description of the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) is a fairly complex license, but allows you to specify &lt;em&gt;Invariant Sections&lt;/em&gt;. While other parts of the document may be changed, the content of these sections can only be copied verbatim. This license is generally unsuitable for small documents like CVs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T14:15:21.273" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6486" CreationDate="2018-01-30T08:57:44.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still think this is off-topic, but since it hasn't been closed yet, I figured I'd point out that &lt;strong&gt;I do exactly this with my CV, and have done for some years&lt;/strong&gt;.  It's not done indirectly via licence but by explicit rights grant; you can see the CV at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gatekeeper.ltd.uk/cv/tom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gatekeeper.ltd.uk/cv/tom/&lt;/a&gt; but the relevant bit says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The material in this CV is (c) Tom Yates, 2016.  Permission to reproduce&#xA;  unaltered is granted.  Permission to reproduce in a modified form&#xA;  is explicitly withheld, but will ordinarily be granted if an application&#xA;  is accompanied by the proposed modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I think makes clear what you can do right now, what you need to ask about, and how I'm likely (but not guaranteed) to respond.  Essentially I didn't want recruiters taking my CV for their talent search engines and filing off the contact details so that anyone who wanted to find me had to go through them.  I've been doing this since 2001 (according to the RCS history) and I've not yet run into problems with it being copied-and-modified (at least, Google finds only one copy, which is mine) so it's possible this works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T06:46:33.040" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T06:46:33.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T16:33:22.780" Score="3" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the plethora of Apache 2.0 libraries used to create many proprietary Android apps, how/where should we refer to the Apache License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we mention Apache license at Google Play, presenting a link to the full license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mention in Google Play is enough or we also must add it into the installed APK?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should the binary contain the full license or a link is enough?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should each Apache library be discriminated (like Instagram) or simply mention it once is enough to cover all Apache dependencies?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6600" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T11:53:02.463" Title="How to properly fulfill Apache 2.0 in commercial Android products at Google Play?" Tags="|apache-2.0|android|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-31T08:41:07.590" Score="4" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently work on a proprietary, closed-source software suite, which is distributed to customers as part of a larger package (including various hardware and services).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software suite uses LGPL-3 libraries (as shared libraries, we haven't done any modifications to these ourselves), but also contains a large amount of proprietary, in-house developed code (also provided as shared libraries) that we want to protect. We have thus added protection to the software suite, requiring a USB dongle to be present - without it, the software doesn't run. This protection also protects against running any part of our software suite in a debugger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protection is added to our own shared libraries, but not to the LGPL-3 libraries. Since all parts of our software suite uses one or more of our own, protected shared libraries, no part of the software suite can be run in a debugger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through the LGPL-3 text though, section 4 on 'Combined Works' says (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under &lt;strong&gt;terms&lt;/strong&gt; of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is - I'm a bit unsure about if section 4 should be read as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are not allowed to restrict the user from debugging/reverse engineering with respect to the LGPL-3 licensed shared libraries in our license terms for our software suite, but &lt;strong&gt;we can technically make such debugging difficult&lt;/strong&gt; by applying the protection - as in, it's only the terms that cannot restrict debugging?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can neither restrict the user from debugging/reverse engineering in our license, nor technically, using the described software protection?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We provide the appropriate license notice, a written offer for providing the LGPL-3 shared library source code, and instructions for where the shared libraries are located, to allow users to manually provide another version - it's just the part about debugging that I'm hoping to get cleared up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10340" LastEditorUserId="10340" LastEditDate="2018-01-31T10:32:26.377" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T16:00:27.127" Title="Does an application linking to an unmodified LGPL-3 library need to be debugger-friendly?" Tags="|lgpl|distribution|proprietary-code|drm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6492" CreationDate="2018-01-31T12:04:26.683" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the apps provide a page containing third party library information.&#xA;This would be the easiest way to fulfil the license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Apache v2 you would have to display:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Copyright information (this can be found in the source code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the complete license text (complete because in absence of an internet connection the user would not be able to know the rights given by the license text.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T11:53:02.463" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T11:53:02.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6463" CreationDate="2018-01-31T14:52:01.293" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;App Store does not care which license you use. It is the users of your application and the Library authors who care. The main point of the LGPLv3 license is that the end users must have the possibility to replace the library with their own modified version. This is very important to understand, dynamic / static / everything else is just distracting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's move to Qt. It is available with LGPLv3 license on major Desktop (Windows, OSX, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android) operating systems. Suppose you develop an application and want to keep your source code closed. On the Desktop you can link dynamically to Qt libraries. When the end users install your application, they can replace Qt libraries in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compile their own version of Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Navigate the the location where the application is installed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replace original Qt libraies that were shipped with your applicatoin with their own modified versions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks easy, right? The main goal of LGPLv3 is achieved. The user can replace libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving to the mobile platforms, starting with Android. Even though you link dynamically to the Qt libraries, we now have a small problem. The user can not navigate to &lt;code&gt;C:/Program Files/YourApp&lt;/code&gt; and replace Qt libraries, because it's Android. Rooting is not an option, since it doesn't work on every device (and might not be legal). Remember, the main goal of LGPLv3 is to give the users ability to replace the library and run the modified version of your application on their device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solution? Provide .apk file to every user who installed your application with detailed instructions on how to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unpack your .apk file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replace Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zipalign / pack / signtool to a new .apk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Install .apk with modified Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's talk about iOS. Many say it is not possible to use LGPLv3 with iOS because of static linking. Wrong. Again, you just need to give the end user the possibility to replace Qt libraries. How? Provide your object files for the end user to relink. Or even better, put all your application code and resources in a separate Qt Quick plugin which will compile in a static library archive (technically just all object files concatenated together) for iOS. Then for every user who installed your application you have to provide instructions on how to replace Qt libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download project files and object files from your website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download XCode and developer tools from Apple website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replace Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deploy application to your device&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before this was not possible because in order to deploy on the device the user had to enroll Apple Developer Program. But this is not the case any more. &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/AppDistributionGuide/LaunchingYourApponDevices/LaunchingYourApponDevices.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can launch your app on a device using a free Apple ID account&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end user rights are protected. They can replace Qt libraries. Just make sure you do required steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mention in your application that you use Qt libraries and also mention you use them under LGPLv3 license. Provide a link to LGPLv3 lincese.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure your setup of replacing Qt libraries work. Set up a clean virtual machine and do everything step by step. Document it for the end users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the users who downloaded your application want to replace Qt libraries, provide them everything so they can do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I don't think anyone would care. But you have to be ready just in case. Do not scream you use Qt LGPLv3 on Qt forums, but make sure you have it visible somewhere down in your application's &quot;About&quot; screen. Qt company does not have resources to scan every application from the App Store if it uses Qt or not. Neither they will touch you if you are a small-near-zero-profit. They have more important things to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very dissapointing however to see absolutely no help from people who work in Qt on the LGPL subject. Most likely all developers were instructed to answer &quot;IANAL, please contact our legal department&quot;. The legal department will tell you - buy our commercial license, it's the only option. On the Qt website you can find &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/qt-licensing-terms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obligations of the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;. I am not surprised, there is no word about static linking &lt;strong&gt;and providing object files&lt;/strong&gt; for re-link on this page. Qt company simply prefers not to tell anyone it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also thinking about MeeGo and Blackberry, there was no problem with developing closed source mobile apps that use Qt and publishing them in respective app stores. No commercial license needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;This has been done before. LGPL is possible with static linking and App Store. &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4302517&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4302517&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10345" LastEditorUserId="10345" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T10:09:54.880" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T10:09:54.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2018-02-01T00:16:33.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can not cover it all here, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public domain is not accepted everywhere (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative commons zero license&lt;/a&gt; does what public domain should do).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a clause that says “no warranty”, however if you sell the software, then you are bound by local sales laws. Consumer protection, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some jurisdictions have software patents, so it may be illegal to create, sell, buy, use, import, or export the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some jurisdictions have Digital Restrictive Management, therefore it may be illegal to create, sell, buy, use, import, or export the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some jurisdictions have laws about encryption therefore …&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and the rest, there are probably more, but I don't know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a good existing licence (approved by the Free Software Foundation). These have been checked by good lawyers, that insure that the licences are applicable globally. However there is nothing that can be said in a licence that can undo a law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That been said: The GPL says you don't have to accept the licence, but if you do not, then note that this work is copyright, so you are bound by laws, and cannot do anything but use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This licence gets away with this, because if you choose not to accept it, then you are worse off.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T14:35:41.823" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T14:35:41.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T15:54:51.890" Score="3" ViewCount="2377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to use a library which is licensed under LGPL (free, only for open source projects). I wanted to use that in a commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that possible that I can develop an open source wrapper library (with BSD or MIT license) and use the LGPL project inside that, and my commercial project use the wrapper library? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this (it should say &quot;LGPL&quot; instead of &quot;SGPL&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XOtJg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XOtJg.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10353" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-05T04:05:41.283" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T10:57:17.307" Title="Bypass LGPL license using wrapper library" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T00:02:04.627" Score="6" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A software project is released as open-source under a non-invasive license (e.g., BSD 2/3 clause, Apache 2, ...).&#xA;During the process, the entire Git repository is made available to the community, which includes the source-code history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During development (pre-release) as third-party library was used. This library is licensed under GPL 2 (with &quot;copy-left&quot;). In a later development phase the third-party dependency was removed. - Nevertheless, the Git history (partially) contains the library's source code and our own code using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: Does this project violates GPL? - And if so, what are the necessary steps to avoid any conflicts/legal issues during open-sourcing (preferably without losing the repository history)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10358" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T11:13:39.620" Title="How to deal with copy-left in source-code history prior open-sourcing?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|source-code|git|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6501" CreationDate="2018-02-02T15:11:54.860" Score="2" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about the licenses GPL and LGPL.&#xA;I see that VLC is released under LGPL license since sept 2011: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.videolan.org/press/lgpl.html&lt;/a&gt;.  But VLCJ, which is a Java wrapper on top of VLC, is released under the GPL license that is more restrictive (stronger copyleft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if yet another library uses VLCJ, it also can be released under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10359" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T08:02:12.367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T08:02:12.367" Title="VLC and VLCJ licenses" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6500" CreationDate="2018-02-02T15:27:08.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is allowed. See the LGPL v2.1, section 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of the Library into a program that is not a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is best to understand the LGPL as “GPL + extra permissions”. The LGPL v3 makes this explicit. The GPL does not allow more restrictions to be added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T15:27:08.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-03T14:15:24.217" Score="2" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have code from a closed-source personal project of which I am the sole author. At work, I have come across situations where the code is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to take a significant amount of code from my personal project, and put it in my company's code base. I am fine with them having full use without restriction of this code. However, I don't want them to have a legal right to the personal project from where this code came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I can publish this code under an MIT (or other) license before I put it in the company's code base and be fine, or even write some comments in a read.me. But I'm moreso wondering what happens if I just directly put the code in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I put code from my personal project into the company's code base, what happens with the ownership of my personal project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="295" LastEditorUserId="295" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T15:02:01.570" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T11:30:18.903" Title="If I share code from my personal project with my employer, who owns it?" Tags="|closed-source|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6461" CreationDate="2018-02-03T14:53:02.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on how the software components are combined. If I take a MPLv2-licensed software and link it with GPLv2+ software, the resulting binary will fall under some GPL variant. This doesn't mean that the source code of the core software without those GPL additions is also GPLed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ discusses GPL plugins to non-GPL software in some length. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I release a nonfree program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] If they form a single combined program then the main program must be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license, and the terms of the GPL must be followed when the main program is distributed for use with these plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fine, because LibreOffice is licensed under the GPLv2+-compatible MPLv2. A LibreOffice binary that includes these GPLed plugins will of course have to be distributed under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T14:53:02.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6465" CreationDate="2018-02-03T23:01:23.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To complete some other replies, legally speaking, as long as you accept to follow the terms of a given licence, you accept to make it the applicable law in case of litigation. &#xA;This doesn't exclude the possibility for the jurisdiction which will hear the case to outlaw/render inapplicable a provision of the licence, if it is judged to be illegal by this jurisdiction. But still, the licence is deemed to be applicable before all. &#xA;So, I guess the straight-forward answer to your question would be : as a general rule, yes.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T23:01:23.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-05T14:20:41.567" Score="2" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an R script application that contains R packages and, mostly, my own code. I would like to sell the script as an application or as a gist (using &lt;code&gt;gist.github.com&lt;/code&gt;) to be used by organizations that buy a subscription to run the script for their own needs. Some of the packages are GPL2, GPL3 or MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use the packages and just need to provide links to the packages on CRAN?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to release my code even if I didn't change anything in the packages content/code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If my script run on a website,  do I need to provide the packages names that I use?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I install R-portable on my clients' computers in order for them to use my script. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10372" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T03:09:39.527" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T03:09:39.527" Title="Commercial application that uses R portable and R packages" Tags="|proprietary-code|package|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-02-06T02:14:08.660" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume by &quot;commercial project&quot; you mean that you do not wish to disclose the source code for the product you are developing. Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect, as it is the basis of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL 2.1, which &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;appears to be the license of TinyMCE&lt;/a&gt;, is actually more permissive than the GPL. The LGPL 2.1 allows you to dynamically link against a shared library, and still keep the source code of your product &quot;private&quot; (closed source). Dynamic linking, in this case, would mean that you have a separate binary library that is TinyMCE (DLL for Windows or a .so file for Linux) that you ship to the end user of your product. TinyMCE and your &quot;commercial project&quot; cannot be combined into a single binary, unless you also intend to license your code under the LPL2.1. &lt;strong&gt;Your executable (which would be different binary from the TinyMCE binary) would then load this shared library at runtime&lt;/strong&gt; in order to access the functionality of TinyMCE. You are NOT allowed to statically link against TinyMCE (i.e. build the functionality of TinyMCE directly into your application binary file) at build time and still keep your commercial project closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wrapper methodology that you describe is more applicable to the GPL (which does NOT appear to be the license of the library you are describing), where both static and dynamic linking require that your application MUST also be licensed under the GPL. If the library that you wish to use is licensed under the GPL, then you may choose to create a wrapper executable. Your closed source program should be able to send this &quot;wrapper executable&quot; data via the command line, sockets, or pipes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mere aggregation of two programs means putting them side by side on the same CD-ROM or hard disk. We use this term in the case where they are separate programs, not parts of a single program. In this case, if one of the programs is covered by the GPL, it has no effect on the other program.&#xA;  Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL—if you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you end up distributing a binary that is licensed under the LGPL 2.1 (which is the case for TinyMCE), then you must abide by ALL of the requirements of the LGPL 2.1. This would include providing the source code for TinyMCE. It does not require you to release the source for any other programs where are dynamically linking against TinyMCE. If you do not send a TinyMCE binary to the end user (e.g. they download the TinyMCE library from some other third party on the internet), then you are not required to provide the source for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Update to include information that you still must release the source code for TinyMCE, if you send TinyMCE to an end user in binary format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5693" LastEditorUserId="5693" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T17:24:51.897" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:24:51.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6511" CreationDate="2018-02-08T14:50:32.733" Score="4" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I am building an embedded linux device using amongst other things (L)GPLv3 software. The device is sold to non-business users so the anti tivoization clause applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be compliant, so I offer the complete corresponding source code as well as a mechanism to install modified (L)GPLv3 software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hardware isn't subsidized, so I am fine when people buy the device and use and modify it for their own purpose, but I don't want to offer guarantees or services for users with a modified device. Is that legal under the provisions of the (L)GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I reject service calls for modified devices?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The device is tied to a cloud service. Can I prevent modified devices from using the service?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I remove my proprietary bits as soon as the user is modifying his device (after a stern warning of course).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10397" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T15:42:41.470" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T15:47:58.947" Title="Does a (L)GPL3 device still need to provide it's original service after modification?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6510" CreationDate="2018-02-08T15:37:30.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am fine when people buy the device and use and modify it for their own purpose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that you're honouring your obligations under the GPL (and therefore under LGPL).  There will of course be the obligations to make source available, etc., but you don't ask about those, so I'm assuming you have them covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I reject service calls for modified devices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many vendors supply devices which incorporate software covered by the GPL and consider the warranty voided if you install your own software on them - just about any company who's ever sold an Android phone fits into this category.  If you've ever tried to get warranty support on an Android phone that's been Cyanogenmodded or LineageOSed, this will not be an alien idea.  I don't say it's a nice thing to do, but lots of other companies do it without issue.  Be clear with your customers about your policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I prevent modified devices from using the service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, it's not clear to me.  GPL3 s6 requires that you provide the user with &quot;installation information&quot;, which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether access to a network service constitutes &quot;continued function&quot; will, I suspect, depend on how useful the device is without that service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the point may be moot, because you may find it technically difficult or even impossible to do this; free software has a long history of precisely emulating closed devices in order to obtain service over a network.  Consider, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/get-iplayer/get_iplayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get_iplayer&lt;/a&gt;; the BBC tries very hard to distinguish between an iphone connecting to view a programme, and a Linux box running get_iplayer doing the same, but has not reliably been able to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I remove my proprietary bits as soon as the user is modifying his device (after a stern warning of course)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't.  Not only is it unlikely to work reliably (see above), but many jurisdictions will take it amiss if you are accessing customer devices to change the contents of them after the customer has pretty clearly expressed a desire to remove the device from your control (by installing modified software).  And of course, and as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T15:47:58.947" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T15:47:58.947" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T08:13:11.753" Score="-1" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I have a question about licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am making an app whose goal is to port some typically desktop software over to mobile. So, there are really two components to what I am making. A binary, and an app which wraps around the binary to interface with it (a pretty UI and what not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This desktop software is opensource and under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to make some modifications to the software to make it run on ARM processors. I have the source code published on GitHub. I obviously know that this code will have the GPL extend to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am not sure of is if the app which is used to interface with the binary is also required to be open source. I am not using any of the original project's source code in the app, all I am doing is calling the binary, and reporting on its output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this, do I need to provide the source code for my app to? It does not use the GPL source code, but it does call a binary which does use the GPL source code. I have provided the sourcecode for the binary itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fine with publishing the source code for the app, I am 100% for free software. My dilemma is that I do not want someone else to be able to push the app to the app store while I am still beta testing. If I do not publish the source code until the app is on the market then I am good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10405" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T08:39:29.433" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T15:58:04.910" Title="Wrapping a GPL binary in an app: does the app need to be GPL too?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6037" CreationDate="2018-02-09T13:41:21.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that distributing the static Qt library as created by the Qt Installer Framework is allowed, LGPL notwithstanding. In addition, programs with any type of license may be installed using the QtIFW. The QtIFW setup program contains the following licence exception (as of 3.0.2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception you may create a larger work which contains the&#xA;  output of this application and distribute that work under terms of&#xA;  your choice, so long as the work is not otherwise derived from or&#xA;  based on this application and so long as the work does not in itself&#xA;  generate output that contains the output from this application in its&#xA;  original or modified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, you have permission to combine this&#xA;  application with Plugins licensed under the terms of your choice, to&#xA;  produce an executable, and to copy and distribute the resulting&#xA;  executable under the terms of your choice. However, the executable&#xA;  must be accompanied by a prominent notice offering all users of the&#xA;  executable the entire source code to this application, excluding the&#xA;  source code of the independent modules, but including any changes you&#xA;  have made to this application, under the terms of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10408" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T13:41:21.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2018-02-09T17:50:03.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no licenses that require you to make your source code or modifications public the moment that you have typed it. The earliest that you can be required to provide access to the source code is once you provide the binaries to others. And then you are still only required to give the people that have access to the binaries access to the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that as long as you provide the app only to a select few (hand-picked?) people during the beta-test period, you only have to provide access to the source code to your beta testers. You can make it a pre-condition of accepting someone as a beta tester that they won't publish the app (or something very similar) before you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the license of the app, that depends heavily on how the app and the executable interact.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The less that your app depends on interacting with this particular executable, the more it can be argued that they are independent works and can be licensed completely independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you are not opposed to making your app open-source, you can eliminate all doubts and just release it under the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T17:50:03.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2018-02-09T19:45:51.120" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that your app is just a wrapper, this would be considered &quot;linking&quot;. Unless the original application is licensed under the &lt;strong&gt;L&lt;/strong&gt;GPL (GPL with linking exception) then your wrapper is required to be licensed under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8950" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T19:45:51.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T19:52:34.907" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not talking about code here but rather about protocol documentation. If I develop an open protocol and release the documentation for it, how can I release the documentation in a way that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prohibits the release of proprietary/closed-source implementations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requires all modifications and extensions to the protocol to be released under the same license (with the same restrictions on implementations and modifications)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that there is a risk that, while my (or someone else's) &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; may always remain open source, the protocols used may be adopted and extended by proprietary competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8950" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T06:11:54.817" Title="Preventing proprietary implementations/modifications of an open protocol?" Tags="|documentation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6518" CreationDate="2018-02-10T02:34:43.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons license&lt;/a&gt; has several options that allow you to customise the terms for your documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T02:34:43.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6518" CreationDate="2018-02-10T06:11:54.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implementations of a protocol are not considered derived works of the protocol description under copyright law, so the copyright license on the protocol description has no influence at all on the copyrights of the implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest you can get to your first point is if you have a patent on (a part of) the technology needed to implement the protocol. Then you could probably require an open-source implementation as part of the patent license that you grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as the copyright license on your protocol can't force how the implementations are licensed, you also can't force such a requirement on derived protocols or extensions that might even be considered completely separate works under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T06:11:54.817" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6502" CreationDate="2018-02-10T11:25:15.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across this situation several times as a consultant.&#xA;First, goto&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://eco.copyright.gov/eService_enu/&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;and set up an account and register the copyright for your code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Officially and legally. Now there's no question who owns its copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, go to your employer and openly discuss it with him, saying&#xA;he can have unlimited free use of your code. If he goes for that,&#xA;then fine. Case closed. If not, say you can re-develop the same algorithm&#xA;on his dime, clean-room-like, so to speak. And then he'll own the newly&#xA;developed version's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you never &quot;owned&quot; the algorithm by registering a copyright, just the particular expression of that algorithm the specific way&#xA;you've coded it. Somebody else can re-code the same algorithm,&#xA;even if you invented that algorithm, and they can separately register&#xA;the copyright for their code version. And that &quot;somebody else&quot;&#xA;can even be you, yourself. Then the original version would be yours, to gpl or whatever you liked. And the second version would be your employer's&#xA;proprietary version. Kinda silly. And every time I've come across this&#xA;kind of situation, the project manager has been happy to accept a verbal &quot;unlimited use license&quot; from me. So I'd guess you're worrying needlessly (but no guarantee:).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to own the algorithm, so to speak, you'd have to patent it, which is a way bigger pain in the neck than simply copyrighting your code, which takes maybe fifteen minutes on eco.copyright.gov (and maybe $35USD for online registration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="6534" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T11:30:18.903" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T11:30:18.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="174" CreationDate="2018-02-11T20:10:13.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making users accept the FOSS license during installation is a convenient way to fulfill the obligation to inform them about their rights. GPL licenses specifically requires that anyone who distributes the software informs all end users that they are getting GPL software, and not doing so is in itself a violation of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, this can be done without making the users accept the license. At the very minimum, GPL requires to appropriately inform users about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyright notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;notice that GPL applies to the software, and information about how to get the full license copy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;disclaimer of warranty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T20:10:13.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6527" CreationDate="2018-02-11T20:28:46.843" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have ported the Arduino core library to NIOS soft-core CPU. This core comes with a &quot;Hardware abstraction library&quot;, which is freely available (e.g by downloading the FPGA development environment) but AFAIK is not GPL. My library includes modified Arduino files, but not the HAL files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right to assume that I can redistribute my work under the same license as Arduino (GPLv2)? Does HAL fall under the definition of &quot;System library&quot; in GPL terms, or do I have to distribute it? I would really prefer not to, because HAL is by definition hardware-dependent, so my version would be useless to anyone using a different hardware configuration, and the whole point of FPGAs is the ability to experiment with hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T16:09:01.523" Title="Does Altera Hardware Abstraction Library count as &quot;System library&quot; in terms of GPL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6529" CreationDate="2018-02-12T11:15:37.777" Score="0" ViewCount="860" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it perfectly legal to release an open source botnet registered under the MIT license? I understand that statements such as 'you download this program agreeing everything you do with it is on your own accord, and the creator cannot be held accountable for anything done with this software' may not be accepted in court if it came to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it legal to release open source malware under a specific license, or is it just completely illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10426" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T12:12:54.537" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T16:24:01.553" Title="Is it legal to release an open source piece of malware" Tags="|mit|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-02-13T14:40:13.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6523" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:09:01.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your library contains GPL-licensed Arduino code, then you must use the GPL license also for your library. Otherwise, you would be in violation of the licence under which you received the Arduino files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing your code under the GPL does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; mean you have to actively distribute all libraries that you depend on, but you must make sure for each dependency that at least one of the following points is true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dependency is available under an open-source license that gives at least the freedoms that the GPL license does (i.e. a license that is compatible with the GPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dependency is a part of what (nearly) everyone needs to depend on in order to use the target platform (the &quot;System libraries&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T16:09:01.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:56:51.953" Score="3" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a GPLv3 project, and i need to use both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/feathericons/feather#feather&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feather's icon set&lt;/a&gt;, licensed with MIT license, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/license-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyQt5 library&lt;/a&gt; with GPL. I don't need to rewrite or extend any content of the these projects, i just need to to include the icon set in my final binary, and dinamically link the PyQt5 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid that, since I'm using a Github repository to host my project, adding more things to the current LICENSE file may confuse the github's algorithm to detect the license of my project, as well as making these additions hard to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For each of these dependencies, do I need to include their license(or copyright notice) in my repository?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, where is the appropriate place to keep the license/notice of these dependencies? It is okay to keep it outside of the LICENSE file?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For each of these dependencies, do I need to distribute their license/notice along with the binary distribution of my project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I want to use &lt;code&gt;git submodule&lt;/code&gt; with the icon set project,  which means that my repository won't contain the icon set, but &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; can be used to automatically download it(with its license) whenever someone clone my repository. Anyway, I still need to bundle the icon set with my project's binary, so i'm not sure whether including its license that way is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10428" LastEditorUserId="10428" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T13:20:00.433" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T13:20:00.433" Title="Proper place to include the license of a dependency" Tags="|gpl|mit|linked-libraries|dependencies|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6525" CreationDate="2018-02-13T01:11:03.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly from a copyright perspective, I know of no impediment to the  copyrightability of malicious code. In patent law, there is a requirement of an invention to possess &quot;moral utility&quot; -- that is, a utility that is not inherently morally abhorrent -- though no such requirement exists for copyright, not least because the question of &quot;utility&quot; is one that does not apply generally to creative works. If the work possesses a modicum of creativity and is original (or a derivative created with appropriate license), then it is covered under copyright. (However, as a fascinating tangent and mild counterpoint, have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2011/11/you-naughty-naughty-men-is-there-an-obscenity-defense-to-copyright-infringement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uneven history of the copyrightability of obscene works&lt;/a&gt;!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your application might run afoul of other laws. For example, the distribution of software whose purpose is to circumvent access-restrictions to copyrighted works is a violation of the DMCA in the United States (in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC § 1201(a)(2)&lt;/a&gt;). There may be statutes in some jurisdictions that similarly prohibit distribution of software that does some objectionable action (e.g., cooperation in a botnet). Your copyright and license on the malware may be legally valid, but you may be legally liable for violating a statute that prohibits distribution of malware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what degree you could be liable for malicious use of your botnet by another person, but it may be nonzero. (This will surely vary by jurisdiction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T16:24:01.553" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T16:24:01.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-13T15:10:46.220" Score="-2" ViewCount="3669" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you go to the Google search &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com.eg/search?q=site:https://themeforest.net/item/%20This%20item%20is%20licensed%20100%25%20GPL&amp;amp;gws_rd=cr&amp;amp;dcr=0&amp;amp;ei=y_-CWuefK4a3gQa5k57YCQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;site:https://themeforest.net/item/ This item is licensed 100% GPL&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, you will find a lot of GPL themes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to use a theme which I buy once in multiple sites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Please use &quot;Yes&quot; or &quot;No&quot; and simple English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10434" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T18:29:07.473" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T23:18:22.843" Title="Is it legal to multi-use a 100% GPL theme from ThemeForest?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-02-13T19:32:07.890" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two web pages for LGPL 2.1 and 3.0 which answered my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v2.1-(lgpl-2.1)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v2.1-(lgpl-2.1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For TinyMCE it would be v2.1 and it's going to be fine if we use that externally in our project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10353" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T19:32:07.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6530" CreationDate="2018-02-13T19:36:44.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. The &lt;em&gt;number&lt;/em&gt; of sites that use a GPL-licensed theme is not limited by the GPL. Using a GPL-licensed theme on only one site is exactly as legal as using it on one hundred different sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a theme on a site is actually &lt;em&gt;redistributing&lt;/em&gt; that theme to the site's visitors. Since the GPL is a free software license, it must not place restrictions on the number of times redistribution can take place or on the number of sites where you perform redistribution. Therefore, you may use the theme on as many sites as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be confusing that the ThemeForest web site says that each theme purchase includes a license for one site only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regular License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Use, by you or one client, in a single end product which end users &lt;strong&gt;are not&lt;/strong&gt; charged for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certainly sounds like the opposite of the answer above! However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://themeforest.net/licenses/faq#gpl-100-a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ThemeForest FAQ clarifies&lt;/a&gt; that those terms &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; apply when the theme is marked &quot;100% GPL&quot; and that the GPL applies instead (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes an author will choose to distribute a theme or plugin item on the basis that it's 100% GPL [...]. In these cases, the GPL license applies to the whole item &lt;strong&gt;instead of&lt;/strong&gt; the terms of the Regular or Extended License. Different versions of the GPL exist and the relevant version of the GPL will identified. You will need to make sure that you read and abide by the GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T19:43:44.540" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T19:43:44.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6534" CreationDate="2018-02-15T12:57:55.083" Score="4" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;If my project has a lax license (like Expat/MIT), I can enforce &quot;inbound=outbound&quot; by requiring that contributors sign off their commits in order to acknowledge the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've identified (to my own satisfaction) that contributions to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5512&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5513&quot;&gt;GPL-family&lt;/a&gt; project are automatically &quot;inbound=outbound&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any benefit to requiring DCO sign-offs on contributions to an Apache or GPL-family project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T13:03:12.320" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T13:03:12.320" Title="What additional benefits does the DCO provide?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|contributor-agreements|collaboration|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6533" CreationDate="2018-02-15T13:28:39.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;inbound=outbound&quot; might not require any extra procedures. If a someone contributes to a project that is clearly under some license, you can assume in good faith that they have the right to publish this contribution and that they implicitly agree to the license. To remove any question of doubt for projects on their platform, the GitHub terms of service explicitly specify inbound=outbound as the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Developer Certificate of Origin is not a license. It merely certifies that the contributor has the right to contribute a contribution. The DCO does not grant any extra rights that wouldn't already be granted. Instead, this creates a paper trail that protects the project. If the project is accused of infringement (e.g. because a contribution was provided without having the right to do so), the project can demonstrate that they exercised due diligence, and can name the source of each contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: whether a DCO is needed does not depend on the project license, assuming there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an obvious license. A DCO is sensible for all projects that are at risk of being accused of copyright infringement. These are particularly larger projects with many contributors, or open-source projects that compete with proprietary offerings. A project may not want to implement a DCO because this extra bureaucracy turns off potential contributors, and signing a DCO could make pseudonymous contributions impossible. Maintaining records of the signed DCOs could make the project subject to privacy regulations such as the EU-GDPR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects have a DCO as part of their Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which does specify licensing terms (typically, a less restricted inbound license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T13:28:39.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T16:47:19.610" Score="2" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an Android developer. In my project (app) I use third party software (ex: Glide image loader library) to save some time and improve my app performance. Now I &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/284773/what-to-keep-in-mind-when-releasing-an-app-which-uses-libraries-licensed-under-t&quot;&gt;read this&lt;/a&gt; and I was able to understand how to give credits to the library, something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rules to license a third party library used in my app&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should have a license link in my settings page, that takes you to see each used library and the license for each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems straight forward and easy to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some times instead of including the whole library in my app, I may want to use a portion of the open source library code (ex: 3 or 4 functions of code). Keeping in mind that the license is Apache 2.0, I want to know how to license some parts of code that are included in my app (but not written by me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some questions said that I must comment beside the code pieces that are not written by me (from where I took them, modifications that I did to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My question about the problem&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should we comment beside the code (I mean who would read them), and lets say I did comment and stated changes, and then before releasing my app to the store I use (pro guard) to protect my code. ((But wait, as pro guard removes all comments then what is the purpose of adding comments)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say this is my file where I use my code and some code from and apache 2.0 licensed library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   // 1: Licensed under EXAMPLE........&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;   private void MyCode1(){&#xA;&#xA;    //..........&#xA;&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;    private void MyCode2(){&#xA;&#xA;     //.........&#xA;&#xA;     }&#xA;&#xA;     //2: this was used from this link (....), and I modified the first line. . .... &#xA;&#xA;     private void CopiedCode1(){&#xA;&#xA;      }&#xA;&#xA;     //3: this was used from this link (...), and I modified the third and second line to .........&#xA;&#xA;     private void CopiedCode2(){ &#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;     }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: comment stands for file header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2: comment stands for some copied method from an open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3: comment stands for some another copied method from an open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say methods are &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/grafika/blob/master/app/src/main/java/com/android/grafika/MultiSurfaceActivity.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copied from this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this the way to license?&lt;/strong&gt; If yes, is it efficient? If no, then how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10447" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T17:22:02.893" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T17:22:02.893" Title="Correct way to license third party software for Android apps" Tags="|apache-2.0|source-code|android|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6541" CreationDate="2018-02-16T10:40:11.640" Score="0" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release to the public domain a software project that copies verbatim (with minor formatting) one function from another project licensed with a permissive license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LoupVaillant/Monocypher/blob/master/LICENCE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copying and distribution of the code, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty. This code is offered as-is, without any warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already attributed this piece of code to the legitimate author in the README file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be done in this particular case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10449" LastEditorUserId="6003" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T17:45:28.177" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T17:10:03.677" Title="Releasing to the public domain fragments of permissive licensed code" Tags="|attribution|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6543" CreationDate="2018-02-16T10:54:40.030" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say, if I found one of the packages in my project adopted GPL license, and I already had published my repository to GitHub as MIT, I immediately have to;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delete the whole repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;change the license to GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove the dependency to maintain MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No way. I'll be sued for it someday.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would be possible choices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't know the example above is okay. So let me change the assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I found one of my JS, CSS, HTML or other stuff had been brought from MIT licensed source and I had never put the copyright notice in the file, I have to;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delete the whole repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove the file or substitute another file for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T14:36:44.490" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T14:36:44.490" Title="When I notice the license of my current repository on GitHub is invalid, what should I do?" Tags="|github|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T01:31:47.047" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is considered the proper way to attribute or acknowledge non-code non-software resources from which part of a piece of software could be considered to be derived (when intending to release the software under a relatively permissive license such as the MIT/Expat license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific example which I am considering is the issue of a Python script, the code of which utilizes (non-code) definitions and formulae from non-software-related academic papers. Plenty of resources make it clear how to properly attribute the papers in (for example) another academic paper, but it is a little less clear how to appropriately attribute non-code resources in a software work. The script itself is not part of an academic work of its own (so academic attribution can't simply be deferred to said work, since there is none). In such a context, how should the attribution be performed (or can the script be released at all)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10458" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T01:31:47.047" Title="What is Proper Attribution for Non-code Resources (Academic papers, etc) in OSS?" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6536" CreationDate="2018-02-17T21:45:07.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To dedicate a creative work into the public domain, you need to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be the copyright holder, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be subject to a jurisdiction that even has a concept of “public domain”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include a function from another project, you are not the sole copyright holder, and are therefore unable to dedicate your project to the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may be able to dedicate &lt;em&gt;parts&lt;/em&gt; of your project into the public domain. To keep this maintainable, I strongly suggest that this isn't done on a function-by-function basis, but either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by managing the license or public domain status individually for each file or folder in your project, and noting in your README that some parts are public domain whereas others are licensed,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or by not including that function in your source code, and rather linking to the non-public-domain code at build time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the resulting executable code will not be in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few general notes about public domain works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As some jurisdictions (especially, civil-law countries) do not have a concept of “public domain”, consider adding a &lt;em&gt;fallback license&lt;/em&gt; such as CC0. This fallback waives any copyright and related rights you may hold.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A public domain dedication does not release all rights you have in the project. Notably, patents and trademarks are not affected. Mature licenses such as Apache 2.0 or GPLv3 also include a patent grant to ensure that users cannot just copy the code, but also safely use it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T21:45:07.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-16T23:37:47.310" Score="8" ViewCount="2408" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm puzzled by the &quot;share-alike&quot; clause in Creative Commons license. This license allows free commercial use but &quot;require[s] [] adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I'm building a commercial product with proprietary content and I use a CC BY-SA work, does that mean that I have to make my entire product available for free download?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the case, then I can see how this would work for a commercial company that, hypothetically, sells printouts of Wikipedia pages. But how would it work for a commercial company that builds its own content? Seems to me that if my product is &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; I have to stay completely away from CC BY-SA works. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10469" OwnerDisplayName="Wynne" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T01:22:02.950" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T10:45:26.400" Title="Creative Commons license CC BY-SA doesn't work for commercial content?" Tags="|commercial|cc-by-sa|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6537" CreationDate="2018-02-18T09:05:59.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you find out that you are not fulfilling the obligations that a third-party license puts on you, then you should correct that as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If copyright and/or license information is missing or incorrect, you should update those files so that they contain the correct copyright and license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a third-party dependency, which is not copied into your repository, changes its license to one that is incompatible to your license, then you should first try to pin that dependency to the last (tested) version before the license change.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After that, you can take your time to consider if you can replace that dependency with something that does have a compatible license or if you want to change the license on your project (which can only be done with explicit approval of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; contributors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, these actions show that you are serious about copyright licenses and that you don't try to take advantage of someone's code. Should they try to sue anyway, that will probably be looked upon favorably by the courts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T09:05:59.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6542" CreationDate="2018-02-18T10:45:26.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the share-alike terms mean that if you create a &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; work of the CC-BY-SA licensed work, you can only publish it under the same license. But &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; a CC-BY-SA licensed work into a larger work doesn't necessarily affect that larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I merely reproducing a licensed work? This is explicitly allowed by the license, as long as I provide proper attribution etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or is my use a kind of adaption or modification? This is only allowed if I license the result under the CC-BY-SA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a blog post and found a CC-BY-SA licensed image. Can I include it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as I provide proper attribution and mention the license. I don't have to license my blog post under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I photoshop the image first. What now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only publish the modified image under CC-BY-SA. This means attributing the original source, stating my changes, and mentioning the license. This still doesn't affect the blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am creating a video to showcase my product. I want to use CC-BY-SA licensed music in the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the terms of the CC license, this makes the whole video a derivative work of the music. I can only publish the video under the terms of the CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish an app that uses CC-BY-SA licensed background images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is OK as long as I provide proper attribution. Note that attribution should also include a link to the original work, so that users can download this image. I may not apply any (legal or technical) restrictions that would prevent users from exercising their rights under the CC-BY-SA with respect to the background image. But the license of the app is not affected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found some CC-BY-SA licensed code. Can I include it in my proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA licenses are not well suited for code, but some people still use it that way. When I include that code, my software becomes a derivative work. I can therefore only publish it under the terms of the CC-BY-SA or a compatible license (e.g. CC-BY-SA 4.0 can also be used under the GPLv3). This means that users are free to share the software and change it. The CC-BY-SA does not require me to publish my source code, and does not prevent me from charging for the software. However, any recipient can share the software at no charge, so I might as well make the software a free download.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T10:45:26.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6546" CreationDate="2018-02-19T11:07:23.977" Score="3" ViewCount="1132" Body="&lt;p&gt;On choosealicense.com, &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/non-software/#data-media-etc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there's a section that says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any open source software license or open license for media (see above) is applicable to software documentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that the MIT license is suitable for documentation.&#xA;However, I find it weird that a software license would be applicable to documentation. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; explicitely talks about software. The only part where the documentation appears is on what triggers the license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10477" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T22:50:46.697" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T22:50:46.697" Title="Is the MIT license suitable for documentation?" Tags="|mit|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6545" CreationDate="2018-02-19T11:12:31.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While re-reading the license again and again, I noticed the slight wording difference that makes it suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when software is spelled with a capitalized &quot;S&quot;, it means: software + documentation. And that's the capitalized version that is used in all the rest of the document:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the license applies to the documentation too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10477" LastEditorUserId="10477" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T14:46:34.877" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T14:46:34.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T15:38:32.580" Score="1" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use GPL-licensed software in a commercial program? I know that the use of source code in a commercial program is forbidden but if I use system call functions for example I make the call a bash program under GPL license using subprocess library in python example code: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import subprocess &#xA;p = subprocess.Popen ([&quot;echo&quot;, &quot;hello world&quot;], stdout = subprocess, PIPE) &#xA;Print p.communicate()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way I only work with the program results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="debianlinux" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T23:26:25.897" Title="Can I use GPL-licensed software in a commercial program?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6938" CreationDate="2018-02-20T15:31:13.837" Score="4" ViewCount="3732" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about eBPF and linux kernel licensing.&#xA;Basically, an eBPF module is a small piece of code that is run &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; Linux kernel, and can use kernel methods that are marked as &lt;strong&gt;GPL-only&lt;/strong&gt; (eg. &lt;em&gt;bpf_probe_read&lt;/em&gt;), in order to use them one must explicitly acknowledge that code is GPL licensed, eg.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;char _license[] SEC(&quot;license&quot;) = &quot;GPL&quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that this eBPF module needs to be under GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My actual question is does a user-space application that uses (but not redistributes or loads) that module also needs to be under GPL-license? And what if the application would distribute compiled EBPF code and will actually load it into the kernel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding the user-space application should be also under GPL-license, however, I have seen open-source projects that use (and redistributes compiled) eBPF modules and are under Apache 2.0 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10484" LastActivityDate="2023-06-18T16:24:58.193" Title="Does program that uses EBPF module needs to be distributed under GPL" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T01:58:13.007" Score="5" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I have an MIT license on some open source software I created. I understand that with an MIT license, I need to state the license information in certain points of a code. I was wondering if it would be possible to change the MIT license so that it is registered to a different person so that they can manipulate the code and then have the new code completely licensed as their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10487" OwnerDisplayName="Evan" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T13:40:14.630" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:24:54.057" Title="Is it possible to transfer an MIT license?" Tags="|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6570" CreationDate="2018-02-21T17:18:44.700" Score="4" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;My program came with GNU GPL 3 license and has a COPYING file which has the copy of GNU GPL 3 license inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I finished my open source program, with all of its documentations. I followed the GPL instructions, put a license notice using comments  on each beginning of every single file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came into this difficulty. I want to put license details and conditions between &lt;code&gt;show c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;show w&lt;/code&gt; command, as my program has the interactive prompt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to put a small version of terms and conditions? What kind of terms and conditions can I put?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10490" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T08:15:32.057" Title="What parts of license to put on &quot;show w&quot; and &quot;show c&quot; command?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6553" CreationDate="2018-02-21T20:42:12.427" Score="8" ViewCount="1187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a big user of Creative Common licenses and I often used &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&lt;/a&gt; in the past to find the right license to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I now see many suffixes for &lt;code&gt;CC Attribution&lt;/code&gt; licenses like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unported&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is there a page that shows all CC licenses (including all these tiny variations) on a single page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that there will be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;CC BY 2.0 Unported&#xA;CC BY 2.0 Generic&#xA;CC BY 2.0 International&#xA;CC BY 3.0 Unported&#xA;CC BY 3.0 Generic&#xA;CC BY 3.0 International&#xA;CC BY 4.0 Unported&#xA;CC BY 4.0 Generic&#xA;CC BY 4.0 International&#xA;CC BY-SA 2.0 Unported&#xA;CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic&#xA;CC BY-SA 2.0 International&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10491" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T22:49:09.350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T22:49:09.350" Title="Creative Commons: Unported vs. Generic vs. International etc" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6552" CreationDate="2018-02-21T22:13:25.163" Score="7" Body="&lt;h3&gt;4.0&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the latest version of the six main licenses, there are no ports. All of them are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;International&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-are-the-international-unported-creative-commons-licenses-and-why-does-cc-offer-ported-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;What are the international (“unported”) Creative Commons licenses, and why does CC offer “ported” licenses?&quot;&gt;There might be 4.0 ports in the future&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;CC expects that few, if any, ports will be necessary for 4.0.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3.0 and earlier&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For earlier versions, next to the international variant of a license (they are called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unported&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in 3.0, and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Generic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in earlier versions), there are ports for many jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; (Unported) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0 DE&lt;/a&gt; (Germany)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/es/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0 ES&lt;/a&gt; (Spain)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (Generic)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0 DE&lt;/a&gt; (Germany)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/es/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0 ES&lt;/a&gt; (Spain)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;…&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ports shouldn’t be confused with translations of the human-readable summary page. For example, the summary for the USA port is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/deed.de&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;CC BY-SA 3.0 US&quot;&gt;also available in German&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/489/138&quot;&gt;When to use a ported (instead of an international) CC 3.0 license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;List of all licenses&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Licenses&lt;/a&gt; links all unported/international licenses&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Ports_by_Jurisdiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Ports_by_Jurisdiction&lt;/a&gt; mentions all existing ports (unlinked)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T11:31:24.660" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T11:31:24.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6555" CreationDate="2018-02-22T11:08:04.057" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with Unity3D on a commercial project, and have found that some vital part of working with social accounts is not implemented, namely - authorized API calls. I am almost done implementing it myself and feel that that code will be very useful both to myself later, and other Unity users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I retain my copyright, but post the code with some very liberal license(that allows commercial use), and maybe than release as Asset Store plugin, and use it at my work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10495" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T08:28:35.560" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T08:28:35.560" Title="How to release small part of my code as an opensource plugin to allow free reuse (including by myself at my work)" Tags="|copyright|creative-commons|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6554" CreationDate="2018-02-22T11:52:37.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First you need to figure out whether you hold the rights to that code. This depends on your jurisdiction and contract. E.g. an employment contract may state that the rights to any work you do that is related to your employment belong to your employer. Here, it seems this would be directly related to your employment even if you coded this on your own time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hold the rights, you can issue a license. You won't lose your copyright by issuing a license. It is recommended that every source file gets a comment at the top that notes your copyright and mentions the license. Then, put the actual license into a separate file or into the README of your project. You don't have to publish your code publicly, but it's probably helpful. GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab are a few gratis options for hosting open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license you should choose depends on your goals. All open source licenses allow commercial use, but not all allow inclusion in proprietary products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft licenses such as the GPL maximize end-user freedom, at the cost of restricting developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permissive licenses such as Apache 2, MIT, or ISC maximize developer freedom, at the cost of end-user freedom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are therefore likely to be interested in a permissive license. The mentioned licenses all require that your copyright notices are preserved. The ISC license is a simplified/modernized MIT license. Both MIT an ISC are very compatible with other licenses. The Apache 2 license is more thorough, and also covers trademarks, patents, modified versions, and additional legal notices. Using Apache-licensed code takes a bit more effort to comply with these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you choose a license, consider asking at work which licenses can be used, or whether there's a pre-approved list of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T11:52:37.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T12:29:49.197" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a web application (hobby project) that aggregates documentations and source code of arbitrary artifacts (from Maven Central) and (possibly) present them to the user in a single web page, side by side. I am planning to host the app at my server for the general public when I am finished writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I won't have any trouble redistributing something that is found in Maven Central as-is, there are plenty of mirrors and software that does just that. What I am worried is that if the user requests two artifacts with have incompatible licenses with each other(Apache 2 and GPL 2 for example, though I am sure there are lots of incompatible combinations), and that the source code and/or api documentations (javadoc) get presented in a single page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of this statement I found while reading GPL2, so I think I'm fine with this particular license though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if there is anything that I should take caution when redistributing source code or api documentations in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10496" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T12:29:49.197" Title="Distributing source code with different licenses in a single page" Tags="|source-code|documentation|redistribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T14:53:41.413" Score="4" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering extending a proprietary application so it communicates with an open source program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This open source program is very similar to Matlab. The user can input commands to execute computations or draw graphics. Also, the user can write scripts. The program provides an API for external applications. External applications can generate variables and assign values to them and they can also execute commands or call scripts via this API. The licence of the program is GPL2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proprietary application shall communicate with the GPL'd program via the API  or via command line arguments. It will send images taken from a camera to the GPL'd program, call scripts to process these images and accept results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user of the proprietary application will be able to select a script and maybe also a file containing parameters of the script. Moreover, the user will be able to create his or her own script and to use the GPL'd program for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how the communication is implemented, the exchanged data will be complex. Images will be exchanged anyway. The proprietary application might even send image processing parameters stored in XML files or classifiers such as neural networks to the open source program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source program will be delivered along with the proprietary application on the same storage media. Both programs will be installed on the same computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GPL 2.0 permit such a scenario? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10498" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T20:01:13.597" Title="Can a Proprietary Application Exchange Data with a GPL'd Program?" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2018-02-22T23:22:02.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the copyright holder (you wrote it, but not for someone else), then you are not bound by the license. You are the licenser not the licensee. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reassign copyright to someone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the license (but not of already-distributed copies).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do anything that you could have done, without the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T19:36:31.350" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T19:36:31.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6561" CreationDate="2018-02-22T23:36:10.947" Score="1" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to package the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cygwin.com/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cygwin&lt;/a&gt; installer executable — and some of its corresponding packages — and run it from another installer that installs a proprietary and commercially sold application?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial application's source does not &quot;build with&quot; or &quot;link to&quot; any source code from any of the Cygwin source nor any of its packages' source.  However, after the commercial application installs and is run, users can invoke some binaries that the Cygwin installer places onto the user's machine — namely bash.exe, mintty.exe, and tail.exe.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://cygwin.com/licensing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cygwin's licensing page&lt;/a&gt; claims that &quot;Most of the tools are covered by the GNU GPL, some are public domain, and others have a X11 style license.&quot;  I realize that distributors of binaries under the GNU GPL are required to include access to the source code for those binaries — which makes complete sense.  However, does this mean that the entirety of the source code for the proprietary commercial application must also be distributed?  My take is that no, it is not required, since the commercial application is deemed &quot;a separate program&quot; according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this statement in the GNU FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody shed some light on this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10501" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T09:58:24.150" Title="Is it permissible to install Cygwin (GNU GPL) and its packages from within an installer for a proprietary and commercially sold application?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-23T07:23:52.873" Score="1" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets take a specific example. The ioquake3 engine is licensed under GPL v2, however the engine can't do anything by its self, it needs code that has been compiled into .qvm binaries in order to create a playable game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I create the game code and all of the digital assets required to create a game that will run using the ioquake3 engine, does my game code need to be licensed under a GPL compatible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I would have to provide the source for the engine and any modifications I had made to it, but would the source for the game logic binaries also have to be available to those whom it was distributed to? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, looking further into GPL v2, if the game code was not considered to be derivative, if I had an installer that downloaded and installed the game code, and then separately downloaded and installed the engine, would that be considered distributing the two software's separately? It states that if two separate works are distributed as a &quot;whole&quot;, then all separate works that are a part of the &quot;whole&quot; must be licensed under GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about two separate installers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10505" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-05-25T11:44:05.170" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T11:44:05.170" Title="Does video game code that uses a GPL engine have to be GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2018-02-23T09:58:24.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need to look in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software definition&lt;/a&gt; and or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software definition&lt;/a&gt; is easier to understand. So in most cases I would start there. Sadly I could not see anything obvious in it. I think it is there but not as obvious at this from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not place restrictions on other software that is&#xA;  distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license&#xA;  must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium&#xA;  must be open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, everyone agrees that if some software is Open Source (according to the definition) then it is also Free Software (according to the definition), and vice versa. However there may be some disagreement an which licences are approved by each organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T09:58:24.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6563" CreationDate="2018-02-24T00:21:25.690" Score="0" ViewCount="734" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop an idea for a commercial web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide that service (and get paid for it), I need to use an external executable software somewhere in the process, which is licensed under GPLv2 or later. I only need to install it (separately) in the server. Then, send it some parameters from my web application, execute it, and get its output back again to my web flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I have any legal problem doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of implications could the use of that external executable have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10513" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T08:25:12.247" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T08:25:12.247" Title="Using a GPL external executable within a commercial web application" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6562" CreationDate="2018-02-24T08:04:21.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you will not get any legal problems with your idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is perfectly fine to use GPL licensed software for commercial purposes. You just have to meet the requirement that the people that get a copy of the binary also get access to the source code and the right to modify the GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the users of a web application don't receive a copy of the server-side backend code, the distribution terms of the GPL are not applicable to those users and you don't have to provide any code to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if the GPL software exists as a separate executable and only communicates with your web application as two different, independent executables in such a way that the GPL program could have been any program that works similarly, then they are considered separate, independent works for copyright purposes. This means that the GPL terms don't apply to your web application and you can keep that under any license that you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T08:04:21.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6566" CreationDate="2018-02-24T16:10:43.340" Score="0" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating online course about coding with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://expressjs.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Express JavaScript framework&lt;/a&gt;, whose site and logo are licensed under the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my course is about Express, I want to use Express's logo as a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of my course's cover. Express's logo is licensed under CC-BY-SA, so this is where I am getting confused. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6544&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I photoshop the image first. What now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can only publish the modified image under CC-BY-SA. This means&#xA;  attributing the original source, stating my changes, and mentioning&#xA;  the license. This still doesn't affect the blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that my course should be licensed under the terms of CC-BY-SA as well? I am launching it on a platform which is used to make a profit (commercial use), and I can't license it under CC-BY-SA. In another place, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I publish an app that uses CC-BY-SA licensed background images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is OK as long as I provide proper attribution. Note that&#xA;  attribution should also include a link to the original work, so that&#xA;  users can download this image. I may not apply any (legal or&#xA;  technical) restrictions that would prevent users from exercising their&#xA;  rights under the CC-BY-SA with respect to the background image. But&#xA;  the license of the app is not affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said, it's only a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of my cover, but I combined it with other image. Does that mean I edited the image? I haven't changed any element of the logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I use a logo licensed as CC-BY-SA as a part of my course cover, must the whole course be licensed under CC-BY-SA as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/expressjs/discussions/issues/65&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Related GitHub discussion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10518" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T05:24:13.710" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T05:24:13.710" Title="Can I use a CC-BY-SA licensed image as part of my online course's cover (commercial use)?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|commercial|cc-by-sa|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2018-02-24T16:58:37.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have stated, there is no need to transfer the license.  You can, however, transfer the &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; according to copyright rules.  Last time I checked, that had to be  done in writing.  I do not know if a digitally signed document is OK but I've done it in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-02-25T09:42:50.190" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T09:42:50.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6564" CreationDate="2018-02-24T17:29:37.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would your course be different if someone received it without the cover or with a different cover? I expect that the answer would be no. That means that the course itself and the front cover are two independent works as far a copyrights are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your cover uses a CC-BY-SA image, the cover is a derived work of that image and must be licensed under CC-BY-SA as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the course itself is a separate work, you can license that under any license that you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, the CC-BY-SA license is not a problem for commercial use. It only makes one form of making money harder, in particular making money for charging for individual, electronic, copies, because recipients also get the right to distribute copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T17:29:37.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-24T21:12:55.423" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't need this but still would be very interested in an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any license in this vein?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;© year &lt;strong&gt;my name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No warranty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You may distrubute exact copies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You may distribute modified copies under the following condition&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remove &lt;strong&gt;my name&lt;/strong&gt; from the work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10520" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T20:43:31.050" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T20:43:31.050" Title="License that prohibits attribution on derivatives?" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6567" CreationDate="2018-02-24T21:56:25.527" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While not exactly a spot-on match, Creative Commons licenses effectively give this option. In CC-BY 4.0, for example, section 3(a)(3) states that attribution must be removed upon request:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the [attribution] information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mechanism in the CC licenses is intended to be used on a case-by-case basis when you see particular works that you object to, but you could use it broadly to object to your name being attached to any distribution or derivative whatsoever. This is further explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-can-i-do-if-i-offer-my-material-under-a-creative-commons-license-and-i-do-not-like-the-way-someone-uses-it&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine in the second paragraph):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can I do if I offer my material under a Creative Commons license and I do not like the way someone uses it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As long as users abide by license terms and conditions, licensors cannot control how the material is used. However, CC licenses do provide several mechanisms that allow licensors to choose not to be associated with their material or to uses of their material with which they disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, all CC licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-need-to-be-aware-of-anything-else-when-providing-attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the licensor endorses or supports a particular use&lt;/a&gt;. Second, licensors may waive the attribution requirement, choosing not to be identified as the licensor, if they wish. Third, &lt;strong&gt;if the licensor does not like how the material has been modified or used, CC licenses require that the licensee &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Licensors_may_request_removal_of_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;remove the attribution information upon request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. (In 3.0 and earlier, this is only a requirement for adaptations and collections; in 4.0, this also applies to the unmodified work.) Finally, anyone modifying licensed material must &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Modifications_and_adaptations_must_be_indicated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;indicate that the original has been modified&lt;/a&gt;. This ensures that changes made to the original material--whether or not the licensor approves of them--are not attributed back to the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you want to prohibit anything that makes it seems like you &lt;em&gt;endorse&lt;/em&gt; a derivative, that prohibition is already present in CC licenses. If you want to prohibit any inclusion of your name whatsoever, you can say something general to the effect of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do NOT include this copyright notice or other author information in derivative works based on this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By itself, this probably won't satisfy the condition that the licensee has been &amp;quot;requested by the Licensor&amp;quot; to remove the the attribution information. (In particular, if Alice gets a copy from you, and then Bob gets copy from Alice, Alice doesn't have an obligation to pass along that separate &amp;quot;no attribution on derivatives&amp;quot; request, so Bob can plausibly claim he never saw it.) However, if people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; comply with the request in this notice, it will save you some legwork sending out requests to every person who makes a derivative. If you have to send a request directly to someone, and they fail to comply, then you may take (or at least threaten) legal action against them for noncompliance with the CC license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:59:17.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6571" CreationDate="2018-02-24T22:10:13.590" Score="0" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a commercial PHP software which I will offer for free for non-profit, open source, personal usage and for self training and I want to make it open source but in the same time it is a proprietary software. I guess I should make a special license for this case, I didn't find any license meeting the criteria?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use &lt;code&gt;composer&lt;/code&gt; to download and setup the software because this is the best way to do it nowadays.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it is a good idea to host the software on Github? I don't have any problems sharing the code and I will have to explain in the license what is allowed and what is not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally any developers which use the software for free may want to contribute to it and another question rises in this case. What happens with the copyrights of the contributed commits. Can I somehow state that any contributed code is owned by me in exchange of adding the contributor to a &quot;contributors list&quot; in the final software so the contributors cannot claim  share of the profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10521" LastEditorUserId="10521" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T22:40:05.777" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T10:30:13.943" Title="Licensing and publicly hosting commercial software, but free for non-profit or personal use" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6551" CreationDate="2018-02-26T08:15:32.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to put license details and conditions between show c and show w command, as my program has the interactive prompt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are referring to the section &lt;strong&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt; (GPL 3.0). The relevant section reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;program&amp;gt;  Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w`.&#xA;This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;under certain conditions; type `show c` for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hypothetical commands &lt;code&gt;show w&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;show c&lt;/code&gt; should show the&#xA;  appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your&#xA;  program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would&#xA;  use an “about box”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical command 'show w' is implied to show information about warranty, and the hypothetical command 'show c' is implied to show information about copying. Keep in mind that this section is not part of the actual GPL license (it comes after &quot;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&quot;), so it is more of a suggestion. As an example, the GNU Octave program, version 3.0.5 interprets the above as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GNU Octave, version 3.0.5 Copyright (C) 2008 John W. Eaton and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is free software; see the source code for copying conditions.&#xA;  There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or&#xA;  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  For details, type `warranty'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typing 'warranty' gives a slightly more elaborated version of the information in the above paragraph, the statement &quot;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program,&quot; and a link to the GNU.org licenses page in case the license was not present for some reason. In Octave there is no 'copying' command, as would be suggested by hypothetical 'show c' command, but as mentioned, it is not actually a requirement to provide that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T08:15:32.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6569" CreationDate="2018-02-26T10:30:13.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @Brandin told you at the comments section, you cannot license your free/open source software according to the field of endeavor in order to charge for it, as that is a form of discrimination which goes against the definitions held at this forum, as well as those by the most important free/open source institutions, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, many companies work around this in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most popular and &quot;correct&quot; way is to completely open and give away the software and then make profit from providing services around it. Think of Automattic selling WordPress - the software itself is completely free under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GNU GPL license&lt;/a&gt;, but that software alone won't give you a fully-functioning website with full support. Instead, you can go to WordPress.com and register an account, where the company provides you with hosting, a (sub)domain, paid extras, as well as technical support. &lt;a href=&quot;https://vip.wordpress.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They even have a VIP service&lt;/a&gt; for taking care of all the details for larger organizations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The other way to do this is to create an open source software with (at least) a permissive license, in order to create your own propiertary fork with commercial-specific features (which could range from just technical support to being a completely different beast), which you could separately charge for. This is the way that software like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Chrome&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://accounts.odoo.com/page/editions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odoo&lt;/a&gt; or even, in a certain way, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;macOS&lt;/a&gt; work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there's a Wikipedia article you may be interested in for further information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10528" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T10:30:13.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7089" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:58:53.663" Score="4" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, I can sell to one of my clients a PHP web service that connects to a MySQL server that I host without making my PHP sources open source. This is because the PHP code only connects to the MySQL server. Please correct me if I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, nowadays, we have docker and I could package my PHP sources together with an official MySQL community edition image via docker-compose (one PHP service, one official MySQL CE image). My client could now host these containers on his own internal servers. Is this still ok, or would I now have to get a commercial license because I am &quot;deploying&quot; a docker-compose file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I have stumbled over &lt;a href=&quot;https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/3914/mysql-and-postgresql-licence-issue&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, where one answer goes in the direction that distributing MySQL is an issue. However, they tell that migrating to PostgresSQL is an option. For me, this would be no problem. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10530" LastEditorUserId="10530" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T09:41:35.813" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T00:01:28.743" Title="Can I deploy a docker-compose.yml that uses MySQL commercially?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T10:15:13.820" Score="1" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day I was thinking about Angular when the question arised: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does Google have in return from developing Angular?&lt;/strong&gt; The same principle applies of course not only for Google, but jQuery, TypeScript, …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently Angular js is free, it can be used for any kind of web projects (open source, public or proprietary). Google invests/pays I don't know how much developers for developing Angular, but for what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, Google reputation is getting bigger or I was thinking that if I use Google open source product, maybe I will recommend to use Google AdWords services?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same principle I suppose is for Linux, … or any kind of open source projects sponsored by commercial companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes I know, Linux is open source, but RedHat, SUSE, … charge custom software development if some customer needs some support or as stated software modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10536" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T14:59:19.557" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T02:08:06.093" Title="What does Google have in return from developing Angular?" Tags="|commercial|software|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="55" CreationDate="2018-02-27T17:54:06.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not good at making drawings, but I hope that this will be appreciated for its content if not for its design&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qO7R6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qO7R6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Source&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Proprietary&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;P.D.&lt;/strong&gt; (Public Domain), are sharp-edge definitions, so are the various &quot;free software&quot; licenses, which are also mostly &lt;em&gt;either/or&lt;/em&gt;: if it's &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; then it's not MIT, LGPL, Apache, etc and if it's &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; it's not GPL, LGPL, Apache, etc.  (some are strictly included, as for example &lt;strong&gt;Affero&lt;/strong&gt; being a strict subset of GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the very definition of &lt;strong&gt;Free software&lt;/strong&gt; is blurry and depends on whom you're talking to.  It definitely includes licenses like MIT and GPL, it definitely implies being Open Source, it definitely is incompatible with being Proprietary, I'm not so sure how it relates to Public Domain, my personal perception is that they are disjoint, but that depends on where I place the blurry line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Public Domain&lt;/strong&gt; software is a strange beast.  As said, it's my interpretation to put it outside of the Free Software.  Whether you get the sources, or not, depends on what the author of the software decided to do.  So, if it's Public Domain and you get the sources, it is not Proprietary.  If it's Public Domain and you do not get the sources, you can call it Proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I'm nowhere speaking of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;price&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, that's a totally different story, independent from what we're discussing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just found a more complete version of my diagram, a bit of an overkill given the OP question.  It includes &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; the &quot;free/gratis&quot; category, &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; it uses the term &quot;copylefted&quot; for what I here call &quot;free/libre&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; it includes a new category for &quot;freely downloadable&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; it shows the position of &quot;shareware&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;→&lt;/strong&gt; and corrects my initial misconception that P.D. is necessarily Open Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/category.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/category.svg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so, short answer: Public Domain may be Open Source, or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10539" LastEditorUserId="10539" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T22:56:08.190" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T22:56:08.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-27T23:28:27.373" Score="3" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;A group of friends and I are discussing founding a startup where the products would be commercial software. One the most important aspects that in our opinion we should put in any legal agreement is to determine what would be the fate of products in the case of the startup fails; that is, if it reaches the bankrupt. We are considering as a condition in the legal agreement that says that if the startup fails, then all its products should be released under more liberal licenses such MIT or GNU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would like to know if anyone knows about an explicit precedent of this kind of juridical figure. If so, is it possible to know more about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10542" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T08:46:18.720" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T00:38:28.680" Title="Is it legal to release an old commercial software as free software?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|law|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6575" CreationDate="2018-02-28T02:06:47.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in no way a lawyer, and this is something that you should consult a lawyer for, in terms of actual wording in your agreements/contracts...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to license a work belongs to whoever owns the copyright of that work. Where the startup is the owner of that work, it has the ability to offer it to other's under a license (in the same way that I can license software that I write to others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a clause would probably write like this (again, this is probably not legally strong):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dissolution of Company - Distribution of Assets&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event that the Company is dissolved and its activities are terminated, all software owned by the Company shall be released and made available under the terms and conditions of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two issues that I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright Enforcement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A party would likely have to be designated to be allowed to enforce copyright infringements by other parties. This probably won't be an issue for something like the MIT license, but it may be an issue for others if you license it under something like the GPL license, which has strong copyleft provisions. If this is something that you don't care about enforcing (aka, you don't have the resources, or you want anybody to use it almost as they wish), I would say just release it under MIT and be done with it. GPL would confuse things here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Re-ownership of Software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't so much an issue as it is a weird thing. If your startup decides to restart, then you have two options depending on choice of license. More &amp;quot;liberal&amp;quot; licenses such as MIT would be easy to deal with: you just take the software and no issues. With something like the GPL, you'd most likely have to follow those terms, but then there wouldn't be anyone to legally enforce it, so the issue kind of becomes moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any judicial precedent for this, and I don't really see reason for one. Cases would only be going to court if the issue was severe, and if the failed startup was interested in enforcing license of provisions, which I imagine would be rare. Any other issues I imagine would be issues with the license involved, and not with this publication scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this said, be sure to ask a lawyer. They are the only ones able to give you proper legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="69" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T16:43:34.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-28T10:26:51.710" Score="4" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use portions of code from the FFMPEG library to provide screen capture function for a commercial application I'm writing. I do understand I need to make a shared library out of the function or it'll make the entirety of our application LGPL, fair enough. The library part will be LGPL with the usual LGPL 2.1 notices and source code availability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I'm done chopping the function(s) to suit my use case, it will not really function in a meaningful way in the context of the FFmpeg anymore. I want a series of discrete bitmaps for processing display contents, not a constant video stream that will be encoded or displayed. So it probably does not make sense to provide it as a contribution to the FFmpeg project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I exactly write in the copyright notice? The original says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * XCB input grabber&#xA; * Copyright (C) 2014 Luca Barbato &amp;lt;lu_zero@gentoo.org&amp;gt;&#xA; *&#xA; * This file is part of FFmpeg.&#xA; *&#xA; * FFmpeg is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA; * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA; * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA; * version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my derived source code I should keep Luca's copyright line as-is and add mine under it? I change the &quot;FFmpeg&quot; to say &quot;MyExcellentScreenCaptureLibrary&quot; and add a note somewhere saying this is based on the FFmpeg XCB input grabber code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10547" LastEditorDisplayName="user10225" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T07:46:57.393" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T07:46:57.393" Title="LGPL 2.1 snippet copyright attribution" Tags="|lgpl|attribution|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6580" CreationDate="2018-02-28T14:35:56.150" Score="4" ViewCount="586" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've made some changes to an open source project but I haven't (yet) been able to get those changes merged into the upstream project source control repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to publish my fork of the project repo but I'd like to disclaim that I'm creating a separate independent project. I intend on regularly merging any changes made to the upstream repo to my forked copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that &quot;soft fork&quot; might cover what I'm doing but Google searches for that phrase are completely dominated by discussion of Bitcoin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an analogous or similar phrase that covers the type of fork I'd like to provide and maintain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2340" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T16:18:20.883" Title="Term or phrase for a 'soft fork'?" Tags="|forking|terminology|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6579" CreationDate="2018-02-28T15:03:17.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no specific term. “Fork” is sufficient. “Soft fork” will be understood as well. “Branch” is another alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, forking is the &lt;em&gt;expected behaviour&lt;/em&gt; when using a distributed version control system such as Git. Once you've published your changes on a fork, you can make a formal or informal &lt;em&gt;pull request&lt;/em&gt; to have the changes from your fork merged into the upstream repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To projects that use centralized version control such as SVN, or to projects that are not familiar with this pluralistic, Bazaar-style approach to open source development, publishing a fork may be perceived as a bit more hostile. But as long as you are exercising your rights in the open-source license you received, you're going to be fine. Note that many of these licenses require you to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly state your modifications from the original (though this might already be satisfied by the version control history)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep legal notices about the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that should not be a problem for a soft fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you fork a GitHub project via their web interface, they will automatically mark your repository as a fork and link to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to normal forking, a &lt;em&gt;hostile fork&lt;/em&gt; is intended to compete, not collaborate. It has no intention of contributing changes back to the original project, and/or wants to enforce a change in project direction or leadership. A few well-known examples include OpenOffice→LibreOffice, MySQL→MariaDB, and temporarily node.js→io.js.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T15:03:17.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6583" CreationDate="2018-03-01T11:21:10.287" Score="9" ViewCount="840" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project I'm involved in currently has headers of the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The X Development Team&#xA;Organization A - Organization B - Organization C - Copyright 1999-2018&#xA;&#xA;This file is distributed under the terms of the&#xA;GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these headers are incomplete: the project has received lots of contributions from people who do not belong to any of the listed organizations. Given that the project has a CREDITS file with a listing of all the authors and their institutions / organizations, I want to change the first part of the headers to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The X Development Team&#xA;Organization A and contributors - Copyright 1999-2018&#xA;(see CREDITS file for the list of authors)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping &quot;Organization A&quot; hightlighted in such a way makes sense because it is the organization which has contributed the most to the project by far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this kind of clause &quot;and contributors&quot; is common practice in the FOSS world. But is it also OK to remove explicit mentions of some copyright holders in the process of moving to such a clause (knowing that they are still listed in CREDITS)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T21:04:13.310" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T21:04:13.310" Title="Can I remove some copyright holders from headers and replace them by a generic &quot;and contributors&quot;?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6582" CreationDate="2018-03-01T13:26:30.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must not change existing copyright notices. That would misrepresent the copyright and authorship. In particular, removing the names of copyright holders is not OK. That is usually against applicable copyright law (e.g. §39 (1) UrhG in Germany, or 17 USC 405 and 17 USC 506 (d) in the U.S.), and violates most open-source licenses. (The LGPLv2.1 is not super clear on this, but in Section 1 requires you to publish an “appropriate copyright notice” and “keep intact all the notices that refer to this License”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's true that in your case, the current copyright notices are incomplete. So it's fine to add &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; notice. For example  changing this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2007 Original Institution A, B, and C&#xA;&#xA;This file is free software under the bla bla bla license...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2007–2018 the FooProject contributors&#xA;Copyright 2007 Original Institution A, B, and C&#xA;&#xA;This file is free software under the bla bla bla license...&#xA;&#xA;For a full list of authors, please see the CREDITS file.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your argument that only the most important contributors should be acknowledged by name seems “fair” to you, but taking attribution away will always be seen as more problematic than giving attribution in the first place. I therefore strongly suggest that you leave the existing attribution alone, and only add additional attribution with your reference to the CREDITS file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T15:19:37.873" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T15:19:37.873" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6586" CreationDate="2018-03-03T11:24:27.743" Score="7" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;A browser plugin was removed from one of the app stores last year as it had stopped working, and the author was no longer maintaining it in favor of their standalone desktop apps. I preferred using the plugin so I forked the repository on GitHub, made some changes so it worked again, and re-published it on the app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code repository said the project was licensed under Apache 2.0 which led me to believe I was free to modify and distribute the software as long as I retained the copyright notice and kept track of all the changes I made. To fulfil this obligation I made it clear in the app store description that I was not original author and linked to the GitHub fork repository where the licence and changes could be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 6 months after publishing the package I received a DMCA Takedown Notice via the app store operator. The authors say I am infringing on their copyright and listed their desktop app as the copyrighted work that I am infringing on (which are not open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the author lodged an improper DMCA takedown request in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10568" LastEditorUserId="1096" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T02:13:07.597" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T02:13:07.597" Title="DMCA Takedown Notice received for distributing software licensed under Apache 2.0" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|derivative-works|distribution|dmca|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6585" CreationDate="2018-03-03T13:02:48.750" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, this certainly seems like an erroneous or abusive DMCA takedown. The copyright holder had already given you rights to modify and distribute the browser extension by their Apache 2.0 license grant, and that license grant cannot be revoked, per the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing I'd be careful of, though, is whether the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; project was licensed under the Apache license. Are there any components (code, artwork) that might be licensed differently? To put it another way: looking at this from an adversarial perspective, if I were this author and wanted to justify my DMCA takedown, I'd look for any file in the repo that I could plausibly claim was not licensed under the Apache license. If you identify any such files, you may wish to remove them to eliminate the possibility of their making any such claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, though, this is just garden-variety DMCA abuse, and you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/guide-to-submitting-a-dmca-counter-notice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;file a counter notice&lt;/a&gt; to the have the takedown reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T13:50:38.323" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T13:50:38.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6461" CreationDate="2018-03-05T17:10:03.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL's copyleft functionality doesn't work in cases of &quot;mere aggregation.&quot; It triggers when you're creating a derivative work, which is generally thought to include all linking and a few other interactions, but not other interactions. Which interactions, exactly, are far enough, and which are too close and trigger the copyleft requirements, is a tricky question people debate pretty often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, LibreOffice is big enough that there's probably an attorney advising them, which means that this probably wasn't done haphazardly. I'd think that LibreOffice is primarily licensed under the MPL, with some parts under the GPL as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T17:10:03.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-06T08:47:37.587" Score="6" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll use Qt as an exmaple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use Qt for a commercial software, I have to consider the Qt licensing, but at the same time &lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.5/licensing.html#licenses-used-in-qt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt states&lt;/a&gt; many own third party components with different FOSS licenses. e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.5/3rdparty.html#des-des-cpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qtmain library&lt;/a&gt;: modified BSD license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.5/qtmain.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DES&lt;/a&gt;: MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of those third-party dependencies may have its own dependencies with different licenses. And each of those dependencies may have...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if I want to release an application (commercial license) that uses Qt under LGPL (as a shared library), is it sufficient to comply with LGPL for the &amp;quot;first-level&amp;quot; (Qt), i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide the LGPL and GPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;state the third-party component used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;describe a way to exchange the Qt shared lib&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if my GUI shows copyright notices, also show Qt's copyright/license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or will I have &amp;quot;recursively&amp;quot; to dig into Qt's third-party components, and provide the license and maybe source code for each of those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of course this question is not limited to Qt, but to third-party components in general which make use of other third-party components&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10584" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-04T13:14:21.287" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T13:14:21.287" Title="Recursive license implications for third party FOSS components?" Tags="|licensing|floss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-04-04T19:29:49.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6578" CreationDate="2018-03-06T12:46:02.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my derived source code I should keep Luca's copyright line as-is and add mine under it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, that's what you'd do. In this case you can do exactly that and be done with it, but the &quot;This file is part of FFmpeg.&quot; line then becomes a bit odd in your context. Can you change this line? Not if it is considered a part of the original copyright notice. Is it? I don't know. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it you have three options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Add your copyright line under Luca's and accept the strangeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Figure out if you are allowed to change the problematic line nor not, if you are, change it and add your copyright line under Luca's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Keep the original header as it is, add a line above saying something like &quot;Portions of this file originate from FFmpeg, original copyright header:&quot; and then add your own copyright header separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T12:46:02.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T06:38:04.023" Score="7" ViewCount="6771" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering integrating iText into an &lt;strong&gt;internal-use&lt;/strong&gt; web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the AGPLv3 license, I have most certainly modified &quot;the Program&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this application cannot be accessed outside of the company office. It is only available to employee workstations that are connected to the office LAN and it is most definitely &lt;strong&gt;not for sale&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;for employees only&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this application is available for use over a network as a service, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; it is not considered distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given what I know it seems that I am in the clear, but I want to be absolutely sure that I will not get into legal hot water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am in the clear for that scenario, what if my application reads files in a directory that is used by a public-facing FTP server where third parties can submit files to my company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I still in the clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10600" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T19:21:38.947" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T10:38:58.827" Title="Can I legally use iText under the AGPL license if my application is only available on a local area network?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T16:21:26.063" Score="1" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Java project made by multiple JARs and one of them is LGPL licensed. I know that this kind of license doesn't propagate through the modules that uses it. But every code modification that I make to a LGPL library must be published in some way and the license cannot change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I modified this LGPL Java module for my purposes and now I have some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I make the code public? Should I have to publish the Java files at first, or do I simply have to send the sources if anyone requests them?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should the LGPL JAR contain other resources in itself, for example the license file or other stuff regarding the license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10606" LastEditorUserId="2270" LastEditDate="2018-03-13T07:23:45.570" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T07:27:04.210" Title="Publishing Java project with LGPL licensed module" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|java|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T18:52:39.030" Score="1" ViewCount="788" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a few scripts to help with doing my US Federal taxes this year. To do things like estimating sales tax and parsing information from 1099 forms. I wanted to post this code on GitHub in case someone else might find it useful. However, I'm worried that since I am not a CPA, this could be illegal. I was planning to release it under MIT because of this clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;  FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;  AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;  LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;  OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which seems like it would cover my liability in case there are any errors with the calculations. I'm concerned though that although my code isn't actually completing any forms, I could be breaking some laws or regulations regarding taxes by posting it online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware whether or not I am allowed to release tax-related scripts open source? Do I need to add any additional disclaimers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10608" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:30:54.017" Title="Do I need to provide additional disclaimers when releasing code related to taxes?" Tags="|mit|law|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-09T17:02:00.220" Score="4" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just published a project on GitHub that I've been working on for a few years to see if I could maybe get some help polishing it up and augmenting it from here. I'm trying to choose a license and I would like to find one that protects my ability to patent at some point in the future, should I choose to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that most or all of the patentable functionality is already intact and what others might contribute would largely be superficial or auxiliary. Does that mean that the core idea can safely be considered &quot;mine&quot; for the purposes of patenting, even if others add things onto it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that prevents anyone but me from patenting the functionality embodied in the project? (Even if they're free to distribute it in the meantime)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10616" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T02:04:47.117" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:26:14.200" Title="Open source license that protects my ability to patent in the future?" Tags="|license-recommendation|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6594" CreationDate="2018-03-09T17:43:53.333" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many licenses that do not include an explicit patent license, e.g. MIT or GPL prior to version 3. These licenses only discuss copyright and warranties, not patents. In contrast, some licenses such as Apache 2 and GPLv3 include explicit patent grants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a few issues regarding patentability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Depending on your jurisdiction, only original, unpublished inventions can be patented. Publishing your invention prior to a patent application may count against you as prior art, regardless of the copyright license used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming the invention is still patentable, any contributors may be co-inventors. In any case, this will complicate the patent application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the patent has been granted, the question arises whether the open-source software may be used even if there isn't an explicit patent license. You may have given users of this software an implicit license by publishing the project – first publishing as free software and then trying to revoke the right to usage could be seen as an act in bad faith. But what is the economic value of the patent, if anyone could effectively use it for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for all these reasons, it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unwise to publish a project with the intention of patenting parts of it later, regardless of the copyright license, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;unusual to both reserve some rights through patents, yet allow free usage by publishing as open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T17:43:53.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T08:51:02.483" Score="2" ViewCount="1388" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my project there are a few library files that I would like to release under the MIT license. The rest of the project is released under GPL. How can I make it clear to someone who reads one of the MIT licensed files that it does not apply to the whole project (the &quot;Software&quot; as it is referred to in the license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt; &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;  CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;  TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;  SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10621" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:23:17.437" Title="How do I combine MIT licence with GPL?" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:26:59.613" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project (haven't chosen a license yet) that uses tesseract for OCR. This is a windows only project. My program requires the end user to have a copy of tesseract on their system and I would rather they didn't have to install it themselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if I can use the windows installer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki&lt;/a&gt;) to get the files, and then include those compiled files in my own project and upload to GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm not talking about including the tesseract source code (which I believe is licensed under apache 2.0). I'd like to include the files installed by an installer, which was created by Mannheim University Library (see link above)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10626" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T05:42:00.497" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T05:42:00.497" Title="Include compiled tesseract application in my project" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6598" CreationDate="2018-03-12T17:16:35.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The beauty of open code is that bundling can be done alright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case there are various parts in play:&#xA;- tesseract proper &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which&lt;/a&gt; seems to be overall under the Apache license and some extras BSD&#xA;- additions by UB-Mannheim: the actual installer -if any- and possibly extra fonts from a quick look at the repos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to bundle a pre-built installer using the UB-Mannheim fors as a base, you would need to ensure that you comply with the licensing of all these parts. My assumption would be that any installer script is like to be under the same license as tesseract. But the fonts may have different licenses that you need to research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general if we are talking about Apache and BSD, the key requirement for compliance is attribution (and possibly some change notifications) when you redistribute binaries which should be pretty easy to produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep us posted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:16:35.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6597" CreationDate="2018-03-12T17:23:17.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make specific files available under the MIT should be easy. You can do this on a per-file basis. I suggest that you give a good look at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt; to make it very clear what your license is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your specific case where some subset of the code is MIT-licensed when the overall license is GPL, I would suggest to make it easy on your users to discover which part is which, possibly by putting the MIT-licensed code in a separate directory (if this is more than a single file). In doing so, the fact that the MIT applies only to this subset will be even clearer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/identify-licenses-clearly.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licensing&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/clearlydefined/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clarity&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://clearlydefined.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;matters&lt;/a&gt; to you and everyone!.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:23:17.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6594" CreationDate="2018-03-12T17:26:14.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm trying to choose a license and I would like to find one that protects my ability to patent at some point in the future, should I choose to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By publishing your code without securing or applying for a patent first, my take is that you have quite likely surrendered your rights to patent whatever ideas are implemented there, as least in the US. This make your question about a license choice moot IMHO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:26:14.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6593" CreationDate="2018-03-12T17:30:54.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm concerned though that although my code isn't actually completing any forms, I could be breaking some laws or regulations regarding taxes by posting it online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any such law. But if your concern is about providing legal or financial advice through this software without having a proper &quot;professional license&quot; that could be a requirement in some jurisdictions (may be in the US?) then you could alright provide an extra disclaimer beyond that of your license to this effect. This is uncommon but could have a purpose.  Yet I doubt that software of its own could be considered ass giving any advice whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:30:54.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2018-03-12T17:44:31.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a Java project made by multiple JARs and one of them is LGPL licensed. I know that this kind of license doesn't propagate through the modules that uses it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, that's a shortcut. The LGPL is rather more explicit on the topic and as you will see after, modifications are quite important in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But every code modification that I make to a LGPL library must be published in some way and the license cannot change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that the LGPL at play is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-2.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you modify a third-party LGPL-licensed library you need to read Section 2 and 7 in details as you may be creating a &quot;work based on the library&quot; in which case the LGPL of this one modified library could apply to your whole project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preamble &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.html#SEC2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ends&lt;/a&gt; with this important sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. Pay close attention to the difference between a &lt;strong&gt;&quot;work based on the library&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;&quot;work that uses the library&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. The former contains code derived from the library, whereas the latter must be combined with the library in order to run. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I modified this LGPL Java module for my purposes and now I have some questions:&#xA;  How can I make the code public? Should I have to publish the Java files at first, or do I simply have to send the sources if anyone requests them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way work. Making the source code available with or in the binaries or make it available at the same time and place as the binaries is easier and typically meets the requirements. But again note that you may have extended source code redistribution requirements beyond that one LGPL-licensed if you end up creating a &quot;work based on the library&quot;: this may require help and legal advice to make this determination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should the LGPL JAR contain other resources in itself, for example the license file or other stuff regarding the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should always contain the license for sure, and also extra information to notify of changes. The LGPL text contains details on this for instance in Section 2.b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T17:44:31.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6575" CreationDate="2018-03-14T00:38:28.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can convert proprietary software to Free Software. It has been done many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to pre-arrange this to happen on closure of the company. Then you would probably have to add it to articles of association (called articles of incorporation in some jurisdictions) or memorandum of association. See the appropriate lawyer about how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to explore bcorporation. It was started in US, but has spread else where &lt;a href=&quot;http://bcorporation.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bcorporation.uk/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T00:38:28.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6378" CreationDate="2018-03-14T17:10:10.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dramatiq appears to also provide a Commercial license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://dramatiq.io/commercial.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dramatiq.io/commercial.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Commercial Licensing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Commercial licensing is available to companies or individuals that do not wish to publish their source code. Commercial licenses are invoiced anually and come with NET30 terms. Each license costs $2,000 per year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Companies that are just starting out may get a commercial license free for one year. Ask about this in the “Additional Notes” section when you fill out the form below and tell me about your use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you’re interested in purchasing a commercial license, fill out this form and I’ll get back to you within one business day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10656" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T19:53:53.017" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T19:53:53.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6614" CreationDate="2018-03-15T04:50:05.937" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you simply just take open-souce content and use it as your own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen this a lot of times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this tutorial &lt;a href=&quot;http://slashtutorial.com/rust/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://slashtutorial.com/rust/&lt;/a&gt; was taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stevedonovan/gentle-intro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/stevedonovan/gentle-intro&lt;/a&gt; instead of using a link. The website is already published here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stevedonovan.github.io/rust-gentle-intro/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stevedonovan.github.io/rust-gentle-intro/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10627" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T19:52:37.120" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T19:00:18.353" Title="Are you allowed to use open source content as your own?" Tags="|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6612" CreationDate="2018-03-15T08:57:30.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not take someone else's open-source content and claim that you made it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What open source licenses &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow is that you make a copy and publish that with or without changes, as long as you acknowledge who owns the copyright on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example you give, the version on slashtutorial.com correctly attributes the work to Steve Donovan, so there is no problem there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T08:57:30.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6612" CreationDate="2018-03-15T11:38:15.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stevedonovan/gentle-intro/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; (i.e., the terms under which Steve Donovan offers gentle-intro) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted [...] to deal in the Software without restriction, including [...] the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...] subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since slashtutorial.com does indeed include the &lt;a href=&quot;http://slashtutorial.com/licenses/ahg0AhRo.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright notice and license text&lt;/a&gt; (when you click on the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot; footer link), it may therefore &amp;quot;use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not you consider this &amp;quot;us[ing] open source content as your own&amp;quot; is a matter of semantics -- certainly the author of slashtutorial.com does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; make a claim that it is his or her own, since they clearly attribute Steve Donovan as the copyright holder and author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T11:38:15.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T11:10:35.103" Score="5" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not quite understand what &quot;user-visible display&quot; in the following sentence in RPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&lt;/a&gt;) means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. User-Visible Attribution. You must duplicate any notice contained&#xA;  in EXHIBIT B (the &quot;User-Visible Attribution Notice&quot;) in each&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;user-visible display&lt;/strong&gt; of the Licensed Software and Your Extensions&#xA;  which delineates copyright, ownership, or similar attribution&#xA;  information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPL-covered &quot;Licensed Software&quot; I intend to use is a library given in form of a source code. My product would not redistribute the source code, the &quot;Licensed Software&quot; will be compiled into it and become &quot;unseparable&quot; from the rest of it. The &quot;Licensed Software&quot; provides some communication protocol functionality and is effectively hidden under multiple layers of other code.&#xA;As far as I understand I am not creating extensions to it, so I believe that I have no &quot;user-visible display of Your Extensions&quot;. (It is also interesting to note that &quot;Your Extensions&quot; are not defined anywhere in the license text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, do I have any &quot;user-visible&quot; display of the Licensed Software? Or is &quot;user-visible display&quot; intended to include indirect effects of using the Licensed Software - which is manifested only by the fact that my software would have some features that otherwise would not work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10670" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T13:44:46.590" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T20:52:39.787" Title="What does &quot;user-visible display&quot; in RPL mean?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T20:56:09.003" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanna develop a software in PHP. This software I wanna put under a license which forces every person, which continues the development or makes an addon, to make it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license would be the best and what would be the disadvantage of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to understand some license, but always I was confusing, what is allowd and what is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10675" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T11:02:24.367" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T11:02:24.367" Title="License that forces developers to make their contributions/add-ons open source" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6612" CreationDate="2018-03-18T11:30:17.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@apsillers &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6614/&quot;&gt;has answered&lt;/a&gt; for the specific case. In general the answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can not claim it as your own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But you do have the following freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Free Software definition&lt;/a&gt;. You may also want to consider the less easy to understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source definition&lt;/a&gt;. Both say almost the same thing, but the 1st is focused on user freedom, the second is focused on developer something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also always look at specific licences. However reading the definitions, and checking to see if the definition authors have approved a licence is a good and quick start. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T19:00:18.353" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T19:00:18.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T13:21:45.667" Score="-2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often read that some distributions contain &lt;em&gt;non-free&lt;/em&gt; components while some other are &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an end-user, I don't understand very well the difference between free and non-free distributions. What are the limitations of one compared to the other? When should I not use non-free distributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a reseller, can I sell an equipment with non-free software? Can I sell an equipement with free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it depend on local laws?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Important note&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't ask this question to receive any general opinion. My question is asked to know how one should choose a license or type of distribution,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;political nor &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;philosophical criterion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;technical or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;legal or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;user experience concerns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/104879/free-or-non-free-what-is-the-question&quot; title=&quot;Free or non-free, what is the question?&quot;&gt;Original closed question on unix.stackexchange.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10689" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T19:09:19.190" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T09:15:37.070" Title="Free or non-free distribution, what is the question?" Tags="|linux-distribution|benefits|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T16:42:06.907" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a requirement where I need to send html template based emails and also attach some pdf which is dynamically generated from some more templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be the most common requirements of any telecom, banking, ERP, etc domain applications. To be able to send such communications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there any open source application/micro-service available which i can use for my projects as well..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am currently trying to do the same in GO but the available libraries for pdf generation are not that much mature...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6398" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T09:01:07.367" Title="Open Source Communication Module with PDF generation" Tags="|mit|communication|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6618" CreationDate="2018-03-18T17:20:50.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I often read that some distributions contain non-free components while some other are free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an end-user, I don't understand very well the difference between free and non-free distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference is that with a distribution that only contains free components, you get access to all source code and the right to make improvements/changes to the code (with the right to distribute the modified version).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When there are non-free components, then for those non-free parts you typically don't get those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the limitations of one compared to the other ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When should I not use non-free distributions ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no intrinsic limitations in one or the other, but it might be that some hardware components don't work (or don't work as well) without the non-free drivers from the manufacturer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or a particular application that you want to use is only available as a non-free package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason that people refuse to use non-free software is a philosophical/political/ethical one: They believe that all software should be available for study and modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a reseller, can I sell an equipment with non-free software?&#xA;  Can I sell an equipement with free software ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on the software in question. If you resell the equipment as-is, then you are likely fine, provided that the manufacturer has done his homework.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you are the one that puts the software on the equipment, then you must check all involved licenses to see what your obligations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free licenses don't require the payment of royalties, but may have the requirement that you offer your customers the possibility to obtain a copy of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T17:20:50.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6630" CreationDate="2018-03-18T19:39:42.017" Score="5" ViewCount="3206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to release my LGPL 2.1 licensed java/maven project where I have a dependency to a 3rd party jar also licensed under LGPL 2.1. I've also copied and modified some of the 3rd party project into my own project. &#xA;I have some trouble to understand if I have to handle attribution, and if I do, how do I do it specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear. My understanding of what attribution means when it comes to open source projects, is that if you use someones else work (in my case a 3rd party jar), you have to give the developer of that work some acknowledgement in your own project. In the Apache License 2.0 I understand that this is done in NOTICE file where you can state that: &quot;This project uses 3rdParty project. You can find the contributors at http:/3rdpartyproject.com&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I have a correct understanding of what attribution is? If not, describe why I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What part in the LGPL 2.1 license text states the requirement of the attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do I do the attribution to the 3rd party dependency specifically? If there only are a generic answer, please give an example that is okay, for example, a NOTICE file where a text like this exists &quot;This library uses 3rdPartyProject..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7417" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:07:45.487" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:07:45.487" Title="LGPL 2.1. Attributions required?" Tags="|lgpl|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-19T03:54:49.513" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I run a free website that lets users pull data out of a database that I maintain.  Sometimes users make suggestions as to improvements to existing reports or new reports they would like to see.  While most are good suggestions, I don't always have time to implement them (I maintain the site in my free time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to put on GitHub the Perl/MySQL code that generates everything that the users see to allow those that want to make improvements on their own to do so and I can simply push them into production.  I'll probably post a small sample database that they can use to confirm their contributions work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they want to use any portion of my code in other projects, I'm fine with that.  If they want to download my entire database and modify my code on their personal web server so they can get the exact reports they want, I'm fine with that.  If they want to download my entire database and create their own public front-end for it based on my code, I'm fine with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that really worries me is someone downloading my entire database and code, modifying the code to harm users in some way, and then publishing it on their own webserver(s) with domain name(s) close to mine and pretending to be my site.  There are already sites with domain names close to mine targeting my users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I maintain enough copyright in my code to take down any copycat sites while putting it on GitHub for anyone to use in any other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10694" LastEditorUserId="10694" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T06:32:31.740" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T12:41:08.250" Title="Avoiding copycats when open sourcing website" Tags="|copyright|website|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6623" CreationDate="2018-03-19T06:36:26.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright isn't the right tool for this: trademarks are. Copyright governs how code and data may be used, but trademarks govern the regulation of names and identities generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a registered trademark you may be able to petition that the copycat's misleading sites and domains can be taken down, especially if you can demonstrate that they are harmful. It won't be easy, but it will help you maintain the integrity and reputation of your own safe site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T09:52:55.257" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T09:52:55.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6623" CreationDate="2018-03-19T08:45:09.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as trademarks, copyright some images (just a simple copyright with no license). Put them on the site. It will not help people that are already breaking the law, but will stop most legit companies, and give you legal powers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all about branding. There are many projects that do not include branding in the licence. Many allow use of branding in verbatim copies, but you would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also avoid putting the branding on github. To avoid accidental infringement. This will protect you and the people creating the derivative. You want it as clear as possible. That they are not allowed to use your branding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this will not stop “bad people” from taking the branding from your live site. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T08:45:09.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6619" CreationDate="2018-03-19T09:01:07.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. There are many. I will list just a few below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want it to look gorgeous then use Latex. It is slow to render, but looks great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also pandoc, it can produce html, PDF (needs Latex), ODT, RTF, docx, and many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open/Libre office can also create pdf, and can be automated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other PDF generators that I have used, are for creating graphs, and pictures. But there are many many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T09:01:07.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6618" CreationDate="2018-03-19T09:15:37.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Why and why-not non-free software, a pragmatic answer.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't use non-free, the you don't use non-free (that is the limitation). Maybe you need some non-free for your hardware to work properly. Or there is an application that in non-free that you want to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use non-free, there are also problems. There have been in the past non-free hardware drivers that no longer work on new versions of the OS. Do you remember how hard it was for MS-Windows users to switch to 64-bit. This is because of the non-free drivers could not be ported to the new OS. Linux had a little of this, but only for the few non-free drivers. Original Equipment Manufactures will not do the port on old hardware that they no longer sell, and the community can not. So in short with non-free software you will get much poorer support, things could stop working, security is less likely to be patched (see Microsoft's Windows XP) (I know that old Gnu/Linux distros are also not maintained, but there are distros for old hardware that is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T09:15:37.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6629" CreationDate="2018-03-19T11:27:38.730" Score="0" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to reuse some LGPL'ed code in a commercial piece of software.  Said code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/panogram/panogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you're particularly interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the library itself (written in JavaScript / CSS) has been split over &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; files.  For practical purposes, I'd like to concatenate those in to a single file.  The software itself is web-based, so will never be 'owned' by the user in the traditional software sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do this ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just concatenate the files and send them &lt;em&gt;as they are&lt;/em&gt;, since the user will get a copy of the source code anyway (it being client-side JavaScript / CSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or, do I need to publish this concatenated code, under the LGPL, on (say) GitHub?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only if the rest of the code is LGPL'ed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, on a similar note, are those three possible if I later &lt;em&gt;minify&lt;/em&gt; the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel that concatenating files doesn't really involve &lt;em&gt;altering&lt;/em&gt; them as of such, so is probably within the spirit of the license.  Minifying them &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; altering the source code, and in practical terms makes it harder to &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt;, so is against the spirit of the license.  So, ethically, I wouldn't be happy with the latter &lt;em&gt;even if it was OK in a legal sense&lt;/em&gt;.  However, I want to go off facts, not feelings!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Addendum&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose this leads to a further question about LGPL'ed JavaScript.  If it's client side, is it always fine to use in any project (since the end user will always have a copy of the original source code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10702" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T16:38:26.167" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T16:38:26.167" Title="Concatenating LGPL code" Tags="|lgpl|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6628" CreationDate="2018-03-19T14:32:05.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the LGPL requires you to offer human-readable source code. You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; perform that offer of source code using the exact same HTTP endpoint that serves the code used by your website in production. However, consider two important points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must include the required attribution and licensing header information in your source code as required by LGPL 2.1 section 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must distribute a copy of the LGPL license text (also required by section 1). You could concatenate the full license text to the code file as a massive comment, but that would add needless overhead to the file transfer in production use. You could instead also serve the LGPL license text on a separate HTTP endpoint and refer to that URL in the production code. I'm reasonably sure that this would satisfy the LGPL's requirement to &quot;distribute a copy of this License along with the Library.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for minification, the LGPL requires that you make available &quot;source code&quot; whenever you offer a modified version of the library. The LGPL defines it as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Source code&quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minified code certainly does not meet this definition. If you serve minified code, you must make available the corresponding unminified source to anyone who receives a copy of the minified code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:15:26.437" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:15:26.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6622" CreationDate="2018-03-19T17:09:16.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;1. Do I have a correct understanding of what attribution is? If not, describe why I am wrong.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GPL family of licenses (and in many other licenses), attribution comes in the form of a copyright notice. You may also provide attribution in other forms, but this is a courtesy not required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. What part in the LGPL 2.1 license text states the requirement of the attribution?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two attribution requirements in LGPL 2.1. The first is in section 1, which applies to any distribution of the source code (including modified code and mandatory source distribution alongside machine code):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[you must] conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple enough: in the source code that you distribute, include correct copyright information and don't remove messages that indicate the licensing status of particular files under the LGPL. (e.g., the headers that start with, &amp;quot;This library is free software; you can redistribute it...&amp;quot;) This requirement does not affect non-source binary files you distribute; those will be covered in the next requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second requirement is in section 6. It applies to the distribution of a larger work that includes a linked LGPL library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you must &amp;quot;give prominent notice&amp;quot; that he library is used by your software, and display copyright notices for the library, if your software displays any copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. How do I do the attribution to the 3rd party dependency specifically?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may do so in any reasonable way. The FSF (the author of the LGPL) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliancelab.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says of this requirement&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some common and acceptable ways that &amp;quot;prominent notice&amp;quot; is done is by clearly giving a notice in the user manual that accompanies the software, by stating a notice in an &amp;quot;About&amp;quot; box in a GUI program, or by printing a notice on the screen at System startup. In general, much flexibility is available for giving this &amp;quot;prominent notice&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example for the first part (e.g., that you might include in a manual or About screen) could look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program uses the Foobar Library, which is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public Library, version 2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you show copyright notices in your program, then you must also include a copyright notice and pointer to the LGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software uses the Foobar Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2016 Jane Doe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Foobar Library is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public Library, version 2.1. You can find a copy of this license at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T19:28:09.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6632" CreationDate="2018-03-19T17:28:56.050" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;We would like to  create a web app that is accessed publicly. The code for Berkeley DB is not modified. the code for the web app will not be downloaded or shared with other groups,but is simply accessed in the standard client-server manner via a browser or REST client. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we use Berkeley DB JE open source for his purpose?  I am specifically confused with what &quot;redistribution&quot; means (at that seems to be the crux of the issue here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Berkeley DB docs says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;redistribution&quot; in the Open Source License means your application is distributed to one or more third parties. Giving an application to customers, even in alpha or beta releases, is redistribution. Giving contractors, affiliates, parent organizations or subsidiaries, business partners or support vendors a copy of the application is generally redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/downloads/licensing-098979.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/downloads/licensing-098979.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10706" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:10:53.220" Title="Berkeley DB JE open source in public web app?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:10:53.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/berkeleydb/downloads/jeoslicense-086837.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual license of Berkeley DB Java Edition&lt;/a&gt;, it's just the Apache 2.0 license. If the code for your web service never enters the storage drive of someone else's computer or otherwise ends up physically in their possession, you have no distribution-related obligations because distribution is not taking place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in contrast to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/berkeleydb/downloads/oslicense-093458.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the AGPL 3 license that applies to Berkeley DB&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Java Edition), which does impose coplyleft source-sharing obligations when you allow users to interact with the software over a network. (Whether or not the use of an AGPL database service by a Web service extends AGPL obligations to that Web service is a difficult question for me to answer and certainly merits a separate question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:10:53.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-21T19:07:38.460" Score="1" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using Google's &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/lookup-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Safe Browsing API&lt;/a&gt;. I want to put their logo on the bottom of my input form so that people know I'm using the API. However, I'm not sure if it is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the bottom of the page it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License&lt;/a&gt;, and code samples are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/a&gt;. For details, see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/terms/site-policies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Site Policies&lt;/a&gt;. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the logo is under Creative Commons. The logo is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/images/SafeBrowsing_Icon.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;green shield&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Tommy Dong" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T01:30:18.497" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T01:30:18.497" Title="Can I use Google's Safe Browsing logo?" Tags="|licensing|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6636" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-22T05:14:19.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T05:14:19.917" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T05:14:19.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-22T05:14:19.917" Score="0" Body="Questions about the SIL Open Font License" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T16:26:26.430" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T16:26:26.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-22T09:31:56.033" Score="7" ViewCount="855" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not clear on what counts as a &quot;copy&quot; in the case of code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I read your code, that was MIT licensed, implement a similar logic on my own and use no code fragments from the original author, does that constitute a &quot;copy&quot; without attribution to the original author and therefore a violation of the MIT license if I release the code under my own copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10727" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T14:58:27.987" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T20:00:56.913" Title="Does reading code and re-implementing the logic, and releasing under your name count as a licensing violation of MIT?" Tags="|mit|copyright|source-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6635" CreationDate="2018-03-22T10:58:12.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google isn't very clear on this issue, but their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/permissions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Permissions&lt;/a&gt; page does say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of our brand features are protected by applicable trademark, copyright and other intellectual property laws. If you would like to use any of our brand features on your website, in an ad, in an article or book, or reproduce them anywhere else, or in any other medium, you'll need to receive permission from Google first. And please note that the user experience with all our products should never be altered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though that blurb that you included from the bottom of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/lookup-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lookup API&lt;/a&gt; page does seem to indicate that the logo is covered under a Creative Commons license, I would contact Google to explicitly get their permission before using any of their logos or icons. You can file a formal request with Google here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://services.google.com/fb/forms/permissionsbranden/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://services.google.com/fb/forms/permissionsbranden/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7884" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T10:58:12.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6623" CreationDate="2018-03-22T12:41:08.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, preventing copycats may just be an impossible task. I'm not a web guy by any stretch of the imagination, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But the truth is, the Internet is full of scammers and criminals with malicious intent. People are out there stealing bank account numbers, credit cards, Social Security numbers, account details, personal information, you name it. Do you really think a software license is going to stop such people from simply cloning your repository and using it for evil?  Regardless of legal status or protections, the practical reality is, when you host your code on GitHub, you open yourself up to the possibility of people using it incorrectly. You still shouldn't let that stop you from sharing if that's what you believe is right. And you can still take steps to do right by your users, such as alerting them to known scams. But no, on a practical level, your choice of license will not stop someone who is already willing to break the law to harm innocent people. Neither will any other legal protections. That's where law enforcement comes in. At the end of the day, you can just appreciate that the MIT License reduces your own liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10731" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T12:41:08.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6644" CreationDate="2018-03-22T13:00:09.657" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an open source project I'd like to release at some point. I am going to license it under the AGPL v3, but I'd like people to have the option to pay for private development which only they have access to under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to specify this commercial right from day one of releasing the open source software or can I release it under the AGPL v3 and then at a later date add in a business license for custom development work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume I would need some form of contributor agreement in place to allow for things like this to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not very clear on the specifics I am afraid as this will be my first open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T14:51:02.300" Title="Do you have to specify dual licensing before releasing open source software?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6643" CreationDate="2018-03-22T14:51:02.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don’t have to specify this additional license at all. You can offer it at any point in time, publicly or privately. Just like you can also change the open source license, or add additional ones, or stop offering it as open source at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this requires that you have the rights to do so in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are the only author&lt;/strong&gt; (so you wrote everything yourself), you do have these rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you aren’t the only author&lt;/strong&gt; (so you integrated contributions, or made a derivative work), you don’t have these rights, unless &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the authors licensed their work/contribution under a license that allows it, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the authors gave you permission in some other form (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5804/138&quot;&gt;by signing a CLA&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T14:51:02.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6646" CreationDate="2018-03-22T15:49:41.763" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a little confused around the restrictions surrounding my use of existing (GPL) open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on using open source code (GPL license) to build an application - my plan is to use and modify the code and release a new application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I able to monetize the new application even if I am using GPL licensed open source code? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I change the license type on the new application and offer as a dual-license or am I obliged to offer this as GPL too?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10736" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T08:01:09.627" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T08:01:09.627" Title="Clarification on use of GPL open source code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6645" CreationDate="2018-03-22T19:07:48.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you plan on creating is called a &quot;derived work.&quot; Unless you have specific permission otherwise, you are not allowed to change the license under which you offer your application. It must be licensed under the GPL and only the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license does allow you to make money from your application. The trouble is that it is virtually impossible to make money by selling copies to people, because under the GPL, they have the right as well to distribute the application and to do it for a lower price.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you want to make money from your application, you need to find a different scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T19:07:48.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6648" CreationDate="2018-03-24T20:31:16.633" Score="2" ViewCount="1818" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/include/uapi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;headers that it exports to user space&lt;/a&gt;, however, are not covered by the license. This is documented in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel's licensing rules&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The User-space API (UAPI) header files, which describe the interface&#xA;  of user-space programs to the kernel are a special case. According to&#xA;  the note in the kernel COPYING file, the syscall interface is a clear&#xA;  boundary, which does not extend the GPL requirements to any software&#xA;  which uses it to communicate with the kernel. Because the UAPI headers&#xA;  must be includable into any source files which create an executable&#xA;  running on the Linux kernel, the exception must be documented by a&#xA;  special license expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;special license expression&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note&lt;/a&gt; that clarifies which files the kernel's license applies to. It is also present in the kernel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;  services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;  of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &quot;derived&#xA;  work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User space code that uses the &lt;code&gt;/usr/include/linux&lt;/code&gt; headers are not considered derived works. What are the implications of this? Is the use of incompatible licenses allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10754" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T07:47:52.217" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T07:47:52.217" Title="License of the Linux kernel user space API headers" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6647" CreationDate="2018-03-25T05:24:30.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Note: I am not a lawyer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When creating a derived work of a GPLv2-licensed piece of software, you must keep the original copyright, and license your own work as GPLv2.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This note helps clear up, or rather, prevent, contention on this point - any program running in user space that merely uses system calls (as opposed, e.g., to adding new system calls or modifying existing ones) is definitely &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; derived work of the kernel, as is not subject to the aforementioned restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T05:24:30.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6658" CreationDate="2018-03-25T22:52:33.600" Score="2" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to build a free open-source copylefted personal website under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (or a similar such license).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like to still be able to include some proprietary content, such as a Google Analytics tracking code or a Twitter widget, on the website.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best way to license my original content (and redistributed copylefted content such as from Wikimedia Commons) as CC BY-SA, but still respect the licenses of proprietary third-party content, such as a Google Analytics tracking code, social-media widgets, an embedded Google Maps iframe, or an embedded YouTube video? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For items like Twitter, Google Maps, or YouTube, I could just post hyperlinks to the content instead of embedding it if I really needed to, but I cannot do that for the Google Analytics tracking code (it needs to be on the website to work).  Or can open-source websites only use open-source software (e.g. Matomo or Open Web Analytics)?  I am not sure if I can claim using Google Analytics code is fair use, since free open-source alternatives to Google Analytics already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10760" LastEditorUserId="10760" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T13:43:36.843" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T19:04:16.617" Title="Can I embed proprietary content in a CC BY-SA website?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T01:05:37.867" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that some OSS projects list themselves as licensed under a variant of a BSD N-Clause License. Yet if you would look closely at the license, you would notice they changed it was in the beginning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-* Neither the name of John Doe nor the names of its&#xA;+* Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No surprises here GitHub won't recognize this license. Sure, this modified license bears all other promises, and grants expected rights, but it is not exactly verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be considered a normal practice? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any consideration against?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5339" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T01:05:37.867" Title="Is there any considerations against changing texts of standard OSS licenses?" Tags="|github|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T09:38:27.473" Score="2" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a small closed source library in C++ for a small company using gcc. For the numerics part I need 128bit floating point arithmetics.&#xA;This leads gcc to pull in libquadmath. As far as I know libquadmath is LGPL, which means that it should be distributed as source code along with my binary package. This leads to the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where do I get the sources from libquadmath? It seems that it is developed in the gcc project, which I would not consider to be a reasonable source package for this library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm using the library that is provided by the MinGW-w64 compiler of my linux distribution. How do I ensure to get the right sources?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there alternatives that are easier to handle?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10763" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T09:38:27.473" Title="libquadmath in binary code" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|redistribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6656" CreationDate="2018-03-26T11:43:45.020" Score="2" ViewCount="1244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project template that I have published to GitHub which is currently licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/a&gt; (I am the sole author/contributor). I want to use this template in another project which is also going to be licensed under the ALv2 and published to GitHub (the template will obviously be modified to fit my needs). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have written this code myself, do I have to place the original copyright notice of my template file in my new project file as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example, suppose there was a file in the template &lt;code&gt;CMakeLists.txt&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# CMakeLists.txt - Contains CMake configuration for whole project&#xA;# Copyright 2018 Arnav Borborah&#xA;#&#xA;# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;# You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;#&#xA;#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;#&#xA;# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;# distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;# limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;... Contents ...&#xA;&#xA;Project Name&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in my new project (the one using the template), I do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;# &lt;b&gt;NewCMakeLists.txt&lt;/b&gt; - Contains CMake configuration for whole project&#xA;# Copyright 2018 Arnav Borborah&#xA;#&#xA;# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;# You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;#&#xA;#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;#&#xA;# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;# distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;# limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;... Contents ...&#xA;&#xA;&lt;b&gt;New Project Name&lt;/b&gt;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do I have to do anything else (such as putting the original &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in the root of my project), or do I have to state the modifications I have made with a &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; license notice? (This is my &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; code in both cases.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10764" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T20:39:02.813" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T06:24:24.957" Title="Do I need to place a second license notice on my own code under the Apache License?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T14:48:03.117" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a closed source app for my employer. This app uses libraries under MIT and Apache licenses. How do I comply with these licenses in such a way that it is absolutely clear that these licenses only apply to the libraries and not the closed source app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10766" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T08:03:55.307" Title="How do I comply with MIT or Apache licenses while making clear that these licenses only apply to the libraries?" Tags="|licensing|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6653" CreationDate="2018-03-26T15:42:58.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole author of the code, then there are absolutely no requirements that you need to comply with. The code is completely yours to do with as you see fit. You can even use a completely different license on the second project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accepted contributions from others, then the situation is completely different. In that case, you are bound by the Apache-2.0 license and you need to follow the requirements of that license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means in particular that the files that come from the template project need to remain under the Apache license and that you can't remove the existing copyright notice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There can be reasons to add a second copyright notice for the changes you made while using the template, but there is no need to add a second license text (especially not if it is the same license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T06:24:24.957" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T06:24:24.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6659" CreationDate="2018-03-26T17:28:20.287" Score="2" ViewCount="2319" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read some topics about GPL, Docker images and distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand you have to provide the source code of all GPL licensed programs within a Docker image but not your own proprietary code within that image. If only the Dockerfile is shipped I do not have to provide the source code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering now since the GPL does not consider a cloud service like GitHub as a distribution of Git, if the same is true for a cloud serivce based on a Docker image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if I sell a service as a Docker image through &lt;a href=&quot;https://aws.amazon.com/ecr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AWS&lt;/a&gt;, would this be considered distribution from the GPL viewpoint?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T20:37:23.503" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T20:37:23.503" Title="Is selling a cloud service based on a Docker image considered distribution from GPL's viewpoint?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6649" CreationDate="2018-03-26T19:04:16.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license you apply only covers the content &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; created. If you incorporate someone else’s content, you should make clear that it’s not your content. Without making it clear, your readers might wrongly assume that the permissions you give for your content also apply to the third-party content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant Creative Commons’ FAQ:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#may-i-apply-a-cc-license-to-my-work-if-it-incorporates-material-used-under-fair-use-or-another-exception-or-limitation-to-copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May I apply a CC license to my work if it incorporates material used under fair use or another exception or limitation to copyright?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Be specific in your license notice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A website consists of many different parts that could be licensed, so you should ideally be specific for which part the license is intended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you should note that not (necessarily) all content on the page falls under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your license notice could start with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except where otherwise noted, […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and include which parts are licensed, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;content on this site is licensed under […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this blog post is licensed under […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;images on this site are licensed under […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you could also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4655/138&quot; title=&quot;How do search engines read image licence?&quot;&gt;mark up in a machine-readable way&lt;/a&gt; (e.g., with RDFa) which content falls under CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Mark third-party content&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, your readers can identify the content that isn’t subject to the CC BY-SA license, and possibly also learn what they are(n’t) allowed to do with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To identify the third-party content, you could, for example, provide notices next to that content, or you could reference that content in the footer (e.g., next to your license notice).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the nature of the third-party content, you might of course have to meet some requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the third-party content is &lt;strong&gt;licensed under a compatible license&lt;/strong&gt;, you’ll typically have to provide an attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the third-party content &lt;strong&gt;isn’t licensed&lt;/strong&gt; under a compatible license, but its &lt;strong&gt;use is allowed by law&lt;/strong&gt; (fair use, public domain, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1005/138&quot; title=&quot;Do I have to exclude quotations in the license notice?&quot;&gt;quoting&lt;/a&gt; etc.), follow that law’s requirements (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the third-party content &lt;strong&gt;isn’t licensed&lt;/strong&gt; under a compatible license, and its &lt;strong&gt;use isn’t allowed by law&lt;/strong&gt;, but you have got that party’s permission, follow their rules (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some best practices, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking/Creators/Marking_third_party_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marking third party content&lt;/a&gt; in Creative Commons' wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Embedding third-party content&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the parts your license notice refers to, you might not need to mark items as third-party content at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if your license doesn’t apply to the HTML/JavaScript, a tracking script like Google Analytics isn’t affected; if your license only applies to blog posts, a social media widget in the site footer isn’t affected; if your license only applies to text, a video isn’t affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the existence of a free/libre alternative is irrelevant for deciding if fair use applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T19:04:16.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6657" CreationDate="2018-03-26T19:13:27.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As far as I understand you have to provide the source code of all GPL licensed programs within a docker image but not your own proprietary code within that image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is true insofar as your code is not part of the GPL software. If you write code that is part of the same work (under copyright law) as someone else's GPL-licensed code, then the GPL requires you to share the source code of everything that is part of that GPL-licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...if I sell a service as a docker image through AWS, would this be considered distribution from the GPLs viewpoint?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important question to consider is: can GPL-licensed material from your container end up in a user's local computer memory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of GitHub and other web services, the answer is often &quot;no&quot;: the GPL code receives input via a web service and then hands its output back to the web service for delivery to the user. At no point can a user view or download GPL-licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is a different matter if your users have the ability to view binary GPL-licensed files (even clumsily, e.g., by viewing binary files encoded as text). This might happen if your offer a service (like remote access to a command shell) that as part of its operation allows the user to view the software that makes up the service. If there is ever a point at which a GPL-licensed binary file loads into the user's local computer memory, then distribution has taken place, and you have an obligation to provide corresponding source code for the binary components that the user is able to view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T19:20:05.443" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T19:20:05.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6657" CreationDate="2018-03-26T19:50:12.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example if I sell a service as a docker image through AWS (Amazon Web Services), would this be considered distribution from the GPLs viewpoint ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume in this case that you have assembled custom images available for distribution. My test to determine when redistribution happens is when you pass the control baton. I guess that when someone buys your service, they get access to your image that they can then deploy to their own Amazon WS account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage, you have passed the control baton and effectively redistributed the image (whether it runs on AWS or not is not super relevant IMHO. Instead what matters is that you have transferred the control of the file(s) to your customer and therefore redistributed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once this happens,  you are therefore the distributor (even though it may go through AWS pipes and hardware). And you are responsible to comply with whatever license requirements may exist with the code in this image. If there is GPL-licensed code (say a &lt;code&gt;bash&lt;/code&gt; package) you would have to make sure that you have proper attribution and can provide the corresponding source code. There may be several other licenses that have attribution or source code redistribution requirements, etc. And FWIW the same would apply to a VM image instead of a Docker image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="947" LastEditorUserId="947" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T19:55:16.160" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T19:55:16.160" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6639" CreationDate="2018-03-28T09:06:17.303" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're okay to independently and entirely re-implement an existing algorithm, and then copyright your code, &lt;strong&gt;as long as&lt;/strong&gt; the algorithm &lt;strong&gt;isn't patented&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the lzw compression algorithm used by gif was patented (the patent expired ~2004). And therefore, (a) you couldn't copyright an independently-written gif generator or viewer, and (b) you couldn't even write one without copyrighting it, and just give the code away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And assuming no patent, then to be completely safe about copyright violation, you'd be best off reading a textbook discussion of the algorithm in a cleanroom-like fashion, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&lt;/a&gt; , rather than poring over already-copyrighted code for long hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T09:06:17.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7412" CreationDate="2018-03-28T14:13:01.860" Score="2" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find some data regarding general open source usage and adoption over time. My own impression is that usage and development of open source software is getting more and more common but i don't seem to find any data to support or negate this impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can i find any good reference regarding the growth of open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10782" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T17:50:24.413" Title="Statistics on open source growth (or decline)?" Tags="|commercial|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T18:34:14.347" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have been using this software for quite some time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/advancedhmi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AdvancedHMI&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to sourceforage page is is licensed under GPL v2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.advancedhmi.com/index.php?main_page=page&amp;amp;id=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AdvancedHMI.com&lt;/a&gt; it states &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is AdvancedHMI licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A: In summary, the freely available version can be used and&#xA;  distributed without fees. The project is under GPL which means&#xA;  projects you develop and distribute to end users must make source code&#xA;  available to them. The graphics are copyrighted and can only be used&#xA;  in AdvancedHMI projects. The DLLs can be distributed with projects,&#xA;  but can not be separated to be used in applications other than&#xA;  AdvancedHMI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do not allow the use of the base components to be used in any other&#xA;  software packages, however if you are interested in the controls, we&#xA;  develop custom versions to be used in your own software packages.&#xA;  Eventually we will also license the communication drivers to be used&#xA;  outside of AdvancedHMI. You may contact us for information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is released as a Visual Studio Solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First Question, I believe the DLLs he is referring to are the 3 projects that are in the solution. (I could be wrong). My understanding of the GPL is that if you alter the license to add restriction to it then it is no long actually licensed under GPL and there for can not be used with other GPL works. So wouldn't this mean that it is not actually licensed under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the license file that is included with the source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AdvancedHMI is released as open source solution under the GPL License. &#xA;  AdvancedHMI's growth relies on continued distribution. As the user&#xA;  base grows so does the support and features. The GPL distriution model&#xA;  is intended to benefit us all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to avoid the need to comb through vast amounts of legal&#xA;  jargon, the following is a quick summary on using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) You can use AdvancedHMI to build HMIs for in house machinery or&#xA;  machinery you sell 2) It is an open source project and must remain&#xA;  that way, which means if you build an    HMI and sell the machine, the&#xA;  customer has the right to ALL of the source code just    as much as&#xA;  you did. If you need to distribute under a closed source license, you&#xA;  may    contact us about purchasing a license. 3) The graphics are&#xA;  copyrighted and only to be associated with AdvancedHMI. 4) You can NOT&#xA;  use AdvancedHMI to develop your own HMI development software and sell &#xA;  it under another name (re-branding) 5) AdvancedHMI must be distributed&#xA;  in full. You cannot remove parts or use pieces in another project 6)&#xA;  The included DLLs can be freely redistributed with HMI applications.&#xA;  NOTE: These files are not    released under a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you wish to use AdvancedHMI outside of those basic rules, then you&#xA;  may contact us and see if we can come up with a written agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Something heavily frowned upon is trying to keep the source code from&#xA;  the customer. If anyone has ever worked in a plant and must maintain&#xA;  machinery software, they know there is nothing more irritating then a&#xA;  locked out PLC and HMI that will not allow you to make something as&#xA;  simple as a quick change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The recommended practice is to create a directory named &quot;source&quot; on&#xA;  the target PC and copy the complete VB project in that directory, then&#xA;  create a shortcut to the executable file found in the \bin directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second Question, after doing some digging though the source, It appears that most of the core code is actually in closed source assemblies. It is it permissible to use closed source assemblies in a GPL project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit In Addition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the author of the software the base components are defined 3 projects in the solution. That come with every release. you are not allowed to remove any of them. The AdvancedHMI project dependends on the AdvancedHMIControls project, and the AdvancedHMIControls project depends on the AdvancedHMIDriver project. The other 2 projects are not dependencies of the AdvancedHMIDriver project but if you remove the AdvancedHMIControls Project you get a run time exception that you need to check the license agreement because the Controls project was removed. This exception is thrown inside the closed source assembly that that contains is inside of the driver project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10785" LastEditorUserId="10785" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T20:44:37.333" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T20:44:37.333" Title="GPL Wrapper around Closed Source Assemblies" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T22:22:51.983" Score="9" ViewCount="4381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found 1-2 interesting Jekyll webpage themes that have the MIT license (on &lt;a href=&quot;http://jekyllthemes.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jekyllthemes.org/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use an adjusted version of these themes for my webpage and I understand that I have to show their entire license text somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure where I have to do this. Can I simply copy+paste the MIT license text into the HTML-header (source code)? Create an additional site? Or do I have to also show something like '(c) John Doe under MIT License' at the bottom of the webpage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10787" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T20:29:55.753" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T13:11:58.353" Title="Where to show the MIT license for a webpage theme?" Tags="|mit|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6667" CreationDate="2018-03-29T03:37:04.960" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a license which is designed such that anyone can use my code so long as the license they release it under is copy-left.  However, I'd also like to be able to license my code out for the production of proprietary code if the opportunity should arise.  The idea being that I don't completely shut out the prospect of my code being used in proprietary software, but feel I should benefit if/when it is used in proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10789" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T06:39:03.953" Title="Is there an existing license that is copy-left by default, but allows use in proprietary software through case-by-case negotiation?" Tags="|license-recommendation|copyright|proprietary-code|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6666" CreationDate="2018-03-29T06:39:03.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual-licencing&lt;/a&gt;, and it is a very normal thing to do.  Since you are the copyright holder, you are not bound by the license, and may offer your code to any third party you choose on any terms you choose, including proprietary ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that once you accept &lt;em&gt;other people's&lt;/em&gt; contributions to your codebase you are no longer the sole copyright holder, and you can no longer dual-licence without the use of a contributors' licence agreement.  See eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4092/how-to-accept-contributions-for-agpl-proprietary-dual-licensed-projects&quot;&gt;How to accept contributions for AGPL / proprietary dual-licensed projects?&lt;/a&gt; for more advice on that, including on the possible chilling effects to potential contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T06:39:03.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6671" CreationDate="2018-03-29T22:21:57.570" Score="2" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a crypto wallet for a top 50 cryptocurrency. I'm part of the core team and we were discussing potential liability around the app we're building. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user always has their wallet seed and/or private keys (presumably), so they should always control their funds and that data is never transmitted off the device. We have no idea who has how much, nor could we access those funds if we wanted to (which of course we never would).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously with crypto being the hot thing right now and it &quot;combining all the things you don't understand about money with all the things you don't understand about computers,&quot; to quote John Oliver, apps, protocols, etc. will be a target for law suits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since our app is free, open source, presumably will have multiple contributors, a few maintainers, and the user agrees to use the app &quot;as-is,&quot; are there any legal rulings around similar pieces of software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been looking around for prior cases or rulings that have to do with lawsuits going after open source projects for &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. A lot of what I've found has to do with patents, or suits over licensing, which my question does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any famous/landmark cases where someone sued an open source project for anything (non-patent related) that I could read more about?&lt;/strong&gt; My guess would be that if someone sued Red Hat, for example, if Red Hat (or the computer) crashed and the person lost all of their stuff, that the ruling would likely absolve Red Hat of responsibility. Obviously with crypto/money things are a bit different. I'm more looking for foundational legal/open-source rulings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10795" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:07:28.477" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:07:28.477" Title="Open source crypto project liability" Tags="|commercial|law|bsd|non-commercial|cryptography|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6669" CreationDate="2018-03-30T08:25:03.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone sued Red Hat, for example, if Red Hat (or the computer) crashed and the person lost all of their stuff, that the ruling would likely absolve Red Hat of responsibility&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  Nonetheless, I think that's likely, and it is because almost all free software licences include a clear and unambiguous liability disclaimer.  Here's the one from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.6/COPYRIGHT2.html#5_%5Bunder_General%5D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt;, for example, since you've tagged your question BSD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;  WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE&#xA;  DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT,&#xA;  INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;  (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR&#xA;  SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)&#xA;  HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,&#xA;  STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING&#xA;  IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE&#xA;  POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimers of liability are a pretty (historically and litigiously) well-tested concept.  It's difficult to start quoting cases since you don't specify jurisdiction, but wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclaimer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article on disclaimers&lt;/a&gt; is fairly clear and generally helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under UK law, the validity of disclaimers is significantly limited by the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. By virtue of the Act, a business cannot use a contract term or a notice to exclude or restrict its liability for negligence causing death or personal injury. In the case of other loss or damage, a disclaimer will only be effective so long as it is reasonable in all the circumstances. The common law in other nations may also place legal limits on the validity of disclaimers[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the United States, disclaimers on the sale of goods are covered by Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, but details vary by state. Unless considered unconscionable, disclaimers are generally enforceable as part of a contract between knowledgeable parties of comparable bargaining power, but most states do not allow a party to limit their liability for gross negligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can disclaim your liability to the end-user by using most standard free licences, and courts have generally held disclaimers to be valid, save that if negligence can be proved many jurisdictions will still attach liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://wallet.schildbach.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitcoin Wallet&lt;/a&gt; on my mobile phone, to administer the small amount of Bitcoin I choose to carry around in my pocket.  It's GPL3, whose disclaimer is even clearer than 3BSD's.  It's been very clear with me about the need to have a wallet backup, and often nagged me if I've not made one recently enough.  It's told me I should keep the wallet backup off-device.  If something were to go wrong, I wouldn't &lt;strong&gt;dream&lt;/strong&gt; of suing the developers; I've been well-warned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Obviously with crypto/money things are a bit different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not obvious to me.  I find nothing that suggests you generally have a greater duty of care to your users if you're writing software to look after their money than if you're writing software to look after their data - and it's not at all clear that most jurisdictions recognise cryptocurrency as money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T17:50:56.830" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:50:56.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6665" CreationDate="2018-03-31T12:39:04.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tawesoft.co.uk/kb/article/mit-license-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the theme license should be put together with other licenses existing in your website, or inside the EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have such documents, just write the license somewhere into the page footer, or embedded as a HTML comment as you proposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only important thing is that the license is clear and easily readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10809" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T12:39:04.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T17:27:32.050" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an editor &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/draft-js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Draft.js&lt;/a&gt;. It's licensed under the BSD-style License. Every file in the source code has a copyright notice. Here is a piece of that notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* This source code is licensed under the BSD-style license found in the&#xA;* LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree. An additional grant&#xA;* of patent rights can be found in the PATENTS file in the same directory.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does that text says that PATENTS should be included in a build?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is a build folder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;build/&#xA;  index.html&#xA;  bundle.js&#xA;  style.css&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10811" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:23:41.987" Title="Should I put PATENTS file to build folder" Tags="|licensing|copyright|bsd|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6677" CreationDate="2018-04-01T10:58:21.803" Score="0" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;A font designer that is hosting font on Google fonts has released a latest font version which does not fit with my design. I rather use the previous version of the font and self host it. So I have generated the font-face kit via &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator&lt;/a&gt; and renamed the font  to ;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@font-face {&#xA;    font-family: 'Myfontname';&#xA;    src: url('myfontname.woff2') format('woff2'), url('myfontname.woff') format('woff');&#xA;    font-weight: 500;&#xA;    font-style: normal;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now since I have changed the font metrics &lt;code&gt;within the file&lt;/code&gt; by OFL I need to change the font name as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the part that confuses me. I want to leave all the credits and copyright of the original font designer but becuase I am forced to change the font name do I have to change the copyright, designer website and credits also? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The font will be packaged with WordPress theme so the OFL redistribution clause should be satisfied with that but the renaming part is very confusing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10818" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T08:38:31.397" Title="How to satisfy the OFL and OFL RFN clause?" Tags="|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T21:13:35.990" Score="5" ViewCount="839" Body="&lt;p&gt;In .NET, assemblies have their AssemblyInfo.cs file where one can put general descriptive info about the assembly. &lt;strong&gt;But, where to explicitly put an (open source) license?&lt;/strong&gt; I will have a copyright, which is still mine, but how am I supposed to explicitly license via GPL (in this case?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I do it for now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// General Information about an assembly is controlled through the following &#xA;// set of attributes. Change these attribute values to modify the information&#xA;// associated with an assembly.&#xA;&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyCompany(&quot;marcelsuter.ch&quot;)]&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyProduct(&quot;Replayer&quot;)]&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyCopyright(&quot;(c) 2018 by marcelsuter.ch, GPL-v3 licensed&quot;)]&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyTrademark(&quot;&quot;)]&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyCulture(&quot;&quot;)]&#xA;[assembly: AssemblyVersion(&quot;1.6.2&quot;)]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This does not seem to fit well, is there a better way to state the license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10693" LastEditorUserId="10693" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T09:26:17.443" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T14:03:40.390" Title="In the .NET AssemblyInfo.cs, where to put the license info?" Tags="|license-notice|source-code|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6675" CreationDate="2018-04-02T08:38:31.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#a8c83d32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OFL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: 3.1 Can I change the fonts? Are there any limitations to what things I can and cannot change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer: You are allowed to change anything, as long as such changes do not violate the terms of the license. In other words, you are not allowed to remove the copyright statement(s) from the font, but you could put additional information into it that covers your contribution. See the placeholders in the OFL header template for recommendations on where to add your own statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means you should add your details to the existing copyright details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should never expect a license to allow you to remove any copyright notice, it will always be a case of adding your copyright for your portion of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T08:38:31.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6679" CreationDate="2018-04-02T11:12:20.117" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a Java annotation processor and looking for the correct license to use with respect to some requirements (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, a user of this tool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;depends on it during compilation (it is a Maven artefact with &lt;code&gt;provided&lt;/code&gt; scope, the common/only way of specifying a dependency as only compile and not runtime),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;refers to a Java annotation in their own code (marked as source-only retention, i.e., it is discarded by the compiler) on their own Java interfaces,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gets a generated Java source file that contains some structural specificity from the tool but is simply a derivative of the annotated interface and only refers to their own code (or its dependencies).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is the following: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/victornoel/eo-envelopes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/victornoel/eo-envelopes&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(notice that I answered the question in the README, but I am not actually confident about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to distribute it under a license like the GPLv3.0 (dependencies are MIT or Apache 2.0),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;while letting anybody use it even in proprietary software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not 100% sure it is a valid use of the GPL here, I've identified 3 potentially problematic points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the compile time dependency &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the generated code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the reference to the annotation in user code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10825" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T11:56:45.997" Title="Code generation, source-only dependencies and GPLv3" Tags="|license-recommendation|gpl-3|source-code|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6678" CreationDate="2018-04-02T11:56:45.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably OK, depending on the licensing status of the code that you generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You only hold the copyright to your annotation processor. You do not hold any copyright to the user's programs. The user's programs are merely input data to your processor. Your annotation processor uses automated techniques to transform the input, which does not produce a new copyrightable work. As you do not hold any copyright to the output, you cannot impose any license on that output even if you wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your processor may include templates, or may copy snippets into the output. You hold the copyright for any such templates or snippets. If you license your project under the GPL, this license also extends to these templates or snippets. The output is derived from these templates or snippets, so the output would be subject to the GPL. This reasoning does not apply if the templates and snippets are so trivial that they are not copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you your processor copies templates or snippets into the output, you may want to clarify their status by adding an exception to the GPL to your license. This is possible under the GPLv3 Section 7 “Additional Terms”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have skimmed your project, and there don't seem to be any substantial snippets or templates to which the second point would apply. I would just add an informal note to your README that the output of your processor can be used without any restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T11:56:45.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6682" CreationDate="2018-04-02T19:30:44.217" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently part of the development of an 'engine' that generates a video out of a MIDI file and includes special effects. We would like to make the code open-source, but we need a kind of license I am unable to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, we want the software to be required to have a watermark on the beginning and/or end crediting the original program. The watermark may be modified by the user (&lt;code&gt;Made using {NEWNAME}&lt;/code&gt;) but must also contain a link to the original project (e.g. &lt;code&gt;You can find the original software at {LINK}&lt;/code&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that can do this, and if not, what should we do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10831" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T03:40:47.230" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T03:40:47.230" Title="License that requires to show watermark on video generated by the software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-04-05T10:33:17.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6683" CreationDate="2018-04-02T22:22:48.903" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;ExpressVPN, a free VPN service, embeds OpenVPN and LZO inside its iOS application. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two pieces of software are both licensed under GPL. To my understanding, ExpressVPN must make source code available because of these licenses. I have emailed ExpressVPN asking for the source code of their iOS app, but they have not replied for multiple days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is ExpressVPN required to share the source code, or am I misunderstanding the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10835" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T03:34:07.900" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T05:14:29.043" Title="Is source code required to be published if a program embeds GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6680" CreationDate="2018-04-02T23:48:30.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general you will not find an Open Source license that will apply to the user generated output of a tool. In some cases where a substantial portion of your licensed content is copied into the output you may be able to apply license terms to the output (e.g. like code generated using Bison or similar) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditions.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Conditions.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-with-bison-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-with-bison-exception.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you want is likely the domain of a commercial or &quot;vanity&quot; license or through making binaries available that do what you want and hope that your target audience finds it difficult to modify and compile you code. You may find this causes you to lose goodwill with your community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10656" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T23:48:30.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6681" CreationDate="2018-04-03T07:36:39.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not matter how GPL licensed software is interacting with other parts of the system. Since ExpressVPN distributes an application (the iOS application) which contains OpenVPN and LZO, they must make available the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses&lt;/a&gt;, search for &lt;code&gt;available&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastEditorDisplayName="user10225" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T05:14:29.043" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T05:14:29.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T09:44:35.227" Score="-1" ViewCount="1055" Body="&lt;p&gt;using psycopg2 of version 2.2.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the LGPL as LICENSE file declares, or the item in module setup.py. even in this module, there are two different license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License :: OSI Approved :: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) on module level&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;license=&quot;GPL with exceptions or ZPL&quot; in setup function&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T11:04:38.493" Title="Which license does psycopg2 exactly use" Tags="|license-compatibility|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6688" CreationDate="2018-04-03T10:45:48.507" Score="6" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently involved in a debate on GitHub surrounding a project that is 'GPLv2' licensed and has recently made a change to it's platform requiring new build scripts to be published in order to build the software. The developer is refusing to publish these build scripts on the grounds that they supposedly don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To be clear the developer is still pushing out binary releases of this software and purporting those releases to be licensed under the GPLv2 license, even going as far to include a copy of the license with those binary releases. These binary releases cannot be reproduced without the build scripts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've become aware that the developer themselves are not covered by the license because they are not licensing the software to themselves. However since they are granting access to their software to individuals under the terms of the GPL, isn't that infringing on the users right to the accompanying source code as defined by Section 3 of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL says that any work published in executable form, must be accompanied by source code. Which it later goes on to define as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in effect - what I'm asking here, is simply this: Is this a violation of the GPL, in any shape or form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10838" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T16:37:33.660" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T16:37:33.660" Title="Do the rights of the developer supersede the rights granted to the end user by the GPLv2 License?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2018-04-03T11:04:38.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://initd.org/psycopg/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license pages&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;psycopg2 and the LGPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;psycopg2 is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternative licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you prefer you can use the Zope Database Adapter ZPsycopgDA (i.e., every file inside the ZPsycopgDA directory) user the ZPL license as published on the Zope web site.&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T11:04:38.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6685" CreationDate="2018-04-03T11:28:38.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a GPL violation. The author may offer any code under the GPL, and it need not compose a complete piece of software. The fact that this source distribution &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; composes a complete piece of software is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I wrote a huge program with hundreds of source files, and then chose to publicly release only one of those files (say, chosen at random) under the GPL, that's not a GPL violation: just because the one source file originally had hundreds of sibling files makes no difference. I can license a single file that I authored under the GPL. Now suppose I chose to license a second file: again, the situation is the same. Finally, suppose I license all but one of the files. Again, the situation is the same. Just because I chose to license N-1 files of my program doesn't give you a right to the last file that I chose not to disclose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one critical edge case, though. If the author distributes a binary and alleges that it is licensed under the GPL, but does not provide the corresponding source, then you have an extremely problematic case. (I can't say whether it is legally actionable.) In this case, no one can distribute that GPL-licensed binary because the complete corresponding source was never made available. If anyone else ever tried to distribute it, they could expose themselves to copyright liability from the author for failing to abide by the GPL. However, the author never gave full corresponding source, so the a GPL license grant on the binary is functionally worthless. To say that anyone may distribute the binary under the terms of the GPL is, in practice, a complete falsehood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a copyright violation (since an author cannot violate their own copyright rights), but it does suggest that the author doesn't understand the consequences of their licensing decisions. You might try explaining that, while they are not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to do so, they might &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to reconsider their licensing choice. Releasing a GPL-licensed binary that no one can legally distribute probably wasn't the author's intent, so they should choose a different license for the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author does not distribute binaries, or never claimed that the binaries were licensed under the GPL, this concern does not apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T19:28:57.323" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T19:28:57.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T08:36:35.960" Score="0" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;FreeBSD publishes &quot;ports&quot; (FreeBSD's term for packages) of software covered by the GPLv2, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/ports/databases.html#mysql56-server-5.6.39_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL 5.6&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. ... These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But unless I am mistaken, the FreeBSD ports system is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; itself published under a GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question: how is the FreeBSD project able to distribute GPLv2 software like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it relying on the following exception that is allowed by the GPLv2, or is it relying on some other rationale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3451" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T05:22:07.020" Title="How is the FreeBSD project able to legally distribute GPLv2 software?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|bsd|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6579" CreationDate="2018-04-05T16:18:20.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;friendly fork&quot; is sometimes used when the intention is to merge back into the original project if possible, and to keep in synch with the original project until then. (These are not strict conditions, just a statement of intent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A typical use-case is forking a popular project that appears to have been abandoned by a sole developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T16:18:20.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T16:45:31.040" Score="3" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created an open source software component which I put under the MIT license. I chose it because I don't like legalese, and this license is about the shortest there is apart from public domain (which would allow people using my work without crediting me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now a need may arise to transfer the copyright to a third party for reasons I don't want to discuss further now. So, instead of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2018 My Name&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would read in the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2018 Company name&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this means that people don't have to credit me; they have to credit the company. The MIT license does not have a requirement to specify the true author; it has only a requirement to specify the copyright holder, which may be different from the true author. So I would like this much more than the previous option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2018 Company name&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Authors: My Name&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, which simple and permissive license should I choose? Or should I create a new by very slightly modifying the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify MIT license to require specifying the author(s) in addition to the copyright holder(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Select some existing license, if there is such a license. But my requirement is that the license must be very short, very much like the BSD or the MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual-license under MIT license modification (1) and some other existing license that also requires retaining authorship statements. In this case, since people can choose the MIT license modification (1), it is not a problem if the other existing license is somewhat longer, unless the other existing license contains some unreasonable clauses like patent grants, which the company might see problematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD license with advertising clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options have these benefits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is exactly what I'm looking for.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is exactly what I'm looking for, if there's such a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This allows people not tolerant of license proliferation to use my software, while at the same time allowing more reasonable people to use, distribute and modify my work with the modified MIT license having extremely fair and reasonable terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No benefits, really. This is just evil.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see these drawbacks in these options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modification of the license leads to license proliferation and extra effort because people can't say that &quot;hey, this is the license I'm familiar with and it's ok&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I would like this option the most, there may not be an existing MIT/BSD-like license, so this option may prove unfeasible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the other license is long, it may contain some problematic clauses like patent grants.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is GPL-incompatible. Although I don't like GPL, I don't want to cause problems to people trying to integrate my work with GPL'd work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: which option should I choose? Is there a permissive non-problematic license that requires distributors to retain authorship statements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T07:35:36.240" Title="Simple permissive license that requires author statement in addition to copyright statement" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:00:44.287" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Users will submit content to my website. I want them to license that content under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt; when they do, otherwise they should not submit it. Thus, all user-submitted content will be released under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing this means they need to read and agree to a Terms Of Service. Is there a standard or common way to present a ToS (or other mechanism) that is &lt;em&gt;specifically appealing&lt;/em&gt; to the libre/sharing/commons community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This question isn't limited to CC BY 4.0, imagine it's any Free Cultural Work license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T11:47:27.277" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T13:34:30.123" Title="How do I require users to license future submissions on sign-up?" Tags="|licensing|contributor-agreements|contracts|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6695" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:11:07.080" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to start an open source project that will provide ready-to-use business logos for use in mapping products. Part of the challenge here is that logos are trademarked and cannot be used without the express consent of the trademark owner. I'm willing to do the ground work to get permissions from a large set of the most common companies (I'm already about 30% of the way through that work. However, as the project grows, should a company decide to use my project for their own mapping needs I want them to be required to contribute their logo and allow for its use my the project. For example, a fast food chain with an arch shaped logo cannot use my project unless they are willing to contribute their logo to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any open source licenses out there that would support this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10858" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:47:11.893" Title="Open Source License that requires commercial users to contribute" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6702" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:21:44.757" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I create a CC BY 4.0 work today, and others contribute to it under the same license. Some individual elements will have multiple authors, some will have single authors. Some might include CC BY 4.0 elements from other sources. Some might include elements with earlier CC BY licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All elements will have a statement similar to Stack Exchange, something along the lines of: &quot;User contributions licensed under CC BY 4.0 with [attribution required].&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When CC BY 5.0 is released, I want to simply update that statement to say &quot;CC BY 5.0&quot;. How can I achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T07:52:27.303" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T07:52:27.303" Title="How can I anticipate a smooth transition to CC BY 5.0?" Tags="|license-notice|relicensing|contributor-agreements|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6693" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:47:11.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there are no open source licenses that require contribution before you can use the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most fundamental principles of open source software is that users of an open source project have the right to distribute the project further, with or without modification.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This right does not play well with a requirement to contribute back to the project, because if I would create a fork of your project, who should users of my project send their contributions to? What if they were required to send their logos directly to you, but they live in a country that doesn't allow them to communicate with people living in your country?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem that I see with your project is that it is unclear how feasible a open source license is in the first place, but that could in part be because I don't really understand what your project is about.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At least, I seriously doubt that you can get an open source license for the logos of a large number of well-known companies. Even to get usage rights for the trademarks limitations can be imposed on you that are incompatible with releasing the project as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:47:11.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6692" CreationDate="2018-04-05T17:59:32.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way that &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; does it is a simple statement that you have read and agree with the Terms of Service when registering for an account.&#xA;Some sites use a slightly stronger indication by requiring you to check a check-box to indicate you agree with the ToS.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is all very standard for sites that allow the creation of accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Terms of Service you need to make it clear that user-provided content is licensed to you under the CC-BY license. You could look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal&quot;&gt;ToS for StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; for inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T17:59:32.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6691" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:24:41.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you are considering changing the license on the project, I can only assume that you are the sole copyright holder.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As you are also transferring your copyrights, any clause in a copyright license requiring attribution of you as the author can simply be deleted by the new copyright holder once you have transferred your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that none of the options you have thought about is effective in getting what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The options that &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be effective in keeping attributions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't transfer your copyrights. The company you are transferring the rights to can use the project under the MIT license and add their own copyrights next to yours for the future development they do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the contract for the transfer of the copyright, add a clause that you must be acknowledged as the original author at least in the copies maintained/published by the company.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T18:24:41.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6701" CreationDate="2018-04-05T21:08:12.697" Score="2" ViewCount="1994" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a BSD 3-clause open source project I would like to contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code I would like to contribute is code that I do not own from an open source library released under the LGPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use the LGPL licenced code in source form in the BSD 3-clause project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What special precautions (if any) would I have to take to include it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I must reproduce the LGPL licencing header, would it be better to move the code to a separate file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T06:33:34.007" Title="Can I use code from an LGPL v2 licenced project in a BSD 3-clause licenced project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6730" CreationDate="2018-04-05T23:41:33.340" Score="17" ViewCount="3954" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I translate/port a repository from one programming language to another, do I need to use the license file (Github) from that original project? Or can I use my own license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to use the exact same license, however, I would like to change the name(s) inside the license file. I of course fully intend to credit the original project and it's developers, but this is my first major project and I want to get the license stuff right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code repository that I translated from, uses an MIT License.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My code is not a complete copy of the original code, but I've used some of the same variable names, and some of the code structures. Though I am using a different language and framework, so there are some major differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should I just keep the original license file and simply add my name and year above the original person like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2018 ProGamerGov&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2015 Person Name&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10862" LastEditorUserId="10862" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T01:02:33.077" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T16:18:17.040" Title="If I translate/port a repository from one programming language to another, do I need to use the license file (Github) from that original project?" Tags="|licensing|mit|github|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6689" CreationDate="2018-04-06T05:22:07.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The FreeBSD ports system is not itself published under a GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL only imposes requirements on programs copied or derived from other &#xA;GPL programs. Its requirements neither apply to separate programs that &#xA;are used to distribute GPL-licensed software nor to separate programs that are bundled together with non-GPL programs. The GPL license calls the latter case &quot;mere aggregation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FreeBSD Ports Collection is a web site hosted at &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software which runs on their web server that shows you the Ports&#xA;Collection pages, provides the search ports function, downloading and other features is a separate program&#xA;from any of the packages they provide for download. FreeBSD also provides non-web based programs to &#xA;manage ports, and the same reasoning applies to those programs. None of the Ports related programs (the server software; the non-web based programs) need to be GPLed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;ports&quot; themselves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it true that all of these patch files and Make-related files, &#xA;  some of which (IIUC) seem to be intended to interact with the MySQL &#xA;  source code at a level that will cause their contents to be compiled &#xA;  into the same executable as MySQL, and that have no other identifiable &#xA;  purpose, really constitute a &quot;separate program&quot; that is &quot;merely &#xA;  aggregated&quot; as set out in the FAQ item that you linked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ports-using.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeBSD ports page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Ports Collection is a set of Makefiles, patches, and description files. Each set of these files is used to compile and install an individual application on FreeBSD, and is called a port.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the description is that the Ports Collection does &#xA;not contain MySQL itself. Using their software, you download MySQL &#xA;source, you download the &#xA;FreeBSD port, and then you compile that into something that works &#xA;on your FreeBSD system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the Ports system to make such a MySQL binary, then clearly&#xA;that binary is a derivative work of MySQL, so if you distribute the binary&#xA;to someone else, you would need to comply with MySQL's license, probably by&#xA;distributing the source code of the version of MySQL you used plus the&#xA;patches and scripts supplied by the FreeBSD ports project. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 section 3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only question is whether distributing &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the patches and scripts&#xA;by themselves (this is what the Ports Collection appears to do) therefore obligates&#xA;the Ports project to supply the corresponding MySQL&#xA;source code from their own servers. Presumably, their downloading tool automates the process of downloading the corresponding MySQL source code along with the patches and Makefiles. If the corresponding source code&#xA;became unavailable and the patches and Makefiles continued to be distributed,&#xA;they would probably be obligated to provide the corresponding MySQL source code to you by some means, at least via a&#xA;written offer valid for at least three years (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 Section 3b&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T05:22:07.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6698" CreationDate="2018-04-06T06:33:34.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot use LGPL code in a BSD-licensed project. When you are using LGPL'ed &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; the LGPL behaves very similar to the GPL. You can then only publish your project under the LGPL or GPL (even though some individual files in your project that do not depend on the LGPLed parts may use compatible licenses such as BSD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A LGPL-licensed &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt; can be used by a BSD-licensed project, as long as users (incl. all end users) are free to study and swap out the LGPLed parts of the software. This means either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dynamically linking to the LGPL library, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distributing your project in a way that allows it to be relinked with a different version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the LGPL doesn't just bind you but also other people distributing your project. This would go beyond the usual requirements of the BSD license, so it is worth documenting these additional obligations in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have to link to the original LGPL code. In theory, you can slim down the LGPL'ed code to a smaller library that is still under the LGPL, but that you can link to in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T06:33:34.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6694" CreationDate="2018-04-06T06:48:44.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY licenses are not copy-left. They do not require you to publish the content under the same license. The only big license condition is that you must provide proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, changing the license of the content is totally unproblematic, even when changing to non-CC licenses – as long as you keep the attribution intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is totally different for CC-BY-SA licenses, which are copyleft licenses. The SA-4.0 license has built-in forwards compatibility, so a CC-BY-SA 4.0 work can also be used under a future CC-BY-SA 5.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T06:48:44.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-06T12:28:32.857" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have published my CC-licensed work on a web page (CC BY 4.0, but it could be any CC license with a BY clause). I want to encourage re-use by making it clear how to attribute my work. In fact, I want to make it even easier than &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the best practice guidelines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see, for example, that the Stack Exchange notice line reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...user contributions licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc by-sa 3.0&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/&quot;&gt;attribution required&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.peppercarrot.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pepper&amp;amp;Carrot&lt;/a&gt; notice line reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Webcomic, artworks and texts are licensed under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0&lt;/a&gt; license, unless otherwise noted in the page. Attribution to &amp;quot;David Revoy, www.davidrevoy.com&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The P&amp;amp;C blog happens to contain a helpful entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/article405/best-practices-for-attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Best practices for attribution&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; that includes instructions for minified attribution - but that entry isn't directly linked from anywhere that I can see.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a &lt;em&gt;preferred or standard&lt;/em&gt; way to link to my own, relaxed definition of &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; from my notice line? (Of course remixers can still follow the regular guidelines if they prefer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way, is there documented guidance on &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; I should insert a link to attribution guidelines in the notices below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Example&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Full Name, licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Example&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Myname, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Post by Myname, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do I just have to do it... reasonably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T20:43:35.683" Title="Can I relax the attribution requirement for my CC licensed work? How?" Tags="|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6714" CreationDate="2018-04-06T20:39:13.317" Score="5" ViewCount="1420" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that using AGPL (specifically AGPL-3-or-later) means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all the linking rules from GPL-3-or-later still apply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;additionally, a user accessing the software over a network should have access to the source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if my software links to a regular library, I must also provide the source of that library, just like the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if my software communicates with a database, on the same machine or over the network, I &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; need to provide the source for the database engine, just like the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does the AGPL introduce &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; linking rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider my software communicating with some other piece of software (not a database engine) over the network. Are there circumstances where I must share that code, that I wouldn't have to with the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-exhaustive illustrative example will suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T23:07:58.227" Title="Does AGPL introduce a new type of linking?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|linked-libraries|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6706" CreationDate="2018-04-07T01:30:49.447" Score="4" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA, LGPL and GPL are all copyleft licenses. GPL's key feature is that by embedding one work in another (as defined in a software context), the combined work becomes GPL. With LGPL this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that if I embed a CC BY-SA work in something, say a photo in an article or a song in the background of a video, the work does not have to be CC BY-SA, it could even be restricted (as long as attribution is given). So in this way would it be more accurate to compare CC BY-SA to LGPL rather than GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I assume that a music video of a pre-existing song would be a derived work, but a slideshow with background music would be a combined work. For the purpose of this question let's assume the distinction is clear.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T00:58:22.270" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T00:58:22.270" Title="Is it more accurate to compare CC BY-SA to LGPL rather than GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|copyleft|cc-by-sa|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6705" CreationDate="2018-04-07T07:02:15.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My understanding is that if I embed a CC BY SA work in something, say a [...] song in the background of a video, the work does not have to be CC BY SA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this may be a misunderstanding.  Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, it says in s1a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in s3b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply [...] The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems pretty clear to me that according to Creative Commons, if you embed a CC-BY-SA song in a video, the video must indeed be licenced CC-BY-SA (or under a compatible licence).  I can't comment on the photo issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this really comes down to is what makes a derivative work, and (as writings here and elsewhere attest) this is not a settled issue.  But the distinction is one of copyright law, and not of an explicit exemption (as is the case in LGPL).  So for the purpose of this question I regard CC-BY-SA as much more like the GPL, on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T07:02:15.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6708" CreationDate="2018-04-07T18:19:14.313" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Everywhere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jenny Everywhere&lt;/a&gt; is an &quot;open source&quot; character made before there were Creative Commons licenses. When including her in a work you are supposed to include the Jenny Everywhere Paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit is clear, but is this a legal requirement? If so, can this notice coexist with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BY clauses in CC licenses?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt;licenses like GPL which prohibit further restrictions?&lt;/del&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6319&quot;&gt;(requiring a rights statement is compatible with the GPL)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyleft licenses in general?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T19:03:53.107" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T20:05:45.293" Title="Can I include Jenny Everywhere in a licensed work?" Tags="|license-compatibility|relicensing|public-domain|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6707" CreationDate="2018-04-07T18:19:14.313" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Jenny Everywhere character concept was dedicated to the public domain (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130512111249/http://theshifterarchive.com/ART/SWjenny01.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130512120941/http://theshifterarchive.com/ART/SWjenny02.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20051124094405/http://www.barbelith.com:80/topic/5491&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20080523211531/http://webcomicbeacon.com/2008/04/17/episode-20-jenny-everywhere/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20080807154302/http://theshifterarchive.com/creators.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;), with the explicit intention that she can appear in any work under any license. Similarly to, say, Thor or Sherlock Holmes. (And unlike trademarked and copyright-restricted characters like Mickey Mouse or Superman.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Jenny Everywhere Paragraph is not a legal notice. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jennyeverywhereday.com/WhoIs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Longer works involving Jenny are encouraged to include this paragraph&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, one might even say &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; encouraged, but this is not a legal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make (for example) a copyright-restricted work featuring Jenny, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; include The Paragraph but you are not &lt;em&gt;legally obliged&lt;/em&gt; to. If you include it, you retain your copyright and the character concept remains in the public domain. If you don't include it, you still retain your copyright and the character concept still remains in the public domain. But you don't get invited to parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are including or adapting &lt;em&gt;other works&lt;/em&gt; (that Jenny happens to appear in), then you should always mention and abide by the license details of those other works, as normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want/need to formally recognise her inclusion the relevant fields would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Title: Jenny Everywhere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Author: Various authors&lt;br&gt;&#xA;License: Public domain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Optional text: &quot;The character of Jenny Everywhere is available...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...formatted appropriately for your context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of an unchallenged appearance in a BY-SA work about six years after the first wave of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/nov/06/jenny-everywhere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Jennymania&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Note that The Paragraph does not appear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AnY8T.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AnY8T.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Reality or bust!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130512113709/http://theshifterarchive.com/ART/DianaNock.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reality or bust!&lt;/a&gt; by Diana Nock. Licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0 US&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jennyeverywhereday.com/WhoIs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who is Jenny Everywhere?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversation with Benj Christensen, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jennyeverywhereday.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jenny Everywhere Day&lt;/a&gt; organizer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T20:05:45.293" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T20:05:45.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6723" CreationDate="2018-04-08T06:47:35.850" Score="0" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently the sole author of a codebase, created for my employer, released under AGPL 3 or later. Moving forward, I want to require that contributions are signed, following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/dco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt; convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To date I have not signed commits myself. Do I need to retroactively sign my old commits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T13:01:37.723" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T13:01:37.723" Title="Must I retro-actively DCO-sign my sole author commits for a work project?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6724" CreationDate="2018-04-08T06:56:53.303" Score="0" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/dco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt; protects the codebase from legal threat by requiring that each commit is signed, indicating that the contributor is authorised to make and license the commit (for example, if submitted while working for an employer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To offer this protection, how strictly must this be adhered to? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an automated tool squashes a series of commits into one before merging it into the codebase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a contributor makes a series of commits, but only signs the last one&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T13:02:38.157" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T13:02:38.157" Title="How strictly should I enforce DCO-signing for complete legal protection?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6709" CreationDate="2018-04-08T12:12:51.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, consider why you want to mandate signed commits. They are not a best practice for most open-source projects because they represent a significant barrier to entry – you need to set up GPG, manage a key-ring, and exchange public keys so that they can be verified. Signed commits have most value when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the software is security-sensitive, so you want to be able to tie all contributions to a committer, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the project is likely to be under legal threat, so you want to be able to trace every contribution to an author that has understood and agreed to the licensing and to the Developer Certificate of Origin. The project can then demonstrate through all signatures that they have exercised due diligence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. for the Linux Kernel project, both of these considerations apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are only interested in the potential legal benefits and manage development through GitHub, there are less cumbersome third-party solutions that verify only that the user account of a pull request has signed a DCO. This is a weaker guarantee than signed commits and represents some platform lock-in, but is much more contributor-friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have decided that commit signatures are desirable, then you should only sign the most recent commit, and then sign all new commits afterwards. This is because of the Git data model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All data of a commit is hashed to produce an identifier for the commit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A commit includes the IDs of parent commits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When a commit is signed, the signature is part of the commit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you were to sign an existing commit, its ID would change and you would have to re-write your complete history. But signing old commits is not necessary since the commit references parent commits – so you're not really signing an individual change, but the complete Git history up to and including that change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T12:12:51.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T16:35:27.537" Score="2" ViewCount="746" Body="&lt;p&gt;In AGPLv3 and GPLv3, clause 5c says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program [only if you] license the entire work, as a whole, under this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but then, 0 Definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or &lt;strong&gt;adapt&lt;/strong&gt; all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;modified version&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; of the earlier work or a work &quot;&lt;strong&gt;based on&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that I have to modify the source to actually make my code fall under (A)GPL? Or just relying on (A)GPL software (let's say a database) makes my software automatically 'adapt' the (A)GPL software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the license there is nothing about 'derivative work'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10879" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T18:18:46.663" Title="(A)GPLv3 - 'covered work' and 'based on'. is it really viral?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2018-04-08T18:18:46.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is – does “relying” on the (A)GPL software require a copyright license from the (A)GPL authors? This depends on your applicable copyright laws, not on the (A)GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you do not publish (or publicly perform) your software, copyright is irrelevant and you do not need the (A)GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your software and the (A)GPL software are entirely separate programs and only communicate “at arms length”, then they are surely separate programs and the copyright of the (A)GPL software cannot affect your software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your software is combined with (A)GPL software into one program, there is some debate whether this means that the (A)GPL also applies to your code. It is safest to assume that it does apply, so you can only publish or publicly perform this program if you follow the (A)GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not necessary to &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; the (A)GPL licensed software. Including it or combining it with your software may be sufficient to trigger the (A)GPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of databases, this can be fairly tricky as the database server and the database driver inside an application may or may not be sharing intimate data structures. I would generally assume that such sharing is not the case, so that the copyright license of an unmodified database server software does not affect your software. E.g. running an (A)GPL database on an internal network does not subject a public web server that connects to this database to the (A)GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T18:18:46.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6704" CreationDate="2018-04-08T23:07:58.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the AGPL does not introduce a new kind of linking. The GPL and AGPL derive their validity solely from copyright. With regards to linking, they are only applicable insofar as linking creates a derivative work that could otherwise not be used without violating the copyright of the linked code. The licenses cannot invent new kinds of linking. However, they could allow certain kinds of linking, as the LGPL does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the requirement of the AGPL to make the corresponding source of modified versions available could be derived from the right to public performance, which is one aspect of copyright. The (A)GPL seems to consider public performance an aspect of “propagating” the work. The (A)GPL allows public performance of unmodified works without special restrictions. For modified versions that users can interact with over a network (i.e. a public performance which requires permission from the copyright holder) the AGPL only allows this under the condition that the corresponding source of the modified is offered to the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write software that interacts with (A)GPL'ed software over a network, it is difficult to see how the (A)GPL could apply in any way to your software, since your software is almost certainly not a derivative work of the (A)GPL'ed software. The GPL and AGPL are identical in this respect, and both allow you to run unmodified versions without restrictions. The AGPL only differs from the GPL with respect to remote network interaction with modified versions of AGPL'ed software, and then only places restrictions on that modified version, not on users of the modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T23:07:58.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6710" CreationDate="2018-04-09T09:23:47.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no complete legal protection. DCOs make it easy to prove that all contributors have agreed to the licensing conditions. But if the contributors do not actually follow the conditions in the DCO, you might still get code without a proper license. With respect to these risks, it is mostly irrelevant how often you sign your commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your concrete questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you rewrite history (e.g. squash or rebase commits), then you get a new commit. Any signatures that are part of the original commits will be lost. So if you want to be able to trace signatures exactly, you should prefer history-preserving operations such as merging.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A git commit is immutable and references its parent commits, so the commit represents the complete history that led up to this state. So a git repository is a bit like a blockchain. Therefore, signing only the most recent commit on a branch implicitly signs the whole history up to and including that commit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T09:23:47.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6717" CreationDate="2018-04-09T10:39:13.520" Score="4" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt; mentions a signature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean a cryptographic (GPG) signature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T13:02:08.717" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T13:54:45.027" Title="Does the DCO require a cryptographic signature?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2018-04-09T10:39:13.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typically all you need is a text signature, which you can achieve with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git commit -s&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the signing mechanism is not defined by the DCO, but by the project. Some projects may ask for a cryptographic signature, others may ask that you use your work-based email (if submitting from work), others may ask that you send an email, or some combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based a determination by the project balancing ease-of-use and legal risk. (Similarly to a CLA.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The DCO uses a common law technique called agency by which a person can act on behalf of an entity like a corporation... using a corporate email as a developer is [an example of] such a sign of authority. (James Bottomley, &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/a-modest-proposal-on-the-dco/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A modest proposal on the DCO&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/dco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/dco&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://julien.ponge.org/blog/developer-certificate-of-origin-versus-contributor-license-agreements/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://julien.ponge.org/blog/developer-certificate-of-origin-versus-contributor-license-agreements/&lt;/a&gt; (includes suggestion for cryptographic signatures as further mitigation, but references text sign-off as a common practice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Examples:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pybee.org/contributing/how/dco/what/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyBee contribution instructions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/a&gt; (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6721/1082&quot;&gt;GitLab Case Study&lt;/a&gt; for some legal analysis)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.samba.org/samba/devel/copyright-policy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samba copyright policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T18:17:10.473" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T18:17:10.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6092" CreationDate="2018-04-09T10:59:55.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not need to provide the source to applications that you merely communicate with over the network. If your application is &lt;em&gt;linked&lt;/em&gt; to another codebase &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6704&quot;&gt;(the definition is the same in both the GPL and AGPL)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you need to provide the source as usual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, this simply means that you can regard your application as running on the user's machine. Anything you would have to provide if it were running on their local machine under the GPL, is what you must provide if they are accessing it over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T10:59:55.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:19:53.347" Score="3" ViewCount="8697" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in the process of creating a project that I would like to make open source for the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I would like to restrict the use of my code to non-commercial use only. Is this possible? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, am I able to specify that if my source code is used for any commercial activities then I am entitled to receive a compensation or would that require I choose a dual-license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10736" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T14:51:27.113" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T18:11:04.457" Title="Non-commercial licensing recommendation" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-04-16T01:14:34.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6719" CreationDate="2018-04-09T14:53:08.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No OSI- or FSF-approved software license allows you to restrict commercial use. There are some Creative Commons licenses with Non-Commercial clauses, but they are not suitable for software (no warrantee clauses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, if that is a strict requirement of yours you will need to dual-license (I assume you mean pick a copyleft license and then dual-license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you will need to get contributors to sign a CLA giving you copyright of their contributions, so that you can relicense the whole codebase. This will most likely reduce your potential pool of contributors: some won't contribute for philosophical reasons, and there is simply a bigger barrier to entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One alternative is to skip the dual-licensing and just use a copyleft license. While these licenses allow commercial use, most companies avoid them because the requirement to release source code isn't compatible with their business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Obviously the few companies that do have compatible business models would be able to profit from your work. However, they could do this anyway if you dual-license. They are likely to be warmer to a regular copyleft rather than dual-license, you will have access to any changes they distribute, and they will most likely contribute those changes to you directly.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-09T15:01:28.897" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T15:01:28.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6533" CreationDate="2018-04-09T16:37:09.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Case study: GitLab&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitLab had MIT and Apache codebases both covered by a CLA. They switched to the DCO for both, citing ease-of-use and honouring contributor rights as the primary concern (as suggested by the Debian project). When evaluating the DCO, key features they required were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patent protection (already covered by Apache 2.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inbound=outbound (already covered by Apache 2.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warranty of provenance&lt;/em&gt; specifically in the case of corporate contributors:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The DCO would seem to cover [warranty of provenance], but doesn’t necessarily provide GitLab with standing to bring suit in the event of a breach... [but] the likelihood of GitLab bringing suit, or an individual contributor being able to defend a suit, is low.  As for corporate contributors GitLab preserves its ability to enjoin the potential corporate defendant in a lawsuit if GitLab were ever to face litigation. (Quoted under fair use.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus warranty of provenance to &lt;em&gt;mitigate&lt;/em&gt; inter-corporation lawsuits is a distinguishing feature of the DCO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-license/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zpjDzL7yhGBZz3_7jCjWLfRQ1Jryg1mlIVmG8y6B1_Q/edit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MEMO CLA vs DCO + License&lt;/a&gt; (GitLab analysis leading to the change)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T16:37:09.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6709" CreationDate="2018-04-09T17:49:58.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Response from the Linux Foundation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most projects that implement the DCO after being in development without it start by first requiring it for all future commits. Some will then go back to contributors and get a signed-off-by for their prior commits in a simple text file they check into git with the various commit hashes of their contributions (usually in a docs folder).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T17:49:58.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6709" CreationDate="2018-04-09T17:56:18.963" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the sole author my &quot;unsigned&quot; commits follow whatever agreement I currently have with my employer. If it is my employer, not me, who will be in a position to legally defend the code, there is no strict need to sign the old commits. (And, as pointed out by Amon, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6711/1082&quot;&gt;old commits are probably covered by any current signature&lt;/a&gt;. In the worst case, I can &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6722/1082&quot;&gt;retroactively sign the hashes via a text file&lt;/a&gt;, as suggested by the Linux Foundation, if the need arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T17:56:18.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6710" CreationDate="2018-04-09T18:03:40.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing as the DCO is intended to mitigate legal threat, a per-commit policy technically maximises the mitigation. (But as pointed out by Amon, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6715/1082&quot;&gt;practically irrelevant, as long as signatures are preserved&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6533/what-additional-benefits-does-the-dco-provide&quot;&gt;What additional benefits does the DCO provide?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6721/1082&quot;&gt;Case study: GitLab&lt;/a&gt; (points out that mitigating inter-corporation lawsuits is the goal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T18:03:40.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T22:28:51.553" Score="1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use qmake to build &lt;strong&gt;Non Qt&lt;/strong&gt; programs with a closed source or MIT licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The c++ code that I'm building does not include any Qt headers or link to any Qt libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only mention of Qt in any of the projects source files is the following line in the projects .pro file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;QT -= core gui widgets&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume using qmake in this way would be just the same as using cmake or gnu make and so would not violate the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10891" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T22:28:51.553" Title="Building programs using qmake" Tags="|gpl|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6727" CreationDate="2018-04-10T03:30:58.353" Score="4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering about the meaning of this term in CC BY-SA 4.0 (and others), with this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to the conditions in Section 3(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply.&#xA;  The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the most extreme but perhaps not unthinkable case, what if Creative Commons releases a &quot;CC BY-SA 5.0&quot; license in the future that removes the requirements for attribution and copyleft -- or maybe even the disclaimer of liability? (The title would then be a misnomer, but I hope that isn't a legal requirement.) Yes, such a license would be incompatible with BY-SA 4.0 if it came from a third party, but the requirement of compatibility doesn't seem to apply for licenses coming from Creative Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under my interpretation, a third party Bob could then 'adapt' my (or any BY-SA 4.0 author's) code in his BY-SA 5.0 (or 6.0, 7.0, etc.) project. Then, transitively, any other programmer could take Bob's 5.0 work (which is really just my work) without crediting me or disclosing source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here are my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my above interpretation correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any measures in place that would protect me from this happening, either legally binding (in the license) or not (e.g. a mission statement from CC or other nonbinding promise)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way for me to license my FLOSS works under CC-BY-SA 4.0 without allowing derivative works to be licensed under e.g. CC-BY-SA 5.0, like you can do with the GPL (by just saying 'v2 only')?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T20:26:08.493" Title="Protection from 'this version or later' in CC BY-SA" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6726" CreationDate="2018-04-10T12:45:32.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation is correct, you are relying on the license steward (in this case Creative Commons) to continue to act in good faith and according to their &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/mission-and-vision/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vision and mission&lt;/a&gt;. You cannot add restrictions to CC licenses, you can only give more permissions. So you won't be able to restrict users from using a later license if the current license gives them that permission. (As a side note, a similar provision exists in CC BY-SA 3.0.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my observations (made since CC was formed) I think the specific scenario you suggest (dropping the BY clause) is incredibly unlikely. In fact, CC previously &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; a bunch of licenses without a BY clause. They stopped updating them because so few people used them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And despite that change they still have a mechanism by which you can ask for your name to be removed from a derivative work. So even when &quot;dropping&quot; a license option, they have provided some way to get similar functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, CC are focused on making sure the existing works remain shareable, rather than making arbitrary changes. For example, they spent some time addressing new &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database laws that threatened the ability to share works with older licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the steward of our licenses and one of several stewards of the greater commons (including the Free Software Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation), we remain mindful and take with utmost seriousness the risks associated with shifting course. We fully intend to (and expect to be held accountable for) strengthening our messaging to policymakers about the dangers of maintaining and expanding [&lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights] within the EU and beyond, and of creating new related rights. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2011/11/03/copyright-experts-discuss-cc-license-version-4-0-at-the-global-summit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/2011/11/03/copyright-experts-discuss-cc-license-version-4-0-at-the-global-summit/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general copyleft &quot;upgrades&quot; rely on a decision by one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the sole author (who may die or otherwise be untraceable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all collaborators (a coordination problem, plus one or more may be untraceable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a proxy (same as the sole author, or if an organization, same as a steward)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license steward (no searching for the author/s, the author puts their trust in the steward)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC have gone with the option that puts the least burden on the author, and the least burden on recipients/contributors, to continue sharing works in the spirit that they were given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T15:41:01.930" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T15:41:01.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-10T13:06:26.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt; (DCO, currently v1.1) is a mechanism declaring that the contributor has permission to make the contribution. This is applicable, for example, if the contributor is working on behalf of an employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally created for the Linux kernel, the DCO is now used by multiple free software projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T00:20:21.563" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T00:20:21.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6729" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-10T13:06:26.837" Score="0" Body="The Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is a mechanism declaring that the contributor has permission to make the contribution. This is applicable, for example, if the contributor is working on behalf of an employer." OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T00:20:34.877" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T00:20:34.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6699" CreationDate="2018-04-10T16:18:17.040" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you port a project to a different programming language, it is quite likely still a derivative work. This is especially the case when you (fully or in part) copy the structure of the code, and particular expressions of the same ideas. You can therefore only publish your code if you follow the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is very liberal. So while you must still keep the original license around to credit the original authors, you can choose almost any license you like. In the simplest case, you can keep the MIT license and add a line with your copyright, as you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example using the same license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2018 &amp;lt;Your Name&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright 2015 &amp;lt;Original Author Name&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;Original License text&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example using a different license, or the same license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Your Software is a program that does this and that.&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2018 &amp;lt;Your Name&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;Your License text&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;---&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;Your Software&amp;gt; was ported from &amp;lt;Original Software&amp;gt;:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2015 &amp;lt;Original Author Name&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;Original License text&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can put the original license in the same file, or put the original license in a separate file like &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;ORIGINAL_SOFTWARE&amp;gt;_LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;, and reference it from your license. Especially for the short MIT license, I would prefer to keep in in the same file to reduce confusion. For longer licenses such as the GPL or Apache licenses, I would create a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file that contains the copyright statements and notes the licenses, but refers to separate files for the full license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to note that different projects use &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; files differently. If we want to be pedantic, there is a difference between the license, and the text with the full licensing conditions. The actual license is the part that explains which licensing conditions apply to this project. Some projects put the license into the README and the conditions into a LICENSE file, others put the license and full conditions into the LICENSE files, while some put the license into the LICENSE file and the conditions into a separate file. A few projects include a file with licensing conditions, but do not make it clear that the copyright holders have in fact licensed the project under these conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T16:18:17.040" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6732" CreationDate="2018-04-11T06:58:04.230" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is simple: is displaying an unreleased product containing open source software at an exhibition considered distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I am concerned about GPL obligations. If the software being displayed contains GPL-licensed software and public display counts as distribution, then I would have a copyleft obligation to share the source code of the displayed software. Does public display cause me to have such an obligation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T11:26:18.120" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T16:28:30.027" Title="Distribution and display at fairs / exhibitions" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2018-04-11T16:28:30.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just showing a product at an exhibition is not considered distribution under any interpretation. That is as much distribution as showing a photo or video of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most licenses, including the GPL, there are two ways that distribution can take place (and he copyleft obligations start to apply):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You physically hand over a device using the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You give someone outside your organisation control over the choice to install or remove the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license has another way that the copyleft obligations come into force and that is when users can use the software over a remote connection.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is a chance that this clause triggers if you demonstrate software containing AGPL parts and allow users to play with it during the demonstration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyleft obligation of providing source does not mean that you must actively hand out the source code, but rather that you must give it when people ask for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T16:28:30.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6738" CreationDate="2018-04-11T17:12:19.207" Score="7" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;I preserve old software by asking copyright owners (often one author) to release the source code under an Open Source License, GPL or MIT. In many cases the source is gone, but the binaries still exist. Often they were released under some home made license 20 years ago. If I'm correct the binaries could be released under MIT, which would give them a world wide recognized license, keeping the copyright owner, but also make it possible to do derived works for the user in clear legal way? (I know that much of this would fall under &quot;abandonware&quot; but that is not a legal term). So the question is - is MIT a correct choice for binaries where the source code is lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10907" LastEditorUserId="10907" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T18:29:01.903" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T14:00:45.500" Title="With source code lost, can the binary be released as MIT?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6737" CreationDate="2018-04-11T20:59:58.740" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a web-app of the popular board game Onitama, and am looking to host the code open source on Github, and on the portfolio website I'm building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I'm not putting any adds on the site or monetising the game in any way is it legal to use in my job search and to allow strangers to enjoy it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license would I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10909" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T23:48:37.620" Title="Is it legal for me to make a fan game to find a job?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6736" CreationDate="2018-04-11T22:04:02.883" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm searching help with a project that is about versioning and querying as well as visualizing of time varying data at the subfile level. It's open source and written in Java, especially well suited for flash drives as for instance SSDs while not dropping support for erstwhile hard disks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm struggling to find interested people. So how do you put the word out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10911" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T07:24:30.420" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T07:24:30.420" Title="How do you get someone to use or even contribute to your Open Source project?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6735" CreationDate="2018-04-11T23:18:21.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The typical project life cycle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;build something that's useful, but buggy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people start using your software because it is useful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people are annoyed because your software is buggy, and is missing important features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;people are so annoyed that they just write you a pull request&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you now have a contributor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the new contributor has the feature they wanted, and leave&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repeat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various ways to increase the probability that these steps work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building something useful is more easy when it is actually useful &lt;em&gt;for you&lt;/em&gt;. What problem are you having? Are you sure there's no existing solution to this problem? For potential users: Is using your software easier than just reimplementing the useful parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can users find your software? When they research their problems, make sure they find your software as a potential solution. E.g. write a tutorial. Create a simple homepage with the documentation. Blog about it. Pick a non-silly name. Keep your project looking alive and maintained. Release your software in easy-to-use formats, e.g. by uploading your Java software to Maven &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; adding JAR download to the project homepage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people want to contribute, how difficult is this for them? Make contributions easy by making sure the code is reasonably tidy and well-structured. A test suite is very helpful to avoid regressions. Set up an automated build. Host your development on a public git service, preferably GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even then, there is no guarantee that your project will attract contributors. And the above loop might very well take years, not weeks. To be blunt: most projects just aren't actually useful. I have written a lot of non-useful open source software. The useful stuff I've done was either PRs to other projects, doing maintenance on existing projects later in their lifecycle, or blogging about technical issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially for many open-source projects that start in an academic context, there isn't a strong problem in the first place. The software is often just a vehicle for papers and graduation projects, which is a problem that is not shared outside of a working group (I say this as someone who has written such software). Hugely successful projects from academia tend to be common infrastructure or unrelated tooling that can be spun off. E.g. consider TeX, Numpy, or Pandoc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T23:18:21.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6734" CreationDate="2018-04-11T23:48:37.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you didn't copy any code directly, this is more a question of trademark (using the Onitama name) and patent (covering the way the board game works) infringement than copyright, if either of those apply. Generally, game mechanic-type patents are difficult to enforce (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nullpomino/nullpomino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nullpomino&lt;/a&gt;, which labels itself as an 'action puzzle' game and to my knowledge hasn't encountered legal trouble despite being an exact clone of Tetris mechanics).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you don't use the original 'Onitama' name anywhere in the code, I don't think it will be an issue. You can use any FLOSS license on the code, because those generally only cover copyright without respect for trademarks or parents. A notable exception would be the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which has a few patent restrictions&lt;/a&gt; that I'm not sure would apply to this situation or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T23:48:37.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6733" CreationDate="2018-04-12T00:04:10.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no reason you couldn't do this and I think it may be your best option, though I'm not aware of any well-known uses of MIT/Expat in this way. I wonder if a non-code license like CC-BY would work better, or CC0 if you don't need attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally 'freeware' developers make their own licenses and there is little standardization. The closest example I can think of would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.binpress.com/license/generator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Binpress&lt;/a&gt;, which is a somewhat common license generator that can make both free and nonfree licenses, and it's been used to distribute binary files before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also be interested in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.floodgap.com/software/ffsl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Floodgap Free Software License&lt;/a&gt;, which was designed for both binary and source distributions and allows modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastEditorUserId="10893" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T14:00:45.500" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T14:00:45.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6744" CreationDate="2018-04-12T22:02:34.853" Score="7" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a free project on Github. I fork it, made some changes, did a PR and everything worked ok (PR was accepted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I update my fork with upstream, did some other changes, and made another PR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I realised that my PR included all the commits I pushed earlier, and every file I modify, even the ones I already sent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the upstream to be up to date, but I failed somewhere, or my fork, never understood that I was up to date (I even made the push).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to avoid that, I made a branch only with the file I changed. However, the PR still want to send all the commits I made to the repo. The files in this case, are ok, only modified files are on the PR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the correct way to work with a fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I missed a step after upstream and push? or should I delete my fork after every PR and start all over again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10919" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T08:32:24.723" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T13:38:08.450" Title="Once I did a PR on a repo, should I delete my fork?" Tags="|github|git|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-04-13T07:01:33.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You aren't using git branches correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you should create a branch each time you want to submit a PR, make all the changes on that branch (could be more than one patch) and push it from there.&#xA;Once the PR is accepted, you should rebase your &lt;strong&gt;master&lt;/strong&gt; branch from the &lt;strong&gt;upstream master&lt;/strong&gt;, and when you have another idea you want to contribute, make sure your master is up to date, and create another branch from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T07:01:33.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-04-13T11:10:06.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the steps you need to do to get a clean, nice pull request. I generally suggest this workflow to people with less previous exposure to git. You could make a rebase on auth repo master, but this might lead to non-trivial merging, depending on the delta. Therefore: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not delete your fork. That was bad advice in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fetch the latest master branch from the target repo to your local clone (on your computer, not your fork).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create a new branch based on that latest official master branch&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cherry-pick all the changes for your second pull request onto your new branch (ideally with &lt;code&gt;git cherry-pick -n&lt;/code&gt;, so you can make a new nice topical commit).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Push your new clean branch to your fork&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a pull request from your new clean branch on your fork to the official repo's master branch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yay - &lt;strong&gt;Now you have a pull request with only your new changes!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a sidenote: A bit of advice for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, you should look at your local clone for all the work. The fork is just a place where to put your finished or half-finished work so it doesn't vanish when your local computer dies, and to collaborate with others.&#xA;Always start new changes based on the latest master of the official/authoritative repository.&#xA;With more experience, you most likely want to rebase your changes daily on authoritative master to always keep only a small delta in order to facilitate merges and simplify your cognitive load when developing and bugfixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10925" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T11:10:06.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6751" CreationDate="2018-04-13T12:40:51.983" Score="2" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;In every open source software community, there is a small group which pay effort on compiling and packaging open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a advantage of open source software, everyone can read the source code and modified easily. Hence, open source software seems secure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However not all user installing open source software by downloading the source code tree and compiling it by themselves. In fact the most of user will download a compiled binary or a package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if there are evil guys in compiling and packaging team. How to ensure the security of software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10926" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T12:54:46.530" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T21:03:30.783" Title="How to prevent integration with malware and virus of open source software in compiling section?" Tags="|distribution|community|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6740" CreationDate="2018-04-13T13:38:08.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One useful way of handling long-term contributions from a fork could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Never touch &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt;. On your fork, &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; reflects the status on the main project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, configure an &lt;code&gt;upstream&lt;/code&gt; remote on your machine to the original project. You can do so by running &lt;code&gt;git remote add upstream https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git&lt;/code&gt; (You need to do this only once).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever you're doing changes, always do them on a branch. If you're working on the &lt;code&gt;feature-guau&lt;/code&gt; branch, you do commits to it and pushes. All of that will be on your fork.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once your feature is ready, you can create a PR from &lt;code&gt;yourfork/feature-guau&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;original-project/master&lt;/code&gt; (you do that on GitHub).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The maintainer may ask you to do changes. Every time you work on it, you keep on pushing to your branch, and that updates your PR.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once the maintainer merges your PR, your changes are on &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt;, but yours is outdated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What you can do now, is &quot;bring&quot; their &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch from &lt;code&gt;upstream&lt;/code&gt;. To do so, you can:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run &lt;code&gt;git checkout master&lt;/code&gt;. That switches your working copy to your &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; (that is outdated).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run &lt;code&gt;git fetch upstream&lt;/code&gt;. This makes your local git aware of the changes existing on &lt;code&gt;upstream/master&lt;/code&gt;, but doesn't do any changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Run &lt;code&gt;git reset --hard upstream/master&lt;/code&gt;. This makes your &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch point to the same commit that's on the original project. &lt;strong&gt;This loses any changes on your &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch, but from my 3rd point, you shouldn't have any&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lastly, you can update your fork so that in GitHub, it's in sync with the original project. You can run &lt;code&gt;git push -f&lt;/code&gt; for that (it's not advised to do so if multiple people are working on your fork... but... I understand that's not your case).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 7th step can be done at any moment, as a way to sync your &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; branch with the original project. Then, you can either merge &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; with your branch or rebase it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10927" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T13:38:08.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T01:04:28.023" Score="6" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob writes an article and licenses it under CC BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_and_exceptions_to_copyright&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia: &amp;#39;Limitations and exceptions to copyright&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;Certain laws&lt;/a&gt; can permit Bob to include someone else’s content in his article, even if this content isn’t compatibly licensed. For example, Bob may have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia: &amp;#39;Right to quote&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;right to quote&lt;/a&gt; an image in his article. By including this image in the article, it &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;doesn’t&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; get licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, because Bob is not permitted to license it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6658/138&quot; title=&quot;Answer to the question &amp;#39;Can I embed proprietary content in a CC BY-SA website?&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;the license only applies to the parts that Bob created himself&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May Bob quote his own image this way, too?&lt;/strong&gt; So that his image (although Bob would be permitted to license it under CC BY-SA 3.0) doesn’t get licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the article or the image is published pseudonymously/anonymously, no one else would know, and the question doesn’t arise. So I’m asking about the case where the reader can see that Bob is the author of both, the article and the quoted image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt; Bob wants to publish the article on a site that licenses all contributions under CC BY-SA 3.0, but he doesn’t want to license this particular image. So in case other contexts would allow Bob to exclude parts of his work for any reason from getting licensed anyway, this context isn’t one of them. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/309025/193139&quot; title=&quot;Is my copyrighted artwork protected if I upload it to a post?&quot;&gt;loosely inspired by a Meta SE discussion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:54:10.753" Title="Quoting your own content (in your own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0) to avoid licensing it" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T02:40:28.120" Score="-1" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do I have to pay a commercial MySQL license to install WAMP with my PHP-script on the localhost of a company, asking monthly fee for it from the company? (The PHP script is a modified version of an open source script on Github). With other words I'm selling my PHP script to the company and use WAMP to load it on their localhost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know WAMP is free for commercial use, but MySQL also comes with a commercial license... I know it is open source GPL but the site doesn't describe my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already read everything on their website so a link to their license page is not necessary. I hope someone can give me the answer on my specific situation as it is unclear for me right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10932" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T16:31:30.567" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T16:31:30.567" Title="Is a MySQL commercial license required when selling a PHP-website that is hosted on WAMP?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6756" CreationDate="2018-04-14T17:06:07.300" Score="3" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there ever any practical reasons for purchasing an explicit license to &quot;public-domain&quot; software, assuming both the software developer and the user reside in jurisdictions where the public domain is recognized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of this, Hwaci, the company behind SQLite (which is famously &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dedicated to the public domain&lt;/a&gt;) offers &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'warranty of title' licenses for sale&lt;/a&gt; costing US$6000 each. These are the reasons they offer for purchasing a license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You desired warranty of title and indemnity against claims of copyright infringement. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You want to hold a tangible legal document as evidence that you have the legal right to use and distribute SQLite.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Your legal department tells you that you have to purchase a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand why someone residing in a country that doesn't recognize PD might want to buy a license, for legal certainty. But for someone residing in e.g. the United States where the public domain is defined, the only one of these points that makes sense to me is the last one, &quot;Your legal department tells you that you have to purchase a license&quot; which is trivially valid if that's a company policy and the money is inconsequential anyways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly curious about the first bullet point, because it's not clear to me what practical rights 'warranty of title' provide, and whether or not they are already provided via the public domain. And aren't all of these rights mitigated just as easily due to the public domain, because Company A could always craft their own license granting themselves these rights (given that they have no more or less rights than Hwaci on the original code to begin with)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;strong&gt;What are the practical reasons (if any) for why a U.S.-based company may want to purchase a license to public domain software like SQLite?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T15:35:21.050" Title="Buying a license to public domain software (where PD is recognized)?" Tags="|licensing|law|multi-licensing|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6719" CreationDate="2018-04-14T18:11:04.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Short answer no.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Free Software definition and Open Source definition, states that the licence must not limit how the software is used. It must give freedom to use in any way that the user wishes. If this was not so, then it would make Free and Open software use less. You could not put a DVD on the front cover of a magazine; you could not provide a service to sell disk; you could never sell a pre-installed computer; …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;From Free Software definition&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (Freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;From Open Source definition&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A better solution&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a copy-left licence, such as GPL. This will force any distributor/modifier to pass on the same freedoms to their customers. So they can charge for copies, but must tell their customers of the freedoms that they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T18:11:04.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2018-04-15T15:49:41.123" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is the simple golden rule: do onto others as you would like other to do onto you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it fair to use FOSS to build your commercial software, but not afford your customers the same benefit you derive from it even if the license permits it?  In other words, is it fair to profit from the good will, hearts, minds and labor of programmers whose intent was too encourage FOSS development, but then turn around and close off their code as well as yours? The letter of the license may permit you to close it off, but the spirit of the license is is usually to open it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are cases where commercial companies, such as Microsoft and Google, encourage FOSS, but mainly as a way to create mindshare and preemptively deter competition. Google will never open its search code base, nor will Microsoft release its Windows source code. In this case, there is no dilemma here. Close it or open it according to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel it is unfair, then deliver the source code. Your customers most likely will have no use for your source code unless they have inhouse technical capabilities.  They may want the source code purely for their own piece of mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to close up your IP, then it is only fair that you replace the FOSS components with commercial open or closed equivalents. It may cost you more money, but you are also contributing to developers whose livelyhood depends on their IP just as much as you do. It also gives you the ability to say no without any dilemmas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10123" LastEditorUserId="10123" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T16:03:28.897" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T16:03:28.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2320" CreationDate="2018-04-15T18:32:06.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of companies with an open source base. Red Hat, Cloudera, and Talend are a few that come to mind. They offer things like paid support, commercial distributions with regular patches versus compiling on your own, commercial enhancements, consulting services, training... I would suggest looking deeper into their business models for examples on how these companies make money. Would similar approaches work with your software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going open source can result in a community of developers, helping enhance your base code at a faster pace. Plus free can be great for marketing, tracking downloads of a free version represent potential leads. That said, the open source version becomes one of your main competitors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, to disrupt a solid business model to go open source would need some strong drivers. Is there an existing open source competitor that is catch up? Are you losing too many sales opportunities due to lack of an open source base? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T18:32:06.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6743" CreationDate="2018-04-15T21:03:30.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source projects are very diverse. The different packaging processes range from cryptographically secured reproducible builds to “there are no official builds, but this third party was kind enough to upload an .exe”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every case, you will have to trust someone. At the very least, you have to trust your CPU vendor, compiler vendor, and the authors of the software you want to use. That is already a huge set of people. It is then not a stretch to add “the people that package the software” to this list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Packaging is often automated. That is: the packaging process is itself open source software that can be audited. This is common in Linux distros like Debian, but is also in reach of every tiniest project on GitHub that adds a few lines to their Travis-CI script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reproducible builds use automation to ensure that compiling the same source code will always result in a bit-identical binary. It is then possible to run the build multiple times by different people, and see if all binaries agree. If not, that would be an attempted attack (or, more likely an error, since manipulating the binary is pointless when it is sure to be detected).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the software is packaged, how does it safely get to the user? This is probably the more dangerous part. Especially with automatic updates, the ability to corrupt an update would be disastrous. One possibility for manual downloads is to publish checksums of the binaries (assuming the checksums can be distributed securely). The APT package manager uses GPG signatures to verify a package repository. When I trust a repository key, I can verify the signature to see whether the key holder did in fact sign this binary. In many cases, just downloading the update over HTTPS is probably the easiest solution nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a lot of software isn't distributed as binaries at all. This might be the case for software that is expected to be compiled on the end-user system, or for software in scripting languages that is never compiled into an executable. Then, the distribution format is the same as the source code! We could be pedantic and say “but well, now we have to trust whoever creates the source code archive!” And that is correct. There are numerous opportunities to subvert any process. But most people are not going to check the source code in the sources they download, just like most people will not verify that their binaries were in fact created from a specific source code version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, a bad actor that consciously tries to manipulate the packaging is comparatively unlikely due to social pressure – packaging tends to be done by core community members, but you'd be shunned from the community for such a stunt. More troubling scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third party download sites that offer manipulated binaries without the project's knowledge, e.g. as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SourceForge/Gimp incident&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An infected build environment for an otherwise trustworthy packager, as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/apple-scrambles-after-40-malicious-xcodeghost-apps-haunt-app-store/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XCode infection&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coercion of a packager, e.g. through legal mechanisms like National Security Letters, or whatever China is doing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manipulating the source code instead of the packaging, because the manipulated source is sure to be used by all packages. It can take quite long for such problems to be detected because &lt;a href=&quot;https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most people don't look at the code&lt;/a&gt;. (The linked article is parody, but presents a reasonable scenario.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T21:03:30.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6378" CreationDate="2018-04-16T07:07:20.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dramatiq is not covered by the AGPL but &lt;a href=&quot;https://dramatiq.io/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Project License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2017,2018 CLEARTYPE SRL &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dramatiq is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dramatiq is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; it without having your code license affected in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T07:07:20.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6747" CreationDate="2018-04-16T18:30:14.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Hwaci is right, and they really have correctly licensed all their code (including code from external contributors) such that none of the code's authors (or any other person, e.g., a person whose copyright might have been infringed by a SQLite author) can prevail in a lawsuit against you for redistribution of their code, then you are correct: warranty and indemnity against copyright infringement are not useful. Indeed, warranties in general aren't useful if you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that everything is going to go &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every legal system is different and complex. A &quot;warranty of title and indemnity against claims of copyright infringement&quot; is useful for highly risk-averse individuals who believe that there may possibly exist a way for their use or distribution of SQLite to expose them to legal liability in their jurisdiction. They are willing to gamble six thousand dollars that such a legal possibility might exist, in exchange for the peace of mind they will not be exposed to it if it does exist. If you run a corporation worth billions of dollars, for example, $6000 seems to me a reasonable wager to consider for your legal safety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T15:35:21.050" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T15:35:21.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6759" CreationDate="2018-04-18T03:11:57.813" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many good open source libraries which are under AGPL license. And sometimes on their official website, I see an license option named &quot;development license&quot;. For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onlyoffice.com/developer-edition-prices.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.onlyoffice.com/developer-edition-prices.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says this license allow others to develop with this open source project? I just cannot understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As under AGPL license, I think others have the permission to develop or integrate that open source project unless they release the product to public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link I give is not an exception, so could someone explain for me what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10970" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T06:06:35.433" Title="What is develop license about AGPL license?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6758" CreationDate="2018-04-18T05:14:44.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onlyoffice.com/developer-edition.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their website&lt;/a&gt; makes clear, the product is dual-licensed, under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL3&lt;/a&gt; and a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to use it under AGPL3, you (broadly) have permission to copy and/or change that code (strictly, to make a modified work) provided that when you distribute the work, whether modified or unmodified, or give access to it over a network, you do so under the terms of the AGPL.  This will broadly mean giving access to the full source and build environment of the work, and making it clear that this access is also under the terms of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial option, as they say, is for people who require professional support with the product, and (presumably, though they don't say this) for those who wish to integrate the product into their own non-free software.  As ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T06:06:35.433" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T06:06:35.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-18T12:59:56.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;terms of service&quot; (ToS) is a document a user must agree to before using a service. Also known as &quot;terms of use&quot; (ToU) or &quot;terms and conditions&quot; (Ts and Cs). It typically defines expected behavior and responsibilities of both the user and the operator, and typically includes a disclaimer of liability on the part of the operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T17:34:01.790" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:34:01.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-18T12:59:56.843" Score="0" Body="Terms of service govern the behavior and responsibilities of both user and operator." OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T17:33:49.353" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:33:49.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6767" CreationDate="2018-04-19T01:12:29.437" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: I am the sole contributor to a git versioned project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a project that is licensed under the CC0. Now suddenly I decide that this license doesn't really fit my needs. Am I allowed to create a commit in which the only change I make is changing the license to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib/libpng license&lt;/a&gt;? I understand that I may not be allowed to relicense the version that is already under the CC0, but I am wondering whether I can release &lt;em&gt;all future versions&lt;/em&gt; under the zlib/libpng. If I cannot, then is dual licensing an option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10764" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T11:22:17.927" Title="Is it possible to release a newer version of a CC0 project under a license such as the zlib/libpng license?" Tags="|relicensing|cc0|zlib-libpng|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6765" CreationDate="2018-04-19T08:29:57.877" Score="1" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I took photos of some copyrighted video game cases and then shared them, I assume it would fall into fair use even though I took the photos, correct me if I am wrong.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a suitable license I can add so that I could share these photos and so could other people in relative legal safety as long as they use it by the terms of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8475" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T09:12:58.933" Title="Is there a license for legally sharing photos of copyrighted content?" Tags="|license-recommendation|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6764" CreationDate="2018-04-19T08:58:07.687" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There cannot be such a license. A license grants rights that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; hold to other people. You do not hold any rights to other people's artwork. Fair use in the U.S. is not quite a right that you have, but a defense that you can resort to when accused of copyright infringement. Even if fair use is a right that you have, this right cannot be licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice this is a bit more complicated. A photograph of the video game case may range from “reproduction of the cover” over “happens to be in the background” to “highly transformative work that includes elements of the original cover, e.g. as a collage or parody”. So you might in fact hold some rights. But that is first and foremost a legal question in your applicable jurisdiction, and only when that is covered could you consider licensing your rights to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the English-language Wikipedia makes heavy use of copyright exemptions such as fair use in order to show cover art. They document this with a “non-free use rationale”, that e.g. explains why this image is necessary, and that the use of the original is minimized (e.g. by only showing a low-res thumbnail). So these images are &lt;em&gt;not actually licensed&lt;/em&gt;. It helps for this that Wikipedia generally fits under the “for nonprofit educational purposes” fair-use factor. For details of their policies, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-04-19T09:12:58.933" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T09:12:58.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-20T06:56:45.267" Score="2" ViewCount="982" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have software with proprietary license. For some reasons I need an AGPL library (DLL). So, for including the AGPL licensed application (To manage license terms) I am using the following methods (I noted the below steps after searching so many sites and referring many advices): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make a separate interface/ intermediate freeware application. Download that intermediate app in my main software when user clicks on the menu/ it is required at any point. This intermediate app will have option to download the AGPL (Or any open source libraries like LGPL etc.) application upon user's confirmation for its license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not integrating the interface/intermediate application with my proprietary software. Instead, I use commandline to run the intermediate application from the main software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the above mentioned method is legal and can I implement this on my software? Or is there any changes needed to my method of integration so that I can use the AGPL licensed app in my proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10545" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:54:06.843" Title="AGPL/LGPL licensed app usage in proprietary software" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6763" CreationDate="2018-04-20T11:22:17.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, you are free to issue licenses as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception to this is if you issue an &lt;em&gt;exclusive&lt;/em&gt; license that effectively &lt;em&gt;transfers&lt;/em&gt; (parts of) your copyright to another person. You cannot issue a license for a right that you no longer hold. However, common open source licenses are non-exclusive. The CC0 fallback license is non-exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source licenses are irrevocable. That means, you cannot terminate an existing license. So if you switch your project to a new license, the old license is still valid for the previous versions, and other people can continue to use old versions under the previous license. The CC0 fallback license (in section 3) is an irrevocable license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC0 has a slight complication. It is not quite a normal license, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a waiver/abandonment/surrender of your copyright,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;plus a fallback license, in case “applicable law” doesn't allow you to abandon your copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in case you have successfully abandoned your copyright, you can no longer use that copyright as a basis to issue a new license. You are not the copyright holder, as there is no copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not quite familiar with how licensing can apply to public domain (PD) works (e.g. works for which you have abandoned your copyright). It may be that you cannot slap a license onto PD works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can certainly decide to stop releasing your new contributions under CC0, and could license them under any other license instead. So some parts of the project may still be in the PD, whereas other parts are subject to some license. It may be best to track licensing on a file by file basis. Even though some parts of the project may be in the PD, the project in whole can only be used under the terms of the license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T11:22:17.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6770" CreationDate="2018-04-22T17:58:37.677" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a fiction whose goal is to bring the reader to examine her/his political beliefs in the light of various political &lt;em&gt;implications&lt;/em&gt; and then to arrive, on her/his own, at possibly different beliefs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see two very different ways that the contents could eventually be changed by licensees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The kind of changes, probably fairly limited, that would be necessary to change the &lt;em&gt;political implications&lt;/em&gt; and thus direct the reader towards &lt;em&gt;specific beliefs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The kind of changes, probably fairly extensive, that would be necessary just to turn the text into, say, a comic strip of a comic book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have read about the CC BY-SA license, I still do not see if it would be possible to prevent the former and allow the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10997" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T21:00:39.803" Title="How to control content changes under a CC BY-SA" Tags="|derivative-works|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6769" CreationDate="2018-04-22T21:00:39.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put simply: if you want to maintain creative control over your work, don't release it under an open source license. This applies whether that license is CC-BY-SA or any other open source license. An open source license by definition allows people to make any modification they like to the content - anything else would violate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&quot; clause of the Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-04-22T21:00:39.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-23T13:43:33.853" Score="0" ViewCount="1401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an Angular5 web application. It is written in Typescript, and then compiled to Javascript. This is not a real compilation, just a minification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The server which serves the .js files is owned by me, if this makes any difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the libraries is licensed under GPL-3. The customer (a company) pays for using the software, and the employees of that company can access the software for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it force me to make the original source of the whole project available for both my customer and all of the users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5250" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:44:06.307" Title="Am I allowed to use a GPL-3 library in a closed source web application?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6773" CreationDate="2018-04-23T17:15:04.137" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past, I licensed most of my photos under CC-BY-SA.  One of my photos ended up on a website with political views I strongly abhor.  Diligently, they attributed the photo with my name.  Exactly as they were required to do by the license.  I was not happy, because now googling my name yielded this website.  Since then, I have become a lot more careful in open-source licensing photos I put online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any license where, apart from source attribution, anyone using the content would need to add a note that permission does not imply endorsement?  Would such a license still be open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T17:51:42.577" Title="Is a &quot;permission does not imply endorsement&quot; clause compatible with OSS?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6772" CreationDate="2018-04-23T17:45:54.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would expect that requiring a notice of non-endorsement would not exclude a license from being a FLOSS license, considering that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original 4-clause BSD license is a FLOSS license&lt;/a&gt; despite its &quot;obnoxious advertising clause&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:  &#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any extant license that actually does require such an assertion, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons licenses already handle much of this, but not exactly how you request. CC licenses don't require a declaration of non-endorsement, but they still&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;disallow a positive statement of (or implication of) endorsement, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;allow you to have your attribution removed in any cases that you find distasteful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full relevant FAQ item is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-can-i-do-if-i-offer-my-material-under-a-creative-commons-license-and-i-do-not-like-the-way-someone-uses-it&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can I do if I offer my material under a Creative Commons license and I do not like the way someone uses it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As long as users abide by license terms and conditions, licensors cannot control how the material is used. However, CC licenses do provide several mechanisms that allow licensors to choose not to be associated with their material or to uses of their material with which they disagree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, all CC licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-need-to-be-aware-of-anything-else-when-providing-attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the licensor endorses or supports a particular use&lt;/a&gt;. Second, licensors may waive the attribution requirement, choosing not to be identified as the licensor, if they wish. Third, if the licensor does not like how the material has been modified or used, CC licenses require that the licensee &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Licensors_may_request_removal_of_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;remove the attribution information upon request&lt;/a&gt;. (In 3.0 and earlier, this is only a requirement for adaptations and collections; in 4.0, this also applies to the unmodified work.) Finally, anyone modifying licensed material must &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Modifications_and_adaptations_must_be_indicated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;indicate that the original has been modified&lt;/a&gt;. This ensures that changes made to the original material--whether or not the licensor approves of them--are not attributed back to the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T17:51:42.577" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T17:51:42.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6766" CreationDate="2018-04-23T20:54:06.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a command line interface to GPL code is the normal approach in this situation. So your approach is generally fine. But you are overcomplicating this: you don't need to download on demand, and you don't have to force users to read the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is equivalent to the GPL when the software runs locally. The LGPL is also equivalent to the GPL, except that you can link with LGPL libraries without a command line wrapper. Therefore, the rest of this answer will only mention the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL explicitly does not require that users accept the license. Accepting the license is only necessary if you modify or distribute the GPL software. I.e., your acceptance and not your users' acceptance is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is equivalent whether you download the GPL software on demand or bundle it with your proprietary software. As long as they are clearly different programs and you comply with the GPL terms, the GPL allows this “aggregation”: “Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a proprietary program uses the command line interface of a GPL program, the GPL won't generally apply to the proprietary program. So creating a wrapper program for a GPL library will, in general, sufficiently isolate your proprietary program.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, the wrapper program does fall under the GPL. A “freeware” wrapper is not sufficient. You can only distribute the wrapper if you comply with the GPL terms, such as offering the source code. The details here depend on the exact GPL version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:54:06.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T06:08:58.960" Score="8" ViewCount="2445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use some source code under CC-BY-SA for my company's project.&#xA;That project is commercial and closed source code.&#xA;I want our project not to have obligation to release the source code.&#xA;Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11008" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T08:30:44.367" Title="Can I use source code licensed under CC-BY-SA for commercial closed source project?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6777" CreationDate="2018-04-25T10:49:08.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can include CC-BY-SA source code in proprietary software iff you do not publish that software. The CC-BY-SA requirements only apply once you Share&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; the adapted work. For example, this would allow internal tools, or possibly a server backend where that usage does not constitute a public performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1] as defined in section 1.k in the CC-BY-SA 4.0, compare Distribute and Publicly Perform in sections 1.d and 1.j in the CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you desire to publish software that was adapted from CC-BY-SA source code, you can only do so under the terms of that license. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must publish your software under that version of the CC-BY-SA or a compatible license,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must provide proper attribution for the original source code,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must not apply additional terms or restrictions, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must not apply technical restrictions such as DRM.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these requirements may be at odds with the terms and conditions of some app stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absent from the CC-BY-SA is the requirement to publish your source code. You can publish CC-BY-SA software in any format you like, including in compiled form. However, recipients of that software are free to reverse-engineer and decompile it, and to adapt that software. So while the CC-BY-SA is generally similar to the GPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CC-BY-SA does not require you to publish your preferred form of making modifications (the source code)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that most code on Stack Overflow is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0. This means that such code cannot be copied freely, not even for open-source projects, unless they are licensed under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible license&lt;/a&gt; (which, indirectly, includes the GPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T10:49:08.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T22:01:42.237" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project which I plan to opensource. The app will use a crash detection library which to initialise requires an API key and app key in order to initialise and send th crash data to the service. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I obviously don't want to publish these keys into the open source repository so I was wondering what the best way of doing it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking my development environment could contain an environment variable which contains the API and App Key and the gradle file checks if the environment variable is set, and if so it updates a string resource value with the environment variable value and the library calls activity.getString(R.id.string_key) and if this is not set, it doesn't initialise the crash detection library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the best way of doing it, or is there a better alternative?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8364" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T22:01:42.237" Title="Publishing Open Source Software without disclosing a libraries API key" Tags="|api|android|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6771" CreationDate="2018-04-26T18:27:19.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot use GPL-licensed code on a proprietary web frontend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you include GPL-licensed code into any software, that software becomes a derived work of the GPL-licensed code. Only the GPL gives you the right to publish the resulting software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, you must offer the source code for the resulting software. The source code is the preferred form of making modifications. Minified JavaScript files are therefore not the source code. The source code can also include build scripts or configuration files that are necessary to run the software, for example a package.json file that specifies dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge for the software or for services around the software. But once anyone receives the software, they obtain a license under the GPL to use and share this software. You cannot add additional restrictions. So any customer may start offering your software for free. It is therefore common not to charge for the software itself, but for services such as administration, customization, or hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your server backend is generally a separate software. If you use GPL libraries on your frontend, this does not put any requirements on the backend. If you do not want to publish certain code, run it on your backend and have the frontend make Ajax requests to the backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T18:27:19.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2212" CreationDate="2018-04-26T19:44:24.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, none of the CC-BY-SA v3.0 licenses (Unported and Ported alike) are compatible with any of the GPL licenses (unless you have a fair use exception such as a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; short code snippet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a long explanation on why one cannot &amp;quot;license wash&amp;quot; CC-BY-SA v3.0 code to the GPL v3.0 via adaption of a CC-BY-SA v3.0 project by a new CC-BY-SA v4.0 contribution and then further adaption of that adaption by a GPL v3.0 contribution and then downstream users choosing to comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA v3.0, CC-BY-SA v4.0, and GPL v3.0 &lt;strong&gt;license stack&lt;/strong&gt; by only complying with the terms of the GPL v3.0 license since GPL v3.0 contributions are simply not allowed to occur in the first place by the terms of the CC-BY-SA v3.0 license.  Note that although the CC-BY-SA v4.0 has a mechanism to allow &lt;strong&gt;adaptions&lt;/strong&gt; to effectively be re-licensed under compatible licenses including one-way adaptions to the GPL v3.0 and CC-BY-SA v3.0 has a mechanism to allow &lt;strong&gt;contributions&lt;/strong&gt; to an adapted work be licensed under later versions of the CC-BY-SA licenses such as the CC-BY-SA v4.0 license if you do adapt a CC-BY-SA v3.0 in such a manner the licenses &lt;strong&gt;stack&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. the original code in the adaption are licensed under the CC-BY-SA v3.0 and the new contributed code are licensed under the CC-BY-SA v4.0 license) and there is no provision in the CC-BY-SA v3.0 where downstream users can elect to comply with it by only complying with just the terms of the CC-BY-SA v4.0 (this kind of provision was new with v4.0).  Hence if someone adapts CC-BY-SA v3.0 code by making a CC-BY-SA v4.0 contribution another person cannot further adapt the adaption by then making a contribution under the GPL v3.0 since the GPL v3.0 has not been deemed by Creative Commons to be compatible with the CC-BY-SA v3.0 and hence such a contribution is simply not allowed under the entire &lt;strong&gt;license stack&lt;/strong&gt; of the adaption.  Relevant quotes from Creative Commons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 4.0, CC added a provision in the ShareAlike licenses that enables downstream licensees to refer only to the adapter’s license when using adapted material that contains the copyrightable contributions of multiple authors. This feature is designed to minimize complexity for reusers where they are using a later version of the ShareAlike license or a compatible license as their adapter's license. In 4.0, users need only refer to a single set of conditions contained in the last license applied to reuse adapted material, rather than parsing the conditions of the original and other adapter's licenses (to the extent the licenses differ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, the licenses stack (the later license does not supplant all previously-applied licenses) when adapted material is created. In particular, the license originally applied to the material being remixed continues to apply once remixed, however permission is given in 4.0 for licensees to meet the conditions of the 4.0 license with reference to those in the adapter's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to the 4.0 versioning process, CC had not always been clear that the ShareAlike licenses stacked just as they stack for the BY and BY-NC licenses, and reasonable minds do differ on this point. CC believes, however, that this is the best reading of its all of its licenses that permit adaptations prior to 4.0 and, now, has made that explicit in version 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11023" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T19:44:24.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6726" CreationDate="2018-04-26T20:18:18.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way for me to license my FLOSS works under CC-BY-SA 4.0 without allowing derivative works to be licensed under e.g. CC-BY-SA 5.0, like you can do with the GPL (by just saying 'v2 only')?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are really worried about this have you considered simply using an earlier CC-BY-SA license?  The CC-BY-SA 1.0 license does not allow contributions at all under later CC-BY-SA licenses.  The CC-BY-SA 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 licenses do allow such contributions but do not allow downstream users to elect to comply with their license terms by only complying with the terms of the license chosen by contributer (such a provision is new in 4.0) and hence require that downstream users comply with &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the original license AND the new (compatible) license(s) the contributor(s) chose.  So while someone could say make an adaption of a CC-BY-SA 3.0 work by making a CC-BY-SA 5.0 contribution such a work would be licensed under the &lt;strong&gt;license stack&lt;/strong&gt; of CC-BY-SA 3.0 + CC-BY-SA 5.0 and a user would still need to comply with all the terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license including attribution and share-alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant quote from Creative Commons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 4.0, CC added a provision in the ShareAlike licenses that enables downstream licensees to refer only to the adapter’s license when using adapted material that contains the copyrightable contributions of multiple authors. This feature is designed to minimize complexity for reusers where they are using a later version of the ShareAlike license or a compatible license as their adapter's license. In 4.0, users need only refer to a single set of conditions contained in the last license applied to reuse adapted material, rather than parsing the conditions of the original and other adapter's licenses (to the extent the licenses differ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, the licenses stack (the later license does not supplant all previously-applied licenses) when adapted material is created. In particular, the license originally applied to the material being remixed continues to apply once remixed, however permission is given in 4.0 for licensees to meet the conditions of the 4.0 license with reference to those in the adapter's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to the 4.0 versioning process, CC had not always been clear that the ShareAlike licenses stacked just as they stack for the BY and BY-NC licenses, and reasonable minds do differ on this point. CC believes, however, that this is the best reading of its all of its licenses that permit adaptations prior to 4.0 and, now, has made that explicit in version 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, although you could no longer call it a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license you could modify the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license (stripping out share-alike compatibility mechanisms) and release your work under that new license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Modifying_the_CC_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Modifying_the_CC_licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11023" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T20:26:08.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6703" CreationDate="2018-04-26T20:43:35.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could have a link to FAQ page giving an example(s) of how you'd like to be attributed as well as any additional license grants &lt;strong&gt;in addition to&lt;/strong&gt; the CC license you are willing to grant (you cannot add additional restrictions to a CC license but you can always grant additional permissions).  For an example xkcd has a pretty good one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xkcd.com/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11023" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T20:43:35.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5909" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:16:33.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One may &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; make a GPLv3 adaption of a CC BY-SA 4.0 work since there is a provision in the CC BY-SA 4.0 license that the GPLv3 is a 'compatible' license and that in such a case a downstream user can comply with the CC BY-SA 4.0 terms by only complying with the terms of the GPLv3.  One may NOT &lt;strong&gt;directly&lt;/strong&gt; make a AGPLv3 adaption of a CC BY-SA 4.0 work since the AGPLv3 is not a pre-approved compatible license.  One can probably &lt;strong&gt;indirectly&lt;/strong&gt; make a AGPLv3 &lt;strong&gt;combined work&lt;/strong&gt; by first making a GPLv3 adaption and then take advantage of the GPLv3/AGPLv3 compatibility clauses (but in this case I think the CC-BY-SA-4.0-adapted-to-GPLv3 &lt;strong&gt;covered work&lt;/strong&gt; must still &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; be under a GPLv3 license and not under an AGPLv3 license i.e. you'd have to write a clearly separate AGPLv3 work to combine with the GPLv3 adaption).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11023" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T22:16:33.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6789" CreationDate="2018-04-27T20:04:08.573" Score="-1" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have software that I want a non-profit or non-commercial entity to use, improve, etc. and so on, and I want them to have it open source, say GPL3, but I don't want commercial entities to be able to get it and sell it (maybe MIT non-Commercial) or make a proprietary source, can I have a license for the same software for each type of industry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7455" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T18:15:11.573" Title="Can you license the same software with different licenses for different industries?" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-05-03T17:40:06.953" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6788" CreationDate="2018-04-28T18:15:11.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have in mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neither Free Software&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nor Open Source&lt;/a&gt; because restricting how software can be used and who can use it is against basic principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T18:15:11.573" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6792" CreationDate="2018-04-29T02:55:01.560" Score="6" ViewCount="887" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have re-implemented a library in Golang which was originally in Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Python library carries an MIT license, which gives me &quot;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I put my own MIT license to my implementation? Do I need to also furnish the copyright notice of the original author's Python library along with mine? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5484/how-to-use-mit-license-in-a-project/&quot;&gt;How to use MIT license in a project?&lt;/a&gt; except that I have not done significant modification but almost literal translation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11042" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T07:19:54.277" Title="Re-implementing MIT licensed software in another language" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6791" CreationDate="2018-04-29T07:19:54.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the original library would be licensed using a copyleft license, the matter would be clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the GPL say about translating some code to a different&#xA;  programming language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under copyright law, translation of a work is considered a kind of modification. Therefore, what the GPL says about modified versions&#xA;  applies also to translated versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TranslateCode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TranslateCode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can use this reasoning to answer your question. You, too, created a modified version of the original library. Therefore you are bound to the license conditions of the library. The MIT license only requires attribution, which you have to give. So your software must give proper attribution as you would have to do if your software included the original Python version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license allows you to use any license you want for your software. This, of course, can also be the MIT license, now with you as the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T07:19:54.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6745" CreationDate="2018-04-29T13:55:22.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be nonsensical if you have more rights to someone else's work than to your own work. Therefore, you are likely able to quote your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of CC-BY-SA, it is important that not only do you have the right to publish the resulting work, but that the resulting work is in fact correctly licensed under the CC-BY-SA, so that others may share and modify it. It may therefore not be adapted from non-CC-BY-SA works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requires that you properly quote your own work as a separate work. When relying on copyright exemptions such as a right to quote, this may require the quotation to be &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt;, and properly attributed. For example, including a high-res image might not be covered by such copyright exemptions, whereas a low-res thumbnail or a cropped part with a link to the original work may be covered. Whether technologies like HTML &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;iframe&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags embed content or merely reference it is an interesting but definitively not resolved question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do make sure that you only exercise rights you would have to another's work, and do not make use of the rights you have as the creator of the quoted work. Otherwise, it would not be unreasonable to assume that you had in fact licensed the quoted work under the CC license, because otherwise the resulting work (containing the “citation”) could not be licensed under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could perhaps also license the work so that it can be included in CC-BY-SA works, without falling under the CC-BY-SA itself. For example, by using a CC-BY license. You can then embed the work in its entirety, without relying on a right to quote. However, you have to make sure that the embedded work and the CC-BY-SA embedding work are clearly separate works. Here, this might be rather problematic because the combination of these works clearly does not fall under the CC-BY-SA in its entirety. I think this could be fine if you can clearly separate the licenses (e.g. in a book with CC-BY-SA text but non-free illustrations). But in the context of creating content on a web site where all user submissions are CC-BY-SA, I don't think this would be possible, so that you would have implicitly licensed the embedded work under CC-BY-SA as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't arbitrarily exclude parts of a work from the CC-BY-SA if you agree to license the whole work under the CC-BY-SA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Self-quoting is OK, but you are then bound by the restrictions of applicable rights to quote or fair use rights. Do not make use of any rights you have as the creator of the quoted work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T13:55:22.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-30T22:11:33.113" Score="1" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used a PHP library, which in turn is elementary based on libraries published with an Apache 2.0 license and a LGPL license. The author himself has published his library under a GPLv2 license. Because the GPLv2 license is not compatible with Apache 2.0 license, it would have to be invalid, right? If it is invalid, then my work that only includes this library to use the API can not be a GPLv2 license either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is the entire construct completely unlicensed, or his derivate-library only, because he has chosen the incompatible license (GPLv2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11049" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T22:11:33.113" Title="What happens when someone merges Apache 2.0 and LGPL libraries into a GPL-2 derivate?" Tags="|apache-2.0|lgpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6797" CreationDate="2018-05-02T05:33:27.363" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Blender animator, and I have found a lot of designs at thingiverse.com and I want to use them for my project. But I found out that the designs that I've downloaded are under Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial licence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was thinking if I alter or innovate the previous design, and use it commercially, will I be in trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11057" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T07:11:28.303" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T07:11:28.303" Title="Will I be in trouble if I alter or innovate a work that is under CC Non-Commercial, and use it to my project?" Tags="|derivative-works|non-commercial|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6796" CreationDate="2018-05-02T05:53:00.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how you're expecting the answer to this to be anything other than &quot;&lt;em&gt;don't do it&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  It's clear from the question that you know you're not allowed to do it.  We're not the current rights holder, so we can't say whether or not the rights holder would feel aggrieved enough to pursue you through the courts.  But free software licences have generally been held to be enforceable when the courts have addressed the issue, and there's no reason to think that CC-BY-NC would be treated differently.  Expect an injunction preventing you from distributing your derivative work, at the very least.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/694890/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some rights holders&lt;/a&gt; may go much further, and very substantial damages could be on the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;em&gt;best guess&lt;/em&gt; about how it will work out (and it really is just a guess) is that if you do this and your project is not particularly successful, the rights holder will either not know or not care enough to sue you.  If for whatever reason your project is immensely successful and you make ten or so million euros out of it, you have just painted a gigantic target on yourself, as you're now well worth sueing.  At that point even ambulance-chasers may get involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So really, don't do this.  It's only worth it if you're setting out to make a commercial failure, and why would you do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T07:08:26.827" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T07:08:26.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T11:34:25.080" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have built our new marketing website on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gatsbyjs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gatsby&lt;/a&gt; and wish to have it as a public repository on GitHub in case it’s helpful for others building projects with Gatsby. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository contains a number of assets and content we do not want others to use commercially, namely, the ‘look and feel’ of the website which includes its CSS styling, our logo, icons, illustrations, and documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m currently considering the MIT license for code, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/au/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU) License&lt;/a&gt; for the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a bit tricky because the content is scattered throughout the React code. For instance, we use TypeStyle, so the CSS is in the .tsx files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have two questions. Are these licenses appropriate? And how do I set up the license structure in the repository to clearly articulate which license applies to which files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11061" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T11:34:25.080" Title="What license structure is appropriate for a site on GitHub where the “look &amp; feel” is proprietary, but the code is not?" Tags="|license-recommendation|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T16:52:47.437" Score="7" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Item C2 in the Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethical Repository Criteria&lt;/a&gt; requires that a repository host, such as Savannah or GitLab, &quot;not discriminate [...] against any country&quot;. How can this be done while complying with applicable foreign law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a takedown order issued by some country A to a service in a different country. The order may cite copyright, patent, trademark, defamation, decency, radio communication regulation, medical device regulation, or any other national law. The service's legal team reviews the order and finds it to be warranted pursuant to the laws of country A but unwarranted pursuant to the laws of the service's home country. The service can do one of a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A. Do nothing, making its assets reachable in some way by country A subject to official confiscation and causing country A to block access by residents of country A to all repositories on the service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B. Block the affected repository in all countries, which encourages an adversary to forum-shop the most ideologically intolerant countries in order to get a particular repository taken down.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C. Geoblock the affected repository, limiting the damage to just that (repository, country) pair but violating C2. GitHub has done this with respect to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/tree/master/Russia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;orders issued by the Russian Federation&lt;/a&gt;, which forms part of its basis for its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html#GitHub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F (unacceptable) rating from the FSF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;D. Something that I have not imagined but your answer explains.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastEditorDisplayName="user10225" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T07:57:59.840" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T11:42:22.647" Title="How can a repository host comply with a foreign takedown order ethically?" Tags="|fsf|project-hosting|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T04:42:22.213" Score="1" ViewCount="812" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a former developer that codes in my spare time for fun and to maintain some level knowledge in the subject. So I found an interesting proof of concept online. I saw the potential to modify it and to make it something useful for a certain industry. So I modified, tweaked, and added to the code, making it a Firefox extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proof of concept is covered by an MIT Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the code is 60-70% original. I added the rest and made it useful. I demo’d the extension to a small conference and I was immediately offered money to sell or license it. Pretty cool for a weekend project. It was something I wasn’t expecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, first question. What’s the first step? Can I copyright my program if it is built off of an open source project? How and what kind of protections does it give? I don’t know the first thing about licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, how do I control the distribution? A general amount was thrown around for the use of the extension (over 100k). So I don’t want it in Firefox’s App Store or whatever you call it. I also don’t want to just email the extension and then they email it on to the next guy or sell it themselves.&#xA;Any advice? Anyone been in this situation before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11065" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T18:42:52.913" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T18:42:52.913" Title="How do you copyright/license software based on MIT-licensed open source code?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-03T05:05:56.820" Score="4" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Data Protection Regulation&lt;/a&gt; that is about to come into effect in the EU appears to impose requirements to (among others) &lt;a href=&quot;https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-18/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anyone who runs a website of public interest&lt;/a&gt;. As some of these requirements are difficult to fulfil for projects developed during people's spare time without any revenue (e.g. getting legal counsel for a legally watertight privacy policy text, getting webspace and an e-mail inbox whose providers agree to sign &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-28-processor-GDPR.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;processing agreements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, etc.), this might prevent EU-based FOSS projects from having a website aside from the default project profile pages on Github and the like&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any statements by the people or institutions behind the GDPR on what the expected effect on open source software projects will be (e.g. the described issues are an intended/unintended side effect, the issues won't occur because ..., they consider the issues irrelevant, ...)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: Also see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/25546/contract-necessary-for-the-most-basic-processing-under-gpdr&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contract necessary for the most basic processing under GPDR?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law SE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: Note that I'm not referring to the few high-profile projects out there that are backed by foundations and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="765" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T08:07:09.353" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T08:07:09.353" Title="Statements on GDPR with respect to FOSS" Tags="|law|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6800" CreationDate="2018-05-03T07:05:25.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the original code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licensed&lt;/a&gt;, you can use it any way you like, including turning it into proprietary software. You can use any license you want. You only have to give the original authors credit as it is required in the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question about controlling distribution is hard to answer since it depends on the type of software and how it is installed and used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T07:05:25.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6801" CreationDate="2018-05-03T07:20:34.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GDPR applies when processing personal data. The solution for open source projects: Don't process personal data. A static website without any analytics does not perform meaningful processing of personal data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you as a project maintainer are still concerned about this, write a short privacy policy that personal data such as IP addresses are processed for the sole purpose of displaying the site, and sign a data processing agreement with your hoster. Currently, I can't find any indication that GitHub or GitLab offer a DPA, but many EU-based hosters do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do process any data, then of course the GDPR applies even for hobby projects. The point of the law is to protect personal data, not to punish businesses. And aside from this initial panic, compliance does not take much effort when not processing personal data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the GDPR perspective, accepting pull requests into a git repo is much more problematic, since the blockchain-nature of git makes it impossible to delete or correct personal information (such as author name and email addresses) afterwards. However, this is not necessarily in violation if you obtain prior informed consent from contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T07:20:34.500" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6771" CreationDate="2018-05-03T17:44:06.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the user just &lt;em&gt;runs&lt;/em&gt; GPL-2 software, there should be no problem. GPL-3 is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:44:06.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6746" CreationDate="2018-05-03T18:06:30.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, ask the owner with the full details of what you want to do. Only they can answer authoritatively. Or a lawyer specializing in this abstruse area of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T18:06:30.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="762" CreationDate="2018-05-04T06:19:00.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR version: read the bulleted list at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things to mention before starting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; Google used Copyrighted Oracle JDK API and then switched to Open Source OpenJDK API &amp;quot; is fake news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand it you need to consider what an API is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;API is like a standard of calling like the phone book: a name and a phone number table. Only one way to write it to be right. You cannot change the phone number of a name or change the name of a phone number but you can emit some entries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the API of Oracle JDK , OpenJDK and Apache Harmony are the same. All are one copyrighted API bunch, always called the Java API. even though every implementation of these has a different license. Oracle JDK adds performance tools not APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real news is that Google is moving from open-source Apache Harmony implementation to open-source OpenJDK implementation.  Both are as Oracle JDK implementations use the same Java API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear code can be classified to API and Implementation. The API is a declaration. The implementations can differ, but all must adhere to the same API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Natural languages, All current programming languages force declaration code to be strictly the same to declare the same concept. No way to write API code to adhere to a specification except only one. Google could not write the API any other way to declare the API for Java. Only one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first trial to mention that APIs are copyrightable. No law or trial to mention this before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The API is common to a platform, Even Kotlin is using the Java API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did the trial start? Let's go back and check Sun's profit model. There is Java SE for computers, and Java ME for Mobiles. Java SE is a one-piece take it or leave it. they refuse to let any vendor fragment it. You want to Implement Java SE, then implement it all, apply for a license, which checks you implemented it all correctly. Microsoft changed the API before. Sun won the case against them and killed Microsoft Java. That is why C# arose later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option is Java ME, a superset of a subset of Java SE. Mobile companies license this from Sun, with no reference implementation, most of APIs are optional, leading to fragmentation. The most successful vendor was Nokia Symbian and Blackberry. But they were falling after Apple iOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google was negotiating Dalvik  ( or a pre-Dalvik as Dalvik appeared in Android 2.2)which removes some parts that are not implementable on a touch phone as Swing ( GUI window , e.g, Multiple Windows each with a close button is never nice on a small touch screen). This license does not match Java Se nor Java ME. But they canceled the negotiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main objection of Sun that this fragments the Java SE, by removing some APIs and adding some API. Steering committees of Java can not control what was added or removed from Java SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Java SE back then did not have optional components. Ideas of Java SE Core and removing Swing from the Java runtime were not there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, back to the impact on open source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first impact of Oracle vs Google is the same as Sun vs Microsoft: If you have projects big enough, then create a new language with a new Platform: C# with .Net or Dart with Flutter. Kotlin (most probably) is not a legal solution as it is in the same platform with same API.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drop backward Compatibility with a debated in court product ( Microsoft Java and Android compatibility in&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fuchsia) or negotiate legally or wait for the next case in court.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Source does not mean copyleft. The news are fake. The copyrighted API are shared between the open source OpenJDK and Apache harmony and the proprietary Oracle JDk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For small entities that needs to re-implement a language or a platform API, you need a legal promise not to get sued (Mono got one for re-implementing .Net) or you need to use a language that no one owns (C++ or Javascript).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not believe newspaper in technical legal details. They do not read programming books nor legal case files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11073" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-30T12:21:32.167" LastActivityDate="2023-05-30T12:21:32.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6799" CreationDate="2018-05-04T11:42:22.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to assume that your ethical criteria are the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF's&lt;/a&gt;.  I observe in passing that the FSF is not just focussed on traditionally-repressive regimes; one of the two C2-class failures in GitHub's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html#GitHub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;report&lt;/a&gt; relates to US export controls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been noted, GNU Savannah seems to deal with this by not hosting projects that might run foul of US export controls or Russian government censorship, or that might engage in any other behaviour that would cause a takedown order.  There doesn't seem to be anything in the FSF's guidelines that requires your ethical hosting service to accept all submitted sources, nor do the guidelines bar you from writing an Acceptable Use Policy that would allow you to remove any such content.  You just can't host something that you give only to some people, and not to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you might wish to consider running your repository inside Tor, as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hidden service&lt;/a&gt;, which might give you the freedom to ignore national laws, at least until you accidentally de-anonymise yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T11:42:22.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6815" CreationDate="2018-05-04T12:57:05.413" Score="7" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an native English speaker so the paragraph below is really hard for me to understand.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that if I find a code repository &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; with Apache2 license and find out that some of code infringe my patents (which means using them without my authorization), and I want to sue the code contributors (e.g. ask them to delete that part of code from &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;), then I can't use the code &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; anymore (including building anything based on &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11074" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T15:15:32.677" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T14:21:36.070" Title="What exactly does &quot;If You […] litigation is filed&quot; from Apache2 license mean?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6811" CreationDate="2018-05-04T14:30:03.200" Score="14" ViewCount="6185" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&lt;/a&gt; I notice that the MIT license doesn't have &quot;patent use&quot; permisson like other popular open source licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it indicate? What's the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11074" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T15:24:42.107" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T02:52:39.953" Title="Why doesn't the MIT license have &quot;patent use&quot; permission?" Tags="|mit|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2018-05-04T16:46:37.843" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD licenses were drafted before software patents were common. Therefore, they completely ignore the topic. For users of MIT- or BSD-licensed software, this creates the risk of a kind of &lt;em&gt;submarine patents&lt;/em&gt;. A rights holder could release software involving patented technology under such an open-source license, and later try to sue users for their patent violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This absence of any mentions of patents has been construed by some as an &lt;em&gt;implicit&lt;/em&gt; patent license. If someone releases software to the public, then surely they must have intended for that software to be used by the public, despite any patents? Although not completely unreasonable, that is a rather shaky argument. Some kinds of implied patent licenses have been upheld by U.S. courts. However, that observation ignores that open source is a global phenomenon, and most users (including myself) are not under the jurisdictions of U.S. courts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects have clarified the MIT and BSD licenses with an explicit patent grant. For example, React from Facebook used to be licensed under the BSD + a separate patent license between 2014 and 2017. The terms of this patent grant disproportionally favoured Facebook over users and made the combined license incompatible with many other open source licenses. After a few rounds of user outcries, they relicensed under a standard MIT license, without any explicit patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 License (and later the GPL 3) introduced an explicit patent grant to the user that only terminates if that user starts any patent litigation that claims that the licensed work were infringing. This approach improves clarity through an &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; patent grant and deters patent trolling, thus protecting other contributors and users. In my opinion, this makes the Apache 2.0 license vastly preferable to licenses like ISC, MIT, or BSD variants that ignore patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T16:46:37.843" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6844" CreationDate="2018-05-05T00:35:10.997" Score="4" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;The open-source, community-maintained game Simutrans uses the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_1_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artistic Licence 1.0 (AL)&lt;/a&gt;. I know many people regard this as a poor choice, but the core of the game was written as someone's spare time project in the 1990s, so it's two decades too late for relicensing.* However, compiling it from source now requires several libraries that use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/zlib/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib Licence (zL)&lt;/a&gt;. Simutrans has been careful not to distribute those libraries with its source code, because of the difference in licences. This is confusing for newcomers, especially since there are many possible combinations of game versions and library versions, which do not all play nicely together. However, licences can be different, but compatible. Are the AL and the zL compatible for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6332/sections-4-and-6-of-the-artistic-license-2-0&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5545/understanding-a-perl-module-license/5547#5547&quot;&gt;answers&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-can-i-determine-if-two-open-source-licenses-are-compatible-with-each-other?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/324/are-permissive-licenses-mit-bsd-zlib-compatible-with-cc-by&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; address various compatibility issues, but none deal with this particular combination. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;choosealicense&quot; website&lt;/a&gt; has a blank space in the &quot;same license&quot; column for both these licences, suggesting that neither requires that it be distributed only with other code from the same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that we are talking about the Simutrans source and the library binaries and source; it seems to be well established that a zL binary can be integrated into an AL binary. The zL also seems very permissive, and does not pose any obstacle. So it comes down to the notorious clause 4 of the AL. Yet it seems to me that clause 4(a) was written to cover precisely this situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the software is being modified in accordance with the wishes of the Copyright Holders, so what is being distributed &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the Standard Version source code in the future;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;all that is necessary is to make clear where people of the future can obtain the last source code revision that does not include the zlib libraries (the Standard Version of the present).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, IANAL and would welcome an answer from someone with more expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*N.B.: This also means that the clauses 3(d) and 4(d) of the AL cannot be used, because many of the Copyright Holders are uncontactable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11078" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T02:54:03.390" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T13:09:43.763" Title="Are the Artistic Licence 1.0 and the zlib Licence compatible with one another for distributing sources?" Tags="|license-compatibility|linked-libraries|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6814" CreationDate="2018-05-04T15:23:05.793" Score="1" ViewCount="2178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have published code on GitHub with the following license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quantum including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Main.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;Enrichment/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;package.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;Graphics/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Canvas.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;Math/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Immutable/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Matrix.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Quaternion.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Vector2.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Vector3.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Mutable/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Matrix.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;Universe/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;package.scala&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Space.scala  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quantum is a point grid rendering algorithm written in Scala&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2018 Markus Appel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am available for any questions/requests: markus.appel@outlook.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The layout of this license does not match any &quot;best practices&quot; and tutorials.&#xA;But I do not like these, mainly because they want me to add multiple lines of legal notice in &lt;strong&gt;every file&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, that is almost unacceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, best practices aside, is this a valid license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" OwnerDisplayName="Markus Appel" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T16:37:02.267" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T16:37:02.267" Title="Is using the GPLv3 without putting a license notice in each source file OK?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6813" CreationDate="2018-05-05T04:19:23.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; indicates this is legally valid but not advised for practical reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clear statement [about GPL licensing] in the program's README file is legally sufficient &lt;em&gt;as long as that accompanies the code&lt;/em&gt;, but it is easy for them to get separated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoticeInSourceFile&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This FAQ item&lt;/a&gt; goes into more depth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why should I put a license notice in each source file?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should put a notice at the start of each source file, stating what license it carries, in order to avoid risk of the code's getting disconnected from its license. If your repository's README says that source file is under the GNU GPL, what happens if someone copies that file to another program? That other context may not show what the file's license is. It may appear to have some other license, or no license at all (which would make the code nonfree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a copyright notice and a license notice at the start of each source file is easy and makes such confusion unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU Project's advice here is based entirely on a concern about future modifications separating code from its licensing information, not about the validity of the license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T04:19:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6809" CreationDate="2018-05-05T04:29:30.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding is close to correct. The rights retracted are limited to patent rights, not rights to use/modify/distribute the software in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an author licenses their work under the Apache 2 license, they offer copyright rights to modify and distribute the software, but also offer rights to any patents they hold that are involved in processes the software performs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In plain terms, the licensor is saying,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you're a patent holder and you sue me (or &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;) for infinging your patent in this Apache-licensed software, then you automatically lose the right to use any of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; patents granted in this Apache 2 license grant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, that means you couldn't distribute the software (since you'd run afoul of the author's patents that are no longer licensed to you) unless you modified the software to no longer perform processes covered by those patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T16:43:05.700" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T16:43:05.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T10:14:13.577" Score="3" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I modify open source software that is under ‚GPLv2 or later‘. I will upgrade to GPLv3 or later – that‘s of course no problem at all. Not looking for advice in this case, but is it possible to upgrade to AGPLv3, too? The info provided at gnu.org/licenses/ are not clear for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: GPLv2 or later -&gt; AGPLv3, possible, yes or no? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11081" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T18:31:07.047" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T18:31:07.047" Title="GPLv2 or later upgrade to AGPLv3" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6816" CreationDate="2018-05-05T12:31:58.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a FAQ about this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are the various GNU licenses compatible with each other?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer includes a compatibility matrix. This matrix does not explicitly include the AGPLv3, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each place that the matrix states GPLv3, the same statement about compatibility is true for AGPLv3 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the relevant cell in this matrix to answer your question is the cell at the intersection of &lt;em&gt;&quot;I want to copy code under: GPLv2 or later&quot;&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;&quot;I want to license my code under: GPLv3 or later&quot;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;OK&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T12:31:58.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6813" CreationDate="2018-05-05T13:26:40.007" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some software, and I assume that the copyright belongs to one Markus Appel. Being the copyright holder, it is his exclusive right to allow you or not allow you to make copies of the software, and it is his exclusive right to allow you or not allow you to create derived works of the software. He also is allowed to allow you to do these things under any conditions he likes (within very wide limits). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your right is to take it or leave it. That is, you have the right to not copy his software, and not create derived works of his software, or to make copies and/or create derived works, while following any conditions that he sets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find his conditions unacceptable, then you can't copy the software or create derived works. Should a judge decide that the license is illegal, then you lose as well, because there would be no legal license, which means you don't have the right to copy the software or create derived works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T13:26:40.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6809" CreationDate="2018-05-05T15:15:15.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to apsillers, I don't agree with his/her answer &lt;em&gt;as it originally appeared&lt;/em&gt;.  There are licences where the licence itself terminates on infringement, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; (see s8), but the Apache licence doesn't appear to be one such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache2 s3, which is what you quote above, refers to the grant of patents that accompanies the licence, and deals with the termination of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;.  Specifically, when someone makes software S available under Apache2 they are covenanting a licence to any of their patents that S might infringe upon, though this licence only covers the context of the software.  In other words, A agrees not to give you software S under Apache2 that embodies their patent P, then turn around and sue you for infringing P when you use S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause you quote says that if you decide that S infringes &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; patent P2 and you decide to sue A for distributing software that embodies P2, your licence to use &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; (not S) terminates (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;then any patent licenses granted to You ... shall terminate&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will also mean that you can no longer lawfully use S, which looks like a termination of the whole licence.  But it's subtly different: if you were to &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; S so that it no longer embodies P, you still have the right to use that modified version (say, S2).  You may also distribute that version, though if you were to do so under Apache2 you would be convenanting not to sue people who used S2 for violating P2 (assuming S2 embodied P2).  If the original licence had terminated in its entirety, you would no longer have the right either to modify S or to distribute S2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T14:21:36.070" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T14:21:36.070" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T23:22:11.537" Score="0" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to make &lt;em&gt;deep&lt;/em&gt; modifications to the Linux kernel, virtually make a 'new' kernel in a way, for my project, which is building my own operating system, (yes, I know, a lot of work, but hey, I'm quite a dedicated guy when it comes it working on projects of any kind.) and if I don't want the source disclosed, is this even possible with Linux's license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I have to include the 'new' kernel's source code if I decide or even manage to release the operating system?  What about if it's closed source, but not paid-for software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if you change it or add to it, but you don't want to make the code you &lt;em&gt;added&lt;/em&gt; open source? Must I also open source that code I made that I would wish to keep closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11086" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T15:18:05.103" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T15:18:05.103" Title="Can you change GPLv2 licensed software, but keep your new source closed?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6820" CreationDate="2018-05-06T07:13:44.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, if you start from the existing kernel, it is likely that &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; you create from it - even if you were to replace every single line of code - will be a derivative work of the existing kernel.  To re-implement an existing work without falling foul of that requires an &quot;arm's-length&quot; technique known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;, and by definition that can't be done by one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because your &quot;&lt;em&gt;virtually new&lt;/em&gt;&quot; kernel is a derivative of the existing one, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s2b requires that the whole new work be made available under GPLv2.  So taking your questions one at a time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would I have to include the 'new' kernel's source code if I decide or even manage to release the operating system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about if it's closed source, but not paid-for software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL makes no distinction between paid-for and zero-cost software; all must be free-as-in-freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if you change it or add to it, but you don't want to make the code you added open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole new work must be available under GPLv2, s3a of which requires that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the source be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must I also open source that code I made that I would wish to keep closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is part of a derivative of a work initially covered by GPLv2, and you distribute it, then yes, you must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T09:40:24.397" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T09:40:24.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6691" CreationDate="2018-05-07T07:35:36.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem, it seems to me, is that you are trying to re-invent the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt;, these being the (often inalienable) right of the original author to retain credit for - rather than any kind of exploitable interest in - an original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, moral rights have enjoyed their best protection in civil law jurisdictions, while common law jurisdictions - specifically including the US - have not generally given them much attention, and where they have, it has often been fairly dismissive.  Quoting from the above-linked article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moral rights have had a less robust tradition in the United States. Copyright law in the United States emphasizes protection of financial reward over protection of creative attribution. The exclusive rights tradition in the United States is inconsistent with the notion of moral rights as it was constituted in the Civil Code tradition stemming from post-Revolutionary France. When the United States acceded to the Berne Convention, it stipulated that the Convention's &quot;moral rights&quot; provisions were addressed sufficiently by other statutes, such as laws covering slander and libel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you try to force a system into doing something it has specifically decided not to do, you can end up making a bit of a dog's breakfast.  In the case of free-software licensing, a previously-unseen licence, or an old one with odd custom add-on clauses, can be such a turn-off that your software has a huge barrier of entry to overcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your best bet is to put the software up on your own website, and try to keep the copy there the most up-to-date one, incorporating as many changes as are fed back to you.  Using a weak copyleft licence isn't helping you with this, but you've said you don't like strong copyleft, so I presume you're ready to deal with the consequences of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider registering a domain name that matches the name of the project; &lt;code&gt;.org&lt;/code&gt; is a traditional home for such, if it's not already taken.  Transferring the copyright doesn't implicitly include transferring either the domain name, or trademark interest in the name if such exists.  If you're really serious about this you might want to consider paying to register the trademark, and explicitly excluding that interest from the copyright assignation.  That way, people who search on the software are always likely to find a trail that leads straight back to you as the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T07:35:36.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6824" CreationDate="2018-05-07T08:31:54.067" Score="4" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to create custom made software for each customer. I will also be telling the customer that I shall be making it open source and they are simply paying me for my time to package things how they want it, but they accept anyone can also use what I have developed for them. So at the end of it, it will not be a commercial product but an open source one. But I was paid for my time to create this open source product for someone before making it openly available. &lt;strong&gt;Is this allowed under an open source licence?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will be between me and an individual not a business and it will only be that individual using. The only exception being if someone wanted to download it from GitHub as again it shall be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11093" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T01:02:40.470" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T01:02:40.470" Title="Can I use PyQt if I make it open source and only charge customers for my time to customize the open source app for them?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6823" CreationDate="2018-05-07T08:47:25.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Being paid for your time in writing or customising free software is a completely-acceptable business model; I've been doing it myself for twenty years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started to get a little lost in the minutiae of python bindings and the extent to which they are like libraries, and then realised there is no problem.  If you take some software, S, available under the GNU GPL (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyQt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyQt is&lt;/a&gt;), and you make a clearly-derivative work S2, this is fine.  You may distribute S2 to some third party, provided that you do so under the terms of the GPL, and you fulfil your GPL obligations to the third party (which include providing them with the full source and build environment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you have said you are happy to provide S2 to the world, via github, under a free licence, I don't expect that you will have a problem with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if the work you are doing is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; making a derivative work of PyQt (and I don't know whether it is, because your question doesn't give enough detail), it makes no difference: provide your customers with the full source of the code you've written for them, and make it all available to them under GPL, and your obligations are (broadly speaking) satisfied.  Whether or not you get paid for this is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T08:47:25.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6835" CreationDate="2018-05-08T18:55:05.367" Score="6" ViewCount="847" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking for some time now for my company to share code publicly that we use in our projects. Code that is not related to any particular business case, but is useful and often copied from a project to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that when I first suggested this, I've been told that we would be &quot;giving away&quot; our time and money to the competition instead. I'm not a fan of this mindset, but I can see that it is not entirely wrong either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some reasons I can imagine for open-sourcing some utilities we are using are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We will be able to share code in an easier way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We get the chance of it being reviewed and maybe improved by others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The world is moving to open-source.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of our time is actually spend adapting solutions to customers' needs. Custom code build for specifically for a customer is out of question and wouldn't be published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last thing I can imagine is how it would look good for the company to have an organisation with code in it. I mean, as a developer it would make me recognise the company more. It would be perceived as a good company, at least.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It doesn't really matter if the code is given away for free if the people copying and using it don't know how or when to use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11107" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T06:58:42.750" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T19:19:26.283" Title="What are the good reasons for my company to offer open source code?" Tags="|software|benefits|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6829" CreationDate="2018-05-09T02:39:40.117" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created many open source projects under MIT license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the inquiries I receive, stargazers, and direct communication with the people who are using them, I know many big companies who are using my open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any legal issue if I show them as possible users of my open source project? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8512" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T17:27:04.727" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T17:27:04.727" Title="Can we mention possible users without their permission?" Tags="|law|marketing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1503" CreationDate="2018-05-09T04:43:37.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;People contribute to an opensource project because of either career or need. On the other side, a project get contribution when it has well known by its users and it welcomes contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First timers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the inspiration of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.firsttimersonly.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;firsttimersonly&lt;/a&gt;, I created many first timers friendly easy and small issues which can be solved in just 5 min effort. I spent 2-3 times more time to create an issue instead of implementing them. And then talking about it on twitter with  &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/first_tmrs_only&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@first_tmrs_only&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/yourfirstpr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@yourfirstpr&lt;/a&gt; help to know people that you're welcoming the first time contributors. A badge, or quote on README is also helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the contribution in any opensource project is done by it's users. And there are many reasons why a good project don't get many users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chicken egg situation&lt;/strong&gt;: Many good projects don't get much attention because they are new, have less popularity, less stars on github, people don't know if there is someone who is using this project etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Less activity&lt;/strong&gt; : Authors who has less activity on a project, or overall github activities, a project which is not updated from a long time (more than an year or something), a project with less contributors, unattended long time pending issues (specially bugs) makes a project unreliable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Documentation&lt;/strong&gt; : Many good projects don't have easy to understand documentation. Or the documentations are placed on some place which is not known by their visitors. For my opensource project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/Stubmatic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stubmatic&lt;/a&gt; I initially created documentation on wiki. But when I received many basic questions, I realized that I should link them on &lt;em&gt;README&lt;/em&gt; as it is the initial point for any visitor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;just another project&lt;/strong&gt; : Many projects seem &quot;just another&quot; project. People don't want to switch until it is really needed and it is easy to switch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many times users are not even aware that there is a project exist which can help them. Such projects don't even appear in google search.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We're open&lt;/strong&gt;: A badge, quote or clear notice that your project is welcoming contribution is really important. But in addition, you should also create &lt;em&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/em&gt; in the root of the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Implementation&lt;/strong&gt;: A project inspired by many anti-patterns demotivate their users to contribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Credit&lt;/strong&gt;: Mention your contributors on README or on a separate file. And appreciate their work once they're done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may mention following in issue template&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would you like to work on this issue?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ ] Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[ ] No&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may ask your users to contribute when they raise an issue&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would you mind to raise a PR for fast resolution? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8512" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T07:17:11.430" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T07:17:11.430" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6827" CreationDate="2018-05-09T07:28:37.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Statements affirming public data are fine.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stars and watchers on GitHub are public data - anyone can see it. If you're just making a statement about that data, you're fine - you're stating a fact, what people choose to make of it is out of your control. Something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BigCompanyA and BigCompanyB have starred this project on GitHub!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would be okay, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd steer clear of making statements based on the implications of that data. You know (for a fact) that the company has starred/watched your repository; however, that doesn't necessarily imply that they use the project. They might just really like you. Unless you know for certain that they use it, I'd avoid saying they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;If in doubt, &lt;em&gt;ask&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you already have a channel of communication open with the people you're planning to claim as users. If you're not sure whether it's okay or not, use that communication channel to ask them! A quick&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, do you mind if I quote you on that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or maybe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey, can I list you as a user of this project on my website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;isn't problematic - you can even tack it on to the end of a more business-focused message, if you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T07:28:37.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2018-05-09T10:21:18.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing a new license can cause more problems rather than helping you, unless you invest in lawyers. It's better that you choose an already existing license. There's a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-incompatible licenses here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a substantial number of such licenses were &quot;fixed&quot; in newer versions, so you must either explicitly specify the license version number that is GPL-incompatible, or choose one that never turned compatible nor seems to have the will for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me add that I understand (and agree with) your position, although I think your wording wasn't the best: you should have avoided talking about &quot;momentum&quot;, as it can be interpreted as that you don't want to be less popular than a GPLed fork of your work. The problem here is not being popular, but that somebody modifies your code, by fixing bugs and adding more features, but they license their changes under the GPL, so the original author of the code cannot benefit from such contributions unless he &quot;surrenders&quot; to the GPL and releases the original code under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe that a permissive license should allow a non-copylefted code to be included in a copylefted project. The only requirement I would add is: &quot;if you do any modifications to my source code files, your modifications/additions/contributions must be done under the original license: only if you simply include my code into yours, you are allowed to use a copyleft license for your project while keeping my license intact&quot; (note that I used quotes here not for saying I would add a clause like that in an existing license, but that what would be my will with my software)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11114" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T10:21:18.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6832" CreationDate="2018-05-09T17:56:08.787" Score="1" ViewCount="3530" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building an IOT product, an home automation solution, where I am using ESP8266 Arduino Core that is LGPL-2.1 and also few libraries which are GPL 3.0 licensed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For security reasons I do not want to reveal the complete source code of my firmware. I am only distributing my product with the microcontroller having the binaries embedded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it come under the output of the program and hence can I keep my source code closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11118" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T19:15:10.070" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T11:30:50.590" Title="Can I use GPL 3.0 or LGPL licensed libraries in my commercial closed source IOT product?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6831" CreationDate="2018-05-09T20:26:53.400" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is simply normal distribution of software that includes GPL components. The fact that the binary is embodied in a physical device only allows a few extra source-distribution options (namely 6(a) and 6(b) in GPLv3) including the written-offer-for-source option even for commercial distribution. (Normally written offers are allowed only for noncommercial distribution.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any part of your software that is part of the same work, under copyright law, as a GPL-licensed component has copyleft requirements applied to it, and you must distribute the complete source code for the work any time you distribute the binary. This is the normal operation of the GPL's copyleft provisions; it is no different for your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the GPL, LGPL components limit their copyleft obligations to modifications to the library itself. Software that makes use of LGPL components as a library do not have copyleft requirements applied to them, even if they create a single work with the library under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, using a GPL library requires you to disclose the source code of your whole work, while using an LGPL library only requires you to disclose the changes you made within that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-05-10T11:30:50.590" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T11:30:50.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6861" CreationDate="2018-05-10T09:43:08.773" Score="4" ViewCount="1061" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've rewritten my personal website using this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher&lt;/a&gt; . I've made some significant changes. Like I did on my previously (built from scratch) website, I'd like to add something like a &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;my name&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at the bottom. I was thinking of something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;my name&gt; | I like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I implicitly link it to the page. I'd also prefer keeping my source code private. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this within the legal implications of the License? It seems the project is licensed with the GNU GPL V3 here &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher#license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a hard time understanding open source licenses and their implications :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7235" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T07:22:40.043" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T11:56:36.447" Title="Can I put a copyright on my website and make the code private when the source code is partially copied from an open source GNU GPL V3 project" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6834" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6836" CreationDate="2018-05-10T15:30:52.990" Score="0" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that any work that is based on work licensed under GPL must also be released under GPL. However, it does not require contacting original authors about the fact that a derivative work has been, in fact, created. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a project for which source codes will be released. What I would like to do is keep the license open-source (GPL3) but get informed if someone uses those sources to create derivative work. I know this would be in general quite impractical for large projects because it would fill authors' inboxes quickly. However, I don't expect that there will be many derivative works (if any) as the source code will be published only on offline medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to extend GPL to require this behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11125" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T19:29:20.237" Title="Extend GPL to be informed in case of derivative work" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2018-05-10T17:45:21.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making your code open source is not always a good solution. It is completely understandable if your company doesn't want to do that. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are legal considerations. &lt;strong&gt;Which license&lt;/strong&gt; do you use? Under what conditions will you accept contributions, e.g. will you require a contributor license agreement so that the company retains exclusive copyright over the project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maintaining&lt;/strong&gt; projects takes time. Who will handle issues and pull requests?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You will have to audit the code first. Are you sure you don't have any &lt;strong&gt;confidential details&lt;/strong&gt; in the code or in the Git history? Note that names, email addresses, and timestamps in commit messages may also be sensitive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the code is used as part of a publicly reachable service: are you confident that this code is &lt;strong&gt;reasonably secure&lt;/strong&gt;, so that access to the source code cannot be used to craft targeted attacks? E.g. having access to source code can be quite handy when constructing a shell injection attack.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that is a cost that your company has to bear, so there have to be some benefits that outweigh it. These benefits are often indirect or abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open source projects can be a vehicle for &lt;strong&gt;PR&lt;/strong&gt; (sometimes euphemized as &lt;em&gt;developer relations&lt;/em&gt;). These projects show how cool and transparent your organization is – with the implication that you also have great products or services to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Along the same lines, open source projects can make your company more interesting for &lt;strong&gt;potential hires&lt;/strong&gt;. If I were considering to apply to your company, seeing some open-source projects would be a good sign. I could also look at your code to see what kind of problems you are solving, and whether the code looks reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might be satisfying for employees to contribute to some open source project during their work hours.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you offer some kind of web API or service, open source projects with related tools or language bindings make it a lot easier to use that API, and can therefore make your product more successful. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, open source projects can also backfire. If the code is unusable, unmaintained, and unreadable, they do not paint the company in a flattering light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most open-source projects are not used by anyone else, e.g. because they don't solve problems other people are having, they are not flexible enough, or they are simply not known to other people. So you shouldn't expect that suddenly an army of open-source developers will start fixing your problems for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also unlikely that you are helping your competitors. If I were competing with you, I'd think twice before starting to depend on tools that you maintain. That's just a lot of risk. But maybe your project is so useful that I want to use it anyway? Then congratulations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have published something actually useful, which is already better than most open source projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your project is so great, many people might use it – thus realizing the benefits such as increased company reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have demonstrated the capability to innovate. Being able to solve new problems is more important than knowing which code to copy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the potential benefits of open-sourcing software are often rather vague, and are not worth the effort (have a negative ROI). Unless there's buy-in from management, this is just not going to happen. And you're not likely to get buy-in from management unless you can show how open-sourcing that code makes the company more money than using that time to work on a client project…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T17:45:21.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6834" CreationDate="2018-05-10T19:29:20.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Requiring someone to do something on creating a derivative work is generally considered to make software non-free; this is the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#debian-legal_tests_for_DFSG_compliance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically for the GNU GPL v3, adding &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; further restrictions to the software is forbidden by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 10&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T19:29:20.237" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6847" CreationDate="2018-05-11T03:06:17.927" Score="6" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've submitted a patch to an open source library that was ignored by the maintainers. Some time after the submittal one of the maintainers implemented a different patch for the same problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implementation has been present for a few versions, but hardly anyone uses it, even the examples in the library still resort to alternate approaches that may be perceived as hacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that my proposal wasn't the only one, in the past others have tried to solve the same problem, and submitted more or less the same solution. However, I'm the only one still going at it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This manifests itself as linking my proposal to various issues that i believe would be easy to solve with the API. I collect examples of improper use of the existing API (which i believe to be flawed) and demonstrated that it is not seeing adoption because users still resort to the &quot;old ways&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went further and filed a couple of bugs, but they were deemed as features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this process it feels like i have alienated myself from the community and that other devs simply ignore my comments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know what to do in this situation. What is considered good etiquette, what should be the drive behind making an aggressive or less aggressive push of a feature/patch? Is there some magic number of &quot;well i've tried&quot; before one should give up. Should one be concerned how one is perceived when doing this kind of a push, or should it not even be a factor in the matter? I see the value of any opinion being expressed for anyone who potentially might be interested in the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my last attempt I refactored some of the code and halved the number of lines in some files. I can see this swing many ways, good and bad. &quot;Here it works&quot;/&quot;Here you've no idea what you're doing&quot;. On the dev front, maybe i didn't want to do the refactor, I just wanted to do the feature, is there a trade off here between &quot;trust me&quot; and putting your code to the test?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there ways to go through this process more efficiently? I tend to write lengthy posts with a lot of (pseudo)code, i've seen people write much conciser posts etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11134" OwnerDisplayName="Dusan Bosnjak 'pailhead'" LastEditorUserId="11134" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T16:05:58.647" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T16:06:15.227" Title="Open-source, when (not) to go on a crusade for a feature?" Tags="|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6848" CreationDate="2018-05-11T13:21:44.460" Score="8" ViewCount="2782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I fork a software with 1000 files licensed under the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's only a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in the root of the project (no MIT License notice at the beginning of the files).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if I add other 1000 files and want to relicense the whole software under another License, how can I keep the proper attribution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I create an MIT License snippet, fill it with the original author's name, and paste on top of each one of the original thousand of files? Or what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what if, instead of adding a brand new file, I modify one of the original ones? Should I put the old license notice, the new license notice, both the license notices and the name of both authors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11133" OwnerDisplayName="Andrea Ligios" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T16:20:04.617" Title="How to properly re-license code released under the MIT License?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2018-05-11T13:48:07.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license reads &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It belongs in the files it covers which includes modified files. Your license would apply to the files you've created. MIT license is compatible with some other licenses, such as GPL, so those could coexist in the same file, but this is not true of all licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11132" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T13:48:07.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-11T16:05:13.410" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;A popular open source library has lots of open PRs. A maintainer claims that they have no time to look at them, but has time to answer the same library related question on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the questions about this library are very repetitive, and some just come from not reading the docs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to suggest for the library's docs/wiki to be updated to capture these common questions from SO? In this case, would it be reasonable to expect the maintainer to not spend so much time on SO? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey seeing how lots of these SO questions are now answered in our wiki, can you use some of this new free time to go through PRs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11134" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T14:30:10.430" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T14:30:10.430" Title="Maintainer ignores PRs but spends a lot of time on Stack Overflow" Tags="|collaboration|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6837" CreationDate="2018-05-11T16:08:27.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, open source has a way to address exactly the issue you're having.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's called &quot;forking&quot;. It means you create your own version of the software. In Github, it can happen by just pressing one button once, and your fork will also be listed in the list of forks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forking is not discouraged; it's very much encouraged. In fact, with Git the preferred development happens by having many forks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they refuse to merge your fork, then you can start contacting the other people wanting the same feature you want and telling them about your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knows, perhaps your fork could overtake in popularity the original project!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T16:08:27.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6840" CreationDate="2018-05-11T16:15:14.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is reasonable, but it will be most reasonable if you create yourself the patches for the docs / wiki. So, don't just go around suggesting things to be improved. Improve them on your own, and sent ready mergeable patches!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you can propose or provide code changes to avoid those issues / difficulties in the library, that's even better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't start to propose the maintainer how to spend their time. That's just way too rude. Some people love answering questions on StackOverflow. Since you haven't paid for the open source support, you have to consider the level of support you may get won't necessarily fulfill your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T16:15:14.823" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2018-05-11T16:53:59.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have proposed exactly the same in the company I work for. I specifically listed non-business-critical code in the request. I failed. The justification they gave was that if the project becomes successful, people may start demanding new features and that may end up taking too much time. I felt there was something else they didn't want to tell, and there probably was: it is not in the interest of the company to improve my job market value (I'm the one who created most of the code in the project). The reason of people demanding new features is a non-issue, as there is no contract or promise to offer any kind of support whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ended up choosing to create my own open source projects in my own time, unrelated to what the company I work for does. When doing so, the thing to consider is does it compete with your employer. If it does, you may end up losing your job due to competing with your employer in your free time, so choose carefully the open source projects you start and work for. For example, if your employer does Python based web development, and you like Java as well, now would be a good time to create a web development utility library in Java and to place it into Github. Or who knows, perhaps you like low-level development in C. If so, you could do some high-performance low-level programming in C. That surely won't compete with Python based web development!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When deciding your free-time open source activities, you need to consider whether you tell your employer about them or even ask for a permission prior to taking part in that activity. I decided I won't, because the response I got about releasing some of our code as open source was so negative as was the response I got about taking part in a particular open source project, including a warning not to take part in any open source projects that might complete with my employer. Of course, there's a fair possibility they will find the projects with Google. If they do, I already have a justification why my projects won't compete with my employer. I also can specifically for every single open source activity they have specifically forbidden me from taking part in, that this project doesn't have that activity at all. I know I'm a very good programmer, so it is extraordinarily unlikely I would get fired because of non-competing unrelated open source activity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you do, don't ask your employer generally whether you are allowed to take part in open source activities in your free time if there's even a slight possibility their opinion is &quot;no&quot;. Instead, you can feel the attitudes by asking about a specific non-important open source project. If their answer is &quot;no&quot;, then you just won't take part in that open source project (and will start your own project instead, or take part in another important open source project, the one you have always wanted to work for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason to provide open source for you is that everything you do in a private company that is mentioned in your CV will be treated with suspicion (did you really do that? you can't show the code!) but if you have code in Github, people will believe you wrote that code. So, open source is extremely important for programmers wanting to advance their career. You don't want to miss that opportunity!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company you're working for has a different interest. Their interest is to keep you as an employer for a long amount of time with a low salary. Your interest is to increase your apparent job market value, the company's interest is to make the apparent value as low as possible so that you won't have many alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And needless to say, you are not allowed to publish copyrighted code as open source in Github (unless it's already open source). Similarly, you are not allowed to use the trade secrets of your employer in open source. Also, the timestamps of your open source contributions should be not in your regular working hours, showing this is a free-time activity and that you're not using your employer's time for your own purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, instead of providing an answer to what you asked (what are the good reasons to offer open source code?) I have answered a question what you should have asked (what are the reasons to not offer open source code?) and that's a fairly big honking reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your employer wants your apparent job market value to be as low as possible for the duration you work for them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T16:53:59.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6812" CreationDate="2018-05-12T13:09:43.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Artistic License is at its heart an &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; liberal license with few restricitions, even more so than the MIT/BSD license family. But it also enforces trademark-like properties intended to give the original author artistic control over their work, which gives the license a confusing copyleft flavour. The solution is to look carefully at your use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the community-maintained version is the Standard Version, you are in luck. Binaries of the project can be distributed including any libraries under clause 4(a):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may distribute the programs of this Package in object code or executable form, provided that you […] distribute a Standard Version of the executables and library files, together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent) on where to get the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation therefore seems to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not the Standard Version, you can still distribute binaries of the software including libraries, if you, at your choice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4(b): include the source code of your version in the download (this doesn't seem to extend to the source code of libraries), OR&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;4(c): distribute your version under a different name, document differences to the Standard Version (e.g. in a changelog), and point to the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are concerned about distributing the source code of the project along with the source or executable form of libraries, then clause 4 is irrelevant. Clause 1 lets you make verbatim copies of the standard version, and clause 3 covers copies of the modified version. However, no restrictions apply to the development of the Standard Version itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any of these cases, it is possible to use any library that does not impose a particular license for the combined software (like the GPL would do). But some care has to be taken. The licenses of the libraries may require certain notices to be retained or displayed. The AL does not generally require this. &#xA;So you are not able to distribute the project + libraries under only the AL. Instead the complete license for such a distribution must therefore consist of both the AL and all library licenses, each of which only apply to their respective parts. Users must comply with all of these licenses at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a combined license document doesn't have to be complicated. You can point to the full license terms in a different document. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 1997 Copyright Holder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SomeProject is licensed under the terms of the Artistic License, which can be found in &lt;code&gt;doc/artistic.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;libs/some/&lt;/code&gt; contains SomeLibrary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2003 SomeoneElse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Put the SomeLibrary notice here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;libs/other/&lt;/code&gt; contains SomeOtherLibrary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 1995 SomeOtherAuthor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Put the SomeOtherLibrary notice here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Artistic License definition of a Copyright Holder can be distinct from the actual copyright holders. The AL Copyright Holder is whoever is named explictly in the copyright notice, which is often only the original author. Other contributors may hold copyright for their contributions, without having the rights of a Copyright Holder under the AL. To enter into alternative distribution agreements as per clause 4(d), you only need permission from the Copyright Holder, not from all copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T13:09:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-12T15:34:09.780" Score="3" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing a bot in Java for &lt;a href=&quot;http://discordapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discord&lt;/a&gt;. In my program I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DV8FromTheWorld/JDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JDA library&lt;/a&gt; which is basically a &quot;Java wrapper&quot; for the Discord API which is under the Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a few question regarding my project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache License states that I have to provide a copy of the license to everyone who uses my program because it contains an Apache-licensed library, the JDA. &lt;strong&gt;How can I achieve this with a Discord bot?&lt;/strong&gt; Is for example an &quot;about&quot; command enough for this which would print the license and references to used libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I have to license my program with Apache License 2.0?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This was the most confusing one to me: I want to integrate a random character chooser for a game called &lt;em&gt;Overwatch&lt;/em&gt; which is the property of Blizzard Entertainment. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/legal-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their legal FAQ&lt;/a&gt; they say that if I use any of their content I must provide their copyright notice and may not sublicense it. &lt;strong&gt;How does this comply with the Apache License when I license my project with it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might have misunderstood parts of the Apache License or the Legal FAQ of Blizzard Entertainment, but I want to have things clarified before I publish anything on the internet, to be safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6747" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-19T19:38:54.310" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T08:28:15.780" Title="Discord bot and Apache License" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6837" CreationDate="2018-05-12T16:06:15.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source project is more than a bunch of source code that anyone can download. It also includes an active community that works together to help make the project better for everyone that uses it. If the owners of a project don't encourage and nurture the community that goes with a project, then they end up being replaced or just cast aside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The smaller your customisations, the easier it is for you to maintain your own &quot;flavour&quot; of a project that has small alterations to your liking. You can merge the parent projects changes into yours for as long as you want, even if the original project isn't interested in accepting your changes into their project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option you have is to fork the project and develop it and the community around it so that your fork becomes the preferred place to go. You can still merge changes made by the original project into yours as well as adding your own changes and changes offered to you by others. An example of this might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSSL&lt;/a&gt;, which was forked into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libressl.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LibreSSL&lt;/a&gt;. Sometimes this happens as the main goal of the new project does not match original goals, this is where we get &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.netbsd.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NetBSD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openbsd.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenBSD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://dragonflybsd.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DragonflyBSD&lt;/a&gt; - all of these projects work together and share code with common goals but have different overall goals that set them apart. Some other examples are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssh.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSSH&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensmtpd.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSMTP&lt;/a&gt;. There is nothing wrong with forking a project to follow your own goals, it is part of what empowers open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anoter option is to start a new project from scratch that has no affiliation with the existing project. You can put the linux kernel into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T16:06:15.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6838" CreationDate="2018-05-12T16:20:04.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no strict rule of where you have to place copyright notices, you just need to make an effort to keep it clear that this piece of code is covered by this license and not try and misrepresent it as your work. While it is common to place the copyright at the top of every file it is not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the original project does not place the copyright at the top of every file, I wouldn't change every file just to add it. I would keep the external project files separated so that it is as clear as possible that these files are MIT licensed and copyrighted by xxx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;project&#xA;  - main.c&#xA;  - lib.c&#xA;  - LICENSE  &amp;lt;-- this is your project license and copyright&#xA;  + extern&#xA;    + proj2  &amp;lt;- everything in here is covered by the included license file&#xA;      - LICENSE     not your license above&#xA;      - lib.c&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T16:20:04.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-12T16:29:12.897" Score="2" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing some C++ code which I might eventually like to release under an Apache v2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to build the application linking to some of the LGPL v2.1-licensed shared libraries from Gnu GPG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I shall not be statically linking with Gnu GPG libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I shall NOT be including any Gnu GPG shared libraries or any other part of Gnu GPG when distributing my application.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users will either already have them installed or will have to install them separately. In the absence of the Gnu GPG shared libraries, my application will continue to run without GPG functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL v2.1 license wording appears to allow dynamically loaded shared libraries to be used in this way by applications which are licensed with licenses other than LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question I have is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it permissible for me to distribute my application under the Apache 2.0 License if it dynamically links with LGPL v2.1 shared libraries as described above, and those LGPL shared libraries are not included in my distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, are there compatibility problems arising from the Apache license side ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11137" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T03:32:19.620" Title="Query on distributing Application under Apache 2.0 license which dynamically links with LGPL2.1 shared libraries" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6846" CreationDate="2018-05-12T16:33:18.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Blizzard Entertainment license is the strictest license here. This is a non-free license that only grants &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; the right to use the software, but you are not allowed to make copies or changes to the software.  In a very strict reading of the license, you can only use a single copy of the software as-is and you can't take parts of it into a separate project.  In a less strict reading, you can use parts of the software for your own projects, but you are not allowed to distribute those projects to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license does not require that every user of your program receives a copy, but only that recipients of the program itself also receive a copy of the Apache license.  You are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to use the Apache license also for your own program, but you should make it clear which license applies to which code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: The license from Blizzard Entertainment effectively forbids you from publishing your project on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T08:28:15.780" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T08:28:15.780" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6849" CreationDate="2018-05-13T03:32:19.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPL copyleft only applies to modifications to the library itself, not to applications that use the library. Therefore, your application may be under virtually any license whatsoever (including a nonfree license) and you could still be in compliance with the requirements of the LGPL license on the library. The only way an application's license could be a problem is if it somehow actively interfered with the library's internal copyleft, e.g., if the application's license actively forbade sharing the source of libraries in use. The Apache 2 license makes no such interfering requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your third-party library were GPL-licensed, the GPL requires than you distribute the source code of any binary form you actually distribute. If you don't distribute a binary that includes the GPL library, you don't have GPL obligations applied to your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is complicated ever-so-slightly by the fact that you application probably makes use of the library's API, which could, possibly, make it a derivative of the library, since APIs are copyrightable expression. However, you're &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the API, not writing an &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt; of the API, so your use is not very large. Also, the closer the API is to some fundamental operation, the less it has any copyright at all: e.g. symmetric encryption takes plaintext and a key, so an &lt;code&gt;encrypt(key, plaintext)&lt;/code&gt; function has minimal copyrightability.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T03:32:19.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-13T17:05:09.623" Score="0" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to make a certain piece of software free and open source but don’t want certain companies (or their affiliates or partners) which are major privacy violators from using it is that possible to do? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is it possible to publish software and make the open source license terms irreversible to prevent any undesired company from trying to pressure the publisher into allowing them to use the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What software license type would best suit what I need to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11141" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T11:05:44.927" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T11:05:44.927" Title="Open Source Software Licensing - Is it possible to make software free but in terms prohibit certain companies from using it?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-11-22T14:14:32.557" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6855" CreationDate="2018-05-13T18:11:01.747" Score="3" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to license my software under the term of &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;, I'm supposed to include its text in a file and place the file in the repository alongside my project. When I distribute the project, I'm therefore also distributing the text of the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not the author of the text, what gives me the right to distribute it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11142" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T02:08:27.160" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T03:11:54.587" Title="What license is the text of &quot;Unlicense&quot; licensed under?" Tags="|copyright|license-file|unlicense|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6854" CreationDate="2018-05-13T18:36:22.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The footer of the Unlicense web page indicates that the entire page (including the text of the license) is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0 Public Domain Dedication&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if it weren't licensed that way, the legal principle of estoppel in general prevents someone from punishing you for performing an action that they permitted you to do. The Unlicense web site says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To opt out of the copyright industry's game altogether and set your code free, put your next software project into the public domain using the following (un)licensing statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have explicitly permitted and instructed you to include the Unlicense licensing statement in your project. If the author of the text of the Unlicense later sued you for violating their copyright after you included the text in your project per their own instructions, their suit would not succeed (even absent CC0 permissions) because you are acting within parameters that the author has explicitly permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you relied on estoppel (instead of CC0), other actions beyond distribution, such as modifying the text, might not be allowed, since the website doesn't appear to contain any permissions for preparing derivatives of the Unlicense. (However, considering the author's attitudes about copyright in general, I would be personally shocked if they tried to sue you for that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T03:11:54.587" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T03:11:54.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-05-13T19:03:13.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Restricting who can use your software is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/53/can-i-restrict-who-can-utilize-my-software/62&quot;&gt;incompatible with the definitions of open source and free software&lt;/a&gt;, so any license you choose that restricts which kinds of entities may use your software would not be a FLOSS license. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; includes the following requirements and rationales:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources. Therefore we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second part of your question, you may offer your code under an explicitly irrevocable license like the GPLv3 or Apache 2. However, as the copyright holder, you always have the right to issue new licenses with different terms. If you wanted to prevent yourself from being talked into issuing a new license with different terms, probably the safest way to do this would be to perform a transfer of title of your copyright so you are no longer the copyright holder. (Or an analogous exclusive transfer of rights, if your jurisdiction does not directly allow copyright transfers.) In that case, only the new copyright holder could issue new licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Optimally, you would chose an ethically rigorous organization (such as the FSF, or Free Software Conservancy, perhaps) as the new copyright holder who would respect your original wish not to issue different license grants. Which organization or individual you trust to do this would depend on your goals and original licensing terms. If you want non-FLOSS terms that restrict which kinds of entities may use your software, I would not expect any organization associated with free or open source software to be helpful in your case. However, if you used a GPL license and wanted to ensure you would not be talked into issuing a non-copyleft license in the future, the FSF might be cooperative and accept ownership of your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T11:36:15.923" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6858" CreationDate="2018-05-13T21:36:07.063" Score="-2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've rewritten my personal website using this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ptrpov/ptrpov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ptrpov/ptrpov&lt;/a&gt; . I've made some significant changes. Like I did on my previously (built from scratch) website, I'd like to add ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11144" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T00:50:41.623" Title="Can I write on my website and make the code private when the source code is partially copied from an open source GNU GPL V3 project" Tags="|gpl|github|contributor|source-code|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-05-14T07:40:36.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6857" CreationDate="2018-05-14T00:50:41.623" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The potential problem that immediately comes to mind is tivoilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tivoization: Some companies have created various different kinds of devices that run GPLed software, and then rigged the hardware so that they can change the software that's running, but you cannot. If a device can run arbitrary software, it's a general-purpose computer, and its owner should control what it does. When a device thwarts you from doing that, we call that tivoization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T00:50:41.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2018-05-14T01:02:53.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developers who write software can release it under the terms of the GNU GPL. When they do, &lt;strong&gt;it will be free software and stay free software, no matter who changes or distributes the program.&lt;/strong&gt; We call this copyleft: the software is copyrighted, but instead of using those rights to restrict users like proprietary software does, we use them to ensure that every user has freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever someone conveys software covered by GPLv3 that they've written or modified, &lt;strong&gt;they must provide every recipient with any patent licenses necessary to exercise the rights that the GPL gives them&lt;/strong&gt;. In addition to that, if any licensee tries to use a patent suit to stop another user from exercising those rights, their license will be terminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words you can use this open source resume template tool. You can make changes to it. Once you start having others use it, then you need to make them aware of their rights to the original code. What you suggested does not meet that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T01:21:39.810" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2018-05-14T11:04:29.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You won't win this argument because people think there is more value in the sourcecode than there really is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They assume...&#xA;- that because they paid you a lot of money to create it, others can run off with the finished product, as if it were a television set;&#xA;- it demands maintenance (I don't see how you could be forced to do so);&#xA;- if the code was written poorly, it will make them look bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give them this example and leave it at that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A chef at a restaurant (pick a particular example if you can) shares his techniques, dishes and even receipies on youtube or the internet. &#xA;Does this make you skip the restaurant and copy the dish at home? Or are you drawn to the restaurant because of the quality of the chef?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11155" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T11:04:29.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6833" CreationDate="2018-05-14T17:10:56.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short overview:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-licensed code you modified is a web page template, and the code you want to distribute as a web site is the output of rendering that template with some of your own text and images. These are two different works. However, since the template-rending process leaves substantial portions of the GPL-licensed template in the output web page, the web page is a derivative of the template, and it can only be distributed under the GPL as well. (See the second paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPL FAQ item&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central principles of the GNU GPL are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you make a derivative of a GPL-licensed work, then your derivative is required to be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you distribute a GPL-licensed work (including a modification), the license requires that you make available the human-readable source code to anyone who receives a copy of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recipients should be aware the work is licensed under the GPL. If you distribute the work verbatim, you must keep notices intact; if you modify the work, you must ensure that notices about the work's license are present.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, the applicable requirements, taken from sections 4, 5, and 6 of the text of the GPLv3 are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy [of the software] an appropriate copyright notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply [...] to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if what you distribute is not the preferred form for making modifications, you must also choose a method from section 6 to make the source code available to anyone who receives a copy of your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These requirements apply to whatever GPL-licensed material you actually deliver to the recipient viewing your page. If there is GPL-licensed code that constructs your page before it is delivered to the viewer, and no one ever receives a copy of that page-constructing code, you do not need to share that unseen code in any form. However, any GPL-licensed material that the user &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; receive, such as the HTML, CSS, or JavaScript that the browser renders, must be licensed under the GPL (and appropriately marked) if it is based on GPL-licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the recipients already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; received the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so you might not need to distribute it separately. However, be aware that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You still need to ensure the files are marked as being GPL-licensed&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You need to make sure the files are not minified or obfuscated, since that is not &quot;source code&quot; as the GPL defines it (specifically, the &quot;preferred form for making modifications&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the structure of your site, people may find it difficult to gather all the separate files involved in your site -- it would be much easier to provide them as a source-controlled repository or as a downloadable file archive (tar, zip, etc.). Without doing this, a copyright holder could make the argument that your are deliberately impeding people's ability to usefully download the complete source. (It is difficult to say whether or not such an argument would be correct, and may depend on the specifics of how your files are structured and used within the browser client during rendering.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these requirements could be satisfied by a simple footer like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;© 2018 {my name}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bk2dcradle/researcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Researcher theme&lt;/a&gt;, © 2017 {original author}&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; | download the source &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;GNU GPLv3&quot; link should be to a locally-hosted copy of the text of the GPL, available from the same server as your site as a whole. The source-download link may point to a remote code-hosting site or a file download where users can download the complete HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the built site. You do not need to share the Jekyll template, which is never distributed to a viewer of the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These requirements are not affected by whether your distribution is commercial or noncommercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, you might be saying, &quot;Wow, do I really need to license my entire site under the GPL just because the template is under the GPL? That doesn't seem great.&quot; In fact, the Free Software Foundation agrees with you, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly discourages the use of copyleft licenses for website templates&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Templates are minor enough that it is not worth using copyleft to protect them. It is normally harmless to use copyleft on minor works, but templates are a special case, because they are combined with data provided by users of the application and the combination is distributed. So, we recommend that you license your templates under simple permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the author of the Researcher template chose to license their template under the GPL, in contravention of the FSF's advice. However, since the original author &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; choose the GPL for their template, you must deal with the consequences: namely, your entire site that is the built from this template must be licensed under the GPL to avoid a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T11:56:36.447" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T11:56:36.447" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T20:59:07.523" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a group at our educational institution that licenses its software with a license that is verbatim the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 3-clause license&lt;/a&gt; with one sentence added under the copyright year/holder line.  The top of the license reads thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2018, MyInstitutionName&#xA;All rights not granted herein are expressly reserved by MyInstitutionName.&#xA;&#xA;...rest is BSD 3-clause exactly ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this change the license?  In particular, does it make it somehow incompatible with the BSD license, or does it still qualify as the BSD 3-clause license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3842" LastEditorUserId="3842" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T21:23:23.113" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T21:26:54.033" Title="Does this addition change the BSD 3-clause license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6862" CreationDate="2018-05-14T21:26:54.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should not make any difference. It just reaffirms something that is true anyway. Similarly, the phrase “all rights reserved” next to a copyright notice is completely superfluous nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since it (probably) makes no difference, yet leads to potential confusion, you might want to inquire why your institution is using this. Was there specific guidance from your legal department? Or did someone add that sentence, and everyone copied it without considering whether it is necessary? I think it would be clearer if this line was deleted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T21:26:54.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T05:15:13.363" Score="3" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many other apps, whenever our app uses a third-party library, we add its licence to a page in our app displaying all third-party licences, be the licence MIT or Apache. Recently, we have added Firebase into out project through cocoapods(yes, this is an iOS app), and specifically &lt;code&gt;FirebaseCore&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;FirebaseAnalytics&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;FirebaseInstanceID&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;FirebaseMessaging&lt;/code&gt; are installed in their compiled framework form, as opposed to their source form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licence should we add into our page? I have found this post:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2568/what-firebase-license-should-i-include-in-my-app&quot;&gt;What firebase license should I include in my app?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;But the only answer it android-specific and confusing, and does not directly mention what licence to use. I have personally found, however, that there is an Apache 2.0 licence in the beginning of some of the header files in the Firebase frameworks, should we use these licences? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, should we attribute each of these four APIs independently, or collectively as &lt;code&gt;Firebase&lt;/code&gt;? I know there's a Firebase User Agreement and a Terms of Service, but that's just between us and Google, and has nothing to do with this kind of attribution or third-party licence, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if possible, can someone also answer that if the same licence apply to Android as well? Since we do have an Android version of the same app, I would like to know if there's any difference in the frameworks licensing  across these two platforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11160" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T07:16:16.193" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T07:16:16.193" Title="How to add Firebase API's licence into our app?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6865" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-15T13:48:44.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Official site: &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FSF: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Unlicense (#Unlicense)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/cc0&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cc0&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cc0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/wtfpl&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;wtfpl&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;wtfpl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/public-domain&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;public-domain&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;public-domain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T11:33:02.147" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T11:33:02.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-15T13:48:44.157" Score="0" Body="The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license." OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T11:32:58.073" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T11:32:58.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T17:00:24.647" Score="7" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a non-trivial scientific text for university.&#xA;It is written in Latex and I want to make the source available under GPL (v3 if that matters) so other can learn from my Latex skills. However I the GPL states it should not be used for texts, so I am considering the use of CC BY-SA for the text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the text of the document considered to be generated fom the code, even if it appears almost literally in the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11167" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:10:06.603" Title="Can I license Latex code under GPL but the content under CC BY-SA?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|copyleft|source-code|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2018-05-17T17:29:30.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not sure why nobody has mentioned it, but there is an excellent &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, that accomplishes exactly what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code is licensed under MPL, then it can be freely used either by itself or as part of another project. The only restriction that MPL places is that your files (and your files only) have to still be available under the MPL terms. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://veldstra.org/2016/12/09/you-should-choose-mpl2-for-your-opensource-project.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If your code is licensed under MPL 2.0 however, everybody retains the freedom to use your code as they please, but any enhancements to your open-source code have to be shared back. Sounds much fairer to me, and hopefully to you too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A GPL project would also be able to use your code. However, they will be forced to dual-license your files under MPL and GPL. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU website&lt;/a&gt; explains this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you receive work under MPL 2.0, you may make a “Larger Work” that combines that work with work under those GNU licenses. When you do, section 3.3 gives you permission to distribute the MPL-covered work under the terms of the same GNU licenses, with one condition: you must make sure that the files that were originally under the MPL are still available under the MPL's terms as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T17:29:30.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6870" CreationDate="2018-05-17T18:04:46.287" Score="14" ViewCount="1571" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is a Python library called &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; which is licensed under GPL v2.0 (or v3.0). Suppose further that the library is sufficiently complex that it contains some C/C++ component(s) that are similarly licensed under GPL v2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'd like to write a program that uses this library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import g&#xA;g.foo()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statement here &lt;strong&gt;links&lt;/strong&gt; to the library &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;, both by loading and compiling &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;'s Python source code, and by dynamically linking to the &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;'s .dll/.so component. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, my program has to be licensed under the terms of GPL 2.0 whenever it is propagated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because the program actually links to the library. As such, the terms of the GPL apply to the entire combination. The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, publishing a program on Stack Exchange is a form of propagation under GPL's terms, so the question is: &lt;em&gt;can I post this code snippet on SE as a question or answer&lt;/em&gt;? After all, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/legal#licensing&quot;&gt;SE Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; require that I provided that code snippet under CC BY-SA license, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not compatible with GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible with the GNU GPL version 3: this means you may license your modified versions of CC BY-SA 4.0 materials under GNU GPL version 3, but you may not relicense GPL 3 licensed works under CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T07:56:51.070" Title="Can I post code examples with GPL software on Stack Overflow?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6869" CreationDate="2018-05-17T20:50:15.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but maybe. You have correctly noted that this is a problem. You cannot paste GPL'ed code to Stack Overflow. But there are two exceptions, which depend on the copyright laws in your local jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code snippet does not fall under copyright. Copyright protects creative expression. If the code snippet is very short, or cannot be creative because there is only one way to write this code, then any license is irrelevant. Where copyrightability starts depends on your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your usage of this snippet falls under a copyright exception. For example, fair use or a right to quote are common copyright exceptions. Again, this depends on your jurisdiction. However, some kind of right to quote will exist anywhere as it is required by the Berne Convention (a treaty about international copyright).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also not 100% clear whether writing code that interfaces with a library creates a derived work of that library. So there is a theoretical possibility that the code snippet is not restricted by the GPL. In practice, you should not rely on this possibility, but assume that the GPL does in fact apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a different scenario, e.g. a blog post that is licensed under CC-BY-SA, you could include the GPL'ed code and specify that it is not available under the CC-BY-SA but the GPL. I.e. the text of the blog post might be CC-BY-SA licensed, but other parts of the post are not. For Stack Overflow, this is not possible because you license the posts in their entirely, and you additionally issue a non-CC-BY-SA fallback license. So in a strict reading of the ToS, you wouldn't even be able to include other CC-BY-SA works in your posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel quite comfortable with posting GPL-derived code snippets on Stack Overflow. These will often not be copyrightable because they are both short and not terribly creative. If the post containing such code is discussing the GPL'ed library, and any GPL'ed code snippets are only there to support my statements, and they are attributed properly, then I can likely rely on a right to quote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T20:50:15.153" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6869" CreationDate="2018-05-18T14:55:49.473" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, you can&lt;/strong&gt; as it is your code only (and so you can license it to SE as you like). The fact that source code contains text &lt;code&gt;import g&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;em&gt;does not make said source code derived work&lt;/em&gt; (as it doesn't contain any code that you yourself didn't write), and so license of &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt; is of no importance whatsoever for the purpose of posting said source code snippet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if some other person compiles and links that snippet to executable, then &lt;strong&gt;produced executable will be derived work&lt;/strong&gt; (as it includes binary parts of GPL'd library mixed with your binary code), and hence is subject to &lt;code&gt;g&lt;/code&gt;'s license (which in case of GPL would mean that person could only distribute that &lt;em&gt;executable&lt;/em&gt; as GPL, not as CC-BY-SA). Which is what GPL FAQ talks about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you use simple interpreter (such as python) instead of compiler, it is even simpler as there is no executable containing mixed code. You can distribute your code under whatever licenses you wish, but you cannot distribute GPL'd library code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair use etc (which might grant you extra rights) does not even need to come into play, as there is &lt;em&gt;no derived work at all&lt;/em&gt; when posting snippet of your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give example for python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tar zcf blah.tgz your_code/*.py&lt;/code&gt; and distribute as CC-BY-SA -&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;OK&lt;/strong&gt;, it your code only. (The fact that it won't work without library is only usability issue for end user, not legal one for you)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tar zcf blah.tgz gpllib/*.py&lt;/code&gt; and distribute as CC-BY-SA - &lt;strong&gt;NOT allowed&lt;/strong&gt;, library is GPL and it is incompatible with CC-BY-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;tar zcf blah.tgz your_code/*.py gpllib/*.py&lt;/code&gt; and distribute as CC-BY-SA - &lt;strong&gt;NOT allowed&lt;/strong&gt;, library is GPL and it is incompatible with CC-BY-SA and so you cannot distribute it as part of something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however that if you did for example copy/paste part of source code from GPL'd library into your code, it &lt;strong&gt;would create derivative work&lt;/strong&gt; (same as linker would do with combining binary code in binary executable example above), and so it wouldn't be just your code anymore, and you'd fall under point 3. above and be unable to distribute resulting source code as CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another easy way to look into it is to see that &lt;code&gt;import g&lt;/code&gt; does not need refer to popular GPL library, it might as well refer to your own reimplementation of the library with same API interface (that you wrote but choose not to publish, for example; or even published it like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessTif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LessTif&lt;/a&gt; did when it reimplemented &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motif&lt;/a&gt; back in the day, for example).  By looking at the posted source code snippet alone, one cannot even deduce which one it is supposed to be using. Or on SE, your snippet could likely be for example pseudocode, which is never supposed to be able to run and uses some imagined library. The copyright issue (and thus licenses that override it) really only come into play only when you mix code (either source code by hand copying, or binary mixing by the way of linker etc.) from different copyright holder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastEditorUserId="5923" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T17:20:59.690" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T17:20:59.690" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T18:16:03.800" Score="5" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Libre Office can open proprietary Microsoft file formats (although some features are unsupported). But how was it able to achieve this? Did they reverse engineer these formats from binaries? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In this article&lt;/a&gt; the author points out the complications associated with Microsoft Office formats. I was wondering how did Libre Office achieve this feat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11038" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T08:26:27.017" Title="Libre Office and proprietary Microsoft file formats" Tags="|proprietary-code|intellectual-property|file-formats|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6875" CreationDate="2018-05-23T07:42:24.517" Score="4" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have software licensed under LGPL 2.1 and I want to modify it and re-publish the whole software under the GPL 3.0 license. Is this legally possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think so, but I'm not completely sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL 2.1&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public&#xA;  License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library.  To do&#xA;  this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so&#xA;  that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,&#xA;  instead of to this License.  (&lt;strong&gt;If a newer version than version 2 of the&#xA;  ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify&#xA;  that version instead if you wish.&lt;/strong&gt;)  Do not make any other change in&#xA;  these notices. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T09:23:32.217" Title="Can LGPL 2.1 licenses software be re-published under GPL 3.0?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6876" CreationDate="2018-05-23T08:07:24.207" Score="-7" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider we have a &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; licensed project, If we try to &lt;code&gt;charge a fee for any warranty&lt;/code&gt; which we provide (e.g. we will ask for a huge amount that no one will ever pay), then, can someone skip our warranty and ask for the source only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean there was nothing mentioned about this aspect or did we miss something!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have read lot of questions about &lt;code&gt;General Public License v2&lt;/code&gt; and know that it's like a virus and everything that does touch it get open-source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We just use/need a single component/library in our project which is under &lt;code&gt;GPL v2&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our client which we developed the app for needs our project closed source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We asked but not even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt; was granted to us&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So we have decided and started to search for license leaks in &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Any &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; leaks we found is listed below:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As long as you don't distribute the copy or a modified version, you don't have to open your project (useful for JS libraries available online).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making GPL source available does not mean download, in fact, we are able to:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wait until we get a written request for the source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and we are allowed to charge a &quot;reasonable&quot; handling/copying charge before sending of DVD with source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tivoization&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL does not contain any passage stating that license fees cannot be asked for. The GPL faq list states explicitly that one can ask for license fees for software under the GPL (but they are still allowed to redistribute it for free).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can &lt;code&gt;charge a fee for any warranty&lt;/code&gt; from our side as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T07:10:00.863" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T07:10:00.863" Title="license - how to skip GPLv2" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-06-04T09:01:20.547" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2018-05-23T09:23:32.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have interpreted the license correctly. A LGPL v2.1 covered work can be relicensed under GPL v2+, which includes the GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL license compatibility matrix in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; confirms this and explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LGPLv2.1 gives you permission to relicense the code under any version of the GPL since GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T09:23:32.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6874" CreationDate="2018-05-24T05:53:43.063" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can someone skip our warranty and ask for the source only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Read: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; &gt;&gt; &lt;code&gt;3&lt;/code&gt; &gt;&gt; &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt;: If you do not offer the source for download, then you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks for the answer in the comments have just extracted it above to help others...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Above mentioned aspect of &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; means:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We can release one version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then we just need to hope no one does ask us in the next three years about the source for that release.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But still:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we can make a fake and bullet-proof document,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which proves we released it before three years then maybe ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, the best thing that would happen this way is that people will call you out for non-compliance (and draw attention to it) and the worst thing is that you may get sued into bankruptcy, since we are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; ever able to make it 100% bullet-proof, we are not the mafia after all ;-)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T07:01:25.930" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T07:01:25.930" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T08:13:11.490" Score="3" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I discovered a chrome extension &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblocker-ultimate/ohahllgiabjaoigichmmfljhkcfikeof&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adblock ultimate&lt;/a&gt;, it claims to be open source on the aforementioned webpage. I see that the app was updated about a year ago. Also, a GitHub page is also mentioned. When I went there I see that the repository was updated about 2 years ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the app is not open source? How can I make sure that the extensions I use are open source and they use the code that they claim to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11038" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T22:13:50.397" Title="False Claims and Open Source" Tags="|software|license-file|enforcement|ethics|freeware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6874" CreationDate="2018-05-24T13:47:57.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enforcement of GPL is no longer a rare event. Trying to find a loophole in the licensing is literally betting the livelihood of your company on that alleged loophole. Different groups attack companies that do not comply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional legal action would be from non-profits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.blackducksoftware.com/dramatic-shifts-in-open-source-license-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;These not-for-profit groups encouraged everyone to “play by the rules” and occasionally took action, including appropriate legal action, against those who didn’t.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I’m thrilled to see basically individual bounty hunters taking part in legal actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.blackducksoftware.com/dramatic-shifts-in-open-source-license-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;These actions are undertaken by a copyright holder against an alleged infringer, fueled by the pursuit of significant monetary claims.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best of all your competitors may now go after your company for violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.blackducksoftware.com/dramatic-shifts-in-open-source-license-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoKinetic is not a copyright holder in this matter and hence not claiming that Panasonic’s alleged failure to adhere to the GPL is resulting in some copyright claim that CoKinetic may have against Panasonic. Rather, CoKinetic is claiming that Panasonic, by failing to play by the rules that everyone else is adhering to, is engaging in anti-competitive behavior and that this conduct has directly injured CoKinetic’s business and that, more generally, as a member of the public CoKinetic is an intended third party beneficiary of the GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see a fourth risk being ex-internal staff. By taking this action you put a bounty on your company that any fired employee can pursue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to take this path of violating the GPL, I have high hopes that you will be caught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10944" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T13:47:57.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T14:47:40.770" Score="12" ViewCount="5456" Body="&lt;p&gt;We develop a commercial desktop application that uses an AGPL library. The lib's code is just used, not modified. Our application runs completely offline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May we use the AGPL library without having to make our application's code open source? As I understood it, this is allowed. But still I am not sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know if my conclusion is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11216" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T17:18:28.453" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T05:36:23.457" Title="May I use AGPL license in a desktop application without providing the source code?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6879" CreationDate="2018-05-24T15:21:20.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license family consists of three kinds of licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; is the most widespread variant. If you include GPL software into your software, you can only distribute the result under the terms of the GPL. Those terms include providing your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;AGPL&lt;/strong&gt; is the same as the GPL, but also requires you to offer the source if users only interact with the software over a network, i.e. your software is a webapp that wouldn't normally be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;LGPL&lt;/strong&gt; is the same as the GPL, but relaxes its terms: under certain conditions you can link to a LGPL library without having to disclose your source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you have a desktop app so the AGPL is equivalent to the GPL. If you want to use the AGPL code, you will have to license your application under the AGPL and offer the source code for that app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T15:21:20.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-25T06:53:45.217" Score="1" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;We develop a desktop application that uses some libraries with BSD-license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD licenses got this line: Copyright (c) &quot;year&quot;, &quot;copyright holder&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall one leave it this way or do I have to fill the &quot;year&quot; and &quot;copyright holder&quot; (in case my program uses a library with a BSD license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11219" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T17:16:45.070" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T18:07:17.237" Title="BSD licenses: What to do with &quot;year&quot; and &quot;copyright holder&quot;?" Tags="|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6881" CreationDate="2018-05-25T07:59:32.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a copyright interest in any work to which you contribute copyrightable content.  It is best to indicate this by &lt;strong&gt;adding&lt;/strong&gt; to the lines, so that it goes from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2015, Fred Yoyodyne&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2015, Fred Yoyodyne&#xA;(c) 2018, Runtime Error&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;assuming that is your real name.  I have no understanding of the copyright implications of a pseudonymous declaration, but I doubt it will help make things simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, whatever the answer to your question, it remains a question of &lt;em&gt;asserting&lt;/em&gt; copyright.  That is unrelated to the question of how you &lt;em&gt;license that interest out&lt;/em&gt;, so the answer isn't different for BSD, GPL, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-05-25T08:05:13.417" LastActivityDate="2018-05-25T08:05:13.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6884" CreationDate="2018-05-26T00:02:44.297" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to bundle the GCC cross-compiler (tar.bz2 file) along with a GPL v2 licensed ARMv4T processor core on Github? The compiler will extracted during simulations to compile C code for the core to execute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11221" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T01:59:49.617" Title="Bundling GCC along with my GPLv2 project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-2|gnu|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6883" CreationDate="2018-05-26T01:59:49.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since processor core code does not appear to be in any way derivative of GCC, this sounds like a typical case of placing two independent programs side by side, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ calls &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights that each program's individual license would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses of the two works do not interact if they are independent works. Since the license of each work independently allows you to distribute it, you may distribute both together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to combine GCC with the processor core in a way that somehow created a combined work under copyright law, then you could not distribute that combination: the GCC is under GPLv3, and versions 2 and 3 of the GNU GPL are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the processor core were licensed under &amp;quot;GPLv2 or any later version&amp;quot; then you could distribute the combination under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T01:59:49.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6888" CreationDate="2018-05-26T16:22:37.957" Score="2" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a single-executable CLI program that I plan on distributing with some man pages.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't seem to understand whether or not I can comply with the MIT license by adding an argument (&lt;code&gt;-a&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;--show-attributions&lt;/code&gt;) that will print the licenses for each library I use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Would that comply with the license, or do I have to write it into some &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10517" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T10:31:18.823" Title="Single-executable CLI program, does this comply with the MIT license?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6886" CreationDate="2018-05-27T10:31:18.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no single MIT licence, and the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advises against using the term&lt;/a&gt; as it is ambiguous.  Assuming you're referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:X11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X11 licence&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to be the most common one so named, the licence obligation is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choose-a-license&lt;/a&gt;, to apply this licence you should&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Create a text file (typically named LICENSE or LICENSE.txt) in the root of your source code and copy the text of the license into the file. Replace [year] with the current year and [fullname] with the name (or names) of the copyright holders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no obligation on you to make your software disgorge the licence terms, or the licence itself, in response to any particular command-line input; you just have to include the copyright and permissions statements somewhere in what you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if, in order to keep what you distribute down to a single binary, you were to choose to make your software behave so, then as Brandin notes above, the most common flags would be &lt;code&gt;--help&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;--about&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;--version&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;code&gt;owned by&lt;/code&gt; is fairly confusing language, so stick with &lt;code&gt;Library X (c) Fred Yoyodyne, 2018&lt;/code&gt;).  If you were to make your software, in response to the chosen flag, disgorge the relevant copyright statements along with the full text of the licence, that would fulfil your obligations, it seems to me (caveat: IANAL/IANYL), as &quot;embedded in the binary&quot; is one way to satisfy &quot;included&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're distributing more than just a binary (eg, because you're using a package manager to distribute it), then include the relevant file, and don't worry about getting the binary to disgorge anything licence-related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T10:31:18.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6877" CreationDate="2018-05-27T13:00:54.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I make sure that the extensions I use are open source and they&#xA;  use the code that they claim to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: you can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer: To check if the source code and the binary belong together, reproducible builds (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://reproducible-builds.org/&lt;/a&gt;) would be necessary. Usually, everyone who compiles the source code will get another result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make sure that &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; binary belongs to the source code, however, you can compile it yourself, which is not an easy task though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that the app is not open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Github page contains only one commit (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/adblockultimate/AdBlockUltimate-chrome/commits/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/adblockultimate/AdBlockUltimate-chrome/commits/master&lt;/a&gt;), so there are two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is Open Source. Then it was a project somebody wrote two years ago, one year ago he/she uploaded it to the Chrome store.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not Open Source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to find it out, you should write a mail to the developer or open an issue on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11226" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T13:00:54.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-05-27T17:30:16.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have legal ownership (copyright) of any original software you write. That ownership gives you the right to restrict use of the software you write as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you choose the terms of your license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take time to understand what people mean when they talk about the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31717/what-do-the-phrases-free-speech-vs.-free-beer-really-mean/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Free beer vs free speech&quot;&gt;“free beer and free speech”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Take a look at the Creative Commons organizations’s article &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Understanding Free Cultural Works&quot;&gt;Understanding Free Cultural Works&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;License Compatibility&quot;&gt;License Compatibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Research the implications of choosing a “custom” license instead of a “standard” license that has been tested in court &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get advice from a lawyer trained in software licenses, especially if you try to write your own license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Creative Commons organization explains, freedom is a spectrum. The license you seek to create/reuse is going to be considered “non-free” because it places a limit upon how people can reuse your software (their freedom). As others have written, a license that restricts fields of endeavor will not meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated%20%22OSI&amp;#39;s%20Open%20Source%20Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI’s definition of open source&lt;/a&gt;. However, your license will still be more free than most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License Compatibility is extremely important to understand. Since you plan to restrict the freedom of people to reuse your software, other people’s code may not be able to include your code (and your code may not be able to include other people’s code). That will affect how people can use your software. Again, incompatibility isn’t good or bad it is just incompatibility. Many Free, Open Source licenses are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please Note: Creative Commons licenses are for written work other than software, like user manuals or documentation, so you’ll want to base your license on a license that is intended for software. I’ve used the “non-free” CC-NC license as an example because it is very well known and learning about it is likely to help you find (or create) a software-specific license you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3844" LastEditorUserId="3844" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T17:44:21.623" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T17:44:21.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6879" CreationDate="2018-05-29T03:15:27.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6880/11220&quot;&gt;the answer provided by amon&lt;/a&gt; is accurate regarding the effect of using [AL]GPL licensed software as part of your software, however there is a 'loophole' of sorts, in that it is legal for software developers to 'dual license' their software, so you should check if there's a second license that you can choose to use instead, or if there is an option to purchase a license that gives you permission to use it in your closed source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11220" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T03:15:27.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6896" CreationDate="2018-05-29T14:37:01.947" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the Android license, being Apache license, permit others to develop their own versions of Android and license them as proprietary? As far as I understand, the Linux kernel on which Android is built is GPL. Then how can Android or further derivatives be released under a different license? What is the sanctity of GPL license of Linux here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11224" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:57:48.870" Title="Does the android license allow handset manufacturers to build an OS that is proprietary?" Tags="|license-compatibility|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6895" CreationDate="2018-05-29T14:57:48.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Android kernel is a variant of the Linux kernel.  Since the latter is GPLv2, the former must also be, and it is.  So the &quot;&lt;em&gt;sanctity&lt;/em&gt;&quot; of the GPL on the Android kernel is intact; you can get the source for those portions at &lt;a href=&quot;https://source.android.com/setup/start/build-numbers#honeycomb-gpl-modules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;places like this&lt;/a&gt;.  If you make and distribute your own modified version you will also have source-distribution obligations to honour.  However, the licence on the kernel has no effect on what you can run on it: I can run Apache-licensed, GPLv3-licensed, and proprietary software packages in user space on top of my Linux desktop kernel, without offending against the kernel's licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The userspace OS is under the Apache licence.  This is a weak copyleft licence, and taking the code and making proprietary products from it is lawful, provided you adhere to a few &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notification-related&lt;/a&gt; obligations (remember, IANAL/IANYL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The applications that run on Android can be under any licence their developers choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T14:57:48.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6898" CreationDate="2018-05-30T03:18:13.763" Score="5" ViewCount="1226" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/45078661/821436&quot;&gt;This answer on Stack Overflow&lt;/a&gt; states that the OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 yet the OracleJDK has a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of GPL was that if they used the OpenJDK sources, they would be required to distribute the code of their project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain how this works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9103" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-26T05:41:20.797" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T05:41:20.797" Title="OpenJDK vs OracleJDK Licensing?" Tags="|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6897" CreationDate="2018-05-30T03:57:20.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All contributors to the OpenJDK project must agree to the Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK contributor page summarizes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The OCA gives Oracle and the Contributor joint copyright interests in the code. The Contributor retains copyrights while also granting those rights to Oracle as the Community's sponsor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Oracle is the copyright holder (or full rights co-holder) of all OpenJDK code, including submissions from outside contributors. Oracle's right to include OpenJDK code in their proprietary JDK stems from their status as copyright holder, not from a GPL license grant. Therefore, they are not required to follow any GPL requirements in their distribution or reuse of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T05:45:05.503" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T05:45:05.503" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T20:35:21.900" Score="1" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to base my engineer's thesis on Truffle framework (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle&lt;/a&gt;) and GraalVM (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/oracle/graal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/oracle/graal&lt;/a&gt;). Truffle is licensed under &lt;strong&gt;GPL 2 with Classpath exception&lt;/strong&gt;, Graal compiler and GraalVM is under &lt;strong&gt;GPL 2&lt;/strong&gt;. What is more when downloading GraalVM from Oracle's website I am asked to accept OTN agreement (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/early-adopter-license-2299792.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/early-adopter-license-2299792.html&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I freely use this software in my thesis? Should I disclose information about the license in my thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11244" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T07:15:53.363" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T07:15:53.363" Title="Using GPLv2 licensed library in engineer's thesis" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6929" CreationDate="2018-05-31T07:33:14.567" Score="1" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt;, on line 632, I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a software with this license, so I created a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file with the whole content of the license. Should I replace this line? Or is it the responsibility of the &amp;quot;new programs&amp;quot; creator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the &amp;quot;copyright&amp;quot; line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T09:52:57.697" Title="Should I replace this line in AGPL-3.0?" Tags="|license-notice|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6900" CreationDate="2018-05-31T23:38:22.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must abide by the GPL. This means that anybody who gets the code is entitled to full source. And you certainly have to disclose this fact. This all depends on if your work is a derivative, of course. Would neen more details to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That in itself doesn't make your work any less valuable/less thesis-worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-05-31T23:38:22.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6879" CreationDate="2018-06-01T09:39:33.110" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of confusion regarding modification. You claim that &lt;em&gt;&quot;The lib's code is just used, not modified.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; That's a very narrow interpretation of modification. In court, integrating the library into your desktop application also counts as modification, hence you also need to open source the code of your desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Amon indicates, your use of the AGPL corresponds with use under the GPL. The FAQ from the Free Software Foundation on gnu.org is clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary&#xA;  system. Can I do&#xA;  this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system.&#xA;  The goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy,&#xA;  redistribute, understand, and modify a program. If you could&#xA;  incorporate GPL-covered software into a nonfree system, it would have&#xA;  the effect of making the GPL-covered software nonfree too. A system&#xA;  incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of that&#xA;  program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program must be&#xA;  released under the GPL if it is released at all. This is for two&#xA;  reasons: to make sure that users who get the software get the freedom&#xA;  they should have, and to encourage people to give back improvements&#xA;  that they make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software&#xA;  alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make&#xA;  sure that the free and nonfree programs communicate at arms length,&#xA;  that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a&#xA;  single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difference between this and “incorporating” the GPL-covered&#xA;  software is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The&#xA;  substantive part is this: if the two programs are combined so that&#xA;  they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can't treat&#xA;  them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole&#xA;  thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the&#xA;  kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two&#xA;  separate programs—but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply&#xA;  one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about&#xA;  this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the&#xA;  free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If people were to distribute GPL-covered software calling it “part of”&#xA;  a system that users know is partly proprietary, users might be&#xA;  uncertain of their rights regarding the GPL-covered software. But if&#xA;  they know that what they have received is a free program plus another&#xA;  program, side by side, their rights will be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example: suppose that you have created an accounting app on the desktop, and that you need to create PDF invoices and PDF reports from this app. Suppose that you use an AGPL PDF library to create the PDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, your own code defines the GUI, and it allows people to enter data that is stored in a database. When they click a button, PDF's are created using the PDF library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That PDF library is considered being a part of the accounting app because the functionality of the library is triggered by an action of the end user in the accounting application (e.g. a PDF invoice is created when the end user clicks a button). You can't &quot;work around&quot; the copyleft license by saying: we separate the GUI part from the PDF generation part. It's all connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference that is explained in the FAQ is for instance: when you compile your app with a specific compiler, then that compiler doesn't have to be open source because there's a clear separation between the application and the compiler. When you run the application on an operating system, then that operating system (or specific components of that operating system, such as the code that defines visual controls) doesn't have to be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make a long story short: your conclusion was wrong, because modification has a broader meaning than you initially assumed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update in answer to comments asking for proof of my claims:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; most of the comments I refer to were removed by their author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example of the accounting software and the PDF invoices wasn't chosen at random. I'm the original developer of iText, an open source PDF library released as AGPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In June 2015, I discovered that iText was used in a closed source module that served as an add-on to closed source accounting software. This is the first thing I did: I went to a bailiff to document the infringement (June 12, 2015):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EufdT.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EufdT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I went to a lawyer, who sent a cease and desist letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTXVL.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTXVL.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The infringing party stalled, and came back with false arguments (similar to some arguments made in the comments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence we went to court (July 8, 2015):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBDCi.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBDCi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our case was very clear, and it didn't take long for the court to issue a ruling (July 17, 2015):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QA9ur.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QA9ur.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the infringing party accepted the ruling of the court:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4syZ8.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4syZ8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These slides were taken from my JavaOne talk &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slideshare.net/iTextPDF/ianal-what-developers-should-know-about-ip-and-legal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IANAL: What Developers should know about IP and Legal&lt;/a&gt; (I won a JavaOne Rockstar Award with this talk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments, I read claims that this isn't an illustrative example &lt;em&gt;because creating invoices isn't an essential part of accounting software&lt;/em&gt;. Landsgericht Köln didn't agree with that point of view. All software using the infringing module was taken from the market because the infringing party didn't want to open source it. Notice the word &lt;strong&gt;v e r b o t e n&lt;/strong&gt; in the rulling. It was forbidden to distribute software that uses iText as a whole or in part without permission of the copyright owners of iText, given the fact that the copyleft of the AGPL wasn't respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, &lt;em&gt;being an essential part&lt;/em&gt; isn't even a criterium. In Artifex versus Hancom, the South-Korean company Hancom used Artifex's Ghostscript to create PDF output from documents created with their office suite. Creating PDF was an optional feature that wasn't essential for the rest of the office functionality to work. However, Artifex went to court, and a Californian judge issued a ruling that &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/981029/a-federal-court-has-ruled-that-an-open-source-license-is-an-enforceable-contract/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL could indeed be enforced&lt;/a&gt; even in cases where the GPL code is only used for a small feature that isn't essential in the context of the complete work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often you read about thought experiments that tend to work around the (A)GPL, but such thought experiments are usually based on wishful thinking. In my (real-world) experience, a judge takes into account the &lt;strong&gt;technical effect&lt;/strong&gt; rather than the &lt;strong&gt;technical implementation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If user A pushes a button in product X, and by doing a technical effect is triggered that results in an action in (A)GPL library Y, then product X needs to be released under the same license as library Y to user A &lt;em&gt;no matter how product X is technically implemented!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't understand the difference between technical effect and technical implementation, consider this: suppose that person A wants to murder person X, but he hires person B to kill person X, then person A isn't technically the murderer of person X, but the effect is the same: person X is murdered because of person A, and for a judge person A will be guilty all the same (and usually get a higher sentence than person B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a counter-party tells the judge that the AGPL doesn't apply when you access an AGPL library from a closed source system through a service that is open sourced under the AGPL, feel free to use the &quot;murder&quot; comparison in court to explain why the judge should discard the technical details of such a workaround. You'll increase your chances at winning your case. Actually, the infringing party might get a more severe sentence because of the &lt;em&gt;intentional&lt;/em&gt; attempt to avoid compliance with the open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do not agree with the above, please document with existing cases that went to court. Please be aware of the fact that allegations that have not been proven in court have no value whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Personal background:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the first example: I am the original developer of iText, an AGPL PDF library, and I wrote most of the Affidavits that were used in the case documented with the screen shots above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the second example: I was consulted by the CEO of Artifex for advice in December 2016, and by Hancom in the Summer of 2017. Eventually, the case was settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have quite some firsthand experience in matters like these, and it's quite disappointing to see how many developers are interpreting the law in a way that best suits the open source &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt;, going against the rights of the open source &lt;em&gt;producer&lt;/em&gt;. I would expect developers to stand up for each other, and respect the rights of their fellow open source developers. In my experience however, decision makers at a company have a better understanding than the company's developers. Management usually makes much less of a problem of the dual license system that allows their company to use software under a commercial license in cases where the company can't comply with the copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2018-06-02T10:24:44.963" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T10:24:44.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1475" CreationDate="2018-06-01T10:02:06.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the new license still applies to the source-code as a whole...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not. The new license applies to the items it was designed to apply. For many common licenses this are the files that are present at the introduction of the new license. You forget the case where old source code gets removed simultaneously with introducing the new license. That would be an effective way to limit the license of some code to the old license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way around could be if the old license allows to upgrade itself to the new license. A common example would be the upgrade of older versions of GPL to newer versions. Everyone, not only the authors, can do that. Another way would be if in the new license there would a provision extending its validity to older commits. However, this is specific to the used licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastEditorUserId="6007" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T09:17:58.317" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T09:17:58.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6499" CreationDate="2018-06-01T10:16:10.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this project most probably violates the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making the entire Git repository available to the community you also publish these early versions. Every publicly available commit &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1475/is-a-license-bound-to-a-commit&quot;&gt;constitutes a source code release&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while one can include for example Apache 2.0 licensed code in a GPL 3.0 project, it's not possible the other way around, which is what you effectively created. By linking to a GPLed library you already create a derivative work. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility&lt;/a&gt; for more information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid any conflicts/legal issues you need to remove those commits from the publicly available source history, for example by pruning the source history from the beginning until the GPL library was removed or by squashing the commits between the introduction and the removal of the library. In any case the repository history of the public repository needs to be changed so that no version that uses on the GPL-ed library is available anymore. The implementation depends on the source repository system in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Privately you can of course keep the repository as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastEditorUserId="6007" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T22:29:42.290" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T22:29:42.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6908" CreationDate="2018-06-01T12:41:14.007" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this: I have a repository on, for example, GitHub, and add a file I wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forget to mention the file in the license, and publish the updated version to the repository, realizing the mistake after it is too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I fix the license and publish it shortly after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the old version of the repository is of course still visible, with a file not covered by any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be exploited? If so, what can I do to protect the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T10:04:38.610" Title="Can a gap in a license coverage on a VCS be exploited?" Tags="|github|law|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6907" CreationDate="2018-06-01T13:15:31.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Files not covered by any license notice are considered &quot;all rights reserved&quot;. I don't see how this can reasonably be exploited in any meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like, you can with many source repositories rewrite the history even after it happened and for example merge multiple commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T13:15:31.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6910" CreationDate="2018-06-03T08:02:08.563" Score="7" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use a modified version of a certain file from an open source project that is licensed under the Apache 2.0.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The file itself doesn't contain copyright notice neither the project does.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now, I understand from the terms of Apache 2.0 that I have to &lt;strong&gt;preserve&lt;/strong&gt; copyright but what should I do if there is no copyright?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I add it myself? If yes, who should I specify in this copyright? The name of the project, something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11261" LastEditorUserId="11261" LastEditDate="2018-09-15T18:12:40.500" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T18:12:40.500" Title="Modifying file without copyright under Apache 2.0" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6909" CreationDate="2018-06-03T19:07:04.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The attribution requirement is in section 4(c) of the Apache 2.0 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, if there are no copyright notices to retain, then you are naturally not required to retain any, just as it would be in the absence of patent notices, trademark notices, or attribution notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not entirely sure how to interpret the relevancy of external copyright notices (or other notices) not included in whatever part of the work you are using. As two separate examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If an author includes copyright information on a separate download website but not within the project itself, does the obligation to &quot;retain&quot; extend to transplanting the notice into the project?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If an author includes a copyright notice within the project's README but you are only using a single file from that project, which does not include a copyright notice, are you obligated to include the notice from README in your redistribution of the single file?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the answers to these questions, but my guess is that you do not have an obligation in the first case (especially since you might have acquired the project through a completely different means anyway), but you might have an obligation in the second case. In that second case, &quot;the work&quot; broadly does include a copyright notice, so your distribution of some part of that work ought to include the work's copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright notice is in a NOTICE file, then you would be required to keep that notice in the NOTICE file, per section 4(d).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, per section 4(b), you are required to state that you made changes to the original work. In that notice, you could opt to identify the original project, even if you don't know the original copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if you do happen to know with certainty who the copyright holder is, and that they would not mind being identified as a copyright holder (and what name or pseudonym they would prefer) then you could add a copyright notice for them out of courtesy. (Basically, if you asked, and they said yes.) In the case of any doubt, I would respect the author's decision to be anonymous and avoid risking an erroneous or unwanted copyright notice on someone else's behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T22:42:10.517" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T22:42:10.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6917" CreationDate="2018-06-04T06:28:22.590" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about using this library: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rxi/classic/blob/master/classic.lua&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/rxi/classic/blob/master/classic.lua&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I have a question regarding the first few lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;--&#xA;-- classic&#xA;--&#xA;-- Copyright (c) 2014, rxi&#xA;--&#xA;-- This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under&#xA;-- the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.&#xA;--&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is illegal to delete the copyright &lt;code&gt;-- Copyright (c) 2014, rxi&lt;/code&gt; even when the license doesnt require it, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and am I allowed to alter following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-- This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under&#xA;-- the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.&#xA;--&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-- You can find the license in /Project/licenses/MIT.license&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11003" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T17:35:32.167" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T17:37:23.433" Title="Change text of original author" Tags="|mit|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6907" CreationDate="2018-06-04T10:04:38.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license grants others the right to copy and use your code under certain terms. Without a license, others have no right to use your code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4226/9558&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; expands on this. Unless you specifically relinquish your rights or allow others the right to use it, you are the only one that can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the only one that can exploit that situation, if you haven't granted a licensed to anyone to use your code, you have the right to chase copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But realistically, based on the history of the repo, you could have trouble enforcing the use of one file that was unlicensed for a short time. It is easy to argue that you released the code under the same license that is globally advertised for the repo, having part of the code unlicensed for a short time could be attacked as deliberate entrapment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T10:04:38.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6911" CreationDate="2018-06-04T13:09:49.327" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you must keep this notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The MIT license permits reuse within proprietary software provided that all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms and the copyright notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10225" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T13:09:49.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6916" CreationDate="2018-06-04T14:19:05.177" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if commercial software can be created with the Tor license without previous permission of the Tor community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's its license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torproject/tor/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tor license.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that license I don't see anything that would forbid someone from creating commercial software, as long as he keeps on distributing the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the other hand there's the following information on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.torproject.org/docs/trademark-faq.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;What if I produce non-open source, commercial products based on Tor?&#xA;Contact us, and let's talk.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about those 2 things, as they seem contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to release commercial software (without previous permission) using the Tor license or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9421" LastEditorUserId="9421" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T15:10:35.713" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T00:03:09.917" Title="Can commercial software be created with Tor license?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6921" CreationDate="2018-06-04T14:59:20.853" Score="1" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if what I'm telling is possible or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I obviously know that's illegal to copy the code and add it to a commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think it's not illegal to study the code so you get to know how the &quot;architecture&quot; is and build your own implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;architecture&quot; I mean for example a messaging system through the Tor network so you get to know what's needed to connect to a Tor node or know if there's any requirement the data packages have to fulfill or things like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first sight, it doesn't look like it's forbidden &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license for the cases of no license looks like it indicates that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's true that the &quot;use&quot; word is somehow ambiguous, I wouldn't consider it to mean studying the code and getting to know the aspects I'm mentioning, but maybe legally it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, there's a discussion forum which argues that no commercial use is allowed, as seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/196&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to study the code and create my own implementation as I'm mentioning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9421" LastEditorUserId="9421" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T15:24:56.487" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:00:49.260" Title="Is it possible to create commercial software by studying the code of a github project with no license?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6914" CreationDate="2018-06-04T15:31:09.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tor's license appears to be a standard 3-clause BSD license, which permissively grants virtually all copyright rights, with the requirement that redistribution includes attribution of the original authors and a copy of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other page you've linked to is entitled &quot;Tor Trademark Frequently Asked Questions&quot;. The FAQ item you quote deals only with the question of when you may use the registered trademark name &quot;Tor&quot; in a software product. It does not address the rights to modify or distribute code from the Tor project, which is permitted at large by the permissive 3-clause BSD copyright license applied to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question directly: yes, the copyright license permits you to release commercial and/or proprietary software based on Tor software, but the Tor Project's trademark policy will not allow you to use the identifier &quot;Tor&quot; in your software's name. In fact, they generally forbid any derivative software product to use the Tor trademark name or logo, commercial or otherwise. You may ask the Tor Project for a trademark licensing agreement to use the name in your software product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally under trademark law, you may use the name &quot;Tor&quot; as an identifier in a description of your software's origins (e.g., &quot;This software uses an onion model similar to the one used by Tor&quot; or &quot;This software is based on the Tor software project with the following specific improvements...&quot;) as long as your use is not confusing to consumers. It must be easy to understand that your project is not sanctioned or approved by the Tor Project, even though it uses code from Tor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T00:03:09.917" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T00:03:09.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6911" CreationDate="2018-06-04T17:37:23.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly all licenses (including the MIT license) require that you keep the copyright notices intact, either explicitly or by forbidding you to misrepresent the authorship of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the other part of the comment block you ask about, I would strongly recommend that you keep that as well. It is not that much longer than your replacement and prevents people from guessing what license is used.&#xA;You &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; however update the filename/location of the file that contains the full test of the MIT license if you moved/renamed that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T17:37:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6919" CreationDate="2018-06-05T02:32:42.453" Score="-4" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Announcing GitHub's acquisition by Microsoft, GitHub CEO @defunkt &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.github.com/2018-06-04-github-microsoft/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Open source and business, people said at the time, mixed as well as oil and water.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, of course, things are different. Git is far and away the most popular version control system, clouds are mostly computers, and Microsoft is the most active organization on GitHub in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he mean by &quot;&lt;em&gt;clouds are mostly computers&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Clouds have always been computers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If he wrote this in that sentence, it must be telling something about business and open source, but what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression uses the same words but certainly has a very different meaning from this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RY53xm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RY53xm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;There is no cloud it&amp;#39;s just someone else&amp;#39;s computer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T06:12:22.237" Title="What did GitHub's CEO mean by &quot;clouds are mostly computers&quot;, and what impact on open source?" Tags="|github|microsoft|cloud|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6918" CreationDate="2018-06-05T06:12:22.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually simpler than it sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we simplify a couple of statements found in this post to their core meanings (as relating to the term 'cloud') we see that the second paragraph states &quot;When GitHub first launched &amp;hellip; clouds were just things in the sky &amp;hellip;&quot;, then the fourth paragraph compares that past to today with &quot;Now &amp;hellip; clouds are mostly computers &amp;hellip;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the first mention of clouds is referring to the fact that ten years ago, everyday conversations in which people used the term &quot;cloud&quot; were almost exclusively about the meteorological phenomenon in which condensed droplets or frozen crystals (usually of water) are suspended in the atmosphere. The second mention of clouds is a statement that in more recent times an everyday conversation including the term &quot;cloud&quot; is more likely to be about 'cloud computing', 'cloud storage', or another similarly computer oriented use of the word &quot;cloud&quot; than about the aforementioned meteorological phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The term &quot;cloud&quot; being used in computing is in fact more than ten years old, however the computer related usage didn't really become house-hold vernacular until around 2009-2012*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*If curious about why I say it became more common around 2009-2012, please notice the increase in search frequency for the term 'cloud computing' from late 2008 to early 2011, and the subsequent increase in search frequency of 'cloud storage' from early 2011 to late 2013 in these graphs: &lt;a href=&quot;https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&amp;amp;geo=US&amp;amp;q=cloud%20computing,cloud%20storage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&amp;amp;q=cloud%20computing,cloud%20storage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World&lt;/a&gt;, and note that the drop in 'cloud computing' searches does not slow the similar increase in search frequency of 'cloud' which appears in these graphs: &lt;a href=&quot;https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&amp;amp;geo=US&amp;amp;q=cloud%20computing,cloud%20storage,cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&amp;amp;q=cloud%20computing,cloud%20storage,cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World&lt;/a&gt;. My guess as to why 'cloud computing' searches slowed then is that more people understood what 'cloud computing' meant, and thus didn't need to search for explanations about it, and/or people no longer felt it necessary to specify that they didn't mean water vapor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11220" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T06:12:22.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5413" CreationDate="2018-06-05T08:32:40.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you just want to exclude App Store distribution, you don't have to modify the license. Just use the GPLv3, because the App Store terms of service are incompatible with the GPLv3. It should not be possible to have your GPLv3 app in the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article from the FSF: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added.) This last sentence is a crucial part of the strong copyleft in the GPL and AGPL: it prevents distributors from using separate legal agreements, like Terms of Service or NDAs, to take away the freedoms that the license is supposed to grant. This is the license condition that Apple is violating when it distributes GPL-covered software through the App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there some minor loopholes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad Hoc - Limited to 100 Devices. Devices must be explicitly added to a provision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enterprise - No device limit, devices do not need to explicitly added to provisions. In effect, these builds will run on any device; the caveat, you are not legally allowed to distribute these builds to anyone outside your company.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11301361/ios-app-deployment-without-appstore?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11301361/ios-app-deployment-without-appstore?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this still fills your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T10:14:59.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6915" CreationDate="2018-06-05T09:42:04.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are living in Europe, you may look at other people's software and legally create your own in case that you do not copy code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are living in the USA, you are called tainted if you did ever look into other people's software and thus may get into trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why you sometimes may read about so called &lt;strong&gt;clean room implementations&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nice thing is that if you are a European citizen and write the code in Europe, you may legally sell it in the USA even if you had a look into other people's sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me be more specific: The basic idea behind a software is not copyrighted. You can protect the basic idea only with a patent and only in countries that permit patents on software. So as long as your implementation is made by you and does not copy implementation details that could be seen as &quot;own creation of sufficient creation level by another person&quot;, you may do so in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastEditorUserId="2562" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T10:19:24.427" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T10:19:24.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6915" CreationDate="2018-06-05T12:00:49.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welcome to the murky reign of &quot;intellectual property rights&quot;.  The idea behind &quot;intellectual property&quot; is that making use of anybody else's ideas against their wishes is not legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea is very much promulgated and infects to some degree courts and juries.  Regardless of the factual legality, there may be costs associated with having to defend against the preconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's look at the actual legalities involved: against copying ideas, the legal protection mechanism are &lt;em&gt;patents&lt;/em&gt;.  There is no &quot;cleanroom&quot; protection against patents: coming up independently with the same idea or mechanism still requires you to pay royalties for any infringed patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the U.S., an astonishing number of trivial ideas might be patent protected.  If you are following an existing sample implementation and the person in question is likely to be an entity who has worked from specs in a patent or has patented stuff himself, you are more likely to tread on troublesome ground than if you just do something yourself.  Simply because currently any random idea is more likely to not be covered by a patent than otherwise, and since patent protection runs out after a comparatively short time, that may even stay so for a while.  Code may also be put out under a permissive license in order to trap you into using it.  When it doesn't have an explicit patent grant, its author can still sue you for patent infringement.  So patents may be a danger if the code is an intentional or accidental trap, but the copyright license it is under, unless specifically also covering patents, is not relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gets us to the next possible problem: copyright.  A tangible expression of an idea (rather than the idea itself) can be covered by copyright.  This includes &quot;transformative use&quot; of copyrighted material such as the mechanical or manual translation into a different language or realm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been very murky and very expensive court cases about transformative use trying to prove &quot;structure, sequence, and organization&quot; of APIs are sufficient for triggering copyright claims.  Defense against such claims is uncertain and potential legal costs can be high.  Regardless of the actual soundness of the underlying legal theories, you want to avoid getting dragged in a case of that kind since it can bankrupt companies let alone individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly so when talking about jurisdiction with juries where the &quot;intellectual property&quot; myth, due to a barrage of propaganda from corporations interested in perpetuating it, has taken enough of a hold in the mind of the populace that they are going to make rulings in accord with it even when none of the actually valid, &lt;em&gt;limited&lt;/em&gt; rights for state-protected exclusive exploitation of some idea is really applicable to the case in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11277" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:00:49.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6867" CreationDate="2018-06-05T12:10:06.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a copyright license and copyright only covers a concrete tangible expression.  Which would include the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have others learn from or reuse your LaTeX content, split it out in a package and/or document class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created frameworks for typesetting complex documents in LaTeX and negotiated a setup where I split out all of the layout-specific stuff (including proprietary fonts) into a document class kept private to the customer and all the general mechanisms into a number of packages released as Free Software (under the GPL, incidentally).  I have had contact with the actual documents processed in that manner just for the sake of debugging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LaTeX makes it comparatively straightforward to split material into different licensing domains appropriate for the kind of intended reuse, making the actual &quot;document&quot; contain basically only content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you split out your work along such lines, licensing the different parts/aspects under different licenses becomes feasible, with the conceptual &quot;content/structure&quot; split actually being traceable to separate files and copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11278" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T12:10:06.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T18:07:26.233" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work in a large company which makes use of a lot of open source software and employees a fair number of software developers but does not consider itself to be a software development firm. I believe the company needs to have a clearer policy on open source. However, I'm having trouble getting the organisation to think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise this is not a straight forward question to answer but &lt;strong&gt;what are tried and tested ways of getting the company to start this discussion and influencing it to be &quot;open source positive&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a mere developer why should I care?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to be able to patch code that is buggy rather than workaround it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to be free to use other people's code and not reinvent the wheel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like there to be a path to open source some code I wrote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example there are questions on here about getting the company you work for to open source some code including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6826/what-are-the-good-reasons-for-my-company-to-offer-open-source-code&quot;&gt;What are the good reasons for my company to offer open source code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4378/help-with-getting-permission-to-open-source-a-small-piece-of-software&quot;&gt;Help with getting permission to open source a small piece of software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case I have been unable to find anyone willing to even say yes or no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the situation gets more complex when you consider your own use of and contributions back to an existing project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider use of an LGPL library. We are legally obliged to contribute any patches we apply ourselves (if we distribute binaries externally). &#xA;This leads to several policy options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We only use unpatched open source software regardless of bugs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We submit patches etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We avoid LGPL licenced code altogether &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that an employee should not upload any changes without an explicit waiver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developers will typically be pro open source at the grass roots level. Talking to the legal team might force consideration but they may think more in terms of risks and cost. The conversion needs to happen at the CTO and CIO level but those kind of people tend to be 'very busy' with 'more important things'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorDisplayName="user176" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T01:56:22.840" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T22:22:17.270" Title="Getting a company to start discussing open source" Tags="|software|benefits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6932" CreationDate="2018-06-05T20:07:00.530" Score="3" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a package on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://assetstore.unity.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unity Asset Store&lt;/a&gt;. Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1346/11281&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it looks like the best option for my situation would be LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after doing plenty of research, I've stumbled across &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OOPLang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this part of GNU's FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. It says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subclassing is creating a derivative work. Therefore, the terms of the GPL affect the whole program where you create a subclass of a GPL'ed class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is going to be a problem for the package I am making. One big feature of my package is that, thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/generics/introduction-to-generics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generics&lt;/a&gt;, it is flexible enough to work with almost any datatype. However, due to a limitation in Unity, the only way to take advantage of these generic classes is to create one subclass for each datatype to be supported. (This sounds like a pain, but I've also been polishing some nice editor tools that create the subclass scripts. This is beside the point, however.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if anyone wants to work with anything beyond the handful of default types that I support, they'll have to subclass &lt;strong&gt;specific parts&lt;/strong&gt; of my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but a developer who wants to use my package with a datatype from non-free code cannot do so. They would need to license the non-free code under the LGPL or a compatible license, since it's considered a derivative work now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not what I want!&lt;/strong&gt; Subclassing in this way in intended. If developers cannot do this, it &lt;em&gt;severely&lt;/em&gt; hampers my package's usefulness. I may as well use the GPL license, but then it's too limiting for most game developers, who are non-free for reasons out of their control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, other than this one exception, I the LGPL to function as normal. I want any developers who expand the core package's capabilities to contribute back to the original project. What is the best way to go about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see two possible approaches, but I don't know how feasible either of them are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use a different license for the code meant to be subclassed.&lt;/strong&gt; I've heard of this solution. It sounds ugly, but I'll do it if necessary. I'd probably go with the Apache license, though I have not done enough research on that license to know for sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Create an &quot;Additional Permission&quot; for the code meant to be subclassed.&lt;/strong&gt; This seems like the best. However, I don't know if it's possible. Section 7 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; mentions additional permissions, but the LGPL doesn't say anything about them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure these solutions are any good. I think that, if a developer can subclass my code without any limits, someone they could create wrapper classes based on my code and distribute it as if they had created new, non-free code. (But I am not going to sweat this; the code to be subclassed isn't even very complex.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11281" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T15:55:37.907" Title="Subclassing, Unity, and the LGPL" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|exceptions|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T21:25:21.443" Score="1" ViewCount="956" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Hub&lt;/a&gt; provides statistics on a number of open source projects. Some of this data is categorized by programming language. How do they identify the programming languages in the source code? Is is by examining the content of the files, by file type or by project tagging. For example, is a specific file Fortran or C?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4vMIh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4vMIh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Open Hub Programming Languages&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11288" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T23:46:24.703" Title="How to identify programming language of a file for Open Hub?" Tags="|statistics|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6927" CreationDate="2018-06-06T02:53:38.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ohloh (the predecessor of OpenHub) created an open source (GPLv2) &quot;source code line counter&quot; for gathering this information. It detects which &quot;primary language family&quot; is present in a source file and also parses the whole file to generate a &quot;line-by-line breakdown&quot; of what languages are in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's called Ohcount, and it can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11220" LastEditorUserId="11220" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T02:59:42.837" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T02:59:42.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6901" CreationDate="2018-06-06T07:21:30.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6901/should-i-replace-this-line-in-agpl-3-0/6929#comment16969_6901&quot;&gt;Quoting @Brandin&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The placeholders in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file itself should be retained; those placeholders are there for others which read the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; and want to adopt the same license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However the placeholders which you put in your own files that have your own copyright should be filled in with your actual name. The notice is to show that you own the copyright to those and you are licensing them in a particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11247" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T09:52:57.697" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T09:52:57.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6933" CreationDate="2018-06-06T08:30:25.323" Score="6" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently using a library that is licensed under MIT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each file of the library has a in-line comment containing the standard MIT license text in full length, which is kind of repetitive in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, can I remove the in-line MIT license and replace it with a notice like this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;This file is Licensed under the MIT License see /Project/lib/MaterialDesign/LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the root folder of the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11291" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T08:26:26.777" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T12:51:53.140" Title="Can I move an in-line license to a file?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6927" CreationDate="2018-06-06T12:27:59.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examining the source for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ohcount&lt;/a&gt; provided &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6928&quot;&gt;by 3D1T0R&lt;/a&gt;, there are various ways that are used. Specifically, for C and Fortran, &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount/717d0a367463f6e30a18ef230d6669a1cfba35a3/src/hash/extensions.gperf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extensions.gperf&lt;/a&gt; shows that for &quot;LANG_C&quot; the file extension &quot;c&quot; is sufficient to identity the programming language.&#xA;Whereas for the file extensions for &quot;fortran&quot; the file extension can be ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;c, LANG_C&#xA;...&#xA;f, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;f03, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;f08, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;f77, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;f90, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;f95, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;for, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;fpp, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;ftn, DISAMBIGUATE(&quot;fortran&quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blackducksoftware/ohcount/master/src/detector.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detector.c&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;code&gt;disambiguate_fortran()&lt;/code&gt; function returns either &lt;code&gt;LANG_FORTRANFREE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LANG_FORTRANFIXED&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  // Try the assumption of a fixed formatted source code, and return free&#xA;  // format if anything opposes this assumption.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other languages the above two links can be examined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11288" LastEditorUserId="11220" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T23:46:24.703" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T23:46:24.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6926" CreationDate="2018-06-06T15:55:37.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your second option, the LGPLv3 is created by using the &quot;Additional Permission&quot; option from the GPLv3. This means that the clauses from the GPLv3 also apply to the LGPLv3 (except where the LGPL says otherwise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the option of granting additional permissions (for example, to create derived classes from the generic classes without invoking the copyleft nature of the LGPL) is certainly viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T15:55:37.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6930" CreationDate="2018-06-06T16:39:24.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using longer licenses like GPL and Apache it is common to point to a full copy of the license but the shorter ones like BSD or MIT are normally kept whole. There are no strict rules on where you place the full license info, it is just common to place short licenses in full and longer ones as a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6838/9558&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; hints that not all projects copy the MIT into each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T16:39:24.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-06T23:59:51.517" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many old defunct software products that are no longer marketable. Is there any organization or group who helps to get these valuable codes released as open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DEC&lt;/a&gt; had a product, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXELN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VAXELN&lt;/a&gt; which ran on 32-bit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VAX&lt;/a&gt; hardware. When they came out with the 64-bit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alpha&lt;/a&gt;, they did not port the product to the new hardware. They continued to support for decades but I presume long term government contracts have expired and it is now just rotting somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a group could help the companies understand the benefits to taking the action such as to society or their reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11288" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T09:52:05.970" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T12:22:31.283" Title="How to get help to get a company to open source a defunct product?" Tags="|community|marketing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6942" CreationDate="2018-06-07T02:47:39.590" Score="2" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some code that I would like to integrate with a GPL licensed piece of code, my code is licensed BSD. If absolutely necessary I could license everything GPL, but if possible I would prefer to only keep the currently GPL license code GPL, and have all other code BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options for including the GPL code in my code base without relicensing everything GPL? I know the GPL says that if it is included with non GPL code than all of the code is license GPL. Does that mean what I'm trying to do is not possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL code in question is just a single &lt;code&gt;sh&lt;/code&gt; script, in a single file. I'm not even executing it from my code, I'm just installing it alongside my code, since it's a requirement for my code to run correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My code executes another program, which will then use the modified script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't use the original code in question since I needed to modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably I would have a notice file that says everything except a single-file which I have forked from a GPL code base is BSD, but I don't know if this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11296" LastEditorUserId="11296" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T22:18:36.880" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T22:18:36.880" Title="Having a mixed license repository with GPL and non GPL code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T18:18:44.530" Score="-1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this source code on GitHub (a PHP class, around 200 lines of code) distributed under GPL license which has some bugs and is not useful to me unless those bugs are fixed. If I fix those bugs, can I use the new code in my product commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11304" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T16:36:41.390" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T16:36:41.390" Title="Can I commercially use a fixed source code distributed under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|commercial|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6936" CreationDate="2018-06-07T20:57:20.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;so long as the commercial product is released under the GNU GPL&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the GNU GPL v3 for clarity's sake (the same conclusion would be reached for the GPL v2, just the wording is different):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By fixing the bugs, you are producing a &quot;work based on the Program&quot;. If distributed, this modified work must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can then incorporate the modified work into your commercial product, and then distribute the commercial product under the GPL in accordance with any of the options in section 6 of the GPL - note that all these require you to release the full source (not just that of the modified code) of your commercial product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T20:57:20.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2018-06-08T19:26:54.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but here are my two cents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;This means that this eBPF module needs to be under GPL license.&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the code needs to be &lt;em&gt;GPL-compatible&lt;/em&gt;. This, from the point of view of the kernel, are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v4.17/source/include/linux/module.h#L171&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;following strings&lt;/a&gt; in the module info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL: GNU Public License v2 or later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v2: GNU Public License v2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL and additional rights: GNU Public License v2 rights and more.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual BSD/GPL: GNU Public License v2 or BSD license choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual MIT/GPL: GNU Public License v2 or MIT license choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual MPL/GPL: GNU Public License v2 or Mozilla license choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;My actual question is does a user-space application that uses (but not redistributes or loads) that module also needs to be under GPL-license?&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is tricky and I'm still struggling with it. The short answer is &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what the FSF says&lt;/a&gt; about aggregated programs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. &lt;strong&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. &lt;strong&gt;But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An eBPF program usually is developed as the kernel counterpart of a user-space program. The BCC tools and examples have both sources in the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you develop an eBPF program that is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; a sub-component of a user-space application, and the &amp;quot;semantics of the communication&amp;quot; (data types for the perf buffers and maps) are &amp;quot;intimate enough&amp;quot; and clearly tailored for this application only, then probably the user-space program should be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your eBPF program has a very generic API, it could be used by non-GPL programs... If we assume that the shared memory used for maps and perf buffers doesn't count as a shared-memory application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;And what if the application would distribute compiled EBPF code and will actually load it into the kernel?&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nice try, but I don't think so. That would be similar to distributing the assembly code of a GPL program written in C. GPL v2 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an executable work, &lt;strong&gt;complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains,&lt;/strong&gt; plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL v3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means &lt;strong&gt;all the source code&lt;/strong&gt; needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Update:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; from the FSF FAQ on GPL pretty much settles the debate, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses &lt;strong&gt;fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures,&lt;/strong&gt; or shipping complex data structures back and forth, &lt;strong&gt;that can make them one single combined program.&lt;/strong&gt; A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my totally non-expert opinion, this description of a program/plugin is very similar to a Python/eBPF pair. It consists in two programs that communicate through shared memory using complex data structures. In most of the use cases I have seen the eBPF program is effectively a plugin of the Python program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Using non-GPL eBPF helpers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen that most of the eBPF helpers don't require GPL-compatibility. I think it is perfectly possible to load a non-GPL eBPF program as long as it doesn't use GPL-only helpers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of GPL-only helpers: &lt;code&gt;bpf_ktime_get_ns&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_probe_read&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_trace_printk&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_ktime_get_ns&lt;/code&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of non-GPL helpers: &lt;code&gt;bpf_tail_call&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_map_update_elem&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_get_current_comm&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;bpf_get_prandom_u32&lt;/code&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd recommend looking for all the eBPF helpers that exist, and see if you can accomplish your task without needing GPL-only helpers. For instance, to read some bytes from a network packet, instead of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ret = bpf_probe_read(data, ((u8)skb) + off, sizeof(data));&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can use the specialized, non-GPL helper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ret = bpf_skb_load_bytes(skb, off, data, sizeof(data));&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11313" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T16:11:55.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5980" CreationDate="2018-06-08T19:43:31.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I my understanding is that &quot;GPL linking exception&quot; refers to any linking exception applied to a GPL license by its owner. Such exceptions allow the module to be linked and distributed with other non-GPL modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Classpath exception is one instance of linking exception, granted by the GNU Classpath project. Other projects, like the GCC runtime, also include custom linking exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3 standardizes the exceptions under section 7.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, briefly, the Classpath exception is one instance of GPL linking exception.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11313" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T19:43:31.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6941" CreationDate="2018-06-08T20:06:00.387" Score="6" ViewCount="1061" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A GPL module with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A non-GPL module.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A pure-GPL module.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;module 1 can be linked with module 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I link module 1 with module 3? That is, module 1 remains GPL-compatible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I link module 1 with modules 2 and 3 &lt;em&gt;simultaneously&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More specifically, can module 1 read data from module 3 and pass it, in a different format, to module 2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under what circumstances that would be possible? That is, what interfaces (pipes, shared ring buffers...), what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;communication semantics&lt;/a&gt; would be appropriate, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's say that I own modules 1 and 2, so I can make any legal changes or exceptions I want while maintaining the essence of the example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, can GPL with linking-exception act as an interface between GPL and non-GPL modules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11313" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T22:41:06.250" Title="Can GPL with linking exception be linked with GPL and non-GPL simultaneously?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|exceptions|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6940" CreationDate="2018-06-08T22:41:06.250" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL with some linking exception is still just the GPL, but with extra permissions. These extra permissions only apply to a specific module, and they do not extend to other modules that are only licensed under the GPL, without this extra permission. Therefore, &lt;strong&gt;you cannot create your own modules with a linking exception as an isolation layer between GPL and non-GPL modules&lt;/strong&gt;. You always have to consider the work as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To discuss your specific examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I link module 1 with module 3? That is, module 1 remains GPL-compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you combine GPL+exception with GPL, the combination is GPL. As you must comply with both licenses at the same time, the GPL-without-exception is relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I link module 1 with modules 2 and 3 simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this is not possible. Again, you must comply with all licenses at the same time. So the GPL still applies. You can only publish this combination if you license it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More specifically, can module 1 read data from module 3 and pass it, in a different format, to module 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this is probably not sufficient. All the modules together still form one program.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under what circumstances that would be possible? That is, what interfaces (pipes, shared ring buffers...), what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;communication semantics&lt;/a&gt; would be appropriate, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “mere aggregation” concept is about distributing separate programs together. It does not seem to apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the non-GPL code is clearly a separate program, then inter-process communication is fine. E.g. you could wrap the GPL-module (module 3) with a server or command line interface (e.g. module 1). This program must still be licensed under the GPL if you distribute it. But now your module 2 (the proprietary program) can communicate with the wrapper using some IPC mechanism (e.g. pipes or sockets).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without discussing a details of the GPL, it is easy to get a sense of whether the GPL considers some usage OK if we consider the impact on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of end users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the user free to study the GPL program in its entirety? If you were combining it with non-GPL code, this would no longer be given. If the non-GPL  code is a separate program, that is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the user modify the GPL parts? If modification of the GPL code would require access to the non-GPL code, this wouldn't be possible. However, a separate program can be modified independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also requires that the two programs communicate over some sensible interface. If they exchange internal data structures or communicate over shared memory, this could indicate that they form one program and are not separate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the user distribute copies of the GPL program? If the program were to include non-GPL parts, this would no longer be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual disclaimer: This answer follows the position of the FSF, i.e. the GPL authors. They assume that linking two modules together into a single program (even if this linking happens at runtime) creates a derived work, so copyright applies and the GPL license can be enforced for the combined program. However, it is not the GPL but your applicable copyright law which defines what a derived work is. It is therefore &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that in your jurisdiction, using the GPL module through its public API does not create a derived work and you are not bound by the license for the combined software. But unless you know for sure, it is best to play it safe and assume that the GPL does in fact apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T22:41:06.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6935" CreationDate="2018-06-09T07:56:58.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL program you wish to use is a single &lt;code&gt;.sh&lt;/code&gt; file, and your program won't even execute it.  It seems to me (IANAL/IANYL) that you would be OK even if it did, since although the GPL requires that derivatives of GPLed code be themselves GPLed, the FSF themselves &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note that&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So use of code via fork-and-exec, passing any data as simple arguments rather than as shared data structures, doesn't establish a derivative relationship in either direction between the code that invokes, and the code that is invoked.  Your packaging of the GPL shell script is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/a&gt;.  You will still have obligations with respect to (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) clear labelling and source distribution in regard of that particular GPLed shell script, but you will not be required to apply the GPL to your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T07:56:58.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6930" CreationDate="2018-06-09T12:51:53.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some practical reasons against doing it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone took single files out and moved them somewhere else it would be more convenient for them if the full MIT license was kept, so he/she would not need to copy it in-line again. Leaving the information directly with each source file is less fragile. And even though it is kind of repetitive, modern IDEs usually show the copyright notes in a collapsed form. Using the proposed note, may mean additional work for the user (needing to check the content of that LICENSE file, just to be sure that it's really MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the legal stuff:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many projects where there is a copyright information only in the license/readme part and not with every source file and they seem to be doing just fine. For a better discussion, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/125836/do-you-have-to-include-a-license-notice-with-every-source-file&quot;&gt;Do you have to include a license notice with every source file?&lt;/a&gt;. If there is no duty to add license information to each source code file under MIT (and nothing in the MIT seems to suggest otherwise), then your proposed notice is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T12:51:53.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-09T16:47:31.227" Score="79" ViewCount="16499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating an open-source library in JavaScript and using Git to control versions and history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several commits in which the LICENSE file is X (for example, MIT), but I would like to change that to Y (for example, Apache-2.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All commits are currently local, I haven't pushed anything to GitHub yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I just add a new commit changing the LICENSE file, and then push everything to GitHub, my release will have the license Y but if someone browses git history, they will find commits in which the license was still X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will someone be able to use my library with license X in this case? I don't want this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could, of course, start a new repository with the correct license, but then I'd lose all history, and I don't want that either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9550" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T22:57:04.063" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T09:49:07.707" Title="If I change the license of my project, can someone use the old license by navigating through Git history?" Tags="|relicensing|publishing|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6951" CreationDate="2018-06-09T18:01:14.823" Score="-2" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reviewers: the post was edited, now it asks for the most important selection parameters and not for a list.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/5/17429054/microsoft-github-acquisition-memes-developers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft bought Github&lt;/a&gt;, I think programmers and coders favorizing software freedom and a better world &lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;© ® ™&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; have a reason to switch their code sharing provider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, having a git server is not a very big service, what the important was in the GitHub, the many possibilities to publish and share the code with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On which parameters should I watch, if I looking for a code hosting &amp;amp; sharing provider, and the software freedom is an important thing for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T07:24:51.980" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T07:24:51.980" Title="How to find opensource/software freedom GitHub alternatives?" Tags="|github|publishing|microsoft|cloud|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="22" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6945" CreationDate="2018-06-09T18:22:09.490" Score="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky question. Open source licenses are generally irrevocable. Once you publish something under a license, you can relicense future versions but cannot retroactively change the license. Yet here, you have never directly published the project under the old license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on this is that the MIT license on the old commits is in effect for those commits, and other people are free to use old versions under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you haven't yet published this project, you are free to &lt;strong&gt;rewrite the Git history.&lt;/strong&gt; This is fairly advanced Git usage, but you don't have to lose all history. Instead, write a parallel history that keeps the commit metadata and just changes the license file. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/docs/git-filter-branch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;git filter-branch&lt;/code&gt; command&lt;/a&gt; can be used to automate this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, we can use the following command to erase a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file from the history. The result will be that these old versions are “all rights reserved”; you can later add the intended license when you publish the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch LICENSE' HEAD&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another great tool to edit, remove, and reorder commits is &lt;code&gt;git rebase --interactive&lt;/code&gt;. However, &lt;code&gt;filter-branch&lt;/code&gt; allows you to automate edits, and could e.g. also be used to remove license headers from all source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Careful:&lt;/strong&gt; if something goes wrong during the history rewrite, it can be difficult to undo those changes. Before you begin, it is best to create some kind of backup, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create a backup of your project directory incl. the &lt;code&gt;.git/&lt;/code&gt; directory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create a new branch on which you perform the history rewrite. If everything goes well, you can update the old branch to point to the rewritten history (e.g. use &lt;code&gt;git reset --hard&lt;/code&gt; to move the current branch to a specific commit).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recently used commits are also available through the &lt;code&gt;git reflog&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example of applying filter-branch:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this example history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git log --name-status &#xA;commit cb42eda9f7ab47ec55a2698fb7616a74bca4b043 (HEAD -&amp;gt; master)&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:12:12 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    some editing&#xA;&#xA;A       bar.c&#xA;M       foo.c&#xA;&#xA;commit a25c2949ca4c1d397c19510b0b05ebbb0266268b&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:11:30 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    adding LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;A       LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;commit 66465e97303c209a239eb212f2dc1b6b76de2cf8&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:09:55 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    initial commit&#xA;&#xA;A       foo.c&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I run the license filter, then I get this history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ git log --name-status &#xA;commit 25ea86eecda1415bf985f1cc03afbc0a30ece281 (HEAD -&amp;gt; master)&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:12:12 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    some editing&#xA;&#xA;A       bar.c&#xA;M       foo.c&#xA;&#xA;commit 505560e9a619b83c71531795cad9ff7a31a93e67&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:11:30 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    adding LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;commit 66465e97303c209a239eb212f2dc1b6b76de2cf8&#xA;Author: amon &amp;lt;test@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Date:   Sat Jun 9 20:09:55 2018 +0200&#xA;&#xA;    initial commit&#xA;&#xA;A       foo.c&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, all commits are still there and have the correct metadata. Those commits that were rewritten now have different IDs. We now have an empty commit where we originally added the license. It is possible to get rid of that as well (e.g. I'd use a &lt;code&gt;git rebase --interactive&lt;/code&gt; to squash it), but it's not terribly important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T09:49:07.707" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T09:49:07.707" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6945" CreationDate="2018-06-10T10:37:57.073" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses are not part of the software but govern a particular &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of software.  The inclusion of license files in distributive media does not, in itself, constitute a license.  The same source code can be distributed with different licenses: as the author you can grant the inclusion in proprietary code, for example, without this necessitating a version with changed licensed headers and files to be sent out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from a legal point of view, you are theoretically fine.  However, going after licensing violations in a manner minimizing legal costs and business reputation problems very much makes it desirable to hit people in the face with the license.  For a &quot;public license&quot;, redistribution under the same terms is usually permitted so attaching a license file to the actual media in distribution makes a lot of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't previously published or distributed your software in the form of a publicly accessible repository but attached a license file nevertheless, I would strongly recommend that you make yourself acquainted with &lt;code&gt;git filter-branch&lt;/code&gt; in order to replace the license files/notices in previous commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can either replace the old license notices with the license you now want to distribute under, or you can put in a license that states that this is only for historic reference.  I'd strongly suggest against the latter since it opens all kind of new headaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that putting up a Git repository means publishing &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; contained code in all iterations so you want to put appropriate licensing notices in it referring to your current licensing.  When there have been previous publications, I'd recommend against rewriting history since it becomes rather tricky then to prove what license any version had been originally received under.  But if you didn't previously publish, the history of the repository is yours to tamper with, and using &lt;code&gt;git filter-branch&lt;/code&gt; is the tool to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; falsification since a repository is a tool to work with, not a historic record.  Part of its utility for distributed development depends on its history not changing after publication, but you haven't published yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11326" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T10:37:57.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6946" CreationDate="2018-06-10T13:21:19.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer was motivated by @apsillers 's hint about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU's ethical repository criteria&lt;/a&gt;. They have also a list of criteria what seem not important for a simply cloud user (for example, the freedom of their javascript sources), but they are important for the second spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The criteria has a little bit of obvious influence from the side of the GNU (for example, saying &quot;GNU/Linux&quot; instead &quot;Linux&quot; is a positive thing by them - my opinion is, doing this is fair to the GNU, but has not too much to do with the freedom of a source hosting service).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing to know, there no such thing as &lt;em&gt;&quot;The Free&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Source Hosting/Sharing Provider&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a set of possible candidates, and your choice should depend also on the actual project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://savannah.gnu.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://savannah.gnu.org&lt;/a&gt; seems very useful for &quot;orthodox&quot; software freedom projects. They check all their projects before inclusion and only really free projects can go there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semi-business projects could go for &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bitbucket.org&lt;/a&gt; . This is in the F, (&quot;unacceptable&quot;) category at the FSF, however there is a strong argument for it, that it is the second largest free source hosting next to github. I found a significant disadvantage that it is painfully slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A smaller, but much faster free source hosting alternative is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.com/&lt;/a&gt;. It gives exactly the same quick and perfect github feeling, except that even its frontend is opensource (a RoR app). People coming from the github will find it probably the best one.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, most Linux distros have some source hosting for their packaging, packages could go into there. (Like &lt;a href=&quot;https://alioth.debian.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://alioth.debian.org&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Ubuntu packages, there is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://launchpad.net&lt;/a&gt; , although it is more like a package builder and ppa site than a git source hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Both as beer and freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T18:09:14.277" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T18:09:14.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6945" CreationDate="2018-06-10T15:22:45.067" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;if the LICENSE file is added in a single commit, then &lt;code&gt;git rebase -i&lt;/code&gt; is an easy way to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;git rebase -i &amp;lt;root commit&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; will give you a list of all commits after the first one in an editor. &#xA;find the commit that adds the LICENSE file and delete it from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick 86a75a8 some commit&#xA;pick 2dc535d some commit&#xA;pick 264b12f add LICENSE &amp;lt;-- delete this line&#xA;pick 86b0365 some commit&#xA;pick 665937c some commit&#xA;pick d4f3a2e some commit&#xA;pick d84554c some commit&#xA;pick ec93b2c some commit&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;once the old LICENSE file is gone from the history, add the new LICENSE, and then you may use &lt;code&gt;git rebase -i&lt;/code&gt; again to move that commit to the start of the history if you desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick 86a75a8 some commit&#xA;pick 2dc535d some commit&#xA;pick 86b0365 some commit&#xA;pick 665937c some commit&#xA;pick d4f3a2e some commit&#xA;pick d84554c some commit&#xA;pick ec93b2c add new LICENSE &amp;lt;-- move this line to the top&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you are unfamiliar with &lt;code&gt;git rebase -i&lt;/code&gt; this is the easiest way to use it, as you are only rearranging commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a more advanced way would be change the LICENSE, commit it, and then use &lt;code&gt;git rebase -i&lt;/code&gt; to move the LICENSE change up in the history, and then &lt;code&gt;fixup&lt;/code&gt; the old LICENSE commit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick 86a75a8 some commit&#xA;pick 2dc535d some commit&#xA;pick 264b12f add LICENSE&#xA;pick 86b0365 some commit&#xA;pick 665937c some commit&#xA;pick d4f3a2e some commit&#xA;pick d84554c some commit&#xA;pick ec93b2c change LICENSE &amp;lt;-- move this line&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;find the LICENSE change, move it just after the old LICENSE and change &lt;code&gt;pick&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;fixup&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pick 86a75a8 some commit&#xA;pick 2dc535d some commit&#xA;pick 264b12f add LICENSE&#xA;fixup ec93b2c change LICENSE &amp;lt;-- this will effectively replace the old LICENSE&#xA;pick 86b0365 some commit&#xA;pick 665937c some commit&#xA;pick d4f3a2e some commit&#xA;pick d84554c some commit&#xA;pick ec93b2c some commit&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;finally you could also directly edit the commit with the LICENSE change. that however is only recommended if you are already familiar with &lt;code&gt;git rebase -i&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all of these actions are straightforward if the history does not contain any merge commits and any LICENSE change is in a separate commit that does nothing else. though the &lt;code&gt;fixup&lt;/code&gt; method only requires the later LICENSE change to be in a separate commit. it will work fine even if the initial LICENSE commit contains other changes too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;either way, do this on a copy of the repo, or at least on a copy of the branch unless you are already very comfortable using git.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2867" LastEditorUserId="2867" LastEditDate="2018-06-10T15:42:38.783" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T15:42:38.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6956" CreationDate="2018-06-10T17:49:08.430" Score="3" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under my interepretation of the GPLv3, specifically the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's assume that, by some means, I convert some GPLv3-covered source code into a physical object (e.g. a poster). Obviously, if I sell or give the poster to someone else, I must provide them with the Corresponding Source under section 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part my intuition isn't giving me a clear answer on is this: if I instead make this object available for viewing (e.g. I hang the poster on my wall), but it does not leave my possession, am I still obligated to make the Corresponding Source available to anyone who views it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11328" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T21:35:50.303" Title="If I convert GPLv3-covered source code into a physical object, what counts as &quot;conveyance&quot;?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6953" CreationDate="2018-06-10T18:07:24.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Your example of viewing a poster is comparable to allowing someone access to a (server-generated) web application. In that case, the code on the server is also not distributed and you are not required to provide the sources to your website's visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T18:07:24.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6957" CreationDate="2018-06-10T19:24:44.580" Score="3" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitHub offers a list of 33 licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Academic Free License v3.0 &lt;code&gt;afl-3.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache license 2.0 &lt;code&gt;apache-2.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Artistic license 2.0 &lt;code&gt;artistic-2.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boost Software License 1.0 &lt;code&gt;bs1-1.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 2-clause &quot;Simplified&quot; license &lt;code&gt;bsd-2-clause&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 3-clause &quot;New&quot; or &quot;Revised&quot; license &lt;code&gt;bsd-3-clause&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 3-clause Clear license &lt;code&gt;bsd-3-clause-clear&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons license family &lt;code&gt;cc&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal &lt;code&gt;cc0-1.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 &lt;code&gt;cc-by-4.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;[...]&lt;/code&gt; Read more here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to offer some customers a shirt (print object) from a selected GitHub repository snippet code. How does the copyright look for print objects? Does there exist a list in the web where licenses are listed with print information? Is it generally allowed to print code snippets of GitHub repositories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT #1&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the first answer of amon: If I have understood right, I can use &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-*&lt;/code&gt; licenses on print objects with attribution? Here an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-4.0&lt;/code&gt; - GitHub offers already a nice listing of &lt;em&gt;permissions, limitations&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;conditions&lt;/em&gt;. Here the limitation is &lt;strong&gt;Trademark use&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;Patent use&lt;/strong&gt; so I am not allowed to use this for a print object?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another repository has the &lt;strong&gt;MIT License&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ry/deno/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ry/deno/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; it allows me trademark use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have to go through each license available on GitHub (I only have to pay attention to those) and check the following (later I want to create a list of licenses which are allowed for print objects):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permission for &lt;em&gt;Commercial use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permission for &lt;em&gt;Distribution&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not&lt;/strong&gt; having limitation of &lt;em&gt;Trademark use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not&lt;/strong&gt; having limitation of &lt;em&gt;Patent use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the right way? To the attribution: I always attribute the author whatever license is used like &lt;code&gt;github.com/ry/deno by Ryan Dahl (MIT)&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the snippet you take is so small and trivial that it is not covered by copyright &lt;strong&gt;- amon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can not rely on this because the search of the code snippet is automated and the automation mechanism does not matter about the triviality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11329" LastEditorUserId="11329" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T06:05:12.493" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T06:05:12.493" Title="Commercial print (shirt) of GitHub repository" Tags="|licensing|copyright|commercial|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6953" CreationDate="2018-06-10T19:25:31.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, public display does not make a copy of the work, and I strongly expect that viewing a public display does not cause the viewer to &amp;quot;receive&amp;quot; the work, either (at least in the United States).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, consider that &amp;quot;conveyance&amp;quot; is a kind of &amp;quot;propagation&amp;quot;, which is defined as virtually anything that requires copyright permission:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is relevant in the United States since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC §109(c)&lt;/a&gt; says of public display:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) ... the owner of a particular copy lawfully made under this title ... is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to display that copy publicly, either directly or by the projection of no more than one image at a time, to viewers present at the place where the copy is located.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if you are displaying a poster lawfully created under the GPL to physically-present people, that display does not require any permission from the copyright holder, so the act is neither propagation nor conveyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LaptopLoan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPL FAQ item&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If someone installs GPLed software on a laptop, and then lends that laptop to a friend without providing source code for the software, have they violated the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. In the jurisdictions where we have investigated this issue, this sort of loan would not count as conveying. The laptop's owner would not have any obligations under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If physically lending the work does not constitute coneyance, neither should we expect that making the work available for viewing (without any change of physical possession) constitutes conveyance either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T21:35:50.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6955" CreationDate="2018-06-10T22:01:17.750" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither printing T-shirts nor Github repositories are special for this question. You are asking whether you can reproduce copyrighted content. The answer is yes, if and only if one of the following cases applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the snippet you take is so small and trivial that it is not covered by copyright, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your use is covered by some copyright exception (in Germany, a right to quote (§51 (2) UrhG), a highly transformative &lt;em&gt;Freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; (§24 UrhG), or purely private/personal use (§53 UrhG) might be options), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you obtain a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GH repository in question is offered under some public license, you already have a possible license. This license may impose various requirements, e.g. for attribution or for reproducing the license. This may be unsuitable for a T-shirt. The CC-BY-* licenses are particularly well suited for this kind of use because you can satisfy them easily with a short attribution. If you don't like the available public license, you can always ask the copyright holder for a separate license to a snippet – but they are not obliged to give you one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you have a copyright license to the snippet that gives you the necessary commercial rights (&lt;em&gt;Verwertungsrechte&lt;/em&gt;), you are not free of obligations. In particular, you must still respect the moral rights (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Urheberpersönlichkeitsrechte&lt;/em&gt;) and possibly credit the author (see §13 UrhG). A copyright license will also not give you rights to other kinds of IP, e.g. trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder of the GH repo, none of these considerations apply as you can freely license these T-shirts to your customers. You don't have to publish the repository under a T-shirt friendly license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T22:01:17.750" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5990" CreationDate="2018-06-10T22:23:07.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your action should be as Bart van Ingen Schenau described. Actually, exactly the same action that you should take if that happened in your closed source software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is much more important than in closed source software to be clean. Closed source is usually not distributed, so if there are problems due to infringing code, that hurts that one company only. And it only hurts those who deserve to be hurt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With open source software, it may be widely distributed. So any infringing code could end up with thousands of developers. And when the infringement is found (by the copyright holder) and you haven't acted promptly, your inaction could have bad consequences for all these thousands of developers, through no fault of their own. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2018-06-10T22:23:07.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6962" CreationDate="2018-06-14T16:04:48.620" Score="30" ViewCount="7571" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are working on a mobile application. Because the application contains GPL licensed code, the mobile application will be licensed under GPL too. The mobile application also uses a pretrained neural network model. (For simplicity, assume you used MIT licensed code that is not used in the mobile application and a set of copyrighted images to generate and train the neural network model.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At development time: Neural network training code and training data make a neural network model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final product: Mobile application code and the neural network model are in the final release binary. The training code and training data are NOT included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this neural network model have to be licensed under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the code used to train the neural network model have to be made available? If so, does it have to be licensed under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the training data used to train the neural network model have to be made available? If so, does it have to be licensed under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could make the argument GPL dictates the distribution of the sources of a system be in the preferred form of the work for making changes in it. Nearly all neural networks are created by the use of training code and a training set of data. Because nobody develops a neural network model by editing its weights one by one, what should be redistributed in this case is the code that allows automatic adjustment of the weights based on training data, not the resulting weights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one could argue since the model itself can be parsed and loaded using only a few lines of code (with the appropriate machine learning library) the model itself is already in the preferred form. The training code is useful for creating a model from scratch but is not necessary for modifying the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Question reposted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/372548/for-gpl-do-trained-neural-network-models-count-as-source-code?noredirect=1#comment818262_372548&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/372548/for-gpl-do-trained-neural-network-models-count-as-source-code?noredirect=1#comment818262_372548&lt;/a&gt; since it was marked off-topic]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11366" LastEditorUserId="11366" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T15:19:44.673" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T12:20:16.277" Title="How does GPL apply to neural network models?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2018-06-14T16:53:09.220" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two critical questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are neural network models code? Importantly, are they code that directly combines with the GPL-licensed code under copyright?  It is instead possible that they are data. If they are data, it is unlikely that they form a combined work with the GPL-licensed code that process them. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;related GPL FAQ item&lt;/a&gt; about GPL code processing non-GPL data:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a programming language interpreter is released under the GPL, does that mean programs written to be interpreted by it must be under GPL-compatible licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about licensing that data to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are neural network models even copyrightable? If neural networks are created in such a way that it does not require a &amp;quot;modicum of creativity&amp;quot; from a human (in the United States -- other jurisdictions likely have similar rules) to create any particular neural network, they are not copyrightable. In general, the choice of mathematical parameters (or selection of input training sources) for a mathematical, automated process does not satisfy this criterion for copyrightability. If neural networks are not copyrightable, I would not expect that they form a combined work with the program under copyright. (Note they a neural network model could still be covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights&lt;/a&gt; in some jurisdictions, without changing the impact of this consideration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: it is reasonable to guess that certain kinds of models, built with copyrightable input data (like human-authored documents, articles, stories, etc.) might, under certain conditions, retain the copyright status of their input training data, if they do not fully abstract away copyrightable expression from non-copyrightable mechanical patterns. (However, this standard has yet to be tested in a court.) However, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; question asks about whether the licensing status of the &lt;em&gt;software that uses the trained model&lt;/em&gt; could impose requirements on the model, not whether a model can have its copyright status influenced by its original training data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to either of these is negative, then the GPL requirements do not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-11-02T16:08:35.110" LastActivityDate="2022-11-02T16:08:35.110" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6965" CreationDate="2018-06-15T02:23:29.663" Score="27" ViewCount="8661" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often use the MIT license for my projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But recently I've had the thought that I really would like to be notified if someone forked my software, whether it's for personal use, released or not I don't really mind or care to restrict. It's more of an ego/motivation thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. if I know people are using the stuff I make, I would really like to see their contributions if it's public to possibly incorporate it into mainline. But I don't want to prevent people using it commercially either. Just knowing for what it's being used, and by whom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would this still be considered Open Source?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you go about modifying the license in this way, that it clearly communicates this desire, and people don't mistake it for the existing MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9103" LastEditorUserId="11394" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T08:08:29.730" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T09:07:40.997" Title="Can I modify an open source license to require that I be notified?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T06:28:11.520" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot say whether this would be considered open source, but it would not be free software.  Free software confers, amongst other things, the right to modify the software; the FSF refer to this as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedom one&lt;/a&gt;.  It imposes, and allows of, no constraint in the application of this right; constraints on the four freedoms are generally allowed only when they increase &lt;em&gt;user&lt;/em&gt; freedom - not &lt;em&gt;developer&lt;/em&gt; freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the specific problems with what you want is that people who can't or won't communicate (for whatever reason) have then lost freedom one.  Debian folks have even named this particular issue: they refer to it as &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Desert Island test&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since such a modification would make a licence non-free, the details of how to do it are off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T06:28:11.520" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T06:28:39.860" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding a requirement to notify you when a fork is being made renders a license non-free. The reasoning behind this is that the requirement discriminates against people that, for whatever reason, are not able to send the required notification (for example, because their government doesn't allow free communication with foreigners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If being notified is not a hard requirement for you, then I would recommend to keep it out of the license, but to put a nicely worded request in the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T06:28:39.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T06:57:51.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want your code to stay free/open as per the usual definitions, you should stick to the plain MIT license that you already use, and put your request to be notified somewhere else prominent on the project pages.&#xA;People who really value your work will at least try to honor your request, and the others you probably don't care about anyways. In any case, since the MIT license comes with an attribution requirement, you could always use Google to find where your code gets used. It may not give you 100% coverage, but at least a good impression on how your code spreads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11374" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T06:57:51.293" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T07:45:32.443" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Do not use non-standard opensource licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers are great, and show that what you want to do is probably not too far down an OSS route but here is a different viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason you use MIT license at the moment, because it fits (the majority, noted) of license requirements you are happy to put on your project. Others who use OSS licenses regularly know at a glance what they are required to do to use your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may feel like a small change adding in a notification clause, but if you do this it is &lt;strong&gt;no longer the MIT license&lt;/strong&gt; and you now need to create a new OSS license called &quot;Ryan The Leach's super amazing open source license&quot; and noone wants to read through your entire license document to work out what they can and can't do.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ben.balter.com/2016/08/01/why-you-shouldnt-write-your-own-open-source-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Other people&lt;/a&gt; discuss on the internet why you shouldn't write your own open source license and if you look on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TLDR legal&lt;/a&gt; there's already a whole bunch of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Unless your code is super duper amazing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11375" LastEditorUserId="11375" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T07:50:55.630" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T07:50:55.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T09:48:13.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other answers point that your license would be open source but it wouldn't be free anymore, and that people don't want to read non standard licenses. Both are true, and good points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a better reason why you shouldn't do what you intend to do: your code wouldn't be useful for many people anymore. MIT license is compatible with GPL and similar licenses. Adding a restriction not allowed by GPL (or similar) license prevent your code to be used combined with software with GPL (or similar) licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, answering your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It still would be open source if you define it as &amp;quot;source is available&amp;quot;, but not according to OSI definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would do to show people that's a different license: name your license with a completely different name, not including MIT in the name, so people can see easily that it is not a standard license. Begin your license with a text like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RYAN THE LEACH VERY SPECIAL LICENSE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is the same than MIT license, with the following exception: you must notify me, Ryan The Leach, as the original author, if you make any derivative work based on this one. You can notify me mailing to aaa@bbb.com. Given you comply with this point, you can use or change the software in any way allowed by the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TEXT OF THE MIT LICENSE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here goes the full text of MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recommend to include a second paragraph, just before the text of the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will give permission to use this code under standard MIT license (without the exception above) to any person who request it when contacting me, so this code will be compatible with GPL and similar licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way less people will be discouraged of using your code, and it will be useful for many more people who will be allowed to mix it with GPL code. However, people that make a fork of the fork will not be required to notify you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6667" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T09:07:40.997" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2018-06-15T11:12:12.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So you have an application that uses GPL code, even if part of the project can be separated and used under different terms (MIT), the project as a whole needs to comply with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the overall project design can also impact on what you can do. If the neural network is a library that links with the main program it can fall into GPL but if it is a separate program that supplies data to the main program it would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While data output from a GPL program is not covered by the GPL terms, Section 1 of the GPL states -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your training data files are stored or converted to C/C++ code that gets compiled into the final app, then the training data will fall into the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the data is stored as separate files that are only read at runtime, you may need to supply at least a basic subset of data that allows the user to &quot;compile, install and run&quot; the project you are sharing, while your paid application gets bundled with more useful data files. Offering your advanced data set as an optional download available once the app is installed could be another way to separate it from the open project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you are under no obligation to make the open version of the program run &quot;really well&quot; or to any extent of usefulness on its own, consider that the linux kernel has a very limited use without other supporting projects to make a complete system distribution. You also don't have to make the project publicly available, you only have to make the code available to users of your binary program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T11:12:12.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10412" CreationDate="2018-06-15T15:00:44.337" Score="15" ViewCount="1948" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/plaintext-versions-of-creative-commons-licenses-and-cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Official plaintext versions&lt;/a&gt; of the Creative Commons licenses are available. Are there similarly official Markdown versions? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:09:06.820" Title="Are there official Markdown versions of the CC licenses?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6977" CreationDate="2018-06-15T15:55:09.563" Score="2" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a simple chat server/client app, written in PHP (server side, 100% my own code) and AngularJS.  The process for Angular development typically brings in many libraries with various licenses.  Of the hundreds of files involved with the source of the project, I've created 5 of them from scratch, with no edits or changes made to any of the other code.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to do is license under the GPLv2 the actual TypeScript code that I have written, on a file-by-file basis for my 2 PHP files and 5 TypeScript files. All 7 of these files are 100% created/written by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, since the PHP code is all mine I can license it how I want, and it can be used stand-alone if the client side is re-implemented in any other language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about my TypeScript?  Can I license code that I wrote in any way I want - specifically GPLv2 - on a file by file basis, regardless of what other code it operates with/depends on and the license that other code uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thinking on this is that some other user can decide to accept the terms of whatever license the libraries are under, and can use the code that I wrote under the provisions of the GPLv2.  In theory, a user could use only the code I wrote to do some other project using some other framework as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T12:10:00.507" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T12:10:00.507" Title="when using AngularJS can I gpl code that only I have written?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6974" CreationDate="2018-06-15T17:11:16.587" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I contribute to an open source webgl library. A PR has been proposed that solves a problem, introduces a new feature to the library, and places some properties on some class FOO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't like the placement of that property as i feel it' better suited for BAR. The pattern can be seen as an anti-pattern according to some principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked out the branch from the PR, refactored it the way i suggested and ended up with 30% less code, and 30% less files being touched, while not breaking the pattern related principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that in the case of this library, it's valid to not follow the principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused by the rejection of such an argument (follow a principle). I thought that literature can be cited as sort of an absolute truth, proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can i address this and what should be my expectations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, several decades of CS research seems to disagree with you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As offensive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11134" LastEditorUserId="11134" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T19:00:23.380" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T19:00:23.380" Title="Should academic arguments be used to convince someone to accept a PR" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6973" CreationDate="2018-06-15T17:45:40.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought that literature can be cited as sort of an absolute truth, proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, that's ridiculous. Just like anything else, SOLID is a set of guidelines which have been found to be &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; applicable and useful - but not universally. It may be the are good reasons to break the guidelines in the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, what you're doing here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argument from authority&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T17:45:40.013" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-15T20:05:28.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To take a slightly different tack, also my first post here so be gentle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the wider complexities of license fine tuning perhaps leave the licence alone and make the software send an &lt;strong&gt;ACK&lt;/strong&gt; to a server somewhere when it is used.  While this is usually objectionable behaviour and can send users away it may be acceptable in this situation. Make it do this only once for each instance.  Document, test and verify that the routines work.  Make this as unobtrusive as possible but let the application data mine the end-user to his comfort level before he sends the ping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Heggert field transform algorithm library&lt;/strong&gt; was developed by&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Simon Green&lt;/strong&gt;.  He would be pleased to know of cases where the library is used and hopes you can assist.  All that is required if for&#xA;  you to select [Send] and a one time notification will be sent to&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;SimonGreen-Heggertfieldtransform@gmail.com&lt;/strong&gt;.  This step is &lt;strong&gt;voluntary&lt;/strong&gt; and you can skip it by selecting [Cancel] or alternately you can recompile the library with &lt;strong&gt;#define NO-AKNOWLEDGEMEN&lt;/strong&gt;T or&#xA;  remove the associated code segments completely.  The library will&#xA;  attempt to save a local file with the same name as the associated&#xA;  application appended with &lt;strong&gt;.acknowledge&lt;/strong&gt; to avoid repeating this&#xA;  questionnaire. You may provide some of the further suggested details&#xA;  if you like.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Locale&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Country, state&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Institution&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Name or type&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Contact&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Phone or email, if you want to be appraised of bug fixes&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Comments&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Any other information you wish to share (max 250 characters)&lt;/em&gt;]    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;strong&gt;Send&lt;/strong&gt;] [&lt;strong&gt;Cancel&lt;/strong&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this does not answer the exact question the OP posed it may solve his problem in an alternative manner that achieves his actual stated goals of knowing where the routines are used and gaining the desired personal recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11393" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T20:05:28.327" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6984" CreationDate="2018-06-15T23:11:01.670" Score="2" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a name to give my &lt;strong&gt;open-source&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;non-profit&lt;/strong&gt; project that will best represent its purpose. Presently, the ideal name for the project would be the name of a certain individual (Ken Burns) with the first letters reversed: &lt;strong&gt;benkurns&lt;/strong&gt;. Given the nature of the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open source (GPLv3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;free, non-profit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I require permission from an individual before using a corruption of their name as the project title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11395" LastEditorUserId="11395" LastEditDate="2018-06-16T06:54:15.230" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T13:04:16.750" Title="Using a person's name for an open source project" Tags="|copyright|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6972" CreationDate="2018-06-16T09:27:29.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;[Obligatory disclaimer - I am not a lawyer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, yes. As long as your code stands alone and there clear borders between it and Angular itself, you can license it however you please. It's up to whoever wants to use your code to make sure he does so in a way that complies with the license (and the license of the other components he or she is using).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T09:27:29.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6826" CreationDate="2018-06-16T19:19:26.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I learned from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://foss-backstage.de/session/20-years-open-source-stories-early-days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSS-Backstage 2018&lt;/a&gt; in Berlin is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source projects can have a governance process which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;makes decisions transparent and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;includes new-comers. (Two among other)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something valuable to have in the company, too. &#xA;Developing open source software can bring this knowledge into the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the conference they also talked about &quot;Inner Source&quot; which I understood means having the open source processes inside a company.&#xA;Having developers inside a company working in open source manner, makes them more familiar to contribute to open source projects, too - which is what we would like to have and the company probably also, if they like to have their needs fulfilled by open source software they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://foss-backstage.de/session/20-years-open-source-stories-early-days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;talk&lt;/a&gt; she also mentioned Apache and how it was created.&#xA;The developers had to be convinced that by making the pie greater,&#xA;there would be more in it for all.&#xA;That is also the case for the company and cannot be measured as competitive advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example from my life where making the pie bigger worked:&#xA;We put a shelf on the playground and some toys inside. After a month we added some more again. After a year, the shelf is too small for the toys all people, not even those having children, put there. There are even toys I would not buy because they are too expensive.&#xA;Now, every child has more toys than they could call their own when they come there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, this metaphor works great for open source projects.&#xA;For me, it is about having access to the resources to strive (richness) and&#xA;letting go of greed and distrust: Putting in one shovel (OS-Project) where it does not hurt and seeing that the others also contribute so you have 10 shovels at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T19:19:26.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-16T22:01:34.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two suggestions for the “middle path”, keeping an open source license and still getting a bit of intel where your code is at works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) You can force people to make their modified versions available with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU AGPL license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a true and tested open source license, even recommended by the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does, however, not contain a “back channel”, i.e., the forced feedback, when a developer uses your code. He just has to make the code available, but doesn’t need to notify you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The other possibility is, that you move your code off Github or a publicly available website and make it available, still free of charge if you like, only if someone leaves his e-mail address. The classical “I’ll mail you the download link” solution. That way you still don’t see, what exactly people are building, but you know, who (most of) them are and you can still use a traditional open source license for the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In combination with the AGPL you can then dig deeper if you’re interested (maybe a developer used an @large-company.com e-mail and you want to see, what they’re doing. Then simply drop them a line asking for the download link of their version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11402" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T22:01:34.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6981" CreationDate="2018-06-17T00:38:12.857" Score="4" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a java library that I intend to release under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I have drawn on another MIT license library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to only use a couple source files/classes from the other library in my library. I would like to just embed those source file directly in my library and modify them as I see fit to meet my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this compliant with MIT license? What do I need to add to my GitHub page when I publish it, in regards to the portions of the other library that I embedded in my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11404" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T06:16:00.463" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T06:16:00.463" Title="Take portion of MIT license library, and redistribute in new library" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6980" CreationDate="2018-06-17T06:15:31.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote the MIT License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright [YEAR] [COPYRIGHT HOLDER]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - you can redistribute modified versions of specific classes from an MIT-licensed project. You'll have to keep the original copyright and license for them, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An acceptable approach could be to have such a paragraph in your license (or readme) file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Classes under the XYZ package were taken from project ABC, Copyright 1999 Original Author.&#xA;  These classes are licensed under the MIT license. See XYZ-LICENSE.md for additional details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T06:15:31.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-17T09:42:03.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But recently I've had the thought that I really would like to be notified if someone forked my software, whether it's for personal use, released or not I don't really mind or care to restrict. It's more of an ego/motivation thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; put &quot;I really would like&quot; items into a license proper.  What belongs in a license are things you feel strong enough about to be willing to sue over (or some prospective future copyright holder other than you).  Everything else is just causing trouble while weakening people's respects of licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source licenses are &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; licenses where any downstream contributors have the same rights as the initial copyright holder reserves for himself.  If everyone could add a postcard requirement, compliance would get harder and harder over the lifetime of software both because contributors grow in number while their reachability declines: addresses often go stale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of unintentional consequence is a good reason to stick with tried licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of licensing proper, you can add &quot;I would appreciate getting to hear...&quot; requests in vicinity of the license or in general documentation.  The ratio of users actually heeding such requests tends to be minuscule so that is sort-of a recipe for frustration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's often easier to set up mailing lists for users, development and bug reports and solicit further development.  The fraction of feedback gotten in this manner is still a minor fraction of the actual user base, but the interaction tends to me more active and gives you more of a clue what people are using the software for than a &quot;thankyou&quot; card would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11406" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T09:42:03.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6963" CreationDate="2018-06-17T10:49:56.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other answers point out the conflict between what you want, and many free/open source/copyleft licenses. But there is a way that might at least partly help you to achieve what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open licenses relate to the rights of a person given a copy of the code. They don't specify or limit how you yourself distribute the code. For example, you can put a download link on your webpage, together with a request to link to this page (or more recent location) so that anyone else can easily find the latest version, and you can also ask that you are told about any forked or modified versions for personal interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't conflict with any open source licence because it doesn't limit &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; in any way. Anyone can do what they like, but you'll find that many people will respect it, if asked on the download page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T10:49:56.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6976" CreationDate="2018-06-17T13:04:16.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personality rights differ wildly between jurisdictions, especially between common-law and civil-law jurisdictions. In general, you have no right to use another person's name or likeness. There is no general exception for non-profit usage. You will have to check your applicable laws for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personality rights have trademark-like aspects, but for natural persons. They also touch on privacy and free speech issues. Questions that arise are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could your usage of this name lead to confusion with the natural person?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could your usage of this name be mis-interpreted as an endorsement by the natural person?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could your usage of this name somehow be detrimental to the natural person (when weighed against your free speech rights)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some jurisdictions, your non-commercial use may weigh in your favour but may be irrelevant in others. The strength of this particular mark (even when obfuscated by swapping letters) probably weighs strongly against your use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further clarity, consider these thought experiments, assuming you are creating a video player widget for websites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider an actual trademark like YouTube. Can you name your project TouYoube as a play on that? If not, then the same reasoning would likely apply to personality rights (especially in U.S. jurisdictions).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider downstream usage of your project. You name the video player “BenKurns” as a pun on “Ken Burns”. It gets more successful and starts being used on porn sites. Would the use of the name “BenKurns” on porn sites violate the personality rights of Ken Burns? If so, who would have performed the violation, the site or you?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the “correct” answers for these thought experiments and the answers will of course depend on jurisdictions and specific details of the case. But your proposed usage is raising questions where the answer is not obviously “go ahead, you're fine”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you avoid celebrity names or puns on these names for open source projects. Quite likely, no one will see your open source project and no one will care. However, you are inviting an unnecessary risk for cease and desist letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T13:04:16.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T18:59:57.620" Score="5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Content posted on Stack Exchange sites like Stack Overflow or Electrical Engineering are &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;User contributions licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cc-by-sa 3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the footer of any SE site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxCqF.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxCqF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see this has two implications for me and many other users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I post code snippets from my Apache 2.0 licensed project, I loose the permissiveness of my own license, because Stack Exchange is overruling this by the chosen Share-Alike license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to always point to my own sources on e.g. GitHub to give users a chance to use my code snippets and solutions under a permissive license policy like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot use any of the posted code snippets in my projects, because the chosen Share-Alike license is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thought from Stack Exchange regarding these facts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If an admin feels it's a meta question, please move it. But since SE has an open source site, we should discuss it openly and not hidden behind the meta walls.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar discussions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4004/must-cc-by-sa-be-included-for-ideas-and-code-taken-from-stack-overflow?rq=1&quot;&gt;Must CC BY-SA be included for ideas and code taken from Stack Overflow?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270014/is-copy-pasting-code-from-stack-overflow-an-infringement-to-cc-by-sa-3-0-or-is-i&quot;&gt;Is copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow an infringement to CC BY-SA 3.0 or is it considered fair use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5663/do-stack-exchange-s-tos-mean-that-the-user-generated-content-is-double-licensed?rq=1&quot;&gt;Do Stack Exchange’s ToS mean that the user-generated content is double-licensed to them?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3226" LastEditorUserId="3226" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T19:15:47.873" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T06:08:46.037" Title="Does Stack Exchange disallow me to use posted contents in an Apache 2.0 licensed project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|cc-by-sa|permissive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6986" CreationDate="2018-06-17T22:05:23.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In brief, item #1 is incorrect, and item #2 is broadly correct, with possible exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may release a copyrighted work under any number of licenses independently and simultaneously. The fact that you offer some of your code under a CC BY-SA in no way impedes your ability to also offer it under the Apache 2 license, and vice versa. You are the copyright holder; you have the power to offer any sets of nonexclusive permissions in any number of licenses grants. (If you grant someone exclusive rights to some copyright right, then obviously you can't offer it to anyone else.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to include someone else's CC BY-SA work into your work, the ShareAlike requirements apply, and your work as a whole must by under CC BY-SA. You may offer your own copyrighted parts simultaneously under Apache 2, so if the CC-licensed are removed later, the ShareAlike obligations go away. If you want to spare other people this complication, you may simultaneously license your Stack Overflow posts under a permissive license (some people do this by a blanket statement in their user profile) so others can use your code under more permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the triviality of the CC BY-SA code, or the degree to which there is only one way to do it (i.e., it doesn't possess any creativity whatsoever, per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;merger doctrine&lt;/a&gt;), it might be that the snippet isn't copyrighted, or its use is defensible under &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; or fair use/dealing in your jurisdiction. Otherwise, you need permission from the copyright holder to use it without abiding by the ShareAlike terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the management of Stack Overflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required?cb=1&quot;&gt;held extensive debate about licensing code from Stack Overflow posts under the MIT license&lt;/a&gt; in 2015-16, with the decision ultimately being &quot;postponed indefinitely.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-06-18T03:16:05.970" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T03:16:05.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6989" CreationDate="2018-06-18T13:39:34.140" Score="2" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I take some code that was released under LGPL v2.1 and make modifications to it, what are my options for releasing that derived work again as open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, one option would obviously be to release it again under LGPL v2.1. But that's about the only option I'm sure of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I release my derived work under&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LPGL v3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any license &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as &quot;GPL-Compatible&quot; at the GNU website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without violating the LGPL v2.1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9990" LastEditorUserId="9990" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T10:32:30.910" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T10:32:30.910" Title="What are my license options for releasing code I derived from code that was released under LGPL v2.1?" Tags="|derivative-works|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6988" CreationDate="2018-06-18T15:38:59.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original code was licensed under &quot;LGPL 2.1 only&quot;. This is the case if the license does not explicitly allow you to use a later version of the LGPL, but the license text does allow you to change the license to GPLv2 or a later version. In this case, your modified version can be released under the LGPL v2.1, GPL v2 or GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original code was licensed under &quot;LGPL v2.1 or later&quot;. If the license reference allows you to use LGPLv2.1 or a later version, then you can release your modified version under LGPL v2.1, GPL v2, LGPL v3, GPL v3 or later versions of either GPL or LGPL (if and when those later versions are created).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License compatibility only becomes relevant when you are using a library in a larger project, where that project uses the library but is not a modification of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are making changes to an existing project, those changes must be under the same copyright license as the original, except if there is explicit permission in the license to use a different (version of the) license or to sublicense the work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-06-19T06:55:47.580" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T06:55:47.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6986" CreationDate="2018-06-19T06:08:46.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If posting a code snippet is an issue for you, you could explain your solution in the answer and only add a link to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you could post longer code pieces using &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/sambler/49d84a74d841c877334342748d230614&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gist.github&lt;/a&gt; or link to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sambler/addonsByMe/blob/master/create_multi_bound_box.py#L92&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific line in a github repo file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T06:08:46.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6993" CreationDate="2018-06-20T12:07:20.503" Score="-3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The docker sources are reachable on various places (mainly, GitHub).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many package repositories to download docker, these are hosted mainly by themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they have no source deb repos (deb-src...). It seems, their debian packages are binary-only and so is it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More likely, this source repo probably exists, but it is not public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay? Are they allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T17:43:50.023" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T17:43:50.023" Title="Docker does not give source deb repositories, is it okay?" Tags="|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6992" CreationDate="2018-06-20T15:00:38.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is entirely okay to distribute only binaries of Docker (or any other project licensed under the Apache License version 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license version 2 has the following text regarding distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Redistribution.&lt;/strong&gt; You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the four requirements that you must meet mentions the distribution of the Source form when you distribute the Object form. This means that it is entirely legal to distribute only the Object form, which means only the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T15:00:38.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2758" CreationDate="2018-06-21T02:58:21.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition of what @paulbeckingham added,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The list should be automatically generated in the order of contribution. It motivates people to contribute more. Moreover people need not to add their name in last of list (general tendency). There are some tools who does that. However I prefer opencollective style to fetch and display contributors automatically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes I prefer to separate maintainers / authors. So that visitors know whom to contact first specially to report vulnerabilities as it should not be public.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8512" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T02:58:21.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7004" CreationDate="2018-06-22T11:44:52.860" Score="0" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a commercial .NET desktop application that uses a nuget package called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Magick.NET-Q16-x86/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magick.NET&lt;/a&gt;. Magick.NET is licensed under Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some functions in Magick.NET relies on Ghostscript (AGPL licensed). In order to use those functions, users have to install Ghostscript manually. That means Magick.NET is using Ghostscript at runtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute Ghostscript installer with our application installer? Do I have to opensource our application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11447" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T05:53:59.587" Title="Can I distribute an AGPL component used by an Apache licensed component in our application" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7001" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:43:17.697" Score="0" ViewCount="1206" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a general question. Is it possible to change the license of your creation (in this case something like linux) that have been developed by an entire community, not just Linus? Can it be changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11448" LastEditorUserId="11448" LastEditDate="2018-06-26T01:20:35.697" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T07:52:40.693" Title="Can Linus Torvalds change the license of Linux to private or nonfree &quot;commercial&quot;?" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7000" CreationDate="2018-06-22T16:03:13.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the license can be changed (except that you can't take back the license you already granted on older versions).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No, Linus Torvalds can not change the license of Linux on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided no exclusive license gas been given, the copyright holder of a work has the full right to decide under which licenses to offer his work to others. The choice of license can change in time and who the license is offered to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are multiple copyright holders, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of them must actively agree to a change in the license. In a project like Linux, with dozen to hundreds of contributors, this makes it effectively impossible to change the license because it takes just one contributor to block a license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T18:04:34.237" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T18:04:34.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7003" CreationDate="2018-06-22T19:28:27.277" Score="1" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5.9/licenses-used-in-qt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; is unclear whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtnetworkauth-index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QT Network Authentication&lt;/a&gt; module is licensed under LGPL or GPL. Has it changed recently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11450" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-23T05:56:55.727" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T05:56:55.727" Title="Is the Qt Network Authentication module LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7002" CreationDate="2018-06-23T05:44:10.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of Qt is licensed under LGPL 3, except for &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some modules specifically noted to be licensed under GPL 3&lt;/a&gt; - Qt Charts, Qt Data Visualization and Qt Virtual Keyboard. Since Qt Network Authentication isn't specifically noted as being licensed under GPL, the general declaration that it's available under LGPL applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T05:44:10.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6999" CreationDate="2018-06-23T05:53:59.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL, and I will assume for the purposes of this answer that the FSF's attitude to what constitutes a derivative work is the correct one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Magick.NET invokes ghostscript solely through userspace, the resulting combination of the two doesn't become a derivative work of both; the two programs are &quot;&lt;em&gt;merely aggregated&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and may be distributed together without either's licence requirements affecting the other.  If ghostscript is invoked through a library, or some other shared-data-structure method, then the resulting combination of the two is a derivative work of both, and if distributed with ghostscript this derivative work would also have to be under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes me suspicious that the latter is true is that Magick.NET themselves don't distribute ghostscript with their code, but instead require the user to download it.  If they were confident that their use of ghostscript was mere-aggregation, they would not need to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming from that (and it is another assumption) that Magick.NET uses ghostscript in such a way as to make a derivative work, distributing ghostscript with it would require that the entire resulting derivative work was covered by AGPL3.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that requirement extends to your product depends similarly on how it uses Magick.NET.  If you are making some kind of derivative work, then the AGPL licensing requirement would extend yet further, to your code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-06-23T05:53:59.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7000" CreationDate="2018-06-23T09:20:31.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is the GPL a non-commercial License? You may sell everything under any  open source License - per definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your question: Of course you may change the license of every pice code, where you are either copyright holder or the copyright holder gave you permission to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To change the license of a community-project, the easy way is to have a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the way big companies like Google or Microsoft or e.g. Python or Canonical do stuff.&#xA;Basically you demand full rights over all contributions from every contributor. Result: Yes, license changes are possible without problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, Wikipedia is your friend: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Linux&lt;/strong&gt; requireres no such thing as Contributor License Agreement. So &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;: Linux may &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; change the whole Linux license but only the licence of parts he wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last, but really important thing, some may not be aware:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source =&gt; always open source (like for ever)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one can revoke open source licenses of published software. Even if you would change the license of linux - every line published today will still be effective open source (mainly gplv2). Of course you can't force anyone (e.g. kernel.org) to publish the open source code forever. But anyone previously downloaded the code could legally re-upload everything - so the licence change would just affect new linux releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically this would fork linux. Because there would be still a community to maintain &quot;open source linux&quot; - and no one could stop them. We would just need to renaim &quot;linux&quot; - because that's still a trademark ;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11455" LastEditorUserId="11455" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T07:52:40.693" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T07:52:40.693" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7007" CreationDate="2018-06-23T19:46:32.307" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a known license where all derivative works must be made public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this: I give copyleft code to team X. Team X improves code and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; shares/uses it internally. This situation is legal because team X is not &lt;em&gt;sharing&lt;/em&gt; their derivative works with the world, therefore they are under no obligation to share the derivative code with the world (or even back to me). Please correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to force the recipient to agree that derivative source code must be published somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T22:14:45.340" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T22:14:45.340" Title="Force derivative works to be public" Tags="|license-recommendation|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7006" CreationDate="2018-06-23T21:44:07.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL comes close, as it creates copyleft obligations for a person whenever they distribute the software or whenever they offer access to a modified version as a network service. (Normally, this is &quot;private&quot; use under other copyleft licenses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any license that meets your requirements, and I have some concerns about how such a license would work in practice, some of which impact the license's status as FLOSS and others which merely cause tremendous annoyance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every keystroke (or surely at least every new line of code) you make in the code may create a new, separate derivative work under copyright law. Must you distribute each and every intermediate work? For sanity's sake, let's assume not: your obligations only apply whenever you make the work available to any other person, even privately. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you perform distribution (or in the more ridiculous case, make a keystroke in the code), to whom must you offer the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. To each and every licencor of licensed code you use? In this case, you probably fail the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;&quot; -- you may only prepare or privately distribute the code if you can get in touch with the licencors. Also, this can be annoying if the code has many authors, and you need to get in touch with, e.g., hundreds of authors every time you privately do anything with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. To &quot;the public&quot; at large? If so, are my obligations satisfied if I simply post a small sign outside my office building saying, &quot;There's source code in here; come inside and get it if you want&quot;? If not, and you want something broader, that probably also fails the desert island test. If that is enough, see problem #3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When may you stop offering the code? Distribution-based copyleft licenses limit their obligations to only as long as (or at the same time as) you distribute the object code, but making a modification doesn't involve any other person and happens at a single instant in time. It's not clear how the license should ensure that the code is made available long enough for anyone to get a copy. Do I need to keep the sign up outside my office for any arbitrary amount of time? A year? Forever?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T03:36:27.617" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T03:36:27.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7009" CreationDate="2018-06-24T00:59:54.113" Score="4" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a small open source project and would like to make sure I got the licensing right. I am pretty new to the open source model. I have benefited from it on a personal level for years. I can't help but want to make sure that my project is open to users who contribute to the project and not just free loaders. Of course this isn't to restrict usage of people experimenting with the project for personal reasons or students or anything of the like. I am thinking more of companies that might profit from too weak licensing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through research I understand that using a strongly protective GPL or an AGPL license distributed freely with the project combined with a more permissive license sold to companies who have different needs might be a good solution. Even though the AGPL is kind of frowned upon even as far as being banned by Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case I realize that this might be an opinionated subject matter so let me keep this to a specific cadre. I recently stumbled upon a less common solution that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://licensezero.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;License Zero&lt;/a&gt;. However, I can't find a lot of information on it's compatibility with other licenses. My question is now, is License Zero a good fit for an open source project? More specifically is it compatible with current business models or licenses like the MIT open license or GPL license. Would someone be able to integrate my code in their open source project? Inversely can I use open source libraries that operate under commonly found licenses in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I understand pretty well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-can-i-determine-if-two-open-source-licenses-are-compatible-with-each-other&quot;&gt;from such posts&lt;/a&gt;, that I essentially can't override a clause of a license from a codebase I use in my project. So in the case of dual licensing I can use a GPLv2 codebase in my open source version but can't use the same codebase when I sell a closed source version of my project for instance am I right? More precisely does the GPLv2 forbid such forms of dual licensing? I guess the only work around for me or a company interested in my code for proprietary projects is to get a license agreement or waiver of some kind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11458" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T16:16:19.513" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T17:13:36.397" Title="Is License Zero compatible with other open source licenses like GNU, MIT or BSD licenses for example?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|derivative-works|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2018-06-24T13:46:45.117" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have asked a fairly broad question so I'll discuss a few snippets, and come back to the License Zero at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Restricting users of free software.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't help but want to make sure that my project is open to users who contribute to the project and not just free loaders. Of course this isn't to restrict usage of people experimenting with the project for personal reasons or students or anything of the like. I am thinking more of companies that might profit from too weak licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that would not be a FLOSS license. This goes against freedom zero in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; (“The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”) and against criterion 6 “No discrimination against fields of endeavor” in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Dual licensing.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;using a strongly protective GPL or an AGPL license distributed freely with the project combined with a more permissive license sold to companies who have different needs might be a good solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does the GPLv2 forbid such forms of dual licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, you can of course issue multiple non-exclusive licenses at the same time. It is not necessary that all licenses are a free software license. The licenses that you sell don't have to be “more permissive”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you accept outside contributions you are no longer the sole copyright holder. This is typically solved by requesting copyright assignment (which is impossible in some jurisdictions), or by requiring contributions to use a different license than the project license (“inbound != outbound”). In any case it is tricky to pull something like that off correctly, and requires assistance by a professional (i.e. talk with your lawyer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Goals of licensing.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even though the AGPL is kind of frowned upon even as far as being banned by Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different licenses have different goals. Different people and organizations have different goals. Not every license fits everyone's goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache 2, BSD try to maximize freedom for immediate users, i.e. other developers. Such software can be used freely in closed-source projects. So this developer freedom comes at a cost of end-user freedom. Using such licenses is typically motivated by “I want as many people as possible to use my software!”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses like the GPL and AGPL try to maximize end-user freedom. This comes at a cost of developer freedom because derived works can only be published under the same license. Using such licenses is typically motivated by a desire to preserve end-user freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are mixed forms such as the LGPL, which is permissive or copyleft depending on how it's used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not necessary to publish software under a FLOSS license. The default license is “all rights reserved”. I.e. people can look at it but can't do anything with the software. If you want other people to use your software and build upon it, you must issue some license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-free licenses are often part of a contract. A contract as a legal instrument offers much more flexibility than a license that has to fit into the confines of (international) copyright law. If you sell private licenses, you would typically use a contract.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to consider what your motivations are to publish your software. Possibly, offering a FLOSS license is not in your interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone might license software under the AGPL if they want to maximize the end-user freedoms especially also for SaaS. Google develops SaaS software and would be restricted by such a license. It is understandable that they do not want to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the AGPL is the most restrictive license in common usage, it is frequently used to discourage commercial use. This is often not well thought out because the AGPL does allow commercial use without restrictions (see freedom zero), and only triggers source disclosure requirements for derived works. There is a goal mismatch between “preserving end user freedom” and “forbid commercial usage”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;License zero.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;license zero. However, I can't find a lot of information on it's compatibility with other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the license zero project, this seems to be a platform to sell commercial licenses. It also includes a “&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180624125901/https://licensezero.com/licenses/reciprocal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;License Zero Reciprocal Public License 2.0.1&lt;/a&gt;”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly a GPL3-style copyleft license, except for point 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you run this software to analyze, change, or generate software, you must release source code for that software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This extremely problematic both from a FLOSS perspective (it violates freedom zero) and from a legal perspective (copyright doesn't work that way).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's also a potential loophole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Releasing source code means publicly licensing it under either this license or a license approved by the Open Source Initiative&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If taken literally, this could be used to publish modified versions under the MIT, thus stripping the copyleft nature from this license. Even if that's not the case, the license is dangerously unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take these problems as indications that the license was not written by a lawyer. &lt;strong&gt;It should not be used&lt;/strong&gt;, regardless of your goals. As it is likely non-free it is &lt;strong&gt;probably incompatible&lt;/strong&gt; with most copyleft FLOSS licenses. Permissive licenses are generally compatible with this license, similar to how permissive licenses are generally compatible with GPL and proprietary projects. This still means that no MIT-licensed project can use License-Zero licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the problem of &lt;strong&gt;license proliferation&lt;/strong&gt;: There are already hundreds of open source licenses. It should not be necessary to create yet another license. Software with “non-standard” licenses is less likely to be used because of the increased legal risks. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license list by the Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to start looking for well-respected, commonly used licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T13:46:45.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7011" CreationDate="2018-06-19T09:23:48.667" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a customer that has built an application on top of WordPress (they are based in the UK) and intends to sell access to this software in two main forms on an international basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A monthly licence fee to use the application hosted by them. (Where the user gets access to certain levels of the platform)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An upfront fee for someone to purchase the software and use it as a full internal system within their own business and have access to the full range of software, in this scenario our customer will also be providing the hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is how does this tie in with GPLv2? Does our customer still have the obligation (in either scenario) to provide the source code as this would obviously hamper their business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been no changes to the wordpress core code base (that we are aware of) but the developer has made several bespoke plugins and themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15212" OwnerDisplayName="Freddy Wetson" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T19:22:46.500" Title="GPLv2 Wordpress Application - Selling" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7010" CreationDate="2018-06-19T12:03:02.043" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Scenario 1, there is no obligation to provide source code under the GPL (but there would be under the AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Scenario 2, your customer would have to provide the source code of their plugins and themes, at least according to the opinion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wordpress.org&lt;/a&gt;. While there is some uncertainly whether plugins really count as derivative works, and I don't think this has been tested in court, I doubt your customer wants to be the model case for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Borgwardt" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T12:03:02.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7015" CreationDate="2018-06-25T09:48:12.000" Score="15" ViewCount="19468" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is explicitly &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about the software &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; Docker images (that should be quite obvious) but about bundling open source software as docker images (-&gt; Dockerfile + build / packing scripts + doku + entrypoint-skript + ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official docker images repo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/docker-library/official-images&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/docker-library/official-images&lt;/a&gt;) is licensed under Apache 2.0. Great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for most images on docker hub no one took the time to add any kind of license information. Let's say, the docker image (downloaded from docker hub) contains only open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I (formally) allowed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modify the image (use as base image)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;distribute my (modified) image (outside docker hub)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;build the docker image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11455" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T06:11:40.590" Title="License for docker images?" Tags="|docker|bundling|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7013" CreationDate="2018-06-25T10:45:12.207" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, found it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docker.com/legal/docker-terms-service/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.docker.com/legal/docker-terms-service/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6.4 The Service allows you to specify or upload the terms under which other users of the Service will be licensed to use your User Content. If you do not specify or upload such license terms with respect to any User Content, you hereby grant to any other users of the Service, a non-exclusive license to access, download, use, modify or otherwise exploit such part of your User Content for any personal or business purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally overlooked this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the way I see it, going to GitHub, downloading any Dockerimage (without license) and building the image is a copyright-violation. I don't know similar section in GitHubs terms of service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Additionally I'm not really sure about publishing a modified image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11455" LastEditorUserId="26261" LastEditDate="2023-05-24T06:11:40.590" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T06:11:40.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7013" CreationDate="2018-06-25T12:52:45.893" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;A container image (a file system that may include various copyrighted works) and the scripts to build these images (like a Dockerfile) are separate works. In general, the license of the included software is completely unrelated to the license of the build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FSE06.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FSE06.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram illustrating licensing relationships: images can inherit some licensing terms from their build scripts, from their base images, and from the included software&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you build upon a build script, you are bound by the license of that build script (but this is not how Dockerfiles are typically used). If there is no explicit license, you have no right to distribute or modify the build script. So you cannot modify or distribute arbitrary Dockerfiles from GitHub unless you have a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you build upon an already built base image, you have to comply with the license of that base image AND with the licenses of all included software. If the image is not offered under an express or implied license then you have no rights to copy and use it. In practice many images will directly or indirectly contain GPL'ed software such as the Linux kernel. This could indicate that the image is an aggregate work. (I do not think technical details such as image layering are legally relevant here.) Under the terms of the GPL the image author must not prevent you from exercising your rights under the GPL with regards to the GPL'ed software in the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is however not necessary to notify you of the exact licensing status of all included software on a download page or similar, so the lack of license indication on the Docker Hub or similar places is mostly fine. You can be expected to look into the documentation for licensing information. Some platforms like the Docker Hub or GitHub may provide a default license grant. Note that some users might offer images under the default license without having the necessary rights (e.g. the Docker Hub default license looks excessively permissive for most software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that some images may include more restrictive licenses. It is your responsibility to check this prior to use. For example, there may be additional trademark requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be the case that the license on the Docker Hub page is misleading. E.g. I found an unofficial image with the Oracle JDK software that is only offered under an Oracle EULA, yet the Docker Hub page mentions the MIT license. It is correct that the &lt;em&gt;build scripts&lt;/em&gt; are offered under the MIT, but this license cannot apply to the software in the &lt;em&gt;image&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you use the image? Typically yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, only if you comply with the license of the image and the licenses of all included software. In absence of a license, all rights are reserved. It is your responsibility to check the license status.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you modify the image (use as base image)? Typically yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, only if this is allowed by the license of the base image and the licenses of all affected software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you distribute the (modified) image (outside docker hub)? Typically yes but there may be additional requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, only if this is allowed by the license of the base image and the licenses of all included software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you build the docker image (from the Dockerfile)? Typically yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, only if this is allowed by the license of the build scripts, the licenses of the base image, and the licenses of all included software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see, image licensing is a bit of a mess. You will have to exercise due diligence when choosing base images for anything other than purely personal use. Building your own images aside from some official base images may be a wise choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T12:52:45.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7008" CreationDate="2018-06-25T13:30:36.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;On licence zero&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just had a look for the first time. It does not appear to be an Open Source / Free Software Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have several licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Reciprocal License, has a compulsion to release changes to the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Noncommercial License, has a non-commercial clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all fall outside of the Open Source definition / Free Software definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;On Dual licencing&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is allowed with &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; licence (As you are the licenser, not the licensee (therefore you cannot be bound by a contract between you and your self). The Free Software Foundation encourages it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T17:13:36.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7018" CreationDate="2018-06-25T15:57:26.880" Score="4" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this license declaration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This source code is subject to the terms of the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL).&#xA;  For details, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-rl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-rl.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And wonder what exactly are those &quot;other rights&quot;? Is it even necessary to explicitly state that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T18:17:40.187" Title="Open source license and &quot;all other rights reserved&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7017" CreationDate="2018-06-25T18:08:23.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This effectively says, &quot;Ms-RL defines the rights granted to you. Any rights not granted to you are not granted to you.&quot; As a tautology, this assertion has no practical effect but is also practically harmless (except to cause some confusion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4403/50&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; nicely covers the history of the related phrase &quot;All rights reserved.&quot; In brief, &quot;All rights reserved&quot; was once necessary (many decades ago) to establish copyright, regardless of how you chose to license a work after you established copyright. This phrase is no longer necessary, but it was kept by BSD (and perhaps other projects) in an abundance of caution, which has led to the phrase's continued needless reuse today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This variant, &quot;All other rights reserved,&quot; is correct but legally obvious: by definition, you reserve any rights that you do not grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T18:17:40.187" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T18:17:40.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-26T02:50:25.233" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I make a program and I put it on Github with GPLv2 license. Can i later add code from another person that has MIT license (adding his/her license in the repository of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11448" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T02:50:25.233" Title="Can I use code with MIT license with my GPLv2 or v3 code?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-06-26T12:13:04.860" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7021" CreationDate="2018-06-26T04:09:37.460" Score="33" ViewCount="20304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still don't understand what Tivoization is and why Linus Torvalds did not like it. Can you explain to me the big idea of Tivoization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11448" LastEditorUserId="11448" LastEditDate="2022-06-18T03:08:00.190" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T03:08:00.190" Title="What exactly is Tivoization and why didn't Linus Torvalds like it in GPLv3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|terminology|drm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7020" CreationDate="2018-06-26T05:10:55.610" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tivolization, named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiVo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TiVo&lt;/a&gt; that widely used it, is a practice of devices running free software, but placing restrictions (such as digital signatures) that block running modified versions of the software on the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument can be made (as Richard Stallman actually did), that such a device could redistribute the source code of the GPLed software it uses, but since a user cannot modify and recompile it so it's usable on the same device (since he can't digitally sign it). Thus, such a device may uphold the letter of the GPL license, but violate its spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds actually stated that TiVo's practice here didn't really bother him (e.g., in &lt;a href=&quot;https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/13/289&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this correspondence&lt;/a&gt; on lkml from 2007):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The kernel license covers the &lt;em&gt;kernel&lt;/em&gt;. It does not cover boot loaders and hardware, and as far as I'm concerned, people who make their own hardware can design them any which way they want. Whether that means &quot;booting only a specific kernel&quot; or &quot;sharks with lasers&quot;, I don't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T06:34:36.753" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T06:34:36.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7036" CreationDate="2018-06-26T18:11:17.793" Score="4" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've just started a podcast and we're not sure which license we will give it. Might be CC or public domain, for now we keep it to the default (all rights reserved). The podcast is about 20 minutes and is about research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we in this case use CC BY-SA content? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically: If I create a 30 second version of a CC BY-SA song and use it as the intro/outro to our podcast, does the podcast need to be CC BY-SA as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this different or similar to using a CC BY-SA photo in a non-CC blog post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11478" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T11:00:29.043" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T11:00:29.043" Title="Using CC BY-SA music in a podcast" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7025" CreationDate="2018-06-27T16:36:33.477" Score="7" ViewCount="1909" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the etiquette around forking and NPM?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following sequence of events:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is an existing open source project published on GitHub (or similar) under some standard permissive license (e.g. MIT) that is also published to NPM.  That package has a relatively high download rate on NPM.  The NPM package name accurately and concisely describes the intent of the package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A user unaffliated with the library discovers the package &amp;amp; library but notices that there are some bugs or other improvements to be made.  The new user opens some GitHub issues outlining the bugs/improvements and then forks the repo and opens a PR where those problems are addressed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no immediate or short term response from the maintainer(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While waiting for the maintainer to acknowlege the PR (either reject, merge or otherwise request changes), the new user &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;notices further changes that need to be made&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;needs their changes to be consumed by other upstream packages (that may or may not be open source)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which course of action is most beneficial to the new user and applies reasonable etiquette?  Some possibilities include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having NPM consume their fork (based on GitHub url)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publishing a new package to NPM based on their fork&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11439" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-06-28T12:36:15.040" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T12:36:15.040" Title="Etiquette around forks &amp; npm" Tags="|forking|etiquette|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7024" CreationDate="2018-06-28T12:34:07.353" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your PRs aren't being accepted, the best course of action is to published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/scope&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scoped version of the package&lt;/a&gt;. You can do this even before you think that your PR is being ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make substantial changes, and after a long while your PRs are still being ignored, then you could consider publishing it with a different name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T12:34:07.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-29T07:58:09.163" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use openshift/origin docker images (openshift/origin, openshift/jenkins-slave-nodejs-centos7, centos/s2i-base-centos7), that are released under GPLv2, to build docker images in my software, if I want to release it under Apache License 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11492" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T10:54:07.350" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T14:00:20.697" Title="Using openshift images in opensource product under Apache License 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7020" CreationDate="2018-06-29T12:13:22.723" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linus has stated that he didn't like the anti-tivoization clause in GPLv3 because it fundamentally changes the GPL. The whole point and purpose of the GPL, in Linus' mind, is to make users of GPL software pay back to the community by making all of their improvements of GPL software available to the community under the same terms. That's it. With anti-tivoization, GPLv3 adds a completely new obligation that has absolutely nothing to do with this fundamental purpose. He has also stated that there is nothing wrong with GPLv3 in isolation, but to call it GPL version 3 and claim that it's like GPL version 2, only better, is decidedly wrong as GPLv3 is very different from GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source, from Q&amp;amp;A session with Linus at some conference in 2014: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T12:42:38.580" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T12:42:38.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-29T19:43:02.500" Score="5" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it considered valid for a company to create an app and then state that it is licensed under the AGPL, but then only allow users who have paid to actually acquire the source code? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this is valid, what prevents me, or anyone, from simply purchasing the app and then rebranding it, calling that a &quot;fork&quot; and then re-releasing the code as free-of-charge open source, still AGPL licensed? (Or for that matter, just releasing the code in the first place - can the AGPL actually prevent you from distributing unmodified source code?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific example: the Full-Text RSS PHP service here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://fivefilters.org/content-only/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://fivefilters.org/content-only/&lt;/a&gt; This application asserts that it is licensed under the AGPLv3, but you are required to pay to get the sources and &quot;free updates for a year&quot;. This is actually the only example I've ever seen of an &quot;open-source&quot; application being fully behind a paywall. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it &quot;compatible&quot; with the AGPL to only allow people who pay to have access to your source code? (This part seems at least partly reasonable, because the GPLs in general do not restrict you from charging)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you actually say &quot;you only get updates for one year, then you have to pay again&quot; with an AGPL application?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I pay for the application, am I allowed to freely redistribute it and/or use parts of its source in my own code under the same terms as I would with a free-of-charge download? (In this case, what's the point of locking the code behind a paywall?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I do understand how some companies will dual-license, offering a free-of-charge community version under (A/L)GPL and then offering a commercial version under a proprietary license. That doesn't appear to be what is happening here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T10:20:15.620" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T10:20:15.620" Title="AGPL licensed app, but only available with payment?" Tags="|commercial|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7029" CreationDate="2018-06-29T22:57:25.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's important to consider whether the company selling this software is the exclusive copyright holder or if they are themselves licensees of someone else's AGPL license grant. If they are the sole copyright holder, they may offer as little or as much of their code as they want under the AGPL purely out of the goodness of their hearts (or according to whatever business goal this actually fulfills). Under no circumstances would they by beholden to the requirements of their own AGPL grant. They may proactively give you updated versions of their own code for as long or as short a time as they please. It's their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if they are licensing the work under the AGPL because their code is a derivative of someone else's AGPL-licensed code, then they have an obligation to offer the code to anyone who &quot;interact[s] with it remotely through a computer network&quot;. If you interact with their modified work through a network then they are required to notify you of your rights under the AGPL, and you are entitled to receive a copy of the code under the AGPL as part of those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have such an obligation and fail to meet it, they are liable for copyright infringement since they are operating outside the terms of their copyright license grant, and the original copyright holder has standing to take legal action against them. (You may wish to notify them, and the Free Software Foundation, which has an interest in helping authors enforce the licenses they publish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, here are the answers to your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it &quot;compatible&quot; with the AGPL to only allow people who pay to have access to your source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may do so as long as one of these is true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are the sole copyright holder of any AGPL-licensed components, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you offer the source code to anyone who gets the binary from you, or interacts with your modified work over a network. (Note that you may take pains to ensure that the set of people who do this is strictly limited to paying customers.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you actually say &quot;you only get updates for one year, then you have to pay again&quot; with an AGPL application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're not the sole copyright holder of the AGPL components, you must offer the source code of the work when a users gets a binary from you or when a user interacts with the work over a network (if you modified it). If you are not the sole copyright holder, you may not say &quot;I previously offered you source code for an older version; I am now offering you network access to a new modified version or a copy of a different binary and refuse to give source code for this current version.&quot; However, if you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the sole copyright holder, or do not give out access to later versions, then you have no obligation to offer the source for later versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I pay for the application, am I allowed to freely redistribute it and/or use parts of its source in my own code under the same terms as I would with a free-of-charge download? (In this case, what's the point of locking the code behind a paywall?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any recipients of an AGPL-licensed work have the freedom to redistribute the work under the terms of the AGPL, whether or not they paid someone money to transfer them a copy. I speculate the point of charging for the code is that people (or likely, businesses) who pay for it are really interested in getting the latest updates immediately, rather than trawling around looking for someone who has a copy of the latest version (and having to trust that it hasn't been maliciously modified by this secondhand reseller).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-01T02:35:32.883" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T02:35:32.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-30T02:48:51.547" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone wants to develop a project but has no idea of what to do, where does he/she go to look for ideas?  I guess i.e. github will be part of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there any platform out there with the goal of having ideas in one side and developers in the other?  I was thinking of a portal where you can find two kinds of people, the ones with the ideas and the ones who want to develop (coding) ideas, if that makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these are related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2933/how-can-i-grow-my-open-source-project&quot;&gt;How can i grow my open source project?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1503/how-can-i-convert-users-to-contributors&quot;&gt;How can I convert users to contributors?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11499" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T08:46:15.180" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:46:15.180" Title="A worldwide software todo list" Tags="|github|software|project-management|collaboration|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-06-30T18:18:21.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7033" CreationDate="2018-06-30T03:12:41.307" Score="4" ViewCount="1535" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this question after what happened when Microsoft bought GitHub. But GitHub core is not git? I know that when you use a GPLv2 in your program you must have to give your program the same license. Can somebody clear this a little bit for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11448" LastEditorUserId="11448" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T16:09:41.957" LastActivityDate="2022-02-03T15:09:38.187" Title="Why GitHub is not opensource when it's use Git that has GPLv2 license?" Tags="|licensing|github|law|gpl-2|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7032" CreationDate="2018-06-30T08:04:18.870" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not forbid you from &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; GPL'ed software. It requires something far more specific: if you &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; the GPL'ed software and &lt;em&gt;publish&lt;/em&gt; your modifications, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you can only publish under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is whether some use of Git would count as &lt;em&gt;modification&lt;/em&gt;, and whether it counts as &lt;em&gt;publishing&lt;/em&gt;. Different GPL versions introduce more precise terms for these concepts, so please read the actual license for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding publishing or distributing GPL'ed software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GitHub web application is not published/distributed to users because they never receive a copy. So this wouldn't trigger any GPL requirements. The AGPL license closes this “loophole”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GitHub Enterprise does however allow on-premise installation which would count as a publication as far as the GPL is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding allowed use versus modifications/derived works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The legal situation here is unclear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly, modifying the GPL'ed software counts as creating a derived work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FSF (the authors of the GPL license but not the authors of Git) suggest that a derived work can be created also by linking with GPL'ed software so that the GPL'ed software is executed in the same process.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In contrast, executing the GPL'ed software in a separate process (e.g. running Git as a shell command) would be “communication at arms length” that does not create a derived work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other people argue that the FSF's interpretation is excessive, and that even use within the same process can be allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if GitHub would call the command-line Git for all its operations, their software wouldn't be a derived work and everything is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in reality, they use &lt;a href=&quot;https://libgit2.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libgit2&lt;/a&gt;, an independent &lt;em&gt;reimplementation&lt;/em&gt; of core Git operations. Libgit2 is licensed under the GPL with a &lt;strong&gt;linking exception&lt;/strong&gt; that allows it to be linked without restrictions from proprietary software, under certain circumstances. This license is similar to the LGPL. Libgit2 is not a weird fork, it's actually the &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Appendix-B%3A-Embedding-Git-in-your-Applications-Libgit2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;officially encouraged library&lt;/a&gt; for embedding Git into other software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer is: GitHub does not fall under the GPL because they don't use Git.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="13970" LastEditDate="2022-02-03T15:09:38.187" LastActivityDate="2022-02-03T15:09:38.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7031" CreationDate="2018-06-30T08:19:28.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience all the best free software comes from a developer scratching his/her own personal itch.  It's really unlikely, on a planet with several billion people, that you're the only person with any given itch to scratch, and the beauty of free software is other people don't have to overcome any barriers to participating in scratching your itch, save the unavoidable ones of capability and desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the feed of new and updated software on &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://f-droid.org/&lt;/a&gt; for examples.  There's (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) an app for talking to the home-automation dashboard HABPanel, two language keyboard packs (Afrikaans and Galician), a J2ME emulator, one that monitors the status of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Stratum_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stratum 0 Hackerspace&lt;/a&gt; and can open the door with your ssh key, and a mini space battle.  Other gems include one to read Swedish and Danish public travelcards via NFC, one to find vegetarian and vegan restaurants, a trivia challenge about the Apollo moon missions, and one to easily mange the wireless network at Chemnitz University of Technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these feels to me like the result of a research process, then a slow identification of people who might be interested, a design process, then some coding and review, followed by UA testing, leading to release.  They feel like someone got up one morning and went &quot;hey, I'm fed up not being able to (easily) do &lt;code&gt;$WEIRD_THING&lt;/code&gt;, I can't find any existing software to help me do it, so I'm going to write some&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just get on with writing software to do something that you need done; people, feedback, ideas, and help will likely come, and if they don't, you'll still have one less annoying un-automated task in your life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-06-30T08:30:32.463" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T08:30:32.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7037" CreationDate="2018-06-30T08:55:35.437" Score="3" ViewCount="2273" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i use a font under the Sil open font license 1.10 including it in my website with (@font-face), where have I to include the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T17:16:13.727" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:16:13.727" Title="Where include SIL open font license in a website if i use @font-face?" Tags="|license-notice|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7022" CreationDate="2018-06-30T10:01:06.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different Creative Commons licenses impose different requirements. After thinking this through more carefully I think you will be able to use CC-BY-SA licensed music in your podcast provided that you present it as a properly attributed independent work. This may or may not fit within your artistic vision for your podcast. It seems that collective works are a red herring, as e.g. CC-BY-SA 4.0 doesn't mention collective works at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 3(a) and 3(b), the license makes a distinction between &lt;em&gt;reproducing&lt;/em&gt; the work (also inclusion in a &lt;em&gt;collection&lt;/em&gt;), and creating and reproduction &lt;em&gt;adaptions&lt;/em&gt; of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1(a), and adaption is defined as basically any change or derivation other than inclusion in a collection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1(b) a collection is defined (emphasis and bullet points mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Collection&quot; means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a collection of literary or artistic works, such as encyclopedias and anthologies, or performances, &lt;strong&gt;phonograms or broadcasts&lt;/strong&gt;, or other works or subject matter other than works listed in Section 1(f) below, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;in which the Work is &lt;strong&gt;included in its entirety in unmodified form&lt;/strong&gt; along with one or more other contributions, each constituting separate and independent works in themselves,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;which together are assembled into a collective whole.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation (as defined below) for the purposes of this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Legalcode_errata#Section_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Errata&lt;/a&gt;: 1(f) seems to be a typo and should point to 1(h). The Adaption is actually defined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your use of a 30 second version of a CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed music as an intro in a podcast does not qualify as inclusion in a collection &lt;em&gt;as defined in the license&lt;/em&gt;, because it is not included in its entirety in unmodified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, your podcast would be an adaption of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed music. Under 4(b), this effectively requires you to license your podcast under CC-BY-SA version 3.0 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 does not deprive you of rights you would have anyway (see the next sections).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license makes no special provisions for collective works because these terms are unnecessary: Your applicable copyright laws already govern collective works. The inclusion of the CC-BY-SA 4.0 licensed work within a collective work would be a &lt;em&gt;reproduction&lt;/em&gt; of that work, as allowed by 2(a)(1)(A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;About collective works.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a collective work does not give you extra rights to other people's work. However, there's a huge legal difference between a &lt;em&gt;collective work&lt;/em&gt; that contains other author's works which has an independent copyright, and a &lt;em&gt;joint work&lt;/em&gt; where multiple authors collaborate and therefore share the copyright. In the CC licenses, this is phrased as reproduction vs. adaption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collective works also assume some amount of editorial control over selection and arrangement of the contribution works; this is mostly relevant for copyrightability of the entire collective work and is irrelevant for licensing of contribution works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the CC licenses, mere reproduction puts fewer obligations on you. I.e. the CC-BY-SA licenses only require attribution in case of reproduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Speculation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a reproduction, the reproduced work should be perceived as an independent work that is merely included here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is e.g. given for a blog post that includes a CC-BY-SA licensed image, as the image is visually and physically independent from the text and is usually attributed directly below the image.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In an audio work such as a podcast, I would expect an independent work to be attributed / announced before or after it is played. The attribution can be “reasonable”. However, I don't think external attribution in the podcast description would be sufficient. Attribution within the podcast itself may be required. This isn't necessarily obtrusive if you already have a section for thanks and acknowledgments. For example I could imagine closing with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You: Thank's again to &lt;em&gt;Guesty McGuestface&lt;/em&gt; for talking with us about advances in p-hacking! Next Wednesday, we'll discuss 7 things we learned by overfitting a machine learning model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The theme music is “Test Sounds” by Jane Doe, used under &lt;em&gt;*inhales*&lt;/em&gt; creativecommons&amp;shy;attribution&amp;shy;sharealike&amp;shy;threepointzero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have a great week!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;McGuestface: bye!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[theme music starts playing]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without clear demarcation within the podcast, your podcast would have the character of a work that is adapted from the music. It would then be necessary to license the podcast under CC-BY-SA (see the above discussion for the CC-BY-SA 3.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T10:01:06.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7035" CreationDate="2018-06-30T10:36:37.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my website, I mention the license in a CSS comment above the &lt;code&gt;@font-face&lt;/code&gt; and provide a link to the license. Depending on the exact license this may be an external link, or to a license file hosted next to the font if the font license includes extra details such as copyright notices. In the case of the OFL, you will also have to keep track of reserved font names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However, I just realized that these CSS comments have been “optimized“ away during deployment so I'll have to fix that…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach shows the license to users who are looking at the CSS to find my fonts, without cluttering more user-visible pages like the legal section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OFL is very flexible in where the license may be placed (bullet points mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Font Software may be […] redistributed […], provided that each copy contains the above copyright notice and this license. These can be included either as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;stand-alone text files,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;human-readable headers or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;in the appropriate machine-readable metadata fields within text or binary files as long as those fields can be easily viewed by the user.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret my solution (CSS comment that points to a file) as compliant with alternatives 1 and 2. I wouldn't know how to read or write font metadata fields as suggested in the third point, possibly the fonts files I obtained already contain such data and would therefore satisfy the license by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OFL-FAQ also discusses &lt;code&gt;@font-face&lt;/code&gt;, but without discussing where to put the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#1b11b702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Question: 2.1&lt;/a&gt; Can I make webpages using these fonts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Answer: Yes! Go ahead! Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is recommended. Your three best options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;using @font-face to distribute the font directly to browsers. This is recommended and explicitly allowed by the licensing model because it is distribution. The font file itself is distributed with other components of the webpage. It is not embedded in the webpage but referenced through a web address which will cause the browser to retrieve and use the corresponding font to render the webpage (see 1.11 and 1.15 for details related to embedding fonts into documents). […]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T10:36:37.173" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7110" CreationDate="2018-07-01T09:12:31.440" Score="4" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a artwork (images) using a font licensed Apache License v2.00, and i include this artwork in a website (commercial),&#xA;do I have to include the license somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-07-02T02:51:02.740" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T12:23:12.520" Title="Do I have to include license in artwork that uses a font licensed Apache License v2.00?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7040" CreationDate="2018-07-02T16:32:54.740" Score="4" ViewCount="2745" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're using a number of open source libraries in our software. They all fall under one of the following 3 licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT License &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache License 2.0 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD 3-Clause License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all very liberal licenses and allow us to use the libraries free of charge in our commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy to give credit to the original author and to include the license information in the source, but I'm wondering how is this best achieved and what am I obliged to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the open source libraries run on my server, I don't actually redistribute the open source code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide a link on my site to a page that lists the open source projects we use?  Or do I just need to leave the license information in the source code, even though it won't be read by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11510" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T13:22:08.117" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T18:06:36.627" Title="What are my license (or giving-credit) obligations regarding open source software?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|license-notice|bsd|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7039" CreationDate="2018-07-02T18:07:05.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you don't distribute the software, you have no distribution-related obligations. (However, double-check if this really true. Notably, if you're running a Web service, check if any licensed code ends up on the user's computer as part of the material served by the Web service. In any case, you have obligations related only to only the material you actually send.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, when you distribute free and open source software that is under a permissive license, you usually have to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;preserve copyright notices (and maybe project names), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include the license text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specifics may vary slightly from license to license. If you don't distribute source, you can include this information in a manual or documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another large category of free and open licenses is copyleft licenses, which come with an additional obligation to distribute source any time you distribute the work (or a derivative) in binary form. The most well-known copyleft license is the GNU GPL, but there are many others. None of the licenses you list are copyleft licenses, but this may be helpful to know if you later do use code under a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, since you don't perform distribution, you don't have these obligations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only FLOSS license (as far as I know) that could impose requirements on you is the Affero GPL (AGPL), which imposes copyleft requirements whenever you offer interaction with a modified version over a network. If you chose to include AGPL code in your service, you might be obligated to supply the source code of your service even if you did never distributed your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T18:06:36.627" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T18:06:36.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7043" CreationDate="2018-07-03T08:01:54.887" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating an open source app, which we're in the first phase of, and didn't release version &lt;code&gt;1.0.0&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if it is ok to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;create an issue per feature, or;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;change and merge it by pull request, or;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do simple process and push changes to &lt;code&gt;develop&lt;/code&gt; branch continuously?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which way do you recommend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11513" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T00:30:03.977" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T00:30:03.977" Title="Making an issue per feature for initial development" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7042" CreationDate="2018-07-03T11:14:52.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you are the one creating the project, you get to decide how things are to be done. While your project is young, go ahead and work on new features the same as you have so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you get some contributors you may find that creating an issue for a new feature idea might be a better approach, allowing other users of your project to input different ideas before any coding has been done, the same for merges, by adding your own work as a pull request you allow others to review your code before it is merged for others to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your project grows you will find what works best for you and what doesn't and you will probably change how you want things done along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T11:14:52.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7045" CreationDate="2018-07-03T18:16:33.573" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a binary form is built from some source files licensed under Mozilla Public License mixed with some source files licensed under Microsoft Public License, what would be a proper license for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4212" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T23:57:21.940" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T01:05:40.377" Title="Microsoft Public License and Mozilla Public License v2: A proper license for the binary form compiled from mixed source code by these two licenses" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|mpl|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7044" CreationDate="2018-07-03T19:33:14.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to pick one license, and often you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; unify it under one license. Generally speaking, if you have a work made of code under different licenses,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you may exercise only the intersection of all permissions that the various licenses grant (i.e., only the rights that are common to all licenses), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must abide by the union of all requirements that the licenses impose (i.e., the complete set of all restrictions from all the licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some parts of the binary are under one license, and other parts are under a different license. So long as the union of all requirements is not contradictory (e.g., one license strictly requires &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and another license strictly requires &lt;code&gt;not A&lt;/code&gt; -- as sometimes happens with copyleft-incompatible licenses), it is possible to distribute the software in a way that does not run afoul of this combined set of requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permissions of the MS-PL are extremely broad, and its requirements are extremely slight. This makes it very easy to add MS-PL licensed code alongside differently-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the MS-PL actually does allow you to distribute MS-PL licensed code under a different license as long as the new license &quot;complies with this license.&quot; However, MS-PL term 3(B) may make it difficult to find &quot;compliant&quot; licenses that include this requirement (and changing to a license that reduces or removes this requirement would be a violation of the MS-PL license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPLv2 has a similar clause but it is less strcit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You initiate litigation against any entity by asserting a patent infringement claim (excluding declaratory judgment actions, counter-claims, and cross-claims) alleging that a Contributor Version directly or indirectly infringes any patent, then the rights granted to You by any and all Contributors for the Covered Software under Section 2.1 of this License shall terminate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, the MPL may respond differently in the case of &quot;declaratory judgment actions, counter-claims, and cross-claims&quot; which the MPL excludes but the MS-PL does not exclude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, simply indicate that various parts of the binary are bound by different licenses, which include both the MPLv2 and the MS-PL. In practice, because the MS-PL is almost universally more permissive (except in a sub-case of patent infringement suits), the requirements of the MPLv2 will dominate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-04T01:05:40.377" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T01:05:40.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-04T14:56:30.163" Score="1" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used the official code example as a starting point to write my own library. On the first few lines :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (C) 2010 The Android Open Source Project&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA; * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA; * You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA; *&#xA; *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA; * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA; * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA; * limitations under the License.&#xA; *&#xA; */&#xA;&#xA;/* This is a JNI example where we use native methods to play sounds&#xA; * using OpenSL ES. See the corresponding Java source file located at:&#xA; *&#xA; *   src/com/example/nativeaudio/NativeAudio/NativeAudio.java&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course being an example code, the code I have now does not look like it except some initialization routines, which all code that is going to use this library should do anyways. One thing that can be trace back to the code example is that I left the variable names related to said initialization logic as is as it is already good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do I have to put attribution in this case of the fact that I am learning from an example code with license? How much modification to consider that the code to become my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have to, because it is an Apache license I have to state changes. I have to state that I changed everything except the initialization routine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11527" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T14:56:30.163" Title="Do I have to comply to license in a completely modified &quot;example code&quot;?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7049" CreationDate="2018-07-04T21:21:16.523" Score="2" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a programmable hardware device that incorporates hardware components (LEDs, switches, ADCs, DACs, batteries etc.) but is designed using Verilog or VHDL for the central FPGA design does the resulting work count as hardware or software regarding copyright and open source licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would one apply an open source license to such a project as it is both hardware and software and since some FPGAs even come with an ARM CPU built onto the development board meaning you also have code written in C or C++ (or some other language) which muddies the water even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10730" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T09:13:03.610" Title="Does an FPGA design in Verilog / VHDL count as software or hardware in terms of copyright law?" Tags="|open-source-definition|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T05:58:26.910" Score="0" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone sent me [ a translation to a new language ] of the open source software I'm developing. He attached the translation messages file to a private message in the discussion forum I've setup for the software. I asked if he could create a Pull Request at GitHub and add the line &quot;I agree to the CLA-v2.txt&quot; to the commit message. (CLA = Contributor License Agreement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe he'll be okay with doing that extra work (i.e. creating a PR), because he knows about Docker and GitHub and software. However, generally, I'd like people to be able to translate the software, send me a file, and agree to the CLA — without having to create a GitHub account and spending a day reading about pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside Git and pull requests and Linux-style &quot;Signed-off-by&quot; messages or GitHub CLA plugins — then, what are okay ways to get someone to officially sign a CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There're things like Adobe Forms (&lt;code&gt;https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/sign/free-trial-global.html&lt;/code&gt;). It's a bit expensive for an open source project (I think) and what if Adobe gets bought, and the new owner shuts down this little Adobe-Sign &quot;side project&quot; and all signatures are then lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe I could use Google Forms — but what if someone decides to do a prank, and submits 10 000 Google Forms replies, ... or signs the Google Forms form, pretending to be someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like there to be a place on the Interntet, that will be there &quot;forever&quot;, where the contributor can publicly post his/her contribution and also at the same time clarify that s/he agrees to the CLA, or just write, together with the contribution, that s/he licenses the things to me under MIT + CC-By 4 maybe, or CC0 or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9828" LastEditorUserId="9828" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T06:09:56.720" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T12:09:51.553" Title="How accept contributions from people who don't know what a Pull Request is?" Tags="|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7047" CreationDate="2018-07-05T09:13:03.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most modern hardware designs are a combination of both hardware and software and like anything we create, both the hardware and software components can be covered by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; :-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HDL modules, when distributed, are called semiconductor intellectual property cores, also known as IP cores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several licenses designed specifically to handle open hardware designs, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tapr.org/ohl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TAPR&lt;/a&gt;, which resembles the GPL and &lt;a href=&quot;http://solderpad.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Solderpad&lt;/a&gt; which is comparable to the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T09:13:03.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T13:35:23.700" Score="8" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;During my PhD at a research institution I developed some software that I made public under the LGPL license (upon advice from the law people at this institution). I then moved to another research institution. The first institution have continued to support the software for the past 3 years, but they are going to run out of funding for it soon and will probably stop the support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this happens, I would like to take the software back and continue its development in the context of the work I do at my current research institution. The first problem is, I don't want the software to be under LGPL (my current institution uses other licenses that are less constraining, like MIT or BSD). Second, I don't want the original institution to be able to come and claim anything (like copyright, or money), should the software get a wider audience and/or be used commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I ask the original institution? To simply re-license the software under a license that is appropriate for me? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11533" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T05:48:55.217" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T05:48:55.217" Title="Relicensing open-source software" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7050" CreationDate="2018-07-05T14:59:05.317" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Relicensing requires the consent of all copyright holders. If your previous institution holds the copyright or exclusive usage rights, you no longer have any usage rights to the software you have written, except as given to you through the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you can either ask your previous institution whether they would like to relicense, or you can find a way to live with the rights you received through the LGPL, as if you were an unrelated third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may in fact be entirely sufficient: the LGPL behaves like a MIT-style permissive license when dynamically linked with your code, so dependent code is not considered a derived work. Just like the MIT license, it doesn't forbid commercial use and provides no basis for collecting royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL does however behave like the GPL with respect to the LGPL-licensed software itself, i.e. you can only publish modified versions under the same license. As this only applies when you publish a version of the LGPL-licensed software, this doesn't restrict how you use the software internally for your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some differences between different LGPL versions of which you should be aware. The LGPL v3 is explicitly irrevocable and includes a patent grant. This may be desirable for your use case. The LGPL v2.1 is not so explicit (but still irrevocable in practice) and does not include a patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T14:59:05.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7053" CreationDate="2018-07-05T16:50:16.983" Score="4" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the FSF's page on &quot;Various Licenses and Comments about Them&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SILOFL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;they state&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;you must redistribute [software licensed under the OFL] bundled with some software, rather than alone&quot;, but that &quot;a simple Hello World program will satisfy the requirement&quot;. There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.software.sil.org/t/fsf-interpretation-of-ofl/694/5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;additional discussion&lt;/a&gt; on the SIL forums that seem to point to the first clause of the OFL, which states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components,&#xA;   in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this clause necessarily require the distribution of additional &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt;, like the FSF states, or would something such as a text file containing a single letter suffice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11536" LastEditorUserId="11536" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T01:28:00.810" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T01:28:00.810" Title="What is the reasoning behind the FSF's interpretation of the SIL OFL?" Tags="|distribution|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7052" CreationDate="2018-07-05T20:52:27.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spirit of this license term clearly is to prevent something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipping&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;asset flipping&lt;/a&gt; where you sell something that's essentially already available elsewhere for free, without adding any value of your own. (The linked Wikipedia article is about real estate flipping, but this behaviour is also rampant in Unity game development.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the license does prevent selling the font directly, it does still allow you to use the SIL-OFL licensed fonts in a commercial context – so it is clearly a free license (free as in Free Software Definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OFL does not explicitly require that the fonts can only be sold together with other software, though that would be the typical use case. The second paragraph does explicitly mention bundling with software with regards to notice requirements, but this doesn't preclude bundling with non-software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we interpret the license &lt;strong&gt;very literally&lt;/strong&gt;, we can observe that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you could sell two separate OFL-licensed fonts &lt;em&gt;together&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the notice requirements do not apply if you bundle or sell the font with non-software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selling the font alongside an artisanaly crafted lowercase ASCII letter &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; in a textfile would satisfy the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, overly literal interpretations are unwise. Legal documents like contracts or licenses should be interpreted in &lt;em&gt;good faith&lt;/em&gt;. (To which degree this matters depends on your local jurisdiction, e.g. good faith principles are very relevant in many civil law and common law jurisdictons, except for the U.K.). Under the principle of good faith, if the intended meaning of the document is clear from the way it is written, but the intended meaning is not expressed 100% explicitly, then it is still the intended meaning that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my interpretation of the OFL is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may sell the OFL-licensed font alongside anything, including non-software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The spirit of the license is that in such a case the main value of the sale should be provided by that other thing and not by the OFL-licensed font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The letter of the license allows this other thing to be trivial and worthless, but that use of the OFL-licensed font might no longer be in good faith.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, selling the font just means selling a &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; of the font, and this copy will still governed by the OFL license (see paragraph 5). The sale cannot impose any other license on the font, so it cannot provide extra permissions and can neither impose any extra restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T20:52:27.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7056" CreationDate="2018-07-06T06:49:40.647" Score="1" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the point of running software that does not violate the four freedoms if our hardware does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us have modern hardware which contains backdoors that allow manufacturers to access the hardware whenever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put my question in other words, what's the point of having blob-free kernels and completely free/libre GNU+Linux distros if the majority of us use non-free hardware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11544" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T08:03:35.450" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:24:54.003" Title="What's the point of running free software on non-free hardware?" Tags="|gnu|linux-kernel|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7059" CreationDate="2018-07-06T06:56:44.890" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Tizen has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.tizen.org/tizen-sdk-license-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary SDK&lt;/a&gt;, as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20131009220540/https://developer.tizen.org/forums/sdk-ide/tizen-sdk-licensing-makes-whole-tizen-not-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which mandates that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not use any component part of the Tizen SDK in any way&#xA;  independent from the Tizen SDK. You may not load or install any of the&#xA;  Tizen SDK onto mobile phones or any other devices, except a personal&#xA;  computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the SDK to develop my app, can I still license the app under GPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T13:58:46.110" Title="Can you make GPL-licensed software using the Tizen SDK?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|law|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2018-07-06T07:23:32.850" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think your question admits of an answer better than &quot;&lt;em&gt;you are right, it's not a great idea&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it may help to know you're not the only person who thinks this way.  I heard Georg Greve, ex-president of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSFE&lt;/a&gt;, talk about the hardware-trust problem, and possible solutions from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openpowerfoundation.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Power Foundation&lt;/a&gt;, at FOSDEM 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We need hardware to run our software on. If we want control over our software, we had better have trust in that underlying hardware. There are two routes to that trust; one is faith-based, and the other is through verifiability. At the moment, the CPUs at the heart of the desktop and server equipment that most of us run our free software on are generally made by Intel, and its track record for both justifiable good faith and verifiable openness is not all that good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The talk writeup was published &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/715817/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in LWN&lt;/a&gt; (from which the above quote comes) but in retrospect I've been impressed at how prescient Greve was.  He drew attention to the problem of Intel's Management Engine, the mysterious CPU-behind-the-CPU, and only two months later I was reporting on &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/721586/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a zero-day bug that bypassed all access controls&lt;/a&gt; in the ME's Active Management Technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it's a problem, and at the end of the day if you don't run your own CPU fabrication plant you will have to trust &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt;.  That said, you can at least try to avoid giving trust to people with a demonstrable record of not deserving it.  You can diversify your risk portfolio by building systems from components instead of ordering closed-box solutions from single vendors; any individual component may still be malicious, but its malice may be contained by the lack of assistance from its neighbour components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal colocated server has two hardware RNGs attached to it, to supply strong entropy; &lt;a href=&quot;http://onerng.info/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt; comes from a vendor who openly and clearly &lt;a href=&quot;http://moonbaseotago.com/onerng/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;addresses the issues&lt;/a&gt; of checking that your hardware and associated firmware is as they shipped it, and as you would wish it.  When you find vendors who want you to be able to trust them, who give you clear pathways to do so, reward them by buying their stuff.  Tell them why you like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are partial solutions; they will require you to do more research and spend more time and money, but then, freedom was never free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T07:31:53.267" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T07:31:53.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7058" CreationDate="2018-07-06T11:26:29.863" Score="2" ViewCount="1065" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a wordpress plugin for a client. I modified two different plugins (licensed under gpl2) with similar functionality and combined them into one to match my client's needs. I'm giving my client the modified plugin under gpl2 licence. Am I required to tell him it's modified version of another plugin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11545" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:43:52.737" Title="GPL 2 License in publishing a modified code" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2018-07-06T12:54:52.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you must indicate that you modified the GPL software. Section 2a of the GPLv2 license answers your question specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it ... and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) You must cause the modified files to carry &lt;strong&gt;prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T12:54:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7055" CreationDate="2018-07-06T13:58:46.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can still use the GPL license for your project, even if you develop it against the Tizen SDK, under the condition that you do not copy code that belongs to Tizen into your own project, but only reference it with #include or import statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to make your project usable for others, you must also give them the extra permission to link their derived works against the Tizen SDK.&#xA;Normally, the GPL only allows you to link with other open-source code, but as original author of your project you are allowed to grant additional permissions on top of the permissions granted by the GPL and that mechanism is often used to grant permission to use a particular non-free third-party library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T13:58:46.110" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-06T20:27:15.143" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just want to be clear about requirements when using content labelled as CC BY. In general this means that some form of attribution is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case it is a custom (Open Source) MakeHuman model that I will render and use in a short video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I still need to provide attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11548" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T19:21:37.303" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T19:21:37.303" Title="Attribution when using CC BY content in video" Tags="|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7060" CreationDate="2018-07-06T20:56:25.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must provide attribution in an appropriate way for the medium. If your video shows credits, you should also put the attribution there. Otherwise, I'd add a small but legible attribution note at the bottom of the frame during the start or end of the video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, ask yourself: how do you want to credit/advertise yourself or your organization as the creator of this video? The attribution for the CC-licensed content should be similar, but can of course be less prominent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be ok to place the attribution outside of the video, e.g. in the video description when you upload the video to some sharing platform. However, this attribution is not visible when the video is embedded or downloaded, or re-uploaded elsewhere. Therefore, I do not think that external attribution would generally satisfy the CC-BY license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T20:56:25.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7063" CreationDate="2018-07-07T04:24:23.360" Score="28" ViewCount="5373" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a tricky situation that I didn't encounter before: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My company embeds a piece of slightly modified GPLv3 code into their otherwise proprietary application. They don't link a library or anything, they just compile the GPLv3 code straight into theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They do not include a copy of the GPLv3 license text in the final package&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They then sell that application, in both binary form AND with the original source code, to their customer. Those two parties are, by contract, the only ones who are allowed to see the code+binary; it is not for the world to see.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does distributing the source code like this count as &quot;open source&quot; in the eyes of GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would it be better if they link to a library made out of the GPL code instead of embedding it like this?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11550" LastEditorUserId="9442" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T01:13:09.217" LastActivityDate="2022-11-03T11:51:33.230" Title="Embedding GPL code in proprietary software" Tags="|gpl-3|law|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-07T06:36:26.093" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;When your code contains (or links to) GPL licensed code, then the GPL license requires that you distribute your application under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require that you distribute your application to the general public. It is entirely legal to sell the application to select customers only, and you only have to distribute your source code only to those parties that have received the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this legal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that your company did not receive a more permissive license on the code that you believe to be under the GPL, then it is not legal to offer that code and the rest of your application under a different license than the GPLv3.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is allowed to offer the application only to select customers, but they must get the freedom to make changes and to distribute the code further. The GPL also doesn't allow you to restrict those permissions through, for example, a separate contract. If you try to do that, then you don't have a license to use/distribute the third-party GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does distributing the source code like this count as &quot;open source&quot; in the eyes of GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. the term &quot;open source&quot; does in this context not refer to the availability of source code, but to the rights that you get. In particular the right to make modifications and to redistribute the code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be better if they link to a library made out of the GPL code instead of embedding it like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL license, this makes no difference. If the code had been under the LGPL license, then it would have made a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T08:16:39.607" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T08:16:39.607" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7027" CreationDate="2018-07-07T11:43:03.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to make a distinction between the licenses of the images, and the licenses of the software in the images. This is based on the assumption that a container image is a collection of various softwares, like a CD-ROM or a ZIP archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your software is not derived from GPL-licensed software, then you can of course license your software under Apache 2 or any other license, including no license or licenses that are not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the container image contains GPL-licensed software (as most images will), this does not put any restrictions on you, except that you must satisfy the GPL for the GPL-licensed software. If your base images are built properly no action on your part is needed, though you must not deprive downstream users from their rights under the GPL to the GPL-licensed parts. But this is the same as with any Linux distribution which may contain GPL- and not-GPL-licensed parts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But what if the image itself has another license? If the base image was licensed to you under the GPL then your image would be a derivative work of the base image. You must then distribute your image under the same license. This doesn't mean that your software in the image has to be GPL, though the source code of the image must be made available and must be compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I'm not quite sure what the requirements are, in particular whether the corresponding source of a container image would be the build scripts to create the image, or also all source for the included software. Here there might be a conflict, because the Apache 2 is not compatible with the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have my doubts whether a typical Linux userland in a container image could be validly licensed under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases Docker images are published under a permissive license (such as the Docker Hub default license). Therefore, my last point will likely not apply and image licensing is probably irrelevant. Instead, consider the licenses of the software within the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T11:43:03.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7048" CreationDate="2018-07-07T12:09:51.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A CLA is not for the contributor but is for you. It typically gives you extra permissions to the contributed work. It is therefore in your interest to keep records that convincingly show that you received the necessary rights. This will depend on your applicable jurisdiction. In particular, it is highly jurisdiction-dependent what kind of legal instrument (contract, …) you have to use, whether a signature is necessary, and what kind of electronic signature would be sufficient. E.g. a special line in a commit message may or may not be sufficient, as commits are very easy to forge. When keeping records you also have to consider GDPR compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any CLA-based workflow, you want to make sure that the person who contributes the work and the person who agrees to the CLA should be the same person. For example you could offer a form on your company website where users can submit translations. The same form would also display the CLA and required privacy notices. Only accept the contribution of they accept the CLA, and keep track of the signatures/contracts in some kind of persistent storage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept contributions through GitHub, the CLA should be signed from the same GH account as the PR. You can check the account via OAuth. Of course there are already third party services that help with this. As always, consider GDPR compliance when using such services. The services should only be used to collect the CLA signatures, but not be the only storage place – these signatures are far too valuable for your company. Export them and back them up regularly. It is then not important if the service you are using goes out of business in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T12:09:51.553" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-07T13:04:26.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those two parties are, by contract, the only ones who are allowed to see the code+binary; it is not for the world to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part of your contract is likely legally void. E.g. if you customer distributes the binary and later gets accused of a GPL violation, they will most probably have to distribute the source code as well, and your contract will not prevent them from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T13:04:26.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7068" CreationDate="2018-07-07T13:23:37.253" Score="0" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm importrting colorama module licensed under BSD-3 licence to my python app. Have I to credit that module and how to do that on github?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11554" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T17:09:15.833" Title="Have I to credit imported bsd module in my python app?" Tags="|bsd|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7067" CreationDate="2018-07-07T17:09:15.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD-3 license requires that you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the original copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the full text of the license in source or object code copies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the only requirements when including a BSD-3 Licensed module in your app, is that you do not remove any copyright notices added by the module, or included within the modules source, and that you include a copy of the fulltext of the BSD-3 License with your project (indicating what code it pertains to, preferably). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD-3 License does not require attribution, and so you are not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to include any attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause_license_(%22BSD_License_2.0%22,_%22Revised_BSD_License%22,_%22New_BSD_License%22,_or_%22Modified_BSD_License%22)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSource.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)#fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TLDRLegal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11541" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T17:09:15.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-07T17:34:48.197" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your propriatiery code combined with GPL licensed code without following the GPL rules, then you commit copyright infringement, and the copyright holder or copyright holders of the GPL licensed code can sue you for damages, and can make you stop distributing your software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contract that the receiving company cannot see or distribute the GPL licensed portions of your software is probably another bit of copyright infringement. You claim to have the legal right to prevent them from seeing or copying that software, when the copyright holder actually allows it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. No, nobody can &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; you to distribute source code. They can just give you the choice between the full force of the law for a blatant case of copyright infringement, and distributing the source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T17:34:48.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-08T04:27:35.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone fails to meet the conditions of a license, it voids the license. Without a license, copying, distributing, creating derivative works, etc., is committing copyright infringement. The owner of the copyright can then bring an action in court against the infringer. If found liable, the infringer will be forced to pay monetary damages and may be enjoined against further infringement, but won't be forced to comply with the license terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7984" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T04:27:35.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-08T08:11:39.140" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to get around the GPLv2 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tivoization&lt;/a&gt;. Users get the source code and are allowed to modify it but the hardware rejects any modified software thus denying users some rights that were intended in GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What successful attack vectors are there against &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; and how to protect against them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of attack vector: a way of making GPLv3 software available that does not practically give recipients or users the ability to exercise the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#f1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; as defined by the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11561" LastEditorUserId="11561" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T13:50:56.477" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T13:50:56.477" Title="Attack vectors against GPLv3 and how to prevent them?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ClosedDate="2018-07-26T09:21:01.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2018-07-08T11:57:15.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You said “hardware”, not specifically “PC” hardware, so let’s talk about why Free software on Proprietary hardware might make sense in this IoT world we’re living in. First, let me say that I’ll be using the work “hardware” here to apply to the entire device, not just the CPU or MCU. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so I buy a new smart thermostat for my house. Don’t ask me what’s so smart about it, I’m far dumber than it is, so I’m not qualified to say. Anyway, after a few years of use, the user community finds a bug in the software, but the startup that built the thermostat has gone out of business. There’s no way for any of us devs in the user community to fix the issue, because we don’t have the code and &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; we can’t reverse engineer it either. We’re either stuck with a buggy thermostat that leaves our homes too cold or we all replace the product we’ve grown to love. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the company released the code for the device under a libre license, the user community could have fixed the issue and provided instructions for everyone to update their device. The physical devices could’ve lived far longer than the start up that created them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s also provides the hacker community legal protection for &lt;em&gt;modifying&lt;/em&gt; the way the devices they &lt;em&gt;purchased&lt;/em&gt; function. In a world where planned obsolescence and companies trying to claim you didn’t purchase a piece of hardware, but a lifetime lease to it, open software on proprietary hardware is still a useful thing to have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that opening the source code wouldn’t have necessarily hurt the manufacturer’s sales either. Unlike a pure software product, it would’ve been extremely difficult to undermine the company’s sales because to do so you’d have to reinvent and manufacture hardware to run it on. So, a model of proprietary hardware/open software is a viable one for IoT companies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T11:57:15.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7076" CreationDate="2018-07-08T11:59:50.160" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an open source database-backed web application uses the AGPL-3.0 license, do its viral aspects extend to the database schema? If another app, written in a different programming language, uses the same schema, must it also be AGPL-3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11563" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T16:25:58.247" Title="Does AGPL-3.0 extend to the database schema?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6934" CreationDate="2018-07-08T12:22:31.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You appeal to the one thing that motivates most companies, their bottom line. You’d need to show them that their investment would give them a return. Microsoft didn’t &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-open-sources-the-file-manager-from-windows-30-and-you-can-run-it-on-windows-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source the Win 3.0 file manager&lt;/a&gt; out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because it buys them publicity and loyalty. In that case, they decided the cost of open sourcing that old code was more than offset by the marketing value of doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a company to open source an old product, you need to contact them and convince them that they’d have a positive ROI on such a project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="775" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T12:22:31.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2018-07-08T14:32:08.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pragmatically most of us can learn to use a text editor and a compiler or interpreter, whereas designing circuits and actually making circuits that are small enough, etc. are beyond the capabilities of just about any one individual.  Think of the resources it would take to create a super simple computer, much less one capable of running even the earliest versions of Linux.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More important to use hardware that the manufacturers provide Free software for or at least the information needed for others to develop Free software for them (like ATI vs NVidia video cards)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T14:32:08.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7073" CreationDate="2018-07-08T16:25:58.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intent behind the AGPL is that users of a web-service get the freedom and the means to recreate a web-service with the same functionality. To be able to do this, the (relevant portions of the) database schema must also be available under an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the license of the database schema does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have to be the AGPL license. It is sufficient if the database schema is licensed under a license that is compatible with the AGPL. This means that another application can use the same database schema without being bound by the AGPL.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, the original author of the database schema is not bound by any particular license and can freely use the same database schema both in an AGPL application and a non-free application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T16:25:58.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-08T16:47:11.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The permissions of the GPL are granted when you meet the licensing requirements that require that you license the resulting work as a whole under the terms of the GPL and make the customer aware of his rights under these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not in compliance with the conditions of the GPL, so the copyright holder of the GPLed software, should he get wind of this situation, can barr you from any further distribution and may require that you disable/withdraw all distributed copies.  You will also be liable for damages but those are hard to specify for Free Software.  However, statutory damages may apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How might the original copyright holder get wind of this situation?  Someone among your customers might notice the GPLed software contained and might decide that they'd very much like to just install multiple copies and/or modified copies and/or further distribute stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this is a problem waiting to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11565" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T16:47:11.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T07:46:07.377" Score="48" ViewCount="26599" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we all know, the GNU General Public License (GPL) is a &quot;copyleft&quot; source license: which means it is designed not merely to make the code to which it is initially applied free and preserve its freedom, but moreover to &quot;catalyze&quot; the creation of &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; free code by requiring that any original works that use any copyrightable portion - no matter how small - of the GPL code in them, to also be released as free/open code under the GPL, in their entirety, and not merely the parts specifically depedent upon it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems this only applies to the case where you directly mix code, i.e. where you actually take a piece of code from the GPL program and put it physically into the source code files of your original program, and perhaps also to linking to it as a library (which is why the LGPL exists, to exempt this particular use case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happens if you try to make an even &quot;looser&quot; coupling?&lt;/strong&gt; In particular, if you were to compile all the GPL code and any modifications thereto as a &lt;em&gt;totally separate executable program&lt;/em&gt; that can run on its own, independently of the original program, but yet which the original program communicates with as a spawn process, while still not containing any actual GPL code, whether directly in its source code or indirectly included by linking, merely the process calls alone, and as a separate program could in theory be used just same by any other program without modification. And moreover, when you distribute the proprietary package, this stand-alone program comes with its complete source code available under GPL terms. Would this be legal or not? If not, what exactly in the GPL and/or copyright laws forbid it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2493" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T15:47:37.760" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T20:00:16.507" Title="Is it legal to use GPL code in a proprietary, closed-source program by putting it in a separate, standalone program?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-09T08:47:38.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think if you want to include your code with the free software, It may be a better idea to simply instruct your customer on how to modify it themselves making it clear that you bare no responsibility for the legal outcome. That gives them a more personal connection to the action, making them more in tune with weather they should share it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11568" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T08:47:38.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7078" CreationDate="2018-07-09T08:55:09.703" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, the FSF, who are generally thought of as arguing for a fairly wide interpretation of what the GPL covers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;are reasonably clear&lt;/a&gt; that the proprietary program and the GPL wrapper program in your example are not derivative works of each other, and their appearance together is mere aggregation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, [...] command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that they go on to add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: as long as it's honest-to-God communication via userspace, where the calling proprietary code forks-and-execs the called GPL wrapper program, the GPL obligations of the called program do not extend to the calling program.  If you start playing silly buggers, for example passing not just a few simple run-time command line arguments, but e.g. instead passing the name of an on-disc file which itself embodies complex program-specific structure, this separation of obligations may not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T08:55:09.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7062" CreationDate="2018-07-09T10:56:35.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be better if they link to a library made out of the GPL code instead of embedding it like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in other answers, for GPL license just linking is not enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is often possible&lt;/a&gt; to include the GPL code in an entirely separate program (separate &lt;code&gt;.exe&lt;/code&gt; file), which is fully GPL licensed. Your proprietary program can then call that program, and give it e.g. input files and read the output data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite commonly done by development environments that include the GCC compiler combined with a custom GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastEditorUserId="3919" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T05:40:13.387" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T05:40:13.387" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7057" CreationDate="2018-07-09T14:43:52.737" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is &quot;take 1/3 of A, 1/5 of B, mush in with a whole lot of my own&quot;, the &quot;modified&quot; part is quite murky. As a courtesy, I'd say something along the lines of &quot;Parts of A and of B used&quot; in the general README, perhaps (if identifiable pieces remain), state in the pieces (files) &quot;Adapted from file F of A&quot; or some such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; any kind of lawyer, just trying to apply common sense/courtesy. In the end, the idea is that if A is redone, bugs are fixed, ... the happy user of your product C can trace back where it has to be updated to match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T14:43:52.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7078" CreationDate="2018-07-09T15:13:59.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that yes, that is legal. I have built systems that work just so, proprietary user space applications spawning GPL applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;which means it is designed not merely to make the code to which it is initially applied free and preserve its freedom, but moreover to &quot;catalyze&quot; the creation of new free code by requiring that &lt;strong&gt;any original works that use any copyrightable portion&lt;/strong&gt; - no matter how small - of the GPL code in them, to also be released as free/open code under the GPL, in their entirety, and not merely the parts specifically depedent [sic] upon it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &quot;original work&quot; that uses code from another source is in fact a derivative work of both the original work and the other source, and it is the derivative work that is required to be licensed under the GPL. The original work remains under whatever licence it had before. Now, the entirety of the original work has been copied into a work that is GPL licenced and thus the source code is public, so the original work's code is now public, true. But it is public because it was included in a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a subtle but important difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11573" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T15:13:59.187" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5775" CreationDate="2018-07-09T17:02:09.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to David Turner of the Free Software Foundation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-java.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;), a LGPL-ed library in the form of a JAR file can be redistributed with non-LGPL software without impacting the other software's licensing terms.  If your legal team has reservations about this, contacting the LGPL's authors via licensing@fsf.org may be the quickest way to assuage their fears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential option that sidesteps the issue entirely is to tweak the way that your program is distributed.  I've seen projects that offer the same sort of public and private versions that you describe, but they distribute them slightly differently.  The private version is distributed as an add-on to the public version.  That is, it's distributed completely separately.  The user would download and install the public version, then download and install a separate module to upgrade it to the &quot;private&quot; version.  The proprietary code is distributed by itself, so the license of the LGPL-ed &quot;public&quot; code doesn't impact it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:02:09.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5775" CreationDate="2018-07-09T17:10:59.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's your code, and nobody else holds a GPL-related copyright, you can do what you please with it.  The LGPL, along with all other Gnu licenses, is about what you can do with the code you are only allowed to use from the license.  Any headaches your distribution causes because of LGPL considerations are the recipient's, not yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (the indicated question and the following one), which says pretty much what I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:10:59.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7013" CreationDate="2018-07-09T17:22:08.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are separate issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license(s) of the individual software product(s) that are part of the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license(s) of the various scripts used to assemble the above pieces into an image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The collection as such (i.e., the selection of the particular pieces used, and their arrangement)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each has a license attached to it, and any use must comply with all of them. Most often the assembly is done by off-the-shelf scripts, which (by minimal sanity of the people distributing the build-your-image stuff will probably be permissive, or at very least place almost no restrictions on the images), while the selection and arrangement is your work, and you call the shots (and should make the license on your work explicit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:22:08.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7054" CreationDate="2018-07-09T17:24:54.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why you might want to use F/OS software, and not all of them require absolutely knowing exactly what your computer is doing.  You might want to avoid license costs and/or hassles, or have the ability to help maintain software (or just recompile it - there's been times when that's all I wanted) if the original distributor discontinues it.  You might want to take advantage of a number of different parties who want pretty much the same software that you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also using F/OSS because it's the software best suited for you.  I'd use Linux and vim if I had to pay for licenses, for example, but that's not using F/OSS because it's F/OSS.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T17:24:54.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7078" CreationDate="2018-07-09T20:31:40.227" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is, it depends. If you are introducing the wrapper &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; to try to avoid the obligations of the GPL, there's a good chance it's not legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether two works are derivative works of each other depends not on the technical aspects of how they communicate, but the creative elements of how they are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has this to say in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU FAQ&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version of&#xA;  that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program&#xA;  must be released under the GPL if it is released at all. This is for&#xA;  two reasons: to make sure that users who get the software get the&#xA;  freedom they should have, and to encourage people to give back&#xA;  improvements that they make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software&#xA;  alongside your proprietary system. &lt;strong&gt;To do this validly, you must make&#xA;  sure that the free and nonfree programs communicate at arms length,&#xA;  that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a&#xA;  single program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difference between this and “incorporating” the GPL-covered&#xA;  software is partly a matter of substance and partly form. The&#xA;  substantive part is this: &lt;strong&gt;if the two programs are combined so that&#xA;  they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can't treat&#xA;  them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole&#xA;  thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the&#xA;  kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two&#xA;  separate programs—but you have to do it properly. The issue is simply&#xA;  one of form: how you describe what you are doing. Why do we care about&#xA;  this? Because we want to make sure the users clearly understand the&#xA;  free status of the GPL-covered software in the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If people were to distribute GPL-covered software calling it “part of”&#xA;  a system that users know is partly proprietary, users might be&#xA;  uncertain of their rights regarding the GPL-covered software. But if&#xA;  they know that what they have received is a free program plus another&#xA;  program, side by side, their rights will be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you are creating the wrapper solely as a means to introduce some sort of artificial separation between the two portions, you are almost surely not creating two separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communicating at arms length means you are communicating at a high-level, barely specific to the GPL program in question. If you are using a GPL program, but you could easily use a different one as a drop-in replacement, you're communicating at arms length. If using a different, but similar program, means you have to re-architect your application, it's not at arms length. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some guidelines to determine if the program and wrapper are at arms length?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the 'wrapper' a useful program just by itself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your program useful and able to function without the 'wrapper'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there other wrapper programs in the wild that you could use instead of yours?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the wrapper created to serve a purpose other than your proprietary program?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answers to any of those are no, then clearly the wrapper and your proprietary program are a single work, and the GPL and any other license of the software you want to use in your wrapper would apply in your proprietary app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T05:57:07.660" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T05:57:07.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6572" CreationDate="2018-07-09T23:49:56.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a docker-compose.yml file is a set of instructions for installing container images, but does not contain the software binaries itself, you have no specific license constraints around how you distribute that docker-compose.yml file (assuming you wrote it from scratch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is possible that your client would not be compliant with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/products/community/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL Community Edition&lt;/a&gt; license once he has run docker-compose and installed it.  That would be up to the terms of that license.  Since MySQL CE is still distributed under the GPLv2, this would only affect your client if they then decided to redistribute &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; software, with the database or its drivers embedded.  This depends partly on their choice of database driver: mysqlnd has a more flexible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PostgreSQL is distributed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/PostgreSQL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The PostgreSQL License&lt;/a&gt;, a &quot;liberal&quot; license which is functionally identical to the MIT license, and thus almost entirely unrestricted in how you distribute it (you have to keep a copy of the license, that's pretty much it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="11583" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T23:55:04.330" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T23:55:04.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2018-07-10T04:48:13.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can a Proprietary Application Exchange Data with a GPL'd Program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, at least in some cases.  For example, Internet Explorer can visit a website served by a GPLed app.  They also exchange images.  (Downloading images, and in some cases, uploading images too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here, I could give you my opinion about your app, but I'm not a lawyer.  The FSF has an answer in their FAQ which is probably unfortunately correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest you read their full answer, but keep in mind that they are generally biased towards reading the GPL's terms to restrict closed-source software.  They do suggest though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2584" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T04:48:13.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T11:10:08.983" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i modify and include a MIT lcensed software in my website (script for functions, no download for users), have i to include the license? Have i to indicate the changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T07:39:34.577" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T07:39:34.577" Title="If I modify and include a MIT lcensed software in my website, have i to include the license?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T11:52:20.767" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do some editing for Wiki A, which is generally licensed in a typical wiki fashion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Content is available under GNU FDL 1.3 unless otherwise noted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiki B uses some templates I'd like to copy for reuse on Wiki A, and its general license is almost identical, except it's CC BY-SA 3.0 instead of FDL.  I assume reuse of Wiki B's content on Wiki A is fine as long as the differing license is clearly stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The templates themselves include this wording in their documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is a chart based on [outside project] (GPLv3,&#xA;CC BY-SA 3.0) which [author] at [Wiki B] authored.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first reading of this is that the GPL/CC-BY-SA license refers specifically and exclusively to the outside project, and does not seem to state that the templates are licensed under these terms.  This leads me to believe the templates are covered by Wiki B's general license.  However, the author indicates to me that these wiki templates might be GPL licensed, which is an interpretation of the templates' wording I hadn't considered, but might be valid.  The author also points out that it's the code that's GPL licensed, and data content that's CC-BY-SA.  The outside project itself is published on Github, but does not appear to include these templates directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm waiting on clarification of the author's stance on the exact license the templates fall under, but I think this situation warrants good answers to these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the general case, are user-created wiki templates &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; licensed the same as the wiki content, or are they treated differently due to &quot;not being content&quot;?  Is posting attribution (author, origin, license) on the templates' documentation enough to satisfy Wiki B's license and the &lt;em&gt;&quot;unless otherwise noted&quot;&lt;/em&gt; clause in Wiki A's license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this specific case, if the templates are indeed GPLv3 licensed, does that change the requirements in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11594" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T11:25:48.777" Title="Wiki template licensing?" Tags="|gpl-3|multi-licensing|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2018-07-10T14:51:01.670" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to ask them. We don't know, and what is &quot;usually done&quot; doesn't cover &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T14:51:01.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7091" CreationDate="2018-07-10T14:55:17.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you do at home (in your websites' servers) is your business, nobody else's (MIT allows any use). If you distribute changed versions of the software, then the license kicks in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful if some of the code ends up running on the user's machine (i.e., Javascript snippets, applets of any sort), that is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T14:55:17.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7098" CreationDate="2018-07-10T16:44:15.640" Score="0" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I modify JavaScript/CSS in WordPress themes/plugins (GPL licensed) for my website, do I have to include all of the changes in the header of the file? I know that use css/js files in a website is a distribute operation for opensource license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T07:39:12.973" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T07:39:12.973" Title="If I modify JS/CSS in GPL-licensed WordPress themes/plugins for my website, do I have to include all the changes?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7078" CreationDate="2018-07-10T20:07:35.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very good answer by @whatsisname. I would say though that &quot;using&quot; will most definitely be legal. &quot;Distributing&quot; though might be an issue. Whatever you want to do, in case you avoid the distribution of GPL code together with your program the requirement to open your source shouldn't apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is seen in some programs in other contexts as well. They have the user download the program with incompatible license (even assisted by the program), then they are not distributing anything thus don't have to comply with said license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11601" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2018-07-15T20:00:16.507" LastActivityDate="2018-07-15T20:00:16.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6271" CreationDate="2018-07-10T20:12:36.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't distribute the GPL programs together with the scripts, then I see nothing that will force upon you any licensing requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise you may need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11601" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T20:12:36.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7095" CreationDate="2018-07-10T21:00:18.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The GPL requires a notice &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; you changed a file, but the notice doesn't have to include &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; changes were made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your changes were large and/or creative enough to be protected by copyright (and the bar is not very high on that), it would technically be enough notice to add a copyright statement to the files for your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people looking at your adapted version, it would be nice if you give a one or two line description of your changes, but you don't have to be complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T21:00:18.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5303" CreationDate="2018-07-11T09:03:24.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is bad. If someone wants to read source code, he would have to run the binary on his machine first. Much of the meaning of open source and free software is to being able read the code before you run it. And the reader of the code would also need to compile the code output after first running that program and then comparing the binaries to make sure that its really the source code of the program. But once you have different compiler version or platform, you are not able to prove that it really is the source code... Pretty bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11608" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T09:03:24.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-11T11:51:09.610" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing some documentation for a project of mine. This project depends on a GNU project so I must license it under the GNU GPL. In future, it might be integrated in that GNU project so I'm licensing the manual under the FDL. I've copied some parts of the manual of the GNU project into my manual. I've already included the Invariant Sections (the GNU GPL and FDL chapters, which I'd need without any parts of the other manual too). What do I have to do? Should I say that I grabbed some parts of that manual and cite the authors in the colophon? Is it sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And regarding Front/Back-Cover texts? Do I have to put them in some specific places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;How much text has to be copied to make my manual a &quot;Modified Version&quot; of the document? It isn't stated in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for my bad English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11609" LastEditorUserId="11609" LastEditDate="2018-07-11T17:06:06.260" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T17:06:06.260" Title="Copy part of GNU FDL-licensed document" Tags="|licensing|documentation|gfdl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7102" CreationDate="2018-07-11T13:09:47.343" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked some code, the license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;. It states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without mentioning &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; the license should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is present in all files of the foked code, at the very top of the file and this is quite annoying when editing the file - are there any restrictions on the place a license should appear. &lt;strong&gt;Specifically, can I move it to the bottom of the file?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: this question was initially asked at SE.Law and suggested to move here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11407" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T22:58:15.653" Title="Can a license be placed anywhere in a file?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7101" CreationDate="2018-07-11T17:20:06.907" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The US Copyright Office has this to say about the positioning of copyright notices (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/title37/202/37cfr202-2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;37 C.F.R. § 202.2&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) Methods of affixation and positions of the copyright notice on various types of works—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(7) Works reproduced in machine-readable copies. For works reproduced in machine-readable copies, each of the following constitutes an example of acceptable methods of affixation and position of notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(i) A notice embodied in the copies in machine-readable form in such a manner that on visually perceptible printouts it appears either with or near the title, or at the end of the work;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, the end of a file is an acceptable place to put the copyright notice and license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would not recommend it, as it is a widely established convention to put the copyright and license information at the very top of source code files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T17:20:06.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-12T04:20:13.053" Score="0" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project used and modified some code from project A licensed under GPLv2 written in C. Now I was wondering that if I release my compiled binary with its reverse-compiled assembly, is it GPLv2-conforming? It seems that reverse-compiled assembly is machine-readable and the definition of source code, &quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications&quot;, appears a little bit vague here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10081" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T01:43:17.143" Title="Is reverse-compiled assembly considered as a valid form of &quot;source code&quot; in GPLv2?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7103" CreationDate="2018-07-12T07:26:02.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were making modifications, would you &lt;em&gt;prefer&lt;/em&gt; to work on the original source code, with proper structure, variable names, comments etc or on the decompiled version which may well be missing all of those? I know which I'd prefer, which I think answers this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T07:26:02.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7106" CreationDate="2018-07-12T16:15:06.237" Score="4" ViewCount="933" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I take some BSD 3-claused code and modify it, do I then have the right to place my own copyright under the original author's copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD 3-Clause License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2018, Original Author&#xA;Copyright (c) 2018, Me&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it remain just the copyright of the original author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T17:51:05.977" Title="How to handle the copyright notice of a BSD 3-clause licence when modifying it" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7105" CreationDate="2018-07-12T17:51:05.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make a change to the code, you hold the copyright to your changes. You are therefore entitled to add your own copyright notice. The copyright for the file with your changes is then shared between you and the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, copyright notices are often ordered newest-to-oldest so that the newest notice is right at the top of the file. But there is no requirement to do so and you can of course put your notice below the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects don't want to add a copyright notice for everyone who contributed to that file. Instead, some notices only attribute the original author (with the implicit understanding that other people might also hold part of the copyright), or attribute the project contributors collectively. If you want to contribute back to such a project, it would not be appropriate to add another notice, even if you are allowed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T17:51:05.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7103" CreationDate="2018-07-12T18:15:38.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reverse-compiled assembly, made from object code compiled from C code that had been licensed under the GPLv2 and modified, is not source code under any reasonable definition. Distribution of such reverse-compiled assembly would not satisfy GPL terms that require distribution of source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7984" LastEditorUserId="7984" LastEditDate="2018-07-14T01:43:17.143" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T01:43:17.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-13T08:11:35.063" Score="3" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an algorithm and the corresponding implementation (code) on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use that code in commercial software? Or would this mean that I would introduce a viral license and would have to share my whole code under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11633" LastEditorUserId="11633" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T18:38:29.377" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T18:38:29.377" Title="Using code from Wikipedia" Tags="|cc-by-sa|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7038" CreationDate="2018-07-14T12:23:12.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license does not discuss fonts and typefaces explicitly, and the intellectual property situation for them is quite uneven internationally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many jurisdictions there is a strong distinction between a &lt;em&gt;typeface&lt;/em&gt; (the visual appearance) and a &lt;em&gt;font&lt;/em&gt; (the computer program that renders a typeface). Whereas the font may be copyright-protected, the typeface itself is not. However, a typeface may be protected by design patents. This is the situation in the U.S. Other jurisdictions like the U.K. copyright-protect typefaces directly, but do not see a document set in that typeface as a copy of the typeface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's complicated, and depends on your jurisdiction. However, in nearly all cases it will be OK to set text in your artwork in a typeface by using an Apache-licensed font. For example, using the typeface as lettering in a comic or for text in an infographic would likely be fine. Assuming that the rendered text is not a derivative work of the font, you are not obligated to show any license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the situation may be quite different for commercial fonts (which may have usage restrictions in their license), or when distributing a font as a webfont. It may also matter whether your artwork consists only of the font, e.g. in a wordmark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-14T12:23:12.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-15T12:12:20.787" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not very well familiar with details in how free licences work and interact, so I'm seeking help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation in brief: There is a desktop application X licensed under AGPL v.3. Users of X may install an X's browser extension (also under AGPL v.3) which imports parsed data from common web-sites to X's desktop app (for that, the desktop app runs a server that accepts data from the browser's extension).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've developed a small app, Y, and I want it to be able to import data from the X's browser extension. For that, I only need to know the format of the data sent by the X's extension, and to mimic the X's server in my app Y. &lt;em&gt;I do not use the X's source codes for developing the server at all&lt;/em&gt;, I build it from scratch and make it correctly accepting the data from X's browser extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May such situation raise any licence/legal issues? Will that depend on the licence I will choose for my app Y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I do know the format of the data sent by X's extension - it is simple JSON data. It is documented at X's website, although not in very detail. Details are easily found by direct inspection of the JSON object. But I should add that this documentation is aimed at contributors who wish to improve/add webpage-parsing capabilities of the X's application itself rather than other apps (although there is no explicit statement that this information cannot be used for importing data into other apps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that helps, the application X is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zotero.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zotero&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12640" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T08:26:40.810" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T14:05:31.243" Title="Mimicking an AGPLv3-licensed server for reading open data: Are there licence/legal issues?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7113" CreationDate="2018-07-16T06:30:08.507" Score="11" ViewCount="1560" Body="&lt;p&gt;I frequently create programs to process my local files in some fashion. About half of them are Bash shell scripts under 100 lines, others may be longer, include multiple files, or even be in other script languages, such as PHP (PHP License) and Perl (Perl Artistic License, or GPL v1+), or full-on programs in C {gcc, et al.} (GPL v3), Java {Iced Tea} (GPL v2 + Classpath), etc. As I modify them over time I track my work in a local git, sometimes adding the &quot;project&quot; once I realize it's been modified a few times already, or when I think I'm likely to modify it later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With rare exception, the only third-party resources used in the Bash scripts are system CLI tools (&lt;code&gt;awk&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;find&lt;/code&gt;, etc.), I do have one larger project which uses &lt;code&gt;ffmpeg&lt;/code&gt; (LGPL v2.1+) and might use &lt;code&gt;vobsub2srt&lt;/code&gt; (GPL v3) and &lt;code&gt;BDSup2Sub&lt;/code&gt; (Apache v2), which is a Java &lt;code&gt;.jar&lt;/code&gt;. My other projects seldom go beyond the basic modules/libraries for the language. So far as I know, none of what I've used is utilized in a fashion that would make their license infect my projects. As in, any module/library I use could easily be replaced by another one without loss of functionality, similar to choosing a font to use in a document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand the licensing, none of my uses for third-party resources affects (infects?) my licensing options. If I am incorrect, or borderline, in some case, a word-to-the-wise would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These programs are useful to me, and likely not of much use to others, as-is. In some of the cases, however, there might be content useful to others - either for how I approached the problem or the algorithm I used to create the solution. Moving my local git to GitHub is simple enough. Doing so will allow others to view them, and use whatever is useful to them for their own situations. I also don't expect, or anticipate, that there will be any sort of &quot;collaboration&quot; or contribution from other in developing or improving these projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary purpose for placing my work on GitHub is to share with others freely. In the case where someone uses a significant portion (whatever that means) of my work in some redistributed work, I'd like to get recognition for my work, while just using a few lines, or the basic concepts of the work-flow shouldn't require them to create a whole new attribution file, or add a bunch of comment lines, &quot;just because they &lt;em&gt;saw&lt;/em&gt; my methods.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A secondary purpose for posting the repos is to provide a collection of my work to which I can refer others. At some future date I may become interested in coding for others, and they could view my repos as a portfolio of past work. Granted, the limited scope of the projects so far wouldn't demonstrate much beyond boredom, it would still be a nice idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, because of the license issue, I have not done so with any significant work. My only GitHub repo thus far is of an answer I posted on SO. (I guess that's now dual licensed: the MIT I applied on GitHub and the CC-BY-SA from the SO posting.) With that exception, all projects are undistributed, in any fashion, though they are in various stages of development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want the licensing to achieve is to make the content usable, most likely by inclusion in larger projects, to the widest audience, while still retaining my copyright and being attributed as the creator when used (no &quot;CC0&quot; or &quot;public domain&quot; options). I've gathered that material distributed under some set of licenses cannot be included in projects covered by some other set of licenses, and avoiding that &quot;lock-out&quot; is the largest of my confusions with the license choice. One way around that, which may not be compatible with the GitHub system is dual licensing of my projects. I suppose it's possible to create two GitHub accounts and list each project twice, once in account &quot;A&quot; with license &quot;One&quot; and again under account &quot;B&quot; with license &quot;Two&quot;. That seems like a rather extreme measure, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which&lt;/strong&gt; license, or license scheme, allows my code to serve the most good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7180" LastEditorDisplayName="user7180" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T07:56:18.220" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T09:05:37.393" Title="License to use for smaller GitHub repos" Tags="|license-recommendation|github|software|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7112" CreationDate="2018-07-16T07:40:30.043" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might take a while, your question isn't a short one, and it seems to me to have a number of misconceptions in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I frequently create programs [...] in other script languages, such as PHP (PHP License) and Perl (Perl Artistic License, or GPL v1+)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licences you quote are those which apply to the languages themselves.  With the exception of a very few language compilers which copy part of themselves into the compiled output, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license on the compiler/interpeter has no effect on the licence of your compiled program&lt;/a&gt;.  You can compile your own code with gcc and then release it under a proprietary licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With rare exception, the only third-party resources used in the Bash scripts are system CLI tools&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7078/458&quot;&gt;generally accepted&lt;/a&gt; that when one program calls another through simple fork-and-exec (as your bash script calls &lt;code&gt;awk&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt;) they remain separate programs for the purposes of copyright and licensing.  You can write a bash script that calls GNU grep, and distribute that script under a proprietary licence.  If you distribute the grep binary as well you will have GPL obligations with respect to the grep code, but they are very unlikely to bleed into your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do have one larger project which uses ffmpeg (LGPL v2.1+) and might use vobsub2srt (GPL v3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the detail of &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; you use them becomes important.  You say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;none of what I've used is 'linked' in a fashion that would make their license infect my projects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking is a term of art used in computing which has a very specific meaning, and this meaning is not the one used in everyday speech; I am using it in its computing sense.  The act of linking, and the method of linking, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5087/458&quot;&gt;are an important part&lt;/a&gt; of deciding whether a new work is a derivative of some other pre-existing work.  The precise conclusions to be drawn remain a matter for debate, as you will find if you follow that link, but &lt;em&gt;what constitutes linking&lt;/em&gt; is not a matter for debate.  If you use third-party resources through fork-and-exec, you're very likely not making a derivative work.  If you link to third-party code, there is at least a strong possibility that you are making a derivative work.  The implications of you having made a derivative work depend on the licence on the third-party code, and are too long and variable to discuss here, but if you use third-party code in a manner that is  not permitted, you are committing copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;any module/library I use could easily be replaced by another one without loss of functionality, similar to choosing a font to use in a document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know where you got the idea that this is relevant to the decision about whether you're committing copyright infringement.  If I choose to use a large piece of Oracle's java code in my project, the fact that I could have used OpenJDK code instead will not save me from Oracle's lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I want the licensing to achieve is to make the content usable, most likely by inclusion in larger projects, to the widest audience, while still retaining my copyright and being attributed as the creator &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a matter of opinion, and therefore likely off-topic; it's also a hotly debated issue.  My own feeling can be summed up in one line, arrived at after many painful debates with my BSD-favouring co-author: &lt;em&gt;weak copyleft licences (eg BSD, Apache) are best at &lt;strong&gt;making&lt;/strong&gt; software free; strong copyleft licences (eg GPL, AGPL) are best at &lt;strong&gt;keeping&lt;/strong&gt; software free&lt;/em&gt;.  I favour the latter class of licences, and along with many other people and organisations I hope you will use them; but there are lots of very bright people who favour the former licences, and their arguments are also well-worth listening to.  Here is probably not the place to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-16T09:05:37.393" LastActivityDate="2018-07-16T09:05:37.393" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7115" CreationDate="2018-07-17T13:02:51.283" Score="8" ViewCount="1404" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ states that is not permitted to sign NDAs when distributing software, as it would be a violation of the redistribution freedom. Let A be an entity that develops a feature on top of an existing GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, in some way (forums, ml, etc), another entity discovers that A is developing such a feature. Is A obliged in some way to distribute that feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if A decides to share that contribution (in a partial or complete state) to just only another entity (call them entity B) before going public? Entity B can be asked to sign an NDA to avoid B to disclose the feature earlier than A's wishes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12656" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T12:41:01.530" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:41:01.530" Title="NDA with GPL software: can the author decide how/when to disclose?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|redistribution|nda|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7114" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:47:13.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, in some way (forums, ml, etc), another entity discovers that A is developing such a feature. Is A obliged in some way to distribute that feature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, if someone privately modifies GPL-licensed software, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIDemandACopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the terms of the license do not require them to share their changes&lt;/a&gt;. The GPL requires that whenever you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; choose to distribute your software (which may or may not ever happen), that distribution must happen under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if A decides to share that contribution (in a partial or complete state) to just only another entity (call them entity B) before going public? Entity B can be asked to sign an NDA to avoid B to disclose the feature earlier than A's wishes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When entity A gives the modified work to entity B, it must do under the terms of the GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5554/50&quot;&gt;except for a few narrowly-defined cases in the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;: distribution to a developer solely for modification, or to a facility for code execution). Adding non-disclosure requirements to the terms of the distribution is a violation of entity A's GPL obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ is quite clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to distribute copies under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy from you has the right to redistribute copies, modified or not. You are not allowed to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowModNDA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to distribute a modified or beta version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The GPL says that your modified versions must carry all the freedoms stated in the GPL. Thus, anyone who receives a copy of your version from you has the right to redistribute copies (modified or not) of that version. You may not distribute any version of the work on a more restrictive basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF is quite clear here: an NDA that adds restrictions to the GPL terms is a GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, consider the special case (which is different from your scenario) that A may regulate how B distributes &lt;em&gt;B's own changes&lt;/em&gt; to the GPL-licensed software. A and B may enter into a contract that regulates if and when B distributes B's own changes, since those changes are not licensed under the GPL until distribution of those changes actually occurs. The relevant GPL FAQ item is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. For instance, you can accept a contract to develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else unless the client says ok. In this case, too, no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA, or under any additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version. In this scenario, the client will probably choose not to exercise that right, but does &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph here indicates that B still has normal GPL rights to distribute A's version, as it was before B made changes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purely as a matter of legal speculation, consider that an entity may generally enter into a contract promising not to do some particular action. It may be legally possible that B could obtain GPL rights from A, and then later freely enter into a contract with A to promise not to exercise some of those GPL-granted rights, in exchange for some consideration from A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a very simple example, suppose entity A hosts a public GPL-licensed repository and derives ad revenue from visitors. Entity A might enter into a contract to pay competitor B some monthly payment in exchange for B not to host a clone of the repo on B's own site. B certainly has the right to host a clone of the repo (absent a contract not to) but they can freely choose to sell away that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not a lawyer, and I don't know how this might be done safely in practice without violating the terms of the GPL. Certainly consult a lawyer if you want to try this: there may be a right and a wrong way to do this. For example, there may be a significant legal difference between B entering into a contract &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; A transfers the software versus entering into a contract sometime &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the software is transferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is sufficient difference between &amp;quot;terms of the license grant from A to B&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;a contract agreement between A and B separate from the license grant&amp;quot; that both might coexist without a GPL violation, but I certainly cannot advise you how to do this in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T16:03:13.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7151" CreationDate="2018-07-17T01:27:36.117" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a pending patent on my &lt;a href=&quot;http://confidence-coin.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confidence Coin&lt;/a&gt; invention. I shared the code publicly on Github (after I started my application), but I have not added a license yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software is a blockchain invention, so I want people to use it, but I don't want people to fork it and create other coins based on the same technology, this is precisely what I hope to protect with my patent application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license can I put in place that will allow people to contribute to my project that would let them download, copy, modify, and using the software. I would like only to allow people to use the latest version of my software and its source code. I would like to prevent people from competing with my coin by making one of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12659" OwnerDisplayName="Ilya Gazman" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T21:27:06.570" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T07:17:50.247" Title="License for open sourcing software with pending patents" Tags="|license-recommendation|contributor|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7135" CreationDate="2018-07-18T08:13:52.973" Score="1" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NetworkManager library is released under GPLv2 license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/COPYING?h=1.12.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/COPYING?h=1.12.0&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the build scripts are GPLv3 (some having the autoconf exception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under which license is the built library under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T19:11:34.560" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:11:34.560" Title="GPLv2 library with GPLv3 build scripts" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7122" CreationDate="2018-07-18T10:37:59.773" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a university course I have developed a software application in a group of 12 students. So far we have been developing without a license (in a private repository), but now that the course is over we would like to continue working on the project under the AGPL v3 license. Since we are about to open a new (public) repository soon this seems like the right time to add it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What steps do we need to take in order to 'change' the license of our code base? I could imagine that simply adding the license to the new repository is not enough, since this action can be done by just one team member.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12664" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T20:36:25.567" Title="How can I add a license to an existing group project?" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7121" CreationDate="2018-07-18T12:42:20.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;License&quot; is really just another word for &quot;permission&quot; -- putting a license on your code is roughly as simple as deciding that you want to grant some permissions to other people, and then adding documentation to ensure everyone knows that you've given that permission. In order to do everything neatly with multiple contributors, and to follow the FSF's recommendations to clearly document your license grant, you should do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have every contributor give permission to use their work under the terms of the AGPLv3. For legal rigor, you could document this in writing, e.g., have every contributor make a comment in your project's bug tracker, or much more rigorously, sign and upload a legal document granting this permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Follow the instructions in the AGPLv3's appendix entitled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. This chiefly involves&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adding license and copyright headers to each source file  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;including a copy of the AGPLv3 license document in your program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ensuring that your university does not hold a copyright claim on your work, or asking them to waive it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T20:36:25.567" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T20:36:25.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7124" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7125" CreationDate="2018-07-19T16:14:37.320" Score="10" ViewCount="785" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started an OSS project with a fellow coding enthusiast in 2014 (that has since pretty much left the project, although as far as I can tell he's still following everything that's going on). Since the beginning, the copyright notice on the software's installer and &quot;about box&quot; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;© Copyright 2014-2018 Mathieu Guindon &amp;amp; Christopher McClellan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I've since transferred ownership of the GitHub repository from my account over to a GitHub organization &quot;Rubberduck VBA&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While my own contributions remain substantial (I'm still #1 contributor), the team has grown, and I feel core contributors have taken the project to new heights and made it achieve things I couldn't have dreamed of achieving on my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to change the copyright notice to read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2014-2018 Rubberduck VBA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that would better reflect the collaborative nature of the code base, and would make me feel much better about standing on the shoulders of the amazing people that have contributed to the project, some much smarter than me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository currently has over 600 &quot;stars&quot;, and according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net/p/Rubberduck_VBA/factoids&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Hub&lt;/a&gt; the team is &quot;one of the largest open-source teams in the world, in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I opened an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rubberduck-vba/Rubberduck/issues/4214&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue&lt;/a&gt; on the repository to change the copyright notice, but then one of the contributors raised the question &quot;is &lt;em&gt;Rubberduck VBA&lt;/em&gt; an entity that can assert copyright?&quot; ...and I don't know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can&lt;/em&gt; I do this? Can a GitHub organization be made the copyright owner?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Should&lt;/em&gt; I do this? Is it stupid to do so?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="575" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:53:35.243" Title="Can a GitHub Organization assert copyright?" Tags="|copyright|github|collaboration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7124" CreationDate="2018-07-20T02:28:04.750" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not expect that Rubberduck VBA, as an unincorporated organization that lacks legal personhood, is an entity that can own a copyright (though this may vary by jurisdiction). Furthermore, unless you and the other authors performed a transfer of title to Rubberduck VBA, the copyright of each contribution would remain owned by it's original author. Changing the repository to be listed as &quot;owned&quot; by another user account on the GitHub.com website is not a transfer of copyright title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this says nothing about whether you can or should include your proposed copyright header. Copyright notices are no longer required to legally establish copyright ownership; in this context they largely serve as attribution to give credit to the authors of a work. Generally you &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6582/can-i-remove-some-copyright-holders-from-headers-and-replace-them-by-a-generic?rq=1&quot;&gt;may not &lt;em&gt;remove&lt;/em&gt; another author's copyright notice&lt;/a&gt; (unless you remove all the copyrighted work by that author as well), because the license under which the author supplied their contribution required you to preserve copyright notices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from your description, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; no other copyright notices. You would not actually be removing any other notices except your own and Christopher's. Other authors could have added their own notices when the made their contribution(s) but effectively chose to remain anonymous within the copyright notices. Whether relying on such a legal technicality is good governance of your project is another matter, of course. (Openly discussing this in your bug tracker, like you're doing, is a good idea.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rubberduck VBA is not an entity that can hold a copyright, but changing your copyright notice to say copyright is held by &quot;Rubberduck VBA Contributors&quot; might be a reasonable thing to do, especially if you list those contributors in a separate, e.g., LICENSE file with the license text and a full list of named copyright notices. You could also just list them standalone in a CONTRIBUTORS file, but my concern there is that a downstream redistributor/reuser might fail to include that file, whereas bundling the list in a file with the license text that requires preservation of that license file and/or subsequent copyright notice(s) increases the odds it will survive downstream modification of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T18:53:35.243" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:53:35.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7127" CreationDate="2018-07-20T02:31:18.937" Score="4" ViewCount="1647" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I release software under the GNU GPL v3, and a new version of the GPL is released, can I change the license to the new version if I choose to without having to say &quot;GNU GPL v3.0 or later&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12678" LastEditorUserId="12678" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T16:54:07.833" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T13:02:40.433" Title="If I release software under the GNU GPL v3, and a new version of the GPL is released, can I change the license?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7126" CreationDate="2018-07-20T03:27:33.477" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the copyright owner then you always have complete freedom at any time to change the license to anything you want. (This only affects people who download the project after the change, those who downloaded it before can continue to use it under the old license.) If other people have contributed code and there are multiple owners then you need to get everyone's approval to change the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Or later&quot; phrases allow other people to adopt a later license without you doing anything. In doing so you put your trust in the writers of the license that they won't fundamentally change it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T03:27:33.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7126" CreationDate="2018-07-20T11:05:13.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7127/56&quot;&gt;As curiousdannii said&lt;/a&gt; you can &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; release your own code under another license, even if it's incompatible with a license you used earlier. Furthermore, specifically with GPL versions, the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#VersionThreeOrLater&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recommends that programs say “Version 3 of the GPL or any later version”&lt;/a&gt;, and in that case you can effectively even relicense &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people's code under a new version: namely, if you use some code that's licensed under &lt;em&gt;GPL3 or newer&lt;/em&gt; and combine it with any own code under GPL4, the resulting project will be under GPL4, legally speaking (even if most of the code still says GPL3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T11:05:13.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7130" CreationDate="2018-07-20T16:24:56.333" Score="2" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;What means &quot;distribution&quot; for Open Source licenses MIT and GPL?&#xA;Is the client side code running on user's browser &quot;distribution&quot; for these licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:44:27.670" Title="What means &quot;distribution&quot; for Open Source licenses (MIT/GPL)?" Tags="|gpl|mit|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7129" CreationDate="2018-07-20T18:44:27.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not define &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; but mentions it as a subclass of &amp;quot;propagation&amp;quot; (which is itself a subclass of &amp;quot;conveyance&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, since a copy of client-side code is transmitted to another person, the GPL's requirements about conveyance (notably, supplying access to corresponding source and making the recipient's GPL rights clear) apply to the client-side code you transmit to a user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for code under an MIT/X11 license, though in that case your requirement are merely limited to preserving the license text and copyright headers, not sharing the corresponding source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:44:27.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7133" CreationDate="2018-07-20T19:34:58.497" Score="9" ViewCount="2189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am releasing a program under the GNU GPL v3.0. I need to include a copyright notice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to use my username in the copyright notice as I don't want to use my real name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12678" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T19:19:48.340" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T19:19:48.340" Title="Can I use my username in copyright?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7116" CreationDate="2018-07-20T21:38:27.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The characteristics you desire in a license mean that it would not be considered an open source license by any commonly accepted definition of the term. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like only to allow people to use the latest version of my software and its source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fails the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#debian-legal_tests_for_DFSG_compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - by insisting that people use only the latest version of the software, you are discriminating against people with poor (or no) Internet connections who cannot even find out what is the latest version of the software is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to prevent people from competing with my coin by making one of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fairly clearly discriminating against specific fields of endeavor, something which is not allowed by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, patents are a thorny issue at best in the open source world. While there is some acceptance of patents which are freely licensed or come with a promise only to be used defensively, a patent which is going to be used to restrict the use of the software is pretty universally considered to make software non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this means that you can't make your code available for others to view and modify, but it doesn't sound like you want an open source license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T21:38:27.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7131" CreationDate="2018-07-21T06:37:04.497" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The governing document for copyright is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works&lt;/a&gt;.  Its Wikipedia article notes that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The United States initially refused to become a party to the Convention, since that would have required [...] elimination of [the] mandatory copyright notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that the copyright statement doesn't even need to be there for protection, much less that it must state a full name.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works/Articles_1_to_21&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;convention itself&lt;/a&gt; says in Article 7(3) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works, the term of protection granted by this Convention shall expire fifty years after the work has been lawfully made available to the public. However, when the pseudonym adopted by the author leaves no doubt as to his identity, the term of protection shall be that provided in paragraph (1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so in convention signatory countries, which is nearly all of them, it is perfectly lawful to publish under a pseudonym, and you don't (entirely) forfeit your copyright protection by so doing.  This seems consistent with the law.SE answer that apsillers kindly links to, &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to publish under a pseudonym and retain maximum control, I'd create a custom GPG key for that pseudonym and use it to sign the copyright notice.  If at some later time a dispute about authorship arises, your demonstrable control of the signing key should enable you to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that you are the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T06:43:22.557" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T06:43:22.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7120" CreationDate="2018-07-21T10:39:22.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 requires that the corresponding source of a GPLv2-licensed binary is distributed under the terms of that GPL. The corresponding source includes any build scripts. As GPLv3-licensed build scripts cannot be distributed under the terms of the GPLv2, this combination is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that is not the case for NetworkManager:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AFAIK the NetworkManager source code is licensed only under the GPLv2+, with no GPLv3 build scripts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if there were GPLv3 build scripts, the binaries could be distributed under the terms of the GPLv3 because the source is under GPLv2+.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Also, the requirements to make the corresponding source  available only trigger when you distribute binaries – source distributions might be fine.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NetworkManager does use Autoconf, which is licensed under the GPLv3+ plus the Autoconf Exception. When using Autoconf to create a source distribution then Autoconf copies parts of itself into that source distribution. (A source distribution is not necessarily the same as the corresponding source in the sense of the GPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the use of Autoconf in a project subject that project to the GPLv3? Quite likely not, due to the Autoconf exception that gives you extra permissions: “You have permission to propagate output of Autoconf, even if such propagation would otherwise violate the terms of GPLv3.” I.e. as long as the generated configure scripts etc. are distributed without modifications you can use Autoconf to build source distributions under any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made that &lt;code&gt;configure.ac&lt;/code&gt; scripts should be subject to the GPLv3 because they link with Autoconf-provided macros. The validity of this argument hinges on whether the &lt;code&gt;configure.ac&lt;/code&gt; file is better described as an M4 program that links with the Autoconf macro library (i.e. constitutes a derived work), or as input data that is processed by the Autoconf system (i.e. is an independent work). I'd see Autoconf in analogy to other languages and preprocessors such as Bash, Perl, and Bison. Here, there seems to be clear consensus that input files are completely independent works from the language implementations, even when the language implementation offers mechanisms to call into GPL'ed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T10:39:22.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7092" CreationDate="2018-07-21T11:25:48.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This scenario is not entirely clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Regarding the license of Wiki A, “GNU FDL 1.3 unless otherwise noted”:&#xA;This seems to be an outbound license, but they may have a different inbound license, i.e. a different license under which that Wiki accepts contributions. For example, they might require all new contributions to be available under the FDL, but use that “unless otherwise noted” to account for differently licensed content in some existing pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) Regarding the licenses of the template on the CC-BY-SA 3.0-licensed  Wiki B, “This is a chart based on [outside project] (GPLv3, CC BY-SA 3.0) which [author] at [Wiki B] authored”:&#xA;The mention of the GPL is a red herring. There are two ways to interpret this notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The templates were available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 and could therefore be included in Wiki B, regardless of who the author is, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The template author was able to contribute them to the Wiki B because they hold the copyright to these templates, regardless of the original license of the templates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that the notice does refer to the templates and not specifically to an image that is shown as part of the template documentation. If the notice only refers to an image then the templates are not carrying any notices with regards to licensing so the default license of that Wiki (CC-BY-SA 3.0) would apply to the templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any of the above three cases the notice as written seems to indicate that the templates are used on Wiki B under the CC-BY-SA 3.0. The notice gives no reason to believe that the templates would only be licensed under the GPL. The author's response to the contrary is highly confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) Regarding code–data separation for templates:&#xA;While this distinction is clear for most programs, templates usually copy large parts of themselves into the output and just fill in some placeholders. The output is therefore a derived work of both the template code and the data. If the output is available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or the FDL), then the template and the input data need to be available under a compatible license. No version of the GPL would be a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) The result is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to the author's responses, the templates on Wiki B are licensed ambiguously and are possibly using an invalid license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the template licensing is valid, the templates are likely available under CC-BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You likely cannot use these templates on the FDL-licensed Wiki because the licenses are incompatible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T11:25:48.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7111" CreationDate="2018-07-21T13:34:27.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely communicating with another software X does not make your software a derived work of X. There are no copies, modifications, or derived works of X involved here so the license of X does not apply to you. You are free to license your code in whatever way you like and are not bound to the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, restricting yourself to available documentation and to reverse-engineering techniques such as observing network traffic makes it clear that you are not copying any X code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all kinds of communication between two software components keep them as clearly separate works. The data flow may be so entangled and intertwined that they cannot be reasonably considered separate. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here as the JSON messages define a clear interface between X and your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T14:05:31.243" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T14:05:31.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7139" CreationDate="2018-07-21T20:31:33.987" Score="3" ViewCount="1364" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I install Android SDK components, I am prompted to accept an EULA for the components I install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it, the core of Android is under FOSS licenses—the kernel is a fork of the Linux kernel, which is under the GPL; the rest is mostly under the Apache license (as Google, like other companies, seems to prefer permissive licenses over copyleft ones, unless they own the code). Still I am asked to accept an EULA which has nothing to do with any of the usual licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that some of the components in the Android SDK (such as Google Play and its friends) are proprietary, and having to accept an EULA seems nothing out of the ordinary here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reasoning behind an EULA for the components I would believe to be FOSS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3776" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T22:01:19.077" Title="Why do I have to accept license agreements for the Android SDK?" Tags="|licensing|android|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7138" CreationDate="2018-07-22T09:57:41.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Android SDK is distinct from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which provides the kernel and other core Android components.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Android SDK includes open source components but is not itself open source. It also includes proprietary components.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses such as the Apache license allow extra restrictions to be added.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses such as the GPL do not force anyone to provide you with a copy. It is not allowed to withhold the source from you if you already have a legally obtained copy of binaries and it is not allowed to add any conditions to the GPL that would limit your rights with respect to the GPL'ed software. But it's perfectly fine to withhold a download bundle that includes GPL'ed software until you accept an EULA regarding the non-GPL'ed parts of that bundle.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T09:57:41.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T10:14:49.813" Score="-3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was using the project, and I did not know this until I was going to use the software on production, and it showed a warning when it realized it's not development mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an open-source project, while I was reading the license, I realized there is no &quot;free or open&quot; version of that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They only have three different versions which all are commercial, which means you need to pay to use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the open-source project has people who not financially benefited as contributors, is this legal? Their license does not have a license code, like MIT or GPD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The warning says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;expired copy of YYY, please renew your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12684" LastEditorUserId="12684" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T13:47:48.317" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T17:34:56.530" Title="Can open-source software have not any free version?" Tags="|licensing|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2018-07-23T12:25:33.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7141" CreationDate="2018-07-22T16:51:06.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If software is distributed to you under terms that do not allow you to run, modify, and redistribute the software, then that distribution does not meet the Open Source Initiative's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; nor the Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;. The FLOSS (&quot;free, libre, and open source software&quot;) community refers to software that has public source code but fails to meet these definitions as &quot;source available&quot; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it is entirely possible for a single vendor distribute the same piece of software under FLOSS terms and non-FLOSSss terms simultaneously. (One popular example of this is vendors who offer their software library under a GPL copyleft license and under a proprietary license that allows non-copyleft derivatives.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vendor may charge any amount of money to transfer a copy of free/open source software to a recipient, but they cannot restrict the recipient from distributing the software further. (If they did, the terms of that transfer would not be a FLOSS license grant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible for a freely-licensed program to demand payment to perform some functionality, but if the program is under a FLOSS license, then you can simply modify it so that it doesn't demand payment anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to other people's contributions, what matters is how the contributors licensed their contributions to the person performing distribution. If the contributors allowed their copyrighted work to be used in this way, there's no problem. If they did not allow it, then the distributor may be infringing on the contributors' copyrights by making unauthorized copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T17:34:56.530" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T17:34:56.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7145" CreationDate="2018-07-23T13:54:49.217" Score="4" ViewCount="1400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that there is a question about gpl and dual licensing, but I know copyleft can behave different depending on the shape of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so here's my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a package of lua programs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They use each other. (like libraries)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;some are gpl.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some are completely mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I dual license the whole thing under gpl (gpl programs) and  (my stuff)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this change when the programs that are not my stuff are lgpl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12694" LastEditorUserId="12694" LastEditDate="2018-07-23T14:07:57.103" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T14:20:30.437" Title="Is dual licensing a software that contains gpl programs possible?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|copyleft|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7144" CreationDate="2018-07-23T14:20:30.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  Based on what you've said about libraries, what you have there is not, most likely, &quot;&lt;em&gt;a package of programs&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; it's one big program that comes in several parts.  As such, and given that the parts that aren't yours are under some version of the GPL, then if you choose to distribute this program, you must do so entirely under the same version of the GPL (modulo &quot;&lt;em&gt;or any later version&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, if permitted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the parts that weren't yours were under LGPL, you could distribute the whole thing under a proprietary licence, provided you observed the LGPL's obligations regarding combined works (and, possibly, combined libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T14:20:30.437" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-23T14:47:00.950" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on software that contains graphics I didn't make, that are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the software contains other parts I didn't make, I want to put it under two different licenses. All the stuff I didn't/partly make will be put under the license it was under before, and my stuff will be put under some non-derivative license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm worried that Copyleft may not allow me to do so.&#xA;(because media is under CC BY-SA 3.0 and my software is based on it, it must be under CC BY-SA 3.0, too (strong copyleft) (?))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this conclusion seems quite senseless to me, because CC BY-SA 3.0 isn't a software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put the software under a dual license as mentioned before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12694" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-01T00:34:42.460" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T00:34:42.460" Title="can I use CC BY-SA 3.0 media (pictures) in a software partly licensed under a non-derivative license?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|copyleft|multi-licensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7150" CreationDate="2018-07-23T16:09:42.413" Score="4" ViewCount="2989" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release some software anonymously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first idea was to release it to the public domain, but I have found out that it is not a safe practice due to incompatibilities with the legislation of some countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some research I concluded that the license I need is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/isc-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC&lt;/a&gt;. Its problem is that it needs a copyright holder and I do not want to publish my full name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to hold a copyright anonymously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematically, attributing the copyright to &lt;code&gt;base64(sha3_256(&amp;lt;my real name&amp;gt; | &amp;lt;long secret nonce&amp;gt;))&lt;/code&gt; is as strong as putting my real name directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will it be enough in on a court?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the confusion generated, I clarify that the algorithm &lt;code&gt;base64(sha256(&amp;lt;my real name&amp;gt; | &amp;lt;long secret nonce&amp;gt;))&lt;/code&gt; means the base64 encoding of the result of applying SHA-256 hash to the concatenation of my name and a long enough (256 bits) secret random nonce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because SHA-256 is prone to length extension attacks, I will replace it with the safer SHA3-256 for extra safety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10449" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T17:23:57.623" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T10:43:42.330" Title="Declaring copyright anonymously" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2018-07-23T16:36:39.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For copyright law, there is no difference between an anonymous copyright holder and a copyright holder who operates under a pseudonym that is not known to be related to a particular person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you don't have to use your real name in the copyright statement, but you can just use &quot;user3368561&quot; or &quot;anonymous&quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hash you proposed will probably also be accepted as a pseudonym, but I don't see the point in going to that length unless you expect that you will need to break anonymity at some point in the future and that would usually be over a lawsuit regarding copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T16:36:39.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2018-07-23T16:40:48.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7148/50&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt; that a pseudonymous work is covered under copyright equally as an anonymous work. Furthermore, your proposed system will probably allow you to prove to a court your identity as the original author, if you later decide to come forward to enforce your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'll add that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you &lt;em&gt;really don't&lt;/em&gt; want the ISC license, because it requires preserving a copyright notice, you might controversially consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0 license&lt;/a&gt;, which both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commits your work to the public domain where applicable, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;licenses your work under an ultra-permissive license (which does not carry attribution requirements) in jurisdictions where you cannot fully commit your work to the public domain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two features in tandem ensure there is no copyright difficulty for others using your work. However, CC0 explicitly does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; grant patent rights to any patented systems embodied in your code, so users may be wary of reusing it out of fear that you might silently hold a patent on some system that your code implements, putting them at risk for patent infringement. That doesn't appear to be the case from your question, but the point is that recipients of the code have no way to be sure of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I don't actually recommend CC0, but offer it as a possibility if you object strongly to requiring a pseudonymous copyright notice and few sentences of licensing information. If you have no such objection, or that objection does not outweigh the perception of secret-patent risk CC0 would cast onto recipients, I recommend pseudonymous use of the ISC license.͏͏͏͏͏&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="6368" LastEditDate="2023-11-21T10:43:42.330" LastActivityDate="2023-11-21T10:43:42.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2018-07-23T19:10:22.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to publish works anonymously. This case is well-covered by international copyright laws (e.g. Art 7 (3) of the Berne Convention). Publishing anonymously is largely equivalent to publishing pseudonymously, except that the identity of a pseudonymous person is known. For example, what I publish here under the name &quot;amon&quot; is pseudonymous and keeps all my rights as if I had published under my real name. In contrast, the inventor of Bitcoin “Satoshi Nakamoto” has used a pseudonym with unknown identity, and is therefore (still?) anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately anonymous works are a legal headache for users. The work is still copyright-protected like any other work. In most jurisdiction the copyright term ends 70 (or 50) years after the death of the author. For anonymous works the author is not known, and the term ends 70 (or 50) years after publication. However, the author may be identified later. If you (or later copyright holders such as your heirs) claim the copyright before it is expired, then the life + 70 years term applies again. A related problem are &lt;em&gt;orphan works&lt;/em&gt; where the copyright holder is not known, therefore the copyright term cannot be calculated reliably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you don't want to exercise your copyright it is best to actively disclaim copyright to the fullest extent possible, i.e. dedicate the work to the public domain and issue a fallback license for jurisdiction where this is not possible. The &lt;strong&gt;CC-0&lt;/strong&gt; is the best available legal instrument for that purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could in principle also use a MIT-style license such as the ISC which keeps the copyright intact. The copyright notice doesn't have to hold your real name, using &quot;anonymous&quot; should be fine. Compared to CC-0 users are required to keep the notice, which may actually be desirable as it becomes less likely that the work becomes an orphaned work. There ISC also includes a disclaimer which the CC-0 lacks. Of course trying to hold an anonymous author of a public domain work liable for anything is a bit silly, but you may still enjoy the minimal legal protection of a disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your idea of using a hash of your identity would allow you to publish anonymously, and would allow you to claim the copyright of the anonymous work later. However, this is not necessary for publishing anonymously, and only makes sense if you do plan to disclose your identity later. If you have published anonymously under the CC-0 you will already have disclaimed your copyright to the fullest extent possible, so disclosing your identity would have minimal value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T19:10:22.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7116" CreationDate="2018-07-23T20:25:33.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, what you want to achieve can not be achieved by the patent.&#xA;But rather with a trade mark. (Ubuntu, NextCloud, ...)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://foss-backstage.de/session/who-owns-open-source-brand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://foss-backstage.de/session/who-owns-open-source-brand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, these two contradict:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modify vs. only allow latest version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would like to prevent people from competing with my coin by making one of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my eyes, this can be achieved by &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a brand - new people will need to build up the brand and may fail, see the talk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using a share-alike license as it will reduce competition &lt;a href=&quot;http://hintjens.com/blog:117#toc34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://hintjens.com/blog:117#toc34&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T20:25:33.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7147" CreationDate="2018-07-24T07:10:03.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7131/can-i-use-my-username-in-copyright/7133#7133&quot;&gt;very recently&lt;/a&gt; addressed the issue of anonymous and pseudonymous copyright here, so I won't go over that ground again.  The advice being given here about CC0 seems good to me, so I won't comment on that, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I will do is warn you against rolling your own crypto, as it never ends well.  In this case, you propose to identify yourself with a hash which is &lt;em&gt;sha256(name|nonce)&lt;/em&gt; (I'm leaving out the base64 as it's just a shortening exercise).  Should you ever need to prove your ownership, you will produce name and nonce, to show that the ORed result sha256s to give your hash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem is, once you've done that, it's trivial to produce another name with a different nonce that gives the same result.  So as soon as you've proved ownership you're open to any number of challengers each of whom has proof of ownership equal to yours, and who need only claim that they didn't know the ownership was in question until they (eg) saw your proof in the papers, and realised you had stolen their name and nonce and that it was time for them, the true owner, to come forward.  This will be difficult to disprove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, as I do in the linked answer, consider generating a custom gpg keypair, and using it to sign the pseudonymous declaration.  Your distributed software should include a copy of the public key.  You can at a later time prove ownership of the private key without compromising it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T07:10:03.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7158" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:45:31.293" Score="3" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to distribute a GNU/Linux distribution as a &lt;em&gt;.iso&lt;/em&gt;, I must :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute the source code of the Linux kernel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute the source code of any GPL (or some other license) package included in the &lt;em&gt;.iso&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must I also release the source code of the build tools I wrote (for example the tool to build the &lt;em&gt;.iso&lt;/em&gt;, or the package manager) ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Must I release something else ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12705" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T08:12:08.133" Title="Should I distribute the source code of the build tools for a Linux distribution" Tags="|gpl-2|distribution|redistribution|linux-kernel|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2018-07-25T00:11:01.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's your code, you don't have to release it, but it's best practice to do so anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it breaks down to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you've used open source code to create these build tools, then you'll need to release them under a license compatible with the license of the code they're based on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you wrote them completely from scratch, then you are the copyright holder, and you may choose to release them under any license you see fit, or keep them entirely to yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're using these build tools to ease the development of an open source project, releasing them &lt;sub&gt;(usually [but not necessarily] under a license compatible with the project, if not the same license as the project)&lt;/sub&gt; is greatly appreciated by any others who may want to collaborate on the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11220" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T00:11:01.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T00:26:52.977" Score="-3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw tool from ubuntu web platform called documentation-builder &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.ubuntu.com/documentation-builder/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.ubuntu.com/documentation-builder/en/&lt;/a&gt; and this is what exactly I need for my product. And my product is commercial one. Can I use the HTML created by this tool for commercial purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8662" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T06:48:01.230" Title="documentation-builder license information" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7156" CreationDate="2018-07-25T06:48:01.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on a cursory look at the project, my answer would be that you can not use document-builder to build your documentation. Not for a commercial application nor for an open-source one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conclusion is based on the fact that I can't find any license information about the project and that the project copies a (non-trivial) template from its sources into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that non-trivial parts of the document-builder project are copied means that the output from the program will be considered to be a &quot;derived work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that no license information is available means that the project defaults to the &quot;all rights reserved&quot; copyright status, which means that you are not allowed to create derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two facts combined make that documentation-builder is effectively unusable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T06:48:01.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7154" CreationDate="2018-07-25T08:12:08.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not required to release the build tools for the image. I would argue that the image &lt;em&gt;contains&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;aggregates&lt;/em&gt; various other software and just arranges them in a way that allows the image to be used for booting. An .iso file is not fundamentally distinct from a ZIP or TAR archive. You therefore have to comply with the licenses for all included software. For binaries that are under various GPL versions (e.g. the GNU userland and the Linux kernel) this requires you to offer the corresponding source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your image is &lt;em&gt;not derivative&lt;/em&gt; of that included software. The image can also include proprietary software and be itself distributed under a proprietary license, as long as that doesn't violate the license for the GPL-licensed components. A classic example of this is any proprietary Android ROM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the GPL never forces you to publish any software that you wrote. However, if something you write is derivative of a GPL'ed work, then you can only publish it under the terms of the GPL. If you publish binaries of GPL software you have to offer the Corresponding Source which includes build scripts etc. so that users can exercise their right to make their own changes to the software. But here those GPL'ed binaries are inside the image, and not the image itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T08:12:08.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7160" CreationDate="2018-07-25T08:58:57.147" Score="5" ViewCount="11192" Body="&lt;p&gt;A product that I'm developing uses a component that is licensed under GPL v3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;do not want to redistribute&lt;/strong&gt; the software: I plan to have a paid service where users can access my software through HTTP APIs. Am I allowed to use this component in my project? Do I have any obligations to open-source my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12709" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T10:16:07.493" Title="Can I use GPL v3 licensed software in a commercial application that is accessed through web APIs?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7159" CreationDate="2018-07-25T10:16:07.493" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use components that are licensed under GPLv3, then you are required to license the complete application the contains the GPL components under the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not all bad news, because the GPL only requires that you distribute the source code only to those persons that you distribute the binary to. If you never distribute the software to anyone, then you are also not required to give the sources away.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only provide remote access, then you are not distributing the software that runs on the server, so there are no distribution requirements for that. You have to be careful though if you also serve javascript parts that are executed on the client's machine, as that code is actually being distributed and might be affected by the GPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T10:16:07.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T18:09:04.413" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to generate &lt;a href=&quot;http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twibright Optar&lt;/a&gt; compatible printed pages but I do not want to license my project under GNU GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The format is simple enough to make a completely new generator tool in few hours without copying any line of code of the original one. This tool will generate PostScript pages ready to print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will be legal to deploy this tool under a non-GPL license (with proper attribution of the original work)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10449" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T18:09:04.413" Title="Using a printed format used by an application licensed under GNU GPL" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1359" CreationDate="2018-07-25T18:49:44.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;WTFPL, Version 2 is a good license for your small FLOSS project. It meets all five of your requirements in that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author attribution of any kind is not required.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone may use your work for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Others may sell your work or use it in closed-sourced projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It contains language, even though some may find it offensive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License modifications are not necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WTFPL is also &lt;em&gt;less restrictive&lt;/em&gt; than most other licenses in that it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has no limitations or conditions for use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can apply to both software as well as other kinds of creative works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is approachable to a wider audience given use of simple language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is terse and more accessible to those with cognitive disabilities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May be translated into any language as long as the name is changed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does not contain a “public domain” dedication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a GPL-Compatible Free Software License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a better license for a small FLOSS project, there isn't one which ensures you will not have to, at some point, modify the license. But if you relax that requirement you may also want to consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/Zlib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib License&lt;/a&gt;, which is simple and permissive, and does not contain &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; legalese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastEditorUserId="8188" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T12:39:20.763" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T12:39:20.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7165" CreationDate="2018-07-25T19:18:21.617" Score="0" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a library in Java for Bcrypt. Bcrypt's OpenBSD implementation uses a exotic flavour of the standard RFC Base64 encoding. Since there are no standard implementations for this, I modified (and simplified) the &lt;a href=&quot;http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/jdk/file/687fd7c7986d/src/share/classes/java/util/Base64.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK Base64 implementation&lt;/a&gt; so it outputs OpenBSD Radix64 encoding. The OpenJDK is under &lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;GPLv2 with Classpath Exception&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/patrickfav/bcrypt/blob/master/modules/bcrypt/src/main/java/at/favre/lib/crypto/bcrypt/Radix64Encoder.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attributed in code&lt;/a&gt; and in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/patrickfav/bcrypt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Readme&lt;/a&gt;, that I use GPLv2 with this class. The  bcrypt library is published under Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody commercially use my library without the need to reveal their source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12714" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T12:28:05.120" Title="I modified and used GPL2 Code in my Apache 2 Open Source Project - can my Project be used commercially, closed source?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2018-07-25T19:47:07.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By including the modified version of the OpenJDK Base64 implementation, your library has to be effectively distributed under the GPLv2 license, with or without the classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you keep the classpath exception, then it is possible to use your library in non-free projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you drop the classpath exception, then any project using your library has to obey the GPLv2 restrictions, which means that the sources must be made available under a GPL-compatible open-source license when the project is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T19:47:07.783" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T23:30:06.800" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I made some contributions to a repository on GitHub and then decided to delete the source code that I contributed, are other users of the repository still allowed to use that particular source code? This particular repository is under the GNU license and I pushed some code to that repository that I shouldn't have and I'm going to permanently delete it. However, some other contributors to the same repository may have clones of it on their local machine and may reupload my code back to the repository. Are they allowed to do this or can I stop them from doing it as I was the one who wrote the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12716" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-02T22:23:09.570" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T22:23:09.570" Title="OSS licensing for GitHub projects" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7166" CreationDate="2018-07-26T05:22:11.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not allowed to prevent this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You made the software available to them under the terms of the GNU GPL, and those are irrevocable.  You are completely free to stop publishing it on those terms, but people who already have it under them may continue to use it under those terms, which include the freedom to copy it (to the original git repository, if that is technically possible, or to any other place) so long as they also do it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you say that you &quot;&lt;em&gt;pushed some code to that repository that I shouldn't have&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but you don't explain why.  &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you never controlled the rights to the code you pushed, for example because you wrote it for an employer who retained the rights, you were not lawfully able to do what you did: you are not taking away rights you previously gave, you are informing everyone that you gave away something you never had any right to give.  No project wants to use rights-contaminated code, so you can go back to the project and explain &lt;em&gt;in painful detail&lt;/em&gt; exactly what the issue is, and what code has to be excised.  It will be embarrassing and public, and should serve as a useful reminder to you never to do that again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T05:41:51.470" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T05:41:51.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7164" CreationDate="2018-07-26T12:28:05.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is by default not possible to combine Apache-2 licensed code with GPLv2-licensed code. Those licenses are incompatible. The Classpath Exception (CE) does provide a path towards compatibility, as long as the GPLv2+CE code and any other code are &lt;em&gt;independent modules&lt;/em&gt;. According to the CE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You copied some code from the JDK, this is fine under the GPLv2+CE. However, you should take care that this code is clearly separate from your other code (to satisfy the “independent module” requirement), and to properly comply with the GPLv2+CE license. It currently looks like your project might be in violation of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, all the GPL-derived code is in a single class. But it does not appear as an independent module from the rest of your code. I would suggest you move that class to a separate top-level folder, and place it into a separate Java package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the GPL, you will also have to include a copy of the GPL and state which changes you made to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it is misleading to describe the resulting project as Apache-2 licensed, as it includes GPLv2+CE licensed code. This is not at all obvious from the current README or the LICENSE. Your license should accurately describe which parts of the code are available under which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have licensed your &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; properly, we can discuss licensing of binaries (i.e. pre-built JARs). Thanks to the classpath exception is is perfectly fine to publish these under the Apache license or any other license, without restrictions or attribution requirements. Therefore your project can be used in proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since properly complying with the GPLv2+CE takes some effort and complicates your project license, it may be much simpler to find another library that provides base64 encoding under a permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your Base64 dialect only differs from a more standard Base64 encoding by the used character table, you could also just transliterate the base64-encoded data. E.g. if the default character table is &lt;code&gt;AB...ab...89+/&lt;/code&gt; and your table is &lt;code&gt;.-AB...ab...89&lt;/code&gt;, you only have to map the data back to the encoding index and then look up the actual character in your table, no bit shifting required. So basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;private static int getTableIndex(char c) {&#xA;  if ('A' &amp;lt;= c &amp;amp;&amp;amp; c &amp;lt;= 'A') return c - 'A';&#xA;  if ('a' &amp;lt;= c &amp;amp;&amp;amp; c &amp;lt;= 'z') return c - 'a' + 26;&#xA;  if ('0' &amp;lt;= c &amp;amp;&amp;amp; c &amp;lt;= '9') return c - '0' + 52;&#xA;  if (c == '+') return 62;&#xA;  if (c == '/') return 63;&#xA;  throw some exception;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;for (int i = 0 ... string.length)&#xA;  string[i] = yourTable[getTableIndex(string[i])];&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the avoidance of doubt, I wave any copyright or related rights for the above snippet to the fullest extend possible, using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T12:28:05.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T21:44:49.697" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to german law, can one get all copyrights on software derivative if one added enough new code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if yes, how is the &quot;percentage of new code&quot; measured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if yes, are there such paragraphs in other countries law, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(especially usa/england/france/finland/china)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if yes can one allow derivatives without allowing taking all copyrights of a derivative by adding enough new code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12694" LastEditorUserId="12694" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T05:24:43.353" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T08:47:49.987" Title="Can one get all copyrights on derivative software if one add enough new code?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyright|derivative-works|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T20:09:53.297" Score="3" ViewCount="13692" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a commercial wordpress plugin. There is a form module that i have to develop however, i found one already built under GPL2 here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/weDevsOfficial/weforms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/weDevsOfficial/weforms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other modules are developed by me, i just wanted to integrate this form module in it. Can i sell my application if i use this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12729" OwnerDisplayName="Abdullah Khan" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T02:40:49.160" Title="Can i use a GPLv2 module in my commercial application?" Tags="|copyright|software|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7170" CreationDate="2018-07-27T20:44:12.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No version of the GPL forbids selling software.  If you're merging other software with it, the whole thing has to be under GPLv2, so other people can use and distribute it as they like, and you need to provide source code.  This may not fit your business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" OwnerDisplayName="David Thornley" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T20:44:12.157" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7169" CreationDate="2018-07-28T08:47:49.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;German copyright law distinguishes adaption/modification (&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearbeitung_(Urheberrecht)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bearbeitung&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__23.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;§23 UrhG&lt;/a&gt;) and free use  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freie_Benutzung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freie Benutzung&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__24.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;§24 UrhG&lt;/a&gt;) when using older works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Bearbeitung&lt;/em&gt; means that you edit an existing work. The character of the original work is still plainly visible. You hold copyright to your changes, but you need permission from the original copyright holder to publish your modified version. Open-source licenses give such permission, under some conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; means that you create a new work that borrows some characteristics from an older work, but that the character of the new work is independent from the older work. As a work that was created in &lt;em&gt;freier Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; is not a &lt;em&gt;Bearbeitung&lt;/em&gt; it is a completely separate work and does not need permission from the older work's copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, the concept of &lt;em&gt;freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; is the legal basis of parodies and other transformative use cases (compare some aspects of &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; in the U.S.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between these two cases is tricky and is decided on a case by case basis. In some cases, a &lt;em&gt;freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; can even involve verbatim copies of snippets of an older work. What matters is that a &lt;em&gt;freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt; involves an inner distance or critical engagement by the creator with the older work, and that the characteristics of the older work fade away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of open source development, most modifications of existing open source software will be a &lt;em&gt;Bearbeitung&lt;/em&gt;. There is no percentage of changes where the original copyright would disappear. I believe that even 100% changes are not sufficient if the character of the original is still clearly visible. E.g. a complete refactoring and reformatting of a project's source code is most likely a &lt;em&gt;Bearbeitung&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, I would argue that one of my current projects is a &lt;em&gt;Freie Benutzung&lt;/em&gt;: I created an independent project that used some library. I inlined some parts of the library and adapted them to my use case, and over time removed irrelevant functionality. The borrowed code is now structured completely differently, all it has in common with the library is the general problem space and a few variable names. I think my critical examination of the older work satisfies the necessary inner distance, and that the character of the work has changed substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T08:47:49.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1188" CreationDate="2018-07-28T18:08:02.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In section 0 of the GPLv2 license text the meaning of &quot;derivative work&quot; is clarified inside the definition of &quot;work based on the Program&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed&#xA;  under the terms of this General Public License.  The &quot;Program&quot;, below,&#xA;  refers to any such program or work, and a &quot;work based on the Program&quot;&#xA;  means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law:&#xA;  that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it,&#xA;  either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another&#xA;  language.  (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in&#xA;  the term &quot;modification&quot;.)  Each licensee is addressed as &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems like &quot;derivative work&quot;, in this license, is intended to mean &quot;a work containing the Program or a portion of it&quot;. When you link dynamically to a library, your program does not contain the library or any portion of it, other than the names of some symbols. Your program may also use some data structures from the library but that might not count as containing a portion of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 does not mention the word &quot;derivative&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12732" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T18:08:02.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7176" CreationDate="2018-07-29T07:19:25.793" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a website and the website components are one master server and a lot of slave VPS, as usual the VPS providers will rent those servers to me.&#xA;The website will use a module which is under GPLv3 licence.&#xA;Now my question is does copying the module to each VPS considered a distribution given that I don't own those VPS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12735" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T09:21:48.780" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T09:52:04.383" Title="Is renting a vps makes me the owner?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7175" CreationDate="2018-07-29T09:52:04.383" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your software includes GPLv3 modules you can only distribute it under the terms of the GPLv3, and you have correctly noted that it is now relevant to consider whether the given scenario is a kind of distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 doesn't directly talk about distribution, but about &lt;em&gt;propagating&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;conveying&lt;/em&gt; the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So “conveying” is the special case of “propagation” that enables &lt;em&gt;other parties&lt;/em&gt; to make copies. This raises the question whether the VPS provider is such an other party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we come to that, the GPL makes it clear that you can run software that you do not convey, without any restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can copy the software to your servers without any restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that the question is settled at that point. Since you control the VPSes they are effectively your servers. You are not giving your software to the VPS provider, the VPS provider is giving you the VPS and you are then running the software on the VPS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 adds additional clarification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them […] provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if you convey the software to the VPS provider (i.e. give them your software in a way that would enable them to make copies) this will not give them any permissions under the GPLv3, as long as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you “comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright” – i.e. keep the copyright and license notices of the GPLv3 modules intact,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they run the software “exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control” – this should be the case for a VPS, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you and the VPS provider have a contract that “prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you” – something like this should be part of the Terms of Service of any VPS provider anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important that the GPLv3 explicitly allows this because a contract that deprives anyone from exercising their rights under the GPL would usually be a GPL violation (see also “further restrictions” in Section 7). The important part is that VPS providers are not “other parties” in the definition of conveyance, but service providers to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T09:52:04.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7179" CreationDate="2018-07-29T11:07:11.177" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;When in the open source licenses is required to indicate the author, can i use simply the domain of the website (not the company name)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@curiousdannii thanks for point me this other question, but i don't think that answer to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no talking about just for the MIT license, and my request is for use the websites domain, not a general unregistered company. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="11500" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T16:07:24.903" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T15:40:54.057" Title="Can i use website domain as author for open source license?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-07-31T12:31:32.733" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7178" CreationDate="2018-07-30T14:08:19.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, modern copyright law imposes no requirement to include a copyright notice whatsoever. You could include no copyright notice, and your work would be just as covered by copyright law as a work with a copyright notice. So, yes, it's likely fine to use a domain name in any copyright notice that you choose to include, with a few caveats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While your copyright is safely intact regradless, you may be forfeiting some procedural advantage by not using your name or a proper peusdonym. For example, in the U.S., per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 U.S.C. §401(b)&lt;/a&gt;, a valid copyright notice requires&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that a domain name would qualify as an &quot;alternative designation of the owner&quot; (possibly, but I really don't know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if it does not qualify, the consequences of the invalidity of your notice are virtually zero. The only advantage (in the U.S.) follows in §401(d):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(d)Evidentiary Weight of Notice.—&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy [...] then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A valid notice can invalidate an infringer's claim of innocent infringement, and that's really it. You can probably beat a claim of innocent infringement with an almost-valid copyright notice anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A more serious issue is that domain names are often trademarks. Whether registered or not, they signify the source of goods and services. If you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; own the domain you're using (e.g., if I did &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2018 www.google.com&lt;/code&gt; but I don't work for Google) then that could easily be trademark infringement for misrepresenting the source of your code. Of course, you wouldn't tell a baldfaced lie like saying your code came from google.com, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; that issue still might arise if you ever abandon the domain. If you forfeit the registration for your chosen domain and someone else buys it to run a completely different site, your code could be legally problematic for claiming association with some &lt;code&gt;foo.com&lt;/code&gt; when you no longer own &lt;code&gt;foo.com&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-07-30T15:40:54.057" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T15:40:54.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T16:04:50.700" Score="2" ViewCount="2393" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to take some GPLv2 licensed code written by someone else and add code with a BSD-3-Clause license, originally written by someone else. This BSD-code has been modified by me to add some functionality, where some of it uses the GPLv2-code (by calling its functions). I want to combine them to make a larger program. This program as a whole would have GPLv2 as its license but the BSD licensed source files would keep their BSD license so that people can share them (but not the program as a whole) without the GPLv2 requirements. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 allows additional terms to be added, in section 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a&#xA;  covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright&#xA;  permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material&#xA;  you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright&#xA;  holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with&#xA;  terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[List of types of terms one can add]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to do something similar but this is not explicitly permitted in GPLv2. My understanding is that you can still do something similar. The closest I have found in the GPLv2 license text is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole.  If&#xA;  identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program,&#xA;  and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in&#xA;  themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those&#xA;  sections when you distribute them as separate works.  But when you&#xA;  distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based&#xA;  on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of&#xA;  this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the&#xA;  entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote&#xA;  it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it requires the codes to be &quot;reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to do this even if the added BSD-code is not 100% independent (it requires the GPL-code to work correctly)? It can still be somewhat considered a separate work since it was developed as a separate project, but then modified by me and combined with the GPLv2-code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, does that mean that it is impossible to add any permissive-licensed code to GPLv2-code and keep the permissive permissions for the added code, if it is not 100% independent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a way, I would like to know how I can interpret the GPLv2 license text that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;But you can give additional permission for the use of your code. You can, if you wish, release your module under a license which is more lax than the GPL but compatible with the GPL.&quot; It sounds like I can use &quot;additional permissions&quot; just like in GPLv3. Is this correct? Does it not matter how independent the &quot;module&quot; is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12732" LastEditorUserId="12732" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T19:50:06.830" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:05:37.170" Title="Can I combine GPLv2 and BSD-3-Clause code and keep the BSD permissions?" Tags="|license-compatibility|bsd|gpl-2|combined-work|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T03:22:44.080" Score="6" ViewCount="2222" Body="&lt;p&gt;A library I used in my native Visual C++ application was GPLv3-licensed; I found the GPL acceptable, and thus I was planning to make my application GPL-licensed as well. The application depends on Visual C++ runtime DLLs, and I was planning to distribute them with the application. However, I noticed the following paragraphs in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WindowsRuntimeAndGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (bold-facing by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may link your program to these libraries [the Visual C++ (or Visual Basic) runtime library], and distribute the compiled program to others. When you do this, the runtime libraries are “System Libraries” as GPLv3 defines them. That means that you don't need to worry about including their source code with the program's Corresponding Source. GPLv2 provides a similar exception in section 3.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may not distribute these libraries in compiled DLL form with the program.&lt;/strong&gt; To prevent unscrupulous distributors from trying to use the System Library exception as a loophole, the GPL says that libraries can only qualify as System Libraries as long as they're not distributed with the program itself. If you distribute the DLLs with the program, they won't be eligible for this exception anymore; then the only way to comply with the GPL would be to provide their source code, which you are unable to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be an alternative to this? Static linking would seem to present the same problem, and would be a rather difficult change to implement due to other precompiled binaries. I could ask users to install redistributable runtimes if necessary, but this would present an additional hassle to them. More drastic alternatives would include asking the library author about non-GPL usage (possibly involving payment) or using a different library and a non-GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated; I would also appreciate if respondents kept in mind that this is the first application that I am publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12742" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T19:54:44.077" Title="Redistributing MSVC runtime components with GPL application" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|redistribution|microsoft|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7180" CreationDate="2018-07-31T05:54:29.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, I got so frustrated with this question that some time ago I asked a barrister specialising in IP law for his take on how English and Welsh law would most likely approach this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, remember is that licences do not inhere in software.  They are instead accepted by persons (legal and natural) when software is conveyed to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, by analogy with restrictive covenants in land law, there is no reason why the terms of more than one licence cannot simultaneously apply to the conveyance of any given piece of software.  This is not dual-licensing, where you are free to choose which of a menu of licences you will accept a conveyance under (A or B).  This is the application of multiple licences, so that your obligations are the union of those in all the licences (i.e., obligations which appear in any of them apply to you), and your permissions are the intersection of those in all the licences (i.e., only permissions which are in all of them apply to you); that is, A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you take BSD software and combine it with GPL software into a single work, the resulting combination must be distributed under the terms of the GPL (GPLv2 s2b).  That isn't relicensing; it's &lt;em&gt;adding&lt;/em&gt; the requirements of the GPL to those of the BSD licence in regard to the conveyed work.  This is possible because the BSD licence does not forbid it, and because the resulting obligations aren't self-inconsistent and the resulting permissions are non-zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also means that a third party could not take the BSD work back out of the combined work while leaving the obligations of the GPL behind.  However, although the BSD-code-as-modified-by-you is part of this greater work, if it stands alone as a work &lt;em&gt;you are free to distribute it separately&lt;/em&gt; under the terms of e.g. the BSD licence.  People who would like to use it under those terms are free to read in the GPL program's sources that (e.g.) &quot;&lt;em&gt;librobalni is available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://librobalni.example.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://librobalni.example.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and go and get it from you under a BSD licence.  GPLv2 was pretty clear about this, in s2 (italics mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections &lt;em&gt;when you distribute them as separate works&lt;/em&gt;. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible to do this even if the added BSD-code is not 100% independent (it requires the GPL-code to work correctly)? It can still be somewhat considered a separate work since it was developed as a separate project, but then modified by me to combine it with the GPLv2-code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code was developed as a separate project, so it seems to me it's still likely to stand alone.  Adding to it can't have made it smaller.  No library can function without being linked into something, so merely not functioning without some more code is no bar to it being a project in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, although your modified BSD code must also be under the terms of GPL as part of the big project, it can be distributed on its own under just-BSD by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:28:21.937" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:28:21.937" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7182" CreationDate="2018-07-31T09:01:25.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you mean the MS Visual C++ runtime libraries, MS has &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235299.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To deploy redistributable Visual C++ files, you can use the Visual C++ Redistributable Packages (VCRedist_x86.exe, VCRedist_x64.exe, or VCRedist_arm.exe) that are included in Visual Studio.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Visual C++ Redistributable Packages install and register all Visual C++ libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bundle the installer for the Visual C++ redistributables with your package as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293575.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS: Deploying a Visual C++ Application By Using the Visual C++ Redistributable Package&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8949" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T09:01:25.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7207" CreationDate="2018-07-31T09:04:48.877" Score="6" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i include Google Analytics JS code inside a php page GPL licensed (WordPress template), is it ok with GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking beacause I think Google Analytics is not open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T07:38:55.357" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T07:38:55.357" Title="Is Google Analytics compatible with GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7182" CreationDate="2018-07-31T22:50:36.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few potential options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only build with MinGW, which links against the unversioned DLL, which comes with Windows. (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964589&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964589&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find a way to force VS to link against the unversioned DLL.  This may be hard because it is officially frowned upon. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166412/how-to-link-against-msvcrt-dll-instead-of-msvcr100-dll-in-vc-10-0&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10166412/how-to-link-against-msvcrt-dll-instead-of-msvcr100-dll-in-vc-10-0&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=1273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=1273&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the LGPL-licensed DLL from Wine/ReactOS: &lt;a href=&quot;http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls/msvcrt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls/msvcrt&lt;/a&gt;  As long as the program has a copy of the DLL's code in the source, everything should be legal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Re-license under the LGPL, which allows such linking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Something else that I'm not thinking of ;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12746" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T22:50:36.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7189" CreationDate="2018-08-01T00:19:23.937" Score="6" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a person releases their source under some Open source license. And later if another person contributes to the project through a pull request (in Github). Then, does the contributor gets a say if the first person decides to make the software proprietary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the second contributor include a license to their contribution, to prevent misuse of their contribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11038" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T12:48:26.390" Title="Opensource license ownership and collaboration" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|github|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7188" CreationDate="2018-08-01T08:12:22.627" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that the original creator A releases a project under an open source license XYZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that a contributor B contributes code to that project under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the question whether or not the contributor can always choose to make &lt;em&gt;his own source code&lt;/em&gt; proprietary, but whether or not he can make the source code of contributor B proprietary depends on the nature of the license XYZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If XYZ is a permissive license (such as BSD, MIT, ASL), then there is no problem. Creator A can close the source of his project, and the XYZ license allows use of the code contributed by contributor B in a closed source context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If XYZ is a copyleft license (such as GPL, AGPL), then creator A needs explicit permission from contributor B to use the contributions in a closed source context.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I have gone through this exercise with my own project, iText. Originally, iText was released using the MPL/LGPL, but that made it impossible for me to create a business model. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88&quot;&gt;How can large open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt; The lack of revenue almost killed the project (my son was diagnosed with Cancer and I could no longer maintain the project. At some point, the project almost died).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to make the project survive, was to change the license from MPL/LGPL to AGPL, but I couldn't do that without the permission of every person who contributed to the project. Watch &lt;a href=&quot;http://lowagie.com/osi2016&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video&lt;/a&gt; to learn about the IP review that was done to clean up the IP of the iText project. As described in my talk &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slideshare.net/iTextPDF/ianal-what-developers-should-know-about-ip-and-legal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;IANAL: what developers should know about IP and Legal&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (presented at JavaOne in 2015), I had to ask every contributor to sign a CLA before I could change the license. This took a long time (I started the process in 2006; it took me until September 2009 before I could start the license migration process). See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.itextpdf.com/question/versions-older-than-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can iText 2.1.7 / iTextSharp 4.1.6 or earlier be used commercially?&lt;/a&gt; for the history of this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the contributors with substantial code contributions were compensated (either financially or by granting specific rights) for their contributions once iText started generating money. There were some contributors who refused to sign the CLA. Their code was either removed from the codebase (that's how we lost the Rich Text Format part of iText) or refactored (some minor parts of the code were rewritten from scratch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; additionally you might want to read the story about &quot;Patrick&quot; in the Eat Me of the ZeroMQ Guide. It's a great story that tells a truth less experienced open source developers haven't discovered yet, a truth open source users know very little about. Mind the difference I'm making between open source developers (those who create and maintain open source projects) and open source users (those who merely use open source, but don't make substantial contributions to open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2018-08-01T12:48:26.390" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T12:48:26.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7202" CreationDate="2018-08-01T19:47:03.267" Score="9" ViewCount="755" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; does not allow people to impose additional copyright restrictions on top of those that already exist in the terms and conditions of the GPL itself. However, the GPL does allow the &lt;em&gt;original licensor&lt;/em&gt; to grant exceptions or &quot;additional permissions&quot; by waiving some of the terms and conditions imposed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could these exceptions be written in such a way that they apply to only certain individuals, or if certain conditions are met?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example: &quot;green-eye privilege&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider if a program author added the following text to their copyright file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GPL, when a person with GREEN EYES modifies this program, they may distribute their modified version under ANY TERMS of their choosing (i.e. they are not required to distribute their version under the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this exception for green-eyed people (and others like it) be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Aside&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception might be accompanied by the usual non-obligation text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you modify this program, you may extend this exception to your version of the program, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete the exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in the case of the GPL at least, even if not stated, the non-obligation clause &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1662/12751&quot;&gt;would still apply&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12751" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T02:15:17.807" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T14:45:02.833" Title="GPL exceptions that only apply to certain individuals" Tags="|gpl|exceptions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7192" CreationDate="2018-08-01T22:56:16.393" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am starting an open source project that consist of two parts: a program for reading, writing, modifying, and displaying information from file and a standard for the file. Obviously, this project may go nowhere, but in case it does I want to make sure I don't have any legal problems later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the code to be under the GPL 3 library. However, I would like the standards to be open as possible i.e. other software programs, even proprietary ones, to be able to read and write the format. Ideally, they would have to change the name of they want to extend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I set up a project like this? Or at least not wedge myself in a corner where I can't set up my project like this later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12753" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T23:12:51.377" Title="How to license or patent an open standard for a GPL program?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7191" CreationDate="2018-08-01T23:12:51.377" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases, you can't copyright or otherwise get IP protection on a file format so there's not much to worry about here, but if you want to make it as easy as possible for other implementations to exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a &lt;em&gt;specification&lt;/em&gt; for the file format, completely independent of any implementation for reading or writing that format. Release this specification under whatever license you want, even &quot;all rights reserved&quot; (this decision probably depends on how you want to manage updates and extensions to the format). If you really want to, include a statement in the specification that others are encouraged to write implementations to read and write the format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write your GPL code which &lt;em&gt;implements&lt;/em&gt; your specification. Try really hard to ensure that any edge cases are covered in the specification so that people definitely don't have to look at your GPL code in order to interoperate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it's not obvious, the key point here is to separate the specification from the implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T23:12:51.377" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-02T13:20:25.120" Score="4" ViewCount="10250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use Material Design icons provided by Google in my web app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According Apache License I guess I must mention the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Write into footer something like: &quot;All icons are licensed under Apache License&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Write into footer &quot;Web app includes icons from authors A,B,C,D etc. (it is so annoying...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Create page, which includes list of all items under license (so it is not directly in app, but beside)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Must I provide link to license from every single icons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12757" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T02:20:44.257" Title="Using Material Design icons in commercial software" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7208" CreationDate="2018-08-02T18:23:18.877" Score="8" ViewCount="1221" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is true that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7190/12751&quot;&gt;GPL exceptions can be made to apply to some individuals and not others&lt;/a&gt;, could the author of an open source program avoid the hassle of asking contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) by simply granting themself (the original author) additional permissions in relation to contributors' code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As a special exception to the GPL, Joe/Jane Bloggs (the original&#xA;author of Program X) is granted permanent and irrevocable&#xA;permission to use this code for any purpose, and to modify,&#xA;distribute and sublicense it under any terms of his/her choosing.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the principle of &lt;code&gt;inbound = outbound&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;formalised in GitHub's T&amp;amp;Cs&lt;/a&gt;), contributors who send code modifications back to the original project do so under the original project's licensing terms, which would include the exception, thereby granting the original project's lead developer permission to (for instance) change the project license at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, people using the code (and not contributing their changes back upstream) would be free to remove this additional permission from their derivative works, which is equivalent to using a CLA covered program without signing the CLA (but see the next point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Opt-out rather than opt-in&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point is that a license exception is &quot;opt-out&quot; (i.e. it is enabled by default and conscious effort is required to remove it), whereas signing a CLA is &quot;opt-in&quot; (conscious effort is required to sign it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An opt-out system has these advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It reduces effort for first time contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may allow the original project to benefit from downstream bugfixes that could not otherwise be applied (i.e. if the downstream project authors haven't signed the upstream CLA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Common features of CLAs&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Confirmation of ownership/permission&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors confirm that they have right to give contributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i.e. work is their own, or they have permission of the owner (e.g. their employer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Transfer of rights&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Full transfer of copyright to original project author, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors keep copyright, but grant an unlimited license to original project author, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors grant project author permission to change project license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Protection of users&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grant licences for patents (built-in to the GPL v3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Protection of contributors&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No warrantee or guarantee (built-in to the GPL anyway)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can all of the above CLA features be replicated using a GPL exception mechanism?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other CLA features that a GPL exception could not provide?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any risks in using a GPL exception mechanism instead of a CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12751" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T02:14:42.843" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:18:18.887" Title="CLA as an exception to the GPL" Tags="|gpl|contributor-agreements|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-03T16:12:44.647" Score="0" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding licensing of mblock based products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mblock.cc/docs/beginner-s-guide-to-mblock-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The mBlock 5 is a software tool for STEAM education.&lt;/a&gt; It is inspired by Scratch 3.0 and supports graphical and text programming. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scratch.mit.edu/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scratch&lt;/a&gt; is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which kind of license is applicable in both of the following situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I made a product based on the Arduino (open hardware). I also made new extension blocks in mblock that enable kids to program my product. I sell these products.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In another situation I do not sell my product. Instead I teach kids how to use my product along with mblock (along with new blocks that I have created).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short I want to know if I am legally allowed to commercialize my own   product that uses mblock. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12765" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T03:21:31.930" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T03:15:19.853" Title="Can I commercialize my product that uses mblock?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7205" CreationDate="2018-08-03T16:40:50.247" Score="3" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a database library in Java which is licensed under the GPLv3, and I want to include the MySQL JDBC driver in it, which is licensed under the GPLv2. Are there any restrictions stopping me from distributing the driver inside of my project? Should I include the license for it as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12872" OwnerDisplayName="Termer" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T02:47:43.693" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T22:42:51.317" Title="Can software licensed under the GPLv2 be included in GPLv3 software?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|gpl-2|redistribution|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2018-08-04T01:53:07.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would not be a Free license - discrimination against (or FOR) persons, groups, or field of work means it is non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do - if the code is all yours - is to dual license it.  Post it via GPL for whoever to use, and on your website simply state &quot;green eyed redheads can contact us for alternative licensing&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T01:53:07.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7197" CreationDate="2018-08-04T02:21:41.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scratch is licensed under the GPLv2, as long as you comply with the GPL terms you can do what you want. In simple terms, you must make your source code modifications available to any users of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mblock is a fork of scratch it is also bound by the same GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no restrictions on you charging for your time teaching users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can sell a hardware product that has the software bundled with it, as long as the source is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="9558" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T03:15:19.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T03:15:19.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2018-08-04T04:09:14.510" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably not in compliance with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Free Software Guidelines&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, both of which prohibit discrimination against persons or groups. However, your case is interesting because even in the most restrictive case, it's still the normal GPL. Your discriminating clause imposes one of two states, and each state by itself would be in compliance with FLOSS definitions. This is kind of similar to the question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5776/50&quot;&gt;Why is the Non-Profit Open Software License (NPOSL) OSI-approved?&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm unsure if it's directly analogous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already suggested, you could avoid this issue by keeping your permissions for green-eyed people as a separate license and only offering it to green-eye people. Alternatively, since the exception is removable, any person concerned about its status as a free software license may simply remove the exception, as allowed for any GPL exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours terms are probably &lt;em&gt;legally valid&lt;/em&gt; (i.e., they do not cause inconsistency with any other term of the GPL) since they only introduce new permissions. Section 7 if the GPLv3 invalidates additional &lt;em&gt;restrictive&lt;/em&gt; terms, but allows additional permissive terms, which are defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each person in the world, your proposed term is either permissive or neutral -- people with non-green eyes do not encounter any restriction to the normal GPL terms, while green-eyed people enjoy additional permissions on top of their normal GPL rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that your terms allow any green-eyed person to redistribute the work under fully permissive terms for people of any eye color. If any green-eyed person has an interest in doing so, then the software will rapidly become available for everyone under both GPL and permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T17:54:05.007" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T17:54:05.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-04T16:38:28.590" Score="6" ViewCount="972" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT License says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a few repositories do not have any copyright notice, while it is published under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webpack/tapable&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;tapable&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says it is under MIT License in package.json. It does not have copyright notice or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder how I can follow MIT License.&#xA;Should I write new copyright notice for &lt;code&gt;tapable&lt;/code&gt; by myself?&#xA;Can I skip including copyright notice of &lt;code&gt;tapable&lt;/code&gt;?&#xA;Or can’t I use this much popular library legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;code&gt;tapable&lt;/code&gt; does have copyright notice in its source code actually. But, how about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mjackson/resolve-pathname&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;resolve-pathname&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? This is also well-used as a dependee of the latest version of &lt;code&gt;react-router&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12774" LastEditorUserId="12774" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T13:55:22.987" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:55:08.317" Title="How to use software published under MIT without copyright notice?" Tags="|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2018-08-04T22:16:22.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there may not be a top-level &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; for or similar, each JavaScript file in that repository both links to the &quot;canonical&quot; copy of the MIT License at opensource.org and contains a copyright line. Combined with the assertion in &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;, the intention of the author is more than clear; I would be more than happy to use the package, borrowing the copyright line from that stated in any of the JavaScript files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other obvious option is to submit a pull request which adds the license file; that would remove all ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T22:16:22.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7199" CreationDate="2018-08-04T22:42:51.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot include GPLv2 software in a GPLv3 product, as the GPLv3 is incompatible with the GPLv2 as it introduces additional restrictions in the distribution of the software (e.g. the anti-Tivoization clause) which is forbidden by the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; GPL projects are licensed under &quot;the GPL version X or (at your option) any later version&quot;. If this is the case for the code you're looking at, you can use that provision to include the code under the GPLv3. Note that this provision is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; universal - most famously, Linux does not have this provision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it gets complicated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the MySQL JDBC Connector is licensed under the GPLv2 only - see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-j/blob/release/5.1/src/com/mysql/jdbc/interceptors/ResultSetScannerInterceptor.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt; so at first glance you cannot include this is in a GPLv3 program. However, Oracle also make the connector available under their &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal FOSS Exception&lt;/a&gt;, which allows the code to be used with any license approved by the FSF as a free license; the GPLv3 clearly falls into this category, so I think you can distribute it in a GPLv3 program. But I'm not a lawyer and Oracle are... not necessarily friendly to the open source community so please don't base anything on this answer without taking to a lawyer first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T22:42:51.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7213" CreationDate="2018-08-05T06:53:50.367" Score="5" ViewCount="1233" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question might be naive but wanted to clarify this anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see software being published as open source. Take for example Signal. We can audit the software since its public. But how do we verify if the code that gets deployed in their actual servers are same as the one available in their public code repositories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly concerned about things like data privacy and security. Let's say the open source version of an application (e.g. Signal) collects very little of my data. But unless I can verify if the same code has been deployed on to their servers, I cannot be sure. Signal may have another private code repository which may be doing much more than what is publicly available in their repo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said this, how do I make sure the software running in Signal's server is same as the one available in its public code repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12776" LastEditorUserId="12776" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T17:12:31.667" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T23:37:45.760" Title="How do we verify if the code deployed in same as the one published?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7185" CreationDate="2018-08-05T09:14:19.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Google Analytics (GA) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; clearly state that GA is not under a GPL-compatible license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; (a) Google grants You a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable license to install, copy and use the GATC solely as necessary for You to use the Service on Your Properties or Third Party's Properties; and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; (b) […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You will not&lt;/strong&gt; (and You will not allow any third party to)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; (i) &lt;strong&gt;copy, modify, adapt,&lt;/strong&gt; translate or otherwise create derivative works of the Software or the Documentation;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;emsp; (ii) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software, except as expressly permitted by the law in effect in the jurisdiction in which You are located;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp; (iii) rent, lease, sell, assign or otherwise transfer rights in or to the Software, the Documentation or the Service; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(line breaks, emphasis, and ellipsis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore not possible to create a work that is derived from both GPL-licensed software and GA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the question is whether merely linking to GA with a &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script src=&quot;...&quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; even creates a derived work. In particular, what aspects of a web page constitute a copyrightable work, and when is a web page distributed/conveyed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31XNT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/31XNT.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wordpress PHP code outputs some HTML. This HTML is transmitted to the client where it is parsed into a DOM. This DOM can also include the GA tracking code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to argue that the PHP templates copy large parts of themselves into the HTML output, therefore the HTML is a derived work of the Wordpress PHP code and inherits the GPL. Fortunately, that does not seem to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If the HTML were subject to the GPL, note that the GPL would here behave more like the AGPL, and you would have to offer the source code of Wordpress and any plugins to your visitors. It would also mean that any content in that HTML (such as blog posts) would have to be published under a GPL-compatible license. Wordpress licensing has never been understood like this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can therefore conclude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only the PHP code on the server is subject to the GPL. Its output is not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The HTML and DOM may include GPL fragments such as individual scripts or images, but is not in its entirety subject to the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The HTML and DOM may include works that are not GPL-compatible, such as images, literary works, and also a GA tracking code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The important part is that the GPL'ed PHP code is not derived from the GA-TC. You cannot bundle the GA code with a Wordpress template/plugin. However, it may be fine to link to GA. It is definitively fine to make local modifications to the templates/plugins that link to GA, if you do not distribute these modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T09:14:19.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7195" CreationDate="2018-08-05T12:18:18.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A CLA as a GPL extension may be possible, but provides no particular advantages. This answer will only discuss GPLv3, as it includes an explicit mechanism for additional terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;GPLv3 additional permissions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy[… .]  You may place additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work, for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms: [of which none apply here]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggested “exception” is de facto a completely separate permissive but non-free license. As you have written it it does not seem to introduce non-permissive terms. Users can strip these permissions away so GPL-compatibility is maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an extension therefore &lt;strong&gt;seems to be valid&lt;/strong&gt;, as far as the GPL is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Compatibility considerations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But license compatibility is not a symmetric relation. Let “→” (“can be used in” or “is compatible with”) be the license-compatibility relation. Then (GPLv3 + your permissions) → GPLv3 is maintained. However, GPLv3 → (GPLv3 + your permissions) is not possible. Consider for example a different GPLv3 exception: the LGPLv3. You similarly cannot use GPLv3 code in LGPLv3 code. A resulting combination must be licensed under GPLv3 without these additional permissions. Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would be inaccurate to describe your project as GPLv3-licensed. More precisely, it would be under a GPLv3-compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you will be unable to benefit from the GPLv3 library ecosystem as your license is incompatible in that direction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What would be the differences to a CLA?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None. You have just chosen an unusual legal mechanism. And just because GitHub has codified “inbound = outbound” and you have phrased the inbound license as part of the outbound license does not mean that this CLA mechanism is legally valid – neither the GPL nor the GH ToS are above the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to think a CLA-as-GPL-extension would be opt-out rather than opt-in with these advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It reduces effort for first time contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It may allow the original project to benefit from downstream bugfixes that could not otherwise be applied (i.e. if the downstream project authors haven't signed the upstream CLA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the GPL extension mechanism does not open new possibilities you wouldn't otherwise have with respect to CLAs. Given any other license you could also note in the license document that any contributions are understood to implicitly accept a CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, a CLA is useless if not affirmed explicitly (see below)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downstream projects are free to strip your extra permissions away, in which case you cannot include their contributions (see license compatibility discussion above). By using the GPL extra permissions mechanism, you no longer sit at the top of a licensing “food chain” like the standard GPLv3 does. (Well, technically the AGPLv3 sits highest.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why CLAs should be explicitly signed.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The signature of a CLA is a feature, not a bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You as the recipient of extra rights want to be able to demonstrate your &lt;strong&gt;due diligence&lt;/strong&gt; in obtaining these rights. Anyone can say “well yeah they implicitly accepted my CLA”. But can you &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; this in a court if accused of copyright infringement? Even if any infringement was accidental, reworking your software to eliminate the infringement can be costly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are &lt;em&gt;risks&lt;/em&gt;, and a CLA helps minimize these risks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By asking users to confirm that they hold the copyright for their contributions (and not e.g. their employers) you reduce the risk of accidental infringement. Here the important part is that contributors are actively alerted to the importance of this step. Hiding these requirements in a license document that looks like the GPL (but isn't!) doesn't help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By obtaining a signature and contact information, you are creating a paper trail that you can use to prove non-infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, a Developer Certificate of Origin could also provide these benefits, to some degree. A CLA goes further by additionally signing over some rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this part is extremely tricky, because it depends on the copyright laws of the applicable jurisdictions. CLAs for international projects &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; professional legal advice. Thanks to the internet, every open source project is effectively international.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of what could go wrong, consider what happens if I (living in Germany) were to contribute to your project, and you assumed that I implicitly accepted your special license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GPL, Joe/Jane Bloggs (the original&#xA;  author of Program X) is granted permanent and irrevocable&#xA;  permission to use this code for any purpose, and to modify,&#xA;  distribute and sublicense it under any terms of his/her choosing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that license you have not exhaustively enumerated the ways in which ways you might use my contributions. This case is discussed in German copyright law in §31a UrhG (translated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&#xA;  (1) A contract through which the author grants or obliges to grant rights for unknown usage categories, requires written form. The written form is not required if the author grants a nonexclusive license free of charge to the public. The author can revoke the grant of rights or the obligation thereto. The right of revocation ends three months after the other has sent them a notification of intended usage to their last known address. […]&#xA;  (4) The rights in sections 1 through 3 can not be waived in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So amusingly a public license like the GPL has much more legal flexibility than a non-public license, such as your CLA that only grants rights for a specific recipient. Under German law you would have to notify contributors if you want to use their contributions in an unanticipated way, and they may decline you that right (although they are required to exercise this right in good faith, under certain circumstances). This would e.g. require you to maintain contact information of all (German) contributors, which can also lead to extra requirements under the GDPR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term “Schriftform” (“written form”) is a specific legal term that is defined in §126 BGB (translated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&#xA;  (1) If the law prescribes the written form, the document must be signed below by the signatory's own hand […]. (3) The written form can be substituted by the electronic form, if the law doesn't say otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… where the electronic form consists of a name plus a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_electronic_signature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qualified electronic signature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar requirements would exist if you want to obtain exclusive rights from the contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The consequence of all of this is that contributions from a German contributor under a kind of CLA or pseudo-CLA would be effectively toxic for your project unless&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your CLA was carefully crafted to avoid these problems, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have collected any required contact information and signatures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An implicit CLA is unlikely to be sufficient, but in fact makes it likely that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; would accidentally perform copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other jurisdictions will likely also have copyright laws that are non-trivial to navigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing is difficult, even more so in an international context. Your idea to use the GPLv3 exception mechanism for a CLA might be fine regarding the GPL, but does not give you any benefits of an explicitly signed CLA. In particular this doesn't give you a paper trail to demonstrate that you hold the necessary licenses, and may be unsuitable to grant you additional rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T12:18:18.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4868" CreationDate="2018-08-05T16:19:43.980" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've covered a few of practical uses for attaching a license like the WTFPL in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7163/8188&quot;&gt;a response&lt;/a&gt; to a similar but more pointed question. The claim CC0 is more liberal is incorrect as CC0 comes with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/cc0-1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;number of limitations&lt;/a&gt; the WTFPL doesn't have such as limitations on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patent use;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warranty;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademark use; and,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Liability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact WTFPL has no restrictions whatsoever other than to change the license name if the license is changed. It's is also useful if you plan to dual-license software and don't want to fall into the permissive license attribution landmine, or copyleft just yet. And since there's no “Public Domain” dedication WTFPL may can make sense in jurisdictions where some law isn't recognized just yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you get sued? Sure. But putting a disclaimer in any license doesn't change the fact anyone may sue you at anytime for any reason. BUT IF YOU WANT YOUR UNCONDITIONAL LICENSE TO SCREAM A LITTLE &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause_license_(&amp;quot;Zero_Clause_BSD&amp;quot;)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; WILL GIVE YOU JUST THAT. PRACTICALLY SPEAKING.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastEditorUserId="8188" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T17:47:16.640" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T17:47:16.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7212" CreationDate="2018-08-06T09:30:58.140" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to enable SSL for Rocket.Chat. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rocket.chat/docs/installation/manual-installation/configuring-ssl-reverse-proxy/#running-behind-a-caddy-reverse-proxy-with-free-ssl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; I found that I can do it with Caddy. I have never used Caddy before. Personal license &lt;a href=&quot;https://caddyserver.com/products/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; says Caddy is free only for non-commercial use. And Caddy has open source too under Apache License 2.0 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether commercial license is needed for running Rocket.Chat behind a Caddy Reverse Proxy. Please point out if it is too naive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12785" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T10:38:30.687" Title="Can I use Caddy in Rocket.Chat snap for free?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7211" CreationDate="2018-08-06T10:38:30.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That website makes it very clear that the Apache license only applies to the source code, not to the official binaries on the Caddy download page. We can't tell you whether the personal license of the official binaries would fit your use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license does not prohibit you from using the software commercially. You may run the software for any purpose. To obtain Caddy under the Apache license, compile the software yourself or obtain binaries from some other provider (for example, the “release” tab on GitHub).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T10:38:30.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7206" CreationDate="2018-08-06T17:30:08.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You simply can't do this, unless they granted you login access to their production servers. In other words, you cannot verify the behavior of any server you do not control. Also, unless they built their service using AGPL-licensed code, they do not have a legal obligation to expose the actual code of their service. (See the end of this answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Signal and other security-oriented applications, you shouldn't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to do this: a securely-designed client should already assume worst-case behavior by any host outside of the user's control. Since the client application encrypts messages before it sends them to the server, a compromised (or otherwise malicious) server cannot do anything worse than simply refuse to deliver messages in a timely fashion. Even in the worst case, a service that only has access to encrypted messages cannot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;read encrypted messages sent by clients, nor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;misdirect messages to other recipients (as those wrong recipients would not be able to decrypt the messages), nor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;replay past messages (since a well-designed protocol will use nonces or sequence numbers to uniquely identify messages).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose a malicious operator could gather metadata about who is talking to whom, but this could be done simply by looking at their own system log files, without any modification to their service's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if any part of the service is based on code licensed under the Affero GPL (AGPL), the server operators have a license obligation to share the source of their deployed service. Of course, there is no way to know that this is done honestly; it is not possible to definitely prove that their deployed code matches the code that they share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T23:37:45.760" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T23:37:45.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2018-08-08T10:31:26.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not need to explicitly include the licence in the footer nor create a separate page for it.  In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://google.github.io/material-design-icons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Material Icons Guide&lt;/a&gt; it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have made these icons available for you to incorporate them into your products under the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License Version 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. Feel free to remix and re-share these icons and documentation in your products. We'd love attribution in your app's &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; screen, but it's not required. The only thing we ask is that you not re-sell the icons themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using the icons in a web app, so there is no installer or other redistributable package, where you would be required to include a file containing the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider that in an Android or iOS application, where the app is downloaded and installed to the device, the icons can also be used but there is no way to include a separate notice... In those cases you would likely include the notice within the source code, perhaps in the main class, so that if the package were to be decomposed then the notice would be visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it says, attribution in the &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; screen would be appreciated but not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8949" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T10:31:26.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7216" CreationDate="2018-08-08T16:13:49.343" Score="4" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I look at a project under MPL 1.1. Can I take the source and re-distribute it under MPL 2.0 without any modification or contribution? That is, I am not a contributor (not the initial, not in the past, not in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other licenses (Apache) seem to state clearly the unmodified parts (in this context: all parts) retain their original license. For MPL 1.1 -&gt; 2.0 (or any other license), I miss such a statement. Is there a difference between a version upgrade (1.1 -&gt; 2.0) and a license change (MPL 1.1 -&gt; Apache).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12805" LastActivityDate="2022-12-01T11:00:56.190" Title="MPL 1.1: Re-distribute under MPL 2.0 without modification" Tags="|relicensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7215" CreationDate="2018-08-08T18:39:13.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle, different versions of license X are different licenses. This means that a &quot;version upgrade&quot; of a license should in principle be treated as a license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some licenses explicitly contain provisions for version upgrades. In that case, a version upgrade of the license can be applied at any time by anyone who legally obtained a copy of the code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The MPL license contains such an version upgrade clause, but the Apache license does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T18:39:13.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T02:55:51.693" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, Cheerp is a tool in a similar way it is GCC, licensed with GPLv2. The license applies to the work reached by the copy rights, but not for use restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as one does not distribute it (as code or object) with the programs created, the resulting program is not restricted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My confusion arieses with the text in the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As parts of Cheerp are licensed under GPLv2, a copyleft license, if you distribute your application you must provide your users access to its sources under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is true if the application is a derivative work of a GPLv2 work, Cheerps in this case. But it is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the following addition looks like a violation of GPLv2, because adds up use restrictions to the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are using Cheerp for developing closed-source, commercial applications you must purchase a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you don't distribute a GPLv2 program with &lt;strong&gt;the same license&lt;/strong&gt; (pure GPLv2, without additional restrictions), you are violating the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: I think that you can't add a use restriction to a GPLv2 licensed program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 26/08/2018: What is beyond this question is if it can be used to create applications without restriction (as I understand that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/458/madhatter&quot;&gt;@MadHatter&lt;/a&gt; said). Or if it is not (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/9558/sambler&quot;&gt;@curiousdannii&lt;/a&gt; said), what it is necessary to accomplish that if there is something that can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4529" LastEditorUserId="4529" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T05:02:37.217" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T06:44:59.590" Title="Is this restriction of Cheerp community edition in violation of GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl-2|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7217" CreationDate="2018-08-09T05:41:26.007" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.leaningtech.com/cheerp/buy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original page&lt;/a&gt; (and as a side-note it would be helpful if you were to provide links in your questions), what is going on is not a licence violation, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing#Single-Vendor_Commercial_Open_Source_Business_Model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual licensing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cheerp is distributed as a Free and Open Source Software under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (core compiler) and under the GNU General Public License v2 (libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the people distributing cheerp are also the copyright holders to the entire project.  They will let you have it under a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:IllinoisNCSA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NCSA/Illinois&lt;/a&gt; and GPLv2, but they remind you that if you get it on that basis and you want to develop a derivative product, then the GPLv2 bits of cheerp and derivatives thereof have to remain GPLv2 in your derivative.  NCSA/Illinois is a weak copyleft licence, and doesn't have a similar requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also say that if you want to develop a closed, proprietary product based on cheerp, that they have a commercial license that you can buy from them, which (presumably) will permit that.  A number of big free-software projects run on this basis; it may not be universally loved, but it's perfectly respectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: in response to your comment above: &lt;em&gt;normally&lt;/em&gt; the licence on a program doesn't control the output of that program, because copyright law doesn't consider the output of a program to be a derivative of that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not always true in the case of compilers, which often include some significant part of themselves in the output.  As sambler notes above, gcc does, and so it comes with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a licence exception&lt;/a&gt; to release compiler output from the licence requirements of the compiler itself.  GNU Bison behaves similarly, and has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_bison#A_GPL-compatible_licence_is_not_required&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a similar exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, the cheerp compiler also does, but they ask you to pay for the exception those other compilers give for nothing.  This is a perfectly lawful business model.  If I were going to compile code into a binary that I intended to release under a proprietary licence, I'd think long and hard before using cheerp: but the details of that internal discussion are off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T06:44:59.590" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T06:44:59.590" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T20:12:51.480" Score="0" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not sure if this question makes sense here although in my point of view it does. Otherwise I would be happy to post it in the right SO.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scope&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to rise a few scenarios concerning licensing obligations under the perspective of components and libraries usages. I will not talk about code language or package management but how would be the best (or close enough to it) approach to fulfill the component licensing obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenarios&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below I will describe a few usage scenarios and I would like to get your feedback/answer how to deal with the obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; An internal team &lt;em&gt;XPTO&lt;/em&gt; developed a component using an open-source component who obligates who use it to open their code publicly. Other teams from this same company are using this component in final projects that will be published in online stores. &lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Who must to open their source code? The internal component from &lt;em&gt;XPTO&lt;/em&gt; team or the projects from other teams?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; An internal team &lt;em&gt;XYZ&lt;/em&gt; developed a back-end REST API based on an open-source framework who demands the usage projects to make a quote about this framework in the about view. This REST API has no friendly interface once is consume exclusively by a project who will be publish in an online store. &lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How to properly quote this framework? In an static land-page for the REST API if accessed by browser? In the about of the project consumer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short I would like to know how far the responsibility of the obligations would be scaled to the usage projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12817" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T07:39:17.577" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T07:39:17.577" Title="Third-party component licensing obligations, usage and obligations scale" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7219" CreationDate="2018-08-09T20:33:27.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the exact licenses. There isn't a general answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scenario 1 – indirect library usage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume we have a third party library that was licensed under the GPL, an “XTPO” component using this library, and some application using the XTPO-component as a library. Then the component and the application are derived works of the GPL library. They can only be published under the terms of the GPL. You may not add additional licensing terms. Note that this is incompatible with some online stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using software components under so-called copy-left licenses such as the GPL is therefore only suitable if you are OK with publishing your derived software under the same license, or if you are OK with not publishing your software at all (purely internal use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to publish without fulfilling the terms of a copyleft license, the only legal alternative is to replace the copyleft components with replacements under a different license. It is best to check libraries for a suitable license before you start depending on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scenario 2 – attribution over a network&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carefully read the license to determine which kind of attribution is required under what circumstances. It is unusual that REST APIs would have to disclose any open source components, unless AGPL-licensed components are involved. If the license in question only requires attribution, providing this attribution in the API documentation would be the usual approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T20:33:27.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7222" CreationDate="2018-08-10T01:00:50.520" Score="5" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Reposted in here because this is the more correct section.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the situation is this: I run a project which is a fork of an emulator licensed under GPL v2, my fork respects that and has not changed the license. Last year, a contributor joined my team and then this year, he quit the team due to a disagreement. He then forked my project.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now the things he did that I am concerned about are two:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. He relicensed his fork as BSD 3-clause, keeping individual GPL v2 licensed files GPL v2, but changing the overall project license - is that allowed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. On his fork's website, he is distributing Linux binaries of his fork but has to this day not released the source code of the Linux-specific parts, claiming on his site that he is going to as soon as he deems it ready for release - is that allowed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12820" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T07:38:54.257" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T07:38:54.257" Title="Relicensing a fork of a GPL project and source code distribution requirements" Tags="|licensing|gpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7221" CreationDate="2018-08-10T03:22:39.160" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the project includes GPLv2-licensed parts, the entire work must be distributed under the GPLv2. It is true that a downstream modifier is free to say, &quot;If you use &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; code that I contributed to this GPL project in isolation, you may do so under this BSD license,&quot; but the software as a whole must be under GPLv2 as long as it contains someone else's GPLv2 work. Section 2(b) requires of derivatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certainly this is not allowed. Section 3 governs the conditions under which licensees may distribute the software in binary form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other options, but they all involve offering the source code for the distributed binary. A vague promise to release the source at some point in the future does not satisfy any option of this requirement. If the downstream author does not feel ready to release their source code, they can simply wait to release the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T11:40:39.287" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T11:40:39.287" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T23:23:43.150" Score="5" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote some software (a simple command-line utility) and released the source code under the following zlib-style open source license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,&#xA;  including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it&#xA;  freely. This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied&#xA;  warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software uses a third-party library which is released under a dual AGPLv3/commercial license model, i.e. I can use the library for free under the AGPL or I can purchase a commercial license.  I chose to use the library under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor (copyright holder) of the library objected to this on the grounds that my zlib-style license is not compatible with the AGPL.  I proposed to the vendor that I would dual-license my code under both the existing zlib-style license and under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor replied that I cannot dual-license my source code, because my source code will not compile without their library, and is therefore a composite work which must be licensed under the AGPL only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that while this would apply to a compiled version of my software (which was compiled against their library and links to it at runtime), there is no such restriction on my source code itself, because simply using an API whose implementation is licensed under the AGPL cannot impose license terms on the API user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I intend to distribute a compiled binary version of my software to a client, and I have no problem licensing that binary under the AGPL only and complying with its terms; my only concern is that I would like the source code to remain available under its existing zlib-style license as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12827" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T08:00:34.837" Title="Does using an AGPLv3-licensed library prevent me from dual-licensing my own source code?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7224" CreationDate="2018-08-11T07:18:25.600" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that you use your own license, rather than a well-known open-source license complicates matters a bit. I am not a lawyer, but your license looks close enough to the actual zlib license that basing my analysis on the zlib license should give the same outcome. I would urge you to adopt a well-known license, which could be the actual zlib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF considers the zlib license to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ZLib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, and in my opinion the your license is equally compatible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The library vendor might think the licenses are incompatible because the zlib license does not require derived products to remain open-source, but the restrictions of the GPL are not required to be present in the other license for them to be compatible, as long as that other license does not forbid those restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that your choice of license is legally sound, but it can lead to an interesting situation if you are not careful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an application depends, directly &lt;em&gt;or indirectly&lt;/em&gt;, on a library that is under the (A)GPL license, then the terms and conditions of the (A)GPL license apply to the entire application and also to the parts that are not explicitly licensed under the (A)GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With your permissive license, it can be that a client of you is not aware enough of the dependency on the third-party AGPL library and they create a closed-source application with your library that is in violation of the AGPL. The library vendor will naturally avoid this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing your library is not an answer to the problem described above, because dual-licensing allows your clients to choose which license they want to apply and they still can get into the situation of accidentally violating the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better solution is to avoid distributing the third-party library along with your library. Instead, in your documentation you would inform your clients that they need to obtain a copy of the library directly from the vendor and that they have to choose between an AGPL or a commercially-licensed version.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Your zlib(-style) license is compatible with both options, and your clients must make a deliberate choice if they are willing to abide by the AGPL or if they are going to pay to keep their sources private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T07:18:25.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7228" CreationDate="2018-08-12T18:01:27.683" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my project, I have copied and used code from two other projects, one of which is licensed under GPLv3 and the other one has an MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license should I use for my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12836" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T20:29:12.573" Title="Used code from two differnetly licensed projects - which license should I use for mine?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7227" CreationDate="2018-08-12T20:29:12.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because your project includes GPLv3 code, you can only publish your project if you offer it under the GPLv3 license. The relevant part of the GPLv3 is in section 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, […] provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License […].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the MIT license has no comparable requirement. It only requires that you attribute the original project appropriately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you inherit the GPLv3 license from the other project, you do have a couple of extra points to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the original project licensed under the GPLv3 or the GPLv3 “or any later version” (GPLv3+)? If later versions are allowed you have the choice of keeping it that way, or only allowing the GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the GPLv3 was augmented with extra permissions (see section 7) you may remove them, at your choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the GPLv3 was augmented to require certain notices to be preserved, you must do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While your project as whole must be available under the GPLv3, specific parts of it may be under a more permissive license (e.g. parts that you wrote entirely by yourself or parts that are under the MIT). If you want to keep it this way, it is best to track the licensing status on a file by file basis (e.g. by a license comment in the file header). If you accept outside contributions, make it clear that individual files have a more permissive license. I would also note this in a LICENSE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T20:29:12.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6591" CreationDate="2018-08-13T11:56:30.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you only internally use the library meaning only people within your corporation are (indirectly) using it, you do not have to distribute the source (even not your employees), because you are not redistributing (selling or giving away a software product that includes the library) outside of your organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But please note that when using the library as part of an network-accessible service: &lt;strong&gt;AGPL != GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. This is one of the differences between AGPL and GPL. So if external users have the possibility to access the service you have to supply the source and obey all other license requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your edit:&#xA;That depends - your service may read any other publicly available file in the internet, no problem. If you do not expose your service to the public you are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basically you have to ask yourself:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a chance that one of your (*Text) generated PDFs (and this is visible in the META information of each generated / edited PDF) is floating around outside your company?&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: As correctly indicated by amon the output itself does not fall under AGPL since there is no source contained. So it is basically all about the reachability of your service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastEditorUserId="12842" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T11:16:48.017" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T11:16:48.017" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7231" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:04:15.640" Score="5" ViewCount="6513" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was originally asked on Stack Overflow but since licensing questions are &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/274963/questions-about-licensing&quot;&gt;off topic&lt;/a&gt; I move it here. So here comes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8705697/itext-2-1-7-in-commercial-project&quot;&gt;original question&lt;/a&gt; about this open source library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use the Java PDF Library iText in a commercial Project (for generating simple PDF reports), which is distributed as CDs. I don't plan to change the original source-code from iText &amp;ndash; just using it. So as far as I know it uses the AGPL after Version 2.1.7 , but before it uses MPL/LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use it in my commercial Project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I choose which licence to use (MPL/LGPL)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to ship the licence texts or do I need to ship the Source code (from iText) too?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it okay if I wrap everything in one Exe-File or do I need to have the iText jar in a separate Folder?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to mention the use of iText inside my Program (like a Info message or something) ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2019-04-08T05:01:32.827" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T08:56:11.437" Title="iText 2.1.7 in commercial Project" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7230" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:06:46.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;And the answer was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, please note, I am not a lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For iText LGPL/MPL version 2.1.7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can I use it in my commercial Project? A: Yes if you comply with LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can I choose which licence to use (MPL/LGPL)? A: There is no &amp;quot;choosing&amp;quot; the license is LGPL/MPL. You can however choose to comply to the LGPL license OR to comply to MPL license (which better suits your needs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Is it enough to ship the licence texts or do I need to ship the Source code (from iText) too? A: E.g. a download link should suffice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Do I need to mention the use of iText inside my Program (like a Info message or something)? A: Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For iText AGPL version &amp;gt; 5.X / 7.X&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can I use it in my commercial Project? A: Yes if you open source your whole project (thus also AGPL it) otherwise no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can I choose which licence to use (MPL/LGPL)? A: There is no &amp;quot;chosing&amp;quot; the license is what it is: AGPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Is it enough to ship the licence texts or do I need to ship the Source code (from iText) too? A: You have to supply the whole sourcode of everything - but a download link should suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Q: Do I need to mention the use of iText inside my Program (like a Info message or something)? A: Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you should still use an old version of iText (pre 5.X) is a totally different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastEditorUserId="12842" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T08:56:11.437" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T08:56:11.437" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7233" CreationDate="2018-08-13T14:09:39.787" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used an unfree license, but I made a copy paste mistake, declaring that the licnesed stuff is &quot;free software&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that legally binding = does it grant the licensee the three fos freedoms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Here the whole License&amp;amp;Purpose.txt file, holding, well, license, purpose, and copy paste mistake.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright and License of the mod this file is in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;===================================================================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2016 KGM : Kai Gerd Müller &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mod is part of the LOTH Minetest subgame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It most likely won't run within any other subgame than LOTH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is free software.&lt;/strong&gt; It comes without any warranty,&#xA; to the extent permitted by applicable law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are any bugs, please tell me about on Minetest Forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0 . you are allowed to use this mod for personal use only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.(taken out of gnu GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright&#xA; holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The&#xA; &quot;Program&quot;, below, refers to any such program or work, and a &quot;work based on the Program&quot; means&#xA; either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing&#xA; the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into&#xA; another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term&#xA; &quot;modification&quot;.) Each licensee is addressed as &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are allowed to create derivative works for personal use only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not allowed to distribute any copy or work based on this programm unless the copyright&#xA; holder declares his consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12694" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T15:30:56.037" Title="Is declaring something one made as &quot;free software&quot; legally binding?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|free-software-definition|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7232" CreationDate="2018-08-13T15:30:56.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should certainly remove the statement from your distribution going forward, but here are several points to consider to put your mind at ease about your past mistake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Free software&quot; is not a legal term of art, and has two common meanings even in everyday usage: the English word &quot;free&quot; admits both &quot;freedom-respecting software&quot; and &quot;software available without cost&quot; as possible meanings. Indeed, even the sense of &quot;freedom-respecting software&quot; has multiple interpretations; for instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Free Software Guidelines&lt;/a&gt; are more specific than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation's original four-point definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the category of free software licenses is a broad one, including both permissive and copyleft licenses. A free license may impose any requirements that do not conflict with the free software definition, so even the more specific claim, &quot;This software license is in compliance with the FSF's free software definition,&quot; communicates some information, but does not even begin to communicate the specific rights and requirements of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somewhat analogously, the statement, &quot;This object is a vehicle,&quot; tells me something about that object's abilities, but does not even tell me if it moves via land, water, or air.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't explicitly granted the FSF's four freedoms in your license terms, merely saying &quot;This is free software&quot; does not grant any rights. However, such a statement will be &lt;em&gt;confusing&lt;/em&gt; (and will appear deceitful) for people who have an exception that such a statement would be accompanied by an FSF-compliant free-software license grant. If you do not wish to make such a grant, it is a very good idea to remove your statement, but you do not need to worry about having unintentionally licensed specific rights by accidentally making such a statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T15:30:56.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7235" CreationDate="2018-08-14T01:34:11.963" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WordPress docker files installs many software including WordPress, PHP, some php extensions and it also uses php docker file such as php:5.6-apache which installs many software for it to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is can those software that those docker images are installing be used to create WordPress Themes and Plugins for commercial purpose ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that i will be selling the WordPress themes and plugins that i create. I will not be selling the docker files or any software the docker file installs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The docker file themselves are under the Apache 2.0 and MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12845" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T08:11:26.277" Title="Can the wordpress docker files and every software it installs be used for commercial purpose?" Tags="|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7234" CreationDate="2018-08-14T08:11:26.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed elsewhere &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7015/1212&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4689/1212&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;, the licenses of Dockerfiles, Docker images, and of the software within those images have to be viewed separately. The most important part is what the licenses of the software in the Docker image are, not what the license of the Dockerfile is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of Wordpress, PHP, and Apache are licensed under terms that allow commercial usage. This does not allow you to do anything that you want. In particular, Wordpress themes and plugins must comply with the Wordpress license (GPLv2+). Therefore, any plugins that you distribute (sell, publish, share,&amp;nbsp;…) &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be offered under a GPLv2+-compatible license. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#1-plugins-must-be-compatible-with-the-gnu-general-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordpress Plugin Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Plugins must be compatible with the GNU General Public License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although any GPL-compatible license is acceptable, using the same license as WordPress — “GPLv2 or later” — is strongly recommended. All code, data, and images — anything stored in the plugin directory hosted on WordPress.org — must comply with the GPL or a GPL-Compatible license. Included third-party libraries, code, images, or otherwise, must be compatible. For a specific list of compatible licenses, please read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-Compatible license list&lt;/a&gt; on gnu.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you are able to sell your plugin, you cannot restrict customers from sharing the plugin and must effectively make the source code of the plugin freely available. Therefore, most plugin authors do not sell the plugin itself, but support services, guaranteed future updates, or external software (SaaS) with which the plugin interacts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T08:11:26.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7237" CreationDate="2018-08-14T10:31:39.753" Score="4" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a relatively young private GitHub repo with 5-6 people working on it together. My understanding of a contributor agreement is that I can use this to state that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users have access to the product and can reap the benefits of using the product, as long as they don't create their own products based on this repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users cannot share any parts of the product or derivative works without my agreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users have no say on future plans involving the product with their contributions, e.g should I want to create a paid service exposing the benefits of the product to paying users in future, I'm free to do so. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct, as long as the CLA states this and each contributor signs it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking at the mongodb contributor agreement as an example, and it states &quot;the agreement is entered between company name having its principle place of business at xyz and you and/or your organisation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm an individual without a legal entity, can it just be something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;the agreement is entered between John Doe and you and/or your organisation&quot;? Or does there need to be an address too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also seems like I need a license in place to complement the CLA, is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12851" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T09:57:29.067" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T09:57:29.067" Title="Contributor license agreement between individuals not an entity?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7236" CreationDate="2018-08-14T14:28:37.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt; is an agreement between the project's copyright holders (i.e. all contributors) and any users. The license typically discusses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how the software may be used,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;under which conditions the software may be copied,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and under which conditions the software may be modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open-source licenses&lt;/strong&gt; typically allow usage for any purpose, allow copies to be freely distributed, and allow modifications to be made and published. They typically impose minor restrictions like that any copyright and license notices have to be kept intact and shown to users, and sometimes that any modifications must be available under the same license. Forking is generally allowed, i.e. taking the code and starting a competing project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an &lt;strong&gt;outside contributor&lt;/strong&gt; wants to share their modifications that they created in accordance with the license, their expectation will generally be that they license their modifications to the project under that license (inbound = outbound licensing, as e.g. formalized by the Github terms of service for public repos). So with respect to this contribution, the original project has no more privileges than other users. For open-source projects, this generally works out fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some projects have &lt;strong&gt;additional requirements&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the future, the project may be &lt;strong&gt;relicensed&lt;/strong&gt; to an incompatible license. E.g. a GPLv2 project cannot be changed to GPLv3 unless all contributors consent – or the necessary rights were previously assigned as part of a CLA. GNU projects also use a CLA so that the project can defend against copyright infringements on behalf of the contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project may need to prove that it isn't doing any copyright infringement. This requires a “&lt;strong&gt;paper trail&lt;/strong&gt;” so that you can demonstrate for each contribution that the contributor had the right to give you their modifications and gave you the necessary rights to use them in the project. A CLA is one way to do this, alternatively a “DCO” is used.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A project may use a &lt;strong&gt;dual-licensing&lt;/strong&gt; scheme, so that the project is available (for free) under an open source license and alternatively under a (paid) proprietary license for users that do not want to comply with the open source license. This is e.g. the case for Qt, iText, or MongoDB. Without a CLA the project would not have the right to issue these proprietary licenses because they would only have received the contributions under the terms of the open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How right assignment works also depends on the jurisdiction of the contributor. E.g. here in Germany I cannot assign my copyright in its entirety, but I can issue exclusive or non-exclusive licenses for some aspects of the copyright. Some of these assignments would require a written contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that you need a CLA, it is important to consider how these rights will be managed. It is legally fine to manage these rights as a natural person. But &lt;strong&gt;what happens if you die&lt;/strong&gt; or are otherwise incapacitated? If multiple natural persons manage the rights, how do they make decisions? This is not just important for managing these rights, but also for gaining the necessary trust of potential contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;legal entity&lt;/strong&gt; such as a &lt;strong&gt;company&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;non-profit&lt;/strong&gt; can survive its individual members. A &lt;strong&gt;foundation&lt;/strong&gt; might also have clear rules on votes and project management that guarantee transparent decisions on the project's future. Aside from technical, financial, and legal support, this &lt;strong&gt;trust, transparency, and stability&lt;/strong&gt; are some of the benefits that a foundation like the Apache Foundation can provide to member projects. Many larger projects start their own foundation as they mature. As an added benefit they make it easier to donate :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nearly all open source projects do not have special requirements that would make a CLA or foundation necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your descriptions of the rights you would like to grant to users does not sound like an open source license. You do not allow usage for any purpose (no competing projects, no commercial usage) and you do not allow the software to be shared freely. If all current copyright holders agree to this, that is legally fine but again: not open source. Even if the source code is publicly viewable. (Such a model where the source code is available but cannot be used freely is sometimes called &lt;em&gt;shared source&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to accept contributions under that model, you do need to make some licensing agreement with contributors. Unless you provide the necessary rights, potential contributors would not be legally allowed to change the source code. But why would a potential contributor even agree to that if you get all the benefits of their work, and they are left with all these restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T14:28:37.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T02:35:55.860" Score="4" ViewCount="5138" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my case, I have open source projects in Node JS that use the MIT license for which I have only added &quot;MIT&quot; to the license field in the package.json config file. There are no contents of the license and no link to any license file so could be considered ambiguous. Would this without a LICENSE file be considered enough for distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be applied to any other programming language and license, and would probably be considered more ambiguous if the license is less well known. If the license is very rare then even if the license contents can be searched online, if there are very few copies, how can someone be certain that the contents have not changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8475" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:59:04.820" Title="Is &quot;license&quot;: &quot;MIT&quot; in config enough to be a valid license in a software project?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7240" CreationDate="2018-08-15T03:07:01.047" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Center_XML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; doesn't give much information on the page. It seems to be only generated by garmin devices but there are numerous open source libraries that can process this file format. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any restrictions on the TCX file format preventing anyone from creating their own devices &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12858" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T05:40:16.377" Title="Are there any licensing restrictions on the Training Center XML file format?" Tags="|licensing|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7239" CreationDate="2018-08-15T05:40:16.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;File formats and protocols are typically not IP-protected. You are generally free to reverse-engineer them. Reverse-engineering for the purpose of compatibility might even be explicitly allowed by your local copyright laws. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might only have access to these files under a contract that forbids reverse-engineering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specific software to read or write these files is subject to copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Techniques necessary to read or write these files may be patented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, consider the legal history of GIFs. GIFs (or more precisely, software that processed GIFs) used the patented LZW compression algorithm and could therefore not be used freely until the patents expired around 2003–2004. This lead to alternative file formats like PNG being created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of TCX files, this seems to be intended as a data interchange format. The XML schemas are freely available, no reverse-engineering is necessary. Garmin does not seem to try to restrict the use of this format – and even if they wanted to, I doubt they could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T05:40:16.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:37:14.533" Score="3" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;While much discussion is there around software patents (because sometimes it's just maybe a creative idea), how does maker community position themselves to existing patents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, is high tech open hardware actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/31011/what-happens-if-open-hardware-infringes-existing-patent&quot;&gt;illegal&lt;/a&gt; in many cases and kind of piracy movement? (because there are lots of patents in this area)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8461" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:59:31.907" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T15:00:07.710" Title="Legality of open hardware vs. patents" Tags="|law|patents|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7238" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:59:04.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For people and organizations that are serious about copyright, just a statement in a package.json file is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright licenses are legal documents and in legal documents the smallest details matter. For that reason, people that are interested in using your project want to know the exact terms under which the work is licensed, which means that the exact text of the license should be part of the project or linked from within the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;licence: MIT&quot; line in the package.json file is at most a tool in quickly determining if the project has licensing terms that make it worth considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:59:04.820" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:08:46.990" Score="-1" ViewCount="1059" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to build a closed-source software with C++ language using GSL (GNU Scientific Library). This software is made by compiling my source codes into executable. By the way, my source codes use GSL without any modification (as it is from its official website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to do the following things. But before that, I want to make sure if it is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I sell this software to only one client. I give the client both the executable software, and my source codes. The money I will get from my client is only to compensate the my labour hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My client will use my software as backend. He will make front-end (the graphical user interface) which calls the backend to do some tasks. My client will then pack the backend and front-end as a whole software, put it on the internet, and make it free-to-use by anyone. Note that it is not a web-service. Users need to download it and use on their own computers. But my client will not share the source codes (neither my source codes for the backend, nor his source codes for the front-end).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the whole process, I do not modify GSL, I only use GSL in my source codes to build my software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are the above mentioned two actions allowed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, my client will also write a license.txt file for the whole software. Do you have any suggestions about which type of the license should be? Must he also use GPL license? Or can he use like BSD, MIT, Apache license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite important to me, since I have to choose a scientific library which can do linear algebra, Bessel functions, Fourier transformation (fft, and inverse fft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked some other asked questions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-use-gpl-libraries-in-a-closed-source-project-if-only-the-output-is-distrib&quot;&gt;Can I use GPL libraries in a closed source project if only the output is distributed?&lt;/a&gt;, I learned something from them, but I could not find any information related to my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12862" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T08:08:46.077" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T08:08:46.077" Title="A question about closed-source software with GNU GSL for commercial and free-to-use cases" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7247" CreationDate="2018-08-16T06:19:32.757" Score="4" ViewCount="2273" Body="&lt;p&gt;We (small team in large organisation, in Germany/EU) have the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we use OSS libraries within our commercial products, licenses are checked and we are sure that we're complying (LGPL, BSD, MIT etc.., no copyleft)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;these libraries do contain/link other OSS libraries, sometimes using other licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, our legal department has a very elaborate/expensive/time consuming process to check new libraries that we want to use. Part of the process manually checks every single file, including those of transitive dependencies in source form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Are we really liable for license problems posed by transitive dependencies of our dependencies? My feeling is that the legal department (which is external) designed the process to take as many billable hours as possible...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12865" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T07:18:00.097" Title="Are we liable for license problems posed by transitive OSS libraries?" Tags="|licensing|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7246" CreationDate="2018-08-16T07:18:00.097" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should practice due diligence also for transitive dependencies. Open-source licensing is frequently shoddy, inaccurate, or slightly misleading. There's no malice involved, but especially smaller libraries treat licensing as an afterthought. So it is unwise to blindly trust your immediate dependencies' authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to comply with the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; components in your system. Transitive dependencies can hide surprises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A transitive dependency might be published under the GPL, which can require your application to be made available under the GPL. This tends to be undesirable for your company.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a variant of the above, consider an LGPL dependency that can be used without such restrictions, but only under certain conditions such as that the dependency is dynamically linked and can be replaced by users. You have to be aware that these conditions exist so that you can choose an appropriate architecture for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A transitive dependency may only be available under a license that includes a restrictive patent grant, and could potentially prevent you from suing a competitor (e.g. older React licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what your legal department doing is not per se wrong. It is a legitimate risk mitigation strategy. The question is whether the effort is proportional to the risk – a business decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T07:18:00.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7248" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7261" CreationDate="2018-08-16T18:55:49.140" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the owner of a company that has a Web application, I would like to make that code freely available for people to contribute code to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several places where this is a specific application, not very suitable for forking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Our copyrighted logo will be included in the repo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It will depend on an Api that is paywalled - so this application is highly coupled with a closed Api.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there still good reason to open source this project (and if so, how, since it includes copyrighted assets)? Or does it make more sense to publish the code with a copyright notice only? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12869" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T08:31:50.630" Title="Whether to open source a specific project" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7245" CreationDate="2018-08-16T20:59:54.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GSL says it's available through the Gnu General Public License, and links to GPLv3.  The exact version doesn't matter here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can certainly incorporate GPLed software into something you sell to one client for any mutually agreed-on price.  That client receives the software under the GPL, and has the usual rights to distribute it under the usual conditions.  The client is not required to distribute, though, and it's possible that redistribution would cut into your client's competitive advantage.  (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few sections of the Gnu GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; to confirm this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client can use the software as a back end without distributing it, since the GSL license is not some version of the Affero GPL, provided the front end and the back end communicate as separate processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, what you propose is legal.  You can't prevent the client from distributing the software, including your own contributions, but that seems unlikely to be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GSL and all software linking to it in some way are under the GPLv3, and that's what the license.txt has to say.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  From the comments, it's evident that the front and back end will be one program and linked together.  The next question is whether the front end is distributed, rather than used.  Any Javascript supplied by the client's server is distributed, but software that reacts to HTTP requests is not normally being distributed.  I'd need more details to say for sure, but it looks like there's no required distribution if the software uses GSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T15:25:10.047" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T15:25:10.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7252" CreationDate="2018-08-17T00:11:03.147" Score="2" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I started a long time ago and licensed under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It uses an implementation of a particular algorithm, where the implementation is licensed under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The algorithm is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)&lt;/a&gt;, in particular the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley%E2%80%93Tukey_FFT_algorithm#The_radix-2_DIT_case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Radix-2 Decimation-In-Time&lt;/a&gt;. The implementation is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~ronw/code/MEAPsoft/doc/html/FFT_8java-source.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MEAPsoft&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 is not compatible with GPLv3, so I wish to get rid of the GPLv2 somehow so I can release the whole project under GPLv3 as I originally intended to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPLv2 actually apply for this usage? And, if so, is there some way I can get rid of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another copyright header later down in the code, I didn't think to include it before since it points nowhere and doesn't specify a license but perhaps the original original FFT implementation/specification can be dug up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;fft.c&#xA;Douglas L. Jones &#xA;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign &#xA;January 19, 1992 &#xA;http://cnx.rice.edu/content/m12016/latest/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the link doesn't work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would suggest that this Java version is adapted from an earlier C implementation, which might have used a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert, but I see two conflicting ways to view this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Algorithms are not owned by anyone, therefore I should not be restricted even if the implementation I am using is based on a GPLv2 licensed one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPLv2 infects any derivative works, and since I have nothing else to base an implementation on, any implementation of the algorithm I make is automatically a derivative work of the original, and under GPLv2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If more details might be needed, here's the relevant bits of the timeline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My project goes on GitHub, released under GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The entire Radix-2 DIT FFT implementation is brought into the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I add some API on top of the FFT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I add some tests and benchmarks for the FFT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewrites happen across several git commits. Unneeded sections are removed. Input checks are added. The algorithm is further optimized. All parts are documented. License header is kept.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I originally asked this somewhere else, before knowing about this stackexchange. So I ask here now.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12868" LastEditorUserId="12868" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T17:30:55.000" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T17:30:55.000" Title="Could I remove GPLv2 from this algorithm implementation?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7243" CreationDate="2018-08-17T14:19:15.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Law is complicated, and I can only offer my layman perspective on United States patent law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, patents are a particularly powerful area of law, because independent invention is not a defense against patent infringement&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Even if you've never seen or heard of a particular patent before, you can violate it if you implement the patented system or method. This is different from copyright, where never having seen the original material &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a valid defense against infringement. In other words, the law makes it incumbent upon system developers to ensure that they do not violate any existing patents. This can be very difficult to do, and for this reason there are lawyers who specialize in searching for existing patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since hobbyists likely cannot afford to do a patent search, doing system development will necessarily be legally risky, especially in an area densely populated with patents. This is a property of how patent law operates, and cannot be avoided without overhauling at least some parts of patent law. (The allowance of &quot;independent invention&quot; as a full defense under the law would be a great start.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One limited solution software licenses have employed is to include patent retaliation clauses: if a plaintiff sues the maker of a freely-licensed system for a patent violation, then the system owners automatically rescind the plaintiff's right to use parts of the defendant's system under other patents. In other words, &quot;If I can't use your patents, then you can't use any of mine.&quot; This is obviously a limited solution; it only has value if the defendant has any important freely-licensed patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1.&lt;/sup&gt; Note that by demonstrating your infringement of a patent was not willful, you may minimize your punishment down to paying merely a reasonable licensing fee for your past use of the patent, instead of much higher punitive damages. Still, the licensing costs to the infringer may be substantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T14:27:36.587" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T14:27:36.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7250" CreationDate="2018-08-17T14:59:11.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright applies to creative expression. You are correct that algorithms are not expression as copyright understands the concept. However, when you look at the FFT code here, you've not looking at a pure algorithm-idea; you're looking at an expression of an algorithm. You might wonder: how, then, can we ever communicate any algorithm at all without a corresponding expression, which will involve copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important concept in copyright law is the merger doctine, which says that if an idea can be expressed only in a limited number of ways, or an expression contains nothing more than the barest possible expression of an idea, then the idea and expression are &lt;em&gt;merged&lt;/em&gt; and the expression is ineligible for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't investigated this case closely, but I would &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; hesitant to assume that this Java code is truly merged with the idea of the FFT algorithm. Different specific choices made by the author of the code may impact readability and performance. In other words, there could be a different implementation of this same algorithm that looks and reads differently (and even operates differently, from a performance standpoint). To the degree that such variance can exist, the work has creative expression covered by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to examine an academic expression of the algorithm, build your own interal understanding of the algorithm-idea, and write your own expression of that idea, which will be distinct from the MEAPsoft implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the fact that you have looked at the MEAPsoft implementation may &quot;taint&quot; your ability to free yourself from the possibility that a court may view your independent re-implementation as a derivative. This kind of &quot;subconscious copying&quot; is an insidious problem in copyright law that is commonly problematic for musicians who accidentally copy one another. A traditional &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room implementation&lt;/a&gt; ensures that people writing new code have never seen the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final option is to contact the authors of MEAPsoft and ask them to license their work under &quot;GPLv2 or any later version&quot; instead of GPLv2 only, which would allow you to distribute it within your GPLv3 work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T14:59:11.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7254" CreationDate="2018-08-18T08:33:08.857" Score="2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I intend to compile Visual Studio Code on my own to be able to redistribute it.&#xA;But I still don't know whether I could do that.&#xA;So may I know if the compiled version uses the MIT License or Microsoft's license which prohibits redistribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12881" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T11:15:39.607" Title="If I compile Visual Studio Code from source, is the compiled version licensed from MIT or Microsoft's license?" Tags="|mit|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7253" CreationDate="2018-08-18T11:15:39.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue #60&lt;/a&gt; in the vscode github repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the vscode sources are available under the MIT license, but the Microsoft-branded binaries are distributed under the more restrictive Microsoft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T11:15:39.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7258" CreationDate="2018-08-20T02:26:50.197" Score="0" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to make a software on Python with a GUI for 3D visual editing of meshes. That's why I ask the question. I suppose at least one mesh editing library is used. And at least one 3d visualization library is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not answer to use blender or other existing OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12893" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T05:26:03.777" Title="What are the libraries Blender is based on for mesh visualization and editing?" Tags="|commercial|software|source-code|forking|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-08-31T20:23:35.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T04:58:09.273" Score="3" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a software which has two parts, &lt;code&gt;kernel&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;plugin&lt;/code&gt;s, their code are completely separated. Here's the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of the &lt;code&gt;plugin&lt;/code&gt;s should be GPL based, as they invoked GPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code of &lt;code&gt;kenel&lt;/code&gt; is separated from &lt;code&gt;plugin&lt;/code&gt;s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;code&gt;kernel&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;plugin&lt;/code&gt;s are distributed separately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I only distribut the &lt;code&gt;kernel&lt;/code&gt; to users, and its their decision to install GPL-based &lt;code&gt;plugin&lt;/code&gt;s or not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, can I license the &lt;code&gt;kernel&lt;/code&gt; with MIT license, or I must use GPL for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12895" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T13:54:30.393" Title="How should I license my project if it can install GPL-based plugins?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7256" CreationDate="2018-08-20T05:26:03.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While you don't want the answer to be blender, it is the answer. All of the mesh editing and display is written in C/C++ and is part of blenders source tree, the external libraries blender uses are for image formats, simulations and rigs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenGL is used for the screen drawing but that offers no help for storing and editing mesh data, it is purely screen drawing commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blender does use python to define its UI layout. It is possible to fork blender and modify python scripts to get a custom UI that uses blender behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/makehumancommunity/makehuman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Makehuman&lt;/a&gt; is a 3d program written using python and pyqt, that might be a source of inspiration for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T05:26:03.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7257" CreationDate="2018-08-20T11:12:56.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming a plugin architecture where the plugins form a single program with the kernel, all parts of the system (kernel and any plugins) must be available under a GPL-compatible license. The MIT license is GPL-compatible, and is therefore allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a list of possible licenses, see the GNU list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Various Licenses and Comments about Them&lt;/a&gt;. Note that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, and other licenses might be compatible with one but not both of these GPL versions. If there are plugins that use GPLv2 code and other plugins that use GPLv3 code, this might be a good reason to choose a license for the kernel that is compatible with both (e.g. GPLv2+ or MIT, but not Apache 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; has a number of questions regarding plugin architectures, starting with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/a&gt; The FAQ explicitly discusses the case of plugins to a GPL program, but the reverse (GPL plugins to a non-GPL program) is equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T13:54:30.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T13:54:30.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7264" CreationDate="2018-08-20T21:21:47.033" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have contributed to a GPL library and I am using that library in my project as a module. Do I have to make my entire project open source or, as I have contributed to the library and the source code is available, is it fine not to make the project open source?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4840/using-a-gpl-v3-library-in-a-android-app-published-on-google-play-do-i-need-to-r&quot;&gt;Using a GPL V3 library in a Android app published on Google Play, do I need to release the application&amp;#39;s source code?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;but any advice will be helpful. I am not the main developer of the project, just a contributer in the project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12903" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T08:33:46.630" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T12:15:24.787" Title="Can we use the source code of a GPL library when we have contributed to the library" Tags="|gpl-3|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7248" CreationDate="2018-08-21T06:27:32.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our copyrighted logo will be included in the repo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no bar.  All the code you write is copyrighted, and that's not a bar to publishing it - the question is what kind of licence you wish to give end-users.  It's perfectly fine to publish the code under a copyleft licence, but allow (eg) only verbatim reproduction of your logo image, and that only when used with unmodified code.  Many mainstream open source projects do something like that; firefox (and the consequent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian#Iceweasel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iceweasel&lt;/a&gt; fork) come to mind.  It's probably not a great idea to include a logo if you grant &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; copying or redistribution rights, though; just leave it out in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It will depend on an Api that is paywalled - so this application is highly coupled with a closed Api.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't quite parse this, because an API would have to be part of the client-side code.  I think you mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;this application talks to paywalled network resources&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and if you do, it's fine to publish an open-source client whose principal purpose is to talk to your non-free network service.  It's very common in the Android world; literally fifteen seconds scrolling through my f-droid turns up &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.quelltext.mundraub/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mundraub&lt;/a&gt;, the first of many free (GPLv3) clients which talk to non-free network services (in this case, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mundraub.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mundraub.org/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this desirable?  Firstly, because legitimate users of the non-free service might want a free client to talk to it.  I can't use the apps of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of my banks, much as I'd like to, because those apps are non-free, and I won't run non-free software.  Secondly, because people building comparable apps to talk to other network services can then modify your code instead of starting from scratch, and as long as your code was strong-copylefted everyone benefits from all this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead you mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;this client would have to use proprietary API code&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then it's not a good candidate for freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T08:31:50.630" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T08:31:50.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7260" CreationDate="2018-08-21T12:15:24.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a simple question of copyright. You have written some code - you can use that code however you wish, and you decided to contribute that to a GPL library. That doesn't change any of your rights &lt;em&gt;to that specific bit of code&lt;/em&gt;, which you can still continue to use as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the same applies to other people as well - they have written code, and the only right you have to use their code is under the terms by which it is made available to you - or in this case, the GPL. &quot;Contributing&quot; to the library does not (&lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt;) change the terms under which other people contributed to that library. To take this to extremes, let's reverse the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have written millions of lines of code in a library, and kindly decide to release it under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You accept a one line pull request from me to fix a minor typo in the comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've &quot;contributed&quot; to the library, would you be happy for me to take your millions of lines of code and use them without having to comply with the terms of the GPL? No? Well, that's exactly what you're asking for here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your specific question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to make my entire project open source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you are using some code from the library &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than the code you wrote, you are using code for which your only right to use them is under the GPL, you must comply with the terms of the GPL, which &lt;em&gt;in non-technical terms&lt;/em&gt; means making the full source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; code which you contributed to the library, then you still own the copyright to that code and can use it however you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T12:15:24.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T18:09:25.920" Score="7" ViewCount="1941" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache License 2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,&#xA;  worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except&#xA;  as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use,&#xA;  offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where&#xA;  such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such&#xA;  Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s)&#xA;  alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to&#xA;  which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand the license, if I contribute code that is using a patent I own, I am practically losing rights to this patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively, anyone who wants to infringe my patent just downloads the project, and does not even have to use it. The user can use the patent in any proprietary software that is not using the open source project in any way, just by downloading it and keeping a record of the download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you cannot contribute a patent to such project without losing all practical rights for the patent in the future, irrespective of that project.  This comes from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise&#xA;  transfer the Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively contributing patented software to this project, makes the patent open source for everyone, even for users who are not using the project in any way. The patent holder is giving up rights to use that patent in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is my interpretation correct?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12911" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T11:00:58.277" Title="Do I lose the right to use my patent after contributing to a project with Apache License 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7265" CreationDate="2018-08-21T19:05:16.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Preface:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm no longer sure this answer is correct, since the patent license terms only apply to the specific &quot;Work&quot; you are offering, and do not include the right to &quot;modify&quot; or similar. However, this also has the strange consequence that only one person's patent license could apply to an Apache license at a time, assuming that a derivative loses the patent license issued for use of the original. The answer below assumes that the patent license does apply to derivatives, but I'm not sure that's the correct reading.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is the same as yours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The point of this section is that a patent holder who licenses their copyrighted work under the Apache License 2.0 also grants a corresponding patent license to any patented system of theirs that their copyrighted work employs. (If the author happens to hold patents that are unrelated to the copyrighted work being licensed under the Apache License 2.0, those patents are not licensed.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since open source licenses allow use of compatibly-licensed material in unrelated projects, your patented system could end up in a completely unrelated project, and your patent license would similarly apply in this new context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as someone makes any copyrighted work derived your Apache-licensed work, you have granted them the right to use your patents expressed in that work. (I suppose it's possible for someone to go through the pain of a clean-room reimplementation of your software to make a copyrighted work that is unambiguously not a derivative, in order to masochistically  &lt;em&gt;deny&lt;/em&gt; themselves access to your patent grant, but there's no sensible reason to do that!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that only people who receive that work under the Apache 2.0 license receive such a patent license. If you make an Apache 2.0 licensed work for a client, for example, you must grant a patent license (as necessary) to your client, but neither you nor your client need to distribute the software to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, since Apache License 2.0 is a permissive (non-copyleft) license, you are never obligated to release code under the Apache License, even if your project makes use of other code under the Apache License. If you do not want you patent(s) licensed in this way, fork the Apache-licensed project and choose a different license for your own contributions. If you do so, ensure you make it &lt;em&gt;very clear&lt;/em&gt; which parts are not licensed under the Apache License 2.0, so that recipients do not mistakenly believe that your patented implementation is Apache-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T11:00:58.277" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T11:00:58.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7265" CreationDate="2018-08-21T19:07:48.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The patent license in the Apache License 2 is very limited, so you do not lose all rights – although enforcing these rights gets more difficult. Let's take your quote apart in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What do you authorize via the patent license?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is given for making, using, and transferring the Work in question. This license is bound to the Work, not to the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone uses your software but creates a &lt;strong&gt;separate work&lt;/strong&gt; that depends on your patents, they would need a &lt;strong&gt;separate patent license&lt;/strong&gt; from you. In practice this is unlikely to happen, because they could just use the Apache-2 licensed software instead – which allows use in proprietary software systems, under comparatively simple requirements like keeping notices intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent license also extends to &lt;strong&gt;derivative works&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;But whether a port to a different language would be a derivative or separate work is not always clear. A fairly direct translation would probably be derivative, an independent reimplementation likely not. This ultimately depends on your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Which claims of your patent are you licensing?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not licensing all claims of your patent, but only those that would be infringed by your contribution if you had not given this license. The result is that you can never inject a patent infringement for your own patents into an Apache-2 licensed project. This protects the project from malicious contributions or “submarine patents”. If other people make a contribution to the project where their contribution would depend on your patents, they cannot provide a patent license for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you have two patents A and B, or one patent with two claims A and B. You make a contribution that would infringe on A and therefore includes a patent license for A. Later, someone else makes a contribution that infringes on B. Can you enforce this patent infringement of B? Yes, you never issued a license for that, although it would certainly look weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What happens if you start patent litigation against a contributor?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed to enforce your patents, but this will terminate any patent license you received through the Apache-2 licensed software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You institute patent litigation against any entity […] alleging that the Work or a Contribution [constitutes] patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, if you need to use the software that you contributed to, you can't sue for patent violations in that software. So &lt;strong&gt;this does effectively weaken your patents&lt;/strong&gt;. But again: this is about the Work, not about persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume you made a contribution with a license for your patent A, and another person made a contribution with a license for their patent B. A third person makes a contribution to the same software that infringes on any of your patents. If you sue, you lose the license for patent B that you received through the Apache 2 license. If you continue to use, distribute, or create derivative works of that software, you are risking to be sued yourself for violation of the patent B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;if you contributed you are no worse off&lt;/strong&gt; than with a software that you didn't contribute to. Let's assume an unrelated Apache-2 licensed software where someone made a contribution that infringes on your patent A, and someone made a contribution with a license for their patent B. Again, if you sue you lose the license through the Apache-2 license for patent B for use with that work. This doesn't affect any other licenses you may have for patent B, such as through an Apache-2 license for a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When does it make sense to issue a patent license as part of an Apache 2 contribution?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to unambiguously keep all rights to the patent you should not issue such a license. The patent grant in the Apache 2 license does make enforcement more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are more interested in encouraging use of one standard implementation of the patented technique, then this patent clause can discourage alternative implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What should you consider when issuing a patent license as part of an Apache 2 contribution?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid any confusion make it clear that you are issuing a patent license as part of this contribution, and which patent claim this contribution intends to license. It might make sense to include this information in a NOTICE file which &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; downstream users of that contribution must preserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T07:11:31.347" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T07:11:31.347" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7269" CreationDate="2018-08-22T02:54:57.010" Score="-4" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a freelancer and recently, built software for an organization. Our deal was for me to develop and submit software at whole. Hence, it is a proprietary software owned by that organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a few many ideas about new features and upgrades that can be integrated into that software. But, the organization is not interested in any upgrades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a beginner, I want to do it anyways to flaunt on my profile &amp;amp; maybe to sell to some other organization if I don't make the upgrade open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ethical for me to do so? Also, what legal complications might I lead myself into?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.: No legal documents have been exchanged between me and the organization. Everything is just verbal. &amp;amp; they may or may not have a license for the software I submitted...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12913" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T05:48:41.920" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T12:12:08.757" Title="How ethical and legal is it to develop proprietary software?" Tags="|proprietary-code|intellectual-property|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-08-22T14:23:50.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7268" CreationDate="2018-08-22T04:26:21.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software is not yours anymore, and you don't have any rights on it. So even if you extend it, it looks the only thing you could do is give those extensions freely (because your customer is not interested in paying for them). I don't think it is a good idea (what is the point of working gratis for a customer which is not interested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you might perhaps do is rewrite (on your own time) the whole project as open source software, starting again from scratch. But I am not sure it is a good idea (I would suggest working on some other project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;maybe to sell to some other organization&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a legal aspect, and you don't mention the legal details (maybe with much more details your question might go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexcahnge.com./&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;law&lt;/a&gt; forum). I guess you are not allowed to do that (unless your prior contract mentions it). I don't recommend trying (you can be in trouble). But I am not a lawyer. You probably should have a written contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next time, during commercial negotiation, get a &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; contract (probably show it to your lawyer) and if possible mention that your work is open source (with a well specified license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T12:12:08.757" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T12:12:08.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7271" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:32:34.387" Score="2" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the javascript library Datejs in my project, the library states in their website that the code is released under the MIT Licence but the code published on their GitHub account is published under Apache License, Version 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a mistake ?! or it is OK to publish the same project under two licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12916" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T09:40:22.723" Title="Is it correct in general to have both MIT and Apache license for the same project" Tags="|mit|copyright|apache-2.0|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7270" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:40:22.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally it's best if a dual-licensed project is explicitly described as such in all the places where it is distributed, but there's no legal requirement for that to happen. Legally, the license which you acquired it is the license that you have to abide by. So if you download it from their website then use it under the MIT license, if you download it from GitHub, use it under the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the one case where it would matter is if you want to redistribute it yourself under both licenses. Unless one of the sites explicitly offers the project under both licenses I don't think it would be legal for you to redistribute it under both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T09:40:22.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T18:58:24.990" Score="3" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say, I have a game engine which is meant to be an executable, not a library (i.e. it has its' own main() and has the top-level control. It calls on other libraries but cannot be used as a dynamic library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to license it under the LGPL? My reasoning for this is that I want the core of the engine to be open source, but to permit using a proprietary &quot;helper&quot; library which is called on by the engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One use case I see for this: Say the engine is used for a Steam game which makes use of Steam's API. Then the API calls to the dynamic library can be put in the engine source and released. However, the actual library would remain closed sourced and proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this use-case of the LGPL make sense? I am clarifying because everywhere I see that the LGPL is sometimes referred to as &quot;library GPL&quot; and is basically used for libraries that are called by applications, not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12924" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T08:08:21.330" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T08:08:21.330" Title="Does it make sense to license an application (not library) under LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7277" CreationDate="2018-08-23T06:34:16.077" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote some texts and put then in the Wikisource website, which says that the content is available under both CC-BY-SA 3.0 and GFDL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a certain publisher wants to create a printed book based on my texts. Creating the book will probably require a lot of investment for copyediting, design, marketing, etc. So to cover his investment, the publisher will probably want to have exclusive rights to publish the contents for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the SA clause prevents him to do this, since this work is a derivative of my work, so he must publish it under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I, as the author, allow him to ignore the SA clause? I want to do this since I want the text to be published and I understand that most people will not want to invest unless they can get some compensation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: to clarify: my question is specifically about derivative works. Suppose person X copies texts from wikisource, does some editing, and publishes the edited material in a book. Now person X wants to prohibit person Y from copying the edited material from the book (not the original material from wikisource). The SA clause prohibits him from doing so, since he is required to publish the derivative work under the same license. My question is: can I, as the author, allow person X to ignore the SA clause and prohibit person Y from copying from the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2292" LastEditorUserId="2292" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T10:31:43.117" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T10:31:43.117" Title="Can an author of a GFDL content allow a publisher to publish a propietary derivative?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|wikipedia|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7274" CreationDate="2018-08-23T07:40:24.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, a quick bit of history: the first version of the LGPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version 2&lt;/a&gt; was released in 1991 and called the &quot;Library General Public License&quot;. This underwent minor revisions and in 1999 was released as the &quot;Lesser General Public License&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version 2.1&lt;/a&gt;. This change was to indicate the FSF's view that the LGPL should not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; be used for every library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, the LGPL contains at least one clause which may cause your use cases problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. the terms of anything which is linked with LGPL code must allow &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the code to be reverse engineered. I suspect the license under which the Steam code is released does not allow it to be reverse engineered at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's the solution to your problem? I suspect you want the to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;full&quot; GPL with a linking exception&lt;/a&gt;, a special permission added to the GPL which allows it to be linked with other code without the GPL going &quot;viral&quot; into that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T07:40:24.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7275" CreationDate="2018-08-23T08:38:14.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You hold the copyright to your works, and can issue licenses. A license can either be exclusive or non-exclusive, but for each sub-right of copyright you cannot grant an exclusive and non-exclusive license at the same time. Multiple non-exclusive licenses can co-exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have granted licenses under the terms of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 and the GFDL. These licenses are non-exclusive, but also perpetual. While these licenses are in effect, you cannot issue an exclusive license for the same works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear whether the CC-BY-SA 3.0 or the GFDL could be revoked. The license text itself is silent on this, but e.g. the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license summary page and the FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-happens-if-the-author-decides-to-revoke-the-cc-license-to-material-i-am-using&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claim&lt;/a&gt; that “The CC licenses are irrevocable. This means that once you receive material under a CC license, you will always have the right to use it under those license terms, even if the licensor changes his or her mind and stops distributing under the CC license terms. Of course, you may choose to respect the licensor’s wishes and stop using the work.” The copyright laws in your jurisdiction may allow license revocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, revoking a public license is difficult at best and impossible in practice, as you will not be able to locate all copies. You are therefore unable to grant exclusive licenses for works that you already published under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do, iff you are the sole author/copyright holder (so that you aren't bound by the CC/GFDL yourself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can grant a separate non-exclusive license to the publisher which doesn't have to include the restrictions of the CC or GFDL licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additionally, you can edit the work in question. You can grant an exclusive license for these edits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case you will have to tell your publisher that (parts of) the work have already been published. This might render your work non-economical for the publisher, though on the other hand even public domain works without any exclusivity continue to be widely printed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T08:38:14.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7287" CreationDate="2018-08-23T12:14:29.173" Score="4" ViewCount="2999" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second clause of the BSD licences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this imply that the binary form must reproduce the copyright notice in the binary itself or just in the binary's documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3657" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T10:03:30.050" Title="Clarification of BSD's second clause - binary must reproduce copyright notice?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7280" CreationDate="2018-08-23T16:39:19.490" Score="2" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few points to be made to help give clarity to the scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL application and its API can and most likely be customised to suit business needs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other unknown licensed applications require to utilise these customised API calls (entry points) to ensure standardisation of calls&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole 'network' of other applications are stand alone applications e.g. ERP and CMS. The assumption would be that these talk between one another through the same means i.e. REST API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Customers (on a SaaS network) would 'connect' to the AGPL application by means of 'indirect' or layered platforms/APIs e.g. customer uses the website portal (CMS) -&gt; eCommerce -&gt; AGPL Application's REST API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found few references of explicitly stating API below, but found they don't tackle or highlight the issue of 'how far' does this network interaction goes IF the application has been modified - tons of answers on unmodified though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6092/under-agplv3-do-i-need-to-provide-the-source-for-secondary-applications&quot;&gt;Under AGPLv3+ do I need to provide the source for secondary applications?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6714/12926&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6714/12926&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that if any customisation is required to tailor to a business needs it must be made publicly available (and releasing their business logic advantage) even if the use of the business logic is through Rest APIs or within layers of applications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so would a potential solution be to develop and release a separately licensed wrapper around the AGPL application (including the customised API) to manoeuvre around releasing the complete business logic and only the wrapper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12926" LastEditorUserId="12926" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T07:51:40.903" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T07:51:40.903" Title="Does using an AGPLv3 application through a customised API deem a interfacing application derivative work and must be made public to network users?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7279" CreationDate="2018-08-23T18:58:58.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (A)GPL license is a strong copyleft license. This means that if an application contains code licensed under the (A)GPL license, then the entire application must be licensed under terms that are compatible with the (A)GPL. This includes any modification/customization you made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main exception is if the application consists of multiple distinct parts that communicate &quot;at arm's length&quot; with each other, like through a REST API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between the GPL and the AGPL is that the GPL requires that you make the source code available to anybody that receives a copy of the executable, but the AGPL additionally requires that you make the sources available to anybody that interacts remotely with the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In yoiur situation, the source of the AGPL application that provides the API must be made available to the users of the API under terms that are compatible with the AGPL license. The sources must correspond to the actual application that the users interact with, so including your customizations.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The source code does not have to be made available to the general public, but only to those entities that use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:58:58.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T23:09:28.597" Score="3" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing an iOS app in which all of the front-end is based on MIT/Apache/BSD components, while server part is fully on GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these licenses are compatible, so there is no problem with this. The main concern is, can we not open our front-end code and avoid applying GPL terms for the whole app? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our idea for avoiding opening is that we distribute only the iOS part to the final customer. The back-end isn't distributed, it only works on servers not on iphones/ipads, so we consider this part as for our own use ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pls let us know your ideas whether our understanding is correct or not, taking into consideration the fact that back-end is firmly specialized and correctly works only with the given front-end (so from this point of view it becomes integral part of the app, so whole app is to be licensed under GPL which isn't ok for us).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12929" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T08:08:07.830" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T08:08:07.830" Title="Can GPL v3 Back-End be used for iOS apps without opening of whole program code" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7286" CreationDate="2018-08-26T02:44:26.693" Score="10" ViewCount="1318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use node.exe and a very simple Javascript that essentially uses only the net module for some functionality in my product. I don't need anything else. I know electron and other frameworks are indeed using the node or may be the V8 engine internally or may be they are just using Chromium Embedded Framework. I do not need to render anything, I just need the most basic functionality that the standalone node.exe alone can handle. Is it is legal to include node.exe in my product's installer? Looking at their License it seems that it should be allowed. But so far I have not seen anyone doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this requirement really mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,&#xA;  and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the&#xA;  Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to just include some text file called LICENSE.txt that includes this text and copy it somewhere in the installation folder? Is that it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12949" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T06:43:26.503" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T14:02:31.547" Title="Can I redistribute node.exe in my commercial Application's Installer?" Tags="|licensing|redistribution|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T04:03:30.147" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;How far does the Non Commercial aspect of by-nc-sa stretch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. someone published a JSON Schema for an (external to both of us) set of JSON files that I wish to validate without a license. I asked them if they could license it so I could use it in a free/open tool that allows people to create and validate that their game-resources are valid according to the Schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst I never want to take my tool commercial or closed, I can't say the same thing about the assets produced by the tool, which indirectly uses the CC - NonCommercial license via the published JSON Schema, which could be hosted on sites with ad-revenue or otherwise used for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will my tool using the NC JSON Schema force my users to use their creations only in a NC way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I make &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; modification to the JSON Schema in my tool, does my tool also have to be published under by-nc-sa ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9103" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:15:04.153" Title="creativecommons by-nc-sa 4.0 Non Commercial Virality?" Tags="|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7284" CreationDate="2018-08-26T06:43:04.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word, yes. Copying the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file should be sufficient. If you really want to cover your bases, you should make this obvious from the GUI. A common practice is to have an &quot;Open Source Attribution&quot; section in your help, with a note in the spirit of &quot;This product uses Node.js, Copyright (c) Joyent, Inc. For full details see &lt;code&gt;/path/to/myprogram/3rd-parties/nodejs/LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T14:02:31.547" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T14:02:31.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7278" CreationDate="2018-08-26T09:52:29.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license requires you to reproduce the license notice, which consists of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the copyright notice of the BSD-licensed software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the BSD license itself, which consists of the list of conditions annd a disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For binaries, the license requires you to include this notice in “the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.” The intention seems to be that the notice can be seen by an ordinary user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, a lot of software does not have any materials provided with the distribution, e.g. mobile apps. Instead, the software itself contains relevant documentation. It is normal to provide the notice in human-readable form within the app, typically in a menu item like &lt;em&gt;Settings → About → Open Source&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Help → Legal Information&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you provide documentation to the software but this documentation is not provided together with the binary, then I don't think a notice in the documentation would satisfy the license. For example, an online manual might be insufficient, especially since such documentation would be unavailable when the user doesn't have an active internet connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T09:52:29.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4288" CreationDate="2018-08-27T01:46:42.010" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the work of Peter Squicciarini (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/pajamaboat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;@pajamaboat&lt;/a&gt;), you can now download 100% FLOSS binaries compiled from VSCode's official MIT-licensed repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is called VSCodium as a reference to the Chrome/Chromium relationship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The build scripts are also available so you can do it yourself and verify the resulting binary against the ones available for direct download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9148" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T01:46:42.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7281" CreationDate="2018-08-27T08:57:27.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're trying to do should be possible. If the back-end application and the front-end app have the character of two separate programs that communicate with each other, then they are clearly separate works and the GPL only applies to your back-end. On the other hand, if your setup is better characterized as a single distributed application where parts run on end-user devices and parts on one of your servers, that's more of a grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, what matters is the copyright law in your jurisdiction: would these laws recognize the apps that you distribute as a derived work of the GPL libraries, or not? But no clear guidance exists. The FSF (the authors of the GPL) use the concept of “communications at arms length” to describe whether two programs are truly separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T08:57:27.360" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7331" CreationDate="2018-08-27T19:11:33.463" Score="9" ViewCount="2935" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a commerical clock application (&quot;&lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt;&quot;), which is written in Python. What I will deliver to my customers will either be a &lt;code&gt;.pyc&lt;/code&gt; file or a &lt;code&gt;.so&lt;/code&gt; file (&quot;compiled&quot;) with Cython -- the fact that a &lt;code&gt;.pyc&lt;/code&gt; is reversible doesn't matter, just that I am not giving my customers the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My clock application has a dedicated &quot;backend&quot; that allows me to use two, alternative &quot;get time&quot; libraries: &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; (GPL licensed) and &lt;code&gt;mitclock&lt;/code&gt; (MIT licensed). The core code of &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; is completely agnostic to which time library is being used (this is controlled via an environment variable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here is something that looks like my &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt; application:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# jjclock.py&#xA;&#xA;import sys&#xA;import clock_api&#xA;&#xA;if __name__ == &quot;__main__&quot;:&#xA;    clock = clock_api.get_clock()&#xA;    time_now = clock.time()&#xA;    #&#xA;    # do something propetary with time_now&#xA;    #&#xA;    print time_now&#xA;&#xA;# EOF&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and here is the implementation of &lt;code&gt;clock_api&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# clock_api.py&#xA;&#xA;import os&#xA;import importlib&#xA;&#xA;class MITClock(object):&#xA;&#xA;    def __init__(self):&#xA;        self.mit_clock = importlib.import_module(&quot;mitclock&quot;)&#xA;&#xA;    def time(self):&#xA;        return self.mit_clock.getTheTime()&#xA;&#xA;class GPLClock(object):&#xA;&#xA;    def __init__(self):&#xA;        self.gpl_clock = importlib.import_module(&quot;gplclock&quot;)&#xA;&#xA;    def time(self):&#xA;        #&#xA;        # IMPORTANT: this API call is different!&#xA;        # API calls were found via `dir` and the man pages&#xA;        #&#xA;        return self.gpl_clock.get_time()&#xA;&#xA;def get_clock():&#xA;    if os.environ.get(&quot;CLOCK&quot;, &quot;mit&quot;) == &quot;mit&quot;:&#xA;        return MITClock()&#xA;    elif os.environ[&quot;CLOCK&quot;] == &quot;gpl&quot;:&#xA;        return GPLClock()&#xA;&#xA;# EOF&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To develop my &lt;code&gt;clock_api&lt;/code&gt; file, I utilised the shared objects for &lt;code&gt;gplclock.so&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mitclock.so&lt;/code&gt; can be obtained via &lt;code&gt;apt-get&lt;/code&gt; with Ubuntu. Furthermore, both &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mitclock&lt;/code&gt; have publicsed Python API examples, which allowed me to develop both of my clock classes without seeing &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the internal code of either &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;mitclock&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we consider developing an application in C, then we need to &lt;code&gt;#include&lt;/code&gt;a header for given library, and therefore it is clear that my commercial object code contains GPL object code (via the &lt;code&gt;#include&lt;/code&gt;), then therefore the GPL applies. However, in the above, there is no &quot;code&quot; from &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; in my application -- only the use of its dynamic API, which could be discoverable by interrogating &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; via &lt;code&gt;dir&lt;/code&gt; in Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, my application is &lt;em&gt;100%&lt;/em&gt; functional without &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt;. It is completely at the discression of the end user to a) obtain &lt;code&gt;gplclock.so&lt;/code&gt; and b) explicitly set the non-default environment variable &lt;code&gt;CLOCK&lt;/code&gt; to be &lt;code&gt;gpl&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; works and runs is completely abstracted from the selected clock -- all of this logic exists inside of the &lt;code&gt;clock_api&lt;/code&gt; (e.g., we might want to implement an &lt;code&gt;add&lt;/code&gt; method between two clocks, and therefore &lt;code&gt;GPLClock&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;MITClock&lt;/code&gt; would implement the logic to do this operation). Again, this would be developed by not looking or obtaining the source for either: it can all be done via (e.g.,) &lt;code&gt;dir&lt;/code&gt; in Python, or maybe even the &lt;code&gt;man&lt;/code&gt; pages for both libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that, at the shared object level, there isn't even dynamic linking between &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt;. There is just a Python call with the string &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; and then method invocations are made via &lt;code&gt;getattr&lt;/code&gt;, with string of the method name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt;'s dependancy on &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; is optional (and no GPL code exists in my code, beyond API calls found via documentation), does this mean that &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be licensed as GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There exists an alternative clock API (&lt;code&gt;pyclock&lt;/code&gt;), which is Apache licensed (???) and supports both &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;mitclock&lt;/code&gt; -- how does this work? Can &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; use this library and remain commercial (without using &lt;code&gt;clock_api&lt;/code&gt;)? What does it mean for &lt;code&gt;pyclock&lt;/code&gt; to &quot;wrap&quot; the GPL library &lt;code&gt;gplclock&lt;/code&gt; and provide it under an Apache license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; can use &lt;code&gt;pyclock&lt;/code&gt;, could I release &lt;code&gt;clock_api&lt;/code&gt; under MIT, and keep &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; as commercial?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would the implications be here if I distributed &lt;code&gt;JJClock&lt;/code&gt; alongside with &lt;code&gt;gplclock.so&lt;/code&gt;? Does this change anything?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T10:12:49.630" Title="Optional GPL dependency in commercial Python application" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T09:42:49.557" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I licensed an iOS &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DaveChambers/SuperCrack&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt; under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; license and a friend made one &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DaveChambers/SuperCrack/commit/709798d3f4fc59ecd4e8d97baa16a9f163c9109a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contribution&lt;/a&gt;, adding a few lines to the &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;.  The project has been forked twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to make the second version closed source.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/173195/83747&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; suggests that in order to do so, I would need the contributor to agree.  If so, what form would this agreement need to take?  Would verbal agreement or an email be ok or can I just update the licence on my repo and make it private as Martijn's &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/173198/83747&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest?  I realise that the original code can still be used under the MIT license so someone coming across the forked code could use that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, can I just switch my project to private (and update the license) otherwise which steps must I take to get the agreement of my one contributor, make the repo private and any further versions closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;:  I just came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5833/12970&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; that seems to suggest I can just make my repo private. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12970" LastEditorUserId="12970" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T09:51:44.390" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T09:51:44.390" Title="Can I make the code in a project currently licensed under the MIT license private without involving a contributor?" Tags="|licensing|mit|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2018-08-29T11:03:44.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7295" CreationDate="2018-08-29T17:17:33.170" Score="3" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to fork an existing repository which has no existing license. I would then like to add the GNU GPLv3 license to any code that I write, but it seems as though I cannot apply this license to the portions of the code I did not write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GitHub support licensing only certain portions of a repository? Can I just license the entire thing, since the original repository still exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12981" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T07:52:45.290" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T07:52:45.290" Title="Can I add a license to a forked repository? Can I license only my added code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7294" CreationDate="2018-08-29T17:55:22.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a repository has no license, then the default copyright permissions apply.&#xA;The default copyright permissions state that only the original author has the right to copy, modify or build upon the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Github ToS allow you to create a fork of any repository, but that is where your rights stop unless the repository has a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T17:55:22.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7324" CreationDate="2018-08-30T15:39:19.837" Score="4" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a few practical programming assignments for a bachelor's course in computer science, which I'm quite proud of. I'd love for my work to be used anywhere, and for any future teachers or assistants to be able to use/modify/improve my work, while making sure my name remains associated to it. The course's teacher agrees, but wants me to make sure the solutions are prevented from being published. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could I license the assignments, allowing usage and modification, but keeping my name on the documents?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there licenses that prevent publication of certain parts of the package? Could I license the solutions separately?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I might've provided too little information. The work I want to license is a package consisting of three assignments. Each assignment has a LaTeX-/PDF-file and a few Python files. These Python files are a framework, which the students need to complement with their own code. For each assignment there is also a &lt;em&gt;reference implementation&lt;/em&gt; (what I called solutions earlier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything from the package can freely be distributed and edited, as long as my name stays associated with it. However, the reference implementations may never be shared publicly. This is mainly targeted at future teaching assistants. There might always be those that budge under the pressure of students asking to share the reference implementations. Of course I cannot (realistically) prevent students from sharing their solutions, but the university can always call in students how do so and ask them to remove their solutions from the web (it happened to me a few times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12988" LastEditorUserId="12988" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T09:13:46.753" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T01:22:52.890" Title="How to license programming assignments permissively, while preventing solutions from being published?" Tags="|license-recommendation|attribution|distribution|multi-licensing|restrictions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7298" CreationDate="2018-08-30T18:05:13.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can prevent solutions from being published, unless you only reveal your assignments in exchange for signing an NDA – which precludes publishing your work in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You simply do not have the right via &lt;strong&gt;copyright law&lt;/strong&gt; to prohibit publication of related works if they are not (textually) derived from your work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright protects specific expression, not ideas&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, you'd have to resort to &lt;strong&gt;contract law&lt;/strong&gt; which allows you to impose almost arbitrary restrictions, but requires the other party to actively accept/sign that contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still want to publish your assignments, the licensing is probably fairly easy. There are scores of open source licenses, but most are concerned about software. For non-software creative works, the Creative Commons license family might be appropriate. This is a modular license system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY&lt;/strong&gt;: This is a permissive license (similar to the Apache or MIT licenses for software) that allows any use of your assignments as long as they attribute you. Attribution usually means your name, a reference to the original source (where you published it), and a mention of the creative common license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/strong&gt;: This is a copyleft license (similar to the GPL for software). In addition to the CC-BY license, any derived works can only be published under the same license. I.e. if someone modifies your assignments they can use them internally, but if they share their modifications they must give their recipients the same freedom to make modifications. Any user content on Stack Exchange uses the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever approach you use, you will probably not be able to prevent students from creating and sharing their solutions. E.g. at one place where I studied, the student association maintained a detailed archive of old exams and lecture notes. And students will of course share notes with their colleagues who take the course next semester. There are a couple of typical approaches to limit the usefulness of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make your assignments parameterized. E.g. for a math course, change the numbers each time. If a student has difficulty with this assignment, they can work through old solutions to understand the applicable methods, without directly getting the correct answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mix facts that can be memorized with reflection, analysis, and creativity. E.g. if a student created a software project, ask them to explain why their design fits the given problem and what the trade-offs involved were.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offer a pool of assignments, from which one is randomly picked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T18:05:13.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7301" CreationDate="2018-08-31T15:16:45.310" Score="10" ViewCount="6778" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, about 50 top contributors (including myself) decided to fork Swagger Codegen to maintain a community-driven version called &quot;OpenAPI Generator&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator&lt;/a&gt;). For the reasons behind the fork, please refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator/blob/master/docs/qna.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We added the following to all Java class files in the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2018 OpenAPI-Generator Contributors (https://openapi-generator.tech)&#xA; * Copyright 2018 SmartBear Software&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA; * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA; * You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA; *&#xA; *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA; * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA; * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA; * limitations under the License.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is added by us and it's allowed according to the Apache v2 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * Copyright 2018 OpenAPI-Generator Contributors (https://openapi-generator.tech)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/strong&gt; For new files we added to the OpenAPI Generator project, do we still need to keep the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* Copyright 2018 SmartBear Software&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One concern is that if the new files contributed by someone are simply copied from somewhere, SmartBear in this case may also be liable for the copyright issue of the new files, which is not something we want to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12997" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T04:39:31.320" Title="Copyright notice in the file header (Apache v2 license)" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7300" CreationDate="2018-08-31T17:37:05.883" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;SmartBear Software only has a copyright claim on files that were copied from the Swagger repository. --And even there, I see some problems. More on that later.--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright on any files that are added to the OpenAPI-Generator repository after the fork formally belongs to the contributor that added the file. The copyright on modifications made after the fork belongs, in the same vein, to the contributor that made the modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As that can give quite an explosion of names in the copyright statements, some projects choose to combine them in an indication like &quot;the project X contributors&quot;. That is also what you have chosen to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the copyright situation of the Swagger code, I could not find anything to indicate that contributors are asked to sign a CLA or transfer their copyrights in any way, nor that &quot;SmartBear Software&quot; refers to the group of contributors rather than a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, unless the contributors to Swagger are all employed by SmartBear Software, the copyright statement implying that SmartBear Software is the sole copyright holder is incorrect. Actually, there are lots of unmentioned copyright holders, in particular all contributors to Swagger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As all contributions were made under the Apache License, I would not worry too much about it, but be prepared to add missing (older) copyright statements if someone comes with evidence that their copyright statement was incorrectly removed from the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T17:37:05.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-27T21:18:54.623" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for Institute X, an academic institution looking to expand its commercialization opportunities. I want to develop with them a hybrid-open-source strategy for the code written by me and my team.  The basic idea is that general-purpose platform code be released as open-source, whereas more-specific and more-innovative application code (built on the platform) should remain protected.   My question is about the open-source part, and for that I'm proposing the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Release the code under an open source license. Part of our reason for doing this is the same as our reason for publishing scientific findings: we want other scientists to use our work, take it further, improve the world (and along the way, improve our reputation and fundability).  Partly it's also because we will benefit from the project's active usage by a broad community, which should provide the feedback that will help us maintain it. We want it to perform robustly, and its documentation to make sense, for our future employees, and we're happy to let the rest of the world be our proving ground for that.  Internal-only projects in academic institutions tend to end up shakily duct-taped together and poorly documented, and hence not reusable—by exposing our code to a broader public we want to tie ourselves to the mast with the aim of avoiding that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use the GPL.  Partly because that's a way of ensuring that, to the extent we have made the code free, it remains so.  Partly it's also the because the GPL is restrictive: the strings it attaches provide a disincentive to many commercial use-cases, which in turn provides an incentive for some users to contact us about &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; licensing options.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Remain (explicitly) open to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#HeardOtherLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallel licensing&lt;/a&gt;: if users want to remove the GPL strings, work out some mutually beneficial licensing agreement with them.  Thus, the code still has potential value to us as copyright-protected IP.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unaware of the best practices for this, but the first step in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL How-To&lt;/a&gt; seems to be to get the company/institute to disclaim copyright interest entirely and assign it to the author. The copyright statement in the release would then read &quot;(c) 2018 [Employee's Name]&quot;.  However this advice seems to be written under the assumption that open-sourcing is equivalent to the institution having &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; interest in the IP. That's not the case—given the parallel-licensing strategy it would actually make sense for Institute X to retain the copyright, while permitting parallel release under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So under the assumption that X retains copyright, let's consider the project's future.  Say I leave Institute X.  Afterwards, I might still be best-placed to improve/maintain the project, and of course nothing would stop me forking it. But I would not be the copyright holder so I would be bound by the GPL just like anybody else. To my mind that's good for me, but less so for X: it means (a) I couldn't transfer the copyright for my improvements back to X, and (b) I'd have no incentive to do so.  So to me it seems to make sense to write an agreement now that would grant me both that right and that incentive (a cut of any licensing fees).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking whether this makes sense, and what precedents there might be for this kind of strategy—does it have a name? More specifically, what precedent is there for this kind of agreement between coder and employer? Are there template agreements out there? Or would Institute X have to work out the details from scratch? The latter might discourage them from adopting this route at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13008" OwnerDisplayName="jez" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T07:07:44.227" Title="Aligning employer's and employee's interests in a hybrid/parallel open-source strategy" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7302" CreationDate="2018-08-27T21:40:56.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesnt make sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason to go open source would be to get programmers to work for free on the product or to promote some assocaited hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, while X retains a comercial interest, or holds back the 'special bits', other developers will be disincentivised from working on the project rather than their own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore X has employeed a team of programmers. Do they need any more contributors to the project anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, no, it doesnt make sense to cut you a special deal, what makes you any different from some other programmer if the thing is written and documented correctly?  It makes it seem like you are trying to trick them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ewan" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T21:40:56.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7302" CreationDate="2018-09-02T07:07:44.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL howto that you link to seems to assume that the readers want to release some private project that was done without involvement of the employer under the GPL. This clearly does not apply to you. In your case, rather than asking for a copyright disclaimer, you should get permission to release the code under the GPL with the copyright belonging to the institution. Then use the name of the institution in the copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;parallel licensing&quot; that you mention is more commonly known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Multi-Licensing&lt;/a&gt; and is a fairly common practice for businesses that offer a free community edition and a paid for edition if you don't want to be tied to the GPL.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This idea of multi-licensing goes hand in hand with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreements (CLA)&lt;/a&gt;. A CLA is a contract between an external contributor and a legal entity (business, institution, foundation) to spell out who owns the copyright on the contribution, how the receiving entity can use the contribution (for example, can they use it also in their commercial offering) and what compensation the contributor gets (if any).&#xA;Without a CLA, contribution to a GPL project must be assumed to be under the GPL as well, which means that those contributions couldn't be used in a commercial variant of a multi-licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an employee of your institution and doing the work on their behalf, the copyright on the work you do automatically belongs to the institution. If you decide to leave the institution, but you still want to contribute to this project, you should sign a CLA.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A CLA should also be requested if someone outside the institution comes up with a good improvement before accepting their contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T07:07:44.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7310" CreationDate="2018-09-04T09:56:26.637" Score="1" ViewCount="751" Body="&lt;p&gt;We want to use 7Zip to extract the contents of the ISO file in our paid product.&#xA;There is no other API free library available as of now that can unzip ISO files on all Windows platforms that we want to target. PowerShell trick does not work on Windows Server 2K8 R2. I have tries all the other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the licensing info for 7Zip: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.7-zip.org/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;https://www.7-zip.org/license.txt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It clearly says &quot;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce related license information from this file.&quot; which seems to suggest that I can redistribute it and that is what PeaZip (another open source tool) seems to be doing as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if I include the pre-built 7Zip.exe and 7Zip.dll binaries in my product's installer then does that mean that we must make our product open source as well?? Can it remain CLOSED source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does addition of  these other two licensing restrictions (LGPL &amp;amp;   BSD 3-clause License and unRAR liencesing restriction) affect our scenario?&#xA;We will not be using the binaries for doing any 7Z or RAR compression decompression all we want is a way to extract contents of ISO file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12949" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:33:36.033" Title="Redistributing 7-Zip Binaries with LGPL &amp; BSD 3-clause License" Tags="|lgpl|bsd|closed-source|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T12:03:23.260" Score="8" ViewCount="2114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a web app based on react framework and I am using npm package manager. Together with transitive dependencies I have about 800 MIT licensed dependencies. To comply with MIT, do I need to include a separate license file for each of those dependencies in my source code? If I use react, should I care about its transitive dependencies' licenses? or to include copyright and permission notice for react package it-self will be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from what I see, in case I am distributing only my source code without dependencies I shouldn't care about dependencies' licenses. But in case I would provide my web app as a service, not as a source code? Or if I run the app internally for the use of the company I am working for? Do I need to include all those copyrights and permission notices? Also clients are not always willing to install dependencies themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13019" LastEditorUserId="25091" LastEditDate="2021-09-19T00:00:03.243" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T14:37:40.653" Title="What is the appropriate way to include third-party libraries copyright notice and permission notice in my project source code?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|dependencies|npm|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7309" CreationDate="2018-09-04T15:16:24.957" Score="2" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;My organization made a Python module and would like to share it under the Mozilla Public License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to add the name of this organization to the license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the license as is, there is no name at all. But according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FAQ of the MPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Q4 : I want to use the Mozilla Public License for software that I have&#xA;  written. What do I have to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To apply the Mozilla Public License to software that you have written, add the header from Exhibit A of the license to each source code file in your project. Sample headers for various commenting styles are available here. &lt;strong&gt;You may also add additional accurate notices of copyright ownership, such as the name of the copyright holder, but this is not necessary.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this answer does not really indicates how to do it in the license file...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13020" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T15:37:27.310" Title="How to add the name of my organization to a Mozilla Public License?" Tags="|licensing|mpl|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7308" CreationDate="2018-09-04T15:37:27.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although many people believe that lines like &lt;code&gt;copyright 2018, Bart van Ingen Schenau&lt;/code&gt; are part of the license, legally they are not. Those lines are notices of copyright ownership (or copyright notice) and they declare who owns the copyright on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyright notice consists of the word &quot;copyright&quot; followed by a list of years and/or ranges of years and finally a list of copyright owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common practice is to have the copyright notices directly preceding the license text (or a formal reference to the license), with the two separated by a blank line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T15:37:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7305" CreationDate="2018-09-04T16:28:11.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant license for your use case is the LGPL license. The BSD license and the unRAR restriction only apply when you take the relevant portions of code out of the 7Zip sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A library or executable that is licensed under the LGPL can be used in a closed source application under the condition that it is possible for users of the application to replace the LGPL portions with a version of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T16:28:11.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T17:23:05.097" Score="3" ViewCount="2518" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project to generate a 508 compliant annual PDF Publication from our database using iText 7 java library. This library works great for accessible PDFs. We are in the process of procurement to get a commercial license to use for our future applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this particular application however, we are planning to create an executable java jar file that will run once a year in a server that can connect to our databases. It will sit in the backend and we will run the application manually or using a cronjob (java -jar application). Since this publication has to come out by the end of September and since procurement process takes around 4 to 6 months, we are planning to make this application open sourced. The resulting PDF however will be put as a download in our closed application manually. I read through many websites about the extent of using AGPL V3 license but was still unclear. I also saw this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6879/may-i-use-agpl-license-in-a-desktop-application-without-providing-the-source-cod&quot;&gt;May I use AGPL license in a desktop application without providing the source code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6591/can-i-legally-use-itext-under-the-agpl-license-if-my-application-is-only-availab&quot;&gt;Can I legally use iText under the AGPL license if my application is only available on a local area network?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl-what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/107883/agpl-what-you-can-do-and-what-you-cant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5003/agplv3-source-redistribution-when-does-it-apply-to-my-code-for-a-server-side-ja?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1#answer-5005&quot;&gt;AGPLv3 source redistribution: when does it apply to my code for a server-side Java app using an AGPL-licensed library?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were so many mixed answers out there and also our scenario is bit different. So here are my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In our scenario, do we need to make the source code open? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes to question 1, are we allowed to use iText 7 as an open source alternative in this particular scenario?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes to question 2, what portion of the source code needs to be open? Since we host the file (even though manually added) in a separate public but closed application, do we need to make the source code of this application also open?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;To clarify things a bit, for our current application, we are using the community version of iText 7 and are in no way modifying the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if we could hear back from the author himself. (@BrunoLowagie; @bruno-lowagie)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13024" LastEditorUserId="13024" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T14:02:47.967" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T14:02:47.967" Title="Using iText library with AGPL license to make application open sourced" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|copyleft|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6573" CreationDate="2018-09-04T18:00:37.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motive 1: Politics and Public Perception&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These big companies have a boost in the Public Perception after these announcements. This is important for them. Remember Google's motto used to be &amp;quot;Don't be evil&amp;quot;, but not anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue that they have a need to steer the political discourse in their favor. For Example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imaginarycloud.com/blog/material-design-is-a-political-choice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's Material Design is a political choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is very well documented and, with an “open source” rhetoric, they ensure that everyone practices their guidelines. And that can be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google is a multinational corporation that represents a particular culture and Material Design is just another tentacle of the octopus that monopolizes the Web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This general behavior in the Capitalist Economic Model is described and criticised in the documentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Corporation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motive 2: Practical Benefits of a Community of Users&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big driver is the long term benefit of having a large community of users testing and improving the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example would be the security aspect, as explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/207/how-is-open-source-encryption-safe&quot;&gt;How is open source encryption safe?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Open source encryption is thus often &lt;strong&gt;more secure&lt;/strong&gt; than non-open source encryption...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cryptographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Schneier&lt;/a&gt; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness—and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motive 3: Long Term Economic Benefits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 1: Google bought Android to have control over the mobile ecosystem and be able to have an audience for their mobile ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 2: Oracle buys Java (Sun Microsytems), then eventually sues Google over Java Copyright because they want to cash in on Android's popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example 3: The React's license change controversy that arose after the project had chosen to use a BSD-derived license that contained some troubling terms surrounding patent litigation. Then&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/09/25/facebook-re-licenses-react-mit-license-developer-backlash/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook re-licenses React under MIT license after developer backlash&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motive 4: Counter Existential Threats&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source Projects compete with Private initiatives, this can be illustrated by the infamous quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Linux is a cancer” by Steve Ballmer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, you could analyse the &amp;quot;Embrace, Extend, Extinguish&amp;quot; strategy by Microsoft &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.patreon.com/posts/20983847&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bryan Lunduke at Linux Fest Northwest, April 28 2018&lt;/a&gt; to understand the mindset of these big companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13023" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-06-21T02:08:06.093" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T02:08:06.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-05T16:02:00.680" Score="4" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my question related with GPL and extern GPL scripts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a closed source project plus an extern .qml file, in the app root folder, that uses some GPL QT modules (for example, Virtual keyboard...maybe this modules loads other c++ dynamic libraries too). This file is accessible and editable by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I load in runtime this GPL .qml file, my project must be GPL too, or can be closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13029" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T14:27:32.913" Title="load in runtime an extern .qml file with GPL license" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7312" CreationDate="2018-09-05T17:13:25.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key question with regards to your use of iText is who can use the application to generate the report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If only employees of your company have access to the application (either by installing it on their machine or accessing it remotely), then you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to make the application open source. Giving employees access to (install) an application as part of the work they do is not considered distribution under copyright law, not even for the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (employees of) customers can remotely use the application, then the AGPL requires that you make the sources of the application available to those customers under the terms of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the general public can remotely use the application, then the AGPL requires that you make the sources of the application available to the general public under the terms of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T17:13:25.357" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-05T21:44:50.740" Score="7" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself in the following situation; I have a software project under GPL license, which is a good fit for usage in the company I am currently employed at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am happy to dual license it to them for commercial use, at no fee whatsoever. However, what I would like for that in return, is an exception to my standard contractual terms; that all code written on the clock belongs to them. I don't want to dilute or confuse my intellectual ownership to my project just because I am making a bugfix to my own project that I am giving away for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would such an arrangement look like in practice? Should I set up a separate Contributor license agreement, which is explicitly referenced by the dual license? Or could the CLA be added as a section in the dual license? Would I have to revisit my employment contract to resolve the ambiguity, or can I simply explicitly override previous contractual obligations in the CLA? Any document templates to this effect would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13032" LastEditorUserId="13032" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T18:03:26.443" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T03:25:03.997" Title="Offering exceptions to the GNU GPL as an employee" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7320" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:04:33.863" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are thinking about to publish a module of a commercial closed software as open source under e.g. MIT or BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The published open source module would have still some dependencies to the commercial closed software e.g. Interface, Superclass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we publish the module as open source eg. MIT or BSD?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we host this module at GitHub?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13037" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T16:24:53.120" Title="Publishing an open source project linked to commercial closed API" Tags="|mit|github|bsd|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7319" CreationDate="2018-09-06T16:24:53.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can publish your module &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; the proprietary software allows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the source code of your module or plugin in itself is not &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; from the proprietary program. So you hold the copyright for that program, and no one can tell you whether and how it may be published. As you are the copyright holder you may also publish on GitHub. There are two potential problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license of the proprietary program may contractually prevent you from publishing the module.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inheriting from proprietary classes or interfaces could make your code a derived work. Whether this is a case is a tricky question to which I don't know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD licenses are both perfectly fine here. However, some licenses such as the GPL would require the whole system (proprietary software + your module)  to be open source, so you wouldn't be able to use the GPL for your module – unless you provide a license exception. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compare the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. But these GPL-specific problems do not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T16:24:53.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7323" CreationDate="2018-09-07T10:23:31.960" Score="2" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;GNU comments the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=License:FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-clause license&lt;/a&gt; in: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD&lt;/a&gt;, referencing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments on&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3-clause license&lt;/a&gt; as all applying to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki?title=License:FreeBSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-clause&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They specifically state that the BSD licenses are prone to &lt;em&gt;patent treachery&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Zlib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib/libpng license&lt;/a&gt; very similar to the BSD licenses. However, GNU &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ZLib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doesn't claim the zlib to be prone to &lt;em&gt;patent treachery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Do you know why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T17:32:54.647" Title="Why GNU doesn't blame the zlib license of the same _patent treachery_ problems of the BSD-2 license?" Tags="|bsd|gnu|zlib|zlib-libpng|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7322" CreationDate="2018-09-07T12:14:43.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In their license list, the FSF doesn't claim that the Zlib License is safe from “patent treachery”. The FSF makes no claim regarding this topic at all in that document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same patent issues apply to the whole permissive license family, including MIT/X11, BSD in their variants, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Zlib. As a guess, they only write a single sentence about the Zlib license because it is rarely used when compared with MIT or BSD licenses. They similarly don't mention this issue for the OpenLDAP license, Standard ML License, Unlicense, Vim license, Zope public license, … you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses that explicitly discuss patent grants are for example the GPLv2 license family, GPLv3 license family, or the Apache 2 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T12:14:43.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7298" CreationDate="2018-09-08T01:22:52.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple.  Don't publish what you consider to be the &quot;right&quot; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a fellow teacher (adjunct, Linux admin stuff for a networking AS degree, the occasional intro to SQL class) I like the fact that you want to share your assignments and work, etc.   And I might even look at how you solved the problem.  But I'm going to do it myself anyway.  And, grading isn't based on how different a student did theirs from mine, it is about if it works, if it follows best practices re: naming things and comment use, the defined coding style for the course, etc.  So the teacher side of me would be interested in seeing what you think is the best answer/solution, but I wouldn't use it for grading or show to the students, and so Teacher Ivan says don't publish your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a student (I'm formalizing my life experience to get a piece of paper) I really hate it when teachers use canned problems, canned solutions, and don't know the subject well enough to 1) complete the homework they've assigned me and 2) know the subject well enough to explain why the way I chose to solve the problem is &quot;wrong&quot;, other than &quot;it is different from the answer I got from some other guy on stackexchange&quot;.  So the student side of me supports you not putting the answers out for my lazy teachers :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T01:22:52.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7326" CreationDate="2018-09-08T07:01:47.860" Score="2" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do commercial firms contribute to Android open source project if they are not bound to. They can build their own version of android and use it with their products under any license. Samsung uses Tizen in its products but at the same time contributes to Android. Why? What is the benefit of doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11224" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T10:52:58.227" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T17:35:14.050" Title="Why contribute to Android if it has an Apache license?" Tags="|licensing|contributor|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7325" CreationDate="2018-09-08T09:49:26.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There a few benefits I can imagine in making such contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, from a practical point of view, I'm guessing such companies have their own patches they'd want to rebase on top of the upstream as it moves forward, in order to consume new features, performance improvements, and bugfixes. The larger these patches are, the harder this rebasing is - so it may sometimes (often?) make sense to donate a patch upstream instead of creating it behind your closed walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it's important to support the community. Even if a company has it's own Android fork, it's customer probably don't use just its software - they install third-party apps and games. These third-party apps are usually developed by developers who develop apps for Android, and not for a specific company's Android fork (although they probably test it on several models of the main manufacturers). To ensure this community continues growing, it's important for these companies to make sure the Android market, as a whole, gets a steady stream of new features and bugfixes - and the way to do so is to contribute to the upstream Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, I can assume there's an HR component here. A lot of developers [this one included] like contributing to open source - it's often a fun experience, it allows for a lot of professional growth (as you're able to get feedback on your work from a wider circle than your immediate coworkers), and it improves your own visibility and personal brand. Companies may recognize this and allow some of the work to be done upstream as a type of benefit for the employee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T17:35:14.050" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T17:35:14.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7328" CreationDate="2018-09-08T14:10:45.630" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing some software very similar to openvas - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openvas.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.openvas.org/&lt;/a&gt; most components of this software are release under the GNU GPL license. To be clear my software will not be directly derived from this software in any way - it will be a completely independent build in a different programming language so there will be no shared code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially the software is capable of executing attack scripts against target machines- I plan to support a number of ways of writing these. The attack scripts for OpenVAS are written in NASL - &lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.195.9728&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.195.9728&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&lt;/a&gt; and licensed under GNU GPLv2+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to release my software under an MIT license so that there is more scope for commercial use and development. So my question is can I do this and support the nasl scripting format. Which i guess boils down to whether implementing support for this open source format can be considered derivative work. The way implementation would have to work is that I would have to support the same function signatures as nasl does so I guess in this sense my code would be derived from the nasl specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13051" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T15:17:28.397" Title="Can I have a different license on a product that executes an open source scripting language" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7327" CreationDate="2018-09-08T15:17:28.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A specification and the implementation of that specification are considered independent works as far a copyright law is concerned. This means that the license of the specification (which is usually very restrictive) does not have any influence on the license that can be used for the implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the scripts processed by a language processor are independent works of the processor, so their licenses also don't affect each other. That is the way that you can use a GPL license compiler or interpreter for commercial, closed-source, programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this combined, there is no problem at all to release your NASL processing software under an MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T15:17:28.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-09T19:24:20.397" Score="1" ViewCount="1037" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody is cleaning up SO and deleting posts (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30625764/what-license-has-jai-imageio-jai-imageio&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/285748/what-license-has-jai-imageio-jai-imageio?noredirect=1#comment831853_285748&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Instead is should have been moved here but I can't comment / edit / move it, so here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that sun/oracle stopped working on its jai_imageio libs a long time ago. Now if someone would still be using it - what license does it have? I checked it and it doesn't seem to be a standard one like apache/BSD or the like. Can anyone shed some light on it? Is it compatible with other standard licenses like Apache, BSD or LGPL? Is it deferred/similar to other known licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://download.java.net/media/jai-imageio/builds/release/1.1/LICENSE-jai_imageio.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here you'll find the full text:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permitted Uses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may reproduce and use the Software for Your own Individual, Commercial and Research and Instructional Use only for the purposes of&#xA;  designing, developing, testing, and running Your applets and&#xA;  applications (&quot;Programs&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and restrictions and exceptions set forth in the Software's documentation,&#xA;  You may reproduce and distribute portions of Software identified as a&#xA;  redistributable in the documentation (each a &quot;Redistributable&quot;),&#xA;  provided that You comply with the following (note that You may be&#xA;  entitled to reproduce and distribute other portions of the Software&#xA;  not defined in the documentation as a Redistributable under certain&#xA;  other licenses as described in the THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME, if&#xA;  applicable):&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) You distribute Redistributable complete and unmodified and only bundled as part of Your Programs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) Your Programs add significant and primary functionality to the Redistributable,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) You distribute Redistributable for the sole purpose of running Your Programs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(d) You do not distribute additional software intended to replace any component(s) of the Redistributable,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(e) You do not remove or alter any proprietary legends or notices contained in or on the Redistributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(f) You only distribute the Redistributable subject to a license agreement that protects Sun's interests consistent with the terms&#xA;  contained in this Agreement, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(g) You agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages, costs, liabilities, settlement amounts and/or&#xA;  expenses (including attorneys' fees) incurred in connection with any&#xA;  claim, lawsuit or action by any third party that arises or results&#xA;  from the use or distribution of any and all Programs and/or&#xA;  Redistributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Java Technology Restrictions. You may not create, modify, or change the behavior of, or authorize Your licensees to create, modify,&#xA;  or change the behavior of, classes, interfaces, or subpackages that&#xA;  are in any way identified as &quot;java&quot;, &quot;javax&quot;, &quot;sun&quot; or similar&#xA;  convention as specified by Sun in any naming convention designation...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it compatible with other standard licenses like Apache, BSD or LGPL? Is it deferred/similar to other known licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T23:39:48.590" Title="What license has jai_imageio ? (jai imageio)" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7329" CreationDate="2018-09-09T19:24:20.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attributions to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/1428606/haraldk&quot;&gt;haraldK&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and all the usual disclaimers. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link you have found, is the license for the JAI ImageIO product shipped by Sun/Oracle. Its license is that text you have found. It's not an open source license, and seems quite restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to what I believe is the latest version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://java.net/projects/jai-imageio-core&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code at java.net&lt;/a&gt;, the license of the source code is BSD. Unfortunately, if you look at the project source control, you'll find that there are multiple licenses, covering different parts of the project, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://java.net/projects/jai-imageio-core/sources/svn/content/trunk/LICENSE-codecLibJIIO.txt?rev=254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;native parts&lt;/a&gt; vs &lt;a href=&quot;https://java.net/projects/jai-imageio-core/sources/svn/content/trunk/LICENSE.txt?rev=254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java source code&lt;/a&gt;. I also believe that the JJ2000 (JPEG 2000 implementation) has its own license, that I have never been able to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also find various forks around the web, fixing some issues. They mostly claim to be BSD-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because JAI ImageIO is neither maintained, nor has an understandable license, I have created &lt;a href=&quot;http://haraldk.github.io/TwelveMonkeys/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TwelveMonkeys ImageIO&lt;/a&gt;. This is an open source project, completely under BSD license, and actively maintained. It uses the same API as JAI ImageIO, and handles most formats supported by JAI ImageIO (and some more on its own).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T19:24:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7291" CreationDate="2018-09-10T10:12:49.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;How GPL interacts with various kinds of linking is a tricky and not completely settled question. First, a few facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is copyright-based. The GPL license only becomes relevant for you if your actions would otherwise be copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright infringement definitively occurs if you copy the library, if your software includes the library, or if your software is a derived work in the sense of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opinion of the FSF&lt;/a&gt; (the GPL authors) that dynamically linking a library creates a derived work at runtime &lt;strong&gt;and therefore requires permission from the copyright holders&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here, dynamically linking means any mechanism that loads the library into a process, including &lt;code&gt;.so&lt;/code&gt; shared objects, &lt;code&gt;dlopen()&lt;/code&gt;, and Python's &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; facilities. Copyright is technology-agnostic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many people disagree with the FSF's interpretation, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lawrence Rosen&lt;/a&gt;. Under Rosen's interpretation the GPL license would be no more restrictive than the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FSF's theory has not been tested in court, but is generally accepted in the industry. Because this is a legal grey area, you too should assume the FSF's opinion is correct, just to be on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL includes a permission by the copyright holders to use the GPL'ed software in any way, which includes linking it to non-GPL software (!). However, you may not distribute the result except under a GPL-compatible license (which given non-free components is impossible).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the tricky question: &lt;strong&gt;who&lt;/strong&gt; is effectively creating the derived work? You are supplying all the pieces, but the end user has to put them together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a simple scenario, the user takes your software and replaces some dynamically linked dependency with an ABI-compatible GPL'ed version. Does this make your software subject to the GPL? Absolutely not. The user combined your proprietary software with the GPL'ed library, and is not allowed to distribute the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not your scenario. Your software explicitly anticipates and suggests using a GPL library. It includes code with the sole purpose to interface with the GPL library. I see no reason why an optional dependency should be treated differently from a hard dependency for the purpose of determining whether copyright infringement has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore find it hard to argue that your usage of the GPL'ed library would be fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are definitively violating the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because your software is &lt;em&gt;designed&lt;/em&gt; to load a specific GPL'ed library, it might already be a derived work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At best, you are &lt;em&gt;skirting direct copyright infringement&lt;/em&gt; by deferring the final step of potential infringement to the end users. Courts tend to dislike clever “loopholes” like this. There might still be &lt;em&gt;secondary liability&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to your remaining questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can a wrapper of a GPL library be licensed under the Apache license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that derived works are published under a GPL-compatible license. E.g. the Apache 2 is compatible with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you cannot depend solely on the declared license of some library, but must consider your complete dependency graph. You must comply with the licenses of all directly and indirectly used components of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could you just introduce a MIT-licensed wrapper for the GPL dependency, while keeping your main code proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because you have to consider &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; components. If your system includes GPL components, then it must be available under the GPL, which means that all other components (including your proprietary software) would have to be available under GPL-compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would you be allowed to distribute the GPL library alongside your proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL allows GPL software to be distributed alongside other software (“mere aggregation”) if it is clearly marked as such and does not deprive users from their rights under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this specific case, doing so would confirm the appearance that the GPL library is part of your software, and that not publishing your software under the GPL would be copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: stop looking for GPL loopholes. Either comply with the licenses of the software you are using, or stop using that software in your system. If you nevertheless want to proceed with your current design, at least get advice from a lawyer to reduce your liability in applicable jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T10:12:49.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7332" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-10T14:51:20.087" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source Code is a human-readable collection of instructions in a programming language.  When passed through a compiler and linker, the result is an executable computer program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T20:01:20.273" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T20:01:20.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7333" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-10T14:51:20.087" Score="0" Body="Source Code is a human-readable collection of instructions in a programming language used to produce a computer program." OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T20:01:29.207" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T20:01:29.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-11T04:42:46.057" Score="3" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm wondering if I distribute my application (as an .iso file) with virtualbox portable &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vbox.me/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.vbox.me/&lt;/a&gt; which is licensed under GPLv2, will that make my program also under the GPLv2 license? Or would this be considered two separate programs interacting at arms length?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also if I distribute a linux distro (iso file) that is under gpl with my program installed on it will that make my program GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13062" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:35:46.387" Title="Will distributing my program with virtual box make it GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7336" CreationDate="2018-09-11T07:14:40.013" Score="0" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can an open-source project be forked and then used to build a proprietary enterprise resource planning app (ERP)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, &lt;em&gt;ERP-A&lt;/em&gt; is already built and now I want to build &lt;em&gt;ERP-B&lt;/em&gt;. Can I fork &lt;em&gt;ERP-A&lt;/em&gt; and then modify some feature(s) to create &lt;em&gt;ERP-B&lt;/em&gt;, but make &lt;em&gt;ERP-B&lt;/em&gt; proprietary? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10494" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T12:47:59.910" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T12:47:59.910" Title="Can a proprietary ERP be built from a fork of an open source project?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7335" CreationDate="2018-09-11T08:28:21.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand you correctly, you want to take an existing free-software project, and make enough modifications to make it detectably different from the original code.  You want to know if you can then make this new product proprietary.  In short, and IANAL/IANYL, it depends on the original licence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your new work is what we call a &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; of the old work; making and distributing a derivative are things controlled by copyright, so you need permission to do those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some free licences (&lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; licences like MIT, BSD) permit you to make proprietary products from the original codebase, and no significant conditions are attached to this grant.  You don't even have to modify the original code to be allowed to redistribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other free licences (&lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; licences like GPL, AGPL) also permit it, but require that whatever you distribute (original or modified) be distributed under the same licence terms as the original.  In many jurisdictions, &lt;em&gt;no amount&lt;/em&gt; of modification will make your work not be a derivative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the extent to which ERP-B differs from ERP-A doesn't affect the answer.  The licence on ERP-A does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T09:40:15.317" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:40:15.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7334" CreationDate="2018-09-11T09:35:46.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An ISO image is not fundamentally different from archive formats such as ZIP or TAR or from storage media such as CD-ROMs and thumb drives. This raises two separate questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under what terms can you distribute the software components contained in the image?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under what terms can you distribute the image as whole?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to comply with the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; components that you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A storage medium/image/filesystem/archive can contain GPL'ed software and proprietary software side by side. E.g. in the GPLv2.0 this is called &lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3.0 explains this in more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the existence of GPL'ed software on the image doesn't make the whole image subject to the GPL, but you must not deprive users from their rights under the GPL, e.g. to inspect, share, and modify the GPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the fact that the image was created by a GPL'ed program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright of a program does not extend to the data that it processes. As a simple example, I can use a GPL text editor such as GNU Emacs to write proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the license of an image creation tool does not extend to the images that it creates. The situation is different if it doesn't just create an image but also copies additional software into the image (in which case the same considerations as above apply) or if it e.g. wraps the image with something like a self-extracting EXE that makes the image runnable without separate software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So absent any such cases, the image itself is not under any license and you only have to comply with all licenses of the software components within the image. This also means that you may impose your own licensing terms onto the resulting image, as long as these terms do not violate the licenses of the enclosed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of images that include GPL software, consider the world's most popular Linux distro – Android. Most Android variants include substantial proprietary software and cannot be used freely. However, in compliance with the licenses of any GPLv2 and LGPLv2 components, my Android phone includes a written offer for the source code of those components, e.g. for the Linux kernel and various utilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: you state that Portable Virtualbox is GPLv2-licensed. According to their GitHub repo, they are using the rather unusual and non-free CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license instead (NC = noncommercial!), but can download the GPLv2-licensed Virtualbox software. However, this license does not change the conclusion of this answer, that the license of the image creation software does not directly affect the license of created images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:35:46.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7339" CreationDate="2018-09-11T21:41:27.560" Score="4" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that I create an open source project with a license X, that grants user the capacity to edit and distribute my code, but under the same license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I, as the owner and copyright holder, have to comply to the licensing terms that I agree to other users? This is, can I do whatever I want with my code (patenting rights, trademark rights, etc.) as the owner (even if this is contrary to the license) or I have to comply with the same conditions as other users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3736" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T22:46:28.840" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T22:46:28.840" Title="Do project owners have to comply with their software's license?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-09-12T20:16:40.663" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7338" CreationDate="2018-09-11T22:43:49.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder&lt;/strong&gt;, you don’t have to comply with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you aren’t the sole copyright holder&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., because you integrated a contribution made under this license), you have to comply with this license, unless the contributor has allowed you otherwise, e.g., by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5804/138&quot;&gt;signing a CLA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T22:43:49.210" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-13T06:28:15.410" Score="7" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bought a Samsung laptop recently. The model is shipped with TCL (Tiny Core Linux) with BusyBox in it. Circumstantial evidence suggests that TCL is  modified to meet Samsung's requirements. I found the following link in the home directory (&lt;code&gt;/home/tc&lt;/code&gt;): &lt;a href=&quot;https://ami.com/en/gpl-package-request-form/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ami.com/en/gpl-package-request-form/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they have rights to do this? (&quot;this&quot; meaning asking for my personal info and not disclosing source code via a download link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as I found this, I contacted BusyBox only to receive a perfunctory reply. I'll contact AMI after writing this, but it doesn't take much to know that they wouldn't answer to my emails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I can confirm that the link is the only offer they provided. I checked everything that came with the laptop (manual, CD) and the product page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13084" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T12:45:06.727" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:45:06.727" Title="Requiring personal info for source code" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-13T12:31:06.063" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.treefrogframework.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TreeFrog&lt;/a&gt; framework.  While its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.treefrogframework.org/en/user-guide/introduction/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; is BSD, it still uses &lt;code&gt;qmake&lt;/code&gt; to compile as seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.treefrogframework.org/en/user-guide/tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tutorial&lt;/a&gt;.  So does TreeFrog's BSD license or Qt's LGPL license apply to the application you create using this framework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13087" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T12:31:06.063" Title="License for your TreeFrog application" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7340" CreationDate="2018-09-13T18:20:20.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they have rights to do this? (&quot;this&quot; meaning asking for my personal info and not disclosing source code via a download link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, yes: it is not inherently problematic to require contact information nor to make users submit a request to the distributor for GPL-licensed source code. This particular implementation of GPL compliance has problems, but neither of the topics you identify in your question are problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is AMI's incomplete attempt to fulfill their GPLv2 source-distribution requirements via section 3(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form does not by itself satisfy that requirement (a link is not an offer). The primary components that are missing are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A written promise, within the distribution itself, that AMI will provide the source code upon request. AMI is clearly willing, in general, to give out the source code, but they failed to mention it within the distribution itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A way to contact AMI to make the request (whether or not this URL satisfies that requirement isn't totally clear to me and may vary by jurisdiction)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to answer your specific question, requesting personal information on a website to get the GPL source code is not particularly problematic. You are naturally concerned that the submission of personal information is an unduly onerous burden in collecting the source code, but I would argue it is not. Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DistributeWithSourceOnInternet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPLv2 FAQ item&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to distribute binaries via physical media without accompanying sources. Can I provide source code by FTP instead of by mail order?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're supposed to provide the source code by mail-order on a physical medium, if someone orders it. You are welcome to offer people a way to copy the corresponding source code by FTP, in addition to the mail-order option, but FTP access to the source is not sufficient to satisfy section 3 of the GPL.&#xA;  When a user orders the source, you have to make sure to get the source to that user. If a particular user can conveniently get the source from you by anonymous FTP, fine—that does the job. But not every user can do such a download. The rest of the users are just as entitled to get the source code from you, which means you must be prepared to send it to them by post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the FTP access is convenient enough, perhaps no one will choose to mail-order a copy. If so, you will never have to ship one. But you cannot assume that. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For physical distribution, providing a written offer for source code based on physical mail is both necessary and sufficient to satisfy GPLv2 3(b). I point this out to show that the GPLv2 assumes a distributor who relies on 3(b) makes available a &lt;em&gt;mail-order option of physical media&lt;/em&gt;. This necessarily requires sharing personal information: at minimum, a mailing address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that they provide a URL and no other instructions, it doesn't look like they formally satisfy the GPLv2's requirements for 3(b). This failure doesn't have to do with the solicitation of personal information specifically but comes down to the lack of formal offer and ambiguity about how to contact AMI. Their also erroneously reject some email addresses, which is a significant hurdle to contacting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite their failure to satisfy 3(b) to the letter, this looks like a pretty close effort by AMI -- they went through the process of setting up a source-distribution website, but did not include the text of an offer within their distribution. They would probably be amenable to correcting their approach after a FLOSS authority informed them they missed the mark on fulfilling their GPL requirements. Contacting BusyBox is probably the best way to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have a copy of the source code, you are welcome to exercise your GPL freedoms to modify and redistribute the code in any way the license allows. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; can distribute &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; (possibly modified) copy of the source source code over a network, per sections 1, 2, and option 3(a) (if distributing a binary). You do not ever need to perform physical distribution if you do not wish to do so, as long as you do not rely on option 3(b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T13:20:57.607" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T13:20:57.607" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-16T09:57:00.763" Score="0" ViewCount="918" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to write proprietary code that links to a shared library that's open source? Under what license and condition are it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13111" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T10:58:17.987" Title="Is it possible to write proprietary code that links to a shared library that's open source? Under what license and condition is it possible?" Tags="|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7345" CreationDate="2018-09-16T10:33:57.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to write a proprietary, closed-source application that uses open-source libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most open-source licenses, including the MIT and BSD licenses, require at most that you disclose that the library is being used and under which license the library is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most well-known licenses with stricter requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The LGPL requires that end-users must be able to replace the LGPL library with a version of their own. This is most easily achieved by dynamically linking to such libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL and AGPL licenses require that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; code in the application is available under an open-source license. This is not compatible with the aim of using it in a closed-source application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T10:58:17.987" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T10:58:17.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-16T13:15:03.230" Score="4" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a library that is indeed a subclass of QTreeView. So I can easily attach it to any Qt application that uses QTreeView.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to patch a GPL application (GPL_APP) in a way that it searches for my library and if it exists then loads it, but if it is not found, GPL_APP will continue to work without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will publish them separately, GPL_APP will be released with its full source-code, but library will be closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library is in theory usable with other applications, but as there is no other application with compatible interface to load my library, GPL_APP is the only application that can use it, and therefore I know in first place that users will combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this violating GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13113" LastEditorUserId="14101" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T05:07:18.890" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T17:03:02.313" Title="Closed source plugin for a GPLv2 application" Tags="|gpl-2|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7340" CreationDate="2018-09-17T14:09:37.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require distributors supply the source code to you with the product, as long as they also provide a &quot;written offer, valid for at least three years&quot; to give you &quot;a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they have rights to [ask] for my personal info &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they need personal information such as your name and address in order to give you the source code according to the GPL, then yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do they have rights to [not disclose] source code via a download link&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the GPL version 2 or 3 obligates the written offer to be a download link. In fact, if the software is licensed with GPL version 2, they are actually required to supply the source code &quot;on a medium customarily used for software interchange.&quot; They are allowed to charge you for the price of the medium and shipping. For GPLv3, they can either supply the source on a medium (and also charge you for the price of the medium and shipping) or they can offer you the source via download free of charge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you mention BusyBox, I assume GPLv2 applies, which means a download link alone is not a sufficient offer. Although the Internet is &quot;a medium&quot; commonly used for software interchange, the GPLv2 literally says that you must place the software &quot;on a medium.&quot; A URL does not place software on a medium until someone initiates a download.  In other words, the &quot;on a medium&quot; phrase in the Version 2 license text implies that a machine-readable physical medium (e.g. a CD, a DVD, a USB stick, an SD card, etc.) is to be provided and that the fee is to cover this physical distribution. However, if AMI were to offer a free download link in addition to offering it on a physical medium (thus fulfilling their GPLv2 obligations), that would be perfectly fine, and I suspect most people would choose the free download link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found [a link to a Web form] in the home directory(/home/tc):&#xA;  ...&#xA;  I can confirm that the link is the only offer they provided. I checked everything that came with the laptop(manual, CD) and the product page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL, the distributor must &quot;accompany&quot; the software with the written offer. Providing a download link in a text file in a particular directory inside the product as you describe seems problematic. Why didn't they include the written offer in the written materials that normally accompany the product? If it were my machine I would be likely to simply create my own home directory and never bother looking at the /home/tc directory. The presence of this text file would not itself be a problem if it was &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; a written offer along with the other written materials (e.g. manual, warranty information, etc.). By placing only a single text file with a URL inside a directory that some users are likely not to look at, and by not including it along with other written materials that are actually included with the product, it seems to me at that they are not trying very hard to make good on their obligation to provide a written offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we accept that the text file and/or URL might qualify as a &quot;written offer&quot; (I would call it more like an &quot;online offer&quot; or &quot;Internet offer&quot;) visiting the linked-to page reveals other compliance problems with the &quot;Internet offer.&quot; The form as currently written requires that users accept an additional agreement in order to request the source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please complete the GPL Package Request Form. Once submitted, an AMI Representative will email you concerning your request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GPL Text (sic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... By clicking SUBMIT, you agree to the following LICENSE AGREEMENT regarding code that is not covered under GNU/GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the agreement is titled &quot;GPL Text&quot; but the actual text in that box is not the GPL at all. The actual GPL license requires that the written offer to the source code be made to &quot;any third party&quot; (GPLv2) or to &quot;anyone who possesses the object code&quot; (GPLv3). What if the third party does not agree to those additional non-GPL terms in the &lt;strong&gt;GPL Text&lt;/strong&gt; box? If AMI want to impose additional license terms for other files (i.e. non GPL files) that are accompanied in the download package, they need to separate those files and make a GPL-only package available which can be obtained without agreeing to an additional software license. Also, they should avoid implying that their terms are part of the GPL or are related to it. They are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Country (For European Union residents, please visit AMI.de.) *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AMI form asks European Union residents to visit a different Web site, written in a different language, which ultimately does not offer the source code to visitors. However, the GPLv2 requires that the written offer be made to &quot;any third party.&quot; As the form is currently written, they seem to be excluding EU residents from their offer, which the GPL does not allow. Again, if this form were simply provided as a possible convenience (at least possibly convenient for non EU residents) &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt; to an actual written offer, then there would be no problem with GPL compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T14:19:07.143" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T14:19:07.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6164" CreationDate="2018-09-17T18:19:35.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source software describes software that can be used freely. What this means in detail is e.g. written down in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition (OSD)&lt;/a&gt; or in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition (FSD)&lt;/a&gt;. The “four freedoms” of the FSD are short enough to be shown here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). […] Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Open formats” have no similar widely accepted definition or underlying philosophy. The term is used (similarly to open source software) to file formats that can be used freely. In particular, this means that an open format can be &lt;em&gt;implemented&lt;/em&gt; freely, whether as proprietary or open source software. Most definitions of open formats include at least two preconditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An open format must have some standard/specification. E.g. if a file format is defined as “whatever this existing program can read/write” that is NOT an open format.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That standard must not be restricted by patents. There is some debate what this means precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. some would argue that a patent-encumbered format can be open if those patents are offered under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FRAND&lt;/a&gt; terms, which means that everyone can buy a license under “reasonable” terms. However, that effectively excludes open source software from implementing that standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for an open format that is intended to be implemented by open source software, the format must either be completely free from patents, or a royalty-free patent license must be available. Some open source licenses have clauses that imply a patent license from contributors, e.g. Apache 2 and GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of non-open and open formats, consider various media formats. When the GIF format was published there was a patent on the used compression algorithm, therefore GIFs were not an open format. As a reaction the PNG format was created. Since the GIF-related patents have expired, GIF is a free format as well. Other media formats have similar stories, e.g. the audio codecs MP3 vs. Ogg Vorbis, or the video codecs MP4/HEVC versus WebM/VP9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T18:19:35.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-18T12:12:29.013" Score="-2" ViewCount="595" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone signed an NDA at a company that does X. Generally speaking, does this typically preclude them from working on open-source projects that  also do X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7834" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T12:41:17.343" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T12:41:17.343" Title="NDAs vs. FOSS Projects" Tags="|licensing|nda|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7350" CreationDate="2018-09-18T14:50:19.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;NDAs are private contracts. Within the laws of the applicable jurisdiction, any terms could be part of an NDA – including terms that forbid work on related projects, including open source projects. From the perspective of a company, contributions to an open source project are not fundamentally different from working for a competitor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-disclosure agreements which protect certain trade secrets or confidential information are distinct from non-compete clauses. In particular, many jurisdictions heavily regulate non-compete clauses, for example by banning them outright or by specifying a maximum duration. Even without an explicit clause, normal employment implies that employees will not compete with their employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is therefore best – with our without NDAs or non-compete clauses – to limit open source contributions either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to projects that are unrelated to employment,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or to projects that the employer has agreed to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NDAs without a non-compete clause do not forbid competition outright. You are generally free to work on competing projects as long as this does not result in trade secrets or covered information being disclosed. A good NDA should spell out what precisely is covered by the agreement. An NDA cannot apply to publicly available information or information that was known beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the NDA might apply to a specific information is a judgement call on your part. In particular, you have to manage the risk of a legal dispute to determine whether your actions breached the NDA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result it is usually unwise to sign NDAs, especially when they are excessively broad. But as they are private contracts, they can be negotiated in advance to limit their scope. On the other hand NDAs can also be a totally legitimate and proportionate legal tool, especially as part of employment or consulting. Aside from protecting trade secrets, an NDA might be necessary if you have access to personal, financial, or other sensitive information in the course of your work – but again, the NDA should spell this out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T14:50:19.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T03:19:44.700" Score="-2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey suppose I would like to create a new modification of the GPL 3.0 license, would I be allowed to copy the GPL, modify it, and then rename it to something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. is the GPL license itself open source, as long as I call the new modification something different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13062" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T03:28:11.037" Title="Creating a new open source License based off of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-09-19T11:11:51.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7354" CreationDate="2018-09-19T03:28:11.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually think I found the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to modify the GPL into something else, as long as you call it by a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13062" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T03:28:11.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7357" CreationDate="2018-09-19T14:19:51.873" Score="10" ViewCount="2020" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm making a library called X, which has a dependency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/requests/requests&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;requests&lt;/a&gt; (which is under the Apache 2.0 license). For X's &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt;, I declare the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;setup(&#xA;    ...&#xA;    install_requires=[&#xA;        'requests&amp;gt;=2.19.1',&#xA;         ...&#xA;    ]&#xA;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now obviously, I understand that the terms of the Apache License state that I need to include the license, state changes, include copyright, etc. However, since I'm not exactly including the dependency &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; (the end user installs it when running &lt;code&gt;pip install X&lt;/code&gt;), does this really apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, taking the example of requests itself, I notice that it has numerous dependencies, but no licenses seem to be included in the repository itself. Other libraries follow similar practices (not including their dependencies' licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do I need to include the licenses for dependencies declared in a setup.py?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10764" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T06:55:19.687" Title="Do I need to include the license for all dependencies declared in a setup.py?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7356" CreationDate="2018-09-20T06:55:19.687" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you do not need to include licenses for code that isn't part of your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as a service to your users, you can consider mentioning the licenses of your dependencies in the documentation. For this service, it is sufficient to have something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This library uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/requests/requests&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;requests&lt;/a&gt; library, which is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T06:55:19.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:05:33.637" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to &lt;strong&gt;fulfill license obligations&lt;/strong&gt; (in some cases) one must display the copyright information (when not delivering source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should one display (in GUI or IFU) the copyright information of each file or only the one in the main COPYING file ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification: I am not referring to how to add the Copyright information to the source code. From this point of view, @John has a very good point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastEditorUserId="6780" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T12:46:43.353" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T10:22:33.670" Title="How to properly display the Copyright information in the User Interface or product documentation?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7358" CreationDate="2018-09-21T06:25:23.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each file, for sure -- even if it's not &quot;for sure&quot;, legally, it can't hurt. Every module of my gpl'ed programs always begins with an elaborate header comment block, summarizing the gpl and referring to COPYING in the zip file distribution. I just cut-and-paste it from one module into a new module, and then edit as required. Here's a typical example which you can use as a template, if you like. And note the eco case# -- I always officially register copyrights, and would encourage you to do the same...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/****************************************************************************&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright(c) 2014-2017, John Forkosh Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.&#xA; *   ( eco.copyright.gov -- Case# 1-5321264531   Date opened: 6/5/2017 )&#xA; *           http://www.forkosh.com   mailto: john@forkosh.com&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; * This file, gifscroll.c, is part of gifscroll, which is free software.&#xA; * You may redistribute and/or modify gifscroll under the terms of the&#xA; * GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, as published by the&#xA; * Free Software Foundation.&#xA; *      gifscroll is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA; * WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, not even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY.&#xA; * See the GNU General Public License for specific details.&#xA; *      By using gifscroll, you warrant that you have read, understood&#xA; * and agreed to these terms and conditions, and that you possess the legal&#xA; * right and ability to enter into this agreement and to use gifscroll&#xA; * in accordance with it.&#xA; *      Your gifscroll.zip distribution file should contain the file&#xA; * COPYING, an ascii text copy of the GNU General Public License,&#xA; * version 3. If not, point your browser to  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&#xA; * or write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place,&#xA; * Suite 330,  Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; *&#xA; * Purpose:   o gifscroll generates an animated gif displaying a message&#xA; *              like a scrolling led sign in store windows.&#xA; *              See the &quot;Notes:&quot; below, and also&#xA; *                http://www.forkosh.com/gifscroll.html&#xA; *              for further details about gifscroll.&#xA; *&#xA; * Source:    o gifscroll.c&#xA; *&#xA; * Functions: o The following &quot;table of contents&quot; lists each function&#xA; *              comprising gifscroll in the order it appears in this file.&#xA; *              See individual function entry points for specific comments&#xA; *              about purpose, calling sequence, side effects, etc.&#xA; *              =============================================================&#xA; *              +---&#xA; *              | gifscroll functions&#xA; *              +-----------------------&#xA; *              main(argc,argv)                      cgi driver for gifscroll&#xA; *              rasterize_this(msgorpbm,type)   rasterize message or pbm file&#xA; *              new_raster(width,height)    raster allocation and constructor&#xA; *              delete_raster(rp)                       destructor for raster&#xA; *              etc, etc&#xA; *&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; *&#xA; * Notes:     o gifscroll() presently runs on Unix and Windows&#xA; *            o etc, etc&#xA; *&#xA; * --------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA; * Revision History:&#xA; * 03/23/14     J.Forkosh       Installation.&#xA; * 10/04/17     J.Forkosh       Most recent revision&#xA; * See  http://www.forkosh.com/gifscrollchangelog.html  for further details.&#xA; *&#xA; ***************************************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T06:25:23.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7364" CreationDate="2018-09-23T08:46:19.560" Score="5" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question occurred to me as a result of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/118/stephen-kitt&quot;&gt;Stephen Kitt&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7358/how-to-properly-display-the-copyright-information-in-the-user-interface-or-produ/7359#comment18129_7359&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; below my recent post, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7358/how-to-properly-display-the-copyright-information-in-the-user-interface-or-produ/7359#7359&quot;&gt;How to properly display the Copyright information in the User Interface or product documentation?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“By using gifscroll”...&#xA;      That paragraph goes against the GPL, specifically, section 9 of GPL v3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;refers to part of the gpl-related comment block in my code reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;*      By using gifscroll, you warrant that you have read, understood&#xA;* and agreed to these terms and conditions, and that you possess the legal&#xA;* right and ability to enter into this agreement and to use gifscroll&#xA;* in accordance with it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And after checking out section 9,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive&#xA;      or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work&#xA;      occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission&#xA;      to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance.&#xA;      However, nothing other than this License grants you permission&#xA;      to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe&#xA;      copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying&#xA;      or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of&#xA;      this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd agree with Stephen's comment. But the gist of that section sounds (to me, at least) like some Alice-in-Wonderland logic...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a license that grants you some rights (in this case &quot;to receive or run a copy of the program&quot;) even if you don't accept the license. But if you don't accept the license in the first place, you wouldn't be appealing to the rights and permissions it does or doesn't grant you. You certainly can't be saying, in the same breath, that both (a)I don't accept this license, and (b)this license grants me permission to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what the heck is the purpose of this &quot;even if you don't accept&quot; clause in section 9? If you don't accept the license, then you don't care what it says, period. They're nevertheless presumably trying to accomplish something or other with that section 9. But what, exactly? And then I'd think (or hope) they could accomplish their intended purpose in a more sensible-sounding way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T15:50:00.043" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T17:36:21.417" Title="Clarification of gpl v3 section 9" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7363" CreationDate="2018-09-23T08:59:14.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ClickThrough&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to agree to anything to merely use software which is licensed under the GPL. You only have obligations if you modify or distribute the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you obtained a piece of GPL-licensed software appropriately (which means that whoever &lt;em&gt;conveyed&lt;/em&gt; it to you accepted the license), you don’t need to accept the license merely to use the software. The onus is on distributors because they need additional rights to be allowed to redistribute the software (rights which are provided by the GPL). Copyright law doesn’t deny users the right to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; copyrighted works; it restricts their rights to redistribute them, modify them, perform them etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rights “to receive or run a copy of the program” are obtained as a result of the distributor’s acceptance of the license, that’s all that’s needed. The recipient doesn’t need to accept any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;, going shopping: the vast majority of goods you can buy (or be given, etc.) don’t require anything additional for you to be allowed to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph of the answer I’m quoting from is very lenient for authors and users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some software packaging systems have a place which requires you to click through or otherwise indicate assent to the terms of the GPL. This is neither required nor forbidden. With or without a click through, the GPL's rules remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So effectively your clause isn’t forbidden by the GPL, because it’s ineffective for users: users’ obligations aren’t changed by either accepting the license or not. Accepting the license merely to use the software entails no obligations for users; refusing the license merely to use the software doesn’t deny anything to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl#preamble&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The GPL’s preamble&lt;/a&gt; gives additional context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“share and change”&lt;/em&gt;, not “use”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“show them”, not “require them to accept them”. The users of GPL software have the same basic rights as any software user, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; the right to use the software; but they also have additional rights, provided by the GPL, and it’s useful that they are made aware of them — but they don’t have to take advantage of those additional rights, and as a result they don’t have to accept the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" LastEditorUserId="118" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T09:12:52.263" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T09:12:52.263" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-24T00:29:39.457" Score="7" ViewCount="900" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know, I know, you're probably thinking CC0 or WTFPL or something along those lines. But the thing is, the way I see it, people have a right to redistribute anything, even if the author doesn't want them to and didn't release it under a free license; once someone receives it from the author it is no longer any of the author's business what they do with it. (Yes, I'm aware the law says otherwise; I believe the law is wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning behind this is unimportant to the question, but for anyone wondering, it basically boils down to the technical nature of the act of conveying a copyrighted work: you're really doing nothing more than altering the state of a physical object you own and then giving it to the recipient, or alternatively altering the state of something that the recipient already owns in the same way. You have a right to modify your own property however you want, and you have a right to give your property to whoever wants it. And anyone can grant you permission to modify their property, at which point you have a right to do it without needing anyone else's permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of all this, bringing copyright infringement claims against a license violator in court would constitute inciting an initiation of force against them. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-aggression principle&lt;/a&gt; (a libertarian idea I strongly believe in) this is not acceptable. So if I license something under CC0, and distribute it to person A, who then in turn distributes it to person B, it's possible that, according to the law, person B won't have a right to further distribute it, and person A will have the right to bring charges against B for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want this possibility. I want to use my copyright protection as an opportunity to, wherever I can, have the law reflect the rights I feel people &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; have. This, I believe, is the point of a copyleft license, which is why I've mostly been using the GPL for my code. But today I realized that this is not sufficient, as it obligates distribution of source code along with binaries. I'd &lt;em&gt;rather&lt;/em&gt; people distribute source code, but they have a right to give me the binaries whether they want to distribute code or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I'd want my license to work as if copyright didn't exist. A license that permits everything &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; legal action of any kind, even on derivative works. I want to ensure people's freedom not just in the way people can use public domain stuff, but I want to enable &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; to do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; with my work, and any other work the law gives me say over. One way to put it is that the only restrictions I want on the license would be restrictions on copyright law, not on any end users or distributors. So, just like if copyright law didn't exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyone may use the software for any purpose they choose, and distribute it in any form and for any purpose—if someone could do it without the existence of copyright law, they can do it with my software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;no one&lt;/strong&gt; may place any type of restrictions on my software, nor any software the law grants me authority to decide this for, under copyright law, &lt;strong&gt;except&lt;/strong&gt; for that one. Which isn't so much a copyright restriction so much as a restriction &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; copyright, because it doesn't prohibit anything that would be allowed if copyright law didn't exist—the law wouldn't allow the use of force for things like this, much less provide an official means of doing so. This would only exist as a license restriction because, ironically, it's the only way to ensure real license restrictions don't become a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An important distinction is that this only applies to legal restrictions, ones that rely on force. Although I strongly dislike DRM, for instance, I still want to ensure the freedom to redistribute the work in any form, including encumbered by DRM. Again, that would be possible and permissible even if it wasn't for copyright law, so it's okay here too. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, if that's what you want, it's on you to make it strong, because if someone manages to crack it, it's entirely your problem; you won't be able to sue anyone for distributing cracked copies, nor take advantage of anti-circumvention laws. Similarly, software released without source code can be freely reverse-engineered and shared in recreated source code form, if anyone desires to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: I don't like copyright law. I want to use a license that allows maximum freedom, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; freedom to enforce copyright, same as if copyright didn't exist. Basically, you can do anything you want, but so can anyone else, so you're on your own if you don't want them to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license applies to whatever I can make it apply to, and the only way to violate it is if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; initiate legal processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license like this or would I need to find a lawyer to write a custom one? (I wonder if the EFF or someone would do that pro bono.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13151" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T04:56:51.240" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T10:25:33.470" Title="Is there a good license for a libertarian programmer who's against intellectual property?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyright|law|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7372" CreationDate="2018-09-24T04:23:27.003" Score="4" ViewCount="1249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an embedded device that runs Linux among other software licensed by the GNU GPL. The manufacturer never released any GPL code, and I plan to demand that from them tomorrow. My question is, do they just have to give me the code licensed under the GPL, or, given how one of my basic freedoms is to modify GPL-licensed software, do they have to give me a way to flash my modifications? (The device has a connection with my PC and if you have code implementing the protocol you can send commands to the Linux system over this connection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm asking another question about this body of code &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7367/do-defunct-companies-have-to-comply-with-requests-for-gpl-code&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13153" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T06:52:24.270" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T07:52:54.993" Title="How much code does the manufacturer of an embedded device that uses GPL software have to give me?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7368" CreationDate="2018-09-24T05:08:21.040" Score="23" ViewCount="3850" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an embedded Linux device. The company that developed and produced this device is now defunct, having been sold to Flex Ltd. When this acquisition occurred, it seems that the employees signed non-disclosure agreements about every aspect of their company (the one that was being sold).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original company never released any GPL code for their product like they should have (they did list off the open source libraries used by the smartphone app that went along with the product, so they knew about this kind of obligation) and I didn't get involved with this until after they were sold. My question is, given that the original company was fully operational less than three years ago, both selling the product with GPL code and hosting firmware updates containing GPL code for that product; is the new owner Flex legally obliged to give me the GPL code if I request if from them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm asking another question about this body of code &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7366/how-much-code-does-the-manufacturer-of-an-embedded-device-that-uses-gpl-software&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13153" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T06:52:50.477" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T00:32:38.623" Title="Do defunct companies have to comply with requests for GPL code?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7367" CreationDate="2018-09-24T07:23:06.377" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legal issues can be very jurisdictionally-dependent, and of course IANAL/IANYL, but the issue seems to me to relate to the circumstances of sale.  If the original company was bought as a going concern, then its obligations transfer with its assets to the new owner.  If it was bought from the official receiver (or local equivalent) after going into receivership, things are more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume the former, in which case to my mind the new company has the obligations of the old.  The big problem here is that those obligations aren't to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, but to the copyright holder(s) of the original code.  When the company took GPL code written by (let's say) Alice, modified and redistributed it, they were either doing so under the terms of the GPL, or they were breaching Alice's copyright power to control the distribution of derivative works.  If this company fails to hand over source code when asked, it's not you they've offended, it's Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's assume you ask the company for the code, and it doesn't hand it over.  If you're considering legal action, the issues that engage you are known as third-party distribution rights, and specific performance.  The former relates to whether anyone other than Alice has standing to sue for breach of obligation, and the latter to whether a court has the power to order anything other than an award of cash damages, for example to order the company to hand over all the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was all very well covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/licenses_and_contracts_eu_us/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a talk at FOSDEM 2018&lt;/a&gt;, which (at the risk of tooting my own horn a bit) I summarised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article for LWN&lt;/a&gt;.  Three lawyers from different jurisdictions (US, UK, EU) considered these very issues, and the results are covered near the end of the article (and of the talk).  What it boils down to is that, at the very least, it's complex, and that is &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; bad news for you: if you're going to sue someone, you &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; don't want to be forging new paths through the law to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, your best option is to see if any of the umbrella rights organisations like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; currently has standing to pursue these issues for any of the code you're interested in, and if so, join them and try to engage them in pursuing this company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T07:23:06.377" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7365" CreationDate="2018-09-24T08:19:02.903" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone may use the software for any purpose they choose ...&#xA;  However, no one may place any type of restrictions on my software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your basic problem is that these are self-contradictory aims.  In the context of modern copyright law, the receipt of freedoms doesn't automatically require you to extend them to others.  If you don't want to allow people to take your work and use it in a way that denies freedom to others, you will have to &lt;strong&gt;actively&lt;/strong&gt; deny them that ability.  The GNU GPL understands that, and is honest about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the preamble&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a similar problem with DRM and anti-circumvention laws.  You may forbid others to lock up your work with DRM; but if you let them do it, you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; absolve everyone else from their nations' anti-circumvention laws, even with respect to cracking open DRM'ed content that includes your work.  Law doesn't function like that, currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So until the international copyright regime is changed, you can either give people maximum freedom with respect to your work, which will include the freedom not to so empower others (permissive licence), or you can give them freedom which is circumscribed so they cannot use your work in a manner that doesn't pass on that freedom (copyleft licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to release your work under either GPL or CC0, and &lt;em&gt;tell people why you have done so&lt;/em&gt;.  Write and speak on why you think copyright is harmful.  Lobby your national government and its representatives to amend what WIPO does, and to update the controlling international conventions on copyright.  Join and support organisations whose aims seem compatible with yours.  It is not likely you will succeed in your aims, but it's possible: once upon a time, Richard Stallman was just a young man hacking Lisp at the MIT AI lab; then he wrote the GNU GPL, released a lot of code under it, and many good things happened.  Every movement must start &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;, but you have to move to have &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; chance of starting one.  Getting too hung up on your choice of licence at this point will guarantee that you achieve nothing - not even code release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T08:17:37.967" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T08:17:37.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7373" CreationDate="2018-09-24T15:09:21.620" Score="17" ViewCount="2788" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an embedded device that contains software licensed under the GPL version 2.0 'or any later version'. The company that produced it never released any GPL code, and I plan to request it from them. I want to get as much code from them as possible: when requesting GPL code for the software licensed under version 2.0 or later, can I request the code under the GPL version 3.0 so that they have to give me the 'Installation Information', as defined in the GPL version 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is regarding the same device as my &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7367/do-defunct-companies-have-to-comply-with-requests-for-gpl-code&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7366/how-much-code-does-the-manufacturer-of-an-embedded-device-that-uses-gpl-software&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13153" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T10:36:39.753" Title="Can I insist on GPL version 3.0 terms when requesting GPL code from an embedded manufacturer?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7370" CreationDate="2018-09-24T15:20:20.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can request, but you will almost certainly get a no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code says 2.0 or any later version, you are only entitled to code that says 2.0 or later version. Of course you can go and apply the 3.0 version yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you get modules that say &quot;2.0 version&quot; (typically just the Linux kernel source) than that's what it is. There's no reasonable way to change it and even the place you are requesting it from cannot do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T15:20:20.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7366" CreationDate="2018-09-24T15:25:11.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out the ability to disallow modifications is very specific to the GPL 2.0 due to a drafting error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If even a single component is GPL 3.0 (direct clause) or even LGPL 2.0 (linkage clause) they must provide the minimal ability to modify the firmware. This doesn't mean they need to provide a good way to do it. It's almost certain that the way to do it is going to be package new root FS image and flash EEPROM or flash ROM with new contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these licenses require the scripts to build and link, but only if such scripts actually existed. If they really did build everything by hand than that's what you get to do too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T15:25:11.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7370" CreationDate="2018-09-24T17:56:25.713" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is an offer made by the original authors to the manufacturer of the device, and it is also an offer made by the manufacturer of the device to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter offer is no coincidence; it was a result of the company accepting the first offer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for you is that the company's obligations follow from the first contract, and that offer said &quot;GPL2 or above, at your (i.e. the companies) choice&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you got offered the same &quot;GPL2 or above&quot; deal therefore means that you have the same choice, &lt;em&gt;when you distribute&lt;/em&gt;. It works forwards, not backwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T17:56:25.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7408" CreationDate="2018-09-25T01:06:39.547" Score="14" ViewCount="2048" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linux now has a Code of Conduct. In the resulting backlash some people have claimed that developers can &quot;flip a kill switch&quot; or &quot;pull their code&quot; from Linux. They seem to mean that developers can revoke the GPL license from the code they have already contributed and force it to be removed from the kernel. Of course if this were done the effect would be disastrous, forcing Linux developers to scramble to identify and replace the affected code, which would be difficult at best and impossible at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm a bit skeptical of this interpretation of copyright law. My amateur understanding is that Linux contributers continue to own the code they wrote but offer it under the GPL upon submitting it; whoever pulls that code licenses it under the GPL at that moment and that license doesn't expire. That license allows other developers and end users to continue using and copying that code under the GPL. While developers can stop offering to license their code to new licensors, as long as people obtain the code via a chain leading back to an original licensor, it is still GPLed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct? Or can developers revoke their code from Linux?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13165" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T02:11:16.270" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T08:17:24.473" Title="Is it possible for Linux developers to retroactively &quot;pull their code&quot; from Linux?" Tags="|gpl|contributor-agreements|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7375" CreationDate="2018-09-25T01:34:27.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No, but what they can do might have the same effect.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that people can continue using the code under the GPL, &lt;em&gt;as long as they don't breach the terms of the license&lt;/em&gt;.  Each step of the chain leading back to the original contributor has to have been in compliance at the time the chain linked up through them -- recent violations wouldn't retroactively affect previously granted licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in order to use that code in future versions of Linux, the major developers and distributors have to stay in compliance.  If some contributor wanted to make a claim that recent events constitute a restriction on recipients' exercise of rights, impermissible under section 6, or any other violation, the result would be a great big mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Future versions of Linux would most likely excise that code rather than trying to defend against allegations of copyright violation.  (Only lawyers win from taking those to court)  So the most likely end result would be almost indistinguishable from revoking code from those contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing versions of Linux would be unaffected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="758" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T01:34:27.170" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7375" CreationDate="2018-09-25T05:17:23.347" Score="11" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.  Just no.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, this has nothing to do with a CoC.  If it was possible for developers to de-license code after release last month, then it's possible this month; if it wasn't possible last month, then it isn't possible this month.  I'd argue, at least in my home jurisdiction of England and Wales, that it's not possible, because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;promissory estoppel&lt;/a&gt;, a legal doctrine that says that you cannot revoke a unilateral promise that someone else has relied upon.  But that is a secondary issue for your question: &lt;strong&gt;the introduction of a CoC has made not one iota of difference to whether such revocation is possible&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CoC doesn't say anything about what you're allowed to do with kernel code that you receive under GPLv2; if it tried to constrain that, it would fall foul of the free software definitions.  It doesn't prevent you downloading the kernel, nor from modifying it to your heart's content, and it has nothing to say about how you should behave while doing so.  It merely tries to (slightly) constrain how you behave publicly whilst so doing &lt;strong&gt;if you want your modifications accepted by upstream&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody is guaranteed to be allowed to participate in any piece of free software development, including the kernel's.  There have always been criteria for participation in mainstream kernel development, which presumably included technical excellence; now, another criterion has been added.  It doesn't seem to me much less arbitrary or imprecise than the pre-existing criteria, but not much more so, either.  That's all that has happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: as Björn has said in his answer, Software Freedom Conservancy have issued a formal statement confirming their view of the irrevocability of a GPL grant, and that Codes of Conduct have no impact on this.  It can be found eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/766784/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Thanks to apsillers for suggesting that I link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T08:17:24.473" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-25T07:43:15.730" Score="48" ViewCount="10771" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I used a piece of software which claims to be open source and is licensed under &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, GPL 2 and 3 are not themselves free, in sense that you can't change them and still call them GPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as far as I remember, they don't allow developers to restrict the rights granted by them. Cases such as GPL, GPL or GPL + exceptions, or GPL or another license are possible, but GPL with some rights is removed is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, is the idea of licensing code under &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot; self-contradictory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&#xA;Do to some website restructuring, I could not find the original page where the research purposes only quote comes from. However, the program itself has a license.txt with GPLv3 in it, and following additional notes appended at the end or the regular GPLv3 text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADDITIONAL NOTES &#xA;&amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; is for research purposes only.  &#xA;&amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; CAN NOT be used for commercial purposes.&#xA;&amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; SHOULD NOT be used for medical purposes.  &#xA;The authors  WILL NOT be responsible for using &amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; in medical conditions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13166" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T12:27:20.043" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:31:48.490" Title="Is GPL &quot;for research purposes only&quot; self-contradictory?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|restrictions|" AnswerCount="11" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7366" CreationDate="2018-09-25T07:52:54.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this device runs Linux, it's certainly &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does-linux-still-use-the-gplv2&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under GPL v2. This means you will receive at least the source code for the kernel,  as well as open-source drivers and userland tools they have modified. In practice, you will often receive the source code for all open-source components regardless of modification status, as well as scripts to build the kernel and the file system. Check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.archos.com/support/faq_videoplayer/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; dedicated to Linux-based media players to get an idea of what to expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you shouldn't expect is to get all the data required to to build a bootable firmware. You mentioned it a comment that some of the components were licensed under GPL v2+. That means the manufacturer, not the user, gets to pick which license to apply, since they are the one who release the new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T07:52:54.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-25T08:03:38.903" Score="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically yes to everything you say, although politically it may get complicated. Section 10 of the GPL v3 forbids &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; further restrictions your rights under the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;For research purposes only&quot; is exactly the sort of term this is targeting. In theory, if a program is claimed to be distributed under the GPL v3 and does contain an additional restriction you can remove that restriction via the wording in Section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So therefore you could try and distribute the code under the GPL without any further restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the specific terms you've mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;TheProject&gt; is for research purposes only.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;TheProject&gt; CAN NOT be used for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are both attempts to put additional restrictions on a piece of GPL licensed software. Section 7 means I can remove them, so they have no effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; SHOULD NOT be used for medical purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fine. I'm allowed to give any kind of hint I like about code, so long as it isn't an attempt to actually restrict people's rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The authors  WILL NOT be responsible for using  in medical conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again, this is fine - but almost certainly redundant given the much more extensive wordings in Section 15 and 16 of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T07:41:27.453" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T07:41:27.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7365" CreationDate="2018-09-25T10:25:33.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I agree with MadHatter's answer, but there's a part left unaddressed in his answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say: &quot;Essentially, I'd want my license to work as if copyright didn't exist. A license that permits everything except legal action of any kind, even on derivative works&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: copyright &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; exist, and it explicitly has the notion of derived works with multiple copyright owners. You're trying to impose a restriction on those co-owners. It's not impossible in the general case, but here's the problem with that: you gave up the very tool (legal action) which is essential for your purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all is lost, however. Open Source is a pre-Internet invention. You don't need to put complicated restrictions on user A distributing to user B. Just ban redistribution outright, but put the source on the 'net and make a &lt;strong&gt;direct&lt;/strong&gt; license offer from you to the whole world, for every purpose (use, modification, study) except redistribution. Redistribution rights are unnecessary when everyone can download the code directly from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this fails the &quot;Island&quot; test in common FOSS definitions, which explicitly tests for an unencumbered right to redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T10:25:33.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7370" CreationDate="2018-09-25T10:36:39.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assumption 0 is that the company in question is not the original creator of the software because otherwise all bets are off and the company is under no obligation whatsoever outside of some bait-and-switch schemes not being enforceable (the legal term for the defense against such schemes is &quot;estoppel&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's first assume that you received a copy of the software in compliance with the GPL (whichever version).  Compliance includes that the licensing has been made explicit to you when you received the software.  In that case you'll be given the information of the license you may use.  The licensor can pass on what is commonly called a GPLv2+ permission but may also choose any subset of licenses from that open-ended set.  If you get a subset, that's all you are allowed to choose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the legal twist that you receive the copy under the given license, but if you take only pieces of software that are unchanged from the original, you are in breach of the license you are given but the redistributor does not have standing to sue for the licensing violation since he does not have copyright in the unchanged software.  He could get the original copyright holder to sue on his behalf for a breach of the licensing restriction he was authorized to perform, but it would be quite unlikely that the original copyright holder can be interested in doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13171" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T10:36:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-25T10:41:04.853" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching for the term &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot; shows a number of hits that shed a somewhat different light on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is quite a bit of GPL'ed software in the academic medical world. Such software is generally not approved for regular medical use by the regulating agencies. Even if it was, any modification would render the regulatory approval invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL may grant you specific rights, including the right to use the software for medical purposes, but this grant cannot overrule regulatory obligations or other laws. The grant originates in, and is restricted to copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can replace &quot;medical&quot; with &quot;aviation&quot; or similar fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T10:41:04.853" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7391" CreationDate="2018-09-25T15:03:08.193" Score="12" ViewCount="2226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a software which I plan to release with Apache 2.0 License and some components are code based from a repository released with MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MIT License states: &quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; I understand that I should copy the whole license including copyright &quot;(c) Creator-of-code&quot;, but WHERE should I put it? In a separate LICENSE file? or in the code itself?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If, for example, I put the original MIT license in the code, how then shall I put my own copyright, based on Apache 2.0 License?&#xA;Will the following be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sample_edited_code.py&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;    # Copyright 2018 one_who_modified_the_original_code&#xA;    #&#xA;    # Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;    # you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;    ...&#xA;    # See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;    # limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;    # MIT License&#xA;    #&#xA;    # Copyright (c) 2016 creator_of_original_code&#xA;    #&#xA;    # Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;      ...&#xA;    # OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;    # SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13131" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T13:57:41.247" Title="Proper way of “migrating” MIT-licensed code to Apache 2.0 License" Tags="|licensing|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-25T15:42:30.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course laws vary from country to country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not knowing which country the software comes from and not knowing in which country the software will be used makes it difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary valid for Germany&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A programmer would be allowed to say: &amp;quot;This program is provided under the terms of the GPL with the following exceptions/modifications: ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL for research purposes only&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is a license which is &lt;strong&gt;not compatible&lt;/strong&gt; to the GPL you would not be allowed to use &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; GPL code in programs licensed in such a license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actually the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL for research purposes only&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; would simply be &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt; license than the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; - just like the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Microsoft EULA&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; which is not the same license as the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like users of Microsoft products must observe the terms of the EULA, users of such a program must observe the &amp;quot;exceptions and modifications&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About point 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a copyrighted work. What license permits you to copy and distribute the GPL with a work that the GPL itself does not apply to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you ship a copy of the GPL or of the modified GPL with your program:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Maybe yes (if the GPL is copyrighted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you don't ship a copy of the GPL and write:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I want you to follow all terms and conditions of the GPL which you you can download from the FSF plus the following terms and conditions: ...&amp;quot;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No (even if the GPL is copyrighted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German UrhG law&lt;/a&gt; you would even be allowed to cite small parts of the GPL without needing the copyright owner's permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German UrhG law&lt;/a&gt; defines which kind of work can be copyright protected at all:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Literature, scientific work and arts&amp;quot; (*)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were already trials in court if texts not matching one of these categories can be copyright protected or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht=LG%20Stuttgart&amp;amp;Datum=06.03.2008&amp;amp;Aktenzeichen=17%20O%2068/08&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trial at the LG Stuttgart court&lt;/a&gt; about the text of a contract (and the GPL is a contract). The decision of the court:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally the text of contracts cannot be copyright protected because they are neither &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;scientific&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;artwork&amp;quot;. Only &amp;quot;very outstanding&amp;quot; contracts can be seen as &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; (*) and therefore are protected. For this reason contracts normally can be copied and modified without needing any permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say that sentences like &amp;quot;this text is copyright protected&amp;quot; have no relevance at all when the law says that a certain text is not copyright protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) As &amp;quot;amon&amp;quot; mentioned in his comment the translation &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; is not 100% correct; the law for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__69a.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly says&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;computer programs&amp;quot; are &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About point 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can say &amp;quot;this is the GPL with additional restrictions&amp;quot; but Section 7 means I can ignore those restrictions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a trial at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht=LG%20M%C3%BCnchen%20I&amp;amp;Datum=2004-05-19&amp;amp;Aktenzeichen=21%20O%206123%2F04&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LG Munich court&lt;/a&gt; if the GPL simply can be ignored or if you have to follow the GPL terms and conditions when you distribute the Linux OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main questions was the English word &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; means. The answer of the court was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are only allowed to use software when you have the permission of the copyright owner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; is the set of conditions that the copyright owner requires you to observe to grant you the permission to use the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So by licensing a program under GPL the copyright owner grants the permission only under certain conditions. If you don't observe these conditions, no permissions were granted and you are not allowed to use the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a software's license information says: &amp;quot;GPL for research only&amp;quot; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... the copyright owner grants you permissions only if you use the software for research. He or she does not grant you permissions for any other use. So using the software for any other purpose would be using the software without permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... the &amp;quot;set of conditions you have to observe&amp;quot; is obviously not the same as the set of conditions described in the GPL. Therefore the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL for research only&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are two different sets of conditions and therefore two different &amp;quot;licenses&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;About point 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Gericht=LG%20Berlin&amp;amp;Datum=08.11.2011&amp;amp;Aktenzeichen=16%20O%20255/10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LG Berlin court&lt;/a&gt; has decided that the term that GPL code must only be used in other GPL programs is a valid condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by licensing your software under GPL license you grant other programmers to use your code in other GPL-licensed programs but you don't automatically grant them to use your code in programs not licensed under GPL conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as I have written above a program licensed under a &amp;quot;modified GPL&amp;quot; is not licensed under &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; so it would be illegal to use foreign GPL-licensed code in such programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T07:11:21.410" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-25T15:52:04.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL explicitly gives anyone receiving a copy of the software the right to use it for any purpose. That is in direct contradiction to &quot;for research purposes only&quot; and &quot;CAN NOT be used for commercial purposes&quot;. So yes, that makes the license as a whole self-contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that the licenses themselves are not free, but that only restricts making derived works of the license text itself. Just saying &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot; does not make a derived work in a copyright sense, so the author of this program is free to do so. UPDATE: The GPLv3 text with additional notes should probably be considered a derived work, in which case the authors are violating the copyright of the Free Software Foundation here. That has no bearing on what you can or cannot do however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether you can restrict the rights listed in the GPL, that depends on who you are. The &quot;you&quot; in the license text is a licensee, i.e. someone who receives a copy of the program under the GPL. Section 10 says that when the licensee gives someone else a copy, that third party automatically gets all the same rights from the copyright owner (the licensor), and the licensee cannot add any other restrictions, e.g. by having the third party sign a contract first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if this author is the copyright holder of the program, then they themselves are not a licensee, and they're not restricted by the GPL. As the copyright holder, they can distribute copies under any terms they like, including &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot;. They would not be distributing their program under the GPL, but that's their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the author is free to do this. However, restricting the allowed uses does automatically make this software non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free&lt;/a&gt; and non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source&lt;/a&gt;, as well as incompatible with other GPL software, which makes it a pain to use even in an academic setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13178" LastEditorUserId="13178" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T12:55:51.100" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T12:55:51.100" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-26T07:37:32.887" Score="12" ViewCount="15998" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below text is cited from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.qt.io/faq/#_Toc_3_6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www1.qt.io/faq/#_Toc_3_6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 is the current version of the GNU Lesser General Public License. LGPLv2.1 is an older version and not recommended by the Free Software Foundation for new projects anymore. Both licenses have the same intention, namely to protect the freedom of users to use and modify the software licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 makes this intention very explicit. You have to provide means to the end user to install a modified version of the library licensed under LGPLv3 and run your software using that modified library. In practice, this for example refers to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tivoization – Explicitly not allowing creation of closed devices where the end user does not have the LGPL granted rights for the Qt open source libraries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DRM and hardware encryption – This cannot be used to circumvent these obligations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Software patent retaliation – Where all users of the software are granted licenses thus making software patent retaliation of any potentially patented software in the distributed software meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) When using LGPLv2.1 license free/open software, don't we need to meet the above three obligations ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) It seems to me it is very difficult to use LGPLv3 license free/open software on embedded system, because a) we have to make the compiler tool chain available  and b) public key to assign the apps to users.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13196" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T19:41:41.890" Title="What is the difference between LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv3?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7387" CreationDate="2018-09-26T08:22:45.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When using LGPLv2.1 license free/open software, don't we need to meet the above three obligations ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. All you had to do was to provide the source code and instructions on how to build the source; there was no need to make it possible for somebody to actually be able to run the new binary on a device. It's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tivoization because this is precisely what TiVo did&lt;/a&gt;. Similarly, you can use patents to restrict the use of LGPL v2.1 (or GPL v2) code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) It seems to me it is very difficult to use LGPLv3 license free/open software on embedded system, because a) we have to make the compiler tool chain available and b) public key to assign the apps to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (a), you have to do this with LGPL v2.1; quoting from Section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For an executable, the required form of the &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The toolchain is precisely what &quot;data and utility programs&quot; is referring to here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (b), not necessarily. You need to provide a means for people to replace the LGPL code on the system with their own - that doesn't have to be a &quot;public key&quot;. Note that attempting to restrict things in this kind of way is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what the (L)GPL v3 is designed to stop. If you don't like that, you have the choice not to use (L)GPL v3 software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T08:22:45.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4083" CreationDate="2018-09-26T11:24:42.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full text of the AGPL 3.0 is here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Below is just a paraphrased summary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL &amp;amp; IANYL but as I understand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 2 times that the AGPL makes people release code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 10: If you convey a modified or unmodified version of the work it will be under the this (AGPL) license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 13: If if you modify the Program, your modified version must offer all users interacting with it remotely an opportunity to receive (have conveyed) the source code, which will be licensed AGPL (by the above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The normal GPL only triggers on the first of these.&#xA;Which mean people could create a derivative work,&#xA;but never actually convey it to the user -- just expose it as a networked service.&#xA;The&#xA;AGPL is suppose to fix that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So section 10 applies to both modified and unmodified versions.&#xA;But section 13 only to modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you built a client, and not a server, It is clear that &#xA;section 13 does not apply to you, since you are not providing any one access to you're a modified version of the work over the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you did something like copy paste a bunch of code from the servers source into your client (which you might have done, I can think of a few reasons.).&#xA;At that point your client might actually be considered as being derived from the server, and someone might argue that being a client is kinda giving people access,&#xA;since HTTP is a two way protocol.&#xA;I think it is a stretch though.&#xA;But in that case, if you convey your work, you would certainly have to worry about Section 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="934" LastEditDate="2018-09-27T01:39:14.290" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T01:39:14.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7384" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:34:09.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your suggested approach is correct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Always keep any existing copyright and license notices intact.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you made non-trivial changes, you may add your own copyright and license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This holds both for copyright headers at the top of each file, and for a project-level license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further tips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is customary to order notices in reverse chronological order so that the newest information is at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project's license must comply with the licenses of all source files. If different files have different licenses or files are subject to multiple licenses, all of that should be summarized in the project-level license document.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When there are multiple licenses, users have to comply with all of them. With respect to existing licenses, you are also a user. For the MIT license, this just boils down to including the existing copyright notices and the MIT license text (both in source files with such notices, and the project level license document).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When the project is under both the MIT and Apache license, then it is sufficient to call your project Apache 2 licensed: the terms of the Apache license are a superset of the MIT license terms. However, you still have to keep any existing MIT license notices intact.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may have to comply with notice requirements, especially if you also publish the software in non-source forms. E.g. by default Python's “wheel” or “sdist” format for installable modules does not include any LICENSE or NOTICE files. This would strip away any notices in the license document. You should therefore either explicitly set the &lt;code&gt;license_file&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;data_files&lt;/code&gt; metadata field, or add the notices to the &lt;code&gt;long_description&lt;/code&gt; metadata field (typically taken from a README file).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an exceptional license document of a project that went through multiple license changes and includes third-party code, consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python license&lt;/a&gt;. The document starts with an overview (which unfortunately isn't 100% clear about the copyright status), then provides a list of apliccable licenses. Some of those include a copyright notice. Finally, the licenses of all included third party software are shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:34:09.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7182" CreationDate="2018-09-26T19:54:44.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the options listed by QwertyChouskie, you could also ask the copyright owners of the GPL library you are using to make a specific exception for linking to the Visual C++ runtime DLLs. Unless they're specifically against their code being used on Windows, this would not really change anything for them, as Microsoft are unlikely to open up the Visual C++ library anyway, only in order to be compatible with their library. Of course they could take a principled stance, but you can always ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLIncompatibleLibs in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2233/gpl-v3-with-openssl-exception&quot;&gt;this related SE question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13178" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T19:54:44.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-26T19:59:04.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ADDITIONAL NOTES &#xA;&amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; is for research purposes only.  &#xA;&amp;lt;TheProject&amp;gt; CAN NOT be used for commercial purposes.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this differently. There's some critical defect in the software's reliability rendering unfit for use &lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt; there's a legal restriction other than the GPL in effect here that the author is not able to remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's likely attuned software for medical research and doesn't have FDA certification for production use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an extremely bad analogy: the old Sun Java installers had a clause in the license &quot;not licensed for use on nuclear reactors&quot;. It wasn't a political statement. As a matter of fact, the developers knew this was a very bad idea. At the time Java had a defect so bad that it rendered the entire machine it was running on unable to meet hard-realtime guarantees. Here I'd be speculating, but it's most likely they couldn't stomach the liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I read this as an extremely short statement warning people not to do this. If they wrote it out in the explicitly legal form it wouldn't be understood so they appeared to impose additional restrictions so nobody would try it. It's hard to argue that something under &quot;ADDITIONAL NOTES&quot; is actual contract terms anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastEditorUserId="2263" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T22:14:49.350" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T22:14:49.350" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2018-09-27T09:06:20.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, open-source license compliance is a tricky task. There are open source (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fossology&lt;/a&gt;) and proprietary (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/products/protex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Duck's Protex&lt;/a&gt;) tools assisting you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be so much more easier and convinient if &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX&lt;/a&gt; becomes a standard for all open-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13058" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T09:06:20.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-27T17:35:46.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This software isn't actually licensed under the GPL. It is licensed under a license created by the software author, which is inspired by the GPL - to the point where the software author apparently copied large portions of the GPL. The software author could even have copied the GPL and modified section 7 in the process. If he left section 7 intact, it would be up to the courts to decide what prevails. The outcome of any case is of course always up for guesses, but my guess is that a court would throw out the section 7 restriction in this case, because the intent of the author is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, a court could come to the conclusion that a licensee can exercise his right in section 7, but that this would automatically result in termination of the complete license, because there no longer is a &quot;meeting of the minds&quot; - that is, an agreement between the two parties on what the terms really should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, the section 7 clause probably wouldn't hold up in court. At least based on my understanding of the law, and based on what would apply in California.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the FSF could potentially sue anybody who uses such a modified GPL and heavily borrows verbatim text for copyright infringement. The question is whether this is practical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="516" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T17:35:46.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7399" CreationDate="2018-09-27T18:12:51.203" Score="0" ViewCount="2614" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is very similar, but crucially different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5771/13218&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;library&lt;/a&gt; that I want to offer under a dual license: GPLv3 and commercial. GPL so others can read, maintain and modify if they share their changes. And commercial for businesses making money with the library, so I can sustain its development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For normal libraries, this would be perfectly captured by the above dual license. Because businesses don't want to open source their code, which the GPL would force them to do, they will buy the commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, due to the special nature of my library, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mherrmann/fbs/issues/30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loop hole&lt;/a&gt;: My library does not require its users to sprinkle references to it all over their source code. They can easily separate those parts that link to my library from the rest of their application, which does not. The reason this works is that the &quot;rest&quot; part does not link to the &quot;library&quot; part. Only the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest solution would be if I could say &quot;You may use this library under the GPL for non-commercial purposes. For all other uses, a commercial license is required.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that (legally) possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13218" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T17:59:05.617" Title="Restrict GPLv3 to non-commercial use" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-09-30T22:47:30.247" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-27T21:08:25.307" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;You are reading the user manual.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not reading copyright licence terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technical name in United States law for what you are reading is &lt;em&gt;directions for use&lt;/em&gt;.  Almost all (there are exemptions) medical drugs and devices must come with them.  You have probably seen them on medications that you have bought.  Medical software is no exception.  It counts as a &lt;em&gt;medical device&lt;/em&gt; and must have them too.  (It is known as &lt;em&gt;software as a medical device&lt;/em&gt;, SaMD.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mandate for directions for use comes from statute, the &lt;em&gt;Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act 1938&lt;/em&gt;, which prohibits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) The introduction or delivery for introduction into interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded.&lt;br/&gt;(b) The adulteration or misbranding of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic in interstate commerce.&lt;br/&gt;(c) The receipt in interstate commerce of any food, drug, device, tobacco product, or cosmetic that is adulterated or misbranded, and the delivery or proffered delivery thereof for pay or otherwise.&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title21-section331&amp;amp;num=0&amp;amp;edition=prelim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 USC 331&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &lt;em&gt;misbranding&lt;/em&gt; is then defined in part as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A drug or device shall be deemed to be misbranded&amp;mdash;&lt;br&gt;[&amp;hellip;] (f) [&amp;hellip;] Unless its labeling bears (1) adequate directions for use; [&amp;hellip;]&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title21-section352&amp;amp;num=0&amp;amp;edition=prelim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 USC 352&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;adequate&lt;/em&gt; directions for use is defined by Federal regulation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adequate directions for use&lt;/em&gt; means directions under which the layman can use a device safely and for the purposes for which it is intended. Section 801.4 defines &lt;em&gt;intended use&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=c1f688a25070b70497af487216922912&amp;amp;mc=true&amp;amp;node=se21.8.801_15&amp;amp;rgn=div8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 CFR 1.801.5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave you to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=c1f688a25070b70497af487216922912&amp;amp;mc=true&amp;amp;node=se21.8.801_14&amp;amp;rgn=div8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 CFR 1.801.4&lt;/a&gt; for the details of intended use, as it is really too long for this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a layman software engineer's simplest way of thinking about this is (crudely, and not quite accurately) that this is a legally-required user manual, directing how the software should be used and giving the intended use according to its manufacturer.  It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a copyright licence term.  It exists because of &lt;em&gt;a completely different statute&lt;/em&gt; to copyright law.  &lt;em&gt;More than one law applies to this software.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Research use only&lt;/em&gt; (RUO) is also a technical term of the USFDA. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=09a56184b88667c26bad2215fe211b28&amp;amp;mc=true&amp;amp;node=se21.8.809_110&amp;amp;rgn=div8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 CFR 1.809.10&lt;/a&gt; one can take an approximate definition of RUO as being something that is in a &quot;laboratory research phase of development, and not represented as an effective [&amp;hellip;] product&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now whether &lt;em&gt;you obey&lt;/em&gt; the directions for use when you have received a copy of the software is a completely different matter, not covered by the aforementioned statute and regulations.  They tell &lt;em&gt;the manufacturer&lt;/em&gt; what &lt;em&gt;xe must provide&lt;/em&gt; with the software to you.  If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; manufacture, package, distribute, or sell the software in the U.S., then &lt;em&gt;you must do that too&lt;/em&gt;.  (Per &lt;a href=&quot;http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title21-section333&amp;amp;num=0&amp;amp;edition=prelim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21 USC 333&lt;/a&gt; it is fines per violation up to USD1,000,000 if you do not.)  It's not a copyright term, and a copyright licence does not override it.  It's the law for medical devices, including medical softwares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(At one point, draft guidance from the FDA was that if &lt;em&gt;you do not obey&lt;/em&gt; the directions for use on RUO devices, the manufacturer is obliged to &lt;em&gt;stop supplying it to you&lt;/em&gt;.  But again, this is a rule for the manufacturer rather than for you the recipient.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legal restrictions on medical softwares are not specific to the United States; and legal restrictions on softwares are not specific to medicine.  In E.U. law, for example, the analogous name for U.S. &lt;em&gt;intended use&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;intended purpose&lt;/em&gt; and the regulations apply to the people who design, manufacture, label, assemble, package, process, or fully refurbish medical devices (&lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:31993L0042&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Council Directive 93/42/EEC&lt;/a&gt; 1(f) and 1(g)) which the E.U. also extends to cover medical softwares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Further reading&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DigitalHealth/SoftwareasaMedicalDevice/default.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software as a Medical Device&lt;/a&gt;. United States Food and Drug Administration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/medical-devices-software-applications-apps&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medical devices: software applications&lt;/a&gt;.  United Kingdom Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jamie K. Wolszon (2011-05-30). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fdalawblog.net/2011/05/fda-posts-on-its-website-then-removes-draft-guidance-that-would-restrict-research-use-only-investiga/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FDA Posts on its Website, then Removes, Draft Guidance that would Restrict Research Use Only, Investigational Use Only Status&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  FDA Law Blog.  Hyman, Phelps &amp;amp; McNamara, P.C..&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/medical-devices-off-label-use/off-label-use-of-a-medical-device&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Off-label use of a medical device&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  United Kingdom Medicines &amp;amp; Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.  2014-12-08.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ec.europa.eu/DocsRoom/documents/17921/attachments/1/translations/en/renditions/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guidelines on the qualification and classification of stand alone software used in healthcare within the regulatory framework of medical devices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. MEDDEV 2.1/6.  July 2016.  European Commission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13217" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T21:08:25.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7397" CreationDate="2018-09-27T21:21:32.793" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not allow you to add a non-commercial restriction.&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; While you can create such a license it will not be the GPL and incompatible with the GPL and possibly other licenses. In particular, such restrictions go against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;. As a consequence, your library will not be usable by the open source ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Defining commerciality.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from philosophical concerns about what free and open source software is supposed to be, a non-commerical restriction has the practical problem that it is really hard to define commercial use. Any definition will either be too vague or too specific, will leave loopholes or accidentally outlaw intended uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classic example for the commercial – non-commercial distinction is use by a non-profit organization. Consider these examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software provides spreadsheet functionality, and is used internally by a charity for children with cancer to organize their fundraiser. Is this use commercial? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software implements an Amazon Dash style button, but for donations to the Red Cross. Is selling and using this button non-commercial?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are existing non-FLOSS license attempts to define non-commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license defines non-commericial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation” which is fairly vague and possibly outlaws intended uses, such as users being allowed to profit from their own modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The widely criticized Commons Clause (unrelated to Creative Commons) defines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Sell” means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is less vague this is extremely broad. For example, getting paid to contribute to your software might be disallowed. On the other hand this still allows products that &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; derive their value “entirely or substantially” from your software, and it allows internal use by a for-profit entity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of these difficulties, it is important to think very carefully about your licensing goals. Possibly, open source licensing or a pseudo-open license is not a good fit for your requirements. You may be more interested in an explicitly non-free “shared source” model where other people can read the code, but development stays under your control. In contrast, the (A)GPL can be summarized as “any use is permitted, as long as the source code of any published version is available (possibly with modifications), and downstream users are not deprived of these rights.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that the (A)GPL is very unattractive for many commercial use cases so that you can sell commercial licenses. Consider Qt and iText for projects with this strategy. Note that those are libraries. In contrast, commercial use of unmodified applications is not hindered by the (A)GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;GPL and derived works.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for when the use of a GPL'ed library renders the software subject to the GPL, this is a widely debated topic. To get the perspective of the FSF (the GPL authors), read the GPL FAQ, starting with the discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;plugins to GPL systems&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;whether the GPL license of an interpreter extends to the programs that it executes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reasonable opinion is that using a GPL library in a software project cannot extend the GPL license to the complete software, because the other source code in that software is not derived from the GPL'ed code. However, the resulting software is derived from both GPL and non-GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To distribute this software you must comply with the GPL license, which requires the Corresponding Source of the software to be available under the GPL. This indirectly requires any other components to be available under the GPL or a compatible license (such as MIT). This e.g. implies that a GPL'ed software cannot use proprietary libraries, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unless the copyright holders of the GPL'ed software provide an exception&lt;/a&gt; for that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this argument, it is irrelevant whether a GPL library is called by other software, or a GPL framework calls a differently-licensed plugin. However, no obligations if the GPL'ed code isn't distributed. For example, it is possible to build proprietary software with a GPL'ed build system such as autotools, as the built artifacts do not contain any GPL'ed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people disagree with this argument, but insist that a software that includes GPL'ed code is not derived from the GPL'ed code. Then, no obligations arise to publish any code except for the GPL'ed parts themselves. Under that interpretation the GPL and LGPL are equivalent, possibly even weaker. While this interpretation has merit it is not mainstream in the open source community. From a risk-management perspective, it would be unwise for a company to rely on this argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]: In section 7 of the GPLv3: “All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.”&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T21:21:32.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-28T12:13:32.147" Score="2" ViewCount="1604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across a project stating in the LICENSE file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This project is released under the Apache License, version 2.0.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is a commercial solution, requiring a valid paid-for license for commercial use.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This product is free to use for non-commercial applications, like non-profits and educational usage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding of Apache 2.0 correct that such a project does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require a &quot;valid paid-for license&quot; for commercial use and that such a library can be freely used in a commercial project (given that you include the licenses page describing the use of the library with the corresponding Apache 2 license, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="666" LastEditorUserId="666" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T12:20:40.700" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T13:59:50.897" Title="Restrict Apache 2.0 to non-commercial use only" Tags="|apache-2.0|commercial|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7400" CreationDate="2018-09-28T13:59:50.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a permissive license, the Apache 2.0 license does not prevent extra restrictions. The code may be used in any project as long as the attribution requirements are met. But such projects would not be licensed under the Apache license! And it would arguably be a misuse of the Apache trademark to call such a project Apache-licensed…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That particular licensing is quite unclear. It is not possible to say whether the author intended to publish an open source project with a public license under the Apache 2 terms, or whether they intended to publish a commercial shared source project that is only free for non-commercial users. There is usually no malice involved in such unclear terms, but frequently a misunderstanding of the open-source license they chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid later problems, projects with an unclear license should not be used by other open source projects. Here, personal use might be OK. If you are interested in using the project, you should ask the authors for clarification. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether the royalty-free license in the Apache license or the “paid-for” license in the quoted license take precedence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether this applies both to commercial use and to other open source projects (which may also be used commercially)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether this applies to both use of the software and to derivative works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally the copyright holders remove this restriction so that the project is licensed under a pure Apache 2 license. The second-best outcome is that they bring clarity by removing the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T13:59:50.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7405" CreationDate="2018-09-28T15:41:03.310" Score="2" ViewCount="298" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a project which is under MIT, has been archived, can it be forked, restarted the dev and be redistributed/renamed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13228" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T03:37:24.357" Title="Fork maintain and distribute a MIT project" Tags="|mit|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7363" CreationDate="2018-09-28T17:36:21.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to accept any license to accept and use a copy of any copyrighted software (at least in the US).  By the First Sale doctrine, you can do pretty much what you want with your legal copy.  You can't copy it (except as necessary to run it) or modify it or anything else specifically forbidden.  As far as that goes, the GPL is merely restating what's already true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Alice-in-Wonderland logic does apply to the language on torrent distribution.  You can't get a copy through a torrent legally without a license (ask anybody the RIAA has sued for ridiculous amounts of money recently).  The license is the only thing that allows that, and it specifies it doesn't have to be accepted to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T17:36:21.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7397" CreationDate="2018-09-28T17:59:05.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is not possible in the United States. In the United States, everyone who lawfully acquires a lawfully-made copy of a work has the right to use it however they want as a right of lawful possession. You cannot offer someone a license that takes away rights they already have, they'll simply refuse the offer and use the software however they want because they already have that right as a right of possession. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 106&lt;/a&gt; for the things that require a license such as modification, distribution, and public performance. You'll see that mere use of a work is not on that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine if you bought a book and inside it was a &quot;license&quot; page that said that you could not read the book on Thursdays. You would simply refuse to agree to this license. You already have the right to read the book because that is ordinary use of the book and is a right of lawful possession. An offer you don't accept can't take away any rights you have or impose any obligations on you. So you'd need some mechanism other than a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other countries are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T17:59:05.617" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7402" CreationDate="2018-09-29T03:37:24.357" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project's license says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software... to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you may distribute the software further, modified or unmodified, and other downstream recipients may do so as well. This is all that is required to maintain a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T03:37:24.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7410" CreationDate="2018-09-29T14:14:27.957" Score="-3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently developed a software which currently uses google drive API for some functionalities, i am looking forward to release the software to the public for free. however i am not sure on which kind of license strategy i should go for. then also i would like to make my source code read only and available on repositories like Github in which fork and pull request on my source code will be requiring permission.&#xA;Could you please provide me more information and advice on how i can go through this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- note that i am using the Google drive REST API, this is a c# application therefore i downloaded the google drive client api DLL file into my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the application basically sends and receive data which is stored on google drive of a user's account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;please let me know if any further information is required&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13233" LastEditorUserId="13233" LastEditDate="2018-09-30T14:55:16.817" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T15:51:48.810" Title="How to License a software that uses google drive API" Tags="|open-source-definition|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-29T20:46:00.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As far as I know, GPL 2 and 3 are not themselves free, in sense that you can't change them and still call them GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct, the license for the GPLv2 and GPLv3 documents themselves is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case, sticking something on the end of the license file (with a clear delimiter) is probably &quot;aggregation&quot;, which is probably fine.  Lots of people do it to provide a single license document, and the FSF hasn't started suing people who do that. &#xA; So you could also claim estoppel (fancy legal term for &quot;you knew about this and if you wanted to sue about it then you should have done it ages ago, you didn't object so I thought you were alright with it, so it's too late to sue now&quot;).  In practise the FSF (who own the copyright in the GPL license documents themselves) are extremely unlikely to sue over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, as far as I remember, they don't allow developers to restrict the rights granted by them. Cases such as GPL, GPL or GPL + exceptions, or GPL or another license are possible, but GPL with some rights is removed is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright owner of the software can license their work under whatever license they like, with whatever exceptions &amp;amp; limitations they like, with very few exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, that only applies if the person owns the copyright to the whole program.  If the program is based on a GPLv2 work that has no exceptions or limitations, then the program can only be licensed under GPLv2, no extra exceptions or limitations can be added unless all the copyright owners agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given the above, is the idea of licensing code under &quot;GPL for research purposes only&quot; self-contradictory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, it's perfectly legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a bad idea, because it leads to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/proliferation-report&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license proliferation&lt;/a&gt; and fragmentation.  &quot;GPLv2 for research purposes only&quot; code cannot be mixed with real GPLv2 code - or rather it's impossible to legally ship the combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13238" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T20:46:00.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7375" CreationDate="2018-09-29T22:02:07.940" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile the Software Freedom Conservancy published a statement which explains it quite well &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/sep/26/GPLv2-irrevocability/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/sep/26/GPLv2-irrevocability/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is: no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a summary: By contributing to the Kernel you agreed to the license: &lt;em&gt;&quot;by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, further the license indicates that there is no way to withdraw the license as long as the recipient comply with it: &lt;em&gt;&quot;parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2018-09-29T22:02:07.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7406" CreationDate="2018-09-30T15:51:48.810" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Google Drive client library for the .NET platform is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. This license does not limit in any way what license you can apply to your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given your licensing conditions, especially that the source code would be read-only and forking is restricted, open source licenses are just plain out. That also means that it is off-topic for this site to recommend a particular license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the Google Drive library license allows you to keep your project closed-source, but we can't recommend a particular license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T15:51:48.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2018-09-30T16:14:31.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot comment, so I leave you this link with the inverse question if a GPL3 license can be retricted to non commercial use only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And in fact, if you look it from that side, well the GPL license cannot be restricted, but you can restrict when GPL applies and when not. Officially they're not changing the GPL3 license. They are saying, that if you use the software for research purpose, the GPL3 license applies, but if you use it connercially, well, you have no right to do so, so there's no license for this use-case. And that is completely legal as far as I know. The use case comes in before the license applies, as far as I can see...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5771/is-it-possible-to-restrict-gnu-gplv3-to-non-commercial-use-only&quot;&gt;Is it possible to restrict GNU GPLv3 to non-commercial use only?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Ok, given  Bart van Ingen Schenau's answer and checking the license itself it's very clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'd like to license my code under the GPL, but I'd also like to make it clear that it can't be used for military and/or commercial uses. Can I do this? (#NoMilitary)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, because those two goals contradict each other. The GNU GPL is designed specifically to prevent the addition of further restrictions. &#xA;  GPLv3 allows a very limited set of them, in section 7, but any other added restriction can be removed by the user. More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL, am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then distribute and sell that new program commercially? (#GPLCommercially)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13246" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T06:18:36.417" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T06:18:36.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6663" CreationDate="2018-09-30T17:50:24.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some slides from a study, conducted in 2015 with quite impressive numbers &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/North_Bridge/2015-future-of-open-source-study&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/North_Bridge/2015-future-of-open-source-study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This are two additional studies/articles from 2017 which show a similar trend:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://itsfoss.com/open-source-adoption-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://itsfoss.com/open-source-adoption-europe/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T17:50:24.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-01T13:54:04.877" Score="2" ViewCount="5472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m a automotive electronic and electrical engineer with little to no software experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to hire a developer to develop Windows GUI application that is used to configure and program a hardware device that I have designed. I’ve found someone who is extremely experienced in all of the fields that this device is to be used for and he wants to develop this app in Qt. All copyright etc will be mine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He uses the open source version of Qt and I do not have the budget for the commercial license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the app to be closed source and as hard as reasonably possible to reverse engineer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does using the open source version make this impossible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain in ‘layman’s terms’ to an inexperienced person how you can stick to the terms of LGPL without giving away your source code of making it easy to reverse engineer? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7226" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T16:57:29.383" Title="Can someone explain the basic requirements of Open Source Qt LGPL to a beginner?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7414" CreationDate="2018-10-01T16:46:25.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want the app to be closed source and as hard as reasonably possible to reverse engineer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part of this request is easy to satisfy. The LGPL expressly makes the second part to some degree impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt hosts a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.qt.io/qt-licensing-terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;practical summary of the LGPL's requirements&lt;/a&gt;. I won't repeat the entire summary here (definitely read it!), but the first three items are major principles of the LGPL, so I'll offer slightly more explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Complete corresponding source code of the library used with the application or the device built using LGPL, including all modifications to the library, should be delivered with the application (or alternatively provide a written offer with instructions on how to get the source code). It should be noted that the complete corresponding source code has to be delivered even if the library has not been modified at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL's most significant requirement is that you must offer the complete source code of the library (here, Qt), including any modifications you've made. This is pretty easy to satisfy: offer a download of Qt's LGPL source code from the same place you offer the binary, or include physical media with the source (or written offer) alongside a physical distribution of the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In case of dynamic linking, it is possible, but not mandatory, to keep application source code proprietary as long as it is “work that uses the library” – typically achieved via dynamic linking of the library. In case of static linking of the library, the application itself may no longer be “work that uses the library” and thus become subject to LGPL. It is recommended to either link dynamically, or provide the application source code to the user under LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL obligates you to share only source code for the library itself, while an application that uses the library (i.e. the code you and your contractor are writing now) can remain free of this requirement. However, it is possible that, under copyright law, in at least some jurisdictions, static linking your application code to the library may cause your application code to become part of the same work under copyright law. This would cause source-sharing obligations to apply to your application as well. To avoid this complication, ensure that your application dynamically links to the library instead of statically linking to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The user is allowed to change and re-link the library used in the application or device – including reverse engineering. With LGPLv3 it is explicitly stated that the user also needs to be able to run the re-linked binary, and that sufficient installation information must be provided. In practice, this forbids the creation of closed devices, also known as tivoization.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to the requirement to enable reverse engineering, which may be the a deal-breaker for you. The LGPL requires that users be able (both legally and technically) to replace the LGPL-licensed library with their own modified version. The language for distributing &quot;Combined works&quot; (application plus library) is in section 4 of the LGPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;d) Do one of the following:&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It must be easy for a user to link a modified version of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It must be legal for the user to reverse engineer your application binary for the purposes of debugging LGPL library modifications. In practice, this likely means you can't legally restrict any reverse engineering, since you can't definitively prove that any act of reverse engineering is not done for the purposes of debugging a library modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Imposing arbitrary technical barriers to reverse engineering your closed-source application code appears to be permissible, as long as you do not intend to punish users who manage to bypass them, and as long as those barriers do not complicate the process of linking a modified library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, note that users may easily insert debugging code in a modified library, which could be substantial help in defeating any anti-circumvention mechanisms you include.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T16:57:29.383" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T16:57:29.383" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7414" CreationDate="2018-10-01T18:01:54.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's keep this short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL licenses mean that the libraries under them must be open source, and it must be possible to change the LGPLed part and recreate the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, this means that all LGPL parts of the software should be in .dlls, and you are responsible for providing the source code for the LGPLed part, either as part of the total software package or on request.  (This is stated for Windows applications, and the details will likely be different on different platforms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of your application, which is the stuff you actually want to protect, may be closed source and whatever else you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-10-01T18:01:54.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7419" CreationDate="2018-09-30T16:51:53.760" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repository (GPLv3) full of configuration files that I recently noticed uses some FDL code (FDLv1.3). I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To resolve this issue and keep the code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could I re-license the repo as MIT or BSD?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a variant of the FDL I could convince the authors of that code to use that would be compatible? How about licensing documentation and inline code with different licenses? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To resolve this issue by removing the FDL code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a Git commit acceptable? Do I need to remove the code from the git history as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if my code is &quot;inspired&quot;, but not a direct copy of the FDL code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if the FDL code has since changed, but you can see if by looking through the documentation's history. Can I leave it in, in that case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13252" OwnerDisplayName="user289371" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T09:24:08.073" Title="FDL code in GPL repo" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7418" CreationDate="2018-10-02T09:24:08.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither the GPL nor the FLD allow you to relicense the covered works under MIT or BSD. You have to keep the respective licenses. Furthermore, the FDL allows no relicensing at all (aside from a historic clause that was only usable by Wikipedia). In particular, you cannot relicense FDL works as GPL. Because of this incompatibility, the FDL encourages but does not enforce included code samples to be dual-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always perform any relicensing if &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders of that work agree to the relicensing. This tends to be impractical as copyright holders may be unknown, unreachable, or even dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a problem if a repository contains works side by side that are subject to different licenses, as long as they do not form a single combined work. For distributing the repository, you will have to comply with all licenses independently. Fortunately, verbatim copies of the source forms are allowed by all open source licenses incl. GPL and FDL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2. Verbatim Copying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, you also don't have to purge any trace of FDL code from the Git history if you remove that code. The Git history will still include FDL-licensed parts, but this doesn't affect the up to date works in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you changed the FDL licensed works, you must only do so in compliance with the license. For example, you must amend or add a “History” section with “an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T09:24:08.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7421" CreationDate="2018-10-03T08:59:50.417" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a .NET C# project with an api library published on GitHub by some company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm now going to publish mine to GitHub as well, but I've found there is no license on the repository that I included. The company has a documentation webpage that explains how to use the api and &lt;em&gt;&quot;We can download the gem file from GitHub&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but there is no license. Hey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay then I wonder if I can say in my readme &quot;please follow this documentation and download this repository&quot;. Is this a good way out or something better you can suggest me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastEditorUserId="10450" LastEditDate="2018-10-03T10:25:04.713" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T11:09:35.993" Title="How can I refer to a repository for my project when it has no license but we can download it?" Tags="|license-recommendation|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7420" CreationDate="2018-10-03T11:09:35.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a GitHub repository is not properly licensed, then the only rights you have are those given to you under the GitHub Terms of Service. The ToS gives you the right to create a fork, but there is where it stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without a copyright license, you are not allowed to incorporate the library in your own project or to build upon it. The best way out of this situation is to contact the company that owns the library and ask them to properly license the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T11:09:35.993" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7423" CreationDate="2018-10-03T21:56:52.973" Score="0" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/license-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Riverbank License FAQ&lt;/a&gt; for PyQt5 it specifies that PyQt5 is under the license GPL. I'm not sure whether I should use GPLv1, GPLv2 or GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I choose and it is MIT compatible? Would I be able to put my application under the MIT license even though PyQt5 uses GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13261" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T22:12:02.210" Title="What license version should I use for an open-source PyQt5 application on GitHub" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7422" CreationDate="2018-10-03T22:12:02.210" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the documentation, PyQt5 is licensed under GPLv3.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://pyqt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pyqt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your application would also have to be licensed as GPLv3 (or a compatible license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it you would not be able to use MIT license for your application. There is a certain asymmetry here, a GPL application may use an MIT library, but not the other way around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13263" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T22:12:02.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7425" CreationDate="2018-10-04T03:17:48.803" Score="4" ViewCount="6032" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NorthwoodsSoftware/GoJS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GoJS&lt;/a&gt; is not open source, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gojs.net/latest/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;its license&lt;/a&gt; stating in particular that modification is forbidden (&lt;em&gt;though the fact that its source code is hosted on GitHub seems to confuse some people&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maintainer of GoJS &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NorthwoodsSoftware/GoJS/issues/35#issuecomment-290998383&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may include the evaluation version of GoJS in open source projects, but people who use your project and want to use GoJS with it will have to purchase a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this statement true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T22:25:12.947" Title="Can GoJS be included into an open source project?" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|redistribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7424" CreationDate="2018-10-04T09:07:25.390" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say the most important question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can an open source project include the library and still stay open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but as I read it, no.  Firstly, section 2.1.4(b) of the licence specifies that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Customer may not ... modify any Licensed Product, or create any derivative work of any Licensed Product&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s2.1.5(a) allows you to modify it under certain circumstances, but then says you can't redistribute the modified version.  Since our &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;accepted definition&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; says in s3 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could not combine GoJS and any piece of free software into a derivative work, and redistribute it as a free project.  I can't square the maintainer's words quoted above with the licence text, and the licence text is likely to have the final word on the subject, but even if we take his/her words at face value, your combined project would be non-free as users would be required to buy a licence for GoJS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-11T06:44:11.540" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T06:44:11.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7427" CreationDate="2018-10-04T18:53:24.327" Score="1" ViewCount="560" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a project from scratch and made it available online under the GPL license. Can I release a new version of the same project that does not have the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to know why/why not this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: I have not incorporated any external changes to the codebase, all the code was written by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Some seem to think this question is identical to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-project-be-relicensed&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question (how can a project be relicensed), however I would argue it is not, because that question deals with a general case while I am more interested in what is relevant for GPL in particular (and I think when people google these things they may not google the general case, I know I did not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13271" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T06:37:00.583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T06:37:00.583" Title="Can I change license of my GPL project?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2018-10-08T03:53:08.700" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7426" CreationDate="2018-10-04T19:09:00.130" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but if you own the copyright - which you seem to do - I think you can change the license, but afaik not retroactively. In other words, you can publish a new version under the 3-clause BSD license for example, but that will not change the license of what is already out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13272" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:09:00.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2018-10-06T02:52:39.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to RedHat&lt;/a&gt;, who happens to be a prominent participant in FOSS IP litigation, the clauses &lt;code&gt;to deal in the Software without restriction&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;including without limitation&lt;/code&gt; already expressly grants patent rights, at least under US law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13280" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T02:52:39.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7431" CreationDate="2018-10-06T12:29:53.050" Score="23" ViewCount="3335" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I'm doing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm adapting a work licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license to a different language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm indicating the original work and its license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm indicating that I have made changes to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release my modified version of the license under CC BY-SA 4.0 or do I have to license my modifications under the CC BY-SA 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguments why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version 4.0 is ported to more languages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version 4.0 is the site-wide version, so I wouldn't have to have this one work licensed under a different version of the license (reducing complexity).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T14:09:43.317" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T07:45:10.473" Title="Can I &quot;upgrade&quot; the version of CC BY-SA from 3.0 to 4.0 in my modification?" Tags="|license-compatibility|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7430" CreationDate="2018-10-06T13:28:10.090" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 license is “forward compatible” with later versions. In section 4(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (i) this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US));&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term “License Element” means the “Attribution” and “Share-Alike” components of the CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons compatible licenses page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 3.0 materials may only be licensed under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;BY-SA 3.0, or a later version of the BY-SA license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ported versions of the BY-SA license, version 3.0 or later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A license designated as a “Creative Commons Compatible License” as defined in BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Currently, no non-CC licenses have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this only applies to Adaptations in the sense of the license: you may use a compatible license or later license version for your Adaptations, but cannot relicense the original work. This difference is relevant when you want to use an un-adapted work. In this sense, the CC licenses have a compatibility mechanism but no way to do a license migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T07:45:10.473" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T07:45:10.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7432" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-07T12:05:14.123" Score="4" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently forked a project on GitHub. After doing a significant amount of work on the fork I was wondering how to proceed with spinning it off into an independent project. The reason I ask is because the main repository has been abandoned and with no way to contact the author I'm wondering what to do next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware I can contact GitHub and they will spin off the fork for me so it's independent. What I'm wondering is how best to legally go forward, for example changing the name of the project (as to not confuse people), crediting the original author/project/repository and anything else I may not be aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13290" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T15:44:50.660" Title="Forking a GPL 2 Project on GitHub" Tags="|gpl|github|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7432" CreationDate="2018-10-07T15:44:50.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the original project was licensed under GPLv2, then your project must also be GPLv2.  You will need to maintain the copyright statements of the original author wherever they appear, which should really be in every file, but you should add copyright statements of your own to files which you have altered.  New files should contain your own copyright statement, and the GPL-recommended header saying that they're under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's really about it.  You don't have to host it on github (and you might want to consider gitlab, who the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF say&lt;/a&gt; are noticeably more free than github).  You can host it yourself if you want to.  You don't have to credit a repository.  Unless the original name has been trademarked, you don't even have to change the name, though it will be a lot less confusing for people if you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T15:44:50.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7436" CreationDate="2018-10-08T00:23:35.247" Score="14" ViewCount="2189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project (code) that I am wanting to license as MIT. It has a few dependencies, mostly assets (icons and images). Some dependencies are MIT and I include their licenses in the source, but a few are CC BY-SA. If they are ShareAlike, does that mean my project that uses them has to be CC BY-SA as well? Do I have to give up the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13293" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T10:09:40.683" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T10:09:40.683" Title="MIT-licensed project with CC-BY-SA dependency" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7435" CreationDate="2018-10-08T06:17:44.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0 requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply ... the Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but as I read it, this says that anything that copyright law regards as a derivative must also be licensed under CC-BY-SA (or a compatible licence, which the MIT licence &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is not&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes a derivative work is a contested issue, but one broadly-supported approach is that things that share complex, custom structure are parts of the same work.  So any of your code that links into the CC-BY-SA assets, or anything that uses its internal formats, is arguably part of the CC-BY-SA work, and will need to be CC-BY-SA also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the rest of your contributions can likely be under MIT, or any other licence that you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't tell us what the CC-BY-SA assets in question are, or how you are using them, so it is difficult to be more precise than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T06:17:44.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7438" CreationDate="2018-10-08T10:57:22.470" Score="43" ViewCount="8493" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a maintainer of an open source project which strictly enforces coding style and 100% test coverage, how do I deal with enthusiastic contributors who write terrible looking, untested code (that might work fine), while the contribution guidelines (and even the readme) very clearly mentions how your code should be formatted/tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13298" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T15:26:24.477" Title="How to deal with contributors who write very bad quality code?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7437" CreationDate="2018-10-08T13:11:16.057" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Define objective criteria that any contribution must fulfill. Automate checks for these criteria, using unit tests, linters, code coverage tools, …, then automatically run these checks for each PR as part of the build process / unit tests. Fortunately, there's a large set of such services that are available at no cost for open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a contribution fails these criteria, decide how much effort you want to invest into that PR and the PR's author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a contribution does not make any sense for your project, kindly say so. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for working on this idea, but I won't merge it. Adding this feature means we won't be able to do X in the future, and I'm not yet sure whether that's the right decision. In the future, if you have any ideas please open an issue first so that the design can be discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be possible to prevent some weird ideas by publishing a project vision and roadmap that outlines where you want the project to go. This will make it easier to say no to contributions that are not aligned with this vision.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the contribution is irredeemable in its current form, close the PR with a kind message that refers to your objective criteria/your contribution guidelines, but possibly leaves the door open. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thank you for your contribution, this looks like a great addition for {project}. Unfortunately, the tests on {CI service} seem to be failing so I'm closing the PR for now. Please let me know when it is fixed so that it can be reopened and merged!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on your patience also offer some help, e.g. a chat room where you can be reached.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the author is willing to make changes or when you want to grow them, comment with specific requests for improvements. E.g. GitHub's code review feature can be great for this. If necessary, consider providing (links to) tutorials and how-tos. For design-level problems, I've found it useful to NOT say “do this instead” (because my ideas are often not that great either) but to ask “what happens if in case of X?” or “I don't understand why this algorithm is necessary. Can't we just add the item to the list?”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the author is unavailable but their change is valuable, consider carrying the PR and fixing any problems yourself. This often takes less effort than writing about your concerns and waiting for responses, but doing work yourself instead of involving others makes your community poorer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt about a PR/feature, &lt;em&gt;say no&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/715277134978113536&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;No is temporary, yes is forever&lt;/a&gt;. This is not personal, this is about keeping the project viable. After all, a feature doesn't just cost effort for the implementation, but will cost effort for maintenance and user support in the future – effort which you as the maintainer might have to provide. Setting boundaries and not taking on work that you don't want is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider also reading Jessie Frazelle's post &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/the-art-of-closing/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of Closing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T15:26:24.477" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T15:26:24.477" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7444" CreationDate="2018-10-08T21:08:54.950" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some open-source programs have a single copyright and license notice in the README file, while others put a notice in each file in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer the first practice because it makes the code more succinct. But I wonder if a central notice is good enough to cover all the files in the program because some licenses allow users to freely copy and modify files in the program. If a user only copies some but not all the files, then those files may lose their trace to the copyright and license notice. In this case, is the user obliged to attach the copyright and license notice to the copied files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13307" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T07:31:45.433" Title="Does a central copyright and license notice cover all the files in a software program?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T21:50:46.390" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a hardware medical device which I'd like to open source without giving out my patent rights to potential competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to open source the firmware/software part. What's patented is implemented in the combination of hardware and firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of license can I use for this? I'd like others to be able to build on top of the hardware, but not allow others to take the firmware/software and make a competitive product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13309" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T07:11:24.697" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T07:11:24.697" Title="Open Source Hardware software and patent license" Tags="|multi-licensing|patents|hardware|firmware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7448" CreationDate="2018-10-08T23:35:13.050" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone came to me with this request, and I couldn't come up with a license that satisfies it.  We found a workaround, but I think the author's request represents a realistic requirement, so would still like to find an appropriate license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Question: is there an OSI-approved license, permissive to moderate, that allows the author to specify a specific unmodified documentation file or text block to be included with all copies of the software?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file/text block is entirely informational, and contains neither code nor legal conditions.  Making a new license (via modification) is not a solution because it would inhibit usage of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T09:32:09.487" Title="License that requires inclusion of a documentation file?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7439" CreationDate="2018-10-09T07:31:45.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a great idea, for the reasons you have noted.  Taking the specific question first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is the user obliged to attach the copyright and license notice to the copied files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on what the licence obliges them to do.  Some do require preservation of existing notices; some do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for best practice, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL advises&lt;/a&gt; people wishing to release software under it to include a single copy of the entire GPL, and at the beginning of each file insert a copyright notice, and text like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This file is part of Foobar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Foobar is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation ...&#xA;  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;  along with Foobar.  If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have trimmed the text to keep the question manageable, but it only runs to three substantive paragraphs, and is of course not mandatory in form.  So best practice is to put a copyright notice and some &lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt; to the choice of licence in each source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is an absolute requirement, but presumably you're publishing freely to maximise the use of what you write, and one element of making something maximally usable is the minimisation of doubt about how it can be used (&quot;&lt;em&gt;What's the licence on foobar anyway?  Did this file even come from our copy of foobar?  Stuff it, let's just write our own &lt;code&gt;baz()&lt;/code&gt; call.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T07:31:45.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7447" CreationDate="2018-10-09T08:00:56.637" Score="3" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a certain open source project I'm planning to use, which is a developmental tool, there is no license included in the project, but the readme contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Terms and Conditions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This utility is free for any use, commercial or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to be copying any code from here into my project, since it is just something that assists you in version control. How do I interpret this, and is this safe to work with? I've already asked the author to add a real license, but I've received no reply for two months now, and the last commit was more than 5 years back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13298" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T13:56:50.753" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T13:56:50.753" Title="How to interpret a one line license?" Tags="|licensing|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-09T08:21:32.040" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a IoT based software which will run on a Raspberry pi and distributed to user(like a product). I also want to place another software on the Raspberry pi which will work in conjunction with my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is the software the I want to use has a GNU GPL v3 licence. So this means and redistribution will require to have same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually don't want to modify that software just want it to run on same Raspberry Pi along with my own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is can I use a different licence to my software? Can I use those two software side by side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am actually very new to building such commerical applications. So any advice or corrections to my question is welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13319" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T08:21:32.040" Title="GNU GPL based commercial project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7445" CreationDate="2018-10-09T09:06:59.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a valid license, but being so short and nonstandard it is not entirely clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; this tool in any project, for any purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May you &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; this tool? This is probably intended by the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May you &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; the tool? This is where it gets tricky. It can be argued either way. It is therefore safer to assume that you may not publish modified versions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the right to make and publish modified versions, this falls short of a free or open source license, and would be incompatible with other licenses. This incompatibility does not prevent you from using this software in your projects. While you may use the tool as part of your development process, you may not copy code from the tool. Note also that for (L/A)GPL projects, the Corresponding Source can extend to build utilities. A GPL project should not depend on this tool, though you may still use it as part of your personal workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T09:06:59.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7442" CreationDate="2018-10-09T09:32:09.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is a reasonable requirement and various licenses explicitly support this. In particular, it is common that some kind of attribution or extra disclaimers have to be preserved. In academia, it is common that grants must be acknowledged in any works they produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/strong&gt; requires any NOTICE file to be preserved, and allows you to add to the NOTICE file when you modify the software. In section 4(d):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(formatting mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;GPLv3 license family (incl. LGPLv3 and AGPLv3)&lt;/strong&gt; allows you to add Additional Terms to the license. Here, 7(b) explicitly allows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This capability is compatible with the Apache 2 license. I.e. while you cannot directly copy Apache 2 licensed code into a GPLv3 project, you can first add an Additional Term that requires preservation of a NOTICE file and then copy the Apache 2 licensed code, along with relevant parts of the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/strong&gt; (FDL v1.3) has a concept of Invariant Sections that must not be modified. Only Secondary Sections can be Invariant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;Secondary Section&quot; is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are additional preservation rules for document sections called History, Acknowledgements, Dedications, and a deletion rule for a section called Endorsements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the FDL is primarily suitable for manuals or technical books (NOT for source code), and is highly incompatible with other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T09:32:09.487" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7445" CreationDate="2018-10-09T10:22:12.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but the licence permits &quot;&lt;em&gt;any use&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  This will include modification and distribution of modified versions, because those are both uses normally constrained by copyright, and thus included in a copyright licence's definition of &quot;&lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  I see no reason why the work or derivatives thereof should not be used in GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair License&lt;/a&gt;, which permits &quot;&lt;em&gt;Usage of the works&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  It is OSI-approved, so the OSI feels it grants the necessary freedoms for, eg, GPL compatibility.  &quot;&lt;em&gt;Any use&lt;/em&gt;&quot; seems to me to be at least as wide a grant of permission as &quot;&lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, on the bare face of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T11:39:10.077" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T11:39:10.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5923" CreationDate="2018-10-11T03:34:15.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In general&lt;/em&gt;, dual licensing to keep the old license is more friendly to forks and distributors, regardless of the specific licenses involved.  A fork of your project may contain changes from many other developers, and the maintainers of that fork may not have the legal right to relicense.  Similarly, downstream distributors and other users may prefer to continue using the previous license (which they already comply with) rather than switch to a new license (which may carry legal uncertainty, or at least require a reevaluation of their compliance).  As a result, you will find that most open source projects do not drop old licenses unless they are actively causing problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some specific examples of this behavior:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia relicensed from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;retained a dual license&lt;/a&gt; for all old content and the vast majority of new content.  Wikipedia is not, strictly speaking, an open source project, but the same concerns apply to its licensing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla relicensed its code under MPL/GPL/LGPL (from MPL-only), keeping the MPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www-archive.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html#mozilla-with-proprietary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in order to continue supporting proprietary downstream reusers&lt;/a&gt;.  Subsequently, they rewrote the MPL to allow compatibility with the various GNU software licenses without needing a tri-license, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/license-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;they keep the old license(s) for existing code&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With the demise of OpenOffice.org, its immediate successors are Apache OpenOffice (which switched the license to Apache 2) and LibreOffice (which kept LGPL 3+ and (somehow) added MPL 2).  LibreOffice is widely regarded as the &quot;legitimate&quot; successor, and the Apache version is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/10/apache_open_office_not_dead/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reportedly having trouble getting code written&lt;/a&gt;.  Licensing was far from the only problem here, but this arrangement does allow LibreOffice to take code from AOO without permitting the reverse.  That may have exacerbated the issue and allowed it to metastasize to the point of nearly if not actually killing off the entire project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T03:34:15.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T20:17:00.483" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this scenario: I have a website that applies special effects for images submitted by the users. The special effects part of my code is coming from GPL code. But in my website, I'm only offering service to the users and not distributing software. I need to keep the rest of the code as proprietary. Will this be a violation of GPL ? Specifically looking for GPL v2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is, can I wrap the GPL code in a webservice , host it internally and call from my proprietary code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13365" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T22:36:39.190" Title="Services delivered vs software distributed" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7458" CreationDate="2018-10-11T22:36:39.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're not distributing software in any way, you're fine.  The Affero GPL family would prevent you from doing what you're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, by linking GPLed code to your own, your own should be under the GPL (not that anybody's going to care).  However, you don't have to release anything under the GPL (there are conditions if you distribute, but nothing forces you to distribute the code in the first place).  If you're the only one using the code, the license hardly matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T22:36:39.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T23:02:15.410" Score="7" ViewCount="2349" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand if you want to use React.js library you should comply with MIT license by adding its copyright and permission notice before the library is included to the source code (to the bundle.js for an example). However, npm React package is distributed with this comment on top of JS files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;/** @license React v16.5.2&#xA; * react.production.min.js&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright (c) Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates.&#xA; *&#xA; * This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the&#xA; * LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.&#xA; */&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why its enough to include only copyright without permission notice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &quot;LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.&quot;&#xA;wording means? After bundling this comment will be the part of the&#xA;bundle.js file deployed to the web server. So should web server has&#xA;some sort of license.md at its root? I don't think so, but this got&#xA;me confused...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13362" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T13:22:39.563" Title="Why it is sufficient to include only copyright without permission notice when using React library in your project?" Tags="|licensing|mit|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7460" CreationDate="2018-10-12T13:22:39.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably incompatible with the license, but not necessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license has only one license requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;  copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the comment shows the copyright notice it DOES NOT show the permission notice. At the face of it, this is a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) React has a CLA, and Facebook is not bound by the MIT license. They can distribute and authorize others to distribute React without following the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) A minified file is essentially a binary. It is not reasonable to interpret the MIT license in a way that requires the license to be physically copied into the binary. It is OK to instead show the license in related documentation, such as a README or a LICENSE file. Here, the header seems to refer to a LICENSE file in the source tree, e.g. as available on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the NPM package contains documentation which includes the license, everything is fine, although the comment will still be rather confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, re-publishing this file as is might not necessarily be allowed. I'm not sure whether this is OK because you would be showing a verbatim copy, whether you would have to correct the header comment to include the full license, or whether you should display the license on the website that also publishes the copy of React.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My assumption is that re-publishing this file verbatim would be allowed in practice, because you can assume in good faith that the file in a format that is intended for such re-publishing is free from legal defects that would prevent you from doing so. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, nothing exempts you from the license conditions. If you include React in your software, you must somehow include React's MIT license. But I have yet to see a webapp that handles front end licenses properly, e.g. by attributing third party libraries in an “About” screen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that linking to the license would be equivalent to including the license, as long as the linked page is reachable. For example, jQuery chooses to link to its MIT license via this header in its minified build:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*! jQuery v3.3.1 | (c) JS Foundation and other contributors | jquery.org/license */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T13:22:39.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4040" CreationDate="2018-10-12T21:37:43.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is data, but it is not available publicly or for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blackduck, for example, maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackducksoftware.com/technology/knowledgebase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knowledge base&lt;/a&gt; of this kind of information, but you have to be a customer to access it.  I would be surprised if FOSSA and other licensing consultants didn't have similar information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also probably get this kind of data from industry analysts as well (Gartner, Forester), but that would be less accurate for your purposes as it would focus only on the kinds of enterprise customers that employ them, not all software projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github has the raw data for their users as well, since they &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.github.com/2017-11-03-search-repositories-by-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classify projects by license&lt;/a&gt;.  However, the full raw data isn't public and I don't know what's required to gain access to it.  Also, I don't know that GH classifies projects by your definition of &quot;industry&quot;, so you would need to find a way to apply that classification yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T21:37:43.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-13T13:49:16.557" Score="7" ViewCount="1809" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I translate an App from Android using GPLv3 into Swift? Because actually I don't use any source code. Do I need to keep it under GPLv3 and open source? Is there any method to avoid infection if it must under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13376" LastEditorUserId="13379" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T07:17:44.693" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T07:33:57.173" Title="Can I translate an app under GPLv3 into Swift without using GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7464" CreationDate="2018-10-13T14:05:24.037" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 licence of the original requires that, if you create a work which is (in copyright terms) a derivative of the original, and you distribute your derivative, you must do so under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear to me in what sense you're using &lt;em&gt;translate&lt;/em&gt;.  If you mean it in the linguistic sense, translating from one human language to another, then I can't see any way not to create a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're using it to mean converting an application from one programming language to another, this is normally referred to as &lt;strong&gt;porting&lt;/strong&gt; (or sometimes, as Brandin points out below, &lt;strong&gt;cloning&lt;/strong&gt;).  It is possible to do this in a way that doesn't create a derivative work, but it requires &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; people, and is known as a &lt;strong&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/strong&gt;.  To do this, one person must take the current work apart, and express exactly what it does in a document called a &lt;em&gt;functional specification&lt;/em&gt;.  The other person then, without ever seeing the original work or directly communicating with the first person, implements the functional specification in the new computer language.  This is an enormous amount of work.  If you decide to do the port by yourself it is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; likely that the work you create would be regarded as a derivative of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; in response to Amon's comment below: I do not think there is any justification for the &quot;&lt;em&gt;of course&lt;/em&gt;&quot; tossed in at the top of that comment.  There is one reliable way not to get sued for copyright violation, and that is not to infringe someone's copyright; everything else is just argument about how effectively one has done this.  The advantage of the clean-room reimplementation is that, when done properly, it has already been held to exclude the possibility of violation (with, eg, Phoenix Technologies' IBM BIOS clone, and VTech Apple II ROM clones).  In NEC Corp. v Intel Corp, the court held that the similarities between source and final product were a necessary consequence of the product's nature, and thus not a violation, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; clean-room techniques had been used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any lesser porting technique leaves the defendant in the difficult position of trying to prove that they have not violated, instead of having a nice set of persuasive case law that moves the burden of proof of violation back towards the plaintiff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T07:33:57.173" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T07:33:57.173" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7464" CreationDate="2018-10-13T20:53:22.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MadHatter names one viable way. Another method is to create an &lt;em&gt;emulator&lt;/em&gt;. If your Swift emulator emulates enough of the Android runtime, it can run the orignal App (and likely at least a few more Apps, especially the simpler ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the emulator is a stand-alone work, it's not in any way covered by the original license. Downside: this is hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T20:53:22.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T19:11:37.837" Score="6" ViewCount="866" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software is completely written in python and has the following architecture of down cascaded dependencies. I plan to share my whole source code (FileA, FileB, FileC) next time in GitHub:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Szpqk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Szpqk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Software Architecture&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FileA: Own written Gui with pyQt (apply GPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FileB: Own written Interface between GUI and Core (apply GPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FileC: Own written core algorithm is a standalone tool in a separate folder as the GUI files. Can be fully independent used on the command line without the GUI (apply MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FileD: Independent external library written from somebody else with MIT licence. The code is in an external directory independent from my code, as part of the python installation and will not be changed by myself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must I include the Copyright statement of FileD in my own MIT licence text of FileC or somewhere else in the environment of FileC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should I only give a note with the reference to the external MIT licenced library (FileD) within the readme of FileC and the Copyright statement of FileD remain only in the source code or licence text of FileD?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similar to (1.) Must I include the Copyright statements of FileD and FileC (just my own) in the GPL licence text of File B?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must I include in the GPL licence text of FileB or anywhere else in the environment of FileB the information that there are existing dependencies to one or more MIT licenced libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or did the dependencies to the MIT libraries get lost within the GPL licence and can only be reconstructed by following the library definitions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13385" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T19:53:54.697" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:53:54.697" Title="Copyright of MIT licenced libraries usage within GPL licensed code" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|copyright|dependencies|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T21:04:08.387" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been writing a docking framework in JavaFX.  This is a new library with original work.  However, I have been reading the source code of a few other open source docking projects to get some hints on how to go about this - some of which are licensed under LGPL.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering exactly how different I need to make my code in order for it to be considered unique.  Can include small chunks of code (say 10 or 20 lines) from other sources if there is really not a better way to write it?  Can I copy the general concepts being used as to how the windows are laid out?  Can I use the same or similar name for my variables?  I'm thinking of eventually releasing this code under Apache 2.0, so being able to extract it from LGPL would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T04:43:14.690" Title="Can I use bits of source from another library in an original work without having to worry about license issues?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T05:33:13.807" Score="2" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to use an api that is exposed in an open source project under MIT License.There's no restrictions mentioned for the use of api anywhere in the License neither it says that we can use the api So, Is it legal to use that api in my commercial Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13387" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T05:33:13.807" Title="Can I use API exposed in an open source project (MIT License) in a commercial software?" Tags="|mit|copyright|github|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7468" CreationDate="2018-10-15T05:40:29.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can [I] include small chunks of code (say 10 or 20 lines) from other sources [without respecting the license] if there is really not a better way to write it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is No. If you copy code and that code is protectable by copyright, you must adhere to its license. There is no specific amount of code as a number of lines that would say whether a piece of code is copyrightable or not. As an example, suppose the program you copied looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you copied these 10 lines, and then decided it is better to express this repetition using a for loop and a variable i to keep track of the iteration number: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;for (int i = 0; i &amp;lt; 10; i++) {&#xA;    printf(&quot;Hello, world!\n&quot;);&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the 10 lines were copyrightable, you've still copied the 10 lines and produced a derivative work. Rewriting it as a for loop, and the fact that it is now 3 lines long, does not change this. However, for this example it's not likely that the example is copyrightable. It is not original and there are only a few ways to print the string &quot;Hello, world!&quot; ten times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suppose the ten lines were this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;printf(&quot;It was the best of times,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the worst of times,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the age of wisdom,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the age of foolishness,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the epoch of belief,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the epoch of incredulity,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the season of Light,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the season of Darkness,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the spring of hope,\n&quot;);&#xA;printf(&quot;it was the winter of despair,\n&quot;);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it copyrightable? It appears to be an original expression and creative. You may recognize the words as a copy of a portion of a work by Charles Dickens. The fact that I wrote it as C programming statements does not change that I took it directly from the famous work, even if I have memorized these 10 lines and recited them from memory. In this case, the work is now in the public domain so no copyright infringement is possible. Even if it were still protected by copyright, you could make an argument that I am using it as a fair use or fair dealing if applicable. But that would depend on the reason for copying, the effect on the market by my copying and so on.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I copy the general concepts being used as to how the windows are laid out? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concepts are not copyrightable. They may be patentable though. Algorithms are generally not copyrightable, but a specific implementation of an algorithm is. Here is a famous one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def gcd(A, B):&#xA;    if B == 0:&#xA;        return A&#xA;    else:&#xA;        return gcd(B, A % B)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an implementation of Euclid's algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor written in Python syntax. As an example, if you write your own implementation of Euclid's algorithm in another language, or if you write your own implementation in Python and it happens to be exactly the same as mine, you have almost certainly not infringed my copyright on this implementation. How many ways really exist to write Euclid's algorithm? You could write it recursively as it was done here, you could write it iteratively, you could change the names or syntax and so on. Ultimately there are very few ways, so this is an example of something that you could use without worrying about copyright. But if you consider all the computer source code that exists, the vast majority is probably not like this, so you have to assume it is protectable unless you have a reason to believe otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I use the same or similar name for my variables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names are not copyrightable. That said, if your idea is to copy code and change all the names of variables, don't do that, as it won't work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24088/if-i-obfuscate-someone-elses-source-code-can-i-avoid-copyright-infringement&quot;&gt;If I obfuscate someone else's source code, can I avoid copyright infringement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy a work and change all the names, you've still made a copy (a derivative work). Look at the above gcd example. If you decide to name 'gcd' something else, or name the variables something other than 'A' or 'B', you've still made a derivative work. Of course, in that example, it doesn't matter. But for a larger example, simply changing all the names to try to pretend that you aren't copying someone else's work will probably become fairly obvious if someone looks closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T04:43:14.690" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T04:43:14.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7473" CreationDate="2018-10-15T08:39:56.473" Score="3" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a PhD candidate and part of my research project involves writing scientific software. I use that code to verify theoretical results and also as a proof of feasibility. It is usually not necessary for me to publish the source code, however I'd prefer to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to do that, I'm looking for an open source software license that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allows free use to verify and reproduce my published results&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grants me co-authorship, if somebody  uses my code for scientific publications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If possible I would prefer a strong copyleft&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This follows the standards for scientific authorship by the German research association (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dfg.de/sites/flipbook/gwp/files/assets/basic-html/page85.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Authors of an original scientific publication shall be all those, and only those,who have made significant contributions to the conception of studies or experiments, to the generation, analysis and interpretation of the data, and to preparing the manuscript, and who have consented to its publication, thereby assuming responsibility for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I only found proprietary software with a license like that (&lt;a href=&quot;https://4aop.noveltis.com/content/4aop-software-package-license-agreement-non-commercial-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is there any standard open software license out there doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that this a critical issue both regarding FLOSS licenses as well as scientific standards.&#xA;The software in mind is able to generate almost immediately publishable results.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My reason for the co-authorship clause is only to protect myself (and my PhD) from somebody taking away the low hanging fruit after me publishing the source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So far, my (current) best solution for this issue seems to be to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Publish the uncritical parts of the software at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://joss.theoj.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Journal of Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add the remaining parts step by step accompanied by a separate publication and linking to the Joss paper and the updated version of the Code. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also add friendly reminder in the readme and the gui that co authorship may be reasonable, depending on the softwares part in the publication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13388" LastEditorUserId="13388" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T11:57:12.613" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T11:57:12.613" Title="Open source software license, granting co authorship in scientific publications?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-15T18:54:31.410" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7471" CreationDate="2018-10-15T11:12:31.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally don't really understand the thinking that authoring software should earn you credit in someone else's scholarship, but several languages, most notably (to me) R, &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/27921/21773&quot;&gt;require you to reference a paper for each library you use in your own research&lt;/a&gt;. Requiring co-authorship seems unreasonable to me. But maybe you could get better answers at &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;the Academia site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think a license will really be able to do this, because it's just not how the legalities of copyright work. While your code may be a derivative of the libraries you use, the research outcomes you produce would not be. Authorship and referencing here is a &lt;strong&gt;social&lt;/strong&gt; issue, requiring a community to come to an agreement on their conventions, as the statistics community did for R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:12:31.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7471" CreationDate="2018-10-15T11:33:57.810" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No common open source license grants co-authorship, in fact such a license could be incompatible with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also very dubious whether a separately developed software would be sufficient to reach academic standards of co-authorship. Usually, the software used for research would be cited, just like another paper that was used during research would be cited. Requiring co-authorship might even be considered unethical. Your interpretation of the DFG's policies seems excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for an open-source license choice, first consider whether you really want an open source license that grants broad freedoms to modify and share your software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you merely want to publish the software behind a paper as supplementary material, a non-free “academic” license may be more appropriate. However, such recommendations are off-topic here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your university and not you holds exclusive rights to your software (e.g. because it was developed as part of your employment), then you should consult your university's legal department for policies regarding publication of open-source software from your research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common open-source licenses for academic software include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL family. Note that version 3 includes an explicit patent grant. The GPL is appropriate if you want to require that modified versions must also be published under open-source licenses. More precisely, the GPL does not require publication of modifications, but only allows publication of modifications if those modifications are available under the terms of the GPL. The LGPL variant allows the software to be combined with non-free modules. The AGPL variant is appropriate for web-apps, as it requires modified versions to be offered to users even when they merely interact with the software over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 license. It is a modern, permissive license with an explicit patent grant. It is compatible with GPLv3 but not GPLv2. Allows the software to be incorporated into non-free systems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD licenses. Older, simpler, but less clear, and less geared towards non-U.S. copyright laws than GPLv3 or Apache 2. Does not include an explicit patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some universities or insititues also have individual licenses for historic reasons, but these are often incompatible with the wider open source ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As open source licenses, all of these discussed licenses allow commercial use and allow modified versions to be published. However, they also require attribution. Attribution in the sense of these licenses and of copyright law is distinct from the academic concept of a citation, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:33:57.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7471" CreationDate="2018-10-15T12:50:38.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might not be classifiable as a FLOSS license, since academic authorship is substantially more consideration than mere attribution. Irrespective of whether this is legally possible, it would not be a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm sure you're aware as a PhD candidate, the question of whether a person ought to be given co-authorship is a significant ethical question. It is wrong to exclude authorship when it is merited, and wrong to grant authorship when it is not merited. The social norms of your academic field either require authorship when using your software, or those norms deem it an insufficient contribution to merit authorship. To try to influence the authors of some future paper to act otherwise via a copyright license would be a significant ethical lapse as a researcher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you truly believe that the norms of your field would consider use of your software as sufficient grounds for co-authorship (N.B.: you may wish you consult about this with your advisor), then you are free to make a note to that effect alongside or within your software. However, making co-authorship a legal requirement would be a substantial misstep if you are wrong, and unfair to researchers in other fields, which may have different social norms regarding authorship criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T14:36:57.937" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T14:36:57.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7316" CreationDate="2018-10-15T14:27:32.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on your description you have built your application by using the following components:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your application (closed source).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Liraries from the LGPL edition of Qt like QtCore, QtGUI, and so on (LGPL).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Qt Virtual Keyboard plugin (GPL).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inluding Qt's LGPL edition libraries in your closed source application is allowed by the license as long as you follow the LGPL rules, which usually implies that you link dynamically to Qt and that you allow users to upgrade or replace the LGPL parts (i.e. the Qt libraries) with their own version if they wish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by including and linking the Qt Virtual Keyboard plugin with your product, you are arguably violating the GPL because you are distributing it and combining it with your program as a plugin. Even if your application uses the functionality of the GPL program only occasionally or only in response to certain user actions (e.g. when the user loads a specific file), you are still distributing the GPLed work with your application, so you must abide by the GPL terms in order to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL allows you to include a GPL program with a closed source program only if the GPL program and closed source program are clearly separated so as they would not be considered one program. The GPL calls this an &quot;aggregate&quot; in the license text. Including the Qt Virtual Keyboard plugin in your application as you have stated sounds like it is combined as to form one program, not aggregation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to maintain GPL compliance you should not distribute Qt Virtual Keyboard plugin or any other GPL library with a closed source product if your closed program makes use of any GPL programs as libraries or plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T14:27:32.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T21:07:55.207" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a fully tax-funded public school use music licensed under CC-BY-NC in a video to promote its educational programs? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13394" OwnerDisplayName="janlindso" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T06:49:01.813" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T06:49:01.813" Title="Can public schools use CC BY-NC content?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7467" CreationDate="2018-10-16T05:52:09.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To license each part of your work under a specific license (GPLv3  for some components and MIT for others), one way is to place a header in each file or directory that states the license under which that part is distributed, and then refer to the full license text. For the MIT license, you can just use the entire full license text in your file because it is so short. For external libraries, the easiest way is to include the package unchanged in a separate directory, retaining any notices already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your description here is one way to include the files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gui/ (&quot;File A&quot;, GPLv3) and gui_inter/ (&quot;File B&quot;, GPLv3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a GPLv3 header [1] in each .py file and the full license text in a file such as LICENSE.GPL. If you decide to display Appropriate Legal Notices in your application, then anyone who uses your work as a derivative will be bound to also include such notices as interactive screens in their version. If you decide not to display notices interactively, then derivatives need not do so. See section 5(d) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL Version 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;algo/ (&quot;File C&quot;, MIT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the full MIT license text. [2]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;extern_lib/ (&quot;File D&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include all the original files of the external library. If you made no changes, you have no further obligations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pyqt/ (optional)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include all the original files of the external library. If you made no changes, you have no further obligations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must I include the Copyright statement of FileD [the external library] in my own MIT licence text of FileC [my core algorithm] or somewhere else in the environment of FileC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would only be required if you copy and paste the external library code (FileD) into your own program files (FileC). If you include them as separate files or directories, it will be easier to maintain and easier to tell what is what. If they are separate, then referring to FileD (the external library) from FileC (your core algorithm) would just be a technical matter of using the programming language's facilities for using external code (e.g. the 'import' keyword in Python, the '#include' directive in C, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Headers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Python source code, you may include the copyright header as a comment (# at the beginning each line), or as a docstring as shown below. An advantage of using a docstring is that it will not be stripped out when compiled to a .pyc file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Example GPLv3 header&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2018 Tom Kate &amp;lt;user@host.com&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This file is a part of KateWare.&#xA;&#xA;This file may be used under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation and appearing in&#xA;the file LICENSE.GPL included in the packaging of this file.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Full MIT license text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2018 Tom Kate &amp;lt;user@host.com&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a &#xA;copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;),&#xA;to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation&#xA;the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,&#xA;and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the&#xA;Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL&#xA;THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING&#xA;FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER&#xA;DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&#xA;&quot;&quot;&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the MIT header, I would avoid including the phrase &quot;this file is a part of KateWare&quot; in the header, because it may cause confusion of what Bob should write in the notice if Bob wants to include your MIT licensed parts in his BobWare application, without redistributing KateWare as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Copyright years, if you started writing a work in a different year and published additional changes or editions, a common convention is to include additional years as a list or range after the (C) symbol. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2000, 2018 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2015-2018 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information see &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2390230/do-copyright-dates-need-to-be-updated&quot;&gt;Do copyright dates need to be updated?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/18123/which-year-to-put-in-copyright-notice-when-mixing-old-content&quot;&gt;Which year to put in copyright notice when mixing old content?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T06:07:51.697" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T06:07:51.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7477" CreationDate="2018-10-16T06:31:18.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;[mandatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the easy part - any usage of a CC-BY-NC piece must include proper attribution, so the video would have to include such attribution (presumably in the end credits?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky part is interpreting the Non-Commercial part of the license. First, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC wiki states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NonCommercial turns on the use, not the identity of the reuser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the fact that the school is fully funded by taxes isn't the key point of this discussion. How this funding works probably is.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;If the school just gets a flat sum no matter how it uses it, and has X open positions on this program, first-come-first-served, there's no monetary gain from producing such a video, so this usage would probably be allowed.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, if the school's funding depends on the number of students that enroll to this program, such a video could be interpreted as an attempt to create a monetary gain (i.e., &quot;commercial&quot;, under the license's terms), and would such be forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T06:31:18.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7483" CreationDate="2018-10-16T07:28:12.217" Score="2" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use RestHeart which comes with an AGPL license. We are looking for a clue whether how this license should be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation: We have a REST service on server 1. This REST Service consumes the RestHeart REST server on another service which also runs MongoDB. So, we do not link the software directly, nor do we change it. RestHeart runs as a standalone Java program on another server. We do communicate with RestHeart over a HTTP connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question is, do we need to make our own REST service AGPL too? or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This is the current architecture, flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User/Customer on web page calls a REST service on Server 1. Server 1 contains all our own code.&#xA;On server 1, the REST call is passed on to RestHeart which resides on server 2 and includes MongoDB. Restheart is started as a standalone tool via Java.&#xA;All servers run in a contained environment, meaning these are Virtual Machines on a server enclosure.&#xA;Customers/Users do not directly interact with RestHeart but always via our own code on server 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13396" LastEditorUserId="13396" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T08:01:44.877" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T08:50:09.467" Title="Interpretation of an AGPL license" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6872" CreationDate="2018-10-16T08:26:27.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, which itself was based on StarOffice.  StarOffice corp, before being acquired by Sun Microsystems, had reverse-engineered rough compatibility with MS Office 97 formats, something that several other companies (e.g. Corel) had done as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When MS released OfficeXP, they published the full spec to their quasi-XML format in an attempt to discourage European and regional US governments from switching to either OpenOffice or Adobe products, both of whom had published open formats.  This spec publication enabled the contributors to The Document Foundation to greatly improve OpenOffice's MS document conversion (although that required a lot of work and sponsorship).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since LibreOffice is the fork of OpenOffice belonging to The Document Foundation, it has all of that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is from my personal recollection; I was a contributor to OpenOffice from version 0.8 to 2.0.  Apologies if I've glossed over anyone's important contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T08:26:27.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7528" CreationDate="2018-10-16T08:45:34.253" Score="8" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Code contributions are easy to account; one totals commits, reviews, and lines of code in whatever code management system the project uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, non-code contributions, particularly in the areas of advocacy, event management, coordination, mentoring, and logistics don't necessarily leave a trail in a repository.  For communities where voting in elections requires a certain threshold of contributions, counting these contributions is critical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What methods have communities used to count non-code, non-repository contributions?  Please give methods that you have insight into, and for which you can relate success or failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Many projects, such as Kubernetes and PostgreSQL, have a &lt;em&gt;numerical&lt;/em&gt; threshold for the number of code/doc contributions required in order to be considered a contributor, and thus have certain privileges (voting, attend summit, listed on home page).  Neither of those example projects has any way to incorporate activity that doesn't generate git commits into that numerical threshold.  I'm looking for a way to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="11583" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T16:21:22.520" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T16:05:16.433" Title="Method for accounting for non-code contributions?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7480" CreationDate="2018-10-16T08:50:09.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we need to make our own REST service AGPL too? or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not require that you make other software available under the AGPL as well. The AGPL is essentially the GPL with the following additional requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently&#xA;  offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer&#xA;  network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to&#xA;  receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access&#xA;  to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge,&#xA;  through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of&#xA;  software.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL License Version 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice in particular that if you have not modified the program, the AGPL does not give you any other obligations in addition to the ordinary GPL obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;User/Customer on web page calls a REST service on Server 1. ... [technical details]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technical details of how you set up your network communication does not affect how the AGPL license applies. Based on your description here is my understanding of the way a user would use your program:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A User --&gt; Your Web Page --&gt; Your REST service on Server 1&#xA;--&gt; Your REST service on Server 2 --&gt; AGPL Program that provides REST service&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you have placed several &quot;hops&quot; in between the user and the AGPL program, a user still can interact with it remotely through a computer network, so you are still obligated to consider the AGPL requirement of the AGPL program you are using and making available. Specifically, if you later decide to modify the AGPL program and continue to offer it for remote use over a network, you need to provide your users a way to obtain the corresponding source of your version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T08:50:09.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7525" CreationDate="2018-10-16T10:22:37.537" Score="6" ViewCount="1019" Body="&lt;p&gt;For client side code, even if it is obfuscated or is just a binary, I can imagine there might be ways of doing this, but if I have some server-side AGPL licensed code, how am I supposed to know that the copyright is not being infringed by someone else? Put differently, if someone is running/selling a service and I suspect that it is using my AGPL licensed code, how could I ever be sure of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13298" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T10:30:43.427" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T17:01:27.137" Title="How do I detect an AGPL violation?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|law|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7487" CreationDate="2018-10-17T12:44:26.453" Score="6" ViewCount="4030" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working in a company that develops and sells embedded systems. We are using Linux and some GPL software, alongside proprietary software. Some of the GPL softwares are modified to fit our needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we are using a GPL tool to build our filesystem images, that is obviously modified by us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are my legal obligations regarding the distribution of all the modified content ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading that I should also release / give instructions for rebuilding entirely the filesystems, which would lead me to release the entire build system, and would mean to release company knowledge for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13406" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T16:31:16.823" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T07:29:19.790" Title="GPL for Embedded" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|publishing|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7486" CreationDate="2018-10-17T15:45:59.413" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, you may want to discuss GPL compliance with your company's legal counsel and develop a clear strategy for dealing with GPL code. Complying with the GPL is not necessarily difficult, but it can place surprising obligations on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of the GPL is effectively an end user protection effort, so that end users of the GPL-covered software always have the freedom to inspect and fix their software. To this end, it is necessary that the source code is available and that users can install modified versions. The different GPL versions express this intention in different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of a GPL-covered software does not extend to any data processed by this software. If you have a GPL-covered tool that creates file system images, those images are not immediately covered by the GPL. However, if the images contain GPL-covered parts then those parts and only those parts are GPL covered. It is perfectly fine to have an image that contains both GPL-covered and differently-licensed parts side by side, as long as recipients of that image are free to exercise their rights under the GPL on those GPL-covered parts (such as making copies of the GPL-covered parts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requirements only trigger when you distribute/convey/sell GPL-covered software. Purely internal use of a GPL-covered tool does not place any obligations on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, you might have a modified version of GCC to build your proprietary software. This is perfectly allowed and you are not required to publish your modified GCC version. (GCC is covered by the GPL.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a different scenario, you might have modified a GPL-covered software so that it requires your internal build tools, and you distribute binaries of the modified software. You are required to publish the corresponding source of your modified version. The corresponding source includes any scripts, tools, and other files that are necessary to build the software. This could include your internal tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL-covered software that you distribute as part of your embedded system (whether modified or not) you have to provide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;licensing and copyright information (also applies to other open-source software)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;source code of the GPL-covered software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possibly: installation instructions for GPLv3-covered software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to provide the source code depends on the GPL version. For the case of an embedded system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv2 requires that you provide the machine-readable source code directly on a customary medium, or provide a written offer that is valid for at least three years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3 requires that you provide the source code directly on a physical medium, or provide a written offer valid for at least three years and valid for your customer support duration. The offer may be for a physical medium or may refer to a download server.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you provide an offer, the offer must be valid for whoever obtains your software, not just your immediate customers. (Consider that customers may resell or lend their devices.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 contains further requirements in case your embedded system is a “User Product”, i.e. intended for personal use or intended to be incorporated into a dwelling. If a device is normally used for both personal and other uses (e.g. commercial or industrial) it is still a User Product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For User Products, you also have to provide installation information so that users can install and run modified versions on the device. This includes any passwords or signing keys necessary for such an installation. This obligation cannot be circumvented by leasing rather than selling the devices. You don't have to provide installation information if such an installation would be impossible, e.g. for a microchip with read-only memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to review the open source software that you include in the embedded system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List any open source software with their copyright information and licenses. This is easiest if you build everything from source yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make sure that your manuals etc. contain the necessary attributions as required by those licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case GPL or LGPL code is copied into your proprietary software or is linked with your proprietary software, inspect the licensing status more clearly: your proprietary software may be covered by the GPL. Here, I'll assume everything is a standalone executable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For any GPL- or LGPL-covered software, prepare to publish the source code. Ideally, your release process creates source archives of the GPL-covered software and then builds the binaries from those source archives, to ensure that the archive contains the corresponding source. Decide how you will publish the source code (e.g. CD-ROM in the device packaging, or a written offer in the manual). If you offer a download link, add an item to your release checklist to upload the source archives to your server (or better yet, automate this).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For any GPLv3- or LGPLv3-covered software, add the necessary installation information to the manual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T15:45:59.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7489" CreationDate="2018-10-17T19:25:45.170" Score="1" ViewCount="2316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this amazing project &lt;a href=&quot;https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://atlaskit.atlassian.com/&lt;/a&gt;. But after visit some pages about license issues I have a lot of confussion. Can I use Atlaskit in comercial projects and customize the controls?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13409" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T20:15:13.777" Title="Atlaskit in commercial projects" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7488" CreationDate="2018-10-17T20:15:13.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;main code page&lt;/a&gt; for the project says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a mono-repo, which means that different parts of this repository can have different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The base level of the repository is licensed under Apache 2.0. There are separate license files (LICENSE) for each component under /packages that specify the license restrictions for each component. While most components are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, please note packages containing styles, assets &amp;amp; icons are most likely licensed under the Atlassian Design Guidelines license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://atlassian.design/guidelines/handy/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlassian Design Guidelines licence&lt;/a&gt; is definitely non-free, and unsuitable for commercial re-use.  Right near the top, in s2, it says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not use the ADG for any purpose not expressly permitted by this License Agreement. You may not modify, adapt, redistribute, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or create derivative works of the ADG or any part of the ADG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I read it (and IANAL/IANYL) you can use Atlaskit in a commercial project provided you don't use any of the styles, assets, and icons.  You will then only have to honour the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 licence&lt;/a&gt;, s4 of which places certain requirements on you which aren't incompatible with a commercial release (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt; give a copy of the licence, and a copy of the NOTICE file if one is provided, though I can't immediately see that one is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you should take proper legal advice before betting any kind of commercial enterprise on any code that you don't own the rights to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T20:15:13.777" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7491" CreationDate="2018-10-19T04:46:15.973" Score="2" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I modified a GPL opensource project and distributed the binary free of charge on Google Play. I'm planning to release source code per request via email only.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is if someone ask for the source code, can I charge them?&#xA;If they refuse, what will happen, do I still have to send the source code to them?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Alternatively, can I put a restriction on my derived code that it cannot be used for commercial product? Even if the original project allows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13415" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T11:50:30.250" Title="Selling GPL derived source code" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2018-10-19T06:30:19.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is if someone ask for the source code, can I charge them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge them for the binary, but once anyone has the binary, you may not impose any charge greater than cost-recovery should they also want the source code.  Specifically, GPLv2 allows you to make &quot;&lt;em&gt;a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which unless you post actual media to the requester, is likely to be nearly zero.  GPLv3 has similar language, but it makes it clearer that network access to source cannot be charged for, and that postal access only satisfies your licence obligations in the case of certain kinds of binary shipment, which do not include Google Play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If they refuse, what will happen, do I still have to send the source code to them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they refuse to pay, it is unclear whether you are still obliged to send them source but may then proceed against them for the cost, or whether you may withhold the source until the cost is defrayed.  In any case, if you're planning on relying on this part of the GPL to save you from source distribution obligations, I would &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; advise against that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternatively, can I put a restriction on my derived code that it cannot be used for commercial product? Even if the original project allows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both GPLs require that you licence the derivative product under the same version of the GPL, and neither of them allows such restrictions.  This requirement applies to the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; of the derivative product, both the original parts, and the parts that you have added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T08:00:25.700" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T08:00:25.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7495" CreationDate="2018-10-19T09:07:29.193" Score="5" ViewCount="1969" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have two applications developed by two teams. One is open-source under GPL, another closed-source without any possibility to open the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there's a requirement to implement some kind of API between them, where open-source acts more like a client, so closed-source app should provide an API. As far as I understand, implementing any program-level API like statically or dynamically linked library oblige to open service-providing application code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what about IPC? Are there any precedents of exchanging queries and data between open- and closed-source applications using system-provided IPC, like pipes, shared memory or sockets? Should we prove someway that closed-source app just a service provider and loosely connected to open-source app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE citation from GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;  communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;  So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;  separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;  intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;  could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;  program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, not only way if communication, but is this communication &quot;intimate enough&quot;. This is very vague term and could be used for speculations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13416" LastEditorDisplayName="user13416" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T12:21:28.743" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T14:40:07.973" Title="IPC between open-source and closed-source applications" Tags="|licensing|closed-source|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7492" CreationDate="2018-10-19T12:26:23.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the closed-source service provider does not depend on the GPL client (other than that the GPL client is currently the only known client application) or other GPL code, there is no GPL-related trigger to require opening up the source code for the service provider.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL client application (and the interaction with the service provider), there are two options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The easiest option is if the service provider offers a documented networked API. The client can implement its side of the API based on the documentation and there is no question about either the client or service provider being derived works of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the service provider is implemented as a library, you can add an additional permission to the GPL license to allow linking the GPL client code to this specific closed-source library. Version 3 of the GPL license explicitly allows this kind additional permission under section 7, but they can only be added by the original licensor of the code (the one who wrote the relevant code).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: If this were not so, it would have been possible to force Microsoft to release the source code for MS-Word by simply writing a scrip around it that uses some features of MS-Word.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T14:40:07.973" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T14:40:07.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7492" CreationDate="2018-10-19T12:50:58.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL, you can distribute GPL programs together with closed source programs as long as the programs are separate. The GPL calls such a collection an &quot;aggregate&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, &lt;strong&gt;which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work&lt;/strong&gt;, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;I'm not linking with the GPL program; I'm just using sockets or IPC&quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[We want] to implement some kind of API between [the GPL program and our closed-source app], where [the GPL program] acts more like a client, so closed-source app should provide an API. As far as I understand, implementing any program-level API like statically or dynamically linked library oblige to open service-providing application code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conventional Internet wisdom on this topic seems to go something like this: &quot;if you statically link with an LGPL program, your program must also be (L)GPL'ed. If you dynamically link with an LGPL program, your program can remain closed source. If you statically or dynamically link with a GPL program, your program must also be GPL'ed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is not at all what the GPL says and it is unlikely that a judge would see it this way if there is actually a legal dispute. Section 5 of the GPL covers your main obligation of what you must do when you distribute GPL programs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must license the &lt;strong&gt;entire work, as a whole&lt;/strong&gt;, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, &lt;strong&gt;to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added. If the program is LGPL'ed, or if it is GPL with a linking exception, then there is extra language in the license which clarifies in what circumstances you are allowed to combine the program with yours, without needing to license your program in the same way. However, for the ordinary GPL, the above paragraph is what you need to scrutinize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the real question is whether your final product will ultimately be considered as one work or separate works. This is true whether your product is packaged as two executables that use IPC with each other, or one executable plus some DLLs, one executable with statically linked code, or in some other way. The FSF tried to answer this in their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But &lt;strong&gt;if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this explanation is from the FAQ, not the GPL itself. The FAQ also explicitly says that it is an unanswered question as to what will actually be considered a combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than guessing what a judge may decide, you should first think about how the copyright holder of the GPL program you are redistributing is likely to interpret what you've done. If the copyright holder considers that your product is an entire work combined with his, and sees that you have not fulfilled your license obligations by releasing your source code as well, he has a copyright infringement claim against you and could take legal action. Then you will be in the position of needing to convince a judge that you were allowed to do what you did. In the worst case, you may even be ordered to release your source code, despite your claim that &quot;[there is] no possibility to open [our] code.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your description, it sounds like you already suspect that combining your closed source program with the GPL program may not be legally possible in the 'conventional' way (via static or dynamic linking), so you are looking for a workaround. If your workaround is to first add on an IPC interface to the GPL program, then add on a compatible IPC interface to your closed source program, then package them together and ship it to customers as a product and say &lt;em&gt;actually, these are two separate programs, so we don't need to supply you the source code to our closed source part&lt;/em&gt;, that would not look good to me. It would look like you are purposefully trying to circumvent the license requirements of the GPL program to your own advantage and the disadvantage of the copyright holder of the GPL program. Why is it a disadvantage to the GPL program's copyright holder? Because many software authors license their programs under the GPL specifically to encourage companies to do the same. I.e. &quot;You may copy our code as long as you release yours as well.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the GPL program already has an IPC interface, and the copyright holder intends for it to be used as a service to other programs via an IPC mechanism, and you are simply using this program in the way it was intended to be used by calling it from a separate program, you can make a good case that they are in fact separate programs and constitute a &quot;mere aggregation&quot; as defined by the GPL. Commercial Linux distributors do this, for example, when they distribute closed source programs for Linux in combination with the Linux kernel itself, although Linux is GPL licensed. Note that the communication between an application and an operating system kernel can actually be quite intimate, but operating system kernels in general and Linux in particular was designed to supply such services to other programs; no one is claiming that a closed source program is a combined work of Linux or &quot;by its nature an extension of [Linux]&quot; simply because it runs under Linux and/or because it performs intimate communication with Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Related questions and answers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6271/calling-gpld-programs-from-a-shell-script/6273#6273&quot;&gt;Calling GPL'd programs from a shell script&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T13:18:30.963" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T13:18:30.963" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-19T23:43:09.000" Score="-2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several discussions have supported the subject of a software license and the majority are limited to offer explanations or definitions (GNU GPL, EULA, BSD License ... etc) without addressing the practical steps to set up a license for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In parallel to the many types of licenses (GNU GPL, EULA, BSD License ... etc), there are also many organizations like FSF (Free Software Foundation) and OSI (Open Source Initiative) and Copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally the software must be legally declared in legal body like FSF or OSI to guarantee the copyrights and the fact of putting a copyright text for license with the source code does not normally complete the licensing process.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1  In the case of Opensource, if we put the code in public, the fact of putting a text accompanying the publication of the project does not legally guarantee the authors' rights since it is possible to modify the code and put a new license for example.  What should author do to protect legally their work and what is the legal approach and the organization that must be contacted to accomplish the license and software patents and where should the project be dropped to be secured ?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2  What is the role of the FSF, OSI, or Copyright if we only limit to put a license text in the Software as for the case of github, we note that it is not enough in practice to limit to the addition of a license file generated by guithub and must concetise the legal approach in reality, so how to apply the license in reality, should us contact OSI or FSF by depositing the source code at them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 If we assume that an open source project has been put online, how are the project authors  guaranteed their rights, since it is possible to take the code and assigned to other owner and the author loses its intellectual properties  ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 How to apply the license of apache or MIT for example, all the articles which are carried out around this license are limited to recite the definition and its contents without speaking about the way to apply it.  In the reality, must one contact FSF or OSI or Copyright office to translate the formal text of the license into reality ?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13424" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T07:12:36.390" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T08:01:36.363" Title="Practical steps to licence Free software and Open Source Projects" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|osi|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2018-10-22T12:02:17.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T02:07:33.237" Score="7" ViewCount="765" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently designed a logo for an MIT-licensed open-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That same open-source project has now launched a commercial offering under the same name (just using a .com instead of .org) domain, using the same logo I initially designed for both the commercial and open-source aspects of the project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reusing open-source work in a commercial setting is covered under the MIT license so that's fine, but it does make me wonder. If the logo is MIT-licensed, does that mean they essentially have no control over who uses their logo? If so that seems like a dangerous basis for building a business?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; MIT-licensed, does it mean I still technically own the rights to the logo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13425" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T19:29:46.887" Title="Who owns the rights to a logo contributed to an open-source project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyright|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T06:35:22.773" Score="5" ViewCount="6613" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I comply with the apache 2.0 license in this context. Neither of these libraries have a notice file. Do I just include the apache 2.0 license to be available with my app's release (like in the folder the installation/binary is in?)? I am not modifying or redistributing the libraries (just calling functions and using classes provided), they are just going to be compiled and bundled into the application as dependencies. How would I include the copyright notices and license associated with these libraries?? From my interpretation of the license if I am going to reserve all rights to my application under copyright, as it has to be closed source--this will in turn close the source of the libraries bundled within because it'll all be compiled and shipped as a whole. Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 4 is giving me the most trouble. 4a states that I must include the Apache 2.0 license with my derivative work (in my interpretation, because my work is based off of(uses these libraries) I must include the license with the work. how would I clarify that the Apache license applies only to the libraries? as... according to 4d &quot;may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&quot; I do intend to extend no license to the users(should I include a statement in the source that it is Copyrighted, all rights reserved in source in case source is leaked somehow? for the sake of clarification?). I intended on reserving ALL rights to this application under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I give attribution, copyright notices and disclaimer for the libraries? Where do I put them? What is required? How do I give attribution? How to I convey their copyright notice? There is no notice file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4c flat out confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This application is going to help a lot of people, and it's important it's closed source for security reasons. I can't use these libraries if I have to supply any source form of these libraries with my work. I intend to compile them and bundle them into the application binary as dependencies--as I stated before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This version of the application will be a desktop application&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13426" LastEditorUserId="13426" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T09:04:28.613" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T09:15:57.473" Title="I'm using 2 libraries licensed under Apache 2.0. How do I comply if my app is proprietary software and I'm not modding the libraries?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7497" CreationDate="2018-10-20T06:38:04.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting a copyright text for license with the source code does not normally complete the licensing process&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#howto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, it does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's it.  Nothing about registration with the FSF, the OSI, or any external body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you will forgive me, your question seems constructed around a misapprehension: that publishing your code with merely a copyright statement and a clear licence declaration is somehow insufficient or lacking, and that registration with some external body is required to make your copyrights enforceable.  &lt;strong&gt;That is, generally, not so&lt;/strong&gt;, which is a direct consequence of just about every country signing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you raise some specific questions, so let me take them individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 In the case of Opensource, if we put the code in public, the fact of putting a text accompanying the publication of the project does not legally guarantee the authors' rights since it is possible to modify the code and put a new license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the licence.  The GNU GPL, for example, forbids exactly that (GPLv2 s2b,  GPLv3 s5b); anyone who takes a GPLed work, modifies it (including, but not limited to, replacing the licence) and distributes it is committing a copyright violation and the rights holder in the original work has standing to sue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-copyleft free licences such as BSD, MIT, and Apache do not prohibit this.  Opinion is divided as to whether you can take such a work and republish it under a different free licence, but in practice it's very possible (and completely lawful) to take such a work and republish it under a proprietary licence.  If you don't want that, use a copyleft licence like the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should us contact OSI or FSF by depositing the source code at them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  They don't act as repositories in the way you think they do, because they don't need to (and they have better things to do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that an open source project has been put online, how are the project authors guaranteed their rights, since it is possible to take the code and assigned to other owner and the author loses its intellectual properties&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The courts guarantee their rights, in the limiting case.  In practice, there are all sorts of halfway houses involving cease-and-desist letters or organisations like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SFC&lt;/a&gt;.  But at the end of the day, the same social mechanisms that stop someone taking your car without your permission should prevent someone taking your code without your permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;must one contact FSF or OSI or Copyright office to translate the formal text of the license into reality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  As the GPL says, it suffices to put a copyright statement and a licence declaration.  Arguably you can get by with even less, but you definitely don't need more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some US-specific wrinkles such as registration with their Copyright Office, but these are not requirements for an enforceable copyright.  They are hangovers from the days when the US &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; didn't like the Berne Convention, and they allow extra legal weight to be brought to bear on offenders; but they are not a requirement for copyright protection, and they only apply in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T08:01:36.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7499" CreationDate="2018-10-20T07:52:19.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to satisfy your obligations is to have the program print in its starting screen something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is (c) 2018 Keith Cronin, all rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It includes libfoo (c) 2008-2018 The Foo Organisation, and libbar (c) 2010-2018 The Bar Coalition and others.  Both are used under the terms of the Apache2.0 licence.  Click here for full details of the copyright holders and the text of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt;'s points 4a, 4b (since you're not modifying the libraries), 4c (since you're not distributing source), and 4d (since there are no such NOTICEs) are fulfilled, and that is the full extent of your redistribution obligations under this licence (note: IANAL/IANYL).  Actually linking through to libfoo and libbar would be a nice gesture, but it's not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's important it's closed source for security reasons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You give no more details, but I will note in passing that this almost never turns out to be true.  Historically, the best security comes from exposure to many eyeballs, because some of those eyeballs are almost certain to sit in front of brains better trained in security analysis and secure protocols than yours (or mine, or just about anyone's).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T09:15:57.473" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T09:15:57.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7499" CreationDate="2018-10-20T08:06:16.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably somewhere have a statement under which terms your application can be used (mentioning how many copies can be made, that source code will not be provided, etc.). This can be a separate document or an about-page within the application or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to comply with the Apache license requirements is to extend your &quot;terms of use&quot; with information along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This application uses the libraries Foo (&lt;a href=&quot;http://foo.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://foo.example.com&lt;/a&gt;) and Bar (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bar.example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bar.example.com&lt;/a&gt;). These libraries are available under the Apache 2.0 license, which can be obtained from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The library Foo contains the following attribution notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ content of the NOTICES file ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing the links to the libraries is not required, but I always consider that an act of goodwill.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have added a link to the text of the Apache license, rather than the license text itself, because that is also how authors &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the license are instructed to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 of the Apache 2.0 license indeed gives you the right to distribute your application as closed source without giving your users the right to replace the linked version of the used libraries with another version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 4c is not applicable in your case, because it deals with the distribution of source code and essentially says that you are not allowed to remove copyright or attribution notices unless the code it applies to also has been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T08:06:16.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7510" CreationDate="2018-10-18T18:46:05.593" Score="8" ViewCount="1657" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm working on a software library in which certain unit tests rely on GPL licensed code but the code that a user of this library would install on their system does not interact with GPL licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I still have to licence all of the library's code under the GPL? Or can I provide separate licences for my tests and the rest of my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone who clones my project repository builds the tests (which is optional), the tests are linked against a GPL (without library exception) licensed shared library as runtime. This is the only part of my library that uses GPL'd software in any way. I'm uncertain whether this makes the whole library fall under the GPL because the tests are distributed as part of the same project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13437" OwnerDisplayName="Peter" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T00:55:58.413" Title="Implications of using GPL licenced code only during testing" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2018-10-18T20:27:54.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely using software in the course of creating other software doesn't make it a derivative work. Otherwise, you would be subject to the licenses of even things like the operating system your compiler ran on! You can safely license your code separately from your tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, depending on the details, it's possible you may not even need to GPL license your tests. For example, if you do not distribute your tests, they wouldn't need to be GPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="722" OwnerDisplayName="Karl Bielefeldt" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T20:27:54.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2018-10-20T12:21:43.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Github, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.github.com/2016-02-17-issue-and-pull-request-templates/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue templates&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These templates are shown to users while they open an issue, which means that a simple warning like &lt;code&gt;Please don't ask questions here, but use https://example.com&lt;/code&gt; is presented to all users, even if they didn't check the repository wiki or readme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11254" LastEditorUserId="11254" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T09:27:39.717" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T09:27:39.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T12:56:42.527" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a mobile app software and we distribute it with LGPL v3. It uses other 2 components licensed under LGPL-v3 and MIT. For our own code, we are have the full ownership (i.e. nobody else have made any contribution)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later we created a modified version and customized it for a company and it will be distributing their own version of this mobile App. But this company doesn't want to publish the sources. How do we give the rights to this company to distribute the App without sources ? We did not modify the other components that our App uses, only our own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple mail saying &quot;Hey, it is ok , you can distribute the binaries of our app without any problem, you have our permission&quot; doesn't look very formal. So, how is this done legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What documents do we have to provide or what changes do we have to make in order to do this correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13431" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T20:29:33.797" Title="Licensing LGPL software commercially" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T11:54:04.773" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a mobile app software and we distribute it with LGPL v3. It uses other 2 components licensed under LGPL-v3 and MIT. For our own code, we are have the full ownership (i.e. nobody else have made any contribution)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later we created a modified version and customized it for a company and it will be distributing their own version of this mobile App. But this company doesn't want to publish the sources. How do we give the rights to this company to distribute the App without sources ?  We did not modify the other components that our App uses, only our own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple mail saying &quot;Hey, it is ok , you can distribute the binaries of our app without any problem, you have our permission&quot; doesn't look very formal. So, how is this done legally? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What documents do we have to provide or what changes do we have to make in order to do this correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13431" OwnerDisplayName="Nulik" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T13:11:26.103" Title="Licensing LGPL software commercially" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2018-10-20T16:15:42.567" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7507" CreationDate="2018-10-20T13:28:31.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple mail to the other company is indeed not sufficient to let them get out of the obligations that the LGPL license imposes on them. The only option to not have to obey those obligations is to receive the code under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the sole copyright holders of the app, you have the option to offer the app to different people under different licenses. This means that you can offer the standard app under the LGPL license to the general public and modified versions under a closed-source license to companies that are willing to pay for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one snag in this scheme, and that is the LGPL-v3 library that you are using. As you don't own the copyrights of that library, you either need to check if the owners of that library also offer a dual-licensing scheme, or you need to obey the LGPL license terms with regard to that library. This means that you must make it possible for end-users to replace the LGPL library you use with a version of their own. This requirement must also be fulfilled if you distribute your app under a closed-source license, but does not imply that your sources must be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dual-license your app, you need to ask your legal counsel to draft a contract and to put the desired license terms in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T20:29:33.797" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T20:29:33.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2018-10-20T14:23:41.923" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; GPL-covered software is perfectly fine under any circumstance. The question is whether software that you wrote is also covered by the GPL. This is the case whenever it is a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of GPL-covered software as defined by copyright law, in particular if the software that you distribute is a modified version of GPL-covered software or if your software includes GPL-covered code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the description of your software, you have mentioned or implied the following components and relationships:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WpgP9.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WpgP9.png&quot; alt=&quot;project components&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you have a repository containing source code for the library and for the tests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the tests need a GPL library to run&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the library source code is not a derivative work of the GPL-covered library. Therefore, you cannot be forced to release the library source code or binaries of the library under the GPL. Similarly, the source code of the tests is (likely) not derivative of the GPL-covered library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the runnable tests are probably derivative of the GPL-covered library. Under the terms of the GPL, the source code of your runnable tests must be made available in compliance with the GPL, in particular under a GPL-compatible license.  The source code of the tests includes the library's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You do not actually distribute the runnable tests but only their source code. In my amateur opinion, this difference is not material to this licensing discussion. Assume the runnable tests were licensed in a way so that they could not be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Whether the runnable tests would be distributed (thus committing copyright infringement) or whether you would merely distribute all the parts necessary to create the runnable tests (thus likely committing contributory copyright infringement) – I doubt this would be legal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, this means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are not required to publish your tests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you publish the tests in source form or other form, you must make the source code of the runnable tests under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code of the tests includes the source code of your main library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can choose different licenses for the libraries and the tests, as long as all licenses are compatible with each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the license that you choose has to be GPL-compatible, it does not have to be the GPL itself. For example, you could choose the MIT license instead. This should not be a problem for most open source libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some niche cases where there would be problems. For example, if you publish the library incl. tests under a license that is not GPL-compatible. Another scenario would be a proprietary software project where you do not intend to share the tests at all, but would later like to license your test suite to a client. This would imply a license of the main library to the client under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the set of GPL-compatible licenses depends on the exact GPL version. In particular, the Apache 2 license is compatible with GPLv3 but not GPLv2. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF license list&lt;/a&gt; for various licenses and the FSF's thoughts on GPL compatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-20T14:23:41.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T14:38:30.547" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Last year, Columbus,OH &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.transportation.gov/smartcity/winner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;won&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.transportation.gov/smartcity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US DOT Smart Cities Challenge&lt;/a&gt;. Since then, they've made major progress on &lt;a href=&quot;https://smart.columbus.gov/projects/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a number of fronts&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smartcolumbusos.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SmartColumbus Operating System&lt;/a&gt; provides the technical core, while ~1000 data sets populate the potential workspace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last week, they put out a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:6458740235097423872/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;request&lt;/a&gt; for advice on moving from internal to open source development. I'm echoing that here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A goal of our program is to make the smart city platform we are building openly shareable with other cities so they can benefit from the grant we received from the USDOT.  What we want to do is to move from internal development to open source development and therefore, are looking for people with experience in doing this to advise us.  It would be great to get folks from open source companies as well as from the user/contributor communities. Please pass this on to anyone in your networks that you feel can provide value.  Thank You!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can Columbus best build an Open Source product to help other cities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13443" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T22:39:11.580" Title="How to Move Smart City Columbus from Internal to Open Source?" Tags="|project-management|community|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2018-10-23T03:23:24.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7498" CreationDate="2018-10-22T16:03:31.527" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you've submitted the logo as a typical inbound=outbound contribution, you still own the copyright on the logo, but you may not forbid anyone else from from using the logo on copyright grounds, due to the permissive copyright grant you made via the MIT license. Effectively, the exclusive rights that copyright law granted to you to reproduce and modify the logo are no longer exclusive to you: you have offered those rights to the public at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trickier aspect of this legal situation is not copyright, but trademark. Trademark allows exclusive use of a mark to identify the source of goods or services. A trademark might be a simple non-copyrightable phrase like, &quot;I'm lovin' it,&quot; or may be a copyrightable work like a logo. Specific colors can also be trademarks. Normally, trademarks are formally registered, but at least some jurisdictions recognize the existence of &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; trademarks: if Entity X has been using Mark M exclusively in commerce to identify themselves and their goods, a court may forbid another Entity Y from using the that same Mark M to identify themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this company has been using this logo for at least some time (this includes prior non-commercial use by the open source project), it is at least possible that a court will recognize the company's exclusive right to use that logo as an identifier. This doesn't forbid anyone from using the logo in a non-identifying context, like within an original work of art, but it may forbid use of the logo in any context that might convey false association with or endorsement by the company which uses the logo as its trademark. Neither your status as the mark's author under copyright, nor anyone else's status as recipients of copyright rights under the MIT license, gives any rights to usurp the current vendor's exclusive right to use the mark as an identifier under trademark law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be clear that, without more facts, I can't even begin to armchair-speculate how a court would rule with regard to a possible trademark case, but I simply wanted to highlight the potential application of a trademark monopoly in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-10-22T19:29:46.887" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T19:29:46.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2890" CreationDate="2018-10-22T21:53:23.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Maven site provides a definition in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://maven.apache.org/ref/3.5.4/maven-model/maven.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;project descriptor reference&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This element describes all of the licenses for this project. Each&#xA;  license is described by a license element, which is then described by&#xA;  additional elements. Projects should only list the license(s) that&#xA;  applies to the project and not the licenses that apply to&#xA;  dependencies. &lt;strong&gt;If multiple licenses are listed, it is assumed that&#xA;  the user can select any of them, not that they must accept all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the intention is to express an OR constraint, i.e. the user can choose. Of course, it may still be prudent to have a look at the actual license terms in addition to the pom, as suggested by other responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13448" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T21:53:23.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T22:51:31.740" Score="-1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;How big open source companies (Mozilla, Apache, Mysql) enforce their rights for their published code as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the case of Mozilla, which has invested in the development of its source code, how it can guarantee the cleanliness of its code to prevent infringements, for example code piracy or the creation of a new browser with its published source code, we are talking about the legal side which normally requires an approach that must be taken for the protection of intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same case for a project that has just launched on Github for example, how can one legally grant the ownership of the code to avoid infringements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13424" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T08:41:11.963" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T08:42:36.517" Title="How the big open source firm guarantees their rights" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|gnu|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-10-23T13:39:08.707" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7518" CreationDate="2018-10-23T02:55:49.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In any nation that is signatory to the Berne Convention, copyright (i.e., a monopoly on redistribution, derivatives, public display, etc.) is automatically in force for the author of a creative work. An author may use license to grant some rights to other people, and, even when using a free/open license, may place requirements on reuse, such as requiring attribution or copyleft terms. Anyone who exercises a copyright-restricted right without meeting the requirements of the author's license is liable to pay damages if sued in a court of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to register your copyright, though not necessary (in the U.S.) until you actually initiate a lawsuit. In the U.S., if you register your copyrighted work before infringement takes place, you can claim extra money in court, called &quot;statutory damages&quot;, on top of whatever &quot;actual damages&quot; the infringement caused you. I expect that corporate-run open source projects may register their work in the Copyright Office, but I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For practical enforcement, the only real tools available to combat infringement are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hire a lawyer and take your infringer to court&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Threaten to do item #1 (this is less costly but may be sometimes less effective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you license your work under a free/open license and cannot afford a lawyer, the Open Source Initiative or Free Software Foundation may be responsive to a request for legal assistance in some form or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you may also be worried about a few other possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Someone violates your license and tries to pretend like they're the original author of your code.&lt;/strong&gt; This is quite a bold move, and unlikely to succeed in a world where history of commits is either a matter of public record or at least privately logged by code-hosting providers. This seems to be more likely (though still extremely unlikely) for a project that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; conduct all development publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Someone takes your code to make a clone of your project.&lt;/strong&gt; This is explicitly allowed by all free and open source licenses, and is called a &quot;fork&quot;. The fork still has to follow your license requirements (like attribution or copyleft) but otherwise may be as similar or different from your original project as the maintainer of the fork likes. Trademark law may prevent a fork from reusing your project name or logo.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A developer contributes code to your project, but it turns out they lacked legal permission to make that contribution&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g., because it belonged to an employer or similar. This is a difficult case to handle, but generally projects deal with it by making contributors legally accept responsibility if any of their code turns out to be itself infringing. This is often done via a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) or a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T08:42:36.517" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T08:42:36.517" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T08:31:09.350" Score="22" ViewCount="6522" Body="&lt;p&gt;MongoDB has decided to change the licensing of MongoDB Community Server, seemingly to prevent businesses from monetizing on their product without giving anything back: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1) Does this new license have a chance of being OSI approved? I'm thinking about this part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license&#xA;  must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium&#xA;  must be open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as if this might in some cases be in conflict with this part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;13. Offering the Program as a Service.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third&#xA;  parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available&#xA;  via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this&#xA;  License. Making the functionality of the Program or modified version&#xA;  available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation,&#xA;  enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the&#xA;  Program or modified version remotely through a computer network,&#xA;  offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives&#xA;  from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a&#xA;  service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program&#xA;  or modified version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding&#xA;  Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding&#xA;  Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified&#xA;  version available as a service, including, without limitation,&#xA;  management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces,&#xA;  automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage&#xA;  software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an&#xA;  instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make&#xA;  available.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2) What will the consequences be if SSPL is not OSI approved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T06:48:50.660" Title="SSPL and the Open Source Definition" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|osi|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7522" CreationDate="2018-10-23T11:07:04.037" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://lukasatkinson.de/2019/mongodb-no-longer-seeks-osi-approval-for-sspl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Update&lt;/a&gt; 2019-03-09: MongoDB retracted the license from OSI review.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the SSPL have a chance of getting OSI-approved? Yes, of course there's a &lt;em&gt;chance&lt;/em&gt;, though currently it looks like a rather slim one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL is significantly stricter than the AGPL. The SSPL puts additional conditions on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]  offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is on the border of what a copyright-based license can accomplish because it effectively treats Services based on the Program as a derived work of the Program. This does not seem to be inherently in conflict with the OSD. As for OSI-approval, it is up to the OSI as to whether they concur with the SSPL's interpretation of Services as derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, the “management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software” for a Service based on the Program cannot be covered by a copyright license of the Program, then this would indeed look like a violation of the OSD as it would force “unrelated” software to be open-sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal feeling is that the SSPL is so close to the line of what is legally possible for a copyright-based license that it will keep lawyers busy for a long time, and using the SSPL would be unwise until there is more clarity. An OSI-approval would bring some clarity, but would only be the OSI's opinion, not reliable legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is ever clarity in this matter, this would also have effects on GPL interpretation. The GPL is often interpreted so that other software that communicates with the GPL-covered software “at arms length” would not be covered. This would e.g. allow us to wrap a GPL-covered software with a proprietary interface. But if the SSPL is an open source license, this would suggest that such proprietary wrappers would also be subject to the GPL. This hinges on what exactly a creative work of computer software is. Is it a complete software system, or is it only individual libraries or files within a software system. Current open source practice points to the latter, but a widespread acceptance of the SSPL would suggest the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily because of this huge shift of interpretation (i.e. under common copyright law interpretation, the SSPL asserts more control than it actually has) I think that it is unlikely that this license will be OSI-approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If OSI does not approve the SSPL, nothing happens. OSI approval doesn't confer any special status to the license. But without OSI approval, many people will be hesitant to use SSPL-covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License compatibility is already clear: as a copyleft license, the SSPL is incompatible with other copyleft licenses such as GPL or AGPL, but like the GPL or AGPL is one-way compatible with permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD, or Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003603.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's license-review thread on the SSPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003623.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Perens notices&lt;/a&gt; that the SSPL might infringe the FSF's copyright on the AGPL, and raises similar concerns to the scope of derived works that I have discussed above.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This derived works issue is &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003622.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;further elaborated by Richard Fontana&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003632.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bradley M. Kuhn&lt;/a&gt; opposes the SSPL as “a campaign by a well-resourced for-profit company to reframe what copyleft is.” They also notice that drafting an OSD-compliant copyleft license is a delicate matter – but no such care seems to have been taken by MongoDB here, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003675.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggest that MongoDB should withdraw the SSPL&lt;/a&gt; from the license-review process. Many posters agree with that suggestion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003696.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;VanL suggests that the SSPL may be unenforcable&lt;/a&gt; in the U.S. because it could be a misuse of copyright.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003727.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heather Meeker (who drafted the SSPL) responds&lt;/a&gt; that copyright misuse is not an issue here, in particular that the precedent cited by VanL hinged on non-compete clauses that are irrelevant here. “Sharing of source code is just not an anticompetitive practice.” They also note that in the U.S. challenges against the GPL on the basis of anti-trust laws have failed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I disagree here because while the GPL and SSPL go in the same direction, the SSPL goes &lt;em&gt;much further&lt;/em&gt;. This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003742.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;further elaborated by VanL&lt;/a&gt; in their response.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003748.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Fontana points out&lt;/a&gt; that discussions about possible copyright misuse are orthogonal to OSD compliance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003735.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brendan Hickey thinks&lt;/a&gt; that SSPL is clearly incompatible with the OSD, and that the SSPL “appears so absurdly expansive that actually achieving compliance might be impossible in practice”. They also list a couple of scenarios where the license is unclear, e.g. “Use Docker to deploy an image that serves MongoDB” – would Docker then fall under the SSPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003738.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nigel T observes&lt;/a&gt; that the SSPL brings legal uncertainty to downstream users of a service because that service might be SSPL-covered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003683.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Florian Weimer observes&lt;/a&gt; that the SSPL seems misaligned with MongoDB's goals, but this is immaterial to OSD compliance. (This confuses me as well. If I pay Amazon for a hosted MongoDB instance, I'm paying them for the value of the instance and not for the value of any secret MongoDB tools they would have to release under the SSPL, if such tools even exist. Therefore, the SSPL would be unsuitable to dissuade Amazon from profiting from SSPL-covered code.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003684.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stefano Zacchiroli notices&lt;/a&gt; a big difference between AGPL and SSPL: while the AGPL triggers source disclosure requirements on modification, the SSPL already triggers on mere use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003730.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vadim Tkachenko sees the SSPL as anti-competitive&lt;/a&gt;, because any MongoDB competitor who offers a MongoDB service would have to use a pure-SSPL infrastructure stack. For example, you would not be able to use SSPL-covered software together with AGPL-covered tools. This would be an OSD 6 and OSD 9 violation.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003750.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Perens profusely apologizes&lt;/a&gt; for phrasing OSD 9 “Must Not Restrict Other Software” in a way that only talks about other programs that are “distributed” along with the licensed software. The SSPL does not violate the letter of the OSD because it restricts tools that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distributed together, but it clearly violates the OSD's intent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since to date no poster who is unaffiliated with MongoDB has stated that the license is perfectly OSD-compliant, but many posters have criticized either the provisions of the license or the manner in which MongoDB presented the license, OSI-approval of SSPLv1 seems quite unlikely (but it's only been a week so far.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T16:50:36.463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T16:50:36.463" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7526" CreationDate="2018-10-23T16:30:13.310" Score="4" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm adapting content released under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY4.0&lt;/a&gt; programatically (think regex and reformatting). I'm then releasing my adapted content, giving credit to the author of the content that was the origin of the now adapted content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I then allowed to give a more permissive license to &quot;my own&quot; adapted content (that does not including the original data that was under CC-BY4.0)? I was thinking WTFPL or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T17:10:46.963" Title="More permissive license after adapting CC-BY4.0?" Tags="|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7484" CreationDate="2018-10-23T17:01:27.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: You don't detect one.  You hypothesize one based on circumstantial evidence, and then start negotiation and/or legal action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the license -- this issue applies equally to all OSS licenses except the most liberal -- it can be hard, and in some circumstances, impossible to figure out who is infringing your license in a server-side service.  Instead, you gather circumstantial evidence until you have a solid case, and then contact an attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first hard part is knowing who to suspect of violations in the first place.  The primary reasons for you to investigate a site would be (a) downloads and/or forks by people from that company, and (b) staff and/or customers saying things in social media to indicate that they may be running a modified version of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have a suspect, then the next step is to gather technical evidence.  Depending on the nature of your software and the potential violator's service, this could consist of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remarks by employees, ex-employees, contractors and/or customers who have seen the code;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any exposed code, such as Javascript or Protobufs;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;API analysis of any public APIs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, with a fully public API, you could map all of the API calls and demonstrate that they are identical to the API calls of your software with a few extensions and/or small modifications.  Be wary doing this in some jurisdictions, though, lest you run afoul of anti-hacking laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have what you feel is sufficient evidence, the next step is to engage an attorney to query the potential violator.  While most such violations are innocent (i.e. some developer injected your code without telling their boss), and can be settled with a code release, removal, and/or payment, some end in court and you want to be on solid legal footing from your first interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T17:01:27.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7524" CreationDate="2018-10-23T17:10:46.963" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adapted works of CC-BY licensed works are not restricted to the same license. You may use any license for the adapted work, as long as proper attribution is preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are using mechanical transformations to modify the original work. As these transformations lack any element of creativity, you have no copyright for “your” modifications and therefore no right to issue a copyright license of your own for this adapted content. (However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;threshold of originality&lt;/a&gt; is jurisdiction-dependent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, section 2(a)(4) allows technical modifications of the work for format shifting, and states that “For purposes of this Public License, simply making modifications authorized by this Section 2(a)(4) never produces Adapted Material.” Purely presentational changes definitively fall under this section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while you may not be able to issue your own license for the transformed works, you may license a &lt;em&gt;service&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; to perform this transformation (but not the transformed works themselves), and you may hold &lt;em&gt;database rights&lt;/em&gt; to a collection of these works (but not to the individual works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T17:10:46.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6113" CreationDate="2018-10-23T17:59:28.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conventionally, most copyright holders would consider that adequate if you include a copy of the license in the users' guide (and not just a link).  The intent of that clause is to make sure that downstream users are aware of their rights to the licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fulfill the letter of the requirement, you should also bundle the license in the program files, even though the user has no way to access the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="11583" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T20:01:30.700" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:01:30.700" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7482" CreationDate="2018-10-24T06:55:06.947" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any hard metrics that can be used to &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; count non-code contributions (and I'm not sure there &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be one) but I do know about projects that (1) survey contribution types in volunteer collaborative communities centered around software development, with the specific goal of encouraging the recognition of non-code contributions, and (2) provide tools to help in the collection of information related to such contributions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;all-contributors&lt;/a&gt; is the main one that I'm aware of, and lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kentcdodds/all-contributors#emoji-key&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a couple dozen&lt;/a&gt; contributor types.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sagesharp/foss-heartbeat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;foss-heartbeat&lt;/a&gt; has similar goals,&#xA;and identifies seven major contribution types&#xA;(Issue reporter; Issue responder; Code contributor; Documentation contributor;&#xA;Reviewer; Maintainer; Connector),&#xA;but it seems to be unmaintained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maintainer Mountaineer’s&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mntnr/name-your-contributors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;name-your-contributors&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;covers issue reporters, PR submitters, PR reviewers, and issue/PR commenters. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also point out similar efforts in communities that whose primary collective activity is not software development:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Wikimedia community has produced a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Contribution_Taxonomy_Project&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contribution Taxonomy Project&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and a survey of&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Volunteer_Roles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Volunteer Roles&lt;/a&gt;;&#xA;more closely related to software development is MediaWiki's&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to contribute&lt;/a&gt; page,&#xA;which lists several ways people can get involved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges&quot;&gt;Badges&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;are another well-known example of a community platform feature&#xA;aiming to explicitly recognize&#xA;the various ways people can contribute to a shared project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully the common patterns manifested in these dispersed initiatives can over time coalesce into a standard set of guidelines for open collaborative projects, or at least become sufficiently popular to have the same effect (who knows, maybe GitHub will add something along these lines to their &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/about-community-profiles-for-public-repositories/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;community profile&lt;/a&gt; dashboard, as they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.github.com/2017-06-14-new-community-tools/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recently adopted&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;code&gt;contributing.md&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;code_of_conduct.md&lt;/code&gt; &quot;standards&quot; that emerged organically through popular use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But until then, the tools listed above can certainly inform any community's efforts to be more inclusive in their recognition of contributions to their shared projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2018-10-24T16:05:16.433" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T16:05:16.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7530" CreationDate="2018-10-24T16:47:30.343" Score="7" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I am re-asking this question here, as I was informed that it was off-topic on Stack Overflow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest in this question stems from concern over the lack of a license in a testing framework I came across (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/npryce/make-it-easy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make-it-easy&lt;/a&gt;). My worry was that the lack of a license in this case would leave my (proprietary) distributed production code vulnerable to legal hassle (though I recognize this is unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this concern led to the following question: do the licenses on open-source testing libraries (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://junit.org/junit4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JUnit&lt;/a&gt;) even apply to the production code that is tested using them? After all, that code will not be distributed with any dependencies on the testing libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Googling and searching Stack Exchange I have not found a definitive answer to this. It seems as if everyone is working under the assumption that the licenses do indeed cover that production code, but I would like a definitive answer and an explanation of that answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13299" LastEditorUserId="13299" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T13:10:28.243" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T13:10:28.243" Title="Do Licenses for Test Libraries Apply to Production Code?" Tags="|commercial|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7529" CreationDate="2018-10-24T17:58:05.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right to be worried, but for the wrong reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using testing code that has no license, merely using it can be in violation of the author's copyright (since you have to download it and make several copies).  While unlikely, you could be sued for this at any point down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never use code from repos that doesn't include a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only one current license, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-and-the-open-source-definition&quot;&gt;the SSPL&lt;/a&gt;, purports to extend to code tested using SSPL code.  Note that the SSPL has not been certified by the OSI (or any other organization) as an open source license, and this is one of the reasons why some argue it shouldn't be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T17:58:05.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7529" CreationDate="2018-10-25T11:19:56.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer you question, then answer this one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the licenses on proprietary testing libraries (e.g. …) even apply to the production code that is tested using them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to the above is yes (but probably not), however such a clause in a licence may be in violation of the non-discrimination clause of the Free Software definition. So the licence would not be a Free Software licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T11:19:56.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7490" CreationDate="2018-10-25T11:50:30.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;see also @madHatter's answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; supply the source, in a manner similar to the binary, so artificially increasing your cost, would be a violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to stop someone taking your source code, studying it, using it, modifying it, distributing it, and/or charging for distribution. However they must continue to comply with the GPL. Therefore you can ask them for a copy of their source code. They must continue to pass-on all of the freedoms that the GPL insists on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T11:50:30.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7534" CreationDate="2018-10-25T12:00:27.597" Score="18" ViewCount="7175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I distribute my own code with a GPL license, even though the code use just external MIT or Apache code. In particular, no preexisting GPL code is in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I later relicense it under MIT or Apache?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13474" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T00:45:11.207" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T15:55:11.533" Title="Can I relicense my own GPL code into Apache/MIT?" Tags="|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-10-26T10:43:55.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7533" CreationDate="2018-10-25T13:52:32.593" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the copyright holder you are in no way bound by any open source license you choose to distribute your own work under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you cannot retroactively change the license terms of a particular distribution of your software for those who have already obtained it, you can permit use and re-distribution under the terms of a more permissive license of any distribution of your software however and whenever you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T15:55:11.533" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T15:55:11.533" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7533" CreationDate="2018-10-25T15:45:57.223" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you hold the copyright to some code (usually, because you are the author), you may license that code however you please, and you may issue different licenses at any time. The matter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;revoking previously-issued licenses&lt;/a&gt; is much trickier and may not be possible. If you have previously issued permission to modify/distribute your code under some version of the GNU GPL, nothing stops you from also issuing permission to modify/distribute the code under a different license like the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you have accepted contributions from any other person, those contributions may be under your original license, licensed to you by that other contributor. You may not re-license another person's code, unless they allow you do so, either by your asking nicely or via a previous agreement like a Contributor License Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, your code is usually as permissively available as your most permissive license grant. If you had the reverse situation -- your code was under Apache and you want to re-license it under the GPL -- you could issue a GPL grant, but you could not take away the more permissive license grant you already made to any recipients who already downloaded it. People might be more likely to get the permissively-licensed version from someone else than use your more restrictively-licensed version. However, you could issue &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; code under the GPL only, making users choose between the old permissively-licensed code and the newer version with copyleft-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-10-25T18:19:44.230" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T18:19:44.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7539" CreationDate="2018-10-24T18:52:20.027" Score="1" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a commercial website that uses MIT/BSD-3 libraries and plugins, do I have to specifically mention the licences of each plugin/library? If so where do I have to add the same? Are the comments that are present in the library js/css which credits the author enough? E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*! &#xA; * Bootstrap v4.1.3 (https://getbootstrap.com/) &#xA; * Copyright 2011-2018 The Bootstrap Authors &#xA; * Copyright 2011-2018 Twitter, Inc. &#xA; * Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE) &#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18581" OwnerDisplayName="Teknoville" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T10:56:34.273" Title="Does Licensing have to be mentioned for MIT/BSD-3 Plugins/Libraries for my Commercial Website?" Tags="|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7542" CreationDate="2018-10-26T10:56:23.027" Score="-1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this repo on my GitHub &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bortek/EZ-WifiBroadcast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bortek/EZ-WifiBroadcast&lt;/a&gt; which is based on Raspbian OS image plus has additional code developed initially by a person which we call here Creator. The code was then taken as a base and developed a lot further by another person, let's call it Continuer. The code contains 3rd party code taken from some other drivers.  Now Continuer has stopped the development and kinda left the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some parts of the code include headers stating copyright (or developed) by Creator and Continuer and that the code is distributed under GPL2 license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project has been restarted and is now actively being developed/reworked by several other Contributors as well as via Pull Requests from others who forked the code previously and somehow enhanced it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am trying to get some structure here and feel like we need to establish the license terms for the code being developed. But I do not know how to proceed. I was first thinking about stamping the code with Apache or MIT license but that would be from stamping time and forward. What will happen to the previous code and what right do we (as a project) have to do with the code. We are not planning any commercial activity out of this, this is done purely on our free time and will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13489" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T19:53:01.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:53:01.933" Title="Licensing current and future change" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7537" CreationDate="2018-10-26T10:56:34.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included &lt;em&gt;in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions&lt;/em&gt; of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the comments inside the library itself should be enough; just make sure they don't get stripped away by a minifier or equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for BSD-3, assuming you're talking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause_license_(%22BSD_License_2.0%22,_%22Revised_BSD_License%22,_%22New_BSD_License%22,_or_%22Modified_BSD_License%22)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, you should include the full text - including the names of the authors, etc - in some page of the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6567" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T10:56:34.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7541" CreationDate="2018-10-22T18:44:35.920" Score="11" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain an open-source project.&#xA;Somebody made a pull-request two days ago, and I accepted it.&#xA;Now I realized, that a large portion of the pull-request is just a copy-pasted from another project (not owned by us). For obvious reasons I want to get rid of the commit. The two options I see are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revert the commit with another commit. Problem: the code is still in the history.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewrite the history. Dangerous, as other people might already have branches containing this commit. In fact I know one person beside me who already has (but is he the only one?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: my case is a little bit special, and I think I just choose the first option. The original author doesn't have a very clear licence, and even allows to use parts of the content as long as we don't claim ownership. However I still find it very unethical to just copy every single word (as it is 95% text and 5% code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's assume we have a more difficult case, and the licence of the source project explicitely doesn't allow copying/modifying their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the legal consequences? I know that we already messed up big, and I guess that the other project can still claim that we used parts of their code in either option.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is option 1 even a good way to proceed? This might be a cause other problems, as anybody can look up the code in the history, and think they can use it as long as it complies with our licence.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As option 2 is also quite bad, are there other options?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13496" OwnerDisplayName="Jakube" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T16:51:25.617" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T16:51:25.617" Title="Accidently commited plagiarism, what now?" Tags="|copyright|law|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7540" CreationDate="2018-10-22T19:32:27.147" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should rewrite the commits/history ommiting the legally dubious one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure its going to muck up other peoples forks/branches but not irretreivably and its not the sort of thing you want to bite you in the arse after your project has become the new facebook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do it as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ewan" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T19:32:27.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7538" CreationDate="2018-10-26T13:20:55.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you know, GPLv2 requires that if a work under the licence is distributed, modified or not, the whole work must be distributed under GPLv2 (GNU GPLv2 s2b).  Only the rights-holder, or if there are multiple contributors, all of them acting in concert, may relicense the work.  Although it sounds as if you have made some contributions to this project, if you release the modified work you are required to do so under GPLv2.  If you don't like that, you need to start from a different work, under a different licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not simply relicense the entire work under MIT or Apache, because you are not the sole rights-holder.  If you do so, you're committing a copyright violation against the existing rights-holders, and they would have standing to sue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T13:20:55.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7544" CreationDate="2018-10-26T14:48:53.880" Score="5" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is clear what a &quot;Contributor&quot; to an Apache 2.0 licensed software has to do when its work abide to the license I am struggling with what an user of an Apache 2.0 library has to do in the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has a patent on something that the Apache 2.0 licensed library is infringing. By preparing and distributing a work that includes the library, does the user lose exclusive rights to this patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the usage of a Apache 2.0 library in another work make the user's work a &quot;Derivative&quot; one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the user forbid the usage of the library due to patent it holds are infringed? Is this a correct interpretation of the non-assertion clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13492" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T15:20:32.310" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T18:40:00.377" Title="Interpretation of the Patent clause of Apache 2.0" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7543" CreationDate="2018-10-26T18:40:00.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The patent clause of the Apache 2.0 license is written in such a way that you can't sue someone for infringing your patent with the library and at the same time enjoy protection against patent litigation related to other patents implemented in the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that way, yes you might be losing some exclusive rights by using a library that is infringing on your patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-10-26T18:40:00.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7547" CreationDate="2018-10-28T06:39:04.307" Score="0" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm just starting an open source project. This question is not related to an existing project, but I want to avoid some mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that AGPL 3.0 could fit to my concept (copyleft, SaaSS safety, ...), but I'm a little bit curious about handling the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible as project owner to sell an alternative license to customers (if needed) which does not respect the copyleft? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, do I need to ask all contributors to do that, or do I need to ask them before they commit? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other things I need to care about, or would it just be okay, taken to its extreme, to write something like &quot;Use the community version which is licensed under AGPL or contact me if you need an alternative (paid) license to use this library in a closed source application&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13503" LastEditorUserId="235" LastEditDate="2018-10-28T18:49:54.707" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T18:49:54.707" Title="Provide customers an AGPL alternative" Tags="|agpl-3.0|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7546" CreationDate="2018-10-28T07:50:02.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible as project owner to sell an alternative license to customers (if needed) which does not respect the copyleft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, provided you are the rights-holder of the entire codebase, or you have the clear agreement of all other rights-holders (see next section).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If yes do I need to ask all contributors to do that or do I need to ask them before they commit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either will do.  You can ask at commit-time, which is usually done via a Contributor Licensing Agreement and refusal of contributions from people who won't agree; or you can ask at re-licensing time, but you will have to get explicit buy-in from &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; contributors at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any other Thing I need to care about or would it just be ok, taken to its extreme, to write something like &quot;Use the community version which is licensed unser AGPL or contact me if you need an alternative (payed) license to use this library in a closed source application&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can write that if you want, but I wouldn't rely on it come the time you cut your first commercial licence.  An explicit CLA, or explicit project-wide agreement to relicense, will be much safer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, IANAL/IANYL, so get proper legal advice before betting a business model on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T07:50:02.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-28T20:21:45.833" Score="-2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today IBM announces, on IBM News Room, that it'll acquire Red Hat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will be the impact on Open Source products part like: CentOS, Ansible etc? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does IBM gain the power to limit the “Scientific Linux” and “Oracle Linux” to use the RHEL source code? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Saw the open source license versions impact on bash on Apple products (uses outdated bash 3.2 as the core). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13506" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-09T20:01:57.033" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T20:01:57.033" Title="What does happen with Open Source products after the acquisition?" Tags="|licensing|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7548" CreationDate="2018-10-28T20:50:09.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such an acquisition can't break the existing licenses of existing open-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IBM could, however, theoretically, decide that it will reduce, or even stop any investment in packaging and maintaining these upstream projects. But speculating on such things is premature at best, and unfounded at worst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T20:50:09.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7551" CreationDate="2018-10-29T00:27:04.627" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a document in LaTeX that contains large sections of Python code and output. Typically, I like to license my writing under CC BY-SA 4.0 and my code under GPLv3. I have already placed a CC BY-SA 4.0 notice at the end of my (as of yet unpublished) document, but this notice was generated using a LaTeX package and therefore does not appear verbatim in the LaTeX source. The source file for the document will be hosted on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good idea to GPL my Python code while using CC BY-SA for the rest of the content? Or would it be better (i.e. less of a headache for others) to use CC BY-SA for the entire work? Also, how do I address licensing both in the output PDF and the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13509" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T06:32:47.857" Title="How could I copyleft a document that contains a substantial amount of both code and prose?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7550" CreationDate="2018-10-29T06:32:47.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stick with CC-BY-SA 4 and get the best of both worlds.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; s3b requires that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to the conditions in Section 3(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC's &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of compatible licences&lt;/a&gt; says that one such licence is GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as long as some potential user wishes to treat your work as a whole (eg to produce a more up-to-date edition, correct errata, or translate it)  they can continue with the simplicity of a single, free licence on the source and PDF.  If someone wants to take only the Python code from your work and use it as code rather than as part of a literary work, and if this would be easier for them under GPL, then they can simply opt to take the code under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T06:32:47.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T09:17:39.273" Score="0" ViewCount="1532" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cite from &lt;a href=&quot;https://source.android.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://source.android.com/license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The preferred license for AOSP is the Apache Software License, Version 2.0 (&quot;Apache 2.0&quot;), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project strives to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions that will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Apache Software License v2 and GPLv2 license are used for Android platform. However, after installing arm NDK build tool-chain (API version 18) on Ubuntu I found below files in the root directory :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MODULE_LICENSE_BSD_LIKE (empty file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MODULE_LICENSE_MIT (empty file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MODULE_LICENSE_GPL (empty file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NOTICE (mentioning both  Apache Software License v2 and GPLv2 license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the licenses used in NDK?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is different license used for different NDK component?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13196" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T10:09:49.883" Title="License for Android NDK toolchain" Tags="|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7552" CreationDate="2018-10-29T09:46:23.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several open source components with various licenses used by it, but the Android NDK as a whole is not open source. To download and use the NDK you'll have to agree to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/studio/terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android Software Development Kit License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To actually answer your question, I believe you should find information about which licenses apply for open source used by the NDK here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/ndk/+/master/NOTICE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/ndk/+/master/NOTICE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing exactly what goes where is a lot harder to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6082" LastEditorUserId="6082" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T10:09:49.883" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T10:09:49.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7555" CreationDate="2018-10-29T15:22:18.730" Score="5" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a set of python-based tools for network testing, and I am currently building a GUI around it and I am going to attempt to sell it. My issue is one part of my code relies on wireshark, or more specifically tshark. The code communicates with tshark exactly how wireshark suggests you use it in their FAQ, through subprocess pipes. So as I attempt to build an installer, for the sake of convenience to the user, can I have the installer check for the tshark path then if it does not exist install it for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR&#xA;If my proprietary installer installs wireshark, will I be in legal trouble. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13515" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T16:51:58.280" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T16:51:58.280" Title="Is it legal to install GNU GPL v2 software alongside my proprietary software" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7554" CreationDate="2018-10-29T16:33:02.007" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can distribute the GPLv2-covered software alongside your proprietary software. The GPL only applies to the covered software, not to the entirety of the software that you distribute – iff the two are separable. Your proprietary software will then not be a derived work in the sense of copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL-covered part, you must comply with the GPL. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must provide the source code or a written offer for the source code of the GPL-covered software. Such an offer must be open to anyone, not just for your customers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your installer should announce that it contains or installs GPL-covered parts, and should give the user a summary of their rights and how to view the license. However, it is not necessary that the GPL is accepted before installation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must not add any restrictions to the GPL-covered parts. E.g. you must not prevent someone from copying these parts. You must not require acceptance of any EULA prior to offering access to the GPL-covered parts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the spirit of the GPL, you should not prevent modifications to the Wireshark software that you installed, e.g. by requiring an exact version or even by checksumming the installation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to get GPLv2 compliance right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, your right to distribute Wireshark is terminated if you violate the license for any reason, and fixing the violations will not necessarily reinstate the license. If your business depends on Wireshark, consider checking your compliance effort with an IP lawyer. On the other hand, many GPLv2 licensors have no interest in a strict enforcement of this clause and will not consider your license terminated if you show a good faith effort to comply and fix any violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: Kuhn, Williamson, Sandler (2008): &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Practical Guide to GPL Compliance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Software Freedom Law Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T16:33:02.007" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7558" CreationDate="2018-10-30T10:36:57.497" Score="5" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say a Git repository initially has either no license, or an extremely restrictive one, and then a more permissive license (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;) is added in a later commit. Does this new license also apply to the history? If not, does this mean that anyone who clones, forks or distributes the repository is also bound by (and probably violates) copyright or license terms of the versions buried in the history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the code with the &quot;bad&quot; license is in a different branch? What if that branch has been deleted, but not yet garbage collected, and is therefore still accessible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13520" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T18:35:51.890" Title="Licensing of Git(Hub) history" Tags="|licensing|history|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7557" CreationDate="2018-10-30T18:35:51.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each commit in git history is a legally distinct entity, and is licensed according to the LICENSE file that existed at that point in history. As an author, you have the right to change the license of your project at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if commit &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; switches the project's license from no-license to MIT, then any user has the right to use the project from point &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; forward under the MIT license; however, any commit older than &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; still remains unlicensed and cannot be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This remains true even if you decide later on to close the project again, say in commit &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt;. Then the code for commits &lt;code&gt;X .. Y-1&lt;/code&gt; will remain MIT-licensed, but the code from commit &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt; forward or before &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, having a &quot;bad&quot; license in the past is not really problematic -- as long as people who clone the project know not to use those past commits in any way. Something like looking into blame history qualifies as fair use; on the other hand, copying blocks of code from past commits might be problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid these issues altogether and apply the new license retroactively, you can: (a) rewrite git history, and place your license-changing commit at the beginning of time; or (b) provide a written note somewhere in README that you wish the new license to apply retroactively to past commits. Note that in all cases you cannot revoke any past license, you can only grant an additional one (which is probably what you want anyway), making your code dual-licensed in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T18:35:51.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7561" CreationDate="2018-10-31T14:36:42.003" Score="11" ViewCount="4754" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is well known and thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere, I have been unable to find much information on precisely how the additional patent stipulation in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-Clear.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause-Clear&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; might change the license terms (if at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD-3 Clear is essentially the same as the BSD-3, except for the line (following the 3rd clause):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PARTY'S PATENT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED BY THIS LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause&lt;/code&gt; is my default license for my projects, but ever since I discovered the &amp;quot;Clear&amp;quot; version, I've been using that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding was that it added additional protections to &lt;code&gt;BSD-3&lt;/code&gt; licence against potential malicious patent bullying/trolls. As in, if you use or modify code licensed under the &lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause-Clear&lt;/code&gt;, you would not be able to patent that modified code (and by extension, enforce that patent against other derivations or contributors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6302/what-does-express-grant-of-patent-rights-from-contributors-to-users-mean&quot;&gt;great threads&lt;/a&gt; here explaining what exactly is meant by &amp;quot;express grant of patent rights&amp;quot; clauses in licenses (notably Apache 2.0), but I still have trouble understanding what patent rights mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone really dumb it down for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does that clause mean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does it differ from the express grant of patent rights in licenses like Apache 2.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it fundamentally change anything about the original BSD-3-Clause?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13525" LastEditorUserId="13525" LastEditDate="2022-11-23T08:20:43.303" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T08:20:43.303" Title="Patent rights: BSD-3-Clause-Clear vs BSD-3-Clause" Tags="|apache-2.0|bsd|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-31T15:51:20.283" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a python project licensed under BSD-License.&#xA;On its bottom I use a &lt;strong&gt;source code&lt;/strong&gt; written in C++ which is licensed as &lt;code&gt;LGPL&lt;/code&gt; and I have an &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; dependency on a &lt;strong&gt;python package&lt;/strong&gt; licensed under &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been told that I should  add licensing information of both of these packages in my original license file (which contains only the BSD-3-Clause License) but I cannot figure out (from searching the internet) what and how I should add it (in order to be formal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13526" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T15:51:20.283" Title="Redistributing LGPL source code or GPL packages on a BSD Licensed package" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|bsd|redistribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7559" CreationDate="2018-10-31T18:19:03.300" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents are intellectual property rights that exist to protect an invention. They are distinct from copyrights, which protect the expression of an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inventions protected by patents can have a software component (or in some cases be completely covered by software). &#xA;The additional text in the BSD-3-Clause-Clear license makes it explicit that if the software is also covered by a patent, then &lt;strong&gt;everybody must request a separate patent license from the patent holder&lt;/strong&gt; to be able to use the software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no different from the regular BSD-3-Clause license, although there it is possible to use a defense when you are sued for patent infringement that there could have been an implied patent license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is the exact opposite of the patent clause in the Apache 2.0 license. The Apache 2.0 license grants you a patent license in addition to the copyright license, while the BSD-3-Clause-Clear license makes it explicit that there is no such combined license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T18:19:03.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7563" CreationDate="2018-11-01T05:12:29.437" Score="5" ViewCount="857" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plan is to use mosaico - open source email editor under license GPL-3.0 - in one of our commercial products. If we hosted mosaico as a separate microservice (with gpl license) and our non gpl product communicates with it through APIs, and authentication done through cookies, would that violate the license? The hosted mosaico service and the commercial products use a shared database. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not the right way, can someone please tell how can we integrate this editor with our non-GPL product? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13531" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T10:04:25.477" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T11:21:48.130" Title="Can GPL-3.0 licensed product be integrated with a commercial product , if it is hosted as a separate microservice?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7562" CreationDate="2018-11-01T07:14:55.080" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, the GPL's obligations (to provide source, to license it under the GPL, etc.) cut in when you distribute (or convey, in the language of GPLv3) copies of GPL software, whether modified or not.  Making, modifying,  and running copies for internal use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not count as distribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: as long as you are &lt;em&gt;hosting&lt;/em&gt; Mosaico rather than &lt;em&gt;distributing copies&lt;/em&gt; of it, GPL obligations will not cut in.  That was the whole reason for the development of the Affero GPL (if mosaico was AGPL-licensed, this argument would not apply).  You can run mosaico on your servers, you can modify mosaico to better run as part of your SaaS offering, and it can talk to your proprietary software any way you want, without triggering any GPL obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that all this development and deployment must be &lt;strong&gt;in-house&lt;/strong&gt;, that is development must be by your company's employees and officers, and deployment must be to equipment that your company owns or rents.  If you start using external contractors, and giving them copies of your source to work with, that may well count as distribution.  If you deploy to some other organisation's servers, that likely counts as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T11:21:48.130" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T11:21:48.130" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7566" CreationDate="2018-11-02T01:23:01.150" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use other licenses(e.g. MIT)  for a library that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;has the same API as a GPL library, but&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not import the GPL nor a snippet of code from it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I am actually doing&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use Blender python API(mainly bpy) as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using bpy to develop my addons. but since this is an API, it will only work in a launched blender, making it difficult to use the IDEs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am planning to make a fake-bpy module written in blender. &#xA;For example, &lt;code&gt;bpy.ops.objects.add_primitive_cube&lt;/code&gt; will add a cube in the real bpy while this will simply &lt;code&gt;print(&quot;cube added&quot;)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with the actual code in blender, just happens to have the same modules, functions and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a GPL program  is a GPL too. But what about my fake-bpy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13538" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T02:45:20.287" Title="License for a mimic of a GPL library" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7565" CreationDate="2018-11-02T02:45:20.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that technically, unless you use a &quot;clean room&quot; recreation of the API calls, your project should fall under the GPL terms. If you use blender or its source in any way to re-create the function definitions for your code, then you are copying GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that an addon or script that uses the blender API falls under the GPL terms, as noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blender.org/support/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blenders FAQ&lt;/a&gt; :-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you share or publish Python scripts – if they use the Blender API calls – have to be made available compliant to the GNU GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so as any script that uses the API falls under GPL, there is no real benefit to not using the GPL for the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, what you are planning &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nutti/fake-bpy-module&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been done&lt;/a&gt;, and uses an MIT license in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also of note is that you don't have to make a fake module. While it is not officially supported, blenders build system includes a setting to build &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.blender.org/index.php/User:Ideasman42/BlenderAsPyModule&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blender as a python module&lt;/a&gt;, this contains no GUI functionality but otherwise works the same as running blender in the background. This module can be imported into IDEs and external python instances for code completion and testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T02:45:20.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7548" CreationDate="2018-11-03T19:20:00.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To qualify as a Free Software / Open Source licence, the licence must be irrevocable. However if they own a copyright, they can licence future versions of the software under a different licence. However third parties can also make changes to the software, under the original Free Software license, or any new Free Software License. Therefore if IBM decides to release future versions under a proprietary licence, then others will probably fork the project (if it is any good). Because this fork is still free, then it will probably be the dominant fork and the proprietary one will die. (IBM knows this, so probably wont do anything stupid, but who can tell what the future will be. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T19:20:00.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-05T09:04:14.960" Score="-1" ViewCount="2693" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a commercial project I'm working on I am using an NPM package called 'react-image-crop'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-image-crop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-image-crop&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;react-image-crop holds the ISC licence. Since I want to edit the functionality of this library and it's a small library I would like to literally copy&amp;amp;paste it directly into my project, mix it with the rest of my commercial source code and edit it (without using node_modules and npm install, also without forking to my GitHub etc). Would I be allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13559" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T10:50:19.123" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T10:50:19.123" Title="Can I copy ISC licence NPM package code into a commercial project?" Tags="|licensing|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7570" CreationDate="2018-11-05T09:18:09.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/isc-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ISC licence&lt;/a&gt; allows that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is very much like other non-copyleft free licences.  We have a number of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7278/clarification-of-bsds-second-clause-binary-must-reproduce-copyright-notice&quot;&gt;other questions&lt;/a&gt; here about how you should fulfil licences that require copyright and/or permissions notices, but provided you fulfil that requirement, you can use the software in a proprietary project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note in passing that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF mentions&lt;/a&gt; some erstwhile issue with the &quot;&lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt;&quot; license text, but also notes that they're now satisfied that it's not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T09:18:09.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7573" CreationDate="2018-11-05T20:54:45.013" Score="1" ViewCount="3839" Body="&lt;p&gt;To clarify once for all the usage of GPL v2 applications without modifying the binary of GPL licensed program and only using it (making queries). My case is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to install MySQL Community edition via msi installer downloaded from the official MySQL website. After installing it I want to create a db and use it. &#xA;Should I open source code of my quires and upload them for example in GitHub with the relevant copyleft notice or I can use the installed MySQL server without any concern about opening my source code for the quires?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was on a db course where I've installed the aforementioned Server and use it until the end of my course without putting my queries in public repository with copyleft note. Did I violate the GPL v2  in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to make the same in my enterprise company where I want to use the MySQL server in the same way. So can I use it without opening my source code and putting copyleft note to my quires?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that I can do it without opening the source code of my quires according to the following links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6132/can-i-use-a-gpl-component-in-my-site-without-having-to-disclose-the-sources-of-m&quot;&gt;Can I use a GPL component in my site without having to disclose the sources of my site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With highlighting the following cite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;If you are calling a separate executable where that executable is subject to the GPL, you are very likely not creating a derived work.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/02/17/when-are-you-required-to-have-a-commercial-mysql-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Are You Required to Have a Commercial MySQL License?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stated as I understood that I can use MySQL Server in the use case I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL version 2 link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this document I can't see some statement that prohibits the way that I want the MySQL server. No mater that it's used in enterprise company or in a home computer (for the purposes of my usage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13565" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T09:56:38.417" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T01:45:23.433" Title="Can I use GPL V2 MYSQL Community edition in a commercial company without making my code open source?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7572" CreationDate="2018-11-06T07:01:12.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL (and all open source software licenses) only covers copying, distribution, and modification of the software. In general, if you have a legally obtained copy of some piece of software installed on your computer, you as the operator of the computer have the right to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; that software in any way. If you think about it for a moment, this is similar to any other non-software product that you may obtain (either for a price or gratis). For example, if you have in your possession a legally obtained kitchen knife (obtained for a price or gratis), then you also have a right to use that knife &lt;em&gt;in absolutely any way&lt;/em&gt;. Indeed, you may even use it to perform an unthinkable action, such as to injure a person or animal. Depending on the details of such an action (was it intentional or incidental, etc.), by such a usage of your knife you have possibly broken one or more laws. But there is no need or benefit for a license on the knife to say &quot;by purchasing or using the Deluxe Kitchen Knife (hereafter 'Knife') you agree not to injure any person or animal using the Knife.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL even says so explicitly at the beginning. Of course, the GPL has no need to actually say this in order to give you this right, but the drafters of the GPL decided to say it anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL version 2&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;When do I need a license?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you need a license in order to copy, modify, or distribute a piece of software. The reason for this is that these activities are normally protected by copyright law, so that's the reason you need a license (permission) to do them. If you aren't copying, modifying, or distributing the software, you have no need for a license of any kind. However, if you don't have a license, or if you were given a license but decided not to accept it (e.g. by not following its terms), but then you decide to go on to copy, modify, or distribute the software anyway, then you have possibly (depending on the details, of course) violated copyright law. That's essentially the only reason that you need the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not going to copy, modify, or distribute software (or any other copyrighted work), you have absolutely no need for a license. This is the same as if you go to a library, take a book off the shelf, and sit down to read it. Do you need a license to read that book? What if the author wrote on the first page &quot;This is a book about vegetarianism. By reading this book, the reader (hereafter 'You') hereby agree that You will renounce the practice of eating meat and fish and that You will eat only non-animal products hereafter.&quot; Do you need to accept this 'license' in order to read the book? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however that in practice, installing a piece of software very often involves some form of copying, such as downloading from the Internet, copying from some external media like a DVD, and so on. So it often seems like in practice you will need a license to use it, because in order to use it, you need to install it, and in order to install it, you need to perform some sort of copying. However, it is the copying that is actually permitted by the license, not the act of running the program or using it in some particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've installed the aforementioned Server and [used it] without putting my queries in public repository with copyleft note. Did I violate the GPL v2 in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. This is the normal use of the software, and you are not copying, modifying, or redistributing the software by writing queries into it. The same argument holds true no matter in what situation you use it. You could use at home, at school, as part of a non-profit organisation, as part of a for-profit organisation, as part of a military organisation, as part of a terrorist organisation, and so on. The actual actions that you perform in such an organisation is what distinguishes legal and proper behaviour from illegal or improper behaviour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T12:03:53.277" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T12:03:53.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7430" CreationDate="2018-11-07T23:29:27.613" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL but according to the Creative Commons Foundation although the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license allows you to license your new &lt;strong&gt;contributions&lt;/strong&gt; under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license it doesn't allow you to &amp;quot;upgrade&amp;quot; the original CC-BY-SA 3.0 license of the original work.  So technically the effective overall license of your translated work will be a CC-BY-SA 3.0 + CC-BY-SA 4.0 &amp;quot;license stack&amp;quot; (i.e. downstream users must technically comply with the terms of both CC-BY-SA licenses and not simply just the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license).  Such a license &amp;quot;upgrade&amp;quot; mechanism was newly introduced with the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license but doesn't retroactively apply to the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant quotes from Creative Commons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 4.0, CC added a provision in the ShareAlike licenses that enables downstream licensees to refer only to the adapter’s license when using adapted material that contains the copyrightable contributions of multiple authors. This feature is designed to minimize complexity for reusers where they are using a later version of the ShareAlike license or a compatible license as their adapter's license. In 4.0, users need only refer to a single set of conditions contained in the last license applied to reuse adapted material, rather than parsing the conditions of the original and other adapter's licenses (to the extent the licenses differ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, the licenses stack (the later license does not supplant all previously-applied licenses) when adapted material is created. In particular, the license originally applied to the material being remixed continues to apply once remixed, however permission is given in 4.0 for licensees to meet the conditions of the 4.0 license with reference to those in the adapter's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to the 4.0 versioning process, CC had not always been clear that the ShareAlike licenses stacked just as they stack for the BY and BY-NC licenses, and reasonable minds do differ on this point. CC believes, however, that this is the best reading of its all of its licenses that permit adaptations prior to 4.0 and, now, has made that explicit in version 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Compatibility_mechanism_in_BY-SA_licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11023" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T23:29:27.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7583" CreationDate="2018-11-08T11:14:43.507" Score="8" ViewCount="5163" Body="&lt;p&gt;We want to publish a project that does use some components under &lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause&lt;/code&gt; license according to below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And currently we plan to place the below &lt;code&gt;BSD-License&lt;/code&gt; in the file &lt;code&gt;C:/program files/our-app/redist/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.txt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD-3-Clause.txt&lt;/code&gt; file:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;########################################################################&#xA;Things under the following license may be included in this product:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2011, Andre Somers&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;    * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;      documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;    * Neither the name of the Rathenau Instituut, Andre Somers nor the&#xA;      names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;      derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND&#xA;ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE&#xA;DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL ANDRE SOMERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;&#xA;LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR #######; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS&#xA;SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&#xA;########################################################################&#xA;Software under the following license may be included in this product:&#xA;   SQLCipher&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2008-2012 Zetetic LLC&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;* Neither the name of the ZETETIC LLC nor the&#xA;  names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;  derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY ZETETIC LLC ''AS IS'' AND ANY&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE&#xA;DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL ZETETIC LLC BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;&#xA;LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS&#xA;SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is that really the right approach and place for the license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; that for security reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only one of the licenses includes name of what we use (&lt;code&gt;SQLCipher&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That's because adding that name is not considered a security leak in our-app's case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But in the first license, we don't even mention &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot; and write &amp;quot;Things&amp;quot; instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We wanted to write &amp;quot;Content(s)&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;Things&amp;quot;, but god knows what's the meaning that different jurisdictions may give to &amp;quot;Content(s)&amp;quot;, hence &amp;quot;Things&amp;quot; is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T05:19:19.543" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T05:19:19.543" Title="BSD 3-Clause: where to place license for binary installation?" Tags="|bsd|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7579" CreationDate="2018-11-09T11:25:48.897" Score="9" ViewCount="1182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@johnmark/why-open-source-failed-6cae5d6a9f6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt;, and I came across the following text (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even that most notorious of “Communist” licenses often cited by&#xA;  paranoid executives as examples of anti-commercial aspects of open&#xA;  source, the GNU GPL version 2 or 3, is useless when it comes to prying&#xA;  open web applications written by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and&#xA;  Amazon. And let’s not forget how &lt;strong&gt;some of these very same vendors&#xA;  infiltrated the process of creating the GPL version 3, undermining the&#xA;  community and cutting off efforts to close the “web app loophole”&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  How they did that was an under-reported story from 2006–2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the details of this &quot;under-reported story&quot;? Searching on my preferred search engine and some Wikipedia reading comes up with nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3298" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T11:18:26.657" Title="What are the details of this accusation regarding the &quot;web app loophole&quot;?" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|website|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7578" CreationDate="2018-11-09T12:44:16.513" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote appears to be misleading. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SeparateAffero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Why did you decide to write the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license?” in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, early drafts of the GPLv3 allowed an AGPL-like restriction to be added to the license (compare the Additional Terms mechanism in Section 7 of the GPLv3). This was dropped during the public review process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some companies […] want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(from the above FAQ item)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. before that change, it would not have been clear whether a “GPLv3” licensed software could be used on a server, because that GPLv3 license could have additional terms. By creating a separate license (the AGPLv3) this ambiguity was avoided, and GPLv3 requirements only trigger on &lt;em&gt;conveyance&lt;/em&gt; of the covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your quote seems to reframe this as a conspiracy by some companies. The “SaaS loophole” was well understood at that point, that's why the Affero license (AGPL) existed. The early GPLv3 drafts would not have fixed this, merely added an option to add a restriction to the GPL. By keeping the GPL and AGPL separate and offering a compatibility mechanim in Section 13 of the GPLv3, literally &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; has been lost and the licenses have only kept their clear labelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-09T12:44:16.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7581" CreationDate="2018-11-10T08:12:39.723" Score="5" ViewCount="1401" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if what I'm about to ask is a daft question, but here goes, I'm currently developing a website of my own which I'm looking to launch as a possible business in the new year, most of the website I've been coding from scratch, but I've used a few libraries and code snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, I'd like to give credit to for what I've used, I gather giving credit to libraries isn't an issue, but where I'm stuck is giving credit to the people who make code snippets, I don't want to break the GDPR laws, so would it be best to contact the people who make the code snippets and ask if I can credit them or just credit them because it wouldn't be an issue anyways as they've already give the code snippets away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13422" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T17:15:53.267" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:15:53.267" Title="Giving credit for code snippets" Tags="|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7580" CreationDate="2018-11-10T10:46:26.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does not treat code snippets differently from libraries. In either case you must first have the right to use that code. Copyright does not only cover &lt;em&gt;copies&lt;/em&gt; of works but also their &lt;em&gt;public performance&lt;/em&gt;. So strictly speaking, even server-side projects need a license for the code snippets and need to follow the terms of that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use code snippets only if any of the following holds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The snippet is so trivial that it is not covered by copyright protection (it fails to meet the &lt;em&gt;threshold of originality&lt;/em&gt;). In particular, copyright only protects an &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of an idea (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idea–expression divide&lt;/a&gt;). If you cannot express an idea differently, that expression is not protected. E.g. no one can claim copyright on the structure of a &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file, or to a popular programming idiom. Many snippets will fall under this category.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your use of the snippet falls under a &lt;em&gt;copyright exception&lt;/em&gt; such as &lt;em&gt;fair dealing&lt;/em&gt;. While the UK's fair dealing concept might apply to private use, I don't think it applies to commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have obtained a license for the snippet from the snippet's copyright holder. Most open-source licenses just require you to provide attribution in all copies, but do not restrict public performance in any way (the exception being the AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absence of a license means “all rights reserved”, not “free for all”. Any Stack Overflow contributions are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license which is difficult to use in projects that are not licensed under GPLv3. It is therefore probably best to avoid code snippets with unclear licenses or with a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not only cover economic usage rights such as the right to make a copy, but also &lt;em&gt;moral rights&lt;/em&gt;: the right of the author to be credited for their work under their preferred name. This right is typically unwaivable, regardless under what license or copyright exception you use the snippet. However, the author might also choose to be pseudonymous (e.g. a Stack Overflow username), anonymous, or have attribution retroactively removed (e.g. if they do not want to be associated with your website). Some open-source licenses also explicitly state that you may not frame the attribution in a way that looks like an endorsement of your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GDPR recognizes various reasons why processing of personal data might be lawful. Under &lt;a href=&quot;https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Art. 6(1)(c)&lt;/a&gt; processing is lawful if the “processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject”. (You are the data controller.) Here, providing attribution is a legal obligation you have. Both the copyright and privacy laws agree as to what the rights of the data subject/copyright holder are: if you've attributed the wrong name you must correct that upon their request (e.g. if they want to be pseudonymous), and you must remove attribution upon request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with common law/UK law. If in doubt, the laws of your jurisdiction apply and not the general concepts in this answer. Also, most people do not care about licensing of snippets – small scale copyright infringement is extremely common. You will most likely be completely fine if you fail to provide attribution for snippets used in back-end code that you do not share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is best to only copy snippets that are clearly not copyright-protected, or to only copy the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of the snippet rather than the snippet itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T10:46:26.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7584" CreationDate="2018-11-10T15:47:41.310" Score="4" ViewCount="816" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello everyone I'm going to use for my app ios the Google library &quot;Tink&quot; for cryptography End To End ... This library is released under an Apache 2.0 license, I wanted to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I easily use an **Apache licensed library?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to do something special to be able to use it freely?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences between an Apache 2.0 library and a MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for these questions but I would like to feel comfortable and have no future problems ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still do not know if my app can be downloaded for free or by payment .. this is a problem for the Apache license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the Library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/tink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google/tink&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13598" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:28:53.893" Title="About of Apache 2.0 License" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7575" CreationDate="2018-11-10T16:42:25.933" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are required to attribute the authors of any libraries you use, regardless of whether this is explicitly required by the libraries' licenses. The BSD license only mentions a suggested place for this attribution. In general, wherever you assert your copyright of the software, you should also mention that you include software from other copyright holders. Claiming that you hold sole copyright when you do not would be a kind of copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a GUI software, such attributions would usually be in a “Help → About” menu item. E.g. Google Chrome shows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Chrome&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Copyright 2018 Google Inc. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google Chrome is made possible by the Chromium open source project (link) and other open source software (link).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second link goes to a page that lists all included libraries and shows their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license requires that binary distributions must show the license “in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.” The intent here is clearly that any attribution within the source code is insufficient because that would be compiled away and is inaccessible to users. Instead, the license requires you to put the attribution somewhere a user can easily see, e.g. any documentation. In my opinion, the documentation can be part of the application's user interface itself and doesn't have to be a separate document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suggest placing attributions into a subdirectory of an installation. In a most literal interpretation, this might satisfy the BSD license. Yet clearly this fails the intention of providing user-visible attribution, since most users would not think to scour the installation directory for legal notices. I think this solution would be fine if and only if you provide documentation that points users to those files, e.g. as part of a copyright notice within the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T16:42:25.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7582" CreationDate="2018-11-10T18:28:53.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive open source license and can be used in any kind of software, including paid applications. This is very similar to the MIT license. However, the Apache license is much more detailed and legally precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like the MIT license, you must give any recipients of the software a copy of the license and copyright notices. The Tink project does not contain any very visible copyright notices, but some files contain a “Copyright 2017 Google” statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the project contains a NOTICE file, you must include a copy of that file as well. Tink does not contain a NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify Tink, you must add a “prominent notice” to modified files. You can however license your modifications under whatever terms you wish, as long as you otherwise comply with the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license has one big advantage over the MIT license: it includes an explicit patent grant, at no cost! Google cannot sue your for patent infringement for your use of Tink. This patent license terminates if you claim in a lawsuit that some part of Tink is patent infringement, but that doesn't matter if you don't hold any patents. The MIT license does not provide similar legal certainty with regard to patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how you should display the Apache license and the copyright notices in your application, you would usually show an “Open Source” menu item in your app's settings screen. See also my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/284860/60357&quot;&gt;What to keep in mind when releasing an app which uses libraries licensed under the Apache 2.0 License?&lt;/a&gt; on Software Engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T18:28:53.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7681" CreationDate="2018-11-11T09:46:50.330" Score="5" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very new to this, and largely self taught but I have created a little python 3 program that edits images (images created and supplied by myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have used PILLOW, along with Kivy (for the UI) and its standard dependencies. The program is then packaged for windows using PyInstaller. I have also used a few of the standard python libraries (io,sys,copy and so on) but I am not sure if those are relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: If I wanted to go about distributing my app for fee use online what steps do I need to take to make sure I won't get into any trouble? I'd also just like to add that I really know nothing about software licensing and how it all works. I have no intention of selling the program, but I'd like to share it with others without having worry about any legal trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13606" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T17:15:41.987" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T02:07:13.143" Title="What do I need to know when distributing my first program?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7595" CreationDate="2018-11-11T15:51:22.113" Score="3" ViewCount="2377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a software that uses (is statically linked to) code licensed under BSD 3-clause license. Just reading the license terms, it seems to me that I'm obliged to allow any one who I sell (redistribute) my software to, to have the right to use the whole software under the conditions of BSD 3-clause license. This is because the license has to be incorporated in the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems however that quite many people are convinced that this is not the case and that is possible to apply a more restrictive license to the whole software without violating the original terms of the BSD license (see for ex &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#Commercial_license_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;If this is possible, how can that be? What am I miss-interpreting?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13607" LastEditorUserId="13607" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T16:30:09.277" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T11:30:44.233" Title="Conditions on binaries incorporating BSD 3-clause licensed code" Tags="|licensing|bsd|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7586" CreationDate="2018-11-11T18:08:38.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A software product can contain parts that are licensed under different licenses, even if everything is statically linked together in the end. The only thing is that all different licenses must be compatible with each other, which means that if license A and license B apply to parts of the product then the requirements/obligations imposed by license A are not forbidden by license B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As different parts of a product can have different licenses, the requirement to include the BSD license text in the distribution cannot imply that the license applies to all parts. Regardless, it is good practice to explicitly identify which parts are governed by the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there are licenses with the property that if they are used for a part of the product, then the whole software must be available under the terms of that license. These licenses are called &lt;em&gt;copyleft licenses&lt;/em&gt;, with the GPL license being the most well-known one. These licenses explicitly call out that they apply to the whole product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T18:08:38.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7594" CreationDate="2018-11-11T21:59:25.653" Score="4" ViewCount="2451" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read many articles on GPL v2 licensing and I understand the main idea - when one uses a library or piece of software that is GPL-based, then the software, generally speaking, must become GPL as well. But what happens when you use a GPL-based &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;tool&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. &lt;em&gt;Git for Windows&lt;/em&gt;)? I would need them for my Visual Studio 2013 (which has only basic git support) to make my work easier. Does it mean that the software I would be writing with help of it, as it facilates the work (but not of its source code nor its libraries) must be GPL as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13610" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T10:18:26.130" Title="Using a tool under GPL v2 in a commercial application" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7589" CreationDate="2018-11-11T23:51:11.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not at all. In your example with the GPLv2, the only time you'd need to worry about sharing source is if you modify &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; in some way, and distribute the results of that modification.  The people you distribute to would have a right to the source, with your changes, under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some other licenses like the AGPL do require sharing of source when distributing output of the software under some conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T23:51:11.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7586" CreationDate="2018-11-12T07:36:01.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD license is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive license&lt;/a&gt; that does not force you to distribute your code under the same terms as the BSD license. As long as you don't claim the code is yours and include the associated copyrights in your documentation you are free to make a closed source commercial product that uses BSD licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft license&lt;/a&gt; like the GPL requires your code to be available under the same terms. Not that this does not stop you making a commercial product that uses the code, it just means that your users have to have access to the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T07:36:01.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7593" CreationDate="2018-11-12T08:52:14.960" Score="0" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;My co-founder recently left my startup, and it has ended on bad terms. We have a piece of software on GitHub under Apache 2.0 licence, and I have revoked his access to the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I continue building and using this piece of software commercially? Do I need his permission? Can I just fork it and continue safely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13614" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T11:53:40.870" Title="What should I do if someone leaves my Apache 2.0 licenced project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7592" CreationDate="2018-11-12T09:38:14.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, you two have made this code available to the world under Apache 2, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is generally held&lt;/a&gt; that licence grants are irrevocable once they have been relied on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not do anything further under the existing repo.  I would fork that repo as soon as possible - the forking being a clear point at which you're relying on your co-contributor's licence grant - and continue work on the forked project.  You don't need to change the name, but it would be helpful to avoid confusion for end-users if you were to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your co-contributor might well insist on having his/her code removed from the original repository, and indeed it might be simpler to delete it.  But it seems to me that (s)he can't insist on his/her code being removed from the fork (though you should be punctilious about preserving his/her copyright notices, as good manners, intellectual honesty, and the Apache licence require).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T09:38:14.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7589" CreationDate="2018-11-12T10:18:26.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's useful to remember that open source licenses including the GPLv2 typically derive their authority from (international) copyright law. They do not impose &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; conditions or restrictions on you. However, copyright law reserves many rights to the copyright holder, such as making copies, making modifications (“derivative works”), publishing derivative works, or “performing” the software publicly. An open source license gives you a license to do all of these things, but under various conditions. For example, you must provide suitable attribution and keep any legal notices intact. And derivative works of GPLv2 code can only be published under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you merely use a tool (such as an IDE, compiler, or version control system) as part of your internal development process, you are not creating a derivative work. Copyright law does not come into play and so the open source license is irrelevant. The GPLv3 spells this out explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. […] However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The GPLv2 has similar but less quotable language.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to merely using some software, you are creating a derivative work when you are modifying open-source sopftware, or when you include open-source code into some project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The focus on copyright law from open source licenses is very different from the focus on contract law by proprietary licenses or EULAs. A private contract can include any lawful restriction, such as only allowing use of the software for certain purposes, or requiring output to be made available under specific conditions. E.g. the EULAs of some games give the game's publisher a license to any “user created content” such as screenshots that you generate through the software. You are not going to see similar terms in open source licenses. (The copyleft nature of the GPL licenses appears similar, but only applies to derivative works, and it's always your choice whether you publish the modified software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, neither open source nor proprietary development tools restrict their use. So you can use proprietary tools like Visual Studio and Windows to develop open source software, and open source software such as GCC, Git, and Linux to develop proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to learn more about the general philosophy behind open source licensing, read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.  The Open Source Initiative maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of licenses&lt;/a&gt; they approved of being OSD-compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T10:18:26.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7586" CreationDate="2018-11-12T11:30:44.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD license requires that you show users the copyright notices and the licensing terms of the BSD-covered components. This is just about attribution. This does not require that you make your software available under the terms of the BSD license. This is all that the license has to say on that matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when you are writing some AwesomSoftware that uses a &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt; library under the terms of the BSD license, you might provide attribution like this library in the documentation or in another customary place for such notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AwesomeSoftware uses libfoo under the terms of the BSD-3-Clause license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2016-2018 the libfoo authors&#xA;Copyright 1998-2016 Jane Doe &#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use &amp;lt;... snip license text&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T11:30:44.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7585" CreationDate="2018-11-12T20:24:31.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you wrote your own code.  It sounds like you want to distribute it for free on the Internet.  (But that is an open question based on the comments.)  Here are a few suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;put your code on github or gitlab so others can have a place to post bug reports and such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pick a license you can live with.  BSD or GPL are popular choices.  BSD is more acceptable to big corps.  GPL has a stronger point of view, but one I also tend to like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include docs as Markdown files in your repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consider git* or bintray as a distribution mechanism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T20:24:31.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T09:03:56.723" Score="2" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the purpose of giving (on the phone) a micro tutorial on GNU make, I am considering writing two &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Hello,_World!%22_program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hello world&lt;/a&gt; programs in C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one fits in a single file &lt;code&gt;helloworld1.c&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second illustrates compilations in two translation units, so have &lt;code&gt;hello2.c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;world2.c&lt;/code&gt; and both include &lt;code&gt;helloworld2.h&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are under github at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/misc-basile/tree/master/HelloWorld&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bstarynk/misc-basile/tree/master/HelloWorld&lt;/a&gt; (this is self-contained; I am using GPLv3+ in commit &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/misc-basile/commit/da5b940fb4b7cab7b631de7793e7eb359bf33bac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;da5b940fb4b7cab7b631de&lt;/a&gt;, but could change the license if something else is more appropriate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I GPLv3+ license these files (and their &lt;code&gt;Makefile&lt;/code&gt;) ??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that such an example is too trivial to be GPLv3+ licensed. It falls into the &quot;obvious code&quot; category, and hello-world was first used 40 years ago as a canonical example of C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/hello/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU hello&lt;/a&gt; is too complex. It also teaches autoconf, which is out of scope for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The juridiction I am under is the French one (I am a French citizen, near Paris, and this is a tiny part of my research engineer work at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Alternative_Energies_and_Atomic_Energy_Commission&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CEA&lt;/a&gt;, a French state owned organization, similar to US DoE). The project funding my work is an European Commission funded one (so under European Union legislation, IIUC), e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chariotproject.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CHARIOT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7598/910&quot;&gt;that MadHatter's answer&lt;/a&gt;: I want to GPL that code to send the right signals to people who use it, to show that I am happy to have it reused by people who themselves go on to share. Also, this might be funded (but hopefully not &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt;, it is too small work) by some H2020 project (funding my work on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bismon&lt;/a&gt;) where contractually all the software I am writing is GPLv3+ licensed. Neither me nor my employer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cea.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CEA&lt;/a&gt;) is interested in legal trolls or sueing others about these hello-world programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS. Of course I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T06:49:14.503" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T06:49:14.503" Title="can hello world be GPLv3+ licensed?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7597" CreationDate="2018-11-13T09:53:38.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel that such an example is too trivial to be GPLv3+ licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, IANAL/IANYL.  That said, there's nothing special about the GPL in this regard.  If your creation qualifies for copyright protection, you may license it under GPLv3, or any other licence you please, or none at all.  The question is merely whether your work qualifies for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much has been written concerning &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the threshold of originality&lt;/a&gt; in copyright - that is, the quantum of originality that must reside in a creation in order to give it copyright protection.  As the linked article says, the Berne Convention (foundation of nearly all modern copyright law) does not define it, which leaves it to individual jurisdictions to decide.  So not only is it a thorny question, the answer varies from place to place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the answer must depend on &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; you're asking this question.  If you want to GPL your code to send the right signals to people who use it, to show that you're happy to have it reused by people who themselves go on to share, I'd say go for it; it's not clear to me that it lacks sufficient originality to qualify.  Conversely, if you were hoping to get a lock on all future &lt;em&gt;hello world&lt;/em&gt; programs, and start &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/article/17/8/patrick-mchardy-and-copyright-profiteering&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;McHardyesque&lt;/a&gt; revenue-generating GPL compliance lawsuits against people who write them on the basis that they're derivatives of your work, I'd advise against it; it's not clear to me that it possesses sufficient originality to withstand the attacks that will inevitably follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T10:09:33.823" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T10:09:33.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7597" CreationDate="2018-11-13T11:29:21.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be to small, for practical reasons. However you can still Copyright it. The FSF have suggested other Free Software licenses for trivial work (one of the very permissive licenses, not Copyleft). However you say it is part of a larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What does copyright have to say about this?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says you can copyright it.&#xA;It says that if a piece of work is identical to a copyright piece of work, and created after it, then this is not sufficient to be a copyright infringement. There must be evidence of copying. (If a work is big, this can also be evidence of copying: statistically it is near impossible to not be a copy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also fair use. This allows copying of small parts, it the work is to small, then it may allow copying of it all (this depends a lot on the jurisdiction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T06:43:34.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7592" CreationDate="2018-11-13T11:53:40.870" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Worse case scenario&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your co-founder succeeds in releaving you of your copyright. Now you are not the copyright holder. You are just a licensee of the software. You can still fork the code, and continue to contribute. After a while you will be a dominant copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case.&#xA;If your co-founder also forks, there will be two projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T11:53:40.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-13T17:01:03.020" Score="0" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a program which uses the JNA (JAVA Native Access) library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I would like to register it under some software license (I have not yet decided which), my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I register my software under any license I choose or am I limited to certain licenses under the terms of the JNA library licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen the following link (a file listing the licenses for the JNA library in GitHub): &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; It says that the library is registered under two licenses: &#xA;1. LGPL &#xA;2. Apache&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a limited type of licenses where I can register my software? If so, to what types of licenses am I limited to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13629" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T11:28:54.547" LastActivityDate="2021-09-09T15:00:50.403" Title="License - register software that using JNA library" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7603" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7606" CreationDate="2018-11-13T17:34:11.657" Score="0" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like this should be obvious, but I'm not finding an answer. LGPL is a subset of GPL, IIRC, so can I use LGPL code in a GPL project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13634" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T20:12:54.097" Title="LGPL3 code in GPL3 project" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7602" CreationDate="2018-11-13T17:50:35.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By using a third-party library in your product, your product becomes a derived work of that library under copyright law. This in itself (slightly) restricts the licenses you can choose for your own code, because all parts of the product must have compatible license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The JNA library is dual licensed and you get to choose which of those two licenses you want to conform to.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The LGPL license is a weak copyleft license that requires that it is possible for end-users to replace the library with a different version.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Apache license is a permissive license that places few requirements on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this choice in licenses for the JNA, you are not really limited in your choice of license. If you want to use an open-source license, you will have to tell us what freedoms you want to give you users. If you don't want to give your users the right to make changes, you must contact a lawyer to draft you a closed-source license. We can't advise you on the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T17:50:35.663" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7603" CreationDate="2018-11-13T20:12:54.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPL-3.0 is implemented as the GPL-3.0 plus additional permissions under Section 7 of the GPL-3.0. “When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it.” I.e. you can ignore these extra permissions if you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you are free to use LGPL-3.0 code as if it were GPL-3.0 licensed (because it is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Bart van Ingen Schenau in the comments, this is also explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL license family compatibility chart&lt;/a&gt; in the GPL FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T20:12:54.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-14T05:09:57.397" Score="4" ViewCount="2266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an app for android. I found this project on GitHub licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/futuresimple/android-floating-action-button/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. I am planning to make modifications to the project and use it &lt;strong&gt;commercially&lt;/strong&gt;. I am also planning to monetize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/futuresimple/android-floating-action-button/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the&#xA;  Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;  modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You&#xA;  meet the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;  (a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or&#xA;      Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&#xA;&#xA;  (b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;      stating that You changed the files; and&#xA;&#xA;  (c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works&#xA;      that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and&#xA;      attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,&#xA;      excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of&#xA;      the Derivative Works&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gives rise to these questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to provide credit (link back) to the original project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I understand that I need to provide a human-readable copy of the Apache 2.0 license in my app, but where do I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I want to publish my app under a different license from Apache, how do I do that? Do I need to display my license on the same page as the Apache 2.0 license? I want to make it less confusing for the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does (b) in the Apache 2.0 license mean? My app has hundreds of activities (pages containing code). Do I need to specify what and where exactly I made changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does (c) mean in the Apache 2.0 license? I am lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am also using a bunch of different libraries in my project like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Karumi/Dexter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dexter&lt;/a&gt;. Do I need to give a license and credit for each library I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13640" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-28T07:28:47.150" LastActivityDate="2023-06-28T07:28:47.150" Title="How do I license my project which is based on Apache 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7609" CreationDate="2018-11-14T06:30:27.283" Score="1" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I download Linux that comes with a pre-installed program in a binary form licensed under, let's say, BSD 2-clause, how does it comply with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I find licenses of installed binaries? Is there a common practice for this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because I plan to distribute my program that uses some of BSD 2-clause libraries in a binary form via docker images. Should I compile LICENSES.md file with licenses of all libs my program uses and put it to, I don't know, the root directory of docker image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13616" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T06:58:36.080" Title="How does Linux with pre-installed binaries comply with binary redistribution license clause?" Tags="|bsd|distribution|binaries|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7608" CreationDate="2018-11-14T06:58:36.080" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, it's handled by the distro's package management utility.  For example, if I examine the contents of &lt;code&gt;postgresql-libs&lt;/code&gt; on my desktop (Fedora 28), I find that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[me@risby personal]$ rpm -ql postgresql-libs&#xA;[...]&#xA;/usr/lib64/libpq.so.5&#xA;/usr/lib64/libpq.so.5.10&#xA;/usr/lib64/pgsql&#xA;/usr/share/doc/postgresql-libs&#xA;/usr/share/doc/postgresql-libs/COPYRIGHT&#xA;[...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and sure enough, therein it lies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[me@risby personal]$ head -11 /usr/share/doc/postgresql-libs/COPYRIGHT&#xA;PostgreSQL Database Management System&#xA;(formerly known as Postgres, then as Postgres95)&#xA;&#xA;Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2018, PostgreSQL Global Development Group&#xA;&#xA;Portions Copyright (c) 1994, The Regents of the University of California&#xA;&#xA;Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its&#xA;documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement&#xA;is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this&#xA;paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is equally true for packages that don't come from RedHat, but from a different repo; &lt;code&gt;compat-ffmpeg28&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;code&gt;rpmfusion-free&lt;/code&gt; includes the following files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/compat-ffmpeg28/COPYING.GPLv2&#xA;/usr/share/doc/compat-ffmpeg28/COPYING.GPLv3&#xA;/usr/share/doc/compat-ffmpeg28/COPYING.LGPLv2.1&#xA;/usr/share/doc/compat-ffmpeg28/COPYING.LGPLv3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can see that although there's no standard &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; for the file, there's a standard &lt;em&gt;approach&lt;/em&gt; to including it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not planning on shipping binaries, you're planning on shipping an entire OS image, which is a slightly different problem.  Personally, I'd encourage you not to do that, because more people will use your software if (a) it's easy to see exactly what they're installing, and (b) it interacts properly with everything else on their systems.  But if you must, I'm sure you can find somewhere inside that image to package some text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T06:58:36.080" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7611" CreationDate="2018-11-14T09:08:39.307" Score="6" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code I am interested in is scientific software released under a CeCILL-A license (equivalent to GPL license). The code is quite widely used in a specific community (which is great and also one of the reasons why it was put under a open source license in the first place) but a team took the code, modified it, published several papers with it, and is very reluctant to share their modified version. They even somehow give the impression that their version is accessible, but the repository is private and they shun most requests to access the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an attempt at clarification on the distribution of a modified version of a software in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cecill.info/faq.fr.html#web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CeCILL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (in French; the following is my own translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I modified a software under a CeCILL license and users access it through a web site. Do I have to publish the source on request?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, absolutely. If paragraph 5.3.2 mentions distribution, it means,&#xA;  as stipulated in 5.3 preamble, &quot;to publish, transmit and communicate&#xA;  the Software to the general public on any or all medium, and by any or&#xA;  all means&quot;. A distribution through a web site or a server is therefore&#xA;  an actual distribution even though the user does not have &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; a&#xA;  copy of the software, and therefore the obligation to share the&#xA;  modified source code applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this, it differs from the GPL license in the sense that it is closer to an Affero GPL than a normal GPL. It is not the situation I mentioned, but it shows that CeCILL is a bit stronger on the sharing aspects of modifications of the code than the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, even if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL license&lt;/a&gt; does not force you to release your modification (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and &lt;strong&gt;use them privately&lt;/strong&gt;, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It stipulates that it concerns a &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; use of the code. Does the use of a code leading to published results in scientific journals constitute a private use of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit afraid that the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, but I was wondering if there were any resort. Also, even if it is a legal use of the license, it does not seem moral to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9292" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T10:37:52.343" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T10:45:35.993" Title="Closed version of an originally CeCILL-A code: how can I access it?" Tags="|cecill|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7610" CreationDate="2018-11-14T10:45:35.993" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, the team that took the publicly-available version and modified it have not made it available to the public either as source, or for remote interaction.  They have merely used it to generate results which have themselves been published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is so, they have no obligation to make their version of the program available.  It is well-established that the GPL permits you to modify GPL software for internal use without triggering any obligation to re-distribute it, and the CeCILL licence appears to be similar.  What they've done constitutes internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the use of a code leading to published results in scientific journals constitute a private use of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  The output of a program is not generally a work derived from the program itself, and so (with certain specific exceptions) the license of the program doesn't generally cover its output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is debate in the scientific community about how proper it is to use unpublished code to generate published results, since the work becomes non-reproducible by this practice, and reproducibility is key to modern science.  But sadly no consensus has yet been reached in favour of requiring publication, so unless they've published in a journal that would have required this as a condition of publishing their paper, that's likely no help to you either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T10:45:35.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7612" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-14T16:23:54.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;External links&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Official source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/isc-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.isc.org/downloads/software-support-policy/isc-license/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FSF: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.en#ISC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OSI: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC License (ISC)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T04:26:55.663" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T04:26:55.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7613" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-14T16:23:54.603" Score="0" Body="a permissive license published by the ISC" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T04:26:52.027" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T04:26:52.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-15T19:43:16.753" Score="5" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tapr.org/ohl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OHL&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;open&quot; in its name but it is not to be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source initiative's list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did they not apply?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did they apply but do not match the open source definition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CERNOHL&lt;/a&gt; is also not listed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastEditorUserId="9464" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T19:52:48.697" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:48:57.447" Title="TAPR Open Hardware License not open source?" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T16:13:37.730" Score="2" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a lot of articles and still can't find the answer to the following question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a project that uses GNU General Public License version 2 license, developed by &lt;code&gt;CompanyX&lt;/code&gt;. We (&lt;code&gt;OurCompany&lt;/code&gt;) want to port this project to another language and that's why we want to take from this project only API + documentation. Can anyone say who will be the copyright holder of the project that we will create? By other words, should we write in every file of our project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * Copyright (c) CompanyX. All rights reserved. //Variant 1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * Copyright (c) OurCompany. All rights reserved. //Variant 2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me, that we should use Variant 2, but it means that if we are copyright holders of the project, we are also the copyright holders of its API and after it we can pass the rights for the API to someone else, that can't be true. Can anyone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13608" OwnerDisplayName="Pavel_K" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T15:03:35.850" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T15:03:35.850" Title="Who is the copyright holder when GPLv2 project API is used?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|derivative-works|api|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7615" CreationDate="2018-11-11T17:14:59.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;An answer depends mostly on country you are in, and the way you're about implementing this. Copyright applies only if you copy something that is under some copyright.&#xA;If you copy an idea - library that solves particular problem, and if that is aspect that you copy, then under U.K. Copyright law, there is no copyright. You dont break the law, because ideas are not copyrighted.(But im still not sure...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user319937" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:14:59.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7615" CreationDate="2018-11-11T17:24:24.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A port to another language is a translation, and, a translation is considered a derivative work, which means the original copyright (whatever it is) applies (e.g. if you have limited rights to the original so do you to the translation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As GPL2 is copyleft license, you must reproduce the full CompanyX license text somewhere within your project.&amp;nbsp; Typically this would be placed at the top level of the project, e.g. perhaps alongside a README file.&amp;nbsp; (Reproduction of the CompanyX license is necessary in both source distributions and binary distributions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You / your company will also be copyright holders for the translation you have made.&amp;nbsp; Thus, you / your company will also provide a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect copyrights for the translation will be held by two (or more) parties.&amp;nbsp; (Here is where it is necessary that the various licenses are compatible, e.g. don't contradict each other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If there are different licensing arrangements for different parts of the project (say you merged two license compatible (e.g. GPL) projects), this should be called out as such, and if there aren't then I would probably explicitly call it out that these licenses cover all files in the project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without being a lawyer or giving legal advice: I personally believe that the above alone covers your legal obligations to CompanyX and your legal needs for OurCompany &amp;#8212; so, what you put in the individual files (as a copyright line and licensing reminder) is more or less up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the proximal authors of the translation, I would suggest to put within each file of your work, a statement of copyright to your company (and date of the translated work), along with a statement referencing the complete &amp;amp; detailed licensing situation that can be found at the top level of the project &amp;#8212; it might be polite to call out that this is a translated work and thus has multiple copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, I don't think there is any requirement to make an explicit copyright statement for ComanyX within each file that is translated.&amp;nbsp; (I'm not even sure if you have the moral authority to do so, as this might imply to others that the original authors were more involved in the translation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For original CompanyX files reproduced as is, I would just leave them alone, having already reproduced their license at the top-level of your project (and made clear which files/directories (e.g. all) are under which licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13659" OwnerDisplayName="Erik Eidt" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T19:40:20.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7615" CreationDate="2018-11-11T17:31:44.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off all you are not violating copyright by making a copy of the API. The API and its description are licensed to you - and to the public in general, as far as I can tell* - under GLP2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*: It is possible to sell these licenses. I only know your company has one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, will your company be the copyright holder of the new project? Yes. Although, it is derivative work, this is allowed by your license, and given that you are reimplementing the API in a different language, your company work would be significantly different from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will your company be the copyright holder of the API? No. The devil is in the details... this is either because your company is not the author of the API, or because an API cannot be copyrighted (depending on the law of the country).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being the API part of the software of which you are doing a derivative work, and having you a license that allows you to do so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you modify the API (add, remove or replace parts of it)? Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you sublicense the API? Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you own your modifications of the API? Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: You still need to respect the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will there be any other legal obligations? Perhaps. There are trademarks and patents. &lt;em&gt;I believe an API cannot be subject of these under any jurisdiction, however that is just my opinion.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum&lt;/strong&gt;: You might be interested in the Oracle-Google litigations over Java API for Android. Note that Java's license &lt;strike&gt;does&lt;/strike&gt; did not grant such rights when the Android project started, however it is a precedent for an API being copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13658" OwnerDisplayName="Theraot" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T17:51:16.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7615" CreationDate="2018-11-11T19:02:47.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is definitively need for qualified legal advise here, since this is about business of your company, that money and reputation could be at stake, and that local laws and interpretation might apply.  You should not rely on internet forum for this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said, I'm not a lawyer, and here my understanding as a simple software practitioner: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you rewrite existing software in another language, reusing the same algorithms and data structures, your code might be seen as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/02/07/facebook-oculus-zenimax-nonliteral-copying-code/id=78105/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nonliteral copy&lt;/a&gt;, and therefore subject to the original copyright license.  So original license conditions would apply, original company would still hold copyright on the software including your rewrite, but in addition, you'd hold a copyright on your rewriting work. So I think it would be:&lt;br/&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) CompanyX and OurCompany. All rights reserved.&lt;/code&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you reimplement the software from the scratch, reusing just the API, but having a different internal logic, your geographical location might play a role.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/eus-top-court-apis-cant-be-copyrighted-would-monopolise-ideas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Europe, the API can't be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt; and you'd own your version.  In US, it's more complex as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;case of Oracle vs. Google&lt;/a&gt; has shown (endless litigations). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" OwnerDisplayName="Christophe" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T19:02:47.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7615" CreationDate="2018-11-11T20:38:01.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's ignore the fact for the moment that there is a license in play, let's focus on copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a new work is created, the creator is the copyright holder, except when it is a work for hire, and the hiring company is the copyright holder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a derived work is created, you have two copyright holders: The copyright holder of the original work, and the copyright holder of the additional work added. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with what you plan, both your company, and the company that created the original work, will hold joint copyright on the work. With a GPL-licensed work, the copyright holder isn't &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; important, except the copyright holder or holders are the only ones who can sue for copyright infringement, and of course all copyright holders together can change the license if they want to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the completely separate point, the license: The original work is published under the GPL license. This license &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; you to create a derived work, and it &lt;em&gt;allows&lt;/em&gt; you to publish this work under certain conditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as your question is concerned, the important fact is that there are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders now for the derived work, and you can only do what the original copyright holder allows, otherwise you commit copyright infringement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" OwnerDisplayName="gnasher729" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T20:38:01.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T10:28:35.350" Score="4" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier today I was installing a small free program hosted on GitHub. The End-User License Agreement shown when installing had a few things, but what stood out was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial&#xA;4.0 International License. Summary and full text of license and is avaliable here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using [...] Web Services you confirm that you are agree with respective terms and conditions listed here: [...] as well as Privacy Policy: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main use for GibHub is as issue tracker. The source GitHub repository only contains a README.md file and zip file containing the &lt;code&gt;.msi&lt;/code&gt; installation file. There's even a few forks from new accounts, but they can't do much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is, what legal purpose does licensing a program with permissive licence have when the source code is not available? Are there likely to be any unintended consequences by licensing binaries under a permissive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13665" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T16:49:53.150" Title="What does it mean for a closed source project to have a permissive licence (CC BY-NC)?" Tags="|closed-source|binaries|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7622" CreationDate="2018-11-17T13:51:34.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC BY-NC is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive license&lt;/a&gt;. Neither the FSF nor the OSI approved it, so it’s not a free software license nor an open source license. The reason is the &quot;NC&quot; part: the licensed work may not be used for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-NC and the other CC licenses aren’t intended for code, so they don’t clarify code-related aspects. This means there is no requirement to license/distribute the source code when licensing/distributing the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A binary licensed under CC BY-NC is essentially proprietary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freeware&lt;/a&gt; which anyone may share in a non-commercial way, and use for non-commercial purposes. But if the source code can be extracted from the binary, it should fall under the same license, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-11-17T16:49:53.150" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T16:49:53.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T18:26:31.500" Score="0" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I worked alot on it, and now I'm thinking of asking people to contribute to it, but my concern is that people will take my existing code and do whatever they want with it(modify it and sell it etc) instead of contributing. What can I do to prevent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13666" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T01:30:07.323" Title="How to get people to contribute to my open source project instead of copying it?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7631" CreationDate="2018-11-17T20:01:42.323" Score="6" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an open source project that I'd like to fork for various reasons. The upstream project uses SVN for source code management, but they maintain a read-only Git mirror on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to take the project on Github and fork it on to Gitlab. One of the most important aspects that I want to be able to do is to merge upstream patches into my fork, but I'm unsure of the best way to go about that? Should I have the master branch track the head branch of the SVN repository and then do all of my development work in a Git branch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license the upstream project uses doesn't require changes to be committed back to the main project, but I'd like to keep that option open if possible since I think my changes might appeal to some people in the future once I've tested them on my fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just slightly confused about the best way to make sure that I can apply upstream patches to my fork and to make sure that I can merge my changes back to the original project as well if that ever became an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10730" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T07:50:34.640" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T13:42:34.793" Title="How to track upstream using Git when forking a project?" Tags="|github|forking|git|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-18T02:22:05.030" Score="5" ViewCount="2456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a developer of Open Source product under GNU GPL license. I always looking for some time and power to make important changes in it (fix bugs and add more improvements), however, it becomes harder and harder each new time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL idea looks great, people should not overpay for software, I completely agree, but does it mean there should be a valid and legal way for a developer to get enough money from his product? Please share ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paid support - it works, but it's not great. If a developer (like me) want for his product to be awesome and useful, he usually created the documentation for it, meanwhile making his income smaller. It's a discrepancy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Automatic updates - it also works, but there are lots of 3rd-side companies who proposed an automatic update of lots of GPL products (including my one) for smaller money. For example I get $10/y for automatic updates and I have only one product. While these ones who resell thousands of such GPL products only takes $10/y for everything. In the perspective, I have no chances.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Begging for money - no, please. I am not a bum and I'm very frustrated by the idea that I will try my best for someone to give me a coin out of pity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Selling an advertisement - no way, anyone can change GPL product and he will remove this from the product or put his own ads. And I think it's even illegal for GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13669" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T04:52:32.377" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T23:42:15.953" Title="How I can monetize GNU GPL product developed (and currently updating) by me?" Tags="|gpl|monetization|gnu|freeware|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7624" CreationDate="2018-11-18T05:13:05.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any free and open source license will permit resale and modification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may be interested in a copyleft license like the GNU GPL, which requires binary distributions (modified or unmodified) to be accompanied by the corresponding source code under the same license terms. In this regard, any modification (that gets publicly distributed) is effectively similar to a contribution back to your project, because you can always pull other people's downstream changes back into your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is a social aspect that you simply can't control: the ability to pull downstream modifications back into your project is quite different from the social power to control the other project's development direction, etc. There is always a possibility that you can lose developer interest by an influential person making a &quot;hard fork&quot; of your project and continuing new development without your involvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T22:25:32.827" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T22:25:32.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7630" CreationDate="2018-11-18T05:41:20.580" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whipped up some demo code for a proof of concept I needed.  Used FPDM which states as its license &quot;FPDF&quot;.  The FPDF license seems Free to me - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software to use, copy, modify, distribute, sublicense,&#xA;  and/or sell copies of the software, and to permit persons to whom the&#xA;  software is furnished to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I needed to fix a few things in FPDM.  Can I distribute my code, and the changed version of FPDM under the GPLv2 ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no, can I distribute the fixed version of FPDM under the same &quot;FPDF license&quot; I obtained it under, and my own original code that calls it as GPLv2 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no to all of this, what license can I use that ensures anyone else with a copy of my work is able to use it permissively? I prefer the GPLv2 for reasons... and the code is PHP, so it is &quot;open&quot; if not Free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T09:06:00.660" Title="FPDF &amp; GPLv2 &amp; distributing changed code" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7629" CreationDate="2018-11-18T09:06:00.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FPDF license is a permissive license very similar to the MIT license. The permissive nature of the license allows you to distribute both your code and the modified FPDM library under the GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your changes to the FPDM library could be of interest to the maintainers of the original library, then it would make thing a lot easier if you distribute the changed FDPM library under the FPDF license (same as the original). The rest of your project can still be licensed under the GPLv2 license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Then your change can be incorporated 'upstream' without the difficulties that come with the code having a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T09:06:00.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7625" CreationDate="2018-11-18T09:36:58.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would use a separate branch that mirrors exactly the head branch of the SVN repository, besides a master branch that contains the latest release of your fork and any other branches (feature, release, etc.) that are indicated by your preferred branching strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is an update from the upstream project, you initially put that in the &quot;upstream&quot; branch, which you then can merge into your main development branch and any active feature branches as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to contribute back, you can make a difference between the &quot;upstream&quot; branch and your main development or master branches to determine what you have added to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T09:36:58.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2018-11-18T15:09:21.400" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Research found out the &amp;quot;stargazers-based classifier [...] to exhibit high precision (97%) [in retrieving &lt;strong&gt;engineered software projects&lt;/strong&gt;]&amp;quot;. Source: Munaiah, N., Kroh, S., Cabrey, C. et al. Empir Software Eng (2017) 22: 3219. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9512-6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9512-6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We used reaper to measure the dimensions of 1,857,423 GitHub repositories. We then used manually classified data sets of repositories to train classifiers capable of predicting if a given GitHub repository contains an engineered software project. [...] The performance of the classifiers was evaluated using a set of 200 repositories with known ground truth classification. We also compared the performance of the classifiers to other approaches to classification (e.g. number of GitHub Stargazers) and found our classifiers to outperform existing approaches. We found stargazers-based classifier (with 10 as the threshold for number of stargazers) to exhibit high precision (97%) but an inversely proportional recall (32%). On the other hand, our best classifier exhibited a high precision (82%) and a high recall (86%). The stargazer-based criteria offers precision but fails to recall a significant portion of the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition 1&lt;/strong&gt; An &lt;em&gt;engineered software project&lt;/em&gt; is a software project that leverages sound software engineering practices in one or more of its dimensions such as documentation, testing, and project management.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5671" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T15:09:21.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7627" CreationDate="2018-11-18T19:45:14.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no known solution to the “economics of open source” problem. Some projects try to apply more restrictive licenses so that the “correct” maintainers can capture a larger part of the value chain. Yet such licenses are frequently non-free or have other flaws, e.g. see the discussion about the recent SSPL license from MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three financing models tend to work fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project is maintained as a &lt;em&gt;hobby&lt;/em&gt;. There will always be more work than can be done, but that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project is sponsored by individuals or companies with a direct interest in this software. For example, a consultant may create some libraries and happen to open source them. They maintain the project because it helps them with their work – they'd have to develop the software anyway. Another example would be companies that profit by hosting a software, or need the software internally. Projects like Linux, Wordpress, or Discourse fit this bill. Advertising or developer relations may also play a role (see e.g. Microsoft's current open source strategy).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A foundation or individual gives out grants for specific work on the project, where the foundation's budget comes from donations by individuals or companies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few strategies that may work but have issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A strategy that works for a few people is relying on small donations, Patreon-style. But whether this works depends more on your user base and your social media presence than the value of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Something I've also seen is selling pre-built official binaries, but I feel that is unfair to users that don't have as much technical knowledge, and it creates a perverse incentive to make the build process as complicated as possible (e.g. I think the Ardour project is toeing the line here). This is similar to your idea of selling updates. The idea is not to extract money from every user, but only to capture some fraction of the software's value.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quite a lot of projects try to make money through dual licensing with a free copyleft license and a paid more permissive option. This tends to only work for libraries, or for white-label applications. The iText PDF library is a successful example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with this approach is dual-fold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyleft license is usually more permissive than the maintainers might think so not many use cases do not need the paid license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual licensing only works if outside contributors sign a CLA. Outside contributors do not profit from their contributions. A CLA also enables the project to switch licenses in a future, and possibly stop being open source (see e.g. the MongoDB and Redis license changes in the last few months). A CLA is not just extra bureaucracy, it is also a deterrent for contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it is important to remember that the GPL does not address any economic points at all. The intention of the GPL is only to maintain &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;end user freedom&lt;/a&gt;. That GPL software is usually free of charge is not a direct requirement by the GPL, but a consequence that monetizing software under these freedoms is quite difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the open source project I maintain, I've decided to keep it exclusively as a hobby. Monetization such as setting up donations is not going to be worth it (because this would complicate my tax filings substantially). Users are free to ask for features or bugfixes, but I don't feel obligated to deliver anything. This means the project is quite crappy in some respects. I tend to focus my work on supporting users and other developers. I.e. instead of developing a feature myself, I try to make it as easy as possible for someone else to implement it. But this is not really a financing model, more like an anti-burnout barrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T19:45:14.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7607" CreationDate="2018-11-19T11:24:10.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you want to publish a creative work such as an app, you need a license from all copyright holders – this includes the copyright holders of any libraries you include. Open source licenses such as the Apache 2.0 license allow any kind of use (including commercial use) as long as you follow the terms of the license. Often, the only condition of these licenses is that you provide suitable attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per clause 4 you may “provide additional or different license terms and conditions” so while you do have to show users the Apache license, you do not have to license your app under the Apache license. You do not have to choose any special license, as the default license is “all rights reserved”. If you want to provide your own license terms you would usually ask them to agree to an EULA before they sign up for your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license makes a distinction between the source code of a project, or its “object form” (for example, an executable or an installable app).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the source code, you need to keep any legal notices intact, most importantly any copyright notices. If you make any modification to these files, you have to add a note about that to the file itself, i.e. add a Change Log within the file. This is what clauses 4(b) and 4(c) are about. You do not have to list the changes, you only have to record the fact that you modified the file.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you must give users a copy of the license as per clause 4(a) and of the NOTICE file, if any exists, see clause 4(d). But in case of object form, users can't look at the source code. If a software has a manual, that manual would be a suitable place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But GUI software often does not have manuals. It is therefore customary to make these notices accessible in a common place within the app, e.g. “Help → About this software” for a desktop app or “Settings → Open Source” for an Android app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, wherever you mention your own copyright of the app you should also mention that you have licensed some parts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common browsers provide a good example of how to attribute open source libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Google Chrome:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;chrome://credits/&lt;/code&gt; shows the license and a link to the homepage of each used project. It includes a number of Apache-2 licensed software, though most of these only show the project's license file and do not show actual copyright notices (this is technically fine by the terms of the Apache-2 license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Desktop: Help → About Google Chrome → open source software&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Mobile: Settings → About Google Chrome → Legal Notices → Open Source Licenses&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firefox:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt;. What Firefox does very well is trying to list the files in the code base to which the license applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Desktop: Help → About Firefox → License Information&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Mobile: Settings → Mozilla Firefox → About Firefox → License Information&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T11:24:10.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7636" CreationDate="2018-11-19T12:35:21.403" Score="4" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;Will that violate GPL? I still allow the recipient to redistribute unmodified copies and with modifications but they have to call the product with a different name when they do it. Is such restriction violate GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assumptions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wrote the software from scratch. No forks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I copyright/trademark (whatever is necessary) the names, logos etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T14:23:09.300" Title="Can I force to use a different name when redistributing GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|redistribution|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7635" CreationDate="2018-11-19T14:23:09.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;By itself the GPL does not include such restrictions, but it neither includes any permission to use trademarked names. Strictly speaking you do not have to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the GPLv3 does have an Additional Terms mechanism that explicitly allows you to add trademark restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you may […] supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;[…]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that trademark law is very jurisdiction-dependent, whereas copyright law is more harmonized through international treaties such as the Berne Convention or the WIPO copyright treaty. You will probably need professional legal advice to create a widely enforceable Additional Term for the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an additional term would perhaps grant use of the trademark for verbatim copies, but require modified versions to use different branding. However, this quickly runs into practical problems if your code base uses branded names e.g. in its APIs. If you want to go down this route, I would strongly advise either allowing use of a trademark within the application (just not for externally visible branding), or to keep your code base completely branding-agnostic, so that any branding is provided by a configuration file that you do not distribute. However, the latter route will also make it easier to create competing branding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be useful to look into the Firefox vs Iceweasel branding history: while Firefox is open source, the Firefox name is trademarked by Mozilla and branding assets like logos used a separate copyright license. Therefore, the Debian project used to consider the Firefox browser as non-free and created a rebranded version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T14:23:09.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7637" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-21T19:26:18.453" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently I'm going to publish my project on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is initialized by some template in Visual Studio and developed with additional nuget packages, but I don't really understand what I did &quot;use&quot; and what should be considered as the derivative of other open source softwares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a nuget package that my project depends on has the 3-clause BSD license, so is it necessary to explicitly describe that my project uses the package somewhere in the repository, even if my code doesn't have any code taken from the library itself and just calling some functions of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how about the template which is provided by Microsoft and given MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, are these licenses for software developers who modify, edit or extend the original software, or for everyone who write some codes depend on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T09:55:22.590" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T09:55:22.590" Title="What is the definition of &quot;use&quot; of an open source software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|dependencies|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-21T21:45:16.447" Score="-1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;For permissive open source licenses, for example Apache 2.0, is it sufficient to include a readable copy of the license.txt/NOTICE/attribution file with the object code in the memory of the device? Or, is the requirement to provide a copy of the license/NOTICE/attribution in a place where a typical end user would see it? For example, a manual for the device. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So many examples I find are about forward facing software that has a UI. What about devices that don't have a user interface (or have a minimal UI).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something has to be provided in the manual. Exactly what has to be provided? A full copy of the license? If there are 50 open source components, do I really need to provide the full text of 50 open source licenses? Would it be sufficient to provide a links to the licenses on the Internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13691" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T17:56:34.647" Title="Embedded Open Source Software" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7638" CreationDate="2018-11-22T17:56:34.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intention of distributing the (open-source) license with a product is to inform the users of the product about the rights they have with regard to the software. This intention would not be served if the license text can only be read when someone tries to reverse-engineer the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, you must distribute the licenses in such a way that the end-user can take notice of them. If the device has a good enough display to comfortably read multiple paragraphs of text, then you can show the licenses from a menu within the device. If there is no suitable display, then the manual or a leaflet in the box is your only option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using 50 open-source components, then you don't have to replicate each of the licenses separately. If multiple components use the same license, you can do something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Components A, B and C are licensed under the MIT license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [ License text ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Components X, Y and Z are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [ License text ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the number of licenses in use are not really that large, it is likely that you only have to produce 3 or 4 license texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T17:56:34.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T00:11:41.673" Score="2" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copy reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's&#xA;  being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is&#xA;  extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the&#xA;  terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is&#xA;  redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in&#xA;  conjunction with the original software distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read this it makes me think that a developer cannot release the same code under two different licenses, for example, have the code in GPL while also releasing a &quot;commercial version&quot; under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have googled this and saw that it's fine to do. But even after reading the annotated version of the points (which was unhelpful for this point) I don't quite get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a piece of software which has both an AGPL license and commercial license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plupload.com/license/oem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.plupload.com/license/oem&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13695" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T04:45:26.857" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:18:30.160" Title="Understanding &quot;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&quot; OSS Guidelines" Tags="|osi|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7641" CreationDate="2018-11-23T00:25:13.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This guideline is aimed at things like bloatware installers. Suppose I make two open-source products, xginx and Flapache. Flapache has really taken off and is an industry-standard tool, but xginx is languishing in the backwaters of the unknown. In an effort to promote it, I might start bundling it with Flapache - if you use my installer to install Flapache, it'll install xginx too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this guideline says I can't do is to say &quot;You can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; have Flapache under the AGPL &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you also install xginx&quot;. In other words, I can't make the Flapache license conditional on you also installing another product at the same time - a &quot;software distribution&quot;, as the guideline says. I can promote xginx and encourage you to install it and even install it without asking (though the latter will certainly annoy people), but I can't condition the Flapache license on xginx's presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T00:25:13.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7641" CreationDate="2018-11-23T05:37:09.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I read this it makes me think that &lt;strong&gt;a developer cannot&lt;/strong&gt; release the same code under two different licenses, for example, have the code in GPL while also releasing a &quot;commercial version&quot; under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that you are reading the Open Source Definition as constraining the behavior of developers.  It does not.  Rather, it constrains the behavior of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This term requires that open source licenses permit users to modify the packaging of any software distributed under those licenses.  For example, if you distribute GPL'd code inside a self-extracting installer (for Windows), an end user can redistribute just the source code, or a self-contained binary (with source) that doesn't need installation.  The GPL permits this, which is a requirement of the Open Source Definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No part of the OSD restricts your decision to offer multiple licenses, nor does it have anything to do with commercial licenses.  Commercial licenses (generally speaking) are not open source, so they never claimed to comply with the OSD in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T05:37:09.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T07:49:28.850" Score="7" ViewCount="984" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ship a GPL-licensed exe &quot;Foo&quot; (not mine) with my exe, and with Foo - some DLLs that it uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These DLLs are licensed under various open-source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I ship the copyright statements of those DLLs? And the full texts of their licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9373" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:27:28.637" Title="Should I attribute open-source DLLs that I ship?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7641" CreationDate="2018-11-23T12:18:30.160" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems you are asking about item 8 in the Open Source Definition: “License Must Not Be Specific to a Product”. There are a number of reasons why an open source license should not be product-specific (or perhaps even technology-specific).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider what happens if a license is specific to a product. Here is an example based on the ISC license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify and/or distribute FooSoft v1.2 for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Difficult questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I modify FooSoft v1.2, is the resulting software still covered by the license? Can I distribute my not-FooSoft version? The license as written only allows me to distribute FooSoft v1.2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In particular, am I free to remove parts of FooSoft v1.2 that I do not want? Or is FooSoft an all-or-nothing bundle? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I take parts of the FooSoft v1.2 code and include it into a completely different software? For example, I might want to reuse FooSoft's implementation of a file format or a protocol. But the license as written only allows me to distribute FooSoft, not necessarily a part of FooSoft, and definitively not MyCompetingSoftware v3.4.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a license is product-specific, this could be used to deny other people the possibility to distribute their modifications, in particular the possibility of forking the project. In such a license, the original copyright holder retains total control. That is not in the spirit of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would also clash with OSD 9, that the license must allow derived works to be distributed under the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In cases where a copyright holder wants to protect the integrity of their software, OSD 4 may apply. E.g. the license could disallow direct modifications but may require modifications to be distributed as patches that are applied at build time, or may require the name or version number to be changed upon modification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truly open source licenses provide a license for the software, not for a branded product. When we are talking about the software, we can consider each part of the creative work independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license that applies OSD-4 style requirements is the &lt;em&gt;Artistic License&lt;/em&gt;. It makes a distinction between the Standard Version of the software as made available by the original author, and modified versions. One way to publish a non-standard version is to distribute it under a different name so that it does not impede use of the Standard Version on the same system. However, the Artistic License is a bit unusual and is widely avoided outside of the Perl ecosystem – the FSF even considers the original Artistic License to be so vague that it is non-free. Instead, open source projects wanting to protect their brand would simply apply for trademark protection of their name, for example consider Mozilla's enforcement of the Firefox trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:18:30.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7645" CreationDate="2018-11-23T12:27:28.637" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;When redistributing GPL-licensed binaries, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; reproduce each copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty and ship the full text of the license (see section 1 of the GPLv2). In addition, you have to (quoting section 3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial distributions typically choose option b. For the GPLv3, similar terms apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other terms apply for other open-source licenses, but you typically have to ship with all copyright notices and license texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13699" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T12:27:28.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2018-11-23T14:36:31.350" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do GitHub Stars measure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take the stars as a measure of awareness, meaning that projects with lots of stars might be known to many people and projects with only a few stars may be relatively unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try to not read more into it but I infer weakly from the number of stars that projects with only a few stars might not be well tested, might not be very mature, might not be popular, while projects with a large number of stars might be well tested, might be mature and might be popular. In general, I will compare all projects above a certain flexible threshold of the number of stars and then decide completely independent of the number of stars which project is the best for me. In short, it's only a hint to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T14:36:31.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7651" CreationDate="2018-11-23T15:55:48.327" Score="3" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;I build a commercial product, which uses some third party products licensed under GNU GPL 2, GNU GPL 3 and LGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not modify myself the source code of these third party products and I do not embed them to my own source code. These products are used as stand alone programs installed on my customer servers, separatelly from my own source code. So, there is no bundle or package with my own code mixed with the code of these third party libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have a commercial product, I do want to know, can I issue my own commercial license and provide my customers with this license? I can attach all GPL licences as well and can inform my customers about this third party products used in my own product. Is this practice legal? I'm asking this, because I've heard a lot, that if you do not modify third party GPL programs and do not embed them to your code, but just use them, then it does not make your code GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lets consider a concrete real world example. If I build a program, that uses MySQL Community Server licensed under GPL, can I still issue a commercial license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13702" LastEditorUserId="13702" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T16:04:04.437" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T17:45:19.347" Title="About using GNU GPL 2, GNU GPL 3 and LGPL software in a commercial product" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7650" CreationDate="2018-11-23T17:45:19.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a step back and consider copyright rather than concrete licenses. An open source project's license can only ever apply to your code if your code is a &lt;em&gt;derivate work&lt;/em&gt; of the open source code. This might be the case if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you modify the open source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you use parts of the open source code in your code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your code and the open source code are combined into one program using some mechanism, e.g. by importing a library or loading a plugin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possibly: your program and the open source program are inextricably linked so that they effectively form one distributed work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But merely running an open source program does not make your code derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using a GPL'ed database, your code is not derivative of this database. However, you might be using some adapter or driver to interface with the database. Then, you must consider the license of this adapter. For example, Oracle's open source MySQL adapters are offered under the GPLv2. If you use them, your code would be subject to the GPLv2 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So more important than the license of other programs in your system is the license of any libraries that you include in your programs that you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL explicitly allows you to distribute GPL-covered software alongside other software (“mere aggregation” clause). You may not impose any license over this collection of GPL and non-GPL programs. You must respect the GPL for the GPL-covered parts, and e.g. provide the license documents, the source code, and so on. You must allow users to copy and use the GPL-covered parts freely. But for those parts of the collection that are not covered by the GPL (or other licenses), you can impose whatever licensing terms you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it is perfectly possible to use GPL software in commercial systems, as long as you do not restrict GPL-covered programs with proprietary terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T17:45:19.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7659" CreationDate="2018-11-23T20:51:03.103" Score="2" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use PHP language in my application and use these two drivers to connect to MySQL - mysqli and pdo. I know that PHP is licensed under PHP License v3.01, so I can freely use it, but at the same time, since I connect to MySQL which is licensed under stricter GNU GPL, I must know how MySQL drivers are licensed. I could not find such information on the Internet and I do not know whether mysqli and pdo are licensed under PHP License v3.01 or under GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13702" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T09:48:58.247" Title="PHP mysqli and pdo drivers licensing" Tags="|gpl|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T22:18:25.280" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a relatively simple extension for Google Sheets that is open source and free, but recently Google have changed their policies and require all such extensions to include a Terms of Service. Not being a lawyer, nor having any money to pay for lawyer as I'm not getting any money from this product, I'm wondering if there are any templates or examples that people can point me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13707" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T05:01:15.243" Title="Example Terms of Service for OSS software hosted on Google platform?" Tags="|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7654" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7658" CreationDate="2018-11-24T02:54:27.977" Score="3" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning a language app for mobile devices using data from Wiktionary. I'm planning on web-scraping the content and compiling it into a database that I'll package with my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Wiktionary content is dual-licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GFDL. They provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Copyrights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;useful information&lt;/a&gt; as to what that entails for developers. But it's still not quite clear to me what parts of my app need to be made available under the same licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my database would be considered the &quot;derived work&quot;. Does that mean I only need to make the database available under the same licenses or the entire app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13710" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T09:41:40.857" Title="Using Wiktionary data in mobile app" Tags="|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7653" CreationDate="2018-11-24T04:43:17.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on which license you use, there may be provided examples. For instance, the folks at gnu.org have a &quot;How to use this license&quot; type document&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it includes the following as suggested in order to use GPLv3-or-later - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at&#xA;  your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA;  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU&#xA;  General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;  along with this program.  If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note specifically the middle paragraph.  This is the type of language you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit your question to include info on exactly what license you want to use - the license creator has likely done the work for you already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T04:43:17.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7684" CreationDate="2018-11-24T04:46:30.367" Score="5" ViewCount="325" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering redistributing a copy of the &lt;code&gt;rt.jar&lt;/code&gt; file available within the OpenJDK Zulu distribution within my GitHub project repository which is licensed on a project basis using the MIT license. I downloaded &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdn.azul.com/zulu/bin/zulu7.25.0.5-jdk7.0.201-win_x64.zip&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this ZIP file&lt;/a&gt; and extracted the &lt;code&gt;rt.jar&lt;/code&gt; file from it. The use case of the &lt;code&gt;rt.jar&lt;/code&gt; file will be as an input to the execution of my project's maven build. The maven build will pass the location/path of the &lt;code&gt;rt.jar&lt;/code&gt; file to the javac compiler using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/10/tools/javac.htm#GUID-AEEC9F07-CB49-4E96-8BC7-BCC2C7F725C9__GUID-E1D24DB1-B67C-49CD-9274-115D36A0B1CB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;-Xbootclasspath option&lt;/a&gt;. I am not modifying the &lt;code&gt;rt.jar&lt;/code&gt; file in any way, and I would be including copies of the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;DISCLAIMER&lt;/code&gt; files as well as the source code (&lt;code&gt;src.zip&lt;/code&gt;) of the entire Zulu openJDK distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this redistribution for this usage be in violation of either the GPLv2 or the MIT license? Would my project be considered an independent module and thus subject to the classpath exception of the GPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13711" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T16:01:02.620" Title="Does redistributing an unmodified copy of rt.jar from OpenJDK7 using an MIT license violate the GPLv2 with Classpath Exception?" Tags="|mit|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7654" CreationDate="2018-11-24T09:41:40.857" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your database content is definitely a &quot;derived work&quot; of Wikitionary and needs to be licensed under CC-BY-SA and/or GFDL (you can choose to use only one of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your database structure (which tables you have in the database) is most likely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a &quot;derived work&quot; of Wikitionary, unless you specifically re-used the data structures from Wikitionary (which is very unlikely as you intend to fill the database using web scraping).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your app, it depends on to what extent your app relies on the fact that your data comes from wikitionary. If the code of your app doesn't care where the database and its content come from, then it is definately not a &quot;derived work&quot; of Wikitionary. &#xA;In that case, you can use any license you like for the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T09:41:40.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7652" CreationDate="2018-11-24T09:48:58.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the mysqli and the PDO database drivers are distributed as part of the PHP language distribution and are compiled into the PHP executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is no indication that the license of PHP changes when either of these drivers is enabled, they cannot be distributed under a copyleft license like the GPL. This in turn means that using the mysqli or PDO drivers in your PHP application cannot force you to use a copyleft license for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T09:48:58.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7627" CreationDate="2018-11-24T10:10:32.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;updating&quot; in your Subject line includes enhancements, I'd suggest forking your project into its existing gpl/free version, and a new for-fee, non-gpl professional version that includes future enhancements/features/support/etc. And hopefully your product is sufficiently useful that its serious user base will be happy to purchase that professional version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is assuming you're the sole developer and sole copyright-owner of the software. Then all current users are licensees under the gpl. Therefore, if any of them develop enhancements, etc, based on your code, then they have to distribute their new-or-modified source (if they distribute anything at all) as well. But you're not a licensee; you're the one-and-only copyright-owner. So you're the only person who can develop and distribute enhancements without releasing the corresponding new source. And that gives you an opportunity to monetize your enhanced versions, leaving the current gpl'ed version as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So go figure out some really cool, value-added enahncements that you think serious users would likely be willing to pay something for. (And don't forget my 15% commission for suggesting the idea:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6534" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T10:10:32.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7627" CreationDate="2018-11-26T23:42:15.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to suggest revisiting support &amp;amp; services as a business model.  It works.  It worked to fund my previous project, and it worked for my current employer (a $5b company that just got acquired for $34b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, balancing improved documentation and automation against potential lost services revenue is annoying.  However, my experience in three different companies has been that customer demands are insatiable, and as soon as you automate away one headache they will find another one for you to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard part about the support &amp;amp; services model is that you have to split your time between working on customer problems and working on improving the software. Speaking from my previous, proprietary software company experience, though, this is true for any software business that has customers, even ones that collect license fees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good thing about support &amp;amp; services is that it keeps you in close contact with your user base, which means that you have a much better idea which bugs and missing features need to be addressed soonest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caveat: Support &amp;amp; Services works well as a business model for infrastructure software, enterprise software, and things like storage.  It works a lot less well for software marketed to developers, or personal end-user software.  In both of those cases, your user base is more likely to do without than to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T23:42:15.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T03:30:03.493" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Background: I asked this question to a statistical research audience on CrossValidated but was suggested that here might be more appropriate, so re-posting; keen for any tips!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spatial analysis (and no doubt, any research field) we often work with a broad range of data and software libraries, increasingly open source.  These are all associated with various licence conditions. I feel that my current approaches for tracking data and software provenance and licence agreements should be improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditional reference management software like Endnote or Zotero is one option, although they seem better geared for managing document references. I have also explored some other approaches such as FOSSA (run by the people behind &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/&lt;/a&gt;), although this seems specifically geared for software development more than research, and in practice I was unable to get it working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I predominantly use Python and R for programming analyses; the latter is able to generate a BibTeX citation for libraries and using the function &lt;code&gt;citation()&lt;/code&gt;, which is great but it doesn't output licence information (which is viewable from the CRAN url).  I am unaware of a similar function for Python (which has similar data available on pypi.org).  I could write R or Python functions to do this task, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!  Surely this exists already?  But I can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other approaches which sound promising - this &lt;a href=&quot;https://open-science-training-handbook.gitbook.io/book/open-science-basics/open-research-data-and-materials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Science Training Book&lt;/a&gt; notes some resources like DataTags (framework for data management, facilitating decisions around data sharing) described in an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://techscience.org/a/2015101601/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;publication&lt;/a&gt; by Sweeney et al. from 2015, but their site datatags.org is no longer accessible.  Also from 2015, Nicholas Car from CSIRO appears to have published on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://confluence.csiro.au/public/PROMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PROMS provenance management system&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CSIRO-enviro-informatics/proms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code available&lt;/a&gt;;  this looks like it could be tied in with my Python workflows, although it sounds like it might be challenging for my less technical colleagues to work with (but I will give it a go).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise I'm conflating a few things here (reference management for data, software, and management of licence agreements), but these seem quite related and have important implications for how research findings are disseminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do you have any advice for management of research resources (in particular, data and software libraries, their licence agreements and other provenance metadata) in an environment where we are striving towards 'open science'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13727" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T03:30:03.493" Title="How do you manage provenance metadata and licence conditions for the data and software packages you use in your research?" Tags="|license-compatibility|software|project-management|open-data|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T22:04:03.953" Score="2" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr, how can I bundle a gratis but closed-source game in an otherwise BSD 2 clause licensed free software project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I develop a free software project which is licensed under the BSD 2 clause license. As an easter egg, I'd like to include a small game in it. The developer of the game has published it as a binary available free of charge from his website, and there is no license or source provided. I am planning to contact him for permission to redistribute the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the developer is happy for me to redistribute the binary, but wants his game to remain closed-source, what would be a good choice of license for him to agree to release it as? Basically something that says &quot;copyright blah blah, redistribution in binary form is allowed&quot; would be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, is this compatible with my project being licensed under BSD two-clause license? Does the fact that BSD license allows source redistribution mean that someone getting a hold of the game's source would be allowed to redistribute it, conflicting with the developer's desire for it to remain closed source (in the event someone stole the source or something)? Does it conflict with my project even being BSD licensed for it to include a closed-source binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13734" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T21:03:15.500" Title="Licensing a closed-source game to allow redistribution in an otherwise open-source project" Tags="|bsd|binaries|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T09:21:59.067" Score="-1" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have images in my WordPress theme that I got from Unsplash or Pexels a year or so ago, when their license was more permissive (GPL compatible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast forward to today: their licenses changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to update the license on my theme for these images, or do the old license for these images still apply (since I've downloaded them at the time where their license was, say CC0)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that with certain OS libraries you can just use the version where their license was different (v1.0.0 was GPL, but v2.1.0 is MIT), but with images, it's a bit different since it's still the same image (no versioning aside the date of download).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are license changes in this case retroactive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13737" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T07:37:50.003" Title="Does license change on images has retroactive effect?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7675" CreationDate="2018-11-29T09:36:33.763" Score="0" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://referencesource.microsoft.com/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS-RSL&lt;/a&gt; contains multiple references to the term &quot;company&quot;, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Reference use&quot; means use of the software &lt;strong&gt;within your company&lt;/strong&gt; as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software, and specifically excludes the right to distribute the software &lt;strong&gt;outside of your company&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company is defined as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Your company&quot; means the company you worked for when you downloaded the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that imply that people who are unemployed or work in a wholly different sector are not affected by the &quot;Reference Use&quot; condition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user13738" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T07:41:55.720" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T07:41:55.720" Title="What is the meaning of the term &quot;company&quot; in MS-RSL?" Tags="|licensing|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T16:57:30.747" Score="-2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is the owner of code uploaded from a personal account to a private Bitbucket repository and there is no license defined in the code, or there is only the name of the author in the header of the code? (based on that there is no any signed contract between the repository owner and the code owner)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13742" LastEditorUserId="13742" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T17:21:34.440" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T21:22:09.740" Title="Bitbucket code ownership" Tags="|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7663" CreationDate="2018-11-29T18:23:14.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 2-clause BSD license is a permissive license, so from that side there is no expectation that the license is incompatible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There is a possibility that the license of the binary-only code forbids combining it with open-source software, which would cause an incompatibility, but that is not very likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent confusion, you should make it clear that different parts of the application are distributed under different license terms (and which terms apply to which part). Then you have immediately side-stepped the issue of people trying to apply the BSD license to the non-open-source portion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-11-29T18:23:14.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7664" CreationDate="2018-11-30T07:37:50.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://pixabay.com/en/service/terms/#usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pixabay specifies CC0&lt;/a&gt;, both &lt;a href=&quot;https://unsplash.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unsplash&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pexels.com/photo-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pexels&lt;/a&gt; show less formal license information that allows any use as long as it isn't in direct competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three sites use a license that is more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive&lt;/a&gt; than the GPL, if any images were previously available under a different license, the current one would appear to be less restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the current license terms conflict in some way with your usage, it will be a matter of &quot;Can you prove that you got the images at an earlier time under different terms?&quot; If you can't prove when you got the images and the terms you agreed to at the time, you are better off adjusting to the current terms, either by adjusting your credits or replacing the relevant images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your description sounds like you should have no issues with the current terms of either site. While neither site requires credit to be given, it is appreciated. Personally, I would update the credits to reflect the current terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T07:37:50.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7670" CreationDate="2018-11-30T14:54:45.203" Score="5" ViewCount="1696" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project and started from some GitHub repository, licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preamble is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2018 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, &lt;strong&gt;there is no copyright holder name&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Once I publish my code, derived from the MIT licensed one, what are my obligations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe I have to include the full text of the MIT license. Is this correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I add my name as copyright holder? Or do I have to replicate the license as is?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13746" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T10:09:18.447" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T10:09:18.447" Title="How should I use software under the MIT Licence without copyright holder?" Tags="|mit|github|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7669" CreationDate="2018-11-30T15:31:53.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must not change or falsify a copyright notice. So you can't just add your name here. However, if you modify the software in accordance to the license so that you have part of the copyright of the software, you may add a separate copyright notice like &quot;Copyright 2018 Tom&quot; above it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, a copyright notice always names the copyright holder. This is important ~70 years from now to determine when the copyright expires. Without the name of the copyright holder this might be an anonymous work, which is still protected by copyright. This does not affect the validity of the license, and you can use it as normal. As the license explains, you must keep a copy of the copyright notice and the license in all versions of this software, even if you modify the code, even if you license your modifications differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to contact the holder of the repository where you found that code to ask them to clarify this copyright notice. Probably, they themselves are the copyright holder. If they don't want to give their real name, it is fine if they use a pseudonym such as their GitHub user name. You would usually use open a GitHub issue for this, but you may also find their email address in the commits (you must clone the repository for this, as GitHub does not display the email address in their web interface).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T15:31:53.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7666" CreationDate="2018-11-30T21:22:09.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unsure whether you're asking who has the copyright or what you can do with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this isn't a work-for-hire and assuming the copyright hasn't been transferred, the code belongs to the person or people who wrote it,  so presumably to the author.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you apparently have no license, you can't do anything with the code, except read it in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T21:22:09.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T16:43:22.537" Score="3" ViewCount="1378" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is django-auth-kerberos (MIT) which I want to cherry-pick as initial implementation and include+modify as a plugin to python-social-auth/social-core (BSD).  Does the MIT license permit this? Are there examples from other projects that did this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Backstory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to re-use the original kerberos implementation and tests, retaining all copyright attributions, commit authorship info, etc and subsequently modify them to work in the context of Python Social Auth because this is what we use and don't want to add yet another auth library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on sending a PR to PSA where the first commit will be the original kerberos implementation so the history is visible and the 2nd commit will be modifications to match the new framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13752" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T20:10:24.957" Title="Can I take MIT licensed code and distribute it under BSD?" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7673" CreationDate="2018-12-01T20:10:24.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can license your modified version of an MIT-licensed software under any variant of the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you  must still comply with the MIT license. This means that you must keep the original copyright notice and license intact. In that case the MIT license notice is merely informational and does not affect the licensing of your code. In such cases, it may be helpful to show your license, and the original directly under it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2018 Your Name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms ... BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Based on SomeOriginalSoftware (&lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://example.com/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2014–2017 Original Copyright Holder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, ... MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects use their project-wide LICENSE file to track extra license notices or differently-licensed components. For example, Python's license still includes licenses for older Python versions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/2.5/COPYRIGHT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pandoc's license&lt;/a&gt; is absolutely exemplary and tracks licensing and copyright status for individual files and folders, similar to the machine readable copyright files that most Debian packages have. The Apache 2.0 license even anticipates extra legal notices, which should be collected in a NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T20:10:24.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7665" CreationDate="2018-12-02T16:33:35.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This means that if you don't consider your (unemployed) self to be a company, or you don't consider your use of the software to be for reference use as per their definition, then you don't have a licence to copy and use it in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All licences are grants of rights over and above the default copyright position, which is essentially that you have none.  You can't say &quot;&lt;em&gt;the licence condition doesn't apply to me, therefore I am allowed to use it&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. It works the other way around - if a licence doesn't actually give you the needed permission to use the software, then by default you are not allowed to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T06:50:52.300" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T06:50:52.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-03T10:26:42.623" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, perhaps due to code's history, a project is released under several different licenses at the same time.  An example of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ranges-v3&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;strong&gt;What is the name for this practise?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear I'm not asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual-licensing / multi-licensing&lt;/a&gt;, which is when the recipient can choose which of several licenses to follow.  My question is about when the terms of several different licenses must &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; be followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13764" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T17:43:38.737" Title="What is it called when a project is released under several different licenses simultaneously?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7676" CreationDate="2018-12-03T17:43:38.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice you are referring to is &quot;using code written by others that is under a different license&quot;. This happens most frequently when you take code from other projects and incorporate that in your codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the readme file of the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the source code in this project are mine, and those are under the Boost Software License. Parts are taken from Alex Stepanov's Elements of Programming, Howard Hinnant's libc++, and from the SGI STL. Please see the attached LICENSE file and the CREDITS file for the licensing and acknowledgments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T17:43:38.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T16:05:56.987" Score="1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a proprietary closed-source project. In this project I use Qt5 under LGPL.&#xA;Now I want to add documentation to my project. Can I just add Qt Assistant into my distribution (under GPL3-EXCEPT, see bellow)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the website and the source code Qt Assistant is available under Commercial License and GPL with exceptions (aka Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception you may create a larger work which contains the&#xA;  output of this application and distribute that work under terms of&#xA;  your choice, so long as the work is not otherwise derived from or&#xA;  based on this application and so long as the work does not in itself&#xA;  generate output that contains the output from this application in its&#xA;  original or modified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, you have permission to combine this&#xA;  application with Plugins licensed under the terms of your choice, to&#xA;  produce an executable, and to copy and distribute the resulting&#xA;  executable under the terms of your choice. However, the executable&#xA;  must be accompanied by a prominent notice offering all users of the&#xA;  executable the entire source code to this application, excluding the&#xA;  source code of the independent modules, but including any changes you&#xA;  have made to this application, under the terms of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first exception is similar to the GCC Runtime Library Exception.&#xA;Let's focus on the exception no.2. Does it allow me to use Qt Assistant &quot;under the terms of my choice&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my sequence of thoughts:&#xA;I take &quot;this application&quot;(Qt Assistant),&#xA;I add a &quot;plugin&quot; to it(my doc files) and produce an &quot;executable&quot;.&#xA;Now I ship it under the terms of my choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that stops me is the word &quot;Plugins&quot;. What is a Plugin in this particular context? Qt Assistant doesn't have a plugin system in C++/Qt meaning - dll/so/dylib library. Qt uses the exact same terms for other tools: Designer, Linguist with lupdate, lrelease etc.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt/qttools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/qt/qttools&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13770" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T16:05:56.987" Title="Qt Assistant under GPL3 + Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0" Tags="|gpl-3|exceptions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7624" CreationDate="2018-12-05T01:22:50.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;do whatever they want with it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective this is great. If they are able to build something with foreign code this means that the code has some quality. I think, if their own use case is followed by a modification, the question to me is how to make the contribution step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mentoring, documentation, communication channels. When people know you, they like you or drop the project. If they are in touch with you they are more likely to succeed in a modification and as such to contribute. Community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using a commonly known way to contribute - like Git, GitHub/GitLab, ... . Plus: You can see your forks and pull in the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giving up control. Invite people to commit to your project. You can always revert and throw them out. It also involves non-technical communication. It is a mental step for you to say what &quot;my code&quot; means and let go. Clear governance processes like &lt;a href=&quot;http://hintjens.com/blog:93&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CCCC&lt;/a&gt; help to communicate the rights of people to the code base. When the code is theirs as much as yours, joining forces is the easier option, if mutual trust exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;instead of contributing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between contributing and giving you the code. If they modify your code and pass that on, this might already be a contribution. It is not a feed-back contribution into the code you control but improves other people's lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question was how to prevent something. Trying my thinking in a non-violent way is: How to nourish what I would like to see? So, I did not really answer your question of how to prevent people from doing something which they may have good reason to do but how to enable them to do the things I would like to see them doing: Contribute. If you do not blame them for not contributing back but find the reasons why they fail to do so, there might be more chance to see them contribute. (Sorry for the unasked advice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastEditorUserId="9464" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T01:30:07.323" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T01:30:07.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7585" CreationDate="2018-12-05T02:07:13.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you like to stay out of trouble, I think you do not need to do much. Nobody is hunting small projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like to make it according to what the other people would like you to do, you can do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kivy is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kivy/kivy/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licensed&lt;/a&gt;. Include the license in the files. Create an about page like all programs have it and include the license there to read or any other way to read it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pillow license&lt;/a&gt; looks just like it with some modifications. You can also enable users to read this license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, what I do is allow people to read the license texts. Licenses like the GPLv3 have a small text at the bottom so you do not need to show the whole license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like the users to stay out of trouble, grant them a license. Best, choose a well known one as mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7596/9464&quot;&gt;chicks&lt;/a&gt;. If you do not grant a license to them, they use your code illegally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9464" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T02:07:13.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7683" CreationDate="2018-12-05T10:42:27.380" Score="11" ViewCount="21538" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently released some projects on GitHub and its catching people's attention(I had released earlier too but they were just for learning and didn't carry much weight).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think I made a big mistake. I was of the impression that &lt;em&gt;just including the &lt;strong&gt;raw&lt;/strong&gt; copy of LICENSE template that GitHub provides would be enough&lt;/em&gt;(?).&lt;br&gt;&#xA; But somebody told me that &lt;strong&gt;my source files were unlicensed&lt;/strong&gt;. This was strange to know. So I started reading up and I think I may have to include the License on top of all of my source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But that just seems like such a waste. &lt;em&gt;I mean the GNU GPLv3 license is 100s of lines long.&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project is Python based. It has the usual source files(scripts and &lt;code&gt;__init__.py&lt;/code&gt;), &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;MANIFEST.in&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;TODO.md&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTION.md&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In what files do I include the licence?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do I have to include the whole of the LICENSE or only a part of it?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If possible could you please demonstrate it with an example perhaps specific to GNU GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13776" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T16:41:08.857" Title="What is the correct way to add license information to source code?" Tags="|licensing|github|license-notice|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7682" CreationDate="2018-12-05T10:47:22.963" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No example is required, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL itself&lt;/a&gt; tells you how to do it, down at the bottom in the section entitled &quot;&lt;em&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, they recommend you include your copyright notice and three short paragraphs at the beginning of each source file, and a copy of the entire GPL somewhere in the source tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T10:47:22.963" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7656" CreationDate="2018-12-05T16:01:02.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reviewing the associated licenses I came to the conclusion that while I could not directly distribute the GPLv2 licensed material within the MIT licensed project, there was a workaround that would allow me to accomplish the same result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including the GPLv2 licensed files would interfere with the MIT license of the project and I would be forcing my project to re-license under the GPLv2, which I did not want. MIT licensed materials can be used compatibly in a GPLv2 licensed material, but not vice-versa. I came to this conclusion by looking the information listed by GNU.org on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Expat license&lt;/a&gt; (same thing as the MIT license) as well as the answer to this Software Engineering exchange question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/228472/include-gplv2-licensed-data-in-mit-licensed-project&quot;&gt;Include GPLv2 licensed data in MIT licensed project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My workaround was to independently redistribute the GPLv2 files (without modification and in full license compliance). Those files I needed are simply downloaded at build-time on the user's machine under the terms of the GPLv2 and are passed as input to the Javac compiler itself (not as a code dependency) via the MIT licensed build script. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the MIT licensed project simply distributes a build script which downloads the GPLv2 licensed files, and the files themselves are thus indirectly redistributed, it means I can still distribute the MIT licensed project while using the GPLv2 files at build time. This workaround is only possible because of the classpath exception within the openJDK project/Zulu distribution's version of the GPLv2 license. If I didn't have a license with that exception then the independent MIT module/project might still be required to be GPLv2 licensed as well as any output dependent on the GPLv2 licensed material being GPLv2 licensed. That would mean that while my build script and source code would be MIT licensed, I would have to license the binaries as GPLv2. Fortunately that was all avoided due to complying with the classpath exception for independent modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My MIT licensed build script downloads the redistributed GPLv2 licensed JAR file and compiles my MIT licensed code using that GPLv2 JAR on the classpath of the compiler to produce an MIT licensed JAR file containing the compiled form of my MIT licensed source code. My source code does not interact with GPLv2 licensed code directly or indirectly nor does it depend on or import the GPLv2 code. The GPLv2 JAR is used strictly at build time and then only as an independent module passed to the maven-compiler-plugin execution of the Javac compiler using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/tools/javac.html#GUID-AEEC9F07-CB49-4E96-8BC7-BCC2C7F725C9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;-Xbootclasspath&lt;/code&gt; option&lt;/a&gt;. This qualified for the classpath exception of the GPLv2 license and thus is fully compliant with the MIT licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13711" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T16:01:02.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7682" CreationDate="2018-12-05T16:35:24.097" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From a legal perspective:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should attach licensing information to a file in such a way that you cannot successfully deny that you intended to license the file under those terms. Suppose, at some point in the future, you attempt to claim in a court of law that you did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; license some particular file under a particular license. The valid methods of attaching licensing information to a file include the set of all methods that would render such a future denial untenable in court, based on the decision of a judge or jury. This is ultimately a subjective determination, but it's the only determination that matters, legally speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From a community perspective:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should aim for clarity, and try to maximize survival of licensing information through multiple generations of reuse. For this reason, the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoticeInSourceFile&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recommends including licensing information on a per-file basis&lt;/a&gt;. If a file is transplanted from your project into another project, you want licensing information to travel with it easily. A notice within the file is the most surefire way to reduce accidental confusion of licensing terms. Per-file notices also help when a project uses different licenses for different files, making it immediately obvious how any particular file is licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another GPL FAQ item&lt;/a&gt; talks about what is legally optimal versus legally necessary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it enough just to put a copy of the GNU GPL in my repository?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just putting a copy of the GNU GPL in a file in your repository does not explicitly state that the code in the same repository may be used under the GNU GPL. Without such a statement, it's not entirely clear that the permissions in the license really apply to any particular source file. An explicit statement saying that eliminates all doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A file containing just a license, without a statement that certain other files are covered by that license, resembles a file containing just a subroutine which is never called from anywhere else. The resemblance is not perfect: lawyers and courts might apply common sense and conclude that you must have put the copy of the GNU GPL there because you wanted to license the code that way. Or they might not. Why leave an uncertainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement should be in each source file. A clear statement in the program's README file is legally sufficient as long as that accompanies the code, but it is easy for them to get separated. Why take a risk of uncertainty about your code's license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T16:41:08.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7710" CreationDate="2018-12-05T17:20:25.923" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a survey using Google Forms. I &lt;em&gt;plan&lt;/em&gt; (if I can find time) to distribute the dataset (or possibly a sanitized, trimmed, and if needed anonymized version of the data) under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0&lt;/a&gt;, similar to how it was done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Stack Overflow Survey&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I best announce this? There's a standard text for the license, but is there any standard text for the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I could think of is just writing something up myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that your data will be shared as part of a (possibly sanitized and trimmed) data set to be published under the Open Database License 1.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but, even though the above mostly relies on the well-thought-out license text, the little announcement was created just by myself, and I might be missing obvious caveats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="451" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T01:53:19.053" Title="How to announce data entered in a survey might be distributed under the ODbL?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7688" CreationDate="2018-12-05T18:40:24.003" Score="4" ViewCount="3789" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/V-Sense/DeepNormals/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have found&lt;/a&gt; the following license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [name]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please read carefully the following terms and conditions and any accompanying documentation before you download and/or use this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors hereby grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, free of charge right to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and sublicense the Software for the sole purpose of performing non-commercial scientific research, non-commercial education, or non-commercial artistic projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other use, in particular any use for commercial purposes, is prohibited. This includes, without limitation, incorporation in a commercial product, use in a commercial service, or production of other artefacts for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You understand and agree that the authors are under no obligation to provide either maintenance services, update services, notices of latent defects, or corrections of defects with regard to the Software. The authors nevertheless reserve the right to update, modify, or discontinue the Software at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. You agree to cite the [someone] in [something].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/V-Sense/DeepNormals/issues/2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;asking the author(s)&lt;/a&gt; it seems they also don't really know what license this is, and they've just pointed out it is actually somewhat common in it's usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually it seems to be used &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/thmoa/videoavatars#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this project&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to be a project by someone from the &amp;quot;Technische Universität Braunschweig, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_University_of_Braunschweig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a well known German university&lt;/a&gt;. Thus, I think they should know what they are doing there…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be popular in the scientific community in general, e.g. it is also used &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davidstutz/extended-berkeley-segmentation-benchmark#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, although the BSD 3-clause license is also in the repo and thus &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davidstutz/extended-berkeley-segmentation-benchmark/issues/5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I am not sure about what applies&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Or also &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davidstutz/probabilistic-pca#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davidstutz/hierarchical-graph-based-video-segmentation#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projects&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;em&gt;David Stutz&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a name for that license? Is it somewhat &amp;quot;official&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, could one copy that license and just use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, I would try to ask now, if it is good to use. But as I know, this subjective view may not be good for Stack Exchange, I'll just ask whether you see any obvious/inherit inconsistencies or other bad things that would make it totally unsuitable. (I don't want to promote it here, if it is bad.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Before confusion comes up: I know this is not an (OSI or FSF approved) open-source/free software license. It obviously restricts the &amp;quot;Fields of Endeavor&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point 6&lt;/a&gt;) and violates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;freedom 0&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. However, as it is used in open-source software, I guess this forum is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5802" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T12:05:17.960" Title="What &quot;non-commercial&quot; license is that?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7687" CreationDate="2018-12-05T20:03:05.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that the license appears to be a modified BSD 2-clause license, with non-commercial language added, and that the license is not Open Source.  This is similar to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://omnetpp.org/intro/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academic Public License&lt;/a&gt;&quot; created (and, as far as I know, exclusively used) by Omnet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this license has never been submitted to an approving body (since it would not be approved), I suspect that it has no &quot;official name&quot;. My guess is that the license was created by a professor or student at a large European university, and has been copied ever since across European academia.  I can find no mention of it in the OSI archives, but since they are not very searchable, I may have missed something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; conflict with the standard 3-clause BSD license.  Neither BSD license prohibits adding extra licensing conditions and restrictions to the Work; this is why they are said to be &quot;liberal&quot; licenses.  So I suspect that the project you're inquiring about was based on upstream BSD code, and is including the original BSD license because they are required to for that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you go about adopting any code under this license, it's worth considering &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the OSI does not consider restrictions on fields of endeavor to be Open Source.  &quot;Non-commercial&quot; is a slippery term, and invites upstream contributors to sue you over differences of opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T20:03:05.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7687" CreationDate="2018-12-05T21:55:11.150" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license for public distribution should be clear as to what people can do with it.  &quot;Non-commercial&quot; isn't clear.  There's room for a lot of disagreement about what &quot;commercial&quot; means.  Can I redistribute it on an ad-supported website?  Can I use it to prototype a commercial activity, if I discard all the software before going commercial?  How about if I play around with it, get an idea for a startup based on it, or what I've done?  If I'm faculty at a University, can I use it in scientific research (since research is one of the things I'm paid for)?  If I'm doing consulting on that research in my off-time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For practical purposes, this wouldn't be all that bad if there was one copyright holder, and that person was reasonably prompt about clarification.  However, the license encourages people to take the software and modify it, so that it's likely to reach someone with lots of copyright holders, any of which could take legal action, including (in the US) a DMCA takedown notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is less clear than simply non-commercial, since it allows only non-commercial scientific research, education, and artistic projects.  Where are those lines drawn?  If I use it to get to understand a concept, does that count as educational?  Can it be used in a university classroom, since the students have paid money to be there?  Exactly what is an artistic project?  And, if I'm a professional artist (or have art as a sideline), and publish an artistic project, and gain some reputation or exposure from it, have I used it commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For almost all purposes one would want to use the software for and show it in public, there's potential arguments about it being allowed, and with dozens of contributors it takes only one to think one stepped over the line to cause problems.  I'd have to seriously consider whether using the software was worth the risk, and software that I had a solid license for (whether open source or paid for) would seem a much safer course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while is isn't actually inconsistent (it's not clear enough for that), there are good reasons to shy away from using software with such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T21:55:11.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7691" CreationDate="2018-12-06T04:11:03.477" Score="4" ViewCount="2255" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Oracle's shuttering of their Java runtime distribution (the January release will be the last version available for commercial use without a paid license) many people are recommending the use of one of various distributions based on OpenJDK, which was released under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 with the Classpath Exception&lt;/a&gt;.  For example, I might consider installing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html#x64_win&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AdoptOpenJDK JRE&lt;/a&gt; in place of Oracle's runtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, taken at face value, the GPL doesn't appear to allow the use of the OpenJDK runtime to run a third-party closed-source Java application, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this FAQ entry&lt;/a&gt;.  If I'm reading it correctly, you would be fine provided the Java application in question does not use JNI or any similar mechanism, but of course I have no way of telling whether or not that is the case for any given third-party application with a dependency on the Java runtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applications developed with JDK 11 should ship with their own runtime built in, but many older applications depend on having a Java runtime already installed.  In a large enterprise, replacing all of these applications is likely to be implausible (or at the very least very difficult and quite possibly rather expensive) which leaves us in a bit of a pickle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can a Java runtime derived from OpenJDK be legally used to replace the Oracle Java runtime when running third-party non-GPL-compatible applications?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13778" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T17:10:12.517" Title="Can the OpenJDK runtime be used to run third-party Java applications?" Tags="|gpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7690" CreationDate="2018-12-06T17:10:12.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that under a plain GPL license, a runtime like the JRE/JDK would only allow the use of open-source applications with a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the classpath exception to the GPL, which is used by OpenJDK, is designed exactly to ensure that the GPL requirements of the OpenJDK do not influence the license choices of Java applications that run on top of the OpenJDK code, as long as the two interoperate in the conventional way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that, yes an OpenJDK based runtime can be used as a replacement for the Oracle Java runtime without having to change the license on your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T17:10:12.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-07T10:01:43.217" Score="3" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine that there is this software, &lt;em&gt;FooBar&lt;/em&gt;, which is under the GPLv2 license. Then, in one of your unproductive Saturday afternoons, you modify, let's say a new module, that is a derivative work of &lt;em&gt;FooBar&lt;/em&gt;. Just to name it, you call your module &lt;em&gt;FooDisco&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is clear that if you personally use and run &lt;em&gt;FooDisco&lt;/em&gt;, you have no obligations to comply the GPL license to anyone on the Earth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, and we enter now in the core of the question, if you decide that your friend &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; is entitled to get a copy of your software (under &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; terms of GPLv2), is the rest of the world inheriting the permission as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the question more formal, what is the definition of &quot;make public a software&quot;, and who are the third parties to whom the GPLv2 addresses its concerns (point 2 of the GPLv2 license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, the software is public only when the public (so, everyone) has a mean to obtain the software in binary or source code form. If, for instance, the software is private (it stays on my computer), I can decide to give it to &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; (full GPLv2, with all rights) but deny to give anything (binary, source code) to &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;. If &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; gets the software through &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, no problem from my side (the GPLv2 allows to redistribute), but &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; can't pretend anything (I mean, can't pretend any compliance) from me, since I am compliant towards &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, and I have no obligations towards &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct? There are references for what I say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12656" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T10:22:27.280" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T17:24:16.047" Title="Selectively distribute a GPL program" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7692" CreationDate="2018-12-07T11:03:31.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but what you say seems correct to me.  The FSF's GPL FAQ has several relevant things to say on the matter.  Firstly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it confirms&lt;/a&gt; that you aren't obliged to give &lt;em&gt;FooDisco&lt;/em&gt; to anyone at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then goes on to clarify who you have obligations to if you choose to distribute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available &lt;strong&gt;to the program's users&lt;/strong&gt;, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note &quot;to the program's users&quot; (bold lettering mine).  Person A can demand GPL-licensed source from you, because you gave them the binary and so the GPL gives them that right.  Person B can't come along and demand a copy from you, in either binary or source forms, just because you gave one to A, and not having either binary or source, they aren't users.  The FAQ clarifies that they have no rights under the GPL to demand &lt;em&gt;FooDisco&lt;/em&gt; from you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I know someone has a copy of a GPL-covered program, can I demand they give me a copy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. The GPL gives a person permission to make and redistribute copies of the program if and when that person chooses to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If A chooses to give a copy to C, then A now has obligations to C with respect to source availability.  You have no obligation to C save that you cannot withdraw your implicit grant of GPL rights to them.  The FAQ is also explicit about that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GPLv2 says that modified versions, if released, must be “licensed … to all third parties.” Who are these third parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Section 2 says that modified versions you distribute must be licensed to all third parties under the GPL. “All third parties” means absolutely everyone — &lt;strong&gt;but this does not require you to do anything physically for them&lt;/strong&gt;. It only means they have a license from you, under the GPL, for your version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, my bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Amon makes a good point about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the source was made available to A.  If you simply gave it to him/her, your obligations end there.  If you decide to go for GPL v2 s3b (written offer of source code), then others can take advantage of this offer.  For simplicity's sake, don't do that; give A the source, and be done with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T17:24:16.047" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T17:24:16.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7692" CreationDate="2018-12-07T12:53:31.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can avoid obligations to third parties if you give your friend the corresponding source code, and not just a binary. But the GPL is a &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; license: it gives permission to everyone, not just your friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you give another person a copy of the program, and you can only pass along copies under the terms of the GPL, then this other person has received the right under the terms of the GPL to make further copies, or share that software publicly (GPLv2 sections 2(b), 6; GPLv3 section 10 “Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients”). So once you give out one GPL-covered copy, you cannot prevent the software from being available publicly. The whole world can potentially acquire a license from you through the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this doesn't necessarily give you any obligations to the public. This depends on how you decided to conform with the GPL when you gave that other person the first copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you already gave them the source code (or binaries along with the corresponding source code) you don't have any obligations to third parties. (GPLv2 sections 2 and 3a; GPLv3 sections 4, 5, 6a)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if your software is covered by the GPLv2, you may provide a &lt;em&gt;written offer&lt;/em&gt;, valid for at least three years, to give &lt;strong&gt;any third party&lt;/strong&gt; a copy of the source code. (GPLv2 section 3(b)). Section 3(c) doesn't apply because you made modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, if your software is covered by the GPLv3, you may either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a written offer as in the GPLv2 case (GPLv3 section 6(b)); or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;offer download of the source from a server (GPLv3 section 6(d)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the slight awkwardness that GPLv3 6(a)–6(b) only apply to physical media, not electronic media like email. However, I interpret section 6 so that you already satisfy the license conditions if you accompany binaries together with the source code, and that 6(a)–6(e) only offer alternatives for providing them separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the meaning of &lt;em&gt;publication&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; ultimately does not depend on the GPL but on your local copyright laws. You can only pass along copies if you are the sole copyright holder, if you have a license, or if you can make use of a copyright exception (e.g. personal copies within a household or family might be exempt). In this particular case, I assume that you would need a license, and therefore have to comply with all requirements of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 in particular doesn't talk about “making something public” but applies conditions when you “copy or and distribute” or “distribute or publish” covered software. The GPLv3 clarifies this by defining the terms “to propagate” and “to convey”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you [make you liably for copyright infringement], except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T12:53:31.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7697" CreationDate="2018-12-07T20:11:11.143" Score="4" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to prevent a specific company or specific employee in that company from using an open-source project that uses GPLv2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give more details, the project is based on another open-source project that uses the GPLv2 license. However, the new spin-off project adds new features to the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is possible, what are the implications for such an action? Also do I need I need to justify the prevention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13789" LastEditorUserId="13789" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T20:37:39.210" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T12:52:45.853" Title="Preventing a company in GPLv2 license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7695" CreationDate="2018-12-07T21:46:00.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no provisions for barring a company or individual or purpose in any version of the GPL.  You could write your own license, but in that case you couldn't use the other open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gnu &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of Free Software&lt;/a&gt; includes the ability to use, the ability to modify, the ability to distribute the original, and the ability to distribute your changes.  The use is for any purpose.  The freedom to redistribute applies to anyone with a copy, and they can redistribute to whoever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to give a copy of your new project to anyone, but anyone you give a copy to can give it to anyone else they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T21:46:00.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7695" CreationDate="2018-12-07T21:46:26.507" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a licensing term is incompatible with the definitions of free software and open source software, which may not discriminate against persons or groups to use, modify, or share the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your own software (either completely original or based on permissively licensed software), it is legally possible to add such a term to your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For software that is derivative of someone else's GPL-licensed software, you cannot impose such a term, because that would be an &quot;additional restriction&quot; which you may not include in the licensing terms of a downstream derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T12:52:45.853" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T12:52:45.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T18:17:29.530" Score="1" ViewCount="3357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found code provided on GitHub under an MIT license. I have modified the code to be useful for my application. In order to give proper credit to the original author/developer, how can I provide the citation in a technical paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Nandu" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T01:01:19.150" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T09:26:41.770" Title="How do I cite MIT licensed software in a research publication?" Tags="|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7698" CreationDate="2018-12-09T09:26:41.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://zenodo.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zenodo&lt;/a&gt; could be your best bet. You can create a citation with DOI using Zenodo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people prefer to cite a software using &lt;code&gt;misc&lt;/code&gt; tag in bibtex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;@Misc{Software_abc2018,&#xA;  title         = {{Software/Tool name}},&#xA;  howpublished  = {\url{http://www.software_url.com/}},&#xA;  year          = {2018},&#xA;  note          = {[Online; accessed 8-Dec-2018]},&#xA;  key           = {software_abc},&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13798" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T09:26:41.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7702" CreationDate="2018-12-10T04:19:30.780" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are creating a Japanese Morphological Analyzer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ku-nlp/jumanpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ku-nlp/jumanpp&lt;/a&gt;), but it needs a segmentation dictionary to perform the analysis. &#xA;We want to license the analyzer under a permissive license (we chose Apache 2.0 at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We use some Wikipedia and Wiktionary data for enriching the segmentation dictionary in addition to our internal entries. We want the overall dictionary to be permissively licensed as well, so it could be used commercially without problems and backward thoughts. What are our options for licensing the dictionary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13801" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T10:20:03.143" Title="Licensing a segmentation dictionary derived from CC SA-BY source (Wikipedia)" Tags="|license-recommendation|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7701" CreationDate="2018-12-10T10:20:03.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Database rights (i.e. rights gained for creating and organizing a collection of data independently of the rights of each entry) and the legalities of data mining are &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; jurisdiction-dependent. In some jurisdictions you may not need to acquire a license for source data used for text mining (e.g. under the &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; doctrine). Others make no particular exceptions, so you would be bound by the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 does not have any provisions for text mining. That license allows you to create and reproduce &lt;em&gt;adaptions&lt;/em&gt; as long as these adaptions are licensed under the same license, or a later version of the same license. I am not sure whether the definition of &lt;em&gt;adaptions&lt;/em&gt; can include databases or the results from text mining.&#xA;The CC-BY-SA 4.0 does consider Similar Rights incl. database rights, but you cannot directly use Wikipedia content under CC 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your applicable jurisdictions allow the text mining you are in the clear. At the very least you want to avoid any infringement of copyrights and similar rights in your local jurisdiction, but you may also want to avoid infringement in jurisdictions where the data set will be published (effectively anywhere in the world). You may be able to license the database as a whole under whatever terms you choose, regardless of the licenses of entries within the database. Understanding how these laws interact may require professional legal help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the applicable jurisdictions only allow data mining for non-commercial purposes, you may not be able to perform the mining as the open-source project might be used commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absent any such permissions, you have to conform with the CC license you have received.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 license does not directly allow for text mining. But the intention of the license clearly is to allow any derivative uses. We can therefore consider databases created through text mining of CC-BY-SA 3.0 content similar to adaptions of CC-BY-SA 3.0 content.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may only publish these adaptions under a same or compatible license, in particular CC-BY-SA versions 3.0 or 4.0. Here, 4.0 may be preferable as it discusses database rights explicitly. Apache 2.0 or other permissive license are &lt;em&gt;not compatible&lt;/em&gt; in this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons wiki has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ page about databases&lt;/a&gt; which may be worth reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T10:20:03.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7706" CreationDate="2018-12-11T15:27:12.513" Score="3" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a library that I would like to use in my project &quot;as-is&quot;, but it is licensed under the Reciprocal Public License. As far as I understand it, you have to make your source code using that library open-source and publish it somewhere for people to find. This seems quite restrictive (as was the intent in creating this license). Is there any type of license that RPL is compatible with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I, for example, use a library that's licensed under LGPL, Apache2 or MIT that does some task for which it needs the RPL'ed library or would that library itself have to be licensed under RPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind you, I do not want to change anything in the original library or redistribute it. Just use it to perform a certain task without having to make the other eleventeen tasks of my software public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13812" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:40:56.853" Title="Compatibility of RPL (Reciprocal Public License) with other licenses" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T17:00:25.090" Score="3" ViewCount="1070" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in using the iTextSharp C# library in a very minimal way.  We have some pdf templates (think &quot;Certificates of Achievement&quot;) for which we need to fill three fields: an ID, date, and name.  I would like to write an ASP.NET page in which these values would be posted, the pdf template filled and formatted (via iTextSharp) and served to the user.  This functionality is a small piece of a larger code base, built on very old, home-grown code unique to our institution and environment.  If this single page uses iTextSharp under AGPL, what am provisions am I obligated to make?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this mean that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the code base I am maintaining needs to become open-source under AGPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just the single ASP.NET page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the page is never displayed to the user (they are just prompted to download a pdf), do I still need to place some kind of contractual language in the comments of the code of the page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13814" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T05:15:38.310" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:50:26.767" Title="How do I adhere to AGPL Licensing restrictions (iTextSharp)?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4750" CreationDate="2018-12-12T13:23:13.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If some evil developer want to steal my code and use it in a closed-source software, how could I be aware of it, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various tools that can be used to examine software binaries for indications of copying.  For example, the &lt;code&gt;strings&lt;/code&gt; command on a UNIX / Linux machine will reveal literal strings (versions, error messages) in a native code binary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could run these tools yourself ... modulo constraints on reverse engineering that might be imposed by the binary's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, someone else could &quot;tip you off&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and how could I prove it since I don't have access to his source code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a well founded belief ... and a good lawyer ... you could launch a breach of copyright lawsuit against the suspected IP thief.  As part of the discovery process, your opponent can be compelled to release the source code to a court appointed expert.  The expert would be instructed to identify evidence of copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Historically, you could also assign copyright of your GPL software to the FSF, and they would take action to defend it.  I don't know if that still applies ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13818" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T13:23:13.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7703" CreationDate="2018-12-12T14:06:34.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have a misunderstanding regarding &quot;license compatibility&quot;. The notion of 'compatibility' with respect to licensing is roughly defined by the GNU project in their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to combine two programs (or substantial parts of them) into a&#xA;  larger work, you need to have permission to use both programs in this&#xA;  way. If the two programs' licenses permit this, they are &lt;strong&gt;compatible&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;  If there is no way to satisfy both licenses at once, they are&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;incompatible&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ - What does it mean to say a license is “compatible with the GPL?”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the question, say, &quot;Is RPL compatible with LGPL?&quot;, you need to ask whether you could combine the RPL-licensed program together with an LGPL-licensed program and still be able to satisfy the requirements of both licenses. As for the LGPL, satisfying its requirements implies that you must also distribute the source code to the LGPL parts to your customer, and you must generally separate the LGPL parts from other parts (e.g. by using dynamic linking) in a way that allows the end user to replace the LGPL parts if he so chooses (e.g. by allowing a user to replace the DLL files of the LGPL parts that you distributed with the user's own DLLs, if he chooses). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the RPL, you must follow what is in section 6.1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must make available, under the terms of&#xA;  this License, the Source Code of any Extensions that You Deploy, via an&#xA;  Electronic Distribution Mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RPL 1.5 License Text&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RPL defines &quot;Deploy&quot; and &quot;Extensions&quot; in a broad way, so that, for example, distributing RPL-licensed software within a company is clearly considered to be &quot;deployment&quot; according to the RPL.  Also, &quot;Extensions&quot; are defined quite broadly in the RPL, so that even separate programs are likely to be considered extensions by the license. In the (L)GPL, however, using software internal to an organization, even for commercial purposes, generally poses no additional obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPL is also quite broad when it says &quot;you must make [source code] available.&quot; If you read the license, it literally says that you must make it available to &quot;the software community&quot;. For the (L)GPL, the requirement to deliver source code (if you need to deliver it at all), only ever needs to be delivered to the person or organization that you distributed the software to in the first place (i.e. no distribution = no requirement to deliver source code). With the (L)GPL there is also the option to deliver binary-only versions with a &quot;Written Offer&quot; instead of the source code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is the RPL compatible with the LGPL? Technically, yes, because it is possible to satisfy the requirements of both licenses simultaneously. However, I think you actually wanted to ask something else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could I, for example, use a library that's licensed under LGPL, Apache2 or MIT that does some task for which it needs the RPL'ed library or would that library itself have to be licensed under RPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You basically want to ask: &lt;em&gt;Can I circumvent the RPL requirements by including software with a 'compatible' but different license together with an RPL-licensed program?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPL does not say you must license the other parts under the RPL as well, but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; require that you &quot;make [the Source Code] available [to the software community] of any 'Extensions'&quot;. The RPL defines &quot;Extensions&quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.5 &quot;Extensions&quot; means any Modifications, Derivative Works, or Required Components as those terms are defined in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RPL defines &quot;Required Components&quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.12 &quot;Required Components&quot; means any text, programs, scripts, schema, interface definitions, control files, or other works created by You&#xA;  which are required by a third party of average skill to successfully&#xA;  install and run Licensed Software containing Your Modifications, or to&#xA;  install and run Your Derivative Works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading of the above two sections means that if you combine an RPL-licensed program with any other software parts (programs, files, etc.) in any way such that one depends on the other in order to function, then you must release all parts &quot;to the software community&quot; as the RPL specifies. Basically, this means that you cannot 'circumvent' the requirements of the RPL simply by using an (L)GPL program (for example) in combination with it, even if the two licenses are 'compatible'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one possible 'loophole' you may see in the above definition of Required Components: if you include a component which is not created by &quot;You&quot; (say, a third party library), then that is not a Required Component according to the RPL, so it appears that the RPL does not require you to make the source code of that component available &quot;to the software community&quot;. However, even if a component is not a Required Component according to the 1.12 definition, it is still likely to be an &quot;Extension&quot; according to the 1.5 definition, since an Extension by definition also includes anything that is considered a Derivative Work according to U.S. copyright law, and compiled binary programs are definitely derivative works of the original (source code) that you compiled them from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't feel you can satisfy the requirements of the RPL (or any other license), you should not use any software with that license, no matter how you combine the parts.  Personally, I don't see how the RPL can be Open Source-approved, since its definition of &quot;Deploy&quot; in the license agreement depends on how you use the software (personal use or non-commercial use). However, the OSD prohibits a license from doing that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, [an Open Source license] may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T14:40:56.853" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:40:56.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7704" CreationDate="2018-12-12T14:50:26.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The crucial part is the remote network interaction clause in the AGPLv3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a modified version? This is explained in Section 0 “Definitions”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To &quot;modify&quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &quot;modified version&quot; of the earlier work or a work &quot;based on&quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL and its variants are typically interpreted so that they not only apply to single components, but on the scale of larger software systems, in particular on the scale of executable programs or processes. We can therefore reason:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your website software would load the AGPL-covered library (iTextSharp).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, your website is &lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt; the AGPL-covered library and is in this sense a &lt;em&gt;modified version&lt;/em&gt;. While you have not modified the library, it is the inclusion of the library into your software that creates a work based on the covered library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users interact with your website over a network (it is a website, after all).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, you would have to offer any visitors the complete Corresponding Source of the website. This includes any scripts etc. that are necessary to run the website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this sounds unattractive, you have the following alternatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not use the AGPL-covered library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acquire a different license for the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrate the library in a manner so that your website is not covered by the AGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point may be achieved if the library is used by a &lt;em&gt;separate process&lt;/em&gt; than your website, e.g. when the library is only used by a command line tool or a distinct microservice. Then only that program would be AGPL-covered, not your main website. It could still be argued that users are interacting remotely with that process because they trigger a PDF to be created for their download. You should therefore still offer the Corresponding Source for that program. The Corresponding Source does not include your template; you may keep that private in any scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:50:26.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7723" CreationDate="2018-12-12T23:59:48.940" Score="6" ViewCount="3229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to create a closed-source application using the LGPL licensing scheme for Qt if I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtdesigner-manual.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt Designer&lt;/a&gt; to generate its user interface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally thought this was possible until I saw this section in their &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.qt.io/licensing-comparison&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing comparison chart&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mVotc.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mVotc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tools open source licensing&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I still have some doubts, maybe this only applies to the Designer tool itself (in case I wanted to distribute it with my application) or just to the generated UI (xml files if I remember correctly)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13831" LastEditorUserId="13831" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T04:37:11.400" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:05:33.773" Title="Using Qt Designer to create UI design for closed source application" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7686" CreationDate="2018-12-13T01:53:19.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something like your suggested statement would be fine. All you need to do here is tell people that you intend to publish the non-sensitive parts of their responses under the ODBL, then link to it and let 'em decide if they're comfortable with that. If you want more formal phrasing, try something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Responses to this survey will be stripped of personal or sensitive information, then published in aggregate as a dataset licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Database License (v1.0)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T01:53:19.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7712" CreationDate="2018-12-13T13:58:11.440" Score="7" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a fork of an opensource project. &#xA;I'm planning to make significant changes to it and I will keep these changes on a git(hub) repository that is available to anyone. As such changes and a list of all contributors will be clearly visible to anyone.&#xA;I will also link to this repository in the readme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will keep the original copyright in the README obviously but my question is more: Is this way of tracking changes okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I don't really want to have to keep track of every single change I make to each individual source file manually (there would eventually be so many changes that some files would have more changes than code!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13834" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T18:15:26.907" Title="Is a git repository enough to show changes to the code for GNU-GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|github|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7711" CreationDate="2018-12-13T17:01:57.780" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, the GPL does not require you to indicate what specific changes you make to a GPL-licensed work. The GPLv3 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the GPLv2 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but the language here seems to require only a positive affirmation that modification did occur, acommpanied by data about when and by whom the modification was done. I don't read any suggestion that such a modification-notice mu.st detail the kinds of changes performed. I don't know of any case law about this, and I doubt there is any, since I would not expect an author of GPL'd work to follow through on a lawsuit about downstream modification messages not being specific enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read this requirement, it can be satisfied by a per-file statement like, &quot;This file was modified by Jane Doe in 2018.&quot; In fact, this is essentially what a copyright notice (&quot;Copyright 2018 Jane Doe&quot;) is, which the FSF encourages you to add to your file headers anyway. I suspect many people who modify GPL-licensed software forgo an explicit modification notice and directly rely on a copyright notice to satisfy the modification-notice requirement. (However, I cannot advise whether or not this is legally rigorous thing to do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T18:15:26.907" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T18:15:26.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8772" CreationDate="2018-12-14T02:36:25.437" Score="21" ViewCount="6694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zero-Clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; (also known as the Free Public License). A version of the BSD license that does not include any restrictions. I've looked for information regarding the license, but I could not find much information about it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comparison, I often use public domain licenses like &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; in my software, but I've been told of issues public domain causes when using software in countries that doesn't have the public domain (eg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1?&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sqlite having to sell licenses so people can use it&lt;/a&gt;). And so a license that gives total freedom to absolutely everyone seems very appealing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, I just want to put stuff on the internet and avoid as many legal issues as I can. Is there any issue with using 0BSD like there is with public domain licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13838" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T15:16:55.320" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T09:04:56.697" Title="Is there any reason to not use 0BSD?" Tags="|license-recommendation|public-domain|permissive|0bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6447" CreationDate="2018-12-14T02:40:27.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-webpack-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;license-webpack-plugin&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to add license information to the webpacked output, which should satisfy the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-license-crawler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;npm-license-crawler&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; does a pretty good job at consolidating all the licenses you dependencies use, including links to the original licenses, and you could just offer this output, either in CSV or JSON form as a download from your website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T02:40:27.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="590" CreationDate="2018-12-14T02:58:31.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most comprehensive data I'm aware of is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2017 Open Source Survey&lt;/a&gt; by GitHub. According to it, about a fifth of open source contributors have experienced a negative interaction in an open source project (e.g., rudeness, namecalling or outright harassment), and almost a half have witnessed such an interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T02:58:31.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7718" CreationDate="2018-12-14T17:41:10.217" Score="2" ViewCount="989" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a situation if I have a code licensed with GPL3, but no source arrived with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original source code is unavailable, either because the other part simply won't give it (violating GPL3 with it), or because it is lost, or disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In same cases (for example, in java .class-files), decompiling them to source and then continuiung the development from that point is a viable alternative, comparing to the re-implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be done legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I consider the .class-files as &quot;unintentionally obfuscated source code&quot;, what I actually &lt;em&gt;improve&lt;/em&gt; by decompiling it into a more useful form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T13:14:36.370" Title="Am I allowed to decompile a GPL3 software if I didn't get source with it?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7716" CreationDate="2018-12-14T18:54:39.000" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are certainly free to reverse engineer and recompile the GPL-licensed binary you receive, whether or not you received source alongside it. You are likewise free to make modifications to such decompiled source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more interesting question is whether you could distribute your modifications without the &lt;em&gt;bona fide&lt;/em&gt; original source code. The GPL requires you to share the &quot;preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&quot; This is certainly the original source code, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7103/50&quot;&gt;not a decompiled version of the binary&lt;/a&gt;. If you don't distribute the source form of your modifications (because you don't have the upstream source to modify), would you be legally liable for a license violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 12 of the GPLv3 certainly indicates this is the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the very short answer is no, you may not distribute the GPL work with source missing. However, if the original author really did lose the source code, rendering further legal redistribution of their work impossible, it may be possible to receive separate permission from that author to distribute it anyway. In this case, the author is simply granting a non-GPL license to allow continued redistribution of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware, though, that if the upstream program contains other GPL-licensed work (from &lt;em&gt;further&lt;/em&gt; upstream authors), the license on those component works would be violated when the author of the program chose to distribute it without source code. If you distribute it further, with or without modification, you are performing a similar license violation and expose yourself to legal action from those further upstream authors for distributing a derivative of their work without the source for their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an instance of a case where you could be left without source and uncooperative author, see my answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2533/50&quot;&gt;Use of AGPL software after developer deleted repository&lt;/a&gt;. In that case, the recipient holds an (A)GPL-licensed binary, but the author later refuses to distribute the source (or binary) a second time after originally making them available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T13:14:36.370" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T13:14:36.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="825" CreationDate="2018-12-15T04:49:45.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different communities have different standards and different etiquette, but there are some shared notions that apply to most communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, do your homework. Most projects document what they expect from contributors, at least to some degree of details (usually in files like &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt;). Contributors are expected to read these guidelines and act accordingly. Statements like &quot;I didn't know I was expected to write a unit test&quot; when the contribution guide explicitly states that are considered lazy, if not rude. Owning up to shortcomings in meeting the guidelines, especially apriori, is often fine, especially for new contributors who need some extra guidance (e.g., &quot;I know I'm supposed to add a unit test, but this bug only reproduces in load conditions with thousands of active connections. If anyone could suggest a way to simulate that in a test, I'd be happy to add it&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, make reviewing your work as easy as possible. When submitting a patch (or PR, or MR, whatever terminology you're using), make sure to document &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; this change is needed, and if the implementation isn't trivial, also &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; it's done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, respect the code style. This may be viewed as a subset of the first point, but it's often prominent enough to justify it being singled out. Almost all the (serious) projects have coding standards. Some provide automated ways to follow them (such as &lt;code&gt;.editorconfig&lt;/code&gt; files or linter configurations), some explicitly state them, and some do neither but still implicitly have all the source files use the same coding conventions. Even if there aren't any explicit guidelines, it's considered polite to follow suit. If the project uses spaces, it doesn't matter that you personally prefer tabs, stick to the project's convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T04:49:45.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7713" CreationDate="2018-12-15T11:56:45.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is at least one reason to avoid 0BSD: it's not popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning that most likely it was not reviewed by most corporation's law departments. If I were to use or contribute to 0BSD code at work I'll have to chase Google lawyers to clear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2 is generally recommended as trouble-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update from Oct 2022&lt;/strong&gt;: somebody at Google reviewed 0BSD and now Google employees &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/patching#forbidden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allowed to send patches&lt;/a&gt; to 0BSD projects and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty/licenses#unencumbered&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use it&lt;/a&gt; inside Google (with many caveats).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original points still stands - it took a while for this license to be reviewed, and many engineers may not just bother checking, falling back to familiar GPL or Apache licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastEditorUserId="4286" LastEditDate="2022-10-19T09:04:56.697" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T09:04:56.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7722" CreationDate="2018-12-15T04:53:52.913" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume you are considering open-sourcing a large service of your internal enterprise infrastructure. Let's say you have the resources required to ensure the minimal requirements are met: the licenses are sorted out, profanities removed, security audits conducted and all known security vulnerabilities fixed. Assume your company doing the open-sourcing has a very recognized and valued global brand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to open-source such service by just dumping the files? I am assuming here it won't even be possible to run the service as-is, because it will have dependencies on other, not open-sourced systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what would be the minimal effort required to make open-sourcing worthwhile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/152654/reasons-not-to-open-source-not-for-profit-code&quot;&gt;Reasons NOT to open source not-for-profit code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/139912/the-reason-to-make-some-code-open-source&quot;&gt;The reason to make some code open source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/171066/is-it-ok-to-push-my-code-to-github-while-it-is-still-in-early-development&quot;&gt;Is it OK to push my code to GitHub while it is still in early development?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/51553/checklist-for-starting-an-open-source-project&quot;&gt;Checklist for starting an open-source project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13859" OwnerDisplayName="Konrad Jamrozik" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T15:13:08.620" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T15:13:08.620" Title="Compelling reasons to open-source internal service of a highly recognized brand by just dumping the sources?" Tags="|benefits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7721" CreationDate="2018-12-16T02:05:53.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;minimum requirements&quot; for open sourcing some code depend primarily on why your company plans to publish it, and secondarily on what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, sometimes this kind of &quot;code dump&quot; actually makes sense.  Specifically, if you are obligated to open source something to satisfy customers, partners, and/or a government, but you don't otherwise care about the code.  This could include terms of an intercompany agreement, plans to abandon an otherwise-popular product, or regulatory compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's not your motivation, then the situation you described falls below the threshold of minimum worthwhile results.  Let's assume that the code is being open-sourced in order to create a userbase for it (&quot;community&quot;, by some minimal definition).  That would require, at a minimum, three of the six requirements below: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Existing popularity or marketing to create popularity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adequate user documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adequate code/developer documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Current code runnable as a &quot;Minimum viable product&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appropriate licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A present and responsive engineering team.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, a project with runnable code and a highly responsive engineering team that is liberally licensed is minimally viable even though it has no documentation.  Alternately, a well-documented and highly-publicized project whose code doesn't currently run will also be minimally viable.  In either case, there's a decent chance of attracting volunteers to fix the bugs/docs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question suggests that you would have only (5) and &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; (1), and the project would fail on documentation, runnability, and involvement of existing staff.  This is not minimally viable.  The fact that it's for a well-known company makes it worse; the project would be &lt;em&gt;visibly&lt;/em&gt; deficient and thus hurt the company's brand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T02:05:53.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7709" CreationDate="2018-12-16T18:05:33.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you are allowed to do so.&#xA;Qt Designer is available under not just GPL but &lt;strong&gt;&quot;GPLv3 with The Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Qt Company GPL Exception 1.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception you may create a larger work which contains the&#xA;  output of this application and distribute that work under terms of&#xA;  your choice, so long as the work is not otherwise derived from or&#xA;  based on this application and so long as the work does not in itself&#xA;  generate output that contains the output from this application in its&#xA;  original or modified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exception 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, you have permission to combine this&#xA;  application with Plugins licensed under the terms of your choice, to&#xA;  produce an executable, and to copy and distribute the resulting&#xA;  executable under the terms of your choice. However, the executable&#xA;  must be accompanied by a prominent notice offering all users of the&#xA;  executable the entire source code to this application, excluding the&#xA;  source code of the independent modules, but including any changes you&#xA;  have made to this application, under the terms of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exception no.1 fully covers your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the repository for Qt tools &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt/qttools&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/qt/qttools&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;There you can find the source code for Qt tools (including Qt Designer) and its licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13770" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T18:05:33.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7724" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-17T15:20:23.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Related tags&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bsd&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bsd&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bsd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://landley.net/toybox/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://landley.net/toybox/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SPDX: &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD Zero Clause License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-12-25T07:55:08.877" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T07:55:08.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7725" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-17T15:20:23.840" Score="0" Body="for questions about the &quot;BSD Zero Clause License&quot; (0BSD), not to be confused with the BSD licenses (tag: [bsd])" OwnerUserId="138" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T11:49:03.137" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T11:49:03.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T21:25:56.620" Score="2" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;free and open-source app (available on GitHub) that needs to bundle a static binary build of FFmpeg's command line executable tool, but does not link to its code statically or dynamically. My app invokes the bundled FFmpeg binary as an external (child) process (as if it were installed separately on my machine and I were invoking it from the command line). So, there are no references to any FFmpeg source code or libraries (dylib) anywhere in my app code.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I got the ffmpeg binary: &lt;a href=&quot;https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg download page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bundle FFmpeg with my app in this way so that my users don't have to worry about having FFmpeg installed and configuring my app to point to their FFmpeg installation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research, I understand that FFmpeg is licensed under GPL V3. I have also read FFmpeg's legal compliance checklist page at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg legal compliance checklist&lt;/a&gt;. The terms of GPL are somewhat clear in the cases of &quot;static linking&quot; and &quot;dynamic linking&quot; of the library (in my case, FFmpeg) with app code. However, my scenario, it seems, is neither of the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also read this other page here which addresses a similar scenario: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4008/can-i-use-distribute-lgpl-command-line-software-in-mine-that-isnt-lgpl?rq=1&quot;&gt;(other Stack Exchange question)&lt;/a&gt;. But what is unclear is - if I need to make the FFmpeg source code available, how exactly? From within my app or in my app's documentation? Do I need to include the source as part of my app bundle? Do I need to provide a link to it from my docs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I have currently not licensed my own app in any way.&lt;/strong&gt; It (and its source code) is available for free download on GitHub. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;So, if I include FFmpeg in the way described above, what must I do to comply with the GPL license terms?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. If you'd like more details about my app and how it uses FFmpeg (including my code), I'll be happy to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13866" LastEditorUserId="13866" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T21:33:11.363" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T21:33:11.363" Title="Bundling FFmpeg command line tool (invoked as child process, no linking) - GPL license compliance?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T23:04:22.427" Score="2" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a video project using FFMPEG shared library with other license abiding projects (like libass and freetype2). I have a script that compiles FFMPEG and the other libraries as a single .so file (Android) and then my actual code just imports/dynamic links the library and use its functions. I have FFMPEG code released the way I compiled it with the libraries on an open source platform (like Github) which I assume abides to the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FFMPEG is compiled without the &quot;non-free&quot; and &quot;gpl&quot; flags so everything together (including the other 3rd party libraries compiled with it) should be LGPL 2.1 (not GPL3). I plan to have it as a submodule to my video player project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my video player library, I do not planning on open sourcing (for reasons out of my control). If my video player is just loading the shared library at runtime can it be treated as its own license, can I can have my video player closed source and have different license? Supposedly anyone can take the library and compile their own shared library and load it into the app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13867" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T23:04:22.427" Title="FFMPEG License as a separate library" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T06:06:36.537" Score="4" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/01/biggan_fake_images/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GANs to generate original images&lt;/a&gt;, but if I train my GAN using CC-BY-ND am I creating a derivative work? If I train with CC-BY-NC images (or even copyrighted images), do I have rights to use the output commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that here I am referring to not the model parameters, but specifically the output images; if I generate an interesting image (like the dog/tennis ball hybrid on the linked site), can I legally put it up for sale on a stock photo site, for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional info: ImageNet, one of the popular training sets, has &lt;a href=&quot;http://image-net.org/download-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this to say about usage issues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The images in their original resolutions may be subject to copyright, so we do not make them publicly available on our server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Researcher shall use the Database only for non-commercial research and educational purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13868" LastEditorUserId="13868" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T23:47:40.443" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T06:06:23.157" Title="Rights of deep learning output trained on CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC images" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7730" CreationDate="2018-12-19T15:06:02.727" Score="3" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am porting a library that somebody else released under BSD-3 license from Fortran to C++. In order to make it run easily under C++, I am using an interface that is only a very minor and almost irrelevant part of the entire library. This interface, however, is part of another code (of which I am the copyright owner) that is released under GPL3. Since the part is minor, is it allowed to include my C++ port with the original project without changing its license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13874" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T23:32:13.843" Title="Adding a very minor part of GPL3 code to a BSD-licensed project" Tags="|gpl-3|bsd|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2018-12-19T17:35:36.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are the copyright holder of the interface, there is no issue whatsoever. The fact that you have previously included your interface in a GPL-licensed work does not prevent you from including that same interface in a BSD-licensed work. You may offer any number of licenses simultaneously on your own copyrighted work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were not the author of the GPL-licensed work, the situation would be slightly different. The GPL would allow you distribute the interface within another work only if that whole larger work were licensed under the GPL.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Failure to license the larger work in this way would expose you to legal action from the copyright holder of the interface. However, since the BSD license on the other work is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt;, it would be completely possible to license the combination in this required way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only possible way around this would be to take the legal gamble that the interface is too simple or mechanical to merit copyright protection, so any copyright license -- such as the GPL -- on it would be void. I would strongly discourage anyone from trying that before talking about your specific case with a legal professional experienced in copyright law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T17:58:10.297" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T17:58:10.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7180" CreationDate="2018-12-19T21:58:16.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD license and the GPLv2 are considered compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt; by the Free Software Foundation, and thus joint works that include both licenses are legally distributable.  However, all of the terms of the GPLv2 apply to this distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your modified version of the BSD-licensed code &lt;em&gt;depends on&lt;/em&gt; the GPL-licensed code (accoding to you).  In that case, the FSF would say that your code can no longer be distributed solely under the BSD license; it must carry the GPL as well, because of the dependancy on GPL-licensed material.  This is what's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linking&lt;/a&gt;, and is somewhat debatable but not with out a copyright lawyer on your side.  Now, some GPL-licensed projects carry a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linking Exception&lt;/a&gt;, which would make your desired licensing scheme legal ... but it's up to the upstream GPL project to carry that rider, you can't add it for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="11583" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T22:05:37.170" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T22:05:37.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7728" CreationDate="2018-12-19T23:11:31.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A definite &quot;maybe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the explanation, a disclaimer: I am not an attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the pro-violation argument: you have no right to access those photos at all except under the license.  Therefore any use you make of them has to comply with the terms of the license.  Certainly if there are structures and portions of images which end up in the GAN image, then those fragments are derivatives of the original image, and thus in violation of CC-BY-ND.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, here's the non-violation argument: a fair use exemption applies to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transformitive works&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, especially those that use the copyrighted work as a small minority of the final work. You would need an attorney to back you up on this one, as you'd be breaking new ground by applying the transformative works exemption to a GAN image (or an AI model), but it certainly seems like a valid defense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's also the moral argument: a bunch of photographers/artists/collectors put their work online for you to enjoy under specific license terms, partly to protect their livelihoods.  Is having those images so important that you want to clearly violate the intent of the photographer, even if you're not &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; infringing?  And maybe endure an internet backlash if this use is found out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="11583" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T06:06:23.157" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T06:06:23.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7729" CreationDate="2018-12-19T23:32:13.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address the general issue (and so assuming that you aren't the copyright holder of the GPLv3 code):  Why are you using that interface?  Is it out of convenience, or because you need it to communicate with other software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's out of convenience, don't.  If it's trivial enough to avoid copyright infringement, you should have no difficulty rewriting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's to communicate with other existing software, you can do that.  Although APIs and the like can be copyrighted in the US, it's legal to use them to make compatible software.  Copyright is not intended to make it impossible to do something, but to protect creativity.  At least in the US, if you can only write compatible software by copying an interface, that isn't a copyright violation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In Google vs. Oracle, Oracle claimed that Google hadn't used the Java API to write compatible software, as Oracle claimed conventional Java and Android Java software would be incompatible.  Therefore, since Google could use another API, one that Oracle hadn't copyrighted, it was a copyright violation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T23:32:13.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7735" CreationDate="2018-12-19T23:42:53.753" Score="-3" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a nice program on GitHub that reads data from “A” and puts it in a text file, it is released under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to modify it to put the data in a database instead and then release it as GPL3. I’m aware of the bigger picture of the license but has never before actually done this by myself, therefor I ask if there are any particular pitfalls and mistakes that will go against the license that I shall look out for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to fork it on GitHub or is it ok to download the code and incorporate it to my new software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to make any attributions to the original author besides leave the original copyright claim at the top of each source file? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shall add my own name as a contributor to the top of files I edit and what is the proposed form for this if so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be quite trivial questions but I don’t seem to find a good guide describing these hands on part of building upon existing open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10782" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:12:39.880" Title="Pitfalls for beginners forking GPL3 code on GitHub?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7734" CreationDate="2018-12-20T18:12:39.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably want to look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Gnu advice page&lt;/a&gt;.  To answer your questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can grab the source and use it as you like, as long as it stays GPLv3.  In fact, if you're going to redistribute a modified version, you have to have the source available.  Probably the easiest way is to have the source and executables downloadable at the same place.  You can have that at GitHub or any other place you like.  Just make sure you never offer an executable download without an adjacent source download (it's OK to do it the other way, a source download without an executable download), because then things get more involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You leave the original copyright notices where they are.  For any file you change, you put your own copyright notice above or below the existing ones, something like &quot;Copyright RobinSt 2018&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T18:12:39.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-21T20:27:27.640" Score="5" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulty understanding how the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; reconciles with their own &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/#full-copy-only&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frequently Asked Questions, question 25&lt;/a&gt;. The question and its answer are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q25: What happens if someone doesn't use the per-file boilerplate, and just ships a copy of the full MPL 2 with their code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is licensed under the plain MPL 2. It is not considered Incompatible with Secondary Licenses. Making code Incompatible with Secondary Licenses requires an active choice on the part of the licensor; it is not the default. The notice in Exhibit B is not considered &amp;quot;attached&amp;quot; merely by being present as the Exhibit B of a copy of the full MPL 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception is if the code used to be straight MPL 1.1 and was upgraded to MPL 2, in which case it would be Incompatible with Secondary Licenses (Sec. 1.5 b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, imagine a repository consisting of just 3 files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;src/&#xA;    mylibrary.h&#xA;logo.png&#xA;LICENSE  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file contains the text of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt; verbatim. Further, assume that neither &lt;code&gt;logo.png&lt;/code&gt; nor &lt;code&gt;src/mylibrary.h&lt;/code&gt; have any copyright/license notices: the former by virtue of being a binary file, the latter out of laziness. &lt;em&gt;What is the license of this repository?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at Q25 quoted above, the description &amp;quot;someone doesn't use the per-file boilerplate, and just ships a copy of the full MPL 2 with their code&amp;quot; applies here exactly; and the answer says that in this case &amp;quot;The code is licensed under plain MPL 2&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I look at the text of the license itself, I reach a different conclusion. The clause 1.4 defines what &amp;quot;covered software&amp;quot; is: &lt;em&gt;Source Code Form to which the initial Contributor has attached the notice in Exhibit A, the Executable Form of such Source Code Form, and Modifications of such Source Code Form, in each case including portions thereof.&lt;/em&gt; So it appears that only the files that have a notice from Exhibit A &amp;quot;attached&amp;quot; are covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license does not define the word &amp;quot;attached&amp;quot;, but there is a note after Exhibit A that offers a clue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not possible or desirable to put the notice in a particular file, then You may include the notice in a location (such as a LICENSE file in a relevant directory) where a recipient would be likely to look for such a notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, based on this wording, it appears that there are 2 ways to make a file into a &amp;quot;covered software&amp;quot;: either put the text of the notice from Exhibit A into the file (presumably as a comment), or have a side-along LICENSE file in the same directory that contains the notice from Exhibit A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that neither of these requirements are satisfied in the example repository shown above. Even Q25 acknowledges that &amp;quot;the notice in Exhibit B is not considered 'attached' merely by being present as the Exhibit B of a copy of the full MPL 2&amp;quot;, and I don't see why the same logic wouldn't apply to Exhibit A as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the big question is: Is Q25 mistaken, and it is not sufficient to merely include into a repository a full copy of MPL-2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9230" LastEditorUserId="24420" LastEditDate="2024-01-08T10:25:34.973" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T10:25:34.973" Title="Is question 25 from MPL 2.0 FAQ correct?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7739" CreationDate="2018-12-21T22:10:08.907" Score="0" ViewCount="1941" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project which is open source. I use the gstreamer library in my application. Can I distribute my application on github and provide a compiled version of gstreamer with it (so users dont have to compile it themselves)? Or is this forbidden? Gstreamer is lgpl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13888" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T09:47:35.023" Title="Am I allowed to provide compiled binaries of open source libraries?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7737" CreationDate="2018-12-22T00:00:36.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is typical in bundling applications to provide all the libraries as compiled binaries to the end-user.  The GPL licences talk about such as &quot;object code&quot;.  With the LGPL such a library can be used in a proprietary app as well.  The terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; mean source &lt;em&gt;and/or&lt;/em&gt; object code. Therefor the clauses specified for using the library code(s) in your application would apply as well be it source and/or object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13697" LastEditorUserId="13697" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T00:50:18.897" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T00:50:18.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7737" CreationDate="2018-12-22T09:47:35.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All common open source libraries allow you to distribute binaries or executables, though they may impose additional conditions. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must always include copyright &amp;amp; license notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For Apache 2.0 licensed software, this includes any notices in a NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Artistic License limits how you may call the executables or libraries in case you are not distributing the Standard Version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL, AGPL, and LGPL covered software only allows you to distribute binaries if you make the Corresponding Source available using one of the mechanisms explicitly allowed in the license. The different license versions differ slightly. E.g. for version 3, you can satisfy this requirement by offering download of the source archive right next to the download of the binaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some licenses allow extra terms to be tacked on, in particular the mechanism in section 7 of the GPL 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from these legalities, there is the question whether it is sensible to check in pre-built binaries into version control. In general and especially for open source projects, the answer should be “no”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Binaries can get quite large, thus unnecessarily bloating the size of the repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Binaries are usually specific to one compiler/CPU/OS. These precompiled binaries are useless to people running a different configuration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sometimes it makes sense that any dependencies are installed by users themselves. They then have the choice e.g. if they compile the dependency from source, use a package manager, or use other precompiled binaries. E.g. the Autotools build system tries to compile small test programs to determine whether a library is present.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, it makes sense that the build system of your project also takes care of building dependencies. Then, you would include the source code of the dependency in your project (possibly a literal copy or Git subtree, possibly a Git submodule). While this makes initial compilation a bit slower, it is easier to guarantee that the binaries of the dependency will be compatible with your main software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also think about the effect of your chosen method on &lt;strong&gt;security updates&lt;/strong&gt; that are published for the dependency. If you manage the depdency yourself, you have to publish a new version of your software so that the security update can reach users. This holds regardless of whether you distribute source code or binaries. In contrast, depending on libraries that are already installed on the system lets you benefit from independent updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've worked on two non-open source projects that did check in binaries. In one case this was for archival purposes, as checking in a binary was simpler than setting up reproducible builds. In another case, other factors prevented us from compiling from source. Checking in compiled artefacts was then the only approach. None of these scenarios fit your circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T09:47:35.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7358" CreationDate="2018-12-22T10:22:33.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some copyright licenses contain the requirement that you must reproduce the copyright &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; information in the GUI and/or documentation of your binary distribution.&#xA;The idea behind such a requirement is that the end-user gets informed about the rights they have with regards to (parts of) the software they receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using third-party software in your product, you usually drag it in in larger components, like &quot;the Linux kernel&quot;, &quot;the foo library&quot; or &quot;the bar package&quot;. It is common to reproduce the license information also on that level of granularity. And even then, if multiple third-party parts use the exact same license, those parts are often grouped such that the license text is only reproduced once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T10:22:33.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2018-12-27T17:29:32.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I understand from both your explanation, the license itself and the answer to the question is that it is sufficient to add the full text if the license in the repo on a place it is expectable - like the LICENSE file in the root of the repo, to license the whole repo as MPL-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that doesn't stop both the author or third parties from (re)distributing it under other licenses - the original author compatible or incompatible license, third parties only compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if the author doesn't add any boilerplate in the files and add both a LICENSE.MPL and a LICENSE.GPL files in the repo, it can be assumed that all the files in the repo are licensed as, by choice of any third party, as mpl or gpl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13918" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T17:29:32.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7744" CreationDate="2018-12-30T02:07:08.307" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I obtained a GPLed (version 2) source code. But it is not maintained, and I have tried to fix some bugs. I plan to publish the code to git repository like GitHub or BitBucket. However, I cannot get the response from the source code author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish the source code to GitHub or BitBucket without the permission of the author, since it is GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13929" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T07:21:56.963" Title="Can I publish someone's GPL (version 2) source code to GitHub or BitBucket?" Tags="|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7743" CreationDate="2018-12-30T07:21:56.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;By providing software under an open-source license (like the GPL license), the original author has already granted everyone with a copy of the software the right to re-publish that software, subject to some restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which restrictions you must follow depend on the open-source license that is used. For the GPL license, those restrictions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All code of the project must be under the GPLv2 (or a compatible) open-source license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you distribute binaries, you must also distribute the corresponding source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T07:21:56.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-31T14:18:08.590" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I receive source code under the Apache License 2.0 and intent to redistribute it to a third party, do I have to do so under the same terms? It seems at first glance that I can sublicense it under more permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states only the following conditions under &lt;strong&gt;Redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or&#xA;        Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;        stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works&#xA;        that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and&#xA;        attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,&#xA;        excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of&#xA;        the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(d) [Handling of NOTICE text file]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I must retain the copyright notices etc. and must provide the third party with a copy of the Apache License. But where is stated that – in the license between the third party and myself – I must require &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to adhere to the Apache License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems I could follow the Apache License and include all the neccessary words with my source code, but be much more permissive in the license I actually give to the receipient of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note I don't neccessarily think this is the case, but I would like to understand exactly what terms allow the Apache License to propagate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8331" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T16:21:22.470" Title="How does AL2 propagate? Can I sublicence under more permissive terms?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7746" CreationDate="2018-12-31T15:54:43.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But where is stated that – in the license between the third party and myself – I must require them to adhere to the Apache License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original copyright holder offered certain permissions to modify and reproduce their work. Since you are not the copyright holder, you can't modify those permissions: you can't offer a different copyright license for work to which you don't hold the copyright. Generally, no modification or redistribution of the copyrighted work is allowed at all, except in the ways that have been allowed by the copyright holder, and you do not have the authority to present different allowances to another person. (If you modify the work with your own copyrighted contribution, you may license that new part in way that doesn't conflict with the Apache license present on the original part.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, it's not your &lt;em&gt;responsibility&lt;/em&gt; to ensure the downstream recipients follow the terms of the copyright holder's license grant. If the downstream recipients don't meet the requirements of the license, you are not liable for their decision, nor can you bring legal action against them (only the copyright holder can do that). However, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; your responsibility to make sure the downstream recipients are aware of the license terms, though, per the requirements you quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you comply with those requirements to preserve notices and include license documents, but then also say something like, &quot;But ignore that legal mumbo jumbo and just use this other person's copyrighted work however you (or I) please,&quot; then that's certainly not allowed. I'm not a lawyer, but possibly you'd be liable for either contributory infringement (for encouraging the recipient to commit copyright infringement). If the downstream recipient acted on such an erroneous statement from you and was sued by the copyright holder, I speculate they could possibly (or possibly not) win a lawsuit against you for having misled them about what they were allowed to do with the copyright holder's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-31T16:21:22.470" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T16:21:22.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7749" CreationDate="2018-12-31T23:09:02.183" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am modifying some STL files for 3d printing which originated from a GPL'd project, and though the originals are available, the &quot;object code&quot; STLs are easier to modify in my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the fact that the GPL is questionably applicable to hardware, what are the requirements in general for what to do if one modifies the object code of a GPL program and distributes that? There are all sorts of requirements for what to do with regards to providing source, but what if I don't have source files of the same format as the original to provide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another confusion is what occurs if I import the STL (object code) into my computer aided design software, and modify it in that software. Do I need to release the CAD file in native, easily editable form following my edits? (or in a software example, say I disassemble a GPL program in IDA and edit it, do I need to release the IDA database as well as the modified object code?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, do I need to provide the source code of the upstream project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13938" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T07:33:02.477" Title="What are my license obligations if I modify the object code of a GPL project?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7748" CreationDate="2019-01-01T08:29:07.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is very clear on this point: you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; distribute source code. If you don't have source code, then you must not use the GPL license, which means you can not distribute your work if you are not the original author of the complete work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for the GPL license, source code &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; mean &quot;human readable&quot; or &quot;ASCII-based&quot;. The GPL license defines source code in this way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a binary file format is the preferred form for making changes, which is, for example, the case in photo editing, then the source code has a binary format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, CAD software can happily work with either binary or ASCII-based STL files for editing 3d models. That means that both formats of STL files count as source code for the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T07:33:02.477" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T07:33:02.477" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7751" CreationDate="2019-01-03T16:59:37.710" Score="-3" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are releasing a software under a dual license APGLv3/proprietary.&#xA;To build it, we are reusing many components availabe on the web. For source code, those components have to be released with a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; license (MIT for instance). But as part of the components already used, we have contents like icons which are released with Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, we wish to know which Creative Commons license are compatible with a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already found that CC0 seems permissive enough.&#xA;What other licenses could be used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13954" LastEditorUserId="13954" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T16:59:27.883" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T04:23:10.450" Title="Which Creative Commons licenses are permissive enough for proprietary software?" Tags="|creative-commons|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7750" CreationDate="2019-01-04T18:59:05.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will probably only be able to use material under CC BY (&amp;quot;Creative Commons Attribution&amp;quot;) licenses and no other CC licenses. Any other Creative Commons terms will be problematic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Non-commercial (NC) terms eliminate your ability to distribute the icons commercially, which is likely a problem for your proprietary business model, as well as being (A)GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No derivatives (ND) terms prohibit the creation of derivatives, which probably disallows the inclusion of the work within your software as a larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike (SA) terms require that derivatives be distributed under the same CC ShareAlike license (or any license the Creative Commons foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enumerates as a &amp;quot;compatible license&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;). This rules out your proprietary license, and sort-of rules out the AGPL as well (the workaround is that the GPLv3 is a compatible license for SA derivatives, and the AGPLv3 permits you to include GPLv3-licensed material in a larger AGPL work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how you use the CC-licensed assets, there is a possible legal argument to be made that the icons and code are separate works that happen to be distributed side-by-side, and the code merely uses the icon files as input data. However, I don't know that this has ever been tested in court, and it may vary based on exactly how you use the assets. Perhaps packing them in a single executable file may yield a different legal result from distributing them as separate files in a directory. I am not a lawyer; I don't know and cannot make a strong speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that turns out to be true in your case, then you could use icons under CC licenses with ND and SA terms, since their requirements about derivative works would not apply to your software insofar as your software is not a derivative work. NC terms would still be problematic from a business perspective, since you could not include the icons in a for-pay distribution, regardless of the software's status as a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I am fairly sure that a CC BY license should be fine, since it limits the scope of its requirements to the original work, not derivatives. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ccby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FSF lists CC BY 4.0 as GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T04:23:10.450" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T04:23:10.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7753" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-05T18:53:05.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T18:53:05.190" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T18:53:05.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7754" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-05T18:53:05.190" Score="0" Body="For contract-related Master Service Agreement questions around Open-Source Software." OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="193" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T03:17:29.887" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T03:17:29.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7756" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7757" CreationDate="2019-01-06T21:20:04.150" Score="2" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I sometimes see open source projects that want to switch their licenses to a more permissive one. If original author of a project or community around it want to switch license then they must ask &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; contributors for a permission to do so. For example this happens with GPL to Apache 2 conversions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In text of Apache 2 license and Github terms of servise there is note that contributions can be under different conditions than project. As I am aware this is used in various CLA's, but requirements to sign a CLA is not a warm welcome for developers. Can contributions be simply licensed under more permissive licence instead of using CLA, just by making note in comment that this PR is under MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&#xA;Author published library under LGPLv3. In every pull request contributors agree that their contribution is under MIT license. Author can later relicence code under MIT license without asking contributors for permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13971" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T22:33:45.330" Title="Can contributions be licensed under different licence instead of using CLA's?" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7756" CreationDate="2019-01-06T22:33:45.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this works... so long as you know exactly which license you might want to re-license your project to &lt;em&gt;in the future&lt;/em&gt; before you accept the very first contribution from somebody. Taking your example, while the author could re-license the project under the MIT license, they couldn't re-license it under the BSD license. The point of a CLA is that it allows re-licensing under &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license, even one which hasn't been written at the time the CLA comes into effect (see Redis etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also personally find it somewhat strange for the author of some code to be asking for contributions to be made under a different license. Either you think that license is right for the code, or you don't - and if you don't, just relicense it now. Unless there's a very good justification for it and/or the author has a very good reputation, I'd regard this kind of licensing situation as a red flag for contributing to a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T22:33:45.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T23:55:44.973" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use some constants defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/include/uapi/linux/kernel-page-flags.h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Linux userspace API header file&lt;/a&gt; in my permissive (MIT) licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could simply &lt;code&gt;#include&lt;/code&gt; this header in my project, which will use the version on the local filesystem. This is what I do now and shouldn't present any licensing difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have run into the issue where some older systems may not have this file, or may have it but with some entries missing, which may cause compile errors. So I would like to include the data from a portion of this file, basically the mapping of names to numbers you see there, with my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I simply copy/paste the 20-odd values into my source? If not, could I type out a new version of the file myself, perhaps with new constant names? Any other options I can use to avoid running afoul of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The portion I'm interested in looks roughly like this (essentially the entire current contents of the file):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#define KPF_LOCKED      0&#xA;#define KPF_ERROR       1&#xA;#define KPF_REFERENCED      2&#xA;#define KPF_UPTODATE        3&#xA;#define KPF_DIRTY       4&#xA;#define KPF_LRU         5&#xA;#define KPF_ACTIVE      6&#xA;#define KPF_SLAB        7&#xA;#define KPF_WRITEBACK       8&#xA;#define KPF_RECLAIM     9&#xA;#define KPF_BUDDY       10&#xA;&#xA;/* 11-20: new additions in 2.6.31 */&#xA;#define KPF_MMAP        11&#xA;#define KPF_ANON        12&#xA;#define KPF_SWAPCACHE       13&#xA;#define KPF_SWAPBACKED      14&#xA;#define KPF_COMPOUND_HEAD   15&#xA;#define KPF_COMPOUND_TAIL   16&#xA;#define KPF_HUGE        17&#xA;#define KPF_UNEVICTABLE     18&#xA;#define KPF_HWPOISON        19&#xA;#define KPF_NOPAGE      20&#xA;&#xA;#define KPF_KSM         21&#xA;#define KPF_THP         22&#xA;#define KPF_BALLOON     23&#xA;#define KPF_ZERO_PAGE       24&#xA;#define KPF_IDLE        25&#xA;#define KPF_PGTABLE     26&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13972" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:13:31.517" Title="Using Linux kernel constants from a UAPI GPL 2.0 file" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7761" CreationDate="2019-01-07T13:31:09.677" Score="5" ViewCount="2645" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my understanding about how software licenses work in most jurisdictions — I add this, because it might help to clearify things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When I attach a license to a program, the license governs my copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can only change the license in case you are compliant with the current license terms or all the copyright-holders agree to change it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because the license governs my copyright it also governs how license updates work. &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case nothing is specified in the license on how license updates work — copyright law does apply. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case it is specified how license updates work the license entirely governs how license updates work. For example oversimplified when my license says you can do whatever you want with that code even attach another license, then what is stated in there counts and copyright law is superseded by the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotation from the GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Revised Versions of this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions&#xA;  of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions&#xA;  will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in&#xA;  detail to address new problems or concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program&#xA;  specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public&#xA;  License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of&#xA;  following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or&#xA;  of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the&#xA;  Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public&#xA;  License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free&#xA;  Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions&#xA;  of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public&#xA;  statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to&#xA;  choose that version for the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Later license versions may give you additional or different&#xA;  permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any&#xA;  author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a&#xA;  later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that mean that when you specify GPLv3 &lt;strong&gt;or any later version&lt;/strong&gt;                                               that anybody who receives the code may add a later version that may not be necessarily compliant with the current version? I mean since from my current understanding the license governs the copyright (see point 3 above) and the license is unclear at that point, I ask my self this question. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that mean that when you specify an &lt;strong&gt;explicit GPL version number&lt;/strong&gt; without having the &quot;or any later version&quot; that implicitly anybody who receives the code cannot add another GPL version that is not compliant with the current version?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13009" LastEditorUserId="2257" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T19:54:33.707" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T19:54:33.707" Title="GPLv3 - Explicit version number / &quot;or any later version&quot; - Implications?" Tags="|gpl-3|fsf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2019-01-07T13:51:35.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you specify &quot;GNU GPL v3&quot; without &quot;or later&quot; then that is the only license other people can distribute the code under. That's why Linux is still licensed under version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you specify &quot;GNU GPL v3 or later&quot; then you are &lt;strong&gt;multi-licensing&lt;/strong&gt; your code. The two licenses do not have to be compatible, and based on previous license updates, will usually be at most one-way compatible. Only do this if you trust the organisation not to publish a new license which goes against the spirit of the current license. You can always republish it if they release a new version in the future. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T13:51:35.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7759" CreationDate="2019-01-07T14:00:07.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does that mean that when you specify GPLv3 or any later version that anybody who receives the code may add a later version that may not be necessarily compliant with the current version?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if you indicate your license as &quot;GPL version X or any later version&quot; then recipients may operate under the requirements of GPL version X or any higher-numbered version, despite the fact that versions of the GPL are incompatible with one another (and future versions may be as well). This is explicit in the license text you quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true, generally, that a downstream recipient may not change the license terms. However, the licensor has explicitly allows the licensee to remain in compliance with the grant when following different terms, per the GPL's language &quot;you have the option of following the terms and conditions... of any later version&quot;. To be clear, this isn't a &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; of the licensor's terms; rather, it is an option within the licensor's original terms that always existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does that mean that when you specify an explicit GPL version number without having the &quot;or any later version&quot; that implicitly anybody who receives the code cannot add another GPL version that is not compliant with the current version?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the quoted section above is a conditional statement. If the licensor chooses not to meet the condition when licensing the software (i.e., they choose not to &quot;specif[y] that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it&quot;) then the associated permissions under that conditional are not in effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T17:27:46.820" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T17:27:46.820" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7763" CreationDate="2019-01-07T15:06:23.850" Score="4" ViewCount="2410" Body="&lt;p&gt;Im preparing to open source some code Im been working on, and have decided for the GPL2 license. Im wondering what the proper way is to mark code as licensed with this license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;looking at the Linux sourcecode I can see that the GPL2 license is included in the root directory in a &quot;LICENSE&quot; file of some sort. Also, some of the files have some (a paragraph or so) license text at their top, other files just kind of reference in a single comment line which license they use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is there a best practice for how to mark a file licensed under a particular license?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13975" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T13:56:04.063" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:56:04.063" Title="GPL2 license header usage in individual files" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7762" CreationDate="2019-01-07T17:10:46.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are the terms for the license, and some statement that your project is licensed under those terms. The GPL has an appendix &quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&quot; that explains how to attach license notices. It &lt;em&gt;suggests&lt;/em&gt; but in no way requires that you add the following header to each source file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.&#xA;Copyright (C) yyyy  name of author&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA;of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA;Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(remember to fill in the description, year, and author, and to remove the &quot;or (at your option) any later version&quot; part.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also place similar text into a top-level LICENSE file and put the full terms of the GPL into a COPYING or LICENSE.GPLv2 file. The specifics don't matter as long as it is clear that the copyright holder has issued this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T17:10:46.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7765" CreationDate="2019-01-07T20:01:41.183" Score="4" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our project is partly software, and partly 3d models and images. To me, the language of the MIT license, which specifically refers to software, doesn't really seem applicable to the parts that aren't software. For that matter, it seems onerous to talk about including the copyright notice for people who just want to make use of the 3d models and images. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/318783&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; suggests that placing a dual license of MIT and CC-BY on everything is a good solution. Is it really? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub has a standard approach to displaying licenses, and I want to make use of it so the license is easy to find. So it would be really nice to just put both licenses on everything, otherwise I have to split things up by file type or folder, and it gets messy and could make it more troublesome to include the proper license or credit notice in downstream works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8798" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T19:39:02.023" Title="What is the way to handle a project that is a mix of software and non-software items?" Tags="|mit|multi-licensing|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2019-01-07T22:47:40.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing under MIT and CC-BY is a workable solution.  Both licenses have the same basic goal of permitting reasonably unrestricted use while preserving authorship credit.  They differ in the details (CC-BY has a number of clauses that really only apply to creative works, while MIT has clauses that only apply to software), but since you're dual-licensing, an end user can pick whichever of the licenses is a better fit for their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that this can have unexpected effects.  For example, someone using your source code as the background for some artwork would be able to do so under the terms of the CC-BY license, rather than needing to figure out how to apply the MIT license to a poster.  Conversely, any sequence of bytes is a valid program in some esoteric languages, so you might find some of your images being used under the MIT license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T22:47:40.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7768" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-08T17:41:12.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T17:41:12.863" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T17:41:12.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7769" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-08T17:41:12.863" Score="0" Body="For questions about MariaDB Business Source Licence (BSL)." OwnerUserId="193" LastEditorUserId="193" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T20:38:18.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T20:38:18.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7774" CreationDate="2019-01-09T09:03:45.803" Score="0" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondered something :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- I develop a little standalone tool for a commercial application written in C++ with Qt (lets say &quot;test.exe&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Not having a commercial licence of Qt, I use Qt LGPL license&#xA;- I cannot legally link statically against QtCore.dll, neither MSVC redist) so I link it dynamically.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- When I want to share this tool with clients, they receive a lot of dll that don't really concern them, making the tool more difficult to run&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it legal to create an SFX archive that embeds the exe and dlls, and make it run automatically &quot;test.exe&quot; ? (no real installation)  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it legal to name this SFX archive &quot;test.exe&quot; and to modify its properties (manifest) to add my organization, app version and icon ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The archive executable would look like the true executable, but it would extract the dlls as a first step.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13990" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T07:33:24.407" Title="Is it legal to create an auto-extractible SFX archive containing mixed commercial/LGPL software?" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7773" CreationDate="2019-01-09T13:16:54.007" Score="3" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using an open source component (say, licensed under CDDL), we are required to distribute the source code for any components directly derived from the component. Is it acceptable to just provide a link to the web page where I downloaded the software from, or do I have to somehow make an additional point from where people can access it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13993" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T14:57:26.013" Title="How to distribute third-party open source components?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7772" CreationDate="2019-01-09T14:57:26.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the license. The CDDL 1 says about source availability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must inform recipients of any such Covered Software in Executable form as to how they can obtain such Covered Software in Source Code form in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downloading a ZIP or TAR archive from a website would be a “medium customarily used for software exchange”, so I think that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other licenses might make different provisions. Some licenses have no such requirements at all (permissive licenses like MIT). The different GPL versions allow you to provide a written offer for the source code, but that offer must be valid for a specific period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the easiest way to comply with these source availability requirements is to distribute the source along with any binaries. Source code typically compresses well so this usually won't inflate downloads unreasonably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One extra difficulty is that you must generally be able to provide the corresponding source code for every version you have distributed, not just the most recent version. It is difficult to keep track of this unless you have an automated deployment pipeline that builds the software completely from source and then uploads both the source and the executables to some sever. Even flagship open source projects like Emacs have got this wrong! Again, this is easier to get right if you always accompany the binaries with their source code, and build from that source instead of relying on precompiled components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T14:57:26.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7771" CreationDate="2019-01-09T19:35:01.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In simple terms, the requirements of the LGPL license are that an end-user has the possibility to replace the LGPL licensed code with a different version and to inform them of those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement is not directly broken by distributing your binaries in the form of an SFX archive rather than an archive format that needs to be explicitly unpacked by the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the use of an SFX archive can hide the fact that you are using LGPL licensed libraries, so distributing just the SFX archive can get you into trouble with the requirement of informing the users of their rights. To remedy that, you should accompany the SFX archive with separate documentation where it is stated that you are using LGPL licensed code and where users can obtain a copy of the license and the source code. Preferably, the license copy would be inside the SFX archive (which implies telling your users that the SFX archive can be unpacked and that the SFX format is chosen as a convenience for the average user who doesn't want/need to exercise their LGPL rights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T07:33:24.407" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T07:33:24.407" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T06:28:50.067" Score="1" ViewCount="2193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a proprietary java application. I want to use a java library licensed LGPL 2.1. One condition of the license is to disclose source code. What does it exactly mean? Do I need to disclose the source code of my full application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9281" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T12:52:59.087" Title="Can I use LGPL 2.1 licensed java jar without disclosing my complete source code" Tags="|lgpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7775" CreationDate="2019-01-10T12:52:59.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if the LGPL-covered JAR is linked in a way so that users are free to modify it, then you don't have to disclose your own source code. You do need to publish the source code for the library though, see the license for options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to comply is if you provide the source code of the LGPL-covered JAR alongside the JAR file. Also, you should not prevent the JAR from being changed by users, so it would be best not to sign the JAR file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the GPL and LGPL only trigger their requirements when you give someone else a copy of (L)GPL covered software. These licenses do not impose any requirements on software that you use purely internally, or if the software provides services to others but is only executed on your servers. So for a Java Servlet or for an internall app you wouldn't have to do anything, but you would have to follow the license for an app or program that you make available to other businesses or people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T12:52:59.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7764" CreationDate="2019-01-10T19:39:02.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is possible to make a custom license and still make use of GitHub's template system for licenses. As long as the license is in the root directory of the repository and the file is named LICENSE, Github will add a 'View License' tab to the repository menu that links to that document. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We created a dual license of MIT and CC-BY 4.0 structured as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT License / CC-BY 4.0 Dual License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2019 Kim Holder&#xA;&#xA;MIT License:&#xA;&#xA;[Standard MIT License text here, plus the following paragraph &#xA;which isn't in the usual GitHub version but is part of the &#xA;original]&#xA;&#xA;*****Except as contained in this notice, the name of Moonwards&#xA;shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the &#xA;sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior &#xA;written authorization.*******&#xA;&#xA;CC-BY 4.0 License:&#xA;&#xA;Images, .blend files, and documents may be used under CC-BY 4.0 &#xA;International. &#xA;See full information at &#xA;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&#xA;The full text of this license is in the file CC_BY_LICENSE.txt&#xA;A summary of the conditions of the license are as follows:&#xA;&#xA;[Human readable text as shown on the above linked page here.]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8798" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T19:39:02.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7778" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-10T23:29:09.163" Score="2" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what requirements must be met if you want to License Code, if you take this Simple Code for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;int main()&#xA;{&#xA;    int x = 0;&#xA;    return 0;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could one Hypothetically License this 5 simple Lines of Code? If not why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14006" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T01:25:40.007" Title="License a single Line of Code / Hypothetical Question" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1579" CreationDate="2019-01-10T23:37:49.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case of interpreters, you get quite broad permissions through freedom 0. Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program; this freedom is particularly unconstrained by the GPL.  You can run and do whatever you want with the program, unless the output consists of parts of the program itself; copyleft only takes place when you convey/distribute something.  Copyright law might see that differently, and might consider the act of running to require a license, but if it does so, you get one very liberal from the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interpreter question in GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that you don't have to put your scripts under GPL when they run on an interpreter, e.g. bash; even when you make use of the many bash-specific constructs that make your script “depend” on in the sense that it won't run on any other shell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly important, if you think of shar-style installers, i.e. shell-scripts that install some proprietary software that is data embedded inside a shell script and extracted by running it.  If bash would “taint” that installer, all that software would have to be GPL'd.  That's not established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing is difficult, because copyright does not talk about technical things such as linking, subclassing, function calling or just running an interpreter which interprets builtins just like a C compiler calls functions — these are technical details that don't matter.  Invoking a bash-specific builtin in a script from a copyright point of view is IMHO exactly the same dependency of two works as calling a function in a C library, or, for what's it's worth, using a C language element in a C program (or a GCC extension, which ties your program to GCC; and it does not help if later a clang developer clones it — the creative process of using a GCC feature is what creates the derivative work, not the existence of a clone, which, by ruling that APIs are copyrightable, is on its own a copyright violation).  It might also be possible that the interpretation of the GPL that merely calling a function in a library is creating a derivative work actually depends on that interpretation of the Google vs. Oracle case (because a short reference to other works is fair use as minor citation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That thing of interpreting a script is covered by freedom 0, the right to run a program.  Running GCC translates your C source into some assembler or binary representation, and by giving you freedom 0, it can't be a copyright violation, regardless if copyright would say that using GCC extensions makes your program a derivative work of GCC: For that part, you have a license.  Interpreting a script with an interpreter is just the same; that is the purpose of the interpreter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you do likely need is a permission to load other software into that interpreter together with your program, i.e. if you use some Python/PHP/Ruby framework stuff together with your code that makes use of the framework (and therefore by copyright is a derivative work), then you better hope that this framework is under LPGL — or your code is GPL compatible.  The same applies to libraries that you interface to in your interpreter, e.g. using SWIG to bind to C libraries.  You cannot use the right to run an interpreter to loophole that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One difficult part here might be if that C library is already a core part of the interpreter; e.g. if the interpreter offers regexps, and uses a library like PCRE to implement those (supposed that library is under GPL).  The combination of interpreter and a hypothetical GPL'd libPCRE is ok, when the interpreter is GPL'd, too.  The act of running the interpreter is freedom 0, i.e. unconstrained.  Running an interpreter is the act of letting it interpret some script; which, in typical interpreters, is matching a lot of strings with regular expressions.  That is accessing the libPCRE functionality just like linking to it, but through the core functionality of an interpreter, and therefore covered by the act of running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might not be legal, because the author of this GPL'd libPCRE did not give that permission of loopholing the GPL.  The author of an interpreter, by defining the core parts of his interpreter, does give you a conscious permission to run it as such.  On the other hand, the act of running the libPCRE is unconstrained, anyways, and the author of an interpreter like AWK should be free to use libraries for low-level stuff like regexps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a core function of an interpreter?  I would say something that does not require some syntactic element that reads like “include source file” or “import class”, and as such clearly refers to the imported element as &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; inherent part of the interpreter.  If the interpreter has a scoping mechanism, accessing an already existing scope is not an import, adding a new scope by loading in the respective program is (same as dynamic linking).  I.e. even if a core functionality of the interpreter gives you the ability to do C bindings on the fly, doing that does not loophole the GPL of that C libraries you can access; at some point in your bindings, you need to load that library, in which case you see that you now add another program to your program, and that's creating a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&#xA;Interpreter core functions are covered by freedom 0, so scripts under incompatible licenses as such are ok, regardless if they are legally a derivative work or not (they probably are).&#xA;Libraries in an interpretative language are just the same as compiled libraries, if you include them, you add them to your program, just as if you link to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14004" LastEditorUserId="14004" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T10:40:26.217" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T10:40:26.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7778" CreationDate="2019-01-11T01:25:40.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always put a license on it, just like anything else, but it's probably too trivial to be copyrightable. But the only way to know for sure would be for it to be tested in court. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T01:25:40.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T09:33:57.170" Score="2" ViewCount="706" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a proprietary java application which uses some open source jars licensed with LGPL 2.1 or EPL 1.0. I am deploying the application in docker container with all jars inside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any issue with licensing? Does this violate any of the terms of those licences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9281" OwnerDisplayName="Shashwat Kumar" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T13:23:13.547" Title="Is using LGPL 1.2 or EPL 1.0 licensed jar allowed in proprietary software in Docker?" Tags="|java|licensing|lgpl|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7785" CreationDate="2019-01-11T10:43:26.277" Score="6" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have Java jar-files which I provide to my customers under a commercial closed-source license.  But my jar-files depend on a few jar-files released under the GPLv2 (without any special &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; or anything like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I give my customers both my jar-files and the GPLv2 jar-files as a complete product, then I am obviously violating the GPLv2: I am (dynamically) linking the GPLv2 jar-files, which by the GPL requires me to provides access to also our my source files.  [Well, fairly obviously.  I know dynamic linking is a grey area in GPL land, but I want to be on the safe side and assume this scenario violates the GPLv2.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However,&lt;/em&gt; what if I deliver the product incompletely, and ask my customers to download the GPLv2 jar-files themselves separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the legal status in that scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I do then is deliver an incomplete product, which depends on &lt;em&gt;an API&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to specific GPLv2 jar-files), which the customer in theory could implement by creating their own GPL'd or closed source or public domain jar-files implementing that API.  So I would be &lt;em&gt;delivering&lt;/em&gt; an incomplete closed source product which doesn't depend on any GPL'd artifact.  That seems legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And would the customer then be violating the GPLv2 by &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; our incomplete closed source product with the GPLv2 jar-files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not asking here whether this scenario would be &lt;em&gt;morally&lt;/em&gt; acceptable. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versions of this same question have been asked before: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4278/14001&quot;&gt;Dynamic linking, bundling, and GPL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5880/14001&quot;&gt;Using GPL resource (with separate installation) with &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; product&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5446/14001&quot;&gt;Automated GPL download and installation in BSD project&lt;/a&gt;.  But I don't see an answer there that addresses the bundle-vs-separate legal status.  I would appreciate authoritative references if available. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14001" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T13:56:08.363" Title="Effect of 'download separately' on GPL linking" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-2|closed-source|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7781" CreationDate="2019-01-11T13:23:13.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that a container image is equivalent to a Zip archive: just a collection of other files. The terms under which this collection may be used and distributed depends on the contents of this collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: your obligations depend on how you're going to use the image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you only use the container image internally (e.g. by using Docker just as a deployment tool) then you have no further obligations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But if you want to give other people a copy of the image, then you may need to publish the source code of some components in this image. License compliance in such a scenario is possible, but quite tedious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Docker image will typically contain a complete Linux userland which can be quite a lot of software. You do not only have to comply with the licenses of the software you added to that image, but also with the licenses of the software from lower image layers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as all the software in the image is either copyrighted by you or under an OSI-approved open source license, you may &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the software for any purpose, such as running it for commercial purposes on a server. However, these licenses may require you to provide attributions or source code when you give someone else a copy of the software, for example if you publish or license your image. In particular, the LGPL and EPL licenses require that you make the source code of these components available (but not the source code of your own code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this also extends to software in base image layers so before publishing an image you should carefully check what software is included in them. This is tedious, so it might be easier to build your own images completely from scratch without using any third party image as base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corollary: many images you can pull are likely in violation of their license, as nearly all images contain GPL covered components like Busybox but I've never seen the Corresponding Source being offered on Docker Hub. If you see a Docker image being advertised under some license (e.g. the MIT license), you should understand this license as only applying to the Dockerfile itself, but not to all the software in the image, and therefore also not to the image file itself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T13:23:13.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7786" CreationDate="2019-01-11T13:34:57.773" Score="1" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is open-source project under GPL 3 hosted on GitHub. The project contains source code and assets (images, sounds etc.). Can I legally use only assets (without soruce code) for custom, commercial closed-source project? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14009" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:28:55.180" Title="Open-source project and assets" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|assets|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7782" CreationDate="2019-01-11T13:56:08.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking this is out of scope of the GPL: The GPL would apply to your software iff your software is a derived work of the GPL library in the sense of copyright law. It is not up to the GPL to decide whether that is the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This causes some to argue that linking with a GPL library never creates a derived work, whereas the FSF thinks that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a process is a derived work of all the software that is loaded or linked into that process; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a a software work may be derivative if it engages in intimate data flow or control flow with another software, such as by exchanging complex data structures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the FSF's interpretation your software would be derivative of the GPL libraries regardless of how the GPL libraries are obtained, because your software is specifically designed to require that library. Their relationship is so intimate that your software is not able to perform its main purpose when the GPL libraries have not been installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software were not derivative, then distributing the GPL libraries alongside your software would not be problematic: then the GPL would consider this to be Mere Aggregation and would not impose any terms on this software, as long as you comply with the GPL with respect to the GPL-covered libraries (such as providing their source code). So asking the users to download the libraries does not change the discussion of whether your software is derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your third option is a legal workaround. You can expose some generic API that must be provided by a plugin. Perhaps even include a minimally viable default implementation! Your end users can then implement their own plugin, and that plugin can use the GPL-covered library. This is possible solely because the GPL explicitly allows anyone to &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt; the GPL covered software for any purpose, and only imposes conditions when the software is distributed. Here, it is not possible for anyone to distribute this plugin implementation as doing so would violate the GPL of the library, unless the copyright holders provide an exception to the terms of the GPL that allows it to be linked with proprietary code (e.g. as the LGPL or under the Classpath exception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that doing stuff that is not allowed by a license is copyright infringement, and helping others to infringe copyright is still contributory copyright infringement. You should therefore refrain from providing your customers with guides to do anything that would be infringement if you were doing it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T13:56:08.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2019-01-11T15:19:13.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is focussed on software, so it is not clear how it applies to non-software creative works such as images. But unless the license allows you to do something with these assets, you cannot use them – they are still copyrighted works!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the GPLv3 so that you can use these assets in a proprietary project. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you use the unmodified assets you still have to provide the GPLv3 license terms to end users and must not prevent them from copying and modifying these assets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you modify the assets then these modified assets would also be subject to the GPLv3. You not only have to mention that you modified them, but also have to provide the preferred form of modifying these assets. E.g. if you modify an image with Photoshop, you would have to provide the .psd file.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL would extend to anything that is a derived work of these assets. What falls under this is difficult to tell, especially for audiovisual works like video games. Because of significant legal uncertainty, it might be better to avoid these assets.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course always contact the authors of these assets and ask them for a more suitable license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T15:19:13.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2019-01-11T17:17:20.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old question but I have a new genuinely useful site that has grown to become very pertinent here.where &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stackshare.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stackshare.io&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its a site which gathers data from Github and generates scores based on social media activity. It also has user accounts that enable you to list what software stacks you use in your day job/business. Thereby adding to the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very good site similar to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openhub.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;openhub.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14012" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T17:17:20.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7424" CreationDate="2019-01-11T21:04:18.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes that statement is true. (I am one of the developers of GoJS)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answerer seems to be conflating open source with free. You are allowed to bundle the GoJS evaluation version for free with your free (and open source) software. But you don't have to bundle it, either. You can leave it as a dependency that is up to others to download (either they download the evaluation, or buy a license, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project still remains open source even if it has a dependency that is not open source. This is very common, think of all the open source projects that run on (closed source) Windows. Open source projects do not need to distribute all their dependencies, either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14014" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T21:04:18.423" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T21:41:03.483" Score="-1" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed an R package that I would have to license under GPL2 due a few of my dependencies having that license. If I do not distribute this package via CRAN, would it be possible to sell the source code to users if it's for commercial / for profit applications, but provide it for free to academics? If so, how should this be organised in practice? Would it be OK to email the code only to academics, and else ask for a fee? I know that GPL2 would allow any user that obtained the code would then be granted to further distribute the code to anyone else, but I just reasoned that an academic would probably not have much incentive to distribute it to a company, and conversely that a company that paid for it wouldn't like to distribute it further. Or what would the other options be in this case to allow a bit of money to be made from commercial usage of this package, to compensate for some of the development work? Putting the package behind a web interface I heard would also be possible, but that's difficult because of the large files the package works with, which are hard to send over internet. A commercial pretty Java interface to use the R package in a user friendly way I guess would also be possible? I.e. a commercial derivative product? Or would that too have to have a GPL-2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14015" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T23:38:07.093" Title="Can I sell a GPL2 licensed R package if it's for commercial applications and make it available for free only to academics?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T22:59:45.910" Score="4" ViewCount="827" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a CrowdStrike kernel module installed, and this is apparently the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;description:    CrowdStrike Pinned Security Module&#xA;author:         CrowdStrike, Inc.&#xA;license:        GPL&#xA;retpoline:      Y&#xA;rhelversion:    7.4&#xA;depends:        &#xA;intree:         Y&#xA;vermagic:       3.10.0-693.21.1.el7.x86_64 SMP mod_unload modversions &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;license: GPL&lt;/code&gt; would seem to indicate that source code is available for this module, but I haven't seen it anywhere online, including at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CrowdStrike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/CrowdStrike&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed that it's listed as &lt;code&gt;intree: Y&lt;/code&gt; but I don't see this in the kernel source tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone aware of the source code for this module being available anywhere? Are they being sneaky with &quot;intree&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, has anyone gone through the process of asking a vendor for source code for a kernel module?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14016" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T10:21:36.357" Title="Source request for a GPL-licensed Linux kernel module?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7789" CreationDate="2019-01-11T23:38:07.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me answer your core question here, since you're asking too many other questions for anyone to answer them all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I developed an R package that I would have to license under GPL2 due a&#xA;  few of my dependencies having that license. If I do not distribute&#xA;  this package via CRAN, would it be possible to sell the source code to&#xA;  users if it's for commercial / for profit applications, but provide it&#xA;  for free to academics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short Answer: Probably not.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer: the GPL does not prohibit you from charging whatever you want to distribute code; if you want to put up a website and ask people for money, you can certainly take anything they are willing to pay.  It doesn't even have to be your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you &quot;have to&quot; license the module under GPL2 because of its dependencies, then the commercial users (as well as the academics) are entitled to demand a full copy of the original source code, and also have the right to redistribute it however they wish.  This means that any model you have for charging for the code would be short-lived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this assumes that you're even distributing the module in binary form to begin with.  A lot of R modules are distributed as source, in which case the commercial user would already &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/is-it-legal-to-sell-gpl-software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/is-it-legal-to-sell-gpl-software/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4414/if-my-r-package-uses-gpl-packages-does-mine-automatically-inherit-gpl?rq=1&quot;&gt;If my R package uses GPL packages, does mine automatically inherit GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4522/is-it-legal-to-charge-for-distributing-the-source-of-a-software-which-uses-gplv2/4523&quot;&gt;Is it legal to charge for distributing the source of a software which uses GPLv2 components?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T23:38:07.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T01:58:13.120" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that Alice has started a project under a permissive license, e. g. MIT. Then Bob forked it and added some features. Now the project has two copyright holders, Alice and Bob. Then Bob decided to continue the development under a copyleft license, e. g. GPLv3 and fixed some bugs. Then Bob decided to move the project back to a permissive license, MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question: could Bob do this without consent of other copyright holders for the project, namely Alice? Intuitively he should have such right. But Alice's and Bob's work might not be dissectable within the project. Are there terms in copyleft licenses that control such situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3724" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T13:12:26.633" Title="Revert copyleft license without consent of all copyright holders" Tags="|copyright|relicensing|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7792" CreationDate="2019-01-12T08:03:26.250" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; example you've quoted, I believe this is possible (though of course IANAL/IANYL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob, being the rightsholder for all the stuff he's added, is not bound by the licence he's decided to use with respect to his additions.  He can distribute his own changes &lt;em&gt;independent of Alice's codebase&lt;/em&gt; under any licence he chooses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice's original codebase is presumably still happily available from Alice, under its single, original licence (MIT).  Even if it's not, Bob presumably has his own copy, which he received under the terms of the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob can therefore recombine his changes with Alice's original code to produce a (new) thing that's never been distributed under GPL, without violating anyone's copyright.  He may also distribute this under, say, the MIT licence, without violating anyone's copyright, or the licence terms on Alice's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone other than Bob has contributed to Bob's fork, either their changes must be abandoned or their consent obtained.  Anyone who has an existing copy of Bob's project under GPL (with the requirements of the MIT licence applying &lt;strong&gt;in addition&lt;/strong&gt; to those of the GPL, to Alice's code) can continue to use it under those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T13:12:26.633" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T13:12:26.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7790" CreationDate="2019-01-12T11:41:03.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If that module is under the GPL (and AFAIK there is no way for a Linux kernel module not to be covered by the GPL), then whoever gave you these binaries is also responsible for providing you with the corresponding source code. If you have obtained this software via RedHat, then RedHat should be the target of your source request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T11:41:03.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7796" CreationDate="2019-01-13T11:05:41.843" Score="1" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know how a licence can both allow commercial use and be share-alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reasoning is as follow : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use it in a product (which is authorized by the &quot;commercial use&quot; part), we have to release it with the same licence, since we're creating from &quot;the material of the original work&quot;. Therefore, our product must also be free of charge to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14026" OwnerDisplayName="Jonathan Simonney" LastEditorUserId="14026" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T09:50:53.793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T09:50:53.793" Title="How does share-alike play with commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7795" CreationDate="2019-01-13T11:29:02.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;commercial use&quot; is very vague and there is no widespread agreement on what it means. The definitions range from &quot;use by a company&quot; to &quot;making money by selling copies&quot; and just about anything in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the corner stones of open source licensing (which most licenses with a share-alike or copyleft nature fall under) is that the license can not exclude groups of people and that includes the group of people that tries to make money off your product.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In this way, share-alike doesn't mean you have to share your work in exactly the same way, including the price asked for it, but it means that you must give the recipients of your work the same rights for modification and re-distribution that you received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you must give the recipients of your work the right to distribute it further (with or without modification), a share-alike license doesn't work well with a business model of selling copies of your work (every customer could become a competitor who can charge less than you do for the same product). But other business models, like selling support contracts, are entirely possible with a product that has a share-alike or copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T11:29:02.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-14T13:14:33.000" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I authored an R package that will be licensed under GPL2 due to some dependencies that I use also being GPL2. I was wondering if I would be allowed to make a commercial closed source JAVA GUI interface though to use this R package in a user-friendly way, or would that also have to have a GPL2 license? It would just be a GUI that would drive some of the functions from that package via the command line (for users that don't like command-line stuff), e.g. allowing one to select files to be analyzed and select a few analysis options and maybe view the analysis output...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14015" LastEditorUserId="14015" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T22:18:05.713" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T22:18:05.713" Title="Can I make a commercial JAVA GUI interface to a GPL2 licensed R package that I authored?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7801" CreationDate="2019-01-14T15:49:30.407" Score="2" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a GitHub project and decided to use the Apache License 2.0 in my source code. Although I never added a file with the full license text but only the boilerplate notice in each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I realized my mistake and added the Apache License 2.0 but someone had already forked the project and added the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what stands and what can I do if anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14030" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T19:51:30.733" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T19:51:30.733" Title="License dispute" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7800" CreationDate="2019-01-14T16:35:53.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The typical Apache 2 license notice contains a link to the full terms, therefore including the full terms of the license in the repository is not necessary. So your license likely was in effect right from the start. If there had been no license, no one else would have been allowed to change the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the rights you give away via the Apache 2 license is that other people may use your code in other software, without having to publish that software under the same license. They still have to follow your license terms, e.g. to keep any license notices intact. E.g. the GPLv2 license terms make it impossible to simultaneously honour the Apache 2 license, but the GPLv3 license is compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives the following possible scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you did not provide an effective license, the other person committed copyright infringement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they removed or changed your legal notices (such as copyright notices) they committed copyfraud (a kind of copyright infringement) and violated the terms of the Apache 2 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they issued a new license without having made any changes to the code, that is a grey area: they are not a copyright holder and therefore have no right to issue a license, even if your software could also be used under the terms of the new license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they chose an incompatible license such as GPLv2 they have violated the Apache 2 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they chose a compatible license such as GPLv3, they have merely exercised the rights you gave them. This is still an unusual move.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they infringed your copyright e.g. by violating the Apache 2 license, you should contact them and ask them to rectify the issue, e.g. via a GitHub issue or by sending them an email (clone their repository to your computer to find committer emails in the git log). If they do not comply you can consider issuing a takedown request to GitHub, but I'd try all other alternatives first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they changed the license in exercise of their rights, you can still ask them whether they wouldn't like to keep the upstream license that you provided. This would have the advantage that their changes could be included in your upstream project. However, you have no way to force them to stick to your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T16:35:53.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7800" CreationDate="2019-01-14T16:39:25.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me be clear that a person who modifies your Apache-licensed work is free to release their own changes under the GPL. The Apache 2 License is a permissive license that is compatible with the GNU GPLv3, so your Apache-licensed material may legally be incorporated into a larger work that is, as a whole, licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the following things are also true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downstream GPL distributor still has an obligation to obey the requirements of your Apache 2 license grant as long as they use your copyrighted material. These requirements include 4(a), &quot;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License...&quot; If the GPL redistributor does not do so, they are in violation of your license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the GPL distributor wants to argue that your code was not properly licensed under the Apache license, since you didn't include the full license text, then that is an even &lt;em&gt;worse&lt;/em&gt; position for them to be in, since they'd effectively be arguing that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;you never gave anyone any permissions at all&lt;/a&gt; and they're committing a flagrant copyright violation by using your code without permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downstream distributor may include your Apache-licensed code in a larger GPLv3 work but they may not simply distribute your work verbatim under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downstream distributor has an obligation to clearly delineate which files include work by which author(s) by preserving copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the solution is simply to ask the downstream distributor to include the text of the Apache 2 License. They are free to include the GPLv3 &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; if (and only if) they added their own copyrighted material that they themselves added on top of your own work. Whether or not they distribute your work verbatim, they have a responsibility to abide by Apache 2's section 4(a) and include the Apache 2 text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-01-14T16:39:25.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7805" CreationDate="2019-01-15T06:03:08.510" Score="15" ViewCount="3694" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you put a license in your software, is it bound to all the versions of your software, or only a specific version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have licensed my software version 1 under license A, and then I developed version 2 but want to apply a different license B, am I free to do so? Is version 2 explicitly or implicitly still licensed under license A?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13307" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T20:53:11.870" Title="Are software licenses version-specific?" Tags="|license-compatibility|version-number|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2019-01-15T07:46:44.863" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, since you are the sole author you are (presumably) the sole rightsholder, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4481/458&quot;&gt;you aren't bound by the licence anyway&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, licences don't inhere in software, they attach to software through the process of conveyance.  As the rightsholder, you may give one copy to Alice under the terms of GPLv2, and she may use it only under those terms.  You may give another copy to Bob under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.6/COPYRIGHT2.html#5_%5Bunder_General%5D&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt;, and he may use it only subject to those terms.  You may give a third copy to Carol under a proprietary licence, and those terms will apply to Carol's use, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, none of this applies to people who aren't the rightsholder; they may only do what they are permitted to do by the licence that applies to their copy.  If you've licensed a copy under GPLv2, users of that copy may do so only under the terms of GPLv2, which (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) requires that further copies and derivative works be licensed under GPLv2.  If you've licensed a copy under GPLv2+ (&quot;&lt;em&gt;GPLv2 or, at your option, any later version&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) then users of that copy may do so under GPLv2, GPLv3, or GPLv2+; the choice of which they use is left to them; further copies and derivative works will have to be licensed accordingly.  If you've licensed a copy under 3-clause BSD, that licence makes no requirement for the licensing of derivative works, so users of that copy will have considerable latitude in choosing how to license any derivatives they might develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T07:46:44.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7808" CreationDate="2019-01-15T12:13:30.877" Score="6" ViewCount="2474" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I add a license to a project, I usually place it in a file &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; at the root of my repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I thought I'd add the license right there in the &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; and not add a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; file to my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just do that? Is it unusual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2983" LastEditorDisplayName="user2983" LastEditDate="2021-07-29T08:33:19.060" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T19:33:34.610" Title="Can I include license text in my project's README and not add a license file?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2019-01-15T12:25:32.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it (I am not a Lawyer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is a grant of permission from the copyright holder(s). Licenses may be given/sold to an individual user or (as is the case with FOSS licenses) offered to anyone who receives a copy of the work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the work is purely yours then you are free to release new versions under whatever license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky bit comes when you start accepting contributions from the community. Absent evidence to the contrary the normal assumption is that copyright of such contributions remains with their authors and the contributions are released under the same license as the project they are contributed to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end result of this is that a project like the Linux kernel is virtually impossible to re-license. The terms of GPLv2 require derivatives to be released under the same license terms and the list of copyright holders is way too large to make getting permission from all of them a practical proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many projects have &quot;or any later version&quot; clauses in their licensing statements. This allows the author of the license to release new versions of the license and then the projects covered by such clauses can move up to newer versions because they have (implied) permission from their contributors to use the code under &quot;any later version&quot; of the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many projects also have some form of &quot;contributor agreement&quot; where contributors agree to either hand over copyright of their contributions to the organisation that created the project or agree to grant the organisation that created the project permission to use the contributions without the normal licensing restrictions and hence to re-license the project as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such asymmetric arrangements are of course controversial, especially when there are proprietary releases involved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastEditorUserId="2975" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T16:37:22.393" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T16:37:22.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7806" CreationDate="2019-01-15T12:40:23.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can absolutely do that and it is fairly common. A file called LICENSE has no special legal significance. It is the responsibility of a user of the software to obtain necessary licenses, so the absence of a particular file doesn't give them any special permissions – if they don't find the license in the Readme, they cannot use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, many projects do not have a &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt; in their LICENSE file, but only the &lt;em&gt;license terms&lt;/em&gt;. There should also be some specific notice that the software can be used under those terms. Other projects have neither a license file nor a license in their Readme, but only a license identifier in package metadata. While it is usually clear what the author intended, I do not think that would be a suitable license because it's too easy to accidentally put into the metadata, e.g. as part of a template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be desirable to also put a license header into all of your source files so that it is clear that they are part of the project, and that they are subject to a particular license. This can help if the source files are copied without the README, which can e.g. happen during some packaging processes or by a careless fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some special file names such as LICENSE may be used by GitHub to auto-detect the repository license. If you put the license into the Readme, GH will no longer be able to recognize that. Then again, this GH license indicator is quite fragile anyway and users should not rely on it but always check the actual license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T12:40:23.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T13:50:24.103" Score="2" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a corner case for including copyright notices when distributing copies of a software under MIT and other permissive licenses. In fact, deploying a smart contract on the blockchain means basically distributing the binary form which will be then executed by anonymous computers called miners. My smart contract can include portions of bytecode coming from opensource projects. A notable example is the MIT licensed OpenZeppelin framework. So my question is: here we have a distribution of binary which will be run by people which is anonymous and, given the Ethereum protocol, there is no way to show them the copyright notices other than putting these in a github repository. Would this be compliant with the license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13047" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T13:50:24.103" Title="Copyright notice in deployed smart contracts" Tags="|copyright|binaries|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-15T13:52:26.457" Score="1" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some reasons I will be using CC BY NC SA license thorough out my project/program, and I know that this license is not approved by OSI or FSF because it have NC ( i.e. non-commercial) clause in it. So what if I use this license anyway in my project, will I get sued for doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13749" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T10:17:04.123" Title="What if my license is not approved by OSI or FSF?" Tags="|osi|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7810" CreationDate="2019-01-15T14:52:21.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the project is all your own work, or any contributors have clearly agreed that their contributions are also licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, then I don't see any major problem.  There certainly aren't any grounds for being sued merely over that choice of licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My calculator runs &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numworks/epsilon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code&lt;/a&gt; which is the work of a proper company, and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.  The biggest problem is that such a restrictive licence is a big turn-off for some potential contributors.  You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a long thread&lt;/a&gt; on the licence choice wherein you can see that some people feel really strongly that they won't contribute to a non-free project (the thread dates back to an earlier time when the code was CC BY-NC-ND-SA, before the company agreed to relax the licence slightly, but the points made then still apply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your big problems with that licence are that it can be turn-off for contributors and the wider community, that it's not very well suited to software (a problem with all the CC licences, excepting CC0), and that it's non-free so you have to be very careful that no contributor accidentally puts eg GPL'ed code into it.  Being sued over your choice of licence isn't likely to be a big problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T14:52:21.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7810" CreationDate="2019-01-15T18:37:27.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think that you will get sued, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons FAQ&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;strong&gt;recommend[s] against using Creative Commons licenses for software.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ goes on to say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenses made available&lt;/a&gt; by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as “open source”&lt;/a&gt; by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for this are related to the concept of source code, patent rights and incompatibility with major open-source licences (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the &lt;strong&gt;distribution of source code&lt;/strong&gt;, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address &lt;strong&gt;patent rights&lt;/strong&gt;, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently &lt;strong&gt;not compatible with the major software licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with GPL version 3, and CC0 Public Domain Dedication is compatible with GPL, so you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use that for software if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can use Creative Commons for docs, manuals, tutorials, artwork etc. related to the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt; in response to Zeeshan Shaikh's comment, &quot;can you name few software licenses which have similar set of rights to CC BY NC SA License please&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NC (NonCommercial) variants of the Creative Commons licences prohibit reuse that is &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; commercial. As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons FAQ&lt;/a&gt; points out,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC's definition does not turn on the type of user: if you are a nonprofit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could still run afoul of the NC restriction, and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term. Whether a use is commercial will depend on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd#fields-of-endeavor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clause 6 of OSI's open-source definition&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that an OSI-approved licence must not prohibit commercial use of the software; this obviously includes using it for purposes that are &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; commercial. As far as I can see, NC condition in CC-NC-based licences conflicts with OSI open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that freedom 0 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Stallman's four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that commercial use is allowed. In addition, the phrase &quot;as you wish&quot; implies that the user does not need to inform you about how they use the software or needs to request your permission for certain ways of using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1399/8601&quot;&gt;Can GPL licenced software be used in corporate environments?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2082/8601&quot;&gt;Open Source license for school use, but not commercial use&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Creative Commons' &quot;BY&quot; (Attribution) clause: many free software / open-source licences require that you retain the copyright of the &quot;licensor&quot; or creator, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License, Version 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-Clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; (see its first clause), &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License version 3&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (see clause 3.4) or the less-well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union Publice License, version 1.2&lt;/a&gt; (see clause 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8601" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T10:17:04.123" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T10:17:04.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T12:47:58.533" Score="5" ViewCount="3682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on my Node.js library/framework. I would like to eventually publish it as FOSS software, but I would like to hinder people who change/fork my code from not giving their changes back. This would lead me to preferring a GPL-style licence over a BSD-style licence such as most Node.js-related projects I've seen use (Node.js itself, Express.js, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question actually boils down to two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any particular reason most of the Node.js ecosystem publish their software under the MIT (or similar) licence? Is it just a historic thing, is it related to the fact that JavaScript is not compiled/linked but run?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Related to the first question, what problems can arise (in terms of practical application of the licence) from publishing my software under the GPL? First, can I do it without violating the Node.js licence or the licences of the dependencies I use (I use one dependency at the moment, which is also MIT-licensed)? I assume I can, since MIT itself is permissive. Would it be a problem the other way around (If Node.js were GPL-licensed and I wanted to publish my framework under MIT)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, I'm trying to understand the interplay of GPL with non GPL code in non classically-linked environments, if that has ever been put to the test, in order to see whether it makes sense for me to license my code under the GPL in order to reach the above-mentioned goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14051" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T14:01:35.293" Title="Publishing my Node.js library/framework under the GPL" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7813" CreationDate="2019-01-16T13:58:45.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can license your code under the GPL, but it is an unusual step in the Node ecosystem. The tendency in that ecosystem to prefer MIT and ISC licenses seems to be largely a cultural thing where developers prefer simple licenses that allow any kind of downstream use, without any extra attribution requirements (MIT generally only requires that you keep existing notices intact). Many package authors also do not care about licensing, and simply stick with the NPM default (ISC). Furthermore, the GPL license text alone is significantly larger than many small packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Nodejs is completely under GPL-compatible permissive licenses, you are free to use a copyleft license such as the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use or non-use of a specific linking technology is irrelevant for the GPL. If you &lt;code&gt;require&lt;/code&gt; an NPM module that is not meaningfully different from dynamically linking a native library or a C program that uses &lt;code&gt;dlopen()&lt;/code&gt;. AFAIK these issues have not been litigated to date, and even then any court precedent would only apply to that jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that no open source license will guarantee that any changes to the software will be made available. The goal of the GPL is to ensure that end users always have the freedom to inspect and change the software that they use. Therefore, a user of your software may make &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; modifications. They are not required to publish them at all. The GPL only requires that if someone receives a copy of the modified software, that they also receive the source code of this modified version under the terms of the GPL, so that end user freedom is ensured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for server side code, it is very rare that copies of that code are given out. The GPL requirements do not trigger on ordinary server side use. The AGPL license may then be a better choice because the AGPL already triggers when users interact with the modified software over a network, not just when the users receive a copy of the software. This is why many open source infrastructure companies used the AGPL for their products, until recently (see Redis/Commons Clause and MongoDB/SSPL for two examples of switches from AGPL to non-Open Source licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the (A)GPL comes in different versions, and that versions 2 and 3 are incompatible with each other, and that version 2 is also incompatible with the Apache 2 license. Choose the (A)GPL “version 2 or later” if you are concerned about maximum compatibility, otherwise version 3 is better as it clarifies and improves the license in some crucial aspects (such as an anti-patent-treachery clause, or that running the software in the cloud is allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T13:58:45.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T14:27:26.880" Score="1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have developed some software and we want to provide with the source code and binaries to the academic and industry community, so that they can freely use it. But if anybody wants to make commercial profit they should ask us for permission first. What do you think is the right license for this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14054" LastEditorUserId="14054" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T11:05:59.193" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T11:05:59.193" Title="Right licenses for software: free use but ask for permission when economical profit" Tags="|licensing|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-01-18T15:44:51.103" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7815" CreationDate="2019-01-16T15:56:29.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No such open source license exists. Usage restrictions, e.g. forbidding commercial use, violates point 6 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have to look for a non-Open Source license, or ask a lawyer to draft a custom license for your use case. Note that publishing software with no license is also possible in which case all rights are reserved. But this can cause accidental copyright infringement, for example if someone publishes a modified version of the software, even if only to send you a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may particularly want to look at “shared source” licenses, e.g. the license suite created by Microsoft in 2001: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T15:56:29.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7821" CreationDate="2019-01-18T11:08:06.663" Score="3" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve made a GPL-3 licensed app, the source code and binary releases of which are available on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I bundle the Pandoc and Pandoc-citeproc binaries with my app? These binaries are GPL-2 licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I upload these binaries to GitHub?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to note anywhere in my app that I have bundled these binaries? (In the source code, in the user interface, or both?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, is there any common text that is used to notify users that a binary has been bundled with an app?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license text for Pandoc reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or&#xA;  (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve read some similar threads on this Stack Exchange, mostly about FFMPEG, but I just wanted to double-check to be on the safe side because my question is specifically about open source binaries in an open source package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14072" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T14:19:40.433" Title="Can I bundle a GPL-2 binary (Pandoc) with my GPL-3 app?" Tags="|gpl|binaries|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-18T11:54:59.633" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source code repository under MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1.&#xA;My question: is deleting a file is a license violation ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14074" LastEditorUserId="14074" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T17:54:19.383" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T17:54:19.383" Title="Is deleting a file under MPL 1.1 is a license violation?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-01-18T15:00:25.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7819" CreationDate="2019-01-18T14:19:40.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pandoc is available under the terms of the GPL version 2 &lt;em&gt;or greater&lt;/em&gt; so the different versions are not relevant: you can just use the terms of the GPLv3. Even then, bundling a GPLv2 program with a GPLv3 project is fine as long as that falls under “mere aggregation”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can of course bundle the Pandoc binaries with you app. The same rules as for distributing other GPLv3 binaries apply (sections 4 and 6 of the GPLv3), in particular that you must also provide their source code. In my opinion it is sufficient to point to the official Pandoc repository (in particular if you also use the official Pandoc binaries), though do note that your obligations to offer the source code do not end should the official repository be deleted for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you bundle the binaries you should make it clear that these are a separate program. E.g. I would place them into a separate &lt;code&gt;third-party&lt;/code&gt; directory, in which I would also place their licensing information and instructions on how to obtain the source code. In the top level license file, I would also list the bundled software and their licenses. For your binary releases, the installer should also offer all of this information (easy if it is just a tarball with an installation script). However, since your software is free software as well, the usual problems do not occur, e.g. a proprietary software that would try to prevent changes to a GPL covered component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T14:19:40.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7826" CreationDate="2019-01-18T21:18:19.673" Score="5" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a Debian VM with Debian based docker containers, so far I would just extract the entire source code after the VM is configured and provide the source code on a physical medium e.g. USB-Stick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some of my smaller customers don't want to update the VM themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I run a cron job to update the vm from time to time am I correct that I would have to provide the source code of the updated gpl programs as well ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case I provide an admin software so that updates can be made easily by my customers, am I correct that in this case his would not count as distribution ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the docker containers are downloaded from my private repository when running an update I would need to provide the source code on my website for each version ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are these assumptions correct ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T14:51:05.897" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T14:51:05.897" Title="How to comply with the GPL when providing auto updates?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|linux-distribution|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7824" CreationDate="2019-01-18T21:33:24.983" Score="3" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say a private company released a popular software product under a copyleft (GPLv3) license. It's business model was offering consulting services and premium features for a fee, which in turn financed the development of the product. Most of the contribution in the projet (&gt;95%) was from employee of the private company. So far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years later, change of business model: the software is now split between an older community edition, still under the GPL, and a newer commercial version, only available to paying customers. All new development goes in the commercial version and the master branch is not longer available publicy on github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&#xA;Is such a move legit and compliant with the original GPL3 licence ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14077" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:06:48.863" Title="Can a copyleft, GPLv3 project be closed by its copyright holder?" Tags="|gpl-3|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7823" CreationDate="2019-01-18T22:59:11.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not possible under the terms of the GPLv3 to subject a GPLv3 project to proprietary licensing. However, it is possible to receive an alternative license from the copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, this would require consent from the copyright holders of that 5% of contributions that were not made by employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the company could refactor the project to eliminate these 5% of contributions so that the company holds sole copyright. But tracking that part down correctly is tricky, in particular when you consider the copyright status of the company's contributions that are derived of outside contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In anticipation of possible relicensing, some projects require a contributor license agreement (CLA) or copyright assignment so that the maintainer (here, the company) is not limited by the outbound license. However, many contributors may refuse to sign CLAs precisely because of this issue. A recent example of a CLA-assisted relicensing was MongoDB's change from AGPL to the (non-Open Source) SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the concept of a &lt;em&gt;Joint Authorship&lt;/em&gt;. In a work of joint authorship, any copyright holder is able to provide a license without needing consent from other copyright holders, though this may be US-specific. To which degree this might apply to open source projects is subject of discussion. AFAIK no notable relicensing effort has used this as a legal basis, and relicensing typically uses the route of obtaining consent and removing contributions from non-consenting authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T22:59:11.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7822" CreationDate="2019-01-19T09:13:17.620" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are re-distributing an entire Debian build with your software (licence unspecified) aggregated inside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I run a cron job to update the vm from time to time am I correct that I would have to provide the source code of the updated gpl programs as well ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are.  We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5106/can-i-distribute-unmodified-gplv2-binaries-without-the-source-code&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; on re-distributing unmodified GPLv2 binaries (they are unmodified in the sense that you're not modifying what Debian puts out, simply passing it along to others) which confirms that you are responsible for source distribution to your end-users.  GPLv3 has similar obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In case I provide an admin software so that updates can be made easily by my customers, am I correct that in this case his would not count as distribution ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; the software is getting the updates from.  If it's getting them from a repository under your control, as it seems it is, then that counts as distribution.  You're making GPL software available online for others to access, and you therefore have obligations; whether you or someone else provides the tool that allows end-users to access your repository makes no difference to those obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since the docker containers are downloaded from my private repository when running an update I would need to provide the source code on my website for each version ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, yes.  If any of the software is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;for the binary-only software you distribute on USB key&lt;/em&gt; you are performing a s6b conveyance, and that &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; you to give a written offer of source, valid for at least three years.  &lt;em&gt;Gratis&lt;/em&gt; network access to the source satisfies this, but you have a prescribed time for which you must continue to offer it, and you must inform USB stick recipients about it in writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T09:13:17.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7823" CreationDate="2019-01-19T17:06:48.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, from the ground up...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the company owns &gt;95% of the intellectual property rights. That's because the employer owns the copyright works created by an employee, unless there are alternative arrangement in place. It's another thing if the employee did not do the work &quot;during the course of their employment&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Git Repo is going to tell the company who wrote what. What was contributed by the employees will be there in black and white. Line by line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company could then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redevelop the &amp;lt;5% remaining sections of the code (which is GPL licensed) internally by its employees (during the course of their employment) or contractors who assign copyright in their work to the employer company.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could then licence the entire package on different terms - without the permission of the other contributors. Why? There's no GPL code in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That assumes that the &amp;lt;5% aren't willing to assign their copyright to the company, so that they can deal with the copyright as it wishes to as the copyright owner.  That could be done with a contributor agreement, or even a one line assignment, supported by consideration, &quot;I hereby assign any copyright I may own in [code base name] to [employer name]&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving on to the Split.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it mostly depends on the state of the GPL'd code base when it was split between the   older community edition and the newer commercial version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the company can't do is &quot;unlicence&quot; the versions previously released.  See first sentence of section 2 of the GPL (v3).  That doesn't mean that the employer must continue to make modified versions available for download. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The condition (section 5, GPL) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; convey a work based on the Program ... in the form of source code under the&#xA;  terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you convey the work (ie make it available to others), you must convey all of it. But you don't have to convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then:&#xA;1. if the newer commercial version, only available to paying customers only has non-GPL software in it, it should be kosher for proprietary licensing. &#xA;2. there's no reason why they would need to keep conveying a code base to the community at large which does not have GPL licensed code in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, there are specific tests to be applied (which are qualitative tests) to determine whether joint ownership of copyright exists in a single copyright work. As said above, joint ownership has different consequences in different countries. In the UK, any joint owner of copyright can prevent any other joint owner from exercising any of the exclusive rights of copyright - ie licence it or continue to licence software under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:06:48.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7784" CreationDate="2019-01-19T17:28:55.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL v3 defines the “The Program” as &quot;any copyrightable work licensed under this License&quot;. That would include works which are literary works (the most common form of a computer program), and artistic works (ie images), sound recordings and films. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artistic works and sound recordings would also be a &quot;covered work&quot;, and if you edited the image, the edited work would be caught by the definition of &quot;modify&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By slotting photographs (ie artistic works), sounding recordings and films into a GPL 3 licensed package, the starting point is that its use is covered by the licence. I think it's a hard one to dodge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:28:55.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7318" CreationDate="2019-01-19T19:09:22.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe a starting point for this is to provide in your contract of employment that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bugfixes when done on your employer's clock are owned by you;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but not when they part of major development to the commercial package that you're getting paid for by them to develop;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can't develop features for the GPL version of the package if they have asked you as part of your job to develop them (and you do so), for the duration of your employment + 6 months. Unless they consented otherwise, in writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest would take care of itself through general principles of employment law associated with ownership of copyright. Whatever you do at work &quot;during the course of your employment&quot; is owned by you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'd need to watch out for breaches of your fiduciary duty to the company as an employee (see number 3 above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T19:09:22.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7831" CreationDate="2019-01-19T20:24:31.657" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making some modifications to this project licensed under MIT License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is: I don't know what to do to their license file. Do I just override with my stuff?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14086" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T21:05:50.493" Title="What am I supposed to do with the license, in case of a third party project modification?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7830" CreationDate="2019-01-19T21:05:50.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must never remove existing legal notices. However, if your modifications are more than trivial changes, you can add your own copyright notice to the existing notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if this is the current license notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2011-2018 Original Author&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted ... [MIT License]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could add your own notice above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 João Lucas&#xA;Copyright 2011-2018 Original Author&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted ... [MIT License]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is somewhat unusual. Many projects only list a project founder in their copyright notice, but not all contributors that also hold a part of the copyright. Since copyright is automatic and does not require such notices this won't affect your rights either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license only requires that its notice is preserved, but does not require that you make your modifications available under the same license. Though doing this is unusual, it is your right to choose any license or even no license at all. Let's assume you want to make your contributions only available under the GPLv3. You would then include the terms of the GPL in a separate file like COPYING, and update the main LICENSE file to show both the new license and preserve the old license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SoftwareName - this line briefly describes the software&#xA;Copyright 2019 João Lucas&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software ... [GPL license dedication]&#xA;&#xA;--------------------------------------------------&#xA;This software is based on SoftwareName from &amp;lt;URL to original repository&amp;gt;&#xA;under the terms of the MIT license:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2011-2018 Original Author&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted ... [MIT License]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;never remove any legal notices&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;possibly, add your own notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if in doubt, change nothing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;all OSI-approved open source licenses allow you to publish your modifications, but &lt;strong&gt;read the license&lt;/strong&gt; for possible conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T21:05:50.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T16:41:41.357" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question extends my last question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7822/how-to-comply-with-the-gpl-when-providing-auto-updates&quot;&gt; 'How to comply with the GPL when providing auto updates'.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a Debian VM with Debian based docker containers, so far I would just extract the entire source code after the VM is configured and provide the source code on a physical medium e.g. USB-Stick and thus complying with the GPL by providing the source code alongside the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that some of my smaller customers don't want to update the VM themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poses the question on how to update the debian VM and the docker containers for my customer without constantly having to provide the source code for the updated version.&#xA;(I do not want to manage all the different source code versions, so I want to deliver the source code once and then the customer or some tool should to the updates)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possible Solutions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I provide an admin tool that let's the customer update the Debian VM and the Debian based docker containers from public repositories e.g the official Debian repository and docker hub for the base containers, would it then be enough to give my customer only the source code for the delivered GPL programs within the Debian vm and containers on an USB drive to comply with the various GPL licenses ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this tool also be automated e.g. with a cron job ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say my customer pays me again to do the updates as a service for him manually e.g accessing his server because he hired me to update the software, am I correct in assuming that this would not count as distribution because I act on behalf of my customer and only use public repositories (default debian ftp to update debian and docker hub plus my docker scripts to update the containers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T21:08:40.950" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T21:08:40.950" Title="How to update GPL licensed software distributed to a customer without providing the source code on each update?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|linux-distribution|docker|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7804" CreationDate="2019-01-22T05:28:07.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's actually better than what you suggest in the second paragraph of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're the owner of the copyright in the entire software package.  (Let's leave patents to one side, because they unnecessarily complicate matters here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is your personal property. You own it. You don't need permission to use it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've probably heard that intellectual property rights- including copyright - are &quot;negative&quot; in nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that everyone else needs permission to use your software. That's all the license does: grant a permission to others to use the software, and any conditions of that permission. So much so, that when you read the word &quot;license&quot; in this context, you can read it as the word &quot;permission&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that means you can licence version 1 to different people using the GPL, Affero, any other open source software license or using a proprietary license. A different license for each person if you want. Any licence you like. It's up to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, with version 2. Choose a different license for different people. Depending on the colour of their hair if you want. There's no implicit or implied licence between version 1 or version 2. That's because it's your property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an explainer on software licenses that covers this in more detail if you're interested here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://hallellis.co.uk/blog/software-licences-explained/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hallellis.co.uk/blog/software-licences-explained/&lt;/a&gt; (disclosure: I wrote it), with some licensing tips. It might clear up some misapprehensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastEditorUserId="14085" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T20:53:11.870" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T20:53:11.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5516" CreationDate="2019-01-22T10:50:37.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In most cases it will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be a problem. Most of the open source licences which require to publish under the same licence limit this requirement to source code distribution. So if you contribute/modify either of the libraries it will be under the licence of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to the distribution of your application, most of the open source licences make it possible to distribute your application in binary form under another license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft Reciprocal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all&#xA;       copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in&#xA;       the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mozilla Public License Version 2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this&#xA;      License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the&#xA;      license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter&#xA;      the recipients' rights in the Source Code Form under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general statement  : The obligation to distribute under the same licence is limited to source code distribution. Binary distribution allows for different licence. The intention is clearly to allow such cases as highlighted in the question : allow a developer to mix open-source software with distinct licence terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL V3 however is in clear contradiction with the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conveying Non-Source Forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms&#xA;  of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the&#xA;  machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License,&#xA;  in one of these ways: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and section 5 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this&#xA;      License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.  This&#xA;      License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7&#xA;      additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts,&#xA;      regardless of how they are packaged.  This License gives no&#xA;      permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not&#xA;      invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this regard, GPL V3 is a &quot;greedy&quot; licence and you would have no choice but to licence your application binaries with GPL V3 - and make sure licences from other components allow it (as do the above highlighted ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14101" LastEditorUserId="14101" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T08:59:02.210" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T08:59:02.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5516" CreationDate="2019-01-22T16:56:58.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But would it be a problem, if the required software, that will not be shipped with my application, would have a licence that does not fit with a GPLv3 licence? Or is this no problem as long as I do not ship the software with my application and give the advice to install this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 license requires that the entire application is available under an open-source license that gives at least the freedoms that the GPL license gives. This is in principle independent of how the different parts that make up the application end up on the end-user's computer. (Some people might believe there is a loophole in the GPL requirements when you instruct the user to retrieve the parts independently, giving the possibility to use closed-source software in an otherwise GPL application. I don't believe that that loophole exists.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my case this is an instance of R&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a different matter. The R interpreter (and other language interpreters or VMs) are not considered part of your application and thus don't fall under the GPL requirement that the entire application must be available under a compatible license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the user needs R to execute your application is a similar requirement to the requirements that you need Python to execute Python scripts, a Java VM to execute Java applications or even Windows to run applications built for that OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T16:56:58.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7838" CreationDate="2019-01-23T04:48:51.707" Score="10" ViewCount="1094" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the consequences of pushing a git repository that has an open-source license violation in its history, but not the current head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a git repository with some open source software I am writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I copy in a block of code from another MIT licensed software project, neglecting to include the copyright notice or MIT license text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I commit my changes, creating change &lt;code&gt;ab78e7e&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I realize my mistake, and add in the relevant copyright notice and license text for the snippet I copied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I create a new commit, &lt;code&gt;b80c081&lt;/code&gt;, and push my changes to a public git repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a problem that this &lt;code&gt;ab78e7e&lt;/code&gt; commit exists in the history of my git repository? After all, someone could clone the repository and run &lt;code&gt;git checkout ab78e7e&lt;/code&gt; to obtain a copy of code that is in violation of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have an obligation to squash these commits or otherwise modify the history of the repository such that there is no infringement at any point in history, regardless of the state of any published branches or tags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen GitHub issues and pull-requests that address cases where the author neglected to properly attribute code snippets. It seems like pushing a new commit to fix such a problem is not really a full solution. But it could also be disastrous to modify the history of a widely used repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14111" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:43:46.753" Title="License violation within git history" Tags="|license-notice|git|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7837" CreationDate="2019-01-23T08:07:05.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst IANAL/IANYL, and no developer, it seems to me that the question boils down to &quot;&lt;em&gt;is it a licence violation to offer a repository from which someone could, with some effort, extract a non-licence-compliant subset of the code&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that it isn't.  With enough care, it's possible to extract a non-compliant version of code from most repositories.  For example, given an FTP repo of GPLv3 code, I could choose to extract everything bar the &lt;code&gt;Makefile&lt;/code&gt;s.  That gives me code that won't build, which is non-GPL-compliant according to GPLv3 s1 (fails to meet the definition of &quot;&lt;em&gt;corresponding source&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).  Given a similar git repo, I could choose to extract a commit that happened to contain code errors which, though fixed later, prevented the code from compiling; this again fails to meet the same GPL provision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, as long as you're offering a repo from which the &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; pull option is a properly licence-compliant codebase, you are satisfying the conditions of the licence.  To require that all repos can only ever provide a fully licence-compliant codebase is to impose too high a burden on developers, and I've never heard any call for such an imposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T08:07:05.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T10:07:45.573" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a desktop application that has the ability to generate PDF reports. I would like to use ubuntu font because it has wide language support. I do not plan to modify the font file in any way. Does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/font-licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; allow that? It seems to me it does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14115" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T12:00:03.513" Title="Can I include the Ubuntu Fonts in a proprietary application?" Tags="|licensing|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7839" CreationDate="2019-01-23T12:00:03.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the Ubuntu Font License seems to be an open source license and does allow use in proprietary applications. The Ubuntu Font License is based on the OSI-approved SIL Open Font License, but removes terms that create a pseudo-trademark and removes terms that gives the original authors of the font a special role. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of conditions apply if you propagate the font, here's the TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must include copyright notices and the full license text with the font. However, these may be included in font metadata.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you do not modify the font, you must not rename the font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The font itself is always covered by this license, you cannot add your own (proprietary) licensing terms. However, documents created with this font are not subject to the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For desktop software, just attribute the bundled font as you would attribute any other included libraries: in a “help” or “about” menu entry, or where you provide your own copyright notices, also provide a list of all included open source works with their copyright notices and licenses. E.g. see web browsers like Chrome or Firefox for inspiration on how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T12:00:03.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7837" CreationDate="2019-01-23T12:33:56.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be technically be a case of copyright infringement, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you acted in good faith&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you already corrected the license violation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you never pushed a HEAD that was in violation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would have squashed or rebased the commits before pushing, but that is a minor point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that your fixed Git repository does contain the proper notices and attributions, and that a user would have to explicitly extract a subset that would be in violation. But there are many ways to do that, e.g. by making a copy of the code but leaving out the license file. The possibility of extracting an infringing version is not in itself copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scenarios like this are a good argument why every file should contain a license notice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one exception to this analysis is the GPLv2. Under the GPLv2, the license terminates automatically as soon as the license is violated. You would need to get consent from the copyright holders to reinstate the license (though some projects provide this consent in advance). Other licenses like the GPLv3 have a compliance window that gives you enough time to fix the violation before the license is permanently terminated. The MIT license has no permanent license termination mechanism, instead the license is only conditional on compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T12:33:56.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T16:54:45.133" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to install and run FOSS (free open source software) in a closed operating system like Windows? If so then why did Richard Stallman felt it necessary that there &quot;must&quot; be a GNU operating system to run free open source software in it (and was reluctant to go with Windows OS for free open source software)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13749" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T17:58:07.523" Title="Is it legal to install and run FOSS in a closed operating system like Windows?" Tags="|operating-system|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2019-01-23T17:43:59.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it legal to install and run FOSS (free open source software) in a closed operating system like Windows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely yes. Even a strong copyleft license like the GNU GPL, which requires derivative works to be under the same GPL terms whenever they are distributed, does not extend to the operating system on which GPL-licensed userland software is run, because userland software does not create a derivative work with the operating system. In the case that a piece of software must be linked with a proprietary (or otherwise GPL-incompatible) system library -- in which case it may indeed form a derivative work -- the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#SystemLibraryException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL explicitly exempts this action as allowed&lt;/a&gt;. Permissively-licensed software carries even fewer requirements, and may absolutely be run on proprietary operating systems as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible for an proprietary operating system to impose requirements against the execution of freely-licensed programs: e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possible-to-have-gpl-software-in-the-mac-app-store&quot;&gt;the terms of service for Apple's App Store effectively forbid the distribution of GPL-licensed software&lt;/a&gt; on its platform, and iOS restricts the execution of binaries from outside the App Store. However, this is a limitation that would be imposed by the legal terms of the operating system itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why did Richard Stallman felt it necessary that there &quot;must&quot; be a GNU operating system to run free open source software in it (and was reluctant to go with Windows OS for free open source software)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one, Windows did not exist in 1983 at the time GNU was announced, but it is worth considering his objection to proprietary operating systems in general, which certainly extended to Windows when it was released in 1985. We may consider what he has to say about proprietary UNIX systems that were contemporaneous with GNU's initial development; his objections are ideological and will apply equally well to all proprietary operating systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is the central focus of Stallman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt; in which he details the reasons for writing GNU and includes defenses for various arguments against GNU and free software in general. For the purposes of your specific question, though, I think the main point may be answered like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Stallman feel it necessary to write a free-software operating system? This had nothing to do with the fact that free software cannot be run on a proprietary operating system (as mentioned above, it can). Instead, Stallman believed it was necessary to build GNU for the same reason he believed it necessary to write every other piece of free software, namely, to avoid the use of proprietary software that could not be freely shared, inspected, and modified. This requirement of Stallman's applies no differently to a text editor, to a music player, or to an operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perhaps worth noting that, insofar as GNU is a re-implementation of UNIX, early GNU developers did indeed use a proprietary UNIX system to perform their initial software development of GNU. They gradually replaced the proprietary UNIX system, component by component, until it consisted entirely of free software. [I recall reading about this on the FSF's or GNU's website; I'd be grateful if someone could find the original passage I'm paraphrasing here.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-01-23T17:58:07.523" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T17:58:07.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7842" CreationDate="2019-01-23T17:51:34.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Windows/MS-DOS licensing&lt;/strong&gt; terms do not apply any conditions on the software that run under Windows/MS-DOS. That is useful if you want developers to write as much software as possible for your platform – and Microsoft certainly wanted that, especially in its early time where it was far from set to become the dominant OS for personal computers. This is in contrast to iOS where the platform owner is more interested in exercising total control over the software on the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open source licenses&lt;/strong&gt; do not prevent installation on proprietary systems. For starters, this runs into the practical problem that nearly no useful pure-FLOSS computers exist – firmware is an especially tricky case. I would argue that such requirements would also be a usage restriction that runs against the ideas of Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; licenses do not allow GPL-covered software to depend on non-free software, the licenses include an &lt;strong&gt;exception for system libraries&lt;/strong&gt;. So it is perfectly fine to create a GPL covered software that can only run under Windows, or only under Solaris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;goal of Free Software&lt;/strong&gt; (in the sense of Stallman) is that everyone, in particular also &lt;em&gt;end users&lt;/em&gt; have the freedom to inspect and modify the software they use. This is primarily an ethical question. But it can also be viewed as a consumer-protection effort that leverages copyright law to ensure these freedoms: software that is covered by a copyleft license cannot be included in a software that denies users these rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using copyright law as the legal vehicle for these freedoms also has the practical advantage that it is internationally harmonized through the Berne Convention and WIPO treaty. In contrast, contract law differs drastically across jurisdictions, especially between common law countries like the U.S. and civil law countries like continental Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Richard Stallman came up with the idea of Free Software, &lt;strong&gt;no free software system was available&lt;/strong&gt;. (BSD did reimplement proprietary Unix components, but did not have a copyleft license to ensure end user freedom, and spent a good part of its early life in limbo while its copyright status was litigated). So the GNU project set out to build such a system, including the GNU Hurd kernel and the GCC compiler. In the meanwhile proprietary platforms have to be used by definition, for example running GNU Emacs on a proprietary Unix kernel. Of course, the GNU Hurd kernel didn't get much traction and was overshot some years later by the &lt;strong&gt;Linux&lt;/strong&gt; kernel, which unlike BSD was unencumbered by legal troubles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Free Software is good and ethical, you want &lt;strong&gt;as many people as possible to be able to use Free Software&lt;/strong&gt;. Using individual Free Software programs in a non-Free environment brings users at least part of the benefits of free software. The GPL system library exception is also necessary to enable and speed up the spread of Free Software. Similarly, the linking exception in the LGPL can enable the use of Free Software in contexts where Free Software would otherwise not be able to gain any traction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T17:51:34.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5516" CreationDate="2019-01-23T20:47:21.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What a great question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear whether R is a library from your question. I don't think it matters whether it is or isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we all know that the GPL v03 applies to &quot;The Program&quot;. The GPL refers to &quot;the Program&quot; other ways as well, such as &quot;a work&quot; and &quot;the work&quot;, depending on the context in which those alternatives are used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL V 03 doesn't say that Program needs to be bug-free, complete, prone to failure, fit for purpose or ..... be fully functional. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my half-cut C# code that will never run can be licensed under the GPL as well. As a receiver of my C# code you've got a right to run it under the GPL v03. It just so happens you can't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about GPL v03, section 5, 3rd bullet point? Sure, you have to &quot;license the entire work&quot;. But what is the entire work? Couldn't it be your &quot;incomplete&quot; GPL v 03 software which fails gracefully, if R is not present and ready for use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggested Solution&#xA;You could structure your code base to look for plugins - or named plugins. Of the sort of &quot;R&quot;, as referred to in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your GPL code would - unmodified - checks to see if the code (&quot;R&quot;) is available and ready to use. (For instance, your GPL code checks to see whether &quot;R&quot; is installed and in a particular location on the disk, and runs some preliminary polling to make sure it's installed correctly and will operate properly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, the receiver of your software can (1) download your GPL package, (2) pull R from elsewhere and install it so as to enable the functionality in your code that would otherwise not be available, because the R plugin is not present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about GPL v03, section 5, 3rd bullet point? (the reference to the &quot;entire work&quot; and &quot;whole work&quot;). The R code would not be &quot;packaged&quot; with your release. So it's not covered by the GPL v03. And no licensing conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm wrong on what I say above....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence at the end GPL v03, section 5, 3rd bullet point says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, let's think about that from the receiver's perspective.  As a receiver of your GPL v03 software, I'm licensed anyway. Just because you don't do the right thing, doesn't mean I'm not licensed to run your code with R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, see the last paragraph of section 5, 3rd bullet point. You wouldn't be distributing R with your GPL v03 package. Therefore, it doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There'd be no problem telling your licensees how to install R. I wouldn't do that in your your distribution package, but I'm not sure it matters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, a warning. Make sure the license for R doesn't prohibit it from being used with GPL v03.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T20:47:21.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4767" CreationDate="2019-01-23T21:06:34.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Article 7, paragraph 1 creates a right of ownership - ie personal property. That right is owned by the maker of the database. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article 7, paragraph 3 makes it clear that the right of ownership can be transferred to another person, or licensed to another person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;data&quot; is a &quot;copyrightable work&quot; for the purposes of the GPL v03 (ie an open source licence), and so the answer is &quot;Yes&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watch out though, the Database Right isn't everything it's cracked up to be (assuming it ever was). There's a couple of pretty horrific exceptions to having protection of databases using these Database Rights. Especially if you're outside the EU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T21:06:34.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-23T22:19:40.993" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a c++ file based on Android java source code.  The file is completely renamed and a lot of the code is gutted, but the basic algorithms and some function names will likely stay the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I add the android apache 2.0 license to my c++ file?  Do I need to redirect people to the original work somehow, or not?  Do I just copy the original license from the top of the java file as is and that's it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14122" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T22:19:40.993" Title="How to add Apache 2.0 License to heavily modified work" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-01-24T16:50:49.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7837" CreationDate="2019-01-24T13:43:46.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The git repository as all information, so also the correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, and more practical: I would make sure that all tags and publish branches will have the correct license. I would amend the source archives (&lt;code&gt;tar.gz&lt;/code&gt; and similar) so that they have correct license (but probably I will keep the original file in a new place, with a README which tell about the error).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happen to violate the license (and to publish such work). Unpublishing is very difficult (especially on pre-digital era). So you should correct it and not take advantage of the wrong license: this last point is checked on copyright violation: not only the violation, but damages to real author and your gain. With the above point, you have minimized the risk (personally I would say you are safe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is also the technical solution: you remove the wrong file from git. Git documentation (on advanced topic) will explain you how to do it. In practice, you remove the &quot;blob&quot;, when checking out the relative version, git will not find the file and it will give an error. But no need to rewrite history or have new commit numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T13:43:46.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-25T10:05:24.700" Score="1" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT-BIH is here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physionet.org/physiobank/database/mitdb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://physionet.org/physiobank/database/mitdb/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a page about licenses, but I did not know about commercial availability of learned models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;license description is here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://physionet.org/faq.shtml#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://physionet.org/faq.shtml#license&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;see &quot;What are the license terms?&quot;&#xA;I quote the relevant part about the data license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is nothing analogous to the GPL for data, but we permit copying and redistribution of unaltered data from this site without restrictions, in the spirit of the GPL. We do not allow distribution of altered data except under conditions that make it clear that the data have been altered, because it is very important that users should be able to distinguish between original data from this site and modified versions of those data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much if you tell me.&#xA;And I am very sorry if it was not an appropriate question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I posted this question, I found a kaggle page that also distributes the same data. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/mondejar/mitbih-database&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kaggle.com/mondejar/mitbih-database&lt;/a&gt; On that page, the license is CC0: Public Domain. Can I trust this license although the kaggle page is not original ? If so, I think I can use the weights of models freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14133" LastEditorUserId="14133" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T14:03:45.243" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T14:03:45.243" Title="Can we use the weight of the neural net learned with the MIT-BIH dataset for commercial purposes?" Tags="|gpl|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-25T11:02:30.210" Score="6" ViewCount="1702" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use an MIT licensed package to receive messages in a certain protocol. If I want to use a part of this package to build a new one (also MIT) which sends messages in that protocol (so it's 80% diff. from the original one, it just shares the translations part) do I still need to fork it and then delete most of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assumed that MIT allows you to do anything with the code (and all files included) but I stumbled over this thread:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5120/what-if-somebody-removed-my-name-from-mit-license/5122#5122?newreg=11aa1ae1c2f2435a959ac343f5a359db&quot;&gt;What if somebody removed my name from MIT license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the correct way of doing this, adding my name to the MIT and keeping the other name? Or do I need to add the license to the files I used from the original repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14134" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T22:23:56.543" Title="Using Parts of MIT Licensed Software" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-25T17:27:21.350" Score="-1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patent &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/US9952841B2/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US9952841B2 - Programming system and language for application development&lt;/a&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the question more concrete (based on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.swift.org/t/apple-is-indeed-patenting-swift-features/19779/11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; in the Swift forum) - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it safe for a new distinct programming language (either open or closed source) to implement optional chaining (or any of Swift's features mentioned in the patent text), without risk of litigation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it safe to develop a new Swift compiler independently of Apple and implement features mentioned in the patent text, without risk of litigation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other important implications that independent programming language developers should keep in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9081" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T12:01:15.250" Title="What are the implications of Apple's Swift related patents?" Tags="|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7853" CreationDate="2019-01-25T18:43:58.330" Score="6" ViewCount="2398" Body="&lt;p&gt;From reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license here&lt;/a&gt; I understand how I can use the software but the only condition it imposes has confused me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I download a MIT licensed software and use it to build a larger proprietary software with the intention to sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if I include this license file wouldn't that make my software MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T22:50:09.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T22:50:09.697" Title="Including the MIT copyright notice when the software is part of a larger proprietary software" Tags="|mit|license-notice|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7852" CreationDate="2019-01-25T20:05:23.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must keep the MIT license notice intact, but you can license your software under whatever terms you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually best to include a separate page in your documentation or in some built-in help system for all the open source libraries you are using. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following open source libraries are used by this application:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;libexample -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://example.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2012 Jane Random Hacker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted ... &amp;lt;snip MIT license&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AnotherSoftware&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;copyright and license terms of another software&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most web browsers like Firefox and Chrome have such pages, reachable from their “about this program” menu entry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such separate pages make it clear that the MIT license only applies to that component, not to the entire software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your source code the difference would usually be unambiguous, because third party components are usually kept in a separate directory from your own source code – and if you're using a package manager, your code doesn't include the dependency at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T20:05:23.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7850" CreationDate="2019-01-25T22:23:56.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the MIT license requires is that you keep a copy of the license with the code you copied.  The license does not specify how you need to copy the code, and it doesn't specify anything about you you license any code you add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your first question you are not required to fork and delete.  You are welcome to use copy and paste to paste code into a new document, &lt;code&gt;cp&lt;/code&gt; to copy code between directories, cloning using your code editing tool, or whatever mechanism you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common way to handle the license attribution would be to just add your name to the license headers as part of a list.  Indeed, for any individual code files that contains both your code and copied code, that's the only practical course.  However, if the code you're copying and your code are in different files, you can actually have separate copies of the license, some for the parts you copied with the other person's name, and some with your code and your name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T22:23:56.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-25T23:11:11.877" Score="2" ViewCount="1106" Body="&lt;p&gt;The JDK license said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;only where Oracle has expressly included in the particular source file's header&#xA;  the words &quot;Oracle designates...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, is all the OpenJDK released under the GPL with CLASSPATH EXCEPTION license,  or it is the responsibility of each developer to check each source to make sure he is not using a GPL class without CLASSPATH EXCEPTION? (Obviously, in a non-open source program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14138" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-06-29T05:48:39.757" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T06:01:35.447" Title="Java OpenJDK GPL license with CLASSPATH EXCEPTION" Tags="|gpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7849" CreationDate="2019-01-26T00:45:14.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So as I understand it, your question relates to the licensing of the data they make available, and not using their software in a commercial application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if that's correct, that's a licensing implosion @ &lt;a href=&quot;https://physionet.org/faq.shtml#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://physionet.org/faq.shtml#license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's I reckon the words they use there would be interpreted like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The software is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL)&quot; [so you can use this if you want] &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;(if noted in the source files) other licenses that conform to the Open Source Definition. These licenses permit verbatim copying and redistribution of the source files, and generally grant other permissions as well.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[So this means you can use any licence which conforms to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/docs/definition.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this description&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;include&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;, because apparently they apparently conform with the OSI's own definition (I'm not about to check)].  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;For further details, see Can I use your code in my commercial application? (below).&quot;&#xA;Not relevant to question you have asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There is nothing analogous to the GPL for data, but we permit copying and redistribution of unaltered data from this site without restrictions, in the spirit of the GPL. We do not allow distribution of altered data except under conditions that make it clear that the data have been altered, because it is very important that users should be able to distinguish between original data from this site and modified versions of those data.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to be the person that says this. The GPL starts with the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. Each &#xA;  licensee is addressed as “you”. “Licensees” and “recipients” may be individuals or organizations.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the GPL applies to &quot;any copyrightable work&quot;. Well, if the data can be protected by copyright (and it can), it can be licensed under the GPL. Badly though - but that's a commercial question, not a question of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when they say, &quot;There is nothing analogous to the GPL for data ... in the spirit of the GPL&quot;, the statement is probably too vague to have any legal meaning (or legal effect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it would probably do is set up an estoppel argument in your favour if you ever did license it under the GPL or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they're really saying is - &quot;yeah sure, use the data, don't alter it, but if you do, record that you have changed it, and make it clear what you have changed&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;on balance, what they seem to be saying (in substance) is the BSD style licences are OK with us, with an additional requirement of telling licensees that you have changed the data, and what you have changed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T00:45:14.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7851" CreationDate="2019-01-26T11:26:12.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patents on software are a difficult topic, not in the least because it depends on your jurisdiction if they are recognized in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the patent is granted, it is recognized in your jurisdiction and that Apple actively defends the exclusive rights it gets under the patent (none of which will be a given), then it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; safe to &lt;em&gt;independently&lt;/em&gt; implement the language features that fall under the patent. That goes both for a Swift compiler as for a completely different programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Swift compiler from Apple is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, which gives an explicit patent grant for patents embodied in it, you could safely derive your new compiler from the Apple one. And it doesn't have to remain a Swift compiler in that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T11:26:12.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7861" CreationDate="2019-01-26T15:16:29.703" Score="1" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, deleting files from a user's computer, or transferring personal data from a user's computer to someone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14146" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T22:48:09.267" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T22:48:09.267" Title="If I use GPLv3, am I responsible for the damage caused by my program?" Tags="|gpl-3|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-26T19:54:51.447" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using this library in my app:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ravi8x/AndroidPhotoFilters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AndroidPhotoFilters library&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, that it uses some other library (link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Zomato/AndroidPhotoFilters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Original AndroidPhotoFilters library&lt;/a&gt;) with some minor changes, I guess. Who to attribute in my app's About page? And how to, because License section just says - &quot;This library falls under Apache v2&quot;. What year &amp;amp; owner to put in Apache license section in attribution page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14150" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T19:54:51.447" Title="Attributing a software library which uses another library" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7858" CreationDate="2019-01-26T22:51:33.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly all open source licenses include a disclaimer of warranty and a limitation of liability, including the GPLv3 (see sections 15–17). However, whether and to which extent such disclaimers are possible depends on the user's local jurisdiction. Maybe you are liable, maybe you are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, as long as you show a good faith effort to write working code, you will be fine. That means: don't knowingly write malicious code. If in doubt, at least review the status of the law in your home jurisdiction, and possibly in larger jurisdictions where your software might be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a disclaimer of warranties does not free you from other legal obligations you might have. For example, if an application collects usage analytics, that would likely have to comply with the EU-GDPR. And cryptographic software might be subject to export controls. Open source cannot be a carte blanche to write software that would otherwise be illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T22:51:33.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7736" CreationDate="2019-01-27T10:25:32.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the repository content as presented, there are two possibilities regarding the licensing status:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The presence of the notice in Exhibit A in the files (apart from it being in Exhibit A itself) is considered critical for applying the license. In this case, the lack of the notice means that the repository would not be licensed under the MPL license and is instead unlicensed. This despite the LICENSE file with the text of the MPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The notice from exhibit A is not critical and the presence of the LICENSE file with the text of the MPL license is enough to infer that the intent of the author is to license the repository under the MPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which possibility is true should ultimately be determined by a judge, but the second interpretation is the most likely one. Not in the least because a LICENSE file is a customary way of stating the license that applies to a repository and stating a license in a customary way without intending to apply that license can be seen as deception of the people accessing the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding the notice from Exhibit A to all files where it is possible should be done to ensure the license status of the file is always clear, even when it gets separated from the LICENSE file for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T10:25:32.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7855" CreationDate="2019-01-28T22:50:46.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did the homework. I reviewed the Java sources and found these licenses in the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://download.java.net/java/GA/jdk11/9/GPL/openjdk-11.0.2_windows-x64_bin.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://download.java.net/java/GA/jdk11/9/GPL/openjdk-11.0.2_windows-x64_bin.zip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources Java 11.0.2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found 17,873 *.java source files in total:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;11,683 files with GPL &quot;Classpath Exception&quot; expressly designation in source header&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1,643 files with AFS - Apache Software Fundation License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;157 files with BSD License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;334 resource files without any kind of copyright or license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7 files without any kind of copyright or license:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.desktop\sun\awt\windows\awtLocalization.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.desktop\sun\awt\windows\awtLocalization_ja.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.desktop\sun\awt\windows\awtLocalization_zh_CN.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.management.rmi\javax\management\remote\rmi\RMIConnectionImpl_Stub.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.management.rmi\javax\management\remote\rmi\RMIServerImpl_Stub.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.jdi\com\sun\tools\jdi\JDWP.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.jfr\jdk\jfr\internal\OldObjectSample.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 file with MIT License&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\java.security.jgss\sun\security\krb5\internal\crypto\dk\DkCrypto.java&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4,048 files with GPL license &lt;strong&gt;without &quot;Linkage Exception&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; designation:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.aot (107 files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.hotspot.agent (998 files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.internal.vm.ci (181 files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.internal.vm.compiler.management (4 files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;\src\jdk.internal.vm.compiler (2758 files)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But each of these 5 directories has a &quot;module-info.java&quot; file whose header contains the &quot;Classpath Exception expressly designation&quot;, which makes it seem like the content of whole of each directory would be included in the Exception, but none file included it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18360" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T20:24:19.087" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T20:24:19.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-28T23:37:32.327" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the problems that comes up around releasing a piece of formerly proprietary software as open source is the necessity to &quot;scrub the history&quot; of potentially embarrassing or legally hazardous material, such as poorly-chosen commit messages.  This can lead to project teams who have authorization to release software and publish it, but only if they delete all repository history by creating a new repo using a clean file copy -- not because anything bad is known to be in the history, but because the resources to inspect it aren't available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question regarding this practice is: have there been any documented occurrences where doing a &quot;no history&quot; release of software resulted in some kind of severe failure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;severe failure&quot; I mean things like: project becomes a pariah and has few users and no contributors, or company gets sued, or lack of history leads to a hostile fork, etc.  Something bad enough to make you doubt the wisdom of releasing at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of the hypothetical problems, but I can't think of anywhere those have actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T20:01:49.367" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T05:16:06.550" Title="Are there cases where not releasing code history led to failure?" Tags="|project-management|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7865" CreationDate="2019-01-29T07:48:06.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ovirt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oVirt&lt;/a&gt; project originated as closed source product that belonged to a company called Qumranet, before Qumranet was bought by Red Hat, and its closed assets were opened. oVirt's two main components, oVirt Engine and VDSM both lack history beyond this point - they both start with mega-commits that introduce fully fledged projects (which of course were extended and improved considerably since).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these projects ever created a strong developer community outside of Red Hat (although they do have a successful user community). Having said that, it's hard to determine whether this is due to the lack of history or another reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T05:16:06.550" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T05:16:06.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7347" CreationDate="2019-01-29T08:50:43.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Keeping your library closed source will violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already mentioned in the comments, your question is answered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way. A main program that is separate from its plug-ins makes no requirements for the plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your follow up question, it does not suffice to release the software separately, specifically your part of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but as there is no other application with &lt;strong&gt;compatible&lt;/strong&gt; interface to load my library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is a signal that you are doing derivative work from the GPL. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to change the GPL App to specifically look for your module and load it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You rely on the QTreeView interface which is a complex data structure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you have to conform to the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14076" LastEditorUserId="14076" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T14:42:42.647" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T14:42:42.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7347" CreationDate="2019-01-29T14:20:05.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question implies four things that you want to do. I will list each one you want to do and analyze whether they are allowed by the license(s):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release GPL_APP with full source-code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is completely in accordance with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patch GPL_APP to look for a proprietary library and use it if available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is possibly allowed. See the GPL FAQ &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NonFreeTools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I release a program under the GPL which I developed using nonfree tools?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you link nonfree libraries with the [GPL program], that would be an issue you need to deal with. It does not preclude releasing the source code under the GPL, but if the libraries don't fit under the “system library” exception, you should affix an explicit notice giving permission to link your program with them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the author of the complete GPL_APP, then it will basically be allowed because you can always choose to attach the permission if you desire. If you are not the author of all of the GPL_APP code, then you seem to have two possible options to overcome this: (a) You need to get permission from the contributors to GPL_APP to add such a permission to the license. (b) You need to develop and distribute your own Operating System under which your library qualifies as a &quot;system library&quot; according to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a library (let's call it TREEVIEW_LIB) that is a subclass of QTreeView, and release that library as closed source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt is available as LGPL and under a commercial license. If you use the LGPL version of Qt, then your library will be considered as a modification or derivative work of Qt, so you will need to release the TREEVIEW_LIB source code to comply with the LGPL. If you get a suitable Commercial license from the Qt company, and their Commercial license allows it, then in principle you could release TREEVIEW_LIB without releasing the source code. Essentially your TREEVIEW_LIB would be seen as a modified version of Qt. Note that whether releasing TREEVIEW_LIB would actually comply with the Qt Company's commercial license agreement is a closed source licensing question that you would have to discuss with the Qt Company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I know in first place that users will combine [GPL_APP and TREEVIEW_LIB].&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do choose to release TREEVIEW_LIB as closed source (e.g. by purchasing a suitable commercial license from Qt, or by releasing closed source code derived from an LGPL version and possibly violating the LGPL outright), then the situation will be that users will be allowed to combine them on their own machine by running GPL_APP with your TREEVIEW_LIB library (See GPLv2 Term 0), but the combination itself that is installed on their machine will no longer be GPL. I.e. a user combining your TREEVIEW_LIB library with a GPL program will &quot;taint&quot; the GPL program and so the user will no longer be allowed to redistribute that combination according to the GPL (See GPLv2 Term 1). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this opinion seems to be at odds with the GPL FAQ &quot;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL FAQ, the above quotation seems to mean that you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; license TREEVIEW_LIB in a GPL-compatible way, because of the technical way that a library will combine with another program while running ('dynamic linking' as opposed to 'fork and exec'). However, this Answer in the FAQ is an opinion and should not be seen as the final arbiter of what you are allowed to do. Your actual permissions under law and the licenses are determined by relevant Copyright Law and the license(s) of the software you are actually distributing (e.g. TREEVIEW_LIB). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute TREEVIEW_LIB only, and if that TREEVIEW_LIB distribution does not include any LGPL licensed code (e.g. because you used the commercial version of Qt instead of the LGPL version), then the GPL cannot pose any requirements on how your distribute TREEVIEW_LIB, since that software does not include anyone's ((L)GPL) licensed code. The Free Software Foundation may disapprove, and the decision arguably violates the 'spirit' of the GPL, but in the end, only the copyright holders of the software that you are deriving from (e.g. Qt) can legally complain about how you distribute their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T17:03:02.313" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T17:03:02.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-29T17:12:03.727" Score="4" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a piece of open source software that's distributed as a binary in a Docker container. Thus, most of the users of the software not only do not interact with the source, they do not even interact with the binary. They simply run the container as a process and interact with it via HTTP calls. It's a text-protocol web service that the user runs on-premises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My codebase, which is licensed under Apache 2, pulls in the source code of many libraries at &lt;strong&gt;build time&lt;/strong&gt;. Those libraries each pull in the source code of many other libraries such that at &lt;strong&gt;build time&lt;/strong&gt; there are literally more than 100 copyright notices on the disk of the person building the software (me). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to distribute those copyright notices with the built software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do, the only convinient interface for a user to view them would be to include in the HTTP text-protocol a command &lt;code&gt;GET /licenses&lt;/code&gt; or similar that would return the contents of 100+ licenses and copyright notices (which would incur a performance hit to the software if it were invoked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the purposes of distributing the licenses can I draw a distinction between libraries that I depend on directly and libraries that I depend on indirectly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14167" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T19:00:13.923" Title="Distributing the Copyright Notices of Libraries with Binary Software" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7869" CreationDate="2019-01-29T19:00:13.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Direct vs. indirect dependency is irrelevant: you must comply with the licenses of all software that you distribute. Since Docker containers can include a surprising amount of software, this means distributing pre-built Docker images in proper compliance with all licenses can be rather difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Docker images have the additional oddity that they can be viewed as half-archive (the file system image is not fundamentally different from a ZIP archive), half-executable (you can just run the container, without having to unpack its contents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where an archive file would usually put license information &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the archive, this may not be sufficient for containers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For executables, it is normal that licensing information is provided either by some built-in help system, or by external documentation. Your HTTP &lt;code&gt;GET /licenses&lt;/code&gt; endpoint would be such a built-in system, but it would not be discoverable to users. Instead, I would suggest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide all license notices in the container's documentation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wherever the pre-built image is offered for download, explain where the license information can be found.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the license information also in the container itself. Note in your documentation under which file path the licenses are stored.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach will satisfy attribution obligations both under the executable-like and archive-like aspects of the image. I do not think you would need to expose the licenses to users over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while the software you yourself write might be under the Apache 2 license, the image may also contain software under different licenses, such as a BusyBox userland which would be GPLv2. As you are responsible for satisfying the licenses of all the software in your image, you must also provide attribution for software in base layers of your image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T19:00:13.923" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7873" CreationDate="2019-01-29T20:10:10.557" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of archive formats such as DAR, AR, tar come under the GNU GPL license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly I only need to license my software as GPL if I use any APIs provided by libraries which manipulate the archive (e.g., libdar). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I write my own software to manipulate the archive(eg. a way to read it) I can release it under a license of my choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libarchive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libarchive&lt;/a&gt; is released under the more lenient BSD license but has capabilities of manipulating GPL licensed archive format types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14168" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T05:22:25.600" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T05:22:25.600" Title="Archive Formats and Licensing" Tags="|licensing|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8567" CreationDate="2019-01-29T20:12:31.323" Score="14" ViewCount="9509" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache provides NOTICE boilerplate for a new software projects which are going to be released under this license. I'm going to release my project under that license, so it actually doesn't contain any code from ASF, but boilerplate states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This product includes software developed at&#xA;The Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I drop this part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I drop NOTICE at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14169" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T13:27:36.063" Title="How to properly assemble NOTICE file for new software under Apache License 2.0" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7871" CreationDate="2019-01-29T21:25:44.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A number of archive formats such as DAR, AR, tar come under the GNU GPL license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is incorrect. Some software which is capable of managing those formats has been released under the GPL, but the formats themselves are not subject to the license - and cannot be as a file format itself cannot be copyrighted. (The &lt;em&gt;specification&lt;/em&gt; of a file format can be copyrighted, but that wouldn't stop somebody implementing that format). About the only thing which can get in the way of implementing a file format is a patent - see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GIFs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership_and_legislation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MP3s&lt;/a&gt;, although both of those are now definitely unencumbered as the patents have expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So if I write my own software to manipulate the archive(eg. a way to read it) I can release it under a license of my choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T21:25:44.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7880" CreationDate="2019-01-29T23:46:19.003" Score="-1" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case someone makes a product based on my open source project, I'd like to have them to acknowledge my project with: &lt;code&gt;&quot;Powered by &amp;lt;MyProject&amp;gt;[link_on_Github]&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license similar to MIT, that forces to acknowledge the initiative works &lt;strong&gt;in a prominent place&lt;/strong&gt; on a third party software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14170" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T04:06:18.650" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:20:37.870" Title="License to acknowledge the initiative work" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T05:21:14.107" Score="-1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if I can use a license like BSD in the code of a software I am making for a client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are not a software company so I don't think they want an exclusive use, but I want to give them the code and they can modify it, share it or use other company to continue developing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I don't want to be limited to use the code or selling the software to another company, or create a new version. Do I need to publish the code online for every body who wants to see it or download it? Or I just need to share it with my client in a private context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:15:14.400" Title="Can I share the code JUST with my client in BSD License?" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7878" CreationDate="2019-01-30T08:48:49.753" Score="2" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found some GPL v3 licensed open source projects that also have paid enterprise license versions with more useful features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only need 10% of the features available in the (expensive) enterprise version and have the time to personally fork/extend the open source project to have those features. Is this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if the open source is MIT? To be clear I do not have access to the enterprise code but the features seem simple enough to implement that the code might end up looking similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14176" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:05:24.403" Title="Extending GPL project with Paid license features" Tags="|gpl|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-30T12:02:51.650" Score="2" ViewCount="1311" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have created a web application hosted on virtual machine for client access through web only, no distribution . The database we have used is MySQL Community Edition under GPL 2. The application is connected to MySQL though MySQL Java connector. Are there any impediments in this case considering GPL 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14180" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T17:00:04.817" Title="MySQL for Commercial Web Application" Tags="|gpl-2|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7876" CreationDate="2019-01-30T12:05:24.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you receive a project from someone under an open-source license (like the GPL or MIT), then that license gives you the right to develop the project further and to add features to it that you think are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which feature you can add is completely independent of the features that the original author might be offering as an extended version of the project under a different license. The only thing that you have to look out for is that you don't copy code that you are not allowed to copy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For example, the (closed-source) license of the extended version can contain a clause that forbids further distribution of the source code of the extended features.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But if you develop your features independently of the extended offering and without knowing the internal workings of the extended offering, then there is nothing stopping you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you want to distribute your extended project, the original license determines what licensing options you have for your own code. If the original is under the GPL license, then you will have to release your code also under the GPL license. If the original is under the MIT license, then you have more options for your code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Something else to keep in mind is that the original authors might have gotten trademark protection on the name of their project. In that case, you would have to re-name your version when releasing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:05:24.403" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7875" CreationDate="2019-01-30T12:15:14.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a client has hired you to create software for them, it is not a given that you own the copyrights on that software. Check your contract what is states about copyrights (or the broader term of intellectual property rights) and if the contract is silent about it, check your local laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't have the copyrights, you don't have the right to say what license terms would apply to the software and you also don't have the right to use/sell the code to another client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do have the copyrights, then you can determine under which conditions the client can use the software and if they get the right to make changes to it. You then also have the right to use the software for other clients and you can provide it to those clients under different conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no case are you required to publish the software to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:15:14.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7874" CreationDate="2019-01-30T12:20:37.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a number of licenses explicitly allow reasonable attribution notices that must be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 license has the concept of a NOTICE file that must be made available to users, but not necessarily in a prominent place. It is sufficient to show them “wherever such third-party notices normally appear”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 has a mechanism for Additional Terms which can be used to require the preservation of notices (section 7). However, the notices must be reasonable, which probably excludes a requirement to show them prominently.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The niche but OSI-approved &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution Assurance License&lt;/a&gt; requires that some text is shown in the documentation, and in a prominent place upon launch of a program (e.g. a splash screen). However, the AAL is about ensuring attribution of original authors, not necessarily of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to see how excessive attribution requirements could be abused to the point that such a software is no longer free. For example, there was a web application which required modified versions to show the original project's logo on every page. Such “badgeware” cannot be open source when it triggers attribution requirements on mere use of the software. Such requirements are only OK if they apply to derivative versions of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution requirements were actually a topic on the OSI's license-discuss mailing list in December 2018. You can read my summary &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/LicenseDiscuss122018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T12:20:37.870" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7877" CreationDate="2019-01-30T15:39:01.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of a MySQL database server has no effect on your software. The GPL only extends to derivative works of the GPL-covered software. Most likely, just communicating with a separate process is not enough to create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the use of a GPL-covered library in your application means that your application would be subject to the GPL as well. You do not have to publish your software, so this is typically not a problem for server-side software. However, if you give anyone else a copy of the software then you can only do so under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a problem for you, you could look for an alternative MySQL client library, or put the code that communicates with MySQL into a program that is clearly separate and independent of your main code, e.g. a kind of storage microservice. Or you could buy a commercial license, which seems to be the point of keeping the official Java connector under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An even better solution might be to look at MariaDB (a highly compatible fork of MySQL after Oracle acquired MySQL). The MariaDB connector is available under the LGPL license, which imposes no license requirements on you as long as you keep the connector in a separate JAR. The MariaDB connector might still be compatible with a MySQL server, but of course this is not guaranteed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T15:39:01.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7931" CreationDate="2019-01-30T17:54:58.253" Score="3" ViewCount="1175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking mainly to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To describe it better, I want to use some external functionality that is available through a proprietary library. Since the library IS NOT compatible with GPL Programs, obviously I can't use it directly on the GPL Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a GPL-compatible license (MIT license) library that uses the proprietary library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL Program is having a version of this library WITHOUT the use of the proprietary library, the GPL Program can dynamically load a binary version of this library (.dll , .so through dlopen, LoadLibrary) and use it's implementation instead of the one that is included in the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I violate GPL if I distribute the binary library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14105" LastEditorUserId="14105" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T15:19:32.307" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T07:29:40.953" Title="Can I use proprietary library in a GPL-Compatible library loaded on a gpl Program?" Tags="|gpl|mit|gpl-3|linked-libraries|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-31T00:42:48.380" Score="3" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone modifies a program licensed with the AGPL, the modified program is required to give user's its source code if it interacts with them over a network. My question is what constitutes a &quot;user&quot; in this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would other programs that interact with it constitute users? Would the program have to honor a request for the source code from them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would the users of other programs that interact with it constitute users? Would the program have to honor a request for the source code from them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about clients of the users of the program? Would their request for source code need to be honored, since they are indirectly interacting the program through a network?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4025" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T12:16:16.697" Title="What counts as a &quot;user&quot; for the purpose of the AGPL?" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7886" CreationDate="2019-01-31T02:58:26.310" Score="4" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a license that &quot;forces leaks&quot;, so to speak. What I mean by that is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyright holder must convey a copy of derivatives works they made using the license to anyone who requests it.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of course, conveying &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; derivative works would be crazy, since every time you save a file, you create a &quot;derivative work&quot;. Therefore, you only need to convey derivative works that you either used commercially, or conveyed previously (possibly for a reason unrelated to this license), within the last 3 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anytime the copyright holder hires some to make a derivative work in their name, they must permit and require them to notify anyone who asks for the list of copyright holders they have made derivative works under this license for, as well as a way to send them requests in accordance with (1). NDAs that contradict this are incompatible with this license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anytime the copyright holder transfers copyright of a derivative work, they must also transfer all of the obligations they have under this license. Additionally, when a request in accordance with (1) is made, they are still responsible for conveying the derivative works for which they previously held copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must permit previous copyright holders to uphold their obligations in (3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably some other GPL-type requirements as well as closing loopholes I may have missed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that it would be nearly impossible for someone to keep a derivative work a secret if it is covered by this license. The reason is that someone just needs to ask one of the programmers how to contact the copyright holder, who then must send them a copy of their derivative works, which they could then publish. The only way to prevent it from leaking is to (1) hide the existence of your company and to (2) hide the existence of all the programmers who worked on it for as long as you want to use it (plus 3 years), which is obviously impossible. Anyone using this license might as well just publish it on their website or whatever, and tell their programmers to refer people to that website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does a license like this exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4025" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T13:17:39.527" Title="Is there a license that &quot;forces leaks&quot;, so to speak?" Tags="|license-recommendation|distribution|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7885" CreationDate="2019-01-31T13:17:39.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they do exist.  For example, versions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vim.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the vim editor&lt;/a&gt; prior to v6.1 have a licence that required that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you distribute a modified version of Vim, you are encouraged to send the&#xA;  maintainer a copy, including the source code ...&#xA;  When the maintainer asks for it (in any way) you must make your changes,&#xA;  including source code, available to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This caused a fair amount of upset in some parts of the free software community.  A &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/01/msg00010.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;post on debian-legal&lt;/a&gt; clarified one problem with this model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I distribute a modified copy, and lose my copy, and lose track of&#xA;  the person I gave it to, and you come to me and say &quot;I hereby demand&#xA;  that you give me your changes&quot;, I will be in violation of the&#xA;  license.  The only way I could reliably meet that demand is by keeping&#xA;  a copy myself.  How long would I have to keep it?  Since the license&#xA;  gives no time limit, I would need to keep it forever--for as long as&#xA;  you could make the demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the issue became known in Debian as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island test&lt;/a&gt; of free software.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Vim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FSF regards&lt;/a&gt; vim prior to v6.1 as non-free; v6.1 introduced an explicit GPL conversion clause that satisfied their objections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if you were to use such a licence, whether you wrote it yourself or adapted an existing one, your software would be widely considered non-free.  In addition, it would be incompatible with lots of existing free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Brandin suggests above, one good halfway house would be to use the AGPL, which requires that anyone who gets a copy of the binary, or even remotely uses the binary, is entitled to ask for a copy of the source.  That's about as far as any free licence goes in the direction you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T13:17:39.527" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7911" CreationDate="2019-02-01T00:08:57.307" Score="-2" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;Me and my friend want to make business on customization of our open source project. We have NOT yet registered the project trademark NOR started a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Сan we write in &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 [name of copyright owner]&lt;/code&gt; the name of our project OR we need to register a company and/or trademark to put that name in the &lt;code&gt;[name of copyright owner]&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an answer here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/500/does-being-open-sourced-mean-others-can-use-my-logo/3995#3995&quot;&gt;does-being-open-sourced-mean-others-can-use-my-logo&lt;/a&gt; Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademark law in almost all countries is about actual use of the name/logo by an organization (you) to refer to a specific product that you're providing to the public. As long as you are consistent about using this specific logo to refer to your software, you can call it your trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to register a trademark; merely continuing to use a consistent name/logo for the same product is enough...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT I saw one comment here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7178/can-i-use-website-domain-as-author-for-open-source-license/&quot;&gt;can-i-use-website-domain-as-author-for-open-source-license&lt;/a&gt; stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice must identify the copyright holder, which is usually a natural person, a legal entity (such as a company), or a set of multiple copyright holders. A domain name is not a legal entity that can hold any rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I need help to figure out what what I can and cannot do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14170" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T13:05:38.433" Title="What entities are eligible to copyright a project?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7895" CreationDate="2019-02-01T09:45:58.307" Score="3" ViewCount="1441" Body="&lt;p&gt;So my team is planning to go open source with a project that has been in development together with an industry partner for some time now. We're not sure about the licensing yet, but GPLv3 looks promising so far.&#xA;From the GPLv3 FAQ I figured our partner company will be allowed to keep a modified version of the program for internal use that uses their own proprietary code.&#xA;My question now is, can the company while maintaining the program, publish only parts of the whole software that was evolved together with the proprietary parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example they have library X1.0 which is GPLv3 licensed and Y1.0 which contains proprietary code and is only used internally.&#xA;Let's say the company now continues development on the project internally and the results are library X1.1 and Y1.1. Are they now allowed to publish library X1.1 but keep Y1.1 for internal use only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for the advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14191" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:11:11.350" Title="Can I publish only select code under GPLv3 from a private project?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|proprietary-code|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7883" CreationDate="2019-02-01T12:16:16.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not define the term “user”, but context makes it clear (to me) that this means &lt;em&gt;persons&lt;/em&gt;, in particular &lt;em&gt;natural persons&lt;/em&gt; that are &lt;em&gt;end users&lt;/em&gt;, or other &lt;em&gt;third parties&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Brandin points out in the comments, the precise definition of users is not that important. The AGPL's requirement to offer the source of a modified version effectively triggers as soon as a user could interact with the software over a network: you have to proactively and prominently &lt;em&gt;offer&lt;/em&gt; the source code, not just respond to &lt;em&gt;requests&lt;/em&gt;. Even if your AGPL-covered software is &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to be used by other programs, this doesn't prevent end users from interacting with these APIs as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes &lt;em&gt;interacting&lt;/em&gt; is left open in the AGPL, because the FSF typically wants to use the strongest interpretation that is available under local law. I think it is safe to assume that interacting with the AGPL-covered software through another program (like a client software or a proxy) is still interaction. The offer of the source code would not have to be made to these client programs, but to the actual user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the AGPL only covers interaction, not other use. For example, a user who interacts with a web app which in turn uses an AGPL-covered modification of the MongoDB database: does the user now interact with that database, thus triggering source disclosure requirements? No: in the general case, the web app's provider will be the user of the AGPL database. The end user does not meaningfully interact with the database at all. But of course that would depend on the functionality of this web app. For example, if the web app is a database management interface, that would probably not prevent any interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whether a software between the user and the AGPL-covered program prevents interaction in the sense of the AGPL depends on context. Unless it is plainly obvious that no meaningful interaction takes place, it is of course safer to assume that such interaction is in fact happening, and that you have to offer the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also note that the AGPL source offer requirements do not trigger for most uses of AGPL-covered software, because they only trigger if you make a modified version of the software available to third parties. Running an AGPL-covered software by itself triggers no requirements, and neither does purely internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T12:16:16.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7889" CreationDate="2019-02-01T19:40:36.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the binaries being distributed or used only in-house?  If not distributed, there are no distribution requirements whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the binaries are distributed, the corresponding source must be distributed or made available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to look for is how any proprietary code is used.  A proprietary library can legally be linked to software distributed under GPLv3, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appropriate FAQ&lt;/a&gt;,  but it requires special permission.  This is permission to link.  The program as a whole is still covered by GPLv3, but if you're the copyright holders no license terms matter, as you can release however you want.  This doesn't apply if you use GPLed software from somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company you're providing the software to may not be able to distribute it as a system, but it can certainly release any GPLed code it likes, including a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T19:40:36.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7893" CreationDate="2019-02-02T14:22:45.577" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt; is using a modified BSD license. I would like to use the same license for some projects, most parts / libraries will be published under an open source license, but clients do demand some of the business logic to be closed. There &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a possibility that a future client needs a copy of the software (distribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this small Go library which almost fitted some requirements. In order to can really use it, I've created a fork on GitHub and re-written most of it's interfacing methods to fit our needs. Then I found out I've been reluctant to check the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, which contains the GPLv2. Bummer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library, including unit, integration tests and example code is roughly 500 lines. I've modified 100+ lines, but I haven't published them &lt;em&gt;yet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, can I choose to separate the changes I've done into a new project and fill in the blanks by re-writing those parts? There are large parts of the original code I can do without (like examples), so I imagine this is only a few hours of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some methods of the library are so simple and short that for sure my resulting code will look the original in some parts, that would be unavoidable. Practically those short functions are alias functions for an imported Go standard library, already licensed under modified BSD. The rest I will implement it &lt;strong&gt;my own way&lt;/strong&gt;, so I will not be copy-typing the original library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12985" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:19:32.980" Title="A small Go library under GPLv2, rewrite it under modified BSD" Tags="|copyright|bsd|gpl-2|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7892" CreationDate="2019-02-02T16:19:32.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Implementing your own software that provides similar functionality is always allowed – when it is an independent implementation (not a derivative work in the sense of copyright) and if that functionality is not patented (likely does not apply here). Copyright doesn't protects ideas, it protects a specific &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of an idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you already have deep knowledge of the original library, it is going to be difficult for you to write a re-implementation that is clearly not derivative. The issue is not that some small wrappers might be identical (they might not be copyrightable at all) but that you might subconsciously copy some copyrightable aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid these issues, the gold standard for reimplementations is a clean room reimplementation: one person inspects the original software and writes a specification, and another person who doesn't know the original software takes the spec and implements it. This is not necessary, but it shows beyond reasonable doubt that nothing was copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, this is a matter of risk management: how do you weigh the risks that your reimplementation may &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; derivative and that therefore the copyright holders of the GPL version might take steps to enforce their license against you? How would these risks impact your clients?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:19:32.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7896" CreationDate="2019-02-02T19:27:57.600" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need music files I can use for testing my program that I can put in my git repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I copy the test music files from other open source projects? Do I have to attribute them and if so how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14196" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T06:12:31.500" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T06:12:31.500" Title="Where to get music for testing my program?" Tags="|copyright|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7889" CreationDate="2019-02-02T22:11:11.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not a lawyer so I’ll give you an engineer’s perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question will depend on what rights you want to grant to others who use your code and what rights you want to restrict. If you have used other open source code in your project, your options may be limited. Here are the key questions I think about when choosing or evaluating an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ownership.&lt;/strong&gt; As the author and copyright holder you will always have a license to your code as long as you don’t transfer your ownership rights to some other person or organization. That means, regardless of how the code is licensed to others, you can do as you wish with the code. A license simply defines how others can use code you release under that license. You can also release future updates to your code under a different license that prior releases (MongoDB recently did this). What you cannot do is change a license of code already released to another party after you have released it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Compatibility.&lt;/strong&gt; What other software do you want your software to be compatible with? Review this Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software License Compatibility&lt;/a&gt; and review related references. Note that compatibility flows one way. Projects with incompatible licenses cannot use your code, so if you pick a GPL3 license then only GPL3 or AGPL projects can build upon your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3RBH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3RBH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Software License Compatibility (source:Wikipedia)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Multi-Licensing.&lt;/strong&gt; If you own the code, you can release it under multiple licenses. For example, you may offer a GPL license to projects that want to use the code for free and you may offer a commercial license to projects that can’t use GPL code but are able to pay you for a commercial license. Multi-licensing can confuse your users and get people who think your code is free into trouble, so be cautious and communicate clearly if you choose a multi-license strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Patents.&lt;/strong&gt; Some licenses, like Apache 2.0, also authorize users of your code to use your patents. Other licenses, like Mozilla Public License, retain patent rights. Retaining patent rights doesn’t mean people must pay you to use your patents, but it does mean you can defend your patents or ask people using your code in a way you dislike to stop violating your patents. You need to decide which approach you want to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trademarks.&lt;/strong&gt; Some licenses, like BSD 3-Clause, prohibit users of your code from using your trademarks and branding. This prevents them from making a derivative work &amp;amp; offering it under your brand. If the brand name of your software is important then it may be important to protect. People can still use BSD 3-clause code, but they need to advertise and market it under their own name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enforceability.&lt;/strong&gt; Licenses are legal documents and not all of them will hold up in court. To increase the odds your license will be legally meaningful it can help to pick a popular open source license that has been tested by others. GPL has been around for a while, and I think has survived in court, so it is an example of a well known and tested license. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; works to identify, evaluate, and promote licenses and is one place you can check to understand how popular or open various licenses are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Creative Commons licenses aren’t appropriate for code, it’s worth reading some of the articles on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; website. They explain licensing in an approachable way. I’ve learned a lot from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3844" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:11:11.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7894" CreationDate="2019-02-02T22:16:27.277" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, I would expect that a program that manipulates audio is a separate work, under copyright law, from any sample audio files that are supplied to be used optionally as input to that program. Therefore nearly any licensing terms that allow redistribution of the audio generally will allow redistribution alongside your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artists who wish to make their artwork (including music) free to redistribute often license their work under a Creative Commons license. The Creative Commons organization maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/arts-culture/arts-culture-resources/legalmusicforvideos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of sites that host music under various Creative Commons licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you plan to use the music as input, and not distribute the songs in a way that includes a derivative work of the music within the distribution, I think your open source project can safely use works under any Creative Commons license terms except NonCommercial (NC) terms. NC terms are not immediately problematic for you if your distribution is non-commercial, but any time a downstream recipient wanted to distribute the repository under commercial terms, they would need to remove those NC-licensed files. If you expect to include sample output as well, you should also avoid NoDerivs (ND) terms, if your program creates a derivative under copyright law (note that simply changing the file format is allowed by ND terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution (BY) terms are fine (so long as you do preserve attribution alongside or within the files) and ShareAlike (SA) terms will not affect your program (since the program and sample input are separate works), but would mean that sample output derived from SA input that you include must be under the same SA terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T00:55:52.553" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T00:55:52.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-03T02:56:19.117" Score="3" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the license of code found in ObservableHQ, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/d3-choropleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really tried reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://beta.observablehq.com/terms-of-service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Observable Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt; but I couldn't get a conclusive answer by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following excerpt seemed the most relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;5. License Grant to Other Users&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any User-Generated Content you post publicly may be viewed by others. By publishing your notebooks, you agree to allow others to view and “fork” your notebooks (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your notebooks in notebooks they control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you publish a notebook, you grant each User of Observable a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the Observable Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on Observable as permitted through Observable’s functionality (for example, through forking). If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other Observable Users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read this many times but I'm still not sure. This seems to mean that I can use other people's code in my own Observable Notebooks, but doesn't say anything explicitly about taking the code to do something else. Do I have to explicitly ask the person (i.e. the code is 'unlicensed' by default)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9550" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T09:43:11.190" Title="What is the license of code found in ObservableHQ?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|software|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7900" CreationDate="2019-02-03T05:38:19.100" Score="2" ViewCount="884" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the code snippet posted in github repository issues section automatically under the same license that the repository is having? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally(and related), is the content in pull request which has not been merged still under the same license of the repository. (The PR may end up never been merged, yet others can often see all the content of the PR). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14199" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T11:46:40.513" Title="license for the code snippet posted in github issues" Tags="|github|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7897" CreationDate="2019-02-03T09:43:11.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These terms looks very much like &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#d-user-generated-content&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub's terms of service&lt;/a&gt;; compare with their section d, subsection 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and &quot;fork&quot; your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it's worth reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;, because the default position on ObservableHQ is likely to be the same as that on GitHub - that is, that you have no rights to do anything with that code except view it, and create an onsite fork. Those terms are designed to make it easy for the &lt;em&gt;site&lt;/em&gt; to operate, enabling their fork-but-stay-on-platform model, but they do nothing for &lt;em&gt;users&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T09:43:11.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7898" CreationDate="2019-02-03T11:46:40.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Github's ToS codify the inbound=outbound license principle: contributions to a repository can be assumed to be under the repository's license. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The repository needs to have an obvious license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user must have intended for their contributions to be included into the repository, for example by creating a pull request and/or uploading their changes under that license to their fork of the repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This cannot apply retroactively: what is relevant is the license at the time the pull request was made, not the current license of the repository. If in doubt, check out the commit in question and inspect the tree for any license notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether issue comments are a contribution in this sense is more tricky, because an issue creator might not have intended to have their issues included under the repository licensed. I would argue that a repository license cannot extend to issues. To determine the license status of a code snippet, you would have to look at context. If it is intended as a contribution, then this may be fine. But in the general case you should assume that all rights are reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the question whether short code snippets are copyrightable at all: copyrightable works must meet some threshold of creativity to be eligible for protection. This threshold is not clear: there is no fixed number of lines before copyright starts to apply. Typo corrections, small fixes, modifications of existing code, and representations of facts can often indicate that these snippets are not copyrightable. For example, a minimal test case to reproduce some bug might not be a creative work but a fact, and therefore ineligible for copyright protection. But again: it's important to look at the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T11:46:40.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7906" CreationDate="2019-02-03T20:16:13.747" Score="0" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on a project that will be given for free under GPL license, for which I have no problem giving the source code. The problem lies in the algorithm used to obtain the private key (to decrypt user data). &lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a way I can give (when asked to) a modified source code (modified algorithm) that behaves the same to protect user privacy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I understand that the algorithm can be reversed engineered from the binary file, but its purpose is to provide a small security layer. Also, I don't intend to make money from this, my only concern is user data privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14206" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T08:32:03.183" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T08:32:03.183" Title="GPL. Can source code be modified for security?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7908" CreationDate="2019-02-03T20:23:45.117" Score="7" ViewCount="2852" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a library with LGPL 2.1 license (e.g., PHPMailer) in your also open source library, can you release your library as MIT license if you didn't actually modify PHPMailer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g., All you did is use and extend PHPMailer as a dependency but its original code was not modified (E.g., &lt;code&gt;class MyLib extends PHPMailer {}&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My clarification is on this line on the LGPL 2.1 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the&#xA;  Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or&#xA;  linked with it, is called a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot;.  Such a&#xA;  work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and&#xA;  therefore falls outside the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the use case I described, is it considered &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; and is therefore okay to be released as &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14205" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T10:55:18.843" Title="Can your MIT library use an LGPL library?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|license-recommendation|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7907" CreationDate="2019-02-03T20:49:12.397" Score="2" ViewCount="891" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a project I noticed that it has a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, apparently put in place as template when the project was initialized by Github. The file contains the standard GPLv2 template but no copyright notice. None of the source files include a copyright header. &lt;strong&gt;There is no copyright notice anywhere&lt;/strong&gt; to be found. Neither any reference to its contributors. With all sorts of licenses I'm use to seeing &lt;strong&gt;at least&lt;/strong&gt; a statement like this in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file header: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2019  contibutors. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the GPLv2 text does not refer to &quot;files in this repository&quot;, &quot;directory&quot; or &quot;folder&quot;. Only &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html#SEC3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article 0 of the GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; clearly states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed&#xA;  under the terms of this General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would lead to my conclusion that the GPLv2 license is not applied to anything in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen many questions on the SE network, where developers are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/292/12985&quot;&gt;asking&lt;/a&gt; if they should include a copyright header. Usually they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/300/12985&quot;&gt;advised&lt;/a&gt; to do so. However my question is the reverse: If I'm to copy or link this project, which lacks any copyright claim, into a non-GPL project, would that be copyright infringement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please note: I have no evil intentions. This question is hypothetical and depending on the outcome of this question, I will probably notify the author of the library to rectify the copyright if needed. I've already decided on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7892/12985&quot;&gt;re-writing&lt;/a&gt; the library from the ground up, to better suit my needs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12985" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T23:36:52.073" Title="If there is no copyright notice, is the license applied?" Tags="|copyright|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7903" CreationDate="2019-02-03T21:06:06.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your project has no GPL/copyleft dependencies (e.g., libraries written by other people licensed under the GPL), then you may do as you please: offer the source code under the GPL, and offer an unrelated binary without corresponding source code available. It so happens that your GPL source code compiles to a binary that somewhat resembles a binary you also offer. So be it; you are the sole copyright holder (or are at least free of others' copyleft requirements) and may do as you please. Simply make it clear that the binary is not licensed under the GPL -- if it were, no one could legally redistribute it, since you did not make the corresponding source available (and so downstream distributors cannot satisfy the requirement to include corresponding source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do use strong-copyleft libraries, then your use of those libraries carries a requirement that, whenever you include that library in a binary, you must make available the full corresponding source for the binary. Offering source code similar to the binary's corresponding source is insufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, as someone with a background in security, I would advise against such a practice generally. Your protocol/crypto/system should be sufficiently strong by itself without relying on security by obscurity. If it is not strong enough, you should select a different one  that is strong enough. The fact that such a flimsy security practice complicates your licensing terms is even further argument against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T02:20:12.583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T02:20:12.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7905" CreationDate="2019-02-03T23:36:52.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of a grey area. In the most formal and literal sense, all the project has is a text document that happens to include terms for some license. There is no express statement that the copyright holders license the software under those terms. If no license was granted, then all rights are reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the inclusion of a top-level file called LICENSE strongly implies that the author did intend to license their software under those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of a copyright notice is not relevant here: copyright is automatic. That's a central part of the Berne Convention on copyright, though the US only joined it as late as 1989. A good part of open source predates that, leading to a culture of always including copyright notices. For your reference, the Netherlands joined Berne in 1912.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consequences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software is copyrighted. You cannot copy it unless you have a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author clearly intended to license their software under the terms given in the LICENSE document.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I were to rely on that license, I would file an issue asking to include an explicit license, e.g. in the README file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T23:36:52.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7904" CreationDate="2019-02-04T10:55:18.843" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not a license expert. The following answer is based on general knowledge of the GPL and LGPL and the LGPL text as found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The section of the license provided in the question refers to works that don't contain derivatives of the LGPL library. For example, if I made a sorting library and you made an application for creating lists by reading file contents, your application could be designed to work with my library (create lists such that they are compatible with my sorting library). I believe, in this case, the given section would apply, as you don't have to make any alterations to my library or write any code that derives from it. Your application only needs to be linked to my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As specified in Section 0 of the LGPL (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “Application” is any work that makes use of an interface provided by the Library, but which is not otherwise based on the Library. &lt;strong&gt;Defining a subclass of a class defined by the Library is deemed a mode of using an interface provided by the Library.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by combining or linking an Application with the Library. The particular version of the Library with which the Combined Work was made is also called the “Linked Version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus your library, by extending &lt;code&gt;PHPMailer&lt;/code&gt;, is an Application that uses the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Section 4, we see that you are allowed to share your library under any terms, as long as they do not restrict downstream users from using the original library under the terms of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, your library can be available under whatever terms you like, as long as the LGPL library is still available under the same terms determined by its original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8725" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T10:55:18.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7915" CreationDate="2019-02-04T13:14:24.573" Score="-1" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I keep reading frequent statements to the effect that, in terms of FOSS, Android is “evil”. Most of these are rather unspecific and do not really elaborate (example &lt;a href=&quot;https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/pureos-mobile/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Now I am wondering if there is any tangible basis for this. I came up with three points, though they are not inherently related to Android itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-free drivers: Just about every smartphone on the market today requires non-free drivers to use its hardware, the only exceptions that I know of being niche products. (Which is quite different from the PC world, where a wide range of systems can run entirely on free drivers, with no or just minor limitations.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bundled non-free apps: Most Android devices ship with non-free apps installed, most notably the Google suite. The only way around this is to install a community-maintained Android distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Project governance: While that doesn’t make the project non-free, the community has little say in the design of Android, and design decision tend to be made by Google behind closed doors. I have seen decisions which were unpopular with the community, but Google so far seems to be dragging its feet in addressing the issues raised.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other points that I am missing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3776" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T06:14:32.890" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T20:02:52.897" Title="Why is Android frequently taunted as “evil” in the FOSS community?" Tags="|android|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7913" CreationDate="2019-02-04T15:05:18.457" Score="4" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I build &amp;amp; release an AGPL (v3) SaaS application, but still put constraints on the usage of user accounts in that application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a hosted version of the service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide the full source of the service, with all the rights AGPL provides&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sell subscriptions for paid accounts on the service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Constrain usage of the accounts themselves (e.g. each account can only be used by the one named user, not shared between users)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that anybody would be able to self-host the app and remove the user limitations, that's fine. I'm assuming that they'll still pay for the web service because it's much easier than forking my codebase, stripping out the paid limitations, hosting it themselves, and maintaining that fork in future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a couple of clauses in the license itself though that make me suspect this wouldn't be enforceable, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your &lt;em&gt;unlimited&lt;/em&gt; permission to run the unmodified Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not&#xA;  convey, &lt;em&gt;without conditions&lt;/em&gt; so long as your license otherwise remains&#xA;  in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this valid, and if so how do I describe this to users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other clear examples of services doing this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T16:09:23.263" Title="User account licenses, in an AGPL SaaS app" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7888" CreationDate="2019-02-04T16:08:45.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only a legal entity can hold a copyright. However, it is worth noting that your copyright &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt; is not legally significant, since it has virtually no legal effect. Generally speaking, in an overwhelming majority of nations (i.e., all that have signed the Berne Convention), there is no need to include a copyright notice at all, because copyright is secured at the moment the work is created (i.e., &amp;quot;fixed in a tangible medium&amp;quot;) whether or not it includes a copyright notice. If your copyright notice is wrong, malformed, or identifies a nonexistent entity, that doesn't matter in the slightest for the application of copyright. (A malformed notice has consequences for a very, very niche edge case in the United States: you cannot procedurally disqualify an infringer's defense of &lt;em&gt;innocent infringement&lt;/em&gt; if your copyright notice is malformed -- however, you might still defeat such a defense in court on the merits of the case even if you can't get the court to dismiss it out of hand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the notice doesn't matter. Your license will likely require downstream distributors to preserve the copyright notice, whatever it says, and that's really all there is to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could, for example, use any of the following without hurting the validity of your copyright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2019 Jane Doe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2019 The Foobar Contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2019 Cthulhu the All-Consumer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all effectively equally useful, since a copyright notice basically has no legal function. The copyright holder is whoever authored the software; the notice should indicate that person or entity, but there's no real problem if it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters slightly more (though still not too much in most cases) is what kind of entity owns the copyright in actual fact. In your case, since you have no legal entity to hold the copyright, you and your partner will hold copyright on your respective contributions as individuals. If you had a legal entity like an LLC, you could have the LLC own the copyright -- either at creation time or via transfer after the fact -- and exercising/licensing rights under copyright would be done by whoever has control of the LLC. This means that the copyright would go with the LLC if the company were sold or liquidated via bankruptcy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the lifetime of the copyright on a contribution depends on whether the creator of the work is a natural person or a corporation. Works produced by a natural person have a copyright that lasts 70 years after the creator's death, while works produced by a corporation have copyrights that last a fix length of time: the shorter of 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation. This type of copyright term (either based on author-lifetime or a fixed term) is set at the time a copyrightable contribution is made. If the copyright is transferred later to a different type of entity, this does not change the lifetime-metric of the copyright that was set at its creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T13:05:38.433" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6925" CreationDate="2019-02-04T22:22:17.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my advice to you as a low-level developer who wants the company to contribute more to OSS: you need to influence by example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you have no opportunity to discuss community policy in a way that you would be listened to, you need to focus narrowly on the specific things you want to do and request permission for just those things.  For example, take a bugfix you've written for an upstream project, package it as a diff, and ask your boss for permission to submit it.  Be patient with this!  If it's new to your company, it will take time as your higher-ups need to even determine who &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make a decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also be prepared to justify this in terms that the business actually cares about (being a good OSS citizen probably isn't one of them).  Examples of justifications that most businesses care about are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lowering cost of maintenance and deployment delays by making it unnecessary to maintain independant patchsets from the upstream project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Improving the company's PR in open source projects and on Github, leading to an easier time getting technical assistance and hiring new experienced developers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;a href=&quot;https://pragprog.com/book/vbopens/forge-your-future-with-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forge Your Future with Open Source&lt;/a&gt; goes over other examples of justifying contributions. Which justifications are going to work is going to depend a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; on the nature of your company and its politics.  Generally, it's best that you introduce your first contribution proposal in a 1-on-1 meeting with your boss; if he/she can understand what you want to do and why, it's going to be a lot easier to push it further up the pyramid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might take more than one attempt, but eventually you'll get a contribution approved.  After that, you want to get more of them approved, and if you do enough of these, you may cause your company to decide to make policy around upstream contributions, just so that they're not dealing with ad-hoc requests every week.  This will work better if you can get one or two of your coworkers to do it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you get nothing approved, and your company makes its new policy &quot;no contributions&quot;, then you've learned something else valuable about your employment situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T22:22:17.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7910" CreationDate="2019-02-04T23:14:14.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but it seems clear enough to me that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the AGPL does not impose restrictions about how you may or may not run your own service, as long as you offer the complete corresponding source to all users, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the two sections you quote, in my understanding, positively affirm your right to do exactly what you want to do, rather than suggest it is not allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you don't have any copyleft obligations from any third-party code or libraries you use, you have no obligation to abide by your license terms, anyway. You can run a service using your own code (and optionally, permissively-licensed libraries from other people) while also offering a copy of the source code to anyone who wants it. You don't &lt;em&gt;receive&lt;/em&gt; the software under your own license, but rather you &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; the software under some license so everyone &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; can have it. You already have full rights to your own code, and letting others use it under the AGPL as well doesn't weaken the fullness of your own rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's now consider the case where you have an AGPL dependency and &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; required to abide by someone else's AGPL grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the AGPLv3 is just the GPLv3 with an additional rule about offering the source to users when you run a network service. If the GPLv3 lets you do it, the AGPLv3 lets you do it, too. (Again, the only difference is that the AGPLv3 requires you to offer source to network users, but it is clear that you already plan to do so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, your rules about accounts pertain to the service you're hosting, and how users may or may not employ that service to do things. You are not placing additional terms on the code that powers that service: users may still download, modify, redistribute, and run the code themselves. You can freely decide who gets to make an account (you could do this in a automated way or make this a manual process and personally approve each account!) and freely deactivate anyone's account (pursuant to whatever terms you set  out for users) as you deem fit as the administrator of your instance of the AGPL service. This is merely how you, as operator, choose to operate your service;  it does not have any bearing on the terms of availability of the service's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume you're including someone else's AGPLv3 work (which I will call X) in your service, and so the license on X requires you to offer source code of your own service, under the terms of the AGPLv3, to all users of your service. The license requirements and permissions on X pertain to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, the person running the service on some physical infrastructure. Thus looking at your quoted passages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I realize you're modifying X, but Section 4 clearly indicates that this sentence also applies to modified versions, as long as you follow the requirements of Section 4.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not at all problematic for you. You are the one running the service, and this sentence clearly indicates your unlimited right to do so. The author of X has said, &quot;I place no restrictions on how you may run this program,&quot; therefore, you may run it however you please, including in a way that imposes requirements about user accounts. Your users do not run the program; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; run the program. It's not totally clear to me that this really even pertains to your exact concerns, but it is fairly clear to me that this is not an &lt;em&gt;impediment&lt;/em&gt; to your plans in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is an assertion from the author(s) of X that they place no conditions on how you may make the software publicly available. If you wish to make your service that runs from your derived software include some technical or legal restrictions, the author(s) of X have explicitly herein given up the power to stop you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you've misread &quot;without conditions&quot; to mean &quot;you may not impose conditions&quot; but I think it means &quot;without conditions placed on you,&quot; i.e., the authors of X may not charge you a royalty to publicly display the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T16:09:23.263" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T16:09:23.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7909" CreationDate="2019-02-05T20:02:52.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The objections to Android are basically the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the objections to any other distribution that is not fully free&lt;/a&gt;. If you see complaints more frequently or intensely about Android, this is probably due to its position as a &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; default operating system for virtually all mobile devices that are not manufactured by Apple. That is, Android's prominence does not change the nature of the complaints against it versus other imperfectly-free distributions, but I suppose it does amplify its importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-phone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free phone operating system&lt;/a&gt;&quot; sits at the top of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's list of High Priority Free Software Projects&lt;/a&gt; (though I don't know for sure if the list is any particular order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T20:02:52.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7917" CreationDate="2019-02-06T08:47:30.280" Score="12" ViewCount="4307" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Background&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the owner of an open-source theme for &lt;a href=&quot;https://gohugo.io&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugo&lt;/a&gt; named &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/UtkarshVerma/hugo-dream-plus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hugo-dream-plus&lt;/a&gt; which, as the name implies, is an upgraded version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/g1eny0ung/hugo-theme-dream&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hugo-theme-dream&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;strong&gt;hugo-theme-dream&lt;/strong&gt; is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/g1eny0ung/hugo-theme-dream/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I liked this theme and so I forked it and made lots of modifications to it according to my own needs. Once I felt that my fork could stand on its own, I made it public on GitHub and added it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-dream-plus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugo Themes&lt;/a&gt; listing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What bothers me now is:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it legally be okay for me to put my own license on my fork?&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think it should be because my theme and the parent theme, from which it was initially forked, are different in a lot of ways now.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it isn't okay, then what shall I do to license it under my own name, because I do want the credit for my work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd like to add that I have stated in my repository clearly that my own theme had initially been forked from &lt;strong&gt;hugo-theme-dream&lt;/strong&gt; and I've also credited the developer. The credits to his theme have always been present in the README of my theme repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14223" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T14:12:17.507" Title="Should I use my own license in a fork of another GitHub repository, which I've revamped completely?" Tags="|mit|github|forking|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7916" CreationDate="2019-02-06T14:12:17.507" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is very permissive; you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed to release your own work under a different license if it was based on something released under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/348395/108994&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on Software Engineering SE and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;plain English explanation&lt;/a&gt; of the MIT license (link also provided in the linked answer). As indicated in the plain English explanation, you are allowed to sublicense the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may incorporate the work into something that has a more restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only condition of the MIT license is that you include the MIT license text and any copyright notices from the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any files in your fork that already existed in &lt;code&gt;hugo-theme-dream&lt;/code&gt; should have a copyright line with the year of creation and the original author's name. Per MIT terms, you have to leave these in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any files that you created yourself after forking and thus are 100% written by you do not need to include any such attribution, since there was no copyright notice in those files to begin with and you wrote them yourself. However, if you copy, move, or otherwise transfer code/text that you didn't write from a file written by the original author, you should also copy over the copyright line (or at least acknowledge that that piece of code/text was written by the original author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to have already done this, but for the record: since other people might want to use the original work under the MIT license (e.g. if you make your fork available under something more restrictive), it would nice to include a link to the original repository so other people can easily find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: any copyright lines from the original author need to be left there. You should include a copy of the MIT license in the repository and acknowledge that your work is based on someone else's work, which is available under the MIT license. You can apply your own license to your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8725" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T14:12:17.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-06T16:35:50.083" Score="4" ViewCount="3104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an application for my organization which needs to be shipped to customer. It has a part of database migration for which I am using flyway library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am confused with licensing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://flywaydb.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flyway&lt;/a&gt; is licensed as Apache 2.0 but still it has Pro and Enterprise editions which are paid. I have following specific queries but would welcome any additional information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is meant by Apache 2.0 here when it is being priced?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use community edition for proprietary software which will be&#xA;given to customers? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the pricing not for software but for support&#xA;i.e. I can use it freely if not availing support?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9281" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2019-02-15T05:29:35.653" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T05:29:35.653" Title="Is flyway community edition free for commercial purposes" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7918" CreationDate="2019-02-06T20:51:10.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://flywaydb.org/download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their webpage&lt;/a&gt;, only the community edition is Apache-licensed; Pro and Enterprise versions have a commercial licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-licensed version can be used for any purpose.  If you redistribute it the Apache licence places some small obligations on you; read the licence for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They indicate that support for the community edition is &quot;&lt;em&gt;community&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which often means &quot;&lt;em&gt;try to find someone else who's already had your problem&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Commercial support is only available with the proprietary, paid versions, which you cannot use for free (or freely) even if you don't use the support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T20:51:10.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7921" CreationDate="2019-02-06T23:00:02.947" Score="4" ViewCount="1446" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using an Apache 2.0 licensed library in my closed source software. Let's say I include the Apache 2.0 text file as a &quot;const string&quot; variable in my C code and make sure it makes it to the binary. Then I only distribute the binary. Would that be enough to comply with Apache 2.0??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because my closed source software is actually the firmware for my embedded device which doesn't have a display. I also don't distribute any documentation or manual with the product to use for printing the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14233" LastEditorUserId="14233" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T00:18:12.037" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T20:24:54.693" Title="Can I comply with Apache 2.0 license by adding the license text in the binary file?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7920" CreationDate="2019-02-07T07:25:51.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache v2 s4 says that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the&#xA;        Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;        modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You&#xA;        meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or&#xA;            Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but giving them that licence locked up inside the firmware of a device with no written output capability is a pretty nugatory way of honouring it.  If you take that route you had better &lt;em&gt;pray&lt;/em&gt; that you don't accidentally make any other compliance slips, because your decision about the licence copy could be presented as evidence that you've decided to sail close to the wind in terms of compliance, ie, evidence of bad faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you're supplying no documentation; OK.  You don't say where you're selling this device, but if you hope to sell it into the EU or US markets, and in my experience many others also, you will &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to include a one-or-more-page set of regulatory statements (FCC compliance, that sort of thing).  Adding the Apache licence on to that won't kill you, and it casts your licence compliance behaviour in a much better light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you say the author of the software has approved your putting the licence in the online-available documentation, which is linked from a one-page sheet distributed with the product.  If (s)he's the &lt;strong&gt;sole&lt;/strong&gt; rights-holder, that is, if (s)he wrote the code in its entirety, then (s)he can permit you to use it under any terms (s)he wants, including &quot;Apache with a reduced documentation requirement&quot;, which is apparently what (s)he's doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If (s)he based her code on someone else's Apache-licensed code, then (s)he can't free you from the obligations you owe to that earlier author, and my answer abve applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T20:24:54.693" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T20:24:54.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7918" CreationDate="2019-02-07T12:33:12.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are mixing up ideas: Free, commercial etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 licence is a Free Software licence. Free as in freedom, not as in price. One of the freedoms is to sell copies. Another is to allow commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not allowed in most Free Software licences is to make it become proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by Apache 2.0 here when it is being priced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can charge a fee (any amount). I don't see anything “here”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I use community edition for proprietary software which will be given to customers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the community (Apache 2 licenced version), and give copies to your customers. However You must give them the same licence that you have ( unless the licence gives you freedom to do otherwise ). You must not make it proprietary. You must give access to source code for any modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the pricing not for software but for support i.e. I can use it freely if not availing support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The price is not limited. You have the freedom to charge any price (only limited by what your customers will pay). Yes you can use it freely.&#xA;You may become liable as the distributor of the software, especially if you sell copies (see local laws). You are free to provide support.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An extract from the licence. Ensure you read the whole licence, get you lawyer to read it, and give you advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;  modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a&#xA;  copy of this License; and You must cause any modified files to carry&#xA;  prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and You must&#xA;  retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You&#xA;  distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices&#xA;  from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not&#xA;  pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and If the Work includes&#xA;  a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative&#xA;  Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the&#xA;  attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those&#xA;  notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at&#xA;  least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file&#xA;  distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or&#xA;  documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within&#xA;  a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such&#xA;  third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file&#xA;  are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You&#xA;  may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You&#xA;  distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the&#xA;  Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be&#xA;  construed as modifying the License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;  provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;  reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such&#xA;  Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;  distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;  in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T11:32:58.280" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T11:32:58.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T13:22:47.100" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;We intend to use openrules in an application that will be deployed and used in house by an insurance firm.&#xA;The application caters to internal users to check whether certain business conditions are met by entities or not and decide the process flow accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://openrules.com/licensing.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Openrules license&lt;/a&gt; says that it has&#xA;GPL Licenses for Open Source Projects.&#xA;Non-GPL Licenses for Commercial Projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are in a dillema as to whether the in house project can be classified as commercial or not.&#xA;Although in the end it does cater to a business transaction indirectly. It is not directly giving any service to the end consumer / customer, but in spirit it is non commercial.&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4245/commercial-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial software definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone clear up this part before we decide to go forward&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14237" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T19:21:49.803" Title="Classifying Commercial and non commercial use" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T14:18:18.010" Score="6" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many MNCs like Facebook, Uber, Google and now Microsoft have joined the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openchainproject.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenChain Project&lt;/a&gt;, but what's it all about? I think it has something to do with FOSS licenses, but based on the material on their website, I can't understand what problem(s) the project is even attempting to solve, let alone how they intend to solve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13749" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T18:59:09.907" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T16:19:54.500" Title="What is the OpenChain project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7923" CreationDate="2019-02-07T14:19:47.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;OpenRules's licensing page is confusing at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In particular, it means that source code of the applications that are based or use OpenRules should be made publicly available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not necessarily true. Code using the GPL must be made available to anyone who legitimately obtains a copy of the binary, which allows a lot of uses (particularly as web services) without making the code publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Non-GPL Licenses for Commercial Projects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly possible to use GPL code in commercial projects, you just need to obey the GPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;Powered by OpenRules&quot; logo should be presented on web pages describing products or services that use or are based on the OpenRules software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not enforceable for the GPL code. I know it's phrased as &quot;should&quot; rather than &quot;must&quot; but it's at best misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you need to be asking is not &quot;is the project commercial?&quot; but &quot;am I willing to distribute the project using OpenRules under the GPL?&quot; If the answer is &quot;yes&quot;, then you can use the GPL version of the code &lt;em&gt;even if it is a commercial project&lt;/em&gt;. If you're not willing to distribute the project under the GPL, then you need the &quot;commercial&quot; license even if you're doing something which is not commercial in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T14:19:47.107" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7927" CreationDate="2019-02-07T14:51:20.060" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the creator of an open source project licensed under MIT and GPL.&#xA;Recently, someone has reached out saying that these licenses do not fit their needs, and that they would like to pay me to be able to use my software without a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, the license protects me from warranty/damage liabilities and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this offer of money to use my software without a license reasonable/justified? Or is it a scam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WCbIY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screen capture of the message received&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14238" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T17:58:21.390" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T18:00:11.297" Title="Someone is offering money to use my software without a license. Is it a scam?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7926" CreationDate="2019-02-07T17:14:12.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I want to point out that the author of the email has misphrased what they want. They don't want &amp;quot;no license&amp;quot; but rather &amp;quot;a different license, just between you and me, without the requirements of the licenses you currently offer.&amp;quot; With that out of the way, let's answer the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; particular offer is a scam depends on the specifics of the case, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;selling exceptions to the GPL&lt;/a&gt; is a business model that many software projects employ. Many companies want to use GPL-licensed software in their own software that they sell, but do not wish to disclose the full source code of their software to the buyers. Therefore, the author of a GPL component might choose to sell the right to be exempt from the GPL's requirements. Some examples of projects that follow this model include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL&lt;/a&gt; (GPL/commercial), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt&lt;/a&gt; (GPL/LGPL/commercial), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/community/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB&lt;/a&gt; (formerly AGPL/commercial, though as of October 16, 2018 MongoDB has switched from the AGPL to a different homemade license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you offer the software under permissive MIT/X11 terms as well, this request is a little stranger. They already have the option to avoid copyleft source-sharing requirements. Still, it's not unheard of: importantly, the request mentions that the licenses you chose are on the organization's &amp;quot;license blacklist&amp;quot; rather than a specific problem with your license requirements. This is likely either a case of corporate paranoia or brittleness about open source, or they don't understand that they can choose the MIT license to avoid copyleft requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the first case, I found an article that deals with this problem from  inside a company, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.networkworld.com/article/2204161/software/how-to-convince-your-manager-to-use-open-source-software.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Convince Your Manager to Use Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;. A helpful bit of perspective from that article is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, developers don't really know how their company acquires software. [...] At most large companies, there's a whole software procurement process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Examples of things that a procurement process normally covers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Price. Both up front and on-going costs are at issue. This includes the price of acquiring the software, installing and integrating it, and providing maintenance and support. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Source Code Escrow. The procurement process usually addresses what will happen if the software company goes out of business. [...] While this isn't usually an issue for open source software, it is worth pointing out what you'll do if your contract with a provider of open source software ends or if the company goes out of business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Support. Who is going to support this software? With the proprietary software procurement model, it's often obvious who is responsible for support; which means this issue is really more about the terms of support: 24x7, work hours, numbers to call, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, not of these apply to your case, but I hope this might clarify why a company could be more likely to say &amp;quot;Let's talk to the owner of the library and buy a license,&amp;quot; when the other option is, &amp;quot;Let's not talk to the owner of the library and assume everything is just fine.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T18:00:11.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7923" CreationDate="2019-02-07T19:21:49.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is sometimes confusion between code being commercial and code being proprietary/closed source.  In fact, it's possible to run an enterprise on free/open source software (Red Hat makes a fair chunk of money), and it's possible to use proprietary/closed source software for noncommercial purposes (lots of the games I play, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you use software under the GPL in your overall product, and it's linked together, the overall product must be under the GPL, so it's automatically an Open Source project (all versions and varieties of the GPL are on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative's list of Open Source Licenses&lt;/a&gt;).  In addition, the GPL does not permit &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;restriction to non-commercial use&lt;/a&gt;, so you can just use it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're proposing to use it in house, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doesn't count as distribution&lt;/a&gt;, so the GPL doesn't require you to do any further distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T19:21:49.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T20:52:07.080" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this might seem off-topic, but you can think of a living organism as a software, with its DNA/genome being the code. In that sense, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.earthbiogenome.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt; aimed at discovering the source code of every software available on earth. I wonder if there are advocates, particularly organisations, calling for DNA/genomes to be open source, and copyleft? This is, that whoever re-engineers a species must not close the code (actually, this is impossible, as you can sequence the genome of any specie), and must not possess the intellectual property of it, nor stop others from using such creations. I know there is something like this for &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourcebees.org/?page_id=15&amp;amp;lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bees&lt;/a&gt;, plus the more well known case for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seed sovereignty&lt;/a&gt;. But I haven't yet found a group calling for &lt;strong&gt;all DNA&lt;/strong&gt; to be made open source. Are you aware of a group like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T03:29:04.077" Title="Are there advocates for open source, copyleft biology?" Tags="|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7882" CreationDate="2019-02-08T07:16:20.017" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, it seems to me that what you're doing is writing a proprietary plugin for a GPL program.  It's a piece of proprietary code designed to slot into a GPL program, that may or may not get loaded at run-time.  We can ignore the bit about the shim library being MIT-licensed on its own, because it's part of the work as distributed so must come under the GPL that covers the main work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF have already &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;given their opinion&lt;/a&gt; on this practice.  They say that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether your plugin and the main program would form a single combined program depends, they say, on how tightly they communicate; that is, on the nature of the interface between main program and plugin.  If you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven't shown us your code, and in any case I'm not qualified to analyse it.  But you should take a long, hard look at your plugin library, and be honest with yourself about how tightly it couples to the main program.  Unless communication across the interface is &quot;&lt;em&gt;arm's-length&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, what you propose to do may well violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T07:29:40.953" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T07:29:40.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7929" CreationDate="2019-02-08T09:17:51.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Applying concepts like Open Source or Copyleft to DNA is a category error. This confuses copyright with life sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software enjoys copyright protection because software is a creative work. Furthermore, some software-based inventions may be patentable. By default, this prevents other people from using and modifying the software. Open Source licenses fix that by providing a license to the public. Copyleft licenses in particular are a clever technique so that no one can exercise their copyright in a software to prevent others from modifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DNA is not copyrightable because it is not a creative work, and not generally patentable because it is not an invention. Knowledge, ideas, and discoveries are not generally protectable IP. Similarly, astronomers cannot copyright a comet they discovered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, inventions, techniques, and data sets can be protected. In particular, a data set representing a sequenced genome may be protected by not-quite-copyright “similar rights” or “database rights”. This prevents others from copying the data set without license, but cannot prevent others from sequencing the same genome. This is similar to how no one can copyright a tree, but photographers have a copyright for their pictures of the tree. (Aside: &lt;a href=&quot;https://petapixel.com/2018/03/07/two-photographers-unknowingly-shot-millisecond-time/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;story of two photographers who captured the same scene at the same moment&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The availability of data sets incl. sequenced genomes is important – but that is a concern for &lt;strong&gt;open access&lt;/strong&gt; science. In connection with the &lt;strong&gt;Human Genome Project&lt;/strong&gt;, the scientific community did in fact agree on the &lt;strong&gt;Bermuda Principles&lt;/strong&gt;, which sets out rules for rapid public release of sequence data. While massive amounts of data are available in the GeneBank, these data sets are not necessarily under an open license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A completely separate problem are engineered organisms, where the genome may be an invention or creative work. Furthermore, the use of individual genes or DNA sequences can be an invention. Whether biological patents are possible differs &lt;em&gt;wildly&lt;/em&gt; between jurisdictions. For example, insulin as a medicine is encumbered by patents despite being a naturally occurring substance. In the EU, biological products can be patented if they are isolated from their natural environment or produced through a technical process. The situation in the US is similar, except that naturally occurring DNA sequences are ineligible for patent protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T09:17:51.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T00:20:42.173" Score="1" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;What open source license do I use to also enable proprietary development using my open source library? I don't want to force all the proprietary source code to be free and available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm building a wrapper over a commercial proprietary application's (CA) RestAPI in C#. I'm interested to put that wrapper into the public domain, and maybe open source it. My hope is that will promote use of the CA. I'll be making use of that wrapper in my own admin application, and that admin app will likely be free for individuals, but paid for commercial use and be proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow up - is there a community for micro-dev companies, one man band operations doing it for love and beer money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14248" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T00:53:20.893" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T00:53:20.893" Title="Which license for open source API with proprietary use of that API?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T02:01:20.407" Score="0" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for ways to communicate to my users that our project is committed to making the world a better place. That we don't collect or sell the user's privacy. That we are committed to promoting the ideals of Open Source Software and the Open Source Community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are there any organizations or Pledges or checklists, that are widely used to communicate good will to our users?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the business world there are things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hon.ch/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Health On the Net&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; the &lt;code&gt;Better Business Beau&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;B Corp&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;1% for the planet&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: My project is not a &lt;code&gt;free-client-captive-service project&lt;/code&gt;. Firefox or Android is open-source but they have done some questionable things regarding data telemetry over the years. Hence the need for a conversation around FOSS that also understands and respects how dangerous new and emerging forms of data collection are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14249" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T20:09:48.250" Title="Is there any Open Source Pledges or &quot;stamps of approval&quot; for Open Source Projects to join to show they are ethical?" Tags="|contracts|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2019-02-09T07:58:15.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source projects are generally about making software, and the licence is the usual and only-meaningful pledge of this good faith.  If you give the software to the users along with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, they will have everything they need to look after themselves; they will also have a much more solid knowledge of your ideals than &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; manifesto or endorsement could have given them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to suggest that your project is not a free-software project, but a free-client-captive-service project; the issue of how well you look after your users' data only arises if they have to give it to you in the first place.  You should be aware that any such model already raises giant red flags in the minds of many free software enthusiasts - for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-droid&lt;/a&gt; labels such software with the warnings &quot;&lt;em&gt;anti-features&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;this app has features you may not like&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and &quot;&lt;em&gt;this app promotes non-free network services&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you've had such labels slapped on you, no pledge of good faith or stamp of approval will bring many users back round to you.  So my advice to you is to free the server-side code as well; let your users operate their own servers if they want to.  In this way, those for whom privacy is a salient can look after themselves, and the rest who don't much care can use your server if they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T08:04:08.107" LastActivityDate="2019-02-09T08:04:08.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-11T17:01:25.453" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a software of our authory and made by our company, We have licensed a sub part of it as GPL v2 and still develloping a professional version with more features and that shares the code we publishes as GPL in a comercial license .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now they are saying that I´can´t comercialize our product becouse its a derivation of a GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesnt use any code of the community or any other GPL library, only code writen by our company and some comercial (we have licenses), LGPL and MIT licensed librarys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know yours opnion about the fact so I can do the right thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advanced&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14262" LastEditorUserId="14262" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T18:56:45.120" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T18:56:45.120" Title="Application code shared between GNU and Comercial software" Tags="|commercial|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7936" CreationDate="2019-02-11T18:03:52.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder of this software component (in particular, if this component is NOT derived from GPL software) then you are in no way bound by the GPL license you offer to &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people. It is perfectly fine to dual-license this code under both the GPL and any proprietary terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;+-------------------+&#xA;|   your software   |&#xA;+-------------------+&#xA;____|__________|_____________________&#xA;GPL |          | proprietary license&#xA;    v          v&#xA;  other      other&#xA;  people     people&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This changes if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you accept outside contributions under the GPL license; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you copy GPL-covered software into your component.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Projects that wish to dual-license their GPL-covered software either reject any outside contributions or require contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement that gives you any necessary rights. You can find a template CLA at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now they are saying that I´can´t comercialize our product becouse its a derivation of a GNU software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What? No. There are a number of misconceptions in that sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GNU project is not the same as the GPL license. If your software were derived from GPL-covered software this would be correct, but that is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are dual-licensing the software under the GPL and proprietary license. This does not make your code derivative of your own GPL license. It would be equally wrong to view the GPL-covered version as derivative of the proprietary-licensed version: they are just two parallel licenses of the same software that don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not prevent &lt;em&gt;commercial use&lt;/em&gt;. It merely prevents receivers of the GPL license from publishing the licensed software under different terms. Other people can't give out proprietary licenses, but you as the sole copyright holder can.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T18:03:52.233" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7929" CreationDate="2019-02-11T22:10:12.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Josiah Zayner might be in the realm of what you're interested in, though I can't vouch for how legit he is or if he's just got a good viral sales pitch. Nevertheless, interesting guy! &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Zayner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Zayner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He used to work for NASA and then left, and started working on creating biohacking kits for crispr that people could use at home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He claimed to have injected himself with a myostatin knock out crispr kit live on facebook. Don't know if it worked because I haven't heard anything about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I reached out to him on twitter and actually found a follow up article he did: &lt;a href=&quot;http://theantisense.com/2018/11/13/true-story-i-injected-myself-with-a-crispr-genetic-enhancement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://theantisense.com/2018/11/13/true-story-i-injected-myself-with-a-crispr-genetic-enhancement/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like I said, interesting guy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14231" LastEditorUserId="14231" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T03:29:04.077" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T03:29:04.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7940" CreationDate="2019-02-11T22:28:27.667" Score="4" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a commercial tutorial website that will teach people to use GPL-licensed R packages in a series of articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website will not execute the code, but will show people the output of the GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could teach people to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ggplot2&lt;/a&gt; (a graphing package that is GPL v2) by showing the code and &lt;a href=&quot;https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/figures/README-example-1.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the output&lt;/a&gt; from ggplot2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;library(ggplot2)&#xA;&#xA;ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = class)) + &#xA;  geom_point()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these code snippets also need to be licensed under GPL given the package is GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14264" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T13:10:18.387" Title="Embedding code using API of GPL library in tutorial website" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7939" CreationDate="2019-02-12T13:10:18.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether using a library creates a derivative work is not entirely clear. Opinions range across:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What no, that's silly!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The running software is a derivative work because it includes the GPL-covered software, but your source code isn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your source code is a derivative work because it uses GPL-covered APIs (is designed to require that GPL-covered work).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safest approach is to assume that your snippets might indeed be derivative of the GPL library. Then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the snippets are short or trivial, they may not be eligible for copyright protection and you don't have to do anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Otherwise, they should be available under the GPL. This does not necessarily mean that you have to offer them under the GPL; any compatible license such as MIT or CC0 would work as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would satisfy this requirement by either linking to a complete script from which your snippets are taken and clearly offering that script under a GPL-compatible license, or by putting a license dedication for those snippets at the end of the blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the entire R ecosystem depends on GPLv2-covered software, so this analysis is likely not unique to that package in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Output of GPLv2 covered software is NOT subject to the GPL (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;). You can show plots etc. without any restrictions or attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T13:10:18.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T16:12:05.273" Score="2" ViewCount="1545" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that would allow a software vendor to show their source code to the public, but if the user wants to run the code require them to buy a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the vendor could be interested in showing that there are no security flaws in the software, but not want to actually &quot;open source&quot; it in the traditional sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is not standard license that covers this use case, could you make your own that is legally enforceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14273" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T17:41:55.023" Title="Is there a &quot;read only&quot; software license?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7941" CreationDate="2019-02-12T17:41:55.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a software has no license attached, that would be the default: all rights are reserved, and no one else can legally make a copy. In practice this won't quite work because many people think “it's on the internet = it's free”, but there's no good way to prevent that misconception. There are some licenses that make this more explicit, for example Microsoft's suite of “shared source” licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, any such license or absence of license would not be Open Source. Open Source Software not only makes the source code of a software available, but also gives users important rights, such as the right to modify the software, share it, and run it for any purpose. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T17:41:55.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2019-02-12T17:53:56.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you release Free/Open Source software, anyone can use it regardless of morals.  You can't make a guarantee that your software will be used only for good.  Evil people will be able to take it and modify and use it for their own purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can of course run an ethical project.  You indicate your support for F/OSS by releasing your software under an appropriate license.  You can provide any other assurances you like that your project is ethical, but that's all you can guarantee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T17:53:56.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T01:59:52.660" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a number of questions discussing AGPL, but none really speak to the scope of AGPL. In practice, large providers such as Amazon provide AGPL software (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quickstart/latest/mongodb/overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB&lt;/a&gt;) and clearly do not provide source code for their full service architecture (i.e., we cannot self-host our own AGPL version of AWS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there authoritative discussion of where the line gets drawn? My guess is that it's largely similar to GPL proper, where derived / modified works include programs that directly use AGPL code in their runtime. Likewise, I would assume work that runs in a separate process from AGPL software would not be under any obligations to respect AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14283" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T01:59:52.660" Title="Is there published precedent regarding the scope of covered work that uses AGPL software?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T15:34:58.567" Score="9" ViewCount="1212" Body="&lt;p&gt;In open source software/projects why do people release there codes with a permissive license instead of a copyleft license? I mean, the original author will not get back much (if anything at all) if they are releasing their code with a permissive license (like MIT) instead of a copyleft license (like GPL). At least copyleft prohibits the source code to be used in closed source proprietary software in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Use_of_licensed_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;For sales or distribution, the entire source code need to be made available to end users, including any code changes and additions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses don't prohibit this. So the author using a permissive license seems to be on the losing side. Yet, permissive licenses like the MIT license are the most used software licenses in the world for FOSS. Why is that the case? Because of altruism or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13749" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2021-03-10T04:01:32.807" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T04:01:32.807" Title="Why to prefer permissive license over copyleft license?" Tags="|copyleft|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7945" CreationDate="2019-02-14T16:38:47.850" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons to use a permissive license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You want to maximize use of your software, and are perfectly happy to see your software made into proprietary software.&lt;/strong&gt; In authoring the GNU GPL, Stallman wanted to make matters more advantageous for free software and more disadvantageous for proprietary software. That was his goal -- and he achieved it very well -- but it may not necessarily be your goal. Perhaps you are more interested in advancing the state of software as a whole, by writing helpful programs and libraries, even if that comes in the form of non-free software. By using a permissive license, you reach the broadest possible audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your software is not very substantial.&lt;/strong&gt; As a general rule, the FSF recommends &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;using a permissive license for software less than around 300 lines&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What if the work is not very long?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a whole software package contains very little code—less than 300 lines is the benchmark we use—you may as well use a lax permissive license for it, rather than a copyleft license like the GNU GPL. (Unless, that is, the code is specially important.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They likewise advocate for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive licenses for website templates&lt;/a&gt;, using similar reasoning that they are unlikely to attract downstream developers when the template's copyleft terms would apply to the whole rendered website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You want contributions from people/corporations who would otherwise be averse to copyleft terms.&lt;/strong&gt; While it is true that anyone can take a permissively licensed work and make a derivative under proprietary terms, it is also true that people or corporations who do so still see a practical benefit to pushing features and bug fixes to the upstream work. For instance, maintaining private patch sets adds complexity to a project, so even proprietary developers have an incentive to push as much as possible back upstream to reduce their work to merge updates. Also, when many major players cooperate in this way, they all benefit, even though no one company gets a direct benefit from sharing its own contributions (e.g., the Apache web server is maintained by developers from many corporations, because they recognize the community benefit of mass cooperation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a project uses a copyleft license, it is possible that some corporations who develop proprietary software will avoid the project altogether, and the project will not enjoy any contributions from those potential downstream users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your real aim is not to profit from the software itself, but to use software as a component of a broader service.&lt;/strong&gt; Google offers hosting services that allow people to remotely deploy services online. Google developed Kubernetes under a permissive license, and now Kubernetes is (at least one of) the de facto standard(s) for deploying complex, scalable systems. Because of the massive popularity Kubernetes enjoys, Google's competitor Amazon had to implement support for Kubernetes in their service offering as well. As a result, Google can more easily pull in customers who currently use Amazon's Kubernetes offering, because their Kubernetes interfaces are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a copyleft license for Kubernetes would not have directly &lt;em&gt;hurt&lt;/em&gt; this strategy (though it may have done so indirectly by the risk of reduced popularity -- a key facet of the plan!). However, the terms of the license were not overly important for Google: it needed to control the market's standard interface in order to force competitors into their standard, and a popular permissively-licensed product met the goal perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T16:45:20.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-14T19:22:45.800" Score="3" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(migrated from &lt;a href=&quot;http://programmers.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;programmers.SX&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm placing a copyright notice with some (FOSS) license in a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in a software package I'm publishing; or it's a license block in a source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted etc. etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so, the year is the year I'm creating the license file / block. That one's easy. But - how should I identify myself, the copyright holder? Obviously, I'm going to write my name, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I specify an affiliation, even if I, rather than the organization, am the holder? e.g. a research institute I work at?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I specify an address, or a town/city name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I write an email address?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, what if that address is tied to an organization/company, which I've not listed and is not the copyright holder?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And what if I &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; have those problematic kinds of email addresses?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer to both previous questions is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, what's to distinguish me, John Smith, from all the other John Smith's out there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T23:21:26.180" Title="How should I identify myself in a copyright notice / license?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7947" CreationDate="2019-02-14T23:21:26.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright notices are mostly pointless. What they do is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remind people that the software is actually copyright-protected&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make it easier to reconstruct the copyright history of a file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can make it easier to prove copyright infringement (in particular, falsifying or removing notices may be criminal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but mostly they are just a remnant of 80s-era copyright law in the USA where such notices were still mandatory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntax for copyright notices is mainly given by US copyright law, which roughly &lt;del&gt;suggests&lt;/del&gt; requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(Copyright | ©) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;(,&amp;lt;year&amp;gt;)* &amp;lt;author-name&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The year should be the year where you &lt;em&gt;publish&lt;/em&gt; the file, not create it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name may be your natural name, or you may use a pseudonym.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do not have to provide any contact details, but you may do so (preferably outside of the copyright notice itself).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright notice must of course list the copyright holder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If some institution is not a copyright holder, it makes no sense to mention the institution in a copyright notice. Of course you may mention affiliation in related documentation, e.g. as part of a file header or in a readme file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In an academic context, there might be a requirement to acknowledge a funding source in all publications. I would recommend keeping these only in the documentation, or to use a license like Apache 2 or the GPLv3 family that can require the preservation of such attribution notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contact details can be helpful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to identify you more clearly, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for users to ask you for support.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former suggests that long-lived contact details would be more helpful, the latter suggests that providing contact information might not be desirable at all. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“I have a Toyota Corola”&lt;/a&gt; – the story of how the cURL author receives emails from car owners because they found an address in the car's license information. Instead, let your documentation point to a public bug tracker, forum, or mailing list (whatever medium you are comfortable with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T23:21:26.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-15T11:13:43.697" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Debian CD or DVD ISO file - here is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/bt-hybrid/debian-live-9.7.0-amd64-gnome.iso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; - consists of many different packages containing software licenses under various licenses such as GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, and a lot of other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The selection of packages that went into a Debian ISO is a process that requires skill (miss some packages and you won't have a working desktop), originality and therefore could be considered a derivative work which has its own copyright, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Debian ISO is created with a build script. Such a build script has yet another copyright and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of creating such an ISO is not simple, so is also copyrighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu says it is an &quot;aggregate work&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ubuntu is an aggregate work of many works, each covered by their own license(s). For the purposes of determining what you can do with specific works in Ubuntu, this policy should be read together with the license(s) of the relevant packages. For the avoidance of doubt, where any other license grants rights, this policy does not modify or reduce those rights under those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that logic, Debian - or more specifically - a Debian ISO (let's say Live ISO to simplify the discussion) - also is an &quot;aggregate work&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the license of the Debian Live ISO binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14294" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T07:53:39.417" Title="What is the license of the Debian Live ISO binary since it is an aggregate work?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-15T13:00:19.717" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to base my embedded project on FreeRTOS, modify the original source code of FreeRTOS (strip some functionality, remove some unused code, increase reliability), write my application specific code and then I want to sell the whole product and give warranty for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT license for FreeRTOS have disclaimers like: &quot;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND...&quot;. As far as I know I am required to include the MIT license text in my product even when I do not disclose the source code (e.x. in documentation or somewhere like the &quot;About&quot; tab).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the impact of the MIT license terms of FreeRTOS on my final product warranty? Am I allowed to give warranty for my product? (I will modify the original FreeRTOS source code, improve reliability, test and verify it in my application)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something like OpenRTOS or even pre-certified SafeRTOS that are targeted specifically for commercial use, but I am not sure if this is the only way for me to be able to provide warranty for my product to my customers and/or apply for some industrial certification in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14295" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T00:04:29.143" Title="Final product warranty vs MIT licensed FreeRTOS warranty disclaimer" Tags="|licensing|mit|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5224" CreationDate="2019-02-15T13:21:03.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For all intents and purposes the &lt;strong&gt;answer is yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Consider Kyle Mitchell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perception-Report.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source License Business Perception Report&lt;/a&gt;. Find the license with the &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; amount of pain and the &lt;em&gt;max&lt;/em&gt; amount of confusion. Find it? The WTFPL. Add that as your main license then offer a dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T13:21:03.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7950" CreationDate="2019-02-15T14:13:14.540" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license requires that you keep all notices intact, and explains that you have not received any warranty from the software's authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this does not prevent you from offering warranties yourself. This is similar to how a car dealership can sell you an extended warranty package that goes beyond the car manufacturer's warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid misunderstandings, it may be best to make it clear that your software is &lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt; FreeRTOS, and show the MIT license incl. warranty disclaimer in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T14:13:14.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-15T15:11:14.857" Score="0" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to&lt;/strong&gt; receive or &lt;strong&gt;run a copy of the Program&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if &lt;code&gt;Acceptance Not Required&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;run a copy of the Program&lt;/code&gt;, then also sections &lt;code&gt;15. Disclaimer of Warranty.&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;16. Limitation of Liability.&lt;/code&gt; don't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I am wrong? But why so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without accepting the license, the work is still copyrighted. So the user doesn't have permission to run the program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And without permission to run the program, there's also no warranty and no liability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14294" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T20:06:34.147" Title="GPLv3 disclaimer ineffective?" Tags="|gpl-3|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7953" CreationDate="2019-02-15T17:19:07.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software is copyrighted whether or not a license is accepted. However, the copyright holders provide a public license (the GPL) that waives some of the copyright holder's rights. For example, the copyright holders waive their exclusive right to make copies, on the condition that whoever makes a copy abides by the requirements laid out in the license. This is effectively a contract that is offered to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing except that license gives you the right to do things that are by default reserved by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not reserve the right to run a software, therefore you do not need permission from the copyright holders, and do not have to accept the license. The GPL makes this explicit for the avoidance of doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Warranties are unrelated to copyright and differ substantially between jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions do not assume implied warranties, others make it impossible to disclaim all warranties. However, a warranty disclaimer is not a contract between author and user, but a shield for the author against claims of damages by the user: if the user has been told that the software is not necessarily fit for any purpose, but uses it anyway and something goes wrong, that's on the user. If the user drags the author before a court, the author can point at the disclaimer and say “I told you so”. But again, this is super jurisdiction-dependent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T20:06:34.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T20:06:34.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7956" CreationDate="2019-02-15T19:57:21.333" Score="2" ViewCount="953" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m using the Google Open Source Project 2016 (and others from Github using MIT and Apache licenses) and it has an Apache license. Do I need to add the Apache license to my project, too? If so, do I need to modify it at all? Or add anything? All of the open source projects that I'm utilizing didn't modify the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t wish to publish my code to the public, either. My project isn’t open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14300" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T23:09:46.923" Title="If I’m using someone’s open source project, do I need to use the same license the open-source project uses?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7955" CreationDate="2019-02-15T23:09:46.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, Open Source licenses come in two flavours: &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permissive licenses let you do whatever you want, as long as you provide certain attribution notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft licenses require that you use the same licenses for all derivative works and that you make your source code available (in case you share binaries).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just different approaches at maximizing software freedom. Permissively licensed code can be used in any context, even in proprietary software. So other developers get maximum freedom, though end users might just receive the attribution notices and none of the freedom. In contrast, copyleft licenses try to maximize end user freedom – but this means such code cannot be turned into proprietary software and that end users need access to the complete source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances do open source licenses trigger requirements on purely internal use of the software. As long as you don't make the software (or software based on the licensed software) available to others, you can do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses like Apache 2, MIT, BSD and their variants are all permissive licenses. You may do whatever you want but if you publish software that includes the licensed code (whether completely or in part, with our without modifications), then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must keep any existing copyright and license notices intact in the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must show these notices in a place where a user would expect them, for example a in a manual or in a help menu&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the Apache 2 license, a file called NOTICE must also be shown if it exists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 license also has patent-related clauses, but these are only relevant if you have a patent portfolio or participate in patent litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T23:09:46.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7959" CreationDate="2019-02-16T19:23:44.590" Score="5" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a code generator in Java that will generate GNU linker scripts and C header files for microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology.  I want both the code generator itself and the files it creates to be BSD-3 licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microchip provides linker script and header files that I have been using as a reference so I know what I actually need to generate, though my output will not be exactly the same.  These files are also BSD-3 licensed, except they put their name right in the license (instead of using the generic &quot;copyright holders and contributors&quot; terms of the default license).  Here is a copy of their license for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2018, Microchip Technology Inc. and its subsidiaries&#xA;  (&quot;Microchip&quot;) All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software is developed by Microchip Technology Inc. and its&#xA;  subsidiaries (&quot;Microchip&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above &#xA;      copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following &#xA;      disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided &#xA;      with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Microchip's&lt;/strong&gt; name may not be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;      derived from this software without specific prior written &#xA;      permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY &lt;strong&gt;MICROCHIP&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;AS IS&quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR&#xA;  IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;  WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT  SHALL &lt;strong&gt;MICROCHIP&lt;/strong&gt; BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,&#xA;  INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING&#xA;  BUT NOT LIMITED TO PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS&#xA;  OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWSOEVER CAUSED&#xA;  AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY,&#xA;  OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR  OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF&#xA;  THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH&#xA;  DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves me with questions as to how I properly give attribution to the original copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a simple way to indicate that I want to release my code under the same terms, but include myself in the places where Microchip put their name?  Would it be sufficient to include my copyright notice and a note that says something along the lines of &quot;this code is distributed under the same terms that the original copyright holder provided, except read 'Microchip and above copyright holders' in place of 'Microchip'&quot; followed by the original license notice?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where would I attribute Microchip, in the generator sources or in the generated files or both?  Which one would be considered the derived work?  The generator will probably end up containing snippets from Microchip's code that will be used to generate the output.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14307" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T21:50:13.757" Title="I'm creating a code generator that uses BSD licensed code as a reference. How do I give proper attribution to the referenced code?" Tags="|bsd|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7958" CreationDate="2019-02-16T21:50:13.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must not modify the license text in any way. However, you may add your own copyright notice above the license, or you may provide your own license (even if that is just a vanilla BSD variant) and mention that your software is based on that other work. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;year&gt; &amp;lt;your name&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;your license&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software is based on &amp;lt;original software name&gt;, provided under the following license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;original license&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the original license, you must show the original license “in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.” Since such license comments are easy to include in generated files it would seem appropriate to show them there as well, but you should at least add a comment that explains &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; the full license information can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T21:50:13.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7949" CreationDate="2019-02-18T07:47:36.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I see the problem.  You correctly note that a live CD is an aggregate work, and you quote Ubuntu policy regarding them, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ubuntu is an aggregate work of many works, each covered by their own license(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media ... The only condition is that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights that each program's individual license would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might reasonably conclude that each piece of software on the Debian CD, then, was covered by its own licence, and you would be right.  The CD has no single licence; each independent piece of free software thereon has a licence that applies to it, and that software is conveyed to you under the terms of that licence.  The fact that any given piece of free software thereon is conveyed to you on a distribution medium which contains other software, to which other licences apply, doesn't change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Debian ISO is created with a build script. Such a build script has yet another copyright and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The process of creating such an ISO is not simple, so is also copyrighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may well be, but here's the kicker: the licence on a piece of software &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally doesn't apply to the &lt;strong&gt;output&lt;/strong&gt; of that software&lt;/a&gt;.  I could set up a super-sekrit highly-proprietary program for making CDs of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC C compiler&lt;/a&gt;, and if I give you a CD so produced you get &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; under the terms of the GNU GPLv3, no matter how proprietary my process for churning out CD-ROMs is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T07:53:39.417" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T07:53:39.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7965" CreationDate="2019-02-18T22:33:13.217" Score="5" ViewCount="1565" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the Apache 2.0 license (A2L), in particular its clause regarding patent licensing (see below). I don't quite understand what's the use of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice lets Bob use a piece of software under the terms of a permissive license without that clause - doesn't that already imply Bob has the right to &amp;quot; make, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work&amp;quot;? (I left out &amp;quot;have made&amp;quot;, let's ignore retroactive considerations here.) That is covered by the license to &amp;quot;reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the former is not covered by the latter, than - why not? And what could happen to Bob with the non-A2L license as opposed to the A2L?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS - If it matters, suppose Alice and Bob do not live in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Grant of Patent License.&lt;/strong&gt; Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastEditorUserId="14290" LastEditDate="2024-02-27T08:51:06.543" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T08:51:06.543" Title="Why is the Apache license 2.0 patent license clause useful/important?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7964" CreationDate="2019-02-19T11:43:10.623" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Explicit is better than implicit. It is right that some have argued that the MIT and BSD licenses contain an implicit patent grant. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These arguments have typically focussed on the US, leaving aside other legal systems that might be less open to finding far-reaching implied terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AFAIK an implied patent grant is at this point a completely untested legal theory. In the future, the interpretation of whether the license terms include a patent grant will be for courts to decide.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This leaves substantial uncertainty for both creators and users of open source software. Such FUD hurts the entire open source ecosystem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An implied patent grant may be revokable or limited. Without explicit license terms, this is simply not clear. Again, a court would have to decide what the implied terms are.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a worst case, an open source software could be a vehicle for a submarine patent that is only enforced after the software has found widespread use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The absence of clear terms gives power to bad actors that abuse their patents and thrive on the surrounding FUD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many open source projects, the presence or absence of a patent grant is absolutely irrelevant because no author holds any patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are also a lot of open source projects that have institutional contributors from academia or industry, which do have a patent portfolio. The issue of patent licenses is much more urgent for those. The Apache Software Foundation has many such contributors in its projects, and therefore included suitable terms in its flagship license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 License includes two sets of terms regarding patents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contributors provide a patent grant to any of their patents that would be infringed by their contributions. Therefore, no bad actor can inject code and later claim that this infringes their patents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If anyone claims that the software infringes their patents, their patent license from (other) contributors ceases. This prevents bad actors from simultaneously enjoying the use of the software while trying to deny others the use. Furthermore, this offers some amount of legal shielding for contributors against claims by unrelated entities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explicit handling of patents makes the Apache License very attractive for the implementation of standards that require patent licenses. For example, consider a software that implements some patent-encumbered compression standard. Even if the patents are available under FRAND terms, this effectively excludes open source implementations. Arguably, an open source implementation might be fine but downstream users would be responsible for acquiring licenses (e.g. consider how Android patent licensing works: the hardware manufactorers are typically on the hook for acquiring patent licenses for the devices they sell to consumers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the patent holders come together to develop an open source reference implementation under the terms of the Apache 2 License, then it is safe to use that implementation for any purpose – while still allowing patent holders to enforce their patents against other implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T11:43:10.623" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2019-02-19T12:43:43.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for ways to communicate to my users that our project is committed to making the world a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you sure it's not committed to making some piece of software? I mean, sure, that software can be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to make the world a better place, but is that what you mean? Or - do you want to talk about what the organization/contributors do &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than writing software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That we don't collect or sell the user's privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of badges - have a clearly-visible brief statement to that effect on your website / program GUI / social media pages / etc. And - a longer statement going into details on your website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That we are committed to promoting the ideals of Open Source Software and the Open Source Community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there are set ideals. I'm guessing you have a notion of what these are based on the views or rhetoric of some prominent activists or developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any organizations or Pledges or checklists, that are widely used to communicate good will to our users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line: This is essentially impossible, since even on the matter of what &lt;em&gt;constitutes&lt;/em&gt; good will there are fundamental disagreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the business world there are things like the Better Business Beau or B Corp or 1% for the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, those are totally bogus. I'll take my Evil Corp., jack up the prices by 1.01% , then donate 1% &amp;quot;for the planet&amp;quot;. Look at me, I'm now an ethical and responsible business... you know what I mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget the badges. Show your users what you actually do to better society. Be transparent about your funding,  use of funds, clients/organizational users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; ... and consider licensing your software under GPL or a similar stricter FOSS license, rather than the permissive ones. That's already somewhat of a sacrifice in terms of propagation of your software in favor of buttressing FOSS-only environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastEditorUserId="14290" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T20:09:48.250" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T20:09:48.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7969" CreationDate="2019-02-19T14:37:56.153" Score="5" ViewCount="3253" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; contains this statement (&lt;strong&gt;emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version,&#xA;or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them&#xA;privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations&#xA;(including companies), too; an organization can make a modified&#xA;version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the&#xA;organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the&#xA;program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in&#xA;certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to&#xA;release it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, when is the condition &lt;code&gt;release to the public&lt;/code&gt; met / fulfilled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us assume that a website is using a modified PHP-CMS that is licensed under the gpl. Is the fact, that the website which can be reached over the internet already enough to speak of a release of the server side software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if only logged in users can use the CMS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T09:48:40.050" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T09:48:40.050" Title="GPL - Is it required to post source code to the Public - when is a software released?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7968" CreationDate="2019-02-19T15:41:58.137" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the fact, that the website which can be reached over the internet already enough to speak of a release of the server side software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it isn't, which is why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt; was developed.  The AGPL extends the group of people who are entitled to have the source to include people who interact with the software over a network (see s13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the PHP code of this CMS is given or sold to some third-party, for example so that they can create their own website, that counts as conveyance under the regular (non-Affero) GPL (as well as under the AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if only logged in users can use the cms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't yet know of any jurisprudence or qualified advice as to what constitutes &lt;em&gt;interaction remotely through a computer network&lt;/em&gt;.  It seems clear to me that a logged-in user is interacting with it.  Whether someone who enters an invalid username/password and thus fails to log in is interacting with it is an interesting question, and I don't think there's a definitive answer to it yet.  My personal feeling is that it would include such non-users, but it's just my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T16:35:56.920" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:35:56.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T16:20:35.493" Score="5" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;So following &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/54737381/1356107&quot;&gt;this schema&lt;/a&gt; if I wish to do everything free I can use the JDK's that are on &lt;a href=&quot;https://jdk.java.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jdk.java.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now say that I wish to publish ready made packages for clients with jlink that I offer for download on my website. &#xA;Following the classpath exception in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 + classpath exception license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;CLASSPATH&quot; EXCEPTION TO THE GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certain source files distributed by Oracle America and/or its&#xA;  affiliates are subject to the following clarification and special&#xA;  exception to the GPL, but only where Oracle has expressly included in&#xA;  the particular source file's header the words &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Oracle designates this&#xA;  particular file as subject to the &quot;Classpath&quot; exception as provided by&#xA;  Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after compiling my program and gathering everything that has been used for distribution, do I have to check every source file of included elements from the jdk to check if that header note was put in there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that sentence isn't there in one of the source files, does that mean I am forced to distribute my program/game/utility under GPLv2 or compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5906" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:20:35.493" Title="Java 11 program, GPLv2 + Classpath Exception license do I need to check everything" Tags="|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7986" CreationDate="2019-02-21T00:41:44.740" Score="1" ViewCount="1822" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a web application with Spring (and Spring Boot) and Open JDK 11 and I'm very confused about their licenses and how I can combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open JDK 11 is released under GPL GNU 2 (with classpath excpetion) while Spring is released under Apache 2.0 license. I read that this two licenses are incopatible: Apache 2.0 is compatible only with GPL GNU 3 so I can't release my application with GPL2. But if I choose to realease the application under GPL3, can I use in this application software under GPL2 and Apache2.0? I don't understand if the incompatible is referred to use this two licences together or just when I decide under which license release my application (in this case, I can't release under GPL2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that maybe my question isn't so clear (as I said before, I'm very confused about this topic) so I leave this little scheme (it's like a box). This scheme represents what I'm asking for: if it's possibile to make something like this or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL 3 (application license)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;|-----------------------------------------|&#xA;&lt;br&gt;|--Included software's licence --|&#xA;&lt;br&gt;|-- GPL2 ------------------------------|&#xA;&lt;br&gt;|-- Apache2.0 -----------------------|&#xA;&lt;br&gt;|-----------------------------------------|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you need further informations and details, I'll try to be the clearest possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14334" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:20:07.650" Title="Java OpenJDK 11 and Spring licenses" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7318" CreationDate="2019-02-21T03:19:54.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need a lawyer to draw up a contract specific to this situation. It is unwise to try to shoehorn some generic legal template into your circumstances, because you will almost certainly need to negotiate all of the terms of this agreement. For example, a contract would have to answer these questions (and probably many others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will you work on the GPL'd code on company time and equipment? What if the company decides your time would be better spent on some other work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who has the final say on accepting or rejecting pull requests, both from inside and from outside the company? What if you reject a coworker's pull request?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the company remove you from the project and install someone else in your place?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are trademarks, who owns them? If there are no trademarks, will you or the company apply for any?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must you own the copyright yourself, or would it be enough for the company to release the code under the GPL on your behalf?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What will become of the project if, for whatever reason, you stop working on it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will you remain an employee, or would it be wiser to reclassify you as an independent contractor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you and the company get into a disagreement over any of this, what happens next? Do you go straight to court, or is there some kind of arbitration or mediation process instead?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every one of these questions can have many different answers. Which answers you end up with will depend on the strength of your negotiating position, as well as the specific circumstances of your individual situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note however that many larger employers already have established processes for incorporating open source projects. You should consult your manager and/or HR to see if the company already has a policy, and try to work within that framework if it exists. They will (should) have plenty of experience dealing with the above list of questions, and should have pre-written answers to most or all of them. You can then make an informed choice about whether to proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T03:25:03.997" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T03:25:03.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7974" CreationDate="2019-02-21T03:28:35.713" Score="3" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a commercial game, with most resources using &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-xx&lt;/strong&gt; licences for graphics, sound etc. I have found some graphics that i want to add to my game. However, these graphics are licensed as &quot;&lt;em&gt;GNU General Public License version 2&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Can someone tells me how to use them commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should i ship these images (source form) along with my game?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should i ship the game with its source code, even if i use some GPL images i.e. not software? Or should i ship the modified resources i.e. images like the &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/strong&gt; does?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shows up as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;You may use and distribute this image under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14336" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T09:30:34.480" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T10:03:32.787" Title="GNU General Public License version 2 on a game image resource" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7973" CreationDate="2019-02-21T09:29:26.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I guess this is a clear example of why the GPL doesn't work well for content rather than code (just as the CC licences don't work well for code rather than content).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the question of how a GPLv2 image combines with the CC-BY-SA content comes down to whether the larger work that includes that image is a derivative work of that image.  If it is, then as Kevin says above, the licences are incompatible, and the resulting work cannot be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the judgement in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150820/10343532017/photographer-loses-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-against-mapmaker-that-used-his-photo-with-his-explicit-permission.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC&lt;/a&gt;.  Although the writeup linked is rather emotive and misspells the plaintiff's name throughout, it has the summary correct: the use of a copylefted image as the main cover photo for a book made neither the entire book nor the cover alone a derivative work of the cover photo.  As the judgement put it, &quot;&lt;em&gt;the Court finds that neither the atlas nor its cover constitutes a derivative work subject to the ShareAlike requirement&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal feeling is therefore that you can have GPLv2 images displayed in your game alongside CC-BY-SA images (and sound) as long as you don't deliberately try to create derivative images or other works that combine GPLv2 content and CC-BY-SA content.  You will, of course, need to make sure that the GPLv2 content (and, for that matter, the CC-BY-SA content) can be obtained in isolation by anyone who wishes to avail themselves of the benefits of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But IANAL/IANYL, so you should seek a qualified legal opinion before you put yourself in harm's way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T10:03:32.787" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T10:03:32.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T14:39:43.963" Score="15" ViewCount="3800" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company I work for is selling PCIe cards. I'm writing the Linux driver for it as a Linux kernel module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When selling these PCIe cards, we give along the Linux kernel driver as source code. Customers can thus compile our kernel driver on their very own version of the Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this source code is stated as Proprietary both in the header and with &lt;code&gt;MODULE_LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what would it make as a difference to state these kernel module source files as GPL licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a customer perspective, I can see no difference as they can compile and use it whatever the license is. What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14340" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:48:21.627" Title="When distributing a Linux kernel driver as source code, what's the difference between Proprietary and GPL license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|proprietary-code|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7975" CreationDate="2019-02-21T14:45:00.923" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you customers have any right to modify the source they've been given? Do they have the right to distribute the code without your permission? Do they have the right to distribute modified versions of your code? All of those would be allowed under the GPL, but aren't under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source is not just about the ability to use the code, it's about freedom to modify the code and adapt it for other uses, and to redistribute it (even sell it) without your permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T14:45:00.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T16:09:07.233" Score="3" ViewCount="1732" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a project using LGPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/a&gt;), would I be able to use within it another component which is under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any site where I can see all the compatible licenses with GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14342" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T16:30:22.853" Title="Is LGPL compatible with GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7977" CreationDate="2019-02-21T16:30:22.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; both LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv3 are compatible with GPLv3.  You can find more details, and the resource you were looking for, at the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licence summary page&lt;/a&gt;, which includes their take on which licences are compatible with the various versions of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T16:30:22.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T17:38:35.910" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to open some my technical notes with example code snippets. Text will be in Markdown (.md) and reStructuredText (.rst) files. Output document (PDF or HTML) will be generated, let's say by Sphinx, and will be hosted on Read the Docs. Source code (md, rst and code snippets) will be hosted on Github. Flow is illustrated in the figure below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BhzVH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BhzVH.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to enable potential contributors contribute easily. On the other hand, I want to prohibit commercial usage. In that case how should I choose type [1], [2], [3]? How should I indicate licenses? Who are the copyright owners if someone contributes? I checked several online resources but couldn't find a clear solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that source code of text sections is licensed by [1], code snippets by [2] and final documents by [3]. I think that I can use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for type [3]. By doing so anyone can change the document but can't sell it. But what are proper choices for [1] and [2]? For [1], if source code of text is considered as code then I think CC BY-SA (with/with out NC) isn't suitable because usage of CC BY-SA is discouraged for code. If I choose CC BY-NC-SA for [1], can I use GPL for [2] and compile all sources to generate a output which is licensed as CC BY-NC-SA? Does this violates GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I decide which licens to use. How should I indicate licenses? I am planning to organize the source such that md and rst files are in Folder 1 and code snippets are in Folder 2. So should I create differente LICENSE file in each folder if [1] and [2] are different? Should I indicate a license (and probably copyright statement) in each file as a comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14344" LastActivityDate="2019-07-21T22:02:55.417" Title="License Selection for An Open Document Project with Codes" Tags="|gpl|documentation|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7979" CreationDate="2019-02-21T21:02:47.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the output document gets created by an automated process, there is not enough creative work in the creation of that document to make it copyrightable in its own right. The output document can only be licensed under the combination of licenses that cover the documentation source and the code snippets.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This means license [3] will be a combination of licenses [1] and [2].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the code snippets, as you don't consider them that important for copyright protection, I would recommend to use the MIT license, which is a permissive license. But the GPL license is also a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the document source, I would recommend CC BY-SA or a variation on it, because it comes closest to what you want to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from adding LICENCE files to the various folders, you should also make sure that a clear indication ends up in the final document stating the license that applies to the text and the license that applies to the code snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T21:02:47.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7975" CreationDate="2019-02-21T23:48:28.910" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not touch it, because of the proprietary licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Idealism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Practicality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What are (some of) the practical implications?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a change is needed to the driver in the future. Then no one but the proprietor can make legal changes. These can include bug fixes, security fixes, comparability fixes, feature improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put a copy on all of my computers (even ones without the hardware)? Do I need to keep track of licences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it part of the mainline kernel?: Does it come pre-installed with my OS, or do I need to install it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T23:48:28.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-22T07:54:10.310" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the BSL using Boost requires &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software [...] must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure about this sentence. Do I have to grep all copyright notices from the source files/headers for the version I use, like somebody already did (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Tencent/mars/blob/master/Copyright%20Notice%20of%20Boost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Tencent/mars/blob/master/Copyright%20Notice%20of%20Boost&lt;/a&gt;)? That would be as far as I currently see over 2000 different statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14350" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T08:58:52.220" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T22:23:28.147" Title="BSL Copyright Notice" Tags="|copyright|bsl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7975" CreationDate="2019-02-22T09:13:57.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Source code distributed as 'proprietary' usually does not come with the legal rights that open-source code does.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot legally modify it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot legally redistribute it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot legally redistribute modified versions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You won't be able to get it into the kernel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributions won't be able to put it into their repositories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributions won't be able to make fixes to your code in order to make it work on their releases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All support onus for the driver will fall on your company&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will need to provide an installer and instructions on how to get it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which will make dealing with your hardware on Linux a little bit of a pain in the ass for the end user, as Linux users are pretty accustomed to 'just works' for most hardware and 'have to install a single package' for most outliers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14352" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T09:13:57.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7971" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:20:07.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have understood correctly that there is no license that would allow you to distribute the combination of an Apache 2 licensed work with a GPLv2 licensed work. You may create and use such a combination, you just cannot copy it outside your organization. For most web applications this would already be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that analysis ignores the Classpath Exception. The Classpath Exception is a LGPL-like clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;link&lt;/strong&gt; with the GPL + Classpath Exception covered work, you may distribute the result under a license of your choice. The GPL only applies to the GPL-covered libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt; the GPL + Classpath Exception covered work, you must keep the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows you to build software with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license on top of OpenJDK. That software is not a modified version or derived work of OpenJDK. Even if you use Java 9 features to pack parts of OpenJDK into an executable, the Classpath Exception limits the scope of the GPL to the OpenJDK parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may still have the GPL obligations for the GPL + Classpath Exception covered works, such as providing the license and a copy of the source code to users. Just as with the LGPL. But that is not relevant for web applications because you don't give your software to users. This only starts being a concern when you distribute your software, e.g. if a customer wants to run your software on-premises or if you want to open-source your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: Your web application doesn't really include or modify OpenJDK. Thanks to the Classpath Exception, this means that you can effectively ignore the GPLv2 license. You can distribute your software under the terms of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:20:07.650" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7975" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:48:21.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you mentioned customer perspective, here's one:&#xA;For some of your customers (or potential customers) there might even be regulatory benefits if you, if you publish the driver as open source and take the effort of having it accepted into the mainline kernel and then further down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, in some fields (say medical), there are regulatory standards for code quality. If I'm using off-the-shelf code, like a driver for a device, I might need to &quot;qualify&quot; it as medical code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For certain levels of criticality, in some regions, some of the arguments which might be used to qualify code are if it's in wide-spread use, and if there's a clearly documented development process using which the code was made, if there's a clear bug reporting and solving process and so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is a part of Linux, then I can qualify it basically &quot;for free&quot;, as a part of the whole kernel package. If it's not, then I'll probably have to do reviews on it, and might have to do an audit of your development processes, write many pages of reports on it and so on and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this means, that if there's a competitor which has his drivers in kernel, I'm going to pick his product, even if it's more expensive or of lower quality, instead of spending a boat-load of money doing paperwork for your, and then repeating the procedure of every device I want to use your product in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13166" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:48:21.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7994" CreationDate="2019-02-23T02:10:39.720" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a project with Lerna, so there's multiple NPM packages in the same repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary for me to place a LICENSE file inside each NPM package, such that when the user downloads the package they can read the license, or is it enough to place a LICENSE file in the root of the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14363" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T14:12:55.517" Title="If I have many distributable packages in the same repository, do I need to include a LICENSE file with all of them?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7992" CreationDate="2019-02-23T05:31:17.553" Score="10" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered an obscure software license called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Maximum+Use+License+for+Everyone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maximum Use License for Everybody (MULE)&lt;/a&gt;. (I have used text from version 4 below, but my concerns also apply to version 3.) The license first states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This software is &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; software. It doesn't matter which of these names you call it. […]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but subsequent sections then state (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may use this software in any way you wish, subject to all applicable laws and to the provisions of this Maximum Use License for Everyone. You may copy and distribute all or part of this software, &lt;strong&gt;without cost&lt;/strong&gt;, at will.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may give away, or sell at cost, an aggregate software distribution containing this software and software from other sources, without remunerating the copyright holder. If you give away, or sell at cost, a fully functional and readily available aggregate software distribution containing this software and software from other sources, then you may also include this software in an enhanced version of the same aggregate software distribution which may be sold for profit, without remunerating the copyright holder. &lt;strong&gt;However, if you sell copies of all or part of this software under any other circumstances, either alone or together with other works, you must reach an agreement with the copyright holder as to a reasonable rate of remuneration per copy (or a waiver of remuneration).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute other software containing all or part of this software, in modified or unmodified form, &lt;strong&gt;without cost&lt;/strong&gt; under this Maximum Use License for Everyone, or under any other &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; software license consistent with the Open Source Definition promoted by the Open Source Initiative &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://opensource.org/&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;However, if you sell any copies of such software (except as part of an aggregate software distribution under the circumstances specified in paragraph 4 of this license), you must reach an agreement with the copyright holder of this software as to a reasonable rate of remuneration per copy (or a waiver of remuneration).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may also copy and distribute other software containing all or part of this software, in modified or unmodified form, under any software license that is not among the &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; licenses to which paragraph 6 of this license refers, &lt;strong&gt;but only after reaching an agreement with the copyright holder as to a reasonable rate of remuneration per copy (or a waiver of remuneration).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to think this &lt;strong&gt;is not&lt;/strong&gt; a legitimate FOSS (free or open source software) license due to contradictions with FOSS definitions, which prohibit licenses from restricting the sale of the software by any party. Overall, I think the author of this license is interpreting &amp;quot;free software&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;open source software&amp;quot; too broadly if not incorrectly throughout this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that ability to relicense under a (recognized) FOSS license in paragraph 6 is impossible in practice, because recognized FOSS licenses will not allow the &amp;quot;without cost&amp;quot; provision to be enforced; the copyright holder of a MULE-licensed project would essentially have to allow sale by anybody without remuneration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4644" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T15:05:53.617" Title="Is the Maximum Use License for Everybody (MULE) a FOSS license?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|restrictions|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7989" CreationDate="2019-02-23T07:19:38.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, good; yet another attempt by the crayon-wielding world to mesh free software ideology with the idea of non-commercial use.  How well they all work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but I agree with you that the licence is non-free, for the reasons you have stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I notice that s6, the section that allows re-distribution under any OSI-approved licence provided it is done at no cost, &lt;strong&gt;does not require a similar condition to be imposed on the recipient&lt;/strong&gt;.  So if you absolutely had to use some code licenced under MULE, my advice is to have a friend download it, and (&lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; s6) convey it to you under GPLv3 (or, if (s)he must, some non-copyleft licence) without charge.  At this point you have a properly-freely-licenced copy with no weird commercial restrictions, and life can proceed.  However, it's probably best to avoid using this code if you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T07:19:38.843" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7983" CreationDate="2019-02-23T08:20:08.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost Software Licence&lt;/a&gt; (BSL) requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software ... must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and all derivative works of the Software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copy you already have has all those entries in already.  Using it requires nothing further from you.  Should you wish to distribute copies, they, too, will already have those entries in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should you wish to make significant changes to Boost or excerpt a significant portion of it, and redistribute it as part of your project &lt;em&gt;complete with source&lt;/em&gt;, then the approach the github user you link to has taken strikes me as a fairly pragmatic one, and one which ensures that no copyright line will get left out merely because you haven't needed to use the particular source file in which it occurs.  2000 lines might seem like a lot, but the Boost libraries (v1.69.0) weigh in at some 4.3MLOC, so if the libraries are useful to you then the obligation seems fairly light, at least to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're redistributing binary-only (&quot;&lt;em&gt;solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) which you now say you are, then you have no obligation to redistribute &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T22:23:28.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T22:23:28.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7989" CreationDate="2019-02-23T08:55:36.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forbidding sale of the software has precedent in OSI-approved licenses, for example SIL-OFL 1.1 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither the Font Software nor any of its individual components, in Original or Modified Versions, may be sold by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is reason to believe the OFL is an outlier and wouldn't be OSI-approved if submitted today. Also, the OFL is only intended for fonts, not for software in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the license at hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MULE has never been put before the OSI for approval. Calling it an open source license is therefore a bit premature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MULE's author disagrees with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. However, the DFSG are the root of the Open Source Definition, and continue to be relevant in license evaluation. I would expect OSI to be hesitant to approve a license that would be shunned by Debian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MULE's royalty sharing provisions violate the DFSG's &lt;em&gt;desert island test&lt;/em&gt;: How could a seller be able to reach a royalty agreement with the copyright holder unless they have communication channels and money transfer channels available? This is not necessarily a given, e.g. consider a potential seller in an isolated dictatorship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MULE's royalty sharing provision requires an agreement to be reached with the copyright holder. But there can be many copyright holders, because any contributor is a copyright holder as well. Reaching a royalty agreement with all of them would be unworkable.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the main reason why this license fails to be open source: The license itself does not allow unrestricted commercial use of the software, it just allows arrangements to be made outside of the license. This aspect is indistinguishable from “all rights reserved“. Thus we have an OSD #6 “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” violation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author's references to the OSD try to lawyer around its particular phrasing (e.g. regarding “aggregate”), without taking into account the intention of this definition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MULE's relicensing provision is badly thought out. For example, MULE is clearly GPL-incompatible. Since the anti-monetization clause is supposed to stick around after relicensing, this relicensing mechanism is not sufficient to save the license from being non-open.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore believe that it is incorrect to consider the MULE license to be open source, believe that it would never be approved as open source by the OSI, and believe no one should ever use this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T15:05:53.617" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T15:05:53.617" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7996" CreationDate="2019-02-23T13:32:16.297" Score="1" ViewCount="2448" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found interesting open source project (mostly dead now) and I would like to fork it, fix some bugs and use it. The project is licensed under &quot;gpl 2 or later&quot;, however I'm not big fan of &quot;gpl 3&quot;, so I would like to keep my changes to the code base &quot;gpl 2&quot; only. To that matter, I have few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I simply relicense it all under &quot;gpl 2 (only)&quot;? I assume yes since &quot;gpl2&quot; and &quot;gpl2+&quot; should be compatible licences?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If answer to 1. is &quot;no&quot;, can I make changes under &quot;gpl2 (only)&quot; and make it explicit that anything &lt;code&gt;git blame&lt;/code&gt; says was written by me is &quot;gpl2&quot;, and not &quot;gpl2+&quot;? I would like to avoid this since it could lead to confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If answer to either of 1. or 2. is &quot;yes&quot;, does not this kinda defeat purpose of the license (I assume the purpose is to get code back)? Even if I share my changes, the upstream (in this case upstream is dead so probably not an issue) cannot use them since they would not fit the &quot;gpl2+&quot; requirement of the rest of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible I'm just missing something fundamental here so please enlighten me :) Links to further reading are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11203" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T18:16:59.800" Title="Is it legal to fork &quot;gpl 2 or later&quot; software and make &quot;gpl 2 only&quot; changes" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7988" CreationDate="2019-02-23T14:12:55.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, each package should have a license. That way they can be used individually. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NPM is weird though in that it lends it's self to &quot;micro-packages&quot; very well. So it's quite possible that your licensing documentation exceeds the size of your package.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if your packages come from the outside then they should already have a license that you should respect. If they are internal only, then each package should have its own license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="892" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T14:12:55.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7993" CreationDate="2019-02-23T16:53:07.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, “GPL version 2 or later“ gives &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; the choice of which version you want to use. It is your right to select only version 2 for the modifications that you make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the GPL is not reciprocal code sharing so that your code could be integrated upstream. Instead, the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that the software and all its derived works remain Free Software, so that others are free to use, study,  modify, and share it. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas permissive licenses like the MIT license give other developers all freedom incl. the freedom to strip end users of these freedoms, copyleft licenses like the GPL are more restrictive for other developers because the GPL tries to ensure that all users incl. end users can enjoy these freedoms: if you publish a modified version of GPL-covered software, you must stick to the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All versions of the GPL try to ensure these freedoms, but the newer GPLv3 contains various improvements, such as clearer language and structure, closing some loopholes around embedded devices, a mechanism for Additional Terms, Apache 2 compatibility with an anti-patent-treachery clause, and automatic reinstation of the license when license violations are fixed. Licensing software as “GPL version X or later” helps downstream users to benefit from such improvements when new GPL versions become available. It also increases license compatibility across versions, thus strengthening the open source ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T16:53:07.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7993" CreationDate="2019-02-23T18:16:59.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU project's GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt; lists &quot;I want to copy code under: GPLv2 or later&quot; against &quot;I want to license my code under: GPLv2 only&quot; as allowed (&quot;OK&quot;). It carries the following footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must follow the terms of GPLv2 when incorporating the code in this case. You cannot take advantage of terms in later versions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes perfect sense: you elect to use the existing code under GPLv2 only so you can distribute it with other GPLv2 only code that you supply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T18:16:59.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T18:49:00.827" Score="1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I want to use a Javascript component that is under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That forces me to license my product under an open source license compatible with GPLv3. &#xA;So, let's say I have an agency and I want to build a website for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the product in which I'll be using the component? My website right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just build my site, silently make it open source in Github under GPLv3 and use the component under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who cares about the license of my site? Who cares if I make it open source?&#xA;No one is really going to look at the open source project, as I won't put any link to its Github URL anywhere else.&#xA;I'm just making it open source because the component I want to use requieres it. &#xA;And honestly, there's no much of a difference. If my site has cero backend work, any website source code is visible to anyone who wants to see it. (right click &gt; view source code). So technically I do not lose anything open sourcing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone, by chance, finds my github account and finds the site, good for them, my business, what generates me money, is the agency and not my site, which is my &quot;open source project&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... my question is, what is it really considered an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any business &lt;strong&gt;silently&lt;/strong&gt; upload their site in Github, put a License.txt with the GPLv3 content and use any component under GPlv3 no matter what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14342" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:31:49.927" Title="What is really accepted as an open source project for GPLv3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|open-source-definition|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7997" CreationDate="2019-02-23T19:31:49.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 triggers its source disclosure requirements when you &lt;em&gt;convey&lt;/em&gt; GPL-covered software. Conveying is defined as something that allows others to make a copy (that they can then convey in turn). If you offer some JavaScript file for download on your site (which is necessary for that JS to be executable) then that is a kind of conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you convey GPL-covered software, the GPL requires you for example to give users of that software a copy of the license, to keep copyright notices intact, and to offer them the Corresponding Source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Offering the source code is more active than just noting that the code is available &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;. At the least the GPL-covered file should contain a license header that points to the source code. Ideally, you have a clearly reachable page on your website that collects third party attribution notices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The downloaded JavaScript file might not be the Corresponding Source in the sense of the GPL. The Corresponding source is the preferred format of making modifications, and could include additional build scripts (e.g. like a package.json file if you are using NPM). If your website serves minified JavaScript, that would not be the Corresponding Source either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complying with the GPL for client-side JavaScript is quite tricky because it is not quite clear what the scope of the GPL would be. For example, you might be using multiple plugins that are completely separate. It is also not obvious whether a GPL license on JavaScript code will also extend to HTML templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly, the GPL does not extend to the content of the website, at most to the theme &amp;amp; JavaScript code that runs on the page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is safest to assume that the GPL extends to all software that runs within the HTML frame, unless you can argue that some widgets are clearly separate so that the complete website is more akin to an aggregation of these programs, rather than a single combined program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For all software that is combined with the GPL-covered component into a single program, you must actively offer the Corresponding Source under the terms of the GPL or a compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A GitHub repository for this code sounds appropriate. I would try to structure this code as a kind of NPM library or as a theme that you can easily reference from your website source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do not have to publish the source code of your entire website. In particular using client-side GPL code does not generally imply a requirement to publish any server-side code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of the GPL is that end users are free to run, inspect, modify, and share the software that they have received. To do this, it is necessary that they are informed of their rights under the GPL and are actively offered the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:31:49.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7999" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-23T19:32:58.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T19:32:58.917" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:32:58.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8000" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-23T19:32:58.917" Score="0" Body="This tag is used for concerns about licenses to software and what rights one grants." OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="5740" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T23:37:04.887" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T23:37:04.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8004" CreationDate="2019-02-23T20:15:32.957" Score="0" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have my application implemented as propriety library. (Like a GUI component that could be embedded in something else)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a virtual keyboard library that is GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to sell my application with the virtual keyboard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I legally make a wrapper (that then should be GPL licensed) that embeds my application and adds the virtual keyboard functionality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;EDIT&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reaction to the comments below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not own the virtual keyboard library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My situation is a bit different than the ones discribed in other threads I've found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[--------------------Wrapper (GPL)----------------------------]&#xA;        ^                               ^&#xA;        | Dynamic link                  | Dynamic link&#xA;        |                               |&#xA;[-Virtual keyboard (GPL)-]  [-My application as GUI component-]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no direct communication between the keyboard and my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14369" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T08:52:13.573" Title="Can I create a GPL wrapper that runs my closed source application combined with a GPL part" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T01:49:44.130" Score="5" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;TypeScript is a programming language &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;released as Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I create my own JS library, using TypeScript, and publish it under MIT, including the compiled results (i.e. including the auto-generated JavaScript files)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When running my build tools to generate the final JavaScript compiled code, the following was automatically inserted to the resulting file (not in the beginning, but in the middle of it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*! *****************************************************************************&#xA;Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;); you may not use&#xA;this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the&#xA;License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;THIS CODE IS PROVIDED ON AN *AS IS* BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY&#xA;KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED&#xA;WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE,&#xA;MERCHANTABLITY OR NON-INFRINGEMENT.&#xA;&#xA;See the Apache Version 2.0 License for specific language governing permissions&#xA;and limitations under the License.&#xA;***************************************************************************** */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in short, I have a &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; file which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was generated by the TypeScript compiler (with the help of other MIT licensed build tools)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Includes the above license comment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I release such file, and the rest of my library, under MIT?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;EDIT:&lt;/em&gt; I've added a bounty to draw more attention, I will be happy to provide extra information if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9550" LastEditorUserId="9550" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T02:51:43.477" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:42:14.293" Title="Releasing a JS library made in TypeScript as MIT including compiled files" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8001" CreationDate="2019-02-25T08:52:13.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, and I assume that the FSF's views on linking and copyright derivatives are correct for the duration of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You correctly note that you cannot establish close communication between two programs (one of which is a library) and not publish the code for one if the other is covered by the GNU GPL and you distribute the combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You propose to put a &quot;shim&quot; library between your proprietary code and the GPL library with a view to sidestepping the problem.  You accept that the shim code will also need to be GPL.  The trouble is that, &lt;em&gt;ceteris paribus&lt;/em&gt;, you still have exactly the same problem: you've just moved it from the interface of your code and the GPL library to the interface of your code and the GPL shim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will work &lt;strong&gt;if and only if&lt;/strong&gt; you have managed to identify a place in the code where the coupling is weak, where you could accomplish what you want by having your code simply fork-and-exec the shim-wrapped library, such that you are no longer making a derivative work of both programs (as defined by copyright law) but instead merely bundling them together.  It seems &lt;em&gt;very unlikely&lt;/em&gt; to me that this will be so, but you don't tell us enough to be able to give better advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if, as Brandin comments, you are using a GPL'ed library which has a commercial-licensing option for people like you, you might reasonably expect the project to be on the lookout for people doing what you're doing, and to bring trouble your way if you publish the result and get the calculus of GPL evasion wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T08:52:13.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T09:46:34.373" Score="0" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have a project that needs to use tools licensed under the GNU/GPL license. &lt;br&gt; &#xA;my question is: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;must a project that a uses GPL licensed tool like netdiscover be licensed as a GPL project? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;if my project contains a line that contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def discoverAllNetworks():&#xA;  # execute a terminal command and get it's output&#xA;  os.popen(&quot;arp-scan &amp;gt; output.txt&quot;).read()&#xA;  # open the file created by command&#xA;  file = open(&quot;output.txt&quot;, &quot;rw&quot;)&#xA;  fileContents = file.read()&#xA;  newFileContents = fileContents.find_ip_addresses()&#xA;  file.write(newFileContents)&#xA;  args = file.read().split(&quot;\n&quot;)&#xA;  # feed modified output of the modified &quot;gpl_licensed_program&quot;&#xA;  # to another gpl licensed program&#xA;  output = os.system(&quot;nmap&quot; + args).read()&#xA;  flash(output)&#xA;  redirect('/output_url')&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does this require that my project use the GPL license? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;as far as i know if i copy GPL code my project needs to use the same license.&lt;br&gt; &#xA;but i am not copying the code; i am only using the project. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;distribution &lt;br&gt;&#xA;i will not bundle the tools this project uses, as most of them are available on most linux package managers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;hopefully will post the project on github when it's mature enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14379" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T09:24:23.023" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T09:26:00.747" Title="When must a project that uses GPL licensed projects use a GPL license?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8006" CreationDate="2019-02-25T10:05:49.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  In answer to your &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; question, it depends on how tightly the two programs are coupled.  According to the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which means that your program doesn't need to be GPLed also.  &lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures or shipping complex data structures back and forth, [&lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt;] that can make them one single combined program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then your code would need to be distributed under the GPL also (edits in the above are mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: if I read your code correctly (which isn't a given!) you're forking tools to build a list of local IP addresses, forking &lt;code&gt;nmap&lt;/code&gt; to run a defaults-only scan of those addresses, and simply displaying the results.  My take is this doesn't constitute intimate communication, and thus the works remain at arm's-length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say you're not distributing &lt;code&gt;nmap&lt;/code&gt; etc., so you won't incur any licence obligations with respect to that GPL code.  I can't see that your code would also be required to be GPL.  As I said, though, IANAL/IANYL, so if you're betting a business on this, get professional legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T09:26:00.747" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T09:26:00.747" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8011" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:07:56.003" Score="3" ViewCount="929" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw some closed-source software (for Windows), which license explicitly allows to do everything with it, including disassembling, decompiling and modification, but no source is distributed, though no obfuscation has been applied. I wonder if it can be considered as free (as in &lt;code&gt;freedom&lt;/code&gt;) software and if it can go into Ubuntu &lt;code&gt;universe&lt;/code&gt; rather than &lt;code&gt;multiverse&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14393" OwnerDisplayName="KOLANICH" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T10:46:15.827" Title="Can a closed-source software be free" Tags="|licensing|closed-source|free-software-definition|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8009" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:46:52.913" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you describe is usually called &lt;em&gt;freeware&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF does not consider freeware to be free software, considering it to be proprietary software, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#freeware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;asks people&lt;/a&gt; not to call free software freeware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So such a software package would not be permitted in the Ubuntu &lt;code&gt;universe&lt;/code&gt; repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" OwnerDisplayName="whatsisname" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T10:46:15.827" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T10:46:15.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8009" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:48:51.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think answer is No. By definition closed-source software goes to Multiverse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would handle this with care. How can you tell that software is not using third-party commercial libraries or patents? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Daiki" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T23:48:51.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T06:56:55.013" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-native&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mapbox-gl-native&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-native/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-Clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states that we need to attribute mapbox in binary form.&#xA;Buts its not clear if we can mention within a menu of the app we make or it has to be on the map view even if we are to serve non-mapbox tiles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help in clarifying this helps us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14398" LastEditorUserId="14398" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T08:10:19.063" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T08:10:19.063" Title="mapbox-gl-native license" Tags="|commercial|bsd|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2019-03-01T10:25:12.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8020" CreationDate="2019-02-28T09:06:39.600" Score="4" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to write alternative implementation of a library which is covered under LGPL 2.1 and keeping the same API ?&#xA;The alternative implementation will be in the closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14399" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T07:37:19.190" Title="Alternative implementation of an LGPL library" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8014" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8016" CreationDate="2019-02-28T12:11:44.490" Score="6" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a plugin (in lua) for a proprietary program, but would like to make my plugin open source, and require that anyone making derivative works/plugins also do so. This seems like a good case for GPL, but I am unclear if this is valid with a non-free program being effectively dynamically linked which I understand normally means all parts must be GPL. But it also seems like say web-page JavaScript in a proprietary browser sandbox which is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program itself is not mine, and I do not intend for the two to ever be distributed together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14401" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T15:53:06.550" Title="Can I GPL licence a plugin for a non-free program" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8013" CreationDate="2019-02-28T13:54:43.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your problem is that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reading of the existing code by the person who re-implements the library opens up the possibility that what you write is then a derivative work of what you read, and thus must also be released under LGPL (or GPL), as the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6791/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; makes clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why we have the idea of the clean room reimplementation, which you can read more about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7465/458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.  I can't say for certain that reading the header files would be enough to make your work a derivative of the existing library, but your having done so must surely raise that possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: @amon and I have disagreed about this before, but since (s)he's chosen to write an answer, and I believe that answer rests on a fundamental error, I'll directly address it here.  (S)he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, a reimplementation of some software is not a derivative work of that software, thus the license of the original software is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is flatly contradicted by, eg, the FSF FAQ, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under copyright law, translation of a work is considered a kind of modification. Therefore, what the GPL says about modified versions applies also to translated versions. The translation is covered by the copyright on the original program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no difference in copyright between a translation into another human language, and into another machine language; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple v. Franklin&lt;/a&gt; it was originally argued that there was a difference, but the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal rejected the argument, see eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://internetlegal.com/impact-of-apple-vs-franklin-decision/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this summary&lt;/a&gt;.  So, since the copyright of the original program still applies, then whether the licence on it permitted modifications (such as translation) is fully relevant.  I continue to hold that the clean room reimplementation is the only strategy which reliably decouples reader-of-old-code from writer-of-new-code, and thus avoids the tricky problem of having to prove a negative in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-10T07:37:19.190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T07:37:19.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8014" CreationDate="2019-02-28T15:53:06.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL's principal obligations, those governing source distribution and GPL-covers-all, apply only when the program is itself &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt;, rather than used.  As long as neither you nor anyone else distributes the program and the plugin together, there will be no GPL violations occasioned; certainly not by those choosing to obtain the parts separately and run them together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good of you to want to GPL your plugin, and you shouldn't feel discouraged from so doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T15:53:06.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8018" CreationDate="2019-02-21T02:05:17.717" Score="1" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edit: This was originally posted in law.stackexchange and was moved here with no input from me.  I'm well aware that most Open Source advocates argue against any license that restricts others from profiting from any open source work.  I think my best option is to break my question down in to several questions and reask them over at law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original Post:&#xA;I am working on a project and I have the source code on github.  I'd like to add a license to it, but I'm not sure exactly what I need.  I have the following circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to eventually be able to sell or otherwise benefit financially from the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to prevent anyone else from doing so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, I'd like to make the source code freely available to others for personal use, including giving them the right to modify it and pass it on to others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd like to keep my right to be identified as the original author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Part of the code includes work that was originally published under the MIT license by someone else, but it has been reworked extensively by myself.  I don't want to make any claim over this part of the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a widely available license that will let me do all of the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, with regard to the final point, I assume I have the option of hosting the modified code in a separate repository, so that the main repository would only contain my original work.  What license could I use then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: If there's a tool that let's me create a legally valid license with the above criteria, that would be a good answer too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14409" OwnerDisplayName="Joel Roberts" LastEditorUserId="14409" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T02:52:53.560" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T07:01:26.483" Title="What widely available software license is appropriate if I want to freely distribute but keep my own right to sell?" Tags="|intellectual-property|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8017" CreationDate="2019-02-22T00:35:30.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various licenses which might achieve what you want. The very widely used &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA  &lt;/a&gt; would seem to do everything you desire, although it is not the only one that would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about Creative Commons licenses in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that once a work is released under a creative commons license, people may continue to use it under the terms of the license even if the author stops releasing it and attempts to revoke the license. (It may be possible for a US author to terminate a license after 35 years, but this is not certain.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can surely  create your own license, you run the risk of creating unintended results or inconsistent requirements, and may not achieve your desires. I would urge using an existing and tested license if it will serve your purposes. You may still want to consult a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14404" OwnerDisplayName="David Siegel" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T00:35:30.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8021" CreationDate="2019-02-06T11:06:40.447" Score="4" ViewCount="2855" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use nvidia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stylegan&lt;/a&gt;, which is CC BY-NC, to generate images that then will be part of a dataset used as input of my own ML algorithm, do I infringe the stylegan license if I make a remuneration of the final output?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14414" OwnerDisplayName="xavier.seignard" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T13:14:02.693" Title="Using output of a CC BY-NC AI algorithm in a commercial product?" Tags="|intellectual-property|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8013" CreationDate="2019-02-28T17:55:15.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, a reimplementation of some software is not a derivative work of that software, thus the license of the original software is irrelevant. This holds in particular when the reimplementation used a clean-room design approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, APIs themselves may be creative works and therefore copyrightable. This would render any reimplementation of the API derivative as it has copied the API. Without a license this would be copyright infringement, though many jurisdictions have copyright exceptions that could apply here (like fair use in the US).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;API copyrightability and fair use are major themes in the Oracle v Google lawsuits about the use of Java in Android. Of course, that lawsuit does not set any precedent outside of the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of an LGPL-covered library, a safe workaround is possible that avoids a direct API copy, but lets users switch between the LGPL-covered library and your implementation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Design an alternative API that achieves the same purpose. Publish a description of the API under a permissive license or through some standards body.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Optional: Implement an adapter from the LGPL-covered API to your new API.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a proprietary implementation of the new API.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such workarounds would not be possible if the library were using the GPL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T17:55:15.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8019" CreationDate="2019-02-28T21:18:51.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the output of an ML algorithm a derived work, and if so from what? I'd argue that it is a derived work not of the ML software but only of the training data set as whole, so that this training set's database rights are relevant. Here, you seem to be dealing with an CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 dataset, which is not suitable for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is whether the generated images would be a derived work in the sense of copyright of the CC-BY-NC licensed stylegan, or of the training data set. If they are not a derived work, then the original license is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the generated images are not derived from the stylegan software: The generated images are not a copy of modified version of the software. They are just data that is processed by the software. Therefore, stylegan's CC-BY-NC license cannot affect the generated images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is more difficult to tell whether the generated images would be a derivative work of the training data set. The training data set may have two levels of licensing: first for database rights for the curation of the training set, second for the individual images in the data set. It could be argued that the generated images are derived from both the database and its individual training images as the stylegan software just extracts, weighs, and recombines elements of the training data set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is unclear to me whether this is done at a level that is relevant for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Very possibly, the elements of individual training images are unrecognizable in the generated images, so that the licensing of the training images  would be irrelevant (as long as the training data set was created legally).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The appearance of generated images would however depend substantially on the training data set as a whole: the stylegan software just performs an automated and randomized translation of the dataset into a generated image. I would argue this is not fundamentally different from a panorama stitching software, except that in stylegan the original images are unrecognizable from the output. I therefore believe the generated images are derived from the training dataset as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the stylegan license and the original image license is likely irrelevant, but your images are bound by the license of the training data set as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stylegan defaults to the Flickr-Faces-HQ dataset which uses CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. As a share-alike license this extends to derived works, and I have argued above that generated images might be derived works and therefore subject to this license with its NonCommercial clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generated images are Adapted Material in the sense of the CC-BY-NC-* licenses. Per 2(a)(1)(B) you can only &lt;em&gt;produce&lt;/em&gt; Adapted Material for NonCommercial purposes, which are defined as “primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation”. Therefore: you cannot generate images from the NonCommercial dataset if the primary purpose of the generated images is to bring you some commercial advantage, such as training your own ML model that would then have more immediate economic benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would instead have to find or create a different training dataset that is not encumbered by the NonCommercial restriction. But again, I don't think that stylegan's license itself is restrictive here, so you can still &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; that software (but likely not share or adapt it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T21:18:51.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8017" CreationDate="2019-02-28T21:39:16.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No open source license would fit your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; lists things that open source licenses do/not do. OSD #6 is “No Discriminiation Against Fields of Endeavour”, which means that an open source license must not prevent commercial use.&#xA;You want to allow only personal use; this is not compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not the only one who would like such a license, so there are various approaches outside of Open Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Creative Commons licenses include NonCommercial variants. However, these are intended for general creative works but are ill suited for software. Despite this they are sometimes used.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Back when Microsoft thought that Linux was cancer, they developed a suite of Shared Source licenses, including the “look but don't touch” Microsoft Reference Source License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recently a number of previously Open Source companies want to deny their software to cloud providers. For this purpose Redis has developed the Commons Clause and later the Redis Source Available License Agreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A summary of various approaches is also given in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source Available&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia article.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any such approach is not Open Source, and potential users might therefore be hesitant to use your software, especially if your software uses a completely custom license. You should also not accept outside contributions to your software until you are sure how this affects copyright/licensing status. You may not be able to use some libraries. You are perfectly free to create proprietary software, but you do give up some of the open source network effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T07:01:26.483" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T07:01:26.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8024" CreationDate="2019-02-28T22:13:25.920" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a new software developer, so I tend to have works with many open source project on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few question about the GPL licence, can someone help me to understand them, and if possible, point to where the rule said so in the GPL licence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) If the program (webbased) using Python display some image/logo and link referring to the original work, and I change that image and remove that link, do I break any of the GPL rule? I will selling this product, and the user will also received the source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If I make some limitation to the software by either changing the code/create an external code or create a licence, do I break any GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14405" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T19:09:26.927" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T19:09:26.927" Title="Does GPLv2 allow removing link to original work and adding limitations?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8023" CreationDate="2019-03-01T16:38:46.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) if the program (webbased)using python display some image/logo and link referring to the original work, and I change that image and remove that link, do I break any of the GPL rule? I will selling this product, and the user will also received the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The GPL allows you to change all parts of the code. Th only things you are not allowed to change are the copyright statements and the information which license applies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The requirement to keep existing copyright notices and license information is stated in clause 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;[...] provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) If I make some limitation to the software by either changing the code/create an external code or create a licence, do I break any GPL license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to add a end-user license check (verification that a license file or a dongle is present and contains the correct information) to your code, but the GPL license also requires that you publish &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; source code and give modification and distribution rights. This means that any recipient of your application can remove the license check and re-distribute that version.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That makes the business model that relies on such a license check immediately non-viable as your first customer can also become a competitor providing a cheaper product with the same functionality and fewer restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T16:38:46.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8028" CreationDate="2019-03-02T01:13:03.590" Score="25" ViewCount="7284" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the difference between the SSPL and the GNU AGPL license, after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the terms of SSPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 13th clause of the license states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version&#xA;  available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service&#xA;  Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge,&#xA;  under the terms of this License. Making the functionality of the&#xA;  Program or modified version available to third parties as a service&#xA;  includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with&#xA;  the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through&#xA;  a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or&#xA;  primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version,&#xA;  or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose&#xA;  of the Program or modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program&#xA;  or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs&#xA;  that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a&#xA;  service, including, without limitation, management software, user&#xA;  interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software,&#xA;  monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting&#xA;  software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service&#xA;  using the Service Source Code you make available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I understand correctly the point, but this what I'm thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under the GNU AGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is legal to create a proprietary program &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; that uses AGPL-licensed program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; over a local network &lt;code&gt;N1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is legal that program &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; provides a service &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; to an end-user over network &lt;code&gt;N2&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is legal to modify the program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; without sharing changes, since &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; is connected to &lt;code&gt;N1&lt;/code&gt; and the end-user is provided with the&#xA;service &lt;code&gt;S&lt;/code&gt; under different network &lt;code&gt;N2&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new SSPL license fixes the gaps above, in order to grant a pure&#xA;open-source service implementation without any proprietary&#xA;counterpart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my analogy correct? Is there other differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5220" LastEditorUserId="5220" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T16:17:48.307" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T18:12:20.570" Title="Difference between MongoDB SSPL and GNU AGPL" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|cloud|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8027" CreationDate="2019-03-02T12:12:46.890" Score="5" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;If license A is compatible with license B, does it mean that one can combine code from those two and should be able to release combination under license B? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just symmetric like 'A is compatible with B' implies same meaning as 'B is compatible with A'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14418" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T15:38:18.237" Title="What does it mean to say two licenses are compatible?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8026" CreationDate="2019-03-02T16:52:17.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licence compatibility arises when works, say A and B, under two different licences, say N and P respectively, are combined to form a new work C.  Because C is a derivative work of A it must honour any conditions N applies to derivative works, and because it is also a derivative of B it must honour any conditions P applies to derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it possible to honour the conditions of both N and P, then C can be distributed.  If it is not possible to honour the conditions of both N and P, then C cannot legally be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Boost-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost licence&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD licence&lt;/a&gt; are compatible because the former requires preservation of the licence text and the copyright notices in the code, and the latter requires preservation of the licence text and the copyright notices in the code and that one refrain from claiming any endorsement by the original code's author.  These two sets of requirements can be honoured simultaneously, so the licences are compatible, and a derivative of both is distributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:JOSL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jabber Open Source Licence v1&lt;/a&gt; are incompatible, because the former requires that any derivative be released under the GPLv3 (s5b) and the latter requires that any derivative be released under JOSL1 (s4a).  GPLv3 further forbids the application of any additional requirements in s10; a requirement to release under (eg) JOSL1 would be such a forbidden additional requirement.  It is therefore impossible to honour the requirements of both GPLv3 and JOSL1 with respect to a particular body of code, and thus the licences are incompatible, and any such derivative work cannot be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licence compatibility is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_property&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commutative&lt;/a&gt; (or as you put it, symmetric); if N is compatible with P, then P is compatible with N.  Compatibility is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_relation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transitive property&lt;/a&gt;; that is, just because licences N and P are a compatible pair, and P and Q are a compatible pair, it does not follow that N and Q are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T15:38:18.237" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T15:38:18.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8025" CreationDate="2019-03-02T18:02:02.237" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL requires that the people interacting with program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; over a network have the right (and possibility) to obtain a copy of the source code of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;. The AGPL does not strictly define what interaction over a network means and if it includes indirect interaction via program &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be argued that interaction with a program means that your actions as a user cause a reaction in that program, even if the action was initially done on another program. This would mean that if program &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; just forwards the user interactions to program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, then it can be argued that the user is actually interacting with program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;. On the other hand, if the requests from &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; can not be directly related to user actions, then the user probably &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interacting with &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL license indeed tries to close the gap that a copyleft program can be used in the background without giving out the sources.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If that is actually successful remains to be seen, because the SSPL license seems to step outside the realm of copyright. The SSPL license puts requirements on programs that are completely unrelated in terms of copyrights and it remains to be seen if that clause will actually be upheld in a court of law.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For example, if you have a web-application that offers data-storage services using MongoDB and runs on Microsoft's IIS as webserver, then clause 13 of the SSPL requires that you provide the source code of IIS even though IIS is in no way derived from code that is copyrighted by the authors of MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T12:28:06.113" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T12:28:06.113" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8031" CreationDate="2019-03-04T11:43:37.463" Score="4" ViewCount="704" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, when I make my code dependent on library, do I have to check its dependencies licenses or library license is the only one to be checked on my side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I be assused of using MIT library that internally violates its own dependency license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14431" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T17:40:33.290" Title="Can I be accused of using MIT library in my codebase that internally depends on library not compatible with MIT?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8030" CreationDate="2019-03-04T17:40:33.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you are distributing an application or library, then you are responsible for ensuring that the requirements of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; involved licenses are fulfilled. This includes the licenses of all transitive dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, if your application uses a library &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; that is distributed under the MIT license and which in turn uses library &lt;code&gt;G&lt;/code&gt; that is distributed under the GPLv2 license. In that case, you must ensure that the entire application can be distributed under the terms of the GPLv2 license. This means that you cannot use library &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; that is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, because that license is not compatible with the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same vein, if library &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; uses both library &lt;code&gt;G&lt;/code&gt; and library &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;, the library &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; can not be legally distributed and can not be used in your application either. And as library &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; can not be legally distributed in this case, then derivative works, like your application, also cannot be legally distributed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T17:40:33.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-05T14:52:14.363" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a library A, which is written in C and licensed under GPLv2, and lib B, which is written in Rust and compatible with the API/specs of lib A but the devs have read through the code of lib A, can lib B be relicensed under the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the above situation again but the devs have not read through the source code (black box engineering), does the GPL still apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14441" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T14:52:14.363" Title="Does rewriting a library in another language allow escaping GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-03-05T19:53:21.303" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T17:17:55.567" Score="15" ViewCount="3988" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding code which was originally under GPL. The code was used and was built upon and used as a service. The code was kept private, which seems okay under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if one of the developers was to steal the code or it was leaked. How does this work? I can't really find any information regarding this situation online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14446" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T20:09:26.350" Title="GPL code private and stolen" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8034" CreationDate="2019-03-06T19:09:12.180" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code of the service has multiple copyright holders. Some published code under the GPL, others didn't publish the code at all. &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; the service code were to be published, it could only be published under the terms of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is the right of each copyright holder to decide whether their code shall be published. If the code were to become public against their will, that would be copyright infringement. The right to control whether a creative work is published is more fundamental than the GPL. Therefore, the illegally published code would not have a valid GPL license attached to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ has a related entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;If someone steals a CD containing a version of a GPL-covered program, does the GPL give the thief the right to redistribute that version?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] If the version in question is unpublished and considered by a company to be its trade secret, then publishing it may be a violation of trade secret law, depending on other circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the FSF's reference to trade secrets is correct but not necessary, and that the illegal publication is already prevented by copyright law. So what the thief is doing is illegal whether  or not they are stealing from a company that has trade secrets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jurisdiction-specific arguments for the US (but this is going to be similar anywhere):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing copies of a copyrighted work is the exclusive right of the copyright holder(s) under 17 USC 106. A thief has not received permission from the copyright holders of the service, therefore the thief is performing copyright infringement (17 USC 501(a)). The GPL restricts the service's copyright holders that they must license the code under the GPL &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they distribute it, but does not compel them to distribute it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible counterargument: if the service is a &lt;em&gt;joint work&lt;/em&gt; then all joint authors might have full rights to the work. A joint author cannot “steal” their own work by publishing it. However, a lot here would depend on the specifics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the service was created as a work for hire, the developers are not copyright holders and have no rights in the software. Joint authorship cannot apply in that case, and this would be plain copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T20:09:26.350" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T20:09:26.350" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8034" CreationDate="2019-03-06T19:42:23.903" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding of copyright licenses (local to the U.S.), it seems to me that if Alice modified some GPL-licensed program Foobar, and Bob stole and distributed her unpublished modified version, then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice never issued a license for anyone to distribute her modified version of Foobar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The modified version is not licensed under the GPL, since it is not licensed to anyone under any terms whatsoever&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a different case where Alice violates the GPL herself by distributing a modified version of Foobar but clearly licenses her parts of the work under a GPL-incompatible license. In that case, her parts don't become GPL licensed without her say-so by some legal magic. Instead, she's simply committed copyright infringement by distributing a derivative of Foobar in a way that Foobar's author did not allow. The author of Foobar could sue her for damages, seek an injunction against her to stop distribution of her modified version, etc. but cannot decide that Alice has licensed her work differently from how she actually licensed it. Alice holds the exclusive right to distribute her own copyrighted work (and therefore holds exclusive ability to license that right to others), and her having run afoul of someone else's copyright rights does not change that fact for her own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to the case where Bob steals and redistributes Alice's modifications, there once again seems to be no reason that Alice's work would be licensed under the GPL. Thus, no one may make use of Alice's work under the terms of the GPL, and neither is Alice liable for the distribution of her work in a GPL-incompatible way, since she never authorized such redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is my own layman legal understanding, and may be wrong and/or vary by jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL FAQ does not comment about the copyright situation of an unpublished derivative, but it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;does note an additional issue in Alice's favor about trade secrets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If someone steals a CD containing a version of a GPL-covered program, does the GPL give the thief the right to redistribute that version?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] If the version in question is unpublished and considered by a company to be its trade secret, then publishing it may be a violation of trade secret law, depending on other circumstances. The GPL does not change that. If the company tried to release its version and still treat it as a trade secret, that would violate the GPL, but if the company hasn't released this version, no such violation has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T19:57:17.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T21:16:53.117" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a small C++ code example (containing a function) that is under CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. I am thinking about revising that example, extending it to multiple functions and using it in a much bigger commercial project. That license is share-alike. AFAIK this means I need to publish the modified code under the same license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what exactly are the consequences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How would I need to publish the code? At the same platform? In the&#xA;web via HTTP? Or is it enough to provide the code on request by&#xA;e-mail?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How much would I need to publish? Only the functions that contain&#xA;parts of the original code? The entire module? Or even the entire&#xA;project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14448" LastEditorUserId="14448" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T21:22:43.820" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T18:47:28.257" Title="Amount and way of publishing under share-alike license" Tags="|copyleft|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8037" CreationDate="2019-03-07T02:09:44.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons (the people who wrote CC-BY-SA 4 and earlier versions) &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specifically recommend against&lt;/a&gt; using any Creative Commons license on software, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, perhaps in recognition of the increasing tendency of developers to license code with CC-BY-SA in particular, for 4.0 and later they added a one-way compatibility clause with the GNU GPL version 3. This means that, instead of distributing your modified code under CC-BY-SA 4, you may choose to distribute it under GPL 3. This is very likely a Good Idea, because the GPL is specifically designed for software and ensures that downstream reusers will share their source code and build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to relicense under the GPL, you should comply with all of the standard requirements on a GPL redistribution. Roughly speaking, that means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make both source code and binaries available in the same way. The usual way to do this is to either bundle them together or to publish them side-by-side but separately. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6 of the GPL&lt;/a&gt; lists a few alternatives if neither of those options work for you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of the GPL in your source distribution, and put a license notice in each file, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF recommends&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FSF also recommends getting a copyright waiver from your school or employer, if applicable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your source distribution should also include any build scripts or other such materials that are required to build the binaries which you want to distribute. You need not include system libraries or headers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FSF is of the opinion that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the line between separate pieces of software is usually drawn at the process boundary&lt;/a&gt;. That is, if you have two or more separate processes, then you may only need to GPL the one which includes the code you started with. However, if you choose to divide your program into a lot of tiny processes that are intimately related and not independently useful, then this analysis may not be applicable and you may have to GPL the whole thing. This is the FSF's opinion, and is not necessarily the actual law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should place prominent notices in the source code, README, or other ancillary files that are included in the source distribution (such as a changelog), indicating that you modified the code, and when you did so. It may also be wise to indicate what you changed or added (although your version control system should already have that information, changelogs are easier to read).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, you should update the copyright notice to add your name and the year(s) of your modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T02:18:52.213" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T02:18:52.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2019-03-07T08:26:13.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you can do is require the users to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;use my code as per the GNU GPL, but don't put it on GitHub &lt;strong&gt;under the same name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a policy can be implemented using a &lt;strong&gt;trademark&lt;/strong&gt;. GPL doesn't allow you to restrict source code distribution, but it doesn't prevent you from protecting your software's name (and the logo, if your software has one) from unauthorized use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that while most businesses register their trade marks to insure their legal status (and pay registration and renewal fees), there's no strict requirement to do that. At the very least, it is advised to use the trademark legend (™) after the name of your software (that is, &lt;code&gt;mimeTeX™&lt;/code&gt;) to show your intention to use the said name as a trade mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if someone makes your software available under the same name, you can ask them to rename their project, or clearly state in the description where the original project is hosted, and follow up with GitHub if they refuse. You'll have to provide reasonable proofs of ownership and precedence of your site over the GitHub repo if you want to succeed. If, as you say, the GitHub repo contains an older version from your site, and your site made it to the web archives, that should not be too difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both the author and GitHub turn down your request, the only recourse you have is to dispute the trademark rights in court. That's how Python project managed to dispute the domain name &lt;code&gt;python.co.uk&lt;/code&gt; (they didn't have a registered trade mark at the time, just like you). It will require quite a bit of effort and investment, and sometimes is not possible at all depending on country laws involved. For a personal / hobby project, you will probably choose to avoid that fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T09:19:09.940" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T09:19:09.940" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8044" CreationDate="2019-03-07T09:17:11.133" Score="7" ViewCount="1539" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL site&lt;/a&gt;, the 4-clause BSD is incompatible with GPL because of the clause 3 which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software&#xA;  must display the following acknowledgement:&#xA;   This product includes software developed by the University of&#xA;   California, Berkeley and its contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the practical problems that arise when software from many contributors is combined (resulting in a very long advertisement message), to the point where Linux Kernel devs may decide not to include such code. But I see no good reason to call it incompatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/902/2829&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; gives a very different reason for the incompatibility with GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The BSD license does not give the permission to re-license and for this reason the final user always gets all permissions from the original author who put the file under the BSD license and who would need to give his explicit OK. The BSD license permits to add code under a different license but then you would need to clearly mark every line that is under this different license. Given that the GPL is for complete works only, the GPL would not permit you to put parts of the code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above is true, 4-clause BSD is indeed incompatible with GPL. But then,  removing the clause 3 apparently won't help with GPL compatibility, because the problem is elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, which one is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T20:03:38.260" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T17:18:40.787" Title="Why does the clause 3 of 4-clause BSD makes it incompatible with GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8042" CreationDate="2019-03-07T09:20:23.153" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having witnessed projects such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LUFA&lt;/a&gt;, which are open source with the MIT license but still have a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/PurchaseLUFA.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purchase button&lt;/a&gt; for a proprietary license of the toolbox (revoking the MIT License and offering support),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to retain the right to sell a non-GPL version of the project that I'll be releasing as GPL? Or is this practice limited to permissive licenses such as MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the drawbacks? If the GPL version gets updated, may I administer a private license for it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14457" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T10:22:03.903" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T16:17:36.167" Title="Release GPL/Open version of project, still sell proprietary license?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8041" CreationDate="2019-03-07T10:21:17.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You intend to release a project under GPL.  It incorporates some BSD-licenced code (you don't say &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; BSD licence, but let's assume it's 3-clause).  You want to know if you can dual-licence this project under a proprietary licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that you can, yes.  You will have some minor labelling obligations from the BSD licence which must apply to both GPL and proprietary-licensed versions.  As you develop the codebase, you may continue to release it under either licence, depending on the requirements of the customer you're releasing it to.  If you accept third-party contributions to the code, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/incorporating-gpl-patches-into-commercial-version-of-our-software&quot;&gt;you will need to have&lt;/a&gt; either a Contributor Licensing Agreement or full Copyright Transfer Agreement in place with each contributor before including their contributions in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as ever, IANAL/IANYL so take proper legal advice before betting a business on this strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T16:17:36.167" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T16:17:36.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8041" CreationDate="2019-03-07T11:10:03.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, like any software license, restricts only those who distribute the software under the terms of that license.  As the actual owner of copyright on the code, you do not require a license to legally distribute the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you can freely choose whether to distribute code you own the copyright to under the terms of the GPL, distribute it under a commercial license, or even to distribute it under the GPL to one recipient and under a commercial license to a different recipient.  Of course, in that last case, the person receiving it under GPL would be allowed by the GPL to then turn around and give a GPLed copy to the person that you offered the software to under a commercial license, so people doing this will generally provide some additional benefit (support allowances, additional features, etc.) along with the commercial license which is not also made available to those receiving the code under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of software packages out there which are offered under both the GPL and some form of commercial license.  The first to mind is MySQL, which also stands a good chance of being the most prominent example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also noteworthy is Perl, which is dual-licensed under the terms of either the GPL or the Artistic License, but that doesn't directly answer your question, as both license options in this case are FOSS licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, if the code includes portions which you yourself received under the terms of a license (GPL, other FOSS, commercial, or otherwise), then you may be limited by that license in what you can do with the complete code base.  The above assumes that you are the sole owner of all involved code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14458" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T11:10:03.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2019-03-07T15:29:08.357" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not normally require licence holders to put any special acknowledgments in their advertising material.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s7 says that any of six additional restrictions may be added to the normal requirements of the GPL, and none of these relate to advertising material.  It then goes on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So 4-clause BSD requires you to acknowledge a third party in your advertising material, and GPLv3 forbids (or, more accurately, voids) this requirement; hence, incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T15:29:08.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8040" CreationDate="2019-03-07T18:42:15.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's already an answer to the first half of your question. Here's an answer to the second half:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The BSD license does not give the permission to re-license and for this reason the final user always gets all permissions from the original author who put the file under the BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and who would need to give his explicit OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They already did by offering their work under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The BSD license permits to add code under a different license but then you would need to clearly mark every line that is under this different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand where this claim is coming from. The BSD license doesn't require it. No law requires it as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that the GPL is for complete works only, the GPL would not permit you to put parts of the code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common misunderstanding of clause 2b of GPLv2. Here's the clause that seems to be saying this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in&#xA;whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part&#xA;thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third&#xA;parties under the terms of this License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice two very important details here. First, it doesn't say that you have to license anything. It just says you have to &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; the entire work to be licensed. And notice that it doesn't say &quot;under this license&quot; but &quot;under the &lt;em&gt;terms&lt;/em&gt; of this license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To have a license that is under the terms of the GPL, you just have to be able to exercise the rights the GPL gives you subject to the conditions the GPL requires and not violate anyone's copyrights. Since the 3-clause BSD license is a superset of the GPL, if you have a 3-clause BSD license, you have a license under the terms of the GPL (and also some additional things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To have a license to a work as a whole, you just need a license to all the protectable elements expressed in that work. This is met in the case of a combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By distributing the work to people, you are causing them to receive a BSD license to those protectable elements covered by that license and a GPL license to those protectable elements covered by that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no other protectable elements, so that is a license to the work as a whole. And it is under the terms of the GPL because you get all the rights the GPL gives you if you comply with only the GPL's restrictions without violating any copyright to any protectable elements in the combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is not a relicensing requirement, it's a cause to be licensed requirement. It doesn't require a license under the GPL, just under the terms of the GPL (that is, a compatible license). And there's no special &quot;license to the entire work&quot;, an entire work is a collection of protectable elements, each of which you need a license to. There's no extra &quot;complete work license&quot; that you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, going back to &quot;the GPL would not permit you to put parts of the code under GPL.&quot; Nothing in the GPL says that and clause 2b is carefully worded to make this work. You can apply clause 2b to any original protectable expression. Clause 2b would, of course, then apply to any work containing that protectable expression unless it was also offered under a different license by its original author or assignee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2019-03-08T17:18:40.787" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T17:18:40.787" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-08T00:15:36.447" Score="4" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Ubuntu I see for many packages &lt;code&gt;copyright&lt;/code&gt; file under &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/%PKG_NAME%/&lt;/code&gt;. In the file of some of those packages, I see the following at the end of the file (protobuf, which looks like BSD (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/9e080f7ac007b75dacbd233b214e5c0cb2e48e0f/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;, as an example):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ tail /usr/share/doc/libprotobuf-dev/copyright &#xA;On Debian systems, the complete text of the Apache License can be found in&#xA;`/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0'.&#xA;&#xA;The Debian packaging is:&#xA;&#xA;        Copyright (C) 2008, 2009, 2010 Iustin Pop &amp;lt;iusty@k1024.org&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;and is licensed under the GPL version 3,&#xA;see `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3'.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean the debian package version of the package is GPL v3??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ lsb_release -a&#xA;No LSB modules are available.&#xA;Distributor ID: Ubuntu&#xA;Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9781" LastEditorUserId="14908" LastEditDate="2020-01-16T01:31:49.643" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T01:31:49.643" Title="Debian packaging ... is licensed under the GPL version 3 in copyrights file" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-notice|package|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8051" CreationDate="2019-03-08T08:44:55.490" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0WR9W.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0WR9W.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Short description About My question&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to create a REST API in my server that internally use a GPL library. As far as I know the GPL license affects the 'distribution' not the 'usage'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-So whoever calls(uses) my REST API shouldn't be affected by the GPL license right ?&#xA;Am I obliged to distribute the API code that uses the GPL library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So must I Distribute Code server and make it under GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14467" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T14:20:27.360" Title="Can I use separate license for commercial use?" Tags="|commercial|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-08T10:43:59.420" Score="7" ViewCount="4795" Body="&lt;p&gt;We develop a software for commercial use and sell it to customers. The software is a web based software that requires Oracle JDK for running (JRE). We are considering moving to OpenJDK because our customers are not interested in paying licenses to Oracle. We would like then to use OpenJDK for running the application and provided that we will not be changing any code we are not sure if the GPLv2 from OpenJDK means also that we would have to be able to show our code if requested to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we distribute our software without a worry that we would have to deliver our source code or publish our code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any help in this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14470" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T02:47:29.733" Title="Can I sell and distribute my software using OpenJDK without having to release my code?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|gpl-2|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-08T14:06:06.777" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering, since the ISO standard already gives already examples for a few functions on how to implement them, but by far not all, and I am not too sure, where exactly the functionality is gotten from when compiling, due to different conditions influencing, which implementation is being used, is it the compiler shipping the standard C implementations? Is the OS providing them? Or is there a different Copyright holder involved?&#xA;If there is no distinct answer, what would be the way to figure which stdlib implementation is being used when compiling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2517" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T19:00:01.743" Title="Who holds the copyright of standard lib C implementations?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8046" CreationDate="2019-03-08T14:08:23.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Debian packages often combine multiple projects into one package. The copyright file typically contains very accurate descriptions of which parts are available under what license. The copyright file will usually contain glob patterns that match specific files to some license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is that yes, the libprotobuf-dev &lt;em&gt;package&lt;/em&gt; in its entirety does contain GPL parts. This does not mean that the &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt; in the package is subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright file explicitly declares its format, typically the format described at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/&lt;/a&gt;. The file consists of paragraphs, each of which map files to a license (identifier or full text) or map a license identifier to the full license text. You should therefore read the file from the start, not from the end where there is just the full license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. my version of the package (&lt;code&gt;3.0.0-9.1ubuntu1&lt;/code&gt;) contains the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Files: debian/*&#xA;Copyright:&#xA;    2009      Dirk Eddelbuettel &amp;lt;edd@debian.org&amp;gt;&#xA;    2016      Dmitry Smirnov &amp;lt;onlyjob@debian.org&amp;gt;&#xA;    2016      Laszlo Boszormenyi (GCS) &amp;lt;gcs@debian.org&amp;gt;&#xA;    2009      Julien Cristau &amp;lt;jcristau@debian.org&amp;gt;&#xA;    2013-2014 Robert Edmonds &amp;lt;edmonds@debian.org&amp;gt;&#xA;    2008,2009,2010 Iustin Pop &amp;lt;iusty@k1024.org&amp;gt;&#xA;License: GPL-3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The package source contains &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; GPL-covered files, but these are just used for the packaging. They don't affect the library at all. The source also contains an GPL with  Autoconf Exception licensed file, but that doesn't affect any dependent code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not feel comfortable using a Debian package you can always download and build the library yourself. However, Debian packagers are very good at checking the actual licensing status of the software they package, rather than simply relying on the declared license of a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T14:08:23.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8047" CreationDate="2019-03-08T14:20:27.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This boils down to “what is a derivative work?” and the answer is “we don't really know”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there seems to be general industry consensus that a server program and a client program that behave as separate programs and just communicate over some IPC mechanism such as HTTP messages are separate works, not derivative works of each other. If that is the case, distributing the client cannot trigger any GPL requirements in the server code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means your understanding seems correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As long as you don't distribute/convey your server software you do not have to disclose the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that the GPL does not trigger when merely running the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exception: if you include modified AGPL-covered software then that already triggers when users can interact with that software, i.e. when you publicly perform the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T14:20:27.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8037" CreationDate="2019-03-08T18:47:28.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA license has two main requirements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution to the original author for the original work (the BY clause of the license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giving recipients of the derived work you create the same rights that you have received (the SA clause of the license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you must give the recipients of the derived work that you created the right to make changes to that work and to redistribute. However, as the CC BY-SA license does not differentiate between source code and object code, people that received the compiled product (object code) don't have the right to demand the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big question is what exactly is the derived work. This probably depends on how the product is structured but it can range from just the revised functions to the entire product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you intend to use this code in a commercial product, then I strongly urge you to discuss this with a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights. The easiest route from a legal perspective is to use the GPL compatibility option outlined in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8038/258&quot;&gt;answer from @Kevin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T18:47:28.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8049" CreationDate="2019-03-08T19:00:01.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The examples for functions from the standard library in the ISO standard for the C language are meant to be illustrative of the behavior of the function and are not a prescription how the function must be implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most actual implementations of the C standard library probably have a different implementation that is optimized for the platform(s) targeted by that implementation. In that case, the authors of the library implementation (or rather, the legal entity they work for) have the full copyrights on the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard C library can be provided by both the compiler and the OS. You will have to check the compiler documentation if it is using the OS-provided library implementation or an implementation that is bundled with the compiler. For one and the same compiler, this can be different per OS or compiler build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T19:00:01.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8056" CreationDate="2019-03-10T07:25:38.160" Score="3" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wanting to sell Wiktionary word definitions - not the raw page HTML and content, but extract the word definitions and package them in a couple of formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documents (e.g. PDF)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Powerpoints&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;App plugins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eventually, my own app&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all of these cases, the Wiktionary content is central to the product. I would format it in some special way, but the information remains the same - Wiktionary definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen already a related question here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7654/using-wiktionary-data-in-mobile-app&quot;&gt;Using Wiktionary data in mobile app&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I want to make exactly sure: can I offer this kind of product and still ask a price for it? Or does it have to be free? Or can I ask a price for it, but just state in my terms that I only sell the format and that the data itself is under the Wiktionary license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14484" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T15:47:07.257" Title="Can I sell Wiktionary data?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8055" CreationDate="2019-03-10T15:47:07.257" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For simplicity's sake, let's assume that Wiktionary is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0, rather than also accounting for the GFDL dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA license does not prevent you from selling the original work, selling adaptations (derivative works), or selling collections that include the work. So you are generally fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you must license the adaptations under the same license. This has a couple of important implications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must provide attribution of the content you used. As a minimum you need to mention the license and provide a link to the Wiktionary page. Ideally right next to the used content, not hidden in a settings page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must not prevent others from sharing your adaptation, or modifying it further, or exercising any other rights the user may have under the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must not restrict use of your adaptations via DRM or other technological measures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; ask for a price, the fact that the content can be shared freely limits the economic viability of a business around this content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A distinction should be made between a medium &lt;em&gt;containing&lt;/em&gt; CC-BY-SA covered content, and a medium that itself is an CC-BY-SA covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example, the software in an app might be separable from the content in a database used by the app. That is, you can sell an app and a CC-BY-SA covered database for this app, but you must not restrict reuse of the content in the database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be careful that any app store agreements you may agree to do not clash with the content license, which could be a problem if one agreement forces you to use DRM whereas the content license forbids this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some use of CC-BY-SA covered content might also be allowed by your applicable copyright laws, e.g. a right to quote or fair use. If your documents mainly consist of your own writing with a few Wiktionary quotes, the license may not apply. In contrast, if these documents just compile parts of the Wiktionary database that is certainly subject to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have no copyright for purely presentational changes such as typesetting the content or transforming it into some file format. If the content in a document/file is subject to the license, you should treat the entire document as subject to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T15:47:07.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8060" CreationDate="2019-03-11T12:24:31.387" Score="15" ViewCount="2376" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it is well known (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-use-gpl-libraries-in-a-closed-source-project-if-only-the-output-is-distrib&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), the GPL licenses do not cover the output of a GPL-licensed program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I could for example generate some pictures with a GPL-licensed program and include these pictures into my non-GPL-licensed software without any issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider the following scenario: Given a GPL program that generates source code files (either based on a template or completely out of nothing), can I include and compile this source code into my non-GPL-licensed program just as I could with a picture? Suppose that the generated file does not contain any license header, as otherwise the answer would be obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, I cannot see much difference between a generated picture and a generated text file (that happens to be used as source code). However, I have a strange gut feeling with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14473" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-18T06:30:55.497" LastActivityDate="2022-03-18T06:30:55.497" Title="Does &quot;the GPL doesn't cover the output of a program&quot; also apply if the output is source code?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-11T13:46:29.093" Score="4" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need &lt;a href=&quot;https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mozilla CA certificate store file in PEM format&lt;/a&gt; to be always available to my Windows C++ proprietary application. I can copy it to user machine as part of normal installation of software, but for several reasons (e.g. working without installation from single exe file) I'd like to have this file bundled into my application as string or binary resource, so I don't have to worry if this file is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding this is not source code. This is data file. I can't find appropriate clause about data files in MPL 2.0 description and corresponding FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from my understanding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; I can build my application using source code licensed under MPL. I hope it covers the case with using CA file as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you confirm this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14496" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T18:03:10.607" Title="Can I use cacert.pem file (MPL 2.0) as part of my proprietary program" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8058" CreationDate="2019-03-11T16:12:10.223" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we say &amp;quot;the GPL doesn't cover the ouput of a program&amp;quot; what we mean precisely is that the license of a program's output data is a function of the license on the particular input data used to produce that output, rather than a function of the license on the program that performed the input-to-output conversion. If a program produces output such that the output contains a derivative of GPL-licensed material (as your jurisdiction's copyright law understands derivative works), then the GPL's copyleft obligations would indeed apply to that output. The license terms of the program that mechanically produces the output are not relevant to the license terms of the program's output&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; covers the substance of this question pretty well, and notes that if the GPL-licensed part of the output can be discretely removed from the rest of the output, users may avoid GPL obligations on the output by removing that part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above) would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;see above&amp;quot; reference about Bison&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons—for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this substantially comes down to how your program produces its output code, and how the code templates used by the program are licensed -- if indeed the templates are creative enough to qualify for copyright protection in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T21:32:48.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8059" CreationDate="2019-03-11T17:04:25.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you combine the certificates with your executable as a single file, then I would consider the file with the certificate information (be it a resource file or a source file containing a string) a source file of the application and not a data file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can combine MPL-licensed code with code under most other licenses, provided that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't restrict the rights of your users with regards to the code that is subject to the MPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You distribute the files that are subject to the MPL license in source code form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would put the certificates in a string in a source file by itself, then only that single file is subject to the MPL license and needs to be made publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T17:04:25.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8066" CreationDate="2019-03-12T02:02:40.313" Score="2" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, if the copyright holder accepts external contributions under GPL / LGPL, they are no longer the sole copyright owner and cannot charge for a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does this only apply to adding contributions to the closed sourced version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the contributor retains ownership of the&#xA;  contribution as the Qt Project does not require copyright assignment&#xA;  for contributions made to the Qt Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14504" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T11:52:56.260" Title="How can Qt charge for a commercial license without getting copyright assignments from contributors?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T06:02:36.790" Score="5" ViewCount="724" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across an old project in which there's a LGPL licensed JavaScript code was used. The code had the commented LGPL license information, but it was in a combined JS file (Not minified though) which also had other library files as well. Not sure, but it looks like the complete file had just third party libraries in it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I need to publish this project as an external facing website and I want to know what could be the repercussion of having LGPL licensed code in it. The code is in a private repo right now and the project is unpublished.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know whether I can go ahead with publishing the project as is or should I invest some time to remove the code from the project? If I really want to go ahead with the current project, would I have to open source just the combined library file or the complete project, or none of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is commercial/enterprise in nature and it was last modified a year ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Following is the library I discussed about -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/jsii/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://code.google.com/archive/p/jsii/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license comment mentions that it's using LGPL, doesn't define any version. Here's the license comment - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*!&#xA; * jsii - JavaScript Inheritance Implementation&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2009 Eduardo Nunes (http://e-nunes.com.br), OtÃ¡vio Avila (http://otavioavila.com)&#xA; * Licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License&#xA; *&#xA; * Inspired in http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/&#xA; *&#xA; * @docs http://code.google.com/p/jsii/&#xA; * @version 1.0.0&#xA; *&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1166" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T13:15:30.737" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T15:51:59.713" Title="LGPL license in a concatenated JS file" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T06:42:11.817" Score="4" ViewCount="6279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions regarding the GPLv2 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For it to be GPLv2, I need provide access to my source files?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I use the v2 license, but charge for use, do users HAVE to purchase my license in order to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the alternative license in creating software if I want to charge for it?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14506" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T13:45:53.100" LastActivityDate="2022-08-24T11:11:45.923" Title="GPLv2 - licensing for commercial use" Tags="|licensing|commercial|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2019-03-12T07:23:24.013" Score="14" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, to people to whom you have distributed the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, they can also get it from someone else who has a (presumably paid-for) binary, and lawfully use that copy.  Because GPLv2 s3 says &quot;&lt;em&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program ... in object code or executable form&lt;/em&gt;&quot; someone who gets the software from you has the right to copy it for their friends, and because s0 says &quot;&lt;em&gt;The act of running the Program is not restricted&lt;/em&gt;&quot; anyone who comes into possession of such a copy may use it.  s6 makes their position even clearer: it explicitly gives them a licence from you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL is fine with you charging for your software; it just requires you to deliver freedom along with your binary.  If what you're asking is &quot;&lt;em&gt;what licence should I use if I want to charge for my software &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; forbid my paying users from exercising the freedoms associated with free software&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, that would be off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T11:07:29.630" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T11:07:29.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8062" CreationDate="2019-03-12T11:52:56.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I understand, if the copyright holder accepts external contributions under GPL / LGPL, they are no longer the sole copyright owner and cannot charge for a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That understanding is correct, but in the case of Qt, they are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accepting external contributions under the (L)GPL license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Qt uses a Contributor License Agreement that gives Qt a very different license to the contribution, which includes the right to re-distribute the contribution under any license of their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T11:52:56.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2019-03-12T19:57:59.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For it to be GPLv2, I need provide access to my source files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you don't. You are not bound by the terms of the license. The purpose of a license is to give you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have … but as the copyright holder and / or author, you have all rights anyway. Therefore, you don't have to provide the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT! It would not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, you chose the GPLv2 for a reason. But without access to the source, the recipients of your license cannot do what the GPLv2 allows them to do. So, you don't &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; need to provide the source code, but &lt;em&gt;practically&lt;/em&gt; it doesn't make sense to release software under the GPLv2 without source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If I use the v2 license, but charge for use, do users HAVE to purchase my license in order to use it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Only the first one. All the other ones could &lt;em&gt;theoretically&lt;/em&gt; get the software from the first one, who can legally re-distribute it under the terms of the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is nothing that guarantees that the first user will actually re-distribute it. The GPLv2 allows it, it doesn't force it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What is the alternative license in creating software if I want to charge for it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it is perfectly possible to charge money and make profit off GPLv2-licensed software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just because the GPLv2 allows your users to re-distribute the software doesn't mean they will.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some (corporate) users &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to pay for software, or actually, they want to pay for the possibility of having a contract with someone that they can sue if the software turns out to hurt their business in some way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You don't sell the software, you sell support and services related to the software. Maybe you give training on how to efficiently use the software, maybe you give extended support contracts, maybe you sell bespoke feature development.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A lot of high-profile projects have an &quot;open core&quot; model, where the core and basic functionality is open source, but the real value of the product is in extensions and plugins, some of which are commercial and proprietary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T19:57:59.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8072" CreationDate="2019-03-13T07:47:24.423" Score="2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to extend an existing plugin (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/plugins/filebird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FileBird&lt;/a&gt;), to add some features, and later publish and sell it off...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But although the plugin's source-code can be simply downloaded from &lt;code&gt;WordPress.org&lt;/code&gt; under &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt;, the plugin has some registration and/or billing built-in...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to modify the plugin, where it asks for purchasing it? or even completely removing that and make a free alternative (under another name of course)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T08:37:43.013" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T08:37:43.013" Title="WordPress: is extending plugin allowed by GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl-2|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8071" CreationDate="2019-03-13T08:35:22.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first question was whether FileBird was really under GPLv2; they don't exactly go out of the way to make the license a salient.  But after some digging &lt;a href=&quot;https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/filebird/trunk/readme.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it looks like&lt;/a&gt; you're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That given, what you propose - removing the billing and registration hooks - is completely lawful.  You don't even have to use another name, though it would probably be kind of you to do so as it may reduce confusion.  You will of course need to release your version under GPLv2 also, which may impact on your plans to &quot;&lt;em&gt;sell it off&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be prepared for the possibility of opprobrium: some people release software under copyleft licences, possibly without fully understanding that that empowers people to develop the code in ways they themselves would not choose to.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jedimark.net/2019/02/08/sleepyhead-project-shutdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They then get &lt;em&gt;very upset&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; when other people try to exercise the rights they've explicitly been given.  None of that, however, makes what you propose in any way unlawful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T08:35:22.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8074" CreationDate="2019-03-14T04:57:42.293" Score="7" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;A project I am following uses the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; but updated the text to replace the copyright statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar &amp;lt;sam@hocevar.net&amp;gt; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the &lt;em&gt;project author's&lt;/em&gt; name and email address, and the year that they adopted the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to convince them that the copyright statement pertains to the license itself, and that they should not change it; but I find it hard to find any resources to support my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there web pages or other public and ideally reasonably authoritative documents or statements which clarify this? Or could you argue that my interpretation is correct or incorrect based on general principles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8208" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T12:14:16.803" Title="Modifying the copyright statement in WTFPL" Tags="|licensing|copyright|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8073" CreationDate="2019-03-14T07:53:36.700" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second item in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; makes it fairly clear that the copyright notice in the license applies to the license itself, not the project using the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are the rules &lt;strong&gt;for the license&lt;/strong&gt;; they mean Sam Hocevar wrote the license, and you can modify it if you want, you just cannot call your version the WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first FAQ item provides instructions for supplying your own copyright notice, which make it clear that your project's copyright information should be stored external to the license text itself. Also, those instructions use the obvious template &lt;code&gt;Copyright © 2000 Your Name &amp;lt;your@address&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; (which is intended to be changed) rather than the specific Sam Hocevar statement present in the WTFPL itself (which is not intended to be changed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T12:14:16.803" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T12:14:16.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T17:03:33.957" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing a smart device in China and we would like to use DuerOS as our voice assistant. Since they have a version of API which is fully compatible with the Alexa Voice Service APIs, we want to re-use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/alexa/avs-device-sdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AVS Device SDK&lt;/a&gt; to access their AVS-compatible API to reduce our development effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure if there's any legal risk to do so, even if the SDK is using Apache License 2.0. Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14540" LastEditorUserId="14540" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T07:53:24.337" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T07:53:24.337" Title="Can I use AVS Device SDK to access another voice service API?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:28:39.690" Score="8" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing in OSS I have now run into a few times are project owners or maintainers who are very aggressive.  Sentences are taken out of context, asking about a design decision is seen as an attack and a demand for free work, and the most mild of statements are labelled as abusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried engaging, but the fever pitch of their reaction started to look like they were going to involve a lawyer over a versioning option.  This latest one I think I just need to stop all communication.  But is there a better way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14542" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T20:35:30.240" Title="How do I handle aggressive or toxic project maintainers?" Tags="|communication|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:50:59.440" Score="2" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a small open-source plugin for a fairly well known CMS, which as far as I can tell has a trademark on the product and company name. It's starting to get a bit of traction, so I'm in the middle of setting up a website to host the documentation and getting started guides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fairly common to see open-source projects use the name of a brand or company because it makes finding them a lot easier, but are there any legal requirements on the maintainers to declare that they're not affiliated with the company, or something like a copyright notice? Would I need to ask the company for permissions to use their name in an open-source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14543" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:55:17.587" Title="Can I use a company's name in my open-source project?" Tags="|copyright|software|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8076" CreationDate="2019-03-15T21:44:51.130" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end, an open source project is just a bunch of humans, and where there are humans there isn't always harmony. This is a social problem, it is not specific to open source, and there is nothing particular about open source that would help avoid this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, open source has an escape hatch: any open source license allows you to fork the project. You can do your own thing, without having to engage with the current maintainers. The two projects can still use each other's patches as long as they stay under compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do a better job at maintainership than the current maintainers (and good maintainership involves social aspects such as the tone used to respond to bug reports), then the community may eventually migrate over to your fork. Or may not. Part of the beauty of open source is that the code and the community cannot be shackled to a particular maintainer or vendor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such forks (either a fork of the code that won over the community, or the community moving to a similar but separate project) have happened multiple times over the history of open source.&#xA;An older example might be the XFree86 server that was developed by a Core Team. After some drama most developers eventually moved to the X.org fork that is nowadays used by most Linux distros.&#xA;A more recent example is the Node.js → io.js fork in 2014 over a disagreement in project governance. However, a few months later the two projects reunited under the governance of a neutral foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, maintainership requires a ton of effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want to go that route, you should check a couple of things first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the project really under an open source license? OSI-approved licenses should be fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the project name encumbered by trademarks? For example, you cannot distribute your own version of “Java” or “Firefox” without changing the name and branding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the license include a requirement to change the name? The Artistic License and the Open Font License come to mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a practical consideration: is the original maintainer particularly litigious? Just because you have a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to fork the code doesn't mean they will accept this. They could e.g. hit a GitHub repo with a DMCA notice which &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; force it to be taken down at least temporarily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maintaining a good fork isn't just a lot of effort, it will also be perceived as as quite hostile move. This will likely sever your relationship to the original maintainers beyond repair. But if you don't have a workable relationship to begin with, nothing is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:44:51.130" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8077" CreationDate="2019-03-15T21:55:17.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a trademark to &lt;em&gt;refer&lt;/em&gt; to that brand itself is generally fine. Using a trademark as part of your name is not. Your project shouldn't mislead users in thinking that your plugin would belong to or be part of the real brand, or would otherwise be official.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, this would be fine and your name can't be confused with the trademark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Flooblargh&lt;/code&gt; – a 3rd party plugin for TrademarkCMS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas a name like &lt;code&gt;Trademark-Flooblargh&lt;/code&gt; wouldn't be fine: that would look like it would be part of that brand, and would therefore mislead users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:55:17.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8082" CreationDate="2019-03-16T04:45:10.867" Score="3" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to develop an addon/extension plugin for an existing WordPress plugin, to add some premium features, but the base plugin's source-code is under &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt;, which makes me doubtful...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is any plugin developed for a product which is published under &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; forced to be under &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt; too?&lt;/strong&gt; Or can we choose our own license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, forcing &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; on plugins would be not very practical, no one would be able to create any plugin for any of such products (except when they do also use &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt; as their plugin license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, does that mean, &lt;strong&gt;we are legally NOT even allowed to develop any plugin for &lt;code&gt;WordPress&lt;/code&gt; in the first place!? except when we do publish the plugin under &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt; too.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I could not find any plugin exception in &lt;code&gt;WordPress&lt;/code&gt;'s license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T20:06:16.870" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T06:56:51.440" Title="Must a plugin for a GPLv2 work also be GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl-2|plugins|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8085" CreationDate="2019-03-16T06:32:26.673" Score="7" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT, GPL, and Apache Licenses all make references to &quot;files&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are example of such references:&#xA;(all emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;  of this software and associated documentation &lt;strong&gt;files&lt;/strong&gt; (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL 3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Corresponding Source includes &lt;strong&gt;interface definition files&lt;/strong&gt; associated with &lt;strong&gt;source files&lt;/strong&gt; for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work. ... If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you must place, in the relevant &lt;strong&gt;source files&lt;/strong&gt;, a statement of the additional terms that apply to those &lt;strong&gt;files&lt;/strong&gt;, or a notice indicating where to find the applicable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Source&quot; form shall mean the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software &lt;strong&gt;source code, documentation source, and configuration files&lt;/strong&gt;. ... You must cause any modified &lt;strong&gt;files&lt;/strong&gt; to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the &lt;strong&gt;files&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a legal definition for what counts as a file, in the sense these licenses are using? Does something as small as a TCP packet count as a file? If not, where is the line? If I split a file from an open source project in two, is it the same file? What if I concatenate two of them together? In general, how much of a file's contents need to be modified before it counts as a distinct file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without some kind of legal definition, then it seems like there would be no way to definitively answer questions like &quot;If use an MIT library in my project (by including the name and a version specifier in a package manager config file,) and I copy code from an example usage file distributed with the library, then modify it and add more of my own code, then distribute the resulting project (containing no more of the library author’s code but what remains of the example,) under MIT, do I need to include the original authors name in the copyright field?&quot; without a court case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8864" LastEditorUserId="8864" LastEditDate="2019-03-16T16:57:53.283" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T20:18:40.330" Title="Is there a legal definintion of a file?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|apache-2.0|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8080" CreationDate="2019-03-17T11:02:41.223" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, and below is my conclusions after reading another &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8087/11200&quot;&gt;Answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt; license gives legally anyone the right of forcing us to change our plugin's license to &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, or the right to simply use it ignoring our sub-license, but at least, I think we will never receive claims or complaints from the &lt;code&gt;WordPress&lt;/code&gt; community itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s2b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish,&#xA;that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof,&#xA;to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above is clear and without any ambiguity.  If your program is a derivative of WordPress, you are bound by WordPress's conditions for making derivative works, and so you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; license the complete new work, when you distribute it, under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note that above only says &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot;, but not &amp;quot;plug-in&amp;quot;,&lt;/strong&gt; that is because we talk about &lt;code&gt;v2&lt;/code&gt; of &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;, and unlike &lt;code&gt;v3&lt;/code&gt;, GPLv2 almost totally relies on the &lt;em&gt;legal definition&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; work, which allows judges to sometimes declare that the plug-in is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a derivative work (if case goes to court).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T06:56:51.440" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T06:56:51.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8084" CreationDate="2019-03-17T14:28:51.437" Score="7" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to publish the source of the compiler of my new language and the standard library, both written in this language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to choose the license. GPL is too restrictive (even with the linking exception) and complicated. MIT seems to not offer patent protection. So I'm now considering either Apache or MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me MPL looks like an ideal option: it protects the project and its contributors, and it doesn't result in any inconveniences for corporations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing they have to do is share modifications to existing MPL licensed files, but it's easier for them to contribute rather than maintain a separate fork anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vlang-io/V/issues/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;But several people are confident&lt;/a&gt;  that if I don't go for a copyfree license, lots of developers and companies will be scared off from contributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't able to get any specific reasons from them other than ideological ones and &quot;the license is too complicated&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the drawbacks I'm not seeing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgot to mention that the compiler can only produces binaries. It emits either x64 machine code or C code which is later compiled by Clang or GCC.&#xA;It can't be run as an interpreter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit 2&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I went for MIT in the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14504" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-06-27T20:14:37.570" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T20:14:37.570" Title="What are the drawbacks of releasing my language under MPL 2.0?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8083" CreationDate="2019-03-17T16:19:37.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an application that is not designed to be used as a plugin and that does not support plugins itself, like your compiler, the only considerations for the copyright license are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the licenses of any third party libraries used by the application (do those libraries limit your choice of licenses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ideals that the authors want to live by with regards to open source (how supportive are you of open source, do you want maximum freedom for your end-users (copyleft) or developers using your code (permissive licenses), etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When plugins are involved, you need to take into account the license of the system you are plugging into and/or how your license will be received by potential authors of plugins for your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the standard library of your language, you need to consider that every application written in your language will link to that library one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Companies are very sensitive to licenses that might force them to publish source code that is related to their core business. For this reason, corporate lawyers try to stay as far away from strong copyleft licenses, like the GPL, as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T16:19:37.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8081" CreationDate="2019-03-17T20:18:40.330" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there is no universal definition of “file” that is accepted in all jurisdictions. However, this technical term is easy to understand and unambiguous in most applications of the license, and therefore does not present a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your particular mention of TCP is not an issue here because TCP is not used for data storage but for data transmission. In many jurisdictions, copyright laws ensure that such temporary copies (like a copy of a packet that resides in a network router, or a copy of a software into RAM) are not copies in the sense of copyright law, and therefore do not require a license. The terms of a license are then irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These file- and source-oriented licenses might have a problem in software systems that don't have source code files, for example a Smalltalk image where developers merely manipulate a temporary representation of some object, or visual programming environments. It would then be for a court to decide how the license should be applied. Maybe the court would find an analogous concept in that system, might decide that software under the license cannot be used in such a system, or might decide that such terms can be ignored in such a system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concrete notes on the quoted licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MIT license only uses the term “files” when referring to associated documentation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPLv3 uses the term “files” in an &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt;, and in the context of adding notices about additional terms. Technical details in the example are just illustrative of intent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache 2 license definitively uses the term “file” in a manner that cannot be handwaved, in particular with such detailed requirements as mandating a particular name for one file (“NOTICE”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question about a particular scenario involving an MIT-licensed project that doesn't contain the license notice isn't directly related to a concept of files. As an aside, it could be argued that the project never received a valid license and therefore cannot be used, or that downstream users cannot exercise their rights under the license without adding the license notice. Under no circumstancees would such an inconspicuous license allow users to just take the code as if it were public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T20:18:40.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-17T23:47:04.587" Score="0" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this design correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;System Qt 5 has &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtvirtualkeyboard-index.html#licenses-and-attributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qtvirtualkeyboard&lt;/a&gt; thich is GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I link my proprietary app with system Qt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I create open source app which run Qt Virtual Keyboard then load my app as module?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14557" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T11:25:46.850" Title="Can i use Qt Virtual Keyboard?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8080" CreationDate="2019-03-18T09:36:43.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You intend to make a &quot;plugin for a plugin&quot; for Wordpress, where the plugin you're writing code to connect to is itself GPLv2, and you wish to know what your licensing obligations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s2b says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no ambiguity or wiggle room here.  If your program is a derivative of the existing wordpress plugin, you are bound by the original plugin's conditions for making derivative works, and so you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; license the complete new work, when you distribute it, under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of &quot;&lt;em&gt;when is my code a derivative of another piece of code&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is a matter of copyright law, not of licensing, and is harder to answer.  For one thing it's jurisdictionally-dependent, and for another a number of jurisdictions lack significant case law on the subject.  While courts are in no way obliged to respect it, the normal community line is to look to the FSF's interpretation, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frames the question&lt;/a&gt; in terms of the idea of the &lt;em&gt;single combined work&lt;/em&gt;.  It &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says that&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, boiling the analysis down to how your plugin and the GPL plugin interoperate.  Many, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7931/458&quot;&gt;including myself&lt;/a&gt;, have written more on that elsewhere on this site, and though you should read it we need not discuss it further here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You write that &quot;&lt;em&gt;it will be depending on interpretation - that of judges&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which is true, but not very helpful.  The GPL has already been litigated a number of times, in a number of jurisdictions, as have some other copyleft licences, and they've stood up in court.  If you're prosecuted for stealing a book from a shop, the outcome also depends on the interpretation of judges on the day.  Historically, that interpretation has usually been that stealing is against the law, and you would be unwise to rely on it being different in your case.  You also make the point that this will only apply if it goes to court, which is true, but are you sure you'd like to be the expensive test case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T09:36:43.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8086" CreationDate="2019-03-18T11:25:46.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is intended to cover the whole program. You cannot create a proprietary program that loads a GPL library. Where a GPL program loads a plugin, that plugin would be subject to the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ addresses these questions in more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I release a nonfree program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one caveat: these issues are not clear from copyright law, and there is no court precedent. This answer presents the Free Software Foundation's &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; on this matter. It is also possible to argue this differently, in particular that the GPL cannot extend to the entire program. But if you want to stay on the safe side of this grey area, you should assume that the FSF's interpretation is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T11:25:46.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-18T13:03:09.923" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Never though of that before, until read Linus note in Linux kernel: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what right do we have to use so called free software licences? Where can I read that e.g. Apache or FSF give us licence to use their copyrighted works? FSF states in GPL licence permittion to distribute, no mentioning of other usage, for Apache I do not see any permissions at least in licence wording itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. side programmers' curiosity - can licence be recursive - kind of state that it licences it's own usage based on it's own wording?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5019" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:49:13.217" Title="Licence for usage of GPL, apache licence" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8089" CreationDate="2019-03-18T14:49:13.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Contracts and similar legal documents are weakly copyrightable. Copyright protects &lt;em&gt;creative expression&lt;/em&gt;. Legal documents are usually not a creative but very technical expression of their content, using specific phrases that have become customary in that context. It is often not reasonably possible to phrase a legal document differently if it is supposed to convey the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is an obvious exception because it also contains a preamble, consisting of prose text. Stripped from the preamble, the terms alone might no longer be copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The WTFPL also contains a copyright line and meta-license, but I think the license's author may be overstating their rights there because the license contains minimal creative expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this leads to the following results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A license may or may not be protected by copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is copyright-protected, open source licenses come with a strong implied license that they may be copied freely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nearly all open source licenses mandate that a copies of the licensed work are accompanied by a copy of the license, which is implies some permission to use the license document.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So yes, licenses can absolutely have self-referential terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License names may be protected by trademarks, which generally prevents a changed license from using a confusable name. For example, Apache is registered trademark.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T14:49:13.217" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-18T17:00:48.700" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across source code for an AI that plays some classic video games.  It's licensed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.1, &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the Gnu license pretty well and if I were to port or include the AI in a game I'm working on I'd need to include the source in my release, and make it free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I use it as a reference for design paradigms?  Basically, I'd have my source code on my right screen, building it as I go, and on the left screen I'd have the AI published under GPL 2.1 for a reference.  Technically, not a single line of the author's code would make it into my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in all fairness, the original author has solved a lot of the hard problems already and I'm using the solutions that they came up with through hours of experimentation and development.  This seems to be a bit of a gray area and I haven't found an answer online to this question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14560" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:44:33.757" Title="Does using a GPL v2.1 as a resource in studying count as derivative work?" Tags="|lgpl|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8091" CreationDate="2019-03-18T17:44:33.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law protect the &lt;em&gt;expression of an idea&lt;/em&gt;, but not the idea itself. This means that if you read the source code of the AI to distill some ideas from it, then you can apply those ideas to your own work without being affected by the copyright license of the AI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when doing this you have to be careful, especially if you use those ideas in a similar context.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If your code starts to look similar to the code of the AI, then you might be affected by the original expression of the idea and that can make your code a derived work of the AI code and subject to the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:44:33.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8094" CreationDate="2019-03-18T18:05:47.920" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Arkansas Division of Land Surveys shares all of their documents as pdfs with password protection, and they have a little viewer app that has the password built in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://surveyor.arkansas.gov/plat-viewer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://surveyor.arkansas.gov/plat-viewer/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The viewer is based on Sumatra PDF, a GPL v3 open source pdf viewer. Does the Division of Land Surveys also have to share the source code that they modified to create their viewer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14563" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T19:16:30.127" Title="GPL v3 - Does freely distributed software that includes GPL licensed code also require sharing source?" Tags="|gpl-3|distribution|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8093" CreationDate="2019-03-18T19:16:30.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the plat viewer is based upon a GPL licensed project, clause 6 of the GPL license requires that the source code must be made available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Conveying Non-Source Forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;e) Convey the object code using peer-to-peer transmission, provided you inform other peers where the object code and Corresponding Source of the work are being offered to the general public at no charge under subsection 6d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if the program can be downloaded over the internet, the same must be provided for the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the source code is not available, the plat viewer is in violation of the GPL license. The only people/organizations that can take legal action on this are the copyright holders of SumatraPDF that is used as basis for the plat viewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T19:16:30.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-19T10:27:39.870" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.inject/project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jersey Inject&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.containers/jersey-container-jetty-http&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jersey Container Jetty HTTP&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.containers/jersey-container-servlet-core&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jersey Container Servlet Core&lt;/a&gt; for the backend of my Android App. In the &quot;Open Source Libraries&quot; section, do I have to mention them all seperately with their own license? Or can I just say &quot;Jersey&quot; and show the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jersey.github.io/license.html#/epl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14566" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T21:13:54.337" Title="Do I have to attribute licenses of all the libraries of the same project?" Tags="|license-notice|attribution|android|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8099" CreationDate="2019-03-19T15:13:03.567" Score="3" ViewCount="5006" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given a repository &lt;code&gt;github.com/x&lt;/code&gt; in github that is licenced with Apache 2.0. On their source files they have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright [2019] [Evil Corp]&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say that I now create a fork of github &lt;code&gt;github.com/x&lt;/code&gt; and add some &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; files of my own under &lt;code&gt;My Corp&lt;/code&gt;. I want to release this under Apache 2.0 to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to add an Apache header &lt;code&gt;Copyright [2019] [My Corp]&lt;/code&gt; to all of my &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; contributed source files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;code&gt;Evil Corp&lt;/code&gt; merges my fork/pull request do they have to display my Apache header  with &lt;code&gt;Copyright [2019] [My Corp]&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if I &lt;strong&gt;change&lt;/strong&gt; existing files from &lt;code&gt;Evil Corp&lt;/code&gt;, do I need to change or add to their Apache header?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14567" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T01:34:14.633" Title="How can I correctly apply the Apache 2.0 licence to contributed code from an existing repository?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|derivative-works|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8095" CreationDate="2019-03-19T21:13:54.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should attribute every &lt;em&gt;project&lt;/em&gt; individually. But here a project seems to produce multiple &lt;em&gt;artefacts&lt;/em&gt;. You don't have to lists all the JARs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T21:13:54.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8096" CreationDate="2019-03-19T21:21:34.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1. Do I need to add an Apache header &lt;code&gt;Copyright [2019] [My Corp]&lt;/code&gt; to all of my &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; contributed source files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt;, but you are &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;encouraged&lt;/em&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2. If &lt;code&gt;Evil Corp&lt;/code&gt; merges my fork/pull request do they have to display my Apache header with &lt;code&gt;Copyright [2019] [My Corp]&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they will have to keep your notice. Removing or falsifying copyright notices is illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3. What happens if I &lt;strong&gt;change&lt;/strong&gt; existing files from &lt;code&gt;Evil Corp&lt;/code&gt;, do I need to change or add to their Apache header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your changes make you one of the copyright holders of the file, you are &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to add your own copyright line to the header. You must not remove or falsify existing copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be fairly unusual for a contributor to add their name to the header. This would be totally unworkable when there are dozens of contributors. Instead, I would recommend that contributors stay within the conventions of the project, and that projects keep track of the full list of copyright holders in the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T21:21:34.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8096" CreationDate="2019-03-19T21:23:29.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright line is a statement of who owns the copyrights on that part of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you add a new file to a project, the copyrights belong to you (or your employer if you created the file as part of your work) and the copyright line should reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you make significant creative changes to an existing file, the you (or again your employer) own part of the copyrights on that existing file and you are entitled to have that recognized by adding a copyright line next to the existing copyright line(s). Adding the copyright line is one way to fulfill the Apache 2.0 license requirement of adding a notice to the files that you changed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most changes to, and especially removal of, copyright lines are not-done, because it can be seen as misappropriation of the code or misrepresentation of who created the code which is prohibited by most licenses, including the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do I need to add an Apache header Copyright [2019] [My Corp] to all of my new contributed source files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming [MyCorp] is the copyright holder of those files, then yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If Evil Corp merges my fork/pull request do they have to display my Apache header with Copyright [2019] [My Corp]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They must leave such copyright notices intact in the source code. There is no requirement to actively show them on a GUI.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you added an attribution notice to a NOTICES file, then they are required to show that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;What happens if I change existing files from Evil Corp, do I need to change or add to their Apache header?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the change has any creative content, then you should add a copyright line next to theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T21:23:29.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8101" CreationDate="2019-03-20T04:08:19.860" Score="1" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm tasked with developing a dashboard using shiny, but I'm concerned about the GPL-3 license.  My understanding is this, and please correct me where I've gone wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the dashboard is used inside my group and never distributed, no concern of copyleft.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the dashboard is shown to the public but fully contained on our controlled computers, no concern of copyleft.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the dashboard is accessed by an external person, even if it is hosted on our computers, that person has rights to access the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the dashboard is installed on a 3rd party computer, the owner of that computer has rights to access the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The middle two are the points of confusion.  Does a demonstration constitute distribution and therefore rights to source code?  Does access to a controlled computer also convey rights to the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help in interpreting these details is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14571" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T04:11:41.077" Title="shiny and GPL-3" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8100" CreationDate="2019-03-20T04:11:41.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL does not really concern software use (other than saying it can't be constrained). What matters is distributing software. If the software stays on your own hardware, you do not owe the source code to anyone. So only in the four situation do you need to provide the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU AGPL is tighter, requiring you to provide the source code if someone uses software on your computer via the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T04:11:41.077" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8104" CreationDate="2019-03-21T18:35:15.023" Score="0" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if I can use any paper from arxiv.org for building commercial app. For better clarity let's say I want to build &lt;em&gt;myself&lt;/em&gt; commercial app based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; in which I can't find anything about its license. But there is also available &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implementation&lt;/a&gt; of this paper with &lt;em&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International&lt;/em&gt; license. My question is - can I build commercial software that will be based on mentioned paper and it'll very similar to that implementation although it will be created by me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14581" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T21:05:14.690" Title="License of papers on arxiv" Tags="|licensing|commercial|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8103" CreationDate="2019-03-21T21:05:14.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The arXiv papers themselves are published without a license, meaning all rights are reserved. However, this only affects the paper as a creative works, and it does not affect the content of the paper, for example any methods or algorithms outlined in the paper: knowledge and information cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inventions can be patented though. Just because some method is publicly known does not imply that it is free to use. It would be your obligation to determine whether a method is free to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software you mentioned (StyleGAN) has a concrete license. If you Share or Adapt StyleGAN, you have to abide by the license terms. If you develop an independent software with the same functionality, and your software is not a derived work of StyleGAN, then you are not bound by StyleGAN's license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes: provided that you are not infringing on any patents and that you do not derive from the StyleGAN software, you can implement the approach from the paper in a commercial software. You will hold sole copyright for your own software. Two caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a matter of academic custom, it would be proper to cite the paper in your software's documentation. There is no legal obligation, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Network requires a training data set to work, and this data will also have some license. The FFHQ data set used by StyleGAN does not allow commercial use, so you would have to assemble your own dataset.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T21:05:14.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8121" CreationDate="2019-03-22T06:57:53.087" Score="3" ViewCount="1556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an free and open source application that uses Qt. I'm not making any changes to Qt library itself. I wanted to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On what license can I publish my application sources.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On what license can I distribute app's executables (that are linked with Qt)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other requirements that I need to fulfill in order to be compliant with Qt licenses?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I believe is the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can publish my application sources on any license that I want (MIT for example).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to distribute app's executables with Qt compliant licence (LGPL in that case) as the executable linked with Qt library is a derivative work of Qt library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to put Qt compliant license in the same package I distribute the executables with. Since I don't display any copyright notices of my own during the application execution, I don't need to put any Qt's copyright notices either. Additionally since I use plain Qt library without any modifications I don't need to distribute its source code as it's publicly available on their website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but I think Qt's requirements are not 100% compliant with the LGPL itself. Those parts I have doubts about (this is part of &lt;em&gt;&quot;3.7. What are my obligations when using Qt under the LGPL?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You will need to deliver the complete source code of Qt (including all&#xA;  modifications you did or applied) to your users/customers.&#xA;  Alternatively you need to provide a written offer with instructions on&#xA;  how to get the source code. Please also note that this has to be under&#xA;  your control, so a link to the source code provided by the Qt Project&#xA;  or Qt Company is not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen anything in LGPL that could back up this claim (that a link to Qt source code from their website isn't enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The user of an application or device using LGPL licensed software has&#xA;  to be notified of their rights by providing a copy of the LGPL license&#xA;  to the end user and displaying a prominent notice about your usage of&#xA;  LGPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this as apart from adding LGPL license to the package I use to distribute the app I need explicitly display proper notice to the end user in the application, while LGPL says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must&#xA;  include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a&#xA;  reference directing the user to the copy of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and my work doesn't display any copyright notices during the execution, so according to this there's no need to display Qt's copyright notice either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be very grateful if someone competent could review my thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14586" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T09:52:18.253" Title="License for open source application based on Qt" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T08:57:32.560" Score="5" ViewCount="880" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice and Bob write a piece of source code (call it Source1) and publish it under the BSD 3-clause license. Later, Bob and Charlie are working on a software project, licensed under AL2 (Apache License v2). Bob wants to add Source1 to the new project's source (with/without modifications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, this is possible and easy - Source1 can be introduced and distributed under 3-BSD while the project as a whole and the non-Source1 part of the code in particular are distributed under AL2; no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for various reasons which we shall not go into, all code in the new  project &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be distributed under AL2. Every file, every function, everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can Bob do so as to be able to meet this condition (other than not use Source1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: Same scenario, except Source1 has not actually been published; it has just been decided and set in writing that it may be published under the terms of the 3-BSD license. Does this change things?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastEditorUserId="14290" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T09:55:45.750" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T09:55:45.750" Title="Distributing BSD-3 code under the Apache license v2 only" Tags="|apache-2.0|derivative-works|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8109" CreationDate="2019-03-22T09:22:36.403" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;An infographic I designed is to be uploaded to my university website. They have asked me to choose between the BY-SA and GFDL to release my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried looking up the difference but I cannot find any. They seem to do the same thing i.e. retain the same license if the work is modified or re-done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one do I choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T12:54:35.970" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T12:54:35.970" Title="My university is asking to choose between BY-SA and GFDL to release my work" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|copyleft|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8108" CreationDate="2019-03-22T12:53:39.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GFDL is mostly intended for books or larger written documents like manuals – it is literally a Free &lt;em&gt;Documentation&lt;/em&gt; License. The license has unique provisions like that some sections can be marked as non-modifiable, or that certain attributions have to be shown on the cover of a book. All of this is difficult or impossible to apply to an infographic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, The Creative Commons licenses were written with all kinds of creative works in mind, including graphics. For that reason alone, you will likely prefer the CC-BY-SA license. The CC licenses are also much more common and better understood, thanks to their modular structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd recommend that you include the attribution and CC-BY-SA note within the infographic itself to make it easier for others to share. Infographics often have a section with sources, that would be the ideal place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T12:53:39.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8112" CreationDate="2019-03-23T18:44:06.777" Score="2" ViewCount="571" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the website of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.secrethitler.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Secret Hitler&lt;/a&gt; board game which states the following (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secret Hitler is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons BY–NC–SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;. That means you have to give us credit for the original, you're not allowed to profit from it commercially in any way, and you have to license it under the exact same CC license. &lt;strong&gt;You also can't submit anything to an app store or anything like that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an exhaustive list, and it's your responsibility to make sure you're not infringing on our thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, assuming the hypothetical app is not for commercial purposes (i.e. it's free, contains no ads and no in-app purchases), I don't see distributing it in an app store being against CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm asking about content licensed under CC NC licenses in general - I'm only taking this example because it's the only one I know that explicitly interprets the license this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8956" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T20:17:17.937" Title="Is content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 allowed in app stores?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8111" CreationDate="2019-03-23T20:17:17.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-NC-SA does not inherently forbid usage in apps. However, usage in apps will be quite difficult:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the use must be non-commercial, as defined in the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license disallows more restrictive terms to be added&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in particular, the license forbids DRM&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such requirements can easily clash with an app store's guidelines and terms which have their own licensing terms. These clashes are similar to the conflicts between app store terms and the GPL. It seems that GPL apps cannot be published on the Apple App Store, but can be published on the Google Play Store. The same considerations would apply to any Creative Commons Share Alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-commercial aspect is not directly relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since the CC licenses only apply to creative works and not necessarily entire programs, I'm not entirely sure whether the above analysis holds. Apps can certainly legally display CC-BY-NC-SA content, for example all web browsers do. Would an app that has the ability to display this content be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that from the perspective of the CC license, it's not terribly relevant whether the content is loaded from external servers or bundled with the app, so that it may be perfectly possible to distribute this content within an app, if appropriate care is taken – in particular, that the content is separable from the app so that it can be shared independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the concrete example you cited, the intent is not necessarily “you totally cannot build apps” but probably “we have a monopoly on economic exploitation of the game”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T20:17:17.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8114" CreationDate="2019-03-24T00:58:00.410" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I hire someone to work on a soon to be opensource AGPL project with me what licence header should they use for the code committed by them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently all files have the following header&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019 Hajime&#xA;&#xA;This file is a part of {{ProjectName}}&#xA;&#xA;{{ProjectName}} is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify ..... etc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10500" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T08:33:30.513" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T08:33:30.513" Title="What licence header to use for paid contributors pushing code for an open-source AGPL project?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8113" CreationDate="2019-03-24T07:34:46.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they create a &quot;work for hire&quot;, then in most jurisdictions the copyrights are owned by the company or person that hired the programmer. It is their name that must appear in the copyright line and they get to dictate which license will be applied if and when they decide to publish the software (which includes running it on a public-facing server in case of the AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer your question more directly: You tell them what license header to use and it can very well be the one you have been using so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not give them any rights to the code, because they did not receive the code under the AGPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T07:34:46.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-24T12:58:24.063" Score="10" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to read the license deed but it was too advanced for me to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider these 2 situations,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I take a CC-BY-SA image and upload it to my blogpost it as is, without any modification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I take a CC-BY-SA image, modify it and then add it to my blogpost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do each of these affect my website? Will it make my post also CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While searching about this someone even suggested not using BY-SA images as it could make my entire website BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastEditorUserId="14136" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T13:11:40.463" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T11:47:27.917" Title="Will adding a BY-SA image to a blog post make the entire post BY-SA?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8115" CreationDate="2019-03-24T16:19:16.320" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ShareAlike licenses (version 4) use &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this definition&lt;/a&gt; to describe what exactly is subject to the ShareAlike requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Section 1(a)] &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Section 1(k)] &lt;strong&gt;Share&lt;/strong&gt; means to provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Section 3(b)] In addition to the conditions in Section 3(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, it's a lot of text. But it is fairly unambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify the image, the modified image itself is certainly subject to ShareAlike requirements. That is, you must license the modified image under the same CC-BY-SA license, a later one, or under one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;compatible licenses&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you display either the modified or unmodified image, with or without accompanying text, then it would depend on whether the text could be considered a derivative work of the image. &lt;strong&gt;In most cases, the answer will be &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;; that's why they had to add a special carve-out for using music as the soundtrack to a film (&amp;quot;synched in timed relation with a moving image&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, if for example the text is a very detailed description of the image contents, to help people with vision problems interpret or appreciate it, then that might be a derivative work, because it incorporates elements of the image directly into the text. This will likely vary by jurisdiction, so consult a local attorney if you're uncertain whether your particular use is a derivative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot imagine a situation in which using a single CC-BY-SA image would subject your entire website to the ShareAlike requirements. There are, unfortunately, licenses that do things like that (e.g. the SSPL), but Creative Commons does not publish any such licenses, nor will you find such a license widely accepted or used within the open source community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T06:28:32.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8115" CreationDate="2019-03-24T16:30:06.793" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC ShareAlike terms merely say that whenever you do make a derivative work of the image, distribution of that derivative work must be under ShareAlike (or CC-approved ShareAlike-compatible) terms. The relevant unsettled question is exactly when a derivative work is created, which lies in the domain of copyright law, not the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly modifications to the image itself will need to be under ShareAlike terms, but the degree to which that requirement extends to a surrounding context is slightly less clear. There is some relevant case law (from the United States):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The U.S. case &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group,_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; found that the use of a CC BY-SA image as cover art for an atlas did not extend the ShareAlike requirement to the whole atlas. The court found use of the image as cover art to be a compilation of separate works rather than a single derivative. This is not exactly the same as inline inclusion in a blog post, but it may be the closest case law that currently exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are considering an online blog specifically, there may be additional factors in favor of the image being a completely separate work. If the blog post is written in HTML and does not directly include the image (e.g., as a base-64 embedded data blob) but instead refers to it by URL, the U.S. case &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perfect 10 v. Amazon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; found that referring to an image resource by URL is not equivalent to displaying the image. The fact that a web browser will attempt to render whatever resource is found at that URL does not mean the author of the HTML page is responsible for displaying that image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the &lt;em&gt;Perfect 10&lt;/em&gt; ruling says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Providing these HTML instructions [i.e., to display someone's copyrighted image] is not equivalent to showing a copy. First, the HTML instructions are lines of text, not a photographic image. Second, HTML instructions do not themselves cause infringing images to appear on the user’s computer screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From such a legal conclusion, I think there's a strong argument that referring to an image by URL in an HTML page would not inherently create a derivative of the image, either, since the HTML instructions do not include the image itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T11:47:27.917" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T11:47:27.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8122" CreationDate="2019-03-24T17:44:15.777" Score="6" ViewCount="1083" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a github repo with a &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; with a line saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;license&quot;: &quot;BSD-2-Clause&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this repo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not have a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no single file inside the repo has a header specifying its licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;overall no mention of licensing anywhere else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this repo considered as a BSD-2-licensed repo? Can I use/fork it under the BSD-2-Clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repo is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/maxogden/menubar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/maxogden/menubar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14594" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T10:21:59.973" Title="License only specified in package.json, no LICENSE file" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8123" CreationDate="2019-03-25T00:16:49.237" Score="-1" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Premise: Software Z (distributed as binary) includes software Y (MIT) and software X (MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does Software Z need to disclose it's inclusion of Y and X?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software Z can be distributed under a proprietary license (given proper acknoledgemnent to Y and X)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT License: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14598" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T11:16:23.727" Title="Proprietary licensing combinations of non-copyleft software" Tags="|licensing|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8105" CreationDate="2019-03-25T09:52:18.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the FAQ that you link, the relevant LGPL is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.  As LPGLv3 makes clear, it is a set of permissions hacks to GPLv3 (&quot;&lt;em&gt;This license is a set of additional permissions added to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version 3 of the GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).  So to answer questions it may be necessary to refer to one or both of those licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On what license can I publish my application sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that it can be under any licence (LGPLv3 s4: &quot;&lt;em&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice...&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On what license can I distribute app's executables (that are linked with Qt)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your answer; you can distribute the app's executable under any licence that you choose; again, see LGPLv3 s4.  However, there are additional obligations, as your next question suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are there any other requirements that I need to fulfill in order to be compliant with Qt licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 s4a and b require you to inform users that your app contains the Qt library, and you must give them copies of the GPLv3 and LPGLv3 so they can know their rights thereunder.  I agree with your reading of LGPLv3 s4c as regards not needing to display Qt's copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for s4d obligations, s4(d)0 says you must &quot;&lt;em&gt;Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Since &lt;em&gt;this Licence&lt;/em&gt; includes GPLv3 except where LGPLv3 explicitly says otherwise, I contend that your obligations under this section must be considered in the context of GPLv3 s6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard a very interesting talk at &lt;a href=&quot;https://2019.copyleftconf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyleft Conference 2019&lt;/a&gt;, given by a chap from no less a monolith than Intel.  My &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/781246/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writeup can be read&lt;/a&gt; in LWN, but the relevant part was that Intel had satisfied themselves that outsourcing the hosting of corresponding source was perfectly lawful under GPL.  That is, for GPLv3 s6d conveyances of your app, where you offer users the ability to download the executable, you don't have to host the relevant corresponding source yourself; it suffices to point to the source on someone else's server.  You note that Qt say this doesn't satisfy your obligations; I think Qt are wrong about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, the obligation to ensure that the corresponding source is complete and of the appropriate version remains yours, as does the responsibility for it remaining available.  Given that Qt are actively hostile to your strategy, they could perfectly lawfully keep changing the URL that points to their source, or update the version without telling anyone, or in some other way frustrate you.  You may find that it is less effort to host it yourself; but if you're willing to go to the effort of constantly checking that the source you've linked to on Qt's servers is still correct and available, then I think you're OK to do it, and so do some others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL; you should get proper legal advice before relying on this strategy in your actual business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T09:52:18.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8118" CreationDate="2019-03-25T10:21:59.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; file is a convention, but not an obligation, except for some licences which require you to add the licence to the distribution of the project, e.g., the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then some projects include a &quot;this is licenced under X, the licence can be found in the LICENCE&quot; header in each file, others imply that it is clear that all files are licenced under the provided licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the BSDL, some author may have forked the BSDL project, but does not intent to licence it under BSDL again. As long as he did not add anything, you're covered by the BSDL. When he added something, his changes might be proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the BSDL require for licencing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BSD 2-Clause License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year], [fullname] All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this    list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,    this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation    and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;  distribution.&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it requires you to retain a copyright notice and disclaimer, but not the BSDL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The package.json licence field is intended to display the licence on sites hosting the package, so you can assume that the author wants mark the package to be licenced under BSDL, when he added the line himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally there is the option to ask him to clarify the licencing, because others may have the same doubts as you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T10:21:59.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8120" CreationDate="2019-03-25T11:16:23.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license only requires that the copyright notice and MIT license notice “shall be included”. I interpret this so that the notices must be discoverable and readable by an ordinary user. The MIT license has no further restrictions or requirements regarding distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does Software Z need to disclose it's inclusion of Y and X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the software must include the copyright and license notices for Y and X.&#xA;Good places for these notices are a manual, or an “About this software” menu item in a  GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Software Z can be distributed under a proprietary license (given proper acknoledgemnent [sic] to Y and X)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the MIT license does not restrict downstream use of the software beyond the notice requirement. In particular, the MIT license is a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; open source license that allows use in proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T11:16:23.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2019-03-25T20:02:18.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This may be possible. For the purpose of this answer I'll assume that the BSD-3 covered software was written by third parties and does not share any copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3-clause BSD license makes three requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for source code: license and copyright notices must be kept intact&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for binaries: the notices must be provided in the documentation or other material that is provided with the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the names of copyright holders or contributors are not used to endorse or promote products&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first item is essentially automatic: just don't remove any legal notices. That would likely be illegal anyway. The Apache license contains the same requirement in section 4(c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second item is easy to comply with. You can distribute the software under the Apache license, but you must still keep the BSD license notice around. The Apache 2.0 license offers the NOTICE file mechanism in section 4(d) for such purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third item with its non-endorsement clause is tricky. The Apache license does not allow you to add extra terms to the license via the NOTICE mechanism (4(d)), and contains no comparable non-endorsement clause itself (but see section 6 for trademarks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would argue that the non-endorsement clause can be effectively ignored: it neither grants rights that the recipients would not otherwise have, nor does it restrict the rights that the recipient would otherwise have. It is just a reminder that the recipient may not claim endorsement anyway. This has also been discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6319/1212&quot;&gt;How is the BSD GPL-compatible?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore argue that it is perfectly possible to include originally BSD-3 licensed code into a 100% Apache 2.0 licensed project, under the condition that the original license and copyright notices are added to the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counterargument: the BSD license does not give explicit or implied permission to distribute the software under a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; license. While the BSD-3 clause license is &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; with Apache 2 (see above discussion), a relicensing is not actually possible without the consent of all copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a user of the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; project, the two alternatives are indistinguishable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a user that extracts the originally BSD-covered &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; from the Apache-covered software encounters the question which license they would have to comply with. I would say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they can always choose to comply with the Apache license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the part was modified since its inclusion in the Apache-covered project, it contains Apache-covered code and the Apache license &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the originally BSD-covered part was not modified, the user has the option to choose the BSD license as well: the code cannot be relicensed and the BSD license did not cease on this copy, it just received an additional layer of Apache-licensing on top&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus question: what if the original project has yet to be published? Copyright is automatic as soon as the work has been created, but the time of publication may be relevant for calculating the copyright term. Only the copyright holders can decide whether and when the work shall be published. In this case, the work would have a valid license that allows its publication by a third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside: the year in a copyright notice should be the year of publication, not the year of creation. The publisher may want to ensure that all copyright notices are accurate at the time of publication, especially if the software was created in one year but only published in a later calendar year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of this answer I ignored that the downstream project and upstream code shared a copyright holder. This makes a difference if the upstream code was a &lt;em&gt;joint work&lt;/em&gt; by multiple authors, in which case every author may independently have full rights to the code. However, legal theories in this direction are generally ignored in the Open Source context, have unclear international implications, and are best left for lawyers in your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T20:02:18.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8131" CreationDate="2019-03-26T08:43:39.100" Score="2" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a work is the Public domain it is &quot;free of any copyright&quot; so it can be called &quot;Copyright free&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use the CC0 license I am waiving off all of rights and dedicating it to the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of CC0 since I am just dedicating it to the public domain do I still hold copyright over it? I read somewhere that with CC0 I am just giving away my work under a very permissive license. If this is true can works licensed this way be called &quot;Copyright free&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask is many sites are offering CC0 licensed images to download as copyright free ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:16:10.420" Title="Can CC0 works be called &quot;Copyright free&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|public-domain|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8130" CreationDate="2019-03-26T09:02:53.470" Score="2" ViewCount="1235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing tracking software using c# windows forms and the NuGet GMap.NET.Windows package by Jurgen De Leon Rodriguez. The problem is will it be legal to use the GMap package in my c# application with google maps for commercial use? How does the licensing work, do I have to pay for something ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/judero01col/GMap.NET/wiki/License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/judero01col/GMap.NET/wiki/License&lt;/a&gt;, the license say you can use GMap for development but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;WARNING: This software can access some map providers and may viotile&lt;/em&gt; (sic) &lt;em&gt;their Terms of Service, you use it at your own risk, nothing is forcing you to accept this Source itself is legal!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;scares me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14611" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T12:29:04.517" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T12:29:04.517" Title="How does C# GMap.Net.Windows NuGet Package and Google Maps licensing work ? Is it legal to use both for commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|microsoft|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8129" CreationDate="2019-03-26T09:12:21.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code appears to be legal to use as it's under some sort of permissive license. I read this disclaimer as a hint that Google Maps licensing is separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Google Maps you need to comply with &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ToS&lt;/a&gt; and may be required to pay: &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T09:12:21.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8128" CreationDate="2019-03-26T10:07:46.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is explained in the CC0 license itself under &quot;The Problem&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Few if any jurisdictions have a process for [contributing their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire] easily and reliably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, some jurisdictions don't recognize the concept of relinquishing your copyright, or may not allow you to do so voluntarily. This means that if you produce a creative work, you may automatically have a copyright whether you want it or not. The best you can do in in this case is to provide an explicit license. CC0 tries to make the license grant as close to public domain as possible, even in case the concept of public domain is not recognized or relinquishing copyrights is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... many sites are offering CC0 licensed images to download as copyright free ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they license the images under CC0, then that is the actual license. The phrase &quot;this is copyright free&quot; is not necessarily accurate and is potentially confusing (see above &quot;The Problem&quot;). But if in addition to saying something like &quot;this is copyright free&quot;, the author also explicitly says that it is CC0-licensed, then you should take the CC0 license as the definitive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T10:16:10.420" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:16:10.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4092" CreationDate="2019-03-27T10:07:40.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another example could be found in Digium's Asterisk project : &lt;a href=&quot;https://issues.asterisk.org/jira/secure/DigiumLicense.jspa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://issues.asterisk.org/jira/secure/DigiumLicense.jspa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on this topic of accepting contributions on dual licensed projects, I found the reading of this article of the CivicCommons wiki worth a read: &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Contributor_Agreements/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Contributor_Agreements/&lt;/a&gt; . In particular, it provides a detailed explanation of the difference between &lt;em&gt;Contributor License Agreement (CLA)&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Copyright Assignment Agreement (CAA)&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Best extract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which one should you use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The short answer is: CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For government projects, we recommend CLA rather than CAA, because a CLA is physically easier for contributors (it can be submitted by email or web form) and because some contributors may sign more readily when no actual transfer of ownership is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CAAs, on the other hand, are mainly requested by private-sector corporations who seek to consolidate copyright ownership. There are various reasons why a corporation might want that. The most common are that it can simplify assertion of copyright internationally, and it can enable “dual-licensing” models where the corporation makes the software available under proprietary terms, for a fee, to customers who need exclusivity for one reason or another (such as marketing a proprietary product derived from the code base). But the transfer of ownership involved in a CAA, along with the possibility of dual-licensing, makes it harder to persuade some contributors to sign, even when the CAA contains a “license-back” provision ensuring that the contributor retains all meaningful rights with respect to their own changes, or even when it contains a promise to only distribute the assigned works under open source terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13954" LastEditorUserId="13954" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T16:32:40.143" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:32:40.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8136" CreationDate="2019-03-28T09:56:41.420" Score="7" ViewCount="1211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have written a program that uses a GPLv2 library. The source code to &lt;em&gt;my program&lt;/em&gt; is publicly available under an MIT license. For the sake of this example let's say my program links to the GPL library statically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to make the program available to download in binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license can / should the resulting binary program be covered by? Can I license my program to end users under the MIT license, or must it be GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14628" LastEditorUserId="14628" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T09:07:55.497" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T17:59:57.987" Title="If MIT licensed code links to GPL licensed code what should be the license of the resulting binary program?" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-28T11:35:19.140" Score="2" ViewCount="1126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a project in Angular licensed as MIT or Apache 2.0 and i need to include projects with different licences (MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0 and perhaps BSD-3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project includes an area for credits with details (project, license, description):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/angular/angular&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;angular/angular&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tws/bootstrap&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ng-bootstrap/ng-bootstrap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ng-bootstrap/ng-bootstrap&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MrRio/jsPDF&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mozilla/pdf.js&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jakearchibald/idb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jakearchibald/idb&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ISC&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/electron/electron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;electron/electron&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/brix/crypto-js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brix/crypto-js&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mozilla/pdf.js&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is forked and modified, also it is included a link to&#xA;  this fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can i use all this licenses in a project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which is the best license for the project? MIT, Apache-2.0, ...?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are all licenses compatibles?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is BSD-3 compatible with MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I  have other considerations?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14629" LastEditorUserId="14629" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T15:16:48.030" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T17:02:15.400" Title="Can i use MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0 in a project licensed as MIT or Apache 2.0?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|apache-2.0|isc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8134" CreationDate="2019-03-28T12:09:36.983" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to distribute &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; source code under the MIT license. But the software in its entirety is derived from GPLv2-covered software, and therefore must be made available under the GPLv2 as well. In particular, your binaries directly &lt;em&gt;contain&lt;/em&gt; GPLv2-covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you are not the full copyright holder of this software but only a licensee of the GPLv2-covered components, you have no other choice (except not distributing binaries at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible to make an argument that your source code would be bound by the GPLv2, but that is not currently the mainstream interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T12:09:36.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8139" CreationDate="2019-03-28T14:35:29.127" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the question is language agnostic but we are doing an audit and there is a python library which doesn't specify license and it doesn't install anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; pip freeze | grep MakeJS&#xA;MakeJS==0.0.3.3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it's installed on production but when I try to install locally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; pip3 install MakeJS==0.0.3.3&#xA;Collecting MakeJS==0.0.3.3&#xA;     Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement &#xA;MakeJS==0.0.3.3 (from versions: )&#xA;No matching distribution found for MakeJS==0.0.3.3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and the second question is forget about this library, what if someone publishes a piece of code on pip without specifying license, what are the conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14630" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:16:45.033" Title="License of a not anymore existing pip library" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-28T15:05:31.750" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the compatibility in terms of license with an API? For example: GPL license from the client side and PHP license from the server side, is it possible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the Android application contain integrated payments?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11636" LastEditorUserId="11636" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T15:56:49.383" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T06:42:11.283" Title="How does GNU GPL work in a fullstack Android project?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|android|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8137" CreationDate="2019-03-28T16:16:45.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a piece of software (be it a library or something else) does not specify a copyright license, then you must assume that the default &quot;license&quot; of &quot;all rights reserved&quot; applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that technically you are not allowed to make copies of the software, which also means you would not be allowed to install it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If such a software package is made available in a standard package manager, then it can be argues that the author intended to give you a license to install the software, but not to do anything else with it that would be protected by copyright, like making changes or making a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:16:45.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8135" CreationDate="2019-03-28T16:37:52.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licenses of the projects you mention are all compatible with each other and the do not constrain which license you can choose for your own code. The BSD-3 license also falls into the same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can freely choose which license to use for your code. It is hard to advise what license to use without knowing what you consider important in a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T16:37:52.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8145" CreationDate="2019-03-29T03:45:12.753" Score="3" ViewCount="1027" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question: this week I found a older project I contributed to, released under GPL/GNUv2. I found back the project by googling my name, thus I found my copyright notice inside the distribution's file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of the contribution my name wasn't really known for that project, as such I never get contacted for any release or any news. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: if the project did a rewrite of my module, aka a new version but rewritten, can I ask for a basic attribution? My goal isn't to get my hand on the files, but to see a simple thank you as a attribution would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To have the context: my module used to add a flood protection service inside an IRC service daemon. The module was a new feature, and the new rewritten code included that module as a feature too, with the same file name in an example (but the code rewriting is major).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question could be stated too as: at which point does the code rewrite nullify my attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14635" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T17:00:23.717" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T17:00:23.717" Title="GPL author attributions" Tags="|gpl-2|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T05:02:52.863" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use some code in the example implementation section of a C++ standard committee proposal.  (Specifically, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0200r0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Proposal to Add Y Combinator to the Standard Library&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper itself is publically available but what is the license of the code contained therein?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am under the impression that this question would be off topic at SO.  But on this stack it is very hard to find a tag that fits the question, except the obvious one. Maybe that will change over time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6410" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T05:02:52.863" Title="License for example implementations in C++ standard committee proposals?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T07:30:20.547" Score="2" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia licenses most of their text and images under two licenses, CC-BY-SA and GFDL. We can choose either of the licenses while using the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know both of them are copyleft licenses and similar in some ways but fail to understand how they differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I use a CC-BY-SA licensed image for my website I have credit the author (with link) and leave a link to the license text. How would it work if I chose GFDL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastActivityDate="2023-09-25T07:25:02.543" Title="How do Wikipedia licenses, CC-BY-SA and GFDL differ?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|cc-by-sa|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T09:40:32.053" Score="1" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using Qt Open source so I have my software under GPL-3 license. I would like the engine to be free for users that are not using their output games for commercial use. For commercial use, I would like to ask for some fees. I know that as long as a user pay fees for the software license it can be redistribute without charges and that's the wrong point. What about outputs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the output contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Javascript interpreted source code under GPL-3 license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assets (does GPL license allows me to produce output containing commercial assets?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dynamically linked Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Executable generated by Qt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about asking users for autorization for using assets under that license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;. However, I guess that Iloose all the rights to ask for fees if they remove the assets and use their own assets. Is there any possible trick to do my purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14637" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T09:40:32.053" Title="Developping a Qt game engine under GPL-3 license: can I force users to pay a fee if they want to commercialize their games (software output)?" Tags="|gpl-3|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8141" CreationDate="2019-03-29T12:59:14.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to this question: what is legally required, and what is the right thing to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You as the author of some software have the legal right to be recognized as the author. These “moral rights” &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; a part of copyright, but their strength varies drastically between countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the software was rewritten, you might still be an author, or you might not. The question is whether the rewrite was a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of your software in the sense of copyright. If the rewrite was derivative, then you should still be credited as a copyright holder. If the rewrite was a completely independent implementation of a software with similar functionality of yours, that is not derivative, you are not a copyright holder, and you have no right to be recognized as an author of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL doesn't really change this – unless the GPL version in question were the GPLv3 and you had made use of the section 7 additional terms mechanism (e.g. (b) “requiring preservation of […] author attributions”). Since that cannot be done retroactively and the project in question is GPLv2, this doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an open source project, it would still be the right thing to do to credit &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; contributors, regardless of whether they are copyright holders in the current version. After all, not every project contribution results in copyrighted works: debugging help, small fixes, administrative work, helping users, outreach, …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right place for such credits wouldn't be a copyright notice but a section in the documentation. Some projects credit the contributors to a version in the release notes. However, it would be extremely odd to later remove attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I (as a project maintainer) believe such attribution is the right thing to do because it fosters the community around the project, you (as a contributor) don't have a right to it. Opening an issue “please thank me” would be a very bad look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T12:59:14.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8143" CreationDate="2019-03-29T13:28:37.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GFDL was written with books or multi-page documents in mind. It contains many provisions that are cumbersome for non-written works or short written works. It is &lt;em&gt;historically&lt;/em&gt; relevant because it is a non-software copyleft license that predates the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In nearly all circumstances you will want to choose the CC-BY-SA license over the GFDL: the license is more widely understood, compliance is easier, and (in CC 4.0) it accounts for newer developments like database rights. I could only see the GFDL being preferable if that would allow a user to lawyer around some details of the CC licenses, or if you're actually dealing with a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big difference between CC and GFDL is that GFDL requires all copies to accompanied by a license statement and the full terms of the license. That's practically impossible for images. In contrast, CC allows a link to the full text, an in many cases just the note “CC-BY-SA 3.0” would be sufficient. The GFDL also allows some sections of the document to be marked as invariant, they must be produced verbatim in derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Wikipedia's licensing is a bit more complex. They do use GFDL/CC-BY-SA dual licensing for most text contributions, but should be treated as purely CC-BY-SA licensed by downstream users. Individual pages may contain non-GFDL content. Media files have their own licenses that are noted on the media file's page. Note that the GFDL 1.3 contains an explicit compatibility clause that allowed Wikipedia to relicense their GFDL content to CC-BY-SA in 2009 (but it was scoped to prevent further relicensing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="31126" LastEditDate="2023-09-25T07:25:02.543" LastActivityDate="2023-09-25T07:25:02.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2019-03-29T16:03:07.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Question 1&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the client application and the server application are in different repositories, both &lt;strong&gt;can have any type of license that will be compatible&lt;/strong&gt; because the communication of the applications in a web service is through the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different happens when using code we import libraries from external repositories, where before using a repository you have to check what can be done and not with a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11636" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T16:03:07.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2790" CreationDate="2019-04-01T11:39:20.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They published their css on github under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JaniRefsnes/w3css/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; in 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They mention the repo &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_downloads.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14651" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T11:39:20.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8150" CreationDate="2019-04-02T01:08:34.363" Score="2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read somewhere that if you modify the source of a software enough, you become the owner (&quot;author&quot;) of that source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I'd like to make sure that this is correct. If not, then the point is moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is possible, then I'm wondering how many such changes are required to indeed switch the ownership of the new work to a new author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, the main code is pretty much the same, however, it now includes many more error checks. My problem is that this very small small part of the code which is licensed under the GPLv2 and used in a library which I would like to make LGPLv2 compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that helps, the original code is pretty old (1990-1997 and a few more changes in 1999), but I guess that copyrights hold for 70 years, at least in the Western World...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current code in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Zipios/Zipios/blob/master/src/dostime.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on github&lt;/a&gt; (there is also a .h) The older version in the zipios project is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/zipios/code/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sourceforge.net in a CVS repository&lt;/a&gt; (the tarball under Files is already an updated version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14656" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T08:28:37.293" Title="How much changes are required for the &quot;editor&quot; of an open source software to become the new owner?" Tags="|relicensing|ownership|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8149" CreationDate="2019-04-02T08:28:37.293" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I read somewhere that if you modify the source of a software enough, you become the owner (&amp;quot;author&amp;quot;) of that source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I'd like to make sure that this is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't.  If you make enough changes to a copyrighted work to yourself qualify for copyright protection, then both you and the original rightsholder now have a copyright interest in the resulting work.  Any decisions about sale, relicensing, etc., over and above the original author's licence grant will need the consent of all rightsholders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: you have written a library which you wish to release under LGPLv2, but which incorporates some third-party GPLv2 code.  You correctly note that this is not possible without violating the third party's licence terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with simply re-writing the GPLv2 code is that you've read it; re-writing it at this stage opens you up to accusations of copyright infringement, since it is possible that you'll be creating a derivative work of the original code, which GPLv2 requires also to be licensed under GPLv2.  As Brandin notes above, the normal path around this is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/can-i-cleanroom-code-by-myself-if-public-specifications-already-exist/6222#6222&quot;&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;, which you can't do on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As curiousdanii notes, finding a drop-in replacement released under a non-copyleft free licence would be another solution to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, even if the original authors were to resurface, it is possible they would not go to the trouble of hauling you over the coals.  You're not planning on making money from your code, you've made some good-faith efforts to contact the original developers to ask for permission, and it sounds as if their code forms a small part of your larger work; it is possible that &lt;em&gt;in practice&lt;/em&gt; you'd be OK.  Nevertheless, IANAL/IANYL, so you should take proper legal advice before exposing yourself to that risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T08:28:37.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7614" CreationDate="2019-04-02T12:48:57.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSI only approves software licenses. The goal of the approval process is to determine whether the license provides software freedom and satisfies the Open Source Definition, which itself is a software-centric document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI does not review licenses with other subject matter, e.g. creative works, open data, or open hardware. While related, that is simply out of scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially with open hardware, there are also pretty fundamental reservations whether such licenses are enforceable. E.g. circuit schematics or 3D designs are not generally considered to be creative works that enjoy copyright protection. On which legal basis could a license then forbid use of the licensed material, or attach conditions? Other kinds of IP like patents or design patents come to mind, but they require prior registration and are highly jurisdiction-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That effectively only leaves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open hardware licenses that focus on definitely copyrightable aspects of the work, e.g. documentation but not the hardware itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open hardware licenses that are based on contract law, but contract law differs internationally (especially common law vs civil law jurisdictions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You note that hardware and software can sometimes be intertwined. The GPLv3 does have some provisions that apply when software is embedded into a physical “user product” (the anti-Tivoization clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:48:57.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6971" CreationDate="2019-04-02T12:56:28.170" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many licenses require that the licensed work is accompanies by a copy of the license, e.g. GPL, MIT, BSD, GFDL, …. A Markdown version that can be copied into the project documentation can then be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the CC licenses can be satisfied by linking to the full terms, or even only mentioning the abbreviated name for the license (like CC-BY-SA 3.0). A Markdown version that can be copied into projects is therefore not as necessary, and is not provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:56:28.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8155" CreationDate="2019-04-04T20:39:54.937" Score="4" ViewCount="895" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; This question has been revised into a more specific question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8156/how-to-license-scientific-software-to-be-open-while-protecting-against-misuse&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that does not muddy the waters  by bringing up the difficulties of supporting scientific software financially. Please see the new question for a clearer explanation of what I'm trying to get at in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a data-scientist in the general field of neuroscience, and, as part of my research, I write a lot of scientific software that is intended to be used and improved by the scientific community. I have traditionally licensed all of this software under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately, I have been reading a lot about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt;, and the various &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC&lt;/a&gt; licenses. This interest is not idle: I'm aware of at least one company that has considered using my software basically verbatim as part of a commercial web-service and charging other scientists/clinicians for its use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't much like this idea for the usual reasons: I've developed the software in the spirit of advancing public science understanding and making the scientific process more transparent; if a company wants to use my software in a manner not aligned with these goals, I want some of the money they make to go back to the scientific community, which altruistically funded and supported the software's development in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting for some context that grants to develop scientific software are rare, difficult to obtain, and generally do not provide very much support. Nor does scientific software development usually provide a path toward supporting one's own research with the software due to the open nature of science. (And, for the most part, we don't want other scientists or hobby-scientists to pay for our software or even for our help using it.) In short, our model is very different than that of MongoDB or other commercial software companies that tend to embrace open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I think there is at least one concern not addressed by the GPL that is specific to scientific software: If company that modifies my software then provides it as part of a web-service, other scientists cannot guarantee that the company has not broken a scientifically-critical part of my code. The company may be inadvertently providing incorrect scientific conclusions to other clinicians or scientists. If I were to use the AGPL license, the company would at least be forced to make these modifications public so that researchers could determine for themselves if the product they were using was actually equivalent to the software I painstakingly wrote, tested, and published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All of this leads up to my questions&lt;/strong&gt;: (1) are there resources that discuss the professional/legal ramifications of these licenses specifically in the context of scientific work? and, (2) given that I don't have funds to have a lawyer write a custom license, how can I ensure that the kind of commercial mis-use I've described above is prohibited? I've spent several days reading discussions about the SSPL and related licenses, but I feel that all of the discussion centers around non-scientific software (and mostly around commercial software) and thus miss the mark. My intuition so far is that the best choice for me would be to license the software under GPLv3 + CC-BY-NC and to offer to license the software under negotiable conditions with anyone interested in commercial use. (&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I did a bit more reading and apparently Creative Commons licenses are not (any more?) compatible with GPL licenses. Alternately, it seems that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; could do what I want; though I'm aware this is not generally considered open-source.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm looking for general advice as well as specific resources; I do not feel that I've been able to find much discussion of scientific software licenses online.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not concerned with the relationship between the software and publications; I don't need the license to require co-authorship or citations or anything, I just want commercial companies to use/distribute the software in a scientifically responsible way, and, when appropriate, for some of the money made by commercial companies to be returned to the scientific community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm aware that relicensing my software does not prevent a company from using previous versions of the software that were licensed under the GPL. I don't see this as an issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm more worried about the scientific misuse issue than the issue of commercial profit; it seems to me that the AGPL is the least restrictive change to the GPL that solves this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14672" LastEditorUserId="14672" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T13:36:45.780" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T13:36:45.780" Title="Licenses for scientific software" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|license|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2019-04-05T09:11:58.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, welcome to OpenSource.SE, and thanks for a very nicely-written first question.  I'm aware that not everyone likes it, but it gets a +1 from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your basic problem is that free licences are incompatible with restrictions on commercial use.  The issue is discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2815/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, in other OS.SE questions, and in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq#NoMilitary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but it boils down to the idea that one freedom users should enjoy is the right to use software commercially, either by using it in a commercial enterprise or selling it as a product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How copyleft software protects the freedoms of users down the line is by mandating that people who sell the software on must provide their downstream users with source and similar rights to those they themselves enjoy.  This means that in practice selling copyleft software is a business with very slim margins.  If they're simply re-selling your software, their users can get the same software from upstream (ie, you) at no cost.  If they're making significant changes to your software, the purchaser of the first copy they sell can then redistribute it for free if they so choose; or many users can club together to purchase it once, then each of them gets a copy.  Neither business model lends itself well to the sort of user abuse we regularly see from distributors of proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Commons Clause (which should not be confused with Creative Commons licences) is a way of making software non-free.  It is incompatible with the GPL, and if you try to distribute something under GPLv3+CommonsClause then depending on the reading of the licences you either render the Commons Clause ineffective (under GPLv3 ss 7, 10) or you render the software non-redistributable (GPLv3 s12).  CommonsClause, along with the SSPL and several other recent &quot;freeish&quot; licences, have a bad reputation in the some parts of the community, and will likely &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/782862/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make your software unusable&lt;/a&gt; even in places that are GPL-friendly (disclaimer: I wrote that article, though I didn't give the talk it describes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So depending on whether your software is something people actually use on their computer, or something that they are likely to interact with over a network (Software-as-a-Service), choosing the GPL or AGPL respectively best protects the freedoms of the wider community while still allowing your software to be free-as-in-freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just want ... some of the money made by commercial companies to be returned to the scientific community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No free licence will require this; they are about freedom, not money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T09:23:48.350" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T09:23:48.350" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8156" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8159" CreationDate="2019-04-05T13:34:47.910" Score="6" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: This question is a revision of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8154/licenses-for-scientific-software&quot;&gt;earlier question&lt;/a&gt;, which MadHatter suggested should be revised into a new more specific question. Note that there is a lot of similarity between the questions; the original question muddied my main concerns by bringing up gripes about the difficulties in supporting scientific software financially--this question focuses more narrowly on the part of my question I actually am seeking an answer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a data-scientist in the general field of neuroscience, and, as part of my research, I write a lot of scientific software that is intended to be used and improved by the scientific community. I have traditionally licensed all of this software under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately, I have been concerned about protecting the scientific integrity of my source code and thus have been reading a lot about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt;, the various &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; licenses, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt;. This interest is not idle: I'm aware of at least one company that has considered using my software basically verbatim as part of a commercial web-service whose source code is not available for scientific review. For the record, my software has potential uses related to clinical diagnosis, thus a mistranslation or misuse of my software has potentially very serious ethical concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this is a concern not addressed by the tradiaional FLOSS/open/free license models: If a company that modifies my software then provides it as part of a web-service, other scientists and clinicians cannot guarantee that the company has not broken a scientifically-critical part of my code. The company may be inadvertently providing incorrect scientific conclusions or diagnoses to other clinicians or scientists, possibly endangering lives, and I have inadvertently participated in this tragedy my not adequately protecting my software. My understanding is that if I were to use the AGPL license, the company would at least be forced to make these modifications public so that researchers could determine for themselves if the product they were using was actually equivalent to the software I painstakingly wrote, tested, and published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To abstract this point a bit: as a scientist, I have a professional and ethical responsibility to ensure, as much as possible, that my scientific work is not misused. This is the same responsibility that forbids me from, for example, doing research on biological weapons or killer AIs: science does not happen in a vacuum, and we all must take responsibility for protecting the integrity of our ecosystem. I see this responsibility as partially competing with the responsibility to make software open/free, and, personally, I see my scientific duty as much more important. A company with an advertising budget is always going to be able to recruit clinicians to their services faster and better than I will be able to alert clinicians to the possibility of misuse (nor would I have any way of knowing that they were misusing it or who they had sold the service to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All of this leads up to my questions&lt;/strong&gt;: (1) are there resources that discuss the professional/legal ramifications of these licenses specifically in the context of scientific work? and, (2) given that I don't have funds to have a lawyer write a custom license, how can I ensure that the kind of misuse I've described above is prohibited? I've spent several days reading discussions about the SSPL and related licenses, but I feel that all of the discussion centers around non-scientific software (and mostly around commercial software) and thus miss the mark. My intuition so far is that the least restrictive solution for me would be to license the software under the AGPL, but I'm curious about advantages/disadvantages of other approaches as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for the record:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm looking for general advice as well as specific resources; I do not feel that I've been able to find much discussion of scientific software licenses online.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not concerned with the relationship between the software and publications; I don't need the license to require co-authorship or citations or anything, I just want commercial companies to use/distribute the software in a scientifically responsible way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm aware that relicensing my software does not prevent a company from using previous versions of the software that were licensed under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm looking for discussions about this tangle of issues, not arguments against the existence of an issue. I would consider any answers that doesn't treat the issue of scientific integrity as a meaningful ethical concern relative to the ethical concerns of the open/free software movement to be out of scope.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14672" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T17:23:35.050" Title="How to license scientific software to be open while protecting against misuse?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|osi|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8156" CreationDate="2019-04-05T15:27:44.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, what you're concerned about is that other people will take your free software, change it in a way that makes it unreliable, and either convey it or provide it as a service to unsuspecting end-users who then assume it works just like the software they know you wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a question of brand identity, scientific implications notwithstanding.&lt;/strong&gt;  Licences are not the right tool to address this problem; trademarks are, which is why (as you note) &quot;&lt;em&gt;this is a concern not addressed by the tradiational FLOSS/open/free license models&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  You can register a trademark for a surprisingly small amount; once you've done so, anyone who takes your software under the free licence under which you are admirably publishing it cannot break it, then redistribute it under the name you have trademarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gets you the best of both worlds.  Your software can be free, which helps both open science and the free software development community.  But it also avoids the problem of confusion in the minds of end-users who just bought a DVD of (say) &lt;em&gt;Wimblefnoot: user16054's amazing fast fourier transform libraries&lt;/em&gt;; they can be confident that they're getting your known-good and peer-reviewed version of the Wimblefnoot libraries, not someone else's unreliably-edited version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also sidestep the problem, referred to in my answer to your earlier question, that when you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; try to do this with free licences, you make them non-free, or even nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many free software projects have freely-available code but a tight trademark policy for exactly this reason.  Mozilla, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Trademark_and_logo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;only allow&lt;/a&gt; the use of the &lt;em&gt;Firefox&lt;/em&gt; name and the associated logos when the software is re-distributed unmodified.  For some time, Debian's version of the browser was called &lt;em&gt;Iceweasel&lt;/em&gt;, because the control Mozilla exerted over their logo was felt to be incompatible with the DFSG, and removing the logos counted as modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T15:27:44.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-05T18:13:23.960" Score="10" ViewCount="2101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a big project with GPL license has several developers, most of whom working on a few source files. Is it appropriate/possible that the copyright notice in each source file include only the names of those developers who have worked on that single file? In other words: who are the copyright holders of a single source file and when somebody is allowed to add his/her name to the copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14681" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T19:51:58.840" Title="Copyright notices and multiple developers" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8156" CreationDate="2019-04-05T18:19:41.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Besides the trademark protection that is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8157/258&quot;&gt;the answer from @MadHatter&lt;/a&gt;, the (A)GPL license also allows you to place certain additional terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of those allowed additional terms is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you can add an additional term to the (A)GPL license of your code that states that if modifications are made to (certain parts of) your code, then it must be made clear to users and recipients of the modified code that it no longer implements your peer-reviewed algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you will need to use the AGPL (and not the GPL) for these restrictions to apply when the software is provided as a service (SaaS) - the GPL does not cover the SaaS case, which was the motivation for the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="4657" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T17:23:35.050" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T17:23:35.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T08:05:34.797" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Founders_Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Founders Copyright&lt;/a&gt; project that tried to adjust the copyright expiration time span to a much shorter time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something similar in software? As far as I understand, a project can release the source code and assets under a permissive license when the interest to the project starts fading so that the community can pick it up without problems, and it is not uncommon to do so. However, are there cases when this release is pre-announced initially and is a part of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar question: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5349/is-there-a-temporary-copyleft-license&quot;&gt;Is there a temporary copyleft license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference is that I want to know about projects where something like this was actually applied (&quot;shorter copyright time span&quot;), not how to do it in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14684" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T13:02:35.437" Title="Are there any projects using a temporary license similar to Founders Copyright?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8163" CreationDate="2019-04-06T12:54:45.623" Score="20" ViewCount="9237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an open source license that requires attribution to end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus far, I've looked at the MIT license and Apache 2.0. But I am not convinced that they require attribution to end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The MIT License&lt;/strong&gt;  - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the above a little bit vague. Does it mean the source? Does it have to be easily readable by the end user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, would an Android app be required to show the copyright notice in the UI? Since a user can't easily access the file system to see a LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;§4 You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative&#xA;  Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in&#xA;  Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following&#xA;  conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the above that the license must be shown to the end users, but not necessarily the copyright notice. Thus, no attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret this part that the copyright notices must be shown only in the source code. But not necessarily in the distributed binary form to the end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;To summarize my questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are any of my interpretations correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do either of these licenses actually require attribution to the end users? If so how?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have a suggestion of another license that fulfill my requirement?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14686" LastActivityDate="2022-09-04T05:37:38.250" Title="License that requires attribution to end users?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8156" CreationDate="2019-04-06T14:41:01.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you need to determine if what you want to do would make it non-Open Source or non-Free Software.  Fortunately, the Open Source Definition has you covered, specifically item #4, key part italicized -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/osd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/strong&gt; - The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the&#xA;  license allows the distribution of &quot;patch files&quot; with the source code&#xA;  for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license&#xA;  must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified&#xA;  source code. &lt;em&gt;The license may require derived works to carry a&#xA;  different name or version number from the original software.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, I'm not aware of any major licenses (GPLvX, etc) that include that provision.  Additionally, while the code could be Open Source it may not be considered Free Software since it puts a restriction on how it can be used to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your desires though, it sounds like a combination of the requirements of the AGPLv3 and a clause referencing this part of the definition would do what you want it to do.  Unfortunately, to get such a license you'll need to get a good lawyer to write one up for you, and then you have the issue of re-licensing for any code written by others you want to include....  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the AGPLv3 and a trademark (or other brand identity protection) on all program names, etc. may do it for you as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T14:41:01.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8161" CreationDate="2019-04-06T17:09:10.593" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretations are generally correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all open source licenses require some amount of attribution, with exception of 0BSD and some niche crayon licenses like WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;MIT license&lt;/strong&gt; requires the notices to be included in all copies the software. Binaries or packaged software are also a representation of the software, so that they too must include the notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With an overly literal reading, this could be satisfied if the binary happens to include the notices as a string: there is no explicit requirement to keep these notices user-accessible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More reasonably, the notices should be shown via some user interface, or in associated files that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; visible to end users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've correctly noticed, the notices include a copyright notice, and therefore provide some amount of attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/strong&gt; requires two documents to be provided to any recipients of the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copy of the license document&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the NOTICE file, if it exists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NOTICE file is intended to contain attribution notices. The license explicitly allows the following locations for the NOTICE file contents, as long as they are readable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as a text file distributed with the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the source form or documentation, if they are distributed with the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;displayed by the software, wherever such notices would usually appear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license has very detailed and strong attribution requirements, but only if the NOTICE file mechanism is used. I'd therefore encourage you to make use of that mechanism for any Apache-licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the license spells this out, the authors of the software still have a &lt;strong&gt;moral right&lt;/strong&gt; to be recognized as the authors. Moral rights are a part of copyright that is independent from the economic rights. I do not interpret licenses without strong attribution requirements as a waiver of these moral rights, in fact moral rights are sometimes unwaivable. However, moral rights differ substantially between jurisdictions. In common law jurisdictions and especially the US, moral rights are extremely weak and do not seem to apply to software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are only bound by the laws from which you first publish your software. Applicability of that in the age of the internet is not entirely clear, but if you publish a software from a country, you should at least comply with the copyright laws of that country. You may therefore have to respect the moral rights anyway, and provide attribution for all works included in the software you publish. What licenses do and don't require is secondary to those concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sweden, Art 3 of the Copyright Act covers the right to attribution, and when it may be waived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T17:09:10.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8158" CreationDate="2019-04-06T19:51:58.840" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the creative work that the developers contributed to? Is every file an independent creative work for the purpose of copyright? Or does a software constituted from multiple files present a single and indivisible creative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, consensus seems to be that software copyright can be considered in a very fine grained manner, down to individual source code lines. However, the FSF also asserts that a larger software system in its entirety can be a derived work of all its components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that those standpoints are contradictory, so that it is very well &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to track copyright holders on a file by file basis. Then, any contributor who makes a nontrivial change to a file holds partial copyright to that file, and would be allowed to add their copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I think this is a fairly bad idea. It makes more sense to track contributors on a per-component basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright notices do have legal relevance but they are in no way required for someone to be recognized as a copyright holder. Many copyright laws do encode the presumption that a person designated as the work's author is the copyright holder, which suggests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that there should be an indication of the contributor's authorship somewhere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that copyright notices should not designate some individuals as authors but not others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be resolved both by providing very complete per-file copyright notices, or by providing no per-file copyright notice at all (!).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to tell whether smaller contributions amount to a copyrightable derived work. A project policy that every change counts will overstate the list of copyright holders. If the project has some policy that decides a cutoff point, that point is almost certainly wrong, and such a policy will attract politics and squabbling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;therefore, correct per-file copyright notices are very difficult and require extra effort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not every contribution is a copyrightable contribution. In particular: not every contribution is code. It seems unfair to attribute only copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal preference is to add a pseudo-notice “© &amp;lt;year&gt; the &amp;lt;project&gt; contributors” to individual files, though that doesn't count as a copyright notice under U.S. law. The full list of contributors can then be listed in a central place, regardless of whether they are copyright holders. Per-file authorship information is more accurately tracked by version control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T19:51:58.840" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-07T08:55:30.313" Score="3" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I make an industrial machine control product with LCD touch screen UGI. I use embedded Linux, I use GPL license tools. I am using industrial single board computer which is a bought out product. I am taking efforts to make software and add business logic to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My application is not so unique and there is not any kind of invention here, so I can't file a patent here to protect my IP. However it's still hell lot of work I am putting up. Isn’t it my loss if my source code goes public, lands up in hands of my competitors for whom it's an easy cake walk? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can just change few things around and sell the product of their own. How companies are dealing with this scenario when most of them are using open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14691" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T22:22:36.650" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T22:22:36.650" Title="How to deal with situation where your competitors have access to your source code because you developed it with GPL?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|business|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8165" CreationDate="2019-04-07T12:28:06.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;If you distribute as GPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you competitor uses your GPL code, then if they distribute it, they must do so under the GPL, to give all the freedoms to their customers that your customers get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Do you have to distribute as GPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in what you say that means you have to distribute your code as GPL. Gnu/Linux allows running of proprietary software. The output of &lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt; GPL tools is yours, to licence how you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your customers may insist that all software is Free-Software, if so then GPL (copy-left), will give you the most protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T10:27:56.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8160" CreationDate="2019-04-07T12:35:01.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can not give up your copy-right in many territories, there is the creative-commons-zero licence (similar to effect of public domain, but with legal fixes to make it work). (not all creative-commons licenses are Free / Open-source.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore stating that the software is GPL until a date, and then CC0. But this is a bit of a crayon wrapper, so lookout for something more general, and that has been checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ever you choose, check that it deals with the expiration properly as the cc0 does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T12:35:01.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8169" CreationDate="2019-04-07T22:58:39.563" Score="29" ViewCount="8369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Companies use headers like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright 2011 The Go Authors.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But countless projects with a single maintainer have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright 2011 John Smith&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even though they have hundreds of contributors, all of whom own their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this ok to only include the owner in the header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14504" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T11:30:41.660" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T03:51:13.420" Title="Is it legal to have the &quot;// (c) 2019 John Smith&quot; header in all files when there are hundreds of contributors?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|software|contributor|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8168" CreationDate="2019-04-07T23:27:16.007" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I am aware, all FLOSS licenses that deal with copyright notices only require the &lt;em&gt;preservation&lt;/em&gt; of notices that exist. Each author had the opportunity to add their own name to header when they made their contribution. If they chose not to do so, there is no existing notice from that author to preserve. There is never (as far as I know) any requirement to proactively add a notice that an author chose not to include.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not having a copyright notice for some copyright holder is not inherently legally problematic, either, since copyright notices have virtually no legal function. An overwhelming majority of nations have ratified the Berne Convention, which requires that copyright rights are automatically granted at the time of a work's creation, irrespective of any copyright notice on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone removes existing copyright notices by another author (whose copyrighted material is still contained in the work), then that's obviously not allowed by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T03:36:46.043" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T03:36:46.043" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8170" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-08T00:53:21.827" Score="4" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I used a GPL 3.0 licensed program like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zipwith/jacc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jacc&lt;/a&gt; to generate a parser generator which I incorporate into an MIT licensed program, do I have to release my program as GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the grammar definition used comes from an MIT licensed project, but the generated parser necessarily also includes code snippets which originate in the GPL licensed parser generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13972" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T14:01:10.497" Title="Using a GPL 3.0 parser generator for an MIT licensed program" Tags="|gpl|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8168" CreationDate="2019-04-08T15:16:43.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether it's legal (it should be, but ask a lawyer), as a maintainer I find it inappropriate. For software that has a single primary author and many contributors of small patches, an appropriate copyright notice looks like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright ©2019 [author's name], et. al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for &lt;em&gt;et alia&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;and others&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a work with multiple major authors (and it's not clear to me the point at which this should change), but with no formal organization holding copyright, a more appropriate version might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright ©2019 the authors of [project name]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you might want to run this by a lawyer, since it's not entirely traditional/conventional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do end up with a formal organization that will hold copyright to most of the work, but don't want to impose FSF-style copyright assignment, an appropriate notice would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright ©2019 [The Organization], et. al.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T15:16:43.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8168" CreationDate="2019-04-08T16:06:40.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legal?  Who knows? If you work for a place that has an open-source compliance lawyer, ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still: open source licenses often suggest what to do with existing copyright notices. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; says, emphasis mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;copyright holder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;  &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, &lt;strong&gt;subject to&#xA;  the following conditions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear, under this license, that the copyright notice on the FOSS you used should be included unchanged on the copies you distribute. If you did a substantial amount of work you could add another copyright line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Other licenses&lt;/a&gt; offer similar requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14713" LastActivityDate="2019-04-08T16:06:40.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8175" CreationDate="2019-04-09T10:35:21.423" Score="6" ViewCount="1610" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently completed my first &quot;real&quot; game and although it's not much I'd like other people to be able to play it without having to compile from source and satisfy dependencies on their own. I managed to create a statically linked executable on my Debian system by linking to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;-l ncurses&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;-l tinfo&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a Debian quirk apparently where you have to specify both for it to work. tinfo is part of the ncurses ecosystem. I did some poking around and ncurses seems to have a very permissive license but there's something in there about a copyright notice that I wasn't able to make much sense of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I required to copy-paste it somewhere in my game in order to distribute it? I want some of my less technologically savvy friends to be able to play it but I don't want to distribute anything until I know I'm doing it right. If someone could take the time to break this down for me in dummy terms I'd really appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the source code for the game itself (which is entirely my own) I've gone with the Unlicense, which I've been led to believe is compatible with the permissive license used by ncurses. I'm not very savvy when it comes to open source licenses which is part of the reason I use the Unlicense for my own work. I just want people to be able to use my stuff. I'd appreciate any advice on how to proceed without running afoul of the way things should be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14727" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T22:26:02.197" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T22:26:02.197" Title="License obligations when creating a statically linked executable" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|unlicense|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8174" CreationDate="2019-04-09T17:23:52.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ncurses library is licensed under the MIT/X11 license. This is a permissive license that puts very few obligations on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only serious obligation is that you must not edit the ncurses library to remove the copyright statements or the license text. If you are just linking to a pre-built version, then you are already fulfilling that obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a license obligation for ncurses, but it is usually appreciated if you mention in the documentation of your software which libraries you use and under which license they are distributed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T17:23:52.113" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8165" CreationDate="2019-04-09T19:07:03.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I will echo the fact that if you don't distribute software that includes GPL-licensed components, you are not bound by the requirements of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are, it is worth noting that Stallman addressed the issue of competition (in the context of operating systems) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt;'s FAQ when he first published the GNU GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“My company needs a proprietary operating system to get a competitive edge.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU will remove operating system software from the realm of competition. You will not be able to get an edge in this area, but neither will your competitors be able to get an edge over you. You and they will compete in other areas, while benefiting mutually in this one. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By publishing your software under the GPL, you reduce the competitiveness of your software's field overall, by making software that is freely available for everyone and potentially developed by many. Your competitors have access, but then you also have access to their improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not wish for your efforts to contribute toward this goal of reducing the competitiveness of your software's domain. In that case, you probably should consider options that don't involve distributing GPL-licensed software, and weigh the costs and benefits of GPL and non-GPL options available to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T19:07:03.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8208" CreationDate="2019-04-11T02:22:36.260" Score="3" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please share me your thoughts about using machine learning models from confidential datasets. For example, I have a classification model I trained using &lt;code&gt;sklearn&lt;/code&gt;. In general, can I use the model for similar purposes? Or does the owner of the confidential dataset automatically own the model too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read that it depends on the &lt;strong&gt;library&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;dataset&lt;/strong&gt; used whether information about the data can be inferred or not. I know for &lt;code&gt;sklearn&lt;/code&gt; models, it cannot be. Can you please give me more examples as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may seem asking for legal advise but no, I just want to know more about this area. I'm not affiliated with any tech lawyer either, and I think that goes too far for a simple informal discussion. Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14743" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T09:39:09.563" Title="Sharing machine learning models of a confidential dataset" Tags="|law|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-11T22:09:28.250" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an application (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.budibase.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Budibase&lt;/a&gt;) that will be used to build and host web applications. My application is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Low Code Development Platform&lt;/a&gt;. Think Wordpress, except that the output would be a Web 2.0 Application (e.g. like Trello), instead of a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Core to my application is a JavaScript library. This JavaScript library will be run on both client (browser) and server (NodeJS web server). This library is the single most important component of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goals are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To allow any application built with the system to be closed source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To prevent another project/organisation using any of our code to&#xA;build a competing, closed sourced (or relicensed) Low Code Platform.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, overall, I wish to license using a GPL-like license. AGPL feels right to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe that AGPL causes an issue. The core library is distributed to the browser, and used by every (closed source) application that is built on the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the core library should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AGPL when linked in a web server environment&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MPL when linked in a browser environment&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know of any examples like this in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do you have any alternative suggestions as to how I could license my core library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think my &quot;dual OS licence&quot; suggestion would be acceptable today? (this is purely opinion, I know, thought I'd sneak it in)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14752" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T07:08:06.030" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:54:44.723" Title="A library that is licensed differently on client and server" Tags="|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8179" CreationDate="2019-04-12T07:54:43.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking the question from the end, backwards: dual-licensing is completely acceptable these days.  You do, at the very least, have to get CLAs from contributors; that definitely discourages some contributors, but it's no show-stopper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the core library should be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;AGPL when linked in a web server environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MPL when linked in a browser environment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This won't fly, because someone can take the library code out of the browser package under MPL.  They can then use that as the basis for their competing server-side offering, which will therefore not be required to be AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goals are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To allow any application built with the system to be closed source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To prevent another project/organisation using any of our code to build a competing, closed sourced (or relicensed) Low Code Platform.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, overall, I wish to license using a GPL-like license. AGPL feels right to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really?  AGPL (like any copyleft license) does (2) but won't do (1), and weak free licences do (1) but won't do (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you need to rethink.  You seem sincerely to want to do free software but at the same time you wish your code not to be usable by a competitor.  You really need to decide on one or the other, because freedom doesn't exclude someone else's right to improve on your mousetrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd recommend doing this all under AGPL.  It doesn't prevent competitors setting up, but it &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; require any that used your code to release their own code to any user, so that relevant improvements could be re-incorporated into your offering.  Failing that, abandon the idea of doing this with free licences, in which case it's off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T07:54:43.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8182" CreationDate="2019-04-12T21:38:53.823" Score="4" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last few months I spent significant time contributing to an open source project which is licensed with MIT license. I was aware that anyone is allowed to copy, use and change the project's code, including my code, even on private or commercial products, and I was ok with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently the project main developer and maintainer (who is also the copyright owner of the license) updated me that he is negotiating the &lt;strong&gt;selling of the project to a commercial company&lt;/strong&gt;, and when this happens the company would get the name and all the rights i.e. they will be the bosses from now on. They are also planning to change the licensing of the project, or make it dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This took me by a surprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So the MIT license not only allows anyone to use, distribute and change the code, but also allows the selling of the project, using its name and changing its licensing...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If I knew this in advance, I might not have contributed my code, that would end up as a property of some company I have nothing in common with, instead of being a part of a public project with a permissive license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seems to be legal, but still feels unfair for the contributors who spent their time and efforts for the community so that eventually some individual company would enjoy its fruits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Well, I know I can keep my code open, or even fork the entire project at present time before re-licensing, but this would be of little value without the name, the community etc. once the &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; project is re-licensed and continues to evolve. I will not have the resources to maintain such a fork, build a community around it and compete with the &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; project)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any well known license types that, from the one hand, are very permissive (allow use, distribute and change the code also for commercial purposes), but from the other hand could &lt;strong&gt;prevent a commercial company from &amp;quot;taking over&amp;quot; a public open source project&lt;/strong&gt;, take its name and its rights, and change its license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they cannot change the license, they are still allowed to make it dual license. Can this be prevented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14757" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:55:25.983" Title="When is a commercial company allowed to acquire an Open Source project?" Tags="|mit|commercial|relicensing|permissive|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8181" CreationDate="2019-04-12T22:14:45.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They are also planning to change the licensing of the project, or make it dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have signed a CLA or assigned the copyright of your contributions in some way, they cannot legally do either of these options. You are the copyright holder of your contributions, and therefore you, and only you, get to say which license or licenses they are distributed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case of the MIT license, this doesn't necessarily have much &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; impact on a commercial company. So long as they keep the copyright notice and attribution to you, they can do just about anything they want with your code - that's sort of the point of a permissive license. Sorry to say it, but if you wanted to prevent this sort of thing happening, you should have licensed your code under a strong copyleft license like the GPL rather than a permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T22:14:45.460" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T07:19:24.647" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many software developers, I am seeing my open source projects as showcases of my abilities and style of work. I want to license them in a way that prevents others from publishing derivative works under completely different names in order to make sure that they stay visibly connected to my original work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am only aware of open source licenses that prevent the reuse of trademarks. Is there a license that requires derivate works to include my project's name in their name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14760" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T13:59:13.030" Title="Is there a license that requires derivative works to be published using my project's name?" Tags="|derivative-works|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8183" CreationDate="2019-04-13T13:59:13.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to license them in a way that prevents others from publishing derivative works under completely different names in order to make sure that they stay visibly connected to my original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to me to be a confusing and ineffective way to accomplish this goal. Suppose you name your software &quot;Foobaz&quot; and license it in the way you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other works with the exact same name aren't &quot;visibly connected&quot; to your original project -- they're now direct competitors for your project's name! It is slightly more difficult for a fork of Foobaz to succeed, since it cannot have its own distinguishing name, but if it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; succeed, then that is bad for your project. The identifier &quot;Foobaz&quot; will be primarily useful in referring to whichever fork is most popular, whether that ends up being your project or, e.g., Microsoft's much more famous fork of your project. Now the name of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; project is stuck being shadowed by the more popular version.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone uses a few lines of code from your project, do they have to name it after your project? If someone packages a few lines of code into a library, and then several downstream projects include that library, do the library and project all share your project's name? This sounds disastrously confusing, though if your intent is exactly to deter such downstream use via the threat of overwhelming confusion, that might work fairly well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I expect this would be generally disallowed for a trademarked name under United States trademark law. The entire point of a trademark is to identify the source of goods or services, whereas you are requiring people to use your name is such a way that it directly obscures the source of the software: when there are a dozen different programs called &quot;Foobaz&quot; by a dozen different authors, the name &quot;Foobaz&quot; no longer carries any identifying weight about a particular program's authorship. This is antithetical to the purpose of a trademark, and so the name would be ineligible for trademark protection. This only means, however, that you can't register your name as a trademark (or defend it as an unregistered trademark), and that's probably not an issue for you, considering your intent to grant universal permission to use the name for any software that uses some portion of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For a case involving insufficient regulation of trademark licensees by the trademark owner, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://cyber.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tmcases/dawn.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dawn Donut Co. v. Hart's Food Stores&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, wherein Dawn Donut Company could not enforce trademark control over donuts sold in supermarkets, when Dawn only sold the donut mix and enforced no quality control over the final sold product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a much better option would be to rely on terms that require &lt;em&gt;mention&lt;/em&gt; of the original project. This is effectively what the Apache 2 license does via a NOTICE file, which can include legal notices and must be preserved in a readable format in downstream distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T13:59:13.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8187" CreationDate="2019-04-13T16:37:24.140" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop and distribute a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for an existing command-line tool (LibLouis).&#xA;I want to do so using .NET WPF or Windows Forms, but the library of Liblouis is written in C++ and I do not have the possibility to merge C# and C++ as far as I know. The library was licensed under the LGPLv2.1+, so that would have been nice, if I could use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlikely, I had to decide to use the command-line tools, which are licensed under the GNU General Purpose License (GPLv3+) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question now is: can I create a GUI for those command-line tools and sell this GUI under my own propretary license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14763" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T14:42:40.203" Title="Can I develop a front-end under a different license than the GPL-license CLI application?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8181" CreationDate="2019-04-14T13:17:08.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any copyright owner can licence their code as they see fit. It doesn't matter what license it has been distributed under - Gnu license is no different from any other license in that regard. Just like code under the MIT license can be changed and sold, the same goes for Gnu license and even proprietary and closed code can be opened and distributed under MIT license if the owner so wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: If Linus Torvalds decides tomorrow to license Linux under the MIT license, he can do that. All it means is that the people who already have the old version under the Gnu license can keep maintaining and developing the old version under the previous license but the variant he maintains goes forward with the new license. That's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same way if MicroSoft decides to open Windows 10 under the MIT license then there is no one to stop them doing so. Like I said, it's up to the copyright owner/holder and not the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically from your perspective regards to the code and license you already have, nothing changes. Also the company that bought the project can't stop you distributing it under the previous license nor can they revoke the license you already have. Only real thing that will impact you is the community and you probably have to create new forum or something. Or put it up on GitHub and problem solved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T13:17:08.390" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8185" CreationDate="2019-04-14T13:51:14.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you do not change nor distribute any code that is licensed under LGPLv2.1+/GPLv3+ - you can.&#xA;This means you &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; sell and distribute your (or permissive open source) code.&#xA;Restrictive licenses apply to you only &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you have to go into their files and code. If you can keep them separate then you're clear.d you shoukd be able to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Legally speaking GPL is no different from LGPL an does not prohibit you from linking with your own code as long you keep your code in different files. Under GPL you are obligated to distribute their source whether you change anything there or not. But you can still license your own code in different files under different license. At least that's how copyright law works. But being legal and all doesn't protect you from being sued since people have different understanding (or lack thereof) of the law. So while you can be right, be prepared to fight ignorant bullies, that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastEditorUserId="14767" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T14:42:40.203" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T14:42:40.203" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8134" CreationDate="2019-04-14T17:59:57.987" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By law you have the sole rights to any of your own creative works. This include code written by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No-one has any right to demand you to license your work under any license they want. Instead, you have the freedom to choose any license for your work yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you combine your code with code licensed under the GPLv2 then you are obligated to release &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; the source code of &lt;strong&gt;said code&lt;/strong&gt; but &lt;strong&gt;not yours&lt;/strong&gt;. Licensing the end product is tricky because you only hold the copyright to your own code but at the same time no one can force you the terms of your license for your code. So basically &lt;strong&gt;you have to explain this to the end-user that there are two separate codes with different licenses (one with the GPLv2 and other with MIT) and not one code with either license&lt;/strong&gt;. This myth like Gnu licenses somehow &quot;infect&quot; code is outright lie. The law protects you and your rights. Even if you have contributed to any project under the Gnu license you still have the right to demand that your contributions would be removed from the project if one day you choose so. Because only you have the copyright to your code and no license can ever take that away from you. This is actually the biggest legal problem (but not the only one) of restrictive copyleft licenses. Because with permissive open source licenses both the contributor and the &quot;project manager&quot;/&quot;Copyright holder of the initial code&quot; have the same rights (but no obligations) therefore there would be no reason for anyone ever to withdraw their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people fail to understand that there is no contract or license that can take away your right given by law. The same way for example, if child labour and slavery are banned by law then even if someone manages to contract a minor or sells themself into bondage than such contracts are legally void. Not only that but the other side to sign such contracts gets punished by the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T17:59:57.987" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4267" CreationDate="2019-04-14T20:41:49.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally speaking it's absolutely a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all we have to take under account that there is no legal precedent and until that happens all answers are going to be more or less hypothetical, limited by knowledge and interpretations of said knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we can even start talking about the contributors we have to understand that the license only goes for the initial code and it can be licensed only by the copyright owner. It is assumed that the contributions go by the same license but by law that's not necessarily the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is true that the contributors have their own copyright, it doesn't mean that the license of the project can't be changed. It depends entirely how someone (and legally speaking - how some judge) interpret the law. Because it could be argued either that the contribution was for the project or it was for the license. In either case, both the license can be changed &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; contributions could be withdrawn any time. Justification for the changing of license is that the copyright holder can do just that and it can be assumed that the contributions were for the project. After all, it's written in the license who the copyright holder is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for Contributor License Agreement is that for most license cases the contributions are not licensed at all. Remember, the license was only for the initial code. So in order to stop contributors to withdraw their &lt;strong&gt;unlicensed code&lt;/strong&gt; (meaning they have copyright), they make them sign these agreements, in order to get them under a license too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) &lt;strong&gt;It depends how significant your changes were not what license it was under&lt;/strong&gt;. Few changes here and there for the most part would mean the same license. On the other hand, if you rewrite most of it, change the functionality of it so it's hardly recognisable, and soon is going to change even more, then you could even write yourself as the copyright owner and license it as you see fit. This is true regardless of the original license. Some people try to mislead you to think like public licenses are somehow stronger or better than permissive licenses but the very opposite is true. The very same people think that if they make few changes to a code that they magically own the copyright - while that's outright illegal. As rule of thumb - permissive licenses will lead you to less legal trouble than restrictive ones. Besides many other, that's one legal reason why most new open source projects choose permissive licenses. Since MIT license is the most permissive, people tend to choose that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) What you are talking about here has absolutely nothing to to with law nor the license. MIT license does not require to attribute contributors. The reason many projects with permissive licenses do this is ideological. These people are liberal and democratic in nature. The sort of people who try to attribute even CC0 licensed authors. One reason they do this is to show their gratitude since permissive licenses do not require anyone to contribute to begin with. Another reason is to express the equality between the contributors and the initial copyright holder. It's just a nice gesture because legally speaking this attribution has no meaning since the license already gives everyone all the liberties. It has more to do with community spirit than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C) If you are planning to fork a MIT licensed project that has lot of contributors listed then you would be safest if - you only add yourself as a contributor. If even that. Do not change the license! Do not erase any names from the contributor list! Regardless how significant your changes are. This is not for legal reasons but for your own safety. Because while most of them are really nice and friendly, there are always some extreme anarchists and hackers in the bunch. Besides, MIT license gives you all the liberties you can ever imagine and there is no reason why to tick off names from the list or do anything like that. (Legally speaking we are talking about one project with one license + lots of contributions with each one of them being copyrighted, but for the meanwhile you could count as part of the same entity - While correct, I don't think this answer is going to help you much in your situation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T20:41:49.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2019-04-14T21:47:59.997" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put - the copyright law does not allow you to change the license of work that belongs to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best would be not to mix up code with different licenses to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you absolutely have to do this then at least keep them in separate files because you can license files separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't do that, then legally you can't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not legal if you mix up MIT code with GPL code and license all of it under GPL, because you just infringed the MIT copyright. Neither can you license it all under MIT because you would infringe the GPL copyright. Simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T21:47:59.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5730" CreationDate="2019-04-14T22:51:25.270" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally speaking, the whole concept of &quot;compatibility of licenses&quot; has no standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mixing up code with different licenses is outright illegal - infringement of copyright law. The same way you can not change the license for work of someone else - only the copyright holder themself can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your case the answer is - no surprise - AFL v. 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elaboration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A) The question should be &quot;How can I code and use external libraries/files without infringing any ones copyright?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every line of code is proprietary and protected by law and the author of that code has all the rights to it. Regardless of the license it is distributed under (or even without any license), the owner still maintains all the rights to it and only licenses it out to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it is absolutely illegal to mix up code (in the same file) with different licenses because you would change one of the licenses in the process - right that only the actual copyright holder has - not you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some rare occasion, if you somehow manage to keep all differently licensed code separated (let's say for example in different files), then you can use that code, regardless of the license - as long as you fulfil all the requirements for those licenses. In such case you can even use GPL code at the side of your own closed source, as long as you distribute the source of said GPL code. You are not forced to license your code under GPL as long as it's separate from the GPL code. If you do modify that GPL code, only then your work goes under the GPL (the modifications, not the other code that is separate from it). Or AFL, in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally speaking, it doesn't even matter whether you link statically or dynamically, because you write human code, not machine code, and what happens in the compiler is out of your control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in any case, you are obligated to inform both your fellow developers and end users what code has what license and that they would not mix up any differently licensed code in the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while what I have just explained to you would be perfectly legal, there are people who might sue you regardless and that's one of the reasons you should try to avoid mixing differently licensed code - especially with public licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B) Another reason why you should try to avoid mixing up differently licensed code in the same project is that there are some people who do not understand how copyright law works and they think that when you use any other code aside code licensed under GPL, then somehow magically they have the right to change said license into GPL - which is actually illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C) The reason why OSI promotes the idea that you could use permissively licensed code aside with restrictive code and not the other way around is not legal but practical one. Because for the most part, it's simply not practical to use restrictive code in permissive project - because of the limitations and obligations restrictive licenses burden both the developers and the end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But because the threat of someone mixing up the code and changing the licenses (a.k.a infringing someone's copyright) can potentially make you liable for such activities - I would advise against mixing permissively licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.) code with restrictively licensed (GPL, APL, MPL, etc.) code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My advice would be that using restrictively licensed code (GPL, APL, MPL, etc.) would be legally safest for you.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you still need to make sure that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You are going to structure your project in a way, that all the license terms are being met.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All differently licensed code has to be kept separate and make sure everyone understands why they are separate.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You need to make sure no-one else would mix up differently licensed code.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastEditorUserId="14767" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T14:48:05.533" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T14:48:05.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6499" CreationDate="2019-04-14T23:18:29.700" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;More importantly, this project violates the copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically you have to remove/rewrite all code that was under GPL v2, if necessary, go back in time before that library was introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you don't want to violate BSD nor Apache licenses either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T23:18:29.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8063" CreationDate="2019-04-15T15:51:59.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPL goes only for the code it's licensed under and for modifications of said code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the LGPL code would be in a separate file, then you would only open source that file under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that LGPL code is mixed up with other code in the same file then you have to open source that LGPL code under LGPL &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; make sure all the other code licensed under different licenses would get their license terms met as well - &lt;strong&gt;you can't license the whole file under LGPL just because there was some LGPL code in it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case - you do not have to open source the whole project if you do not want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T15:51:59.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8179" CreationDate="2019-04-15T17:54:44.723" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If those are your goals, then you shouldn't go open source at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if you want &quot;any application built with the system to be closed source&quot; then you can't use any restrictive licenses like GPL, AGPL, MPL etc. and because of these licenses you would render your whole product useless for most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you really want to go open source, then the best license ever is MIT license.&#xA;While MIT license would legally leave a door open for your competition to use your code against you, in reality this rarely happens. Because of the following you get, if your framework is awesome, and the bad PR your potential competitors would face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:54:44.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8197" CreationDate="2019-04-16T01:28:31.960" Score="7" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made an AGPL-3.0 project in Python3 that fills in missing regions of images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone made a website that uses the AGPL code on their server. A user uploads an image on their website, the image is saved to a folder on their server, and, the AGPL Python3 code (which processes the image) is executed with a PHP script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They share their modifications to the AGPL Python3 code but do not share the PHP script or any other server/website code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is sharing the modified AGPL Python3 code sufficient? If not, what needs to be done to comply with AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14779" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T20:15:17.270" Title="Calling AGPL code with a PHP Script" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6499" CreationDate="2019-04-16T11:13:39.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to the other answers, I disagree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have developed some code, which you have released under a non-copyleft free licence; let's pick BSD 3-clause (BSD3).  The choice doesn't affect the answer all that much, but it's easier than dealing with a list of possible licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the development of your project, you have linked in a library that is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.  Now, when you distribute the resulting project, GPLv2 s2b requires that you do so under GPLv2.  This doesn't violate BSD3, which has no requirement that you not do this.  Some would hold that this is re-licensing, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;as I argue elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; it it not: it is adding &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; conditions to the conveyance, over and above those which BSD3 imposes, which BSD3 does not forbid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF are clear&lt;/a&gt; that you may still continue to release your code &lt;strong&gt;on its own&lt;/strong&gt; under BSD3.  But when you release the whole project (including the library) you must do so with the conditions of GPLv2 applying to all of it.  If you do not, then yes, you are violating the library's copyright licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of removal of the library then arises.  Some (including me) would argue that by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; the version with the library removed is a derivative of the previous version with the library in and thus still subject to GPLv2.  Others, such as Brandin in his excellent comments above, would disagree, and claim that once the GPL library was removed, the GPL obligations on derivatives would lapse.  I'm not aware of any jurisprudence on the subject that can help us say which is the most likely interpretation, and it would depend on your jurisdiction anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you're still publishing the original, pre-GPL-library version under BSD3 (see above), and also your new-non-GPL library patches under BSD3, &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; could combine them and produce a version of the project that had never seen the GPL library, which would have a very strong claim to be releasable under BSD3 in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T11:13:39.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8195" CreationDate="2019-04-16T20:15:17.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The distribution requirements of the AGPL license apply to derived works, not to works that merely co-exist or interact with the AGPL work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big question is when is a work a derived work. The FSF (the authors of the AGPL license) draw that line at the process boundary and a concept called &quot;at arms length communication&quot;. In a nutshell, it comes down to if it is possible to create a drop-in replacement for your Python3 code that does not contain any of your (A)GPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, this is possible if the PHP and Python code only communicate using the normal command-execution mechanisms of the underlying OS and don't depend on particular data structures being exchanged. In that case, it is indeed sufficient to publish only the (modified) Python code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T20:15:17.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8200" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-17T10:01:37.627" Score="5" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a python GUI for my company using &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PySide&lt;/a&gt; which is under &lt;strong&gt;LGPL&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My company would like to sell it and thus it can't be open source.&#xA;From my understanding of the LGPL, I need to make sure that the final user would be able to replace the libraries in my program with their own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To obtain a compact, sharable version of the program, I am using &lt;a href=&quot;https://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cx_Freeze&lt;/a&gt;. Do you think this comply with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From cx_Freeze &lt;a href=&quot;https://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;docs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cx_Freeze normally produces a folder containing an executable file for your program, along with the shared libraries (DLLs or .so files) needed to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14789" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T23:46:56.970" Title="LGPL licensed software distributed with cx_Freeze" Tags="|lgpl|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8204" CreationDate="2019-04-18T01:26:20.183" Score="9" ViewCount="4958" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there's a public API server that has it's source code licensed with AGPL, and if I make an app that uses these public endpoints in some part of it, (entire application doesn't necessarily depend on it but a functionality) is this considered as &quot;derivative work&quot; thus oblige me to license my code with AGPL too? Note that, I'm not manipulating it's source code, merely making RESTful API calls to some server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked for similar discussions and they claim those are separate programs and the app that consumes the API doesn't have to open its source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5995/proprietary-desktop-application-that-works-with-agpl-licensed-server-application&quot;&gt;Proprietary desktop application that works with AGPL-licensed server application&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6092/under-agplv3-do-i-need-to-provide-the-source-for-secondary-applications&quot;&gt;Under AGPLv3+ do I need to provide the source for secondary applications?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6704/does-agpl-introduce-a-new-type-of-linking/6714#6714&quot;&gt;Does AGPL introduce a new type of linking?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But if that's OK, it brings up some follow up questions.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say there's an open source library licensed with AGPL, and if I were to create a thin API wrapper around it, which is also open source and licensed with AGPL, can I make a closed sourced app that does RESTful calls to a server that has this new API deployed, thus effectively bypassing the restrictions of AGPL for the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that library owners might be commercializing their work by providing a commercial dual license (like iText) to bypass restrictions of AGPL without using &lt;em&gt;nefarious tricks&lt;/em&gt; like I described above. So if this is possible, it may create a problem for people that make money from open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14775" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T09:04:17.400" Title="If I use a public API endpoint that has its source code licensed under AGPL in my app, do I need to disclose my source?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-18T04:46:01.530" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I'm working on a game, where I have created some asset from closed source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest I actually re-created assets similar identical to &lt;em&gt;hill climb&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if I use those or I use those and make my project open-source with those asset, is it illegal/bad-practice/not following community standard/copyright violation ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get a glimpse of present/future impact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14615" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T18:12:06.067" Title="Recreating assets from closed source projects" Tags="|copyright|open-source-definition|closed-source|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8202" CreationDate="2019-04-18T18:12:06.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assets that you re-created can be protected under multiple different intellectual property protections. Copyright protection is just one of them, but the assets can also be part of a registered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;industrial design right&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_dress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;trade dress&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accidentally re-created the assets from &lt;em&gt;hill climb&lt;/em&gt;, as in you can prove that you didn't know about their similarity until after you created the assets, then you are not infringing on the copyright of the original assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, you knew about &lt;em&gt;hill climb&lt;/em&gt; before creating your assets, it is likely that your assets will be seen as derivative works of the original assets and infringing on their copyright (unless you have a license to create derivative works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if any of the other intellectual property rights are in force (they usually require an explicit registration), then your assets are definitely infringing on them. For those rights, the creation process does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T18:12:06.067" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8201" CreationDate="2019-04-19T11:08:48.310" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Making calls to a public API&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there's a public API server that has it's source code licensed with AGPL, and if I make an app that uses these public endpoints in some part of it, ... is this considered as &quot;derivative work&quot; thus oblige me to license my code with AGPL too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. A derivative work is only possible if you've copied at least some part of the original work, or if you've made a new work based on an existing work. E.g. if you wrote a similar program with similar functionality while having access to the original program, then your new program could possibly (but not necessarily) be considered a derivative work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the situation you describe (making requests to a server), you are not copying anything that could be considered a portion of the program itself. You are merely running the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that public API server is offering a service to you using (A)GPL code, then that server operator is the one that needs to comply with the software licenses, because she is the one that copied the code onto her server in order to offer the services to you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, if you are only running a program, and not copying it or making a derivative work from it, no permission is generally required according to copyright laws. The GPL (and thus, the AGPL as well), even go so far as to explicitly affirm that you are indeed allowed to run a GPL-covered program, even if you do not accept the underlying license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run&#xA;  a copy of the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Does this allow circumventing the AGPL?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's say there's an open source library licensed with AGPL, and if I were to create a thin API wrapper around it, ..., can I make a closed sourced app that does RESTful calls to a server that has this new API deployed, thus effectively bypassing the restrictions of AGPL for the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the AGPL program does not offer a REST API, and you decide to add one to it and then offer that program on a server where users can interact with it, then the AGPL would require that you contribute the source code of your version (i.e. the one with the REST API implemented) to anyone who can access the service through a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[If] you modify the&#xA;  Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;  interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your&#xA;  version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;  Corresponding Source of your version ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, you are not circumventing anything. You made changes to the AGPL program, so you must disclose your source to that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second program that calls your REST service, the AGPL does not make any requirement on that program for the same reason as mentioned above (calling a REST service is not a form of copying the program). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this circumvent the purpose of AGPL? I don't believe so. The purpose of AGPL is to prevent you from circumventing your obligation of contributing your improvements to the program itself.   For example, suppose you have an idea for improving the GNU C Compiler (which is GPL licensed), so you download the GCC source and make your improvements. According to the GPL, the mere fact that you've modified GPL code is not enough to require you to release your source code changes. Only if you actually distribute your custom GCC program are you required to release your source code (or a Written Offer to provide the source code). Not wanting to do this, you decide to instead install your custom GCC program onto your own server, and then only let users interact with it over a network. Since GCC is GPL licensed (and not AGPL licensed), this would be OK according to the license, although it would probably be a shame, since the authors of GCC probably intended for you to eventually disclose your source code changes when you finally release your software. It's just that technically you never &quot;released&quot; your software in this case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of the AGPL is to clarify this sitation -- if you take an AGPL-licensed program, and make changes to it in some way, and then you let users interact with your version over a network, the AGPL says that that basically counts as releasing your version, so you need to in turn release your source code to your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why the Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T09:04:17.400" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T09:04:17.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8201" CreationDate="2019-04-19T15:49:18.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of GPL-style licenses is to ensure end user freedom. For the GPL, anyone who receives a copy of the software also receives the full rights under the GPL. But with network-based software, this no longer works: the end user never receives a &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; of the software they are using. The AGPL steps in here: it ensures end user freedom also when the user is only &lt;em&gt;interacting remotely&lt;/em&gt; with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can that restriction legally work if the software is never &lt;em&gt;copied&lt;/em&gt;? Copyright doesn't just reserve the right to make copies, it also reserves the right to &lt;em&gt;public performance&lt;/em&gt;. Under the AGPL, the copyright holders license the public performance right to whoever runs the software, but under the &lt;em&gt;condition&lt;/em&gt; that they also offer the source code to remotely interacting end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your scenario, your wrapper API is not generally a derived work of the API server, and you are not generally bound by the AGPL. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you provide both the API server and the wrapper API, you are still bound by the AGPL to offer the source code to remotely interacting end users. A simple proxy probably does not break this interaction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you are effectively forwarding the public performance of the software by a third party, it could be argue that you are infringing because you have no license for this public performance. That is a creative legal argument though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your software is not a wrapper but some software that merely uses the AGPL-covered API, no issues arise: the end users of your API are clearly not interacting with the upstream API server. For example, using an AGPL-covered database server is generally unproblematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, keep “a bright line between the free and proprietary pieces that would be extremely clear to any court” (Bruce Perens). Don't try pulling any tricks that are obviously just attempts at circumvention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T15:55:11.890" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T15:55:11.890" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T04:22:04.270" Score="5" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you write a book, the copyright for that work is protected for a long time, but the work will eventually enter the public domain under US copyright law. Does the same thing apply to pieces of software released under a permissive open source license? Would software released under a BSD, GPL, or MIT license automatically enter the public domain at some point in the future? I know that copyright law changes frequently and retroactively, I'm just curious about how the current laws would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14805" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T07:40:53.780" Title="Do permissive or copyleft licenses have a limited term based on US copyright law?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8206" CreationDate="2019-04-20T07:40:53.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, the license itself is not time-limited - once the code has been released under any of the MIT, BSD, GPL or Apache licenses, it is available under that license in perpetuity. If 200 years from now you wanted to distribute the source to version 5.0 of the Linux kernel via the GPL, you could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the copyright expires (70 years after the death of the author or whatever), everybody gets the ability to distribute the code however they like so they would no longer be &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to follow the GPL, any other open source license, or for that matter any proprietary license. Open source licenses rely on copyright law for their effectiveness just as much as proprietary licenses do, and they &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; cease to be effective when the copyright protection expires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T07:40:53.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8178" CreationDate="2019-04-20T09:39:09.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not necessarily clear how a trained model relates to the training data set. At the very least this depends very much on what exact model you are using, since some models abstract over the features in the data set, whereas other models might include verbatim samples. Even if the model abstracts over the data set, the model may carry some characteristics of the data set as whole or of individual samples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not sufficient to talk about “an sklearn model”, as the library contains many different kinds of models. You will have to understand and analyze the specific model you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a copyright perspective, a trained model is not a creative work and therefore cannot be copyrighted by itself. However, it is possible to argue that the model is just a compiled form of the data set, so that any rights in the data set also extend to the model. This matters especially if you are in a jurisdiction with database rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you used the word “confidential”, which is a completely separate concern from copyright. Your options here will depend on your jurisdiction, and under what circumstances you got access to the confidential dataset, for example if the data set is a trade secret at a company you are working at. Sharing a model trained from confidential data is generally not OK. If you are bound to confidentiality (implicitly, or explicitly by an NDA), first get authorization to share the model from the entity to which you owe confidentiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, one reason why a data set may be confidential could be because it contains data that is subject to the GDPR. The GDPR regulates the processing of personal data. Personal data is data that identifies a natural person, and other data that is linked with such identifying data. Any processing of personal data requires a legal basis. If we have a data set with personal data, using that data to train a model would be processing, and would require a legal basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about use of the trained model? This will depend on whether the model still contains personal data or is linked with identifying information in some form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A model that represents preferences, interests, or other characteristics of one person is clearly personal data, and sharing it would be processing that requires a legal basis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, a model that summarizes or generalizes over a larger number of persons might no longer be linked with personal data, and would then be anonymous. Such anonymous data is not personal data, and would no longer be regulated by the GDPR.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If one person's data has unusual data points and these are recognizeable in the model, that might make the person identifiable from the model. Such data would not be anonymous until identifying data is discarded or locked away, in order to prevent a user of the model to perform the identification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here the compliance obligations depend very much on what the data set represents, and what information is contained in the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T09:39:09.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8200" CreationDate="2019-04-20T10:16:14.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to comply with the LGPL, you still need to bundle your product with the PySide library source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DLLs and .so files are compiled. You also need to provide the source code of PySide that you are using. But only theirs. You don't have to share your source code, if you only use their library without modifying it. If you don't want to do that then Qt is providing commercial license as well and you don't have to worry about anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastEditorUserId="14767" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T17:57:20.970" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T17:57:20.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8080" CreationDate="2019-04-20T10:26:43.140" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you are modifying an existing plugin, then there isn't much room to play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you would create plugin from scratch, then you wouldn't need to release it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using libraries or creating your own plugins from scratch are not derivative work since you aren't modifying existing code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T10:26:43.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8212" CreationDate="2019-04-20T12:31:17.380" Score="3" ViewCount="854" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a license (similar to the GNU v3 software license) that forbids the usage of an open-source software in closed-source software, but except parties that receive approval by the original owner (NOT other contributors) to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine I write an open-source library, and I am the original owner/creator, and I only want to allow it to be used in open-source projects. But, I (and only I, without consent of other contributors) can allow a company to use the open-source library in their closed-source software in exchange for a fee or other advantages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another situation could be when I write an open-source library that I don't want to be distributed in closed-source software, except for closed-source software that I write myself in order to gain an income based on my open-source library, but not close the library to other people that want to create a new open-source project using my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14806" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T13:34:31.120" Title="License to disallow distribution in closed source software, but allow exceptions made by owner?" Tags="|license-recommendation|distribution|closed-source|redistribution|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8211" CreationDate="2019-04-20T13:28:25.513" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;selling exceptions to the GPL&lt;/a&gt; is perfectly commonplace, but you must either be the sole copyright holder, or else have prior permission from all other copyright holders. In order to achieve the latter, you must have other contributors agree to a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that allows you, specifically, to offer that contributor's copyrighted work under different terms in the future. In order words, it is important that you not receive contributors' work under (exclusively) GPL copyleft terms, but under a much more permissive arrangement in which each contributor gives you latitude to do as you please with their contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may wish to search for CLA templates that suit your needs. (I cannot recommend one in particular.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for a contributor to agree to such terms, it is either the case that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the contributor doesn't care about GPL copyleft terms and would happily allow anyone to use their work under permissive terms, or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the contributor has some expectations about how they trust you to exercise this privilege over their work. In this case, be forthright with contributors about how you plan you use their contributions. Surprising your contributors by doing something they did not expect, e.g., selling their contributions to a company for your own personal profit, is not likely to garner goodwill for yourself, nor attract future contributors to your project. Therefore, simply be upfront about your intent to do so, and you can still get contributions from anyone for whom that strategy is not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-20T13:34:31.120" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T13:34:31.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8214" CreationDate="2019-04-20T17:43:31.923" Score="8" ViewCount="1130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I'm over-reacting but a while ago, I'm using a library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sudeepag/SAConfettiView&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/sudeepag/SAConfettiView&lt;/a&gt; and I saw an open ticket &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sudeepag/SAConfettiView/issues/57&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/sudeepag/SAConfettiView/issues/57&lt;/a&gt; and it says someone ripped off the said library that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ugurethemaydin/SwiftConfettiView&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ugurethemaydin/SwiftConfettiView&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No credits given to the original author or project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The guy just renamed the project and literally took ownership of it, and just updated some little codes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Didn't bother to just fork the original project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is, how is this okay? I don't know anything about licenses, but if I use a library and I have to edit some functions, what I do is either fork the original library or edit it in my local project and avoid deleting author's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14809" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T00:03:18.603" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T17:03:08.473" Title="Is ripping off an open source library okay?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8213" CreationDate="2019-04-20T19:51:09.207" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, a fork done without consultation of the original project (and without the intent to merge change back upstream eventually) is called a &quot;hostile fork&quot;. Performing a hostile fork is -- as its name suggests -- a socially aggressive move.  So long as people have disagreements about the management of open source projects, we will continue to have hostile forks. They may sometimes cause hurt feelings, as any disagreement may.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, a hostile fork (like any fork, social concerns aside) still must abide by the original project's license terms. In this case, the downstream author removed the original author's copyright notice and appears to be in violation of the license grant that allows them to distribute modified version of the upstream work. While the downstream author is not required to prominently mention the upstream author (though that might be polite, depending on the substantially of their included work), they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; legally required to preserve copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that if the fork is licensed under the same terms as the original project, then the original project may legally pull the fork's changes back upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T01:53:47.167" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T01:53:47.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8216" CreationDate="2019-04-21T14:18:46.093" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a simple project licensed under BSD3 that provides a CMake module. The project has a CMake build system that builds an example document by including the provided module. The CMake module has the BSD3 license and copyright included within it, which I assume applies to the entire project, not just that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To mesh this project with my own, I have modified the build system. I have captured these changes in a patch file. While the project containing the patch doesn't include the original project, it does contain a few lines of code from the build system inside that patch file as context for my changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am relatively new to working with open source licenses, I am wondering what is the appropriate way to mark the project to ensure the terms of the original license are fulfilled. I know I need to include the original copyright, license, and disclaimer, and I would like to release my own code/changes under an equally permissive license (BSD2, BSD3, or MIT), but I am unsure how to differentiate what parts are covered by which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14811" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T08:24:03.513" Title="Releasing Patch File for BSD3 Licensed Project" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2019-04-21T15:05:18.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are few ways to solve your problem. In order to be legally safest I would find those few lines from the original project, mark them with comments /* Name of the original copyright holder + BSD3 */, and then would include the original license along side with your own. Since you are going to release your own project as open source, then those lines might get erased in the future. When that happens with all those lines, then you can scrap the old license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid this situation with your own project and mark each line written by a contributor then it would be necessary to sign CLA's with your contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T15:05:18.210" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8213" CreationDate="2019-04-21T16:14:18.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is ripping off an open source library okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, absolutely. Copying an open source library, even if you make no changes, or only make trivial changes, is completely OK &lt;strong&gt;as long you follow the requirements of that library's license&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the example you have highlighted (SAConfettiView vs. SwiftConfettiView), the author of the fork (SwiftConfettiView) has apparently not followed the license requirements of the original (SAConfettiView), because he has not retained the copyright notices as required by the MIT license. See @apsillers answer for further details about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in general, copying a library, even if you copy it verbatim or make only trivial changes, is generally allowed by open source licenses, including the MIT license. In general, none of the things you complained about is actually a problem. Let's look at each of your complaints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No credits given to the original author or project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses, and the MIT license in particular, do not specifically require &quot;credits&quot; to be given to the original project. For example, if your app features a &quot;credits&quot; screen of some sort, the MIT license does not require you to place any particular notice there. If your app does not feature a &quot;credits&quot; screen, the MIT license does not require that you add such a screen.  The MIT license only requires that you retain the required copyright notice(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The guy just renamed the project and literally took ownership of it, and just updated some little codes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to change a certain amount of an open source project in order to distribute your version. If you want to copy a project verbatim, that is allowed. If you want to copy a project and make trivial, meaningless changes to the source code, that is allowed. If you want to copy a project and introduce subtle bugs here and there, that is also allowed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about it for a moment, there is really no need to make any requirements on what changes you make to an open source project. If the new version actually is better than the original, then people will eventually use the new version in favour of the old. On the other hand, if the new version is simply a copy/paste of the original, or if it introduces bugs or is generally worse than the original, there will be no reason for people to use the new version, so they will just continue to use the old version anyway, and the new version (the &quot;rip off&quot;) will eventually be forgotten.  In any case, the original author is always allowed to incorporate positive changes back into his version, at his discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Didn't bother to just fork the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general a &quot;fork&quot; just means it is a copy of the original, with or without changes. In GitHub, there is also a &quot;fork&quot; button that you can use on a GitHub-hosted project which copies that project and links it back to the original, but if the project is released under an open source license, there is never a requirement that you use that particular button in order to release your own version of a project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T17:03:08.473" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T17:03:08.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8215" CreationDate="2019-04-22T08:24:03.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A patch file has a distinctive format that allows a tool to recreate a derived work from an original work. In order to correctly do that, the tool must be given the correct (version of the) original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for your patch file to be effective, you need to tell recipients of your project which third-party project it is based upon and then you can document there as well what license that project is under and fulfill your license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copied more from the original project than those few lines of context in a patch file, then it is considered wiser to mention both licenses in a LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T08:24:03.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T11:58:09.143" Score="4" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;So my understanding of the AGPL, is that it requires modifications to be distributed to the users of the network service, but I'm looking for a licence that would require any modifications (non-internal) to be public rather than be limited to the users. Are there any licences that would support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an example use case is, let's say Company A takes my program/source code (let's say it's a webapp) under AGPL and makes modifications to it that significantly improve performance. Company A charges it's users $1000/month to use it, following the AGPL by distributing the source code to it's users but only it's users. It's users would likely not be technically-literate so wouldn't really be inclined to publish that source code, so what I'd want is for the company to not just distribute the source code to the users but make it publicly available for everyone or contribute it through github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also asked asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/39329/are-there-any-agpl-style-licences-that-require-source-code-modifications-to-be-p&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/39329/are-there-any-agpl-style-licences-that-require-source-code-modifications-to-be-p&lt;/a&gt; before being alerted to crossposting etiquette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14818" LastEditorUserId="14818" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T14:26:43.227" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T21:52:32.653" Title="Are there any AGPL-style licences that require source code modifications to be public?" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8219" CreationDate="2019-04-22T13:41:35.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are such licenses, but they are not generally recognized as open source. If you are interested in background, I'd recommend looking at the OSI review process of the “Convertible Free Software License”, e.g. as summarized by me &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/LicenseReview012019&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. That license was later rejected by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Key problems of forced-publication licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contributors are copyright holders as well. Copyright includes the right to decide whether to publish at all. Forcing publication under a particular license would effectively dispossess the contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It extremely easy to accidentally become noncompliant with such a license, e.g. if I fiddle with a local copy of the software and forget to publish it at once. The open source community generally wants people to comply with the license for the good of all, not to trick them into license violations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Debian Free Software Guidelines (a precursor to the Open Source Definition) have gathered  a lot of wisdom around them, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island Test&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, license compliance would be the last concern for a desert island castaway. But such thought experiments are useful at finding out how a well-meaning license term can actually hurt legitimate users.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if a company were to lock access to AGPL software behind such sums (which in itself is legal), I wouldn't be surprised if license enforcement foundations such as the Software Freedom Conservancy would help exercising the right to receive the source code, or if competitors of the company were to help free the AGPL modifications out of spite: what are a few thousand dollars compared to ruining their competitive advantage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company using the AGPL software is very limited in how they can control user's access to the source code. Their primary defense would be to not take on clients at all. This makes it very very difficult for a company to charge for access to open source software rather than for services or hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T13:41:35.740" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T18:24:34.517" Score="8" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;monkey-patching&lt;/a&gt; is considered a modification by LGPL 3.0 and MPL 2.0 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'm interested in monkey-patching of ruby code. E.g. I require an LGPL library (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://sidekiq.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sidekiq&lt;/a&gt;) and apply a patch in run-time. Here I have a couple of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is it considered a modification of the original work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) If so, what part of my software shall be copylefted by the same license now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14829" OwnerDisplayName="Danny Ocean" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T20:08:29.820" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T20:08:29.820" Title="Is monkey-patching considered a modification of the original work licensed under LGPL or MPL licenses?" Tags="|licensing|ruby|lgpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8222" CreationDate="2019-04-24T07:15:31.433" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;(mandatory disclaimer - I am no a lawyer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand the license, the fact that you're using monkey patching is inconsequential. The core issue here is that you're using an LGPLed library, modifying its behavior in some way, and then using it. Whether you're monkey patching it, wrapping it, inheriting from it or whatever probably isn't the point here. The main point probably is how tied to that library your code is. If you're providing a general monkey-patching mechanism (e.g., automatically logging every API call), that could be applied to any library, you're probably free to license it as you will. If it's deeply tied to that library (e.g., you're redistributing the LGPLed library and just slightly tweaking some functionality by monkey patching), chanced are it should be considered as a modification of the existing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T07:15:31.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T07:36:06.153" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;if I’m using an open source GPL-3.0 library in my saas product, do I need to publish my code under the same license as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14832" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T18:28:33.890" Title="GPL 3.0 Licence Query" Tags="|license-recommendation|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8229" CreationDate="2019-04-24T09:27:29.793" Score="2" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to make a webapp but I don't want to host it myself so if people want to use it they will have to host it themselves. The source will be on GitHub and I don't know which licence to choose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My requirements are that people are allowed to fork and modify the app but they should make pull requests on my repo for the modifications they do, so my app gets improved (not mandatory but I'd prefer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that I allow people to host the app but for private use only: I don't want to see a public website featuring my app appear with a different name etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the code is public and people are encouraged to enhance the app (by making pull request on my repo) but they cannot make their own website using my app (I want to be the only one to have this permission, if one day I decide to host the app myself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it's like if the YouTube website was on GitHub, people can download and host locally, etc, but they cannot make a public website using the app (for example ToTube.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which licence should I choose to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user14835" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T23:29:58.880" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T23:29:58.880" Title="Which licence to choose to deny hosting a software?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T09:41:35.550" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I spawn an AGPL executable (mupdf for example) from my python based  Apache-2.0 project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not linking to it, merely calling the executable from the shell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14836" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T16:46:22.463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T12:00:37.130" Title="Spawning an AGPL executable from an Apache-2.0 project" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8224" CreationDate="2019-04-24T16:14:36.627" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By law you are &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; to license &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; code as &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; decide to license it. No one can force you to do anything. Just be prepared to fight for your right in a court in case some FSF, FSC or some similar organisation is going to bully you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead ask yourself: do you have the resources to go to court? Are you a sort of person who gets easily intimidated by threats and false claims? You can estimate your risks by counting all the down-votes this answer gets from the fascists around here alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14767" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T16:14:36.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8224" CreationDate="2019-04-24T16:41:03.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you only run the software on servers that you control, then that is not considered distribution according to the GPL license and thus you are not required to publish your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you give the binaries to others to run on their servers, then you are distributing the software and you need to observe the restrictions of the GPL license. That means that you must also provide your source code under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T18:28:33.890" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T18:28:33.890" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8225" CreationDate="2019-04-24T17:39:58.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This cannot be done via any free or open source license. The Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt; requires&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the Open Source Initiative's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; requires&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rationale:&lt;/strong&gt; The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So any license that disallows execution of the code for some purpose will not be among the set of licenses approved by either organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The traditional ways such problems have been solved by using FLOSS licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Affero GPL (AGPL) requires modified versions of your software that interact with users over a network must make their source code available to those users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This does not force those who run modified forms of your software to offer the source code to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; specifically, but only to each user of the network service. (Requiring modifications to be pushed back to some specific person is non-free, as it fails the &amp;quot;desert island&amp;quot; test. For instance, if someone living in a totalitarian state modifies your software, but their government prohibits communication with outsiders, they could not comply with your license.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Online services are about the &lt;em&gt;service&lt;/em&gt;. Attract users and material (videos, blogs, whatever your service is for) and rely on the network effect to ensure others choose your service over your competitors: you have the best stuff, so people will choose your service to contribute more great stuff in the future. For instance, for many years Reddit offered their source code under a free license, but no one ever offered a remotely competitive clone site to reddit.com. Why go to a little-known site running identical code when you could be communicating with thousands of people already on reddit.com?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meanwhile, rely on trademark law to prevent a copycat site from having a confusingly similar name or branding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T19:06:55.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2019-04-24T17:59:39.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, what you are doing is ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, by spawning the AGPL executable as a separate process, the two programs are considered independent works as far as copyright is concerned and their licenses do not affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if your project would be considered a derived work there is no problem. The Apache license is compatible with the AGPL, so you can have an application that contains code under both licenses. In this case, you may have to take some action to meet the requirements of both licenses, like offering your users the option to download the complete software according to the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T10:58:33.653" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T10:58:33.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-24T19:06:45.137" Score="6" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the early phases of a (team) project on GitHub, I had copy-pasted the Apache Software Foundation's license header into our code as opposed to the usual License header. I hadn't realized for quite some time (as I, like most people, tune-out license headers) that the header I had pasted contained the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF)&lt;/strong&gt; under one&#xA;  or more contributor license agreements. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if this had been a small (solo) project I would have just changed this to the correct one without letting anyone know. However, the project in question has about 100 stars on GitHub and a handful of forks, though most of these seem to be &quot;archive&quot;-forks and hence don't contain any extra commits (the ones which do contain work are those of the team members). This incorrect header has been in place for several months now, with nobody having noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options? I doubt the Apache team cares about owning our code, so would my best bet be to just change the license headers throughout the repo's history, and then try to get people to update their forks (is this part even necessary)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14843" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T03:30:10.623" Title="Accidentally used ASF license header instead of normal Apache License V2 header" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8231" CreationDate="2019-04-25T00:30:14.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I don't find this mistake alarming at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the worst possible case, that such a statement really did license the work to the ASF, the ASF probably wouldn't ever exercise that right anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that worst case likely isn't true: you don't specify the terms of the CLA, so it's unclear what's allowed and disallowed. Also, no such signed CLA document exists in actual fact, and the ASF knows this, so they probably would not try to exercise this erroneous grant purely out of legal prudence if nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly you could be liable, somehow, for making false statements, but I don't know under what statute or who would have an interest or standing to sue you. Since there doesn't appear to be any harm from this error, such a lawsuit would be practically pointless if not legally baseless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the other direction, since you &lt;em&gt;failed&lt;/em&gt; to include the APLv2 header, some users (or potential users) may be concerned that your project isn't actually properly licensed under the APLv2. By correcting this error, you can permanently alleviate those fears. (Since you know (I assume) that you don't actually plan to litigate against any of your software's users, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; can be sure this isn't a concern in practice, though your users don't know that for sure until you correct the license headers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, try to correct your error as well as possible, but I would not lose sleep over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T03:30:10.623" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T03:30:10.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8234" CreationDate="2019-04-25T09:20:33.313" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I needed to implement my own pagination system, but I did not know the logic behind a system like that, so I would look up how to do it and then after understading how to do it I would implement my own version without any copy and pasting, do I need to cite the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or another example, I didn't know how to use a foreach for a dictionary so I looked it up on own to do it and then after understading it I implement it without any copy and pasting, do I need to cite the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14849" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:17:12.463" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:17:12.463" Title="If I just look up a solution for a programming problem do I need to cite the source?" Tags="|copyright|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8233" CreationDate="2019-04-25T17:33:28.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are at least two relevant legal considerations here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De minimis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; use: use so small it does not merit consideration under the law. I am not aware of any case law indicating where copyright draws the line for &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; use in any jurisdiction, though.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_divide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;merger doctrine&lt;/a&gt;: for an idea that can only be expressed in a very limited set of ways, the expression functionally &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the idea, and therefore the expression is ineligible for copyright. In the U.S., this distinction is instrumental to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test&lt;/a&gt;, which is used to evaluate claims of copyright infringement between two pieces of software. Wikipedia summarizes the &quot;Abstraction&quot; and &quot;Filtration&quot; steps as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The purpose of the abstraction step is to identify which aspects of the program constitute its expression and which are the ideas. By what is commonly referred to as the idea/expression dichotomy, copyright law protects an author's expression, but not the idea behind that expression. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second step is to remove from consideration aspects of the program which are not legally protectable by copyright. The analysis is done at each level of abstraction identified in the previous step. The court identifies three factors to consider during this step: elements dictated by efficiency, elements dictated by external factors, and elements taken from the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The court explains that elements dictated by efficiency are removed from consideration based on the merger doctrine which states that a form of expression that is incidental to the idea can not be protected by copyright. In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For very simple pieces of code, like using a particular programming language to iterate over the items of a list, this would certainly constitute an &quot;element dictated by efficiency&quot; that would be eliminated from consideration for a claim of copyright infringement. The more complex the code you borrow, however, the less likely you will be to satisfy a court's belief in the code's inseparable idea-expression union.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T20:21:54.367" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T20:21:54.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8237" CreationDate="2019-04-27T09:27:30.420" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written from scratch some SW that I want to publish as open-source in Github while being the only contributor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish it under AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time I want to use the very same software in my other private projects which supposed to be commercial. The projects should not disclose the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case should I include the licensed SW as-is (i.e. under AGPL license with proper textual declarations) or should I include it under more permissive license (e.g. MIT) or should I remove any licensing reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14862" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T09:34:13.733" Title="Proper licensing of commercial SW including open-source by the same author" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8236" CreationDate="2019-04-27T16:32:55.720" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder you can do with it as you wish, and issue multiple &lt;em&gt;non-exclusive&lt;/em&gt; licenses at the same time. For example, you can license it to the public under the AGPL and license it to some client under a commercial license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When issuing a commercial license I would remove all AGPL license headers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need to disclose to the client that you have licensed the software to the public as well: the client's license stands on its own. But it might be helpful to link to the public version anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no need for a workaround like licensing the software to yourself or to the client under the MIT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stops being simple if you are not the sole copyright holder, or if you want to issue an exclusive license or transfer your copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you received outside contributions under the AGPL you are bound by that license as well, and would not be able to provide commercial licenses for versions including the third party contribution. The solution is to not take outside contributions, or to only accept contributions under a Contributor Licensing Agreement that gives you the necessary rights. CLAs and Cathedral-style development are frowned upon by the open source community because it gives you all the power over the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have licensed the software to the public under the AGPL you can no longer issue exclusive licenses (“sell” the software). However, you can still sell your right to issue more licenses &lt;em&gt;in the future&lt;/em&gt;. So people who received the software under the AGPL will continue to enjoy their license. If you want to transfer your copyright, the same problem arises: this won't cancel existing licenses. The new copyright holder must be made aware of existing licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T16:32:55.720" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2019-04-27T18:25:28.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Github star is like an OK and easy metric given there is not a lot of ways to tell if a framework is good or even just tell if it is popular or not. On the other hand, it costs so much delay / trouble if you choose a framework which does not fit well. But I think besides the total number of stars, the recent change on the number of star is also a good metric because an older repo tends to have more stars since it accumulated so much in the history. I actually created a &lt;a href=&quot;http://popularframeworks.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; to track monthly change of stars for some frameworks I am interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14864" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T18:25:28.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7013" CreationDate="2019-04-28T18:54:10.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most answer cover the topic but I see they missed an important note&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most official docker hub images and many community images are based on ubuntu which has a strict IP policy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/intellectual-property-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/intellectual-property-policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it clearly state that you are not allowed to redistribute or run cloud images. What is allowed is to redistribute original cd/vm images with same package selection and same manual installer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can redistribute Ubuntu, but only where there has been no modification to it.&#xA;  ... &#xA;  You can modify Ubuntu for personal or internal use&#xA;  ... &#xA;  You can redistribute Ubuntu in its unmodified form, complete with the installer images and packages provided by Canonical (this includes the publication or launch of virtual machine &lt;em&gt;images&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since docker is similar to vm and since it has different installer and different selection then you need to buy license from canonical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since they inject the word ubuntu trade mark in every package you need to recompile every package&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Docker might have bought exceptions or partnership with canonical, but you did not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those terms are controversial and maybe invalid because if ubuntu imposed restrictions on a free software then its license to obtain it is revoked in the first place. Not to mention patents. For more information refer to articles by figures like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jriddell.org/2015/09/02/jonathan-riddell-ip-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonathan Riddell&lt;/a&gt; founder of Kubuntu and a key KDE community developer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/45939.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Garrett&lt;/a&gt; famous Debian developer and free software activist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14869" LastEditorUserId="14869" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T14:44:49.140" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T14:44:49.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8244" CreationDate="2019-04-29T08:25:09.343" Score="14" ViewCount="1809" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an NPM package on github geveloped by the company and licensed under MIT. &#xA;There is one author listed in &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file of this package, and there is a company copyright in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made a fork of this project in order to rewrite it for my own needs (not for making the pull request, since the changes are going to be quite heavy). If I understand correctly, I must preserve the existing copyright and can add my own one under it. But what to do with &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; entries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I list myself as author, and original author as contributor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or should I somehow refer to the company in general?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or it is legal to only mention myself here (and leave the reference to company in README, which I feel I must do anyway)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no real experience with FLOSS projects yet, so maybe this question is somewhat incomplete, - in this case, I'll be grateful for pointing out on any missing parts of a picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14872" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T09:50:46.477" Title="Authors and contributors of forked project" Tags="|contributor|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-29T08:59:12.827" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a GPL version 3 licensed Open Source client written in Python and have compiled it into a .deb file and distributed to around 900 users over the last few years.  This client connects to the corresponding server that I run which is licensed using the same GPL v 3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of my users are non-technical and I spend a lot of my time helping them to configure and maintain this client after they've re-installed it, messed with it etc !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make the configuration process less tedious for me I'm considering adding a class in a separate file to the .deb package which will carry out the configuration for the user and will add a couple of features specific to my server setup such as monitoring the client cpu load etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this I'd need to modify a couple of the existing files in the package.  I understand that - via the GPL - I'd need to make my changes to the original files available (the ones that call the class) but could I license the file containing my class that I add differently so that I don't have to release it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14873" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T11:04:17.757" Title="Adding a self-contained class to a GPL v3 project. Do I need to release the code of the new class?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8242" CreationDate="2019-04-29T09:50:46.477" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I list myself as author, and original author as contributor?  Or should I somehow refer to the company in general?  Or it is legal to only mention myself here (and leave the reference to company in README, which I feel I must do anyway)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file says that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “author” is one person. “contributors” is an array of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that doesn't reflect the reality of copyright law regarding works with multiple creators, which says that everyone who has made a copyrightable contribution to a work has a copyright interest therein.  Fortunately, that is unaffected by local conventions such as the &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file.  So we're not dealing with anything formal as regards assertion of rightsholding status; it's just a packaging convention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The function of the &lt;code&gt;author&lt;/code&gt; entry seems to be to direct humans who wish to contact the person who best knows about the code they're looking at.  I presume that the original author might get fed up of telling people that (s)he only wrote the original code on which the work-in-question rests, and that they need to contact the person who made all the modifications, ie, you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my advice, and it's only advice, as regards that file, is that you list yourself as &lt;code&gt;author&lt;/code&gt; and the original author as a &lt;code&gt;contributor&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the copyright assertions, as you suggest, leave all those that are already there intact and add one of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T09:50:46.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8246" CreationDate="2019-04-29T11:28:59.990" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend and I developed an open-source non-commercial website which we would like to publish with MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mit License starts with words&#xA;Copyright (c) [year] [fullname] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it OK to write both names there, we really wouldn't like to create a legal entity for this website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14874" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T13:36:26.787" Title="MIT License for a jointly developed website" Tags="|mit|copyright|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8245" CreationDate="2019-04-29T13:36:26.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can absolutely have multiple names in a copyright notice, if the licensed work has multiple authors. In some jurisdictions there's also the concept of “joint authorship” that might apply here. You hold copyright automatically by authoring something. It is unnecessary (and quite unusual) to create a legal entity to hold the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects with many contributors do not list everyone in the copyright notice. Instead, they might only list the project founders, or may just say something like “the project contributors”. This isn't a problem because copyright notices aren't terribly important. They aren't a complete list of authors, but more of a reminder that &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; holds the copyright for the licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T13:36:26.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8248" CreationDate="2019-04-29T15:35:26.883" Score="6" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;A French citizen has suggested that there are legal reasons why he cannot contribute to a project using the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I responded saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French people have contributed to such things under that license in the past and not had a problem. It's probably better to not consider work as &quot;new&quot; but modifications of the existing work, and just inherit the Apache2 under that consideration. If there's question, you can have me create an initial version of a file with a license, and then modify it afterward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They do this out of ignorance or because they do not care. Yet conventional open source licenses are not usable as such by a French because of the particularity of intellectual property law. I say French but that is also true of several other European citizens in copyright countries, against copyright countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is why licenses compatible with both French law and OpenSource licenses have been created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... European citizens in author rights countries, against copyright countries.&#xA;  For example, something as simple as the language in which the license is written forbids me to use it. I can not sign a contract that has legal value in the eyes of the French legislator if it does not write in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I override, the license will be vein [sic] and the French intellectual property right will apply and the part of the software I contributed will no longer be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He linked to some stuff that seems fairly abstract about the law, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_France&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's &quot;Copyright in France&quot; article&lt;/a&gt; or a page summary of some &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:C2005/082/09&amp;amp;from=EN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;court judgment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he's trying to push for use of French-compatible licenses I've never heard of, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://cecill.info/licences.fr.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;Similar Questions&quot; box I get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2108/what-issue-does-the-mozilla-public-license-have-with-the-european-legal-system&quot;&gt;What issue does the Mozilla Public License have with the European Legal System?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4346/what-if-anything-is-wrong-with-the-apache-license-2-0&quot;&gt;What if anything is wrong with the Apache License 2.0?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing suggesting French people fundamentally can't use it.  While I can find Google searches that say people are French and releasing things under Apache2, I find no support of &lt;em&gt;&quot;conventional open source licenses are not usable as such by a French&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2268" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T06:52:25.367" Title="Are there legal reasons blocking the use of Apache 2 License in France" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8247" CreationDate="2019-04-29T21:46:26.260" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;French courts definitely don't have a problem with licences in foreign languages.  Two French courts (a lower court and the court of appeal) &lt;a href=&quot;https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/24/1316220/gpl-wins-in-french-court-case&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;have upheld the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, which is not written in French.  (Yes, translations &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;are available&lt;/a&gt;, but the FSF makes clear that they are for unofficial guidance only, and that only the English-language original has legal force.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The famous debugging tool &lt;a href=&quot;http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coccinelle&lt;/a&gt;, which is almost entirely a French production (IRILL, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, and INRIA, amongst others), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinelle_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is licensed&lt;/a&gt; under GPLv2.  So even the French government is happy to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Later edit&lt;/strong&gt;: according to the OP, closer examination of Coccinelle has unearthed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.data.gouv.fr/en/licences&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an official French government list of approved software licences&lt;/a&gt;, which includes Apache2 and GPLv3, thus even more emphatically settling the issue.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have noted, I suspect that the person in question is confused about the issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt; of the author, which indeed cannot be assigned away.  Neither Apache 2 nor the GPL make any mention of these; the rights therein licensed are purely economic rights, which France permits.  So this, too, should not be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T06:52:25.367" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T06:52:25.367" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8243" CreationDate="2019-05-01T11:04:17.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are distributing GPLv3-covered software. You are only able to do so under the conditions of the license, which include giving every recipient access to the complete corresponding source code of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK if this software includes components that are not licensed under the GPL. In that case, one of the following scenarios must apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the other license is compatible with the GPL, so that the software as whole (including the non-GPL components) can be distributed under the terms of the GPL. For the GPLv3 a number of licenses are suitable here, such as MIT, BSD, Apache-2, or LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt;, although it only covers GPL-family licenses.&#xA;The roles are a bit reversed here, e.g. your file would be library like and shall be used by the GPLv3 software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the other component falls under the system libraries exception, for examples components that are part of the operating system&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the other component is a “generally available free [program] which [is] used unmodified [but is] not part of the work”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the copyright holders have issued an exception to these requirements so that the GPLv3 software can be combined with differently-licensed components as well. The LGPLv3 or the Classpath Exception are examples of such an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want to modify/extend the software, but want to license your extension in a way that doesn't require source disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the above scenarios, &lt;strong&gt;this is not possible&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You still have to provide the complete corresponding source code for the software. This would include your extensions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must license your extensions under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of the exceptions would apply here. Your modifications are not a system library, your modifications are a generally available free program, and you have not received a special exception from the copyright holders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have to &lt;em&gt;publicly&lt;/em&gt; offer your source code. However, you must provide the source code to any recipients of the software. This is easiest to do if you always provide an archive of the source code alongside the installed software. As you said, your users are non-technical and are therefore unlikely to share the source code further, even though they would have the right to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to distribute the software with your modifications, without licensing the complete corresponding source code of the software under a GPL-compatible license, that would be a license violation, and your license to the software automatically terminates. Any further sharing of the software or of your modifications or making further modifications would then be copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The installed form of a Python software is not generally identical with its source code in the sense of the GPL. For the GPL, the source code is the preferred form of making modifications, and includes build scripts such as setup.py. It could also be argued that test files are part of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T11:04:17.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8252" CreationDate="2019-05-01T23:21:13.117" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a purely Apache v2 licensed software automatically downloads data files from its copyright holder's website without asking the user, does that automatically grant Apache v2 license to the downloaded files? Does the user have permission to use the files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4212" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T06:15:42.223" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T06:15:42.223" Title="Are downloaded data automatically licensed?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8251" CreationDate="2019-05-02T06:11:48.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be a resounding &quot;no&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing of any data file protected by copyright is completely up to the copyright's author, and he or she may bot may not choose to license these files under some permissive license. The fact that the tool used to download it was licensed under some particular license is completely inconsequential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T06:11:48.253" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5629" CreationDate="2019-05-02T08:20:59.027" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OGL 1.0a isn't the easiest licence in the world to read, and one might be forgiven for thinking WotC's lawyers drafted it on an off-day.  Also, IANAL/IANYL, so my analysis may be no better.  Nevertheless, as I read it, it does address what you're doing.  In s1, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Derivative Material&quot; means copyrighted material including derivative works and translations (including into other computer languages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Open Game Content&quot; means [...] any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Use&quot;, &quot;Used&quot; or &quot;Using&quot; means to use, Distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then goes on in s2 to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice indicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. [...] No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that you can only use the Open Game Content to create a computer translation if at least the parts that embody OGL content are distributed under OGL 1.0a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note your idea of putting the OGL content off into its own library, and calling it via that abstraction.  That's a good idea, except that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;some people&lt;/a&gt; (though &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;by no means everyone&lt;/a&gt;) think that linking to a library creates a derivative work under copyright law, which by the second quote above would mean your &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; program had to be distributed under OGL.  As the linked questions make clear, there is no definite answer yet on whether linking a library has this effect, so we can only say this may be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the &lt;em&gt;simplest&lt;/em&gt; path is to distribute the whole program under OGL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you use a library to separate out OGL content, and license most of your code under (eg) Apache2, you may find that at some future time a court case you didn't know about and weren't party to has the effect of yanking your distribution rights out from under you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;WotC's FAQ suggests that you separate the OGL content out even further, by putting it into a separate text file which functions as input for the program, but I suspect this will involve building a natural-language parser for RPG rules.  Speaking as a GM these past 35 years (and a GM is essentially a natural-language parser for RPG rules that eats pizza) that may be more pain than you want; nevertheless, it would likely sidestep the whole issue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There may be a reason why free software licences are either copyleft or permissive: the OGL's attempt to be neither fully one nor the other whilst failing to precisely define the extent of its non-permissiveness doesn't work well with software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-02T08:52:08.543" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T08:52:08.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8256" CreationDate="2019-05-02T16:25:25.410" Score="2" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I fork a project. I'd like to adjust the format of the license without actually changing its content. Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the license does not contain line breaks in some cases. So when this is seen online there are a couple of very long lines. I'd like to add line breaks to make it more readable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Old license (after forking some project)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;New license (after reformat; basically adding line breaks for readability)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person&#xA;obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation&#xA;files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction,&#xA;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,&#xA;publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and&#xA;to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;(...)¹&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Not showing the rest of the license (in this question) but would appear in the forked project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1964/13633&quot;&gt;Can I change a LICENSE file text format?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1613/13633&quot;&gt;Can I make typographical changes to the MIT license?&lt;/a&gt; (similar to this one, but in my case I want to reformat after forking from someone else so I am not the one creating the original license file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13633" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T17:39:05.040" Title="Can we re-format the text of a license after forking a repository?" Tags="|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8258" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:29:42.930" Score="1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I add the month (or even day) after forking a project to be more explicit regarding timeline boundaries?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any benefit in doing so?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License, for example, has the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019 foo bar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now say I fork a project in April 2019 and want to add my copyright line above this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019 Daniel&#xA;Copyright (c) 2019 foo bar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I instead do something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019-05 Daniel&#xA;Copyright (c) 2019-04 foo bar&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;³ Also, any idea on why licenses usually ask only for the year and not for the month?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13633" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:10:36.273" Title="Should we add the copyright month to a license, in addition to the year, after a fork?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8254" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:39:05.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1964/13633&quot;&gt;Can I change a LICENSE file text format?&lt;/a&gt;, the formatting of the license text can have legal significance. For this reason alone, it is not recommended to change even the formatting of a license because it can have unintended effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if the re-formatting is limited to adding line breaks at logical places to a paragraph of text, that is probably safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T17:39:05.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2437" CreationDate="2019-05-02T17:57:56.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: The New Library must be made open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am modifying the LGPL application in such a way that, I am integrating a new library to it. So the flow is like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Appl Code &gt;&gt; LGPL Library &gt;&gt; &lt;strong&gt;New Library&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this description, the LGPL code is using/depending on/linking to the New Library. In that case, the only way that you can distribute the (modified) LGPL code is if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the New Library is made available under an LGPL-compatible (open-source) license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the New Library is a System Library (unlikely, based on the description)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an explicit exception is added to the LGPL license, which is only possible if you own &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the copyrights on the LGPL code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linking clause of the LGPL (which allows it to be used in GPL-incompatible applications) is written in such a way that it does not apply to this situation, but only when the LGPL code is the target of the linking action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T17:57:56.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8255" CreationDate="2019-05-02T18:10:36.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The laws that specify what a copyright line should look like dictate that you only mention a year or a year range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§ 401  ·    Notice of copyright: Visually perceptible copies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(b) Form of Notice.-— If a notice appears on the copies, it shall consist of the following three elements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright”, or the abbreviation “Copr.”; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) &lt;strong&gt;the year of first publication of the work&lt;/strong&gt;; in the case of compilations or derivative works incorporating previously published material, the year date of first publication of the compilation or derivative work is sufficient. The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying text matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful articles; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(3) the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US Copyright law&lt;/a&gt;; emphasis mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-02T18:10:36.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8272" CreationDate="2019-05-02T22:38:00.313" Score="8" ViewCount="2176" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I meet the requirement to &lt;em&gt;state changes&lt;/em&gt; of a forked project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;choose a license website&lt;/a&gt; has a table comparing licenses. One of the columns is called &lt;code&gt;state changes&lt;/code&gt;. This is described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Changes made to the code must be documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the repository commit history sufficient to meet the requirement? Do I need a &lt;code&gt;CHANGELOG&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The answer is likely the same independently of the license, but to be more specific I was looking into &lt;s&gt;the MPL-2.0 and&lt;/s&gt; the EUPL-1.2.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13633" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T08:44:44.110" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T09:33:54.937" Title="Meeting the &quot;state changes&quot; requirement in licenses" Tags="|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8076" CreationDate="2019-05-03T07:48:19.787" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deb Nicholson gave an excellent talk at FOSDEM 2017 called &quot;&lt;em&gt;Handle conflict like a boss&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  I wrote the whole talk up &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/715081/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for LWN&lt;/a&gt;, and the original talk is likely available on the FOSDEM servers somewhere, but some points I found important included&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conflict happens because some people are missing some information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She showed a slide with a sign from a local &quot;&lt;em&gt;boat and dog wash&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and asked us to think about the reaction of the dog washers to a boat washer who announced they'd made things much more efficient by the introduction of a highly-caustic soap that cleaned boats in half the time. The dog washers will be appalled, and say so, and the boat washer in turn may be quite hurt that his or her work in optimizing the wash is unappreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Passion can become a problem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same motor that drives us to do these amazing things can drive us straight onto rocks, as people get caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment and lose sight of the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sense of identity can be a minefield, especially when tied up in something task-oriented rather than goal-oriented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all very well to have a project to upgrade the bug tracking system to one that doesn't require hours of volunteer work to keep it ticking along, but the person who's known throughout the community as the volunteer who keeps the bug tracking system running may get upset if they're not fully invested in the upgrade. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can help to be aware that there are generally three ways people handle conflict: avoidance, which can lead to festering and eventual disconnection; accommodation, which can lead to the adoption of false or unworkable middles out of a desire to make the conflict go away; and assertion or aggression, where behaviour degrades to provoke responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She reiterated that more information is generally the best way to help; often the information that some people, usually newer arrivals, are missing is the historical information. That is particularly important because it tends to explain why we do things the way we do them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it would be nice if the project maintainers and managers were thinking these thoughts every day, if - as is common - they are far from those people's minds, there's quite a lot you can do if you keep them near the forefront of yours.  And if it proves impossible to prise any of these project leaders out of their toxic behaviours, then find another project to contribute to that's better for your blood pressure.  As Sarah Sharp once said &quot;&lt;em&gt;there are many FOSS projects, but only one me&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T20:35:30.240" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T20:35:30.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8268" CreationDate="2019-05-03T15:48:53.457" Score="0" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I write some code and place it online under License X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A researcher, or group of researchers, makes changes to the code and publishes a scientific paper based on the results obtained.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They used the code they modified (based on my code) to obtain the results, but make available neither binaries nor modified source code.¹&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license would be appropriate to ensure they are forced to release the modified version of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note a key difference from the general practice of releasing binaries without source code, is that in this case there may be no binaries available at all but only published results based on modified software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was looking into either the MPL-2.0 or the EUPL-1.2. They appear to be a middle ground between GPLv3 and MIT. Would these work, any major differences between the two one should be aware of? (one difference appears to be regarding something called &lt;em&gt;state changes&lt;/em&gt; I ask about in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8259/13633&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There seems to be some &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1279/13633&quot;&gt;politics&lt;/a&gt; surrounding GPL. I don't know if this is true but was looking to staying away from these just in case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6833/13633&quot;&gt;Can I put a copyright on my website and make the code private when the source code is partially copied from an open source GNU GPL V3 project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7728/13633&quot;&gt;Rights of deep learning output trained on CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC images&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;¹ Usually when the code is not available they provide it on request, so this is more of a theoretical question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13633" LastEditorUserId="13633" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T15:01:43.583" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T08:11:28.717" Title="License for research projects" Tags="|license-recommendation|mpl|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8264" CreationDate="2019-05-03T17:54:44.410" Score="5" ViewCount="767" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Wikipedia articles contain code or pseudocode samples. I implemented a pseudocode snippet in a concrete language and am planning to use it in one of my projects. There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7109/using-code-from-wikipedia&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; on here asking about the usage of such code in commercial projects. In contrast to that question, my project will be non-commercial and open source and I was wondering how to properly include such code snippets without violating reuse terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, one of the licences recommended by Wikipedia is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation Licence&lt;/a&gt;. The very last section describes how to use this license, but this seems to apply to more traditional &quot;documents&quot; instead of source code. There's also a recommentation to publish any code separately under the GPL but most code snippets published on Wikipedia don't seem to abide by this. So my question is whether (and how) I can still use those snippets (or reimplementations thereof) in open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13437" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T19:39:28.823" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T19:59:35.210" Title="Proper use of Wikipedia code sample in open source projects" Tags="|licensing|gpl|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2019-05-03T19:51:44.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but provided you're happy with making your content available under GPLv3, you should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're planning on implementing the Wikipedia-provided pseudocode in other languages, which means you're creating a derivative work (or, as CC refers to it, Adapted Material).  Content in Wikipedia may be reused under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content#Re-use_of_text_under_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 or later&lt;/a&gt;.  The next such later version, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one such compatible licence&lt;/a&gt; is GPLv3.  So by passing through CC-BY-SA 4.0 you can get permission to license your derivative under GPLv3, at which point it becomes absolutely standard free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T19:51:44.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2019-05-03T19:59:35.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When merely copying small snippets of code, it may be worth considering whether the use could be covered by a copyright exception, such as fair use in the US. Because if some exception applies you won't have to consider the licensing. You would still have to properly attribute the snippet, of course. Note also that while pseudocode is copyrightable, the underlying algorithm cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no exception applies, you would have to follow the license under which you acquired the snippet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is generally dual-licensed under the GFDL and CC-BY-SA 3.0, though individual pages may differ (that should be noted on the page, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GFDL can be understood as a historical artefact. Wikipedia originally used this license. However, the GFDL is highly incompatible with other licenses, and is geared towards books rather than websites. Compliance can be rather cumbersome. It is not compatible with any licenses that are used for source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A later version of the GFDL added a relicensing clause that made it possible for Wikipedia (but no one else) to relicense to CC-BY-SA 3.0. Wikipedia exercised that clause, and has been using dual-licensing with GFDL/CC-BY-SA 3.0 for roughly a decade now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA 3.0 license has a much better compatibility story. In particular, you can choose to license adaptions a later license version, CC-BY-SA 4.0 allows you to use a compatible license, and Creative Commons has named the GPLv3 as a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means the full list of licenses that you can use code snippets from Wikipedia under include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GFDL&lt;/strong&gt; (unversioned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/strong&gt; (explicit dual-license, and compatible licenses per GFDL 1.3 section 11)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compatible licenses per section 4(b) (adaptations only!)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jurisdiction-ported versions of CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compatible licenses at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&lt;/a&gt; (none)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;later CC-BY-SA versions&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compatible licenses per section 3(b)(1) (adaptations only!)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;later CC-BY-SA versions (none)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compatible licenses at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free Art License 1.3&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compatible licenses under section 5 (unclear)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPLv3&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/strong&gt; per GPLv3 section 13&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an open source project really only has the option to copy code snippets from Wikipedia if the project uses GPLv3 or AGPLv3 licenses. Note this excludes many popular licenses such as MIT, LGPL, GPLv2, GPLv2+, GPLv3+, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T19:59:35.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8267" CreationDate="2019-05-04T01:04:25.757" Score="1" ViewCount="1748" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project that uses a C++ library licensed under CDDL v1.0. Ideally I would like to publish it commercially as well as keep it closed source (wouldn't mind open sourcing it but then it'd be hard to make any profit) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; distribute the app commercially, but it is not clear to me if I have to share the source code as well as licence my package with CDDL too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does it matter that I modify the library or not? (I plan not to make any changes to the lib)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Static/Dynamic linking. does that have any effect? I do prefer to include the library within the final executable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yea.. so I guess my question is as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed Source + CDDL licensed static lib = OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14903" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T09:42:59.347" Title="CDDL library and closed source application" Tags="|licensing|closed-source|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2019-05-04T09:42:59.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;CDDL is a “weak copyleft” license, roughly similar to the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are allowed to combine the CDDL covered software with your software, e.g. by static linking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your software will not fall under the CDDL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you modify the CDDL-covered component, your modifications must be CDDL-licensed as well&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must also include a notice that identifies you as the contributor for this modification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when you distribute CDDL-covered software (whether standalone or linked with a larger software) you have to:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make the source code of the CDDL-covered software available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;include a copy of the license with the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;inform users how to acquire the source code for CDDL-covered components “in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are not required to distribute the executable form of the CDDL-covered software under the CDDL license, but may choose a different license, if:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you otherwise comply with the CDDL, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the different license does not limits or alters the recipient's rights to the source code, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you make it absolutely clear that the different license is offered by you alone, not by the initial developers or contributors of the CDDL-covered software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize all of this, having a proprietary software that includes a CDDL-covered library (no matter how it is linked) is perfectly fine. For example, you might take the following steps for compliance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make the library source code available in a public GitHub repository under your control. If it's already available there, consider just forking it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in your proprietary licensing agreement, note that parts of the software may be under open source licenses that provide additional permissions (and where to find more info about these components&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the included documentation of your software, include a list of all included open source components with their names, websites, copyright notices, and licenses. For the CDDL-covered components, note that the source code is available at a linked GitHub repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T09:42:59.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8261" CreationDate="2019-05-05T08:11:28.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems to me to sit at the intersection of two sets of community norms: the scientific community's reproducibility and openness requirements, and the free software community's licensing requirements (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm familiar with the scientific community's desire for reproducibility, and note with happiness your footnote that suggests that most scientists will, on request, part with the code they used.  However, there is no free software licence that will require this.  We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7885/458&quot;&gt;considered similar issues&lt;/a&gt; here previously, and a licence that &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; re-distribution of modified versions is considered un-free by many.  The Gnu GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is very clear&lt;/a&gt; that it does not require redistribution of modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:EUPL-1.2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL1.2&lt;/a&gt; is a copyleft license much like the GPL, save that it permits relicensing to certain other licences, some of which are weaker than the EUPL, and so does not provide the copyleft protections that the GPL does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure there's politics around the GPL &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;.  It's more that free licences lie on a spectrum from the almost-completely-unrestrictive (like CC0) to the strong-copyleft (like the GPL).  Some prefer to use licences at one end of the spectrum to achieve one set of ends, and some prefer licences at the other to achieve a similar-but-different set of ends.  While some of each group disagree very publicly, lots of highly-respected free software is distributed and widely used under the GPL, and lots of equally-respected free software is distributed and used under non-copyleft free licences.  For most people, most of the time, this causes no issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal feeling is that you would do best with a strong copyleft licence, such as the GPL.  As I have noted, you can't compel the release of modified versions of your software with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; free software licence.  But given the scientific tradition of release-on-demand you have noted, a strong copyleft licence will require that the modified version is itself released under strong copyleft, thus giving downstream users access to the modified sources.  It will also prevent them in turn from taking any released sources and turning them into a proprietary product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T08:11:28.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8270" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8271" CreationDate="2019-05-05T17:30:33.907" Score="5" ViewCount="1941" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Java project (for research) where I use Apache POI which is under Apache Software License v2. Now I want to integrate iText into the project, but iText is under AGPL. The project itself is not web-based nor will I make any modifications to iText. What I'm not entirely sure is on what is a non-AGPL environment, as far as I know my project will only be used under research and will not be commercialized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can I still use both libraries under the same project legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14914" LastEditorUserId="29181" LastEditDate="2023-01-27T17:05:44.400" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T17:05:44.400" Title="Can I use Apache 2.0 licensed libraries with AGPL licensed libraries?" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8270" CreationDate="2019-05-05T18:25:59.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A software that includes AGPLv3-licensed components is subject to the AGPLv3 &lt;em&gt;as a whole&lt;/em&gt;. But other parts of the software can be under compatible licenses such as the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you can combine AGPLv3 and Apache 2.0 libraries, with the resulting software being subject to AGPLv3 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly, AGPLv3-licensed software implies the following obligations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are not required to publish your software. It is fine to keep it private.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the AGPLv3 is almost identical to the GPLv3&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must include a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modified versions must have the same license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you give someone a copy of the software, you must give them the source code under the same license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;additionally, if you modify the software &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; let users interact with the software over a network, then the software must offer users the source code for your modified version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this only applies if you want to give someone else a copy of the software, or want to make the software available over a network. Purely internal use (e.g. personal use or within a research group) does not trigger any license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T18:25:59.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8259" CreationDate="2019-05-06T09:15:06.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The EUPL says the following with respect to &quot;stating changes&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Licensee must cause any Derivative Work to carry &lt;strong&gt;prominent notices&lt;/strong&gt; stating that the Work has been modified and the date of modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added. See Section 5 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL-1.2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is the version control history sufficient to meet this requirement?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version control history alone would probably not be sufficient. I'm not sure if the comments in a version control history log would be considered &quot;prominent&quot;, but the more serious problem is that it is too easy for such commit comments to be separated from the code itself. Let's take GitHub as an example -- when you visit a project on GitHub, you can certainly clearly see which files were modified and when, which might appear at first to comply with the EUPL-1.2 requirement, but consider what happens when an end user clicks &quot;Download&quot; to download a specific version from your repository. Unless you've stated the required changes somewhere in an actual file of your repository, the ZIP file that the user downloads will no longer be in compliance with the license.  The same potential problem occurs when a user uses &quot;git clone --depth 1&quot; to download only the latest version of your repository, and the same problem will probably also occur with most other version control systems (e.g. &quot;svn checkout&quot; will not copy commit logs of any kind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to comply with the &quot;prominent notices&quot; requirement of the EUPL is to add a note to the source code file(s) that you modified. You don't need to say what you modified, just that they were modified and the date. For example, suppose the source file that you want to modify looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* Copyright 2016 J. Random Hacker. This source code file is part of FooLib and is&#xA; * licensed under the EUPL-1.2. For the full license text, please see the file &#xA; * LICENSE.EUPL12 or visit https://opensource.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2 &#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To meet the requirement, you could modify it to look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* Copyright 2016 J. Random Hacker. This source code file is part of FooLib and is&#xA; * licensed under the EUPL-1.2. For the full license text, please see the file &#xA; * LICENSE.EUPL12 or visit https://opensource.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2 &#xA; * &#xA; * 6 May 2019 - Modified by K. Deterministic Hacker.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way is simple, meets the requirement, and makes it easy for future contributors to also comply.  If you wish, you could also add a note in a CHANGELOG if you'd like, but that is extra -- a CHANGELOG could still easily be &quot;lost,&quot; overwritten, or otherwise moved around if code from multiple projects are ever combined, or if parts of one project are used in another, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What if I distribute binaries only?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are distributing binaries only, note that the EUPL also requires that you provide the source code along with the binaries, or otherwise provide a way for the user to access it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work is provided as Executable Code, the Licensor provides in&#xA;  addition a machine-readable copy of the Source Code of the Work along&#xA;  with each copy of the Work that the Licensor distributes or indicates,&#xA;  in a notice following the copyright notice attached to the Work, a&#xA;  repository where the Source Code is easily and freely accessible for&#xA;  as long as the Licensor continues to distribute or communicate the&#xA;  Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you will need to distribute the source code anyway, the notification you made above in the source code file is already sufficient in this case. You don't need to do anything else other than what the EUPL already requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Using the Choose a License page&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Choose a License page is best used when you need an overview of popular open source licenses and want to pick the right open source license for your own code. But when you are copying someone else's code and need to comply with their license, or when you need details about a particular requirement, the best place is to look at the specific license itself for the specific way that you want to use the code (e.g. whether you will distribute binaries only, or source code as well, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T09:33:54.937" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T09:33:54.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8275" CreationDate="2019-05-06T14:35:37.193" Score="4" ViewCount="815" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project is a command which is split in library modules (the logic) and a &quot;main&quot; module, which glues my lib modules to make the CLI command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really care about what people can write with the lib or the main module, but I want people to be forced to publish any modification they make to the lib, so I though I could double-license my project with LGPL3 + Apache2, the LPGL3 would be for lib modules. Would this be feasible? Would this result in what I described?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14917" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-09-05T11:23:30.000" LastActivityDate="2022-09-05T11:23:30.000" Title="Can I use LGPL3 for library and Apache 2 for &quot;main()&quot;?" Tags="|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8289" CreationDate="2019-05-06T14:46:48.297" Score="4" ViewCount="1131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a library I wanted to use: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/yodle/docker-registry-client&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/yodle/docker-registry-client&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it's dead (Last PR merged in 2017), and there are bugs that I need to be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's maybe 2-3 files that are needed, so I was thinking about copying them into my project. The issue is that the License is only in &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, and not any of the source code files. My code most probably will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 licensed&lt;/a&gt;, so there shouldn't be any issues, but where should I include original License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Create headers with license in the source code? In &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file add author's License and then below &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2015 Yodle, Inc.&lt;/code&gt; add same line just with current year and my name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I in &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file only have the text of the license and in source code include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#apply&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;boilerplate headers&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14916" LastEditorUserId="3675" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T15:43:32.707" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T15:43:32.707" Title="Modifying software with Apache 2.0 License" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2019-05-06T17:28:46.653" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can use such a construction. However, it would be much simpler if you license the command line wrapper under the LGPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “L” in LGPL officially does not stand for “library” but “lesser” than the main GPL: it scopes its protections to the LGPL-covered component, and does not affect the entire program. For the FSF this is a matter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;strategy&lt;/a&gt;: they want to increase the amount of free software in the world. The LGPL does not help as much as the GPL because it doesn't entice users of the component to publish their software under a free license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 is implemented as a section 7 exception to the GPLv3. If the conditions in that exception do not trigger (linking), then it behaves effectively identical to the GPLv3. It is therefore perfectly fine to use it for applications as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T17:28:46.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8273" CreationDate="2019-05-06T19:39:26.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@amon is mostly right, however my understanding is that you want others to make changes to &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt; and not have to publish those changes upon distribution of the binary. In that case, license your &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt; file as Apache2 (or something else that's permissive like BSD/MIT) and the library as LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally projects have a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in the repository, however you might want to leave that out and then at the top of the files actually put the license for that file. Or you could have a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; that explains the licensing of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also split the project into the library portion and the executable portion that links to the library, or you could choose to license it all under a single license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastEditorUserId="9985" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T19:45:14.573" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T19:45:14.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8278" CreationDate="2019-05-06T22:37:32.027" Score="2" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a closed-source C++ application that includes an embedded CPython interpreter.  It ships with a directory full of example Python scripts that I wrote, which perform useful actions within the context of the application.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the user clicks the &quot;run script&quot; button in the GUI, the C++ application launches a child process (via &lt;code&gt;fork()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;execvp()&lt;/code&gt; of its own executable), with special command line arguments telling it to run the CPython interpreter on the filepath of the appropriate &lt;code&gt;.py&lt;/code&gt; file.  The Python script then connects back to the parent process (via a local TCP connection) to interact with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if I include a GPL'd Python script in my directory of example scripts, am I violating the GPL?  (I suspect yes, but given that I'd be including the source code of the GPL'd Python script in the distribution, and not linking it to any of the closed-source code, I'm not sure that it would be a violation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8933" LastEditorUserId="8933" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T05:38:38.090" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T07:56:21.060" Title="Is it a GPL license violation to bundle a GPL'd Python script with a closed-source application?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8277" CreationDate="2019-05-07T07:50:17.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to Brandin's comments above, I think this one's pretty cut-and-dried.  It's known that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;the licence of a compiler doesn't transfer to its output&lt;/a&gt;, except in certain odd corner cases.  If it's true for a compiler, it seems to me no different for a run-time interpreter.  The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InterpreterIncompat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;addresses the issue&lt;/a&gt; and reaches a similar conclusion, provided you are not sharing complex state &lt;em&gt;sub rosa&lt;/em&gt;, or turning the functions provided by the GPLed code into library functions provided by your interpreter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do mention functions in one of your comments, but it's not clear if you're using the word precisely, to denote the creation of some kind of API to the GPL'ed code, or loosely, meaning that some of your scripts in turn call the GPL'ed script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: as long as it's the latter, I see this as no different from supplying a proprietary compiler with a bunch of proprietary sample source files, and one GPL'ed source file.  As long as you are fulfilling the terms of the GPL with respect to the covered work, its appearance alongside the other programs in your package is &quot;&lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  As ever, though, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-07T07:56:21.060" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T07:56:21.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8317" CreationDate="2019-05-07T09:02:27.137" Score="3" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it fine to use a Go-licenced 3rd party library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/re2j&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google/re2j&lt;/a&gt;) within an Apache2-licensed code?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14924" LastActivityDate="2024-04-04T04:27:29.563" Title="Go and Apache2 license compatibility" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T01:37:46.580" Score="5" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: This is a question about a specific individual's viewpoints and beliefs. Good answers will cite that individual, or other people with similar beliefs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy holds (or has previously held) the following positions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/05/10/oracle-google.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;APIs are not copyrightable, and also the Federal Circuit never said they are.&lt;/a&gt; (I am ignoring the second half of that sentence to focus on the first.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compiling ZFS into a Linux kernel module and distributing the resulting binary is a GPL violation.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these positions seem contradictory to me. As I understand it (and I may be mistaken about this part), the ZFS kernel module is built entirely from ZFS code, plus a small amount of &quot;declaring&quot; code similar to that at issue in &lt;em&gt;Oracle v. Google&lt;/em&gt;. Yes, the Java API is a &quot;public&quot; or &quot;external&quot; API and the Linux API is a &quot;private&quot; or &quot;internal&quot; API, but I don't see why copyrightability should care about that distinction. They are both functional objects in the sense of the merger doctrine, regardless of whether they are labeled as &quot;internal&quot; or &quot;external&quot; (or even &quot;GPL'd callers only&quot;). An API is an API, and if you can't copyright an API, then you can't copyright &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the kernel module is not legally a derivative work of the Linux kernel (because it incorporates only an uncopyrightable API from the Linux side), I cannot understand how it could infringe the GPL all by itself. After all, the GPLv2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite plainly says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. &lt;strong&gt;If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works.&lt;/strong&gt; But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The binary module is &quot;distributed as a separate work.&quot; It certainly doesn't include a compiled copy of the entire Linux kernel. The GPL does not say &quot;...when you distribute them in source form as separate works,&quot; so the fact that the module is a binary is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an equitable perspective, we can argue that the ZFS code is obviously not based on Linux, and it would be &quot;unfair&quot; to apply the GPL to it. And the GPL itself supports that position:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might point out that Canonical also distributes the Linux kernel itself, and perhaps by distributing both at once, they somehow infringe the GPL. But that runs right into the next paragraph of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I really don't understand how Mr. Kuhn can simultaneously maintain that APIs are not subject to copyright, and that Canonical's ZFS distribution is a copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What part of Mr. Kuhn's reasoning have I misunderstood? Can these two positions be reconciled?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am &quot;picking on&quot; Mr. Kuhn in particular because he has clearly articulated both these viewpoints in detailed blog posts, but many other people in the various FLOSS communities have similar beliefs. I have nothing against him personally.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T01:47:45.823" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T09:00:21.120" Title="If APIs aren't (shouldn't be) copyrightable, how can ZFS-on-Linux infringe the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8281" CreationDate="2019-05-08T07:00:05.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two statements are compatible because the argument that Linux-plus-ZFS is a copyright violation isn't based on the copyrightability of the API through which they interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence violation arises because GPLv2, which covers the kernel, requires that derivative works in their entirety be distributed under GPLv2.  The CDDL, which covers ZFS, requires that any files which were under CDDL remain so.  If Linux+ZFS is a single work, it cannot therefore be distributed without violating the terms of at least one of those licences.  The FSF explains this in more detail &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would Linux+ZFS be a single work?  If it is, it's because linking two codebases together makes a derivative work of both.  This is not a settled issue; you can find it argued in any number of places.  We have a pair of questions that argue both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;against&lt;/a&gt; the conclusion; note that APIs (and the copyrightability thereof) don't feature in any of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So because the question of whether or not Linux+ZFS is a single work for copyright purposes doesn't turn on the issue of the API between them, it's possible for both statements to be true at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; (following your comment): &quot;&lt;em&gt;If the module is not a derivative work of the kernel, and the instructions certainly aren't either, then I do not see where a &quot;classical&quot; copyright infringement would live.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;  I think I agree with you there.  Note, however, that your argument starts &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; the module isn't a derivative work&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  What we're examining in my answer, and the linked answers, are the arguments that it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a derivative work of the kernel, and those arguments don't turn on the copyrightability of the API.  Nor, incidentally, do they turn on how many parts the work is shipped in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T09:18:25.773" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T09:18:25.773" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8284" CreationDate="2019-05-08T14:56:59.413" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to place my app (a dictionary) under the GPL Licence. I don't care if everybody changes the source code, fix bugs or add some new features to it; but I don't want developer changes &lt;strong&gt;donation link&lt;/strong&gt; for his own. Is there any way to handle this problem? Of course I'm fairly new in open source and it's possible to have wrong misinterpret. Anyway I need enlightenment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14935" LastEditorUserId="14935" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T15:10:58.390" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T17:11:00.227" Title="Can it be possible to prevent user from changing donate link in a GPL licenced project?" Tags="|gpl-3|non-commercial|donations|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8283" CreationDate="2019-05-08T17:11:00.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not really possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next closes thing that you could do is to add an additional term under GPLv3 section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7(b) to require the “preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7(c) to prohibit “misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can prevent someone else presenting the project as their own, you cannot really prevent them from changing a donation link. Such a link is not a legal notice or author attribution. You can put such a link next to attributions, which might deter changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a link to the project homepage might be part of reasonable attribution. You could then have a section about how to support the project on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not allow you to prescribe how such notices shall be shown. There are widely accepted practices about this, but none require that the notices be highly visible. For example, desktop applications often have such attributions in a help menu item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we may want to use copyleft licenses like the GPL in order to deter commercialization by others, that won't quite work and is undesirable in the long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the intent of the GPL is to ensure freedom for end users, not to prescribe software pricing (sounds silly, but there actually was a lawsuit arguing the GPL was an illegal price-fixing scheme to devalue software)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the GPL explicitly allows copies to be sold&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;capturing the monetary value of the software may feel fair right now&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but what about contributors, what is their fair share?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what if someone overhauls the software a decade from now, with your remaining contributions being minor. Would it still be fair if they are not allowed to add a donation link?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been recent attempts at licenses that address these issues. For example, the SSPL effectively gave the original developer a monopoly on commercially running the software as a service. The Convertible Free Software License had a threshold of changes where a new maintainer could take over ownership from the original authors. Both licenses have been criticized as discriminatory, and were retracted or rejected from review by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T17:11:00.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T19:42:52.017" Score="7" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/org-rs/org-rs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/org-rs/org-rs&lt;/a&gt; written in Rust programming language.&#xA;The goal of the project is to provide a parser for the Org markup language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the incompleteness of Org's spec, I have to study the original implementation of the parser that is written in Emacs Lisp.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode/src/master/lisp/org-element.el&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode/src/master/lisp/org-element.el&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Emacs and Orgmode are licensed under GPLv3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to provide the complete implementation of the parser I am using the same parsing algorithm as original implementation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I am facing is that the Rust ecosystem is primarily licensed under permissive licenses (MIT and Apache2) and this presents a problem for my project. Since my project technically is a library licensing it under GPL severely impacts adoption of my library - other projects will have to become GPLv3 too in order to include my library. (Rust statically links libraries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I legally obligated to release my work under the GPLv3 license? Or can I use MIT/Apache2/LGPL license to release my work? &#xA;This is a question of life and death for my project. If I have to use GPL - my project is going to be still-born and I would rather not waste my time on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14937" LastEditorUserId="14937" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T21:23:45.577" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T12:38:40.133" Title="org-rs: can I use MIT/Apache2/LGPL license?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|gpl-3|apache-2.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8287" CreationDate="2019-05-08T21:26:13.640" Score="6" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apple's &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizing_your_app_before_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation for notarization&lt;/a&gt; states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, all new or updated kernel extensions and&#xA;  all software from developers new to distributing with Developer ID&#xA;  must be notarized in order to run. In a future version of macOS,&#xA;  notarization will be required by default for all software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple doesn't require notarization by default at the time of this writing. If they do at some point, does that count as &quot;Tivoization&quot;? That is, is it incompatible with section 6 of the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14938" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T14:01:00.257" Title="Is macOS notarization compatible with the GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8286" CreationDate="2019-05-09T14:24:42.857" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know MacOS development, but I assume there must exist some way of running a non-notarized executable, if only for development purposes. (Otherwise, you'd have to submit your binary for notarization each time you ran your compiler, which seems unlikely, even for Apple's possessive attitude toward Mac development.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;tivoization&amp;quot; requirement in GPLv3 section 6 requires &amp;quot;Installation Information&amp;quot; necessary to run modified versions of the source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, [...] the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, Installation Information must be sufficient to &amp;quot;install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source&amp;quot;. The significant question is: if you have the source and modify it, can you get your User Product (i.e., your Mac computer) to &amp;quot;install and execute&amp;quot; that modified version of the program from modified source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I assume in the first paragraph above (though I welcome clarification), Apple supports some way for a user to turn source code into a binary through normal use of the operating system and its associated development tools. No upstream key of any kind is required to accompany the GPL'd source code into to compile it locally into an executable that can be run on a user's machine. The user may need to acquire or generate a key of their own, but I assume this can be done through normal use of Apple's dev tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as a user may translate modified source code into a runnable binary without keys or secrets from the author(s) of the GPL'd program, this does not run afoul of tivoization requirements. It is true that the rendered binary might only be runnable on one user's machine (without sharing their secret key(s)), but this is not a problem for tivoization. Downstream recipients may repeat the process themselves to build their own local executables from source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an ideologically surprising result, either. These terms in GPLv3 are intended to prevent GPLv3 code from running on device that will accept updates from a manufacturer but not the device's owner. Since a computer that runs MacOS is a general-purpose device that can compile and run arbitrary user-supplied code, this isn't an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there's an argument to be made that if MacOS restricts execution of a binary prepared in such a development mode only to the machine that compiled it, that's a way it has &amp;quot;interfered with&amp;quot; the  &amp;quot;continued functioning&amp;quot; of the binary, but I really don't find that argument convincing. The program functions in the context that the binary was prepared, and there is no limitation on preparing additional binaries for additional machines from the GPL'd source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T14:01:00.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8274" CreationDate="2019-05-10T11:11:22.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many licenses consist of two parts: the license terms, and the license notice where the copyright holders actually grant the license. The Apache license suggests a specific text for this notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the upstream software contains only the license terms and metadata about the license, but not the actual notice. This complicates downstream use, but since the intent is clear this is not fatal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you do attribute the upstream project, but do not synthesize a copyright notice. You do not know who the copyright holder is or when they published the software, but you do have reason to believe they licensed it under the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would use a section 4(d) NOTICE file to explain the origin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which files are impacted&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where they were taken from (name/link/author of the project)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that they were licensed under Apache as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the impacted files, I would add a short notice and refer to details in the NOTICE file. If you modify the copied files, per section 4(b) you should add a prominent notice that you changed them. Taken together, you should probably add header comments with the following info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from which project the file was taken from&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that details are explained in the NOTICE file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the file was modified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also add license headers with your own copyright line to the NOTICE file, and to those files that you modified substantially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide that you do not want to license your code under Apache 2 this is not a problem. But in that case, you should not use Apache's NOTICE mechanism but probably put the relevant information into the LICENSE file itself, or possibly into a README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T11:11:22.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8285" CreationDate="2019-05-12T12:38:40.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your code either is derivative of GPLv3 software, or it is not. If it is derivative you can only publish your code under the GPLv3 as well, if it isn't derivative you can do whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear whether your software would be derivative of the Emacs Orgmode implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Implementing&lt;/em&gt; the same file format &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; render your software derivative. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Looking&lt;/em&gt; at some details in the original implementation would &lt;em&gt;might not&lt;/em&gt; render your software derivative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In contrast: &lt;em&gt;porting/translating&lt;/em&gt; the entire parser would clearly be&#xA;derivative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest to avoid looking at the Emacs Orgmode code. Instead, reverse-engineer the necessary behaviour. Do implement stuff that's in the manual or other documentation. Do run Emacs to test actual behaviour. If an incompatibility turns up in the future, treat it as a bug and fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will likely get a good approximation of the Orgmode language with only a tiny subset of its features – most of Org complexity is around its dynamic features, e.g. when used as an interactive notebook or as a todo list app. You can also look at other Org ports under permissive licenses, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wallyqs/org-ruby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;org-ruby&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an MIT-licensed Ruby gem that's used by GitHub to render .org files on their website. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PoiScript/orgize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;orgize&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Rust crate is MIT-licensed as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T12:38:40.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8293" CreationDate="2019-05-13T14:05:38.053" Score="0" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are looking to build a platform on the Android health and health website, which is similar to the examples of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lybrate.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lybrate&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.medshr.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medshr&lt;/a&gt;. It's actually an environment like the Instagram app with some features like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Video and audio calls&#xA; -Ranking&#xA;-View and connect to other sites such as Isentagram, Watts App&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Medical consultation and time&#xA;Multi-choice medical tests for diagnosis&#xA;-To advise between groups of physicians for better diagnosis&#xA;Location of physician and patient&#xA;-To store patient medical information in the system in the form of a photo, video or text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collaboration with insurance to facilitate drug delivery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Automatic posting of the medication after the patient's visit to the patient's address for the big cities&#xA;-To work with private medical and government organizations for retraining - pursuing complaints and ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ability to train through video, audio, and text video and audio tests and register sample cases for medical and health students.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To cooperate to improve charity by introducing people in need and cases to the state agencies or charities or physicians and individuals.&#xA;And...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needs of this project is big and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- So could we describe free open source subject for our project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-What kind of rules and ... Needed to attract and manage new people around the world to work together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3-Do you know any successfull experiment of this kind in android application building field as free open source communuty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4-Any ... Yours suggestion for doing better work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks alot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14969" LastEditorUserId="14969" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T18:02:20.623" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T07:09:04.410" Title="How to build android health application via free open source commuity" Tags="|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8297" CreationDate="2019-05-13T14:37:25.413" Score="3" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms for the Apple AppStore have been shown to conflict with the GNU GPL in such a way as to prevent GPL apps from being in the store — see &lt;a href=&quot;https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6109/is-it-possible-to-have-gpl-software-in-the-mac-app-store&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. Are the Amazon AppStore (the standard repository for software for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_OS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FireOS&lt;/a&gt; devices) terms similarly restrictive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T10:00:39.757" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T19:04:30.797" Title="Do Amazon AppStore terms allow for GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|law|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8291" CreationDate="2019-05-13T14:41:28.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very big question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before anything else, you should think more concretely about what you're planning on doing.  Both the Lybrate and Medshr apps are zero-cost; if you're going to develop a fully-free competitor app that uses your proprietary back-end, that's great, but the group of people who care about freedom as opposed to cost in their phone apps is fairly small compared to the market as a whole.  If you're planning on freeing both the user app &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the back-end, that's fantastic, but it's going to be very hard to make a business plan that's attractive to funding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're planning to do has some serious privacy implications.  Even the US, which is generally pretty &lt;em&gt;laissez-faire&lt;/em&gt; about privacy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gets all steamed up&lt;/a&gt; about protecting healthcare information.  If you release code to do some of the things you list which turns out to have holes in it that let people get hold of other people's information, you could end up facing &lt;em&gt;substantial&lt;/em&gt; fines, or even going to jail.  It also seems to be quite country-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That given, I think you have two ways to go.  You can get a working business plan together, get a big chunk of funding somehow, and pay lots of developers to implement it all.  That doesn't stop you releasing the whole thing open-source, but expect a lot of pushback from your investors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can drastically reduce the scope of what you're doing (less tasks, for less people, in a smaller location) in order to be able to get something that people can download off &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-Droid&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;actually works&lt;/em&gt;.  One of the best ways to get volunteers to help code is to give them something that solves a problem they have, but which could solve it even better if it were just fixed up a little.  Your question about rules needed to attract and manage volunteers from around the world is premature: should you be lucky enough to have more volunteers than you can handle, and I emphasise that this is not the usual problem, you can get started with community managers and codes of conduct at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T07:09:04.410" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T07:09:04.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8292" CreationDate="2019-05-15T19:04:30.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: The Amazon AppStore is compatible with GPL software, as long as it stays away from the DRM features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms of the Amazon AppStore, which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201485660&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, include some restrictions that would be incompatible with the GPL or other copyleft licenses, but most of those restrictions can be waived by the publisher of an App.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;3.3 Separate Licenses to Use Apps.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your use of an App will be governed by the terms and conditions of an end user license agreement between you and the Publisher of the App (a &quot;EULA&quot;). The EULA for an App includes the terms set forth below (the &quot;Standard EULA&quot;) and any additional end user license terms included in the App (the &quot;Publisher EULA&quot;). [...] &lt;strong&gt;As used in this Section 3.3, the term &quot;App&quot; does not include any Appstore Software included within an App (your use of Appstore Software is instead governed by Sections 3.1 - 3.2 above).&lt;/strong&gt; The Standard EULA includes the following end user license terms, and if the App does not include a Publisher EULA, these terms will constitute the entire EULA between you and the Publisher:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(ii) If the App does not include a Publisher EULA that specifies App license rights, Publisher grants you a limited, nontransferable license to download and use the App only for your personal and noncommercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(v) You may not modify, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the App in whole or in part, or create any derivative works from or sublicense any rights in the App, &lt;strong&gt;unless otherwise expressly authorized in writing by Publisher&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;3.1 Appstore Software.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We may make available to you software that you need to install on your device in order to download Apps purchased from the Amazon Appstore to that device and to access or use Apps on that device (the &quot;Appstore Software&quot;). [...] &lt;strong&gt;Publishers may choose to protect their Apps using a digital rights management (&quot;DRM&quot;) system implemented through the Appstore Software. Appstore Software includes any software we include in an App to enable the DRM or for other purposes.&lt;/strong&gt; If you uninstall the Appstore Software from your device or sign out of your Amazon.com account in the Appstore Software, you will not be able to access or use any Apps on your device that Publishers have protected with DRM. &lt;strong&gt;You may not attempt to disable, bypass, modify, defeat, or otherwise circumvent the DRM or any other security or content protection system used in connection with the Amazon Appstore.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have copied the relevant sections from the terms of use and highlighted some key portions. From this, my conclusions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can distribute GPL-licensed software via the Amazon AppStore if you accompany that software by a Publisher EULA that specifies that the GPL license applies and explicitly mentions that you are allowed to make derivative works, modifications, do reverse engineering, etc. according to the terms of the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distribute a GPL-licensed app that uses the AppStore DRM system, because the DRM system &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; put additional restrictions on you as a user that are incompatible with the GPL license. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T19:04:30.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8306" CreationDate="2019-05-05T19:00:31.840" Score="-1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning on making an open-sourced Chinese version of Java by modifying the open-sourced Java JDK, like how the Easy Programming Language (aka. 易语言) did with Visual Basic. Is this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15008" OwnerDisplayName="Hykilpikonna" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-05-17T18:50:38.697" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T10:36:47.103" Title="Is it legal to modify Open-sourced Java JDK?" Tags="|derivative-works|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8298" CreationDate="2019-05-06T16:34:12.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to read the license and check what it says. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time I looked at the license was when Sun owned it, and they explicitly did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow you to use what they gave you to create incompatabile versions of Java. Probably directly aimed at Microsoft and C#. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from checking whether you are allowed to create a modified language, you need then to check what conditions apply to distributing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" OwnerDisplayName="gnasher729" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T16:34:12.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8304" CreationDate="2019-05-17T14:54:05.647" Score="4" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to recreate Judge Engine of Online Judge named HUSTOJ. However, HUSTOJ was released under the &lt;strong&gt;GPL-2.0 license&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to release a new Judge Engine with &lt;strong&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that GPL-2.0 and AGPL-2.0 are incompatible licenses. However, I left the question because I do not know whether &lt;strong&gt;GPL-2.0 and AGPL-3.0 are compatible with each other&lt;/strong&gt;, and whether &lt;strong&gt;I can set a license in this situation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate it if you know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14995" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T16:08:55.827" Title="I want to rewrite the GPL-2 software with AGPL-3.0" Tags="|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8303" CreationDate="2019-05-17T16:08:55.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you've examined the code of HUSTOJ and are creating a very similar work, you are legally preparing a derivative work of HUSTOJ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, no, you may not license a derivative of a GPLv2-licensed work under the GPLv3 or AGPLv3. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ's compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt;, which indicates the incompatibility (and note the statement of GPLv3 and AGPLv3 equivalency directly above the matrix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since HUSTOJ is actually under GPLv2-or-any-later-version, you may receive HUSTOJ under the GPLv3 instead. GPLv3-licensed material can be included in an AGPLv3-licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-05-17T16:08:55.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8298" CreationDate="2019-05-18T10:36:47.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OpenJDK is GPL-licensed software (GPLv2 with Classpath Exception). You are free to  modify this Java implementation, such as by translating the keywords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, “Java” is a trademark that you are not allowed to use. You do not have to rename all classes or packages in OpenJDK, but you must not call the resulting language “Java”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T10:36:47.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8313" CreationDate="2019-05-20T00:04:33.490" Score="3" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;i am using several OSS libs from github in my project and want to add them to a combined licence file (using the amazon oss attribution builder) so i can attribute their work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, several of them them contain only a license file without a copyright notice with contributor(s) and years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/msteiger/jxmapviewer2/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/msteiger/jxmapviewer2/blob/master/license.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&gt; There is no &quot;Copyright 2012-2017 MSteiger and Contributors&quot; or similar like in other projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of best practice for adding this kind of missing information? Or should i just leave year and contributor information empty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15005" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T08:02:13.970" Title="License but no copyright notice - how to attribute correctly?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8311" CreationDate="2019-05-20T01:00:42.977" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project that I want to release under the MIT license. However, it includes a GPL'ed library. I understand this means I must release my work under GPL. Am I able to release the whole work under GPL, but also license the code I wrote under the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does feel against the spirit of the GPL, but will it get me into trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15006" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T23:33:26.940" Title="Can I license code that links to GPL code under a more permissive license?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8312" CreationDate="2019-05-20T06:30:21.567" Score="14" ViewCount="10833" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about a true fork (with new name, different features, different objectives and not targeting a pull request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I am developing a new application based on an other project I usually keep the forking link like the example bellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rd0Bo.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rd0Bo.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, when I stumble on true forks on GitHub, that link is not kept. What is the proper way to operate regarding the GPLv2/GPLv3 rules? and what would be the advantages of keeping that link in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the original project is referred to in the README, the copyright rule are respected and the new project is under the same license.  Also I found some information on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/19368792/4877948&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; and I do know that standard GitHub forks (with the link reference) do keep a sort of strong link to the main project (like master project &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/articles/what-happens-to-forks-when-a-repository-is-deleted-or-changes-visibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deletion situation&lt;/a&gt; or commits/network analysis on the main project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15010" LastEditorUserId="15010" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T08:04:44.157" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T21:47:53.023" Title="Is keeping the forking link on a true fork necessary? (Github/GPL)" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|github|gpl-2|forking|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8309" CreationDate="2019-05-20T06:47:53.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is covered (in the affirmative) in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ item&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You have a GPLed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not exactly. It means you must release your program under a license compatible with the GPL (more precisely, compatible with one or more GPL versions accepted by all the rest of the code in the combination that you link). The combination itself is then available under those GPL versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may license your own components under any license that is GPL-compatible, i.e., its terms are a subset of the GPL's terms. You may then distribute the combination of your permissively-licensed code and the GPL-licensed component together under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T10:22:50.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8310" CreationDate="2019-05-20T06:58:30.333" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement whatsoever in any version of the GPL to maintain a reference to some upstream project. Imagine if you use substantial code from multiple GPL-licensed projects: the GitHub website only allows one &quot;upstream&quot; pointer anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub's upstream link is only a helpful reference and is unrelated to any license requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T06:58:30.333" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8308" CreationDate="2019-05-20T08:02:13.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The file in the repo you've linked to is the LGPL itself, which is definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; going to have the package author's copyright in it.  As it says, it is &lt;code&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we examine one of the source files inside the repo, eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/msteiger/jxmapviewer2/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/msteiger/jxmapviewer2/blob/master/license.txt&lt;/a&gt; , we find &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/** &#xA;* A simple sample application that shows&#xA;* a OSM map of Europe &#xA;* @author Martin Steiger&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7907/458&quot;&gt;is not a requirement of the Berne convention&lt;/a&gt;.  LGPL3, via GPL3 s7, requires&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but you're not obliged to create them if they're not there.  Nevertheless, I applaud your drive for proper attribution. Looking at the git history on that file, my feeling is that, while you are in no wise obliged to, if you wanted to add the comment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2012 Martin Steiger&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to that file, and comparable and appropriate notices to other files in the work, that would satisfy the requirements of both honour and the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T08:02:13.970" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8310" CreationDate="2019-05-20T10:28:08.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not directly an answer to your question, but if you want a fork that &lt;strong&gt;doesn't&lt;/strong&gt; reference the parent, you should import the repo instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/new/import&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/new/import&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you will only get the code and not the wiki, settings, etc this way, as if this repo doesn't live on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you wrote, it's not related to any licensing issue; if the parent is GPL, your derivative work is GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15013" LastActivityDate="2019-05-20T10:28:08.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8310" CreationDate="2019-05-20T11:56:17.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering GPL-v3 and GPL-v2 this is not required at all (and this is true for all opensource licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main purpose of a &amp;quot;GitHub fork&amp;quot; is to collaborate back to the original project, this could be one of the reason a lot of &amp;quot;true forks&amp;quot; are not using that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the project health as @PeterCordes commented&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can every usefully cherry-pick a commit from the other tree, it might make sense to keep it. Otherwise it's probably best to have the reference only in the GitHub readme and/or other documentation. Although perhaps it's slightly interesting to have GitHub calculate 2xxx commits ahead and 3xxx commits behind the original tree, or whatever. If not, then that's just meaningless noise that you don't want to display or make GitHub waste time calculating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also as the new project will not be linked it's recommended to contact the original project owner letting him be aware of the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that forking a project on GitHub without the link is easily doable by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/new/import&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;import&lt;/a&gt; function, but bear in mind that some settings will not be imported like the wiki page, also an import on an already forked version is possible, this could be helpful if changes have been made to the fork, the only downside is, stars and some other things will be lost.&#xA;The alternative is to ask GitHub support for the matter. And lastly the old commits done by other developers will remain intact because they are linked to the submission email and thus will be linked to the proper developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15010" LastEditorUserId="15010" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T21:47:53.023" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T21:47:53.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8279" CreationDate="2019-05-21T07:58:09.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license of the re2j project you linked to is a 3-clause BSD license. This is perfectly compatible with Apache 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This 3-clause BSD license requires that you do not remove the license notice from the source code, that you include the license notice in your documentation, and that you don't use Google's brand to promote your software (duh!). None of these requirements conflict with Apache 2, which essentially requires the same things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 license uses a NOTICE file mechanism for acknowledgements and upstream licenses.&#xA;If you include the re2j software into your project, you should probably add the re2j license to your project's NOTICE file. If you merely declare re2j as a dependency that's not necessary for your source code, but note that these requirements still trigger if you distribute a binary (like a jar file) that includes the re2j software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T07:58:09.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8327" CreationDate="2019-05-21T11:00:54.563" Score="1" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a theme for the static website generator Hugo to use for my personal portfolio website. Since I prefer open-source code and would like to keep all my own projects in the same vein, I want to release this theme's source (&lt;code&gt;html&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;css&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;js&lt;/code&gt;) publicly under an appropriate license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would not only allow potential employers to look at my front-end code but also ensure that other developers can easily examine and learn from the ways I've implemented certain functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One thing I want to ensure is that people will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; reuse my theme &lt;em&gt;as is&lt;/em&gt; without making any design changes. I believe that, as a theme for a personal portfolio, it should be unique; especially when it comes to front-end development.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also want to keep any alterations to the theme open-source. That is, anyone who modifies it for their own purposes should be required to open-source their changes as well and make the code available to their site's users (which I gather is one of the main points of the GPL license family).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'd like attribution, but I reckon that this is part of most licenses anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that my best option is to license the theme under either the GPL or AGPL license and place a note in its README file that kindly asks the user to not simply copy the theme without at least making some design changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provided there isn't a license for this exact purpose, is this a sensible course of action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;If yes, does a web theme require the GPL or AGPL license, i.e. does it count as network usage?&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15026" LastEditorUserId="15026" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T15:00:46.653" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T16:38:57.607" Title="License for open-sourcing a website theme while disallowing direct reuse" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T14:01:38.617" Score="3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an R package for my employer which will be used as part of the backend of a proprietary web application. We intend to distribute this under some type of open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we license it under AGPL, does that allow us to reference other packages that are licensed under GPL/MIT? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a competitor uses our R package in the backend of a competing application, would they need to open source their entire application in order to remain compliant with our AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this allow us to keep the rest of our application proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better or alternative way to allow our R package to be open source while limiting the possibility that it might be used as part of a competing proprietary application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15029" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T17:55:50.740" Title="Open-source licensing while limiting competitive use" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8324" CreationDate="2019-05-21T14:20:54.483" Score="1" ViewCount="968" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ive been developing a commercial management application for windows in Qt, and im using MySQL as my default DB system. I have a setup file that installs both my software + MySQL on my client's machine (my clients cant seem to know how to install MySQL on their own), it simply copies all the required files (including MySQL's already extracted and shrunk &amp;amp; cleaned files).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But i was wondering about the licensing issue here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My clients are free to use their own MySQL installation of course, or to change the version or anything, but my software includes a default MySQL installation if none was found.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I did some asking around and was told that as long as i mention what database is used, and give the user the freedom to install his own version and use libMySQL.dll instead of embedding it, than there is nothing wrong with including the MySQL installation with my setup.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;PS: SQLite isnt an option because the app can host connections from different clients on the same network and it just doesnt work well with my app + i tried Firebird too and it caused a lot issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, is it okay to include MySQL's installation with my setup ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T18:10:52.453" Title="Including MySQL installation with commercial application" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T15:55:01.703" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally I use the following format,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Photo&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Author&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;License&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Photo&lt;/strong&gt;: Link to where I found the photo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Author&lt;/strong&gt;: Author profile page. For example, flickr profile.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License&lt;/strong&gt;: Link to the license page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, today I came across this image: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikemacmarketing/36588125251/in/photostream/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikemacmarketing/36588125251/in/photostream/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is asking to link to a website that has nothing to do with image. The website did not carry the image nor does he have a profile there. He has specifically asked to not link to his Flickr profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty evident that he is doing so gain links for SEO purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this okay to do? Do authors have the liberty to ask to link to any resource or does the license say anything about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to comply and link to his website to use the image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14136" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T18:09:12.023" Title="Whom to leave link credit while using CC BY images" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8321" CreationDate="2019-05-21T17:11:26.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The image in question is licensed under CC BY 2.0, which requires in section 4(b) [emphasis mine]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; &lt;strong&gt;to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensor has certainly specified a URL to be associated with the work, and it is certainly practicable to include it. However, insofar as the URL &quot;does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work,&quot; it appears the CC BY 2.0  license requirements excuse you from including the URL within the required attribution statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the URL is required, making it a clickable link is probably not enforceable under the license, though perhaps there's an outside chance a court may view linking, when possible, to be necessary to remain &quot;reasonable to the medium&quot; of the Web. Even in such a case, you may use a &lt;code&gt;nofollow&lt;/code&gt; directive in order to thwart any SEO advantage to the author's URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some concerns I have about actually carrying out such an omission in practice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author does not explicitly say they should be attributed by name. It is possible they may argue the URL in question is their pseudonym and is meant to be used in place of their name. (A previous U.S. case determined that &quot;CC BY-SA 3.0&quot; legally qualified as a &quot;license URI&quot; to identify the license in use, so stranger things have happened.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder definitely did state a requirement to link to that URL when reproducing his copyrighted work. The question of how that requirement interacts with the statements in the CC BY 2.0 license document is uncertain and may vary by jurisdiction. There is the legal principle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_corners_(law)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four corners&lt;/a&gt; that limits contract obligations to only those expressed in the contract document, but it is unclear to me how this applies to CC BY, a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T18:09:12.023" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T18:09:12.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8319" CreationDate="2019-05-21T17:55:50.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal of the (A)GPL is to ensure end user freedom, not to limit competitors. These goals do have some overlap but are fundamentally divergent. A pro-freedom license like the AGPL doesn't exactly fit your anti-competitive requirements, and will likely leave you frustrated as it isn't effective for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; goals. For example, MongoDB and Redis stopped using the AGPL in 2018 because the license didn't work for their goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL triggers requirements when others receive a copy of the software. The AGPL additionally triggers requirements when others interact with the software over a network. If none of these cases trigger, you can already use (A)GPL-covered software without any requirements, such as running the software in combination with proprietary parts. (Note that this also means that competitors could use such software without any obligations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write software that is combined with GPL-covered software, you must either (a) not trigger license requirements (like distributing the software), or (b) license it under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this means that your goals (denying your software to competitors) are best served by not publishing your software at all. The GPL does not require you to do so if you only run your software on your own servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do publish your software then we have to discuss GPL versions for a moment. GPLv2 and GPLv3 are fundamentally incompatible, unless there is an upgrade clause such as “or any later version”. GPLv2 and AGPLv2 are incompatible as well. However, GPLv3 may be combined with AGPLv3. This means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have a mix of GPLv2-only and GPLv3-only libraries, you cannot distribute the resulting software. Workarounds like splitting the software into multiple services may be possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have GPLv2-only libraries, the GPLv2 is the strongest open source license you can use for the entire software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have GPLv2-or-later or GPLv3 libraries, you can choose the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 license for the entire software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the (A)GPL is required for the software as a whole, you could license the code that your company wrote under more permissive licenses (e.g. MIT). However, this is at odds with your goal of using a license that is as copyleft as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T17:55:50.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8320" CreationDate="2019-05-21T18:10:52.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine to include the MySQL server in your installer – assuming this is the GPL-covered version, and not a proprietary licensed version from Oracle. The GPL allows you to aggregate the GPL-covered MySQL software alongside your proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you still have to follow the requirements of the GPL. This includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;giving users a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;giving users a copy of the source code of the GPL-covered software (!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must not restrict the user's exercise of their rights under the GPL, for example they should not have to agree to your licensing terms in order to install the GPL-covered software via your installer. Prefer a separate installer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most importantly, your software must be clearly separate from the GPL-covered software. Using separate executables is necessary, using a separate DLL is not enough. Do not confuse guidance that is about the LGPL with your requirements due to the GPL. The LGPL license would give you extra flexibility when using DLLs, but it does not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the MySQL server, you should also consider the licensing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of the MySQL connector&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of the Qt libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are necessarily part of your software. If these are subject to the GPL, you would have to open source your software as well. If you cannot do that, you may have to acquire commercial licenses, or migrate to different libraries. The official MySQL connector is only available under the GPL, which doesn't work for you. Most of Qt is under LGPL which lets you use it from proprietary code (under some requirements), but some modules may be GPLv3 only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T18:10:52.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8310" CreationDate="2019-05-22T07:52:46.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One more bit to consider, a &quot;github fork&quot; project has fewer features available than a standalone (imported) project. You can not post issues to a &quot;github fork&quot; by default (have to go to Settings to enable them), and I believe search is constrained. You do still have a wiki and PRs on a &quot;github fork&quot; out of the box though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This adds technical reasons to make a &quot;true fork&quot; on GitHub for a project that decides to live on its own, even if sharing legacy code with another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15038" LastEditorUserId="15038" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T10:17:09.903" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T10:17:09.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8318" CreationDate="2019-05-22T16:38:57.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No open-source license allows this.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; is the generally-accepted guide by which a license is declared to fit (or not) with the principles of open source. While it doesn't &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; say you can't prevent people from distributing verbatim copies of your work, its wording implies as much. For your work to be licensed as true open source, others must be able to use and distribute it as-is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T16:38:57.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T07:36:12.037" Score="2" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have modified a GPLv3 program to link to libtorch (part of PyTorch). PyTorch is licensed under the BSD-3 clause license. I would like to convey my changes to the original GPLv3 program and the original program together under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the problem is that libtorch has an optional dependency on CUDA and likely other proprietary backends. I assume already that most readings of the GPLv3 would prohibit releasing binaries that depend on proprietary libraries. I have these questions though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I distribute binaries compiled only with BSD-3 licensed portions of the libtorch source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I distribute the source code of my combined work, not including libtorch, with the intent that users compile libtorch on their own and link to my work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I distribute the source code of my combined work with the libtorch source code included?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If 3 isn't possible, can I modify libtorch so as to remove all references to proprietary libraries, and include that with my source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under options 2 and 3, can I openly encourage users to compile with CUDA?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be interpreting the GPL overly strictly here, but I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that has experience using CUDA with the GPL. I understand though, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4278/dynamic-linking-bundling-and-gpl&quot;&gt;some of the questions may not have answers backed by case law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major theoretical issue I can see with some of the above options is that you could (as a way of getting around the GPL) distribute GPLv3 with an &quot;optional&quot; dependency on proprietary software, where your optional dependency is in reality required to use the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15047" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T06:02:02.387" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T06:02:02.387" Title="Linking to libtorch/CUDA from a GPL program" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8281" CreationDate="2019-05-23T08:55:03.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two topics are entirely orthogonal, in my understanding. The debate about whether APIs can be copyrighted is about whether program interfaces are copyrightable even without the implementation of those interfaces. In the case of Oracle v. Google, the question was whether Google could duplicate class and method names without infringing Oracle's copyright. For example, is a method signature like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;void &amp;lt;E&amp;gt; quicksort(List&amp;lt;E&amp;gt; items);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;along with many other similar method signatures protected under copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with ZFS and Linux is unrelated as far as I can tell. In that case, all parties agree that Linux is copyrightable and ZFS is copyrightable because they are more than mere APIs. Instead, Linux and ZFS are implementations of APIs, along with the specification of the APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To continue this point, as an example, I think people who would argue API are not copyrightable would say it would be okay for someone (e.g. Canonical) to completely reimplement ZFS with the same interface and release the reimplementation under any license. If that license were GPLv2 compatible, then it could be released together with Linux with no issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you agree with Kuhn's characterization of &quot;ZFS+Linux&quot; as a combined, derivative work, rather than an aggregation of two separate programs is a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15047" LastEditorUserId="15047" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T09:00:21.120" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T09:00:21.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-23T15:13:31.500" Score="3" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some times I step into software that I believe that is fully-open-source, but then I discover that it actually contains a lot of dependencies (either by the same author, or by different authors) for which the source is not provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid the overhead of manually checking this, I would like to know whether there are some software licenses, which require that there are no closed-source dependencies on the licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15050" LastEditorUserId="15050" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T09:17:32.677" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T09:17:32.677" Title="Which licenses require that the third-party dependencies used by the licensed software are also open-source?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2019-05-23T16:28:52.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no such license. &#xA;Instead of looking for a particular &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt;, it might be better to look at a curated &lt;em&gt;selection&lt;/em&gt; of free software. Debian is notable for rigorously checking the licensing of any software they package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a legal perspective, the problem is that an open source license is generally just an unilateral grant of rights from the author to the public. It doesn't really bind the author, unless the author is also a licensee of more upstream code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dependencies can take on a variety of forms. Depending on context, you might experience non-free dependencies as fine: Would you be OK using a non-free operating system? A non-free SaaS offering? A non-free library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does have language that is relevant here. The GPL requires the complete corresponding source of a GPL-covered binary to be published under the GPL or a compatible license. But the exact effect of this is rather subtle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this does not bind the original author, but binds authors who are also licensees of upstream GPL-covered software&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the original author could always issue an exception to the GPL that allows linking with some non-free component, a bit like the LGPL or Classpath Exception&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this excludes system libraries or general purpose tools such as operating systems or compilers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this excludes freely available software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this only covers code that is part of the software&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is not entirely clear when dependencies form a single software with the GPL-covered code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the FSF thinks that dynamically linked libraries are part of the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but that is only about binaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the source code, merely declaring a dependency likely doesn't count&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this means that it is possible for GPL-covered code to exists that can be distributed only in source form but not in binary form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T16:28:52.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-25T14:40:06.703" Score="2" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;filename:       dc_sunxi.ko&#xA;license:        Dual MIT/GPL&#xA;author:         Imagination Technologies Ltd. &amp;lt;gpl-support@imgtec.com&amp;gt;&#xA;srcversion:     39B570CC4B56A8FFF5C64C3&#xA;depends:        pvrsrvkm,disp&#xA;vermagic:       3.3.0 SMP preempt mod_unload modversions ARMv7 p2v8 &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems kernel modules can be licensed under multiple licenses, such as GPL and MIT. That makes it possible for another developer to choose a license which suits their needs the best. However, it seems that a kernel module which uses internal kernel structures is a derivative work of the Linux kernel and therefore &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; use the GPLv2 as their license. Can another developer legally choose MIT as the license of this module in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15072" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T21:18:46.770" Title="What is the purpose of dual licensed kernel modules?" Tags="|license-compatibility|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8334" CreationDate="2019-05-25T21:18:46.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a derivative work of GPL software has to be licensed under the same license? Almost, but not quite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does require that a software as a whole must be licensed under the GPL if it contains GPL-covered parts, or if it is a modified version of a GPL-covered software. This does not mean that all parts of this software have to be GPLed as well – they merely need a &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a kernel module, it is not at all obvious that the module would be derivative of the kernel. That's for copyright law to decide, not the GPL. It is however more obvious that the module forms a combined work with the kernel at run time, so that it must use a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license clearly is a GPL-compatible license, so this dual license seems fine. However, the module may not include any GPL-covered code – it is not possible to use such a dual license to move GPL-covered code to a more permissive license. Were the modulle to be found derivative of GPL-covered code (such as by using internal kernel APIs) then this would not be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T21:18:46.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-26T08:38:00.687" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if my question is repeated, but I have searched and read allot about this topic and kind of confused and want to make sure at this point. I'm planning to use an open source tool that will be installed on my server, it will be online and users can have access to it. Does that implicate that I have to distribute the source code in this case?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noting that the license is GPL 3 &#xA;If so, how people are using Drupal for example? as I understand this situation, they must distribute their modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15080" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T04:28:33.793" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:21:17.070" Title="Distribution of code of a system that uses open source tool with GPL license" Tags="|gpl|source-code|gnu|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-26T16:21:58.893" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use MySQL JDBC connector (called connector) licensed under GNU GPL V2 to exchange data to and from a MySQL database in my project, as far as i can read, If i add the connector file directly to my project and i decide to sell a copy of this project/application to be run on external servers, i would need to disclose my source code if asked for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as i understand this is because the connector file becomes a part of the larger project/application, and because the connector is licensed under GNU GPL V2 the entire project/application would need to be licensed under the same or similar license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Part 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a thread on stackoverflow i read a comment that said, that if the connector is part of a separate project and you use that project to communicate with the SQL server, only the source code for the project running the connector would need to be disclosed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i use the connector as a datasource managed by the server, so my project would not directly contain the connector file. Would my project than still fall under the GNU GPL V2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15084" LastEditorUserId="15084" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T09:57:34.000" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T09:57:34.000" Title="Using MySQL JDBC connector, when to disclose source code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-27T14:13:34.460" Score="2" ViewCount="486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite confused about what are the obligations of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; libraries in the context of plugin based software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I want to distribute &amp;amp; sell a plugin based app as closed source providing to the users a set of closed source core plugins as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the thing, if both the plugin framework and core plugins are not using any GPL deps and assuming they're not violating license terms of possible deps should not be mandatory to open source any of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here's my question... what happens if some of the plugins (be it plugins either created by the company or by users) use GPL dependencies... Would the GPL dependencies only affect to the plugin(s) or would also infect the host and other closed-source plugins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common sense suggests that only the source code of plugins using GPL deps should be opened but considering GPL is virical &amp;amp; nasty I'm not sure anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if that was the case (which would be crazy), as a user, you could argue companies to open source a whole host app in case you've added a plugin that uses GPL code on a plugin for that host... couldn't you? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You've created a driver for windows that uses GPL code, would Microsoft be forced to open source the OS?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You've created a plugin for SublimeText/VisualStudio/3dsMax/(whatever closed source plugin based software goes here) that uses GPL code, would these companies be forced to open source the hosts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summing up, could anyone clarify here which type of code GPL libraries would infect directly/indirectly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. Reason I've opened this thread is because I've found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/47048/242854&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; and I found it pretty confusing, specially the part where he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) If you do distribute YOUR APPLICATION, and you used something GPL&#xA;  as part of your application (even if only linking at run-time to a&#xA;  library) - and even if you do not charge money - and even if you do&#xA;  not change that GPL s/w in any way - then you MUST make the source of&#xA;  YOUR APPLICATION available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how would you interpret that statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15090" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T01:28:00.007" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T22:59:15.670" Title="Can I use GPL libraries in plugins without infecting a host commercial application?" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8339" CreationDate="2019-05-27T21:47:43.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First GPL is commercial (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Commercial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Commercial&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to answer the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third party, can not affect the licencing of your code. That is if a 3rd party, writes a plugin, then you have not done anything wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you create a plugin system as a way to get around the GPL, then you have not got around it, you are in violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T22:59:15.670" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T22:59:15.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8339" CreationDate="2019-05-28T19:37:04.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question of the form &quot;You've created a plugin for X with GPL'd libraries; can you force X to be open sourced?&quot; -- absolutely not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, what &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be true (see the final paragraph for the corresponding &quot;might not&quot;) is that that plugin cannot be legally distributed in combination with the main program &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; the main program is also under the GPL.  However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;logical implication&lt;/a&gt; &quot;&lt;code&gt;[Distribution of combination is allowed] implies [combination licensed under the GPL]&lt;/code&gt;&quot; does not itself compel the right-hand side of the implication: it simply means that the left-hand side can't be true (i.e., distribution being possible) without the right first being true. (To put it in equivalent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrapositive terms&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;code&gt;[Combination NOT licensed under the GPL] implies [distribution of combination is NOT allowed]&lt;/code&gt;&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that if GPL obligations were to extend to the nonfree main program, distribution would only be possible by GPL-licensing the main program, but this is only a problem for the person who wishes to distribute the combination, not for the author of the nonfree main program who has no intent to distribute your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this problem only arises in the case that the GPL requirements inherent to the plugin extend to the main program at all. Depending on how the plugin system is architected, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite possible that a plugin is legally separate work from its main program&lt;/a&gt;, even when distributed in aggregate with its main program. For closely-related discussion of this topic, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1479/50&quot;&gt;Can plugins for closed source software use GPL&amp;#39;d libraries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T20:58:08.023" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T20:58:08.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T21:47:27.803" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;When attributing open source software, do you always default to the current year or the year that the library you are using was built?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'm using MIT licensed software from a build in 2018, would I include 2018 in the copyright since that it is when it is built or 2019 as the author still asserts their copyright in 2019?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15100" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T04:26:33.160" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:28:02.250" Title="What year to use copyright - current year or library build year?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8353" CreationDate="2019-05-29T12:14:09.233" Score="3" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to release a videogame with a map based on the real map of a city (or part thereof) based on the Open Street Map. It would also include Open Street Map in the game, almost certainly modified. Open Street Map as a tiled map is released on CC SA BY which is compatible with GPL 3. I want to release my game on GPL 3. But there's a problem - Open Street Map &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;as a database&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is released on Open Data Commons Open Database License &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(ODbL)&lt;/a&gt;. This license is share-alike which means I would have to release any derivatives under the same open database license. As far as I know GPL does not allow additional restrictions placed on the released content, and I'm not sure whether I could even release parts of the game (i.e. code and most assets) on GPL and then the map on ODbL. Even if that was ok with GPL, if my work would be considered as a derivative of the map then I would still be bound to release the game on the database license which is unacceptable and also doesn't make any sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I include Open Street Map (MODIFIED - it's important as the license places the restrictions explicitly on modofied derivative works) in a game released on GPL 3 (or GPL 2) for that matter? Am I required to release any game that includes OSM through Open Database License? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;How I use the Open Street Map data --- the map itself (in tile form, released under CC-SA-BY also) as a map (in fragments) of the environment, in addiction the layout of the buildings, streets etc. all serves as the basis (trying to keep it accurate but for obvious reasons it's impossible) of the game map as it takes place in a certain real (postapocalyptic but that's irrelevant) city. So I tried to model specific places, streets and such from the map to specific places in the game. Also I thought it would be a good idea to use the street map (perhaps after some graphical tinkering) as the game's map as it would be both accurate and already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8888" LastEditorUserId="8888" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T12:22:56.820" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T13:02:00.240" Title="Open Data License - connect with GPL" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8337" CreationDate="2019-05-29T12:21:17.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, as long as you do not release the source code or the binary to them, you are not required to release any source code. However there is another license - &lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&lt;/a&gt; which &lt;strong&gt;DOES&lt;/strong&gt; require you to do that and was written explicitly with that in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&#xA;GPL 3 &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; NOT require you to give source code for programs which run only on your server and you are not distributing them&#xA;AGPL 3 &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; require you to give source code for programs which run only on your server and you are not distributing them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8888" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:21:17.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8342" CreationDate="2019-05-29T12:28:02.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not invent your own copyright notices, just use the one displayed by the software in question. This would typically be what you refer to as the “build year”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing a copyright notice, the year should be the &lt;em&gt;year of publication&lt;/em&gt; for this version – neither the current year, nor the year of writing. For some aspects of copyright, the year of first publication is relevant to calculate the copyright term. In most jurisdictions, copyright notices no longer have substantial legal relevance and could also be omitted. (But you may not falsify or remove them!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:28:02.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T13:04:21.983" Score="4" ViewCount="2443" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my master thesis in software engineering I am looking into opensource projects using JIRA as an issue tracking system. However, other than Jenkins and the projects by Apache, it seems that such projects are rare (or at least difficult to find). Does anyone know some other opensource (github) projects that use JIRA for their issue tracking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15107" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T16:14:31.357" Title="Opensource projects using JIRA?" Tags="|github|project-management|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-02-15T21:42:47.640" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8346" CreationDate="2019-05-29T13:31:03.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WildFly project uses both JIRA (&lt;a href=&quot;https://issues.jboss.org/projects/WFLY/issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://issues.jboss.org/projects/WFLY/issues&lt;/a&gt;) and GitHub (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wildfly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/wildfly&lt;/a&gt; ) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15109" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T13:31:03.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8350" CreationDate="2019-05-30T04:21:56.403" Score="0" ViewCount="1069" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks/blob/master/utils/autoban.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub opensource project code&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Executable File  67 lines (60 sloc)  2.42 KB&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in front of the content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what's the meaning of &lt;code&gt;Executable File&lt;/code&gt;? and the &lt;code&gt;sloc&lt;/code&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and when I run it in my PyCharm, there seems nothing happening. what's the function of it? how to use the file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5E6jP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5E6jP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15115" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T08:18:25.230" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T02:56:58.047" Title="what's the meaning of `Executable File `? and the `sloc` of github hint?" Tags="|source-code|terminology|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8349" CreationDate="2019-05-30T05:01:00.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Executable&quot; means, as you guessed, that you can execute this file directly (i.e., it's not just a library or a collection of functions).&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Specifically, this executable is designed to take input from a log being piped in to it. Since you're running it in PyCharm without that piping, it seems like it does nothing. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks/wiki/Ban-Brute-Force-Crackers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the project's wiki entry&lt;/a&gt; for an explanation on how this utility should be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SLOC stands for Source Lines of Code - the number of logical lines of code in the file (as opposed to the number of physical lines). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for some additional details about the differences between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T05:01:00.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8343" CreationDate="2019-05-31T09:05:42.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's still some ambiguity about how your program uses the OSM content; I'm assuming that your code reads the OSM data and renders it to produce environment images that are displayed to the player in the course of his/her playing the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, that makes the OSM content input to your program, and the images part of its output.  Corner cases aside, the licence of an executable program and the licence of that program's inputs and outputs &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;are separate from each other&lt;/a&gt;; compiling proprietary code with &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; neither makes gcc proprietary nor requires the resulting executable to be freely-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSM data that you're shipping needs to be conveyed under ODbL (ODbL 4.2(a)), and your game needs to make it clear that it's using ODbL-covered data (ODbL 4.3).  Your code, in turn, can be under GPL, without your inputs and outputs needing to be so covered.  If the outputs were to be stored and conveyed as a work in their own right, that might complicate matters, but I'm assuming this is unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: IANAL/IANYL, but I don't think you have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T09:05:42.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-31T10:29:17.550" Score="0" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please, could you propose to me what kind of software license fits my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am creating a software project that relies on paid license software. I will release this software for free to help the community. But my users have to buy the software used in my project in order to get the benefit of my project. So kindly share your ideas about what kind of license I can add in this situation to my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15127" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T14:36:29.797" Title="My open source project relies on a paid software" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8354" CreationDate="2019-05-31T14:36:29.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before going too far, I suggest you review the license for the library you are using. Sometimes these licenses impose restrictions on how they can be used with open source. For example, a library may say you can't use it with GPL projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the license doesn't impose any restrictions, I recommend you look at a permissive license (like MIT or Apache 2.0) for your project. It's pretty well understood in the community that these licenses are compatible with closed source commercial software. That analysis is more complicated with restrictive licenses like the GPL and some people may bypass your project as a result. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to encourage adoption and use, consider a permissive license. If you want to ensure that no one uses your code to create and distribute a closed source version of your project (and if the library's license allows it), you should consider a copyleft license like the GPL. But note that this option comes with added complexity for your users. Good luck! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T14:36:29.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8360" CreationDate="2019-05-31T21:31:03.227" Score="3" ViewCount="1242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making use of a library licensed under LGPLv2 in a proprietarily licensed closed-source project. Specifically, I am &lt;em&gt;dynamically&lt;/em&gt; linking my commercial C++ program to a C++ library that is itself distributed under LGPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now as much as I understood, the dynamic linkage makes my software a &quot;work that uses the library&quot; and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work and thus frees me from having to distribute either the source or object code of my own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What isn't entirely clear to me is, &lt;strong&gt;if I have to include attribution to the library (in form of a copyright notice) and, more importantly, a copy of its license as part of my software distribution&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2 license seems to list these requirements under section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the&#xA;  Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by&#xA;  this License.  You must supply a copy of this License.  If the work&#xA;  during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the&#xA;  copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference&#xA;  directing the user to the copy of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where it also lists the whole deal about offering source or object code of my own stuff. But being merely a &quot;work that uses the library&quot; through dynamic linking would seem to make section 6 &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; apply to my software, thus freeing me of any need for attribution and delivering a copy of the license. But being not too well-versed in the intricacies of software lawyering, I want to make sure I didn't miss or missinterpret anything there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(It's not like I have any problem with acknowledging use of the library at all. But anything that doesn't have me include a ton of third party license files into my software distribution is welcome. I also know (or think to know) that I will also have to make the entire source code of the LPGL-licensed library available through an additional venue, which then would of course include the entire license information anyway.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2321" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T10:42:50.227" Title="Do I have to include attribution and license files for an LGPL-licensed library together with a &quot;work that uses the library&quot;?" Tags="|lgpl|license-notice|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-01T02:15:23.660" Score="7" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because copyright law can encompass a huge range of scenarios and be unclear to talk about in abstract terms, I'm going to give concrete examples. I understand CC BY is a permissive license. All it requires is attribution, a copy of the license, and perhaps a list of any modifications made. However my question is about CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have spoken to people who have claimed that using any CC BY-SA content, such as a photo from Wikipedia, requires you to license your work that contains that photo under the same license. They likened it to the GPL license, where once you include any piece of GPL content, then your entire project must be licensed under GPL also (it spreads). First of all, I don't know if this is strictly true in all cases, but I'll move on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC license mentions two terms: &quot;collection&quot; and &quot;adaptation&quot;. The term &quot;derivative work&quot; is something I think was used in earlier versions, but I didn't find it reading the most recent ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now for the concrete examples. There is an Ancient Greek sculpture named Venus de Milo. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo#/media/File:Front_views_of_the_Venus_de_Milo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a photo of it on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and the photo is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use this photo in content of my own, in which cases must I release my ENTIRE work under the same license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I print a large number of and distribute flyers containing a copy of this photo and containing a few paragraphs about its history. I may sell these or give them away for free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I publish a book about Ancient Greek art, and I include a copy of this photo and spend multiple pages discussing the subject of the sculpture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I publish a book on nutrition and a copy of this photo is printed somewhere in the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I publish a book and this photo is featured on the front cover of that book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make a collage poster featuring different works of art, and one of the components is a copy of this photo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make a fictional film that features a copy of this photo. It appears in my film for no longer than 5 seconds and is not related to my film.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make a documentary film about Ancient Greek art and spend a considerable time discussing Venus de Milo, and this photo is shown throughout the film considerably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make a video game where this photo features briefly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make a video game where this photo is seen for considerable periods of time, perhaps as a background. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about the Sharealike component of CC license is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you&#xA;  must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible&#xA;  license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have the terms such as &quot;remix&quot;, &quot;transform&quot; and &quot;build upon the material&quot;. However it says I must distribute my contributions to the original. In all of the 9 examples I've given I don't see how I've &quot;contributed&quot; to the original work. Perhaps if I'd made such modifications such as changing the color, brightness, contrast, crop the photo etc., then I could see this as contributing to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see I am incorporating the content into a larger work. I don't know if this falls into the category of &quot;adaptation&quot;, &quot;collection&quot;, or &quot;derivative work&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a very important point I'd like to know about, let's say I make film that features this photo in it briefly, and I've made modifications to it, is it the modified photo I have to license in the same way, or is it my entire film that I have to license the same way because of this one piece of content which is Sharealike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is a complicated question, but I think the nature of the topic is complicated. I hope I didn't complicate things any more than they need to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, just one final thing. If the answer is that I must make my whole production under the same license because it's a copyleft issue (like the GPL, that spreads), I can give the example of the text on Wikipedia being CC BY-SA, but I doubt anyone would suggest that if I use a quotation from a Wikipedia article that I need to license my entire project or effort under a CC Sharealike license also just because Wikipedia text is licensed in that way. Wikipedia quotes only require an attribution with a link. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15133" LastEditorUserId="15133" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T12:17:11.150" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T15:25:04.573" Title="In which cases must I relicense my product under the CC BY-SA license?" Tags="|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8359" CreationDate="2019-06-01T03:01:44.440" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a C library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JL2210/minilibc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minilibc&lt;/a&gt;) and at the time of releasing it I was unsure as to what license I was going to use, so I left it unlicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've now decided on the LGPLv3+ and am unsure whether or not this is safe or advisable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I license a library as LGPL after it has been released under no license for a while? What will be the implications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15134" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T06:40:32.653" Title="Can I license a library as LGPL after it has been released under no license for a while?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8358" CreationDate="2019-06-01T06:40:32.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you are the only copyright holder on the code of the library, you can freely change the license that is applied to the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the unlicensed version of your library, the rights of others are very limited. They may fork your repository (per the ToS of GitHub), but that is just about where it stops. People are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to make changes or create derived works, which would include applications that use the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When changeing to the LGPL license, you give others more rights. They can make changes, as long as the changed version remains under the LGPL license, and they can use your library in applications of their own. Those applications can be closed-source applications (under condition that users of the application can swap out the library part for another version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T06:40:32.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8356" CreationDate="2019-06-01T10:42:50.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether section 6 applies does not depend on how you link, but on how much of the library is included into your software's binaries. The threshold is that no macro or function in the header may have more than 10 lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2 discusses multiple cases of a “work that uses the library” (WuL), which is defined as being “designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Section 5&lt;/strong&gt; distinguishes between the WuL in isolation, and the result of linking them (which includes the library). The WuL is not derivative of the library, whereas the result of linking may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 allows any kind of linking without further conditions if the linked object code only contains minor parts of the software. Applied to C++, this allows any kind of header files as long as all macros and inline functions are less than 10 lines in length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even dynamic linking has a compile-time component and may copy part of the library into your software's object code, specifically any definitions in a header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that 10 line threshold, the license defines this as a work that includes portions of the library, and you must meet the conditions in &lt;strong&gt;section 6&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have found the correct paragraph that applies to any software that includes portions of the library. Section 6 then requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prominent notice that the library is used in the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;prominent notice that the library and use of this library are covered by the LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if your software shows any copyright notices at run time, you must show the library's copyright notices as well. The library's copyright notice must direct users to a copy of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 then has a further requirement to make the source code of the library available. In case of dynamic linking, 6(b) applies which frees you from further conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case of dynamic linking (whether under section 5 and/or 6) you still have to copy the library. The conditions for this are given in section 4, which just includes the usual GPL stuff like providing the corresponding source of the library. But such requirements are separate from possible attribution requirements within your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that all open source licenses that I know of have an attribution component. A few licenses waive this where the covered software is only used as object code, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPLv2, LGPLv3 (under the 10 line threshold, as discussed above)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boost license (explicit exclusion for object code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arguably, the ISC license (the license must appear in all copies, but doesn't have to be human-readable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the specific requirements, attribution of included third party software is a best practice, and does not have to be overwhelming. Web browsers like Chrome or Firefox are a fairly good example of managing a large number of open source attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T10:42:50.227" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-01T12:07:10.413" Score="5" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;These questions can easily devolve into philosophizing, so let me be concrete:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is open source software &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; licensed under the GNU General Public License (v2 or later).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; runs as a stand-alone Java socket server process, i.e. &lt;code&gt;java -cp x-gpl.jar edu.x.SocketServer -port 8000 …&lt;/code&gt; . &lt;strong&gt;No modifications needed nor done&lt;/strong&gt;, this is how &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; works out of the box.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm calling this socket server from my own program &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both the socket server &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; and my program &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt; processes run inside Docker (Ubuntu Linux), launched from that Docker's &lt;code&gt;supervisord.conf&lt;/code&gt; on container startup.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to distribute this Docker image to 3rd parties, as a commercial proprietary application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question is, is &lt;strong&gt;this particular combination of &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt; and Docker&lt;/strong&gt; in line with GPL v2 or later? Does it constitute derivate work, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aggregate work&lt;/a&gt;, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL Section 5&lt;/a&gt; sense? Does my program &lt;code&gt;Y&lt;/code&gt; or the entire distributed Docker image need to be licensed as GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy to provide additional details if relevant, but please avoid irrelevant tangents. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other related (but overly generic) questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/264773/the-term-aggregate-in-gpl3&quot;&gt;The term “aggregate” in GPL3&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4677/are-all-docker-images-free-i-e-gpl&quot;&gt;Are all docker images free (i.e. GPL)?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7078/is-it-legal-to-use-gpl-code-in-a-proprietary-closed-source-program-by-putting-i&quot;&gt;Is it legal to use GPL code in a proprietary, closed-source program by putting it in a separate, standalone program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ifross.org/en/program-forks-gpl-licensed-program-system-or-vice-versa-call-derivative-work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is a program that forks a GPL-licensed program via a system or vice versa call derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15136" LastEditorUserId="15136" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T12:17:33.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T13:41:06.160" Title="Calling GPL'ed socket server inside Docker?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8361" CreationDate="2019-06-01T13:41:06.160" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;X and Y clearly are separate programs. Your program Y is not subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The container image is an aggregate of various software. When distributing the image, you have to comply with the licenses of all software in this image. Some parts of the image (including software X and parts of Ubuntu) are subject to the GPL. So you have to comply with the GPL with respect to these parts. Debian/Ubuntu has built-in mechanisms to include the licenses and get the corresponding source, so your compliance requirements are mainly confined to including a license and the source for software X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of complying with the GPL, you must not restrict end user's exercise of their rights under the GPL. For example, users must be free to make copies of the GPL-covered components. That means you cannot place the image as a whole under a proprietary license. But you can license your software Y under whatever terms you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find container image licensing so tricky that I would never want to do it. Instead, consider only distributing your software + a Dockerfile, so that users can build their own images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T13:41:06.160" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2019-06-02T10:41:02.700" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a lot of questions for one post, and you don't say what jurisdiction you're in.  Nevertheless, and noting that IANAL/IANYL, I'll try to answer at least some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My principal authority is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150820/10343532017/photographer-loses-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-against-mapmaker-that-used-his-photo-with-his-explicit-permission.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group&lt;/a&gt;.  As I said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7974/458&quot;&gt;an earlier reference to this case&lt;/a&gt;, the writeup linked is rather emotive and misspells the plaintiff's name throughout.  Nonetheless, it has the summary correct: the use of a CC-BY-SA image as the main cover photo for a book made neither the entire book nor the cover alone a derivative work of the cover photo. As the judgement put it, &quot;&lt;em&gt;the Court finds that neither the atlas nor its cover constitutes a derivative work subject to the ShareAlike requirement&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  This isn't a binding authority anywhere, but it's one of the few guiding lights we have on how this issue might be litigated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this basis, my answer to your question 4 is no, you do not have to release your entire work CC-BY-SA if you use the photo on the cover.  Similarly, I feel you would not have to release the entire work CC-BY-SA in cases 3, 2, 1, 8, and 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cases 7 and 9 I just don't know.  I'm aware of no authority that sheds &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; light on such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 5 is to me the thorniest of all, because being a mashup, and a work of similar type (2D art), it is most arguably a derivative work of all the component artworks that go into it.  If you produced for sale a similar work featuring lots of unlicensed reproductions of images of great works of art, I suspect that the museums holding the copyrights would come down on your head.  So my guess is that the whole collage would need to be released CC-BY-SA in order to be a lawful use of the photo in question, but it's only a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T15:25:04.573" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T15:25:04.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8366" CreationDate="2019-06-02T10:01:19.280" Score="1" ViewCount="1366" Body="&lt;p&gt;For embedded system projects which have small hardware using MCU's and sensors and use open source c-source codes. How will it make a difference if my license is an MIT or a GNU licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="jackly" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:05:11.243" Title="MIT vs GNU licences for Embedded system projects" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8365" CreationDate="2019-06-02T10:18:02.493" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking this from an electrical engineer's perspective, which puts all this in the context of building electronic devices and handing them to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very simple: If you give anybody a device with GPL software on it, you must offer the source code at no additional expense (aside from the physical cost of copying the source code, which should be effectively zero these days) to them, especially including all your modification to it, and all the build infrastructure needed to build that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT doesn't require that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses require you to let the receiver of the device including the software know that the software is licensed under MIT or GPL terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is more &quot;dispersive&quot;: when you write software that builds upon GPL code (e.g. you use a GPL library to calculate coordinates), that software becomes copyleft, too, and you'll need to also offer that software's source code to the receiver of the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that there are multiple versions, especially of the GPL, and some contain specific exceptions. So, you need to make an individual case for each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, most complex embedded consumer devices you know run a lot of Free &amp;amp; Open Source Software – for example, the Linux kernel powering both your Android phone and probably your airplane seat TV and quite likely your internet router and … is GPL'ed. Your smart TV contains probably copious amounts of LGPL, MIT, Apache licensed code. The Arduino Platform itself is LGPL/GPL. The arm mbed operating system, which is relatively popular in IoT devices, is Apache Licensed; FreeRTOS, one of the very most popular emdedded operating systems for smaller, real-time devices, is MIT-licensed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note: if you're not giving your device to anyone (paid or not), but are keeping it to yourself, there's no differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, note that in the world of hardware description languages (e.g. Verilog, VHDL), things are a bit fuzzy when it comes to the effects of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" OwnerDisplayName="Marcus Müller" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T19:05:11.243" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:05:11.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-02T20:07:20.683" Score="33" ViewCount="7323" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, MongoDB introduced a new license called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; following some conflicts with AWS. Later they presented this license to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval for it to be called an 'open source' license. But as this license does not meet the open source definition given by the OSI, they simply rejected it. Now the question is: can MongoDB (or someone else) just 'call' SSPL an 'open source license'? Or is it a trademark owned by OSI? Will they get sued for just calling it that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: I am aware of this newly coined term so called 'Source Available', and my question is not on this, but on being called &quot;Open Source&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13749" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T14:59:14.193" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T14:59:14.193" Title="Is the term 'open source' a trademark?" Tags="|terminology|trademark|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8367" CreationDate="2019-06-02T21:47:03.773" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI failed to secure a trademark on &quot;open source&quot; in 1999&lt;/a&gt;, and the term remains not trademarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use &quot;open source&quot; to mean virtually anything you want, without legal ramifications, but to use it in a way that contravenes the OSI's definition may put you at significant social disadvantage with anyone who enjoys the culturally consistent understanding of &quot;open source&quot; to mean &quot;in compliance with the OSI's definition.&quot; For a major player like MongoDB to do so would be tantamount to all-out culture warfare, which might not be to their advantage (or to the advantage of many, many other players in the FLOSS community).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;source available&quot; is not a new term, but has long been used by the OSI and others to indicate the public availability of source code, versus use of a license in compliance with the OSI's definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T22:36:04.590" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T22:36:04.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8367" CreationDate="2019-06-02T21:56:34.620" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;International trademarks can be searched online in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wipo.int/branddb/en/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WIPO Global Brand Database&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“open source” is trademarked in some areas, none relevant for software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OSI holds a US trademark for “Open Source Initiative Approved License”, but no trademark for “open source” by itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So from a &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; perspective, anyone could use this term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from an &lt;em&gt;open source software community&lt;/em&gt; perspective, the OSI is the arbiter of what counts as open source. They are the steward of the Open Source Definition, just as the FSF is the steward of the Free Software Definition. Technically, the term “open source” was not coined by the OSI. But OSI was immediately founded to promote that term, so for all practical purposes this is the OSI's term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a community consideration, calling something “open source” against the decisions of the OSI would look bad and pointless. It would demonstrate ill will towards precisely that community which is interested in (real) open source or free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Unfortunately”, the open source movement has become so popular that it's also a nice brand, and some actors do seem to try to usurp this brand for their purposes. This has had mixed success. In response, OSI has run a campaign to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/OSD_Affirmation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reaffirm&lt;/a&gt; that the OSI's Open Source Definition defines open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T21:56:34.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T22:38:08.227" Score="4" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;As part of a survey (collecting environmental data from the public) my participants can choose to provide their name or to contribute anonymously. Part of the survey includes submission of photos that we wish to be able to reuse under the terms of a CC-BY license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with that license we need to acknowledge the source of the photos wherever they are re-used - which is fine for named contributors, but potentially problematic for users who wish to remain anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be a problem that many others have encountered, what is the simplest solution that respects the licence but avoids too much special-case legalise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can an anonymous CC-BY work be legitimately 'acknowledged' using something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;anonymous my_survey participant&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there a simple way to allow CC0 to be applied to anonymous photos while using CC-BY for the rest? Excessive legalise will scare away many of my users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15156" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T07:54:15.720" Title="Use of Creative Commons licenses by an anonymous user" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8372" CreationDate="2019-06-04T07:54:15.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC licenses – and copyright&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in general – allow the creator/artist/author to opt out of attribution. The creator can decide under which name or pseudonym they should be attributed, or whether they would prefer not to be associated with the work at all. For you, this might be a simple checkbox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you upload a photo, you agree to license it under the CC-BY 4.0 license. This allows anyone to use the photo for any purpose, as long as they attribute you. How would you like to be attributed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [x] attribute photo to __________ (your name)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [_] stay anonymous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion of attributing to “anonymous my_survey participant” is fine.&#xA;In digital media, the attribution can also link to a page that is about the licensed work. For example, you could link to a page about your survey. Technically, the CC licensor (the author) can decide this, but I don't think there could reasonably be any different link target in the context of your survey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allof this is fine for the creator, but what about you? How do you know that you received a valid CC license? What if the survey contributor does not hold the necessary rights to the photo? You may very well want to keep contact information for the contributors on file, even if you don't show this info publicly. This isn't directly about the licensing, more about CYA. Some jurisdictions require you to be able to trace the licensing chain from the author to you. Others might have safe harbour laws that shield you from liability for user-contributed content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. That attribution or &lt;em&gt;moral rights&lt;/em&gt; are part of copyright is a comparatively European, authors-rights oriented view. It is not generally part of US-style copyright.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T07:54:15.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8377" CreationDate="2019-06-04T08:23:29.577" Score="1" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say heic is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format#Patent_licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patented image format&lt;/a&gt;.  There is an open source implementation of heic called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/strukturag/libheif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;libheif&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  GIMP use it to edit heic images, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/eog/issues/36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;development team of Eye of Gnome(EOG) refuse to support heic&lt;/a&gt; because GPL license doesn't include a patent license.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1. What is the relation between patent protected format and open source implementation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;2. Do I need to pay royalty fee to use patent protected format when the software I use is free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15159" LastEditorUserId="15159" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T05:24:57.330" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T07:56:16.213" Title="Is open source license compatible with a patent-encumbered standard?" Tags="|gpl|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8393" CreationDate="2019-06-04T09:31:23.190" Score="8" ViewCount="4331" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we have been discussing the implications of the GNU AGPL/GPL 3.0 license on our distributed code. I will make things, extremely simple. I hope. We will use AGPL in this example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will write code. Our main application we will call -A-. -A- will be built with Docker via a Dockerfile (code will be copied into the image) and then the image will be run to create a running container. The code in -A- will try and connect to a broker on ip x.x.x.x port xxxx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Dockerfile will be built on Debian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will now use a Docker image which has the license GNU AGPL 3.0. This is the broker that -A- will try and connect to. We will call this broker -Broker-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will have a docker-compose file in the code as well. Which will run the -Broker- image to create a running container, and then of course, run the -A- image to create a container which will then connect to the -Broker-. So everything consists of two images (-A- and the -Broker-) and some helper files (docker-compose and some scripts and docker-engine) to get those two images running. We will call all of this together our -Product-.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I am very clear so far. We have only made code adjustments to -A- and the helper files. The only line specifying any relation to the -Broker- image is the following, which lies in the helper file code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;docker run --name broker the-agpl-licensed-image /bin/bash&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Would the above line cause the entire -Product- to be licensed under GNU AGPL 3.0?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to DISTRIBUTE our -Product-, which consists of the -A- image TOGETHER with the -Broker- image and the helper files in a tar file and sell this commercially. So the customer will not be downloading the -Broker- image, it will be included in the tar file they will receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Would the above inclusion of the -Broker- image file in the tar cause the entire -Product- to be licensed under GNU AGPL 3.0?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3)&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;If instead of including the actual -Broker- file in the tar, and instead let the customer download it (when executing the &lt;code&gt;docker run&lt;/code&gt; command in the helper files), would this cause the entire -Product- to be licensed under GNU AGPL 3.0?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We wish to sell this commercially and not have to disclose the source code to the customer. I hope you understand how everything relates to each other in our product. I find everything revolving around copyleft to be confusing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14967" LastEditorUserId="14967" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T10:13:30.907" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T20:01:25.383" Title="GNU AGPL/GPL 3.0 and Docker containers" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|agpl-3.0|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8374" CreationDate="2019-06-04T11:53:23.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You lucky person, you have wandered into the minefield which is engendered by the use of the term &lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt; to treat three different areas of law - copyright, trademark, and patent law - as if they were all one big thing (and a thing analogous to real estate law, to boot).  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RMS writes&lt;/a&gt; about this at more length elsewhere, but what this comes down to is that copyrights, patents, and trademarks are three different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A piece of software can embody all three at once.  Even if you have a copyright licence to use such a piece of software, that licence may say nothing about the patent and/or trademarks therein.  If you don't have a licence to use the patent implementation and/or trademarks in a way that would otherwise be infringing, then even though you're not infringing the author's copyright, you still may not use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recent free software licences, especially those written since it became clear that software patents were a problem, often mention patents, and function as both copyright and patent licences.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s11 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and similarly &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache v2&lt;/a&gt; s3 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of&#xA;  this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,&#xA;  worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable&#xA;  (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,&#xA;  use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with GPLv2 is that it was written some time ago, and its mention of patents is limited to preventing them from being used as a shield against a GPL infringment claim by someone who refuses to honour the source-distribution requirements of GPLv2 on the grounds that it would infringe one of their patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to your particular case, libheif says it &quot;is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License&quot;.  It doesn't says which version, which is unhelpful, as LGPLv3 is a set of deltas to GPLv3, and doesn't remove the patent grant therein.  So LGPLv3, as I read it, includes the necessary patent grant language, while LGPLv2.1 doesn't.  This, however, is not helpful if the author of libheif doesn't hold any of the patents in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyrights and patents are orthogonal.  Open-source, aka free, software, is &lt;em&gt;au fond&lt;/em&gt; a copyright issue; some free licences, as we have seen, include patent grants; others don't.  Knowing that your software is free doesn't tell you whether you have a patent grant; you will have to read the licence to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the free software you're using infringes some third-party patent, you may not lawfully use it.  The patent holder might permit you to purchase a license to use the patent as embodied by the software, but they also might not; it's up to them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T07:56:16.213" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T07:56:16.213" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-04T13:42:04.283" Score="7" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;For software preservation reasons, I've been trying to sort out the licensing for a lot of 40-year-old CP/M code with an intent to liberate as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back then formal licensing was very rare, and what we now call open source was handled on a very informal basis by 'public domain' libraries. (Very little was actually public domain.) People would donate things they wrote to the libraries for redistribution. Except, there was hardly ever any kind of &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of the kind of thing I'm dealing with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;;***********************************************************************&#xA;; MICROCOSM ASSOCIATES  8080/8085 CPU DIAGNOSTIC VERSION 1.0  (C) 1980&#xA;;***********************************************************************&#xA;;&#xA;;DONATED TO THE &quot;SIG/M&quot; CP/M USER'S GROUP BY:&#xA;;KELLY SMITH, MICROCOSM ASSOCIATES&#xA;;3055 WACO AVENUE&#xA;;SIMI VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, 93065&#xA;;(805) 527-9321 (MODEM, CP/M-NET (TM))&#xA;;(805) 527-0518 (VERBAL)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/SIGM/VOLS000/VOL005/CPUDIAG.ASM&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/SIGM/VOLS000/VOL005/CPUDIAG.ASM&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: it's got a an actual copyright declaration; there's a statement that it's been donated to a user's group; there's no actual license; the original author is unlocatable and potentially dead; the user's group itself has no formal licensing or even documentation other than a few text files describing which archival tool to use, and no longer exists outside archives (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/SIGM/VOLS000/VOL000/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/SIGM/VOLS000/VOL000/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is actually unusually clear, as there's a statement in the source that it was actually donated. Frequently there isn't.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been very cautious and have been going by the principle that if I can't locate the actual author and persuade them to put a real open source license on it, I can't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this actually true? Is there any basis behind the frequently-expressed opinion that as it's been freely distributed for 40 years then it's legally safe to continue to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure there isn't: while you could plausibly argue that the author's intent is clear, in that they wanted the software distributed, there's nothing indicating the terms of distribution. (Non-commercial use only statements were pretty common back then.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm an engineer, and tend to think in terms of rules. Second opinion, please? I'd love to be wrong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15163" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T08:28:18.960" Title="Handling very old implicitly licensed code" Tags="|licensing|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8378" CreationDate="2019-06-05T08:16:49.793" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There might be such a thing as implicitly-licensed code, but if there is, old age doesn't make it so.  Under the Berne Convention, the exploitation rights to any creative work are reserved from the moment of the work's creation.  Old code whose current rightsholder is unclear is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;abandonware&lt;/a&gt;; like any other copyright work which has not been clearly relicensed, the rights in it don't disappear until the normal expiration of copyright.  In the EU, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Works_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orphan Works Directive&lt;/a&gt; has made tentative moves towards dealing with the problem for some classes of work, but it's not clear that it covers software, and in any case it permits a rightsholder to emerge down the road and terminate a work's orphan status.  The US lacks even this tentative approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You clarify that you're interested in getting this into Debian, by which I presume you mean into &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt;.  I think you're right to note that it is vanishingly unlikely that any rightsholder will emerge to claim ownership of this code, but Debian are famously punctilious about freedom.  Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt; guideline one requires that the work be freely redistributable, and abandonware isn't, I doubt that you will be successful.  &lt;code&gt;non-free&lt;/code&gt; seems to me to be a perfect place in Debian for such works, but I'm no expert on the Debian ecosystem and I could well be wrong about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T08:28:18.960" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T08:28:18.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8380" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8381" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:23:59.543" Score="3" ViewCount="496" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the MIT license is suitable for code and its associated documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is it suitable for an open source specification (without any code)? Or should I use a different license (and what license in that case)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I create an open source implementation of my specification, must I include both an MIT license for the code and the license of the specification I'm implementing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15169" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T04:36:15.540" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T04:36:15.540" Title="Is MIT license suitable for an open source specification?" Tags="|licensing|mit|specifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8380" CreationDate="2019-06-05T12:35:03.883" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;must I include [...] an MIT license for the [...] license of the specification I'm implementing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Categorically, no. The license of the text of a specification has zero influence on the license of any implementations of the specification. You can have an GPL implementation of a proprietary specification, and you can have a proprietary implementation of a GFDL specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exceptions to this would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anything where you copy example code from the specification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T12:35:03.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8383" CreationDate="2019-06-06T12:27:00.207" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are currently developing an open source project using the MIT license, and we'd like to incorporate Microsoft's Visual Studio 2017 icons, which can be found here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35825&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35825&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we're not entirely sure if the associated license permits us to use these images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we upload individual images with the project online that the users will be able to access? Do we have to include their license if we do? Or is it prohibited entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15183" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T13:41:31.567" Title="Question about whether license allows inclusion in open source project" Tags="|mit|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8382" CreationDate="2019-06-06T13:41:31.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The link you gives allows access to the Visual Studio 2017 Image Library EULA.  It's a bit of a mess, referring to images as &lt;em&gt;Distributable Code&lt;/em&gt; and making references to &lt;em&gt;the software&lt;/em&gt; throughout.  Still, as I read it (and note that IANAL/IANYL) you may distribute the images alongside MIT-licensed code, but you may not distribute the images themselves under the MIT licence.  Moreover, the licence terms you must distribute the images under are sufficiently onerous that they may dissuade others from accepting and using your code, if it means accepting the images alongside it; the whole process may also mean you have to require your users to undergo some kind of click-through acceptance of the image licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I base this on s2b of the EULA, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The software contains images that you are permitted to distribute (“Distributable Code”) in applications you develop as described in this Section&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For any Distributable Code you distribute, you must ... require distributors and external end users to agree to terms that protect the Distributable Code at least as much as this agreement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in addition s6, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may not work around any technical limitations in the software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any piece of software that you couldn't improve would be regarded as non-free, and since you may not improve it, and you are required to get others to agree to similar terms, this content is non-free.  s3 of the EULA also prevents the images from being incorporated into copyleft-licensed software, which further rules out distributing them under the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T13:41:31.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8387" CreationDate="2019-06-07T03:18:16.690" Score="0" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an open source Android app that has push notifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background#services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.android.com/about/versions/oreo/background#services&lt;/a&gt; correctly, &lt;strong&gt;Android 8 forces me to use Firebase&lt;/strong&gt;, or otherwise tells the user that my app is misbehaved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem&lt;/strong&gt;: The Firebase Android client library is &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.firebase/firebase-client-android&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not open source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to make sense of this situation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Any solution for all open source developers like me? I want to keep push notification features in Android 8 while also remaining 100% open source and not being stigmatized as misbehaved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Push notifications are needed by all messaging apps, for instance. Telegram-FOSS recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/blob/master/Notifications.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;raised&lt;/a&gt; this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Related but different: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2568/what-firebase-license-should-i-include-in-my-app&quot;&gt;What firebase license should I include in my app?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:50:03.190" Title="Push notifications for Android 8 open source app" Tags="|proprietary-code|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8386" CreationDate="2019-06-07T10:30:52.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, this explains much.  I've recently taken to using &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.riot.im/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;riot.im&lt;/a&gt; for E2E-encrypted instant messaging on my Android phone.  It's aggressively open source (they have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-Droid&lt;/a&gt; link on their front page), and also under fairly intensive and well-funded development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it persists in showing a notification at the top of my screen, and from time to time insists on warning me about battery consumption.  I wasn't too worried, but the Telegram document you link to explains all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since one can't use Google's push messaging in a FOSS app, Telegram-FOSS has to show you a notification to keep the background service running. Otherwise, you wouldn't be notified about new messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sadly, if the app would set the notification to lower priority (to hide it a bit in the lower part of the notification screen), you would immediately get a system notification about Telegram &quot;using battery&quot;, which is confusing and is the reason for this not being the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I conclude that, at least for the moment, free-software people are just not using Google's push messaging.  Maybe Google will relax on Firebase licensing, maybe they'll change the rules about background apps, maybe the free-software community (I run Lineage OS) will get fed up and fix Android themselves.  But currently, short of guiding your users to lower the priority of the resulting notification, and likewise the the battery warning that results from &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;, I don't think anyone has a workaround.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T10:30:52.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8346" CreationDate="2019-06-09T07:05:55.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sonatype&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jira for Issues: &lt;a href=&quot;https://issues.sonatype.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://issues.sonatype.org/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Nexus OSS: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-public&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/sonatype/nexus-public&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JFrog&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jira for issues: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jfrog.com/jira&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.jfrog.com/jira&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Code on GitHub: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jfrog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jfrog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15088" LastEditorUserId="15088" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T05:52:06.387" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T05:52:06.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-09T07:18:35.823" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are websites made with Google Sites compatible with GPL 3.0? A prospective user can create a web site with Google Sites using the web editor, but the HTML output, which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be interprited as the source code, is ultimately delegated to Google's proprietary engine, unless I am misunderstanding something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, should such a site be given a &amp;quot;View Only&amp;quot; link on Google Drive, a user who wishes to could make a functional copy of the site, and modify it as they wish, once again, using the Google Sites/ drive editor. Does the use of Google's proprietary software make such a site ineligible for GPL use, given that the HTML source is not available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, for Google Docs, does the fact that you essentially have to open the original Document on the proprietary docs software make it ineligible for use of the GPL open documentation/ publication license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, I am looking between the GPL and the GFDL and trying to see which license is appropriate for the website that I am making via GSuite. The site will read potentially like a technical whitepaper in a lot of regards; most of the site will be Google Docs documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the GFDL, there is a section regarding &amp;quot;Transparent&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Opaque&amp;quot; documents, which spawned my curiosity about the qeustion. Taken from version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;Transparent&amp;quot; copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup, or absence of markup, has been arranged to thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. An image format is not Transparent if used for any substantial amount of text. A copy that is not &amp;quot;Transparent&amp;quot; is called &amp;quot;Opaque&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML, PostScript or PDF designed for human modification. Examples of transparent image formats include PNG, XCF and JPG. Opaque formats include proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally available, and the machine-generated HTML, PostScript or PDF produced by some word processors for output purposes only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure is that is even imposing a restriction or not on the types of formats I choose, but I would think that the benefit of using the GPL would be that it doesn't seem to have any similar clause, and like commentors have said, the output of a program is licensed differently than the program required to make the output, so I'm thinking GPL 3.0 is the way to go. By the way, I don't think GFDL and GPL3 are compatible...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about algorithms provided via Collabratory? Those are licenseable via GPL3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user15191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T12:55:36.063" Title="License Comptatibility with GSuite?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|website|documentation|gfdl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8346" CreationDate="2019-06-10T07:23:27.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;jfrog is another one, they have OSS projects on GitHub: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jfrog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jfrog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they use Jira for issues: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jfrog.com/jira&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.jfrog.com/jira&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15088" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T07:23:27.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8375" CreationDate="2019-06-10T19:58:18.083" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your scenario, the AGPL is unlikely to have substantial effect.&#xA;(1) The AGPLv3 is identical to the GPLv3 except for a clause about remote network interaction.&#xA;(2) Container images are usually an aggregate of different softwares. It is more useful to analyse the licensing those softwares themselves rather than as the combined image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The AGPL is basically just the GPL&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPLv3 is exactly the same as the GPLv3, except for the section about remote network interaction. The section about remote network interaction only triggers if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you modified the AGPLv3-covered software; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users interact with the modified software over a network&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the section does not seem to trigger because you have not modified the Broker software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore: in the context of this question, the AGPLv3 behaves exactly the same as the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if this weren't the case, the AGPLv3's remote network interaction section does not change to which software the AGPLv3 would apply. The A/GPLv3 only applies to &lt;em&gt;derived works&lt;/em&gt; of the A/GPLv3-covered software, and not to other software that connects to it or is distributed alongside in an “aggregate”. (By the way, no open source license would restrict such other software, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSD #9&lt;/a&gt;. Any attempts to create a microservice-copyleft are flawed because copyright simply doesn't have that kind of power.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are merely connecting to the Broker via its unmodified network interface, and are not using any A/GPLv3-licensed connector in your software, then I don't see how the AGPLv3 could apply to your proprietary software. They are clearly separate programs. Your software is in no way derived from the broker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Images are just archive files&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is misleading to look at container images as a pre-linked program. It is more correct to view the container image as a file system image plus a bunch of metadata. Such a file system image is not fundamentally different from a TAR or ZIP archive.&#xA;I therefore think it is better to talk about the individual licenses of the software in an image rather than about a singular image license. (Furthermore, an image may be an aggregate of incompatibly-licensed software, such as Apache 2 and GPLv2, or CDDL and GPL – then, no single image license could exist.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As hinted at above, the A/GPLv3 allows you to distribute A/GPLv3 covered software alongside other software, without the A/GPLv3 affecting the license of this software. They are completely separate softwares, they just happen to be stored on the same filesystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do however have to comply with the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the software in your images and TAR files. In the case of A/GPLv3 covered software, this means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must not limit the recipient's rights regarding the A/GPLv3 covered software. For example: you may sell the A/GPLv3 software, but you must not prohibit modification or resale of the A/GPLv3 covered components.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must keep any legal notices intact and provide a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must provide the source code for the A/GPLv3 covered components&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar requirements exist for all other licenses in the GPL license family as well. The Apache 2 and BSD licenses may trigger notice requirements. Note that a Debian system contains &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of such software, but that Debian has a built-in system to manage licenses, notices, and source code. Your compliance requirements are therefore limited mainly to the software that you add to an image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your planned distribution model seems fine, provided that you otherwise comply with the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; Would your entire product fall under the AGPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your product consists of multiple separate programs, of which one is AGPLv3-covered. The mere use of AGPLv3-covered software is not sufficient to make your entire product derived of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; Would having the user download the AGPLv3 software be easier than bundling it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your compliance requirements are the same either way. Whether you bundle the AGPLv3-covered software or have the user download it from you, your software either is derivative of A/GPL covered software, or it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T19:58:18.083" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-10T22:49:50.177" Score="0" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be &lt;strong&gt;technically (legally) possible&lt;/strong&gt; for the Linux kernel developers to create a new license (similar to GPLv2) but different in the sense that hardware manufacturers are prohibited from distributing future versions of the Linux kernel with their product if they do not open source their latest drivers' source code for the device?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15200" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-08-27T19:35:41.890" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T19:35:41.890" Title="Technically possible to prohibit closed source drivers with Linux?" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-11T08:09:50.973" Score="7" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2244/2829&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer (correct me if I'm wrong), copyleft software licenses don't do much when applied to hardware. Unlike software which is protected by copyright in any form, HDL/CAD hardware is transformed to &quot;circuit&quot; / &quot;netlist&quot; / &quot;layout&quot; when compiled, and these cannot be copyrighted. As a result, one can make a hardware device based on modified open-source blocks, and they are not required to release their modifications if they produce and distribute a physical product (unless the hardware blocks are also protected by a patent):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Legally, you can use copyright to protect your drawings, but you can't protect the actual circuit, nor the PCB layout, and therefore you can't insist on share-alike clauses to be followed. What we are left with is a &quot;social contract&quot;, i.e. a statement that a design is shared for general use but please be nice and share your modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tapr.org/TAPR_Open_Hardware_License_v1.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TAPR license&lt;/a&gt; which seems to require exactly that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; *  You may distribute products you make to third parties, if you either&#xA;  include the documentation on which the product is based, or make it&#xA;  available without charge for at least three years to anyone who requests&#xA;  it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is Arduino (licensed under CC BY-SA) which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;states&lt;/a&gt; in their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deriving the design of a commercial product from the Eagle files for an Arduino board requires you to release the modified files under the same Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. You may manufacture and sell the resulting product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I understand these clauses correctly and are they really enforceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T08:26:35.497" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T20:30:01.457" Title="Are there open source hardware licenses that require publishing modified sources when a physical product is distributed?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8394" CreationDate="2019-06-11T12:29:51.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is no one group that holds &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyrights to the kernel code.  Hundreds if not thousands of contributors and corporations, all of which must OK re-licensing the kernel.  Given that some are dead, etc. that likely won't happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it is already a requirement to release via GPLv2 any kernel code or modifications.  This means the closest you'll get to a proprietary driver in the kernel is a F/OSS wrapper to a binary blob, much like the NVidia drivers or wireless drivers/firmware using the &lt;code&gt;ndiswrapper&lt;/code&gt; utility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that on a technical level, the kernel will complain (and loudly) about being tainted with non-free code if you are using a wrapper and non-free binary blob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T12:29:51.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8395" CreationDate="2019-06-12T07:59:01.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern electronic products are a combination of hardware and software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firmware&lt;/a&gt; is software that is &quot;burnt&quot; into hardware, that may or may not be modifiable, which controls the functionality of the hardware. Whether the software is stored in a temporary medium such as hard drive or flash memory, or permanently etched into an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ASIC&lt;/a&gt;, it is still software, developed using source code like any other software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you build a desktop computer and install GPL software on it you need to provide access to the source code. Get a raspberry pi and install a linux kernel onto a flash card and you still need to comply with the GPL. Using the same software to burn an eprom or program an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FPGA&lt;/a&gt; doesn't get around the need to comply with the GPL terms, you are distributing a binary copy that was generated from the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using dedicated languages to design hardware components has little difference to installing software on a temporary storage device, only the method of storage differs. If the source used to create the component is licensed under terms that require providing access to the source code, it should be just as enforceable as any &quot;standard&quot; software distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A persons ability to make use of HDL files may still be rather limited today, but then walking around with a computer in your hand was an absurd thought 20 years ago. Hardware you design today could be the basis of consumer personalised hardware next year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I am not a lawyer and my opinion has little merit, until someone takes it to court and gets a legal ruling one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T07:59:01.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8394" CreationDate="2019-06-12T18:31:39.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL already limits, to the maximum extent possible under copyright law, the ability to include proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel. Kernel drivers already must be licensed under the GNU GPL in order to be distributed within Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The workaround that you are concerned about in asking this question is the practice of a including a &quot;wrapper&quot; kernel driver that is designed to link to or otherwise execute a non-GPL-licensed &quot;binary blob&quot; of code, external to the driver itself. In this case, the legal reality is either that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The binary blob is part of the same work, under copyright law, as the GPL-licensed driver, in which case it is indeed a GPL violation to distribute the blob without source. Such a legal conclusion, if true, would satisfy your requirement perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The binary blob is a separate work, under copyright law, that is distinct from the wrapper driver that uses it. In this case, the copyright license like the GPL cannot impose requirements on an unrelated copyrighted work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL's copyleft provisions can successfully operate as they do because new code that enters into combination with a GPL-licensed work becomes part of a derivative work of the GPL'd work. Since the preparation of distribution of derivatives is an exclusive right of the copyright holder, the GPL may limit this activity by regulating how it licenses to downstream users the right to prepare derivatives. By contrast, if the blob is not part of a derivative, then no copyright license terms may impose requirements on it, and it is not possible to construct a copyright license that operates in the way you request.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it is either the case that the GPL already satisfies your requirements, or no copyright license can do so. (I do not attempt to resolve this disjunction here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it might be possible to draft contract terms that prohibit use of binary blobs, in much the same way that I suppose it may be possible to draft contract terms that impose any arbitrary requirement (e.g., &quot;I'll let you modify and distribute this software but only if you do so while holding your breath underwater&quot;), but I don't know enough about contract law versus copyright licensing to say how this would operate differently from a copyright license in practice. In particular, I'm not sure if, how, or when you would need the downstream user's agreement to the contract terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T18:39:34.947" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T18:39:34.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8399" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8400" CreationDate="2019-06-12T19:50:37.267" Score="2" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I need to do is blogging about my own code. I already use github for my experiments and release code usually on GPL3. My wish is to write blog pages with code snippets from the GPL3 projects. Like so: write my thoughts/experiments and raw code examples on the post and then release the final result on github as GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I use for my blog posts? I'd like to use one of the Creative Commons license (favouring CC Attribution). I know CC Share Alike v4 is compatible with GPL3 but I don't understand if it is so in my particular case. I own the copyright to all the code I might put in the blog posts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15213" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T09:36:43.190" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:14:34.730" Title="Can I put a GPL code snippet in a Creative Commons paper?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8399" CreationDate="2019-06-12T21:09:07.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(1) If you hold the copyright to the GPL code, then you are not bound by the GPL license. You are free to &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; license that code snippet under CC-BY-whatever (dual-licensing). No formal mechanisms are needed, you can just write your blog post with the code snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) If you do not hold the copyright, then you have to abide by the GPL license. The GPL &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; allow you to publish that code snippet under a different license. Instead, you would have to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;link the GPL code rather than including it into your blog post; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rely on a &lt;em&gt;copyright exception&lt;/em&gt; so that the GPL or any other license would be irrelevant for your use (e.g. &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; in the U.S.; I'm not familiar with Italian exceptions)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting a snippet from your own projects seems perfectly fine (case 1).&#xA;If those snippet include other people's GPL-covered code then you are bound by that license (case 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why are CC-BY-SA 4.0 and GPLv3 considered compatible? Because the CC-BY-SA has a compatibility mechanism in the other direction: you can take something for which you received a CC-BY-SA license and use it under the terms of the GPLv3 instead. This is a one-way street and doesn't help you in this case. For CC-BY no special compatibility mechanism is needed because CC-BY is not a copyleft license, but CC-BY → GPL is a one-way street as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T15:14:34.730" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:14:34.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8404" CreationDate="2019-06-13T14:53:29.717" Score="2" ViewCount="1076" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/esa/pagmo2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PaGMO 2&lt;/a&gt; includes both GPL and LGPL in their copyright notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2017-2018 PaGMO development team&#xA;&#xA;This file is part of the PaGMO library.&#xA;&#xA;The PaGMO library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of either:&#xA;&#xA;  * the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free&#xA;    Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your&#xA;    option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;or&#xA;&#xA;  * the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software&#xA;    Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any&#xA;    later version.&#xA;&#xA;or both in parallel, as here.&#xA;&#xA;The PaGMO library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA;WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY&#xA;or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License&#xA;for more details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as it says &lt;code&gt;or&lt;/code&gt; explicitly, it seems that only LGPL could be picked when using it, without the downsides of GPL. But I would like to confirm this, as &quot;I'm Not A Lawyer&quot;. Note: I want to use it in a commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what would be the reason to license it with both GPL and LGPL? Would it be advantageous for someone to pick GPL over LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15220" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:34:12.863" Title="Can I use a library that is dual licensed GPL + LGPL as if it was only LGPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|lgpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8401" CreationDate="2019-06-13T16:03:52.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have a choice. This dual license is actually a bit silly because the LGPL alone already gives you that choice. The LGPLv3 is literally just the normal GPLv3 plus an additional set of exceptions. You can always drop the extra permissions the LGPLv3 gives you, and stick to the normal GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your own software shall use the GPLv3, then this choice is irrelevant. However, if your software shall use a different license, then using the extra permissions from the LGPL would be desirable. The LGPL confines the GPL-like requirements only to that component, and does not affect the entire software. However, you must still make it possible for end users to modify the LGPL-covered component. This is usually done by &lt;em&gt;dynamically linking&lt;/em&gt; the LGPL-covered software as a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T16:03:52.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8405" CreationDate="2019-06-13T16:14:34.763" Score="-1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a functional peice of mechanical hardware. To my knowledge, GPL-3.0 is compatible with non-software works. I would like to license the design of my under GPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like also to use commercially available items in my product, some of which may be protected under patent. Is this licensable under GPL-3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T20:14:38.577" Title="GPL for CAD design using patented hardware" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8401" CreationDate="2019-06-13T16:17:35.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if you like, you may ignore the offer to receive the software under the GPL and instead receive it only under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is redundant, in terms of permissions granted, to offer software under the GPL and under a GPL-compatible license simultaneously, since any project that could use the code under the GPL could also use it under the GPL-compatible license. However, it may be more convenient for a downstream GPL-licensed project to receive upstream code under the GPL proper to simplify licensing information (i.e., to be able to say the entire work is monolithically under the GPL, rather than call out some parts as being under a more permissive compatible license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the LGPL, though, even this is not needed, since the LGPLv3's own terms allow distribution under the GPL instead (LGPLv3, sect. 2(b)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...you may convey a copy of the modified version: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) under the GNU GPL, with none of the additional [LGPL] permissions of this License applicable to that copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only mechanical difference, then, between the GPL/LGPL dual-license done in PaGMO's case versus licensing only under the LGPL, would be if a future LGPLv4 or 5 (etc.) did not include the option to convert to the GPL. In such a case, the authors here have explicitly given permission to use any version of the GPL, 3 or higher, without needing to get permission from the LGPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T19:34:12.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8403" CreationDate="2019-06-13T20:14:38.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL can technically be applied to non-software works, but its interpretation becomes difficult because the GPL explicitly references concepts such as programs and source code. Furthermore, the copyrightability of hardware and hardware designs is not clear. All of this indicates against using the GPL in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever license you do choose, you cannot license rights that you do not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not affect the rights of third parties. If those third parties hold patents that would be infringed by your design, the GPL cannot shield you from that infringement. There is a GPL clause that discourages users from suing you, but third parties are not affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, using some patented component would generally be unproblematic if you acquired that component properly (e.g. &lt;em&gt;exhaustion doctrine&lt;/em&gt; in the US).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you hold patents in the design (or have licensed the relevant patents), then the GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 licenses include a patent license for all those patents that would be infringed by your design. This protects users from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you hold no patent rights, this is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you issue a patent license through the GPLv3, that is a non-exclusive license. This does not prevent you from also using the patents commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T20:14:38.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8416" CreationDate="2019-06-13T20:40:26.033" Score="3" ViewCount="997" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions about GPLv3 and I want to find an answer to them or confirm that what I've found is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothesis: I pay 'someone' to make me a 'closed source' software. That someone decides to use in the delivered product an open source library which is part of a project licensed under GPLv3. Part of the functionality of the program relies on that library.&#xA;(When I say product, I refer to the entirety of the software, meaning rights to it, source code and everything related to it is supposed to become 'mine'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Is it considered to be software distribution when I receive the product I paid 'someone' else to make for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The GPL says that internal use of the software within my company is allowed without having to comply with the licence. Is that correct? (Internal use refers to distributing the software only within my company and not with other companies or private individuals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1) If I want to distribute the software (not internally), do I have to send the source code to the owner of the GPLv3 library, or just to the one I'm giving the software to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2) Does the software needs to become 'open source'  and made public? Or just the original GPLv3 owner needs to get access to it? Does he also get rights to it? Does that also mean that he can make it public and open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) The moment I distribute the software outside of my company, it becomes licensed as GPLv3 and I have to comply with it? Or are there alternatives? Are all the alternatives involving the software not being 'closed source' anymore and giving rights to others to use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.1) Is it considered illegal to receive the software  without the 'LICENCE' file from the GPLv3 licenced part which that 'someone' used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.2) What if the original files do not contain any licence information either in the header? What if they have a short mention about their provenience in another file which links to those GPLv3 libraries in the usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen people asking about GPLv3, but are answered instead about GPL in general, leading me to find some contradictory information, so I want to make sure I understand everything. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15222" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T21:47:19.737" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T18:16:35.090" Title="GPLv3 in proprietary software - clarifications" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8406" CreationDate="2019-06-13T22:05:50.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My, what a lot of questions.  I'll try to answer them all, but the answers will of necessity have to be brief; you want longer answers, ask shorter questions.  And, of course, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it considered to be software distribution when I receive the product I paid someone else to make for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless they are an employee of yours, generally, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL says that internal use of the software within my company is allowed without having to comply with the licence. Is that correct? (Internal use refers to distributing the software only within my company and not with other companies or private individuals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I want to distribute the software (not internally), do I have to send the source code to the owner of the GPLv3 library, or just to the one I'm giving the software to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL obliges you to provide source to anyone to whom you distribute the binaries, but not to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the software needs to become 'open source' and made public? Or just the original GPLv3 owner needs to get access to it? Does he also get rights to it? Does that also mean that he can make it public and open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is complex, and we deal with it at more length in other questions on this site, but my belief is that the entire work is a derivative of the GPLv3-covered library.  As such, the entire work, when it is conveyed to others, must be conveyed under the terms of GPLv3.  Everyone to whom it is conveyed gets those rights, and any of them may in turn choose to convey it more widely.  If they do, then they, too, must convey it under the terms of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The moment I distribute the software outside of my company, it becomes licensed as GPLv3 and I have to comply with it? Or are there alternatives? Are all the alternatives involving the software not being 'closed source' anymore and giving rights to others to use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My belief is that yes, it does, and therefore, yes, you must.  Your alternative is not to use GPLv3-licensed code when making your product (or having it made for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it considered illegal to receive the software without the 'LICENCE' file from the GPLv3 licenced part which that 'someone' used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 s5 requires (by inclusion of s4 requirements) that modified works based on GPLv3 code are conveyed with a copy of the GPL.  It does not have to be in a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt;.  Failure to do this isn't illegal &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but it does open the conveyor up to accusations of copyright violation.  Thanks to amon for spotting my original error, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What if the original files do not contain any licence information either in the header? What if they have a short mention about their provenience [sic] in another file which links to those GPLv3 libraries in the usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's unhelpful, but not improper, unless the person who gave you a copy of the GPLv3-covered code excised this information from the headers in the process of modifying it to be part of your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T09:00:56.537" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T09:00:56.537" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T09:29:25.420" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a small java application which I was building with Oracle JDK till now. Now I am migrating this application to OpenJDK11 and am bit confused with the licensing. I am using RedHat distribution of the OpenJDK to build my jar file. I am planning to bundle the RedHat's OpenJDK11 zip file along with my app and use the JVM to run this Jar file. I am not building the JDK itself rather using the prebuilt binaries. In that case, apart from bundling all the license text present in OpenJDK11, do I need to do anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15227" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T09:29:25.420" Title="Licensing question about using OpenJDK to build and run" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8411" CreationDate="2019-06-14T10:39:24.190" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a need to emulate a 6502 in my project, but I don't really want to spend time to develop and debug something to do that when there already exist many solutions to exactly that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I scouted out and found someone else's solution, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hrvach/espple/blob/master/user/fake6502.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fake6502.c&lt;/a&gt; by Mike Chambers. That's good, I will only need to make a few small amendments to this file. So my plan is to explain what I did, in the changelog near the top, and then put a copy of the GPL somewhere in the source tree. As it is, this file has the following license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *****************************************************&#xA; * LICENSE: This source code is released into the    *&#xA; * public domain, but if you use it please do give   *&#xA; * credit. I put a lot of effort into writing this!  *&#xA; *                                                   *&#xA; *****************************************************&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to redistribute the file with a few changes under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15229" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T10:58:01.153" Title="Can this file be included in a project that's going to be released under the GPL?" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8410" CreationDate="2019-06-14T10:58:01.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL.  That said, a licence is compatible with the GNU GPL if it imposes no requirements or restrictions that are contradicted by the GPL; such a work can be combined with code under the GPL, and the resulting whole released under the GPL (as the GPL requires).  In this case, the author has released the work into the public domain.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's compatibility list&lt;/a&gt; has this to say about public domain works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Being in the public domain is not a license; rather, it means the material is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive non-copyleft free software license. Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note the author's request for acknowledgement.  Since this follows directly on from an explicit release into the public domain, I can view it only as a request, rather than a requirement, because there's no such thing as &lt;em&gt;public-domain-but-must-acknowledge&lt;/em&gt;.  Even if it were a requirement, this would still be compatible with the GPL, which has similar language in itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I see it, yes, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T10:58:01.153" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T11:26:17.910" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want &lt;strong&gt;decent&lt;/strong&gt; developers to extend and use my framework as they please. Is there a middle-ground where it is open source, but only to these with the permission?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the 2 developers that uses it on one of his big products had great success with it and it was amazing to see it, but I know what will happen if I allow people that really shouldn't be writing code use it. I want to maintain a high grade of confidence in the products that use this framework and I'd like to pick who has access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, if the freedoms of the MIT license apply, it means they'd also be free to redistribute, creating conflict with my intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license should say: &quot;This software is not to be used, modified or interacted with in any way or shape or form unless permitted to do so[..] Should you receive permission, you are free to do anything under the moon, except re-distribute the package for commercial use.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intent, if it helps clear it up: There are a lot, or dare I say, the vast majority of developers within the WordPress eco-system are bad and in the worst way possible. Even popular plugins / themes are bloatware and performance hogs with the code being a total mess. I don't want these people nor to use my framework, nor to interact with it. I've given access to 2 developers, one of which is very big and they're using it and seeing great results, these people have respect for their code base, strict rules and are adepts to good code and they've made good contributions. These people, I want to work with and give freedom to, yet it seems that my request in its own seems draconic and contradictorian in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15230" LastEditorUserId="15230" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T11:32:48.880" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T19:35:12.633" Title="Is there a license that allows the freedom of the MIT license but only with permission to an entity?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8412" CreationDate="2019-06-14T11:49:41.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.  The limited freedoms you intend to grant to approved persons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should you receive permission, you are free to do anything under the moon, except re-distribute the package for commercial use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6719/non-commercial-licensing-recommendation&quot;&gt;would disqualify this as free software&lt;/a&gt;, even if you gave those freedoms to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a further problem in that an approved person could then redistribute to a third party under, say, the Apache licence (as relicensing is a thing under the moon which is not redistribution for commercial use); the third party could then happily use it for commercial use.  If you ban redistribution even by persons on the approved list, you fall even further foul of the free and open-source definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it seems that my request in its own seems draconic and contradictorian in nature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't have put it better myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T14:55:50.080" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T14:55:50.080" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T12:29:42.393" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have a native library for Android that is built with ndk17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include license information from android toolchain with my library package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15232" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T09:53:20.940" Title="Do I need to include license files/info from android ndk toolchain into my library?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|android|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8406" CreationDate="2019-06-14T18:16:35.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Is it considered to be software distribution when I receive the product I paid 'someone' else to make for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you specifically commissioned someone to create a software product for you and according to your specifications, then they create a &quot;work for hire&quot; and the copyright situation is similar as when they would be an employee. The transfer of that work to you is not considered to be distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) The GPL says that internal use of the software within my company is allowed without having to comply with the licence. Is that correct? (Internal use refers to distributing the software only within my company and not with other companies or private individuals).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct, assuming your company is a single legal entity and you provide the software as part of the employment of your employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.1) If I want to distribute the software (not internally), do I have to send the source code to the owner of the GPLv3 library, or just to the one I'm giving the software to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your software to other legal entities, then the GPL (any version) requires that you provide the source code to anyone that asks for it. You are not required to actively push the source code to the users of your product. You also don't need to send anything to the owner of the GPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.2) Does the software needs to become 'open source' and made public? Or just the original GPLv3 owner needs to get access to it? Does he also get rights to it? Does that also mean that he can make it public and open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your product contains GPL code and you distribute your product externally, then you are required to distribute the product under the terms of the GPL license. This means that every recipient of your product gets the right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to make changes to the product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to re-distribute the original or changed product under the terms of the GPL license, for any price they want to ask for it (including free distribution).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owner of the GPLv3 library does not get any special rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4) The moment I distribute the software outside of my company, it becomes licensed as GPLv3 and I have to comply with it? Or are there alternatives? Are all the alternatives involving the software not being 'closed source' anymore and giving rights to others to use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute outside your company, you must comply with the terms of the GPLv3 license, which means distributing your product under the GPLv3 license, or you lose the rights to distribute and use that GPLv3 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your software does not become automagically licensed under the GPLv3, but doing that is the only legal way to distribute the product externally. This does not mean that all the code must itself be under the GPL license, as long as everything is under a GPL-compatible license, whitch at least means that it must be an open source&#xA;license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5.1) Is it considered illegal to receive the software without the 'LICENCE' file from the GPLv3 licenced part which that 'someone' used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it is not illegal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the full text of the license might be in a file with a different name. And even if the full license text got separated from the files covered by the GPLv3 license somewhere in the process, that doesn't invalidate the license you got.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5.2) What if the original files do not contain any licence information either in the header? What if they have a short mention about their provenience in another file which links to those GPLv3 libraries in the usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is also no license information in the files themselves, the situation becomes more tricky. If the external file with licensing information ever gets separated from the source files, then it will appear that you have unlicensed files in your product.&#xA;The problem with unlicensed files is that only the author of those files is allowed to use them in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, then you should contact the owner of the library and urge them to put proper license headers in the files. Until then, I would advise you not to use that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T18:16:35.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T20:54:44.800" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a piece of software which I have grown so fond of that I wish to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the software is an MIT licensed project I could fear that the change I would like might not be what the devs had in mind, so in order to protect the changes I make from being removed or stop working due to changes in the core files I would like to know what could be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I make a copy of the core files and &quot;freeze&quot; them by relicensing the MIT license to another type of license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15237" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-06-15T09:10:54.723" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T09:10:54.723" Title="Relicensing a MIT licensed project to prevent damaging code changes" Tags="|mit|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8417" CreationDate="2019-06-15T08:23:43.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you can not change the license of the code you received to prevent people from making changes that are incompatible with features you depend on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; keep your own repository of the code and refuse to merge changes into it that are incompatible with how you want the code to function. There is no obligation for the developers of the original code to take over your changes, but similarly there is no obligation for you to take over any changes in the original project or changes proposed by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T08:23:43.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8423" CreationDate="2019-06-15T22:07:38.403" Score="31" ViewCount="15290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to develop an application using an easy to use GPLv2 licensed libraries. Once my app is complete I plan to distribute it free and open source complying with GPLv2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; requirements. The GPLv2 source code will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be put online, but &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be obtained by request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, down the line, say after 1 year, I intend to replace those GPLv2 libraries with proprietary ones. I will also make my application closed source and proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are people already using the open source version of my application, am I obliged to give them the source code upon request? Note: The open source version of the project has been abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" OwnerDisplayName="user1034912" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-10-03T12:23:45.217" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T12:23:45.217" Title="Am I legally required to provide a (GPL licensed) source code even after a project is abandoned?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2019-06-15T23:55:50.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to make the source code available in some form if you publish the program. If you never publish it, you have no obligations whatsoever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you publish, you have (in theory) three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a commercial distributor of the software, you can point everyone to that distributor to get the source code. This doesn't apply in your case, since no commercial distributor has the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can promise to supply the source code to anyone who wants it, charging only reasonable cost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You only ever distribute the software together with the source code. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you distribute one version, as you plan, you have to supply the source code &lt;em&gt;for that version&lt;/em&gt; to anyone who wants it, unless you only ever distribute application and source code together. There are no requirements for newer versions that you don't distribute, or for newer versions that you distribute with no open source code within. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What about your own code that was part of the first, open source, version? Isn't that open source? Yes, it is. But the only one with the right to complain is the copyright holder, that is you yourself. So you are fine distributing future versions without source code.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastEditorUserId="15302" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T09:09:40.780" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T09:09:40.780" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2019-06-16T04:32:06.000" Score="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL gives you a few options for how to distribute source code. Typically, you distribute source at the time you distribute the binary. However, section 3(b) of the GPLv2 allows you to distribute a work based on another GPL-licensed work, in binary form, as long as you also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The approach will work for you so long as you are prepared to respond to requests for source code for at least three years after you stop distributing a version of your software that includes GPLv2-licensed work. Since this offer is only usable by someone who has obtained your GPLv2-derived software, for three years after you distribute it, your obligation to supply source will naturally end three years after you switch to dependencies that do not include GPL-licensed code. This obligation only extends to the version(s) of your software that include GPLv2 components: fully non-GPL versions may be distributed with no source, even during the three years that you are required to share your the source of your old GPL'd version(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this would &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#TOCDistributeWithSourceOnInternet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;require you to send the source, in physical media, to anyone&lt;/a&gt; in possession of your binary, upon request. Probably anyone would be willing nowadays to receive it via download instead, but recipients do have that right under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that this distribution of source still happens under the GPL, so any recipient in the world can take the source you give and upload it to a public website, forever. You might not get any requests for source code after that (unless you release a new version) because your source code is now freely out in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of those factors, it's not clear to me what benefit you'll see by using a written offer, and you'll be incurring a three-year obligation to potentially mail out source code. If you're worried that everyone who downloads your binary will &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to download your large source code as well, rest easy that the GPL expressly does not require users to download the source if they do not want it (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though &lt;strong&gt;third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T13:31:53.960" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T13:31:53.960" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8425" CreationDate="2019-06-16T11:14:54.330" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a variation of the GPL/BSD licences that states that you may use modify and distribute this code however you please but in such a fashion that should your distribution of the code compete with my distribution of the code some ways down the road that you will be open to merging our distributions together ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider more vs. less, cat vs. dog or Libre vs. Open Office each set of packages provide similar functionality yet are direct competitors to one another. While the competition is good this creates a plethora of packages with similar implementations and features that users have to sift through before selecting one to become productive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if it were possible to license a package such that anyone can modify and extend it but not necessarily release it in direct competition to primary release. Should a competing release occur I would like to have the power to say &quot;Hang on this is silly, Let's merge our efforts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate that any two packages might have uniquely different architectures/strategies/structures for a particular problem and can see the benefit of such packages being in direct competition. When two packages are technically similar though merging them into one should be a no brainer and the way forwards, especially where the latter simply forked the former, added some features and released it in direct competition to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update (This was too long to respond with as a comment to @vonbrand):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@vonbrand commented that the freedom to extend and distribute a given source is a core part of Open Source software. I was just curious to know if there might be some means of converging the efforts of useful/successful modifications back into the the project in an effort to provide the &quot;Best Possible&quot; product versus having multiple branches where mine features X, his Y and hers Z. Users of the project cannot install/import X,Y and Z and are forced to go with one variant over another. That some variant Y or Z may supercede X is also fine provided the resulting project is better off for it in the end. Python's Esky project got abandoned by the original author due to competing clones and the frustration the maintainer experienced in having to compete against variants of their own package for example. Granted the freedoms permitted to the forks extend back to the original project and it could certainly incorporate these extentions back in but the maintainer of the project must then run around tracking down the forks and may loose the original audience due to the added noise. @amon points out that this is essentially the fault of the projects' stewardship but there might be some means of legally compelling all parties to stay true to the success of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15249" LastEditorUserId="15249" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T14:12:31.703" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T14:12:31.703" Title="Convergent Licencing" Tags="|restrictions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8424" CreationDate="2019-06-16T12:28:54.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to distinguish between open source projects as a software artefact and open source projects as a social community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly possible to license open source software in a way so that an “upstream” project will be able to merge downstream modifications (to the degree that such modified software has been published). For example, copyleft licenses such as the GPL do exactly that. Note that no open source license requires private modifications to be published.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, no open source license will let you control a community, such as by preventing community forks. You mention the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice split. This split happened precisely because the community was not confident in the new project leadership (Oracle). Because the software was open source, they were able to do their own thing. And the world has been much better for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in such issues, it might be worth reading the OSI review process of the (rejected) Convertible Free Software License. That license tried to give Original Authors total control of the project. There was some interesting discussion about the value of forks (→ scroll to &lt;em&gt;Relicensing and Maintainer–Community Dynamics&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/LicenseDiscuss012019&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;January 2019 summary&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T12:28:54.380" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-16T12:57:24.657" Score="2" ViewCount="1081" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can the author of software make it proprietary after making it gpl? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Tendo Ssemwanga" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T06:16:54.383" Title="Can a GPL license be converted to Proprietary by the author later?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8412" CreationDate="2019-06-16T19:35:12.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The short answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The longer answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;. It says almost the same thing as the Open Source definition, but is harder to miss-understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The medium answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be free it must have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract from the Open Source definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T19:35:12.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8438" CreationDate="2019-06-17T07:25:41.477" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am including a copy of SDL2.dll (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.libsdl.org/download-2.0.php&lt;/a&gt;) in my open source project. Do I need to also include the source code of SDL in my repository, add a document with the URL to SDL's source code, or do I not need to do any of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T18:42:18.443" Title="If I bundle an open source DLL with my GPLv3 software, how do I properly handle supplying the source of that DLL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|distribution|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8476" CreationDate="2019-06-17T07:40:22.773" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a Python package capable of generating a web page with some embedded tables and figures. The web page employs some open source components (namely Angular.js, Bootstrap and font-awesome, all of them licensed under MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the web page to be &quot;standalone&quot;: I want users to be able to view the web page even if they have no Internet access. So ATM I am including the minified versions of these projects in my package, and I copy them together with the generated files to produce the final web page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ship my package to PyPI. My question is: is it acceptable for a PyPI package to include these projects? Do I have to do anything like including any copyright/license notice for these projects in my package? (I am pretty new to licensing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release my project under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15258" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-06-27T20:13:50.160" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T14:00:43.833" Title="Licensing: distributing open source components with your PyPI package" Tags="|mit|distribution|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2019-06-17T09:46:42.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL doesn't define what constitutes an &lt;strong&gt;abandoned&lt;/strong&gt; software. FWIF you can declare your software abandoned right after the release, but that doesn't mean you don't have to provide the source code if you release it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters in terms of GPL license is &lt;strong&gt;distribution&lt;/strong&gt;. If users can obtain software from a source that's under your control, you're distributing it, so you have to provide the source code. If you stop distributing the software, you have no further obligations (unless you opt to provide the source code on demand, in which case such offer should last for 3 years after you stop distributing the software, so it's wise to avoid this option).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T09:46:42.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8426" CreationDate="2019-06-17T13:09:21.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the author (or whoever holds the copyright) can do as they please, changing the licence at will. But anyone who already received a copy under a free licence continues to enjoy the rights that accompanied it; the author cannot take those away merely by ceasing to distribute further copies under the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point is SSH: It was open source up to version 1, version 2 (clearly a development on version 1) is closed. OpenSSH took version 1 (still open source) and created an extension handling the new protocol, released as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-10-14T06:16:54.383" LastActivityDate="2021-10-14T06:16:54.383" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8436" CreationDate="2019-06-17T13:31:39.497" Score="3" ViewCount="1178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a program that uses a library released under the AGPL license. Can the program be released as GPL, or does it have to be released as AGPL too ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5823" LastActivityDate="2023-05-16T01:31:27.823" Title="Is GPL linking to AGPL possible?" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|gnu|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2019-06-17T15:37:47.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;, section 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to &quot;keep intact all notices&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no GPL linking to an AGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5823" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T15:37:47.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-17T09:52:51.547" Score="1" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to embed &lt;code&gt;libgit2&lt;/code&gt; in my commercial application (here is license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/master/COPYING&lt;/a&gt;) . I want to create static &lt;code&gt;libgit2&lt;/code&gt; library, and link it with my commercial application. Is there any restrictions for my app? Something like - should I provide source code by user request? As I understand GPL v2 license states that. But license of libgit2 uses linking exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LINKING EXCEPTION&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License,&#xA;the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled&#xA;version of this library into combinations with other programs,&#xA;and to distribute those combinations without any restriction&#xA;coming from the use of this file.  (The General Public License&#xA;restrictions do apply in other respects; for example, they cover&#xA;modification of the file, and distribution when not linked into&#xA;a combined executable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody make clear such situation, please? I am not laywer, and that license rules confused me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="LmTinyToon" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:09:23.953" Title="Can I use libgit2 in commercial application?" Tags="|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8434" CreationDate="2019-06-17T13:20:52.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found answer, It turns out I did not complete reading of libgit2 repo README. That's quote from repo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;libgit2 is under GPL2 with linking exception. This means you can link to and use the library from any program, proprietary or open source; paid or gratis. However, if you modify libgit2 itself, you must distribute the source to your modified version of libgit2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="LmTinyToon" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T13:20:52.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:16:28.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may perform this combination, and the works technically retain their respective GPL/AGPL licenses. However, your concern that the combination may &amp;quot;have to be released as AGPL too&amp;quot; has some truth to it: the AGPL requirement to share source over a network does indeed apply to the combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explicitly handled in section 13 of the GPLv3 (and correspondingly in section 13 of the AGPLv3), which articulates the interaction between GPLv3- and AGPLv3-licensed code when combined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last sentence here means that the most significant requirement of the AGPL -- disclosing source to users over a network -- applies to a combination of GPL and AGPL work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is technically true, though, that the AGPLv3 copyleft requirements do not extend into the GPLv3-licensed material (nor vice versa), so the two licenses are compatible. The GPL and AGPL components may be freely intermixed and each retains its original AGPL/GPL licensing status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:28:44.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2019-06-17T17:23:38.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the answers to legal questions differ from country to country, I can only speak about the situation in Germany. However, I think that the situation in other countries of the European Union is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have to say that I'm not a lawyer, so my understanding may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because German law does not know the word &quot;license&quot;, a court had to decide what a &quot;license&quot; (such as the GPL) actually is. (It was a trial of some Linux developer against a company which created a closed-source variant of the Linux kernel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision was (more or less): A license is a document written by the copyright owner where he defines the conditions and terms under which he grants &lt;em&gt;other persons&lt;/em&gt; the right to copy the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition has consequences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you publish your software under some license, &lt;em&gt;other people&lt;/em&gt; must observe the license terms to legally copy and re-distribute it (in Germany).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because nobody is required to grant any permission to &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;, the copyright owner himself may legally copy and re-distribute the software &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; observing the license terms!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you may even distribute your own software under GPL license and keep the sources secret!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course this makes absolutely no sense, but it would be legal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BUT...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Normally, GPL projects contain code written by other developers (such as libraries) that are also licensed under GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other programmers published their code under GPL license, which means that you have to observe the GPL's license terms to legally use their code!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't observe the GPL's terms, you violate &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; copyright (unless the other developers explicitly grant you the right to use their code)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And GPL would require you to provide the sources for download a certain time (as far as I understand correctly: three years) after you delivered the binaries (unless you deliver your program together with the sources). So if you provided the sources by request, you still have to provide them three years after the last download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One single line of code in your project which is not written by you - and you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; observe the GPL terms!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once you published your software under GPL, you granted everybody to copy, modify and re-distribute your software - forever!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may sell your program as closed software if all source lines without exception are written by yourself (and not taken from another GPL project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as far as somebody has the source code of the old version, he is allowed to improve the old version of the program and to re-distribute the improved version for free!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there will be a free version of your program available and you cannot forbid anybody to copy, re-distribute or to use that free version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that you will sell too much copies if there is a free version available.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastEditorUserId="2895" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T10:43:14.027" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T10:43:14.027" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8428" CreationDate="2019-06-17T18:42:18.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;SDL uses the zlib license, which is a permissive license similar to the MIT or BSD family. This license does not require you to provide the source code. Please read it, as it is very short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; project uses the GPL, and if you supply binaries for your project, then you should also provide the corresponding source code for those binaries, including the libraries. One way to do this is to import the library's source code into your project and to build the library from source. A link to the SDL source code might also work, but that is risky as the link may go down or change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T18:42:18.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8441" CreationDate="2019-06-17T21:31:15.857" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I take an open source app (chat app) under The GNU General Public License v3.0 and implements it as a feature in a bigger app, I will not make modification on the source code, will I have to provide the big app code as open source under The GNU General Public License v3.0? and if I did modify, will I have to provide the big project code as source code or just the chat part that I modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The big app is more like an Uber app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15275" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T22:32:00.863" Title="Implement GNU License code with or without modification" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8440" CreationDate="2019-06-18T08:09:02.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires you to provide the source code of a program if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you give someone else a copy of that program, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the program includes GPL-covered code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the entire source code for the program must be provided so that other people can make their own versions, and the program as a whole must be licensed under the GPL. However, individual components could use compatible licenses such as MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL always applies to an entire program, not only to individual components or libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Integrating a GPL chat app into another app, would most likely subject the entire app to the GPL, and require you to publish the source code, if you let other people install that app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T22:32:00.863" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T22:32:00.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T16:35:14.667" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completely know that most of open source projects could be used to make profit and people contribute to them whether the creators are making money from it too or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the creators profiting make any impact on contributes decisions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will it prevent significant number of people from contributing to the project (saying that &lt;code&gt;well, they make money, I can care less about it.&lt;/code&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any researches about this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15296" LastEditorUserId="15296" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T08:09:51.367" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T07:51:59.797" Title="Is there any research on, whether the owner of a project making money from it, has any significant effect, on contributions?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8446" CreationDate="2019-06-18T20:03:46.273" Score="1" ViewCount="771" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt that this question has been answered countless times before, but my searches have not produced an answer yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library using LGPLv3 and I would like to copy a couple of utility files from a GPLv3 project and change the namespace. Is it sufficient to keep the GPL header with the files and credit the project? Alternatively, can you add another license file to the project and reference just those files in it? Would the same answer apply if using MIT instead of LGPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: update based on comment received&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment seems consistent with what I'm finding elsewhere, basically license library as GPLv3 or don't copy any parts of any project that is. So I have a follow up question now, because I have no problem using the same license, but I can't use it in all projects that I will create that uses my own library. I also have no problem writing the half dozen functions that I need from scratch, I'd just like to do what's right and still be able to write applications for my employer that they don't want to give away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do use GPLv3 for my library can I link to it from another application that I create with it? The internet says absolutely not, and also yes in some cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to comprehend the descriptions about linking here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&lt;/a&gt;, but this honestly makes my head hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15300" LastEditorUserId="15300" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T22:37:23.943" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T07:07:53.447" Title="How do I include GPLv3 code in a LGPLv3 or MIT project" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8447" CreationDate="2019-06-18T23:55:27.147" Score="2" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use code posted on JSFiddle in a project but do I have permission to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jsfiddle.net/terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of service &lt;/a&gt; &#xA;but they do not mention anything about licensing the code they host. Instead its the typical stuff, JSFiddle has no liability, warranty, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their intellectual property section does not mention using posted code, does this mean all rights are reserved to JSFiddle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15303" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T07:11:01.657" Title="Can I use and distrubute code posted on JSFiddle" Tags="|copyright|intellectual-property|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8451" CreationDate="2019-06-19T06:14:17.827" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/workflow/export/changing_application_icon_for_windows.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godot requires a tool called rcedit to change the application icon&lt;/a&gt;. According to my understanding of GPL, I believe I have to include the source code of Godot with the releases of my game. Do I also need to include the source code for rcedit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:53:11.550" Title="Does the GPLv3 license on my project require me to also include the source code of a tool to edit the icon of my executable file?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|distribution|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8443" CreationDate="2019-06-19T07:07:53.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 is the GPLv3 plus an exception that allows linking with non-GPL programs. Only the copyright holder can grant this exception. You are not authorized to add this exception to a third party's GPL code. Therefore, you cannot include the GPL code into your library and also license the library as a whole under the LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the LGPL and GPL are highly compatible. Individual parts of this library may use either LGPL or GPL, but as a whole that library would be subject to only the GPL – the LGPL's extra permissions are ignored here. Your library is no longer LGPL-licensed at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to link GPL libraries with other software, under two circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;either, this is for purely internal or private use and you do not distribute that software with the library;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or, the software is under a GPL-compatible license and the software as a whole (incl library) is distributed under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: There are vastly different opinions on linking as evidenced by the Wikipedia article you  linked. This answer is modelled after the FSF position.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, using a GPL software like Wordpress in a web server backend is usually not a problem. In contrast, you cannot use GPL-covered code in a proprietary program that you give to other people or organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your scenario, it seems that writing the necessary code yourself would be preferable over including GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T07:07:53.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8444" CreationDate="2019-06-19T07:11:01.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is a license from the code snippet authors to the code snippet hosting site, there is no license from anyone to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In absence of an explicit license, all rights are reserved. You have the right to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; at the code snippets, but nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T07:11:01.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T10:02:04.120" Score="3" ViewCount="705" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is code obfuscation allowed in FOSS source code as per any of the popularly used FOSS licenses? If it is allowed, to what degree and extent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15262" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T09:01:57.107" Title="Code obfuscation in FOSS source code" Tags="|licensing|source-code|floss|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8454" CreationDate="2019-06-19T14:35:01.137" Score="1" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use code written by others and published under gpl2 license, on my software project. I was wondering what is the way to go about it. I hope to publish my software using the gpl3 license. I am very new to this field, so please let me know if I missed any crucial information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15308" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T07:57:57.020" Title="Incorporate gpl2 code into software" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8448" CreationDate="2019-06-19T14:48:27.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No open source license that I know of disallows obfuscation, minification, or similar modifications. In a way, that's just a kind of translation like compilation, and it wouldn't make sense for an open source license to disallow compilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some licenses require the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; to be made available under certain circumstances. But what is the source code? The GPL defines the source code as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very flexible definition. For example, if only obfuscated source code is available then that code might indeed be the preferred form of modifications. But the GPL's source code requirements cannot be satisfied with an obfuscated version if you have a non-obfuscated version available. Providing obfuscated code in place of the actual source code would be a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T14:48:27.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8445" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:38:11.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/tutorials/legal/complying_with_licenses.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godot is licensed under the MIT license&lt;/a&gt; which only requires you to preserve and reproduce a copyright notice and simple license terms. You do not need to share any of your source (or Godot's source) whatsoever, if you don't want to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Godot &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL, and you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; need to share the source code of your application built on Godot code, you would not need to include the source code of the rcedit tool. Admittedly, rcedit (or another tool for modifying Windows executables) is needed to produce the final binary as-is, but the GPLv3 excuses it from being part of the required source in the following section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include [...] general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as rcedit is a &quot;general purpose tool&quot; or is a &quot;generally available free program[...] used unmodified&quot; (in fact, it appears to be both) that is not part of the work, you do not need to distribute it along with your program's source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:53:11.550" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:53:11.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8453" CreationDate="2019-06-20T03:56:52.557" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;this question is an extension of the following question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7078/is-it-legal-to-use-gpl-code-in-a-proprietary-closed-source-program-by-putting-i&quot;&gt;Is it legal to use GPL code in a proprietary, closed-source program by putting it in a separate, standalone program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been more or less concluded that such practice is legal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in my case, I plan to &lt;strong&gt;put the separate GPL program together with the proprietary program under the same windows installer&lt;/strong&gt;. This gives my users a seamless experience while installing the suite. The installer will install two separate programs. They communicate with each other optionally via HTTP (Resftful) Web API. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a downloadable stand alone installer JUST for the GPL software. And this GPL software is really stand alone by nature i.e. I'm not trying to beat the bush by doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this violate the GPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T09:18:05.903" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T09:18:05.903" Title="GPL code in a proprietary program by putting it in a separate standalone program, but shipping in same installer together with proprietary program?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8452" CreationDate="2019-06-20T07:50:42.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If they are separate programs, putting GPL and non-GPL together into a single installer is fine. The GPL calls this “aggregation”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do still have to comply with the GPL for the GPL-covered program in the installer, in particular you must not limit end user's rights for that software. Ideally, the GPL-covered program can be extracted or installed independently, and is not not gated behind some EULA that users would have to agree to first. It should be possible for end users to modify the GPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky question is when two programs are separate. Just because you have two separate executables does not guarantee that these are separate creative works in the sense of copyright law. (Neither, for that matter, is it clear that combining components into a single program would create a single creative work). The FSF argues that two programs are separate if they do not share an address space and they do not share intimate data structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That your programs communicate via some REST API is a strong indication that they are truly separate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More to the point, that the GPL software is standalone and can be installed separately is a very clear indication that they are completely separate programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T07:50:42.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8449" CreationDate="2019-06-20T07:57:57.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the GPLv2 and GPLv3 are very similar, they have clauses that make them incompatible. If you combine GPLv2 covered code with GPLv3 covered code, you cannot share the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some GPLv2 software doesn't limit you to the GPLv2, but also allows &lt;em&gt;any later version&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL. In that case, you could use that code as if it were GPLv3-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without such an upgrade clause, your choices are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to not use the code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to ask the copyright holders to change the license to one they can use (but note that license changes can take a ton of effort because all contributors must agree)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to wrap the GPLv2 code you want to use in a standalone program that you can launch from your code. For example, wrap the GPLv2 code with a REST API or with a command line interface. It is allowed to distribute programs with different licenses side by side, you just can't always combine them into a single program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T07:57:57.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8475" CreationDate="2019-06-20T13:02:28.650" Score="4" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The question refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tomcat.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomcat&lt;/a&gt; as an example, but it applies to any software that is licensed under Apache 2.0 and requires configuration through configuration files.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am creating a Docker image for Tomcat that in principle looks like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;FROM some-centos-base-image:1.0&#xA;&#xA;ARG TOMCAT_VERSION&#xA;&#xA;RUN yum install -y tomcat-${TOMCAT_VERSION}&#xA;&#xA;RUN mkdir -p /code/templates&#xA;&#xA;COPY entrypoint.sh /root/entrypoint.sh&#xA;COPY templates/*.xml.template /root/templates/&#xA;&#xA;ENTRYPOINT [ &quot;/root/entrypoint.sh&quot; ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;code&gt;templates/&lt;/code&gt; is a folder with templates for Tomcat configuration files, and &lt;code&gt;entrypoint.sh&lt;/code&gt; is a script that simply renders the templates based on environment variables into Tomcat's configuration directory and starts Tomcat via &lt;code&gt;catalina.sh run&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The configuration file templates are derived from the example configuration files that come bundled with Tomcat, and thus have the Apache 2.0 License notice header in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am about to license my project using GPLv3, and am wondering how to approach these configuration file templates. The Apache 2.0 License seems pretty clear that configuration files are covered by it, so I believe I have to respect the license in my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right in that I need to respect the Apache 2.0 license in my derived project when the only part I've modified is configuration files? (if not, yay!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the above is true, how do I properly include both GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 notice headers and &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; files in my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I handle the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file that is required by Apache 2.0? It comes with the Tomcat RPM I install and could be dependant on Tomcat version, so it seems &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; strange to copy-paste a version of it into my repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If my Docker image did not include configuration file templates, and instead required configuration by mounts (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/docker-library/tomcat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the official Tomcat image&lt;/a&gt;) does, would I be free from having to handle both GPLv3 and Apache 2.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an example Open Source project I could refer to that is GPLv3 but includes Apache 2.0 software? As in one that has to deal with both licenses in terms of header notices, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; files and so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15317" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-06-28T14:27:07.540" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T14:27:07.540" Title="Licensing in Docker image that only modifies configuration files of used software" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5599" CreationDate="2019-06-20T16:10:22.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To your main question: &lt;strong&gt;Any successful “dual license” OSS project I can use as template?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue: There are successful examples, but &lt;em&gt;you shouldn't use them as a template&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right license(s) and strategy for your project are very specific to your project and community. I strongly encourage you to choose your licenses based on what seems appropriate in your case, rather than which ones have seen success with other projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The SFOSC project I'm involved with for example decided &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfosc.org/business-models/dual-licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the entire model&lt;/a&gt; doesn't align with it's principles)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB&lt;/a&gt;, which is arguably successful by several metrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently they dual license with their new &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; as a copyleft license for which they offer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/commercial-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial license&lt;/a&gt; alternatives as one aspect of their business model. (They also offer MongoDB as-a-service for example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They created and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-issues-new-server-side-public-license-for-mongodb-community-server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;switched to this license&lt;/a&gt; as a direct response to cloud providers making presumably large profits with their software and it sparked &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-open-source-server-side-public-license-rejected/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heated discussions&lt;/a&gt; whether given the new restrictions the license can even be considered a free and open source software license. However it has been part of the apparently required pressure for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-makes-big-open-source-move-managed-databases-redis-labs-mongodb-elastic-coming-soon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google to negotiate a deal&lt;/a&gt; but also for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-calls-mongodbs-licensing-bluff-documentdb-new-managed-database/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon to make another hard fork&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your project is in the exact same boat of this cloud providers vs database vendors clash of the titans, you'll have to ask yourself if you really want to take the same approach as MongoDB or your community has different values and concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a standardised license that fits my use case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, whether it fits your case is something you will need to decide with your community, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By definition, for dual-licensing you will want to select at least 2 software licenses. One for the OSS aspect, one as the commercial license you can buy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally you will need some type of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor Agreement&lt;/a&gt; and have all contributors sign it. Specifically to make sure all copyrights are held by a single legal entity, which is necessary to be able to change the license without infringing on the copyrights of your contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the OSS license, there may be fitting candidates among the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/resources/what-is-copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source available&lt;/a&gt; licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For CAs you might look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/overview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harmony agreements&lt;/a&gt; though I'm convinced there are more options out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as talked about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5634/15316&quot;&gt;the previous answer&lt;/a&gt; I'm not aware of any templates you can 'just use'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15316" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T16:10:22.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8459" CreationDate="2019-06-20T17:45:13.630" Score="0" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started my project with the GPLv3 license, but I haven't released or made available any code related to it yet. As I move further along in my project, I am starting to realize that it is something I could potentially sell and would not the code being made freely available. Since I haven't released the source code at all yet, could I remove the current license and re-license with something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: The main concern here is the fact that the current license is GPLv3. Even if I change the license now, will the old version of my project be considered to be licensed under GPLv3. If so, will the new version be considered a modification of that, and carry the same requirements of the GPLv3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15322" LastEditorUserId="15322" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T19:08:08.383" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T00:45:41.367" Title="Can I change my project's license before release?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8448" CreationDate="2019-06-20T19:27:47.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is code obfuscation allowed in FLOSS source code? Only if real source code is also available under the licence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any FLOSS licences that allow obfuscation without restriction? Yes: all permissive licences, but then the software is no longer FLOSS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Longer answer&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;: it is impossible, there are no FLOSS licences that allow this. Any licence that does is not FLOSS. &lt;strong&gt;However it is allowed (e.g. as the compiled form of the program), so long as real source code is available&lt;/strong&gt;, according to the rules of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;, here is an extract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code&#xA;  is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a&#xA;  chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a&#xA;  precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;The freedom to study the source code and make changes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to&#xA;  publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you must have access&#xA;  to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source&#xA;  code is a necessary condition for free software. &lt;strong&gt;Obfuscated “source&#xA;  code” is not real source code and does not count as source code.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;2. Source Code&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form&#xA;  of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a&#xA;  well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a&#xA;  reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet&#xA;  without charge. &lt;strong&gt;The source code must be the preferred form in which&#xA;  a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source&#xA;  code is not allowed.&lt;/strong&gt; Intermediate forms such as the output of a&#xA;  preprocessor or translator are not allowed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A note on permissive licences&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive Free-Software / Open-Source licences, allow one to make the software become proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the licenses are Free-Software / Open-Source licences, and the software is Free-Software / Open-Source.&#xA;You may choose to make it proprietary, then you may distribute without access to the source code. This includes obfuscation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. The MacOS X core is not Free-Software / Open-Source even though it was based on BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T09:01:57.107" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T09:01:57.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8457" CreationDate="2019-06-20T20:25:18.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need not &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; your project's license because your project does not &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a license. A license is a legal granting of rights between two people (or other legal entities). If there is only one party involved (i.e., you) then there can't be a license in effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like you added some license headers and a copy of the GPLv3 to your code. This doesn't have legal effect until you share the software. You may remove those components (taking care not to miss any!), add different licensing information, and release it under those other licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it very simply, I could take a file on my hard drive, privately add the line, &quot;Anyone may modify and/or reproduce this file for any purpose,&quot; at the top, then immediately erase the line before showing it to anyone. This action of mine has no practical legal effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using any code not written by yourself, for which you do not own the copyright, then you must abide by any licensing requirements on those other people's code, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T00:45:41.367" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T00:45:41.367" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8465" CreationDate="2019-06-21T07:55:37.953" Score="3" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, will accepting someone's copyrighted contribution prohibit me from changing the license, accepting donations towards the project, or anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T08:33:05.440" Title="As the owner of a GPLv3 project, what type of restrictions will be placed on me if I accept contributions?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8462" CreationDate="2019-06-21T14:58:07.263" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say there is an analytics suite Foobarize. Authors of it have it released under GPL to promote collaboration and research and advance mankind and all that good stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they would also like to have binaries available under a non-GNU license for commercial applications that black-box it. Is there anything they should be worried about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15328" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:43:23.610" Title="Distributing binaries under non-GPL license for GPL code?" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8461" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:43:23.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there anything they should be worried about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The practice you described is called dual licensing and is not uncommon for open source projects offered by commercial entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment you mentioned a fear that the closed-source offer could be used to somehow circumvent the GPL requirements on the open-source version, but that is not possible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If someone receives a copy of Foobarize, then they receive that copy with one particular license attached to it and they have to follow the conditions set out in &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; license. Once you have chosen to receive code under license A, it becomes completely irrelevant which other license options are offered for that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:43:23.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-21T22:03:46.157" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;These assets would include images, sounds, and anything else in the project besides the source code. I own the copyright to these assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I'm asking how I would actually apply the license in my repository in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastEditorUserId="15256" LastEditDate="2019-06-26T03:31:23.790" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T03:31:23.790" Title="What is the correct way to add a CC BY-SA 4.0 license to the assets in a project already licensed under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|cc-by-sa|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8484" CreationDate="2019-06-21T22:11:03.900" Score="2" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone makes a code for their project using a certain library, oftentimes he will refer to the official documentation. But how does he need to think about the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I have been using an npm package &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@material-ui/core&lt;/a&gt; for my react project. The documentation explains that it provides a way to stylize my react component with &lt;a href=&quot;https://material-ui.com/styles/api/#makestyles-styles-options-hook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;makeStyles&lt;/a&gt; function like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// The MIT License (MIT)&#xA;// &#xA;// Copyright (c) 2014 Call-Em-All&#xA;// &#xA;// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;// of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;// in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;// to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;// furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;// &#xA;// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;// copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;// &#xA;// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;// IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;// FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;// AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;// LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;// OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;// SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;import React from 'react';&#xA;import { makeStyles } from '@material-ui/styles';&#xA;&#xA;const useStyles = makeStyles({&#xA;  root: {&#xA;    backgroundColor: 'red',&#xA;    color: props =&amp;gt; props.color,&#xA;  },&#xA;});&#xA;&#xA;export default function MyComponent(props) {&#xA;  const classes = useStyles(props);&#xA;  return &amp;lt;div className={classes.root} /&amp;gt;;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I have added the MIT license statement here because I borrowed the code from them. My concern is that, for example, if I write the following code,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need the statement in the file every time I use the &lt;code&gt;makeStyles&lt;/code&gt; approach?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to include the statement somewhere in my repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't I need to include it as long as I do not distribute a package based on the library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I must take option 1, I have to write the statement in hundreds of the files but is it necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// The code here is based on the @material-ui/core document.&#xA;// &#xA;// The MIT License (MIT)&#xA;// &#xA;// Copyright (c) 2014 Call-Em-All&#xA;// &#xA;// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;// of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;// in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;// to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;// furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;// &#xA;// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;// copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;// &#xA;// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;// IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;// FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;// AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;// LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;// OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;// SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;import React from 'react';&#xA;import { Grid, Typography, makeStyles } from '@material-ui/styles';&#xA;&#xA;const useStyles = makeStyles({&#xA;  headline: {&#xA;    fontSize: 120,&#xA;    display: props =&amp;gt; props.on ? true : false,&#xA;  },&#xA;});&#xA;&#xA;export default function HeadlineComponent(props) {&#xA;  const classes = useStyles(props);&#xA;  return (&#xA;    &amp;lt;Grid&amp;gt;&#xA;      &amp;lt;Typography variant=&quot;h1&quot; className={classes.headline}&amp;gt;My excellent headline!&amp;lt;/Typography&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;/Grid&amp;gt;&#xA;  );&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastEditorUserId="10450" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T22:20:04.960" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T05:15:27.733" Title="How to refer to the license when my code is based on a sample in documentation?" Tags="|license-recommendation|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8460" CreationDate="2019-06-22T08:33:05.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you include other people's code in your project, you are no longer just a licensor but also a licensee – you are now bound by the terms of that license. For the GPLv3, this means for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that you cannot unilaterally change the project license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in particular, dual-licensing is no longer possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you cannot add additional terms under GPLv3 section 7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to do any of those you would need consent from all copyright holders&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that you are now bound to honour the GPL's terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;importantly, the section 5 terms about modified source version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in practice, this is not an issue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No open source license prevents you from making money of the project. As far as the GPL is concerned, you can always ask for donations, even if you didn't write a single line of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL only limits what you can charge in one specific scenario: when you distribute binaries you are obliged to provide the corresponding source code. You may not charge for access to that source code, except for a reasonable cost where the source code is provided on a physical medium (like a CD-ROM). Where source code is provided via download, that must be at no cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This still leaves you free to sell binaries, sell the source code if you aren't offering binaries, sell services, ask for donations, or to otherwise derive economic benefit from the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T08:33:05.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8469" CreationDate="2019-06-22T14:18:09.960" Score="3" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/eclipse/paho.mqtt.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Paho&lt;/a&gt; library (licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL&lt;/a&gt;) for a proprietary  project and NOT disclose the whole source code of that project? I'm not going to make any changes to Paho code, I just want to use it as a library in an Android app. Are there precedents? I could not find the exact answer on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15334" LastEditorUserId="15334" LastEditDate="2019-06-23T10:08:22.370" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T12:37:39.783" Title="Can I use the EPL-licensed library (Paho) for a proprietary project and NOT disclose the source code of the project?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|linked-libraries|dependencies|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8463" CreationDate="2019-06-23T15:56:13.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are your files (well, you hold the copyrights) so you can convey them under whatever licence you like.  If you decide that CC-BY-SA 4 would be more appropriate than GPLv3, then simply stop conveying them under GPLv3.  Remove any text that suggests these files are conveyed under GPLv3, and instead attach text making it clear they're conveyed under CC-BY-SA 4 instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you cannot do is somehow call back copies that were already distributed under GPLv3.  People who have those copies will continue to use them under the terms under which they were conveyed, ie, GPLv3, which requires that if they convey copies onwards those copies will also be under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T15:56:13.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8466" CreationDate="2019-06-24T12:11:18.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a letter to the Eclipse Foundation. The consultant pointed me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#epl-derivative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point 5 in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. My case falls under the term &quot;linking&quot;. He warned that he isn't a lawyer, but offered the following short answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Eclipse Foundation does not consider linking with EPL content to be a derivative work and so you are not required to disclose your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15334" LastEditorUserId="15334" LastEditDate="2019-06-24T12:37:39.783" LastActivityDate="2019-06-24T12:37:39.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-25T09:22:51.323" Score="6" ViewCount="528" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to open source my software library under the LGPL license. But I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use that license, as my library uses another library which is currently closed sourced. By using I mean that my library has a dependency on that closed sourced, third-party library. I won't be able to distribute the third-party library, but I hope that they will open source it some time later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I allowed to do in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15349" LastEditorUserId="14656" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T04:24:30.820" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T00:34:07.690" Title="Use of closed-source library in LGPL library" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8820" CreationDate="2019-06-25T22:05:51.000" Score="5" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm new to both freelance development and software licensing. However, I still managed to convince a company to let me develop a small piece of software for them (woohoo!). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company runs JRE 8 so I need to develop in SDK 8. However, I'm having a little trouble understanding exactly how the OTN License Agreement for Java SE works. Per Oracle's website: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This license permits personal use, development, testing, prototyping, demonstrating and some other uses at no cost&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It allows for development but I know there's a difference between development and production, but I'm not sure exactly what that difference is or how either is legally defined. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I'm going to develop and build (i.e. compile) my code using Oracle's JDK 8 and then sell a license to my client, do I need to buy a license from Oracle to do that? Or is it only the end user who must have a license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what, I would be fine using OpenJDK since it is GPL w/ Classpath, correct? Would I be better off just using OpenJDK anyways so I don't have to worry about any of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15354" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T02:04:22.963" Title="Java SDK 8 vs. OpenJDK 8 licenses for freelance development" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6033" CreationDate="2019-06-26T09:48:15.563" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, and it's not a legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL prohibits &quot;linking&quot;. There's two kinds of linking, static and dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Static linking means you put the whole library into your program. It is impossible with Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dynamic linking means you put symbols into your program, and then, they are resolved with a dynamic linker. Python acts as a dynamic linker, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dynamic linking happens &lt;strong&gt;after you compile your program. You don't have&lt;/strong&gt; to compile Python program! Your users will compile the program when they run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you actually use is the program's API. Which is not covered by the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And GPL software can be distributed along with proprietary products. It's called &quot;aggregate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So yes, you can, as long as you are not including .pyc, .pyo and pycache ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15357" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T09:48:15.563" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8455" CreationDate="2019-06-28T13:03:58.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in that I need to respect the Apache 2.0 license in my derived project when the only part I've modified is configuration files? (if not, yay!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless explicitly stated elsewhere, these configuration files are indeed covered under the Apache-2.0 license. However, these licenses are compatible so they can be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation considers the Apache License, Version 2.0 to be a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GPL...Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works. --&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License v2.0 and GPL Compatibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the above is true, how do I properly include both GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 notice headers and LICENSE files in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I would simply leave the Apache-2.0 headers in the templates alone. If you are modifying them in anyway, then perhaps you can add a comment underneath stating any changes. Note that since the licenses are compatible, your changes to &lt;strong&gt;these&lt;/strong&gt; files would be under the original Apache-2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I would then copy the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file from Tomcat, and place it in your templates directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to use GNU licenses for your own software&lt;/a&gt;, you should include a copy of the GPLv3 in a file named &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; in the top-level directory for your project. Also, be sure to specify whether you are licensing as either GPL-3.0-only, or GPL-3.0-or-later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in your README, add a statement regarding the licensing of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;## Licensing&#xA;&#xA;This project is licensed under a GPLv3 license or (at your option) any later version. See `COPYING` for any terms and conditions.&#xA;&#xA;This project makes use of several templates provided by the Apache Tomcat project. These files are licensed under an Apache-2.0 license. See `templates/NOTICE` for any terms and conditions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is just an example to show how this can be done. I wouldn't recommend using it word for word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my Docker image did not include configuration file templates, and instead required configuration by mounts (like the official Tomcat image) does, would I be free from having to handle both GPLv3 and Apache 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an example Open Source project I could refer to that is GPLv3 but includes Apache 2.0 software? As in one that has to deal with both licenses in terms of header notices, LICENSE files and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably would've done it differently, but a quick search of Github turned up the following project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CODEJIN/HNet_on_Tensorflow#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/CODEJIN/HNet_on_Tensorflow#license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T13:03:58.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8429" CreationDate="2019-06-28T14:00:43.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is it acceptable for a PyPI package to include these projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to do anything like including any copyright/license notice for these projects in my package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The files themselves should include a license header.&#xA;However, you could include a statement in your README&#xA;that lists the bundled files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to release my project under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the same license definitely makes this simpler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T14:00:43.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8478" CreationDate="2019-06-29T11:22:20.177" Score="5" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is open source protected in any way if I haven't filed for a patent myself? Maybe a specific license?&#xA;Any examples of open source projects that introduced 'inventions' that could be patented (but they were not) would be really appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And please take into consideration: design &amp;amp; utility patents.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15375" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T15:09:27.140" Title="Can someone else patent an invention that I have introduced in my open source project?" Tags="|license-recommendation|copyright|law|patents|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8477" CreationDate="2019-06-29T12:35:24.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, no: once you've published your idea (whether as open source or not), it becomes part of the &quot;prior art&quot; and is no longer eligible to be patented. Patents are for &lt;em&gt;innovation&lt;/em&gt;, and almost by definition something can't be innovative if it's just taking someone else's idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T11:02:29.163" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T11:02:29.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8479" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8480" CreationDate="2019-06-29T14:31:53.193" Score="1" ViewCount="1470" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would imagine steps like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The community (current maintainers) makes request to the foundation about publishing an application to App Store. Note that only the current maintainers can submit such request; if the project isn’t maintained then it shouldn’t be published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The foundation checks out the code on some publicly available repository (such as GitHub).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The foundation examines the application, such as checking license compatibility, obvious malicious content, popularity, and user feedback. It can do this with help of community, such as publishing the request and wait for comments. More communication can happen in this stage (such as discussing how the foundation receives update).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The foundation publishes the application under its own developer account.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The application homepage directs user to install the application in App Store.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be a valid model because only the foundation pays the fee for developer account, and it should be able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-many-apps-upload-in-single-developer-account-in-iOS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;publish unlimited number of applications&lt;/a&gt;. Is there any such foundation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10915" LastEditorUserId="10915" LastEditDate="2019-06-29T16:00:35.557" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T15:41:04.353" Title="Is there any foundation publishing open-source application on App Store for free?" Tags="|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8479" CreationDate="2019-06-29T15:50:34.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, there is no such foundation. Such a foundation would also face the following difficulties:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;where open source apps exist, the app's original maintainer has likely already published it. Re-publishing it through the foundation will – in general – only lead to unnecessary duplication and may be rejected during the app store's review.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the foundation would likely not be in a position to provide necessary maintenance for the application, such as implementing security fixes, removing deprecated APIs, or keeping up with publication requirements. All of those things take effort. Either this effort is already provided by the upstream project, or the foundation would need developers that do this work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the available selection of open source apps may be quite slim. Whereas Android has a large open source ecosystem, iOS does not. There is also the issue that GPL-licensed software may be incompatible with Apple's App Store, which drastically limits the available software. (Where iOS apps are GPL-licensed, there are typically either CLAs or license exceptions involved, neither of which are compatible with the wider GPL ecosystem.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantages of such a foundation would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that individual developers can get their app published without having to cover the developer account fee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that users can trust the foundation's curation, and don't have to trust a no-name developer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that would be worth it, do start such a foundation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T15:50:34.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8482" CreationDate="2019-06-29T17:52:17.893" Score="-1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote some software from scratch, with a GPLv3 license which I am the holder. The software is free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then have some external contributors creating pull requests, and I merge them (via Github, if that's relevant). I have no CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time later, I manage to monetize the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the external contributors claim financial compensation? Since they own the code they wrote, and I'm using it for my own profit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If one day I decide to sell the whole license to some external party (that is, change the license holder to their name, and let them do whatever they want), should I get the agreement of all external contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14594" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T18:27:39.493" Title="Can I sell GPLv3 licensed code that has external contributors?" Tags="|gpl-3|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-06-29T19:02:53.607" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8481" CreationDate="2019-06-29T18:27:39.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can the external contributors claim financial compensation? Since they own the code they wrote, and I'm using it for my own profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is doubtful, but there are issues you should be aware of.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no CLA and no due diligence, you have no way of knowing that your contributors actually own the copyright to the code they submit to you. If they do not, then they are unable to release it under GPL, and your project is infringing on some third party's copyright (e.g. the contributors' employers). This is likely to go unnoticed until you try to monetize, because unlike with trademarks, there is no legal mandate (at least under US law) to enforce copyright uniformly, so copyright holders can pick and choose who they want to sue and who they want to ignore. They may not even be aware of your infringement until well after you have launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If one day I decide to sell the whole license to some external party (that is, change the license holder to their name, and let them do whatever they want), should I get the agreement of all external contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, you must get the agreement of all external contributors before changing the license. If the third party will not change the license, then you can sell your &quot;share&quot; of the copyright without obtaining permission.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, you or the new owner might be able to argue that the use of very small amounts of code from minor contributors is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and therefore non-infringing, but this is a complicated legal argument that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis in court. You do not want to go to court. It is unbelievably expensive and time-consuming. So it's much easier to just ask for everyone's agreement up-front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T18:27:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8464" CreationDate="2019-07-02T06:54:55.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consulting documentation and using that documentation to create your own work does not mean you are &quot;creating a work based on the documentation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the example you have asked about. The documentation explains how to use the makeStyles function of a component which you have included. The component itself, which has its own code, and its own files, undoubtedly has its own copyright, and since it is licensed with the MIT license, you presumably already have permission to include that code, since you presumably followed the MIT requirements when copying it into your project. However, when considering  the &lt;em&gt;documentation sample itself&lt;/em&gt; about how to use this component, I would argue that the license of that sample itself should not matter so much to you if you are using it for its intended purposes -- to create your own work. Let's look at why: First of all, the license header, and the first two lines of the documentation will be the same for any documentation page which applies the same license and which states that it 'includes' a certain component according to the syntax of the language in question, so they can be excluded from any analysis, so basically we have the following 2 lines of code posted as documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;const AA = makeStyles({root: { backgroundColor: KK, color: x1 =&amp;gt; props.color}});&#xA;&#xA;export default function BB(props) { const CC = AA(x1); return &amp;lt;div className={classes.root} /&amp;gt;; }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I have replaced the names that the author seems to have chosen with AA, BB, and CC, and apparent parameter choices with x1 and KK since perhaps these name choices could &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; be considered creative choices. But notice that the rest of this example appears to be dictated by the programming language (const, etc. by JavaScript) or associated standards (e.g. backgroundColor aka background-color by CSS, e.g. div by HTML). In other words, whoever writes such code will have no choice but to write it in this form, where AA, BB, CC, x1 and KK will perhaps differ, depending on who wrote it, but the rest cannot help but be written the same way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AA = myStyles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BB = MyComponent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC = classes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KK = 'red'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;x1 = params&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that even if you were only to customize the above elements, you would already have your own creative work, or perhaps have a work so generic as not to be considered creative at all. Indeed, the chosen names of &quot;myStyles&quot; and &quot;MyComponent&quot; of this example seem to heavily imply that the intention is that the reader of the documentation will choose her own names for these things, e.g. 'futuristicStyle' if you are creating a futuristic style, and so on. The color 'red' is obviously an example color, probably chosen to stand out. Of course you will choose your own color. But even if you were to choose 'red' for your background color, the same as the author of this documentation sample, that is just fine. No one 'owns' the singular choice of the color 'red' for the background of some kind of design. The other names 'classes' and 'params' seem entirely generic to me, so you could either customize those or not, depending on your coding style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice you would probably use this example as a starting point to insert your own styles. For example in a style you would have chosen many things other than background color to customize. And of course any style element you customize will be dependent on a relevant standard such as CSS for the name of the element you are customizing. If you consider the entire body of customizations necessary to create your own style, then perhaps that entire body of choices could be considered a creative work and subject to copyright protection, but in this example, we basically have the single choice 'set the background color to red' presented as an example to show how you can insert your own choices into this code in order to create your own unique style. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, using a name such as 'backgroundColor' in your code, does not mean you are 'deriving' your code from someone else, who also happens to be using 'backgroundColor' in his code. Why? This is because anyone who writes such code has no other choice but to use this word, since it is derived from a CSS standard name of background-color.  But even if the author had a choice in this name, and came up with the name 'backgroundColor' himself (for example), I still think this name itself is not creative in itself enough to warrant a particular creative choice. What else would you call a background color? It is a completely straightforward explanation of the color of a background of something. Anything else would simply be a different way of saying the same words, for example 'bgColor', which is simply an abbreviation of background, or background-color, which is simply a hyphenated form of the same words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a choice depends entirely on context, however. For example if you make your own fictional tale about a boy wizard, and choose to name the protagonist &quot;Harry Potter,&quot; one perhaps could make an argument that you are deriving such a choice of the character name from a different work that you do not own, and you might need a license for that. But if you choose to name him &quot;John Doe,&quot; I don't think anyone could argue that such a choice is a derivative of someone else's work or demand that you get a license to use the name &quot;John Doe&quot; for your character, even if it could be shown that someone else wrote his own story about a boy wizard in which the protagonist of that story was also named &quot;John Doe.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, if you are using documentation in the manner it is intended -- to refer to it how to do something, and then you use it in that manner, then what you have written will be considered your own work. There might be some cases where this could be challenged, but you will probably recognize when this is the case. For example, if you have found a very useful function hidden in some documentation and want to copy and paste that into your code without changes (and the code also has its own creative elements), then perhaps you should consider the license. If the license is something like MIT, then including it would be no problem in practice, as long as the requirements of the MIT license are met (for the MIT license, this means including a copyright notice in any distribution of the work that you make).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-07-04T05:15:27.733" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T05:15:27.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8486" CreationDate="2019-07-02T13:54:25.837" Score="2" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read many post and descriptions of MIT license and I have the question that If I use third party library with MIT license that the owner has add extra conditions that limit the use content and the must to share the license in all the apps that use in (it have to be shown in the UI? )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that legal or It exceeds MIT license that it said that you cannot limit the content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15389" LastEditorUserId="15389" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T14:40:53.543" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T14:55:29.117" Title="MIT license with extra conditions" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8485" CreationDate="2019-07-02T14:55:29.117" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the MIT license has been modified, that is no longer the MIT license but some custom license. Using such a custom license may or may not be fine, although terms that limit its use might no longer be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine though to modify the MIT license. The MIT license text is not protected in any way. It is also possible to distribute MIT-licensed software under different terms, as long as that use still complies with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T14:55:29.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8489" CreationDate="2019-07-03T16:39:36.680" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently in the process of porting some Lua code used in a Wiktionary module to JavaScript for an npm package. I can't find anything on whether Lua Modules on Wiktionary (or Wikipedia, which also has them) are released under a license differing from the rest of the content, so I have to assume that CC BY-SA also applies to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that I have to release my package under CC BY-SA as well, which is generally not recommended for software, or did I just miss the information about the modules' license from Wikimedia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15397" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T19:59:53.203" Title="Wiktionary module code licensing" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8487" CreationDate="2019-07-03T19:56:29.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing indicates that the Lua code would have a special license, you therefore have to assume that Wikitionary's default CC-BY-SA 3.0 applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your port is most likely an adaptation of that Lua code, you are bound by the share-alike clause. If you publish your port you can only do so under the same CC license, or a compatible license. This effectively gives you a choice between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons licenses are generally unsuitable for software because they fail to consider issues around running the software or access to the source code. But since the GPLv3 has been declared a compatible license to CC-BY-SA 4.0, you do have a choice of a license that is suitable for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T19:56:29.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8487" CreationDate="2019-07-03T19:59:53.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All content on Wiktionary is under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt;, according to a link in the footer of each page. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 3.0 materials may only be licensed under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BY-SA 3.0, &lt;strong&gt;or a later version of the BY-SA license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you make an &amp;quot;adaptation&amp;quot; of the module, you can publish it under BY-SA 4.0. If you then proceed to make another &amp;quot;adaptation&amp;quot; of the original &amp;quot;adaptation&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 4.0 materials may only be licensed under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A license designated as a “BY-SA Compatible License” as defined in BY-SA 4.0.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Art License: The Free Art license 1.3 was declared a “BY-SA–Compatible License” for version 4.0 on 21 October 2014. See the full analysis and comparison for more information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3: The GNU General Public License version 3 was declared a “BY-SA–Compatible License” for version 4.0 on 8 October 2015. Note that compatibility with the GPLv3 is one-way only, which means you may license your contributions to adaptations of BY-SA 4.0 materials under GPLv3, but you may not license your contributions to adaptations of GPLv3 projects under BY-SA 4.0. Other &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3#Considerations_for_adapters_applying_the_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;special considerations&lt;/a&gt; apply. See the full &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility_analysis:_GPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;comparison&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matters here is the definition of &amp;quot;adapatation.&amp;quot; CC-BY-SA 3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gives this definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (&amp;quot;synching&amp;quot;) will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA 4 gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, &lt;strong&gt;the original work is not an adaptation of the original work,&lt;/strong&gt; so you cannot directly relicense from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to GPLv3 without creating an intermediate work and releasing it under CC-BY-SA 4.0, and which involves &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;genuine creative differences&lt;/a&gt; from the original. You would then have to make a second adaptation, which differs from both of the first two, in order to relicense under GPLv3 or the Free Art License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T19:59:53.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4875" CreationDate="2019-07-05T02:33:55.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, no matter if is incorrect, is a complex problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 1 and 4 are not responsibility of the license but technologies or your will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could Multi Licensing (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&lt;/a&gt;) - each user chooses a license according to the use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point 2 makes no sense since open source and non-profit are not related at all. If you remove the &quot;open source&quot; part of that paragraph then I then it still miss important info. It's not so important what you give to the users, but what the users can do with it, in terms of seeing, modifying and distributing. The later is the most complicated and you need to decide if they must pay, respect / honor author / restrict licenses / etc. Also is not clear if you want to enforce users not to profit with your library or in general like a ONG organization,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for 3 you want a copyleft license like GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and since the last point is not important right now you don't even need a multi license, right now :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you could not have a license at all, put some general non formal rules that what's allowed without permission and what is only allowed with your permission and negotiate each situation individually: &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15404" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T02:33:55.147" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8496" CreationDate="2019-07-06T14:18:59.193" Score="6" ViewCount="1505" Body="&lt;p&gt;The is a single file source code that I have used as a base for my little project. That source code already works as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is its syntaxes, variable naming, spacing, and so many unused lines of code/variables. I consider it as bad and does not follow the conventions at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have re-written the code and &lt;strong&gt;added some new features&lt;/strong&gt;. The changes in the code are over 80%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code that I used as a base is licensed &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;According to the license, I can:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I am going to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Under the following terms:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the&#xA;  license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any&#xA;  reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor&#xA;  endorses you or your use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I will give a link back to the original repository/source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not sell it and will publish it as free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material,&#xA;  you may not distribute the modified material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this part. Why am I not allowed to distribute &lt;strong&gt;&quot;modified material&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; when I can just &lt;strong&gt;&quot;indicate if changes were made&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; as stated in the attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish my re-written code with new features on GitHub with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; license. Can I do it or will I encounter problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15414" LastEditorUserId="15414" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T14:32:48.480" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T15:23:27.047" Title="Can I change the license of re-written code?" Tags="|licensing|mit|creative-commons|relicensing|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-06T15:09:53.657" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to know that if I installed a SAP ASE on windows 10 (only choosing the ODBC component to install) with a trial license. Would I still be able to use it (ODBC) after the trial expires?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used SAP ASE installation to install only the ODBC for windows 10. My intention was to use the ODBC for python as I couldn't make any other driver to work properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, can I find a similar open-source driver for Sybase using python?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15415" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T15:09:53.657" Title="Will the ODBC installed with SAP ASE Trial continue working after ASE trial license expires?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8494" CreationDate="2019-07-06T15:23:27.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to publish my re-written code with new features on GitHub with MIT license. Can I do it or will I encounter problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can not publish your rewritten and extended code, because the CC BY-NC-ND license under which you received the original code does not give you permission to publish your changed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reasons only known to the author of the original code, they chose to license their code under restrictive, non-open-source terms. As those are the terms under which you received the code, you have two choices: Either you play by the rules and use your version only for yourself, or you break the rules, break the law and risk that you have to defend yourself in a court of law. A possible outcome of a lawsuit is that you have to pay penalties and stop distributing your software. Given that you are asking about the license here makes that a reasonably likely outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T15:23:27.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-07T05:02:48.853" Score="1" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going through a tutorial on Apple/Swift and they show a sample project which they offer users to download. On the Swift file, they show:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* See LICENSE folder for this sample's licensing information */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After clicking to the licensing information, I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2019 Apple Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused where this licensing information should be located in my project, especially if I am modifying/adding to the sample code. Also, which parts of the license need to be located in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15417" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T07:18:52.307" Title="Placement of Licensing in Apple Sample Code - Swift" Tags="|licensing|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8498" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-07T09:33:21.933" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just wondering how offensive would it be to promote my open source project via LinkedIn messages? I am thinking about buying a premium access in LinkedIn so I can search people who might be interested in my project and sending them mail&#xA;However I am not sure it is ethical or how annoying it can be for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15419" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T06:52:17.090" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T06:52:17.090" Title="Promoting open source project via LinkedIn message" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8498" CreationDate="2019-07-07T12:10:56.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Advertising for open-source software is no different from advertising other products or services you might offer. I am calling it advertising, because that is what your messages would be doing: bringing your product to the attention of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sending unsolicited messages, regardless of the medium, is spamming and as such is not appreciated and might even be illegal in some jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better approach would be to publicly post about your project, so that the interested people can read about it on their timeline. However, be careful you don't overdo it, both in frequency of posting and the tone of your posts, or people will just start to ignore your messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T12:10:56.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-07T19:23:51.093" Score="1" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to publish a plugin on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordPress&lt;/a&gt;. My plugin uses a library which is licensed under the LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am planning to ship the library along with plugin code, however, the library isn't statically linked to the rest of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WordPress states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anything stored in the plugin directory hosted on WordPress.org — must&#xA;  comply with the GPL or a GPL-Compatible license. Included third-party&#xA;  libraries, code, images, or otherwise, must be compatible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using this library, does my plugin comply with either the GPL or GPL-Compatible Licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15423" OwnerDisplayName="Bipin Thakur" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T05:28:52.523" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T18:23:47.273" Title="Can I use an LGPLv3 library in my WordPress plugin" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-08T03:29:43.570" Score="3" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a co-maintainer of a open source (GPLv2 licensed) image metadata library and recently a contributor made a pull request adding support for the HEIF format via &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/strukturag/libheif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libheif&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the HEIF format is a patent-minefield: is there a way for me to accept this contribution and include HEIF support as an optional &amp;amp; default off feature (also not included in binary release builds), without getting into legal trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15426" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T08:11:17.873" Title="Supporting the HEIF format in a open source library" Tags="|gpl-2|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8503" CreationDate="2019-07-08T08:55:38.227" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a a piece of software. The Software is licensed under the AGPL. &#xA;If I wanted to use an icon licensed under CC-BY,  Apache license version 2.0 (Material Design) or GPL (numix icon theme), is it enough to &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; the source only in the metadata of the icon files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FsBQX.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FsBQX.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons FAQ suggest, that I add a textual header under every image. But this would obviously disturb the whole website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15430" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T10:45:52.347" Title="Cite the source of a CC BY icon in a website only in the metadata?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8502" CreationDate="2019-07-08T10:45:52.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it will be sufficient to have the attribution of your icons only in the file's metadata (however, don't strip is out if there is licensing information in the metadata). However, I also believe it is not needed to break your design by adding attribution notices right next to each icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the placement of attribution notices, it is best to differentiate between content and design elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For content (what is also shown in the examples in the Creative Commons FAQ), I would recommend to put the attribution right next to the third-party work (photo, image, whatever) as that is where people expect to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For design elements, I would recommend to put all the attributions on a separate page. This is usually the same page where you would mention the third-party software that you used and the licenses that are applicable to the software. For the style of attribution, use the recommendations from Creative Commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T10:45:52.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8500" CreationDate="2019-07-08T18:23:47.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wordpress plugins must be available under the same license as Wordpress: GPLv2 or later. That in turn means any software that you use in the plugin must use a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is a highly compatible variant of the GPL. To determine exact compatibility we can look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility matrix in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. For the combination “I want to use a library under LGPLv3” and “I want to license my code under GPLv2 or later”, the entry says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OK: Combination is under GPLv3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because GPLv2 does not permit combinations with LGPLv3, you must convey the project under GPLv3's terms in this case, since it will allow that combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, using that library is fine, and you can license your plugin under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T18:23:47.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8507" CreationDate="2019-07-08T19:49:20.957" Score="5" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to explicitly consider possibility of having either of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig.1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1-A) A GPL application with dlopen-based plugin system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1-B) LGPL plugin for application (1-A), that is linked to (1-C)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(1-C) Proprietary non-GPL compatible library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig.2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2-A) A GPL application with dlopen-based plugin system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2-B) LGPL plugin for application (2-A), that is making own dlopen-based plugin system for (2-C)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2-C) LGPL plugin for a plugin (2-B), that is linked to (2-D)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(2-D) Proprietary non-GPL compatible library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fig.3: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3-A) A GPL application with dlopen-based plugin system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3-B) LGPL plugin for application (3-A), that is making use of any network/IPC/shared memory communication to (3-C)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3-C) An application linked to (3-D) and receiving commands from (3-B) over communication channel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(3-D) Proprietary non-GPL compatible library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as GPL-compatible way to allow GPL application utilize proprietary library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt; quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fig.1 apparently ruled out (not sure about Fig.2 completely though), however, where does &lt;code&gt;make function calls to each other and share data structures&lt;/code&gt; part ends anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Q-1) Is Fig.2 the same as Fig.1 in this respect after all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Q-2) Is IPC/shared memory page to purely exchange data counts? It lacks one of &lt;code&gt;function calls&lt;/code&gt; AND &lt;code&gt;share data structures&lt;/code&gt;, only sharing data structures that may themselves be under LGPL, dual-licensed or public domain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Q-3) Is network-based RPC falls into same category as shared memory? What if RPC implementation (e.g. zeromq) can be configured to use shared memory as a transport as well as some TCP/UDP/Unix socket?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15435" LastEditorUserId="15435" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T19:55:46.143" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T07:11:04.863" Title="GPL Application &lt;-&gt; LGPL Plugin &lt;-&gt; Properietary code" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|proprietary-code|communication|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-09T03:26:51.130" Score="5" ViewCount="2411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building my Angular app with Angular CLI and it generates &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; when I execute a production build.&#xA;The file is deployed to the server and therefore is published under &lt;code&gt;/3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know whether I should include an explicit link to &lt;code&gt;/3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; into somewhere easily recognizable to the app users.&#xA;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;angular.io&lt;/a&gt;, for example, I cannot find any link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io/3rdpartylicenses.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://angular.io/3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/a&gt; where they publish OSS licenses just like I do in my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15436" LastEditorUserId="15436" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T03:32:26.923" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T04:17:47.380" Title="Proper way to show 3rdpartylicenses.txt in Angular app" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8505" CreationDate="2019-07-09T07:11:04.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q-1) Is Fig.2 the same as Fig.1 in this respect after all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. There is no significant difference between Fig.2 and Fig.1 with regards to determining if they are considered a single combined program or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q-2) Is IPC/shared memory page to purely exchange data counts? It lacks one of function calls AND share data structures, only sharing data structures that may themselves be under LGPL, dual-licensed or public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on the data structures that are being shared and the kind of calls made over the IPC connection. GPL code can interact with proprietary code if this interaction happens &quot;at arm's length&quot;. This effectively means that the side that falls under the GPL regime can be written without having knowledge of how the proprietary code is implemented and that it is possible to replace the proprietary code with an open-source alternative (where the feasibility of writing the alternative is not considered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Q-3) Is network-based RPC falls into same category as shared memory? What if RPC implementation (e.g. zeromq) can be configured to use shared memory as a transport as well as some TCP/UDP/Unix socket?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Network based communications fall in the same category as the on-machine IPC/shared memory. With network based communications, it is usually easier to keep the two parts &quot;at arm's length,&quot; because the network protocols make it harder to accidentally share implementation details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T07:11:04.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8509" CreationDate="2019-07-10T11:56:13.347" Score="1" ViewCount="861" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a program in the Rust programming language. My program uses libraries (called crates in the Rust's ecosystem) with various licenses, like MIT Apache 2.0 and MPL-2.0. Can I use GPL if I build binaries with libraries with such licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T14:53:56.667" Title="Can I use GPL license, if my program uses libraries with MIT and MPL licenses?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|apache-2.0|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8508" CreationDate="2019-07-10T14:18:15.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The X11/MIT license, the Apache 2.0 license, and the Mozilla Public License 2.0 are all compatible with the GNU GPL version 3, which means you may include code licensed under those various licenses in a larger work that is licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL 2.0 and X11/MIT license are also compatible with the older GPLv2 license, but the Apache 2.0 license is compatible only with GPLv3. If you use GPLv2 material in a way that requires to license your work under the GPLv2, you may not include other material licensed under Apache 2.0 in that same work, but you may include MPL 2.0 and MIT-licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you merely want to license your own work under the GPL and do not use GPL-licensed material from anyone else, you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;create an exception&lt;/a&gt; to use other code licensed under any terms you like. In that case, your GPL-with-exceptions license is incompatible with any other GPL-licensed code. Downstream recipients can elect to remove the exception, thereby gaining compatibility with other GPL-licensed code but losing compatibility with whatever normally-incompatible code you allowed via your exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T14:53:56.667" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T14:53:56.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8513" CreationDate="2019-07-11T17:40:34.013" Score="1" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PistolRcks/reddit-content-analyzer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently open-source project&lt;/a&gt; was made so that I could analyze a specific dataset. However, when in talks with the data holders, they want to keep their data in a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. How can I handle this? My code is under GPLv3 and I would like to include the data with the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15452" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T14:51:54.577" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T14:51:54.577" Title="Using Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Data in a GPLv3 GitHub repo" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|github|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8512" CreationDate="2019-07-11T17:51:02.827" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently looking at ways to circumvent the limitations imposed by LGPL licences. The software I am planning to use is LGPL and is mostly used in the UI side. The idea which I am thinking is to create a client server architecture where the client can be distributed as LGPL but the server will be closed source. Since both the component is only communicated via ports; my understanding is that there is no need to release the server part of the software under LGPL or any OpenSource License. The software is a desktop application which in my view could run on the same machine communicating via ports. Is there any problem seen with this model?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15453" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T13:41:55.423" Title="Working around GPL Restrictions" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8511" CreationDate="2019-07-11T19:32:45.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that copyleft requirements can only apply to material that is within the same copyrighted work as the copyleft-licensed material. If you employ a client-server model, it is quite likely that the client and server will be separate works. It may be possible to bungle this separation such that the two pieces remain one work but it's unlikely to happen as long as you have sensible separation of duties and a meaningful protocol employed between the two components. (In other words: don't simply have them use and modify the same memory, and ensure each component has a sensible design independent of the other piece.) The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ has more to say&lt;/a&gt; about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that &lt;strong&gt;this may not be necessary at all&lt;/strong&gt; for your case. The LGPL does not place significant requirements on your work as a whole, so you may spend quite a bit of work rearchitecting your program for something that was never a problem in the first place. Unlike the GPL, which requires that your whole work be licensed under the GPL whenever it is distributed, the LGPL only requires that the library itself -- not the whole work that uses the library -- remain under the LGPL. The only requirements the LGPL places on the broader application is that the LGPL library must be easily replaceable by a modified version of the library. In practice, this usually means dynamically linking the LGPL library so that a modified version can be dynamically linked later by someone else. Your own application code may be under virtually any license whatsoever without causing issues with the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T13:41:55.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8510" CreationDate="2019-07-12T08:31:14.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, an application and the input to it are two distinct works for copyright and they can be licensed independently of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your application reads the dataset from a file and doesn't really care what dataset it reads as long as the structure is correct, then the application and dataset are definitely separate, independent works. The simple fact that they happen to be stored in the same repository doesn't change anything here. The one thing you need to do is to make it clear that different parts of the repository are covered under different licenses and which license applies to which part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T08:31:14.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8519" CreationDate="2019-07-13T03:35:38.297" Score="6" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Zipios/Zipios/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zipios version 2.x&lt;/a&gt; in 2015 based on an existing library and inherited the &lt;a href=&quot;http://zipios.sourceforge.net/zipios-v0.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old version (0.1.5)&lt;/a&gt; as a result...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In June 2019, I got an email from Mike Salvatore who reported having a problem with the library, generating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://salvatoresecurity.com/fun-with-fuzzers-how-i-discovered-three-vulnerabilities-part-2-of-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DoS&lt;/a&gt;. I don't really support 0.1.x... but Mike was kind enough to create a patch. I applied it and created a new version of the source tarball for download and posted everywhere about the issue and the availability of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/zipios/files/zipios%2B%2B/0.1.7/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patched version 0.1.7&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are you expected to do with the older versions that have that one bug in them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't add a note directly in the old versions since the tarballs, the CVS, all of those things are expected to all be frozen (read-only.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I posted notes about the corresponding &lt;a href=&quot;https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13453&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CVE-2019-13543&lt;/a&gt; on all the attached websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you do more? Sourceforge.net lets me delete the old .tar.gz files, for example. I can also rename the folders (so instead of &lt;code&gt;0.1.5&lt;/code&gt;, I could have &lt;code&gt;0.1.5-with-DoS&lt;/code&gt; or something of the sort.) The one place where I've seen people dealing with such issues is Drupal and they hide versions that have security issues, but they remain available for download. You have to know your way to those files, though, they are somewhat hidden. So it seems to me that just leaving everything else the way it is would be the normal solution for such. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14656" LastEditorUserId="14656" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T10:12:15.383" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T09:06:43.800" Title="Are there rules on what to do with an old OpenSource software with a security issue?" Tags="|source-code|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8536" CreationDate="2019-07-13T13:48:13.877" Score="0" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Server-client based HTTP open-source projects like MongoDB use AGPL/SSPL for their main backend implementation and use a more permissive license for their client so that devs embedding MongoDB clients get a more relaxed license when using MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the same licensing approach be used for AGPL libraries? Should all public interfaces, classes, methods etc provided by the library be of a more permissive license so AGPL does not apply when using the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10500" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T11:00:55.557" Title="How can an AGPL library be more permissive when using the library's public APIs?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|copyleft|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8517" CreationDate="2019-07-13T20:52:47.147" Score="3" ViewCount="2731" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are so many licenses that honestly they are making me dizzy. Here is what I want to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;require my copyright notice and no-warranty statement.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;permit people to use + run my code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;don't permit people to modify my code because I don't want to see hybrids of mine+others' files out there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;permit people to incorporate my code as a library in their projects.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;permit people to copy, sell, distribute my code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modification issue stems from my not wanting to fuss over what part of a modified file was my code and what is the other person's. I would prefer if people email me to point out bugs or make suggestions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such a license out there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15474" LastEditorDisplayName="user15474" LastEditDate="2019-07-13T21:46:46.843" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T08:46:29.257" Title="What open source license allows everything except modification?" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2019-07-14T02:53:25.620" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Epsilon is a software which chose to use a license as you describe. Here is a talk about that license and the different problems it can cause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/numworks/epsilon/issues/38&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for would be this type of license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not really see a problem with others playing with your code. In most cases, though the source remains the main version and the forks are only checked for possible enhancements and/or bugs that would need to be fixed in the main source. So it can really be helpful to have people help you improve your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Epsilon, I suppose it is from a company and a team works on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're by yourself, why not have a few people help every now and then?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14656" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T02:53:25.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8501" CreationDate="2019-07-14T08:05:01.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl; dr&lt;/strong&gt;: no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8374/458&quot;&gt;already had a question&lt;/a&gt; here about HEIF and free implementations thereof, the upshot of which was that the use of LGPLv3 for libheif grants a licence for any patents &lt;em&gt;held or used under licence by the author&lt;/em&gt;.  Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that the libheif authors have the rights so to use the patents embodied by HEIF, so it's not at all clear that their use by libheif users is licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the bigger problem is that your software is GPLv2, and libheif is LGPLv3.  The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has held&lt;/a&gt; that those two licences are incompatible, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://nikmav.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-perils-of-lgplv3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;others agree&lt;/a&gt;.  So all patent issues aside, unless one of you changes your licensing arrangements, the two bodies of code cannot be combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that your question introduces subtleties like enabling HEIF support to be turned off at build time, and not shipping any binaries with it turned on.  Whether that would improve the patent situation I cannot say, but I &lt;em&gt;suspect&lt;/em&gt; that enough libheif-specific changes would have to be made to your codebase to enable HEIF to be &lt;em&gt;meaningfully&lt;/em&gt; compiled-in on request that your code would become a derivative work of libheif, thus running you squarely into the licence compatibility issue.  I also suspect, though with less grounds, that shoving the whole patent issue downstream like that will not endear you to distributors, who may just throw up their hands and decide not to touch your project until it's &lt;em&gt;unquestionably&lt;/em&gt; patent-unencumbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, as ever, IANAL/IANYL, and you should seek your own legal advice before relying on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T08:11:17.873" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T08:11:17.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8514" CreationDate="2019-07-14T08:52:02.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are you expected to do with the older versions...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is something that is decided by every project maintainer. Some projects will only provide support and updates for the latest release, others may also provide updates for several past releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have provided an update and documented a known issue, even for an old version released before you started your fork of the project. I would say you have done more than what is expected of you. It is now up to the users to update what they have installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the issue is of big enough scope, then taking steps to hinder acquiring older versions of the code will help to prevent additional vulnerable installations and encourage packaging systems to be updated. That is the most you can be expected to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T08:52:02.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8520" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8521" CreationDate="2019-07-14T10:56:02.920" Score="7" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that WordPress is licensed GPLv2 (or later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that all things that use WordPress must also be GPLv2 (or later) compatible (eg. Plugins and Themes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read somewhere that cracking/nulling premium plugins/themes are legal since these also must use GPLv2 (or later) license. &lt;strong&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Can-I-get-sued-for-using-nulled-WordPress-plugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I get sued for using nulled WordPress plugins?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will use version control (Git) for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/roots/bedrock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordPress site running Bedrock&lt;/a&gt;, I am planning to release it as a public repository with MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WordPress is GPLv2 license but why is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/roots/bedrock/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordPress boilerplate Bedrock is released MIT&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that I can release a Bedrock WordPress website as MIT license while also using premium themes and plugins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15414" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T20:29:48.093" Title="Can I publish a WordPress site as MIT?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|gpl-2|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8520" CreationDate="2019-07-14T20:29:48.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free to publish your own software under MIT, as long as it doesn't include any GPL-covered components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordpress themes and plugins do not have to be GPL-licensed, the must merely have a GPL-&lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; license. MIT is GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T20:29:48.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8516" CreationDate="2019-07-15T08:46:29.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no Open Source licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see extract from definition &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/osd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as&#xA;  the license of the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However did you know that this &lt;strong&gt;does not mean&lt;/strong&gt; that people have permission to edit your copy of the code. And a licence is not the way to stop people breaking your personal files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T08:46:29.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8514" CreationDate="2019-07-15T09:06:43.800" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there rules on what to do with an old OpenSource software with a&#xA;security issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I don't see that this is related to OpenSource, as there is nothing in the definition about this. You and everyone else is free to delete any open source executable software. But you may have to keep source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second if you are the maintainer you are not bound by the licence, so can even delete source code. However I would just label and hide source code, and remove executable version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be laws stating that you have to make some effort to protect your users (this will vary by legal system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T09:06:43.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8511" CreationDate="2019-07-15T09:18:18.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPL dose not affect the rest of the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing something that is obviously a circumvention will not work. If the two pieces of software are intimately connected, then they are one. No matter the communication mechanism. Procedure call, pipe, socket, syscall, it makes no difference. What makes a difference is dependency: if they both depend on each other, then they are one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-07-15T09:18:18.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8605" CreationDate="2019-07-15T18:10:22.120" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently open sourced a utility which uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/pdftoprinter.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDFtoPrinter.exe&lt;/a&gt;. Now I am confused with choosing a license because its &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/pdftoprinter.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;homepage&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This system uses the free PDF-Xchange Viewer. You should consult the&#xA;  linked page to determine whether or not you may use that program for&#xA;  your own purposes. The compiled AutoIt script that wraps the PDF&#xA;  software is free for use by anyone, anywhere, for any purposes&#xA;  whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found this &quot;PDF-XChange® PDF Viewer&quot; license &lt;a href=&quot;http://downloads.pdf-xchange.com/PDF_VE.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but I am completely confused what licenses my open source project can have now. Should I use the same license or it's possible to find something that will allow me to distribute it with my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15489" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T06:08:14.737" Title="What license can I choose, if my utility uses another one with a custom license" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T02:18:39.207" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;for example, File A.java is distributed under GPL with Classpath Exception License..&#xA;And I develop software C. There is a B.java file in C. B.java imports A(not A.jar, but A.java) and call function of A.java&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, should I release code of B.java or all source code of software C?&#xA;Or I wander that I need not release code of B and C in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15493" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:07:25.440" Title="GPL with Classpath Exception License" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8532" CreationDate="2019-07-16T05:44:47.153" Score="5" ViewCount="2121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building some docker image which is using &lt;code&gt;alpine:3.10&lt;/code&gt; as base image. When I scan my built image for any license violation using whitesource scanner, I am getting lot of libraries which are licensed under &lt;code&gt;GPL 2.0&lt;/code&gt;, They are all part of the base alpine image I have used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Hlzq.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Hlzq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Libraries having GPL 2.0 license&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to know whether it would be safe for me to use this image for commercial purposes ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15494" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T08:24:56.597" Title="is it safe to use GPL 2.0 licensed libraries in my commercial container image?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|gpl-2|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:00:43.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The PDF-Xchange software is free of cost, but it is not free in terms of freedom. The relevant portion of the license is (emphasis theirs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may use the Free version without charge provided you are the End User&lt;/strong&gt; and do not intend to distribute or incorporate it with or into any other product or software package intended for resale or distribution for any purpose whatsoever other than as provided for in this license. Should you wish to distribute the PDF-XChange Viewer/Editor (free version) for any purpose, whether for commercial gain or not – please email Tracker at sales@tracker-software.com and provided you receive no direct commercial or financial gain directly from doing so from such distribution – such permission will usually be granted ‘free’ - promptly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In layman's terms, this says that you must ask explicit permission to incorporate even the (cost-)free version of PDF-Xchange Viewer in your own project. This in itself does not affect the license of your code, but the terms under which Tracker allows re-distribution of their software and how you integrated the PDFtoPrinter software in your application might affect your licensing options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the copyleft licenses, like the GPL, have the strong implication that all parts of the system can be freely re-distributed, also for financial gain, those licenses might not be compatible with the distribution terms of the PDF-Xchange software, but that can only be determined with any level of certainty when those terms are known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses, like the MIT license, have that expectation to a far lesser extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:00:43.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8527" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:07:25.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the file B.java uses the A.java from your development environment and that can not be switched to another version of A at runtime, then the Classpath Exception to the GPL license can never trigger. As a result, software C, which contains B.java, must comply with the GPL terms and be released itself under a GPL-compatible open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:07:25.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8533" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:09:49.673" Score="6" ViewCount="1433" Body="&lt;p&gt;For educational purposes I've open sourced my blog on GitHub (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nehalist/nehalist.io&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nehalist/nehalist.io&lt;/a&gt;), which is based on a fork of an MIT licensed repo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-default&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't changed the license until I released version 1.0. With this release I switched to a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I've open sourced my blog multiple people cloned or forked it and published pretty much exact copies of my blog - even with the exact same content (just replaced my name with theirs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I tried to contact them and politely explained that publishing exact copies of my work was not the intent of open sourcing it they just reply with &quot;it was released under MIT back then&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I'm confronted with a couple of issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;everyone could just check out an earlier version of my blog (before 1.0 was released where the license was changed) and publish an exact copy of my blog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't just make the repo private due to Travis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly didn't think of the possibility that people would simply &quot;steal&quot; my entire site and simply replace my name with theirs (some of them even use the same random facts on the about page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone got an idea what I can do in this case? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15479" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T09:51:36.927" Title="License validity of unreleased project" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8528" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:27:50.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just want to know whether it would be safe for me to use this image for commercial purposes ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is safe to use this image for commercial purposes, assuming the commercial application is a normal userland application and there are no dependencies on other GPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The packages noted in the screenshot are all either system libraries of a typical Linux system (and those have the possibility of using the LGPL or similar licenses, which are friendly to commercial applications), or they are infrastructure packages that provide common unix/linux tools and your application shouldn't be dependent on exactly that package being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple fact that a container contains GPL packages does not affect in any way the possibility to also have commercial software in the same container.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:27:50.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8531" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:30:57.550" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do nothing.  Releasing software has nothing to do with version numbering; it is a matter of conveying it (which includes &quot;making it available&quot;) to others, and making the licence terms under which it's conveyed clear.  Once you have conveyed code under a licence, people may use it under that licence until the terms of that licence say they cannot.  In the case of free software licences, most contain no termination provisions, and even those that do (such as the GPL) do not allow for termination based on compliant re-use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, no free licence is going to let you do what you want.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; include the freedom to use the software for any purpose, and the freedom to redistribute verbatim copies.  By releasing under the MIT (or any other free) licence, you told people they had the right to do those two things, so it is unsurprising that when you &quot;&lt;em&gt;explained that publishing exact copies of my work was not the intent of open sourcing it&lt;/em&gt;&quot; people were unsympathetic to your interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it is possible to write some kind of licence that only allows for re-distribution after sufficient modification.  But I think you will run into terrible problems describing &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; modification is sufficient, since you've indicated that a trivial one (&quot;&lt;em&gt;just replaced my name with theirs&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) is not, in your opinion, enough.  In any case, such a licence would be non-free, and so off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do also bear in mind that GitHub's &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of service&lt;/a&gt; include (s. D5) giving other users the right to clone your repo, so by developing on GitHub the one thing you are still permitting other people to do is &lt;strong&gt;make verbatim copies of your work&lt;/strong&gt;, your own licence notwithstanding (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vndangky/nehalist.io&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it looks like&lt;/a&gt; someone has already done so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T09:51:36.927" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T09:51:36.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8531" CreationDate="2019-07-16T07:42:33.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8533/258&quot;&gt;answer by @MadHatter&lt;/a&gt;, there is nothing you can do against existing forks of your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To prevent future forks of your repository from getting the MIT-licensed content, you can rewrite the history of your repository, so that the commit with the license change becomes one of the very first commits (before you added serious content). When you do this, you must also remove all existing tags from the repository, so that there is no way (short of knowing the actual commit hash) to retrieve commits with content under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T07:42:33.540" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8528" CreationDate="2019-07-16T08:24:56.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL allows commercial use, and allows you to distribute GPL software side by side with proprietary software. Issues only arise if your proprietary software &lt;em&gt;includes&lt;/em&gt; GPL components or is &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; from GPL components – then, your software would have to be available under the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux systems commonly include lots of GPL software. Merely running your proprietary software in a Linux environment does not make your software derived from these GPL programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A container image isn't a single program that links all its contents. Instead, it is more like a file system image, and can be treated similarly to a ZIP archive or an USB thumb drive that includes software. We can therefore look at all the programs in the image separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may distribute software with different licenses side by side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must comply with the license for &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; software in the image.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the GPL-covered software, this means providing the recipient a copy of the license and the source code for that software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No open source license extends its effects to unrelated software in the same image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some Linux distros like Debian have built-in mechanisms for managing licenses and source code for installed packages, which simplifies compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T08:24:56.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8515" CreationDate="2019-07-17T10:21:09.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licensing decisions on code are largely up to the code's developer.  Some free software developers love the effortless re-usability that non-copyleft licences give, others love the feeling that they're contributing to an open community that the copyleft licences give.  Although I have my preferences about which should be used, it's really up to the people doing the legwork of creating the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a library that you want to use, but you can't because it's AGPL and you want to make non-free code out of it, then I'm sorry, but live with it; the creators of that library have been clear that they don't want their library used that way.  Whether you, or I, think that they were wrong to want that is not, in my opinion, really material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T11:00:55.557" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T11:00:55.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8538" CreationDate="2019-07-17T22:28:37.337" Score="2" ViewCount="389" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL is infectious, so my application would become GPL once a single GPL-licensed file is included.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, MIT is compatible with GPL, and MIT isn't infectious, so my application doesn't have to be GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, I'm talking about an R package named &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lib/testthat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;testthat&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/issues/904&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed under MIT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15509" LastEditorUserId="15509" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T23:52:59.833" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T00:44:33.637" Title="What if I used a MIT-licensed library which has a GPL dependency?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8537" CreationDate="2019-07-18T00:44:33.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GPL is infectious, so my application would become GPL once a single GPL-licensed file is included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF FAQ&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program...All GNU GPL versions permit such combinations privately; they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer the question, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, MIT is compatible with GPL, and MIT isn't infectious, so my application doesn't have to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is incorrect. From the above quote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case, the only GPL file I can see is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/commit/53b5b635f298de1b52e12fe24265b07c0f689466#diff-a3dd38952aa234e2fb229f7484ebf704&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;R/stack.R&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Source: https://github.com/rstudio/shiny/blob/master/R/stack.R&#xA;# License: GPL-3&#xA;# Relicensed a MIT with permission.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would contact the authors of rstudio, to validate this claim before assuming it to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T00:44:33.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8540" CreationDate="2019-07-18T03:52:53.120" Score="-1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.xml.soap/saaj-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.xml.soap/saaj-api&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It mentions 2 licenses:&#xA;CDDL and GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean it uses both licenses ? or any one of them ? If just one of them how to know which one ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15510" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T06:34:38.950" Title="Which of the license is used by SaaJ-api ? CDDL or GPL?" Tags="|gpl|license|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8539" CreationDate="2019-07-18T06:34:38.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SaaJ-api package is dual-licensed under both the CDDL and the GPL with Classpath Exception. This dual licensing means that you, as user of the package, can choose which license terms you want to comply with, either the CDDL or the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T06:34:38.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8542" CreationDate="2019-07-18T14:29:46.547" Score="1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find what license is used by axis-wsdl4j here - &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/axis/axis-wsdl4j&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/axis/axis-wsdl4j&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since no license was listed I looked at axis license:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.axis/axis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.axis/axis&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Here it clearly lists that it is using Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since axis-wsdl4j appears to be a subset of axis, is it safe to assume axis-wsdl4j  also uses Apache ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15510" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T19:14:06.317" Title="Do all packages under Axis come under apache license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8541" CreationDate="2019-07-18T19:14:06.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't blindly trust any website concerning licensing for a software package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always find the origin, and see what they have to say about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question, the license for WSDL4J is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Public License v1.0&lt;/a&gt;, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/22369159/8507637&quot;&gt;this answer on stackoverflow&lt;/a&gt;, which points to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsdl4j&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WSDL4J SourceForge page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/wsdl4j/files/WSDL4J/1.6.3/wsdl4j-src-1.6.3.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt; available there contain the following license file, (wsdl4j-src-1.6.3/wsdl4j-1_6_3/license.html).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Common Public License - v 1.0&#xA;&#xA;THE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS COMMON PUBLIC LICENSE (&quot;AGREEMENT&quot;). ANY USE, REPRODUCTION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THE PROGRAM CONSTITUTES RECIPIENT'S ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT.&#xA;&#xA;[ . . . TRUNCATED . . . ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T19:14:06.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-19T14:52:07.363" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Microsoft will soon make Edge a Chromium-based (i.e. WebKit) browser.  This is good for Microsoft and the WebKit ecosystem, but not necessarily good for the web as a whole (since this further allows WebKit to define what is standard, vs WebKit following proper standards).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the existing Edge implementation is going away, this old code will have little or no value to Microsoft.  The community might find value taking a browser like Edge and breathing new life into it.  If enough momentum (i.e. market-share) can be gained by an open-source spin-off, perhaps Microsoft would at some point even return to using their creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, the code has the Microsoft name on the copyright and breeds good-will to the open-source community, which is something that Microsoft has invested large amounts of money to do &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in recent years&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, &lt;strong&gt;why wouldn't Microsoft make the existing Edge browser (in its entirety) open-source&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15522" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T17:49:20.047" Title="Why doesn't Microsoft open-source the existing Edge browser?" Tags="|commercial|proprietary-code|microsoft|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8543" CreationDate="2019-07-19T17:49:20.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons why releasing the source code for Edge under a FLOSS license may not be a worthwhile investment for Microsoft:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code may be tightly coupled with other Microsoft components (e.g., undocumented Windows APIs) that aren't intended for third-party use, so Microsoft is reluctant to disclose code that makes use of them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code and documentation may be unfit for release to the public such that it would look bad for Microsoft: if they released code that was quite difficult to build or understand, it might be embarrassing, or at least look like a cheap &quot;reputation grab&quot; by appearing to release something significant without doing the work to make it maximally useful.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Web standards change quickly. Unless a significant community will invest in an open-sourced Edge, it will become obsolete very quickly. This differs from a tool to accomplish a particular job (word processing, photo editing, etc.) because a browser must actively change and grow in order to remain useful to render Web documents. It might be embarrassing for Microsoft to have Edge live on as a kind of &quot;undead&quot; project that grows rapidly less useful over time, rather than to cleanly kill it at once.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T17:49:20.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8547" CreationDate="2019-07-19T19:12:12.747" Score="1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to do this as an alternative to having a CLA (which was suggested to me in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8460/as-the-owner-of-a-gplv3-project-what-type-of-restrictions-will-be-placed-on-me&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt;) that transfers all copyright over to me. Is this a good idea and are there any potential issues with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T22:09:36.457" Title="For a GPLv3 project, would accepting contributions under the MIT license allow me to keep full control of the project?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8549" CreationDate="2019-07-19T20:55:37.380" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons website gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/get-permission/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; example for giving attribution to an image that was found on a website. For this project, contributors who wish to contribute assets would be sending the assets to me directly/through git and would likely not be hosted anywhere else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15256" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T14:54:05.740" Title="What is the correct way to receive and give attribution to CC BY-SA asset contributions on a project managed with git?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|contributor|cc-by-sa|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8545" CreationDate="2019-07-19T22:09:36.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inbound = outbound licensing is the community expectation, and is also codified by Github terms of service. You want inbound ≠ licensing. That is entirely possible, but you're on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make this difference absolutely clear to potential contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;collect agreement from each contributor for the more permissive inbound license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're doing is essentially a CLA, just implemented with an open source license for the rights that you receive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you want to be able to use your software as a whole under the MIT license, then you must not include any third party GPLv3 code in your project. Neither you nor your contributors can make use of GPLv3 code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contributors are probably unable to provide an MIT license because they are bound by the terms of the GPL. This is a bit of a subtle distinction, but it's important for your inbound ≠ outbound system to work. Otherwise, other people would also be able to use the contributions under the terms of the MIT license. Your CLA will have to clarify that you are the sole recipient of this MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that novel licensing constructions are a headache for everyone involved and should be avoided. Sane solutions include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just normal inbound = outbound licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cathedral-style development where you do not accept community contributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a fair and straightforward CLA, e.g. from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harmonyagreements.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harmony Agreements&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T22:09:36.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8552" CreationDate="2019-07-20T14:47:17.593" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), library released under an MIT license, however, the sources contain XML specifications which are owned by the Bluetooth SIG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is an excerpt from the file, &lt;code&gt;org.bluetooth.characteristic.alert_level.xml&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;utf-8&quot;?&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- Copyright 2011 Bluetooth SIG, Inc. All rights reserved. --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;Characteristic xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation=&quot;http://schemas.bluetooth.org/Documents/characteristic.xsd&quot; xmlns:xsi=&quot;http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&quot; name=&quot;Alert Level&quot; type=&quot;org.bluetooth.characteristic.alert_level&quot; uuid=&quot;2A06&quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;[ . . . TRUNCATED . . . ]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this allowed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not the original author, just a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-07-21T07:21:42.647" Title="Including copyrighted specifications in an MIT-licensed project" Tags="|mit|copyright|specifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8546" CreationDate="2019-07-20T14:54:05.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your README, include a statement for each asset used,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Project&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Attribution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Foo” by bar is licensed under CC BY 2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Baz&quot; by qux is licensed under CC BY 2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; bar and qux would be the names of the original creator of each asset specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, you can create a separate file, e.g., &lt;code&gt;assets/NOTICE&lt;/code&gt;; and include them there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T14:54:05.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8479" CreationDate="2019-07-20T15:41:04.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one main issue with your question, &lt;strong&gt;it is not possible&lt;/strong&gt; to publish Free/Libre and Open Source software on the Apple Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OWASP/owasp-mstg/blob/master/Document/0x06a-Platform-Overview.md#code-signing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OWASP Mobile Security Testing Guide&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Apple has implemented an elaborate DRM system to make sure that only Apple-approved code runs on their devices, that is, code signed by Apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's article, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/apples-crystal-prison-and-future-open-platforms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, because Apple modifies binaries before publishing apps in the App Store, open source apps released under the GNU General Public License cannot be published without the approval of all authors, which caused the popular media player VLC to get removed from sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/459833/8507637&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/459833/8507637&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T15:41:04.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8548" CreationDate="2019-07-21T07:21:42.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the mere fact that it's copyrighted isn't cause for alarm.  Every work that qualifies for copyright protection acquires this protection at the moment of its creation, according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;, so &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; that's contributed to a piece of free software is copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the free software world has licences that make it clear which of the rights normally reserved by copyright are made available to the world, and that spell out the conditions under which this is done.  It is also why well-behaved software licences (eg, GPLv3) advise that each source file clearly state what licence it is distributed under.  They also generally require you to leave pre-existing copyright notices alone, so the presence of such is really nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; (ARR) bit is perhaps more worrying.  As Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;makes clear&lt;/a&gt;, this is a now-meaningless declaration which is often used, cargo-cult-style, by companies who don't realise it adds nothing to modern copyright's default protections.  Worse yet, some companies that intend to distribute content under a free licence use ARR &lt;em&gt;as well as&lt;/em&gt; a free licence declaration, which is tantamount to saying &quot;&lt;em&gt;you cannot use this work; feel free to use this work&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  This is at best confusing; Debian &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/06/msg00253.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advise against it&lt;/a&gt;, and it leads to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved&quot;&gt;other questions here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it is possible to get &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sputnikdev/bluetooth-gatt-parser/blob/master/src/main/resources/gatt/characteristic/org.bluetooth.characteristic.alert_level.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;org.bluetooth.characteristic.alert_level.xml&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - still carrying the ARR notice - from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sputnikdev/bluetooth-gatt-parser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a repository&lt;/a&gt; which is clearly Apache-licensed.  Does that other project owner have the right to distribute this code under a free licence?  We can't tell, but (s)he is certainly advertising that (s)he does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does that leave you?  I presume from your question that though you are a contributor, you didn't contribute that particular file.  My advice from here - and bear in mind IANAL/IANYL - depends on your personal relaxation level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are feeling relaxed, note that there is a path to get that file under the terms of Apache 2, which is probably free enough for you (if you dig around you can probably find a copy under MIT).  Should you need to, you can point to a good-faith effort to find a legitimately-reusable copy of the file.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are not feeling quite that relaxed, find out who checked those particular files into your repo, and ask them whence the files came, and why they think they have rights to MIT-license them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are feeling distinctly tense, delete any copies you have of the files, and walk away from the project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-07-21T07:21:42.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8566" CreationDate="2019-07-21T08:35:04.247" Score="4" ViewCount="1265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there some web page or Unix command line tool where I can paste the text of a license, and it would match it against a database of well-known open source licenses to tell me which one it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the SPDX project already has an excellent database, I'm just looking for an easy front-end for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15528" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T05:59:15.390" Title="Interactive tool to identify license based on the license text" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T08:46:21.737" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;for example, File A.java is distributed under GPL with Classpath Exception License.. And I develop software C. There is a B.java file in C. B.java imports A(not A.jar, but A.java) and call function of A.java&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, should I release code of B.java or all source code of software C? Or I wander that I need not release code of B and C in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15493" OwnerDisplayName="JuHyun Park" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T21:12:19.970" Title="GPL with Classpath Exception License" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-07-23T16:14:42.213" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8560" CreationDate="2019-07-23T19:12:46.760" Score="19" ViewCount="4808" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use GIMP, Inkscape, and Lightzone for work in a government environment. Not modify the software, just use the applications. Does the license allow me to use the software in such environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure this is allowable, I just can't find anything stating it explicitly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15543" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T13:47:19.120" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:50:04.733" Title="Do the licences permit GPL- and BSD-licensed applications to be used for government work?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-07-23T20:00:17.363" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different organizations have different policies.  Google is apparently fine with GPL software, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;doesn't permit&lt;/a&gt; AGPL.  Facebook seems fine with both, but anything under the SSPL or with a Commons Clause addendum &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/782862/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is right out&lt;/a&gt;.  My company is fine with MIT/BSD/Apache, GPL, and AGPL but bans proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think there is a hard and fast rule that we can point to; you will have to ask your employer what the applicable policy is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T20:00:17.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-07-23T22:01:44.250" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of Free Software includes anyone being able to use the software for any purpose (any field of endeavor and no discrimination against persons or groups).  So no version of the GPL, or any other Free Software license can prevent the DoD or any other government entity from using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some software or the things that some software does could be banned in various countries or perhaps under international treaty, but that isn't really license related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T22:01:44.250" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-07-24T09:53:05.773" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me quote the relevant section from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3 license&lt;/a&gt;, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. Basic Permissions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. &lt;strong&gt;This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.&lt;/strong&gt; The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may&lt;/strong&gt; make, &lt;strong&gt;run&lt;/strong&gt; and propagate &lt;strong&gt;covered works&lt;/strong&gt; that you do not convey, &lt;strong&gt;without conditions&lt;/strong&gt; so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording of the BSD license makes this implicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and &lt;strong&gt;use in&lt;/strong&gt; source and &lt;strong&gt;binary forms&lt;/strong&gt;, with or without&#xA;modification, &lt;strong&gt;are permitted&lt;/strong&gt; provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's nothing from the GPL and BSD licenses preventing you from &lt;strong&gt;running&lt;/strong&gt; the programs in any scenario, and the GPL even reaffirms so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that both GPL and BSD are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI-approved licenses&lt;/a&gt;; that means that the license complies with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, this assures that GPL- and BSD-licensed software can be used in any field / kind of work, including governmental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different question is whether your particular workplace/scenario/organization allows you to run GPL/BSD licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, if you were distributing the programs or allowing other people to use it, the situation would be different. Since you're talking about desktop productivity/graphics software (GIMP, inkscape, etc) this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15547" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T15:24:01.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-07-24T13:40:22.407" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whilst others have covered the legal aspects, I think it's worth noting there are numerous real-world examples of government agencies successfully using open-source licences without issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germany's government is quite fond of open source solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the federal government of Germany has decided to partner with&#xA;  Nextcloud–a popular open source file sync and collaborative service&#xA;  provider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fossbytes.com/german-government-open-source-cloud-nextcloud/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fossbytes.com/german-government-open-source-cloud-nextcloud/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The International Space Station, and thus NASA, uses Linux:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the “dozens of laptops” will make the change to Debian 6. These&#xA;  laptops will join many other systems aboard the ISS that already run&#xA;  various flavors of Linux, such as RedHat and Scientific Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/155392-international-space-station-switches-from-windows-to-linux-for-improved-reliability&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu was even approved for use by the federal government:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Canonical's Ubuntu has become third Linux operating system approved by&#xA;  the General Services Administration for use by federal purchasers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pcworld.com/article/190264/Government_Ubuntu.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.pcworld.com/article/190264/Government_Ubuntu.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The US Navy Oceanographic Office uses Linux:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a grander scale, many federal agencies are also using Linux. One&#xA;  example is the US Navy Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO), which&#xA;  collects and analyzes the world's oceans for the benefit of both the&#xA;  Navy and other Department of Defense agencies, is currently using&#xA;  Linux in certain environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6217&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6217&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The UK government even encourages the adoption of open standards, including ODF and ODF-compatible software, such as LibreOffice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-open-document-formats-odf-in-your-organisation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gov.uk/guidance/using-open-document-formats-odf-in-your-organisation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of governments even open-source their own works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The UK government has it's own dedicated open-source licence:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The US government in 2014 trialled open-sourcing some of it's code (for internal government reuse):&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160808/17314335186/us-government-now-has-official-open-source-software-policy.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160808/17314335186/us-government-now-has-official-open-source-software-policy.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DoD and USAF even offered up a lightweight Linux OS:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geek.com/chips/u-s-dept-of-defense-offers-up-tiny-secure-linux-distribution-1405659/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.geek.com/chips/u-s-dept-of-defense-offers-up-tiny-secure-linux-distribution-1405659/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of other examples which you can find. I even work in a government organisation and we use a variety of GPL and open-source style licences (including Ubuntu and CentOS). It's advisable you read and comply with the terms of each given licence as stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15548" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T13:40:22.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:04:24.893" Score="3" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a simple GUI with Electron for a CLI executable that is distributed under GPLv2. I assume the license isn't an issue since this is a personal project and I'm happy to license mine GPLv2 as well, but I was wondering the correct way to bundle the executable file in my Git source control as it seems like a really bad solution to include it as if it was a source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15552" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2020-01-02T09:30:27.033" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:45:48.257" Title="What's the correct way to bundle an executable (GPLv2) in my Git project" Tags="|github|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:10:48.713" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you did not made any modifications to the CLI tool just link to the original repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T20:10:48.713" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:39:04.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, yes. However, some government agencies place additional requirements on their software, either by policy or by law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: The USG often requires FIPS certification for cryptographic modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, there may be other types of certification for other use cases. I don't believe there are any for graphics editing, but I don't work in that industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certification costs are often borne by the developer, so most FOSS packages aren't certified. This is part of the reason why OpenSSL and Red Hat are important parts of the ecosystem; they allow penetration into regulated sectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In general GPL and BSD are permissible, but it depends on the specific industry, policies, and laws.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15554" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T20:39:04.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8553" CreationDate="2019-07-25T05:59:15.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order that this question can have an answer accepted, but given that Amon doesn't seem minded to write it, I'm repeating his/her answer verbatim as community wiki.  Amon, if you do want to write it up, flag me or a mod to remove this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/licensee/licensee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensee&lt;/a&gt; tool, which is written in Ruby, to determine project licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T05:59:15.390" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-07-25T05:59:15.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7872" CreationDate="2019-07-25T20:46:18.327" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) draws a distinction between Apache-licensed software that is produced by the ASF, and your own software that is distributed under the Apache 2 license. The rules applied to the NOTICE change whether your software falls in one category or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Apply-My-Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Apply-My-Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How should I apply the Apache License to my own software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should include a copy of the Apache License, typically in a file called LICENSE, in your work, and consider also including a NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also valuable to tag each of your source code files in case they become detached from the LICENSE file. To apply the Apache License to your source code files, one approach is to attach the following boilerplate notice to as a comment at the top of the files. You should replace the Copyright templates with your own identifying information: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is not an Apache Software Foundation project, but just happens to be Apache 2 licensed, you're not required to even keep a NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NOTICE file is where you would mention if parts of the code have a different copyright, or are under different a different license. The LICENSE file should remain unmodified, taken straight from the official license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this page from OSEHRA, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.osehra.org/wiki/how-apply-apache-20-license-your-software-project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.osehra.org/wiki/how-apply-apache-20-license-your-software-project&lt;/a&gt; , the NOTICE should be used to identify the following information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright holders (and potentially patent holders)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The portions of the source code for which they hold the copyright (and that potentially can be covered by their patents)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The License adopted for that portion of the code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not you consider OSEHRA to be an authoritative source for that kind of information, you should keep the NOTICE short, because it will need to be redistributed by &amp;quot;downstream&amp;quot; users of your software (that's rule 4d of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license&lt;/a&gt;). i.e. don't add anything to the NOTICE that isn't legally relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Regarding your specific example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question asks about the validity of the following the specific notice text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This product includes software developed at&#xA;The Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code wasn't developed at the Apache Software Foundation, then I wouldn't write that in the notice. It would be false information. Perhaps this was obtained from an example NOTICE only applicable to new software projects &lt;em&gt;specifically from&lt;/em&gt; the ASF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15571" LastEditorUserId="14857" LastEditDate="2022-06-20T13:27:36.063" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T13:27:36.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-28T02:45:22.817" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a website that offers both a codebase to process some arbitrary public data (as Apache 2.0), but licensed the output data of the workflow as BY-NC-SA 4.0 (at least the processed data on the website). Can I re-produce the output data with the (free) codebase, and integrate it into a commercial offering? Presumably, the data is considered a derivate of the code, and should be covered by Apache 2.0 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15585" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T06:32:41.370" Title="Code workflow is licensed Apache 2, but the data generated is BY-NC-SA. Can I recreate the data and commercialize it?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|license|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2019-07-28T06:32:41.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but your presumption is wrong; the output of a program is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;not generally subject to the licence of the program&lt;/a&gt;.  Instead, the output data are generally considered a derivative of the input data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, as long as the input data aren't subject to any kind of restrictive licence, you should indeed be able to download a copy of the Apache-2.0-licensed code, run it yourself, and recreate a copy of the output data which doesn't have a restrictive licence attached.  You don't give us any information about the input data, so it's hard to say anything more precise than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T06:32:41.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8574" CreationDate="2019-07-29T05:03:25.753" Score="4" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a developer who makes open-source software, typically libraries and websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My libraries are under the Apache 2.0 license, while websites / applications are under the GPL/AGPL 3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading into copyright and licensing and understand that contributors retain copyright of their contributions, and that if I hypothetically wanted to change the license later, I'd need the consent of all copyright holders (contributors) to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no qualms with this, but I've been wondering if it's practical to provide the means for individuals to voluntarily sign an optional &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement (CLA)&lt;/a&gt;. The goal is to minimize friction to contributing initially, but to also encourage signing to reduce potential headache should I ever want to change the license, or update to a later version of the current license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems optimal to me, as it grants contributors the choice to grant the right to relicense, while not obligating them to do so just to contribute to the project. However, I've failed to find any projects that do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15592" LastEditorUserId="15592" LastEditDate="2023-04-19T19:51:23.827" LastActivityDate="2023-04-19T19:51:23.827" Title="Is it appropriate to have an optional Contributor License Agreement?" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8575" CreationDate="2019-07-29T05:21:00.490" Score="13" ViewCount="4283" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I have forked a project on the GitHub that used the GNU GPL v3 license. So I also had to use the GPL license in my fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, the author of the original project changed license to the MIT. Can I now change the license of my fork to the MIT too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12832" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T08:07:15.700" Title="Can I change the license of a forked project to the MIT if the license of the parent project has changed from the GPL to the MIT?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|relicensing|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8572" CreationDate="2019-07-29T07:54:19.243" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having an optional CLA is definitely not common, but I also don't see why it might be considered inappropriate. I think the main reasons why it isn't seen are more of a practical nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having a CLA that is optional to sign, you get the administrative burden of keeping track who signed the CLA, but you don't get the benefits of the CLA because when you want to exercise the rights granted there, you still need to track down and contact the (potentially large number of) contributors that didn't sign the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main use case for a CLA is to support the situation where a software product is offered both with an open-source license and with a commercial closed-source license and the organisation maintaining the product wants to be able to include open-source contributions also in the closed-source offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License changes are very rare, especially if you carefully considered your initial license choice, and most licenses are already prepared for a license upgrade without needing explicit consent from the contributors at the time that the upgrade takes place. For example, the standard license indication for the GPL reads (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;      it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;      the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, &lt;strong&gt;or&#xA;      (at your option) any later version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bold portion gives anyone permission to use the code under GPLv4, whenever that new version of the GPL appears, because all contributors have already agreed with such a license upgrade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T07:54:19.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8573" CreationDate="2019-07-29T08:07:15.700" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't make any changes in your fork of the project, you can just update your fork to include the latest upstream changes and get the license change along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyrights on the changes made on your fork are all owned by you, and you agree with re-licensing those changes under the MIT license, then you can merge the upstream changes into your fork, including the license change.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If, as part of your changes, you added the use of a GPL-licensed library, then you can change the license of the code in your fork, but the combination with that external library would still be governed by the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't own all the copyrights on the changes in your fork, for example you accepted contributions from someone else or you re-used code written by another, then you must get approval from those others before you can incorporate the license change in your fork. As long as you don't have that approval, you must take care that you don't merge the upstream commits of the license change into (branches of) your fork that also contain GPL-licensed content for which you don't have permission to change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-29T08:07:15.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-30T16:21:53.607" Score="7" ViewCount="1666" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a lot of articles and information regarding my questions, but those answers were very technical and I wanted to understand the law in simple English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)(GPL3)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)(GPL3)&lt;/a&gt; Version Information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per above Link, I can commercially use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have modified in GNPL GNU Application and selling it to my customer for a fee via a Web Portal.&#xA;I will include a Copyright and also License copy of original software which I used. Is the enough?&#xA;My Problem is disclosing the upgraded code, I am ok sharing with people when they justify me a reason to get free access to upgraded code over an email, but I do not want to simply publish the code over the web or URL for the world to see, because check below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine two situations which support my above line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1)My competitors can copy the same code and resell, then my investment for customization goes into the drain. 2)As per TDRLegal, I can even claim a patent for the upgraded product going future or I can we are inspired for X Open Source Software and charge for the upgrade as one time free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a situation which most of the small startups have faced and wanted to know if there is a workaround the law, where we can use the open-source at the same time stay compliant with the legal law and protect our investment made over time by customizing the open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please suggest the best actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15608" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T17:43:46.780" Title="GNU GPL V3 with no code change disclosure" Tags="|licensing|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8577" CreationDate="2019-07-30T17:43:46.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You aren't required to make code public - but you are required to make code and all changes available to anyone that you distribute binaries, etc. to.  So supplying source on request of only the people/groups that you have licensed your program to is OK and permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure on GPL3, but for GPL2 it is even permissible to have the recipient make a request for code, and then you mail them the code on floppy/cd/backup tape/etc - electronic format is required, but electronic delivery is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that anyone who does obtain a copy of your code after requesting it has the right to put a copy out on github, etc.  Hence the &quot;free&quot; (as in money) nature of many pieces of Free (as in liberty) software - redistribution at no cost, etc. is almost inevitable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T17:43:46.780" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8580" CreationDate="2019-07-31T10:06:21.277" Score="7" ViewCount="1089" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using in my code dependencies managed by npm. For example I'm using &lt;code&gt;uglify-js&lt;/code&gt; which is using BSD license (which doesn't require code disclosure). But this plugin uses as dependency (so to my project it's sub-dependency) e.g. &lt;code&gt;source-map&lt;/code&gt; which is using Mozilla License (which requires code disclosure). The question is: I'm I safe to not disclose my code? Do I need to care about sub-dependencies licenses or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as this question may be closed as a duplicate of it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15613" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-20T05:40:41.143" LastActivityDate="2023-07-20T05:40:41.143" Title="Do I need to respect licences of dependencies of dependencies?" Tags="|source-code|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8579" CreationDate="2019-07-31T10:35:01.480" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are required to comply with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the licenses that apply to the different code parts that make up your project, including the licenses on transitive dependencies (dependencies of dependencies and deeper). If there is a transitive dependency with a license that states that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; source code of the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; project must be available (like the GPL license does), then you are required to make sure that all source code actually is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, a requirement for have the source code available does not necessarily mean that it must be available from &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; repository or server, unless the license explicitly states so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most licenses allow that if you use the software unchanged (which would be the case if you use a package manager to retrieve an official release), then you can refer your users to the location where you would retrieve the source code of that package from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your direct dependencies, it will normally be enough that you include a link to their repository and/or homepage in your documentation. This is a good thing to do even if the source-code disclosure doesn't mandate it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For transitive dependencies, you can either treat them as direct dependencies (I would recommend this for dependencies with a strong copyleft license, unless they are coming in through a dependency that already has such a license), or check that there is a path through the sites/repositories of your dependencies to their source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T10:35:01.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8506" CreationDate="2019-08-01T04:17:47.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have an &quot;About&quot; page or some other location where you provide the contact and license information for your app itself I would &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; suggest putting a link to the &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; there. This is a common location for license information and is generally where people will look for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15619" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T04:17:47.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8583" CreationDate="2019-08-01T08:42:32.610" Score="3" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to modify a document under the &lt;strong&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/strong&gt;. From the wikipedia page I can read: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All previous authors of the work must be attributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All changes to the work must be logged.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;All derivative works must be licensed under the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The full text of the license, unmodified invariant sections as defined by the author if any, and any other added warranty disclaimers (such as a general disclaimer alerting readers that the document may not be accurate for example) and copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Technical measures such as DRM may not be used to control or obstruct distribution or editing of the document.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the first point. If I modify the content and change &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of it. The initial owner would not be happy to be cited as the &lt;em&gt;owner&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I attribute &lt;code&gt;John Doe&lt;/code&gt;, the initial owner and &lt;code&gt;Me&lt;/code&gt; the subsequent owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15621" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T09:02:59.283" Title="Author attribution in open-source licenses?" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8582" CreationDate="2019-08-01T08:54:54.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note the requirement that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the usual method of attributing previous authors.  The copyright section might now read something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2018-2019 John Doe&#xA;(c) 2019 A. Nowox&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I modify the content and change a lot of it. The initial owner would not be happy to be cited as the owner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be true, but you're not excused from a licensing requirement because of a belief that someone else might not want it, however sincerely it's held.  Note the other requirement that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All changes to the work must be logged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is designed to allow any third-party to quickly establish how much of John Doe's work you have changed.  That should put to bed any fears you might be entertaining that Mr. Doe will be upset that you are in some way misrepresenting him as having written what you, in fact, wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T09:02:59.283" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T09:02:59.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5730" CreationDate="2019-08-01T15:08:12.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take a peek at David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FLOSS License Slide&lt;/a&gt;. It doesn't answer your question, but discusses the area in depth and gives pointers to more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF keeps a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of licenses&lt;/a&gt;, but they are only interested in whether the license is free (in the FSF sense) or not. Likewise, the Open Source Initiative maintains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; of licenses and discusses them. Again not exactly what you are looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the problems with the proliferation of licenses. A nice discussion is David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software licensing is an &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; complex area of the law, much worse if you have to factor in differences in jurisdictions (and when talking software distributed via the Internet, it can't be restricted to just one of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T15:08:12.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8586" CreationDate="2019-08-01T17:34:59.707" Score="10" ViewCount="1895" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the main difference in obligations of both MIT and X11 license. How do they differentiate or there is no difference and can be used in replacements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15630" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T20:03:50.037" Title="What is the different between MIT and X11 license? Should the open source package be identified differently under these two licenses" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8585" CreationDate="2019-08-01T20:03:50.037" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license comes in two variants which we'll call Expat and X11. The X11 variant includes an extra paragraph like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there are countless MIT variants that substitute “the authors” or “the copyright holders” with the name of a particular person or organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The anti-advertising clause from the X11 variant can be interpreted to impose an extra condition on the license. Then MIT/Expat → MIT/X11 is compatible, but MIT/X11 → MIT/Expat is not compatible. Here, the compatibility relationship “A → B” would mean “software licensed under A can be distributed under terms B”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, that paragraph can be interpreted as a basic reminder of what is and isn't allowed, without changing the rights of the recipient: you're not allowed to advertise with someone else's name whether or not you use their software. Under this interpretation the two license variants are effectively interchangeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when the variants are compatible or interchangeable, the license requires the complete license to be kept intact – once you receive the license, you cannot replace it by another MIT variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for your own software, the choice between the variants is effectively arbitrary. In practice, the Expat variant that doesn't have the extra paragraph is used more widely. This variant is what most people think of when they hear “MIT license”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T20:03:50.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8442" CreationDate="2019-08-02T07:51:59.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any better answer, I think this is going to be pretty much impossible to know because of a major &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confounding variable&lt;/a&gt;; specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt;s/&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_transfer_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CTA&lt;/a&gt;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three classes of open-source project that generate revenue: those where a contributor CLA/CTA is used to permit non-free relicensing and subsequent for-profit distribution of the code, those where a charge is made to distribute free software under a free licence, and those where donations are encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the first case&lt;/strong&gt; there is ample qualified testimony that the presence of a CLA/CTA is a big turn-off for some contributors; para 8 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/714524/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; (disclaimer: which I wrote) is but one of many examples.  It is very possible that some element of that turn-off is the thought that profit will be made from the contributor's contributions, but in the absence of more data we simply can't tell how much of the turn-off is due to that and how much is due to other causes such as general loss of freedom.  Further investigation is hampered by the difficulty of identifying those to ask: if you're looking for people who haven't contributed &lt;em&gt;for cause&lt;/em&gt;, how do you find them among the many billions who haven't contributed anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the second case&lt;/strong&gt; the biggest problem is that such contributors will likely never know that this is happening.  As a professional free-software sysadmin, I spend much of my workday getting paid to install free software, and none of the people who helped write it ever knows of any of those installs.  It's very possible that one or more of the contributors would be annoyed if they knew - though I like to think not - but since they don't, the question's unanswerable in these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For the third case&lt;/strong&gt;, I think an interesting question emerges: when free software projects solicit financial donations, under what circumstances (if any) does this discourage other forms of contribution?  But that isn't the question you asked, and though I'd like to be I'm not personally aware of any work on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think we can say with confidence that CLA/CTAs discourage contribution, and that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of that discouragement is due to fear that for-profit non-free relicensing will occur.  But that's probably all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T07:51:59.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8591" CreationDate="2019-08-02T16:15:49.677" Score="3" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been considering making a website and backend open-source under the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some services like &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weblate&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitwarden&lt;/a&gt; are open-source; I assume because they need to be self-hostable as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other examples of companies that are releasing their backend under an open-source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15592" LastEditorUserId="15592" LastEditDate="2023-04-21T13:15:05.657" LastActivityDate="2023-04-21T13:15:05.657" Title="Examples of open-source backends" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8590" CreationDate="2019-08-03T01:23:48.877" Score="4" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've downloaded the source for Linux device driver from the manufacturer's website. The source was included in a zip file, so no source control was involved. Unfortunately, the driver source was grossly out of date, so I have been working on porting it to more modern kernel versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source files all seem to include a header at the top denoting a GPLv2 license as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/******************************************************************************&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright(c) 2007 - 2012 ACME Corporation. All rights reserved.&#xA; *                                        &#xA; * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it&#xA; * under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License as&#xA; * published by the Free Software Foundation.&#xA; *&#xA; * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT&#xA; * ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or&#xA; * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for&#xA; * more details.&#xA; *&#xA; * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with&#xA; * this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,&#xA; * 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA&#xA; *&#xA; *&#xA; ******************************************************************************/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot, find anywhere in the files I downloaded, a copy of any sort of license. Could there be any issue, with me redistributing my modified version of this source code because of the lack of a license? There are other files, firmware binaries, etc. that I am unsure of the licensing terms for and don't know if those can be distributed either. Do I need to write said address in header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15641" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T19:29:14.463" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T01:50:17.980" Title="What if I don't receive a copy of the GPL license?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8589" CreationDate="2019-08-03T02:49:19.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ACME Corporation &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have violated the GPL, if their files are a derivative work of somebody else's GPL'd code. They are supposed to supply you with a copy of the license, and they did not do that. But they cannot violate their own copyright, so if there is nobody upstream of them and if they do not accept non-CLA'd outside contributions, then there may be no violation at all. However, at a minimum, the Linux kernel is probably upstream of them in this sense. Regardless, &lt;strong&gt;their problem is not your problem&lt;/strong&gt; - their violation of their license will not invalidate your license. If you want to pursue this violation, you might talk to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt;, who tend to be very interested in this sort of thing but are not (usually) directly legally empowered to take action (the Linux kernel is a special case as some Linux developers have assigned their copyrights to the SFC). Nevertheless, they have a lot of practice at contacting violators and getting them into compliance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It might be unclear which &quot;GPL&quot; they actually mean (for example, Brazil &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPL-PA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has a &quot;General Public License&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but it's non-free and not widely used). But I think this is very unlikely, given that they supply the mailing address of the Free Software Foundation. If you really want to, you can write to the FSF as it suggests to get a copy of the license, but the FSF will almost surely send you a word-for-word identical copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license on their website&lt;/a&gt;, so you may as well save the time and postage unless your lawyers advise you otherwise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T01:50:17.980" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T01:50:17.980" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8588" CreationDate="2019-08-03T14:58:43.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  Take a look at Instructure, the provider of the Canvas online course management system (disclosure - I was the Canvas admin for the college I worked for for 6 years, and I love the product).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only do they have a wonderful well documented REST API that actually works the way the docs say they do, the product is licensed under the AGPLv3.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky part for it is that there are various hooks to services provided by other corporations.  For example, the built in conferencing tool is actually Big Blue Button (also F/OSS) and that is hosted by Blindside Networks.  There are also a lot of LTIs (LTI is an interoperability spec for course management systems and other tools to pass info back and forth - what user, course, send a grade back in, etc) that are 3rd party hosted, some integrated into the base product, some that the admin (or instructor, if allowed) has to activate/integrate, and some of which have license costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never really got into the online communities (I prefer old fashioned listservs vs. online ticket/forum combinations) so I'm not aware of any institutions that self-host, and I'm not really aware of what the base AGPLv3 code base actually comes with compared to the paid-for-hosting version.  Strangely, our hosting and support contract costs are just about what a license from Blackboard, D2L, etc. would cost :)  This cost may have licenses for some of those 3rd party tools included, I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T14:58:43.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-03T16:56:17.873" Score="2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a small desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a license that guarantee :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the code cannot be sold, and must be freely distributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That modifications of the code cannot be sold, and must be freely distributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the software can be used for commercial purposes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That other code that interreact with the software through automation interfaces can be kept closed source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this purpose, i was evaluating the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, i would like to use in my application libraries under the MS-PL license, such as : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/xceedsoftware/wpftoolkit/wiki/AvalonDock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/xceedsoftware/wpftoolkit/wiki/AvalonDock&lt;/a&gt;. I do not intend to edit the source of these libraries, only to have them as compiled dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that MS-PL and GPL are 'incompatible', but am not sure of the exact meaning of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that i cannot re-license modified MS-PL code under LGPL, but can i use libraries compiled from MS-PL code in an LGPL application ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15646" LastEditorUserId="15646" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T17:16:42.530" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T19:28:06.680" Title="Call MS-PL library in LGPL code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-03T17:04:09.430" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to select the correct licensing model for training content I create and currently host on Github. The content may be migrated in the future to another hosting platform &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; be converted to a static website (Jekyll, VuePress, etc.) and obscured from the fact that its hosted on Github hosted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issue:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The content I create contains a &lt;strong&gt;mix&lt;/strong&gt; of code and tutorial text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because of the nature of the code (low-code solution), it is NOT separable from the tutorial text itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple content example:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Create the screen component&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &lt;code&gt;Components&lt;/code&gt; under &lt;code&gt;Tree View&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Click &lt;code&gt;New component&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rename the component to &lt;code&gt;cmpRespScreen&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set &lt;code&gt;cmpRespScreen&lt;/code&gt; properties:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Width: &lt;code&gt;Max(App.Width, If(App.Width &amp;lt; App.Height, App.DesignWidth, App.DesignHeight))&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explanation: Set the component width to the larger of:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The device width OR,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the device is in portrait orientation, the width in App Settings OR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The height in App Settings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Substitute &quot;device&quot; for &quot;browser window&quot; when the app is used on laptop&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Researched:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the way the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python Data Science Handbook&lt;/a&gt; is licensed (CC-BY-NC-ND license for text, MIT for code). I'd like to mimic some of this, but again, I can't easily differentiate between code and text in my content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also reviewed &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/non-software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose a License&lt;/a&gt;, but being new to the game AND having non-traditional content is making things tough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15647" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T17:04:09.430" Title="Selecting the right licensing model" Tags="|licensing|copyright|github|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8592" CreationDate="2019-08-03T19:28:06.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, neither the LGPL nor its (more-restrictive) brethren, the GPL and the AGPL, prohibit someone from selling the code; they merely require that the recipient receives source (of the library itself in the LPGL case, and of the entire binary in the GPL/AGPL case) under the same licence.  In practice it's not a viable business model, but it's still allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, no free licence within the meaning of this site will prevent someone from selling your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I get that i cannot re-license modified MS-PL code under LGPL, but can i use libraries compiled from MS-PL code in an LGPL application ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole point of the LPGL (as opposed to GPL/AGPL) is to allow the distribution of binaries including the LGPL'ed library linked into more restrictively-licensed code, so assuming the MS-PL doesn't prohibit this, then yes, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T19:28:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-04T20:05:18.913" Score="3" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related to but distinct from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on piece of web-based software under the AGPL, which I may monetize in the future on a pay-for-content (rather than the software) basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One requirement of my software is to interface with midi pianos. The web midi interface is relatively new technology (only available in Chrome so far), and there don't seem to be any exist any published libraries that simplify and abstract over the raw browser APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does exist a website with accompanying github repository which interfaces with midi pianos, contains very user-friendly configuration and discovery of midi devices, etc. The repository has no license file. The site's &lt;code&gt;About&lt;/code&gt; page includes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;A work in progress&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This app is far from complete and is still being developed. If you have ideas or feedback please get in touch. If you'd like to contribute to this app, you can find the source code on GitHub: (link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The invitation for contributions makes it unlikely that the author intended to publish to GH in the &quot;all rights reserved&quot; sense, since that would prevent others from modifying a fork and creating a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository includes an old, unacknowledged &lt;code&gt;License file missing&lt;/code&gt; issue, and I've emailed the author referencing the issue and asking for clarification but received no response. The author has made recent contributions to GH so is unlikely to be dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, I know that I'm not able to &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt; code from this repository in my own project. That said, I'm a &lt;em&gt;wimpy baby&lt;/em&gt; who hates working directly with browser APIs and I dread undertaking this work on my own from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much risk do I assume if I have a good look at the relevant code in this repo and then write my own from scratch two weeks later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8408" LastEditorUserId="8408" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T20:36:26.570" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:00:19.920" Title="Is it a good idea to read code in a no-licence repository?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7101" CreationDate="2019-08-04T22:58:15.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Bart mentioned, it is more conventional to put the license at the beginning of each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;v3 here&lt;/a&gt;) is more precise about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They clearly say &lt;em&gt;&quot;should&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;start of each source file&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also state why this is so: &lt;em&gt;&quot;to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, although you are expected to copy the full warranty notice to each file, you could also just have something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2020 (c) My Name Here&#xA;See LICENSE.txt for details&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14656" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T22:58:15.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T00:37:36.683" Score="31" ViewCount="19263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was alarmed to see that someone uploaded one of my old GPL'd projects to Github. &#xA;Github has refused to remove it however, and suggests I contact the uploader who is completely anonymous and cannot be contacted.&#xA;Even though the GPL allows copying, this is alarming because Microsoft is a malicious company, both now and in the past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The act of uploading could be used by their corporate lawyers to claim that they can automatically abscond with my copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what if Microsoft attempts to give itself rights that are not addressed by the GPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years ago, &lt;strong&gt;the &quot;fine print&quot; on Sourceforge literally said that by uploading code you are assigning copyright to them.&lt;/strong&gt; It was a clear attempt at theft-by-lawyer. All Microsoft has to do is change their fine print for 1 day and they can claim that my code is theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was GitHub correct to reject my takedown request?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any plausible legal theory or strategy by which Microsoft could lay claim to my code/copyright, based on the actions of this anonymous uploader?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15474" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T16:46:28.857" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T09:11:50.073" Title="If someone else uploads my GPL'd code to Github without my permission, do they not put it at risk of being stolen by Microsoft?" Tags="|gpl|github|microsoft|" AnswerCount="9" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-05T03:50:43.143" Score="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question concerns a case where Author A publishes original work under the GNU GPL, and then Person B uploads it to GitHub. You ask whether it would be possible for the transaction between Person B and GitHub to affect the ownership of copyright title to the work by Author A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply put: no. Person B does not have standing to perform a transfer of title to GitHub, since they don't hold ownership of the copyright title. Therefore, even if Microsoft drafted an agreement that required Person B to transfer copyright title to GitHub/Microsoft, Person B couldn't fulfill their end of such an agreement, even if they erroneously misrepresented their ability to do so. Person B can't under any circumstances sell or give away a copyright for which they do not hold the title. You might as well also worry that Person B will sell the house you own without owning the deed: Person B doesn't hold any property rights for the property in question, and so does not have standing to transfer those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Microsoft tried to rely on Person B's grant of copyright title to use Author A's work in other software under terms incompatible with the GPL, Author A would have standing to sue for Microsoft's unauthorized distribution of a derivative work. In such a case, it would be Microsoft's responsibility to ensure they didn't infringe copyright, and their misplaced agreement with Person B does not eliminate their liability for infringing Author A's copyright, especially since the work would be marked with Author A's copyright notices rather than notices with Person B's name. Any agreement with Person B affords no legal defense to Microsoft, so if Microsoft had an interest in violating Author A's copyright, it would be much faster and just as (in)valid to use the work illegally outright, without spurious justifications about some unrelated third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corporations use tools like chains of title and contributor licensing agreements when using outside code (including open source software) to mitigate liability that the outside code might include improperly-licensed parts whose author did not license its use. The idea that a corporation might actively seek out or deliberately engineer such risk within their codebase seems nothing sort of an attempt at legal self-destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person B &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have rights under your GPL license grant, but those rights decidedly do not include the ability to transfer title or even to grant a permissive license to Microsoft to use the software outside the conditions of the GPL. However, those rights do include redistribution rights, so Microsoft was correct to decline your DMCA takedown. Generally, anyone who receives software under the GNU GPL may redistribute it however they please&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, and those recipients have the right to distribute it further, etc. This definitely allows recipients to post copies of the software to online servers to facilitate further distribution. You gave permission for your software to be redistributed in this way when you licensed it under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowRequireFee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ further clarifies that the GPL does not even require a redistributor to notify you&lt;/a&gt; (nor does any FLOSS license require this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of GitHub in particular, there has been some speculation that their terms of service are technically incompatible with the GPL, but even the FSF itself has found the possibility very unlikely. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/are-the-new-github-terms-of-service-a-kiss-of-death-for-open-source-projects&quot;&gt;Are the new GitHub Terms of service a kiss of death for open source projects?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All Microsoft has to do is change their fine print for 1 day and they can claim that my code is theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A much more plausible (but still hardly airtight) formulation of the problem would be if Author A directly uploaded the work to a site that did require transfer of copyright title, as you hypothesize in your &quot;1 day&quot; case. If Author A agrees to be bound by such terms of service, then there is at least a glimmer of plausibility that Microsoft could receive copyright title or a permissive license grant. (I still think there could be serious obstacles to a court upholding such a usage agreement, but it is at least plausible.) As the situation actually is, though, Author A has not uploaded their work to GitHub, and Person B (who is not a rights holder of the work in question) cannot even begin to give Microsoft the necessary rights for this scheme to succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; Redistribution is allowed as long as they meet the requirements to preserve the GPL notices/permissions downstream and that any binaries are accompanied by source; see MadHatter's answer as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T22:36:18.563" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T22:36:18.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-05T06:07:12.703" Score="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;APSillers' answer is excellent, but I'd add one thing: although by licensing under the GPL you gave permission to anyone to redistribute your code, you by the same mechanism required that such redistribution be under the relevant version of the GPL.  If this github repository isn't clearly GPL'ed, then a copyright violation is occurring, and you as the rightsholder have every right to have this repository taken down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that's happening in this case we have no hope of saying without knowing the exact repo in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T06:07:12.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2019-08-05T11:13:22.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL &quot;with exceptions&quot; (usually quite a murky area since the license text and license number and identification lose meaning) is incompatible with other GPLed software and thus you lose a lot of what the GPL is actually about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Stallman has strong politicial leanings and opinions and goals while the GPL steers clear of anything but his principal goals in writing it.  The point is that it takes a lot of discipline to make a license do what it is good at and leave things off that it isn't as good as, particularly if you want others to join your efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't let your license do your job without more damage than utility, you have to do it manually.  Stallman has a full speaker schedule.  In your case, the work is manually contacting the GitHub project contact and registering a ticket for upgrading the repository to your current version.  If you have an announcement mailing list for new releases, it may be worth suggesting to the GitHub project maintainer to subscribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on.  This is not zero-maintenance but a bit like whack-a-mole but getting the license to help here in its indiscriminate way is not going to really help a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15656" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T11:13:22.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8607" CreationDate="2019-08-05T14:32:03.177" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NorthwoodsSoftware/GoJS/blob/master/assets/js/goSamples.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the code. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NorthwoodsSoftware/GoJS/blob/master/samples/DOMTree.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; too, a large portion of it. I'm not associated with any organization, I'm just trying to create a Chrome Extension that I will post to the Chrome Web Store and expect people to install for their own use. One of the aforementioned links contains another link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://gojs.net/2.0.15/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GoJS's licensing agreement&lt;/a&gt;. I think the answer to my question is can be found there, but I need help understanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15664" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T07:17:11.863" Title="What are the guidelines I must abide by in order to use this code I found on GitHub in my own Chrome Extension?" Tags="|licensing|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-05T15:52:20.473" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Probably not a violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer (using the relevant part from GPL - since you did not specify the version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source&#xA;  code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and&#xA;  appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and&#xA;  disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this&#xA;  General Public License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any&#xA;  other recipients of the Program a copy of this General Public License&#xA;  along with the Program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the uploader comply with the requirements above? Then it is not a copyright/license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the (new) second part of the question (which was added after this answer was posted) I can only refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8598/15669&quot;&gt;apsillers' excellent answer&lt;/a&gt;. (In short: No, there isn't any plausible legal way for them to do that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15669" LastEditorUserId="15669" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T09:11:50.073" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T09:11:50.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T19:18:20.500" Score="7" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a pretty unique software product, which I believe can be useful for professionals in organizations. I spent a lot of personal time on it and it would be great if companies could pay/donate for it. On the other hand, I definitely would like to go open-source, so community would be able to help me to improve the project in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that it is encouraged on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU website&lt;/a&gt;, and some companies actually would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;happy to donate to OSS products&lt;/a&gt; providing them business value, if that would be legally allowed and easy to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is how actually I can make it work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best idea I came up with is to offer 2 options on the website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PERSONAL LICENSE KEY (any donation, removes &quot;buy me&quot; text in the status bar)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;COMMERCIAL LICENSE KEY (let's say $50, removes &quot;buy me&quot; + I provide priority support and feature requests)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a correct way to sell it? Are there any better ways to do that? Which of Open Source licenses is better to use for this purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15673" LastEditorUserId="15010" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T14:24:08.323" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T14:24:08.323" Title="Can I sell personal/commercial licenses for an Open Source product?" Tags="|license-recommendation|commercial|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2019-08-05T22:41:28.227" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I suggest looking at @bart-van-ingen-schenau's answer, I think the simpler (and more correct) answer is that you cannot use PDF-XChange as part of your open source project. The restriction that potential users would have to contact sales@tracker-software.com for permission, no matter how generous in it's granting, would seem to violate the first tenet of Open Source software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. Free Redistribution&#xA;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is generally a problem both for copyleft licenses and more permissive licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15680" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2019-08-11T21:33:44.097" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T21:33:44.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8604" CreationDate="2019-08-06T01:31:33.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is Free Software, getting the source and removing the &quot;buy me&quot; nag should trivial to do, quickly followed by a new github with the code posted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do what you want, you simply have a not too nagging screen asking for donations and offering commercial support or wishlist work (I have $25 and wish there was a keyboard short cut for &lt;em&gt;foo&lt;/em&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll want to be sure you solve any copyright issues regarding resulting work (ie, is it work for hire and company owns new bits? or is it yours and they just rewarded you for filling a feature request?) and get a contract, etc. before actually writing any of the custom code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T01:31:33.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8602" CreationDate="2019-08-06T06:06:43.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The code you first link to starts &lt;code&gt;/* Copyright (C) 1998-2019 by Northwoods Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. */&lt;/code&gt;, but as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8548/including-copyrighted-specifications-in-an-mit-licensed-project/8552#8552&quot;&gt;I have noted here&lt;/a&gt; this is a historical hangover with no modern function save to really complicate the licensing position of content.  It is, however, a harbinger of bigger licensing issues to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to the project's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NorthwoodsSoftware/GoJS/blob/master/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual licence file&lt;/a&gt;, we find it not only written in HTML, but HTML made by MS Word; both of these are bad signs.  The licence when viewed makes much (worrying) reference to &lt;em&gt;License Certificates&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Evaluation Licenses&lt;/em&gt;, and goes on to say that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.1.4      Except as may otherwise expressly be permitted by this Agreement, and subject to such additional limitations and restrictions as are set forth in this Agreement, Customer may not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a)          use, copy, display, publish, or transfer any Licensed Product;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b)          modify any Licensed Product, or create any derivative work of any Licensed Product;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not free software.  I'm guessing it was never intended to be.  It's a commercial company's commercial source, and in a popular modern form of stupidity they have decided to do their development out in the open on a public &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot lawfully use this content.  Worse, by even reading it in detail you risk opening yourself up to accusations of any similar work you later write being a derivative, and thus unusable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T07:17:11.863" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T07:17:11.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-06T06:28:58.840" Score="2" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing a Yocto based embedded Linux project, it uses Linux kernel (of course), some MIT libraries, some GPL libraries, and our own commercial applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the GPL code is used to generate the final yocto image, to be compliant to GPL, I think we need to provide the required source code. Apparently we don't wan't to open our commercial source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering the list of source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the Yocto project file (&lt;code&gt;bblayers.conf&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;local.conf&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the meta files (folder of &lt;code&gt;meta-something&lt;/code&gt;), which actually points to our applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the source code downloaded and saved in &lt;code&gt;DL_DIR&lt;/code&gt; folder during Yocto compiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yocto document: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/2.6/dev-manual/dev-manual.html#maintaining-open-source-license-compliance-during-your-products-lifecycle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/2.6/dev-manual/dev-manual.html#maintaining-open-source-license-compliance-during-your-products-lifecycle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if it's necessary to provide files in 1 or 2, because those project file and meta files should be possible for a &lt;em&gt;reasonably skilled user&lt;/em&gt; to recreate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we will not provide our commercial code, but if the commercial code is use to generate the final Yocto image together with GPL code, is it required to provide our commercial code? (Let's say our application does not need GPL code to build its own binary, it's Yocto that build them into a single image)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, I'm considering separating our application binary from the base Yocto image: build a totally open source Yocto image and open source it, then install our commercial packages during a separate phase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--I understand that I'm not asking for legal advice, but engineering's understandings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T06:28:58.840" Title="Which files in a Yocto (Embedded Linux) project should I provide to be compliant to GPL?" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-06T07:43:49.247" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/497/how-to-encourage-questions-about-anything-but-licenses&quot;&gt;(warning: not a license question)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GSoC&lt;/a&gt; mentor, I just received an email from Google about how to retain volunteers, and here is their main tip:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The orgs that have been most successful in keeping their GSoC students as long term contributors to their project have encouraged their students to become maintainers on their projects and make it clear they have ownership of a particular area of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Is there hard evidence (or statistics) that giving a volunteer &lt;strong&gt;ownership of a specific area&lt;/strong&gt; benefits an open source project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Successful and unsuccessful examples of this strategy are also welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context if needed: Our project is a single Android app, in a single GitHub repository, a large user base with many beta testers, about 10 regular developers and 1 GSoC student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="199" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T07:43:49.247" Title="Giving ownership of a particular area of the project?" Tags="|contributor|project-management|collaboration|community|human-resources|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:44:51.287" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;To address some of the questions in the follow-up edit(s), since the GPL redistribution aspects are well covered by other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For instance, what if Microsoft does something illegal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is going to break the law and steal your code, then they are going to break the law and steal your code. It makes absolutely no difference whether the code is hosted on Github or any other site. Even if the code is only available on your personal website, somebody could download it from there and use it in violation of the open source license, for example by incorporating it into a closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses are not magic spells; they don't prevent somebody from using the code in an unlawful way. What they do is give you the ability to take that person to court if they violate your rights (assuming you find out about it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;like assign the copyright of my work to itself, or give itself rights that are not addressed by the GPL? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft cannot &quot;assign&quot; copyright of your work, nor can Microsoft &quot;give itself rights&quot; to your code, because it is not their copyright to assign in the first place. &lt;strong&gt;Only you&lt;/strong&gt; as the copyright owner can legally assign your copyright to somebody else, and &lt;strong&gt;only you&lt;/strong&gt; can choose to grant rights to other people through the choice of an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Microsoft were to claim rights to your code which you hadn't granted (either individually to Microsoft, or generally to everybody via the GPL) then they would be making a false claim and possibly breaking the law, at which point they could be sued or prosecuted depending on exactly what they did and which legal jurisdiction they did it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The act of uploading could be used by their corporate lawyers to claim that they can automatically abscond with my copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No they could not, because even if Github had a clause requiring copyright assignment (which it doesn't), the person who uploaded your code to Github was not the copyright owner (you), and therefore had no authority to assign copyright to Microsoft. Unless Microsoft's corporate lawyers are shockingly incompetent, they are not going to make such a clearly false claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All Microsoft has to do is change their fine print for 1 day and they can claim that my code is theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't work like that. Changing the terms on their website doesn't magically seize ownership of all code that is currently hosted on that site. If Microsoft did wish to change the terms of Github to require copyright assignment (which I'm 100% sure they will never do, because nobody would use it on these terms and the site would be dead in a heartbeat), the change would only apply to code that was uploaded &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the new terms were put into effect, and would require explicit agreement by the copyright holder at the point where they uploaded the code. This would mean that Microsoft would probably need to delete all existing projects (including yours) that did not agree to copyright re-assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how you may personally feel about Microsoft, your concerns are unwarranted. Your code does not become vulnerable to some kind of &quot;copyright seizure&quot; simply by being on Github, because there is no such concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only rights Microsoft have to your code is the rights &lt;strong&gt;you have chosen to grant&lt;/strong&gt; via releasing the code as GPL. If you did not want them to have those rights, you shouldn't have released it as GPL in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15692" LastEditorDisplayName="user15692" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T08:32:43.530" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T08:32:43.530" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8612" CreationDate="2019-08-07T00:00:29.530" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to open-source a program I wrote for my employer. As I understand it, this is a “work for hire” (at least in the United States) since I wrote the code for them and on their time. This means that they own the copyright, not me, so I can't just publish it of my own accord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of documentation/agreements do I need to get from them to ensure that the program is properly licensed when I publish it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15712" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T04:45:20.687" Title="What do I need the company I work for to do to open source a program I wrote for them?" Tags="|copyright|closed-source|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8611" CreationDate="2019-08-07T04:45:20.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html#SEC4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; had some advice on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a &quot;copyright disclaimer&quot; for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright&#xA;  interest in the program `Gnomovision'&#xA;  (which makes passes at compilers) written &#xA;  by James Hacker.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ty Coon, President of Vice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, since your employer paid you to write this code, it is likely that they intend to use it, and they therefore may not be happy to assign the copyright to you.  If this is so, your employer can also choose to publish it under the free licence of their choice, which means you can then copy it, host it yourself, fork it, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's the path they take, then although it'd be ideal if they put in all the (say) GPL headers, added a copy of the GPL, put it all up on a website, and so on, all they really need to do is give you a copy and make clear that the conveyance is subject to the licence in question, perhaps by giving you a copy of the complete tarball along with a letter that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yoyodyne Inc. conveys this copy of the program &quot;Gnomovision&quot; to James Hacker under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 3 (or at his choice, any later version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ty Coon, President of Vice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of the latter route is that your employer remains free to commercially exploit the code they paid you to write; you, meanwhile, get a copy that you can use freely, and which will (if they pick a copyleft licence) remain free for others to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T04:45:20.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8614" CreationDate="2019-08-07T09:45:28.390" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add a source file (which is under GPL v2.0 (not in v2.0+)) in a project which is under Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentioned&lt;/a&gt; on GNU's website&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where, &lt;code&gt;this&lt;/code&gt; word is used for Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder, can I add a source file which is under different license and incompatible with project license? And what would? If I explicitly mention about that file and its license in a LICENSE file (usually this file is present in root directory of the project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14778" LastEditorUserId="14778" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T12:25:45.673" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T12:25:45.673" Title="Add source file in Apache 2.0 licensed project" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8613" CreationDate="2019-08-07T10:36:58.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saying that licences are incompatible means that the work to which those licences apply can not be used in a way that simultaneously satisfies all the conditions of the incompatible licences.  If the project accepted your contribution, it would make the project unusable, since no user could then satisfy the conditions required to have the copyright licence necessary to enable its use.  Mentioning what you've done in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file doesn't make that problem go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is likely to happen is that the project refuses to accept the contribution.  They are completely at liberty to do so: no person is obliged to accept another's offer of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're involved enough with the project that you have commit rights to the project's code repository, and you check it in anyway, then once it's noticed it'll likely be removed, or rewritten by someone else who doesn't insist on using GPL.  There may be some knockback on you; the project may formally request that you not do that again, or even remove your commit privileges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T10:43:37.467" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T10:43:37.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-07T11:17:35.580" Score="1" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scenario: you distribute your program in binary format, and it uses a GPL or LGPL library. In addition to the required conditions on your part of the application, you must offer a way to obtain the source code of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you fulfill that with a link to the download page of the original library's author? Of course you have to be confident that the link will be valid for the required number of years, but many sites keep archives with all the previous releases of their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it violate the license condition that &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; must provide such a service to the recipient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15719" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T12:38:43.980" Title="GPL/LGPL license: convey source code by linking to original author" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|distribution|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-07T11:24:07.217" Score="8" ViewCount="1665" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of my coding projects are licensed under the MIT license, with my copyright notice at the top:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2019 David Callanan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone making modifications to my code must keep the MIT license in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do contributors add copyright for their changes to my code? I'd feel bad having my name if 90% of the contributions were by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One solution I've seen (if your project is on github) is to use the following copyright notice (in a markdown file):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2019 [these people](https://github.com/&amp;lt;repo&amp;gt;/contributors)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has a few issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any revision of the project is now copyrighted by the contributors of the latest revision&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This form of copyright doesn't seem legally acceptable, because the page linked to isn't in plain text and therefore might not be clear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GitHub could break these links at any time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project could be moved to a new git provider (such as GitLab) and all copyrights are then broken&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forks to the project will be copyrighted by the original project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The entire project is copyrighted by each contributor rather than the sections they changed being copyrighted by them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My other idea would be to have a folder for each contributors work and they can put whatever license they like in that folder. These folders would contain machine-readable instructions to modify the original with their changes to produce their modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has following issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The produced final code would not include their copyright/license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Messy - it's like reverse-engineering a copyrighted project and then creating code that adds changes on top of the project without including the original project in their source (except in this case there's no reverse-engineering)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way would be to just add the contributors names to the MIT license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2391/how-should-i-assert-copyright-when-im-forking-an-mit-project&quot;&gt;How should I assert copyright when I&amp;#39;m forking an MIT project?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has following problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not clear what portions of the project they worked on&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper way to note contributors work with the MIT license? Or is another license necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15169" LastEditorUserId="15169" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T11:36:39.763" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T06:33:43.433" Title="How to note contributors work with MIT license?" Tags="|mit|contributor|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6438" CreationDate="2019-08-07T12:24:58.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each license grants the licensee certain rights. Licensing under GPL and OSL means you get the rights both grant. In essence, you (as licensee) can pick which license you get the package under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T12:24:58.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2019-08-07T12:31:15.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the GPL version 3, if you provide a binary only distribution (a &quot;Non-Source Form&quot; according to the license), you need to provide the corresponding source &quot;from the same place&quot; -- if you merely link to the project download page or a site containing archives of several versions of the source code (one of which corresponds to the version you used), that is not sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason is that the GPL specifically requires you provide the &quot;Corresponding Source&quot; -- for example if you use library version 1.2.3 to build your product, you need to provide the exact same version in your source code distribution (not 1.2.4, not 1.2.2, not 1.2.3a, etc.). If all you do is link to an archive page where I can download (say) 10 different source code releases, how would I know which one corresponds to the one that your binary distribution uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you provide a single page which provides multiple download links together -- one to your binary version and then one or more separate (direct) download links to the corresponding source(s), and it is made clear which source code corresponds to which binary release, I would consider that &quot;the same place&quot; and I believe it would satisfy the license, even if some links went to different servers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant information is from the GPL version 3, section 6 (Conveying Non-Source Forms). It gives the rules you must follow when distributing binaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of&#xA;  sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable&#xA;  Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these&#xA;  ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way &lt;strong&gt;through the same place&lt;/strong&gt; at no further charge. [...]  If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you &lt;strong&gt;or a third party&lt;/strong&gt;) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided &lt;strong&gt;you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source&lt;/strong&gt;. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, &lt;strong&gt;you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed&lt;/strong&gt; to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added bolding to the parts you need to pay attention to. In particular, if you go with this option, you need to ensure the link to download the corresponding source is valid as long as you are distributing the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T12:38:43.980" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T12:38:43.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8595" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:00:19.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is no explicit license, you have to assume that there is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; license, you are in essence not even allowed to copy it to your machine and use it. Sure, nobody is going to sue you for doing so; but if you build multi-million dollar enterprise on it, it will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be nice. Ask the author for permission. Tell them to select a license for their code and publish it with the code. Point them at David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (by publishing the code, I assume they want it to be freely shared). A useful stop would also be &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose a license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:00:19.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7758" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:13:31.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your included file states the license as &quot;GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note&quot;, track that note down. Chances are that said constants are free to use, and the whole discussion is moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:13:31.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8170" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:31:46.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A program like a parser generator or a compiler is quite useless unless you can use it's output as you please. For example, the GNU parser generator bison adds the following note to generated code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* As a special exception, you may create a larger work that contains&#xA;   part or all of the Bison parser skeleton and distribute that work&#xA;   under terms of your choice, so long as that work isn't itself a&#xA;   parser generator using the skeleton or a modified version thereof&#xA;   as a parser skeleton.  Alternatively, if you modify or redistribute&#xA;   the parser skeleton itself, you may (at your option) remove this&#xA;   special exception, which will cause the skeleton and the resulting&#xA;   Bison output files to be licensed under the GNU General Public&#xA;   License without this special exception.&#xA;&#xA;   This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation in&#xA;   version 2.2 of Bison.  */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:31:46.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-07T21:35:29.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;ability to redistribute&lt;/strong&gt; the source code code (to a site like GitHub) is a &lt;strong&gt;fundamental aspect of the GNU/GPL&lt;/strong&gt; licence. If you wish to prevent someone from doing this, then perhaps releasing the project / code under a different licence would be worth while. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15725" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T21:35:29.317" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2391" CreationDate="2019-08-07T21:44:25.557" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listing copyright for each individual may imply that these holders hold copyright over all of the code, whereas really they should only hold copyright over the portions they have created. I would recommend instead using the lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Portions Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Håvard Fossli&#xA;Portions Copyright (c) 2016 John Snow &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then use a source control system to keep track of which parts were contributed by whom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15680" LastEditorUserId="15680" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T19:44:08.587" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T19:44:08.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8616" CreationDate="2019-08-07T21:54:22.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The correct answer likely depends on how many contributors you have and how much work you want to keep track of it all. If you only have a few contributors, you can use language such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Portions Copyright (c) 2016-2019 Geddy Lee &#xA;Portions Copyright (c) 2016,2017 Alex Lifeson&#xA;Portions Copyright (c) 2018 Neil Peart  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can keep track of which portions through the use of a source control tool. If this becomes too cumbersome, you can replace the above notices with a pointer, along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 The Rush Project Developers. &#xA;See the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at https://ru.sh/project/COPYRIGHT.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you will want to use source control to keep track, but this will provide a consistent way to keep track. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15680" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T08:01:04.593" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T08:01:04.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-07T22:19:39.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, they can copy or fork your whole code into a new GPLed project, or copy or any parts of your code into other GPLed projects, and distribute it however they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm assuming that copyright notices remain intact on this copy of your project.&lt;/strong&gt;  Other answers cover the possible copyright violations if that wasn't the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the only possible offense here is plagiarism, if they claim to have &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/strong&gt;  That's a separate thing from copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To simplify, let's consider another case: I publish a book of plays and poems.  I put my name on it.  But the works inside are word-for-word copies of Shakespeare, whose name doesn't appear anywhere.  The work is in the public domain so there's no copyright claim to be made, but I've committed a new offense by claiming to have written them.  (This is a kind of fraud against society, as well as or instead of against Shakespeare.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may not actually be a crime, I'm not sure.  But if the project doesn't credit you, that's probably why you're feeling offended even though (from what you've said) there's no sign of a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&lt;/a&gt; for more about the moral rights of authors to get credit for their work, regardless of copyright law.  Some countries even have legislation supporting that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="581" LastEditorUserId="581" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T22:39:49.663" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T22:39:49.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-08T04:41:40.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly. The GPL requires distribution of build scripts and so forth. If source code only was uploaded and this was not sufficient to build the system then the licence conditions have not been met, so there would be no permission to distribute the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15730" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T04:41:40.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8809" CreationDate="2019-08-08T06:06:53.107" Score="4" ViewCount="426" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve found a nice HTML email template that I would like to customize and use to send automated emails to my clients. The template is MIT licensed, which means I should provide a copy of the license (or a link to the license) on all copies of the software that I distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: email HTML is often preprocessed by email clients (like Gmail) such that much of the original code is modified. For example, most email clients remove html comments and even parts of the code that are not visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use the HTML templates for my emails &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; putting something like “&lt;em&gt;This email was created using library X, licensed under the MIT license that you can find at Y&lt;/em&gt;” at the bottom (I want to keep the email short and clean).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be allowed? How can I include a MIT license “under the hood” in this situation, where the final code is preprocessed by email clients?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15731" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T13:57:02.240" Title="Including license in emails" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-file|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8632" CreationDate="2019-08-08T06:43:34.927" Score="5" ViewCount="1367" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does a PySide2 (Qt for Python) desktop software application for Windows, Mac or Linux &lt;strong&gt;need to be distributed with&lt;/strong&gt; in order to comply with LGPL license requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about a simple, bare-bones application that only uses these modules: &lt;code&gt;from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can ANYONE that actually develops and distributes &lt;strong&gt;and sells&lt;/strong&gt; downloadable desktop software PLEASE provide a clear example of what exactly the developer needs to put into their program and also distribute to the end customer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my research, I see &quot;&lt;em&gt;dynamically linked&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;statically linked&lt;/em&gt;&quot; but I have no idea what this means in the context of Python. I am absolutely clueless here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: the whole point of selling under LGPL would be that I don't want to give my actual application's source code to the end customer (obviously).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's my best guess:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyrights inside the GUI (maybe in a &quot;Help&quot; menu)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide LGPLv3 and GPLv3 texts (also maybe in a &quot;Help&quot; menu)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modifications file (but I don't ACTUALLY plan to modify the PySide2 library itself, just use it so........)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a copy of PySide2 separate from the actual application (ex: on Windows, a myapp.exe + a directory with the PySide2 library? Can this be a link instead?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwTlCBbB3RY&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwTlCBbB3RY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15734" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T14:58:32.827" Title="How To Package A Basic PySide2 Desktop Application Under LGPL For Sale - EXAMPLE PLEASE" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-08T07:22:07.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question title now reads, &quot;do they not put [my code] at risk of being stolen by Microsoft?&quot;, and nobody has yet addressed that part of the question since all the previous answers were written when the question title was, &quot;is that a copyright violation?&quot; So I'll try to address the new part of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, Microsoft won't steal your code, because &lt;strong&gt;they would not benefit from doing so.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume for now that you're completely correct in characterizing Microsoft as a malicious company, who would steal code in violation of its license if they could get away with it. GitHub is a site used by millions of coders each day, many of whom are extremely cautious about legal terms and read them carefully. If GitHub's terms of service changed to, say, assign copyright to Microsoft, even for a few hours, &lt;strong&gt;people would notice&lt;/strong&gt;. There would be news stories about it all over the Internet, and lots of people would be contacting their lawyers. Pretty soon there would be a class-action lawsuit going; you might not think that a single individual can afford to sue a big company with deep pockets, but that's exactly the situation that class-action lawsuits are designed for. (Class-action lawsuits can also be abused as a lawyer-enrichment mechanism, but that's a topic for a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; Stack Exchange site and not on-topic here). If Microsoft were to change the GitHub terms of service to claim rights they're not actually entitled to, they'd be facing copyright lawsuits from thousands and thousands of people, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;statutory damages of up to $150,000 per case&lt;/a&gt; (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2)) since it would be easy to prove intentional infringment in such a case. That adds up to billions of dollars, far more than Microsoft would gain from such a move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, maybe your GPL'ed project is something that Microsoft could make &lt;em&gt;trillions&lt;/em&gt; of dollars by stealing, but I doubt it. Most open-source projects are small, limited in purpose, and not all that valuable in objective terms. So the cost of the lawsuits Microsoft would face would far outweigh the money they would make by stealing GitHub-hosted code with an illegal ToS change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if we grant the premises of your question (that Microsoft is malicious and will steal anything they can get away with), &lt;strong&gt;they would lose more than they would gain, so they won't do it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15736" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T07:22:07.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2019-08-08T09:12:44.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something I want to note is the GPL aspect of this question: If someone uploads your code to GitHub, and GitHub does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have terms of use that contradict the GPL, that someone is perfectly entitled - and indeed, &lt;em&gt;licensed by you&lt;/em&gt;, to do so. GitHub are also licensed to further redistribute the code, as long as they are not in violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, you cannot prevent someone giving a copy of your code to Microsoft even if you believe they are malicious, whether or not they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; malicious, while simultaneously licensing it under the GPL, as long as that redistributor is acting within the license. You could even say that the GPL is &lt;em&gt;explicitly designed&lt;/em&gt; to permit redistribution to and by all sorts of entities without regard to their general level of malice, as long as they do not act in violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other answers such as InfiniteDissent's one address the key points about licenses and terms of use not being magic spells. I would, however, like to add a few points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First if a site were to require granting of rights you'd rather not, and then you agree to those terms and use the site, you have in fact granted those rights yourself, as outlined in the agreement you accepted when using the service.&#xA; This does also mean that anyone who is not the copyright holder would be violating copyright when uploading works to such a service. Indeed, requiring worldwide perpetual non-exclusive licenses to redistribute, perform, display, sublicense (etc.) is a relatively common practise on a lot of websites, and probably millions of people commit minor copyright breaches in this manner every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, a site having such a clause in its terms of use without it being particularly called upon might seem underhanded, but is not by any means forbidden or illegal - the terms of use are at least ostensibly a legally binding contract that you are expected to read and that you indicate you have agreed to. What I want to note, though, is that this is materially different from Microsoft &quot;changing their fine print for 1 day&quot;, for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Microsoft were to change the GitHub terms of use without a 30 day notice, they would be in breach of the current terms which require such public notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They would have to make the wording retroactive for it to be retroactive, and even this would not &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; grant them new rights - and indeed, they almost certainly know that such an action would place them under &lt;em&gt;immense&lt;/em&gt; legal liability by turning both themselves and a sizable amount of their users into copyright violators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if they did not have the 30 day notice requirement, they could not do such a change discreetly, without notice, &quot;for one day&quot;. As said, contracts, licenses and such are not magic spells - unilateral amendments to a contract are generally not enforceable without &quot;reasonable notice&quot;. If they did not tell their users that the terms had changed, and then changed them back, it would simply seem like they were trying to claim that their terms of use had a clause it could easily be observed it did not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if they &lt;em&gt;somehow&lt;/em&gt; managed to completely unnoticed make everyone grant them such rights, and then they tried &lt;em&gt;knowingly fraudulently&lt;/em&gt; enforcing those rights, they would likely do so by means of lawsuit, and a court of law would be relatively likely to find that they were indeed making a fraudulent copyright claim&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, even if you think Microsoft is a malicious entity out to steal your copyright, ultimately as a publicly traded corporation it seems quite unlikely that they would take such actions in full public view, destroying an &quot;open source credibility&quot; they have recently been building, as well as making a product (GitHub) completely unfit for the purpose they bought it for (at a price of $7.5 billion US dollars). That is, the people who control the corporation &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't sink over seven billion dollars down the drain for what appears to be no or minimal gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15738" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T09:12:44.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8628" CreationDate="2019-08-08T13:48:36.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my research, I see &quot;dynamically linked&quot; and &quot;statically linked&quot; but I have no idea what this means in the context of Python. I am absolutely clueless here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to compiled programs, however, Python is an interpreted language, (usually, See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/6889747/8507637&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/6889747/8507637&lt;/a&gt;), it is safe to say that this shouldn't necessarily apply in your situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwTlCBbB3RY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Making Qt Systems Comply To LGPL Version 3 - Burkhard Stubert (02/04/2019)&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hardest and most instructive cases for LGPLv3 compliance are Qt embedded systems. A Qt embedded system typically runs one or more Qt applications on a Linux system custom-built with Yocto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The video is specifically referring to this use-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article from GNU on the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tl;dr Legal&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Derivatives works (including modifications or anything statically linked to the library) can only be redistributed under LGPL, but applications that use the library don't have to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...but I don't ACTUALLY plan to modify the PySide2 library itself, just use it so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you aren't modifying the library, then you don't need to do anything.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a copy of PySide2 separate from the actual application (ex: on Windows, a myapp.exe + a directory with the PySide2 library? Can this be a link instead?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure what you mean by a link, but yes, you could distribute them separately also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating an installer for an application is out of scope here, but there are ways of invoking a separate installer for PySide2 as part of the installation process for your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-08-08T14:58:32.827" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T14:58:32.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-09T14:22:45.237" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was interested to discover the GPL Cooperation Commitment today, and more particularly the &lt;code&gt;COMMITMENT&lt;/code&gt; file they propose to include in a project under GPL v2 or LGPL v2 or v2.1:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gplcc/gplcc/blob/master/Project/COMMITMENT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gplcc/gplcc/blob/master/Project/COMMITMENT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file says that any person who contributes to the project, starting when the file was introduced, grants a very specific additional permission (extracted from GPL v3), to the users of the project, that applies to &lt;em&gt;all the copyright of this contributor&lt;/em&gt; on the project, including for past contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's now consider a software project, with many contributors, licensed under LGPL 2.1 only (no &quot;or later&quot; clause), whose core developers would like to move to LGPL v3 or later. Could this project commit a similar file in the project repository that would declare that anyone who contributes to this project starting when the file is introduced, agrees that all their contributions, including past contributions, be relicensed under LGPL v3 or later at any later point in time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the core developers could proceed on obtaining an additional agreement from past, &lt;em&gt;inactive&lt;/em&gt; contributors, without having to worry that each new contributor makes the task a bit more difficult. If at some point, such agreement has been obtained from all past copyright holders, the change of license can be executed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the LGPL v2.1 license imposes that new contributions be licensed under LGPL v2.1 or a GPL license, such text must be delicate to craft, so I would be particularly interested in an existing text, already vetted by lawyers, and preferably standard enough to be reusable by any project that wants to follow the same process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the fact that such text is standardized would facilitate contributions from corporate employees, who likely need additional approval for contributing to a project granting additional permissions beyond standard open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously if such process is realistic, it should not only be applicable to projects wanting to switch to a new version of a license, but also to projects wanting to switch to a more permissive, or incompatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: In any case, if such an extension already exists, it is not yet listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/exceptions-index.html&lt;/a&gt;, contrarily to the GPL Cooperation Commitment which is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-CC-1.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-CC-1.0.html&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5858" LastEditorUserId="5858" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T14:34:09.047" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T14:34:09.047" Title="What is a good strategy for gradually preparing a switch to a new version of a license / new license?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8646" CreationDate="2019-08-09T15:03:23.157" Score="2" ViewCount="1296" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;: As it turns out, based on the comments below CC-SA-NC is not considered an Open Source license. The moderators are free to close this. That being said, whether my software is CC-SA-NC or GPL or any other Open Source license does NOT change the relevance of my question. The same situation applies. I still believe its an important question that would benefit open source developers. So I am not going to delete it, but like I said, folks are free to close it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've developed a mobile app with the following setup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The app can be purchased for a fee from Play/App store &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've open sourced the app on GitHub under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-SA-NC&lt;/a&gt; (Creative Commons,&#xA;Share Alike, Non Commercial) usage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also have a desktop version for the same app, that I offer for free on my GitHub site. It is free&#xA;for personal use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I want to make sure that I am protected in the event the app fails/doesn't work.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've only found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2865/does-open-source-software-need-an-eula-to-protect-the-developer&quot;&gt;this thread&lt;/a&gt; that discusses the considerations of EULA for open source, but it doesn't cover my more detailed scenario (at least in my mind). I am primarily interested in protecting myself from folks who decide to sue me because my app did not work for their needs (if that were to happen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Releasing the source code under CC-SA-NC doesn't cover the usage of the app for folks who purchase it from the app/play store, or don't compile my  source code at all. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-SA-NC license&lt;/a&gt; has a Section 5 – Disclaimer of Warranties and Limitation of Liability. While my source code is under CC-SA-NC, I don't think this applies to people who use my app binary, without having compiled it, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apple Store &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has its own EULA&lt;/a&gt; for all apps downloaded.  - see section e and f for limitation of liability and disclaimer of warranty. So I would assume if  someone purchases my app from the Apple store, I am protected if the app doesn't function properly? (We are not talking about violation of T&amp;amp;Cs of the store, like say, my app secretly accessing user data etc. we are simply talking about the app not functioning in certain situations, if that were to occur) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't see a similar protection in &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/about/play-terms/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android Play Store EULA&lt;/a&gt;  - does this imply I should add an EULA for my app that is uploaded to play store?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, what remains is protection for me for folks who choose to use my desktop binary. I assume I need to add a EULA or statement just for that which would basically be the &quot;Disclaimer of Warranty&quot; and &quot;Indemnification&quot; sections? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15755" LastEditorUserId="15755" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T14:09:38.893" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T19:46:44.967" Title="&quot;As is, no warranties&quot; statement for open source app that offers precompiled binaries via app/play store and GitHub" Tags="|license-recommendation|license-notice|eula|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-09T16:46:50.737" Score="0" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was alarmed to see that someone uploaded one of my old GPL'd projects to Github. I don't use Github or any other Microsoft product. Github has refused to remove it however, and suggests I contact the uploader who is completely anonymous and cannot be contacted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the GPL allows copying, this is alarming because Microsoft is a malicious company, both today and in the past. &#xA;The act of uploading could be used by their corporate lawyers to claim that they can automatically abscond with my copyright, if their ToS is written to assign copyright to them. I've seen this before. Sourceforge did it in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years ago, the &quot;fine print&quot; on Sourceforge literally said that by uploading code you are assigning copyright to them, no matter what license is applied to it. They assumed the author was the uploader. But it was a clear attempt at theft-by-lawyer. All Microsoft has to do is change their fine print for 1 day and they can claim that my code is theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is unlike any other on SO because it is clear in meaning and not a chameleon question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15474" LastEditorDisplayName="user15474" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T23:25:07.663" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T23:25:07.663" Title="Can the fine print (ToS) of Github permit them to seize copyright of my code if someone else uploaded it?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|license|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-08-12T01:28:30.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8634" CreationDate="2019-08-09T17:48:09.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've open sourced the app on GitHub under CC-SA-NC (Creative Commons, Share Alike, Non Commercial) usage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license&lt;/a&gt; is not an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All Open Source software can be used for commercial purpose; the Open Source Definition guarantees this. You can even sell Open Source software. --&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#commercial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/faq#commercial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, your application cannot be considered open source.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source licenses contain a clause regarding warranties, however, even though the source is licensed under those terms, any app uploaded to a proprietary store is subject to the licensing of said store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T17:51:49.147" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T17:51:49.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8636" CreationDate="2019-08-09T20:28:32.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, they could &quot;claim&quot; anything they want, but as long as the code has been following the GPL and properly shows you as the author and copyright holder, and/or you have some other way to prove this, then you should win any legal disputes, as they cannot receive copyright assignment in any way from the uploader, since the uploader had no legal claims of copyright to give. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T20:28:32.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8643" CreationDate="2019-08-10T05:19:50.270" Score="5" ViewCount="948" Body="&lt;p&gt;In GPL v3.0 paragraph 5a it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified&#xA;  it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is adding your copyright notice enough? (like described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11670368/gpl-copyright-notice-when-contributing-new-files&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Some open source application&#xA; * Component Foo&#xA; * (C) 2019 by The guy who made a modification (modification-author@foo.bar)&#xA; * (C) 2018 by Original Author(original-author@foo.bar)&#xA; *&#xA; * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA; * it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA; * the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA; * (at your option) any later version.&#xA; * &#xA; * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA; * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA; * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA; * GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA; * &#xA; * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA; * along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should there be a separate modification notice?&#xA;And how should this notice look?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, what is the recommended way of creating a &quot;prominent notice&quot; for a bigger project that includes a modified version of another smaller project licensed under GPL v3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15759" LastEditorUserId="15759" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T11:49:20.590" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T11:49:20.590" Title="GPL v3.0 Is there a standard format for modification notice?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8642" CreationDate="2019-08-10T07:56:50.330" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to FSF&lt;/a&gt;, to use  LGPL in my library, I have to include both the copy of GPL &amp;amp; LGPL. I understand that the reason being LGPL 3 is now written as additional permissions over GPL 3. However, as that's not the case for prior versions of LGPL, I understand that if I use LGPL 2.1 I only have to include a copy of LGPL 2.1. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as a side question, should I also include a copy of (L)GPL 3 too, given that it's now available, so that users can also know the additional rights (L)GPL 3 grants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15761" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T11:22:26.357" Title="Do I have to include a copy of GPL 2 if I'm using LGPL 2.1 (or later)?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2019-08-10T09:37:58.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the general consensus here that stars are meaningless is a case of privileging theoretical a priori knowledge over empirical observation. True, the empirical case is sketchy and very low quality evidence, but I believe a lot of us can attest that our personal experience reflects a correlation between stars and significance of some kind; A significance that is usually popularity, which itself correlates with other good and bad traits.&#xA;It is true that a lot of users might be using the stars in “non-standard” ways, but even that indicates some measure of popularity. And the important thing here is that the ecosystem is so large that it can tolerate a lot of noise. Even if %15 of users star completely randomly, it wouldn’t make the metric useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, whenever there is a heuristical signal, there is effort to fake and cheat. This is seen, e.g., in animals that sport colors of poison, while being completely harmless. And still, the signals endure; Since for the poisonous animals to signal, merely a differential benefit of being eaten less is enough. For the predators, merely surviving more by not eating potentially poisonous animals is enough. And the cheaters are enough of a minority to be able to freeride the signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, on a calm meditation, obvious and observed repeatedly in nature, society and the cyberspace. Instagram’s likes are a great example. People like (and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; like) for a dizzying breadth of reasons. The Instagram bot ecosystem is teeming. Nepotism is the default behavior. And yet, likes signify popularity (even if only to some niches). And the more likes, the bigger these niches. Sure, I myself hate most of the popular stuff on Instagram, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; that is besides the point. The highly liked posts are not at all random; They push the human animal’s buttons methodically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, careful, good empirical investigations can shed more light on the correlations, but it’s dumb to reject something because you don’t understand its technical underpinnings. What’s the methodical research that shows you your brain’s conclusions are of any value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all need to accept that sometimes, we are under heavy technical debt. Ignoring obvious (though very imprecise and suspicious) empirical evidence is a frequent cause of intellectual folly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15762" LastEditorUserId="15762" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T13:20:55.930" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T13:20:55.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8640" CreationDate="2019-08-10T11:22:26.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2 is a standalone license. You are not required to include the GPLv2 as well. That might even be confusing if someone contributes to the project and only intends to license their changes under GPLv2, which would not be compatible with the LGPLv2 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the LGPLv2, then people who modify the software are already free to switch to the GPLv2 or later. This license change is an irreversible operation (for that copy of the software), and would replace any mention of the LGPL with the selected GPL version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordinary users (that do not modify the software) cannot switch to LGPLv3 – unless you license the software under the LGPLv2 &lt;em&gt;or any later version&lt;/em&gt;. Even if that is the case, I wouldn't include the LGPLv3 but merely link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T11:22:26.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8639" CreationDate="2019-08-10T11:32:07.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL makes a distinction between verbatim copies and modified copies. For that, it is relevant who made modifications. For example, this affects who has to provide source code in which form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This measure also protects users. For example, I'm not allowed to surreptitiously insert unwanted behaviour into the software and pass it off as the original – unless I make it clear that I modified the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you make these notices is secondary, as long as they are prominent. This depends on the context. My personal preference is to gather such notices in a LICENSE file, or exercise the additional terms mechanism to implement a NOTICE file as in the Apache 2 license, or to include such information in a README. In practice, where only the source form of the software is provided via a version control system, the version control information might suffice as prominent notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding a copyright notice to a source file may or may not be sufficiently prominent notice. It definitely isn't a prominent notice if you distribute binaries of that software. It may also not be sufficiently prominent if it is just one source file of many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the place of the notice is prominent, then I think that using a copyright notice is fine as the notice of modification. It seems like a very reasonable approach that is not excessively obtrusive but still sufficiently prominent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T11:32:07.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8645" CreationDate="2019-08-11T20:59:42.177" Score="8" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a proprietary program which is illegally linking to a GPL library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the GPL states that programs which link to GPL libraries must also be GPL, does this mean that I can assume that by using the library, the program automatically became GPL, and I can redistribute it under the GPL despite its (illegal) proprietary license saying otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15767" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T21:33:13.520" Title="If a non-GPL program is illegally linking to a GPL library, can I assume that program automatically became GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8644" CreationDate="2019-08-11T21:33:13.520" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No,&lt;/strong&gt; and you potentially put yourself on the wrong side of copyright law by doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL states that if you wish to link to a library that is licensed under the GPL, your program must also be licensed under the GPL. When an author applies the GPL to their library, they are using the GPL to dictate the terms and conditions under which &lt;em&gt;their work can be used&lt;/em&gt;. What that means is that you may only use the library if you comply with the specified terms and conditions; if you do not comply with them, your use of the library is unlicensed and becomes a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is a matter between the library author and the author of the noncompliant program. The library author may have a case against the noncompliant author for violating the terms of their license. However, neither the library author nor the GPL hold any sway over the copyright for the proprietary program - that right remains with its author (or copyright holder). In effect, that means that even though the proprietary program's author has broken the terms of their license, their copyright in their own work is still in effect, and to distribute their work under the GPL without them having explicitly licensed it as such would place you in violation of their copyright. You may not assume that just because their license terms were broken, their copyright is also void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T21:33:13.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8634" CreationDate="2019-08-11T21:44:45.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An alternative thought: &lt;strong&gt;use an open-source license instead.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons licenses are intended for more &quot;traditional&quot; creative works, and are not intended for software. While they can certainly be applied to software, they weren't designed with it in mind, which raises a few domain-specific issues - and this is one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most open-source licenses are written with a disclaimer of liability and warranty, which is exactly the clause you want for your own protection here. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose A License website&lt;/a&gt; has a list of the most popular licenses, from strong copyleft to highly permissive, and lists what each license allows, disallows, and limits. Each license on that list has a disclaimer of liability and warranty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open-source license will not give you the non-commercial restriction, as that's not in keeping with the principles of free/open source software. However - if you're aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1451/98&quot;&gt;problems of creating a crayon license&lt;/a&gt;, you may want to tack a non-commercial restriction on the end of one of the licenses listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever license you choose to use, bear in mind that you can apply the MIT/whatever else you choose to the entire product - binaries as well, not just source. You'll also want to look at the Play Store's terms of use regarding licensing of apps, so you know how you're allowed to license your products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T19:46:44.967" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T19:46:44.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2437" CreationDate="2019-08-12T00:30:03.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Apple's terms for software on their AppStore are incompatible with GPL. If you build and distribute directly, this by itself should pose no problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; check the terms and conditions applicable to any other code you are using, you might run into license incompatibilities that make the combination illegal to distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T00:30:03.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8470" CreationDate="2019-08-12T00:34:07.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably the license under which you got the closed source forbids such use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the exact relationship of your code and said library, it might fall under &quot;mere use&quot; of it (in which case it would be OK) or some more intimate relation (in which case you would have to distribute the closed part as LGPL too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I don't know full details, I'm not your lawyer, so take this as a guess and encouragement to look further into the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T00:34:07.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8650" CreationDate="2019-08-12T01:30:09.890" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a scenario. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say Person 1 makes a web app, distributes it under AGPL v3 and keeps the project updated on their GitHub. Person 2 says hey I want to modify your software and so Person 2 modifies it and puts it on their GitHub as well, but doesn't disclose the original source of the program (no fork relation, nothing that discloses that it's a modified version of Person 1's web app). Would Person 2's not disclosing the original source be considered a license violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15769" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T09:26:15.453" Title="AGPL v3.0 Modified Version Question" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8649" CreationDate="2019-08-12T07:26:13.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would Person 2's not disclosing the original source be considered a license violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course not. AGPL licenses  (and AGPL or GPL free software) existed before &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt;. And you can distribute their source without &lt;code&gt;github&lt;/code&gt;: just put a tarball on some website. Read also about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt;. See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpl-violations.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gpl-violations&lt;/a&gt; website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(no fork relation, nothing that discloses that it's a modified version of Person 1's web app).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should put a proper copyright notice in every source file (in a comment), with a comment telling its AGPLv3+ license. Then the relation between original and modification is documented. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how to use GNU licenses&lt;/a&gt; and about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy of GNU&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, from a legal perspective, if you legally find some source code without any proper license, you are just allowed to &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; that code, not to &lt;em&gt;compile&lt;/em&gt; it or &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; it on a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T07:32:18.500" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T07:32:18.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8654" CreationDate="2019-08-12T07:47:58.600" Score="11" ViewCount="4727" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use three MIT licensed projects in my source code. Do I need to duplicate the three copies of the license (in different directories)? Or is a single copy of the license sufficent? If a commercial software uses my project where does it need to include the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15659" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-20T07:57:27.723" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T07:57:27.723" Title="Include duplicate MIT licenses for every project even if my code base is available in GitHub?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8526" CreationDate="2019-08-12T08:02:52.517" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recently open sourced a utility which uses PDFtoPrinter.exe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Improve your utility to easily make that &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt; configurable (if your utility is a command-line one, add some option like &lt;code&gt;--printer-command=&lt;/code&gt;). For example, on Linux, that command is usually &lt;code&gt;lp&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;lpr&lt;/code&gt; (using CUPS). That printer command could even be a &lt;code&gt;.bat&lt;/code&gt; script (itself running &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt; and also doing some logging) provided by your user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then some user might rewrite on his own (perhaps even as an open source program) a &lt;em&gt;functional equivalent&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt; and does not even use that proprietary software. And perhaps some more or less equivalent to &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt;, but open source, programs &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdf.wondershare.com/pdf-knowledge/open-source-pdf-printer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;already exist&lt;/a&gt; for your operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other users could play with their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;PATH&lt;/code&gt; variable&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symbolic links&lt;/a&gt; to use their own variant of &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By enabling your user to &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; change that particular &lt;code&gt;PDFtoPrinter&lt;/code&gt; command used by your open source program, you weaken the relation between your program and that proprietary utility (and in front of a legal court - should you have to legally defend your rights and license -, that would matter a lot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, in the Unix world, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/a2ps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;a2ps&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a free software program (GPLv3+) conceptually similar to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Your situation illustrates why I prefer most &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt; to even free as in beer operating systems (including a Windows sold with a laptop). I actually never used Windows (but Linux since 1993) on my PCs (both at home and at work). I am a computer scientist aged 60.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T06:08:14.737" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T06:08:14.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8649" CreationDate="2019-08-12T09:26:15.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Person 2 must keep any existing copyright notices intact, but is not required to add notices about the source of the software. They don't have to link to the original version's website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPLv3 requires that modified versions are prominently marked as modified (term 5(a)), and that the date of modification is recorded. But again, stating that modifications happened does not require Person 2 to point to the original version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as such a notice of modification has been made (arguably possible simply through the version control history), then no license violation has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more general point to keep in mind is that the goal of the GPL/LGPL/AGPL is to ensure software freedom for end users, not to ensure attribution or to ensure that any modifications can be included in the upstream project. That often happens, but that's more a side effect of the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T09:26:15.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8651" CreationDate="2019-08-12T09:48:51.983" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your source code, you only need to keep the MIT license notices of your dependencies intact – you do not have to add them anywhere. If someone builds upon your software, they have to comply with the licenses of their entire dependency tree, and also look at your dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your software in non-source form (e.g. compiled or minified), you still need to keep the notices intact. Then, it would make sense to copy the MIT license notices of your dependencies to a separate file, or to show it in a help message within your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notice that you must preserve consists of both copyright notices and the MIT license text. There are two different variants of the MIT license (Expat and X11) which cannot be exchanged. But where the precise license text is duplicated, you are free to include it only once. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;License&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2019 your name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Your license text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Third party software&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Dependency A&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2019 someone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License: MIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Dependency B&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Copyright 2016-2018 someone else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License: MIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Third party license text&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;MIT&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look at how web browsers like Chrome or Firefox do this, which is generally reasonable. E.g. Firefox includes license text once, unless it differs with copyright notices or other additions. This means that MIT-licensed dependencies are each listed with their own license (e.g. “the dependency A license”), whereas standardized license documents like Apache 2 or GPL are only included once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T09:48:51.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8656" CreationDate="2019-08-12T13:59:26.843" Score="6" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a Python package that was rather popular (2000 or so GitHub stars), but most recently committed to two years ago. In addition, the module version in the Python Packaging Index is an outdated one. There are loads of pull requests waiting to be merged, many of them trivial or small improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is rather poor in style, but works for what it was intended to do. I would be interested in maintaining such a package, but after a brief consideration and some refactoring my initial best attempt at a new package doesn't have much in common with the original. But I feel it's a huge step in the right direction, cleaner and easier to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I struggled with the package when I was trying to use it. &lt;strong&gt;What should I do to create a better tool for everyone to enjoy and actively contribute to?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contact the maintainer? &lt;strike&gt;He might be interested in handing the torch over, but if not&lt;/strike&gt;... (in my case the maintainer's email does not exist anymore)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a competing repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new repository would allow for a fresh start, but as the current one is clearly an established tool and downloaded quite often, I would need to inform potential users of this new repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is commenting on the open pull requests and issues (effectively advertising another project) considered rude? As I used the old code in my own version, I could go through the pull requests and inform that the issue has been taken care of in the new version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other options do I potentially have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first open source issue I've taken to heart and one that I might have a valuable contribution to make to. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Python Packaging Index does define &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0541/#abandoned-projects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;abandoned packages&lt;/a&gt;, allowing for some contesting of e.g. the name of a package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15775" LastEditorUserId="15775" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T14:22:14.770" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:25:49.680" Title="Starting to maintain an unmaintained but popular repository" Tags="|github|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8655" CreationDate="2019-08-12T15:25:49.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you have stated, since the project seems to be abandoned, and you have made efforts to ensure that this is really the case, the next step would be to &lt;strong&gt;fork the project&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdixon.wordpress.com/forking-protocol-why-when-and-how-to-fork-an-open-source-project&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forking Protocol: Why, When, and How to Fork an Open Source Project&lt;/a&gt;, provides a good answer to this problem,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Why Fork?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer – Because you cannot get the software to meet your needs any other way.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further answer your questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is commenting on the open pull requests and issues (effectively advertising another project) considered rude? As I used the old code in my own version, I could go through the pull requests and inform that the issue has been taken care of in the new version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using PRs and issues to advertise a competing project would be considered rude, however, it doesn't appear that you are trying to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What other options do I potentially have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could write a completely new package from scratch and have a completely separate name. As you have stated, then you wouldn't benefit from the familiarity that users have with the other package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Try to reach out to the original author if possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open an issue stating the need for the updates.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fork the project, keeping the name intact.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reference the original repository, and state the need for the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:25:49.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6493" CreationDate="2019-08-12T16:00:27.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be friendly to your users... consider making your code debugger-friendly, or even giving access to source, if that is important to them. If not, and debugger-requiring research is common, see if you can ease getting the needed information into the hands of your engineers, or how to make that need disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T16:00:27.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-14T02:52:47.177" Score="12" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I started on a mobile version of a desktop game released under GPLv2. At first, the desktop version was just inspiration, but I've reached the point where I suck as an artist and would like to just re-use the artwork in my game. Would doing so mean my game has to be released under the GPL? I am not &lt;em&gt;modifying&lt;/em&gt; the artwork or any of the code; I am not even re-using the code. I'm just using the artwork, and some text files that describe game levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The game in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/KDE/katomic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;katomic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15784" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T11:56:33.773" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T19:01:41.070" Title="If I use artwork from a GPLv2 application, does my application have to be GPL as well?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8662" CreationDate="2019-08-14T03:28:52.120" Score="5" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to redistribute an image containing MySQL and Apache httpd. However, MySQL is GPL-2.0 licensed and Apache httpd is Apache-2.0 licensed. The two licenses are known to be incompatible. Do I have to keep license compatibility as well when redistributing the Docker Image on DockerHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15594" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T11:27:16.583" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T11:27:16.583" Title="Can I redistribute image containing GPLv2 and Apache2.0 software(packages) on Docker Hub?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10575" CreationDate="2019-08-14T19:13:23.247" Score="14" ViewCount="1343" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geogebra.org/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geogebra.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geogebra&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You are free to copy, distribute and transmit GeoGebra for non-commercial purposes. Non-commercial use is subject to the terms of our GeoGebra Non-Commercial License Agreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Any use of GeoGebra for a commercial purpose is subject to and requires a special license. If you intend to use GeoGebra for a commercial purpose, please contact office@geogebra.org to arrange a License and Collaboration Agreement with us.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;Non-commercial License Terms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The GeoGebra source code is licensed to you under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3 or later) as published by the Free Software Foundation, the current text of which can be found via this link: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt;(&quot;GPL&quot;). Attribution (as required by the GPL) should take the form of (at least) a mention of our name, an appropriate copyright notice and a link to our website located at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geogebra.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.geogebra.org&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aren't these &quot;GPL for non-commercial use only&quot; terms essentially void? If the give me, a non-commercial Geogebra user, a version of their software under GPL3, then I can re-release it under GPL3 to the rest of the world without all other restrictions, making it available under GPL3 for commercial uses as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9666" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:23:36.397" Title="Is Geogebra's &quot;non-commercial only GPL3&quot; license valid?" Tags="|gpl-3|non-commercial|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8659" CreationDate="2019-08-15T02:17:07.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker images are simply portable archives containing the files of an operating system, including configuration files, application binaries, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#TOCGPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...if the two programs are combined so that they become effectively two parts of one program, then you can't treat them as two separate programs. So the GPL has to cover the whole thing...If the two programs remain well separated, like the compiler and the kernel, or like an editor and a shell, then you can treat them as two separate programs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Installing two programs incompatible licenses on a system does not violate the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the licenses of the Dockerfiles themselves is another matter entirely. A Dockerfile is a source file, and therefore is licensed under the terms of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T02:17:07.450" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-15T20:17:15.707" Score="4" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some graphic design creations that I want to allow others to modify if they wish to, as long as their remixed versions have the same permissions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt; (CC SA 1.0) exactly describes what I want, but that page has a notice that it is retired and not recommended for use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an active license called &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike&lt;/a&gt; (CC BY-SA 4.0), however this requires that the modifier give credit back to me for the original. In the case of this project I don't want to require attribution as I feel it could be cumbersome and detrimental to future use by others (in other words, I care much more about the project's usefulness than I do about getting credit). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also release as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Public Domain&lt;/a&gt; (CC0), but I'm uncomfortable letting people make money off of my work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Reason for Deprecation&quot; for CC SA&lt;/a&gt; just says &quot;Inadequate demand&quot;, which doesn't explain why I shouldn't use it now, but I don't understand if there's an actual practical reason why I shouldn't just do so. Any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15805" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T15:05:59.190" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T15:05:59.190" Title="Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC SA 1.0) is retired and not recommended for use, but there's not a suitable active alternative. Should I not use it?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-15T21:44:29.773" Score="5" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does licensing and ownership of software and intellectual property work on a spectrum of extremes and in-between nuances, or is it an &quot;either this or that&quot; decision?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give concrete examples by presenting 3 hypothetical phases in the development of a software company:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You've developed software for a while and you're on to something big, you're creating novel technology or a niche application that could gain traction and wide-spread use. However, you're inexperienced in launching businesses and you don't have financial assets to hire additional workers to help you with various aspects of your endeavor. &lt;strong&gt;Is it possible at this point to simply open-source your software to accelerate the development of the product and later on close source it, or some kind of arrangement where you allow others to partake but still retain ownership of the software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You now lead a modest middle-sized software business. Your intent was never to simply maximize profits, you actually want to share your technology so that others can make use of it, at least parts of your tech. &lt;strong&gt;Is it possible here to limit the use of your technology to private actors, educational institutions and non-profits while demanding royalty/license fees from businesses that wish to license your tech for use in their non-profit ventures?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You're ready to let your business be acquired/sold but you're concerned with how the technology that you have built and refined over the years will be misused and that the management and future utilization of it will not be aligned with your mission statement of making this available to non-profits. &lt;strong&gt;At this point is it possible to enforce a clause that would prevent the future owner from shutting down and wiping the technology from public use? Or is there a way to ensure that &quot;if company B, that acquired tech X from company A, should itself cease to operate, then tech X must be released into the public domain&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the underlying premise of the questions is, if there is such a legal and business-oriented arrangement that &lt;strong&gt;maximally empowers a software engineer or creator to publish their product in the open-source space&lt;/strong&gt; and gain traction (assuming they're lacking financial aid to run their own business out of their own pocket) and &lt;strong&gt;avoid being ripped off by larger corporate entities&lt;/strong&gt;. Furthermore if it is possible to keep a commitment to &lt;strong&gt;provide the core technology to the public&lt;/strong&gt; without having for-profit entities profit off of it, and monetizing parts of the product or perhaps providing a service to remain cash flow positive. As well as, ensuring the &lt;strong&gt;tech or value of the product doesn't get squandered&lt;/strong&gt; should a change of ownership or acquisition occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15807" LastEditorUserId="15807" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T22:01:33.990" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T07:34:58.583" Title="Are there any hybrid open-source/proprietary software licenses and business models?" Tags="|law|license|business|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8664" CreationDate="2019-08-15T22:06:49.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would strongly advise against using any v1.0 Creative Commons license, since the most recent iteration is v4.0, and has made many improvements to clarity and enforceability (especially in varied international contexts). Furthermore, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) should suit you just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA's attribution requirement in Section 3(a)(1)(A) requires recipients to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;retain the following &lt;strong&gt;if it is supplied&lt;/strong&gt; by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:&#xA;  identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you don't supply any attribution information to be retained, this requirement doesn't have any effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Section 3(a)(3) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really intended to allow the removal of attribution for specific uses (e.g., use of your work in a political campaign you dislike), but I point this out to show that if &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; wish to be attributed, CC BY-SA strongly respects this choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T22:06:49.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8665" CreationDate="2019-08-16T02:47:09.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;1 - You could go back to closed source ... IF you did not accept any code from others under the terms of your Free-license-of-choice.  You could also refuse to accept code contributions without an accompanying assignment of copyright, but that will just get your software &lt;code&gt;fork()&lt;/code&gt;ed (see Open/Libre Office for an example, or MySQL and how MariaDB came about).  Note that users that obtained your program before switching back still have the original rights of the Free license the software was distributed to them under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - What you are looking for with this point is non-Free software.  &quot;No discrimination against persons or groups&quot; and &quot;all fields of endeavor&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - Some people think that using Free software as the back end and infrastructure behind a SaaS setup is a violation of end user rights, and some newer Free software licenses try to do something about this, the AGPLv3 being an example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T02:47:09.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8665" CreationDate="2019-08-16T22:57:26.910" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible at this point to simply open-source your software to accelerate the development of the product and later on close source it, or some kind of arrangement where you allow others to partake but still retain ownership of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is possible, but you have to make sure all contributors abstain from their rights - which can actually be a reason for potential contributors not to participate. If you want free work from other devs, you usually need to give them something in return for this, which means usually the source code of the whole product. They may not be happy with the idea of giving you some source code for free, and then you close the source and sell their work. Note you can never close an already published version of the source afterwards, once you made a version of your product FOSS, that version stays open. Only newer versions can become closed. That means, closing afterwards the source will only cut external contributors from updates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible here to limit the use of your technology to private actors, educational institutions and non-profits while demanding royalty/license fees from businesses that wish to license your tech for use in their non-profit ventures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely - but this question is not really about open source, and the answer &quot;yes&quot; is valid for closed or open source equally. If you can enforce correct licensing for commercial usage, especially internal usage inside a company, is a complete different thing. If someone as a private person, downloads your software and then passes it over to some company for their internal usage is something for which the chances are high you will never become aware of, and even if you become aware, you may have problems to proof this in court. GPL, for example, does not even try to enforce this, that license only enforces depending code (derivative works) to be open-sourced in case of public deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note some companies use the approach of dual-licensing a product - they make the source code GPL and offer a commercial license for paying users. GPL does not forbid commercial usage, but it can make it economically infeasable. So if a commercial useer wants to use the source in a closed source product which is deployed/sold to customers, they have to buy the commercial license unless they want to be forced to open source their own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At this point is it possible to enforce a clause that would prevent the future owner from shutting down and wiping the technology from public use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can surely write such a clause into the selling contract, or you can release the code to the public under a suitable open-source licence right before the sale. If you can &lt;em&gt;enforce&lt;/em&gt; such a clause is a different question, that may require to be tested in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2019-08-17T07:34:58.583" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T07:34:58.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8658" CreationDate="2019-08-17T12:30:27.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though the GPL surely was intended for &quot;usual source code&quot;, it applies AFAIK to images and artwork as well. Especially in the described case, some images of the original game are in SVG format, which is just an XML format, which can clearly be seen as a form of &quot;source code&quot; (but beware, what I wrote applies also to pictures in binary format like JPEG or PNG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, if you want to use the images in your game, you need to follow the GPL license, which means as soon as you release it to the world, you need to put it under GPL as well. If you don't like this, better ask the authors if they give you a permission for using a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/6455/use-an-image-under-gnu-gpl-in-a-commercial-application&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; was asked formely on law.SE, and the answers seem to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T12:30:27.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T04:29:07.100" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just started my career as an online freelancer and even though I try to do my best I have this constant stress &amp;amp; anxiety about what will happen if there is a huge unwanted issue/bug in my code that might hold me responsible for any possible future damages caused by the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason, I started putting &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mpl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL-2&lt;/a&gt; &quot;LICENSE&quot; file in my root directory of projects before delivering them, so basically my clients can do whatever they want with the code, re-sell it, publish it online, etc. I also offer 6-months of free bug fixing to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that enough to not to be held responsible? (am I doing it right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm a PHP coder so the source is always provided to the customer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P.P.S.&lt;/strong&gt; In case it's relevant, I am diagnosed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15819" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T10:03:40.500" Title="Can I use MPL-2 for not being held responsible for software bugs?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8675" CreationDate="2019-08-18T07:56:30.227" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently got aware that someone on Github is trying to build an image labeling tool that I already have developed 2 years back. His work is in the initial stage currently. But got good popularity. Other than a few features which are not developed yet but in his roadmap and not present in my code yet, we have the same goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I suggest him to not waste his effort and to join the project that I have already built?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8512" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T11:09:24.780" Title="Should I notify the author to avoid duplicate effort for the same work?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8671" CreationDate="2019-08-18T09:28:17.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most, if not all, software license agreements place the blame of any damages onto the user of the software, not the developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have a close read of sections six and seven of the MPL-2 (abbreviated below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disclaimer of Warranty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Covered Software is provided under this License on an &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot; basis, without warranty of any kind... Should any Covered Software prove defective in any respect, You (not any Contributor) assume the cost of any necessary servicing, repair, or correction. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Limitation of Liability&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances ... shall any Contributor, or anyone who distributes Covered Software as permitted above, be liable to You for any direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character including, without limitation, damages for lost profits, loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all other commercial damages or losses, even if such party shall have been informed of the possibility of such damages. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T09:28:17.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8682" CreationDate="2019-08-18T09:51:16.863" Score="2" ViewCount="1201" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd really like to use the GPL license for my cross-platform mobile app. I want to publish on the iOS AppStore, the terms of which indirectly &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prohibit the GPL from being used&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best way to work around this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to use a more permissive license. I'm thinking the only other way is to have a CLA and dual-license the app under both the GPL and a proprietary license, specifying that the proprietary license can only be used for the purpose of publishing on the AppStore. Ideally, though, I'd like others to be able to reuse the code and publish on the AppStore as well (again, under a GPL license with an iOS exception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T20:49:04.353" Title="GPL with license exception for iOS?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8672" CreationDate="2019-08-18T11:09:24.780" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons to develop open source software – not only to create some necessary tool, but sometimes also just to &lt;em&gt;build&lt;/em&gt; something. So this is not necessarily a case of &lt;em&gt;wasted&lt;/em&gt; effort. Phrasing it like that would  be highly disrespectful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sure, pointing them to your existing project would be a nice thing to do. Maybe you can get inspiration from their code, or they can incorporate some of your components. I closely watch “competing” open source projects, and point users to them if my project doesn't have some feature that they need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But do not expect the projects to somehow merge. Open source is not a competition, and nobody wins or loses. Everybody wins if you cooperate, but nothing is lost if you don't. Instead of suggesting that all development concentrates on one of the projects, you might instead be able to identify some components that can be shared and maintained together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T11:09:24.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T12:34:21.000" Score="2" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://bytebuddy.net/#/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ByteBuddy&lt;/a&gt; library (not intended for end-users, but for developpers) is distributed as a JAR file, which contains the compiled classes of ASM (&lt;a href=&quot;https://asm.ow2.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://asm.ow2.io/&lt;/a&gt;), licensed under the BSD 3-Clause. According to the second BSD clause, the ASM license should be included &quot;in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the [ByteBuddy] distribution&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the ASM license is included in the ByteBuddy JAR (a &quot;binary&quot;), is this sufficient to comply with the ASM license? According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7575/bsd-3-clause-where-to-place-license-for-binary-installation&quot;&gt;BSD 3-Clause: where to place license for binary installation?&lt;/a&gt;, this might &quot;fail the intention of providing user-visible attribution&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, should ByteBuddy be distributed instead as a zip file, containing the ByteBuddy JAR, plus &quot;other materials&quot;, including the ASM license in a plain text file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15820" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T09:01:10.437" Title="BSD 3-Clause library: redistribution in a Java library as a JAR file?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8678" CreationDate="2019-08-18T14:19:18.757" Score="2" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to incorporate an open source library that is GPL-3.0 licensed into my program. The library is quite big in size and I would be just fine with just a small part of it. Will removing most of its code and then using that version with my software count as modifying the original library's source code? (e.g. Will I have to distribute the source code of the library I &quot;modified&quot;, which is basically the same with some classes removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15822" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T17:04:53.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T17:04:53.173" Title="Does removing part of gpl3 licensed source code count as modification" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8677" CreationDate="2019-08-18T15:43:55.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the GPL-3.0 license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, modify is defined as anything other copying as-is; truncating a library would be considered modifying it, and therefore, requires that the adapted version be marked as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T15:43:55.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8681" CreationDate="2019-08-18T17:11:24.270" Score="21" ViewCount="6796" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a web game under the GNU General Public License v3.0 open sourced on GitHub. Recently I found out that someone else had forked the repository and is setting up AdSense on their version. They really only just translated the project to Spanish, changed the name, and added a whole lot of content to the main page (to what I can only assume) to get approved for AdSense because of their original content rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that leads me to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are they allowed/in the right to monetize a forked version of my project under the GNU General Public License v3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what should I do about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15824" LastEditorUserId="61" LastEditDate="2023-11-29T20:48:52.753" LastActivityDate="2023-11-29T20:48:52.753" Title="Can others monetize my project with GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|gnu|monetization|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8684" CreationDate="2019-08-18T17:18:52.227" Score="3" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an open source project is licensed under MIT, I want them to be able to use my library without changing their license to GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I still want developers of proprietary applications to make their code available, since I'm going to offer a dual commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess one option is to offer the commercial license to open source projects for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15825" LastEditorUserId="15825" LastEditDate="2019-08-18T19:29:52.403" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T13:16:40.707" Title="I'm developing a library. Is there a license similar to GPL3 that doesn't force a license change for the project?" Tags="|gpl|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8679" CreationDate="2019-08-18T18:56:45.577" Score="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, what is being done on that fork is entirely legal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are also allowed to take the useful changes (like the translation) and incorporate them in your own fork. Then you can advertise it as the ad-free version that users might like better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T22:07:42.753" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T22:07:42.753" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8674" CreationDate="2019-08-18T20:49:04.353" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are depending on GPL code from others,  you are essentially out of luck. Unless you can get a different license for the code, you can't publish your project to the app store. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, then you can simply use multiple licenses for your code. The GPL in the public repository and another license for the version published in the app store. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to accept contributions from others that can also be used on the app store, then the best option is to add an &quot;additional permission&quot; to the GPL license as allowed under section 7.&#xA;For example, you could add a permission like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As additional permission under section 7, you are allowed to distribute the software through an app store, even if that store has restrictive terms and conditions that are incompatible with the GPL, provided that the source is also available under the GPL with or without this permission through a channel without those restrictive terms and conditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T20:49:04.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-18T22:38:34.257" Score="4" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me describe the situation: there's an old piece of software (a game) with source code publically available. Source code was (officially, legally) released with following non-free license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The source code to GAME NAME is copyright (c) YEAR-YEAR NAME and is provided as-is with no warranty for its suitability for use. You may not use this source code in full or in part for commercial purposes. Any use must include a clearly visible credit to NAME as the creators and owners, and reiteration of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the initial release, several people/teams updated it, modified (substantially, e.g. by porting to SDL2) - but every fork eventually fizzled out and died (it's playable on modern Linux systems, but I haven't tried it myself yet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about picking up the fork and maintaining it, but I don't feel like working on non-free software (it would be pointless, IMHO). I was planning to dual-license all of my future changes under original license and GPLv3, and clearly indicate this in Git repo - e.g. by marking every change that modifies code (so every change sans formatting) as GPL-compatible. This way I was planning to gradually liberate the code, so eventually, when all lines would be covered by GPL, I could release it with GPLv3 being primary license. Maybe some older maintainers would agree to re-license their changes on GPL as well (that would speed up the process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legally defensible? Has there been any precedence for liberating source code this way? Is there some better license than GPLv3 to handle such a transition? (LGPL maybe?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[edit]&#xA;Clarifying question: what if the gradual rewrite was not line-by-line (commit-by-commit), but instead module-by-module (maybe even using completely different language linking to the original source code compiled as shared object). LGPL seems to be ideally suited for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15829" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T15:52:47.600" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T18:53:46.990" Title="Is it possible to liberate source code through double-licensing changes?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8680" CreationDate="2019-08-19T02:43:37.787" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you want appears basically to &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; source-disclosure copyleft as employed by the GPL (though you appear to tolerate nonfree terms, as long as they still include source disclosure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case that an MIT projects wants to use your work, you're happy to let them do so, because they disclose their source code. But as soon as a proprietary project wants to use &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; MIT-licensed project (that uses your work) in a closed-source project, you don't want to allow &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; to happen. In order words, you want the MIT project to stop operating under permissive terms when it incorporates your work. The MIT project would have to stop being fully permissively-MIT-licensed, because after incorporating your work, it can no longer be incorporated into proprietary works without source disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of this fact, you may as well just use the GPL for your work, since it has virtually the same effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T02:56:20.700" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T02:56:20.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8683" CreationDate="2019-08-19T08:09:02.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, your tactic is not legally defensible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the GPL license requires that all code of the project/game is available under a GPL-compatible open-source license and the original game code isn't. This means that you can't use the GPL or a similar copyleft license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, even if you would use a compatible license, you will run into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thesius' paradox&lt;/a&gt;. If you replace the existing code, it is unclear what would happen to the copyright of the original authors. The current safe assumption is that they can still claim copyright and must agree to a license change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T08:09:02.063" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8679" CreationDate="2019-08-19T09:31:46.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but I believe this is legal within GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why there exists Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) license. This will force them to share any source code changes if running it on a web server (e.g. if software/scripts not run locally on client).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15833" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T09:31:46.843" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T10:53:49.597" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a bug in a open source project.  The bug is easy to reproduce and as such I have added a failing unit test (the project already uses unit tests) and submitted a pull request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not fixed the problem, I just wrote a unit test illustrating the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PR cannot be merged because the unit test fails.  Did I do the right thing by submitting the unit tests as a PR?  Should I have done something different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="jornane" LastEditorUserId="2380" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T11:57:06.670" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T11:57:06.670" Title="How to send a merge request for a new unit test that fails?" Tags="|github|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8658" CreationDate="2019-08-19T11:53:06.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to my colleague, Doc Brown, I disagree.  Some of the only jurisprudence we have about using &lt;em&gt;artwork&lt;/em&gt; under a copyleft licence as part of a greater work comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group,_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group&lt;/a&gt;.  Although the copyleft content in Drauglis was under CC-BY-SA, not GPL, I believe the analysis applies because the question of what constitutes a derivative is a &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; question, not a &lt;em&gt;licence-specific&lt;/em&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the court found that not only was the whole work (a road atlas) not a derivative of the CC-BY-SA cover photo, even the cover image was only a collective work, not a derivative one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though that case isn't a binding authority in any jurisdiction, given that you're not modifying the artwork the analysis seems germane, and suggests that you could use the artwork taken from the GPL source game without having to GPL your entire game.  You would need to honour the terms of the GPL with respect to the artwork, though.  And, of course, IANAL/IANYL, so you would do well to take qualified legal advice before relying heavily on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T19:01:41.070" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T19:01:41.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T13:46:02.933" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the maintainer/main contributor to a Java library, that is open source software under BSD license. I currently receive no funding for my work in this project, but demand is rising. As a full time employee, and a father I don't have a lot of spare time to put in. But there are possible clients who are willing to pay for fixing bugs or new features, and my current employer is positive to let me do this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, &lt;strong&gt;where can I find a good (template) contract to use for short-term OSS work&lt;/strong&gt; like described above, between me/my employer and the third party (client)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched extensively, but I find only template contracts for use between an employer and me, to allow me to contribute to OSS. I have this covered, and this is not what I am looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2344" LastEditorUserId="2344" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T15:27:20.903" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T12:20:26.690" Title="Standard contract for OSS work" Tags="|bsd|contracts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8687" CreationDate="2019-08-19T14:06:32.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the programming language you are using you can creatge a mergerequest with a disabled/ignored unittest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This avoid having  &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/58248/what-is-the-value-of-checking-in-failing-unit-tests/58509#58509&quot;&gt;failing-unit-tests&lt;/a&gt; in the code branch which can be easyly reenabled when fixing the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2380" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T14:06:32.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8683" CreationDate="2019-08-19T15:26:49.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most obvious problem with this plan is that by including GPL-licensed code alongside code under a GPL-incompatible license, you might make it impossible for anyone else to distribute the software. As far as my legal knowledge extend, downstream recipients may only distribute a work that includes your GPL-licensed code if they distribute the overall work as a whole under the terms of the GPL (per GPLv3 sect. 5(c)). You could avoid this problem by employing a GPL exception. Supposing your game was called, say, Foos Versus Bar, you might &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;draft an exception&lt;/a&gt; like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional permission under GNU GPL version 3 section 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with Foos Versus Bar (or a modified version of that program), containing parts covered by the terms of Foos Versus Bar, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work. Corresponding Source for a non-source form of such a combination shall include the source code for the parts of Foos Versus Bar used as well as that of the covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, downstream distributors have permission to distribute the work notwithstanding the inability to distribute the whole work under GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that problem out of the way, there still remains these problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It isn't perfectly clear that this license allows modification at all (the only permission granted is a vague &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; which doesn't clearly correspond to any particular set of copyright rights). It clearly indicates what you may not do, and requirements for use, but does not make explicit what use is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Considering that developers doing internal modifications to files have definitely seen the original code, their code is very likely a derivative of the original code. Per the above issue, this license doesn't clearly license the right to prepare derivatives or, if it is allowed, under what terms they may be prepared. This means the derivative modifications may be disallowed entirety or may have to be made under the original non-commercial terms. If either of those cases applied, then even an all-at-once wholesale rewrite of the entire program could not be licensed under the GPL, unless you applied clean-room practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T18:53:46.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8692" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T22:25:29.103" Score="5" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project is licensed with MIT license, can someone fork the project, create significant changes, and put a more restrictive license on it? Or even copyright it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15843" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T10:08:02.333" Title="Licensing for forked projects" Tags="|licensing|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8692" CreationDate="2019-08-20T07:14:54.957" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;So we suppose that Alice creates a piece of code &lt;em&gt;ab initio&lt;/em&gt; and publishes it under the X11 licence (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;more precise name&lt;/a&gt; of what is often referred to as &quot;&lt;em&gt;the MIT licence&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).  Bob then copies it and makes significant changes (resulting in &lt;em&gt;the new work&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can Bob copyright it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new work is a piece of code in which &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; people, Bob and Alice, have a copyright interest.  That's not something either of them has to do, it flows out of their authorship and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne Convention&lt;/a&gt;.  No third party may then do with the new work those things which are restricted by copyright without the consent of both Alice and Bob; Alice and Bob may each do only those things with the consent of Bob and Alice, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By publishing under a non-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; free licence, Alice has permitted a very wide range of things to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can Bob put a more restrictive licence on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have written &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4149/can-one-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl/4194#4194&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, yes, he may.  Some free software licences forbid distribution under terms more restrictive than their own (eg GPLv3 ss 5c, 7); the X11 licence is not one of these.  Bob may therefore distribute the new work under the requirements of &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the X11 licence &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; (eg) GPLv3.  Note that this isn't dual-licensing, where the recipient chooses which of two licences (s)he wishes to apply; the requirements of &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; licences apply.  GPLv3 permits this since the demands of the X11 licence do not conflict with those of GPLv3 (ie, X11 is &quot;compatible&quot; with GPLv3); X11 permits it since it does not forbid adding additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob may even distribute the new work under almost-completely-restrictive terms, as proprietary software, so long as he fulfils the (very lightweight) labelling requirements of the X11 licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T10:08:02.333" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T10:08:02.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8676" CreationDate="2019-08-20T08:09:08.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here, the ByteBuddy library is Apache-licensed. The Apache license makes provisions for a NOTICE file that must be user-visible. The easiest way for ByteBuddy to simplify downstream compliance would be to include the ASM license notice in the NOTICE file. That way, downstream users don't have to care about the ASM license separately. The JAR can effectively be considered Apache-licensed, rather than the Apache/BSD mix that it actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ByteBuddy already has a NOTICE file, but oddly it just contains a template for the Apache license dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license gives the following options for showing the NOTICE file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a library JAR, only the first two alternatives are available. Including the NOTICE within the JAR itself is a very good idea and likely already satisfies the license requirements (both Apache and BSD when the BSD notice is included in the Apache NOTICE file). However, this NOTICE should also be referenced in documentation material so that people know where to look for third party attribution notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing the library as a ZIP that contains a JAR and documentation/notices does not provide significant value over including the license in the JAR, as a JAR already is exactly such a ZIP archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downstream users that redistribute ByteBuddy will have to think about their license compliance requirements themselves. If they create applications with the library, they would likely have to show the NOTICE in the application's user interface or in documentation provided alongside the application. I do not think that relying on notices within the JAR is appropriate in an end user context. However, downstream compliance is out of scope for the ByteBuddy project itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative that ByteBuddy seems to have chosen in the meanwhile – separately including the ASM license in the JAR – is also OK, especially since the ASM license is explicitly mentioned in the online documentation. However, centralizing all license notices into one NOTICE file would simplify downstream compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, you can also look at how other libraries do this. For example, the JAR for the Groovy language includes some ASM classes as well (checked in version 3.0.0-beta-3). Groovy is under the umbrella of the Apache foundation, so they should have a grip on licensing. They reference third-party projects in the NOTICE file inside the JAR, and include the third party license text in a license directory within the JAR. This is almost exactly the same approach as ByteBuddy has started using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T08:09:08.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8679" CreationDate="2019-08-20T14:26:39.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that while monetizing itself is legal, the project that is based on a GPL software must (obviously) comply with GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any browser-side source code (which is distributed to users) has to be released under the same license&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All copyright notices (e.g. &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019 Hunter Parcells&lt;/code&gt;) in such files must be preserved, with additional copyright notices in files that have been modified.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the original game had an interactive notice with copyright/attribution statement (e.g. &quot;About&quot; page), that notice should also be preserved / amended as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any additional terms from section 7 must be observed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AdSense itself is not a problem. Many CMS are released under GPL (e.g. Drupal), and those are compatible with AdSense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your game runs mostly (or entirely) server-side, you're out of luck. There's no requirement for the new authors to release the code (and thus GPL terms do not apply), and if you were to copy their translated text and release a Spanish version of the original game, you'd violate their copyright. Unless, of course, the forked repository is public, so that its content can be considered to be released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What open-source games often do to keep spin-offs under control is having a separate license for artwork. If that is the case, you can claim copyright violation for images / sounds, if the project in question reuses those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2019-08-20T14:37:49.180" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T14:37:49.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-20T17:35:43.450" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project is licensed GPLv3 at top level but includes packages that are MIT, do the licenses of the included packages apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15851" LastEditorUserId="15680" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T15:43:29.463" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T15:43:29.463" Title="If a project is licensed GNU GPLv3 at top level but includes packages that are MIT are the included packages MIT?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8697" CreationDate="2019-08-21T12:58:34.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand your question like this: &quot;I received the source code for a software package. The root directory of the source code contains a &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file containing the GPLv3. I found a subdirectory in that tree that contains another project that has been re-used by the GPL project as sub-project. The subdirectory makes no mention of the GPL, but instead contains the MIT license. May I use code from that subdirectory according to the MIT terms?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the answer is &quot;most likely yes&quot;. The fact that the MIT-licensed code is re-used in an GPLv3 project does not change the license of that code. The MIT license still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the MIT-licensed source code has been modified by the authors of the GPLv3 project, they might think of their changes being licensed under the GPLv3. &lt;em&gt;In my oppinion&lt;/em&gt;, they would have needed to adjust the license statement of the files they edited in case they don't want their changes to be subject to the MIT license. So, to be extra safe, you can try to receive the MIT-licensed source code from the original author instead of taking it from the source tree you have now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15279" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T12:58:34.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2019-08-21T12:58:38.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/heremaps/oss-review-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSS Review Toolkit&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/heremaps/oss-review-toolkit#analyzer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;analyzer&lt;/a&gt; is designed to do just that. You need to clone your GitHub repo to a local working directory, and then run the analyzer on it as explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/heremaps/oss-review-toolkit/blob/master/docs/GettingStarted.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;getting started&lt;/a&gt; document at the example of the &lt;em&gt;mime-types&lt;/em&gt; project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/em&gt; I'm the founder and lead developer of the OSS Review Toolkit (ORT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14857" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T12:58:38.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4819" CreationDate="2019-08-21T15:33:27.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically google-s geofencing-api is implemented on google-servers so you cannot use google-s api without their service. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can use the alternatice opensource implementation &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lostzen/lost/blob/master/docs/geofences.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lost-geofences&lt;/a&gt; which has a local implementation without the need for gms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2380" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T15:33:27.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8733" CreationDate="2019-08-21T15:52:09.047" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing is used to maximize compatibility. One requirement is that licenses must be non-exclusive, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/326/dual-license-compatibility&quot;&gt;they don't have to compatible&lt;/a&gt; and as licensee you are free to choose a subset of the licenses when publishing your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With non-exclusive I mean that you don't give up rights to license the work to others under other licenses in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered, if one could actually maximize this, e.g. create some kind of &quot;omni&quot; license that includes all possible non-exclusive licenses at the same time? Something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Omni-license&lt;/strong&gt;: This work is multi-licensed under all non-exclusive licenses that ever existed or will ever exist. This includes but is not restricted to all past and future variants of GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, CC and the Public domain (wherever it exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part should not be necessary, it's here just for illustration of the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is if that would work (maximizing compatibility, not creating other problems on the go)? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine that derivative works could then also be distributed under the Omni-license or could be distributed under any (set of) non-exclusive license(s) and Omni-licensed material would be compatible with all non-exclusive licenses by design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it doesn't work, could one at least just compile a really big list of existing non-exclusive licenses and create a multi-license containing them? Something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any-license: This work is multi-licensed under GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0, MIT, 3-clause BSD, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where one could just link to the texts of the respective license. Or would the full texts need to be included (could probably be done with reasonable effort)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6007" LastEditorUserId="6007" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T09:03:17.103" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T09:03:17.103" Title="Would a multi-license consisting of all possible non-exclusive licenses work?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5851" CreationDate="2019-08-21T20:09:12.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Loks OK to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is only relevant if you want to distribute said LaTeX files further. In which case consider carefully if your changes might benefit others, and contribute them to upstream. If not (or your changes aren't accepted), perhaps you can get the same results by e.g. overriding some part of the original in an extra file, or just define your own macros to complement the original. That way you (or whoever gets the package from you) isn't tied to this particular version (presumably upstream will fix bugs from time to time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says this package is in &quot;maintenance mode&quot;, that might mean that it is superseded by some newer package that offers the same (or similar) functionality. I'd look into that before digging in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:09:12.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5819" CreationDate="2019-08-21T20:11:10.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the thesis may not be legally yours, e.g. here in Chile by law anything somebody creates as part of the study work is the property of the school. Or you might be required to assign copyright to the school to graduate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T12:11:22.830" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T12:11:22.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8003" CreationDate="2019-08-21T20:42:14.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The note says the file includes parts of APL 2.0 code. You can then release only under licenses compatible with that one. If you take a peek at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#Compatibility_of_FOSS_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this license compatibility chart&lt;/a&gt; you see that APL 2.0 is not compatible with MIT (i.e., you can mix MIT and APL, the result has to be licensed APL; not the other way around).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T20:42:14.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8679" CreationDate="2019-08-22T07:19:49.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to other existing answers, if your goal is to completely forbid others to monetize your project (&lt;em&gt;offering the Program as a Service&lt;/em&gt;) without disclosing their source, SSPL (Server Side Public License) was created by the MongoDB team specifically for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is relatively new, whether it's enforceable or not is debatable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do not call your project &quot;open source&quot;. As in the MongoDB case, the idea was rejected by much of the open-source community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15620" LastEditorUserId="15620" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T11:27:00.380" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T11:27:00.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8714" CreationDate="2019-08-22T12:46:19.057" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;When releasing software on GitHub, I usually state something in the Readme which reads like &amp;quot;Code written by [name and alias], licensed under GPLv3&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this sufficient? Or do I need to include the full license on GitHub (I have seen many doing so), use the full name (&amp;quot;GNU Public License Version 3&amp;quot;), or even more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: And for other licenses, such as MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15872" LastEditorUserId="15872" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T12:43:50.137" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T12:43:50.137" Title="Properly licensing my software on GitHub" Tags="|licensing|github|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8710" CreationDate="2019-08-22T13:00:15.923" Score="8" ViewCount="985" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found that Google uploaded Product Sans font to a repo licensed under Apache License 2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/iosched-ios/blob/master/Source/IOsched/ProductSans-Regular.ttf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google/iosched-ios/blob/master/Source/IOsched/ProductSans-Regular.ttf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the font file be considered to be under Apache License 2.0, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/iosched-ios/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; file in the repo says?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15873" LastEditorUserId="4028" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T06:35:02.787" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T17:26:27.243" Title="Did Google accidentally release Product Sans/Google Sans font in Apache License?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|font|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8709" CreationDate="2019-08-22T13:16:13.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One has to assume they did so on purpose. In any case, if they did so on purpose or not is not your concern: You did get the font legally under the stated license, and enjoy the benefits laid out there (and have to abide by the restrictions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can't take it back. Sure, they might decide not to license next version under the same conditions, but this one version is under APL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T13:16:13.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8709" CreationDate="2019-08-22T15:38:41.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LICENSE file in the repository contains the text of two licenses (the Apache 2.0 and the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0) and between those is a very important paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All image and audio files (including *.png, *.jpg, *.svg, *.mp3, *.wav&#xA;  and *.ogg) are licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. All other files are&#xA;  licensed under the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph specifies that different parts of the repository are made available under different licenses and which license applies to each part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a .ttf font file is neither an image nor an audio file, and the .ttf extension is not explicitly listed, the font must be under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T18:40:28.567" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T18:40:28.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-23T05:59:22.990" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, first of all I do not want to sell any scripts or commercial applications that use R scrips or libraries. The Open Source is there for a reason and it should remain as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to build an online platform that presents data using RShiny, the OpenCPU in the back-end and other interesing insights using RMarkdown. Any line of code written with the R programming, based on packages developed by the OpenSource community will remain OpenSource and anyone can access it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial point of view of the platform will be in paid subscriptions for accessing the insights of the data, requesting personalized insights and consulting. Will this interfere with the GPL licence of R and AGPL licence of R Shiny? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I would like to sell the insights of the data, not the language used to get them. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15881" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T09:48:32.333" Title="Open Source licences applications in R, RShiny and OpenCPU data outputs" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8712" CreationDate="2019-08-23T09:48:32.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the GPL and AGPL licenses allow commercial exploitation of the code, so your use of paid subscriptions to your service is entirely fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source licenses may not even prohibit commercial use of the code. The thing is that the (A)GPL license makes the first thing that most people think of (selling copies of the software for money) economically unfeasible, because the first buyer has the right to become a competitor who can undercut the prices being charged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, this also counts for your usecase to some extend. As your service is based on RShiny, which is licensed under the AGPL, you must give your users the right to download the code for your service and allow them to use that code to setup a similar service. The main reason why your subscriptions can be economically feasible if because of the data you have (which doesn't fall under the AGPL license of the software) and because it anyway costs money to host a (successful) service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T09:48:32.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8708" CreationDate="2019-08-23T12:50:18.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To pull all the comments together, I'll take the question in parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I usually state something in the Readme which reads like &quot;&lt;em&gt;Code written by [name and alias], licensed under GPLv3&lt;/em&gt;&quot; ... Is this sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sense that anyone who wants to exercise their free-software rights can safely do so, yes.  But it's very helpful if you do a little more, as vonbrand says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;do I need to include the full license on GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're publishing a derivative of someone else's GPL software, you are &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; to do so (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; ss 4, 5).  If you're the original author of the entire work then the GPL doesn't bind you, even though you're publishing under it, but it's still very much best-practice to include a copy of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub has a per-repository &quot;licence&quot; field, and it's helpful for people automatically searching for free software if you set this correctly also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it's very helpful if the header of &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; file in your codebase includes a clear copyright statement, and says what licence it is distributed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL's full name is &quot;the GNU General Public License&quot;, by the way, and as Brandin points out there is best-practice guidance at the bottom of the licence on how to apply it to your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And for other licenses, such as MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that at least some authorities find the term &quot;MIT licence&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ambiguous&lt;/a&gt; it would be an equally good idea (to maximise user convenience, and minimise ambiguity) to include a copy of any other licence you intend to publish under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T12:50:18.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8689" CreationDate="2019-08-24T12:14:28.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To summarise the comments above, it seems a little odd that your employer is willing to get involved in a professional relationship between you and a third-party.  I can see how it's good for you and the third party, since you don't have to form a company and the third party doesn't have to get involved in short-term employment, but it's much less clear what your company gets out of this.  However, you say they're happy to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that a good starting point is to use the same contract that they would use with any other party for whom the company develops software, since your employer will already be very familiar with it, thus keeping things simple for them.  You should include the conditions that the software so developed will be released under a specific BSD licence, and contributed back to the library project on those terms.  You will also want to include details of what the third-party is paying your employer for this work, and be clear about who gets the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How your employer passes this money on to you, how much they deduct for providing this service, what further deductions they will make for payroll taxes and the like, &#xA;are separate issues that have no place in the contract between your employer and the third party, but are instead matters for written negotiation between you and your employer.  Also, you don't ask about those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-24T12:20:26.690" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T12:20:26.690" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8718" CreationDate="2019-08-24T14:22:17.593" Score="3" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7002/13926&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question asking if &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtnetworkauth-index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QT Network Authentication&lt;/a&gt; module is licensed under LGPL or not. The answer states that since this module is not specified under &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Add-ons available under Commercial Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3&lt;/a&gt;, it is LGPL. Checking the link, we can see that, now, this module is specified there, which means it's not LGPL. If we check the documentation of this module, we can see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To link against the Qt Network Authorization module, add this line to&#xA;  the project file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;QT += network networkauth&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Are &lt;code&gt;network&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;networkauth&lt;/code&gt; both not-LGPL now? Or is it just about &lt;code&gt;networkauth&lt;/code&gt;? In other words, can I use functions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qpassworddigestor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;QPasswordDigestor&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; namespace without making my sourcecode available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13926" LastEditorUserId="13926" LastEditDate="2019-08-24T16:22:49.537" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T06:20:23.513" Title="Is the Qt Network Authentication module still LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T23:33:55.980" Score="7" ViewCount="802" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some code I've posted on git hub (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/blackears/Photoshop-Perspective-Tool&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/blackears/Photoshop-Perspective-Tool&lt;/a&gt;) and recently I got an email from someone wanting to know how they might use it in their own project, and in particular they need to attribute license information.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what they've stated, it sounds like they've broken my original single file into several separate files.  They also mentioned that they'd like to release it under a new license, but they didn't say which one.  They also say they've added some new content in the form of additional UI boxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert with licenses.  How does the Apache V2 deal with modifying and releasing code in a new form?  What's the correct way for this new project to attribute my original repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T09:09:12.870" Title="How to attribute code from a project under Apache V2 in a new project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8716" CreationDate="2019-08-26T06:20:23.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The documentation of each Qt component mentions the licenses under which it is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Qt Network it mentions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qt Network is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company. In addition, it is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3, or the GNU General Public License, version 2. See Qt Licensing for further details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for Qt Network Authorization&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qt Network Authorization is available under commercial licenses from The Qt Company. In addition, it is available under the GNU General Public License, version 3. See Qt Licensing for further details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the Qt Network Authorization module does not mention the LGPL license, so it is not available under that license. If you want to use OAuth authentication in your Qt application without having to disclose your source code, then you must go for a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;code&gt;QPasswordDigestor&lt;/code&gt; only requires the use of the Qt Network module, which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; available under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T06:20:23.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8138" CreationDate="2019-08-27T06:42:11.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the compatibility in terms of license with an API? For example: GPL license from the client side and PHP license from the server side, is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about a web-API, then the provider and consumer of the API are generally considered to be independent works. This means that the license of the one does not affect in any way the license choices for the other one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can the Android application contain integrated payments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can, but if you distribute the application under an open-source license then you are also giving the people that have a copy of the sources the rights to re-distribute the application without the payments but with otherwise the same functionality.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You will have to decide if it makes economic sense to add the payment options to an open-source application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T06:42:11.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-27T10:52:23.923" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;In cases where my software is only ever rented with a dedicated PC, is it permissable to compile Qt statically, as I would still technically own the program and it`s not being sold? Seems to be a bit of a grey area. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15899" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T09:01:26.987" Title="Can I compile Qt applications statically for rented software" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8721" CreationDate="2019-08-27T12:00:59.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are still subject to (L)GPL compliance. You always retain ownership over your software, and also have to comply if you issue a gratis license to your software. So that doesn't help you determine what your obligations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the L/GPLv3 defines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, your device may count as a “User Product” in the sense of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renting your computers with the installed software is clearly a kind of conveying the software because the recipient could make copies of the software. They are &lt;em&gt;not allowed&lt;/em&gt; to actually make these copies because it's your proprietary software, but you still need to respect the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit of the LGPL license is that end users can modify the LGPL-covered parts. This is typically done by dynamically linking the LGPL components and providing the necessary source code so that end users are able to modify the component. The LGPL does allow other approaches than dynamic linking (such as including the source code for the complete software, even if it's not under a free license). However, all other approaches will likely be more complicated than the standard dynamic linking technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T12:00:59.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8616" CreationDate="2019-08-27T12:02:37.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cleanest way to do this is to keep a changelog, summarizing changes with authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T12:02:37.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8721" CreationDate="2019-08-27T12:05:30.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right to lend or rent a work out is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least in the EU&lt;/a&gt;, covered by copyright law. This means that if you rent out a work that is covered by copyrights without permission from the copyright holders, then you are liable for a copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ties back to the following definitions in the GPL license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the renters of your PC receive a copy of the Qt software, the conditions that the (L)GPL license places on conveying a copy must be met, which means they must be told about their rights under the license and given the possibility to exercise those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that they receive their copy on a medium that does not become their property is also catered for in the GPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By renting out the PC, you are giving the renters a temporary right to have the PC in their possession and to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T12:05:30.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8730" CreationDate="2019-08-27T19:13:54.493" Score="3" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project that uses Modernizr, which uses the MIT license. I have a &lt;code&gt;modernizr-custom.js&lt;/code&gt; file containing code downloaded from their website and this at the top:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*! modernizr 3.6.0 (Custom Build) | MIT *&#xA; * https://modernizr.com/download/?-webp-setclasses !*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;code&gt;bundle.js&lt;/code&gt; file with all my JavaScript files combined into one and minified, but my minifier also removes comments if I don't remove the &lt;code&gt;--compress&lt;/code&gt; option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it legal to just remove the credit? If not, I can just remove that option but I was wondering if it could be removed or shortened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15903" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T10:13:40.633" Title="Can I remove the Modernizr credit from the top of my .js file?" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8727" CreationDate="2019-08-27T20:31:36.897" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I ship a closed-source .exe that dynamically links to an LGPLv3 library  (such as Qt), must I also ship the .obj files from which I built the .exe?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/CgwsHKiii_U?t=2070&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;podcast&lt;/a&gt; at 34:30-36:00 claims so, and also explains that shipping the .obj files lets the end user run a decompiler to reconstruct my source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15904" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T17:26:09.103" Title="exe using LGPLv3 lib: must I also ship the exe's object files?" Tags="|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8726" CreationDate="2019-08-28T06:39:54.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require you to ship .obj/.o files for your closed-source code. The LGPL requires that an end-user is able to use the closed-source part of the complete program with a different build of the LGPL code and you are required to provide the files necessary to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a &lt;em&gt;statically&lt;/em&gt; linked executable, this indeed means that you must ship the .obj/.o files, as you would need to re-link the executable to get it to use the new LGPL code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For a &lt;em&gt;dynamically&lt;/em&gt; linked executable, especially when the LGPL code is dynamically linked, the end-user just has to make sure that the LGPL library is in a place where the OS will pick it up and the loader that is part of the OS will do the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The podcast is also wrong about the risk of people being able to reconstruct your source code from an .obj/.o file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Decompilers indeed exist, but they can reconstruct some form of source code even from the final executable, but you probably would not recognize it as your source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;First of all, optimizations can do really funny things to the code, like unrolling loops, inlining functions, reordering statements or creating new functions out of sub-expressions that occur multiple times.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Secondly, during compilation names of types, functions and variables are irrevocably lost, so the decompiler has to make something up that will invariably be much less descriptive that what you used. Object files make decompilation to readable source code slightly easier, because publicly accessible names will still exist in those files to facilitate the linker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best chance of reconstructing the source code exists when debug information is present, but why would anyone ship files with debug information regarding proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-08-28T17:26:09.103" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T17:26:09.103" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4346" CreationDate="2019-08-28T15:50:51.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any &quot;non-standard&quot; license runs the risk of walling your work off from the wider world. Take a look at David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:50:51.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8181" CreationDate="2019-08-28T15:55:25.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You certainly can fork the project and perhaps get developers move over to your fork. I'm sure many of them feel like you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; happened before: Libre Office from Open Office, Maria DB from MySQL, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T15:55:25.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8725" CreationDate="2019-08-28T18:13:22.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can change the files in any way you wish. There is only one condition for redistributing code licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the MIT license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there is no requirement that you include the notices in a particular file or at some particular location in a file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some example places to include the required notices are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a source code distribution, in a file called LICENSE, LICENSE.MIT, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For an interactive program, in a documentation screen such as &quot;About this application.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a device, in printed material accompanying the product.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the particular text you have indicated, this is not a copyright notice in my opinion so it does not need to be preserved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;/*! modernizr 3.6.0 (Custom Build) | MIT *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This string is informational only. It does not contain Copyright YYYY Author, and does not count as a copyright notice. Therefore it is not subject to any requirement of the MIT license. However, even if it &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; a copyright notice, I would argue that you could still remove it, provided that you comply with the MIT license by including the required notices somewhere else in your distribution, for example in a file such as LICENSE.MIT, or included in an a documentation screen such as &quot;About this application&quot;, or included in a printed notice notice accompanying a product you are distributing, or in some other way that is compliant with the license requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For use in web applications specifically, please refer to this QA: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6342/where-to-put-license-for-mit-licensed-code-on-website&quot;&gt;Where to put license for MIT licensed code on website &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-08-29T10:13:40.633" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T10:13:40.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8717" CreationDate="2019-08-29T07:19:41.613" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the Apache V2 deal with modifying and releasing code in a new form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is fine with it.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache licence&lt;/a&gt; says in s4 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the&#xA;        Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;        modifications&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few conditions to this grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the correct way for this new project to attribute my original repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of those conditions appear in ss 4c and 4d, which say that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works&#xA;            that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and&#xA;            attribution notices from the Source form of the Work&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(d) If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its&#xA;            distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;            include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained&#xA;            within such NOTICE file&lt;/em&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best way for them to attribute you is to preserve your copyright notices, and for you to add a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file to your source, pointing to your repository, which they will therefore reproduce in any sources they redistribute, possibly adding their own modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-08-29T09:09:12.870" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T09:09:12.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8721" CreationDate="2019-08-29T08:50:17.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you make it clear that you are renting only the hardware and the lessee is only allowed to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; that device as supplied (i.e. to run, but not to make copies of, any software contained), then the associated copyright licenses and the associated licensing requirements of the software residing on that device are not relevant to you and are not relevant to the lessee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? This is because if you let someone use a physical medium in which software is contained (such as a PC, or some hardware device which contains ROMs with software written on them), copyright law only protects the action of making &lt;em&gt;copies&lt;/em&gt; of (or modifying) the software. If the end user only runs the software, or uses it in some normal way, which does not otherwise require a copyright license, then the copyright holder has no right to dictate how a user may &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. run, execute) a piece of software. I.e. copyright law protects only making &lt;em&gt;copies&lt;/em&gt; of a work or &lt;em&gt;modifying&lt;/em&gt; a work. The GPL goes so far as to point this out explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run&#xA;  a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work&#xA;  occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission&#xA;  to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However,&#xA;  nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or&#xA;  modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do&#xA;  not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a&#xA;  covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you are a renter of a PC which includes some (L)GPL software. And suppose you do not agree to the terms of the (L)GPL license. According to section 9 of the (L)GPL license itself, you are under no obligation to accept the license requirements in order to use the software in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL goes so far as to make the above explicit, but this notice is not actually specific to the GPL. Even if the software were under some other license (e.g. a proprietary license), if no copy is being made (i.e. no propagation is occcuring, and no modification is occuring), then no license is actually required to simply &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; hardware that happens to contain software which is under copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-08-29T09:01:26.987" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T09:01:26.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8702" CreationDate="2019-08-29T12:16:55.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would certainly &quot;work&quot;, you can place any license you want (even several) on your work. But the end result is that of the most liberal of all of them (why should I select, e.g. GPLv3 when you offer me public domain?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Select your license(s) with care. Look at David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose an open source license&lt;/a&gt;, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's discussion of licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T12:16:55.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8736" CreationDate="2019-08-30T07:52:41.773" Score="7" ViewCount="786" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have very basic question.&#xA;I'm building website service where I want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WooCommerce Subscription&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-memberships/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Membership&lt;/a&gt; plugins. These plugins are paid on the official websites, but there is written &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A subscription entitles you to 1 year of updates and support from the date of purchase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I'm correct, the WooCommerce and it's products are GNU GPL licensed. So my question is - &lt;strong&gt;If I download that plugins from another website for free, can I use it for my small business for free legally&lt;/strong&gt; (I will not distribute the copy, I will just use it as it is)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to pay for this products when my business will start to be profitable, but right now the almost 400 euros for that plugins is too much. I've already found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4066/are-all-gpl-licensed-projects-free-to-use-for-commercial-use&quot;&gt;threads&lt;/a&gt;, but there is not the clear answer for my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15917" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T15:30:18.677" Title="GPL Licensed Woocommerce paid plugins" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8735" CreationDate="2019-08-30T08:42:14.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I download that plugins from another website for free, can I use it for my small business for free legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://woocommerce.com/terms-conditions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms and conditions&lt;/a&gt; page of WooCommerce states that the products themselves are licensed under the GPLv2 (or later) license. This license gives anyone who obtained a (legal) copy of the software the right to legally re-distribute the software in either the original or in a modified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end result is that you are allowed to use the code, even if you received it from someone else than the official distributor/maintainer. You could even distribute copies (or modifications) yourself. However, remember that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;using code from less reputable sources also carries a risk in that they may have modified the code to nefarious ends and didn't tell you&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you won't have access to upgrades and support from the WooCommerce team&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T15:30:18.677" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T15:30:18.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8740" CreationDate="2019-08-31T14:43:02.047" Score="4" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to distribute in a rather open way an Excel spreadsheet I am the creator of, but would like to provide a framework regarding the way this piece of work could be used and re-distributed. In this context, Creative Commons license seems quite adapted to my needs - especially with respect to the flexibilty/possiblity to grant or not modification rights, commercial use rights, or to enforce or not redistribution under the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it sounds like the Creative Commons licenses put a bit of emphasis on the artistic traits on the protected material (&quot;musical work, performance, or sound recording&quot;, &quot;moving image&quot;) and are explicitly not recommended for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, I am wondering whether these licenses are adapted to the distribution of an Excel spreadsheet that could also admittedly be considered as a software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of completeness, this Excel spreadsheet does not contain any fancy-AI, or crazy-NN algorithm and can be more seen as a tool for nicely managing, aggregating data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15922" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T07:31:40.627" Title="Are Creative Commons licenses suitable for distributing an Excel spreasheet?" Tags="|creative-commons|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-01T12:49:20.950" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project right now that is essentially a set of libraries for game development. The idea is that these modules (in the form of DLLs, jars or other extensions) are open source and can be exchanged with custom ones the user builds. Developers can mix and match which modules they need and build connections to them in a closed-source manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It used to be BSD-3 because originally it was just code that could potentially be copied, but I feel like shifting the design into a bunch of modules makes a GPL-like license more attractive (and just easier for people to use). Since they are modules, only the custom module would be restricted under the license, not the entire codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make sure that the modules are still attractive to developers though - so I want to make it so that the modules cannot be hardcoded into these engines themselves, but can still be freely. The purpose of these being modules is to be switched out and it defeats the purpose of this ability. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this count as &quot;free use&quot; of the module? In my head it seems right but I don't want to jump the gun and intimidate devs down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there good examples of licenses that I can reference as well that have a similar problem? Sorry if this sounds dumb I'm just intimidated by the length of everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15925" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T04:34:18.237" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T04:34:18.237" Title="Help with how to approach a GPL license in a set of libraries" Tags="|gpl|gaming|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2019-09-01T17:20:15.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to make it so that the modules cannot be hard coded into these engines themselves... The purpose of these being modules is to be switched out and it defeats the purpose of this ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, this is exactly what the Lesser GPL (LGPL) v3 requires in 4(d): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;0) Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when someone distributes a program that uses your LGPL'd work, they must make it technically possible for recipients to modify and relink your LGPL'd library, either by supplying at minimum the object files (or more generously, the complete source) needed to perform a new static link or else by using dynamic linking. This ensures that your module can be always be replaced, without placing many requirements on the application that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that is doesn't strictly stop someone from &quot;hard-coding&quot; your work into a larger engine in a way that it can't be easily replaced, but if someone did do that, the whole engine and it's source code would have to be available under the LGPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sentence, the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of the library in a larger application only applies source-sharing requirements to the library itself, while any modification internal to the library must be shared upon distribution. So, to reiterate the above points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone combines the library and engine in a way that there is clear application/library separation between the two components, the library must be replaceable but the source of the application need not be shared.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If someone combines the library with an engine in a way that there is direct intermingling of code, then that's allowed, but it's a derivative of the library that must be licensed (with disclosed source) under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second point may or may not be acceptable to you, depending on whether you find copyleft source-sharing to be an acceptable gain to compensate for the close combination of the library with an engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T17:20:15.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8737" CreationDate="2019-09-02T07:31:40.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, it sounds like the Creative Commons licenses put a bit of emphasis on the artistic traits on the protected material (&quot;musical work, performance, or sound recording&quot;, &quot;moving image&quot;) and are explicitly not recommended for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons licenses were created as an alternative to the open-source software licenses for non-software works, because the software licenses don't really work well for more artistic works while their creators might still want to grant freedoms to the recipients of the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main issue here is the notion of &quot;source code&quot; that is used in many open-source software licenses, but that doesn't really make sense for non-software works. This immediately also gives us one very important reason why the CC licenses are not recommended for software works: By removing the concept of source code from the license, people can subvert the intention of the license. For example, if I were to create an application under the CC BY-SA license (with the idea that it would work similar to the GPL license), someone can legally make changes to my source code and distribute just the changed executable without making the changed source code public. They have to give rights to make further changes to the executable, but due to the lack of the notion of source code, the license regards the executable and source code as equivalent alternatives of which you only need to distribute one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason why the Creative Commons licenses are not recommended for software works is license proliferation. In software, it is very common that two or more works get combined into a larger derived work (think of creating an application that uses multiple libraries), and the more licenses that are in common use, the harder it becomes to determine which combinations are allowed and which are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this context, I am wondering whether these licenses are adapted to the distribution of an Excel spreadsheet that could also admittedly be considered as a software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC licenses are not specifically adapted to be applied to a spreadsheet, but I don't think they need be. Spreadsheets are usually fairly self-contained, so the issue of license proliferation is less of an issue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To my knowledge, the risk of distributing spreadsheets in a format that is different from the preferred format for making changes (aka source code) is also negligible. This risk would be largest if the underlying algorithms would be translated into a different programming language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these considerations, I don't see a problem with using a CC license for spreadsheets, but I would recommend allowing a license change to a (specified) software license if the work is modified to be used outside the context of a spreadsheet application. The CC BY-SA 4.0 license already contains this possibility to change the license to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T07:31:40.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8757" CreationDate="2019-09-02T10:58:00.370" Score="4" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a commercial project for our customer, I would like to install a driver on all target machines. The driver is on sourceforge (&lt;a href=&quot;http://com0com.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://com0com.sourceforge.net/&lt;/a&gt;). The website states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Null-modem emulator is an open source kernel-mode virtual serial port driver for Windows, available freely under GPL license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without further details on which GPL version or what the implications may be. I do not intend to use the source code. Using the provided installer would suit me well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now if there are any legal implications if I want to install the driver with our closed source software (e.g. from a single installation script) in a commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the file license.txt included in the com0com archive, it uses the GPL version 2. (thanks @Brandin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will be installing all software on the target computer and ship the entire machine to the customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No specific dependency will be made to the driver. Our closed source software will just open an existing COM port via standard Windows API functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15932" LastEditorUserId="15932" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T07:55:46.960" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T13:53:20.460" Title="Use of GPL licensed driver in commercial project" Tags="|gpl|commercial|closed-source|binaries|combined-work|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8742" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2019-09-02T18:55:39.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&#xA;    On Stack Exchange, we believe the core moderators should come &lt;i&gt;from&lt;/i&gt; the community, and be elected by the community itself through popular vote. We hold regular elections to determine who these community moderators will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;    Community moderators are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/05/18/a-theory-of-moderation/&quot;&gt;accorded the highest level of privilege on our community&lt;/a&gt;, and should themselves be exemplars of positive behavior and leaders within the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;    Our general criteria for moderators are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;patient and fair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;leads by example&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;shows respect for their fellow community members in their actions and words&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;open to some light but firm moderation to keep the community on track and resolve (hopefully) uncommon disputes and exceptions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;    Every election has three phases:&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Nomination&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Primary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;Election&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&#xA;    Please participate in the moderator elections by voting - this is a small site, so your vote really does matter - and perhaps even by nominating yourself to be a community moderator!&#xA;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-28T07:22:49.757" LastActivityDate="2023-10-28T07:22:49.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8744" CreationDate="2019-09-02T21:28:46.660" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a piece of software that could potentially be modified to provide revenue, but it is not going to be clear where the revenue goes - I want to add a license condition that ensures all users of any copy (including and modifications or derivatives) of the software know exactly where potential revenue goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: It is a website that allows to browse existing user content. I don't own the rights to that content. Anyone could host the website (showing the exact same user content as other hosts) and decide to enable/integrate advertisements. I want to ensure that users using any of these hosts at all times know WHERE the revenue from these potential ads go - to the content creator or to the website host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implementation of this restriction would be a link to a clear declaration visible on all pages that can display ads and - in case there are ads of both types, for users and for the host - additionally a small text displayed in every ad, e.g. &quot;Revenue goes to user&quot; or &quot;Revenue goes to host&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other terms of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep header in each file linking to original distribution intact&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source is inherently open since we're talking about a website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any derivative work has to include the same condition so that and further derivative is still bound to it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say MIT would work - if it wasn't for the extra condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I go about adding such a condition to an existing license without too much trouble?&#xA;I don't expect anyone to actually pick this project up and host it, but I want to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15935" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T09:41:03.977" Title="Restrict commercial use to protect users" Tags="|license-recommendation|commercial|license|restrictions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8743" CreationDate="2019-09-03T07:47:47.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7365/458&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; here from someone who is opposed to the current idea of copyright and wanted a license (s)he could combine with ordinary copyright to simulate the effects of his/her view of how copyright should work.  It wasn't really possible to satisfy him/her, because of an underlying problem: &lt;strong&gt;when you take a system designed to achieve certain ends through certain mechanisms, and try to make it achieve similar ends through different mechanisms, it tends not to work well&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licences are explicitly designed to allow the monetisation of other people's software.  Copyleft licences avoid the sort of ends you have foreseen, where someone runs a copy of your software to generate revenue which they keep, but the &lt;strong&gt;mechanism&lt;/strong&gt; by which it avoids these ends is by preserving the freedom of end-users to make yet another copy which doesn't generate revenue for the offending party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many single-use free-with-a-twist licences end up classified as crayon licences; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;these are a problem&lt;/a&gt; and may end up making your code unusable.  My advice is to accept the current system's way of achieving the ends you desire: release your code under AGPL and empower users to escape annoying revenue traps.  Alternatively, don't release it at all, thus denying anyone else the right copy it - as Brandin pointed out above, publication doesn't imply licensing.  If neither of those appeals to you, then as Bart has advised, get your new licence professionally written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T09:41:03.977" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T09:41:03.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8746" CreationDate="2019-09-03T10:12:34.490" Score="2" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do I have to GPL &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software in a .deb package just because it contains &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; GPL(v2 in this case) code, &lt;em&gt;even if these things have nothing to do with each other except being distributed in &#xA;the same installer at the same time&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In more detail: I want to distribute a .deb installer for a product we're smushing together. It is only intended to be installed on this product. It contains a closed-source application and also a Plymouth theme for the OS. Needless to say the two do not interact or depend on each other in any way, since, once is a piece of desktop software, and the other is just a theme for making the OS look pretty on boot/shutdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing themes seem to be GPLv2, so if I were to modify one to create a new theme that way, I understand I'd need to provide the source and license/copyright to go along with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But am I right in thinking, since the theme has nothing to do with the closed-source software other than being in the same .deb installer, it shouldn't affect the licensing of the closed-source software in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15938" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T10:29:45.023" Title="Distributing GPLv2 code and ENTIRELY SEPARATE closed-source software (no interaction between them)" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-2|distribution|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8745" CreationDate="2019-09-03T10:29:45.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your thinking is correct. This is called &quot;mere aggregation&quot; and the GPL FAQ has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an entry about it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mere aggregation of two programs means putting them side by side on the same CD-ROM or hard disk. We use this term in the case where they are separate programs, not parts of a single program. In this case, if one of the programs is covered by the GPL, it has no effect on the other program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Combining two modules means connecting them together so that they form a single larger program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination must also be released under the GPL—if you can't, or won't, do that, you may not combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T10:29:45.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8748" CreationDate="2019-09-03T14:40:32.710" Score="1" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project which I would like to open source under the MIT license. However, it uses assets (images) which are available only for personal use, not for commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the MIT license safe? Can I somehow state, that the assets are unavailable for commercial purposes? Is there a license that handles these issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15942" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T15:06:49.897" Title="Appropriate license for project using assets not available for commercial use" Tags="|mit|commercial|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8747" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:06:49.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A permissive license like MIT/X11 is a perfectly suitable choice. Consider that permissively-licensed code may be freely combined with proprietary components. The situation is no different here. (If you wanted to use a copyleft license like the GNU GPL, you might need to grant an exception to allow distribution of your GPL'd code with the nonfree assets, but a permissive license like MIT/X11 already grants such permission by default.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you need to take care is in clearly indicating &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; files are licensed which way, and communicating to recipients that the project as-is cannot be redistributed for commercial purposes due to the proprietary license on the art assets. Communicating this information is not within the purview of a license document itself, which indicates what use is allowed, but belongs in a separate document that says which license terms correspond to which files. Include this information in your &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSING&lt;/code&gt; file, or other prominent document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T15:06:49.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T21:16:34.887" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to document a scientific experiments I've presenced on a blog post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do that, I want to give clear descriptions of each commercial equipment used, and using photos would be a great addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just take a photo of the equipment myself and use it on my blogpost with a Creative Commons license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a concrete example, the equipment I have in mind this time is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Nanpore Technologies MinION&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190825022606/https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The design of that equipment closed source and has related patents, but I just want a picture showing how the user will see while using it, nothing that would allow reverse engineering undocumented aspects of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you would expect, the object design itself does not have a particularly artistic design and is purely utilitarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equipment does have a logo or sticker with the name of the company, but I believe that this falls under trademark and is likely not &quot;creative enough&quot; be copyrighted, but how do I check that? Alternatively, I could edit the photo to blur the logo is that's an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this supposing of course that I don't have any explicit NDA or contractual restriction with the seller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen plenty of car pictures marked as creative commons, so my intuition is that this should be fine, while what is mostly not fine are copyrighted materials such as films and pictures taken by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1072" LastEditorUserId="1072" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T09:41:04.497" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T09:41:04.497" Title="Can I license photos of physical products / equipment I took as Creative Commons?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4371" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:09:18.317" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a generic (late) answer: Google (and lots of companies) expect contracts signed by &lt;strong&gt;the person legally authorised to represent the company&lt;/strong&gt;. If you are the only one then your best title is &quot;&lt;em&gt;owner&lt;/em&gt; of the company&quot; or whatever your legal environment provides (here around I am the &quot;CEO&quot; even if it's a one-man show).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Europe at least Google usually asked for company registry papers which specifically contained the persons who were authorised to represent the company, then the signature sheet which connected these persons to signatures, then they have checked the signatures and names on the contract. It really went smoothly, provided you have all the required papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you live in a country with less than full paper trail it might be a challenge to prove you're authorised. &quot;I am the owner and the sole executive&quot; usually works well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:09:18.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7285" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:15:04.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ryan, your comment actually was the answer: &#xA;&lt;em&gt;They won't be making derivatives of it, but using it in the creation of their own works.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is about the use, reproduction and distribution of the &lt;em&gt;schema&lt;/em&gt; and not something it has touched. If the result neither contains the schema nor contains parts of it then the licensing will not apply to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an extreme example: a copyrighted pen can be used to write a free novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:15:04.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7109" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:18:48.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Brandin said: &lt;strong&gt;if you copy the code verbatim&lt;/strong&gt;, or copy and modify it then you have to follow the license. In this case you are advised to check the &lt;em&gt;original sources&lt;/em&gt; since they may be licensed differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use Wikipedia to &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; the method, then &lt;strong&gt;create your own code based on that knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; then it is not restricted by the license of Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:18:48.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:44:00.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question.&#xA;I have tried to browse through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.midi.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.midi.org/&lt;/a&gt; (Trademark policy, IP policy and ToS) and I formed my &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; based on those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be two problems for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trademark. Since &quot;MIDI&quot; is trademarked, you can only use it according to its usage policy. While it is allowed to use even commercially (the website is rather liberal about its use), it is only valid for products working completely according to the official specifications. If you strictly follow the specification then the usage is valid; if you deviate from the official spec it could be make valid by specifically saying that your work is based on the official, but since it deviates it is not &quot;MIDI compatible&quot; and cannot be called &quot;MIDI&quot;, but it does not prevent you from mentioning that.&#xA;(It may be tricky to &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; your repo, to avoid confusion between &quot;midi&quot; and &quot;midi-like&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyright. While databases may be copyrightable as a whole this whole spec is a creative work, so it'd be copyrighted by itself (you canot come up with the same numbers by yourself). However all the website suggests that these are specifications for the general public (they are even referenced or partially contained by other, open and public standards) and you are allowed to use it provided it's aligned with the Midi Association's plans and purposes (which seems to be to distribute the real and reliable standards).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I would say that if you strictly follow the GM spec then it is valid for both the ™ and the ©, and if you deviate then you shall not call it &quot;MIDI&quot; but you can mention that it's based on that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably useful to repeat these sentiments in your shared repo as well if you apply them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you're really worried you could ask them directly, I would if my project required to make it sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9044" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T08:44:00.907" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-04T17:20:51.707" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/open-public-license-v1.0-(opl-1.0)#summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Public License (OPL)&lt;/a&gt; allows library being bundled together or be a part of other code covered by other license (e.g. standard copyright - closed source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found these relevant parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.7. &quot;Larger Work&quot; means a work, which combines Covered Code or&#xA;  portions thereof with code not governed by the terms of this&#xA;  License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.7. Larger Works.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You may create a Larger Work by combining Covered Code with other&#xA;  code not governed by the terms of this License and distribute the&#xA;  Larger Work as a single product. In such a case, You must make sure&#xA;  the requirements of this License are fulfilled for the Covered&#xA;  Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that would mean that a binary using code under OPL may be under any license and only the portion of the code under OPL must be made accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/EasyasABC.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Class  C  -  Unbounded  Copyleft  Licenses.This  class  of  FOSS  licenses  can  be  the  most problematic  to  use  commercially  because  &lt;strong&gt;these  licenses  require  that all combined  files—even those not  containing  FOSS code at  all—must  be  licensed under the  same  license as the  FOSS project&lt;/strong&gt;. This class of “unbounded” copyleft  licenses presumes that the derivative works will become part of a compiled program. Based on this assumption, the licenses require that any new  code  (modified  or  not)  from  the  FOSS  project  is  required  to  use  the  same  license. Philosophically,  supporters  of  this  class  of  strong,  unbounded  copyleft  licenses  included  this viral requirement  to  promote the availability of free software and to  allow  licensed projects to become sources of additional, same-licensed FOSS code. Examples of this include GNU GPL(Version 2 and 3), Common Public License, and &lt;strong&gt;Open Public License&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15972" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T06:15:24.357" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T16:27:14.063" Title="Is Open Public License suitable for libraries?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8741" CreationDate="2019-09-05T09:46:24.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some legal implications for using a GPLv2 licensed driver, but they are not very onerous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main requirement is that you inform your customers about the fact that GPLv2 licensed software is being used, tell them which software it is, tell them where to obtain the sources for the exact version you are distributing (you may have to host them yourself to ensure they are available long enough) and give them a copy of the GPL license text.&#xA;As the driver is under the GPLv2 license, you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to make it possible that your customers are able to replace the driver on the hardware you are supplying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your proprietary software does not depend on this particular diver (it just needs &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; driver that provides serial communications) and you are only interacting with it through the normal OS APIs, your software is considered to be an independent work as far as copyright is concerned. This means that the copyright license of the driver does not affect in any way what copyright license you can use for your proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T13:53:20.460" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T13:53:20.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8762" CreationDate="2019-09-05T16:14:41.647" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have employed a developer for a project who has developed a CMS platform and licensed it under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that developer is going to use that MIT licensed CMS in my project. No problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contract I have, though, states that copyright for any and all work produced for this project by the developer is assigned to me as the owner as a &quot;work for hire&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make sure that the CMS that he wrote, owns the copyright of, and is licensed under MIT is NOT going to be signed over to me by the section in the contract that states all ownership of code is assigned to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it best to include a new section in the contract specifically to address that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15982" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T06:18:23.557" Title="Copyright of proprietary code created by author of MIT licensed code" Tags="|copyright|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8761" CreationDate="2019-09-05T19:24:04.877" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I develop an algorithm, and I get a patent for that algorithm. Could I create a patent license that requires anyone implementing the algorithm to license their code under the GNU GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if I implement the algorithm myself, then I could license that code under the GPL, but someone else could potentially re-implement the entire algorithm from scratch (for example, in a different programming language, but using the same core steps), and their implementation wouldn't necessarily have to be GPL-licensed. My goal would be to create something stronger, requiring &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; implementation to be free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know people can get around patents sometimes by changing &quot;just enough&quot; that it's no longer covered by the patent (like in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimplex_noise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSimplex noise&lt;/a&gt;) but my understanding is that patents tend to be stronger than copyright when it comes to software and algorithms. Is my understanding correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more importantly, is my goal even possible? I understand that the GPL has several provisions designed to weaken patents (and stop patent trolls); would these provisions make my goal impossible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15984" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T07:37:28.407" Title="Can a patent license require all algorithm implementations to be GPL-licensed?" Tags="|gpl-3|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T23:07:36.620" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there published templates or guidelines for contract terms for engagements where the deliverable is new open source software or an enhancement to existing open source software? I have some of my own that I've used on various projects, but I'd like to be able to compare, and have references to show to clients who may not be used to such engagements and entering into them for the first time to establish what the norms are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I generally work from a master agreement that specifies upstream project policy (this is all on existing software) will be followed regarding assignment or non-assignment of copyright and any CLAs needed, giving unlimited license to the client to exploit and sublicense independent new code produced, and setting mutual non-interference expectation between parties (including via patents). Are there other important things I should be including? Examples I could look at (or contribute to) for improving or clarifying the wording of such terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8689/463&quot;&gt;Standard contract for OSS work&lt;/a&gt; but it does not seem like a comparable situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T23:07:36.620" Title="Contract templates for open source work" Tags="|law|contracts|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-10-03T16:50:44.007" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8759" CreationDate="2019-09-06T06:33:46.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if I implement the algorithm myself, then I could license that code under the GPL, but someone else could potentially re-implement the entire algorithm from scratch (for example, in a different programming language, but using the same core steps), and their implementation wouldn't necessarily have to be GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, and IANAL/IANYL, no.  If you, patent in hand, release an implementation under GPLv3 and someone releases a competing implementation, then by &lt;em&gt;P or not P&lt;/em&gt; one of two things must be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Either the other implementation &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a deriative work of your implementation, in which case the implementer has a licence to use your patent (by GPLv3 s11) but they must also release it under GPLv3 (by ss 4, 5b);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or it &lt;strong&gt;isn't&lt;/strong&gt; a derivative of your implementation, in which case the implementer has no licence to your patent, and may be stopped in the usual way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know people can get around patents sometimes by changing &quot;just enough&quot; that it's no longer covered by the patent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sailing close to the wind around patents isn't really, to my mind, within the scope of this site.  But yes, if some third party issues code that doesn't infringe your patent (for whatever legally-valid reason), and isn't a deriative of your code, then there's not much you can do about it, whether the licence on it pleases you or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T07:37:28.407" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T07:37:28.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8758" CreationDate="2019-09-07T06:18:23.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All credit to you for &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; wanting to hoover up work done by your developer simply because you don't feel you're entitled to it.  However, speaking as a contractor, I wouldn't be happy to start changing the contract mid-stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can unilaterally disclaim any rights interest in the CMS and work done thereof.  There is a standard form of words that appears in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; which I find suitable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright&#xA;  interest in the program `Gnomovision'&#xA;  (which makes passes at compilers) written &#xA;  by James Hacker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ty Coon, President of Vice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, should anyone ever attempt to make the case that the contract as written gives you the copyright of the work done on the CMS while the author was in your employ, both you and (s)he can show your later, and therefore over-riding, disclaimer of any such interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T06:18:23.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8765" CreationDate="2019-09-07T16:58:14.773" Score="1" ViewCount="1730" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am testing the Tyk API Management solution and it asks me to provide a license key: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tyk.io/product/tyk-on-premises-free-edition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tyk.io/product/tyk-on-premises-free-edition/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why this product is not fully available for free? What allows open source developers to ask their users to pay? What prevents me from removing the license key restriction and build the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15999" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T07:12:06.740" Title="Why am I being asked for a license key to use an open source product?" Tags="|license|paid-software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-07T18:51:23.180" Score="1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a C++ project which is meant to be used as a plugin in a third party software. The project includes three libraries: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: The development kit of the third party software mentioned above&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: A GPL'd library (version 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C: An MPL'd library (verison 2.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of A allows me to distribute binaries but not the library source itself. Is it allowed to share all codes, including the part written by me but excluding the library A, as well as the binaries under GPLv3? According to my research, B &amp;amp; C do not conflict with each other since MPL2.0 can be embedded in GPLv3 but recipients would not be able to compile the project and obtain the binaries themselves because of the missing library A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for helping me out here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16000" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T08:29:35.130" Title="Conflicting Licenses: Can binary be released even though one library is missing?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8763" CreationDate="2019-09-08T07:12:06.740" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The product seems to comprise two elements: the API Gateway, and the Dashboard/Portal, which is a web-based management interface for your API Gateways.  According to their &lt;a href=&quot;https://tyk.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;front page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Tyk Open Source API Gateway has no restrictions and is Open Source in the truest sense of the world.&#xA;  Tyk Dashboard and portal is free for developers, nothing is missing, you have the full-fat product ready for non-commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; site is the API Gateway, and it is available under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPLv2&lt;/a&gt;; the software they make that requires licence keys is the Dashboard/Portal.  This looks to me much like the business model known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Core&lt;/a&gt;, inasmuch as the core of the product, the gateway, is genuinely free software, but the shiny bits around the outside, the bits that help you manage hundreds of these things in deployment, are non-free (though I note that they are zero-cost in limited form to developers, presumably to help them bring it into an organisation and convince management that it's worth paying for the non-free stuff).  You then ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What prevents me from removing the license key restriction and build the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is no such restriction in the free part; the part that has licence key restrictions is the non-free part, and you are prevented from modifying and copying that by copyright law, just as you would be with any other proprietary piece of key-activated software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why this product is not fully available for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry?  If someone comes up to you and offers you a free bicycle, is your first response to complain that she's not giving you her car as well?  In this case, the creators have decided to make part of their software available along with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/basics/4freedoms.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.  If you can make use of that in your endeavours, good luck to you, and go to it.  If you decide that it's too much work to make it do what you want, they give you the option to pay for another product they make that may make your life easier, or you can stop using that piece of free software, and find another or write your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What allows open source developers to ask their users to pay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside that Tyk aren't doing that, there is no bar to this in any free software licence; indeed, licences that forbid monetisation are regarded as non-free.  I recommend reading Stallman's writing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;selling free software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T07:12:06.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-08T12:35:24.540" Score="3" ViewCount="966" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a project called NetFPGA that has HDL code for various Ethernet uses in an FPGA.  The project is listed as LGPL.  From a software perspective, my understanding is that if you dynamically link a LGPL library you can use it in a commercial application.  How would this work in the case of an FPGA design?  The concept of dynamic linking does not really exist in the hardware design.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the LGPL HDL in a larger design would I have to release the source of the whole project?&#xA;If I edit the LGPL HDL and use it in a larger design would I have to release the source of the LGPL HDL and/or the whole project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NetFPGA/NetFPGA-public/wiki/Licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/NetFPGA/NetFPGA-public/wiki/Licensing&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3035" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T04:36:14.123" Title="LGPL HDL in larger FPGA design" Tags="|lgpl|hardware|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8767" CreationDate="2019-09-08T14:21:12.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The aim of the LGPL license is that people can replace the LGPL code in a larger project, without requiring that the complete source code of the larger project is disclosed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with how HDL works for FPGA design, but the LGPL requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you release the modified LGPL HDL code under the LGPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you release the rest of the full project in a format that makes it possible to re-create your FPGA design with another version of the LGPL code. This format does not need to be human-readable or source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you give recipients of the FPGA design the right to replace the LGPL portion of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T14:21:12.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8774" CreationDate="2019-09-08T16:16:57.890" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use an alternative license on GitHub that isn't listed? Specifically I want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://licensezero.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License Zero&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16002" LastEditorUserId="7884" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T22:30:55.213" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T22:30:55.213" Title="Can I use an alternative license on GitHub that is not listed there?" Tags="|github|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8767" CreationDate="2019-09-09T00:10:34.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would [the LGPL] work in the case of an FPGA design?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't. At least, not very well. You've correctly identified the problem with this license construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only situation I can think of where the LGPL might be usefully applied to an FPGA design would be in a design that uses dynamic reconfiguration. In particular, this might be relevant to the use of a freely-licensed FPGA design in an environment which mandates the use of a non-free wrapper, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon EC2 FPGA instances&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user15142" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T00:10:34.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7713" CreationDate="2019-09-09T01:38:24.423" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently worked with the team at GitHub to provide more information about 0BSD. More info about Landly's 0BSD &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;now appears&lt;/a&gt; on choosealicense.com and, subsequently, will appear on GitHub license drop-downs (takes time). Beyond that you can also find more info about 0BSD &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause_license_(%22Zero_Clause_BSD%22)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Wiki&lt;/a&gt; which I added after you asked this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other places to seek information would be a developer legal site such as Kyle E. Mitchell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/dev/lawyer&lt;/a&gt; and TLDRLegal is a source of &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-0-clause-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;information on 0BSD&lt;/a&gt; for non-legal types. 0BSD was also added over the last few months as a recognized license to the NPM CLI so the CLI no longer warns on 0BSD. More discussion about that may be found on the NPM discussion forums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for reasons &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to use a license the primary reasons would be that permissive and unconditional licenses such as BSD/ISC/Expat have the propensity to violate user freedoms as defined by Richard Stallman in that they may be made closed behind closed doors and inhibit contributions back to the community under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;strict copyleft terms&lt;/a&gt; of the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, have at it. 0BSD is a good unconditional license as it contains no public domain dedication and, therefore, may be used without fee in jurisdictions where public domain is not a recognized legal concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T01:38:24.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8767" CreationDate="2019-09-09T04:36:14.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I use the LGPL HDL in a larger design would I have to release the source of the whole project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, but if so that's likely a limitation of the FPGA development tooling. If the tooling were good, it would let you isolate the LGPL'd component's placement in the design specifically to facilitate replacing it in-place without rebuilding the entire design/bitstream from source. This would be useful not only for licensing purposes, but also to make build times and testing cycles much more reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, in order not to have to release the full source, you would also need to have clear interface boundaries between the components. For an ethernet core this does not seem like a problem; it will have documented public interfaces that the rest of the components interface with it through. On the other hand, if the LGPL coder were an FPU or vector operations core taken from one softcore CPU design that you were reusing as part of another softcore CPU design, it would be a lot less clear whether it was being used as a &quot;library&quot; or whether your new CPU design was a derived work requiring all source to be released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T04:36:14.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8770" CreationDate="2019-09-09T05:54:27.670" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must admit that the phrasing of the question is a bit unclear, at least to me. I am assuming you meant something in the spirit of &quot;Can I use a license that isn't listed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;, and thus isn't recognized by GitHub, when I host my project there?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my understanding of the question is correct, the answer would be a resounding &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. As the creator of the project, you can use whatever license you wish to license your project, or even write a new one yourself (although, if you're not a lawyer, that's probably an ill-advised idea). Just place the license in a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file, and you're good to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst thing that will happen is that GitHub wouldn't &quot;magically&quot; recognize the license, and you won't get some of its bells and whistles around it, like explanatory text, or the ability to search according to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/blob/gh-pages/CONTRIBUTING.md#adding-a-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;request GitHub to add a license&lt;/a&gt;, although License Zero doesn't seem to listed in one of appropriate sources GitHub would consider, so you may need to do some extra work beforehand (e.g., get it listed by the OSI).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T05:54:27.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T13:13:33.737" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Microsoft Windows, there exists a lot of software which can be downloaded &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;, granting full access to all features without paying, which is not however OSS or FOSS. This occurred to me when looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.luminescence-software.org/en/metatogger.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metatogger&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't find out anything: Why might a developer decide not to make any money with their software, but still to keep the source proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not talking about security-critical gratis software, which might be employing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Security through obscurity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16017" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T13:13:33.737" Title="What are possible reasons for freeware not being OSS or even FOSS?" Tags="|floss|freeware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2019-09-10T06:53:12.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8778" CreationDate="2019-09-09T15:58:55.930" Score="1" ViewCount="813" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the nuget package is a dll after it is released. Do I need to open source the application that references it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16018" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:58:31.903" Title="If my commercial application includes a GPL licensed Nuget package, do I need to open source my application?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2019-09-09T17:50:04.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The License doesn't prohibit installation and usage as others have mentioned, but each agency will likely perform its own risk and compliance analysis. For example, the VA has reviewed both GIMP and Inkscape and approved usage (with constraints):&#xA;Inkscape:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=8240&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=8240&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;GIMP:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=5982&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=5982&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16019" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:50:04.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8776" CreationDate="2019-09-09T17:58:31.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a library that is released under the GPL license, then the entire project needs to be available under a GPL-compatible open-source license. The fact that you retrieve a compiled version using a package manager doesn't change anything in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T17:58:31.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T18:07:06.660" Score="2" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example: A programmer produces a library. They release that library under the LGPL and provide full source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The programmer wants to monetize their product as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than offering a &quot;pro&quot; or &quot;plus&quot; version with extra features, the author writes a statement stating: &quot;The LGPL licensed library is free for any use up to 100 operations per hour. If you need to use the library to do more than 100 operations per hour. please purchase a license.&quot; The author then offers a paid license that &quot;allows&quot; you to use the library for unlimited operations. They do this under the claim of a dual-license model. The author naturally knows some people will just bypass the limit, but expects that nobody in a serious business or commercial context would &quot;violate&quot; his license and would thus pay the fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These operations do not depend on any external server. There is no other technical enforcement of the limitation, other than that the LGPL code does a simple shifting counter to enforce a per-hour limit. But since the code is open source any developer could easily edit out that check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this type of licensing compatible with LGPL licensing? I.e. if a commercial developer did just modify the library to remove that check, and then used the library beyond this 100-operation limit, would you be liable from a licensing standpoint?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If trademark or naming were the issue, suppose you just cloned the code, removed the check, rebranded the project and re-released it yourself under the LGPL with no limitations. Would this be a violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put more succinctly: Can the author of an LGPL library prescribe written limitations on how the library is used, and legally, enforcibly demand payment for the same library with the only difference being you have the &quot;right&quot; to use that library in some other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastEditorUserId="11496" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T18:19:53.637" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T12:42:33.380" Title="If a library is LGPL licensed, can the creator impose additional usage limits?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8779" CreationDate="2019-09-09T19:36:36.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are attempts to do this in practice, and they can be quite a mess; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8660/is-geogebras-non-commercial-only-gpl3-license-valid&quot;&gt;Is Geogebra&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;non-commercial only GPL3&amp;quot; license valid?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 (which contains the base requirements for the LGPLv3) has relevant language in section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it... contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would appear to allows users to eliminate your sidecar restriction on number of operations when that restriction is placed alongside the (L)GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you are the author chosing a license yourself, you could write your own license which internally limits its applicability to 100 operations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/253/what-are-the-licensing-terms-of-the-text-of-the-gpl/254#254&quot;&gt;You may use the GPL text as a basis for your license&lt;/a&gt; if you change the name and drop the preamble, though your intent about limiting operations is so different from what the GPL allows, I would exercise great care (and seek professional legal advice) about how to create legally valid terms. Such a license will be non-free and GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T12:42:33.380" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T12:42:33.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-10T15:04:23.367" Score="2" ViewCount="2710" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT License permits Commercial use, Distribution, Modification, and Private use, while requiring the inclusion of the License and copyright notice and limiting Liability and Warranty (source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to add one thing: that all modifications must be indicated explicitly with date and by whom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way, my open software can be freely modified outside of a repository but with accountability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an existing license that offers close to these terms? Or may I simply edit the MIT License and include it in my software as &quot;modified from the MIT License&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16024" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T15:55:37.140" Title="Is there a license similar to MIT that also requires changes to be indicated?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8781" CreationDate="2019-09-10T15:17:17.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to add one thing: that all modifications must be indicated explicitly with date and by whom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 2 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib license&lt;/a&gt; comes to rescue that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License#Text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License#Text&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be&#xA;   misrepresented as being the original software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Is there a license similar to MIT that also requires changes to be indicated?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there an existing license that offers close to these terms? [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is, &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib/libpng license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Or may I simply edit the MIT License and include it in my software as &quot;modified from the MIT License&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best not to create any newer licenses until extremely necessary; complicates the landscape further&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Citation needed]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/blob/libpng16/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libpng license&lt;/a&gt; in action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1: If there is a libpng license version 2 (it seems there is), I mean the classic one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="13042" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T15:55:37.140" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T15:55:37.140" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8784" CreationDate="2019-09-10T16:36:56.923" Score="4" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently using Qt in my academic studies, and my professor wants me to display the code in the thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since all of the code will be presented in the appendix, it will become public when the thesis is published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's on my mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting a header for each file that matches with the Qt license. However, this will increase the amount of paper used, as the thesis will be printed at some point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting a detailed license such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.12/LICENSE.LGPL3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.12/LICENSE.LGPL3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I overthinking this? What is the formal way to handle this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16027" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T20:28:51.373" Title="Displaying Qt Licence in Thesis" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8783" CreationDate="2019-09-10T20:28:51.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Putting a header for each file that matches with the Qt license. However, this will increase the amount of paper used, as the thesis will be printed at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/ids&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX IDs&lt;/a&gt; of the license in a header,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL3&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Putting a detailed license such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.12/LICENSE.LGPL3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.12/LICENSE.LGPL3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would then add the full license to the appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T20:28:51.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8346" CreationDate="2019-09-11T15:49:24.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ovirt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oVirt&lt;/a&gt;, an open source data center virtualization solution, uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://ovirt-jira.atlassian.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jira&lt;/a&gt;, although, AFAIK, it is only for tracking issues around their own infrastructure (Jenkins builds, Gerrit code review, etc) and not for tracking issues/features in the project itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T15:49:24.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8048" CreationDate="2019-09-12T00:13:14.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Oracle makes the OpenJDK source code available under an open-source licensing model.&#xA; It's both gratis, and free (as in freedom) software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from the FAQ for OpenJDK(&lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://openjdk.java.net/faq/&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link&#xA; this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the &#xA;license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting &#xA;executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked &#xA;independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An &#xA;independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another quote, from the license(&lt;a href=&quot;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&lt;/a&gt;) &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/291741/chris-lercher&quot;&gt;Chris Lercher&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16037" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T00:13:14.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-11T05:58:44.753" Score="1" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does one identify and ascertain the applicable license for the respective OSS Java libraries (directly or via transitive dependency) included in a Java application from a Maven archive (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mvnrepository.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mvnrepository.com&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;http://mvnrepository.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mvnrepository.com&lt;/a&gt;, it lists that xml-apis library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/xml-apis/xml-apis/1.4.01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/xml-apis/xml-apis/1.4.01&lt;/a&gt;) is available under Apache 2.0, W3C License and SAX License. However, I am unable to verify from Apache, W3C or the SAX websites where it says that the specific .jar (or the library name) is covered under a certain license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering, in general, what's the most definitive means of establishing the applicable license for any given library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ajay" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T01:02:18.403" Title="How to identify and ascertain applicable license for OSS java libraries?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8788" CreationDate="2019-09-11T07:59:59.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;whats the most definitive means of establishing the applicable license for any given library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You find the source code of the library, in there, there must be some kind of &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; document. &lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; is the &quot;applicable license&quot; for the corresponding library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;TS;DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll find &lt;strong&gt;multiple&lt;/strong&gt;, tons, of software written by parties 3rd to Apache, who use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ALv2&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;All of those uses are unrequested from the Apache Foundation and the Apache Foundation has no derived responsibility&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find that some software is using some license such as the &quot;A&quot; license, you don't go to &quot;A&quot; to check if that's true. Other &quot;A&quot;s here are e.g. MIT, zlib, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead use the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;guide to find license for software package whatever&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find the library in &lt;a href=&quot;http://mvnrepository.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mvnrepository&lt;/a&gt; or wherever: &lt;a href=&quot;http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/xml-apis/xml-apis/1.4.01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/xml-apis/xml-apis/1.4.01&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jump to the home page: &lt;a href=&quot;http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/external/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/external/&lt;/a&gt; (ask for further help if you don't find this in the page of step 1).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fetch the Apache XML commons source code: &lt;a href=&quot;https://xerces.apache.org/xml-commons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xerces.apache.org/xml-commons/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1. No luck next time? Derive it via Ohloh: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net/p/xml-commons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openhub.net/p/xml-commons&lt;/a&gt;, access code locations, only if unbroken at Ohloh.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Keep fetching the source code: &lt;a href=&quot;http://xerces.apache.org/mirrors.cgi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://xerces.apache.org/mirrors.cgi&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Download the thing: &lt;a href=&quot;http://apache.uvigo.es//xerces/j/source/Xerces-J-src.2.12.0.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://apache.uvigo.es//xerces/j/source/Xerces-J-src.2.12.0.zip&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Uncompress, find the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; (sometimes they call it &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt;!) document:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;                                 Apache License&#xA;                           Version 2.0, January 2004&#xA;                        http://www.apache.org/licenses/&#xA;&#xA;   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION&#xA;&#xA;   1. Definitions.&#xA;&#xA;      &quot;License&quot; shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction,&#xA;      and distribution as defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document.&#xA;&#xA;      &quot;Licensor&quot; shall mean the copyright owner or entity authorized by&#xA;      the copyright owner that is granting the License.&#xA;&#xA;      &quot;Legal Entity&quot; shall mean the union of the acting entity and all&#xA;      other entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common&#xA;      control with that entity. For the purposes of this definition,&#xA;      &quot;control&quot; means (i) the power, direct or indirect, to cause the&#xA;      direction or management of such entity, whether by contract or&#xA;&#xA;[...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" OwnerDisplayName="john" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T08:44:37.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8791" CreationDate="2019-09-12T02:15:06.300" Score="3" ViewCount="963" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the library: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mtford90/react-native-watch-connectivity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mtford90/react-native-watch-connectivity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the Podspec: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mtford90/react-native-watch-connectivity/blob/master/Libraries/RNWatch/RNWatch.podspec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mtford90/react-native-watch-connectivity/blob/master/Libraries/RNWatch/RNWatch.podspec&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A BSD licence is specified in the Podspec: &quot;s.license = 'BSD'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is not an actual licence file included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also no licence text in the source code headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this library legally covered by the BSD licence or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16038" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T09:21:42.237" Title="If a CocoaPod does not have a licence file but a licence is specified in the Podspec, does the licence apply?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8790" CreationDate="2019-09-12T08:08:46.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The most obvious problem is that there is more than one license called &quot;BSD.&quot; Specifically there is a 2-clause BSD license and a 3-clause BSD license. So even if we accept the programming-language statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;s.license = 'BSD'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as a valid declaration of a license, it is ambiguous at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the BSD license(s) require that the BSD license itself be included in the distribution, at least in distributions of the source code. For example the 3-clause BSD license says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The single line of a machine-readable specification statement such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;s.license = 'BSD'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does not meet this requirement, so it is not a valid way to license something under the BSD license(s). Probably you can take it as an &lt;em&gt;intention&lt;/em&gt; that the work be licensed under a BSD license, but I do not think it is yet a valid license, because it does not itself follow the requirements of the license that it is supposedly under (namely, to include the copyright and permission statement with the source distribution). The best thing to do would be to contact the author or file a bug report and ask him to fulfill the license requirements of the BSD (3-clause) BSD license in his own work if his intention was to license it in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Technically speaking, the above &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; possibly still be considered a valid license. The original author is not technically bound to himself fulfill the requirements of the license, since it is his own code. I.e. the license says what &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; must do in order to redistribute the code, not what the author must do. However I think it would still be best to contact the author and clarify the situation. It was probably just an oversight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is the developer of a GPL-covered program bound by the GPL? Could the developer's actions ever be a violation of the GPL?&lt;/a&gt; (this is for the GPL, but the same reasoning would apply to any license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T09:21:42.237" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T09:21:42.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8764" CreationDate="2019-09-12T08:24:28.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recipients would not be able to compile the project and obtain the binaries themselves because of the missing library A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are distributing and including GPL code in your source code distribution (which you are, according to your comments), then to fulfill the GPL requirements you must distribute all source code. If a certain part of the source code (e.g. library A) is not available, then you cannot distribute that GPL component while also fulfilling its requirements. This is what is meant when we say a license is &quot;incompatible&quot; -- it means you tried to fulfill all the requirements (e.g. license A says you cannot distribute its source code, and license B says you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; distribute &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; source code), but failed to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible exception would be so-called &quot;system libraries&quot; or components, which are described in the following paragraph of the GPL v2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means &lt;strong&gt;all the source code for all modules it contains&lt;/strong&gt;, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, &lt;strong&gt;the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs&lt;/strong&gt;, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above quotation (emphasis added) is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, but similar language (&quot;System Libraries&quot;) is in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, if you were developing, say, a Windows application, you would need not include, for example, the source code to the Windows modules that are normally distributed with the operating system, compiler, kernel, or other major components of the Windows operating system. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, seeing as you intend to distribute the executable version of library A along with your program, and seeing as the library A does not qualify as &quot;a major component of the compiler, kernel, and so on, of the operating system on which the executable runs,&quot; I would say that this this exception does not apply in your case. So you will need to be able to distribute its source code in order to comply with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your comments, you are using the FFTW library, which is specifically licensed under the GPL along with a dual-licensing offer. See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fftw.org/faq/section1.html#nonfree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFTW FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. It is common to license something under a GPL license as well as a non-GPL license for the use case you describe (for producing non-free software). In this case your only recourse is to ask the author for an alternative (non-GPL) license, or to remove dependence on the library A, which seems to be what is mainly preventing you from distributing all the source code and thus complying with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-09-12T08:29:35.130" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T08:29:35.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8794" CreationDate="2019-09-12T17:03:19.333" Score="8" ViewCount="932" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a helpful project that is licensed under the LGPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have taken some of the useful code out of it and refactored it into a wrapper class and would like to add it to an upstream project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, my refactored code would count as a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the upstream project is licensed under Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the LGPL license from the original project mean that I can't contribute the refactored code to the upstream project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6088" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T17:12:41.450" Title="Can I Commit LGPL3 Derivative Work To An Apache 2 Licensed Project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|lgpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8793" CreationDate="2019-09-12T17:12:41.450" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your code is derived from the LGPLv3 code you are bound by that license – it is a copyleft license like the GPLv3, just with a linking exception. You do not have the right to license this code under the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Apache 2 and LGPLv3 are compatible, license compatibility is a one-way street: you can include Apache 2 licensed code in a LGPLv3 project, but not LGPLv3 licensed code in a Apache 2 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the LGPLv3 offers a linking exception: the license of linked code doesn't matter if the relevant LGPL terms are still complied with. For example, the Apache 2 licensed project could use your software as a dynamically linked library without any impact on licensing. However, when binaries of the Apache 2 licensed project are distributed it would have to be accompanied by the source code of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T17:12:41.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9720" CreationDate="2019-09-13T08:56:02.703" Score="7" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether Creative Commons ShareAlike is a weak or strong copyleft license. That is, does it allow linking with code with under a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16048" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-09-13T14:50:54.867" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T04:54:48.550" Title="Creative Commons ShareAlike, weak or strong copyleft?" Tags="|creative-commons|copyleft|software|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8799" CreationDate="2019-09-15T13:38:09.513" Score="4" ViewCount="2634" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a program uses an API which has two implementations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An MIT implementation which uses GPL libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A newer version of it which no longer uses any GPL libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither is distributed along with the program, one is already present on the system. I don't know which version the programs will be linked to. It may be the first, and therefore (transitively) link to GPL libraries, or the second, and not link to any GPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the program have to be GPL-compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16057" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T19:53:01.687" Title="What if I don't know whether my program will be linked to a GPL library or not?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8797" CreationDate="2019-09-15T17:50:16.273" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The GPL is a copyright license. Its restrictions are a subset of those imposed by copyright law.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In very broad terms, copyright protects copying, distribution, modification, and various similar rights such as &quot;public performance or display&quot; (usually for artistic works). So, if you never distribute, modify, or copy* GPL'd code or binaries, then the GPL does not apply to you and it does not matter whether someone, downstream of you, does one or more of those things. However, that hypothetical person might have difficulty complying with both your license and the GPL, and might therefore choose not to distribute your software at all. Whether you consider that a problem is your decision, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position of the Free Software Foundation, and most other people in the open source and free software communities, is that APIs cannot be copyrighted. Numerous people have said as much during the &lt;em&gt;Oracle v. Google&lt;/em&gt; lawsuit. If this is in fact legally correct, then &quot;using an API&quot; also does not require a license. If this is legally incorrect (in your jurisdiction), then you may need a license from whoever developed the API in the first place, which complicates this analysis somewhat. However, I would certainly hope and expect that most reasonable authors would be willing to place their APIs under permissive terms or a CC0 public domain dedication. Unfortunately, this is a relatively new problem, and most existing licenses do not take it into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* In general, most if not all of the GPL's obligations attach at time of distribution. Making private copies or modifications does not usually trigger any obligations by itself. This is not true of, for example, the AGPL, for which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13&lt;/a&gt; attaches at time of modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T17:57:33.417" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T17:57:33.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8797" CreationDate="2019-09-15T19:53:01.687" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not responsible for what other people do with the software. If someone else links with a GPL library they are perfectly allowed to do that: GPL does not trigger on use or linking, only on distribution/propagation of the covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your project shall not be derived of GPL software, in particular do not give the impression that you designed your software for that particular GPL library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not distribute GPL software alongside your software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not offer scripts etc that installs GPL components&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do feel free to test for compatibility with different library implementations, incl. that GPL library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do mention in your documentation that this GPL library is compatible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you want yourself or someone else to be able to distribute the software alongside the GPL library, stick to a GPL-compatible license such as the MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the little information you're providing it seems that everything you are already doing is perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T19:53:01.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8795" CreationDate="2019-09-16T06:10:57.153" Score="-3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About one of your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] does it allow linking with code with under a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is restriction 4.a applied to grant 3.a supporting on the fitting that linking software libraries has in definition 1.a - read the &lt;strong&gt;TS;DR&lt;/strong&gt; section for the full explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About your other question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am wondering whether Creative Commons ShareAlike is a weak or strong copyleft license. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accepting the definitions at &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Strong_and_weak_copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The strength of the copyleft governing a work is an expression of the extent that the copyleft provisions can be efficiently imposed on all kinds of derived works. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Weak copyleft&quot; refers to licenses where not all derived works inherit the copyleft license&lt;/strong&gt;; whether a derived work inherits or not often depends on the manner in which it was derived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;restriction 4.a of CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;You may distribute [...] the Work only under the terms of this License, and You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy [...] of the Work You distribute [...]. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may not distribute [...] the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement. The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but &lt;strong&gt;this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License&lt;/strong&gt;. [...]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It explicitly mandates the licensed Work to be weak copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TS;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Definition 1.a&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definitions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Collective Work&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (as defined below) for the purposes of this License.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People don't normally develop software on its own, siloed, &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NIH&lt;/a&gt;. Most software will depend on libraries, which, if not tailored, customised to the user project's needs, will be unmodified, hence fitting the category of &lt;code&gt;Collective Work&lt;/code&gt; as per &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA definitions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When linking to a third party library, one is not creating a &lt;code&gt;Derivative Work&lt;/code&gt;, but a &lt;code&gt;Collective Work&lt;/code&gt;. However, if any modification is done on the linked library, it becomes &lt;code&gt;Derivative Work&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Note that using actual software licenses, such as &lt;strong&gt;e.g.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;//www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GNU recommendation&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;linking, linked libraries&lt;/em&gt;&quot; will be expressions used in the license, rendering needless an &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; as in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;. This is a reason supporting the typical advice &quot;don't use CC licenses for source code&quot;. For a graver reason, consider that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;restriction 4.a of CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt; forbids sub licensing&lt;/strong&gt; all or part of the Work, the code, effectively locking as CC it in case anyone interested would want to fork a GPL alternative from your Work. Now how does that compare with &lt;a href=&quot;//www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clause 2 of ALv2&lt;/a&gt; explicitly allowing sub licensing!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Grant 3.a&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License Grant.&lt;/strong&gt; Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collective Works, and to reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collective Works;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensor of some software licensed &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt; grants the right to incorporate the Work, e.g. a library; into Collective Works, e.g. a binary program using that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Restriction 4.a&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;b&gt;Restrictions.&lt;/b&gt;The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You may distribute [...] the Work only under the terms of this License, and You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy [...] of the Work You distribute [...]. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may not distribute [...] the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement. The above applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collective Work, but this does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License. [...]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provides for making Collective Works as long as the Work parts licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt; are properly identified and not sub licensed in any way. But those Collective Works are not required themselves to be made subject to the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="13042" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T07:52:09.417" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T07:52:09.417" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8802" CreationDate="2019-09-16T09:46:10.903" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following question. One commercial license scanning tool notified me that following artifact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jboss.xnio/xnio-api/3.3.8.Final&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jboss.xnio/xnio-api/3.3.8.Final&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has a public domain, cc0-1.0, and Apache 2.0 licencing. (Public domain, according to the support of that tool, means that software was released under generic public domain statement.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I go to the repository, I find that it is declared as CC0-1.0 and Public, but actually source code license as well as pom file declare only Apache 2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody explain, where the CC0 and Public come from in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16062" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T22:37:32.867" Title="MVN repository artifact licence?" Tags="|public-domain|cc0|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8801" CreationDate="2019-09-16T09:53:03.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the link to home page is correct and that the source code link from the home page is correct,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd think that the &lt;code&gt;CC0-1.0&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Public&lt;/code&gt; notes are just wrongly tagged. An unimportant human factor mistake, maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The grave bit is that &lt;strong&gt;actually the software might not be under ALv2&lt;/strong&gt;, because &lt;a href=&quot;//github.com/dmlloyd/xnio/commit/1753816e17c26d294bc371ee0af7aa9b8b7c4891&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it seems it might be GPL'ed software later disguised as ALv2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;It is widely accepted that *GPL* source code can not be demoted to a permissive license such as ALv2 &lt;strong&gt;(unless every copyright holder has been reached out and has explicitly agreed to)&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8794/13042&quot;&gt;Read this as a &lt;em&gt;most immediate&lt;/em&gt; example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="13042" LastEditDate="2019-09-16T22:37:32.867" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T22:37:32.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8627" CreationDate="2019-09-17T02:07:44.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this would help very much, so sorry if this doesn't :/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as you can see here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or &#xA;substantial portions of the Software. &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you would have to;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a link to the original software &amp;amp; license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Re-create the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get in contact with the author(s) and request permission without adding credit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16037" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T02:07:44.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8806" CreationDate="2019-09-09T10:06:29.860" Score="12" ViewCount="23837" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a developer working for an automotive company and I'm currently developing a hardware testing tool which includes a graphical user interface built on the QT framework. The application will solely be used by employees of our company and is not intended to be sold to external customers. My question is, do I need a commercial license for the framework even though I don't want to sell the software and the source code is free for all employees of the corporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alex&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16086" OwnerDisplayName="WoodenGolem" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:35:44.497" Title="Do I need a commercial license for the QT framework?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2019-09-09T12:10:00.847" Score="-5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are using it in your business - that’s a commercial application. It doesn’t matter that your business is cars, not software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27862" OwnerDisplayName="Dale M" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T12:10:00.847" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2019-09-17T05:28:59.380" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is, do I need a commercial license for the framework even though I don't want to sell the software and the source code is free for all employees of the corporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you can comply with the (L)GPL requirements of the Qt libraries, then you do not need to purchase a &quot;commercial license&quot; from the Qt Company. Note that the terminology &quot;commercial license&quot; is a bit ambiguous, because the (L)GPL license also allows 'commercial' use as long as you can follow the obligations. Namely, the obligation for the LGPL is that you distribute the source code of the LGPL libraries themselves (i.e. the Qt libraries), and also that you allow your users to replace the LGPL libraries with alternative versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically what this has been interpreted to mean is that if you distribute LGPL libraries (such as Qt) with your application, then you also must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Distribute to your users the source code of the same version of that library, or make it available in a way that is conformant with the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make it possible for a user to use a different version of that LGPL library with your application. In practice this means that you must use dynamically linked libraries for the LGPL library (i.e. on Windows, the Qt libraries must be DLLs, and on Linux the libraries for Qt must be .so's). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice it also means that on platforms like iOS and Android, LGPL is not really usable (because these platforms apparently do not allow users to replace the libraries with another version). Basically, the LGPL requires that you document the process for replacing &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; version of the LGPL library (Qt) with another version that the user may have built herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some components of the Qt framework may be GPL licensed, and not LGPL. If you don't want to release the source code of your whole application, you must avoid distributing GPL applications in a way that combines it with your application. To be safe it would be best not to distribute the GPL components at all together with your application. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47323/can-i-use-an-lgpl-licenced-library-in-my-commercial-app&quot;&gt;Can I use an LGPL-licenced library in my commercial app?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T07:54:59.137" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T07:54:59.137" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2019-09-17T07:44:27.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you don't need a commercial Qt license if you don't distribute your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code you write for this application is owned by your employer and is only provided to your colleagues to assist them in their work duties, then the application is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being distributed according to copyright law. This means that the requirements of the LGPL license don't trigger and you have no obligations to comply with those requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application gets distributed to a different legal entity (this could be within the same corporation, depending on how it is legally organized!), then you either need to comply with the LGPL requirements or you need to buy a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T07:44:27.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T12:02:21.120" Score="2" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just discovered that the project which I'm working on was using &lt;strong&gt;iText&lt;/strong&gt; but it is expected to be released under the Apache v2 license.&#xA;As I understood the only way to use the free AGPL version of iText is to release the whole project under the same license, AGPL. The other alternative is to buy a license. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to use it and release the whole project as Apache v2, since right now the iText library is used as a maven dependency, without any modification? Maybe by highlighting the use of such library?&#xA;Would it be legal to use it in a different microservice, let's say the &lt;strong&gt;report-ms&lt;/strong&gt;, and call it from the other project, then just releasing the &lt;strong&gt;report-ms&lt;/strong&gt; under AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16076" LastEditorUserId="16076" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T13:30:01.963" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T14:33:59.093" Title="How to use AGPL library in an Apache v2 project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8627" CreationDate="2019-09-17T13:57:02.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're probably in the clear to use HTML comments. Just because a client may process it later doesn't mean you're not compliant, and every client should let users view the original email source if they want to. You'll just have to ensure that whatever system you use to &lt;em&gt;send&lt;/em&gt; the emails doesn't strip your license notice out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T13:57:02.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8808" CreationDate="2019-09-17T14:33:59.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2 license and the AGPLv3 are compatible. Here, this likely means that you can release your own source code under the Apache 2 license. However, the software as a whole including the AGPLv3 libraries can only be distributed under the AGPLv3 license. This means that the source code for your parts must be provided as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How the AGPLv3 dependency is managed is irrelevant. By having the user fetch the AGPLv3 components from somewhere else, you can at most argue that you aren't responsible for providing the license and source code for the AGPLv3 components. However, if the AGPLv3 components are installed automatically, that is functionally indistinguishable from bundling them with your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally OK to split a software into clearly separate programs where one of them is governed by an A/GPL license and the other isn't. To be clearly separate, they should be able to run independently and should not communicate by sharing internal data structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether splitting your software into such services is helpful to you depends: either way, you can publish your own source code under Apache 2, either way the software as a whole will at least contain AGPLv3 parts. Using separate programs is mostly useful when some component is A/GPLv3 incompatible, e.g. proprietary software or GPLv2 libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T14:33:59.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8813" CreationDate="2019-09-17T23:44:34.997" Score="6" ViewCount="3957" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading the differences between these two licenses for a few hours now and it is still quite not clear to me how this duality works. As far as I understood, the MIT license basically gives you the freedom to decide if you wish to open-source the author's code or not as long as it carries the MIT license notice (i.e. include the copyright). On the other hand, the GPL license gives you more restriction. If you distribute a GPL licensed code (i.e. as in a website) you must make it open-sourced including your own code (i.e. no code on your website can be encrypted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if my understanding is wrong and I would be thankful if someone could clarify to me how this duality works. If MIT allows us to distribute it without the requirement of open-sourcing it how can it be dual with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16082" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T05:22:10.140" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T11:37:15.467" Title="Clarification: Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL Version 2 licenses" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mit|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-18T01:52:07.013" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a PCB layout, not based on any other PCB layout.&#xA;The netlist used for the PCB, comes from my schematic, which is under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the PCB layout under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be selling finished products containing my designed PCBs, and would like to hold off publishing my PCB layout for at least a year, but I won't if the GPLv3 must pass on to the PCB layout because it uses a netlist exported from my GPLv3 schematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My schematic is GPLv3, because half of it is based on another GPLv3 schematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16084" LastEditorUserId="16084" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T02:05:48.360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T06:17:47.220" Title="Is a PCB layout required to be under GPLv3 if it's created from scratch, using a netlist exported from a GPLv3 schematic?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8811" CreationDate="2019-09-18T06:29:31.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I decide to sell you a car, I can offer to do so for (say) a thousand pounds, or if I choose I might say to you &quot;&lt;em&gt;You can have my car for either a thousand pounds or your motorcycle in exchange&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  If you decide you want my car it's up to you to decide which condition to honour: the money or the motorcycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the essence of dual licensing.  I offer to give you a copy of some code, plus the rights to do certain things with it, and in exchange I require that you agree to honour &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; this set of conditions here (the MIT licence), &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; this other set of conditions here (the GNU GPL).  If you want the code and the rights, you must decide which set of conditions you will accept.  In theory you should probably decide then and there, though in practice it makes no difference until you want to do something, probably redistribution, where the two set of requirements differ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to accept the code under MIT, then the added restrictions of the GPL no longer apply to your copy; if you decide to accept it under GPL, then the  absence of those restrictions from the MIT licence no longer matters with respect to your copy.  That's why any contradiction between the two doesn't matter in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; you have pointed us to the code in question, for which many thanks.  Reading eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pioul/jQuery.Maxlength/blob/master/jquery.maxlength.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt;, the author writes &quot;&lt;em&gt;Dual licensed under the MIT &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; GPL Version 2 licenses&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  So yes, you can choose which one of those licences you receive it under, and once you have done so, you need not worry about the requirements of the one you didn't choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T20:48:50.333" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T20:48:50.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8816" CreationDate="2019-09-18T08:13:03.780" Score="5" ViewCount="4326" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've forked a (declared by the owner) unmaintained Node.JS project on GitHub which uses the &lt;a href=&quot;//www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License, version 2&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;&quot;license&quot;: &quot;Apache-2.0&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there are no license headers in any source code files which to my knowledge of &lt;a href=&quot;//www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License, version 2&lt;/a&gt; is required. What do I need to do if I want to edit any of these files? Is this Apache licensing valid? And if not, can I remove it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16088" LastEditorUserId="13042" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T12:43:49.650" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T12:43:49.650" Title="GitHub repo with Apache License version 2 in package.json, but no full license copy nor comment headers" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8814" CreationDate="2019-09-18T11:03:37.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the apache license valid? And if not, can I remove it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license is deemed invalid, then you have no rights at all to make any changes to the project. Also removing the only indication which license the project is presumably licensed under will make it hard to prove that you had the right to make changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best course of action is to get in touch with the (old) owner of the project to get a clear, written, statement under which license the project is released. If that license is an open-source license, add the appropriate LICENSE file to the project and license comments to the source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the license state of the project has been clarified in that way, you can do further maintenance on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T11:03:37.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8814" CreationDate="2019-09-18T11:22:02.327" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the Apache license, one requirement of the license is that recipients of the work receive a copy of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did not receive a copy of the license, then I would argue that based on the license itself, it is not a valid way to license a work under the Apache 2.0 license. If &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; you received was a file called package.json that contained a line such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;license&quot;: &quot;Apache-2.0&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then this does not fulfill the above requirement (&quot;you must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this license&quot;).  Based on the license itself, this is not a valid way to license a work under the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do i need to do if i want to edit any of these files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to get a valid license. If you have communicated with the author and he has actually told you that the license is valid, that it is indeed under the Apache-2.0 license, then perhaps that would be sufficient. But in this case, to redistribute the work under that license you would need bring the files in a state that follows the requirements listed in the Apache license under &quot;Redistribution&quot;. In particular, you would need to give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of the Apahce 2.0 license.  You would also need to follow all of the other requirements of section 4 of the Apache license. For example, you must indicate which files you changed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T11:22:02.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8817" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2019-09-18T12:42:04.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi everyone, I'll put myself forward. I've been here since the beginning of the site, and am a frequent contributor both on the main site and on our meta site. For example, I drafted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/a/499/190&quot;&gt;site description&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/a/326/190&quot;&gt;the on-topic help centre page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a long time member of the Stack Exchange network and am a mod on one other site. If elected I anticipate continuing our current mod team's fairly light handed approach, though I would be interested in restarting a discussion on our site's name (to more fairly include the Free Software movement) if the site community still thinks that would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T12:49:21.293" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T12:49:21.293" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-09-18T12:42:04.997" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8818" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2019-09-18T14:14:03.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been an OS.SE user since the fairly early days, and&#xA;a user of SE sites in general for&#xA;nearly a decade, particularly ServerFault.  I think I have a reasonable handle on the&#xA;etiquette and process of SE sites in general, and on the spirit and flavour of this&#xA;one in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no issue with the way this site is moderated now.  I don't seek to introduce&#xA;significant changes in anything, because I don't currently see that we have major&#xA;problems.  My feeling is very much that we've slowly established what it is that we&#xA;do, and that we do it pretty well, and (mercifully) largely free of the arguments that sometimes seem&#xA;to threaten to drown out productive activity in the free software world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professionally I'm a free software sysadmin, and I don't use non-free software if&#xA;I can humanly avoid it; I also write professionally about free software.  From a timezone standpoint I'm in the UK.&#xA;I tend to keep an eye on OS.SE throughout the day, but am most active&#xA;early in the mornings (UK time).  I'm a frequent contributor, and apparently what I've&#xA;written has been generally well-received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we need an extra moderator, then I'm keen to be it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T14:14:03.710" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T14:14:03.710" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-09-18T14:14:03.710" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-18T19:02:53.997" Score="8" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;For technical reasons (classloader issues), I need to rename the packages of the &lt;em&gt;compiled&lt;/em&gt; version of an Apache library when I build my application, (which includes my code and the Apache code, a so-called &lt;em&gt;fat jar&lt;/em&gt;). There are Maven and Gradle plugins to achieve this, (Maven shade plugin or Gradle shadow plugin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means, that the bytecode is modified so that the qualified name of a class is not &lt;code&gt;org.apache.commons.lang3&lt;/code&gt; any more, but something like &lt;code&gt;shadow.org.apache.commons.lang3&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my problem, I only change the bytecode so there is no (sensible) way to put a notice in there, at least not in a readable form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T13:17:05.447" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T14:05:48.317" Title="Does renaming compiled Java packages violate the Apache license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8471" CreationDate="2019-09-19T02:04:22.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use either one and it doesn't matter.&#xA;Take minecraft for example. The microsoft/mojang company has earned billions of dollars in revenue using the Oracle JDK 8, without paying a cent to oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would honestly use Oracle's JDK 8 because it's faster performance-wise. The main difference is OpenJDK updates more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: Also, congrats on getting a job for a company! Hopefully it all goes well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16037" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T02:04:22.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-19T15:21:53.030" Score="4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an author of a non-GPL code that is distributed under an Apache license. There is a GPL2 library (not LGPL) that many users will commonly want to link to that provides part of our algorithm, but our repository does provide a default for the same functionality and links fine without it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out a standard for separation. Is it OK for users to obtain and use the library? Does it matter that our code anticipates this through hooks commented out with macros or the build system? Does it matter if obtaining the code is facilitated, either using GitHub with submodules or cmake with FetchContent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16101" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-19T15:29:02.127" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T03:25:01.507" Title="Can Apache/BSD application contain optional (commented out) hooks to link to GPL code?" Tags="|gpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8755" CreationDate="2019-09-19T18:03:22.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpenPublicL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF does not consider the Open Public License a free software license&lt;/a&gt;. Importantly, it requires a developer to send modified code to a single upstream developer, which prohibits sharing of the code privately between two parties, and it fails the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;desert island&quot; test&lt;/a&gt; meaning that people who cannot communicate with the upstream developer, due to reasons of infrastructure or censorship, cannot legally distribute the software in a modified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OPL has a per-file copyleft; see analysis below. If you are considering using the Open Public License, please know that you would be much better served by choosing a library-friendly license approved by the FSF and OSI, such as the LGPL or MPL 2.0. Free software developers may avoid contributing to your library as a matter of principle, and they may avoid using it as a practical matter, because they want GPL compatibility or because they wish to privately sell or share their modifications with a particular person without giving a copy to the original developer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice, but based on my non-expert reading, the Open Public License appears to have a per-file copyleft, similar to the Mozilla Public License, so changes to an OPL-licensed file fall under source-sharing requirements for that file, but source-sharing requirements do not extend to other files within a work that contain no OPL-licensed material. The core basis for this is in section 1.9, which defines &quot;Modifications&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.9. &quot;Modifications&quot; means any addition to or deletion from the&#xA;  substance or structure of either the Original Code or any previous&#xA;  Modifications. When Covered Code is released as a series of files,&#xA;  a Modification is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. Any addition to or deletion from the contents of a file&#xA;  containing Original Code or previous Modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B. Any new file that contains any part of the Original Code&#xA;  or previous Modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as your project is divided into files, then any file which contains no &quot;Original Code&quot; nor any &quot;Modifications&quot; from previous authors (i.e., your code in some file is either your own or governed by an entirely different license) does not incur obligations under section 3 of the OPL, which apply to only Original Code and Modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, as long as your library is contained in separate files, OPL obligations on that library do not affect your larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the specific language about &quot;Larger Work&quot;, the license says only that (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must make sure the requirements of this License are fulfilled &lt;strong&gt;for the Covered Code.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but &quot;Covered Code&quot; is defined in 1.3 as being only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Original Code or Modifications or the combination of the Original Code and Modifications&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and since new work in separate files are neither Original Code nor Modifications, they are not Covered Code, and therefore the language about Larger Works does not apply to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, there are more popular and less onerous licenses that have nearly identical practical effect, such as the LGPL. If you are making the licensing decision for your own software, please consider a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-09-19T20:33:37.780" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T20:33:37.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8755" CreationDate="2019-09-20T16:27:14.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was checking up on the website you gave us in your question, and in the sub-license section it says;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Describes the ability for you to grant/extend a license to the software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this would mean that you can publish your library, and people would be able to use it in &quot;third party&quot; projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this didn't help, its kind of hard to tell what you mean because you didn't give much detail about your library, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16037" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T16:27:14.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8812" CreationDate="2019-09-20T20:59:26.903" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At mentioned in the comment, there are hardware related issues around copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, non of this matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you own the copyright of your schematic, you are not bound by it (you can not be in breach of a contract with your self, as both parties will automatically agree). You can change your licence at will (but can not take away a licence from a 3rd party).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T20:59:26.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8823" CreationDate="2019-09-21T08:28:53.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly note that while linking to a GPL library means you have to comply with the GPL terms, that doesn't mean that your code has to be licensed under the GPL, only that the license you use &lt;strong&gt;cannot prevent users complying&lt;/strong&gt; with the GPL terms. This is where &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt; come into play, which includes Apache 2.0 and Modified BSD (3-clause). &lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; in the compatible licenses list, that the version matters, you will see that Apache 2.0 is compatible with GPLv3 but not GPLv2, also the BSD mentioned is the modified BSD license which has no advertising clause, so be sure to look closely at what is used when looking at compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the examples I have seen, it is considered a matter of what code is compiled/linked into the final binary rather than the method of retrieving the code that is used. I would suggest using a build option or only searching for installed libraries rather than making your build system download and build the libraries, that leaves it to the user to install and enable the use of the GPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example to look at would be the eigen library, where older versions were released under LGPL, it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moslty licensed under MPL&lt;/a&gt; now. It uses the preprocessor symbol &lt;code&gt;EIGEN_MPL2_ONLY&lt;/code&gt; to not compile LGPL licensed code into the library. See example in v3.3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/eigen/eigen/src/a5c3d12011a0/Eigen/src/OrderingMethods/Ordering.h#lines-41&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src/OrderingMethods/Ordering.h&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly the quadriflow project using eigen &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hjwdzh/QuadriFlow/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt#L102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has a build option&lt;/a&gt; to only use eigens MPL algorithms, you can see in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hjwdzh/QuadriFlow/blob/94ad93dca0ac/src/optimizer.cpp#L22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src/optimizer.cpp&lt;/a&gt; that it chooses different classes based on the licensing choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="9558" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T03:25:01.507" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T03:25:01.507" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8831" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8832" CreationDate="2019-09-21T09:32:41.253" Score="29" ViewCount="30227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to license my project (hosted on GitHub) under MPL-2.0, which looks like a reasonable choice. But since I'm not a lawyer, it's hard to estimate long-term benefits and consequences of this choice. Specifically, I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to distribute the project for money under this license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are permitted licenses for my project dependencies so I won't be sued if I depend on those libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a difference between depending on a library (without including its code into my project, only use build artefacts) vs copying the code from other libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this license protect my project from copying by a big corporation and selling the product under their name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What people &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; do if they want to fork my project, change the code and use the modified version in their projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I put a copyright notice in each file or having a single top-level file is fine?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some similar questions are probably already answered here, but they answered for different licenses (like Apache-2.0). I would like to have a more understandable explanation about MPL-2.0 pros and cons in one place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14043" LastEditorUserId="14043" LastEditDate="2019-09-21T10:37:10.900" LastActivityDate="2022-05-10T06:35:57.920" Title="Pros and Cons of using MPL-2.0 license?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8831" CreationDate="2019-09-21T12:46:40.393" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to distribute the project for money under this license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. However, if you distribute/sell binaries, then you may not charge extra for the source code.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, as the MPL license is a weak copyleft license, you are giving the users of your library also the right to distribute it further, which means that selling copies of the software is not sensible from an economics viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are permitted licenses for my project dependencies so I won't be sued if I depend on those libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL license is a copyleft license, which means that in principle people are not allowed to distribute code that is under the MPL-2.0 license under different terms.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The GPL licenses (including LGPL and AGPL) require that the entire application is distributed under the terms of the GPL license. In principle, this is incompatible with the MPL license, but the MPL-2.0 license has a special exception for allowing the code to be distributed under the terms of the GPL licenses. However, an author can also choose to explicitly disable that exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a legal standpoint, this means that any license is permissible, but the GPL license can be problematic if your project contains/depends on code under the MPL-1.3 license or the MPL-2.0 license that is marked as &amp;quot;Incompatible with Secondary Licenses&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical standpoint, if you depend on GPL code, you should seriously consider using the GPL for your code as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a difference between depending on a library (without including its code into my project, only use build artefacts) vs copying the code from other libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on the licenses involved and if the copied code ends up in the same source files as your MPL licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it is better, and legally clearer, to depend on an external library than to copy its code into your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this license protect my project from copying by a big corporation and selling the product under their name?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, but if they sell the product, they must provide access to the source code under the MPL-2.0 license. If they don't, that is a violation of the license terms under which they received the software and that would make them liable for copyright infringement claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What people must do if they want to fork my project, change the code and use the modified version in their projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; make it clear that (parts of) the project are licensed under the MPL-2.0 license and where the source code for those parts can be obtained.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;People &lt;em&gt;must not&lt;/em&gt; charge money (above the costs they make for the distribution) for obtaining the source code that corresponds to a distributed binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I put a copyright notice in each file or having a single top-level file is fine?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should put a copyright notice in each file, along with this statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at &lt;a href=&quot;https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to put the notice in each file if it is &amp;quot;not possible or desirable&amp;quot; as per the license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exhibit A&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If it is not possible or desirable to put the notice in a particular file, then You may include the notice in a location (such as a LICENSE file in a relevant directory) where a recipient would be likely to look for such a notice.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="26100" LastEditDate="2022-05-10T06:35:57.920" LastActivityDate="2022-05-10T06:35:57.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8819" CreationDate="2019-09-22T17:44:34.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may not be able to follow that requirement to the letter, but you can adhere to the intent of the requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent is that recipients of your version of those libraries are informed that changes have been made compared to the version you received. To comply with the intent of the requirement, you should put a notice in a location where your users are likely to see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend to mention in the documentation of your application, where you mention that you are using library, that you have shaded/shadowed the names of the library using the shade/shadow plugin of Maven/Gradle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not following the license requirements to the letter may be seen as a license violation, I believe that if you take a reasonable effort to fulfil the intent of the requirement, then no judge will actually rule it as a license violation. Sometimes, it is technically impossible to follow the requirements to the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-09-26T13:25:50.397" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T13:25:50.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-23T15:44:44.683" Score="22" ViewCount="7794" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that GPLv3 imposes that we should make the source code of our app available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, available to whom? &#xA;In case we sell our GPLv3 software, does it mean we have to make it available to those we sell the software to? Or to everybody else that didn't purchase it as well? Such as providing a repository online with the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14342" OwnerDisplayName="Alvaro" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T06:57:36.193" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T06:57:36.193" Title="GPLv3 forces us to make code available, but to whom?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2019-09-23T17:55:48.650" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;To any recipients. You do not have to make the source code available to the public, but have to provide the source code to anyone who received the software from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details here depend on how you want to provide the source code (see section 6 of the GPLv3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way is to always bundle the corresponding source code when you give someone a copy of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you offer the software for download, you can also offer the corresponding source for download at the same place. For example, any places where you offer your app could link to a GitHub repository with the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under certain circumstances, you can include a &lt;em&gt;written offer&lt;/em&gt; to provide the corresponding source code. This written offer must be valid for at least three years, sometimes longer. You must then provide the software to anyone who contacts you with a copy of that offer, not just to those to whom you gave the software directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you only distribute the software “occasionally and noncommercially” in unmodified form, you can also pass along a copy of a written offer that you received.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can satisfy a written offer either by providing the source code on a physical medium (you may charge postage etc), or by offering the source code for download.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under no circumstances can you charge any fees for the source code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T17:55:48.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2019-09-24T04:20:58.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 have it written in sections 4-6 &#xA; - You send (convey) Source Code verbatim (4) or modified (5) and that is it - no more sharing required - &lt;code&gt;you are giving Source automatically to the person to who you convey, nobody else&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you send (convey) the Non-Source code with Source code on the same medium (6 a) - no more sharing required - &lt;code&gt;you are giving Source automatically to the person to who you convey, nobody else&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you provide some Physical Product (as a eq. machine) with Non-Source code (6b) so you must add written promise to provide Source Code to anyone who got the object code either on media for (basicaly) postage price, or free acces to the Source code on web (both for at least 3 years and at least while you support such physical product) - &lt;code&gt;you are promising to give Source anybody, who have Object Code or (copy of) written promise - but only if you are in bussiness still&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you may resend such product (ocassionally, nonbusines) with copy of the  written promise (basically give the machine and all to somebody) (6c) - &lt;code&gt;you are giving (copy of) written promise to the person to who you convey, nobody else&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;put it on web and provide link for download Source code to anybody as long as you provide it (6d) - &lt;code&gt;you are giving Source automatically to anybody on Internet, who hit the download link (at least as long as you provide Object Code), the person to who you convey you must give such link&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;give the object code to a peer and send him link, where the Source is (6e) - &lt;code&gt;you are giving link to Source to the person to who you convey, anybody can use such link&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or do not convey it at all (that means, there is no other way to convey legally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask money for conveying itself, but no extra for Source code (if you are requered to provide it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you asked about HTML form and similar, that are provided in Source Code, that is covered by (4) and (5) - you can ask money, as it is conveying itself and is accompanied by Source Code automatically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11411" LastEditorUserId="11411" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T11:03:14.940" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T11:03:14.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2019-09-24T12:06:14.287" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be helpful to provide the motivation for the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I run your application on my computer, I should be able to read the corresponding working source codes and modify them as needed. It recognizes the right of the computer owner to retain control over his computer, regarldess of the software he has installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not say code should be free. It does not say application should be free. It only says that if I provide you with binaries of my product, I must also give you sources that can be used to modify the product in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you have code under GPL, and you sell the application as an end product the customer runs on their own hardware, you must provide the sources to that customer. If you the code doesn't run on the customer's hardware, you don't have to provide sources. In examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a GPL-based PHP application that you're hosting, you don't need to provide the source codes to anyone (beyond the HTML/JS you run in the user's browser, of course)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a GPL-based desktop application, anyone who buys your application has the right to request the corresponding source codes. You can choose to bundle the source codes with the application, or have them available at request (for at least 3 years after the sale happens).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a non-GPL desktop application that uses a GPL-based web service you host on your own servers, you don't need to provide source codes to anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should clarify the requirements and rights you have as developed of GPL-based software. But it doesn't end there, of course. Any of the customers who run your code on their own hardware:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can take the GPL program you sold them, and distribute it further with or without any modifications of their own, and sell them for whatever price they want. The only requirement is that the copyright notice isn't removed (i.e. you can't take random GPL code and say it's your work) and all of the license and notices stays in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&#xA;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do modify the code, and release your modified version, you still must include all of the notices, along with extra notices that you made some modifications, and when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use any GPL-based application without accepting the GPL license, since that doesn't infringe on the original copyright. To redistribute and modify the work, you need to accept and follow the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for a final summary of what is probably important to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I buy a piece of software from you and install it on my own computer, I have every right to redistribute your piece of software further, at a profit to myself, without giving you a notice or any licensing fees. You must also provide source codes to me if I ask for them, and I can modify the application any way I want, as long as the notices stay, and the whole work is under GPL. I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have automatic access to any further updates, either for new binaries or source codes, and there's no requirement for you to support my modified or redistributed versions of your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, this is why commercial GPL works are usually either 1) services you do not run on your computer or 2) free, but with paid support. If I wanted to, I could order every single piece of GPL software on the market, and release it for free to everyone in the world, including the source codes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2364" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T12:06:14.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2019-09-24T17:11:00.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've read that GPLv3 imposes that we should make the source code of our app available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 says that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you want to &lt;em&gt;redistribute&lt;/em&gt; the app, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you need to also provide the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt;, you as the original author are not bound by the license. So, you don't need to provide the source code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes no sense to do that, but it is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T17:11:00.390" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-09-25T03:36:06.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the United States, you can ignore these alleged restrictions. Those statements are simply notices. They are not binding on you because you have not agreed to them. A notice cannot take away any right you would otherwise have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A book cannot contain a &quot;license page&quot; that says you may not read the book on Thursdays and have that &quot;license&quot; be enforceable. That's simply not the way copyright works in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own something, you can do anything you want with it unless a law says you can't do it or you agreed not to do it. You own the piece of software and you haven't made any agreements not to do things with it. So that means you can do anything copyright law doesn't say you can't do. You need the copyright holder's permission to do any of those things and the copyright holder can impose conditions &lt;em&gt;on only those things that you need their permission to do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 106&lt;/a&gt;, you'll see things like producing derivative works and distributing copies. And that's why the GPL can put restrictions on producing derivative works and distributing copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at those restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; is for research purposes only.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nope, ordinary use is a right of possession in the United States. A copyright holder can't impose requirements on mere use of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; CAN NOT be used for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, ordinary use is a right of possession, even commercial use unless you're performing the work publicly, which wouldn't apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; SHOULD NOT be used for medical purposes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The authors  WILL NOT be responsible for using  in medical conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, you should check with a lawyer. But at least in my non-professional opinion, none of these restrictions are unforceable in the United States unless you agree to them being made enforceable by agreeing to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T07:12:22.807" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T07:12:22.807" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8844" CreationDate="2019-09-25T06:02:34.373" Score="2" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if I can use the official Tomcat Docker image from docker hub for commercial purpose without becoming liable to purchase a license or anything from Oracle or some other company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Oracle Linux have any licensing implications for commercial use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tomcat Image&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/tomcat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/tomcat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenJDK image &lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/openjdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/openjdk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16144" LastEditorUserId="16144" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T06:40:51.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:22:54.093" Title="Licencing Question: Tomcat docker image is built from openjdk:13-jdk-oracle and that is inturn is built from oraclelinux:7-slim" Tags="|java|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8843" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:22:54.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both projects have a licensing statement for the image (on each page you link above, scroll down to &quot;License&quot;) and both are a bit of a cop-out.  They are clear that Apache Tomcat is licensed under Apache v2 (surprise!) and that OpenJDK is licensed under GPLv2 (with the added classpath exception).  They also note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a great example of buck-passing and one of many reasons why &lt;strong&gt;containers are not a good format for distributing software&lt;/strong&gt;.  But coming back to your question, the licences on the two key parts (tomcat and the openjdk) permit commercial use.  Because of the classpath exception in the OpenJDK's licence, you may (for example) choose to treat the combined whole under the Apache licence, which is pretty business-friendly and imposes few obligations on you besides a patent grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it turns out there's other weirdly-licensed rubbish buried in either docker image, that's your problem, but it's probably only an issue if you choose to redistribute, rather than use, and although your question isn't clear, I don't get the impression you intend to do that.  Personally, I'd advise you to get an actual sysadmin, and install docker and dependencies directly on a maintainable platform of your choice.  But that's not an issue for this site; from a licensing standpoint, I don't see any reason you can't build your company's web offering on top of Tomcat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oracle Linux is a completely separate thing, a distribution maintained by Oracle, and has no bearing on your question.  And as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:22:54.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7378" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:31:48.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is GPL “for research purposes only” self-contradictory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But I am not a lawyer and not your lawyer.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important insight is the notion of copyright. It also applies to the text of the GPL license. Please read &lt;em&gt;carefully&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK, the GPL license text is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;allowed&quot; to be modified and still called GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe that the text of GPLv3 is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA licensed&lt;/a&gt;. So copyright rules apply to that text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you need to &lt;strong&gt;ask &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:31:48.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T09:59:01.757" Score="3" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to develop a ffmpeg filter to have an easier and better integration of the ffmpeg functionalities in case of complex command lines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine an ffmpeg command line in which you can configure a filter that will use to configure a 3rd party executable to fork and use named pipe to pass video through that external tools. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically I can write it, but the question is, is it legal from FFMPEG license point of view (FFMPEG can be GPL or LGPL depending of how it has been built). As far as I understand, if I have an executable called &quot;my_video_transformation.exe&quot; (no relationship with ffmpeg, it just read input pipe and write to output pipe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's ok for a user to run the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(FFMPEG GPL or LGPL).exe decoding_args | my_video_transformation.exe | (FFMPEG GPL or LGPL).exe encoding_args &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's not ok if a user can run something similar to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(FFMPEG GPL or LGPL).exe filter=&quot;my_video_transformation.exe&quot; transcoding_args&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from my understanding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as you write in a GPL or LGPL executable something that can fork and communicate with 3rd party and by the way maybe a commercial executable, it doesn't respect the license ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe not the correct place to ask, but would like to have some feedback before starting that project. FFMPEG dev community will reject my code proposal if it's not legal or even border line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16148" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T20:15:16.250" Title="Legal consideration before development of a FFMPEG filter using named pipe for I/O to any forked program and" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8811" CreationDate="2019-09-25T11:43:45.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @MadHater showed it is possible to publih under both of them and let user choose, which one use. (Selling car for 1K$ or for motorcycle - your chose)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Author you can publish your code under any number of (possibly incompatible) licences, but at the moment of transaction the user have to choose, which one to pick and be bounded to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can go to local market, put a table there marked &quot;Gilhad superior util, now in many versions avaiable&quot; and place few stacks of CDs there, marked like &quot;1$ GL-2&quot;, &quot;2$ GL-2 (with free brownie)&quot;, &quot;0$ GL-2 (if you smile on me)&quot; &quot;1$ GPL3&quot; &quot;1$ GL3 or later&quot;, &quot;$100 proprietary with super duper restrictions a funny necktie included&quot;, &quot;0$ MIT&quot; .... and containing the same code with just different Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Customers come and take, what they want and if they use it, they are bouded by respective licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some may even came, take one with GPL-2 (and give me a smile to have it free) and one with MIT, than compare it at home to see, thay are the same, except licence, duplicate that and put they table &quot;Fergo's copies of Gilhad superior util, now in many versions avaiable - we have nice T-shirts too&quot; with &quot;2$ GPL-2&quot; and &quot;0$ MIT&quot; stacks of CDs with respective licencies there (as long, as they stick to their promises and licencies :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also can fix all my typos and add some their work and make table with &quot;Fergo's copies of Gilhad superior util with fixed all typos, now in many versions avaiable&quot; and put again  &quot;2$ GPL-2&quot; and &quot;0$ MIT&quot; stacks of CDs with respective licencies there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you can make nice website and put it there to download, taking my utils from old middleages to hot future :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11411" LastEditorUserId="11411" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T11:51:05.443" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T11:51:05.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8812" CreationDate="2019-09-25T12:56:58.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be wrong, but &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the scheme is GPLv3 work based on other GPLv3 work (and added work) and is software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;compiling the software you get netlist, which is data (object form) of such scheme so it is GPLv3 too&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;from here I am not sure&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the PCB layout si based on the netlist and could be considered &quot;Instalation Information&quot; in making specific PCB, while if would be Source/Object code in order to make another PCB Layout.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so if you provide the Layout as &quot;Instalation Information&quot; to PCB making company, with restriction only to follow it to install the netpart to copper traces on PCB you are not bounded to provide it to PCB users, as there is no way to change the copper traces (as is no way to instal something to ROM) on the finished PCB. (part (6) in GPLv3, which ends with &lt;code&gt;...ROM)&lt;/code&gt;), if you make contract with the factory, that the factory works (create your PBCs) on your behalf only and is not entitled to convey your work to enyone else (the 2. paragraph of part (2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not&#xA;      convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains&#xA;      in force.  You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose&#xA;      of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or &lt;strong&gt;provide you&#xA;      with facilities for running those works&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that you comply with&#xA;      the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do&#xA;      not control copyright.  Those thus making or running the covered works&#xA;      for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction&#xA;      and control, on &lt;strong&gt;terms that prohibit them from making any copies of&#xA;      your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but if you publish your Layout so it could be used by others it still be &lt;code&gt;covered work&lt;/code&gt; and so entitled the Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11411" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T12:56:58.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T15:02:30.450" Score="6" ViewCount="1060" Body="&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A hardware device has closed-source firmware running inside it (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; based on any open-source code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computer software to &lt;em&gt;update&lt;/em&gt; the hardware's firmware exists, with a GPLv3 license.  It takes a binary firmware image file and writes it without any modification to the hardware.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the GPL software to recognize the hardware, the GPL software must be modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a zip file is distributed with these things inside it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Binary for customer to run, compiled from the modified GPL software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A nested zip file with source code for modified GPL software, to meet GPL requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Binary firmware image for the hardware, without any source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that legal?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL license &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;infect&lt;/a&gt;&quot; the binary firmware image, so that the entire zip file is considered a derivative work, and therefore requires that the hardware's source code &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be distributed under GPL?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the binary firmware image considered a separate work and can be distributed alongside it without any licensing issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9996" LastEditorUserId="9996" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T18:42:20.017" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T09:34:51.773" Title="Does distributing GPL software along with binary image force the binary image to be GPL too?" Tags="|gpl|binaries|firmware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2019-09-26T02:29:31.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone that asks, and is entitled to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distributor must make the source code available, so if you pass it on, you must be able to supply that source on demand, not just at the time of distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not acceptable to point them to an upstream distributor, because your act of distribution resets the clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise you do not have to provide source to anyone further downstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it become tricky is the interpretation of distribution. If you provide a GPLv3'd script that downloads &quot;other&quot; packages, are &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; distributing?  What about providing a baseline of an upstream application that subsequently pulls updates?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are only obliged to keep the baseline source as that is what you supplied. The &quot;updates&quot; are not &quot;distributed&quot; by you. Keeping the non-GPL'd components clearly separate to avoid tainting of either is prudent as well. Certainly do not ship anything pirated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also really provide any build materials, such as make-files and commands. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be sure when you support anyone ($), that you specify you are not asking for source, as some people will mail this to you on CD or flash drive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't imagine selling a 15 year old car and then having to supply source code for the GPS Navigation system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4401" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T02:29:31.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8819" CreationDate="2019-09-26T14:05:48.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does renaming compiled Java packages violate the Apache license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, as long as you provide appropriate notice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is my problem, I only change the bytecode so there is no (sensible) way to put a notice in there, at least not in a readable form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You do not need to put the notice in the bytecode&lt;/strong&gt;. You simply need to inform your users that you have modified the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license specifically mentions modified files, and the intent here as seen in the clause above is for you to provide notices in &lt;em&gt;Source form&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8833/8868&quot;&gt;the other answer&lt;/a&gt;, already provides a clear solution for how to accomplish this, it is not quite accurate regarding the requirements of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T14:05:48.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-26T23:29:15.063" Score="5" ViewCount="3732" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I change the copyright holder name when using a project of MIT license ? Example: Changing 'john' to 'Justin' in below license ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2018 john&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Follow up questions :&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I do some modifications on the code and then change the name to my own name ? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;what kind of flexibility does MIT license allow in terms of changing the license text ? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If that is not possible , can I change the whole license from MIT to something like GPL3 ? What are the implications ? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16165" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T06:58:27.373" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T06:58:27.373" Title="Can I change the copyright holder name and year of an MIT license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8853" CreationDate="2019-09-27T06:21:05.973" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I do some modifications on the code and then change the name to my own name ? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes to the modifications, no to the change.  As the licence says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As now both you &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the original author have a copyright interest in the software, you should &lt;strong&gt;add&lt;/strong&gt; a line that says, eg,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 Natesh Bhat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That both honours your obligation to include the original copyright notice, and includes your new notice under the same protections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;what kind of flexibility does MIT license allow in terms of changing the license text? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not much; see &quot;&lt;em&gt;this permission notice shall be included&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  The original author has allowed you to do pretty much whatever you want with the code, provided you honour two conditions (retain his/her copyright notice, retain the text of the MIT licence).  They're not onerous conditions, so it's simplest to honour them - and if you don't, you lose the rights to use, copy, modify, etc. the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If that is not possible, can I change the whole license from MIT to something like GPL3 ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we move onto contentious ground.  As I write at more length &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4149/can-one-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl/4194#4194&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I believe that you can use that code as part of a greater whole, all of which is under the &lt;strong&gt;combined&lt;/strong&gt; terms of &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; the MIT &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the GPLv3 licences, which in practice means &quot;&lt;em&gt;under the terms of GPLv3, which include keeping copyright statements and the licence text intact&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  This is not dual-licensing, where the recipient picks which to honour; it is a requirement to honour the terms of both licences with respect to the resulting code.  As you can read elsewhere in the linked question, this position is not universally held.  I'm not aware of anywhere that this has been tested in court, so &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; statements on the subject are primarily theoretical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T06:21:05.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8849" CreationDate="2019-09-27T09:21:03.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;the output of a piece of software is not covered by the piece of software's licence&lt;/a&gt;, because the output is not a derivative work of the piece of software.  Using a GPL-covered program to upload a firmware blob no more forces the firmware blob to be GPL'ed than using a GPL-covered file transfer program to upload your photograph requires freely-licensing the image, or using a GPL-covered web server to serve your audio files to customers requires that your audio be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: yes, it's legal.  No, the GPL doesn't &quot;infect&quot; like that.  The blob is considered a separate work and be aggregated alongside the GPL program, for example in a zipfile, without issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as an aside, words like &quot;infect&quot; should be avoided in this context - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scare-quoted&lt;/a&gt; or otherwise - because they can be seen as legitimising some of the giant piles of FUD that commercially-interested parties have been dumping on the free-software landscape over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-09-27T09:34:51.773" LastActivityDate="2019-09-27T09:34:51.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-27T21:14:58.027" Score="0" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as i understand, the AGPL license permits me to use the library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Corvusoft/restbed&lt;/a&gt;) for a server that faces the web and is publicly accessable, as long as the server it's self's source is publicly available  under the same license (AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My web microservice framework would be open source under the same license and would use the library but i would write modules for it as a developer would for any framework. I do not intend to open source the modules i write in any way. Modules would also be written by the users of the framework and hosted by the framework interfacing with the library but not distributed with either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the data is passed to the modules and stuff, it is manipulated from the form that the library generates. So the code does not directly interface with the AGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am i ok for the modules to be closed-source as long as the framework that uses it is also open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16172" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:46:10.650" Title="AGPL used with a modular framework, modules are not open source" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8856" CreationDate="2019-09-28T05:46:10.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to plugins, there are no differences between the GPL and AGPL license. Just read AGPL where the FAQ entries refer to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#GPLAndPlugins&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for determining when plug-ins and a main program are considered a single combined program and when they are considered separate works&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way. A main program that is separate from its plug-ins makes no requirements for the plug-ins. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, this means that Modules of your framework can only have a GPL-incompatible license if they are separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T05:46:10.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8860" CreationDate="2019-09-28T08:12:42.673" Score="3" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I made an application using Qt's QML language and I didn't have a commercial license, am I required to disclose the whole source code for said application or just the modules I modified (if I even modified them to begin with)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, if I just use the QML language and the LGPL modules without modifying their source code, am I required to disclose &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; source anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As am example, I wrote ApplicationX using Qt Quick/QML/etc but I didn't modify the source of the modules I used. I just used it to write an application, am I then required to disclose ApplicationX's source code if I release the binary to the public? Or can I just release the source code of the (unmodified) modules I used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16175" LastEditorUserId="16175" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T21:38:00.197" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T08:24:57.697" Title="If I wrote software using QML and the community version of Qt, am I required to disclose the source code of the whole software?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8858" CreationDate="2019-09-28T16:34:24.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you write an application in the QML language, there's a strong argument to be made that your application is not derived from Qt so that the Qt license has no effect over your code. You can freely decide what you do with your source code and whether you want to disclose it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This changes if you combine your application with Qt software into a single program, and give someone else a copy of that combined program. Since that combined program contains Qt software, you will need to comply with that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the LGPL, this involves providing the corresponding source code of the LGPL-covered parts, even if you did not modify them. You must also make it possible for recipients to modify the LGPL-covered parts. One way to satisfy that requirement is to  provide source code for the entire program. But in general, the LGPL does not require you to publish source code for the entire program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this depends mostly on how you will distribute your QML application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T16:34:24.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-28T20:26:00.610" Score="6" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a lotta docs written in reST (note &lt;em&gt;docs&lt;/em&gt;, not docstrings in code) to which I'd like to add (depending on the work) one or more of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyright notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license badge/icon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know, are there established conventions for this? Particularly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing this will involve adding to the doc(s) one or more &lt;a href=&quot;http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reST directives&lt;/a&gt;, and furthermore probably&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#meta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;meta&lt;/code&gt; directive&lt;/a&gt; with one or more fields for the copyright notice, license name, license URI, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;(if badging)&lt;/em&gt; an &lt;a href=&quot;http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#image&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;image&lt;/code&gt; directive&lt;/a&gt; with a field containing the standard URI for the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those assumptions are correct, my question becomes: are there canonical fieldnames for each of these data? If not in reST/docutils, are there fieldnames in {canonical, accepted, wide} use in a related domain, like a reST extension (e.g., Sphinx) or a related markup (e.g., Markdown)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16179" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T03:12:36.377" Title="How to add {copyright, license, etc} to restructuredText source?" Tags="|license-notice|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8858" CreationDate="2019-09-29T08:24:57.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No Free or Open Source licence compels you to publish, even if you make changes to the original. They only set rules about how to publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the Open Source and Free Software definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T08:24:57.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8865" CreationDate="2019-09-30T13:36:19.547" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a commercial project which connects to a database (e.g. PostgreSQL) all licences are agreed at this moment. What should I do if I alter the database server with GPL (version 3 to be concrete) library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the library, for example, affects only the database - improves performance or security of the server)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16187" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T16:46:39.837" Title="Using GPL modified system software in commercial projects" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8864" CreationDate="2019-10-01T16:46:39.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though IANAL/IANYL, this seems a bit of a thorny one to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You currently distribute your proprietary software (&quot;your offering&quot;) alongside stock Postgres, with which your software interacts through JDBC.  You are happy that this is all permissible via the current licensing arrangements, though you don't say why (I don't doubt you, but it makes a difference; see below).  You intend to modify the Postgres DB by linking in a GPLv3 library, whose authorship is unclear, and you wonder about the implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postgres is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently distributed&lt;/a&gt; under a permissive (non-copyleft) open source licence.  Currently, therefore, you acquire no particular source distribution obligations of any kind by virtue of either your distribution of, or your offering's interaction with, Postgres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you link a GPLv3 library into Postgres and distribute the resulting binary, the binary will need to be under GPLv3 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s6, s5c).  You have now acquired the obligation to distribute the entire source of Postgres, also under GPLv3, according to the terms of GPLv3 s6.  Furthermore, if you were relying on the non-copyleft licence of Postgres to avoid any obligation to distribute the source of your offering (rather than any arms-length relationship between your offering and Postgres introduced by the use of the standard interface that JDBC provides) you have now acquired an obligation to licence your offering under GPLv3 also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at the very least you now have a giant ongoing source distribution obligation which you did not previously have, and this may extend to the code of your offering.  I advise you not to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T16:46:39.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="297" CreationDate="2019-10-01T22:51:44.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is personal property. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be bought and sold like any other property – a house, a car, a pen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference with copyright and other personal property is that it’s intangible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Houses (and the land they are on) are a type of property named “real property”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, real property is the land. The house is “attached” to the land (by being built on it) and therefore for legal purposes becomes part of the land. The house is inseparable from the land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cars and pens are choses in possession, or chattels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are things you can touch, pickup and hold, which aren’t land or things affixed to land, like houses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intellectual property rights are intangible rights. You can’t touch them. They’re incorporeal rights, although it’s not fashionable to call them that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More technically, copyright along with the other intellectual property rights are choses in action. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As choses in action they’re like a debt: they can only be enforced by legal proceedings. They’re a legal fiction: they only exist in law, unlike your pen or house. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you know, copyright protects source code. It also protects the written word in books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you walk into a bookstore and buy a book, you’re buying the printing copy of the book. You’re not buying the copyright in the book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buying the copyright in a book means that you are able to exercise the exclusive rights of the copyright owner of the written word in the book. In this context, that means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copy the book;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;authorise others to copy the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source code is protected in the precisely the same way as books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s because the written words in books are the same type of copyright work as source code: literary works.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, the written words which make up the source code is the form of a work protected by copyright: a literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all intellectual property rights, copyright vests in the work itself to protect it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might imagine the book or the source code soaked (like a sponge soaks up water) in copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for so long as copyright subsists in the source code, it is soaked in intellectual property rights; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when the term of copyright protection expires (think 70+ years from the time it is created), the source code is no longer soaked in copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point in time, the source code is no longer soaked in copyright and it's no longer protected by copyright. Anyone can:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copy it, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;issue copies of it to the public, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rent copies to the public, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make copies available to the public; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;edit it, and/or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give permission to others to perform the acts above in respect of the copyright work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've probably heard some of those terms in the context of copyright, or similar terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're some of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner: the rights which the copyright owner gets as a result of ownership of the copyright. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A licence is a grant of a permission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;granted verbally;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;granted in writing; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;implied by law; and/or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;supported by contractual consideration or not; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exclusive, non-exclusively or sole&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owner of copyright is the owner of the exclusive rights granted by copyright (some which are listed above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s say I own some land. I can give permission to somebody or lots of people to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enter onto the land. I can specify the time of day they can enter onto the land&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the time by which they must leave&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what they need to wear (or not) when they enter into the land.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;limit which parts of the land they can go to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with copyright works (ie literary works, artistic works et al), such as literary works that I own. I can carve up the permissions however I like as copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maximum length of a licence to use a copyright work – if it’s written properly - will only last for the term of copyright, and no longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after all of that, the answer to your question is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are aspects of the same thing; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;they serve two different populations or markets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.  copyright owners; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b.  people that want to use the copyright work, ie licensees.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastEditorUserId="14085" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T15:24:54.390" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T15:24:54.390" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6233" CreationDate="2019-10-01T23:30:00.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be confidential information (and probably a trade secret too) and protectable on that basis - GPLv2 or no GPLv2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remedy against the thief is known as a springboard injunction whether the confidentiality had been lost or not by the exposure to the public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, once the members of the public that had obtained a copy from the thief or through the thief (ie an intermediary) had been notified that it was confidential information, they'd be in the firing line as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because it was exposed to the public as you say doesn't necessary result in a loss of confidentiality (in UK law at least). There's not enough information in your question to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd add that any licence in this case is probably tainted - permission under the GPLv2 isn't given by the copyright owner. No copyright owners (the company that developed it) gave the licence contemplated by GPLv2, because it didn't distribute it in the first place. The thief did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14085" LastEditorUserId="14085" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T15:31:29.767" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T15:31:29.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-02T02:27:32.353" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source code of this binary is under GPL V2. In my software, I didn't use its code, I just execute this binary to do some tasks, nothing more. Is it legal? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16197" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T02:27:32.353" Title="Can I put a GPL licensed binary file in my proprietary software?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-10-03T16:50:23.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-02T18:37:12.137" Score="5" ViewCount="1846" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was intending on using a GPLv3 licensed JavaScript library on a website I'm developing for a client. This library would be part of the theme. Will this necessarily make the entire them GPLv3 so my client would have to release the source to every visitor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make any difference if the intended use is for a company wide intranet site and will not be of public use outside employees and contractors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16200" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T06:40:38.483" Title="Can I use a GPLv3 JavaScript library on a website I'm developing for a client?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-02T20:29:58.500" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a project with an AGPLv3 license. In another repo I am creating the documentation associated to the previous project and the template (in LaTeX) used for the documents is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. I did the template along with another partner. The documentation includes user manual, physics and architecture of the different modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any incompatibility issue if I will put an AGPLv3 license in the repo which contains the documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16199" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T10:01:40.170" Title="AGPL project with AGPL documentation and templates with CC by-nc-sa 3.0" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8877" CreationDate="2019-10-02T22:12:18.587" Score="36" ViewCount="2165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that Company A is an online platform which hosts user-generated content, and to do so Company A requires in its ToS that users license said content publicly under Creative Commons License X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further than that, say that, at some point, Company A releases those contributions under a more permissive license, Creative Commons License Y, in a way that goes beyond the permissions granted by the copyright holder. (For the purposes of this question, assume that (i) the licenses are incompatible, and (ii) the ToS does not give permission to license the content under license Y.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, moreover, say that some third party, Website B, pulls that content and hosts it, with correct attributions, under License Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where does that leave everybody in terms of license violations?&lt;/strong&gt; Company A is definitely in breach of the license terms for its incorrect distribution of the works, but is Website B liable for its redistribution under License Y, given that they got it from Company A, making the fair assumption that their distribution under those terms was appropriate? Is Company A liable for the downstream redistributions of the works by other actors? What recourse do the copyright holders have to stop distribution of the works under License Y from those downstream actors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep answers general as regards to the licenses X and Y -- the change could be something as noxious as going from CC BY-NC-ND to CC BY, but also a smaller violation, such as a switch to a later (but incompatible) version of the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16001" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T19:47:23.773" Title="What are the consequences for downstream actors of redistributing a work under a wider CC license than the copyright holder authorized?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8871" CreationDate="2019-10-03T03:50:04.127" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Company A violated the license by redistributing in a manner they were not licensed to do so when they changed from CC X to CC Y. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company B thought they were doing a permitted thing by taking what turned out to be incorrectly / illegally licensed, but thought doesn't count, so they have no right to redistribute and so they too would be in violation of various copyright laws for any redistribution.  However in a just world they would only be told to cease and desist, and not face any penalties unless they do not C&amp;amp;D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is like buying a car off Craigslist for $1000 and going to register it at the DMV and finding out it was stolen a few years ago when they run the VIN on it.  You lose the car, you probably lose $1k, and you get nothing.  But at least you don't go to jail for grand theft auto either :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7665" LastEditorUserId="16211" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T16:50:01.460" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T16:50:01.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8870" CreationDate="2019-10-03T07:46:07.270" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any incompatibility issue if I will put an AGPLv3 license in the repo which contains the documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think so. But only if you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create some LICENSE-README document clarifying that your intention is to license code as AGPL and to license documentation as BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For each and every document where it'd be hard to tell if they are code or documentation (e.g. large snippet embedded or elsewhere included with the documentation), the actual license is explicit in a clearly identifiable header.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T07:46:07.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6676" CreationDate="2019-10-03T08:10:34.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you using the dotnet core? You can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/csproj#packagelicensefile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PackageLicenseFile&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/csproj#packagelicenseurl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PackageLicenseUrl&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Also, related with Assembly information you have this &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/csproj#assemblyinfo-properties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Assembly Info Properties&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this information is related to the new &lt;code&gt;.csproj&lt;/code&gt; structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16185" LastEditorUserId="16185" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T09:52:01.493" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T09:52:01.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8869" CreationDate="2019-10-03T08:18:31.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a GPLv3 licensed library in the front-end of a website/webapp, then the entire front-end code must be released under the GPLv3 license, when that front-end code is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key here is that the source code must only be made available if the code is distributed. For purposes of copyright, a company making software available to its employees for work-related purposes does not count as distribution of the software. This means that if the GPL library is used for an intranet site, then the source does not have to be made available, not even to the employees of the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T08:18:31.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8876" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T10:15:41.893" Score="0" ViewCount="2456" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I statically link Apache2/ISC/MIT/BSD licensed libraries to my project that is under GPL (v3 because I've learned that v2 isn't compatible with Apache2) and create an executable binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's assume I've written all the code in the project and hold all the copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'll be hosting the project (open source) on GitHub and distributing binaries from some place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to statically link some Apache2/MIT/BSD licensed libraries due to some technical limitations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project itself does not have any of the non GPL licensed code. It only references the libraries which are then linked in at compile time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16206" LastEditorUserId="16206" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T12:09:59.903" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T12:18:52.200" Title="Can I statically link Apache2/MIT/BSD licensed code into my GPLv3 licensed code?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8871" CreationDate="2019-10-03T11:38:37.997" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Company A is certainly liable for their misrepresentation of licensing terms. However, that does not legally excuse Company B's downstream distribution under those wrong terms; they have (accidentally) committed copyright infringement as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, copyright infringement is a strict liability tort, meaning that Company B's ignorance and lack of ill intent is not automatically a defense. Company B could provide a defensive case based on the statutory defense of innocent infringement, however, which could reduce or (rarely) eliminate the amount of damages. In any case, it's certainly possible for a court to enjoin Company B to cease distribution immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if someone successfully collected monetary damages from Company B for their accidental infringement, Company B could very likely succeed in collecting that money back by suing Company A for their blatant misrepresentation of license terms that caused harm to Company B. (That's not a great situation -- the legal system is not fast or cheap -- but it does seem like an option likely to succeed in court.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T19:47:23.773" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T19:47:23.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8876" CreationDate="2019-10-03T11:48:22.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I statically link Apache2/ISC/MIT/BSD licensed libraries to my project that is under GPL (v3 because I've learned that v2 isn't compatible with Apache2) and create an executable binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD license requires you to add some messages to your binaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT license requires you to add some messages to your binaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache License version 2 requires you to add some messages to your binaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. [...]; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c. [...]; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d. If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="13042" LastEditDate="2019-10-03T12:18:52.200" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T12:18:52.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8880" CreationDate="2019-10-03T17:30:49.747" Score="2" ViewCount="1635" Body="&lt;p&gt;For trained a model I have used training data set covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD license&lt;/a&gt; and using a software covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to publish the pretrained model on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license should I apply to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16212" LastActivityDate="2021-10-12T12:59:15.780" Title="Licensing pretrained machine learning models" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8879" CreationDate="2019-10-03T17:54:53.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if a pretrained machine learning model is actually protected by copyrights or not. Copyright protection exists to protect the creators of creative works from having their work &quot;stolen&quot;, and I am not sure if training a ML model is an act of creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, assuming that a pretrained ML model is actually protected by copyrights, then it is more likely that the model is a derived work of the data set used for training than that it is a derived work of the software that uses the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software reads the model in as data, assuming that the software can be used with many differently trained models. In that case, the software and the model are considered completely independent works in the same way that MS Word and the documents you write with it are independent works for copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you want to publish the trained model with a license, I would recommend to use the BSD license that was also used for the training set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-03T17:54:53.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-03T14:14:37.140" Score="2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any licenses that allow anyone to distribute the source code, but pre-compiled binaries can only be publicly distributed by the original developer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Chris" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-10-04T04:40:22.493" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T10:10:10.970" Title="Are there any common software licenses which only allow distribution in source code form?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8883" CreationDate="2019-10-04T04:30:13.793" Score="1" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to open source my framework with Apache-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of dependencies with different licenses:&#xA;Most are Apache-2.0. There are a couple of exceptions:&#xA;(These licenses are listed from mvnrepository.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JAVAXB API&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CDDL 1.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Javax WS RS API&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EPL 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jersey Media JSON Jackson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0, EPL 2.0, GPL 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jersey Inject HK2 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0, BSD 2-clause, EDL 1.0, EPL 2.0, MIT, Public, W3C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jersey Container Grizzly2 HTTP &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0, BSD 2-clause, EDL 1.0, EPL 2.0, MIT, Public, W3C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I still be able to have a Apache 2.0 License? What would I be required to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16216" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T05:49:59.227" Title="License for a framework with multiple dependencies" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8882" CreationDate="2019-10-04T05:49:59.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The good news is that you can pick whatever license you would like for the code that you are writing. You're the author and owner, so you get to pick the license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you should still consider a license that is compatible with your dependencies and be aware of how the license of the dependencies can impact your code. So, for example, you can use Apache 2.0 and have a dependency that is GPL 3. Those two licenses are compatible. But be aware that, practically, it means that any one who uses your framework (and the dependencies) will need to license their project under the GPL 3. If you're picking Apache 2.0 because you want a permissive license, that may be a problem for you - even though your code is permissive, the GPL dependency carries through and the person/company using your framework will have to comply with the GPL 3. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other point to consider is ensuring that your license is compatible with the licenses for your dependencies. For example, the Free Software Foundation's position is that Apache 2.0 is not compatible with the GPL 2. This means that the user of your framework can't comply with both licenses. If they take that sort of thing seriously, it will mean they don't pick your framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T05:49:59.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2019-10-04T10:10:10.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, and it's basically Red Hat's business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can get the sources for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), thus satisfying Red Hat's obligations under the various versions of the GPL.  However, you can only get the binaries buy buying a licence from Red Hat, at which point you are required to agree not to redistribute the binaries.  This has not generally been felt to fall foul of the GPL, or any of the other free licences that apply to software in RHEL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only affects redistribution of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; compiled binaries.  You cannot prevent recipients of the source code from offering &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; pre-built binaries to the world, though you may require trademark material to be removed (hence, eg, CentOS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T10:10:10.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-04T11:44:35.860" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Red Hat has community and enterprise editions of it's application server. WildFly is licensed under LGPL. JBoss EAP is based on WildFly and costs a lot of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it possible that they don't provide JBoss EAP source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8814" LastEditorUserId="8814" LastEditDate="2019-10-04T12:41:05.460" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T12:08:26.570" Title="Community and enterprise editions of LGPL software" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|commercial|law|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8886" CreationDate="2019-10-04T12:48:04.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit more research shows that the previous version of my answer was based on an incorrect assumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JBoss EAP is actually also licensed under the LGPL license, sames as the WildFly product that it is based upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; require that source code is provided to the general public, nor that the software is provided at no cost. The requirement is that the source code is provided, at no &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; cost, to the customers that bought/obtained the software from you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the business model of Red Hat is slightly different from just selling software. They actually sell the software in combination with a support subscription. And without a valid support subscription, you can only turn to the (volunteer) community of WildFly to get your questions answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The support subscription is a regular contract between Red Hat and the customer and it is completely independent of the copyright licenses used for the software covered by the support subscription. This makes it uninteresting to try to obtain the JBoss EAP software from another source than Red Hat and there is no incentive to make an offering of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: The JBoss EAP source code &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; provided, but only the the customers of Red Hat that bought the software (along with a support package), and there is no incentive for the buyers of JBoss EAP to offer the software to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T12:08:26.570" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T12:08:26.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-07T00:54:04.730" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;What text in the GPL says that a GPL'd library really cannot be used in a non-GPL application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16243" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T16:25:24.357" Title="Can a GPL'd library really not be used in a non-GPL application?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8889" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-07T01:40:07.557" Score="2" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do open-source foundations have oodles and piles of cash lying around for patent trolls to scoop up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are open-source softwares licensed under the GPL not immune to patent trolls since there is no profit motive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16243" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T00:09:40.490" Title="What can a patent troll win by suing an open-source foundation e.g. GTK foundation?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8888" CreationDate="2019-10-07T06:14:46.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obligatory disclaimer: I am not any sort of lawyer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; details how to &quot;convey a work based on the Program&quot;.  Among other requirements is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend reading the definitions section, which I will not copy here for the sake of brevity, as it does clarify the use of some terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the GPL(v3) does not say that &quot;a GPL'd library really cannot be used in a non-GPL application&quot;. What it discusses is this idea of &quot;a work based on the Program&quot;, which is typically called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;derivative work&lt;/a&gt;. So, if a program P uses a library L, is P necessarily a derivative work of L? The Free Software Foundation would say yes. Unfortunately, the concept of a derivative work is not precisely defined. Although I am not aware of anyone who would argue that P is never a derivative work of L, some would argue that there are contexts in which P &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;may not necessarely constitute a derivative work&lt;/a&gt;. I would not recommend testing that. The particulars may depend on the laws of a specific jurisdiction, but that is a matter for lawyers to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, I can tell you with certainty that you would be in violation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#mission-statement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spirit of the license&lt;/a&gt;, and with that knowledge I hope you'll decide against trying to find some loophole (unless to aid in ensuring the license as written more accurately represents its intent in future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't really specify why you need to know, though, perhaps you want to distribute a library that can be incorporated into proprietary programs? If so, you may want to check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10789" LastEditorUserId="10789" LastEditDate="2019-10-09T16:25:24.357" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T16:25:24.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8894" CreationDate="2019-10-08T03:58:22.303" Score="0" ViewCount="835" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a piece of open source code that I want to use the AGPLv3 license, but at the same time, if a company pays a fee, I want to allow them to access the software using a much more permissive license such as the MIT license or the Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit unsure about a couple of things, though. Is this even allowed? Also, how does once apply this to your codebase? The standard practice is to have a LICENSE.txt file in the root of your project which (in my case) contains the AGPLv3 license text. It is also common practice to include a shorter version of the license text at the top of every source code file to emphasise which license applies to which files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to do this should I include two LICENSE.txt files in the root of my project and two shortened license headers at the top of each file and then in the readme state that the MIT license is only applicable if you pay a licensing fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how an open-source project handles this particular problem. Any help is appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10730" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T06:36:29.723" Title="Dual license open source software?" Tags="|mit|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8895" CreationDate="2019-10-08T04:05:50.647" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in the process of writing an open-source application. It is not yet ready for public consumption, but I am building up to releasing it. One thing I wondered was if you required contributors to your open source project to assign their copyright to the project and to disclaim all copyright claims by either themselves or their employers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the GNU website&lt;/a&gt;, it recommends that you do this.  What is the deal here? What is the majority thought on this particular issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10730" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-08T08:35:26.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T11:21:02.030" Title="Do you require contributors to your open source code to assign copyright?" Tags="|mit|copyright|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8889" CreationDate="2019-10-08T04:42:48.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fairly sure that the OSS &quot;foundations&quot; are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-profit organisations&lt;/a&gt; that collect funds to pay for site hosting and put extra money into paying developers for their time, this would leave little for any troll to collect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; section 11 specifies that a contributor grants a &lt;em&gt;royalty-free patent license&lt;/em&gt; which should prevent a patent troll from suing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T04:42:48.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8891" CreationDate="2019-10-08T06:36:29.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, dual-licensing is fine and uncontentious: as long as you own all the copyrights in this codebase, you can offer it to different recipients under different licences without issue.  Note this will require not accepting community contributions, or only doing so when a suitable Contributor Licensing Agreement, or a Copyright Transfer Agreement, is in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you probably don't want paying customers to get the product under the MIT licence, otherwise they can create an arbitrary number of copies and distribute them widely if they so choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One route is to take your product code and insert all the AGPLv3 headers, licence copies, and relevant statements, and you make that tarball available to the community under AGPLv3.  You then prepare a similar package without any of the liberal licensing inclusions, add a tiered support offering, and sell it at various price points.  The licence on the non-free offering usually permits the licensee to use the product in their business, and often in their own products (possibly not in unlimited quantities), but doesn't allow them to extend that licence to others.  Such a licence needs legal help to write properly, and being non-free, would be off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've got a big operation going you can free up only the main bit in the middle of the product (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-core&lt;/a&gt;) then add increasing amounts of peripheral product as the licence class and price increases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to see how people do this is to read the websites of people who are doing it.  The open-core article above links to a number of examples, and one of the earlier adopters of the nonfree-licence-for-a-price model was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/products/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T06:36:29.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8892" CreationDate="2019-10-08T11:21:02.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not necessary to have contributors assign their copyright to you, as long as the contributions are licensed under sufficiently permissive terms that permit you to use them and distribute them under (or compatibly alongside) your project's existing license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU project does this for at least two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holder can litigate against copyright infringement. If the GNU project didn't hold copyright on some piece of code within GNU software, they could not sue to stop a GPL violation on that piece of code.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A much more complex concern has to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;joint authorship&lt;/a&gt;, which occurs under special circumstances in some jurisdictions (including the United States). If certain conditions are met, then a work with multiple copyright holders can be unilaterally modified, distributed, and relicensed by any one copyright holder individually, sort of as if they were the only copyright holder. The law around this subject is complex and I'm not completely familiar with it, but this is very likely the complexity that GNU hopes to avoid by being the sole copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of having a university or employer disclaim copyright interest is in any case very important, since otherwise the contributor may not have the right to submit their contribution to you at all, because they have an employment contract that grants copyright control of works they create to a third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T11:21:02.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-09T16:02:39.080" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;As driverctl utility is LGPL compliant so what will happen if we change the code of driverctl ?&#xA;This is a ask from one of the client, so can anyone answer what will happen if we change the code of this utility ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16268" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T06:21:25.937" Title="LGPL: Can drivectl utility code be modified under LGPL license?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-09T19:25:53.197" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're trying to make sure future changes to a single page app (including perhaps adding a backend API) are GPL'd, is it sufficient to release the code under the GPL, or is the AGPL required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16270" LastActivityDate="2019-10-09T19:25:53.197" Title="Does GPL cover single page web apps fully" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T02:16:25.140" Score="1" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;If person A writes software and says &quot;I wrote it and this is my name&quot;, she can potentially be sued by a patent troll who says &quot;I invented the program statement and the variable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If person A writes software and says &quot;no one specific wrote it and there is no author's name to mention&quot;, she cannot be sued by a said disingenuous patent troll because she cannot be identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why ever put one's name on a piece of free software? And why apply a license to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16243" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T09:10:18.250" Title="If authors of open source software can be held liable for (accidentally) infringing (vaguely worded) software patents, why add one's name to it?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|patents|public-domain|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8896" CreationDate="2019-10-10T06:21:25.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that driverctl is indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/driverctl/driverctl/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;under LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;.  This was a licence in its own right (as opposed to LGPLv3, which is a permissions hack on top of GPLv3).  It says in s2 that you may modify the source, and that you may distribute modified copies provided that all of these conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a) The modified work must itself be a software library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices     stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no     charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) If a facility in the modified Library refers to a function or a     table of data to be supplied by an application program that uses     the facility, other than as an argument passed when the facility     is invoked, then you must make a good faith effort to ensure that,     in the event an application does not supply such function or     table, the facility still operates, and performs whatever part of     its purpose remains meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The normal interpretation of this is that you must release your modified version under LGPLv2.1.  On closer examination, however, (a) is a bit of a problem, because as far as I can tell &lt;code&gt;driverctl&lt;/code&gt; isn't a software library right now.  This isn't fatal for the original authors, because they aren't bound by the terms of their own licence, but it is a bit of a problem for you because, by the strict letter, you can only distribute a modified work based on &lt;code&gt;driverctl&lt;/code&gt; if you turn it into a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you have an out.  s3 of the LGPLv2.1 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation (and note, IANAL/IANYL) is that you receive the work under straight GLPv2.  You can then modify it to your heart's content, and distribute it as widely as you like, under the well-understood terms of GPLv2, which has no weird requirements about the function or nature of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T06:21:25.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8898" CreationDate="2019-10-10T09:10:18.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last question is the easiest.  You apply a licence to it because if you don't, the software is unusable.  Nobody else will have the right to run, copy, modify, or redistribute it, so nobody will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why you'd put your name on it, I agree that in theory some patent troll could sue you.  The thing is, patent trolls exist to make money via lawsuits.  It's the only reason they buy patent portfolios, and the only reason they sue based on those portfolios.  It's axiomatic in law that you don't sue a paper tiger; the moral satisfaction of getting a judgement in your favour when no money can be collected from the defendant is poor reward for human plaintiffs, and none whatsoever for corporate ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most ordinary free software developers simply aren't worth suing.  Only when the projects become successful and widely-adopted, and the code starts being distributed by third-parties, does any kind of any attractive target (ie, a corporate entity with a goodly chunk of VC money in the bank) pop up.  For this reason, companies that make distributions &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/714524/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have people whose job is&lt;/a&gt; to track patents that particular bits of free software might infringe, and keep those bits of free software out of the distro until the patents have expired (full disclosure: I wrote the linked article).  As you'll see from the link, some patents are known to have aggressive enforcement: yet even those active enforcers didn't bother to go after the original free software projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is a guarantee.  Some patent holder could get so angry that your &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt; infringes on his patent for enabling bars to baz that he decides to sue you (or initially more likely, send a cease-and-desist letter).  But history suggests that this doesn't happen much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T09:10:18.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8905" CreationDate="2019-10-10T13:32:18.087" Score="4" ViewCount="843" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my current understandig, both the Apache License version 2.0 and the BSD+Patent grant you a license to any patent that the software is using. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what situation is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSDplusPatent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD+Patent&lt;/a&gt; license preferred over the Apache License version 2.0, which is far more widely used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To complicate matters, it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://golang.org/PATENTS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golang&lt;/a&gt; uses a different version than the BSD+Patent published by the OSI. So what makes this modified version better than anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Golang:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional IP Rights Grant (Patents)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This implementation&quot; means the copyrightable works distributed by&#xA;  Google as part of the Go project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive,&#xA;  no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this&#xA;  section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell,&#xA;  import, transfer and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents&#xA;  of this implementation of Go, where such license applies only to those&#xA;  patent claims, both currently owned or controlled by Google and&#xA;  acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily&#xA;  infringed by this implementation of Go.  This grant does not include&#xA;  claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further&#xA;  modification of this implementation.  If you or your agent or&#xA;  exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of&#xA;  patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or&#xA;  counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of Go or&#xA;  any code incorporated within this implementation of Go constitutes&#xA;  direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent&#xA;  infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License&#xA;  for this implementation of Go shall terminate as of the date such&#xA;  litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD+Patent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (c)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;  modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, each copyright&#xA;  holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under&#xA;  this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge,&#xA;  royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the&#xA;  conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use,&#xA;  offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software,&#xA;  where such license applies only to those patent claims, already&#xA;  acquired or hereafter acquired, licensable by such copyright holder or&#xA;  contributor that are necessarily infringed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) their Contribution(s) (the licensed copyrights of copyright&#xA;  holders and non-copyrightable additions of contributors, in source or&#xA;  binary form) alone; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) combination of their Contribution(s) with the work of authorship&#xA;  to which such Contribution(s) was added by such copyright holder or&#xA;  contributor, if, at the time the Contribution is added, such addition&#xA;  causes such combination to be necessarily infringed. The patent&#xA;  license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the&#xA;  Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as expressly stated above, no rights or licenses from any&#xA;  copyright holder or contributor is granted under this license, whether&#xA;  expressly, by implication, estoppel or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DISCLAIMER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS&#xA;  &quot;AS IS&quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;  LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR&#xA;  A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT&#xA;  HOLDERS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,&#xA;  INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING,&#xA;  BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS&#xA;  OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND&#xA;  ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR&#xA;  TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE&#xA;  USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH&#xA;  DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15072" LastEditorUserId="15072" LastEditDate="2019-10-10T14:07:24.200" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T14:27:59.443" Title="What is the difference between the Apache License v2.0 and the BSD+Patent License?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-11T07:27:18.903" Score="15" ViewCount="5709" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a software that will be preinstalled in a headless PC. The user will see the &quot;output&quot; of the software processing (sent with a given protocol via ethernet), and can configure some parameters of the running app via web interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application have some proprietary processing code, uses some third party library (closed, precompiled libraries under BDS license to use third party hardware) and some LGPL libraries linked dinamically. To display/stream the mentioned web interface we would like to use a GPLv3 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How will this affect the rest of the software licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read several topics on this, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-use-gpl-libraries-in-a-closed-source-project-if-only-the-output-is-distrib&quot;&gt;one quite similar here&lt;/a&gt;. The main difference in my opinion is the fact that the poster is releasing a virtual machine image, that the user can install and use on his PC, while we are actually giving the user a &quot;black box&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked thread mentions the AGPL license, that in our case will probably put all the software under AGPL. But looks like the GPL won't do it, if I got it right. Or better, the GPL says that a software running on a server will not be affected by the license (right?). This seems to be actually the case. But we don't really have a server running the app, say, in our office, and the users are connecting to it; we are actually selling such server, that the users will have on their office (actually on their machinery), although they cannot do anything with it besides access the web interface and collect outputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to give you the big picture with a little simplfied example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an overtechnological thermostat. It's a device that runs Ubuntu Server. My app is running on it. It uses a third part library to access the thermal sensor and gather data. It does it sophisticated calc with my proprietary algorithm and controls the water eater. It displays the outputs and controls on a web interface for the user (no other way to access the system for the user); the interface display/streaming is done using a GPLv3 library. What licensing can be used for my software, in particular my algorithms? And what about third party closed libraries used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16285" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T13:40:33.800" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T08:33:26.553" Title="Use GPLv3 library in a closed system (no software distribution)" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2019-10-11T11:10:57.197" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;The premiss of your question is faulty, at least so far as the title.  You are selling a widget (in this case, a thermostat) which contains the binaries of Ubuntu Server and other pieces of free software, these all being covered by a variety of free licences.  &lt;strong&gt;This is distribution, plain and simple.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any software you are distributing, whether yours or someone else's, which is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, you must provide the source code or access thereto.  Your life will be simplest if you give each customer a DVD of all the relevant sources along with their widget, but you are permitted by GPLv2 s3b to provide a written offer, valid for at least three years, to provide the source on request. If you go down this path, and a customer requests it, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Oh come on, you bought this two years ago&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is not a sufficient reason not to have all those sources to hand and ready to ship.  Much of Ubuntu Server will fall into this category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any software covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, you must similarly provide source or (via s6b) a written offer to provide it on demand.  In addition, under the anti-Tivoisation provision of s6 you must also provide documentation and any relevant access tokens to permit the customer to install updated versions of any covered software, whether those updates are provided by you or created from the source by the customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The additional provisions of the AGPL aren't relevant here because the device doesn't &quot;&lt;em&gt;phone home&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - the server code ships on the widget.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your application, which links to a GPLv3 library, the question of whether or not your code must also be GPLv3 is unsettled.  You can find summaries of both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;pro&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat?rq=1&quot;&gt;con&lt;/a&gt; positions on this site.  My personal opinion is that dynamic linking does in nearly all cases create a derivative work, but that opinion is not universally held (and nor is any other on the subject).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software licensed on non-copyleft terms often carries labelling or licence-notice requirements, so you will probably need a good few pages of your thermostat manual to print all these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proprietary software which ships on the widget and which is &quot;&lt;em&gt;merely aggregated&lt;/em&gt;&quot; thereon carries no source distribution obligations.  The test for mere aggregation is often felt to be arm's-length execution via userspace.  Again, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/search?q=aggregation&quot;&gt;more detail&lt;/a&gt; about this can already be found on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T15:31:01.173" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T15:31:01.173" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8901" CreationDate="2019-10-11T14:27:59.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not see an objective reason why the BSD+Patent license would be better than the Apache 2.0 license, but there can be a ton of personal, subjective reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is (at least) one objective reason where the BSD+Patent license can be seen as inferior to the Apache 2.0 license, and that is when patent litigation is started. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent license of the Apache 2.0 license explicitly terminates when litigation over any patent held by the contributor is started, but that is not the case for the BSD+Patent license. &#xA;This means that if company A claims that you are infringing one of their patents, you can not deny them the use of your patents if they are licensed under the BSD+Patent license. This can give A a big competitive advantage over you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the patent license of Golang, I am not convinced that that license is really better. Except maybe for Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it only covers patents from Google. If someone else creates a derived work by adding code that is covered by a patent of their own, they don't automatically grant a patent license when distributing under the Golang license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, and I hope I am wrong about this, the patent license appears to be written such that it only covers the code when it is part of Golang and gets silently removed when the code is modified to implement a different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T14:27:59.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-11T15:31:45.957" Score="0" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;We got a notice from our internal legal team that we cannot use this react native component  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-activity-recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-activity-recognition&lt;/a&gt;) because it uses GPL License and that means when we distribute our mobile app we will also have to give away our source code. Is this true? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not doing any changes to that react-native-activity-recognition library, instead using as it is to integrate with other react native packages and build out our user facing app. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate if community can help us to sort this out, because that involve major change in our app and finding some alternatives. I would be very surprised that any mobile apps that uses this package have to give away their complete app source code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks and appreciate your support. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16288" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T06:11:17.317" Title="GPL2 and React Native Component License" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8906" CreationDate="2019-10-11T16:12:38.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. GPL case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Modification of the software is just additional and expansional requirement which says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EVEN&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;if you&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;DO NOT ONLY USING&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;this software&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ALSO MODIFYING&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;and enhancing it with your own labour and efforts it&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;MAKES NO DIFFERENCE&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;and anyway falls under the GPL license&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you use GPL modules as part of your product then your product falls under the GPL license and you must to follow the obligation. If GPL modules do useful work for your project (you include them in your product) so you need to contribute for that back to the society but without fair price judging - you just touched this and your project becomes GPL (that is why sometimes GPL called &quot;toxic&quot; license and makes people angry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. LGPL case&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Later, clever people balanced the pendulum with the LGPL (&lt;em&gt;Lesser GPL&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;library GPL&quot;) license which &lt;strong&gt;ALLOWS&lt;/strong&gt; you &lt;strong&gt;TO USE&lt;/strong&gt; open source software &lt;strong&gt;BUT&lt;/strong&gt; in a strictly defined way: &lt;strong&gt;in binary form as dynamically linked libraries&lt;/strong&gt;. In this case it seems like a separated software realms and satisfying both sides. (LGPL became a &quot;saviour&quot; or &quot;loophole&quot; for the proprietary projects)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that you &lt;strong&gt;CANNOT MODIFY&lt;/strong&gt; LGPL software, you &lt;strong&gt;CAN ONLY USE&lt;/strong&gt; it (as described above). &lt;em&gt;Using&lt;/em&gt; means that your project is not obliged for changing the license terms (as it should be in the case of GPL where you must fall your project under the GPL). If you change the LGPL software included in your project you must change the license agreement of your project accordingly with the LGPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16187" LastEditorUserId="16187" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T17:56:19.953" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T17:56:19.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2019-10-11T16:14:31.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the purpose of the GNU GPL (LGPL, 2 and 3) is to ensure that free software remains free. (so anyone who has a copy can run, modify, and share it forever)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the conditions of redistributing (for free or money) such software is that you provide the same access to the source code of whatever you're releasing under similar terms. (either the piece you licensed and used in the LGPL case, or the whole thing, in the GPL case)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you might expect, there's been a lot of attempts to circumvent this intent in the years after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like companies that exist to break the GPL's terms and get sued, but give their customers indemnity in their use of such software. (e.g. Novell)&#xA;Or devices which run free software, but refuse to be modified. (e.g. Android, Amazon Kindle, Tivo) (which is why GPL3 exists)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or running free software on a server, and charging for access to it. (e.g. Amazon with mongodb) (combated by AGPL. Though, I personally don't think SaSS should be used in most cases.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are describing seems to me like you want to avoid licensing problems by making the &quot;product&quot; a single unit which can't be modified. It does not. If there's GPL software in there, you need to abide by the license. Same as you would if you used any other copywritten material in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15687" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T16:14:31.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2019-10-11T17:34:29.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As MadHatter so expertly explained, the issue of whether or not linking to a GPL library constitutes a derivative work has not been settled.  For your purposes, you'll have to assume that it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; (just to be safe), and plan your product accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common way to deal with situations like this is to split your software up into pieces.  One of those pieces will be the GPL library and some non-proprietary parts of your code, just enough to make that piece operate on its own.  The proprietary parts of your program would communicate with the &quot;GPL-tainted&quot; parts of your program through some sort of user-space interface.  You still have obligations under the GPL to distribute source code, but only for the the code that's included in the module containing the GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question leaves out a lot of details, but it sounds like you may already have a situation like this.  You said that your device has a web interface, and that you would like to use a GPL library to &quot;display/stream&quot; that interface.  I don't know what exactly you mean by that, but a web interface is generally considered to be a clean breaking point between programs.  Since the web interface is usable all by itself, external software that happens to use that interface isn't automatically considered part of the same program.  If you're simply trying to make that web interface viewable somewhere else, then you should focus on writing a stand-alone program that uses that GPL library and works on any arbitrary web interface.  That would be an independent program, would inherit the GPL, and would require you to provide the source code.  All of your proprietary magic is on the other side of that web interface, however, so the GPL wouldn't apply there.  You'd have two completely independent programs that are usable on their own, and your device just so happens to use them both together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The devil's in the details, of course.  Considering there's a risk of having to publish what might be considered trade secrets, you really should run everything past a legal professional who knows the details of your product and its architecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T17:34:29.410" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8906" CreationDate="2019-10-12T06:11:17.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 s2b requires that any derivative work based on GPL code must be released &lt;em&gt;in its entirety&lt;/em&gt; under the GPLv2, which would mean giving your customers all the source code, and freedom to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether dynamic linking to a GPL library creates a derviative work of that library is an open question.  The position of the FSF is that it does, but since there is little or no case law on the question, the matter is capable of argument.  We have summaries of the reasons why &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;it should&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;it shouldn't&lt;/a&gt; on this site, but we can't give you a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your company's legal department has prohibited you from using the library, you might reasonably infer that they have at least some fear that the FSF are right.  Personally, I agree with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T06:11:17.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8913" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8914" CreationDate="2019-10-12T16:36:35.377" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I write some &lt;strong&gt;package manager&lt;/strong&gt; which will install, manage (start, stop, send commands, write configuration files etc.) binary programs distributed under various GPL licenses but not incorporate in my distribution. Can I license &lt;strong&gt;package manager&lt;/strong&gt; under my own license of choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16296" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T08:33:21.793" Title="Can GPL2/3 software installer have custom license?" Tags="|gpl|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8913" CreationDate="2019-10-13T08:33:21.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You propose to write a piece of glueware which on one end is designed to interface with a variety of standard free software publishing sites (github, gitlab, sourceforge, etc.) and download software from them, internally refactor it, then present it on the other end to the user's standard system software installer (apt, yum, dnf, etc.).  You want to know if the licensing of your glueware will be affected by the software it installs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, no, I believe it will not.  Taking a Red Hat distro as an example, &lt;code&gt;yum&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is licensed&lt;/a&gt; under GPLv2, but is used to install software with many licenses, including software under other versions of the GPL, under non-copyleft free licences, and proprietary software.  More generally, the licence of a program doesn't bleed to either its inputs or outputs, so one could similarly have a proprietary installer which installed free software.  As long as you are not conveying free software, but merely providing code which allows the end-user to convey it to him or herself, then I don't immediately anticipate problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T08:33:21.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-13T21:39:34.320" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;An AGPL licensed web application I'm interested in using has the following stipulations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Pursuant to section 7 3(b) of the GNU AGPL you must retain the original {{package}} logo when distributing the software. If the display of the logo in its graphic form is not reasonably feasible for technical reasons, you must include the words &quot;Powered by {{package}}&quot; in every copy of the program you distribute. Pursuant to Section 7 3(e) we decline to grant you and rights under trademark law for use of our trademarks&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concerns with this are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the requirement to display a logo or specific string rather than just the name of the project a &quot;reasonable legal notice&quot; as discussed in the section of the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since logos are trademarks and they explicitly disallow use of trademarks, would the effect be to limit commercial use of this package thus removing one of the fundamental freedoms? The software is provided as SaaS by the original authors, so the result limits competition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16312" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T10:39:23.443" Title="Displaying a logo as attribution" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2019-10-14T05:29:11.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just wanted to point out that you shouldn't needlessly distribute DVDs when the vast majority of people will never look at the source, and a large portion don't even have a DVD drive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the rest of your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modifications to a GPLv3 licensed source code must be released under GPLv3. If you didn't modify the library you do not have to license your code under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The source code must be public whenever it is distributed. You are distributing the GPLv3 code , so you need to make it public--be it by a web link or including the source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A derivative work is one that includes aspects of the original. Libraries are software packages utilized by calling their public interfaces. Using a library for its intended purpose without modification is not derivation. That would be like saying a song is a derivative of the instruments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would have replied with this post but you need 50 karma before you can comment)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is an article by Lawrence Rosen&lt;/a&gt; about what derivative software is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The meaning of derivative work will not be broadened to include software created by linking to library programs that were designed and intended to be used as library programs.  When a company releases a scientific subroutine library, or a library of objects, for example, people who merely use the library, unmodified, perhaps without even looking at the source code, are not thereby creating derivative works of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He even goes on to paraphrase the idea that &quot;linking a library creates a derivative work&quot; is as if &quot;merely touching [...] open source software will infect their software with a virus.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16314" LastEditorDisplayName="user16314" LastEditDate="2019-10-21T08:33:26.553" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T08:33:26.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8903" CreationDate="2019-10-14T07:45:38.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have an overtechnological thermostat. It's a device that runs Ubuntu Server. My app is running on it. It uses a third part library to access the thermal sensor and gather data [...]; the interface display/streaming is done using a GPLv3 library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, you are distributing 3 separate objects: the Linux OS, the third-party libraries and your software. Thus, you need to provide the source code for the OS and the GPLv3 library, and maybe the &quot;third party&quot; library (it its license requires it) &lt;strong&gt;solely because you're distributing these&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining question is about the status of your app. From your description I understand that it uses a GPLv3 streaming library, so you need to release your software as GPLv3 too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can avoid using GPL libraries in your app and stick to e.g. LGPL libs, you will be able to forego disclosing your app's sources. Linux has no requirement to apply GPL license to software that runs on in, even if it links to essential system libs like &lt;code&gt;libc&lt;/code&gt;, due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exceptions&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;'s the relevant exception license if you use &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt;, other compilers have similar provisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T07:45:38.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-14T13:29:48.623" Score="0" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need general advice: I have an android app that currently relies heavily on GPLv3 source code. I have never published any app and I'm a bit rusty within android as my day job is programming in a different language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to publish it as a paid app I can either rewrite the functionality of the GPLv3 code or publish the modified source code - correct me if those are not the options I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a bad idea to publish an open source app as a paid app?&#xA;Could an original author of GPLv3 code license an essentially identical code to me for a fee? An/or is that a stupid thought?&#xA;Should I just forget &quot;cashing in&quot; or is there another business model to consider?&#xA;Anything else? Am I just looking at this &quot;all wrong&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: I don't like apps with adds. The model of having a perfectly usable app with an option for a little extra in a pro version (I have also bought pro versions of apps just as a way to donate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16319" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T14:39:59.920" Title="Monetizing app using GPLv3 source code" Tags="|gpl-3|android|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8915" CreationDate="2019-10-15T08:31:09.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What a thicket the authors of &lt;code&gt;{{package}}&lt;/code&gt; seem to have created for themselves by trying to get a licence to do things it wasn't designed to do, not least simultaneously requiring you to display their logo and forbidding you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am persuaded by apsillers' excellent point above.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says in s7b that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for material you add to a covered work, you may ... [Require] preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions &lt;strong&gt;in that material&lt;/strong&gt; or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and defines &quot;&lt;em&gt;Appropriate Legal Notices&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in s0 as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes on to note in s13 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the app doesn't copy its own source into its output, what the AGPL &lt;strong&gt;doesn't&lt;/strong&gt; say in s13 is that s7 reasonable legal notice and attribution preservation requirements apply to interactions over a network with the application; nor does s0 allow such requirements to be sneaked back in under cover of interactively displaying &lt;em&gt;Appropriate Legal Notices&lt;/em&gt;.  All s13 requires is that you prominently offer interacting users an opportunity to receive the source.  If they choose to avail themselves of that, then s7 &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; require that certain notices are maintained in the source.  The AGPL doesn't define &quot;reasonable legal notices&quot;.  We &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4971/what-are-the-attribution-requirements-of-the-agpl-license?rq=1&quot;&gt;have addressed this question&lt;/a&gt; previously; I see no grounds there or elsewhere to think that promotional statements (&quot;&lt;em&gt;Powered by foo&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) may be defined as &lt;em&gt;legal notices&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since AGPLv3 s7 is clear that additional restrictions that don't satisfy s7 may be ignored or removed.  I contend that since the s7e prohibition on trademark reuse is lawful and clearly expressed, it trumps the very questionable s7b requirement to display the logo, and thus that requirement may be ignored.  In the absence of any clearly-identifiable &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; notices in the current source, textual acknowledgement of the current authors clearly and prominently placed in the downloadable source of your application will fulfil your s7b requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might well &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; also to give a more prominent acknowledgment to the original authors in the UI of your modified application, but the form of that is up to you, and if you decide to do so, it doesn't relieve you of your &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; s7 obligations, &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As ever, if you're betting anything of worth on this view, take professional legal advice first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-15T10:39:23.443" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T10:39:23.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8923" CreationDate="2019-10-15T14:29:07.593" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working alone on a project that I intend to publish under the AGPL3+ license. I want to use parts of the Sympy source in it. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sympy/sympy/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sympy license&lt;/a&gt; says, that &quot; Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&quot;. Can I just put the GPL and this copyright notice at the beginning of the file and I'm good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16326" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T06:03:26.713" Title="Use sympy code in a GPL project" Tags="|gpl|license-notice|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8918" CreationDate="2019-10-15T14:39:59.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are using GPL-licensed code in your app, then it is very difficult to effectively monetize it by asking a payment per copy. The reason for this is that the GPL not only requires that you provide your source code, but also that every user of your app gets the right to re-publish it with or without modification and for any price &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; want to ask for it, including providing it at no charge at all. This means that anyone can price you out of the market by buying one copy of your app and republishing it for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using ads as a monetization option is also not viable, because under the same GPL rights someone can just modify your app into an ad-free version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves the options&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rewrite your app so that you don't use/depend on GPL-licensed code and monetize it anyway you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the owner of the GPL code for a different license that doesn't require the disclosure of your sources. This can be tricky if there are multiple copyright holders, as they &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; have to agree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See if you can have a different monetization scheme that is not based on payment for installing the app, but for example is based on using services from a server you control.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-15T14:39:59.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8921" CreationDate="2019-10-16T06:03:26.713" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sympy licence you link to is actually three licences, all of which are slight variants of &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; (BSD3), inasmuch as the authors have replaced &quot;&lt;em&gt;the author&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in clause c with project-specific text.  I'm not sure why they've done this, though it doesn't change anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is pretty well established, not least &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;by the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, and by custom and practice, that you can combine code licensed under BSD3 with code licensed under any version of the GPL, including (in your case) AGPLv3+.  There is more argument about whether the resulting work must in its entirety be licensed under AGPLv3+ (as the AGPLv3 requires), or whether the BSD3 bits remain available under the terms of BSD3 in perpetuity.  I have &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4149/can-one-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl/4194#4194&quot;&gt;written about this&lt;/a&gt; elsewhere on SE, and I'm personally satisfied that the terms of the AGPLv3+ will cover the entire combined work.  As you will see from the other answers to that question, this position is not universally held.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you ask how to do it.  AGPLv3 gives advice at the bottom about how to apply it to your code, so I assume you have read and followed that.  This will have you add at the top a line which says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2019 Kryptomatrix&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in each file which contains any sympy code at all, I would add the other copyright lines &lt;em&gt;immediately below yours&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2006-2019 SymPy Development Team&#xA;Copyright (c) 2013-2017 Sergey B Kirpichev&#xA;Copyright (c) 2014 Matthew Rocklin&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these files, I would also &lt;strong&gt;below the AGPL header&lt;/strong&gt; add a line that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This file contains code derived from the sympy project,&#xA;to which the following terms originally applied:&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then below that quote all three BSD3-type licences verbatim.  That satisfies the requirement to reproduce the text, while making clear that it is now not the sole copyright licence applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T06:03:26.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-16T08:32:47.967" Score="2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a study published as a PDF under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I create a commercial (proprietary) web application that uses data from the study and makes computations as proposed by the study, and have users pay for the usage of this web application? So basically I would apply the data in the study to the specific case of my web application user, and I would do the calculations on input data entered by my user, with my own implementation, but using the data in the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What implication would this have on the license of my application? Would that then be a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://bsimm.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSIMM study&lt;/a&gt;. They asked a large number of companies about their software security practices, and gathered the results broken down by industry for example. They also identified 100+ activities that are somewhat common to ensure secure software, and proposed a way to assess yourself against this empirical best practice. What I had in mind is basically just a calculator for a given company to assess itself in a nicely presented webapp, based on the data in the study (assessing how that specific company fares compared to the ones in the study - this is the very purpose of the study, they even propose methods to do the comparison).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16330" LastEditorUserId="16330" LastEditDate="2019-10-18T07:05:58.650" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T07:05:58.650" Title="Using CC-BY-SA 3.0 data in commercial web application" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8927" CreationDate="2019-10-17T05:39:07.897" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am borrowing and heavily modifying code from an open source repo (let's call this &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;). However, the code I am borrowing also contains code borrowed from another open source project (let's call this &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;). Naturally, I would include the license of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; into my project, and since &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; has some code from &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;, I am assuming that I should include &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;'s license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I modified the code borrowed from &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; in such a way that only one line from &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; remains (in my project, only the start of the &lt;code&gt;for&lt;/code&gt; loop remains). Do I still include &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;'s license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16336" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T09:20:55.357" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T09:20:55.357" Title="Re-using code from an open source project, but said code partly re-uses code from another project" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T08:16:34.207" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an R package that uses data from other authors (UN Voting). Is there any licensing issue in adding the data directly to the package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure whether I can just add this data to the package (surely quote it), or if this is not allowed and I should include an extra command that downloads the data every time from the website (15 mb).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data is downloaded from this Harvard dataverse &lt;a href=&quot;https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/12379&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16338" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2019-10-19T04:48:56.950" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T04:48:56.950" Title="Attach CC0 licensed datasets to own R package" Tags="|licensing|cc0|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8925" CreationDate="2019-10-17T08:39:19.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have tripped over an old conundrum known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt;, or sometimes as the Grandfather's Axe paradox.  If you remove all traces of B's work on a project through a gradual process of refactoring and replacement, is the project now a derivative work of B's?  Or as Wikipedia puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;texts and computer programs may be edited gradually but so heavily that none of the original remains, posing the legal question of whether the owners of the original have any claim on the result&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6499/how-to-deal-with-copy-left-in-source-code-history-prior-open-sourcing/8196#8196&quot;&gt;I have written elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, I'm not aware of any jurisprudence to guide us on the matter, so it comes down to opinions.  Personally, I think a strong argument can be made that even a completely-refactored work is a derivative, unless &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special care&lt;/a&gt; is taken to avoid this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we need not argue that here as fortunately, in your case, one line from B remains.  That seems to me to be enough to make it very clear that it is a derivative work, so yes, include B's copyright statement, and honour B's licence requirements, including those regarding the licence text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T09:18:03.387" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T09:18:03.387" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-17T15:30:44.523" Score="1" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole of atk1.0-2.4.0 is listed under GNU-GPLv2.0.  Can I take certain files out of GNU GPL license code and use it under different license / no license, or is this considered as obfuscation of GNU GPL licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16340" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T17:41:10.783" Title="Using only certain files out of GPL code" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8928" CreationDate="2019-10-17T15:48:21.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Insofar as the GNU GPL license allows modification, you may modify a GPL-licensed work to no longer include certain files while retaining other files. However, you may only perform such distribution under the license terms granted by the work's copyright holder(s) -- typically the author(s) -- so you may not offer such a modified form under any terms other than the GPL (unless the copyright holder granted a different license option, either generally or privately to you specifically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly not &quot;obfuscation&quot; of the GPL-licensed code, but if you use those files in binary form, you must also offer the corresponding source necessary to rebuild those binaries. Indeed, even if it did constitute obfuscation, outright obfuscation is not even automatically problematic, as long as you also distribute (or offer) a corresponding unobfuscated source form that is the &quot;preferred form for making modifications&quot; from which the obfuscated form was created. As a pratical example, you may offer a minified version of a GPL-licensed web application that loads faster over a network (at the cost of readability and comprehensibility) as long as you also offer the readable unminified version under the GPL to all recipients of the minified code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include those files in a new work with other files, then the entire work may be distributed only if you distribute it as a whole under the GPL. This obligation to license other material under the GPL extends as far as copyright law understands the upstream GPL-licensed work to exist in the same copyrightable work as that other material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-10-17T17:41:10.783" LastActivityDate="2019-10-17T17:41:10.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8932" CreationDate="2019-10-18T08:09:52.197" Score="3" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finding it hard to understand so I thought maybe I could get a clearer explanation here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing an app. This app is pretty large and sometimes I find myself looking at &lt;code&gt;Github&lt;/code&gt; project (for example some UI designs such as slider - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/woxingxiao/BubbleSeekBar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) and it says &lt;code&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that I can take that piece of code and copy-paste into my app and maybe one day to sell the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16345" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T11:18:15.930" Title="Using Apache 2.0 code in my app" Tags="|apache-2.0|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8926" CreationDate="2019-10-18T10:53:34.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC0 license allows you to do just about anything you like with that dataset, including distributing it along with your R code in the same package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of common curtesy, I would recommend that you add things to the documentation of your package&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A statement that the dataset is licensed separately from the rest of the package under the CC0 license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A reference to the source of the dataset (they prefer it in the form of a citation) and which version you are including&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T10:53:34.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2019-10-18T11:18:15.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it mean that I can take that piece of code and copy-paste into my app and maybe one day to sell the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you comply with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the requirements of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the copyright licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the third-party code in your app, then yes. It does generally not matter if you copy/paste the code into your app or if you use the code as an external library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source licenses do not forbid you from selling code, but some of them (copyleft licenses like the GPL) have requirements that make charging money for copies of the app economically unviable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you also have to take care of is that some licenses are not compatible with each other, which means that they can't be used together in the same app. And example of this is the GPLv2 and Apache 2.0 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To successfully use Apache 2.0 licensed code in your app, you must&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide the users of the app with a copy of the Apache 2.0 license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide the users of the app with the contents of the NOTICES file, if such a file exists in the repository where you got the Apache-licensed code from&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it clear which parts of the app are governed by which license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make the source code available, then you must additionally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep all copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices intact (unless they refer to something you removed from your copy)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a notice to modified files that you changed them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T11:18:15.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-18T18:46:07.433" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a binary that contains exactly the same class-, method- and field signatures as a proprietary application, but I've left everything else out - does the license of the original app still apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16349" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T06:09:04.913" Title="Does a software license apply to a stripped version of the original binary?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2019-10-20T06:09:04.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take a software binary B, distributed under licence L, and use a piece of software to modify that binary according to certain pre-defined rules, you have created a modified binary B', which is very likely a derivative work of B in copyright terms.  The licence on B' will therefore depend on the terms of L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If L was a permissive free software licence, then although there may be certain labelling requirements for B', it may also be possible to distribute B' under other licence terms, including copyleft and proprietary ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If L was a copyleft free software licence, it will likely require that B' also be licensed under the terms of L (see, eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; ss 6 and 5c, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; ss 3 and 2b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If L was a proprietary licence, you likely have no right to do what you've done and are already in violation; see as a random example &lt;a href=&quot;https://care.pressreader.com/hc/en-us/articles/214361123-Software-License-Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this proprietary licence&lt;/a&gt;, which says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You shall not alter, disassemble, decompile, reverse-engineer, adapt, translate &lt;strong&gt;or modify&lt;/strong&gt; the Software or any portion thereof ... You shall not copy the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked at the top how you created this stripped-down derivative work, and you asked whether it mattered.  The short answer is that I'm not a programmer, and in any case there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy; so instead of guessing what you'd done and basing my answer on a guess, it seemed simplest to ask for more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-20T06:09:04.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8939" CreationDate="2019-10-20T13:57:14.780" Score="2" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to make my first Python repo on github public and it needs a license. It imports four libraries, without modifying them, it merely makes use of their functions. These libraries are in requirements.txt and my application's import statements, they are not in my repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their licenses are MIT, LGPLv3, &quot;LGPL with exceptions or ZPL&quot; and MIT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally I'd like there to be as little restriction as possible on my code and I'm not sure if what license I choose has to do with the libraries my application imports, specifically the &quot;weak copyleft&quot; LGPL ones. Do they matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16359" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T19:35:21.813" Title="Opensource license for github Python project which uses lgpl libraries" Tags="|lgpl|github|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8938" CreationDate="2019-10-20T15:42:30.577" Score="2" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was having a programming problem and Google brought me to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ankargren.github.io/avoiding-openmp-problems-in-rcpparmadillo-dependent-packages-on-os-x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, which refers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/RcppCore/RcppArmadillo/blob/master/configure.ac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2+ licensed file&lt;/a&gt;. However, I would like to keep my project MIT-licensed. What should I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering the following approaches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invent a GPLv999 license, make it MIT-compatible, and accept it since v999 &gt;= v2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generate a &lt;code&gt;configure&lt;/code&gt; from the GPL-licensed file &lt;code&gt;configure.ac&lt;/code&gt; and use the generated file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Type the source code by hand, and tailor it to my need.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Read the source code, learn from it, throw it away, and write my own &lt;code&gt;configure.ac&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, if any, of the above options are legitimate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, a GPLv3-licensed utility program &lt;code&gt;autoconf&lt;/code&gt; will be run when a user installs my package. Will this cause a license incompatibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15509" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T06:14:28.570" Title="How can I use this GPLv2+ file in my MIT project?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|mit|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8937" CreationDate="2019-10-20T17:13:35.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Won't work, because you can't legally call it the GPL; see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can legally use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical upshot is that only the FSF can issue versions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The resulting &lt;code&gt;configure&lt;/code&gt; would be a derivative work of a GPLv2+ licensed file, which must therefore be licensed under GPLv2+ as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; ss 3, 2b.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That would be a simple manual copy, which must therefore be licensed under GPLv2+ as per GPLv2 s1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a derivative work, see above, unless you do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanroom_software_engineering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;.  You cannot do that on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence on &lt;code&gt;autoconf&lt;/code&gt; is not a problem, as long as you're not distributing it.  The licence on a program does not (generally) affect the licence status of the program's output; the licence on the program's inputs do, hence point 2 above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, none of the options you list are legitimate.  The author of the &lt;code&gt;configure.ac&lt;/code&gt; file you link to did not intend for you to be able to release it under an MIT licence, and has signalled his intent by picking a licence that forbids such release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument could be made, however, that the compilation environment of a work is not the work itself.  Having an MIT codebase the compilation of which is directed by a series of files under GPL, when all these files are distributed together, isn't immediately obviously a GPL violation (at least, not to me).  Certainly if you shipped a GPL compiler with your MIT code, it would be possible for the compilation environment in the field to invoke the compiler without the compiler's licence bleeding into the main, MIT-licensed code.  It's not clear to me that files that direct the operation of the compiler are more tightly coupled to the main code, in a copyright or licensing sense, than the compiler itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're betting a company on this, however, take professional legal advice first.  If you're not, it might be simpler just to release your work under GPLv2+, and remove any risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-21T06:14:28.570" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T06:14:28.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8936" CreationDate="2019-10-21T18:18:12.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you didn't include code written by others into your codebase, the library licenses you mention don't put significant constraints on the licenses you can use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main restrictions come from the LGPL licenses and boil down to the requirement that you have to make it legal and possible for the users of your code to replace the LGPL code with a different version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, as long as your license does not forbid replacing those third-party libraries, you are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T18:18:12.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8936" CreationDate="2019-10-21T19:35:21.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could say that you are not subject to the open source licenses since they are not part of your repo and thus are not distributed or conveyed by you. On the other hand you might worry if a user that actually combines your work with the libraries could encounter a license conflict. That could be the case if someone used the LGPLv3 license in a tivoized system. If your software was intended for an embedded device you might want to look for a differenzt library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16368" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T19:35:21.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7387" CreationDate="2019-10-21T19:41:41.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though LGPLv2.1 does not mention TiVo it does come to almost the same effect when you combine the library via dynamic linking with proprietary code. For that purpose you have to adhere to No. 6b of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b) Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the&#xA;  Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (1) uses at run time a copy&#xA;  of the library already present on the user's computer system, rather&#xA;  than copying library functions into the executable, and (2) will&#xA;  operate properly with a modified version of the library, if the user&#xA;  installs one, as long as the modified version is interface-compatible&#xA;  with the version that the work was made with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license requires the software to operate properly if the user installs a modified version. So if your system uses mechnisms against manipulation such as signatures you will have to make sure the user can get hold of these signature keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16368" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T19:41:41.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8846" CreationDate="2019-10-21T20:15:16.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb you are fairly safe communicating via pipes, however GPLv2 does not speak of interfaces but rather of &quot;derivative work&quot; and this is highly complicated game that may have different output even in different countries. If your filter can only process streams coming out of and going into ffmpeg your work may be seen as a derivative work as it is not functionally independent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be out of question for you to license the filter under GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16368" LastActivityDate="2019-10-21T20:15:16.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="661" CreationDate="2019-10-22T06:25:14.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;All OSI approved licenses (except AGPL) will allow modification without further conditions as long as you do not distribute the code. Conditions only apply upon distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16368" LastActivityDate="2019-10-22T06:25:14.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8945" CreationDate="2019-10-22T20:17:20.087" Score="4" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if I embed GPL licensed code into my application, then I would be compelled to furnish the source code (or at least make it available to them) to any customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question relates to a slightly different scenario. What if my application was, for example, a control panel that installs and manages various different web services (e.g., Postgres, Apache, HAProxy, etc). If one of those web services was GPL licensed (HAProxy is GPL v2), would I then be required to provide the source code of my control panel to my customers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hypothetical software can't function without the installation of GPL licensed packages, but the source code of the GPL licensed packages is not embedded in my source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16373" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T05:23:49.167" Title="Closed source software with GPL dependencies" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8944" CreationDate="2019-10-23T02:06:09.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that your control panels will not be affected by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not using or linking to any GPL code, you are altering config files read by the GPL software, or sending commands to running binaries to alter their behaviour. When it comes to not functioning, you test the existence of an app and only show the relevant panel if it is installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of precedent look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.webmin.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;webmin&lt;/a&gt; - a BSD licensed collection of control panels for many GPLed software packages. This may even satisfy the requirements of what you are planning to create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-23T05:23:49.167" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T05:23:49.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8948" CreationDate="2019-10-23T21:14:56.870" Score="2" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that I create a 3d model of a tree using a GPL plugin in GPL 3D software (Blender). The addon generates this 3d tree model from scratch, using an algorithm. No other external assets are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original developer of this GPL plugin asserts that the generated 3d models cannot be shared, either free or commercially, and only be used in still and moving imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? Can the author of a GPL plugin attain control over what the user is allowed to do with the generated assets and assert copyright over these assets in this particular case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16384" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T03:41:43.153" Title="Can the developer of GPL software assert copyright/usage claims over assets generated with that software?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|assets|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8947" CreationDate="2019-10-24T07:14:38.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several levels of thing going wrong here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, as Brandin notes above, with a few odd exceptions the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;licence of a program does not affect the licensing status of the output&lt;/a&gt;; the status of the output is much more usually a function of the licence on the program's inputs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, if this is really a GPL-licensed plugin, then even if the output were in some way a copyright derivative of the program, both versions of the GPL would require&#xA;that they be licenced under GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; ss 1 and 2b, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; ss4 and 5b).  The GPL, being a free licence, explicitly does not include any restrictions on usage and sharing (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedoms&lt;/a&gt; zero and two).  You don't say which version of the GPL it is, but GPLv3 explicitly forbids adding any such restrictions (GPLv3 s7), and GPLv2 disclaims any restrictions on usage (s0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm afraid this chap's claims don't stack up; even if his plugin does something odd like copying part of itself into the output, thus making the output a dervative of the program, his claim that the plugin is GPL-licensed rules out any non-GPL restrictions on subsequent usage, copying, and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as ever, IANAL/IANYL, so take professional legal advice before relying on this position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T07:14:38.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8960" CreationDate="2019-10-24T09:02:30.700" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the CLA of the Linux Foundation, under section 2 there was the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... You hereby grant to the Foundation and to recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetua&#xA;  l, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that for any contribution I have made since signing, I won't be able to demand copyrights, nor do I wish to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, can I revoke my signature of the CLA in a future time, such that any contributions (or anything that might be perceived as one) I make &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; revocation are not subject to the terms of the agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let say I'm signing today, contribute something tomorrow, a day after revoke my signature, and a day after that publish some code in a forum. Can the Foundation claim the the code published in the forum is also under the original CLA, free of any copyright, because it was &quot;irrevocable&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16387" LastEditorUserId="16387" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T09:56:32.067" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T19:35:04.900" Title="Question about the word &quot;irrevocable&quot; in a Contributor License Agreement" Tags="|licensing|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8953" CreationDate="2019-10-24T11:47:42.420" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am relatively active in the 3D-printing community and have created a design that requires a part that has been patented by a company from the United States in 1997. The part is very rare outside of the U.S. because of export regulations, and when available, usually very expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, because I own such a part, I could recreate the design as a 3D model and make it available for everyone (as Creative Commons) to produce with a 3D printer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't actually plan to make a profit with it, would this action violate the patent holders rights? Could such an act be incriminating for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11096" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T08:02:58.603" Title="Can I open-source a design based on a patent?" Tags="|creative-commons|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8947" CreationDate="2019-10-25T03:41:43.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blender is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blender.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed under the GPL, this also means that addon licenses need to be GPL compatible&lt;/a&gt;. The 3D models and artwork made by blender are not affected by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while the GPL does not affect the data generated by the program and/or addons, you should look into the addon a little more to see if the output data is generated or pre-bundled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the output generated by a GPL program is not affected by the programs license, there &lt;strong&gt;could be a catch&lt;/strong&gt; where the program is modifying pre-existing data that is bundled as part of the source code which would fall under GPL. That would mean that the 3D models you save would fall under GPL. If on the other hand, the addon uses an algorithm to &lt;strong&gt;programmatically generate&lt;/strong&gt; the trees, then the output &lt;strong&gt;would not be affected by the GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact that the addons developer says you cannot share the models, means they are either ignorant of how the GPL works, or know that you would be sharing data that was bundled under a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using bundled data that is GPL to generate a 2D image as output, then that image would not be GPL. Which is what the addons developer is saying is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comparison, &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;makehuman&lt;/a&gt; is released under AGPL, this program bundles pre-built mesh objects that the program modifies to your parameters. In this case, the project specifically states that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman/src/default/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mesh data is released under CC0&lt;/a&gt; so that there are no restrictions to the use of models output by the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special and limited exception, the copyright holders of the MakeHuman assets grants the option to use CC0 ... as a license for the MakeHuman characters exported ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T03:41:43.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8950" CreationDate="2019-10-25T07:07:59.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the principal question in the body: yes, this would violate any such applicable patents.  A patent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#Effects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;provides the legal right&lt;/a&gt; to &quot;&lt;em&gt;exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Note that although some of those activities are implicitly commercial, others are not; &lt;em&gt;making&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; are both controlled, whether or not they are done for profit.  Creating and distributing a 3D model is an interesting approach, the details of which I'm not qualified to consider, but even if it doesn't leave you in infringement it will leave your end-users, if they use it to make an item which embodies one or more valid patents, in infringement of those patents.  It is not kind to publish such designs without very clear warnings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question in the title: yes, and you may do so without putting yourself or your end users in harm's way, provided you own the patent or have a licence so to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the unasked question in the body: the usual lifetime of a patent is 20 years.  If this one was granted in 1997, it may well now be expired.  You should probably dig a little harder on that front.  And as ever, IANAL/IANYL, so don't rely on this opinion without taking professional advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T08:02:58.603" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T08:02:58.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-25T15:41:11.993" Score="2" ViewCount="1587" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to make a closed-source application with Qt and PyQt5, using the open source licenses available for those libraries, in the way described below? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose there are no changes made to the PyQt or Qt library themselves. Consider, for the purposes of this question, making use of PyQt5 via a Python &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statement like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication&#xA;from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QMainWindow&#xA;from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QWidget&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, in order to distribute a closed-source binary that makes use of these libraries, it is necessary to buy a &lt;a href=&quot;https://riverbankcomputing.com/commercial/buy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial PyQt license&lt;/a&gt; from Riverbank, plus a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/buy-product/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial Qt license&lt;/a&gt; from Qt. I'm interested in knowing if that's true for the case outlined in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support of the idea that it may be possible to use the LGPL option for Qt, my understanding from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11994053/can-i-use-qt-lgpl-license-and-sell-my-application-without-any-kind-of-restrictio&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; is that disclosing the source code for a main application is not necessary in the case that the main application dynamically links to the Qt library. My questions are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this way of using the Qt library qualify as dynamically linking?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does such a proposed use of these libraries in a closed-source application fall under what is allowed by the (L)GPL options for Qt and/or PyQt (or would it be necessary to buy one or more commercial licenses to distribute such an app)?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if I hire someone who have commercial licenses do the GUI development for me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not seeking for legal advice, any answer to my question won't be considered as legal advice. No one should take any answer in this post as legal advice. This question asks about the requirements of the LGPL/GPL as applied to Python's &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; mechanism, within a potentially closed-source application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16400" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T18:54:27.087" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T18:54:27.087" Title="Do I need both commercial PyQt license and commercial Qt license for close source commercial app?" Tags="|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-25T16:57:26.057" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s say an organization writes a JavaScript library under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then let’s say the organization writes a web app which uses several MIT licensed libraries along with this GPL library that the organization itself wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the organization legally required to open source the web app considering the organization itself wrote the GPL library its app is using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16401" LastEditorUserId="16401" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T17:00:10.240" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T22:26:47.340" Title="Is an app required to be open sourced when the app is using a GPL library created by the organization that created the app?" Tags="|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8955" CreationDate="2019-10-25T22:26:47.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed on the other thread referenced, if your company created the entire GPL library, and still owns the entire copyright in it, it does not restrict your company in any way -- it's simply a permission your company has given others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, there are other authors. If all of those other authors indeed licensed their copyrights under permissive licenses, you may only need to comply with those licenses. However, if there are contributors who contributed to your GPL library who did not state an explicit license, you may have a problem -- you should have contributors sign a CLA, or at least sign a DCO and state an explicit license. Presumably, that license would be the GPL, but that would not be something I can tell you. The details here can get complicated, so if you don't know you have permission to use all of your code, consult an attorney directly. The point is, if you are taking any contributions under a non-permissive license, you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be required to comply with the GPL provisions you're trying to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Using&quot; the GPL package is entirely permissive -- copyright does not restrict use at all. Presumably, you're distributing the GPL library, and interacting with it in some way more interesting than &quot;mere aggregation.&quot; The details of GPL compliance are, again, complicated. To oversimplify, linking is not allowed, but some &quot;distant&quot; interactions are allowed. Again, if this information isn't enough to answer your question, consult an attorney directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T22:26:47.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8958" CreationDate="2019-10-26T09:18:39.593" Score="2" ViewCount="582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to include &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perceptron_example.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt; from Wikimedia into a deck that I am using to film a paid course on Udemy.   The image was created by Elizabeth Goodspeed  and covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know that I am free to: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Share&lt;/strong&gt; — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapt&lt;/strong&gt; — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I am fine with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attribution&lt;/strong&gt; — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dont know about the last term: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ShareAlike&lt;/strong&gt; — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I include the image in my deck &lt;strong&gt;without modifications&lt;/strong&gt; and then make a video of the deck playing, with a voiceover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;am I remixing it? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;am I building upon the material? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;am I transforming it? (don't think so) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: can I use it to film the video (screenshare of the powerpoint + voiceover) without sharing the whole video?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16404" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T15:34:52.427" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T15:34:52.427" Title="Can I include an image covered by CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 in a deck for a paid online course?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8957" CreationDate="2019-10-26T09:39:53.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have considered the issue of reuse of artworks licensed under CC-BY-SA here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8357/in-which-cases-must-i-relicense-my-product-under-the-cc-by-sa-license/8364#8364&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt; (and also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8658/if-i-use-artwork-from-a-gplv2-application-does-my-application-have-to-be-gpl-as/8688#8688&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  The upshot is that the best guide we have says that when a CC-BY-SA photograph was used unmodified as part of a cover image, the cover image in its entirety was considered not to be a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That strongly suggests to me that you can use this image, with appropriate attribution, as a single slide in a deck, without having to share the whole slide deck under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am less clear about the implications of your proposal (which did not appear in the original question, but was disclosed following an exchange in the comments) to make a short video which uses this slide deck as background images while your voice-over features as the audio track.  If the issue were reversed, and the CC-BY-SA work were the audio track, CC-BY-SA is very clear in s1a that the whole video would be a derived work, and thus subject to the share-alike requirement.  I therefore suspect that what you propose may make the whole video a derivative work, but I am unsure, and hope that some of my colleagues here can shed light on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course IANAL/IANYL, and you should take professional advice before you rely on this or any other opinion here.  And I would encourage you to take more time writing your questions, so that they accurately reflect what you desire to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T10:04:33.683" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T10:04:33.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8949" CreationDate="2019-10-27T19:25:45.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CLA says it applies only to capital-C &quot;Contributions&quot; which is a term that would be defined elsewhere in the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example (not necessarily correspondent to your specific CLA), the Apache 2.0 License includes the definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Contribution&quot; shall mean any work of authorship... that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming your CLA has a remotely similar definition, then code that is never submitted for inclusion in the project would not constitute a Contribution and would not be covered by the license grant in the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably you could also rescind your agreement to the CLA (insofar as you may terminate any legal agreement), at the cost of not having future contributions accepted. Contributions made while your agreement was still in force would remain bound by the irrevocable grant you agreed to, but future contributions would not be (and neither would the project accept them, as a matter of policy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T19:35:04.900" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T19:35:04.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8967" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:32:41.547" Score="2" ViewCount="677" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a project called  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/endless-sky/endless-sky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Endless Sky&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's license for &lt;strong&gt;Source code&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license for &lt;strong&gt;Graphics&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY, CC-BY-SA and Public Domain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license for &lt;strong&gt;Data&lt;/strong&gt; .txt files with content like this is also &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;outfit &quot;Small Collector Module&quot;&#xA;    category &quot;Power&quot;&#xA;    licenses&#xA;        Coalition&#xA;    cost 60000&#xA;    thumbnail &quot;outfit/small collector module&quot;&#xA;    &quot;mass&quot; 8&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    on offer&#xA;        conversation&#xA;            `When you repair the &amp;lt;origin&amp;gt;, the captain hails you. &quot;This is the fourth time I've nearly died in the past week doing this job! Here, take this &amp;lt;cargo&amp;gt; to &amp;lt;destination&amp;gt; and finish this job for me. They said the payment is &amp;lt;payment&amp;gt;.&quot;`&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Data&lt;/strong&gt; files define all the ships and such but it doesnt call any APIs, and is not linked. It's like a high-level scripting language for a VM. It's not neccessary for the game engine itself to exist. It describes gameplay (ship statistics), quests and the universe(where planets and systems are and how they connect)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graphics&lt;/strong&gt; are in CC-* or Public Domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My research suggests that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL &lt;strong&gt;source code&lt;/strong&gt; is infectious, so I'd have to write the engine from scratch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL &lt;strong&gt;data&lt;/strong&gt; is infectious so I need to release all data changes (except for mods) in GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-*/Public Domain &lt;strong&gt;content (audio/visual)&lt;/strong&gt; is OK to be used where I can't provide the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is creating an open-source engine for Endless Sky in Unity&lt;/strong&gt; that uses the same data and images and sounds, but is unable to release the Unity source code (obviously) be a violation of GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I know there's GODOT and it's MIT, which is compatible with GPL&lt;/strong&gt;, but I'm asking because I would like to understand is, if &lt;strong&gt;GPL game content &quot;infects&quot; the game engine with GPL or not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to know if &lt;strong&gt;creating non-GPL mods to a content that's GPL&lt;/strong&gt; is possible or a violation of GPL as the data is being merged together(a mod might take some GPL-covered ship statistic and modify it, like price, shields or armor amounts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16420" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T16:07:00.077" Title="Open source project on a closed source engine (Unity) with GPL covered data" Tags="|gpl-3|closed-source|cc-by|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-28T15:54:52.637" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's suppose a developer writes software for a company which wants to open source the project. One might assume that the knowledge of the code being publicly available might have a psychological effect on the developer. This might lead him to writing higher quality code than if it was just an internal project where only a few members could read the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there studies that conclude such a behaviour or prove that this is not the case? I'm thinking of something like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hawthorne Effect&lt;/a&gt;, where individuals modify their behaviour, because they are aware that they are under observation. In this case the individual is not under observation, but rather the result of his/her work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16422" LastEditorUserId="16422" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T16:22:11.483" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T16:22:11.483" Title="Does open source contribution push developers to deliver higher quality code?" Tags="|benefits|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8966" CreationDate="2019-10-28T20:44:08.260" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have modified a work, that is a series of paper booklets,  under CC BY-NC-SA, and redistributing those under the same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the licence requires to give the PDF (PDF of the printed booklets) if someone asks for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16423" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T08:39:16.527" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T08:39:16.527" Title="Does CC BY-NC-SA require me to share PDF of a printed booklet?" Tags="|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8964" CreationDate="2019-10-29T06:36:45.520" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code/1718#1718&quot;&gt;top-rated answer&lt;/a&gt; on the problems with using CC licences for software identifies the issue: the CC licences have no concept of source code, that is, the &lt;em&gt;underlying digital protoform of a work&lt;/em&gt;, which allows generation of new, perfect copies.  In the case of your booklets, that's the PDF form, and the CC licences make no mention of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do specifically cover printed works, see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-NC-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;, which says in s1g&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Work&quot; means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License including [...] a book, pamphlet and other writing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as far as I can determine it is the clear intention of the licence to give end-users the right to copy (non-commercially, and with certain other conditions) the work in the printed form in which it was distributed to them, while making no mention whatsoever of obligate access to any underlying protoform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T20:09:12.290" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T20:09:12.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8962" CreationDate="2019-10-29T16:07:00.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is creating an open-source engine for Endless Sky in Unity that uses the same data and images and sounds, but is unable to release the Unity source code (obviously) be a violation of GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on how the Unity version of the engine would be created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, an application and the data processed by that application are independent works for copyright purposes and that means that their licenses do not affect each other (with a small caveat for when the application transforms its input and adds parts of itself to the output document, but that isn't the case here). That means that we can disregard the licenses for the Data and Graphics parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the part of making a game engine that can process the Endless Sky data files and recreate the game experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you base such an engine on the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; of Endless Sky, then you are creating a derived work and you must release that under the same GPL license as the Endless Sky sources themselves. This would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be compatible with the closed source license of Unity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you re-implement such an engine from the &lt;em&gt;documented behaviour&lt;/em&gt; of Endless Sky without knowledge of their source code, then it can be argued that you have created a new work that is not bound by the GPL license. The catch here is that you need to do a &quot;cleanroom&quot; implementation: The person/team doing the re-implementation must not have any knowledge of the source code of Endless Sky, not even second-hand knowledge by consulting with the people that did read the source code in order to write the documentation. The documentation itself must also not contain parts of the source code but it must reflect only the ideas present in the source code. This is incredibly hard and resource intensive to pull off to a level that would hold up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: It is theoretically possible to re-create a Unity-based engine for Endless Sky, but if you don't get all the legal details right, the chances of failure are high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T16:07:00.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8971" CreationDate="2019-10-29T17:15:03.237" Score="2" ViewCount="639" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Python package in which I plan to vendorize a modified copy of part of another package that was released under Python License 2 (it is not part of the PSL and not subject to any other licenses). The license allows producing &quot;derivative works&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;... provided, however, that this License&#xA;  Agreement and {Licensor}'s notice of copyright, i.e., &quot;Copyright (c)&#xA;  2001-2019 {Licensor}; All Rights Reserved&quot; are retained in {Software} alone or in any derivative version prepared by Licensee.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the event Licensee prepares a derivative work that is based on&#xA;  or incorporates {Software} or any part thereof, and wants to make the&#xA;  derivative work available to others as provided herein, then Licensee&#xA;  hereby agrees to include in any such work a brief summary of the&#xA;  changes made to {Software}.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my modified version of the vendorized code, do I retain copyright to my modifications? Can I put a notice such as &quot;Modifications Copyright (c) 2019 ipetrik&quot; after the required &quot;brief summary of changes&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I license my changes and any of my own files not incorporating any code from the Python License 2 licensed software under a different license, such as Apache or MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16139" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T18:54:28.653" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T12:00:09.870" Title="Copyright of modifications and derivative works of Python License 2 licensed software" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|law|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8968" CreationDate="2019-10-30T12:00:09.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In my modified version of the vendorized code, do I retain copyright to my modifications? Can I put a notice such as &quot;Modifications Copyright (c) 2019 ipetrik&quot; after the required &quot;brief summary of changes&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You always own the copyrights on code you write, even if it is a modification of code owned by others, except&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you have signed a contract to transfer copyright ownership&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you write the software as part of your employment contract (your employer owns the copyrights).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have made large enough changes to write a meaningful &quot;brief summary of changes&quot;, then it is entirely acceptable to add your own copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I license my changes and any of my own files not incorporating any code from the Python License 2 licensed software under a different license, such as Apache or MIT?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Python License you quote appears to be a permissive license, so it places few restrictions on you and how you can license your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would recommend against using different licenses for code that lives in the same project, because it is hard to properly indicate which parts of the code are subject to which license. This problem only becomes harder if you try to apply different licenses to different parts of a single file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T12:00:09.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-30T18:17:30.827" Score="-2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;We carry Mongodb version 3.4.10 in our installer and installer will install mongodb. We are not modifying the source code we are using it &quot;AS-IS&quot;. We do not link the mongo db. We have Architectural separation from our commercial product. we use the libraries/drivers provided by mongodb to connect to the database. their drivers are Apache license v 2.0. We are providing our product via SaaS, do we have to give out the source code if we provide via SaaS(Software as a Service)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16340" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T17:00:16.047" Title="AGPL License/Distribution" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8974" CreationDate="2019-10-31T11:23:48.503" Score="-1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing my Thesis about Machine Learning and for that purpose I am searching for Databases with Pictures.&#xA;I have seen that some people just download pictures from Google Images with a script and there are a lot of tutorials how to do that. I know that some of those pictures have a copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to use those pictures for my (non commercial) Thesis? &#xA;Do I have to filter them by the license and look on every site the picture appears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16443" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T11:41:22.920" Title="Using Images from Google Image" Tags="|licensing|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8973" CreationDate="2019-10-31T11:41:22.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know that some of those pictures have a copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All&lt;/strong&gt; those pictures are protected by copyrights. Some of them may have an explicitly stated copyright &lt;em&gt;license&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to use those pictures for my (non commercial) Thesis? Do I have to filter them by the license and look on every site the picture appears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are not the copyright holder and you don't have a license, then you are not allowed to use those pictures, unless your usage falls under a &quot;fair use exemption&quot; in the copyright law. That the usage is non-commercial is by itself not an exemption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for each picture you want to use, you will have to obtain a copyright license. Sometimes the owner will have made it clear already what license applies and sometimes you will have to contact the owner to negotiate a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T11:41:22.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8994" CreationDate="2019-11-01T00:44:14.363" Score="2" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Problem description&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently wrote a PHP(7.3) wrapper for accessing some git functionality (I use git to create incremental backups).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another wrapper I wrote is for gpg (to encrypt my backups).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These wrappers use phps &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shell_exec&lt;/a&gt; function and thus are not derived works (as far as I understand) because the gpl programms run through the shell in a different process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With php 7.4 I would like to get rid of &lt;code&gt;shell_exec&lt;/code&gt; and use the foreign function interface (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.ffi.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFI&lt;/a&gt;) instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Assumptions about the (L)GPL:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;LGPL allows dynamic linking (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10130143/gpl-lgpl-and-static-linking&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer) without&#xA;having to apply the LGPL license to the dynamically liked code, since&#xA;php is an interpreted language this should be the case even when&#xA;using the FFI (based on  &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/311882/what-do-statically-linked-and-dynamically-linked-mean&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer about static vs dynamic&#xA;linking).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not differentiate between dynamic and static&#xA;linking and sees both as derived works if linking in our program to gpl licensed library and thus I would have to publish the code under the same&#xA;license (only to the person/organisation I distribute the program&#xA;to).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Assumptions about PHP FFI:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.php.net/manual/en/ffi.examples-basic.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;php7.4 FFI example&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;The following counts as dynamic linking ?:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;?php&#xA;// create FFI object, loading libc and exporting function printf()&#xA;$ffi = FFI::cdef(&#xA;    &quot;int printf(const char *format, ...);&quot;, // this is a regular C declaration&#xA;    &quot;libc.so.6&quot;);&#xA;// call C's printf()&#xA;$ffi-&amp;gt;printf(&quot;Hello %s!\n&quot;, &quot;world&quot;);&#xA;?&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusions:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PHP 7.4 FFI counts as dynamic linking because the php script does only link to the functions and/or data structures of the library but not contain them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;So since &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnupg.org/software/libgcrypt/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libgcrypt&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under the LGPLv2.1+ I can wrap it&#xA;with the php FFI because the LGPL allows dynamic linking and and php FFI calls count as dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libgit2&lt;/a&gt; I would have to publish my code under the&#xA;gplv2 (only to the person/organisation I distribute the program&#xA;to). Except that in this case the authors have given a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking&#xA;exception&lt;/a&gt;. Hence I can keep my php code under my own license but&#xA;only because the authors gave a linking exception.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastEditorUserId="10768" LastEditDate="2019-11-02T18:05:41.570" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T06:16:09.757" Title="Does interacting with a (L)GPL licensed library through PHP7.4 FFI count as a derived work?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|gpl-2|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-01T02:49:24.073" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will have the chance to take part in a meeting with the whole department of my university program (translation degree) and I would like to address what I believe to be a major problem, namely the absence of an introduction to any open-source software through our whole degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption is that the professors at my uni only teach MSWord and Trados because they are used to and most comfortable with these softwares, but also that I will very probably be served the &quot;this is the industry standard&quot; justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am convinced that, if anywhere, it's at universities that we should try to change these industry standards by teaching at least both the standard and an open-source alternative (MSWord and LibreOffice or Trados and OmegaT, for example). Apart from that, I also think that a university is a good place to start and develop open-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I'm looking for arguments, reliable sources and convincing examples of what a such endeavor can bring to the community. I already have MuseScore in mind, which became as usable and efficient (if not more) as the industry standards in a very short period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16447" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T14:24:17.660" Title="What are good arguments against my university teacher's justification, which is that the softwares taught are the industry standards?" Tags="|proprietary-code|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8972" CreationDate="2019-11-01T17:00:16.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The latest versions of MongoDB is licensed under the Server Side Public License. The drivers continue to be licensed under the Apache license. Mongo maintains an FAQ page that I believe answers your question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq&lt;/a&gt;). Their position is &quot;The copyleft condition of Section 13 of the SSPL applies only when you are offering the functionality of MongoDB, or modified versions of MongoDB, to third parties as a service. There is no copyleft condition for other SaaS applications that use MongoDB as a database.&quot; &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;They have a similar position for code under the AGPL versions (see blog post here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-agpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/the-agpl&lt;/a&gt;). &quot;To say this another way: if you modify the core database source code, the goal is that you have to contribute those modifications back to the community. Note however that it is NOT required that applications using mongo be published.... This is why Mongo DB drivers are all licensed under an Apache license.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3332" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T17:00:16.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5383" CreationDate="2019-11-02T07:25:31.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I release Package A under the 3-clause BSD license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but it doesn't buy you anything.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As Package A is derived from PyQt, which is under the GPL license, the combination of Package A and PyQt must also be used under the terms of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing Package A with a different license than the GPL would only make sense if (parts of) Package A can stand on their own without depending on PyQt, because then those parts could be taken out of Package A and reused in a new derived work that is not bound by the requirements of the GPL license. If there is no part of Package A that can be used independently of PyQt, then the best option is to use the GPL as well for Package A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I release Package B under the GNU Affero GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as you noted in your own answer, you can use GPL-licensed parts in AGPL applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T07:25:31.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-02T21:18:52.190" Score="-3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I come from a country &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ALGERIA&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; where nobody buys a software license &lt;strong&gt;even the government&lt;/strong&gt;, except fore rare cases where the government institution is very sensitive, other governmental institutions does not apply, or no crack for that software or library would be available in the internet, in most case that would be an antivirus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering what would happen if I link statically with &lt;strong&gt;LGPL Qt 5&lt;/strong&gt; toolkit for closed (&lt;strong&gt;proprietary&lt;/strong&gt;) software!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, will I just be considered as law breaker!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will they sue me!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will happen!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&amp;amp;A:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Why no body buys a software license in &lt;strong&gt;ALGERIA&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Because Firstly, no body has a &lt;strong&gt;Credit Card&lt;/strong&gt;, and it is very hard to get one, unless very recently &lt;strong&gt;Paysera&lt;/strong&gt; gave us this opportunity, and it is still hard to debit it from Algeria because the government won't allow hard currencies to go out the country for normal people, so you have to find someone from &lt;strong&gt;ALGERIA&lt;/strong&gt; living outside the country like &lt;strong&gt;EUROPE&lt;/strong&gt; to send you the amount of money you need directly to your &lt;strong&gt;Paysera&lt;/strong&gt; account, and when he comes back to &lt;strong&gt;ALGERIA&lt;/strong&gt; you will give him that debt in the local currency. And even though no one will buy a software license, because, secondly, and the most important part is the individual income (salary) that is very cheap. For me as a &quot;Computer Science Engineer&quot; (with 5 years university degree in a technical branch), I am getting the equivalent of a &lt;strong&gt;($250-$300) a MONTH&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this Q&amp;amp;A has not importance, I put it though because I am pretty sure most of you will wonder why it that!.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16455" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T10:53:09.547" Title="What happens when I use LGPL Qt 5 toolkit to link statically for a closed source (proprietary) application?" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|linking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2019-11-03T05:16:21.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you statically or dynamically link to any GPL code, you need to follow the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say no one in Algeria pays for software, you obviously don't expect to sell your program. If you are planning to sell it outside Algeria, then you are expecting to get money that you can use to buy a non-GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the GPL only says you have to provide the code to the users of your program, you don't have to make it publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license holders may or may not come after you for not following the licensing terms, and while I don't know what options there are for enforcing the GPL within Algeria, they have the right to try enforcing them if they so choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use the Qt libraries without sharing your source code, you need a paid license. If the standard pricing is extreme for your case, you should contact &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the company&lt;/a&gt; and ask for a fair price in your local currency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Qt libs may be useful they are not the only option you have, if you have trouble following the license terms, then you need to look at other options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T05:16:21.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-01T06:11:19.313" Score="9" ViewCount="1717" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I was reading an article related to Anaconda in Python and it said that commercial support is available in Anaconda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched online but was not able to find a perfect answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean by commercial support and is it compulsory for any open-source project to have commercial support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should we have to pay for such commercial support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please ignore if it looks like a naive question, because I don't have much knowledge about business terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16208" OwnerDisplayName="Moon" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2019-11-13T05:10:50.833" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T05:10:50.833" Title="What does it mean by &quot;commercial support available&quot; for an open-source platform?" Tags="|commercial|support|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2019-11-01T06:49:53.243" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commercial support is support offered on a business basis, to meet business needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial support is not compulsory, and indeed many (I'd say most) open source projects do not advertise this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the writer of the software (or skilled contributors) would like to make money doing what they are great at, and people want to pay them, its a win-win.  (Many businesses want commercial support to mitigate their risk, and often the cost of getting an expert is cheap in the overall picture to the business, and having expert support can help meet commitments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely many open source projects are a labour of love/scratching an itch/giving back, and the authors dont want to offer help because its not what they do - plenty of projects thrive on a supportive community but not commercial support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12747" OwnerDisplayName="davidgo" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T19:02:35.370" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2019-11-01T16:53:17.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commercial support can include paid training, installation services, non-open-source accessories or add-ons, consulting, and so on.  Although the open source project itself may be free, some users - usually companies or larger organizations - may be willing to pay for the convenience and expertise included in these extra services and tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The availability of these for-pay commercial services doesn't normally affect the open-source user from getting and using the basic software without paying for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, the commercial support organization's web site - let's call it &quot;XYZOpenSource.com&quot; - shows up first in search results, before &quot;XYZOpenSource.org&quot;.  It can sometimes take a minute to find the underlying open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="CarpenterSF" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T16:53:17.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2019-11-02T10:57:04.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does it mean by commercial support and is it compulsory for any open-source project to have commercial support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, obviously not. An open source project may be a fifty line python script you wrote to solve your own problem, that you publish for others to use. No support included; just the right to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should we have to pay for such commercial support?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want it, you'll have to pay for it. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone offers to dedicate time to assist you using a specific software, in exchange for money. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't need it, don't pay for it. You can employ someone, to read the source and provide the support in house if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial support is commonly used to support development costs, such as with MariaDB, or an integral part of the product, as with Red Hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15250" OwnerDisplayName="vidarlo" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T10:57:04.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2019-11-03T06:36:09.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A business may be reluctant to use open source software due to a perceived lack of &lt;em&gt;reliable&lt;/em&gt; support for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Updates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Documentation/Training&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bug Fixes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Customization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, using that open source software may offer the potential of huge savings compared to a full commercial package or writing their own equivalent from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commercial support&lt;/strong&gt; can provide the best of both worlds. A paid source for updates, documentation/training, bug fixes (at a much higher priority than simply waiting on volunteer developers) and customization (particularly if the business does not have developers to do it themselves), but with a starting cost far below that of a full commercial package or writing a new system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24614" OwnerDisplayName="manassehkatz" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T06:36:09.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-04T21:25:13.573" Score="10" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know, under what license is the content of GitHub issues that were created by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify my needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &quot;issues created by others&quot;, I mean issues created by GitHub users both in their own repositories and in the repositories of others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &quot;content&quot;, I mean all content that GitHub allows one to put into an issue – source code, images, poems, personal thoughts, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I have discovered so far&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GitHub's Terms of Service explicitly mention issues only in one place – in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#5-license-grant-to-other-users&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;point D.5&lt;/a&gt; (they are mentioned as a part of so-called &quot;User-Generated Content&quot;), but there is only one indication of things interesting for me: that other GitHub users may view issues.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to find indications of license (or just rights and obligations) for &quot;User-Generated Content&quot; in the Terms, but I could not find anything more specific than in the point D.5, according to my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;point D.6&lt;/a&gt;, the Terms state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the mentioned &quot;contribution&quot; might include issues, but I am not sure whether it is so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16471" LastEditorUserId="16471" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T15:10:53.163" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T13:54:56.523" Title="Under what license is the content of GitHub's issues that were created by others?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4431" CreationDate="2019-11-05T08:30:30.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is the copyright owner of your code? If your university paid you for that work, it probably is your university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the &lt;strong&gt;copyright owner can dual license your GPLv3+ code&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. give a GPLv3+ license to outsiders, and some other license or EULA to those paying for it). Ask your university lawyers on what should exactly be done for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things are more complex if you accepted patches from individuals outside of your university. But lawyers should know how to deal with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt; so don't take my advice seriously&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T08:30:30.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8995" CreationDate="2019-11-05T11:08:43.810" Score="1" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to use some images from a project governed by the 3-clause BSD license, but I can't find any information about whether it's allowed or not. The license specifies: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted, with or without modification,  provided that the following conditions are met: ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the images considered a binary form? If so, I understand I could use them anywhere I want as long as I meet the conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, it is also allowed to print the images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16477" LastEditorUserId="16477" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T21:37:03.823" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T08:57:17.877" Title="Using an Image from a project governed by a BSD license" Tags="|bsd|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8996" CreationDate="2019-11-05T18:04:52.857" Score="2" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created an app (not a library) and published it. It is used by dozens companies for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code was published under Apache 2.0. I had wrong expectations about publishing, I thought that companies would be interested in participating in the software development, but actually all my issue tracker is about support. So, I'm not interested in this activity anymore and want to sell the app. At least, it might give a chance to desired features to be developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to sell the app licensed under Apache 2.0? Also, I don't know what the subject of the deal is, because the code is open. What rights can I sell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16482" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T08:48:03.213" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T21:47:21.713" Title="Can I sell my app which code is published under Apache 2.0?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8975" CreationDate="2019-11-05T22:25:12.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Is using PHP FFI similar to dynamic linking?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Your code sample demonstrates loading a file which contains executable code (libc.so.6) into your own program and calling portions of that code from your program. That is essentially dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that neither the LGPLv2 (libgcrypt's license) nor the GPLv2 + linking exception (libgit's license) technically depend on a specific type of linking from a technical standpoint. The licenses try to use phrases like &quot;combination,&quot; &quot;derivative&quot; or &quot;containing portions of the Library,&quot; probably to avoid singling out a specific method of linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I use libgcrypt (LGPL v2 licensed) with PHP using FFI?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you call functions from an LGPL-licensed library from your own program using the PHP FFI mechanism, then the LGPL v2 seems to be of the opinion that your work then becomes a 'derivative' of the LGPL-licensed library: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... linking a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library creates an&#xA;  executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains&#xA;  portions of the Library), rather than a &quot;work that uses the library&quot;.&#xA;  The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states&#xA;  terms for distribution of such executables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(LGPL v2 Section 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the &quot;executable&quot; is your program (your .php file). Fortunately Section 6 is fairly permissive in how you can distribute it together with the LGPL library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a&#xA;  &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library to produce a work&#xA;  containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;terms of your choice&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that the terms permit modification of&#xA;  the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for&#xA;  debugging such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(LGPL v2 Section 6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically what that says is that if you use an LGPL library, then the license terms of your own program are basically unaffected. For example, you aren't required to provide source code for your program, but it also says that you aren't allowed to prohibit your customer from modifying or reverse engineering his own copy of your program (proprietary software licenses often have such prohibitions.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I use libgit (GPL v2 licensed + linking exception) with PHP using FFI?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the GPL v2 (before we consider the linking exception), that license also considers linking as producing a sort of derivative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The GPL v2 Section 2 requirements] apply to the modified work as a&#xA;  whole.  If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the&#xA;  Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate&#xA;  works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to&#xA;  those sections when you distribute them as separate works.  &lt;strong&gt;But when&#xA;  you distribute the same sections as part of a whole&lt;/strong&gt; which is a work based on the Program, &lt;strong&gt;the distribution of the whole must be on the&#xA;  terms of this License&lt;/strong&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(GPL v2 Section 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, you could read that and &quot;reasonably consider&quot; that your program is separate from the library, but on the other hand, the same paragraph also asserts &quot;when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole ... the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might appear to mean that linking with a GPL library means that you also have to release your program as GPL as well.  But the linking exception in this case seems to explicitly give you permission to link to such a library, probably without requiring that you make your own program GPL'ed as well. It says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License, &#xA;  the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled &#xA;  version of this library into combinations with other programs,  and to&#xA;  distribute those combinations without any restriction  coming from the&#xA;  use of this file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(GPL v2 + Linking Exception)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically what that says is that you can use and distribute your .php file + libgit.so combination &quot;without any restriction.&quot; Personally I think the LGPL language of &quot;under terms of your choice&quot; is clearer, but basically the intention seems to be about the same -- you are allowed to use the library + your program combination without it affecting (or precisely 'restricting') your program from a licensing standpoint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T06:16:09.757" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T06:16:09.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8991" CreationDate="2019-11-06T08:57:17.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD license does not contain a definition of what is meant by &quot;source form&quot; and what by &quot;binary form&quot;, although it does make the assumption that the &quot;source form&quot; can include the license text directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &quot;source form&quot; and &quot;binary form&quot; are also not defined in any relevant laws, it essentially boils down to using common sense in determining if something is &quot;source form&quot;, &quot;binary form&quot; or not covered at all by the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does not distinguish which forms of copyright license can be applied to which kinds of works, so there is nothing in the law stopping the BSD license from being applicable to the images. The only other case where the images would not be under the BSD license is when the license documentation of the project explicitly mentions that the images are under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the nature of most image file formats, it is reasonable to treat images as being in binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Printing the image is a transformation onto a different medium, which is allowed under the BSD license but you still have to comply with the license terms of the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T08:57:17.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8993" CreationDate="2019-11-06T09:00:56.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have written an app and distributed it under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2&lt;/a&gt; licence.  You have accepted a single contribution, but the code has been entirely refactored.  You say you want to sell the codebase, not least because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it might give a chance to desired features to be developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good news is that anyone who wants to develop your code already has just about all the rights they need, under the existing licence.  If you were to sell your residual rights in the codebase, it would add very little to what the buyer could do.  Anyone can make a free or proprietary app from the code as is.  The only things they can't do right now are those forbidden by Apache 2, which include redistribution without clear copyright notices and a copy of the licence, or the inclusion of technologies on which they hold patent rights if they are not prepared to relicense those rights to end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the only thing you have left to sell is the actual copyright in the existing code, and as we have said, that adds very little to what any third party can do, so these rights are not very significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bad news is that you are likely not the sole rightsholder in the existing code.  I accept the contributed code was refactored out, but there is a strong argument that your work remains a derivative of the contributors', in copyright terms (search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/search?q=theseus&quot;&gt;Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; here and elsewhere).  The contributor might well be happy to permit the sale, but consent would be required in such a case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you don't have much left to sell, it's going to be complex to sell it, and you probably don't need to bother anyway given your stated aims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though you didn't ask, given that companies actually use this code, and they keep logging support calls, a better way to monetise the project might be to introduce support packages.  You can be clear that as long as there are open support calls from package holders, those bugs and feature requests will get priority; only once they are all dealt with will you address issues from non-package-holders, and then only if you have nothing you'd rather do.  You can make exceptions for security bugs, things you personally want to work on, and the like, if you wish; but companies need to pay for their support.  You will soon find out how much your commercial users really want the bugs fixed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T21:47:21.713" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T21:47:21.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2019-11-06T10:53:09.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will they sue me!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could and they should. But I don't know the business strategy of Qt (the corporation). And if I did know, I won't speak of it on a forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is equivalent to: &quot;I stole a piece of bread at my baker's. Will he sue me?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is always: &quot;it depends&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T10:53:09.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9011" CreationDate="2019-11-06T11:24:19.990" Score="3" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am have some images which has following license:&#xA;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using these images I am going to make an Android app and sell it via Google play store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the license terms, can i do it?&#xA;I did go through the CC SA etc licenses, but they confused me a lot.&#xA;Please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16488" LastActivityDate="2019-11-09T18:20:37.113" Title="Can I set my android app as paid which uses Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License IMAGES?" Tags="|creative-commons|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9002" CreationDate="2019-11-07T12:57:06.907" Score="3" ViewCount="624" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my projects is in &lt;strong&gt;Github&lt;/strong&gt; and currently it does not have any license such as &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, it should be considered as an Open Source project by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, I wish that if anyone uses this project then he makes a reference to me and my repository as well. So, i am not asking money for my code and it will be free, but i hope that no one treats it as his/her own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any solution for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16491" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T04:58:34.853" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T07:27:53.927" Title="Is it possible to ask for reference in an open source project?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8999" CreationDate="2019-11-07T17:09:04.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do not attach a specific license to your public GitHub project, then the project is publicly viewable and people are allowed to make forks of it based on the GitHub ToS. But that is where the permissions end. &#xA;Your code is most definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open-source, as that term includes giving additional freedoms to users of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All licenses I am aware of allow that you are recognized as the author of the software, most commonly in a copyright declaration (Copyright (C) 2019 Salman Lashkarara). In addition, the Apache 2.0 license has a mechanism for non-legal attribution notices that could be used to reference your repository. In both cases, people building upon your code are required to keep those declarations/notices intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-11-15T07:27:53.927" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T07:27:53.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8999" CreationDate="2019-11-07T17:09:23.733" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of my projects is in Github and currently it does not have any license such as MIT. Therefore, it should be considered as an Open Source project by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but that's wrong.  We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;a clear analysis&lt;/a&gt; of the licence status of github code that has no explicit licence, and it's not open source in any way.  If you want your code to be free you need to attach a licence to it telling people what rights they have, and what obligations they assume if they exercise those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, I wish that if anyone uses this project then he makes a reference to me and my repository as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly every free software licence there is requires that existing copyright statements be maintained, so if having &lt;code&gt;(c) 2019 Salman Lashkarara&lt;/code&gt; displayed is enough for you, then pick any of the standard permissive or copyleft free licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want explicit text to be displayed, something like &lt;code&gt;This code uses libfoo by Salman Lashkarara, the original source of which can be found at https://github.com/libfoo&lt;/code&gt;, you still have some options.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s7b allows &quot;&lt;em&gt;Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  To me, a pointer to a repository is reasonable author attribution, so GPLv3 might work for you in that regard.  Other licences may have similar possibilities, but note that people may be unwilling to use GPLv3 material with a section 7 requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want more than that, you quite quickly get into the realm of advertising, and that can be both a practical and aesthetic turnoff for free software users.  Your code may not get much reuse if you take this route.  The old &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-4-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;4-clause BSD licence&lt;/a&gt; required that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this&#xA;  software must display the following acknowledgement: This product&#xA;  includes software developed by the University of California,&#xA;  Berkeley and its contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this caused problems.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility list&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;practical problems&lt;/a&gt;, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short: you need a licence.  The licence is where you tell people how much credit they have to give you when reusing your code, so pick it carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T08:31:02.653" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T08:31:02.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9005" CreationDate="2019-11-07T23:12:37.037" Score="8" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333678/was-the-retroactive-change-to-cc-by-sa-4-0-approved-by-stack-exchanges-lawyers?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;a discussion on Meta&lt;/a&gt; over whether or not StackExchange was allowed to retrospectively change their licensing policy from CC SA 3.0 to CC SA 4.0. Presuming that it is indeed an open question, how can people sharing content from StackExchange sites properly attribute back to the original author? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution#Examples_of_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official CC wiki&lt;/a&gt; recommends the following format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco&quot; by tvol is licensed under &lt;strong&gt;CC BY 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I'm not sure if 3.0 or 4.0 applies to SE content, how do I write a proper attribution? Some possibilities include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is licensed under CC SA 3.0/4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is licensed under CC SA 3.0 (possibly 4.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is licensed under CC SA // ignore version altogether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is licensed under CC SA (exact version unknown)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References to official statements by Creative Commons or to relevant copyright lawsuits are appreciated, if any are available on this subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16497" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T04:15:49.047" LastActivityDate="2019-11-09T07:50:30.413" Title="How do you write an attribution if there's ambiguity over which version of Creative Commons applies?" Tags="|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9003" CreationDate="2019-11-08T09:51:45.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You absolutely need to be sure which exact license applies before you use some content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not sure which license applies it means you don't have a license to use the content at all and would break the law by doing so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright law almost everywhere says that you are not allowed to copy/use/... anything someone else created. If you want to use the intellectual property of someone else, you need the permission of the creator/owner of the intellectual property.&#xA;The burden of proof that you actually have this permission (a license) lies with you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy my intellectual property from this site and I sue you for copyright violation, you must be able to prove in a court of law that you have my permission to use my intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's some version of CC SA. Maybe 3.0, maybe 4.0, I don't know, who cares anyway? I just copied it from this website where I knew they changed the license although it wasn't allowed by the former license and I don't care much.&quot; might not do to convince the judge that you actually have my permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="944" LastEditorUserId="944" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T12:41:58.897" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T12:41:58.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9003" CreationDate="2019-11-08T16:14:47.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question seems slightly disingenuous to me.  It purports to be about uncertainty in the licence version that applies, but in a specific case: SE's forced relicensing of all SE sites' content.  The ambiguity here is not the version which is declared at distribution time, since that is clearly indicated.  Instead, it seems to me that the heart of the question is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a)  whether content contributed under CC BY-SA 3.0, with the contributor futher granting certain unlimited rights to SE &quot;&lt;em&gt;in order to provide the Services&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, can be relicensed by SE for general distribution under CC BY-SA 4.0, and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) if it cannot, which licence should people reusing content from SE assume applies, and label their reused content with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is uncertainty as to the &lt;em&gt;answer&lt;/em&gt; to part (a), it is not an uncertain point.  Either the terms on which contributions were made permit the relicensing - in which case it's now under CC BY-SA 4.0 -  or SE has no permission, express or implied, to do it - in which case all contributions made prior to the change are under CC BY-SA 3.0.  So I don't like &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the attribution options listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I'm no lawyer, and it would seem to me to have got way past the point where they should have been involved.  I agree with the point made in the leading answer to the linked meta.SE post that, had SE any formal justification for this, they might reasonably be expected by now to have presented it, and that as the ones trying to initiate the change the onus is on them to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So proceeding on the assumption that the relicensing was ineffective, I turn my attention to question (b).  There is further ambiguity about when the licence change for newly-contributed content was effective: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; says that the ToS change to CC BY-SA 4.0 was made 2019-04-30, but those ToS as I read them don't specify a CC BY-SA version number &lt;strong&gt;at all&lt;/strong&gt;.  Moreover, the linked post noted that the individual site footers - which is all many contributors see - kept displaying &quot;CC BY-SA 3.0&quot; until 2019-09-05 by &quot;&lt;em&gt;oversight&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  That further blurs the status of contributions made between 2019-04-30 and 2019-09-05, though I lean towards concluding that contributions on individual sites were made under CC BY-SA 3.0 until 2019-09-05.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; provides in s4b(ii) that derivative works can be relicenced under later versions of CC BY-SA, so posts originally predating the relicensing that have received substantive contributions after 2019-09-05 (and thus under CC BY-SA 4.0) can reasonably be taken to have been so relicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that any honest agent reusing content entirely predating 2019-09-05 should label it, on reuse, as subject to CC BY-SA 3.0.  Content entirely postdating 2019-09-05 should be labelled CC BY-SA 4.0.  Content predating 2019-09-05 but with substantive contributions after that date can reasonably be labelled CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-11-09T07:50:30.413" LastActivityDate="2019-11-09T07:50:30.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-08T17:40:50.083" Score="3" ViewCount="290" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#cite_ref-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official copyright FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the WMF legal team, CC BY-SA 4.0 is not backwards compatible with CC BY-SA 3.0. Therefore, mixing text licenses under 3.0 and 4.0 would be problematic, however media files uploaded under this license are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't Creative Commons make the 4.0 license officially compatible with the previous version? Isn't this making it hard for projects like Wikipedia to reuse CC content in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16497" LastEditorUserId="16497" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T18:22:21.873" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T10:41:20.203" Title="Why didn't Creative Commons make CC-BY-SA 4.0 backwards compatible with CC-BY-SA 3.0?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9008" CreationDate="2019-11-08T18:21:55.530" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7430/can-i-upgrade-the-version-of-cc-by-sa-from-3-0-to-4-0-in-my-modification&quot;&gt;looks like&lt;/a&gt; Creative Commons only allows a relicensing from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-SA 4.0 for derivative works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform &lt;strong&gt;an Adaptation&lt;/strong&gt; only under the terms of:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (i) this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (ii) &lt;strong&gt;a later version of this License&lt;/strong&gt; with the same License Elements as this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US));&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does CC have a guideline on how a website hosting CC content (such as Wikipedia) could possible upgrade to CC-BY-SA 4.0? Or is Wikipedia permanently stuck with 3.0 forever, as no migration path could possibly exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16497" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T20:07:23.810" Title="Is there an official guideline from Creative Commons on how a CC-BY-SA 3.0 website could &quot;upgrade&quot; to CC-BY-SA 4.0?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9007" CreationDate="2019-11-08T20:07:23.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0_upgrade_guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guidelines&lt;/a&gt; and they contain a Paragraph &quot;Dealing with mixed-version (e.g., 4.0 and prior versions) content&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll just quote that here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Always mark which license version applies to which content. CC has published &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best practices&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;In many cases, a work will have multiple rights at play because there is more than one contributor to a work. This often means there are multiple license versions applicable to a work. In those cases, reusers must comply with all relevant license versions when reusing the full work.&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;For, example, reusing a 4.0-licensed translation of a 3.0-licensed essay would require complying with the conditions of both versions 3.0 and 4.0. This means attributing the original author as specified in v3 and attributing the translator as specified in v4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;CC has published &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_Versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidance&lt;/a&gt; about what differs between versions. As a practical matter, compliance with a later version of a license is typically compliant with the earlier license. There are certain exceptions with respect to attribution. A comparison of the attribution requirements is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. (The definition of NonCommercial is unchanged from prior versions, and the scope of ShareAlike has only expanded, so looking only at the later license should not be problematic vis-a-vis those license elements.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Note: These same considerations apply when dealing with any two different CC license versions and/or types. They are not unique to 4.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that Wikipedia could't just upgrade all content to CC BY-SA 4.0.&#xA;But they could decide that &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; content has to be licensed by the contributors as CC BY-SA 4.0. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They would then need a system to track exactly which content is licensed under which license and give this information to users of the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="944" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T20:07:23.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9010" CreationDate="2019-11-08T20:18:36.997" Score="4" ViewCount="1550" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use license GPLv3 in my open source project on GitHub. And I want to ask &lt;em&gt;how can I do that&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have read an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; and I have understood that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My repo has to have a file &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt;, that contains information about GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the beginning of each project file should be the following text:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Copyright (C) &lt;code&gt;year&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;name of author&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;  the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;  (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;  GNU General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;  along with this program.  If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And now I want to ask experts&lt;/strong&gt;: Have I understood correctly how to use GPLv3 in my project?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16500" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T21:33:35.650" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T21:33:35.650" Title="How to use GPLv3 in open source project?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9009" CreationDate="2019-11-08T21:32:53.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it's not much of an answer, but yes: it seems to me you have done your research carefully and understood the process well.  The only change I would make is that the file &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; (or &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt;, or similar) should contain the full text of GPLv3, rather than information about it.  But other than that, I think you've got it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T21:32:53.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8998" CreationDate="2019-11-09T07:55:56.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless you go out of your way and convert the images to an array of numbers and include them in that way in your source code so that they become part of the built binary, your app is not a derived work of the images it shows. This means that the images and the app itself can be licensed independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the original images are under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license, the cropped versions you created need to be under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app itself can be under a completely different license, including a closed-source one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-11-09T18:20:37.113" LastActivityDate="2019-11-09T18:20:37.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9014" CreationDate="2019-11-09T15:35:54.147" Score="4" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license mentions the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform &lt;strong&gt;an Adaptation&lt;/strong&gt; only under the terms of:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (i) this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US));&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an exact definition or explanation anywhere of what constitutes an Adaptation? I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0/Treatment_of_adaptations#Summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an official wiki&lt;/a&gt; dealing with how Adaptations are supposed to be relicensed, but it doesn't explain what an Adaptation is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example from this very site - if someone takes my CC-BY-SA post and edits in a comma, is it an Adaptation? What if it's one word, one sentence, one paragraph, two paragraphs, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16497" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T18:28:15.730" Title="What is the exact definition of an Adaptation under Creative Commons?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9012" CreationDate="2019-11-09T18:27:27.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The legal text of the CC BY-SA-4.0 license contains the definition you are looking for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How large a change needs to be to create an Adaptation (or equivalently Adapted Material) is not defined. If the change is clearly non-mechanical and required some thought from a human, then that change is definitely large enough to create an Adaptation. If the change is purely mechanical (for example, a different placement of line breaks) then it is insufficient to create an Adaptation. Where the exact difference lies is not defined and has to be judged on a case by case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-11-11T18:28:15.730" LastActivityDate="2019-11-11T18:28:15.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-13T02:35:39.950" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a book, but I liked all its source files distributed on derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the advantages and disadvantages of licensing non-executable content under GPL when compared with CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" LastEditorUserId="21" LastEditDate="2019-11-14T10:49:22.983" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T09:58:08.560" Title="Pros and cons of licensing non-executable content under GPL rather than CC-BY-SA?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7190" CreationDate="2019-11-13T04:18:16.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will be more like having two licenses. One that you grant only to a specific group of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" LastEditorUserId="16525" LastEditDate="2019-11-13T14:45:02.833" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T14:45:02.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-13T12:32:16.903" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a functionality in my propriety software for translation of names between Spanish (and other languages) and English.  The translation function works by typing words in Spanish which then performs a 'look-up' and 'match-up' function against a dictionary (database/text file) of Spanish to English translations.  The translations are then used to perform the primary function of my software (which is compliance services and wholly unrelated to a translation type service - the translation function is just an optional first step so non-english speaking users can use the software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complicating factor is that I want to use dictionaries licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA license. The dictionary is not integrated in to the software code or modified in any way, rather, it is provided as an external file which would be distributed as part of the software package (containing my proprietary software) for use in conjunction with the software, which carries out the data-mining exercise on the dictionary and spits out the results to the client.  However, the software doesn't depend on the dictionary to work - it's more so the data that is fed in to it to generate results for the end client. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main question is whether the above use case would constitute an &quot;adaption&quot; and therefore potentially require me to distribute my software under the same licence?  I want to licence my software under my own strict commercial licence term so don't want to be subject to the 'ShareAlike' condition contained in the BY-SA licence terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the provision of the dictionary as part of my software package is adaption... however, I'm not so sure if the running of the translation function over the dictionary and the production of the results (albeit simply an automated presentation of the selected words already contained in the dictionary) is adaption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a simple way around this to avoid any risk of infringement? I could potentially distribute the dictionary to clients under a separate module and under the same CC-BY-SA licence but want to avoid this so not to detract from the client having a user-friendly experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally see the risk as low because it's not as if I am providing a marketed translated service - its more of an automation feature to support the real purpose of the software (automated compliance services.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any insight on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16528" LastEditorUserId="16528" LastEditDate="2019-11-13T14:07:20.173" LastActivityDate="2019-11-13T14:07:20.173" Title="Is use of Creative Common's BY-SA licensed database in software 'adaption'?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|copyleft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-13T18:06:39.497" Score="18" ViewCount="77251" Body="&lt;p&gt;United States here. I have a client that I would like to build a small suite of Java 8+ applications for to be installed on their office desktops and servers. This requires the Java Runtime Environment (&lt;strong&gt;JRE&lt;/strong&gt;) to be installed on all of those computers/servers as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their IT department is telling me that installing Java will require a license &amp;amp; fees for the JRE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling myself I have found a mixture of answers, none of which are &lt;em&gt;definitive&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some articles state that Java is and will continue to be totally free for commercial use, with the exception of certain optional add-ons like &lt;em&gt;Mission Control&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Flight Recorder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other articles state that as of January 2019, Java will require licenses for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other articles state that different rules will be applied to different versions of the JRE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which is it?&lt;/strong&gt; If there are rules/conditions based on the versions, what are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="hotmeatballsoup" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T23:23:25.603" Title="Is Java (JRE) still free for commercial use?" Tags="|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2019-11-14T05:14:55.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe requiring &lt;code&gt;.js&lt;/code&gt; files is definitely a dynamic linking. It's not much different from linking a library in your project for the use of library's functionality, which would be considered using the library as a plugin by GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is not clear. Are the JS files your own written work as part of the server project? Then they probably are GPL and if somebody takes their source code it's also GPL. If somebody is taking the server and not taking the JS files then it's still the GPL. If someone takes all of them then they all GPL. If you release JS files as separate modules then you can license then with MIT, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requiring a JS file is absolutely a linking. You can statically link Node.js modules too by compiling a Node.js program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16536" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T05:14:55.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8869" CreationDate="2019-11-14T06:23:48.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree with the previous answer, using a GPLv3 library does not make your website GPL, if you merely include the library in its compiled form provided by the author and exported to the &lt;code&gt;window&lt;/code&gt; namespace. Then it's the same as using a precompiled binary in other programs, and using &quot;sockets, pipes and command line interface to communicate with it&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if have a source code that &lt;em&gt;imports&lt;/em&gt; the library, and then compile it with something like Webpack, you're producing a derivative combined work using static linking and must release all JS source code for the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you have to make a call here, for example if you're using callbacks, that's quite intricate communication, whereas if you're merely passing args in a config object, that's almost the same as command line arguments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ask the author of the library what he meant by GPL as well. For example, the WOW &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matthieua/WOW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/matthieua/WOW&lt;/a&gt; lib specifically provides a dual license, one for commercial use, and one for derivative open source work. I still don't think that because they released the code under GPL, I would have to make a non-commercial website open source if I used their library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16536" LastEditorUserId="16536" LastEditDate="2019-11-14T06:40:38.483" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T06:40:38.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9029" CreationDate="2019-11-14T08:01:18.860" Score="2" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a MIT licensed application which we sell packed under virtual appliance to our customers. the application has a marketplace where users can download and install additional plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We wish to pre-install some plugins from the marketplace and then distribute it, I understand that MIT is compatible with GPLv3 and hence both can be distributed together licensed as GPLv3, but we do not wish to disclose source for our MIT licensed application. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note :&lt;/strong&gt; Plugin (GPLv3) is not a dependency for Application (MIT) in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do we violate GPL if we ship MIT licensed application pre-installed with GPLv3 plugin from the marketplace and do not release source for MIT licensed application ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to not assemble plugin (GPLv3) and application (MIT) prior to distribution and ask the customer to do install plugin (GPLv3) after the distribution ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would the situation be any different if we had re-licensed our MIT app to a proprietary licence ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16530" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T08:22:12.637" Title="Distributing MIT application with GPLv3 plugin without releasing source for MIT application" Tags="|license-compatibility|mit|gpl-3|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2019-11-14T16:37:27.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do not wish to disclose your sources for the MIT-licensed application, then it would be really helpful to everybody to make that intention clear by changing the license of the application to a closed-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing status of your application in combination with a GPL plugin depends very much on how the two interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application interacts with the plugin as a separate application (the plugin gets loaded as a separate process and the two communicate only over typical inter-process communication channels like sockets or STDIN/STDOUT), then the two are considered to be separate works of authorship and their licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application interacts with the plugin as with a library (the plugin is loaded into the same process, function calls are made, data structures are shared, etc.), then many consider this a derived work and the terms of the GPL license apply to the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Do we violate GPL if we ship MIT licensed application pre-installed with GPLv3 plugin from the marketplace and do not release source for MIT licensed application ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the second case of how the application and plugin interact, then yes it would be a violation of the GPL to not disclose the source code of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is it acceptable to not assemble plugin (GPLv3) and application (MIT) prior to distribution and ask the customer to do install plugin (GPLv3) after the distribution ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again assuming the second case of how the application and plugin interact, I would still consider it a violation of the GPL license. It is less clear cut than distributing the combined work and would depend to some extent also on how actively you encourage the customers to use the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would the situation be any different if we had re-licensed our MIT app to a proprietary licence ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that would make a very big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the MIT license, there can be an assumption that you would be willing to comply with the terms of the GPL licence, when that is used in a plugin, and release the source code with the necessary freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a proprietary, closed-source license, there is no question that the license is GPL-incompatible and that you don't intent to ever honour GPL-like conditions on your source code. If people want to license their plugin under the GPL license in this case, they will have to add an exception to their license to allow the plugin to be used with your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T16:37:27.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9026" CreationDate="2019-11-15T08:22:12.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to my colleague, I disagree with a lot of his answer.  The core analysis I think is correct, not least because it comes straight from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;: if the plugin is tightly coupled to the main body of code, the whole (application and plugin) is a single work, which is a derivative of (amongst other things) the plugin; if not, then not.  Note that this doesn't hinge on distribution arrangements: if you &lt;strong&gt;wrote&lt;/strong&gt; your code to be tightly-coupled to someone else's pre-existing GPL code, then your code - from the moment of its creation - is a derivative of this GPL code, and when you distribute it, however you do that, GPL obligations will come into force.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that because the plugin is free software, it will be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; obvious to the plugin's authors whether or not the coupling is tight or loose.  If it's tight, for example because complex memory structure is exchanged, then it would be very easy to establish that you had reference to the plugin's source during creation of your app, because there's no other reasonable way you could have discovered the API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think the answers to your questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do we violate GPL if we ship MIT licensed application pre-installed with GPLv3 plugin from the marketplace and do not release source for MIT licensed application ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the works are a single work as per the analysis above not only must you provide the source for the main application, but you must also convey the whole thing under the GPL.  You can still release your application alone, without plugin, under MIT, but you must provide the source; and when the works are conveyed together, they must be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the works are two works, it makes no difference whether they ship together or separately.  If you ship the GPL plugin, you will still have source obligations in respect of the plugin, but that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to not assemble plugin (GPLv3) and application (MIT) prior to distribution and ask the customer to do install plugin (GPLv3) after the distribution ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking the customer to assemble the pieces is fine, the licences are fine, not providing source for your app (if tightly-coupled) is not; see above.  &lt;strong&gt;Copyright obligations are not a function of shipping arrangements.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would the situation be any different if we had re-licensed our MIT app to a proprietary licence ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  It is the GPL that is placing obligations on you here, not the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An underlying confusion here is that you're writing a work and distributing under an MIT licence, without source.  This seems to be causing problems, as some people are very used to being able to treat non-copylefted free code as being even more free than copylefted code, and thus are confused by your intent not to distribute source from the get-go.  I maintain this is a cognitive error on their parts.  It's completely lawful to distribute an original program under these terms, though it is unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T08:22:12.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9017" CreationDate="2019-11-15T09:58:08.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As has &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/777/458&quot;&gt;already been discussed here&lt;/a&gt;, the main reason for not using CC licences for software is that they fail to distinguish between the source and executable (&quot;&lt;em&gt;object code&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) forms of a work.  There are a number of ways of making this distinction, but one I find useful is that the source form is easy to edit, but hard to use, while the executable form is easy to use, but hard to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have written a book which you intend to distribute in a format that is easy to edit (eg TeX source, oowriter file, some kind of markup language) but hard to read, in additional to the usual form (eg PDF, ebook, paper book) which is easy to read (or use on a reading device) but harder to edit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, good for you!  Secondly, this distinction is very similar to the one that copyleft software licences try to make.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; defines the difference thus, in s1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is compatible with the distinction you and I have both made, above, and moreover contains nothing that implies it's referring to software.  I would say that, with a bit of helpful labelling (where you make it clear that your source files are &quot;&lt;em&gt;the preferred form of making modifications&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for your book) you could use GPLv3 verbatim, and benefit from the requirement that people using your work downstream would need to maintain the distinction you have started, and keep &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; parts free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-15T09:58:08.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5657" CreationDate="2019-11-16T04:18:04.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there's nothing otherwise prohibiting you, you may publish your app code to a public git repository under any license you choose and even with no accompanying license at all. With regard to copyright it depends on applicable laws. In the United States, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/title17/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright&lt;/a&gt; is automatic and a transfer of that copyright &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cannot be executed&lt;/a&gt; without a written and signed instrument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose GPL, you can be reasonably sure your code will not make its way into another App Store app due to Apple's App Store app licensing requirements and you (as well as others) will have the opportunity to view contributions back to your app in forks or copies of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose the Expat license, you may not know when someone uses your code in another App Store app as there's no requirement to reproduce the license in object form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8188" LastEditorUserId="8188" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T04:37:46.043" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T04:37:46.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-17T09:00:25.163" Score="4" ViewCount="1619" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I give a binary executable (loaded as a dynamic library/FFI) an MIT license, whilst keeping the source code proprietary, and selling &quot;source code licenses&quot; on a per customer basis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Id like to allow people to use the compiled artifacts for free under the MIT license, but if they want to change the source code and recompile they require a different paid for license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this is not strictly &quot;open source&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14273" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T12:49:54.393" Title="Can I MIT license a binary, but keep the source proprietary?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9036" CreationDate="2019-11-18T12:29:31.657" Score="5" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a suitable license for a current software project. The project is special as it is rather a template, its primary goal is to provide a solid basis for &lt;a href=&quot;https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/q/33562/30021&quot;&gt;scientific software&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore, I would like to provide the source code (only little amounts of actual source code, the majority of the project are configuration files for CMake, YAML configuration files for continuous integration, etc.) under a license that is very permissive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical work flow would be to clone the project and adapting it, including renaming the project and changing the license in LICENSE and (if any) in the source code files. Hence, anyone should be able to copy and adapt the source code, use it for their own project (commercial or open-source), and even re-license it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the only thing that prevents me from CC0'ing the code is that an attribution would be nice. However, I am not sure how attribution is actually defined. For me it would be sufficient if at some point (README or ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for open-source projects, in the documentation of a commercial software) the original project is mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What would be a suitable license for this situation?&lt;/strong&gt; I was thinking about Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, which would require attribution but apart from that everyone is allowed to do anything. The CC licenses are generally considered not appropriate for software (as pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1717&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example), but I would say it might fit here as it is not a common software project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the license have to be included?&lt;/strong&gt; In LICENSE I would say. Does it have to be in all the source files (which I find inconvenient)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What forms could the attribution assume?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16558" LastEditorUserId="16558" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T13:07:33.087" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T14:27:44.253" Title="What is a good license for a software project template?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9035" CreationDate="2019-11-18T14:27:44.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be a suitable license for this situation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license that comes closest to your desires seems to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is a permissive license that allows derived works to be distributed under different terms than your template and it has a mechanism for handling attribution notices. The license does have a requirement that if different license terms are applied to a derived work, then they must effectively include the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. This means that people can't use an even more permissive license that would allow removing the attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the license have to be included? In LICENSE I would say. Does it have to be in all the source files (which I find inconvenient)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full license text should be in a LICENSE file.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is strongly recommended to have a license indication in each source file. The Apache license recommends this text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand that you would skip this in files that are expected to be heavily edited by users of your template. The recommendation to include it in each file is to ensure that the license information remains intact even when the file gets somehow separated from the LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What forms could the attribution assume?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the Apache 2.0 License, attributions must be placed in a NOTICE text file. The attribution could be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This software is created using the &amp;lt;XYZ&amp;gt; template created by carlosvalderrama. &#xA;The template itself can be found at &amp;lt;link to repository/website&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T14:27:44.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-20T00:59:56.087" Score="3" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working for a service company. As per client requirement we need to slightly modify eclipse  mosquito source code. It is dual licensed with EPL and EDL. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/eclipse/mosquitto/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/eclipse/mosquitto/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the License FAQ it says user can select the license(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#DUALLIC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#DUALLIC&lt;/a&gt;) . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As EDL is more permissive and BSD like (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php&lt;/a&gt;), we choose EDL license. &#xA;Now can we use modified mosquito without opensourcing our modifications? Is there any other implications which will impact it's commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4103" LastEditorUserId="4103" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T01:38:47.940" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T06:40:11.567" Title="What are my license obligations if I modify eclipse mosquito for commercial use" Tags="|license-recommendation|bsd|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9037" CreationDate="2019-11-20T06:40:11.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you point out, the EDLv1 is BSD-like (in fact, it's a copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; with names changed in clause 3 and the disclaimer), so your rights and obligations are pretty simply stated in clauses one and two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but it seems to me that you may use modified mosquito within your organisation, and you may sell it without, and in neither case will you have any obligation to release the modified source.  You will need to reproduce the text of the licence somewhere in the content you transfer to customers along with the binary, and you must refrain from claiming that Eclipse or any contributors endorse your binary (to be safest, it's best not to claim that anyone endorses it, except you), but that's the full extent of the impact of EDLv1 on commercial activities with this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T06:40:11.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9067" CreationDate="2019-11-23T12:35:35.630" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a GPL license (with an AppStore exception) for my app and CC BY-SA for the images used in the app, as I know the GPL isn't appropriate for artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm wondering what I should license translation files under (and ask contributors to license their translations under too). Is the GPL appropriate for translations, or would CC BY-SA be a better fit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T19:31:06.853" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T12:31:21.317" Title="Appropriate copyleft license for translation files" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9045" CreationDate="2019-11-23T16:32:21.227" Score="5" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a website. Some of functionaly is using open-source libraries from npm, github, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to monetize my sites using ads, or even I want to create some sites template and sell to others. But, I want my project copyrighted as mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there type of libraries license or even toolkits license that I use for building the site that should be aware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16537" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T07:48:26.993" Title="Open-source license that should aware if I want monetize my project" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|copyright|relicensing|monetization|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9046" CreationDate="2019-11-23T20:44:34.380" Score="5" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob writes software for employer A and employer B. Bob has a general contract with employer A which states that any IP generated in the course of employment (whether during work hours or not) can be claimed by employer A. On the other hand, Bob's contract with employer B has no claim over IP generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purposes of the software at each company are different, but from time to time he implements the same code in both systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob has a specific release contract from employer A regarding work at employer B. Specifically employer A will not claim ownership over IP produced at employer B, if it is not derived from the work at employer A (let us call this the release condition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overlap in code potentially goes against the release condition. To avoid this situation, Bob releases all software at employer A under CC-BY-4.0. This is justified because the code will be released as open source due to the nature of the field. The software at employer B is commercial and not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether the following statements are correct: (1) if company A agrees to open source licensing suggested by Bob (which is justified by the field), they cannot claim that work at company B is derived from work at company A, since the code which belongs to both is in the public domain; (2) company B has no licensing conflict due to CC-BY-4.0 not requiring them to release their code under the same license; (3) CC-BY-4.0 can be a valid choice of license for software (I see that GNU recommend against it for code); (4) Between GPLv3 and CC-BY-4.0 there is no difference in terms of IP claims, while GPLv3 is more limiting for subsequent commercialisation (by any party).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16600" LastEditorUserId="16600" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T13:48:03.723" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T12:10:38.680" Title="Employer IP release and open source published code" Tags="|gpl|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9041" CreationDate="2019-11-24T09:28:31.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the copyright, copyright automatically goes to the person (or organization) that wrote the code. You will own the copyright of all the code you write (unless you have a contract that says otherwise), but you will not own the copyrights on code written by others. And it doesn't matter if those others contributed directly to your project or if they contributed to a library you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you should be aware of license wise is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open source licenses can not forbid you to try to monetize your project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL and AGPL license are somewhat problematic around monetization. Monetization is allowed, but people receiving the binaries (for GPL) or interacting with the binaries (for AGPL) must be given the right and possibility to offer the same product without the ads/subscription fee/etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are (non-open source) licenses around with a &quot;no commercial use&quot; clause in them. Most forms of monetization go against those clauses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T07:48:26.993" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T07:48:26.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9043" CreationDate="2019-11-24T09:57:58.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Bob releases all software at employer A under CC-BY-4.0. This is justified because the code will be released as open source due to the nature of the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; justified. The code that Bob writes at employer A is the property of employer A and they are the only ones that can definitively state under which license terms the code gets released. Bob can at best offer a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) if company A agrees to open source licensing suggested by Bob (which is justified by the field), they cannot claim that work at company B is derived from work at company A, since the code which belongs to both is in the public domain;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this statement is false. There is a very big legal difference between code that is in the public domain and code that has a (permissive) open source license. And for determining if something is a derived work, it doesn't even matter what license applies to the original. That only determines if creating the derived work was legal and what you are allowed to do with the derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that employer A agrees to the permissive open source license suggested by Bob and employer B has obtained a copy of the software through the proper channels, you get into an interesting legal situation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;According to the license terms, employer B is allowed to create a derivative work and use that in their commercial product. They just have to give the proper credits to employer A. However, based on the release contract Bob has signed, Bob &lt;em&gt;is not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to work on that derived work. In law, the more specific contract usually trumps a more general terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(2) company B has no licensing conflict due to CC-BY-4.0 not requiring them to release their code under the same license; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) CC-BY-4.0 can be a valid choice of license for software (I see that GNU recommend against it for code); &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY license can be a valid choice for software, but in general it is not recommended to do so, because the CC licenses were not created with software in mind. There are already enough licenses for software in common use, also with similar terms like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD&lt;/a&gt; licenses. Bob should have recommended one of those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) Between GPLv3 and CC-BY-4.0 there is no difference in terms of IP claims, while GPLv3 is more limiting for subsequent commercialisation (by any party).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no difference in which rights are licensed under the GPL and CC BY licenses, but there is a big difference in the conditions under which you can exercise those rights. The GPL requires that you pass on the same rights and obligations to the people that receive your product, while the CC BY only requires attribution of the creators of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T09:57:58.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T11:58:54.013" Score="9" ViewCount="4643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to use mingw-w64 for commercial software and I'm looking for info about it's licensing. I was looking through licenses included in package and some discussions on forums and mailing lists and I'm still not quite sure if I can use this compiler for my purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mingw-w64 with default settings requires you to include three dll's with them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libstdc++-6.dll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libgcc_s_seh-1.dll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libwinpthread-1.dll&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to distribute those files with my own software which would be licensed under my own (commercial) license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, can I link those libraries statically? I was looking through some licenses and I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/master/tree/COPYING.MinGW-w64/COPYING.MinGW-w64.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt;, specifically this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;These don't apply to the binaries built with&#xA;MinGW-w64 unless you specifically tell MinGW-w64 to link against&#xA;these parts, for example, by enabling profiling code.&#xA;&#xA;In addition to the notices in this file, also the notices in&#xA;COPYING.MinGW-w64-runtime.txt apply to MinGW-w64. Some (possibly&#xA;all) notices in that file may apply also to the binaries built with&#xA;this version of MinGW-w64. The idea is that if you create binary&#xA;packages of your software with MinGW-w64, you can simply copy&#xA;COPYING.MinGW-w64-runtime.txt into your package to fulfill the&#xA;license requirements of the MinGW runtime.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that if I'm building binaries based on mingw-w64 ones, I have to provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/master/tree/COPYING.MinGW-w64-runtime/COPYING.MinGW-w64-runtime.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt; with my software, which contains those lines at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Disclaimer&#xA;&#xA;This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU&#xA;Lesser General Public License for more details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that it refers to software that I've created, which would mean that I have to distribute my software under GNU LGPL license. Does that mean for me that i have to link this dynamically through dlls in order to keep my own commercial license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16601" LastActivityDate="2024-04-05T14:37:42.330" Title="Can I use (statically or dynamically linked) mingw-w64 runtime libraries for commercial purposes?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|commercial|linked-libraries|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T13:16:51.060" Score="11" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been wandering in the issues of a particular open-source project hosted on Github for a few months, as well as related projects. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a contributor myself (except for some typos in the docs), but I now know that a handful of old issues have been addressed and can be closed. A typical example is feature requests being answered &quot;Good idea, but we don't have time for that now&quot; and implemented a few years later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it polite/useful/good practice to add a comment in the GH issue stating that it can probably be closed?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, it will help with triage, on the other hand, I don't want to add noise for the core devs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context:&lt;/strong&gt; The project is split into a lot of repos (~15), is complex, traces back to 2014, and the main repo alone has 800 open issues, half of them being older than 2017. The project is very active, with a growing community of users and devs using it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16609" LastEditorUserId="16609" LastEditDate="2020-01-21T09:02:13.150" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T09:02:13.150" Title="Github etiquette: Is it polite to help for issue triage?" Tags="|github|collaboration|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9052" CreationDate="2019-11-25T15:05:18.107" Score="50" ViewCount="10135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fairphone does not provide any source code for its Fairphone 3 phone. They admit this on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032971751-Operating-systems-OS-for-the-Fairphone-3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; and also confirmed this to me in an email:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We really appreciate your feedback and concern, but unfortunately at this point the source tree still on the working process. It will be published eventually once the responsible team considered it is ready.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe them that they want to release it eventually, but it's not legal to delay like this, right? Assume I have the phone in my hands right now (note 1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On their website they also claim that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As parts of this kernel are owned by third parties, we need their permission first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this isn't possible either I believe. Or is it possible they signed some contract that said they can't redistribute the source, even though by using it they also agree to the license which requires them to distribute the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the printed materials distributed with the phone the only relevant section is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fairphone provides mobile phones using Android OS with GApps. For&#xA;  this OS Fairphone will provide software updates and fixes. Please&#xA;  note, Fairphone only supports unmodified, officially released&#xA;  software...Software is an essential aspect of the mobile phone and&#xA;  Fairphone will make every effort to provide timely updates and&#xA;  fixes...&lt;strong&gt;You may not resell, sublicense, rent, lease, transfer,&#xA;  disclose or lend this software to any third party. You may not modify,&#xA;  alter, reverse engineer or decompile this software.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to obviously contradict the GPL and I assume is null and void - right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 1: I don't actually own the phone, but please assume I do -  if I thought I could get the source code as a phone owner, I could and maybe would buy the phone. It's readily available from stock where I live. Nowhere in my exchange of email with them they said or even hinted at the possibility that their answer would have been different had I attached proof of purchase or asked via another channel that could be indicated on a written notice distributed with the phone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="846" LastEditorUserId="846" LastEditDate="2019-11-27T18:45:02.963" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T18:45:02.963" Title="Is Fairphone violating the GPL with its newest Fairphone 3?" Tags="|gpl|android|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9051" CreationDate="2019-11-25T16:41:22.243" Score="39" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe them that they want to release it eventually, but it's not legal to delay like this, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If indeed Fairphone is distributing a device with an embedded Linux kernel but not making the corresponding source available to recipients of that device, that's a rather cut-and-dry GPL violation. An author whose work is included in Fairphone's version of the kernel could sue (either for monetary damages and/or an injunction to stop distribution) and probably win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal liability here is fairly clear, assuming my stated preconditions are true. It is worth noting, however, that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy's Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement&lt;/a&gt; advise legal action as a last resort. If you are the copyright holder of code whose GPL license terms are being ignored, consult with the SFC or the GNU project for advice on how to correct such misuse in the most constructive way possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As parts of this kernel are owned by third parties, we need their permission first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is vague enough that it might not be problematic. Possibly this refers to hardware drivers that are loaded as binary blobs from wrapper modules, which are outside the application of the GPL. That is, it is possible for Fairphone to have received binary blob drivers not under the GPL and incorporated them into their kernel, thereby placing them in a position of having legally acquired &quot;part of the kernel&quot; from a third party without GPL rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-11-25T23:32:11.873" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T23:32:11.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9050" CreationDate="2019-11-26T10:32:26.070" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been in projects that would be absolutely delighted to have a volunteer come in and do scut work like that, and I've been in projects that got really quite upset when lots of old issues were resurrected when everyone was happy to just let them be dead.  You, very sensibly, wish to know what kind of project yours is &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; sticking your head above the parapet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most projects have mailing lists, and in my experience those are the best places to ask nuanced questions about the tastes and conventions of a particular project.  IRC and chat fora will do in a pinch, but I find I get more &quot;off the cuff&quot; answers, and fewer thoughtful responses reflective of a community's ethos.  It's also harder to point to IRC logs later, when the inevitable out-of-step grouch starts banging on about your &quot;&lt;em&gt;vandalism&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to post a message listing a few examples of the tickets that you felt you could usefully tidy up, showing how you propose to do this, and soliciting community opinion about whether this was a good idea, and were then to wait a few days, one of a few things would be likely to happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone points out this has been asked and answered before, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief debate ensues, and the community's viewpoint emerges, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing much happens, in which case I hold that &lt;em&gt;qui tacet consentit&lt;/em&gt;, and you should happily press ahead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also note Bart's excellent aside above, which you have thoughtfully acknowledged, that this is most likely to go well when you add your proofs to each ticket, so that anyone later reading it can quickly convince themselves  that a particular bug or feature request has been dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T10:32:26.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4837" CreationDate="2019-11-26T10:53:03.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you re-license, the GPL would be going on the work as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Expat parts you added are still licensed under the expat license individually, and under the GPL collectively. (which is why many source files have the license notice at the top in a comment. So people don't have to be concerned about this when developing free software)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15687" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T10:53:03.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8058" CreationDate="2019-11-26T11:34:37.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not carry forward to things created by software licensed under the GPL (unless the output contains other GPL licensed code, like libraries. Although, most examples of that have the linking exception applied for this reason.)&#xA;This is for practical, as well as ideological reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Imagine if MS Word 2009™ (or other word processor) required you to give Ballmer's cousin first right to license any screenplay you wrote in it.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Such software would cease to be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To require licensing on the output of some GPL licensed software would fly in the face of &quot;Freedom 0&quot; To run (your copy of) the program in any way you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason it comes 0th, it's the part of the GPL that makes it clear there's no obligation on users of GPL software to fulfill any terms to use the software once they've got a copy of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligations only kick in when you provide copies of the software to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15687" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T11:34:37.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9061" CreationDate="2019-11-27T02:35:47.003" Score="6" ViewCount="1151" Body="&lt;p&gt;A project (desktop app) that I've been using for a while has decided to go closed source. I fully respect the decision, but also have no interest in the direction where this new development is headed. As such I've become curious about making a fork of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the last version of the code available, I saw the license is AGPL v3. Reading up on it - it sounds like it's something that is used with very specific intent: Open Source + vendor lock-in. (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2014/09/how-to-achieve-vendor-lock-in-with-a-legit-open-source-license-affero-gpl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.dr-chuck.com/csev-blog/2014/09/how-to-achieve-vendor-lock-in-with-a-legit-open-source-license-affero-gpl/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the project went from MIT -&gt; AGPL when I assume, the author decided to prepare the move. This is when the cloud functionality started appearing in the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was to fork the project from the last code point - the only license available to me would be AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, now any new changes on my fork cannot be incorporated by the now closed source project - because it is closed source? Even tho it was the original AGPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, one of the deciding factors for choosing the application was the fact that it was Open Source. I'm just trying to make sure I understand the situation before taking any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16628" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T15:47:16.300" Title="Forking an AGPL v3 project that went closed source?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-27T09:17:35.920" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems no one reads email list, bugs and the last commit was in 2015. At the same time, the project is heavily used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the appropriate action to find new company to maintain the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16630" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T09:17:35.920" Title="What are appropriate actions when particular linux project seems dead?" Tags="|collaboration|ownership|software-development|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9050" CreationDate="2019-11-27T13:05:47.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer obviously depends on the project and the best course of action can only be found by talking to the core devs / maintainers / community around the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is two ways to approach this: You can (start to) go through issues and make appropriate comments, maybe with links to where / when it was implemented. Concurrently (or before) you may contact the maintainers (is there a discord / irc / e-mail / dedicated forums ... way? Use that to establish direct contact, if possible) and ask about the best way to do so. They even might give you some priviliges on the repo or issue tracker so that you can actually close issues or flag them appropriately (maybe they would want to review some decisions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being involved in a similar project, I shall be delighted to have such help offered. Personally I'd tell such person to go ahead and comment on the issues. And when I see that it is substantiated with a considerate eye, I shall be quick to give that person the necessary power and tools  to do that properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2019-11-27T13:11:29.517" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T13:11:29.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9060" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-27T15:38:21.710" Score="3" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;We would like to use this library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SebastiaanKlippert/go-wkhtmltopdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/SebastiaanKlippert/go-wkhtmltopdf&lt;/a&gt; to generate PDFs from HTML. That library is licensed under MIT. It is really nothing more than a wrapper for the go language to use this library: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf&lt;/a&gt;. wkhtmltopdf is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 (LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to build and host a docker containerized deployment of a go binary and the wkhtmltopdf lib binary as a microservice in AWS. Internally we would call this service from any number of other microservices when we need to create PDFs. We would not be making any modifications to the library itself, we would only be linking to it dynamically via the go library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what the legal requirements are in a situation like this. Again, we are not modifying the library, nor are we distributing the code or the binary. It's only being used internally and will not be publicly accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone provide some insight? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16637" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T16:20:40.933" Title="LGPL v3.0 and how it relates to wkhtmltopdf in a SAAS scenario: what are our obligations?" Tags="|lgpl|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9056" CreationDate="2019-11-27T15:47:16.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I was to fork the project from the last code point - the only license available to me would be AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will assume that &quot;the last code point&quot; refers to the las commit that is positively identified as being open-source and under the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically the answer is no, but practically it is yes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Technically, you can provide your modifications under any AGPL-compatible license, as long as the fork as a whole gets distributed under the terms and conditions of the AGPL. In practice it is not really workable to have different contributions under different licenses unless those contributions are in clearly separable parts, like libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, now any new changes on my fork cannot be incorporated by the now closed source project - because it is closed source? Even tho it was the original AGPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your contributions are under a copy-left license (like the GPL or AGPL), then that code can not be included in a closed-source project. It does not matter at what time your contribution was added or what licenses the project previously had. If the following conditions are true, then that is a violation of the copyright license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You provided a contribution under a copyleft license (e.g. AGPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You did not grant additional rights to apply a different license (e.g. via a CLA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project now uses a license that is incompatible with the license of your contribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the Open Source + Vendor lock-in trick described by Dr Chuck in your link can only work if the company offering the AGPL+proprietary product owns the full copyrights to the AGPL code or the AGPL and proprietary parts are carefully crafted that they work together but are not considered derivative works even under the strict interpretation that the FSF uses for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, you are not bound by any licensing terms, so you can offer your software under a incompatible set of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the various parts are considered independent works (no derivatives), then their licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T15:47:16.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9051" CreationDate="2019-11-27T16:03:37.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a common misconception, but under GPL, you are only obliged to supply source code to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2014/fall/common-gpl-misconceptions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;those who receive the binary&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Since the phone with the binary on it is not publicly available, they have no obligation to make their source changes public. Even when it's out, they only have a legal obligation to share source with phone owners, not the public as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure about other obligations Fairphone has due to android licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16639" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T16:03:37.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9060" CreationDate="2019-11-27T16:20:40.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements for the MIT wrapper are simply &quot;don't remove the copyright and license texts&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirements for the LGPL library are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If/when you make changes to the library, effectively distribute them under the LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If/when you use the library in an application, give the recipients of the binary the means to replace the library with a version of their own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this only starts to matter when you distribute your software to a third party and putting it on an AWS instance whose contents you control does not count as distribution.&#xA;As long as you don't distribute, there are no restrictions coming from the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T16:20:40.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9034" CreationDate="2019-11-28T12:49:54.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wish to ship your software as a zero-cost binary (&quot;&lt;em&gt;freeware&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) whilst reserving source code to paying licensees, who will not be permitted to use it to make products for general distribution.  You want to know if you can release the binary under an MIT licence without causing yourself problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, this is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9029/458&quot;&gt;second question&lt;/a&gt; we've had here recently about using the MIT licence on a piece of proprietary-source freeware.  The more I think about it, the more I think it's a reasonable idea.  Using a well-established non-copyleft licence for your binary makes it immediately clear what is permitted with the binary (including using it, copying it, selling it, and reverse-engineering it).  However, it is in my experience an unusual way to use this licence, and IANAL/IANYL, so you should take professional legal advice before betting the farm on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also wish to consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt; licence for your binary, instead of MIT, as the patent grant therein will further reassure potential users that they're not exposing themselves to any liability by adopting your binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T12:49:54.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9066" CreationDate="2019-11-28T17:16:25.920" Score="4" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitHub Actions is a continous-integration service by GitHub. You can create actions that other people use in order to e.g. test their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say, I license a github action with GNU GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do people using this action need to open-source and license their whole repository with GPL&lt;/strong&gt; or is this just the case if they e.g. fork my action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They just include the action by adding something like this to a &lt;code&gt;yml&lt;/code&gt; file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- using: myusername/myaction&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not redistribute my code or create binaries or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16654" LastEditorUserId="16654" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T09:56:57.687" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T09:56:57.687" Title="Does GPL affect use of GitHub Actions?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9065" CreationDate="2019-11-29T09:02:54.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It probably depends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not look like adding source code. It looks like what makefiles add to a repository: instructions how to build your programme from source, specifying tooling in the required order. So it is an indication of using a certain toollike certain flags for certain compilers, to use make or whatever is needed to build your programme from source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer might change when the tool actually injections something like libraries do... (which use the LGPL for that very reason). So GPL might be a requirement for the build artefacts, unless &lt;em&gt;your tool&lt;/em&gt; chooses to use the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow: IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T09:02:54.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9040" CreationDate="2019-11-29T12:31:21.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The translations are usually a part of the programme and translations hardly fit another context. So that's a good reason to license them under the same terms as the rest - and it saves you licensing troubles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphics assets often are treated differently as they might both come from different sources as well be used in entirely different context. Additionally they cannot be treated textually as translations can. Both makes a CC-BY-whatever license more appropriate for graphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T12:31:21.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="304" CreationDate="2019-12-01T01:30:29.080" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the BSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You absolutely cannot distribute source code or binary w/o retaining the original BSD license with the code or making people aware that the associated binary code is under a BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16664" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T21:01:44.450" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T21:01:44.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9074" CreationDate="2019-12-01T05:30:37.350" Score="6" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made an open-source blog theme(template) based on Hugo's static web page generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my first step to the open-source world. So I didn't know much about license things. I copied and pasted an MIT license from an other Hugo theme. I didn't notice that there was a column with the owner's name in the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a month, I found that there is a column with the owner's name in the MIT license. So I changed it to my name. &#xA;Now, I have a problem: The Hugo theme's owner that I copied the license from, come to my GitHub repository and insisted that I have to keep his name on the LICENSE.MD file in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that this is none-sense, because I made this project from scratch. I worked really hard to make this project. I don't want any other person listed on LICENSE.MD file.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zzossig/hugo-theme-zzo/issues/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This link&lt;/a&gt; is a full discussion about this with the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what I should do. Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I referenced some code from his project. I referenced the way of loading the library. No more than that. Something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{{ printf &quot;script defer src=\&quot;%s\&quot; integrity=\&quot;%s\&quot; crossorigin=\&quot;anonymous\&quot; title=\&quot;katex\&quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&quot; $js.katex.url $js.katex.sri | safeHTML }}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the way of doing something in Hugo. I can edit this part very easily. But the person keeps insisting that I should keep his name in my LICENSE.MD file, and does not point out to me anything about a copied code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just removed all the code that I referenced from that person's Hugo theme now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16669" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T09:19:17.337" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T09:19:17.337" Title="I put someone else's name in MIT license by mistake and then changed it back to my name. The other person is insisting I keep their name on it" Tags="|licensing|mit|github|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9006" CreationDate="2019-12-01T10:41:20.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft means &quot;you can redistribute the work, as long as you stick to the exact same conditions/license&quot;. This way the licenses protect the rights granted by the license for everyone. This means that by default two copyleft licenses can only be compatible if they are exactly the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make two copyleft licenses compatible the author of the license have to add some explicit &quot;compatibility clause&quot;. The most used copyleft license, the GNU GPL, does it with the &quot;or any-later version&quot;-clause. This kind of forward-compatibility makes a lot of sense because normally you want to be able to update to a newer version of the license which most of the time improve the wording and/or take new legal and technical challenges into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand backward-compatibility would make all the improvements of the newer version void because everyone could ignore it and go back to the older version. I would say that this is the main reason why backward-compatibility doesn't make sense. On the other hand forward-compatibility makes a lot of sense and I'm surprised that Creative Commons doesn't have such a clause. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1154" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T10:41:20.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9043" CreationDate="2019-12-01T12:10:38.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When this happens to me, then I work it so that it is to company A's disadvantage. E.g. write for B, then distribute to A after ward (The delay is to A's disadvantage, but is inline with the contract).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I will tell them that the contract is bias and thus not complaint with contract law in my jurisdiction. As there is disagreement on this, I will until the contract is re-written, not bring into the company anything that I have written / learnt outside of it. That is Nothing out = nothing in. If I can't take what I learn here with me, then I will assume that this has always been the case, and bring nothing with me. You can not dismiss me, as this is your rule not mine. Then tell them that it is there move, and sit around reading &lt;del&gt;xkcd&lt;/del&gt; manuals on new and exciting ways to do things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T12:10:38.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9076" CreationDate="2019-12-01T12:42:16.880" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;In section 7 of the AGPLv3.0 there is the possibility to make limited changes to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I understand the changes allowed by subsection f) and I have certainly never seen it applied. It seems to me like it allows someone to not just ask money in exchange for the program, but also to ask money from all downstream recipients of the program, in essence creating a program that is free as in free software, but not gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always understood the &quot;not-gratis&quot; clause to be kind of a technicality, because it only applies to the first distribution and redistribution need not be indemnified. But this seems to create the possibility for free software that is truly not gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right? And can you give an example of this clause's use, if a significant one exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quote section 7 below, with irrelevant subsections omitted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Additional Terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Additional permissions&quot; are terms that supplement the terms of this&#xA;  License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.&#xA;  Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall&#xA;  be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent&#xA;  that they are valid under applicable law.  If additional permissions&#xA;  apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately&#xA;  under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by&#xA;  this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option&#xA;  remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of&#xA;  it.  (Additional permissions may be written to require their own&#xA;  removal in certain cases when you modify the work.)  You may place&#xA;  additional permissions on material, added by you to a covered work,&#xA;  for which you have or can give appropriate copyright permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material&#xA;  you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright&#xA;  holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with&#xA;  terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[sections a to e omitted]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that&#xA;  material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of&#xA;  it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for&#xA;  any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on&#xA;  those licensors and authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered &quot;further&#xA;  restrictions&quot; within the meaning of section 10.  If the Program as you&#xA;  received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is&#xA;  governed by this License along with a term that is a further&#xA;  restriction, you may remove that term.  If a license document contains&#xA;  a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this&#xA;  License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms&#xA;  of that license document, provided that the further restriction does&#xA;  not survive such relicensing or conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you&#xA;  must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the&#xA;  additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating&#xA;  where to find the applicable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the&#xA;  form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the&#xA;  above requirements apply either way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="846" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T13:09:36.687" Title="What does AGPLv3.0 section 7f mean and can you give an example of its use?" Tags="|commercial|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9069" CreationDate="2019-12-01T13:07:25.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made an open-source blog theme(template) based on Hugo's static web page generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much the beginning and the end of the analysis, right there.  Your work is a derivative of Hugo's generator, by your own admission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just removed all the code that I referenced from that person's Hugo theme now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings you up against what is known as the paradox of the Ship of Theseus.  You can search here for more information, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8927/458&quot;&gt;my opinion&lt;/a&gt; is that a completely-refactored work is still a derivative, unless special care is taken, which in your case it was not.  This means both you and the original author have a copyright interest in your code.  That given, your obligations under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; are that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say &quot;&lt;em&gt;derivatives&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which is interesting, but it also doesn't say &quot;&lt;em&gt;verbatim copies&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so I see a strong argument that derivatives are copies.  If they are, then the licence &lt;strong&gt;requires&lt;/strong&gt; that you preserve the original copyright notice, and failure to do so means you're committing copyright infringement.  The penalties for that vary by jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the safest and most appropriate thing to do is to preserve the original author's copyright notice, while adding your own, eg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2016-2019 George Cushen&#xA;Copyright (c) 2019-present Z Zossig&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have not decided to relicense your code, so reproducing the licence text is easy, as you will be including it in your code anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice that in the linked github issue the original author requests that you use a particular markup language (TOML) to acknowledge the original author and licence.  You are not obliged to do so, and doing so will not free you from the licence obligation to preserve the original copyright notice, so whether or not you honour that request is entirely up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T21:19:34.980" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T21:19:34.980" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-02T11:03:25.887" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a research-related project which currently has one developer (myself) and one sponsor (myself). It involves an open-source platform (AGPL3), and user submitted content which has its open-source licenses defined individually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is 100% free, and I will be funding it till I find a sponsor to cover running costs (such as a public institution or foundation, i.e. not a for-profit company).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have other projects which are not free or open-source. The question is what are the ethics/legal pitfalls of linking these projects. How is this affected by contributions to the platform of the open-source project? How is it affected by sponsors? I can imagine that so long as I host the open-source project, there should be no issue in linking them, similarly to wordpress.org/wordpress.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My priorities here are not to maintain a link between the projects, but to make sure that I am not doing anything illegal in benefiting from my contribution (infrastructure rather than code in this case) to the free project by linking to the commercial project, AND to protect the free project from ever being commercialised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An associated question is whether there are any other protections necessary for the free project, such as registering a trademark, which will prevent it being replaced by a for-profit project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16600" LastEditorUserId="16600" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T11:09:31.727" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T11:09:31.727" Title="Providing an open-source free web service which is linked to a commercial company, pitfalls" Tags="|commercial|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-12-12T09:13:56.907" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9073" CreationDate="2019-12-02T12:00:29.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure I know what it means, but I have as yet no examples of its use.  I think it's designed for use cases along the lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cygnus&lt;/a&gt;, where a company distributes another party's (A)GPLv3 code to customers who are paying for a support contract, or for some other assumption of responsibility, for issues with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such parties as Cygnus are &lt;em&gt;&quot;convey[ing] the material ... with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  If the original author chooses to distribute with clause 7f active, then any second party who uses the code in this way is required to include in those contracts &quot;&lt;em&gt;indemnification of licensors and authors of that material&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Given all the disclaimers in the (A)GPL, I don't think any sane party would for a moment assume that any liability attached to the original author, but 7f requires this to be made explicit to paying end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In concrete terms, suppose Alice writes program &lt;em&gt;foo&lt;/em&gt; and distributes it under (A)GPLv3.  Bob downloads it and packages it, and offers it for a fee to Charlie under the terms of (A)GPLv3, along with a contract that says that if Charlie is using it and it breaks in the next year, Bob will fix it.  Clause 7f allows Alice to require that such a contract &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; state that both Bob and Charlie agree that Alice is in no way responsible if it breaks, and nor is anyone else in the supply chain, except Bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it allows someone to not just ask money in exchange for the program, but also to ask money from all downstream recipients of the program,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't read it that way, and I've never met anyone who thinks you can do that.  The (A)GPL is very clear that downstream recipients have to get the same rights that you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T13:09:36.687" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T13:09:36.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9079" CreationDate="2019-12-03T18:12:27.110" Score="3" ViewCount="1826" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to relicense one of my projects from Apache 2.0 to Apache-or-MIT dual license for consistency with the outer community (Rust — &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cmr/relicense-assistant/blob/f5c0a2922a98a74e4d555848f9b72a81dd19b38d/issue-template.txt#L10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;), and to allow GPLv2 compatibility, which I was previously unaware was disallowed by Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, it is necessary to get approval from all contributors to migrate from MIT to Apache, as that implies contributions &lt;a href=&quot;https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rationale-of-apache-dual-licensing/8952/3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are providing the Apache 2.0 patent grant&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Requiring both MIT and Apache 2.0 as &lt;em&gt;inbound&lt;/em&gt; licenses for contributions means that anyone making a contribution is providing the Apache 2.0 patent grant. And then having MIT and Apache 2.0 as &lt;em&gt;outbound&lt;/em&gt; licenses people can use Rust under means that Rust provides widespread compatibility with all sorts of other FOSS licenses, including GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the inverse? Since MIT is mostly a subset of Apache, and the dual MIT license is there just to serve as an outbound license that allows GPLv2 compatibility, does the conversion from Apache to MIT still require approval from all contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16686" LastEditorUserId="16686" LastEditDate="2019-12-03T20:36:42.807" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T20:36:42.807" Title="Relicensing from Apache-2.0 to Apache-or-MIT" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-03T18:19:11.800" Score="6" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in borrowing functions from a file in a project dual-licensed as MIT-or-UNLICENSE in my package that I intend to also be dual-licensed as Apache-or-MIT. Is this possible? How should I properly cite the borrowed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first thought is to add a disclaimer to the top of the derivative file saying it was taken under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UNLICENSE&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. public domain), but unsure if that would be sufficient. Would including this mean my project won't actually be under the terms of the Apache-or-MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16686" LastEditorUserId="16686" LastEditDate="2019-12-04T21:42:54.023" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T21:42:54.023" Title="Using public domain code within Apache-or-MIT licensed project" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9077" CreationDate="2019-12-03T19:35:13.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rules are very simple: If you want to relicense a project, then you need approval from all the copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not matter here that the MIT license is mostly a subset of the Apache license. They are different licenses and if you want to change the license under which the project is offered, you need permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T19:35:13.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9078" CreationDate="2019-12-04T11:06:34.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't really like the UNLICENSE, because I am not 100% convinced that that license does exactly what was intended in jurisdictions that don't allow you to dedicate your work into the public domain&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license explicitly allow sublicensing of the work, so my recommendation would be to go that route. Then you can, in the file that you borrowed from the other archive, add a note below the existing license text that you sublicense that file under the Apache-or-MIT dual license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: One example of such a jurisdiction is Germany. There works only become public domain when the copyright term on the work expires 70 years after the death of the author.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T11:06:34.743" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9087" CreationDate="2019-12-04T12:48:34.803" Score="5" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain a project called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hacker-laws&lt;/a&gt;. It is a collection of laws, theories, patterns and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repo is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was pointed out that the MIT License is not appropriate, as it is for code. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the correct license should be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the CC-BY-NC license correct in this case? I want people to use the content freely, but ideally attribute the source, and not use it commercially&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I publish the content in a physical book one day and sell it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I do decide to publish it, how can I best ensure that contributors understand it may be published, and make sure they are comfortable and consent? I would list all contributors but want to make sure all is done openly and fairly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of publishing into a book will likely never happen, but I'd like to ensure there is at least the possibility!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16698" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T12:37:36.050" Title="What is the appropriate license for open-source content which I might publish into a book?" Tags="|license-recommendation|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1849" CreationDate="2019-12-04T16:29:47.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In short, no. You're not required to share anything when you use or adapt CC content.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while you may share your final product, you aren't required to share the intermediate forms, including source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0 license&lt;/a&gt; (paraphrased and emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3.a.&lt;/a&gt; (Attribution) says &quot;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form)&quot; you must provide proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s3b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3.b.&lt;/a&gt; (ShareAlike) says &quot;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; You Share Adapted Material You produce&quot;, you must apply an Adapter's License that is compatible with the CC source material you used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that you take steps to share any licensed or adapted material. Thus, you are free to adapt the work into a LaTeX format, adapt that once more by converting it to a PDF, and only share the PDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What about &quot;effective technological measures&quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC licenses include a clause about &quot;effective technological measures&quot;, which essentially means you can't use DRM on CC-licensed content to prevent people sharing it. However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-use-effective-technological-measures-such-as-drm-when-i-share-cc-licensed-material&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; explicitly allows converting material for non-DRM purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;merely converting material into a different format that is difficult to access or is only available for certain platforms does not violate the restriction; you may do this without violating the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16699" LastEditorUserId="16699" LastEditDate="2019-12-05T20:31:02.580" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T20:31:02.580" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9126" CreationDate="2019-12-04T21:48:23.593" Score="12" ViewCount="2037" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in publishing a small script of mine with effectively no conditions, including attribution. What's the best license to accomplish this? It looks like the most popular options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Zero_/_public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0 / Public Domain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;UNLICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; (also known as the Free Public License or Zero-Clause BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, these have the following drawbacks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC0 contains a clause which excludes from the scope of the license any relevant patents held by the copyright holder. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This resulted in it getting disapproved by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;, and not recommended for software by the FSF. It also may cause issues in jurisdictions that don't allow work prematurely dedicated into the public domain. The FSF has this to say about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC0 is a public domain dedication from Creative Commons. A work released&#xA;  under CC0 is dedicated to the public domain to the fullest extent permitted&#xA;  by law. If that is not possible for any reason, CC0 also provides a lax,&#xA;  permissive license as a fallback. Both public domain works and the lax&#xA;  license provided by CC0 are compatible with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want to release your non-software work to the public domain, we&#xA;  recommend you use CC0. For works of software it is not recommended, as CC0&#xA;  has a term expressly stating it does not grant you any patent licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because of this lack of patent grant, we encourage you to be careful about&#xA;  using software under this license; you should first consider whether the&#xA;  licensor might want to sue you for patent infringement. If the developer is&#xA;  refusing users patent licenses, the program is in effect a trap for users and&#xA;  users should avoid the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;UNLICENSE does not have this clause, but it is also unclear whether it would be valid in countries with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9081/16686&quot;&gt;different public domain laws&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;WTFPL is also effectively a public domain license but seems to be mostly a joke, as it doesn't even contain a no-warranty disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0BSD seems to be the only license I can find that has no conditions (aside from the no-warranty disclaimer), but also doesn't fall into the trap of public domain laws. It is the only one of these that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;officially approved&lt;/a&gt; by the OSI, but is also relatively unpopular which could hurt credibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, 0BSD is what I'm leaning toward. Are there any better alternatives, or other drawbacks I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 or BSD+Patent are both preferable with regard to patents, but they have attribution clauses, and Apache is GPLv2 incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16686" LastEditorUserId="16686" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T20:37:07.747" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T00:23:36.353" Title="Recommended license for small script without an attribution clause?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|public-domain|license-comparison|0bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-04T22:57:16.893" Score="6" ViewCount="862" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some doubts about source code re-distribution and GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wrote DummyLib, a library that includes AmazingLib (third-party lib, released under GPL) and links against ProprietarySDK (no source, only an API heade).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;ProprietarySDK &amp;lt;--&amp;gt; DummyLib &amp;lt;--&amp;gt; AmazingLib(GPL)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to share DummyLib:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't distribute DummyLib.dll for sure, because it would mix ProprietarySDK and AmazingLib &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I guess I can't distribute all the source code (ProprietarySDK.h + DummyLib/src + AmazingLib/src) either&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;Can I distribute only my DummyLib/src code?&lt;/strong&gt; i.e. my own code that has calls to both AmazingLib functions and ProprietarySDK functions but that won't work unless you get AmazingLib/src and ProprietarySDK.h code &lt;em&gt;yourself&lt;/em&gt; and then compile it &lt;em&gt;for yourself&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine I cannot because it'd seem like a trick to actually use GPL code everywhere. On the other hand I have the feeling that the key thing with GPL is re-distribution, so if I don't release back any of the GPL code it should be ok, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16610" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T17:24:24.617" Title="Can I distribute non-GPL code that uses GPL code as long as I don't distribute myself that GPL code" Tags="|gpl|source-code|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9090" CreationDate="2019-12-05T16:05:26.367" Score="2" ViewCount="1466" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software project is using several third party libraries which have different licenses (LGPL, MIT, BSD). I distribute the dlls of those libraries, and I understand that I need to give license information and if the license demands it (like LGPL) acknowledge the use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes see, that some programs have separate copyright sections, where they list the copyright holders of the third party licenses? Is this necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16684" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-06T07:35:13.850" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T09:11:09.690" Title="Do I need to display copyright information of third-party libraries?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9082" CreationDate="2019-12-05T16:05:54.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-NC license is most likely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the license you want if you are accepting contributions from others and you are considering publishing the work also as a physical book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as there are multiple copyright holders to a work, all of them are bound by the license terms under which the contributions were made (which is typically the same license under which the work is offered). This means that you also wouldn't be able to exploit your project commercially and selling physical books will most likely be considered commercial use (unless you can make it very clear that you don't get any financial gain out of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you were also considering the MIT license, the CC BY license closest to the MIT license in terms of permissions and obligations. Another possibility would be the CC BY-SA license, which requires derived works to be under the same license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T16:05:54.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-05T19:09:25.303" Score="2" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering using a CANbus software package under GPLv3 that, in addition to code, contains data specifying the format of many hundreds of bus messages.  I'm particularly interested in that data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does data (e.g. in JSON) that is distributed as part of this GPLv3 software package fall under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does data that I generate using a GPL software package, from the data that was supplied as part of that software package, fall under GPL?  (Think of making a conversion of the data that's more suitable for my purpose.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is data in a C header file considered data or code?  If it's considered code, could I transform it into say JSON to get it outside GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Now that I'm talking about header files, a theoretical question: Could source code be transformed into another form to make it fall outside GPLv3?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16707" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T14:43:10.450" Title="Does data contained in a GPLv3 licensed software package fall under GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-06T05:21:22.597" Score="3" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have been considering making some screenshots of LibreOffice's applications and putting them on my blog (just as graphical examples for the text). But then, I started to think about what rights and obligations – in general, what licenses – are appropriate to such use of LibreOffice. For example, whether I am required to include any particular license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean screenshots both of whole windows / dialog boxes, and of any part of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What I have found so far&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found the following threads related to my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/160742/can-i-use-screenshot-of-libreoffice-product-on-my-blog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/160742/can-i-use-screenshot-of-libreoffice-product-on-my-blog/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/145838/question-about-sreenshots-copyright/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/145838/question-about-sreenshots-copyright/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, none of them answers my question as I do not see in neither of them any mentions about screenshots from the legal point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I have searched for any such mentions in the license that LibreOffice is made available under (Mozilla Public License Version 2.0), but found nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that it may not make any sense speaking about licensing in such a case; if so, I would also like to see any source that states it explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found the following guide for legally using screenshots of Microsoft products. I am putting it here because maybe it will better show what I am about. I imagine whether there would be a statement like this on the internet, but considering LibreOffice (or some broader group of software that LibreOffice explicitly states it is a part of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/permissions/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/permissions/default.aspx&lt;/a&gt; (navigate to the section &quot;Screenshots&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16471" LastEditorUserId="16471" LastEditDate="2019-12-07T03:24:05.227" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T06:05:32.440" Title="Under what license may I take and use screenshots of LibreOffice?" Tags="|software|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9086" CreationDate="2019-12-06T07:33:33.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you need to do this.  Most of the licences you list don't demand a general-purpose acknowledgement, they specifically require that the copyright notice be preserved; this is often seen as sufficient acknowledgment, also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD 3-clause says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce &lt;strong&gt;the above copyright&#xA;      notice&lt;/strong&gt;, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA;      the documentation and/or other materials provided with the&#xA;      distribution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT X11 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;above copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt; and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and LGPLv3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For a Combined Work that displays copyright notices during execution, &lt;strong&gt;include the copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt; for the Library among these notices, as well as a reference directing the user to the copies of the GNU GPL and this license document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 does have a more general &quot;prominent notice&quot; requirement, but the requirement to preserve copyright notices is sufficiently widespread that preservation of them all is a good idea, as well as courteous to those authors - as if your work is a derivative of theirs, then they actually do have a copyright interest in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-07T09:11:09.690" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T09:11:09.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9092" CreationDate="2019-12-06T10:08:53.103" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about developing an open-source web application where users can enter trips that they have done (touristic or commuting) and then view statistics and maps created from this data. If I want to host this application myself and make it publicly accessible, I would have to also to take care of the databases containing the data on the server. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am certainly not an expert on online-security, so I'm wondering, what happens, if someone get unauthorised access to the data and maybe even the passwords, will I be personally liable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16711" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T15:03:35.450" Title="Am I personally liable if user data from an open source web application is stolen?" Tags="|law|website|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9091" CreationDate="2019-12-06T10:47:45.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are likely liable if applications that you run and operate, that store user-supplied data, have that data exfiltrated.  The exact nature of the liability depends on the applicable jurisdiction(s): in Europe (and now that the GDPR is in effect also if you cater for European visitors) things can get quite hairy, while the US is generally less-sensitive to this (with certain exceptions: health information, credit card data, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This liability does not generally depend on whether the application is open-source or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not, generally, liable if &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; runs a copy of your open-source application, and it gets hacked either through their misconfiguration or vulnerabilities in your code.  Most free software licences contain big disclaimers that make this clear to the end-user; this one's from GPLv3 (shouty capitals are theirs, not mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MODIFIES AND/OR CONVEYS THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-12-06T15:03:35.450" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T15:03:35.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9088" CreationDate="2019-12-06T14:43:10.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does data (e.g. in JSON) that is distributed as part of this GPLv3 software package fall under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes/No/Maybe. For copyright, it does not matter if a work consists or code, data, text, images, whatever. Except that certain types of data are not subject to copyright protections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those CANbus message formats are the original creation of the authors of the GPL package and the data is not also offered under a different license, then that data is subject to the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the CANbus message formats were copied from another source (for example, a CAN specification), then you can use the message formats also under their original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is the possibility that the message formats are &quot;simple statements of truth&quot; and not subject to copyright protection at all. In my opinion, it is unlikely that this case will apply to message structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that I'm talking about header files, a theoretical question: Could source code be transformed into another form to make it fall outside GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. If you transform source code, you are creating a derived work of the original and the GPL license requires that derived works are also licensed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T14:43:10.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9100" CreationDate="2019-12-06T23:48:36.740" Score="4" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;A customer (from a freelancer website, who awarded me this single project) has asked me to add some extra functionality to a &lt;code&gt;Wordpress plugin&lt;/code&gt; which is licensed under &quot;GPL version 2&quot;, the customer explicitly mentioned this plugin's name and asked me to either add the extra functionality to it, or code the whole thing from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to edit the plugin since it's allowed under GPL v2 &lt;code&gt;(I think, please let me know if I'm wrong)&lt;/code&gt; but I'm not sure how I should provide it to customer after it's edited...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, based on my understanding after reading GPL v2 , I should include something like the following text above all the files that I edit, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This file was modified on Jan 12, 2020 to add extra functionality to the original XYZ plugin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I provide it with the same name as the original plugin to customer? nothing else required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0W42.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0W42.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15819" LastEditorUserId="15819" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T10:55:40.007" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T13:59:48.187" Title="How to edit a &quot;GPL version 2&quot; code and provide it to the customer (to get paid)?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8889" CreationDate="2019-12-08T00:09:40.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One directly infringes a patent by making, selling, offering for sale, importing or using it. An open source foundation generally does not do these things. But it likely does encourage others to make, use, etc. technology that it essentially distributes. That can be an indirect infringement classed as contributory infringement or active inducement of infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16723" LastActivityDate="2019-12-08T00:09:40.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-08T18:47:18.873" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I discovered my project of mine (call it A), was cloned by another project (call it M) to create a port for a different platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A&quot; was originally licensed as MIT, but has since been relicensed as MIT/Apache. &quot;M&quot;, however, was created by copy-pasting all source files in &quot;A&quot;, without including the license. &quot;M&quot; is licensed as MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a handful of bug fixes (mostly one-liners) in this port that I'd like to include upstream. How do I include these while maintaining a valid license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16727" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T18:24:23.520" Title="Merging bug fixes from a project with a different license" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|derivative-works|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-08T23:45:45.313" Score="7" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologise for this question but I am really really confused! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I develop a program that uses R packages published under GPL, in their standard unmodified form in my own source code, will I have to publish the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; source code (i.e. Even RScripts that I write using these packages)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interaction with the GPL libraries will only be to use them not modify them. I will just load them using &lt;code&gt;library(packageName)&lt;/code&gt; and use their functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to then publish my software under GPL as well and provide code that I have written as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologise if this sounds really dumb but I am really confused as you can probably tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16729" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T07:44:52.250" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T07:44:52.250" Title="If I use R packages licensed under GPL without any modification, do I have to publish my own software's source code when distributing commercially?" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9095" CreationDate="2019-12-09T08:18:48.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There usually is a simple way to do so with open source projects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Create a clone of the repository of the project. If it doesn't exist, create a repository and import the version you start with into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make the modifications you want and commit them with meaningful commit messages.&#xA;Make an amendment to the readme that states your contribution. That can be as little as adding your name to the copyright list like[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;§10 Attributions / Copyright&#xA;(c) 2004-2018 someone else&#xA;(c) 2019 based on version x.Y, Addition of feature XY by me&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can be even more verbose in the title and name it like Projectname-myname. The by-line changes in the source files are documented by your usage of the VCS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When done, push the repository with your changes to some repository accessible to your customer. Give this version to your customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're a nice guy and your contract allows and if the upstream project of that plugin is alive and kicking, consider to create a pull request for your changes and work with them to get your changes integrated (the maintainers will tell you how they want to receive them and in which format). You might do this right from the start for active projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]Check your contract (and your local laws if the contract doesn't specify it) who owns the copyright on your work. If your customer owns it, put their name in the copyright line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T13:59:48.187" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T13:59:48.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9099" CreationDate="2019-12-09T12:54:04.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license states that if you use a library that is licensed under the GPL, then your code is considered to be a derived work of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to provide your scripts to someone else, then the GPL license requires that you give every recipient the right and the means to make further changes. You must provide source code and you must use a license that is compatible with the GPL. The whole package of your scripts and the used libraries must be offered under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use GPL libraries, then the easy option is to use the GPL also for your own scripts (if/when you decide to publish them). A reason to use a different (GPL-compatible) license, like the MIT, could be if it is intended that the scripts can be ported to a different ecosystem where there is no dependency on GPL libraries (python perhaps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T12:54:04.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9103" CreationDate="2019-12-09T13:22:13.787" Score="0" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing WordPress plugins. As WordPress itself is GPL licensed we must publish our plugin as GPL, too. Our complete plugin development environment is built on top of a lot of &lt;code&gt;devDependencies&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dependencies&lt;/code&gt; (npm with &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;). I did some tests with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/licensee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.npmjs.com/package/licensee&lt;/a&gt; and the output gave me also dependencies licensed under &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-3.0&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-4.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above mentioned CC dependencies are only represent in &lt;code&gt;devDependencies&lt;/code&gt;, that means, the code of that dependencies are only used for building the plugin. In our CI/CD pipeline we get an installable and uploadable &lt;code&gt;.zip&lt;/code&gt; file with the WordPress plugin itself as artifact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the build process itself (e. g &lt;code&gt;webpack&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;babel&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;typescript&lt;/code&gt;) relevant for the built WordPress plugin? Can I differentiate between licensing of &lt;code&gt;dependencies&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;devDependencies&lt;/code&gt;? Do I need to make the build process also GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to put a file like &lt;code&gt;3RD_PARTY_LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; to the built artifact. Do I need to refer to all used dependencies (inclusive &lt;code&gt;devDependencies&lt;/code&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11329" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T14:38:15.503" Title="WordPress: only built plugin GPL licensed" Tags="|gpl|commercial|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9102" CreationDate="2019-12-09T14:38:15.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For copyright licensing, only the dependencies of the deployed software are relevant. The licenses on your build tools can be completely ignored&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A file like &lt;code&gt;3RD_PARTY_LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; also only needs to refer to the licenses of your &lt;code&gt;dependencies&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: the exception here are tools that copy part of their source into the output. Those would effectively be a dependency of the deployed software.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T14:38:15.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-09T21:24:59.300" Score="4" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a product that links to a number of LGPL (or compatible) licensed libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The product itself is a creator tool for intellectual property work of its users. The LGPL libraries are used in implementing the tool, but the derived user works do not reference the LGPL libraries directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem perfectly abiding to the LGPL, my product is free (as in free beer) and open source, but I would like to set a different license under which my product is to be used, that would cover all the user content it is used to generate, which could be either FOS or commercial/proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does using LGPL libraries in my product prevent me from distributing it under my own license or extending it to cover all work, derived from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional point, will the situation be different for GPL, and if so - how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T12:59:26.283" Title="Does using libraries under LGPL in my product limit my choice on how to license it?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|proprietary-code|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9098" CreationDate="2019-12-10T10:33:31.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, M doesn't have a valid license. By removing the license information when the copy was made the author of M violated your copyrights. You are fully within your rights to request from the author of M to restore the copyright/license information &lt;em&gt;as it existed at the time of the copy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the license violation of M has been rectified, you can take over the changes that you want. The MIT license allows that a work is sublicensed, so you can use it without trouble under the new MIT/Apache license combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T10:33:31.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9104" CreationDate="2019-12-10T12:59:26.283" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does using LGPL libraries in my product prevent me from distributing it under my own license or extending it to cover all work, derived from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL only requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changes made to the LGPL code itself are published under the LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users of your product have the possibility (and right) to replace the LGPL code with a version of their own. The possibility part is most easily achieved by dynamic linking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only restriction that this places on your choice of license for your own code is that you can't forbid users to replace the LGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an additional point, will the situation be different for GPL, and if so - how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The GPL requires that your product gets distributed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] I would like to set a different license under which my product is to be used, that would cover all the user content it is used to generate, which could be either FOS or commercial/proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under copyright law, work A is derived from work B only if portions of work A are present in work B. And the license of work A can only affect the license of work B if B is a derived work from A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if your product is used to create user content, then you can only affect the license of that user content if it also contains parts of your product. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;Is the output of an open source program licensed the same?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T12:59:26.283" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9108" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-10T00:47:12.847" Score="1" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a python package with several files and directories out of which only one particular module requires a library (PyQt) with GPL license. Since GPL license of the used library puts a restriction on the program to have same license. I was wondering if I can have separate license for other files of the package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Anmol Kumar" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T12:24:15.617" Title="Can I use dual license for a python package which uses library with GPL license?" Tags="|python|package|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7503" CreationDate="2019-12-11T00:55:58.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to put the tests under GPL unless you distribute the executables linked with the GPL code.&#xA;You should disribute the tests as source code, and let the customer find his own copy of the GPL code and compile and link them together to perform the tests himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you don't do anything even resembling distributing a version linked with the GPL code, you should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be sure, don't even distribute the GPL code with your system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16742" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T00:55:58.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9111" CreationDate="2019-12-11T15:13:56.837" Score="24" ViewCount="9023" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a package on Github that was released fully without any license and it stayed this way for close to a year. Then just recently after no updates since the initial commit, a License was added. It's GPL 3.0 and it has some restrictions that make me hesitate about using it for a commercial project. Let's not go off on a tangent though, this question has nothing to do with GPL. It has to do with whether I can ignore a license completely if I use code that was released without a license, by simply using the version of code before the license was added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same note, this particular repository happens to have a full-featured tutorial on a blog, which links to the repo at the end. This is how I found out about the Github repo, by first reading the blog tutorial. In truth I don't even need the repository at all since the full code is given away in the form of a tutorial on the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't check if there's a license associated with the blog, is it even possible to license code given away in the form of a tutorial on a blog though? Could I simply use that and never actually checkout the github repository and then I'd have nothing to worry about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16746" LastEditorUserId="16769" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T20:14:20.817" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T05:55:52.507" Title="Can I ignore an open source license if I checkout a version that was released prior to the code having any license?" Tags="|gpl-3|github|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2019-12-11T16:01:24.943" Score="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, a licence grant is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;not revocable&lt;/a&gt; once it has been relied on.  Once an author has published a piece of code under a licence, and someone has taken a copy on that basis, the author cannot retrospectively revoke that licence.  If that licence permitted the recipient to make further copies, as free licences do, then you can get a copy from any earlier recipient under the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is more subtle, in that the earlier version of the code has been succeeded by a later version with a different licence on it.  However, the code is being made available through an interface (GitHub) which permits a historical version to be viewed.  If the author hasn't gone back and retrospectively changed the licence for current downloads of the older code, then my feeling is that you can still take it under that earlier licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;fatal&lt;/strong&gt; problem here is that the code hasn't been relicensed to GPLv3, it's simply had GPLv3 placed upon it at a certain point in time.  By your own admission, the earlier code has &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; licence, and we already &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/458&quot;&gt;have a question about that&lt;/a&gt; which concludes that you have nearly no rights with respect to unlicensed code on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm afraid that getting an earlier version of the code will in no wise get you a copy with &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; constraints on it than GPLv3 imposes, but instead a much &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; constrained copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licence the blog is published under, and whether you can take a less-constrained copy from there, we can't say, since you don't link to any of this.  If, as seems probable, the blog is not clear as to the licence terms on its content, then you have even less rights than you do in the early-GitHub case, ie, none at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T07:44:03.367" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T07:44:03.367" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2019-12-11T20:31:39.620" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;With licenses it is actually quite simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No license means no rights to you to even use the code for whatever purpose. Code being available somewhere for download doesn't imply any right to use it - similar as you don't have the right to harvest a field, just because you can enter it from the street.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a license that specifies the conditions under which you may use, re-use, modify and distribute the code (that is the whole purpose of it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unhappy with the restrictions put onto you by a license, you are always free to contact the authors (or more generally copyright holders) of the code in question. If all affected authors agree, then they (and only they) may give you additional rights (thus grant you a special license) - possibly against some payment, or whatever you mutually agree to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T20:31:39.620" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9793" CreationDate="2019-12-12T12:00:46.857" Score="3" ViewCount="398" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write an Android application that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flutter&lt;/a&gt;. Flutter has the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 3-Clause &quot;New&quot; or &quot;Revised&quot; License&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. But I want to release my application as an application under the GPL. Would it be possible in this case or not? My application will only use Flutter framework, all the rest of the code I write myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16758" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T06:54:27.653" Title="Release an application that uses Flutter under the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-12T12:58:26.200" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about developing an open-source web application where users can enter trips that they have done (touristic or commuting) and then view statistics and maps created from this data. From the answer to my &lt;a href=&quot;http://I&amp;#39;m%20thinking%20about%20developing%20an%20open-source%20web%20application%20where%20users%20can%20enter%20trips%20that%20they%20have%20done%20(touristic%20or%20commuting)%20and%20then%20view%20statistics%20and%20maps%20created%20from%20this%20data.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;previous question&lt;/a&gt; I have concluded that it would not be realistic to host this application on a server myself because I would be personally liable if there is a data breach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other options are there? Here's what I have thought of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://sandstorm.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sandstorm.io&lt;/a&gt;, if I have understood the concept correctly. It's shutting down at the end of this year though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make it a mobile application (Android/iOS). The user data would then be stored on the user's phone. I really would like it to be accessible via a computer too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set up a company, to make sure that I'm not personally liable (that's how I have understood the concept of a company). That would be a lot of work though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16711" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T12:58:26.200" Title="How can I deploy an open source web app that hosts user data?" Tags="|law|website|security|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9110" CreationDate="2019-12-12T13:35:56.617" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a misconception here. You're thinking that licenses &lt;em&gt;take away&lt;/em&gt; your right to use a piece of code. In fact, licenses &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; you the right to use a piece of code. If there's no license, you can't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt;: if you want to use the code in a way which is fair use, then that is permitted, whether or not there's a license. But if you write your own software which is based on or which incorporates this other software, then that is probably not fair use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ignore an open source license if I checkout a version that was released prior to the license being added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Technically&lt;/em&gt;, yes. But you can't use the code. If there's no license, you can't use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I didn't check if there's a license associated with the blog, is it even possible to license code given away in the form of a tutorial on a blog though? Could I simply use that and never actually checkout the github repository and then I'd have nothing to worry about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you can't use it. Software is automatically copyrighted as soon as it's written, and posting it on a blog does not destroy the copyright or give other people the right to use the code in any way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T13:35:56.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-12T14:26:59.027" Score="1" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop a web app for which I want to make the source code available, but I want to prevent others from offering my web app as a hosted service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any existing license (which would obviously not comply to Open Source) that covers this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16762" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T18:15:28.833" Title="License that prevents SaaS hosting" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-03-11T15:21:14.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9116" CreationDate="2019-12-12T14:41:13.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are license which go in that direction, but not sure there exists one which completely forbids offering SaaS of a software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MongoDB recently switched to their license to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; which requires anyone to make available everything needed to run the instance of their database including all tools so that anyone can build that service as-offered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar thing happend recently for &lt;a href=&quot;https://redislabs.com/legal/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Redis Lab&lt;/a&gt; which might even come closer to what you seek. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/is-the-software-world-taking-too-much-from-the-open-source-community/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ArsTechnica&lt;/a&gt; there's a read-worthy article with some background on these things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T14:41:13.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9119" CreationDate="2019-12-12T21:52:56.877" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5990/handling-copyright-infringement-in-your-own-open-source-project&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; which answers what should be done if you find that your open source project infringes a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the answers states it's ok to simply remove the infringing code. However, the repository history will always have the infringing code and anyone will have access. Is it really enough to simply remove the code and from now on live a non-gangster-criminal-code-thief-thug life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16773" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T02:02:35.577" Title="What if your repository history infringes a license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-14T09:11:17.660" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9118" CreationDate="2019-12-13T02:02:35.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That might not be enough. You might need to edit the history of the repo you publish and remove the infringing code so that all (public) history is on compliance with copyright and licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual answer of what actions are necessary and which are nice but not required likely depends on the exact circumstances. IANAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T02:02:35.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13944" CreationDate="2019-12-13T08:42:49.733" Score="6" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear for me if it is possible to include software licensed under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 2.0 in commercial closed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found some related questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/152983/epl-licensed-library-with-closed-source-commercial-product&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/174907/can-i-use-epl-licensed-libraries-and-not-give-out-the-source-code-of-my-applicat&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/138520/what-are-the-restrictions-on-derived-works-of-epl-licensed-software&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/82035/which-open-source-license-is-right-for-my-project/82059#82059&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2792/copyright-on-derived-software-under-epl-license-v1-0&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;) that deal with EPL 1.0.&#xA;As far as I understand, software licensed under EPL 1.0 can be included in commercial software as long as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modified code under EPL 1.0 is released. Not the whole software, only the modified work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The contributors of the EPL 1.0 code are properly identified (Notices are maintained) and their liability is limited.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have not found questions addressing EPL 2.0. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#h.n9g0wv1ltlut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; in EPL 2.0 FAQ suggests the situation is the same but I am not sure of whether there have been significant changes. Specifically, I am struggling with the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#h.w1np1lrpht6k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;secondary license&lt;/a&gt; although I think it is not relevant in the case of commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is EPL 2.0-licensed software still usable in the conditions above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also unsure about how to distinguish the modified work from the rest of my code. I understand that if the modified work is a separate module or library I do not need to release the whole code.&#xA;However, if I make significant changes that greatly modify the original code but depend on it, am I required to release everything? Is it possible to change the license in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I develop a separate module to be used with the software released under EPL 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16763" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-05-02T12:28:12.407" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T12:28:12.407" Title="Include Eclipse 2.0-licensed software in commercial closed source software" Tags="|commercial|derivative-works|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9123" CreationDate="2019-12-13T16:28:47.277" Score="6" ViewCount="955" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found that some wordpress themes and plugins uses activation key approach, to sell GPL licensed theme. Is it illegal to remove the code logic for licensing, and redistributing them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16719" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T08:17:57.357" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T13:39:43.103" Title="Licensing wordpress theme with an activation key" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9122" CreationDate="2019-12-13T17:29:23.070" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is completely lawful, and in my opinion a public service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible argument against it would be that you're circumventing a technological protection measure, a practice which signatories to certain WIPO treaties are obliged to forbid.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; is very clear that that doesn't apply, in s3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-13T17:35:25.513" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T17:35:25.513" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-13T22:20:50.583" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are possibly millions of worldwide OSS committers indepdently from the fact how the contributions are related to their employment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the a way to know how do they are spread across the world, and if this is too broad, how many are in Germany?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8461" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T14:38:30.230" Title="How many open source committers are in Germany?" Tags="|statistics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-14T08:20:12.823" Score="1" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a scenario , I received a software that uses some Apache 2.0 licensed libraries. Software copy I received contains obfuscated codes. Also library part of code is obfuscated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since library is coded in java, compiled files will not contain prominent notices of changes made to source. May I ask the author of software where and what changes they made in library? Or May I ask the author to provide a software with atleast not obfuscated library part of code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16719" LastEditorUserId="16719" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T10:19:41.693" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T10:19:41.693" Title="Obfuscation and Apache 2.0 license" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9084" CreationDate="2019-12-15T03:56:29.287" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kyle E. Mitchell on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/dev/lawyer&lt;/a&gt; makes a compelling argument against using no-attribution licenses like 0BSD, et al.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some recent licenses, like 0BSD, omit attribution conditions. There is literally nothing users have to do to use or reuse work under these licenses. That’s the ideal of “anti-licenses” like WTFPL and also public domain dedications: Anyone should be able to treat the work as if they themselves wrote it. It’s as if intellectual property laws, or at least copyright laws, didn’t exist. Zero friction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But copyright laws aren’t the only laws bearing on software. Even when clients don’t care one lick about credit for work done, I recommend they stick to licenses with attribution conditions, like MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0. Why? Attribution conditions help ensure that disclaimers—the parts in ALL CAPS—remain intact, and reach end users, so they have legal effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The defaults make a lot of sense when you’re buying software from a vendor. But offering those kinds of warranties is a lot to ask for no dollars in return, as with open source. So open source licenses almost uniformly reverse those defaults, by disclaiming implied warranties. Contributors give their work away, but it’s up to users to decide whether to rely upon it, and to accept the whole risk of doing so. At least in most countries, which honor written disclaimers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reversing the defaults requires sending users a message that different rules apply. By requiring copies of the software to come with copies of disclaimers, attribution conditions ensure those messages reach users, who might otherwise sue under a default warranty. The point isn’t “here is the person you should shower with credit”. The point is “here is a note making clear you can’t hold them accountable”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-Coincidences.html#attribution-doesnt-mean-credit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-Coincidences.html#attribution-doesnt-mean-credit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was enough to dissuade me from using any of these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16686" LastEditorUserId="16686" LastEditDate="2023-05-26T00:23:36.353" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T00:23:36.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9084" CreationDate="2019-12-16T04:35:41.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright James Daniel Marrs Ritchey. This material was created for&#xA;  submission at&#xA;  '&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9084/recommended-license-for-small-script-without-an-attribution-clause&quot;&gt;Recommended license for small script without an attribution clause?&lt;/a&gt;',&#xA;  but can also be alternatively obtained from&#xA;  '&lt;a href=&quot;https://snippetly.blogspot.com/2019/12/searching-for-permissive-license-with.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://snippetly.blogspot.com/2019/12/searching-for-permissive-license-with.html&lt;/a&gt;'&#xA;  under the terms of any of the following licenses: Ritchey Permissive&#xA;  License v6&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2019/12/ritchey-permissive-license-v6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2019/12/ritchey-permissive-license-v6.html&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;  The 2-Clause BSD License&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following licenses are very permissive, don't require attribution, and include disclaimers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GNU All-permissive License (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_All-permissive_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_All-permissive_License&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;It is very similar to the WTFPL. It does not require attribution, and does include a disclaimer of warranty. However, unlike the WTFPL it requires retention of the license terms in derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ritchey Permissive License v6 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2019/12/ritchey-permissive-license-v6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2019/12/ritchey-permissive-license-v6.html&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Like the WTPFL it does not require attribution, or retention of the license in derived works. It does include a disclaimer of liability. However, it imposes arbitration requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zero-Clause BSD (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;Just like the WTPFL it does not require attribution, but unlike the WTPLF it does have a disclaimer. However, notice retention is required. Also, while the license is irrevocable, like many short licenses it doesn't actually use the word 'irrevocable'. Longer more thorough licenses often go out of their way to include this term to fully clarify the license cannot be revoked, or can be only under a breach of the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to settle on one license. You might consider releasing your work under multiple in case your users have a preference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16793" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T04:35:41.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9130" CreationDate="2019-12-16T10:25:35.770" Score="12" ViewCount="1991" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the owner of the code in github and responsible of merging PRs in the main upper stream. I have two different PRs from different two contributers which have conflicts in some files. Who is responsible in resolving conflicts in the both PRs? shall I reject one of them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16796" LastEditorUserId="16796" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T11:11:04.007" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T01:10:13.413" Title="Who is responsible on resolving conflicts on different PRs?" Tags="|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9129" CreationDate="2019-12-16T11:18:02.560" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a tricky question for the maintainers / core devs to answer and there cannot be &quot;the one correct answer&quot; as it depends highly on how that particular community works and how the people talk to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Factors to consider are the type of contribution (bug fix, feature extension, new feature), quality of the contributions, the need and urgency to have one or both merged into master, and the time the individual people (patch authors, core devs) can and likely would be willing to spend on the issues. Either way it's good manners to explain the situation to the involved PR authors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever approach you take, you will need to decide which PR to merge first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is one PR clearly more important or beneficial than the other? IMHO: bug fix &gt; feature enhancement / new feature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is one of the PR authors more communicative and approachable? Explain the situation to him and ask him to rebase his/her PR on top of the other. If so agreed, merge the other PR and wait for an update to the second.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can you spend the time yourself right now? Then just do that, if you want it done quickly. But still explain why you did so to the PR authors in the closing message or a comment. They might want to have done the necessary changes themselves in another way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T01:10:13.413" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T01:10:13.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9124" CreationDate="2019-12-16T14:32:36.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A typical &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.physics.uwo.ca/science_olympics/events/puzzles/fermi_questions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fermi question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some data for Germany and Europe and will extrapolate:&#xA;there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://2017.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapter/talent/article/europes-tech-workforce-and-dev-population-booming/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;800k programmers&lt;/a&gt; in 80M people. Now, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bitkom.org/sites/default/files/2019-09/190916_oss_vorteile_pg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1-digit percentage of companies&lt;/a&gt; in Germany &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Open-Source-deutschen-Wirtschaft-angekommen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;value open-source&lt;/a&gt; for other reasons than cost-cuts. Thus I assume that reflects approx. on programmers (conservative estimate IMHO): every 10th programmer is doing some open-source stuff. In Germany that will result in 80000 people doing OSS development in one form or another. The answer of course also depends on how you actually define &quot;open source commiter&quot;? Is it a person working on a major project? Or also the person who publishes a small script for general usage on the personal home page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably want to write to the CCC or Bitkom. They might have more hard-fact numbers to base such guestimate on than what is shared publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we want to expand to the world (just because we can) we have to make a few more assumptions:&#xA;The above amounts to 1/1000 of the population, Now, this is the high-end concerning percentage of inhabitants, so assume half the number. If we now assume that maybe 3 to 4 billion people on the world have not enough access to computers to even persue such trade or hobby, thus half the planet's population misses out the opportunity: again half the fraction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall 0.025% of the world population might produce open source which is like 1.5-2.0 million people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T14:38:30.230" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T14:38:30.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-17T08:45:21.577" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started an open source project on github which solves one very specific problem which is encountered by event driven distributed systems. I position this project as a handy tool to solve common issue without sweat - just use my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I faced difficulty to get everyone know about even existence of such a project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any common methods which addresses promotion of open source libraries and which can be done without money in relatively short term by one man - the developer itself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/636/what-is-the-best-way-to-promote-an-open-source-product&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; but it was not specific to libraries.  I'm particularly keen to hear any stories of bringing a one-man library to the attention of developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16805" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T09:40:47.020" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T09:40:47.020" Title="How to promote simple github library?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2019-12-22T00:16:53.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9137" CreationDate="2019-12-17T09:47:33.437" Score="7" ViewCount="1825" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third clause of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish a software tool developed by me that I use for my research. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/97480/112007&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; on Academia.SE, I know that licenses that try to enforce citations of the software when used by other researchers have disadvantages, and it is better for me to &quot;ask nicely&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let us assume another researcher runs simulations that partially use my code and publishes the results in a journal. Maybe they also publish the full code (which includes my tool), or maybe not: I do not want to enforce this and I am interested in the implications of both cases. Does the third clause prevent them from citing me in their journal publication unless they ask me for permission first? This is not something I want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16807" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T10:25:17.587" Title="Does the three-clause BSD license hinder academic citations?" Tags="|bsd|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9138" CreationDate="2019-12-17T10:52:09.547" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a new developer and recently have to work on project where I guess using arduino lib will be easy, because writing my own library will be a lot more time consuming. This isn't a mass production device, it is a embedded system that I have to develop to solve a task, my client will be using this system. The arduino lib which I'm using is licensed under GNU LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Can I use the lib APIs in my code and then license my code under my own terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.What is the deal with static linking and dynamic linking of this lib?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.Do I have to redistribute my code or any object form of my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I don't see any need for me to modify the library code, will just be using APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16803" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T12:58:32.450" Title="Need help understanding GNU LGPL terms" Tags="|lgpl|distribution|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9135" CreationDate="2019-12-17T12:46:48.757" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the third clause of the BSD license does not prevent an academic citation of your work. What it prevents is statements along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because we have made use of tool X by @wimi, they support the outcome of our research into &amp;lt;controversial topic&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These results were made possible by six years of effort by (Author A), (Author B), (Collaborator X) and @wimi who were funded by (Grant Y) and (Grant Z)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;from comment by @Ben Voigt&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our program is the best because, unlike its competitors, it uses the code produced by YY&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;from comment by @supercat&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or more subtle forms of endorsement/promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, it means that people using your tool or building upon your tool may not state/imply that you have particular thoughts about those further developments without getting a separate explicit permission to publish your thoughts.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It does not forbid a neutral mention that your tool was used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T10:25:17.587" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T10:25:17.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9136" CreationDate="2019-12-17T12:58:32.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.Can I use the lib APIs in my code and then license my code under my own terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as your license does not forbid users of the code/device to replace the LGPL library with a different version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2.What is the deal with static linking and dynamic linking of this lib?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL requires that it must be possible to replace the LGPL code with a different (compatible) version and have a working executable using that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three ways of fulfilling that requirement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using dynamic linking. Then the dynamic library (.so/.dll) can just be replaced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute object files of the application. This way, the new library can be relinked into the executable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.Do I have to redistribute my code or any object form of my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, unless those files are needed to create a functioning executable that uses a new version of the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the answers above, I have disregarded any contractual obligations you might have to provide your code to your client. The answers also apply to your client if they decide to sell the device to customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T12:58:32.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9129" CreationDate="2019-12-17T13:16:42.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @planetmaker pointed out, every one has their opinions. But weighing in my $.02, it's usually first raised first merged. So, whoever raised it later has to work on merging it in. The reason for doing this is simply because the the owner is just a middleman to make sure of code quality. So simulating the behaviour of git, usually the one who pushes after the last commit has to fix the conflict. Ofcourse, exceptions can be made when there's a bug fix that's needed ASAP and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16808" LastEditorUserId="16808" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T13:22:54.977" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T13:22:54.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-18T10:16:10.830" Score="2" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are using kie-server-api (Version 7.29.0.Final) and kie-server-client (7.29.0.Final) in one of our microservices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//Drools - Java API&#xA;// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.kie.server/kie-server-api&#xA;libraryDependencies += &quot;org.kie.server&quot; % &quot;kie-server-api&quot; % &quot;7.29.0.Final&quot;&#xA;// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.kie.server/kie-server-client&#xA;libraryDependencies += &quot;org.kie.server&quot; % &quot;kie-server-client&quot; % &quot;7.29.0.Final&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Maven both components are licenses under Apache 2.0. In contrast to that our license scanner found issues in these components:&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9E8V2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9E8V2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can kie-server-api and kie-server-client be under Apache 2.0 and deep inside there are GPL-components with copy left???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for an explanation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16816" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T18:01:55.177" Title="Compliance issue with kie-server-api and kie-server-client" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-18T01:41:13.190" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a developer named Peter has an application named &lt;code&gt;AppMIT&lt;/code&gt; licensed MIT that has a dependancy on Tony's library named &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me understand if the cases below are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Case1 - What if Peter does NOT modify Tony's &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. If Peter does not modify &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and wants to share his code by open-sourcing his &lt;code&gt;AppMIT&lt;/code&gt; then nothing is required of Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. If Peter does not modify &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and wants to keep his &lt;code&gt;AppMIT&lt;/code&gt; closed source and share within his organisation then nothing is required of Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. If Peter does not modify &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and wants to keep his &lt;code&gt;AppMIT&lt;/code&gt; closed-source and wants share his application with his Company's clients (outside his company) then he has to allow within his application for his clients to switch Tony's &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; to a different version and also make the source code of &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; available to his clients. This means Peter has to either make his code open-source to &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; his client so they can change the build file (&lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;maven&lt;/code&gt; or some other build file) to switch the &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; dependancy &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; if Peter does not want to share his source-code then he should allow some other way for his clients to dynamically update the &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; dependancy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the above point 1c if Peter does not allow his clients to switch &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; does not make the source code of &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; available to his clients then Peter is in violation of LGPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Case2 - What if Peter modifies Tony's &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. If Peter modifies &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and makes his changes public by open-sourcing it as another project under the same LGPLv3 license or any other GPL license then nothing is required of Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. If Peter modifies &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and makes his changes public by creating a pull-request to Tony's &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; Git repository then nothing is required of Peter even if the PR does not get approved as the PR (Peter's changes) is still available in history and therefore is open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. If Peter modifies &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and does not make his changes public and uses the &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; code &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; within his organisation then nothing is required of Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. If Peter modifies &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; and shares his closed-source application outside his Company (clients) making only the changes to the &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; available to his clients then nothing is required from Peter. Open-sourcing his changes to the public is not required here as long as his clients have access to the modified &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; source-code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the above point 4 if Peter does not allow his clients to switch &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; AND does not make the source code of his modified &lt;code&gt;LibLGPL&lt;/code&gt; available to his clients then Peter is in violation of LGPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10500" OwnerDisplayName="hajime" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T10:53:23.700" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T13:49:43.513" Title="How does an LGPLv3 dependency affect an application when sharing the dependent application with others?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-18T12:53:26.790" Score="7" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit similar to what asked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8505/gpl-application-lgpl-plugin-properietary-code&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, unless that here the case is that the application only directly loads LGPL code, and this one then may dlopen a proprietary lib, so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL Program links to an LGPL library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL library can &lt;code&gt;dlopen&lt;/code&gt;'s and use a proprietary module (optionally linked with the lib), that is optional to have&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The module will provide structures and methods that the GPL application will consume or call, but will not use any library or data of the GPL application, while it will use the ones provided by the LGPL lib.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is this legal (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this parapgrah&lt;/a&gt; is a bit confusing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16817" LastEditorUserId="16817" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T21:24:32.167" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T21:24:32.167" Title="GPL Application linked to a LGPL library loading proprietary-plugins" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|proprietary-code|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-19T05:52:58.473" Score="-3" ViewCount="2051" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have taken AOSP code and build for my system? AOSP does not provide apk for google text to speech apk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now i want to build application which supports tts using google text to speech engine so i have installed google text to speech apk from external source and made application which uses google tts engine and it is working fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure weather we can use google text to speech for commercial use? is there any legal terms and condition to use this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able to find any documentation of google text to speech . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16822" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T09:03:34.100" Title="Can i use google text to speech app for comercial use?" Tags="|android|google-play|google-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2019-12-20T20:15:36.257" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9143" CreationDate="2019-12-19T09:03:34.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;API&lt;/a&gt; (and only the API) is under the Apache v2 License, so you can use that under its terms which includes commercial usage; that doesn't make google's TTS open-source though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual access to the API and services requires agreement to further terms from google which are described in the documentation and when signing up for / signing-in to a google account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T09:03:34.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9147" CreationDate="2019-12-19T13:47:35.640" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;A company I work in has wrote an implementation of Reed-Solomon codes through &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/intel/isa-l/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Intel ISA-L library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm trying to start a discussion about open-sourcing our code, and distributing as a dual-licensed project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3 for everyone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A proprietary license for those who are willing to pay for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nuisance here is that ISA-L header files are distributed under a BSDv3 license. Hence my question is: can we distribute our sources under a GPLv3 license, given they use the BSDv3 headers from the ISA-L?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5506" LastEditorUserId="5506" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T14:48:00.433" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:15:06.380" Title="Can a GPLv3 project use BSDv3-licensed includes?" Tags="|gpl-3|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-12-20T06:43:12.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-19T19:30:22.663" Score="2" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm open-sourcing a library that tries to make managing local files easier by enabling full text search, encryption, corruption handling &amp;amp; remote transfer/distribution of files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license to use that allows the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be used within other open-source projects with different licenses without forcing others to change their license. No viral license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be used within proprietary or commercial closed source software with no restrictions or conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But has only one condition that any changes, updates and bug-fixes to the library itself (just the library) are published back to the open-source project so that the library maintainers and other developers can benefit from it regardless of where the software is run, locally, remote over a web service or on a Rocket to the Moon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;MPL-2.0&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/code&gt; provide the above but they do say that modifications should be published if it's run over a web-service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/code&gt; says that modifications should be published if it's run over a web-service but it's a viral license so other open-source projects cannot use my library unless they are &lt;code&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/code&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10500" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T19:30:22.663" Title="Which license to use LGPL-3.0, MPL-2.0 or AGPL-3.0 for a library that manages files locally?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|agpl-3.0|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9145" CreationDate="2019-12-19T22:15:06.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-compatibility.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF writes&lt;/a&gt; and as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/304/can-i-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and its accepted answer: yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given those license versions: BSD is on all accounts at least as permissive as GPLv3. Thus GPLv3 puts more restrictions on code than BSD does, and BSD does not place restrictions where the GPL does not request at the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T22:15:06.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9141" CreationDate="2019-12-20T11:41:41.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, noting that IANAL/IANYL, and assuming that Peter is an employee of his company rather than a contracted resource:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1a. Mostly correct.  You also have certain labelling and license-distribution obligations (see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s3); but as regards the provision of actual code, I think you're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1b. Correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1c. Correct; Peter must either supply AppMIT as a dynamically-linked executable, or if statically-linked to LibLGPL he must also supply the object file form of AppMIT so that it can be relinked in the field with a replacement for LibLGPL (LGPLv3 s4d).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a. See 1a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2b. No.  You are conveying a modified version of LibLGPL, and so are bound by GPLv3 s6 (and thus also GPLv3 s5).  LGPLv3 s2a exempts you from the licensing requirement in  GPLv3 s5b, but you are still bound by the source-distribution requirements of GPLv3 s5.  Merely pointing to a pull request to someone else's public repository won't meet these, particularly not if Tony takes his repository down; supplying a copy of the full corresponding source of modified LibLGPL to anyone who receives an executable copy of AppMIT will.  If you don't know who these people are (for GPLv3 s6d conveyances) then making it available to everyone is your safest bet.  It's fine to use a third-party hosting site to do so, but it should be &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; third-party hosting account, and if the third-party site goes down, you're obligated to bring it up elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2c. Correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2d. Correct, though note that Peter may not attempt to prevent those clients from exercising their rights under LGPLv3, and re-distributing accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T13:49:43.513" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T13:49:43.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T18:14:27.950" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most debian-based Linux distributions are using a quite complex package development workflow. In my experience, it is at least so complex than all the commonly used technologies today for professional software development (most commonly: git + CI deployment scripts). While it is very badly documented, it is full with oldie things targeting oldie problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also serious problems to solve, if someone wants to distribute his software as deb packages. Although debian and the related distros are all open-source...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;becoming a package maintainer is a huge overhead, requires also a social integration and many communication on their mailing lists,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;packages need to fullfill a lot of (mostly unneeded, archaic) packaging requirements/standards,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and even in the best case it will be included in the next stable distribution (meaning &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt; of overhead).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem for me practically unfullfillable requirements if I only want a place, where I can upload my code, and it becomes automatically included into an apt repo, where everybody will be able to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think the current deb system has a too rigid structure, does not follow best-practice standards, and it has an unfeasible administrative, social and technological overhead. It was a good practice some decades ago, when source code management was not really common (git did not even exist), and software was distributed mainly in downloadable .tar.gz files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://launchpad.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Launchpad&lt;/a&gt; has initiated an option for a free package management system, but it has many disadvantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it has zero SCM integration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it has zero CI integration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it likes only Ubuntu (ok, most ppa can be used also from Debian)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;source package upload with its - unneeded - signatures is a nightmare (for example, I am not sure, anybody can still remember, what are those required &quot;.changes&quot; files for that and why are they required). Also gpg became a nightmare since gpg2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/379352/52236&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slow. It takes about an hour from the source upload and to the appearance of the compiled binary package in the apt repository. This is mostly unneeded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;creating dependencies across ppas is impossible. This avoids to create a free, fluid community. Only independent personal package archives can be created, what can't grow once into even a distro fork.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that here we have the problem, that old customs becoming unfeasible today, are bonding us due to the social inertia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the correct development workflow would be far more easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to debianize a package, we should need to fork its git repository&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;its debianization should exist on a branch (in our repository), for example on the branch name &quot;debian&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;upstream changes/developments should be simply merged into it with the git&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a CI software - integrated into the git server - should automatically rebuild the package on every push, and deploy it, &lt;strong&gt;easily&lt;/strong&gt;, into a downloadable apt repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that, already a lot of opensource software exists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gitlab&lt;/a&gt; can be used for newbie-friendly source code management&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gitlab runner&lt;/a&gt; (even from a different machine) could execute the package building/deployment script, &lt;em&gt;automatically on push&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/SetupWithReprepro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprepro&lt;/a&gt; could be used to generate the apt repo and deploy the packages in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the apt repositories could be publicized on http/ftp with any http/ftp server, as usual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/en/buster/apticron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apticron&lt;/a&gt; could be even used to automatically install it on the systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make also a lot of simplifications possible. For example, the all packages could have the &quot;native&quot; source format. In my opinion, having a patch manager which simply patches an unmodified upstream source, is sub-optimal. Patches should be managed by git, of course the ideal is if it is close to the upstream source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking on to create a free service, using gitlab and gitlab CI, but what would be integrable also with other free source management sites (github.com, gitlab.com).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my problem is that it will be probably not very well used. I don't want to invest a lot of time and (possibly) a lot of money into a free service, what will be used probably only by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2019-12-20T18:42:10.417" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T18:42:10.417" Title="How to initiate a more simple deb package management workflow in the opensource community?" Tags="|package|git|debian|gitlab|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-12-20T21:04:40.560" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-21T13:16:46.377" Score="2" ViewCount="1806" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT License gives you permissions to use the software commercially without any restrictions. You need only give credit to the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am going to use for my project (that will be commercial) that uses this license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;VS Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a bunch of extensions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I need to credit all of the authors of software I will use to write my own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to credit in my case, as I only used the &quot;environment&quot; to code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where should I credit, considering that the project won't be open-source. Inside the app under credits?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16837" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T02:07:31.463" Title="MIT License and how to use" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9140" CreationDate="2019-12-21T17:30:24.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Digging down into the licensing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.kie.server/kie-server-api/7.30.0.Final&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the components that make up&lt;/a&gt; the latest version of &lt;code&gt;kie-server-api&lt;/code&gt;, all the dependencies of the code itself are Apache2, BSD, or MIT-licensed; &lt;code&gt;jaxb-core&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;jaxb-impl&lt;/code&gt; are needed only for testing.  We already have a question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7503/implications-of-using-gpl-licenced-code-only-during-testing&quot;&gt;the implications of using GPL-licensed components during testing&lt;/a&gt;, and I recommend it for your perusal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger problem here is your licence analysis tool, which doesn't seem very good at determining the exact nature of components - at least, not in the case of &lt;code&gt;kie-server-api&lt;/code&gt;.  &lt;strong&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt; a piece of copylefted code is used in the production of your software is &lt;strong&gt;very important&lt;/strong&gt; in determining the licensing implications for your software; for example, a piece of code might require a GPL'ed compiler in order to compile, but that almost never means that the resulting executable must be GPL also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no developer, so I can't shed much more light on exactly how those java components are used in this case, but I think we have good grounds to be suspicious of your automated tool.  It might be time to actually start doing some legwork yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T17:30:24.750" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9155" CreationDate="2019-12-21T18:37:51.123" Score="2" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can artwork under CC-BY NC ND be used in AGPL codebase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have sprites for a game I want to release under CC-BY NC ND license. Game code itself is licensed as AGPL, while sprites are mostly CC-BY SA. Our sprites are completely new and we do not want them to be used commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will that work? What we can do to make our sprites unusable commercially, or that is impossible if code is AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16838" LastEditorUserId="69" LastEditDate="2019-12-22T00:17:48.573" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T08:56:02.940" Title="Can artwork under CC-BY NC ND be used in AGPL codebase?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9116" CreationDate="2019-12-21T21:07:45.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally found the &quot;Commons Clause&quot;, which should solve my problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough to add the following LICENSE.txt file to my project or did I make any mistake or overlook something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                                    &amp;lt;PRODUCT&amp;gt; Licensing&#xA;                    Copyright 2019-2020 Daniel Berghold (public@&amp;lt;my domain&amp;gt;.cc)&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;) modified with Commons Clause&#xA;Restriction; you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a&#xA;copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the&#xA;License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY&#xA;KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions&#xA;and limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;Commons Clause Restriction&#xA;&#xA;The Software is provided to you by the Licensor under the License, as defined below, subject to&#xA;the following condition.&#xA;&#xA;Without limiting other conditions in the License, the grant of rights under the License will not&#xA;include, and the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software.&#xA;&#xA;For purposes of the foregoing, “Sell” means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you&#xA;under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without&#xA;limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or&#xA;service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.&#xA;Any license notice or attribution required by the License must also include this Commons Clause&#xA;License Condition notice.&#xA;&#xA;For purposes of the clause above, the “Licensor” is Daniel Berghold (public@&amp;lt;my domain&amp;gt;.cc) the &#xA;“License” is the Apache License, Version 2.0, and the Software is the &amp;lt;PRODUCT&amp;gt; software provided&#xA;with this notice.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16762" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T21:07:45.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9150" CreationDate="2019-12-22T02:07:31.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a binary program to develop your own software does not affect your source code under the terms of any open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source licenses are about copying all or some of the source code used to make an application or library, in your example that is VS Code, and incorporating that projects source code into your applications source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means you need to keep track of any libraries you use from your source code, as for example, the GPL considers linking to a GPL library as incorporating its source code into your project. Check whether there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt; applied to any GPL libraries that you want to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is compiled from source code that only you have written, then you are free to use any licensing terms you want for your end product and give yourself credit wherever you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One note of caution, if a plugin/extension to your IDE or source code editor is used to &quot;inject&quot; source code snippets into the code you are writing, then you should check whether that code requires you to follow any licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T02:07:31.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9152" CreationDate="2019-12-22T08:56:02.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is a tricky question and the answer depends whether you ship it as one entity or as two (and whether that can be done sensibly). Generally any CC-NC license is incompatible with any GPL license: The latter allows commercial usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your artwork is distributed as a separate package, and your code can live without the artwork, it's fine. But that basically means that the end user has to have the ability to combine your product from those two packages and that the possibility exist to create alternate graphic ressource packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many games apply two licenses, one to code, one to art assets where the latter can be shipped separately and the form of the assets is known. As an example: OpenTTD comes with the base game which requires one or another base set of graphics (and sound and music) to be installed; a choice to obtain and download these is offered via installer  or you provide your own from a locally available path. Given this is clearly separated, it is no issue to have different licenses for graphic assets and code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you should consider an ND clause very carefully. It also means that none of your successors may edit the graphics even to adjust it for the purpose of improving the project you donate them to.&#xA;Also consider an NC clause very carefully - it excludes your project being offered on an app store or similar.&#xA;Thus my advice is to actually put the graphics assets under the same license as the code itself or to use CC-BY-SA. In any GPL context that does mean commercial usage is allowed - but it is only allowed when the corresponding code is shared, in an AGPL case even that it is shared when you only offer the product as a service without distributing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T08:56:02.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-22T09:49:46.253" Score="2" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to create a package based on an existing library written in a different language. The package will be a simple translation to the another language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existing project is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause &quot;Simplified&quot; License&lt;/a&gt; and is open-sourced on GitHub. I'd like to license my package with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 3-Clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; and I'd like to publish it on GitHub and to the package manager. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I include in the license so that everything is fine with the law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16839" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T17:06:04.803" Title="What to keep in BSD License when porting package to another language" Tags="|licensing|github|bsd|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-03-11T15:19:40.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-22T10:51:16.180" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many FLOSS licenses contain a variant of the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR&#xA;  OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,&#xA;  ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR&#xA;  OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short licenses, it stands out that this is all uppercase. Does it have any legal implications, or is it just an aesthetic thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3686" LastActivityDate="2019-12-22T10:51:16.180" Title="Why is this text usually uppercase in licenses?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2019-12-23T07:20:50.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9159" CreationDate="2019-12-22T14:35:28.640" Score="6" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first foray into the open source world. I've got a Microsoft Excel workbook that I have some custom VBA modules in that I want to distribute under the GPL v3. I can't find much discussion on the philosophy of using the GPL with Excel, but I think it would be kind of treating it like a plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excel is independent, but my particular &quot;plugin&quot; requires my independent worksheets and code to add it's a new benefit. Therefore, even though Excel is a paid program, my VBA script and workbook would be covered, right? Am I misinterpreting the GPL? Would that run afoul of any other intellectual property issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16841" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2019-12-23T08:43:35.173" LastActivityDate="2019-12-23T08:43:35.173" Title="Can I release an Excel Workbook with VBA code under the GPL v3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9158" CreationDate="2019-12-23T06:45:18.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mandatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it, GPL allows your program to depend on non-GPL &quot;system libraries&quot;, which are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3&lt;/a&gt;. GPL 2 has a slightly different definition, but the spirit is the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, as long as you are not shipping Excel, but assuming the end-user already has Excel and would just install your plugin to provide additional functionality, Excel would be your &quot;system library&quot;, and the fact it isn't licensed under GPL should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2019-12-23T06:45:18.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-23T14:58:54.763" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing some kind of test frame work in Python3. I am about to publish it, I am looking for right license for it... and I am confused :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what am looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;common/well known license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone modified this framework it need to be published (bug fixes, useful features)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone use this framework for testing - nothing should be done, but it will be nice to know&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone use this framework for other software (ex webservice for testing) - needs to mention it (like BSD 3clouse)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone write plugin etc for this framework it can be under any license and don't need to publish it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will LGPLv3 be Ok? And can it be changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16847" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2019-12-23T16:56:48.380" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T17:29:50.653" Title="Test framework license selection" Tags="|lgpl|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9163" CreationDate="2019-12-24T09:28:41.260" Score="-1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to use Hyperledger Fabric open source project and it has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under Apache License 2.0 but while check it's vendor license it got opencontainers/go-digest which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric/blob/master/vendor/github.com/opencontainers/go-digest/LICENSE.docs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it safe to use fabric in production despite this vendor licenses ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16851" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T15:55:36.620" Title="Go vendor license" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9162" CreationDate="2019-12-24T15:55:36.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the opencontainers/go-digest part of the repository has 2 license files, LICENSE.code and LICENSE.docs. Based on the file extensions, one appears to contain the license for the source code and the other for the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The .go files themselves and the LICENSE.code file all refer to the Apache 2.0 license as being applicable. It appears that the documentation has been stripped from this copy of opencontainers/go-digest, so the LICENSE.docs can be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: Yes, it is safe to use fabric in a closed-source project. The CC-BY-SA license you found in the vendor section does not actually apply to any portion of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-24T15:55:36.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-26T14:15:46.453" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/theworldisnotflat/shriveling_world&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scientific open source project in GitHub for a software aimed at creating three dimensional representations of geographical time-space&lt;/a&gt;. The tool will be soon in version 1, functional, and I want to prepare for its use by a larger community, possibly dozens of people. For this I wish to create a &lt;strong&gt;knowledge base for the software users&lt;/strong&gt;. GitHub can be used for bug management, but does not seem adapted to foster such a knowledge base. Is a forum the best solution? Which forum? A wiki?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sdna.cardiff.ac.uk/sdna/support/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sDNA&lt;/a&gt; which invites to send questions to a gis.stackexchange. This solution needs an existing community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the best practices of &lt;strong&gt;users oriented knowledge base&lt;/strong&gt; and what guidance could I receive in order to set it up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16845" LastEditorUserId="16845" LastEditDate="2019-12-26T14:23:39.423" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T14:23:39.423" Title="Good practises of a knowledge base for users of a scientific open source project: a forum?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-26T19:19:34.727" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to figure out this problem in the internet. What if I train embeddings on the wikipedia texts? And then use them in training of my model?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, fastText embeddings are distributed like Wikipedia under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;. This states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, &#xA; or build upon the material, you must distribute your  &#xA; contributions under the same license as the original.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that my model should be also distributed on the same license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16863" LastActivityDate="2019-12-26T19:19:34.727" Title="What is the license of models built on pretrained embeddings?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-28T23:59:31.033" Score="5" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering using &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/keijiro/FFmpegOutBinaries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPL-3.0-licensed library&lt;/a&gt; as a development aid in a game. Development builds that include this library (and other unrelated tools) would be used by myself and any parties involved in the development of the game. &lt;em&gt;The library (and the features that use it) would be entirely excluded from production builds intended for the general public.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would this be allowed under the terms of the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt; While we're at it, is there precedent for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some facts that may be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The game is proprietary and closed-source and will remain so for the foreseeable future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No other libraries or assets in my game are licensed under the GPL or similar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I use a lot of permissively-licensed (MIT, BSD, public domain, etc.) third-party libraries, but I can provide details if necessary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have not actually installed or used this library yet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I may someday extract parts of the game's source code into reusable libraries. I don't yet know which parts or under which license I would do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't yet know if I will need to include the library in my game's source repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm the sole developer of this game, but if I had employees then they would have access to development builds. If I hire contractors, they will also have access to development builds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I work with a publisher or other service provider (such as for marketing or QA), they would have access to development builds. They might or might not have partial ownership of the game and its copyright, but it would depend on the terms of an agreement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5006" LastEditorUserId="5006" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T18:41:12.793" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T18:41:12.793" Title="Can a GPL-licensed library be used in private development builds of a proprietary application?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|proprietary-code|linked-libraries|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9238" CreationDate="2019-12-29T12:26:54.993" Score="-2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to contribute some code and design on this app:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://invent.kde.org/kde/kdeconnect-android/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://invent.kde.org/kde/kdeconnect-android/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't push my code on this repository:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://invent.kde.org/frdana/kdeconnect-android.git&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://invent.kde.org/frdana/kdeconnect-android.git&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to request the owner to add me as a project member?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16882" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T21:11:57.457" Title="Join as project member on invent kde" Tags="|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9166" CreationDate="2019-12-29T17:48:03.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that would be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Versions of a software product that don't derive from/use GPL code are not subject to the GPL licensing terms, so you can use whatever license ou like for those versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the people using the development builds are all part of the same organisation, which holds the copyright on the project, then there the use of the GPL library is also not a problem, because the code that depends on the GPL library is not being distributed and the restrictions of the GPL only kick in when you distribute code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the development builds &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; being distributed between copyright holders, then you need to investigate which parts need te be under a GPL-compatible license or dual licensed to meet both your objectives of being GPL-compatible for the development builds and closed-source for the production builds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Adapting the license requires the explicit consent from all the copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-29T17:48:03.567" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-31T03:01:32.747" Score="3" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ansible is licensed under the GPL 3.0, they provide a wonderful collection of documentation for most every bit of the software. For instance the copy module can be seen on their documentation page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/copy_module.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/copy_module.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and is seen in their source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/modules/files/copy.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/modules/files/copy.py&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The documentation contains ready to use examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: Copy file with owner and permissions&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: /srv/myfiles/foo.conf&#xA;    dest: /etc/foo.conf&#xA;    owner: foo&#xA;    group: foo&#xA;    mode: '0644'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to use it, it would end up looking a lot like the sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: Copy bar.conf into place&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: bar.conf&#xA;    dest: /etc/bar.conf&#xA;    owner: bar&#xA;    mode: '0644'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe my copy task is a derivative of the example from the documentation. Leading me to my first question: Does this mean any use of the copy module, or any ansible module for that matter, would be a derivative of the documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it is a derivative of the documentation, does that mean that any ansible playbook would be subject to GPL 3.0 licensing? Due to being a derivative of documentation that is licensed under GPL 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16890" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T07:39:12.130" Title="Is code made from the documentation a derivative work" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9172" CreationDate="2019-12-31T07:39:12.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can both write a HelloWorld application in the same language and chances are that both programs will look very similar. This does not mean that, if I were to publish mine first, that your version would be derived from mine. Both are independent works, no matter how similar they look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law and -judges also recognize the fact that as there become fewer ways to express an idea, the more likely it is that the expressions of the idea will look alike even if they are created independently. This goes even as far that if there is only one way to express an idea, then that expression is not subject to copyright at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your invocation of the ansible &lt;code&gt;copy&lt;/code&gt; module would only be a derived work of the documentation if you actually copied an example from the documentation and modified that. &#xA;If you wrote the invocation yourself and used the documentation only as a reference which parameters you can use, then the code is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derived work and wholly your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T07:39:12.130" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9207" CreationDate="2019-12-31T12:39:37.460" Score="2" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some days ago, I successfully built my own software. I want it to be open source. Someone told me about the Unlicense license. So, if I publish my software under the Unlicense license, would anyone be able to take credit for my work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16895" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T12:57:23.073" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T06:43:53.480" Title="Can anyone say my work is their work if I license it under the Unlicense?" Tags="|attribution|unlicense|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9176" CreationDate="2019-12-31T17:15:36.370" Score="7" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will elaborate my question with a hypothetical example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A commercial software named &quot;Kota&quot; from a company called &quot;GRILL&quot; is based on a publically open-source GPL-3 software &quot;Choc&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Kota&quot;, as stated in their website, is claimed to be an &quot;open-source ... simulation engine.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, &quot;Kota&quot; is not publically &quot;open-source&quot;. The source of the software is only shared with clients who pay for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As discussed in&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6366/16900&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6366/16900&lt;/a&gt;), selling a GPL-3 based code, and sharing its source only with the client seems to be allowed, and is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue however is this: &quot;GRILL&quot; asks her clients to sign an agreement that they will not share any information regarding the source code with third parties or public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Is there anything in GPL-3 or in its peripherals commenting on such scenarios?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16900" LastEditorUserId="16900" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T08:45:42.797" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T08:45:42.797" Title="Can a developer of a GPL-3 code ask a client not to publicly share the code?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9175" CreationDate="2019-12-31T19:28:15.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 is very clear about this situation. It is explicitly disallowed by sections 7 and 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Additional Terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions. Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent that they are valid under applicable law. If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional terms, permissive or non-permissive, may be stated in the form of a separately written license, or stated as exceptions; the above requirements apply either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 10 clearly states that the restrictions imposed by the separate contract with &amp;quot;GRILL&amp;quot; are a violation of the GPLv3 license they are holding on &amp;quot;Choc&amp;quot;. However, only the copyright holders of GPL code used by &amp;quot;GRILL&amp;quot; can start a lawsuit to get &amp;quot;GRILL&amp;quot; to stop this practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody decides to ignore the separate contract and distribute &amp;quot;Kota&amp;quot; regardless, then section 7 allows them to do the distribution under the plain GPLv3 without the additional terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note of caution is required here: I can easily imagine that the person/company redistributing &amp;quot;Kota&amp;quot; will get sued by &amp;quot;GRILL&amp;quot; for breaking that separate contract and that a judge would award quite significant damages to be paid to &amp;quot;GRILL&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T08:36:00.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9190" CreationDate="2019-12-31T19:51:16.720" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source software I am using has a pull request for a feature that I need, but it has never been merged due to failing checks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of implementing the feature myself, is there any way that I can fix the problems with the other user's pull request?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to, but not exactly the same, as these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36944055/fixing-a-bad-pull-request&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36944055/fixing-a-bad-pull-request&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/GitHub-Is-it-bad-etiquette-to-change-someones-pull-request-before-committing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/GitHub-Is-it-bad-etiquette-to-change-someones-pull-request-before-committing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6837/open-source-when-not-to-go-on-a-crusade-for-a-feature&quot;&gt;Open-source, when (not) to go on a crusade for a feature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16901" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T14:01:14.383" Title="Need feature in PR with failing checks" Tags="|github|etiquette|pull-request|git|feature-requests|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T07:54:40.997" Score="3" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a 2D sidescroller game for mobile platforms and am trying to figure out the best licensing option for this situation: My desire is to make the game's source code open-source, but the content (maps, graphics, etc..) proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open-source component I just wish to be able to show in a Github public repository to support my resume and perhaps benefit the gaming / mod community with a small and easy to work with engine. Cloning this repository would just give the uncompiled source code and documentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full-featured game (levels, sprites, scripts, etc..) I'd like to be able to publish for a fee on platforms like Google play store, without necessarily exposing the raw content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any guidance, cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16906" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T10:58:49.527" Title="Suitable license for open-source game with proprietary content" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9188" CreationDate="2020-01-01T22:58:23.757" Score="5" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9172/is-code-made-from-the-documentation-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;Is code made from the documentation a derivative work&lt;/a&gt; it was asked if code made from licensed documentation constitutes derivative works, and thus license restrictions. It seems the answer is mostly no, with the detail of if one copies an example from the documentation and modifies it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your invocation of the ansible copy module would only be a derived work of the documentation if you actually copied an example from the documentation and modified that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Bart van Ingen Schenau&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the ansible example, I deliberately copy out of the ansible documentation all the time, the ansible creators know what they're doing, anything I try to recreate would be worse. As such I do things like (as in @carpeting_sales_rep 's question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: Copy file with owner and permissions&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: /srv/myfiles/foo.conf&#xA;    dest: /etc/foo.conf&#xA;    owner: foo&#xA;    group: foo&#xA;    mode: '0644'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would paste it right into my editor (out of the examples section of the ansible docs), and start editing it, ending up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: Put in the dog photo&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: dogphotos/dog.png&#xA;    dest: /var/www/html/dog.png&#xA;    owner: dog&#xA;    group: husky&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between copying and modifying the documentation, and referencing the documentation to make a piece of software? Would the above be a derivative, because I literally copied it and modified it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16909" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T08:01:45.300" Title="Copying vs referencing" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9181" CreationDate="2020-01-02T19:04:51.937" Score="1" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;a library that depends on jquery was created. After that, a version where all dependant calls were replaced with original jquery code. Most parts of such code were removed as redundant. Should be jquery somehow mentioned in such case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16914" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T14:01:05.423" Title="Should one reference a source library under MIT license if a code was grabed out of it and was changed" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9180" CreationDate="2020-01-03T08:26:10.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license does not require that you in some way reference the original project when you copy some code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; require that you copy the copyright and license text along with the code that you copy. Depending on how the copyright statement is formulated, this can become effectively a reference to the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T08:26:10.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9161" CreationDate="2020-01-03T17:29:50.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problems here are the requirements that &quot;&lt;em&gt;If someone modified this framework it need to be published&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;If someone use this framework for testing - nothing should be done, but it will be nice to know&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have written &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6834/458&quot;&gt;elsewhere here&lt;/a&gt; about publication requirements, and the fact that such a requirement is considered to make a licence non-free.  A free licence may require that &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; a modified version is distributed it be fully-free; but it may not require that a modified version be distributed in the first place.  Requiring that the author of a modified version notify the author of the original version &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6963/458&quot;&gt;makes the software non-free&lt;/a&gt;, and I would expect a notification requirement attached to usage to be regarded similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore no free licence, which includes LGPLv3, will have these requirements in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T17:29:50.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9184" CreationDate="2020-01-03T20:11:42.550" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Scenario&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A software vendor wants to &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; their own &lt;em&gt;commercial&lt;/em&gt; software (S1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S1 relies heavily on a third party GPLv2-licensed software (S2) to function. But:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;DO NOT modify&lt;/strong&gt; S2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;DO NOT link&lt;/strong&gt; S2 (as in a binary-linked library).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They &lt;strong&gt;DO interact&lt;/strong&gt; with S2 by &lt;em&gt;configuring&lt;/em&gt; it for their needs, &lt;em&gt;running&lt;/em&gt; it, and &lt;em&gt;interfacing&lt;/em&gt;  with it (as in, specifically: S1 invokes S2 via REST APIs, and I guess also takes care of bootstrapping it).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They would like to package S1 with S2 in a single software package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This a B2B model, in that this vendor's customers, buying S1, would then allow &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; end-users/customers to use S1 (which itself uses S2 in the background).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's a model this whole software package contains 2 stand-alone apps, where one relies on the other as a back-end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make no claims as to whether S1 is also open source or not for now, that's also what I want to determine via the possible options explained later below.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &quot;distribute&quot;, I mean here 2 possibilities:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sell and offer for electronic download,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sell and provide everything already ready on a set-top box system (secondary option though, not the one I'm most interested in for now).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, as S2 is GPLv2-licensed, and they want to distribute S2 with their S1 software, the following options would be acceptable. Please confirm and let me know if that's correct or what would be the recommended approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option 1 - Licence S1 with a GPLv2 compatible license and package both&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They decide to package and distribute S2 with their software. As a result, as per GPLv2's terms, S1 has to be distributed with a GPLv2-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the vendor needs to distribute both S1's source and S2's source with the package. (Or make it clearly available with visible preambles?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow-up question in this option: what GPLv2-compatible licence would you recommend here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option 2 - License S1 as you please and do not package and distribute with S2&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor keeps S1 closed-source, and they do not distribute S2 with their software package. The vendors customers have to take care of that themselves, or via an explicit action during installation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that, as S2 is not modified or distributed, this is also legally acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Option 3 - License S1 as you please and still package S2 with it?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I am completely wrong, and as S2 isn't modified, and S1 isn't linking to it as a binary, there are no needs to do this? This seems incorrect to me, as S2 would still be distributed and used, but on the other hand GPLv2 does allow commercial redistribution (and again, there's no modification). Is just providing S2's source all that is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or any other possibility I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16922" LastEditorUserId="16922" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T20:16:57.227" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T21:29:26.967" Title="Licensing concerns when distributing a software package containing a GPLv2 third-party software" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9183" CreationDate="2020-01-03T21:29:26.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As S1 and S2 communicate over a REST interface (and thus a network connection), their communication is considered to be &quot;at arms length.&quot; This means that S1 and S2 are considered independent works for copyright considerations and the GPL license of S2 does not affect S1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is also independent of how you package a product or combination of products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this means that you can use whatever license you like for S1 and sell the combination of S1 and S2. The only thing you can't do is restrict the GPL-based rights that your customers get on S2. Thus your customers must have the right to replace the S2 version they got from you with a different version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T21:29:26.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9187" CreationDate="2020-01-05T22:19:21.597" Score="4" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/01/05/208249/open-source-initiative-co-founder-bruce-perens-resigns-citing-move-toward-license-that-isnt-freedom-respecting#perens_coherent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;coherent&quot;&lt;/a&gt; open source?  How is it different from other forms of open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T13:34:09.493" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T17:45:50.000" Title="What is coherent open source?" Tags="|licensing|terminology|osi|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9186" CreationDate="2020-01-05T22:19:21.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/01/05/208249/open-source-initiative-co-founder-bruce-perens-resigns-citing-move-toward-license-that-isnt-freedom-respecting#perens_coherent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;slashdot post&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Bruce Perens has declared:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Coherent Open Source&amp;quot; plan asks creators of new work to place it under one of only three licenses: The Affero GPL 3, LGPL3, or Apache 2. These three were chosen because they are all compatible with each other, are all approved of by both OSI and FSF, and they provide a range of permissions suitable for different applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The premise here is that having so many different Open Source licenses is in general harmful to the community, due to the combinatorial problem and the need to understand so many of them, and is simply not necessary because each additional license does not bring a high value in innovation or new functionality -- at least in a way that supports the community rather than some company. Yet OSI goes on approving new ones. And the new license submissions tend to depart from the respect for freedom that has made Free Software / Open Source so successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we plan a coherent strategy and go forward with it from here, we start to solve the problem of too many licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three licenses address the problem of software patents in some way. There is much text shared between AGPL3 and LGPL3, so the effect is sort of like having to learn 2.5 licenses rather than 3. And of course AGPL3 addresses the SaaS problem by requiring SaaS providers to share their modifications, just as the GPL required people to share modifications before SaaS. We should be asking more of companies like Google and Amazon today, since they get so much value from us. But without deviating from the ideals of Free Software / Open Source as some license proposals do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest criticisms are that it's difficult to combine with these licenses if your project is &amp;quot;GPL2 with no later version&amp;quot;. There are several ways for either side of the combination to address that, but they aren't automatic. And I heard from a lawyer who really didn't like the scheme, but as far as I can tell it's just because he wants to do more lawyering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am all for the community needing attorneys only when it's time to enforce their licenses, &lt;strong&gt;not to figure out their own operations&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T17:45:50.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9179" CreationDate="2020-01-07T07:54:52.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a piece of documentation in order to write your own program does not generally produce a derivative work. A derivative work would mean that you copied or transformed copyrightable portions of the source material in a manner that would require permission. Keep in mind that copyright only protects the particular expression of an idea. The idea itself is not copyrightable. So let's take a look at your example. Suppose this example appears in the documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: Put in the dog photo&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: dogphotos/dog.png&#xA;    dest: /var/www/html/dog.png&#xA;    owner: dog&#xA;    group: husky&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of this is &quot;a script to copy a file.&quot; Anyone is free to write his own script that copies a file. No one can own that idea. Additionally, elements which are strictly necessary to do this are not protected by copyright, so let's remove the elements which are not strictly necessary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: A&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: B&#xA;    dest: C&#xA;    owner: D&#xA;    group: E&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the elements A, B, C, D and E are generic symbols which represent parts of the document which are not strictly necessary. Whether the text in those elements themselves are creative enough to be copyrightable or whether your use of them would be infringing is another question, though. For example, in my opinion, the text in A &quot;Put in the dog photo&quot; is so short and generic that it is very plausible that two independent authors, each having her own idea in mind about putting in a photo of a dog somewhere, decided to write precisely the same words &quot;put in the dog photo&quot; independently. That doesn't mean those two authors are copying from each other and it doesn't mean one of them would require permission from the other in order to use the same words. However, if the text in A were something substantial, original, and creative, then the particular text in A could be copyrightable and using it or something derived from it would require permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, though, I think you are not interested in copying A, B, C, D and E. You are interested in the other words of the document. However, if you look at those portions, they should be ignored when analyzing the copyright. Those elements (&quot;name:&quot;, &quot;copy:&quot; etc.) are necessary for writing the script. They are part of the language used by the program. In other words, there is not really any other way to write a script that copies a document, other than to use those specific keywords. In copyright these are called scènes à faire. I.e. they are parts of a type of work that are basically obligatory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Using the ansible example, I deliberately copy out of the ansible documentation all the time, ... [and] I would paste it right into my editor ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you are talking about using the copy/paste function of your computer. Copyright is not generally concerned with the method that you used to do the copying. For example, if you copy a chapter of a book, it does not generally matter whether you used a photocopier, whether you clicked copy/paste in your computer, whether you clicked &quot;Forward&quot; in your e-mail client (which also makes a copy), or whether you wrote it out by hand on a piece of paper. A copy is a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, using copy/paste of the non-copyrightable parts is not &quot;copying&quot; in the sense that copyright is talking about. It sounds like you are using copy/paste simply as a convenient way to avoid typing or to avoid making typos. In other words you could have just as well used copy/paste on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- name: A&#xA;  copy:&#xA;    src: B&#xA;    dest: C&#xA;    owner: D&#xA;    group: E&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which as we've already established has no copyrightable elements left in it, so it's not possible to infringe anyone's copyright by producing this, no matter what method you used to produce it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T08:01:45.300" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T08:01:45.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-07T10:34:56.623" Score="3" ViewCount="2297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm in a situation a bit similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9108/can-i-use-dual-license-for-a-python-package-which-uses-library-with-gpl-license&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, but more precisely I developed a Python package with multiple modules. Some of them have dependencies under GPL, therefore &quot;infecting&quot; this specific submodule to be under the GPL. However it is possible to specify a different license in each module, so I can put specific license files into each folder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; would have e.g. two modules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Extract of setup.py&#xA;setup(&#xA;    name=&quot;mypkg&quot;,&#xA;    packages=[&quot;moduleGPL&quot;, &quot;moduleBSD&quot;],&#xA;    classifiers=[&#xA;        &quot;License :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+)&quot;,&#xA;        &quot;License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License&quot;&#xA;    ]&#xA;    # additional setup parameters&#xA;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is this formulation allowed?&lt;/em&gt; GPL is incompatible with BSD, but the GPL module can be interpreted as optional in my use case, so I believe this would be legit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does the setup.py acts as a declaration of licensing?&lt;/em&gt; Because if not it's more convenient and I can declare the licenses explicitly in the README without trouble.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I'm anyway releasing my package as open source for non commercial use, so it does not have much practical consequences, however I feel frustrated to be &quot;obliged&quot; to put restrictions on my code reuse, simply because of import statements... (realised that too late, I know) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16934" LastEditorUserId="16934" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T10:40:36.253" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:56:23.583" Title="Python package with different licenses per modules, some with GPL: is a global GPL license required?" Tags="|gpl-3|multi-licensing|setup.py|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9177" CreationDate="2020-01-07T11:57:33.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To resolve this problem you can fork the version that includes a feature that you need and resolve the check problem. After that you can submit the PR with your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist a project called A by some developer add the feature to fly over the world inside the fork of project is called A1. This fork A1 does need to define some additional details to be merged to the project A, but noone did do this; so they will live the life in 2 separate fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some developer want the feature inside the A1 marged into A; they can fork the project A1 (let's call it A2) and add the necessary details so that A2 can be merged into A. These details added, they can create a PR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the question is &quot;Where do I create the PR of the fork A2?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can create the PR of A2 directly to the fork A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can create the PR of A2 to the fork A1 and it you can join the A1 to A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16907" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T14:01:14.383" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T14:01:14.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9108" CreationDate="2020-01-07T12:07:32.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license on the library does not strictly imply that you must use the GPL license on the program. The GPL license requires that the rights that users get under the GPL license are extended to all code in the application, but that can also be achieved by using a GPL-compatible open-source license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the GPL license requires that you inform recipients that the terms of the GPL apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you inform the recipients of your program that the GPL terms apply due to and as long as there is a dependency on PyQt, you can use a dual license (with one of the licenses being GPL compatible), or even a single GPL-compatible license for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T12:07:32.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9189" CreationDate="2020-01-07T12:09:40.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL. Short answer: Yes, you need to use GPL, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer answer: There is a reason we have the GPL (which wants to enforce that any derivatives of this software use the same license) and the LGPL which allows the software be used as library by other projects not under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In python a module is the equivalent of a library. So you will need to use the GPL for your product, if you include modules under GPL. You will have no such restriction for modules under LGPL or BSD-like licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT to add: According to the FAQ for the GPL there is no way around to distributing the GPL module and your programme as completely separate packages which communicate &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fluendo.com/en/blog/post/gpl-vs-lgpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at arms length&lt;/a&gt;&quot; at least: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linking statically or dynamically&lt;/a&gt; makes the whole product a derivative of the library, thus GPL is required (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#SwitchToLGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which could well be the intention of the license choice of the library&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T10:22:17.450" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T10:22:17.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9108" CreationDate="2020-01-07T12:24:15.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A GPL-licensed library requires that any programme making use of it is also distributed under the GPL. However a GPL-licensed programme does not require that all libraries (or modules) it uses are also GPL-licensed. The modules can be under GPL or other licenses which are more permissive (like BSD, Apache, LGPL etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T12:24:15.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9196" CreationDate="2020-01-07T15:04:53.243" Score="5" ViewCount="1026" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm rewriting/reimplementing an open source program/library and need to know about my options for licensing.&#xA;I'm asking about software rewrites/reimplementations generally and specifically about my current &lt;em&gt;use-case&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software (also as shared object library possible) I'm reimplementing is &lt;a href=&quot;http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avrdude&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AVRDude&lt;/a&gt; licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU General Public License v2 or later&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't currently need all provided options I'm writing a &lt;strong&gt;prototype with minimal functionality&lt;/strong&gt; that is required for Arduinos. AVRDude is written in C/C++ with YACC config parsing and I'm programming in Python mit PLY parsing. Since C and Python are sometimes rather different syntactically, I need to more or less re-implement everything. I can orientate myself by the logical flow of AVRDude and need to re-use defined constants but everything else is rewritten and optimized for Python. There is no usage of the native AVRDude afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of code (information) that has to be kept as is (only converted from C to Python):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logical sequence of commands issued to the chips by a programmer, e. g. STK500&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;constants defined with command codes, error codes/returns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of code that is currently being kept relatively unchanged (adopted to Python naturally):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;structures to hold the data for fuses, memory etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bitflag lists but &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; optimized for Python&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;programmer functions with weird pass-by-reference parameters (will be changed later if it works)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commandline interface (will be later changed more like the one in &lt;code&gt;esptool.py&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of code that is re-implemented by myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;config file parsing (currently in own grammer in PLY), naturally not that restrictive compared to the native implemenation by AVRDude (output similar to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://avrdude-conf.herokuapp.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;avrdude-config-webapp&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;USB device access (for use in Termux on Android, only possible with USB file descriptors)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is generally under the licence?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Definitions like error codes etc., functions names, general logic flow? &lt;em&gt;[not?]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A communication to hardware is specified &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; (documenatition, manuals) and it is only possible in this way.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are sometimes other implementations out there that can/could be the base for my own code, e. g. on Github with less restrictive licensing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a &lt;strong&gt;rewrite&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;modification&lt;/strong&gt; of software or a &lt;strong&gt;newly created&lt;/strong&gt; 'thing'?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does the licence apply in that my rewrite/reimplementation also has to be under GPL or do I only have to include the notice/credits that I base my code on?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I reformulate &quot;rewrite&quot; as &quot;(re-)implementation based on ...&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are my options for my AVRDude reimplementation? GPL v2 and more restrictive or also less restrictive like MIT?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would like to publish under a less restrictive license if other may want to use my code later on, so that closed source software does not have to be open sourced if I understand the GPL correctly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution to AVRDude is no problem but I do not know if I can change to MIT licence for my library etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe similart to this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/36352/re-releasing-re-naming-and-re-writing-open-source-gnu-v3-licensed-software&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/36352/re-releasing-re-naming-and-re-writing-open-source-gnu-v3-licensed-software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6791/re-implementing-mit-licensed-software-in-another-language&quot;&gt;Re-implementing MIT licensed software in another language&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;[but i don't just re-implement, I more or less base my own implemenation on it]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/9728/viral-nature-of-open-source-licences&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/9728/viral-nature-of-open-source-licences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update #1, 08.01.2020, Reply to @Brandin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to look and read through each line and trace most program paths of the original AVRDude source for my re-implementation.&#xA;A more or less literal translation is the communication in the STK500 programmer as I'm unsure of how to do this any other way and keep it still working.&#xA;That points into the &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; direction.&#xA;The original code may be &lt;em&gt;'functional'&lt;/em&gt; as it is sometimes 'just' an implementation of a protocol, but there must have been much &lt;em&gt;'creativity'&lt;/em&gt; to write it that way in the first place.&#xA;And there are still many people contributing patches etc. and improving the code even if it is rather old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since AVRDude is a tool for a rather specific use-case, reading from &amp;amp; writing data to microcontroller, there is not much leeway compared to a large general purpose library from which I would only extract/rewrite a small functional part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16940" LastEditorUserId="16940" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T14:52:16.443" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T14:52:16.443" Title="Licence of open source software re-implementation" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9142" CreationDate="2020-01-07T18:02:58.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, what you propose is not legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license is written in such a way that the linking exception only works one way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the code that an LGPL library depends on must be under a GPL-compatible open-source license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code that depends on an LGPL library may use a GPL-incompatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the LGPL library gets used by a GPL application is not really relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way out is if the proprietary code can be treated as a plugin that only communicates &quot;at arms length&quot; with the GPL application and the LGPL library. This means that the proprietary code must run as a separate process and the (L)GPL code may not depend on (complex) data structures defined by the proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T18:02:58.820" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9194" CreationDate="2020-01-08T14:36:39.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you describe reads pretty much as a translation to another language with &quot;only&quot; the work necessary to adopt it to that without changing the principle logic or structure of the programme. Generally, that makes your work a derivative work of the original work and you are bound to its license. For a GPL-licensed source that means you will need to comply to that and use a compatible GPL-license for your translation as well. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#TranslateCode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ on the GPL&lt;/a&gt; is quite clear on that a rewrite as described constitutes a modification. Especially important in this aspect is the structuring in functions and programme flow as well the use of data structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unaffected by this argument are strictly only these things which are required to create a compatible piece of software which is the commands sent to the chips (thus the API for it). This does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; include the naming of the constants, though. Additionally the API you offer to your user can be an exception, that is the command line parameters accepted can be the same by your implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make an independent piece of work you would have to re-implement the software completely anew without ever looking at the thing you try to translate (a so-called clean-room implementation) - the APIs (and only these) to the chip and user excluded from this argument for compatiblity reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T14:43:31.920" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T14:43:31.920" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9198" CreationDate="2020-01-08T20:34:52.453" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2019/12/ritchey-permissive-license-v7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ritchey Permissive License v7&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;provided without warranties of any kind. The authors, owners, and&#xA;  providers will not be held responsible for anything&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When sharing the material with others you take on all responsibilities&#xA;  of and relating to consequences (including warranties, implied&#xA;  warranties, liabilities, and damages),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does the second statement accomplish, if the first has already disclaimed all warranties, and other responsibilities, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16950" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T22:50:26.143" Title="What does the second statement accomplish if the first has already disclaimed all warranties?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9197" CreationDate="2020-01-08T22:50:26.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It accomplishes a couple things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a sharing chain it attempts to provide cumulative protection against reparations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's pretend for a moment that the second statement doesn't exist. &lt;strong&gt;Person A&lt;/strong&gt; publishes a shell script under the license, and &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; downloads it. A bug in the script deletes all of the user's files in select scenarios. If &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; decides to sue &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; should hopefully be protected by the disclaimer. Now let's expand this scenario. &lt;strong&gt;Person B&lt;/strong&gt; downloads the script, and shares it to &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Person B&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt; could sue &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt;, but hopefully &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; would be protected by the disclaimer. Now lets add that second statement back in. If &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; attempts to sue &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; is hopefully protected by the disclaimer. If &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt; attempts to sue &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; is hopefully protected by both statements. If &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt; attempts to sue &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; is hopefully protected by the disclaimer. Now lets add another person to the mix. &lt;strong&gt;Person C&lt;/strong&gt; shares the script with &lt;strong&gt;person D&lt;/strong&gt;. If person &lt;strong&gt;D decides&lt;/strong&gt; to sue &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; now potentially has 3 layers of protection, &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; has 2 layers of protection, and &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt; has the standard 1 layer of protection. The second statement attempts to create cumulative protection against legal reparations for each person in the sharing chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It attempts to protect the owner from reparations when others redistribute without the license included. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; publishes a shell script under the license. A bug in the script deletes all of the user's files in select scenarios. &lt;strong&gt;Person B&lt;/strong&gt; then downloads it, and shares it with &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt;. However &lt;strong&gt;person B&lt;/strong&gt; didn't include a copy of the license when he shared it. Remember the license doesn't require retention of the license. &lt;strong&gt;Person B&lt;/strong&gt; received it with the license so it's likely he saw the disclaimer, and &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; is hopefully protected. &lt;strong&gt;Person C&lt;/strong&gt; didn't get a copy of the license though which means she never saw any disclaimer, &lt;strong&gt;and therefore nothing was disclaimed to her!&lt;/strong&gt; The second statement should hopefully protect &lt;strong&gt;person A&lt;/strong&gt; in this scenario from &lt;strong&gt;person C&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Person B&lt;/strong&gt; on the other hand may not be protected. The second statement allows for users to share the work without retaining the license, but makes it their risk to take, rather than leaving the script owner responsible for their actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related Reading:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-Coincidences.html#attribution-doesnt-mean-credit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/08/28/Unhappy-Coincidences.html#attribution-doesnt-mean-credit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1410/do-warranty-disclaimers-in-software-licenses-carry-any-legal-weight&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1410/do-warranty-disclaimers-in-software-licenses-carry-any-legal-weight&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/5202/is-it-possible-to-distribute-bsd-derived-software-with-a-warranty?rq=1&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/5202/is-it-possible-to-distribute-bsd-derived-software-with-a-warranty?rq=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16952" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T22:50:26.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-09T04:37:36.273" Score="4" ViewCount="1692" Body="&lt;p&gt;I duplicated a source-code file released under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License, Version 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, made very few changes to adapt the code to slightly different situation. So this would seem to be a Derivative Works as defined in part 1 of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top of that source code has the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2000-2020 Example Corporation.&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;); you may not&#xA; * use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of&#xA; * the License at&#xA; *&#xA; * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, WITHOUT&#xA; * WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the&#xA; * License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under&#xA; * the License.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly how should I change that statement now that I am technically the author but (a) need to acknowledege that I derived this code from existing code of another author, and (b) meet the terms of license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I leave that  text block seen above intact as-is? Do I simply add a mention of me above or below that block, stating that I made changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I change the &quot;Copyright&quot; line to use my name instead? Both my name &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the original author's name? The original author does not know of my changes, and did not approve of my changes, so I don't want to imply their involvement or support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part 4 item 2 says my modified files must &quot;carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files&quot; but I do not know what exactly that means, nor what is the usual custom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would help if someone could post a full example of original versus derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3675" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T07:47:50.450" Title="How to label and license Derivative Works made under Apache License, Version 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|derivative-works|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9199" CreationDate="2020-01-09T15:22:48.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exactly how should I change that statement now that I am technically the author but (a) need to acknowledege that I derived this code from existing code of another author, and (b) meet the terms of license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, you are not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; author of the file. You are &lt;em&gt;one of the authors&lt;/em&gt;, because multiple authors have now made changes to the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must leave that comment block with the copyright and license statements in place, but you should change it to &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; your own copyright line, making the comment block&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2000-2020 Example Corporation.&#xA; * Copyright 2020 Basil Bourque.&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;); you may not&#xA; * use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of&#xA; * the License at&#xA; *&#xA; * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS, WITHOUT&#xA; * WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the&#xA; * License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under&#xA; * the License.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also customary for satisfying the &quot;prominent notices&quot; of part 4 item 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another custom, that is not required by most licenses but is done anyway, is to add a comment which project you copied the source from, something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copied and adapted from &amp;lt;Original project name&amp;gt; (&amp;lt;link to repository&amp;gt;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This both acknowledges the original project and makes it clear that they are not responsible for the full contents of the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T07:47:50.450" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T07:47:50.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9203" CreationDate="2020-01-10T20:35:59.390" Score="5" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;The VirtualBox Base Package is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My company is distributing software that runs on an Ubuntu system within a VirtualBox VM. We have not modified VirtualBox in any way and the install file and process is totally separate from our software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were led to believe that it would be OK to distribute our software to multiple clients without them needing a license for VBox, but recently this has been called into question and we want to confirm that what we're doing is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, the software itself is free and we charge clients for each file/document that they generate using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal for us to charge for our software? If not, does it make a difference that we charge for files rather than the software itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we need to make our source code available to users if we are using VBox under the GPL? This is almost certainly not acceptable to us as it is proprietary software that we do not want to make available to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we will run into licensing issues, I wonder if we could get around them by having the client install their choice of Virtualization software (we would heavily recommend VBox). We would install our VM image on their virtualization software. Since we are not involved at all in the distribution of VBox, does that let us off the hook for any licensing concerns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I'm not very knowledgeable on licensing practices. I've been doing some research on the GNU GPL v2, but some things I read lead me to believe we're in the clear and others seem to suggest we're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone could shed some light on this it would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16979" LastEditorUserId="16979" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T21:05:59.217" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T23:46:38.433" Title="Using Oracle VirtualBox Base Package for Commercial Applications" Tags="|licensing|commercial|law|distribution|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9202" CreationDate="2020-01-10T23:38:12.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;All free / open source software can be sold. If you're distributing GPL software then you have to make the source code available to those who receive it. If your code is merely running in a VBox instance then you won't be bound by VBox' license, though if you use other free software libraries make sure you follow their licenses too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With VirtualBox the one thing I'd say to watch out for is that you're disturbing a fully open source version, and not one from Oracle with non free components (from memory this includes USB drivers.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="964" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T23:46:38.433" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T23:46:38.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9205" CreationDate="2020-01-11T15:12:21.393" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my open-source projects, I have to rely on the users to send back bug reports, tell me which features they need, etc. I’d love to encourage all users to make a good-faith effort to do this via the license. Has that sort of thing been done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16984" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T10:16:20.090" Title="Are there any established licenses that encourage users of my projects to give back?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9204" CreationDate="2020-01-12T09:38:22.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is such a license, it would not be an open-source license. Such a license would likely fail the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island Test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can a group of people exercise their rights under the license, even if they have no way of communicating with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, a copyright license is not the best way to motivate people to contribute bug reports/feature requests/patches to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better way is to have a good README file that clearly documents how people can submit their bug reports, feature requests and patches and next to that a policy that people are responded to so they won't feed ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T09:38:22.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9204" CreationDate="2020-01-12T10:16:20.090" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to my colleague Bart, a licence that &quot;&lt;em&gt;encourages&lt;/em&gt;&quot; users to contribute back would not fail the desert island test: that is engaged when the licence &lt;strong&gt;requires&lt;/strong&gt; such contribution or communication.  The example Debian quote in the linked page refers to an author who says &quot;&lt;em&gt;you must hereby send me your changes&lt;/em&gt;&quot;; note &quot;&lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  A licence that asks the user to &quot;&lt;em&gt;try hard ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or to &quot;&lt;em&gt;please consider ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot; doesn't, in my opinion, engage the test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I don't think you should do this, for two reasons.  Firstly, you shouldn't make such a licence, because licence proliferation is bad, and proliferating licences in order to add clauses that neither prescribe nor proscribe actions is even worse.  Secondly, even if you can find such a licence, I think it's pointless to use it.  No free software project I've ever used that (a) has any significant number of users, and (b) has an even slightly-usable request tracker, lacks for feature requests.  In nearly all cases, the opposite applies: the tracker is packed with feature requests that are either infeasibly difficult or stupidly pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to maximise interaction with your user community, you are better off making sure the barriers to usage and engagement are low.  To ease usage, package your software for ready installation on major distros (PPAs for Debian and clones, YUM repos for RedHat and clones, provide an APK or better still get it on F-Droid for Android, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ease engagement, provide web fora as well as mailing lists, as some prefer one, and some prefer the other.  Better still, gateway them to each other, so all members see all contributions.  If you require CAPTCHAs or similar to minimise spam, make sure they work and are accessible for all users.  A clear code of conduct has increasingly gone from being a very good idea to being a thing whose absence raises red flags.  Be responsive and fair in moderation, so conflict doesn't drive some users away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make your project easy to use and a nice place to participate, and I'd be very surprised if you don't get a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T10:16:20.090" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9174" CreationDate="2020-01-12T12:43:43.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, if anyone can say the work as his work, if they re-release it. There is no need of mentioning the original author. BSD, MIT, GNU GPL can be used instead to be mentioned when others re-release the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16895" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T12:43:43.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4968" CreationDate="2020-01-12T13:59:00.893" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, Git is not being packaged or &lt;strong&gt;redistributed&lt;/strong&gt; here for the terms of GPL conditions to get it enacted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6181" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T13:59:00.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9174" CreationDate="2020-01-12T17:24:22.823" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the Unlicense doesn't require attribution, downstream distributors are under no obligation to identify you as the author. This is in contrast to most other free and open licenses, which require downstream distribution to preserve your copyright notice. The MIT/X11 license and the BSD licenses are very permissive choices that require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I would expect that someone falsely claiming your work &lt;em&gt;as their own&lt;/em&gt; might cause a civil offense in some jurisdictions and definitely would run afoul of your moral rights (in jurisdictions that recognize them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it may be legal for a downstream author to omit mention of you as the author while also making their own copyrighted changes. They could then correctly identity themselves as the author of their own changes and choose not to mention the original author. Being craftily selective about which attribution to include may or may not run afoul of the original author's moral rights, depending on your jurisdiction's specific laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T19:32:30.463" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T19:32:30.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-12T23:55:36.273" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;It'stated in the license that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Font Software&quot; refers to the set of files released by the Copyright&#xA;  Holder(s) under this license and clearly marked as such. This may&#xA;  include source files, build scripts and documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Modified Version&quot; refers to any derivative made by adding to, deleting,&#xA;  or substituting -- in part or in whole -- any of the components of the&#xA;  Original Version, by changing formats or by porting the Font Software to a&#xA;  new environment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i have two questions to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what's the meaning of &quot;Font Software&quot;, is it include the font that i use in a graphic design software or just the source file like TTF file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm designing a vector background which has text in it, If i convert the font(text object) into vector object while designing my artwork, then i export my vector file which include my font that already converted to vector to eps file format and i sell it, is this mean that i change the format and porting the Font Software to a new environment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16993" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T19:56:06.680" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;porting&quot; in SIL Open Font License v1.1?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9213" CreationDate="2020-01-13T22:47:23.540" Score="3" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where should I put the licencing information for the Android App if it is dependent on some GitHub projects with MIT licence . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users are going to see the user interface of the finished app, where should I put information on the GitHub Projects that are used in parts. Is there an App that I can look, how they show this to end user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the requirement is to keep the license with code and not with end product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16998" LastActivityDate="2022-09-15T08:17:07.687" Title="Android App for commercial use depended on some GitHub projects with MIT licence" Tags="|mit|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1736" CreationDate="2020-01-14T07:19:49.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question has been around, but this is what I noticed based on the current situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You mention often posed questions. If the same questions are posed more than once they will often at least contain some common keywords (or synonyms). A common search engine should be able to find hits in your documentation (or FAQ) based on the question, e.g. search &lt;code&gt;for how can I render PHP file using Userfrosting&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this works, is the page they found helpful for this question or is there an easy to find link to something which might answer the question? (My observation: it is not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might want to do something for your SEO. My search above directs me to legacy.userfrosting.com. There is a banner on the top, directing me to the newer one, but doing this several times is simply annoying&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15477" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T07:19:49.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9211" CreationDate="2020-01-14T08:14:31.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you mean the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/X11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT-X11 licence&lt;/a&gt;, this requires that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you do need to preserve their copyright notice, and the text of their licence, even in the shipping binary.  This is generally pretty easy in Android apps, which are by their very nature graphical and amenable to drop-down, nested menus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask for extant examples.  Poking through my phone (which runs only free software), I find that for a small app, a good example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.filemanager.pro/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simple File Manager Pro&lt;/a&gt;.  Under &lt;code&gt;Settings (...) -&amp;gt; About&lt;/code&gt; is a menu entry &lt;code&gt;Third-party licences&lt;/code&gt; which has all the required copyright and licence statements for the packages on which it depends, and has links to them in addition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a larger app, &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.wikipedia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has under &lt;code&gt;Main Screen -&amp;gt; Menu (top left) -&amp;gt; About&lt;/code&gt; a section on &lt;em&gt;Libraries Used&lt;/em&gt;, with a clickable in-app license statement for each one as well as a link to that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing special in those choices; they're just examples of free software I already have installed where I think the authors have done a good job honouring the exact terms of the (non-copyleft, free) licences on elements they've used to make up their code.  I should add that I also managed to find a fair number of installed free apps that don't realise that more than a link to each contributing project is needed.  Three cheers for you for not wanting to be such another one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-15T08:17:07.687" LastActivityDate="2022-09-15T08:17:07.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9215" CreationDate="2020-01-14T12:16:58.920" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an old proprietary service that contains automated tests and they run in our CI &amp;amp; CD infrastructure. In order to run these tests, we are dependent on the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.codeplex.com/?p=cpntr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NUnit.Parallel&lt;/a&gt; and this executable is distributed with the &lt;code&gt;ServiceStack.Text.dll&lt;/code&gt; that contains and AGPL License but with a FOSS Exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack.Text/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ServiceStack.Text license @Github&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/ServiceStack.Text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ServiceStack.Text license @Nuget&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license at Github has the following clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Derivative Work and its Additions are intended for use in end-user applications and do not constitute software intended for use by software developers, such as software libraries, components, and development kits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the end, am I distributing the code or serving it via the network (breaking the AGPL compliance)?&#xA;The final package doesn't use or contains the &lt;code&gt;NUnit.Parallel&lt;/code&gt; so I'm assuming that we aren't beeing not-compliant because we are not redistributing the derivated work of the &lt;code&gt;ServiceStack.Text.dll&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right? The Black Duck is warning us because of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16185" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T15:41:08.797" Title="Indirectly distributed AGPL with FOSS exception compliance" Tags="|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9214" CreationDate="2020-01-14T15:41:08.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL requires source-sharing only when someone interacts with a service that is based on AGPL-licensed code (or, when you physically distribute work that includes AGPL-licensed code). If no end users interact with your test-enabled version of the service that includes AGPL-licensed code, then there is no one to whom you are required to send the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth nothing that your quoted section of the ServiceStack terms is a requirement within an additional permission on top of the AGPL. The first paragraph in that section says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Exception extends AGPLv3 by providing additional grants [...] provided that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you wish to operate within the normal requirements of the AGPL (and you may do so safely, per the first paragraph of this answer), you may ignore this additional permission entirely and you may remain unconcerned with what this additional permission requires to be employed validly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T15:41:08.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9219" CreationDate="2020-01-14T17:38:20.313" Score="6" ViewCount="616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a presentation that includes some unmodified images licensed under either CC-BY, CC-BY-SA version 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0 (no CC-BY-SA 4.0) and some public domain images. They are all attributed.&#xA;My original intent was to release the final presentation as CC-BY-SA-NC 4.0 as a PDF file, as my understanding/assumption was that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For some reason I assumed CC licenses to be forwards compatible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I assumed that the work as a whole being CC-BY-NC-SA was ok, even if some images in it may have less restrictive licenses (which are mentioned) and given that these images could always easily be extracted from the pdf and then used under solely the original license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know that not all CC versions are forward compatible and I'm no longer sure if my second assumption was valid or if the presentation counts as a &quot;derivative work&quot;, which cannot impose additional restrictions, and don't know what license I even could use if this is the case as BY and BY-SA would be incompatible in this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also CC BY-SA 4.0 is listed as incompatible with prior versions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#cite_ref-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Does this mean I also could not release it under CC-BY-SA 4.0 if I wanted to and would instead need to remove all 4.0 images and release the whole document as CC-BY-SA 3.0 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate if somebody could clear up my confusion about the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17008" LastEditorUserId="17008" LastEditDate="2020-01-15T17:35:29.757" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T21:48:15.233" Title="Using CC-BY-SA images in a CC-BY-NC-SA document" Tags="|license-compatibility|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9218" CreationDate="2020-01-15T10:15:42.730" Score="0" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use nuget package with three .dll libraries &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Tabular/13.0.2150.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Tabular/13.0.2150.2&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to be just additional pack to .net framework and doesn't seem to be under any special license.  But there is no any information about it. Google didn't help at all. Does anybody know its license? Not very sure 'Contact owners' will help me in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17013" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T12:51:04.977" Title="Is Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Tabular nuget package free or not?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9217" CreationDate="2020-01-15T12:51:04.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recommend to avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you download the package manually you can check that no License available in the whole package and no references to it. So for me, this is an &lt;code&gt;Unlicensed&lt;/code&gt; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you can check more information about the maintainer in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/edberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github profile&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16185" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T12:51:04.977" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9216" CreationDate="2020-01-15T21:48:15.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This takes us on another visit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group%2C_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group&lt;/a&gt;, that being some of the only guiding jurisprudence we have on the question of derivative works and CC licences.  Note that is not a binding judgement anywhere, but as courts tend to follow each other unless they see good reasons not to, it gives us some idea of how other courts might approach the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Drauglis, a basically-unmodified CC-BY-SA image was used alongside other images on the cover of a road atlas.  The court held that neither the atlas as a whole, nor the cover as a whole, constituted &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt; within the meaning of the licence, and thus the Share-Alike obligations extended no further than the cropped copy of the CC-BY-SA photo that appeared thereon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By those guidelines, you should be fine to re-use unmodified images under various licences and versions, each licence applying to the relevant works in the whole PDF, since the PDF (like the printed atlas before it) is just a collection of individual works, not a derivative of any of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T21:48:15.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9220" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-01-15T23:15:07.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some examples of specific questions included under this tag:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;best practices for inclusion of license information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;display/aesthetics of license notices or marks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;specific requirements for enforceability&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;relative merits of various standard licenses used for web content&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2024-03-05T14:53:51.727" LastActivityDate="2024-03-05T14:53:51.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9221" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-01-15T23:15:07.843" Score="0" Body="Topics centered around the application of legal licenses to creative works displayed or offered for use primarily in the form of a web page or site via the use of a browser application. Best practices for inclusion, display/aesthetics, specific requirements for enforceability and relative merits of various standard licenses used this way are some examples of specific questions included under this tag." OwnerUserId="14908" LastEditorUserId="14908" LastEditDate="2020-01-17T13:57:25.313" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T13:57:25.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9236" CreationDate="2020-01-16T13:49:23.980" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an API that I created myself here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://db.ygoprodeck.com/api-guide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://db.ygoprodeck.com/api-guide/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get roughly 20,000 requests per day on it but have asked by a couple of people to open source it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look into this and I'm not entirely sure what way I would go about it or if it's even a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created the API using PHP so would it be simply uploading my PHP file to something like github?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would normally be fine but I'm worried that I would be exposing my database structure as it makes database calls within the PHP file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have my DB details in the PHP file but I understand that I could put them in a different file (that would not be open sourced) and then call that file. But does that defeat the purpose of having it transparent and open sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the etiquette is here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17021" LastEditorUserId="17020" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T10:15:08.213" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T10:15:08.213" Title="Open Sourcing my API - Exposing my Database?" Tags="|open-source-definition|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-16T18:58:05.667" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm releasing a bunch of code that is part of free teaching resources and lessons I'm providing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, I'm totally fine with others reusing the code however they want. That's the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing I want to avoid though is somebody either taking one of the sample projects and just wholesale republishing or selling it (or making super-minor trivial changes) or trying to take the whole package and republishing or selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of any open source licenses that would fit the bill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: To be clear, my main goal is that someone doesn't take this and restrict others access to it by suddenly putting a price tag on it in their &quot;own&quot; &quot;course&quot;. I'm not so much worried about them taking the code and doing something like publishing an app on the app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17023" LastEditorUserId="17023" LastEditDate="2020-01-17T16:20:16.967" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:48:13.310" Title="License that is MIT-like but prevents wholesale republishing or sale of the original" Tags="|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-03-11T15:20:15.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9227" CreationDate="2020-01-16T21:56:02.440" Score="5" ViewCount="1604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to design a web app with a free and paid tier that will include a WYSIWYG editor. I'm considering the following options&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CKEditor - GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TinyMCE - LGPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;QuillJS - BSD 3-Clause&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SlateJS - MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use CKEditor or TinyCME editor because they seem highest quality, but I am struggling to understand the implications of GPL and LGPL for a web app. I think the license states anything using code licensed under GPL must also be licensed under GPL. Here are my questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it correct that if I wrote a React web app using one of those two editors I would have to license my project under GPL or LGPL as well and make all source code publicly available?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where does the effect of GPL and LGPL end? Would I have to share my backend code too, and all related scripts and config like Dockerfiles or just frontend code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I went this route and made a commercial product using the GPL license, what is stopping some random person from just cloning my code and selling or freely hosting a copy of my site?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some examples of successful commercial consumer web or native applications that use the GPL or LGPL license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17025" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T11:01:58.227" Title="How can commercial products use GPL or LGPL libraries?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|lgpl|commercial|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-17T10:46:19.510" Score="12" ViewCount="1254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/unidoc/unipdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;UniPDF&lt;/a&gt;, which is a Go project to handle PDF documents, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/juruen/rmapi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UniPDF has a dual license: AGPL and commercial while my project is licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to fork UniPDF and use it in my project for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project renders the PDF document with a watermark that states that the document was created with an unlicensed version. I'd like to get rid of this. I contacted the company to see if there's a simple way of doing this but they didn't get back to me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But even if the watermark part is solvable without forking, I'd like to add some functionality to the project that I don't think they'll be interested in. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I right assuming that the AGPL and GPLv3 are compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should I proceed with the fork and the dual license? Should I keep the original README where the dual license model is explained, or can I just point that to the original README and state that it's a fork under the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do I need to do to fully comply with the license in my project apart from just importing the Go library?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17028" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T21:35:54.520" Title="How can I properly fork a project that is dual-licensed AGPL/Commercial?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9225" CreationDate="2020-01-17T11:01:58.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is a copyleft license. It means that you legally obliged to distribute derivative work under the same or equivalent license (see here &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&lt;/a&gt; for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL is a more relaxed license in this regard and allows publishing derivative work under a different license if it uses LGPL-licensed component/code as a linked library without modification (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is correct that if you use GPL-licensed component in your work you must publish your own work under GPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am not sure regarding this one. Technically, all front-end javascript code is already &quot;distributed&quot;. But I am keen to understand further implications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nothing stops them from doing it. In fact, it is a rather welcomed thing to do under copyleft licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TinyMCE is used very widely by commercial products. I know about several commercial projects using it, but I am not sure I can name them. The question of using TinyMCE (and LGPL components) in general was covered here in more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6497/bypass-lgpl-license-using-wrapper-library&quot;&gt;Bypass LGPL license using wrapper library&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T11:01:58.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9224" CreationDate="2020-01-17T12:09:30.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forbidding someone from redistributing or selling the work is considered a restriction that prevents a license from being an open source license. This means that there cannot be any open source licenses that meet your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you could do is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; and use the attribution mechanism of that license to ensure people get at least a link to your original resources. That might be a slightly bigger deterrent for re-publishing than just having to preserve your copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could give an additional waiver that the attribution may be dropped if a single sample project is used as a template to create a new project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T12:09:30.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9226" CreationDate="2020-01-17T13:56:18.470" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I right assuming that the AGPL and GPLv3 are compatible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can combine them, with the combination effectively being governed by the AGPL v3 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL v3 section 13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I proceed with the fork and the dual license? Should I keep the original README where the dual license model is explained, or can I just point that to the original README and state that it's a fork under the AGPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing means that the publisher of the project makes it available under two licenses. Recipients of the project generally use it only under one. If a project is dual license under AGPL and a commercial license, then if you use it under the terms of the AGPL license you completely ignore the commercial license. You can keep or ignore the project's README, what matters is that you include the AGPL license in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do I need to do to fully comply with the license in my project apart from just importing the Go library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By including an AGPL v3 library in your project, your project now becomes an AGPL v3 licensed project. It's probably simplest for you to simply stop thinking of it as a GPL v3 project, and to replace all references, license files, etc, to the AGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T21:35:54.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-17T16:34:23.583" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basically, I have an idea for some software based on an Open Sourced application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was to build an application based off of that, and sell my plugins, would this be a breach of terms? This is the flow in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The base application which would ingest the plugins is completely open sourced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plugins would not use any part of the GPL licensed software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plugins would be sold on a hypothetical marketplace and would be fully optional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would also like to allow other people to sell their own plugins for the base software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17032" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-01-18T13:53:53.513" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T13:53:53.513" Title="Can I sell closed source plugins that interface with a GPL v2 software which is open sourced?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|closed-source|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-01-20T14:48:55.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9232" CreationDate="2020-01-17T21:07:53.853" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some very old software (not written by me) which comes with a license which is clearly intended as a 'we really don't care what anyone does with this any more' license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The HI-TECH Z80 CP/M C compiler V3.09 is provided free of charge for any&#xA;use, private or commercial, strictly as-is. No warranty or product&#xA;support is offered or implied.&#xA;&#xA;You may use this software for whatever you like, providing you acknowledge&#xA;that the copyright to this software remains with HI-TECH Software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; mention distribution of modified versions, but does appear to imply it heavily in the last paragraph (acknowledging copyright is only meaninful if &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; includes redistribution, and it does not forbid modification, so the license would only cover the original code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct it would make it pretty much equivalent to MIT or 2-clause BSD. Is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15163" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-01-18T13:55:51.100" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T05:01:52.780" Title="Does this license allow the distribution of modified versions?" Tags="|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9231" CreationDate="2020-01-18T01:05:49.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way to argue that the license doesn't allow you to distribute modified versions is to argue that when the second paragraph says &quot;use&quot;, it means &quot;use&quot; in the technical sense, that is, as opposed to distribution. You would also have to argue that the &quot;as-is&quot; in the first paragraph means without modifications rather than without support or warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with reading the second paragraph that way is that a copyright license can't put restrictions on ordinary use. If a book had a &quot;license page&quot; that claims you were not permitted to read it on Thursdays that would not be an enforceable restriction. So reading the second paragraph to mean use as opposed to distribution or modification would make the second paragraph invalid. The only valid reading is that it permits modification and distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also several problems with reading the first paragraph to mean that &quot;as-is&quot; prohibits modifications. First, the phrase &quot;strictly as-is&quot;, especially followed by a clause explicitly disclaiming any warranty, very strongly suggests that the second sentence clarifies the first sentence's denial of support or guarantee. In addition, it would be odd to permit something for &quot;any&quot; use and then make it difficult for people to adapt it for other uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, I think it would be pretty crazy to argue this license doesn't permit both modifications and distributions of modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T01:05:49.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9230" CreationDate="2020-01-18T02:13:34.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is an application &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are developing, there's no problem: as the copyright holder, you can do whatever you like.  If you want to permit other people to develop closed-source plugins for your application, it's recommended that you add an exception clause to your license statement (eg. &quot;Plugins for MyApplication that use the documented plugin API can be developed even if doing so would otherwise violate the license terms for MyApplication&quot;).  See the GNU website for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/exceptions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a couple of examples of exception clauses written by lawyers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is an application that someone else has developed and has released under the GPL v2, things get more complicated.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; doesn't clearly define what constitutes a &quot;modified version&quot;, but many forms of plugin (such as a dynamically-loaded library) are generally considered modifications, and thus need to be licensed under the GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T02:13:34.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-18T13:06:02.803" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use a software licenced under Apache version 2 licence and there is a configuration file where I have to enter a secret key, do I have to state it as a change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T01:06:52.370" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T01:06:52.370" Title="Stating changes involving secrecy in Apache version 2 licence" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9234" CreationDate="2020-01-18T16:05:42.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, the Apache license requires that you state &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; you made modifications, but you are not required to spell out &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; you changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, such requirements of copyright licenses only become effective when you distribute the software further. So, if you only use the software and you don't give it to others, then you are not required to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T16:05:42.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9223" CreationDate="2020-01-18T20:55:35.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Uploading code to Github makes your code possible to read. It would not be legally possible to use unless you choose a license for your code. Github can suggest you some license options and help you with licensing your code. Make sure you choose the one that fits your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to expose your DB structure, you can refactor your code in a way that DB-related code can be extracted and not published. Think of &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@priyalwalpita/software-architecture-patterns-layered-architecture-a3b89b71a057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Layered-architecture&lt;/a&gt;, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider moving credentials and other sensitive information into the configuration file, which will not be open-sourced. If you follow step 2 properly, that should be very easy to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you opensource something you don't have to give away things which you don't want to give away. There's no ethical concerns (at least none that I am aware of) about hiding sensitive information when releasing an open-sourced product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T20:55:35.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9178" CreationDate="2020-01-18T21:04:16.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, let me personally thank you for considering open-sourcing your game. I think it is a very good decision, both for yourself and the community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There're many games which were partially open-sourced, leaving some of the content not available for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOOM&lt;/a&gt;. Source code is publicly available (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM&lt;/a&gt;), but there's proprietary content which is required to make the game playable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also note that nothing would stop other people from developing free content for the game source (Fore example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://freedoom.github.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeDOOM&lt;/a&gt; was developed to make an open-sourced DOOM-based game)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastEditorUserId="17020" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T10:58:49.527" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T10:58:49.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9168" CreationDate="2020-01-18T21:11:57.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best way to know how you're expected to contribute to the project would be either check project documentation or reach one of the project maintainers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open-source projects have would have some kind of a guideline for new contributors. For the project you're interested in this information is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://invent.kde.org/kde/kdeconnect-android/#contributing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://invent.kde.org/kde/kdeconnect-android/#contributing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good portion of projects stored on the Github would have &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING&lt;/code&gt; file with the guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T21:11:57.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2020-01-18T21:36:08.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There're several different JRE available with different licenses. Two most prominent are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/install/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; is open-source (GPL). You can use it without having to pay for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oracle JRE use different license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-javase-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-javase-license.html&lt;/a&gt;). I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, it is still free for usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for JDK, OpenJDK is still free and GPL. Oracle JDK does not look as free anymore (&lt;a href=&quot;https://java.com/en/download/faq/distribution.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://java.com/en/download/faq/distribution.xml&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you stick to OpenJDK (there's no many reasons why you can't/shouldn't) - it would be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-18T21:36:08.293" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-20T00:46:35.323" Score="4" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a library that is based on  a modified version of an already existing source released under the GPLv2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm modifying each files of the original project to adapt it to my needs, so I'm adding to each file my copyright notice leaving the one  of the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm releasing it under the GPLv2  as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is related to the compiled binaries and to the copyright notices on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.net libraries give you the possibility to add a copyright statement in the information of the library, but should I put only my copyright notice or should I mention the original author too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17048" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2020-02-08T18:17:38.937" LastActivityDate="2020-02-08T18:17:38.937" Title="Copyright notice in the binaries of a library" Tags="|licensing|copyright|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9245" CreationDate="2020-01-20T01:14:28.323" Score="8" ViewCount="2027" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ on the Creative Commons website states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software.&#xA;  Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good&#xA;  software licenses which are already available. We recommend&#xA;  considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation&#xA;  and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific&#xA;  terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important&#xA;  to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many&#xA;  software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to&#xA;  software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works.&#xA;  Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major&#xA;  software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed&#xA;  work with other free software. Existing software licenses were&#xA;  designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of&#xA;  rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC&#xA;  licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for&#xA;  separate artistic elements such as game art or music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to recommend not using &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; CC licenses for software. But the reasons for this recommendation listed in the second paragraph do not seem relevant when examining a software license such as the MIT license. The MIT license does not mention source code or patents and the CC-BY license seems compatible with the MIT license. For me, this begs the question &quot;How is using CC-BY any different than using MIT?&quot; (with respect to the license's functionality). There must be a functional difference in the CC-BY and MIT license that would explain why CC-BY shouldn't be used for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is similar to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code&quot;&gt;Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it discusses the CC-BY-SA license which has more complexities than CC-BY. This question does mention &quot;License Proliferation&quot; and I understand that could be a concern here, but since the CC licenses are so widely used I don't find it a compelling argument as to why not to use CC licenses. Thus, I'm interested in an answer other than &quot;to prevent license proliferation&quot; if there is one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation for this questions is that I have creative works that are collectively made up of software, images, written text, animations that I'd like to group and license in a liberal way. Applying the CC-BY license to the entire set of items in the work seems like the appropriate thing to do, rather than using the MIT license alone which is only for code &amp;amp; documentation or using multiple licenses for the different content types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why does Creative Commons recommend not using &lt;em&gt;CC-BY&lt;/em&gt; licenses for software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17049" LastActivityDate="2022-03-04T12:08:35.650" Title="Why does Creative Commons recommend not using CC-BY licenses for software?" Tags="|licensing|mit|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-20T13:40:37.167" Score="1" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a open source application (written in PHP), Which depends on daemon/service process to do certain tasks. This open source application communicates with daemon/service process using socket. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I open source the daemon/service process also ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17055" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T01:09:38.797" Title="GPL source code, Interacting with proprietary software using socket, is it a GPL violation?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9242" CreationDate="2020-01-20T16:58:52.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main reason why Creative Commons recommends against using CC licenses, including CC-BY, for software is probably license proliferation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that, even for an apparently simple license like CC-BY, it is not entirely clear how that license interacts with other licenses and where the incompatibilities lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the legalcode contains the clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downstream recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;b. No downstream restrictions. You may not offer or impose&#xA;             any additional or different terms or conditions on, or&#xA;             apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the&#xA;             Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the&#xA;             Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed&#xA;             Material.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reads to me, and I am not a lawyer, that you can't use CC-BY material in a completely closed-source product. That makes the CC-BY license closer to a weak copyleft license (like the MPL or LGPL) than a permissive license (like MIT or Apache 2.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are probably other points where the formal legal text of the CC-BY license has effects that are contrary to the initial looks and possibly surprising when used in a software context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T16:58:52.443" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9253" CreationDate="2020-01-21T16:34:22.053" Score="3" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a database consisting of large JSON files, based on sources that are licensed under the public domain or CC-BY. I would like this database to remain open but I would also like to prevent people from creating proprietary software that they sell to others essentially milking my work while not giving back to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered 3 licenses but all of them seem to have drawbacks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/strong&gt;: Not good for databases or source code, not really compatible with other licenses, loopholes around derivative works like binaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ODbL&lt;/strong&gt;: Great for databases but the &quot;share-alike&quot; side seems to be only in effect when the dataset itself is changed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;: Great for code and has the most strict &quot;share-alike&quot; policy but seems like it can still be circumvented by downloading the data from an external source. Not recommended for databases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe my understanding of &quot;open data&quot; is not in line with its definition. Seems like downloading the data file from and external source (just for reading, not for modifying) can't be prevented through these licenses. Should I just give up this requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17062" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-01-23T07:56:06.500" LastActivityDate="2020-01-23T07:56:06.500" Title="License for JSON database that prevents proprietary use" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9250" CreationDate="2020-01-22T08:50:24.133" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope this question fit well in this community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I create a scientific figure using some programs, e.g., Matlab/Python from some data. However, the programs script for generating the data are copyrighted by someone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simple words, do I own the copyright of the figure that I created using someone else's script? If not, what kind of license does the figure follow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17065" LastEditorUserId="17065" LastEditDate="2020-01-22T10:36:50.163" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T13:19:43.010" Title="Copyright of scientific figures" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-22T09:01:18.723" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The program I am building for our production system relies heavily and Python and a few libraries such as pandas, flask, jupyter and pillow. I have observed that the licensing tied to them are mainly BSD3 and MIT. From a license perspective, do I have to bundle all the library licenses and copyrights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17066" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T12:52:30.867" Title="What licensing should I include or consider if I am building a program in Python and a range of PyPi libraries?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9248" CreationDate="2020-01-22T12:52:30.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements of copyright licenses only come into play when you provide the code to other legal entities (people or businesses), with the assumption that they get to decide what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code doesn't leave your company, or if you only give the code to a hosting company with the explicit instruction to run it on a (virtual) server that you otherwise control, then you are not distributing the code and there are no license-related requirements that you have to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T12:52:30.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2020-01-22T13:19:43.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is the effect of using a third-party tool on copyrights. The nice thing is that the copyright license of tools don't affect the possible copyright licenses of the output. This also means, for example, that Microsoft has no say in how you license the documents you write with MS Word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, there is the question if a graph representation of scientific data is subject to copyright protection at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright exists to protect the original expression of ideas. Simple facts are not protected by copyright because they don't represent ideas. Also, mechanical transformations are not separately protected but they retain the copyright protection of the original.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Based on that, the copyright protection of your graph depends on if the underlying data is protected by copyright and if there was an amount of creativity that went into the creation of the graph. And I have some doubts if the underlying data is subject to copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the end, If it took creativity/thinking to create your graph, then its copyright belongs to you. Otherwise, I believe that your graph is not subject to copyright at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T13:19:43.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9271" CreationDate="2020-01-22T20:50:13.277" Score="13" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to learn more about satisfying GPL3 object code distribution requirements with a hopefully simple enough example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I download a docker image for e.g. Debian from hub.docker.com with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;docker pull debian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will transfer among other things the executable command line program &quot;ls&quot; from their server to my computer, which is part of the GNU coreutils, a software package which is licensed under the GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now trying to understand how whoever runs the download server is complying with section 6 of the GPL3, which regulates access to the corresponding source code of coreutils:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of&#xA;  sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable&#xA;  Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these&#xA;  ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes on to list 5 different ways, a) to e). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) and b) only apply when a physical device is transferred, therefore, a) and b) cannot apply here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) requires the transfer of &quot;a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source&quot;. There is no paper physical paper slip, and no text file in /usr/share/doc/coreutils inside the image has such a written offer. The &quot;license&quot; section from the docker image description at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/debian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/debian&lt;/a&gt; has also no such written offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e) involves peer-to-peer transmission, which I understand as something like bittorrent, which also does not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by elimination, d) must apply. It reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place&#xA;  (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the&#xA;  Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no&#xA;  further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the&#xA;  Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy&#xA;  the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be&#xA;  on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports&#xA;  equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions&#xA;  next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source.&#xA;  Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain&#xA;  obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to&#xA;  satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that whoever runs the docker hub image download server provides the source code (for any and all distributed GPL3 software in object form) on the same server, so the &quot;different server (operated by you or a third party)&quot; clause must apply. Could it be they rely on the debian project distributing the source for GPL 3 software contained in debian on the debian servers, at least as long as debian functions? If so, then I am still missing how the part &quot;provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source&quot; is fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I would like to ask for your input. The reason that I ask is that I want to distribute Docker images and SD card images for Raspberries myself and want to comply with all the licenses of all contained software. One way would be to include all the sources inside the images that I distribute, but Docker seems to have found an easier way, and I want to understand how they comply with the contained licenses, here GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14697" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2020-01-25T10:22:51.600" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T11:10:26.333" Title="How is the GPL3 for GNU coreutils satisfied when I pull a docker image?" Tags="|gpl-3|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-22T23:10:19.267" Score="-6" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking, in particular, at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PowerShell 6.0 Linux Administration Cookbook Prashanth Jayaram, Ram&#xA;  Iyer November 30, 2018 566 pages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to go in eyes-open, knowing any pitfalls of the impact of using powershell for sysadmin on Linux, particularly with regards to licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically: to what extent is powershell &quot;core&quot; an example of embrace, extend, extinguish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not fully up to speed on the distinction between .NET core and .NET framework and the licensing -- I only know that &quot;core&quot; is available on Linux.  Not asking a technical question, just asking what licensing booby traps are involved with using powershell on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5058" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-01-23T07:57:51.480" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T10:56:17.427" Title="Implications of powershell usage on Linux" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|source-code|linux-distribution|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9246" CreationDate="2020-01-23T07:54:31.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have a dataset which you wish to release under an open licence.  You also wish to encourage people who write software to work with this dataset to release their software under a copyleft licence.  Firstly, good for you for wanting to free your data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, you have a problem.  The licence on software does not generally affect the licensing on the output of the software; that is generally only a function of the licensing on the inputs.  Copyright does not normally extend from software to data, or vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside unenforceable encouragements, you could distribute your database under terms that &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; any software written to work with it to be distributed under a copyleft licence, and required the database to be re-distributed under the same terms.  Such a licence is unlikely to be seen as being open, much as the SSPL - another attempt to extend the reach of copyright - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has not been so seen&lt;/a&gt;.  So forcing open others' analysis software closes your database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you can live without that, the main contender for opening your database is, as you say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ODbL&lt;/a&gt;.  You say that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the &quot;share-alike&quot; side seems to be only in effect when the dataset itself is changed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that is not entirely true.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_License#Conditions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It is true&lt;/a&gt; that the share-alike conditions only cut in for modified versions, but the attribution and openness requirements apply even to verbatim redistribution.  Anyone receiving a verbatim copy from a third-party will know that they have an ODbL right to reuse it, and cannot be technologically prevented from extracting the database from whatever they received.  Even if they find they can't do that, the ODbL requires attribution; the sample attribution given within the text of the ODbL spcifies the inclusion of &quot;&lt;em&gt;the name of the Database and a hyperlink to the URI of the Database&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, so any such recipient can easily find your original copy of the database, and work from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-23T07:54:31.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9260" CreationDate="2020-01-23T14:29:22.813" Score="5" ViewCount="1982" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have an open source project (Apache2) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I only take one function from another project which is also open sourced under MIT/Apache2 license, and put it together with my code in a single file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I put original license from the function author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to attribute author for just that one single function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17076" LastEditorUserId="17076" LastEditDate="2020-01-25T00:52:07.247" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T08:09:28.590" Title="What's the correct way to include licence for part of the code from another project" Tags="|licensing|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9347" CreationDate="2020-01-23T15:31:49.680" Score="-1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could a derivative work of this image be used as a logo for an organization, without violating the terms of the CC-BY-SA-2.5, especially when considering trademark infringement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Styles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article on trademarks&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark usage&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The owner of a trademark may pursue legal action against trademark infringement. Most countries require formal registration of a trademark as a precondition for pursuing this type of action. The United States, Canada and other countries also recognize common law trademark rights, which means action can be taken to protect an unregistered trademark if it is in use. Still, common law trademarks offer the holder, in general, less legal protection than registered trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following image is licensed under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic&lt;/a&gt; license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Chess_piece_-_Black_queen.JPG&quot; alt=&quot;Black Queen&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5232/8868&quot;&gt;Does CreativeCommon ShareAlike allow logo removal or rebranding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2020-01-23T17:02:48.370" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T05:07:52.110" Title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic image derivative as organization logo" Tags="|cc-by-sa|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9275" CreationDate="2020-01-25T02:25:18.360" Score="6" ViewCount="1731" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's take React framework for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the minification process, all the code is modified and put in a single minified file also stripped of licenses.&#xA;As far as I understand, as required by MIT license, users should also receive original code and original license of the React framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is that dealt with from the legal perspective?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for all other Javascript frameworks, it's common practice for performance reasons, to minify the code which is served on a production site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17076" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T12:26:22.920" Title="How does Javascript minification process comply with requirements of opensource licenses" Tags="|distribution|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9231" CreationDate="2020-01-25T05:01:52.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. It's freeware. You've been granted permission to run the program at no cost. While the word &quot;use&quot; is not defined, &quot;as is&quot; restricts the definition to exclude modification, and without permission to modify, there isn't even implied permission to distribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the license intended to grant permission to modify, and distribute, but misplacement of &quot;as is&quot; accidentally turned it into a usage restriction, instead of PROVIDING the software as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17085" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T05:01:52.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9254" CreationDate="2020-01-25T08:09:28.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For clarity, it is easiest if you can put the third-party source code in a separate source file. Then you can put the copyright and license notices without any issue at the normal place (the top) in the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't use a separate source file and both projects use the same license (or the third party code uses a dual license with the license of your project among the choices), then you should add the copyright of the third party code next to your copyright. You don't have to copy over the license, because that should match the already existing license statement for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once had a situation where I included third-party code with a different license into a source file, and I solved that by stating at the top of the file (next to the copyright/license applying to the bulk of the file) that some functions are subject to a different license. Then, in a comment block directly next to the relevant functions, I included the license that applied to that function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T08:09:28.590" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9252" CreationDate="2020-01-25T10:56:17.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are referring to this project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/powershell/powershell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/powershell/powershell&lt;/a&gt;, then the answers to your two questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing: That project is MIT licensed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;. So far, there has never been any licensing issue with running MIT licensed software on any Linux to my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Embrace... : You are apparently asking if Microsoft plans to take over the Linux administration market by publishing Powershell for Linux. I do not think that anyone outside of Microsoft's management would know, and they will probably not tell anyone if they plan something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14697" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T10:56:17.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-25T02:43:13.220" Score="3" ViewCount="799" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a SaaS medical research startup project with a MIT license. The goal is for the source to be open (because then customers can help improve it and find bugs), and end-users who want to pay to use it can just go to the site and get started. If somebody wanted to fork it or borrow the code for another SaaS, I don't really care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I want to use Neo4j for the Cypher query language, because I think it's pretty cool. We got into the Neo4j startup program but it lasts 1 year with no clarity whatsoever on what happens at the end of that year, and the Neo4j enterprise licenses are insanely expensive, like tens of thousands of dollars per server. There's a community edition licensed under GPLv3, and I was gonna run that on AWS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for my problem. If my source code is on GitHub with MIT license, and I put &quot;docker run neo4j&quot; in the development code (to make a local database to test it) ... does that count as &quot;distribution of GPLv3 software&quot; and force me to GPL license my MIT licensed project? The software I write uses MIT / Apache 2.0 stuff and I want to keep it that way because it enables businesses to use my stuff without license headaches. Also, the stuff on github isn't for sale, rather, the hosted site is what I'd sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens when a MIT licensed project uses Apache 2.0 drivers to connect  to GPLv3 databases? Does &quot;docker run &quot; count as distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yeah, I know, &quot;just use Postgres&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any advice or clarification, and yes, I know you're not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17088" OwnerDisplayName="Bion Alex Howard" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T13:17:39.740" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T13:17:39.740" Title="What happens when a MIT licensed project uses Apache 2.0 drivers to connect to GPLv3 databases?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9262" CreationDate="2020-01-26T19:23:08.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, but I believe it is OK for a MIT-licensed project to use a GPLv3-licensed database and remain MIT-licensed, if the MIT-licensed project does not modify the source code for the GPLv3-licensed database, but instead simply connects to and uses the GPLv3 database via the Apache 2.0 client&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zdnet.com/article/gplv3-myth2-you-cant-mix-gpl-software-with-other-software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.zdnet.com/article/gplv3-myth2-you-cant-mix-gpl-software-with-other-software/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant part of GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an &quot;aggregate&quot; if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17088" LastActivityDate="2020-01-26T19:23:08.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9272" CreationDate="2020-01-26T21:27:36.430" Score="2" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m forced to work with software that has been given incompatible licenses by its authors. They have created an original API that they’ve licensed under the GNU GPL, but then they implement that API into a larger program containing LGPL licensed work, and licensed that program under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I must fork this LGPL program. Do I adhere to the GPL because that license was granted to that software first? Do I adhere to neither, because they’re incompatible and it’s impossible to satisfy both? Or do I attempt to adhere to both of them except in cases where they conflict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, and  most importantly how am I expected to license my fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9744" LastEditorUserId="9744" LastEditDate="2020-01-26T21:44:19.210" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:05:41.370" Title="Forking a project with conflicting licenses" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|lgpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9269" CreationDate="2020-01-27T11:54:33.450" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a hobbyist software developer and had some disputes with a group of passionate FOSS proponents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although they didn't manage to convince me, It made me think about what the issues with FOSS licensing are (from my point of view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now I am asking myself if I can put things under a FOSS license without suffering from these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first issue is that I don't want anyone to make money with my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is adressed easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue, &quot;credit stealing&quot;, is described below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2yZph.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2yZph.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to solve using licenses that allow derivatives, because it's hard to define.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have drafted the following license to address both issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;===================================================================&#xA;Copyright and License of this work:&#xA;===================================================================&#xA;Copyright (C) date pseudonym : name &amp;lt;mail&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This work comes without any warranty,&#xA;to the extent permitted by applicable law.&#xA;&#xA;License:&#xA;0.&#xA;you are allowed to use this work for personal use.&#xA;1.&#xA;A &quot;derivative work&quot;, below, means either the work or any derivative work under copyright law.&#xA;Especially, if this work is a text or program, any translations of it into another language are seen as derivative works as well.&#xA;the &quot;creator&quot;, below, refers to the single author of this work.&#xA;2.&#xA;you are allowed to create derivative works for personal use.&#xA;3.&#xA;You are allowed to redistribute derivative works non-commercially, as long as you give &quot;proper credits&quot;, as explained below, to the creator of this work.&#xA;This means that you are not allowed to redistribute work based on this work if this causes you to gain money by any means.&#xA;giving proper credits to the creator of this work at a time when distributing a derivative work means that:&#xA;I.&#xA;given the derivative work that is distributed, anyone must be able to find out that it is based on this work and thus partly made by the creator of this work.&#xA;II.&#xA;shown any of the &quot;places&quot; where the work is distributed, anyone must be able to find out that it was based on this work and made by the creator of this work.&#xA;III.&#xA;If the creator of this work &quot;requests it properly&quot; (as defined below), you must be able to proove that the credits are &quot;perceived enough&quot;.&#xA;You have to proove this using the following procedure.&#xA;let n be the number of times your derivative work got distributed during the week the creator sent his request.&#xA;if n can't be evaluated, n is estimated to be 100000.&#xA;You have one month time to proove that (n/10)+1 (rounded down) people you distributed the derivative work to noted that the derivative work contains this work.&#xA;If that month passes and you fail to proove that, you are not allowed to distribute the derivative work anymore.&#xA;Such a request by the creator is not called &quot;requested properly&quot;, if you provided a legal way to contact you at the expense of less than 1 euro in your derivative work in a way that a human can find it easily, and the creator didn't use that way aldough it was available to him/her, or if the creators request was not cognizable as such or didn't contain the date it was sent.&#xA;If the way of contacting you you provide the creator of this work&#xA;In all other cases, such a request is called requested properly.&#xA;4.&#xA;You are allowed to offer services provided by derivative works (softwares that are derivative works) non-commercially, as long as you give &quot;proper credits&quot;, as explained below, to the creator of this work.&#xA;This means that you are not allowed to offer services provided by software based on this work if this causes you to gain money by any means.&#xA;giving proper credits to the creator of this work (at a specific time) when offering a service provided a derivative work means that:&#xA;I.&#xA;given the information available to these who use the service, anyone must be able to find out that the software used is based on this work and thus partly made by the creator of this work.&#xA;II.&#xA;If the creator of this work &quot;requests it properly&quot; (as defined below), you must be able to proove that the credits are &quot;perceived enough&quot;.&#xA;You have to proove this using the following procedure.&#xA;let n be the number of times the service provided by your derivative work got used during the week the creator sent his request.&#xA;if n can't be evaluated, n is estimated to be 10000.&#xA;You have one month time to proove that (n/100)+1 (rounded down) people who used the service provided by the derivative work have noted that the derivative work contains this work.&#xA;If that month passes and you fail to proove that, you are not allowed to offer services provided by the derivative work anymore.&#xA;Such a request by the creator is not called &quot;requested properly&quot;, if you provided a legal way to contact you at the expense of less than 1 euro in your derivative work in a way that a human can find it easily, and the creator didn't use that way aldough it was available to him/her, or if the creators request was not cognizable as such or didn't contain the date it was sent.&#xA;If the way of contacting you you provide the creator of this work&#xA;In all other cases, such a request is called requested properly.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think that this draft is particularly useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just added it to this post to point out what I want to achieve in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that already adresses those problems and solves them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, can you draft me one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12694" LastEditorUserId="12694" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T15:35:08.943" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T16:40:41.733" Title="How to address common FOS license problems? - About creditstealing and ruthless cashcowing" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|derivative-works|commercial|license-creation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T13:31:39.257" Score="7" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a software for which I set the license at the beginning of each file. The model I have is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ************************************************************************** //&#xA;//&#xA;//  My Soft:&#xA;//&#xA;//! @file      PhysicalUnit.h&#xA;//!&#xA;//! @homepage  http://www.gitlab.com/scientific-software/mysoft.git&#xA;//! @license   GNU General Public License v3 or higher (see COPYING)&#xA;//! @copyright My Institute 2013-now&#xA;//! @authors   John Doe, Bobby Clark&#xA;//&#xA;// ************************************************************************** //&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, in order to avoid a yearly update of my copyright with 2013-2020, 2013-2021...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put naively 2013-now. Is it valid?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is it mandatory to put a date?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17092" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-02-06T22:53:26.550" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T22:53:26.550" Title="Can I skip the end of term for my license in the preamble of my source code?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9267" CreationDate="2020-01-27T15:52:33.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making your software available under free and open source terms means the legal terms under which you make your software available meet certain standards (namely, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;). Those definitions allow commercial reuse/distribution, so any legal terms that don't allow commercial reuse will not fall within the definitions of free or open source software licenses. I point this out first to highlight that you and the FOSS proponents you argue with have different goals, and you aren't likely to convince one another of anything. One of your fundamental tenets (disallowing commercial reuse) is in conflict with one of their fundamental tenets (allowing commercial use). Understanding this disagreement might help you have fewer or more constructive arguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, no FOSS license will meet your non-commercial requirement. The traditional way this is resolved in practice is by using a copyleft license like the GNU GPL, which requires that all downstream distribution must be under identical permissive terms, with source code. This ensures no one has a monopoly on any changes, so the commercial value of any public distribution approaches zero as the software becomes universally available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the problem of attribution, virtually all FOSS licenses require the preservation of copyright notices, so your name must remain attached to the software. The Apache License 2.0 goes even further and allows you to specify a NOTICE file that must be preserved in a specific way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file... in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; &lt;strong&gt;within the Source form or documentation&lt;/strong&gt;, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, &lt;strong&gt;within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise against drafting your own license without consulting a legal professional. Many jurisdictions have rules about how licenses are interpreted, what terms are possible or impossible to enforce, how external statements and intent interact with license text, etc. Any license should be drafted by someone with a full awareness of such legal issues so your license functions as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your specific suggested terms, I would not personally feel comfortable redistributing software under such terms because I do not know how I would go about proving that any number of &quot;people... noted that the derivative work contains this work&quot;. Even if this happens to be true for my distribution, I don't know how to rigorously prove what a user did or did not note. Furthermore, if the methodology of proving this is at all onerous, a licensor could easily harass me by constantly requesting I produce this proof, e.g., on monthly basis. I expect many other people -- whether they are proponents of FOSS licenses or not -- would stay away from using software under such terms for similar reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also note that placing terms on how the software may be &lt;em&gt;executed&lt;/em&gt; (versus how it may be modified or distributed), as you do in section 4 for services, falls outside the capability of a copyright license and will need to rely on a different legal instrument. Consult a lawyer to ensure this is done correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T16:40:41.733" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T16:40:41.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9268" CreationDate="2020-01-27T16:34:05.340" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Putting &quot;now&quot; is a bad practice since it will necessarily become inaccurate over time. Even if you continue to update your work and remember to change &quot;now&quot; to a specific year whenever you make your final change, years-old copies of your work made by other will not have copyrightable changes in the current year. Even if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; only ever distribute copies for which &quot;now&quot; really is the last year you made a copyrightable change, others might distribute older copies for which that assertion is no longer correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright notices are virtually meaningless except for a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; small benefit in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mcplegal.com/insights/innocent-copyright-infringers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;certain niche procedural concerns in the United States&lt;/a&gt;, and even then &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/401&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a start-year only is sufficient&lt;/a&gt; to qualify. Consider further that such a &quot;now&quot; will inevitably become wrong (when older copies are not updated in the future) and even in the best case is wothlessly obvious (of course it was &quot;now&quot; when you made the changes -- when else would it have been?). In view of those facts, and that there is little reason to include a copyright notice other than your name anyway, you may as well omit your &quot;now&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T18:41:14.247" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T18:41:14.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9251" CreationDate="2020-01-28T12:45:36.510" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that, for my money, it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with you that for GNU Coreutils, this is a s6d conveyance.  I haven't followed the links that start at Docker Hub and flow through GitHub all the way, but I've already found a bunch of build tools, and I suspect they do end up pointing to the actual sources.  Whether this chain of frangible links satisfies GPLv3's requirement to &quot;&lt;em&gt;maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is open to argument; I don't think it does.  Nevertheless, I suspect the source is available, with enough digging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amon's comment above about Debian making sources readily available is a good one, and the point applies equally to other grown-up distros (eg Fedora) as well.  However, I don't think that satisfies s6d conveyancing requirements either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger problem is that even if this particular distributor of container images is doing the right thing, albeit not very well, distribution via container image is no &lt;strong&gt;guarantee&lt;/strong&gt; of correctness.  Copyleft licence fulfilment has no salience in the containerised image world, it seems to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of good reasons, at least from a sysadmin standpoint, to dislike container images as a general-purpose software distribution method; this is another one.  I'd advise you to avoid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bootable images for specific hardware are a somewhat different case; there are good technical reasons to distribute them.  If you want to be in the best-possible standing about your GPL obligations, start from a well-known bootable image from a project that makes modifying its images easy, and which also &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; satisfy its licence obligations.  Then you can point to the same place they point to and satisfy nearly all of your obligations in one go (at least, for as long as that project lasts).  You will need to make specific arrangements only in respect of the licence requirements for changes you make and additional software you include in your images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T11:10:26.333" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T11:10:26.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9264" CreationDate="2020-01-28T14:05:41.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licences don't inhere in software, they attach to software during the act of conveyance.  If you received a chunk of code under LGPL, you may use it under those terms regardless of any other licence under which parts of it may have already been published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL normally requires modified versions to be published under LGPL.  But as apsillers notes above, LGPLv2.1 (in s3) permits code conveyed under its terms to be received under the terms of GPLv2 or any later version.  Similarly, LGPLv3 (in s2b) permits modified versions to be conveyed onwards under GPLv3.  Both of these options apply, in your case, at your discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if the version you received was under LGPLv2.1, you should license your modified version under either LGPLv2.1, GPLv2, or GPLv3, as you prefer; arguably, GPLv2+ could also be chosen.  If the version you received was under LPGLv3, you should license your modified version under either LGPLv3 or GPLv3, as you prefer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:05:41.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9307" CreationDate="2020-01-29T06:39:46.167" Score="3" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created a Python package, and it contains another package written by a third-party:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;my_pkg/&#xA;  |- vendor&#xA;  |    |- vendoredFoo (MIT license)&#xA;  |&#xA; ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to handle the license of &lt;code&gt;vendoredFoo&lt;/code&gt;, which is distributed under MIT license?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I want to opensource &lt;code&gt;my_pkg&lt;/code&gt; as MIT or Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17108" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T13:04:44.167" LastActivityDate="2020-02-08T07:54:39.267" Title="How to handle license for third-party packages?" Tags="|license|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-30T11:37:48.807" Score="4" ViewCount="1151" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary program&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Is this permission granted in cases where an LGPL-3.0 licensed work links against a proprietary library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt; grants specific&#xA;permissions (&quot;rights&quot;) from a copyright holder of a work to other parties or &lt;em&gt;licensees&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Some of the permissions granted by these licenses have specific conditions&#xA;which must be met for the permission grant to be in effect.&#xA;If these conditions are not met then permissions contingent on them are also not granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question seeks to clarify whether the requisite conditions&#xA;for any of the permissions granted by LGPL-3.0 are met if an LGPL-3.0 licensed work&#xA;links against a proprietary library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically is a &lt;em&gt;licensee&lt;/em&gt; of an LGPL-3.0 licensed work that links against a&#xA;proprietary library permitted do any of the following with the LGPL-3.0 licensed work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;convey modified source versions of the LGPL-3.0 licensed work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;convey non-source forms of the LGPL-3.0 licensed work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if so, under what conditions and are these permission to do this granted by LGPL-3.0 (as opposed to GPL-3.0)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrangement in question can be represented visually as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RO-nQiCm48RdwYcEP3Eu14gNa1XQKtVnaAspObtimx9aJXU22Nttsh53RH8jWlj-VV_9uab0F32LbO0XnaB8EnLgSgrctK2ejF4NSYMSj0seAZ88sBJIWHPXEfu5mtpQe5JUJAE2kB3Jeo38wALhKStyXTKXm5L1Vpuz6-JKMy-mtjpERVx1x2-FuwCkwfBzsPaRs-s-3tdyzhf94bYdwTTxbZsFvOjSbgNfyzo1VSk4ehaReaEmL_ugDUuyQ78gq0KqFvvhq05M-_tT3dS60rp1elUgNko8jn15Tn15__PPUKv7xg_9FmCmaK6-N7Rfdx6nuc7rE4wUDMx1aki_LcfoGI3v0m00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RO-nQiCm48RdwYcEP3Eu14gNa1XQKtVnaAspObtimx9aJXU22Nttsh53RH8jWlj-VV_9uab0F32LbO0XnaB8EnLgSgrctK2ejF4NSYMSj0seAZ88sBJIWHPXEfu5mtpQe5JUJAE2kB3Jeo38wALhKStyXTKXm5L1Vpuz6-JKMy-mtjpERVx1x2-FuwCkwfBzsPaRs-s-3tdyzhf94bYdwTTxbZsFvOjSbgNfyzo1VSk4ehaReaEmL_ugDUuyQ78gq0KqFvvhq05M-_tT3dS60rp1elUgNko8jn15Tn15__PPUKv7xg_9FmCmaK6-N7Rfdx6nuc7rE4wUDMx1aki_LcfoGI3v0m00&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cls-x_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that &lt;strong&gt;the LGPL-3.0 licensed work&lt;/strong&gt; uses an interface provided by the &lt;strong&gt;the proprietary library&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/TP91QiCm44NtEiMGx0mseQMRa0HQqvI25u4kkkb6iSUni2sPaT8GIg6dQ6_I0-KabPquaOaw6yFyf_-_BHSYGz062PNPDyXqAMJ3YTUGghfH4gLvCViAOLjNDuwg2vwfdP0Ro7cbtND2MhUSf_Z0qt93QYkpM5MAOBpineigof1EsAGRvgi27mpi-F1sVq-aTjVhzR38RFQqIiBRQB9Om3YE7-zi9o-M3BZbCexzt8fKGm8DftsBjg2r_6JiqhkrIaIAKcFsggW4hc4qd_S9q6lGYMyIgkDY2a7GGq4m0hUKO-yqICIQxECKu0ZGAqDtXpW63Dw6dQ_8a_7SXGG1bvURj1wCUUg45UOcz9fCuV3p1GsfT_ilQdRrgQA8nAOmKRJuv_XMeuR3zo_x0m00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/TP91QiCm44NtEiMGx0mseQMRa0HQqvI25u4kkkb6iSUni2sPaT8GIg6dQ6_I0-KabPquaOaw6yFyf_-_BHSYGz062PNPDyXqAMJ3YTUGghfH4gLvCViAOLjNDuwg2vwfdP0Ro7cbtND2MhUSf_Z0qt93QYkpM5MAOBpineigof1EsAGRvgi27mpi-F1sVq-aTjVhzR38RFQqIiBRQB9Om3YE7-zi9o-M3BZbCexzt8fKGm8DftsBjg2r_6JiqhkrIaIAKcFsggW4hc4qd_S9q6lGYMyIgkDY2a7GGq4m0hUKO-yqICIQxECKu0ZGAqDtXpW63Dw6dQ_8a_7SXGG1bvURj1wCUUg45UOcz9fCuV3p1GsfT_ilQdRrgQA8nAOmKRJuv_XMeuR3zo_x0m00&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cmp-x_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of how the arrangement in question can occur, consider the following examle arrangements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Example Arrangement 1: &lt;code&gt;ApplicationA {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt; links against licensed &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; which links against &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/dP3DReCm48JlVefLSaEYYbJr4YL82OLUEEGL36p0mjXelL64ghvx-KiB9QVkpJEpdsQjySh05aWL9KEk23DMrWXNATD8aZMuKkRsham1LwaTYbBb25Wtt89a9fNU6DrShP5BcqzIfYZJqv9Z9BJSDYXc_4nBv-1JG3TdIpbIQBKbsEw66VGJaRslvLHcLK7sPlB1Enm-Bed_-h8B0jY6OVGMnyzZoI8Nns7uF7SXsv12bjJsqJxO8R-463kVcaQhJFR_TGBfO7CypgKD_2MCHtO1D0xtu7aps_CwyCXDL4gTyZun7y-UDsk-WZsyDIbQag9_D1EBOtq_-6svx_PC1RAGoZY6GFmuirYqZdq3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/dP3DReCm48JlVefLSaEYYbJr4YL82OLUEEGL36p0mjXelL64ghvx-KiB9QVkpJEpdsQjySh05aWL9KEk23DMrWXNATD8aZMuKkRsham1LwaTYbBb25Wtt89a9fNU6DrShP5BcqzIfYZJqv9Z9BJSDYXc_4nBv-1JG3TdIpbIQBKbsEw66VGJaRslvLHcLK7sPlB1Enm-Bed_-h8B0jY6OVGMnyzZoI8Nns7uF7SXsv12bjJsqJxO8R-463kVcaQhJFR_TGBfO7CypgKD_2MCHtO1D0xtu7aps_CwyCXDL4gTyZun7y-UDsk-WZsyDIbQag9_D1EBOtq_-6svx_PC1RAGoZY6GFmuirYqZdq3&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cls-a_propr-l_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that &lt;code&gt;ApplicationA {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt; uses an interface provided by &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;and that &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; uses an interface provided by &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bP9DRi8m48NtFiK8Tf68KAjk423H_5ILM21rsur99c0HR6jiYb1LgQTeRz83SP8QIfEOf8lERiPllZTZUoro16EHKDc3HcOsGcfEV0kPscebKTedUoWHTjlofd5grZnNUo5NKF3IDFk4TBI2PtZFiysAr4xcaIeLGJyzHwTKKOvqaGtFmRf6WLS6Bhhaf_gCIEtRvQK_o7Zyi9WFRiFXT0hzA4hkt4oTihcdIzCewjOjI6aIQ3aTJjAJq27V6AlddcbTYenReUGCk87UPEALdYMu1AN14GH10nW4FRXoQ63dOack5b-GLUhZVlVuOTLRiUh-Az3ZcHG4NDQFuzhQbeblcVnlWvPnyfSngmm69HPsq6WOmV7p7JIf5_U73QkM3qCIgxKDmwadtXaqSFpugeK-CMuHlHTgKsEF-Wq0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bP9DRi8m48NtFiK8Tf68KAjk423H_5ILM21rsur99c0HR6jiYb1LgQTeRz83SP8QIfEOf8lERiPllZTZUoro16EHKDc3HcOsGcfEV0kPscebKTedUoWHTjlofd5grZnNUo5NKF3IDFk4TBI2PtZFiysAr4xcaIeLGJyzHwTKKOvqaGtFmRf6WLS6Bhhaf_gCIEtRvQK_o7Zyi9WFRiFXT0hzA4hkt4oTihcdIzCewjOjI6aIQ3aTJjAJq27V6AlddcbTYenReUGCk87UPEALdYMu1AN14GH10nW4FRXoQ63dOack5b-GLUhZVlVuOTLRiUh-Az3ZcHG4NDQFuzhQbeblcVnlWvPnyfSngmm69HPsq6WOmV7p7JIf5_U73QkM3qCIgxKDmwadtXaqSFpugeK-CMuHlHTgKsEF-Wq0&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cmp-a_propr-l_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Example Arrangement 2: &lt;code&gt;ApplicationB {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; links against &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; which links against &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/dP1DRi8m48NNzIb6i8i4GggwGH09qgGR5bp194CoYcDRuq48eTwzIO0s4QmwEx_t_CsFmQE0E60gAu6267CXPrMeoNhDke5GwSAToPPmr2QWggX0mCRB1RG8q-4a68PgWrAvuYxbnBcvVmg2Z4uk7jM0dniT0bmLjBLrN20dpZY6wQAlNjymk_EpVD1vNR8xsQBtLgkl_MxsFb_4CKoJ9Ft8ijUntIYNPKdoEhTdvvbGD5-wQ1TiaTzAtMRUU6yerzszjg03JDRheJI1KQUhUcijj06N44KF8ufQtWstemEtdJxlgCVpdvXqZ4axp7YVCMdWzJ0rscusY__cMu8XMuCkDTaW4AjVPn1Bds8_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/dP1DRi8m48NNzIb6i8i4GggwGH09qgGR5bp194CoYcDRuq48eTwzIO0s4QmwEx_t_CsFmQE0E60gAu6267CXPrMeoNhDke5GwSAToPPmr2QWggX0mCRB1RG8q-4a68PgWrAvuYxbnBcvVmg2Z4uk7jM0dniT0bmLjBLrN20dpZY6wQAlNjymk_EpVD1vNR8xsQBtLgkl_MxsFb_4CKoJ9Ft8ijUntIYNPKdoEhTdvvbGD5-wQ1TiaTzAtMRUU6yerzszjg03JDRheJI1KQUhUcijj06N44KF8ufQtWstemEtdJxlgCVpdvXqZ4axp7YVCMdWzJ0rscusY__cMu8XMuCkDTaW4AjVPn1Bds8_&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cls-a_lgpl-l_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that &lt;code&gt;ApplicationB {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; uses an interface provided by &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt;,&#xA;and that &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3.0}&lt;/code&gt; uses an interface provided by &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZPB1Qi9048Rl-nI3tW89qjABgA19B0KFGg-zhCbe5fFTPNQjI2dqATetwGFv95sjZTacXSvjP__v_Z-pAKIEO2mIAdlGoCnMICs9Lv2fIYk9qZxQGucmgygRngqfUAxsGcvWpKlJd1FIqTOymndFjXjIEvd7gbG4_VcvEgMASgIBR70krXK5NXYuwfAV-bCYjM-tLtwGqUX-kGXley5a0lquJkzSfaxPmjFDvt7ShLkIqYJGSZgSf2UXGxuoTiqzrReK6RT2oHbm0xtns6izIN07b0Q740G_na7GWsQC1d0XLkJyaWkiFluJL6--1ZsSIK70vVLPt5ZRClKjqr-MZMLykthRQHkdVncpsY0iSMt3ni0GZXzle4azkx_NiFhZeuZ4fh1HDF74EuC6Zk-VLw5FJ5f4xstQrCIZVW40&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZPB1Qi9048Rl-nI3tW89qjABgA19B0KFGg-zhCbe5fFTPNQjI2dqATetwGFv95sjZTacXSvjP__v_Z-pAKIEO2mIAdlGoCnMICs9Lv2fIYk9qZxQGucmgygRngqfUAxsGcvWpKlJd1FIqTOymndFjXjIEvd7gbG4_VcvEgMASgIBR70krXK5NXYuwfAV-bCYjM-tLtwGqUX-kGXley5a0lquJkzSfaxPmjFDvt7ShLkIqYJGSZgSf2UXGxuoTiqzrReK6RT2oHbm0xtns6izIN07b0Q740G_na7GWsQC1d0XLkJyaWkiFluJL6--1ZsSIK70vVLPt5ZRClKjqr-MZMLykthRQHkdVncpsY0iSMt3ni0GZXzle4azkx_NiFhZeuZ4fh1HDF74EuC6Zk-VLw5FJ5f4xstQrCIZVW40&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cmp-a_lgpl-l_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Example Arrangement 3: &lt;code&gt;ApplicationC {LGPL-3}&lt;/code&gt; links against &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RP11QuD048NFtLyn93SX9L1w2OcGBh4N3_aBgqvqSDsLsGb1GlzxrHYgD7FRzzv-ynYB5m7nm5HM0WKnvaBUgL2JQmsR1a9b2dyZLyB5s82geW81crOwC29CsLKmpDK6fVB59EN4kPq-1K56BrsBQiRFhGa1xWhw-V9S86jlFSDwEywe7vdzxR-ScRmksLzTCNhx_VSvtNoyR-COrbgVFfFaTInTv994wzUvC_kM2SLmDqI7O8_yKUhH-TYsbd8pt4k32R0w7ERI2XQRxkgjjz05t44KFOqewdaFN4ePzvjE4-hv733B8alIp1jXQb5hiud_m3kmv6emfI4N1E9V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RP11QuD048NFtLyn93SX9L1w2OcGBh4N3_aBgqvqSDsLsGb1GlzxrHYgD7FRzzv-ynYB5m7nm5HM0WKnvaBUgL2JQmsR1a9b2dyZLyB5s82geW81crOwC29CsLKmpDK6fVB59EN4kPq-1K56BrsBQiRFhGa1xWhw-V9S86jlFSDwEywe7vdzxR-ScRmksLzTCNhx_VSvtNoyR-COrbgVFfFaTInTv994wzUvC_kM2SLmDqI7O8_yKUhH-TYsbd8pt4k32R0w7ERI2XQRxkgjjz05t44KFOqewdaFN4ePzvjE4-hv733B8alIp1jXQb5hiud_m3kmv6emfI4N1E9V&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cls-a_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that &lt;code&gt;ApplicationC {LGPL-3}&lt;/code&gt; uses an interface provided by &lt;code&gt;LibraryE {Proprietary}&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RP9DQiCm48NtEiMGx0mseQMRa0HI4PT25e5kkr7iSInYIsAaD8HIw2dQc_H0EKbbDtKiujbfzBqtJp-bp16iGqBjJWQPtKjb18aQCbqRhL2v5tUg40vrTTVRjQN8zL6g7HIYidsTLDwj41a-Yco_8trGETUL9XYdRGsYcdAa2pPfYmr5WNS6leRmfhyaqiVRzZOCCfizRTRnVJ9PB63C-Uh1Pnh4rW6NffmFSnlIXYGwGQS6RK1l-S7ODVVIc4fcmacjE0WBe_ayQBqgy0jK5gSGHV-3esW4_HWzmxNSaf-tkfXroz2eb-pFAuZAklllx9vRloWIwleuNibODo2ki71nJp25y_Sd6D9l_YjP5XmhIKZkIfSaYq1mi6ZX_FN3VW40&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RP9DQiCm48NtEiMGx0mseQMRa0HI4PT25e5kkr7iSInYIsAaD8HIw2dQc_H0EKbbDtKiujbfzBqtJp-bp16iGqBjJWQPtKjb18aQCbqRhL2v5tUg40vrTTVRjQN8zL6g7HIYidsTLDwj41a-Yco_8trGETUL9XYdRGsYcdAa2pPfYmr5WNS6leRmfhyaqiVRzZOCCfizRTRnVJ9PB63C-Uh1Pnh4rW6NffmFSnlIXYGwGQS6RK1l-S7ODVVIc4fcmacjE0WBe_ayQBqgy0jK5gSGHV-3esW4_HWzmxNSaf-tkfXroz2eb-pFAuZAklllx9vRloWIwleuNibODo2ki71nJp25y_Sd6D9l_YjP5XmhIKZkIfSaYq1mi6ZX_FN3VW40&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;question-cmp-a_lgpl-l_propr.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question applied to these examples arrangements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Example Arrangement 1 and 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does LGPL-3.0 grant a &lt;em&gt;licensee&lt;/em&gt; permission to convey &quot;modified source versions&quot; or &quot;non-source forms&quot; of &lt;code&gt;LibraryD {LGPL-3}&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;Further, are there any other permissions, pertaining to &lt;code&gt;LibraryD&lt;/code&gt;, that LGPL-3.0 grants that are not already granted by GPL-3.0&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Example Arrangement 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does LGPL-3.0 grant a &lt;em&gt;licensee&lt;/em&gt; permission to convey &quot;modified source versions&quot; or &quot;non-source forms&quot; of &lt;code&gt;ApplicationC {LGPL-3}&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;Further, are there any other permissions, pertaining to &lt;code&gt;ApplicationC&lt;/code&gt;, that LGPL-3.0 grants that are not already granted by GPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question &quot;proprietary library&quot; refers to a library that is&#xA;NOT licensed under an LGPL-3.0 and GPL-3.0 compatible license and which, additionally, is&#xA;NOT licensed under a license that is considered an open source or free software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No other licenses than those explicitly mentioned here should be considered in the answer,&#xA;this includes open source licenses on proprietary works (they would not be proprietary if such licenses existed)&#xA;or exceptions such as linking exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current understanding is that is that at least some permissions granted by LGPL-3.0&#xA;are contingent on directionality of linking as a consequence of the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitions used by LGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt;, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by combining or &lt;strong&gt;linking an Application with the Library&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that those permissions would not be granted in any of the example arrangements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Related Questions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9142/gpl-application-linked-to-a-lgpl-library-loading-proprietary-plugins&quot;&gt;opensource.stackexchange.com / GPL Application linked to a LGPL library loading proprietary-plugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;consensus&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, what you propose is not legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5664/linking-from-lgpl-2-1-software-to-apache-2-0-library&quot;&gt;opensource.stackexchange.com / Linking from LGPL 2.1 software to Apache 2.0 library&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;consensus&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note that the LGPL-2.1 is permissive only with regards to software that uses this library ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8505/gpl-application-lgpl-plugin-properietary-code&quot;&gt;opensource.stackexchange.com / GPL Application &amp;lt;-&gt; LGPL Plugin &amp;lt;-&gt; Proprietary code&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2219/can-i-use-a-proprietary-library-in-my-gpld-program&quot;&gt;opensource.stackexchange.com / Can I use a proprietary library in my GPL'd program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastEditorUserId="16951" LastEditDate="2020-02-27T08:06:13.037" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T13:45:26.810" Title="What permissions does LGPL-3.0 grant if the licensed work links against a proprietary library?" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9258" CreationDate="2020-01-30T12:26:22.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Brandin points out, this material is pretty much completely covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/45033/can-i-minify-javascript-that-requires-copyright-notice/45170&quot;&gt;Can I minify Javascript that requires a copyright notice?&lt;/a&gt;, over on SoftwareEngineering.SE.  However, questions can't be closed as duplicates of those on other sites; although I could kick this question over to SE.SE so it could be closed as a duplicate there, I think it's good to have this question appear here also.  So I summarise the problem here, then briefly reproduce the argument from the linked SE.SE question, with which I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most non-copyleft free licences have requirements similar to these from &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 3-clause BSD licence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most JS used on the internet is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minification_(programming)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minified&lt;/a&gt; before publication, and this process normally removes all comments, including copyright notices, along with other &amp;quot;extraneous&amp;quot; material.  Minified JS isn't exactly binary code, but it's not exactly source code within the traditional meanings of free software, either; GPLv3 defines source code as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and minified JS is hardly that.  In any case, whichever form you feel it is, the copyright notice and a short text passage must go along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the leading answer on SE.SE points out, most minifying software has an option to leave certain extraneous text in the input untouched.  You should find out how you instruct your minifier of choice to do this, and ensure that whatever you are required to pass on untouched by the licence is left untouched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you unwilling or unable do that, you should be aware that you are violating copyright.  It is highly unlikely there will be any comeback for that, but if there should be, neither &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I like my minifier and I couldn't work out how to make it preserve the copyright notices&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;My boss told me to cut out the extra 1500 bytes&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; will be an acceptable excuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T12:26:22.920" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9277" CreationDate="2020-01-31T14:32:50.220" Score="65" ViewCount="2725" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have compiled a body of work from numerous contributors, who all licensed their individual works to me under CC-BY-SA version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I now instead redistribute their work under CC-BY-SA version &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17122" LastEditorUserId="17122" LastEditDate="2020-02-04T09:33:35.293" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T09:33:35.293" Title="Relicensing content under CC-BY-SA" Tags="|relicensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9276" CreationDate="2020-01-31T15:54:14.263" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so, no.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; allows in s4 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License ... This Section ... applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if you were to redistribute each of these works &lt;em&gt;verbatim&lt;/em&gt;, individually, you would have to do so under CC-BY-SA-3.0; the permission to uprate the license to (eg) CC-BY-SA-4.0 applies only to adaptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might argue that the mere act of collecting the works together constituted adaptation, but CC-BY-SA-3.0 is pretty clear above that the people who wrote the licence didn't think so.  In one of the few pieces of jurisprudence we have on CC-BY-SA interpretation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group,_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group&lt;/a&gt;, the judge held that placing a CC-BY-SA photo amongst other photos on the cover of a road atlas didn't make either the entire cover or the entire atlas a derivative work of one of those photos, which again to me argues that mere collection doesn't make an adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T21:07:45.290" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T21:07:45.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9276" CreationDate="2020-01-31T20:31:55.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on my reading of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, it is OK to change the license of the Collection but not to change the license of the individual works that comprise the Collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have two things to be concerned with, the Collection and the Work, both of which are defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sections 4(a), 4(c), and 4(d) are the relevant sections for dealing with works that are licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and collections. What follows is my understanding based on reading those sections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you own the collection. You can release the collection under any license that you choose. There are requirements in the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license about how you provide attribution to the creators of the individual works that are part of the collection, but also give the creator of the individual work the ability to request the removal of credit. Section 4(d) does place some restrictions that the creator of the Collection &quot;must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation&quot; unless such things are permitted by applicable law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you do not own the individual works. Unless &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0_upgrade_guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you take action to change the license&lt;/a&gt;, those individual works will always remain under CC-BY-SA 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical perspective, it doesn't make sense to release the collection under a more restrictive license than CC-BY-SA 3.0, though. If all of the works were licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0, then anyone who receives the collection also receives a license to the individual works under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and can use the license to make a collection from those works and release it under a less restrictive license again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T23:35:13.603" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T23:35:13.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-31T21:03:00.137" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose a developer receives software from XX with a license permitting unlimited modification and redistribution as well as full ownership of any original content. The only restriction being no selling/monetizing anything which packages XX's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that other developers could build off of the functionality of XX’s code without packaging it and becoming limited in their commercial usage, this developer creates a wrapper for indirectly interfacing with XX's software and distributes it with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Downstream users now have GPL licensed software containing XX’s code. If they fork it, the GPL which comes with the software would indicate that they could sell their fork for a price. However, XX’s software license (while not requiring that the license itself it be transmitted with the software) still asserts that selling content containing their code is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that this is effectively an &quot;inferred&quot; dual license, since the developer of the interface cannot simply re-license XX’s code under the GPL which permits commercial usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the GPL allows commercial usage and XX’s code does not, and since the GPL forbids &quot;further restrictions&quot; not permitted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 7’s a—f&lt;/a&gt;, I believe the two licenses are incompatible, and thus downstream conveyers of the software must choose one license or the other to adopt for their derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my understanding of dual licensing is correct; then if they choose to create and distribute a derivative containing XX’s code, they &lt;strong&gt;MUST&lt;/strong&gt; adopt XX’s license and not the GPL. However, if they choose to create and distribute a derivative not containing XX’s code, they have the option of adopting &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; the GPL &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; XX’s license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I erred in this conclusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9744" LastEditorUserId="9744" LastEditDate="2020-02-01T07:43:15.850" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T07:43:15.850" Title="Can downstream dual licensing be inferred?" Tags="|gpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9279" CreationDate="2020-01-31T22:10:08.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem is in the line &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this developer creates a wrapper for indirectly interfacing with XX's software and distributes it with a GNU GPLv3 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You gloss over the details of this wrapper, which hides the problem.  Either this wrapper is tightly-linked to the XX software, or it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's loosely-linked, the two works are &quot;&lt;em&gt;merely aggregated&lt;/em&gt;&quot; within the meaning of the GPL.  XX remains under its non-free licence, the wrapper under GPLv3.  The works can be distributed together, there is no contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the wrapper is tightly-linked to the XX software, then the result is a derivative work of both.  GPLv3 requires the work to be under GPLv3, the XX licence (if I understand you correctly) requires the work to be under the XX licence.  It is not possible to distribute this work without violating at least one of these terms, and as a result, the work may not be distributed.  Still no contradiction, since nobody else will ever see a copy of this chimera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T22:10:08.417" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9293" CreationDate="2020-02-01T11:37:12.867" Score="1" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to open source a full-stack project (hardware schematics + firmware). I want to find a way of open sourcing it with a copyleft-style license that allows anyone to use, modify, and redistribute both the hardware and software and all distributions inherit the license, but explicitly disallow people from charging (money or otherwise) for the result of doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, is there a copyleft license that enforces &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;free as in freedom&quot; (&lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;) and &quot;free as in free beer&quot; (&lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17132" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T00:10:00.543" Title="Copyleft license that explicitly disallows monetisation" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-05-18T14:22:46.407" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6536" CreationDate="2020-02-02T17:10:03.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simplest way out (for you, and for potential users) is to just license everything under the same (permissive) licence. Just make sure you carefully consider David Wheeler's advise, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make your open source software GPL-compatible. Or else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Perhaps you should contact any upstream for specific permission to (re)license under any terms you feel comfortable with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T17:10:03.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9284" CreationDate="2020-02-02T19:13:34.847" Score="4" ViewCount="1597" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6873/can-lgpl-2-1-licenses-software-be-re-published-under-gpl-3-0&quot;&gt;Can LGPL 2.1 licenses software be re-published under GPL 3.0?&lt;/a&gt; and followed link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL license compatibility matrix in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, which is confusing me a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the table correctly it says that I can take code published under GPLv2 and use it in my fork (even without any modifications?), which I can publish under LGPLv2.1?&#xA;Doesn't it contradict the original authors' intention (GPL) to disallow their work to be used in a closed source software, which now my LGPL-ed fork allows? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17139" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T02:39:40.903" Title="Can GPLv2 licensed software be re-published under LGPLv2.1?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9283" CreationDate="2020-02-02T21:55:59.840" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think you are reading the compatibility table correctly.  When I look at the intersection of &lt;em&gt;I want to copy code under GPLv2&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I want to licence my code under LGPLv2.1&lt;/em&gt; I see a box that says &lt;em&gt;OK: Combination is under GPLv2 only&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that as saying that you can write some code which you release under the LGPLv2.1, but that if you later combine it with someone else's GPLv2 code you can only release the resulting &lt;em&gt;combined&lt;/em&gt; work under GPLv2.  I certainly don't read it as permission to relicense GPLv2-covered code under LGPLv2.1, and I've never heard it suggested that such a thing is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to admit that I don't find it a very helpful table, since I think it's clear that if I have released code I wrote under &lt;em&gt;Mr. Grumpy's Evil Proprietary Licence That Requires You To Surrender A Kidney&lt;/em&gt;, I can still combine that code with someone else's GPLv2 code and distribute the result, so long as I distribute it entirely under GPLv2.  But there we go, I didn't create the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T21:55:59.840" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9281" CreationDate="2020-02-03T07:02:45.327" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license cannot put restrictions on the mere use of something. So this is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't understand why this is so, imagine if you buy a book and it has a &quot;license page&quot; that says, &quot;You may not read this book on Sundays&quot;. You can simply not agree to the license and then you can read the book on Sundays because it's your book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 106&lt;/a&gt; for the list of things you can restrict in a copyright/copyleft license. You'll notice that ordinary use is not on that list because it's a right of ownership under US law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T07:02:45.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9244" CreationDate="2020-02-03T07:06:31.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't answer with just what you've told us. That the two pieces of software interoperate over a socket is irrelevant. What matters is whether the software you are trying to decide whether you must open source contains sufficient protectable expression taken from the open source application. That they communicate over a socket tells us nothing about what elements of the open source program are or are not in the service process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they only communicate over a socket and no protectable expression that came from the open source project appears in the daemon/service process, then there is no requirement that you open source the deamon/service process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T01:09:38.797" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T01:09:38.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9289" CreationDate="2020-02-03T12:04:00.867" Score="2" ViewCount="3738" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ive been reading about Qt and its licensing and ive come across &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this part&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qt is available under different licensing options designed to&#xA;  accommodate the needs of our various users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qt licensed under commercial licenses is appropriate for development&#xA;  of proprietary/commercial software where you do not want to share any&#xA;  source code with third parties or otherwise cannot comply with the&#xA;  terms of the GNU LGPL version 3. Qt licensed under the GNU Lesser&#xA;  General Public License (LGPL) version 3 is appropriate for the&#xA;  development of Qt applications provided you can comply with the terms&#xA;  and conditions of the GNU LGPL version 3 (or GNU GPL version 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im confused, because some modules of Qt (&lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtcharts-index.html#licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QtCharts&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtsql-index.html#licenses-and-attributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QSql&lt;/a&gt; for example) state that the module is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;available under free software licenses. Since Qt 5.4, these free&#xA;  software licenses are GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3, &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  the GNU General Public License, version 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i still dont understand which license do i have to comply with, is it GPL or LGPL ? do i get to choose which is better for my project ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Im only talking about Qt Community, the commercial license is out of my reach for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15031" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T14:09:47.607" Title="Qt's open source license (GPL or LGPL)" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9288" CreationDate="2020-02-03T14:52:47.607" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most Qt modules are licensed under the LGPL, but some are available under only the GPL. The Qt Modules page lists the (currently) &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;six modules in Qt 5 that are not available under the LGPL&lt;/a&gt;. Qt Charts is one such module &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; available under the LGPL. One the other hand, Qt SQL &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; available under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your confusion over the &quot;LGPL or GPL&quot; language is understandable, and it is an ambiguity inherent in the English language. When we make the broad statement about Qt, &quot;All Qt modules are available under the LGPL or GPL,&quot; we specifically mean, &quot;For every module, it is the case that either the LGPL or the GPL applies to that module, but possibly not both -- some modules are not available under the LGPL.&quot; Conversely, the statement &quot;The Qt SQL module is available under the LGPL or GPL,&quot; means that you may select either license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This information is available in legally-rigorous language within the Qt project artifacts themselves. For example, one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/13e0a36626bd75e631dd9536e795a494432b1945/src/sql/kernel/qsqlindex.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt SQL &lt;code&gt;.h&lt;/code&gt; header file says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;** Commercial License Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** Licensees holding valid commercial Qt licenses may use this file in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** accordance with the commercial license agreement provided with the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** Software [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  **&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** GNU Lesser General Public License Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Lesser&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** General Public License version 3 [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  **&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** GNU General Public License Usage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** General Public License version 2.0 or (at your option) the GNU General&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ** Public license version 3 [...]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clearly indicates that the &quot;or&quot; mentioned in the documentation means that you may choose either license for Qt SQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-02-04T14:09:47.607" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T14:09:47.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9283" CreationDate="2020-02-03T20:01:22.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The table is basically wrong. The header says &quot;I want to license my code under LGPL v2.1&quot; so the answer is &quot;no&quot;. Including the possibility of a relicense completely muddles things and rather defeats the purpose of the table. If you already own the copyright, as is assumed for the top header, then you can relicense it to whatever you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's basically answering the question &quot;I want to license my code under LGPL v2.1, can I?&quot; with &quot;sure, but you have to use a different licence than LGPL v2.1&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't even assuming that you own the GPL v2 code. If you read the paragraph above it explicitly says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It assumes that someone else has written some software under one of these licenses, and you want to somehow incorporate code from that into a project that you're releasing (either your own original work, or a modified version of someone else's software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the purpose of the odd corner case is that you can relicense someone else's LGPL v2.1 code into GPL v2. But in that case you could just look at the LGPL v2.1 -&gt; GPL v2 entry in the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="848" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T20:01:22.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9281" CreationDate="2020-02-04T00:10:00.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No such license exists, or can exist.  One of the basic principles of copyleft is that the recipient of the licensed content is permitted to use it as they see fit, so long as they extend that right to anyone they in turn provide the content to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a more practical reason why &quot;no commercial use&quot; licenses in general are rare: it turns out that &quot;charging money&quot; is a very difficult concept to nail down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2020-02-04T00:10:00.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-04T06:44:22.253" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ZHST_IMS_Package 1.0.0  was installed through Application insights nugget packages. As part of black duck scan found this has issue with license and reported as &quot;License Not Found&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this component info at &lt;a href=&quot;https://libraries.io/nuget/ZHST_IMS_Package&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://libraries.io/nuget/ZHST_IMS_Package&lt;/a&gt; but not provided license info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the license of this package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17156" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-02-06T03:07:05.227" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T03:07:05.227" Title="ZHST_IMS_Package license issue" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|security|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9464" CreationDate="2020-02-04T13:25:02.837" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a pretty big open-source project which will require multiple technology stacks. My hope is that this project will be primarily community-based, which means the community should be able to contribute and expand on the source publicly or privately (on their own repository/software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I have opted for the GPLv3 license since it seems to fit most of the requirements, however, I'm still in doubt about developers being able to use it for their own private, commercial use, and, possibly involve using patents or NDA protected code from other 3rd-parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the GPL FAQ:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It states that other developers can use it without disclosing their code but must use the GPL license if released publicly (which is fine). But I'm not sure if it means that if using it privately they are bound to using a GPL license which might conflict with the 3rd-parties closed-source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here is a basic layout of how multiple repositories could possibly link against each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ModuleRepo1&lt;/strong&gt; (Open Source)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: GPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dependencies: None&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ModuleRepo2&lt;/strong&gt; (Open Source)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: GPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dependencies: ModuleRepo1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3rdPartyRepo&lt;/strong&gt; (Closed Source)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License: NDA (Patented)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dependencies: Unknown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CustomRepo1&lt;/strong&gt; (Closed Source &amp;amp; Commercial Binaries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License: EULA (Patented)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dependencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ModuleRepo1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ModuleRepo2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;3rdPartyRepo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CustomRepo2&lt;/strong&gt; (Open Source &amp;amp; Free/Commercial Binaries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;License: EULA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dependencies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ModuleRepo1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ModuleRepo2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the GPLv3 license a good option for these requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, are there other licenses that could better fit my needs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17161" LastEditorUserId="3016" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T10:45:26.670" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T10:45:26.670" Title="Using GLPv3 for open-source library modules that can be extended and linked by closed-source libraries and binaries" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|license-recommendation|closed-source|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-04T16:38:42.980" Score="1" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company sells Zebra Android devices that we install our own app on (the devices are like a phone, but with scanners and more durable hardware). We can order the devices with the GMS or AOSP operating systems. If we order AOSP then there is less setup, but we would have to load a PDF reader on the device. One solution is to side-load Google's PDF Viewer from APKMirror before distributing the devices to clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since APKMirror states that they manually verify each apps signature I am not too worried about security, but I am confused about how this is licensed. I opened &quot;About this Viewer&quot; from within the app and saw a plethora of Open Source licenses, which all say the app is free to use and distribute. However, I thought all apps provided by the Play Store were licensed only to the individual downloading the application. IE - APKMirror would have to violate the license to generate the APK, unless they received an APK directly from Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that each app developer is responsible for licensing their application independently. So, in general, is it enough to verify the signature of the APK from APKMirror and read the license agreement within the app itself to verify that the app is ok to redistribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17163" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T17:37:06.810" Title="License for Google Pdf Viewer APK" Tags="|redistribution|google-play|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-05T14:18:28.720" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several open source projects. I'm fine with people making forks or using them as pluings/libraries for their commercial products. I only want to make sure that I will be credited as the original author. Will the MIT license suffice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17167" LastActivityDate="2020-02-05T14:18:28.720" Title="Which open source license should I use to allow forks but oblige people to credit me?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-02-08T07:50:28.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-05T19:05:38.587" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of building a chrome extension using some open source code licensed under AGPL version 3 for one of my projects. I have modified the original source code quite heavily, and am fine with publishing the modified chrome extension code under AGPL. However, I’m worried about the copy left aspect of AGPL. The new modified extension runs on a chrome browser instance in the cloud or on a user’s own chrome browser. It's only interaction with my other code is that it receives/sends commands via web sockets or http, all over a network. So there is obviously a ton of logical separation between the chrome extension code, and the code that runs the rest of my SaaS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I’m also extremely worried about the copy left aspect of AGPL version 3. Would I be required to publish all my code for my entire SaaS or just the extension code? Obviously I’m not an expert on AGPL... =(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in response to my post on StackOverflow a user asked for more specifics about how the chrome browser in the cloud worked. So I provided the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It runs on an ec2 windows instance on aws that automatically loads a chrome browser at launch which then registers itself with the SaaS. The extension receives commands via web sockets, does something in the browser, like takes a screenshot, then sends the results, in this case an image back to the SaaS's own internal apis. The browser version used by front end users is used to build command sets that are then scheduled for execution and relayed to a remote instance at the appropriate time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the reason I'm concerned about copy left is that my SaaS platform has a ton of non-browser related functions which honestly is where my actual value proposition is. The execution of macros in a cloud environment is just one small piece of it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17170" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T12:15:35.217" Title="Using AGPL version 3 code in a chrome extension that is part of a SaaS project" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-06T10:06:13.197" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NeuronRobotics/nrjavaserial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nrjavaserial&lt;/a&gt;)  library in a java application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This library is released under the LGPL v 2.1 + Linking Over Controlled Interface license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the implementation falls under the Linking Over Controlled interface exception, do I still need to fulfill the LGPL part (allowing the user to replace the library).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming the above ponint is fullfilled, the license says &quot;provided that every copy of the combined work is accompanied by a complete copy of the source code of RXTX&quot; , do I need to provide the RXTX source code with every delivered copy of the softare or is it enough to provide it through a written offer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6780" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T10:06:13.197" Title="LGPL v 2.1 + Linking Over Controlled Interface" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9298" CreationDate="2020-02-06T12:15:35.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using GPL code in a larger derivative work requires that the entire derivative work  be made available under the GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s4, s5c) to anyone who gets a copy of it.  The AGPL extends this privilege to anyone who interacts with the derivative work over a computer network (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is: what is the derivative work in this case?  Is it just the extension, or extension+browser, or extension+browser+whole SaaS stack?  Taking your extension as the core of an onion, how many layers do you have to go out before you leave the derivative work and enter into software that is &quot;merely aggregated&quot; with the onion core?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the Chrome browser is proprietary freeware (see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).  But some have written GPL extensions for it, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copyfish-%F0%9F%90%9F-free-ocr-soft/eenjdnjldapjajjofmldgmkjaienebbj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (there's nothing special about that, it's just the first GPLed Chrome extension that I came across); it wouldn't be possible for others to distribute these if they were part of a derivative work along with the Chrome browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that the wider world has already taken a view on whether Chrome extensions are merely aggregated with their browser, or are derivatives thereof, and they've concluded the former.  In my opinion (and IANAL/IANYL), you can publish your modified extension under AGPL without having to openly-license your entire software stack &lt;strong&gt;unless&lt;/strong&gt; your browser extension is sufficiently tightly-integrated with your SaaS stack that the two are part of a single, larger work.  But you don't give us any particular reason to suspect this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T12:15:35.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7193" CreationDate="2020-02-07T02:20:44.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, to achieve license attribution for Apache License 2.0 one must ensure that users of the software can read the full License and Notice files (i.e. the License and Notice files should be included with the deployment and be accessible, License can be in short form). In an Android app that can be as simple as dropping them into &lt;code&gt;assets&lt;/code&gt; folder, which can be accessed by unzipping the apk or using the relatively new OSS Licenses Plugin [1]. For web, making them available in a licenses folder that is publicly accessible would suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your software doesn't have to be packaged or have an installer to be classed as &quot;derivative work&quot;, any software that utilises a library/code that is licensed under Apache License 2.0 is derived from that library/code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Derivative Works&quot; shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object&#xA;  form, that is based on (or derived from) the Work and for which the&#xA;  editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications&#xA;  represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship. For the&#xA;  purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works&#xA;  that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the&#xA;  interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause &quot;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&quot; [2] it would seem that integrating with a SaaS library would fit that case, or in your case linking to externally hosted material icon files. The existence of Google's OSS Licenses Plugin suggests that including a library while only utilising it's interfaces still falls under &quot;Derivative Works&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you hold the icon files on your server/in your infrastructure, your web app is effectively redistributing parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/android/guides/opensource&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developers.google.com/android/guides/opensource&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17186" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T02:20:44.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9296" CreationDate="2020-02-07T02:36:49.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you were making a gaming device and side-loaded Sony apps from APKmirror, how do you think that would turn out? Doing similar with Google apps, for which you don't have written permission to redistribute, could easily turn out the same way. The risk you run is: you will likely get sued (especially if you company/product is successful, or even if your client is successful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17186" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T02:36:49.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9210" CreationDate="2020-02-07T13:14:27.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;font software&quot; should be clear from the files themselves in the package you got (they state they are clearly marked). Using the font as part of some document/background is just use of the font, as long as you don't modify it in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T13:14:27.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9180" CreationDate="2020-02-07T14:01:05.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If what was done was to start using A's code, and gradually replacing it by own (rewritten) code, written by referencing the original A code, the result is a derivative of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T14:01:05.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9296" CreationDate="2020-02-07T17:37:06.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to try and condense the helpful comments above into a single answer. First of all, permission must be obtained directly from the app developer to legally use/distribute any app from APK Mirror. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APK Mirror protects themselves with the DMCA (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apkmirror.com/dmca-copyright-infringement-notification/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apkmirror.com/dmca-copyright-infringement-notification/&lt;/a&gt;). I guess the way it works is that, since they distribute stuff online, their liability is limited by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMCA&lt;/a&gt; so that they need only respond to copyright infringement requests in a prompt manner, and are not held liable if they post an APK that infringes a copyright; provided that the infringement is not obvious to them, and they don't make an effort to hide licensing information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a company distributing physical devices, I'm guessing that the DMCA protection would not limit our liability, and there would be no opportunity for us to respond to a cease-and-desist before incurring possible financial consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the alternatives are to download stuff from F-Droid (APKs that are explicitly licensed as FOSS), or to contact developers directly and request a license for what can be downloaded from a site like APK Mirror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am still not sure why mobile apps themselves don't seem to carry licenses within them, like a Windows program would, or what the validity of such a license statement within the app would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct/expand any of the points here that are deficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17163" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T17:37:06.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9273" CreationDate="2020-02-08T07:54:39.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answer converted from third-party comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7246/are-we-liable-for-license-problems-posed-by-transitive-oss-libraries&quot;&gt;Are we liable for license problems posed by transitive OSS libraries&lt;/a&gt;?  However, if what you are including is MIT licensed, then meeting the requirements of that license should be very simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words I believe the answer to your question about how to handle the license of vendoredFoo is the same as any other MIT licensed package. If you copy the code, you have to abide by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-02-08T07:54:39.267" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-02-08T07:54:39.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9262" CreationDate="2020-02-08T18:09:44.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some projects just distribute full source code to  licencees and encourage modifications/extensions to be shared among them (and perhaps incorporated into the official version, with provider maintenance going forward), thus creating a sort of &quot;open source&quot; comunity among users. Sure, it is not open source as such (not everybody gets access), but it might be a viable model for a narrow but very diverse user base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-08T18:09:44.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T18:49:00.390" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a new project I want to make use of some GPLv3 javascript plugins which prohibit me from monetizing it with Adsense, and also requires me to share the source of the project that uses it. I only need to use this package on one or two pages of my website and it would only account for about 20% of the website's offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this, can I abide to the GPLv3 license only for those pages that load the javascript in question. So say I have a domain example.com and the GPL'd javascript is only loaded on example.com/here and example.com/there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I could share the source code for only those two pages and not run any advertisements on those two pages. And on the rest of the website which doesn't load the javascript I would be allowed to do whatever I want (while still respecting licenses of course, but no GPLv3) without being in violation of the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it makes a difference I could use a different subdomain instead of a different url path&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, it's my understanding that the GPLv3 applies to the entire front-end, if used as part of the front-end, but to what extent? It should only apply to whatever other software is loaded in that instance? This could be defined as a specific web page or subdomain? It doesn't automatically apply to an entire website based on branding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if it's on a different route, or different subdomain, but there are many shared things.. such as images, css, js. Possibly you need to login with the same account. But on those pages where the GPLv3 plugin is used, everything loaded on THOSE pages has its source available and is not accompanied by anything incompatible with the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would appreciate some clarification. Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16746" LastEditorUserId="16746" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T18:55:09.957" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T18:55:09.957" Title="can licenses apply differently to distinct URLs/subdomains on the same domain GPL/MIT" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9315" CreationDate="2020-02-11T15:57:58.410" Score="4" ViewCount="649" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL-3 places different obligations for conveying &quot;source code&quot; and &quot;object code distribution&quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0 / 4. Conveying Verbatim Copies&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0 / 6. Conveying Non-Source Forms&lt;/a&gt;. Among other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corresponding Source&lt;/a&gt; under the terms of this License, in one of these ways [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-3.0-S6&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;python wheels&lt;/a&gt; (see examples from psutil here &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/psutil/#files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) be considered &quot;object code&quot; or &quot;source code&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wheels in many cases are just ZIP archives with the source code and some metadata - so I think there could be a compelling case to be made than if a tarball of source is source form then so is a python wheel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a listing of the content of one of the psutils wheels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ bsdtar -tf &amp;lt;(curl --silent https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/13/a7/626f257d22168c954fd3ad69760c02bdec27c0648a62f6ea5060c4d40672/psutil-5.6.7-cp27-none-win32.whl)&#xA;psutil/__init__.py&#xA;psutil/_common.py&#xA;psutil/_compat.py&#xA;psutil/_psaix.py&#xA;psutil/_psbsd.py&#xA;psutil/_pslinux.py&#xA;psutil/_psosx.py&#xA;psutil/_psposix.py&#xA;psutil/_pssunos.py&#xA;psutil/_psutil_windows.pyd&#xA;psutil/_pswindows.py&#xA;psutil/tests/__init__.py&#xA;psutil/tests/__main__.py&#xA;psutil/tests/runner.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_aix.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_bsd.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_connections.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_contracts.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_linux.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_memory_leaks.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_misc.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_osx.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_posix.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_process.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_sunos.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_system.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_unicode.py&#xA;psutil/tests/test_windows.py&#xA;psutil-5.6.7.dist-info/LICENSE&#xA;psutil-5.6.7.dist-info/METADATA&#xA;psutil-5.6.7.dist-info/WHEEL&#xA;psutil-5.6.7.dist-info/top_level.txt&#xA;psutil-5.6.7.dist-info/RECORD&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the answer is that it depends on the content of the wheel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T15:35:13.857" Title="Would python wheels be considered &quot;source code&quot; or &quot;object code&quot; under GPL-3" Tags="|gpl-3|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9322" CreationDate="2020-02-11T18:38:02.787" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an open source project, but need to use a library. The library is open source, but I don’t know if I need to tell the user about the dependency. Do I have to show a license of the dependencies that I use? The dependency is under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17211" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T23:23:27.413" Title="Should I show the dependencies that I use" Tags="|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9274" CreationDate="2020-02-11T20:10:32.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that only permission, pertaining to the LGPL-3.0 licensed work, granted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt; that is clearly applicable to the arrangement in question is the permission to upgrade to a later version of LGPL (granted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other permissions granted by LGPL-3.0 seems to me to be contingent on conditions that are not present to the arrangement in question (i.e. if an LGPL-3.0 licensed work links against a proprietary work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning behind my understanding on this matter follows below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then whether a licensee of an LGPL-3.0 licensed work is permitted convey &quot;modified source versions&quot; or &quot;non-source forms&quot; of said work becomes a question of whether these permissions are granted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt;. On this matter my understanding is that GPL-3.0 does not grant these permissions to licensees, this question and my understanding can be found in this stackexchange question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/931&quot;&gt;Licensing software that uses a proprietary library under GPL-3.0 without linking exceptions: what are the implications?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary: My understanding is that neither LGPL-3.0, nor GPL-3.0, grants permission to licensees to convey &quot;modified source versions&quot; or &quot;non-source&quot; versions of a &lt;em&gt;LGPL-3.0 licensed work&lt;/em&gt; that links against &lt;em&gt;a proprietary library&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;LGPL-3.0 definitions and directionality&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; defines the following terms &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 0: Additional Definitions.&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“The Library”&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a covered work governed by this License, other than &lt;strong&gt;an Application&lt;/strong&gt; or a &lt;strong&gt;Combined Work&lt;/strong&gt; as defined below.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An “Application”&lt;/strong&gt; is any work that makes use of &lt;strong&gt;an interface&lt;/strong&gt; provided by the &lt;strong&gt;Library&lt;/strong&gt;, but which is not otherwise based on &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;. Defining a subclass of a class defined by &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt; is deemed a mode of using an interface provided by &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A “Combined Work”&lt;/strong&gt; is a work produced by combining or linking &lt;strong&gt;an Application&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;. The particular version of &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt; with which &lt;strong&gt;the Combined Work&lt;/strong&gt; was made is also called the “Linked Version”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These definitions are in the arrangement that can be seen in this diagram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/TPB1Qi9048RlUOf1B-s2GLfw4H7IK4l1Wz12BxsioPWi9hlBxbgH8lGfsZVf0_aadMYY6vlEQVddc_bdXir5Yc0T6bHkgp6mAo4rDxo4H9LQIPJksMqBX7LPt7XPc_DKROJCOCaBwzS9ITsMFC5xdgmoezOoZLMX3FIdX-X4bKdHrDZm447NAF0H04KNNkcHCMhpLrwq1ncF7-UpmMqud4oW7ySFTpHJ9pPhSTDf77TpSwEq4UYusLPe1LBBNH1e8dc6y99ZhCg5a9Y-AhC2Rg776AdGo53fZFKE2vxN9MGc5eOQUpMrmXYyIRZY4feveH09IalTDjJjcj84rDe866kuoiVVhcKPoKXhAk9EA5cxHX8yiJ46VTxx7qVlCaVJrgd8z_G3oFVfz3wwqcQdD5K7X7lt61IuT8DMsGZstv_LLE_qgItXxLt2q8WiTs4ukQXQMxIm__e9Thy0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/TPB1Qi9048RlUOf1B-s2GLfw4H7IK4l1Wz12BxsioPWi9hlBxbgH8lGfsZVf0_aadMYY6vlEQVddc_bdXir5Yc0T6bHkgp6mAo4rDxo4H9LQIPJksMqBX7LPt7XPc_DKROJCOCaBwzS9ITsMFC5xdgmoezOoZLMX3FIdX-X4bKdHrDZm447NAF0H04KNNkcHCMhpLrwq1ncF7-UpmMqud4oW7ySFTpHJ9pPhSTDf77TpSwEq4UYusLPe1LBBNH1e8dc6y99ZhCg5a9Y-AhC2Rg776AdGo53fZFKE2vxN9MGc5eOQUpMrmXYyIRZY4feveH09IalTDjJjcj84rDe866kuoiVVhcKPoKXhAk9EA5cxHX8yiJ46VTxx7qVlCaVJrgd8z_G3oFVfz3wwqcQdD5K7X7lt61IuT8DMsGZstv_LLE_qgItXxLt2q8WiTs4ukQXQMxIm__e9Thy0&quot; alt=&quot;answer-cmp-lgpl.plantuml&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 1: LGPL-3.0 arrangement ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this arrangement the following is clearly directional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;makes use of &lt;strong&gt;an interface&lt;/strong&gt; provided by &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the arrangement in question, there is not something (i.e. another work, proprietary)&#xA;«&lt;em&gt;[making] use of &lt;strong&gt;an interface&lt;/strong&gt; provided by &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, in the arrangement in question, there is something (i.e. another work, proprietary) «&lt;em&gt;providing &lt;strong&gt;an interface&lt;/strong&gt; used by &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;»:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RPB1QiCm38RlVWhHNZP3GzdOfPH25zOnwA6ZE-xY9cfYcjZ1TbRAAEmfjZVP0_L9fdHf6s_MoKZVB_qIpcMAO1qQr6vN8RCRgIfXH0c9BYkjKBcbsnK8TLdSTAes5wdUIfN1MXIsgvEAkgr5WlSYsMH6rogDTQ4Dz6V72ABQf6XQR7WC5h82xmmeGdYJdngZj__JAz_8UFouc0zke-5a0lquVhWZJq5ixd6pMHo7kONHbP7eXDarQ0DIoprZ5P4YGrZg4XVjMrZeSKvEXSgmR7QI2fvhj4vgnNdlkE9buPSSvt9bg7Mhf0Iq6SxXLS6LK71o2eLCK5bCOQlDvfhA1BIv4N1-ufevtVsyaTFEFlvi0TMbH7qz5rujFBxJ-DU1TpaoSVuGC5LFvtSxN5tAf6Q4XvmE2boxWQSVmU7hex7tHf_Tagvpr2WoCijT54t-I6gB5WwVtsp_0m00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/RPB1QiCm38RlVWhHNZP3GzdOfPH25zOnwA6ZE-xY9cfYcjZ1TbRAAEmfjZVP0_L9fdHf6s_MoKZVB_qIpcMAO1qQr6vN8RCRgIfXH0c9BYkjKBcbsnK8TLdSTAes5wdUIfN1MXIsgvEAkgr5WlSYsMH6rogDTQ4Dz6V72ABQf6XQR7WC5h82xmmeGdYJdngZj__JAz_8UFouc0zke-5a0lquVhWZJq5ixd6pMHo7kONHbP7eXDarQ0DIoprZ5P4YGrZg4XVjMrZeSKvEXSgmR7QI2fvhj4vgnNdlkE9buPSSvt9bg7Mhf0Iq6SxXLS6LK71o2eLCK5bCOQlDvfhA1BIv4N1-ufevtVsyaTFEFlvi0TMbH7qz5rujFBxJ-DU1TpaoSVuGC5LFvtSxN5tAf6Q4XvmE2boxWQSVmU7hex7tHf_Tagvpr2WoCijT54t-I6gB5WwVtsp_0m00&quot; alt=&quot;answer-cmp-question.plantuml&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 2: Arrangement in question ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrangement in question differs from the LGPL-3.0 arrangement in that the roles (i.e. provider of interface vs user of interface) of the proprietary work and LGPL-3.0 licensed work are reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arrangement in question is thus not described by the &lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; definitions and permissions granted by &lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; that are contingent on those definitions are therefore also not granted for the arrangement in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, sections can be eliminated for consideration if the permissions they grant are contingent on the LGPL-3.0 definitions or LGPL-3.0 arrangement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Eliminated Sections&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 1: Exception to Section 3 of the GNU GPL.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work under sections 3 and 4 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is section applies only if section 3 and 4 is applicable and as is shown below those sections are not applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 2: Conveying Modified Versions.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you modify a copy of the Library, and, in your modifications, a facility refers to a function or data to be supplied by &lt;strong&gt;an Application&lt;/strong&gt; that uses the facility [...], then you may [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permissions granted by this section are contingent on the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Since nothing in the arrangement in question satisfies the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; the permissions granted by this section are also not in effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 3: Object Code Incorporating Material from Library Header Files.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The object code form of &lt;strong&gt;an Application&lt;/strong&gt; may incorporate material from a header file that is part of &lt;strong&gt;the Library&lt;/strong&gt;. You may convey such object code under terms of your choice [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly to section 2, The permissions granted by this section are contingent on the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Since nothing in the arrangement in question satisfies the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; the permissions granted by this section are also not in effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 4: Combined Works.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey &lt;strong&gt;a Combined Work&lt;/strong&gt; under terms of your choice [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permissions granted by this section are contingent on the definition &lt;strong&gt;a &quot;Combined Work&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. The definition of a &lt;strong&gt;a &quot;Combined Work&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in turn is contingent on the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since nothing in the arrangement in question satisfies the definition of &lt;strong&gt;an &quot;Application&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; there can also not be something in the arrangement in question that satisfies the definition of &lt;strong&gt;a &quot;Combined Work&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Consequently the permissions granted by this section are not in effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Remaining sections&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This elimination process leaves only Section 5 and Section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 5: Combined Libraries.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may place library facilities that are a work based on the Library side by side in a single library together with other library facilities that are not Applications and are not covered by this License, and convey such a combined library under terms of your choice, if [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither &quot;library facility&quot; nor &quot;side by side&quot; (pertaining to library facilities) are terms of art in software engineering, there is also no clear definition in LGPL-3.0 of these terms. Consequently what would qualify as &quot;side by side&quot; and what would not qualify as &quot;side by side&quot; is somewhat open to interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some snippets from &lt;em&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/em&gt; that we can use to try and piece together what &lt;em&gt;side by side&lt;/em&gt; means pertaining to &lt;em&gt;library facilities&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] place library facilities that are a work based on the Library side by side in a single library [...] ~ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] an Application that uses the facility [...] ~ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this we can gather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A library can have one or more &lt;em&gt;library facility&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two &lt;em&gt;library facilities&lt;/em&gt; can be arranged in a manner which we can say they are side-by-side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two &lt;em&gt;library facilities&lt;/em&gt; can be arranged in a manner which we can say they are not side-by-side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;library facility&lt;/em&gt; can be used by something external to the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems reasonable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A library facility can use another library facility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can now consider the following arrangements of two library facilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Option A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZP51Qy8m5CVl_HGFlHKSZk55jD0MkqjXmhRBy1BRPnkCINXv8cNiko-rTTHDOJab__poUtc9mXq36o1PrGob92nO6XsulTHMa3Y0gqLfJb9Ni1FAOL3B4W4FbXiGp2ItHqOtJ0_8jIdxg91KgFwGOoGqt5WSwAqezgB2LsuKGbjTwCeV610azDwXXSVPT1WNIZW7dm7uaHWgaLAZ3C5uUXxdF2Oofx_nrjUio1nrUTvRB9xN-UJfOHf5C4xJrIpBRcFv5PTbQNgRMvEn9945DItQWhULtPxNV0L1ryzAIsu-G3WOBPShpUrg50JzAxNXMusGoorv-HnURFjR46yqA5cWTZY7CBpSCmn7_GDryhooAXE5LDuQzpKkx4RxUQU52mFn28PTtr4b_r4blrI-uxxNoIIwljaStXqwYEu1oG_m3G00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZP51Qy8m5CVl_HGFlHKSZk55jD0MkqjXmhRBy1BRPnkCINXv8cNiko-rTTHDOJab__poUtc9mXq36o1PrGob92nO6XsulTHMa3Y0gqLfJb9Ni1FAOL3B4W4FbXiGp2ItHqOtJ0_8jIdxg91KgFwGOoGqt5WSwAqezgB2LsuKGbjTwCeV610azDwXXSVPT1WNIZW7dm7uaHWgaLAZ3C5uUXxdF2Oofx_nrjUio1nrUTvRB9xN-UJfOHf5C4xJrIpBRcFv5PTbQNgRMvEn9945DItQWhULtPxNV0L1ryzAIsu-G3WOBPShpUrg50JzAxNXMusGoorv-HnURFjR46yqA5cWTZY7CBpSCmn7_GDryhooAXE5LDuQzpKkx4RxUQU52mFn28PTtr4b_r4blrI-uxxNoIIwljaStXqwYEu1oG_m3G00&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;answer-cls-facilities_sidebyside_a.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 3: Option A ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume &lt;em&gt;a library facility&lt;/em&gt; to be analogous to &lt;em&gt;a function&lt;/em&gt; in Python, then we can represent the same in python as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def lgpl_facility_a():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def lgpl_facility_b():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the neither of the two facility uses the other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Option B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZP51Qy8m5CVl-HIFUYiuXB6BQC6MTfV2X6sNuIMsppOOa_BoHChOTrzgwwZEmN9A_ldbb_SIZJi6ja2ggXbAHLYmiaQulJAD97a0LylIdfIfO2UrGr6h4W4F3RSWcKbjZunkd1wGQriEKQ6eqCCXnqXekMrmf6zaiPSLldAh4RhRfQdy0J522YsTWqy1ViIMIgJ4QaimcPt7ELyHsTFlUElj5TcZASzxYyNpEfy-FioY22P9aZvbsNqil-AoB4dkSsko3IbaIMs7Tk1zPR_dDLz2zFsaHd7x0T91i5ocXhjL8CJm7btuLYFaQajUFeUNfliNY3S6j2hGE9n365xg3CDWUA1UdbUDpcIXjBUkXZikxCRuUQ-52mEh0CPT_w6A_wEARrI-uw7NwJIwhcmExmuTHEAwtbik_k6-0G00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/ZP51Qy8m5CVl-HIFUYiuXB6BQC6MTfV2X6sNuIMsppOOa_BoHChOTrzgwwZEmN9A_ldbb_SIZJi6ja2ggXbAHLYmiaQulJAD97a0LylIdfIfO2UrGr6h4W4F3RSWcKbjZunkd1wGQriEKQ6eqCCXnqXekMrmf6zaiPSLldAh4RhRfQdy0J522YsTWqy1ViIMIgJ4QaimcPt7ELyHsTFlUElj5TcZASzxYyNpEfy-FioY22P9aZvbsNqil-AoB4dkSsko3IbaIMs7Tk1zPR_dDLz2zFsaHd7x0T91i5ocXhjL8CJm7btuLYFaQajUFeUNfliNY3S6j2hGE9n365xg3CDWUA1UdbUDpcIXjBUkXZikxCRuUQ-52mEh0CPT_w6A_wEARrI-uw7NwJIwhcmExmuTHEAwtbik_k6-0G00&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;answer-cls-facilities_sidebyside_b.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 4: Option B ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def lgpl_facility_a():&#xA;    lgpl_facility_b()&#xA;&#xA;def lgpl_facility_b():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, one of the two facility uses the other.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these figures &quot;LGPL-3.0 Library Facility&quot; is shorthand for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;library facilities that are a work based on the Library&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question now is, does &lt;em&gt;side to side&lt;/em&gt; refer to the arrangement in Option A or Option B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that Option A is side by side and Option B is not side by side. Since these terms are not well defined I am sure other views on the meaning of &quot;side by side&quot; is also reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we now consider what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;combined library&quot;&lt;/a&gt; might look as extensions of these options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Combined library: Option A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bL71Yi8m4BttAmOzU79nMRo82csnUn5MMFQoU4dJiGscIPb4f2pxxvlQogPh1JUdvCtBUszc91uiM0qayi929WYv5Le5vYXKnOYLO0gMwRDGEHoOD1WK8aF0ih8rC6j9f2UBnaTBj8NEEeWBuhBxP2mIQbjNwCbNZ1zPZk-sbWYDErEv--0nYAcZmGgUvpCVvf8P0ry1k1Dfof1YBJN1U7Ov5pmaqkTRE7MUEUcJoYwrvV9rjvs-FCtMQnZ7yMQU9CEqRO-N974ypDkHhaYWPLGtr8OuBDdMdCnt4BJzR9ImzISm0wFLQgDiyne5GJUb1kIwJ8N23AH8oJaiuArgLWRXNZcCepAuW4cjJmIyq0wOZBenjHRRl989uq8wxR1pkdQsL-xUwiAL0-48_DuzAQ_HlufUwRveRr1t8aQFH8p-4p5wC69q6z7jgTlGTBhkJt817mODh7t2q7o6UBr-7nJwvVq0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bL71Yi8m4BttAmOzU79nMRo82csnUn5MMFQoU4dJiGscIPb4f2pxxvlQogPh1JUdvCtBUszc91uiM0qayi929WYv5Le5vYXKnOYLO0gMwRDGEHoOD1WK8aF0ih8rC6j9f2UBnaTBj8NEEeWBuhBxP2mIQbjNwCbNZ1zPZk-sbWYDErEv--0nYAcZmGgUvpCVvf8P0ry1k1Dfof1YBJN1U7Ov5pmaqkTRE7MUEUcJoYwrvV9rjvs-FCtMQnZ7yMQU9CEqRO-N974ypDkHhaYWPLGtr8OuBDdMdCnt4BJzR9ImzISm0wFLQgDiyne5GJUb1kIwJ8N23AH8oJaiuArgLWRXNZcCepAuW4cjJmIyq0wOZBenjHRRl989uq8wxR1pkdQsL-xUwiAL0-48_DuzAQ_HlufUwRveRr1t8aQFH8p-4p5wC69q6z7jgTlGTBhkJt817mODh7t2q7o6UBr-7nJwvVq0&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;answer-cls-facilities_combined_a.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 5: combined library: Option A ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def lgpl_facility_a():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def proprietary_facility_a():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def lgpl_facility_b():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def proprietary_facility_b():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, LGPL-3.0 facilities do not use proprietary facilities and proprietary facilities do not use LGPL-3.0 facilities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Combined library: Option B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bL71Yi8m4BtdAuPwyEGYB7iHBTXYzoAiiEnbyPAcOnjCapA9I5dstpUrrQrk1JUdvCtBcpTl5EuSE0Cayy919Wc5aqOpkvUwuiHBi0NFp57g77PSMMI5p12mh5mDt3cIwS6XxQCbki9a7IGa2TLziWu9ZQihxCbNNEnvZk-kLWXDTwvp_u7rA49nQ-6BWJ-HeGmfDieGZAQdSyANHERu5qwzUaxceBDJRJv_tQmdpq_JC8HH7AzUacIOjhxY9KaS3_CsP2gIw3ZL3RKX3aksDI_ppLWxpqfBLty2jn0i5YljcbV0M9T70mfJfb9Z1agcv3lCuArgbWFHLdjCeBOuWt5j3WIYC1uO1rrCROjrNgc42wcyzhBhT9vig_szrOKp1vO1z6VlIVK6lLNibUwBNWLrnsBqYCNeFnQZ1or6VotwFNKRcap2woHdy67HGiYkysruGp5Tw3sz8QyNtk0Wjov-wJy0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/svg/bL71Yi8m4BtdAuPwyEGYB7iHBTXYzoAiiEnbyPAcOnjCapA9I5dstpUrrQrk1JUdvCtBcpTl5EuSE0Cayy919Wc5aqOpkvUwuiHBi0NFp57g77PSMMI5p12mh5mDt3cIwS6XxQCbki9a7IGa2TLziWu9ZQihxCbNNEnvZk-kLWXDTwvp_u7rA49nQ-6BWJ-HeGmfDieGZAQdSyANHERu5qwzUaxceBDJRJv_tQmdpq_JC8HH7AzUacIOjhxY9KaS3_CsP2gIw3ZL3RKX3aksDI_ppLWxpqfBLty2jn0i5YljcbV0M9T70mfJfb9Z1agcv3lCuArgbWFHLdjCeBOuWt5j3WIYC1uO1rrCROjrNgc42wcyzhBhT9vig_szrOKp1vO1z6VlIVK6lLNibUwBNWLrnsBqYCNeFnQZ1or6VotwFNKRcap2woHdy67HGiYkysruGp5Tw3sz8QyNtk0Wjov-wJy0&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;lt;code&amp;gt;answer-cls-facilities_combined_b.plantuml&amp;lt;/code&amp;gt;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Figure 6: combined library: Option B ▲&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In python:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;def lgpl_facility_a():&#xA;    proprietary_facility_a()&#xA;&#xA;def proprietary_facility_a():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def lgpl_facility_b():&#xA;    pass&#xA;&#xA;def proprietary_facility_b():&#xA;    lgpl_facility_b()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, at least some LGPL-3.0 facilities use proprietary facilities and/or some proprietary facilities use LGPL-3.0 facilities.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these options, Option B corresponds to the arrangement in question, while Option A does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best answer I can devise to whether this section applies to the arrangement in question (and thus grants any permissions applicable to the arrangement in question) is that it does not clearly apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why it does not clearly apply is because &quot;side by side&quot; very well could be interpreted to be Option A only and not Option B - this is how I interpret it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the section does not clearly apply, and does not clearly grant any permission, then it should not be assumed to apply either. It could apply, but whether or not it does apply has to be determined by litigation and until such a determination is made the permission cannot be said to be granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 6: Revised Versions of the GNU Lesser General Public License.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section seems to apply regardless of arrangement, though the only permission it grants it conditional permission to use later versions of LGPL. Subsequent versions of LGPL-3.0 could change the answer but the question is about LGPL-3.0 so other versions will not be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Views of the FSF&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the FSF would favour my understanding for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FSF would view a LGPL-3.0 licensed work that links against a proprietary work as &quot;off limits to the Free World&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Can I write free software that uses nonfree libraries? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#FSWithNFLibs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you do this, your program won't be fully usable in a free environment. If your program depends on a nonfree library to do a certain job, it cannot do that job in the Free World. If it depends on a nonfree library to run at all, it cannot be part of a free operating system such as GNU; it is entirely off limits to the Free World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html#preamble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intent of GPL-3.0 is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intent of LGPL-3.0 is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Lesser GPL was designed to fill the middle ground between these cases, allowing proprietary software developers to use the covered library, but providing a weak copyleft that gives users freedom regarding the library code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, it seems likely that LGPL-3.0 was not intended to allow &quot;proprietary software developers&quot; to turn free software into something &quot;off limits to the Free World&quot;. And this would be permitted if licensees are allowed to convey &quot;modified source versions&quot; and &quot;non-source forms&quot; as they could take a &quot;free software&quot; library, enhance it but make the enhancements depend on proprietary software thus making it &quot;off limits to the Free World&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing also seems like exactly what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0-standalone.html#section2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 2: Conveying Modified Versions.&lt;/a&gt; is trying to prevent with conditions in subsection b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastEditorUserId="16951" LastEditDate="2020-02-27T12:31:29.870" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T12:31:29.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9319" CreationDate="2020-02-11T23:24:16.040" Score="3" ViewCount="710" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: Changed the person in example from &quot;I/me&quot; to &quot;PersonXYZ&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, hypothetically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; wrote some software (will refer to as &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;) that uses a proprietary library (will refer to as &lt;strong&gt;LibraryABC&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; licensed that software under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; without adding any linking exceptions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; is not the author of the proprietary library, someone other than &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; has copyright on it (will refer to as &lt;strong&gt;PersonABC&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, what exactly are the implications for doing the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONVEY-SOURCE-CODE&lt;/strong&gt;: Conveying only the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;source code&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;'s software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this would be fine as per (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 4: Conveying Verbatim Copies&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nobody (except &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;) would ever be able to avail themselves of the permission to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 6: Conveying Non-Source Forms&lt;/a&gt;. So if someone can only avail themselves of some of the permitted actions in &lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; then is the software really &lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONVEY-OBJECT-CODE&lt;/strong&gt;: Conveying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;object code&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;'s software without distributing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Corresponding Source&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; would not be able to convey the &quot;Corresponding Source&quot; as this includes the proprietary library and &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't have permission to convey it in any form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how this would make sense as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 6: Conveying Non-Source Forms&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways: ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ / DeveloperViolate&#xA;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;'s would not really be liable in any way but the resulting &quot;object code&quot; will not be conveyable by anyone without violating GPL so it is not clear how the software is then actually released under GPL-3.0? Maybe it is not released under GPL-3.0 even though &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; labeled it as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 12: No Surrender of Others' Freedom.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; has the following to say on somewhat similar cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that. Below are two example license notices that you can use to do that; one for GPLv3, and the other for GPLv2. In either case, you should put this text in each file to which you are granting this permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is not entirely clear that you have to do this if you only distribute/convey source code and not object code, as this does not mention distribution/conveying here nor does it make it clear what the basis for this FAQ entry is, maybe it is just section 6?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insights into the implications of these scenarios and this situation would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastEditorUserId="16951" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T14:06:55.117" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T14:06:55.117" Title="Licensing software that uses a proprietary library under GPL-3.0 without linking exceptions: what are the implications?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9311" CreationDate="2020-02-12T03:46:41.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A wheel is either source code or object code. Any form of any work is one or the other, according to the GPL's disjunction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a wheel is source code, then sections 4 and 5 apply and you've satisfied your source-sharing requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a wheel is object code, then you must offer the &quot;Corresponding Source&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The salient questions, if a wheel is indeed object code, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a wheel contain all the necessary material to build a modified version of that wheel, such that the resulting modified wheel may be used/installed/run in a similar capacity as the original?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this source material free from obfuscation that would make it fail to be the preferred form for making modifications?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the first question is a partly a broad structural question about wheels but could also vary case by case. The second question is likely purely a case by case determination considering a particular author's code, since, structurally, wheels appear to be perfectly accessible file archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are special tools needed to prepare or configure a particular wheel, then it might be object code. Generally, though, it seems to me that wheels are source code, insofar as they are readily readable, modifiable, and reusable in and of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the wheel specification PEP says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a wheel file may be installed by simply unpacking into site-packages with the standard 'unzip' tool while preserving enough information to spread its contents out onto their final paths at any later time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates to me that &quot;installation&quot; really is just a unzip and copy operation on the source contents of the archive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a wheel also has a metdata &lt;code&gt;RECORD&lt;/code&gt; that must correspond to the wheel file contents in a particular way, this appears to be a simple matter of file path bookkeeping. A hypothetical tool that modifies wheel archives would appear to use the &lt;code&gt;RECORD&lt;/code&gt; directly as metadata input; there is no &quot;easier to use&quot; format for this information that might force me to consider wheel metadata an object-code transformation of some original source code. The package metadata in the wheel is the simplest and most direct expression of that information that exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-02-12T15:35:13.857" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T15:35:13.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9317" CreationDate="2020-02-12T12:32:00.103" Score="12" ViewCount="1601" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an open source project licensed under the GPL v2. It does also contain textual files (JSON configuration examples). I would like to put those texts on slides in a presentation of mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this make my presentation a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt;, thus enforcing the copyleft clause of the GPL forcing me to put my whole presentation under it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17215" LastEditorUserId="17215" LastEditDate="2020-02-13T14:33:21.047" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T23:21:46.687" Title="Quoting GPL licensed text in presentation slides" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|copyleft|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9316" CreationDate="2020-02-12T12:46:12.200" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Berne Convention on copyright specifies the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Right to Quote&lt;/a&gt; as an exception to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article 10 (1) It shall be permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made available to the public, provided that their making is compatible with fair practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose, including quotations from newspaper articles and periodicals in the form of press summaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union, and for special agreements existing or to be concluded between them, to permit the utilization, to the extent justified by the purpose, of literary or artistic works by way of illustration in publications, broadcasts or sound or visual recordings for teaching, provided such utilization is compatible with fair practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as the second paragraph says, it is up to each country to determine in law how this right to quote shall be specified. Many countries cover this right under their broader rights of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair dealing&lt;/a&gt;. There are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#The_following_countries_are_not_signatories_to_the_Berne_Convention:&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several countries&lt;/a&gt; which have not signed the Berne Convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just as you can quote from any random book without a license, you can quote from something GPL licensed without needing to abide by that license. But because the laws implementing the right to quote can be somewhat nebulous, and not every country has laws explicitly permitting it, I'd recommend you only quote the minimum you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the right to quote applies to quotes in literature, and doesn't apply to using copied code in other software. When you copy code to use it in software there's no minimum amount of code that means you wouldn't be bound by its license. It's possible that you could make an argument that the copied code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5059/190&quot;&gt;too trivial to be copyrightable&lt;/a&gt; but it might be expensive to attempt to defend such an argument in court, and if the code really is so trivial then you should be able to reimplement it instead of copying it. But this is a different situation to quoting some code in an academic text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T23:21:46.687" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-12T14:43:41.607" Score="1" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the headers of QtCore 5.6 it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;-- clip --&#xA;&#xA;** GNU Lesser General Public License Usage&#xA;** Alternatively, this file may be used under the terms of the GNU Lesser&#xA;** General Public License version 2.1 or version 3 as published by the Free&#xA;** Software Foundation and appearing in the file LICENSE.LGPLv21 and&#xA;** LICENSE.LGPLv3 included in the packaging of this file.&#xA;&#xA;-- clip --&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this now mean that I can still use QtCore from Qt 5.6 under LGPL v2.1 ? At least this is how I interpret &quot;or&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On their web page they say that QtCore would be LGPL v3 from 5.4 onward, but it's not what's in the actual headers..?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17217" LastEditorUserId="17217" LastEditDate="2020-02-12T14:54:08.133" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T14:54:08.133" Title="License of QtCore in Qt 5.6: LGPL v2.1 or LGPL v3?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9314" CreationDate="2020-02-12T16:54:03.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you distribute source code that's available under the GPL, you can simply do it (provided you preserve markings, etc.). It doesn't matter that the source code won't build into a meaningful executable without some proprietary library. If what you're distributing is a preferred form for modifying the work, it doesn't matter if that work builds into anything at all -- it could be full of fatal syntax errors, for all the GPL cares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the way in which you distribute the unbuilt source with the binary could create a derivative, rather than an aggregate, in which case people would not be able to distribute the resultant source-plus-library derivative. But if the library is omitted or is legally merely in aggregate with the source, then there is no problem distributing the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you correctly identify the problem with distributing the binary built from such a source-plus-library combination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But nobody would ever be able to avail themselves of the permission to GPL-3.0 / Section 6: Conveying Non-Source Forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed the author of the GPLv3-licensed source may distribute such a binary, but no on else may, since the author has forbidden it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So if someone can only avail themselves of some of the permitted actions in GPL-3.0 then is the software really GPL-3.0 licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The binary built from such a combination (built by someone other than the author) is beholden to the requirements of the GPLv3, which have become impossible to satisfy. Analogously, I could release software today under terms like, &quot;You may modify and/or redistribute this software as long as the Gregorian calendar year is prior to 1900 CE.&quot; This is technically a license that includes specific permissions, but which is contingent on a condition that is impossible to satisfy. It really is under such a license, but that fact isn't very meaningful insofar as it does not change the rights recipients may practically enjoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the built binary may have a different license than whatever subset of the source the author chooses to release. Assuming I am the sole author, I may distribute my source under the GPLv3 and distribute a built binary (whose corresponding source is identical to or a subset/superset of my GPLv3 source code) under proprietary terms. This is no different from my ability to distribute the source code under multiple terms simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might actually be done sensibly when an author wants to distribute a binary under a proprietary license, but deliberately deny people the right to build their own modified binaries. The author offers a binary alongside some subset of their own source under the GPLv3, either in hopes of community goodwill (that any part whatsoever is free) or to solicit improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T16:54:03.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6188" CreationDate="2020-02-12T18:50:35.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;See Apache License, Version 2.0, paragraph 4, especially 4a and 4d. In addition to all other requirements of that license, You have to give recipiets of your product (P) a copy of the Apache 2.0 License text (in a human readable form). You also have to add the attribution notices from the original NOTICE file to at least one of the following locations &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within a NOTICE text(!) file distributed as part of the Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within the Source form, if provided along with the Derivative Works &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within the documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within a display generated by the Derivative Works (e.g. in an About dialog from the About menu or Help menu)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying my ethics I would choose at least two of those places. Giving attribution ensures that people make more good stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17220" LastEditorUserId="17220" LastEditDate="2020-02-12T19:00:25.237" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T19:00:25.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9312" CreationDate="2020-02-12T23:23:27.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is open source, so the user can find out by themselves that you are using said library (at the very least, it will show up as a dependency, or as part of the code). Trying to hide this just comes out as dishonest, making your software suspect. All for nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole idea of open source is &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt;: Tell (as well as you can/manage) all any user or potential adaptor might want to know up front about the software. You want it to be widely used, so you are doing yourself (and your users) a favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T23:23:27.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1809" CreationDate="2020-02-12T23:33:30.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check what each license asks for, and comply with each. Probably a file saying &quot;Piece A is from AAA, under Apache License; Piece B you'll find on github at B&amp;amp;B, under GPLv2; Piece C is Gplv2+, from FTP CXY; ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, common courtesy (to contributors of the pieces, to people who want to extend/adapt your software) would say to do the above, even if the license doesn't ask to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T23:33:30.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8168" CreationDate="2020-02-13T03:51:13.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the copyright holder to the file (there might be several) should add a line &quot;Copyright 2020 John Smith. Licensed under &lt;em&gt;conditions&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to it somewhere. If no explicit permissions, &lt;em&gt;nobody&lt;/em&gt; has any right on the file's contents. Not read it, not change it, not pass a copy to somebody else. If somebody makes a (substantial) change, add their line in. Nobody else is entitled to delete those lines, FOSS license or not. Sure, can create a veritable mess if &lt;em&gt;conditions&lt;/em&gt; don't match...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some organizations (e.g. the FSF, also most comercial software houses) retain all rights over any changes (FSF asks any contributors to sign them over, if you work at SomeCorp, your work is work for hire and belongs to SomeCorp anyway), and thus can do with the result as they please. Many large projects ask contributors to give a license to the changes and guarantee that the contributor is entitled to contribute the change under the given license, thus the project has some leeway in handling licensing issues. For example, to contribute to Linux (the kernel) you contribute your changes under GPLv2, but you remain owner. Nobody can come in and contribute under e.g. GPLv3+ and force (part of) the kernel to a licensing change or rejection of the patch. The ownership of Linux code is explicitly distributed among the thousands of individual contributors, to change license would require all of them to agree. It would be a nightmare. But only the whole collection has legal standing to sue somebody violating the license, also a mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T03:51:13.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9330" CreationDate="2020-02-13T17:08:09.433" Score="9" ViewCount="2726" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan open source some python script files which &lt;strong&gt;import&lt;/strong&gt; from NumPy (BSD license), scikit-learn (New BSD License) and Keras (MIT license). However, I do not modify and/or redistribute (parts of the) code from those projects. I assume that the users of my scripts will setup copies of NumPy, scikit-learn and Keras on their own (e.g. by providing a requirements.txt file usable by Pip).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (due to @Brandin's comment):&#xA;From what I understand so far there are two steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In order to use Numpy, scikit-learn and Keras as a developer in the first place, I have to accept their respective licenses. This affects me in any case – independently of how I may use/modify/share/redistribute the licensed software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By accepting their licenses, I have to obey the terms of those licenses which primarily tell me how I may&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redistribute source code from / redistribute in binary form using Numpy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;redistribute source code from / redistribute in binary form using scikit-learn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make copies or substantial portions of Keras&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the licenses ask me to retain/include/reproduce the specific copyright notices and permissions in the redistributions/copies I make using the licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the case I stated in the first paragraph (publishing code which imports licensed software to a repository on GitHub which does not include copies of the licensed software): Does that case qualify as redistributing code or copying code? If so: How do I practically retain the copyright notices and permissions (where do I place what license files)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17234" LastEditorUserId="17234" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T09:07:43.087" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T13:39:47.800" Title="What are the license obligations if just importing licensed code without modifying/distributing it" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-14T06:29:47.870" Score="2" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I  use the output of Apache v2 licenced software do I have to adhere to stating changes?  Also if  I only copy    3-4 lines of apache code into my project with large number of files and code do I still need to adhere to  its terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T08:58:29.023" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T09:04:46.790" Title="Is output of Apache-licensed software Apache-licensed?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9327" CreationDate="2020-02-14T09:04:46.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I use the output of Apache v2 licenced software do I have to adhere to stating changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8058/458&quot;&gt;have already said&lt;/a&gt;, the licence on a piece of software does not &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; extend to its output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also if I only copy 3-4 lines of apache code into my project with large number of files and code do I still need to adhere to its terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will depend on whether you've copied enough material to require a copyright licence in order to do so lawfully.  Whether three or four lines are enough to qualify for copyright protection is not an easy question to give a definitive answer to.  If it were held to be the &quot;&lt;em&gt;expressive heart of the work&lt;/em&gt;&quot; then less than three lines can qualify for protection; conversely, if it were three or four lines of boilerplate header code, such as one would often see in other programs, it is unlikely so to qualify.  We really can't help you decide which applies in your case, since we're not judges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the requirements of the Apache licence are not particularly onerous, why not follow them anyway, just to be on the safe side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T09:04:46.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4395" CreationDate="2020-02-14T12:03:37.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is the case of &lt;em&gt;Versata v. Ameriprise&lt;/em&gt; and then &lt;em&gt;XimpleWare v. Versata and Ameriprise&lt;/em&gt;, over some GPLv2-licensed XML parsing utility :&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/law/14/7/lawsuit-threatens-break-new-ground-gpl-and-software-licensing-issues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.com/law/14/7/lawsuit-threatens-break-new-ground-gpl-and-software-licensing-issues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17212" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T12:03:37.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9326" CreationDate="2020-02-14T13:22:16.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you write your own module which just imports other modules (but does not contain them in the distribution itself, thus referencing and using them in a requirements.txt or similar), you do not distribute them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point you have to look out for, is any license clauses in the libraries / modules which disallow their usage in cases you want to allow (e.g. commercial usage). Yet all three modules (numpy, scikit-learn, keras) have real open-source licenses (BSD, MIT) which do not restrict usage; they only put some restrictions on modification and (re-)distribution which do not apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your programme in binary form (e.g. using cxfreeze or similar), it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; include the modules / libraries used and you distribute them as well. In that case you need to abide by the requirements of the BSD and MIT license and make the copyright notice available to your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual: IANAL, so take my word with a grain of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T13:39:47.800" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T13:39:47.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1741" CreationDate="2020-02-14T21:22:08.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses operate under copyright law, which governs permission to do certain things with the &quot;creative work&quot; under consideration. It covers permission to use, to modify, and to copy (get it yourself and pass it to somebody else). &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open source&lt;/a&gt; is about allowing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free distribution:&lt;/strong&gt; Can pass it to whomever you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source code is available:&lt;/strong&gt; So you can study how it works, build it yourself for your use (say another operating system or architecture).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Derived works:&lt;/strong&gt; It is allowed to change it, and allow to distribute changes under the same conditions you got the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No discrimination against groups:&lt;/strong&gt; No group of people can be excluded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No restriction of use:&lt;/strong&gt; Can use it however you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No restriction of other software:&lt;/strong&gt; Can not mandate or forbid use with other software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(there are other provisions, which don't concern us here). So under an open source license, you are allowed to change it for your own use. You can pass your changes to others, but are not obliged to do so, the license can't even ask for you to share your changes with whoever originated the software, or notify them when you pass a copy around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are lots of licenses going around, not all of them are truly open source even if they allow free sharing. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unrar&lt;/a&gt; is distributed freely as source code, but you aren't allow to modify it or study how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read and understand the license(s) of the stuff you want to use. If in any doubt, and there is a possibility of any significant risk, &lt;em&gt;hire an expert lawyer and ask them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:22:08.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6550" CreationDate="2020-02-14T21:24:54.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No need to do so, whoever gets the code form you can do as they please under the license you grant. And the MIT license is very generous, it places almost no restrictions on whoever gets the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:24:54.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2020-02-14T21:42:35.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand (IANAL, IANYL, I don't impersonate one on SE either), the MIT license doesn't allow &quot;... even though you legally claimed ownership of the code (as explicitly permitted by the MIT license),...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the owner of the code is the author(s) (or, if written under contract for somebody else, who hired them). They can transfer their rights to others (in some jurisdictions, the right to be considered the author can not be transferred, however), but just placing the work under the MIT license definitely doesn't allow anybody else to &quot;legally claim ownership&quot;. The MIT license allows whoever gets the code a lot of leeway, even use it in closed source software and sell the result for big bucks without giving anything back. Almost the only consideration it asks for is to keep and distribute notices acknowledging the authors/contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go read the license, it is quite understandable. Check out e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on the MIT licence at OSI&lt;/a&gt; for further details. Copyright law is a complex, convoluted area. And even varies at lot from place to place, today it is under the umbrella of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berne convention&lt;/a&gt;, but even so there are variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:42:35.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4273" CreationDate="2020-02-14T21:49:43.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is the copyright holder is governed by copyright law, not the license (the license works in the frame of the law). If you put &quot;Authored by Marvin the Martian&quot; in your code, that doesn't change the fact that you wrote it, and you own it. And in some jurisdictions (e.g. Germany) the copyright protections last for 70 years &lt;em&gt;after the dead of the author&lt;/em&gt; or (if no author can be determined) 70 years &lt;em&gt;after writing&lt;/em&gt;, so to be able to identify the author can be important. And if you want to pass on your rights to somebody else, or enforce your rights against somebody trying a ripoff, you'd have a hard time proving you are really that &quot;Marvin the Martian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:49:43.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7203" CreationDate="2020-02-14T21:55:08.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you got the software with no discernible copyright notice, you got it in violation of the license. See if you can get it upstream, or contact the original author(s) to see how to fix the violation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T21:55:08.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T06:23:25.823" Score="4" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I'm thinking of taking the libraries that &lt;a href=&quot;https://squoosh.app/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;squoosh.app&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) uses internally (imagequant, optipng, etc) and break them up into an image optimization webassemby set of libraries that can be used by other npm and browser build/bundles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand this work to have webassembly builds of these libraries would be GPL, does this also mean anyone using them would be GPL too? Even though it's not even dynamically linking.  IMO, it's even more of a grey/allowed use than with dynamic linking.  It's much closer imho to calling a GPL executable from a non-gpl executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/issues/280&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Release codecs on NPM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17245" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T13:54:23.337" Title="Does using a WebAssembly compiled GPL library require calling application to be GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9336" CreationDate="2020-02-15T13:54:23.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the library is under GPL, anything linking to it must be GPL per FSF's interpretation that linking creates a derivative work. That hasn't been tested in court, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can ship code (or object only) program under non-GPL, and ask the user to do the linking. They can do as they please, so it wouldn't be an overt violation of GPL, which only restricts distribution while allowing you to do as you please in private. But FSF contends that just creating said program that can only be linked to the GPL library is derivative of the library... even less court tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See e.g. the readline library (GPL) and its replacement libedit (BSD-like), where the second one was written to sidestep the above restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T13:54:23.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T22:34:40.673" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to use open source project code and as well as the license.&#xA;I have do some searching about the source code use cases along with the source code license, but mostly i found is about the definition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I want to ask if my below use cases is correct without problem? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let say I download and use a GitHub source which use Apache License as a component on my software for commercial, and my software will be distributed to my users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;without modify the source and add my new License:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./myProject/wholeGitHubDownloadedSource/(notMycode1.js, notMycode2.js, License.txt)&#xA;./myProject/(myCode1.js, myCode2.js, myNewCreatedLicense.txt)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the License.txt &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;  SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since I do not modify the downloaded source, in myNewCreatedLicense.txt &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Copyright [yyyy] [my name]. All rights reserved.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this case is good to go and I can distribute the whole /myProject software for commercial and sell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delete some of the source and add my new License:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./myProject/wholeGitHubDownloadedSource/(notMycode1.js, License.txt)&#xA;./myProject/(myCode1.js, myCode2.js, myNewCreatedLicense.txt)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub source always contains many files, I am not sure if delete some of the files count as modified. In this case, I deleted (notMycode2.js) in the downloaded source folder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In myNewCreatedLicense.txt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Copyright [yyyy] [my name]. All rights reserved.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this case is good to go and distribute? If not, and I need to add modified notice in the License.txt or myNewCreatedLicense.txt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then what should I type about this modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;modify the source and add my new License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./myProject/wholeGitHubDownloadedSource/(modifiedNotMycode1.js, License.txt)&#xA;./myProject/(myCode1.js, myCode2.js, myNewCreatedLicense.txt)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, should I put the modified notice in License.txt or myNewCreatedLicense.txt? And what should I type about this modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17249" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T13:24:23.053" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T13:24:23.053" Title="GitHub downloaded source use cases" Tags="|apache-2.0|commercial|github|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-02-26T20:58:53.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9338" CreationDate="2020-02-16T07:53:32.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modification, deletion or addition of any file to a source code counts as modification of the source code as a whole. Thus in that case you are bound by what is allowed by the original license when it comes to distributing modified versions of the software and the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When making modifications and distributing them, the Apache license in particular requires, that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a&#xA;  copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution&#xA;  notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that&#xA;  do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;  include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within&#xA;  such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any&#xA;  part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places:&#xA;  within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&#xA;  within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the&#xA;  Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative&#xA;  Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The&#xA;  contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do&#xA;  not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices&#xA;  within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an&#xA;  addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such&#xA;  additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the&#xA;  License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;  provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;  reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such&#xA;  Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;  distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;  in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ALL conditions apply simultaneously. In particular you may not remove the copyright notices and the license notice for the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are allowed to add your own copyright and own license for your own modifications - but you need to display the original ones, too. You need to make sure in your own license that all further derivatives also comply with the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your question in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad 1) of your question: you may not simply replace the copyright ownership as you gained no copyright. Just copying does not transfer ownership to you. That is a violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad 2) and 3) You may do so on the conditions stated above (and in the license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally it's a good idea to actually read the licenses. They are not that hard to understand and not that long as the typical EULA of typical enterprises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T07:53:32.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-16T19:01:18.577" Score="4" ViewCount="1297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use some icons on some links in the footer of my website, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=github&amp;amp;price=free&amp;amp;type=vector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt;. They are under the MIT license. These icons are files by themselves, so I cannot just add the MIT license at the top of the files I want to use. I want the source code of the website to be as small as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; do I add the MIT license to these icons? I have spent a surprising amount of time googling without getting a clear answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is an HTML comment on the line above the icon &lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt; to the license sufficient, or would I have to include the full copy of the license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a copy of the license or link to that license displayed in an about section of my website a sufficient alternative, saying it refers to these icons? I think that's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6672/17253&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; is saying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a copy of the license in the GitHub repo that hosts my project (in the same folder that holds the icons) sufficient, provided I link to the GitHub repo at the bottom of every page of my website?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17253" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-12-29T12:15:23.287" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T14:43:05.650" Title="How to show MIT License on Icons" Tags="|mit|attribution|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-17T01:39:11.313" Score="3" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about create a couple of python-based applications and distributing them for free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My applications will be only for Windows since it is the system I use personally. What I am looking for is to distribute a compiled executable, with the '.pyd' files of the modules used or needed.&#xA;I have no commercial purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is the use or distribution of modules. There would be some kind of problem with distributing the applications with the '.pyd' files, so they can be easily used?. How can you distribute these files, without facing any problem?. All licenses are gpl and I find them quite complicated even to make free programs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen a lot of programs and games lately, even commercial ones, that use python and distribute the '.pyd' files of the modules. I've researched everything possible, but it's never clear enough. In some cases it is supposed to indicate which modules were used and together with this, the source code is placed. In other words, copy all python modules used, many times? I can't believe it's like that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, I come to ask, if anyone knows for sure how to do this. Thank you in advance for your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17257" LastEditorDisplayName="user17257" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T15:23:31.023" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T17:02:15.207" Title="Distribution of Python modules" Tags="|gpl|distribution|license|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9343" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-17T13:08:24.017" Score="3" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a javascript library licensed under the GPLv3 for a new website I am building. I want my website to remain closed-source. The GitHub repository of the GPLv3 states that anyone using their library on a publicly facing website must open-source their entire website, but I believe this may be incorrect. If I pull in their library separately from the rest of my javascript bundle, so that it is distinct and clear that I am using an unmodified version, which includes their copyright text, and that isn't intermingled with my own code through some bundler software. Doesn't that then mean that I am not obliged to release the rest of my website's front-end javascript code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16746" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T13:08:24.017" Title="if my javascript front-end pulls in an unmodified version of a GPLv3 library, must I release the whole source code for the website?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-17T15:31:36.237" Score="13" ViewCount="5040" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially I am just testing out stuff, here is my situation:&#xA;I am developing a program which consists of several code files. I made a public repository on github where I regularly update those files. I am the original author to all of them. For the heck of it I licensed the project under the GPLv3.&#xA;The repository is public but I doubt that anyone has ever stumbled over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the right way to change the license to e.g. the GPLv1 if that is even possible?&#xA;Can I just relicense all future code? Do I have to keep the old code public under the original license? Am I even allowed to delete the project files? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17263" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T13:36:38.597" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T00:07:49.593" Title="Is it possible to change the current GPLv3 license to something else?" Tags="|gpl-3|relicensing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9344" CreationDate="2020-02-17T16:14:59.990" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who received the code under the GPLv3 can redistribute it under those terms forever (and so, too, may &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; recipients, etc.) so if the set of recipients of your code so far is a nonempty set, you may not be able to stop future redistribution of your past code under GPLv3 terms. If no one has downloaded your code, or if anyone who downloaded it didn't keep it, then this is not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, since you're the sole copyright holder, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; may stop offering your code under the GPLv3 and offer future work under different terms. In that case, whatever code that you offered up to the point of the switch might be available (from somewhere) under the GPLv3; the GPLv3 would not apply to code you offered after you stopped offering code under the GPLv3. Whether any old copies under the GPLv3 exist is a practical question of circumstance, as discussed in the above paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to attempt to completely eliminate use of your old code under the GPLv3 (hoping that no old copies exist on anyone's computers), then if your code is in a version control system (VCS) like SVN or Git, you should retroactively rewrite your version history to make no mention of the GPLv3. The validity and scope of license offers that are removed but persist in VCS history is not legally tested, but it is certainly safest to purge them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish, instead, you may continue to offer your software under the GPLv3 &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; another license simultaneously. This is commonly done when companies offer a program under the GPL alongside the option of a proprietary license (usually for a fee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T11:54:31.697" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T11:54:31.697" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9344" CreationDate="2020-02-17T22:29:07.293" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not bound, as a user, by your own licence. It is like having a contract with yourself: both parties need to agree, for you to change the contract. I decided to break it, I agree, done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it may put obligations on you as a supplier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend sticking with GPL3. If you think it limits you, then don't worry it does not. Weak Free-Software licences, allow free-loading, and allow people to make it proprietary (sometimes in only limited situations, such as web-hosting). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T14:59:01.313" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T14:59:01.313" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9255" CreationDate="2020-02-18T05:07:52.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it would be a really bad idea. You want to have complete (legal) control over the image of your organization, not have anybody being able to use it legally (share alike or weaker rights) or take it, deface it and use it to disparage you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T05:07:52.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-18T10:51:36.917" Score="-1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need to develop free software for a company. The company will reward me with 8% of the profits. I have to give the source code to the company so that they can modify it if necessary. Is there a license that protects me in case they reuse my source code to build a new application and I no longer get 8%?&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17272" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T10:22:10.113" Title="if a company rewards the use of software, which license should apply?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-02-20T11:24:19.857" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9349" CreationDate="2020-02-18T13:18:33.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a license that protects me in case they reuse my source code to build a new application and I no longer get 8%? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By accepted definition on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses&lt;/a&gt; such a license won't be open source (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3+&lt;/a&gt; software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a  lawyer. You need to pay one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read a paper on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simple Economics of open source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Tirole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; of the authors had a Nobel prize in economics)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T13:38:41.580" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T13:38:41.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9314" CreationDate="2020-02-18T13:20:47.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a my understanding after further consideration and the response from apsillers for these scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conveying Verbatim Copies (of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In brief&lt;/strong&gt;: Always okay, for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In brief&lt;/strong&gt;: Never okay for anyone except &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conveying Non-Source Forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In brief&lt;/strong&gt;: Never okay for anyone except &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE&lt;/strong&gt;: Some of this are consequences of the content of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; - if that is wrong then the consequences may be wrong also. My view is that it is safer to work within the interpretation of GNU/FSF even it it may be more strict or prohibitive than what the actual situation is as long as it is not clearly contradictory to license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conveying Verbatim Copies of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; of &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No restrictions whatsoever as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 4: Conveying Verbatim Copies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions of &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. the copyright holder to &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;) it is permitted as they own the copyright to &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DeveloperViolate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLFAQ#DeveloperViolate&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For everyone else:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pertinent question here is whether &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; (referred to as &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ ⟶ LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;) constitute together a single &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Program&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which is work based on &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; (more on this later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ ⟶ LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; is a single program then the only way someone other than &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; is permitted by license to convey modified source versions is if the owner of the copyright of the proprietary library &lt;strong&gt;LibraryABC&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. &lt;strong&gt;PersonABC&lt;/strong&gt;) released &lt;strong&gt;LibraryABC&lt;/strong&gt; under a GPL compatible license. This does not occur in this scenario so nobody except &lt;strong&gt;PersonXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; can distribute modified source versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; prohibiting such action is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt; / Section 5: Conveying Modified Source Versions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a &lt;strong&gt;work based on the Program&lt;/strong&gt;, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c) You &lt;strong&gt;must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.&lt;/strong&gt; This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, &lt;strong&gt;to the whole of the work, and all its parts&lt;/strong&gt;, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important implications of the quoted texts are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt; in 5b &amp;quot;entire &lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt;, as a whole&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt; based on the Program&amp;quot; from the first paragraph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ ⟶ LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; constitute one program, then &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;whole of the work&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; refers to &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ ⟶ LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; and &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;and all its parts&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; refers to &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether or not &lt;strong&gt;SoftwareXYZ ⟶ LibraryXYZ&lt;/strong&gt; constitute one program we can consider the following from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”? (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? &lt;strong&gt;This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide.&lt;/strong&gt; We believe that a proper criterion &lt;strong&gt;depends both on the mechanism of communication&lt;/strong&gt; (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) &lt;strong&gt;and the semantics of the communication&lt;/strong&gt; (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. &lt;strong&gt;If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would cover all cases that I would refer to as &amp;quot;using a library&amp;quot;. Specifically it would cover cases of using library in C++, C, Go, Rust, JVM, CLR, NodeJS among other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are potentially some cases &amp;quot;using a library&amp;quot; that may be not be covered by this excerpt but is not clear what they would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also potentially some cases of things which are not clearly &amp;quot;using a library&amp;quot; which may be covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16951" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T13:39:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9344" CreationDate="2020-02-18T13:37:48.750" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is akin to putting a basket with apples, no let's make this pears, out on the street and put a price tag on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two days later, you decide that the price tag was silly and double it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that anybody can now take the same pears as were on offer for half the price at the original price?  No.  But someone who bought half the basket under the old conditions can put up his own basket with your original pears next to it and undercut your new price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is not an inherent part of the software, just like the price tag is not an inherent part of the pears.  But if somebody got the software under the GPLv3, they can redistribute &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; version and copies of it under the GPLv3, possibly subverting your own new desires for licensing.  Because that is one right that you granted them by using the GPLv3 on the previous version of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nobody can demand that you put back the old license on copies you choose to distribute, whether they are a new version or actually the old one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, you can distribute software under a restrictive license even while every header of the software and the included license file state differently.  In practice, you'll have a hard time proving that this kind of distribution was not misleading to the customer to the degree where your claims of damages are moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while you do not need to remove evidence your software ever was licensed differently, you should make sure to counter the plausible impression that it is being distributed &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; under the old license by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17274" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T13:37:48.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9344" CreationDate="2020-02-19T01:17:54.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would be the right way to change the license to e.g. the GPLv1 if that is even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can just change the license. You wrote all the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I just relicense all future code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can offer any code you wrote under any license you want. The GPLv3 is not an exclusive license and it doesn't prevent you from offering the same code or different code under any other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I have to keep the old code public under the original license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. But that imposes no affirmative obligations on you to actually do anything. You never exercised any rights you obtained from the GPLv3, so you have no obligations under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Am I even allowed to delete the project files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have no obligations whatsoever. You can delete the project files if you want. You never exercised any rights you obtained from the GPLv3, so you have no obligation to comply with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T01:17:54.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T09:36:00.093" Score="3" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jacques Pitrat was one of my intellectual masters, and the pioneer of French AI (his PhD thesis mentioned artificial intelligence in 1966).  He was the president of the jury of my PhD defense (1990). I probably owe him my PhD title (at least partly). He has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Pitrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; on French Wikipedia and a very interesting blog (in English) on &lt;a href=&quot;http://bootstrappingartificialintelligence.fr/WordPress3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://bootstrappingartificialintelligence.fr/WordPress3/&lt;/a&gt; and interacted in the mid 1960s with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Mc Carthy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was in good relation with J.Pitrat, and visited him a few times each year, we spent delicious moments speaking of Artificial Intelligence. I believe to be respected by his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spent nearly 30 years full time working on his &lt;a href=&quot;http://bootstrappingartificialintelligence.fr/WordPress3/?s=CAIA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CAIA&lt;/a&gt; system, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quine&lt;/a&gt; artificial intelligence system in GPLv3+ license for Linux and Unix systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He gave me a tar sourceball of CAIA, and verbally the permission to publish it on my web page as &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/caia-su-24feb2016.tar.bz2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/caia-su-24feb2016.tar.bz2&lt;/a&gt; and he published a previous version of that software (as MALICE) on &lt;a href=&quot;http://jacques.pitrat.pagesperso-orange.fr/MALICE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jacques.pitrat.pagesperso-orange.fr/MALICE.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jacques Pitrat passed away on October 14, 2019. I did attend his funerals  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe to have kept his trust (even if we had some scientific disagreement: mostly I believe that artificial intelligence is part of computer science, he thought it is a different science).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I respect a lot Pitrat's vision and work. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://refpersys.org/&lt;/a&gt; for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Am I legally allowed to put the source code of that tarball on github.com ?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(obviously, under my name, but keeping the generated copyright notices mentioning his name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tarball contains many binary data files (e.g. &lt;code&gt;_10527&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;_11065&lt;/code&gt;,   &lt;code&gt;_11603&lt;/code&gt;,   &lt;code&gt;_14&lt;/code&gt;) and many generated C files (such as &lt;code&gt;dx.h&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ATOME84T0.c&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;EQMPOSX0.c&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;PLUSC2.c&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Z52Z0.c&lt;/code&gt;) essential for operation. The C files carry a comment mentioning GPLv3+, but not the data files). There are 3833 generated &lt;code&gt;*.c&lt;/code&gt; files and 5972 generated binary files &lt;code&gt;_*&lt;/code&gt;. CAIA is able, in 30 minutes of CPU time, to regenerate all the 38 34 C files it is made of (totalizing 522586 lines of generated C), and all the 5966 data files (totalizing 32 megabytes, serializing objects) it needs to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T17:58:25.300" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T17:58:25.300" Title="putting on github the GPL code of a dead person" Tags="|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9314" CreationDate="2020-02-19T10:27:21.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;PersonXYZ could dual-license the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PersonXYZ could (if he/she is the sole copyright owner), if the code can run on POSIX system, and if the proprietary LibraryABC is available as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_(computing)#Shared_libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shared library&lt;/a&gt;, implement some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plugin&lt;/a&gt; machinery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking, on Linux, use &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/dlopen.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlopen(3)&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/dlsym.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlsym(3)&lt;/a&gt; and document and define an API to interface with LibraryABC. Your users are then allowed to either buy and call the proprietary LibraryABC or to recode an open source variant of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PersonXYZ then put the legal burden on the users of SoftwareXYZ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related discussion is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC plugins&lt;/a&gt;. The FSF deployed legal tricks (the so called GCC runtime exception) to discourage development of proprietary GCC plugins (technically they remain possible, legally probably not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ncurses&lt;/a&gt;. it is a library sharing the API of the original proprietary curses library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe that you can publish under GPLv3+ a code using an API provided by costly software. A typical example would be some GPLv3+ code using specific APIs of proprietary Lisp implementations (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Lisp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franz Lisp&lt;/a&gt;). Others could adapt SoftwareXYZ to run on &lt;a href=&quot;https://sbcl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SBCL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also publish under GPLv3+ some code using API specific to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle databases&lt;/a&gt; or to some IBM PL/1 compiler for mainframes or to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_HANA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAP HANA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might not have many users interested by your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A GPLv3+ program can be written in a computer language that almost nobody uses or understands (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE_(programming_language)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSE&lt;/a&gt;). Read also about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bootstrapping compilers&lt;/a&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/9354/910&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; giving a practical example (I am probably the one knowing the most &lt;a href=&quot;http://bootstrappingartificialintelligence.fr/WordPress3/?s=CAIA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CAIA&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't understand it very well, but am working on &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt;; J.Pitrat, the author of CAIA, passed away in october 2019) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bismon&lt;/a&gt; as another example (I am the main author of Bismon; it can be seen as a programming language whose specification is not written yet for non-technical reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MicroSoft Word is a program scriptable in some version of Basic. MicroSoft Excel is an interpreter. You could publish an Excel spreadsheet under GPLv3+, and people would need a proprietary program to run that spreadsheet. I don't have Windows or Excel, so I could not run such a program, but I am allowed by the GPLv3+ license to study it (probably using LibreOffice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T10:59:48.137" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T10:59:48.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9354" CreationDate="2020-02-19T11:35:46.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is quite clear on redistribution: you may do so, under the condition that you retain the original copyright and indicate your own changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such you are of course allowed to post the code on github, if you recieved it under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you received it with another or no license - that's different. Technically you need explicitly the license with each change made by an author. If the license is part of the source package, it's usually no issue. If you just receive the license verbally, it will be hard to prove, if someone questions the legality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in your case: all(?) files carry in their header a copyright notice and statement that they are released under GPL. So I see little way someone can question the source code license, even when there's no license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T11:35:46.233" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-19T13:18:18.467" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a (most possibly) proprietary front-end React app for my company. We use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/@wiris/mathtype-tinymce5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this npm package&lt;/a&gt; as a plugin for TinyMce editor. Turns out, it has GPL v3 license, which isn't allowed as per our policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some research, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.wiris.com/en/mathtype/mathtype_web/integrations/external-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this solution&lt;/a&gt;. In short, instead of installing and using the above package as a local plugin, I can list it as an external plugin and request to the following URL to get the &lt;code&gt;js&lt;/code&gt; code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wiris.net/demo/plugins/tiny_mce/plugin.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.wiris.net/demo/plugins/tiny_mce/plugin.js&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code from the above URL is identical to the main &lt;code&gt;js&lt;/code&gt; file in the npm package as far as I'm concerned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if this is a viable way to avoid the licensing issue that I have? Is the &lt;code&gt;js&lt;/code&gt; file hosted on Wiris' server protected in the same way their package is? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17285" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T10:20:19.617" Title="Legally, is getting a js file from a server the same as installing npm package?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|law|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9360" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:21:33.983" Score="2" ViewCount="799" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently was nominated co-maintainer of this GPL library&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coq-community/corn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/coq-community/corn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not use a copyright transfer agreement, historical authors are listed as copyright holders by their names at the beginning of each file, in the GPL license notice, as in this file&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/coq-community/corn/blob/master/reals/Cesaro.v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/coq-community/corn/blob/master/reals/Cesaro.v&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is : must I ask permission to all these authors (there are 19) when I fix a bug, develop, or even delete parts of their code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a git repository so nothing is lost. Any user has access to all previous versions, knows exactly who wrote each line of code and when, so it looks in agreement with the modified works in the GPL :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;For both users' and authors' sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also looks compliant with section 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It this interpretation of the GPL correct, or is this library frozen until the 19 of them give me written permission to modify their code ? This will never happen, some of them no longer respond about this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: my modifications are not private. I plan to push them publicly in the github repo, so they will become the first version that people see when they open the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17293" LastEditorUserId="17293" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T11:56:01.667" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T05:57:35.793" Title="Must I notify copyright holders of GPL code when I modify it?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9358" CreationDate="2020-02-19T22:44:50.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you needed permission to do what the GPL says that you can do, then it would not say that you can do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you start by reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software definition&lt;/a&gt; (this is relevant to all Free Software licences). Extract next:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four&#xA;   essential freedoms: [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom&#xA;  0). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it&#xA;  does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code&#xA;  is a precondition for this. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you&#xA;  can help others (freedom 2). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your&#xA;  modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give&#xA;  the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to&#xA;  the source code is a precondition for this. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A program is free software&#xA;   if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is&#xA;   nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then read the appropriate version of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T22:44:50.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9358" CreationDate="2020-02-19T23:22:27.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is this library frozen until the 19 of them give me written permission to modify their code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have already given you written permission concretely by attaching the terms of the GPL to their work. As long as it is reasonably clear that these authors intended to publish their work under the GPL, you may use it under those terms, which include the freedom to make modifications and publish them under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, even the (non-GPL) requirement of needing to notify authors about modified versions (let alone get advance permission) is outside the &quot;Desert Island&quot; test of the Debian Free Software Guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T23:22:27.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9344" CreationDate="2020-02-20T00:07:49.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers between them cover the area but a simple non-lawyer class answer is hard to easily discern from them. I'd summarise the situation as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For any code where people have already accepted the initial agreement and made copies of the code, that agreement stands irrevocably. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In all other cases (no agreement has been accepted) you can do as you wish with your code. (Delete any or all records, amend offered licence, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence of &quot;already accepted offers&quot;, code which is &quot;out there&quot; retains the old licence, as do copies of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14599" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T00:07:49.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9357" CreationDate="2020-02-20T10:20:19.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very murky...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application's relevant parts run on the user's machine, you aren't distributing anything.&#xA;If it runs on your server, you arent't distributing anything.&#xA;In neither case would GPL kick in, as I understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by FSF's interpretation (not court validated, as far as I know), &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; software that can only be used with something GPLed makes it a derivative, thus bound by GPL. Which makes quite a lot of sense to me, but I'd factor in how tight/extensive the use is. (IANAL, IANYL, I don't play one on TV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, from what you say, company policy would forbid such use. Or at least take a very dim view of it. Better stay clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T10:20:19.617" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9349" CreationDate="2020-02-20T10:22:10.113" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are writing the software under contract with the company, so the rights aren't yours to begin with...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T10:22:10.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-20T23:36:54.943" Score="3" ViewCount="582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a task at work which requires me to build AI that can do general game playing. Contemplating this task, I have found several games that I would like to use in doing training and analysis to learn &quot;general game playing skills&quot;. This is similar to what was done with AlphaStar. Most of the games in question are released GPL for src code, but the graphics and music are CC BY-NC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will not be redistributing the game software or associated media at all (just using it for machine learning).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will be playing the game manually at first to understand the mechanics and getting paid to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will be using the game for machine learning, and the ML will not be &quot;looking&quot; at the graphics nor &quot;listening&quot; to the music, only analyzing strategy and such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The product of the analysis will result in ML models which may be used for commercial purposes later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concerning #2 - If I got fiscally compensated for my time playing a CC By-NC game, does this violate the license? It's not much different from people who play such games in tournaments for prize money I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concerning #3 - If I told a machine to play a CC BY-NC game while I get paid for it, would I be violating the license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Concerning #4 - If I trained ML using a CC BY-NC (or BY-SA or BY-ND) game, and my company used the trained models for commercial purposes would this violate the contract? (It's a similar question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8019/using-output-of-a-cc-by-nc-ai-algorithm-in-a-commercial-product&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer to any of these questions change if the src code is GPL and the media is CC BY-NC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, Blizzard has released this &lt;a href=&quot;http://blzdistsc2-a.akamaihd.net/AI_AND_MACHINE_LEARNING_LICENSE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EULA&lt;/a&gt; which basically says you can use the Starcraft software in order to build AI which you are allowed to sell, but you cannot re-sell the starcraft software itself (nor modifications thereof.) I know this is different from a CC BY-NC license. But it's a great idea, because it opens the market to bot developers to build bots by interacting with their software -- in turn hyping up the game and increasing their user base to other types of users. My use of CC BY-NC games for a similar purpose can only be beneficial to such game creators right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17302" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T23:36:54.943" Title="Can I use CC BY-NC software for machine learning and analysis purposes?" Tags="|gpl|creative-commons|intellectual-property|software-use|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9358" CreationDate="2020-02-21T05:49:36.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My question is : must I ask permission to all these authors (there are 19) when I fix a bug, develop, or even delete parts of their code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally certainly not, since the GPL allows you to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Socially, as a courtesy, you might inform (once in a while) the authors that you modified it. There are likely to be happy of that and grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I feel honored when someone just reads the  GPL code that I wrote (professionally, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/gcc-melt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bismon&lt;/a&gt;, or personally as a hobby e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; or just &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/misc-basile/blob/master/manydl.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;manydl.c&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). By past experience, this does not happen often. I even feel very proud when someone &lt;em&gt;compiles&lt;/em&gt; the GPL code that I wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coq&lt;/a&gt; community is in practice mostly made of academics (I happen to attend several INRIA seminars mentioning Coq proofs). These people are likely to feel happy if you told them that you did read their papers or their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T05:57:35.793" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T05:57:35.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-21T11:06:07.923" Score="5" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building an application and I want to use OpenMoji in it, but with modified colors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I wanted to add &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All emojis designed by OpenMoji – the open-source emoji and icon&#xA;  project. License: CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into the &quot;About&quot; section. But I read the license and it says that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So looks like OpenMoji with modified color are also CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed. Does it mean I need to provide a download link for recolored OpenMoji in my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do according to this license in my situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17307" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T14:03:13.023" Title="Using modified CC BY-SA 4.0 images in app?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6557" CreationDate="2020-02-21T20:01:13.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that GPL specifically states that how you &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the program is your own business. Getting/putting data from/to BigEvilProgram is just regular use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shipping a GPL program together with BigEvilProgram say on a CD is distributing a mere aggregation, clearly allowed. Whoever installs that stuff is using it, also in the clear. Must make sure any recipient knows what is GPLed (and the attending rights), though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least Data General's DG/UX shipped gcc and other GPL stuff as their &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; userland, where it certainly would interact daily with all sorts of non-GPLed stuff.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T20:01:13.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2653" CreationDate="2020-02-21T20:06:18.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any combined work has to abide by the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; pieces. If one of them is &quot;ambiguous&quot;, the whole's license is ambiguous...  and might even make the result illegal to distribute, if the terms contradict. For example, GPL forbids &quot;further restrictions&quot;, so combining with anything whose license imposes &quot;further restrictions&quot; creates something you might be allowed to use (but the other license may forbid &quot;use with GPLed software, for one), but not distribute at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T20:06:18.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-23T08:00:43.310" Score="3" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've searched the web for information about this, but haven't found a clear answer, that I understand at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have created an Flask app, which utilizes libraries such as Pandas, NumPy, Scikit Learn and some others. This app is eventually meant to be used for commercial use mainly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to add their licenses somewhere, when I only import the libraries, and not redistributing their code? If so, where? &#xA;Since it's not open source and it is a web app, do I need to add it somewhere on my site, is it any best standards to where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to credit these libraries anyway, but I just want to be sure I'm not doing anything wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also one of the functions is to deliver back files in e.g. Excel formats, PDF and PowerPoint, do I need to do anything with licenses regarding this? Since two of them are Microsoft owned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-03T11:01:20.177" Title="Using third-party libraries in my webapp (Python)" Tags="|license-recommendation|website|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-23T10:02:30.910" Score="5" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using &lt;strong&gt;bumptech/glide&lt;/strong&gt; for loading images in my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the License i saw that most of the library was licensed under the Apache License except for the AnimatedGifEncoder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;License for third_party/gif_encoder/AnimatedGifEncoder.java and&#xA;  third_party/gif_encoder/LZWEncoder.java:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No copyright asserted on the source code of this class. May be used for any purpose, however, refer to the Unisys LZW patent for&#xA;  restrictions on use of the associated LZWEncoder class. Please forward&#xA;  any corrections to kweiner@fmsware.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not using any &lt;strong&gt;GIFS&lt;/strong&gt; so should i just fork Glide and remove the AnimatedGifEncoder from the library or should i just ignore this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17314" LastEditorUserId="17314" LastEditDate="2020-02-24T07:29:58.770" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T07:29:58.770" Title="Bumptech glide licensing" Tags="|licensing|commercial|patents|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-23T16:42:36.407" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a specialized binary file parser using &lt;a href=&quot;http://kaitai.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kaitai Struct&lt;/a&gt;. In brief, the file formats are described in YAML documents according to a custom spec called KSY, which are then passed to a code generator to produce source code for any of several target languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kaitai's documentation recommends using a &lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.kaitai.io/ksy_reference.html#_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metadata field&lt;/a&gt; to specify the license of the document, but I have concerns about what licensing the document itself under my preferred FOSS license, MPL 2.0, would mean. In particular, I am concerned whether or not the license is flexible enough to cover my use case. There is no notice of the selected license in the generated code, and there is no means to add a license notice or related copyright notices to the generated code. There is a way to add arbitrary comments via docstrings, but there is no guarantee that these docstrings will actually appear, depending on the target language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to ensure any distributed software using modified or unmodified versions of my KSY documents, as well as any software using code generated from said documents, must also distribute said documents under the same license. To this end, would licensing each KSY document under MPL 2.0 be sufficient? If not, if there were a reliable way to add a license notice to the generated code, would that be sufficient? Or should I consider a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17317" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T16:42:36.407" Title="Licensing auto-generated code under MPL 2.0?" Tags="|license-notice|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9374" CreationDate="2020-02-24T12:27:00.830" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm playing around with creating a sound mixer for TTRPGs, I was thinking this could pull in external sounds from other sources but I'm not sure how this would interact with non commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application isn't delivered with Non Commercial content but does allow pulling in NC content from a third party would this restrict me from charging for the application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17325" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T13:59:03.977" Title="Linking to CC-BY-NC Content" Tags="|commercial|non-commercial|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9373" CreationDate="2020-02-24T13:49:31.377" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your application does not rely on those as an integral part and the sound files are not distributed with your application: no issue. Just offers your user the possibility to use whatever sound source they personally are comfortable with, and you're fine; it is also permissible to provide some default sources. The sound files are only data the users work with - they are not your content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise one could make the argument that the manufacturer would need permission for whatever documents if they want to allow their users to work with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However should strongly consider to NOT directly linking any files for download by URL from 3rd-party servers, but directing the user to the usual download pages of their distributors. Give your users instructions as to where s/he has to place the sound files for consumption by your programme. Directly linking resources for download from 3rd-party servers without their permission might be considered in violation of the terms of service and might make you liable to damages, especially if you have commercial interest in your programme yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-02-24T13:59:03.977" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T13:59:03.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9376" CreationDate="2020-02-24T17:58:24.667" Score="2" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/minizip-asm.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; nodejs package and it is labelled as &quot;zlib like&quot; with no further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if any, are the implications of the license being zlib like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17327" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T04:45:21.230" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T14:03:45.443" Title="Using a &quot;zlib like&quot; license" Tags="|licensing|crayon-licenses|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9375" CreationDate="2020-02-25T13:54:51.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The package you link contains an actual version of zlib - which in turn comes with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/madler/zlib/blob/cacf7f1d4e3d44d871b605da3b647f07d718623f/README&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;readme&lt;/a&gt; which has a license section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The zlib-license in itself is very permissive (basically a &quot;do what you want&quot;) and only asks for attribution when you use it and indication of changes when you re-distribute changed source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This noted, the package itself is still of somewhat questionable license as it does not explicitly contain its own license and wording (especially the sentence on &quot;The library has been entirely written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler; it does not include third-party code.&quot; obviously cannot be true - but the intention should be clear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to be really legally safe you will still need to contact the authors and ask them to clarify... maybe send them a PR with an appropriately adopted version of the zlib license (don't be lengthy, the license also asks to not send lengthy legal documents ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T14:03:45.443" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T14:03:45.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9378" CreationDate="2020-02-25T16:15:56.153" Score="4" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use MIT licensed library in program when I publish it how do I create copyright notice for it because I already created LICENSE.md file with license for my project. Note: I didn't edit libraries code I only used it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17333" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T22:38:53.350" Title="Question about MIT licensed library" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2020-02-25T17:43:27.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the binary, it's common practise to display the credits in an 'About' section or similar. There you list your programme (version) with credits and license and the names and licenses of the libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for instance this &lt;a href=&quot;https://keepass.info/help/base/credits.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;keepass page&lt;/a&gt; as example where the about section is put online on a webpage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your source distribution you likely don't need to change anything: you have your license on your code, the libraries on theirs - irrespective whether you have them inside your repository (then the complete code incl. their license) or not as part of your repo at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As uaual: I'm not a layer, take my word with a grain of salt :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T17:43:27.273" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9380" CreationDate="2020-02-25T21:16:46.223" Score="11" ViewCount="670" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine you have a proprietary project (non open source), and by mistake you added a dependency to a library with a strong copyleft license. You have already distributed your code. And you realize that now you have to open source your code due to this dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to remove this dependency and keep your proprietary source code closed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your advice ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17334" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-02-27T13:01:31.467" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T20:15:41.257" Title="Is it legal to remove a dependency with a copyleft license from a proprietary project?" Tags="|law|proprietary-code|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9379" CreationDate="2020-02-25T21:36:44.867" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Law is complicated and varies by jurisdiction. In the United States (and probably many other jurisdictions), a court generally cannot compel you to release your source code simply because you did not abide by the terms of a copyleft copyright license. In this situation, you have committed copyright infringement (based on the facts you've presented), but the remedies for copyright infringement are monetary damages and injunctions to cease future distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of what complicates the case is that the GPL says you may exercise certain permissions pursuant to certain obligations. If you exercise the permissions without meeting the obligations, the question is: have you simply acted outside the license altogether, or have you acted within the license but failed to meet your obligations? In the latter case, how should the law resolve the situation? Different jurisdictions may answer this question quite differently, and even within a jurisdiction the answer could possibly turn on case-by-case particulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the best thing you can do immediately is to cease distribution of the infringing version (as you say you've already done in your hypothetical). From there, it is up to the copyright holder whose copyrighted work you infringed whether to take legal action against you, or ask for a settlement in lieu of legal action, or do nothing at all. Regardless of what the law may do, it is not impossible that the copyright holder could ask that you release your source code or else they will pursue a lawsuit. In that case, you can decline their offer and leave it to the court whether and how your infringement will be punished under the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eben Moglen (a lawyer who has advised the FSF substantially) offers the following explanation (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/61292/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The claim that a GPL violation could lead to the forcing open of proprietary code that has wrongfully included GPL'd components is simply wrong. There is no provision in the Copyright Act to require distribution of infringing work on altered terms. What copyright plaintiffs are entitled to, under the Act, are damages, injunctions to prevent infringing distribution, and--where appropriate--attorneys' fees. A defendant found to have wrongfully included GPL'd code in its own proprietary work can be mulcted in damages for the distribution that has already occurred, and prevented from distributing its product further. That's a sufficient disincentive to make wrongful use of GPL'd program code. And it is all that the Copyright Act permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though he speaks from the perspective of a United States lawyer -- indeed, the Copyright Act he references is an American law, so the answer may differ internationally. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9386/50&quot;&gt;MadHatter's answer&lt;/a&gt; for some international particulars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that GPLv3, section 8, explicitly grants a copyright holder the right to permanently terminate your rights under the GPL if you violate those terms. If that happens, it doesn't impact your proprietary project, since you've already removed its dependency on the GPL-licensed code, but it would prevent you from using that dependency in other correctly-licensed projects in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-02-27T20:15:41.257" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T20:15:41.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9377" CreationDate="2020-02-25T22:38:53.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your program just &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the library, it should be enough to state in your README file that it is being used (and give a --hopefully reliable-- address where to get it, state it's license for potential users of your code with e.g. terminal GNU allergy) and perhaps give instructions to do so in INSTALLING.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing so has the advantage that users can benefit from any library updates (might add somewhere &quot;tested with libxyz version 0.0.95&quot; or so), perhaps use the version already installed (by their distribution? for other packages using it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T22:38:53.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9385" CreationDate="2020-02-26T12:28:43.457" Score="4" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have forked an open source project after the original maintainer has not responded for almost a year.&#xA;The original developer left things in a bit of a mess however, and while there is a LICENCE file with BSD-3 inside, there's an MIT licence in comments at the top of 2 files in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning on refactoring, and perhaps removing, these 2 files, but I'm not sure what happens to the licences within? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I just put both licences in the LICENCE file, or are they similar enough that I can put one or the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If putting one licence in, it seems BSD-3 is more restrictive, and hence that would need to be the one I put in the licence file, but the MIT licence explicitly says not to remove it. (Does that apply if I remove/refactor the files it is in?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17344" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T10:18:31.767" Title="How to handle a project with both MIT and BSD-3 licence" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9383" CreationDate="2020-02-27T10:18:31.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the original author is not available to clarify the situation, the best thing you can do is assume that those two files were under the MIT license when they got added to the project and have been sub-licensed under the BSD-3 license when they became part of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for those two files, you must comply with the requirements of both licenses, which effectively means that you can't remove the MIT license from those files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep the licensing situation manageable, I would recommend that you do not copy code from those two files into other files of the project, as you would have to copy the MIT license along with it. Otherwise, you can refactor as you like and if in the process one of those MIT-licensed files becomes obsolete, you can just delete it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, it might be worthwhile to mention in the LICENSE file that those two files have been sub-licensed from the MIT license and that that license also applies to those two files, but not to the rest of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T10:18:31.767" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9379" CreationDate="2020-02-27T12:59:37.493" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to my colleague apsillers (and noting IANAL/IANYL) I disagree somewhat.  The law is indeed complex, and does indeed vary by jurisdiction.  Just how much became clear to me in a talk at FOSDEM 2018 by three experienced lawyers, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I wrote up for LWN&lt;/a&gt; (the article also links to the original video).  The parts specifically relevant to your question are the availability of orders for specific performance, and third-party rights.  The former deals with whether a court might order someone who had violated a licence such as the GPL to perform a specific act, such as releasing source code to a recipient of binaries, instead of merely paying compensatory damages.  The latter deals with whether third parties, such as the recipients of those binaries, have standing to bring such suits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusions of the panellists shows how much things vary by jurisdiction.  In the US, they said, third-party rights depend on the wording, and orders for specific performance are theoretically available but are rarely granted, which broadly agrees with what Eben Moglen said above.  In the UK, no third-party rights exist, and specific performance is not available.  In civil-law jurisdictions such as much of the EU, however, third-party rights do exist, and specific performance is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in civil-law jurisdictions, such as Germany (where courts have already held on several occasions that the GPL is a contract, and can be litigated as one), it is very possible that a recipient of your code can sue, and ask a court to order you to release the rest of your code under GPL, with some likelihood of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover (said one speaker) in these jurisdictions, acceptance of the GPL's conditions can be signalled by many means, including conduct, and is probably irrevocable.  So removing the dependency stops you continuing to widen the pool of people who might so sue, but it doesn't make those who are already in that pool disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T12:59:37.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9274" CreationDate="2020-02-27T13:28:13.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPL is intended to provide free (as in FSF-free) software that can be used with closed (propietary) software, as a compromise (they'd like &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; software to be free, they compromise in that only a part of the work is free instead of nothing at all, hoping to encourage use of the free part by others). Thus the uses above are legal, even the intended (if not really desired) uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you are allowed to use the above (GPL/LGPL doesn't/can't regulate private use), whenever you distribute the combination to a client, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; tell them that a part is LGPL, and (as the license details) give access to the exact source code (as modified by you to work with the closed part, if applicable) used to (re)create the free part and rebuild the whole. Common courtesy is to give complete build machinery and any documentation to replicate the original, if so desired (I believe the license requires this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, just an enthusiast who learned a bit about software licensing and has followed flamewars around it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2020-02-27T13:45:26.810" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T13:45:26.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9366" CreationDate="2020-02-27T17:58:03.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; you distribute in any way. Just showing them on your website is (arguably) not &quot;distributing&quot;. In any case, you could place the modified icons/emoji somewhere a user can get them, with the respective notices (taken from so-and-so, modified by you, under CC-BY-SA) and link from e.g. the &quot;About&quot; or such page of your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T17:58:03.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-28T18:21:17.677" Score="3" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe context is important, so here is a little story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's imagine (all characters and events in this story - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional) that Alice has developed a software, 'Sierra' - starting from a preexisting educational code - during her PhD, and has subsequently used it and developed it during her academic career. 'Sierra' is software for base scientific research with little or no purpose outside academia, and many people who worked with Alice over the years have contributed to it in some way. The code was never made public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Alice dies prematurely, and the last 3 people working with her - Beth, Charlie, Dave - decide that the best way forward is to release the whole thing as open source. Other previous collaborators and contributors agree, and they get the permission from the author of the educational software which 'Sierra' was based upon (the closest person to an owner of the code after Alice) who agrees , but does not want to be further involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dave, who is still employed on the last active project of Alice, sets about to tidy, debug and test the code, so that it is in a state where it can be made public. For reasons not entirely clear, things go south: Dave rebuffs all offers of help and suggestions from Beth and Charlie and eventually releases 'Sierra' under &lt;code&gt;EUPL&lt;/code&gt; license. Because of Dave's unwillingness to collaborate, Beth and Charlie decide to fork the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: can Beth and Charlie change the license of their fork from &lt;code&gt;EUPL&lt;/code&gt; to, for example, &lt;code&gt;GPL2&lt;/code&gt;? The reasons are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;EUPL&lt;/code&gt; is designed with compatibility with EU law in mind and, while this is not a problem per se, it is also not relevant for scientific software which is not tied to the EU and is by design international in scope and objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dave has chosen the license without consulting with any of the other previous contributors. It is true that he has done a lot of work on the code, but surely that doesn't transfer ownership to him, enabling him to take this decision by himself. In addition, the choice of the license seems to be at least in part motivated by political reasons, which is inappropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'Sierra' works with a customized version of another software which is under &lt;code&gt;GPL2&lt;/code&gt;. The two licenses are compatible, but it simply makes sense to distribute both programs with the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not just a question of relicensing, and whether one licence allows conversion to the other. Even if that is not the case, there is also the question of whether the original choice was in fact legitimate (hence the story above) and therefore whether the change can be done regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dave was in charge of preparing the official release and he did major updates and changes to the code, so he has some IP claim. However, there were several other contributors (besides Alice) before him, and it was implied that the release of 'Sierra' would be made in agreement with Beth and Charlie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the original educational code approved the &lt;code&gt;EUPL&lt;/code&gt; (he was the only person consulted by Dave), but since he is not interested in being involved, he would likely be fine with whatever is decided by Dave, Beth and Charlie. Given the purely scientific nature of the software, the legal heirs of Alice are very unlikely to have an opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it boils down to two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dave had the right to unilaterally pick a license (with the only approval of the author of the original educational code). If so can the license of the forked project be changed from &lt;code&gt;EUPL&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dave did not have the right to choose a license without consulting other former contributors. In which case, can Beth and Charlie do whatever they want with their fork?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17367" LastEditorUserId="17367" LastEditDate="2020-03-01T11:41:30.067" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T11:41:30.067" Title="Changing the open source license of a forked project (EUPL to GPL)" Tags="|licensing|gpl|relicensing|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-29T03:29:18.637" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;So all Wordpress plugins are supposed to be GPLv2 or higher. We'd like to fork a plugin that currently integrates with one system and change it to integrate with a different system. There's a readme.txt file with the following in it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License: GPLv2 or later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License URI: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version on GitHub is much older than the version on wordpress.org so we'd like to base it off the wordpress.org version. Usually, GPL licensed code has the GPL header in every file, but none of the files in this plugin - except for the readme - have any headers at all. From what I've read, putting the notice in every file is recommended but optional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming that it's still ok to fork it? We'd give credit to the original author and release it on github (under the same license). But it would be far newer code than the author currently has on Github. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just want to double check since I'm fairly new to the GPL license and releasing open source code based on someone else's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17372" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T03:29:18.637" Title="Does every file need to have GPLv2+ mentioned in the header to be GPLv2?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-03-01T10:17:09.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9393" CreationDate="2020-02-29T03:54:18.833" Score="5" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing open-source code based on another author's open-source code. The original author licensed the code under the GNU Public License and copyrighted it under his name. I am, of course, retaining the original license and won't remove his name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm confused as to whether I can now copyright the code under my name, if it's already copyrighted under his name. How is this usually written in the code? For example, do I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2013 &quot;Original Author&quot;&#xA;Copyright (C) 2020 &quot;Me&quot;&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software... etc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the copyright belong solely to the original author unless I change it completely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17373" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T05:37:39.383" Title="How do I use GNU licensed code copyrighted by the original author?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9392" CreationDate="2020-02-29T05:37:39.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the way you show is exactly how the copyright notice should look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to give date ranges, if applicable, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 1993 - 2001 the other&#xA;Copyright 2019 - 2020 Me&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright belongs to all people who contributed to the content of the file, each to what was individually written. That in turn means that you should add your copyright only to files of the project which you actually made modifications to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T05:37:39.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7486" CreationDate="2020-02-29T10:27:10.023" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a concrete example. I'm considering creating a non-upgradable consumer product using an ATtiny85 microcontroller that, in part, uses a GPL2 library to control a string of RGB LEDs. (there is an alternative MIT-licensed library that would also do the job, but let's ignore that). The GPL2 library is of course (being embedded with no OS) statically linked, but is used unmodified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's theoretically possible to disassemble the device and use an in-circuit programmer to reflash the MCU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it would satisfy the letter and the intent of GPL2 to make available a stripped .o or .a file with the compiled proprietary code (no source), a link to the GPL library source on github, and a script to link the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17375" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T10:27:10.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-29T14:20:35.747" Score="4" ViewCount="1472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of creating an open source Unity video game. I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; to have an overview of the MIT license. But there are still some things that are not very clear to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone want to fork the project and create a proprietary or pay version of it, what does it mean for him to add a copy of the license and a copyright notice ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the project includes C# code or shaders that I didn't write (SteamVR, Photon Unity Networking, TextMesh Pro, &quot;Procedural patterns&quot; from the ShaderGraph package, library from the asset store, ...), what should I do ? Should I avoid including them in a git repository, and explain in README.md how to add these dependencies after a clone of the project ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I use a built library (dll, ...), should I add a notice concerning the license ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use Creative Commons assets in the project ? How to deal with the ShareAlike condition ? And with NonCommercial, knowing that the MIT license allows commercial reuse ? Should I add a notice (text file) next to an asset for the Attribution condition, or can I just add a line in the credits ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use a specific license for a given script or asset (instead of MIT) ? I saw that it is possible with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/headers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Mozilla License&lt;/a&gt; (CC0 license for a given file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I add a licence header at the top of source code files ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance for your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17377" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T18:16:21.387" Title="Questions about MIT license for a Unity video game" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9395" CreationDate="2020-02-29T18:16:21.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a lot of questions. IANAL, but let's look at them one by one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who forks an MIT-licensed project is bound by the license. Namely it requires to keep the copyright notice - which includes binary distribution of derivatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inclusion of 3rd-party code: If you can do without that code in your own repository, explaining how to install the dependencies is best. You can include it for simplicity's sake, if distribution is permissible (mind their licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using libraries in builds most likely requires you to add a notice as to their license for &lt;em&gt;binary&lt;/em&gt; distributions (again: check their license). In your code you don't need to mention that if it doesn't contain the library - otherwise probably yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bundling assets with a different license usually is ok, when they can be considered a separate piece of work. If you distribute it as bundled work, then do mind to abide by its license. That means you cannot sell a piece of software with non-commercial assets bundled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle you can use different licenses for different files. Mind though, that when it comes to distribution you are bound by the most restrictive one. It makes the whole process much more complicated. Try to use as few different licenses as possible. Your example with CC0 for a single file is actually a relaxation of restrictions for a single file, thus does not pose such problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good practise to note the license in file headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T18:16:21.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9389" CreationDate="2020-03-01T11:40:40.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, the joys of licensing lacking salience during academic code development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice has developed a software, 'Sierra' - starting from a preexisting educational code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is the licensing status of the code Alice imported.  If that was under a copyleft licence, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; that followed may have to be distributed under a similar licence, or not at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice has developed a software ... during her PhD ... Beth, Charlie, Dave - decide that the best way forward is to release the whole thing as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice, Beth, Charlie and Dave all work for this university.  Many universities have policy about who is the rightsholder in code created as part of paid academic endeavour.  If it turns out that the university holds the rights in this code, then what Alice, Beth, Charlie, and Dave agree is not very important compared to what the university wants.  If it turns out Alice retained the rights in her work, then her executors will need to be consulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other previous collaborators and contributors agree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say what?  There are other contributors, and their contributions were not made under a clear CLA/CTA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is basically a mess.  First of all, the licence under which Alice acquired the original code will inform any subsequent licensing decisions as to the terms under which the current codebase will be distributed.  Then the &lt;strong&gt;rightsholders&lt;/strong&gt; in the current code, including &lt;em&gt;previous collaborators and contributors&lt;/em&gt;, must agree to distribute Sierra under those terms.  If you can get that all lined up, you have a chance of being able to get this codebase ready for release as-is, with a clear licence.  Then, &lt;strong&gt;and only then&lt;/strong&gt;, can &quot;&lt;em&gt;Beth and Charlie decide to fork the project&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, assuming the rightsholder in their contributions agrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dave almost certainly has no right to distribute the codebase under EUPL, and can be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, this codebase is now so entangled that it can never be cleanly released.  This is why it is &lt;strong&gt;vital&lt;/strong&gt; to sort out rights and licensing from the very beginning of development, in this case, the minute Alice downloaded someone else's code, and started to hack on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T11:40:40.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9224" CreationDate="2020-03-01T16:48:13.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you should go for GPL, check them out. They allow any use, must distribute full source. If somebody makes a million bucks, good for them! But they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; give full source to anybody who gets the program, no futher strings attached (except for those of GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read and think over David Wheeler's essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make your Open Source software GPL-compatible. Or else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Go check the various &quot;what license should I use&quot; sites, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense&lt;/a&gt;, see and compare licenses at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;. True, it is work, but it isn't a decision to be taken lightly either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, make &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; you are the owner of the code (any pieces from third parties? other collaborators? you wrote this as part of your job/studies (then it probably belongs to your employer/school)?). If not, you'll have to get any (substantial) contributor/co-owner get to approve the license formally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:48:13.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9189" CreationDate="2020-03-01T16:56:23.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: In my (IANAL) opinion, no. That is, as long as you ship your program and the modules separately, and the final user combines them, and your program doesn't depend intimately on the GPL piece (what &quot;intimately&quot; is here would be up to a court to decide). But FSF contends that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; linking to a work creates a derivative, thus linking/using GPL code forces distributing under GPL. I see where that comes from, but my personal opinion is that that is a very thin argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:56:23.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9156" CreationDate="2020-03-01T17:06:04.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Translating to another language is definitively creating a derivative work. You must keep the original notices in that case. Common courtesy dictates linking to the upstream project, perhaps notifying then of the translation; include/mention any tools used in the translation so anybody can update for new upstream versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T17:06:04.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9116" CreationDate="2020-03-01T17:56:23.910" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe AGPL satisfies your needs. Note that forbidding certain uses makes the license not open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2020-03-01T18:15:28.833" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T18:15:28.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9098" CreationDate="2020-03-01T18:24:23.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Presumably &quot;MIT/Apache&quot; means &quot;user can select which one to abide by&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there is the question if the relicensing was legal in the first place...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T18:24:23.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9370" CreationDate="2020-03-02T15:13:51.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I am not Lawyer and nothing below is legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each library is likely to have its own license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some licenses (GPL, for instance) would require you to opensource your code should you use libraries under such license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Depending on the license, you may (or may not) be required to give a credit or state author(s) copyright in some way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For instance, Flask has BSD License. Summary for BSD license can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As one of the options of giving credit, one may consider listing all the used libraries somewhere (at the footer, at a specific page on the web site, etc.) with links and all the relevant information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17020" LastEditorUserId="17020" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T10:08:01.573" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T10:08:01.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-04T01:02:36.613" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;As GNU GPL v2.0 allows commercial use as long as we disclose sources under the same license. I have some confusion about use of such application. This is my situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commercial software I am developing needs to use virtual USB ports.&#xA;I can't write a software for USB port virtualization. But there is a software with GNU GPLv2.0 license that does it. I am not incorporating their code in my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the user will have to create(or I might set up virtual ports) on their computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean I need to disclose the source of my software too under GNU GPLv2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ship/recommend such software separately along with my product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I sell the computers with GNU GPL v2.0 software along with my software installed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17394" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T11:23:36.650" Title="Question related to the use of GNU GPL v2.0" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-04T05:35:34.110" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will start off with this excerpt from Qt's legal faq to give some context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3.13. I have started development of a product using the open source version of Qt, can I now purchase a commercial version of Qt and move&#xA;  my code under that license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Products distributed under the commercial version of Qt must also be&#xA;  developed under the commercial version of Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you have already started the development with an open-source&#xA;  version of Qt and wish to move to a commercial license you need to&#xA;  have a written explicit permission from The Qt Company to facilitate&#xA;  this change. The Qt Company reserves the right to grant the permission&#xA;  at its own discretion...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be somewhat recent development, as I seem to recall a different answer to that question, and it was more in line with &quot;No, you can't, if you plan to distribute an application with a commercial license, you must also begin its development with a commercial license&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This didn't sound right with me at the time, and I am not surprised to see the answer has changed a bit. The company has a history of bending the truth barely enough to imply legal threat while being careful to stay away from liability for basically lying, in order to prop up sales of their commercial licensing. But still, this matter doesn't sound like something that's up to their whim. Or maybe they changed that because they realized it actually eats into their sales, and maybe even decided that for &quot;viable targets&quot; they may offer some retrospective licensing options or something, to make a bit more money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've read, licensing requirements is more of a distribution thing than development thing, at least in the case of the licenses I am familiar with. Their own commercial license can technically be whatever they want, within legal limits of course. So I guess as long as their commercial license has an explicit clause which says they get to say what situation you can come from and into their license, that may be true. Whether the license actually has such a clause I do not know, and may not even be relevant in cases that do not touch their commercial license at any point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about using opensource Qt for the development stage, then removing Qt as dependency altogether for the product release version? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or developing and initially releasing a product under LGPL, but dropping Qt in future releases and changing the product licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither switching dependencies nor switching license is unprecedented in the software world. But are there any lasting implications from previously used dependencies or licenses? To make that last question answerable, let's exclude the numerous arbitrary proprietary licenses and focus only on the popular FOS license in use today, such as GLP, LGPL, MIT, Apache, ZLib, BSD and similar. For example, the less permissive GPL, which makes it clear that all software, featuring GPL dependencies must also be distributed under GPL or a compatible license, but what about using it only during development and then dropping it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:05:36.997" Title="Any lasting licensing implications from previously used, subsequently dropped library dependencies or usage licenses?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|distribution|dependencies|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4875" CreationDate="2020-03-04T07:36:04.643" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a license specifically designed to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source-available software&lt;/a&gt; for non-commercial use, namely the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been some very strong characters in the history of open source software(!), but after cutting through all the messianic zeal, there is at least one very good reason for requiring open-source or free software to adhere to the 'official' definitions - which is that many big corporations are only prepared to adopt &lt;em&gt;fully&lt;/em&gt; free/open-source software. It is too big a risk for them to find that their commercial software has been tied in unexpected ways by a non free/open-source clause in the license of some software which they have used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this worry apply to Common Clause Licensed software? Note that the Commons Clause License FAQ includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;May I [...] “sell” my products using Commons Clause licensed components?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may develop on top of Commons Clause licensed software (adding applications, tools, utilities or plug-ins) and you may embed and redistribute Commons Clause software in a larger product [...] . You just can’t sell a product that consists in substance of the Commons Clause software and does not add value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here and elsewhere in the FAQ the intention is clearly to permit usage in commercial products which aren't &lt;strong&gt;entirely or substantially&lt;/strong&gt; the original product. Like much in open source, this hasn't been legally tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem obvious that another exception to worries about being 'infected' by a non-commercial license is the case of software development tools, where there is apparently no question that the source of the tool gets included into the product which the tool is used to develop. But even this is a grey area! Compilers, for instance, are software development tools, but part of their code very much does get included in software which they are used to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17349" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T07:36:04.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9410" CreationDate="2020-03-04T07:42:54.000" Score="4" ViewCount="874" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I make changes, updates or modifications to MPL-2.0 licensed code and start offering it as a service (SaaS) am I required to disclose those changes? Or does MPL-2.0 only require disclosing changes if the code was distributed as files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10500" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T12:12:03.833" Title="Do I have to disclose changes made to MPL-2.0 licensed code running on server?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9404" CreationDate="2020-03-04T11:23:36.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your software just needs a particular set of (virtual) USB ports and doesn't care how the user manages to achieve that, then your software is independent from the GPL tool to create virtual USB ports from a copyright perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the copyright licenses on the two pieces of software don't affect each other in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does that mean I need to disclose the source of my software too under GNU GPLv2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You can keep the source for your application private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I ship/recommend such software separately along with my product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, provided that you comply with the GPL requirements for the GPL tool (i.e., you inform the recipients that the tool is under the GPL license and you give them the possibility to obtain the source code for the version you distribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I sell the computers with GNU GPL v2.0 software along with my software installed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. It makes no difference if you distribute just the software or the software pre-installed on a piece of hardware.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, the GPL license does not forbid you to ask money in return for the software or the hardware/software combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T11:23:36.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9407" CreationDate="2020-03-04T12:12:03.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MPL-2.0 license does not define the term &quot;distribution&quot;, so the normal interpretation applies. This means that distribution only takes place when files are transferred from one party to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For server-side software offered in a SaaS setting, no transfer of the software takes place and thus also no distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute MPL-licensed software, you are not required to explicitly mention changes, but you are required to make the source code available alongside any binary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T12:12:03.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9283" CreationDate="2020-03-05T02:39:40.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the intent of LGPL, it is a license meant for libraries, to encourage use of free software even together/from closed source. Sort of a stopgap measure, &quot;we can't go GPL free here, no user wants to open all their stuff; as a compromise, &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; part is free but can be used with non-free parts&quot; (where GPL is all free or nothing). Also, LGPL originally was &quot;Library GPL&quot;,  today it reads &quot;Lesser GPL&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing GPL --&gt; LGPL transition at the user's discretion would be very much against the whole objective of the licenses. That you are allowed to consider anything under LGPL as GPL also (sort of implicit dual-licensing) is exactly in line with the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T02:39:40.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T11:13:38.650" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing an automatic machine learning software for researchers under a GPL license. This will allow them to use different ML algorithms on their data. Is it possible to offer an additional proprietary algorithm as a plug-in for a fee? The application wouldn't depend on the proprietary plug-in, neither they would be included in the base bundle and would be downloaded separately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17405" LastEditorUserId="17405" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T14:05:28.440" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T14:05:28.440" Title="Is it possible to have a proprietary commercial plug-in in a GPL licensed app?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9412" CreationDate="2020-03-05T12:50:25.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the code is all yours, you can do whatever you want. If it is based on/includes other GPL code, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; distribute under GPL or you aren't allowed at all to distribute the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL code to be combined with closed plugins goes against the spirit of GPL, so that makes not much sense. But you certainly can add a special dispensation to use closed plugins &lt;em&gt;using the public interface&lt;/em&gt; to your code. Murky, to say the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out the LGPL, it might be nearer what you want (it allows linking to closed source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T13:49:41.153" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T13:49:41.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9416" CreationDate="2020-03-05T15:12:38.340" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Linux kernel's RBT implementation has a nice trick of using the LSB bit of parent pointer as a node color. If I were to implement a RBT for my proprietary software and use the LSB as a node color bit as well, would it be considered a derived work (and have to licence my code under GPL v2.0) or independent implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17401" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T23:50:43.337" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:50:43.337" Title="Implement a RBT for proprietary software using idea from Linux kernel" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T15:44:17.840" Score="5" ViewCount="576" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently looking into a very useful git-related development tool (it's nothing whatsoever to do with me, except that I use it, so I won't state here which tool it is). I bring it up because that project has decided to remain closed source (not even 'source available') due to worries that otherwise some larger company could take its codebase and productize it with no recompense. The developers hope to eventually charge for their own product, and don't want to be 'gazumped'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked into this issue on my own behalf. I was initially thinking that surely there was some way for the developers to release their source in a usefully 'open' way but still to avoid this worry, if they wanted to. Now I'm really not so sure!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While looking into it, I did come across the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked around, and I now understand that this site is purely for discussion of strictly open (OSI) and free (FSF) licenses, not for variants and related concepts. Nevertheless, I'm hoping it is on topic enough to ask here for some authoritative links to discussions of the (moral or practical) &lt;em&gt;problems&lt;/em&gt; with attempting to add non-commercial clauses to (what would otherwise be) free or open licenses, i.e. informed, authoritative discussion of why this &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do realise that any such a modification to a free/open license definitely &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; meet the widely accepted definitions of free and open. That's true, but it's not an answer as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it's desirable for this to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am already aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&lt;/a&gt; but it does seem really rather dated now. Importantly one key, multiply repeated point is that people certainly can make money out of open source software since it is easy to simply make available copies on physical distribution media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) and to (morally and legally) charge for this - but this isn't a plausible business model any more, I assume almost anyone would agree. So anything which makes relevant points without relying on that argument would be particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17349" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T13:55:41.723" Title="Links to authoritative discussion of why not to add non-commercial clauses to otherwise free/open licenses?" Tags="|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2020-03-05T16:16:30.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright protects creative expression, not ideas. So feel free to use such bit twiddling tricks in your software. TBH, tagging pointers in the lower or upper bits is a fairly standard technique in low-level C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are of course most welcome to copy Linux' implementation into your software, but then the GPL would clearly apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be worth pointing out that some organizations want to steer very very clear of intellectual property infringement. In such a setting, even just reading open source code would be “dangerous”: (1) you might accidentally copy copyrightable aspects of the code into your software, or (2) some of the ideas and techniques you see could be patented. When such an organization would want to copy functionality from another software, it would attempt a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room design&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T16:16:30.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T16:17:04.267" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Python module, pygalmesh (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nschloe/pygalmesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/pygalmesh/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyPi&lt;/a&gt;), published under the &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; license. It essentially interfaces a part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cgal.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CGAL&lt;/a&gt; which is published under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cgal.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL3&lt;/a&gt; and uses other pieces of software with different licenses (e.g., Eigen with MPL2). I understand that this is fine since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT is GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To install pygalmesh, the user first has to download and install CGAL (e.g., via &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/sid/libcgal-dev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian/Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;) and Eigen, and then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pip install pygalmesh&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting binary library &lt;code&gt;_pygalmesh.so&lt;/code&gt; contains both compiled pygalmesh, Eigen, CGAL code (and more, like pybind11). I believe the user then has to adhere to all restrictions induced by those licenses, meaning, for example, she cannot include this library into another piece of software and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; publish the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The command&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;pip show pygalmesh&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;however simply shows &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; as license as defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nschloe/pygalmesh/blob/master/setup.cfg#L10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. My concern is that the user might be mislead into thinking that &lt;code&gt;_pygalmesh.so&lt;/code&gt; is completely &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; as well. &lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Is it correct to say pygalmesh is &lt;em&gt;MIT&lt;/em&gt; or should it rather say &lt;em&gt;MIT + GPL3&lt;/em&gt; or  &lt;em&gt;MIT + GPL3 + MPL2&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Mixed&lt;/em&gt; or something entirely different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15610" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T22:56:52.030" Title="MIT code interfacing GPL3 library," Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9417" CreationDate="2020-03-05T22:56:52.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In no way does GPL forbid mangling the code whichever way you fancy. It places conditions on &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the licenses allow doing the combining, no problem. You are right (partially) in that you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; distribute the combination, as you would have to distribute the whole hairball under GPL, and at least you can't do that for the closed part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T22:56:52.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9414" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:01:32.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure the idea isn't original in Linux. If you rummage around in oldish data structure books (or books on assembly language programming, LISP implementations, or perhaps even in Knuth's &quot;The Art of Computer Programming&quot;) you'll find rampant reuse of &quot;spare&quot; bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:01:32.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9405" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:05:36.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the structure of the program was (heavily) influenced by the (now not used) piece, it could be argued that it is derivative. See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox of Theseus' ship&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:05:36.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2020-03-05T23:49:24.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding restrictions makes the software less useful for reuse. That is the principal reason. Exactly the same argument speaks against the license proliferation (read Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make your Open Source software GPL-compatible. Or else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for a lucid discussion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the original author has an advantage over others when it comes to being able to give support. The sucessful open source shops leveraged this. But it certainly isn't the only way to earn money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T23:49:24.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2020-03-06T02:53:54.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSI makes their position quite clear in the annotated &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rationale: The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an open-source utility perspective, this makes sense. Neither GNU/Linux nor the Apache web server (to name some seminal FLOSS successes) would have taken off long-term if they didn't allow commercial use and redistribution, being commonly resold (modified or commercially bundled with other software) or run within commercial services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the free software side, freedom is paramount, so any terms that dictate how you may not redistribute the software would not be accepted without extremely good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that the modern ethos of FLOSS was formed by Richard Stallman's formation of the GNU project, it is worth looking at what values he put forward in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt; regarding commercialization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An awareness of service-based business models:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Nobody will use it if it is free, because that means they can't rely on any support.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“You have to charge for the program to pay for providing the support.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people would rather pay for GNU plus service than get GNU free without service, a company to provide just service to people who have obtained GNU free ought to be profitable.(4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your business needs to be able to rely on support, the only way is to have all the necessary sources and tools. Then you can hire any available person to fix your problem; you are not at the mercy of any individual. With Unix, the price of sources puts this out of consideration for most businesses. With GNU this will be easy. It is still possible for there to be no available competent person, but this problem cannot be blamed on distribution arrangements. GNU does not eliminate all the world's problems, only some of them. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote 4: Several such companies now exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A paradigm that prioritizes the economic value of &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;modifying&lt;/em&gt; software and dislike for an economic model that relies on a copyright monopoly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“My company needs a proprietary operating system to get a competitive edge.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU will remove operating system software from the realm of competition. You will not be able to get an edge in this area, but neither will your competitors be able to get an edge over you. You and they will compete in other areas, while benefiting mutually in this one. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Won't programmers starve?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restricting copying is not the only basis for business in software. It is the most common basis(7) because it brings in the most money. If it were prohibited, or rejected by the customer, software business would move to other bases of organization which are now used less often. There are always numerous ways to organize any kind of business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote 7: I think I was mistaken in saying that proprietary software was the most common basis for making money in software. It seems that actually the most common business model was and is development of custom software. That does not offer the possibility of collecting rents, so the business has to keep doing real work in order to keep getting income. The custom software business would continue to exist, more or less unchanged, in a free software world. Therefore, I no longer expect that most paid programmers would earn less in a free software world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear from these quotes that even in the early formation of the free software ideals, allowing commercial use presented an economic hurdle, but not an insurmountable one. Conversely, drafting a license that disallowed commercial use entirely would have (1) made this vision of free software as the core of future commerce impossible and (2) would have run afoul of the entire rest of the manifesto that speaks about freedom to use the and distribute software as one wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a practical problem that &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; is often ambiguous: does it include nonprofits? Even when they are using it to solicit donations? Do governments count as commercial? Is the profit-seeking nature of an agency performing distribution sufficient to categorize some use as commercial, despite no money changing hands for this particular software? In the specific case of the Commons Clause, the prohibition on commercial &amp;quot;hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software&amp;quot; has this kind of ambiguity: the prohibition on &amp;quot;consulting/support&amp;quot; seems dangerously broad. If I sell a book on how to use the software, or charge tuition on a course about using your software, am I in violation of the license? Possibly, if I include the software with my book, or install the software on the computers I use for the course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hazy field of categorization, alongside the strong historic non-monopoly commercial success of major FLOSS projects, has led the community to strongly reject non-commercial terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T13:55:41.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2020-03-06T08:41:07.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think apsillers has already done an excellent job of answering your main point, but I must take you up on a lesser one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am already aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&lt;/a&gt; but it does seem really rather dated now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't agree.  The idea of selling distribution media to cover your costs seems dated now, but here's the thing: it always was.  I worked for a client in the early '90s who used a lot of GNU software, and I persuaded them to buy the all-singing-all-dancing complete distro of all GNU software, which even at the time was (iirc) several hundred pounds.  Nobody at that time was under any illusion that this was anything other than a voluntary donation to GNU, with but the merest fig leaf of &lt;em&gt;ooh look, it's a commercial transaction&lt;/em&gt; to satisfy the auditors.  People understood then that you need to donate to keep the free software coming, and I hope they still understand that now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more fundamental idea, that &lt;strong&gt;it is OK to charge money for your software, but it is unethical to restrict your users' rights in order to shake them down&lt;/strong&gt;, I don't think has dated in the slightest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T08:41:07.497" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9426" CreationDate="2020-03-06T09:16:34.387" Score="8" ViewCount="2862" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one very cool app on GitHub, under the MIT license. However, for some reason, the author has not published the source code, only binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed under the MIT license to provide binaries only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask it here because I'm going to ask the author to publish the code, but I don't want to look rude or pretentious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: The app is based on .NET and at seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/reverse-engineering-your-net-applications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse engineering of .NET apps is somewhat relatively easy&lt;/a&gt;. It is possible that author intentionally created some kind of challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16973" LastEditorUserId="16973" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T21:51:11.323" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T21:51:11.323" Title="MIT-licensed app without the source code" Tags="|mit|distribution|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9425" CreationDate="2020-03-06T10:39:10.157" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license doesn't require source code to be published. It only requires that the license notice is kept intact. MIT-licensed binaries without source code are rare – no source kinda defeats the purpose of &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; – but it's also not the first time I've heard about this construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for licenses like the GPL that do require source code, it's useful to look at who is subject to this requirement: only recipients of the license and creators of derivative works, not the licensor who created the original software. Thus, even a GPL-licensed binary without normal source code could legally exist in rare cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you do not have a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to receive the source code for the MIT-licensed binaries, you can still ask. Often, such weird licensing constructions are created by people who are new to the open source community, often also new to how version control works. Therefore: don't demand source code, but kindly ask whether they would be willing to publish it. If GitHub issues are deactivated, you can often extract an email from the Git commit history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T10:39:10.157" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-06T12:41:00.463" Score="3" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at a repository with the BSD-3 license in its LICENSE file, but in which the source files say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) Big Corp Inc. All rights reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I redistribute / modify, and include the copyright notice and BSD-3 terms, Do I need to say that &quot;All rights reserved&quot; for Big Corp Inc. ? Even though that is literally not true and they don't reserve all rights? Or is it enough if I say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) Big Corp Inc. &#xA;Modifications Copyright (c) 2020 Joe User.&#xA;&#xA;[BSD-3 terms here]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T13:15:55.943" Title="With BSD-3, do I need to propagate an &quot;All rights reserved&quot; statement?" Tags="|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9427" CreationDate="2020-03-06T13:15:55.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should not modify the notices in any way and reproduce them verbatim. If the copyright notice says “all rights reserved” leave it be. This is the “default license” anyway. The license text then goes on to grant specific rights, so this is not a restriction on your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under older copyright regimes (the 1910 Buenos Aires convention), a notice like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“all rights reserved”&lt;/a&gt; was required to obtain copyright protection. However, this is no longer necessary. The use in a software context is mostly cargo-cult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright is automatic under the Berne convention, without requiring any notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since 2000, all Buenos Aires signatories have implemented Berne.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Israel signed Berne in 1950.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The U.S. switched to the copyright symbol &amp;copy; in the 50s, and finally implemented the Berne convention in 1989. Some open source licenses like MIT or BSD predate this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T13:15:55.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-06T15:34:42.647" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly sure where this question would belong, but would love to hear some opinions about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, I came up with a way to integrate open-source Platform A with open-source Platform B (and other things, but the main point was the integration).  I spoke to a company that has helped me to perform the integrations. They are specialists in Platform A, but had not used Platform B before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other day they contacted me to let me know that they are now offering a Version 2 of their own offerings which integrated Platform A to Platform B and would I like to purchase the use of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then today I received an email from them in which another idea I talked to them about (and have been building) is now being incorporated into their V2 offer (and would I like to buy it at a discount).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are your thoughts on this? I didn't set up an NDA with them, so they have not done anything illegal. However, it hasn't sat well with me. My thoughts on this are that they are taking my ideas, building them into their own products, and then offering to sell them back to me, while at the same time reducing my competitive advantage by commodifying my ideas for anyone to purchase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone have any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17416" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T16:11:41.833" Title="Do you think its OK for an open-source hosting company to incorporate your ideas into their product offerings?" Tags="|licensing|nda|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9429" CreationDate="2020-03-06T16:11:41.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want the company gain your knowledge and ideas, you should not help them get it less tell it explicitly to them before you sell it yourself. From their pov they might actually think they are doing you a favour in now offering you a more polished (?) version of the solution with support. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T16:11:41.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-07T00:28:20.510" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release a game built with the MonoGame framework, which includes the Ms-PL in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;. I want to include source code with my game and impose a strict requirement for others who modify or redistribute it so they're required to provide source code as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4174/17423&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and gnu.org's website, the GPL is not compatible with Ms-PL. Since my game is built with MonoGame (DLL included next to executable), does this count as &quot;distributing&quot; the library? Given these conditions, is there any license I can use that will allow me to impose a strict source code requirement to ensure my game remains libre?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this won't cover my game assets (music, sounds, textures, etc), only the code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17423" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T15:06:30.547" Title="Licensing options for libre game built with MonoGame (Ms-PL)" Tags="|copyleft|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9442" CreationDate="2020-03-07T19:34:45.523" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got an open source web project on GitHub licensed under GPL 3.0. Now I'm going to be adding some material under copyright (verses from a translation of the Bible) that I've been given permission to use. What are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I put it in the public repo, but somehow mark the material (with a stricter license or that only I'm allowed to use it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do I have to either make the repo private or keep the material outside the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13710" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T17:28:14.720" Title="Include copyright material used by permission in open source repository" Tags="|gpl-3|github|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9441" CreationDate="2020-03-07T21:59:23.287" Score="5" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I bit of background: When I was working in my previous company I came up with an idea to extract all some generic functionality from the different projects and create open source library (MIT) from them - the source code was mainly implemented by me and my former colleague for the company. The library itself was build and maintained by me and it is released under the name of my former employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm not part of the company anymore and I have a lot of new things to add to that library, as well as the better infrastructure (automatic builds and deployment) -- now, mu former employer does not care about the repo nor open source (that was one of reasons I quit) and I still have access, so I can quietly push the code to the repo and release it... however, as they don't care about the open source community I was more wondering about forking it, rebranding it and release it under my name...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, that MIT license allows that if you link the authors (related &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2228/merge-rebrand-relicense-projects&quot;&gt;Merge, rebrand, relicense projects&lt;/a&gt; ), however I'm not exactly sure whether it is not a &quot;dick move&quot; from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you do if you were at my place? Keep updating the repo and releasing it under former employer name, or forking it and rebranding it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: as pointed out, this question can be rephrased to: What are the cultural pros and cons of each approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17430" LastEditorUserId="17430" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T07:58:26.243" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T17:22:11.687" Title="Rebranding existing library under MIT" Tags="|mit|software|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9431" CreationDate="2020-03-09T12:11:57.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since my game is built with MonoGame (DLL included next to executable), does this count as &quot;distributing&quot; the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If people download the MonoGame DLL together with your executable (possibly in the same installer package), that definitely counts as distributing the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given these conditions, is there any license I can use that will allow me to impose a strict source code requirement to ensure my game remains libre?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can choose a copyleft license that doesn't try to extend itself to the MonoGame library. An example of such a license is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL-2.0&lt;/a&gt;, which has copyleft terms for the code which is put under that license by you, but not for third-party code. The MPL-2.0 is effectively a per-file copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T12:11:57.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9438" CreationDate="2020-03-09T12:39:59.490" Score="26" ViewCount="4428" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I develop a plugin for third-party application X. My plugin has a non-free license, and is commercially distributed. I don't distribute application X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Application X is licensed under GPL, so an end-user of X who installs the plugin creates a combined work &#xA; - which can't be redistributed as it includes my non-free plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ implies my plugin &quot;should&quot; be licensed under GPL, but unless the plugin linkage mechanism required me to compile or distribute some GPL'd files, I can't see how that can ever be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL FAQ wrong, or just saying what they'd like people to do...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17439" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T19:24:28.900" Title="How can GPL terms apply to distribution of a proprietary plugin?" Tags="|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-09T13:21:48.000" Score="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; your plugin is a derivative work of the GPL-covered software, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you can only publish/share/distribute your plugin under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear when a plugin is a derivative work. It seems to be the belief of the FSF (the GPL authors) that the following aspects can indicate derivativeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the plugin is designed to be combined with a GPL'ed work, in particular that the plugin is nonfunctional without the GPL-covered software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the plugin is designed to be linked into the same process as the GPL'ed host application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the plugin accesses internal data structures of the host application, i.e. behaves as part of that application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the FSF seems to believe that plugin-like services that run in separate processes and communicate over some protocol are not derivative works. For example, microservices communicating over a REST API are clearly separate works from each other. Similarly, AGPL-covered database servers have no licensing impact on the software connecting to that database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people believe that the FSF's interpretation is incorrect, especially around linking. However, you are betting a business on interpretations of copyright law. It may be wise to assume the “worst case”, i.e. that the FSF's interpretation would be upheld in a court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people believe that even the FSF's criteria are too narrow, and that the use of APIs could be copyright infringement without a proper license. This is related to the U.S. Oracle v Google case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are also making a different argument, that the &lt;em&gt;customer&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;not you&lt;/em&gt; is combining the GPL'ed with non-GPL'ed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as discussed above, your plugin might be derivative regardless of whether its combined into a single work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is still the issue of contributory copyright infringment, or a judge might not follow your argument that an assembly kit is totally unrelated to the assembled thing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do want to walk the fine line around the edges of GPL compliance, please get a lawyer to assist you. They have deeper knowledge about the copyright laws in the jurisdictions you are targeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, it's often much easier and safer to keep a bright line between the GPL software and the proprietary software, e.g. by having a GPL-covered plugin that exposes relevant functionality via a REST API, and a clearly separate proprietary service that makes use of this API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T13:21:48.000" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-09T16:26:00.743" Score="5" ViewCount="1206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's consider a proprietary Android app which is using an LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL requires that the user could be able to replace the library with a modified version.&#xA;For languages like C, LGPL suggests either using a dynamic library, or making object files available for static relinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of an Android APK, you cannot just drop in a &lt;code&gt;.jar&lt;/code&gt; with a modified LGPL'd library. OTOH sufficient open source tools (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/iBotPeaches/apktool/src/master/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ApkTool&lt;/a&gt;) exist to deconstruct the APK into class files, replace the file(s) related to the LGPL'd libraries, and make an installable modified APK back from these (e.g. using the Android development tools which are also open-source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the presence of such well-documented, widely known tools be considered sufficient in order to not make the raw class files of the app available, and be still compliant with LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope extensive prior cases exist for this particular configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8261" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T16:32:46.807" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T15:50:36.027" Title="An LGPL library inside a proprietary Android app" Tags="|lgpl|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-09T16:50:00.487" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't we have a mobile operating system and applciation store that is independent of any country's current political views? It would be an alternative of Google's Android OS. Or if it exists, why is it not getting promoted to the forefront?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17441" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-11T09:06:33.703" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T00:05:28.390" Title="Why don't we have a full-fledged alternative for the Android OS?" Tags="|distribution|intellectual-property|software-development|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9433" CreationDate="2020-03-09T17:22:11.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Better fork the repository (it is under an open source license, right?) and hack away at &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; repository. Working on &quot;company&quot; repo but not being part of &quot;company&quot; could get you in trouble (e.g. if management changes to one even less open-source friendly). Much worse if it isn't open to the public!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T17:22:11.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9432" CreationDate="2020-03-09T17:28:14.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If only you are allowed to use that extra material, keep it out of the repository. Say I (inadvertently, or on purpose, doesn't matter) grab that material, you could be liable for distributing it to me without permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep the private stuff in your own, personal, local (or non-public) repository; replace e.g. with choice phrases from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lipsum.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lorem ipsum&lt;/a&gt; for mockup purposes in your public repository explaining the matter in README or some such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T17:28:14.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9440" CreationDate="2020-03-10T07:07:45.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have an alternative to Android OS because no one has made an alternative. There should be no reason it can't be done, it just hasn't been done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect at this point in time, given the market share of Android, that anyone would have a hard time getting a decent market share with an alternative OS. You would need to offer a strong incentive to choose it over Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only want an alternative to the Google Play store, there are many alternatives, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slant.co/topics/2175/~best-google-play-store-alternative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; would be the largest I have seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T07:07:45.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9440" CreationDate="2020-03-10T10:08:53.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why we cannot have a mobile operating system and application store independent of any country's current political views as an alternative for Google android OS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're presumably aware that there are many community rebuilds of Android.  Nearly all of those leave out the Google core apps (the bits that identifiably tie you to Google, including the Play Store client).  Some (/e/) provide their own cloud and app store as replacements for Google's, others (Paranoid Android) try to be as minimalist as possible.  In all cases, development lags behind vendor-provided Android, as the code bases are sanitised; in some cases, the supported model list is so behind-the-times that it's almost impossible to buy a new phone to run the custom ROM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also free infrastructure, such as the F-Droid app store, which provides only free software for Android.  Sambler links to a list of many alternative app stores, each with its own pros and cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from Android rebuilds, there have been very-open GSM smartphones in the past, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Openmoko&lt;/a&gt; FreeRunner, which I used for two years as my main phone.  Apart from the usual corporate troubles, what killed the future of that was the absence of open 3G hardware.  I can't lay my hands on it at the moment, but I have somewhere a post from the then-CEO explaining how nobody who made 3G modems was in the slightest bit interested in opening them up for a company that was only likely to order a few tens of thousands of chipsets; even at the time, if you weren't buying a million modems, you simply got handed a bunch of closed firmware blobs and proprietary API libraries, all stapled to a giant NDA, and told to get on with it.  Most people aren't really concerned with openness and end-user privacy in their mobile phone operations, so the market is not geared to the few who are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or if it exist why are they not getting promoted to the forefront?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that they exist, they are not promoted (at least, not comparably well to vendor Android) because &lt;strong&gt;your privacy is not in anyone else's commercial interest&lt;/strong&gt;.  The major handset manufacturers believe that as long as they turn out a continuous stream of &lt;em&gt;ooh shiny&lt;/em&gt;, most people will keep throwing money at them, end-user privacy and data security notwithstanding, and so far, it looks as if they're right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Handset manufacturers can make more money selling you phones &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; selling your data than they can just selling you phones, so if you want privacy, you will have to work for it.  This includes learning, experimentation, wasted time and money (I've very nearly bricked some &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; expensive brand-new phones in my time), and a frequently sub-par user experience.  Do by all means hold out for your privacy, but don't be in the slightest bit surprised that large commercial organisations are not rushing up to serve it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-11T09:07:40.127" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T09:07:40.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-10T12:57:49.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;If they can't distribute, then they won't&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you state, &quot;Application X is licensed under GPL, so an end-user of X who installs the plugin creates a combined work - which can't be redistributed as it includes my non-free plugin.&quot;. This means that the user would be unable to legally distribute the combined work under GPL because they can't relicence part of the combined result (i.e. your plugin) under GPL, and they can't distribute the combined work under something other than GPL because of the licencing requirements of the rest of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no major problem with that - they can't redistribute the combined result to others, but can use the combined result themselves, and that's probably all they need and want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="916" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T12:57:49.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-10T15:23:50.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wording &quot;should&quot; is a dead giveaway. The FSF would generally like you (and everybody else) to comply with their ideology but they have no real means of forcing you, in general. That's not necessarily a bad thing because although it's a bit quixotic, the FSF ideology isn't bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you are legally bound to comply with all terms that anyone (not just the FSF) puts in a license (not just GPL) if you do something, anything, that makes you subject to the license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If you &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; do anything that makes you subject to the license, people may still have opinions and wishes, but they are just that. Much like vegans tell you every day how eating animals is bad, and that you &quot;should&quot; not do it, but they have no means of enforcing their ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of GPL, in order not to be bound by its terms (all of them!), what you need to avoid is, in very simplified and somewhat inaccurate words, distributing a program that includes, links with, or derives from code which is under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some people's opinion, plugins are by their very nature derivative work since they cannot work without the host application. While there is a grain of truth in that argument, I nevertheless beg to differ on that opinion &lt;em&gt;for the general case&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A plugin needs a host application to run, that's true. However, this needs not necessarily be one particular application, or even an application that is under some particular license (including GPL). Also, a plugin hopefully &lt;em&gt;adds&lt;/em&gt; something to the program rather than just exposing functionality that is already present anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of plugins that will very well work with different applications can be found in the audio/video and graphics world. The same, identical plugins will work interchangeably with different programs. Plugins written in embedded scripting languages would be another example, they are not necessarily bound to one particular application.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Another example where the logic doesn't hold would be dual-licensed software. For example, you can have MySQL under two different licenses where one is GPL, and the other is not. MySQL supports plugins. So, whether or not your plugin falls under GPL depends on whether some future client buys a commercial license from Oracle? And your obligations are different for everybody else? Or only until the first person buys a commercial license? Well, no, that's hardly how it is...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in my opinion, the idea that a plugin is &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work doesn't hold. It may be, can be, but doesn't need to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, however, that a plugin needs to follow some kind of specification (some particular file format, magic numbers, exported symbols, etc) and possibly use an API of sorts to connect itself to the application. Which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; require e.g. including some headers (that contain inline functions) or linking to some libraries. Or, whatever.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;These &lt;em&gt;may or may not&lt;/em&gt; be licensed under the GPL like the application, or they may be under the GPL, but &lt;em&gt;with an explicit exception&lt;/em&gt;. You will need to verify to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is important to note that the FSF doesn't own the rights on the software (nor do I, or any other random person here), so whatever they think is widely irrelevant. What the actual author(s) has/have in mind is what's relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, when in doubt about the exact intent, it is a good idea not to ask FSF or a Q&amp;amp;A site, but to &lt;strong&gt;contact the authors&lt;/strong&gt;. A lawyer cannot really help you either (the lawyer can express an opinion, but although this opinion is very expensive, it is also entirely worthless).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask the authors what their intent is. Quite likely, you will get an answer like &lt;em&gt;&quot;Wait, what? No, of course that's not intended, please go ahead, write your plugin!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's because plugins, whether open-source or not, greatly enhance your software's visibility, exposure, and overall value. Few authors will turn that down for ideology. But if they do turn you down, you know. That's more than anyone else (me, someone else on this site, or your lawyer) can tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get an authorative reply from the authors / copyright holders, it's the only thing that matters. Whatever is written in some license document or one someone's website is entirely irrelevant, since they simply do not have a say. The only ones who &lt;em&gt;do have&lt;/em&gt; a say are the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="509" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T15:23:50.103" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9439" CreationDate="2020-03-10T15:50:36.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably allowed &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you include a tool to deconstruct the APK into class files in your distribution. The LGPLv3 says in 4(d)(0) that you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Minimal Corresponding Source of the LGPL-covered library, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Corresponding Application Code of the non-LGPL'd components &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minimal Corresponding Source is simply the source code of the library and may exclude source of the Application that is linked to the library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “Minimal Corresponding Source” for a Combined Work means the Corresponding Source for the Combined Work, excluding any source code for portions of the Combined Work that, considered in isolation, are based on the Application, and not on the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Corresponding Application Code is the object object (or, optionally, source code) of the Application, plus utility programs (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Application Code” for a Combined Work means the object code and/or source code for the Application, &lt;strong&gt;including any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the Combined Work from the Application&lt;/strong&gt;, but excluding the System Libraries of the Combined Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we know that the Corresponding Application Code must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;be &lt;em&gt;in a form suitable for... the user to recombine or relink the Application with&lt;/em&gt; the library, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;includ[e] any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the Combined Work from the Application&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your assertion that the APK &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be deconstructed into classes &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the user has a particular tool to perform that transformation. The remaining question is: does such a tool as ApkTool fall within the category of &quot;utility programs needed for reproducing the Combined Work from the Application&quot;? If so, you must include such a tool as part of the Corresponding Application Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am included to say such a tool would be part of the Corresponding Application Code, since without that tool, there is insufficient tooling to reproduce the Combined Work with a modified library. You might point out that a compiler or linker would fall under this definition -- and those, too, are surely needed to reproduce the Combined Work -- but it seems that those tools would be required in any case (even with the class files directly) whereas ApkTool is required only when you opt to bundle the files inside of a build APK only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your distribution requires at least the library source code, I would say it's not much more trouble to include either the raw class files or ApkTool alongside that library source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T15:50:36.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-10T16:26:21.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of these questions have not been decided in the courts, and it's anyone's guess how they would be decided if the question came up. A lawyer's guess might be better than yours, or it might not; the language in the FSF licenses is so vague technically that I certainly wouldn't want to hazard a guess myself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it comes down to what risks you are prepared to take. And remember here that risk equals (what an event would cost you) times (how likely is it to happen); so this means thinking about who might be motivated to sue you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own experience of developing open source software is that all the licensing questions come from my customers, not my suppliers. The people who actually wrote the open source components I use are perfectly happy for me to use the stuff. It's the customers, especially mega-rich customers (the IBMs, Microsofts, Oracles, and Googles of the world) who worry about it, partly because they employ expensive lawyers who are paid to worry (and anyone who is paid to worry does a lot of worrying), and partly because these companies are much more attractive targets for patent and copyright trolls than I am. So my advice would be: don't consult your lawyers, consult your customers. It doesn't matter what the license says, or what your lawyers say, it matters what your customers are happy with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3774" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T16:26:21.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-11T00:32:26.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's say I develop a plugin for third-party application X. My plugin has a non-free license, and is commercially distributed. I don't distribute application X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay. That would require that your plugin not be a derivative work of any work covered by the GPL. That means that it cannot contain sufficient protectable expression from the work that is covered by the GPL. It is quite hard to figure out what &quot;sufficient protectable expression&quot; means precisely, but that's the legal standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Application X is licensed under GPL, so an end-user of X who installs the plugin creates a combined work - which can't be redistributed as it includes my non-free plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's correct. Note that it's a combined work, not a derivative work. This is no different from me taking two DVDs and stapling them to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ implies my plugin &quot;should&quot; be licensed under GPL, but unless the plugin linkage mechanism required me to compile or distribute some GPL'd files, I can't see how that can ever be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether your plugin &quot;should&quot; be licensed under the GPL is moral question. Whether it has to be is a legal question. The standard is pretty clear -- it has to be if it contains sufficient protectable expression taken from a work covered by the GPL and to which you have no other license. The application of that standard is, however, not so clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the GPL FAQ wrong, or just saying what they'd like people to do...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think they're mostly trying to both explain their opinion about what the GPL means and to provide some clarification of their intent in case that might help influence future courts. But it's hard to say without just speculating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is clear is that your work has to be covered by the GPL if it's a derivative or combined work including sufficient elements of protectable expression from a work covered by the GPL (assuming you have no other license to those elements). What's much less clear is precisely how that standard has to be applied to your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, how your work interacts with the GPL work when people use it is entirely irrelevant to the test. Arguments that make it relevant are based on the idea that if two programs interact sufficiently intimately, the later one must have copied some protectable expression from the earlier one. This seems obviously wrong to me as functional elements are not protectable and it seems all you need to take are functional elements. Of course, that doesn't mean you necessarily didn't take non-functional elements that are protectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but it's clear as mud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T00:32:26.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9454" CreationDate="2020-03-11T16:10:02.357" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the original author (and copyright holder of source code) of code which I have chosen to release as GPL. I think I am correct in saying I can dual license my code and thus choose to enforce one lic or the other as I see fit (please correct me if I am wrong here)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this work if I accept downstream contributions from other developers into my project. From the downstream perspective, the upstream contribution was made under the assumption that they were contributing to a GPL code base?... So would I have the right to distribute this 'contributed code' under my original dual license (i.e the other non GPL lic that I use in my dual licensing), I presume that I would have to get permission of the downstream author to lic their code in a non GPL way? So does this mean I have to enforce this by indicating I reserve the right to distribute contributed code under a dual lic (or more importantly non GPL) to contributing authors as the process of accepting their code into my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an author does not want to agree to that (understandable), I presume this means that they cannot contribute upstream, however if they fork my repo (which is GPL) they can contribute so my dual licensing is redundant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17472" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:19:22.907" Title="Can I dual license my code after accepting downstream contributions into my code base?" Tags="|gpl|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9453" CreationDate="2020-03-11T18:19:22.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you accepted contributions from third parties, their contributions belong to them and you can't change licensing terms on them. They might not even have made their contributions legally available at all...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why most projects insist on some sort of agreement that any contributions are (a) legal to make (i.e., no code pilfered from a third party, no patent encumbrance, ...), (b) given to the project to distribute under the project's license.  Some (for example the FSF) insist further that any copyrights be donated to them, so they are sole owners of the result, and can decide to e.g. change licenses (and have legal standing to sue for infringements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:19:22.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7305" CreationDate="2020-03-11T18:33:36.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is just a tool you are using. Ship it just the way you got it (binaries, documentation) and mention somewhere that you are using that tool, where it is found in whatever you ship, what changes you made --if any--, where to get the original, upstream version). The unrar license mostly says you are not allowed to base a compression program compatible with it by studying unrar's source, so I assume you are in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:33:36.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2020-03-11T18:36:34.307" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask any contributors to make clear their contributions are under the same license, and that they are legal owners of the contributions (not swizzled from somewhere else), and that they give up any patent rights and so on. Check for some large project using your license, exactly how they do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T18:36:34.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1524" CreationDate="2020-03-11T22:50:23.813" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Is EUPL alone compatible with proprietary softwares?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Yes, you can use an EUPL library in your proprietary application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of information about this topic on the official website of the European Union:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/eupl-and-proprietary-commer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL and Proprietary / Commercial use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/eupl-freeopen-source-software-licence-european-union/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About EUPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-eupl-not-viral-l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why EUPL is NOT a viral license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/meaning-copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The meaning of copyleft in EUPL License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-viral-licensing-ghost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why viral licensing is a ghost&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all says: virality does not exist legally in Europe, even for the GPLv3 or AGPLv3. And you are bound to the EU law for the code corresponding to EUPL.&#xA;Here are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.slideshare.net/OpenWorldForum/eole-owf-12-viral-licences-myth-or-reality-patriceemmanuel-schmitz-eole20121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slides from Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz&lt;/a&gt;, a lawyer that participated in drafting EUPL, where he clearly question the legality of &amp;quot;strong&amp;quot; copyleft licenses in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To be fair, there is a debate around this, as the lawyers of FSF Europe does not really agree with that. Can't find the link about this anymore though. You can find &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-1-1-2010/2419/dippadm1268746871.43.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cases&lt;/a&gt; where the GNU GPL seems to have been successfully enforced in Germany.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the FSF wishes there is virality and tries to enforce it as much as they can with their own GNU licenses, the EU did not intend that in any way. The EUPL is closer to the weak copyleft MPL or EPL in intention than to the GPL.&#xA;And when it comes to licensing, the only person that may sue you is the copyright owners that initially released their software under the said license. Therefore, if they say it is not viral, especially on the official European Union website you can feel safe and use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a big misunderstanding with the EUPL, probably because of Google treatment of the license (they literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#european-union-public-licence-eupl-not-allowed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;banned it&lt;/a&gt; without much explanations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;LGPL library that depends on an EUPL library: which license is applied to the combined work?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EUPL is a compatible copyleft license. What is &amp;quot;compatible&amp;quot; about? It means that you can combine a EUPL licensed software with a LGPL/GPL/AGPL/EPL/MPL software and the licensed of the third-party software will apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example in your case: the library you want to depend on is licensed under LGPL and rely on an EUPL software. Therefore, EUPL somehow disappears and only LGPL applies. Don't get me wrong the initial library is still under EUPL, but as a whole, the two combined libraries can just be licensed under LGPL. It is very closed to dual licensing for the EUPL Library. As a consequence you can treat the library you depend on as a standard LGPL library. You don't need to care about its EUPL dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some links that may help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#h.lgjcpvoq08a9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is EPL-2.0 with Secondary License considered dual licensing?&lt;/a&gt; (the same principle is used in MPL-2.0 and EUPL-1.2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/how-use-eupl#section-17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is the EUPL compatible with the GPL and other F/OSS licenses?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your case, you only need to know whether you can link the LGPL library with your application. With LGPL, it comes down to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dynamic vs static linking&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Side note on Free software (as in Freedom) vs open-source&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed you seem to confuse &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;proprietary&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;open-source&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;free software&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;closed-source&amp;quot;.&#xA;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://baozi.technology/floss-business-ethics-part-1-definitions-and-context&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; is a good read to get your head straight about all these terms and know what you can and cannot do.&#xA;Disclaimer: I am biased, I wrote it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, LGPL is incompatible with proprietary softwares &lt;em&gt;to some extent&lt;/em&gt;. LGPL is not incompatible with commercial products. LGPL softwares can be sold for a price. Proprietary softwares are not necessarily closed-source: they can be made &amp;quot;source-available&amp;quot;. A free software can be closed-source, as &amp;quot;not available online for the general public&amp;quot;. A free software source code is always available to the people to which it has been &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; to, that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-Source refers to any software that is distributed under a license approved by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/closed-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Closed-source&lt;/a&gt; is strictly defined as opposed to Open-Source, but can also mean &amp;quot;not available online for the general public&amp;quot;, depending on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14261" LastEditorUserId="14261" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T11:27:51.167" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T11:27:51.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9465" CreationDate="2020-03-12T14:20:36.603" Score="6" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are looking to distribute an embedded software product using an open-source, GPL3.0 licensed operating system with our non-GPL proprietary software running on it. With normal works, if our code is using a GPL library, our software must also be licensed under GPL. However, since the software we are distributing is not a derivative of the operating system, must we license our software under GPL? Or does this restriction not apply to the software running the proprietary software? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17483" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-12T16:27:13.377" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T08:54:56.477" Title="Distributing GPL OS with proprietary software" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|operating-system|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2020-03-12T19:24:28.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plugin does not magically become covered by the GPL.  However, the conditions of the GPL state that by distributing the software, you are committing to distribute the work as a &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL (this is the principal difference to the LGPL).  Is your plugin part of the work as a whole or not?  If you distribute the combined software and your plugin as one offering, and the offering does not make sense for the customer to acquire without either plugin or the software itself, arguably the software as a whole includes your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the action of the user which combines software and plugin, there may be the argument that the user is merely acting as your agent in completing the combination since nothing else makes sense.  That argument is likely weaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a strong counterargument if your plugin were usable with other software without containing special-purpose code only catering to the particular GPLed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with many licensing decisions, the situation is more on the murky side, depends on how individual courts may make a decision, and one usually wants to avoid being dragged into court in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17490" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T19:24:28.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2020-03-14T01:42:33.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything that links against GPL has to be distributed under GPL. If you never distribute, no problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T01:42:33.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2020-03-14T02:37:34.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any source which makes use of GPL-licensed code needs to follow the license when you distribute it or it's binaries. That means the GPL applies to the complete work and you will obliged to provide source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example all three, 3rdPartyRepo, CustomRepo1 and CustomRepo2 cannot be shared without either changing licenses to GPL (and sharing complete code with recipients) or violating the library's license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For libraries there is the LGPL. That is GPL with a linking exception and meant for libraries so that software linking the library does NOT need to follow GPL terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T02:37:34.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9460" CreationDate="2020-03-14T08:54:56.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine for you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6451/9558&quot;&gt;make a non-GPL program&lt;/a&gt; that runs on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a somewhat similar result, Linux &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/2721696/2684771&quot;&gt;kernel modules&lt;/a&gt; are linked against LGPL code to prevent modules requiring to be GPL. Linus &lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explained this back in 1995&lt;/a&gt; as a deliberate design decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you say &quot;embedded software&quot;, you could risk your software becoming part of a single product, look into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TiVoization&lt;/a&gt; to see if this could affect your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9558" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T08:54:56.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T13:15:28.853" Score="3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the precise syntax of the &lt;code&gt;// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-only&lt;/code&gt; comments in source files, and which organization, project or specification defines it? If there is no such definition, what syntax would be interoperable with the current crop of tools reading those comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, how to determine where the SPDX license expression starts and ends -- has anyone defined a programming-language-independent rule for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15528" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T13:15:28.853" Title="Precise syntax of SPDX-License-Identifier in source files" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9468" CreationDate="2020-03-15T03:50:51.457" Score="4" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do any licenses exist that might serve the purposes below?&lt;/strong&gt; If not, what licenses might be similarly useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Initial license goals&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Drive updates back to the source.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; My team seeks Creative-Commons-like (...we think?) license with addition(s) to either 1) strongly request or 2) require that modifications of original work be contributed back to the source content (eg: a github.com repo in the form of a pull request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enforceability&lt;/strong&gt;. We do not expect these terms to enable any meaningful form enforceability for those who do not honor the license or &quot;request.&quot; Rather, we simply seek to clearly state out intent and preference to more-honorable users and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-sensitive content&lt;/strong&gt;. We have no concern for loss of rogue-editors source-documentation updates that are not contributed back other than the opportunity cost of the stakeholder community not benefiting from those updates. eg: there's no sensitive content or trade secrets contained in the content. We're simply (mostly) attempting to repackage general community knowledge in a more-efficient presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Main application&lt;/strong&gt;. For the initial, targeted project we want to create and foster creation of freely-accessible and freely-distributable documentation--and probably not software. At risk of being a bit repetitive: in the license for said application we want to encourage and/or motivate editors to contribute changes back to source repo so that all community stakeholders can benefit over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Our team's background&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not (yet) well-studied in open-source licenses or the depths of difficult legal contracts. As such, please do not let our above &quot;Creative-Commons-like&quot; suggestion deter you from suggesting a significantly-different (from Creative-Commons-like) path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17504" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T21:34:24.513" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T21:34:24.513" Title="Seeking Creative-Commons-like license with addition(s) to request or require modifications be contributed back to source" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-03-15T22:02:37.057" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2020-03-15T08:24:50.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Requiring people to contribute their changes back to the original project is a bit of a problem point for licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For open-source license, such a requirement fails the &quot;desert island test&quot; and prevent the license from being an open-source license. The desert island test means that a group of people on a desert island with no way of contacting the outside world must be able to make and distribute changes among themselves without violating the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I were to receive the software/documentation from a third-party, how would I know where to send my changes? Would that location still be valid in 10 years time? What if the original project stopped in the mean time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your main concern is that you can practically and legally incorporate modifications made by others into the original project, then I would recommend you use a copyleft or a share-alike license. These license require that modifications, if they get published, get published under the same license. That gives you the right to incorporate the modifications in the original project, even if they were not explicitly sent to you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;For documentation, the CC BY-SA license would be a good option. For software that license is not recommended and then the GPL or LGPL is a common choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, you can mention in the project's documentation, for example in a readme file, that contributions are greatly appreciated and how they can be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T08:24:50.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9342" CreationDate="2020-03-15T14:49:35.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After having read all the documentation on the different licenses, I understand that it may be about the 'Linking' method explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About 'linking' in Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses the following is explained:&#xA;Linking [name of your program] statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on [name of your program]. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even so, it is not explained how to proceed when having multiple modules with gpl licenses. It is an impossible task to chase each of the modules attached by python in a program, to put the license of each of them together with the source code. In addition, the gpl licenses requires the source code to be published, even when a single unmodified library is used and the program is completely freeware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that these conditions really must be met, but for me it is not possible, so I will end up doing absolutely nothing, and sadly I will continue to use my software personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17257" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T14:49:35.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9480" CreationDate="2020-03-16T07:09:04.997" Score="14" ViewCount="9132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a commercial application for my own company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use PySide2 in it which comes under the LGPL license. I will be using PySide2 without any modification to it for designing the GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that if I will be able to sell the software packed along with PySide2 without making my proprietary code public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, what are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17510" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T09:57:09.177" Title="Can I sell a proprietary software with an LGPL library bundled along with it, without making my source code public?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9475" CreationDate="2020-03-16T12:18:10.403" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have seen Flameshot labeled as proprietary on the Ubuntu Software Center:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/egc7i.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/egc7i.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(german text, &quot;Proprietär&quot; means &quot;proprietary&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Flameshot mislabeled on the Software Center, as it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://flameshot.js.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official website&lt;/a&gt; links to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;repository&lt;/a&gt; which specifies GPLv3 as Flameshot's license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15872" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T13:16:51.050" Title="Is Flameshot mislabeled on the Ubuntu Software Center?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9474" CreationDate="2020-03-16T13:12:13.043" Score="3" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a web app for my University that will be accessible to the entire uni. One of the things I'm negotiating for is to retain the copyright without giving it to the Uni. The Uni on the other hand is concerned that if I do retain the copyright, they will not have the legal right to use the code later. A middleground I can think of is to license the code using an OSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to force them to open source the code once I graduate. I will make this clear to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use AGPLv3 for this situation?&#xA;TLDR: Can I use AGPLv3 on code that won't be open sourced for a while if I'm the original author and none of the code code used has come from copyleft sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything else I can do in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that if my code depends on AGPL code and is hosted on a publicly accessible server, I must open source it.&#xA;I also do understand that what I'm doing might go against the spirit of OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17513" LastEditorUserId="17513" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T06:46:47.920" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T06:46:47.920" Title="Can the original Author keep his GNU AGPLv3 licensed code private if it is hosted on a server accessible to an entire university?" Tags="|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9470" CreationDate="2020-03-16T14:26:58.837" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can distribute your software without making the source code public and without giving recipients the right to make changes to your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license explicitly allows such usages of libraries/packages released under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using an LGPL library/package like PySide2, your obligations are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to allow and make it possible that users of your software replace the library/package that actually gets used when running the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for LGPLv2.1, to provide to users of your software the sources of the exact version of the LGPL library/package that you used, when they want to have them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T09:57:09.177" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T09:57:09.177" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9472" CreationDate="2020-03-16T14:33:19.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the author, you can dictate the conditions under which your work is being used. The limits here might only be for you in this case employment obligations and contract law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you are the sole author, you can safely apply the AGPL to your code and host the software without publishing it - you are not bound by your own license. Others who host your software will have to follow the terms of AGPL and make the source available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the university hosting your code is not you. But you as employee can give them a license which exempts them from the obligations of the AGPL as long as they employ you or whatever you write in the contract with your university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not the sole author and use other 3rd-party AGPL code requires you to make available the complete source on the server, including your own contributions. You then also cannot offer your university an exemption to the AGPL obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usual disclaimer: IANAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T14:33:19.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2020-03-16T15:09:52.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These labels are only as good as the metadata that goes into them. When the license is unknown, it is reported as “proprietary” as a fallback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lupoDharkael/flameshot/issues/398&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#398&lt;/a&gt; but it has not yet been fixed. My guess it that the software contains assets under the Free Art license, which doesn't have an SPDX identifier, so the license metadata is not machine-readable. Other licenses in the Appstream metadata also use the wrong identifier, which is reported by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://appstream.debian.org/sid/main/issues/flameshot.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Appstream Linter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T15:09:52.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9485" CreationDate="2020-03-16T21:49:59.613" Score="7" ViewCount="1472" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many open source projects whose development is officially discussed through mailing lists (the obvious example being &lt;a href=&quot;http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Linux kernel&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being young and spoiled by nice clean website design, I find many of these threads unreadable, because it is so difficult to follow. Does anybody know of some kind of mailing list browsing software that I can use to make them a little more readable? Maybe something that can render a mailing list as a messageboard thread? I think that interface is the most analogous to a mailing list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17519" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T08:21:05.277" Title="How to effectively browse mailing lists" Tags="|software|community|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9479" CreationDate="2020-03-16T10:23:04.127" Score="3" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Is it legal to use a modified version of the product licensed under LGPL 2.1, for commercial purposes and without the permission of the author (because the authors cannot be reached), and following the conditions as stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some context:&#xA;I am a software engineer, not a lawyer, need help on understanding license LGPL 2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ZedGraph/ZedGraph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ZedGraph&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under LGPL 2.1, I made modifications to the software to fix a bug (meaning corrected a software mistake).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since I suspect the project is basically abandoned by the authors, I don't want to bother with the process of contacting the authors, waiting for the author to review my changes, integrate the changes, and finally publish a release (is it even necessary?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus, I want to update the current version of ZedGraph used by the company software, to the modified version that I made, without going through the process above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal under LGPL 2.1? More specifically, is it legal to modify the product, without permission from the author, and use it for commercial purposes, given that we meet the conditions in the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license&lt;/a&gt;, point 2 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it... provided that you also meet all of these conditions...&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, here &quot;You&quot; refers to the licensee (that's us?). I assume given that we follow strictly to the conditions, we may modify it, but the license never states if the modified version can be used for commercial purposes, less the author's permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then on point 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, link with, or distribute the Library is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License...&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, which I think just means if we follow the conditions in (2) for modifying the product, we are good to use it regardless if in a commercial product? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real confusion for me is that the license never states whether using it in a commercial product is even allowed. I don't think the lack of clarification automatically means it is legal that modified versions of the product can be used for commercial purposes without the permission of the author, unless I am misunderstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17520" OwnerDisplayName="ayspair" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T04:13:36.070" Title="Modifying and Using Open Source Software licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License, v2.1" Tags="|copyright|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9478" CreationDate="2020-03-17T04:13:36.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may do this. I would summarize your obligations as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure recipients of your software are given or offered the modified library code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure that recipients can rebuild your software using a further modified version of the library. This generally means offering the at least the compiled, linkable object code of your own application code alongside the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the license never states if the modified version can be used for commercial purposes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (L)GPL is generally agnostic to commercial use. You must follow requirements regarding license/copyright notices and permitting specific downstream use, but whether distribution is done for pay or free of charge does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume&quot;commercial use&quot; here means redistribution for sale. If you never distribute software (e.g., your &quot;commercial use&quot; is running a private instance of some software that never leaves your workplace) then you have no obligations whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T04:13:36.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9470" CreationDate="2020-03-17T09:13:31.490" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already got the answer that LGPL libraries can be used in commercial software.  So far, so good.  There's more to this than meets the eye, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PySide2&lt;/a&gt; is for using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt framework&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python&lt;/a&gt; programs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides the LGPL license for PySide2, you'll have to make sure that you comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/licensing/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt licensing terms.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt licensing FAQ&lt;/a&gt; lays out your options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can get a commercial license which allows you to do everything with Qt with no concerns about opensource.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use only those parts of Qt that are under the LGPL and have no concerns about opensource.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third alternative is to go with the GPL license, which will require your product to meet the GPL2 or GPL3 terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some portions of Qt that are only available under the commercial license.  There are differences in the available modules between LGPL and GPL licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll need to look at which Qt modules you really need, and see which license fits your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you want to keep your proprietary code under a proprietary license, your only options for Qt are to use the LPGL version or buy a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the commercial Qt license is expensive.  I just checked, and a 1 year subscription for a single developer is currently over $5000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use Qt in my personal projects, but they are all under the GPL so I can use the GPL licensing on Qt and not have to pay for a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16134" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T09:13:31.490" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9482" CreationDate="2020-03-17T19:54:33.083" Score="6" ViewCount="1460" Body="&lt;p&gt;or am I seeing this wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some digging (It's NOT easy to find on their site), I found the community version (&quot;Open Source&quot; version) of ONLYOFFICE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after reading their FAQ, it seems they impose some restrictions that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Aren't in the AGPL v3 license on their Github (There are 0 Additional Permissions&quot; in the License they provide)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't seem to line up with the AGPL v3, even though they point to the sections of the License in their FAQ, it doesn't really make sense AGPL v3 wise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the AGPL v3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option&#xA;remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of&#xA;it.&#xA;&#xA;https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/CommunityServer/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet from their FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Can I remove ONLYOFFICE logo or change it to my own?&#xA;&#xA;According to Section 7 of the GNU Affero General Public License v.3 (AGPL v.3) we're&#xA;permitted to supplement terms of this License requiring preservation of specified reasonable&#xA;legal notices. Using this permission we do not allow you to remove the original ONLYOFFICE&#xA;logo from ONLYOFFICE products and components or change it to your own one. The interactive&#xA;user interfaces in modified source and object code versions of the Program must display&#xA;Appropriate Legal Notices, as required under Section 5 of the GNU AGPL version 3. To discuss&#xA;any co-branding issues feel free to write to our sales department at sales@onlyoffice.com.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions for you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What basis do they have to restrict someone from removing the&#xA;  ONLYOFFICE branding, if it's licensed under AGPL v3, with no&#xA;  Additional Permissions written into the License they provide? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And even if they did write it into the license, couldn't someone just&#xA;  remove those permissions anyway and create a modified version of the software and supply an AGPL v3 without the Additional terms? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just seems to me like a shady way to make users pay for their rights to free software. I'm hoping someone can explain this to me if I'm reading it incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17524" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T21:45:45.060" Title="Is ONLYOFFICE restricting our freedom with their FAQ? (AGPL v3)" Tags="|agpl-3.0|license|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9481" CreationDate="2020-03-17T21:32:45.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unfortunately fairly common for companies to overstate the restrictions of the AGPL. But as the AGPL states, additional restrictions can be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is primarily based on the GPLv3 CommunityServer license you linked. But aside from the GPLv3 vs AGPLv3 point, the analysis is identical for the AGPLv3-covered DocumentServer which contains the same additional terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The actual license terms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it is important to pay attention: The code in their CommunityServer GitHub repository and their Debian package currently uses the GPLv3 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200317203918/https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/CommunityServer/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive snapshot&lt;/a&gt;) without any additional terms in the README or license, but with the following additional terms in the source files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In accordance with Section 7(a) of the GNU GPL its Section 15 shall be amended to the effect that Ascensio System SIA expressly excludes the warranty of non-infringement of any third-party rights.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The interactive user interfaces in modified source and object code versions of ONLYOFFICE must display Appropriate Legal Notices, as required under Section 5 of the GNU GPL version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pursuant to Section 7 § 3(b) of the GNU GPL you must retain the original ONLYOFFICE logo which contains relevant author attributions when distributing the software. If the display of the logo in its graphic form is not reasonably feasible for technical reasons, you must include the words &quot;Powered by ONLYOFFICE&quot; in every copy of the program you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pursuant to Section 7 § 3(e) we decline to grant you any rights under trademark law for use of our trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, they can license downloads via their website or binaries etc under the AGPLv3 instead. The software would also be effectively covered by AGPLv3 when combined with the AGPLv3 components of their offering, e.g. the DocumentServer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Analysis of additional terms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The additional terms consist of three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A warranty disclaimer per GPLv3 section 7(a). It is correct and effective, though superfluous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A requirement for retaining certain notices and attributions per GPLv3 section 7(b). This is unclear and discussed further below.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A refusal to license their trademarks per GPLv3 section 7(e). It is correct and effective, but is imprecise and seems contradictory with the requirement to use their logo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional term per section 7(b) requiring “preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works” is allowed, but Ascensio's term is overly broad and therefore &lt;strong&gt;partially defective&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ascensio wants you to display:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the original ONLYOFFICE logo in its graphic form, on the basis that it contains relevant author attributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if displaying graphics is not possible, the words &quot;Powered by ONLYOFFICE&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (A)GPLv3 defines Appropriate Legal Notices thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows the following contents of an Appropriate Legal Notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;appropriate copyright notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;warranty exclusions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;information to the user about their right to convey the software under this license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how to view a copy of this license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nothing from the items required by Ascensio matches the definition of an Appropriate Legal Notice.&lt;/strong&gt; E.g. the logo contains a product name, but no copyright notices.&#xA;Similarly, those items fail to be “reasonable legal notices”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the logo and the “Powered by” phrase &lt;strong&gt;could count as “author attributions”&lt;/strong&gt;. But such author attributions do not have to be a “convenient and prominently visible feature” of the user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By talking about AGPL but using GPL, and by introducing mild to serious defects into all their section 7 additional terms, Ascensio has demonstrated a serious lack of understanding about their licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to their potentially defective licensing approach, end users of Onlyoffice-derived software may not be eligible to receive the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, by asking for derivatives (potentially created by competitors) to use their logo, they are creating a contradiction with the refusal to license their trademarks and are at risk of diluting it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to their statements, removing their logo etc. is largely OK. It does not have to be used in the branding of a derivative work, but must be shown as part of the attributions for the original work. In any location where you mention your copyright in the software and mention the license, you should also mention Ascensio's copyright and show the logo. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-03-17T21:45:45.060" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T21:45:45.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9484" CreationDate="2020-03-18T05:44:16.047" Score="4" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find how to license my open source project, but after having spent a few hours Googling around, my head started to hurt! Instead of asking a million of questions about different licenses, I will start by explaining how exactly my project is structured:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have developed a Python application which also calls some C++ code. The C++ code is also part of the application and it is written by me. The Python part of the code only uses libraries with MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 licenses. The C++ part of the code makes use of a GPL library, FFTW3. If I am not mistaken, the license of FFTW3 is GPLv2. The C++ code simply #includes the FFTW3 headers, calls the FFTW3 API functions, and links to the FFTW3 libraries. The source code of my application (available on a GitHub repository), does not include the FFTW3 source code or libraries. Furthermore, a user who wants to clone and  build my application from source has the option to disable all the code that is related to FFTW3, and then compile the C++ code without FFTW3 support. In other words, FFTW3 is an &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; dependency when compiling from source. Finally, I also distribute my application, along with the binaries of the C++ code and the FFTW3 libraries, on PyPI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is absolutely clear to me is that: the version of my application that is distributed via PyPI must have a GPL license as well because the Python wheel encapsulates the FFTW3 libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is my question now: Can I use a more permissive licence (e.g., BSD/MIT/Apache) for my source code on GitHub, and at the same time use a GPLv2 license for its PyPI binary distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17527" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-03-21T07:31:51.130" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T07:31:51.130" Title="Can I have the source code of my Python/C++ project under MIT/BSD/Apache2.0 and its PyPI binary wheel under GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|python|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9483" CreationDate="2020-03-18T07:43:19.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I use a more permissive licence (e.g., BSD/MIT/Apache) for my source code on GitHub, and at the same time use a GPLv2 license for its PyPI binary distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can. You can even create a separate PyPI binary without FFTW3 support and distribute that under the more permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license requires that, if you use GPL-licensed code somewhere in your project or its dependencies, then all code of the project (and its dependencies) must be available under a license that is compatible with the GPL license. The GPL does not require (and probably can't legally require) that works depending on GPL code are themselves actively using the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know that your project depends on GPL code, even if the dependency is optional, and you choose to use a different license for your own code, then it is very strongly recommended that you mention the GPL dependency in your licensing information in the source code, so that recipients of the source code know they may have to disable a feature to be able to keep their own code private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T07:43:19.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9477" CreationDate="2020-03-18T08:21:05.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that the threaded reading and search facilities of many mailing list web interfaces vary between bad and appalling.  But the principal advantage of mailing lists over web fora, however good the forum, is that &lt;strong&gt;with a mailing list the choice of client is yours&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas with a web forum you get whatever software the admin has decided to run, for better or for worse.  I thnk this observation goes far in explaining the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.teaparty.net/pipermail/toasters/2011-August/022948.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very strong preference for mailing lists&lt;/a&gt; (and consequent dislike of web fora) amongst a certain generation of sysadmins.  The recommended workflow for doing what you want is to subscribe to the list, build your own archive, and then browse it using the mail client of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sites like the dear, departed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gmane&lt;/a&gt; were very useful for keeping archives of important mailing lists open to the major search engines, so that questions with explicit answers (eg, &quot;&lt;em&gt;What's the best path to upgrade a NetApp filer cluster from 8.3.2P9 to 9.3P17?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) could easily find those answers if they'd already &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.teaparty.net/pipermail/toasters/2020-March/028847.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;been posted&lt;/a&gt;.  But they weren't, as you point out, great for browsing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't let me stop you searching for the perfect web tool to search your personal archive of any given mailing list, though such a search is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/688/whats-wrong-with-external-resources-questions&quot;&gt;off-topic here&lt;/a&gt;.  But I think you'll find that a mail client with good threading capabilities - though I don't use it myself, people speak highly of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#threads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mutt&lt;/a&gt; - is your best bet for doing what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stipulate that this answer ducks the question of how you get hold of the list archives, but you ducked it in your question by presuming you could get them to run your own web tool on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T08:21:05.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2020-03-18T13:11:18.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Flameshot mislabeled on the Software Center?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The Ubuntu Software Center does not label software licenses accurately at all. In addition, it does not make any distinction between different licenses such as GPL, LGPL, etc. In short, you cannot trust what the SW Center displays at all as far as licenses are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this specific case, as you have pointed out, the official web site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://flameshot.js.org/#/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://flameshot.js.org/#/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly links to a repository which clearly identifies the license as GPLv3. In addition, GitHub also correctly identified the license as GPLv3 as well (but even that result is not definitive; since it is just determined automatically). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is really disappointing that a popular distribution like Ubuntu would pay so little attention to such an issue. In my opinion, given that their reporting of licenseing is so inaccurate in the titles they have labeled in their Software Center, it would have been better not to display any information at all regarding licensing, rather than to risk displaying inaccurate information about a license in a title.  Clearly they have chosen that it is better to display &quot;something&quot; than to display nothing at all, and quite often, this information is wrong, as you have pointed out in this case. But in my experience I have encountered many such cases like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their choice to display licensing information for all software titles, which results in inaccurate information being displayed in about 70-80% of cases, does a complete disservice to the open source software community. If you use Ubuntu SW Center, please try to totally ignore any information you see regarding the &quot;license&quot; of any software titles you see. Maybe it happens to be correct by luck, but most likely it is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2020-03-18T13:16:51.050" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T13:16:51.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-18T19:14:13.207" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm on an organization's Bylaws Committee and am using a (currently private) GitHub repository to track our proposed changes/amendments.  Once the committee's work is complete, the intent is to make the repo public so other sister organizations can use it as a starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was considering including a Free/Open Source license like &lt;code&gt;CC0&lt;/code&gt; to make things official, but it occurred to me that we'd like to make sure that anyone reading a &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; copy of the bylaws knows &lt;em&gt;these are not the official bylaws of organization X&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a simple way to concretely require that any modified version either remove references to my organization, or that it be clearly indicated in some way that the content has been modified?  Is there an existing FLOSS-like license that would be a better fit than &lt;code&gt;CC0&lt;/code&gt;? Should I even bother including a license at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17531" LastEditorUserId="17531" LastEditDate="2020-03-18T20:12:48.300" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T05:33:45.223" Title="How to require anyone who modifies a work with intent to distribute REMOVE references to the originator?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|attribution|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-18T21:19:59.493" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/60740375/3767239&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; on Stack Overflow which is largely based on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/da1fe768e582387212201ab8737a1a5f26110664/Lib/inspect.py#L2889&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific part&lt;/a&gt; of a module in the CPython standard library. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python license&lt;/a&gt; seems to be permissive and they also indicate compatibility with GPL but since code posted on Stack Overflow is automatically &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under CC-BY-SA, I'm not sure if these two are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the following two questions about derivative works of Python source code I'm inclined to believe it's no problem, but both answers also indicate that they prefer to release derivative work under the original license (which seems to conflict with the fact that Stack Overflow content is CC-BY-SA automatically).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8968/7904&quot;&gt;Copyright of modifications and derivative works of Python License 2 licensed software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4335/7904&quot;&gt;License for Python module derived from standard library module&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize my question, I copied a portion of the CPython standard library source code, modified it slightly to my needs and included the modified version in one of my answers on Stack Overflow. Is that allowed per the Python license or does it cause a conflict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T06:46:17.290" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T06:46:17.290" Title="Does the Python license allow to post modified versions of their source code on StackOverflow?" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-19T13:32:32.137" Score="3" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use a compiled program/non compiled source code which is under a license that everyone has the rights do use and sell (Eg: GPL) and no one can deny any person to use or sell it and then I want to develop an extended feature for it/document/presentation/compiled version for it to be sold for money, to be available only to the person that payed for this premium feature - Must I release this premium feature also as GPL ? If I must than it means that the person that just payed money for this premium feature can distribute it or sell it too or do whatever he want without paying me further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone develop a premium feature - how can he protect his premium feature for further free distributions that will eventually stop him of getting pay for his premium work.&#xA;If this premium feature will be available to all - then why would someone want to continue paying for it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: If I develop a wordpress plugin. (Wordpress is GPL). I develope a free plugin under the GPL too which everyone can take and do what they want with it (Almost), then I develop a better version of this plugin for money. Must it also be GPL ? If it does that as I wrote above - everyone can do whatever they want with it and I won't have the ability to continue selling it for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the solution for that ?&#xA;Thanks !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17537" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T16:58:17.220" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T07:52:24.977" Title="Releasing the source code of a premium feature for another open program" Tags="|distribution|open-source-definition|license|monetization|plugins|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9489" CreationDate="2020-03-19T16:53:30.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I use a compiled program [...] which is under a license that everyone has the rights to use and sell (Eg: GPL) [...] and then I want to develop an extended feature for it [...] to be sold for money, to be available only to the person that paid for this premium feature - Must I release this premium feature also as GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your work is a derivative of the original GPL work, then yes, you must.  GPLv3 requires this in s5c (&quot;&lt;em&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).  Older GPL versions, and other &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; licences have comparable requirements.  If the original work was licensed under a &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; free licence, then no, you may not have to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether your work is a derivative of the original is a complex question, but from what (little) you've told us, I for one suspect that it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it means that the person that just paid money for this premium feature can distribute it or sell it too or do whatever he want without paying me further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is exactly what it means.  It further means that any of those people to whom your client distributes it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; get similar rights under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If someone develops a premium feature - how can he protect his premium feature [against] further free distributions that will eventually stop him getting pay for his premium work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He can't.  That is the whole point of the GPL - to ensure that all users who get the program get freedom along with it.  The author of the original work intended that this should be the case, which is why (s)he picked the GPL in the first place.  If you don't like that, don't work on GPL code; or better, price your work so that you're paid fairly for it by the person who gets the first copy, and so have no need to make more money by shaking down other users. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this premium feature will be available to all - then why would someone want to continue paying for it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they want that feature?  I have been involved in paying money to free software developers in order to prioritise features that I had a particular need for.  I was very happy to get those features added, and it in no way diminished me that others had access to them also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific question about Wordpress plugin licensing is addressed in several places on this site already, eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8080/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/9102/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T06:58:23.887" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T06:58:23.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9487" CreationDate="2020-03-20T18:00:14.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, the TeX license states that any modified version has to be distributed under a different name. This is allowed by the Open Source Initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; read and understand David Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The essay is oldish, but still very much relevant. Knitting your own license is (a) a task for an &lt;strong&gt;expert&lt;/strong&gt;, (b) creates an island that can't share anything with other work (unless done &lt;em&gt;very carefully&lt;/em&gt;), thus isolating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T18:00:14.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9483" CreationDate="2020-03-20T18:08:17.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't coherent. If I get code under e.g. MIT, and compile it myself, I have to comply with &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; for source and binary. If I get binaries under GPL, I have to comply with &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;and I am entitled to source code under GPL&lt;/em&gt; by that same license. But then I get the code, can elect under MIT, and the first case applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses are designed to apply to source &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; binaries, as applicable. GPL specifically talks about whoever gets &lt;em&gt;binaries&lt;/em&gt; is entitled to &lt;em&gt;full source&lt;/em&gt;, no strings attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T18:08:17.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9489" CreationDate="2020-03-21T15:56:21.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it is &lt;em&gt;documentation&lt;/em&gt;, you can e.g. write a book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.masteringemacs.org/book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;emacs&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/9888381962&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU MP&lt;/a&gt; (one example among many), &lt;a href=&quot;https://realpython.com/best-python-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://learn.perl.org/books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perl&lt;/a&gt;, keep it's source closed and sell it. This is quite common, just take a peek at &lt;a href=&quot;http://shop.oreilly.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;O'Reilly&lt;/a&gt;'s offers, some are open source, but not all. Note the software described is under different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-21T15:56:21.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-21T21:27:31.370" Score="0" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very simple question. I have been watching some tutorials online regarding Android Java Programming and Firebase. A particular Youtuber does tutorials that are open to everyone and he shows his source code, however in his description he has a URL where he sells the source code to any of his apps on Fiverr. If I use his code from his Youtube tutorial videos, am I free to use it without paying for his Fiverr source code. (Also the only code I have used from this person relates to simple Firebase queries and other simplistic code that other Youtubers have done tutorials on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your opinion would be greatly appreciated! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17556" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T07:16:02.047" Title="Youtubers Selling Their Source Code" Tags="|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-03-22T13:38:35.373" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9496" CreationDate="2020-03-22T07:16:02.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The simple fact that the code is being shown in a (tutorial) video does not give you the right to copy/transcribe that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use code written by others, you need to have a copyright license and unless the video or description mentions an open-source copyright license for the code being shown, you most likely don't have one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; allowed to do is to take the &lt;strong&gt;ideas&lt;/strong&gt; being explained in the video and write your own code based on those ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T07:16:02.047" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2598" CreationDate="2020-03-23T07:46:48.743" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I simply added to the terms of service (why would it need to be verified by a lawyer? I would use lawyers only if the terms get hugely neglected)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pasifistic Software. Therefore you may not use it to operate machinery equipped with destructive weaponry.&#xA;Using it for any mortalizing, violent or destructive application, military or otherwise is strictly forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17561" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T07:46:48.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2020-03-24T07:23:10.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that Linux kernel makes specific exceptions &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; towards userspace apps using GPL kernel services through syscalls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;  services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;  of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &quot;derived&#xA;  work&quot;.  Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free&#xA;  Software  Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the&#xA;  Linux  kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this, an ebpf userspace app that accesses the bpf maps using syscalls may not need to adhere to GPL. Hence folks are well-within their rights to use Apache 2.0 license for userspace ebpf app code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17564" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T07:23:10.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9525" CreationDate="2020-03-24T10:51:48.663" Score="18" ViewCount="6188" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is specifically about GPLv3, LGPLv3, and Apple's App Store for iOS devices. Given&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the additional restrictions Apple imposes on iOS users (i.e. not allowing them to modify and run GPLv3 software or LGPLv3-licensed portions of software without additional conditions or at all), and/or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the terms of service Apple users must agree to in order to receive software from the App Store,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal for Apple to redistribute GPLv3 or LGPLv3 software in the iOS App Store?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only material I've managed to find about the GPL and Apple is from the early 10s when Apple pulled several GPL-licensed projects from its App Store [2] [3]. However, that incident involved the GPL&lt;strong&gt;v2&lt;/strong&gt; and Apples old TOS [4] which apple has since changed [5]. Furthermore, that incident mainly drew focus to Apples's App Store TOS, without sufficient  consideration being given to the fact that Apple is acting as &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the distributor and the entity imposing additional restrictions on device users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, the FSF's FAQ doesn't seem to include anything that can help answer this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removed my reference to GPL's Installation Instructions requirement since it's limited to object code sold with a device.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/mirrored/apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/mirrored/apple.com/legal/itunes/us/terms.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17566" LastEditorUserId="17566" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T03:34:47.647" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T03:34:47.647" Title="Is Apple allowed to distribute GPLv3-licensed software through its iOS App Store?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|redistribution|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-24T13:40:07.973" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are having a debate about whether we are allowed to package CDDL 1.1 licensed software like jaxb-api as-is with our commercial software. We would provide the licensing terms of CDDL 1.1 as required  and we are not making any modifications. Reading the texts at &lt;a href=&quot;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/top-10-common-development-and-distribution-license-cddl-questions-answered&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/top-10-common-development-and-distribution-license-cddl-questions-answered&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest we can. Can anyone share their experience? There is also a question about whether re-distribution terms changed between CDDL 1.0 and CDDL 1.1 and while &lt;a href=&quot;https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-121&lt;/a&gt; seems to say no in legalese, a plain-speak insight would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17569" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T16:46:12.753" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T16:46:12.753" Title="Is there a licensing restriction shipping proprietary software that packages/redistributes CDDL1.1-licensed software?" Tags="|licensing|cddl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9504" CreationDate="2020-03-25T04:26:25.800" Score="3" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a new package that I would like to submit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bioconductor.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bioconductor&lt;/a&gt;. It's essentially a C code, which is called by R (using Rcpp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the C functions within my package, is the C code of the R optimize function (obtained from a C file of the folder: &lt;code&gt;R-3.6.1\src\library\stats\src\optimize.c&lt;/code&gt;), but slightly modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the top of the &lt;code&gt;R-3.6.1\src\library\stats\src\optimize.c&lt;/code&gt; file it states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just not entirely certain if my Bioconductor package is allowed to contain this slightly modified C code of the R function? And if yes, should I place the aforementioned phrase &quot;This program is free software...&quot; in comments above the specific function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17574" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T08:31:49.503" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T08:31:49.503" Title="New Bioconductor package function redistribution" Tags="|license|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9503" CreationDate="2020-03-25T08:05:44.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, since your software contains code taken directly from R, albeit then modified, your software is, in copyright terms, a derivative work of R.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Is] my Bioconductor package ... allowed to contain this slightly modified C code of the R function&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is.  The point of the GPL is to allow code reuse in this manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;should I place the aforementioned phrase &quot;This program is free software...&quot; in comments above the specific function?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right to suspect that you now have some obligations, but they are a bit more complex than that.  Firstly, you are obliged to distribute your entire program under the GPL, either &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;v2&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;v3&lt;/a&gt;, so you should read them both and decide which to use; GPLv3 is the more &quot;current&quot; one.  You may, at your discretion, extend to your users the &quot;or any later version&quot; option, using language much like the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having decided which version to use, the licence will tell you the exact nature of your obligations, and give you advice on labelling your code.  In short, you must make your source code available to all your users, you must do so under the terms of the GPL, and you must distribute a copy of the GPL alongside your software; but this summary is no substitute for reading the licence itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not say what Bioconductor is, nor do you link to it so it's hard to know, but I suspect it's some kind of central repository for life-science-related code.  Whatever it is, it may impose some terms on the redistribution of your program.  If it does, and these terms are incompatible with those of the GPL version you have chosen, then &lt;em&gt;you cannot have your program redistributed in this way&lt;/em&gt; and will not be able to submit it to Bioconductor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T08:05:44.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-25T15:33:02.720" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using AngularJS in a web app I am building, and I'm wondering about the legal obligation of disclosing that my app uses AngularJS, and whether I need to make AngularJS's licence agreement available on my website. My reasoning is: if my users are using AngularJS through my app, they are subject to the terms of AngularJS's licence, and therefore must be informed of this fact.&#xA;Is this the case legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17576" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T15:33:02.720" Title="Am I legally obligated to disclose that my web app is using AngularJS?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9507" CreationDate="2020-03-25T22:35:02.127" Score="8" ViewCount="1234" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I found an old project that is GPL2, not hosted on Github. I fixed bugs in it, and want to post on Github. Can I distribute it under GPL3? In other words, is GPL3 a GPL2 with additional restrictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17578" LastEditorUserId="17580" LastEditDate="2020-03-27T00:00:15.477" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T00:00:15.477" Title="Is it possible to migrate old GPL2 project to GPL3?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9506" CreationDate="2020-03-25T22:50:36.643" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the GPLv2 is incompatible with the GPLv3. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLv2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF says of v2 and v3 compatibility&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that GPLv2 is, by itself, not compatible with GPLv3. However, most software released under GPLv2 allows you to use the terms of later versions of the GPL as well. When this is the case, you can use the code under GPLv3 to make the desired combination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPLv2 code says &quot;or any later version&quot; then you may distribute your modified work entirely under the GPLv3. Otherwise, you must stick with the GPLv2. (You could technically release your changes under any GPLv2-compatible license, in order to release the whole work under the terms of the GPLv2.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T22:50:36.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9514" CreationDate="2020-03-26T06:46:14.130" Score="6" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the FAQ section of the GPLv3, the Free Software Foundation presents the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#TwoPartyTivoization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: Suppose that two companies try to circumvent the requirement to provide Installation Information by having one company release signed software, and the other release a User Product that only runs signed software from the first company. Is this a violation of GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answer&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes. If two parties try to work together to get around the requirements of the GPL, they can both be pursued for copyright infringement. This is especially true since the definition of convey explicitly includes activities that would make someone responsible for secondary infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not immediately apparent to me how the GPLv3 goes about achieving this. Reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of convey&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then the relevant excerpts in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &amp;quot;installation information&amp;quot; is only required when the GPL software is conveyed as part of the transaction that involves the ownership of the device itself, wouldn't a company still be able to circumvent the anti-tivoization provisions of GPL by conveying the software separately after the device has been sold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The company first sells a device with a small proprietary program that only loads software if it was signed with the company's private cryptographic key. Think gaming consoles or a Juicero where the device is bought with the expectation that you need to by something else to actually use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then sell or deliver the GPLed software in another &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; transaction with the company or a third party. The user would be free to not buy signed software of course, but they won't get to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; their device to run anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't manage to find anything in the GPLv3 that would thwart this. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17566" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T13:00:11.950" Title="Could the anti-tivoization provisions of the GPLv3 be circumvented by providing software separately?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-26T07:04:44.060" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a software with components marked as Apache 2.0 and MIT license. Are they considered as open source components, also are they redistributable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17579" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-03-27T13:12:14.813" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T13:12:14.813" Title="Are Apache 2.0- and MIT-licensed components open source?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9509" CreationDate="2020-03-26T11:05:19.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt; both Apache2 and the X11 (often called MIT) licences as being both free and GPL-compatible.  The OSI &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt; both licences as meeting their definition of Open Source.  So by the usual standards, content offered under either of those licences is both free and open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;are they redistributable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF's four freedoms include the freedom to distribute copies of the software, and the OSI's open-source definition requires free redistributability.  Both licences have some small requirements that you must honour, mostly to do with preservation of copyright notices, but as long as you honour those, then yes, the content is freely-redistributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T11:05:19.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2020-03-26T13:12:50.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently theres this standard/specification/bot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allcontributors.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://allcontributors.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is more info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allcontributors.org/docs/en/overview&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://allcontributors.org/docs/en/overview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a big example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors#contributors-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/all-contributors/all-contributors#contributors-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17584" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T13:12:50.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9508" CreationDate="2020-03-27T13:00:11.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at this in more detail. We have a platform vendor PV which will only allow signed software to run on the platform. The platform is a User Product in the sense of the GPLv3. And we have a software vendor SV which wants to supply software that runs on the platform. However, SV's software is subject to GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If SV gives the software to PV which loads it into the User Product and then gives it to end users, PV is conveying the GPL-covered software and has to supply Installation Information, including the signing keys. PV can avoid this if SV's software cannot be updated in the User Product, e.g. because it was burned into ROM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is quite similar if SV gets the software signed by PV and gives it to end users directly, but in a transaction that is somehow connected to sale/lease/lending of the User Product. E.g. if PV gives end users a voucher for SV's software, I would think that SV's conveying to the end user could be part of the User Product transaction. The same if the User Product cannot be used without SV's software. Thus, the vendors cannot circumvent the GPLv3 requirements just by involving a third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scenario you are actually asking about occurs when the conveying of GPLv3-covered software is truly separate from the transaction involving the User Product. The GPLv3 requires for that section to apply, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;object code is conveyed ”in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product“&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; “the conveying occurs as part of a transaction [involving ownership rights to the User Product]”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and that the object code in the User Product can be modified by anyone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the object code is “for use in” a User Product, the second condition would not apply. Then, the anti-Tivoization clause does not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical example, I would argue that signing GPLv3 software so that it can run without warnings on a Windows PC made by Dell or on a MacBook made by Apple would not entitle recipients of the software to receiving those keys, whether from the software vendor, Microsoft, Dell, or Apple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is much much more nuanced in an App Store scenario where all installation of third party software goes through the platform vendor. While the conveying must occur as part of a transaction involving the User Product, the anti-Tivoization clause can apply “regardless of how the transaction is characterized”. The scope of this clause is intended to be broad, but it is entirely unclear how broad it is – a matter that a court will have to eventually decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that if full access to an app store is only possible when you have a User Product, then the transaction of the User Product would also be a master agreement permitting use of the app store, and all further contracts or transactions via the app store could therefore be part of the transaction of the User Product. GPLv3 software conveyed via the store would then be required to provide Installation Information, which could make it impossible to distribute via the store. But if the software can be downloaded from the store without having the User Product, that would be a strong indication that store transactions are completely separate from the User Product transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-rationale.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3 Third Discussion Draft Rationale&lt;/a&gt; makes it clear that the authors did not intend such subtleties. The need to provide signing keys was originally part of the Corresponding Source definition, but this was too complex and had some unwanted consequences in an enterprise context. Therefore, the requirement to provide Installation Information was restricted to the context of User Products, the definition of which was lifted almost verbatim from US law. This suggests that the circumstances where Installation Information has to be provided should be interpreted rather broadly, in line with the goal stated in the license preamble to “guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Installation Information only involves information that is specific to the User Product, whereas other installation reqirements are still part of the Corresponding Source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T13:00:11.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9500" CreationDate="2020-03-28T05:24:53.163" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I emailed Mr. Richard Stallman, the primary author of the GPL, for his opinion on this issue. I received the following reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I studied this question for a while.  It is clear that that matter of distribution violates GPLv3 overall.  However, I couldn't be sure&#xA;  what courts might say.  To work out the answer would require&#xA;  a very capable lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17566" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T05:24:53.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9085" CreationDate="2020-03-28T15:17:35.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; If your code works with the GPL program, then the whole program must be released under GPL, which you can't do because &lt;em&gt;ProprietarySDK&lt;/em&gt; is non-GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar issue with including &lt;em&gt;ProprietarySDK&lt;/em&gt; in your program: you will have to check what their licence allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's position:&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another relevant section &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MoneyGuzzlerInc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I'd like to modify GPL-covered programs and link them with the portability libraries from Money Guzzler Inc. I cannot distribute the source code for these libraries, so any user who wanted to change these versions would have to obtain those libraries separately. Why doesn't the GPL permit this?.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is very similar to these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2139/can-i-license-python-project-under-3-clause-bsd-while-it-has-gpl-based-dependenc&quot;&gt;Can I license Python project under 3-clause BSD while it has GPL-based dependencies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6033/can-a-non-gpl-python-program-use-gpl-python-module&quot;&gt;Can a non-GPL python program use GPL Python module?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And has been answered in more detail there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17603" LastEditorUserId="17603" LastEditDate="2024-02-28T17:24:24.617" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T17:24:24.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T15:54:08.970" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a maintainer of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dreamer/dosbox-staging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dosbox-staging&lt;/a&gt; project, which is licensed using GPLv2+. I am considering bundling &lt;a href=&quot;https://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOS/32A&lt;/a&gt; with my project (as it greatly helps with the emulation of old DOS software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DOS32/A is definitely open source, it's also considered &quot;free&quot; by many sources, but it uses a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; with certain limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 1996-2006 by Narech K. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistribution  and  use  in source and  binary  forms, with or without&#xA;  modification,  are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;  met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions  of  source code  must  retain  the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions  in binary form  must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice,  this  list of conditions and  the  following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any,&#xA;  must include the following acknowledgment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&quot;This product uses DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender technology.&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alternately,  this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself, if&#xA;  and wherever such third-party acknowledgments normally appear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Products derived from this software  may not be called &quot;DOS/32A&quot; or&#xA;  &quot;DOS/32 Advanced&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS  SOFTWARE AND DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED  &quot;AS IS&quot; (etc, etc…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These limitations are clearly designed to prevent misrepresentation in derived software, but from POV of strict license adherence, they give me a pause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I have the following options available to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just bundle it, make changes required by points 1-3 and keep using GPLv2+ - it's not a problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Same as (1), but add a new condition to GPLv2 about respecting DOS/32A license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Switch to GPLv3 (I would prefer not to, but I can if I must), and use GPLv3 section 7 to put a limitation (b) and (c) in place to preserve DOS32/A restrictions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some other option I haven't thought off?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best course of action in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15829" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T20:55:50.750" Title="Does GPLv2 allow for prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6203" CreationDate="2020-03-28T15:58:43.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I use a software license for this or a Creative Commons&#xA;  license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do either, nothing prevents you from releasing data or any copyrightable material under a software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page at GNU.org&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;you will find license recommendations on releasing data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another issue to consider. Your resume (CV) is also a statement about what you have done, where you have studied etc. Allowing fake or modified versions of this is not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So perhaps the best approach is to create a &lt;em&gt;default version&lt;/em&gt; of the resume that contains dummy or placeholder data, and release that under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Types_of_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free licence (CC-BY)&lt;/a&gt;; and release &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; resume (and the graphical output) under CC-BY-ND:&#xA;For more on this, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OpinionLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU.org / Licenses for Works stating a Viewpoint (e.g., Opinion or Testimony)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T15:58:43.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9518" CreationDate="2020-03-28T20:55:50.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, this is mere use together of the two separate pieces by the recipient of your package (you talk about &quot;bundling&quot; because it helps -- i.e., isn't really essential). As such, this is mere aggregation as GPLv2 understands it, and you are in the clear. Just keep both pieces apart, state clearly what is what, where each piece comes from, and the respective licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T20:55:50.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T22:42:40.953" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I modified a BSD licensed software and proposed the patch to the contributors. I has been discussed and refused. I'm respecting the decision not to merge the changes, however I want to provide the modification in an easy accessible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSSRH&lt;/a&gt; account for a namespace that differs from the namespace of the original software. Is it ok if I upload the original software + my changes + a modification to &lt;code&gt;build.gradle&lt;/code&gt; with my OSSRH namespace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the license is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2000-2015 www.hamcrest.org&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of&#xA;conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce&#xA;the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA;the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&#xA;Neither the name of Hamcrest nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse&#xA;or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written&#xA;permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &quot;AS IS&quot; AND ANY&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES&#xA;OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT&#xA;SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,&#xA;INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED&#xA;TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR&#xA;BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN&#xA;CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY&#xA;WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH&#xA;DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aware of alternative ways of distributing my modification. I'm interested in the correctness of this particular approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6658" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T07:24:35.610" Title="Is it allowed to redistribute a modification of BSD licensed software on OSSRH with my Maven groupId?" Tags="|bsd|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9521" CreationDate="2020-03-29T07:24:35.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license explicitly gives permission to distribute the software with modifications. The only conditions to that are that you retain the copyright notice and license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your changes, you can put in your own copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T07:24:35.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8976" CreationDate="2020-03-29T14:24:17.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a very good essay on this by Richard Stallman: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moral duty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;save schools money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Software permits students to learn how software works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the second argument doesn't really apply as you'll have to teach Trados and OmegaT (and buy the licence) anyway, and the third argument really applies to programmers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there needs to be a very good Free Software alternative first: an option is to team up with other translation and programming teachers (worldwide) and develop a translator software (or contribute to an existing one) as a thesis project of Computer Science BSc/MSc students, or with online volunteers, or perhaps as a crowdfunding campaign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T14:24:17.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6673" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:23:41.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, the project has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/blob/94f6db8f8801b75924e689d210cf8c102a11d317/CHANGELOG.md#added-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relicensed under MIT and patent grants were removed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original PATENTS file is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/commit/585af35c3a8c31fefb64bc884d4001faa96544d3#diff-7373d27f0ea94a5b649f893e20fffeda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/commit/585af35c3a8c31fefb64bc884d4001faa96544d3#diff-7373d27f0ea94a5b649f893e20fffeda&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiously, the MIT licence does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; provide &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Relation_to_patents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patent protection for contributors&lt;/a&gt;. So this seems to be a step backwards. It should have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License#Licensing_conditions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relicensed under Apache&lt;/a&gt;, if they intended to give the same patent assurances as the original notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question, it is better to include the patent disclaimer, but the original BSD licence does not require this, and neither does the MIT licence. For other licences, consult their text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more info on software patents, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/want-abolish-software-patents-tell-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EFF&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-patents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:23:41.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9500" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:34:53.657" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no intention of trying to argue with rms about this (or any other GPL-related) issue.  But I think there's an interesting difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 that gives rise to a new line of approach to the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous issue with Apple was, as the OP notes, GPLv2-specific.  GPLv2's handling of additional obligations being placed on distribution is to shut down the right to redistribute, in s7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which led to the suggestion that Apple had no right to distribute GPLv2 software, and the discussions that arose and are documented in the question, &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;.  GPLv3 takes a more interesting line, in s7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When GPLv3 software is uploaded to the Apple store, that conveyance is covered by GPLv3.  Apple's standard restrictions are placed on it afterwards; thus the recipient, by GPLv3 s7, may simply ignore them.  An exception may arise when the software is uploaded to Apple by a rightsholder; then an argument can be made that the rightsholder, knowing that Apple will place these conditions on redistribution, has consented to them.  But as long as the upload is done by someone who isn't the rightsholder, and who has no power to consent to additional terms, then the GPL, coming first, takes precedence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Apple chooses to redistribute software conveyed to them under the terms of GPLv3 (and I firmly believe that Apple is doing the distribution here, and that arguments of &quot;mere conduit&quot; protection do not apply) then they have consented to the GPL, and their terms, to the extent that they are incompatible with GPLv3, are thus invalidated by GPLv3 s7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:34:53.657" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-29T19:59:54.573" Score="2" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a mobile app and I'm using GitHub for source code which is set to public, so I can show my friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was using some free icons from www.flaticon.com/home , which required the developer to attribute the authors to the icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I decided to go ahead and just create my own icons and delete all the icons I was using the flaticon, but the problem is in the previous commits on GitHub, the old images of the icons are still visible in my resource folders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a problem I need to address at all? Do I need to mention anywhere that I WAS using icons from FlatIcon or am I good to just act like it never happened? There is no trace of it left on my current version of the app, and it hasn't been published yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;edit: I don't know if this is possible but maybe an option would be to just delete every instance of the previous icon images from my github history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17610" LastEditorUserId="17610" LastEditDate="2020-03-29T20:28:49.240" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T11:46:38.800" Title="Do I need to attribute icons not used anymore but visible on GitHub's previous commits?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9530" CreationDate="2020-03-30T02:04:33.320" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most-relevant existing question I can find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4421/17609&quot;&gt;Dual license Apache2.0 GPLv3 for a library with optionnal GPLed code&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6883/17609&quot;&gt;Bundling GCC along with my GPLv2 project&lt;/a&gt;, still, I could use some clarification. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use GNU FreeFont to typeset some maths expression in user agents without MathML support, as well as to produce single-page HTML docs suitable for conversion to PDF formats using external softwares. To this end, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/FAQ.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (as of March 2020) says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it's fine to arbitrarily license the PDF (since the PDF is considered the output of the font instead of the font itself); and &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;online websites must distribute the fonts' lincesing information along with the web pages (if I understood correctly, one way to do that is to make sure the font package content is intact). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I want to dedicate the template system to the public domain, and allow recipiants of my package to replace the fonts with whatever else they prefer. To that end, the FAQ says about bundling the fonts in non-GPL software: I must indicate it's a separate product and users can &lt;strong&gt;obtain&lt;/strong&gt; it themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there's a half-complete &quot;tutorial&quot; and a half-complete &quot;license&quot; in the docs for the templates. And what I'm doing right now, is that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've put the fonts in a subdirectory of my template files.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Included a text in the &quot;tutorial&quot; saying the fonts is bundled with the templates, where to obtain it, and it'ss used for maths expressions, and can be &lt;strong&gt;replaced&lt;/strong&gt; if users find licensing conflicts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also in &quot;tutorial&quot;, the relative path in the package to the directory containing the fonts. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Indicated in my &quot;license&quot; that: the templates are public domain; the fonts are from GNU and is GPLv3. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that might not be adequate as I'm telling users to replace the fonts rather than obtaining it from official sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without including a full verbose text of license, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should I tell users of the template system? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should I tell users of the template system to tell website and PDF authors? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do I need to do to make sure the templates can be placed in public domain? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17609" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T12:14:03.733" Title="Bundling GPLv3 GNU FreeFont with my public domain HTML template system" Tags="|gpl-3|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9536" CreationDate="2020-03-30T08:49:29.743" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a distributed computing project. The client for this project uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twisted&lt;/a&gt; (MIT licensed) to communicate with the server. The client will locally invoke a &lt;a href=&quot;http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PARI/GP&lt;/a&gt; (GPL licensed) script to do all of the computations based on two numbers passed from the client. The PARI/GP script will then return a few numbers to the client, which it will process into information for the server before sending it off. What I want is to have the client itself be closed-source, since this processing it does for the server is to discriminate against fake results. I don't care either way whether the PARI/GP script source is distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPL question&lt;/a&gt; and it seems that my client and the PARI/GP script would be considered separate programs in an aggregate, since they communicate very basic data and do so rather remotely. This would allow for the client to be closed-source. Are they really separate? Would it change if I offered proprietary alternatives to the PARI/GP script fulfilling the same purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that PARI/GP itself could be considered a &quot;System Library&quot; as defined in section 1 of GPLv3.0? If so, would I be allowed to provide a download link to PARI/GP itself, or could I just include PARI/GP in the whole application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification:&lt;/strong&gt; The PARI/GP script does all of the actual computation necessary for the results of the distributed computing project. The processing the client does is just to ensure that those computations were actually done, and then show this to the server. That is what makes me believe they are two separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17615" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T16:56:59.857" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T09:58:54.263" Title="Use of GPL software with proprietary network program" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9526" CreationDate="2020-03-30T11:46:38.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you don't need to maintain acknowledgements for assets that are no longer in use by the project. As soon as you take out the last of those assets, you can also remove any statements about using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, each commit in GitHub should fulfil all the attribution and other copyright-related requirements that the licenses place on you, but that would mean you also couldn't make any errors in that area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, you should aim that all tags and the head of each public branch fulfills those requirements. If you show good faith in that, then I believe you will be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T11:46:38.800" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9527" CreationDate="2020-03-30T12:14:03.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With what you have done so far, you are nearly there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without including a full verbose text of license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to include a copy of the GPL license in your own license file, but you should have a copy of it in the FreeFont subdirectory&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I tell users of the template system? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing missing from your &quot;tutorial&quot; is a link to the FreeFont homepage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What should I tell users of the template system to tell website and PDF authors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would add a link to the FreeFont FAQ. That is likely to be better than anything you can write up yourself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do I need to do to make sure the templates can be placed in public domain? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing more. However, it might be good to know that not all jurisdictions, including large parts of Europe, allow works to be placed explicitly in the public domain. An alternative might be to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0 license&lt;/a&gt;, which is effectively &quot;public domain or a very very permissive license if public domain isn't recognized&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T12:14:03.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-30T21:27:53.603" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying Computer Science in Germany. Even before the beginning of my studies, I wrote some software in order to learn how to write good code (and in order to have fun, too :-) ).&#xA;Now, I'd like to publish some of it (on github) so that I can show it to other people in a convenient way. Additionally, I'm looking forward to receive helpful suggestions, so that I can not only improve my programs, but also my coding style. (And hopefully, some of my projects will turn out to be useful to others, too.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the situation. But I'm not sure how to handle the publication. I'd like to license my software under the GPLv3+, because I like the idea of free software and would be proud to be part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germany, however, the &quot;Disclaimer of Warranty&quot; (Nr. 15 of the GPL*) and the &quot;Limitation of Liability&quot; (Nr. 16 of the GPL*) are not applicable for legal reasons. In spite of the fact that I'm distributing the software as individual without commercial interests, there remains some sort of liability and warranty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] less stringent liability (only for willful intent and gross&#xA;  negligence) and restricted warranty (only for malicious concealment of&#xA;  a defect).&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ifross.org/en/what-legal-standard-liability-and-warranty-germany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ifross.org/en/what-legal-standard-liability-and-warranty-germany&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, I do not want to distribute malicious content, but I'm a bit worried about the negligence thing. I'm really trying to write good and stable software, but I'm still a beginner. I already changed the &quot;master&quot; branch of my github repositories to &quot;development&quot; and marked the software as &quot;alpha&quot; short after uploading it (under the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now, my question&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Is there any software license that is applicable for such educational purposes? Perhaps a license that grants all freedoms (copy, modify, distribute, etc.), but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the freedom to actually execute the software (especially in production environments)?&#xA;Or are my concerns unjustified? What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be really happy if you would like to give me some advice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*the text of the GPLv3: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17620" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T01:53:53.733" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T01:53:53.733" Title="Can I use a license with a warranty disclaimer when my country's laws make that inapplicable?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-recommendation|law|warranty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-03-31T15:28:40.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-30T22:29:16.993" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm distributing a device (ARMv8 server) which runs GNU GPL licensed software. I've changed this software so that it is able to load any plugin in the form of *.so file. I've open-sourced this feature and it is under GPL.&#xA;I'm planning to distribute closed source shared library. This library will be loaded by GNU GPL thanks to a feature that I've added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if I'm actually violating GNU GPL here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL binary &amp;lt;---loads---&gt; Closed-Source-Lib&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17621" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T23:59:08.897" Title="Usage of closed-source software loaded into GPL software as a plugin" Tags="|gpl-2|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9533" CreationDate="2020-03-30T23:59:08.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distributing the GPL binary linked to the closed-source lib will be a license violation. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MoneyGuzzlerInc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it depends a bit on circumstance. If the library can be used on its own or with another software, thus independent of the GPL binary and is distributed separately so that the user combines the work: likely fine.&#xA;It is also fine if it is merely an aggregate work, thus if you distribute a GPL-licensed OS, it is of course allowed to run proprietary software on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library is only usable as a plug-in of the GPL binary, or if they share data and memory, or if they are distributed as a functional unit: then it is a violation of the GPL as by the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T23:59:08.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T03:32:29.193" Score="4" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, a distributor of GPLv3 software who &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not have any right to redistribute software except by becoming a GPLv3 licensee, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;knowingly distributes GPLv3 software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;agrees to Section 3 of the GPLv3 which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the the redistributor is aware that they are redistributing GPLv3 software,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this imply that a recipient of GPLv3 software is legally allowed to circumvent technological measures placed &lt;em&gt;by the redistributor&lt;/em&gt; to the extent that it interferes with the user's rights granted by the license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so, &lt;em&gt;assuming that Apple is aware that it is distributing GPLv3 software&lt;/em&gt;, would this imply that users of Apple iOS devices who received GPLv3 software from the Apple App Store are legally allowed to circumvent technological measures by Apple (to the extent necessary for them to exercise their rights)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up question for another question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple-allowed-to-distribute-gplv3-licensed-software-through-its-ios-app-store&quot;&gt;iOS App Store and the GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17566" LastEditorUserId="17566" LastEditDate="2020-04-02T05:01:18.870" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T05:06:19.203" Title="Does the GPLv3 give recipients the legal right to circumvent technological measures imposed on them by third-party redistributors?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9528" CreationDate="2020-03-31T09:58:54.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the requirements of the client application are just that there needs to be an external program that can be invoked with a two numbers as input and that produces a few numbers as output, then those requirements are generic enough that the client application and the PARI/GP script will be considered to be separate works for copyright purposes. This means that the GPL license of the PARI/GP script has no influence on the licensing options of the client application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that even if you distribute the client application and the PARI/GP script together, your client application can be closed-source as long as the PARI/GP script can be modified and the client application can use the modified script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it possible that PARI/GP itself could be considered a &quot;System Library&quot; as defined in section 1 of GPLv3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. System Libraries are libraries that are reasonably expected to already be present on the end-user's system because they are part of the OS or so extremely widely used that an average user doesn't need to receive it as part of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T09:58:54.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9539" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:33:09.000" Score="2" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; contains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted,[..] to sell copies of the Software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Bootstrap uses the MIT licence, I also see thousand of Bootstrap templates sold on various platforms. Does it imply, that they are all under the MIT licence and that each buyer may sell them as often as he wants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17624" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T00:01:56.787" Title="Can one resell any Bootstrap template because of the MIT licence?" Tags="|mit|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T21:08:19.430" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Party A writes some software; perhaps intending to distribute it under the MIT or some other permissive license. THe software uses some GPL'd software. Party A conveys the software to party B, without conveying any of the GPL'd software; relying on B to obtain that software themselves. Does party A have to attach the GPL license to the conveyed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17625" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T21:08:19.430" Title="What are my obligations if I convey software that calls GPL code (specifically via python import), but I do NOT convey the GPL software itself?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2020-04-01T06:26:36.540" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;No.  If Bootstrap were conveyed under GPL, or another &lt;strong&gt;copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; free licence, and if templates were (in copyright terms) derivative works of Bootstrap, then the templates would be required to be conveyed under GPL also, and could be distributed as you have described (though the buyers in your example would have to resell them with GPL rights attached, which might not be a great business model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the MIT licence, like the other &lt;strong&gt;weak&lt;/strong&gt; free licences, does not require that derivatives are distributed under the same terms.  It is perfectly lawful to mix proprietary and MIT-licensed software, and the proprietary software does not become implicitly freely-licensed by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have to examine each of these Bootstrap templates for the terms that govern the purchase, and if (as is likely) they are non-free, you have no more right to sell copies of them than you do with, say, Microsoft Office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T06:26:36.540" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9541" CreationDate="2020-04-01T10:24:43.803" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am maintaining a free open-source (3-clause BSD) code checker for c++ files, and to run regression tests on real-world code, I added isolated C++ files from other high-profile open-source projects (such as Chromium, Boost), all of which have different licenses.&#xA;I only picked 1-2 files from each, so not a whole filetree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not compile or run those source files, I just use them as text input for the linter.&#xA;Since I keep those files in my repository, I am wondering whether this kind of usage has any chance of becoming a serious legal issue, ever. I guess my tests could instead download those files on each run from some static web location if necessary, but it seems unlikely to me that this is a serious breach of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9799" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T12:41:26.763" Title="Use code snippets as canaries for a static code-checker" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9540" CreationDate="2020-04-01T12:41:26.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just keep the licenses of the files as-is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make a clear statement and indication that separate licenses and attribution apply to the files used for regression tests as indicated in either the files respectively (I'd choose that) or a separate file you maintain where you state license and attribution by file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you may not violate the terms of those licenses - but you are distributing them unmodified as source with their license - that does not pose a problem with any open source license (if it does, it's not open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume building your binary (without regression testing) does not require any of these files. Thus your own code and distribution of binaries is not affected by the license of the files in the regression tests. It can have any license iff your distributed binaries don't depend on the regression tests in your repository; thus the regression tests are a mere tool you use to develop your programme and verify its quality and providing them along with your source is thus a service to developers of your programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T12:41:26.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9543" CreationDate="2020-04-01T20:45:43.523" Score="3" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand what I, the copyright holder of a project, am permitted to do according to the license I have given my project. I want the source code for most versions of the project to be free, but for some beta versions to have binaries distributed without source. If I own and am the sole contributor to the project, and have licensed the project with the GNU GPL license, can I give a later version or release of the project a different license, and can I remove the license entirely? If I do this, can I distribute binaries of that version without source without violating the GPL license I previously used? If there are other contributors to the project can I, with their permission, do what I previously mentioned? And if I am not bound by the license I have put in place, can I distribute binaries for a version of the project with the GPL license without providing source? The FAQ page about GNU licenses on the GNU website, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&lt;/a&gt;, says that I will &quot;surely lose moral standing in the community&quot;, which of course I do not want to do. It also says to release the project as a non-free program is &quot;ethically tainted&quot;, but not illegal. Since the purpose of the version is to be a limited access beta, I would assume this would be alright to do, but I just want to make sure before I continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T21:33:57.120" Title="Distribute binaries of GNU GPL licensed project without source as copyright holder" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|relicensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9542" CreationDate="2020-04-01T21:25:41.157" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally, as the sole copyright holder you can apply any license any time and even in retrospect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot withdraw the license given to people previously, though; the latter means if you published under GPL and handed out the source, that person can henceforth distribute the source in perpetuity provided the person obeys the license given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two paragraphs above also apply in the case of several contributors when ALL contributors to the codebase from past and present agree to these actions. You might want to get written permission in those cases to stay legally reasonably safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, yes, you can release versions now as GPL, and later versions under a less permissive or proprietary license. A license change always is a big step: it means that every user has to review whether they can continue to use the product for whatever purpose they use it. Thus the license generally is one important factor when choosing a software, thus changing it on-the-fly indeed does damage your reputation and costs you trust as you expressly prove yourself that you cannot be relied on to provide a product continuously on reliable terms. People and companies alike generally don't like to have such burden put onto them without their own choosing - especially if it means at the same time that they get less for probably more money (removing open source and going proprietary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything you handed out under GPL terms will can in future also be distributed under GPL terms by anyone who received it under that condition. You will be inviting unfriendly fork(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to ask for example the people from rhodecode how well that went down with a community and then-prospective customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus generally: choose your license before you publish anything. Choose wisely and make sure that it aligns with your values and expectations. Don't needlessly change the license once you chose one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, you imply in your question you might want to distribute the final product under GPL but not the testing versions. To me this does not make sense this way at all: you might get a better final product when you allow people to look at the source before the final release as they can give better-quality feedback that way or even hand-in patches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T21:33:57.120" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T21:33:57.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="217" CreationDate="2020-04-04T16:01:01.677" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of things were not mentioned in the accepted answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;documentation associated with the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;community adoption&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent aka &quot;BSD+Patent&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Documentation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference between the BSD licenses and the MIT license is how they deal with the meaning of &quot;software&quot;. &#xA;MIT applies to the documentation associated with the software, BSD doesn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In MIT license, the word &quot;Software&quot; with a capital &quot;S&quot; is explicitly defined as being &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6545/is-the-mit-license-suitable-for-documentation&quot;&gt;&quot;this software and associated documentation files&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In the BSD licenses, they talk about &quot;source code and binary form&quot;, no mention of documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, FreeBSD uses a complete &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;different license for its documentation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both MIT and BSD allow you to release your documentation under another license, that's potentially more restrictive. It is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://symfony.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Symfony&lt;/a&gt; does with MIT+&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be liberal with your documentation as well, you'd probably want to pick MIT instead of BSD. It avoids you to have to choose another documentation-specific license like &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; or equivalent on top of your BSD licensed source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I want to mitigate a little bit this assertion. I Am Not A Lawyer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/non-software/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose A License&lt;/a&gt;, the GitHub initiative, suggests that any open source software license is suitable for documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any open source software license or open license for media (see above)&#xA;  also applies to software documentation. If you use different licenses&#xA;  for your software and its documentation, be sure to specify that&#xA;  source code examples in the documentation are also licensed under the&#xA;  software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flask&lt;/a&gt; is an example of widespread BSD-licensed project that also applies BSD to its documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This license applies to all files in the Flask repository and source&#xA;  distribution. This includes Flask’s source code, the examples, and&#xA;  tests, as well as the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Community adoption&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NPM package manager contains libraries &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/community/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mostly released under MIT&lt;/a&gt;. So using it as well for your NPM package will most likely grant you more adoption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you're looking to work closely with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/COPYRIGHT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeBSD project&lt;/a&gt; for example, you'd rather use one of the BSD licenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easier for your work to be accepted by a community when its license is already widely used within this very same community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's face it though, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.blog/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT is in general more popular&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent aka &quot;BSD+Patent&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another relatively new OSI-approved BSD license which @Philipp didn't talk about: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSDplusPatent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent&lt;/a&gt;, also referred as &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause-Patent.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause-Patent&lt;/a&gt; or &quot;BSD+Patent&quot;.&#xA;BSD+Patent is exactly the same as BSD-2-Clause, except that BSD+Patent contains the explicit patent grant of the Apache License v2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, each copyright&#xA;  holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under&#xA;  this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge,&#xA;  royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the&#xA;  conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use,&#xA;  offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software,&#xA;  where such license applies only to those patent claims, already&#xA;  acquired or hereafter acquired, licensable by such copyright holder or&#xA;  contributor that are necessarily infringed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) their Contribution(s) (the licensed copyrights of copyright&#xA;  holders and non-copyrightable additions of contributors, in source or&#xA;  binary form) alone; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) combination of their Contribution(s) with the work of authorship&#xA;  to which such Contribution(s) was added by such copyright holder or&#xA;  contributor, if, at the time the Contribution is added, such addition&#xA;  causes such combination to be necessarily infringed. The patent&#xA;  license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the&#xA;  Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as expressly stated above, no rights or licenses from any&#xA;  copyright holder or contributor is granted under this license, whether&#xA;  expressly, by implication, estoppel or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like MIT and BSD-2-Clause and unlike Apache License v2, BSD+Patent is compatible with GPLv2. Like Apache License v2 and unlike MIT and BSD-2-Clause, BSD+Patent avoids leading to potential &lt;a href=&quot;https://google.github.io/opencasebook/patents/#express-but-non-specific-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;patent trolls&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing under BSD+Patent is an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rationale-of-apache-dual-licensing/8952/5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alternative to dual-licensing under MIT+Apache v2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14261" LastEditorUserId="14261" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T11:26:25.653" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T11:26:25.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9547" CreationDate="2020-04-04T22:06:08.290" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're using a library that is licensed under GNU GPL v3 to help develop your application, then from what I understand, you must release your application for free and it's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it then possible or permitted to release your application for free, but allow people to purchase content that is separate from its source code and therefore not required to be released with the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the following apps where a GNU library helped create the functionality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a video player, but the content videos are sold separately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a text reader, but the text files sold separately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a video game engine for a type of game, but levels, models and&#xA;overall content sold separately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the bare core essential source code of the application is released for free under GNU as required by the license, but it's like an empty application, where the content is sold separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To solidify it further, think of a language learning app! The bare&#xA;  structure of the app is the menus and functionality to load text and&#xA;  play audio back, and this source code is released. Then sold&#xA;  separately is the language packs which consist of the text and audio&#xA;  files that are not part of the source code. People can also create&#xA;  their own language pack and sell them separately, within the app or&#xA;  their own language learning app that is a derivative of the original&#xA;  app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, all the functionality of the app has to be there in the source code, so you can't create separate modules that introduce new functionality without releasing them as part of the source code - but media like videos, audio, text files, etc... could possibly be released separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, this leaves me thinking what could be counted as separate content from the apps source code like XML files and where the limits are? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I suppose too, these downloadable files/content have to be external and therefore loaded from the app from a different directory to not be considered part of the app's source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the separate content also have to be not sold together with the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17664" LastEditorUserId="17664" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T01:42:48.870" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T07:00:32.450" Title="Sell content separately for app licensed under GNU v3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9546" CreationDate="2020-04-05T07:00:32.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Files that are read as data by the application (i.e. the files may unlock/trigger behavior, but they don't add new behavior or code) are considered independent works of authorship. This means that those files are not affected by the copyright license of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not needed that the data files reside in a different directory as the application or that they are never distributed together with the application, but they would have to be different files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bit of a grey area when it comes to (XML) files that describe the GUI or files that contain translations of the UI. For those it can be argued both ways if they are just data files or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T07:00:32.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8987" CreationDate="2020-04-05T23:12:42.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but in my understanding GitHub issues can be considered as documentation associated with source code. The only difference between opening an issue and sending a PR or committing changes directly is purely technical. The effect is the same: you add content to the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you released your repository under, say, the MIT license, then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6545/is-the-mit-license-suitable-for-documentation&quot;&gt;license also applies to the documentation&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;You can also explicitly mention a license for documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub functions in a way that all contributions use the same license initially used - except otherwise stated. This rule is often referred as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.guide/legal/#does-my-project-need-an-additional-contributor-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;inbound=outbound&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and it is explicitly stated on the site.&#xA;However, I'm not entirely sure it has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/1620&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;real legal ground without a proper Contributor Licensing Agreement&lt;/a&gt;. Well, most projects do not ask for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt; or even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DCO&lt;/a&gt; - so I am guessing it is fine. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ben.balter.com/2018/01/02/why-you-probably-shouldnt-add-a-cla-to-your-open-source-project/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;controversy&lt;/a&gt; about the real legal necessity of using a CLA in general, so I imagine that the answer to this question is also controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All things considered, we can reasonably expect issues to be bound to the documentation license chosen by the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: to respond to comments I haven't read anything from GitHub that confirm the previous statement, it was just an educated guess. Open-source teams often regard issues as documentation.&#xA;However, what happens when you're the sole owner of the project (no external commits or PR) and you change the license? What about the issues posted by others? &#xA;Issues could simply be &quot;all rights reserved&quot;.&#xA;Frankly I am not sure about it and the suggestion below is even more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doubt, reaching out to GitHub directly is probably best. You mentioned poems and other contents potentially unrelated to the software (is it even a software you're storing on GitHub?). Honestly, it's a great question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14261" LastEditorUserId="14261" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T13:54:56.523" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T13:54:56.523" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9551" CreationDate="2020-04-06T05:32:46.393" Score="4" ViewCount="2418" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it permissible?  Do I need to specifically mention it somewhere in my thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17672" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T09:42:56.847" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:07:37.637" Title="Can I use open source code with Apache 2.0 license in my thesis?" Tags="|license-recommendation|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9550" CreationDate="2020-04-06T07:05:07.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license allows use for any purpose, so using the code in a thesis is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is common to cite relevant&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; libraries and software that you used in an academic context. This is entirely an academic thing and has nothing to do with licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can cite the project website or the code repository website as you would cite any other website. Sometimes, software that originated from academia also has &quot;how to cite&quot; instructions, e.g. when the authors wrote a paper that presented the software. For example, the SciPy software that is often used in Python has such information &lt;a href=&quot;https://scipy.org/citing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[1]: don't cite everything that you used, but cite software that is relevant in the context of the thesis. E.g. when researching optimization algorithms, don't cite your version control system, your operating system, or that you are using LaTeX. In contrast, do cite other optimization tools that you used or inspired you, and other libraries that were essential in doing your project.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T07:05:07.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9554" CreationDate="2020-04-07T08:20:15.450" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;i m thinking on making browser game and would like to start it on ready made code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FrankProjects/UltimateWarfare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/FrankProjects/UltimateWarfare&lt;/a&gt; if i would pick this one. ..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that i would need to include that MIT license on my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is do my project that would be based on example above have to be open source at the end? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I m new too licensing and GITHUB so please try to hep me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17676" LastEditorUserId="17676" LastEditDate="2020-04-07T09:37:36.530" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T13:02:12.007" Title="I m interested in package on GITHUB - what are my rights and what should i do?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-04-20T14:38:56.060" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9553" CreationDate="2020-04-07T13:02:12.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you do not have to make your own project open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only requirement is that you keep the MIT license information of the original project intact and that you send it along with any binary distributions of your project (with the indication that the MIT license applies only to the original project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T13:02:12.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9558" CreationDate="2020-04-08T19:51:16.133" Score="6" ViewCount="868" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wappalyzer.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wappalyzer&lt;/a&gt; has recently been &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/commit/304b5976a5d30b235445848eb5cc4582933ba688&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;re-licensed to MIT&lt;/a&gt;; however, it was previously licensed under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had opened an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/issues/2977&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue to clarify&lt;/a&gt; whether it was &lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-or-only&lt;/code&gt;, or &lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-or-later&lt;/code&gt; before this change, and I am not quite sure the developers realize the implications of this change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't this change violate the terms of the previous copy-left license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_relicensing#Cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia - Software Re-licensing Cases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastEditorUserId="8868" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T12:16:49.750" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T12:16:49.750" Title="Upstream re-licensing project from GPL-3.0 to MIT allowed?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9557" CreationDate="2020-04-08T20:28:58.360" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wouldn't this change violate the terms of the previous copy-left license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed true that the GPL itself does not give permission to offer another's work under more permissive terms like the MIT/X11 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, nothing precludes a copyright holder from allowing their work to be made available under other terms besides the GPL. The relevant question is: does there exist any person who contributed their copyrightable work into the project under the GPL (and no other terms) and now objects to the distribution of their code under more permissive MIT/X11 terms? If so, that person could sue (or credibly threaten to sue) based on infringement of their copyright due to distribution under unauthorized terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This case would not be true if all contributors offered their contributions under more permissive terms, e.g., according to a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that allowed the project owner to distribute their work under more permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, there is an interesting legal concept of a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-ownership/#who_owns_the_copyright_in_a_joint_work&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;joint work&lt;/a&gt;&quot; wherein all contributors of the work have full independent standing to distribute and offer licenses to the entire work. However, I am not sufficiently well versed in law to say when circumstances are sufficient to create joint ownership in a particular work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T20:41:52.417" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T20:41:52.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9560" CreationDate="2020-04-09T05:23:26.920" Score="4" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;I own a GitHub organization in which I licensed the projects under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Public License&lt;/a&gt; to which I expect contributions from other contributors. However, the organization is not registered as a company. I found that I will have to enter the agreement on behalf of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how a registered company (e.g., Microsoft) introduce the parties to the agreement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This Contribution License Agreement (&quot;Agreement&quot;) is agreed to by the&#xA;  party signing below (&quot;You&quot;), and conveys certain license rights to&#xA;  Microsoft Corporation and its affiliates (&quot;Microsoft&quot;) for Your&#xA;  contributions to Microsoft open source projects. This Agreement is&#xA;  effective as of the latest signature date below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-license-agreement.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft's CLA&lt;/a&gt; to write my organization's CLA. How do I refer to myself in the agreement as such that it holds as per the law? Should I include my home address to specifically refer to the 'Siddharth Venu' that lives in that particular address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My jurisdiction is India - Tamil Nadu, in particular. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17697" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T10:08:57.860" Title="Entering into a Contributor License Agreement on behalf of a non-registered open-source organisation" Tags="|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9559" CreationDate="2020-04-09T09:34:46.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you write &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I own a GitHub organization in which I licensed the projects &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you are mistaken.  In most legal systems there is more to creating a body with legal personhood, to which licences can be assigned and which can exercise those licences, than simply making up a cool name.  You don't necessarily need to register a limited-liability company; your local jurisdiction is likely to have rules for creating other kinds of body. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But until you've followed them, the project, and any property (tangible or intangible) assigned to it, are in fact owned by you.  Your CLA should reflect that by simply listing you (full name, address) as the entity with whom contributors are making an agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; in response to comments: if your address changes, you should update it on your CLA for new signers, but you haven't changed identity: the intention of those who signed the CLA with your old address on was still to make an agreement with &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;, so those won't need to be revisited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does this mean I ... personally own the code other people contribute to my organisation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  A well-written CLA merely clarifies the terms under which contributors make their contributions; some also permit re-licensing.  If your CLA actually assigned ownership of the copyrights, it would be a Copyright Transfer Agreement rather than a Contributor Licensing Agreement.  There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/714524/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some evidence&lt;/a&gt; that CTAs are an even bigger turn-off for contributors than CLAs (full disclosure: I wrote the linked article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, you should probably try to pick a more open-source-friendly template than Microsoft's CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T10:08:57.860" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T10:08:57.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9562" CreationDate="2020-04-09T13:52:58.690" Score="2" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not very familiar with github and license copyright. I purchase &lt;a href=&quot;https://keenthemes.com/metronic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metronic admin dashboard theme&lt;/a&gt; and built one project using it. So can I put this project on github as public so that others will be able to see it? Is this good decision? Or is this violation to Metronic theme privacy policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17700" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T16:20:57.743" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T16:34:07.463" Title="Can I put project using premium theme on github as public?" Tags="|licensing|mit|github|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9561" CreationDate="2020-04-09T16:34:07.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://themeforest.net/licenses/terms/regular&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the associated licence summary&lt;/a&gt;, when you purchase a regular licence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are licensed to use the Item to create one single End Product for yourself or for one client (a “single application”), and the End Product can be distributed for Free.&#xA;  [...]&#xA;  You can’t re-distribute the Item [...] with source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So putting it on github strikes me as a bad idea.  It would be pointless, anyway, because nobody else is allowed to copy the source, or modify it to create a different product (without buying their own licence).  This is not free software, nor can it be used to create free software; only zero-cost software, which is something completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make free software, don't embed this product in it.  If you don't, your question's off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T16:34:07.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9565" CreationDate="2020-04-09T19:55:56.753" Score="1" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say that I were to try to sell a piece of art generated by a generative adversarial network (GAN) created by someone else on GitHub which has an MIT License. The MIT License states that this GAN can be used for commercial purposes and no attribution is required. However, it states:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This mentioned software, but since the thing I am trying to sell is not actually any type of software, but a separate entity produced by the software, is it still necessary to include the license in the art, and if so, how would I go about doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17703" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T07:44:00.660" Title="Including MIT license in art created by generative adversarial network" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9568" CreationDate="2020-04-10T07:10:29.283" Score="1" ViewCount="638" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created my own computer application and I wanted to use Apache License 2.0 to license it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute only binary form of my application without source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17705" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T11:19:44.583" Title="Distributing my own software under Apache License 2.0 - should I distribute source code?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9563" CreationDate="2020-04-10T07:44:00.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is very rare that a computer program copies portions of itself into the output it generates and the ones that do are almost invariably used to generate code for another computer program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the output of your GAN does not contain code from the GAN itself, let alone a full copy, the condition you quoted for reproducing the MIT license doesn't trigger and you are under no obligation to include the MIT license with your generated artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, as this artwork is generated by a computer algorithm, its status under copyright law is a bit unclear. Copyright law exists to protect the &quot;original works of authorship, fixed in a tangible medium&quot;, where authorship is understood to involve the human intellect. Purely computer generated artwork seems to fall outside that definition and thus might not be copyrightable at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T07:44:00.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9569" CreationDate="2020-04-10T10:25:31.673" Score="27" ViewCount="5140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2020q2/006098.html?print=cGh4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; in the KDE-mailinglist and then i wonder (generally):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has released his software under the terms of (for example) GPL or LGPL or something similar, can he withdraw the license for his product so that no one is allowed to use it anymore even if folks are using it currently under the originally provided license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17706" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T03:41:52.400" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T08:45:45.520" Title="Can you withdraw the license on an open source project so that even those who already have it can no longer use it?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9564" CreationDate="2020-04-10T11:19:44.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache License 2.0 does not require source code to be disclosed. However, open-source licenses like the Apache license are intended for, well, open source software. For proprietary (non-open) software, it would likely be better to get a lawyer to write custom licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when not disclosing your source code, the Apache license has some interesting properties that could be valuable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recipients are allowed to share and modify the software, e.g. by reverse-engineering or decompiling it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you grant a patent license to recipients (if applicable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license has a robust attribution mechanism through its NOTICE file concept&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T11:19:44.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9567" CreationDate="2020-04-10T13:01:54.850" Score="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally assumed that such open source licenses are irrevocable, although there is some fringe debate on this matter, and some legitimate concern in the context of U.S. contract law (which is not applicable here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Qt situation does not involve the revocation (or threat of revocation) of a license. The Qt software uses a dual-licensing model, offering both proprietary and GPL licenses to the framework. The Qt company has announced that the availability of &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; versions under the GPL will be limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the old license remains intact, the open-source Qt community &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; fork Qt and maintain it themselves. There are many historical instances where a a company leading an open source project went against the interests of the community, and ended up getting forked. However, this is a highly undesirable scenario for all involved because this wastes/duplicates effort: Qt would no longer get bugfixes from the KDE community, and KDE would no longer get updates from Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be worth pointing out that GNOME was started precisely because KDE is reliant on Qt politics, but back then Qt didn't even offer GPL versions. While the current news isn't good news, things are still much better than back in the 90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T13:01:54.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9578" CreationDate="2020-04-11T05:41:17.657" Score="5" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;I moved this question to this place here as I got the information on stackoverflow - the question is offtopic there. Here is my original question at SO (and the discussion): &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61152045/which-jre-may-be-distributed-with-my-libgdx-game&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61152045/which-jre-may-be-distributed-with-my-libgdx-game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in the setup process of the final binary distribution of my libgdx game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people use packr (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libgdx/packr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/libgdx/packr&lt;/a&gt;) to create a windows exe for the jar file of the game, so do I. Spiced up with rcedit (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/electron/rcedit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/electron/rcedit&lt;/a&gt;) which allows me to set the icon and copyright/version strings in the exe after packr has run, I am now a bit unsure whether I did everything right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The game is written in Android Studio as it runs on Desktop and Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;packr uses the jre from Android Studio which is by default installed at &lt;code&gt;C:\Program Files\Android\Android Studio\jre&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: if packr uses this jre to create the jre folder that is packed with my game... is this allowed? I have no other jdk/jre/whatever installed on my system as the one from Android Studio is all I ever needed to develop my apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, packr included all the important files and license files. But may I distribute my game when the created jre from packr is based on the jre of Android Studio?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to create a jre from openJdk following these steps: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51403071/create-jre-from-openjdk-windows&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51403071/create-jre-from-openjdk-windows&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect was that the jre was over 200MB in size (compared to android studio's ~65MB jre) and the game needed almost 7 times longer to start up with openJDK. While I had the spash screen within ~3 seconds in android studio's jre, openJDK needed over 20 seconds to show the same splash screen. Both issues I want to avoid, so I'd prefer simply re-packing from android studio's jre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... is this legally ok?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not native english, what doesn't make all that easier for me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;jre Folder structure&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After running &lt;code&gt;jlink&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;packr&lt;/code&gt;, I have these folders in jre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;bin&#xA;conf&#xA;legal&#xA;lib&#xA;and a files named &amp;quot;release&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;code&gt;legal&lt;/code&gt; folder contains 73(!) subfolders, each of them containing on or more of these files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ASSEMBLY_EXCEPTION&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;OPENJDK ASSEMBLY EXCEPTION&#xA;&#xA;The OpenJDK source code made available by Oracle America, Inc. (Oracle) at&#xA;openjdk.java.net (&amp;quot;OpenJDK Code&amp;quot;) is distributed under the terms of the GNU&#xA;General Public License &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html&amp;gt; version 2&#xA;only (&amp;quot;GPL2&amp;quot;), with the following clarification and special exception.&#xA;&#xA;    Linking this OpenJDK Code statically or dynamically with other code&#xA;    is making a combined work based on this library.  Thus, the terms&#xA;    and conditions of GPL2 cover the whole combination.&#xA;&#xA;    As a special exception, Oracle gives you permission to link this&#xA;    OpenJDK Code with certain code licensed by Oracle as indicated at&#xA;    http://openjdk.java.net/legal/exception-modules-2007-05-08.html&#xA;    (&amp;quot;Designated Exception Modules&amp;quot;) to produce an executable,&#xA;    regardless of the license terms of the Designated Exception Modules,&#xA;    and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under GPL2,&#xA;    provided that the Designated Exception Modules continue to be&#xA;    governed by the licenses under which they were offered by Oracle.&#xA;&#xA;As such, it allows licensees and sublicensees of Oracle's GPL2 OpenJDK Code&#xA;to build an executable that includes those portions of necessary code that&#xA;Oracle could not provide under GPL2 (or that Oracle has provided under GPL2&#xA;with the Classpath exception).  If you modify or add to the OpenJDK code,&#xA;that new GPL2 code may still be combined with Designated Exception Modules&#xA;if the new code is made subject to this exception by its copyright holder.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;LICENSE&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This file is pretty long as far as I can say, it contains a complete GNU License&#xA;&#xA;it starts with:&#xA;The GNU General Public License (GPL)&#xA;&#xA;Version 2, June 1991&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA&#xA;&#xA;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license&#xA;document, but changing it is not allowed.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;ADDITIONAL_LICENSE_INFO&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                      ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT LICENSING&#xA;&#xA;Certain files distributed by Oracle America, Inc. and/or its affiliates are &#xA;subject to the following clarification and special exception to the GPLv2, &#xA;based on the GNU Project exception for its Classpath libraries, known as the &#xA;GNU Classpath Exception.&#xA;&#xA;Note that Oracle includes multiple, independent programs in this software &#xA;package.  Some of those programs are provided under licenses deemed &#xA;incompatible with the GPLv2 by the Free Software Foundation and others. &#xA;For example, the package includes programs licensed under the Apache &#xA;License, Version 2.0 and may include FreeType. Such programs are licensed &#xA;to you under their original licenses. &#xA;&#xA;Oracle facilitates your further distribution of this package by adding the &#xA;Classpath Exception to the necessary parts of its GPLv2 code, which permits &#xA;you to use that code in combination with other independent modules not &#xA;licensed under the GPLv2. However, note that this would not permit you to &#xA;commingle code under an incompatible license with Oracle's GPLv2 licensed &#xA;code by, for example, cutting and pasting such code into a file also &#xA;containing Oracle's GPLv2 licensed code and then distributing the result. &#xA;&#xA;Additionally, if you were to remove the Classpath Exception from any of the &#xA;files to which it applies and distribute the result, you would likely be &#xA;required to license some or all of the other code in that distribution under &#xA;the GPLv2 as well, and since the GPLv2 is incompatible with the license terms &#xA;of some items included in the distribution by Oracle, removing the Classpath &#xA;Exception could therefore effectively compromise your ability to further &#xA;distribute the package. &#xA;&#xA;Failing to distribute notices associated with some files may also create &#xA;unexpected legal consequences.&#xA; &#xA;Proceed with caution and we recommend that you obtain the advice of a lawyer &#xA;skilled in open source matters before removing the Classpath Exception or &#xA;making modifications to this package which may subsequently be redistributed &#xA;and/or involve the use of third party software.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading all that and with a look at openJdk's website, the confusion increases as I found there something about CLASSPATH_EXCEPTION but I couldn't find that in the license files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://jdk.java.net/14/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jdk.java.net/14/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;JDK 14 General-Availability Release&#xA;This page provides production-ready open-source builds of the Java Development Kit, version 14, an implementation of the Java SE 14 Platform under the GNU General Public License, version 2, with the Classpath Exception.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I follow the link to the classpath_exception, I land on this page:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the one single truth now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance, Gris&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17710" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T06:53:42.097" Title="Which jre may be distributed with my libgdx game?" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9567" CreationDate="2020-04-11T08:17:40.247" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely as a supplement to amon's excellent answer, I note that this was explicitly addressed in the 2018 FOSDEM talk that &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I wrote up&lt;/a&gt; for LWN.  The talk was given by three lawyers, all with a particular interest in copyright and free software, and addressed the positions in the US, England and Wales, and civil law jurisdictions such as much of the EU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their opinion was that in the US, a licence grant is irrevocable once even partial performance has occurred (that is to say, once the recipient has done any of the things that the grant permits).  In England and Wales the position is similar: the licence is irrevocable once the licensee has relied on it.  In civil law jurisdictions, &quot;&lt;em&gt;the licence is probably irrevocable&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T08:45:45.520" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T08:45:45.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9567" CreationDate="2020-04-11T13:07:00.997" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;KDE also has a special safety net for just this case called the KDE Free Qt Foundation which can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while I think above answers and &quot;default&quot; law only address the &lt;strong&gt;current&lt;/strong&gt; code, KDE has also ensured this is preserved for &lt;strong&gt;future&lt;/strong&gt; code. The one year delay being discussed is exactly the maximum written in this contract. If The Qt Company would delay publishing their modifications (updates, bug fixes) by more than a year, KDE has the right to publish Qt under BSD or similar license. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17715" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T13:07:00.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9574" CreationDate="2020-04-11T20:49:54.420" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of questions regarding making a PRO version of an app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I want to make a PRO version with more features of my already&#xA;existing open-sourced MIT licensed app, what changes should I make to&#xA;the license and code? Should I fork and maintain a private repo with&#xA;different license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I get any contributors to the oss version, since I'll be using&#xA;majority of the oss code, will the contributors who helped on oss&#xA;version become stakeholders? If so, How much and how to share revenue&#xA;among contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, how does business model of Octotree browser extension work? (Amazing extension. If you use GitHub, do yourself a favor and use it.) It is Opensource and has FREE and PRO versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other things &amp;amp; suggestions I should consider?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17717" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T14:40:03.097" Title="How does monetization of opensource app works?" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|relicensing|project-management|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9573" CreationDate="2020-04-12T14:40:03.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I want to make a PRO version with more features of my already existing open-sourced MIT licensed app, what changes should I make to the license and code? Should I fork and maintain a private repo with different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should maintain at least a separate (private) repository for the code of the PRO features. If this PRO repository needs to contain code from the oss repository depends on the code structure and how the PRO features are integrated into the rest of the code. Any code that is copied from the oss to the PRO repository needs to keep their MIT license statement and copyright notice. This, however, does not prevent you from distributing a binary-only PRO version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I get any contributors to the oss version, since I'll be using majority of the oss code, will the contributors who helped on oss version become stakeholders? If so, How much and how to share revenue among contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributors to the oss version are copyright holders to (parts of) the code. As you are using the MIT license, which allows using the contributions in code under a different license, this is not a problem to use the contributions in your PRO version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributors are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; automatically entitled to a share in the profits you make from a paid version. If and how much of your profits you want to share with your contributors is entirely up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T14:40:03.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-12T23:24:08.417" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;My new code imports libraries from other sources (pandas,tqdm,plotly to name the big ones). Do I need to reference them in my LICENSE.md? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it enough to simply mention them in the README.md?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17734" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T23:24:08.417" Title="Do you need to include the copyright for imported libraries?" Tags="|licensing|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T05:52:22.337" Score="31" ViewCount="9105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that program &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; was made by me, with me being the sole copyright holder. If I license this program under the GPL-3.0, can I use that program in program &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; that is closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17739" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T04:26:29.870" Title="Can I use my own GPL'ed code in my closed source program?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|closed-source|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2020-04-13T05:52:22.337" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/TINLA: Proceed at your own risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. According to the GPL FAQ, it states &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I would like to release a program I wrote under the GNU GPL, but I would like to use the same code in nonfree programs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To release a nonfree program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this. If you are the copyright holder for the code, you can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the developer of a GPL-covered program bound by the GPL? Could the developer's actions ever be a violation of the GPL?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the GPL is a license from the developer for others to use, distribute and change the program. The developer itself is not bound by it, so no matter what the developer does, this is not a “violation” of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that no matter what you do with your own GPL'ed code that you have copyright ownership of, you can never violate the GPL. But, this would be unethical, as the whole point of the GPL is free&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Free as in free speech and not free beer. More info &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T05:52:22.337" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9570" CreationDate="2020-04-13T06:53:42.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: Yes, it is allowed to distribute the Android Studio JRE that you have along with your game in the way that packr did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the OpenJDK and the Andoid Studio JRE that you use appear to be licensed under the GPLv2 license with the Classpath exception&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL version 2 is an open source license that allows redistribution of the covered code under the same license terms. The GPL is also a copyleft license that requires that if GPL code gets used (even as a library) in a larger program, then that entire program must be distributed under the terms of the GPL license. The Classpath exception weakens that requirement a bit by allowing the code with that exception to be used by non-GPL applications as long as it is only included as a library that gets loaded through Java's Classpath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined, this means that you can write Java programs with any license you like (even closed-source licenses) as long as you use the normal classpath based mechanisms to refer to the classes in the JRE. And the JRE itself has a license that allows you to redistribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; You mentioned you didn't find any reference to the classpath exception in the Android Studio JRE. I expect it to be there but just not referenced by that name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T06:53:42.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2020-04-13T08:18:15.380" Score="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can freely issue additional licenses to your own GPL software, without restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses can either give an exclusive or non-exclusive right. For example, an employment contract will typically give the employer exclusive rights to whatever the employee produces as part of their work. But the GPL is non-exclusive, thus allowing multiple licenses for the same material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing GPL code is a common business model: the software is available as open source, but those that don't want to comply with the GPL can buy a commercial license. IIRC this was pioneered by Ghostscript, tried by MongoDB for a while, and is also used by Qt and Oracle (Java, MySQL). This works precisely because the GPL is non-exclusive, but is seen critically in the software freedom camp – the copyright holder now has an incentive to make the GPL version as cumbersome as possible to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this only works when you hold the entire copyright to the software, or have suitable licenses to the other parts. That means in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot use GPL libraries (as you have no right to use them under a different license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cannot accept outside contributions, unless the contributors sign a Contribution Licensing Agreement (CLA) that gives you additional rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T08:18:15.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T21:21:36.000" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering using the free version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Font Awesome&lt;/a&gt; in my closed-source game. Its icons are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Because of how the game engine works, the game would embed rasterized versions of the SVG files, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the original vector icons. &lt;strong&gt;Given this, what would my obligations be when using Font Awesome in this way?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5006" LastEditorUserId="5006" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T23:56:31.533" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T23:56:31.533" Title="What are my obligations if I bundle rasterized CC BY 4.0-licensed vector icons in my software?" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T09:58:32.983" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are building an application that uses machine learning to predict certain parameters and use them in an optimization algorithm afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not building the front-end in R neither the back-end and our only R component is the feature engineering, training, serialization and prediction scripts that generate a couple of .RDS files and expose them via REST-API using AWS sagemaker endpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The feature engineering is done with dplyr (MIT license), lubridate&#xA;(GPL2/3) and forecastML (MIT license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The training is done using&#xA;    keras with tensorflow backend (Apache license), glmnet (GPL2/3) and&#xA;    xgboost (Apache License).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prediction is done with the same libraries and with MLflow (MIT license) which exposes this model to sagemaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Serialization is done of course with base R.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my end-user is an external company that is going to take the results of the optimization (which are consequently feed with the machine learning predictions) do I have a problem in terms of licensing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end the end-user does not receive any code it only receives the predictions via an API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best Regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17768" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T09:58:32.983" Title=".RDS files and GPL license in R" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:34:54.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use any source code, no matter where from, the copyright holder can sue you for copyright infringement if you do it without their permission, or if you don’t fulfil any conditions that the copyright holder sets. That principle is the same for open source, closed source, any source. People other than the copyright holder have no standing to sue you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, nobody other than yourself can sue you. So nobody can sue you. You are free to do with your own source code whatever you like. But of course that’s only the case if you are the sole copyright holder, with no copyrightable contributions by anyone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:34:54.323" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:49:03.517" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are building and hosting a website for our company that is built with HTML/CSS as usual. However, in writing those, SCSS was used, all JS files were written completely from Dart source. I wonder if we should include open source licenses for the technology that we used in a separate &quot;Acknowledgement&quot; page in my website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which technology that I should include?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The library that I included in my Dart/SCSS project, which are also transpiled into CSS/JS?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The licenses for the programming languages (Dart, SCSS, even Go for backend)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The backend technology and libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The infrastructure technology (Nginx, Nginx module, and Docker)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain which that I should include and which are not and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17774" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:49:03.517" Title="How to include open source licenses (and what to include) in a Dockerized, Nginx hosted website?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T15:34:23.127" Score="1" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a specific case here for which I could not find a clear answer here or on other pages. I am working for a company that is interested in using an open source code licensed under GPLv2. The software has machine learning and database components. The machine learning models are used, often in combination with the database, to solve specific tasks. My employer would like to use it internally for its own research. However, we would like to update it so that it works better for us. The modification would aim at improving the models and the database content, so that they are more accurate for the company. This will of course also force us to change the original source code so as to make use of the models. The modified version would be made available on an internal service platform that scientists will use only for internal research. There is no intention of selling/redistributing the software commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the company have to release the updates, since technically, the models and the database will be plugged into the source code?&#xA;If we were to (a) refactor the code to make it flexible so that it would allow any user for dynamically plugging their own sets of machine learning models they train and a modified version of the database, and (b) release the refactored source code under GPLv2: Would we have to release the ML models or any addition to the database content.&#xA;Your help would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17777" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T09:48:06.930" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:48:06.930" Title="Can a company modify and use the source code of a GPLed library without selling it or releasing the modification?" Tags="|commercial|gpl-2|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9590" CreationDate="2020-04-15T17:22:44.663" Score="3" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a script on python3. It is fairly simple it converts one biological sequence format of text file to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am adding it to GitHub and was wondering if I should and need add a licence. I want it to be quite permissive so I was thinking of using the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice would be great. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17778" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T20:10:01.947" Title="Should I add a licence to a Python3 script when putting it on GitHub?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9589" CreationDate="2020-04-15T20:10:01.947" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without a license, other people are just allowed to look at it, and click the “fork” button on GitHub. Because the default license is “all rights reserved”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you do want other people to be able to use, modify, and share this code, please do add an open source license. For permissive licenses I recommend the Apache 2.0 License because it is legally precise, but the various MIT license variants are fine as well. But only add a open source license if you feel comfortable with the rights you're giving to the public. Some authors aren't comfortable with commercial use, in which case open source licenses are not appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for GitHub to detect the license, put the license text into a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; (or named similarly). It would also be helpful to add a copyright header to the script itself, and to note the license in your README. If you want to publish your script to PyPI, you can add license metadata to the &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T20:10:01.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9598" CreationDate="2020-04-15T21:15:40.457" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a python service that runs on anaconda (using a lot of &lt;code&gt;conda install&lt;/code&gt;) and a C# UI. Are there any restrictions for shipping anaconda (not modified) + installed packages + my service as a paid not opensource product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17578" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:55:45.930" Title="Ship Python based product with Anaconda on windows?" Tags="|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9576" CreationDate="2020-04-15T22:35:51.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sole purpose of a copyright license is to allow certain parties (e.g. everyone, for the GPL) to not be liable for copyright infringement provided they follow the terms of the license. Only parties &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than the copyright owner have copyright liability in the first place. This means that the copyright owner has no copyright liability for works they own, regardless of the content of the license they apply for others to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the text of the GPL is irrelevant to your question. You can do anything you want with a work, provided you own its copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6993" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T22:35:51.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T23:03:47.213" Score="4" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first ever question...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the (excellent) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnuradio.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNURadio Project&lt;/a&gt; the source code (example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/blob/master/gr-blocks/lib/multiply_impl.cc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) generally features a header declaring the copyright holder, the project that the file is part of and an SPDX line pointing to the GPL3. The project source has a copy of the GPL3 in its root. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is the SPDX line in the source code file sufficient to unequivocally assert that the file is licensed with GPL3? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure that it is. My thinking is that, taken in isolation, the file makes no written English assertion as to what the licensing conditions for the file are or where to go look for them. SPDX is merely a machine digestible convenience for developers wanting to automatically keep their license usage properly sorted. The words &quot;license&quot; and &quot;gpl3&quot; are used, but words like &quot;under the terms of&quot; or &quot;applies&quot; are absent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A developer familiar with SPDX knows what it means. Not all developers know SPDX. Also I think it's doubtful that the Man on the Clapham Omnibus can be expected to understand the meaning of an SPDX line, and there's nothing in the GPL3 text that unequivocally refers to each individual source file in a project by name, or to the name of the program. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no adequate reference in the source to GPL3, a recipient has a program that happens to come with a copy of the GPL3 text.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also section 5b of GPL3 requires that a modified work should contain &quot;prominent notices&quot; that GPL3 applies. Does that, stricly speaking, mean that someone modifying GNURadio-style source code has to put all the traditional license text back into each file? My assumption is no, presumably one can adopt the original authors' styles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that leads on to another question. Suppose I were to contribute to the project, and I put in the GPL3 recommended header text in the files I've created; can I object if someone else subsequently removes it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in a presentation about SPDX that it's considered best practice to include both the SPDX line(s), and the traditional text about the license terms. Also, the GPL3 text itself states that it is safest to include the recommended text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not part of the GNURadio project. I'm simply using it, glanced round its git repo, was startled to see very little in the way of license terms in source headers and wondered about the wisdom of that absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17780" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:39:34.220" Title="Legal Status of SPDX Headers" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9550" CreationDate="2020-04-15T23:14:27.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License v2.0&lt;/a&gt; states that you have a &quot;perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute&quot; the software, so you can freely reproduce the source code in your thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an orthogonal concept to copyright is plagiarism. To avoid plagiarism, you must, at the minimum, clearly cite the source of the reproduced source code.&#xA;Plagiarism is unrelated to copyright and is not a law (in any country I've heard of) but is almost certainly a policy at your university and is considered unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6993" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T09:07:37.637" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:07:37.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9595" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9596" CreationDate="2020-04-16T03:22:04.843" Score="6" ViewCount="1664" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license defines (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Work&quot; shall mean the work of authorship, &lt;strong&gt;whether in Source or Object form&lt;/strong&gt;, made available under the License, as indicated by a copyright notice that is included in or attached to the work (an example is provided in the Appendix below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, article 4.a says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm developing an app which uses a library distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The distribution channels are the official Android and Apple app stores. My users download, install and manage my app entirely through those channels. As a result, there's never a point in which I'm able to provide any kind of documentation to my users except by one of two means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In some view inside the app itself or&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in the source code, available at its GitWhatever repository.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the app is open source (MIT license), and I can include anything in the source code package that I want. My concern is if I would need to implement functionality in the app itself to display the Apache 2.0 license to users of the app, since I have no other way of providing it to them in the &lt;strong&gt;Work in its Object form&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it might matter, the Apache 2.0 code in question is not just referenced in the app's build profile (package.json), but is an actual copy, slightly modified. A copy of the Apache 2.0 license already exists in the source code package and the changes are properly denoted as per the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern regards if and how to provide the app's users with the license, given that the distribution channels of the &lt;strong&gt;Work in its Object form&lt;/strong&gt; are out of my control, i.e. whether this scenario requires me to extend the app's functionality to show the license to the end-users of the app, or if I've fulfilled the requirement by including it in the source code package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope I'm being clear. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17783" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T06:52:18.787" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T05:14:59.453" Title="Does a program need to show the open source license (Apache 2.0) of its components?" Tags="|apache-2.0|distribution|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9595" CreationDate="2020-04-16T06:46:44.073" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Combining the two articles, we see clearly that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the work of authorship, whether in Source or Object form, a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt: yes, this is a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also widely observed in the free phone software world.  Apps generally have an option somewhere down under the menus that either displays, or links you through to, a copy of the licence under which the app was conveyed, or (in the case of works incorporating free third-party code under a different but compatible licence, which I note would include yours) relevant licences.  I don't propose to go into the question of whether linking is sufficient except to note that including the full text isn't very painful, so you might as well.  Going alphabetically through the apps on my phone that have such an option, I find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Agram: info -&gt; about app&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Appbak: (column of three dots) -&gt; view license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;APV PDF Viewer: (column of three dots) -&gt; About&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Barcode Scanner: (column of three dots) -&gt; Help -&gt; Privacy policy, Legal and License information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bitcoin Wallet: (column of three dots) -&gt; Settings -&gt; About&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Browser: (column of three dots) -&gt; Settings -&gt; About Browser -&gt; Legal information -&gt; Open-source licences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go into C, but hopefully you get the idea (there were two other applications in A and B that didn't seem to have any such option).  It is very normal practice, if not completely ubiquitous, to include this information inside the app as described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T05:14:59.453" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T05:14:59.453" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9587" CreationDate="2020-04-16T09:36:04.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is pretty clear about releasing modified versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do distribute the software to people outside your organisation, then you must do so under the terms of the GPL license and you have to release the sources of your modified version also (at least to everyone that can obtain a copy of the binaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data read by a program, including the contents of a database, and the software of the program itself are completely independent things as far as copyright is concerned. They are licensed independently and their licenses don't affect each other. This also means you can decide to distribute one but not the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:36:04.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9591" CreationDate="2020-04-16T09:55:45.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the restrictions come from the licenses of anaconda and the installed packages - you will have to abide by them when you distribute them, modified or not. You need to check them all and specifically you should check that none has a non-commercial clause or license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also want to make sure that people get the license information for each package and that they can obtain the sources to those software where they have a right to obtain it. Usually it must not be more complicated than getting the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While anaconda itself is open source, Read carefully about distribution of bundles of the packages as taken from anaconda.com. The TOS for &lt;em&gt;individual&lt;/em&gt; end users explicitly say that no-one should get the impression that they endorse derived endevours. I find no text on commercial usage...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T09:55:45.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9603" CreationDate="2020-04-16T15:48:04.340" Score="4" ViewCount="662" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that in using a LGPL library in your application, you have to provide a re-linking mechanism for the end user (by linking to the library dynamically or providing all your object files which they can then use to re-link against a different version of the library) but what is the reason behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if I'm missing the point, but I cannot think of an example where the general user would go and specifically replace the .dll files I have provided/relink my object files against their own version of the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me the purpose of this requirement as I don't really understand it and am considering using a LGPL library for my project. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17794" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T18:35:13.033" Title="What is the purpose of the LGPL re-linking requirement?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|linking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9599" CreationDate="2020-04-16T19:48:57.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To understand this you have to see things from the Free Software Foundation's point of view (note: I am not saying you have to agree with their point of view, or that everyone who releases their code under one of the FSFs licenses shares their point of view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not sure if I'm missing the point, but I cannot think of an example where the general user would go and specifically replace the .dll files I have provided/relink my object files against their own version of the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fundamentally where your worldview doesn't line up with the FSFs, it looks like you view users as people who just passively use software. The FSF views users as people who may want to modify the software they use but are denied the ability to do so by proprietary software companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSFs ideal is that all users would have the freedom to freely use modify and redistribute all the software they use. Whether any particular user chooses to exercise those freedoms is of course up to them. In their definition of free software they explicitly state &quot;Freedom 1 includes the freedom to use your changed version in place of the original.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They knew that if they just released their code &quot;no strings attached&quot; that people would not always share alike. The proprietary software world would be able to benefit from the work done in the free software world but not vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we have the concept of &quot;copyleft&quot;, the idea that you can use code for free  as long as you give your users the same freedoms you received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they knew that they could not get rid of proprietary software overnight (if ever) and that in some cases (for example a library supporting a free file format, or the platform libraries for an operating system) taking an all or nothing approach may not be the best route for maximizing user freedom. If a user is going to use a piece of proprietary software it's better that they use it on a free operating system with free file formats than on a proprietary operating system with proprietary file formats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the LGPL is a compromise, you get to keep your application code proprietary while using the library provided you extend your users the freedom to modify the library. The re-linking requirements are there to ensure that users can actually use their modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastEditorUserId="2975" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T18:11:24.540" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T18:11:24.540" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9602" CreationDate="2020-04-17T10:31:08.503" Score="2" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the GPLv3 license for a tool that embeds files into source code. However as part of it's operation it copies a portion of it's own source into projects that use it (as a library to allow files to be read). I don't want this file, nor the files generated by the execution of the program to be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am using the standard GPLv3 header in all my files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// &amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&#xA;// Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;//&#xA;// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;// the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;// (at your option) any later version.&#xA;//&#xA;// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;// GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;//&#xA;// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;// along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I am not sure what to do about the file that gets copied in, nor the files generated by the program as it runs - is there a specific header I should use, or should I merely have a small header indicating that it was generated by my program and is exempt from the licensing my program is under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have currently just used the existing GPLv3 header in my files, with a small addition to indicate the different licensing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// As an exception, you may distribute programs that contain code generated&#xA;// with or copied into by this program under terms of your choice.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17804" LastEditorUserId="17804" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T11:39:00.643" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T14:50:59.803" Title="Is there a specific header used to indicate that a file is exempt from the licensing of the rest of the project?" Tags="|gpl|multi-licensing|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9601" CreationDate="2020-04-17T14:50:59.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few options you can use for code of your program that gets copied into the output:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can license that code under a different, GPL-compatible, license. This would then typically be a more permissive license and it would allow using that code also in a closed-source competitor application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose this, you need to mark clearly in your source code which portions of the code are differently licensed and which license applies to them. The license information should also be copied into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can take the route that GNU Bison uses: Give an additional permission on top of the GPL to use the output under terms of the user's choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use this option, you should make sure the special permission is present in the output you generate. It might be useful to mention it also in the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, GNU Bison uses this special permission&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, you may create a larger work that contains&#xA;  part or all of the Bison parser skeleton and distribute that work&#xA;  under terms of your choice, so long as that work isn't itself a&#xA;  parser generator using the skeleton or a modified version thereof&#xA;  as a parser skeleton.  Alternatively, if you modify or redistribute&#xA;  the parser skeleton itself, you may (at your option) remove this&#xA;  special exception, which will cause the skeleton and the resulting&#xA;  Bison output files to be licensed under the GNU General Public&#xA;  License without this special exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation in&#xA;  version 2.2 of Bison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the exception explicitly excludes competitor products from being exempted from the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T14:50:59.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9599" CreationDate="2020-04-17T18:35:13.033" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relinking requirement says that whenever an LGPL library is distributed linked to a (possibly proprietary) application, recipients of that code must be able to substitute in a modified LGPL library attached to the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hypothetical LGPL that did not require this would still grant a useful sets of rights. Suppose libFoo is distributed under such a hypothetical weakened license, and MegaProg is an application that includes libFoo. Recipients of MegaProg are free to use their included copy of libFoo (possibly modified) in their own projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, suppose libFoo has an annoying bug in it, and the maintainers of MegaProg have stopped issuing new releases of MegaProg. You could fix the bug in libFoo yourself (or grab an improved copy from the libFoo maintainers) but unless MegaProg structurally allows relinking against a new version of libFoo, your right to improve libFoo is useless in the local context of MegaProg. Therefore, the authors of the LGPL felt it necessary to require this possibility from any application that uses an LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T18:35:13.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9606" CreationDate="2020-04-17T22:22:49.687" Score="2" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on developing some libraries in C++, and I was wondering whether I should include my &lt;code&gt;.vcxproj&lt;/code&gt; files that Visual Studio creates in my project's GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17810" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T23:17:12.527" Title="Should I include .vcxproj files with open source C++ projects?" Tags="|github|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9605" CreationDate="2020-04-17T23:17:12.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes! They make It easy to build the project. Source code includes those things commonly needs to create a binary which are very individual to your project - like  project files or built and configure scripts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T23:17:12.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9607" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-18T01:17:22.153" Score="20" ViewCount="3262" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a GPLv3-licensed open source library on GitHub which is used by the company I work for in a central component of the business. The business does not sell software, but only a manipulation of the output of software. All software is executed by the business on machines owned by the business, not by the customers. No binaries or source code or anything is distributed to the customers except for the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made minor modifications (&amp;lt; 30 lines) to the &gt;50,000 lines of source code of this open source library which slightly changed this open source library's output in a way that is beneficial for downstream proprietary code that is external to the open source library, i.e. beneficial to downstream code that is not open source but is proprietary to this company,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These slight modifications to the open source library are useful to the broader public, and I would like to use the modified version of this library in later work at a different employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I leave the company, I would like to make the modified copy  of this open source library public. For instance, I could: fork the open source library's repository from GitHub as a public fork on my personal GitHub account, copy the code with the modified parts that I made at work, and then upload the modified code to my public fork on GitHub. &lt;strong&gt;To be clear, I am only asking about copying and publishing the modified copy of the GPLv3-licensed library, not the all of the code surrounding it and interacting with it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that code that you write for an employer is their property. But this code is a (few lines of) modification to a GPLv3-licensed open source library. &lt;strong&gt;If an employee makes a modified copy of a GPLv3-licensed open source library on the job, is that modified copy property of the employer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it legal to copy, keep, re-use, and publish a modified copy of a GPLv3-licensed open source library if the modified copy was created for the employer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17815" LastEditorUserId="17815" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T03:38:54.633" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T07:01:11.730" Title="If an employee modifies a copy of a GPLv3-licensed open source library, is the modified copy intellectual property of the company?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9607" CreationDate="2020-04-18T06:20:54.043" Score="30" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If an employee makes a modified copy of a GPLv3-licensed open source library on the job, is that modified copy property of the employer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  But the &lt;em&gt;modifications&lt;/em&gt; are their property, in most countries, either under the local equivalent of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;work for hire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; doctrine, or through a specific provision of the employee's contract.  At that point, the new work's rightsholders are everyone who had a copyright interest in the original work, plus your employer; or, if none of the above applies in your case, plus you.  You'll have to read your contract of employment, and local law, to know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it legal to copy, keep, re-use, and publish a modified copy of a GPLv3-licensed open source library if the modified copy was created for the employer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends.  If the employer has chosen to release the modified program outside the bounds of the organisation, then by GPLv3 s5c, that conveyance &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be done under GPLv3.  If you can get a copy &lt;strong&gt;from that recipient&lt;/strong&gt;, then it, too, will be under GPLv3, at which point you may keep, copy, modify, and publish it, again all subject to GPLv3.  But you're not simply allowed to lift a copy on the way out the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you establish that the employer hasn't retained the rights to your modifications, and I stress that would be quite unusual, then you can lawfully obtain a copy of the original code from the distributor, and re-apply your modifications, to make a GPLv3-redistributable copy of the new work.  But I stress that you will want to be very sure of the ground on which you stand before you try that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much better, to my mind, would be to work with your employer before you leave, encouraging them to contribute those changes back to the original project.  The benefits include maintenance (at that point, those changes will be carried through into future versions, and continue to work with them, with no further effort on your employer's part) and reputation (other users of the code will see your employer's copyright statement therein).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T07:01:11.730" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T07:01:11.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9607" CreationDate="2020-04-18T20:59:07.653" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally, those 30 lines are company property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, those 30 lines are technical debt.  As the original codebase evolves, you will need to continually apply the same 30 line patch to the code every time you update.  &lt;strong&gt;When&lt;/strong&gt; you leave the company, it will fall on your successor to keep making the changes.  And you have to tell your successor and they have to tell their successor and so on, until the whole system collapses one day and nobody knows what those 30 lines for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should convince the appropriate channels at work to let you submit a pull request with the changes.  Then it becomes Somebody Else's Problem to maintain your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17824" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T20:59:07.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-19T10:28:37.080" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an open source project going on Github and so far, have been able to comply with all licensing terms and conditions of libraries used, to the best of our knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today when debugging, I ended up with an exception in this file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFCB5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sFCB5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transcript, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 1985-2015 Intel Corporation.  All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information and source code contained herein is the exclusive&#xA;property of Intel Corporation and &lt;strong&gt;may not be disclosed, examined&#xA;or reproduced in whole or in part without explicit written authorization&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;from the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would venture to examine it rather thoroughly now, for diagnostic and bug-fixing purposes. Is this already a transgression, and how to avoid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to previous research, I've rarely encountered such a clause before and when I did, it meant that I was not supposed to have that source code file on my machine in first place. Is this file (and many more, similarly) wrongfully included in the SDK? Microsoft themselves do not mention this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/3548824/1132334&quot;&gt;SDK licence&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apitrace/dxsdk/blob/master/Documentation/License%20Agreements/DirectX%20SDK%20EULA.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DirectX licence&lt;/a&gt;, at least not in a way for laymen to grasp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering commenters' questions:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm in the jurisdiction of the European Union (Austria),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;location of the file on my computer running Windows 10:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\SDK\ScopeCppSDK\VC\include&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It was put there by the installer software of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise product, for which I legally own the required licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17829" LastEditorUserId="17829" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T20:11:02.173" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:28:27.873" Title="How prohibitive is this Intel copyright clause in Microsoft Windows SDK sources?" Tags="|copyright|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9612" CreationDate="2020-04-19T14:30:36.813" Score="-2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got question about following situation: if i have closed source binary and device with Linux, i want to sell this device with Linux and closed binary in its filesystem. Is it legal to keep source of this binary closed, or it become GPL? Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17832" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T15:38:22.240" Title="closed source binary in Linux image" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9611" CreationDate="2020-04-19T15:38:22.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel and the GNU C and C++ libraries have exceptions in their GPL license to allow closed source applications to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if your closed source binary only depends on Linux itself and libraries with a permissive license or a permission to link against closed source code, it is legal to distribute the closed source binary without disclosing its source code. This is independent of if you distribute just the binary or if you distribute it installed on a device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute a device with Linux (and other GPL code) on it, you are still required to inform the recipient of the device of their rights under the GPL license and where/how they can obtain the GPL-licensed code. You are just not required to include the source code of your closed-source binary in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T15:38:22.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9615" CreationDate="2020-04-19T19:08:21.227" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;When starting a new project in the Tizen Studio, you are given two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start with a template project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Start with a sample project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sample projects (like several watches, several simple apps, etc.) all seem to begin life with a text file titled &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2012 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.&#xA;Except as noted, this software is licensed under Flora License, Version 1.&#xA;Please, see the LICENSE.Flora file for Flora License, Version 1 terms and conditions.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a file called LICENSE.Flora which contains the full text of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://floralicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flora license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;template&lt;/strong&gt; projects, on the other hand, are not generated with any licensing information.  They're also working projects but they only do something simple like print &quot;Hello World&quot; or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that the sample projects should not be reused or adapted without adhering to the Flora license.  Is this a correct interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16889" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T07:15:16.570" Title="Tizen OS &quot;sample&quot; projects are all generated to contain the Flora license. Must derivative works also apply the Flora license?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-19T19:15:11.443" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/quick-start/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gatsby site&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;code&gt;gatsby new gatsby-site&lt;/code&gt;, there exists the file &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2015 gatsbyjs&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I delete the &lt;code&gt;src/&lt;/code&gt; directory and all files inside, do I still need to keep the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on creating a open source site created with &lt;code&gt;Gatsby&lt;/code&gt; (with no explicit license stated so that any users who want to use my code must contact me first)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only files I will keep are &lt;code&gt;gatsby-config.js&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;.gitignore&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;.prettierignore&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;.prettierrc&lt;/code&gt;. These are very simple files to create, so I could delete them and rewrite them myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17834" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T07:26:53.767" Title="LICENSE file required?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9613" CreationDate="2020-04-20T07:15:16.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Flora license is a permissive open source license that is comparable to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material difference between those licenses is in the patent license they contain, because the patent license in the Flora license appears to be restricted to software running on Tizen products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Flora licence, like the Apache license, has a few conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must include a copy of the license, with an appropriate indication which parts of the software fall under that license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modified source files must have a clear indication that you changed them. This is usually done by adding your own copyright line to the existing ones. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must retain, in the source code, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices, except those notices that refer to deleted code. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file, then you must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, except those notices that refer to deleted code, in at least one of the following places:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within a NOTICE text file; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within the source code or documentation, if you distribute that together with any binaries; or, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within a display generated by the software, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license explicitly allows the code you write to have a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that the sample projects should not be reused or adapted without adhering to the Flora license. Is this a correct interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, in so far that that applies to any third-party code. But adhering to the Flora license is not all that difficult or onerous and it does not prevent you from using a completely different license (even a closed source one) for the product you build from one of those sample projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;template&lt;/strong&gt; projects are more troubling for me. Most likely, those template projects are also subject to copyright law and the fact that they don't carry a license means that you have &lt;strong&gt;no rights at all&lt;/strong&gt;, especially not to build upon them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That effectively means that you cannot legally start with a template project. If you plan to do some serious work based of a template project, I recommend you get into contact with Tizen to clarify the intended copyright license of a template project, because they are giving a mixed message by providing those templates without a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T07:15:16.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9614" CreationDate="2020-04-20T07:26:53.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, as long as you have Gatsby-generated files, you need to retain the license information that they are under. However, you &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to amend the LICENSE file to make it clear which files that MIT license applies to and what licenses apply to the rest of the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the files you mention can be written only in a very few limited ways to achieve the desired effects, to the level that they can easily be auto-generated, then those files are probably not copyrightable and thus not subject to any copyright license. If those were the last files remaining of what Gatsby generated, then you can remove the LICENSE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T07:26:53.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9624" CreationDate="2020-04-20T12:18:21.337" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing one android application in which I am using images licensed under creative common shared alike license(CC BY SA). license is saying &quot;If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&quot; and must give attribution to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is that I am using images as it is, no modification in images. So I am really confused in whether giving attribution to work is enough for me or should I distribute my work under same license and if it is how in case of Android app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specially I am really confused with build upon the material in license statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help will be really appreciated. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17843" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T14:36:20.543" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T07:25:21.220" Title="Should i publish my android app under creative common sharealike license or not? And how?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-20T14:51:19.343" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I convert an AGPL-licensed library from Java to Kotlin using the IntelliJ code conversion functionality, and change the code from there. Can I then use this converted library in my closed source commercial project without violating the AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17850" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T15:10:11.660" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T15:19:28.747" Title="AGPL, and converted code" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9618" CreationDate="2020-04-20T15:10:01.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, no.  Machine translation doesn't change the licensing terms on a work any more than converting a Hollywood film from .avi to .mp4 strips the copyright and permits redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the machine-translated version is just as AGPL-covered as the original.  You then modify it, making a derivative work, which is required by AGPLv3 ss6 and 5c to be distributed under the terms of AGPLv3.  Proprietary, closed-source redistribution would violate that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T15:10:01.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-20T15:12:55.247" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on PDF password cracking tool which borrows a file from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John_the_ripper_bleeding_jumbo&lt;/a&gt;. I want only one single file, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper/blob/bleeding-jumbo/run/pdf2john.pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;pdftojohn.pl&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. How can I use that file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing information within the file itself says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17848" LastEditorDisplayName="user17848" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T17:19:30.917" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T17:19:30.917" Title="Can I use a General Public License code from a github repositiry?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9618" CreationDate="2020-04-20T15:19:28.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely no. The license is not rendered void simply because you take a programme and translate it into another language; translating existing source code into another language is similarily a derivative of the original work as is adding any feature or other alteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license text&lt;/a&gt; which reads &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &quot;covered work&quot; means either the unmodified Program or a work based&#xA;  on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence this is the same question as &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/151515/rewrote-gnu-gpl-v2-code-in-another-language-can-i-change-a-license&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; some time ago concerning GPL v2. However... IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T15:19:28.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9620" CreationDate="2020-04-20T15:24:35.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally no. Usually - and unless stated expressly differently - the license applies to all files in a repository. It's good practise to state the license and copyright information in the header of all source files; but it is by no means required for copyright and license to be applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case the file explicitly states to you what you may do under which conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the&#xA;  same terms as Perl itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have to abide by that. And in the case of the GPL license that means that any derivative work (thus any work which makes use of any part of it) has to be released under GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me the analogy: Just because I only steal 10% of your money doesn't mean I don't steal from you and should not be prosecuted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T15:32:04.333" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T15:32:04.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9617" CreationDate="2020-04-21T07:25:21.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, you could have used any image in your application and you just choose these ones. If that is the case, your application and the images are separate works as far as copyrights are concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you can use any license you like for the code of your application, but the images need to stay under the CC BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T07:25:21.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9626" CreationDate="2020-04-21T07:50:16.700" Score="3" ViewCount="1126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have created a personal blog hosted on Github Pages, based in a modified version of a template from &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HTML5UP&lt;/a&gt;, which is available for free for personal and commercial use under the CCA 3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inside this blog, I will generate original, digital, and creative content. In addition, I will use it as a personal portfolio for photography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to protect all my content (my digital creations and original photos) against any kind of use, personal or commercial (copyright license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Right now, the repository is public. But I would like to make it as private as possible, where only I can make any modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Which are the steps I should take in order to license my hosted-Github Page and to protect my content, taking into account that I am using a template with Creative Commons Attribution 3.0? I do not want people to confuse the license from the template with the license from the content of the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my public repository, there is already a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; for the template. Can I just add another one for my content specifying the other type of license (copyright)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17859" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T19:32:48.357" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T19:32:48.357" Title="How can I license my GitHub Page hosted in a open-source template?" Tags="|copyright|github|cc-by-sa|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9625" CreationDate="2020-04-21T08:21:04.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep it simple: CC-BY 3.0 means you have to give attribution. It doesn't require you to share any code or whatsoever. Thus it is generally deemed appropriate to have e.g. in your page footers a line which reads like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This page uses the CC-BY 3.0 licensed template &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HTML5UP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your repository itself I'd be explicit in the LICENSE.txt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All content copyright edualvarado, all rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The web page uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY 3.0&lt;/a&gt; licensed template &lt;a href=&quot;https://html5up.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HTML5UP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to rename LICENSE.txt to something like LICENSE_pagetemplate.txt to make it clear that it applies to the web page template you use. And restrict LICENSE.txt to the above two lines or something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T08:22:26.480" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T08:22:26.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-21T14:39:30.537" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume we have a software which we developed completely ourselves from scratch.&#xA;We are thinking of making the source code available to others, thus I am pondering what license to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: would a GPL-like license covering above mentioned software (e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2017/863/oj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union Public Licence&lt;/a&gt;) create an incentive to buy an exception? &#xA;I read about &quot;selling exceptions&quot; here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html&lt;/a&gt; , and here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-source-license-to-prevent-commercial-use&quot;&gt;Open-source license to prevent commercial use?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarification: our software is a library that would be a building block for simulation software, so pretty much at the bottom of a software stack. We plan to sell exceptions to an open-source license, but the demand is probably not very high. I am looking for experience (not opinions) whether or not such a model would actually generate some revenue. Second-hand or hear-say experience is fine, though. Qt is one such example, but I am interested in more examples, especially in cases where there is no big foundation or company behind the OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also perused the license comparisons at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; and on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;And I think, I understand the difference between commercial and proprietary software (at least in layman's terms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17862" LastEditorUserId="17862" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T15:26:53.390" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T15:26:53.390" Title="Is an open-source license an incentive for companies to buy an exception?" Tags="|commercial|copyleft|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9627" CreationDate="2020-04-21T14:52:49.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft terms like those in the GNU GPL place obligations on distribution of the software. Therefore, copyleft terms place an incentive to purchase an exception (i.e., a separate, non-copyleft license) only when the recipient expects to distribute the software further. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Qt is a collection of UI components that are available under the GPL, so people who use Qt libraries in their own software must disclose their source code and license their software under the GPL as well. If someone doesn't want to do that, they can purchase a proprietary license from the Qt Company to allow distribution without source disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software you plan to distribute is a complete software product that recipients are unlikely to distribute further, then there is no incentive for them to purchase a license: they have the software, and they may keep it and run it without any obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is primarily used for running a network service, you might consider the AGPL, which also places copyleft source-sharing requirements whenever someone uses a modified version of your code to run a network service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T14:52:49.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9630" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9633" CreationDate="2020-04-22T10:29:01.600" Score="11" ViewCount="4740" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most CC licenses allow a change of the material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a big fan of CC licenses, because they enable creativity and progress. I see a bit of problems when it comes to pictures of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I ask people if I may modify their photos, they probably think of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changing contrast and brightness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cropping and resizing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;putting a border around it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, anyone may put the person into a new context by &quot;adapting&quot; the picture, i.e. modify it. The modification may include &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;political statements (like Nazi symbols), &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;religious symbols or &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sexual practices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the CC licenses prohibit such changes, e.g. changes that insult someone or that may get the person in trouble (e.g. someone starts an investigation because of potential sexual abuse)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are the &lt;em&gt;ND&lt;/em&gt; licenses, which do not allow any modifications at all. My question is not about the ND licenses. I want to be as permissive as possible with pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3850" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T02:38:13.060" Title="Do the CC licenses prevent insults?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2020-04-22T10:52:35.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC licenses cover copyright and related rights, but do not affect other permissions or restrictions. For example, personality rights might still apply – but that is extremely jurisdiction-dependent, and very fact-specific. A CC license does not authorize defamatory edits, but also doesn't guarantee that you'll like how the work will be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a CC-BY-*-licensed work is edited, that has to be mentioned in the attribution notice. That limits the impact of problematic edits, but only when the license is complied with properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the type of work, using a license other than CC-BY or CC-BY-SA could be appropriate. CC-BY-ND could be particularly appropriate for opinion pieces where you don't want your words to be changed. Of course, the only way to be safe is to avoid publishing potentially problematic works entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T10:52:35.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2020-04-22T10:57:17.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. If you allow people to make derivative work from your assets, they may do anything they want, for any purpose they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of not appropriate or illegal may vary from persion to person or jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Thus what can be done with cc-by licensed material does not so much depend on your personal views and ethics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it is always required to give proper attribution, i.e. no-one can claim that the modified work is your work, less that you endorse it - or they might make themselves liable to the usual damages via law suit as for any other insult or defamation. But they must state that their modification is based on your original work and preferentially link to the original one. See here how &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/attribution/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good attribution&lt;/a&gt; should look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T03:18:21.283" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T03:18:21.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2020-04-22T14:08:10.527" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons licenses do not restrict field or purpose of use. Local laws about defamation, etc., may do so, depending on the nature of the downstream use. For example, if someone edits a CC-licensed picture of you so it appears that you are committing a crime, this might still be an illegal, libelous modification, despite it not being a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that Creative Commons licenses do have two attribution-based provisions that may minimize harm in certain cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Modifications must be clearly marked, per 4.0's section 3(a)(1)(B), so any prejudicial modifications will clearly indicate you are not the immediate author of the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More strongly, section 3(a)(3) in the 4.0 licenses require that downstream users remove upstream attribution altogether upon the original author's request:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the [upstream attribution] information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if someone uses your work in a way you don't like, you may request that your name not be attached to it in any way whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, neither of these help if the problem is that you are &lt;em&gt;depicted in&lt;/em&gt; the image itself, but they do help if the issue is having your name unfairly attached to an unsavory work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T14:20:25.200" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T14:20:25.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9634" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9642" CreationDate="2020-04-22T20:03:26.553" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical Scenario: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say that, I need to find a way to delete an image from a list of images in a Java program. I go online to learn how to delete an image programmatically, and as I am searching the web on how to do this, I notice that multiple websites (non affiliated with each other) are teaching a very similar way to do this exact thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What should I assume is the copyrightability of such code being presented on these websites?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17556" LastEditorUserId="17556" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T20:11:39.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T05:48:14.770" Title="What can I assume about the copyrightablity of a certain method of doing something programatically appearing on multiple websites" Tags="|copyright|open-source-definition|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-10T20:24:08.517" Score="6" ViewCount="1408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because of the current debate about tracking and privacy regarding the new Corona apps, I'd like to know in general, if an app or software really uses solely the code that it claims to be build on if it is open source. So how can I be sure, an app that I download from an app repository (like Googles Play Store) is truely using exactly this code? Is it possible at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there might be other vulnerabilities (e.g. the app uses system libraries too which I have to trust). But let us consider only the app/software itself, in order to make it not to complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got the impression that it is not truely possible. Or only with much efforts that a normal user cannot perform. Can one only trust and hope? Or how can I authenticate an app easily?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source is fine (actually one of the greatest things ever!), but if I don't know whether I get what I should get, it is really bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17707" OwnerDisplayName="robsch" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T09:10:53.317" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T09:10:53.317" Title="Open source software: How do I know whether it uses the actual code?" Tags="|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-04-29T14:06:20.297" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9635" CreationDate="2020-04-11T00:21:02.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, let's take for example a Google Play Store app. You can download an .APK from the Google PlayStore (there is an extra website which does that for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After downloading the .APK file you can hash it with md5. Also, you should get the hash from the open source .APK file, which you have to build yourself. Now you have to compare those two hashes, if they match, it's the same code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But be aware that a published app on the PlayStore may contain other informations like API keys etc. Which would change the hash and thus not having the same hash. Same goes for different Android Version the app is built on. Key is to build the app the same way it was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: this is just me thinking how it should work, in practice there can go a lot of things wrong, just a tiny bit of the app has to be different, and the hash will be different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="filip" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T00:27:04.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9635" CreationDate="2020-04-11T05:26:40.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s not possible to validate it 100% but you can get close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a prerequisite, the app needs to support reproducible builds. That means you need the information how to compile and package the target app exactly the same way the maintainer did, including compiler parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For simple apps, the answer given by @filip is true. You compile the app and hash (MD5, SHA1) the resulting package or binary. You do the same with the app downloaded from the app store and you should get the same hash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality though, this is impossible. Many apps use API keys for third party APIs that are baked into the app and unless you somehow receive the company’s production API keys, your compiled binary will differ from the app store version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signing is also something that will complicate a comparison because you would need the maintainer’s signing key to create an exact copy of the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest way is to compile the app with your own API keys and then diff the 2 binaries with a program like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zynamics.com/bindiff.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BinDiff&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IDA&lt;/a&gt; or the IDA plugin &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/joxeankoret/diaphora&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diaphora&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These programs (and many other similar tools) will show you the differences between the 2 binaries. It’s fairly easy to see the small differences caused by differing API keys and large chunks of code added to one version of the app will be immediately obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17888" OwnerDisplayName="otherguy" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T05:26:40.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9639" CreationDate="2020-04-23T00:42:42.977" Score="15" ViewCount="2220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I see a popular closed source application (distributed for free in binary form) links dynamically with a library that has a GPL license (according to the library's website). Can I write to the company and demand the source code to their app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17885" LastEditorUserId="17885" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T03:02:08.120" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T11:18:40.983" Title="Can I demand the source of a closed source application if I discover it links with a GPL library?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9638" CreationDate="2020-04-23T02:42:04.620" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can ask for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However likely only the authors / the copyright holders of the GPL library will have legal leverage as their copyright has been violated.how exactly will strongly depend on your jurisdiction. Before you go wild, you might want to check that the library copyright holders did not give a special license to the authors of that programme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I recommend to do both: (a) inform the copyright holders of the library. (b) Ask the authors of the violating programme to give you the sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lobby the library authors to take action, in the same way and to take legal action, if you don't get the sources of the programme - provided that no special license was given to the programme authors. &#xA;You might also inform the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwarefreedom.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Law Centre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://gpl-violations.org/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gpl-violations.org&lt;/a&gt; and/or FSF. Maybe they can support the library authors in some way in their claim. Legal action is expensive and not necessarily a thing every person wants to burden themselves with for financial or psychological reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However even legal action might not mean that you get the source. Result might just as well be that the programme is withdrawn completely or simply changed to not rely on that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T11:18:40.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T11:18:40.983" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2744" CreationDate="2020-04-23T03:31:48.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the safest choice is to just follow the GNU guidelines[1], and license the Clojure code under GPL 3+ with an additional Clojure permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, that's what I do for &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; projects (albeit with the AGPL3+)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even helped writing a Leiningen template[2] that does just that for the GPL3+ :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you prefer using the AGPL3+, the procedure is the same: just modify the title of the permission so it mentions that license instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever license you choose, just remember that the GNU and the FSF both advise to always allow &quot;either version X of the License, or (at your option) any later version as published by the Free Software Foundation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW: the ASLv2 is GPLv3-compatible[3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] GNU's Rationale and HOWTO: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] GPL3+ template for Leiningen: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ujihisa/gpl3p-lein-template/blob/master/src/leiningen/new/gpl3p/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ujihisa/gpl3p-lein-template/blob/master/src/leiningen/new/gpl3p/README.md&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17886" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T03:31:48.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9638" CreationDate="2020-04-23T05:33:06.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends.  Specifically, it depends on jurisdiction.  Yet again, I go back to the &quot;&lt;em&gt;Licences and Contracts&lt;/em&gt;&quot; talk at FOSDEM 2018 that &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I wrote up for LWN&lt;/a&gt;.  The relevant bit was what are called third-party rights, which specify the extent to which anyone other than the licensor has standing to sue a licensee for failure to observe the terms of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opinions of the lawyers giving the talk were that: in England and Wales, no third-party rights exist.  In the US, third-party rights likely depend on the precise wording of the licence (which I heard as &lt;em&gt;don't count on it&lt;/em&gt;).  But in civil law jurisdictions, such as most of Europe, the opinion of the speaker was that third-party rights do exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you're in such a jurisdiction, it's worth a try.  If the company in question is also in such a jurisdiction, it's even more worth trying.  Though in the end, planetmaker is right when (s)he notes that litigation is painful and &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; expensive, so you'll want to do more than just ask for opinions on a community board before you start throwing solicitors' letters around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T05:33:06.280" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9634" CreationDate="2020-04-23T05:48:14.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/software/protection/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been held&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if there is only one way to express the idea in software, that one implementation is not protected ... If an implementation must be done in a particular way, there is no room for creativity, which means the implementation is not protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that source goes on to note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[t]his is rare; even with trivial programs like &quot;Hello, world&quot; a programmer can usually choose equivalent instructions to print the text, or to start and stop the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, that doctrine is not well-established everywhere.  So even if you were to conclude that you see that code snippet everywhere because it's the only way to delete an image from a list in Java, you're treading on shaky ground reusing it under such terms.  It's not indefensible, but I'd hesitate to rely on it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T05:48:14.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9644" CreationDate="2020-04-23T10:27:06.687" Score="1" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand GPL, it uses the author's copyright to restrict usages of their code:&#xA;Whenever someone wants to use this piece of code, he also has to publish his modifications &lt;strong&gt;if he distributes the resulting executable&lt;/strong&gt;. Local modifications for your own use do not require public disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2006-August/010883.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, cmake works like gcc, where CmakeLists.txt ist the source code and the resulting Makefile is the resulting binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, this renders GPL on CmakeLists useless. Anyone can use CMakeLists licensed under GPL for their own project, as they will &lt;strong&gt;never share the resulting Makefile&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Additionally, the Makefile does not contribute to the final binary the same way that my editor's programmer doesn't get to claim copyright on every piece of code I write in this editor, so the project does not need to be under GPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, this is no fundamental problem: I do have the copyright for my own CMakeLists. I could come up with a new Licence, the &lt;em&gt;Berne-Licence&lt;/em&gt;, where I state that my CMake script may only be used for GPL-Licenced Code. Is there any licence out there to fit my needs? Is there any reason why I shouldn't do that, for example compatibility reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also please feel free to correct me if some of my assumptions or conclusions are simply wrong. I have very limited experience in the copyleft / opensource ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17893" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T13:01:40.173" Title="GPL on cmake scripts" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9643" CreationDate="2020-04-23T11:50:24.243" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the GPL requires that you distribute not only source, but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2688/do-you-violate-the-gpl-if-you-provide-source-code-that-cannot-be-compiled&quot;&gt;the scripts needed to build it&lt;/a&gt;.  If the build is controlled by Makefiles, they, too must be distributed.  If the Makefiles are automatically generated from some other input file then it, too, must be distributed, and all of this distribution must be under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you distribute your CMakeLists as part of your GPL software, and if someone takes that file, modifies and uses it to build part of their new software project, which they release with this derivative of your CMakeLists inside, I think there's an argument that the whole release will need to be under GPL.  Certainly, the derivative CMakeLists will need to be under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not clear to me that the problem space you ask about is all that big.  Nevertheless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could come up with a new Licence, the Berne-Licence, where I state that my CMake script may only be used for GPL-Licenced Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you could, but you probably shouldn't.  Firstly because crayon licences are a known problem, as is licence proliferation.  But also because there have been other attempts recently to stretch the copyleft net wider than the GPL does, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8025/difference-between-mongodb-sspl-and-gnu-agpl&quot;&gt;the SSPL&lt;/a&gt; which tries to cover the entire build architecture up to and including the software that backs up the server where the code is hosted.  This has not been without criticism, such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/782862/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this talk&lt;/a&gt; from FOSDEM 2019 (full disclosure: I wrote the article), which shows an example of a large, GPL-tolerant company that bans from their entire environment any SSPL software, and anything covered by a Commons Clause addendum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I think the GPL already does most of what you want.  What it doesn't do, I advise you against trying to do with a custom licence, or nobody will use your software, and that will defeat the objective of freeing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T13:01:40.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T13:01:40.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2020-04-23T17:02:45.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC license explicitly does not hinder you from doing any such thing. For your particular example, that's widely irrelevant, though. The CC is the least concern, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your jurisdiction, display of Nazi symbols (whether as defamatory or insulting edit to a photograph, or otherwise) is explicitly illegal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even without Nazi symbols or other things, taking (or attempting to take) a photograph of a person without permission can be more than just a trifle, but indeed a serious felony (&quot;höchstpersönlicher Lebensbereich, 201 StGB&quot;). Humiliating photography, intent to humiliate, or a photograph of a person in exigence? Felony. Making an unsolicited copy of an otherwise legitimate picture? Felony. Insult, defamation? Felonies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC license &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; require (3b) that when you make modifications, you make it &quot;obvious&quot;, whatever that means (the license doesn't say). It also does not require you to point out &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; was modified, only that prior notification notices are retained.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thus, a meaningless small disclaimer similar to the one that is required in France since 2017 for photoshopped images in fashion magazines would arguably make it &quot;obvious enough&quot; that an image has been modified, and would mean that you fulfill the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, nobody cares anyway. You can, for example, read CC-licensed content on the Kindle platform and the license explicitly says under (4a) that you may not take any technical mesures that could hinder the user's ability to use the content. Which, on a closed DRM-enabled system is quite obviously the case. The same is true for e.g. the RTL group sending CC-licensed footage (or excerpts thereof) over HD+.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is, by all means, a violation of the license, and guess what, nobody cares. They do it every day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="509" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T17:02:45.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9651" CreationDate="2020-04-23T17:06:41.967" Score="2" ViewCount="938" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone please clarify the legality of bundling and using the full version of FFmpeg (with included &lt;code&gt;libx264&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;libx265&lt;/code&gt; and other &lt;code&gt;gpl&lt;/code&gt; codecs) in an open source app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to modify anything, all I want to do is to bundle compiled FFmpeg binaries downloaded from their website with my open source app which would use them for media files editing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to bundle the full version of FFmpeg since without &lt;code&gt;--enable-gpl&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;--enable-nonfree&lt;/code&gt; features, not being able to process h264, FFmpeg becomes effectivelly useless. So I want to know if I have to bundle the binaries compiled &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;code&gt;--enable-gpl&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;--enable-nonfree&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17895" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T11:44:12.347" Title="Clarification on using FFmpeg in an open source app" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|law|source-code|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T18:11:39.770" Score="2" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;For simplicity lets say i created a Server-Client programm which uses libraries under the GNU license.&#xA;My understanding is that i now have to give everyone who asks my full client source-code and because the client communicates with the server also the server-source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem with that is, running server-Side there are configuration files(simple txt files an the like) wich include encryption configuration (memory cost, time cost, salt, pepper, hash lenght), without those the source code is not working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my Questions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do i also have to publish these configuration files?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or is it enough to &quot;just&quot; publish the full (non working) server Source code, and the (working) client source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;configuration files on the server also include  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-where the database is located&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-initializing the database(commands to create all tables)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;-time each user is allowed per session   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The programm is pretty much working with Remote Method Invocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17897" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T23:24:11.400" Title="Does GPL require me to publish the source code INCLUDING configuration files needed to run?" Tags="|gpl|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9649" CreationDate="2020-04-23T18:58:12.283" Score="7" ViewCount="822" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to opensource a personal project on github. As a part of this - I plan to add necessary License file(s) in the latest commit prior to making the repository public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the License file(s) have to be in the initial commit, so that all commits/files in the repository adhere to license? --- If that is the case, any recommendation of how to have all the files adhere to the License?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for the GPL license: Does the license apply for files in older commits, which do not have the GPL copyright header?&#xA;GPL requires one to add a copyright header in the source code per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17899" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T09:44:24.150" Title="Should the License be the initial commit in a repo?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9648" CreationDate="2020-04-23T20:46:27.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is your own personal project. Thus you have all rights to all content of it and you can license it like you want and when you want. You're in no obligation there at all - unless you make use of libraries or 3rd-party code which requires you to take such action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no explicit requirement on how a license has to look like. It has been common to use a LICENSE file and state the license(s) for the whole repository. You even can list different licenses for different files, if necessary and/or desired (e.g. to distinguish code and art assets or give more detailed attribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good practise to repeat the license in the header of individual source files. That makes attribution clear when taken out-of-context. Additionally it needs more than an act of copy &amp;amp; paste of a single file to remove the information of its origin, if someone re-uses it somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally the license is considered to apply to the version of the repository as checked-out. That means a 3rd-party person cannot a priory assume that it applies to revisions of your repository before you commited the license file. However that is not a problem for you. As author you can - in principle - change the license every commit... and of course you can grant people the same rights for older versions (I'd be carful with future ones, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T20:46:27.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9647" CreationDate="2020-04-23T23:24:11.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usual practice is to do one or more of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make your project work without configuration, by having good default options. (But this doesn't sound like an option for your project.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a template for the configuration file and document that people have to copy and rename it, and then put in their proper values.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a script which interactively asks for the config values and then builds the config file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T23:24:11.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2020-04-24T11:44:12.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An FFmpeg binary that has been built with &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; --enable-gpl &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; --enable-nonfree cannot be distributed. Not at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL has the requirement that all code must be available under a GPL-compatible license, but --enable-nonfree adds some codecs with a GPL-incompatible license. The result is something you can not distribute without violating the copyright licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you use --enable-gpl, there is a chance that your app must also be distributed under the terms of the GPL, depending on if you use FFmpeg as an external application or as a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I want to know if I have to bundle the binaries compiled without --enable-gpl and --enable-nonfree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must make a choice between those two switches for the binaries that you bundle with your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T11:44:12.347" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9630" CreationDate="2020-04-25T02:38:13.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Creative Commons is not relevant here. Fair Use is.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, anyone may put the person into a new context by &amp;quot;adapting&amp;quot; the picture, i.e. modify it. The modification may include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;political statements (like Nazi symbols),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;religious symbols or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sexual practices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the CC licenses prohibit such changes, e.g. changes that insult someone or that may get the person in trouble (e.g. someone starts an investigation because of potential sexual abuse)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't matter if they did.  CC replaces copyright, but it does not replace copyright law.  Specifically, it does not delete the allowances copyright law grants for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair Use&lt;/a&gt;.   Fair Use is a complicated beast, but it very broadly protects uses for &lt;strong&gt;parody and criticism&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Defamation is evaluated separately&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something falsely paints you in a bad light, you may have no recourse on copyright or CC grounds due to Fair Use.  But separately you may have recourse under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Defamation&lt;/a&gt;.  The examples you mentioned are extreme, and look like they'd fall into a special category called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law#Defamation_per_se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Defamation &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Those are statements so heinous that the victim doesn't even have to bother proving damages; they are just assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in some countries, truth is a defense against defamation.  If you accuse someone of being a sexually promiscuous homosexual, and they actually can be found every Saturday night at sex clubs... then they get to accuse you of defamation &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but you get to -- well, that case won't ever happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are the ND licenses, which do not allow any modifications at all. My question is not about the ND licenses. I want to be as permissive as possible with pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair use (and defamation) override ND licenses too, so that's no help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could go after them for both defamation and license violation. If they &lt;em&gt;fail to&lt;/em&gt; make their case for Fair Use, then you win.    If they fail to defend your defamation charge, you win.   Such that winning a court case is winning.  You may be worse off, due to your legal fees, uncollectability, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Streisand Effect&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15278" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T02:38:13.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9648" CreationDate="2020-04-25T09:44:24.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license only applies to the commit on which you committed the license, and any subsequent commits (assuming the subsequent commits do not change the license). For example, let's say you commit code as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 1 (January 2019) - Added basic functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 2 (February 2019) - Bug fixes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 3 (March 2019) - Added frobulator functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 4 (April 2019) - Bug fixes to frobulator functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 5 (May 2019) - Added LICENSE stating that all files are under license X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commit 6 (June 2019) - Edited text for spelling, grammar and punctuation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this situation, the license X applies to commit 5, commit 6, and any other subsequent commit which does not change the license. Anyone who got commit 4 or earlier is not allowed to use the software under license X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if there is no license mentioned, as in the case of commits 1 through 4 in the above fictitious example, then you should refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for GitHub, however, if a project has no license mentioned, the GitHub terms of service state that if you've posted a project publicly on GitHub, then you are implicitly at least giving permission to users to look at the code and to fork it (i.e. to use the GitHub fork functionality). This would apply specifically to commits 1 through 4 of the above fictitious example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T09:44:24.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T08:22:20.770" Score="8" ViewCount="2928" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL must be applied on screenshots of GPL software or not. Can a screen recording of GPL software, such as Linux, be published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T07:19:36.723" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T07:34:22.433" Title="Are pictures of GPL software GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9656" CreationDate="2020-04-26T09:10:47.487" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you need to be asking here is whether the picture/screen recording is a derivative work of the copyrighted material or not. In general, the answer to this is &quot;no&quot; (and this is independent of license) - a program compiled with &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; is not a derivative work of &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt;, and a document created with Microsoft Word is not a derivative work of Microsoft Word. If the output isn't a derivative work of the copyrighted material, the license of the copyrighted material is irrelevant, and you can distribute it under any license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably the most common situation in which in may be possible for a picture to be copyrighted is if it includes significant graphical assets - for example, I couldn't take a screenshot of Super Mario Bros (or Freeciv if you want a GPL example) and then distribute that under an arbitrary license, although various fair use/fair dealing exceptions may apply. You can think of other examples in which the output &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; subject to the original license - e.g. quines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T09:10:47.487" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9660" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:46:50.373" Score="9" ViewCount="2646" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want all the people who link to my software should also release their code under GPL. But what if someone forked it and attempted to relicense it under the MIT, BSD, Apache, or LGPL licenses? Can I ensure this can't happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user16021" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T23:53:11.583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T23:53:11.583" Title="Can someone fork my GPL licensed project and re-license it under MIT or BSD?" Tags="|gpl|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T23:01:56.517" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a modern engine for an old video game, pretty much like those modern engines for Doom game that require the user to provide original Doom game data in order to be runnable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that modern engine requires the user to possess a legal copy of game it emulates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that modern engine as it is, does not contain any copyrighted content of games it emulates&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking more or less for a license that could cover this case but I didn't find any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I decided to write my own license (preliminary but you get the idea):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;## Disclaimer&#xA;&#xA;This software as it is offered to the public does not contain coprighted content.&#xA;&#xA;This software is and will always be free for the public, it is made for fun, not for profit.&#xA;&#xA;This software requires legally acquired copies of XXXXX games in order to be usable.&#xA;&#xA;XXXXXX serie of games is the property of XXXXXX.&#xA;&#xA;## License&#xA;&#xA;By using this software you accept the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;- you CANNOT monetize this free and open source software in any way&#xA;- you CANNOT redistribute copies of this software as an executable software&#xA;- you CANNOT use illegal copies of copyrighted games needed to build and run this software&#xA;&#xA;If you don't agree with any of these conditions, stop using this software immediately.&#xA;&#xA;We can't be held responsible for inappropriate actions of people on the Internet.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear, the software will be provided as source code that one will have to build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you suggest which common license, if any, could cover this case ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Else, what should a custom-written license for this particular case specify ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(basically, we respect original work but also can't be held responsible for X, Y or Z, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7344" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T12:36:01.163" Title="License for a modern engine for an old video game?" Tags="|licensing|gaming|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9658" CreationDate="2020-04-27T01:21:32.620" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your rights to a piece of software derive solely from the GPL -- and this is the usual case for most people who are redistributing GPL software -- then you cannot legally relicense under MIT, BSD, Apache or LGPL, because the GPL does not allow that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Special cases are possible, of course. If you own the copyright on a piece of software and have not somehow limited your rights to it, then you could simultaneously offer it to some people under the GPL and others under, say, the MIT license -- or more likely, under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17931" LastEditorUserId="17931" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T16:52:41.393" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T16:52:41.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9659" CreationDate="2020-04-27T07:16:06.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you suggest which common license, if any, could cover this case ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, we can't suggest a license for you, because all the conditions you listed in your draft are restrictions that are not allowed in an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Else, what should a custom-written license for this particular case specify ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A custom-written license should be written by a qualified lawyer. There are just too many details that you would miss or write down in a way that can make the license unenforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the statement &lt;code&gt;This software as it is offered to the public does not contain coprighted content.&lt;/code&gt; can be understood to mean that you dedicated our software to the public domain, in which case no license is needed to do whatever you like with the software, including making money with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T07:16:06.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9656" CreationDate="2020-04-27T07:34:22.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the software is featured in the image whether the image can be considered a derivative work or not and if copyright exceptions apply or not. If the image is a derivative work and no copyright exceptions apply, then it must be licensed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an image to be a derivative work of something else, that thing must be the main thing being depicted in the image. So, a screenshot or photo showing only a text editor with Linux code is most likely a derivative work of the shown portion of Linux code. On the other hand, a photo of a study with a monitor in the background showing Linux code is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work of the Linux code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there is a class of derived works where you don't have to abide by a copyright license, and that is if your work falls under the Fair Use (or similar) exceptions in copyright law. A most notable example of Fair Use is when giving critique. In such cases, Fair Use allows you to reproduce parts of copyrighted works that would otherwise be in violation of the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T07:34:22.433" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9659" CreationDate="2020-04-27T09:36:17.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Make those restrictions a technical requirement, not a license one&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't make that a requirement by putting it in the license. You make it a requirement by not shipping any original or replacement assets, since your replacement engine requires these assets to run the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, it is pointless to put in any extra copy protection, since the original copy protection will likely be completely broken and not even relevant anymore if the game has a modern release (not including remakes or remasters, think GoG) as almost such releases ship with the copy protection removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty pointless to put the requirements in your license anyway; the pirate has already ignored the license of the game developer, what makes you think they'll honour yours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14352" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T09:36:17.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9659" CreationDate="2020-04-27T12:36:01.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't go this way. Solve the problem like many did before you successfully:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code and assets are two different things. You should be able to clearly distinguish those. Legally you are not allowed to distribute the assets, unless you have written permission by the original distributors or authors of the original game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the usual solution is to build your game, and use an established open-source license for that. Often a version of GPL is used (&lt;a href=&quot;https://openttd.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenTTD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FreeRCT/FreeRCT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeRCT&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenDune&lt;/a&gt;, etc...) to distribute the programme and code. Instructions are commonly provided on how to copy the assets from the original game so that the open source programme can digest it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This approach also allows to create assets from scratch such that eventually the game finally can be distributed as whole under an open-source license without need for the original assets - while allowing to use the original assets for those who like the original look &amp;amp; feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T12:36:01.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T19:26:52.190" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering releasing a software product under MIT license. It's a complete front-end web application, that users would self-host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 3 parts to the application: index.html (a simple file with some dom structures), app.js (this makes up 95% of the application), and app.css There will be my copyright header in each of these files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT license permits to modify and redistribute the code. Let's say someone wanted to modify and redistribute, but they are using only my app.js (or derivative) and their own custom index.html.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that they would be required to preserve my copyright anywhere near the bundled JavaScript code and there's no doubt about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would they also be required to preserve the copyright header at the top of the HTML file? (the license mentions all copies or substantial portions of the software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This JavaScript code is not just a library, but the application itself. I think it should be most fair to also preserve the original copyright at the top of the main HTML document (where it's most visible), even if the main HTML isn't a derivative, but is it enforceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, are there other licenses which I could use to accomplish this, or would I have to create my own license (e.g. by adding an additional clause to MIT License)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17943" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T19:26:52.190" Title="MIT Licensed web app - can I enforce copyright header at the top of the main html in derivative works?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9667" CreationDate="2020-04-27T21:19:55.287" Score="5" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that if I buy a device it counts as distributing the software that comes with it, therefore entitling me to ask for sources of the GPL code within.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if the hardware is technically loaned? The particular case I have in mind is ISP-provided hardware like my router or set-top box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17946" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T15:36:47.443" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T15:36:47.443" Title="Does GPL apply to loaned or rented hardware?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9666" CreationDate="2020-04-28T06:31:04.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll consider specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, since to my mind the terms in it are more tightly defined, and since you don't ask about any particular, older version.  I'll also consider only software in which some third party has a copyright interest, which interest they licensed to the ISP under GPLv3; the analysis is different if the ISP is the sole rightsholder in the affected software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obligations are placed on the your ISP by the act of conveying binary software covered by GPLv3, by s6 &quot;&lt;em&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Both s4 (which applies to verbatim copies) and s5 (which applies to modified copies) require that the software be conveyed under GPLv3 (ss4, 5c), and s6 obliges them to provide source code (plus build scripts, makefiles, etc., as per s1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is conveyance?  From s0,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, you've received a copy, in the device you currently hold.  Did the act of providing it constitute propagation?  s0 also says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That says nothing about &lt;em&gt;transfer of ownership&lt;/em&gt;; the ISP merely has to make, and/or to provide you with, a copy of software that they would have had no permission to copy and/or distribute had the GPL not granted it to them.  Subject to the stipulations at the top of my answer, this they have done.  So it seems to me that the executable copy of the GPL software (if any) in the set-top box you hold has been conveyed to you by your ISP.  Their decision not to sell but to rent you the box containing it doesn't change this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T06:56:26.457" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T06:56:26.457" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9669" CreationDate="2020-04-28T15:25:21.283" Score="3" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quick question: I would like to publish a software under a self-written BSD-like license, and under the GPLv3. So far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody would fork said project according to the GPL, I would, in my understanding, have the right to use the code of the fork as GPLv3 in return. But I would not have the right to use that part in my BSD-version, even if my software is still available as GPLv3, am I right? So I would have to disable features I got from the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what if I would only license my software under the GPLv3, provided that they too would let me access this fork under a BSD-style-license?&#xA;I would not modify the GPL license per se, just add a condition to the header, like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C)   &#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation. &lt;strong&gt;Additionally, if you choose to&#xA;use (part of) this program in you own works, you grant me the right to&#xA;use the source code of the program under -my BSD-style license-.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause is of course not water-proof, but I think you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17955" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T08:17:28.290" Title="GPL/BSD-like Dual license add special clauses to the GPL" Tags="|gpl|copyright|bsd|copyleft|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9668" CreationDate="2020-04-28T15:53:16.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s7 is clear about permissible additional restrictions that can be applied to GPLv3.  I would argue that your clause is in fact a restriction, because it restricts people from conveying their modifications under pure-GPLv3, and thus can be ignored by any recipients of the fork, under GPLv3 s10.  If you edit your requirement into the licence to make it an integral part rather than an additional clause, you can't call it GPLv3; it becomes Yet Another Crayon Licence, and &lt;em&gt;nearly nobody&lt;/em&gt; will use that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that's not a slam-dunk argument, but as I say, I think the case can be made.  Whether or not you agree with the above, I think you're going about this the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you should add a clear Contributor Licensing Agreement to your project, saying that contributions to &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; fork are made under BSD.  If you're going to accept contributions from other people, a CLA is a good idea, anyway.  People who are happy for their contributions to be circulated under BSD won't have an issue with that,  Conversely, those who do have an issue have presumably chosen to work on the GPL fork for a reason and are likely people who would much prefer their work be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, BSD is a non-copyleft licence, which doesn't require people to keep code freely available, and under it.  If you want those outcomes, you should pick a copyleft licence which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; require them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T08:17:28.290" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T08:17:28.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T17:22:43.967" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to create a commercial monitoring software using Zabbix agent. Zabbix agent is a data collection software installed in a remote computer that collects the data and sends to a central server via internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will ask customers to install Zabbix agent and then point to my sever where I plan to collect the information and show the data on the website without using any Zabbix component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding this is allowed in GPL but not AGPL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17958" LastEditorUserId="17958" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T17:31:15.070" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T17:31:15.070" Title="Can I use a GPL data collection agent in commercial software" Tags="|commercial|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9676" CreationDate="2020-04-29T06:26:56.290" Score="2" ViewCount="881" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a google font which comes with Open Font License, in my web app. When I download the font it has truetype (.ttf) format. For a reason I need that font in woff/woff2 format, because that improves font render quality. I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://google-webfonts-helper.herokuapp.com/fonts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tool&lt;/a&gt; to convert the font, and use it in my app. So does it compromise the license terms? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately the web app would be soon launched as a product. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17965" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T06:39:44.043" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:17:17.843" Title="Does converting a google font to another format breach the license?" Tags="|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T08:49:09.770" Score="4" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume someone has bought some hardware with open source software, maybe GPLed software, and also assume that the original vendor has fully complied with the licenses.  Which means, for example, that they provide access to the sources for a certain time period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now assume further that the person who bought the hardware wants to sell it at some point later.  Maybe early after the original purchase, maybe much later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the person who sells the used hardware also bound by the open source licenses?  They may not even be aware of the licenses, they may have no software background at all.  And, the time that the original vendor was required to provide the sources may long have elapsed, and the sources may no longer be publically available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about all the people selling used cars, maybe future vintage-cars...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17966" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T09:37:48.093" Title="Selling used hardware with open source software" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9674" CreationDate="2020-04-29T09:37:48.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question.  Traditionally, in the US the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doctrine of first sale&lt;/a&gt; has held the that the copyright holders' right to control distribution of a particular copy is extinguished by the first sale of that copy.  There is much ongoing discussion about the extent to which first-sale applies to digital assets; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Capitol Records v. ReDigi&lt;/a&gt; the court held that resale of digital music was not permitted by first-sale, but the argument turned on the way reselling digital music inevitably involved making a further copy, and that is not so in your case, where the digital asset is contained inside a (non-reproducible) physical asset.  Similarly, in 2012 &lt;a href=&quot;http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=124564&amp;amp;doclang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ECJ held&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly from the Internet, and that the first sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlimited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(summary from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine#Application_to_digital_copies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;.  So I can't find a completely dispositive answer, but the way I read it is that in many jurisdictions, the rights-holders' power to control ongoing distribution of a particular copy is extinguished by first sale.  This includes the rights-holders' power to require that ongoing distribution take place under particular terms, including choice-of-licence and source-provision obligations.  So as I read it, you can sell the box to your friend without worrying that you're giving him or her the right to turn around and demand source code that you don't even have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone thinking &quot;&lt;em&gt;ooh, I can get round the GPL by getting my friend to download a copy then selling it to me for £1, thus stripping the GPL from my copy&lt;/em&gt;&quot; should note that even if that is so, you have neither the right to make multiple copies of, nor to modify, the copy you have thus acquired, since control of those is not extinguished by first-sale.  All you have is the right to sell it on to someone else for £2, and good luck with &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T09:37:48.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:17:17.843" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fortunately for both of us, the Open Font Licence FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;item_id=OFL-FAQ_web#1db14da7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly addresses&lt;/a&gt; this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I make and use WOFF (Web Open Font Format) versions of OFL fonts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, but you need to be careful. A change in font format normally is considered modification, and Reserved Font Names (RFNs) cannot be used. Because of the design of the WOFF format, however, it is possible to create a WOFF version that is not considered modification, and so would not require a name change. You are allowed to create, use and distribute a WOFF version of an OFL font without changing the font name, but only if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;the original font data remains unchanged except for WOFF compression, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;WOFF-specific metadata is either omitted altogether or present and includes, unaltered, the contents of all equivalent metadata in the original font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the original font data or metadata is changed, or the WOFF-specific metadata is incomplete, the font must be considered a Modified Version, the OFL restrictions would apply and the name of the font must be changed: any RFNs cannot be used and copyright notices and licensing information must be included and cannot be deleted or modified. You must come up with a unique name - we recommend one corresponding to your domain or your particular web application. Be aware that only the original author(s) can use RFNs. This is to prevent collisions between a derivative tuned to your audience and the original upstream version and so to reduce confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please note that most WOFF conversion tools and online services do not meet the two requirements listed above, and so their output must be considered a Modified Version. So be very careful and check to be sure that the tool or service you're using is compressing unchanged data and completely and accurately reflecting the original font metadata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: if you want to do it with minimal effort, change the font name and fulfil the other obligations shown above.  If you want to keep the font name, do due-diligence on your tool of choice, and pick a better tool if it doesn't pass muster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:17:17.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9679" CreationDate="2020-04-29T11:28:32.260" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a software in Java and JavaFx for a local sports club (I don't get payed). I would like to grant the club all the rights for using and modifing the software as they like. Therefore I checked the Open-Source-Software-licences and thought the MIT-licence would be a good choice. But i get pretty confused, if it's possible for me to use it since my software uses some libarys with different licences (Apache License 2.0, Eclipse Public License v2.0 and Eclipse Public License v1.0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to read and understand the licences but i can't really figure out if they are compatibile or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i licence my software with the MIT-Licence when i use the libarys with the licences mentioned above? Or do you have a recommandation which licence i should use? For me it's just important that the club can use and modify the software and of course that my licencing is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17968" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T12:05:40.370" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:05:05.680" Title="Licence recommendation" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9678" CreationDate="2020-04-29T12:51:03.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licenses you mention (MIT, Apache License 2.0, Eclipse Public License 1.0 &amp;amp; 2.0) are all fairly permissive licenses and they are all compatible with each other. So, yes you can use the MIT license for the code you write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses that may cause a problem are the various versions of the GPL, because those licenses are not compatible with the Eclipse Public License v1.0 (EPLv1.0). This means that if you start thinking of adding a GPL-licensed library to your product, you might have to remove the EPLv1.0-licensed ones. Be aware of that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Additionally, when you have a GPL dependency in your project, the binaries need to be released under the terms of the GPL, so it would make the licensing situation clearer if you switched your own code to GPL at that time as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:05:05.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:05:05.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T15:20:49.610" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Django project which uses Javascript and CSS libraries. Every library is unmodified and has its license as comment in the actual files I link to. Their licenses range from GPLv3 to BSD-3, MIT and Apache v2. I am trying to figure out how I can license my project considering those dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, is there a legal difference between simply linking to the libraries (e.g. hosted by the project owners) and distributing an unmodified version (still containing the license) on my site's server?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, how do I manage the licensing? Do I have to include an explicit &quot;Licensing&quot; page on the website linking to all the dependencies or are the comments in the code sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am understanding the situation correctly, the mere use of a GPLv3 library binds me to make the project open source. The other licenses do not seem to require such a thing. They however require a certain reproduction of the license notice, and I am wondering what is considered as a &quot;notice&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17971" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:20:49.610" Title="How to license a website linking to JS/CSS libraries" Tags="|gpl-3|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9684" CreationDate="2020-04-29T19:07:29.743" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've created some opensource, free to use Javascript tool. Currently, my program operates under a different name(which i want to change).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool is rather similar to an existing one, &lt;strong&gt;that was deprecated&lt;/strong&gt; by the creators(Their site clearly states &quot;DEPRECATED&quot;, and recommends some other tool, to be used instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal/safe to use the same name? Does contacting the company by email, asking for their written permission, have any legal validity? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note, that i'm not a US/Canada/EU citizen(assuming that matters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17974" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T09:23:39.340" Title="Is it legal to use the name of an existing GPL-2.0 program, in my own open source project?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1506" CreationDate="2020-04-29T19:51:44.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone asks you to print the model then you are likely in the clear. The 2nd and 9th circuit courts have decided that a non-commercial entity can contract a for profit entity to make their copy, and as long as the entity doing the copying is working within their normal parameters, they are not using the work commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you definitely can't sell copies (that you printed with the intent to sell), and you probably can't advertise it's availability (just a feeling that advertising prints of the models is using them commercially).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if someone says &quot;I'd like this model, can you print it for me, it's CC-NC-SA&quot; as long as you charge the same time and materials you'd charge for somebody trying to get their own self designed model printed, you are free to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the owner used someone else's CC-NC-SA piece as a starting point, they cannot change the license, but if it is their original work, than they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to reply to an old thread, but I was looking for similar information and stumbled across this (both referenced cases are newer than the answers, so I figured it was relevant to add):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2020/01/07/u-s-appellate-court-enforces-ccs-interpretation-of-noncommercial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/2020/01/07/u-s-appellate-court-enforces-ccs-interpretation-of-noncommercial/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17975" LastEditorUserId="17975" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T03:18:51.610" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T03:18:51.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9682" CreationDate="2020-04-29T22:52:38.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't do it.  Using an existing name most likely is a very bad idea unless you get the consent of the people who use(d) the name before; the name might be a registered trademark and you might get into legal trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not the same product, a different name is also a courtesy for the customers to allow distinction of the different products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if you fork an existing yet abandoned open source programme (thus in a way continue an existing project), it is at least common courtesy to choose a different name if you have no consent from the original authors to continue the project. Additionally: the legal argument about registered name(s) from my first paragraph might also apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing a new name is very common: Libre Office vs. Open Office. Kallithea vs. Rhodecode. Jenkins vs. Hudson. Redmine vs. OpenProject. OwnCloud vs. NextCloud. There likely are many more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T09:23:39.340" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T09:23:39.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9688" CreationDate="2020-05-01T05:18:32.500" Score="-1" ViewCount="1194" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use not my module with  GNU GPL in my android app, that showing adware or that i sell for money?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must i make my all app open source in that case? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Module:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/whyorean/playstore-api-v2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/whyorean/playstore-api-v2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;playstore-api-v2 is Free Software: You can use, study share and improve it at your will. Specifically you can redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17984" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T08:49:20.470" Title="Can i use GNU GPL Module in commercial app?" Tags="|commercial|gnu|android|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2020-05-01T06:23:45.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use any GPL-licensed software for any purpose you like - on he condition that you follow the license. This means you even have permission to use it in scams and software of dubious usage and moral standing, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, on Android the term &quot;module&quot; usually refers to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/studio/projects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commonly is referred to as library&lt;/a&gt; and not just an independent programme which you rely on and communicate with, but could do without. Thus the licenses of those must be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the license means that you use the GPL (or compatible) license for your complete software, too. Thus no part can be kept proprietary. That means among others to make available the sources in a similar manner as the binaries and at no additional costs, and to make users aware of their rights. Of course it doesn't mean you have to share your api keys, but you should then provide a reasonable example setup which also compiles easily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T08:49:20.470" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T08:49:20.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9686" CreationDate="2020-05-01T08:39:29.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I [show ads] or [sell my software for money]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ - Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also show ads, but remember that the GPL requires you to publish source. So if a customer does not like the fact that you show ads, she is allowed to recompile your app without that feature enabled. Or she is allowed to hire a developer to do that for her. She is also allowed to replace your ads with her ads and then to sell her customised version for money. You sold her the software, but the GPL says that she is allowed to change it or to hire someone to change it for her, and to resell her version if she wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must I make my [entire] app open source in that case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you depend on GPL software and include it in a way that it becomes a part of your program (e.g. as a module, library, etc.), then that whole program must be open source as well. There could be some exceptions to this, for example if you distribute multiple independent programs together. To find out if this applies, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL Section 5&lt;/a&gt; where it talks about &quot;aggregates&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T08:39:29.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9690" CreationDate="2020-05-01T15:16:13.360" Score="3" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am preparing to (formally) release my first standalone FOSS program (source and binary). It basically relies on Hashicorp's Vault's implementation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/master/shamir/shamir.go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm&lt;/a&gt; to provide users an easy interface to sharding passwords and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's my license disclaimer&lt;/a&gt;. Here's my 4 questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I publish my tool as it currently is with import vault/shamir? (pretty sure MPL allows this but I want to confirm). Is my disclaimer sufficient, insufficient, or overkill? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could I fork/copy the vault/shamir.go and test code into my repo while maintaining a license notification? I do not need to vendor the entire Vault lib, so taking this subsample greatly reduces dependencies. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would I be able to fork/copy the code and make small modification to it? (e.g. I want a variant of Split where I pass in the seed value, for testing purposes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would I be able to rewrite my own shamir.go from “scratch”? (kind of hard to do without “plagiarizing” since it is an algorithm and there is basically 1 way to implement an algorithm. Also the python implementation is on wikipedia). I probably don't actually want to do this, but I am curious how it works in a situation like this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17591" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T08:17:41.627" Title="MPL2.0 with Golang code - am I doing this right? Can I fork part of a library?" Tags="|forking|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9689" CreationDate="2020-05-02T08:17:41.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Can I publish my tool as it currently is with import vault/shamir? (pretty sure MPL allows this but I want to confirm). Is my disclaimer sufficient, insufficient, or overkill?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the libraries you mention in the License section of your README.md are all third-party libraries and you have the copyrights to the rest of the code, then I see nothing that would make it illegal to publish your tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph in that section (your actual disclaimer I think) is not needed, but it won't hurt either. It shows you have at least the intention to abide by all relevant license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Could I fork/copy the vault/shamir.go and test code into my repo while maintaining a license notification? I do not need to vendor the entire Vault lib, so taking this subsample greatly reduces dependencies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would I be able to fork/copy the code and make small modification to it? (e.g. I want a variant of Split where I pass in the seed value, for testing purposes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the MPL license allows you to create a copy of the vault/shamir.go code and to make changes to it. Removing unused code is one of the modifications that are allowed, so it is impossible to tell if you vendored the entire Vault lib, or just that one file and associated license information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Would I be able to rewrite my own shamir.go from “scratch”? (kind of hard to do without “plagiarizing” since it is an algorithm and there is basically 1 way to implement an algorithm. Also the python implementation is on wikipedia). I probably don't actually want to do this, but I am curious how it works in a situation like this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algorithms themselves are not subject to copyright protection, only their implementations are. So, if you took the mathematical description of an algorithm and created your own implementation of it, that would be entirely your copyright.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, if you took an existing implementation and ported that to a different language, then your implementation would likely be considered a derivative work of the source implementation and you would be bound by that implementation's license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Re-implementing an algorithm from scratch after having seen another implementation muddies the waters, because it will be hard to tell how much was your own inspiration and how much was based on remembering how the other implementation was written. Making a copy based on memory is still making a copy as far as copyright is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T08:17:41.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9692" CreationDate="2020-05-02T09:42:57.213" Score="3" ViewCount="1065" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that many startups are using both licenses to create commercial FOSS products (note I am here more interested in complete products not libraries). Is the 3-clause BSD more protective for the startup rights than AGPL without creating the stigma that's around GPL? Does it make other for-profit companies and competitors think twice before repackaging, rebranding and selling the FOSS software as is for profit and simply making easy profits off the back of the original FOSS author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17990" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T11:30:13.937" Title="3-Clause BSD vs AGPL for a startup FOSS product" Tags="|gpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9691" CreationDate="2020-05-02T09:54:21.760" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the 3-clause BSD more protective for the startup rights than AGPL without creating the stigma that's around GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hard question to answer, because I don't accept that there's a &quot;&lt;em&gt;stigma&lt;/em&gt;&quot; around the GPL, and variants.  Some organisations definitely don't like copyleft-licensed code; for them, see below.  Many other organisations are just fine with it.  Enough people are suspicious about the pervasiveness of the idea that there's something wrong with copyleft that experts give talks like &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/nobody_uses_the_agpl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who wants you to think nobody uses the AGPL, and why&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But be clear: if by &quot;&lt;em&gt;startup rights&lt;/em&gt;&quot; you mean &quot;preventing &lt;em&gt;repackaging, rebranding, and selling the FOSS software as-is for profit&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then 3-clause BSD, and all the other weak free licences, do next to nothing to protect those &quot;rights&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does it make other for-profit companies and competitors think twice before repackaging, rebranding and selling the FOSS software as is for profit and simply making easy profits off the back of the original FOSS author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of any academic work on this, though I'd like to be enlightened.  But in my experience, the organisations that are &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; worried about the GPL and other copyleft licences, who won't let code covered by it anywhere near their development processes, and who often won't let it through the door at all, are &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; the ones that want the right to resell someone else's work under their own brand, and with no more acknowledgement than the couple of paragraphs the weak free licences require, often buried at the back of a manual or deep-down in some menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I see it is that the weak free licences are primarily about &lt;strong&gt;making software free&lt;/strong&gt;.  People who choose them don't really care if their code stays free, as long as it gets used.  That is a perfectly legitimate choice for them to make, but if you decide to make it, don't be surprised when your work is commoditised.  You told the world you were happy with that in your choice of licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyleft licences are about &lt;strong&gt;keeping software free&lt;/strong&gt;.  People who choose them would like their code to be used, but aren't willing for that to happen if the users aren't going to keep it free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Work out what's more important to you, and pick your licence accordingly.  Do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; indulge any faint hope that, by picking a weak free licence, the world will keep free what it builds on your work, out of some sort of perceived debt of honour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T10:35:12.933" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T10:35:12.933" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9694" CreationDate="2020-05-02T16:23:06.487" Score="2" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the header of GPLv3 wrote &lt;code&gt;Copyright ... Free Software Foundation&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE&#xA;                       Version 3, 29 June 2007&#xA;&#xA; Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &amp;lt;https://fsf.org/&amp;gt;&#xA; Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies&#xA; of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean? A code under this license owned by FSF? Or it's my code (if I'm author). Which role has FSF in a project under GLP3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Project name &#xA;// Copyright (C) 2019  My name &#xA;//  &#xA;// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify &#xA;// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by &#xA;// the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or &#xA;// (at your option) any later version. &#xA;//  &#xA;// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, &#xA;// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of &#xA;// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the &#xA;// GNU General Public License for more details. &#xA;//  &#xA;// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License &#xA;// along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it valid header for a file to save my copyright. Can I use the &lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) year My name&lt;/code&gt; only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17993" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T20:21:44.013" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T20:27:50.523" Title="Who is owner of code under GPL3?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9693" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:36:55.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright and license headers you quote in your first segment pertain only to &quot;this license document&quot; -- i.e., the text of the GPLv3 itself -- and not to any external work that might be made available by others under the terms described in that license document. In short, licensing a work under the GPL does not impact your own copyright of your work; you retain copyright ownership by default (unless you proactively assign it to someone else or it belongs to your employer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some related concepts that might have confused you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For legal reasons, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF only accepts contributions to its own projects if the author of a contribution assigns the copyright to the FSF&lt;/a&gt;. This is a policy decision by the FSF and is not required by the GPL. Many GPL-licensed projects do not require copyright assignment and allow authors to keep the copyright on their contributions, resulting in a project with heterogeneous copyright ownership uniformly licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that the header of the GPL does not allow modified versiona of the GPL text, the FSF separately &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;does give that permission in its GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, provided you change the name of your modified license and omit the preamble.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T20:27:50.523" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T20:27:50.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9696" CreationDate="2020-05-03T14:47:47.423" Score="3" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I participate in the development of a soft that will be distributed on a commercial basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: 1. If I take the open-source Library (under LGPL v.3), will there be any obligations to support the functionality after the distribution of my application will occure?: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. for this library, if I will modify it; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Directly dynamically linked to this Component Libraries of my Application;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Other components of my Application indirectly related to the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: 2. Will I be obligated to ensure the operability of the components of my Application if the user of the Application has independently modified the used Library and tries to apply it to my Application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18000" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T17:22:04.350" Title="Some questions about LGPL v.3 (support, warranty…)" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9695" CreationDate="2020-05-03T17:22:04.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements you have under the LGPL license are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that any changes you make to the Library are done under the LGPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that you make you users aware that your product contains LGPL-licensed code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that your users can obtain the source code for the LGPL parts. This must be the same source code that you used to create your product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that your users are given the technical and legal means to replace the LGPL parts with another version. A user that wants to do this is supposed to have themselves or hire someone with sufficient software engineering skills for the task.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license does not require you in any way to specifically give support on the LGPL library. There might be other laws that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; require you to give support on the product you sell (which would include the LGPL library in that case), but you would still not be required to give support outside of the context of your product and most likely the support requirement would not extend to replacing parts of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are also not required to guarantee interoperability of your application with custom builds of the LGPL library, but you must not make it unduly difficult to reproduce the library version that you ship. You are also not required to give warranty to users that have replaced the LGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T17:22:04.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9700" CreationDate="2020-05-03T20:03:48.963" Score="0" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; of English words sorted by frequency. I used that list to create a small hangman game and I would like to put it up on GitHub. The game is probably going to be open-source (GPL). Do I have to give Wikipedia credit or something like that? I found this article on Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reusing_Wikipedia_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reusing Wikipedia content&lt;/a&gt; but I don't quite understand it and I am not really good with licenses and all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Can I use that list in an open-source game I will put up on GitHub? Do I have to give them some kind of credit? If so, exactly how? I would quite like to not bother with attribution and all, this is just a small game and I already make no profit on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1984/13926&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, but it's presumable about commercial use of the material. So, I don't know how much of it applies here. Also it's sort of directly republishing the material, but I am just using it to make the game work. The words are in a text file and I load them at runtime. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case that other question applies here also, I would appreciate a small example of how to give attribution. Do I just say &quot;I took the word list from Wikipedia&quot; in the license file in GitHub after the GPL conditions? Do I note that in a separate file? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13926" LastEditorUserId="13926" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T20:25:00.703" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T06:03:58.823" Title="Is it OK to use content from Wikipedia in an opensource project without attribution?" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-03T20:23:27.510" Score="3" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I've had some trouble trying to get &lt;code&gt;std::thread&lt;/code&gt; working with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MinGW&lt;/a&gt; g++. Considering that I don't want a dependency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Portable_Threads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gthread&lt;/a&gt;, I was wondering if I could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.woboq.org/gcc/libstdc++-v3/src/c++11/thread.cc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thread.cc&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hjl-tools/gcc/blob/master/libstdc%2B%2B-v3/libsupc%2B%2B/cxxabi_forced.h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cxxabi_forced.h&lt;/a&gt;) with the following macro functions instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#define _GLIBCXX_HAS_GTHREADS 1&#xA;#define __gthread_t thrd_t&#xA;#define __gthread_create(a, b, c) thrd_create(a, (thrd_start_t)b, c)&#xA;#define __gthread_join thrd_join&#xA;#define __gthread_detach thrd_detach&#xA;#define __gthread_self thrd_current&#xA;#define __gthread_yield thrd_yield&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;use of source code generators and preprocessors need not be considered&#xA;  part of the Compilation Process, since the Compilation Process can be&#xA;  understood as &lt;strong&gt;starting with the output of the generators or&#xA;  preprocessors&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me think that in the first example, the whole code is now covered by GPLv3 due to some macros changing the code itself. So, I came up with another idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#define _GLIBCXX_HAS_GTHREADS 1&#xA;typedef thrd_t __gthread_t;&#xA;int __gthread_create(thrd_t *thr, void *func(void*), void *arg) {&#xA;    return thrd_create(thr, (thrd_start_t)func, arg);&#xA;}&#xA;int __gthread_join(__gthread_t thr, int *res) {&#xA;    return thrd_join(thr, res);&#xA;}&#xA;int __gthread_detach(__gthread_t thr) {&#xA;    return thrd_detach(thr);&#xA;}&#xA;__gthread_t __gthread_self(void) {&#xA;    return thrd_current();&#xA;}&#xA;void __gthread_yield(void) {&#xA;    thrd_yield();&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this line of code below, you can see that &lt;code&gt;_GLIBCXX_HAS_GTHREADS&lt;/code&gt; was set to &lt;code&gt;1&lt;/code&gt; just so that thread.cc would function properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#if defined(_GLIBCXX_HAS_GTHREADS) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; defined(_GLIBCXX_USE_C99_STDINT_TR1)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this doesn't cause licensing problems. Can I use the last example in combination with non-GPLv3 compatible software? Is it true that the first example is completely covered by GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18004" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T20:23:27.510" Title="To what extent does the GCC Runtime Library Exception cover macros, typedefs and functions?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|exceptions|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9702" CreationDate="2020-05-03T22:03:25.420" Score="12" ViewCount="2337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use and improve an old library for a new project.&#xA;It is a specialized library and it has not been updated for 5 years.&#xA;My project is licensed with a permissive license, while the library is licensed under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To allow use of the library without strong separation, I'd need the library to be more permissive, at least LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to ask the maintainer to grant such a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to &quot;save&quot; my improvements of the library from GPL, it's just for the use in non-GPL projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T06:51:44.053" Title="Asking for a more permissive license" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9697" CreationDate="2020-05-04T05:47:10.293" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commercial activities which infringe copyright don't become non-infringing simply by becoming non-commercial; that is, the commercial nature of your activity has very little bearing on its infringing nature.  You are also distributing this word list with your game, so please disabuse yourself of the idea that you are not republishing the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, some substantive questions arise.  The one about attribution of CC material in a game is one &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1727/how-to-attribute-creative-commons-images-in-a-quiz-game-mobile-app&quot;&gt;we have already addressed&lt;/a&gt;, so you should read those answers carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;apsillers raises an excellent point about whether such a list qualifies for copyright protection at all, and if not, what you will need to do about jurisdictions which recognise a database right; these jurisdictions include the EU, in which I believe you are located.  I would be quite nervous about making an argument based on Feist (to which apsillers links, &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;) that the list failed to qualify for copyright protection; I can see the arguments both ways, but it's not clear to me that either outcome can be relied upon.  In any case, the &lt;strong&gt;specific&lt;/strong&gt; question of copyright protection, and the one about database rights and the licensing thereof, should probably be asked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why take the risk?  Acknowledging the source of the word list isn't exactly onerous, and the legal analysis required by way of alternative is becoming comparably ponderous, at the least.  Once you've made the acknowledgment, no questions about infringement can arise, as you have honoured the terms of the licence.  The word list is used as an input to your code, so the entire program cannot be regarded as a derivative of the word list.  Thus the share-alike right goes no further than the list itself, which can be had from Wikipedia anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honour the requirements of CC BY-SA and sleep soundly, untroubled by the interestingly thorny issues lurking round the back of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T06:03:58.823" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T06:03:58.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2020-05-04T06:25:11.960" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question seems to have a number of misapprehensions embedded in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to &quot;save&quot; my improvements of the library from GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's good, because LGPL requires (eg LGPLv3 s2) any modified version of the library to be redistributed under LGPL, or GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My project is licensed with a permissive license ... to allow use of the library without strong separation, I'd need the library to be more permissive, at least LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, no, you wouldn't.  As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ says&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL &lt;strong&gt;or a GPL-compatible&lt;/strong&gt; license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes... The software modules that link with the library &lt;strong&gt;may be under various GPL compatible licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis) The upshot is that you can release your work, in source form, under a more-permissive licence.  You must release the binary form under GPL, with the usual obligation to provide sources, but your parts of those sources may be under a more-permissive licence than GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only real reason to ask the author to relax the library's licensing terms is if you want to incorporate it into proprietary code, and I would guess said author is unlikely to do that.  Nevertheless, you can still ask; it is, as they say, a free internet.  However, the conversation is likely to go better if you're asking for reasons that actually hold water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T06:25:11.960" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9699" CreationDate="2020-05-04T06:51:44.053" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can ask. It is not unheared of that people relicense it. But if the project is abandoned or had no clear governance (I.e. not all contributors assigned the right to change the license to the main author) they might not respond, might not agree or might not be able to re-license it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are lucky, you get offered maintainership. In this case you will need to track back all major contributors to see what kind of agreement they have given. If it has only a single author the tracking becomes easier, but I still would try to get the license change before you transfer ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18006" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T06:51:44.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-04T18:35:32.773" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;When looking for a strong open source license for a new project, a license such as the (A)GPLv3 provides a round-all catch-all protection against legal shenanigans such as patent disputes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Effectively it ensures that software that was intended to contribute to an open society cannot be turned around and used against that goal.&lt;/strong&gt; (among other things)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source community is adamant that &lt;em&gt;discrimination against field&lt;/em&gt; is incompatible with the open source idea. Reasons for this range from technical (&quot;where do you draw the line&quot;) to idealistic (&quot;it's not really free if not all can use it for whatever&quot;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/20050211.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF has been very clear&lt;/a&gt; that a limitation of the use should even be opposed even when it attempts to forbid the use for &quot;really bad thing&quot;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, people have been trying to limit the use of their software for various &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unspecific&lt;/em&gt; things they don't like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Military use (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/199055/8977&quot;&gt;researchers in general&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OCB&lt;/a&gt;, formerly the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gpu.sourceforge.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPU project&lt;/a&gt; who had to pull the restriction for hosting reasons in 2006).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial use (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7397/17991&quot;&gt;Restrict GPLv3 to non-commercial use&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5771/17991&quot;&gt;Is it possible to restrict GNU GPLv3 to non-commercial use only?&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And prominently; &quot;Evil&quot; use: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.json.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;json&lt;/a&gt;'s modified MIT license which adds the line &quot;&lt;em&gt;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Which according to the author had some &lt;a href=&quot;https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;limited, qualified success&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want, and I think also motivates the examples above, is the intent to protect the idea of open source not to the letter, but to its spirit. &lt;strong&gt;A way to limit the tools intended for an open society by people or organisations (and specifically their goals) that are incompatible with it -- according to &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; interpretation as the software's author.&lt;/strong&gt; For example, the ideology of fascists is utterly incompatible with a free society, so I want to limit the use of free software so that it cannot be used to further such a cause (e.g. the official website of the BNP uses WordPress under a GPLv2 license, so does the Identitäre Bewegung, and many many more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the general position expressed by the FSF for a general-purpose license like the GPL, if only from a practical standpoint; How do we define what is and isn't considered to fall under a category such as JSON's &quot;Evil&quot;? But the general case doesn't necessarily apply to the special case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So - How do I license a piece of software under the GPL or something equivalent, while excluding its limitation that no discrimination can be made for its applicability? Specifically I want to list a number of purposes and fields that are not covered by the license for the very reason that they are (ideologically) incompatible with the (perceived) spirit of the license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17991" LastEditorUserId="17991" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T19:58:49.153" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T19:58:49.153" Title="How do I enforce not just the letter but also the spirit of open source for an open culture?" Tags="|license-recommendation|restrictions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2020-05-04T19:14:32.550" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I license a piece of software under the GPL or something equivalent, while excluding its limitation that no discrimination can be made for its applicability?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL, you cannot. The GPL license explicitly forbids additional restrictions and if you do add such a restriction, recipients of your software are allowed to disregard and even remove them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &quot;something equivalent&quot;, you will have to ask a lawyer to draft you a new license. Most likely this license will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be accepted as an open-source license, so it will do your cause little good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:14:32.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9706" CreationDate="2020-05-04T20:36:03.290" Score="2" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is a piece of software that uses GPLv3 headers, but the code that includes said headers is not under the GPLv3 itself, but rather a GPL-compatible license, say MIT Expat. Thus the binary produced by the MIT and GPLv3 source itself must be distributed under the terms of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this &quot;core&quot; source is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL and as the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not permit distribution under an NDA&lt;/a&gt;: is it in violation of the GPL to distribute said MIT and GPLv3 source (header source) under an NDA prohibiting (only) the distribution of said MIT source? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it then follow that it would become impossible to distribute produced binaries because the accompanying source code (tied up in an NDA) cannot be shipped with the produced GPLv3 binary (violating the GPL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18013" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T22:01:17.603" Title="NDA over code that includes GPLv3 headers" Tags="|gpl|distribution|nda|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9705" CreationDate="2020-05-04T22:01:17.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that the &lt;em&gt;corresponding source&lt;/em&gt; of a GPL-covered binary is made available under the GPL license. If some parts of the source use the MIT license, this is fine because MIT is compatible to the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding an NDA breaks this compatibility. From a downstream perspective, MIT+NDA can no longer be considered MIT-licensed, and is just some proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you have reached the correct conclusion: if the GPL would require the corresponding source to be made available under the terms of the GPL, and the NDA prohibits the corresponding source to be made available at all or under incompatbile terms, then the only legal solution is to not distribute the software at all. Of course, purely internal use is still allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible solution is to rearchitect the software into two clearly separate parts: a GPL-covered part and a proprietary part, with these two only communicating “at arms length”. For example, invoking the GPL-covered &lt;code&gt;ffmpeg&lt;/code&gt; software as a command line application from proprietary software is fine, but linking it with the proprietary software would run into exactly the issues of this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T22:01:17.603" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9691" CreationDate="2020-05-05T11:30:13.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a world of difference between GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My experience with AGPL is that any corporate lawyer who looks at it first faints, and then demands company-wide banning of touching any AGPL software with a 10 meter pole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL will get you users, and lawyers rarely care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL will get your software banned under penalty of getting fired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example you won't get any users or contributors who are Google employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google open source guru: 'Why we ban the AGPL'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/dont-believe-the-hype-agpl-open-source-licensing-is-toxic-and-unpopular/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don't believe the hype. AGPL is toxic and unpopular&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18021" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T11:30:13.937" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9711" CreationDate="2020-05-05T15:26:05.573" Score="-2" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;On our project we are allowed to use following licences : MIT, MIT-equivalent, Public Domain and several other concrete licences. I am not able to find out which licences are MIT-equivalent or Public domain lincenses. From the title GNU General Public License, version 2 it is probably a Public domain licence, but I am not sure about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18022" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T04:45:03.100" Title="What kind of license is GPL 2.0 license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-05-23T07:27:50.767" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2020-05-05T18:34:28.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the restriction from section 1(c)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;only applies to Original Work or Derivative Works which is defined in section 1(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the Original Work, thereby creating derivative works (&quot;Derivative Works&quot;) based upon the Original Work;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So only if you modify the OSL 3.0 project that you are using you are obligated to publish the source of this project, not the whole code that was built using that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magento is distributed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/magento/magento2/blob/2.3.5/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; license and we don't see the source code of thousands of stores built in Magento published, do we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18023" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:34:28.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9708" CreationDate="2020-05-06T04:45:03.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL 2.0 license is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; license. This means that it puts major restrictions on anyone who distribute GPL licensed code or who wants to reuse GPL licensed code in another project. The most important rule is that anyone who uses GPL licensed code in their own project must publish their own project under the GPL license itself. So you can't use GPL licensed code in a closed-source program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can include MIT licensed code in a GPL project, but you cannot include GPL code in an MIT project. The GPL is definitely not a public domain license. Public domain means that anyone can do anything with it, including using the code in closed-source programs, and without attributing it to the original author. That is absolutely prohibited by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you use the GPL 2.0 license for your project? Maybe. Best thing to do is ask whoever is setting the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T04:45:03.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2020-05-06T15:48:23.547" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not the first person to want to try this.  In 2019 &lt;a href=&quot;https://where.coraline.codes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coraline Ehmke&lt;/a&gt; released the &lt;a href=&quot;https://firstdonoharm.dev/version/2/1/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hippocratic Licence&lt;/a&gt;, which forbids the use of covered software to violate human rights laws.  She's not the first person to try it either, but she's not unknown in the free software world, so you may learn some salutary lessons from how it worked out for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently over 300 projects have signed up to use it.  You can see the A-list &lt;a href=&quot;https://firstdonoharm.dev/adopters.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and you will notice no projects of any significance at all.  The estimable Andrew Katz writes about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://openuk.uk/ethical-open-source-licence-dilemma-andrew-katz-pro-bono-gc-openuk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for OpenUK&lt;/a&gt;, and he makes some very worthwhile points, the first of which is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If people use the [Hippocratic Licence] then this creates yet another, incompatible pool of software, which cannot be combined with any copyleft code, and can only be combined with open source software licensed under very liberal licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a good outcome; we need more, mutually-incompatible free software licences like we need holes in our heads.  It's not that the aims people are seeking this way aren't desirable ends, it's that they are only tangentially connected to the software and the process of its development, and so they don't fit well into a software licence, and they don't work well when they're there.  Katz notes similar desires arising when he was involved in drafting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_Open_Hardware_Licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CERN Open Hardware Licence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In our drafting of the CERN OHLv2, we were often asked to incorporate superficially desirable conditions, like a condition requiring any item made from the design to be energy efficient, or to use sustainable materials, or to be easily repairable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He didn't yield to any of them, but instead suggests a potential solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We suggest that organisations could apply a certification, to say that certain items of hardware meet sustainability standards, or are certified repairable. That is, a certification which is in parallel with the licensing requirement, and in order to use the relevant certification mark, the distributor of the hardware would have to be licensed by the relevant body. In effect, control would be through a combination of community norms, and legal remedies akin to trademark infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no reason why such a scheme could [not] be extended to software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is excellent advice.  Instead of muddying the waters with Yet Another Weird Licence, use a regular copyleft licence, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; launch a marking exercise for users of your software, something that they can only display if they avoid military use, or commercial use, or even (if you can define it) evil use.  I'd really like to see a sticker on my next laptop that says, eg, &quot;&lt;em&gt;non-weaponised bitmask software inside&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Note that copyleft is a necessity for this scheme to work: there's no shame in weaponising the bitmask software if nobody knows you've done it, because nobody knows your product includes bitmask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; to address Diagon's comment, &lt;em&gt;infra&lt;/em&gt;: re governments, it won't work brilliantly, to be honest, because the consumer doesn't care about acceptability: they're the only game in town.  There are other ways to pressure governments, though, of which I recommend the ballot box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your second point, about the little extra clause: your software is then GPL-incompatible.  If you purport to distribute it under GPLv2 with the extra clause, it's simply unusable in practice (crayon licence, non-free, GPL-incompatible).  If you purport to do so under GPLv3, your additional clause may simply be ignored under s7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is that your choice as an author is not between &lt;em&gt;software that may be used by all&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;software that may be used by all except bad people&lt;/em&gt;.  Because of pre-existing expectations and modes of interaction in the free software community, your choice is between &lt;em&gt;software that may be used by all&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;software that may be used by nearly nobody&lt;/em&gt;.  If you're happy with the latter, why pretend to be writing free software at all?  Release as zero-cost proprietary software, and then I guarantee your work can't be re-used by bad people, because it can't be re-used by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T10:15:38.227" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T10:15:38.227" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:50:05.350" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an app that uses material (the material I want to show is a website) which is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 but I want to place ads in my application. The application has another functions other than showing the content. I thought that if I keep the links for the content and open it in a webview inside my app (yes it connects to the server) there would not be a problem. Also, I thought I can put a premium option that no ads will be showed and the content will be stored locally then will be shown in a webview because I'm not generating any profit from it. Would this violate the license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6564" LastEditorUserId="6564" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T21:48:44.993" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T21:48:44.993" Title="Can I use CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 content in a webview while keeping the app commercial?" Tags="|creative-commons|software|android|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9713" CreationDate="2020-05-06T21:06:52.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd consider that a license violation to use CC BY-NC licensed material in such way. The CC BY-NC license says already in its name that the licensed content must not be used in commercial context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist a study from CC which gives &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2009/09/14/defining-noncommercial-report-published/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;general interpretation of the NC clause&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a scale of 1-100 where 1 is “definitely noncommercial” and 100 is “definitely commercial” creators and users (84.6 and 82.6, respectively) both rate uses in connection with online advertising generally as “commercial.” However, more specific use cases revealed that many interpretations are fact-specific. For example, creators and users gave the specific use case “not-for-profit organization uses work on its site, organization makes enough money from ads to cover hosting costs” ratings of 59.2 and 71.7, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning could be as follows: if this usage is allowed, then one enters a slippery slope and can simply use it for any advertizement, decoration or similar in any context as long as it is not sold itself. It's the impression the user has to get (it's used to promote content which aims to make a profit), not the technical means used to dispay a CC BY-NC license piece of art. It's different if you use the art and ask for donations for the combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a legal interpretation but just what people who use it mean and interpret it. You might simply approach the artist and explain the situation and your intentions - and ask for permission. You might also seek legal councel. Legal interpretation will vary depending on your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T21:06:52.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-07T03:56:29.070" Score="0" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing Windows application. It is crypto-functioning notepad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And its design(UI interface) is almost(approx 90%?) same with Microsoft Windows Notepad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Differences are only some buttons and sub-windows for encryption and decryption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to distribute my program for non-commercial. In this case, can I use its UI interface legally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbPpb.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GbPpb.png&quot; alt=&quot;example&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18039" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T01:47:26.433" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T01:47:26.433" Title="Copyright issue of the interface of Windows Notepad" Tags="|copyright|software|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-05-08T16:41:55.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-07T20:43:17.490" Score="4" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a small library which I decided to open-source under the Apache 2.0 License on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not long afterward I realized that some of the code in here makes use of proprietary information which belongs to the third-party company (let's say that it's the structure of the packets of data) and the fact that anyone can find that structure on the Internet (there're at least two libraries and dozen of articles which describe that structure in great details) does not mean that I can use it in my open-source code. Now, I can write an abstract parser that would handle that format of data and, possibly, some other formats, but the question is - how can I release it so that the company can not claim that I was redistributing their proprietary info? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough to put some commits on top of the existing code which will destroy all mentions of hard-coded proprietary data package structure? I don't think so, because anybody can check the Git log and see that information here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I add this abstract parser in a new commit and then squash all existing commits into a huge single commit, so that there will be no evidence that this reliance on proprietary info has ever existed in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't want to destroy the overall history of the repository, but if that's the price that has to be paid, then I'm fine with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18046" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T21:04:31.420" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:44:08.497" Title="How to completely get rid of proprietary code in the library?" Tags="|apache-2.0|proprietary-code|network-protocol|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9717" CreationDate="2020-05-07T21:17:04.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would question your assertion that you cannot use the information in your library. Copyright is about the &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of an idea, not the idea itself. So long as somewhere along the line, you have a clean break from the original implementation - for example, if you coded your implementation solely from one of the descriptions of the data structures, rather than by looking at the proprietary code - then the copyright on the original does not apply and you can use it in your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes that there aren't other forms of intellectual property, most likely a patent, protecting the information. If there is a patent, that's a whole different problem, and not one that open source software can solve because the whole idea is protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T21:17:04.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9716" CreationDate="2020-05-08T01:03:21.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all text editors have that look and feel. If your application were to violate MS copyrights, Microsoft would have already had many other text editors pulled from the market already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18047" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T01:03:21.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8795" CreationDate="2020-05-08T04:54:48.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can link CC-SA content along with your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weak/strong copyleft is a term that only exists for software, because it only defines an exception to the copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use CC-SA content, you just have to give credit to the original author and share &lt;strong&gt;the content&lt;/strong&gt; (modified or unmodified) under the same license. Not your code. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to do so is to add the license next to the content files. If that's not possible, you could add a watermark with the author name and &quot;CC-SA-X.X&quot;. You could add this info to your &quot;about&quot;-splash (if applicable). Be creative (pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T04:54:48.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9722" CreationDate="2020-05-08T19:05:22.573" Score="5" ViewCount="1102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm relatively new to open source, esp. in terms of collaboration, etiquette, etc. I am working on an open source library in the scientific/numerical programming domain, licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some functions which I have not yet implemented that I have found to have already been done in another repo on GitHub, licensed under MIT. To prevent duplicate work, I am interested in incorporating parts of their code into my library, of course with attribution, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious as to the following however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the differing licensing schemes, what should I do? Should I specify that those subroutines are licensed under a different scheme?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I contact the author of the other package letting them know of this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18054" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T21:02:57.867" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T02:09:01.380" Title="Etiquette for incorporating someone else's MIT code in my GPL project?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9721" CreationDate="2020-05-08T22:06:52.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing you HAVE to do is follow the license of the code you incorporate which reads like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As MIT is more permissive than GPL and compatible to it: ideally put that license in the header of the file(s) with only copied code. If that is not possible, and you need to mix licenses in one file, it gets difficult to indicate licenses clearly: put the license immediately above the routines, indicating that it applies to the routine below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your about text / help text / readme you also would want to give appropriate attribution so that your users (and not only those who read the source) can learn about their contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to contact the authors (that's why they chose the license they chose), but sure it is a thing you can do and they might be delighted to hear that you find their work useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T08:02:50.877" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9725" CreationDate="2020-05-09T10:02:03.530" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in converting part of our company application into and open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They will let me work on it (they need it) and publish it to their own GitHub account. I will be the only one working on it.&#xA;If I leave the company, I would like to continue contributing to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of license should I choose to avoid the code being turned back into closed source and that would allow me to fork it without being troubled by the company ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18059" LastEditorUserId="18059" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T16:17:32.280" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T22:10:04.067" Title="What license to choose when starting an open source project in a company?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9723" CreationDate="2020-05-09T22:10:04.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to avoid that any derivative is kept as closed-source, you will need a copyleft license. That ensures that any derivative work will need to be published with accompanying source as well. The established licensed in that area is the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only want to ensure that your current work remains free software, any open source license will do; the licenses are irrevocable. But MIT and BSD-style licenses allow - contrary to GPL - that derivatives can remain closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T22:10:04.067" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9727" CreationDate="2020-05-09T22:37:04.070" Score="6" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;These packages are excluded from Fedora repositories for legal reasons. The only way to install them is to use third-party repositories like RPM Fusion or building from source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fedora docs states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Software patents apply to some of the packages in RPM Fusion, and as a consequence, it might not be legal to install these packages in certain countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I get in trouble by installing a open source or free (FSF) software package? Is this because the idea of an opensource software might be patented? What about developers of that software? What about package maintainers, why patent does not affect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any version of these packages shipped without patented codecs?&#xA;What happens if I install them in a country not affected by patents and then move to an effected one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18063" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T05:50:28.733" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T07:26:22.527" Title="Am I doing something illegal by installing VLC or MPV?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9726" CreationDate="2020-05-10T05:49:30.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A patent is a temporary legal monopoly on an invention, which grants to the holder the legal right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, and/or importing that invention &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(source)&lt;/a&gt; or anything which embodies it.  In most countries, the concept of &quot;&lt;em&gt;invention&lt;/em&gt;&quot; now &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unfortunately&lt;/a&gt; includes ideas expressed in software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can I get in trouble by installing a open source or free (FSF) software package? Is this because the idea of an opensource software might be patented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly; it's because the free software might embody one or more inventions which are covered by a live patent.  However, in practice you're unlikely to get into trouble; see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about developers of that software?  What about package maintainers, why patent does not affect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, it does; however, patent lawsuits are notoriously expensive.  That's fine if you're suing a big company with deep coffers, as if you win you'll likely get your costs covered.  If you're suing Fiona Q. Hacker for publishing some code on gitlab, then even if you win and get a costs award, odds are you'll never recover the money.  Meanwhile, seventy-three people will have forked her repo and be publishing similarly-infringing code.  That's not to say the occasional &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;patent troll&lt;/a&gt; doesn't pump out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cease-and-desist letters&lt;/a&gt; to poor starving free software developers, but it's not that common, because it's not very effective.  Big companies involved in free software, however, are very careful not to knowingly violate existing patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any version of these packages shipped without patented codecs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's package-specific, but in some cases it's effectively impossible, because the software exists solely to implement a patent-encumbered standard.  The tendency of international standards bodies to standardise on patented technologies whilst only requiring the patent to be licensed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reasonable and non-discriminatory terms&lt;/a&gt; doesn't help.  (To be clear, I would prefer to see bodies like W3C and the ITU mandate that anyone applying for a technology to be standardised agree to abandon any patents they hold on it if the application was approved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What happens if I install them in a country not affected by patents and then move to an effected one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents include the right to control import, so that's a no-no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T07:26:22.527" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T07:26:22.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9729" CreationDate="2020-05-10T09:28:56.003" Score="3" ViewCount="594" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project comprised of a small HTML page and a JavaScript script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the HTML page I include a library which is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and from my script I invoke some of its functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to release the HTML page and the script file under the MIT License, but I'm not sure... Is it allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know MIT and GPL-3.0 code can be mixed, but in this case the GPL-3.0 code is a dependency of the would-be-MIT code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I would be allowed to simply publish a code repository with my MIT code (without a copy of the GPL-3.0 library), and to publish the web page with a link to both my repository and the original repository of the library. Would I be correct? Would I also be required to host a copy of the source code of the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18067" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T18:25:12.910" Title="GPL-3.0 library in MIT project" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9728" CreationDate="2020-05-10T12:40:39.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; GPL-covered code in an MIT-licensed project. You have to use GPL (or a compatible license) for the project as a whole, if you include GPL-covered libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can also be argued that running a website is distributing the code, so even combining it on the front-end of a running web server is at least very fishy and must not be done; GPL very likely was chosen for that very reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T18:25:12.910" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T18:25:12.910" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9736" CreationDate="2020-05-10T15:18:14.107" Score="21" ViewCount="5395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been foraging GitHub and making small one-off contributions to a variety of codebases that interest me.  Typically, the projects that I want to contribute to are very large in nature and already have a lot of active contributors.  I don't think that adding another contributor to an already large project will do myself any good (as far as growth is concerned), nor the project (by just adding more noise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difficulties I've found are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Making contributions to a variety of smaller projects results in knowledge ramp-up with how the maintainers want their commits and contributions done.  From my experience, maintainers are flexible, yet always have hard-and-steadfast--sometimes &quot;unspoken&quot;--rules when it pertains to making contributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most small projects typically never grow into anything beyond what it already is.  The largest projects, of course, solve a wide variety of problems and have many users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most projects I've encountered have stale issues that just sit there without activity from years past.  Triaging is typically fruitless, since responses are typically &quot;oh yeah, we'll get to that later.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a lack of transparency across large projects.  There's always an &quot;in&quot; group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up with facts and statistics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these difficulties, what is the best way to go about being an active, influential FOSS contributor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17995" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T23:28:24.283" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T13:08:51.967" Title="How do I become a regular contributor to GitHub FOSS projects?" Tags="|github|contributor|project-management|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9732" CreationDate="2020-05-10T16:38:34.170" Score="1" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;What open source license should I use on a project that I wanted to limit to personal and home use but if it is being distributed as a commercial product you have to pay to get permission and license from the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17090" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T23:53:45.613" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T23:53:45.613" Title="Open source license for limited use" Tags="|license-recommendation|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-05-11T06:14:47.217" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9731" CreationDate="2020-05-10T17:45:19.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no open-source licenses that have such a &quot;no commercial use&quot; restriction, as such restrictions are limitations on the freedoms that open-source wants to give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fairly common business model is to dual-license your project with a copyleft license (like the GPL or AGPL) and a closed-source proprietary license. Someone producing a commercial product is allowed to use the open-source version, but the copyleft provisions of the license would require them to publish the commercial product under the same license terms (including the right for competitors to resell copies of the software for a lower price) and many producers of commercial products are happy to pay for a license without that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T17:45:19.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2020-05-10T18:32:24.120" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be more of a team player. Comments like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's always an &quot;in&quot; group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up with facts and statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would really scare me off having you as a contributor on a project I ran - even if you don't say things like that directly, it's what you're thinking and that attitude will influence your contributions to the project. There are very, very few things in software development which are so clear cut as to mean that they should be adopted on every project, even if you can find some statistics to support your position. Almost by definition, statistics are a measure for the &quot;average&quot; project, and there may be a very good reason why idea X isn't a good idea for any particular project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this isn't the answer you wanted to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T18:32:24.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2020-05-10T20:50:31.430" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most FLOSS projects are a kind of meritocracy: those who contribute(d) a lot, they have a say. The well-known projects are not new projects and especially the maintainers often work on them for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if you want to influence projects, you have to earn your standing with the existing contributors. You can only do that by friendly, on-topic discussions. And by also accepting that &quot;this is not our way&quot; is an acceptable answer - there are often many ways to do one thing. And there are often also many absolutely not obvious reasons to choose one or another approach, some reasoning sometimes also forgotten in history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad 1) If you want to work with people you will have to accept them and respect them. Everyone has his or her own way of approaching things - that includes you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad 2) How is that a problem? Well-defined scope and keeping it that way is a good and sane thing. Not everything is supposed to become the jack-of-all-trades software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad 3) Those issues are often stale for a reason. Solving them might surface other problems. Or require sound and extensive re-factoring in order to not introduce too much technical debt. Or it needs to make some hard decisions no-one found the courage or the authority to make. However it can be a good idea to contact developers / maintainer and agree to go through the bug tracker and possibly start labeling issues and closing the really stale or obsolete ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ad 4) Sorry to say, but that sounds very arrogant of you - even when it's true. The people who run the project, do that often with dedicating loads of time to it over years. They often do that for their own fun and enjoyment in their own free time. Administration is not everybody's favourite past time - and organizing a project such that it is easily accessible can be a big task depending on how things are. They cannot pamper everybody extensively who stumbles over their projects and comes with a whole plethora of great ideas of how things are supposed to work - and who show at the same time that they are not much willing to even listening to them and their reasons why things are being done like they are. Thus: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First learn the rules. Then break the rules. Then forget the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's this order for a reason, and Rome wasn't built in a day. Each step is a lot of work which &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have to do. You have to show that you are going to become a consistent contributor of quality contributions - and not a one-shot-idea guy who quits or throws a tantrum when not everything goes his way or quickly enough; take the bug tracker, submit patches for bugs. Implement wanted features and make yourself useful for the project. Those two things often go far further than submitting your own patch queue for your own new big shiny feature which just scratches your own itch. Being accepted as a core contributor is also a social decision of sorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T20:50:31.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9737" CreationDate="2020-05-11T01:19:07.860" Score="1" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I purchased a single developer license for CanvasJS.&#xA;Here is the CanvasJS License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://canvasjs.com/eula/chart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://canvasjs.com/eula/chart/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the library to create my library which is for a specific factory automation application (It does not compete with CanvasJS in any way). I want to make the license free to download for everyone, hence thinking of using the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this in any way violate any license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T02:11:45.420" Title="Can I make a JS Library license 'MIT' if the JS library includes a paid commercial license" Tags="|licensing|mit|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2020-05-11T01:33:19.373" Score="33" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is the best way to go about being an &lt;strong&gt;active, influential&lt;/strong&gt; FOSS contributor? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two goals I bolded that you seem to be asking about are quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many open source projects start because a person has a problem, and they want to share their solution with other people (the original developer is altruistic) as well as collaborate with others on solving the problem if it's non-trivial. This is often called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scratching one's itch&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take this path, &lt;strong&gt;contribute to a project that you personally use&lt;/strong&gt; - identify what this project can do better that you would benefit from, implement those changes and submit them to the project. Start with a small change and if successful, move on to bigger changes. For example, almost all open source projects can benefit from documentation improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing that you asked about is &lt;strong&gt;influence&lt;/strong&gt;. To answer this part, consider &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; develops open source projects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are developed by individuals. In most such projects, the developers are &lt;em&gt;volunteers&lt;/em&gt; - they are not paid for their work on these projects, and they do this work either out of altruism or self-interest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some are developed by full time company employees. In these cases the code is available under an open-source license just like with the volunteer projects, but people who work on these projects actually are paid to do so by various companies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Influence&lt;/em&gt; is, basically, you telling the project what it should do.  Sometimes you would do part of the work (such as proposing a new feature). Sometimes you wouldn't do much work (such as asking the project to triage issues). In virtually all cases, the &lt;em&gt;current maintainers&lt;/em&gt; have to do &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; work to fulfill your request. It could be a small amount like responding to your inquiry. In many cases it's  a lot of work, for example ensuring that the new feature you are proposing doesn't &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt; the software for its existing users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why would the project do as you want?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Volunteer developers don't get paid to implement someone else's ideas. So, the best strategy is to convince them that the idea is worthwhile. Since their time is often severely limited, this is often Very Hard. Often people may agree with you that your proposal is a Good Thing, but they don't have the &lt;em&gt;resources&lt;/em&gt; to actually do the work.  This is when you hear:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;responses are typically &quot;oh yeah, we'll get to that later.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Companies already have roadmaps that their developers are working on. More often than not you wouldn't see these roadmaps unless you were employed by the company in question. But the effect is roughly the same - the company may agree with you that your idea is a nice one but they are already committed to implementing X other features that other teams in the company are expecting, that are in the sales/marketing pipeline, etc. You see this as:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a lack of transparency across large projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you are likely mis-assessing their response with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up with facts and statistics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely it's not that the companies think your ideas are bad, or wrong, but rather there are factors you aren't aware of (that may have been existing for a long time already) that inform the company's commitments and priorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source is an area where everyone can &lt;strong&gt;contribute&lt;/strong&gt;, but not everyone can be &lt;strong&gt;in charge&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another answer notes, open source is for the most part a meritocracy, meaning &lt;strong&gt;those who do the work get the most say in how the work is done&lt;/strong&gt; (but, especially in corporate-backed projects, following rules is a requirement, and sometimes there are many rules that must be followed, frequently too many for casual contributors to get through; this is why many large projects are in fact developed primarily by employees of the companies backing them). For most projects, the path to influence is through significant contributions, over a significant period of time (months, minimum). The more active and significant a project is, the more effort generally has to be expended to arrive at a position of influence. But if you think about this objectively it shouldn't be surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One venue that you may consider is &lt;strong&gt;taking over maintainership&lt;/strong&gt;. There are projects out there that were built by developers who no longer use them (because they changed jobs, industries, technologies they work with, etc.). Some of these projects say that they are looking for a new maintainer. Sometimes you can become a maintainer of a project that isn't looking for a maintainer but is clearly unmaintained (I personally have done this with &lt;a href=&quot;http://pycurl.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pycurl&lt;/a&gt; years ago). This route can be easier than getting a voice in an active project, where you have to compete with other developers for the privilege, but still requires work because you would often need to convince whoever has the current admin password that giving you the admin access is good for the &lt;em&gt;project&lt;/em&gt; and isn't just good for your &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt;. This, again, is easiest to do through contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most projects I've encountered have stale issues that just sit there without activity from years past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These issues are waiting for someone to tackle them. When the issues are open, this means the current maintainers (people or companies) agree they should be done, but lack resources. You can take on any of these issues that appeal to you, but keep in mind &lt;strong&gt;what you are asking the maintainers to do&lt;/strong&gt; with your contribution. Are you in fact following the rules, like commit messages? If not, a maintainer has to adjust your contribution prior to accepting it. Does your contribution have tests? Documentation? Etc. Think about all of the objections you have but instead of trying to get around them, find a project that agrees with how you would like to work, and try to comply with as many of these proactively as possible. Make it as easy as you can to accept your contribution. Try to make your contribution appear as if it came from the regular maintainers/developers on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly I would like to address this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think that adding another contributor to an already large project will do myself any good (as far as growth is concerned)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a maintainer of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mongodb/mongoid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;good sized project&lt;/a&gt;, I can tell you that in a large project there are many &lt;strong&gt;meaningful&lt;/strong&gt; contributions that can be made, that are localized to a part of the whole project, and that require a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of work. These types of contributions are definitely meaningful enough to, for example, talk about at a job interview, but they aren't anywhere close to changing direction, scope or functionality of the project overall. If you wish to build experience for the purposes of changing jobs, it can be more valuable to implement a change like this in a well-known project, especially in the field in which you seek employment, rather than be the boss of an obscure project, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; this shows you are a team player as pointed out in another answer, can work well with others, understand scope and requirements, and can work in decently large codebases. These are skills that are hard to evaluate in a 30 minute interview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="18078" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T01:50:31.577" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T01:50:31.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9735" CreationDate="2020-05-11T02:11:45.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why software must have a license is because two actions are otherwise not allowed by copyright law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributing software (giving others exact copies)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributing modified versions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://canvasjs.com/eula/chart/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license of CanvasJS&lt;/a&gt; permits distribution under certain conditions. For the developer license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are allowed to distribute CanvasJS Software along with your Applications to the end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As phrased, and I am not a lawyer, the developer license of CanvasJS does not allow distribution of CanvasJS to &lt;em&gt;other developers&lt;/em&gt;. If you wish to include CanvasJS source code in, say, a Github repo with your own library, I suggest contacting Fenopix to clarify whether this is allowed by the license. I suspect they would say no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website license does not permit distribution in the sense of someone obtaining CanvasJS source from a Github repo in which you also have your application either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can release &lt;em&gt;your library&lt;/em&gt; under any license terms you wish, including MIT, &lt;em&gt;provided&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your library is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;derivative work&lt;/a&gt; of CanvasJS. (If it is, you are in the same situation as if you were trying to distribute CanvasJS with modifications.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You only release the source code of your library and not any source code of CanvasJS. (Users would need to obtain their own copy of CanvasJS on their own.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject of what software is or is not a derivative work of other software is a complex question - see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1890148/when-is-your-code-a-derivative-work&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. To be sure, you may inquire with CanvasJS whether they consider your library a derivative work, or inquire with a copyright lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T02:11:45.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9717" CreationDate="2020-05-11T02:46:57.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how can I release it so that the company can not claim that I was redistributing their proprietary info? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on what you mean by &quot;proprietary info&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the company had a document that described a network protocol, that &lt;em&gt;document&lt;/em&gt; could  be considered &quot;proprietary information&quot; by the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any derived documents (such as format conversions or reformattings into tables/lists) would also be considered &quot;proprietary information&quot; by the company, if they consider the original document &quot;proprietary information&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the protocol was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Reverse_engineering_of_protocols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse engineered&lt;/a&gt; without using any company-owned &lt;em&gt;documents&lt;/em&gt;, I would consider the result of such reverse-engineering &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;proprietary information&quot; of the company but 1) I am not a lawyer, 2) the company could argue that the protocol wasn't reverse engineered but a document was consulted. The most prominent example of such reverse-engineering that I know of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_%28software%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samba&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;proprietary info&quot; you mean a particular implementation of the protocol by the company, and not a description of the protocol, then by creating an implementation from scratch without referencing any of the code of the company's implementation should eliminate the issue of the use of company's code. At this point depending on how valuable the protocol is to the company they could still claim that 1) the protocol is proprietary in which case you'd need to back to reverse-engineering it or 2) they hold patents on the protocol in which case you may not be able to use it at all without a legal battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wouldn't want to destroy the overall history of the repository&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your repository contains code that you are not legally allowed to distribute, such as because it is owned by the company and the company hasn't given you permission to distribute the code, you should remove it from history to avoid legal issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same applies to documents or notes that contain what the company may consider &quot;proprietary information&quot;, if you are not allowed to distribute it you shouldn't have it in the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T02:46:57.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9741" CreationDate="2020-05-11T07:53:48.247" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have forked a project with LGPLv3 license and I did there a lot of changes.&#xA;Can I distribute a new version under the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or only the possibility is to write the code from &quot;scratch&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively: To which license is it possible to migrate, from LGPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18084" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T11:33:29.347" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T11:33:29.347" Title="Can I change the license of a forked project from LGPLv3 to MIT?" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|relicensing|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9743" CreationDate="2020-05-11T10:46:58.960" Score="4" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing blog posts and would like to include Emojis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twitter/twemoji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emojis&lt;/a&gt; which are licensed by CC BY 4.0. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pixsy.com/academy/image-user/correctly-attribute-images/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; says (highlighting by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To make sure images are correctly attributed, include the following details and &lt;strong&gt;make sure they are clearly displayed by the relevant image (ideally directly underneath)&lt;/strong&gt;: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving attribution for each Emoji directly underneath the Emoji or even adding a footnote to each Emoji is a bit awkward as it interrupts the reader's flow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd like to have one attribution page on my blog where I state which Emojis are used in my blog posts and give the attribution there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-insist-on-the-exact-placement-of-the-attribution-credit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This creativecommons website&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, providing attribution to the creator when using licensed material in a blog post may be different than doing so in a video remix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say what the exact difference is though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the correct way to give attribution for Emojis in blog posts (for CC BY 4.0)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18090" LastEditorUserId="18090" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T11:38:49.840" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T21:39:55.617" Title="Where to place attribution details for Emojis in blog posts (CC BY 4.0)?" Tags="|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9739" CreationDate="2020-05-11T11:31:47.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will have to do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room implementatio&lt;/a&gt;n of the substitute MIT-licensed library. That means to not look at all on the existing library except the public interface defintion. You might have made this approach already impossible by looking at the existing code. If you look at the existing code, it usually can be considered already a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also this related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/151515/rewrote-gnu-gpl-v2-code-in-another-language-can-i-change-a-license&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/151515/rewrote-gnu-gpl-v2-code-in-another-language-can-i-change-a-license&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T11:31:47.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2020-05-11T11:57:04.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many good things have been written already in previous answers.  One alternative that hasn't been mentioned yet: you can always fork a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are unlikely to get anywhere forking a large project and working on it on your own, but if you find a stale project where the maintainer has gone silent, forking could be a success.  If you actively maintain the fork, fix bugs, add features that users want, and provide a friendly environment, users and developers will come sooner or later, and you will be not only a regular contributor, but you will have influence, because now you have become the primary developer.  If I'm not mistaken, something like that happened years ago with the Python Imaging Library (PIL); the original version was never ported from Python 2 to Python 3, but eventually some people did fork the original project to make Pillow, which did work for Python 3, and now Pillow is the primary (I think only) version in actual use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that with a FOSS license, you don't need to ask the owners for permission to do this: you already have this permission granted to you by the license.  However, you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; need permission to use the same or a similar name, as the original owner may still trademark the name.  For example, if someone would want to fork Python 2.7 to create something like Python 2.8, they could do so; but they could not call it Python 2.8 without permission from the Python trademark holders (which, in this case, they &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;will not give&lt;/a&gt;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomment-266218423&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this attempt where someone tried&lt;/a&gt;; they wanted to call it Python 2.8, weren't allowed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;now it's called tauthon&lt;/a&gt; instead).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="33" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T13:08:51.967" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T13:08:51.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9740" CreationDate="2020-05-11T12:18:50.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki page with some best practices for attributing&lt;/a&gt;. On that page they say among other things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Don't make it too complicated&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license tells you to be reasonable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may satisfy the conditions in (1) and (2) above in any &lt;strong&gt;reasonable manner&lt;/strong&gt; based on the medium, means and context in which the Licensed Material is used. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy some or all of the conditions by retaining a copyright notice, or by providing a URI or hyperlink associated with the Licensed Material, if the copyright notice or webpage includes some or all of the required information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an About page that has that info. (More on different mediums below.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expecting that you place attribution and licensing information next to each emoji you use would not be reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your blog has a footer with copyright information, I would make a short mention there that the emojis are from another source and then link to a licensing page with the full attribution information. And make that page easy to find, even if you don't have such a footer or people don't think about looking there for a link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most attribution guidelines don't take such small items as emojis into account and give their advise based on images that are at least as high as half a dozen lines of text. Then it is quite reasonable to have the attribution in the caption or otherwise on the same page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T12:18:50.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9753" CreationDate="2020-05-11T17:39:22.550" Score="1" ViewCount="2720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a specific question with respect to using a project which is licensed under MIT/Apache 2.0 in a SAAS product (proprietary). The open source project have multiple dependencies, if any of the dependency is restrictive (AGPL, GPL) what happens to my SaaS product license or do I have to open source my SaaS product code is the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Product: Integrate an open source form builder to integrate with my SaaS product offering for my customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For eg., webiny-js (form &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/webiny/webiny-js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;builder library&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;webiny-js library has 10 &lt;a href=&quot;https://app.fossa.io/projects/git%2Bgithub.com%2FWebiny%2Fwebiny-js/refs/branch/development/6ff988d82673e809d292541dc397f059cc8344d4/browse/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obligations&lt;/a&gt; - (e.g., Disclose source for projects)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage Scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My SaaS product directly calls the 'form builder service' in its code workflow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Form builder service is not directly integrated to my SaaS app, but it gets used seperately and it redirects to my SaaS app. (and no api calls from my SaaS app)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any possibility where I have to open source my proprietary application code in any case, when I use open source (MIT/Apache) software which in-term uses dependency libraries (which are restrictive) as in the above example?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does the above usage scenarios have a difference, with respect to (1) based on the type of restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to hear your experience and knowledge on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18099" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T12:57:32.660" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T13:39:27.963" Title="Using MIT/Apache License 2.0 project in a SaaS product, Limitations from its dependencies" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9740" CreationDate="2020-05-11T21:39:55.617" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The README of the GitHub project you linked &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twitter/twemoji#attribution-requirements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has an &amp;quot;Attribution requirements&amp;quot; section&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an open source project, attribution is critical from a legal, practical and motivational perspective in our opinion. The graphics are licensed under the CC-BY 4.0 which has a pretty good guide on &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best practices for attribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we consider the guide a bit onerous and as a project, will accept a mention in a project README or an 'About' section or footer on a website. In mobile applications, a common place would be in the Settings/About section (for example, see the mobile Twitter application Settings-&amp;gt;About-&amp;gt;Legal section). We would consider a mention in the HTML/JS source sufficient also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to the guidance in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9743&quot;&gt;Bart van Ingen Schenau's answer&lt;/a&gt; and suggests an acknowledgement in the footer of your website is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6940" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T21:39:55.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9748" CreationDate="2020-05-11T23:35:28.357" Score="7" ViewCount="2643" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common desire in the Free and Open-Source Software world is to release some code in a way that approximates two ideals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software is in the public domain and its techniques are common knowledge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The software is unusable for corporate purposes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the shape of the software cannot itself ensure the second property, perhaps because the software is attractive for a variety of commercial applications, then the license is often used instead in order to prevent software misuse. (Indeed, I have found dozens of queries here along these lines.) However, there are two well-known obstacles to a licensing solution; there's the first property I've listed, and there's also the fact that corporations may decide to ignore the terms of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that anything can be effectively done about this second obstacle; corporate coders will not stop copying code from Stack Exchange anytime soon. However, about the first obstacle, I have heard many tales; &lt;strong&gt;which FSF- or OSI-approved licenses technically allow corporate usage but are toxic and forbidden in practice?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18097" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T17:33:24.507" Title="Which FSF- or OSI-approved licenses limit corporate usage in spirit, but not in letter?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2020-05-11T23:35:28.357" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer my own question, here is a small sampling of possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there are licenses that are approved by both standards bodies, the FSF and the OSI, but which are often not acceptable in corporate codebases. A gold star goes to Affero GPLv3 (or later), which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;banned at Google&lt;/a&gt; and almost certainly banned at any place which bans GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which, GPLv3 is a fine license for this purpose as well; it caused Apple to &lt;a href=&quot;https://libcxx.llvm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;write their own C++ standard library&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2010-09/msg00132.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stop contributing to GCC&lt;/a&gt;. Similarly, GPLv2 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not allowed on Apple's phone app store&lt;/a&gt;. The GPL is also why Google wrote their Bionic C standard library; &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160408053917/http://androidteam.googlecode.com/files/Anatomy-Physiology-of-an-Android.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;we want to keep GPL out of user-space&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's go beyond the FSF's offerings. Google publishes a handy &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#banned&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of banned licenses&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_Attribution_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Public Attribution License&lt;/a&gt;, CPAL, is on this list. So are versions 1.1 and 1.2 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union Public License&lt;/a&gt;, EUPL. These licenses behave like AGPLv3 in various ways, and this &amp;quot;Affero&amp;quot; behavior is what landed them on Google's ban list. Nonetheless, CPAL and EUPL still designate open-source software, and are FSF- and OSI-approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, what if we only care about one standards body, but not the other? The FSF considers some public-domain attributions, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Zero_/_public_domain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Zero&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Do What the Fuck You Want To Public License&lt;/a&gt;, WTFPL, as well as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;, to be reasonable licenses for Free Software, but folks may not see software licensed with them as Open Source, since they are not OSI-approved. Google employees are not, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/patching/#forbidden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by policy&lt;/a&gt;, allowed to contribute to projects using these public-domain-like licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18097" LastEditorUserId="18097" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T17:33:24.507" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T17:33:24.507" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-12T12:47:04.323" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've already gone through the following links and many more:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7589/using-a-tool-under-gpl-v2-in-a-commercial-application&quot;&gt;Using a tool under GPL v2 in a commercial application&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-use-gpl-libraries-in-a-closed-source-project-if-only-the-output-is-distrib&quot;&gt;Can I use GPL libraries in a closed source project if only the output is distributed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8064/gplv2-licensing-for-commercial-use&quot;&gt;GPLv2 - licensing for commercial use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesFreeSoftwareMeanUsingTheGPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still need some clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm developing a commercial software that would require virtual com ports to work. I know there are many great paid tools like &lt;code&gt;Elitma&lt;/code&gt;, but I stumbled upon &lt;code&gt;com0com&lt;/code&gt; which is free. But it's licensed under &lt;code&gt;GPL v2&lt;/code&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/paulakg4/com0com/blob/master/license.txt]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/paulakg4/com0com/blob/master/license.txt]&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not modifying the &lt;code&gt;com0com&lt;/code&gt; tool but using it as it is. (just using the CLI API, not even any DLL api, to create COM ports). I just need the virtual ports and have nothing else to do with the tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So here are my questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I bundle &lt;code&gt;com0com&lt;/code&gt; installer along with my application and freely distribute it without having to share my source code ?? I can share the &lt;code&gt;com0com&lt;/code&gt; source if required, but will I have to share &lt;code&gt;MY&lt;/code&gt; application source code as well ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, is there any other way? Like not bundling the 3rd party installer with my application, but urging the user to download it from a website (maybe my own website) ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I'm developing an independent software that &lt;code&gt;incidentally&lt;/code&gt; uses the 3rd party tool for some functionality, and not modifying the tool itself, will my work still fall under derivative work ?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18116" LastEditorUserId="18116" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T13:04:33.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T13:04:33.777" Title="Can I use a GPL v2 software in commercial software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-05-13T06:40:53.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2020-05-12T12:53:07.653" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the question is valid, the broadest ideal of open-source is to make &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; software open-sourced, including that which is used for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly, some strong-copyleft OSS licenses have a &quot;viral&quot; property, requiring prohibiting anything not under the same license from linking to that component, others are permissive or non-viral. The GPL and AGPL represent extreme virality, the LGPL is mostly non-viral, the MIT is strongly permissive, and public domain is absolutely permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, the most common use of viral licenses is to &lt;strong&gt;dual-license&lt;/strong&gt; the product. That is, companies will release the product under GPL for free, and also offer a paid commercial license. In some cases, the commercial version even requires per-user licensing. In effect, the GPL version serves as a free trial, protected from production use by its license, rather than some DRM scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently architect software that is commercial in function, but, due to its critical nature, we maintain a strict open-source-only policy for all components not created in-house. Not a byte can go in unless we and others can inspect the line it's been compiled from. Having started my coding in the OSS community, I do my best to have this go both ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the nature of our primary software renders the legal cost of assessing the risks in releasing its code prohibitive. We contribute to libraries and packages that we use, but can't open-source the complete product. In a perfect world we could and would - but there are products that are by their nature only useful to a closed list, like owners of specific hardware (such as aircraft), or entities with a special legal status. In such cases, &quot;herd security&quot; cannot be relied upon to weed out the vulnerabilities, because no external party is interested in reviewing or improving such narrowly-specific code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that industries like ours can use MIT, Apache or LGPL components, but not GPL or AGPL. In all of the cases where we were interested in viral-licensed components, and where the creators were reachable to discuss licensing, they offered a paid license. Some of the times it was worth it, other times we updated non-viral OSS to our standards instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, licenses that restrict corporate usage most often do so in order to sell it, not to prevent it. For that purpose, prohibition in spirit is meaningless if it's not done in letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of promoting open-source software is &lt;em&gt;not always best served&lt;/em&gt; by choosing the most extreme copyleft license. The application needs to be considered. Some software exists in millions of copies, other can never possibly have more than one running instance. The most extreme licenses restrict their use cases to only one facet of the software world, while permissive or compromise licenses trade some risk of proprietization for enhanced applicability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18122" LastEditorUserId="18122" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T18:16:12.183" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T18:16:12.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9744" CreationDate="2020-05-12T13:39:27.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Is there any possibility where I have to open source my proprietary application code in any case, when I use open source (MIT/Apache) software which in-term uses dependency libraries (which are restrictive) as in the above example?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If your product contains code under a strong copyleft license (like the GPL or AGPL), either directly or via a (indirect) dependency, then any distribution of the codebase must be done under the terms of that copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distribution includes the obvious selling of your SaaS product to others, but front-end code that gets sent to the user's browser for execution there also falls under distribution and for the AGPL also if users can remotely interact with the server-side code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Does the above usage scenarios have a difference, with respect to (1) based on the type of restrictive license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. It is not so much the usage scenario, but rather if your SaaS application and the &quot;form builder service&quot; are one integrated application or two independent applications that communicate &quot;at arms length&quot; with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some criteria that are commonly used in that determination are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does the code in one process or in multiple processes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how tightly are the pieces of code connected in terms of the data they exchange&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what kind of communication mechanism do they use? Is that customary for independently developed applications that communicate with each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &quot;form builder service&quot; effectively runs in a separate browser tab, it can be argued that it is independent from your SaaS front-end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I noticed from the Fossa.io link you provided is that some of the licenses of the dependencies are mutually incompatible. The license list contains, for example, GPLv2-only, GPLv3-only and CC BY-SA-NC 3.0 in the first level of dependencies. Each of those license has the requirement that the entire project gets distributed under the terms of exactly that license, which is not possible for all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this analysis from Fossa is correct, then you cannot use webiny-js, because that project can't fulfill all the requirements that the various licenses place on them at the same time. This is something to look deeper into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T13:39:27.963" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2020-05-12T17:05:12.890" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frame challenge: neither the FSF nor OSI have point 2 as a goal. To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to use software for whatever you like, including corporate uses, is important to the FSF, and the OSI has historically been even more corporate friendly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL and AGPL sometimes seen as being corporate-unfriendly, since it is difficult for organisations to re-use GPL or AGPL components in software they wish to exercise monopoly rights on. But it's worth noting that some companies choose to licence their products under these licences for precisely this reason (MySQL being one example of this), since it allows them to limit competitors ability to exercise monopoly rights on products containing their components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One seemingly corporate friendly &quot;licence&quot;, that has consequences for businesses, is public domain (which isn't technically a licence, and isn't OSI approved, although the FSF do regard it as free software). SQLite is dedicated to the public domain, but it's also possible to buy a licence from one of the companies that does much of the development work on it. The reason companies feel compelled to do this is that whilst copyright law has been largely standardised internationally, public domain has not, so companies that need to operate internationally prefer to buy a licence, which saves them having to consider the legal implications of releasing a product containing SQLite in all the countries they operate in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1018" LastEditorUserId="1018" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T17:03:48.003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T17:03:48.003" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9717" CreationDate="2020-05-12T19:20:46.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How to completely get rid of proprietary code in the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, but you could consider providing some &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plugin&lt;/a&gt; machinery in your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some legal systems, a plugin machinery might be a technical solution to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;who owns the copyright of your code&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and how many millions of US$ or € are available to the copyright owner)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, &lt;strong&gt;contact a lawyer, but don't worry that much&lt;/strong&gt;. Most of open source code is not relevant to most people. There have been lawsuits (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google vs Oracle&lt;/a&gt;) showing the opposite, but most open source libraries are not that important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you made &lt;em&gt;alone&lt;/em&gt; a small library open source, and if you don't have millions of US$ in your bank account, you should not  worry that much. It is likely that your library is small (just a few dozen of thousands of source lines) and used by few people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a boss or a client who asked you to code that library, raise that issue the next time you speak with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your case go to court, the judges are human and all of them now that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(E)#errare_humanum_est&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;errare humanum est&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You are allowed to make mistakes like you are allowed to make bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC, in Europe, you legally are allowed to reverse engineer network protocols. Things are different in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could delete your &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt; repository entirely and just publish the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tarball&lt;/a&gt; of your code on the website of your choice. FWIW, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fox-toolkit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fox Toolkit&lt;/a&gt; is LGPLv3+ but without any &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; repository. In practice, it is unlikely that you'll get sued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the fact that anyone can find that structure on the Internet (there're at least two libraries and dozen of articles which describe that structure in great details) does not mean that I can use it in my open-source code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK (and that was told to me by French lawyers) &lt;strong&gt;that above claim is wrong.&lt;/strong&gt; Of course you need to go to court to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;contact your lawyer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have an idea of how many hundred thousands downloads your library has gotten? Show also to your lawyer the output of &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/sloccount/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sloccount&lt;/a&gt; on your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:44:08.497" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:44:08.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9747" CreationDate="2020-05-12T22:50:26.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that in the world of contracts and the law, the &quot;spirit&quot; is essentially irrelevant.  The &quot;letter&quot; of the contract is everything.  When the letter and the spirit of a contract/license differ, that's where courts come into the picture.  Courts make decisions and interpretations based on the letter of the law since the parties to the contract aren't mind-readers and can't reasonably know anything that's not explicitly included in the text or in established law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license you want will largely depend on what exactly you mean by &quot;unusable for corporate purposes&quot;.  There are a couple of ways to interpret that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want a corporation to use my software for any purpose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want anyone selling verbatim copies of my software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want people charging money for software that incorporates my code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want anyone to use my code in projects that are not themselves open source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want anyone to modify my software without publishing their changes to it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strict reading of the question sounds like you're talking about the first option, but that's not really something that you can limit with a license.  A corporation is simply a legal construct that allows a group of people to act as a collective body.  This obviously includes businesses, but can also include things like universities, museums, charity organizations, and even the FSF itself.  It also doesn't cover a self-employed consultant acting as an individual person, even when they're doing the sorts of things normally done by a &quot;corporation&quot;.  The legal definition of a corporation varies from locale to locale, so this would be a very impractical limitation for a license and I'm not sure it would accomplish much.  For those reasons, I'm going to assume this isn't what you meant.  This sort of restriction is also a probable violation of the FSF's &quot;Freedom 0&quot;, which would make it non-free (James_pic gives more detail in his answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the second and third interpretations: I don't think that you can incorporate these restrictions and still have &quot;free software&quot;.  These specific reasons are given as why the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#Aladdin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not consider&lt;/a&gt; the Aladdin Free Public License (among others) to be free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the fourth interpretation, you're looking for a strong copyleft license like the GPL.  Weak copyleft (like the LGPL) is not sufficient to guarantee this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the fifth interpretation, you can achieve this through a number of different licenses (including the GPL).  Be aware, though, that most of the time, the modified source code only has to be provided to those who receive a copy of the program.  Modifications don't have to be submitted back to the original author (and in many cases, it might not even be possible to do so).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of these cases, though, you're not prohibiting &quot;corporate usage&quot; across the board.  A strict, viral copyleft like the GPL will probably chase off the largest number of potential users, but corporations can still use the code if they're willing to abide by the restrictions.  For example, Red Hat writes a lot of GPL code as part of their enterprise Linux distributions, and hardware vendors often publish fully GPLed Linux drivers for their devices.  Many of the GPL's &quot;viral&quot; aspects only take effect when the software is distributed, so a corporation can modify it for internal use and keep those modifications secret (example: modifying &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; to support a custom FPGA core used in the company's products).  No matter how &quot;distasteful&quot; you try to make the license conditions, there will always be situations where a corporation finds your license acceptable.  The only way to ensure that no corporation ever uses your code is to use a restrictive, closed license, but at that point you're not free at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastEditorUserId="9682" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T22:58:39.223" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T22:58:39.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-12T23:16:03.283" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm running a data journalism operation, and as part of our business, we generate a lot of datasets. We're fine with these datasets being used by just about everyone, as long as they give us credit. So we're licensing them under CC-BY 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we also want to publish the source code that generated these datasets, so that people can spot bugs and keep us accountable. And since we can't copyright the output of a program, I wonder if this would essentially nullify the CC-BY protection of our data, since people could just download our R scripts, generate the data for themselves, and call it their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see two solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I do in fact hold copyright over the data anyway, even if it can be independently generated by others through open-source code. I wonder what international law might have to say about this (I'm outside the United States).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, I could publish the source code under a proprietary license that restricts users' right to use the software or its output. I'm thinking something along the lines of applying GPL-like terms to non-commercial use; and stripping commercial users (i.e. news organizations who may want to copy our work without attribution) of the right to run the software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that sound right? Is there another option I'm not seeing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18135" LastEditorUserId="18135" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T23:22:20.260" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T10:03:31.563" Title="How to enforce CC-BY in data generated by a program, if I open-source that program as well?" Tags="|proprietary-code|cc-by|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2020-05-13T02:47:02.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a concept called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database right&lt;/a&gt;. I am not sure whether this would apply in your case though - the idea behind database rights is to protect investment in creating the database, but if a user of your program creates the database by running it, you haven't invested anything into creating the database itself (for example, the user running the program bears the electricity costs to operate the computer that runs the program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the wikipedia page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, any lawful user of the database has a right under regulation 19(1) &quot;to extract or re-use insubstantial parts of the data for any purpose&quot;, and that right cannot be restricted by the database owner (regulation 19(2)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/11359/can-you-copyright-data&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; says data is not generally copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine there are ways for other organizations to use this dataset without explicitly crediting you if they really want to. Depending on how malicious you think your competitors are (or said differently, if attribution is part of your/their culture and how much you think they would honor the attribution request) simply requesting attribution in all references to the code and data &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be sufficient to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if a competing news organization uses a small piece of data that is &quot;yours&quot;, they may not consider that worthy of mentioning you as their competitor even if technically you could legally require such a thing. (There is a parallel to this in software licensing as well, where a tiny fragment of code is often considered not copyrightable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T02:47:02.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8861" CreationDate="2020-05-13T03:12:36.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;RST supports &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4783814/how-to-comment-a-string-in-restructured-text&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; in various forms, which could be used to specify licenses inline. This would be similar to adding a license block to an individual source code file in a program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about something like a directory/subdirectory or a whole source code repository (e.g. a Github repo) with documentation, I personally would look for a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or similar in that directory/repository. Failing that I would open the starting page of the documentation and try to figure out where the license is mentioned. Honestly I haven't even considered up to now to try to look for a license block in the documentation source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Github for example supports extracting the license name out of a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file,  I don't know if it is also able to do that with source code comments especially in a markdown language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T03:12:36.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2020-05-13T08:19:46.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And since we can't copyright the output of a program, I wonder if this would essentially nullify the CC-BY protection of our data, since people could just download our R scripts, generate the data for themselves, and call it their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not sure of the claim &quot;&lt;em&gt;we can't copyright the output of a program&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Have you asked your lawyer about that claim?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But I do know a lot of programs whose output can and is copyrighted.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compiler&lt;/a&gt; produces an executable, and in some legal systems, that file is or can be protected by copyright laws. For example, both &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://clang.llvm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clang&lt;/a&gt; or the Linux &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; are open source (millions of lines of code), and they are mostly written by developers paid for that work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A transpiler such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.call-cc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicken Scheme&lt;/a&gt; produces C files, and you need these C files to build it since Chicken Scheme is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bootstrapped compiler&lt;/a&gt; from Scheme to C. In the &lt;code&gt;chicken-5.2.0&lt;/code&gt; tarball, the &lt;code&gt;chicken-5.2.0/chicken.process.signal.import.c&lt;/code&gt;  file is obviously generated, since its start with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; /* Generated from chicken.process.signal.import.scm by the CHICKEN compiler&#xA;    http://www.call-cc.org&#xA;    Version 5.2.0 (rev 317468e4)&#xA;    linux-unix-gnu-x86-64 [ 64bit dload ptables ]&#xA;    command line: chicken.process.signal.import.scm -optimize-level 2 -include-path . -include-path ./ -inline -ignore-repository -feature chicken-bootstrap -no-warnings -specialize -consult-types-file ./types.db -feature chicken-compile-shared -dynamic -no-trace -output-file chicken.process.signal.import.c&#xA;    uses: library eval expand&#xA; */&#xA; #include &quot;chicken.h&quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bismon&lt;/a&gt; project produces C code and requires the previously produced C code to be built. The generated C files contain a copyright notice. My past &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/gcc-melt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt; project did generate C++ code (from some Lisp dialect) and kept copyright notices in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; project is generating C++ files with a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bison&lt;/a&gt; parser generator is generating C files with a copyright notice. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU emacs&lt;/a&gt; editor is writing files and can be (and usually is) used to edit its own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocaml.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ocaml&lt;/a&gt; compiler is distributed with binary bytecode files generated by ocaml. You won't be able to build Ocaml from sources without these generated files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Linux relational databases (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sqlite.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sqlite&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://postgresql.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PostgreSQL&lt;/a&gt;) can dump their content as &lt;code&gt;*.sql&lt;/code&gt; textual files. With an easy &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/sed.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sed(1)&lt;/a&gt; script you can prepend a copyright notice to these files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text formatters like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lout&lt;/a&gt; (both are open source programs) are routinely used to produce PDF files with a copyright on them, and the copyright on the produced output is unrelated to the copyright on these LaTeX or Lout software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/caia-pitrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CAIA system&lt;/a&gt; by the late J.Pitrat generates &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; its C code (about 500KLOC in 3834 C source files and 5976 small binary data files, generated in an hour of computer time), and is copyrighted and GPLv3+ licensed. &lt;strong&gt;Typical generated C code&lt;/strong&gt; (I just reformatted it) &lt;strong&gt;looks like:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  #include &quot;dx.h&quot;&#xA;  void&#xA;  SPC0 (void)&#xA;  /* Copyright (C) 2000-2012 Jacques Pitrat&#xA;&#xA;  This generated file SPC0.c is part of CAIA.  &#xA;&#xA;  CAIA is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under&#xA;  the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free&#xA;  Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your&#xA;  option) any later version.  CAIA is distributed in the hope that it&#xA;  will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied&#xA;  warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See&#xA;  the GNU General Public License for more details.  You should have&#xA;  received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with CAIA.  If&#xA;  not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;. */&#xA;  {&#xA;    int V1 = 0;&#xA;    int I, X;&#xA;    int J;&#xA;&#xA;    I = pile[v[22]];&#xA;    X = pile[v[22] + 1];&#xA;    v[22] += 3;&#xA;    V1 = I + 1;&#xA;    c[v[1]][I] = X;&#xA;    J = V1;&#xA;    v[22] -= 3;&#xA;    pile[v[22] + 2] = J;&#xA;    return;&#xA;  }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can write your own &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quine&lt;/a&gt; program (by definition they are outputting their own source code when being run) which generates a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could study the copyright notices related to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linuxfromscratch.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LinuxFromScratch&lt;/a&gt; project. Many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux distributions&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://debian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubuntu.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt;) are self-building: with a big enough computer and weeks of your time, you can produce their &lt;code&gt;*.iso&lt;/code&gt; image, redistributable on various media (e.g. as LiveCD....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, copyright laws are different in France (where I live and work) and in the USA. Some French lawyers at work (one of them being an author of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cecill.info/index.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt; license) did told me that generated output at work can be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your application might be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web service&lt;/a&gt; (under GPLv3), with your business model being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IaaS&lt;/a&gt;. You would &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; the access to the data, and publish its &quot;specification&quot; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open format&lt;/a&gt;. Read a lot more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open data&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simple Economics of Open Source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Read also more about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code obfuscation&lt;/a&gt; techniques.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there another option I'm not seeing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, using a code obfuscator. I don't say it is a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might apply them to your program (e.g. redistribute some &quot;obfuscated&quot; variant of your source code). If your code is written in &lt;em&gt;standard&lt;/em&gt; C11 and compiled by a recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; - e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC 10&lt;/a&gt;, writing your own &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC plugin&lt;/a&gt; which &lt;em&gt;obfuscate&lt;/em&gt; your code is a matter of a few months of work. So (assuming you are legally allowed to do that) &lt;strong&gt;you could obfuscate all your source code&lt;/strong&gt; and publish only its obfuscated variant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Be however aware that it is likely that your program won't be used much, even if you open source it.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most open source programs, even non-obfuscated, are rarely used. Most large open source programs (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux&lt;/a&gt; kernel - I am using Linux since 1993, and probably have used less than half of its source code lines - think of the countless drivers for hardware I never seen) have lots of code which is rarely used....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philosophically and ethically, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, obfuscated source code is not really source code anymore, but if you own it you could redistribute only an obfuscated variant. Legally obfuscated source code can obtain copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I spent 20 years of my career in writing professionally open source programs -funded, perhaps indirectly, by the European Union or the French Republic - that have in practice never been used, with the exception of my past contributions to GCC. Most open source code produced by computer science academics is almost never used in real life: most programming languages implementations have very few users outside of academia: did you ever use a program coded with &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/pmwiki.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agda&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/gcc-melt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt;? How many persons have you met using that programming language? But its implementation is open-source and developed by paid more or less academics)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;How to enforce CC-BY in data generated by a program&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By going to court&lt;/strong&gt; when that data is mis-used. You'll have to &lt;strong&gt;pay a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt; (or be one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T10:03:31.563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T10:03:31.563" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9757" CreationDate="2020-05-13T08:42:10.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a tricky question and a good question - and I'm not sure there is one solution which will work under all circumstances. I can share a (probably legally-not-too-sound) procedure for similar cases which I see in my environment being employed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In scientific context consider someone wrote a programme which allows to simulate  to allow to gain insight in processes depending on assumptions accessible as input parameters or easily and slightly modified code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is IMHO similar to your case where you also have an analysis programme and you use it to work on data - but the outcome is different depending on what you search for / filter for / how you aggregate the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these cases I often find a note in the source code (which often is GPL, MIT - licensed or similar) which gives a suggestion on how to reference the original authors' contribution to the work for all work which relies on this programme being used for independent analysis. Usually this is given in form of a reference paper / article being cited which describes the method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This method only works when people work with good intent and follow good scientific behaviour - it does not prevent legally malitious intent and makes it hard to legally enforce the attribution in cases you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional note: Mind that an re-implementation of your analysis programme would be considered a derivative of your programme, so that it needs proper attribution. However for open-source licenses that does not solve your problem with reference when data are being generated. With an OSI license you can only ask for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T08:42:10.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9703" CreationDate="2020-05-13T10:25:00.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How do I enforce not just the letter but also the spirit of open source for an open culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You practically cannot&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write your own license, you need a lawyer. And even if your new license is seriously written there are lots of places where using your software won't be allowed. (e.g. large corporations are limiting the set of usable licenses on corporate computers, to a small subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source licenses&lt;/a&gt;, and individuals usually don't bother compiling source code... Think of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; compiler: do you compile it from its source code in 2020?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And don't be naive: as soon as you publish some code on the web, someone could download it and might mis-use it (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.php.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHP&lt;/a&gt; interpreter or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocaml.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ocaml&lt;/a&gt; compiler is certainly used for activities you disagree with; it is open source). That guy can be a gangster, a criminal, a military in some dictature regime, an engineer in a GAFAM corporation that you dislike...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;personal example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FWIW, I worked in the past (2004) on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/poesia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;POESIA&lt;/a&gt; internet content filtering project (GPLv3). The good motivation (and reason for funding that interesting project by the European Union) was of course protection of European school-aged kids (e.g. against porn sites).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ten years later, I have been contacted by some Iranian guy, starting his email with &quot;In the name of the Iranian republic&quot; about that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just ignored that email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the notion of open culture or freedom varies a lot. A widely known example is public apology of Nazism: legal in the USA, illegal in France or Germany. My opinion is that the US culture is no more open than the French or German one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Be aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code obfuscation&lt;/a&gt; techniques. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9760/910&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB. I am of course ignoring illegal means, such as machine guns or bribery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T10:42:53.047" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T10:42:53.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T10:36:45.727" Score="17" ViewCount="2432" Body="&lt;p&gt;At my employer we use open source software in our products. Eventually it came to the point that someone in the company fixed an issue in an oss library (a performance thing, not a big deal but important for the way we use the library). According to the license it wasn't  necessary to contribute this modification, however we like to contribute it: we benefit from the use of this library and we want to give something back and - not that altruistic but also important - we don't want to apply the same patch again and again when new upstream versions of the library arrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Management now has the idea to contribute via a more or less anonymous - or at least: not personal - company account, something like &quot;software-contributions@example-company.com&quot;, of course with the real company name but without the name of the individual developer. Management wants to avoid insights into company internals by this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When discussing this topic with our legal department we came to the conclusion that this would actually be a nessecary approach: the employee gives by her or his contract the rights on her or his work to the employer - the written code is owned by the employer. If now the employee personally signs a contribution agreement or contributes under her or his own name, she or he would give away rights on something which are owned by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when browsing through some repos on Github I only see real names at commits. Is the approach we are thinking about that uncommon or would it even not be accepted by oss projects? Or do other companies use some kind of &quot;proxy persons&quot; hiding the internal structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13360" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T11:57:55.120" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T18:27:23.573" Title="Contributing as a company" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-13T11:57:35.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's true that a CLA by an individual employee would be of no use, I'd question the assertion that individual employees can't contribute under their own names - as you have yourself found, there are many examples of this happening out there right now. However, that's perhaps slightly irrelevant if your employer, for reasons of their own, doesn't want individual names on contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is the approach we are thinking about that uncommon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, in that the vast majority of companies contributing to open source projects seem happy for their employees to contribute under their own names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;would it even not be accepted by oss projects&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a question you'd have to ask the project in question. I can't see a fundamental reason why such contributions would be rejected - however it's attributed, the legal entity contributing to the project is the company, not the employee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do other companies use some kind of &quot;proxy persons&quot; hiding the internal structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's obviously a very difficult question to answer as anybody doing it isn't likely to shout about it, but I would at the very least regard it as a disreputable practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T11:57:35.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9800" CreationDate="2020-05-13T12:09:38.627" Score="2" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about writing a cloud app that uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petersalomonsen/wasm-git&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wasm-git&lt;/a&gt;. wasm-git is licensed under GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since wasm-git runs in the browser, users of my cloud app would get a copy of wasm-git when they open my home page in the browser, so my assumption is that this is considered a &quot;distribution&quot;, and therefore my cloud app needs to be licensed under GPL v2 as well. Correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18148" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T12:12:14.067" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T15:34:12.313" Title="GPL v2: what does &quot;distribution&quot; mean in terms of cloud apps?" Tags="|gpl-2|distribution|terminology|cloud|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2020-05-13T12:51:09.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h2&gt;GPL v2: what does “distribution” mean in terms of cloud apps?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You need a lawyer.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are asking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Does my cloud app needs to be licensed under GPL v2 ?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends upon several factors: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your legal system (USA is not the same as the European Union or the Chinese one). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your ethical values (you might have motivations, including economical ones, to contribute to an open source project; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software quality&lt;/a&gt; is a good one; but do &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read about &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your business model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the subtle difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 and AGPL. Ask your lawyer to explain it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notice that I am not a lawyer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that free software is free as in speech. There are lots of corporations making profit with open source software and paying developers full time on it. Read of course the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Simple Economics of Open Source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that most contributors to the Linux &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; (a GPLv2 program) are &lt;em&gt;paid&lt;/em&gt; for their work. You probably know that a lot of cloud computers are running some variant of that Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation: first &lt;strong&gt;contact the authors&lt;/strong&gt; (contributors) &lt;strong&gt;of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/petersalomonsen/wasm-git&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wasm-git&lt;/a&gt; and ask them&lt;/strong&gt; for advice. It could be cheaper to ask than  to pay a lawyer. (there might ask you money, but less than your lawyer would).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T13:42:11.797" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T13:42:11.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-13T13:47:15.937" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Management now has the idea to contribute via a more or less anonymous - or at least: not personal - company account, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;strong&gt;this could be illegal&lt;/strong&gt;, at least in France (where I live and work), unless the physical person agree on not being mentioned. Since here the moral rights of a software developer as an author (even if he/she is paid to do that at work) is not transferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also believe that mentioning open source developer's name is good for morale and is a matter of respecting their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do professionally contribute to open source project, and I certainly would refuse to do that if my name did not appear in the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest your company to pay for a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: authorship is not the same as copyright ownership, and open source software can routinely be dual-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: My past contributions to &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; -with my name- appear both in the source code and on my &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/cv-Basile-Starynkevitch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;resume&lt;/a&gt;. AFAIK, my employer (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www-list.cea.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CEA LIST&lt;/a&gt;) is not much &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; mentioned in the source code. It is mentioned in the copyright agreement (signed between my employer and the FSF), and that document is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; public. My employer owns the copyright of most of my other free software contributions and could re-license them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T10:30:03.937" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T10:30:03.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-13T15:44:59.547" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Managing copyright and licensing of the company's contributions in a legally rigorous way, including corporate agreement to the project's CLA, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of a single company account to interact with the project, used by multiple employees.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright ownership of the code is completely separate from the display name of the account used to participate in online discussions and enter commits into a version control system. Regardless of how you choose to resolve issue #2, it has no bearing on issue #1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One helpful practice is to ensure your copyright notices read &quot;Copyright {year} The Foo Corporation&quot; instead of an individual name like &quot;Copyright {year} Wolfgang Smith&quot;. Since the copyright is owned by the company, ensure you represent that fact in any copyright notices you add. Copyright notices don't have much of a modern function anymore, but this would at least easily ensure everyone understands the ownership of the copyright (including the project maintainers, the contributors themselves, and third parties who download the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way projects deal with corporate contributions in a legally rigorous way is to have a company officer agree to a corporate contributor licensing agreement (CCLA) that has an attached list of employees. A CCLA works pretty much the same as an individual CLA: a person agrees to let the project use their contributions under certain terms, but the person here is a corporate &quot;person&quot; rather than a natural person. A CCLA requires the extra step of maintaining a current list of employee contributors, so the project knows which individual contributors are already covered by their company's CCLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the social and policy question of a single GitHub account for your company, I've never seen this done, and I'd certainly find it strange and at least a little suspicious. Whether it will be a problem in practice will vary from project to project. It also presents problems of scaling, though your company may never encounter such an issue. (Imagine, for example, if every employee at Google or Microsoft had to orchestrate their corporate FLOSS contributions through a single GitHub account!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T22:48:08.250" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T22:48:08.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9730" CreationDate="2020-05-13T16:25:59.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a maintainer in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/bluebird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;various&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/to-fast-properties&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projects&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/mobx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sinonjs/fake-timers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/lolex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nodejs/node&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;~50&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/tmp-promise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;million&lt;/a&gt; weekly downloads but I am one person and can only share what worked for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Persistence.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number one mistake I see people get is not set aside enough time to make a meaningful contribution, assume they're going to be awesome and then assume they failed when they don't get it right the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably failed to contribute to projects I'm a team member of 30 times before I got to contribute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go over this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lckris5U5iw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this talk&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Set a goal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a very general suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick a project you already use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick an amount of time you have (for example 16 * 3 hours)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Send an email to one of the project collaborators telling them and asking them &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to contribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this simple strategy succeed time and time again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your Challenges&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Making contributions to a variety of smaller projects results in knowledge ramp-up with how the maintainers want their commits and contributions done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't contribute when it's hard or frustrating. Seriously, plenty of projects will work with your commits. In Node.js for example we have a very strict guideline about how commit messages look but we will format the commit ourselves for first-time contributors if they're having trouble with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel it's frustrating there are hundreds of open source projects that would benefit from your time. This should be fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most small projects typically never grow into anything beyond what it already is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's fine, sometimes you'll build stuff &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/fast-mhtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no one will use&lt;/a&gt; and sometimes a small package you write will &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/tmp-promise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get hundreds of thousands of downloads a week&lt;/a&gt;. It's not about getting the numbers it's about building interesting software that you find challenging, learning and helping others. I don't regret stuff I've built that isn't popular and I don't believe the stuff that is popular is somehow great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most projects I've encountered have stale issues that just sit there without activity from years past. Triaging is typically fruitless, since responses are typically &quot;oh yeah, we'll get to that later.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that's true - which is why it's always better to talk to the project maintainers and acknowledging their human-ness than to try to hunt issues off GitHub. Most projects have a chat and maintainers use Facebook, Twitter, Slack or another platform with chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a lack of transparency across large projects. There's always an &quot;in&quot; group that's running things about how the project works and aren't accepting of new ideas and innovations even if they are backed up with facts and statistics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That goes back to persistence. I tried getting Node to take in promises when it got a lot of resistance and I was called stupid and mocked by an &quot;in&quot; group many times. It's part of why I now help moderate our GitHub org. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGpmUyFnyuQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;worked for me&lt;/a&gt; was persistence, making friends and understanding that it's a community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="49" LastEditorUserId="49" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T11:33:20.523" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T11:33:20.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-13T20:24:32.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;author&lt;/strong&gt; of a work and the &lt;strong&gt;copyright holder&lt;/strong&gt; of the work don't need to be the same entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this is music - a song is written by an artist, but the copyright on it  may be held by a distributor. We still credit the artist with creating the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an employee writes code as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;work for hire&lt;/a&gt;, the employee is still frequently recognized as the &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; of the work, although according to law the employer may claim authorship (as well as copyright and other rights). It is up to the employer to decide whether, and how, the employee is acknowledged as the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, the employer generally holds the legal rights to the work, for example copyright. When projects ask for &lt;strong&gt;copyright assignment&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. signing a CLA), they generally use language which makes the contributor either state that they own copyright (i.e. the work is not a work for hire), or get the employer to sign off on the copyright assignment. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.facebook.com/cla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook CLA&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You&quot; (or &quot;Your&quot;) shall mean the copyright owner or legal entity authorized by the copyright owner that is making this Agreement with Facebook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html#clas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The ASF CLA&lt;/a&gt; goes into more detail on what is expected from both individuals and corporations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what the requesting project requires, &lt;strong&gt;names of developers who produced the code  may not need to be published&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The employer (in the US, other jurisdictions may vary) owns all interest in the work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The employer designates a person who is legally allowed to sign copyright assignment on  behalf of the employer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Subsequently, this person can submit the code as &quot;being produced by FooWidgets Inc.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms the code submitted by an employer still needs to be associated with a person (either the one who signed the copyright assignment, or someone who the employer designated as being allowed to submit code). But this person can, in principle, be someone from legal team and not a developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If now the employee personally signs a contribution agreement or contributes under her or his own name, she or he would give away rights on something which are owned by someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The employee can legally sign the copyright assignment agreement extending to whatever code they own copyright to (such as work done on their own time). The employee would not be legally allowed to contribute code that they don't own copyright to (such as work done for hire) even if they signed such an agreement, because they don't own the rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when browsing through some repos on Github I only see real names at commits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most tech companies allow their employees to retain authorship/credit of the work they have done, even when the company owns all rights to the work. This serves to motivate the employees, and doesn't usually cost the company anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I worked for a company that allowed open source contributions as long as they &lt;em&gt;did not&lt;/em&gt; have any association with the company. (The thinking as I understood it was the company did not want to provide the impression of &quot;giving away&quot; their IP.) I was allowed to contribute if I did so under a fake name and the company's name was not mentioned anywhere. A project that does not require copyright assignment typically won't bother checking whether the name that someone gives is real - there is no way to do that, really, short of asking for government-issued ID which I think many people would balk at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't a 100% legally sound way of running a software project (which is why copyright assignments are required by large companies) but the majority of free software/open source projects operate in this way. Also, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github terms of service&lt;/a&gt; state that a contribution to a repository is made under the repository's license, which is satisfactory for most projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or do other companies use some kind of &quot;proxy persons&quot; hiding the internal structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that many people post their company &amp;amp; position at LinkedIn, hiding corporate structure by preventing developers from putting their name on their contributed code probably doesn't accomplish much. The managers who are, one might argue, the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; hierarchy often don't write code and are even less likely to submit it to a project outside of the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="18078" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T20:54:42.640" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T20:54:42.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6615" CreationDate="2020-05-13T20:37:15.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Extensions&quot; are defined in the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.5 &quot;Extensions&quot; means any Modifications, Derivative Works, or Required Components as those terms are defined in this License. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Your extensions&quot; are used in the following context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.14 &quot;Serve&quot; means to deliver &lt;strong&gt;Licensed Software and/or Your Extensions&lt;/strong&gt; by means of a computer network to one or more computers for purposes of execution of Licensed Software and/or Your Extensions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;your&quot; is, in my non-lawyer opinion, added to emphasize the distinction between &quot;licensed software&quot; (the original software you obtained) and the &quot;extensions&quot; (your changes and additions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your program, as I understand it, would be considered a derivative work of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;&lt;strong&gt;user-visible display&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; means user interface that provides authorship/credits/copyright  information. For example, at the bottom of this very page you might see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;site design / logo © 2020 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa. rev 2020.5.13.36813&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a GUI program the equivalent &quot;user-visible display&quot; could be the About dialog. In a console program the equivalent could be the output of &lt;code&gt;foobar --version&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever facility your program is employing, the requirement is that attribution to the authors of the library licensed under RPL is provided in that facility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that there is a requirement to provide attribution in documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must also include such User-Visible Attribution Notice in at least one location in the Software documentation where a user would be likely to look for such notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="18078" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T20:52:39.787" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T20:52:39.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T20:58:12.123" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to come up with all the license-related considerations I should think about when starting a software project from scratch. I believe taking into account the licenses of programming languages, frameworks, libraries and packages cover almost everything. I'm focusing mainly on software but hardware, cloud, DBMs, documentation, assets, ... also play an important role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I may want to license my software project under open source or free or proprietary software licenses. So knowing the licenses of the software I need to reuse is key for license-compatibility, relicensing or attribution. And surely it has an impact on my desired outcome and may put constraints on the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other stuff related to software licenses would you also consider?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;By the way, I've already looked at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/106/what-should-i-keep-a-close-attention-to-when-selecting-a-license-for-my-project&quot;&gt;similar post&lt;/a&gt; but its not addressing my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18134" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T08:52:56.010" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T08:52:56.010" Title="What I should consider about licenses when starting a software project?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license|dependencies|license-creation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-05-14T09:22:35.963" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T22:07:46.647" Score="1" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to make sense on how MIT, BSD and Apache 2.0 licenses and attribution work, I've taken some real examples from GitHub. The open source software projects below are classified according to these 3 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;=== MIT ===&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tawesoft.co.uk/kb/article/mit-license-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.tawesoft.co.uk/kb/article/mit-license-faq&lt;/a&gt; (FAQ &quot;How do I use the MIT License?&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it a common practice to include a &quot;dist&quot; (abbr. for distribution/release) folder in the source code repository with files with the MIT license and copyright notice already embedded in them? If that's the case, I understand anyone using the software don't have to do anything else to give attribution. In fact, who is responsible to give proper attribution to the license, the licensor or the licensee? It looks like are cases in which the licensor uses a MIT license and the &quot;dist&quot; files already include proper attribution but that's not always the case.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to name or link to the MIT license instead of copying it entirely in a source file? As seen in the below examples it's a common practice. However, in the MIT license, it's stated that &quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; which for me means to include the whole license in each file.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I'm using a source file, let's say &quot;bootstrap.min.css&quot; (which already includes the MIT software license embedded) for a software project with a private license it's sufficient to use the file or I have to do anything else to give attribution to the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semantic UI&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI/releases&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI/tree/master/dist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file + there's no specific compressed file for getting only the distribution.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- There's a dist folder in the source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- An example of how they include the license embedded in the dist files:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * # Semantic UI - 2.4.0&#xA; * https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI&#xA; * http://www.semantic-ui.com/&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright 2014 Contributors&#xA; * Released under the MIT license&#xA; * http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&#xA; *&#xA; */&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bulma&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/jgthms/bulma/releases&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/jgthms/bulma/tree/master/css&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- No dist folder in the source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file + a compressed file for getting only the distribution (with a copy of the MIT license and a few more files)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- An example of how they include the license embedded in the dist files:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/*! bulma.io v0.8.2 | MIT License | github.com/jgthms/bulma */&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/twbs/bootstrap/releases&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/twbs/bootstrap/tree/master/dist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file + 2 additional compressed files (one oriented to the dist and another with examples)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the dist they don't provide a copy of the MIT license. The ñicense and copyright notice are embedded in the files.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- An example of how they include the license embedded in the dist files:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/*!&#xA; * Bootstrap v4.5.0 (https://getbootstrap.com/)&#xA; * Copyright 2011-2020 The Bootstrap Authors&#xA; * Copyright 2011-2020 Twitter, Inc.&#xA; * Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/LICENSE)&#xA; */&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UIKit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/uikit/uikit/releases&lt;br&gt;&#xA;github.com/uikit/uikit/tree/develop/dist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file + a compressed file with the dist files but without a copy of the MIT license as a separe file in the root directory.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- An example of how they include the license embedded in the dist files:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;/*! UIkit 3.4.6 | https://www.getuikit.com | (c) 2014 - 2020 YOOtheme | MIT License */&lt;/code&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;=== BSD 2-Clause &quot;Simplified&quot; License ===&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-2-clause/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-2-clause/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People using Leaflet should give attribution to the BSD 2-Clause license editing the source files? Is it the licensor or the licensee who should comply with it?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the BSD license, it's not mentioned to place the entire license as a text file in a root directory when distributing, isn't it?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaflet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/releases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/releases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/tree/master/dist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/tree/master/dist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the dist directory there's no LICENSE file neither the license is embedded in each source files.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;=== Apache License 2.0 ===&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hugo is a Static Site Generator (SSG). Let's imagine, I'm going to use the last release. I download the binary (object in Apache 2.0 terms) files (so I won't compile the source code myself) for my OS distribution. Then, I'm using Hugo (the hugo.exe) binary file to do several stuff (create the structure of my static site, generate my static site, run a local server, ...). Since I'm using Hugo (the binary) should I give attribution somehow (I need to comply with the Apache point &quot;4. Redistribution&quot; or any other)? If that's the case, where I should do that in my website?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why they include a copy of the Apache License 2.0 license in each *.go file? I don't understand if the licensor should have to include or not the license and copyright notice on the source files or is the licensee who should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hugo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- In the release they provide the whole repository source code in a compressed file + several binaries targeting several operating systems...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Taking a random file from the source code, for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/source/sourceSpec.go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/source/sourceSpec.go&lt;/a&gt; it already has the license embedded. It happens the same with several files. By extension, I guess every *.go file include the license at the top.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18134" LastEditorUserId="18134" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T09:43:49.683" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T09:43:49.683" Title="Trying to understand MIT, BSD and Apache 2.0 licenses and attribution with real examples" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|attribution|license|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T22:28:26.533" Score="4" ViewCount="3892" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an open source project, licensed under Apache License 2.0. It is abandoned, so I would like to fork it, do some significant modifications, and publish it again as an open source project, under Apache 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original project does not contain a LICENSE.txt file, but the author wrote &lt;code&gt;licence: Apache License 2.0&lt;/code&gt; in the package information file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to generate a license file, with this template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &quot;License&quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &quot;AS IS&quot; BASIS,&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I write in the &lt;code&gt;name of copyright owner&lt;/code&gt; section? Both my name and the original authors name? What if there were other contributors too? Is it legal to write something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 John Doe, Jane Doe and others&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5250" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T17:43:24.237" Title="How to fill the &quot;name of copyright owner&quot; in the license, if there are multiple authors?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9778" CreationDate="2020-05-13T22:54:36.697" Score="2" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference to provide for instance a npm package.json or to provide all the packages source code in the source code repository of the software project? What's the impact if the project has a free or open or propietary license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I usually look at a &lt;code&gt;GitHub repository -&amp;gt; Insights -&amp;gt; Dependency Graph&lt;/code&gt; and most of the times I see a reference to a file that lists dependencies but they are not provided in the source code repository. It has some relation with dynamic links or derivative works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18134" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T07:14:13.467" Title="Dependencies installed via package managers" Tags="|derivative-works|distribution|source-code|redistribution|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9774" CreationDate="2020-05-14T06:38:29.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is legal to mention multiple people in a copyright line. It is also legal to have multiple copyright lines next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation would be to first add a copyright line mentioning the original author, any contributors you can identify and the range of years they worked on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, add a new copyright line with the current year and your name, resulting in something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2000-2010 John Doe, Jane Doe&#xA;Copyright 2020 Iter Ator&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T06:38:29.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9775" CreationDate="2020-05-14T07:14:13.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mention a dependency in &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; (or a similar file that gets used by a mackage manager),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you only need to have the right to download &amp;amp; use the dependency, not the right to redistribute it. That latter right is usually not granted for proprietary software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can automatically get the latest released version of the dependency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include the source code in your own repository&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can only do that for dependencies that allow redistribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can make changes to the dependency and use them before those changes are officially released&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you won't get unexpected upgrades of the dependency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you need to arrange your repository in such a way that it is clear which code is yours and which comes from a dependency (that possibly uses a different license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the licensing options you have for your own code, it doesn't make a difference if the dependencies have their source code in the same repository or if they are downloaded via a package manager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T07:14:13.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9773" CreationDate="2020-05-14T09:20:49.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before I address &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of your questions (of which there are rather a lot), note that the licence &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2078/458&quot;&gt;does not bind the author&lt;/a&gt; of wholly-original code.  GPLv3 s4 requires that a copy of the GPL accompany any copy of the code, but if Fiona Q. Hacker writes &lt;code&gt;libfiona&lt;/code&gt; from scratch and unambiguously releases it under GPLv3, and yet she doesn't include a copy of the licence, that means &lt;strong&gt;neither&lt;/strong&gt; that the release is invalid, &lt;strong&gt;nor&lt;/strong&gt; that you have the right not to include a copy if you redistribute her code.  So looking to existing projects for best-practice can be misleading.  That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it a common practice to include a &quot;dist&quot; (abbr. for distribution/release) folder in the source code repository with files with the MIT license and copyright notice already embedded in them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know, but the licence does not require it, so you should read nothing into its presence, nor its absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it correct to name or link to the MIT license instead of copying it entirely in a source file? ... it's stated that &quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&quot; which for me means to include the whole license in each file. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; does not define &quot;&lt;em&gt;substantial portion&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but it's clear that the notice (ie, the licence text) must be included in each copy of the covered software, which is to say that one copy of the licence per complete copy of the codebase suffices.  I see no reason to think you need to include one copy in each file that makes up the codebase; but if you want to, go for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I'm using a source file for a software project with a private license it's sufficient to use the file or I have to do anything else to give attribution to the MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must preserve the existing copyright notices also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since I'm using Hugo (the binary) should I give attribution somehow (I need to comply with the Apache point &quot;4. Redistribution&quot; or any other)? If that's the case, where I should do that in my website? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless Hugo copies substantial portions of its own source into the output it generates, you are using, rather than re-distributing, Hugo.  Therefore you have no obligations whatsoever with respect to your generated website, and you can license the content therein as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why they include a copy of the Apache License 2.0 license in each *.go file? I don't understand if the licensor should have to include or not the license and copyright notice on the source files or is the licensee who should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their work may be based on some upstream work which is also under Apache2.  If so, then it is likely they are honouring their obligations under Apache2 s4a by including the licence text.  It is the licensee's obligation to comply, but remember that each licensor may also be a licensee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T09:20:49.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9783" CreationDate="2020-05-14T12:19:38.630" Score="3" ViewCount="2552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering under what license the code generated by a code generator that generates code from conditional code templates would fall under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to release the generator's source code (generator logic + templates) under say GPLv3 without having the generated code to be GPLv3 licensed too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would a custom license or exception be needed for this to work and if so, would adding such exception to the GPLv3 license of the generator's source code break the compatibility with GPLv3 and/or other opensource licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or should I release template files under another license (any recommendations if this is a case?) that would allow the final user to license generated code under any open or closed source license and only keep the generator logic licensed under say GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this similar question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8058/does-the-gpl-doesnt-cover-the-ouput-of-a-program-also-apply-if-the-output-is&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;the GPL doesn&amp;#39;t cover the ouput of a program&amp;quot; also apply if the output is source code?&lt;/a&gt; From what I understood from here, generated files would fall under GPLv3 too if an exception is not provided. Please correct me if I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the question linked in the paragraph above does not cover are my additional questions about how and if to add an exception to GPLv3 or if the template files should be released under another license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  The generator output does not contain any part of the generator (except some Java keywords and tiny fractions of code without added value), all code is defined in the templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer it if the templates could not be reused in a closed source non-free situation by a third-party as one of the commenters asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6777" LastEditorUserId="6777" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T07:04:19.837" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T07:04:19.837" Title="License of code generated by a code generator" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|source-code|exceptions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-14T16:52:15.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in all previous answers, there is a difference between the author and the copyright holder. And this distinction usually is quite clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person contributes to a project with an e-mail address of joe.doe@example-company.com then it is - IMHO - very clear that &lt;em&gt;example-company&lt;/em&gt; is the copyright holder while Joe Doe is the &lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt; who did the work as part of his work contract; thus no-one will be unclear about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally it has several benefits, if people contribute in a way that they can be identified. Contributions usually need to go through a review process in any project - thus it needs personal communication via e-mail or other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a company has several contributors, they might have different views on issues and different expertise - and it gets &lt;em&gt;very confusing&lt;/em&gt;, if they communicate from the same e-mail address. It's similar when I do business with a company... I might address info@ or call the general service number initially... but I usually get a reply from a non-anonymous person whom I henceforth can actually talk to. Thus having a face and a name is a &lt;em&gt;bonus&lt;/em&gt; for your company to the outside. But definitely also to the inside in terms of motivation for your employees as it grants them respect and reward in terms of recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T16:52:15.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2020-05-15T05:12:13.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would it be possible to release the generator's source code (generator logic + templates) under say GPLv3 without having the generated code to be GPLv3 licensed too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt; of course. But this is a legal question and &lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C preprocessors&lt;/a&gt; : &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cpp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU cpp&lt;/a&gt; (part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt;) is GPLv3+ licensed, but not its output (which is valid C code)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;other preprocessors, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/m4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU m4&lt;/a&gt; (also used by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/autoconf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU autoconf&lt;/a&gt;) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://logological.org/gpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gpp&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;parser generators such as perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.antlr.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ANTLR&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bison&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/flex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU flex&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;more generally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transpilers&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code obfuscators&lt;/a&gt;. You could write your own one for C -and publish it under GPLv3+ license- as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC plugin&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/obfusc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obfusc&lt;/a&gt; obfuscator is GPLv3+ and claims to work on C code. I leave you to test it. You could also adapt the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinycc&lt;/a&gt; compiler and make an obfuscator out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;any &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quine&lt;/a&gt; program. You certainly can write your own under an MIT license, and you probably could already find one with other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also my old &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/gcc-melt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC MELT&lt;/a&gt; (a transpiler for a Lisp dialect generating C++ code for &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC plugins&lt;/a&gt;), my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bismon&lt;/a&gt; project, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would prefer it if the templates could not be reused in a closed source non-free situation by a third-party as one of the commenters asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look into the licenses of various popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler-compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parser generators&lt;/a&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hwaci.com/sw/lemon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lemon&lt;/a&gt; and  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bison&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/flex/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU flex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if someone (in a different continent) would -illegally- reuse your code in a closed source situation, what is your concrete way to retaliate? Intercontinental law suits are expensive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perhaps you legally could &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fork&lt;/a&gt; some bootstrapped transpiler&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;a href=&quot;https://s48.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;s48&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bigloo&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.call-cc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicken-Scheme&lt;/a&gt; as GPLV3+ projects. &lt;strong&gt;That is a question for your lawyer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;please consult your lawyer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details could be dependent of your legal system (not the same in the USA and in the European Union).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;And the definitive answer will happen in court.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Writing an obfuscator for C or Java code (or even C++) is really a simple exercise, and could be an internship project for any student having followed courses on compilation. The idea is simple: you collect all the symbols &lt;em&gt;program-wide&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. in some &lt;a href=&quot;https://sqlite.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sqlite&lt;/a&gt; database, perhaps with the help of &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/nm.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nm(1)&lt;/a&gt;), e.g. &lt;code&gt;a_symb&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;other_name&lt;/code&gt; and you generate a header file like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#define a_symb x12345&#xA;#define other_name x12346&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.... Then you invoke your preprocessor on that header file before every your &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_unit_(programming)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation unit&lt;/a&gt;. In other terms, a C source obfuscator is a C to C transpiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Java, you could get the bytecode of your entire application and transform it in C or Java  using transpiler techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would refuse to use any obfuscated source code (all my computers run Linux, because it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt;), because in that case I cannot evaluate its software quality (and cannot delegate my trust): it could contain a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software virus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T06:27:16.827" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T06:27:16.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9780" CreationDate="2020-05-15T07:02:23.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As no (copyrightable) part of the generator makes it into the output, the license on the generator code does not affect the license of the output in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license on the templates is a different matter. As much of the content of the template does make it into the output, the output is legally a derived work of the template used to generate it. That means that any licensing restrictions of the template carry over into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if the templates are licensed under the GPL, the output of the generator must also be licensed under the GPL. But as you are the copyright holder of the templates, you can grant an exception to the GPL requirements or even choose to put the templates under a completely different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't really care what happens to the templates themselves (for example, you are just providing them as a convenience to people using your generator; they could just as easily write them themselves), then you could choose to use a short permissive license, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause_license_(&amp;quot;Zero_Clause_BSD&amp;quot;)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt;. Those licenses put very few requirements on the people that use the template to start a larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want the templates to remain open-source always, but allow the use of the code generated from them in a non-free application, you can add an additional permission to the GPL license, for example something like this (adapted from the exception used by GNU Bison):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a special exception, you may create a larger work that contains part or all of the [Generator] template and distribute that work under terms of your choice, so long as that work isn't itself a template for code generation. Alternatively, if you modify or redistribute the template itself, you may (at your option) remove this special exception, which will cause the template and the resulting [Generator] output files to be licensed under the GNU General Public License without this special exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T07:02:23.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9785" CreationDate="2020-05-15T07:15:20.930" Score="6" ViewCount="1374" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just can't seem to find an answer to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally I assign MIT License to all of my GitHub repositories, but so far they have only included code that I have personally written. I think that MIT License is great, but with my new project I need to include the logos of a few organizations. I have the permission to use these organizations' logos and digital brand images, but I clearly can't place these under the same MIT License as my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I use for a repository that includes MIT Licensed code and trademark/copyright protected images like logos and brand imagery from third parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17359" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T14:23:40.213" Title="What license to use for GitHub repository containing trademark/copyright protected images?" Tags="|mit|closed-source|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9784" CreationDate="2020-05-15T09:35:23.613" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The big picture answer is that you should probably use a mixture of licences; MIT (or whatever you like) for your code, and whatever licence is appropriate for the logos.  There doesn't seem to be any easy way on github to indicate in the &quot;license&quot; field that a mixture of licences is in use, but that's not the end of the world.  Don't use that field, and make the licences clear in the code itself, in the README, and in the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licence is appropriate for the logos?  It depends on what permissions the rightsholders have given you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they've just said you can use them, but said nothing about other people, then they shouldn't be in the repository at all, because nobody has any rights to copy them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they've hedged the grant, such as &quot;&lt;em&gt;you can use the logos, but they can't be used or reused except in the context of this project&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then you need to make that clear to potential users, and since there is no simple licence that quickly expresses that, you'll have to write that yourself.  Just be clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they've said something like &quot;&lt;em&gt;you can use and distribute them unaltered&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, then something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt; is a quick and well-understood way of telling people they can copy and use the logos, but not edit them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T14:23:40.213" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T14:23:40.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9763" CreationDate="2020-05-15T18:27:23.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's generally frowned upon in open source culture to make contributions under what is essentially an anonymous identity.  Contributions often require authentication mechanisms like SSH keys, and like a password the sharing of private keys among who knows how many individuals is a gaping security hole ripe for nefarious exploitation. Few open source projects want to wake up one day to find their name in the news as a vector for an infamous infection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's not a hard-and-fast rule and many projects would prefer anonymous contribution over no contribution.  People vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most companies recognize both this culture and the difficulty of maintaining a shared secretive anonymous identity among many employees.  The compromise is that employees are required to contribute using their corporate email, and such contributions are generally recognized as coming from the company not the person.  Often some sort of corporate legal acknowledgement is required to be on file before accepting such code contributions to protect the project from later claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to do is discuss this with the upstream project to see how they feel about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18027" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T18:27:23.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-16T04:23:00.813" Score="2" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the original author of an Apache 2.0 licensed open source project. I'm considering splitting up from this project and continuing to develop my own fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I owe anything to the original authors if I monetize and sell my fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS - I'm the only active developer on this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1 - There were a few more people involved in the past. Those are not involved with the project as of now in any manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18175" LastEditorUserId="18175" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T05:21:10.420" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T08:14:22.630" Title="Original author splitting up and developing independent fork" Tags="|apache-2.0|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9787" CreationDate="2020-05-16T05:44:38.600" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do I owe anything to the original authors if I monetize and sell my fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must comply with conditions of the Apache license, such as maintaining existing copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache license permits commercial exploitation of covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T05:44:38.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9089" CreationDate="2020-05-16T06:05:32.440" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the term &quot;license&quot; is most frequently applied to program source code text, it also covers visual assets and such. An argument could be made that, for example, if the title bar of a program includes its icon, and you are distributing a screenshot of the program, your screenshot is a derived work of the icon and is thus subject to the license that the icon was distributed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LibreOffice license&lt;/a&gt; includes the following grant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by such Contributor to use, reproduce, make&#xA;  available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit&#xA;  its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications,&#xA;  or as part of a Larger Work;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement permits, as related to our example, reproduction of the LibreOffice icon in a screenshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that trademark rights are explicitly excluded. Trademark applies to both the &quot;LibreOffice&quot; name and the logo; a full program screenshot would generally include at least one, and thus would be subject to the trademark license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Trademark_Policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LibreOffice trademark policy&lt;/a&gt; grants the right to use LibreOffice trademarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Except as outlined below, you may use the Marks without prior written permission (subject to the following terms):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;To refer to the LibreOffice software in substantially unmodified form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grant should apply if the screenshot is not used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Trademark_Policy#Non_Permitted_Use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a prohibited way&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T06:05:32.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9787" CreationDate="2020-05-16T06:06:58.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is a little confusing; it asks about your debt to the original authors, while suggesting you're the only original author.  Nevertheless, you've written enough to make me wonder about contributors, and the licence under which they contributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributions to code under GPL generally don't cause problems.  The normal workflow (contributor copies codebase, modifies codebase, then conveys modifications back to the original project) is enough to ensure that a contribution can only be lawfully made if it's made under GPL.  A Contributor Licensing Agreement is often helpful, but without it there are still legs to stand on if a contributor later decides to cause trouble about the terms under which their contribution can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so for all the permissive free licences.  I can copy the original codebase and modify it, and as long as I preserve the original copyright notices and some additional text, I can re-distribute those modifications without incurring any particular obligation with respect to the licensing of my contribution.  As amon points out (to whom many thanks!) Apache2 s5 does make provision for this, but it's only advisory as an opt-out is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the project leader, and you don't clarify the terms on which you are accepting my contribution, such as by using a CLA or (in the case of Apache2) having a procedure to ensure nobody's opting out of s5, then they may remain ambiguous, and I &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; later cause a fuss if you did something with them that I personally did not approve of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not suggesting this is common, or even likely, but if your project accepted contributions and didn't have a clear CLA in place, then to be on firmest ground it would be useful to make a good-faith effort to contact those contributors and have them clarify that their contributions were also made under Apache2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once it's clear the whole codebase is under Apache2, then I concur with the interpretation of my colleague D. SM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T08:14:22.630" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T08:14:22.630" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9047" CreationDate="2020-05-16T06:24:06.993" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can create and distribute proprietary software using &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; libraries that ship with mingw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, if you are using a library (which includes libstdc++, libgcc and libwinpthread in your question) your program is subject to the license of the library. If the library is distributed under GPL, your program would also be subject to GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, standard libraries often have exceptions in their licenses that relax GPL requirements for programs using these libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For libstdc++, the exception is &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. libgcc is explicitly mentioned on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; as enjoying the same exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/master/tree/COPYING.MinGW-w64/COPYING.MinGW-w64.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mingw blurb you referenced&lt;/a&gt; seems to reference these exceptions but is not legalese. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mingw.org/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; states that some parts of mingw are released under non-copyleft licenses, repeats the exceptions to GPL requirements for libstdc++/libgcc, and reiterates that profiling code is licensed under GPL only (i.e. without any exceptions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the profiling library is licensed under GPL without exceptions, if you distribute your application linked to the profiling library the application will also be covered by the GPL. The solution to this is to not distribute your application with profiling enabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;libwinpthread appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/mingw-w64/ci/master/tree/mingw-w64-libraries/winpthreads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this project&lt;/a&gt; which is MIT licensed. Unlike GPL, MIT does not impose a particular license on your application - you can use an MIT library in a proprietary application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be legally safe and compliant, you need to perform this type of analysis for each library your application links to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="17122" LastEditDate="2024-04-05T14:37:42.330" LastActivityDate="2024-04-05T14:37:42.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6639" CreationDate="2020-05-16T06:37:30.440" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted [...] to modify [and] sublicense [...] copies of the Software, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all &lt;strong&gt;copies or substantial portions of the Software&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you memorized the entire text of the original program, and then wrote a similar program that &lt;strong&gt;did not include any of the original text&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;portions of the Software&quot;), then in my opinion the attribution requirement would no longer apply and you could put your own name on the reimplementation and not credit the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your reimplementation would still be a derived work of the original program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T06:37:30.440" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9113" CreationDate="2020-05-16T06:54:27.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can release &lt;em&gt;your application&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot alter copyright notices in Flutter, but you didn't ask about doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T06:54:27.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5092" CreationDate="2020-05-16T16:26:26.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try The Unlicense, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18183" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T11:20:18.637" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T11:20:18.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9799" CreationDate="2020-05-16T21:33:42.743" Score="5" ViewCount="1264" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an OS project that I like (and would want to contribute), however, it's very inactive and there are PRs that stayed unreviewed even for years.&#xA;I'd want to create a clone and take control of it. That said - create my own fork of this project: not only merge in some older PRs, but also change some internal structure and design decisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the appropriate steps to do here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18187" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T08:42:43.240" Title="Clone, modify and rename Apache v2 licensed project" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9797" CreationDate="2020-05-17T08:31:30.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are nearly none, other than just doing it.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt; gives you the right to do this, and places minimal obligations on you should you do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to maintain the pre-existing copyright notices (s4c) and any &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file (s4d), and provide a copy of the Apache2 licence (s4a).  Those source files you modify you must clearly indicate that you have done so (s4b) but to my mind adding your own copyright notice to the pre-existing one in each such file suffices, and is a good idea, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to decide what licence you are going to distribute your new program under.  Staying with Apache2 is probably a good idea, but it isn't mandatory.  Be &lt;strong&gt;clear&lt;/strong&gt; about what you are doing in this regard, and don't put the decision off until later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other things, like finding a repository to host your code, choosing a new name (you haven't indicated that there are trademark interests in the old name, but I think a name change is helpful for the avoidance of community confusion), contributor interaction (mailing lists / web fora / irc channels), but these apply to all free software projects and are not peculiar to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T08:42:43.240" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T08:42:43.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9765" CreationDate="2020-05-17T15:34:12.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;wasm-git (and the libgit2 library it is built around) use the GPLv2 &lt;em&gt;with linking exception&lt;/em&gt;. This exception reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License,&#xA;   the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled&#xA;   version of this library into combinations with other programs,&#xA;   and to distribute those combinations without any restriction&#xA;   coming from the use of this file.  (The General Public License&#xA;   restrictions do apply in other respects; for example, they cover&#xA;   modification of the file, and distribution when not linked into&#xA;   a combined executable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, using GPL-covered code in a webapp frontend would trigger the full breadth of GPL license conditions, such as offering the complete corresponding source code of your frontend under a GPL-compatible license. This is clearly a kind of distribution or copying, especially since recipients would be able to make further copies from the file they downloaded from your servers. It is clearly not distribution if the wasm-git files are only used on your backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But due to the linking exception, you can integrate an unmodified wasm-git “binary” into your frontend, without extra license obligations. This linking exception is more permissive than e.g. the LGPL. But as I read the linking exception, you should still offer the complete corresponding source code for wasm-git and libgit2 to recipients of the software, and provide them a copy of the license. The code you write is unaffected by the license, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do read the libgit2 license carefully since it includes a lot of bundled software, including some under the LGPL (which is similar to the linking exception, but requires you to enable users to use the software with a modified version of the LGPL-covered code – tricky in a web context due to CORS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T15:34:12.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-17T21:02:29.240" Score="16" ViewCount="3987" Body="&lt;p&gt;They're a pretty decently sized company within the space and I assume they did their due diligence and so, I'm wondering if I misunderstood something. Are you not allowed to include paid software (A) that is licensed to you under GPL v2 if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The overall product (B) you're building using (A) is also GPL v2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I include their license and also give credit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sub-licensing/re-selling, as they told me. I am simply using their software to make mine work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I misunderstanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18195" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T16:12:51.147" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T07:29:41.927" Title="I was told by a vendor who licenses their paid software under GPL v2 that I cannot include the software inside my framework. How so?" Tags="|gpl-2|copyleft|paid-software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9801" CreationDate="2020-05-18T06:31:06.337" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the original work was distributed under the GNU GPLv2, and that you have made a work which is a derivative of it (in copyright terms), you may redistribute your derivative work subject to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; ss 2 and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of distributing under the GPL is to enable a work to continue to be used and/or repurposed by as large a number of people as possible.  That said, in my experience people and organisations do occasionally release under the GPL without fully understanding what they are permitting&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.  Sadly for them, there are no take-backs from people who have already acquired a copy under those terms (see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my article&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the license is irrevocable once even partial performance has occurred&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the licensor seems to be unwilling, so you will need to be &lt;strong&gt;very, very&lt;/strong&gt; sure of your grounds before you proceed.  Read the section entitled &quot;&lt;em&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/em&gt;&quot; at the end of the GPL.  If the licensor has done &lt;strong&gt;everything&lt;/strong&gt; the GPL recommends, you have good grounds for believing that the work was licensed to you on those terms.  If, by way of example on the other hand, you downloaded it from a page titled &quot;&lt;em&gt;Here's our GPL software&lt;/em&gt;&quot; but the code made no mention of that, then you might want to be a great deal more hesitant.  If anything of significance (eg your business, or your house) rests on this you will want to take professional legal advice, which this is not, before proceeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But assuming you do proceed, then as long as you obey the requirements of GPLv2, particularly ss 2 and 3, with respect to your derivative work, then you should be OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;See by way of example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jedimark.net/2019/02/08/sleepyhead-project-shutdown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sad fate of SleepyHead&lt;/a&gt;, wherein the highly-dedicated lead developer generously published his work under GPL, putting in thousands of hours of his own development time while failing to understand how free software development works.  He then completely lost it when other people dared to take the current code and release it.  He halted all development and walked away from the project (as is completely his right), concluding &quot;&lt;em&gt;Friends don’t let friends release full blown complex applications under the GPL&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final note for anyone interested in sleep apnoea and free software: the fork survived and is doing nicely, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/pholy/OSCAR-code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.com/pholy/OSCAR-code&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T07:29:41.927" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T07:29:41.927" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9807" CreationDate="2020-05-18T09:02:25.453" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the author of an open-source program. I am the primary author, and the repository on github is owned by me. There are however, ~3 other individuals who have made a few dozen commits into the project. Their commits are non-trivial, and cannot simply be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a company that wants to pay me to modify this program to fit their needs. However, they want the changes to be closed source. Part of their business involves them distributing this binary to their users via a web assembly. My understanding is that since they are distributing this binary, they must comply with requests for the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to &lt;strong&gt;re-license a fork&lt;/strong&gt; of my project. My understanding is that I can obtain permission from the ~3 other individuals and create a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is:&lt;/strong&gt; What is the process? Is this as trivial as receiving written permission to fork as of a specified commit? Or is there a deeper legal process involved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18198" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T14:25:03.040" Title="Relicense a GPL 3 project which has other contributors" Tags="|gpl-3|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9803" CreationDate="2020-05-18T09:37:35.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The process needed is one where you get agreement by each involved person that you can re-license their work (or get a separate proprietary license). You might want to be able to prove this to a court, should someone come and claim that you are conducting a license infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T09:37:35.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9806" CreationDate="2020-05-18T14:06:36.933" Score="70" ViewCount="21677" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to make my project open-source. Is there a free/open-source license that lets me do that, but disallows anyone receiving my project to use it for commercial purposes or monetary gain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar vein, what if I find a project that says it's open-source but its license disallows using it for commercial purposes or monetary gain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/855/98&quot;&gt;canonical question&lt;/a&gt;. New questions asking effectively the same thing as either of the above questions may be closed as a duplicate of this one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T14:23:51.910" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T17:55:05.097" Title="Can I license my project with an open-source license but disallow commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|commercial|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2020-05-18T14:06:36.933" Score="81" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No free/open-source license may disallow commercial use.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole purpose of the Free and Open movements is an altruistic one: if you're making your project free and open, you're gifting it to the public at large, under certain terms (which often boil down to &quot;attribute it back to me&quot;). See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; for some explanation of what these movements are trying to achieve, and why no open-source license can disallow commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the central tenets of these movements is that they do not discriminate: your software becomes something that &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can use, no matter for what purpose they're using it. Point 6 of the Definition sums it up: &quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&quot;. You can't say &quot;open-source but non-commercial&quot;, because that does exactly that - discriminates against those who wish to use your software for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What? But it's &lt;em&gt;mine&lt;/em&gt;! Surely I can restrict it!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can, if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to. What you can't do is restrict commercial use and still call your project open-source. As the copyright holder, it's your prerogative to restrict any kind of use of your software, if you wish to, or to keep it to yourself and not allow anyone else to use it at all. If that's what you want to do, that's your right - but the Open Source movement is about sharing gratuitously, not about excessive restriction; you can place restrictions on your own software, but you can't truthfully claim that it's still truly open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;But I found X project that restricts commercial use and &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; call it open-source!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're lying to you - though whether that's intentional or not, who knows. Sorry. See above. Refer the maintainers of that project here, if you're not sure whether or not they know the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of people use &quot;open source&quot; to mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;source-available&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, thinking the two are synonymous. For many purposes, they are, but a strict interpretation of the term &quot;open source&quot;, as coined by the open-source movement, includes the philosophy of not placing restrictions on the use of the licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So what &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; I do?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can &lt;strong&gt;dual-license&lt;/strong&gt; your software. This is a very common model: you offer your software, open-source, under the terms of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/42/98&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; license. Anyone can use this, for any purpose, but since a copyleft license requires that the project developed around your software be distributed under the same (or similar) license, using a copyleft-licensed project for commercial purposes is often more difficult than with a permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, you advertise that you also offer your project under a closed-source license that offers the licensee more freedom (and the ability to not have to redistribute their software as open-source too). The catch? You &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; these licenses, rather than giving them away. If someone wants to pay you to be able to use your software for commercial purposes, you sell them one of these licenses, and you both win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to disallow any commercial activity using your software, no matter whether they're paying or not, you have two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a license that disallows commercial activity, and accept that you can't truthfully call your project open-source or free software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a copyleft license (such as the GNU GPL) and accept that although it'll be more difficult to use your software for commercial purposes, it may still happen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T09:13:11.320" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T09:13:11.320" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9803" CreationDate="2020-05-18T14:25:03.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the process? Is this as trivial as receiving written permission to fork as of a specified commit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the process does not have to be more complicated than that, although it would be good if you have some way to prove that the permission to relicense was given by the same person that holds the copyrights on the corresponding contributions. If it comes to a court case, if the only proof you have is the From: line in an email, that is probably not going to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to look at how a Contributor License Agreement works, even though those are typically signed before a contribution is accepted into the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T14:25:03.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-18T18:15:11.747" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I take something which is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/01/ritchey-extra-permissive-license-v2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ritchey Extra Permissive License v2&lt;/a&gt;, and use the sub-licensing clause to distribute it under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zero-Clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18204" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T10:39:19.410" Title="Change license from Ritchey Extra Permissive License v2 to Zero-Clause BSD" Tags="|license-compatibility|relicensing|0bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="270" CreationDate="2020-05-18T22:21:14.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to make an open source project into a closed source project. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder can change the license of a project at any time, or cease to distribute source code of new releases. New releases can therefore be made closed source. Neither of these actions affect previous releases of the project which were distributed under open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the copyright holder wishes to affect previous releases, those releases must have been made under licenses which give the power to do so, such as licenses which are revocable, or expire (eg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/05/ritchey-2020-2030-permissive-license-v1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ritchey 2020-2030 Permissive License v1&lt;/a&gt;). Whether or not these licenses can be considered open source depends on your definition, but they appear to meet &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the definition put forth by the Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18210" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T22:21:14.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9812" CreationDate="2020-05-19T02:33:06.490" Score="-2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to publish a program that had been copied and UPDATED from GitHub on google play, let's say I had done this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I went to GitHub and Cloned a project into my Android Studio.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I updated the codes to fits my requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I uploaded the release to google play and publish it under my name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal? I see sometimes a file called License form Apache, does that mean publishing it is not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igrek51/android-songbook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/igrek51/android-songbook&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18213" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T10:01:33.903" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T10:01:33.903" Title="Use of open-source templates at GitHub, android studio templates" Tags="|github|open-source-definition|android|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2020-05-19T06:40:48.780" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes you can&lt;/strong&gt; (but with big caveats)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several licences that disallow commercial use of the software (or other intellectual property). Most notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC 3.0&lt;/a&gt; but please keep in mind that it's generally &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; recommended to use CC BY-NC 3.0 licence for software (you still can!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several problems associated with this kind of licensing though mainly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is a commercial use? Creative commons has this semi-covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&lt;/a&gt; but your interpretation may differ from mine. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It won't mix well with other software, specifically it'd be practically impossible to reuse that code outside of your project, or use it as a library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about for-profit universities? what about not-for-profit ones? (different from non-profit). In my opinion any university that charges its student should be excluded, but practically everyone else differs from this opinion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What about foundations that also provide commercial services to fund their charitable work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Practical solution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to reduce commercial use one of the more effective ways is to choose very strict licence like AGPL 3.0 and dual licence it with a commercial licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it does not strictly forbid the commercial use, it's strict virality and no &quot;over the network&quot; loopholes, make it toxic enough for most corporations to not touch it with a stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if some corporation does make use of it, they'll be required to share any improvements they make for it for free (with conditions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What exactly &quot;Open Source&quot; means differs depending on who you ask&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So take all answers with a grain of salt, some of the open source organizations recognize licences that restrict commercial use, most don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People often mix, misunderstand the meaning of the &quot;free software&quot; and &quot;open source&quot;. It doesn't help the fact that often those terms are used incorrectly on purpose (eg. by commercial vendors that want &quot;open source&quot; badge just because they published a source code), or the fact that initially Free Software was synonymous with Open Source, but then meanings slightly diverged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also does not help when open source/free software community often cannot agree what is what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6569" LastEditorUserId="6569" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T13:54:06.363" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T13:54:06.363" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9810" CreationDate="2020-05-19T08:31:38.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Steps 2 and 3 (modifying and republishing) are only legally allowed if you have permission to do so in the form of a copyright license that allows such actions. Without a copyright license, you are allowed to create a fork on GitHub (by means of GitHub's Terms of Service), but pretty much anything else is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright licenses come in many forms and besides how rigorous they are written, they vary in the permissions you get and the conditions under which you can use those permissions. Those permissions also may cover other intellectual property rights, such as patents, besides copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those permissions and conditions range from &quot;you can do whatever you want. You don't even need to preserve my copyright notices&quot; and &quot;you can do what you want as long as you preserve the existing copyright and license notices&quot; to &quot;any project you use this in must be available as open-source/free (libre) software&quot; and &quot;you must pay me to get a copy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license terms are often spelled out (in legal language) in a file called &lt;code&gt;License&lt;/code&gt; or something similar. Besides that, GitHub shows the name of license under which it is commonly known (next to the icon of the scales) and links to a page with more easy to understand information about the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source license are a class of licenses that always include the permission that you can make changes to the code and that you can redistribute those changes, sometimes with the condition that the result must remain under the same license.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Apache license that you refer to is a permissive open-source license. Its main requirement is that you make users of your app aware that it contains code under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T08:31:38.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9808" CreationDate="2020-05-19T10:39:19.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have already written &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;on the subject of relicensing&lt;/a&gt;; if you read the whole of that question you can see my answer reflects a viewpoint which is widely-, but far from universally-, held.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that viewpoint I don't see a problem with what you want to do.  In the first place, the Ritchey EPL v2 does not require you to convey either the code itself, or derivative works thereof, under that licence; this to my mind is all the permission you need.  But he goes further, as you point out, and explicitly permits &quot;&lt;em&gt;sub-licensing&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (whatever he means by that) &quot;&lt;em&gt;under terms which do not require further permissions from the owner than granted by this license&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which 0BSD does not.  If I were you, I'd just do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this Ritchey fellow &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/search/label/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has form&lt;/a&gt; when it comes to licence proliferation, and anything you can do to propagate a body of otherwise-usable code without the attached handicap of one of his superfluous crayon licences is a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T10:39:19.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9815" CreationDate="2020-05-19T13:28:34.937" Score="10" ViewCount="3543" Body="&lt;p&gt;A company sells a closed source software product - one that they actively also obfuscate - and market it as &quot;open and flexible&quot;. Similarly there is no public issue tracking and when major exploits are discovered they do not openly inform everyone either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When directly asked about this, they simply ignore the question. This seems like a rather misleading use of the word &quot;open&quot; as they don't seem to reflect any of the values of &quot;open source&quot;. But maybe I'm biased because I care too much about open source software and I'm expecting more than I should be from this company based on their marketing material. Is &quot;open software&quot; different from &quot;open source&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18218" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T15:08:41.060" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T15:08:41.060" Title="Is &quot;open software&quot; the same as &quot;open source&quot; software?" Tags="|open-source-definition|terminology|marketing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2020-05-19T14:34:17.953" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;open source&quot; has a broad base of speakers who use the term to refer strictly to software licensed under terms in compliance with the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unaware of any community of speakers that acknowledges a formal definition for &quot;open software.&quot; Broadly, &quot;open&quot; might indicate some ability to integrate with other systems (e.g., having an extensive API might be considered &quot;open&quot; by some speakers) or the ability to be inspected (but source visibility is only one fraction of the OSI's Open Source Definition). However, while &quot;open source&quot; as used above is a binary -- either some license/software meets the OSI's formal definition or not -- the adjective &quot;open&quot; as applied to software is a subjective determination. (&quot;How open is it?&quot; might be answered by &quot;Not very&quot;, &quot;somewhat&quot;, or &quot;sufficient for my needs&quot; to list a few possibilities.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hear someone talking about &quot;open source&quot; it may be worthwhile to confirm that they are using the term in the well-established OSI-prescribed sense of the term, since (like most language in general) not everyone uses the term in a uniform sense. On the other hand, if you hear someone talking about &quot;open software&quot; it is worthwhile to confirm what they mean at all, since there is no obvious single meaning to attach to the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T13:36:15.110" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T13:36:15.110" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2020-05-19T19:36:52.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard disclaimer: IANAL, as such this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case is actually not clear cut. In my opinion there are two different works here: the design of the template, and the code behind the design of the template. The code does not actually make it into the final output PDF, so the GPL is not actually relevant. The template is what makes it less clear cut. It may very well be that such a template is not creative/original enough to be copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can actually look at another program similar to LaTeX. Lilypond is a music typesetting problem, and its license is GPLv3 (plus a font exception for PDF embedding). Probably no sensible person would argue that the default style of lilypond output requires the output to be GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a valid question: what is the difference between &lt;code&gt;\documentclass&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;\usepackage&lt;/code&gt; and an &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statement in python, that would cause the latter to require GPL compliance? The difference is simple: &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; introduces a runtime dependency. No dependency is introduced when &lt;code&gt;\documentclass&lt;/code&gt; is used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I see that a lot of the arguments made relies on the architecture of LaTeX. I don't see how this matters - if you use work A to produce work B, whether B is a derivative work of A is a property of B itself, not the process used to produce B. The reason that architecture matters for GPL vs LGPL is that static linking vs dynamic linking produce different works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="17687" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T21:11:03.110" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T21:11:03.110" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-19T19:52:54.190" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please consider this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A company modifies a GPLed website &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; and adds a feature to accept plugin. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then develops a new feature as API service &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt; and publishes it separately. Service &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt; needs to have some information from main apps and can get them by receiving messages -or- fetching from identity database. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After that writes a plugin on website &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; to integrate it with service &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt; (for example by adding a widget and filling it by REST request to service &lt;strong&gt;Y&lt;/strong&gt;). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finaly runs website &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; as a website on own server and serves requests from the globes. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the GPL say they must release program X and plugin sources? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the GPL say they must release service Y sources? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Program A is a website and user can receive client side JS codes from browser. Does it mean &quot;distribution&quot; in GPL terms? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would happen if website X were published under AGPL? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18225" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T06:24:40.853" Title="Extending a GPL website by web service plugin" Tags="|gpl|distribution|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2020-05-19T21:50:00.677" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answer says, &quot;open software&quot; is not generally used as a synonym for &quot;open source software&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I heard a vendor describe their application as &quot;open and flexible&quot;, I would generally interpret that as meaning that it provides many hooks for customizing the behavior, but without actually making the source code available. As a result, you're limited to the customization points that they provide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is better than nothing, it's not nearly as good as being able to tailor the internal code of the application. The attitude &quot;We know better than you where you need to customize&quot; is antithetical to the open source mindset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8948" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T21:50:00.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-20T05:13:49.133" Score="38" ViewCount="8998" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think of open-source developers as people with a certain sense of social responsibility. In that regard, why would someone decide to contribute to Android? Why help Google make more money? How does the society benefit from such a contribution? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10469" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T15:45:01.880" Title="Why would anyone contribute to Android?" Tags="|android|software-development|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-20T05:48:20.717" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the core Android OS space, much of the free software effort is on alternative ROMs&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lineageos.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LineageOS&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://e.foundation/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;/e/&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://paranoidandroid.co/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paranoid Android&lt;/a&gt;, and the like.  Many of these projects have removing Google's control as a principal aim: right now, the very first line on /e/'s website says &quot;&lt;em&gt;WE’RE OPEN! You can still shop for our unGoogled smartphones here&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  Nearly all install without the Google-tied core apps by default; you can put them back, by installing one of the compilations thereof such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/MindTheGapps&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MindTheGapps&lt;/a&gt;, but there has to be a deliberate decision, by you, at ROM installation time, to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the application space, much application development goes on without Google, and many apps are distributed with strongly-free licences.  The classic repository of these is &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-Droid&lt;/a&gt;, but you can go straight to a project's website (by way of random example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://framagit.org/dystopia-project/simple-email&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simple Email&lt;/a&gt;) and get an APK built by the authors, or indeed just get the source and build it yourself, should you so wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is perfectly possible to run a phone using Google-free Android, and only free apps.  Indeed, I have used such a phone as my day-to-day handset for about a decade now.  I haven't paid Google a penny, and to the best of my knowledge it has neither view into nor control over what I'm doing on my handset, so I don't see how Google has received any benefit from any of the considerable free-software development effort that has got me to this point.  I don't know if you think such an outcome has social utility, but I certainly do, and I am very grateful to the hordes of free software developers on whose effort I rely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;ROM&lt;/em&gt;&quot; being Android-speak for &quot;&lt;em&gt;operating system&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T05:48:20.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9818" CreationDate="2020-05-20T06:24:40.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the GPL say they must release program X and plugin sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief, the GPL says that anyone who receives the binaries of X or derivative works of X must also receive the sources.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9438/458&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; deals with the issue of whether or not the plugin is a derivative work of X; other answers on this site also address the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the GPL say they must release service Y sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the plugin, it depends on whether service Y is so tightly-coupled to X that it becomes a derivative work thereof.  I personally don't think that a REST API constitutes tight coupling, but I could be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Program X [I assume you meant X] is a website and user can receive client side JS codes from browser. Does it mean &quot;distribution&quot; in GPL terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there is much settled work on the licensing of JavaScript code; certainly the question doesn't often seem to trouble web developers.  I have advocated an approach that treats code that the user neither asked for nor had foreknowledge of the delivery thereof in the same manner as unsolicited goods, which in England and Wales &lt;a href=&quot;https://consumerarbitration.co.uk/2018/11/01/unsolicited-goods-your-rights/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;become the property of the recipient&lt;/a&gt;, but such is not (yet) a widely-held point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear you would have an uphill battle convincing a court that receiving JS from the website meant you had received the entire binary of modified-X, and were now therefore entitled to a copy of the entire sources as per your q1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What would happen if website X were published under AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would expand the group of people entitled to receive the source code from &quot;&lt;em&gt;those who have received the binaries&lt;/em&gt;&quot; to &quot;&lt;em&gt;those who have received the binaries and those who have interacted with the work remotely via a computer network&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T06:24:40.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-20T08:56:43.233" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can one build a server that uses a cc by sa database for computation but does not respond with the       cc 4.0 without giving attribution or follwing the terms of cc 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T09:09:33.033" Title="Using cc-by-sa 4.0 in a server" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9823" CreationDate="2020-05-20T09:09:33.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: &lt;strong&gt;no, since you are redistributing the material, you need to give attribution&lt;/strong&gt;.  Both to the original database as well as to the content if it is under a &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you haven't modified the content under the license, then from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence text&lt;/a&gt; you need only to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;give appropriate credit&lt;/strong&gt;, provide a link to the license,&#xA;  and indicate if changes were made.&#xA;  You may do so in &lt;em&gt;any reasonable manner&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your&#xA;  use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; redistribute without giving appropriate credit, but &lt;em&gt;any reasonable manner&lt;/em&gt; can be interpreted quite leniently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that you both add the attribution in the API documentation, as well as strongly consider adding attribution notice in the actual API response, either in a &lt;code&gt;copyright&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18088" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T09:09:33.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-20T11:46:13.637" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: I haven't contributed to Android in any way, but I've been actively contributing to other open source projects.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why help Google make more money? How does the society benefit from such a contribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspect 1 of 2: The Contributors' Objective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be all kinds of idealistic goals to open source software development, such as promoting the thought of giving away knowledge, and the results of it, for free, so as to making those things available to anyone. Possibly also to break the power of walled garden ecosystems under the control of large corporations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I certainly am in favour of such goals, I feel that my personal, concrete motivation when I contribute to some project - the one that brings me to the keyboard, that makes me enthusiastic about coding and rejoice when I've completed a feature or task - is much more &quot;hands-on&quot; (and probably not at all unusual): &lt;strong&gt;I love creating something that is useful to several people and simplifies or improves their lives.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In fact, that is also my motivation to work in my paid-for, non-open-source-related day-to-day job.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based upon this rationale, it is easy to see how contributing to a widely used system can motivate people; whatever they create might pretty immediately benefit thousands of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aspect 2 of 2: The Underlying Assumption&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beside the above statements, I would like to point out that what I perceive as your implied assumption - the contribution benefits Google, so it doesn't benefit the society - is based upon a misconception. The mere fact that someone else gains something on the path from your contribution to the end users' benefit does not reduce the end users' benefit in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that we're doing the very same thing here, right now: We write questions and answers to help one another, while the company that runs the Stack Exchange Network makes some revenue. IMHO, &lt;em&gt;this is totally fine&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, it is well possible that contributors to Android see their work as a benefit to society &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; accept that helping Google make more money is a sufficiently unproblematic side-effect that occurs at the same time without diminishing the former goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: There are plenty of ways how this model can go wrong or be abused. A company who thrives on their users' content could hide that content behind a paywall, or change its business goals in such a way that the content is hardly of any use anymore for the people the platform was intended for. I'm merely saying that as long as these things do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; occur, there is nothing wrong with the model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="765" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T15:24:02.903" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T15:24:02.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-20T12:07:53.617" Score="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The external contributors to the Android codebase are not private hackers. &lt;strong&gt;They are companies with business models that depend on the support of the Android platform&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the email addresses of the contributors to &lt;a href=&quot;https://android-review.googlesource.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the official Android sourcecode repository&lt;/a&gt; you will see that the vast majority of contributors seem to be Google employees. But if you look further, you will occasionally see contributions from people working at companies like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Qualcom (makes hardware for Android phones)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jetbrains (makes development tools for Android)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ittiam Systems (Develops video formats which Android can play)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various companies surrounding the ARM ecosystem&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do all these companies have in common? They are providing hardware or software which has strategic interests in the Android ecosystem. They want their products to be able to work flawlessly in, on or with Android devices. So they are providing the sourcecode to the Android project which ensures that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This helps both Google and these companies. Google gets more features for their operating system and these companies get more happy end-users who use their products through the Android operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually a pattern which is anything but uncommon in the world of Open Source. The cliché of open source projects being developed by global teams of private volunteers driven by purely altruistic motivation is no longer true. Most of the large open source projects of today are mostly collaborations between large companies with aligning strategic interests. Even the Linux kernel is now mostly developed by companies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="2731" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T15:45:01.880" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T15:45:01.880" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2020-05-20T13:17:41.133" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_API&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;system&lt;/a&gt; in engineering predates the concept of open source by a few decades. The use and popularity of the concept in software development occurred roughly the same time as, if a bit earlier than, &lt;strong&gt;open source&lt;/strong&gt; - with the development and rise of Unix in the 1980s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open software is one that can be easily integrated with other software. An example of which is the SWIFT system for bank-to-bank transfer. All banks agree to how it should work and all banks can integrate with it. The fact that you need to pay SWIFT an annual fee to connect to their network does not make them closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of a closed system is the API banks develop for their own online banking portals - other banks cannot integrate with those APIs easily without working directly with the bank that owns the API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples of open systems include Adobe Photoshop (anyone can write plugins and scripts for it), Wordpress, the PCIe interface, USB and the MPEG4 media format. Some of which are open source, others are closed source, still others are patented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this usage, the concept of &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt; is well defined in industry. People who are new to programming or who didn't grow up in the 80s where almost everything is incompatible with each other may not be familiar with this use of the term &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt;. But throughout the history of computing the term &lt;strong&gt;open&lt;/strong&gt; has been used to promote interoperability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The are also systems, including software, that can be integrated but is not considered open. The main difference between the two is weather you need permission to integrate said system with yours. Payment is not an issue. If you are required to pay, for example to write apps for iOS, the system is still considered open. What is not open is if the owner of the system can refuse to allow you to integrate the system or integrate with the system or charge you a lot more to allow you to use their system compared to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastEditorUserId="1119" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T10:52:41.397" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T10:52:41.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2020-05-20T17:53:00.507" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but you can get close enough: you can prevent your Open Source project from getting included in a closed-source project (for example, by using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; license), and then offer a dual-license option for companies who don't want to release their own proprietary code as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySql&lt;/a&gt; follows this model, and has since before Oracle bought them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7224" LastEditorUserId="7224" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T18:10:52.563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T18:10:52.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-20T19:40:58.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, Android != Google. Yes, Android is maintained and mostly developed by Google, and a key factor in Google’s business plans, but it is still open in the sense that the community can take it, fork it and use it any way they like, which includes use cases which might go against Google’s interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think of open-source developers as people with a certain sense of social responsibility. In that regard, why would someone decide to contribute to Android?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have stated already, many contributors are major companies who themselves depend on Android for their own profit. If I were to nitpick, those with a sense of social responsibility develop free (as in free speech, not as in free beer) software, whereas those who develop open-source software believe that joining forces with other programmers solving a similar problem means more bang for fewer bucks for everyone involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why help Google make more money?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same could be said of anyone who contributes to the Linux kernel, or any of the many of widely-used libraries out there. Many of these are part of some company’s cash cow, and contributing to these projects might help a lot of companies make more money. (In particular, one of the products built upon the Linux kernel is Android.) So that is not exclusive to Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How does the society benefit from such a contribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as Google keeps Android an open-source project, they get an improved, feature-complete mobile operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I entered the smartphone world in 2010 with a Freerunner. After trying the factory-installed SHR as well as FDOM (both being mobile-adapted Linux distributions) and finding neither of them suitable for everyday use, I checked out Android and had a clear favorite at once. Three devices later, I am still with Android (now on LineageOS), without any of the Google apps. I benefit from the OS and the open-source ecosystem around it (most notably F-Droid), but the only time Google has made a profit from it was when I bought my old Nexus S (which I promptly reinstalled with Cyanogenmod).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, I asked a question a while back which approaches the Google vs. FOSS dilemma from the other side and which you might find interesting: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7909/why-is-android-frequently-taunted-as-evil-in-the-foss-community&quot;&gt;Why is Android frequently taunted as “evil” in the FOSS community?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3776" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T19:40:58.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-21T05:26:26.637" Score="6" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be against the GPL to publish a work (eg. a preamble) that has a dependency on both GPL and LPPL packages? The LPPL is not GPL compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I argue that the LPPL package is a system library? CTAN actually does specify a list of packages that are required, meaning every latex distribution should have them, so that package writers can require them. At the same time, one problem cannot argue every package on CTAN is a system library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the case is much less clear for packages specific XeTeX and LuaTeX. It's unclear when a package is core enough to be a system library, like fontspec or unicode-math. Is there a standard in the community for this kind of thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a followup question, wouldn't this issue result in GPL packages that cannot be modified and redistributed if they use a non-system-library LPPL package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't talk about the compiled output of the latex document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="17687" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T19:17:14.943" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T19:17:14.943" Title="Deriving from a GPL LaTeX package" Tags="|gpl|lppl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-21T11:35:35.467" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there's a bug in an Android comapatibility library. If you change the icon of a FloatingActionButton after it's been laid out (I wanted to animate it), the display doesn't update. I download the source, make the one-line code fix, and used the modified version in my sources. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, I can either file the bug report, and have the change show up in production source about 6 months later, or I can file the bug report with corrected sources atached, and have the changes show up in the next minor release, preferably before my product goes live. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source Android is an incredible blessing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18267" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T11:35:35.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9833" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-21T19:30:28.910" Score="1" ViewCount="1195" Body="&lt;p&gt;While libstdc++ (and GCC) is licensed under GPLv3 + GCC Runtime Library Exception, and glibc is under LGPLv2.1, the header files (see, for example, &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;memory&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;vector&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; for libstdc++-v3) contain additional licenses - for example from Hewlett Packard and SGI and some others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to distribute binaries (compiled for linux; and some object files) dynamically linked with libstdc++ and glibc. I'm not distributing copies of libstdc++ and glibc. Since the code is in C++ and header files contain a lot of templates (and because C's macros exist), I've chose to also add those additional licenses to the mix (in case the templated/macro code is covered by them and inlines).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to comply with the terms of the licenses, I've &quot;grepped&quot; all copyright notices from preprocessor output (gcc -C -E) and after a few scripts and a lot of manual checking I ended up with a file like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Third party copyright notices and licenses:&#xA;&amp;lt;Library name: libstdc++, GCC (build-ins and etc.), glibc&amp;gt;&#xA;(notice the difference in spelling and years)&#xA;Copyright (c) 1000-1100 Company name&#xA;Copyright (c) 1000-1100 Company name, Inc&#xA;Copyright (c) 1000 - 1100 Company name, Inc&#xA;Copyright (C) 1001-1102 Company name, Inc&#xA;Copyright (C) 1208 Company name, Inc.&#xA;Copyright (C) 1208 Company name, Inc. &amp;lt;an.email@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) 1208, 1209-1300 Company name, Inc.&#xA;Copyright (c) 1208, 1209, 1300 Company name Inc.&#xA;This library is available under the license GPLv3 with GCC Runtime Exception (see below).&#xA;In addition, some code is available under different licenses:&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) Invividual&#xA;Copyright (c) Invividual &amp;lt;email@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) Invividual Full Name &amp;lt;email@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;Text of the license&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;(repeated several times for different libraries, licenses and notices)&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;GPLv3 license text&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;GCC Runtime Exception license text&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;LGPLv2 license text&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;other named licenses&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that some licenses demand to put them in documentation separatedly, so I couldn't just grab the source code and distribute them with my binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process was rather cubersome and unintuitive, as I couldn't find any lists of &quot;add those copyright notices and licenses for this release of GCC/libstdc++/glibc and you are good to go&quot; in the manual or on the internet and had to write regular expressions and scripts myself. I'm still not sure if I've included everything, since I haven't checked the respective non-header source code (I assume that dynamic linking makes my life easier in this regard) and checked only the included files - not to mention that some copyright notices, theoretically, might have had a weird format. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if GCC's built-ins are linked statically (which means that I have to check libgcc's sources) or are separated in libgcc dynamic library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The binary distribution is a very common task, but to manually re-check every included standard header every time before release doesn't seem right. There has to be a better way and I'm not sure that my process is even correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Homework&lt;/strong&gt;: by googling I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ScanCode toolkit&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to automate the process for arbitrary third-party libraries. As for the license notice format, I'm staring at the &quot;Open Source Software Notice&quot; by Huawei (PDF of several megabytes, no link), which has the similar format of &quot;Software name -&gt; Copyright notices -&gt; License&quot;. Mozilla Firefox's &quot;about&quot; section also demonstrates something similar. It's just the lack of specific instructions on automating this common process for standard libraries makes me concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there has to be an automated tool (that can come with the compiler itself) for such a common task as compiling all used in the binary standard library's licenses? How do open-source projects that distribute binaries do this? I'm not experienced in open source - do they just use tools like ScanCode and simply don't talk about it, as it actually something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14277" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T07:27:20.840" Title="What licenses and copyright notices I should include with dynamically linked libstdc++ and how to do it properly?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9814" CreationDate="2020-05-21T19:45:08.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open&quot; and &quot;flexible&quot; are meaningless marketing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like saying that a breakfast cereal is &quot;natural&quot; or &quot;nutritious&quot;.  There are no standard definitions of &quot;natural&quot; or &quot;nutritious&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your hand can be described as &quot;open and flexible&quot;, but it's definitely not open-source.  (Technically, it can even be described as &quot;natural and nutritious&quot;, but let's not go there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, &quot;open&quot; just implies that software has accessible API's or is able to import/export to a variety of data formats.  But it doesn't even have to mean that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend completely ignoring such vague marketing terms, and questioning the motives and integrity of any company using such language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be considered open-source, the developer must publish the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; source code in a location accessible to all users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3426" LastEditorUserId="3426" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T12:02:39.337" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T12:02:39.337" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9837" CreationDate="2020-05-22T01:22:02.047" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got some code that is Open Source published under, GNU AFFERO GENERAL v3, my question is can I re-licenses to so something more strict with sharing? And what license could I change it to, to be more strict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18285" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T04:35:06.127" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T07:24:25.860" Title="Relicensing AGPLv3 content" Tags="|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9836" CreationDate="2020-05-22T04:40:59.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you may not.  If you were to change the licence, that would constitute a modification.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; is clear about modified versions; in s5 it says that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the AGPL is already regarded as one of the strictest free licences when it comes to sharing; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;elsewhere on this site&lt;/a&gt; you will find people arguing that the AGPL is so strict that some corporations refuse to allow employees to use any code so licensed.  I find myself wondering what kind of restrictions you were hoping to add, and yet still call your program free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T07:24:25.860" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T07:24:25.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9833" CreationDate="2020-05-22T07:27:20.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any lists of &quot;add those copyright notices and licenses for this release of GCC/libstdc++/glibc and you are good to go&quot; in the manual or on the internet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not surprising.  As you say, GCC is &lt;strong&gt;in its entirety&lt;/strong&gt; under GPLv3 with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC runtime library exception&lt;/a&gt;, and glibc is similarly under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;.  The former states in s1 that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have permission to propagate a work of Target Code formed by combining the Runtime Library with Independent Modules, even if such propagation would otherwise violate the terms of GPLv3, provided that all Target Code was generated by Eligible Compilation Processes. You may then convey such a combination under terms of your choice, consistent with the licensing of the Independent Modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the latter states in s6 that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;you may also combine or link a &quot;work that uses the Library&quot; with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, as long as you are not distributing any code from &lt;code&gt;glibc&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;libstdc++&lt;/code&gt;, which you say you are not, then you may do almost anything you like and still be licence-compliant.  LGPLv2.1 s6 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though in my experience this is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.  You will have additional requirements if you link statically against glibc, but you say you are not doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the likely reason why you can't find any simple &quot;do this and this&quot; lists is that there are nearly no obligations placed upon you when you act as you are acting.  You can license your program how you like (&quot;&lt;em&gt;terms of your choice&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), proprietary or free, and you can advertise and label it how you like.  Strictly, you should honour the labelling requirements of LGPLv2.1 s6 with respect to &lt;code&gt;glibc&lt;/code&gt;.  But that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T07:27:20.840" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9842" CreationDate="2020-05-22T09:42:45.610" Score="2" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a GPL project use proprietary resources (icons) as part of it? What I mean is that if it is possible that there is a repository covered by a GPL license that has a build script that downloads resources from another repo (and these resources are covered by non-OSS license - permission for private use without redistribution rights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There would be an official distribution (build) of software using icons with permission for private use without redistribution license, but one could build their own fork or build of software, but would have to use their own image resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a concept like this compatible with GPLv3 or would this not work out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that the software is rich with icons that I paid a designer to make and I would like to distribute the software in OSS means, but keep these icons in my ownership (and distribute my build with these icons only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know one needs to provide full build script and build instructions with GPLv3 software, so the question is if not offering icons would break this rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6777" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T10:48:27.067" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T21:06:00.037" Title="Proprietary resources in GPLv3 project" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|exceptions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9820" CreationDate="2020-05-22T09:50:27.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been contributing to various FLOSS projects over almost two decades now, and the dominant motivation for most if not all of my contributions wasn't some ideal of building a better future for the mankind. It was &lt;strong&gt;scratching my own itch&lt;/strong&gt;. I know this also applies to many other contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always starts with a bug in a tool that you're using, or with a missing tool that you really need, or a bug in the Linux kernel that affects your company or your customers. Most of the time, waiting for someone else to do the work isn't really practical (like, the boss wants that issue fixed ASAP). So you go ahead and fix the bug (or develop that tool).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, job done, right? Well, there are two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep that patch to yourself, have to apply it every time the software gets an update, keep distributing patched kernel versions to your customers. The rest of the world misses out, someone else will inevitably have to re-do the same work to fix it for themselves as well. But at least you don't support your competitors or Google.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Submit that patch upstream, release that tool. This may have the nice effect of taking a part of the maintenance burden off your shoulders. You just tell your customers to update to a particular kernel version. Also, you get the complimentary warm fuzzies for making the world a better place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the second option doesn't cost you much extra (if anything), I don't find it too surprising that many developers opt for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18291" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T09:50:27.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2020-05-22T10:24:13.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, such thing is possible - how exactly depends on a few conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole owner of copyright, you can do as you want anyway and you need to exercise little care on how you bundle and ship code and ressources (icons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is GPL-covered and other authors also have copyright, it is good and established practise to separate code and ressources so that they can - at least in theory - be distributed separately. Then it is easy to indicate that the source code for the programme falls under license X and the ressources are governed by another license Y, and both can be indicated easily inside the programme to the user and in a readme / license (possibly one for each).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD#14-installing-and-running-openttd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenTTD&lt;/a&gt; is an open source rewrite of the copyright-protected Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Users can use the original paid-for graphics, and the installer also allows to make the available to the game, if you point it to where they are found. Alternatively it allows to install free graphics; internally the graphics are treated as a required dependency where you have to choose one option during install in order to get the game going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T10:24:13.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2020-05-22T10:38:35.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There would be an official distribution (build) of software using icons with permission for private use without redistribution license, but one could build their own fork or build of software, but would have to use their own image resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is a concept like this compatible with GPLv3 or would this not work out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the icons and the software are most likely two independent works as far as copyright goes, this is compatible with the GPL, but I would still advise against a &quot;no redistribution allowed&quot; license on the icons, as it is too easy to accidentally infringe upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, suppose I download the official build of the software and then provide it to my friends as well. That is redistribution of both the software and the icons and would thus infringe upon the license of the icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative, I would use trademark protection on the icons. Redistribution with the original software would be allowed, but any other use of the icons (in a modified software or in a completely different context) would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T10:38:35.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8236" CreationDate="2020-05-22T12:42:41.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beside the good legality-oriented answer above, there is also another facet to the issue: &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; does someone want to buy your software, especially if a FOSS equivalent exists? This is not a simple question, and history shows that many projects that wanted to attract community by being open and having a value-added version that is closed and for sale, brought upon themselves frown from the community (&quot;are we your free lab rats?&quot;) quite vocally, not sure about the commercial side (they are usually under NDA and quiet, or otherwise not as socially active).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not really aware of projects that would provide as a FOSS or sold &quot;closed-source&quot; variant the exact same codebase, but this is logically just a first-step subset of having a closed commercial value-added product, or many such in case of customizations per customer's needs. Note that &quot;closed&quot; is not a requirement for &quot;commercial&quot; - based on your written agreement, the customer can effectively sponsor a feature they need and you still have it in the open. On the up-side, if their feature is exposed to the public and eventually someone improves it or fixes bugs, the original &quot;sponsors&quot; also benefit like anyone else in the community. Conversely, even if someone pays for development of their new tool, or buy/license the use of one you made earlier, they may have or not have access to its sources - it is all discussed in the contract you would have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings to the &quot;why buy?&quot; question. From what I've seen over the years, major reasons include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;indemnification - someone to blame in case of errors, others' copyrights and license violation claims, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;support the author - hoping for more goodies to come out of this source :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;support the client - a customer can not/does not want to burden themselves with builds and modifications of your open source codebase, it is just not their business. If something does not work or something they need is missing, it is your job (as a proven expert in the area) to make it happen. Often for an added premium, depending on the agreement, though some things can be part of the original sale (e.g. N-year warranty coming with the license, or right to upgrade to any release of same X major version while you iterate X.Y.Z, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;really private &quot;forks&quot; with customizations and features needed by this customer, and unknown to their competitors. Even if they did not actually change anything, with your or others' help, nobody really knows, adding to the &quot;muddiness in the water&quot; as a protective scheme from peering eyes (what do they use? where are they heading? is this a really used building block or something just bought to mislead &quot;spies&quot;?)...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there are quite a few projects out there licensed very permissively (e.g. with a MIT License, or BSD, or indeed one of Apache ones) so effectively anyone can do anything with the sources with few constraints (e.g. embed into their proprietary codebase and just mention that your work was used). Sometimes they are &quot;one-man shows&quot;, sometimes large industries like the Jenkins core and plugin community, or the *BSD and illumos OS ecosystems, which actively intend and help to give the code away for any use (or some extent thereof), and the people in community make money by consulting, maintaining, customizing, etc. for the willingly paying users. Or they are employed by such users. Or they make it for the fun of it in the afterhours and just want to see their work spread and be used (well... TBH &quot;seeing&quot; is not that easy when people don't even have to tell you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;forks&quot; of such projects are not required by license (like in GPL-licensed projects) to open the sources or commit back to upstream, this still happens actively in practice if only as a way to easily synchronize your fork from the upstreams eventually, have your changes revised by more experts, and maintained by someone else in the long run (non-regression as new features are added in upstream).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15038" LastEditorUserId="15038" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T09:34:13.733" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T09:34:13.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-22T14:09:06.177" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would uploading a file, a program, a script, etc. to an online storage service without sharing it, count as distributing the file to the online service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specific cases of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I backup a python script not intended for distribution in a private GitHub/GitLab/etc. repo, which imports a GPL library, do I have to comply with GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Normally, running a GPL web service is not distribution. However, what if the web service is running on a server like AWS, where you have to upload it first? Do you have to comply with the GPL for the upload?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that GPL compliance in source form is typically easy, but not complying with GPL would allow non-GPL-compatible dependencies. Also, I know it's probably impossible for anyone to actually know if the first case has occurred. I am only asking because GPL has termination conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="15010" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T12:23:36.563" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T12:23:36.563" Title="Uploading to online service and distribution" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8709" CreationDate="2020-05-23T01:02:34.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an ambiguous case for multiple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The downloaded font file contains this in its license field: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/fonts/license/productsans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.google.com/fonts/license/productsans&lt;/a&gt; ,&#xA;which tells you that it is not open source. So you have two contradictory statements about the license of the font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;All images and audio files (including ...)&quot; does not necessarily mean an inclusive list. It is technically possible, although unlikely to work, for someone to argue that a font is an image file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This may well depend on legislature and internal workings of Google, but the person who uploaded the repo may not have the right to give away to copyright, so the Apache 2.0 license on the font may be void.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T01:02:34.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T06:19:31.233" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is any license / paperwork need to build an open-source forum / community like stack overflow or like others Linux community site?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If needed then from where i can get license for my forum / community, at low cost or free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18307" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-23T07:43:09.017" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T07:43:37.673" Title="Is any license needed, to build an open-source forum / community?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|license-file|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-06-07T19:50:25.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9847" CreationDate="2020-05-23T07:23:31.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is any license / paperwork need to build an open-source forum / community like stack overflow or like others Linux community site ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether your project is code-oriented or community-oriented, you will need to decide on a licence.  Otherwise, the community won't know what rights it has to use your content, and people won't know what they're giving away when they contribute.  Both of these are a big discouragement to the formation of any kind of community.  Picking a licence, whether for content or for code, puts your answers to this front and centre, where people can see them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If needed then from where i can get license for my forum / community, at low cost or free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking to pick a free licence, either for code or content, there are a number of sites that can help you.  We can also help, but you will need to be &lt;strong&gt;much&lt;/strong&gt; more specific and tell us what kind of resource you're looking to license (code repository?  community forum?  clipart collection?), what sort of rights you want to give your users, and what you want to retain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no financial costs incurred by the act of using any kind of free licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-23T07:43:37.673" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T07:43:37.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9845" CreationDate="2020-05-23T11:18:20.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Would uploading a file, program, script, etc. to an online storage service, without sharing it, count as distributing the file to the online service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it depends on the terms and conditions of the remote storage service.  If the service itself acquires rights to use content you store on it, then yes, it is very possible this constitutes distribution.  But if they're simply providing you a safe repository wherein you store data, then it no more constitutes giving them a copy than putting your valuables in a safety deposit box constitutes giving them to the bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I backup a python script not intended for distribution in a private GitHub/GitLab/etc. repo, which imports a GPL library, do I have to comply with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't intend to read their terms and conditions; if you decide to use their private repositories, that's your job.  But assuming they don't acquire any rights over and above those needed to safely store a copy of your data and return it on demand, then by Q1 I don't think it does.  If they do acquire some rights, then we'd need to know what those are, at which time apsillers' excellent point may come into relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Normally, running a GPL web service is not distribution. However, what if the web service is run on a server like AWS, where you have to upload it first? Do you have to comply with the GPL for the upload?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd hold that AWS is rented space, like a safety deposit box, and thus Q1 still applies.  I've stored quite a lot of data on some fairly expensive AWS deployments over the years, and I've never heard the slightest suggestion that that data belonged to anyone other whomsoever owned it at the time of storage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make it available to anyone else from that storage, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; distribution definitely occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T06:27:28.717" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T06:27:28.717" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T20:54:22.270" Score="1" ViewCount="546" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a personal project (in C++) I've been working on that I'm thinking of putting on Git hub. I'm finding the question of picking an appropriate license quite daunting.  Part of the project is an editor which I think would work well with a GPL license, but the editor is driven by a set of core modules for rendering and layout which would by themselves work best under something like LGPL, since I can see other programs wanting to link to this library.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One drawback of using two different licenses is that I've effectively got two projects I'm developing at the same time that are tightly bound to each other.  This would make compiling trickier and also create problems if I ever decided something I initially put in the GPL project should be moved to the LGPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again, I could just put everything under a permissive license like MIT which would solve access issues (lots of developers won't touch GPL with a 10 foot pole), but would also mean that some third party could make their own closed fork of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate hearing any advice folks have on choosing a license.  The main aim of this project is to create a simple open source editor people can download and use for free, but also provide access to the rendering libraries so a third party apps can take a file the user created in my editor and  draw with the same rendering engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T07:38:29.510" Title="Can different parts of a project be under different licenses?" Tags="|gpl|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T22:58:19.340" Score="-1" ViewCount="3353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop a desktop Java application, deploy it as a jar file and sell it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What is the latest Oracle JDK version I can use to keep it free assuming I don't need further updates nor support and I will keep using this version for a couple of years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Should I stick with Oracle JDK-8u202?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Wht not Java 11?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I want maximum compatiblity. I don't want to target users with only JRE 11 installed and answer users' questions about application not working or Java updates. I just want it to work for everyone. JRE 8 is dominant with with over 60%, and 11 adoption is only about 25%. Even Minecraft still uses Java 8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18312" LastEditorUserId="18312" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T09:54:03.873" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T01:59:52.933" Title="What is the highest Java version I can use for free?" Tags="|licensing|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-24T02:07:43.877" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering utilizing a few GPL libraries in an application I'm working on, the source code for which I'd of course make available and would be subject to the GPL also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a critical part of this application would be a large collection of bundled assets -- text, images, and so on -- that I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to make available without purchasing the application commercially. And while the assets do not include anything like code, they do include things like icons that would be used as interface elements which I've purchased under a commercial license that is not GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where is the line drawn in terms of what is or is not part of the derived product? Are &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; text/images/icons/etc separate from the &quot;software&quot;, even if they're, say, built into the application package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18316" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T02:07:43.877" Title="GPL software, proprietary assets?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|assets|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-05-24T08:29:35.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9851" CreationDate="2020-05-24T07:38:29.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different parts of a project can definitely be under different licenses. This occurs already when you use a third-party library that has a different license than your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is even possible to have those differently licensed parts in a single repository, but then you have to clearly indicate which files/directories belong to which part and what license applies to them. This makes things a bit trickier license wise but not necessarily with regards to compiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to moving code from a GPL-licensed part to a LGPL-licensed part of the project, as long as the code in question was written entirely by you without contributions from others, you can freely take it out of the GPL code, change its license and put it into the LGPL code. That is a right you always have as copyright holder. If the code in question did receive contributions, all contributors/copyright holders must explicitly agree to the change in license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to use the LGPL for the entire project, including the editor itself. The main difference with a GPL editor and LGPL rendering and layout libraries is that this would allow the editor to be turned into a library and used in a larger, closed-source, application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One drawback of using two different licenses is that I've effectively got two projects I'm developing at the same time that are tightly bound to each other. This would make compiling trickier [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the fact you have two projects does not come from using two different licenses, but rather from the wish to make the rendering and layout libraries usable independent from the editor application. This is what adds the small complication to your build process that you can't dump all files in a single bucket but have to decide what belongs to which module/library. But if you want to be able to maintain your project long term, you should do that kind of code organization anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T07:38:29.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9856" CreationDate="2020-05-24T10:40:58.030" Score="6" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a company that uses opensource code licensed by GPLv2 and BSD, they have a page in their site that specifies a contact mail to request the opensource code and a list of the used open source projects and their licenses; I've tried several times to request the source code by email to multiple email addresses of the company without success, they seem to be ignoring the request. What is their obligation about providing the opensource code in this situation? What law can help in this situation? What can I do in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18318" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T18:41:01.090" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T18:41:01.090" Title="Opensource software company and license obligation" Tags="|gpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9855" CreationDate="2020-05-24T13:14:18.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a legally obtained copy of some software that is under the GPL license, then you have a right to obtain the source code for that software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in most cases you don't have any legal means to enforce that right yourself. If the company is not honoring their obligations under the GPL license, then only the copyright holder can take legal action against the company for violating the copyright license and thus infringing on the rights of the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know which portions of the software were provided to the company under the GPL license, you can inform the owners of those projects about the violation of their copyrights so that they can take appropriate action.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Apart from that, the only thing you can do is nicely ask the company for the source code or an explanation why they believe they don't have to give it to you. But if your earlier requests yielded nothing, don't expect too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T13:14:18.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-24T19:21:16.160" Score="9" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a project I've posted on Github and after having it online for a month, I get an email or pull request from someone recommending a small change (For example, they say that on line 123 of file Foo.cpp I should change &lt;code&gt;a = b + c;&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;a = b - c;&lt;/code&gt;).  I review this code and realize that they are correct.  However, I'm also wary about accepting contributors since every new contributor expands the number of license holders to my code and who I may have to contact if I need to change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my obligations in dealing with this fix?  The change is so small, there is really only one way to do it.  Since it has been brought to my attention, I can't really claim it is my idea, and yet this is something I would likely have eventually discovered and fixed.  Do licensing restrictions require me to credit this?  Do I have to completely rewrite this bit of code with a new algorithm just to avoid adding a new license holder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13386" LastEditorUserId="15010" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T18:56:42.787" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T22:04:49.157" Title="Do I have to credit small changes to my source?" Tags="|restrictions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9852" CreationDate="2020-05-25T01:59:52.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no limitation on the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) you can use for free in commercial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've misunderstood how Java is licensed: First of all, Java is more like a specification than a piece of software. Oracle publishes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java specification&lt;/a&gt; which defines how the language and runtime work, and anyone can implement the specification by writing their own Java Development Kit or Java Runtime Environment. (I'm not sure of any off the freedoms, either &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; to write your own JDK or JRE - The specification license isn't clear on that point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oracle provides two implementations. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-downloads.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle JDK&lt;/a&gt; which is closed source, but still free as in &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;. They also provide the open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; which is some variation of free as in &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have to pay anything to write software in the Java language, or which runs on a Java Runtime Environment - Appendix A of the Java specification details that point. Your customers can also acquire a copy of a JRE at no cost from various sources: I believe the OpenJDK is GLPv2, so you could include a copy of OpenJDK with your software provided you also included the OpenJDK source code. Your application and the Java implementation are separate pieces of software, so my understanding is the GPL from the OpenJDK would not effect your ability to commercially license your application which runs on the java implimentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, a common solution is to have your installer get your customer to agree to a JRE (Oracle, OpenJDK, dosn't matter...) license when you install your software, and then have your installer automatically download and install download the JRE from the official distributor. This way you aren't &quot;shipping&quot; the software you don't have the license to distribute, but still ensuring the user acquires it when they need it to run your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18328" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T01:59:52.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9857" CreationDate="2020-05-25T02:19:46.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends how your repository is run... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some repositories the person submitting a fix (or even large features) is implicitly or explicitly transferring the copyright of the code the the repository owner - Typically this would be in the contributing guidelines or pull request template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases the copyright is held collectively by all the contributors to the project with something like &lt;code&gt;Copyright The MyAwsomeProject Contributors, 2020.&lt;/code&gt; and then the repository owner/administrators/senior collaborators decide the licensing, hopefully with consultation with all active developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, some projects include a separate authors list as a kind of acknowledgement of contributions, independent of legal copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience there's a general understanding that contributing code to open source projects is assigning the open source project the rights to the code, although if there's any doubt, just ask your contributor to state in the pull request that he's assigning the copyright to your or your project, as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18328" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T02:19:46.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9857" CreationDate="2020-05-25T06:16:07.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My esteemed colleague has written that &quot;&lt;em&gt;there's a general understanding that contributing code to open source projects is assigning the open source project the rights to the code&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, the problem with general understandings is that they're not universal, and it's the people that don't share them that can cause the trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(S)he has also suggested that the pull request template or the contributor guidelines are good places to put a Copyright Transfer Agreement (or, presumably, a Contributor Licensing Agreement).  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1874/458&quot;&gt;We have examined&lt;/a&gt; the issue of clickwrap CTAs/CLAs before; they are not problem-free, as some jurisdictions remain really quite unsure about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own feeling is that the analysis should go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is the contribution copyrightable?&lt;/em&gt;  I'd argue that, in the above case, it is, because it embodies considerable insight and makes the program go from less-well-working to more-well-working.  One could, however, argue that this change came in the only form it could: there may not be any other ways in this language to easily express the idea that &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; should be getting smaller by the amount of &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt;, and such absence would argue against the copyrightability of that contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you want the right to relicense the entire project?&lt;/em&gt;  If so, then get GPG keys and GPG-signed agreements from contributors before examining or accepting their contributions.  Note that there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/714524/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anecdotal evidence&lt;/a&gt; (though it's from a &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt; project) that CTAs are a major turn-off for contributors.  You could do what you want with a mere CLA that gives you the right to relicense the code, but even CLAs are an impediment to contribution (see same article; full disclosure, I wrote the article).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So think hard about what you're doing here, and why.  If you don't have any real intention to relicense, it might be good to shrug and rule it out, or you might pick a weak free licence such as MIT for your project, which would place little impediment on the path to productisation.  If you're sure you want this right, then be clear about it to your contributors, and ensure they signify assent before you even &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; at what they submit; you may well find, though, that such a decision ensures that the annoying problem of having contributors simply goes away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T08:38:31.690" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T08:38:31.690" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9857" CreationDate="2020-05-25T16:41:49.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The example you gave is very unlikely to be copyrightable. Copyright covers expression of ideas, not ideas themselves. However it would be courteous to put a thank you somewhere (eg. in the git commit message).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of contributions in general, this will largely depend of several factors. The norm in open source is that the inbound license = the outbound license. However, this is more of a community standard rather than a legal stance (I don't think this implied license has been challenged in court). If you are hosting on GitHub, the GitHub ToS states that inbound = outbound is the explicit default. If you are hosting on BitBucket, the ToS requires you to specify an inbound license. I did not find anything in GitLab ToS, so you will need a CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional point of consideration is the requirement to maintain copyright line in many licenses. If the contributor adds a copyright line, you need to store it somewhere. It is unclear what happens if the contributor does not specify a copyright line whatsoever. It would be preferable to leave copyright lines in the project root, so that users of your project do not have to search the source files to comply with the license when searching for a binary. Alternatively, your CLA can specify that you require contributors to agree that the copyright line &amp;quot;(c) xxx and contributors, xxxx&amp;quot; is sufficient, or that they waive the requirement to retain the copyright line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just became aware that there are certain licenses that specify an inbound license. This should be a viable option as well. Such an example is the BSD-3-Clause-LBNL license, which states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any bug fixes,&#xA;patches, or upgrades to the features, functionality or performance of&#xA;the source code (&amp;quot;Enhancements&amp;quot;) to anyone; however, if you choose to&#xA;make your Enhancements available either publicly, or directly to&#xA;Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, without imposing a separate&#xA;written license agreement for such Enhancements, then you hereby grant&#xA;the following license: a non-exclusive, royalty-free perpetual license&#xA;to install, use, modify, prepare derivative works, incorporate into&#xA;other computer software, distribute, and sublicense such Enhancements&#xA;or derivative works thereof, in binary and source code form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This effectively asks for a public domain dedication from contributors.&#xA;Of course, you should change the reference to &amp;quot;Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory&amp;quot; to something more sensible to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="17687" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T22:04:49.157" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T22:04:49.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8604" CreationDate="2020-05-25T17:40:33.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few solutions: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt is released under both a commercial license and the LGPL.  Many companies find the LGPL license too contaminating (must release derivative works, no static-linking, must provide sources if distributing binaries, yada, yada, yada) so they pay significant amounts to Qt to have a commercial license instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to release with a free license, and go with the &quot;support&quot; scheme.  Allowing users to buy development of features and buy prioritization of bug fixes.  Maybe they can also purchase installation and configuration support. This makes your support of the software the product, instead of the software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your &quot;license key&quot; suggestion is possible, it sounds more like freeware than FOSS.  If you did release the source code, it wouldn't be hard to remove the locks.  FOSS usually doesn't have piracy protections other than the license text itself.  That's generally because you can't really pirate FOSS if the license grants a right to re-distribute.  The closest thing to a pirated copy would be a re-distribution of binaries without source code.  A user who gets a binary without source code, would be encouraged to report the violation to the copyright holder (you), and you would be entitled to pursue the re-distributor for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18333" LastEditorUserId="18333" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T17:55:46.743" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T17:55:46.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9863" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9893" CreationDate="2020-05-25T19:31:22.437" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like the GPL.  I like that it keeps FOSS free and open.  I like that if my software is re-distributed, users know where to file bug reports, buy feature requests, and know where it came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corporations who develop proprietary software often loathe the GPL because of its &quot;contaminating&quot; nature.  They may have legitimate and necessary reasons to keep their software proprietary (export control, data license agreements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a simulation engine and development framework.  I anticipate corporations to use my software and architecture to develop and run dynamically loaded proprietary models.  I need a license which:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Preserves the FOSS nature of my application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explicitly allows development using my application framework (static, or dynamic linking against my -dev libraries) in proprietary models.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I release the development libraries under MIT and the application under GPL?  Any incompatibilities? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to argue that extensions are &quot;covered works&quot;, or &quot;works based on the program&quot;, so if any ambiguities exist, my application will be less attractive.  Is it reasonable to release my own version of the GPL with an alternative definition of &quot;covered works&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18333" LastEditorUserId="98" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T00:37:24.343" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T10:00:59.013" Title="A license to protect the core, but allow proprietary extensions" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9865" CreationDate="2020-05-26T11:00:24.620" Score="6" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an R package and distribute it under the GPL-2 license by submitting it to CRAN. According to CRAN's &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-exts.html#Licensing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writing R extensions&lt;/a&gt;, i am the author and maintainer of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The R package implements an algorithm which is published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. I am not the author of the paper and have no affiliation with the authors or the publisher Taylor &amp;amp; Francis group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is the copyright holder i should add in the DESCRIPTION file of the R package?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the term 'copyright holder' refer to the person who invented the algorithm and/or the person who wrote the R source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18338" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T17:27:08.770" Title="Copyright holder in R packages" Tags="|license-recommendation|copyright|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9864" CreationDate="2020-05-26T11:32:47.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the copyright in what you've written covers the creative aspect of what you've written, but not the idea(s) therein expressed.  If the code is entirely your own work, then as far as copyright is concerned, you are the sole rightsholder therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T11:32:47.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9867" CreationDate="2020-05-26T12:51:13.030" Score="41" ViewCount="3871" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked a repository a year ago, which at the time had GPLv3 license. Mainstream repository has now applied AGPLv3 license. Do I have to change my license too ? My fork's last commit is over a year ago (GPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18339" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T13:06:20.010" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T15:39:13.070" Title="Do I have to change license of fork if mainstream changes license?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9866" CreationDate="2020-05-26T12:58:07.197" Score="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only are you not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to change the licence, you are not &lt;em&gt;permitted&lt;/em&gt; to.  The code you took at the time was, according to you, conveyed under GPLv3.  You've worked on it, and made a derivative work (in copyright terms), which you can only lawfully distribute under GPLv3 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that now upstream have relicensed, you cannot trivially take ongoing contributions to their project and work them into your own (I'm not suggesting that you were doing this; only noting that hitherto you were permitted to do so, and the situation is now more complex).  As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#AGPLv3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF explain&lt;/a&gt;, it is possible to combine work under AGPLv3 with work under GPLv3, but the accounting gets a bit messy.  As long as you don't wish to do that and are happy to stay under GPLv3, you are fine to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should you wish to relicense your fork, you could rebase your fork against the current upstream project; essentially, you could take their current offering, and re-apply the changes you had made.  At that point you'd have a derivative of a work received under AGPLv3, which by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c you can only redistribute under AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a rebasing would be further complicated if anyone other than you has contributed to your fork.  You have no right to distribute their work under any terms other than GPLv3, so you would need to seek their permission to relicense their contributions under AGPLv3.  If this is the case, and you go this route, make very sure to keep safe copies of the permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T15:05:16.027" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T15:05:16.027" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-26T20:22:48.000" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I get some code off of the public domain, and I make major changes, can I re-license it and put my copyright on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18285" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T09:33:35.817" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T09:33:35.817" Title="Credit for re-used public domain code?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9857" CreationDate="2020-05-26T22:50:40.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is regulated in the ToS of GitHub, Section D, §6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. Contributions Under Repository License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isn't this just how it works already? Yep. This is widely accepted as the norm in the open-source community; it's commonly referred to by the shorthand &quot;inbound=outbound&quot;. We're just making it explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So unless you have another contributor license agreement that contributors agree to, this part of the ToS applies and that means their contributions are under the same license as your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can not relicense your repo anymore without the consent of all contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9413" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T22:50:40.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9868" CreationDate="2020-05-27T00:54:32.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. If something is truly public domain, then there is no copyright it at all. Note that only your changes are under the new copyright, not the original public domain code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it sounds like you might have found code that is posted with no license. If this occurs, technically the default copyright is &quot;all rights reserved&quot;. In that case you should ask the author to specify a license. I actually had to do this earlier today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional caveat: since any source code you find is probably less than 70 years old, you should still ask the author to use a public domain equivalent license, because there are some weird legal issues in Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T00:54:32.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-27T02:39:29.147" Score="28" ViewCount="7707" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are there issues with public domain in Europe, that forces public domain projects to use CC0, 0BSD, Unlicense or other similar licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.E. why is it that, when someone dedicates a work to the public domain, someone in Europe can still get into trouble for using it? Isn't the copyright holder the only person that can sue? Or is there some other law in Europe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T12:59:43.647" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T12:59:43.647" Title="Why is there no public domain licensing in Europe?" Tags="|public-domain|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9871" CreationDate="2020-05-27T06:10:54.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's actually very simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;public domain&quot; is not a legal term, it's strictly US-specific. So it bears no meaning legally &lt;em&gt;outside US&lt;/em&gt;. (So in reality US is special here, not &quot;the rest of the world&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You cannot give up authorship nor copyright. If you want to concede rights for everyone to use your work in perpetuity, use words (a license) which does bear legal meaning - so that they can rely on the words of the license to hold up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, of course you, as author, can write &quot;I put it under public domain&quot;. And no-one will be in trouble, if you don't go to court as author. But due to the circumstance that it is not a legally - defined term you can come at any later time and still sue for infringement. That's why people insist on a license to make clear that work can be used under a CC-0 license or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T06:10:54.120" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9871" CreationDate="2020-05-27T06:42:52.407" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to my colleague planetmaker, &lt;em&gt;public domain&lt;/em&gt; is not a US-specific concept.  It dates back to the first copyright law in the world, Britain's 1710 Statute of Anne, where it was referred to as &lt;em&gt;publici juris&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;&lt;em&gt;of public right&lt;/em&gt;&quot;).  French jurists further developed the idea and we see the term &quot;fall into the public domain&quot; entering the discussion in mid-19th Century France, to refer to the fate of a creative work after all the time-limited rights reserved to the creator expire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem to which I think the OP is referring is that of &lt;strong&gt;moral rights&lt;/strong&gt;.  Some implementations of copyright law recognise more controlled rights than the economic right - the right to exploit the commercial potential of one's creation.  In particular, many jurisdictions recognise the creator's moral rights - the right to be attributed as the creator of the work, and the right to the integrity of one's work (that is, the right not to be attributed as the creator of modifications of one's work of which one does not approve).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is further compounded because in some jurisdictions, primarily civil law ones, the author's moral rights are inalienable.  That is, the author &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; lawfully give up those rights, however much (s)he wants to.  France and Italy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#Table&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;are examples&lt;/a&gt; of such jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those jurisdictions, if an author says &quot;&lt;em&gt;I have no interest in this work, do as you please with it&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, you cannot know that (s)he intended to waive his/her moral rights.  The author might know full well that those rights are inalienable, and intended only that others should have the right to profit from his/her creation.  (S)he might well turn out to be very annoyed if an &quot;unsuitable&quot; adaptation appeared, and his/her name was associated with it without even a by-your-leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this risk isn't huge.  I don't think I've ever heard of it happening in respect of a work where the creator had abandoned his/her economic rights.  Secondly, if it does, then it seems to me that changing the name of the project and removing all references to the original author will likely suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for those seeking clarity, licences like &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; are specifically intended to implement a simple method of putting a work into the public domain &lt;em&gt;in so far as is legally possible in any given jurisdiction&lt;/em&gt;.  As Creative Commons note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a licence like this makes it clear that you, the creator, are relinquishing all legally-relinquishable control of your work, and would like to go the whole way if you were permitted.  Anyone who chooses to use your work can then decide for him/herself what sort of jurisdiction (s)he's in, and respect moral rights if that's what the local jurisdiction requires.  Anyone using that adaptation can know that the original author intended this to be possible, and is therefore particularly unlikely to start filing suit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; in response to OP's additional questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen several people say that certain jurisdictions do not recognize the right to waive copyright and/or moral rights. But who can enforce that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody has to enforce it.  In those jurisdictions, the author simply can't waive those rights, however much (s)he wants to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can someone other than the author sue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will be jurisdictionally-dependent, and is beyond the scope of this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can the author act in bad faith claiming that the public domain dedication is legally unenforcable even though the intention is clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No bad faith is required.  In such jurisdictions the moral rights aspect of the public-domain dedication is indeed invalid, however clearly the intention is expressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The utility of CC0 (and similar licences) is to clarify that the author intended to waive even the moral rights wherever possible, and is thus &lt;em&gt;unlikely&lt;/em&gt; to sue in those jurisdictions where (s)he retains them.  One could argue under the doctrine of &lt;em&gt;promissory estoppel&lt;/em&gt; that an undertaking had been given not to enforce those rights, even though they couldn't be waived, and this might well provide a defence if a creator were ever to sue.  Failing that, the mitigation measures I outline above aren't exactly painful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T12:50:24.320" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T12:50:24.320" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9875" CreationDate="2020-05-27T10:36:10.003" Score="3" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;From 2001 thru 2019, a company &quot;A&quot; that I own and I am the CEO of with HQ in EU, had a commercial software product for sale on the international market.&#xA;We issued perpetual per-site licences to what are mainly large industry clients all over the world, prices depending on client size and modules used, ranging from roughly USD 5,000 up to USD 500,000 to pay once, and made a living off that, and from maintenance contracts which were yearly ~17% of the licence price, plus the occasional bespoke add-on project from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then a partner from another EU country &quot;B&quot; ripped me off, conned me, took advantage of me, did me up like a kipper. Formally I am still owner and CEO, but they managed to seize the company and deprive me of my estate. We had an escrow contract which would allow &quot;B&quot; to obtain the source code of said product for EUR 200,000 but only in case &quot;A&quot; went out of business, which it didn't. Some lawsuits are in preparation, some are ongoing already. I have seen not a cent so far. They continue to sell my product as their own now, and keep the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My lawyers support the view that I am the de facto owner of &quot;A&quot; still, and &quot;B&quot; might have committed punishable offences in the process. Also, I am personally the developer and author of &gt; 90 % of said source code. The rest was written by my &quot;A&quot; employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to publish the complete source code along with documentation and build instructions on github. The intent is to give it away for free, render it worthless for &quot;B&quot;, enable existing customers to terminate the contract with the &quot;B&quot; company (so they wish), and offer them, as well as prospective new customers my services for additional development, maintenance and support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which license model should I select, to best match this intent?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What do I write to document the transition from closed source to open source?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't ask for legal advice regarding the status of my company ownership or overall legal strategy, details of which I mentioned for context. Let's focus just on the licensing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17829" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T10:57:36.050" Title="Which licence do I choose, publishing a previously closed-source product?" Tags="|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9874" CreationDate="2020-05-27T10:57:36.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I plan to publish the complete source code along with documentation and build instructions on github. The intent is to give it away for free [...] and offer [existing users] as well as prospective new customers my services for additional development, maintenance and support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which license model should I select, to best match this intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any free licence will work with that model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you were to release under (say) a permissive free licence such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt;, other people (and here I specifically mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;Company B&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) could take the improvements you publish and incorporate them back into their closed codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you don't want that to happen, then if you were to publish under a strong copyleft licence, say &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, others could only incorporate those changes if they opened up their entire codebase to their customers.  GPLv3 ss 5c, 6 require that modified works (and the entire codebase becomes a modified version of your patch, once they incorporate it) be available, in full source code form under GPLv3, to anyone who has a copy of the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't, however, deal with SaaS customers.  For maximum protection from closed-source competitors absorbing your improvements, consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.  This functions similarly to GPLv3 but extends the right to receive AGPLv3-licensed source to people who interact with the work over a computer network.  It seems to me that licensing under AGPLv3 will prevent your competitor from incorporating any of your changes into their offering, whether provided on-premises or as SaaS, unless they are willing to open their own product up as you intend to open yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, IANAL/IANYL.  You should take specialist legal advice from someone who understands free software licensing before you bet a company on this strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T10:57:36.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9882" CreationDate="2020-05-27T09:06:23.813" Score="5" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a proprietary project. My colleague used - by mistake - GPLv3 library (copying it's source code and building along with it). The fact was discovered pretty early (before any release happened), and he replaced it by library with more permissive licence, however, the development process does not allow rebasing - the fact that given library was used is in git history probably forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that pose an issue? Did the single component already &quot;poisoned&quot; the code, and do we need to remove all traces of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was used in a tool, where it is possible it could be made public with source codes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18355" OwnerDisplayName="nothrow" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T15:09:27.503" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T17:50:35.973" Title="Does GPL library in git history impose GPL requirements even after its removal?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:23:45.403" Score="4" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a closed source module (&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;) in odoo that it working fine without depending on anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to add an AGPL module(&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;) and integrate it with the module (&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am planning to create another module(&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;) that does the integration between &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the module (&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;) should have an AGPL license. However what about module (&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can an AGPL code depend on closed source code giving that it doesn't work without it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case, do I have to distribute the source code of module A giving that module C doesn't work without it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Clarification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A and B will not share anything However to simplify we can say that module C will create a class with multi-inheritance that will inherit a class from A and another from B. (I can do this using dynamic linking if static linking is a problem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18352" LastEditorUserId="18352" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T14:49:49.933" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T14:49:49.933" Title="Can AGPL code depends on closed source code" Tags="|agpl-3.0|law|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9877" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:34:29.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (A)GPL requires that the entire program can be distributed under the terms of the (A)GPL. Thus, it doesn't matter whether the proprietary parts and the (A)GPL parts touch each other directly. Introducing a component C that tries to isolate them changes nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two workarounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the components A and B are clearly separate programs, the (A)GPL has no effect on the other program. You're also allowed to distribute (A)GPL and proprietary programs together, as long as you otherwise comply with the license and clearly keep them separate. Introducing a component C to manage the communication between these programs could be sensible, and the (A)GPL side would need an (A)GPL compatible license such as MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holders of the (A)GPL covered software can issue a license exception. If you are the copyright holder, you can just do what you want. But if you want to use other people's software, you have to ask them. It is often extremely difficult to retroactively add a GPL exception because all contributors would have to agree. The LGPLv3 is an example of a license exception to the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T14:34:29.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9871" CreationDate="2020-05-27T15:27:46.757" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will give an example specifically for the jurisdiction that I am most familiar with, which is Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germany doesn't have &quot;copyright&quot;. We have &quot;Urheberrecht&quot; (literally translated &quot;Originator's Right&quot; or &quot;Creator's Right&quot;, but usually translated as &quot;Author's Right&quot;). In German Author's Right, there is a notion of the &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; being somehow a &quot;brain child&quot; of the author. There is a connection between the author and their work that goes beyond any form of commercial interest, that is almost metaphysical. (In German literature, this is called the &quot;Band&quot; (roughly &quot;bond&quot;) between a creator and his work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also the reason why it is simply impossible for corporations to be authors and thus hold Author's Rights, whereas it is completely normal for corporations in the US to be copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Urheberrecht is split into two distinct subgroups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Persönlichkeitsrechte (literally &quot;Personal Rights&quot;, but usually called &quot;Moral Rights&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Verwertungsrechte (&quot;Exploitation Rights&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Moral Rights, in particular, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Full Control over &lt;em&gt;publication&lt;/em&gt;. The author has full control over if, when, and how the work is published. This includes not publishing it at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recognition&lt;/em&gt;: The author has the exclusive right to control if and how their name is attached to the work, and which name to use (the real name, a pen name, a pseudonym, &quot;anonymous&quot;). Conversely, the author also has the right to have their name removed from a work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work must not be &quot;defaced&quot;, and this is interpreted somewhat broadly. The starting assumption is that the work, as created by the creator, is the perfect version of itself, and even an &quot;improvement&quot; is actually worsening it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These Moral Rights cannot be transferred and cannot be given up. (Remember the &quot;bond&quot; between an author and their works.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the reason why you cannot &quot;put a work in the Public Domain&quot; in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also limitations on the &quot;Exploitation Rights&quot; (which correspond more closely to e.g. the US idea of copyrights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a landmark case a while ago (I unfortunately don't remember the name, it was a case at the Bundesgerichtshof and it must have been before 2000) that restricted the rights that an author can sign away. Roughly, journals and magazines started to create digital archives with search engines, and sold these archives or access to them. (Seems obvious to us now, but wasn't nearly so in the 1980s.) Journalists typically had contracts with the magazines / journals stating that all exploitation rights for works created in the employ of the magazine belong to the magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The court found that, even though the journalists had signed away &quot;all rights&quot;, that actually &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; meant &quot;rights for usage that commonly existed at the time the contract was signed&quot;. Since the lawsuit was about creating archives of old content, the court found that, e.g. for articles written in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the right to use the articles as part of an electronic database was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; included, even though the journalists had &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; signed away &quot;all rights&quot;. The court argued that, since this kind of usage did not exist before, you couldn't have willingly agreed to give up your rights to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;even if&lt;/em&gt; you interpret &quot;Public Domain&quot; as &quot;signing away all exploitation rights&quot;, that *still doesn't work in Germany&quot;, because &quot;all&quot; doesn't actually mean &quot;all&quot;, it means &quot;all, as far as we know today&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T15:27:46.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9880" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9887" CreationDate="2020-05-27T15:44:39.387" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if the distinction between free and open source software makes a difference for this question, so I'll use the term FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a FOSS platform make API calls to proprietary systems, such as Wolfram Alpha?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10469" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T05:17:23.920" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T11:15:30.753" Title="Can FOSS software make API calls to proprietary systems?" Tags="|license-compatibility|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2020-05-27T16:12:05.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practical impact is that the Git repository is tainted. If you want to distribute the whole history, including the commits containing GPLv3 code, then (by copyright law) you need permission, and (by GPLv3) you can only get that permission by licensing the whole as GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no impact if you distribute a current binary. Under copyright law, that is not a derivative work of your Git repository as a whole. Therefore, you don't need permission of the authors of a library that's not included in the binary. That obviously also means it doesn't matter under which terms they might grant that unnecessary permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T16:12:05.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9876" CreationDate="2020-05-27T17:50:35.973" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a settled matter, but I think that having a GPL-licensed library in your history is not going to be a big problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not taint or infect other code, in the sense that it would force that other code to be GPL ever after. Instead, it merely requires that when you distribute a program that includes GPL components, that you also offer the corresponding source of the entire program under the GPL. Other components don't actually have to use the GPL license, but could use any compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a program includes both GPL components and GPL-incompatible components (such as proprietary software) then the only legal consequence is that the program cannot be distributed at all. For example, purely internal use of such undistributable software is perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can therefore say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;current version&lt;/em&gt; of your software is definitely not subject to the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;at most, the versions that included the GPL component could be subject to the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in any case, it's probably a good idea to prevent internal Git history from becoming public, ever, even if you want to open-source a later version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the past versions could be subject to the GPL, if they are ever distributed, depends on how the GPL component was used. A Git repository is not necessarily a single program but will generally be an aggregate of multiple works. In such an aggregate, GPL-covered programs could live alongside non-GPL programs without affecting each other. However, if the GPL component was a library, then your proprietary software might have been a work based on the GPL component during those versions, and would be subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to publish the source code of your proprietary tool, it's probably a good idea to either push through a one-time history rewrite to remove any doubt about possible GPL influence, or to start a new repository with a snapshot from your current state. Publishing internal history is usually a bad idea, independently from licensing concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T17:50:35.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9884" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:59:08.860" Score="3" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created an library (A) that uses several other GPL v2 or v3 licensed libraries (B,C,D) which, I am not the author of. I am only the author of A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I license library A under a GPL or a dual license and use it in a commercial software which will be licensed only under proprietary license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar question have been posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37119/application-code-shared-between-gnu-and-comercial-software?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37343/can-i-use-my-own-open-source-code-in-commercial-software-im-writing&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; but don't address the fact that other GPL licensed libraries might be re-used in the main library (A).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18357" OwnerDisplayName="bricx" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T04:50:44.083" Title="Use of GPL licensed code in commercial software" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9883" CreationDate="2020-05-27T22:51:07.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A software which includes (links to) a GPL-licensed library, whether directly or indirectly (thus as a library called by another library), needs to be released under GPL. You link GPL-licensed software, and as such your library is a derivative of those and needs to follow the license terms; the license gives you no right to distribute it under different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things look different, if we talk about the LGPL, thus GPL with linking exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may, of course, sell additional guarantees or indemnification to clients for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; library or programme - but even that doesn't lift the obligations put on you and your library's clients by the GPL introduced by the dependencies of your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T04:50:44.083" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T04:50:44.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7572" CreationDate="2020-05-28T01:45:23.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL saids that if there is 2 programs linked (this is term when I join 2 programs in C), and one is covered by the GPL license, then it is a derivated work, and it must be covered by the GPL license, then it must not be commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically there were 2 examples that this simple formula was not clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Two programs in Java.  In this case the Java programs never has been linkaged because it has different technology, but the formula is simple, if the two programs run in the same JVM then they are &quot;virtual linkaged&quot;, the derivated work must be covered by GPL. If they run in different JVM, or in other proccess or in other machine, they are independents work, and you can use it in commercial programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) MySQL. Historically, Sun Microsystem always fought because MySQL could not be used in commercial projects, and they were right.  But why, if my commercial program runs in a different machine that the database?  Because of the client library, the driver to connect to the database in the client was covered by the GPL and this library runs in the same proccess or JVM of my program, then my program must be covered by GPL.  But not anymore, because there are currently many client libraries to connect to MySQL that are not covered by GPL (do not use the oracle drivers, use MariaDB).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use open source programs if you do not distribute the program (internal use. Or in a Web Server except with APL license), in diferent process or JVM (when you use the GPL program with a command line instruction, or communication via), it runs in another computer, or if the open source license is Apache, MIT, BSD, Common Public, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18360" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T01:45:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9871" CreationDate="2020-05-28T07:02:00.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In France authors (including authors of software, even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; ones paid by their employers or clients) have a moral right which cannot be transferred (e.g. to the employer or client).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://cecill.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CECILL&lt;/a&gt; license has been carefully designed to be compatible with French laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested by joining &lt;a href=&quot;https://framasoft.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSource.org&lt;/a&gt; providing some expertise and hints about many open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In France, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.april.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APRIL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://aful.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AFUL&lt;/a&gt; non-profit organizations has several legal arguments (usually in French) related to your question. And the French &lt;a href=&quot;https://systematic-paris-region.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Systematic&lt;/a&gt; competitiveness cluster has written a good summary related to legal aspects of open source licenses. The topic is really complex. You could also contact &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EFF&lt;/a&gt; and (in the USA) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; (and in French, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.laquadrature.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Quadrature du Net&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://framasoft.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FramaSoft&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your question is a very difficult one, and you should contact a lawyer.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gpl-violations.org/contact/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-violations.org&lt;/a&gt; website is located in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isn't the copyright holder the only person that can sue? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, this is false in France. If you are paid for coding, the code is usually (at some point) copyrighted by your employer or client, but you can go to court (e.g. to defend your moral right).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &lt;strong&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a lawyer !&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;PS. Disclaimer: I am employed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cea.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CEA&lt;/a&gt;, one of the organizations driving that CECILL license (and member of Systematic). I am, as a private individual, member of APRIL and AFUL and FramaSoft.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T07:18:20.107" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T07:18:20.107" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9880" CreationDate="2020-05-28T11:15:30.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for a strong copyleft license like the GPL, when two applications communicate &quot;at arms length&quot; with each other, then the two applications are considered to be independent works and their copyright licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The determination if two pieces of code communicate &quot;at arms length&quot; revolves mostly around if they execute in the same process context, if they use a communication mechanism typically used for inter-process communication and if you need to have knowledge of the implementation to reproduce the datastructures used in the communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For using a published web-API, all of these indicators point to independent works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T11:15:30.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9866" CreationDate="2020-05-28T15:30:45.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While MadHatter's answer covers the general case of a changing upstream license fairly well, it's worth noting that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; has a special compatibility clause with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this section of the GPLv3 allows you (or anyone else) to include GPLv3-licensed code in an AGPLv3-licensed program and, for most purposes, effectively treat it as if it was licensed under the AGPLv3 in the first place.  Technically, the GPL code still remains licensed under the GPL even if included in an AGPL program, but the distinction is mostly academic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means, in your case, if that if you &lt;em&gt;want to&lt;/em&gt; relicense your fork under the AGPL, you can do that, even if it includes third-party contributions that are only licensed under the GPL.  And, conversely, even if you decide to keep your fork GPL-only, the authors of the upstream version (or of another fork!) may still legally merge back your changes into their AGPL version if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps. There's also, naturally enough, a corresponding clause in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; as well.  It's included in the same section as the Remote Network Integration clause (which is the main thing that differentiates the AGPL from the GPL):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As written, this clause seems to allow you to also incorporate any AGPLv3-licensed code from the upstream project (or elsewhere) into your GPLv3-licensed fork, and to distribute the combined program under the terms of the GPLv3, &lt;em&gt;as long as&lt;/em&gt; you (and any reusers) comply with the Remote Network Interaction clause of the AGPLv3 (which requires the provision of source code to any AGPLv3 &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; GPLv3 licensed parts of the code to any remote users of the software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, what this &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; means is that you can take GPLv3 and AGPLv3 licensed code and link or copy-paste them together.  Insofar as the combined work is more that just the sum of its distinct parts, you can even choose which license (GPL or AGPL) to convey it under — but in effect, as long as there's &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; AGPL code included in the mix, you (and any reusers) will have to follow the AGPL's requirement to make all of the source code (both the GPL and the AGPL parts) available to any remote users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pps. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#AGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The GNU licenses FAQ says&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;emphasis&lt;/em&gt; mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the GNU AGPL is not compatible with GPLv2. It is also technically not compatible with GPLv3 in a strict sense: you cannot take code released under the GNU AGPL and convey or modify it however you like under the terms of GPLv3, or vice versa. However, you are allowed to combine &lt;em&gt;separate modules or source files&lt;/em&gt; released under both of those licenses in a single project, which will provide many programmers with all the permission they need to make the programs they want. See section 13 of both licenses for details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I don't see anything supporting the &amp;quot;separate modules or source files&amp;quot; requirement in the license text itself; it seems to rest on a particularly restrictive interpretation of the word &amp;quot;combine&amp;quot;, which is not specifically defined in either license.  That said, given that it's apparently the FSF's interpretation, it &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be wisest to abide by it and keep the GPL and AGPL parts of any mixed programs clearly separated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T15:39:13.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9890" CreationDate="2020-05-28T17:20:18.573" Score="3" ViewCount="1088" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an ASP.NET application which is deployed to virtual machines running on Microsoft Azure and customers access using their browser. The virtual machines are under my control and customers only access the service using their browser (they never log on to the virtual machines using RDP and they don't have access to binaries running on the server).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm told that if I use an MIT-licensed library on the web server then i'm required to provide attribution to end-users (informing them that I use this library). The library in question is a library used by the .NET application on the web server to connect to Azure Storage. In other words, the library is never shipped to end-customers (it's not a javascript framework or similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the MIT licese, it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My naïve, I-am-definitively-not-a-layer-interpretation of this is that I don't need to inform my users that I'm using the library, because I'm not shipping any portion of the library to the users. I realize that it may be a nice gesture  to the original author to inform users about what open source software I use, but I'm more trying to understand what the hard requirement is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something, or am I correct that attribution is not required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18381" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T01:31:57.957" Title="Is attribution required for server-side usage of MIT-licensed library?" Tags="|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9889" CreationDate="2020-05-28T20:52:25.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct: the MIT license does not require attribution for server side only libraries. Attribution is required only when you give someone a copy of MIT-covered software. Of course, you can still provide that attribution as a courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T20:52:25.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9889" CreationDate="2020-05-29T01:31:57.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is no. When you are running a server, the server's code is not distributed, only its output. The server's copyright does not extend to the output unless an API somehow exposes part of the source code of the server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually true in general for almost all free software licenses. The one major exception is AGPL, which requires that if a modified version of AGPL software is served over the internet, that modified version must be distributed under AGPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T01:31:57.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9863" CreationDate="2020-05-29T05:11:12.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm developing a simulation engine and development framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, ...) and language implementations provide a way to accept &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_(computing)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plugins&lt;/a&gt;. On Linux with C code that means using &lt;a href=&quot;http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/dlopen.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlopen(3)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example is the recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; compiler, or the Firefox browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;You could implement a plugin mechanism in your simulation engine.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of your simulation engine might not be related to the one of proprietary plugins loaded by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Alternatively, you could embed some interpreter in your application.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://lua.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lua&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guile&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://python.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python&lt;/a&gt;, or your own interpreter (perhaps using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just-in-time compilation&lt;/a&gt; techniques). Read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniques,_and_Tools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dragon book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; then &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~scott/pragmatics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Programming language pragmatics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SICP&lt;/a&gt; before designing then implementing your own interpreted language. Read also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gchandbook.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Garbage Collection Handbook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;but I am not a lawyer, and you probably need one&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it reasonable to release my own version of the GPL &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Certainly not:&lt;/strong&gt; in most large corporations, developers are allowed to use open source components only with a specific set of licenses (defined by in-house lawyers). And writing a software license requires legal expertise. Choose (with your client) some &lt;em&gt;existing&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I anticipate corporations to use my software and architecture to develop and run dynamically loaded proprietary models. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be an optimistic view. Lots of open source software have almost no users. You might want to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;simple economics of open source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; paper. You should at least put a lot of efforts on proper documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T05:29:34.473" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T05:29:34.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9863" CreationDate="2020-05-29T10:00:59.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to argue that extensions are &amp;quot;covered works&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;works based on the program&amp;quot;, so if any ambiguities exist, my application will be less attractive. Is it reasonable to release my own version of the GPL with an alternative definition of &amp;quot;covered works&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, do not do that.&lt;/strong&gt; There are already too many open-source license as we speak and adding another one that is deceptively similar but different from a widely used license will only make it worse.&#xA;Moreover, I expect that the legal departments of those corporations you want as your users will block the usage of your software until they have studied the license text for a few years to be sure there are no hidden surprises in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I release the development libraries under MIT and the application under GPL? Any incompatibilities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not going to help you. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?&lt;/strong&gt; (#GPLAndPlugins)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for determining when plug-ins and a main program are considered a single combined program and when they are considered separate work.&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program and the plugins are a single combined program then this means you must license the plug-in under the GPL or a GPL-compatible free software license and distribute it with source code in a GPL-compliant way. A main program that is separate from its plug-ins makes no requirements for the plug-ins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/strong&gt; (#GPLPlugins)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your application does not have any dependencies that are under the GPL license, then you do have the option of using the GPL license with an additional permission. For example, you could give a permission like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;As an additional permission, plugins for &amp;lt;application&amp;gt; may be distributed under the terms of their author's choice without being bound by the requirements of the license of &amp;lt;application&amp;gt;. This permission does not extend to changes made to &amp;lt;application&amp;gt; itself or its development libraries.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T10:00:59.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9864" CreationDate="2020-05-29T17:27:08.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just as an addition to MadHatter's good answer, you should cite the original paper where the algorithm was published in the help files for the commands or the package using it, although this is not a copyright issue. The help files are somehow academic publications and intellectual honesty rules for academic publications apply, and hence the need to cite. If you publish your packages in an academic paper, then the need to cite is even more evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see examples of citations on help files of most functions and datasets in R, even on these from base functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8246" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T17:27:08.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-29T20:20:13.757" Score="0" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Java server side solution utilizing open source libraries (using jars ‘as-is’) released under CDDLv1.0 license. The open source libraries is either statically or dynamically bound in an combined archive / binary being sold. I publish license &amp;amp; notices as part of software documentation (viewable to users). When I distribute software to a customer, is it mandatory to publish proprietary source code as well under the CDDLv1.0 license? What are other considerations that legally I should be wary of and should take care before commercially distributing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18401" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T10:12:38.707" Title="Is it required to disclose proprietary / closed source code of commercial software which utilizes open source CDDLv1.0 libraries?" Tags="|commercial|law|distribution|java|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-29T21:08:20.130" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a Java web application which utilizes Open source libraries with LGPLv2.0 and v2.1 libraries without any modification. For distributing this software commercially, what legal considerations needs to be made. I am publishing the libraries utilized along with licensing details as part of software documentation. Do I need to also make my proprietary source code open source with LGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18401" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T04:00:41.803" Title="What legal considerations needs to be made for distributing a commercial/closed source software which utilizes LGPLv2 open source libraries?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|distribution|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9896" CreationDate="2020-05-30T04:00:41.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to talk about the major impact points to your project rather than the nitty-gritty (like how to attribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is a weak copyleft license. It does not require software that is dynamically linked to be open source. However, you are required to release source code of modifications to the library, if you release that modified version with your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL also requires you to distribute the source of the library (or there are some alternative methods when not delivering over the internet, which doesn't sound like the case here). The linking mechanism must allow the user to swap the library out for a modified version with a compatible interface. I don't see that being a problem given that java compiles to individual &lt;code&gt;.class&lt;/code&gt; files unless you deliberately check for modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T04:00:41.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9895" CreationDate="2020-05-30T10:12:38.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I distribute software to a customer, is it mandatory to publish proprietary source code as well under the CDDLv1.0 license? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only code that must have sources published under the CDDL 1.0 license is the original library that came under that license and any modifications (edits, additions, deletions) you made to that library. Code that simply uses/links to the library is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to be under the CDDL 1.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are other considerations that legally I should be wary of and should take care before commercially distributing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of it (mentioning copyrights and licenses) you already covered. One requirement from the CDDL 1.0 you did not yet cover is hat you must inform the users of your application where they can obtain the source code for the CDDL-covered portions of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T10:12:38.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-30T12:46:27.627" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to license a project made by me. MIT License would be sufficient, but I want any future work to be linked back to the sourcecode. Similar to the MPL where you always have to link back to the original sourcecode of any compiled or non compiled code you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just extend the MIT License with one or two sentences or is there a better alternative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18416" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-05-30T12:48:25.647" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T14:38:49.063" Title="Software license that has the condition to link back to the original" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9913" CreationDate="2020-05-29T09:48:34.713" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a library that contains &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arphic (1999) Public Licensed (says the author) image resources, generated by converting a Arphic (1999) Public Licensed Font into SVG and modifying the SVG code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL JS code that dynamically modify the Arphic PL Images and serve it to HTML. I intend to use the Arphic public licensed part for my project &lt;code&gt;*since the codes is not usable for my use case in decided to rewrite them from scratch to suit my use case (the text in code block is outside the scope of question if anyone know anything about this you can give me a link in the comments; I might even release this as open source and dynamically link it to my Application)*&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only part of the library that I am going to use, by statically linking, is their image resources which the original author made by modifying Arphic PL images and specifically states that the images stays licensed with Arphic PL. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does that mean if I only use the Arphic public licensed part of the library, I am only using a Arphic public license material thus does not need to comply with LGPL. If I need to comply, do I license parent folder with LGPL which then contains resources folder with Arphic public license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To reinstate,&lt;/strong&gt; my question is &lt;strong&gt;how to use&lt;/strong&gt; or more specifically, &lt;strong&gt;what license to comply to to only use non-LGPL resources inside a library that contains LGPL codes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an illustration to better understand my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Library/ -&amp;gt; &#xA;  |-- LGPL.js -&amp;gt; LGPL&#xA;  |-- Images -&amp;gt; APL&#xA;     |-- img1.svg&#xA;     |-- img2.svg&#xA;&#xA;My-App/ -&amp;gt; &#xA;  |-- from-scratch.js -&amp;gt; (Outside the scope of this question)&#xA;  |-- Images -&amp;gt; (What?)License&#xA;     |-- img1.svg&#xA;     |-- img2.svg&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18424" OwnerDisplayName="LordSacha" LastEditorUserId="18424" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T06:40:06.503" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T07:40:56.393" Title="How to use non LGPL resources inside a library that contains LGPL codes?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9911" CreationDate="2020-05-31T07:40:56.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming the original library can handle any SVG-formatted glyph images and not just these Arphic ones, then the library and images are two independent works as far a copyright is concerned and their licenses don't affect each other. They just happen to be bundled for convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arphic Public License is a copyleft license, which means that the images that were derived from the font must remain under that same license. An application that reads those images and does something with them can be licensed in any way you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T07:40:56.393" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9909" CreationDate="2020-05-31T14:38:49.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no free licence that requires a redistributor to link back through all previous versions, or to make them available on demand.  Nor is there likely to be, because it would fail what the Debian folks call the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island test&lt;/a&gt;: a group working on a derivative of a piece of free software in isolation can't meet the requirement.  If the requirement is to link, and one of the earlier repositories moves, how are they, without internet, to know?  And if the requirement is to distribute, how are they to get hold of (say) a library that they are later told was once part of what they're currently working on but was removed before they made a copy and went to the island?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we step back to a licence that requires a link to the source of the work as-distributed, I would urge you not to start adding extra clauses to existing licences.  The community refers to these as &lt;em&gt;crayon licences&lt;/em&gt;, and there is ample reason to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;think them a bad idea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why you've avoided the idea of a strong copyleft licence.  Perhaps it's the requirement that derivatives be bound by the same licence?  Unfortunately, for what you want, that's necessary: without it, I can use your code and not provide source to my users, by getting a friend to take a copy of your code, and distribute it to me without the additional clause, which MIT+clause doesn't forbid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that you might as well use the GPL.  Version 3 requires that the source be linked to when the distribution itself is over a network (s6d), and it requires that derivatives be published under the same terms (s5c); version 2 has similar language.  You could also use the MPL, since you mention it, but it makes your code less-useful for reuse, because the requirements for combining it with GPL code are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a bit baroque&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T14:38:49.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T06:15:33.327" Score="12" ViewCount="2433" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I contribute to a few projects, but the code I contribute is from ideas for my own projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say I have Project A, and a competitor has Project B. I contribute code I wrote to Project B, and they accept my code. Then, later, using the same code that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; wrote, I release Project A as a direct competitor to Project B. However, both projects use the same code, which was originally written by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, who owns the contributed code, and could Project B file a DMCA request on Project A, because &lt;em&gt;the code was first seen in Project B&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I don't think I was clear enough. I write code for Project B first, with intention of using code in Project A later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18425" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T07:09:55.480" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T07:09:55.480" Title="Who owns contributed code?" Tags="|licensing|ownership|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9915" CreationDate="2020-06-01T06:27:24.227" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;You own any code that you write.&#xA;When you contribute to projects you aren't handing over your copyright (ownership), you're giving them a license to your work. It's usually inferred to be the same license as what's in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you contribute to project B, you own the code, and gave Project B a license to that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing prevents you from putting that code in Project A, no need to attribute or include the license from the other project because &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; are the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15592" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T06:27:24.227" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T15:16:05.460" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The X window manager &lt;code&gt;dwm&lt;/code&gt; is designed to be customised by copying its default configuration &lt;code&gt;config.def.h&lt;/code&gt; (which is supplied, along with the program's source code, under the MIT/X consortium licence) into &lt;code&gt;config.h&lt;/code&gt; and then editing &lt;code&gt;config.h&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have uploaded a custom &lt;code&gt;config.h&lt;/code&gt; to a GitLab repository I own which I'm using for config files and the like ('dotfiles'). This file was created in the manner described above, but I did not include &lt;code&gt;config.def.h&lt;/code&gt; in my repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;  all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include the MIT licence with &lt;code&gt;config.h&lt;/code&gt; in the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18431" LastEditorUserId="18431" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T15:27:34.803" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T15:27:34.803" Title="Do I need to include the licence for part of a program, which I have modified?" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|law|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9918" CreationDate="2020-06-01T15:23:25.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the license applies to the header as well. The easiest way to satisfy the license terms is to copy the project's MIT license directly into a comment block in your modified header file. You only have to include the license notice, but are not required to publish your modifications or your dotfiles under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T15:23:25.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T21:37:23.883" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to make a GPLv3 or AGPLv3 library to allow the library user to interact with the multiplayer portion of a non-free, closed-source, proprietary game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The game's EULA explicitly allows the players to customize the game, create and share mods but has some protective restrictions to prevent the game from being pirated, used commercially, or with intentions to make money out of it. It also distributes the game server binaries publically so that people can host their own dedicated servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what confuses me, I know that I can't use the game's code or link to it and I'm not willing to, the library code will be written from scratch, but can I make a client/server library with a compatible protocol so it can be used to host customized game servers for example? Do I have to add an addendum to the licenses or can I use the plain GPLv3/AGPLv3 licenses as they are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some community-made server Softwares of this game, but I don't know how legal they are. I want to make this project completely legal since the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18437" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T08:22:39.853" Title="Can I make a GPLv3 or AGPLv3 software which serves a proprietary protocol?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|network-protocol|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9920" CreationDate="2020-06-02T06:10:43.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I make a GPLv3 or AGPLv3 software which serves a proprietary protocol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends upon your country, and &lt;strong&gt;should ask your lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;. I am not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the European Union, reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is AFAIU legally allowed. You could look at what the developers of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nouveau&lt;/a&gt; driver for Nvidia cards on Linux did. It is a widely known example of reverse engineering a proprietary (hardware related) protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm planning to make a GPLv3 or AGPLv3 library to allow the library user to interact with the multiplayer portion of a non-free, closed-source, proprietary game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be safe and avoid losing your precious time, you could inform in advance the corporation selling that game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to make this project completely legal since the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are making a very optimistic bet: that legal systems are logically consistent everywhere. &lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt; but I tend to believe that what is legal in California might be illegal in France or vice versa. Regulations on selling alcohol, or tobacco, or medical drugs comes immediately to mind. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://cecill.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CECILL&lt;/a&gt; license has been written by lawyers who told me that some obscure wordings of GPL could be illegal in France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You (or your lawyers) could also take inspiration from the license driving &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC plugins&lt;/a&gt; : the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC runtime library exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to avoid writing your own software license (without help from a lawyer). Choose one existing on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source licenses&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Notice that I current &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/cv-Basile-Starynkevitch.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;am&lt;/a&gt;, and have been in the past employed, by two out of the three institutions (CEA, INRIA, CNRS) authoring CECILL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-06-02T08:22:39.853" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T08:22:39.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9923" CreationDate="2020-06-02T10:36:05.890" Score="5" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to release a software package which needs polynomial fits to work, and I'm currently using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Scientific Library&lt;/a&gt; (GSL) in my project.&#xA;GSL is licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GSL has many modules that can do many operations, but I only need polynomial fits. Users have to compile the package themselves, and including the whole GSL would mean a high compilation time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does including only the GSL source code I need for my project comply with the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18446" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-02T11:06:29.650" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:29:33.933" Title="Can I partially include third party source code in my project?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9922" CreationDate="2020-06-02T11:10:33.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect to the GSL source code, you need only include in your release the code that you have taken from the GSL, not the entire library suite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you must include all the rest of the source of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; program, and &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of it must be released under GPLv3.  This is required by GPLv3 ss 6 and 5c respectively, because your work is now a derivative of the GSL code.  My apologies if you already know this, but it wasn't clear from your question that you did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T06:29:33.933" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:29:33.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-02T11:16:24.590" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw an interesting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZSFNUT6iY8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt; on computer-generated code snippets. The model has been trained on thousands of open source GitHub repositories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the video, an AI model produced some small code snippets.  Given an input, for example, a function name with a comment, the model wrote correct implementation code of the function. I assume the AI model was trained on repositories with different open sources licences. I also assume this model will be useful if added to developer productivity tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might be the licences for the code that was generated by such a tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18447" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T11:16:24.590" Title="What might be the licence for OpenAI model generated code snippets?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9926" CreationDate="2020-06-03T07:37:23.217" Score="0" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, in Github, can we declare our own license (in LICENSE.txt): &quot;make any use only if you declare the author&quot;, or must we choose known ones like GPL3, MIT, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18455" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T07:46:02.890" Title="Own license creation" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-06-04T20:47:41.723" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9925" CreationDate="2020-06-03T16:22:21.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the conditions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt; might forbid you doing what you want (unless you pay them). See of course also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you need to pay a lawyer to write your own license. AFAIK, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cecill.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CECILL&lt;/a&gt; license required more than a full time year of work to several lawyers. Law is as difficult as programming (and perhaps even more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if you invent your license, you'll need to negotiate and convince organizations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenSource initiative&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://april.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APRIL&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://aful.org/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AFUL&lt;/a&gt; to label your license as open source and compatible with existing ones....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In practice, if you invent your license, nobody will use your software&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(in a professional setting). In many corporations, it is managers and lawyers who dictate what open source licenses developer can use (even to link an existing open source library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; on the simple economics of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So make us a favor: don't publish your software with your own license. You'll avoid losing your and perhaps our time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget a known fact: even if you develop &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; one, you'll have very hard time in attracting users to it. Most code on github is probably almost never used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I speak of personal experience, being paid to write free software. The most difficult issue is to find real users&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Since you live in France, consider joining AFUL or APRIL -I am member of both- and look into &lt;a href=&quot;https://systematic-paris-region.org/fr/groupe-thematique-logiciel-libre/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Systematic GTLL&lt;/a&gt;. Read J.Tirole's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.puf.com/content/%C3%89conomie_du_bien_commun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Économie du Bien Commun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (it has a long chapter dedicated to open source software), look online into &lt;a href=&quot;https://xavierleroy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X.Leroy talks&lt;/a&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/college/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collège de France&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dicosmo.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roberto DiCosmo&lt;/a&gt; website, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.softwareheritage.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Heritage&lt;/a&gt; initiative, follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://codesource.hypotheses.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Séminaire Code Source&lt;/a&gt;, and see &lt;a href=&quot;https://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt;. If you want to, please send me an email to &lt;code&gt;basile@starynkevitch.net&lt;/code&gt; mentioning the URL of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-06-04T07:46:02.890" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T07:46:02.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9928" CreationDate="2020-06-03T22:18:14.300" Score="2" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use some code from an MIT-licensed project I don't own (let's call it project A), in a project (B) with a different license. It is my understanding that I can do whatever I want with this MIT-licensed code, as long as the license and attribution stay with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the license is in a file at the root of project A's repository. Is it OK to copy a file from project A to project B, and add the license's content in a header in this file, instead of keeping it as a separate file? Do I have to keep the license file somewhere instead, and if I do, how should I specify which files in the project are under this license? Is a link to the original repository/license added at the top of the copied file enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7509" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T23:01:18.983" Title="How to integrate MIT-licensed files into a different project?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9927" CreationDate="2020-06-03T23:01:18.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding the (unmodified) license including the authorship &amp;amp; copyright notice to the header of each file you copy, should be fine - and makes clear(er) which files fall under that license. Thus this version is IMHO preferrable over a solution where you keep the original license file and another for the files of your project and the need to indicate which files are under which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If applicable and possible you could put the copied files in their own sub-directory along with the license file. That way it is also very clear that all files in that directory fall under the license found adjacent to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just linking to the original source does not suffice as it fails the desert island test as it requires an online connection to obtain the information about the rights you have on those files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(However, I'm not a lawyer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T23:01:18.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-05T10:39:22.240" Score="4" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I change the name of the BSD 3-clause project and its binary name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be specific, I have forked EACopy with a BSD 3-clause license.  Its project name and binary name are the same, EACopy.  I would like to rename the project name to YARCopy, and its resulting binary name to YARCopy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18472" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T12:57:14.867" Title="Changing the binary/project name under BSD 3-clause license" Tags="|derivative-works|bsd|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9936" CreationDate="2020-06-05T10:51:20.890" Score="4" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently having trouble understanding the ND part of Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that I have found a database which is being published as CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE. Most of the corresponding restrictions are pretty self-explanatory for me, except the ND part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the database is rather big, I would like to extract some columns (without changing their content) from the database and use this part as input to my (open source) application (which is completely free). The extracted data itself would be available on the web to be downloaded by my software if needed. A license file with proper attribution would accompany my extract, with the license being the same as the original one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE license allow this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18471" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T01:10:36.270" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T13:28:43.973" Title="Possibilities with Creative Commons ND" Tags="|derivative-works|creative-commons|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-05T12:16:16.577" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;What if I do not own the proprietary software but I have been given permission to distribute it (will being able to open-source the build automation help? This would mean only someone with the correct connection to the proprietary software's VPN would be able to run the automation correctly)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do own the proprietary software, do I have to open-source it under GPL2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I include an open-source script that pulls in closed-source content upon initial install, am I covered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Nvidia and Ubuntu get it right to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&amp;amp;px=Ubuntu-19.10-NVIDIA-On-ISO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;include proprietary drivers in the Ubuntu ISO?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Struggling to know what is legal. I take it very seriously and am attempting to avoid violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18473" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T06:11:04.470" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T06:11:04.470" Title="I want to build a new ISO based on official Ubuntu 18.04 ISO, plus some propietary software. What do I have to open-source to comply with GPL2?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|proprietary-code|redistribution|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9929" CreationDate="2020-06-05T12:57:14.867" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can change both the name of the project and the name of the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3-clause BSD license gives you permission to make changes to the project and that includes the changes you want to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if you fork a project with the intention of maintaining it as a separate, independent project, then it is recommended to change the project's name to avoid causing confusion with the original project. Some projects even have a trademark on their project name, in which case you have to change it or obtain a separate permission to keep using the trademarked name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T12:57:14.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-05T22:21:38.700" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;My NAS has an app which includes a modified version of rsync version 3.1.3 with additional options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     --XXXX-mode=mode        0:Normal, 1:XXXXXX, 2:USB copy 3:HD copy USB&#xA;     --check-dest                 Check if the destination path is valid&#xA;     --password=WORD         the password of XXXX mode&#xA;     --enc_password=WORD     the encryption password of XXXX mode&#xA;     --server-mode=mode      0:Normal, 1:XXXX in daemon-mode&#xA;     --schedule=name         specify the schedule name&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I redacted the vendor specific parts in the options.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to modify the program myself to provide a new use case. Can I ask the vendor for the source code and must it be provided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18477" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T07:28:45.847" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T12:44:22.887" Title="NAS vendor modified rsync with own options; can I ask for the source code?" Tags="|gpl-3|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9935" CreationDate="2020-06-06T01:37:27.793" Score="2" ViewCount="1065" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently attempting to install Debian, and I noticed it said that my wifi card (a Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174) required nonfree drivers. I was able to find the firmware for these, which turned out to be ath10k. Apparently these drivers are not included in distros like Parabola or Debian (by default) because they are nonfree. However, I noticed that they are part of the Linux kernel source tree (specifically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Linux is licensed under GPLv2 and is open source, and as far as I know respects the 4 GNU essential freedoms. So how come the ath10k drivers qualify as nonfree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18478" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T02:52:55.420" Title="Why is the ath10k driver nonfree if it ships with Linux?" Tags="|linux-kernel|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9934" CreationDate="2020-06-06T02:52:55.420" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian firmware page&lt;/a&gt; explains that some hardware with free (as per GPL) drivers requires firmware to operate which is not free. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/blob/master/LICENSE.qca_firmware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license for ath10k firmware&lt;/a&gt; is incompatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Driver &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; is free software and may be included in Linux kernel. However, without the corresponding firmware, the driver may be useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases like this distributions like Debian may say that the hardware requires non-free firmware to operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T02:52:55.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2020-06-06T06:07:53.987" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two questions here.  Firstly, can you extract a subset of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 database and distribute it on the web, and secondly, can you use that subset to inform the decisions of a piece of software with which others interact.  You have the added complication that you're asking about the German language version of the licence; I'm assuming that it is, as CC say, a mere translation of the English version, which is the only one I can speak to.  I'm also assuming that the database is a collection of facts, and not (eg) poems, or some other content in which copyright vested before they were so collected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question of subset distribution, as unor points out &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/965/458&quot;&gt;we already have an answer&lt;/a&gt; about excerpting *-ND works, which argues that you may not.  But that question is specifically about creative works, whilst in this case the work is a database, and different jurisdictions recognise different amounts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;protection for databases&lt;/a&gt;.  Some, notably in the EU, recognise a specific database right; others say that copyright protection can arise through the originality implicit in its creation, but the extent of this depends on &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the database was assembled, of which you tell us nothing; still others say that copyright cannot vest in collections of facts, so there is nothing to licence, and reuse cannot be controlled in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4&lt;/a&gt; recognises the database right, and speaks of it in s4a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for the avoidance of doubt, Section 2(a)(1) grants You the right to extract, reuse, reproduce, and Share all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database for NonCommercial purposes only and provided You do not Share Adapted Material&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence does not define &lt;em&gt;a substantial portion&lt;/em&gt;; I would read it as &lt;em&gt;larger than de minimis&lt;/em&gt;, which would permit what you propose by way of subset distribution.  Unfortunately, CC BY-NC-ND 3 has no similar language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the question of informing the execution of a program with the subset of a database, and the subsequent licensing of the program's outputs, the question is very muddy.  I can find no guiding precedent on the subject.  I am inclined to think that such an arrangement does not create a derivative work, but the chances of me being your judge when the database creator hauls you up in court are very slim indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I think this is very messy.  I see &lt;strong&gt;no clear and generally-valid set of permissions&lt;/strong&gt; that allow your proposal, although you may be able to do it in some jurisdictions.  I think you are much better off contacting the database rightsholder, explaining your proposal, and asking them if you may do what you propose.  Either they don't really care, in which case they're likely to give you much clearer permissions, which would hopefully extend to distributing a copy of the database subset alongside copies of your program, and under much clearer licensing terms.  Or they do really care, in which case you can avoid the unpleasantness of a later lawsuit by allowing them to forbid it now for the price of a stamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T06:07:53.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9938" CreationDate="2020-06-06T12:21:15.147" Score="10" ViewCount="8628" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;If you plan to use [some software] on a commercial basis, you must separately purchase a commercial-use license&quot; [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the commercial-use and non-commercial use licenses for my software both obey the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four essential freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, does extract [1] violate any of the four freedoms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, I can see why [1] suggests the software is not free for anyone to use for any purpose since the cost is different depending on how it is intended to be used. This would imply it violates Freedom 0. However, for software to be free it can still have a cost. So really I'm asking whether the owner of free software is allowed to distribute it with different license costs depending on the intended use of the software by the user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18480" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T19:39:19.403" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T22:05:25.900" Title="Is my software still &quot;free&quot; if I charge for its commercial use and not for non-commercial use?" Tags="|license|free-software-definition|freedoms|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-06T12:32:01.423" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU Philosophy says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says there that the price of the software does not matter in any situation. As long as you respect the 4 essential freedoms, your software should still be free, even if you do have to pay for it in some scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18478" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T12:32:01.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9943" CreationDate="2020-06-06T13:08:23.307" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The page &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Javascript Trap&lt;/a&gt; describes guidelines for making JS code free/libre. I know that this is considered mandatory in web pages, but do the same rules apply to server-side JS? For example, do I need to add license comments in my Node or Deno scripts? If so, is there something like LibreJS for the server-side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18478" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T20:08:28.553" Title="Do the GNU Rules about Nonfree Javascript apply to Server-Side JS?" Tags="|website|gnu|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T14:29:12.363" Score="2" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've searched the web for hours trying to figure out if I'm using the licence properly, hopefully some one can enlighten me furthermore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I own a start-up company that creates business-development tools for business of any kind, in some of our tools we develop on android, in order to install on a device, lock it with a kiosk app and sell it as a unit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: assuming the unit make use of 3rd party library protected by Apache\MIT licences, does I use those library in a legit way? more info: the source code is closed, and the app will never reach the app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18482" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T06:43:32.487" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:43:32.487" Title="Using Apache/MIT licenced libraries in a closed source project" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-06T14:53:51.220" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may charge money for distributing free (as-in-freedom) software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your license is a true FSF-approved  free license, then charging based on purpose isn't so much a license violation as it is a nonsensical thing to do.  Because the license provides the freedom to use it for any purpose, a buyer can trivially express a desire to use your software for its cheapest purpose and then change their mind immediately after purchase to use it for any purpose whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license that codifes Freedom 0 is one that does not allow you to legally punish a buyer for not limiting their use to the use they said they purchased the software for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrapositively, if your legal setup does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow the possessor of a copy to change their mind in this way, then your terms are nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T21:20:28.243" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T21:20:28.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9939" CreationDate="2020-06-06T20:08:28.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a word: no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF advocates for LibreJS annotations because of the special place web browser scripting plays in the lives of web users. The &lt;em&gt;linga franca&lt;/em&gt; for browser scripting happens to be JavaScript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Server-side code gets its own consideration from the FSF&lt;/a&gt; but the use of JavaScript as a server-side language does not merit more consideration than any other language. In other words, if you have a service written in JavaScript and you rewrote it in another language, the FSF's recommendations pertaining to those two implementations would be identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T20:08:28.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T22:44:14.873" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;For context, I have couple repositories on github, some of which showcase solutions to course projects or homeworks, while others - are created &quot;for fun&quot; (for example implementation of &lt;code&gt;tail&lt;/code&gt; command in Python). They're by no means &quot;high-grade&quot; examples of code. There's no intent to distribute code in those repositories for commercial or non-commercial use. The entire goal is to just show to others what I've done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; definition, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[a] software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this reads to me that even if I don't intend to distribute my software for others to use, if someone does copy it off the repository and uses it, I may want to add a license to explicitly state what I am OK with and not OK with the licensee doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/licensing-a-repository&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This by contrast seems to imply that I can showcase my code just fine, but if someone copies the code to try it out, they're therefore breaking copyright law (which kinda sounds like &quot;look but don't touch&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the question, &lt;em&gt;for code that is intended to be showcased and not necessarily distributed or used by others, does the code still have to be licensed in some way, shape, or form  ?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18486" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:24:51.293" Title="Showcasing vs Distributing code on public repository such as github" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-07T05:57:02.927" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main problem you will be having is with the freedom to redistribute copies (freedom 2 and 3). The GNU project codifies this freedom in GPL clarifying it's exact meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that &lt;strong&gt;you do not have to ask OR PAY for permission&lt;/strong&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you may charge for commercial use if you want but you also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;May not prevent people who downloaded your software for non-commercial use to then give it to other people to who then use it for commercial use for free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;May not prevent people who downloaded your software for non-commercial use to then sell it to other people to who then use it for either commercial or non-commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;May not prevent people who paid for your software for commercial use to then give it to other people to who then use it for commercial use for free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;May not prevent people who paid for your software for commercial use to then sell it to other people to who then use it for either commercial or non-commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it does not make much sense to ask people to pay you for commercial use because you cannot prevent people from then redistributing it for others to use your software for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, preventing someone from using your software for their own reason violates freedom 0 - the freedom to use the software for any reason. However this is mostly strictly defined in GPL and GPL derived licenses but there are licenses where this right is not specified the same way. For GPL, a user may download your software for non-commercial use then later (for example 1 millisecond later) decide to use it for commercial use instead and you cannot prevent him from doing so without violating GPL clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastEditorUserId="1119" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T05:33:29.693" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T05:33:29.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9944" CreationDate="2020-06-07T06:24:51.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your intention is to have a &quot;look but don't touch&quot; policy on your code, then you indeed don't need to choose a license for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to make it clear that this is your code and that you hold all the rights, by adding a comment to your files like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2020 Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, by putting your code up on GitHub, you have given out some license to it: You have given GitHub a license to store and reproduce your code and you have given other GitHub users a license to fork your code. Both of these licenses are granted by agreeing to GitHub's Terms-of-Service and subsequently uploading the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:24:51.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9940" CreationDate="2020-06-07T06:43:04.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principal &lt;em&gt;pre&lt;/em&gt;scriptions (there are also a few &lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;scriptions) applied to object-code-only distributions by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD&lt;/a&gt; licences are, respectively, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or&#xA;            Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &quot;NOTICE&quot; text file as part of its&#xA;            distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;            include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained&#xA;            within such NOTICE file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you honour those, you should be fine.  It's also generally considered a good idea to include the copyright statements from the Apache-licenced code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often tablet- or phone-app code includes this in a submenu, a behaviour you can see in almost any piece of free Android software.  Assuming you've got an Android phone, point it at &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://f-droid.org&lt;/a&gt; and install a couple of free apps to see how it's done.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9596/458&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; contains a short list of some such apps, and the locations of the license acknowledgments therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T06:43:04.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9489" CreationDate="2020-06-07T07:52:24.977" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As far as I know, but I'm not a lawyer, and I'm certainly not &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; lawyer…&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to release under GPL if and only if your source code also includes source code from GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your plugin is &lt;strong&gt;independent from Wordpress code&lt;/strong&gt; itself, i.e. you can distribute it on its own without including parts of Wordpress, you should be fine with any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead it's tightly coupled with GPL software, there still is a way, but it's annoying: &lt;strong&gt;sell a patch&lt;/strong&gt; containing only your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;strong&gt;several problems with patches&lt;/strong&gt; though, like they usually apply to only one specific version of the original software, that in order to be applied they usually do include a few lines of the original software (I have no idea of those count for GPL purposes or not, ask a lawyer, as you should ask everything else anyway), and they are annoying to apply and to maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, as soon as your &lt;strong&gt;source code is in the wild&lt;/strong&gt;, good luck trying to stop those misusing it as they want, let alone finding it out in the first place…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="455" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T07:52:24.977" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9933" CreationDate="2020-06-07T08:10:24.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As curiousdannii notes above, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rsync&lt;/a&gt; is released under GPLv3, so the distributor has source distribution obligations.  Unfortunately, those obligations are principally to the licensors, these being the rightsholders in the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So first of all, as noted, you should look on the manufacturer's website.  Many companies take their free-software obligations seriously, and those will generally already have the software up for you - somewhere.  I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/781246/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a whole article&lt;/a&gt; on Intel's partnership with Software Heritage, intended specifically to ensure long-term availability of any source code that they had an obligation to distribute.  Most such companies aren't as good at publicising source availability as I would like, but they do generally understand their obligations, and make an honest attempt to fulfil them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the history of copyleft software is also &lt;a href=&quot;https://gpl-violations.org/news/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;littered with examples&lt;/a&gt; of nasty little companies that popped up out of the ground, took a bunch of GPL code and adapted it to suit, embedded it in their product, then ignored their consequent obligations.  There has been some success in dragging these into court, both in terms of mandated compliance, and in terms of damages awarded.  Unfortunately the availability of court orders to require source release (referred to as &lt;em&gt;specific performance&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another article of mine&lt;/a&gt;) is a function of jurisdiction, which is why so many of the more-successful actions have been in Germany, and the wider EU).  Other court systems tend to view everything in terms of compensatory damages, which is not what you want, and very likely not what the rightsholder wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same article also discusses &lt;em&gt;third-party rights&lt;/em&gt;, which relate to &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; standing to sue for the performance of the NAS maker's obligations to &lt;em&gt;the rightsholder&lt;/em&gt;, and again, these are generally most available in civil-law jurisdictions such as much of the EU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Organisations like &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; exist to shepherd violators back onto the path of compliance (though they use the dogs less often than I would like).  Sadly, rsync is not one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SFC's current projects&lt;/a&gt;, but if this question had been about, say, SaMBa, then a letter from them can be &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more effective than one from you or me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's likely worth asking on the project mailing list.  Search the archives first, and see if you can get a measure of how much they appreciate violation reports on-list, but a big project may well have a standard template letter they're prepared to send to a violator.  Since they represent the rightsholders, the NAS maker will know that ignoring &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; request is much more dangerous than ignoring yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The source might already be available, so look first.  Use of the more sophisticated controls on your search-engine-of-choice can be very helpful, here.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it's really not available, do by all means ask.  It's likely to be most effective if you don't go in all guns blazing, but respectfully and as a supplicant, even though you have a complete right to this source.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are obliged to give you the source, but the obligation isn't to you, so getting all lawyered-up, even if you can afford it, may not be very effective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for community organisations who might be prepared to help, and see if the original authors are set up for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T12:44:22.887" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T12:44:22.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-07T17:10:12.067" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to build a web app that allows users to upload and share JSON data.  The JSON data generated and exported by an open-source app licensed under GPLv3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I begin building, I want to ensure that this data is useable in the above manner and there aren't any issues with this concept.  Is the data generated by an open-source GPLv3.0 software free to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18491" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T17:10:12.067" Title="Using data generated by an open-source GPLv3.0 software" Tags="|gpl-3|open-data|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-06-11T15:20:51.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-07T17:20:14.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot restrict this just with the license in an efficient, working way and still claim it is a Free software. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right thing to do would be to have the support contract in addition to the software. The support may be paid for commercial use and free (mostly non existent or relying on community input only) for non commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T17:20:14.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-07T19:05:18.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically you still have free software, but such a business model by itself is questionable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your product is an end-user application, this is unlikely to work as a pricing model. Anyone who obtained a copy for free can post it online, so that commercial users can get it for free. If you put an addition term that prevents such distribution, then you no longer have free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your product is a library, the situation is different. You can dual license your library, under GPL (or another copyleft license) and a commercial license. Open source users can use the GPL version. Proprietary users will need to buy the commercial license. Many companies actually do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T19:05:18.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-08T09:27:34.060" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;no, software which attaches terms for use does not constitute free software.  that is implied in the term free :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;something like &quot;FSF-approved free license&quot; is not a free license, it's a software license that has no guarantee with being &quot;free&quot; regardless of having the word in the title (twice).  in fact if you feel the need to have a license dictating terms of use at all then it is not free in my book.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a bit of a rant on the obvious, but obfuscation should happen on the code and not in the language describing the code.  the companies I have been at have avoided any &quot;free&quot; or &quot;open source&quot; software because having a lawyer to check the applicability of the license is more expensive than paying for a royalty free license elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very black and white interpretation, I know.  but unless the definition in the the dictionary has changed dramatically, it's worth pointing out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18498" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T09:27:34.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-08T13:48:38.977" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for one of the 4 big consulting companies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I developed a software on my free time. It gained lot of attention, I was asked to register it as company asset. I guess there are plans to use/sell it in the engagements with clients. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I leave the company, I still want to be able to use it and if the company sells it, I wanted to be able to get some credit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to license it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18503" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T13:48:38.977" Title="Licencing a software while working in an enterprise" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|software|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9959" CreationDate="2020-06-08T15:24:45.907" Score="3" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 3.2 of MPL-2.0 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code&#xA;  Form, as described in Section 3.1, and You must inform recipients of&#xA;  the Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code&#xA;  Form by reasonable means in a timely manner, at a charge no more than&#xA;  the cost of distribution to the recipient; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(b) You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this&#xA;  License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the&#xA;  license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the&#xA;  recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interpreting this to mean that a distributed product must disclose all uses of MPL-2.0 code within it, and be specific about where that code comes from, even if it is unmodified. This would seem to apply, for example, to using MPL-2.0 components via build systems like Gradle and Cargo. Not just for immediate dependencies of the product, but for all cascading dependencies as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems prohibitive. I have a library, for example, that handles logging. It's made for other library developers to use. But if a library depends on my logging code, then any application using that library has to disclose that they're also using my MPL-2.0 library as a consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I understanding this correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T10:19:35.810" Title="MPL-2.0: Propagation of Section 3.2" Tags="|licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-08T16:54:28.583" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first post so I apologize in advanced if this question has been asked/answered before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the usage of open source libraries. We own several apps that are not open source, but use open source libraries that doesn't require our source code to be open sourced like LGPL, MIT, Apache, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've been through a long process of sanitizing our apps and remove libraries that require our code to be open sourced. Sadly, we can't go open source at the moment, but we are sure that the libraries that we use does not make as in infringement with any license, What we don't know is if we have to specify for each of the open source libraries that we use what license they have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have to include in our apps a screen that lists all the open source libraries that we use?. Do we have to include a file with this information?. Do we have to do anything at all?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18507" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T05:08:17.237" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T05:08:17.237" Title="Disclaimer of included open sourced libraries in project" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9956" CreationDate="2020-06-09T09:07:37.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your understanding is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find it prohibitive, but it is actually a requirement of many open source licenses such as MIT, BSD, or Apache-2 that at least the license text is made available to users of a product that contains (indirect) dependencies under that license. The only thing that the MPL 2.0 adds on top of that is that those users are also informed where they can obtain the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses go even further, because if you have an indirect dependency on a component under the GPL license, you must even make sure that everything, including your own code, is made available under a GPL-compatible open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end this means that any project needs to check what indirect dependencies they pull in when adding a new dependency (version) to their build system and what licenses those dependencies have, so that they know what obligations they are entering into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T10:19:35.810" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T10:19:35.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T10:58:12.723" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think of the software which is being distributed in following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Available to download gratis and giving the freedom to run the software for any purpose as you wish, the freedom to redistribute exact copies of free software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want a source code of the program, it's not available to download gratis, you have to purchase the source code but after buying the source code, you're free to modify it and re-distribute the modified version to others as you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this type of software be called &quot;free software&quot; as per the FSF definition? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any examples of this kind of software distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note: While typing the title of question, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4142/296&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; sounds discussing of a similar method of distributing the software.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="296" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T11:11:23.190" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T16:55:52.153" Title="Are there examples of the free software which are available to run and copy as gratis but source code is being sold?" Tags="|commercial|source-code|free-software-definition|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9960" CreationDate="2020-06-09T14:48:58.723" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF includes Freedom #1 in their Free Software Definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A software artifact is not inherently free or nonfree, but the terms under which it is possible (legally and practically) to use, modify, and redistribute it are free or nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per Freedom #1, a binary distributed without source is a nonfree distribution. That is, for any particular person, either they have access to the source under free terms or they do not. For those recipients who do have the source code (with, as you say, full FSF-required freedoms), the software can be used, modified, and distributed freely. For those recipients that do not have access to the source code under free terms, the software is nonfree. Under your economic model, recipients of the binary may receive it under nonfree terms and then pay to receive it under free terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I don't know of any company doing this. There is some software, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://grsecurity.net/agree/agreement_faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grsecurity&lt;/a&gt;, that is sold under the GPL but only made available to purchasers (but can be shared by those purchasers broadly thereafter). I don't know of any vendor that offers a gratis public binary alongside paid freedom-supplying source code, but it's not an impossible business model. Considering that some companies have had success doing this with the binary-plus-source together, this could work similarly, if you have buyers who have a business need to modify your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with selling binary-plus-source, you are likely to see quick propagation of your free source becoming available from other sources. You can mitigate this if you provide frequent updates (so few people have the latest version unless they got it from you) or your have a base of purchasers who all have a business interest in not sharing their source with competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that if you are not the sole copyright holder of the work and you make use of code under a copyleft license (like the GPL), you may not distribute a binary without making the source available to each recipient. For this system to work, the code must either be all yours, or all not-yours parts are available under permissive non-copyleft terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T16:55:52.153" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T16:55:52.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-10T10:24:58.423" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following &lt;strong&gt;scenario&lt;/strong&gt;, and will appreciate any advice on the licensing issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THE SCENARIO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have &lt;strong&gt;Application A&lt;/strong&gt; that is open source, and has an &lt;strong&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/strong&gt; licence. And I have &lt;strong&gt;Application B&lt;/strong&gt; that is &lt;strong&gt;proprietary&lt;/strong&gt; and closed source, but can carry out analytics on any given data set. Application B refers to no AGPLv3 libraries at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I configure Application B so that it can read the MySQL &lt;em&gt;database tables&lt;/em&gt; of Application A, fetch specific datasets, and produce graphs and statistics in HTML format. Now I write &lt;strong&gt;Module X&lt;/strong&gt; inside Application A (AGPLv3), and I am happy to release the source code of Module X as open source. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All that Module X does&lt;/strong&gt; is to simply read the HTML generated by Application B and displays it to the users of Application A. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTIONS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION 1:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Is it right to think that&lt;/strong&gt; I do not need to distribute Application B? Because: (a) It is proprietary, and (b) It works independently of any AGPLv3 libraries or code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Now, if Module X were to execute a closed source / proprietary Application B on the command line, at run-time to fetch some output and simply display it, &lt;strong&gt;is it safe to assume that&lt;/strong&gt; I do not need to expose/release Application B? That is because Application B has no AGPLv3 libraries - and it works independently of any other software - it can simply be called by anything on the command line. Any user that has bought the proprietary licence to Application B can execute it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts will be highly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18530" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T10:24:58.423" Title="AGPL Code reading output from proprietary software" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9964" CreationDate="2020-06-10T12:52:10.203" Score="0" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I am installing a distro, which comes with two pieces of firmware: free firmware for chip A, and nonfree firmware for chip B. I install it on a machine that has chip A and chip B, but I choose to only activate chip A. If my system still has the nonfree firmware for chip B, but I never use it, does my system still count as being all free software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18478" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T15:49:30.687" Title="Is my system still free if it has nonfree firmware on it?" Tags="|free-software-definition|firmware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9963" CreationDate="2020-06-10T15:20:12.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Freedom is not a property that inheres in software; it's a set of rights that attach to software through the act of conveyance.  Even less does it inhere in an installed system, powered-down, on a table.  So it's not very meaningful to speak of your system as being free, or non-free, in isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have the rights and capability to exercise all four freedoms with respect to all the software that's installed on your system that you use and care about, I'd say it's free.  If there are a couple of additional files full of random numbers on the disc, no harm is done, even if they later turn out to be firmware instructions for some piece of hardware you're not using.  Delete those files if you feel bad, or don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, as long as you can fully exercise the four freedoms with your system, it's free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T15:49:30.687" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T15:49:30.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8709" CreationDate="2020-06-10T17:26:27.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just downloaded the font file. While I didn't see a link to the clearly unambiguous license in the properties of the file (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fonts.google.com/license/productsans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fonts.google.com/license/productsans&lt;/a&gt;), it does say under the &quot;Legal trademarks&quot; field that &quot;Product Sans is a trademark of Google.&quot; The license that the GitHub repository is working under (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/iosched-ios/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/google/iosched-ios/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;) explicitly disallows use of trademarks in the Apache portion: &quot;6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems like the entire argument may be sidestepped and we're still not allowed to use the font because of trademark, rather than other points of licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18535" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T17:26:27.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-10T20:07:34.337" Score="1" ViewCount="1496" Body="&lt;p&gt;In OpenCV, you can use the SIFT algorithm in doing feature detection.  According to Wikipedia, however, the SIFT algorithm's patent has recently run out: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-invariant_feature_transform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true?  According to the patent, it expired in March of 2020:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/US6711293&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://patents.google.com/patent/US6711293&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean, for end users?  Can anyone use it, for commercial programs as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18219" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T08:54:12.057" Title="If the SIFT algorithm for vision is out of patent, can it be included in open source?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-10T22:53:44.600" Score="1" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;if using in a website a free API that has the following license: For personal / non-commercial projects. under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the website that uses the API have some banners ? (affiliates / google ads, etc.) or by having the banners the website considers then a Commercial and then need to purchase a license for the API?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18539" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T09:04:39.707" Title="Using a free API which licensed “For personal / non-commercial projects” in website with banners" Tags="|licensing|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9972" CreationDate="2020-06-10T23:30:07.540" Score="5" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past I have made use of a third party project released under the LGPL licence. Recently the owner/creator of the project has archived the original repo and created a new version (seemingly based on the same code-base) licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0&lt;/a&gt; which requires payment for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was basically wondering if this is possible with any LGPL project - for example could I create a commercially licensed fork of the original LGPL project - or if it is a right reserved for the original creators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18540" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T05:47:18.083" Title="Can I release a fork of an LGPL project under a commercial licence?" Tags="|lgpl|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10012" CreationDate="2020-06-11T03:32:16.830" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on various wrappers for web APIs, these wrappers are released under the Apache-2.0 license. For unit tests, I'm running an embedded web server which serves mock responses. The responses served during unit tests were acquired by manually querying the API and saving the JSON response to a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means I'll have &lt;code&gt;.json&lt;/code&gt; files in my repository that are actual responses from production APIs. In most cases, this doesn't matter as it contains arbitrary data, and so is in no falls under original or copyrightable content. However, there are examples like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube Data API&lt;/a&gt;, which includes the video title and description, which are ultimately under the content creator's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure if it's necessary, but I'd like to avoid including the API responses under the license of the project itself. Otherwise, I'd essentially be redistributing content I don't hold copyright of under Apache-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good idea to take measures to exclude these files from the license of my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15592" LastEditorUserId="15592" LastEditDate="2023-04-19T19:33:16.363" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T07:24:27.117" Title="Should I exclude files from the license if they reference other copyrighted work" Tags="|apache-2.0|exceptions|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9968" CreationDate="2020-06-11T05:47:18.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we say in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2077/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;The copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.  The copyright holder is not bound by his/her own licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that Alice creates a library, say &lt;code&gt;libalice&lt;/code&gt;, which she releases under, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;.  Although s2c requires that modified versions be released under LGPLv2.1, Alice is not bound by that, as she is the rightsholder.  She may release her library (and/or modified versions thereof) under any other licence she pleases, including proprietary ones, either in parallel with the LGPL version, or subsequent to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not do that with &lt;code&gt;libalice&lt;/code&gt;, because you are not the rightsholder.  If you get hold of a copy, and modify it, you have no rights to propagate copies of that save as the licence on the original permits.  If you choose to propagate it, either you have accepted the licence, and are therefore bound by its conditions, including s2c, or you are violating copyright and can be hauled into court and (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) proscribed from further distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice accepts contributions to &lt;code&gt;libalice&lt;/code&gt; from, say, Bob, and furthermore she does not require Bob to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement (or a Contributor Licensing Agreement which permits relicensing) then she has lost this power as the sole rightsholder.  Now she, also, may not release the combined work under any terms other than LGPLv2.1 unless she gets the consent of all other rightsholders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T05:47:18.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-11T06:54:37.903" Score="1" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i import code from a github repository in my go code by doing something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;import &quot;github.com/.../...&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this repository is licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include the copyright notice? And if so where and in what format? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18544" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T09:06:36.390" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T09:06:36.390" Title="Should I include copyright notices with golang imports?" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9973" CreationDate="2020-06-11T07:29:25.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry if I seem terse, we just seem to be having a rush of people at the moment who can't read copyright licences.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're compiling a chunk of somebody else's code into your executable, we need to examine what rights you have to do that.  The licence makes it clear that you may do this, in return for retaining a copyright notice and two paragraphs of permissions statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you do need to include the copyright notice, and a bit more, too.  The licence doesn't say how; since you and the author of the other code are now joint rightsholders in the resulting code, you might want to put their notice wherever you put your own.  Finding a suitable place for the permissions statement is left as an exercise for you; but it would be worth making it clear, when you do, that it's included as a requirement of a licence on a &lt;strong&gt;part&lt;/strong&gt; of the code only, and doesn't apply to your whole codebase (unless, of course, you wish to publish your code under MIT also).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T07:29:25.837" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-11T07:49:05.480" Score="16" ViewCount="4086" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fellow developer has done something that has made me curious, he has a popular javascript front-end package on GitHub which for years was licensed under MIT, then all of a sudden he released a v2 and switched the license to GPLv3 and added the means of purchasing a MIT license  for a one-time fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before he changed to GPLv3 it was pretty clear that anyone could fork the MIT code and use it just about whichever way they wanted while abiding to the MIT license. But now that the MIT license is purchasable and obviously intends the MIT version to be kept away from non-paying users, I wonder if this is solid or just full of holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering doing the same for one of my own popular packages but I have to wonder, if someone goes ahead and pays this one-time fee to purchase a MIT license to gain access to code which is otherwise available through GPlv3, what's to stop them from uploading the MIT version to Github with the MIT license attached. Wouldn't that be within their rights and perfectly legal and wouldn't that be circumventing the intent of the party selling the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16746" LastEditorUserId="16746" LastEditDate="2021-10-02T12:38:15.530" LastActivityDate="2021-10-02T12:38:15.530" Title="If someone purchases a MIT license for code that is otherwise GPLv3, may they redistribute it? May they upload it on Github?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|dual-license|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9975" CreationDate="2020-06-11T08:11:10.693" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Selling licence exceptions, usually to copyleft licences, is a perfectly normal (though arguably somewhat distasteful) practice.  Provided the developer is the sole rightsholder in the package, or has some other lawful means to re-license (eg CTA, or CLA that permits this, on all contributions) then this is a perfectly lawful thing to do..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence change doesn't affect any pre-existing copies.  If you got a copy of this code under MIT, then the conditions of the MIT licence continue to apply to that copy; it is generally only &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; versions that can be meaningfully affected by such a change.  But this also means that if you incorporate changes published under GPLv3 from the original project site, your copy is now entirely covered by GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, anyone purchasing a copy under MIT would be free to re-publish it under MIT, or indeed many other, licences.  However it, too, would no longer be able to be kept up-to-date with patches from the original project without turning it into a GPLv3 version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wouldn't that be circumventing the intent of the party selling the MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't (and can't) know what their intent is, so I can't say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T07:04:39.547" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T07:04:39.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9966" CreationDate="2020-06-11T08:54:12.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A patent gives an inventor the exclusive right to use the ideas covered by the patent. This means that nobody is allowed to create a product incorporating those ideas without permission from the patent holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exclusive right is time limited and when a patent has expired then the time period for which those exclusive rights were given has ended. This means that you no longer need to ask permission to use the ideas that were covered by the patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For end-users it means that more, competing products based on the SIFT algorithm may become available, as anyone is now allowed to implement it without prior permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T08:54:12.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9967" CreationDate="2020-06-11T09:04:39.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The NC clause in CC licenses is very vague and says that your usage must not be &quot;primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unsure if your usage of the API falls within that definition or not, your best bet is to ask the publisher of the API if they consider showing ads on a site using their API to be a Commercial use or not. They are anyway the ones that determine if you would get into legal trouble for violating their license or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T09:04:39.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9983" CreationDate="2020-06-11T15:45:02.963" Score="5" ViewCount="1669" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an MIT-licensed project, &lt;em&gt;FooSoftware&lt;/em&gt;, which I have done some work to make work in a Docker container [1]. I would like to publish that work so that others can use &lt;em&gt;FooSoftware&lt;/em&gt; in Docker without doing the work to adapt it themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would involve publishing a project including a &lt;code&gt;Dockerfile&lt;/code&gt; and some simple associated scripts, for example through GitHub. It may also involve making the built image available, for example via Docker Hub. The Docker project does not itself provide the source code to &lt;em&gt;FooSoftware&lt;/em&gt;, though it fetches it from the upstream repository when building, ie when a command such as &lt;code&gt;docker build&lt;/code&gt; is issued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am slightly unclear as to what precisely to include in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file. The original project lists contributors, eg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(C)opyright 2018-2019 Joe Bloggs &amp;lt;jbloggs at example dot org&amp;gt;&#xA;(C)opyright 2015-2016 Tracey Beaker &amp;lt;tbeaker at example dot org&amp;gt;&#xA;(C)opyright 2005-2012 A Dent &amp;lt;arthurd at example dot org&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure whether to include these in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file I create. On the one hand, I want to properly credit the upstream authors and do not want to make it seem as if I am claiming credit for the whole project. On the other hand, I do not want to make upstream responsible for downstream Docker adaptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the MIT license includes the clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;  copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe including the copyright notices is required, even though the Docker project does not directly include the upstream project's code. &lt;strong&gt;Should I add my name to the top, and include previous names below?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to clear on this before making a FOSS faux pas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1: In the real case this is indeed dealing with the MIT license, but if the answers would be applicable to the broader case of all FOSS licenses which permit redistribution of derivative works I can change the question to the more general case&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18548" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T06:32:54.047" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T07:22:27.840" Title="Copyright when creating a Dockerfile &amp; image based on a FOSS-licensed project" Tags="|licensing|mit|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9975" CreationDate="2020-06-11T18:52:19.860" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've paid for an alternate license for a software package before, and here's more or less what happens (disclaimer: it's been a while and I'm doing this from memory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternate license covers the source code that you receive, but that license is not the entirety of your agreement with the developer.  There's also a contract that covers the remaining portion of the transaction, things like payment terms, support agreements, eligibility for updates, etc. that are outside the scope of a software license.  The software license can technically permit you to redistribute the code, but the overall contract can include language that renders it null and void should you redistribute the source code under the alternate license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't technically limit your rights/freedoms with respect to the source code.  You're still free to use and redistribute it according to the terms of the license.  The developer is simply saying that anyone who redistributes the alternate license version will lose access to the support, upgrades, and other extras that they've already paid for (things that the software license never obliged him to provide in the first place) and forfeit the money that they paid for them.  This is a big waste of money for the customer, and the customer doesn't really gain much in return.  Not to mention, word can travel quickly around the open-source community.  Try something like this once and you risk having other developers refuse to do business with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &quot;loophole&quot; where I suppose the customer could upload the alternate license version &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; their support agreement expires.  This would be a snapshot of an older version, though.  Since you're not selling old versions of the code, this shouldn't really compete with your business.  Your public repo will show any potential customer all the bugs that &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; fixed in that old version, which should make them much less likely to try and use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is much easier to do with some licenses that with others.  As apsillers notes in the comments, there's an existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5426/threatening-with-non-renewal-of-contract-when-users-distribute-the-gplv2-license&quot;&gt;question on the open source site&lt;/a&gt; discussing this practice with respect to the GPL.  It looks like the GPL includes language designed to prevent this sort of contractual relationship, but the MIT license does not.  Make sure to choose your alternate license carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastEditorUserId="9682" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T18:45:56.573" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T18:45:56.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9975" CreationDate="2020-06-11T19:59:33.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;if someone goes ahead and pays this one-time fee to purchase a MIT license to gain access to code which is otherwise available through GPlv3, what's to stop them from uploading the MIT version to Github with the MIT license attached. Wouldn't that be within their rights and perfectly legal?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The MIT license is clear that you can do whatever you like so long as you keep the MIT license notice intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;  of this software and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal&#xA;  in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;  to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;  copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;  furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;  copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they add additional restrictions then it is not the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;...and wouldn't that be circumventing the intent of the party selling the MIT license?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll guess that the intent of the author is to have their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; cake and eat their commercial software, too, to mangle a metaphor. Many projects are skittish about using GPL code in their project for reasons real and imagined. Offering their code under a more compatible license is a way to handle that and make a little money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could have chosen a different license for commercial use, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL has several commercial licenses and exceptions&lt;/a&gt;, but they didn't. Whatever their intent was they chose to sell an MIT licensed version and that has consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, the MIT license only applies to that specific version of the code, a snapshot which will presumably be unsupported. Later GPL releases would not be covered. They could choose to make a fork, but they would have to be careful to wall themselves off from the GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that they would be releasing an MIT licensed snapshot of what is already available under the GPL there's little harm done. And if someone wants to run with it and make an MIT licensed fork, those changes can be incorporated into the GPL project. This is in the spirit of the GPL and Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3228" LastEditorUserId="3228" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T21:04:01.093" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T21:04:01.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9975" CreationDate="2020-06-12T03:38:04.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nobody has to pay for the MIT licensed version. As the text of the MIT license says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, &lt;strong&gt;to any person obtaining a copy of this software&lt;/strong&gt; and associated documentation files (the &quot;Software&quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if a piece of software is offered under an MIT license, then everyone who has the software has the license. There is no need for anyone to pay for the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this must be true for precisely the reason you mentioned. Say I paid for the MIT license. That gives &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; a license, but what would give an MIT license to anyone I distributed it to under the MIT license? That license &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; come from someone who has the legal right to license the software, and I don't have that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of the MIT license is to permit anyone who has the software to have a license to use it. It does not authorize anyone to relicense anything -- the license always comes from the copyright holder. (It must be this way under US law. Other countries might allow a license of this type to give someone else the right to themselves license someone else, but US law doesn't.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T03:38:04.183" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9979" CreationDate="2020-06-12T07:22:27.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Docker container licensing is an utter mess. If you have a choice, the best move is not to play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dockerfiles are simple: they are just an installation script. If you write the Dockerfile by yourself you are the sole copyright holder and can license it however you like, regardless of the licenses of the software referenced by the Dockerfile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Container images are really tricky though because they contain copies of all the software in the image. Thus, you need to comply with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the software in the image. Additionally, the image as a whole may inherit licensing restrictions from the Dockerfile or from base images (I've illustrated these relationships in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7015&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that your base images have already sorted out license compliance, e.g. because they use a Debian base and only install official packages (Debian is &lt;em&gt;really good&lt;/em&gt; at managing license compliance, and you can find license info under &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/*/copyright&lt;/code&gt;). Then, you can focus on the software you add in your topmost image layer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license requires that the copyright/license notice “shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software”. This means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of the license in the image itself, including any copyright notices that are in the original license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your image has associated documentation such as a README file, add the license there as well, or at least tell people where they can find the full license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licenses might have other requirements, for example if you copy GPL-covered software into the image you would also have to provide a copy of the source code for that software (but not for the entire image with all base images).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not modify the software's license to add your own copyright notice because you did not modify the software – you only copied the software into the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you may decide to offer your Dockerfile and the image as a whole under a license of your choice. But you should be aware that the license of the image as a whole seems to ahve little to do with the licensing of the software in the image. E.g. it is common that an MIT-licensed image includes lots of GPL software. I assume that if a base image is GPL-licensed, then your image would have to be GPL-licensed as well (even if your Dockerfile has a more permissive license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, this could mean that a document describing the licensing status of the image could include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license of the image as a whole, taking into account licenses of Dockerfiles and base images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the licenses of the base images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the licenses of the Dockerfiles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the licenses of all the software in the image incl base images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in particular, the licenses of the software you added to the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where applicable, information about the corresponding source code of images or software in the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, this means that I do not publish Docker images because this seems awfully complicated. Other people (incl many official Docker images) seem content to only provide the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license of the image, which is taken to be the same as the license of the Dockerfile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the licenses of major software components added to the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a vague nod towards base images&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this compliant? I doubt it, but so far no one is complaining. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T07:22:27.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-12T12:56:37.190" Score="0" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a library, that can be used for free in any open-source project, so I want to publish it under terms of GNU GPL v3. But, also I want to sell it, so it could be used in proprietary projects under terms of Lesser GPL or my proprietary license. Does GPL let me do this? If not, which copyleft license could I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18557" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T12:56:37.190" Title="Selling copy of GPL v3 app under another license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|proprietary-code|gnu|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-06-12T13:31:43.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10066" CreationDate="2020-06-12T13:18:17.253" Score="2" ViewCount="1897" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an app made with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.electronjs.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;electron.js&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have used third party packages in my app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the packages have permissive licenses(MIT and BSD License) with them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am using UI assets(e.g. icons) with MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to license my app with MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I license my app. Is it just as simple as adding MIT license copy in my repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to do something for third party packages licenses (for both packages dev and dep).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some assets owner/authors did mention that I need to credit them in project. So how do I handle this, do I need to make a file with all their license and credits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18558" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:47:10.037" Title="Licensing an electron app made with third-party packages" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9992" CreationDate="2020-06-13T12:43:00.093" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a piece of software and I plan to have it interact with the Discord API, which I know is nonfree because it expressly prohibits freedom 1 (the freedom to look at and modify the source  code). If I release my software as free and open source under the GNU GPL v 3.0, is it still free? Or can I just not use the API?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18478" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T08:10:09.247" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T08:49:32.160" Title="Is software still free if it uses nonfree APIs?" Tags="|free-software-definition|api|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2020-06-13T16:12:44.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can check the discord API on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;It is an open API and you will be able to use this API in your application, but each API that is provided by a developer is bound by the legal terms set by the developer themselves, and for discord you can find them here &lt;a href=&quot;https://discord.com/developers/docs/legal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://discord.com/developers/docs/legal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;From the same page this is what you should be concerned with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;LICENSE, ACCOUNTS AND RESTRICTIONS&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;  2.1 API or SDK License. &lt;BR&gt;&#xA;  Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Discord grants you a limited, non-exclusive, revocable, non-transferable license to access and use the API or SDK solely to as necessary to (i) develop, test, display and execute your Applications with the API or SDK functionality included; and (ii) distribute to third parties, or permit third parties to access, the API or SDK as integrated into your Applications.&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;  2.2 Restrictions.&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;  You shall not, and shall not permit any person, directly or indirectly, to (i) reverse engineer, disassemble, reconstruct, decompile, translate, modify or copy the API or SDK, other than as explicitly permitted hereunder (except to the extent the foregoing restriction is expressly prohibited by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation), (ii) create derivative works of the API or SDK or any aspect or portion thereof, including without limitation, source code and algorithms, (iii) distribute or otherwise disseminate the API or SDK by any means or in any form, except as an integral part of your Applications; (iv) use the API or SDK in connection with any Applications that include any malware or other harmful code or that facilitate spamming in any way; (v) circumvent any limits or any privacy or access controls (or attempt to do so); or (vi) include any advertisements or other promotions within the functionality enabled by the API or SDK. Except as expressly set forth in this Agreement, Discord reserves all rights in or the API and SDK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you are doing any of that, you will be able to use the API in an open source application.&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;API is just that, an API, its not source code. It is a way that your application is able to communicate with another so its not covered by source code license but has its own license terms.&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I am in not a lawyer but I recommend that you read through those license terms.&#xA;&lt;BR&gt;&#xA;Hope this helps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18571" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T08:45:25.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T08:45:25.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-13T17:06:37.570" Score="1" ViewCount="508" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions regarding the implications of releasing something open-source and it later being used by &quot;bad people&quot; (terrorists, authoritarian regimes, and so on). The first is about the legal consequences and the second is about what free software advocates say about this (I googled but couldn’t find anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For illustration, let’s say I release as &quot;open hardware&quot; the code to make a gun with a 3D printer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I legally liable if a terrorist 3D prints the gun and hurts somebody?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is free software advocates' take on the issue of use of open source software for nefarious objectives? Is it the price to pay for freedom?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18569" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T08:52:26.120" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T21:57:20.757" Title="Use of open-source by “bad people”" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2020-06-13T20:15:32.657" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, unethical use of open source assets &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an ethical problem. However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Licenses that say “don't do illegal stuff” won't stop criminals from doing illegal stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unwanted behaviour is really hard to define, to the point that the definitions might be too vague to be enforceable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Excluding specific groups is a very blunt instrument. E.g. allowing everyone except the government of a certain country to use some software would continue punishing that country after the government has changed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hopefully, the good that comes from Open Source outweighs the bad uses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition both emphasize that the software must be free to use for all purposes, without excluding anyone. However, all licenses do express the values of their drafters. For example the GPL expresses the belief that software freedom is ethically mandated, and the Cryptographic Autonomy License expresses the belief that end users should have control of their data in SaaS scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethicalsource.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethical Source&lt;/a&gt; folks suggest licenses that directly exclude purposes or groups for ethical arguments, despite the problems mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that licensing is the wrong layer to address ethical issues in the open source community. It is unreasonable to believe that we can create software in a manner that only benefits the right people. However, we can run projects in an ethical fashion. Ethical artefacts vs ethical processes and communities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth considering whether a certain software is even worth creating: a sysadmin tool like Chef is going to have way more neutral than bad uses, whereas the societal consequences for working on facial recognition or deep fakes are much darker on average.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether a developer is legally liable for the uses of the stuff they publish depends on what they are publishing, and what the applicable laws are. In general, it is impossible to disclaim all liability. For example, building an application that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;purpose-built to commit copyright infringement&lt;/a&gt; is clearly contributing to that infringement. Publishing malware treads a very fine line between giving tools to red teams to improve security on one hand, and providing cyber-munitions to terrorists on the other. Your 3D printed gun example is close to the Liberator from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed#Legal_challenges&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Defense Distributed&lt;/a&gt;. While one open source advocate (ESR) has lauded this gun, it may be worth pointing out that his views have diverged from the FOSS mainstream. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T20:15:32.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9988" CreationDate="2020-06-14T08:40:20.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discord claims rights over two things here, the SDK (copying and use thereof) and their API (use and implementation thereof).  The question of the SDK is pretty simple: it's a piece of software, and it's well-established that you can require end-users to agree to arbitrary terms when they take copies of your software, and expect them to be honoured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of the API is much more interesting.  Historically, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ideas could not be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;, only the &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of those ideas.  So if Discord publishes the API, then although you can't make copies of the published API without permission, you can read and implement it &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; in your own code, and you haven't done anything that requires permission.  This in turn means that Discord can't make you agree to their terms in order to implement it.  Since their terms require you to restrict users of your code from certain kinds of use, and modification thereof, your software would be non-free.  If you were to publish it under, say, GPLv3, you would be purporting to give your users rights that aren't yours to give, just as if you made unlawful copies of MS Office and resold them to end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that APIs couldn't be copyrighted was upended in the US by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google v. Oracle America&lt;/a&gt;, where two lower US courts found that they couldn't be, and the US Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit twice reversed the decision.  The cases were appealed to the US Supreme Court, who agreed to hear the matter following the second reversal.  This they were scheduled to do on 2020 03 24, but the COVID crisis intervened, and the hearing has been rescheduled for the court's 2020-2021 term, when the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the specific question of the copyrightability of APIs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, naturally, great interest in the outcome; many tech companies have filed &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amicus briefs&lt;/a&gt;, the great majority arguing against such copyrightability.  The judgement will not, of course, have authority outside the US, but judges tend to keep an eye on what their colleagues are doing around the world, and the case cannot fail to have a global impact.  The Supreme Court is, in turn, likely to have half an eye pointing towards the EU, where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Programs_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Computer Programs Directive&lt;/a&gt; states in s11 of the preamble that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ideas and principles which underlie any element&#xA;  of a program, including those which underlie its&#xA;  interfaces, are not protected by copyright under this&#xA;  Directive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, if you're in a jurisdiction that holds that APIs aren't copyrightable, then because Discord have chosen to publish their API on github, you would be free to implement it without having to agree to their terms, and thus could do so in free software.  If you're in a jurisdiction that holds that they are, then because of the terms on which the API is made available, it would be impossible for free software to implement the API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T08:49:32.160" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T08:49:32.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-14T09:13:19.040" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I choose to implement an interpreter or compiler for an existing programming language whose (only) reference implementation is distributed under the GPL. If in doing so I do not derive any code from this reference implementation and figure out the languages grammar/rules etc. from its official reference manual alone, does my interpreter/compiler still classify as a derivative work under the GPL? I.e. can a language &quot;itself&quot; fall under the GPL independent of any concrete implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13437" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T09:31:37.440" Title="Licensing of independent implementation of GPL language" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-14T09:18:27.497" Score="6" ViewCount="1575" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many corona apps are developed in the moment, and some of them e.g. In Germany are open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people fear to be spied by this app. Im definitely Not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still it raised the question in me:How can we make sure that the open source code is actually deployed without modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the client side that is easy, you just decompile the Apk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about the server code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory I could make changes to the opesource code before deploying it and nobody would know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there mechanisms out there to ensure that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18578" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T05:45:04.820" Title="How can we verify that the open-source code is deployed and actually in use?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9993" CreationDate="2020-06-14T09:31:37.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer these in reverse order because the second one is easier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can a language &quot;itself&quot; fall under the GPL independent of any concrete implementation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The GPL derives its legal power from copyright law, and copyright covers only the &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt; of an idea. The reference specification of a language can certainly be under the GPL (although the GPL is really designed for code, not documentation), but a language itself cannot be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;does my interpreter/compiler still classify as a derivative work under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your description, &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; not, but what you're asking here is actually much more a legal question (&quot;what does the law in jurisdiction X consider as a derivative work?&quot;) rather than an GPL question - the GPL does not (and cannot) define what a derivative work is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T09:31:37.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9994" CreationDate="2020-06-14T16:10:20.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only can you not verify that the code is running unmodified, you cannot verify that there is any code running at all: perhaps the entire service is operated by a clever hacker tapping out electrical pulses into an Ethernet cable, and you'd have no way of knowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so maybe you could tell (for one, such a hacker would have to sleep eventually -- but if there were &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; hackers...), but the larger point here is that a service is always completely opaque to its users. Any code-verification methods afforded by the service are also part of the service and could therefore lie, undetectably, to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two solutions (or, really, workarounds) to this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the code is available, you can run your own instance of the service. Since you are the operator of the service, you know firsthand what code is running and do not have the verification problem that users of the service do.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A service may be architected such that a client never sends any sensitive data to the service. This is considered under the field of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;secure multi-party computation&lt;/a&gt;, which Wikipedia defines as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a subfield of cryptography with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, you may encrypt or transform data on the client in such a way that the service can operate on submitted data but not understand its substance. (Related concepts include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homomorphic encryption&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zero-knowledge proofs&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivious_transfer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oblivious transfer&lt;/a&gt;.) One such simple service is &lt;a href=&quot;https://clipperz.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clipperz&lt;/a&gt;, a password manager that holds a user's encrypted passwords and never exposes the unencrypted data to the server. We do not know if the service is authentic, but we limit the worst case of what an evil service can possibly do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relies on trustworthy client participation in the scheme, but clients are actually verifiable, unlike services. (Client verification may not be easy but is at least informatically possible.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T18:15:39.650" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T18:15:39.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9937" CreationDate="2020-06-14T20:56:48.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short answer:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether software is &quot;free&quot; (as in freedom) depends on the licensing terms, and the software owner is allowed to license it to different users under different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Longer answer:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license that allows noncommercial use only is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free license&lt;/a&gt; because it violates &quot;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you received the software from someone else under the terms of a free license, any redistribution must be consistent with the free license's terms. Thus, you cannot limit the purposes the software can be used for; you cannot apply a &quot;noncommercial use only&quot; restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you yourself are the software owner, you can license your software however you want. You are allowed to give it away or sell it under terms of your choosing. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can sell the software to some users under a free license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the same time you can give away the software to other users under a nonfree license, such as a &quot;noncommercial use only&quot; license. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's possible for the same software to be free for some users and nonfree for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as mentioned in other answers, if &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; receives software under a free license, they can redistribute it at will, thus making the software free for anyone who receives it from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two more points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calling a free license a &quot;commercial license&quot; is kind of unusual, so it could be confusing to those who receive the software. Calling it a &quot;license to use for any purpose&quot; is more clear -- but it's probably best to just describe it as a free software license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also it's important to make sure to specify which free license is being applied (GPL, MIT, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastEditorUserId="3016" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T22:05:25.900" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T22:05:25.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-15T04:19:34.817" Score="3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am implementing an online version of a card game. The author and publisher of the game owns the IP, evidently (e.g on mechanics and design).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the game (mechanics) and the graphics are our intellectual property - to be used only with our consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are open to my publishing my implementation as open source - but in the interest of transparency, I'd like to pick the most appropriate license to a) ensure my work just doesn't get appropriated and used for commercial gain, b) ensure my work is not providing ways for someone else to appropriate their IP, if that makes sense (basically I don't want to accidentally screw them over) -- they are a small publisher, and struggling with pirate copies of the physical game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea or precedent of a similar scenario elsewhere? I could obviously just &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; open source this, but I don't see good reasons to do so, except my lack of understanding of copyright laws :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18584" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T13:24:13.557" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T13:24:13.557" Title="Open Source license for a software implementation of a game for which I don't own IP (on mechanics, design, ..)" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9994" CreationDate="2020-06-15T07:02:58.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of the Corona Apps data protection feature is, that your data does not leave the mobile unless you upload it in case of a positive test. This is good insofar as the integrity of a server application is less relevant and would be hard to proof by users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order for you (or somebody doing that as a public service) to verify that the critical client app (on the app stores) actually reflects the open source code you would have to compare the binaries with a self build  binary. This is tedious since you need the exact same buildchain and you might need to account for differences in things like hostnames, timestamps and random file ordering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movement&lt;/a&gt; around reproducible/deterministic and verifiable builds which would make that easier, but I don't think that was part of the requirements (and is not so common for mobile apps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to actually analyze the network traffic of the app. This can however be hard depending on the encryption and is not entirely reliable as there can be hard to find side channels or the app can decide to wait with unauthorized transfers till a certain time/signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So generally I expect people will try to poke holes and they could discover malicious builds, but there is no guarantee. Especially not since it also depends on the vendor provided Bluetooth tracking API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would think the risk (for example for the German App) is small, SAP, Telekom or Government has all to lose and nothing to gain from a backdoor in the covid app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18006" LastEditorUserId="18006" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T05:45:04.820" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T05:45:04.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10000" CreationDate="2020-06-15T08:47:25.827" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the game publisher doesn't want an open source license. As soon as the code is released under an open source license, anyone will be able to do what they like with the code, and that's going to mean that they lose all control as to what people do with their mechanics and graphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The graphics issue can actually be worked around by licensing the graphics separately from the code - this is exactly what has been done by e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://keldon.net/rftg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keldon's excellent &lt;em&gt;Race for the Galaxy&lt;/em&gt; implementation&lt;/a&gt; where the graphics are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; released under the open source license that the code is released under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Game mechanics are a more interesting issue - I believe the general consensus right now is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/273935/Texas_court_affirms_game_mechanics_not_protected_under_copyright_law.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;game mechanics cannot be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;, so it's debatable whether they could actually enforce anything if somebody did make a reimplementation of their mechanics. Of course, releasing the game engine as open source would make it easier for somebody else to take those mechanics and re-use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T08:47:25.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-15T14:16:38.363" Score="2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am maintaining a Github project which is owned by our company.  It's a sample for demonstrating how to use the software sold by our company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, if I want to modify code of another Github project under Apache license 2.0 and use it in my project, what should I do in my obligation? (this Apache licensed software has a block for LICENSE statement but doesn't have a block for NOTICE)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done some researches but can't understand very well because there are many terms and English is not my first language.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my understanding, I need to add a NOTICE file in root directory to let people know I use this software.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do I need to specify which files are modified or copied from this Apache licensed software project(they are located in three different  folders)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is what I plan to do(ExoPlayer for example), I will add a NOTICE file in root directory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MyProject&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 OurCompany&#xA;&#xA;This project uses the modified code from this project:&#xA;&#xA;================================================&#xA;ExoPlayer&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0&#xA;================================================&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I do it right?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I will appreciate for the answers and thanks a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18585" LastEditorUserId="18585" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T03:42:51.417" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T03:42:51.417" Title="What should I do when using apache licensed library in my github project" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10009" CreationDate="2020-06-15T15:29:30.390" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing library and I want to license it under EUPL v1.2. EUPL is not very clear about whether linking EUPL licensed library creates derivative work, so I want to explicitly allow it for both static and dinamic linking. What is the correct way to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/understanding-eupl-v12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page says that I can put the following copyright notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Licensed under the EUPL, with extension of article 5 (compatibility clause) to &#xA;any licence for distributing derivative works that have been produced by the &#xA;normal use of the Work as a library.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct? And can I allow linking only from OSI-approved licensed code, to prevent linking my library from closed source project? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18573" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T09:10:59.040" Title="How to explicitly allow static linking EUPL licensed library from differently licensed code?" Tags="|linking|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-18T07:26:29.963" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also, I didn't disclaim any warranty (which is typically part of the license). Does that mean others can sue for damage? (In the BSD 2-clause license this looks like: &amp;quot;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning the rights granted, the relevant section (D.5) of the GitHub ToS &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Grant to Other Users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that means that the implicit license excludes the right to actually modify the code (that is not part of GitHub's functionality and thus cannot be done on GitHub). How does forking-only (which is at the end of the day only a copy) make sense? Why would they do it this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in Germany if that matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14587" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:31:33.173" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T07:26:29.963" Title="I accidentally released some of my code, on github, without a licence, what rights (if any) do others have with respect to it?" Tags="|licensing|warranty|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2020-06-18T09:05:34.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10004" CreationDate="2020-06-18T09:10:59.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EUPL is not very clear about whether linking EUPL licensed library creates derivative work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely to be clear, since that isn't a question of a licence, but of copyright law.  It's also not a settled question; we have explicit questions arguing that dynamic linking both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;does&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;does not&lt;/a&gt; create derivatives, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5087/is-linking-a-correct-proxy-for-derivative-work-determination-in-copyleft-foss&quot;&gt;other questions&lt;/a&gt; on the subject besides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to explicitly allow it for both static and dinamic linking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; being what?  Are you saying you want to allow people to link to your library?  Any free licence will permit that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can I allow linking only from OSI-approved licensed code, to prevent linking my library from closed source project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you developed your library from scratch in your own time, it's your code, so you can distribute it on any terms you see fit.  You certainly could put in a licence term requiring that any code linked to your library be distributed under, eg, an OSI-approved licence.  But this would be a little unusual, in my experience.  It would also be a crayon licence, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;those aren't good things&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More usual would be to use a licence like the GNU GPL, which is well-understood.  It requires (amongst other things) that any code that links to your library be distributed under the terms of the GPL also, this preventing your library from being used in closed-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If courts start to hold that linking doesn't make derivative works, then although the GPL won't save you, nor will any other licence you can write, because linking code of any kind to your code (without a licence to do so) then isn't a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T09:10:59.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10011" CreationDate="2020-06-18T16:11:04.647" Score="9" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering releasing a project of mine using the GNU Affero General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been researching Contributor License Agreements, Developer Certificate of Origin, as well as the pros/cons of FSF-style Copyright assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accept contributions to the project with the expectation that they are licensed under the AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have the right to pursue &lt;strong&gt;violations&lt;/strong&gt; of the license, without needing to get explicit approval/participation from all contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; have the right to change the license of, or dual license, the code base&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way to accomplish this within the existing FOSS ecosystem, other than requiring a CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18604" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T17:19:50.977" Title="How to protect a project from license infringement, without a CLA?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10010" CreationDate="2020-06-18T17:19:50.977" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything you want is already possible without a CLA or copyright assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5513&quot;&gt;inbound=outbound is automatic for GPL-family licenses&lt;/a&gt; because it is not allowed to distribute modifications without offering them under the same xGPL license. Modifications to LGPL-licensed code can be distributed under the GPL, which could block you from receiving modifications under upstream-usable terms, but there is no similar transformation allowed for the AGPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not necessary to get approval of all contributors to litigate against infringement. It is only necessary that you own some part of the code being infringed. In other words, infringement can be litigated against by &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; copyright holder, not by some critical mass of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders. As long as you hold copyright to some part of the code being infringed, you have standing to sue infringers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since other contributors retain their copyright, and you can make use of their contributions only under their AGPL grant, you will not have the ability to relicense those contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One edge case that you will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be well-protected against without a CLA is if a contributor illegally offers a contribution that is itself infringing. (i.e., a contributor illegally offers someone else's code without permission) In at least some jurisdictions, you would be liable for passing along such infringing material, even if you didn't know it was infringing. (A defense may still be possible in some jurisdictions, but it would surely be simplified by the contributor's assurance beforehand that the contributor wasn't infringing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T17:19:50.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9970" CreationDate="2020-06-18T22:41:47.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this scenario, it's not a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't make sense to add exclusions because I need the entire project to be under FOSS terms, not just parts of it. By making exceptions, it just creates unnecessary confusion for users and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It creates complexity when someone wants to contribute to those files. Are they entitled to make changes? What license are the excluded files under, if not the Apache-2.0 license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I wish to exclude content from the license because they can be linked back to another copyright holder, then I'm not entitled to include that content in my repository in the first place. (Though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair use&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dealing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair dealing&lt;/a&gt; could be argued, this is an unnecessary complication, as including the content can be avoided outright.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper way to handle this is to review the files, and omit or replace content that may be encumbered by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;API responses with arbitrary data are fine, but if a response contains information that can be linked to a copyright holder, I should just obfuscate the content. As usernames are arguably identifiable information, these should be obfuscated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my scenario, the most notable candidates are responses from the YouTube Data API. For example, I could replace video titles and descriptions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorem Ipsum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15592" LastEditorUserId="15592" LastEditDate="2023-04-20T07:24:27.117" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T07:24:27.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10014" CreationDate="2020-06-19T21:10:56.107" Score="6" ViewCount="1906" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose my GitHub project requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DCO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In case of DCO, for a &amp;quot;proof&amp;quot; of origin it's usually enough to add a commit message that includes &lt;code&gt;Signed-off-by&lt;/code&gt; line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in case of GitHub it's very easy to identify the committer anyway, assuming all commits are done by GitHub users.&#xA;In such case, is there any legal benefit to a &amp;quot;Signed-off-by&amp;quot; line in the commit, vs simply identifying the GitHub account related to that commit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14757" LastEditorUserId="14757" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T21:24:25.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T05:45:43.620" Title="Is &quot;Signed-off-by&quot; really needed for a GitHub hosted project?" Tags="|github|contributor-agreements|git|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10013" CreationDate="2020-06-19T22:33:23.723" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The signed-off line does not indicate the author but who authorized the commit to enter the project's repository. It has primarily nothing to do with who committed or pushed the commit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commonly it's used to indicate who did the review (that doesn't mean being the author, just the person who allows the commit to enter the repo or endorse the pull request.) Usually that's done by the more senior developers or maintainers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T05:45:43.620" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T05:45:43.620" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9990" CreationDate="2020-06-20T21:57:20.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;So you know that Free and Open Source Software can not limit use, and that trying to do so would be useless and problematic. So I will discuss the other part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your liability: First this is a legal thing. Consult lawyers in your jurisdiction. All I will say is it may depend on what you supply. For example you mention a gun. In the UK it is illegal to supply guns, so you would probably be liable. A chefs knife is illegal to supply to any one under 18 years old. Where as a doughnut (though these have killed far more people than the other two combined), is perfectly legal (but check out food hygiene and labelling laws). Generally if a software has a good purpose and is used for bad you should be ok. However this is not always the case. In the UK the government tried to pass a law with a clause that any software that could be used for breaking into a software system would be illegal (this would have make all software illegal, and after much lobbying was removed). So the short answer is, it depends, on what you write and where you are, and where you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T21:57:20.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10018" CreationDate="2020-06-21T00:19:13.253" Score="2" ViewCount="1793" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to make a list of people and companies that I want to thank for somehow taking part in the creation of a repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;paragraph in README.md&lt;/strong&gt;? What's the header then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;special file&lt;/strong&gt;? How to name it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that it can't be a rule and I can do it any way I want, but I want to know about common practices. Examples of existing repos will be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18395" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T00:58:05.417" Title="How to say thanks in a Git repository" Tags="|github|git|gitlab|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10017" CreationDate="2020-06-21T00:58:05.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common place is indeed in the readme, a separate contributors file which accompanies the project. Optionally and preferentially also shown this list in the application somewhere in the about dialogue or whereever you inform the user about credits and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If found in the more general credits section, more specifically contributors or authors section it looks somewhat like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenGFX/blob/master/README.md#60-credits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you also often find a separate file like CREDITS.md (e.g. see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob/master/CREDITS.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/CREDITS?h=v5.8-rc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) or AUTHORS file (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/releases-comm-central/blob/master/AUTHORS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) which lists contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T00:58:05.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8019" CreationDate="2020-06-23T08:11:10.100" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that it would not strictly be an infringement, however there is a key point in the license, namely 2(b)(3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Licensor expressly reserves any right to collect such royalties, including when the Licensed Material is used other than for NonCommercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it may not be an infringement to use the product as part of a wider commercial product, if you are not using it for NonCommercial purposes, the Licensor is entitled to (an unspecified proportion of) the money you make with your commercial venture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license sates explicitly what NonCommercial means: &amp;quot;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation&amp;quot;. So it is not limited to selling the software directly. Gaining a commercial advantage from its use is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, I think such usage (although possibly technically legal) would also be going against the spirit of the license, based on the fact that newer versions of the software (Stylegan 2) have introduced much clearer text to explain what you can and cannot do with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.3 Use Limitation. The Work and any derivative works thereof only may be used or intended for use non-commercially. [...] As used herein, &amp;quot;non-commercially&amp;quot; means for research or evaluation purposes only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18646" LastEditorUserId="18646" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T13:14:02.693" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T13:14:02.693" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10023" CreationDate="2020-06-23T20:55:58.073" Score="16" ViewCount="3169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The software is distributed under these terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to read&#xA;the Software only. Permission is hereby NOT GRANTED to use, copy, modify,&#xA;merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license does not pass Open Source Definition.&#xA;Is there any other term besides &amp;quot;proprietary&amp;quot; which can be used to describe this approach for distributing source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-06-25T01:45:29.880" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T01:45:29.880" Title="What is the correct term for software whose source code is available only to read?" Tags="|proprietary-code|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10022" CreationDate="2020-06-24T03:14:40.963" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source available&lt;/a&gt; is a common term used to describe such licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="18078" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T15:23:43.670" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T15:23:43.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10039" CreationDate="2020-06-24T09:16:41.087" Score="4" ViewCount="476" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a library that may violate software patents. I just don't want to lose my time trying to see if I violate any software patents: I suppose that any skilled mathematician could be able to prove that there exists a morphism from the algorithms I have developed to patented algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want is to publish the library without having to live in the terror to be prosecuted by USA justice. I am not living in USA, and I have a European nationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do? Can I publish my code on gitlab or github? Should I write a license that explicitly forbid the use of the library in any country that recognize software patents? Or could I simply be protected by a license that forbid any commercial uses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18650" LastEditorUserId="18650" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T09:38:28.727" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T14:21:35.357" Title="Can I protect my open source library from USA software patent?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10024" CreationDate="2020-06-24T12:43:18.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Patents are a national affair and each country's patent office can only grant patents that apply to that country's territories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the EU, the patent laws have been harmonized to a large extent and the EU patent office has been granted some powers to act on behalf of each member country's patent office. Similar agreements may exists in other parts of the world, but the only global agreement is on some filing procedures to make it easier to apply for a world-wide patent without having to contact 192 national patent offices. Each national patent office will still evaluate the application against its national laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you cannot apply for a patent in the US under US law and have that patent apply in the EU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a patent grants its holder the exclusive rights to control making, using, selling, offering for sale, and/or importing devices embodying the patent, you have to avoid doing one of those things in a country where the patent has been granted if you want to avoid being sued for patent infringement. This effectively means you would have to make sure your library is not available to people from those countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T12:43:18.670" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-24T13:39:42.673" Score="2" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Need help with a **complicated GPL/LGPL Dual Licensing issue**.&#xA;We need to read the contents of a .ESD file which which is nothing but a LZMA compressed .WIM file.&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am planning to use the wimlib prebuilt binaries as it is in my product. The pre-built wimlib binaries are available here &lt;a href=&quot;https://wimlib.net/downloads/wimlib-1.13.2-windows-x86_64-bin.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wimlib.net/downloads/wimlib-1.13.2-windows-x86_64-bin.zip&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of all these files we will be needing only the libwim-15.dll file. We are thinking of redistributing this pre-built DLL file as it is with our installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing information is a but tricky and is available here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wimlib.net/git/?p=wimlib;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=c26af332a990696e75a452abbd43f278ccdcc503;hb=HEAD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wimlib.net/git/?p=wimlib;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=c26af332a990696e75a452abbd43f278ccdcc503;hb=HEAD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already know that a software with LGPL license can be definitely redistributed in the pre-built binary form as long as we clearly mention it and also include the license text in the installer. But this is a bit tricky situation here; the documentation says ;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, when not prohibited by conflict with a third-party&#xA;software license, the library portion of wimlib may be redistributed&#xA;and/or modified under the terams of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;License; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any&#xA;later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! The primary reason for the GPL/LGPL &amp;quot;dual licensing&amp;quot; for the&#xA;library is that on UNIX-like systems, wimlib can optionally be linked&#xA;to the third-party library &amp;quot;libntfs-3g&amp;quot;, which is licensed GPLv2+.&#xA;Under some interpretations of the GPL, this would require that wimlib&#xA;be licensed under the GPL as well. However, a binary copy of wimlib&#xA;that was compiled without libntfs-3g support (for example; the&#xA;exception may be applicable in other situations as well) logically&#xA;cannot be affected by libntfs-3g's license and should therefore be&#xA;free to be redistributed under the LGPL instead of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now since I am using it on Native windows I really do not need any of the libntfs-3g functionality as the Windows apis natively support NTFS.&#xA;So based on this fact can I consider that only LGPL licensing terms apply here in this case and I can use the pre-built binary DLL as it is in my commercial closed source product? I will definitely mention the library name in credits and add the appropriate licensing files in the installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12949" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T23:21:28.517" Title="Using pre-built library wimlib with GLP/LGPL dual licensing in closed source commercial product" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-24T14:39:36.677" Score="1" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have an dependency to drools-compiler (Version 7.19.0.Final) in one of our microservices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Drools Compiler :: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.drools/drools-compiler&#xA;libraryDependencies += &amp;quot;org.drools&amp;quot; % &amp;quot;drools-compiler&amp;quot; % &amp;quot;7.19.0.Final&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.drools/drools-compiler/7.19.0.Final&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maven website&lt;/a&gt; the license of this component is Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In pom.xml drools-compiler includes a component called Eclipse JDT Core Batch Compiler (Eclipse ECJ) in Version 4.6.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;org.eclipse.jdt&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;ecj&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of &amp;quot;Eclipse ECJ&amp;quot; is EPL-1.0. This license is on the blacklist of our compliance tool.&#xA;Therefore we have an compliance issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to questions to the contributors of drools-compiler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you explain why it is correct to use &amp;quot;Eclipse ECJ&amp;quot; which is under EPL-1.0 license in drools-compiler which is under Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is there no copy left effect of &amp;quot;Eclispe ECJ&amp;quot; infecting drools-compiler?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your reply in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16816" LastEditorUserId="16816" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T06:14:17.740" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:14:17.740" Title="Compliance issue with drools-compiler including Eclipse ECJ" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|copyleft|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10029" CreationDate="2020-06-24T15:22:09.953" Score="51" ViewCount="18365" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone (Person_A) is sharing an open source project (Project_A) on GitHub. The Project_A is a decompiled version of another project (Project_B). But the original Project_B is not open source, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Project_B never granted Person_A permission to open source the project. Clearly, the GitHub sharer A violated the software license of the original Project_B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is: if another person followed the open source license of Project_A, will that be a violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because it's hard to verify the validity of the open source license on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T06:05:43.873" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:09:55.327" Title="Someone open-sourced an un-open-source project" Tags="|derivative-works|closed-source|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2020-06-24T17:59:58.497" Score="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Person A has no right to distribute that software, and is committing a copyright violation. Since they hold no rights in the software, they cannot grant a license to others. Any license they purport to offer is void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third parties that are relying on A's license are probably acting in good faith, but they didn't actually receive a license. When they become aware of the infringement, they would have to stop using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every license is valid, and that is a problem when managing open source supply chains. Some projects make such issues less likely by asking all contributors for a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), where the contributor affirms that they either made the contribution themselves, or know for sure that it is covered by a compatible open source license. Corollary: don't use niche projects that were uploaded by a single contributor, unless its clear (e.g. from the commit history) that they created it themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T17:59:58.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10026" CreationDate="2020-06-24T23:21:28.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going by what you quote, you only need to worry about the binary being subject to gpl license under Linux. Even under Linux you could use and distribute  in a version without the mentioned library compiled into the library: it is a dependency which can be part but need not be, so you could use version without that library compiled into it). And if you choose a version which does not depend on gpl code, you handed the choice to use it under LGPL or GPL as by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: IMHO you should be safe to proceed like you describe. IANAL though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T23:21:28.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9487" CreationDate="2020-06-25T05:33:45.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/zlib/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zLib License&lt;/a&gt;, which includes this requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be&#xA;misrepresented as being the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true the zLib License is intended for software, but it still might suit your purposes in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full text of license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;zlib License&#xA;&#xA;(C) [year] [fullname]&#xA;&#xA;This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied&#xA;warranty.  In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages&#xA;arising from the use of this software.&#xA;&#xA;Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,&#xA;including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it&#xA;freely, subject to the following restrictions:&#xA;&#xA;1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not&#xA;   claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software&#xA;   in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be&#xA;   appreciated but is not required.&#xA;2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be&#xA;   misrepresented as being the original software.&#xA;3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T05:33:45.223" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9174" CreationDate="2020-06-25T06:43:53.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;can&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;is able to,&amp;quot;  someone else &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; falsely take credit for your work -- and that's not necessarily illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he can't do it ethically, because plagiarism is unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plagiarism&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; are separate concepts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you wrote software (or any other type of creative work) and someone else falsely claimed he wrote it, that's plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you licensed your software and required attribution, and someone else redistributed it while falsely claiming he wrote it, that's plagiarism and also a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you licensed your software without requiring attribution, and someone else redistributed it while falsely claiming he wrote it, that's plagiarism but not a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in some situations it's possible to plagiarize another person's work without violating copyright law or licensing requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T06:43:53.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2020-06-25T07:15:57.863" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Project_A is a decompiled version of another project (Project_B). But the original Project_B is not open source, AND Project_B never granted Person_A permission to open source the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;You are asking a legal question (so consult your lawyer).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, but I am understanding that in the European Union, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;decompilation&lt;/a&gt; or reverse engineering of a binary software may &lt;em&gt;sometimes&lt;/em&gt; be legal&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., for purpose of interoperability).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the GitHub sharer A violated the software license of the original Project_B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is your opinion, but what matters is what a court would decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I am not a lawyer, and my understanding is that there are legal systems where this won't be a license violation; as an example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hash tables&lt;/a&gt; algorithms in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ocaml.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ocaml&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rust-lang.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rust&lt;/a&gt; are probably &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; close. See however in the USA the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google vs Oracle&lt;/a&gt; case, rumored to deal with 7 lines of source code.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A known precedent is &lt;a href=&quot;https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nouveau&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, obtained by reverse engineering of Nvidia binary drivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may need to go to court. This is quite costly (possibly more than the value of Project_B) and may take years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software patents&lt;/a&gt;. Legal framework is different in the USA and in Europe.&#xA;On the economical side, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Simple Economics of Open Source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (and see also references in &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/bismon-chariot-doc.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this draft&lt;/a&gt; report), and  Steven Weber's &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0674018583&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Success of Open Source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It could be more rational and beneficial (for both parties) to cooperate with Project_A.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to rumors, some Nvidia engineers are legally cooperating with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nouveau&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David A. Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/sloccount/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sloccount&lt;/a&gt; utility might be used to estimate the economical value of Project_B, based on which you could make a rational decision (cooperation vs. legal fight). Be aware that open source does not mean &amp;quot;no economical value&amp;quot;: a lot of corporations are involved in &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; or in the Linux &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; and are making money by developing open source software. Be also aware that &lt;a href=&quot;https://debian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeBSD&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.x.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xorg&lt;/a&gt; are not made by unpaid amateurs, but essentially by a community of cooperating professional software developers. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phoronix.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phoronix&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LWN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. In France, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://april.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APRIL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://aful.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AFUL&lt;/a&gt;. I am member of both. Contact perhaps the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Electronic Frontier Foundation&quot;&gt;EFF&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gpl-violations.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-violations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS. The important question is do you prefer to feed (that is spend your money on) lawyers or software developers.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T06:09:55.327" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:09:55.327" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10027" CreationDate="2020-06-25T08:44:44.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is there no copy left effect of &amp;quot;Eclispe ECJ&amp;quot; infecting drools-compiler?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additions to EPL-covered projects that are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;separate modules, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not derivative works of the EPL code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are not considered contributions to the EPL code and are not required to be licensed under the EPL or a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not legally settled if linking to a library makes the code that does the linking into a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, clause 3 of the EPL allows binary distributions to be done under a different (open source) license, as long as the source code remains under the EPL. But the fact that the source code is under the EPL does not have to be made clear until that source code is actually distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As clause 3 allows the distribution of a binary under a non-copyleft license without explicitly stating the source is under the EPL license, it is hardly defensible that modules which link to that binary (and don't need access to the source code to do that linking) should be considered derivative works, as the authors of those modules might not even be aware that the source code of the binary is under the EPL license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By extension, this would imply that similarly linking to an EPL binary without needing access to the sources also does not create a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all combined makes the EPL license only weakly copyleft. By my analysis, only modifications where you need access to the source code are required to remain under the EPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can explain why it is correct to use &amp;quot;Eclipse ECJ&amp;quot; which is under EPL-1.0 license in drools-compiler which is under Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either the drools-compiler is not considered a derivative work of Eclipse ECJ, for example because they only link to the binaries, or they are making use of the permission in clause 3 to distribute binaries under different terms than the EPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T08:44:44.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4012" CreationDate="2020-06-25T12:46:30.543" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;IAAL and I will tell you the only possible correct answer to this question is: it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know for sure that FOSS licenses are not the same as public domain grants, which are irrevocable. With licensed FOSS, the copyright continues to exist and is held by the author(s). The authors can still sue for infringement of the copyright. A license is a defense to infringement, but a license requires consideration, i.e., there must be a contract. (Note contracts are usually governed by STATE law). No contract, no license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A FOSS license is an example of a unilateral contract. This is a topic that's not encountered that often in modern day legal practice. I don't even pretend to fully understand all its nuances except to say that unilateral contracts CAN generally be revoked by the offeror prior to performance by the other party - the exchange of consideration. Importantly, BOTH parties have to be giving something up. It's not enough for the offeror to get something of value (the promise of a gift is not a contract). Whether the FOSS licensor gains prestige, or a warm and fuzzy feeling, that's all well and good, but there's still no contract unless the other party has given something up too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; must be will depend on the wording of the license AND the specific facts, so getting further into that is only hypothetical and speculative. What I do believe is clear though - and this is my personal opinion not legal advice - is that a FOSS license can be revoked as to anyone who has not already used or distributed the FOSS product. In other words, if a FOSS product has been published but only browsed a few times on Github and never actually been used or distributed by anyone else, I think the author could revoke that license going forward and anyone who could not prove that they had accepted the terms of the license and given something of value - or possibly relied on the existence of the license in anticipation of doing so - before the license is revoked would be out of luck. On the other end of the spectrum is a party who has built a business around someone else's FOSS product and complied with all terms of the license (e.g., Ubuntu or Red Hat) - almost certainly this party could not have their license yanked away. But there is a huge range in between those two extremes and no one can tell you for certain what would happen in any particular case until it comes up in real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see people on the Internet argue that &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot; just &amp;quot;knows&amp;quot; that FOSS licenses are perpetual, and therefore they are. No one thought API definitions were copyrightable until Oracle decided they were, sued Google, and an appeals court agreed with Oracle. (Hopefully the Supreme Court will be correcting that travesty soon.) So while industry understandings can be persuasive, they are by no means conclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, anyone who relies on open source licenses for their business should consult a professional, and, if possible, have a plan B to replace the FOSS if it ever becomes necessary to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit) PS - While this is an old thread, I think this topic is very timely and likely to come up in real life sometime soon. We see for example Redis and other companies, resentful of how much profit other companies are making off of their software, trying to change their licenses to put in poison pills. It's only a matter of time before a prominent FOSS publisher tries to revoke their license completely and tests the waters in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18670" LastEditorUserId="18670" LastEditDate="2020-06-25T12:58:50.663" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T12:58:50.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-25T13:28:23.177" Score="3" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not good at legalities and this is my first official project so I have little knowledge of copyrights and licenses. I haven't read a lot of legal documents and only a bit of knowledge about licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Packaging&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an app in Python3 for managing a library of books (and possibly videos) for the users. I'm using Arch Linux so my first packaging will be for Github and the AUR. I'm not sure if this will be used on other distros like Ubuntu, but people can feel free to package it for other distros, *nix or Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Current progress&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still only creating the skeleton for my project. I'm just mapping out what functionalities I want now and in the future so I haven't decided on exactly what libraries I'll be using. So far, I'm just using the basic modules like &lt;code&gt;sys&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;curses&lt;/code&gt;. This is also practice for myself so I don't intend to use many external libraries and write most of the modules for the app myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Contributions of a functionality&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This app is meant to be just for managing the library and some downloads. One of its functionalities is downloading files from third-party sites. The act of downloading may or may not be pirating, but all that is left to the users to decide. The app can manage downloads, but &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to download is meant to be written as individual modules by the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Joe may want to download 100 images (each of which is a comic page) from &lt;code&gt;comic.com/read/name_of_comic/&lt;/code&gt;. I'm not going to write all the &amp;quot;how to download&amp;quot; for all the websites. Joe will have to write an extension for downloading images from &lt;code&gt;comic.com&lt;/code&gt; himself. After writing that extension, he can upload it in his own repository (like vim plugins) or push it to my repository of extensions provided by users of the app. The majority of these extensions will be written by strangers, not me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The license&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like this to be copyleft, in that anyone can contribute to the project, fork it, repackage it for other distros, etc. while keeping it free and open for all. I don't want people trying to sell it for profit or making it closed-sourced in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing I want from the license is credit. I don't plan on using this app to make money by selling it. I just want some reputation for my future work. If this app (or a fork of it) somehow becomes popular, I'd like to be credited for the original idea and implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What license?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the MIT license seems simple enough for this project, but I'm not a legal expert, so I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit 1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems &amp;quot;not sell it for profit&amp;quot; isn't very viable. I'll allow people to grab pieces of my code for their own products, as long as it remains open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the extensions for downloading that are meant to be written by the users, I only want them to stay open-source. The extensions are meant to be made by the users and shared to the public. However, I don't require my name to be on those extensions. They're meant to be used with my app by default and will get traced back to my app anyway. Authors of the extensions are free to do as they want with the extensions, as long as they're open-sourced. (If forcing them to make the extension open-source is not viable, just let them do as they please with their own extensions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for crediting, I'd like any and all forks of the project to have my name and/or a link to my original project. If someone makes another version or repackages it for another distro, my name and/or a link to my project should be somewhere in the README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14831" LastEditorUserId="14831" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T00:45:01.023" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T00:45:01.023" Title="A license for a python project with unforseen libraries usage and lots of outside contribution?" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10024" CreationDate="2020-06-25T13:39:19.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want is to publish the library without having to live in the terror to be prosecuted by USA justice. I am not living in USA, and I have a European nationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would contact European open source organizations (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://april.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APRIL&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://aful.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AFUL&lt;/a&gt; - I am personally member of both) and perhaps the embassy (scientific advisor) of your country in the USA. See also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://cecill.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CeCILL&lt;/a&gt; license and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL&lt;/a&gt; one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also take advice from &lt;a href=&quot;https://debian.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubuntu.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubuntu&lt;/a&gt; communities. In France, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://systematic-paris-region.org/fr/groupe-thematique-logiciel-libre/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Systematic/GTLL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, you could choose to not care at all (it is probable that your library won't be a planetary success) or to pay a lawyer. I am not a lawyer. If your library is very successful, Google might buy your business. But don't expect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are paid by some organization to code your library, ask your client or employer for legal help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2020, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software patents&lt;/a&gt; are just a business game. For mega-corporations (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google vs Oracle&lt;/a&gt;) they do matter. But for a private individual or an SME, they might not matter much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, things are different if your library is a cryptographic library (in France, it might be considered as some weapon) or just a GUI widget. In Europe, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GDPR&lt;/a&gt; is a serious thing and potentially impact a lot of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nber.org/papers/w7600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Simple Economics of Open Source&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also some references inside &lt;a href=&quot;http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/bismon-chariot-doc.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this draft&lt;/a&gt; report, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10035/910&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; related answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinion is that it is more probable that your open source library would never be used (or you being shot by some crazy person in the USA holding a gun, or you been hit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by a bus&lt;/a&gt;), than you being prosecuted in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In France, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?idArticle=LEGIARTI000006418316&amp;amp;cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006070719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Article 323-1&lt;/a&gt; du code Pénal. And the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://xavierleroy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xavier Leroy&lt;/a&gt; (including talks at Collège de France).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2020-06-25T14:21:35.357" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T14:21:35.357" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-25T15:03:50.467" Score="3" ViewCount="1473" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen that QT framework offers 4 licenses, as shown here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/product/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/product/features&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial: A commercial license keeps your code proprietary where only you can control and monetize your end product’s development, user experience and distribution – securing your intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the commercial license gives you complete freedom on what to do with QT. But it is also an overkill for small applications and individual developers, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Qt Small Business license has all the Qt features for mobile, desktop, and embedded development for 499 USD per year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to a question: What would happen if I were to buy this license, develop an application, but only pay the license for the time of the development of the application? Would the application need to change to an open-source license after I stop paying the annual fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to the commercial license, we have the LGPLv3, GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR, from what I currently understand, the LGPLv3 license also lets us do what we want, with the following limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must dynamically link to QT libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cannot use the grayed out features/libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second limitation I don't understand very well, because design tools are grayed out as well, does this mean I cannot use them, or that I cannot include the actual design tools in my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally the GPLv2/3 license. From what I understand, I can use most features, but my application needs to be open source and under that same license. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18671" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-31T11:50:14.113" LastActivityDate="2023-05-31T11:50:14.113" Title="QT Licensing - limitations" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10038" CreationDate="2020-06-25T15:42:09.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to credit the original author is intrinsic to basically each open-source license. Credits whom credit is due and usually the credits have to be retained and own changes indicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't want people to make it closed-source in any way&amp;quot; is a strong statement - and IMHO a clear indicator that the MIT choice is not ideal: MIT allows to make derivatives and NOT disclose its source code. Thus to ensure that all derivatives, if published anywhere, need to disclose their source code, and remain open source, your best choice is the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your statement &amp;quot;don't want to see people sell it for profit&amp;quot; is technically not possible - it's one of the fundamental freedoms to use open source for whatever purpose. However, practically, the GPL is a good choice here, too. People can sell it - but need to provide the sources for what they sell. And that in turn means that there is little incentive to buy and sell the software itself. Usual commercial ideas around GPL are rather a service around or for that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The backdraw of the choice of a GPL license is, that all plug-ins etc also need to follow that licensing scheme; thus the choice there is much more limited than if you chose a more permissive license (like MIT, BSD,...) which allow in principle to distribute binaries and modified binaries without disclosing the source as long as credits to the original authors are retained and given. Practically this limitation is not big when it comes getting contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in one word: IMHO you are looking for the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-25T18:24:53.747" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T18:24:53.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-25T18:57:06.130" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitHub is protect by DMCA, i.e., so long as a service provider follows the DMCA's notice-and-takedown rules, it won't be liable for copyright infringement based on user-generated content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If another website (Website_W) shared a project forked from Github, following the license of the forked repository. Will Website_W be protected by DMCA, if Website_W follows the DMCA's notice-and-takedown rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is an infringement on Website_W, because of the wrong license of the forked project, what responsibility Webstie_W needs to take except taking down the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Website_W relies on licenses of Github's repositories. Are there any law/act that Website_W can use to protect itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18652" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T11:36:05.103" Title="Does DMCA protect third-party website?" Tags="|dmca|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2611" CreationDate="2020-06-25T21:03:21.947" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update, based on new Terms of Service:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a GitHub repository specifies a license, that's the default license for contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's Section D.6 from GitHub's &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;current Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6. Contributions Under Repository License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't this just how it works already? Yep. This is widely accepted as the norm in the open-source community; it's commonly referred to by the shorthand &amp;quot;inbound=outbound&amp;quot;. We're just making it explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule has been in effect &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.blog/2017-02-28-new-github-terms-of-service-are-in-effect/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;since GitHub revised its Terms of Service on February 28, 2017&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3016" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T21:03:21.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10046" CreationDate="2020-06-26T00:41:56.813" Score="9" ViewCount="909" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/commons-clause-stops-open-source-abuse/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; implies that Commons Clause and AGPL could be compatible, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#comclause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; seems to completely disagree with that.&#xA;Can Commons Clause be applied on a AGPL project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have misconstrued that it prevents people from offering maintenance, support or professional services. This is a misreading of the language. Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL. Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used! Still, even with AGPL, few users of an author’s work would deem it prudent to simply disregard an author’s statement of intent to apply Commons Clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T10:44:14.327" LastActivityDate="2023-08-22T01:30:06.493" Title="Can Commons Clause be used along with AGPL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|agpl-3.0|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10045" CreationDate="2020-06-26T04:28:42.030" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I am able to understand the author, the specific claims being made here are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have claimed that it conflicts with AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There exist some people who claim the AGPL &amp;quot;conflicts&amp;quot; with the Commons Clause. Assuming the author here means &amp;quot;is incompatible with&amp;quot; as the FSF uses the phrase, this is true: there do exist such people, and what is more, I think such people are right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Commons Clause adds restrictions not present in the AGPL. No GPL-family license admits the introduction of further restrictions on derivative or verbatim distribution, so you cannot distribute (or offer as a network service) combined AGPL-licensed and Commons-Clause-licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author means, &amp;quot;An original author cannot meaningfully release software under a license that contains the union of terms of the AGPL and the Commons Clause simultaneously,&amp;quot; that may well be true, too, but it is largely semantics. See the final item in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commons Clause is intended to be used with open-source licenses that are more permissive than AGPL, so that AGPL does not have to be used!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code under the Commons Clause may be used alongside code under permissive FLOSS licenses. This is true; permissively-licensed code under MIT/X11 or BSD licenses can be used modified or unmodified within virtual any proprietary or freely-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, even with AGPL, few users of an author’s work would deem it prudent to simply disregard an author’s statement of intent to apply Commons Clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests to me that the author is discussing a case where a piece of software with a sole copyright holder is licensed under a custom proprietary license whose terms consist of both the AGPL and the Commons Clause. In general, a copyright holder may license their work under any terms they choose. However, the AGPL might be a nonsensical choice to couple with the Commons Clause, due to the language in Section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Commons Clause certainly imposes further restrictions, so depending on how the copyright holder applies their license, they may be giving recipients free reign to drop the Commons Clause altogether by keeping this language from the AGPL in their license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it could be possible to retool the AGPL so it plays well with the additional restrictions of the Commons Clause, but then it obviously it wouldn't be the AGPL anymore. I think the final sentence you've quoted means, &amp;quot;This nonsensical pairing of restrictive terms and freedom to remove restrictive terms would lead to an unknown outcome in the legal system,&amp;quot; which is certainly reason enough for me to avoid any software offered under such terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T11:15:42.963" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T11:15:42.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10048" CreationDate="2020-06-26T09:22:57.710" Score="12" ViewCount="1696" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will frame my question with a concrete example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://engys.com/products/helyx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HELYX&lt;/a&gt; is a software based on another software &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openfoam.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenFOAM&lt;/a&gt;. OpenFOAM is an open-source freely-accessible software distributed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HELYX advertises itself as an open-source software. However, users need to &lt;strong&gt;purchase the access to the source code&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the definition of the term &lt;strong&gt;open source&lt;/strong&gt; by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, the attribute of &lt;strong&gt;open access&lt;/strong&gt; seems not to be mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Stallman&lt;/a&gt;, the meaning of the term &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; is obvious where the source code must be public/accessible for inspection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, HELYX is a ten-year-old open-source software with a pay wall. This indicates that the term &lt;strong&gt;open source&lt;/strong&gt; does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; always mean &lt;strong&gt;open access&lt;/strong&gt; in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct, or there is a nuance I do miss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16900" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T08:38:06.730" Title="Does &quot;open source&quot; always mean &quot;open access&quot;?" Tags="|gpl-3|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10047" CreationDate="2020-06-26T09:58:40.917" Score="24" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct, or there is a nuance I do miss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be several, but this one is important: free software grants freedom, but not to everyone.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; are granted to &lt;strong&gt;all legitimate users of the software&lt;/strong&gt;.  It is perfectly OK for some organisation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sell you a copy&lt;/a&gt; of executable software under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.  Having done so, they must &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; try to charge you extra for the corresponding source code (eg, s6d); nor may they try to prevent you from using and/or redistributing it under GPLv3 (ss 4, 5c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But just because they sold you a copy under GPLv3, and (at the same time, or upon your later request) gave you the source, that does not mean they are obliged also to give your friend Bob a copy of either the source or the binary.  &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; may give Bob a copy of the binaries, source, or both, and if you do that you must honour the requirements of GPLv3 when you do it; but neither you nor they are &lt;em&gt;obliged&lt;/em&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a distributor charges too much money for a copy of the software, potential users may club together to buy a single copy, which they then all lawfully share, and usually it makes its way out into the wider world.  Thus in practice, charging for binary access to GPL software generally only works as a business method if there is some considerable value-add.  But it's perfectly acceptable to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Also&lt;/strong&gt;: the above argument only applies if the distributor is obliged to follow the GPLv3 with respect to this program by having acquired it under those terms, or having incorporated someone else's GPLv3 software into it while making it.  If the distributor is the sole rightsholder&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, (s)he may offer it under multiple different licences.  (S)he may also offer different versions under different licences; when this happens, it's common for the non-freely-licensed version to be somewhat whizzier and slicker (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open-Core model&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything (yet) that confirms that Helyx is a derivative of OpenFOAM, but if it is, it may well be that it's the whizzy version of OpenFOAM, offered under less-free terms as described above; or it may well be distributed under GPLv3, but only to paying customers, also as described above.  Only Helyx can tell us what's going on, and I'm not asking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your initial question: the rights granted by &lt;em&gt;FLOSS&lt;/em&gt; (as per the FSF, OSI definitions) are a pure superset of those granted by &lt;em&gt;open access&lt;/em&gt; (however that is defined).  But the question is, &lt;strong&gt;open to whom&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; or has permission to do this via, eg, an appropriate CLA covering all external contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T08:38:06.730" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T08:38:06.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10040" CreationDate="2020-06-26T11:06:31.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the application need to change to an open source license after I stop paying the annual fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the the terms; it might mean you get a perpetual licence to use the libraries, but only an annual support and dev tools licence, or it might mean that you have to keep up payments to be entitled to keep selling your product, or it might mean something else.  Any way, that is a question about the exact terms of a proprietary licence, and off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;design tools are grayed out as well, does this mean I cannot use them, or that I cannot include the actual design tools in my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they are grayed-out for LGPL, but not for commercial or GPL, it seems that if you want to build proprietary software and pay for the licence, you can have them (though on what terms we don't know, and it's off-topic for this site); if you want to build free software, under GPL, then you may also have them, presumably on GPL terms; and if you want to build proprietary software but not pay, by taking it subject to the LGPL option, then you don't get the helpful tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally the GPLv2/3 license. From what I understand, I can use most features, but my application needs to be open source and under that same license. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T18:27:31.647" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T18:27:31.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10051" CreationDate="2020-06-27T14:38:26.887" Score="7" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm quite confused with MongoDB's licensing model. MongoDB at its core is an open-source project, licensed under the SSPL which is a small modification of the AGPLv3 license. Then how does it release enterprise versions of its software with &lt;em&gt;advanced features&lt;/em&gt; with an entirely different proprietary license which still uses AGPL code? Why doesn't MongoDB have to release its modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does MongoDB being the copyright holder give it these rights? Then what about the contributions made to MongoDB by the folks in the OSS community? How does MongoDB incorporate these changes to its proprietary solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am an absolute novice in open-source, so please be liberal!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18704" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T09:00:29.220" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T09:00:29.220" Title="How do products like MongoDB not violate the GPL licenses?" Tags="|gpl-3|commercial|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10050" CreationDate="2020-06-27T16:45:47.317" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;MongoDB requires contributors to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://mongodb.com/legal/contributor-agreement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;contributor agreement&lt;/a&gt; where they have to  waive all rights so that MongoDB can license the code subsequently under whatever license they see fit. That includes non-free licenses which allows them to sell proprietary extensions which would otherwise be in violation of the GPL, if they had to abide by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T16:45:47.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10055" CreationDate="2020-06-27T20:51:24.597" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider I wrote a screenplay or book and I want if someone make a film from it, share it with same license that I used (Or another free license that keeps this constraint).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is CC BY-SA okay? Or is there some other ready copyleft license specially for films and screenplays?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18707" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T09:31:46.747" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T09:31:46.747" Title="Copyleft for screenplay that forces film to be free" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:23:52.667" Score="1" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the Qt framework for a personal project of mine. Not intended to be sold or used by anyone else. Just a cool project that I want to have in my portfolio. What is required of me under the license if I am to add this to my public GitHub so employers can see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18708" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T07:52:25.757" Title="Using the Qt framework strictly for a personal project I want in my GitHub portfolio" Tags="|lgpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10052" CreationDate="2020-06-28T06:55:12.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licence text&lt;/a&gt; of CC BY-SA 3.0, it explicitly includes someone else making a film from your work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; ... includes cinematographic adaptations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mention that to suggest that CC BY-SA 4.0 doesn't include such adaptations, I only note that in 4.0 it's left implicit rather than being spelled out.  However, the idea that making a film from a book or a screenplay requires a licence is pretty well understood, so I don't think anyone in the industry could, with a straight face, claim that such a film was not an adaptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases I think the licence will do exactly what you want, ie any film made from your work will need to be made available under CC BY-SA, or a compatible licence (ie, another copyleft licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T06:55:12.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10053" CreationDate="2020-06-28T07:52:25.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As this is a personal project, I will assume you are not using Qt under a commercial, paid for, license but under an open-source, free, license.&#xA;The requirements depend on how you incorporate the Qt code in your project and which Qt components you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use any components that are under the GPL license, rather than the LGPL license, then you must use a GPL-compatible open-source license for your code and it is preferred to use the GPL itself. This is because the combination of all code must be made available under the terms and conditions of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only use LGPL-licensed components, then it is very strongly advised that you dynamically link them as libraries into your project. The LGPL requires that it must be possible for the end-user to replace the LGPL code with a different version and that requirement is most easily fulfilled with dynamic linking. Other than that, there are no requirements on your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T07:52:25.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10061" CreationDate="2020-06-28T20:17:46.250" Score="2" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software is a compiled Python module, which provides commands when loaded into the interpreter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the project, the source code and accompanying Python scripts are using the Apache Software License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like for the compiled module to now be LGPL Version 3.  Any accompanying example scripts would still be under the Apache Software License, Version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from clearly marking each C++ or Python file with the appropriate license statement.  I would note the dual license in the documentation, NOTICE and README files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other projects with a similar approach?  Are there other best practices I should consider?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18717" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:40:12.577" Title="Using LGPL for shared library, and ASL for scripts?" Tags="|apache-2.0|lgpl|python|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10069" CreationDate="2020-06-29T18:40:19.990" Score="5" ViewCount="978" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give more details, I've created a repository on GitHub, and I'm using the MPL-2.0 license (not only as a separate file but also with a copyright notice in each source file). Now, after some time, somebody forked my repository, did a lot of changes in the code, &lt;strong&gt;didn't&lt;/strong&gt; update copyright notice in existing files and released a binary of my project under their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't sound right to me. What can I do legally stop the person from such abusive behaviour and prevent such occasions in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14043" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T11:33:26.573" Title="What can I do if somebody copied my MPL-2.0 licensed code and released under their name?" Tags="|licensing|github|mpl|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10060" CreationDate="2020-06-30T00:00:11.313" Score="7" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;What happens if I take a small piece of code (~400 lines) that is licensed under GPLv2, and modify and use it in my own project? Am I now obliged to license my program under GPL, or can I use a more permissive license like WTFPL, or do I have to license that particular file that has the GPL-ed code in GPL, and all other files in other license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18726" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T08:34:33.170" Title="Take a piece of GPL'ed code and put it in code under other license?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10059" CreationDate="2020-06-30T00:20:44.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are only allowed to use the code and distribute it and its derivatives under the GPL unless you have permission of all authors to re-license it. That is true for a part of the code, too: deleting one half does not make the remaining half magically something not derived from the whole. A license applies to each line of code unless it says otherwise explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if you want to take part of a GPL-licensed project to incorporate it into your own, you become bound by the GPL as a whole, if you compile it into one binary or they work together closer than &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot; (that is closer than two separate programmes talking to eachother over a well-defined public API).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T08:34:33.170" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T08:34:33.170" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10057" CreationDate="2020-06-30T05:55:53.340" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;dual licensing&amp;quot; describes the situation where the entire repository is available under two (or more) licenses and the user gets to choose which license terms they want to comply to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have, based on your comments, is different in that you have different licenses that apply to different parts of the repository. This is not very common, but it is not rare either, although it is usually used to give different licenses to the code and assets, like images or icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have already described the best practices here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the documentation make it clear that different files are under different licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In each file clearly indicate which license applies to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I would add to that is to organize your files in the repository in such a way that a visitor, after reading about the different licenses in the documentation, can make a reasonable guess for each file which license it is under without having to open up the file itself. This could, for example, be achieved by putting all example scripts that are under the Apache license together in an &lt;code&gt;examples&lt;/code&gt; folder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T05:55:53.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10043" CreationDate="2020-06-30T11:36:05.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but as I understand it, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Title_II:_Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passed as Title II&lt;/a&gt; of the DMCA, limits liability for Online Service Providers who store infringing material provided that they &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;comply with standard technical measures and remove repeat infringers&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  In addition, to benefit from these protections, OSPs must&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again quoting Wikipedia, '&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Standard technical measures&amp;quot; are defined as measures that copyright owners use to identify or protect copyrighted works, that have been developed pursuant to a broad consensus of copyright owners and service providers in an open, fair and voluntary multi-industry process, are available to anyone on reasonable nondiscriminatory terms, and do not impose substantial costs or burdens on service providers&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that, we see that it very much depends on W's terms of service, business model, and the like.  If the operators of W were making money by selling access to this code, they have a problem.  If they dragged their heels in taking the material down when they got the DMCA notification, they have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If W is simply running a non-commercial mirror of one or more GitHub repositories, acts expeditiously to remove the material on receipt of a notice of infringement, and doesn't have a track record of hosting infringing content, it seems to me that OCILLA will protect them as it does GitHub.  But, of course, you should take proper legal advice if you start getting DMCA takedown notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T11:36:05.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10064" CreationDate="2020-06-30T12:37:11.170" Score="12" ViewCount="3522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been asked to make an application about astrology, and I would like to use this library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/astrolin/ephemeris/tree/develop/src/java/swisseph-2.01.00-01&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/astrolin/ephemeris/tree/develop/src/java/swisseph-2.01.00-01&lt;/a&gt;, however it is licensed under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get paid to make the application if I release both the source code and the binaries for free? I'm not trying to sell the binaries after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.s.: I might also have to use a library licensed under Apache v2, but if I understood well that shouldn't be a problem, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18728" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T00:06:38.747" Title="Can I get paid to make code that includes GPLv2 libraries?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10063" CreationDate="2020-06-30T13:27:29.237" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been asked to make an application&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you mean that you were &lt;em&gt;hired&lt;/em&gt; to create an application, the answer to your question depends on the contract you have with your employer (if you work for a company) or customer (if you are a freelancer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an employee, generally your employer owns all of the work you produce for them. In this case you do not have the right to release your work by yourself - you must ask your employer for permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your employer may have rules as to what licenses are acceptable for third-party libraries or components. If you work for a well-run company, there would be some kind of a review process before you start working and the issue of GPL should come up there. If you work for a not so well-run company, you may be asked to redo the entire project if your boss finds out you used a GPL library and that is against company policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an independent contractor or a freelancer, your contract with your customer should stipulate whether the customer owns all interest in the work you perform. If they do, you can't release the work without their approval because you don't own it. If they don't, you can provide the work to your customer but you retain the ability to also release it yourself under any license you choose that is in compliance with licenses of  its component parts, if any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important&lt;/strong&gt;: if your employer or customer expects that you wrote the application &lt;em&gt;from scratch&lt;/em&gt;, they do not just expect that you'd spend a certain amount of time on that project (which could be dramatically reduced if you used an existing library, leading to perhaps a lower payment), but also that they &lt;strong&gt;would have all rights to the finished product&lt;/strong&gt;. GPL imposes significant obligations on derived works, and you should probably verify with your employer/customer that it is OK for you to incorporate GPL libraries into an application they are paying you to produce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might also have to use a library licensed under Apache v2, but if I understood well that shouldn't be a problem, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache license tends to not cause issues/concerns because it does not impose requirements that GPL does on the software that uses Apache-licensed components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastEditorUserId="18078" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T13:42:43.303" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T13:42:43.303" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10063" CreationDate="2020-06-30T13:46:11.607" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just adding another take on the question, hopefully to complement D. SM's excellent answer.  You say that you're writing an application and you want to use a GPLv2 library in it.  You fully understand this will mean releasing the entire program you write under GPLv2, and honouring the licence (providing source to anyone to whom you provide the binaries, etc.), and you're fine with that.  You just want to know if it's a violation of the GPL to get paid to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly OK to do this.  The GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is clear&lt;/a&gt; that it's OK to write code and convey it under GPL, in exchange for money.  I get paid to write code and release it under GPL on a regular basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;is it OK to do this as part of my regular salaried job&lt;/em&gt; is a different question to &lt;em&gt;is it OK to get paid to do this&lt;/em&gt;, and I'm only answering the latter; D. SM alludes to some of the complexities that arise from the former.  Note also that I approach the question from a licensing standpoint; there are many other standpoints, such as payroll taxes, that we can't deal with here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T15:53:35.280" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T15:53:35.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9985" CreationDate="2020-06-30T15:24:42.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;How I have done it-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes it is as simple as that, beside that you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/licensing-a-repository&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License your app from GitHub repository it self&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can add a file(ThirdPartyLicense.txt) consisting all the licenses of dependencies and transitive dependencies in you main repository folder.&#xA;This method is used by all big projects &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Add credit for third party in your app credits page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18558" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T15:24:42.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10058" CreationDate="2020-07-01T11:33:26.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MPL-2.0 license does not require that Contributors add a copyright notice or in another way mark files as changed and it also doesn't contain any explicit clauses about mis-representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that, there seems to be no violation of the license, although you might look deeper in the copyright law of your country if it states anything about mis-representation by the appearance of attributing modifications to you. Thus there is nothing you can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the fact that this Contributor did not add a copyright notice does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean the copyright now belongs to you. The copyright notice is just a means to make it explicit who owns the copyrights, but this Contributor owns the copyrights on their changes regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As clause 3.4 quite explicitly states that copyright notices may not be altered, there is a possibility that this Contributor (mistakenly) believes they are not allowed to add their own copyright notice. In that case, a friendly note asking them to add their copyright claim should be enough to set this straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T11:33:26.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10063" CreationDate="2020-07-02T00:06:38.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you write software as an employee, you should have an employment contract and get paid. If you write software as a contractor, I assume you have a contract that guarantees that you will be paid as well. Whether you are using open source software doesn't matter at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course consequences for using open source software: Whoever is the final copyright holder of the parts that you wrote, isn't the copyright holder of &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; because they don't hold the copyright to the GPL parts. That means they need to follow the GPL license terms if they distribute the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problematic thing is if you use GPL licensed software without telling your employer or the company you have a contract with. If the company planned to sell the software as proprietary software and you added GPL licensed software, then they can't do this. This may completely upset their business plans. Worse, if they distributed the software without following the GPL license, they have unknowingly committed copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that happened because you lied about the use of GPL licensed software, then you are in trouble. From being told off to being fired as an employee, and from not getting paid to be sued for damages as a contractor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, what should you get paid for: You should always get paid for your work. Handing over the binary and source code will most likely be part of your contract or part of your employment, but according to the GPL license you can charge &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; amount for the binary, and your reasonable cost of copying for the source code. You are not allowed to charge for the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T00:06:38.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-02T03:24:26.700" Score="4" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now I am using &lt;code&gt;excel4node&lt;/code&gt; in my product. &lt;code&gt;excel4node&lt;/code&gt; is using &lt;code&gt;jszip&lt;/code&gt; which using &lt;code&gt;openent&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;excel4node&lt;/code&gt; is under MIT license, &lt;code&gt;jszip&lt;/code&gt; under both MIT and GPl license, but &lt;code&gt;openent&lt;/code&gt; is GPL licence. So can I use &lt;code&gt;excel4node&lt;/code&gt; for my product ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ticket relate to openent and jszip license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Stuk/jszip/issues/650&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Stuk/jszip/issues/650&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6gdyC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6gdyC.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18743" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T08:22:11.357" Title="Can we use excel4node for commercial" Tags="|license|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10071" CreationDate="2020-07-02T08:15:05.377" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, both the MIT and GPL licenses are open source licenses (as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;), so you can use them for any purpose, including commercially. If jszip and thus excel4node are using a GPL component, then you would have to comply with the terms of the GPL which basically means making your source code available if you are distributing your program to anyone outside your organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... this whole thing looks like a Black Duck false positive to me. It really doesn't look like jszip includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://openent.adullact.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;openent&lt;/a&gt; in any way at all. It would be somewhat surprising if it did, as jszip is JavaScript and openent seems to be pretty much pure Java; I'm guessing that there's some remarkably generic file in openent which is being flagged by Black Duck. Another important note here is that Black Duck seems to think openent is GNU AGPL licensed, which is a different license from the GNU GPL and requires you to distribute the code even if people only interact with your program via a computer network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all said, you shouldn't trust the word of a random poster on the Internet. If you have concerns, you need to talk to your lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T08:22:11.357" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T08:22:11.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10074" CreationDate="2020-07-02T14:10:38.087" Score="5" ViewCount="1235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to understand if Google's Chrome web browser is truly open source.  Some people claim that it is, while others claim that it integrates binary blobs for which the source is completely closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the truth on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3426" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T18:20:10.917" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T18:20:10.917" Title="Is Google's Chrome web browser truly open source?" Tags="|proprietary-code|source-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10073" CreationDate="2020-07-02T14:41:32.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Chrome is not fully open source, but closely based on the open-source &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chromium&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; project, which itself is built around the open-source &lt;em&gt;Blink&lt;/em&gt; engine. Chromium still includes tight integrations with many Google services though. But Chromium is perfectly usable as a browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than Google Chrome, a large number of browsers and similar projects are based on the Chromium/Blink open source components, such as Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, and Electron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T14:41:32.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10078" CreationDate="2020-07-03T05:01:34.623" Score="6" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;I try to understand If I must release my own modifications of an existent software which is under &lt;code&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must disclose your source code when you distribute, publish or serve (i.e. through a web portal) modified or derivative software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projeqtor.org/en/copyright/759-agpl-en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;But this&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are free and do not need to redistribute the code you have changed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have to distribute your version but under &lt;strong&gt;GPL license&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/dont-believe-the-hype-agpl-open-source-licensing-is-toxic-and-unpopular/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL is the closest thing possible to a proprietary software license. But. Open Source!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me to understand the &lt;code&gt;AGPL-3.0 LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18752" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T06:01:39.870" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T06:21:16.800" Title="Must I share made modifications of a software which has a AGPL-3.0 license and is founded on github?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10077" CreationDate="2020-07-03T05:59:29.813" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first site you link to is a pretty good summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without wishing to criticise the quality of their software, the second site you link to is an incoherent ramble.  It says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, if I modify the code within my company, am I obliged to make the source code available to internal users (employees of my company)? We wish to remove this ambiguity: for us NO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v3CoworkerConveying&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;traditionally doesn't regard&lt;/a&gt; distribution within a company as conveyance, but that refers to activites that engage ss 4-6 (GPL and AGPL).  The extra language of AGPL, in s13, says merely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;your modified version must prominently offer &lt;strong&gt;all users interacting with it&lt;/strong&gt; remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language I have highlighted says nothing of &amp;quot;conveyance&amp;quot;, and gives no reason to think that it should be interpreted with the same traditional rules and exceptions.  Certainly the authors of ProjeQtOr, who are presumably the rightsholders in the whole of their code, can distribute on any terms they like.  But they cannot modify the AGPL as they have tried to do, and still call it the AGPL (that's forbidden by &lt;strong&gt;line one&lt;/strong&gt; of the AGPL!).  They also can't, as I read it, do what they want with a s7 permission, since s13 starts &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, they can &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; distribute under AGPLv3, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; under a weird crayon licence that looks a lot like AGPLv3 but exempts intra-company interactions from s13.  What they can't do is the latter while still correctly claiming to be doing the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their table of AGPL obligations, which says that if you &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;change ProjeQtOr to propose hosted services in SaaS mode ... You have to distribute your version under GPL license&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; directly contradicts AGPLv3 s5b.  I can understand how you might be confused after reading this piece.  I recommend ignoring it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your third linked site is an opinion piece focussing on whether the AGPL is &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt;, which has nothing to do with the rights and obligations it grants you.  I won't comment on it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In answer to the question in the title: you must share such modified software - and not just your modifications, but the complete corresponding source - with anyone to whom you distribute any portion of the software, and with anyone who interacts with your modified version over a computer network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T06:21:16.800" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T06:21:16.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-03T16:25:41.247" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a web page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- A custom javascript library --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;myCustomScript.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- A GPL2 javascript library --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;GPLv2Library.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;!-- A MIT licensed javascript library --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;MITLibrary.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;script&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;//other custom javascript&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;body&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the presence of the GPL2 library affect the licence options for the custom scripts (assuming the GPL2 licence text is included in the GPL2 library source and that the source code has not been modified), or the MIT licensed library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the whole webpage/application escape being classified as a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot;? If not, are there any ways to avoid it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18755" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T16:25:41.247" Title="Does a web application avoid becoming a &quot;derivative work&quot; if it loads in an unmodified GPL-2 javascript library?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10057" CreationDate="2020-07-04T14:05:34.233" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt if there is a point for releasing the compiled module under the more restricting LGPL license. Users can just receive the source code under Apache license 2.0 and compile it by themselves. The resulting binary will be under Apache license too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be better if you use the same license for both source code and compiled modules, like LGPL. Python scripts can be licensed under a separate license of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15873" LastEditorUserId="15873" LastEditDate="2020-07-04T14:40:12.577" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:40:12.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9985" CreationDate="2020-07-04T14:21:42.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Third party packages are normally not uploaded to the repo and will be downloaded when someone tries to compile your electron app (by running &lt;code&gt;npm install&lt;/code&gt;). If no third party code is included in your repo, I think it will be ok for just adding a license file to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15873" LastEditorUserId="15873" LastEditDate="2020-07-04T14:47:10.037" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T14:47:10.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T09:37:02.117" Score="3" ViewCount="817" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering building a commercial system consisting of a GPU-enabled desktop computer with pre-installed drivers and software.  Nvidia makes a distinction between their GeForce and Tesla series in their EULA.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licence.php?lang=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tesla EULA&lt;/a&gt; says in Paragraph 2.1.2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux/FreeBSD Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems, or other operating systems derived from the source code to these operating systems, may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, this would make a commercially sold stand-alone system possible as long as it has a linux core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licence.php?lang=us&amp;amp;type=TITAN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GeForce EULA&lt;/a&gt; says that too, but they add in Paragraph 2.1.3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Sublicensing or Distribution. Customer may not sell, rent, sublicense, distribute or transfer the SOFTWARE; or use the SOFTWARE for public performance or broadcast; or provide commercial hosting services with the SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would that additional clause prohibit GeForce GPUs in the envisioned product?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18771" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T11:00:44.727" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T12:42:45.123" Title="GeForce nvidia driver license for commerical use?" Tags="|commercial|eula|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10084" CreationDate="2020-07-06T11:49:40.713" Score="44" ViewCount="9771" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a developer creates a binary from the code and puts it in the releases section, does it match the code in a restrictive way so there is no chance that malicious code is compiled into it? How does GitHub ensure this? Is there a validation mechanism or compiling pipeline applied by GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18773" LastEditorUserId="13675" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T13:49:31.563" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T08:50:50.193" Title="Is GitHub &quot;releases&quot; section safe from malicious code? To be specific, does the binary match the code in a restrictive way?" Tags="|github|binaries|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10083" CreationDate="2020-07-06T12:46:13.593" Score="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no guarantees that the uploaded artefacts match the source code in the repository. That something is on GitHub does not mean that it can be trusted. You need to also trust the maintainers of that repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T12:46:13.593" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-07T06:23:01.567" Score="6" ViewCount="1846" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a Python module (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Belval/pdf2image&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Belval/pdf2image&lt;/a&gt;) in my commercial software. This module is licensed under the MIT license whereas the library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poppler&lt;/a&gt;) it is built on is licensed under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So, if I use this Python module in my software, will it be under&#xA;MIT or GPL license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will I have to make my software's code available to the end users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other restrictions, if any, will my software be subjected to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this has already been asked, I couldn't find a situation specific answer. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18788" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T06:47:37.173" Title="Will there be any restrictions if I use a MIT licensed module which is built on a GPL library in my commercial software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|commercial|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10085" CreationDate="2020-07-07T06:47:37.173" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is uncertainty about whether or not dynamic linking makes a derivative work and thus engages the GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;pro&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-not-constitute-derivat&quot;&gt;con&lt;/a&gt;).  But reading the python module's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Belval/pdf2image/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;README&lt;/a&gt;, it seems to me that the developers have already thought carefully about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although pdf2image does use poppler, it only uses two commands, which it invokes through userspace (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;A python module that wraps pdftoppm and pdftocairo to convert PDF&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally accepted&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Looking at eg lines 156-169 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Belval/pdf2image/blob/master/pdf2image/pdf2image.py&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pdf2image.py&lt;/a&gt;, it very much looks to me as if they are building a simple command line to invoke a poppler tool using only its standard command-line flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this to be true, then, how does it affect you?  You're building a complete product, so unlike the pdf2image developers you will need to redistribute poppler.  That will give you source-redistribution and labelling obligations which are detailed in eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s6, but only with respect to the poppler code.  Taking your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So, if I use this Python module in my software, will it be under MIT or GPL license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pdf2image is licensed to you under the term of the MIT licence, and so that's what you'll use it under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will I have to make my software's code available to the end users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use and redistribution of poppler solely as described above will not require you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What other restrictions, if any, will my software be subjected to?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from those detailed above, none that I can think of as a result of your use of poppler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course IANAL/IANYL, so you should get professional legal advice before betting a company on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T06:47:37.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10096" CreationDate="2020-07-07T20:47:34.870" Score="21" ViewCount="4688" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of differing governance styles on open source projects. Some have looser contribution restrictions, with PR approval coming from people who have earned the privilege to do so, either through merit, election, or membership on the host foundation/corporation. Others have a single person with final say over the project, a so-called &amp;quot;benevolent dictator,&amp;quot; usually the original creator/founder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there benefits for contributors and users to participating in BDFL-led projects over more open governance models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18802" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T17:54:20.627" Title="What are the benefits of having a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) on OSS?" Tags="|contributor|project-management|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10088" CreationDate="2020-07-08T00:57:06.253" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that projects having a BDFL &lt;strong&gt;ultimately trust the vision of the project to one person&lt;/strong&gt;, as opposed to &lt;strong&gt;design by committee&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the list of BDFLs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the individuals listed there have strong opinions as to what their respective project should do, not do, and how it should function (DHH and Theo are examples I am familiar with). Some others are not as controversial but are very respected in the community (Matz).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there benefits for contributors and users to participating in BDFL-led projects over more open governance models?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are aligned with the BDFL in terms of vision for the project, contributing to a BDFL-run project makes sense. Alternatively, if you think that it is easier to evaluate a single person for trustworthiness (of project steering decisions) rather than a changing group of people, you may support the idea of a BDFL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T00:57:06.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2020-07-08T02:46:09.090" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is receiving stolen property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the person that is releasing the code is wrong, but so is anyone taking the new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you accept something that you know or should suspect is stolen then you are committing a crime in most areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18806" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T02:46:09.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7924" CreationDate="2020-07-08T14:36:36.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openchainproject.org/get-started&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;getting started page&lt;/a&gt; pretty much explains it all, quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Mission is to establish requirements to achieve effective management of open source for software supply chain participants, such that the requirements and associated collateral are developed collaboratively and openly by representatives from the software supply chain, open source community, and academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrased in my own words, OpenChain defines processes on how to properly implement Open Source compliance (like: license obligation) checks and create software Bill-of-Materials (BOMs) throughout a software supply chain. Companies can get certified to adhere to OpenChain recommended processes, and ultimately OpenChain aims to become an ISO standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far for the &amp;quot;abstract&amp;quot; part. But OpenChain also hosts a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slideshare.net/ShaneCoughlan3/openchain-reference-tooling-work-group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference tooling work group&lt;/a&gt; that actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Open-Source-Compliance/Sharing-creates-value/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implements&lt;/a&gt; the different tools required to perform all these checks and the generation of reports, and these reference tools all are Open Source Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/em&gt; I'm the founder of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/oss-review-toolkit/ort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSS Review Toolkit&lt;/a&gt; which is part of OpenChain's reference tooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14857" LastEditorUserId="14857" LastEditDate="2020-07-09T16:19:54.500" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T16:19:54.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10093" CreationDate="2020-07-08T16:24:31.380" Score="4" ViewCount="684" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a license using the 3 clause BSD license as a base and added parts from the Apache 2.0 license. I was wondering if this license would hold any water or if it is legal. My legal knowledge is nil. Would it be possible if anybody could help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changes to 3-clause BSD licence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changed first clause to be similar to clause 4c of Apache license 2.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changed second clause to be similar to clause 4c of Apache license 2.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Added a 4th clause to the license, copied from clause 3 of Apache license 2.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices,&#xA;excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the&#xA;Derivative Works, this list of conditions and the following&#xA;disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices,&#xA;excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the&#xA;Derivative Works, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from&#xA;this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of       this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,&#xA;use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;institute patent litigation against any entity (including a&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS&#xA;&amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;LIMITED TO,  THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR&#xA;A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT&#xA;HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,&#xA;SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY,  OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA;LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,&#xA;DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)  HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY&#xA;THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE&#xA;OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18825" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-10T08:05:48.477" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T05:53:26.837" Title="I made my own open source license. Is it any good? Is it legal?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2020-07-08T16:31:35.890" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if this license would hold any water or if it is legal. My legal knowledge is nil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;screams&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;BAD IDEA&amp;quot; at me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason that lawyers train for as long as they do. Legal documents are tricky and hard to get right unless you know exactly what you're doing; often, you may be able to do something that &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; does what you want, but actually has some glaring errors in it that you wouldn't notice without the necessary experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have legal experience, leave creating your own license &lt;em&gt;alone&lt;/em&gt; - let those who know what they're doing do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445/98&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="98" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T16:31:35.890" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="462" CreationDate="2020-07-08T16:52:33.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not a lawyer, this is my understanding as a long-time participant in the opensource world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses and contributor agreements serve different purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses are a grant of permission from the copyright holder(s) of the work to the general public allowing them to use, modify and redistribute the work. Depending on the particular license there may be conditions attached such as requiring derivative works to be released under the same license and requiring source code to be released alongside binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of evidence to the contrary the default assumption is that copyright of contributions remains with their creators (or their creators employers in the event of a work for hire) and that the contributors are released under the same license as the project that is contributed to. I don't know if this assumption has ever been tested in court but it is the assumption that a substantial proportion of the opensource world works on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is, in a project with lots of contributors and no contributor agreement, the license can become effectively &amp;quot;locked in&amp;quot;. To change the license terms would require getting permission from all the copyright holders, some of which may disagree or may simply be impossible to contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributor agreements are typically used create an asymmetry in the legal relationship. Contributors grant extra permissions to the originators of the project or even transfer copyright completely. This gives the originators of the project the right to release those contributions under other licenses either as part of an overall project re-licensing or in some cases to sell licenses to use the code in ways not allowed by the open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such agreements are controversial, on the one side they can make it easier for a project to move with the times and can provide a means of financing development by selling licenses to downstream users who do not want to accept the open-source license terms. On the other side many find the asymmetry goes against the principles of open-source/free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastEditorUserId="2975" LastEditDate="2023-08-04T23:55:44.510" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T23:55:44.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2020-07-08T17:10:49.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One problem with your proposed license is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD license&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA;notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means the list of conditions and the disclaimer must be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices, &lt;strong&gt;excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bolded the part that I can interpret as being a single clause. Now your license says that the list of conditions and the disclaimer are not required to be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the patent allowances and, more importantly, &lt;em&gt;requirements&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was evaluating your license and I saw those conditions, I would immediately wonder whether those requirements are 1) reasonable and 2) in my best interest. Since you said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My legal knowledge is nil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... chances are there are some loopholes in your wording that would come to bite me in the rear in some way down the road, even IF I assume you were in fact simply ignorant in the first place and not secretly malicious. The well-known licenses are drafted over months and sometimes years by professionals who address issues like this. Once I realize your license was homegrown I'd try to forget everything about your software as fast as I could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to incorporate your software into my own program which I wanted to keep proprietary, I would not do it based on the patent concerns I just laid out. If I wanted to incorporate your software into my library or program which I wanted to release as free software, I wouldn't use your software either because then I'd be responsible for figuring out license compatibility between your homegrown license and other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR use a known license, pick the one you like the most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T17:10:49.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10088" CreationDate="2020-07-08T17:54:20.627" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always seen the BDFL model as halfway between a traditional open-source project structure and a traditional corporate project structure.  You have the openness, transparency, and general culture of OSS, but with a single strong project manager to make high-level decisions and direct the overall effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see many of the advantages just by breaking down the title itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Benevolent&lt;/strong&gt; - a mutual trust that this person will act in the project's best interest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dictator&lt;/strong&gt; - this person is the singular, ultimate authority&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For Life&lt;/strong&gt; - this person intends to lead the project for the long term, not just until something nicer comes along&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A BDFL is highly invested in the project, typically the original creator. Their own name and professional reputation are often inseparable from that of the project. Unlike a corporate manager, users can find it easier to trust their leadership since the BDFL has a &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; vested interest in the success and longevity of the project.  Both corporate projects and OSS projects can end up with a revolving door of leadership, which stalls progress and frustrates users. A BDFL generally holds that position for a long period of time (thus the &amp;quot;for life&amp;quot;), which adds a degree of stability to the project. It also allows leadership to develop and stick to a cohesive long-term vision instead of a series of short-lived leaders constantly changing plans and directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequently, a BDFL is also the undisputed subject matter expert and central authority for that particular project/technology. Corporate managers can run a project without a deep understanding of the technology or its history, leading to decisions that frustrate developers/users. Many OSS projects have a number of people in equally-powerful leadership roles, leaving room for disagreement and confusion.  If you have a question about where Python is heading and Guido van Rossum answers your question, then you can be confident that the answer is authoritative. BDFL-run projects tend to attract fewer forks for this reason. Any fork with only minor changes would seem like a &amp;quot;lesser&amp;quot; project without the BDFL's involvement. This helps prevent a community from splintering into multiple groups that are each too small to be effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T17:54:20.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10028" CreationDate="2020-07-08T18:47:41.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ditto what Basile Starynkevitch posted, I believe that there are some cases where reverse engineering or de-compiling are legit for research and education. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Title_II:_Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMCA&lt;/a&gt; is the document that you probably would want to look at for more details on what is and isn't allowed. I suspect the legality of this is largely going to depend on what the copier is doing with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, your question relates to someone using the possibly illicit copy. US law holds that you are still guilty of breaking the law, even if you are unaware of the law for criminal law (ex: I cannot murder someone and claim I don't know it was wrong), I suspect that the same holds true for civil law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use were to sell a product using code that was infringing on a copyright, you would likely still be liable for damages should the copyright holder decide to sue. It's a minor consolation, but this would create solid grounds for you then suing the person or company that committed the copyright violation in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;IANAL&lt;/strong&gt;, so take all of this post with a grain of salt. Consult a real lawyer if this is important to your or your company. Do not assume that my speculation is good advice, or even correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18827" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T18:47:41.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10101" CreationDate="2020-07-10T05:27:34.510" Score="8" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a software that is licensed AGPLv3. It's a simple tool that takes a user-provided string and generates an image based on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license is the generated image under? Can I choose the license, or does it inherently have some license simply because it is derived from user input?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to require that generated images are attributed to my software, e.g. CC-BY 4.0. Can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18864" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T19:49:29.387" Title="Licensing user-generated content" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10100" CreationDate="2020-07-10T06:04:33.280" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way I'd be inclined to handle this is as if it were a program which ships with a corpus of clip-art, then selects and arranges elements of that corpus according to user-provided instructions, expressed via an input string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it is well-established here that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;the licence on a piece of software does not generally affect the licence status of the software's output&lt;/a&gt;.  So in answer to your first question, the licence status of the generated image is, most likely, a function of the licence on the letter shapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have several questions around here already (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9839/proprietary-resources-in-gplv3-project&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8463/what-is-the-correct-way-to-add-a-cc-by-sa-4-0-license-to-the-assets-in-a-project&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) which advance the idea that the code and the other digital assets in a piece of shipping software do not have to be under the same licence.  If you distribute your code under AGPLv3 and the letter shapes under (say) &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, I think you will achieve the desired effect: people offering your code to others, including as a network service, will have to provide full AGPLv3 source, whereas anyone using the output images need only credit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For maximum compliance, it may help if your program makes it clear when it produces the output that, as a consequence of the use of inputs supplied by you, the output is under CC BY.  Also, when split-licensing like this, it is very helpful not to mix the two bodies of differently-licensed content.  If the images can be loaded from an external file, rather than being incorporated into the program, it helps avoid misunderstandings about which licence covers any particular element of the distributed whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-10T19:49:29.387" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T19:49:29.387" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10100" CreationDate="2020-07-10T19:13:21.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to require that generated images are attributed to my software, e.g. CC-BY 4.0. Can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would do no good. Even if you could, nothing would stop me from removing that restriction from your licensing, distribution, installer, or whatever and redistributing it as the AGPLv3 allows. You can't both put something under the AGPLv3 and also impose additional restrictions on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T19:13:21.920" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9839" CreationDate="2020-07-10T21:06:00.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would suggest designing the software so as to allow a user to supply a set of icons, and include with it a set of functional (but not necessarily attractive) icons that you would allow to be freely distributable under GPL, and bundle it with an alternate set of icons which is explicitly not part of the GPL-licensed package, but which users may load into it.  I think the GPL would require that the open-sourced parts of the package be adequate to build a working application, but supplying a freely distributable set of functional icons would meet that requirement even if icons that are distributed under a more restrictive license would make the program nicer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2020-07-10T21:06:00.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10108" CreationDate="2020-07-11T02:53:42.467" Score="8" ViewCount="8950" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is collaborator just a contributor with &amp;quot;commit-bit&amp;quot; and other privileges or there is more to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastEditorUserId="18648" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T12:23:45.647" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T12:23:45.647" Title="What is the difference between contributor, member and collaborator?" Tags="|github|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-11T05:13:58.753" Score="2" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;About a week ago I found some commercial software that is closed source using two GPL v2 licensed packages in the binaries. I emailed the company back and forth and they finally agreed that they would release the source code to me. However, they state that they will ship it to me (perfectly fine under GPL) but that the processing time would be around 15 months due to COVID-19 and their engineers working from home. This seems extremely excessive to put source code on a disk and mail it. I assume they are doing this to stall the release of the source code. Is there anything in the GPL license that requires reasonable processing time for releasing the source code? The software has been out for over 2 years at least and has had the two offending packages in it since the beginning. Do I have any options for requesting a reasonable processing time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am located in the US and their main operations are in Norway, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18876" LastEditorUserId="18876" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T06:36:07.823" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T20:03:51.293" Title="Time limit to supply source code under GPL" Tags="|gpl|copyright|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10106" CreationDate="2020-07-11T06:10:57.757" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Contributors&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Git (in a git repository) identifies authors and committers by email address. Github users can associate email addresses with their accounts. When a user's set of email addresses is found in the commit history of a github repo, github marks that user as a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise/2.18/user/insights/installing-and-configuring-github-insights/managing-contributors-and-teams&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GH Enterprise docs&lt;/a&gt; seem to be consistent with contributors  only being associated with email addresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Collaborators&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user that has defined permissions in a github repo is marked as a collaborator. These permissions can vary and do not need to be the commit bit. A random org I am a member of shows the following options presently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;read&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;write&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;admin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;issue triage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;non-admin manager&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise/2.15/user/articles/adding-outside-collaborators-to-repositories-in-your-organization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gh enterprise docs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who has read-only access to a private repo should be marked as a collaborator, in my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A user who has permissions to a repo but no commits in that repo with any of email addresses associated with their github account would  be   a collaborator but not a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Members&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a github repo belongs to an organization, users that have membership in that organization are marked &amp;quot;Member&amp;quot; in the same space used for &amp;quot;Contributor&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Collaborator&amp;quot;. Organization membership does not necessarily grant any permissions in a particular repository, but the user is marked a Member regardless. For example, one org I am a member of grants me read/write access to some repos, but I am marked a member also in other repos where I have the same permissions/access as any other github user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T06:10:57.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10107" CreationDate="2020-07-11T08:29:00.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s3b says nothing about the permissible time to fulfil a demand for Complete Corresponding Source, but given that the offer only has to be valid for three years, I doubt that a 15-month delay could be seen as reasonable by &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, COVID isn't, generally, a permissible reason to delay on a legal obligation; see all sorts of sources commenting on various retailers' failures to honour refund obligations after COVID-related cancellations, eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jun/24/get-this-message-over-to-airlines-stop-passing-the-buck-over-refunds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues of third-party rights (the right of someone other than the licensor to sue the licensee for failure to fulfil the licence conditions) and specific performance (the right to ask a court to order a licensor to fulfil a licence condition, instead of merely awarding damages to compensate for their failure to do so) were covered in a talk at FOSDEM that &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I wrote up for LWN&lt;/a&gt;.  The upshot was that in civil law jurisdictions, third-party rights do exist and specific performance is available, so apparently you could in theory ask a Norwegian court to compel the delivery of the source.  Whether you think this is worth doing I must leave to you.  You should certainly take professional legal advice before doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practical (rather than legal) remedies are fully covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/463/someone-is-violating-the-copyleft-license-they-are-refusing-to-give-me-the-sour&quot;&gt;our earlier question on the subject&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T20:03:51.293" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T20:03:51.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10115" CreationDate="2020-07-11T10:46:00.927" Score="15" ViewCount="1495" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an eBook (perhaps to be published physically one day) on the topic of programming. As such, it contains many coding samples. I want to expressly allow readers to copy the source code of code samples for their own use, and I feel no need to require them to give me attribution in their compiled output--I don't need a byline on some corporate web site, just because somebody copied 300 lines of my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I also don't want somebody to copy some or all of the source code, and redistribute it solo, or with their own text, as their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ideal would be something that requires attribution only in source form, but not in compiled/binary/object form. I believe this would accomplish both of my key goals mentioned above. Something like the MIT or 2/3-clause BSD license would be fine with me, except that I don't need it to apply to the compiled program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any existing open-source licenses that would apply to such a situation?  Or should I just stick with a well-known MIT/BSD-style license, even though it covers compiled output?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can, of course, write my own, but since IANAL, I'm sure I'll screw something up, and end up with a worthless license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3557" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T07:26:48.547" Title="What license can I use for source code in an (e)book, that does not restrict binary distribution?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|books|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10110" CreationDate="2020-07-11T13:29:22.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first thought was that a simple variant of BSD could probably do the job for you, but then I caught myself.  It's kind of you, that you don't want to saddle people offering compiled versions of your code with any kind of attribution requirement, but I advise strongly against attempting to embed that in some form of custom licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/782862/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this talk at FOSDEM&lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure: I wrote the article), one of the people responsible for open-source and licensing inside Facebook said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of his work, he gets many inquiries from Facebook people asking him if they can use a particular piece of technology. His normal workflow is such, he said, that if it takes him more than &lt;em&gt;five seconds&lt;/em&gt; to work out if he can use a given piece of technology, he probably won't bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use some modified form of BSD, then your wishes will be given full expression, and nobody will use your code.  If you stick with straight 3BSD, anyone who wants to can reuse your code, because 3BSD is well-understood.  Potential users would &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; rather have your code under simple terms that are well-understood, than under fairly simple terms that are less onerous but less well-understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T16:16:48.827" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T16:16:48.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-11T20:30:46.383" Score="2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on a workout app for a gym and in my research stumbled upon wger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wger.de/en/software/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wger.de/en/software/license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An API distributed under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is the following:&#xA;Does the usage of the API (sending requests to it and doing something with the data) also fall under AGPL, meaning I am required to make the code of the app publicly available or does that only fall under the API itself (meaning if I modify the API I would make those modifications available)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18880" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T20:30:46.383" Title="AGPL - Api usage" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10114" CreationDate="2020-07-12T01:07:45.550" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I place restrictions on public domain software that I modify.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I want to make closed source but freely available binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18472" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T05:50:50.757" Title="Can I place restrictions on public domain software that I modify. I want to make closed source but freely available binary" Tags="|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10113" CreationDate="2020-07-12T05:50:50.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can use public domain code in your closed-source application without any problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot place restrictions on that public domain code in the sense that you forbid others from obtaining it as well and using or modifying it. But you are under no obligation at all to provide that public domain code nor do you have to tell anyone that you are using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T05:50:50.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10110" CreationDate="2020-07-12T06:57:06.583" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ideal would be something that requires attribution only in source form, but not in compiled/binary/object form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost Software License&lt;/a&gt; has this very feature baked right into it, no modification needed. It is “very similar to the BSD license and the MIT license” (direct quote), but was designed with these very use-cases in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must require that the license appear with all copies [including redistributions] of the software source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must not require that the license appear with executables or other binary uses of the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s recognized by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#boost&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with the GNU GPL according to the FSF&lt;/a&gt;. Like BSD/MIT, it’s reasonably (IMO) brief, consisting only of three paragraphs: a license, a restriction, and a disclaimer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boost Software License - Version 1.0 - August 17th, 2003&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization&#xA;obtaining a copy of the software and accompanying documentation covered by&#xA;this license (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;) to use, reproduce, display, distribute,&#xA;execute, and transmit the Software, and to prepare derivative works of the&#xA;Software, and to permit third-parties to whom the Software is furnished to&#xA;do so, all subject to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including&#xA;the above license grant, this restriction and the following disclaimer,&#xA;must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and&#xA;all derivative works of the Software, &lt;strong&gt;unless such copies or derivative&#xA;works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by&#xA;a source language processor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT&#xA;SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OR ANYONE DISTRIBUTING THE SOFTWARE BE LIABLE&#xA;FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,&#xA;ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER&#xA;DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Emphasis&lt;/strong&gt; added by me&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15766" LastEditorUserId="15766" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T07:26:48.547" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T07:26:48.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10126" CreationDate="2020-07-12T07:03:06.613" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DidierStevens/DidierStevensSuite/blob/master/zipdump.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a file&lt;/a&gt; in a repository that says the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;source code put in public domain by xxx, no copyright&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not contain an explicit license, just the aforementioned waiver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is that enough for me to use the code however I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18884" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T15:20:10.937" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T15:20:10.937" Title="Using code with copyright waiver and no license" Tags="|public-domain|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T16:59:34.957" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license?newreg=b5911384f42a4cb4bf98144d513446a6&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-my-code-floss-just-because-it-is-published-it-on-github&quot;&gt;Is my code FLOSS just because it is published it on GitHub?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/148146/open-source-code-with-no-license-can-i-fork-it&quot;&gt;Open source code with no license… can I fork it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and other question on this website but haven't found what I am searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dmolina/cec2013single&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;program&lt;/a&gt; on github licensed under GPL3.0. It's a python wrapper around a C software. The original C software is from an academic competition and neither the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/P-N-Suganthan/CEC2013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive released on github&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/EPNSugan/index_files/CEC2013/Definitions%20of%20%20CEC%2013%20benchmark%20suite%200117.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;associated paper&lt;/a&gt; mention a License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/EPNSugan/index_files/CEC2013/CEC2013.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website of the project&lt;/a&gt; doesn't mention a License neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the python wrapper has the following sentence in the README:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This package is a unofficial package using cython for calling the official implementation in C source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;enforcing the idea that no explicit authorization were given to the author of the wrapper, which was made later, compared to the R wrapper mentioned on the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I saw on others questions, if I want to use the original C code, I need the permission of the original author, who I can mail.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, would this authorization extend to the use of the code inside the python wrapper? Can I use the python wrapper code without worrying about the lack of license in the original code (I mean legally, not ethically)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18887" LastEditorUserId="18887" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T08:51:53.160" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T08:51:53.160" Title="Using a licensed code which use an unlicensed code without explicit mention an authorization from the author" Tags="|licensing|github|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-07-13T08:54:13.583" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10092" CreationDate="2020-07-12T18:41:14.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rolling your own anything-which-requires-skill usually results in a product inferior to what a professional would produce&lt;/strong&gt; so it's best not to do so unless you have a reason which makes it a better course of action. This isn't to say rolling your own is a bad idea. In fact it benefits the opensource community by introducing new ideas, and showing areas for new license demand. But it's important to &lt;strong&gt;make sure you understand the consequences of making/using a bad license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Custom licenses aren't likely to be widely used, because anyone who wants to use works under this license may run into license compatibility issues when combining works. Also many people will steer clear simply because an untested license is a wildcard. People like to know how a license will hold up in court. So &lt;strong&gt;by using a custom license you'll be limiting the potential audience for your work&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your license will be awkward to actually use. &lt;strong&gt;You've taken text from existing licenses, and those licenses need to be adhered to when distributing your license&lt;/strong&gt;, or you violate the copyright of the authors of those original licenses. The key example of this being that both the 3 Clause BSD license, and the Apache 2.0 License require a copy of the license to be distributed with works. So when you use your license you must also include the BSD and Apache licenses. In doing so, you'll need to be careful not to accidentally try to license those license texts under your license, or each other. You'll also need to be careful not to accidentally license you work under the BSD, or Apache licenses (unless you're wanting to do that). &lt;strong&gt;You might be able to get around all of this by arguing fair use of the text in your license, but that's not a guarantee.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that by posting the license on this site you've licensed it under the CC BY-SA 4.0 which means anyone who takes it from here will also need to adhere to the CC BY-SA 4.0 when using your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're having trouble finding a license that meets your needs try browsing the list on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;, or consider hiring a lawyer to draft one for you (or proof this one for you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright James Daniel Marrs Ritchey. This material was created for submission at 'https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10092/i-made-my-own-open-source-license-is-it-any-good-is-it-legal', but can also be alternatively obtained from '&lt;a href=&quot;https://snippetly.blogspot.com/2020/07/making-homebrew-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://snippetly.blogspot.com/2020/07/making-homebrew-license.html&lt;/a&gt;' under the terms of any of the following licenses: Ritchey Permissive License v8 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/01/ritchey-permissive-license-v8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/01/ritchey-permissive-license-v8.html&lt;/a&gt;), The MIT License (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;), Ritchey 2020 Permissive License v1 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/05/ritchey-2020-permissive-license-v1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/05/ritchey-2020-permissive-license-v1.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18889" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T05:53:26.837" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T05:53:26.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T12:35:45.727" Score="1" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just hypothetical at this point. So just doing some ground work to understand, if this is even possible. If yes, which licensing model is most appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our company has several units. In many cases, type of technology work done also overlaps. However, each unit does its own thing. So I feel that is there is lot of duplicate work being done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to propose a common open source model (just within the company), when developing new idea/product, where anyone from any unit can contribute towards the development/enhancement of the product. I am also okay with the product being used by the unit for other purposes within their unit, without any cost. But if they were to make any customization, I want it to be contributed back to main repo. Will I be able to legally enforce this, just internally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These units also have their own clients that they service. However, I also want to allow these units be able to sell the product based on their billing model (either for services, support or license itself). When they use it at their respective client location, I still want the software to be deemed as proprietary from company perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, please suggest, if this is even possible. If yes, what kind of licensing model that would be more appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18899" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T13:15:17.330" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T13:15:17.330" Title="Which licensing model should I use to share software within a company?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10120" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:14:16.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source style collaboration within a company or group of companies is called &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inner source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within a legal entity, no special licensing is needed. Collaboration can be based on (non-binding) internal policies. But between legal entities (e.g. subsidiaries), custom licenses can be useful to establish boundaries of use and contractual obligations. E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dbsystel/open-source-policies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DB Systel has developed an inner source license&lt;/a&gt; (German only). Normal open source licenses should not be used here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T13:14:16.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10123" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:31:47.120" Score="6" ViewCount="1393" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I download Android SDK from &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.android.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developers.android.com&lt;/a&gt;, I am prompted to agree with Google's EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I use in order to avoid agreeing on these terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm under impression that Android SDK itself is a free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T14:13:56.463" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T10:44:05.047" Title="Is there a free open source version of Android SDK available for use?" Tags="|open-source-definition|android|binaries|eula|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10122" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:37:56.713" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source code itself is available here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/sdk/+/master/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://android.googlesource.com/platform/sdk/+/master/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is Android Rebuilds project which provides binaries built from this source code without non-free EULA:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastEditorUserId="18648" LastEditDate="2021-06-25T00:11:06.190" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T00:11:06.190" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-07-13T13:37:56.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T17:28:33.313" Score="1" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an open source Python module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within my code is a function which I have adapted from a function which I found in an other open source package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that other package was a direct dependency of my project, then great, I would just list it as a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't want to include that other project as a dependency, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it does some other things which aren't relevant to my project, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;even if I did include it as a dependency, only to use this one function, the function as it's written still wouldn't work as I need it to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how should I give credit to this other package? Is it OK to just list it in an &amp;quot;acknowledgements&amp;quot; section in the README?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18902" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T13:36:00.723" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T13:36:00.723" Title="How to credit open source package if I just borrow a function" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10124" CreationDate="2020-07-13T17:35:06.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From one of your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just checked and they don't even list a license in their repo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you have no right to use the code from that module. Try and forget everything you've seen of their code and implement the function on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T17:35:06.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10116" CreationDate="2020-07-14T03:21:02.660" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This type of notice is known as public domain dedication. Only the copyright holder can do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright owner can dedicate a work to the public domain. -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is used to release a work into the public domain so that anyone can use it freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, upon viewing a work, you see words such as, “This work is&#xA;dedicated to the public domain,” then it is free for you to use. -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However a dedication must be done properly to be effective under law. It's unclear if this dedication is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible&#xA;[...] Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and&#xA;reliably. -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally not all jurisdictions allow making a dedication to the public domain. So the author may not have the authority to make this dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to&#xA;surrender rights automatically -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind this dedication, if valid, only applies in the jurisdictions the Copyright holder had Copyright in, and possibly in some jurisdictions with the necessary foreign Copyright recognition, and necessary permittance of dedication to Public Domain. So, it's possible this work is not protected by Copyright in your jurisdiction. It's also possible that it is protected, and can't be dedicated to Public Domain in your jurisdiction. It's possible that it is protected, can be dedicated to Public Domain, but that this dedication doesn't meet the requirements of your jurisdiction, even if does meet requirements of the Copyright holder's jurisdiction. So there's a lot variables here making it hard to determine if this dedication is valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such thing as an &amp;quot;international copyright&amp;quot; -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=What-is-a-Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=What-is-a-Copyright&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;most countries offer protection to foreign works under certain&#xA;conditions -&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Is-My-Copyright-Good-in-Other-Countries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Is-My-Copyright-Good-in-Other-Countries&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be safest to contact the Copyright holder, and request they grant you permission to use the work under your desired opensource license, in case their dedication is not legally recognized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I am not a lawyer. This answer is for education purposes only, and is not intended to constitute legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright James Daniel Marrs Ritchey. This material was created for&#xA;submission at&#xA;'https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10116/using-code-with-copyright-waiver-and-no-license',&#xA;but can also be alternatively obtained from&#xA;'https://snippetly.blogspot.com/2020/07/public-domain-dedication.html' under the terms of any of the&#xA;following licenses: Ritchey Permissive License v10&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/07/ritchey-permissive-license-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/2020/07/ritchey-permissive-license-v10.html&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;The MIT License (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18907" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T07:52:17.137" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T07:52:17.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-14T05:40:03.030" Score="4" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use an older verion of dojo in our product and our upgrade to newer version needs lot of overhauling of the product code - which is not possible at this wee hour. But we need to get rid of this reported vulnerability - CVE-2018-15494. I found that the fix is there in the dojo's two files - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dojo/dojox/pull/283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dojo/dojox/pull/283&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know if I can make the changes in my application directly? Are there any license issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18908" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T06:01:27.443" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:08:48.867" Title="In Dojo Toolkit before 1.14, there is unescaped string injection in dojox/Grid/DataGrid.: CVE-2018-15494" Tags="|license|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10127" CreationDate="2020-07-14T06:08:48.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't say what licence you got the earlier version of dojo(x?) under, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dojo/dojox/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current LICENSE file&lt;/a&gt; says either 3BSD or Academic Free License, at your choice.  Were you to choose to take the patch under 3BSD, then assuming that your product is distributed in binary-only form, your major obligation after incorporating this patch would be that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,&#xA;this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation&#xA;and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to me unduly onerous for a commercial product.  If you can live with that, I think that you may use the patch.  That said, you may wish to take professional legal advice before betting a company on this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T06:08:48.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-14T21:34:01.710" Score="3" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have used many libraries from the pub dev site in my flutter project and i notices many of them use the bsd, mit or apache 2.0 licence. I want to release this app in the future and have read that you should make sure the library licences are available in the source code. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I just include them in my pubspec.yaml does this already do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I need to include a reference to all the libraries i use in my project and there licences is there a way to auto generate such a thing in flutter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been reading online and there seems to be a few methods in android to do this e.g.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/google-developer-experts/keeping-your-licenses-in-check-411e34a0bcb4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://medium.com/google-developer-experts/keeping-your-licenses-in-check-411e34a0bcb4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The produces the following output.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c59VM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c59VM.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody help me with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18916" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T20:49:04.370" Title="How to credit packages used in a commercial flutter project?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|commercial|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7230" CreationDate="2020-07-15T10:02:12.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: Migrate to OpenPdf, it will fix the issues of iText 2.1.7 and it is open source and up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot use iText open source 2.1.7 because of IP/license issues of the code fragments in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18920" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T10:02:12.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-16T03:00:14.840" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you take a piece of GPL code and write an English document sketching a proof of correctness of the code. Would your document be considered a derivative of the code. Can it only be distributed under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18927" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T15:03:41.633" Title="license: is a correctness proof of a piece of code a derivative of the code" Tags="|copyright|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10134" CreationDate="2020-07-16T14:39:07.033" Score="0" ViewCount="617" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is an open source project (a collection of open-source repositories) on GitHub. Can we include closed-source software in the same open-source repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Specifically I'm referring to this issue: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/riscv/riscv-compliance/issues/125#issue-657900613&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/riscv/riscv-compliance/issues/125#issue-657900613&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is optional, can it be included?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18932" LastEditorUserId="18932" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T15:07:10.733" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T06:23:02.887" Title="If closed source software is distributed along with open source software, will the resulting code still be open-source?" Tags="|github|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10133" CreationDate="2020-07-17T09:19:06.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A single repository can contain multiple, independent, copyrighted works. There is no requirement anywhere that the contents of one repository must be under a single license.&#xA;And independent works have the property that their copyright licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that, there is very little against a repository that contains both open-source and closed-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing to look out for is if the two pieces of software are not independent works under copyright but one is a derived work of the other. For derived works, the licenses &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; affect each other and you need to ensure that the license on the base work allows the creation of derived works and that the licenses are compatible with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With permissive licenses, there is little problem with license compatibility but it is definitely a problem with copyleft licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T09:19:06.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10144" CreationDate="2020-07-17T17:09:45.130" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2-clause BSD licence&lt;/a&gt; includes the clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What implications does this have, if any, for the copyright of contributions to the project?  Is it the case that someone who contributes to a project licensed under this licence is automatically assigning copyright to the copyright holder listed in the project licence? Should this be augmented by a contributor agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18942" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T11:06:06.667" Title="Is copyright of a contribution to a BSD 2-clause project automatically assigned to the project's copyright owner?" Tags="|copyright|bsd|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10151" CreationDate="2020-07-17T18:58:10.457" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a puzzling question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody contributed to a AGPL licensed project (he is not the owner). Now this code could also be applied to a different project licensed under LGPL. Could the author of this code part (he is listed in the license header of the AGPL code as (c) ) give permission to use that code in the other LGPL project? The contributor thinks that he can not because he signed some contributor agreement with the AGPL project but I wanted to ask this here and maybe someone has some insight...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: I think I found the CLA, so here is the interesting part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wzlqe.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wzlqe.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12842" LastEditorUserId="12842" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T09:07:25.367" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T13:04:05.170" Title="Can code licensed under AGPL also be (re)licensed under LGPL by its contributor?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|relicensing|contributor-agreements|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10135" CreationDate="2020-07-18T06:09:54.290" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it the case that someone who contributes to a project licensed under this licence is automatically assigning copyright to the copyright holder listed in the project licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  Unless arrangements are made to the contrary, you retain the copyright to any contributions you make to any free software project (or any other project, or anything else, for that matter).  There are exceptions, in many jurisdictions, for work done during the course of employment, but the breadth of this exception varies by jurisdiction, and you didn't ask about that, so let's not complicate matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5853/do-contributors-own-copyright-after-sending-contributions&quot;&gt;Custom and practice&lt;/a&gt; has it that contributions to free projects are made under the licence that governs distribution of the project.  In the case of *GPL code, this is made explicit by the licence: having acquired a copy of the code in order to modify it, your subsequent redistribution of a derivative work thereof, can only be lawfully done under the GPL (see eg GPLv3 s2).  So GPL projects are on clear ground in this respect from minute one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this be augmented by a contributor agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissively-licenced projects are slightly more tricky than *GPL projects, because despite custom-and-practice it's legally possible for a contributor to turn round later and claim they never intended to licence their contribution under, eg, 2BSD.  This isn't common behaviour, but one good use of a Contributor Licensing Agreement (CLA) is to make sure that all contributions are unambiguously licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Projects with no single licence governing all their parts would also be well-advised to use a CLA to clarify the licence status of contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, CLAs tend to raise hackles somewhat, since one of their common uses is to enable later closure of the code into a non-free, revenue-generating version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T06:09:54.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10139" CreationDate="2020-07-18T15:56:24.283" Score="1" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a full copy from &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62969381/is-it-in-line-with-the-dco-that-a-github-sign-off-needs-and-publishes-full-name&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62969381/is-it-in-line-with-the-dco-that-a-github-sign-off-needs-and-publishes-full-name&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;########&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming from Stack Overflow where a pseudo name is normal and enough, a github beginner like me does not expect to have to sign-off a git pull request with the full name and kind of full-name-email being published. Going over to github, I simply do not expect more than what Stack Overflow is asking for. I thought the other contributors on github just chose willingly to sign with their full names and respective e-mails, and I was astonished to see my personal mail being published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tasks you follow to do the pull request on github (not from the DCO, this was just a helping comment):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need sign-off your PR with your email address. Below are steps to&#xA;sign-off a commit. At first, you need configure your git with user&#xA;name and email: &lt;code&gt;git config --global user.name &amp;quot;FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;code&gt;git config --global user.email &amp;quot;MY_NAME@example.com&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;Next run &lt;code&gt;git push --force-with-lease origin YOURBRANCHNAME&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the DCO Developer Certificate of Origin now in the github version &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apps/dco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/apps/dco&lt;/a&gt; and in the original version &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developercertificate.org/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The github version asks for more than the original DCO, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It requires all commit messages to contain the Signed-off-by line with an email address that matches the commit author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;further below...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributors sign-off that they adhere to these requirements by adding a Signed-off-by line to commit messages.&#xA;This is my commit message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signed-off-by: Random J Developer random@developer.example.org&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here you could already discuss if &amp;quot;Random J Developer&amp;quot; has to be the full name or just a pseudo name, and also whether the name (or pseudo name respectively) should be part of the mail. The original DCO speaks just generally of the personal information in the sign-off:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are&#xA;public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal&#xA;information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained&#xA;indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with this project or&#xA;the open source license(s) involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its intro, the github DCO mentions the email that &amp;quot;matches the commit author&amp;quot; as the core of the personal information, and later adds the name in the example. This &amp;quot;matches the commit author&amp;quot; is already a stricter requirement than the original DCO is asking for, thus this requirement could already be questioned. From the original DCO I read the option to put your full name and full name email, but not the need to do so, as the github user name and a mail that includes the github author name would be personal information enough to identify you as well, which is the main requirement. From the github DCO I read the wish that you put your full name, but it is only in the example, not in the text, and I could also go around that now by putting my github username and an email that does not show my full name but includes my github name, and still following the DCO, as I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My final question after this long explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the github DCO requirement of full name and an &amp;quot;email address that matches the commit author&amp;quot; in line with the official DCO? Or does it ask too much, and a pseudo name + email using that pseudo name would be already enough? Or as a third option, would a pseudo name + email not using any pseudo or full name already be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p.s.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To anyone of github reading this. If publishing the full name and respective email is really needed, I simply would like to be informed about this when doing my first pull request, because few people will read the DCO before starting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18949" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T17:11:34.053" Title="Is it in line with the DCO that a github sign-off needs and publishes full name + an email &quot;that matches the commit author&quot;?" Tags="|github|open-source-definition|pull-request|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10138" CreationDate="2020-07-18T17:11:34.053" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some projects such as Linux ask for the DCO to be signed in order to do due diligence, and ultimately to protect downstream users. The DCO does not forbid projects from establishing individual processes, such as requiring that it's clearly the committer who has signed off on the commit and to have a clear means of contact later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has nothing to do with GitHub, as far as I can see.&#xA;Projects on GitHub are not required to have a DCO, and most do not.&#xA;The DCO integration that's available on GitHub is just a third party app or bot to automate part of this workflow, if a project chooses to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow has it's own standards for contributions, and is not quite as bent on ensuring that downstream users can enjoy the license. However, the terms of service contain somewhat similar terms. Stack Overflow the company also has access to your email address in case they need to contact you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T17:11:34.053" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-18T19:23:28.167" Score="5" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a combined work containing program X, plugin P and plugin Q. Plugin P has a proprietary license (which allows redistribution) and plugin Q is distributed under the GPL. X has a license which is compatible with both, such as LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I'm not allowed to distribute this combined work under any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute an installer script which installs X, P and Q on the user's computer when they run it? Is there any GPL violation happening here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may even include copies of X and P, or X and Q, inside the installer. The other component will be downloaded from the Internet so that I can claim the installer is not derived from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastEditorUserId="483" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T11:04:59.453" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:37:20.123" Title="Is it okay to combine a proprietary program with a GPL program after distribution?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|plugins|linking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-18T23:37:22.563" Score="51" ViewCount="9333" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is a hypothetical question, but I am curious. Feel free to ignore it, when it seems too theoretical for you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people may know the situation that you implement a feature and in the end you have added like 10 lines and removed 100 and from the 10 there are possibly 5 that just were moved around and not really added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;lice writes code and releases it with a strong copyleft, e.g., using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;. Then &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;ob contributes to this code and improves its efficiency by removing redundant (but not dead) code and in the end Bob contributed a lot of deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterward, Alice wants to re-license the code with a weak copyleft, e.g., using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD license&lt;/a&gt;. To do so, she asks every contributor to re-license their code and removes any code from persons that cannot be reached or not willing to re-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;arol is rewriting the missing pieces and licensing them under the BSD license, so there is no conflict with Alice already knowing the removed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's assume the problem, that Bob did not re-license his changes, but contributed a lot of deletions. The deletions made a significant difference, so you would think that copyright should apply. At least for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff#Usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diff&lt;/a&gt; (containing the copyrighted content to be removed) it certainly does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does copyright apply to this case to the resulting code (without its commit history) and what can Alice do about the GPLed deletions? You could say she cannot keep them, as then the project stays the same as after the work of Bob. But should she re-add the deleted code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when she does and Carol removes it again, the result is the same and looks just like the code with the GPLed deletions, so it cannot be free of GPL work (i.e. the negative code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastEditorUserId="8162" LastEditDate="2023-04-09T09:09:25.177" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T23:54:50.987" Title="Can there be a copyright on negative code?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|relicensing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10136" CreationDate="2020-07-18T23:47:32.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author has the copyright, so he can relicense from the license point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the CLA is not a license, but a contract. And you need to read the contract to know what it allows and what not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possiblity is, that the contributor signed that he will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; license the code other than to the company the CLA is for or AGPL for the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possiblity is, that he just signed that the project can use the code without following the AGPL and nothing more. I know some projects that accept code from people that do not belong to the project either under a CLA or under a permissive license like MIT, which allows everyone to use it without following the AGPL, when no other AGPL code is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T23:47:32.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2020-07-19T07:32:27.653" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, this exposes a weakness in the mental model many coders seem to have about the operation of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a pile of bricks, representing code contributions to a work.  In one (surprisingly common) model, each brick is painted in a colour representing its licence status; red for BSD, blue for GPL, green for Apache, and so on.  Whoever made and placed any given brick can consent to its repainting, but nobody else can, though anyone can remove a brick from the pile.  In this model, a pile of Alice's bricks, painted blue, is added to with blue bricks from Bob.  Alice now wishes to paint the pile red, but cannot because of Bob's bricks, so she asks Carol to make some red bricks with which to replace them.  Once the pile is entirely composed of Alice's blue bricks and Carol's red bricks, Alice repaints her own bricks red.  How can the sometime presence of Bob's blue bricks be a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a practising barrister and sometime lecturer in copyright law with whom I have discussed this&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; a better mental model is a pile of bricks under one or more comparably-coloured tarpaulins (waterproof covering sheets, aka tarps), with names written on them.  Here, anyone can add or remove bricks, but any time you touch a pile under one or more tarps, you add your name to the list(s) written on the tarp(s).  The colour of a tarp specifies certain rules: for example, bricks removed from under a blue tarp can't be used in any other pile which is not also under a blue tarp.  You can in some cases combine piles under various tarps, and throw a new tarp over the whole lot, without necessarily removing the under-tarps.  Certain operations on certain coloured tarps (eg, replacement of a blue tarp with a red tarp) requires the consent of everyone whose name is written on the tarp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not mean to suggest everyone should adopt this mental model, and certainly not all the time, because like any abstraction it too has problems.  But thinking about it may reveal to you when you're (quite possibly unintentionally) using the coloured-bricks model, because that is not a good model for copyright.  For a start, coloured-bricks falls foul of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; problem, as we have well-documented here.  The tarp model has no issues with the Ship of Theseus, and that alone, to my mind, makes it useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tarp model makes understanding this question less-problematic.  Firstly, Alice piles up bricks under a blue tarp with Alice's name on it.  Bob comes along, removes several, and adds his own name to the tarp.  A replaces them.  Carol then slides a small pile of bricks, under their own tiny red tarp, underneath the big blue tarp, removes some of the bricks replaced earlier by A, and adds &amp;quot;Carol&amp;quot; to the blue tarp.  You now have a blue-tarp-covered pile with three names on the tarp: Alice, Bob, and Carol.  The consent of all three will be required to replace the blue tarp with a red tarp (again, with all three names on it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short&lt;/strong&gt;: Alice, Bob, and Carol are all rightsholders in the current work, either by virtue of their contributions to it, or by having been rightsholders in an earlier version, of which the current work is a copyright derivative.  The consent of all will be required to relicense it away from GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice can apply Carol's changes to the version immediately prior to Bob's doing any work on it, and if Carol's changes were made without knowledge of anything B had done, then she will have forked the project to a point where Alice and Carol are the only rightsholders, and relicensing will be possible without Bob's consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Nevertheless, I am an imperfect conduit, and any mistakes are of course mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-11T08:50:04.803" LastActivityDate="2023-03-11T08:50:04.803" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10135" CreationDate="2020-07-19T11:06:06.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to retain the existing copyright notice(s) does not in any way affect whether you own the copyrights to your contribution or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to have an explicit copyright notice in order to own the copyrights to your work, so from that it follows that the copyright notices that do exist must not be assumed to be an exhaustive list of the copyright owners of that work. This is especially true for open-source software projects where everybody is allowed to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it explicit that you own a copyright claim on (parts of) a file or project, you are entirely within your rights to add your own copyright notice next to the existing notice(s). Under the 2-clause BSD (and all other licenses that require preservation of a copyright notice), &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright notices that are present must be retained when making a copy, not just the one that refers to the initial author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T11:06:06.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2020-07-19T16:06:17.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you modify a work by removing from it or making rearrangements, the modifications you have made are based on your &lt;em&gt;ideas&lt;/em&gt; which manipulate someone else's &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt;. Copyright is concerned with expression, not ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright statutes in the United States do not define what &amp;quot;expression&amp;quot; is. If you wanted to assert copyright over something where your only contribution was chopping, rearranging and deleting existing content, you would have convince a judge that it plausibly constitutes an expression, which would probably be difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one thing, your expression isn't a piece of content whose existence can be demonstrated on its own. You cannot show the judge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;here is the material I expressed, viewed separately from the combined work in question; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;here is where that same material appears in the combined work, which should therefore acknowledge me as a copyright holder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material you expressed, in isolation, is just a blank, a nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The US Copyright Law has a paragraph about derived works, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/103&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;103&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, (a) states that if a derived work is unlawful, then it enjoys no copyright protection. This has implications for open source software, because, by default, a work grants no permissions for making derived works. The permitted ways for making derived works are defined by the specific license. If the license happens to say that the author of a derived version who simply deletes or rearranges lines of code is not permitted to add their name to the copyright notice, then that holds. If the license is violated, then it lapses, leaving that person with no permission to redistribute. Most open source licenses neglect to have such wording, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subparagraph (b) is about lawful derivative works; this is more relevant to the present topic, has this sentence: &lt;em&gt;[t]he copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A deletion or rearrangement does not look like &amp;quot;material contributed&amp;quot;, which is &amp;quot;distinguished from the preexisting material&amp;quot;. All portions of the derived work are material which is preexisting. Concretely speaking, no line of code in the material is one which cannot be found in the original version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, people will try anything in court, and sometimes there are surprises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastEditorUserId="6066" LastEditDate="2023-04-29T23:54:50.987" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T23:54:50.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2020-07-19T19:59:08.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the question makes the assumption that there's just a single work and copyright can either apply or not.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, we have two works which are separately copyrightable: The commit history, and the code at a specific version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get copyright in the history if you have a commit there, since you are one of the many authors of that history.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You get copyright in a specific version of the software if you code is in it. If your lines get deleted, you retain the copyright to the versions that have your lines, but not to later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17532" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T19:59:08.157" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10131" CreationDate="2020-07-19T21:19:41.757" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question, because you are mixing code copyright and copyright of articles and facts, which work quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest parts are the facts. A mathematical proof is something that deserves academic acknowledgement, but no copyright, as it just states facts and facts cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing the proof may warrant copyright. The full article certainly is copyrighted. The proof in formal math language may be not as it is merely stating the facts. But what about proofs written in prose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final part is the code. When you do a rigorous proof, you probably include the code or include facts about the code in a way that it can be written again using your article. And the code by itself is copyrighted by whoever wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there may be copyright clauses for academic works, that may permit including GPLed code regardless of the copyright of the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a definite answer I second @curiousdannii that law.stackexchange.com may be the more appropriate site for the full details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastEditorUserId="8162" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T15:03:41.633" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T15:03:41.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2020-07-20T00:15:33.360" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not all changes are of sufficient novelty to constitute something copyrightable, whether they are additions or deletions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a simple example, consider any old out of copyright song or hymn of five verses. I could make an 'arrangement' of only the first, second, and fifth verses, but this should not be considered novel enough to be copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in terms of your question about code, I think we would have to see the actual code and what was deleted to make any judgement about it. If what was removed was previously cleaned encapsulated in module-like code (not necessarily using any programming language's module syntax) and the whole module was removed and nothing else, as a non-lawyer I'd guess it probably doesn't reach the level of being copyrightable. But if the deleted code was thoroughly interspersed through the code which was kept and it required a lot of thought to determine what should be kept and what should be deleted, then I'd guess it probably can be copyrighted. But if it matters to you, get a lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a non-code example of the later, consider the idea of taking an old out-of-copyright novel, perhaps Little Women, and deleting any sections which don't pass the Bechdel test. I'd think the resulting work is probably novel enough to be copyrightable, especially if they were careful to leave enough connecting sentences that it still makes sense or has a logical plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if B's contributions are thoroughly intertwined with A's original code, probably the best way forward is not to try to cut out only B's code, but all the affected sections or modules even though parts of them were authored by A not B. Then C can replace the whole modules and you don't need to worry about B's contributions any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T02:03:04.787" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T02:03:04.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10150" CreationDate="2020-07-20T07:13:14.663" Score="3" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the &amp;quot;MPL&amp;quot; license. Is it possible to re-brand and distribute an MPL licensed open-source software for commercial purposes? I read that Debian has rebranded software in MPL, but couldn't get a clear picture. Any pointers would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18962" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T07:16:38.190" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T09:36:55.770" Title="Is it possible to re-brand an MPL licensed open source software?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10149" CreationDate="2020-07-20T09:36:55.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rebranding a software suite is a modification that is allowed by all open-source licenses. If you can effectively use the rebranded software in your commercial product depends on the license terms and if they would conflict with the way you want to exploit the commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL license has 3 main requirements that are relevant here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code must remain under the MPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recipients of the binaries must be informed of their rights and where they can obtain a copy of the source code (at a cost no higher than the actual distribution costs)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license on the binaries may not restrict the rights on the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebranded MPL software in the Debian distribution&lt;/a&gt;, Debian has used rebranded versions of the Mozilla applications Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey from 2006 to 2016. The rebranding was done because Debian and Mozilla had a conflict over the terms for using the Mozilla trademarks (which includes the branding).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T09:36:55.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10136" CreationDate="2020-07-20T09:47:31.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What this author has signed in not a Contributor License Agreement, giving the project additional (non-exclusive) rights in addition to what they get under the AGPL, but a &lt;strong&gt;transfer of copyrights&lt;/strong&gt; (CTA, Copyright Transfer Agreement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the AGPL project owns the copyrights on the contribution and the author has just as many rights as anyone else who obtained a copy&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: This is not entirely true, depending on the view on moral rights in the author's jurisdiction, but that does not make a difference when it comes to re-using the code in a different project.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T13:04:05.170" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T13:04:05.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10163" CreationDate="2020-07-20T17:43:54.520" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is looking to build a marketplace for peer to peer services. You could think Thumbtack type setup. We have identified two to three open-source platforms we could use as a base, but each have features the others don't have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How difficult would it be to combine different elements from different platforms into one? Would this save time and make development easier, or would it be easier to build the other features from scratch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed under different open-source licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18970" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T11:16:26.093" Title="How difficult is it for a developer to combine features from two separate open source solutions?" Tags="|licensing|software-development|combined-work|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10154" CreationDate="2020-07-20T19:33:30.710" Score="7" ViewCount="1747" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I fork a library that uses the GPL3 license and &lt;em&gt;heavily&lt;/em&gt; modify it, can I then release the new library with an ApacheV2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually already did this 2 years ago without putting much thought into it. Now however I'm not so sure I was allowed to do this or what I need to do to comply with the license rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also contacted the original project's developer for express permission, would that cover any legal issues for my users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18973" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T20:37:16.587" Title="Can I fork and modify gpl3 licensed code and release it with Apache v2 license?" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10153" CreationDate="2020-07-20T20:21:16.157" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I fork a library that uses the GPL3 license and heavily modify it, can I then release the new library with an ApacheV2 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you may not.  Your library is still, by your own admission, a derivative of the original GPLv3 code.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c says that if you convey a derivative work, you must do so under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also contacted the original project's developer for express permission, would that cover any legal issues for my users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to obtain the permission of &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the rightsholders in the work you modified (which may well be more than just the original developer, if the project accepted contributions, or if it was in turn built on another GPL work), then yes, you could relicense as you have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now however I'm not so sure I was allowed to do this or what I need to do to comply with the license rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suspicions are justified.  Right now, from what you've written, you're committing copyright infringement, and have been doing so for two years.  At the very least, you should &lt;strong&gt;immediately&lt;/strong&gt; stop distributing your code.  In my opinion, you should promptly contact everyone who you believe may have taken a copy of your code, and tell them that they have no right to use it.  If you have a project website, take it down, and replace it with a clear statement of the problem.  And if I were you, I'd also be looking at talking to a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T20:21:16.157" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8660" CreationDate="2020-07-20T20:27:42.643" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This won't work in the United States. In the United States, if you own a lawfully-made copy of a work and haven't agreed to any particular restrictions on it, you are permitted by law to do anything that isn't reserved to the copyright holder. What is reserved to the copyright holder is specified by 17 USC 106, and ordinary use of the work is not on that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you buy a book, or find a book, or otherwise come to lawfully possess a book, you can read that book. It doesn't matter if the book has a license page that says you agree to only read the book on Sundays, because you don't have to agree to a license unless you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or worse, imagine if somebody drops copies of their poem from an airplane and on the back of each poem is printed a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; that claims you agree to certain restrictions on what you can do with the poem if you read it. That's not enforceable because nobody needs to agree to the license to read the poem. They can read the poem because they own the paper it's on. Ordinary use is not a right restricted by copyright and nobody can make you agree to something to let you do something that you already have the right to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By right of possession, you may do anything the law doesn't restrict to the copyright holder, and that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ordinary use in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need a license to read a book you own. You don't need a license to use a piece of software you own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T20:27:42.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10153" CreationDate="2020-07-20T20:31:12.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. But maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL applies to all derivative works as a whole. When you modify some code, that is a derivative work and has to be GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you can clearly identify parts that are not derivative but entirely your creation, then you can license those parts under any other license as well, including Apache-2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in theory possible that your modifications have amounted to completely rewriting the code base from scratch, and that no traces of the original GPL-covered version can be found. Only then could you license the entire project under Apache-2, but that is very unlikely in practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unlikely that you will receive permission to use the original code under Apache-2. Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;update your project's license to GPLv3, which was the real license of the project all along&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;communicate to stakeholders/downstream users that previous versions used Apache-2 erroneously&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;potentially, indicate an alternative they can migrate to, in case they can't use GPL-covered software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;audit your dependency tree to see if there are license incompatibilities&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;optional: identify components that are not derivative works, and indicate that they are dual GPLv3/Apache-2 licensed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also consider GPLv3 section 8, which deals with license termination and reinstatement. You have violated the GPLv3 and are therefore in a temporary state of copyright infringement. If you fix this, your license will be automatically reinstated. However, the copyright holder (i.e. any upstream contributor) can permanently terminate your license within 60 days afterwards if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T20:37:16.587" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T20:37:16.587" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10141" CreationDate="2020-07-21T02:29:58.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in some sense this is really a question for Law SE, the common-sense version of it is a matter of whether there are original ideas in the deletion and whether the changeset is expressible (not necessarily as a patch, just in some comprehensible form) in a form that's insufficiently original/creative to be subject to copyright. As the extreme cases, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case 1, pretty clearly no copyright: &amp;quot;Remove &lt;code&gt;froblicate&lt;/code&gt; function and all calls to it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case 2, pretty clearly copyright: Imagine a giant useless program consisting of an lexicographic-ordered list of all possible statements of length at most 80 characters in a language, where the &amp;quot;modification&amp;quot; of the &amp;quot;program&amp;quot; is a list of lines to remove to make it into a useful program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can imagine an entire spectrum between these. Unless it's incredibly obvious, where a particular case falls is really a matter for a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T02:29:58.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-21T05:21:09.297" Score="6" ViewCount="1816" Body="&lt;p&gt;the question has been asked many times, but as far as I can tell, answers always depend on the concrete situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to release an open-source project written in C# on GitLab soon, and I am afraid of unintentionally breaking 3rd party dependency licensing requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project uses the following NuGet packages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MaterialDesignThemes &amp;amp; MaterialDesignColors by James Willock licensed under MIT&#xA;PDFsharp-MigraDoc by empira Software GmbH licensed under MIT&#xA;DocumentFormat.OpenXml by Microsoft licensed under MIT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not modified any code of the aforementioned NuGet packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct to assume that I need to include an MIT-license file for each package, or can I simply include one, as all are unmodified copies of the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, next to my own &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, I would include a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file containing the information about the packages from the formatted paragraph above.&#xA;As I will also include binary releases every now and again I would also need to include my own &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, all MIT-licenses as well as the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be the correct way to comply with the MIT license? Am I missing something? I would love to hear your feedback on my poor deduction skills, I just want to be extra careful not to improperly comply to any of the above licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18977" LastEditorUserId="18977" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T08:35:24.270" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T13:49:55.027" Title="How to credit MIT NuGet dependencies in specific C# project?" Tags="|licensing|gitlab|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-21T07:41:36.720" Score="4" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my company we're evaluating a licensing matter before proceeding further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We sell a SaaS service running on CentOS Linux Boxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard CentOS distribution comes with a binary software licensed under AGPL 3.  We'd like to use this &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt; binary software in our SaaS PHP application in order to manipulate some data by issuing some well-formatted shell execute statements.  Then the output of this manipulation is then sent to the SaaS service users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this trigger some AGPL clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand it, if we use (in the way described above, without redistribution and without using source code but only binaries) unmodified binaries we should not violate AGPLv3, should we?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18979" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T07:55:13.723" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T07:55:13.723" Title="AGPL License Usage" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10159" CreationDate="2020-07-21T07:54:17.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are two issues here: what are your AGPL obligations with respect to this binary, and do those obligations extend past that software package?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your AGPL obligations with respect to the binary are clear, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s13:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not modifying the covered work, so I don't see that this clause is operative in your case.  If you were to distribute the unmodified binary, you'd still have the normal GPL source-provision obligations; but you're not doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the AGPL obligations extending to cover your software, the FSF is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty clear&lt;/a&gt; that using an AGPL binary &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;by issuing some well-formatted shell execute statements&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; doesn't make your work a derivative of the AGPL code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you're not passing complex structure (including but not limited to  pointers to regions of shared memory, or files embodying complex structure) it seems to me that you should be fine.  Nevertheless, IANAL/IANYL, so you may wish to get professional legal advice before betting a company on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T07:54:17.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10152" CreationDate="2020-07-21T09:52:49.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;License wise, you can combine code from multiple platforms into one if the licenses are compatible with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two licenses are compatible if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither license contains a restriction on what license must apply to other code in the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The restrictions/requirements that a license imposes on the rest of the codebase is not forbidden by the license governing that part of the codebase&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't know the licenses on the platforms you mention, I can't tell if those licenses would be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the technical feasibility of porting features from one platform into another platform, that depends entirely on the architectures of the involved platforms and the skill of the developers involved in the process. That can't be answered by a random poster on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T11:16:26.093" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T11:16:26.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10165" CreationDate="2020-07-21T10:32:50.927" Score="5" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to build an Android ROM for myself and the ROM i picked has an &amp;quot;official maintainer&amp;quot;. On the website it states that if a device has an &amp;quot;official maintainer&amp;quot;, it is forbidden to share an &amp;quot;unofficial build&amp;quot;. If someone builds and shares it, they will send a dmca request. is that possible with open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18982" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-22T12:10:02.300" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T12:10:02.300" Title="Is it possible to have open source software such that binaries can only be distributed by the official builder?" Tags="|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10164" CreationDate="2020-07-21T10:41:33.993" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not according to the definition of &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt; we use here, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the OSI's&lt;/a&gt;.  That requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I can't modify the program to make my own &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;unofficial build&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and then share it, we don't consider the software to be open source.  That said, the term &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; isn't a restricted one, so anyone can distribute their software under any old hideous proprietary licence and yet claim it's &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.   They can even start DMCA takedowns for violation of their proprietary licence, and still claim with a straight face that their software is open source.  To my mind, they're wrong, and their claim is a lie, but they're not forbidden from making it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the idea that you can restrict the use of a trademarked name is much more normal, and acceptable within the free software community.  So a site that said, eg, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;we distribute the official build of FooBarOS&lt;sup&gt;TM&lt;/sup&gt; for the Google BazBar Developer Phone; if you distribute your own build for this phone, you must not call it FooBarOS&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-22T12:08:07.447" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T12:08:07.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10167" CreationDate="2020-07-21T17:58:45.737" Score="8" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have built a software tool that recognizes text from images of handwriting. I want to make the code public under a permissive license (like Apache 2.0), but with the stipulation that all transcriptions and images be shared to a (publicly accessible) datastore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to use these data to further improve the software tool for everyone.&#xA;Is there an open source license that includes such a stipulation (i.e. you must allow the tool to upload your inputs to a publicly accessible datastore) or does this necessitate an entirely new form of license? I understand GPL et al cover changes to code, but I don't see any mention of a data sharing policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18991" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T20:39:05.650" Title="Do any open source licenses cover outbound internet connections/data sharing?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10166" CreationDate="2020-07-21T18:58:22.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has many philosophical, social, and practical problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This could not be free or open software according to Debian's Free Software Guidelines since it fails the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;, i.e., it is necessary to communicate with some particular third party to use the software. Aside from being annoying for those who are able to comply, it is a huge practical problem for people who cannot comply due to political firewalls or regional unavailability of the necessary network infrastructure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your code may be used in contexts you never anticipated. Imagine someone used a piece of your code (e.g., pre-recognition image processing or something) to do something completely unrelated to handwriting recognition. Your requirement to send input to you would be onerous for them and could be quite bad for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; as well, since you may be innundated with inputs unrelated to handwriting samples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Generally, users of FLOSS software (and to a lesser extent, users of software in general, when I'm feeling optimisitic) expect submission of their own data to a vendor to be opt-in. A mandatory data-submission policy will not be popular. In addition to concerns about social norms, there may be legal issues as well: have you considered how such a submission policy complies with Europe's GDPR privacy requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your data store goes offline 50 years from now, can people still distribute your code? What if you change locations? What if you forget to renew your domain and someone else registers it? In other words, how will you specify the location where data must be sent in a way that is broad enough to be durable in the long term and specific enough to be legally meaningful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say a better plan is to implement such a feature (preferably in an opt-in way), and people who don't wish to use it (or for whom use would be impossible or mutually undesirable) may opt-out or remove the feature from their version of the code. Yes, this is much weaker than your desired requirement, but it avoids the myriad problems listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T20:39:05.650" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T20:39:05.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10158" CreationDate="2020-07-22T13:49:55.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you just publish your source code that references the MIT-covered libraries, you don't have to do anything: the MIT license only imposes requirements when you &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; covered code in whole or in part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you offer binaries of your software they would include the MIT-covered code. Then, including the notice files as you suggested is a very good approach. Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just include a separate copy of the MIT license for every dependency. The license is not overly long, and there are subtle variants between MIT licenses that would be tedious to check. Also, you must keep the copyright notice from each library's license intact. But in principle, deduplicating the license text is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file can be a very good approach, especially if you are using the Apache-2 license which requires downstream users of your software to respect the contents of this file. But in general, it would be more reasonable to include the licenses of any third party software that you include in your license file itself, though clearly separated. This makes it easier to keep track of all applicable licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your License and Notice files should be offered together with any binary downloads, e.g. in the same ZIP archive. If your software has some kind of user interface, it can also show the licenses or directions to the full license terms. E.g. the &lt;code&gt;--version&lt;/code&gt; output of some programs often contains copyright/license information. Desktop GUIs often have an entry in the help menu, web apps often a link in the footer, and apps often a screen in the settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your general approach to dealing with upstream licenses seems fairly robust, so you don't seem at risk of unintentionally breaking license conditions. Enjoy the open source ecosystem!f&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T13:49:55.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-23T11:16:36.457" Score="1" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand, the core modules of Qt are under LGPL and can be used in a closed source project.&#xA;But the Qt WASM module is under GPL. I'm not sure if it's linked into the project or only acts as a build system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I create a wasm project using Qt (and by extension, the Qt WASM module), will it fall under GPL or can it be closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if it falls under GPL, is it considered 'distribution' if hosted on a server and accessed by a browser?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16206" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T11:16:36.457" Title="Are projects created using Qt WASM required to be under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10177" CreationDate="2020-07-23T13:44:39.063" Score="3" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen several questions on this site regarding tivoization, and how the GPLv3 can prevent it. However, for my particular use case, the GPLv3 actually seems to be more permissive than the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because the GPLv3 anti-tivoization clause only applies to consumer products, but the company i'm working at doesn't make consumer products. We are currently developing several linux-based embedded devices, which will be incorporated into the machines we are selling to our customers (other companies). Preventing the installation of &amp;quot;unofficial&amp;quot; updates (i.e. updates not signed with our private key) is pretty important to us (and our customers), to make it harder for any random operator to accidentally (or intentionally) brick the machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the GPLv3 definitely isn't a problem for our use case, but i'm not so sure about the GPLv2, and here's why (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation &lt;strong&gt;and installation&lt;/strong&gt; of the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording is of course not nearly as clear as in the GPLv3, but the intent sure seems to be that we need to allow installation of modified software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when people say the GPLv2 doesn't prevent tivoization, is the situation actually that clear-cut?&#xA;Or is it more like &amp;quot;well, &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt;, if you follow the license text to the letter, and the installation isn't done by a script...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: i have seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4493/is-an-un-modifiable-linux-a-violation-of-gplv2/4494#4494&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but the answer unfortunately doesn't actually explain &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; the GPLv2 isn't violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19001" LastEditorUserId="19001" LastEditDate="2020-07-23T13:49:54.180" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T11:05:50.103" Title="Tivoization and the GPLv2" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-23T22:00:36.497" Score="7" ViewCount="820" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a really hard time understanding how can I use copyrighted programming documentation, tutorials, articles, blogs, etc. presented as text or video, without infringing copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will explain what I found in my research and what troubles me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that there are differences in each country legislation but in general the following principles apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every copyright-able material must have a physical form it must be recorded in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;work of authorship&lt;/a&gt; is by default &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, so nobody can use it without explicit permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyrighted materials can still be used without permission from author in certain conditions, for research, for criticism, for news reporting, etc. as long as this is used in small amount, non-commercial, and creates no conflict of interest. This is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFhF_tHrj4s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not all the copyrighted content is protected by the copyright law. For instance, I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright law expressly excludes copyright protection for “any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Eligible_works&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the copyright legislation is complex and cover a wider spectrum of intellectual property, but I am interested in this specific use case: &lt;strong&gt;programming documentation, etc&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am doing some computer programming and therefore I am often searching the internet for tutorials or documentation. Many such resources (the majority) are &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, some use &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;creative commons&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or other documentation specific licenses (ex:  &lt;em&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/em&gt;), and even less use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my understanding, there are 4 possible &lt;strong&gt;options&lt;/strong&gt; to use copyrighted materials:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fair use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use ideas and information provided, without reproducing the shape in which they are presented&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;provided license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (if applicable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ask for permission (for &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can not apply &lt;strong&gt;option 1&lt;/strong&gt; (from above), &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot;, because my software may be used commercially, and for other reasons, and usually is not intended for private use (I may distribute it as open source using FSF / OSI licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also I do not want to use &lt;strong&gt;option 3&lt;/strong&gt; because sometimes the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;provided license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; for the tutorials or documentation is not applicable to software programs (ex: &lt;em&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/em&gt;), or is not compatible with the license I choose for my software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also &lt;strong&gt;option 4&lt;/strong&gt; is not convenient because it feels awkward and not practical. By reading the article or blog post, it is clear that the document is intended to help others and share knowledge or information, but it still uses &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; for some reasons. Also, there are &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; books that are &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. In programming, you almost always have to use some snippets of code from the book (and adapt it to the particular software context). One can not use such book like a novel, but more like a cook book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that remains is &lt;strong&gt;option 2&lt;/strong&gt;. This looks quite applicable for programming documentation, because in most cases, this provides examples and explanations, intended to understand the mechanics of some frameworks, API s, etc, and basically provides &amp;quot;ideas and information&amp;quot;. This option looks convenient to me, but, I am not sure, because there is a large dose of subjectivity (I may be wrong in my judgement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let’s take the following specific examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of programming tutorials on YouTube. Most of them are using YouTube standard license which basically means &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. For example: am I allowed to use Excel function VLOOKUP() as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3BYVQ6xIE4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video tutorial&lt;/a&gt; in my own  spreadsheets ? If yes, why? What gives me the right ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of programming tutorials on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computer_programming&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikibooks&lt;/a&gt;. Most of them are using CC BY-SA 3.0. Using such documentation it is impossible not to copy and adapt snippets of code, because it is about programming languages fundamentals (it’s trivial code). Can I use this documentation without having to license my software project CC BY-SA 3.0 (the problem is Share Alike). Can I use &lt;strong&gt;option 2&lt;/strong&gt; from above ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are other sites for programming tutorials that are &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;, like for instance &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;C++ Language&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rubyguides.com/ruby-tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Definitive Ruby Tutorial For Complete Beginners&lt;/a&gt;. How is this documentation supposed to be used ? Can I use &lt;strong&gt;option 2&lt;/strong&gt; from above ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are also available free e-books but unfortunately they are &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;, like for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.syncfusion.com/ebooks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syncfusion Succinctly Series&lt;/a&gt;. Again, how are this books supposed to be used ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And last, but not least, there are tons of useful answers on &lt;em&gt;Stack Overflow&lt;/em&gt; for programming but unfortunately most of the content is licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Again, can I use &lt;strong&gt;option 2&lt;/strong&gt;, or should I license my software project CC BY-SA 3.0 (which &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code&quot;&gt;is not a good option for software projects&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many, many examples like this. There are tons of useful documentation out there, which apparently can not be used without risking copyright infringement. How others are using this documentation ? What is the normal practice ? How is this documentation supposed to be used ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me with this copyright problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8417" LastActivityDate="2024-01-20T18:05:36.130" Title="How can I use programming documentation without infringing copyright?" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-sa|software|documentation|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10173" CreationDate="2020-07-23T23:02:58.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One point that you are missing is that &amp;quot;trivial&amp;quot; things do not create a copyright of their own; nobody gets a copyright on &lt;code&gt;VLOOKUP()&lt;/code&gt; as a whole just by using it in a YouTube video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of your examples you're pretty much correct on - some of them you can use under CC-BY SA (which as you note is a problem for code) or you have to reimplement the functionality of the code from scratch, without referring to the code in the textbook or whatever. The Stack Overflow powers that be realised that this was a problem for Stack Overflow, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required&quot;&gt;tried to relicense code snippets under the MIT license&lt;/a&gt; but this proposal was abandoned after feedback from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-07-23T23:02:58.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10176" CreationDate="2020-07-24T02:38:13.173" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a public open source package that uses, as part of the library, a modified script from an already modified code originally under the GPL v3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to allow optional academic citations in my package.&#xA;E.g. in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ipeaGIT/geobr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;readme of geobr&lt;/a&gt; the citation suggestion reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pereira, R.H.M.; Gonçalves, C.N.; et. all (2019) geobr: Loads Shapefiles of Official Spatial Data Sets of Brazil. GitHub repository - &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ipeaGIT/geobr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ipeaGIT/geobr&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I suggest the citation to be?  Can I put only my name? Or should I put the previous authors, even without their consent?  I've cited the previous authors in the modified script's docstring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19010" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T05:40:39.627" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T05:40:39.627" Title="I modified an already modified script under GPL v3 and want to allow optional academic citations in my package" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10175" CreationDate="2020-07-24T05:37:42.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A section for &amp;quot;how to cite&amp;quot; is legally speaking a nice-to-have part often found in repositories used for academic research. It is not a requirement by the licenses which require that proper attribution is given or retained within the repository as to not mis-represent who contributed and what is the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion on how to cite generally should be treated with similar measure like author information for license considerations though. While you have the right to remove the suggestion and replace it exclusively by your own, doing so might not be the wisest choice - but depends on how much you modified the content of the repository and the code's functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The likely best approach is to amend the quote suggestion such that you either add an additional line which refers to your repository or to modify the existing in a way that both you and the original authors get credit (but possibly only linking to your repo).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A suggestion following the suggested quotation from the link you provided could be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Name, Your (2020); Pereira, R.H.M.; Gonçalves, C.N.; et. al (2019)&#xA;geobr: Loads Shapefiles of Official Spatial Data Sets of Brazil.&#xA;GitHub repository - &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/YourRepositoryLink&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://example.com/YourRepositoryLink&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T05:37:42.477" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10172" CreationDate="2020-07-24T08:54:45.033" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The anti-tivoization change made to the GPLv3 is to explicitly call out that signing keys are part of the installation information that you must provide as part of the Corresponding Source, and that using a modified version by itself must not be a cause for a degraded (or non-)functioning of the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is debatable if the signing keys are also required to be distributed under the GPLv2, but imagine the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I build a device that contains a signed Linux image (under the GPLv2) and a firmware blob (under a closed source license). I design things such that the Linux image and the firmware blob are not derived works of each other, so I don't have licensing issues with the GPL &amp;lt;-&amp;gt; closed source combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two signing keys for the Linux image. If the image is signed with key1, the firmware provides the full functionality, but if it is signed with key2 the firmware provides limited functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people ask for the source code, I only ever provide them with key2.&#xA;When people now rebuild the Linux image and load it onto the device, they get a device with degraded functionality, even if they built the sources without making any changes to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this scheme, I have fulfilled my obligations under the GPLv2 to the letter (and I might have gone slightly further by providing the signing key). People &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; install their own executables. They just don't get as much functionality from the closed-source firmware blob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T11:05:50.103" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T11:05:50.103" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-24T10:09:26.477" Score="4" ViewCount="2164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses e.g. GPL, MIT etc always has a clause about how they should be treated when &amp;quot;Distributing&amp;quot; the code that they are used in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use an open source library in one of my web applications, and &amp;quot;deploy&amp;quot; my application to web server (on internal network or on a public cloud e.g. azure, aws) and then the end users uses my web application using their browsers over the internet or intranet (weather they pay for this service to me or not), am I &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; ? do I now have to be complaint with the &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example if the &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; clause says I need to include the license if I am distributing the application. So now that I have hosted my application on the public internet, do I have to host all the open source package licenses (obtained from npm, nuget etc) along with my hosted application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding with &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; was that &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; mean when I am distributing the binaries of my software. And this distribution does not mean distributing as in copying to my own hosting environment for deployment. I see distribution would mean me selling my application binaries. That would be when I sell (sell or for free) my application's source code to some one else, at that time I need to include the open source licenses along with the my application source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19013" OwnerDisplayName="M. Ali Iftikhar" LastEditorUserId="19013" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T10:35:41.907" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T13:44:23.223" Title="In open source licenses what does &quot;Distribution&quot; means in terms of hosted web applications?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10178" CreationDate="2020-07-24T13:44:23.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding about distribution being conveying the source or binaries to others is accurate in general. Licenses like the Affero GPL were created to close this &amp;quot;loophole.&amp;quot; However, it's considered good etiquette to make an acknowledgement of the software you include, and to upstream or otherwise publish the changes you make to open source software, even if you are not legally required to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="722" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T13:44:23.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-25T05:26:58.487" Score="0" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to coding and I've found a lot of useful information regarding this question by reading online, but for whatever reason I simply can't find a simple answer to this. It's about using other people's software in your code; in particular, GPL licensed code. I realize that this is probably a common question and that it has been answered somewhere but I have been looking for this for weeks which tells me that I'm not the only one who can't seem to find this. Thank you for your patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is if you use GPL licensed code in your app, like GIMP's source code (let's say I took the code from GIMP for their vector pen tool) would that cause my entire app to forcibly become GPL as well, as in I would have to make them share forward? If so, would the art and sound assets be exempt because they are not code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also like to know how much of a GPL program I can copy into my app and still sell my app as my own (provided of course that I keep the GNU code share-forward). Could I for example take all of GIMP's art tools but then put my own user interface and teaching experience on top and sell it so long as I keep the GIMP portion of the code share-forward and easy to acquire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that any modifications made to GNU code must also be made GPL. Does that mean that if I use GIMP's pen tool in my app that my entire app could be considered an add-on to GPL code and therefore the entire app must now become GPL, even the games and non-art related content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or what if I program my own pen tool but it's really really similar to GIMP's but I didn't even look at GIMP's code. Does that make it GPL? Vector pen tools have been around for a long time and nearly every art software has them, so could I avoid the GPL license by virtue of it being common knowledge? What if it was a more advanced tool unique to GIMP that I happen to program similarly, like an advanced photo filter they made and I happen to come up with a similar idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software is planned to be commercial and I'm willing to make at least part of it GPL, I'm just wondering how much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, how much of my app becomes GPL if some GPL is used in it, and how different does my code have to be for it to not be GPL? And could I alter GPL code significantly and still make it proprietary, in other words, look at what they did but write my own code differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19017" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-07-25T07:27:46.257" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T07:48:08.690" Title="How much of my code becomes GPL if I use some GPL code and how different does my code have to be to not be GPL?" Tags="|commercial|copyleft|gnu|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10182" CreationDate="2020-07-25T09:44:45.373" Score="3" ViewCount="551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I use in my closed source a library A which is by the Author claimed as a non GPL license (e.g. MIT, LGPL or even a paid license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now somebody finds out, that one of the used library in A was licensed under GPL and so enforces the GPL on the library A. Does this automatically make my code GPL aswell? How can I prevent this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19019" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T12:22:19.500" Title="Could the GPL &quot;infect&quot; my Code if the libraries I used violated the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10181" CreationDate="2020-07-25T12:16:44.683" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the GPL doesn't apply automatically like that. But the result of using GPL-covered code that you thought wasn't GPL-covered is that you accidentally committed copyright infringement. There are various ways to stop this infringement, such as  (retroactively) offering your software under the GPL as well, or by stopping to use the GPL-covered software. But this doesn't change what has already happened. For the GPLv3, if you fix any infringment in a certain time frame after being notified of the problem, the license is automatically reinstated. This limits your risks for &lt;em&gt;accidental&lt;/em&gt; infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Depending on where you are&lt;/a&gt;, open source licenses like the GPL can be understood as contracts. A defining feature of contracts is the &lt;em&gt;meeting of minds&lt;/em&gt;: all parties to the contract agree on the same thing. And contracts have to be &lt;em&gt;accepted&lt;/em&gt; by all parties in order to have effect. This means you can't be tricked by imposing terms that you haven't accepted, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A: If you say “what” you owe me $100.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B: What??&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A: ok, pay up!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you can't be forced to open-source your code because you accidentally used GPL-covered code. But nothing except the GPL gives you the right to copy or modify the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different view is that licenses like the GPL are unilateral promises by the copyright holder not to sue you if you comply with the license terms. You haven't complied with the license so you can be sued successfully. But what would a court award for this infringment (or what would be negotiated in a settlement)? They don't automatically get a right to decide what you should do with your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best legal problem is that which never arises. It's therefore sensible to manage licensing risks, for example by auditing licensing status and contribution policies of the dependency graph of your software. If you buy commercial software you likely receive warranties that the seller holds the necessary rights to the software. If that isn't the case, you might be able to sue them for the resulting costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-07-25T12:22:19.500" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T12:22:19.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10184" CreationDate="2020-07-25T12:48:46.363" Score="3" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's suppose that developer D created some OS code and published it under some OS license, e.g. MIT.&#xA;A company C downloaded copy of the code, modified it a bit and incorporated in its own work.&#xA;Suddenly it appeared that the code had unnoticed bugs in non-modified section.&#xA;Does C has now legal case against D for inflicted damages, if any has place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14862" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T13:21:04.127" Title="OS license and responsibility for code modification" Tags="|mit|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10183" CreationDate="2020-07-25T13:21:04.127" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licenses contain similar wording, but even if they don't the general principle of &amp;quot;caveat emptor&amp;quot; applies. At least in UK law, the only way C could possibly make a successful claim against D would be if the &amp;quot;bugs&amp;quot; were actually deliberately and maliciously introduced, although that would rapidly be moving from a civil case to a criminal one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T13:21:04.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10180" CreationDate="2020-07-25T18:47:26.330" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law is centered around making a copy of something and then doing things with that copy. How such a copy is made is usually not specified in the copyright laws, which makes that a &amp;quot;mental copy&amp;quot;, where a work is read and then what was memorized is reproduced, can be regarded as a copy as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As copyright law works on actually making a copy and not just how similar two works are, if two people without knowing about each other write (nearly) identical &amp;quot;hello world&amp;quot; programs, each would own the copyrights on their own program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All copyright licenses, including the GPL, are based in copyright law. They give you additional permissions (under certain conditions) that copyright law restricts to the owner of the copyrights. The difference between the various open-source licenses lies in the conditions they impose in return for the permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions that the GPL license imposes are that if even a tiny part of the software is licensed under the GPL license, then the whole application must be distributed under the terms of the GPL license, which includes that the source code must be available and that recipients get the right to make changes and distribute those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To get to your specific questions, if you take some GPL licensed code from another project, for example GIMP, then &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; code in your application must have a GPL-compatible open-source license and the project as a whole (including the binaries) must be distributed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not forbid that you ask money for your software (except that you can't charge additionally for providing the source code, above what it costs you to ship the source code), but you can't forbid your customers from reselling copies at a lower price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, artwork and sound assets are independent works under copyright law, so they are licensed independently from the software. This means that if you copied GPL-licensed artwork from someone else, then the artwork has to remain under the GPL license, but you can use it and bundle it together with a non-GPL application, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, how much of my app becomes GPL if some GPL is used in it, and how different does my code have to be for it to not be GPL? And could I alter GPL code significantly and still make it proprietary, in other words, look at what they did but write my own code differently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you used &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; GPL-licensed code from someone else, then &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of your app effectively becomes GPL. For your code to be not-GPL, you must not have copied &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; GPL-licensed code, not even by looking at it and then reproducing it. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; look at the behaviour of a GPL-license application and then write your own code to replicate that behaviour, as long as you never access the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T07:48:08.690" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T07:48:08.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10191" CreationDate="2020-07-26T09:55:10.033" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;This came to my mind recently as I was thinking of releasing some code I wrote under a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Xcode IDE automatically inserts the following at the top of new files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//&#xA;//  [filename]&#xA;//  [project name]&#xA;//&#xA;//  Created by [name] on [date].&#xA;//  Copyright © [year] [name]. All rights reserved.&#xA;//&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the corresponding fields filled in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this conflict with (for example) the GNU GPLv3? And what difference would it make if I were to remove this header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This may very well be a duplicate. This seems like a common question, but I couldn't find anything on this site for it.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19031" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T11:46:49.883" Title="How does copyright interact with licenses?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-26T10:45:09.987" Score="3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bookdown.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bookdown&lt;/a&gt; is a commonly used package for authoring reports, books etc. in the R language (but can just be used for writing anything, if you know Markdown, and you want a way to produce HTML, PDF, ePub etc. outputs automatically).  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;code itself&lt;/a&gt; it released under GPL3 (although not in a very &amp;quot;formal&amp;quot; way...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Included in the package are some templates for producing HTML &amp;quot;books&amp;quot;: some HTML templates, CSS &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; and Javascript code.  Here is an example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tidytextmining.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welcome to Text Mining with R&lt;/a&gt; though you can find 1000s of these on the web (and so I don't wish to get too hung up on this example: I could ask instead if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; can release a website version of a book, authored with Bookdown, and using this template, as CC-BY, for example?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That example is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed, under the GPL3 terms?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Creative Commons website&lt;/a&gt; suggests not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying issue is that the &amp;quot;book&amp;quot; uses the CSS, JS and HTML code from the template (the &amp;quot;GitBook&amp;quot; template) in the BookDown package.  I am new to all this, but from some Googling, this seems slightly a contentious area.  There is no question about the &lt;em&gt;PDF version&lt;/em&gt; of the book (actually, you can find arguments either way; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2735/gpl-licensed-latex-template-implications-for-resulting-work&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is an argument that the PDF is also covered by GPL3).  But the website version seems to use &amp;quot;code&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6132/19025&quot;&gt;Using GPL component in a website&lt;/a&gt; suggests that using &lt;em&gt;client side&lt;/em&gt; javascript code does trigger the GPL.  So a corollary you cannot re-license the &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; of the website with something more permissive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4360/19025&quot;&gt;implications of licensing a JavaScript library&lt;/a&gt; suggest the same, I think, as does a link from that question: &lt;a href=&quot;http://greendrake.info/#nfy0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Implications of using GPL-licensed client-side JavaScript&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A broader question here is: how do you separate the &lt;em&gt;code&lt;/em&gt; from the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of a website?  One could guess that in the example above, the intent was to license the &lt;em&gt;content of the book&lt;/em&gt; as CC-BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask the same question, but now suppose I am using a website template which is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BjoernSchotte/gitbook-template/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;randomly chosen example&lt;/a&gt; -- sorry, this example is bad, as I'm not sure it has any real content; but in principle I hope you see the idea).  Can I license my website content (but not the CSS, js etc. code) as CC-BY, for example?  Or is the whole website a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19025" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T10:45:09.987" Title="GPL3 &quot;code&quot; in css and html templates: Implications for books hosted on the web" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10189" CreationDate="2020-07-26T11:46:49.883" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing to remember here is that licenses, open source or otherwise, are effective &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; because of copyright. Without copyright protecting your code, anyone could just take it and do whatever they like with it. Copyright law (fairly universally across jurisdictions as it's part of the Berne Convention) sets the default position is &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;, so nobody can do anything with your code except the very limited number of things allowed by fair use/fair dealing exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the copyright holder, you are free to release your code under any license you wish. By choosing the GNU GPL, you are allowing people to do more with your code than is allowed by the default &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; so long as they comply with the conditions of the license - but the thing to always remember here is that you are the copyright holder and can do whatever you like with the code so there cannot be a &amp;quot;conflict&amp;quot; between the GPL and your copyright: you personally are always free to completely ignore the GPL for any code you own the copyright on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; intend to release a piece of software under the GPL, having a line in it saying &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; is at best going to be very confusing for anyone wanting to re-use the code. By granting people extra rights under the GPL, you have specifically unreserved some rights. I personally wouldn't touch a piece of code which was claimed to be released under the GPL but also contained that line because of the legal uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, the GPL gives us clear guidance on how best to indicate a program is released under the GPL - see the &amp;quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&amp;quot; at the end of the license, although note these are not part of the terms and conditions so do not have to be followed to the letter. You should replace the &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; line in any source file with the example text listed there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T11:46:49.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10199" CreationDate="2020-07-26T14:52:03.883" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to create an AGPL licensed web app that should help you with organizing your life. I want to create it in Clojure but there are a few roadblocks that I want to avoid with additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clojure and many community libraries are licensed under the EPL 1.0&#xA;which is strictly incompatible with the AGPL. In order to avoid any&#xA;potential issues with accidentally including an incompatible library,&#xA;I would like to strictly allow any code under any EPL version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that by adding additional permissions I would make the code&#xA;incompatible with the MPL's sub-licensing mechanism. That's why I&#xA;want to add an exception for this as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Appstore. I mainly intended to create a Progressive Web App but the&#xA;iOS appstore might be a valuable distribution channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the above requirements in mind, is this formulation acceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional permission under GNU AGPL version 3 section 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify this Program or any covered work, by linking or combining it with any library (or a modified version of a library), containing parts covered by the terms of any version of the Eclipse Public License or Mozilla Public License, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As additional permission, you are allowed to distribute the software through a distribution channel, even if that distribution channel has restrictive terms and conditions that are incompatible with the AGPL, provided that the source is also available under the AGPL with or without additional permissions through a channel without those restrictive terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19036" LastEditorUserId="19036" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T15:53:22.880" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:42:04.777" Title="Are these additional permission properly worded?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-26T16:02:49.610" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a proper license (I have already checked MIT, LGPL, CC licenses),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which fits the following needs (conditions), or it has to be specify some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BY (from CC): Attribution needed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SA (from CC): Share-alike, the code can be continued, shared with the same conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Share the source-code, e.g. on GitHub&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial usage of the code is supervised, or granted by the code author. So if anybody would like to use the code for commercial, they have to contact the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this last one possible by any license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not advise the coder to pick NC (from CC), which means 'no commercia'l usage, since it would kill any future commercial purposes, for him as well. The ND: no derivatives, can be also interesting option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19037" LastEditorUserId="19037" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T14:10:05.217" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T14:10:05.217" Title="Choose or write a proper license" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|commercial|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-07-26T19:34:29.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10195" CreationDate="2020-07-27T04:58:43.543" Score="7" ViewCount="1964" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to create YouTube videos where the idea is to explain current affairs using the following approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use of animations, text content and images as the visual part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The voiceover which narrates my own analysis on a topic of current affairs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now sometimes this would mean the need to use images of certain individuals and entities during a portion of video. However the image is not the core subject or topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this process, if an image is licensed under Share Alike then does it mean the video also need to be licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is certainly not about attribution as I will give it at the end of the video with a separate credits screen. Also will be providing links to licenses in the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main doubt for me is whether the use of a CC BY SA image in YouTube video will be considered a remix, transformation or attempt to build upon the material, when I believe the main essence of video will be my own summary and narration on a topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have tried to find answers to the question online but my understanding so far is inconclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be really helpful if someone can help by providing more clarity or share some pointers on the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19042" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T07:53:23.997" Title="Can a YouTube video use images licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike (CC BY SA) and not be an adaptation?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10194" CreationDate="2020-07-27T05:57:15.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want to reuse a CC BY-SA image in a video presentation.  You don't say which version of CC BY-SA is applicable.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;v3&lt;/a&gt; includes language that is explicit about your use case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work [...] and includes cinematographic adaptations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing there limits the consideration of &lt;em&gt;cinematographic adaptations&lt;/em&gt; to originally-cinematographic material, so it seems a simple conclusion that the licensor intended your use to fall under Share-Alike.  Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;v4&lt;/a&gt; of the same licence lacks that specific piece of language, I don't regard the licence as being in any way weaker with respect to controlled uses of the material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consider the question of whether the use of an image in a video renders the entire video a copyright derivative of the image to be much less settled, but it seems also to me to be fairly unimportant: you have no rights to use this image &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; save by the terms of the licence, and if the licence requires you to release any work that reuses the image in a video under the same terms (as v3 definitely does, and v4 arguably does) then if you will not do that you must not use the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reject the argument that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the image is not the core subject or topic ... I believe the main essence of video will be my own summary and narration on a topic&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Nothing I see in copyright law suggests to me that incidental reuse of controlled material is treated differently from any other form of reuse.  The counter to your position would be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;if the image is so incidental to your video, then it should be easy find another one to do the same job&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-07-27T07:53:23.997" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T07:53:23.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10197" CreationDate="2020-07-27T13:19:49.170" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the Opensource projects which use libraries which have a permissive license, doesn't include copyright and license information. For eg: Requests project (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/psf/requests&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/psf/requests&lt;/a&gt;) uses Pytest (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest&lt;/a&gt;) (which uses MIT license) but still, Requests project doesn't include its copyright and license information of Pytest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me with the above query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4932" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T13:46:04.113" Title="Why Opensource projects don't include notice and copyright information of dependent libraries having permissive license?" Tags="|mit|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10196" CreationDate="2020-07-27T13:46:04.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to have a copy of the MIT license and &lt;code&gt;pytest&lt;/code&gt; copyrights only applies to those sites/repositories that actually host a copy of &lt;code&gt;pytest&lt;/code&gt; itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What many open-source projects do is that they don't contain the code for their dependencies, but only a configuration file that instructs a package manager to retrieve the relevant dependencies from the official location where those dependencies are hosted. The location where &lt;code&gt;pip&lt;/code&gt; retrieves &lt;code&gt;pytest&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required to have the copyright and licensing information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a &lt;code&gt;Pipfile&lt;/code&gt; mentioning &lt;code&gt;pytest&lt;/code&gt; is a far cry from having an actual copy of &lt;code&gt;pytest&lt;/code&gt; in your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T13:46:04.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9366" CreationDate="2020-07-27T14:03:13.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the OpenMoji project is under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, you have the right to adapt the emojis by changing their color under these conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your adapted emojis must be under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license or a later version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must give attribution to the OpenMoji project with an indication that you modified the emojis. As indicated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hfg-gmuend/openmoji#attribution-requirements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their documentation&lt;/a&gt;, this attribution should include a link to the OpenMoji project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; required to provide a download link for your modified emojis. For license compliance, it is enough that you don't forbid further modification if someone has scraped your modified emoji from your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T14:03:13.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10192" CreationDate="2020-07-27T14:26:31.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I don't see any glaring holes in those additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that has me very slightly worried is the sentence about the Corresponding Source at the end of the first permission (Now removed in an update of the question). I had to read the license text very carefully to convince myself that it doesn't contradict the additional permission and I could understand it if someone else comes to a different conclusion.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As both the EPL and the MPL themselves also require that the source code is made available, this sentence should not be needed, so you might consider removing it is more people express their doubts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T14:42:04.777" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:42:04.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10205" CreationDate="2020-07-28T02:31:22.557" Score="5" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an MIT-licensed library that supports user-provided backends.  I was asked to implement a backend that would require using a GPL-licensed library.  If I write such a backend, license it's files as GPL, and have no dependence from my MIT code on the GPL code (the user would have to load and enable the GPL-backed), would that be acceptable under the terms of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2085/can-plugins-for-non-gpl-open-source-software-use-gpl-libraries&quot;&gt;This questions&lt;/a&gt; indicates that it'd be allowed if I put them in separate repositories.  So, would it be a &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; if I put all of the files in the same repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it makes a difference, the user would have to specifically load the file, then set a global variable in the main library to an interface function from the GPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19046" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T09:20:52.870" Title="Including GPL plugin in repository of MIT code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|license-compatibility|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-28T03:30:20.273" Score="9" ViewCount="1364" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan on writing a personal blog, which will be mostly about software development topics. It's going to be implemented as a Github Pages blog on my own custom domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am debating whether I should licence my blog posts; I want my content to be used freely by all, but I just want something to protect my work as my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep gravitating towards &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC By 4.0&lt;/a&gt;. However, there is one part of the licence that is making me feel hesitant; it appears that any reference to my work will also require the person to also have a link to my licence available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that mean anyone linking to my blog post's public URL also be forced to link to my open source licence too? I have certainly never done so when linking to others' works, I would have never guessed before today that I may have been required to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I want to licence the source code in my project under something permissive like MIT. What's the best way to implement two different licences in my blog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last question: what if I just don't licence any of my work? I know that it falls into default copyrighting laws, but is there a possibility that I can no longer claim my work as my own in the future, such as a situation &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggested here&lt;/a&gt; where another person contributes to my work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19047" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T09:39:05.180" Title="Is it common to licence blog posts under Creative Commons?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-28T04:14:24.230" Score="0" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does MIT require people must to mention the project that they use code or binary files obtained under this license? Even users close source or modified it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how about only the binary file or folder with this project name in the program directory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT requere inlude the MIT licence, and how will if I used any other MIT licence project? Can I merge them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, which of the following actions does not meet MIT's minimum requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                           | No mention | mention only | licence only |&#xA;Use binary files           |            |              |              |&#xA;Use full code              |            |              |              |&#xA;Use modified full code     |            |              |              |&#xA;Use code fragment          |            |              |              |&#xA;Use modified code fragment |            |              |              |  [V][X]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19048" LastEditorUserId="19048" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T07:08:37.330" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T07:08:37.330" Title="If my program use a project with MIT, but I modified some code of it, than do I need to mention that I use this project?" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-07-28T07:41:30.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10201" CreationDate="2020-07-28T06:32:42.637" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Common licenses and thus especially CC-BY ones were designed as licenses for creative work like texts, like images, models etc. That includes of course work like texts in blog posts - and they are very suited to that, so go for that. I've no statistics, but as popularity of usage goes, wikipedia definitely is a good example, as is this site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to usage and reference to work: simply linking to a blog post usually does not count as use of copyrighted work (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlinking_and_framing#European_Union&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;but see this ruling concerning linking to copyright infringements by the ECJ, thx @MadHatter&lt;/a&gt;) - thus anyone linking to some resource usually needs not worry about the copyright of the resource. Generally, copyright for a piece of work applies and needs to be obtained when you &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; a substantial part of that work. Linking is not copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to fall under the requirements of obtaining a license of copyrighted work usually requires that you actually show the image, or quote or paraphrase a substantial part of a text on your own page or similar, thus anything which goes beyond fair use. In those situations one needs a license to use that work - that's what you allow by licensing to your texts under a creative commons license. The only requirement &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; put on such usage with a CC-BY license is that your name is mentioned as creator of that (original) text. It is good and established practise to actually link the source when dealing with electronic texts. Good examples for this are how &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gps-atmospheric-efects.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; links their user-contributed resources and how they give citation recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You always can claim your own work (details depend on jurisdiction) However, if there is no license on a joint piece of work, how do you know what your collaborators allow to be done with their work on it? No license means you may not modify, re-use etc a text - you have no license from them at all. For the case of joint work of several authors that quickly poses a problem: How would you make clear that you have permission from the other person to modify, show, re-use their part of a text? You never obtained the express permission from the other author to include their text in a combined work with your text - and thus put yourself in jeopardy of being sued by them for copyright infringement. Having a license like CC-BY on your joint work makes it clear under which conditions all parts can be used by anyone, including you and all collaborators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T09:51:17.287" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T09:51:17.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10200" CreationDate="2020-07-28T09:20:52.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging by your last paragraph, the backend plugins are loaded as libraries into the application that contains your library. The GPL license considers that the application and all involved libraries are a single work and that the GPL terms and conditions must apply to every part of that work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, if you distribute your library build with/configured for this GPL backend, then your library must also be distributed under the GPL license. However, a version of your library that is built with/configured for some other backend could still be distributed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can make it clear that the effective license of the library depends on which backend you use, then you can have everything in a single repository. If you can't make that clear or you don't want to bother, then you can use separate repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of your repository setup, you can offer a download for &amp;quot;library + GPL backend&amp;quot; under the GPL license and &amp;quot;library + MIT backend&amp;quot; under the MIT license, even when the library code is identical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do that, one thing to look out for is that third-party contributions to the library are licensed to you under the MIT license, even if the contributor started off with the version with the GPL backend. Make sure you get agreement on these license details before accepting a contribution. A Contributor License Agreement would be the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T09:20:52.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-28T12:54:13.730" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific example I have in mind is the code posted along with a descriptive article at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/04/191200.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lines with Arrows, Charles Petzold, April 18, 2007, New York, N.Y.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article it simply says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;© 2007, Charles Petzold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the code all files have a heading like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//------------------------------------------&#xA;// ArrowLine.cs (c) 2007 by Charles Petzold&#xA;//------------------------------------------&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't see or couldn't find any other statements about this on the website itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this code is not &amp;quot;licensed&amp;quot; in any explicit way (or is it?). But it does seems implicit that the author expects people to use it in some way (or why else even provide it?) - but maybe just by reading it.  But it is not clear whether any type of re-use either by modification or incorporation would (not) be allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19052" LastEditorUserId="19052" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T13:26:59.987" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T13:26:59.987" Title="If source code is only labelled &quot;copyright&quot; - what kinds of use, if any, are allowed?" Tags="|copyright|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-07-28T14:29:55.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2020-07-29T09:54:20.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with Philippe. However you should note, that newer OJDBC drivers (since 19.6) are under FUTC license according to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/jdbc-ucp-19-7-c-downloads.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/appdev/jdbc-ucp-19-7-c-downloads.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a non-clickthrough license. Therefore the artefacts are also available in public repositories (in contrast to the removed older versions). E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://search.maven.org/artifact/com.oracle.database.jdbc/ojdbc8/19.7.0.0/jar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://search.maven.org/artifact/com.oracle.database.jdbc/ojdbc8/19.7.0.0/jar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T09:54:20.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10140" CreationDate="2020-07-29T11:50:32.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCompatInstaller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I would like to bundle GPLed software with some sort of installation software. Does that installer need to have a GPL-compatible license? (#GPLCompatInstaller)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The installer and the files it installs are separate works. As a result, the terms of the GPL do not apply to the installation software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8868" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T11:50:32.570" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10140" CreationDate="2020-07-29T14:37:20.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute an installer script which installs X, P and Q on the user's computer when they run it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that you are treading on thin ice here and you should definitely consult a lawyer with experience in open-source licensing before betting a company on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your safest option is to distribute X without any plugins and let the user install them afterwards. It would be even better if the plugins are retrieved from different locations, as that can give you a defense that you don't know about the conflicting licenses and that you can't control it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, I see a possibility where you might be on the hook for &amp;quot;contributing to copyright infringement&amp;quot; because you knew about about X+P+Q not being legal to be distributed and not telling your customers who make that combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T14:37:20.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-29T14:37:29.140" Score="3" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use several LGPL third-party library JARs in our product, some of which contain classes with security concerns, which are identified by the OWASP scan during build. We do not require the classes identified by the scan, so would like to remove them from the jar files we distribute. If we do this, does it change anything under the terms of LGPL? LGPL talks about modifying the code, but we are not doing this, just removing classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19066" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T15:58:33.220" Title="Does removing some class files from a third-party jar file mean it becomes a derivative work?" Tags="|lgpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-08-03T11:20:51.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10211" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10215" CreationDate="2020-07-29T16:40:12.090" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;stackexchange helped me out in many ways and right now I'm stuck with the next problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a company, my company paid, to extend an opensource code because we had no time. The original code is licensed by EPL. The original License from the existing opensource code looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Eclipse Public License - v 1.0&#xA;... &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company that extended the code now wanted to hand over the code to us and added a new line to the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2020, CompanyName&#xA;All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Eclipse Public License - v 1.0&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed? I get a strange feeling about this, but I'm new to opensource and don't know if this is common practise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19067" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T07:52:43.547" Title="Company Copyright and Eclipse Public License at the same time?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10217" CreationDate="2020-07-29T18:47:27.607" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a library that uses the &lt;code&gt;GPL-2.0&lt;/code&gt; license. I know about the conflicts between GPL, closed source and commercial projects. I am considering to use a GPL licensed library in an executable (helper.exe) that is executed by my main application (main.exe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to keep my source closed of &lt;code&gt;main.exe&lt;/code&gt;, but &lt;code&gt;helper.exe&lt;/code&gt; I would make open source. Is it legally possible to ship my project with this combination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19068" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T16:45:53.100" Title="Can I use a GPL licensed library in my software if its only used in a helper process?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10216" CreationDate="2020-07-29T22:54:01.153" Score="0" ViewCount="1202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library that I want to use in my GPL3 main project and I wonder if I can license the library using the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18747" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T07:51:45.087" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T07:51:45.087" Title="Can i use MIT licensed library in my GPL3 project" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10211" CreationDate="2020-07-30T07:52:43.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is normal for each rightsholder to add a copyright line to freely-licensed code.  Who the rightsholder is in this case is a function of the contract between your company and the one that did the work.  If the contract specifies that you own the rights in the work, the line should say something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) YourCompany 2020&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, they own the rights, and it is appropriate that their name should appear.  The licence statement is similarly appropriate, because in the absence of any arrangement to the contrary they received the work under EPL, and are returning it to you, modified, under the same terms, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/EPL-1.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPLv1&lt;/a&gt; s3 requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have written elsewhere here about the habit of adding &lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;.  Personally, I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved/4403#4403&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;: it's an ancient &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cargo-cult&lt;/a&gt; practice, pointless in a Berne-Convention-copyright context, and actively harmful where freely-licensed content is involved.  Don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T07:52:43.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10214" CreationDate="2020-07-30T09:29:58.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can use an MIT-licensed library in an GPL-licensed application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is a permissive license that is compatible with the GPL license, so there is no problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the library is used in the context of the GPL application, the GPL terms and conditions also apply to the library, but when the library is used independently from the GPL code, the MIT license is in full effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T09:29:58.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10212" CreationDate="2020-07-30T16:45:53.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is likely perfectly fine. The GPLv2 calls this case “mere aggregation”: you can distribute a GPL-covered program alongside a proprietary program without issues, provided you comply with the GPL for the GPL-covered program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not always clear whether two executables form two separate programs, or whether they are so intertwined that they effectively form a single program. The GPL FAQ suggests that two programs are separate when they only communicate “at arms length”. Since your programs communicate via simple command line arguments and JSON documents, there's a very good chance that they are indeed separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think a good test is to consider the actual goals of the GPL: software freedom. Is an end user actually able to inspect and modify the GPL-covered program, and your proprietary system will be able to use modified versions? If so, very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant entries from the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. I have no permission to use that software except what the GPL gives me. Can I do this?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T16:45:53.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-31T09:34:46.507" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to create a website using &lt;strong&gt;React&lt;/strong&gt;, and I need to implement a &lt;strong&gt;word cloud&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jasondavies/d3-cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;D3 word cloud&lt;/a&gt; free? I have read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jasondavies/d3-cloud/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; file, and it says it is protected by copyright. I am not sure I fully understood all the terms, I am looking for more detailed information about how they will translate into practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you create a website and (eventually) make money with it using that tool for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20077" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T09:46:11.820" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T12:30:22.413" Title="Is it possible to use D3 word cloud on your (for profit) website for free?" Tags="|copyright|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10218" CreationDate="2020-07-31T12:30:22.413" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick comparison will show that the licence is the very common &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; (3BSD) licence.  The author of the software has modified the licence to incorporate his actual name, which is unnecessary, but the rights granted are those granted by 3BSD.  I mention this because much is written about 3BSD, some or all of which may now be of use to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, though, you will be fine taking this tool and using it to make word clouds on your website, even if you charge money for access to the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T12:30:22.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10221" CreationDate="2020-07-31T21:10:25.107" Score="5" ViewCount="1226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a web service that links to a C library which is licensed under GPL. If I host this service on my own server, then I think I don't have to license my web service under GPL. This is probably the major difference between GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what if I host it on Amazon AWS? When my service is hosted there, although I own my cloud instance, the instance is on a server owned by Amazon. This means that an Amazon server contains a full copy of my web service. Does that mean I 'distribute' my work to Amazon AWS? If so, does this mean any third party also have rights to get a copy of my source code (the first paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this FAQ item&lt;/a&gt; seems to suggest so)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20081" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T07:31:15.150" Title="In the GPL definition, if I host a service on public cloud, does it mean I 'distribute' my service to the cloud provider?" Tags="|gpl|cloud|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10220" CreationDate="2020-08-01T07:31:15.150" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect you may be overthinking this.  When I download a copy of a piece of GPL software onto my home computer, I have never heard it suggested that I am conveying a copy to my landlord simply because I happen to rent my house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's generally accepted that during the period of rental, whatever the real-world facilities of the thing that you are renting - the hardware of a colocated server, the memory and disc footprint of a KVM VPS or a containerised instance, disc space on a shared webserver - those facilities are under your control, and anything stored there would generally be regarded as yours during that time absent some very clear contractual language to the contrary.  If Amazon started trying to claim any property rights whatsoever in data being processed in AWS, I can only imagine the fuss that would result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you knowingly and deliberately left those resources to the renter at the end of the rental period - a USB stick in the house, or code all over a VPS which wasn't going to be zeroed out on termination - then I can see an argument might be made about conveyance.  But during the rental period?  No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T07:31:15.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-01T16:18:59.570" Score="2" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my project work testing, I want to use win32com APIs through python package (pywin32). Is there any license restriction for this? OR in other words what is the license clause if this python script is used to test a commercial development?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage of win32com APIs (of course running machine has valid Microsoft softwares)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usage of python package (pywin32). On &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/pywin32/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pypi.org/project/pywin32/&lt;/a&gt; it mention as &amp;quot;OSI Approved :: Python Software Foundation License&amp;quot; for pywin32. But I am not sure if this allows to use in creating scripts to test commercial product and if internally allows Microsoft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20085" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T16:18:59.570" Title="Licensing requirement for usage of win32com APIs through python package (pywin32)" Tags="|licensing|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10225" CreationDate="2020-08-02T13:09:45.960" Score="21" ViewCount="7491" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official GPL 2 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I have to use GPL for any project using a library under GPL (even if I don't directly use its sources), because my program links to the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I run an executable, I am using an operating system obviously. So do I have to use GPL for any project I am running on Linux? I think this does sound strange, but I can't explain to myself, what is wrong and why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20093" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-08-02T16:06:10.243" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T14:12:20.683" Title="Should I publish everything running on Linux under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10258" CreationDate="2020-08-02T14:12:12.510" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the official GPL2 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I have to use GPL for any project using a library under GPL (even if I don't directly use its sources), because my program links to the library. But what about non-compilable languages like Python? When I run my Python program, no linking happens and my code only contains the name of a library. Do I have to use GPL for my project then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;strong&gt;linking&lt;/strong&gt; the keyword of the statement or what is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20093" LastEditorUserId="20093" LastEditDate="2020-08-02T18:20:53.647" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T11:48:33.423" Title="GPL and non-compiled languages' libraries" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10223" CreationDate="2020-08-02T14:29:06.890" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to publish your Linux software under the GPL. You are of course welcome to do so, but you are under no legal obligation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've taken a mental shortcut: “using a GPL library means I have to license under GPL”. But the GPL (and copyright law in general) doesn't care about what other software you &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;, but only whether your software is a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL-covered software. For example, a software might be derivative if it is a modification of the original software, or if it includes the original software (in whole or in part). Using a library means &lt;em&gt;linking&lt;/em&gt; the library, and the act of linking includes parts of the library in your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you write a software that runs on Linux, you are not including or modifying any part of Linux. Your software is not a derivative work of Linux. Thus, the license of the Linux kernel doesn't affect the license of the software running on it. (In fact, there is lots of software running on Linux that's completely incompatible with the GPLv2, such as Apache-2 licensed software or proprietary software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For technical reasons the Linux kernel actually does inject the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSO&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vdso&lt;/a&gt; pseudo-library into every running process as part of Linux' implementation of syscalls. But this is widely considered to be no licensing problem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, GPL does not mean that you have to &lt;em&gt;publish&lt;/em&gt; your software. &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; your software is derivative of GPL-covered code &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; if you publish the software &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; the software as whole can only be licensed under the GPL. The GPL's requirements only trigger when you give a copy of your software to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T14:29:06.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10210" CreationDate="2020-08-02T15:58:33.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how you remove the class, this is a modification of the work under license, and can be done only in full compliance with the license of the libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this might seem absurd, let me illustrate with a more concrete but hypothetical example why it is so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are the director of a museum. The museum gets the copy of a wonderful statue as gift from a famous sculptor. It’s called “the well balanced justice”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You decide to expose it, of course with attribution. There’s only a single place left to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the security department says that one leg of the justice symbol now interrupts a laser beam vital to the security of the museum. You decide to remove the leg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now the statue is there, with the name of the artist and the title. But it no longer  looks balanced. Worse, the artist gets bashed bu the critics for her alleged lack of taste (due to the leg you removed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why copyright is concerned with any changes to copyrighted work: Copyright aim to protect the rights of the owner of the original work. Since LGPL is a license that is based on the principles of copyright laws, even if for free, it still covers changes performed whether on the binary or in the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; This is not legal advice. For legal advice consult a lawyer or a qualified legal advisor in your jurisdiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T15:58:33.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10223" CreationDate="2020-08-03T00:24:48.160" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#PortProgramToGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ, in the #PortProgramToGPL section&lt;/a&gt;, says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I port my program to GNU/Linux, does that mean I have to release it&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;as free software under the GPL or some other Free Software license?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;(#PortProgramToGPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the answer is no—this is not a legal&#xA;requirement. In specific, the answer depends on which libraries you&#xA;want to use and what their licenses are. Most system libraries either&#xA;use the GNU Lesser GPL, or use the GNU GPL plus an exception&#xA;permitting linking the library with anything. These libraries can be&#xA;used in nonfree programs; but in the case of the Lesser GPL, it does&#xA;have some requirements you must follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some libraries are released under the GNU GPL alone; you must use a&#xA;GPL-compatible license to use those libraries. But these are normally&#xA;the more specialized libraries, and you would not have had anything&#xA;much like them on another platform, so you probably won't find&#xA;yourself wanting to use these libraries for simple porting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, your software is not a contribution to our community if it&#xA;is not free, and people who value their freedom will refuse to use it.&#xA;Only people willing to give up their freedom will use your software,&#xA;which means that it will effectively function as an inducement for&#xA;people to lose their freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you hope some day to look back on your career and feel that it has&#xA;contributed to the growth of a good and free society, you need to make&#xA;your software free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The GPL 2 FAQ you link to has word-for-word the same text in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#PortProgramToGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;corresponding section&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="979" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T00:24:48.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10233" CreationDate="2020-08-03T02:29:13.170" Score="5" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on some materials for sale to history teachers.  I have found a map that has a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-SA 3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...licensed attached.  I am not adapting the map or altering it in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that since there is no &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; clause on the map, I'd be good to use this in a product for sale as long as I credit the author for the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20103" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T13:23:01.953" Title="Clarifying &quot;Share Alike&quot; in CC licenses" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10232" CreationDate="2020-08-03T03:33:29.627" Score="1" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand GPL, your software can be sold for any amount you wish, but you must make the source code available to everyone without charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have noticed a trend where certain software released under GPL has a &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; edition with limited features, and is fully open source.  But you can buy a &amp;quot;premium&amp;quot; version of that same software with all the features and the premium feature source is not included in the source distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This effectively allows marketing your product as free and open source but still keep the important features behind a closed source paywall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this allowed under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20104" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T05:13:52.033" Title="GPL Software with &quot;Premium&quot; Features" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10231" CreationDate="2020-08-03T05:13:52.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand GPL, your software can be sold for any amount you wish, but you must make the source code available to everyone without charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a correct read of the GPL. You may sell your software for any amount that you wish, but you must make source code available to anyone &lt;em&gt;to whom you give binaries&lt;/em&gt; for no &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; charge. That person then has the right to redistribute your source code (and binaries, provided they also include the source) to third parties, and so it is effectively impossible for you to prevent the source code from ending up publicly available, if your users want it to be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the case you describe, the company providing the software under the GPL is (probably) the sole copyright holder. The copyright holder, in general, is not bound by their own license.* They can do whatever they like with their software, including selectively licensing only the &amp;quot;core&amp;quot; of their software under the GPL. On the other hand, if the proprietary portions are derivative works of other GPL'd software, and the company does not own the copyright of that software, then the company might be infringing the copyright of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Think of it like this: A license is basically a (legally-binding) promise not to sue for copyright infringement, provided that certain rules are followed. Nobody is going to sue themselves for copyright infringement, so you don't need to give a license to yourself in the first place, much less follow the license that you give to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T05:13:52.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10230" CreationDate="2020-08-03T05:30:01.163" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your analysis would hold if the licence on the map was &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY&lt;/a&gt;.  For &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;, a little more is required.  The licence requires that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[list of notices for retention deleted];&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the map remains under CC BY-SA; that is to say, you must understand that if someone excerpts the map from your material and reuses it in a way that accords with CC BY-SA, they are within their rights to do so, and it will be pointless for you to sue them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some would argue that the entire work becomes a derivative of the map, and thus subject to the ShareAlike requirement, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8357/in-which-cases-must-i-relicense-my-product-under-the-cc-by-sa-license&quot;&gt;as we discuss elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; the little jurisprudence we have on the subject suggests this is not so, and you are merely aggregating the map with other material in your final work.  Nevertheless, this is a thorny area, and you would do well to take professional legal advice before betting a business on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T11:34:53.207" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T11:34:53.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10223" CreationDate="2020-08-03T06:42:03.843" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linux kernel has a couple of exceptions from GPLv2. Namely the exception to not treat a syscall to the kernel as linking and the exception to allow non-GPL code to link to kernel-related services exposed via libc:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syscall exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;.&#xA;Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software&#xA;Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux&#xA;kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/LICENSES/exceptions/GCC-exception-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the permissions in the GNU Library General Public License,&#xA;the Free Software Foundation gives you unlimited permission to link the&#xA;compiled version of this file into combinations with other programs, and to&#xA;distribute those programs without any restriction coming from the use of&#xA;this file. (The General Public License restrictions do apply in other&#xA;respects; for example, they cover modification of the file, and&#xA;distribution when not linked into another program.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these exceptions are not applied to the entire kernel but only to specific parts. Which parts of the kernel has what exception is documented by a tagging system as described by the kernel licensing rules document: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/process/license-rules.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/process/license-rules.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general it can be assumed that you can distribute any non-GPL userland software that run on linux. When distributing kernel modules (devices drivers) however you need to be a bit more careful which parts of the kernel you are interfacing with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastEditorUserId="1119" LastEditDate="2021-09-30T14:12:20.683" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T14:12:20.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10230" CreationDate="2020-08-03T13:23:01.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Share-alike&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;described&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you&#xA;must distribute your contributions under the same license as the&#xA;original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is definitely more than just give credit by mentioning the name. It means you have to give the same license (CC-BY-SA) to every of your customers for the material you derive from this map. That means you cannot stop anyone from distributing the CC-BY-SA licensed material and distribute it themselves under the same license for any fee they like - which might just as well be none at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extend you create an aggregation rather than a single derived work certainly might be up to debate and depends on details - MadHatter said what can be said about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case: IANAL/IANYL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T13:23:01.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10238" CreationDate="2020-08-04T03:25:37.937" Score="5" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an application I want to put my own license on. In order to get my application started, I wrestled with boilerplate code issues I was not able to find answers for online. When I tried launching a similar project licensed under the LGPL3.0 I was able to identify my issue as two mis-linked libraries. The unrestrictive documentation I had been using for my project was out of date and the aforementioned LGPL3.0 project had updated boilerplate linker flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL defines a modification as copying code. In the case of something like a linker flag I'm not sure there are alternative creative solutions that make sense. Can I cite the LGPL project in my work and keep closed the source of my own application? Or does this kind of issue fall under fair use? Or am I making a &amp;quot;modification&amp;quot; of the LGPL3.0 work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20114" LastEditorUserId="20114" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T11:48:39.343" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T13:52:24.150" Title="Does learning boilerplate code from a project with a restrictive license make my own work derivative?" Tags="|copyright|lgpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T10:54:10.403" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm newbie in Open Source. In the near future I plan to publish to GitHub my web framework based on ECMA(JScript)/XSLT based on IIS hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In plans to make the repository as public. So that I can share my codebase with everyone. So that everyone can copy/fork/modify the code and documentation. So that everyone can build their own fork (based on my), with subsequent sale based on their solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will clarify that I need a suitable license for any forks, changes, modifications and including in solutions, including commercial ones, but without a cash back to my as author - I don't need that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is important that the modified code will be posted as public (open source), &lt;strong&gt;preferably&lt;/strong&gt; with an indication of the original source on which it was based (the author of the idea or a resource with the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm completely confused about which license to choose for this (full open for everyone)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best fit for this: GPL(v2 or v3), BSD, APACHE(1.1 or 2.0) or MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18922" LastEditorUserId="18922" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T21:30:33.543" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T21:30:33.543" Title="What are the most suitable license for full open source framework?" Tags="|gpl|mit|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-08-04T22:54:11.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10236" CreationDate="2020-08-04T13:52:24.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Within copyright law, there is a distinction between idea and the expression of that idea. The idea itself is not subject to copyright protection, but only the expression is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an idea can only be expressed in one (or a very limited number) way, then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction#Merger_doctrine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merger doctrine&lt;/a&gt; states that the idea and the expression are one and the same and that the expression is not protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case of which linker flags to use to get the desired outcome, it seems to me that the number of ways in which the correct set of flags can be passed is limited enough that the Merger doctrine applies and the idea and expression are one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If something is not protected by copyright, then it is also not possible to use a copyright license to dictate under what conditions and how it can be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T13:52:24.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10239" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T16:07:01.213" Score="12" ViewCount="3926" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any stylistic conventions governing the choice of file extension to use for the license file in an open source project? I see &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; all being commonly used, and I know there's no functional difference between them (at least in terms of applying the license itself), but is there any reason to prefer one over the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20122" LastEditorUserId="20122" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T17:59:39.287" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T17:59:39.287" Title="Should I call my license file LICENSE, LICENSE.md, or LICENSE.txt?" Tags="|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-08-04T22:54:31.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10244" CreationDate="2020-08-04T21:51:01.297" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;My goals for the open-source license is credit for contributions like I get credit for the code I write and I would like if a person shows me a concept of how to do something and I implement it I want him to get credit for showing me how I could do something, but he never showed any code, so the code I wrote for it is mine, but the idea/concept was his.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like something where &amp;quot;I give you source code you give me your changes back.&amp;quot; (quote from Linus Torvalds &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?t=24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?t=24&lt;/a&gt; 24-45) I was thinking GNU General Public License v2.0 would satisfy these needs but would like more opinions on if this is the right choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code will be written in a game called Garry's mod using the steam workshop add-on called wire mod.  Within the add-on is an Expression 2 toll which is where the code is run and can be saved within the game to a txt file which later can be opened or copied from to rerun/run the code. I believe the add-on source code is available on GitHub under Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20127" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T06:02:12.513" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T00:49:49.067" Title="Choosing the right open source license" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10223" CreationDate="2020-08-04T23:47:30.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the official GPL 2 FAQ, I have to use GPL for any project using a library under GPL (even if I don't directly use its sources), because my program links to the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is correct. But you go on to ask a very different question, &amp;quot;...do I have to use GPL for any project I am running on Linux?&amp;quot; Running a program on the GPL'd Linux kernel is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; linking the program to a GPL'd library; other answers have explained how this works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if you port a program to Linux you will most likely be linking against libraries commonly distributed with Linux, and here you must be aware of the license for each library you decide to use. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU C Library&lt;/a&gt;, a popular libc implementation, is under the LGPL so there are no issues there. But some other commonly used libraries, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;readline&lt;/a&gt;, are under the GPL and linking to them (including dynamic linking) would require you to relicense your whole work under the GPL. (This is one of the primary reasons that there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline#Alternative_libraries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;serveral API-compatible alternatives to readline&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15544" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T23:47:30.613" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10240" CreationDate="2020-08-05T06:01:12.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the GPL will do most of what you ask, though see the two exceptions below.  The latest version is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, so unless you have a specific reason for wanting to use GPLv2, it may be better to stay current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You desire that someone who shows you an idea, let's call her Alice, should be entitled to a credit.  There are problems with embedding that requirement in a copyright licence.  Firstly, if the rest of the code is yours, the licence doesn't bind you, so even if you were to write such a licence it wouldn't force you to credit Alice.  Secondly, ideas aren't copyrightable, only the expression of them, which you have stipulated that Alice didn't provide.  However, it's your code base, so nothing stops you from giving Alice a copyright interest in it.  If Alice had given or shown you her ideas in code, and you had then used them in the same or a derivative form, that would give her a copyright interest in the resulting work as a matter of right, and you would need do nothing to further that as long as you and she live in Berne convention signatory countries (which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#List_of_countries_and_regions_that_are_not_signatories_to_the_Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nearly all of them&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you desire that anyone who makes changes should be required to give them back to you.  That is not what the GPL requires; it says that anyone distributing a modified version in binary form must also give the full source code, under GPL, to the recipient(s) of the binary.  It is assumed that from there, those contributions will make their way back to the community, and in practice it's generally so; but that's not exactly what you ask for.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7885/458&quot;&gt;We discuss elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; the idea of forcing modifications to be contributed back to the original author, and it is generally thought of as being a non-free requirement.  So you can do this, if you want, but your software will not be usable by substantial sections of the free-software community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T06:43:03.747" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T06:43:03.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10246" CreationDate="2020-08-05T10:15:36.560" Score="2" ViewCount="706" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, sorry if this is a silly question. I have little experience with regards to licencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an app (commercial) in which I need to convert MP4 to MJpeg .avi so that I can use grab the frames of the video in an efficient manner (on mobile). For this I use this library: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tanersener/mobile-ffmpeg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tanersener/mobile-ffmpeg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To execute this command: FFMPEG -i path1.mp4 -vcodec mjpeg path2.avi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is ALL I do with it. I do not modify the source code or anything like that. I also use the minimum version of the mobile-ffmpeg so that there are no extra external libraries (so com.arthenica:mobile-ffmpeg-min:4.4.LTS).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am totally unsure if this is allowed, since there is just SO much going on. So far, what I can gather is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to attribute FFmpeg in my about dialog and on my apps store entry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I need to atrribute the FFmpeg-mobile library linked above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if there is anything else that should be done, or if I'm even allowed to use this in a commercial app. (The app will be free to download, but you need to be a client of the company to use it - so it requires login details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20132" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T12:27:02.417" Title="Licence confusion FFmpeg &amp; MobileFFmpeg" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10245" CreationDate="2020-08-05T12:27:02.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MobileFFMpeg is licensed under the LGPLv3 license. When using a library under that license, the requirements you have to fulfill are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must inform users of your software that this library is being used and under what license it is. This would be covered by your attribution, if you also refer to the LGPL license there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must allow users of your software to replace the LGPL parts with a different version. This means you can't forbid all reverse engineering in your license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must give users of your software the means to replace the LGPL parts with a different version. Depending on how the library gets linked into the mobile app, this can mean that you have to make the object files (or even the source files) available to the users of your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you end up providing source code to satisfy this point, you can do so under a license that forbids everything except rebuilding the app out of it combined with the LGPL code of their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T12:27:02.417" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10249" CreationDate="2020-08-06T01:31:49.803" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was planning to use &lt;a href=&quot;http://html2canvas.hertzen.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;html2canvas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is really confusing to me, as it's never stated which parts are for Microsoft, which are not and if the whole code is licensed under MIT, as it also states: &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/dist/html2canvas.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a link to the file including the licenses.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the license text for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*!&#xA; * html2canvas 1.0.0-rc.5 &amp;lt;https://html2canvas.hertzen.com&amp;gt;&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2020 Niklas von Hertzen &amp;lt;https://hertzen.com&amp;gt;&#xA; * Released under MIT License&#xA; */&#xA;&#xA;/*! *****************************************************************************&#xA;    Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.&#xA;    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;); you may not use&#xA;    this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the&#xA;    License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;    THIS CODE IS PROVIDED ON AN *AS IS* BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY&#xA;    KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED&#xA;    WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF TITLE, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE,&#xA;    MERCHANTABLITY OR NON-INFRINGEMENT.&#xA;&#xA;    See the Apache Version 2.0 License for specific language governing permissions&#xA;    and limitations under the License.&#xA;    ***************************************************************************** */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to use this in a commercial project? (while preserving the exact same license text and not modifying the file, including it as is)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15819" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T07:46:23.873" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T08:03:16.620" Title="Confused by html2canvas library's license" Tags="|licensing|copyright|apache-2.0|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10247" CreationDate="2020-08-06T08:03:16.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like to me as if &lt;code&gt;html2canvas&lt;/code&gt; contains code from Microsoft's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TypeScript&lt;/a&gt; project.  I don't know if the inclusion was manual or via an automatic tool, but it makes &lt;code&gt;html2canvas&lt;/code&gt; a derivative of TypeScript, in copyright terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TypeScript is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under Apache2.  This requires that any derivative work include the Apache licence text (s4a) and the original copyright notices (s4c), but it does not require that the derivative actually be distributed under the terms of Apache2.  It is therefore lawful for html2canvas' author to have used the TypeScript code in this manner.  If you wish to reuse any of the code, you may do under the terms of the MIT licence.  If you would prefer to reuse just the TypeScript portion and to do so under Apache2, you can get it directly from Microsoft's github site under those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either of those licences will allow reuse in a commercial product (by which I presume you mean &lt;em&gt;proprietary&lt;/em&gt;; note that even GPL code can be &lt;em&gt;commercially&lt;/em&gt; distributed), subject to their notice-preservation and other applicable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have discussed the tendency to include the phrase &lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt; at some length.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved/4403#4403&quot;&gt;conclusion I favour&lt;/a&gt; is that it is a purely historical piece of cargo-cult labelling, and means nothing in the context of modern copyright.  It's actively unhelpful when used in the context of freely-licensed code, as your question shows, and I wish people would stop doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T08:03:16.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10251" CreationDate="2020-08-06T10:19:27.180" Score="2" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which kind of licence would be better for the open source community. An extremely permissive licence like the MIT or Apache Licences of a more copyleft licence like the GNU licences that limit commercial use. I initially thought the GNU licences are better for making more projects open source, but I later realized that if the commercial use were limited organizations and people who have commercial interests in mind would want to stay away from Open Source. So is there any kind of definitive answer on what to use for larger open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20138" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T19:46:49.190" Title="Impact of a license on the Open Source Community" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-08-07T07:36:02.980" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10250" CreationDate="2020-08-06T12:39:00.350" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question presumes there's &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; free software community, with &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; set of goals in mind.  In my experience, in any room containing ten free software enthusiasts, you can usually find at least eleven different motivations.  But I do think there is something objective that can be said about the permissive vs. copyleft free licence distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive free licences are better at &lt;strong&gt;making&lt;/strong&gt; your code free.  They're easier and simpler to apply, because modulo patent protections they're all the same licence.  You throw your code out there, everyone can use it, it's not difficult.  If your aim as a developer is to have as many people as possible use your code, these are the licences for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft free licences are better at &lt;strong&gt;keeping&lt;/strong&gt; your code free.  They're a bit finickier to use, you have to decide things like whether to go Affero or not, but your code will be free for as long as it lasts, howsoever it evolves.  If your aim as a developer is to have your code, and all its users, free for the foreseeable future, these are the licences for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that both those aims are legitimate.  Any given developer will know what's important to her (or him, or hir) and will pick a licence accordingly.  The Apache folk aren't wrong to use the Apache licence, they're just signalling what they value.  The FSF aren't wrong to keep on with the GPL, they too are just signalling what they value.  There is no right set of things to value; different people can legitimately place different weights on those two sets of values.  I'd advise anyone who thinks otherwise to spend more time worrying about what's important to them, and less about what other people value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And incidentally and in passing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL is no bar to commercial code use&lt;/a&gt;; I think you may be looking for the word &lt;em&gt;proprietary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T19:46:49.190" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T19:46:49.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10257" CreationDate="2020-08-07T03:55:18.640" Score="3" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying out different Linux distributions when I came across Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I then started wondering how Red Hat gets money from the product. The Linux kernel is GPL which means people who buy RHEL can get the source code and make it completely open source too. Then why do people buy RHEL? Is there some kind of loophole I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20138" LastEditorUserId="964" LastEditDate="2020-08-11T03:23:47.817" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T03:23:47.817" Title="Question on Red Hat's monetization model for RHEL" Tags="|licensing|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-07T04:58:30.990" Score="4" ViewCount="673" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; Is it legal to redistribute &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;JRE component&lt;/code&gt; of OpenJDK 8 with my app? If possible, tell me what OpenJDK vendor I can redistribute (RedHat, Azul,...) Installing JDK on user machine is NOT an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My application uses the Java Attach API, which needs &lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;JRE component&lt;/code&gt; of JDK (NOT the JRE&#xA;from java.net, and because bundling &lt;code&gt;attach.dll&lt;/code&gt; instead of the whole &lt;code&gt;JRE component&lt;/code&gt; won't work (it will print out error &lt;code&gt;Cannot find dependent libraries&lt;/code&gt;)). I want to include these components (&lt;code&gt;tools.jar&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;JRE Component&lt;/code&gt;) in my app directory (not compiled inside the app), so that one only needs to install Java (normal JRE, from java.net) to run my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I don't know if redistributing those without the whole OpenJDK package is legal. I did some search on the Internet, many sources said that one cannot redistribute OpenJDK without redistributing the whole bundle (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/22477688/7908886&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/a/22477688/7908886&lt;/a&gt;). While some said that one can redistribute it as long as he/she comply with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 2.0 with CLASSPATH EXCEPTION&lt;/a&gt; license of OpenJDK. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4583&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4583&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm really really confused here. If it is allowed to redistribute components of OpenJDK without the whole thing, please tell me how to do it step-by-step (and what OpenJDK vendor I can redistribute, such as: RedHat, Azul,...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P/S: I have thought of notifying the user to install JDK before running the app, but I think JDK is for developer and kinda heavy (my customers will complain and they are not really good at computer stuffs, actually none of them will use JDK for any other purposes), so installing JDK is NOT an answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20143" LastEditorUserId="20143" LastEditDate="2020-08-07T05:08:27.187" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T07:16:17.270" Title="Is it allowed to redistribute tools.jar and JRE component of OpenJDK 8?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-2|java|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10253" CreationDate="2020-08-07T07:16:17.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know why the author of the SO answer writes as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sie&lt;/a&gt; does.  Having stated that you can't redistribute only parts of OpenJDK, sie then summarises the GPL as saying that you may &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;modify the program’s source code and distribute the modified source&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, which explicitly permits you to redistribute only parts of OpenJDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may strip out of OpenJDK just the parts you need, and you may reuse them in your own code.  You may do this with any code you receive under GPL: the question is what obligations will apply to you after you have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, if you were to use GPL code in this manner, then unless you could make the argument that your code only used the copied GPL code &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;at arm's length&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, you would be obliged to release all your code under GPL also.  In this case, however, OpenJDK is covered by GPL &lt;em&gt;plus the classpath exception&lt;/em&gt;.  Our &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4569/can-we-redistribute-openjdk-tools-jar/4583#4583&quot;&gt;previous question on the subject&lt;/a&gt; considers what your obligations will be in this case, and they do not seem to include a requirement that your code, also, be published under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow Philippe's recommendations, and you should be OK to distribute, alongside your code, a modified OpenJDK containing only the elements that you need.  We are not lawyers, though, so you should take professional legal advice before betting a company on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T07:16:17.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10224" CreationDate="2020-08-07T07:47:55.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ and even the GPL itself have only a limited freedom to redefine copyright. It starts out with copyright law, and then adds precedents set by courts. Now copyright law generally doesn't talk about linking, but it often does talk about derived works and aggregations. Judicial precedents are more detailed, but also more varied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, the courts do admit professional fields like software development to define their own interpretations by consensus. That's why you see expert witnesses in trials. The GPL FAQ is right; the consensus in the field is that the act of linking creates a derivative work. For Python, I'd argue that there's no such clear consensus yet, but I couldn't point out a derived work. The Python interpreter is running code from multiple independent sources, but each of those sources appears to be an independent work. If anything, this would be an aggregation in legal terms, but even that's a bit of a stretch. An aggregate work is typically not as volatile as a running Python program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T07:47:55.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10252" CreationDate="2020-08-07T08:09:35.427" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The business of RedHat and other linux companies usually lies in selling service, training and convenience around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the software itself is open source (at least most of it), they do sell the service to provide expedite security fixes. In particular they offer you the guarantee that you can run  the product for at least a decade on the same software which will continue to get security fixes - something you don't get for free. They provide cloud and workplace administration services and tools to that end (those are not all open source iirc); there are integration services to bring together different existing solution to form a solution to your problems. They provide services in a form that you can roll-out your company-specific software to all workplaces in an easy way, they provide training. They provide customer-specific solutions, thus adoption of software to your specific needs and configuration / setup services - or offer you all the software as a SaaS solution so that you don't have to deal with any of the setup stuff on-site at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can do all this yourself - it's nearly everything open source, RHEL without the branding is mostly equivalent with CentOS. That includes also the long - term updates and fixes for the distribution. But if your business depends on it, time is money and it still might be cheaper to pay one to setup stuff and provide the glue between different software programmes to fit your needs than figuring out all loose ends when tailoring your software setup to your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T21:37:27.027" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T21:37:27.027" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10224" CreationDate="2020-08-07T11:48:33.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the answer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ on determining if a plugin should be considered a derived work&lt;/a&gt; to be illuminating on how the FSF would likely look to the use of third-party libraries/modules in primarily interpreted languages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a third-party Python library in your application, you are sharing memory and communicating complex data structures with that library. According to the quote above, that is considered to be equivalent to dynamic linking. This means that your application would be subject to the GPL if it uses a GPL-licensed library, even in a primarily interpreted language like Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T11:48:33.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10260" CreationDate="2020-08-07T18:50:32.087" Score="5" ViewCount="753" Body="&lt;p&gt;This BSD DLL depends on 3 MinGW run-time libraries (&lt;code&gt;libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;libgfortran-3.dll&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;libquadmath-0.dll&lt;/code&gt;). What if I'll compile them statically into BSD dll to eliminate dependences on MinGW libraries? Is this an Eligible Compilation Process in terms of the GCC Runtime Library Exception to GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20152" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T11:04:36.270" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T11:04:36.270" Title="Can I use BSD license-based dll statically linked to MinGW under the run-time licence exception?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|software|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10259" CreationDate="2020-08-08T08:11:59.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, no, it's not.  The clue is in the name: it's a &lt;strong&gt;runtime&lt;/strong&gt; library exception (RTLE) not a &lt;strong&gt;compile-time&lt;/strong&gt; exception.  If you statically link your binary with GPLv3-plus-RTLE-covered libraries, not only will you be distributing GPLv3-covered code (the library's object files), but you will also have created a work which in many people's eyes is a derivative work of those libraries, by virtue of the static linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RTLE&lt;/a&gt; that makes it clear that it only covers dynamic linking is in s0.  s1 having clarified that your code is referred to as the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Independent Module&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have permission to propagate a work of Target Code formed by combining the Runtime Library with Independent Modules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s0 notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A file is an &amp;quot;Independent Module&amp;quot; if it either requires the Runtime Library for execution after a Compilation Process, or makes use of an interface provided by the Runtime Library, but is not otherwise based on the Runtime Library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not satisfy the first requirement (&lt;em&gt;requires the library for execution &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; compilation&lt;/em&gt;) because you required the library at compile time, well before execution.  Nor do you satisfy the second requirement (&lt;em&gt;makes use of an interface but is otherwise not based on the library&lt;/em&gt;) because your work is in copyright terms a derivative of the library and is thus very much based on it.  You would thus not qualify for the RTLE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stipulate that the question of whether static linking creates a derivative work for the purposes of copyright is a generally-unsettled one, but the FSF are clear that all kinds of linking create derivatives, and since they are also the authors of the RTLE, their exception must be read in the context of their definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T08:11:59.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10262" CreationDate="2020-08-08T09:33:03.807" Score="2" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had earlier asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10259/can-i-use-bsd-license-based-dll-compiled-in-mingw-for-the-commercial-use&quot;&gt;Can I use BSD license-based dll statically linked to MinGW under the run-time licence exception?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use dynamically linked MinGW runtime libraries (f.e. &lt;strong&gt;libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;libgfortran-3.dll&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;libquadmath-0.dll&lt;/strong&gt;) with the &lt;strong&gt;BSD dll library&lt;/strong&gt; for commercial purposes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20152" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T11:17:26.177" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T11:17:26.177" Title="Can I use dynamically linked MinGW runtime libraries with a BSD dll library for commercial purposes?" Tags="|gpl|bsd|software|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10261" CreationDate="2020-08-08T11:17:03.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see several issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there is no bar on using GPL software for commercial purposes.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can sell it&lt;/a&gt;; you must simply honour the GPL when you do so, which means giving your customers access to source, on the GPL's terms.  So I think when you say &lt;em&gt;commercial&lt;/em&gt; you mean &lt;em&gt;proprietary&lt;/em&gt;, ie, without giving your customers access to the source of your product under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you have told us (here and in your earlier question) that your code is to be dynamically-linked to a DLL which is distributed under a BSD licence, and which is in turn dynamically-linked to the three GPLv3-plus-runtime-library-exception (GPLv3+RTLE) libraries in question.  Because of the exception, while you are obliged to give your customers (either on request, or simply automatically) the source of the GPLv3 code you are distributing, you are not obliged to distribute the source of your own product on the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I understand it: you can distribute your binary, presumably alongside the BSD DLL and the three GPLv3+RTLE DLLs.  You will be obliged to fulfil source distribution (and other GPLv3) obligations in respect of any GPLv3+RTLE DLLs that you distribute, but you will not be obliged also to distribute &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; code under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, IANAL/IANYL, so you should take professional legal advice before betting a company on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T11:17:03.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10265" CreationDate="2020-08-08T17:54:22.970" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/gpl-2.0/&lt;/a&gt; 3 in the optional steps section it talks about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you would like your project to adopt the GPL-3.0’s cure provision, add the text of the GPL Cooperation Commitment to a file named COMMITMENT in the same directory as your GPL-2.0 license file.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what would change if I added/had the Commitment compared to not adding/having it? In laymen terms. I understand it as adding in a period that a issue can be resolved, but not sure if I am correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20127" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T17:32:12.960" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T17:32:12.960" Title="question about gpl commitment" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10263" CreationDate="2020-08-08T19:43:23.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL Cooperation Commitment is a promise from you that you will not (continue to) litigate for copyright violation if the person violating the GPL license shows good faith and takes the proper steps to comply with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This promise is an integral part of GPLv3, but it is not part of the GPLv2. Some companies have decided to give that promise anyway. It might make your software slightly more attractive, especially if you are a big corporation and your software is used by individual developers, because the developers using your software in their products have less to fear if they accidentally infringe upon the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T19:43:23.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10269" CreationDate="2020-08-09T20:13:41.317" Score="4" ViewCount="783" Body="&lt;p&gt;Predicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0 code may be relicensed as MPL-2.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/permissive-code-into-mpl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0 code is incompatible with GPL-2 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MPL-2.0 code may also be distributed under GPL-2 when done as a larger work (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; - Q14).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The riddle: &lt;strong&gt;How can all three of these be true at once?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To be clear, I have no idea. But it does have implications for assuming that a piece of MPL-2.0 work can just be included in a GPL-2 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastEditorUserId="18501" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T20:25:41.370" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T13:49:09.627" Title="MPL-2.0 Compatibility: A Riddle" Tags="|gpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10267" CreationDate="2020-08-10T13:49:09.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache-2.0 code may be relicensed as MPL-2.0 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/permissive-code-into-mpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is misleading on 2 accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actual relicensing of code requires the permission of all the copyright holders, but when they give permission, you can relicense from any license A to any licence B regardless of the compatibility between the licenses. This is what gets described in point 2 of [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/permissive-code-into-mpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is described in point 3 of [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/permissive-code-into-mpl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;] (Boilerplate) is actually creating a file whose contents are subject to multiple licenses. When using such a file in your project, you need to comply with &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the applicable licenses, so both the MPL-2.0 &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the Apache-2.0 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can all three of these be true at once?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL terms of the file may allow using it in a GPLv2 project, but the Apache terms that equally apply block the usage in a GPLv2 project, because those Apache terms are incompatible with the GPL as you identified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T13:49:09.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-10T18:09:31.693" Score="8" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since GPL licenses may contain the notice that derivative software can be released either under the same or under a future GPL version, does the GPL also define who is eligible to define a new version of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20172" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T18:26:46.453" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:27:27.830" Title="Who is legally eligible to define a new version of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10270" CreationDate="2020-08-10T18:23:55.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on how to use the GPL for your software&lt;/a&gt;, the exact language they recommend for a GPLvN+ (GPL version N or any later) licence grant is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version N of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes it clear that only things called the GNU GPL &lt;em&gt;as released by the FSF&lt;/em&gt; qualify for the optional upgrade.  The language that makes that clear is in the the original software's licence grant, not the GPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly possible that someone could carelessly release software with a grant that said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is to say, a grant that failed to define &lt;em&gt;whose&lt;/em&gt; later version of the GPL could be so used.  But the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL itself&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the FSF have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;addressed the question&lt;/a&gt; of others using the GNU GPL as a basis for their own licence, and they say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can legally use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name [...] and not mention GNU&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: say someone else were to muddy the waters by issuing something they called &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the GNU GPL version 6&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (which, for the sake of argument, allowed anyone with red hair to do anything they liked with all GPLv2+ and GPLv3+ content) the FSF would likely sue for copyright violation in short order.  Following their probable success, courts would almost certainly take an extremely dim view of any red-haired person attempting to use the GPLvN+ licence grant, and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the GNU GPL version 6&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, to justify doing something that the GNU GPL would not iself permit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T09:27:27.830" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:27:27.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10275" CreationDate="2020-08-10T20:51:58.780" Score="4" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to use this open source project for my commercial product. The project itself is licensed under Apache 2.0 license but when I review the package, I found couple of JS libraries that it uses which are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, is this allowed?&#xA;And, am I allowed to use the main project in my commercial project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20174" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T09:21:50.003" Title="Project licensed under Apache 2 License but has JS libraries licensed under CC BY-NC-SA" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|commercial|creative-commons|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10274" CreationDate="2020-08-10T20:52:04.543" Score="11" ViewCount="2833" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a software that I'm sharing under MIT license. I would like to add some GPL library to accelerate some algorithms. I #ifdef the includes and calls to this library so that my application can be compiled without the GPL code. The include statements to this third party library and references to it in the makefile are still there though.&#xA;Can I keep the MIT license on my software project or do I need to change it to GPL? How do I need to structure the license of my git repository in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20172" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T23:46:04.910" Title="Can I share software under MIT license if it conditionally includes GPL code?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10273" CreationDate="2020-08-10T23:46:04.910" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can license your source code under MIT, since your source code doesn't contain GPL-covered parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you compile the software with the GPL component, then the binary as a whole can only be licensed under the GPL with all the obligations that implies, like providing the complete corresponding source code of the binary – including your MIT-licensed parts. There is no fundamental difference between an MIT project including GPL code vs a GPL project including MIT code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T23:46:04.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10272" CreationDate="2020-08-11T09:21:50.003" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes this kind of licensing is probably allowed, but no, you likely cannot use the software for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license only applies to that component itself. It is a permissive license that allows combination with software under other licenses, even if that license is copyleft or proprietary. All the Apache license requires is that notices and the license are included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, CC BY-NC-SA is a copyleft license. That means any creative work that is derivative of material licensed under CC BY-NC-SA must use the same license. It is also prohibited to use material under this license for commercial purposes. Because of this purpose limitation, it is not considered an open source or free software license. (CC licenses are bad for software anyway because they don't consider issues around making the source code available or providing patent licenses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you use this dependency tree, you will have to comply with both the Apache 2.0 license (easy, just include their license &amp;amp; notice files) but also the CC BY-NC-SA license (very tricky, no commercial use allowed, must use the same license if you give someone else a copy of your project incl. bundled dependencies, incompatible with other copyleft licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That you did a license audit is very good, precisely because of such problems. The license of a library has little to no bearing on the licenses of the dependencies it might use. There might even be incompatible licenses from your different dependencies. It is best to stick to licenses that are approved by the OSI as Open Source or by the FSF as free software licenses, because such licenses generally ensure that you can safely use them in commercial software (leaving aside issues like that GPL software might be incompatible with a particular business plan, or that many older licenses don't explicitly provide a patent license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T09:21:50.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10282" CreationDate="2020-08-11T14:03:09.827" Score="1" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;git portable binaries are distributed (included in the installer) with a windows commercial app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the app calls the binaries (init, add, commit, push) as command line then handles the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does the license of git (GPL) obligate the app to be distributed under GPL (its source code is available)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20178" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-11T14:33:40.023" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T05:11:04.873" Title="Can git binaries be distributed and called by a commercial app without providing source code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-11T14:55:57.030" Score="2" ViewCount="1002" Body="&lt;p&gt;A company wants to distribute a product which includes a browser extension. A browser extension is implemented in JavaScript, so it's distributed in source code form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of extension are written by the company employees, parts are modified pieces of another extension. The other extension is licensed under Apache 2.0. The company does not want to grant an Apache 2.0 license to the modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This combination looks legal but it's unclear how to properly include the copyright notices and mentions of the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another has every file starting with this wording:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 Another Extension committers&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it also contains a link to Apache 2.0 license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly section 4c of Apache 2.0 license requires that all copyright notices are retained in the modified files. So it looks like the company should append its own notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2019 Another Extension committers&#xA;Copyright 2020 Cool Company. All rights reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear what should be done with &amp;quot;licensed under the Apache License&amp;quot; wording. If it's kept in place then the recipients of the code may decide that the whole derivative work is licensed under Apache 2.0 which would be no good. If this wording is removed then it's unclear how to fulfill the requirement of section 4a (&lt;em&gt;give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the proper way to place copyright notices and mentions of Apache 2.0 license in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1096" LastEditorUserId="1096" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T14:32:17.793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T19:05:30.573" Title="How should copyright notices be included when distributing source of modified Apache 2.0 code commercially?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|commercial|derivative-works|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10283" CreationDate="2020-08-11T19:47:02.527" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have project 'P' which will be commercially used in the future (it's an android app). It uses service 'S' source files and this service is written with Apache License 2.0. The problem is I need to make changes in S-files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood, If my project was open-source, I would need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Retain copyright and license preamble in every S-file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In case of changes made in S-file mention it with something like 'Modifications copyright (C) 2020 &amp;lt;your company/name&amp;gt;'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add Apache license description in LICENSE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there's any NOTICE files in S, then also add this NOTICE at the root directory of your repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add Apache license description, copyright and NOTICE content in UI (either by about/any other different approach).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right? If yes, since my project's source code is closed, is it enough to execute only the 5th step?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20182" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T07:11:05.813" Title="Can I skip preamble, LICENSE and NOTICE files in my closed repository which uses Apache License 2.0 component?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-12T02:48:01.217" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use case is for an image I made from scratch using gimp, I was thinking about using CC-BY-SA-4.0 but I am not sure if it is the right license for this. The image you print out, cut and then you tape it or glue it to a physical tool that will provide a cheat sheet so you do not have to do the precise math (in mm). It basically goes over the information that is normally there and can give you more precise details than what is already labeled on the tool (working on it still).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now there is only one version and each version can give the same level of detail in mm as the tool normally does. I plan on making it so you can have a small mm on a tool labeled for a larger one or maybe a universal one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main thing is you can get the exact mm quicker than without it. And it allows you to quickly identify how precise in mm it is without doing the math and you do not need to know how to read the tool to get the information with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I want a GPL 2 license but for stuff like this where it is a image cause I believe GPL 2 is more for software and code and not images, documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20127" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T08:07:42.033" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T08:10:45.307" Title="Is CC-BY-SA-4.0 appropriate for this use case?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10276" CreationDate="2020-08-12T05:11:04.873" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it does, no.  As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; makes clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible... pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the app &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;calls the binaries as command line&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, I'm inclined to think that the app and git are two separate programs that you happen to be shipping together in a single installer.  You have obligations to make the source code of git available to your users, under GPL, but you're not obliged to extend the GPL to your app as well.  However, IANAL/IANYL; take professional legal advice before exposing yourself to liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T05:11:04.873" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10279" CreationDate="2020-08-12T07:11:05.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you incorporate files from S, with or without modification, in P, then your 5 steps are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the source code of P is not distributed, steps 1 to 4 are only visible to you and nobody can tell if you complied with them or not. I would recommend you do them anyway. Those steps are not really all that hard to comply with and you can't forget to do them if someday someone decides to make P open source after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T07:11:05.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10286" CreationDate="2020-08-12T10:29:01.570" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about releasing an extension package for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pypa/twine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyPA's Twine&lt;/a&gt;. I wanted to name it &lt;code&gt;twine-exists&lt;/code&gt;, but after giving it a minute of thought, I have doubts about whether that doesn't encroach over their trademark rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1929/can-you-reuse-a-projects-name-if-the-project-is-mit-licensed?newreg=b574333db09545b7b5cb80da3121ebed&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; would indicate, that the issue is separate to licensing, and (in US at least) the protection is established via &amp;quot;use in the marketplace&amp;quot;. But I've seen many different projects that would use such naming strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need a permission from the authors of a project X, in order to use &lt;code&gt;X-Y&lt;/code&gt; as the name of my own project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20188" LastEditorUserId="20188" LastEditDate="2020-08-12T13:20:39.670" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T16:25:16.153" Title="Could reusing a project name as part of my own get me into trouble?" Tags="|law|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10284" CreationDate="2020-08-13T07:01:54.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trademarks exist to avoid confusion in the public about who or what a particular name refers to. Trademark right are not given automatically, but trademarks have to be explicitly claimed and actively defended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search shows no trademark registration on the name &amp;quot;Twine&amp;quot; in the context of Python packaging, nor any statement in the project's repository and documentation that Twine is used as a trademark. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a Twine trademark for a tool for &amp;quot;telling interactive, nonlinear stories&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As trademarks are intended to prevent competitors to use &amp;quot;confusingly similar&amp;quot; names, the scope of a trademark's protection is in part determined by how the name in question is known among the general public. The name &amp;quot;Twine&amp;quot; is not associated in the public's mind with one particular company, so the trademark's protection is effectively limited to the market where the holder of the trademark operates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there would be a trademark on PyPA's Twine, then the question becomes if your name &amp;quot;twine-exists&amp;quot; would be interpreted (by the average Python user) as a third-party add-on to PyPA's Twine or as something offered by PyPA as a tool belonging to or replacing Twine. For the first case, the use of the trademark's name in your name is typically allowed (but it is good to get explicit permission), and in the second it isn't. Personally, I would read &amp;quot;twine-exists&amp;quot; as a PyPA tool to check if Twine is (properly) installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-08-15T16:25:16.153" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T16:25:16.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T15:42:04.693" Score="6" ViewCount="5539" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand if an NPM package can be open-source on GitHub with an MIT license if it depends on NPM packages that are open-source on GitHub with a BSD-2, BSD-3, Apache 1 or Apache 2 License (I've been told GPL and LGPL does prevent an MIT license in this case)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project doesn't build binaries, it just gets uploaded to NPM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20200" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T09:02:15.527" Title="Can an NPM package have an MIT license on github if it depends on MIT packages with BSD-2, BSD-3 and Apache 2 licenses" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|bsd|npm|apache-1.1|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T23:37:42.127" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some images on Azure are 'supported' via a 'plan' (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/cli-ps-findimage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/cli-ps-findimage&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/skylarkcloud.centos-7-7?tab=PlansAndPrice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/skylarkcloud.centos-7-7?tab=PlansAndPrice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A problem with this is that any subsequent images or VMs you create from the original VM also carry the same plan options:&#xA;E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;az vm create \&#xA;--location &amp;quot;westeurope&amp;quot; \&#xA;--resource-group blah \&#xA;--name myvm \&#xA;--plan-name centos-8-0 --plan-product centos-8-8 --plan-publisher skylarkcloud \&#xA;--attach-os-disk copyofacopyofacopy \&#xA;--os-type linux&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I have been given a VM based on CentOS 8 image originated by Skylarkcloud. Aside from uploading a CentOS 8 image I recieve no value from the fact that it is a skylarkcloud image rather than an untainted CentOS 8 image. In fact it has if anything had a negative effect to having to navigate around the &lt;code&gt;--plan&lt;/code&gt; options (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/questions/1029522/azure-move-restore-a-vm-from-a-backup-what-is-a-plan/1029534?noredirect=1#comment1338348_1029534&quot;&gt;https://serverfault.com/questions/1029522/azure-move-restore-a-vm-from-a-backup-what-is-a-plan/1029534?noredirect=1#comment1338348_1029534&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paying for commercial support if required is one of the key &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/404948/what-is-the-current-difference-between-centos-and-red-hat-enterprise-linux/404949#404949&quot;&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; between CentOS and RedHat variants.&#xA;It makes no sense to pay (SkylarkCloud) for a free version (CentOS) of a non-free/commerically supported version (RedHat) of a free OS (Linux). A one off fee for distribution media is arguably fair. It makes no sense to pay ongoing fees for any future copies made by the originator or anyone given a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the idea is that the distribution cost (which is virtually zero for digital media) is amortised over the lifetime of the VM. But what about all future derived VMs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does adding a permanent charge violate any of the licenses for the software included in the image?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking particularly, of the anti-tivoisation clause in GPLv3 and similar&#xA;(though I note the Kernel is only covered by GPLv2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is no here as Microsoft are supplying the hosting service and add the conditions to that service rather than to the content of the images. They can therefore add whatever terms they wish. However, something seems off here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that if you download your VM image and move it to a different provider somehow this could not apply. That freedom to download and transfer a snapshot of your VM should be a fundamental freedom in the sense the FSF is trying to protect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelated to this question is the question of &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/questions/1029823/remove-plan-settings-from-an-azure-image/1029938#1029938&quot;&gt;whether it is possible to remove the plan from an image&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an even worse problem with plans if &lt;a href=&quot;https://serverfault.com/a/1039818/202472&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; is to be believed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undocumented feature--if your publisher pulls the offer that you're using, you will NEVER be able to create a VM with it again. Not from an ASR failover. Not from a backup. So keep an eye on your versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just spent the last 10 hours trying every way I could to recover a VM because the publisher had removed all versions prior to 10.6 of their software. My customer, even tho they're on a fully supported 10.5.1 release, is now fairly hosed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="5925" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T10:37:16.260" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T17:58:40.460" Title="Is it a violation of the GPL (or any other license) for Linux images on Azure to have 'plans' associated with them in all future copies?" Tags="|relicensing|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T04:52:37.577" Score="7" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I pack my application, Webpack generates additional code into the bundle output file(s). Under which license is this code and am I not obliged to include that license into the source code (as it is done with packages like jQuery, Lodash, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note, this question refers to the Webpack generated (frame) code in the bundle output. Not the code of the included packages or the code of webpack, which is used for the development (MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20204" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T04:52:37.577" Title="What license does the auto-generated code of Webpack have?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10292" CreationDate="2020-08-14T05:46:44.643" Score="21" ViewCount="3773" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently tried to build .deb package and a PPA for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/aramg/droidcam/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Droidcam&lt;/a&gt; (turns phone camera into webcam), and mentioned it in a related GitHub issue for feedback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The developer replied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to ask that you &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; package and distribute a PPA. My stance&#xA;in general is against 3rd party packages, all you're going to do is&#xA;create more support emails for me down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that in principle anyone can package it (due to its GPLv2 license) and it would save a lot of hassle for the users, but I also want to respect the developer's wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that if not packaged correctly, there can indeed be issues with this program (the program requires certain kernel modules to be loaded in order to function), and I don't have much experience with packaging such complicated programs either. Right now, the PPA package works, but it has to be reinstalled after every kernel update. The developer provides a dkms installer to handle kernel updates, but the PPA package is not yet configured to use it. I asked the developer some questions about implementing the dkms installer in the .deb package, and got the above reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There used to be a PPA (whose code I modified to repackage it) in 2014-15, which soon died. I can see why the developer is frustrated with 3rd party packaging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, waiting for a more experienced person to package it is one option, but this software is there for almost 10 years, and the only way to get it is to download binaries from GitHub releases, and run &lt;code&gt;./install&lt;/code&gt; to load the kernel modules (the other way is to build the binaries from source and load the kernel modules).&#xA;Many people (39) &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/paolorotolo/droidcam/network/members&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forked&lt;/a&gt; the debian source of the original PPA after it died, but it looks like no one made another PPA, or at least, provided a .deb package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know what is the standard practice for packaging useful free and open source softwares for Ubuntu or Debian in such cases, when the developer asks not to redistribute it in order to avoid hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T05:26:59.507" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T15:34:37.580" Title="What is the standard practice when the developer does not want third party redistribution of a certain free and open source software?" Tags="|distribution|redistribution|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-14T06:35:36.630" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There probably is no generally accepted way to handle a situation like you describe; the best answer and course of action always depends on the individual case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand it's good to have a package available as easily as possible - but as a maintainer it's very much desirable to have them on a reliable basis which will last some time and create the least friction and work possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such my recommendation is: in your fork of the repo, create a way to automatically update the PPA from the sources. As the repository lives - by your question - on GitHub: Make use of GitHub Actions as a CI tool which creates artifacts for each push and each tag (release) - or however the workflow of that project works in detail. And make this work available to the maintainer of the original repo as a pull request. Offer him to do the necessary setup work for the CI which cannot be done by the PR alone. I'm not familiar with PPAs themselves - if they need a specific deployment method to allow distribution, that can be integrated in the GitHub Actions, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally or alternatively you could want to look at &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; package building, thus provide the necessary files to allow building a *.deb and/or *.rpm from the repo. That means you actually have to look through building a first-class debian or rpm package which can henceforth be natively built and distributed by the linux distributions themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such course of action has some advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it makes the actual work to create the PPA for subsequent releases a piece of cake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it shows the maintainer that you care about his/her time and ressources. It's an approach which might even work for him/her sustainably, even in case you lost interest after 6 months. And exactly that might be one of his fears in starting support for another distribution method - a support s/he has to provide for every transient distribution channels whenever and whereever it pops up. Take and remove that fear, offer real and lasting value for no additional work to the mainainer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of ressources to setup this kind of thing. The one I'm somewhat yet still only remotely familiar with is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/CompileFarm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenTTD CI/CD pipeline&lt;/a&gt; which lives completely in our GitHub repositories and builds packages from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;main repo&lt;/a&gt; for different OS and OS versions automatically. It might offer you some reference how such task can be addressed (see also its repos for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD-git-hooks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hooks&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/actions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;actions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/actions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;workflows&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T08:58:05.463" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T08:58:05.463" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-14T06:35:53.330" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to happen again and again.  Someone develops software, generously distributing it as free software, but doesn't fully understand the implications of giving their users &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a piece of free software that gathered data from various sleep apnea machines, the principal developer of which &lt;a href=&quot;https://jedimark.net/2019/02/08/sleepyhead-project-shutdown/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;parted company with the entire community&lt;/a&gt; (warning: currently using an expired SSL certificate) after their desire for frequent, rough releases came into conflict with his desire for occasional, polished releases.  The software &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forked&lt;/a&gt;, and development continues, but it's not a happy turn of events; the original developer finished his signoff with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Friends don’t let friends release full blown complex applications under the GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which suggests to me that he &lt;em&gt;fundamentally&lt;/em&gt; didn't get what software freedom is all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four freedoms are pretty well-known; I think it's wrong for anyone to release software that purports to give you those freedoms, and then to ask you to refrain from using them for their personal convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I think the developer has a pretty good point about the support problems; I've run into similar problems with support for certain plugins for calibre, across the Python2/Python3 transition.  But I think a more appropriate response to these concerns would be to have your package launch a dialogue on startup that makes it clear that the package they're using is unsupported by the app's principal developer, and that the user understands there is no point in troubling said developer about bugs in the packaged version.  It's fine to have a check-box that prevents the dialogue from coming up any more, once the user has acknowledged their understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: some other answers and comments are reflecting on the perceived obligations of people who set out to release free software, some going so far as to suggest that you shouldn't do this if you can't commit to supporting it for a given period of time (possibly a long one).  For what it's worth, I fundamentally disagree with them.  &lt;strong&gt;If you feel moved to do something with free software, you should just do it, and release.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users aren't entitled to support for any particular period of time, or with any particular combination of distro/toolchain/etc., or indeed at all.  If your work proves useful to enough people, a community will likely arise to assist with the work, or to inherit it if you decide not to pursue it, and if it doesn't, it's not your fault.  If one other person is helped by the work you've done, you may consider that work justified.  No obligation to help that person for longer than pleases you, nor to help a second person, attaches to you as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T16:41:52.757" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T16:41:52.757" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10310" CreationDate="2020-08-14T07:39:55.953" Score="3" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a classic proprietary on-prem application, that I might sell software licenses for if the project succeeds. The application is dependent on MongoDb as a database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I freely bundle MongoDb community edition in the application installer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I freely (regarding MongoDB) offer my application as SaaS?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an answer from MongoDb customer support from june 2020, which make me belive the answer is yes to questions 1 and 2. I guess I'm just overly cautious since it is a non-standard open source license. My idea of what constitutes a service is a bit ambigious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My loose interpretation is that as long as what you're launching is not a competitor to MongoDb Atlas you have nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANSWER JUNE 2020 MONGODB CUSTOMER SUPPORT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Below is a brief explanation and full blog post written by our founder to be read in detail.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;SSPL maintains all of the same freedoms the community has always had with MongoDB under AGPL, and users are free to use, review, modify, distribute the software or redistribute modifications to the software.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If you have further questions, we recommend first reading thoroughly Eliot’s blog post on this topic.&#xA;If you are planning to offer MongoDB as a service you are obliged by law to open source code you code for the service.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under-the-server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/mongodb-now-released-under-the-server-side-public-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20206" LastEditorUserId="20206" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T18:17:51.763" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T20:30:03.350" Title="Can I freely redistribute MongoDb community .msi installer with proprietary software" Tags="|licensing|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10287" CreationDate="2020-08-14T11:08:41.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD, MIT and Apache license are all permissive licenses. They have little to no restrictions on how code licensed under then can be used and they have no restrictions on how other projects can be licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T11:08:41.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-14T11:34:39.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to deal with such a request is to treat is as a &amp;quot;please respect my trademark&amp;quot; request. You create a fork of the complete project, give it a new name and you make it clear that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are the maintainer of this fork and not the person maintaining the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After having done that, you can take your fork in any direction you (and the community that might build around it) want. You can also continue pulling improvements from the original project into your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is fully allowed by the GPL license and should alleviate the fear of the original maintainer for additional support emails as those should all come to you instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T11:34:39.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T23:33:21.873" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that is basically an MIT license (public domain plus attribution) but in addition also requires someone who releases a derivative work publicly to inform the copyright holder of the release and granting the copyright holder the right to add a mention of the derivative work in a public list of derivative works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20172" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T07:05:52.833" Title="Is there an existing license similar to MIT that requires the original copyrightholder to be informed of public release of derivative work?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-08-15T13:53:38.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-15T00:09:14.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a great question because it comes up a lot and might seem like a bit of a free for all, but there are ways to be a bit objective in answering! I will try to do this by sharing with you approaches that I have seen to be successful, and basing what I say on documentation and policy where it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know that there is a &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; practice here. You're fundamentally asking about cultural norms, not legal interpretation (which you already know).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it helps to think about responsibilities. This is where many open source developers experience conflict and express defensiveness. They want to help people, and have their package be used. But if they get &lt;a href=&quot;https://cmustrudel.github.io/papers/raman20toxicity.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;burnt out or overwhelmed&lt;/a&gt; (PDF), they can't achieve that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/developer-duties.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;responsibility to the users&lt;/a&gt; of the package (Ubuntu and probably Debian users) not to mess up their system, to provide useful software, and to respect their rights. You have a responsibility to Ubuntu and Debian not to decrease the quality and perception of their distribution. You have a very similar responsibility to the developer of the source package, plus to respect their time and effort. (The latter is what they've explicitly warned you about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(How did I come up with this list? Partly by reflecting on projects I've participated in, packages I've created, operating systems I've used... but also by repeated reading of the documents I link to, research on open source communities, and developer articles/blogs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The developer in question might be more likely to accept your offer and provide help if you can demonstrate that you are aware of these responsibilities. (They might not be, I don't know them.) You don't have to fulfill them all! But if you think about your actions in terms of them, you will probably have better luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can you, or others in a similar position, proceed? Well, let's work backwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you demonstrate that you respect the developer's time and effort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make it clear that you're a regular user of the software, and that you're &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;dogfooding&amp;quot; it&lt;/a&gt; ie. installing your own packages, from your own PPA, using it regularly — then they know you'll be the first to notice the most prominent issues. See below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contribute to the project! File issues, provide detail, do a bit of debugging yourself. Fix bugs if you can, small ones at first. Improve documentation. Help out with issue tracking and user support if you're able.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Document what you do! If, for whatever reason, you have to stop then good documentation means that there's a much better chance of someone else picking up the PPA maintenance. Here's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/development/packaging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sample&lt;/a&gt; of what I mean, from when I left RabbitVCS. Share your &lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/development/packaging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;config files&lt;/a&gt;. Your tips. Your bookmarks. Everything. As you go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hey, now that you've documented it... you could maybe document it in code form! That is, automate it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seriously, there is a &lt;strong&gt;world of difference&lt;/strong&gt; between some random person asking for help with a PPA, and a regular helpful contributor proposing one. Random person: could &lt;em&gt;increase&lt;/em&gt; a developer's workload. Regular: &lt;em&gt;shares&lt;/em&gt; workload, improves quality, attracts more contributors into the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you demonstrate that you respect your distribution and their community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Read the packaging docs! Ubuntu is closely based on Debian, so start with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Policy Manual&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Developer's Reference&lt;/a&gt;. Yes, they're dense reading material. You don't have to memorise the whole thing, skim it, skip to the parts you need at first, and become familiar with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Search the web for other packaging guides eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfxpt.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/debianubuntu-package-developing-with-docker-continued/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this series on Debian/Ubuntu packaging with Docker&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;It's important that you take in the underlying philosophy:&lt;/strong&gt; build packages from source, in a clean environment so that you (a) know for sure the package is open source and buildable from scratch! and (b) you know you have all the dependencies, requirements, etc. Another tool for this is PBuilder (see also Ubuntu's &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PBuilder HowTo&lt;/a&gt; although I think that's gone by the wayside a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, this comment of yours is somewhat contrary to that philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was shipping the release tarball containing the prebuilt binaries in the deb package, and provided the source along with it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Build some simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/unstable/hello&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;hello world&amp;quot; style packages&lt;/a&gt; first. One that's just a single file C program. Look at how other packages are done, especially DKMS packages. Make changes to them yourself. Use them as a starting point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you respect your users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be one. It sounds like you are, great! But do you use every feature? Do you test installation on all the systems you distribute for? Use VMs, even for kernel packages you can at least test that your package installs properly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make it clear how to get help, and who from. Users don't want an annoyed response from a developer any more than the developer wants to deal with bug reports for something that's not their problem. Make sure the Launchpad site for your PPA has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/YourProject&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relevant features disabled&lt;/a&gt; if you're not going to use them. (Seriously, I have lost count of the number of times I've asked a question on Launchpad for a PPA package only to have it ignored for years.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem like a lot. But don't despair! As I said above, you don't have to do everything, but you should (a) do &lt;em&gt;and commit to&lt;/em&gt; at least some of these things, (b) be aware of them (or, if you disagree with them, your own set).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, remember your responsibility &lt;strong&gt;to yourself&lt;/strong&gt; as well! You are a developer too — set your own boundaries, be realistic about what you can commit to, and watch yourself for burnout. Be kind to yourself, and if you can't work on a project in a way that makes you happy, maybe it's time to move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20215" LastEditorUserId="20215" LastEditDate="2020-08-15T07:40:47.093" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T07:40:47.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-15T00:16:42.813" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's purely open-source software &amp;quot;the developer&amp;quot; has no rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &amp;quot;the developer&amp;quot; has built upon free or open-source software, the builder/developer has rights to what was built/developed but nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18334" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T00:16:42.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10290" CreationDate="2020-08-15T00:26:43.343" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to take a contrary position to some of the other answers here. To be clear: &lt;strong&gt;You have the legal right to make a PPA,&lt;/strong&gt; with or without the developer's permission. But it might not be a good idea, based on what you have told us in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Packaging and distribution is not easy to do. At an absolute minimum, you will be responsible for all of the following tasks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Identify all dependencies and correctly list them in a format understood by the package manager.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compile binaries in a format which is compatible with every architecture you intend to support (possibly just x86_64, but Debian at least supports many other architectures, and users will expect them to work).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make point releases for security vulnerabilities.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some upstreams don't provide a &amp;quot;stable&amp;quot; version, so you might need to backport these fixes yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the upstream is hostile to your package, they may not give you any advance notice that they are about to drop a security fix, and nobody else will tell you either, since security vulnerabilities are traditionally embargoed until a fix is available. Your users will be vulnerable until you find out about the vulnerability and do a point release.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Test your packages and ensure that they work correctly under a wide variety of conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Handle incoming bug reports, determine whether they can be reproduced, and if appropriate, forward them upstream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Continue to support the PPA for an extended period of time. Suddenly dropping support after a year or two will potentially inconvenience a large number of people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on some of the wording of your question, I am not totally convinced that you are prepared to do all of these things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You admit that you &amp;quot;don't have much experience with packaging such complicated programs&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You needed to ask the upstream for advice on how to package their software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the circumstances, I would advise that you should not proceed with making a publicly-available PPA, unless it is clearly marked as &amp;quot;no support, use at your own risk&amp;quot; or similar. If there really is a downstream community that wants to use this software on Ubuntu, I would suggest you try to get it added to the universe repository instead, so that the whole community can be collectively responsible for it. To do this, of course, someone will need to become the maintainer, and that person might end up being you, but there will at least be a reasonable process for someone else to take over maintainership if you leave the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T15:34:37.580" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T15:34:37.580" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10296" CreationDate="2020-08-15T07:05:52.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to inform the copyright holder of new releases of forks is a requirement that disqualifies a license from being open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a license fails the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island Test&lt;/a&gt;, which effectively ensures that people who are not able to communicate back also get the freedoms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right to mention a derived work in a public list is not something that can be controlled effectively in a copyright license. Copyright does not forbid you to compile such a list, so a statement around that topic in a copyright license has no meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is to add a section to your documentation with the .list of derived works and ask your users to send you updates for that list when new derivative works are created and/or when new releases are published. You just can't make it a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T07:05:52.833" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-15T16:30:20.997" Score="10" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under which license is the license text of the MIT license itself distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I make a new license based on the MIT license (a derivative work) and call it differently, am I allowed to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20172" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T15:25:39.100" Title="license of MIT license text?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:34:28.470" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a more philosophical question, but such questions are allowed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we all know, there are various free project hosts. The common feature for probably all of them is the ability to link or even manage an external website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is do you think there's actually a need for an external website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A place such a GitHub lets the project's owners create a wiki with screenshots, etc.&#xA;Nevertheless, places like Wikipedia's software infobox treat GitHub like a repository while expecting the official link to lead somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Maybe big projects don't want to rely on a third party like GitHub, but what about small projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why having 2 identical websites, both with exactly the same information, manual, etc. (except one of them is called a repository)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be better for marketing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And should you choose an external website, should you not use the repository's wiki in order to avoid the aforementioned duplication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20235" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:58:30.407" Title="Should a repository also serve as the project's website (at least for small projects)?" Tags="|marketing|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10303" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:58:30.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For many projects, a README is all that is needed in terms of a website. Since repository hosts like GitHub or Gitlab will display that README rendered nicely, a website wouldn't add much. This is a common approach for probably the vast majority of open-ish software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate website (possibly on your own domain) makes more sense when you want the project to have an identity that is less dependent on the source hosting service, or if you want to show content that goes beyond what can be reasonably put into a README. So essentially, marketing or docs. Even though the source code for the website might be part of the source code repository, those are not the same. Even in rendered form, those source files aren't quite human-friendly, for example links might be wrong, or GitHub might not fully understand the syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd suggest that you stay away from GitHub's Wiki feature. On the plus side, the wiki pages are easy to edit. But compared to an actual website they are hard to find, and are very limited in navigation or theming options. Most good uses of GH wikis seem to be as a project's knowledge base or as a kind of scratch pad. This wiki will never serve as a landing page for users, so you need to link the wiki from elsewhere (README and/or website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:58:30.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T21:30:01.357" Score="6" ViewCount="1223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere (I cannot recall where) that licensing a work under a Creative Commons license (or any license, really) is like adding a second license on top of the &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; that copyright law grants (i.e. a Creative Commons license grants permission &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; the permissions normally granted in copyright law). For example, people are allowed to use your work under the fair dealing exception to copyright law, and Creative Commons licenses cannot do anything to restrict such usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA 3.0 license states in section 4(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License. If you license the Adaptation under one of the licenses mentioned in (iv), you must comply with the terms of that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then I could conclude that this means that an adaptation of a CC BY-SA work that is licensed under CC BY-SA is technically dual-licensed under &amp;quot;copyright law&amp;quot; and a CC BY-SA license, which would violate section 4(b) which states that a CC BY-SA work can only be licensed under the same license or a later version. Obviously this conclusion is not correct, as there are many people who have created adaptations of CC BY-SA licensed works without a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I reading too much into the license, or am I somehow misunderstanding copyright law and how it works with Creative Commons licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20238" LastEditorUserId="20238" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T13:11:38.553" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T23:51:57.453" Title="Does every adaptation of a CC BY-SA work violate its terms?" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10305" CreationDate="2020-08-16T23:23:34.857" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and this is not personalized legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I reading too much into the license, or am I somehow misunderstanding copyright law and how it works with Creative Commons licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a bit of both. The bottom line is that &amp;quot;copyright law&amp;quot; is not a license itself, it's the legal foundation that makes licensing possible in the first place. In the US (and probably other countries with similar copyright law frameworks) the law basically says that the copyright holder of a creative work is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; one allowed to distribute it, perform it, create and share adaptations of it, and so on. So by default, if you get access to someone else's creative work, you can't share it or adaptations of it at all. That itself is not a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a license, by comparison, is an agreement between you and the copyright holder that allows you to do certain things with their creative work which you wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to do, &lt;em&gt;in addition to&lt;/em&gt; the things that copyright law itself lets you do. For example, making and distributing an adaptation of the work would normally be disallowed, but you can make an agreement with the copyright holder that gives you permission to do that. The terms of the agreement (license) tell you exactly which things you're allowed to do and what conditions you need to follow to be allowed to do them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA license relies on that ability to set conditions for otherwise-prohibited activities. Basically, it's a way for the author of a work to say, roughly, &amp;quot;I give you permission to distribute adaptations of this work &lt;em&gt;as long as&lt;/em&gt; you agree to give anyone else who gets your adaptation the same extra permissions I gave you, under the same conditions.&amp;quot; The &amp;quot;as long as [...]&amp;quot; part of that translates into legalese as the text you quoted. It means, among other things, that you can't attach terms to your adaptation which would, say, block other people from sharing it entirely. (If you try, then you forfeit the extra permissions given to you by the copyright holder, including the right to distribute the adaptation in the first place.) But it's still understood that when you receive a copy of the creative work under the license, you can do anything you would normally be allowed to do under copyright law, e.g. things allowed by the the fair use/fair dealing exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T23:23:34.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10316" CreationDate="2020-08-17T13:40:57.523" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without loss of generality, suppose you have an open source Java project with Gradle as the build system, and you want to add the MIT licence to it. Consider the cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 1.&#xA;From the build.gradle file you decleare a depedency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/junit-team/junit5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JUnit5&lt;/a&gt; which is licenced under Eclipse Public License - v 2.0. You make a few tests with it in a test folder, and all that along with a src folder is uploaded on GitHub. Can your project be licenced under MIT? Furthermore, you will create a package with your project, but the JUnit5 tests will not be included in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 2.&#xA;From the build.gradle file you decleare a depedency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JetBrains/java-annotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;java-annotations&lt;/a&gt; from JetBrains, which is licenced under Apache License 2.0. Can your project be licenced under MIT? Furthermore, you will create a package with your project, and you want the dependeds to view the annotations on your code, but you are not concerned if they can use the annotations in their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&#xA;I understand that if you copy and paste the files of a project you can only re-licence it with compatible licenses, but does the same hold true if you only depend on them via Maven/Gradle packages and your produced project package will not contain them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20241" LastEditorDisplayName="user20241" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T15:18:21.580" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T10:18:43.767" Title="Can you use a less restrictive open source licence from the one your depedency has?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:32:44.947" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;What license is most similar to GPL 2.0 but for stuff other than code like images and documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20127" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T16:04:45.670" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T19:35:05.083" Title="What is the most similar license to the GPL 2.0, but for non-code works?" Tags="|license-recommendation|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10308" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:54:22.530" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOtherThanSoftware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL can be used for any copyrightable work&lt;/a&gt;, including images and text. People who distribute such work under the GPL will need to supply the &amp;quot;corresponding source&amp;quot; for making modifications which may simply be the work itself, or some more malleable format (e.g., an image may have been made from a file with editable layers in Photoshop or GIMP, or a PDF document may have been created from LaTeX source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) is a weaker copyleft license intended for artistic works. It is notably weaker than the GPL because it does not require the distribution of corresponding source. If someone distributes a modified work based on a CC BY-SA work, then that new work must also be licensed under CC BY-SA, but the distributor does not need to supply their underlying source. This means recipients may legally distribute and modify that work further, but in practice it may be very difficult to make modifications without corresponding source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF recommends the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL) for software documentation. However, this license is GPL-incompatible and (in this writer's opinion) rather complex and cumbersome. Wikipedia has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;good overview of its complexities&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T19:35:05.083" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T19:35:05.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10293" CreationDate="2020-08-17T20:30:03.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are planning on spending months or years of effort and money to build software on top of other software, it's a good idea to find a lawyer and pay for a  proper professional opinion, which the rest of this answer isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I freely bundle MongoDb community edition in the application installer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is this is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I freely (regarding MongoDB) offer my application as SaaS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you expose MongoDB to your users in any capacity you need to be very clear on exactly what that exposure is and whether that constitutes &amp;quot;service&amp;quot;. An argument can be made that if you allow users to query MongoDB with arbitrary queries you are providing MongoDB as a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My loose interpretation is that as long as what you're launching is not a competitor to MongoDb Atlas you have nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One problem with this statement is you don't know what &amp;quot;MongoDB Atlas&amp;quot; is, in its entirety. You know some of the things it does today but you have no idea what is going to be included a year or 5 years from now, when SSPL will still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second problem with this statement is it's not what the license says. You are obligated to release source code you may not be allowed to release under SSPL even if you do not &amp;quot;compete&amp;quot; with Atlas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T20:30:03.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10305" CreationDate="2020-08-17T21:11:55.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am unsure exactly what you mean by the 'license granted by copyright law'.  Copyright laws generally give creators the SOLE right to copy, distribute, and perform their work as well as the SOLE right to create derivative works.  You can gain permission to do some of these things by attaining a license from the copyright holder, which is what the CC BY-SA license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, people are allowed to use your work under the fair dealing exception to copyright law, and Creative Commons licenses cannot do anything to restrict such usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair Use&lt;/a&gt;?  That is not a 'license'.  It is an exception to the protections created by copyright law for the authors of creative works.  In your question if you decide to create a derivative work of a CC BY-SA work and distribute it under the same license as required, you are not providing a &amp;quot;copyright act license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18350" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T21:11:55.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10305" CreationDate="2020-08-17T23:51:57.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In simplest terms, copyright law says two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright owner has &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rights to the covered work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Everyone else has a very limited set of rights to use the work in specific instances&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second category covers things like &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot; laws.  The specifics of category #2 will vary &lt;em&gt;greatly&lt;/em&gt; from one locale to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt; is a legal document created by the copyright owner to take some of the rights that the law places in category #1 and share those rights with others. In the case of CC BY-SA, this includes things like the right to redistribute the work.  A license cannot take away any of the rights that are already in category #2, it can only &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; rights to category #2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your underlying issue, copyright law is not a type of license.  The rights granted by law are exceptions to the law (that is, they are special use cases where a license is not required and regular copyright law does not apply).  Copyright law cannot grant a license, only the copyright owner can do that.  Both mechanisms give rights to users of copyrighted works, but they are completely separate mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T23:51:57.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T01:07:34.273" Score="6" ViewCount="3902" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing my Master Thesis. I used code from GitHub for my application and did modifications and extended its functionality to adjust my requirements. I am also citing the code in my own code and text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that the Github repository doesn't mention any license, which means that the copyright law applies by default. However, I know the author and have their explicit permission to use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options here?. Should I ask the author to upload the license or is it not necessary since I have their permission?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20243" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T19:29:25.257" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T19:29:25.257" Title="Is it OK to use unlicensed GitHub code in a thesis, by having explicit permission to do so?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|github|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2020-08-18T06:16:00.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license is a legal agreement between the author and the the user of the code. Contracts usually need no special form (at least in my legislation); an oral contract is just as binding as a written one. But it's hard to prove an oral agreement in court or otherwise when it comes to a dispute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following that argument: you are fine to use the code, if you have the permission to use it by the original author (and assuming that all code is indeed original by that person). Depending on the exact words of the agreement you might or might not be allowed to share it further (e.g. on GitHub) or even publish it under a certain license - that difficulty is exactly what a license information inside the original repository would resolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the explicit agreement you'd be where anyone else is without much rights (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T06:16:00.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10313" CreationDate="2020-08-18T06:20:52.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As curiousdanii notes in comments above, we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;a canonical question&lt;/a&gt; that addresses the issue of what your rights are with respect to published-but-unlicensed code, specifically on GitHub, and you should read it.  But your case is more complex, because as you note&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the author and have their explicit permission to use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This changes the whole question to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;what exactly do you have permission to do, and how would you prove it?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you simply have permission to reproduce excerpts of the code in your thesis?  Do you have permission to reproduce the whole code base?  To whom can you give copies, and how many?  May you modify the code?  Do you have permission to make commercial use of the code, or of any patentable concepts therein?  Yours would be by no means the first piece of university work to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Express#Early_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;significant commercial potential&lt;/a&gt;, and you really don't want to get half-way through founding a company after your graduation, and have the author come storming in from one side, demanding a big piece of the enterprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the permissions grant is clear, should for some reason acrimony arise later about the exact nature of the grant, you don't want this to descend into a &lt;em&gt;he-said-she-said&lt;/em&gt; match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution to both problems is the same: get this permission in writing.  If the grant is clearly written down and signed, there is much less scope for the original author to later claim that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_gendered_third-person_pronouns#List_of_standard_and_non-standard_third-person_singular_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sie&lt;/a&gt; never intended to permit a particular kind of use, or indeed that sie never gave any permission at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life will be simplest if the grant is of a wide-reaching form.  If the original author is happy to sign something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D. Original Author hereby disclaims all copyright&#xA;interest in the program 'Gnomovision'&#xA;(which makes passes at compilers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;signature, date&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all well and good (that language comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, by the way); file the release away, and continue with your thesis.  If sie expresses reservations about signing such a grant, it is a useful indicator that sie's not intending to permit quite as wide a range of usage as you might have thought.  At that point, you'll need to find out what the university requires by way of rights in the contents of theses (reproduction rights?  translation rights?  commercial exploitation rights?), list these all out, and see if the original author's willing to sign those away.  If sie is, all well and good, file and forget.  If not, you may have just dodged a really nasty bullet, and will need to complete your thesis without this code.  If the university has no specific requirements (and that would, in my experience, be quite rare) consider using a standard rights grant such as the Apache2 or GNU GPL licences, as these are well-known to many software authors, and applying them to one's code feels a bit less like a step into the unknown.  Oh, and as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T05:54:25.053" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T05:54:25.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10307" CreationDate="2020-08-18T10:18:43.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you declare a dependency on package X, there are two possibilities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Package X has a strong copyleft license, like the GPL or AGPL: These licenses have the requirement that the final binary application is licensed under respectively the GPL or AGPL license. As a result, they put a restriction on the licenses you can choose for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any build you distribute that contains package X must be licensed under the same license as package X. If there are no builds without package X, then it is best to license the source code also with that same license. If you also have builds without package X, then you can choose a compatible license for your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Package X has any other license: These licenses do not extend their scope beyond the files that are explicitly licensed with that license and thus they don't put any restriction on the licenses you can choose for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you can use a less restrictive open source license, a more restrictive open source license or even a closed-source license that is compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both cases you mention (JUnit5 and java-annotations) involve licenses in the second category and thus they don't affect the license choices you have for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T10:18:43.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-19T06:05:17.530" Score="4" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wand to share my code under MIT license on github, my question is: can I add a condition to the license that makes anyone who uses my code include copyright notice along with a url to my original work on github so that other people find it easy to get a licensed copy of this code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T09:27:24.747" Title="Adding condition of giving a url to the original work to MIT license" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10321" CreationDate="2020-08-19T23:26:25.990" Score="4" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Git repository with a medium-sized project on GitHub. Since there are some components depending on GPL libraries, the repository is currently also licensed under the GPL. However, the GPL-licensed library is only used by some components (which can be isolated), and the remainder of the project is perfectly usable without those components. Therefore, I want to license everything that has no dependencies on any GPL libraries under the MIT license. What are the best practices to achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to have two different branches: one branch contains the full code and is licensed under GPL. The other branch removes all functionality that depends on GPL code and is licensed under the MIT. Is it feasible and/or common to have different licenses for different branches of the same repository? If not, what would be better alternatives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be a problem that, technically, the full history of that new non-GPL-branch once included GPL-code? Or is it fine as long as all GPL-code is removed from that branch before I add the new MIT license file on the branch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9851/can-different-parts-of-a-project-be-under-different-licenses&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is somewhat similar, but I have the feeling that mine is more concerned with the &lt;em&gt;technical implementation&lt;/em&gt;. That is, can I simply put two different LICENSE files in the root directory of the repository, depending on which branch we are currently on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20263" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T09:51:14.210" Title="Using different licenses for different branches of the same repository" Tags="|gpl|mit|github|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10320" CreationDate="2020-08-20T09:51:14.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Git branches don't work very well for maintaining different “editions” of the same project, because there's no good way to share changes across branches without merging them completely. So simply for technical reasons, I'd urge you not to use differently-licensed branches. Such branches are also not very discoverable to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, keep all the code in one main branch, but keep differently licensed code in different folders and make it very clear which code is under what license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require that any downstream code is under the GPL. It requires that any derivative works (as a whole) are under the same GPL license. But this can be satisfied when any components you've written yourself are under a GPL-compatible license, such as the MIT. For the avoidance of doubt you might also dual-license those components as &amp;quot;MIT or GPL&amp;quot;. This would be important for licenses that aren't compatible, e.g. &amp;quot;Apache-2.0 or GPL-2.0-only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the best practice would be to separate the GPL-covered parts from the parts you've written completely by yourself, and use the top-level LICENSE to describe what parts are available under which license. If you want to do this extremely accurately, you could even adopt Debian's machine-readable &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;copyright&lt;/code&gt; file format&lt;/a&gt; which associates glob patterns with licenses. You could store the full license text either within the same license file, or maybe as separate files like &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.GPL.txt&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.MIT.txt&lt;/code&gt;, or in their respective directories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you're currently offering the entire code under GPL, moving the MIT for some parts would require &lt;em&gt;relicensing&lt;/em&gt;. This is trivial if you are the sole contributor, because you as the sole copyright holder can issue licenses however you please. But if there are other contributors, you will have to get their consent to the relicensing or have to remove their contributions (which can be extremely tricky because it generally requires rewriting the component starting with the last state before the GPL-covered contribution). I don't think it matters that the Git history would show those same files as GPL-covered even after the relicensing. The old license is still valid for those old versions, the new license is still valid for those new versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T09:51:14.210" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-20T12:29:32.503" Score="1" ViewCount="846" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company develop a VPN for Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to develop a driver using kernel space for a Proprietary VPN software. I would like to know if it technically possible to develop it using Proprietary licence, with the GPL restrictions in Linux kernel module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for ur help :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20269" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:18:43.367" Title="Develop Proprietary Linux Driver" Tags="|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10322" CreationDate="2020-08-20T14:57:28.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license requires that for the entire project (the Linux kernel in this case) the source code must be available and users must have the right to make changes and redistribute the work with or without changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license on your VPN driver does not give those freedoms, then it might be technically possible to create the driver, but the combination of Linux kernel + driver cannot legally be distributed and it might be that the driver by itself is already seen as a derived work of the Linux kernel and thus let it have incompatible license terms that make legal distribution impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your company really want to use a proprietary license, make sure that your legal department knows enough about the GPLv2 and the proposed license to make an informed decision if this is a good idea. If you don't have a legal department, hire a lawyer to give you an informed legal opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T14:57:28.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10346" CreationDate="2020-08-21T09:01:59.657" Score="3" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really interested in the conf module from the Django framework. It's pretty well done and will fit perfectly my project with some modification. The code I'm looking for is in the &lt;em&gt;init&lt;/em&gt; file: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/django/django/blob/bf6d07730c41ae23836d8dae98626fe8614307e2/django/conf/__init__.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/django/django/blob/bf6d07730c41ae23836d8dae98626fe8614307e2/django/conf/__init__.py&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Working on my own framework in python that is totally different from what they are doing, Should I add their license or not ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Django project is under BSD-3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I need to include their license, can I add it directly on top of the file? Or should I put it at the root of my project ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least, If I need to publish my work (open source), should I put my project under BSD-3 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20274" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T07:32:21.933" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T08:01:06.090" Title="Use code from BSD-3 License for my own framework" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T19:29:50.270" Score="3" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use one source code file from other open source project which is licensed under GPL3. That source code will be used to perform a single task in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My entire project is licensed under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please suggest, how can I do that without violating LICENSE term of other project? How and where to include other project's license in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20279" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T11:42:50.730" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T21:22:43.400" Title="Using one source code file from other project with different license type" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10326" CreationDate="2020-08-21T23:54:07.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per GPL, if you use GPL code in your project, the whole shebang must be under GPL. If that isn't acceptable, you'll have to find a way around that (find another one with a MIT-compatile license, write your own MIT-licensed version, don't use that functionality, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be careful, looking at the GPLed code while writing your own can/will be construed as copying. You'll have to make sure it is as different as possible from the original: Use a different algorithm, place different constraints (e.g., narrowly designed for your use, not generality; efficiency vs code clarity; ...). Take a peek at the advise the FSF gives (gave? it has been quite some time) while creating clones of Unix utilities, to make sure the result can't be sued as an illegal copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T11:43:32.583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T11:43:32.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10287" CreationDate="2020-08-22T00:07:07.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. If you are uploading to NPM you also do not need to include the license of downstream BSD or Apache licensed code assuming you are not distributing the dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a good idea to mention in your README file's licensing section if you used Apache code because of GPL2 compatibility issues, or if you used BSD+Patents code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T00:07:07.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10287" CreationDate="2020-08-22T09:02:15.527" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source license obligations are usually triggered on &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of the software. That is, if you are only distributing &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; MIT-licensed NPM package via GitHub but none of its (transitive) dependencies, then it's not you who's creating a potentially conflicting license mix (due to maybe contradicting license obligations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're fine as your NPM package only &lt;em&gt;refers&lt;/em&gt; to the other packages via its &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt;, but these are not included in your distribution. Instead, you require your users to run &lt;code&gt;npm install&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things would be different if you were distributing e.g. a ZIP archive which for some reason includes your package &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; all dependencies. Then it would be &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (re-)distributing all the packages, and &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; would be liable for any license compliance issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, this is also why it usually makes a big difference whether you link a dependency dynamically or statically, but that concept does not really apply to JavaScript, and I'm mentioning it only for completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14857" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T09:02:15.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-22T11:51:01.147" Score="2" ViewCount="1240" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dll&lt;/strong&gt; is a wrapper of &lt;strong&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/strong&gt; C++ library.&#xA;Can I use this dll in my commercial project (an executable dynamically calls a function of dll)?&#xA;Will users be able to request sources of this dll only or all my whole project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20152" LastEditorUserId="20152" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T12:42:29.853" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T03:02:28.303" Title="Can I use dynamically linked MPL 2.0 dll library for commercial purposes?" Tags="|commercial|license|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10332" CreationDate="2020-08-23T16:36:14.137" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning on creating a rather small repo on github but I am not sure which license should I use. The project is basically a collection of bash, batch and powershell scripts. Those scripts invoke programs licensed under Mozilla Public License 2 and GPL 2 and 3. I am not using any actual open source code inside my scripts, just running programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, does this scenario mean that I am creating a derivative work based on those programs? In this case I would have to distribute my scripts under the GPL and/or MPL. I am not sure if this is possible since GPL and MPL aren't compatible to my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally planned on releasing my project under the Unlicense license. Is this possible? I understand that I would need to either distribute all the source code of the programs or provide instructions on where to get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20289" LastEditorUserId="20289" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T17:18:32.710" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T21:18:19.110" Title="Combined distribution of open source binaries when used as program in a CLI-Script" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|distribution|mpl|unlicense|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10331" CreationDate="2020-08-23T21:18:19.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merely calling various programs through their command line interface is most likely entirely fine, and does not impose any licensing obligations on you. You are free to use MPL or GPL, but can just as well use the Unlicense, a proprietary license, or no license at all (all rights reserved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd caution against using the Unlicense. While its intent is clear, it is not drafted very well, is arguably contradictory, and might not fully work in some countries. Thus, it fails at a crucial task for an open source license: giving potential users peace of mind that they can freely use the software. Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dual license with a more robust license, e.g. “Unlicense OR Apache-2.0” (at the user's choice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you want to give up your rights in these scripts to the fullest degree possible, use CC-0. It uses the same general mechanism as the Unlicense (public domain dedication + fallback license) but is drafted much more carefully.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you want a very liberal license that doesn't even require attribution, consider 0BSD or MIT-0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T21:18:19.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10326" CreationDate="2020-08-24T20:56:17.370" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a complicated license. Part of the problem here is that it uses the words &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; to determine whether your code needs to go out under the same license. If you're thinking &amp;quot;my code isn't based on this one file,&amp;quot; hold on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Based on&amp;quot; echos the statutory definition of a &amp;quot;Derivative Work.&amp;quot; The jurisprudence around derivative works in software is still very hazy, as not that many cases have gone to trial on this issue. However, the tests the FSF and others have put together involve a few simple guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your code can't link statically or dynamically to the GPL code. In interpreted languages, runtime imports are still a lot like dynamic links, and probably aren't good ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your code can't be combined in with the GPL code in a way that they can't be separated easily. Webpack is a good example of this. You also can't just mix functions into the same file by copying and pasting or something dumb like that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Mere aggregation&amp;quot; is allowed -- they are allowed to sit in the same directory or go out on the same hard drive or the same zip folder or something like that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something like a command line call is probably safe, as long as you're interacting with it in some standard, natural way. Don't try to smash your way in through the back door when there's a front door.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-licensed code still needs to go out under the GPL, but your project itself could go out under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's still not super clear to you... You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; hire your own attorney. If it's worth it. Note that I am not your attorney, and nothing in this comment comes close to establishing an attorney-client relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastEditorUserId="6501" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T21:22:43.400" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T21:22:43.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10344" CreationDate="2020-08-24T23:50:01.760" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing an app based on Apple's ARKit and I'm just wondering what licenses should I use for this project as none of these libraries demonstrated what licenses they are currently using, which makes me really confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20301" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T03:32:02.557" Title="What license should I use if my code on GitHub includes Apple's ARKit and SceneKit?" Tags="|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2020-08-25T11:31:15.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;NO. You can use open source Qt. I think you can use GPL components too.&#xA;If you want to sell your closed source software, then you can use only LGPL Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use LGPL Qt for a closed source project, but you must comply  the LGPL requirements.&#xA;It's hard, but not impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easy way: you can use this QT LGPL app template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and add the &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; dialog in your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13029" LastEditorUserId="13029" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T14:35:44.497" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:35:44.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10040" CreationDate="2020-08-25T11:38:44.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use LGPL Qt and static linking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easy way: a QT LGPL app template&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13029" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T11:38:44.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:02:30.767" Score="1" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to try a WYSIWYG editor in my closed-source application and I'm wondering if what I want to do is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I create an OSS project (GPL license) that contains the editor of my choice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I deploy it to the cloud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my closed-source application I use it through an &lt;code&gt;iframe&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know as long as the project is not using AGPL I can do this, am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clarification:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;There are &lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; projects involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL WYSIWYG editor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A GPL wrapper project for this editor that exposes it as a service&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A proprietary project that uses this service through an &lt;code&gt;iframe&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Workflow:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user loads the site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The site has a textarea that contains markdown&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The client (javascript running in the browser) converts this to html&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then it calls a webservice with the html and gets back html content (containing the iframe and the embedded WYSIWYG editor)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user interacts with the editor and when they click save&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The modified HTML data is extracted from the iframe, converted back to markdown and the textarea's content is overwritten&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are no files being edited, only HTML travels as a byte array to the webservice and from the iframe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final note: The javascript files are not stored on the same server as my app. It is loaded from a remote server when the iframe is appended to the DOM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8768" LastEditorUserId="8768" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T15:59:37.817" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T15:59:37.817" Title="Can I use GPL-licensed services embedded in an iframe from a commercial application?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10339" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:33:01.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the creator of the GPL project, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2077/458&quot;&gt;you're not bound by the licence&lt;/a&gt; anyway, so there's no problem with what you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you mean &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I take someone else's WYSIWYG editor under GPL, and use that as part of my proprietary web-hosted SaaS&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then as long as it's not AGPL, there's still no problem with what you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if in addition that WYSIWYG editor involves Javascript, and that Javascript is downloaded to the client browser, you are now distributing GPL software, and at that point you do have obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T13:33:01.867" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10342" CreationDate="2020-08-25T19:15:21.760" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got a awarded a contract for a report of the performance of some new software. The software is a result of two merged open-source codebases (I merged them) and some logic on top of it (including a new user interface/UI). One of the codebases is under an MIT license and the other under an Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not providing the organization with any code&lt;/strong&gt;, just performance results and screenshots of the UI (the UI shows numerical results that depend on the calculations/algorithms of the two codebases).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to include any software licensing info in the final report?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20307" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:14:38.773" Title="If an organization pays me for a report that shows performance results of executed MIT/Apache 2.0 code, do I have to include the respective licenses?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10341" CreationDate="2020-08-26T18:14:38.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do with the output of &lt;em&gt;open-source software&lt;/em&gt; what you want and are not bound by the software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute screenshots, some might argue that they might fall under some licenses if there is some special license for particular graphical elements shown and require giving credits - but most often their use in screenshots should fall under fair use or the right to cite for documentation purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not distribute any software, neither in binary form nor in source code form, you are not bound by the licenses which deal with distribution of the software.&#xA;Unless you use a proprietary-licensed programme which restricts the usage for certain cases (e.g. no commercial use), open source software - by-definition - does not imply any usage restrictions. (Mind, that source available does not necessary imply open-source - you need to check the license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the answer here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;Is the output of an open source program licensed the same?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However IANAL/IANYL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:14:38.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10330" CreationDate="2020-08-27T03:02:28.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consuming and distributing MPL-2.0 code is easy so long as you aren't making any changes to it. If all you're doing is using a compiled DLL as-is, things are going to be very straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All you really need to do is inform users of your application that you have a component in your project covered by the MPL-2.0 license and link to the DLL's source repository. You are responsible for keeping that link current in new versions of your application. See section 3.2 of the license for the exact text. This is usually handled by an application's About box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as having to disclose all source in total, that's a clause in the GPL licenses that the MPL licenses simply do not have. Even if you modify the MPL-2.0 code in question, you still have to disclose that code only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T03:02:28.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10336" CreationDate="2020-08-27T03:32:02.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the open source licenses don't really care about how you combine code. There are three in particular that come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;MIT&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to get licensing out of the way and not worry about it, slap the MIT license on it and call it a day. Commercial entities can come along, though, and use your code as the base for a proprietary solution for profit. They will &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be obligated to publish their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is designed to be clear to ordinary people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The MIT License and How to Apply It&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very popular opinion that the MIT license doesn't provide entities with suitable protections against patent litigation on the part of the author. You could, theoretically, attract users to your project, get them dependent on it, and then panhandle them for money claiming patent violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address this issue, the Apache Software Foundation maintains its own license. It's like the MIT license, but handles the situation described above. And instead of being clear and obvious like the MIT license, the Apache 2.0 license is designed to withstand litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Apache 2.0 License and How to Apply It&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you don't want people making changes to your project and then profiting from them? The MPLv2 license exists to say that any changes someone makes to your code and distributes must also be under the MPLv2 license. This keeps commercial entities from hoarding modifications to your source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only applies on a file-by-file basis, however. It doesn't prevent someone from outright adding whole new files to your project or completely replacing others. This license was designed to be legally solid while also being understandable. It was also designed to be internationally enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mpl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The MPL 2.0 License and How to Apply It&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;GNU Licenses&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't talked about the GNU licenses since their viability in the App Store is highly contested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T03:32:02.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10325" CreationDate="2020-08-27T03:46:46.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest thing is to just have your project be BSD-3. We do licensing audits at my company and the last thing anyone wants to deal with is a segmented project with two different ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T03:46:46.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10325" CreationDate="2020-08-27T07:43:10.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take code from somewhere, you need to obey its license requirements. As such it's not question of &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;, but of &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;am I allowed to ship a combined product / are the licenses compatible&amp;quot;. As you don't mention your own - it's a question no one can answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should license your product such that the license reflects what you want. There is no un-opinated answer to the question &amp;quot;should I use BSD&amp;quot; as there's a lot of compatible licenses, too. As BSD is a quite permissive license (weak copy-left) you have many choices for your own work which derives from the BSD-licensed code base, including strong copy-left like GPL. For sure BSD is a valid and established choice of an open-source license, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to indicating licensing, there's many approaches. IMHO easiest is: If you choose the same license as Django, put the license in the root of your project, if you choose another, keep the short license info at the top of the copied files or make a separate sub-directory exclusively for them. Always keep the existing copyright information at the top of the files - irrespective of what license you choose. You may add yours there, too, when you make changes to them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T08:01:06.090" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T08:01:06.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T16:50:30.447" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of my projects, I used some code from an Apache version 2 licensed project in the beginning. Now I have completely removed their code and it is no longer part of my project. Do I still have to mention them in my license? Their code is visible only if you go to the older commits of my GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20313" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T12:56:39.450" Title="Should I credit the authors for code that is no longer part of the project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10349" CreationDate="2020-08-28T11:13:09.307" Score="9" ViewCount="1282" Body="&lt;p&gt;My employer wants to publish a paper about software and make it open-source under the GPL, but they want to know who is interested and downloads it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it legal to ask people to fill in a regular registration form in order to download the code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking this because open-source GPL code should be accessible without restrictions, but at the same time I am not obliged to distribute all GPL code that I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible that after registration users get a link to a GitHub repo that is otherwise hidden?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20324" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T12:04:31.020" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T12:04:31.020" Title="GPL code behind a registration form" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10348" CreationDate="2020-08-28T11:54:53.430" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal to ask people to fill in a regular registration form in order to download the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely.  You can even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;require people to pay money&lt;/a&gt; to download GPL'ed software.  What you &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; do is to stop them redistributing it afterwards (provided they do so under the GPL).  So while you may be able to record the people who downloaded it &lt;em&gt;from you&lt;/em&gt;, you won't know about people who got it from one of those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that possible that after registration users get a link to a github repo otherwise hidden?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would seem to me to be a fairly normal mechanism for distributing software only after some condition (registration, payment, etc.) has been satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: several comments are very properly making points about source-access obligations.  I'd ignored the issue in my answer, because in the case of a scientific paper, there may not be a &amp;quot;binary form&amp;quot;, as opposed to a &amp;quot;source form&amp;quot; - which is also why a copyleft CC licence might be more appropriate than the GPL.  But the points being made are all very valid, and I am grateful for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T06:11:52.510" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T06:11:52.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10347" CreationDate="2020-08-28T12:56:39.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If their code appears in your repository, it will be helpful to anyone that needs to go through your old commits to have that author information available to them.  However, you could probably get away with just mentioning them on GitHub, rather than mentioning them in your license since they didn't make the final product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20326" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T12:56:39.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-28T14:40:03.217" Score="1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This compatibility chart provided by GNU&lt;/a&gt; appears to state that a GPLv3 program can include a LGPLv2.1-only library. This doesn't make sense to me as the LGPLv2.1 license would have to be compatible with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this combination possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:06:55.187" Title="LGPLv2.1 + GPLv3 = Okay?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10355" CreationDate="2020-08-28T15:04:38.033" Score="6" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal when i download a software under AGPL-3, modify it, put it on a vending machine and place the vending machine in a public place, where everybody can use it, without publishing the modifications i made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do i have to inform the customers about the AGPL-3 software i use in the vending machine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that i need to provide the source when i run it on a server and let users communicate with it. But does this count as a server? Is it different when i run only the GUI and the ejection controller in the vending machine but do everything else on my server that is connected via a network? Do the customers legally count as users of the software? Does it make a difference if it is the GUI or some background program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20327" LastEditorUserId="20327" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:32:18.727" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T07:34:29.493" Title="AGPL-3.0 Software on a vending machine" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10351" CreationDate="2020-08-28T15:06:55.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Section 3 of the LGPLv2.1 seems to be explain this quite clearly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:06:55.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10352" CreationDate="2020-08-28T16:49:26.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you sell any device which uses GPL-licensed software, you are required to make the software available in the form the devices uses it. The same principle applies to AGPL software - with the added requirement that the software is also made available when the users interact with the software via a network interface, thus the software works server-side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, if you use GPL &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; AGPL software on a machine, you are required to make an offer to provide the full sources to the code on that device. It doesn't matter wheter GUI or backend. The simple fact is: you convey the software, thus you are bound by the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;$4: You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you&#xA;receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and&#xA;appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice (...) and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§5 You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to&#xA;produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the&#xA;terms of section 4, provided that (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§6: You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of&#xA;sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable&#xA;Corresponding Source under the terms of this License: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the software is AGPL, you are required to publish it also, if the software runs &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt;, on that device or a remote server and is used for the functionality of the service in any way. And it doesn't matter wheter it's GUI or backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Customers who &lt;em&gt;buy the vending machine&lt;/em&gt; fall under both GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question seems about users of the vending machines who just interact with it to purchase something... tricky. I still feel that an offer needs to be made for the AGPL case - the vending machine is in that case the client which interacts with the server - and then the offer has to be made and the user has to be made aware of the fact; it's just an uncommon, custom client, but that does not mean the AGPL license has no effect - it works just the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from AGPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;interacting with it remotely through a computer network (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T17:07:33.077" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T17:07:33.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10352" CreationDate="2020-08-28T20:37:42.887" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elegant and interesting question.  My read of the AGPL is that you are fine to build your own terminal containing third-party GPL/AGPL software, put it in a public place, and allow the public to interact with it, all without triggering either AGPL or GPL source distribution obligations.  I note that you have stipulated that you will retain ownership of the device, and this is important: once ownership passes to another, software has been conveyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, your terminal is a device which allows users to interact with third-party software on a remote server via a network, and that software (on the remote server) was received by you under AGPL, at that point it seems to me that you trigger AGPL s13 obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the customers legally count as users of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what you're asking.  If you mean do customers using your point-of-sale device to interact with remote server software over a network count as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;users interacting with [the server software] remotely through a computer network&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; for the purposes of AGPL s13, then yes, it's pretty clear to me that they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T07:34:29.493" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T07:34:29.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10348" CreationDate="2020-08-29T02:34:32.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is my understanding as a long time member of the open-source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first, if your employer owns the copyright to all the code they are not bound by the GPL, the GPL only binds them if they are redistributing GPL code owned by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, (unless you have previously made a physical distribution under option 6b) there is nothing in the GPL that requires offering the code to everyone, so even if the code is a derivative work of other GPL code, putting it behind a registration form should not be a problem from that angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one area where you may have to be careful is if the work is a derivative of other GPL code &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you are distributing the work in binary form. In this case you must comply with one of the options listed in section 6 of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options a, b are only relavent to physical media distribution. Option c is only relavent if the distribution is noncommercial and the place you got the code from used option b. Option e is only relavent for distribution through peer to peer networks (and mostly references option d anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that leaves you with option d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or&#xA;for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the&#xA;same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require&#xA;recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the&#xA;place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may&#xA;be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports&#xA;equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the&#xA;object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server&#xA;hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available &amp;gt; for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret this as it being ok to put the source and binaries behind the same registration wall. But not to distribute the binaires openly while putting the source behind a registration wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastEditorUserId="2975" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T15:46:24.803" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T15:46:24.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10359" CreationDate="2020-08-29T06:18:45.717" Score="1" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in creating a fork of an abandoned software. The software which is no longer maintained is release under the terms of Apache 2 license.&#xA;Am I allowed to create my patches under a less permissive license and so, gradually replace the whole software license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation agree that the Apache License 2.0 is a free software license, compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3,[7] meaning that code under GPLv3 and Apache License 2.0 can be combined, as long as the resulting software is licensed under the GPLv3.[8]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can do with it derivatives ... So here is how I interpret this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my code is written in Python,  can I re-used the abandoned software as a module (released under APACHE-2) and add my wrapper under GPL-3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the APACHE-2 license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated in this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why not AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference in the case the abandonware is licensed under MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20335" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T15:48:31.913" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T07:11:18.547" Title="Adding AGPL patches to a Software with APACHE2 or MIT License" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|apache-2.0|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10357" CreationDate="2020-08-30T06:32:01.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my code is written in Python, can I re-used the abandoned software as a module (released under APACHE-2) and add my wrapper under GPL-3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the two licenses are compatible, you can indeed use the Apache-2 licensed code as a module in your GPLv3 licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same holds true when you use the AGPLv3 instead of the GPLv3 or when the third-party module uses the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Apache or MIT code doesn't even have to be abandoned for this. The licenses allow this even while the other project is still actively being developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T06:32:01.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10357" CreationDate="2020-08-30T06:32:39.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have found unmaintained software, distributed under Apache2.  You wish to update it, and to distribute the modified, derivative work under GPLv3/AGPLv3 (you are unclear as to which).  You want to know if this is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My belief, about which &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4149/can-one-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl/4194#4194&quot;&gt;I have written elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, is that one can take a piece of existing software under licence A (which permits re-distribution, and modified versions), and modify and release it under the more onerous combined requirements of licences A and B, provided that nothing in A forbids adding the extra requirements of B, and nothing in B forbids the requirements already applied by A.  Note that this isn't dual-licensing, where the user can choose which licence applies; this is having both sets of requirements apply &lt;em&gt;at the same time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 explicitly forbids additional requirements over and above its own, so the above para is only satisfied for licences A and GPLv3 if the requirements of A are a pure subset of the requirements of GPLv3.  This is also referred to as licence A being &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; with GPLv3.  Apache2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is such a licence&lt;/a&gt;, as is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my understanding (which is not universally held; see the linked post on law.se) is that you can make a derivative work, and release it under GPLv3, or AGPLv3, provided that you also meet the requirements of s4 of the Apache licence (include a copy of the licence text and any pre-existing NOTICE file, maintain existing copyright statements, and make it clear which files have been modified).  The same analysis applies if A=MIT, provided you meet the even-less-onerous requirements of MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I urge you not to think about this in terms of applying individual &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPLv3 patch files&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; until the work is completely replaced, as you apparently do in para one of your question.  Unless you're actually distributing the work as original+patches, this encourages a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10143/458&quot;&gt;coloured bricks&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; view of copyright, which I think is an unhelpful view.  Instead, as soon as you make changes to the codebase, the entire thing is a derivative work in copyright terms, and can be distributed on any permitted set of requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T07:11:18.547" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T07:11:18.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10391" CreationDate="2020-08-30T17:37:05.760" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;My distro (Gentoo) has added a patch to GCC that enables an internal macro.&#xA;I already have enabled that macro in my CFLAGS for a while. I asked them on their IRC about this issue, that now GCC warns about overridden macros, and in some cases when &lt;code&gt;-Werror&lt;/code&gt; flag (&lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Docs&lt;/a&gt;) is enabled as well, either compilation or configuration of some specific packages fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, they told me that their policy is to disable &lt;code&gt;-Werror&lt;/code&gt; in all packages (&lt;code&gt;ebuild&lt;/code&gt;s), which seemed not to be the case here. Then they began blaming me for adding a macro to CFLAGS (while the package manager, portage, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization#How_are_they_used.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;supports&lt;/a&gt; adding more flags).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such case is PulseAudio, in their configuration script in a specific part, they force &lt;code&gt;-Werror&lt;/code&gt; (this seems reasonable to me because a developer wants to know about possible flaws).&#xA;Now, what should I do? Should I open a bug report in Gentoo's own issue tracker, or in the upstream's (PulseAudio)? (I've already written the patch for a possible pull request).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. That macro is &lt;code&gt;-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20342" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T07:58:42.620" Title="How should I contribute to fix a possible bug in an open source project?" Tags="|contributor|linux-distribution|gcc|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10360" CreationDate="2020-08-31T08:44:56.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bug report with the upstream maintainers is not likely to be accepted. It is not a bug in their build scripts that you force-define a macro that a new version of the compiler also defines, especially as it is a macro with a leading underscore, which are reserved for use by implementers of C and C++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a Gentoo policy to remove all uses of the &lt;code&gt;-Werror&lt;/code&gt; flag, then a bug report that points one out that has been missed might be accepted, but there could also be reasons why this particular instance is left in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the most reliable course of action is to remove this macro from your local, custom, CFLAGS definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T08:44:56.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-31T08:45:42.617" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.88/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ITU-T Recommendation T.88&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-T.88-201808-I/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;includes software&lt;/a&gt;. The software seems to be behind a paywall today, but I downloaded it 2 years ago when it wasn't. The accompanying copyright notice says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ICT Link (contact: Shigetaka Ogawa; address: 1-24-5 Komaba Meguru, Tokyo, Japan; Tel. +81 3 5465 0904; email: s_ogawa@mug.biglobe.ne.jp (hereinafter the &amp;quot;Software Copyright Holder&amp;quot;) holds or has the right to license copyright with respect to the accompanying software (hereinafter the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;). The Software Copyright Holder hereby grants to you an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable copyright licence to prepare derivative works of (including translations, adaptations, alterations), the Software and reproduce, display, distribute and execute the Software and derivative works thereof, for the limited purposes of: (i) including the Software in a conforming implementation of this ITU Recommendation, (ii) evaluating the Software and any derivative works thereof for inclusion in your implementation of this ITU Recommendation, and (iii) determining whether your implementation conforms to this ITU Recommendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I include this software in a project I am developing that has an Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20349" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T08:45:42.617" Title="Include ITU-T software in an Apache 2.0 licensed project" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10370" CreationDate="2020-08-31T11:38:03.783" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am being asked to deploy Notepad++ (a software distributed under GPL) in an enterprise which is a SaaS company. Before doing so, I want to make sure our users wouldn't be violating the license in anyway so I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looked around&lt;/a&gt; for the terms of use and what it is meant for and how it can be used etc..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a legal person so possible I didn't read between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am trying to make sure is that, I use notepad++ as an IDE to create a software of my own and sell it commercially without violating GPL ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20351" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T18:58:42.423" Title="Distribute GPL software in enterprise" Tags="|gpl|commercial|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12979" CreationDate="2020-08-31T17:38:53.547" Score="8" ViewCount="701" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand exactly when a work becomes a &amp;quot;derivative work,&amp;quot; and how it affects licensing of my project. In my situation, we have a scientific code that we have written which is licensed under the MIT license. It uses the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) which is licensed under the GPLv3 (specifically not the LGPL). It is obvious to me that, once compiled and statically linked, the resulting binaries (and subsequently their source) must be distributed under the more restrictive GPLv3. However, we never distribute any binaries or any source licensed under the GPL. Therefore my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I license and distribute source code under the MIT license which requires a GPL'd library to compile if I do not include anything derived from the GPL'd library?&lt;/strong&gt; That is, does the dependency on a GPL'd library only &amp;quot;kick in&amp;quot; once compiled/linked into a binary? Or does the dependency itself mean that all source files which need to be linked with the GPL'd library need to be under the GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the following questions before but they don't seem to quite answer my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/using-gpl-library-with-mit-licensed-code&quot;&gt;Using GPL library with MIT licensed code&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9728/gpl-3-0-library-in-mit-project&quot;&gt;GPL-3.0 library in MIT project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8797/what-if-i-dont-know-whether-my-program-will-be-linked-to-a-gpl-library-or-not&quot;&gt;What if I don&amp;#39;t know whether my program will be linked to a GPL library or not?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4362/gpl-2-derivative-works&quot;&gt;GPL-2 Derivative works&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;s&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10287/can-an-npm-package-have-an-mit-license-on-github-if-it-depends-on-mit-packages-w&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/495361/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lwn.net/Articles/495361/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20354" LastEditorUserId="20354" LastEditDate="2022-06-28T14:13:57.763" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T09:04:33.297" Title="Source-only distribution of MIT-licensed project which depends on GPL library" Tags="|gpl|mit|license-compatibility|derivative-works|linking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-31T14:22:56.447" Score="2" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latex-project.org/lppl/lppl-1-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.latex-project.org/lppl/lppl-1-3/&lt;/a&gt; but I still don't really understand how this licence works. Can I use the &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; under this licence in a commercial product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20359" OwnerDisplayName="illya_k" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T06:12:48.180" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T08:16:11.930" Title="The LaTeX project public license (LPPL), version 1.3" Tags="|lppl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10383" CreationDate="2020-09-01T01:20:42.170" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished my personal project about writing a simple version of Apache Tomcat. The &amp;quot;simple version&amp;quot; means following the main structure and implementing the basic features of Apache Tocmat. The project does help me a lot in learning about how a server works. It was based on a book which explains the principles of Apache Tomcat. The project was only for educational use and definitely will not get into commercial use. I want to put it on github so my friends can also read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to add the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache license2.0&lt;/a&gt; to my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, do I need to follow the naming restriction when it is not a commercial product:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;If you use the words &amp;quot;Tomcat&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Apache&amp;quot; in your product name then you must call your product &amp;quot;... for Apache Tomcat&amp;quot;. No other form of product name that includes &amp;quot;Tomcat&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Apache&amp;quot; is permitted.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is found on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tomcat.apache.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official page of Apache Tomcat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the silly question, but I do not know much about copyright and licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATED&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book I mentioned contains the source code of Tomcat to help describing the features. Also, I have utilitzed a component of Tomcat &lt;code&gt;jspc&lt;/code&gt; in my project. Sorry I didn't explain it clearly in my first post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20357" LastEditorUserId="20357" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T01:59:54.783" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T07:05:49.703" Title="Do I need to add a license to my personal project about Apache Tomcat?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10318" CreationDate="2020-09-01T09:27:24.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice is already protected by the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore you can achieve the desired effect, without modifying the license itself, by just adding your URL to the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like &lt;code&gt;Copyright © 2020 Your Name (your-url.xyz)&lt;/code&gt; should be sufficient to ensure that anyone who reads the license can easily find your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19001" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T09:27:24.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10382" CreationDate="2020-09-01T17:30:59.800" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is more about conventional practice, so I don't include the detail about code or environment. It should be applied to all type of API call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was asked on SE exchange, but it is off topic so I repost a new one here as suggested (with adjustment to the question). I don't delete the question on SE to preserve the answers.  My GitHub project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hunghvu/dynamic-wallpaper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/hunghvu/dynamic-wallpaper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's say I make a call to &lt;a href=&quot;https://picsum.photos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorem Picsum&lt;/a&gt; (a public free image API without API key) in my code. My intention is to implement the feature that get a picture from an API call and make it as wallpaper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it legal to push the codebase to GitHub public repository (without executable file)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it legal to make an executable file and put to release section?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any clear information about these, since they don't have Q&amp;amp;A section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look at other APIs like &lt;a href=&quot;https://placeholder.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Placeholder&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pexels.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pexels&lt;/a&gt;, it seems like there is a restriction when putting the application to production server, or the application has a high amount of request to the API server, which make senses (rate, access limit, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, an application, or code snippet, I want to publish are simply out-of-class/personal/student project that I make during spare times. Certainly, it isn't the same as what commercial apps do (high amount of API call, etc); well, unless my repository somehow becomes popular and my application is downloaded/used 1 million times, then it will be a different story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because Lorem Picsum uses database of &lt;a href=&quot;https://unsplash.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unsplash&lt;/a&gt;, how will this relationship affect the rules? I choose Lorem Picsum because they don't require Authorization, so it is safe to publish code on GitHub (or is it?), and I can ignore the complexity of applying authorization process into the code (I'm learning about API).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the matter that I asked in question 1 and 2, can they be applied to all public API, or will it vary from one to another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20363" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T11:05:38.840" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T11:05:38.840" Title="Publish code on GitHub with a call to public API" Tags="|github|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10363" CreationDate="2020-09-01T18:58:42.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not restrict how you may use the software, it only places conditions how you can distribute or modify the software. Thus, using a GPL-covered IDE to produce proprietary software is perfectly fine. Similarly, it is well-established that using GPL-covered compilers (like GCC) to compile proprietary software is perfectly fine. An editor, IDE, or compiler only processes your software as data, but does not insert GPL-covered material into your software that could cause your software to be subject to the GPL. There could be issues around included templates, snippets, or macros, but those are usually exempted from the license. As far as I can tell, Notepad++ does not have a built-in snippet library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing commercial use is not unique to the GPL. &lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; open source licenses allow use for any purpose, including purposes like creating proprietary software. The “freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose” is the foundation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom&lt;/a&gt; concept. Similarly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; forbids “Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” (OSD #6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T18:58:42.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10372" CreationDate="2020-09-02T09:59:31.547" Score="3" ViewCount="1118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a Software licenses that force contribution back to the original project only for commercial use (projects that wants to make money out of it)?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to phrase the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can use and fork the project, but only the original can be used commercially so they have to get the changes to be accept in the original in order to sell product with it, &lt;strong&gt;they can sell only products with the original code&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if it will fail the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DesertIslandTest&lt;/a&gt; because I am talking about giving back only for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licenses and their characteristics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simulator question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9204/are-there-any-established-licenses-that-encourage-users-of-my-projects-to-give-b&quot;&gt;users of my projects to give back?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20277" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T19:25:05.537" Title="Software licenses that force contribution back to the original project only for commercial use" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2020-09-02T10:57:51.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a Software licenses that force contribution back to the original project only for commercial use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but it would not be an open source license because this is a clear violation of the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no discrimination against fields of endeavor&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By forcing commercial users to do something, you are restricting them from using the program - the desert island test is one of the examples of this, as the smart entrepreneur on the desert island wouldn't be able to modify and sell the software .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T10:57:51.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10375" CreationDate="2020-09-02T18:41:50.000" Score="4" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an Electron app that I would like to distribute on the App Store. The app runs completely fine without any GPL parts or elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app itself has plugin support and communicates with them through the command line, means the plugins are standalone applications that can also ran independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would like to offer the main app on the App Store &lt;strong&gt;without&lt;/strong&gt; plugins. The plugins or extensions are downloadable through my public repository on GitHub where of course all plugins are open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that interfere with the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of GPL? As far as I understand the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of GPL is free open source software and the opportunity to modify software, and I think I cover this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My closed-source main app has no GPL elements and can run without plugins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugins can be executed through the command-line and don't require the host-application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All plugins are open source and publicly forked on my GitHub repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plugins are loaded from a user-readable/writable location&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anything I explained smell like it could potentially violate the purpose of GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification: The plugins are able to load an image file and create a PNG out of it. I would like to use libraries like FFMPEG for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;% plugin-a /path/to/image/file.HEIC -o /output/path.png&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20372" LastEditorUserId="20372" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T18:47:55.657" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T19:16:31.257" Title="Is it ok to side-load GPL software into a closed-software?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10374" CreationDate="2020-09-02T19:16:31.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on your description, it doesn't seem like these are really &amp;quot;plugins&amp;quot; at all - they can function entirely separately from your main application, and don't need anything from the main application. That sounds like a separate program, so the GPL which covers those programs wouldn't extend to your Electron app. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FSF have their views on this in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which again sounds like your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to whether you are interfering with the &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL, that depends who you ask. The FSF would like pretty much everything to be Free Software (capitals deliberate), would prefer that your release all your software as GPL and that you do not run it on Apple hardware which does not give users the freedoms they desire. Other groups may view the intent of the GPL differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T19:16:31.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10378" CreationDate="2020-09-02T19:21:53.390" Score="11" ViewCount="3596" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have an app and some of its parts are illegal in some countries (e.g. due to different copyright laws in different countries). And the app is licensed under (L/A)GPL v3. Can I forbid using and distribution my app in certain countries? If no, are there any open-source licenses that allow this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20373" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T18:46:20.543" Title="Forbid distribution of the app licensed with GPL v3 in certain countries" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10371" CreationDate="2020-09-02T19:25:05.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your other way to phrase the question isn't equivalent to the first. If you want to force commercial users to not modify your software at all, that's impossible. If you want to force commercial users to make their changes available to the original project, that is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do this by dual licensing. Software is open-source as long as it's available under at least one open-source license, even if it's also available under other non-open-source licenses. Choose one license that's copyleft and allows commercial use (like the GPL, or even the AGPL), and another license that disallows commercial use but is otherwise permissive (like CC-BY-NC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11403" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T19:25:05.537" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10376" CreationDate="2020-09-02T20:11:00.387" Score="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license either is an open-source license, or it restricts usage of the software to certain regions or types of usage. You cannot have both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it is not your responsibility as the software creator to forbid people the usage when the law already forbids the usage. That serves no purpose (law overrides license, always) and would impose an unnecessary restriction when the law changes. It's the responsibility of the users of software to obey the law and not use unlawful tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do is to add to your README a section which explains the legal situation with an emphasis on countries where the usage of your software or its distribution to certain regions might expose a person to risk of prosecution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T05:10:51.450" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T05:10:51.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10380" CreationDate="2020-09-03T06:24:37.593" Score="6" ViewCount="702" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a license that would allow anyone to contribute to an open source project. That of course includes copying/forking the code and applying changes to it, that potentially (and maybe only partially) go back into the original source code via a review process. (pull-request on GitHub or similar processes) The sources itself are available on GitHub and as archived downloads from other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making builds for distribution should be exclusively reserved to the project owner. These builds are, just as the source code, available to everyone and free of charge and may also be redistributed by third parties for free. Usage of the software in commercial and non-commercial products is allowed and would require credit, however the builds itself can not be part of the price in commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating customized builds or builds derived from the source code or available builds should not be allowed if these are going to be distributed in any form. Creating builds for the sole purpose of verifying that available builds are indeed created from the available source code may be allowed of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15655" LastEditorUserId="15655" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T07:36:16.350" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T08:41:42.167" Title="License that allows contribution and distribution but no custom builds" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10379" CreationDate="2020-09-03T08:41:42.167" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no open source license that would satisfy these requirements because it goes against the fundamental principles of Software Freedom and the Open Source Definition. The freedom to create (competing) forks is essential: free software should not be shackled to a particular maintainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A milder version of your license situation could be possible though: preventing modified binaries from being distributed &lt;em&gt;under the same name&lt;/em&gt;. The Artistic License contains such a provision, but is a really bad license in this scenario. More reasonably, your project could establish and defend a trademark for the name of the software. This strategy is e.g. used by Mozilla software like Firefox. However, the result of some versions of the Mozilla trademark policy was that projects like Debian considered it to be non-free software, so that they included rebranded versions instead: Firefox became Iceweasel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T08:41:42.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10376" CreationDate="2020-09-03T08:59:42.843" Score="16" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No and No, and also you shouldn't&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;License&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement you propose is in contradiction with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official definition&lt;/a&gt; of open source, namely with criteria 1 and 5 (since I interpret inhabitants of a certain country as group of persons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also in contradiction with the definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt;, from which the official open source definition indirectly derived, and which is short enough to be printed in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;misconception&lt;/a&gt; about what &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Responsibility&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;planetmaker's answer already states that it is nor your responsibility to prevent people from using your software, which I agree with.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I want to go one step further though, and say that from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ethical standpoint&lt;/a&gt;, it is very much your responsibility to make your software as free as possible, to help people keep (or regain) the control over their own computing.&#xA;What ever oppressive laws prohibit the use of free software in some country, it is not our job to support them in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T08:59:42.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10369" CreationDate="2020-09-03T11:02:16.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, it's legal, at least until it causes them a problem.  Then it might not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What Lorem Picsum do around the back is their problem, not yours.  You're using their service, is all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That's too general a question to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for best practice, I'll consider a similar situation: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ntppool.org/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NTP Pool Service&lt;/a&gt;.  They run a volunteer global network of timeservers which no permission is required to use; anyone who wants to may configure their own clocks to sync from the server pool, with no registration or request required, which seems much like the Lorem Picsum service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ntppool.org/en/vendors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty clear&lt;/a&gt; that people who sell equipment, or distribute code, that wants to know what time it is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;must absolutely not use the default pool.ntp.org zone names as the default configuration in [their] application or appliance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the project has a procedure where any vendor can apply for a pool DNS zone of their own.  The Acme Corp. then configures their FooBoxes to get time from &lt;code&gt;[0123].acme.pool.ntp.org&lt;/code&gt;.  The servers returned by the query are just ordinary pool servers, but because they're reached through a vendor-specific DNS lookup, if/when FooBoxes malfunction and do thousands more NTP queries than they should, this can be detected and mitigated through the DNS.  When people sidestep this policy, either deliberately or by failure to know it exists, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/709874/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;things can go badly wrong&lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure: I wrote the linked article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with regard to you and Lorem Picsum, I think the thing to do is &lt;strong&gt;ask them what they would like you to do&lt;/strong&gt;.  Be prepared for the answer to take some time coming: if they've not been asked before, it may take them time to formulate policy; indeed, it may even take them time to decide &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to formulate policy.  Be prepared for them to say &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, and honour their wishes if they do so.  Don't release code that uses their servers until they have given clear approval for you to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you allow this relationship to become adversarial, you risk your installed user base suddenly having dead picture links spring up all over, when Lorem Picsum work out how to block your users' requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T11:02:16.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10367" CreationDate="2020-09-03T16:22:35.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand your question, you have written a server that offers a subset of the functionality of Apache Tomcat and you based your design on a book that describes the design principles of such a server (using Apache Tomcat source code as illustration) and using some libraries you took from Apache Tomcat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license is a permissive license that does not restrict what you can choose as a license for your own code too much. The Apache license is incompatible with the GPLv2 license, but most other licenses can be freely combined with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use nearly any license you want for your server, as long as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you include a copy of the Apache license for the parts of the source code that are under that license, alongside the license for your own code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if any of the Apache-licensed parts have a NOTICES file, you include a copy of that file (or have a way to display its contents on your UI)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for using the names Apache and/or Tomcat, those are protected by trademarks and as you are effectively creating a competing product, you should choose a different name for your server. Be creative and don't let yourself be guided by the fact that the big &amp;quot;competitor&amp;quot; is called Tomcat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T07:05:49.703" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T07:05:49.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10385" CreationDate="2020-09-03T17:44:45.093" Score="15" ViewCount="2940" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to write some software, in my free time, and release it under GPLv3. As I understand it, this would imply that any software that uses that code must also abide by the terms of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work on a project which is closed source, and while I would like it to be free software, I certainly do not have the power to make it that way. But the code I write would be helpful for my work (in fact my motivation for writing it is to help at work, but I am being careful to avoid writing it in a professional capacity as I know that this sometimes can cede the copyright to my employer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if my organisation were to adopt my code without my permission, it would be a clear violation of the license terms. My question is: Am I free to give an exception in this case, given that I hold the copyright for this program? Either explicitly, or by simply never mentioning that the software is free in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing the answer is &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, since I think that the burden of enforcing a license is probably on the person who owns it. But I'm not sure. Could someone clarify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="20382" LastEditDate="2022-10-03T16:30:28.453" LastActivityDate="2022-10-03T16:30:28.453" Title="Can I make a personal exception to a license I grant?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2020-09-03T18:26:25.887" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, yes, if you hold the copyright to some code, you may issue simultaneous licenses for others to make use of that code under different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the code I write would be helpful for my work (in fact my motivation for writing it is to help at work, but I am being careful to avoid writing it in a professional capacity as I know that this sometimes can cede the copyright to my employer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ensure you have not already signed a blanket agreement to transfer copyright of all work you create (that is germane to your responsibilities as an employee), whether created on company time or not. This is extremely common practice for employment that involves creative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you do own the copyright free and clear, you would be putting yourself in a position of simultaneously being an employee and an external vendor. Management might look askance at licensing code from an employee: they might not wish to be left asking, &amp;quot;If we need to fire him, what's our strategy to get continued updates?&amp;quot; Even if they do agree, your project would then be directly involved in your work, so doing continued work as &amp;quot;outside employment&amp;quot; for which you retain the copyright could become impossible (unless you work out an explicit agreement about this in advance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, if my organisation were to adopt my code without my permission, it would be a clear violation of the license terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your organization plans to distribute a piece of software which includes your GPL'd work, yes. If they plan to only use it internally (e.g., to run computations internally, or to run a public Web service) then the GPL imposes no responsibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T03:35:48.083" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T03:35:48.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2020-09-03T18:26:28.933" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A clear 'yes', your reasoning is sound in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the (sole) author, you decide who gets the software under which license. If that means that everyone gets it under GPL and your employer under a special license with additional rights (and possibly obligations), that's totally in your power to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't give any indication for this, so it likely does not apply: The only thing you will need to care about is, that your software does not depend on nor is derived from other software where you are NOT the sole copyright holder. In that case, you would not have the permission to re-license it so freely, but it would depend on the license of what you built on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T18:26:28.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10376" CreationDate="2020-09-03T18:46:20.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer: A &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; is the permission given by the author of a software (or other kind of copyright protected work) to do something with the software that requires the permission of the author according to the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the law states that something is allowed or forbidden independently of the permission of the author, the license terms do not have any effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a country where the law forbids the distribution of certain software, it does not matter that the GPL states that distribution is allowed: It's forbidden by the law, so a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; cannot allow it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, in a country where the law allows using foreign source code in closed-source programs without the author's permission, it does not matter that the GPL forbids this: It's allowed by law, so a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; cannot forbid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for the (L)GPL and for the MS EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your actual question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... some of its parts are illegal in some countries ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the only reason why you want to forbid using the software in some countries, this is no reason to forbid the use in those countries in the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote above, it does not matter what the license says if the law forbids using the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may publish your program under (L)GPL and point out that the use or distribution of your program may be illegal according to the laws of certain countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T18:46:20.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2020-09-04T08:43:15.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the only contributor, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the nature of Open Source is that it attracts contributions from other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option is to simply refuse contributions.  If people want changes, they have to fork the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, you can maintain two versions, one under GPL and one for the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For big contributions, it is easy. You include them in the GPL version and not in the company version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is small bug fixes.  Somebody sends you a patch that fixes a bug.  As is often the case, the hard part was &lt;em&gt;finding&lt;/em&gt; the bug, the fix is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You dutifully patch the GPL version and leave the company version alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now you know about a bug in the company version.  You know where it is, you know how to fix it.  And the contributors patch is really the only sensible way of fixing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is the headache that makes dual licence projects so hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2971" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T08:43:15.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10384" CreationDate="2020-09-05T07:16:30.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am being careful to avoid writing it in a professional capacity as I know that this sometimes can cede the copyright to my employer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Am I free to give an exception in this case, given that I hold the copyright for this program? Either explicitly, or by simply never mentioning that the software is free in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to retain the copyright and keep the code available under the GPL, you should talk to your employer about it.  You are definitely allowed to license the code under a different license as long as you are the sole copyright holder, i.e. you haven't accepted code from anyone else who expects their changes to be available under the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However your employer will &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; want to have code in their software that is copyrighted by someone else and that they do not have a valid license for.  They will be assuming the code you write will be copyrighted by them.  If you try to sneak it in without mentioning it then at the least you are setting yourself up for an angry manager or executives.  If your library is available on github, it's possible they will find out about the code copying.  There are automated tools available that check for just this sort of thing, where employees might copy code from open source projects.  The copying could be inadvertent or just well-intentioned by employees that don't know or care much about licensing, but it can cause problems for a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt your employer could be in trouble for you copying code you own into their product.  Since you were the copyright holder at the time and you are the one that incorporated the code into their product, they could rely on your employment contract.  If you ever came after them for money, they could show how it was done in bad faith, and possibly have the copyright transferred.  There's always the case where you die in a car accident and they no longer have any sort of relationship to whoever owns the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are things managers and executives don't want to worry about and they will probably be pissed if they find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18350" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T07:16:30.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10395" CreationDate="2020-09-05T07:22:40.930" Score="1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a project with the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIA3G.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qIA3G.png&quot; alt=&quot;license&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have the right to the &lt;strong&gt;BUNDLE&lt;/strong&gt; where I do not want clients to resell the &lt;strong&gt;BUNDLE&lt;/strong&gt; they have bought?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it sufficient to include the &lt;strong&gt;license of the modules / libraries&lt;/strong&gt; in a file such as thirdPartiesNotices.txt as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/master/ThirdPartyNotices.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VS Code&lt;/a&gt; does?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20398" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T07:26:28.720" Title="Do I have the right to the bundle that generate by / dependent on open-source libraries?" Tags="|commercial|distribution|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10360" CreationDate="2020-09-05T07:58:42.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, you propose the fix to whichever group created the code that caused the issue. So in your case, if the possible bug you're trying to fix is caused by some code in the upstream project (e.g. PulseAudio), you should file a bug report and propose your fix in the upstream project. If the bug is caused by code in Gentoo, such as a patch applied by an ebuild, then you should file your report and propose the fix in the Gentoo bug tracker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the former case, if the bug is caused by upstream code, generally it should be possible to confirm it by reproducing the bug without any Gentoo-specific infrastructure. Download and compile the upstream project's source code manually, following the instructions they give, and tweak compiler options or whatever you need to do to get the bug to occur. Ideally, you would even do it on a non-Gentoo system or two. This has two benefits: first, it proves that the bug has nothing to do with any customizations applied by Gentoo or anyone else, and second, it lets you work out a clear procedure for reproducing the bug, which will be tremendously valuable to the upstream project's developers when they are evaluating your bug report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're quite confident that the bug does not exist in the upstream code, but it was introduced by some Gentoo-specific customization, then you can propose to the Gentoo people that they change that customization. Again, it's tremendously valuable if you can make it happen on a clean Gentoo system configured in the standard way. That proves that the bug has nothing to do with any customizations you may have applied, and it also allows the developers to reproduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you may run into a situation where it's not possible to reproduce the bug on a clean Gentoo system, and in that case you have to consider the option that it's &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; specific environment that causes the bug. In that case, you're on your own. The &amp;quot;group&amp;quot; that created the code that caused the issue is you, and therefore the only person you can really report the issue to is yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T07:58:42.620" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="456" CreationDate="2020-09-05T17:41:57.933" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If software is open source, then anyone who has a copy can legally make it free online, whether the original author does or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing that has the advantage of being helpful to others who want to use it, as well as potentially enhancing the reputation and influence of the person who does it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T17:41:57.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-06T04:52:16.837" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the license file from some libraries so I can figure out what needs to be included in my own app.  I notice a lot of software includes only a summary of the license, and not a full copy of the license itself.  Why is this so common, and is there some loophole that makes it legal?  For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/mysql-connector-python/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL Connector&lt;/a&gt; Python module is GPLv2, and this is what their license file says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright (c) 2012, 2020, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.&#xA;#&#xA;# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.0, as&#xA;# published by the Free Software Foundation.&#xA;#&#xA;# This program is also distributed with certain software (including&#xA;# but not limited to OpenSSL) that is licensed under separate terms,&#xA;# as designated in a particular file or component or in included license&#xA;# documentation.  The authors of MySQL hereby grant you an&#xA;# additional permission to link the program and your derivative works&#xA;# with the separately licensed software that they have included with&#xA;# MySQL.&#xA;#&#xA;# Without limiting anything contained in the foregoing, this file,&#xA;# which is part of MySQL Connector/Python, is also subject to the&#xA;# Universal FOSS Exception, version 1.0, a copy of which can be found at&#xA;# http://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception.&#xA;#&#xA;# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&#xA;# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.&#xA;# See the GNU General Public License, version 2.0, for more details.&#xA;#&#xA;# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,&#xA;# 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do publish the full license on their &lt;a href=&quot;https://downloads.mysql.com/docs/licenses/connector-python-gpl-en.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;, but the URL is not included in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20405" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T05:28:40.220" Title="Why do some softwares not include the full license?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-06T07:09:13.023" Score="4" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a very complex API endpoint with a documentation licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to its complexity, I am considering developing a commercial visual drag &amp;amp; drop editor (single-page web application) to make working with that API a lot easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to take parts of the documentation and display it in the editor. For example, when the user is editing a certain parameter, I want to show the CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed content for that parameter. It's okay to show the licensed content even behind a paywall &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Application_of_effective_technological_measures_by_users_of_CC-licensed_works_prohibited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-share-cc-licensed-material-on-password-protected-sites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;. Obviously I need to display an &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attribution&lt;/a&gt;, which is not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The documentation is in plaintext, so I intend to write a parser to convert it into something more manageable, such as JSON. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-take-a-cc-licensed-work-and-use-it-in-a-different-format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is expressly allowed under CC.&lt;/a&gt; I can do this in the backend, so if I don't share the JSON I don't even need to worry about section 3 (attribution, sharealike) of CC BY-SA 4.0 for that JSON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I struggle with the definition of &amp;quot;Adapted Material&amp;quot;. Answers to similar questions on OpenSource StackExchange seem to conclude that as long as there is no ancestral path from the editor to the documentation, the editor would not be considered an adapted material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-share-if-i-include-cc-by-sa-artwork-in-my-software&quot;&gt;What do I need to share if I include CC-BY-SA artwork in my software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8111/is-content-licensed-under-cc-by-nc-sa-4-0-allowed-in-app-stores&quot;&gt;Is content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 allowed in app stores?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reading the following CC statements seem to suggest the editor could be actually considered an adapted material of the documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#combining-and-adapting-cc-material&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#combining-and-adapting-cc-material&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-an-adaptation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-an-adaptation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#if-i-create-a-collection-that-includes-a-work-offered-under-a-cc-license-which-licenses-may-i-choose-for-the-collection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#if-i-create-a-collection-that-includes-a-work-offered-under-a-cc-license-which-licenses-may-i-choose-for-the-collection&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And particularly:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Content_-_A_Practical_Guide_to_Using_Creative_Commons_Licences/The_Creative_Commons_licencing_scheme#Adaptation_by_changing_the_context_and_combining_the_work_with_other_content_%E2%80%93_remixes,_mash_ups,_collections_and_work_combinations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A practical guide to CC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from the practical guide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between collections and combinations of works will most likely be an important factor under every jurisdiction. In a collection, e.g. an anthology or a catalogue, a number of works are simply put together for publishing. The different contents stand alone as separate and distinguishable works, so their identification and the identification of each author are unproblematic. Hence, to include a work into a collection will usually not be considered an adaptation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, combining works will in many cases have the effect of “entwining” the individual works causing them to lose their individual expression. Depending on the technique, work combinations tend to display their own aesthetic expression which differs from the individual works which were used. If this is the case, the result will usually have to be considered as “adapted material” and the ND license will not permit its publication unless allowed under the applicable copyright law.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One determining differentiator between collections and combinations is whether the individual works remain separate and distinguishable in the given context. If the work itself was modified, e.g. a text was curtailed or a song remixed, the ND restriction would apply in any case, since mashing up and remixing will usually involve such modifications. If a verbatim copy of the work was, however, simply grouped with others, the result would in many cases be a collection rather than a combination, i.e. there would be no adaptation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If verbatim copies of works were combined to create a new comprehensive work with its own aesthetic expression, the new work would also have to be considered “adapted material.” Here, the combined material would not be “grouped” but rather “merged” resulting in the emergence of a new and larger work which contains both, own and reused material. Examples for this would include the use of a copyright-protected image in a movie, the use of a copyright-protected cartoon character in a video or the above-mentioned use of music tracks in moving images.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In light of the above, it would seem appropriate to adopt the following principle as a general rule of thumb: Every time existing material is merged into a larger work which has a character of its own, the works are adapted in the terms of copyright and the CC ND restriction. The more the individual works are used “as-is” and “stand-alone,” i.e. they are only grouped, the less likely their combination/collection will be considered as adapted material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explanation seems to contrast with the one provided in other related questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/173/what-do-i-need-to-share-if-i-include-cc-by-sa-artwork-in-my-software&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8111/is-content-licensed-under-cc-by-nc-sa-4-0-allowed-in-app-stores&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; and give me the impression that even if you use a CC BY-SA 4.0 protected image in an application, where the image is presented in a way to merge with surrounding visual expression, such application would be considered an adapted material because at that point its a combination of works, not a simple collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So hopefully you can see my struggle with adapted materials. The quote above suggests using any CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed content in a software application would require that application itself to be licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (or compatible license), as long as the licensed content merges with the visual expression of the application. I guess the only way to prevent that is to very clearly make the licensed content pop-out of the application visuals, with a proper attribution footnote or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if I show the documentation snippet for a specific parameter in a way that blends with the UI, that would make the app adapted material, while having the content pop out of the UI and make it look quite foreign, it would no longer be adapted material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10173/how-can-i-use-programming-documentation-without-infringing-copyright&quot;&gt;How can I use programming documentation without infringing copyright?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20406" LastEditorUserId="20406" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T07:38:15.523" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T17:55:57.980" Title="Can I use documentation licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 in an application?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10390" CreationDate="2020-09-06T07:26:28.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have the right to the BUNDLE where I do not want clients to resell the BUNDLE they have bought?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have that right, but you will need to get a lawyer to draft a closed-source license for you. The restriction to disallow reselling is not something that an open-source license can offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license of the libraries you use is compatible with closed-source licenses, so that isn't a hindrance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it sufficient to include the license of the modules / libraries in a file such as thirdPartiesNotices.txt as VS Code does?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T07:26:28.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2020-09-06T09:53:43.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That sounds like a case of a programme (your editor) and data it processes (the documentation). That's two pieces which can work independently and which can be distributed indpendently and would be bundled for convenience reasons in the case you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concerning bundling, the different parts can have different licenses according to common concensus, if each component makes sense on its own. They are considered independent works, they do not directly depend on oneanother - even when they work together. Think of it like this: would it be possible to come-up with another documentation in same format without changing the editor. Or would it make sense to use the documentation in the adapted format in another editor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in your case, you may distribute your editor under whatever license you choose. And you may distribute the adopted documentation under terms of the CC-BY-SA 4.0 (or compatible). That would in your case mean that the &amp;quot;share-alike&amp;quot; part applies to the modified version (=the adaption) in json format (or whatever you choose) which is being digested by your editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T09:53:43.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10398" CreationDate="2020-09-06T11:58:50.470" Score="2" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the first time, we have a plan to use Open source software as it provides a good start and lot of modules by default.&#xA;We have plan to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/axelor/axelor-open-suite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/axelor/axelor-open-suite&lt;/a&gt; which is a open source software for developing business apps.  It comes with AGPL License. Software says you can use it to build your apps. But how can we use this open source software framework to develop our commercial apps and sell? We see &amp;quot;AGPL&amp;quot; license restricts user to modify this source code and sell. i.e. We need to make our full source code public which we dont want.&#xA;I have a few very basic questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do we usually these open source AGPL license softwares either for internal org or commercial products. Where do you make changes to this source code? Clone and do a local change and commit in your private repos? Or you need to fork on the same git and update there?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did we misunderstood this open source software framework license use?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20409" LastActivityDate="2023-12-12T03:27:18.420" Title="Using Axelor-Open-Suite Open source software with AGPL license for commercial product" Tags="|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10397" CreationDate="2020-09-06T13:13:25.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we usually these open source AGPL license softwares either for internal org or commercial products. Where do you make changes to this source code? Clone and do a local change and commit in your private repos? Or you need to fork on the same git and update there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright licenses like the AGPL don't concern themselves with the nitty gritty details of how exactly copies are made and how you make changes to your copy. As far as copyright law (and consequently, copyright licenses) is concerned, there is no difference between forking a git repo and retyping something as you read it from a screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual way when you want to make private changes is that you create a private repository with as copy of the code you want to use as a basis and then make your changes on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did we misunderstood this open source software framework license use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, I don't think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license requires that if you make your product that is based on the framework available to someone outside your organisation, either as a download or as SAAS, then you must make the full source code also available to them under the AGPL license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This does not preclude commercial use, but you can't realistically base your business case on selling copies or basic subscriptions. You have to offer something more to make your business profitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use your software in-house without any problem, even if it is based on an AGPL framework. Providing (access to) software to your employees is generally not considered to be distribution of that software, so the requirements of the AGPL don't trigger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T13:13:25.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10400" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10405" CreationDate="2020-09-06T21:53:12.963" Score="5" ViewCount="568" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a game engine (a set of libraries actually) that simplifies game development with C# language (OK it is yet another game engine :).&#xA;My plan is to make it as free as possible. MIT License looks as a best choice.&#xA;What I call a game engine will consist of a set of libraries that cover game subsystems (Graphics, Audio, Input, Math, etc...)&#xA;I plan to use NOT MODIFIED OpenAL (-Soft) library for sound. It is redistributed under LGPL license.&#xA;Sound subsystem of the game engine will consist of two libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost raw bindings to OpenAL native library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some high level interface to produce sounds in a game (it uses the library #1 internally).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A developer (who uses the engine) will be able to choose option #1 or option #2 depending of his/her knowledge in game development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Redistribution model:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the source files of all libraries of the game engine written by my will be uploaded to GitHub under the MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the libraries written by me in binary form will be available as nugget-packages under the MIT License. Native library OpenAL will be available as an additional multi-platform nugget package redistributed under the LGPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the engine libraries in binary form and the native OpenAL lib in binary form will be available as a single download redistributable under the MIT License with mention that it uses OpenAL library redistributed under LGPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doubts:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the LGPL license many times. I searched the forums. But I'm still not sure that I understand it correctly. Pls help me answer the following questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I create a multi-platform nugget-package which contains a compiled version of LGPL library (OpenAL) and add it to the official nugget repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Yes then What is minimal set of requirements should I met to do it completely legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I redistribute C# OpenAL bindings (without the native lib) under the MIT License? C# bindings mimics the OpenAL API header files almost one to one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I redistribute the game engine libraries written by me and the native OpenAL library in binary form under the MIT License?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Yes, then what is minimal set of requirements should I met to do it completely legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What requirements should be met to legally redistribute the games (in binary form) which use the described game engine (and the OpenAL native library inside)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20413" LastEditorUserId="20413" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T10:37:53.947" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T11:44:53.960" Title="Distributing LGPL library (OpenAL) as part of the MIT licensed game engine" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T09:30:33.717" Score="2" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chrome has a bug where it doesn't properly report download progress for gzip-encoded content. I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AirConsole/xmlhttprequest-length-computable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;library that works around it&lt;/a&gt;, as far as I understand by injecting the fix into the DOM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm wondering, if link to both this library and my own js file on an html page, would the GPL force me to release the code of my own js file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script type=&amp;quot;text/javascript&amp;quot; src=&amp;quot;chrome-bugfix-library.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;script type=&amp;quot;text/javascript&amp;quot; src=&amp;quot;my-code.js&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't use any new API introduced by the library, and my code already worked correctly in Firefox, but with that fix features I developed now work correctly in Chrome as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So since I didn't have to change any of my source code as a result of including that GPL-licensed library, I guess I could at least argue that it's not a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must I disclose my source or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess this is a more specific version of this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4360/what-are-the-implications-of-licensing-a-javascript-library-under-gpl&quot;&gt;What are the implications of licensing a JavaScript library under GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I got a message from the library developer that I could use it under the MIT license, so that solves my problem, however I'm still curious as to the answer of my question. Are function calls due to polyfills enough to invoke GPL terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18009" LastEditorUserId="18009" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T12:15:12.773" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T11:19:44.870" Title="Can I use a GPLv3-licensed workaround for a chrome bug without disclosing the rest of my web page source code?" Tags="|gpl-3|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10401" CreationDate="2020-09-07T15:32:36.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've written a webpage which contains some of your own JS.  This JS requires a call provided by a third-party library, published under GPL, which you also make available on your server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, you have GPL obligations with respect to the existing library.  These include (but are not limited to) making (unminified) source available on demand, and providing a copy of the licence text.  Both of these could be easily accomplished by links in your webpage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, you wonder whether your JS code must also be made available under GPL.  Opinion is divided on whether linking to a GPL library makes your work a derivative; some say &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;it does&lt;/a&gt;, others say &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;it doesn't&lt;/a&gt;, and the question remains unsettled.  Personally, I believe it does, in which case, yes, you must provide unminified source under GPL on demand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you also note that the library author has agreed to make the library available to you under the MIT licence, so the question is now moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T15:32:36.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10406" CreationDate="2020-09-07T19:38:17.967" Score="6" ViewCount="2133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a book on Github (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/iggredible/Learn-Vim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Learn-Vim&lt;/a&gt;) under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Non-Commercial Non-Derivative 4.0 License&lt;/a&gt;. If you're wondering why I selected this particular license, the main reason is because the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You-dont-know-JS&lt;/a&gt; uses the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone asks if he/she can translate my work into a different language. According to this person, my current license doesn't allow for any changes or derivatives. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons site for Non-Commercial Non-Derivative&lt;/a&gt;, I see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material,&#xA;you may not distribute the modified material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand it correctly, translating a body of work to another language is considered creating a &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot;. I think this is why anyone might think he/she cannot make any translation of the original repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I saw other projects using the same Creative Commons License I have being translated into a different language. One example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoeHetfield/You-Dont-Know-JS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese translation of You-dont-know-js&lt;/a&gt; vs &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The original You-dont-know-js&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;(It looks like the owner is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/issues/900&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;aware of the existence of the translation repo&lt;/a&gt;. Also, the forked repo references the original creator at the end of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoeHetfield/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;README&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, can anyone fork my repo and translate it into a different language under the Creative Commons License Non-commercial Non-derivative that I have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, if it provides any help, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smartcopying.edu.au/open-education/creative-commons/quick-guide-to-creative-commons&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; provides an overview of what each variation of the Creative Commons license does. If the answer for the above is a no, should I change the License into Creative Commons NonCommercial 4.0, or Creative Commons NonCommerical-ShareAlike 4.0 or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to allow anyone to translate my work non-commercially and they need to acknowledge the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20424" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T20:19:40.977" Title="Can I create a translation for a project under a Creative Commons non-commercial non-derivative?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10400" CreationDate="2020-09-07T19:49:02.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I create a multi-platform nugget-package which contains a compiled version of LGPL library (OpenAL) and add it to the official nugget repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license does not forbid this, but there might be additional considerations. It would be best if the maintainers of that OpenAL implementation make such an official release in the nugget repository, or that you do so on their behalf (and with their agreement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Yes then What is minimal set of requirements should I met to do it completely legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The minimal requirements depend a bit on the exact LGPL version, but at least you must include a copy of the license text and an indication how and where users can obtain a copy of the source code of the package.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With LGPLv2.1 it could be the case that you would have to host the source code as well, but that is not all that clearly specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I redistribute C# OpenAL bindings (without the native lib) under the MIT License? C# bindings mimics the OpenAL API header files almost one to one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those C# bindings were created by effectively translating the native OpenAL header files, then it can be argued that the C# bindings are a derivative work and that they must also be distributed under the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I redistribute the game engine libraries written by me and the native OpenAL library in binary form under the MIT License?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You may distribute the game engine libraries in binary form under the MIT license, but a binary distribution of the OpenAL library must be done under the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Yes, then what is minimal set of requirements should I met to do it completely legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The minimal requirements to comply with the MIT license is that you include the license text with your distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license has the additional requirement that you inform the users where they can obtain a copy of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What requirements should be met to legally redistribute the games (in binary form) which use the described game engine (and the OpenAL native library inside)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The games can be distributed under any license (including a closed-source license), provided that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the MIT and LGPL license texts are distributed in the documentation, with an indication which parts are subject to the LGPL license (i.e. the OpenAL library). It is preferred that a similar indication is given for the libraries under the MIT license, but that is not a requirement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the LGPL parts can be replaced by the user of the game. This is most easily achieved by dynamically linking to the relevant libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T11:44:53.960" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T11:44:53.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10404" CreationDate="2020-09-07T20:19:40.977" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, can anyone fork my repo and translate it into a different language under the Creative Commons License Non-commercial Non-derivative that I have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. I believe that the copyright laws of several countries even explicitly mention translations as a form of derivative work that requires permission from the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep control over what languages your book is translated into, then you can keep the CC BY-NC-ND license and give each translator a separate license to create their translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone should be able to create a translation, then you could switch the license to CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-SA, but that will have the side effect that other kinds of adaptations and modifications are also possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T20:19:40.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T20:31:40.860" Score="1" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a javascript application that will be sold commercially with a non-free EULA.  I used small sections of code from an MIT licensed project, so I understand I need to include the MIT license text in a LICENSE file.  But how can anybody tell which sections are covered under that license and which sections are my own?  I have not used any full classes, only small snippets scattered all throughout the code.  Maybe this means my usage is not &amp;quot;substantial&amp;quot; and therefore the license does not need to be included, I just wanted to err on the side of caution.&#xA;Due to the nature of javascript, the source code will be distributed, but I will include a LICENSE file, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This is proprietary software.&#xA;Copyright (C) 2020 &amp;lt;my name&amp;gt;&#xA;All rights reserved.  No warranty, explicit or implicit, provided.&#xA;Unauthorized copying of this software is strictly prohibited.&#xA;&#xA;This software uses portions of code under MIT license as shown below.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20405" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T20:31:40.860" Title="How to tell which parts of code are under MIT license?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10422" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:22:47.193" Score="2" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project has files related to CI/CD process in its repository, such as Travis-CI and GitHub Actions configurations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they be classified as source code? Should I put copyright notice into them (all other files (*.java, *.xml, etc) in the project have copyright notice).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18648" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T09:23:26.727" Title="Do I need copyright notice on CI related code?" Tags="|github|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10413" CreationDate="2020-09-08T09:10:25.907" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been looking for illustrations for the commercial website I'm building and I am a bit confused by some license terms and would like to know if someone with experience could answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flaticon.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flaticon&lt;/a&gt; makes it pretty clear that websites and blogs are &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.flaticon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001776217-Blogs-and-websites&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;part of its license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are authorized to use Flaticon images for your own blog and website as main or secondary elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;a href=&quot;https://stock.adobe.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adobe Stock&lt;/a&gt; states the following restrictions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/servicetou/Stock-Additional-Terms-en_US-20200615.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its terms&lt;/a&gt;, section 7)1)A :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;use the Stock Assets in any way that allows a third party to use, download, extract or access the Stock Assets (1) as a stand-alone file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the same for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vectorstock.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VectorStock&lt;/a&gt; for example in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vectorstock.com/faq/members/what-can-i-use-vectorstock-content-for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, section 1)b :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content is strictly prohibited from being used where there is the potential for the file to be downloaded, copied in any way or extracted, reinstated or restored by a third party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, it is fairly easy for anyone using the devtools to extract the image as a separate file. How does this licensing work then ?&#xA;In one place they say that we can use at will on websites (for ex on Abode 3.1 section &amp;quot;audience size does not apply to Works displayed only on websites, social media sites, or mobile applications&amp;quot;), but in the restrictions that we should protect the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are devtools considered a workaround protecting us enough ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to anyone with experience in that domain !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20429" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T09:20:17.203" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T04:48:50.420" Title="How do illustration licenses work for website" Tags="|license|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10401" CreationDate="2020-09-08T11:19:44.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have created a combined work - the web page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web page is a derivative of a GPL work, because it contains parts of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All derivative works of GPL works must be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an exception - if your use is &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; then you do not need to make the entire derivative work GPL (only the combined part). An example of &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; is a disk containing different pieces of software, some of which are GPL. In this case, the whole disk doesn't have to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since you are actually using the software, it's not &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T11:19:44.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6971" CreationDate="2020-09-08T13:55:18.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No. Creative Commons do not host a Markdown version of their licenses.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8152/1082&quot;&gt;The license terms do not require that you distribute a copy of the license.&lt;/a&gt; If you want to distribute an official copy anyway, use the plain text version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T13:55:18.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10410" CreationDate="2020-09-08T15:00:34.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bearing in mind that we're a free software website, and that our answers may well be tinged by a deep belief that freedom is good, a quick perusal of those terms brings one thing clearly to my mind: &lt;strong&gt;these are commercial services, and they want your money&lt;/strong&gt;.  They allow you to make some fettered uses of their stock images, but eventually, you hit their line in the sand, and they want paying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flaticon's terms aren't too bad.  They say that with a standard licence you may use the content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For commercial and personal projects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On digital or printed media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For an unlimited number of times and perpetually&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anywhere in the world&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To make modifications and derived works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're required to attribute them, in a particular way, but that at least absolves you if someone else grabs the image and uses it in a non-compliant way: the fault is clearly the grabber's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Adobe's terms, as you've seen, say that with a standard licence you may&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post the asset to a website or social media site with no limitation on views&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but at the same time you may not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute the stand-alone file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how you're supposed to do that.  If you put the image up on your webserver and put it on a page with a simple &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;img src=...&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tag, which is as simple a definition of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;post the asset to a website&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; as I can imagine, then you've just distributed the standalone file, and are in violation.  You've identified a similar problem with &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the devtools&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;: once an image file is served to a client over the web, then unless the server bends over backwards to make it hard, it's very easy indeed for the client to save a copy.  That's how the web works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to do anything of interest with Adobe stock images, pay the money.  VectorStock may well be the same, though I haven't looked - and of course IANAL/IANYL.  Flaticon is slightly more reasonable in what you can do before you're obliged to pay.  Much better would be to go to &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;, where you can get sixty-million-plus images, all of which are distributed under properly-free licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T04:48:50.420" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T04:48:50.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10393" CreationDate="2020-09-09T05:28:40.220" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that most free software licences require that code covered by them be accompanied by a copy of the licence; GPLv2 requires it in s1, for example.  But we have also noted that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;the licence doesn't bind the rightsholder&lt;/a&gt;.  Assuming Oracle are the sole rightsholder in the code above, as the copyright line suggests they are, then they don't have to obey the GPL when distributing this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does failure to include a copy of the licence make their licence grant invalid?  Personally, I think that if they argued that the licence grant explicitly required a copy of the licence along with the code, then because they didn't give one the grant was never valid, it'd be a pretty diseased court that accepted the argument.  The rightsholder's intention to distribute under GPLv2 is pretty clearly indicated in the header of that file, and as you note they publish a copy of the licence on their website.  I think you're pretty safe to use it, though of course IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that anyone that redistributes it - which includes some fairly big corporations, who are clearly happy that they have the right to do so - doesn't have this freedom.  On my system (Fedora 32), the package that provides this file also includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[me@risby ~]% rpm -ql mysql-connector-python3&#xA;[...]&#xA;/usr/share/licenses/mysql-connector-python3/LICENSE.txt&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and down in that file I find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GNU General Public License Version 2.0, June 1991&#xA;&#xA;The following applies to all products licensed under the GNU General&#xA;Public License, Version 2.0: You may not use the identified files&#xA;except in compliance with the GNU General Public License, Version&#xA;2.0 (the &amp;quot;License.&amp;quot;) ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T05:28:40.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10418" CreationDate="2020-09-09T08:52:35.753" Score="1" ViewCount="896" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in using this (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/awaragi/prometheus-mssql-exporter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/awaragi/prometheus-mssql-exporter&lt;/a&gt;) software within our organisation. This repository has an MIT license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would like to clone this repository to my organisation git and also make some modifications to the code.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can I do so without breaking any licensing agreements? (I am not sure if this has been asked before, could find it.) Thank you helping me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20440" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T21:49:46.863" Title="Using MIT license for commercial purpose" Tags="|mit|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10419" CreationDate="2020-09-09T11:08:09.100" Score="3" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a proprietary (non-open source) commercial application that depends (both directly and indirectly through direct dependencies) on some LGPLv2.1+ libraries (specifically some MinGW64 libraries from MSYS2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have understood that if I distribute the libraries as binary DLLs, I must provide notice of the usage of the LGPL libraries and offer to provide source code for them. This is cumbersome, as I am not in fact in possession of the source code. I would have to download the MSYS2 build scripts and all related source code, and make sure that I can produce the same binaries with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If instead I write a script that downloads the binary packages from the MSYS2 repositories and tell the users of my software to run it, them I think that I am not distributing the libraries myself. Instead, I would distribute my dynamically linked executable, and the downloader script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read section 5 of the LGPLv2.1, I am unsure whether the executable I want to distribute would count as a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot;, and unsure how the other paragraphs of section 5 affect the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to offer source code or mention the LGPL libraries? What other obligations from the LGPL am I left with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20441" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T14:14:33.737" Title="LGPLv2.1: Distributing dynamically linked executable without the LGPL library" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T08:55:28.663" Score="3" ViewCount="2013" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed to use CKEditor5 in a commercial (closed source) application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this github page they use GPL 2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKEditor5 License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will publish any changes to CKEditor5 I will do and make them open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't want to publish my whole application as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK CKEditor5 is a rewrite which shares not much with the CKEditor4. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor4/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKEditor4 License&lt;/a&gt; is LGPL, which means I may use it in my closed source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20452" LastEditorUserId="20452" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T20:09:08.533" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:10:12.960" Title="CKEditor5 in commercial application?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10415" CreationDate="2020-09-10T21:49:46.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT license does not restrict you for your usecase. As you may refer the license wordings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2020 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;“Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mit-license.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20449" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T21:49:46.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10416" CreationDate="2020-09-11T14:14:33.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your executable requires the DLLs to be present when it is run, then your executable is a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; as defined in section 5 of the LGPLv2.1. This is independent of whether the DLLs themselves are distributed together with your executable or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't distribute the DLLs themselves, then your obligations are spelled out in section 6 of the LGPLv2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are required to mention your use of the DLLs, the fact that they are under the LGPLv2.1 license and you must include a copy of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the target audience of your application, you could have an installer download the DLLs you need, or you can document that the user needs to install MSYS2 before they can use your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T14:14:33.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-11T20:43:06.377" Score="3" ViewCount="601" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the question state. When using open source code and there is a &lt;code&gt;// Copyright (c) 2017 xxxxx&lt;/code&gt; in the file.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know I must keep the notice but if I change the code a bit or much do I always keep it or is there some situation when it can be removed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some praxis or even some guideline what to do or not here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20466" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T07:05:35.687" Title="How much changes to open source code is needed to remove the //Copyright (c) 2017 notice, or can it never be removed" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10420" CreationDate="2020-09-12T07:05:35.687" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may help to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10143/458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to get a bit more insight into the mental model you're likely using, and how it sometimes goes wrong.  In any case, it is likely that once someone has a copyright interest in a work, they retain that interest in adaptations or derivatives of the work until their interest expires due to the passage of time.  No amount of incremental changes to the codebase will extinguish that interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if you're using content under a free licence, you also very likely have a licence obligation to preserve these notices: your right to make a transformative work &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt; is conditional on (&lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;) their preservation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the downsides of preserving all pre-existing copyright notices are very small, so I would preserve them as a matter of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T07:05:35.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10408" CreationDate="2020-09-12T09:23:26.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright notices are not &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt;, but it would be reasonably common to add such notices to scripts and config files as well. There is no fundamental difference between a Java program, a shell script, and an actions.yml file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those individual files may or may not be copyrightable in your jurisdiction, but we can't know that up front. If a project has a policy of using such copyright notices, put them everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T09:23:26.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T11:37:35.263" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this is the right forum for this question, I came her form stackoverflow. I would like to include some world maps in my academic publication. As the title suggests, I am working with the maps package with R. The license on the package is a GPL-2 license. I know that some worldmap &amp;quot;shapes&amp;quot; are copyright protected, so I am trying to figure out if that is the case here. The package itself is fine to use, I am however, not sure if the &amp;quot;free to run, study, share, and modify&amp;quot; part of the license applies to the shapes of the countries in plots as well. Am I allowed to publish a map created with that program in an academic journal? I know that the shapefiles come from the Natural Earth project, which can be used freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone understand this better and can shed some light on the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20471" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T11:37:35.263" Title="Shapefiles in R maps package (GPL-2)" Tags="|gpl|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T00:09:59.387" Score="3" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is a partial derivative of this one: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10028/someone-open-sourced-an-un-open-source-project&quot;&gt;Someone open-sourced an un-open-source project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a device and a proprietary software to manage that device. They are developed by some big international company. The proprietary software uses some kind of protocol to exchange information with the device. This protocol was reversed engineered partially via sniffering, partially by decompiling the proprietary software. The protocol itself looks quite huge, but only small part, say 5-10% of all functions was reversed and used in a new open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it legal to publish the open source software, say on github, where this reversed part of the protocol is used?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note 1: The protocol itself is a relatively small part of the new open source software and not clearly visible from the first glance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note 2: Yes, there are words about banning &amp;quot;reverse engineer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;produce derivatives&amp;quot; in the vendor terms of use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From the practical perspective: what can be the consequences from such an action and how it happens?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note 3: Probable options could be: from noone notice, to simple ban of the project / developer account, to court invitation. E.g. a vendor employee notice the software on github and trigger the action&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note 4: The logic can also be the following: The vendor makes money on selling the devices. So appearing a software, which does not expose/exploit any vulnerabilities of a relatively old product will not hurt anyone, even can attract some attention to the products&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonus question: What happens if the new software is published as closed source on some app store?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vendor itself should decompile the new software to prove that the protocol was reversed. This part is totally confusing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20482" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T10:46:38.727" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T18:43:35.987" Title="Using reverse-engineered closed protocol in open source software" Tags="|law|closed-source|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T08:27:19.643" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a web app, and I want to offer an AGPL image editor in it. That image editor is run separately from the app but is displayed in an IFrame on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code of both apps is completely separate and the AGPL licensed editor is unchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this fall under the terms of AGPL? Does the source of the app just including it also need to be open?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20485" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T22:23:21.517" Title="GNU Affero Can I offer in connection to another app?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10427" CreationDate="2020-09-14T13:27:02.550" Score="25" ViewCount="4230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently opened the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code&lt;/a&gt; for the widely-used TeX typesetting system, and was surprised by the restrictive license I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is copyright (C) 1982 by D. E. Knuth; all rights are reserved.&#xA;Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are D. E. Knuth, or if&#xA;(2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. (The WEB system provides&#xA;for alterations via an auxiliary file; the master file should stay intact.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that systems that build on top of TeX, such as LaTeX, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/272425/is-latex-open-source&quot;&gt;have different licenses that are free and open source&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this license pass the definition of free or open source? Or is TeX better understood as propriety software that is merely distributed at no financial cost (&amp;quot;free as in beer&amp;quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20488" LastEditorUserId="20488" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T21:03:55.693" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T15:22:57.240" Title="Is the TeX typesetting system free and open source?" Tags="|license|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10426" CreationDate="2020-09-14T13:47:34.313" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is open source, at least according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, the closest thing the community has to an agreed definition of open source. The clause that allows this is Clause 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of &amp;quot;patch files&amp;quot; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is occasional debate about this clause (which to some extent was added to the Open Source Definition &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of TeX), but it is what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T13:47:34.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T12:32:56.407" Score="2" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to impart a few native features (menus, tabs support etc.) to the original Draw.io project. I cloned the project and started modifying, only to find that the changes I made could not be merged to Draw.io since it deviates vastly from the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to this I decided against submitting a pull request. I was wondering if I could rebrand the software that I built and release it under the same license as of Draw.io (Apache 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to do so? If it is possible, what all things would I need to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20519" OwnerDisplayName="Aswin Rajeev" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T16:28:56.467" Title="Rebrand a modified version of an Apache licensed software" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-09-14T19:16:42.377" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10277" CreationDate="2020-09-14T17:45:58.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license allows a derived work to be published under a different license and &amp;quot;retaining copyright and license notices&amp;quot; does not mean that all copyright notices must be in chronological order next to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, you can write the header of the file like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2020 Cool company. All rights reserved.&#xA; *&#xA; * &amp;lt; Your license text &amp;gt;&#xA; *&#xA; * This file includes work covered by the following copyright and permission notices:&#xA; *&#xA; *  Copyright 2019 Another Extension committers&#xA; *  Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA; *&#xA; *  &amp;lt; Apache license text &amp;gt;&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T17:45:58.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10450" CreationDate="2020-09-14T20:17:45.423" Score="2" ViewCount="577" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a github repository with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pluralsight/git-internals-pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; edited and in a special presentation format. How should I do it? What files the repository should contain and with what contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20416" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T22:16:31.310" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T22:16:31.310" Title="How do I apply the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10426" CreationDate="2020-09-15T00:37:06.430" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;TeX was created before Open Source was formally defined.  Its use is not restricted; it is stated explicitly in Knuth's writings that its methods and algorithms may be used freely for any purpose, whether personal or commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The request that changes to the program under its original name be made only by the author is made for the purpose of maintaining user integrity and consistency, and avoiding confusion by having a manuscript prepared with a changed version submitted for publication to a journal that uses TeX in production.  (A number of mathematical publishers do depend on TeX for their book and journal production.  I retired from one such where the production stream has depended on TeX for more than 30 years.  Dependability is a must in such an environment.)  This requirement was considered sufficiently compelling that it was accepted into the Open Source Definition as noted by another answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knuth still accepts bug reports on an announced schedule (see the &amp;quot;Errata&amp;quot; section at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/abcde.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html&lt;/a&gt;).  This year (2020) is the review year designated in the present cycle, so if you have anything to report, please submit it by November; the next review won't occur until 2028.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ur-TeX program has been expanded into a number of different variants, each with its own particular features, and all distinctly named, so that a user knows exactly what s/he is getting when selecting (or requiring) a particular variant, as does a publisher when receiving a manuscript.  This saves considerable time and expense; preparing technical material for publication is complicated enough without having to deal with unannounced &amp;quot;improvements&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A statement by Knuth covering usage of TeX was included in his comments on the occasion of the &amp;quot;coming out party&amp;quot; for the five volumes of &lt;em&gt;Computers and Typesetting&lt;/em&gt;, held in Boston on 21 May 1986, and published in &lt;em&gt;TUGboat&lt;/em&gt; 7:2, 95-98 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb07-2/tb15knut.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb07-2/tb15knut.pdf&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;The following quote appears near the bottom of page 97, column 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the methods described in these books are in the public domain; thus anybody can freely use any of the ideas. The only thing I'm retaining control of is the names, TeX and METAFONT: products that go by this name  are obliged to conform to the standard. If any changes are made, I won't  complain, as long as the changed systems are not called TeX or METAFONT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another, more recent, statement by Knuth regarding the status of TeX and the reason for the request that the name be restricted to his direct work: &amp;quot;The future of TeX and Metafont&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-4/tb30knut.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-4/tb30knut.pdf&lt;/a&gt; published in 1990).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20493" LastEditorUserId="20493" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T00:48:20.663" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T00:48:20.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10424" CreationDate="2020-09-15T01:57:28.983" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you aren't allowed to &amp;quot;reverse engineer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;decompile&amp;quot;, what you did was illegal. So no, you are definitely not allowed to share results of such activity. Probably not even use it yourself. But that may depend on the exact details of the case, your local legal environment, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What practical consequences it may have is anybody's guess. They might never notice, or notice and don't care, or go after you all lawyers blazing. It might also happen that current owners don't care, but future ones might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T01:57:28.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T10:17:20.620" Score="4" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mattermost Licensing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SOFTWARE LICENSING&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are licensed to use compiled versions of the Mattermost platform&#xA;produced by Mattermost, Inc. under an MIT LICENSE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;See MIT-COMPILED-LICENSE.md included in compiled versions for details&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be licensed to use source code to create compiled versions not&#xA;produced by Mattermost, Inc. in one of two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the Free Software Foundation’s GNU AGPL v.3.0, subject to the exceptions outlined in this policy; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under a commercial license available from Mattermost, Inc. by contacting commercial@mattermost.com&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it like this: This is AGPL or commercial. What do they mean with &amp;quot;MIT&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20452" LastEditorUserId="20452" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:06:28.737" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T19:06:28.737" Title="Mattermost License" Tags="|licensing|mit|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10434" CreationDate="2020-09-15T10:42:43.877" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have a question here about &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9034/can-i-mit-license-a-binary-but-keep-the-source-proprietary&quot;&gt;distributing the compiled binary form&lt;/a&gt; of a piece of proprietary software under an MIT licence.  As we said there, it's basically formalised freeware: the binary can be freely distributed (and in principle, freely modified, for all the good it will do you) but it doesn't come with source.  The use of the MIT licence for the binary makes clear what can and can't be done with the binary in a way that makes immediate sense to people with free software experience, and it's quicker and simpler than trying to write your own freely-redistributable-binary licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, we also have the added wrinkle that the source distribution is dual-licensed, much in the manner of MySQL: if you want to take this source code and use it as the basis for your own project, then if you're going to give your customers freedom you can use this source for free, but if you're not you have to pay.  This concept is well-known and doesn't, it seems to me, conflict with Mattermost's use of MIT for their binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note in passing that MIT permits reverse-engineering the binary, so in theory you could reverse-engineer the source from that, and have it usable under very lax licence terms.  But since the source is already publicly-available under a strong copyleft licence, if you were thinking of taking that route you had better have a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; clean and tightly-controlled reverse-engineering effort, so that nobody can later claim it was done with sight of the AGPL source, and thus was a derivative work thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T10:49:09.650" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T10:49:09.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10365" CreationDate="2020-09-15T12:31:44.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF (owners of the GPL licenses) take the stand that by writing programs to the API of the libary creates a derivative work, that thus must be distributed under GPL. As far as I know (IANAL, even less one versed in copyright law and open source licensing), there are no legal precedents on the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case in point is the (GPLed) &lt;a href=&quot;https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;readline&lt;/a&gt; libary. For quite some time, linking to it from non-GPLed programs was forbidden, until the drop-in replacement (BSD licenced) &lt;a href=&quot;https://thrysoee.dk/editline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;editline&lt;/a&gt; showed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T13:48:31.153" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T13:48:31.153" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10322" CreationDate="2020-09-15T15:18:43.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several VPN implementations are purely (or almost) userland code. What makes your take different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as it uses the &lt;em&gt;public&lt;/em&gt; interface to &lt;em&gt;loadable&lt;/em&gt; kernel modules, you can go ahead. Part of the kernel's internal interfaces are off-limit, and a kernel using your non-GPLed module will be considered &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot;, and might have issues when running on current PCs (which insist on cryptographically signed kernels).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:18:43.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10446" CreationDate="2020-09-15T18:41:51.093" Score="-3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the government liable in all cases of the open-source software?            Who except the government is to accept liability in the first place (later on, liability will be fixed on the erring officer)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20411" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T11:37:39.123" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T11:37:39.123" Title="Liability for errors in open source software" Tags="|license-compatibility|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T22:21:13.487" Score="5" ViewCount="894" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker and licenses are difficult to understand for me. I'm looking for a license that requires any people who use the code covered under the license to say &amp;quot;this code came from lwl59438cuoly&amp;quot; or some variation of that (even if person x takes the code from me and person y takes it from person x, person y should still have to say it came from me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also want it so that they cannot hold me liable or trademark (not sure if this is the correct term - basically they cannot claim the code as theirs) the code. Other than that, they can do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license would come closest to these requirements? I'm ok with more restrictions but would prefer to have the above as base restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20512" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T08:20:03.210" LastActivityDate="2022-09-12T20:58:31.290" Title="Licence that says the original author must be given credit, but is otherwise mostly free" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10439" CreationDate="2020-09-15T22:35:46.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licences generally require that any copyright notices (they do include the author) have to be retained. The package (at least source, but often also the binaries) are required to ship with licence and warranty information, which today will naturally include where to get upstream sources and the author's contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking to display author and such when running/using the program can become a major hassle, enough to discourage use. Many programs give some splash screen when starting up stating name, version, author, hints at the license; others have some sort of &lt;code&gt;About&lt;/code&gt; command or menu entry giving the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; knit your own license, use one of the major licences that have been vetted by &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; lawyers to be (reasonably) airtight. Check out e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's list&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's take&lt;/a&gt;, and, much more important, take care that whatever license you select is at very least &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible&lt;/a&gt; (yes, the document is quite old by now, but still very relevant). An &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overview of the most important licenses&lt;/a&gt; gives some detail if the OSI/FSF documents turn out overwhelming by sheer license counts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T22:35:46.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10443" CreationDate="2020-09-13T09:31:54.563" Score="2" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where do i have to link the copyright notice of a used package under BSD license in my App?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not publishing documentation or any source code of my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20532" OwnerDisplayName="Rhoran" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T08:37:52.483" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T08:37:52.483" Title="Flutter: using package under BSD License" Tags="|package|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10442" CreationDate="2020-09-16T08:23:00.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apps usually have a separate screen where they collect license and attribution notices. If your app has a settings screen, you could add an “about” section where you mention yourself and also link to the screen with open source libraries. Here's the Settings &amp;gt; About screen on the Todoist Android app, which is closed source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BwgjQ.png&quot; height=&quot;600&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description: The “About” screen shows information about the app and about the company behind it. Under a headline “Legal”, there are entries for “Open source licenses”, “Privacy policy”, and “Terms of service”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most licenses (including most BSD license variants) require you to show the license even for binaries “in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution”. Whereas the manual was a reasonable place in the case of software distributed on physical installation media (e.g. floppy disks) or for software accompanied by electronic manuals (e.g. man-pages on Linux), there is no such accompanying material in the case of mobile apps. But this doesn't free you from having to show the license notices. Instead, these notices are typically shown &lt;em&gt;within&lt;/em&gt; the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T08:23:00.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10451" CreationDate="2020-09-16T17:11:58.640" Score="3" ViewCount="463" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like make use of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/certifi/python-certifi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;certifi&lt;/a&gt; library in my project, but I am not allowed to use any copy-left libraries, and certifi is MPL.  Really the certifi library just provides a pem file of a bunch of root CA certificates and dumps it to disk for other programs to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So instead I started looking at using a pem file directly that wasn't subject to the same copy-left restrictions.  It seems like just about everything comes back to the list curated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/raw-file/tip/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla&lt;/a&gt; or by &lt;a href=&quot;https://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cURL&lt;/a&gt; (which really is just wrapping the Mozilla one I believe).  Both of these to no surprise are covered by MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However - at this point the pem file is now a data file, and not a library.  Can I create a closed source commercial project at this point that uses one of these files as a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;data&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest I've found on the topic is this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8059&quot;&gt;Can I use cacert.pem file (MPL 2.0) as part of my proprietary program&lt;/a&gt; But the only answer on that question discusses pulling the certificate into a final bundled distribution file.  If I instead write my code in such a way that it pulls the pem file from some location, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Directly from the Mozilla or cURL links above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An S3 bucket hosted by me and publicly available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A configurable location specified in a config file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then stores that file on disk for other applications to use...  Does my application or any other application using that pem file need to be MPL as well?  Or have I effectively broken the copy left chain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20524" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T17:23:37.667" Title="Can I use a data file covered by MPL in a closed source commercial program?" Tags="|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10438" CreationDate="2020-09-16T20:02:53.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to have several misconceptions about free (open-source) software, but the principal one for the purposes of your question is that someone has to be responsible if it goes wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just about all free software licences contain disclaimers.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is provided &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot;, without warranty of any kind, express or&#xA;implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability,&#xA;fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall&#xA;the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or&#xA;other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise,&#xA;arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or&#xA;other dealings in the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by&#xA;applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright&#xA;holders and/or other parties provide the program “as is” without&#xA;warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not&#xA;limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a&#xA;particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of&#xA;the program is with you. Should the program prove defective, you assume&#xA;the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, I've removed most of the traditional caps to keep the shouting to a minimum, but they both boil down to the same thing, which is that &lt;strong&gt;if you decide to run this software, you assume all risks associated with it&lt;/strong&gt;.  You don't need to approach Apache for permission to run their web server, because they've already made it available to everyone under the terms of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their licence&lt;/a&gt;, which makes it clear that although there are no charges and fees for running it, the Apache people take on board no responsibility for the correct operation of their software.  The government doesn't need to absorb any responsibility, because there's none to absorb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't like that, you should pay for your software, and get support contracts with SLAs, and the like.  You'll very likely find that the software provider &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; isn't responsible when things break, but at least you get a phone number with someone on the end of it who's paid to be shouted at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T20:08:44.697" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T20:08:44.697" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2020-09-17T11:25:14.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;So having thought about this, I should be clear how I'm coming at the answer.  We already have a pair of questions that address the issue of whether dynamic linking creates derivative works; one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;those who think it does&lt;/a&gt;, and one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;those who think it doesn't&lt;/a&gt;.  Both note that the question remains unsettled, but I firmly believe that dynamic linking &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; create derivative works, and the rest of this answer reflects that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question, you're using a GPLv2 Javascript application as a library: your JS code calls functions it provides.  The core question is: to what extent are interpreted languages that make such calls at run-time similar to the behaviours of dynamically-linked executables that cause them to be derivative works of their linked libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, one of the key arguments for dynamic linking creating derivatives is that, unless there is a published third-party guide to the API, the only way to discover how to call the library code (either via dynamic linking or at run-time) is to inspect the library code, or to read the (GPLed) project documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to inspect the library code in order to reimplement it from scratch, you would have contaminated yourself such that the reimplementation is likely to be held to be a derivative work; hence the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;.  As I see it, the same applies to anyone inspecting the library code in order to work out how to call it; you are taking its methods and APIs with you following an inspection of the source.  As pointed out &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/10951/2870&quot;&gt;elsewhere in the SE universe&lt;/a&gt;, APIs can be and often are copyrightable; Oracle v. Google turned on a fair-use defence, and (by clean room principles) it's not at all clear one could succeed in one of those after having read all the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as I see it, you're doing something just as copyright-entangling as dynamic linking, and thus your work has to be GPLv2 also.  If you invoke the editor at arms-length, through (eg) fork-and-exec with a simple filename passed between caller and editor, I would hold differently; but you're not, and the fact you're doing it in an interpreted language rather than a compiled one doesn't make me see it differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I also suspect that the CKEditor people see things the same way.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They write&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CKEditor 5 is licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License Version 2 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are running an Open Source project with an OSS license incompatible with GPL please contact us and we will be happy to support your project with a CKEditor 5 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier versions were licensed under multiple terms, one of which was  LGPLv2.1+.  This option has gone, for version 5; clearly they feel that&#xA;there are uses that LGPL permitted that they no longer wish to permit, and your proposed usage seems to me to be exactly one such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T14:19:35.480" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T14:19:35.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10454" CreationDate="2020-09-17T15:56:18.093" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an existing way to make music in an open source way (similarly to developing software on Github with a public domain license) ?&#xA;If not, is open-source music producing actually something that is possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that with Sonic Pi (or even MIDI) you can already program music, but could one theoretically use that as a base for collaborative, asynchronous music production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question to all you open source gurus out there is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can music be open sourced the same way code is open sourced, as in give it a MIT license or similar so that others can use, improve and build on your music?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20425" LastEditorUserId="20425" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T17:42:53.727" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T07:39:46.400" Title="Open Source Music" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10431" CreationDate="2020-09-17T17:04:20.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright licenses are based on copyright law. As far as copyright is concerned, a repository isn't a thing and copyright licenses generally don't mention the term 'repository' at all or even a term that is similar.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For copyright purposes, a file is a computer term for how data is organized and which typically holds (part of) a copyrightable work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, copyright licenses generally have very little requirements about what files are present in a repository. They mainly have requirements about what information is given to the recipients of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For software, there are certain conventions about what files to include in your repository, but those conventions are not universally accepted nor is there a legal reason to follow them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-software works (which the &amp;quot;Git Internals PDF&amp;quot; is and which the CC licenses target) the use of a repository is not a given, nor that a work might consist of multiple files. For that reason, it is sufficient if your repository contains just a single file with the final rendered version of the document, as long as that document contains an attribution of &amp;quot;Git Internals PDF&amp;quot; and is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license itself. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/use-remix/attribution/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As explained by Creative Commons itself&lt;/a&gt;, an ideal attribution contains the title, a link to where the original can be obtained, the author of the original and the license (with a link) under which you obtained the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to treat your work more like software, with a source code that the final document can be rendered from, that final rendered document should meet the requirements of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license without the need for a separate &amp;quot;license file&amp;quot; because that is the common expectation with literary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T13:18:57.937" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T13:18:57.937" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10445" CreationDate="2020-09-17T17:23:37.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your application just wants to read a file called &lt;em&gt;cacert.pem&lt;/em&gt; that can be interpreted as having the format of a pem file, then the contents of the file are just data to the program and under copyright law the two are considered independent works whose copyright licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the cacert.pem file provided by Mozilla under the MPL license can be used by a completely closed-source application without any issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the MPL is actually a fairly weak copyleft license (files under the MPL must remain under that license, but there are no requirements at all for other files), you could even include the cacert.pem file in your distribution without it affecting your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other options are to let the end-user make sure the file is present on their system or to download it from a reputable source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T17:23:37.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-19T21:00:21.027" Score="4" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing some proprietary library, at least for the time being it is proprietary, until I can get enough money to hire a lawyer to properly unwrap this (as I want to opensource, but keep a way to monetize), currently however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clause A: The library is proprietary, and it allows software built with it to be released into any license, as long as the library source itself isn't bundled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clause B: The library's functionality can be extended with plugins, plugins might be of any license, including MIT, plugins might just be a bridge for 3rd parties; the library needs nothing else to work by default.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clause C: Plugins can be of any license type, MIT, GPL, unlicense; and can be written by anyone, including myself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that if one of the 3rd parties is GPL, only the plugin must be GPL, but not the whole library right?... after all, anyone can write a plugin; but there are some GPL parties I want to write plugins for, and since the final software can be of any license, they can release under GPL, but my library stays clear off it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20547" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T06:34:46.173" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T06:56:57.993" Title="Can I mix GPL with proprietary if it's a GPL plugin?" Tags="|gpl-3|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10452" CreationDate="2020-09-20T06:26:07.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are free in your license choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However not every license allows software to be distributed if it links to proprietary libraries. One of the licenses which disallow distribution of software which is not free in its entirety (thus its own source as well as sources of all libraries and dependencies used) is the GPL. That means your 'clause A' is an assumption which does not hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not distribute GPL-licensed software in a compiled form which depends on a proprietary library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A GPL-licensed software may of course require a proprietary library. But as no-one is allowed to distribute the resulting executable, it makes such programme in all situations pointless where the ready-to-use software leaves your computer(s). That includes the case where you want to sell licenses for the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause B/C is similarily problematic when distributing it jointly in binary form. Yet in my understanding a plug-in is usually much easier to install and as such you might offer the software and the plug-ins separately for download with an installer for plug-ins (or even an integrated installer for the plug-ins).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paragraphs where I talk about GPL don't apply for other open source license which do NOT employ the strong copyleft principle but only a weak one (like MIT, BSD,...). Programmes with such license may link to proprietary libraries and the resulting executables may be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T06:56:57.993" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T06:56:57.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10449" CreationDate="2020-09-20T06:52:31.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It having been said that this question admits of an answer, it'd better have one.  That said, questions which ask for lists of offsite resources are off-topic, so I'll answer accordingly.  You ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can music be open sourced the same way code is open sourced, as in give it a MIT license or similar so that others can use, improve and build on your music?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it can.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://openscore.cc/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Openscore&lt;/a&gt; is a project which releases classical music in freely-reusable editable score form, in the free &lt;a href=&quot;https://musescore.org/en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;musescore&lt;/a&gt; format.  Although the underlying music here is out of copyright, the scores from which it is usually conducted, and the orchestral parts from which it's then played, generally aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The musescore format allows a number of reuses which are only possible for third-parties because of the free licensing of the openscore scores.  These include printing off a full set of orchestral parts, as well as more-transformative uses such as generation of synthesised audio recordings via MIDI, the generation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://musescore.com/openscore/scores/4145221&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cover images&lt;/a&gt; (which are images processed directly from the score), and the generation of freely-reusable Braille scores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no reason why in-copyright music could not be similarly made available, given the permission of the rightsholder; but things had to start somewhere, so they started with the classics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt there are many other examples of open-source music on the internet, but you asked if it was possible, and indicated that this example met your criteria, so here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T07:39:46.400" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T07:39:46.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T10:13:23.673" Score="3" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software A: BSD-3 clause software, I &lt;strong&gt;am not&lt;/strong&gt; its author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software B: forked from A, a few files have been changed &lt;strong&gt;by me&lt;/strong&gt;. There are a few file additions, these files have a single author, me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I can license new files as GPLv3 as they are 100% made by me. But can I put a GPLv3 notice (without removing the original BSD-3 notice) in files modified by me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="gabrielgbs97" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T08:15:01.610" Title="BSD-3 clause software fork redistributed with GPLv3 parts" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10455" CreationDate="2020-09-21T16:53:35.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do that. Software licensed under a BSD-3-clause software is compatible with the GPL license. As such you are allowed to distribute it under GPL v3. That includes that you add a copyright notice to the file - especially if you make modifications to the file (otherwise it would IMHO be bad style, but still not forbidden).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind to adhere to the BSD-3 license which forbids create the impression that the original authors endorse your changes. Depending on circumstance it might be a good  idea to do something like LibreOffice or Jenkins did: change the name from the project they were forked from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T08:15:01.610" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T08:15:01.610" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-22T11:49:40.563" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of recording a couple of coding tutorials on Youtube. I wonder if I can use free (e.g. codepen) and purchased software (e.g. Visual Studio) in those videos without risking to run into licensing issues. And does it make a difference if those videos would be used for monetization purposes later on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20559" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T11:49:40.563" Title="Licensing of software in commercial Youtube videos" Tags="|licensing|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10458" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10459" CreationDate="2020-09-23T02:45:48.097" Score="8" ViewCount="1487" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This post contains various related questions, but I think it's needed to solve my doubts properly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know if I can access a free software I have the freedom to run, study, modify and distribute its source code and modifications; and that if the license contains copyleft there's no way anyone can circumvent this freedoms on modified copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albeit, on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ it states that&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes me wonder: Can a company, in any way, restrict the release of a modified version of a free software with copyleft by its employees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been told that indeed a company can circumvent the right to distribute the software outside the company since it owns the copyright of the modifications, but it's hard for me to understand how that would not violate the copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently usage by the company employees does not count as distribution. If that's the case, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, if one company which owns GPLv3 software modifications requests a second company to work on its code... is that considered distribution? can the second company distribute the code then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3542" LastEditorUserId="3542" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T03:14:00.587" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T23:36:03.977" Title="Can a company circumvent the freedom of distribution on GPL software for its employees or service providers?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|copyright|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10458" CreationDate="2020-09-23T03:31:16.810" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ is fairly clear&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain a bit further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL obligations apply whenever distribution occurs. The question of when distribution of copyrighted material occurs is a matter for regional copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer why copyright law generally does not consider it to be distribution when a corporation makes a work available to an employee, we must consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal fiction&lt;/a&gt; of corporate personhood. Without giving too much detail (which I can't give, and would probably be better suited for Law.SE anyway), a corporation is a single person, capable of being one of the two parties in an act of distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might assume, then, that when a corporate person gives some copyrighted work to a natural person, it constitutes distribution. However, corporate persons are, by necessity, composed of natural, human people who execute the actions of the corporation. When the receiving natural person is an employee of the corporation, the corporation is effectively giving the work to itself, which doesn't cause distribution to occur. Therefore, no GPL obligations apply in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the recipient is not an employee of the corporate person (e.g., another corporation or an outside contractor) then distribution does indeed occur and GPL obligations must be observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that the GPLv3 (but not v2) &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5554/50&quot;&gt;offers a special exception&lt;/a&gt; whereby service providers or contractors who receive the software solely for the purpose of making modifications for you or remotely executing the code on your behalf (e.g., AWS) do not enjoy full GPLv3 rights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T14:59:49.430" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T14:59:49.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-23T16:09:49.910" Score="3" ViewCount="712" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the keyboard layout QWERTY proprietary? Can one use it in their own keyboard apps without buying a license? If no, are there any non-proprietary keyboard layouts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17070" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-09-25T01:23:15.390" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T01:23:15.390" Title="Is the QWERTY keyboard layout proprietary?" Tags="|copyright|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10460" CreationDate="2020-09-23T17:39:44.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keyboard layouts can be patentable inventions. But the relevant typewriter patents are &amp;gt;140 years old and have long expired&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;. So QWERTY is effectively public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, novel smartphone input methods are still patented. E.g. the technique of swiping is still patented until at least 2024.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Keyboard layouts are explicitly open source. I use the EURkey layout which is GPL-licensed. That doesn't make patents impossible per se, but makes it possible to implement the layout freely regardless of which patents the layout's author might hold. Of course, EURkey is itself a keyboard layout based on QWERTY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: The paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Eyasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the prehistory of QWERTY&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; suggests that an early version of this layout appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/US207559A/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US patent 207559&lt;/a&gt;, but I can't find it in that document. The patent describes technical workings of a typewriter, it probably wouldn't have occurred to the inventor at the time to also patent a particular arrangement of keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T17:39:44.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10468" CreationDate="2020-09-23T21:09:23.967" Score="7" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 has clause to ensure that device manufacturers are not circumventing &amp;quot;freedom to run modified software by users&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3. Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid&#xA;circumvention of technological measures to the extent such&#xA;circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with&#xA;respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit&#xA;operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against&#xA;the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid&#xA;circumvention of technological measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in practical terms, this means, a device manufacturer must not block any user from updating a GPLv3 package in rootfs image with a modified version of own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of many commercial products, OEMs protect the rootfs image by using features such as dm-verity or some other signing mechanism so that device is booting with a trusted rootfs, and hardware provides the root-of-trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What options do OEM(s) have to ensure both below mentioned goals met?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow users to run their own modified versions of FOSS packages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure that the trust model of the product is met.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can OEM take the following approach of implementing two modes to meet the above 2 goals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Normal mode&lt;/strong&gt;, boot with a trusted rootfs image with root-of-trust established by the hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Run trust based use-cases in this mode, e.g., face recognition in a security access control camera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Special mode&lt;/strong&gt;, Let's say mode is activated when user toggles a hardware switch on device. On next reboot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A warning is presented to user and confirmation is received from user for entering special mode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All trust based data on device is wiped off&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rootfs verification is not done&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this mode now user is free to install his own modified version of FOSS and run it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This mode does not support use-cases tied to hardware root-of-trust&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this separation of modes an acceptable mechanism to remain compliant with GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20566" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T11:40:47.417" Title="Acceptable techniques to verify rootfs without circumventing gplv3 terms" Tags="|gpl-3|copyleft|redistribution|warranty|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10464" CreationDate="2020-09-23T21:49:29.657" Score="3" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering developing a project based on a modified version of some GPLv3 code. But, I need to use some proprietary library. This is a for-profit endeavour, in which I plan to sell the modified GPL code with the GPL license to a client and charge for the unitary closed-source cost of the proprietary library, but I cannot change the terms for the proprietary library. I can get license to share the headers or equivalents to them, but surely not to the library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that okay? I believe I'd be violating the GPL license terms, but I'm not close-sourcing anything I have access to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14729" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T17:32:26.540" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T17:32:26.540" Title="Can I add a proprietary library to GPL software?" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10463" CreationDate="2020-09-24T05:55:39.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says in s5c that if you convey (distribute, for the purposes of this answer) modified versions of the original GPLv3 code (which includes distributing larger works incorporating the GPLv3 code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must license &lt;strong&gt;the entire work, as a whole&lt;/strong&gt;, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people make an argument that linking a library into code doesn't create a single work for copyright purposes, but I'm not one of them, and I certainly wouldn't bet a business on being able to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I'd be violating the GPL license terms, but I'm not close-sourcing anything I have access to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree, but the first part of that sentence matters, and the second doesn't.  As GPLv3 s12 puts it so eloquently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T05:55:39.407" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10466" CreationDate="2020-09-24T09:27:29.067" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a piece of software which is licensed under the GPL 2.0 &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; (there is no &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; clause in it's license), and I modify it, can I relicense my derivative work as GPL 2.0 &lt;em&gt;or later&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that I can't just change the license and call that a derivative work, but beyond that, when I really do have a derivative work, it is not clear that I can change the license of the derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20569" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:45:13.507" Title="Can a derivative of a GPL 2.0 only work be relicensed as GPL 2.0 or later work?" Tags="|derivative-works|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10465" CreationDate="2020-09-24T09:45:13.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that derivative works &lt;em&gt;as a whole&lt;/em&gt; have to keep the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; license (with some exceptions, e.g. GPL → AGPL). Thus, a modified version of a GPLv2-only program cannot offer GPLv2-or-later. That would provide additional permissions regarding the original portions,  but you're not authorized to offer these permissions because you're not a copyright holder for those portions but are bound by the GPLv2-only license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you create a component that is not derivative of the original software, you could offer that component under any license you want. But when you combine the component with the original software, the resulting work as a whole would have to be GPLv2-only. Thus, your component should have a compatible license, e.g. GPLv2-or-later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:45:13.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10470" CreationDate="2020-09-24T08:11:55.670" Score="9" ViewCount="1499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about dynamic linking in C++ in stackoverflow (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/64039902/14321464&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/64039902/14321464&lt;/a&gt;), however, I got intrigued on the responses about my desire to keep my source code uncovered by LGPL copyleft. I've been asking this as well myself and searching about it for days here in stackexchange, reading many clarifications made by various teams (such as from Teems: &lt;a href=&quot;http://teem.sourceforge.net/lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://teem.sourceforge.net/lgpl.html&lt;/a&gt;), and googling around. This is what I understand so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I write and compile my source code and link LGPL library statically (via .a in Linux or .lib in Windows (...maybe? I'm not sure what is the equivalent of .a file in Windows)), I am bound to at least provide the output file (.o) from compilation of my source code so people can use their linker of choice to relink and compile the .o file into final executable using library of their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I write and compile your source code and link LGPL library dynamically (via .so in Linux, or .dll in Windows), and if i decide to redistribute the .SO file as part of my software distribution, then I must provide the source code of the LGPL library that is in use and distributed (I assume, by self-hosting only, I might even be inclined to just pack the source code as part of the distribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I write and compile my source code and link LGPL library dynamically (via .so in Linux, or .dll in Windows), and only states that to run this program users must acquire the LGPL libraries themselves, then no source code needs to be provided to end user. I just need to state how and where those files need to be placed so the program can run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And after reading the LGPL v2.1 and LGPL v3 back and forth, I still have 2 questions in my head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider this case:&#xA;a LGPL v2.1 library provides set of .so / .dll files, as well as an include folder containing all .h (header) files that relates to .so / .dll (describing all the structures, classes, constructors and destructors, and all function declarations in the compiled .so / .dll).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, dynamic linking means that the program must be able to be run (either via terminal using ./(executable name), double clicking on the executable, or some other forms of running the executable as intended by the host Operating System) and still able to run even without the .so / .dll present (by popping up an error screen or even just force closing itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in that case, consider this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sampleso.hpp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#IFNDEF SAMPLESO_HPP__&#xA;#DEFINE SAMPLESO_HPP__&#xA;&#xA;struct carDesc&#xA;{&#xA;    const char *model;&#xA;    int prod_year;&#xA;    int wheel_num;&#xA;    const char *license_plate;&#xA;    const char *colour;&#xA;} car;&#xA;&#xA;carDesc fillCarID(void);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sampleso.cpp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;sampleso.hpp&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA;carDesc fillCarID(void)&#xA;{&#xA;    car.name = &amp;quot;Ford Fiesta&amp;quot;;&#xA;    car.prod_year = 2014;&#xA;    car.wheel_num = 4;&#xA;    car.license_plate = &amp;quot;D 1234 ABC&amp;quot;;&#xA;    car.colour = &amp;quot;Midnight blue&amp;quot;;&#xA;    &#xA;    return car;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and those 2 are compiled to become libsampleso.so (g++ sampleso.cpp -fPIC -shared -Wall -ldl -o libsampleso.so). I then distribute this code as LGPL v2.1 with both the libsampleso.so and sampleso.hpp. If, later on, I use libsampleso.so by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;main.cpp (v1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;quot;sampleso.h&amp;quot; //&amp;lt;&amp;lt; THIS IS THE INTERESTING BIT&#xA;&#xA;int main (void)&#xA;{&#xA;     carDesc fordCar;&#xA;    &#xA;     fordCar = fillCarID(); //I know this function will produce NOTHING USEFUL, but let's just pretend it is&#xA;     ...&#xA;     return EXIT_SUCCESS;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and compile it by dynamic linking (g++ main.cpp -Wall -Wextra -std=c++17 -L. -ldl -lsampleso -o main), is the addition of &lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;sampleso.h&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; makes my main.cpp (V1) counted as &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt;, hence forcing main.cpp source code to be disclosed as copyleft, or not? Or do I have to go as far as using dlopen, dlsym, and dlclose to be considered dynamic linking (see main.cpp V2)? How far does FSF and LGPL count a program as dynamic linking (by just mentioning it as part of -l param enough? or do i have to literally call the library using dlopen and remove every &lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;sampleso.h&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; anywhere in my code to be count as dynamic enough?). Everyone talked about .so and .dll, but no one talks about the inclusion of the LGPL header file and compilation of any code with LGPL header included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;main.cpp (v2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;dlfcn.h&amp;gt; //Completely has no sampleso.hpp in it&#xA;&#xA;int main (void)&#xA;{&#xA;     //... some dlopen codes here to find the libsampleso.so, and handle the error if it failed to be found in the aformentioned location ...&#xA;&#xA;     struct carDesc * fordCar;&#xA;     fordCar = reinterpret_cast&amp;lt;struct carDesc*&amp;gt;(dlsym(hHandler,&amp;quot;car&amp;quot;));&#xA;    &#xA;     carDesc(*__fn_fillCarIDv)(void);&#xA;     __fn_fillCarIDv = reinterpret_cast&amp;lt;carDesc(*)(void)&amp;gt;(dlsym(hHandler,&amp;quot;_Z9fillCarIDv&amp;quot;));&#xA;&#xA;     fordCar = __fn_fillCarIDv(); //doesn't work, error: function returns incomplete type &amp;quot;carDesc&amp;quot; C/C++(862), still working on how to make it work&#xA;     return EXIT_SUCCESS;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since LGPL v2.1 and v3 demands the ability to user to upgrade/downgrade the shared library as they see fit, while keeping the executable's ability to run, what about an executable that requires specific library version (still with dynamic linking, but specific version of .so / .dll file is made mandatory by the programmer)? That makes the user unable to upgrade or downgrade as they see fit anymore, since users are bounded to that specific library version, and if they upgrade or downgrade, the program would break too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very sorry if this question more like an essay, but coming from a country other than US, it is very difficult to interpret clearly what LGPL constitutes and where are the boundaries where LGPL applies or not to applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;I know about all other legal stuff required by LGPL license (mentioning the use of it in my license, providing LGPL license text in full, and hosting of LGPL codes, etc.) I just want to focus on the section 4, 5 and 6 which is still debated by many as how far someone can say that something is derivate work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20570" OwnerDisplayName="Jacobson123" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T14:11:39.983" Title="Understanding LGPL implication on #include" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10462" CreationDate="2020-09-24T11:40:47.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting; let's examine your list of special-mode features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A warning is presented to user and confirmation is received from user for entering special mode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All trust based data on device is wiped off&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;rootfs verification is not done&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this mode now user is free to install his own modified version of FOSS and run it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This mode does not support use-cases tied to hardware root-of-trust&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, a lot of Android phones, which are devices specifically made to run the (GPLv2) Linux kernel, and which ship with it, do something very similar.  When I unlocked the bootloader of my S9, the device warned me that I was unlocking the bootloader for the first time (1) and that it would be erasing the device's memory for privacy reasons (2).  (3) didn't really apply, since the device achieved trust by shipping with a bootloader that didn't allow uploading arbitrary OSes.  Once I'd unlocked the bootloader I was able to upload a new recovery image to the phone, and thence a new OS (4).  Android has an interface that allows applications to &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ask the OS if the hardware is bootloader-unlocked&lt;/a&gt;, and LineageOS (the most popular alternative OS build) honours this (5).  That said, once the user controls the phone, it's perfectly possible to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-use-magisk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;get around the issue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for GPLv2, it's possible to get most of what you want (1, 2, 3 or equivalent, 4, and the appearance of 5) without violating the licence.  What of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;?  The only differences that matters here are the &lt;em&gt;installation information provisions for user products&lt;/em&gt; in s6, aka the anti-Tivoisation provisions.  As I read them, those provisions make no mention of, and thus have no issue with, requirements 1, 3, and 4.  5 is pointless, because once the user controls the device an application running on it has no way to reliably verify that the device can be trusted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 seems to me to be the sticky point.  The issue arose during the creation of the licence; RMS, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/activities/gplv3/drm-and-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speaking in Turin&lt;/a&gt; in 2006, said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL version three says that if they distribute a GPL-covered program in this way, they must provide you with the key necessary so that you can sign your version and make it access the same data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that having the device wipe itself when unlocked isn't compatible with that aim, particularly if there's no way to get this data off the device with the OS as supplied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as as I read it, and IANAL/IANYL and others could well read it differently, if you drop (2) and accept that (5) is a dead duck, you can do the rest of what you want and still satisfy GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T11:40:47.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10467" CreationDate="2020-09-24T14:11:39.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2.1 contains these paragraphs that is directly relevant to your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not. Whether this is true is especially significant if the work can be linked without the Library, or if the work is itself a library. The threshold for this to be true is not precisely defined by law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions (ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 has a similar section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Object Code Incorporating Material from Library Header Files.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The object code form of an Application may incorporate material from a header file that is part of the Library. You may convey such object code under terms of your choice, provided that, if the incorporated material is not limited to numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, or small macros, inline functions and templates (ten or fewer lines in length), you do both of the following: [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms that can also be understood by normal humans, if you use a header file from an LGPL library which contains only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;numerical parameters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;data structure layouts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;accessors for that data structure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;small macros (less than 10 lines each)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;small inline functions (less than 10 lines each)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then your code does not get &amp;quot;infected&amp;quot; by the LGPL terms and you can distribute your code under any license you like, including a closed source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is accepted by the FSF that there is no guarantee that those portions of the library can be replaced by the end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T14:11:39.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10471" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-24T15:35:08.403" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use React Navigation in my React Native app which I would like to distribute in the Google Play Store.  Both Stack and Drawer implementations of React Navigation have MIT licenses with the corresponding license files so I may acknowledge the use of them but one of there dependencies (@react-native-community/masked-view) says it has a MIT license but does not have a license file so I am worried to use it meaning I cant use React Navigation Stack/Drawer.  @react-native-community/masked-view looks like a popular library and many people are using it so I'm wondering if its safe for me to use React Navigation Stack/Drawer even though one of the dependencies has no license file but acknowledges it has an MIT license.  I'm just worried about installing the library then getting in trouble down the line from the creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20572" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T15:35:08.403" Title="Is it ok to use React Navigation Stack/Drawer in your app when its dependency (@react-native-community/masked-view) does not have a license file?" Tags="|mit|license|dependencies|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-25T12:50:02.680" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to share my android project on GitHub, allow everyone contribute to it but I don't want them to upload the project to play store without changing anything. Because I will be doing it. Why I want this is I want to be the official distributor of it, otherwise there would be a ton of the same app in store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no problem in uploading it after changing it though. They can distribute their own version as long as it is different and open-sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if this is even against the definition of open source but can there be a license that says what I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20580" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T12:50:02.680" Title="Which license should I use" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|google-play|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10475" CreationDate="2020-09-25T11:17:28.563" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a totally Persian portable (single .exe) app and want to apply &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; on it. I included English license text in the help PDF which is embedded in app.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should I translate license text to Persian also or only including English text is enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20582" OwnerDisplayName="AmirSina Mashayekh" LastEditorUserId="7343" LastEditDate="2020-09-25T19:42:11.197" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T19:42:11.197" Title="Should I translate license to app's language?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10473" CreationDate="2020-09-25T14:49:40.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; translate a license text yourself (or ask a non-lawyer to translate it). If there are multiple official translations of a license, then you can choose the one in a language spoken by the largest portion of your users, but I am not aware of any official translations of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is a legal document and if you try to translate that to a different language it is very likely that nuances get lost or added in the translation and that the translated license says something other than the original license, which effectively results in different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, the license text is itself also protected by copyright and most authors of license texts don't give permission to make derived works (and a translation to a different human language is a prime example of a derived work) or you get that permission only on condition that you call the license differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T14:49:40.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10477" CreationDate="2020-09-25T16:27:53.653" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine a person develops a program. During development, he/she writes tests for it.&#xA;But tests are removed before publishing the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the developer relies heavily on the tests then they seem to be a part of the &amp;quot;preferred source of modification&amp;quot;. So deleting tests is a form of obfuscation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can such software be considered free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20581" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T17:29:23.533" Title="Deliberately deleting test suites in free software" Tags="|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10476" CreationDate="2020-09-25T17:29:23.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tests are not generally &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of a program, so I would consider a license that &lt;em&gt;requires&lt;/em&gt; tests to be published to be non-free. Conversely, I think that deliberately withholding tests for open-source software is technically fine, but quite uncooperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the actual source code or build scripts, access to tests is not required to inspect or modify a software. In practice, lack of tests is a barrier to successfully forking a project as the fork might become more buggy than the original project. However, this barrier doesn't actually prevent succesful forking. The relevant software freedoms can still be exercised without tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notable project that doesn't publish its test suite is SQLite, but it uses a very “cathedral” development process (“open source, not open contribution”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T17:29:23.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10425" CreationDate="2020-09-25T22:23:21.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a web context, it is not always clear where one program starts and the other ends. However, since content in an iframe runs in a separate browsing context, it is likely a separate Work in the sense of the AGPL. Thus, loading an image editor in an iframe would likely be OK, and would probably not require you to publish source code for the other software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, these concerns can be entirely side-stepped by loading the AGPL image editor in a separate tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule of thumb, open source licenses never affect &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; software (Open Source Definition #9: License Must Not Restrict Other Software). Thus, you can distribute or run any open source program side by side with other software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T22:23:21.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-26T16:12:18.190" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a piece of commercial, closed-source software. I'm using an open-source piece of software called Neovim -- I want to include the Neovim binary in my software bundle that I distribute and leverage its functionality in my app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neovim uses the Apache 2.0 license. Is what I'm doing permitted, and if so, what are my obligations --  e.g. crediting Neovim, displaying a notice to the user, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20584" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T16:12:18.190" Title="Requirements of Apache license" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10482" CreationDate="2020-09-27T17:55:03.990" Score="2" ViewCount="766" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the software project &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwm.suckless.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dwm by Suckless&lt;/a&gt;. The project is &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.suckless.org/dwm/file/LICENSE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clearly licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the MIT/X Consortium License, which includes the clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is customarily augmented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code patches&lt;/a&gt;. Suppose that someone wished to distribute either their modifications to, or their modified version of, dwm. Without the agreement of Suckless, it is clear to me that any fork of dwm must also be licensed under an MIT/X-compatible license. But since the patches are new material in themselves, it seems to me that the patches themselves could (pathologically) be given an incompatible license, which would forbid anyone from creating or distributing a fork of dwm which included those patches. I make no assumption about how substantial the patches are - they could be a minor change, or they might change the nature of the program completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about several different situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch of dwm, and explicitly licenses her changes under a restrictive copyright license. Alice could distribute her changes to whoever she likes, but could not distribute a fork of dwm which included those changes[1]. Bob (who is lawfully given Alice's changes) could apply them to dwm, but would not be able to distribute either those changes, or their version of dwm, to anyone else. Is this accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch, and does not explicitly license it at all. If we assume nothing at all about Alice's work, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the copyright is hers and hers alone&lt;/a&gt;, and we are in the same situation as 1. Suppose that it is &amp;quot;known&amp;quot;[2] that Alice's work is intended to be a patch of dwm. Does the default situation change in this case, or does it require an explicit agreement of Alice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch, and explicitly licenses it under a license like the GPL, which also includes a clause that requires modified versions to be under the same license[3]. Are forked versions forbidden in practice, just like in situation 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These restrictions sound like a major obstacle to patching open source programs, and require agreement of all contributors to submit to the parent license. Are such agreements common in projects which accept contributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Clarifications&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Alice could of course distribute a fork of dwm &lt;em&gt;provided&lt;/em&gt; that it included a copy of the MIT/X License. I believe this would in practice cause the changes themselves to be subject to that same license, effectively nullifying her simultaneous restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2]: By &amp;quot;known&amp;quot;, I mean any precise criterion which would indicate that a piece of software is intended for use as a modification to an existing program, and not as a new project in and of itself. For example, if the official host page of the patch said something to the effect of &amp;quot;This file consists of a patch to version 6.1 of dwm&amp;quot;. Something which is a direct mention that the work is a modification, but not which makes any specific statements about the copyright of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3]: I am under the impression that code cannot simultaneously be licensed under MIT/X and GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T05:31:42.713" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T06:32:08.940" Title="How are software patches licensed?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10487" CreationDate="2020-09-28T03:48:58.570" Score="1" ViewCount="1061" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL Require Source Posted Public&lt;/a&gt; states about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to find the definition about release. It's seems like a quite basic problem but it's hard to find online due to &amp;quot;release&amp;quot; is frequently tied with other keywords...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tried following keywords on google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;release definition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;opensource definition of release&#xA;It least to wiki of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource&lt;/a&gt; but it doesn't specifically state the definition of &amp;quot;release&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also search through GPL-faq and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyUseGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why should I use the GNU GPL rather than other free software licenses?&lt;/a&gt; navigates to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism&lt;/a&gt; but both articles doesn't specify the definition of release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/release&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the problem could become &amp;quot;what is distribution&amp;quot; and then it leads to wiki of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_distribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Distribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a form of source code or binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An end user not considered as developer would using it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even an end user doesn't directly use it. If it provide the environment for a user to use, it's consider as released. Eg: BIOS / UBOOT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To restate my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an official definition of release/distribute in GPL (in GPLv2 and GPLv3)? Or it's too simple to be consider as a basic knowledge?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17296" LastEditorUserId="17296" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T07:30:51.033" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T17:04:14.190" Title="How does GPL define the term &quot;release&quot; or &quot;distribute&quot; officially?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10480" CreationDate="2020-09-28T05:18:44.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear to me that any fork of dwm must also be licensed under an MIT/X-compatible license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not, in fact, clear.  Firstly, if you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/4149/2870&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; you'll see that there is quite a body of opinion that says it's perfectly acceptable to change the licence conditions on code if it was shared with you on terms that do not forbid that.  The copyleft free licences require copies and derivatives to be distributed under the same licence (see eg GPLv3 ss 4 and 5c, GPLv2 ss 1 and 2b) but the non-copyleft free licences simply don't have similar language - they require only the distribution of specified text.  Certainly, it's known that derivatives of BSD-licensed code are used in commercial products distributed under proprietary licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you don't address the issue that it's very hard to write a patch for a piece of software without carefully examining said software, and copying the interfaces so that your patch can cleanly replace or supplement existing code.  Those are very strong arguments that the patch is a derivative in copyright terms, whether or not it ships with the original software.  What that implies for distribution depends on the original licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those things said, let's examine your specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch of dwm, and explicitly licenses her changes under a restrictive copyright license. Alice could distribute her changes to whoever she likes, but could not distribute a fork of dwm which included those changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that dwm is licensed under a non-copyleft free license (such as MIT), Alice is completely free to distribute such a fork.  It is, as I have said, a common-enough commercial practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch [which she intended to be a patch of dwm] and does not explicitly license it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/458&quot;&gt;has been said here before&lt;/a&gt;, if code is distributed with no specific licence terms, and it's not required to be free by eg being a derivative of a third-party strong-copyleft work, you can make no assumptions about what you can do with it.  The patch is proprietary, and thus unusable by the free software community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch, and explicitly licenses it under a license like the GPL... Are forked versions forbidden in practice, just like in situation 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that would be fine.  Such combinations are permitted provided the original licence is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T08:52:13.120" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T08:52:13.120" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-28T06:03:30.963" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;An application has a few links, where it needs to open a browser window. Does this mean the browser is a dependency and a liscence for the browser is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17070" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T12:37:32.830" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T12:37:32.830" Title="Is browser a dependency?" Tags="|licensing|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10483" CreationDate="2020-09-28T08:07:14.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you bundle a browser (or one of its components, such as the gecko engine) as part of your application or force the user to install it, it's a dependency like any other component your application might use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, it's not a dependency, at least not in the traditional sense - people who use the application can decide what browser to install, or, in theory, could even implement one on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T09:03:10.747" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T09:03:10.747" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10480" CreationDate="2020-09-28T16:49:09.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the agreement of Suckless, it is clear to me that any fork of dwm must also be licensed under an MIT/X-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the MIT/X license also gives recipients the right to sublicense the work, it is almost trivial to meet that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only licenses that would be incompatible are what I would call The One That Rules Them All licenses: licenses that require that all copies of the code are under the same license, The One License. To my knowledge, such a license does not currently exist and it would get very little traction if someone would create such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch of dwm, and explicitly licenses her changes under a restrictive copyright license. Alice could distribute her changes to whoever she likes, but could not distribute a fork of dwm which included those changes[1]. Bob (who is lawfully given Alice's changes) could apply them to dwm, but would not be able to distribute either those changes, or their version of dwm, to anyone else. Is this accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that is not accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license does not (claim to) apply to code that wasn't licensed with it. As long as Alice's license does not forbid combining the work of Alice with dwm, there is no problem having a fork that contains the result of applying Alice's changes to dwm. Different parts of that fork will be subject to different license terms and to be able for Bob to distribute that fork (or even just the changes from Alice), the license used by Alice will need to permit that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch, and does not explicitly license it at all. If we assume nothing at all about Alice's work, then the copyright is hers and hers alone, and we are in the same situation as 1. Suppose that it is &amp;quot;known&amp;quot;[2] that Alice's work is intended to be a patch of dwm. Does the default situation change in this case, or does it require an explicit agreement of Alice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one situation where the default copyright &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; changes if it is known that the changes are intended to be a patch to another work. That is if the changes are offered in a pull-request to a repository that has the policy that the incoming license (the license of contributions) is the same as the outgoing license (the license under which the repository is offered). In that case, by making a pull request, Alice has agreed to license her changes under the repository's license, even when it is not explicitly stated among the changes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Repositories hosted on GitHub are an example of repositories with that policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a patch, and explicitly licenses it under a license like the GPL, which also includes a clause that requires modified versions to be under the same license[3]. Are forked versions forbidden in practice, just like in situation 1?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3]: I am under the impression that code cannot simultaneously be licensed under MIT/X and GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your impression about the simultaneous licensing under MIT/X and GPL is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, it is generally held that the MIT/X license does not forbid redistributing the code with additional conditions attached to it. And the GPL also does not require that you relicense all code to be under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the result of combining GPL code and non-GPL code is distributed under the GPL, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the source-code distribution requirements from the GPL are also observed for the non-GPL code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;oth of those points are allowed by the MIT/X license, which makes it compatible with the GPL license, with the result that you can combine works under both licenses in a single codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that isn't enough, the sublicense grant that the MIT/X license gives makes it possible to distribute dwm under the GPL license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T06:32:08.940" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T06:32:08.940" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10481" CreationDate="2020-09-28T17:04:14.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an official definition of release/distribute in GPL (in GPLv2 and GPLv3)? Or it's too simple to be consider as a basic knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, there is no official definition of either &amp;quot;release&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;distribute&amp;quot; in GPLv2 nor GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;release&amp;quot; is not used in either license in a context where an official definition is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;distribute&amp;quot; is only used in the GPLv2 and it is the ambiguities around that term that caused it to be dropped from the GPLv3, which uses and defines the terms &amp;quot;propagate&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;distribute&amp;quot; is also used in the US Copyright law, with the meaning &amp;quot;the right to make a work available to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T17:04:14.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-29T05:34:16.400" Score="1" ViewCount="745" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that Microsoft claims to apply an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license to their .NET core code&lt;/a&gt;, which appears to contain a variance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) .NET Foundation and Contributors&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource.org MIT template&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt; &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, after 1989, it really doesn't matter what the copyright format is (it's actually optional).  I have some questions regarding this variance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the legal consequences of each of the two forms of copyright notice?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the year is used, does it have to be updated in each of the years the code is modified?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isn't the '(c)' redundant?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should Microsoft be claiming to use the MIT license, given the variance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open-source license management tool for use in DevOps work-flows. &lt;strong&gt;Understanding the full legal nuances of the above questions will help me design a better tool&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, should I separate the copyright line(s) from the actual license content for all of the OSS licenses, or is the copyright format specified by each of them, part and parcel to the license?  Should I create a special category of license for the Microsoft variant?  Etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20600" LastEditorUserId="20600" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:42:14.637" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T01:05:42.320" Title="Is Microsoft in compliance with MIT license for .Net Core?" Tags="|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10490" CreationDate="2020-09-29T07:55:58.160" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose there exists a software library &lt;em&gt;libfoo&lt;/em&gt; distributed under the terms of a hypothetical license we will here call The Foo License (TFL). The terms of TFL are identical to those of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;, but with two extra conditions tacked on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No one by the name of Bob may use this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The binary form of this software may not be run on Mondays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us disregard the silliness and potential untenability of this license for the sake of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose now that I write and hold copyright for a piece of software, let's call it &lt;em&gt;bar&lt;/em&gt;, that uses libfoo. None of libfoo's code is copied into bar's source code, but when bar is compiled and linked it also compiles pieces of libfoo and links these into the bar binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that I cannot distribute bar under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, as TFL places incompatible restrictions on its non-source form. Can I, however, distribute bar under a license that says something along the lines of &lt;em&gt;Bar is distributed under the GPLv3, with the following exception: a non-source form of this work is under TFL&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My actual intent here is that I'm writing a piece of software that I want to be under the GPL. For the moment, &lt;em&gt;but hopefully not forever&lt;/em&gt;, that software needs a library that is under something like TFL to actually perform any useful function in real life. I would like to essentially GPL my source and in the future swap out libfoo whenever it becomes possible to do so, yet not have a non-redistributable binary (violating either the GPL or TFL) in the meantime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20502" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T08:14:39.880" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T08:14:39.880" Title="Granting exceptions to the GPL so that binary is compatible with 3rd party license" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|multi-licensing|exceptions|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10489" CreationDate="2020-09-29T08:07:23.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I, however, distribute bar under a license that says something along the lines of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Bar is distributed under the GPLv3, with the following exception: a non-source form of this work is under TFL&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not meaningfully.  GPLv3 s6 says that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and s5c requires that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, GPLv3 s7 says that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your intent is really to distribute the work under the terms you propose (strict GPLv3 plus TFL-related restriction), any recipient may simply strip off and ignore the TFL-related restriction.  If on the other hand your intent is to use and distribute a modified form of the GPLv3 with permission for a durable TFL restriction added in, then you're violating the copyright on the GPL text itself (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also also, there's simply no point, as nobody will touch your software with a bargepole &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;because it's under a weird crayon licence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T08:12:27.033" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T08:12:27.033" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-29T08:39:46.117" Score="3" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10480/how-are-software-patches-licensed&quot;&gt;an earlier question&lt;/a&gt; which included a misunderstanding about the nature of the MIT/X license, and has been clarified there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the software project &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwm.suckless.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dwm by Suckless&lt;/a&gt;. The project is &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.suckless.org/dwm/file/LICENSE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clearly licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the MIT/X Consortium License. It is customarily augmented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code patches&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice makes some changes to dwm. The changes could be conveniently distributed as either a patch file, or as a fork of the original repository. Suppose that Alice's changes make no alteration to the existing license of dwm. Her fork would include the same license statement that the original project did. Then I think that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice's forks to dwm are clearly licensed as MIT/X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice's patches, taken by themselves, have all rights reserved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows that as long as no fork including Alice's patch has been published &lt;em&gt;by Alice&lt;/em&gt;, that Bob (who forked dwm and included Alice's patch in good faith), might be violating Alice's copyright by distributing his version. This sounds like a problem for managing copyright among large projects - is it a problem in practice? Is there some inference made about the fact that Alice's changes were clearly intended to patch dwm, or must some explicit agreement be made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license with greater copyleft in the parent project (like the GPL) does ensure that Bob's fork is allowed. Section 5 of GPLv3 states (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.&#xA;       You may convey a work based on the Program,&#xA;       **or the modifications to produce it from the Program**,&#xA;       in the form of source code under the terms of section 4,&#xA;       provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&#xA;       ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copied from previous question&lt;/strong&gt;: Bart von Ingen Schenau wrote the following relevant detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one situation where the default copyright &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; changes if it is known that the changes are intended to be a patch to another work. That is if the changes are offered in a pull-request to a repository that has the policy that the incoming license (the license of contributions) is the same as the outgoing license (the license under which the repository is offered). In that case, by making a pull request, Alice has agreed to license her changes under the repository's license, even when it is not explicitly stated among the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They mention that GitHub is an example of a platform with such a ToS. I am interested in finding out if there are any more general considerations, in the absence of something like a ToS explicitly guaranteeing these rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="20382" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T16:44:56.670" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T15:03:45.333" Title="Do software patches ever inherit the license of the patched project?" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10494" CreationDate="2020-09-29T13:22:20.027" Score="7" ViewCount="1045" Body="&lt;p&gt;We want to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Sicos1977/MSGReader&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MSGReader library&lt;/a&gt; in our project. MSGReader is open-source project under MIT license. MSGReader depends on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/OpenMcdf/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenMcdf library&lt;/a&gt; under Mozilla Public License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our project is proprietary enterprise product (commercial software, code is not disclosed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is using of library under MIT license with dependency on library under MPL-2.0 legal in our case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20605" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T16:32:09.313" Title="Using of library under MIT license with dependency on library under MPL-2.0" Tags="|mit|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10493" CreationDate="2020-09-29T16:32:09.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using MIT licensed and MPL-2.0 licensed dependencies in your closed-source product is legal if you meet these requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a copy of the MIT license in your documentation. You can precede that copy with a statement that only part of the software is covered by the MIT license. You are not required to identify which part of the software you are referring to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You state in your documentation that your software is using the OpenMcdf library and where people can obtain the source code for that library. There is no requirement that users can do anything with that source code in relation to your product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T16:32:09.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10491" CreationDate="2020-09-30T10:08:34.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I can answer my own question at this point. The two relevant factors appear to be the scope of the parent license's copyleft, and whether some kind of contributor license agreement is in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;No CLA, with a non-copyleft parent license&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice's forks to dwm are clearly licensed as MIT/X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice's patches, taken by themselves, have all rights reserved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not true that Alice's forks are licensed under MIT/X. The license notice which is obtained from the parent project applies &lt;em&gt;only to the code from that project&lt;/em&gt;. Alice's new code is not licensed under those changes, which implies that Bob's fork is always unauthorized, no matter how the changes are distributed. See the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10135/is-copyright-of-a-contribution-to-a-bsd-2-clause-project-automatically-assigned&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for two opinions to that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;No CLA, with a strong copyleft license&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the question, if we replace &amp;quot;MIT/X&amp;quot; with, for example, the GPL, then modified versions (or the parts of the program necessary to reproduce the modified version from the original) are necessarily licensed under the GPL also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;CLA&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An explicit CLA may cede copyright to the project maintainer, or it may simply grant certain rights to the maintainer to use the contributor's code (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;). If copyright is ceded, then that code is now a contribution of the project owner, no differently to any other part of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project owner merely has a license to use the contribution in their project, then a forker seems to be on shakier ground, and the exact situation probably depends on the details of the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Implicit&amp;quot; CLAs, and Community Expectations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is generally &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5853/do-contributors-own-copyright-after-sending-contributions&quot;&gt;a community expectation&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;inbound=outbound&amp;quot;: that contributions to Free projects are Free. As far as I can tell, this is mistaken. However, some platforms make this assumption into an explicit agreement in their Terms of Service. The linked question gives an example of GitHub, and again this varies from platform to platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="20382" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T12:19:32.097" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T12:19:32.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10498" CreationDate="2020-09-30T12:43:36.503" Score="3" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seeems like such a simple question but having a hard time finding a definitive answer. Apologies if it has been asked before (and it feels like it should). Please point me in the right direction if so (I did look!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the CC-BY-SA license, attribution should be given &amp;quot;in a reasonable manner&amp;quot;. For something like a font or image with this license used on a website, is it okay to place this in the source code (i.e. HTML, JS or CSS)? I note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.toptal.com/designers/subtlepatterns/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Subtle Patterns&lt;/a&gt; has this license and allows this explicitly in their FAQs but other resources do not say whether this is a &amp;quot;reasonable manner&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20612" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T11:30:24.633" Title="Attribution of resources under CC-BY-SA" Tags="|creative-commons|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10497" CreationDate="2020-10-01T11:30:24.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, let's look at your legal obligations.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4&lt;/a&gt; says in s3(a)(2) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which isn't, I'd agree, terribly definitive.  It's generally well-understood (see best practice guidelines, qv) that for inlined images all good attributions should be placed by the image in question.  I understand that for an image used as background that's not possible; your question is whether non-rendering content (eg, HTML or JS comments) constitute a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;reasonable manner&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; for including the attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue they do not.  You can't put the attribution beside the image, because the image is used in a way that doesn't permit it.  But you should make as few departures from best-practice for inlined images as are required by the way the image is used to have the best chance of justifying your behaviour as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider a footer on any page that uses CC BY-SA content for background.  Or one might have a specific page for all attributions related to (eg) BY and BY-SA content used on the site, linked to from the top of every page.  These are both comparably prominent to the inlined image attribution examples, and easily done for your usage case, and I would argue that they are therefore comparably reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: IMO, putting the acknowledgments in HTML comments buries them more than is necessitated by the usage case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T11:30:24.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-02T10:37:54.290" Score="3" ViewCount="1045" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused. Can I use a GNU GPLv2 licensed piece of software with a proprietary (closed source) piece of software without affecting the license of the proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I able to distribute a pre-compiled (vendor supplied binary with no modification) piece of GNU GPLv2 software (executable) with our software without breaking license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to be able to distribute it with our product, but we also need to have the ability to run the executable as a standalone process and pass some parameters to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By doing this we want to ensure that our source stays closed is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20626" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T15:02:39.397" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T15:37:56.040" Title="Use and distribute executable licensed under GNU GPLv2 with proprietary software" Tags="|gpl-2|gnu|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10499" CreationDate="2020-10-03T10:11:33.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;0.&#xA;…&#xA;Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. &lt;strong&gt;The act of running the Program is not restricted&lt;/strong&gt;, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that you can distribute, if you follow the distribution rules. It is clear that you can use for any purpose.&#xA;(See also the free-software definition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T10:11:33.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-03T10:58:06.883" Score="2" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose you build a point of sale software using PHP code. You used another standalone server for the report viewing such as the Jasper Reports Server. These two links only via library built in PHP which the Jaspersoft also created and is licensed under LGPL. It communicates through a RESTful API which then accesses the reports in the Jasper Reports Server to be embedded in an iFrame in the Main PHP Program. However, this Jasper Server is licensed under AGPLv3. These two programs are separate and communicates only via the library. There was no code modifications made in the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is, does the jasper server with its AGPLv3 license will also affect the main program? Since the two programs are implemented separately and links only through an LGPL library, how will the Jasper Server AGPLv3 come into play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Nikola Einstein" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T17:04:55.370" Title="How does the APGLv3 applies on a project which links only through an iFrame?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10501" CreationDate="2020-10-04T15:27:56.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPLv3 is the same license as the GPLv3, with an extra section that requires you to provide the source code when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you modified the AGPLv3-covered software, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users interact with the software remotely over a network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you haven't modified the AGPL-covered software, we can treat it as the GPLv3 for this discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So would the use of a GPLv3-covered server on your backend somehow affect your other backend code? In practice, no:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL only triggers requirements when giving someone a copy of the program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As your program and the (A)GPLv3-covered program seem to communicate over a REST API, they are completely separate programs and the (A)GPLv3 license doesn't affect your code – but this depends on how the connector actually works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that last point: if your architecture looks something like this, you likely have two separate programs and you only have to comply with the LGPL license, and that only triggers requirements when giving someone else a copy of your software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;      Your Program                        Not Your Program&#xA;+-----------+----------------+            +-------------+&#xA;| your code | LGPL connector | &amp;lt;--------&amp;gt; | AGPL server |&#xA;+-----------+----------------+  REST API  +-------------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, if this were a single program your program would fall under the AGPL, and you would have to make the source code available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                              A Single Program&#xA;----------------------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;+-----------+                +----------------+                +-----------+&#xA;| your code | &amp;lt;------------&amp;gt; | LGPL connector | &amp;lt;------------&amp;gt; | AGPL code |&#xA;+-----------+ function calls +----------------+ function calls +-----------+&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, it doesn't matter whether  your code directly interacts with code under a certain license, but whether your program (in its entirety) is &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; of other code, for example by &lt;em&gt;including&lt;/em&gt; that other code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an argument that this interpretation of the (A)GPL doesn't count for dynamic languages like PHP where there is no binary that actually includes both your code and the (A)GPL code, but I wouldn't bet on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have only discussed the backend, and not the embedding of the AGPL web app in an iframe. As long as the iframe contents are treated separately from your other frontend code, I don't think it could be considered to form a single program for copyright purposes. However, if the iframe and outer frame share data over mechanisms like &lt;code&gt;window.parent&lt;/code&gt;, that could be an indication that they form a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T15:27:56.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10499" CreationDate="2020-10-04T15:37:56.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can distribute/provide GPL and non-GPL software side by side, without any further license obligations. This is often called “mere aggregation”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A non-GPL program can launch a GPL program without any further license obligations, provided that they are clearly separate programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you could create a proprietary text editor that internally uses the Markdown text format. You could bundle a copy of the GPL-licensed Pandoc tool to export the Markdown as various formats, provided that you do this by launching Pandoc as a separate process (in contrast to embedding Pandoc as a library in your application).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you must still comply with the GPL for the GPL-covered program. In particular, this means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;providing a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when providing binaries: providing the complete corresponding source code (see the license text for details)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have an installer that bundles your own software with GPL-covered software, it should be possible to install the GPL software separately, without having to agree to any of your EULAs or licenses (you must not restrict the recipient's rights under the GPL). Your software should also work with modified variants of the GPL-covered program, so e.g. don't calculate checksums for the GPL-covered binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T15:37:56.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10424" CreationDate="2020-10-04T18:43:35.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on jurisdiction, there could be copyright exceptions available that allow reverse-engineering for the purpose of interoperability. Sniffing is particularly unproblematic because you're observing behaviour instead of reading copyright-protected material,&#xA;but decompilation could be an issue because it's not clear that your software is your own creative work, rather than copying relevant parts from the original software. In a professional setting that would want to limit liability, a clean–room approach would be used to prevent the people writing the reimplementation from having access to the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a legal right to reverse engineer the software, then a private contract denying you this right might be unenforceable in that part – but again, this would depend on jurisdiction. In the US, a contract (including EULAs) would override your right to reverse-engineer the software. Thus, it might be preferable to have the reverse engineering being done in countries where the right overrules contracts – it is the reverse-engineering and not the reimplementation that would be the primary concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the vendor of the original software finds a reimplementation, they could reasonably believe that the protocol was not reverse-engineered legally and that your software could be a derivative work. They could for example send you a cease and desist letter, or send a takedown request (e.g. DMCA) to any services that host the software to you. You could also be sued, and would then have to demonstrate in court that your software was created legally – that it was created independently, without copying parts of the original software, without using reverse engineering techniques that were not authorized. The same would hold for closed-source software, except that the vendor would have a harder time becoming aware of potential infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T18:43:35.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10506" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10508" CreationDate="2020-10-04T21:11:39.370" Score="4" ViewCount="699" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched for this question over the internet but with no success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a MIT licensed python library and did my modifications to fit my necessities. I want this new version to be a copyright with all rights reserved. I know that even if I don't say anything, this new project is automatically under all rights reserved to me. Even so, I want to add some note that indicates the copyright, as the same way the MIT License note previously added in the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common practice for licencing is adding a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file to the root dir with the license text. For sub-license as a &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;, what is the main procedure or the common procedure? How, in practice, can I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20639" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T09:18:01.713" Title="How to sub-license a modified MIT licensed project as a copyright?" Tags="|mit|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8219" CreationDate="2020-10-04T21:52:32.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are missing an important point. It would be very difficult for Company A to get $1000/month from their customers just for using that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, Joe Client may not be technically literate to understand nor run it, but he could provide it to Bob competitor which will install it for him for a fraction of the cost (or Joe may have an in-house sysadmin able to do so). While theoretically yes, company A could get lots of money this way, in fact it's hard they would get such profit from the software itself. They would need to differentiate from competitors using the same software in a different way, such as having the in-house  experts that know how to and rune it and debug the problems that may arise (Bob has no idea), presenting an integrated interface so that any dumb user could set it up, selling an appliance with the system already installed, support contracts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T21:52:32.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10506" CreationDate="2020-10-05T09:18:01.713" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license requires you to preserve the original copyright &amp;amp; license notice as a kind of attribution, but you can make it clear that it's no longer in effect. For example, you might write a license notice like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2020 Your Name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software is based on libfoobar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2017 Original Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Full text of MIT License here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could put such notices into a LICENSE file, but would probably also want to update any license headers in files that you modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T09:18:01.713" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10519" CreationDate="2020-10-05T10:41:44.550" Score="6" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I develop a piece of software that uses AGPL licensed iText7. The licensing options are therefore GPL and AGPL. The software is to be installed locally and acts as a plugin to a proprietary desktop application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This PDF manipulation software needs to work with very specific PDFs that contain very specific proprietary, non-Unicode fonts.  This means, the test suite must include such PDFs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the following options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Embed the publisher-specific fonts that our clients' publisher requires them to use. Effectively those fonts are &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; and not available for purchase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a proprietary alternative as stand-in font that has a proper commercial license, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fonts.com/info/legal/eula/monotype-imaging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monotype Imaging EULA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a font under SIL Open Font License as stand-in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1 is technically preferable because it tests the software precisely like the client will use it. Also no need to make the software work with stand-ins. However, it's likely to be problematic licensing-wise because of the lack of a proper font license.  Could we have a test suite that we do not publish under GPL terms and keep it secret instead, despite testing a software that has an AGPL component?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2 might allow us to distribute the test suite documents, if the respective font license can be interpreted in such a way. (In the case of the Monotype Imaging EULA that is still debatable, but I don't want to make this the topic of this question – commercial font licenses vary in their terms.) Would it be possible to exempt the test documents from the GPL license, despite the software itself and the test suite being under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3 seems to be unproblematic, both from a technical as well as a licensing perspective. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20648" LastEditorUserId="20648" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T07:59:14.663" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T08:29:22.203" Title="PDFs with proprietary fonts in test suite of (A)GPL software" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10488" CreationDate="2020-10-06T04:33:25.913" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me just say that I am not a lawyer, and all I can say on this topic is what I've found online, where non-lawyers tend to give out substantial quantities of bad advice, and there are few legal scholars volunteering free guidance. If anyone can post a more definitive answer to my questions, I will happily withdraw this and chose a better answer, once I've got a reasonable selection to chose from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What follows is my interpretation of the information I have found. Hopefully, minus the noise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the &amp;quot;is Microsoft compliant with MIT license?&amp;quot; part of this question, since that is the title of this thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Ambiguity_and_variants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there is no one MIT license. They point out that MIT has released code under more than one permissive license, however, all of the variants listed, include the year of creation/publication, but we must keep in mind that these licenses date back to the 80's when US and other laws were substantially different, and the presence and form of the copyright notice were strictly proscribed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open source Initiative&lt;/a&gt; only lists one &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; which does include the year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft's LICENSE.TXT file, for the Core repository&lt;/a&gt;, starts with the line &amp;quot;The MIT License (MIT)&amp;quot;. It's not at all clear what variant or version they are referring to, but the parenthesized 'MIT' happens to be the SPDX short identifier for the MIT license, and since it is redundant, I assume they are referring to that SPDX, which takes us to the OSI. The fact that they do not comport with the MIT license published by the OSI, suggests what they really have is a variant of some MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wearing my pedantic cap, I'd say the OSI and most of the various license authors have generally failed to adequately separate copyright concerns from license concerns, but I know from previous lurking on their various email lists, that many of the legal experts, claim that the copyright notice itself is integral to any OSS license, as you must first establish that; you are granting permissions based on your legal ownership of the work. Without it, there's no grantor for the grantee to be bound to contractually. It is the MIT license after all. On what basis would MIT be granting anyone a license to someone else's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a statement of who is the grantor of the license, seems to me to be required for any contract to be valid. In this case, the grantor can only be the current copyright owner, hence the copyright notice. Keep in mind that the distributor of the source code in question, may not be connected/related to said owner, so including this information in the license, attached to the source, seems perfectly reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that Microsoft should make it clear, that what they have is a variant of the MIT license, not the MIT license itself. So the answer to my question is a qualified NO. Qualified in the sense that, I am just not a lawyer and there are no legal restrictions, I am aware of, on the use of the MIT license published by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Microsoft includes a copyright, it's just not of the form suggested by the OSI or used by similar licenses. So why the variance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That brings us to &amp;quot;What are the legal consequences of each of the two forms of copyright notice?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis are mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although notice is optional for unpublished works, foreign works, or works published on or after&#xA;March 1, 1989, using a copyright notice carries the following benefits:&#xA;• &lt;strong&gt;Notice makes potential users aware that copyright is claimed in the work.&#xA;• In the case of a published work, a notice may prevent a defendant in a copyright infringement&#xA;action from attempting to limit his or her liability for damages or injunctive relief based on an&#xA;innocent infringement defense.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Copyright Notice 4&#xA;• Notice identifies the copyright owner at the time the work was first published for parties seeking permission to use the work.&#xA;• &lt;strong&gt;Notice identifies the year of first publication, which may be used to determine the term of&#xA;copyright protection in the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work&#xA;made for hire.&#xA;• Notice may prevent the work from becoming an orphan work by identifying the copyright&#xA;owner and specifying the term of the copyright.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So two of the listed benefits, in the US at least, and probably others, mention establishing the date of publication. I seem to recall that copyright begins at the point of creation, not the point of publication, but establishing the creation date is difficult without some form of public disclosure. It seems that Microsoft is willing to forgo the benefit of a date established in the copyright notice. Perhaps they feel their publication process is adequate to the task of establishing a year of publication? Perhaps they prefer the potentially later publication year, to be the point at which their legal term of copyright begins?  I can't say, but those are the only reasons I can think of at this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the answer to #2 is yes, if you wish to reset the start of the remaining term of copyright. Now this may bring us to another of Microsoft's motivations (only speculating of course). If you modify a work in a given year, and you're tracking years in the copyright notice, then you must update the notice to include the years of modification, otherwise you run the risk of not gaining the benefit of the potential extended copyright term. Now there may be other ways to establish that the work was updated, and attribute the changes to the listed copyright owner, but why complicate that process? Either update the notice in every year the work was modified, or don't post the year in the copyright notice to begin with. For a large organization like Microsoft, ensuring that a copyright notice is updated with every change, would require the build system inspect every changed file for an accurate year and either fixing the notice or stalling the build for manual intervention. The former would require tooling and build time, while the later is not worth contemplating. It's far simpler to enforce a fixed static copyright notice in every source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For #3, I think the answer depends on your jurisdiction. In the US, it seems redundant to me, but there may be countries where the symbol takes precedence. I believe that the copyright symbol is common to many, if not all countries, but the word &amp;quot;copyright&amp;quot; might not be so obvious in some languages. I suppose a little redundancy doesn't hurt, but I can only speculate why Microsoft chose to use both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#4 just restated the title, and I think I've made it clear that they are using a variant. It's still not clear to me why they chose to call it &amp;quot;The MIT License (MIT)&amp;quot;. Perhaps someone will enlighten us, for history's sake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my search for information, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/copyright-guide/#european-copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I stumbled across this excellent page written by another non-lawyer who seems to have done some good research&lt;/a&gt;, where I was reminded that, in the US, you can only sue someone for infringement if you have registered your copyright with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US copyright office&lt;/a&gt;. I think we can assume that Microsoft does in fact register in most, if not all jurisdictions that require it. Perhaps it is the US registration they rely on for establishing the publication date?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if I have asked more questions than answered here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20600" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T04:33:25.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10488" CreationDate="2020-10-06T05:59:03.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sole function of the copyright statement in modern, well-managed free software licences is as a chunk of text that must be reproduced verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the MIT licence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice [...] shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright [...] notices from the Source form of the Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This from &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice [...] Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This from &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/ISC.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ISC licence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on, at length, but the idea should be clear.  None mandates any particular form of copyright notice; they say only that if someone else attached one to a work that you are conveying, you must reproduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards any other function of the notice,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_formalities#Benefits_and_critiques&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 1908 Berlin text of the Berne Convention forbade treaty signatories from conditioning copyright on formalities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;such as the existence, position, or form of the copyright notice.  The US continues as an annoying holdout, granting what it sees as Berne-compliant copyrights regardless of formalities but reserving a higher tier of protection to those who comply with s401 of the Copyright Act 1976; discussion about this, however, is not pertinent to the question at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note also that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;the copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and that the MIT licence isn't a copyleft one.  This means that even if the MIT licence &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; require a particular form of notice (which it doesn't) it wouldn't require that the author of the work use that form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to your question, it makes no difference whatsoever to Microsoft's compliance with the MIT licence that they have chosen to include a copyright notice in such a form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T05:59:03.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10517" CreationDate="2020-10-06T10:01:52.683" Score="6" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I write latex templates (e.g. to account for department-specific guidelines for theses etc.), and wonder how to license them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Background&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IEEEtran latex class is &lt;a href=&quot;https://mirror.clientvps.com/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/IEEEtran/IEEEtran_HOWTO.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:LPPL-1.3a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) v1.3&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation (FSF)&lt;/a&gt;, this is a free license (which is good), but not compatible with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Public License (GPL)&lt;/a&gt; (which may be bad, depending on circumstances). There are also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latextemplates.com/template/ieee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;templates&lt;/a&gt; for specific IEEE conferences or journals, which to my understanding are licensed in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I found&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Templates&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/309614/what-is-a-template&quot;&gt;debate&lt;/a&gt; about what a latex template is (as distinction from classes or packages). However in this case, I think it is quite straightforward: There is the class (IEEEtran.cls) and there are some templates (e.g. bare_conf.tex), that follow the appropriate layout guidelines. This is what I mean by &amp;quot;template&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to copyleft the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7551/20376&quot;&gt;content&lt;/a&gt; of my work, I can use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; (CC) license, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;. However, I don't know if a template counts as content (my guess is that it doesn't).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;LPPL restrictions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6395/20376&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, I'm free to license my tex files in any way I like, as opposed to being restricted to the LPPL. So I could just use the GPL, but the FSF recommends to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;license your templates under simple permissive terms&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4206/20376&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Multi-licensing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could use &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2302/20376&quot;&gt;two licences&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. GNU and LPPL), so the user could decide which one to further use. But this just leaves the user with my original problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a GPL compatible license suitable for latex templates, that can be used instead of LPPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Edit&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a strong preference for copyleft licenses. The reason why I asked about an alternative to LPPL, which is not copyleft, is that it &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/179371/164146&quot;&gt;seems to be&lt;/a&gt; a standard license for latex projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastEditorUserId="20376" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T10:37:41.813" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T09:53:32.287" Title="GPL compatible alternative to LPPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|lppl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10525" CreationDate="2020-10-06T22:11:11.640" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this article on the msdn magazine and would like to use the code included in there in a commercial program. Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2017/october/test-run-time-series-regression-using-a-csharp-neural-network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2017/october/test-run-time-series-regression-using-a-csharp-neural-network&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is not complete here, but is given complete in the following site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.dragansr.com/2017/10/ai-time-series-regression-using-c.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.dragansr.com/2017/10/ai-time-series-regression-using-c.html?m=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20656" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T06:42:26.457" Title="Is this MSDN code free for commercial use?" Tags="|copyright|commercial|microsoft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-07T05:37:17.887" Score="5" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to create an open-source database of electronic components and their standard, manufacturer-independent attributes. So, for example, a user could query the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_number&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manufacturer part number&lt;/a&gt; for a capacitor and get back information like the capacitance, voltage rating, etc. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IEC 61360 standard&lt;/a&gt; classifies electronic components and standard attributes. It does not provide a database of components, but specifies e.g., that a &amp;quot;class 1 ceramic capacitor&amp;quot; should have such and such standard values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use the component classification and attribute values defined in this standard as the basis for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_schema&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database schema&lt;/a&gt;. However, this standard is under copyright and I'm not sure what I can use from it in my code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To provide a little background, the IEC 61360 standard consists of a hierarchical classification of components (some component classes are subclasses of other component classes - e.g., &amp;quot;ceramic capacitors&amp;quot; are a subclass of &amp;quot;capacitors&amp;quot;). Additionally, it defines standard attributes which apply to one or more of these classes. These attributes are accompanied by a description and a specification of the format of the value associated with it. The essential difficulty I'm facing is that in order to have my database be in accordance with the standard, I'd like to provide a schema that enforces it. However, the standard is basically a non-code schema itself, so providing one in my code base would involve copying portions of the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard provides a license &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdd.iec.ch/cdd/iec61360/iec61360.nsf/License?openPage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the following passage about permitted use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;YOU are allowed to print, copy, reproduce, distribute or otherwise exploit, whether commercially or not, in any way freely, internally in your organization or to a third party, the following attributes of the data elements in the database with or without contained values:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• Identity number;&#xA;• Version number;&#xA;• Revision number;&#xA;• Name (Preferred name);&#xA;• Unit;&#xA;• Value format.&#xA;• Symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a little below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using or making available any portion of the IEC 61360 database or information extracted from it, YOU shall ensure that IEC is referenced as the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I understand this. I can use the unique names and identifiers in the standard (names are &amp;quot;preferred name&amp;quot; and identifiers are &amp;quot;version number&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;revision number&amp;quot;). Moreover, for attributes, I can state the expected format of the value. However, this doesn't appear to mention descriptions for classes or attributes. For instance, I can't provide a definition for &amp;quot;tangent of loss angle&amp;quot;. Anyone contributing to my database would need to look that up in the standard. Additionally, this doesn't say anything about the hierarchical classification of components. This is tricky, because although I haven't explicitly described the hierarchy, the schema (and structure of files for the database) reflect this hierarchy. I can omit definitions if need be, but I can't see any way to make this project open source and deal with the hierarchy issue if that is indeed an infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regard to the first issue, Wikipedia copies (with attribution) definitions from the standard (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_capacitor#Application_classes,_definitions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Does that mean as long as I cite the source I can provide the definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that the IEC provides an actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_Common_Data_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metadata registry&lt;/a&gt; where a schema of this metadata can be downloaded. I wouldn't use this - my schema would be a sort of reimplementation based on the contents of the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I found this other &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100206.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISO guide&lt;/a&gt; that discusses how not to break copyright. However, it mostly just advises against distributing the standard document, which of course I wouldn't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What parts of the standard can I include in my code base?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdd.iec.ch/cdd/iec61360/iec61360.nsf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;introduction page&lt;/a&gt; to the common data dictionary (the online metadata registry) also contains relevant information in the context around the link to the license (&amp;quot;license conditions&amp;quot; links to the license, which is linked earlier in this post):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license conditions allow the use of the classes, properties, units, values and relations in business and engineering processes and related applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to indicate that I can use the hierarchical classification (this should be what class &amp;quot;relations&amp;quot; means). I'm a bit confused that there's no mention of &amp;quot;relation&amp;quot; in the actual license, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, &amp;quot;values&amp;quot; is a little confusing to me. The IEC 61360-1 standard, which provides terminology definitions, describes &amp;quot;value attributes&amp;quot; in section 4.4. It then refers to value attributes as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;attributes related to the value of the data element types&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me think that &amp;quot;value&amp;quot; refers to all parts of the value, including all attributes and sub-attributes. This is important to me because &amp;quot;value meaning&amp;quot; (which is a definition of the value) is one of these sub-attributes. However, the actual license only explicitly mentions &amp;quot;value format&amp;quot;, which is a subclass of value and not a superclass of &amp;quot;value meaning&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17205" LastEditorUserId="17205" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T21:25:42.147" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T21:25:42.147" Title="Copyright considerations for using IEC standard in open-source code" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10526" CreationDate="2020-10-07T10:30:05.297" Score="4" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a project which I'm about to release under the GNU GPL 3+ license. It does, however, contain a number of public domain subroutines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: How do I go about placing a GPL license notice in the file containing those subroutines, i.e. I understand there should be a copyright line at the beginning which allows me to license things, but I don't (nobody does?) own a copyright on the public domain part. Does it mean that I should just include the PD part 'as is' without any license notice or is it possible to specifically &lt;strong&gt;license the PD code&lt;/strong&gt; under GPL? The latter would imply that I own the copyright which I don't. How to approach this and &lt;strong&gt;fully comply with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this official GPL guideline&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every file of my project contains the GPL preamble; do I leave it out entirely in the PD file or attribute it somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20657" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T08:45:25.313" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T07:21:37.097" Title="The specifics of licensing public domain code within project under GNU GPLv3+" Tags="|gpl|software|license|gnu|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10513" CreationDate="2020-10-07T15:11:31.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, a template, in the context how you appear to use it, is a bare-bones document that people can copy and flesh out with their own content. The template document gives some indications how the author of the template thinks such a document should be structured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As using such a template always starts with making a copy of it and then making changes to that copy (usually by adding stuff), copyright law states that the final document is a derivative work of the template. Copyright law also states that a derivative work may only be created and distributed with permission from the author of the original work (the template). This is where copyright licenses come into play, because they are the way in which such permission is granted and they specify the conditions under which the permission is granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe you can already see the problem with using a copyleft (or share-alike) license for a template: &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; documents written using that template must use the same license as was used for the template itself. Many people don't realize that and I am not sure if your department would agree that all theses must be published under a copyleft open-source license. That is why the FSF recommends to use a permissive license for templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for which license you can use for your own latex templates, don't focus too much on GPL compatibility. While using a GPL compatible license for software is a good thing, as nearly all software sooner or later comes into contact with the GPL license, LaTeX forms essentially an ecosystem of its own where GPL compatibility is not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the GPL or CC BY-SA licenses for your template (yes, your template counts as content), but then you run into the issue outlined above that any document written using your template must be published under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a template should not put too much burden on the people that use it to write a document, I recommend to use a simple permissive license, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; or perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; for templates. Both of those are compatible with the GPL and place very few requirements on the users of the template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For LaTeX class files and packages that accompany the template, I recommend that you use the LPPL license. That license is specifically tailored for packages and classes in the LaTeX ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-10-08T09:53:32.287" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T09:53:32.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10509" CreationDate="2020-10-08T08:29:22.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the question as-is, you added in chat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd [...] ask for solutions to have a test suite with a) &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; fonts, b) proprietary fonts that allow embedded and subsetted distribution (I'd link to more specific licenses) and c) fonts under SIL Open Font License. (Where solutions might be technical, like separating software and test suite, or &amp;quot;legal&amp;quot;, like exempting PDFs from the license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, you are not obliged to distribute a test suite at all.  It's good that you wrote one — I wish more software authors did — but you don't have to do it, and having done it, you don't have to distribute any or all of it.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; doesn't list &lt;em&gt;test suites&lt;/em&gt; under the definition of &lt;em&gt;Corresponding Source&lt;/em&gt;.  This is quite an important point, because you will be releasing your software under GPLv3 or a mix of AGPLv3+GPLv3 (depending on your choices), and it means that the test suite is not part of the work which iText is part of, and so the licensing obligations imposed by iText don't extend as far as the test suite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, the answer to all three of your cases above turn on the same point: what the licence on the font says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the font licence is proprietary (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), then you have no permission to redistribute it &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, so the question is academic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the font licence is proprietary+distribution-allowed, then you may redistribute it but you will have to be clear that the test suite contains material governed by a more restrictive licence than the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the font licence is &lt;a href=&quot;https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OFLv1.1&lt;/a&gt;, then your proposed use satisfies all five conditions, provided that you make it clear that the font is covered by OFL, you include the relevant texts (condition 2), and you do not modify the font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second and third cases, it might be worth thinking about packaging the test suite separately from the main software, because it will be easier for prospective users to know which bits are AGPL/GPL+AGPL, and which bits are not.  Every time someone asks me about reuse of code on GitHub under mixed licences, my heart sinks, because I know I'll have to comb through it working out which licence applies to which bits.  And, as usual, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T08:29:22.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10523" CreationDate="2020-10-08T15:16:49.040" Score="2" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can Transpiled Output Source-Code Have Different License And Different Copyright Holder Than Input Source-Code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Prj-A──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TP──&amp;gt;────┬─&amp;gt;Prj-┐ &#xA;(Apache) │(Python-to-C++)│  TP  │&#xA;         │               │      │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;───┘      │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-G──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TG──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj──&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(GPLv2)  │ (Go-to-C++)│  TG     ┝━&amp;gt;Prj&#xA;         │            │         │   D&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘  my code─&amp;gt;─┘         │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-B──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TC──&amp;gt;──┬─&amp;gt;Prj─&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(BSD)    │  (C#-to-C++)│  TC    │&#xA;         │             │        │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;─┘        │&#xA;                                │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;─────┘&#xA;          Diagram - A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have applied pre-processors on source-code of (1) &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt; based Project-A (Prj-A) with Apache&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; License, (2) &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt; based Project-G (Prj-G) with GPLv2&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; License, (3) &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; based Project-B (Prj-B) with BSD&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; License, etc and prepared them for Transpiler, and then applied transpiler on source-code of those software projects as input source-code, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transpiled&lt;/a&gt;/translated/converted (aka: Source-to-Source conversion) those input source-code into &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; based output source-code, and then i have added even more &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; codes in each, and created completely &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;-language based (1) Prj-TP (2) Prj-TG (3) Prj-TC respectively, And then i have taken &amp;amp; used different portions of Prj-TP, Prj-TG &amp;amp; Prj-TC's code/files, and incorporated into my another project, Project-D (Prj-D), Can i use my own name to Copyright &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; based new source-code of Prj-D ? and Can i use different license for the Prj-D ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DETAILS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prj-A uses &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt; language, &amp;amp; has Apache License.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Prj-G uses &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt; language, &amp;amp; has GPLv2 License.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Prj-B uses &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; language, &amp;amp; has BSD License, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in each of this &amp;quot;upstream&amp;quot; project i have made small contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Prj-A──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TP──&amp;gt;────┬─&amp;gt;Prj-┐ &#xA;(Apache) │(Python-to-C++)│  TP  │&#xA;         │               │      │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;───┘      │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-G──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TG──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj──&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(GPLv2)  │ (Go-to-C++)│  TG     ┝━&amp;gt;Prj&#xA;         │            │         │   D&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘  my code─&amp;gt;─┘         │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-B──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TC──&amp;gt;──┬─&amp;gt;Prj─&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(BSD)    │  (C#-to-C++)│  TC    │&#xA;         │             │        │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;─┘        │&#xA;                                │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;─────┘&#xA;          Diagram - A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not very-familiar with or expert on &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; computer programming language.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have learned &lt;code&gt;C&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Assembly&lt;/code&gt;, etc so i'm confident with those.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Compiled &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; program runs much much faster than &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I needed to add new feature into those software, but their dev(s) has denied to add, with different excuses, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lic = License.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TP = &lt;code&gt;Transpiled-Python-to-C++&lt;/code&gt; &lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt; Prj-A(&lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;)(Lic:&lt;code&gt;Apache&lt;/code&gt;)⮕Prj-TP(&lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TG = &lt;code&gt;Transpiled-Go-to-C++&lt;/code&gt; &lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt; Prj-G(&lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;)(Lic:&lt;code&gt;GPL&lt;/code&gt;)⮕Prj-TG(&lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TC = &lt;code&gt;Transpiled-C#-to-C++&lt;/code&gt; &lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt; Prj-B(&lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt;)(Lic:&lt;code&gt;BSD&lt;/code&gt;)⮕Prj-TC(&lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So i have transpiled source-code of Prj-A, Prj-G &amp;amp; Prj-B , into &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; based source-code for new projects Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC respectively&lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First i had to change &amp;amp; prepare certain code-lines in each source-code file of &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; based project, to make it transpiler-friendly. I had to use many different techniques &amp;amp; scripts at this stage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then i have applied different transpiler software on those &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; source-code files, one by one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transpiler software mostly transpiled only subset of &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; language, which are very SIMPLE &amp;amp; EASY &amp;amp; BASIC code, correctly. Transpiler software cannot &amp;amp; did-not convert all types of &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; source-code, especially COMPLEX CODE STRUCTURES.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transpiler skipped many advanced &amp;amp; COMPLEX &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; source-code lines &amp;amp; sections, and also incorrectly converted many lines &amp;amp; sections.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then I have spent long long time, to manually COMPARE &amp;amp; CHECK each line of INPUT &amp;amp; OUTPUT SOURCE-CODE, and i have converted those skipped &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; source-code lines &amp;amp; sections, into my own &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; based code line or section, as much as i could. I have also transpiled &amp;quot;incorrectly&amp;quot; converted &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; into correct &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;, etc. There is no trace of &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; left anymore in the final &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; source-code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So finally transpilation process was done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So finally i have new source-code based new projects: Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, i have taken necessary &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; source-code lines, sections or files from Prj-TP (transpiled from Prj-A w/Lic:&lt;code&gt;Apache&lt;/code&gt;) , Prj-TG (transpiled from Prj-G w/Lic:&lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt;) or Prj-TC (transpiled from Prj-B w/Lic:&lt;code&gt;BSD&lt;/code&gt;), and used into my own new Project-D (Prj-D). ( D = Final-Destination )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Prj-A──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TP──&amp;gt;────┬─&amp;gt;Prj-┐ &#xA;(Apache) │(Python-to-C++)│  TP  │&#xA;         │               │      │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;───┘      │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-G──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TG──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj──&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(GPLv2)  │ (Go-to-C++)│  TG     ┝━&amp;gt;Prj&#xA;         │            │         │   D&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘  my code─&amp;gt;─┘         │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-B──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TC──&amp;gt;──┬─&amp;gt;Prj─&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(BSD)    │  (C#-to-C++)│  TC    │&#xA;         │             │        │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;─┘        │&#xA;                                │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;─────┘&#xA;          Diagram - A&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transpiled codes usually need lots of re-writing &amp;amp; testing &amp;amp; modifications, to functionally perform same-way as &amp;quot;upstream&amp;quot; software.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So at this point, these projects: Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC &amp;amp; Prj-D, still have too much bugs and incompleteness, and still needs lots of fixing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I want to publish my &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; based Prj-D source-code as new project, and share source-code with other devs/users, so that others can collaborate+contribute to fix &amp;amp; improve it further, if they want to.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can i publish Prj-D with a different License ? (different than what is used in Prj-A/Prj-G/Prj-B).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-D ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i also release Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC, each under different License ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do i need to notify Prj-A/Prj-G/Prj-B ?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;END OF DETAILS.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT / UPDATE &lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;i have added this/below section(s) after User:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/258/bart-van-ingen-schenau&quot;&gt;Bart van Ingen Schenau&lt;/a&gt; posted his initial answer in below.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Please check &amp;quot;EDIT&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;UPDATE&amp;quot; section in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10523/18616&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As GPLv2 license is grabbing downward/derivative works/projects/source-codes , in my case I definitely want to avoid usage of GPL license , and my reason of creating this SE Question was to find out if I can use a different license or not, in above mentioned final project Prj-D.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So i have re-searched again &amp;amp; found a replacement for &lt;code&gt;GPLv2&lt;/code&gt; based Prj-G, let us call this new project, Prj-M, as it is under &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This Prj-M is using same &amp;quot;Go&amp;quot; language, like previous Prj-G . I will have to do similar work like before, to transpile Prj-M into Prj-TG2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Prj-A──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TP──&amp;gt;────┬─&amp;gt;Prj-┐ &#xA;(Apache) │(Python-to-C++)│  TP  │&#xA;         │               │      │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;───┘      │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-M──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TG2──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj─&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(MIT)    │ (Go-to-C++) │  TG2   ┝━&amp;gt;Prj&#xA;         │             │        │  D2&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;─┘        │&#xA;                                │&#xA;Prj-B──&amp;gt;─┬─&amp;gt;Prj-TC──&amp;gt;──┬─&amp;gt;Prj─&amp;gt;─┤&#xA;(BSD)    │  (C#-to-C++)│  TC    │&#xA;         │             │        │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;┘   my code─&amp;gt;─┘        │&#xA;                                │&#xA;my code─&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;────────&amp;gt;─────┘&#xA;            Diagram - B&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will transpile simple basic small portion of &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt; code into &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; by using software trnspiler, rest of the advanced code sections, complex code sections, etc all will be manually transformed by me from &lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on above code conversion diagram and related info , Can i publish Prj-D2 source-code with a different License ? a different license than what is used in Prj-A/Prj-M/Prj-B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;( i think i can, for above case )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-D2 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i think i can add my-name under previous copyright-holder, as explained by User:&amp;quot;Bart van Ingen Schenau&amp;quot; in his answer . I have to use previous copyright-holders too, because i have used software transpiler on some portion of the &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; source-code conversion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i also release Prj-TP(&lt;code&gt;Apache&lt;/code&gt;), Prj-TG2(&lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;) &amp;amp; Prj-TC(&lt;code&gt;BSD&lt;/code&gt;) source-code, each under a different License ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i think i can, for above license cases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-TP, Prj-TG2, Prj-TC ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i think i can add my-name under previous copyright-holder(s), as explained by User:&amp;quot;Bart van Ingen Schenau&amp;quot; in his answer, because i have used machine to convert some portion of the input source code . If i convert &lt;code&gt;Python&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;Go&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;C#&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;code&gt;C++&lt;/code&gt; without using any machine or transpiler software, with my own hand, eye, brain manually, then i do not need to add previous copyright-holder(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do i need to notify Prj-A/Prj-M/Prj-B ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i think i don't have to, as explained by User:&amp;quot;Bart van Ingen Schenau&amp;quot; in his answer, and its courteous to do so anyway . I will ofcourse inform upstream original authors/devs . and their name is also in copyright notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have forgotten to mention &amp;amp; ask this earlier &lt;b&gt;:&lt;/b&gt; I have added new features in new project Prj-D and also added new features in transpiled project Prj-TG, which did not exist in &amp;quot;upstream&amp;quot; project Prj-G or in transpiled project Prj-TG . And i will add those same new features again for the planned new project Prj-D2, and in Prj-TG2 . These new features are using new source-code files created by me . Can i use only my-name as copyright-holder in those specific new source-code files ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i think i can, as i alone created those source-code files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, by the way, i also want to inform you, that, projects Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC, Prj-D, &amp;amp; planned new projects Prj-TG2, Prj-D2, etc, EACH has (and will have) completely different &amp;amp; new software name.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18616" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T11:02:32.353" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T11:02:32.353" Title="Transpiled Source-Code License &amp; Copyright Holder" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|relicensing|source-code|transpiling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9082" CreationDate="2020-10-08T15:51:49.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the CC-BY-NC license and sell your content, but you missed the chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to make sure you are the only person to sell your content, you must state that &lt;em&gt;all contributions are donations to the project before accepting pull requests&lt;/em&gt;. You can add a statement like this to the contribution guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please feel free to improve the quality of this content by submitting pull requests. A merged PR will make you appear in the contributor list. It will, however, be considered a donation of your work to this project. You are still bound by the conditions of the license, meaning that you are not considered an author or owner of the content once it has been merged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/thejsway/thejsway/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statement&lt;/a&gt; above comes from The JavaScript Way contribution guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can learn more about making money from opensource books from this article: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/taking-off-the-successful-launch-of-an-open-source-book-7553a2262898/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to launch your own open source book that’s popular and profitable&lt;/a&gt;. I hope this answer can help you when you start a new project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another method: asking contributors to provide an agreement (CLA) to transfer the copyright to you. This method was suggested by &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown-book/issues/72#issuecomment-706480729&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yihui Xie&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20667" LastEditorUserId="20667" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T12:37:36.050" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T12:37:36.050" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10521" CreationDate="2020-10-08T17:05:12.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basis of copyright protection is that the result of &lt;em&gt;human creativity&lt;/em&gt; gets protected from being appropriated by others. This means that if you apply a purely mechanical transformation on some source code, then you are not creating a new work as far as copyrights are concerned and thus you can't claim any rights on the transformation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any modifications you made, either before or after transpiling, where you had to think about how to make the change (however short or long), resulted in a new work for copyright purposes where you can claim the copyrights on the modification. But the act of transpiling itself did not change who owns the copyrights to the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i also release Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC [and Prj-M], each under different License ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC and Prj-TM are respectively derived works of Prj-P, Prj-G, Prj-C and PRJ-M. If you can use a different license for the transpiled projects depends on if the license of the original project allows the use of a different license for a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache, MIT and BSD licenses allow that, but the GPL license doesn't, meaning that Prj-TG must remain under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i publish Prj-D with a different License ? (different than what is used in Prj-A/Prj-G [or Prj-M]/Prj-B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you actually included code from Prj-TP, Prj-TG and Prj-TC in Prj-D, Prj-D is a derived work of all three of those projects and by extension also of Prj-P, Prj-G and Prj-C.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As Prj-G uses the GPL license, Prj-D must also be licensed under the GPL license. And there you hit a problem, because the GPLv2 license is incompatible with the Apache license, which means that a project that includes code under both licenses cannot be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two ways out of that problem, one of which I am sure resolves the issue, the other I am less sure about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If Prj-G is actually licensed under &amp;quot;GPLv2 or any later version&amp;quot;, you can use GPLv3 for Prj-D and optionally for Prj-TG. The GPLv3 license is compatible with the Apache license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache license allows you to distribute a derived work under a different license. You could distribute Prj-TP under a GPLv2-compatible license, but I am not 100% sure that that resolves the compatibility problem between the Apache and GPLv2 licenses. If you choose to go this route, I strongly urge you to take professional advice from a lawyer if you can actually do it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you actually included code from Prj-TP, Prj-TM and Prj-TC in Prj-D2, Prj-D2 is a derived work of all three of those projects and by extension also of Prj-P, Prj-M and Prj-C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As all of those projects have a permissive license that allow derived works to be licensed differently, you are allowed to choose a different license for Prj-D2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC ?&#xA;Can i use my name to Copyright Prj-D ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you did some manual work to create Prj-TP, Prj-TG, Prj-TC and Prj-D, you are justified to add your own copyright line, next to the copyright lines that existed in the original. The involved licenses (Apache, GPLv2 and BSD) do not allow you to remove those original copyright lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do i need to notify Prj-TP/Prj-TG/Prj-TC ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you are not required to notify them, but you could do so as a courtesy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-10-09T06:46:41.843" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T06:46:41.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-08T19:04:19.937" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;.NET 5.0 introduces single file deployments, &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/single-file&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/single-file&lt;/a&gt;. The LGPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/lgpl-3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/lgpl-3.0/&lt;/a&gt;, section 4 requires that modification to the library be permitted and specifically 4d.1 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library.&#xA;A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the&#xA;Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will&#xA;operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is&#xA;interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may not be easy, and there don't appear to be tools that would permit the library to be swapped out of or replaced in a .NET 5.0 single file deployment, it would seem that this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you use an LGPL library / assembly in a .NET 5.0 single file deployment without violating the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20669" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T19:04:19.937" Title="Does an LGPL licensed library (assembly) prevent its usage in a .NET 5.0 single file deployment?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10514" CreationDate="2020-10-09T06:42:26.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought this question was a simple duplicate, but it's now ramified enough that I thought I'd write an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2017/october/test-run-time-series-regression-using-a-csharp-neural-network&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an old article&lt;/a&gt; in MSDN Magazine, with some code available either by cutting-and-pasteing from the main page, or via &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2017/october/code-downloads-for-october-2017-msdn-magazine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a separate link&lt;/a&gt;; we'll call this code A.  You also found the same code discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.dragansr.com/2017/10/ai-time-series-regression-using-c.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another article&lt;/a&gt;, which offers a download link for the code; we'll call this code B.  You've then found it in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.quaetrix.com/Build2014.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a third place&lt;/a&gt;; we'll call this code C.  You want to know what rights, if any, you have to reuse the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code A has no explicit licensing statement in it.  You contend that code is available under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net/licenses/mslpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/a&gt; on the authority of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2318/using-open-source-sample-code-provided-by-microsoft-for-commercial-software&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I cannot find a similar licensing statement anywhere on the current &amp;quot;magazine back issues&amp;quot; website.  There is a pointer to MS's generic &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/termsofuse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of use&lt;/a&gt;, but those don't give you anything useful (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The Software is made available for download solely for use by end users according to the License Agreement&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  That puts us back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/458&quot;&gt;usual default position&lt;/a&gt; for code-without-licence found on the internet, ie, you have no right to use it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code B is in fact a link directly back to the repository of code A, so there are no new rights there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code C contains an explicit licence statement at the top, which is more generous than the MS-LPL (the MS-LPL is non-free, because it has a platform restriction).  Specifically, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;// You can use this code however you wish subject to the usual disclaimers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;// (use at your own risk, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question becomes: can you rely on that declaration?  My initial inclination was no, because it's so clearly the same body of code as A and B; it has all the look-and-feel of a grant bolted on after the event, without authority, as a fig-leaf.  But it's also clear about the provenance of the code (&lt;em&gt;2014 Microsoft Build Conference, April 2-4, 2014, San Francisco, CA&lt;/em&gt;).  So my gut feeling - and it's only a feeling - is that the licence declaration can be relied on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you intend to re-use this code as part of a commercial program, which raises the stakes.  If I were you, I'd try to establish that such code was indeed given to attendees at that conference; if you can, then it's re-usable as you would wish.  Otherwise, steer clear of it.  And as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T06:42:26.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2020-10-09T06:57:10.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: How do I go about placing a GPL license notice in the file containing those [public domain] subroutines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the file only contains public domain code, then you should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; add a GPL license notice nor a copyright line in the file. Instead, you should put a notice in the file that the contents are in the public domain.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This does not conflict with the FSF guideline for applying the GPL license, because that guideline is for applying the GPL license to &lt;em&gt;your own&lt;/em&gt; code, and by your own admission that public domain code is not written by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the file also contains code written by you (and which should be licensed under the GPL), then just add the copyright line and GPL license notice as you do for other files written entirely by you. If you want to be nice, you can add an additional notice that parts of the file (and optionally which parts) were released into the public domain, but that is not a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you should make it clear in the top-level documentation of your project that the project as a whole is under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-10-09T08:45:54.063" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T08:45:54.063" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-09T22:18:49.480" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine, there is communication library to specialized communication protocol to end devices licensed by GPL v3 and implemented for JVM. Then I implement specialized Kafka Connector on top of this library in order to communicate to end devices utilizing Kafka messaging platform (sending messages with special schema definition based on API of library). Code of this &amp;quot;wrapper&amp;quot; will be published under GPL v3. Technically the wrapper could be run as separate process or on Kafka Connect platform (licensed by something similar to Apache v2 license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of the following I am allowed to do from licensing point of view ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could I communicate with this standalone running wrapper from my proprietary application (via Kafka messaging) without the requirement to relicense my proprietary app also in GPL v3? My app is fully functional and usable without data sent from this wrapper, but end users my be interested to get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could I do the same as in point 1, when wrapper with GPL licensed code is running from Apache Connect platform (I think wrapper will not be started as separate process, but as some threads inside) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Could I distribute this library with my proprietary app to end users without need to publish my proprietary code with GPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20677" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T22:18:49.480" Title="GPL v3 library used in custom built Kafka Connector wrapper" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10532" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10534" CreationDate="2020-10-10T21:49:57.527" Score="0" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume that I use a template repository on GitHub (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/actions/typescript-action&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/actions/typescript-action&lt;/a&gt;), make a tool, and publish it on GitHub under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, obviously I need to show the original statement of the template repository in addition to mine. How do I write the license description for this repository? Can I write both them down in one file like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ./LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 My name&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;---&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 2018 GitHub, Inc. and contributors&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or keep only my statement in the LICENSE file and move the original statement somewhere else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ./LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 My name&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ./license/original.md&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 2018 GitHub, Inc. and contributors&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10450" LastEditorUserId="10450" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T05:16:16.823" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T07:28:52.413" Title="License description for repository that uses a template under MIT license" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|copyright|attribution|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-11T03:32:44.963" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is off topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a basic technical blog which will contain tutorial/code snippets/project management thoughts, whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Host the raw markdown on a public Github&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publish it to my site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross publish it to Medium/Dev.to/Whatever new blogging platform crops up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in terms of licensing, I was thinking using a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is - I'm happy for people share/reuse my content for their similarly free blogs, but I just don't want someone hoovering up all the content I create and creating a book out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, there's a bit of a gnarl there. Say I'm saying 'here's a snippet of code that does XYZ'. I don't want attribution or to prevent commercial use in someone using that snippet. I just don't want someone doing commercial reuse of the tutorial/blog post itself (eg. creating a book out of it, or using it in paid training material).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that something I need to worry about, even if I used an MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does licensing working when publishing to third party publishers like Medium/Dev.to? ie. Will my license by respected if I publish to Medium/Dev.to? Do I need to include a copy of the license in the blog post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20690" LastEditorUserId="20690" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T03:38:00.517" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T08:07:18.040" Title="Licences for creating technical writing/documentation - also publishing to Medium/Dev.to" Tags="|mit|documentation|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10532" CreationDate="2020-10-11T07:28:52.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you fully incorporate third-party code in your project, which is the case if that third-party code is a template you base your project on, then the license and copyright notices of the third-party code should be right next to your own license and copyright notice. This means that both should be in the same file, like in your first option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the same license for your project as the license of the template, then you only need to have a single copy of that license text, resulting in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// ./LICENSE&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 My name&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 2018 GitHub, Inc. and contributors&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want to make it clear that GitHub and contributors only contributed a template and add a paragraph with that message between the copyright lines, then it is clearer to readers which license applies if you duplicate the MIT license text. It is short enough anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T07:28:52.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10533" CreationDate="2020-10-11T08:07:18.040" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three kinds of people to consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ignorant, who believe that because your content is available at no cost, they have the freedom to use it as they like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dishonest, who know how copyright works but just don't care and do what they want anyway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the honest, who know and care about copyrights&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first two categories, it doesn't really matter what license you use. It is at best a stick to beat them with if they do something that isn't allowed by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the third category, you need to think about what effects your license has on the possibilities for reuse that you want to create.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA-NC license severely limits the possibilities for reuse of the code snippets in your blog. The NC part disqualifies the license from being open-source and makes it incompatible with the GPL license, while the SA part requires that any project that uses the code must be under the CC BY-SA-NC license. This will probably cause people to steer away from using the snippets you provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license on the other hand would not meet your criteria that the text of the blog cannot be exploited commercially by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a compromise, you can use a dual license for the code snippets. With a dual license, the recipients of the code can choose which license terms they want to conform to. This could look something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Copyright 2020 dwjohnston. This blog is made available under the CC BY-SA-NC license. The code snippets presented here are additionally licensed under the MIT license.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does licensing working when publishing to third party publishers like Medium/Dev.to? ie. Will my license by respected if I publish to Medium/Dev.to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When publishing via Medium/Dev.to/etc., you give a license to the publisher to do what they need to do to show your blog on their platform. Otherwise, the content is yours and you can decide yourself what license the readers of your blog on such a platform get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include a copy of the license in the blog post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Not just when publishing through Medium/Dev.to/etc., but it is a good idea to always include a license statement in your blog, especially if you use a license that allows others to reproduce the blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be a statement like the example I gave above, with links to the tekst of the appropriate licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T08:07:18.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10516" CreationDate="2020-10-11T08:23:08.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry to disagree publicly, but Bart's answer, while excellent in many respects, seems wrong in one: you may (and in my opinion should) put a GPL header in the files you acquired under PD but are now redistributing as part of your project.  If you choose not to, you will need to make it clear that they are public domain, by adding a comparable &amp;quot;public domain&amp;quot; header if it is not already clearly there.  And &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; don't mix PD and GPL code inside a single file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me take that in parts: firstly, the idea that you may include the PD content under the GPL's conditions.  Some call this &lt;em&gt;re-licensing&lt;/em&gt; of someone else's content, and think it's never permissible.  I take &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;a more nuanced view&lt;/a&gt; and say it's permissible, unless the terms under which you received that content forbid it (as they often do).  In this case, you received the public domain content under the most elastic terms imaginable, and you are perfectly within your rights to add conditions to its onward distribution.  Anyone who wants to use the original files without those conditions can get them from somewhere other than the inside of your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c obliges downstream recipients to distribute the entire package under GPLv3.  But it adds that they may (though they are not obliged to) pass on additional permissions if they have received them.  Since PD gives the same rights as GPLv3 but with less conditions attached, it seems to me that PD status is an &lt;em&gt;additional permission&lt;/em&gt; within the meaning of the clause.  Distributing this content under PD is permitted, but not compulsory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would I advocate changing the status?  Simplicity.  It's permitted, and it brings everything under a single licence.  That in turn encourages reuse by making the licensing decision as to reuse as simple as possible.  But if you decide not to do that, it's very important that you clarify the status of each non-GPLv3 file by clearly indicating that it's in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T07:21:37.097" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T07:21:37.097" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10537" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10571" CreationDate="2020-10-11T08:41:44.940" Score="8" ViewCount="997" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish my opensource project with an MIT license but was wondering if that is ok given that a dependency (not a direct dependency) seems to have LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my python packages that I depend on. Setuptools is only needed to package the software. I am not directly calling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;setuptools&#xA;scikit-learn==0.23.2&#xA;numpy==1.19.1&#xA;requests==2.24.0&#xA;matplotlib==3.3.1&#xA;pandas==1.1.2&#xA;pytest-runner==5.2&#xA;python-dateutil==2.8.1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here the license of all the packages it pulls when installing my package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ pip-licenses --format=markdown&#xA;| Name            | Version   | License      |&#xA;|-----------------|-----------|--------------|&#xA;| Pillow          | 7.2.0     | HPND         |&#xA;| certifi         | 2020.6.20 | MPL-2.0      |&#xA;| chardet         | 3.0.4     | LGPL         |&#xA;| cycler          | 0.10.0    | BSD          |&#xA;| idna            | 2.10      | BSD-like     |&#xA;| joblib          | 0.17.0    | BSD          |&#xA;| kiwisolver      | 1.2.0     | BSD          |&#xA;| matplotlib      | 3.3.1     | PSF          |&#xA;| numpy           | 1.19.1    | BSD          |&#xA;| pandas          | 1.1.2     | BSD          |&#xA;| pyparsing       | 2.4.7     | MIT License  |&#xA;| python-dateutil | 2.8.1     | Dual License |&#xA;| pytz            | 2020.1    | MIT          |&#xA;| requests        | 2.24.0    | Apache 2.0   |&#xA;| scikit-learn    | 0.23.2    | new BSD      |&#xA;| scipy           | 1.5.2     | BSD          |&#xA;| six             | 1.15.0    | MIT          |&#xA;| threadpoolctl   | 2.1.0     | UNKNOWN      |&#xA;| urllib3         | 1.25.10   | MIT          |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20693" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T10:13:13.180" Title="MIT license ok if dependent package uses LGPL" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-11T13:04:14.040" Score="1" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OpenSSL license talks about crypto laws in various countries.  I have seen many apps using https. So, do all of them take a license or something? What kind of license can I choose to give to take no liability (in case I distribute commercial software made with SSL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17070" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T03:21:08.880" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T03:21:08.880" Title="Using openSSL in a software and exporting it" Tags="|cryptography|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-11T19:48:09.933" Score="10" ViewCount="2027" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see that a lot of proprietary projects which make their source available operate with dual licensing model, with the open source version being licensed under GPL v3 and proprietary product being, well, proprietary. The rationale behind choosing GPL v3 is to often exclude other commercial entities from using their code without them disclosing their source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have two entities, a company C and a programmer P. If P modifies C's GPL v3 code, then C cannot P's modificationsin their proprietary offering without releasing their proprietary code under GPL. Here P and C are on equal footing -- both of them own their own code, and their code can't be used by the other under a proprietary license without re-licensing. I believe this is what the point of GPL was -- if 100 developers contribute to the project, all 100's consent is required in any contract which doesn't use GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if P additionally signs a CLA so that they may contribute code to the upstream project, don't they lose their power? Now C can use P's code in their proprietary product, but P still cannot use C's code in a proprietary product (and neither can anyone else besides C).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of social issues I have with this, but I'd like to keep this question about (a) if I am correct about GPL's original &amp;quot;motivation&amp;quot;, and (b) if I'm correct about CLAs being antithetical to that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20695" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T23:36:05.740" Title="Doesn't GPL with CLA defeat the point?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10539" CreationDate="2020-10-11T20:22:39.603" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) if I am correct about GPL's original &amp;quot;motivation&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No you are not correct about the motivation for creating the GPL. To &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote Richard Stallman&lt;/a&gt;, the father of the GPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has also been said that the philosophy behind the GPL is to give freedom (to inspect, modify software) to the end-users. If you hold to that philosophy, then you don't want that someone between you and the end-user can decide to restrict the freedoms on the end-user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a philosophy behind the permissive licenses and that is that the immediate recipients should have the maximal freedom, even if that means they have the freedom to curtail the freedom of recipients further downstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) if I'm correct about CLAs being antithetical to that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CLA that gives someone the right to use your code both under the GPL and a proprietary license indeed goes against the philosophy of the creators of the GPL.&#xA;But that philosophy is not part of the actual license, so you can use the GPL license without believing in that philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential contributor who holds the philosophy behind the GPL in high regard will probably refuse to sign such a CLA. Adherents of the philosophy of permissive licenses might not have an issue with signing such a CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T20:22:39.603" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4012" CreationDate="2020-10-12T08:02:44.970" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since it seems worth having an answer that is explicitly multijurisdictional, I refer people to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article I wrote for LWN&lt;/a&gt; on a talk at FOSDEM 2018, given by a trio of actual lawyers, that explicitly addressed this question.  While the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/licenses_and_contracts_eu_us/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;whole talk&lt;/a&gt; was excellent, and remains well worth listening to, the answer to the revocability question was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the US, at least for the frequently-used free software licenses ... the license is irrevocable once even partial performance has occurred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the UK ... the license is revocable by the licensor until the licensee has relied on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the EU ... the license is probably irrevocable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly (and I may well not) &lt;em&gt;partial performance&lt;/em&gt; is a term of art from contract law, and means that the licensee (ie, you) has done at least some of the things that the licence requires you to do in order to avail yourself of the grant (eg, retaining copyright and licence notices).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the practical upshot is that in all those jurisdictions, once you've got yourself a copy of the code, and have done the least of things with it, your licence cannot be revoked by the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T08:02:44.970" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10538" CreationDate="2020-10-12T08:49:11.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those crypto laws are typically not centered around copyright, which means that there is no copyright license, open-source or not, that can limit your liability when breaking those laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those crypto laws are typically centered around the idea that having better cryptography that your enemy gives your military an advantage. And having a military advantage is a good thing when a war starts.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Those laws restrict the export of the actual cryptography software (i.e. the SSL library itself), but not of software that just uses a secure connection to protect its communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if your app does not include the SSL library itself but rather asks the OS to create a secure connection for them, then the app is not restricted by the crypto laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do include the SSL library in your app (or implement cryptographic algorithms yourself), then you need to carefully look at the export laws for both your country and the countries where your repository and servers are hosted. You may need to restrict from which countries those servers can be accessed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Licenses to export your app under the crypto laws do exist, but that is typically a license for a single sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T08:49:11.023" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-12T15:57:17.683" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that there are aspects of the GPL, one of the Creative Commons, and MIT licenses that I want to use for a project. Do any of those licenses restrict me from copying the contents of the actual licenses themselves for use in a new derivative license, even if let's say, that derivative license is not compatible with the originals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course a lawyer would need to get involved with the latter aspects. I'm just wondering if it's a nonstarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20706" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T06:22:10.413" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T06:22:10.413" Title="Copied and modified amalgamation of GPL, Creative Commons, MIT, etc?" Tags="|licensing|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10544" CreationDate="2020-10-12T17:48:27.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is legally possible but socially inadvisable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact wording of licensing terms is generally copyrightable, insofar as it is possible to state the same terms using different words. (I will not attempt to consider whether the legal language in the GPL or CC licenses passes or fails this standard.) The terms, as abstract permissions and requirements, are not copyrightable, but their fixation into a particular human language might be copyrightable, to the degree that some creativity was employed in authoring that fixation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if the GPL and CC family of licenses are copyrightable, their authors have each granted explicit permission to reuse their written terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their GPL FAQ, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/254/50&quot;&gt;the FSF permits reuse of the GPL in a new license&lt;/a&gt;, as long as you change the name and omit the preamble. They also strongly advise against doing so, and to use the exception mechanism instead. (See the linked question for more information.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-change-the-license-terms-or-conditions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Creative Commons organization similarly allows reuse of their terms&lt;/a&gt; (in fact, they actively claim their license documents are not copyrightable), but forbid the use of Creative Commons trademarks alongside such reuse, including the name and logos of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't be sure about the MIT license -- it's been around so long and is so widespread I couldn't even guess who the original author of those simple terms might be. Considering the simplicity of the terms, it is probably not copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please &lt;strong&gt;strongly&lt;/strong&gt; reconsider doing this. I'm pleased to see your intent to consult a lawyer. Be aware that the GPL has many terms that are designed to work in concordance with one another. If you take only part, it may not legally operate as you intend in isolation, or may have substantial loopholes, normally closed by another part of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if your intent with this license is to attract collaborators or downstream reuse, many people who make community contributions (to software, art, etc.) will be wary of building upon a project with a nonstandard license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T19:21:14.167" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T19:21:14.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10539" CreationDate="2020-10-12T20:38:34.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand them, Contributor License Agreements do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allow the curator to make certain decisions about what can be done with the project without needing to seek additional consent from all contributors,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Help the curator ensure it has the legal right to distribute the project in the first place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can think of a project that accepts contribution as a kind of federation.  While there is some overarching unity, every contributor retains copyright (even in copyleft licensed projects) to their contribution, and permission is needed from every contributor to distribute or license the project.  This is because distributing or licensing the project requires distributing and/or sublicensing the contributions.  There is the additional wrinkle that any individual contributor may later choose to revoke this permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good CLA will reduce this headache to a manageable level.  Once a contribution is made, it is considered irrevocably made under some known conditions and the curator has the right to sublicense and distribute the contribution.  You can think of the GPL itself as a sort of macro-level CLA where the contributions are entire libraries: the library creator has given you the irrevocable right to use their contribution subject to certain conditions.  Further the GPL (like a good CLA would be) is structured so that meeting the conditions is entirely within your control and is not subject to the library creator arbitrarily changing their mind later about what you can do with the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: My point is that a CLA (or a DCO which is a similar concept) is a necessary component to any FOSS project, whether or not it uses the GPL as its license.  Without a CLA or DCO that is compatible with the philosophy of the project's license, contributions cannot be accepted by the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18378" LastEditorUserId="18378" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T23:36:05.740" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T23:36:05.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-12T21:55:35.523" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project which I distribute under BSD license. I would like to include parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/HewlettPackard/wireless-tools/blob/master/wireless_tools/iwlib.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iwlib.c&lt;/a&gt;, which is part of iwlib project, and which is released under GNU GPL 2.&#xA;To my understanding this is not possible unless I also change the license of my project to GPL 2, which seems quite silly. Is this correct? Can I overcome this limitation by, say, changing the code a bit (e.g. by changing variable names, removing comments etc)? Or by asking permission to the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20711" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T16:33:15.403" Title="Including GPL code into BSD project" Tags="|gpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10547" CreationDate="2020-10-14T00:32:47.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot overcome this limitation by changing the code a bit.  The GPL specifically protects against this, and, arguably, it is the central idea of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your only options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change your license,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ask the author if they will license their code to you under a different license, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Find or create an alternative implementation with a BSD-compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that option #3 may also violate the GPL if you choose to write your own replacement and you don't do it cleanly from the ground-up (thus without looking at the original work as reference or ideas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18378" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T16:33:15.403" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T16:33:15.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10552" CreationDate="2020-10-14T19:33:44.120" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have contributed heavily to a open-source github repository and they are licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license (Which isn't really an open-source license). Each of my contributions was merged via PR and each of those PR's had a piece of writing at the end of the PR template:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making this pull request, I represent that I have the right to waive copyright and related rights to my contribution, and agree that all copyright and related rights in my contributions are waived, and I acknowledge that the [ORG] organization has the copyright to use and modify my contribution under the [REPO] License for perpetuity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is simply appended to the end of the PR template, and it's placed there automatically without any contributor interaction. In addition, I was never asked for a signature to sign a CLA or give the owner any form of documentation giving rights to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the act of the text simply being in the PR template mean that I automatically give up my rights to my contribution when it's merged? What rights do I have to my contributions in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20489" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T20:15:45.477" Title="Validity of agreement to Copyright/CLA via Pull Request merging with agreement text" Tags="|copyright|github|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10551" CreationDate="2020-10-14T20:15:45.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making contributions to a project with a CC ND license is problematic in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you make a contribution to a project, you are making a derived work, but that very thing is not allowed under the CC ND licenses. CC ND licenses effectively only allow further development of a project as long as it has only a single copyright holder, because the copyright holder is not bound by the license(s) they offer for their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that text in a pull request will hold up in court in all jurisdictions, but in those where it does you have indeed given up all your rights (or at least those you are legally able to give up) to your contribution. You would have the same rights as a random user has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is under the assumption that you can easily remove that text from a pull request when making one. Otherwise, it will probably be less acceptable as proof in court that you have knowingly and willingly given up your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T20:15:45.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1165" CreationDate="2020-10-15T00:21:28.773" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://plausible.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plausible&lt;/a&gt;, an open source alternative to Google analytics, released a &lt;a href=&quot;https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; post detailing their move from MIT licensing to the AGPL (Affero GNU Public License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it, they have the following claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of events that made us aware of the risks with a permissive open source license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There’s been at least one case where a corporation has taken parts of our code, made it closed source and started selling it as a direct competitor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of this writing, Plausible looks to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://plausible.io/about&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two full time employees&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T00:21:28.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10555" CreationDate="2020-10-15T12:59:09.117" Score="1" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a weak copyleft license for some new software project of mine. When reading the MPL v2.0 &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license text&lt;/a&gt; I stumbled over the following lines in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MPL-2.0#versions-of-the-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 10&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.2. Effect of New Versions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may distribute the Covered Software under the terms of the version of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software, or under the terms of any subsequent version published by the license steward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remembering the controversy when the FSF released GPL-v3 and some projects got converted to the new  license without approval from all contributors due to being &amp;quot;GPL-v2 or later&amp;quot;, I would like to avoid a similar scenario and restrict the license to &amp;quot;version 2.0 only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I technically change the MPL-v2.0 license to exclude automatic version upgrades? Shall I put some notifier in all relevant source files (similar to the Exhibit B notifier), or just delete section 10.2 from the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt; file in my project folder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20726" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T14:05:29.167" Title="How to distribute a project under MPL v2.0 only?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10554" CreationDate="2020-10-15T14:05:29.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I technically change the MPL-v2.0 license to exclude automatic version upgrades?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot change the MPL-v2.0 license to exclude the automatic upgrade clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you remove clause 10.2 from the MPL license, then you have created a new license and you must call that new license by a different name. Only Mozilla itself is allowed to create new versions of the MPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not having an automatic upgrade clause in the license is important to you, then you should look for another license. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/EPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License (EPL-2.0)&lt;/a&gt; might be a good candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating your own license is the most secure way to ensure your project will see very little use, as every user will have to figure out how your license interacts with all the other licenses that might be in use in their project and that is work that lawyers get handsome paychecks for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T14:05:29.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1165" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:36:38.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to answer your question from the perspective: what is the risk to open sourcing the technology that your friend's business has developed.  I try to tackle your more specific question at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL,DR&lt;/strong&gt; If your friend's company is built around the technology the company would open source, it's a real risk that their company would not be financially viable if the make the code available as open source, but it's unlikely to be as the result of a competing company forking their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you venture outside the GPL-only ecosystem, I classify companies that support major open source projects in two categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The open source project is an important part of their infrastructure but not central to their business (think Microsoft with .NET Core or Facebook with React)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The open source project is the central to their business (think Cassandra and DataStax)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within each category there are different ways to try to monetize the open source, but I think this high level view is sufficient for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your friend's company finds itself in the first category, putting the code out under an open source library is minimal risk to them in terms of other companies adopting it and using it to compete against them.  For example, having access to React would not immediately let another company recreate Facebook's business and compete against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your friend's company finds itself in the second category, they need to more carefully think about their business model.  There are two major risks here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The vast majority of people and companies that use the open source project will do so without paying for it.  The business must be sustainable based on income from the minority that chooses to pay.  If the technology is in a niche business area where the pool of potential users is small, this may be unsustainable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the business is too closely linked to the technology (e.g. all they do is provide consulting services to enhance the technology and help people install it), it would be possible for another business to provide the same service and do it better, whether that is with the same or with competing technology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is really about the second risk here, but the first risk will be the bigger one.  Unless the company has convinced itself that there are enough users that are actually willing to pay for the use of the technology (or services associated with it, etc), then the company will not be viable if they make it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How big a risk the second one is really depends on how unique and complex the technology is and how big the market for it is.  Forking an open source project is kind of like any software maintenance work: there is a body of code that costs time and money to understand and improv.  If the potential reward for doing this is not greater than the cost and time to do it, then it's not worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your friend's company's codebase is not that big and the market for it is not that large, it's probably not worth the effort for a competitor to fork the code and compete against your friend's company.  If the codebase is not that big and the market is huge, then the risk is potentially real, but, because the codebase is not that big, it's equally likely a competitor would come in with their own implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most likely scenario for head-to-head competition based on a fork is large codebases with large markets.  A ground up rewrite would be painful so a competitor would want to start with something it can already monetize.  Companies built around Linux distributions as examples of this.  StarOffice / OpenOffice / LibreOffice is another example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18378" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:36:38.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10569" CreationDate="2020-10-15T18:32:55.363" Score="2" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a noob with regards to software licensing ... this might seem like a very silly question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per this page (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&lt;/a&gt;) on Wordpress official website, Wordpress is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I researched &lt;strong&gt;on compliance with GPLv2 with regards to hosting a Wordpress site&lt;/strong&gt; online, from the following links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6132/can-i-use-a-gpl-component-in-my-site-without-having-to-disclose-the-sources-of-m&quot;&gt;Can I use a GPL component in my site without having to disclose the sources of my site?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8869/can-i-use-a-gplv3-javascript-library-on-a-website-im-developing-for-a-client?rq=1&quot;&gt;Can I use a GPLv3 JavaScript library on a website I&amp;#39;m developing for a client?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I want to do&lt;/strong&gt;: host a Wordpress site (with my personally built theme) online without disclosing any source code at all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are my confusions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does GNU GPLv2 require that I have to disclose my source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The HTML, CSS, and Javascript portion of the site (both for Wordpress core and for my personally built theme) will be inadvertently disclosed to the public anyway ... only the PHP code is hidden ... does this violate GPLv2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20728" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T15:43:53.823" Title="Licensing restrictions for a Wordpress site hosted online" Tags="|gpl-2|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-16T10:06:06.640" Score="18" ViewCount="4419" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a popular program licensed under GPL3, a system of plugins exists. The program and the plugins are closely interoperable and exchange large structures of data, so the plugins will necessarily be also under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Situation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone is &lt;strong&gt;willing to pay me&lt;/strong&gt; to develop a certain plugin because &lt;strong&gt;someone else is paying her&lt;/strong&gt; for the development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will deliver the code to my client and in turn she to her client, and both my client and the final client are aware of the plugin being GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the license says that anybody requiring the source code, the source will be delivered, I think they are not planning to publish it initially (although they conform to give it if someone requires it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Monetization&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are willing to pay me for developing this plugin because they plan some kind of monetization of this plugin (I'm not clear on how, though). But my client is a company and the client of my client also a commercial company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I will be &amp;quot;the author&amp;quot; by the fact of being me the one that thinks, models, architectures and finally codes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But... Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they as payers retain any special right further than &amp;quot;getting it done&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I retain the ability to &amp;quot;publish it to github&amp;quot;? Or as I'm being paid, the decission to publish is theirs and I can't do unless I request permission from them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm not having any intention to break their business up. If they pay me, the most natural is I don't publish it.&lt;/strong&gt; I just deliver the code to them and forget.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe after some time, for any reason I feel it'd be valuable for the society to have it in github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can just publish it, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have to require permissions from them, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can publish but I have to mention them as holders of any kind of right for the mere fact of having paid for the plugin to exist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pointers to specific paragraphs of the supporting documentation will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20729" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:30:49.877" Title="Can I publish a GPL source I'm being paid for to develop?" Tags="|gpl-3|copyleft|monetization|publishing|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10558" CreationDate="2020-10-16T10:30:45.637" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on the contracts for this development effort. The GPLv3 explicitly covers the case that you are doing development exclusively for someone else, and this is OK (section 2, basic permissions):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright.&#xA;Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that quote, “you” is not you asking the question, but the client. This part of the GPL allows the client to give you the GPLv3-covered program and to have you make modifications exclusively for them. If the client decides to publish your modifications they would be bound by the GPLv3, but you would not be allowed to publish your work without consent from your client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This snippet from the GPLv3 imposes some requirements that such a contract must fulfil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the changes must be made exclusively for the client&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must work under the direction and control of the client (i.e. you have been instructed to perform these modifications)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you are contractually bound to not make other copies of the client's modifications (this doesn't affect your rights to the original, publicly available version of the GPL program)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the GPLv3 explicitly allow this, since it seems like it would circumvent other provisions of the license? The GPL is copyleft, but not anti-commercial or anti-monetization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making use of software as authorized by the license terms often requires running it on rented hardware (e.g. a cloud server), or to make modifications of the program. There is general agreement that giving a GPL program to employees is not distribution/conveyance in the sense of the GPL. But a business might not have in-house capabilities to perform the modification. This section makes it clear that your client can exercise &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; rights from the GPL license by engaging cloud providers or external consultants to perform services on their behalf, without being in a worse legal position than doing everything in-house. Importantly, they remain able to make &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as to your concrete questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you just publish it? No, you're bound by the contract with your client. You should treat the GPL software as effectively proprietary within this contractual relationship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you have to require permission from them? Yes, your contract should explicitly discuss what you may do with your modifications if you would like to publish them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could you publish the modifications when attributing them? Depending on your contract and on local laws, you may not even be the copyright holder for your modifications (e.g. &lt;em&gt;work for hire&lt;/em&gt;). Even if you hold the copyright, your contract has likely assigned exclusive rights to the client. So mere attribution is not generally sufficient, and your contract should explicitly cover this case if you would like to publish modifications. The GPL doesn't directly require attribution, but certain attributions must be preserved if they are present.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T10:30:45.637" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10558" CreationDate="2020-10-16T11:38:02.157" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it seems that you're doing this as a piece of contract work, not under employment rules, so the issue of work-for-hire probably doesn't enter into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules about what you can publish and when come entirely out of the contract between you and the payer, and apparently that's not written yet.  That's great news.  A good contract sets out each side's expectations clearly and simply, so that everyone knows what to expect if things go well, and also if/when they don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's important to you that you retain the right to publish this work under GPL, then you should put something in the contract to make that clear. &lt;strong&gt;Do not&lt;/strong&gt; start exploring the possibilities of &lt;em&gt;stuff that everybody understands is normal in cases like this&lt;/em&gt;; if you publish later, and they get angry about it, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;everyone knows that the author can still put it up on GitHub&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is not a defence you want to be making.  If you want it clear, put it in the contract. That way, everybody will know up front that you intend to do this; they can push back on whether, and when, it's done, and if you're not happy with that, you can walk away before signing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at it from the other side: if the client's happy with having you republish under GPL, they won't mind having that in the contract.  If they do mind, &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; is when you need to know - not after you've written the code and slapped it up on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T12:04:13.937" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T12:04:13.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10564" CreationDate="2020-10-16T15:48:29.160" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am making this library and I wish to monetize it, I got my first client for it and I am already rolling a product made with it, yet I don't have a license yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing more than just a library is an entire toolbox, includes a lot of server code, client code, and toolkits to build and deploy the application, and interaction with other libraries (mainly MIT), but also proprietary APIs (this is allowed in their licenses, API keys needed, so that's a non-issue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My purpose is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you make something with it and (both client and server) are opensource I don't care.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify the source library it must be on the same opensource terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming business with competition aren't interested in making their own code opensource and GPL (as anyone else can then copy them) these will need to buy a proprietary enabled license from me (the copyright holder).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are a small business/startup and have 0 money but also don't wish to make your code opensource then you can get a free proprietary license for a limited number of users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are a business that wants to use the library to develop products for others, you can do so freely, however to make a closed source product for another person requires either the free proprietary enabled license (same terms as #4) or the paid proprietary enabled license (same terms as #3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to achieve some balance here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about GPLv3 GPLv2 and AGPLv2 would they work too?... I prefer less restrictive as long as they give advantages to the purpose, I want to create value, make something useful, but I have to eat too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20547" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T16:23:26.260" Title="AGPLv3 for fullstack library?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10563" CreationDate="2020-10-16T16:17:24.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like the well-known and perfectly respectable &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual-licensing model&lt;/a&gt;, with the small wrinkle that there are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; proprietary licences: one zero-cost but usage-limited, and one paid-for and usage-unlimited.  Dual-licensing models are well-known and well-understood in the free and proprietary software worlds; IANAL/IANYL, but I can't see any problems with offering your software like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the free licence, GPLv2, GPLv3, and AGPLv2 are all suitable; all will give freedom to users who get copies of derived works based on your software, and AGPL will in addition give freedom to users who interact with such software over a network.  I'd be inclined to go AGPLv3 in that case, but it's your software, so it's your call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major wrinkle of all dual-licensing schemes is that you can't accept contributions unless you get clear permission from the contributor(s) to relicense their code on the same terms.  So if you're going to accept contributions from the community, you'll need a clear and unambiguous CLA in place from each contributor before you merge (and preferably before you even examine) his/her contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T16:23:26.260" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T16:23:26.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-16T19:13:55.407" Score="8" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about Open Source programs. How can I sure an open source program is safe and isn't spying on me? For example, I installed Firefox on Linux and how can I sure this program is safe! It is true that Firefox is open source, but who can read a million lines of code!. Users using open source software and trust to them because they are open source and all people can read and examine codes, but no one does that. I guess some companies and programmers abuse from this mindset of users and can do anything. Closed Source programs don't have any confidence and I think it is true for large Open Source programs too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20739" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T10:54:02.357" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T19:56:21.030" Title="How can I trust to Open Source programs?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10565" CreationDate="2020-10-16T19:59:57.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is, that with an opensource software, there is at least some chance that a backdoor is revealed. In the case of closed source, the chance is close to zero (maybe if the most honored producer commits a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mistake&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, actually searching for security holes in a software is a different skill than developing it, thus the complexity of the code does not defends it against a security audit so strongly as we would think with layman's eyes. There are many tricks to use, for example, by checking always for the &lt;em&gt;differences&lt;/em&gt; of the code, or using various software tools to check for possible vulnerabilities and then analyzing them by human brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could work, if you use a combination of opensource softwares where to break your system, one needs to break both of them. For example, using opensource app in a virtual machine - to crack your host machine, both of the VM and the app needs to be cracked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T13:20:06.463" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T13:20:06.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10565" CreationDate="2020-10-16T20:49:13.387" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is true that the developer of the original application can be malicious: Ken Thompson's famous (and seminal, and also very readable) paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Reflections on Trusting Trust&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; makes clear just how deep that rabbit hole can go.  Absolute security is &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; difficult to achieve, and free software is not a perfect remedy for this.  But between &lt;em&gt;absolute security&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;no security&lt;/em&gt; there is quite a gulf, and not all locations in that gulf are equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other people who could be malicious, against whom free software &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; help defend you.  Commercial developers can, and frequently do, write software which is at least partially inimical to the interests of their users.  You have no way of knowing what that software is doing - certainly none so easy as examining the source code, for all that that is difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other people other than the developer involved in the software packaging and distribution chain who might wish you ill, and here, too, free software can help.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reproducible Builds&lt;/a&gt; movement aims to enable people independent of the distributors to build software from the sources provided; you can then compare the checksums of your binaries with those they produce, to have greater confidence that the software you're running is indeed a faithful representation of the source code to which you are entitled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, free software is not perfect.  But it's a &lt;strong&gt;great deal&lt;/strong&gt; better than running some random binary that comes on a CD-R with the strange webcam you've just bought off the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T20:54:43.260" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T20:54:43.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10557" CreationDate="2020-10-17T15:43:53.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL does not include the right for users (of webservices) to request the source code nor a any need for you to publish it somewhere. So it's totally fine -- if you don't want to -- to don't publish or offer users to download changes you have done at Wordpress or of your written plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason here is, that user in terms of GPL is the admin or somebody directly running your software. So in case you want to sell your work, you have to grand them the 4 rights you do have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as for CSS/JS you ship and run on users computer -- I'm not sure -- by I'm not a lawyer.So this answer is only about PHP changes at wordpress itself or some of it's/your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software licensed under terms of AGPL do include the right for users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T15:43:53.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-17T19:50:27.960" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say one develops a closed source app that can produce a file of its own format like .ll .Then one asks the user to run a GPL licenced batch script that uses ffmpeg(GPL) to do the final bit. Note that ffmpeg or the batch script is not distributed with the software but install instructions are there in the software. Will the software have to be GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T12:46:37.537" Title="Commercial app with optional GPL software usage" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10537" CreationDate="2020-10-18T10:13:13.180" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is not what your code &lt;em&gt;depends&lt;/em&gt; on, but what the program &lt;em&gt;includes&lt;/em&gt;. Assuming that your code doesn't include any snippets from these libraries, you can most likely license your source code under whatever license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things are different if you compile or bundle your code along with all dependencies into a program/executable. Now that program includes all dependencies – not just direct dependencies, but also transitive dependencies. You can only distribute that compiled program under a license that is compatible with all the dependencies. Sometimes, no such license exists, e.g. when trying to combine a GPLv2 dependency with an Apache 2 dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the LGPL wouldn't cause such a problem: you're allowed to distribute programs that include LGPL components under any terms, as long as recipients can modify the LGPL component. That would e.g. involve providing the source code for the LGPL component, and scripts to re-bundle the program. If all the involved code is open-source anyway, this is fairly straightforward because you can just point to the repository which already contains the code and scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating bundled Python programs is pretty rare, so I think only the first paragraph of this answer applies: You can license your code under whatever terms you want. The MIT license is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T10:13:13.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10570" CreationDate="2020-10-18T12:46:37.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the software have to be GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on how closely your software depends on the post-processing by ffmpeg in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ffmpeg is just one of potentially many (independently developed) programs that can read and process the files your app creates, then your app is a separate and independent work from ffmpeg as far as copyright is concerned and that means both works can be licensed completely independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your app uses intimate knowledge of how ffmpeg works and uses this file format to communicate complex, ffmpeg-specific data structures, then most likely your app will be considered a derived work of ffmpeg and needs to be under the GPL itself as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question as to who invokes ffmpeg (the app itself or the user of the app) I find less relevant. Just the fact that it is two executables is relevant for the determination if the GPL applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T12:46:37.537" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-18T17:58:40.227" Score="2" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be silly question but I thought its best I thought I should clear this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/theAIGuysCode/yolov4-deepsort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this repositoy&lt;/a&gt; on Github. It has a MIT license attached to it and I modified this repository according to my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know that do I have to apply for a license to use this code or can I use it without acquiring the license as I'm planning to use/sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have to acquire it's license then how should I do it? Please give the method as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20761" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T07:17:51.037" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T07:17:51.037" Title="How do I ensure I am using MIT-licensed code correctly?" Tags="|licensing|mit|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10573" CreationDate="2020-10-19T06:27:26.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hope you have read the license included in the repository .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know that do I have to apply for a license to use this code or can I use it without acquiring the license as I'm planning to use/sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes , You are permitted to use it without acquiring any  explicit license. But you have to include the copy right notice as they have clearly stated in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for more clarity on what it means please check &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/178486/what-exactly-does-the-condition-in-the-mit-license-imply&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/178486/what-exactly-does-the-condition-in-the-mit-license-imply&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20766" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T06:27:26.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8660" CreationDate="2020-10-19T10:23:36.397" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Geogebra license is nonsensical. You are absolutely correct: &amp;quot;GPL for non-commercial use only&amp;quot; is an impossible combination. The GPL specifically forbids the imposition of any additional licensing restrictions on top of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the&#xA;rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the GPL specifically states what happens when anyone attempts to impose additional restrictions on GPL software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a&#xA;covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this&#xA;License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may&#xA;not convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Geogebra license itself also states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License incorporates (by reference) additional license terms published by the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons Corporation. In the event of any conflict between those additional terms and the terms of this License, the latter shall prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is indeed a conflict between the Geogebra license and the GPL, the Geogebra license prevails, and the GPL is inapplicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one further complication. Geogebra is free to invalidate the GPL with respect to their own software for which they own the copyright, but Geogebra is absolutely forbidden from incorporating third-party GPL software into their own codebase and distributing that codebase under non-GPL licensing terms. Doing so violates the GPL, because the GPL forbids the imposition of additional licensing restrictions, as highlighted above. Unfortuantely, this situation is relevant, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg1147653.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geogebra includes third-party GPL software&lt;/a&gt;, for which the Geogebra Group does not own the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a legal standpoint, Geogebra is violating the GPL by distributing third-party GPL software under non-GPL terms. If they were to fix this licensing violation by removing said third-party software, then Geogebra would be non-GPL freeware, licensed only for non-commercial use without a paid license. The portions of the Geogebra license claiming that (portions of) Geogebra are GPL are invalid and void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that Debian only distributes &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=geogebra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;version 4.0.34.0&lt;/a&gt; of Geogebra, from 2013, which was unambiguously licensed under the GPL and pre-dates the current nonsensical license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20767" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:23:36.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10558" CreationDate="2020-10-19T10:30:49.877" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not, but i am not a laywer: Because the (I suppose your contract states that the rights of works created are with the customer) copyright owner the source code copyrights did not license it to you, i do not see how your relationship to the customer would be affected by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL is a license which specifies the minimal rights of the receiver of a distributed software. You did not receive distributed software. If the copyright owner decides to use the only internally (in which publication is not needed) or redistributes it, is probably not up to you to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, if you have the feeling that you contract is loose enough you can try such a career suicidal move, but honestly talk to a lawyer before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20769" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:30:49.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10579" CreationDate="2020-10-19T19:07:03.253" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry for the rather strange question, I made a GPL library and I got a project I am making with it for someone else (alpha testing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client wants the software that links to my library to be closed source (special reasons) and I don't mind this, normally the course of action would be to give such client a proprietary closed source enabled license for my product, except, I haven't figured out how to do/write such a thing and the focus is on alpha testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do this? For the time being at least, as if I spoke with my client by email that this won't be a problem and I allow it, is that legally valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20547" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T06:25:08.890" Title="Can I write closed source software linked to a GPL library if I am the copyright holder?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10623" CreationDate="2020-10-20T01:34:35.690" Score="6" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;In response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the FAQs&lt;/a&gt;, FSF has noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to use the GPL for a manual, but the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is much better for manuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL was designed for programs; it contains lots of complex clauses that are crucial for programs, but that would be cumbersome and unnecessary for a book or manual. For instance, anyone publishing the book on paper would have to either include machine-readable “source code” of the book along with each printed copy, or provide a written offer to send the “source code” later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand this correctly, in the situation where one shares their PDF along with the TeX source files under the GFDL, a recipient can modify the TeX source files to produce a modified PDF and can share the modified PDF without providing the recipient the modified TeX source files. In this crucial sense, the GFDL is different from GPL in that the latter wouldn't allow for a modified end-product to be distributed unless it is accompanied by the distribution of the corresponding modified source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, CC BY-SA licenses also seem to allow the same practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, one can simply use GPL licenses for distributing documentation but as alluded to in the quoted text by the FSF, GPL is too &amp;quot;bloated&amp;quot; for the purposes of documentation. Is there a copyleft license specifically pertaining to documentation that also includes the GPL like structure so that one cannot redistribute a modified version of the documentation file without accompanying it with the modified version of the source files used to produce the documentation file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20741" LastEditorUserId="20741" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T11:44:33.377" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T14:58:55.730" Title="A non-bloated license for documentation with the benefits of GPL?" Tags="|gpl|cc-by-sa|documentation|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10577" CreationDate="2020-10-20T06:25:08.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a question here called &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2077/458&quot;&gt;So the GPL doesn't restrict the creator of the software in any way?&lt;/a&gt; which addresses the first part of this issue.  Essentially, as long as you are the sole rightsholder in this library (ie, it's not GPL because it's based on somebody else's GPL code) then it is fine for you to convey the library to the client on terms other than straight GPL, eg on terms that permit proprietary usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But having clarified the terms that &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; apply to the library, it is perhaps more important that you clarify those that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;.  The usual arrangement when Alice pays Bob to write code for her is that Alice will expect to hold the copyright on the work as delivered, so that she can use it as she pleases.  But if you were to do this, then you could no longer distribute the library under GPL, since you would have no rights to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will therefore be important to address exactly what rights the payer is getting, since they will need to be able to do all the things they intend to do with the code they've paid for (eg: copy it, use it, sell it, relicense it, etc.) without taking from you the rights to do what you want to do with the library (continue to distribute it under GPL).  This will require a negotiation process between you and the client, and it would probably be a good idea to get your lawyer involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T06:25:08.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10591" CreationDate="2020-10-20T12:35:36.310" Score="3" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using a dependency with an Apache license but  has sub-dependencies under GPL, do I need to open source my own code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my own research, it appears I would have to abide by the full line of license terms but I don't totally understand how things like Hadoop could release under Apache 2.0 if they are dependent on &amp;quot;more restrictive&amp;quot; licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example - Hadoop (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-common&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.hadoop/hadoop-common&lt;/a&gt;) has dependencies on a variety of Jersey projects which is licensed under CDDL and GPL (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.sun.jersey/jersey-core&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.sun.jersey/jersey-core&lt;/a&gt;) and stax.api (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.xml.stream/stax-api/1.0-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.xml.stream/stax-api/1.0-2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example - Selenium components (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/htmlunit-driver/2.44.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.seleniumhq.selenium/htmlunit-driver/2.44.0&lt;/a&gt;) has dependencies on a variety of Jetty projects under Apache 2.0 and EPL(&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.eclipse.jetty/jetty-http/9.4.20.v20190813&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.eclipse.jetty/jetty-http/9.4.20.v20190813&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20781" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T14:38:22.947" Title="When using a dependency with an Apache license but has sub-dependencies under GPL, do I need to open source my own code?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|dependencies|cddl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2020-10-20T15:00:08.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is various mention of &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot; above - but that is a US thing. In the UK a freelance software writer maintains copyright of their code, unless explicitly transferred to the client - I gather this is the opposite of the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not keeping copyright of the code, then you should probably check with the client if GPL is okay. At a later date, they may wish to distribute it and they should know that they would need to do this under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are keeping the copyright, then you must provide the software to the client under GPL. This includes GPL licensed versions of all code which is part of the product. For example, if you have a library of your own helper functions, you should have to give this library to your client under GPL and there would be nothing you could do to stop your client giving the source of these helper functions to anyone they wish, including your competitors. They would even be permitted to strip out just your helper functions and distribute these on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this because you state &amp;quot;it is impossible for someone else to buy this application&amp;quot;, but if you provide it to your client under GPL, your client is free to distribute it as they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20782" LastEditorUserId="20782" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T18:52:24.797" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T18:52:24.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T16:04:26.077" Score="7" ViewCount="1003" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now consider two people A and B.&#xA;A uses B's GPL code to make a software  that is closed source and does not follow any other term imposed by the GPL.&#xA;B files an infringement case against A.&#xA;A says he has made his own equivalent of the GPL software .&#xA;B asks A to prove it.&#xA;A has only one option to show source code but in this case A wants app to remain closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will happen?  Will A have to reveal source code to the judge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T16:31:19.267" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T14:05:29.617" Title="Asserting copyright infringement against closed source software using GPL code" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10583" CreationDate="2020-10-20T18:42:51.797" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to depend to a large extent on the jurisdiction which you care about and the specifics of the case, but from a general point of view in English law a copyright breach is a civil matter so &amp;quot;balance of probabilities&amp;quot; applies. B would have to provide the evidence on which they are basing their assertion that A has used their code, and A would have to provide evidence that they have written their own work without it being a derivative of B's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both sides would be able to call expert witnesses who would provide their opinions as to the matter; A could make their code available to B's expert witnesses &lt;em&gt;under NDA&lt;/em&gt; - not doing this would likely be regarded by the judge as obstructive, as revealing the code to a third party under NDA would in no way stop it being closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is incredibly unlikely that the code would be revealed to the judge, as frankly the judge wouldn't know what to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A small note about expert witnesses in UK law: expert witnesses &lt;em&gt;know nothing about the case&lt;/em&gt;. They are experts in their field, but have no relationship with either side, other than having their fees paid. A university professor would be a very typical expert witness in this sort of scenario).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T18:42:51.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10588" CreationDate="2020-10-20T01:20:21.060" Score="2" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a commercial closed-source project in C++. I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BYVoid/uchardet/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; library, uchardet, which is licensed under MPL 1.1 or GPL 2.0 or LGPL 2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For say LGPL 2.1, can I statically link uchardet to MY project with no modifications to uchardet, without disclosing my projects source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what else do I have to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20787" OwnerDisplayName="userofstackoverflow123" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T00:51:42.140" Title="Using LGPL 2.1 in a closed-source project" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-19T01:19:43.073" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a library for a commercial application, and I'm wondering how I credit that library. The library is using the BSD-3-Clause license, and my application is going to be closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I credit the library in the documentation of my application, and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="personmanperson" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T10:35:14.757" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T10:35:14.757" Title="Crediting a library" Tags="|license-notice|bsd|closed-source|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-10-24T12:02:22.970" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10586" CreationDate="2020-10-21T00:51:42.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like with the post provided by @Nikos C., LGPL 2.1 requires the object code to be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just decided to get rid of this hassle and use a different library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20787" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T00:51:42.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10580" CreationDate="2020-10-21T14:38:22.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the dependency tree of your project somewhere contains a dependency that is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; available under the GPL license, then all code in your project and all dependencies must be open-source under a GPL-compatible license and the project itself must be distributed under the GPL license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the examples you mention involve dependencies that are dual-licensed. This means that the authors of those dependencies give you a choice between two (or more) licenses and you only have to conform to one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that Hadoop, for example, can use Jersey and stax.api both under the CDDL license, which is weakly copyleft and doesn't require larger projects that uses CDDL code to be open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T14:38:22.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10583" CreationDate="2020-10-21T15:35:10.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A can reasonably demonstrate this without showing the source code, by showing their change control history (without the differences for each file, of course).  Other documentation such as design documents and review records would also help.  The aim is to show that a development process took place, starting from nothing, and developing iteratively until they ended up with what they have today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since B's code is GPL and hence publicly accessible, A must also have a quality process document describing their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese wall&lt;/a&gt; process to ensure A (or A's team) did not refer to B's code during the process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If A does not have an appropriate quality process, and A's code &amp;quot;magically&amp;quot; appeared in their version control system overnight with no further documentation, A will have a great deal of trouble proving that they did not violate B's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely of course, B does have to have a credible case to put to the court.  Common ways for B to prove this would be by checking for common function and variable names within the object files, and checking for common text strings within the object files or executable.  And during disclosure, of course any lack of documentary evidence for independent development would be considered too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important feature of any copyright case though is that it is a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;civil&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; case.  As such, there is no such thing as &amp;quot;innocent until proven guilty&amp;quot;.  The judge is expected to rule based on the balance of probabilities, and it is as much for A to &lt;em&gt;disprove&lt;/em&gt; the allegation as it is for B to prove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16289" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:35:10.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10595" CreationDate="2020-10-21T15:50:47.027" Score="3" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license says &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot; where Software refers to the &amp;quot;software and associated documentation files&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use a MIT library in my statically linked application, is it OK to put the license text inside as an ELF section called &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; or similar? Or do I even need to include the license text at all if only parts of the library is used in my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused since the musl library for example, which uses the MIT license, makes a big thing that applications can be easily statically linked and distributed as a &lt;strong&gt;single file&lt;/strong&gt;. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.musl-libc.org/intro.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.musl-libc.org/intro.html&lt;/a&gt; we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using musl maximizes application deployability. Its permissive MIT license is compatible with all FOSS licenses, static-linking-friendly, and makes commercial use painless too. Binaries statically linked with musl have no external dependencies, even for features like DNS lookups or character set conversions that are implemented with dynamic loading on glibc. An application can really be &lt;strong&gt;deployed as a single binary file&lt;/strong&gt; and run on any machine with the appropriate instruction set architecture and Linux kernel or Linux syscall ABI emulation layer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate license file would not make it a single file deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slides at &lt;a href=&quot;https://elinux.org/images/e/eb/Transitioning_From_uclibc_to_musl_for_Embedded_Development.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://elinux.org/images/e/eb/Transitioning_From_uclibc_to_musl_for_Embedded_Development.pdf&lt;/a&gt; written by the musl author says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive license means you can make static-linked&#xA;binaries without license-conformance concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I really need to include the license text somewhere, couldn't that be called a concern?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20791" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T17:11:01.763" Title="MIT license text as ELF section?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10583" CreationDate="2020-10-21T16:36:20.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the US, B would have an opportunity to depose A and/or their staff about how the functions of B's code that seem like B's code got implemented before the case began to go to trial and to potentially get other &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?typed=discovery&amp;amp;type=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discovery&lt;/a&gt; such as the source code to be examined under NDA by an expert. Assuming that A didn't give up under the threat of the discovery process uncovering their malfeasance, then they might not have used B's code at all and discovery might prove whatever A has been saying about that so far (hopefully through their attorneys). In which case, B goes home with their tail between their legs and is out attorneys' fees (maybe to both sides).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting to this point probably will cost dozens if not hundreds of attorney hours, and the winning side in a US copyright case can request costs from the court including their own attorney's fees, so it's worth thinking about how much this is worth to you. All this will happen in federal court before a most likely non-technical judge who will have to be convinced of the copying and probably not understand or know about copyright licensing or appreciate FOSS nor software development processes (if any were followed, see @Graham's answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B's attorney might have to lay this out for A's attorney, that their clients could both be out over $100k over a command-line parsing library for not following the GPL (or whatever), and see if they really don't want to open up their code or buy a license for, perhaps, less than the court case is likely to cost. B's attorney should make sure that's not extortion in their state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20705" LastEditorUserId="20705" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T14:05:29.617" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T14:05:29.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10593" CreationDate="2020-10-21T17:11:01.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license doesn't introduce license concerns in the sense that the MIT license would introduce license incompatibilities or that it would disallow certain uses. But the MIT license does still include a condition for the license: precisely that requirement to keep the copyright &amp;amp; license notice intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ELF section or similar embedded metadata would satisfy the letter of the license, and could theoretically be an appropriate mechanism in very very niche scenarios. However, the intent of this requirement seems to be that end users get to know about the MIT-licensed software. An ELF section is effectively invisible to users. For other binary file formats (e.g. images, fonts) embedded metadata might be more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, open-source components should be attributed in the same place where the application's author asserts their copyright. This might be in a help message, in interactive elements, or in associated documentation. E.g. while your executable might be a single file (instead of using dynamic linking), you might still distribute that executable alongside a README which would provide ample space to provide attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not interpret third party opinions about “single file deployments” too literally. If you want to be pedantic then everything could be a single-file deployment by deploying it via ZIP file, but that is not a useful approach for interpreting a license. You already understand that the Software in the sense of the MIT license is not just the software (which might be a single file) but also associated documentation. Thus, I see no contradiction between the MIT license requirements and third party observations about static linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T17:11:01.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10565" CreationDate="2020-10-21T19:56:21.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I [be] sure an open source program is safe[, that it] isn't spying on me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can not be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do have a couple couple notes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; doesn't do anything at all for security, there is no mechanical&#xA;limitation that requires your software vendor builds their software programs&#xA;from the public source code they may share.  (or for that matter, use a sane compiler, or computer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; is a license that many label as open source which ensures you own the&#xA;software you run, which means that at-worst you could rebuild the program&#xA;from source/scratch yourself, and remove or change any and all parts of it you&#xA;don't like or don't have a license to use, (there are many examples of this happening&#xA;in the browser space, such as chromium, and iceweasel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building it from source still doesn't do anything to secure you against against your&#xA;software source-code vendor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building from source only gives you the capability to secure yourself from yourself.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not all &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; code permits you the right to modify, remove parts, or even use&#xA;at-all, the source code you may be able to find and read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;building software&amp;quot; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10567/4370&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10567/4370&lt;/a&gt; mentions,&#xA;an essay &amp;quot;Reflections on Trusting Trust&amp;quot;, talks about how the software build tools&#xA;can silently, transparently, and perpetually inject malware with real examples.&#xA;I summarize this for myself to the effect of &amp;quot;any computer can lie to you without&#xA;you knowing at any time&amp;quot;, (this is the premise of hacking culture, invisible lies).&#xA;This can seemingly only sorta be remedied by compiling all your critical build software&#xA;by hand with your own brain, and then trusting that you as a human computer was not&#xA;compromised, and then ensuring the software supply chain end to end you trust,&#xA;(which then implies that only ever use physical computers you trust, trust not to do the same&#xA;thing software can do and transparently inject perpetual malware, so we add the step of &lt;a href=&quot;https://eater.net/6502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;building&#xA;a computer from scratch&lt;/a&gt; by yourself &lt;em&gt;with components simple enough that they alone&#xA;cannot compromise the integrity of your computer&lt;/em&gt;). Both of these are even more&#xA;herculean task than simply reviewing a lot of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this rabbit hole does not end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;trust&amp;quot;, there are many trust-models each with various theories of operation of their trust model&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One popular trust-model is the &amp;quot;web of trust&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;I trust my good friend Bob, &#xA;I know for an indisputable fact that Bob trusts Alice as much as I trust Bob&#xA;Via this logical chain of trust I can imply to myself that I trust Alice&#xA;&#xA;Suppose I know six people who all trust Alice,&#xA;Eventually I these six people reasonably enough, &#xA;with enough of a &amp;quot;web of trust&amp;quot; bridging any two people, &#xA;I can establish how much trust I can assign to Alice, or any identity.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, I can then 'trust' that if I get a program emailed to me from Alice, I can probably&#xA;run it and expect it not to spy on me, at least not by Alice's intention.  Except, an email address&#xA;guarantees no authenticity of the data within the message, nor any integrity checks that the message is not corrupt.&#xA;(more on this later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more widespread trust model is the &amp;quot;chain of trust&amp;quot;, similar to the web of trust except&#xA;it relies only on a single path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Lets say I choose to trust Google, or Mozilla; &#xA;both trust some parts of Digicert&#xA;Digicert trusts example.org and certifies their authenticity (usually with a financial relationship)&#xA;&#xA;in this way; when I visit example.org, I assume I can trust example.org because I trust mozilla&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how HTTPS on the internet works, by-in-large (it is not the only way it can work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note on space-time;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that can be secured across space(distance), must also be secure across time.  Meaning,&#xA;if I can securely copy something from example.org to my computer, then whatever I copied must also&#xA;be secured between the time the copy started, to the time the copy's authenticity was asserted.&#xA;In the web, this usually takes less than a second, but note that it is not instantaneous.&#xA;It is possible for this time gap to be quite large, all the maths and assertions we do can also function&#xA;over a large span of time say between the year 1999, and 2020, in fact, many HTTPS certificate authorities,&#xA;have certificates themselves that are valid for a decade!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;cryptographic signatures&amp;quot;, a tool to assert with maths, that my copy is authentic (and necessarily not corrupt)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;end-to-end encryption&amp;quot;, a way to prohibit, with maths, anyone who isn't my recipient from reading my message to my recipient&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;checksum&amp;quot;, a tool that asserts with maths, that two copies are identical, cheaply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PGP 'asc' and 'sig' files are cryptographic signatures. for example this older version of firefox offers a checksum&#xA;protected with a PGP signature (a common practice to reduce computational expense):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.6.13/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.6.13/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note!! please use &lt;em&gt;extreme care&lt;/em&gt; when using &lt;em&gt;obsolete browser programs&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example if we want to believe that we trust in whats happening, consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;we choose to trust Mozilla, we somehow magically acquire their signing key securely, &#xA;(doing so is quite hard, reflections on trusting trust tell us we are probably already compromised by this point)&#xA;we use that signing key to assert that this SHA1SUMS file is authentic (came from someone mozilla trusts)&#xA;we use this checksum to assert that ./linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.6.13.tar.bz2 is not corrupt, implying it is probbaly authentic&#xA;we now have our firefox program,&#xA;we open it, and use it to open example.org&#xA;our browser checks that example.org's response is authentic by checking that it is signed by Digicert, trusted by Mozilla&#xA;(done)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a lot of work, especially to ask of a large body of individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;software repository&amp;quot; is a storage location for software packages, often including meta data,&#xA;maybe even metadata on how to automatically test each program for authenticity, often offering&#xA;a custom tool to fetch and install these packages automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a ton of these if you go looking for them, almost every programming language has their own,&#xA;almost every operating system, and major tech company has their own. I've worked extensively with debian's&#xA;apt, either way we're simply adding one more layer onto the code signing lasagna, consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;we choose to trust debian, we somehow magically acquire their signing key and apt securely&#xA;&#xA;debian already built a custom version of firefox themselves in a very well documented and public way&#xA;debian already checked that the software license permits them to use it as we want to&#xA;debian already provides packages checksums so that we can trust our copy is the same as theirs&#xA;debian already signed their packages so that we can trust that the file came from them&#xA;debian already has an automatic build system to ease production of packages and modifications&#xA;debian already has a reproducible builds initiative&#xA;https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds&#xA;we can in some cases already check if we can reproduce a software build to assure we aren't the target of anything but an extremely sophisticated personal attack&#xA;debian already defined and publish documentation and policies to govern its repository&#xA;we do have to blindly trust whatever happened to produce debian repository packages followed policy&#xA;we do have to blindly trust software origins were verified before they are published&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;we use `apt` to install the package `firefox`,&#xA;apt downloads debian's custom version of firefox&#xA;apt verifies everything is correct as we before did by hand&#xA;&#xA;if we ever had a doubted that this is program is spying on us&#xA;we can download everything needed to build it automatically ourselves&#xA;we can know we have the right to modify it as we see fit&#xA;either way, we can know that the surface for attack is much smaller, &#xA;an attacker would have to compromise the debian package itself, &#xA;and such an attack would be capable of attacking a large body of computers, not just ours&#xA;not just take advantage of our individual computer use and behavior&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use debian an the example here because I think they are an extremely good learning resource for the curious,&#xA;similar stuff is probably happening behind almost every major software distribution platform, but often in an opaque way where any trust is necessarily more blind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One poor example in the software industry is that python's pypi, and pip,&#xA;do not (at time of writing) check any software-author cryptographic signatures,&#xA;and rely entirely on the HTTPS connection to provide on-the-fly signatures dynamically,&#xA;and user account system which likely means pypi packages authenticity is only protected&#xA;by a package author's password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But its all house of cards anyway, no? Does it really matter that pypi's&#xA;house is one/two stories tall and not six, seven, or more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; start to form the foundation of your trust, your security?&#xA;Did your hardware manufacturer mail you an operating system that you've trusted blindly?&#xA;Did you download your operating system, your programs? Where did your upstream provider get these programs it? Did they fabricate it from&#xA;scratch, by hand? Could their computers that generated it really be trusted?&#xA;Does the organization that produced the program have an incentive to spy on you?&#xA;Is the program really prohibited from using the hardware, operating system; in your hands, in ways you do not want it to? (a ongoing problem in the smart phone space at time of writing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all have to take some risk, and the risk tolerance is an individual choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as you are using a software repository that has a software front end, which is currently maintained, used by a large body of people,&#xA;you are probably, on average, incurring less risk by trusting these programs, than you are by otherwise running any program at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weather or not your specific platform's software distributors spends the energy necessary to&#xA;have the high assurances that form the foundation of reasonable security is&#xA;entirely up to the software, and hardware supply chains therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4370" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T19:56:21.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-21T19:58:45.800" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make a dual-license source-available software that allows copying of the software for the sole purpose of contributing to the original software, with the exception of the copyright holders, who are 5 or so people. I planned on doing that by modifying a copyleft license, stating that copies must be distributed with a very restrictive license that doesn't allow usage or distribution. I chose to use the AGPL for this, but it said in the preamble that people may not modify it. I have three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How come MongoDB made the SSPL license, which is a modified version of the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I do what MongoDB did to make my own license based on the (A)GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better license/license-combination for the purpose I listed above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20794" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T08:43:44.807" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T08:43:44.807" Title="Modified Version of the (A)GPL" Tags="|gpl|dual-license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-10-22T08:52:08.320" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10599" CreationDate="2020-10-21T22:08:07.243" Score="6" ViewCount="783" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to license two products, one with AGPL, one with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement we have is that we want to keep the initial release until BSL, but thereafter OSS is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the most compatible license with our intention is MariaDB's BSL (Business Source License 1.1).. &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-mariadb/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three main &amp;quot;in the wild&amp;quot; usages are Sentry, CockroachDB and MariaDB. Each have written articles about the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CockroachDB: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt; then &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/8acfe8ffd0028ce1d81a9b1148f7e9ba2673bf95/licenses/BSL.txt#L8-L16&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sentry: &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.sentry.io/2019/11/06/relicensing-sentry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt; then &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MariaDB: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/licenses/BSL.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/licenses/BSL.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would simply like to know is, the BSL license requires release under a GPL compatible license, but I cannot find a definitive answer if AGPL is compatible. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero General Public License Wiki&lt;/a&gt;  provides that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Free Software Foundation's judgment, the added requirement in section 2(d) of Affero GPL v1 made it incompatible with the otherwise nearly identical GPLv2. That is to say, one cannot distribute a single work formed by combining components covered by each license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This causes me confusion... in one vein it says compatible another incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20797" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T03:46:44.017" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T03:46:44.017" Title="Is AGPL Compatible with GPL for the purposes of BSL License Change" Tags="|gpl|bsl|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10598" CreationDate="2020-10-22T02:23:57.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final quote you include correctly states that the AGPLv1 is incompatible with the GPLv2. However, the AGPLv3 is compatible with the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSL's requirement of GPL compatibility is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“compatible” means that software provided under the Change License can be included in a program with software provided under GPL Version 2.0 or a later version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this to mean a Change License's compatibility with the GPLv3 alone is sufficient, especially since several BSL grants name the Apache 2 License as the Change License, which is only GPLv3-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T02:23:57.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-22T11:47:34.403" Score="3" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say there are 3 people Q A Z . Q makes a GPL library.  A uses  it and licensed it under the MIT licence purposefully.   Z uses A's library in a proprietary, paid-for library and distributes it with over a million downloads when Q realizes and files an infringement case against A and then Z has also infringed indirectly.  However Z cannot apply GPL to his code as it would be a commercial disaster.  What will Z do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T11:52:58.240" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T14:48:01.397" Title="Using a library that is wrongly licensed" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10600" CreationDate="2020-10-22T12:28:34.193" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Z will &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; release his/her work under GPL, &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; (s)he will immediately cease distribution and refund all his/her affected customers for the code which they have paid to use but may no longer use.  Those are the options available (&lt;strong&gt;edit:&lt;/strong&gt; approaching Q for a commercial licence is, as Felix G points out below, another option, though one that I consider very unlikely to succeed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As covered in comments above, Z didn't pay A for the code that A mistakenly made available under MIT; indeed, A may well not have the faintest idea that Z is using A's code in this way.  So it is very unlikely A would have any liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Z was selling a product with a clear disclaimer that the customer bought it at their own risk and Z had no idea whether the customer was entitled to use it, then I suppose it's possible that Z would be protected from an obligation to refund his/her customers.  But (a) it's jurisdictionally-dependent, (b) it's also off-topic for OS.SE, and (c) why would anybody buy a product under those terms in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, Z has decided to make a business out of selling someone else's work.  If you're going to do that, you need to &lt;strong&gt;bend over backwards&lt;/strong&gt; to ensure that you have the right to do it.  Z failed to ensure that, and is enjoying the consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T14:48:01.397" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T14:48:01.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10605" CreationDate="2020-10-22T20:01:15.587" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this website &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/non-software/#data-media-etc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/non-software/#data-media-etc&lt;/a&gt; they seem to classify non software as data but can't data be code which in turn would be software? Basically in the open source world what is considered software and non software? Is the code concidered non software if you put it into a game which is software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, there is this code I wrote and you have to copy it into a in-game editor for a game using an addon that is licensed under Apache 2.0 and is on the Steam workshop to use the code you make work in-game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the code I wrote be considered software or non-software? I think it is non-software because I am not baking it into the game. But I am not sure and need opinions on what people would classify it as. I know non-software is media and stuff like that. But this is kinda in-between software and non software cause it won't work without the addon that you have to add to the base game/software to be able to use it in the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20127" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-21T06:55:27.167" LastActivityDate="2023-06-21T06:55:27.167" Title="Software vs non software differences" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10602" CreationDate="2020-10-22T22:02:55.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically in the open source world what is considered software and non software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no fundamental difference: the primary form of protection for both software and &amp;quot;data&amp;quot; is copyright. However, some licenses (e.g. the GNU GPL family) are specifically deal with issues that are specific to software (e.g. linking) so are better suited as a license for software. Other licenses, for example the Open Font License deal with issues that are specific to other forms of media (fonts unsurprisingly in the case of the Open Font License) so are better suited as a license for fonts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you could if you wanted to use the GNU GPL to license a font (and that's certainly been done) or the Open Font License to license some software. It's certainly not recommended to do the latter as it would probably not give you or the recipients of the software the freedoms and protections you desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not sure and need opinions on what people would classify it as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think this is actually a serious issue for you, you don't need the opinions of random people on the Internet, you need the professional services of a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T22:02:55.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10602" CreationDate="2020-10-23T07:13:15.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically in the open source world what is considered software and non software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know about all of the open source community, but I can give you my stance on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my view, something is software if it contains instructions to let a computer perform certain actions, where those actions are not just &amp;quot;show this content with this formatting&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the code concidered non software if you put it into a game which is software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, that depends on what the code does to the game. If it just affects the scenery in which the game is played but does not really affect the nature of the game, then I consider it to be data. If the code really affects the nature of the game, then it is more likely to be software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For copyright protection, it doesn't matter if your code is considered software or not. For copyright law, it is all the same as books and other literary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that we have copyright licenses that are specifically tailored for software is because there are some unique aspects to software that are not found in other copyrightable works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software is routinely and mechanically transformed from a human-readable format into a machine-readable format. This gives rise to the notion of source code in the copyleft/share-alike software license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contrary to other works, end-user software is rarely produced by a single copyright holder (or group of cooperating copyright holders). An application is typically linked to one or more libraries that are independently developed. Some consider that this linking creates a new derived work that derives from all input projects. As creating a derived work is only allowed with a license, copyright licenses for software might need to take this aspect into consideration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean that copyright licenses tailored for software cannot be used for non-software works, but some terms and clauses might look a bit strange when a software license is applied to a non-software work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T07:13:15.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-23T12:18:54.890" Score="2" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a suitable license for my project (A Grav CMS PHP Website Rating Plugin). I want to ensure that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code is published open source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code will be kept open source by other users (copyleft)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Restrict usage to non-commercial projects (Nobody can commercially use or sell my plugin without permission)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion was, that the GPL3 covers the first and the second. However if the Software/Website is hosted as a service (which websites are in my understanding) they can modify the code, but do not need to publish it to the world. Thatswhy I'd need the Affero GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the last option:&#xA;I know, that it is possible to add additional restrictions to the GPL3. Is it possible to forbid commercial use, without explicit permission by the owner (me)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen for example fancybox3 which does this:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fancyapps.com/fancybox/3/#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fancyapps.com/fancybox/3/#license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have only written those commercial restrictions to their readme and website, but they did not publish any license text itself. Does this still count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do not add any additional (commercial) restriction, but only use the AGPL, would that mean, that any commercial project must open source their changes to the plugin? Or would that even mean they must open source the whole website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20814" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T13:13:31.773" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T15:21:03.187" Title="Is it possible to restrict GPL3 licensed software to non-commercial projects?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|website|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10606" CreationDate="2020-10-23T15:15:16.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL and AGPL permit commercial use, as do all licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. If you want to prohibit commercial use or distribution, you will need to look outside the FLOSS community for licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you mentioned Fancybox, I should note that the author of that software has &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fancyapps/fancybox/issues/1533&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;made significant errors in expressing their license terms&lt;/a&gt; in a coherent way. You cannot add restrictions to the GPL. You may craft your own license whose terms are similar to the GPL, but that would be some other license, not the GPL. Fancybox's primary error is saying that &amp;quot;open source projects can use Fancybox under the GPL&amp;quot; but one of the chief freedoms of the GPL is to give it to others for, potentially, downstream commercial use. Are open source projects afforded this freedom to make such an offer to a downstream commercial user, or not? It's very unclear. If yes, then the prohibition on commercial use is toothless; if no, then there's no way the freedoms afforded to open source projects could be called the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worthy of legal consideration is the following in GPLv3 section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems directly applicable to your case. Do not state your work is under the GPL unless you want to grant users the freedom to remove your externally-stated prohibition on commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you ask,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I do not add any additional (commercial) restriction, but only use the AGPL, would that mean, that any commercial project must open source their changes to the plugin? Or would that even mean they must open source the whole website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL requires that modifications must be offered to all users who interact with the modified code over a network. Use of your plugin would possibly require disclosure of the entire back-end system that includes the plugin, assuming that it forms a single new work under local copyright law. The FSF considers this legally nuanced question in their GPL FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T15:21:03.187" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T15:21:03.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10288" CreationDate="2020-10-23T16:13:11.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like these are all business-logic rules of Azure's VM-orchestration software. Since the software within the VM is GPL-licensed, you are legally free to download it and use it in a totally different deployment. As you've described the situation, there is no particular obstacle to doing that (beyond the general difficulty of copying and modifying an operating system and other components), so I don't see anti-Tivoization applying here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are paying for Azure/Skylarkcloud to provide an interface by which you can manage your VMs and have them updated for you. It sounds like this plan-lock-in behavior of Azure's VM orchestrator is a proper nuisance, but there appears to be no legal or DRM obstacle to making a network copy of your VM's software outside of Azure. I don't see this as a GPL violation, based on my current understanding of the facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T17:58:40.460" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T17:58:40.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10611" CreationDate="2020-10-23T08:09:01.527" Score="4" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a GPL3 code repository containing a client + server (Say it's a proxy server and client library). I want to create a paid service which uses them. It is my understanding that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assumptions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I use the server component, I can still charge money for access to my service without disclosing my other server-side code because I am not distributing the GPLed server as a binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If my proprietary client software depends on the GPL3 licensed client software, I do not have to distribute my source-code as long as:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My client app executes the GPL licensed client app binary on the system (The two client app's codes not merged)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Communications between the two apps are done via some IPC (Again, no shared code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When user installs my proprietary client, the GPL3 licensed client is downloaded separately by the installer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are all these statements correct or did I get something wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20706" OwnerDisplayName="xendi" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T06:09:17.830" Title="Utilization Of GPL v3 Client / Server Components For A Service + Client App" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10610" CreationDate="2020-10-24T06:09:17.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use the server component, I can still charge money for access to my service without disclosing my other server-side code because I am not distributing the GPLed server as a binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The client app is a bit more complex.  It is true that &lt;em&gt;no shared code&lt;/em&gt; is a necessary condition for your code not being a derived work of the GPL client code (and thus not subject to GPL itself), but it's not sufficient.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's view&lt;/a&gt; is that when one program invokes another through simple fork-and-exec the relationship is sufficiently distant that questions of derivative work generally don't arise, but if they share complex structure, then it's possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you write &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Communications between the two apps are done via some IPC&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, it tells us nothing about the &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; status of your code.  The devil is in the details, and you've not told us any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When [a] user installs my proprietary client, the GPL3 licensed client is downloaded separately by the installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How the end user installs the client code is not material to the question of derivative works.  If there are other reasons, such as closeness of communication, to consider your work a derived work of the client code, your shipping arrangements will not change this, and you will have GPL obligations with respect to your code, regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T06:09:17.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10624" CreationDate="2020-10-24T19:33:34.183" Score="7" ViewCount="3225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that the main difference between GPL and CC is that the former is for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;computer memorized data&lt;/a&gt; which is a source code&lt;/em&gt; and that the latter is for &lt;em&gt;computer memorized data which isn't a source code&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;raw data&amp;quot; such as general-communication-language text, images, videos, audios, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the main difference between GPL and CC?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A better question might be, why is there no open license for a given piece of &lt;em&gt;computer data in general&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20823" LastEditorUserId="20823" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T05:54:07.720" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T12:49:24.400" Title="What is the main difference between GPL and CC?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-24T21:56:50.950" Score="2" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I have code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;int main()&#xA;{&#xA;    myFunction();&#xA;    MitCopyPastedFunction();&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I have copied a section of code from a MIT licensed library. In this case, i want to release my project code with all right reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;is this allowed under MIT licensing of the library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it is allowed, I believe I would still need to include original MIT license notice due to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in this case, how can I include this without having the included MIT license for library applying to my original code which is not intended to be MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20824" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T23:35:48.887" Title="Releasing code containing MIT library using all right reserved license?" Tags="|mit|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10614" CreationDate="2020-10-24T23:35:48.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must retain the notice and make it clear (at least by the name of the library) which code the MIT license terms apply to. You do &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; need to make the MIT license terms apply to the software as a whole. (If a license does require this, we call it a &amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; license. The MIT license is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a copyleft license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, here is a screenshot of how the Chrome browser (which is under a proprietary license) attributes the libraries it uses in &lt;code&gt;chrome://about&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lS9Hd.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the page chrome://about showing permissive terms for Android Crazy Linker&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T23:35:48.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-25T00:02:31.653" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about my final project for my grade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a project. I looked at similar open source projects and got influenced by them. I didn't copy them, but i definitely got influenced and some parts look similar. I have to write a paper about it and publish it. There is going to be some UML diagrams and explanation about the internals. I checked one of said open source projects and mine's structure (class relations) ended up pretty similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do i properly reference the other works in the paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i decide to make my project open source how do i reference the other works? It is not like i copy-pasted the code, neither did i forked them (because i am an idiot, i could've done this and built on it) or anything like that. But i got influenced by how they structured them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of said project is GPL 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20825" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T07:51:22.363" Title="How to publish paper and project inspired by Open Source Projects" Tags="|gpl-2|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10616" CreationDate="2020-10-25T07:51:22.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a legal expert at all just a long time developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per your description I do not think that you can be held liable for any infringements of your work, and as far as being 'similar'... that is a non-issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaining and deriving knowledge from others is part of the learning process everybody must go through, especially when it was gained from other open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if you stand to gain commercially from your work then perhaps there is a slight concern... but in general, no, you should have no issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20827" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T07:51:22.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4221" CreationDate="2020-10-25T21:42:12.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the four years since this question was asked, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; has appeared. While it's not free of controversy (e.g. is it open source? Is it enforceable?), I think this is exactly what the asker was looking for. In short, you can append this to your favorite open source license and it will, in theory, prevent the resale of your software without &amp;quot;substantial&amp;quot; modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From commonsclause.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Commons Clause was intended, in practice, to have virtually no effect other than force a negotiation with those who take predatory commercial advantage of open source development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20831" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T21:42:12.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-26T00:24:26.663" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repository on Github that I want to license under the MIT license. I have copy pasted parts of two other projects, one which is under an MIT license, and another which is under a BSD 3-Clause License. This is how my license file looks like right now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* This repository as a whole is under the following MIT license:&#xA;&#xA;// ... my MIT license&#xA;&#xA;* Parts of this project was derived from [Project A](https://github.com/projecta) &#xA;and so the license from it's repository is included below:&#xA;&#xA;// ... Project A's BSD 3-Clause License&#xA;&#xA;* Parts of this project was derived from [Project B](https://github.com/projectB) &#xA;and so the license from it's repository is included below:&#xA;&#xA;// ... Project B's MIT license&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this proper attribution of the other projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is licensing my project under MIT when I used part of a project with a BSD 3-Clause License okay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I incorporated more projects, would I have to do the above for each one? That would make my LICENSE very long...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19039" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T21:11:11.497" Title="Proper attribution of 'BSD 3-Clause License' code in a MIT license project" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|github|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2020-10-27T15:43:41.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10621" CreationDate="2020-10-26T09:53:18.873" Score="3" ViewCount="760" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned that one of the apps on my smartphone is using the Apache 2.0 license, but when reading the in-App EULA i found a &amp;quot;rights of use&amp;quot; section, which severely limits the usage and distribution rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some snippets of that EULA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are hereby granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable and&#xA;revocable licence, which may not be sub-licensed, to use the App for&#xA;your own personal, non-commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may make copies of the App for backup purposes. You are not&#xA;granted any further rights to the App.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The App’s source code is published under the terms of the “Apache 2.0 License”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not manipulate or change the App.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence terms which apply to the App’s source code as well as to third-party components contained in the App are not affected by the granting of rights under this Section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, it's pretty obvious that the EULA contradicts the actual license of the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually intend to distribute, modify or even read the source code of that app, but what if i did?&#xA;Which terms would actually apply in a case like that? The repository license or the EULA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: does the user get a &lt;code&gt;perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable&lt;/code&gt; license (Apache 2.0), or do they get a &lt;code&gt;limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable, non-commercial&lt;/code&gt; license (EULA)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19001" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T10:03:26.823" Title="Limiting rights through in-app EULA" Tags="|apache-2.0|eula|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10620" CreationDate="2020-10-26T10:03:26.823" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You write that you &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;recently learned that one of the apps on my smartphone is using the Apache 2.0 license&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but then you write that the app says that its &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;source code is published under the terms of the 'Apache 2.0 License'&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache2 is a non-copyleft free licence; it doesn't require that redistribution takes place under Apache2.  So it's perfectly permissible to distribute source under Apache2 but binaries under a more restrictive licence, and from what you say, this seems to be what's happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually intend to distribute, modify or even read the source code of that app, but what if i did? Which terms would actually apply in a case like that? The repository license or the EULA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms shown would apply (restrictive to the binary, Apache2 to the source).  If you don't like having a restricted-rights binary installed, then get hold of the source code, compile it yourself, and load it onto your smartphone.  You will then have a copy with no such restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T10:03:26.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-26T11:44:27.023" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; modifying or redistributing the GPL3 licensed software, nor am I selling it. I am merely &lt;em&gt;using it&lt;/em&gt; to create a different product, which contains the output of the software for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More precisely, I am planning to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Latex package&lt;/a&gt; that creates nice looking graphs. I then intend to use the graphs created by this software package in a commercial manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do so under the terms of its license? Am I going to be in trouble for doing so? Do I need to explicitly mention the package name within the product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20833" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T11:44:27.023" Title="Can I use GPL v3 licensed software to create my commercial product?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-10-26T15:58:32.277" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10578" CreationDate="2020-10-26T14:58:55.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the basic problem here is that it's the copyleft nature of the GPL that makes it &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;bloated&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  You can grant the same rights as the GPL does &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:X11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in a few lines&lt;/a&gt; - all the extra words in the GPL are there to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a copyleft license specifically pertaining to documentation that also includes the GPL like structure so that one cannot redistribute a modified version of the documentation file without accompanying it with the modified version of the source files used to produce the documentation file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GFDL&lt;/a&gt; (note the s1 definitions of &lt;em&gt;transparent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;opaque&lt;/em&gt; copies, and the s3 and s4j requirements to make transparent copies available to end-users in nearly all cases.  What there isn't is a short licence that does that, for very much the same reasons that there isn't a short copyleft licence for code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T14:58:55.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10613" CreationDate="2020-10-26T16:03:43.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly recommend reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1717/50&quot;&gt;Why is CC BY-SA discouraged for code?&lt;/a&gt; to understand why Creative Commons does not recommend their licenses for software. In short, the main points are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a copyleft license: it requires downstream redistributors to make available the work's source code (&amp;quot;the preferred form for making modifications,&amp;quot; whatever that may be for a given work). CC licenses -- even ShareAlike licenses -- do not require distribution of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC licenses are not patent-aware, so if a piece of software implements a system covered by an author's patent, a CC license may not necessarily give recipients the right to run that patented system that is implemented in the software. The GPL (like some other software licenses, e.g., the Apache 2 License) explicitly grants patent rights so recipients may run it without fear of infringing an author's patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your question is more broad than that: why is there no &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; license for a given piece of computer data in general? So, we must also consider why the GPL (or even non-copyleft software licenses) may sometimes be unsuitable for non-software works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL specifically, copyleft (the requirement to share source code) may be more onus than an artist wants to impose on redistributors. If I share a painting, song, or movie and allow others to modify it, I might not care if they share the underlying editing files with the individual layers/tracks/scenes they used to make a new work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution also has different practical concerns for different media. It might be really burdensome to distribute a copy of the GPL -- or even a shorter license, like the MIT/X11 -- along with a modified painting or movie. The CC licenses allow much lexically shorter attachments, which may be more appropriate for certain types of works; for instance, CC BY 3(a)(2) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="20823" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T12:49:24.400" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T12:49:24.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-26T18:10:04.287" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am constantly using open source projects during my work.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Usually I view the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/visualizing-repository-data-with-graphs/exploring-the-dependencies-of-a-repository#dependents-view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dependents graph&lt;/a&gt; to see which other open source projects use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, How do I gauge the reach of a project such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;python-poetry&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&#xA;&lt;br&gt; As there are 0 dependents in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/network/dependents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its repo dependents graph&lt;/a&gt;, but I am quite sure that a lot of projects use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20836" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-12-29T20:52:20.640" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T20:52:20.640" Title="How to evaluate the reach of an open source project when there are 0 projects in its repo dependents?" Tags="|github|dependencies|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10647" CreationDate="2020-10-27T03:23:40.527" Score="5" ViewCount="807" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like the top answer of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8030/can-i-be-accused-of-using-mit-library-in-my-codebase-that-internally-depends-on&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; says, let's say your project uses library M. M uses the MIT license and has dependencies G and A, which use GPLv2 and Apache2 respectively. As a result, M is not legally distributable since it doesn't comply to the licenses of it's dependencies since GPLv2 and Apache2 are not compatible, and so your use of M isn't legal either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it sounds to me that if any of your dependencies, or sub-dependencies, or sub-sub-dependencies etc. don't comply to their licenses correctly, you can be at fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there are tools that look through your dependency tree and can tell you all the licenses it finds so you can ensure you're doing your part, but is there any way to ensure that every dependency you have has done their part and are legally distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18523" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T08:21:54.120" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T21:22:29.077" Title="How can you check if your dependencies comply to their dependencies' licenses?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10628" CreationDate="2020-10-27T09:01:26.873" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a software license that doesn't distinguish between &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;raw data&lt;/em&gt; (as two different types of computer memorized data [computer data]), so that every &lt;em&gt;piece of computer data&lt;/em&gt; could be licensed by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a license could cover both CC and GPL licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20823" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T09:49:57.637" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T12:26:58.323" Title="Is there a software license that doesn't distinguish between source code and raw data?" Tags="|open-data|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10627" CreationDate="2020-10-27T10:21:10.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fear the question is founded on a misunderstanding: that CC is specifically for &lt;em&gt;non-executable&lt;/em&gt; forms of digital content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code/1718#1718&quot;&gt;As we've said here before&lt;/a&gt;, the problem with using CC licences for source code is that they're not specifically intended for code, so they make no mention of source availability and entitlement.  Having free access to binary computer code is a lot less useful if you don't have access to the Complete Corresponding Source, and the rights to copy, modify, and distribute that, so licences like the GPL are clear about giving users rights to this.  CC licences don't mention source code.  It's not that they say they can't be used for source code, they just don't treat that source as a special partner to binary code, in the way (eg) the GPL does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the CC family of licences seem to be the &amp;quot;universal&amp;quot; licences you seek, in that they can be applied to all digital content.  But when you apply them to digital content which is executable, you don't empower the users as fully as when you use a copyleft licence designed specifically for use with code.  Thus, the dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T12:26:58.323" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T12:26:58.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10629" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T16:47:30.450" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say there is a GPL library written in C++ for example a library that finds some value using some algorithm and there are two individuals A and B.  A uses Emscripten on it to convert it into Javascript . B writes an assembly port of the program. Can A or B release their source under MIT licence or develop a closed source application with that code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T07:07:28.837" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T07:07:28.837" Title="Translating a software to bypass the licence?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10629" CreationDate="2020-10-27T17:15:48.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Person A definitely can only use that Javascript code under the GPL license. For copyright purposes, there is no difference if source code is mechanically translated to machine code (a.k.a. it is compiled), or if it is mechanically translated to another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For person B, it makes a difference if they translated the GPL source code into assembly code, or if they replicated the &lt;em&gt;behaviour&lt;/em&gt; of the library without looking at the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they replicated the behaviour without looking at the GPL source code, then the version of person B is an independent work for copyright and they can use any license they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they did inspect the GPL source code and wrote the assembly port based on that knowledge, then the assembly port is considered to be a derived work and, per the GPL, must be under the GPL license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T17:15:48.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T17:55:04.160" Score="2" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little new to the nuances of how licensing of software can propagate/affect other pieces of software so sorry if there's anything in the question that doesn't make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically though, I'm trying to package up some software that is MIT licensed that has dependencies that are mixed licensed (I think it's a couple GPL dependencies and some MIT/BSD dependencies) into a more easily deployable solution (Docker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see my options as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put commands for installing dependencies into the Dockerfile but have users build the image themselves (instead of pushing built images to an image repo). I think I've seen online that this is okay, but this isn't ideal for us because our clients won't always be familiar with Docker and how to run things themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Write an install script and have it as a part of a container's startup process at runtime. This is okay for us, but it adds some overhead to spinning up new containers (which we'll be running as scalable workers, so this isn't ideal as they'll be coming up/winding down often).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bake the dependencies into an image and push this image to a public image repository. This is ideal for us, but sounds closest to the language of &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot;, which is a bit spooky to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I'm wondering, are there any differences from a licensing perspective between 2 and 3? If so, what are they? Will either 2 or 3 be incompatible with our desire to keep the source code for our binary MIT licensed? Are there other solutions that I've overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20841" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T17:55:04.160" Title="Can I bake licensed dependencies (i.e. software under GPL) into a Docker image and keep the project MIT-licensed?" Tags="|licensing|dependencies|docker|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10633" CreationDate="2020-10-28T08:42:52.197" Score="5" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have used an image licensed under Apache license for my own products. I have modified it, change colors, add shadows, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: can I register it? If anyone steals that image from me I have the right to claim the ownership of this image I changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20854" OwnerDisplayName="svprdga" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T12:11:02.367" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T12:11:02.367" Title="Can I have the copyright of a derivative work from a project licensed under Apache license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10632" CreationDate="2020-10-28T09:49:22.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's not really how copyright works.  What you have now is an image with several &lt;em&gt;rightsholders&lt;/em&gt;, each of whom has a &lt;em&gt;copyright interest&lt;/em&gt; in the work.  The rightsholder(s) in the Apache2-licensed image still have an interest in the work you've made, as do you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't, and can't, own the image.  Anything you do with the image, you will need to do in accordance with the Apache2 licence under which you made your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do own your copyright interest in the image (assuming you didn't create it for someone else, and that it doesn't fall under the local equivalent of a &lt;em&gt;work for hire&lt;/em&gt; doctrine, if any).  You may benefit from, license, or otherwise dispose of, that interest as you please.  In countries with a doctrine of copyright that recognises &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors%27_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;authors' moral rights&lt;/a&gt; as well as economic rights, note that the moral rights are often inalienable (ie, you cannot dispose of those).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody can meaningfully &lt;em&gt;steal&lt;/em&gt; that image from you.  It is possible that somebody might use copies of the image in a way that infringes upon your copyright interest in it; that will depend on the terms (if any) under which you made the image available to others.  If somebody does that, you get to sue them for copyright infringement, if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you will forgive me, misunderstandings like these often arise from thinking that the law treats &lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt; just like it treats physical property.  But law doesn't do that, generally.  In my opinion, it's worth reading Richard Stallman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arguments against the use of the term &lt;em&gt;intellectual property&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  I don't necessarily agree with everything he says there, but it's a useful counterpoint to the common MPAA/RIAA-driven view that copyrights are property rights, and that copyright infringement is morally and legally equivalent to theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T10:58:04.390" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T10:58:04.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10639" CreationDate="2020-10-28T18:27:31.363" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us say I create a recycler view for &lt;code&gt;MyFeedItem&lt;/code&gt; using snippets from &lt;a href=&quot;https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/kotlin-android-training-diffutil-databinding#3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this codelab&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copy snippets from the mentioned codelab to create below file first&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;class SleepNightDiffCallback : DiffUtil.ItemCallback&amp;lt;SleepNight&amp;gt;() {&#xA;&#xA;override fun areItemsTheSame(oldItem: SleepNight, newItem: SleepNight): Boolean {&#xA;          return oldItem.nightId == newItem.nightId&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;    override fun areContentsTheSame(oldItem: SleepNight, newItem: SleepNight): Boolean {&#xA;         return oldItem == newItem&#xA;    }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and just replace &lt;code&gt;SleepNight&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;MyFeedItem&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;nightId&lt;/code&gt; with &lt;code&gt;id&lt;/code&gt;  to generate &amp;quot;my&amp;quot; software below&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;class MyFeedItemDiffCallback : DiffUtil.ItemCallback&amp;lt;MyFeedItem&amp;gt;() {&#xA;&#xA;override fun areItemsTheSame(oldItem: MyFeedItem, newItem: MyFeedItem): Boolean {&#xA;         return oldItem.id == newItem.id&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;    override fun areContentsTheSame(oldItem: MyFeedItem, newItem: MyFeedItem): Boolean {&#xA;        return oldItem == newItem&#xA;    }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For brevity, let us assume that this is the only file in the software produced and I am selling this software commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I under some copyright violations here? (given no license info is mentioned on the website)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, what is the remedy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the same scenario, let us say that the snippet is under MIT license and I have produced the same single file software that I am selling commercially and keeping it closed source. Are there any copyright violations, if yes, then what is the remedy and can I keep it closed source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20847" LastEditorUserId="20847" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T18:39:23.993" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T10:40:34.440" Title="Google Android Codelab code snippets license" Tags="|android|google-code|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10637" CreationDate="2020-10-28T23:15:22.967" Score="9" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nmap project uses a custom license called the &amp;quot;Nmap Public Source License&amp;quot; based on the GPLv2 but with additional terms.  They provide the text of the license with annotations on their changes here:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://nmap.org/npsl/npsl-annotated.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nmap.org/npsl/npsl-annotated.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the modifications to this license qualify it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-compatible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free software (per FSF)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20852" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T00:41:04.717" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T00:41:04.717" Title="Is nmap's custom NPSL license free?" Tags="|license-compatibility|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10636" CreationDate="2020-10-29T00:02:13.027" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is probably not free.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going through the points that concern me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid any misunderstandings, we consider software to constitute a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; of Covered Software for the purposes of this license if it does any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GPL, &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; is intentionally undefined. It is a term of art in copyright law, and if you are offering a bare license (i.e. not an EULA), then it's not clear to me how you would be able to expand the scope of &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; beyond its normal meaning under the applicable copyright law. If a judge holds that some particular work is not, legally, a derivative work, then they might further rule that the license is inapplicable to that work, because permission was never required in the first place. If that happened, then this part of the license would not be considered at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this necessarily puts it outside of the scope of &amp;quot;free software,&amp;quot; but it does mean that they appear to have broken GPLv2 compatibility for no meaningful benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is designed specifically to execute Covered Software and parse the results (as opposed to typical shell or execution-menu apps, which will execute anything you tell them to).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble with this argument is that there are quite a few open source drivers and other pieces of software which have been developed by reverse-engineering proprietary software or hardware. If any and all intentional parsing automatically creates a derivative work, then much of that open source code would actually be proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By purporting to restrict the use of parsing in this manner, I think they may be in violation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedom 0&lt;/a&gt; (freedom to run the software for any purpose), but it's debatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Includes Covered Software in a proprietary executable installer. The installers produced by InstallShield are an example of this. Including Nmap with other software in compressed or archival form does not trigger this provision, provided appropriate open source decompression or de-archiving software is widely available for no charge. &lt;strong&gt;For the purposes of this license, an installer is considered to include Covered Software even if it actually retrieves a copy of Covered Software from another source during runtime (such as by downloading it from the Internet).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the boldfaced part is questionable. It appears to say that, if I build a proprietary installer which downloads the latest tarball from their website, my installer is a derivative work of their software, despite the fact that I am neither hosting nor distributing any of their software myself. I very much doubt such an interpretation would be legally enforceable, as described in greater detail above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, the whole bullet probably violates &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSD&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt; #9 (license must not restrict other software) because an installer counts as &amp;quot;other software&amp;quot; within the meaning of that rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Executes a helper program, module, or script to do any of the above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the first (quoted) bullet, this one doesn't exempt shells. I sincerely hope that this is an oversight, but regardless, it needs to be &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more specific, or else this is getting perilously close to the Server-Side Public License's infamous &amp;quot;Service Source Code&amp;quot; clause, which is widely regarded as non-free in part because it is extraordinarily vague and expansive. This bullet has the same problem. It could conceivably apply to anything in the same technology stack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is certainly not GPLv2-compatible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to all of the issues identified above, section 8 (Termination for Patent Action) is a &amp;quot;further restriction&amp;quot; within the meaning of GPL section 6. This is the same problem GPLv2 has with the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T00:02:13.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10635" CreationDate="2020-10-29T10:40:34.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I under some copyright violations here? (given no license info is mentioned on the website)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there truly is no license given, then you have indeed violated the copyrights on the code because you need a license to make copies and/or changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the overview page for the cource &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a link to a page with licensing information (&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.android.com/license&lt;/a&gt;) and that page states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless otherwise noted, the documentation on this site, including any code shown in it, is made available to you under the Apache 2.0 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license is a permissive license that allows you to keep your modified version closed source, but you must inform the recipients of the app that parts of it are under the Apache 2.0 license and give them a copy of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T10:40:34.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T06:32:58.880" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a commercial product, and we want to provide an opensource project for community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But those two projects are different, one commercial, one community, like features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, we will have two code repositories, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we have no experiences to sync codes between them, like new features request from community or bug fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How to manager those repositories together? Like we use GitLab internal, and use GitHub for external.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any solutions for this kind of project/repository management?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a multi project management problem.&#xA;It's a cloud native product, so it has many repositories currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20858" LastEditorUserId="20858" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T11:11:15.477" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:11:15.477" Title="cooperative work between opensource project and commercial projects" Tags="|project-management|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10641" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T14:28:07.363" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on small app for searching authors and their works. I had quite issues with finding reasonable and clean data. Main problem was a licence of usage and since I plan to use data for affiliate marketing (commercial-use), most data sources were pretty much out of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really liked worldcat data. But on worldcat website is clearly stated (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/ext-ref/worldcat-org/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;worldcat terms&amp;amp;conditions&lt;/a&gt;) that data must be used Non-Commercially. After some research, it seems that only possible data I can use (and &lt;strong&gt;keep&lt;/strong&gt;) for commercial usage must be published under &lt;strong&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/strong&gt; and worldcat data certainly are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on wikipedia (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Catalog_data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;goodreads page&lt;/a&gt;) is stated that in 2012 goodreads imported worldcat data, which is also supported on goodreads announcement (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/766331-announcement-goodreads-to-import-worldcat-library-of-congress-data-to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;goodreads announcement&lt;/a&gt;) where obviously one of the user (1. comment) also raises doubts about legal (copyright) issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite obvious that goodreads is not non-profitable website and uses the data for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How could this be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20863" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T14:28:07.363" Title="Book &amp; Writer data for commercial use (goodreads contradictory behaviour)" Tags="|licensing|commercial|creative-commons|non-commercial|open-data|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10640" CreationDate="2020-10-30T14:44:11.680" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typical solutions on the market are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The opensource version is public, anybody can download and use it - but the extra features of the closed project is only distributed as modules/extensions which are not public. It works well if your project is modular, and it is not a problem if it is a script language (like python).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The opensource version is public, the commercial version is a service. This is being done by, for example, gitlab.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You release the source of the public part, but do not the commercial part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Syncing code between entirely different repos will be surely a bad solution. Make your code modular and publish only the modules what you want to. You can do this modularity also on the source level (having a set of sub-projects, some of them have public repos, others do not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T14:44:11.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T14:48:32.563" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;An intermediate client (say software agency) requested me to develop a plugin for a popular system. She is selling this to the final client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full story is here in this other question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/10558/20729&quot;&gt;Can I publish a GPL source I&amp;#39;m being paid for to develop?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am acting as a freelance, not an employee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popular system is GPL-3 and the plugin exchanges a significant amount of structured data with the host system. So I guess my work must necessarily be GPL-3 too (or a compatible one). But for sure -I guess- it can't be delivered without licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Problems&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The intermediate client is requesting me to deliver &lt;strong&gt;without adding the GPL license terms&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;without mentioning GPL3&lt;/strong&gt; at all. She says: &amp;quot;The client will decide the license&amp;quot;. But I ask &amp;quot;tell me what license, and I'll check if compatible and I'll place the terms&amp;quot; and the client says &amp;quot;you don't need to know&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The intermediate client is requesting me to &lt;strong&gt;remove any mention to &amp;quot;me as the author&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; She says: &amp;quot;If they need any modification, they already know how to reach me&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The intermediate client is &amp;quot;telling me&amp;quot; that the &amp;quot;final client&amp;quot; (the payer) is who will hold the copyright, but &lt;strong&gt;she is not willing to tell me who the copyright owner is for me to add this info in the license terms.&lt;/strong&gt; She says: &amp;quot;Just give me your source code and they'll add their name by their own&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination of all seems quite &amp;quot;scammy&amp;quot; to me. Doesn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is my first time I'm &amp;quot;selling my time&amp;quot; for doing OpenSource and IDK if this is normal in the sector or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess his fear is that the final client comes directly to me for next works. But hey, this is why the open source licenses are so transparent, no? I would be open to sign a declaration with the intermediate that for X time I won't sell to this particular client directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Questions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is all this normal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What should I tell to the intermediate client?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it normal that the plugin is delivered without license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I &amp;quot;enforce&amp;quot; that my claim of &amp;quot;me being the author&amp;quot; is not removed? Or the intermediate has the right to eliminate the authorship information?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it normal to deliver without specifying who is the copyright owner?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20729" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T07:14:18.117" Title="Is this normal? Intermediate client is not willing to provide license terms and not willing that I appear as the author" Tags="|licensing|copyright|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10646" CreationDate="2020-10-30T15:04:37.627" Score="40" ViewCount="12434" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question really baffles me. What advantage does making it Open Source bring? Aren't they worried someone can learn the secrets in their code and make a competing version of chrome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T17:43:15.490" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T20:32:31.697" Title="Why did Google make Chromium Open Source?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2020-10-30T17:22:26.447" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google is broadly not in the business of selling copies of software. Google is in the business of offering Internet and Web services, most often accessed through a browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overwhelming dominance of Chromium clones that you suggest in your question has already happened: Opera, Edge, and Chrome are all Chromium-based. Firefox and Safari are the only major holdouts not relying on Chromium. There could scarcely be better news for Google:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any improvements made by Microsoft or Opera are usable by Google. The permissive license of Chromium means competitor are not required to share their changes, but it is generally a huge pain for downstream modifiers to keep patch-sets private and much easier to push them back the upstream project. Also, Microsoft and Google both realize they have much more to gain by open cooperation on a sidecar piece of software like a browser than doing the same duplicated work independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is much easier for Google to maintain their web services, because they have fewer browser to support. If there were only one brand of browser in existence, Google could focus on a single version of their services, instead of one for each browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is easier for Google to have their service require (or only be efficient on) Chromium-based browsers, the development of which Google can control directly or indirectly. They can afford to lose holdouts still using Firefox/Safari or (even better) convert them to Chromium users instead, because their need to use Google services outweighs their desire to use Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T23:24:58.277" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T23:24:58.277" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2020-10-30T17:30:46.833" Score="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Companies produce open source software for a variety of reasons, including marketing and developer relations. But I don't want to speculate. Instead, I want to point out three aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Browsers don't have any secrets that must be protected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chromium is derived from a tradition of open source components.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google benefits from the reach and impact that open source enables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Google created Chrome/Chromium, they didn't start from scratch. Building browser engines is expensive! Instead, they looked at the market situation at the time (2008):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Internet Explorer had won the first browser war (late 90s) and had about 70% market share, but was somewhat stagnant since then. Google depends on the web to sell ads, but IE wasn't a very attractive portal to the web.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firefox was an open source browser that had about 25% market share. The Firefox code was based on the Netscape browser which had lost the first browser war – but was then open-sourced in an experiment: a bet that working together was better than working against each other. While FF could never match IE's popularity (because it didn't come pre-installed on Windows), it was the browser of choice for anyone who had a choice. But Google didn't want to bet the future of their company on another organization's browser.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The remaining market share was split between Opera and Safari. Safari was based on the WebKit rendering engine, which had recently been open-sourced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WebKit was actually a fork of the KDE project's KHTML browser engine. There was some collaboration between WebKit and KHTML but at some point Apple found it easier to completely open-source their code: working together is easier. After all, Apple was not in the business of making browser engines but in the business of selling devices that need a pre-installed browser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google created Chromium by taking the open-source WebKit and combining it with their more advanced V8 JavaScript engine, which made client-side web applications more feasible. (V8 wasn't completely written from scratch, but some parts were based on Strongtalk which also formed the basis of the OpenJDK/HotSpot Java Virtual Machine). The name “Chrome” is a reference to the fairly minimal user interface Google added around WebKit and V8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There wasn't any proprietary magic in Chromium that was worth keeping secret. V8 might have been such a thing, but Google didn't need a better engine for themselves, they needed a better web for themselves: a medium to sell ads through. This was a “platform play”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/welcome-to-chromium_02.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;release announcement&lt;/a&gt;, the Chromium team explains their reason for publishing the code under a permissive BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Primarily it's because one of the fundamental goals of the Chromium project is to help drive the web forward. Open source projects like Firefox and WebKit have led the way in defining the next generation of web technologies and standards, and we felt the best way we could help was to follow suit, and be as open as we could. To be clear, improving the web in this way also has some clear benefits for us as a company. With a richer set of APIs we can build more interesting apps allowing people to do more online. The more people do online, the more they can use our services. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We believe that open source works not only because it allows people to join us and improve our products, but also (and more importantly) because it means other projects are able to use the code we've developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the mention of Firefox and WebKit but not Internet Explorer, which was perceived as holding the web back. The innovators in the space were open source, so Chromium also went open source. This openness helped the new browser gain rapid adoption with technology enthusiasts and later with the mainstream. This openness (paired with Google's deep pockets) helped Google become a heavyweight in shaping the future direction of the web. By becoming a major browser maker, they could help new technologies gain acceptance &lt;em&gt;by implementing them themselves&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't have to become the biggest browser for this to be successful, they just needed the web as a whole to become more attractive. Their decision to open-source V8 led to one such effect: the NodeJS system was built on V8, which is now one of the most popular environments for building backends for web apps. Node also helped with many important web technologies such as Websockets, and helped JavaScript to become a more attractive language. The web has become so attractive as a development environment that it is even displacing native apps, e.g. Electron is based on Chromium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, Chrome did become the biggest browser, and with this some things changed. E.g. Google forked Blink from the WebKit engine so that they no longer had to think about compatibility with Apple. But Chromium/Blink is still open source and this is very good for Google. Aside from Firefox and Safari, &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; other browsers have switched to Blink, including Microsoft's Edge. This gives Google an insane amount of leverage. When Google implements a browser feature that makes the web more attractive, nearly all browsers benefit directly and Google's web-based services become even more attractive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course Google's current level of influence also has drawbacks. E.g. they recently weakened the capabilities of ad-blocking addons (ostensibly for performance reasons, but Google &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an ad company). This isn't always good for users. They are also so dominant that they don't have to stick to the web standards process but can just implement features directly – such proprietary extensions are reminiscent of Internet Explorer at the height of its popularity. But unlike IE they are still largely open source. Downstream browser makers can either take the features, or expend the effort of maintaining a forked version. Maintaining a diverging version is not really an economically viable option, thus being open source helps Google exert control over most competing browsers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T10:58:33.920" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T10:58:33.920" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10626" CreationDate="2020-10-30T21:22:29.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot get such guarantees because compliance cannot be checked automatically. It's not even possible manually because some facts might only become known in the future. At most, it can be verified e.g. whether a project has processes to ensure compliance, such as requiring contributors to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DCO&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can trust someone else to do some level of checking. Is the dependency used directly by high-profile projects? Is the dependency packaged by the Debian project? Are the maintainers known for caring about licenses? Nothing will be entirely safe, but in most settings it would be unreasonable to trawl through the entire commit history of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking the licenses of the entire dependency tree is already a very good step, because this also catches cases where a dependency used another dependency with a wrong license. This just can't find more tricky cases, like copying code from another project without complying with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T21:22:29.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10648" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10672" CreationDate="2020-10-30T21:53:07.727" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess I am ignorant about open source software licensing and am trying to understand it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work for a retailer that has an ecommerce site.  Our ecommerce site is built in-house and uses various open-source libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am struggling to understand how the licenses of our third-party libraries pertain to us.  For example, if we use a library licensed under GPL v2, what does this mean to us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read the GPL v2 as well as discussions about it, and it is still unclear to me what exactly constitutes &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;copying&amp;quot; licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't sell software.  We don't publish software, at least not in the sense of an app store or software vendor or package repo.  But what about, say, javascript that runs on client browsers?  Does that count as &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;copying&amp;quot; software in a way that invokes the GPL license restrictions?  Are there other common licenses that trigger restrictions for this kind of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20867" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T12:24:46.687" Title="how do open source licenses affect ecommerce sites?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-31T00:46:03.710" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a bit lost with license compatibility and re-licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author Alice is author and holds copyright of software under GPL3. This software supports plugins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author Bob authors a plugin for Charlie, which will hold the copyright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that Bob's software must be GPL3. But I see some plugins published under MIT, for a main software under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the plugin be MIT instead of GPL3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can Charlie (the copyright owner of the plugin) &amp;quot;mutate&amp;quot; the license back-and-forth from GPL3 to MIT or from MIT to GPL3 if the author specified X license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could the plugin be releaded under the GNU All-Permissive license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can Charlie, the copyright owner &amp;quot;move&amp;quot; its software from All-Permissive to MIT or GPL3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any public matrix of &amp;quot;from&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;to&amp;quot; possibilities in an easy way to understand?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20729" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T08:14:52.793" Title="Can a copy-left licensed software mutate to a permissive one? Can a permissive licence mutate to a copy-left one?" Tags="|gpl-3|relicensing|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10643" CreationDate="2020-10-31T07:14:18.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For nearly all issues of work done under contract, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10558/can-i-publish-a-gpl-source-im-being-paid-for-to-develop&quot;&gt;as we've already said&lt;/a&gt;, the details depend entirely on what's in the contract.  In terms of normal behaviour, the answers to your questions are yes, up to you, yes, no, no (but the owner won't be you).  The usual path, unless you hold out for a contract that specifies otherwise, is that you're being paid to give both work and copyright to the entity who's paying for it.  In some countries there may be a wrinkle with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt;, but apart from that, you have no interest in or rights to the work once it's handed over and payment is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting departure here is that you're being paid to create a plugin for a third-party GPLv3 work.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's view&lt;/a&gt; is that the degree of integration between plugin and main work determine whether the plugin is a derivative work of the main program, and thus must be conveyed under GPL.  You note in the question that this integration is tight.  In any case, if it's loose, the GPL doesn't complicate matters, and we're back to the paragraph above.  So let's assume that integration is tight, and that the plugin will be a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 has language to address this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I confess I'm not entirely sure how to read this, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2008-March/015693.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a gentleman from Intel's Open Source technology centre&lt;/a&gt; said this about it in the early days of GPLv3, when we were all trying to understand it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the intent here in GPLv3 is clear enough that &lt;strong&gt;use of contractors or outsourced&#xA;hosting providers does not constitute conveyance&lt;/strong&gt; (distribution in GPLv2&#xA;nomenclature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By his reading, then, your client is allowed to give you a copy of the original GPLv3 program, with full sources, and pay you to develop and sign over to them a plugin for the work, on normal commercially-confidential work-for-hire terms.  Nothing in GPLv3 obliges them to give you credit or recognition of any kind, and since they own the copyright, it should be &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; name, not yours, that appears on any sources they later choose, or are required, to publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You add in a comment that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I don't mind giving them the copyright. But I want to preserve the credentials of authorship when the source code spreads.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  It seems to me that you are trying to reinvent moral rights.  I think that's pointless; either you're in a civil law jurisdiction that recognises them as inalienable, in which case you need do nothing, or you're not, in which case you will find it difficult to reinvent them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we said earlier, make sure that what you want is in the contract.  If you care about credit, add a term that says you will retain copyright, but that they have unlimited rights to use, reuse, copy, distribute, and relicense your work.  They are likely to resist signing this, and you may have to agree to lower your fee - but if this is important to you, you should do that.  What you shouldn't do is fail to negotiate for it now, then try to weasel it round the back after the work is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T07:14:18.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10649" CreationDate="2020-10-31T07:44:06.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the plugin be MIT instead of GPL3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Plugins for GPL applications can be under any GPL-compatible license, assuming the interaction between the application and the plugin is such that the GPL terms apply also to the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license requires that the combination of application+plugin is distributed under the GPL terms, but that does not mean that each separately identifiable part of that combination must also be licensed under the GPL when those parts are separated. The same mechanism is in effect here that allows you to use non-GPL libraries in a GPL application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can Charlie (the copyright owner of the plugin) &amp;quot;mutate&amp;quot; the license back-and-forth from GPL3 to MIT or from MIT to GPL3 if the author specified X license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could the plugin be releaded under the GNU All-Permissive license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can Charlie, the copyright owner &amp;quot;move&amp;quot; its software from All-Permissive to MIT or GPL3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes to all of them. As copyright holder, Charlie has (gained) the right to set the copyright license and to change it at whim. Charlie can even put a proprietary, GPL-incompatible, license on the plugin, but that would prevent Charlie from distributing the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any public matrix of &amp;quot;from&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;to&amp;quot; possibilities in an easy way to understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually changing a license can only be done by or with express permission of all copyright holders. In that case, everything is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For using the work from others in an application (either as a library or by copying), you need to have a copyright license. This license can put restrictions on what you are allowed to do, like a requirement to make the source code public under an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two licenses are incompatible with each other if they have requirements that cannot be both fulfilled at the same time. The problem here is that you are only allowed to distribute your application if you can fulfill &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the requirements from &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; applicable licenses at the same time. If you can't, for example due to contradictory requirements, then you are not allowed to distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a chart about license compatibility in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on the topic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T08:14:52.793" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T08:14:52.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-31T08:32:38.423" Score="3" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an application for macOS on the Mac App Store, and I would like to embed ffmpeg into the application's binary. Is this compliant with the ffmpeg license and does anybody have experience of doing this on the Mac App Store ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20869" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T08:32:38.423" Title="I would like to embed ffmpeg in my app for the Mac App Store. Is this compliant with the license ? is there any other blocker to achieve my goal?" Tags="|licensing|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-11-03T21:07:23.900" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2020-10-31T21:54:07.373" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;By making Chromium open source, Google succeeded in turning almost all competing browsers into rebranded copies of Chrome and getting to set all the baseline behavior/policy that would go into them. This would not have happened if it were not open source (either by virtue of not having source available, or not being licensed as open source, or both). It's not clear whether independently developed browsers would have continued to thrive or not in this alternate timeline, but even if not, it's likely that Google would have gotten the same kind of hatred Microsoft got for Internet Explorer back in the day when it was a thing; as it stands, they're instead getting &lt;strong&gt;prasie&lt;/strong&gt; for destroying the competition and creating a browser monoculture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T21:54:07.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-01T15:24:41.750" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had previously downloaded an open source project under the BSD 3-Clause, which I am planning to make use of in a commercial product. As far as I understand, this license will permit this in a closed source operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the license for the open source project has just changed to GNU General Public License v2.0, which would force me to distribute the source code of my commercial app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I downloaded the source code when the license was BSD 3-Clause, is that the license that applies to my alteration of the code? Or does the new license apply to me, since I don't believe there were any changes to the source code of the original, other than the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20881" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T15:34:13.413" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T15:34:13.413" Title="BSD 3-Clause License Changed to GNU General Public License v2.0" Tags="|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-11-01T21:18:46.613" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-03T16:44:14.923" Score="4" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I opened an issue on a Javascript library hosted on GitHub. The maintainer pushed a fix to &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt;, but there has not been a new release since that fix was pushed. Should the issue be closed now, or when there is a new release and the fixed code is available via npm? Or should this be at the discretion of the maintainer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20906" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T23:25:08.840" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T23:25:08.840" Title="Should a GitHub issue be closed before or after the fix has been included in a release?" Tags="|github|issue-tracking|release|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10656" CreationDate="2020-11-03T21:04:37.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion - and I should stress it's only that - it's great that you've found a bug in a piece of free software.  It's good to find bugs, because it makes software better.  That said, if you report the bug, the maintainer is not obliged to fix it.  If you fix it, the maintainer is not obliged to accept your fix.  If your fix is accepted, you're not entitled to any particular workflow with respect to the release of that fix and the closure of the bug report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasonable expectations you can have of free software are laid out in the licence, and reiterated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Four Freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.  If you come across a piece of free software that has bugs, you have the right to copy it, fix the bugs, and redistribute the modified version, because it's free software.  &lt;strong&gt;Everything&lt;/strong&gt; else is discretionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:04:37.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10656" CreationDate="2020-11-03T23:21:30.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the common workflow, issues are used to track the work that needs to be done on a given branch (usually &lt;code&gt;master&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt;, but not necessarily). Once the fix is committed, there's no more work to be done on that branch, and the issue should be closed to signify it. Large projects with more diligent maintainers may also tag the issue to signify what release it will be included in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the project uses a different issue tracker than GitHub issues, it may use two different statuses for these two actions - a &amp;quot;modified&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;merged&amp;quot; status for when the fix is committed to the relevant branch and an additional &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; status for when the release is performed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T23:21:30.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10691" CreationDate="2020-11-04T02:16:50.970" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say we are ready to give link and credits to another party's code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edits Based on comments:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Planning to give a link to download executable (hosted on a private server). If it has to be hosted on publicly downloadable link, that's also fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL software is an separate executable and will be part a commercial&#xA;solution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The open source software I am using is licensed under GPL v2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20909" LastEditorUserId="20909" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T02:58:28.127" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T02:58:28.127" Title="Are we obliged to host the code, if we distribute(share) build of an exact commit of already hosted(by another party) GPL code base?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9930" CreationDate="2020-11-04T13:23:25.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the options simplified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribution: Attribution is required for all six licenses. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution#Title.2C_Author.2C_Source.2C_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good attribution should include title, author, source, and license.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike: Derivatives must be under the same terms. For example, someone could license a CC BY work under all rights reserved. ShareAlike fixes this problem, so a CC BY-SA work can only be licensed under CC BY-SA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NonCommercial: Usage only for non-commercial purposes is allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;NoDerivatives: You cannot share derivative works. Answering your original question, excerpting is considered an adaption, and is prohibited by BY-ND and BY-NC-ND. Resizing an image or changing it's format, for example, is not considered a derivative work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need help choosing a Creative Commons license for your own project, I would recommend CC BY-SA in all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T13:28:43.973" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T13:28:43.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-05T08:47:09.613" Score="6" ViewCount="1414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use TinyMCE rich text editor in one of our project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are using angular warpper of TinyMCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will host the tinymce.min.js in our servers (not tinymce cloud). Exact steps mentioned at end for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is, as per the licensing do I need to show the branding &amp;quot;Powered by Tiny&amp;quot;? Like this &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z8cFZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z8cFZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking because it mentions that if you are using tiny cloud you must mention branding but I could not understand about self hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to mention is since it will be self hosted, we are not modifying the any of the tinymce's files, all the files will be delivered to browser using HTTPS call like &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com/tinymce/tinymce.min.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://example.com/tinymce/tinymce.min.js&lt;/a&gt; along with license comments. (we are not including tinyMCE's JS files in our build process and hence not minifying and not obfuscating its js files)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// installing&#xA;npm install --save @tinymce/tinymce-angular&#xA;npm install --save tinymce&#xA;// config&#xA; &amp;quot;assets&amp;quot;: [&#xA;   { &amp;quot;glob&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;**/*&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;input&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;node_modules/tinymce&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;output&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;/tinymce/&amp;quot; }&#xA; ]&#xA;&#xA;// in module&#xA;import { EditorModule, TINYMCE_SCRIPT_SRC } from '@tinymce/tinymce-angular';&#xA;/* ... */&#xA;  @NgModule({&#xA;    /* ... */&#xA;    imports: [&#xA;      EditorModule&#xA;    ],&#xA;    providers: [&#xA;      { provide: TINYMCE_SCRIPT_SRC, useValue: 'tinymce/tinymce.min.js' }&#xA;    ]&#xA;  })&#xA;// in html&#xA;&amp;lt;editor [init]={ branding: true/false, /* your other settings */ } &amp;gt;&amp;lt;/editor&amp;gt; // no apiKey=&amp;quot;your-api-key&amp;quot;&#xA;// no other steps&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20920" LastEditorUserId="20920" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T08:02:16.490" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T08:02:16.490" Title="Do I need to show branding for TinyMCE (self hosted, free usage license)?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|gnu|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10662" CreationDate="2020-11-05T10:45:51.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;, the licence under which you have this code, doesn't require any banners or particular forms of advertising.  Such requirements famously &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_(original_%22BSD_License%22)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make licences non-free&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you don't intend to modify this code, the LGPL, in brief, requires that you preserve existing copyright notices and copyright disclaimers, and doesn't require that you use any particular licence for code you write which uses it.  Your decision to exclude the LGPL code from your minifier is a good one.  And of course, IANAL/IANYL, so you may still wish to take professional advice before betting a business on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; in the light of the image you posted: if the library produces this banner itself, then although you're within your rights to edit the library code to remove it, at &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; point you have extra obligations, because you're now distributing a modified version of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt; apparently TinyMCE are interpreting LGPLv2.1 s6 as requiring you to incorporate branding as per their guidelines.  Firstly, s6 is engaged only if you distribute &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a work containing portions of the Library&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and it's not clear to me that you are doing that.   Secondly, even if you do enage s6, the only relevant requirement is that you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to do this in a form specifically prescribed by the authors, particularly not when &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/general-configuration-guide/attribution-requirements/#freeandopensourceusers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that form&lt;/a&gt; doesn't mention the LGPL at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of licences with clear advertising and linking clauses, and (assuming they are the sole rightsholders in the code) TinyMCE are perfectly free to use one of those.  If they want to require advertising in the way they seem to, they &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; use one of those, and accept that their software is non-free.  What they &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; do is try to read an advertising requirement into a respected free licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T07:18:46.090" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T07:18:46.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10669" CreationDate="2020-11-05T16:29:43.343" Score="14" ViewCount="3631" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, if I want to add a bunch of lines in VS code using a single command and say I'm able to build this feature, can I use this on my version of VS code without the community acceptance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20923" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-11-07T06:53:40.770" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T06:53:40.770" Title="Since some software is open source, can you add a feature you created and use it for your own personal use?" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|private-changes|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10664" CreationDate="2020-11-05T18:10:24.583" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The freedom to modify a piece of software is an essential open-source freedom covered by any open-source license, specifically the MIT License which &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;VSCode is licensed under&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words - you most certainly can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T18:10:24.583" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14085" CreationDate="2020-11-05T20:58:37.483" Score="7" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain a PyQt5 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/adamerose/pandasgui&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;project on GitHub&lt;/a&gt; under the MIT license but now I am wondering if I am risking getting in trouble by not making it GPL... &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4557/17025&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; makes me think that releasing my own code under MIT should be allowed because I have PyQt5 as a &lt;code&gt;pip&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;conda&lt;/code&gt; dependency and my project does not directly include or modify and GPL code it just has it as a dependency, but the 2 other answers in that thread make me unsure. All I have is a single LICENSE.txt in my project root saying it's MIT. Can anyone help clarify whether I am breaking GPL rules here? Another big PyQt based project released under MIT is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pyqtgraph&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17025" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:56:29.110" Title="Can PyQt5 projects use the MIT license?" Tags="|gpl|mit|gpl-3|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10747" CreationDate="2020-11-05T20:56:26.270" Score="1" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have two applications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Server-side application which is written by myself entirely and it communicates with a GPL software in various ways, i.e: HTTP REST API (preceisely it's Asterisk if it does matter).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Client-side application which is also written by myself entirely and it communicates only with my server-side application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have two situations and I want to know if I should distribute the source code of any of my applications (none, one of them or both) in each of those situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My server-side application is installed on my server and no one else can get binaries of it. Binaries of my client-side application are distributed to end users.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Binaries of my both applications are distributed to end users but my server-side application requires users to install the GPL software on their computer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20966" OwnerDisplayName="Jelony" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T07:43:56.077" Title="Does communicating with GPL software force me to distribute my source code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10664" CreationDate="2020-11-06T00:57:32.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do anything for your own personal use.  That includes making changes and additions to the open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20926" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T00:57:32.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10664" CreationDate="2020-11-06T09:39:38.187" Score="30" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;VSCode&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mureinik already pointed out that VSCode is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; license, which is a permissive license. To quote from it (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, &lt;strong&gt;including&#xA;without limitation the rights to&lt;/strong&gt; use, copy, &lt;strong&gt;modify&lt;/strong&gt;, merge, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More General&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are asking about open source software in general, I'll add a more general part to my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Open Source&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the elements of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; is the right to modify software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. Derived Works&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow&#xA;them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the&#xA;original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Free Software&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four essential freedoms required by the Free Software Definition also include the modification of software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code&#xA;is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a&#xA;chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a&#xA;precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license of a software prohibits you from making any modifications to it, then it is neither &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free nor open source&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T09:39:38.187" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-06T11:49:13.067" Score="4" ViewCount="584" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a dictionary is published under CC BY-NC-SA and one takes out a word list and publishes it after modifying it for some purpose without the definitions . Will CC BY-NC-SA still apply?  The use is commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T14:04:43.453" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T18:31:16.527" Title="Copyrightablity of word lists" Tags="|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10670" CreationDate="2020-11-06T12:20:05.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking a word out of a dictionary is like taking a music note out of a music work. Of course the license still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anything, it might prove the willful infringement, and that can bring triple damages with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T12:20:05.610" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10648" CreationDate="2020-11-06T12:24:46.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It depends&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, your question has two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do free licenses of third-party libraries affect the license of the resulting software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the effects of free licenses on software that is not distributed, but run on a server?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before answering those two questions however, it is important to note that there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/42/20376&quot;&gt;difference&lt;/a&gt; between permissive licenses and copyleft licenses. Since you mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;, my answer will focus on copyleft licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Libraries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use copyleft licensed libraries in your software, then your software &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1641/20376&quot;&gt;must&lt;/a&gt; be licensed the same way. Because this is not always desired, many libraries do not use the GPL, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; instead, which allows the use in proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Server-side software&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you never distribute your software, licensing is of little consequence. Running it on your server does not qualify as distribution. However, it is sometimes desired that software run on a server also needs to make its source code available, which is the exact &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reason&lt;/a&gt; why the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; was invented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20376" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T12:24:46.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T08:16:22.353" Score="-4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the licence of this dictionary file &lt;a href=&quot;https://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?revision=61569&amp;amp;view=markup&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/share/dict/words?revision=61569&amp;amp;view=markup&lt;/a&gt; . Is it also BSD or some else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-07T12:05:25.040" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T12:05:25.040" Title="Licence of this dictionary file" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10673" CreationDate="2020-11-07T08:57:22.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the note in the accompanying README file, the copyrights on the wordlist have expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyrights expire after a certain time, which is different for each country. For natural persons, copyrights typically expire some 50 to 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. For businesses and other legal entities, copyrights typically expire some 50 to 70 years after the publication of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the copyrights on a work expire, then the work comes into the public domain and can be used in just about any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T08:57:22.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T17:40:32.473" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have trouble understanding if a web api must be credited if it's under the MIT license. I'm technically only calling the API so I'm not modify the API code. It seems to my understanding that it is not required to credit the API. Is this understanding correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20944" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T17:40:32.473" Title="What does a web API entails if it's licensed under MIT? Do I have to credit the API if I use it in my app?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T19:06:39.357" Score="1" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;Youtube allows creation of auto-generated captions. What are they licensed as? Is it cc0 or can one use them outside the video or to provide a transcript to users after ADA compliance editing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16880" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-07T19:58:48.570" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T07:15:04.650" Title="Licence for youtube captions" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-08T18:02:28.610" Score="-2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seeing how most things Apache now have at least something to do with Confluence, it seems that they are getting very close together. Is Atlassian in the process of acquiring Apache foundation? I am primarily seeing this trend as regards to Apache web server and Kafka MQ that Atlassian is selling. Correct me if I am wrong, because seeing how Kafka is available through Confluence I am assuming that it is owned by Atlassian. I am very confused about these interrelations, so please bear with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, having heard that Microsoft is now a substantial donor to Apache foundation, I am getting impression that either Atlassian and Microsoft compete for the ownership of Apache, or they are one and the same. So, what is the skinny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20954" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T19:10:45.133" Title="Can anyone explain what is going on between Apache foundation and Atlassian?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10670" CreationDate="2020-11-08T18:31:16.527" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In jurisdictions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights&lt;/a&gt; (primarily the UK and EU):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly infringement, either of copyright or of the database right. Creative Commons 4.0 licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly include&lt;/a&gt; database rights, meaning that there is no problem with applying them to word lists and similar compilations of information, in jurisdictions that recognize database rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In jurisdictions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sweat of the brow&lt;/a&gt; copyright (primarily the UK):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very likely copyright infringement, assuming that some sort of &amp;quot;skill, labour, and judgment&amp;quot; was expended in assembling the list of words in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In jurisdictions with neither (primarily the US):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under US law, a list of purely factual information, with no original content, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cannot be copyrighted&lt;/a&gt;. In the linked case, the list at issue was a phonebook. It consisted of the names and phone numbers of all residents in a given area, in alphabetical order. The Supreme Court held that this was not copyrightable, because it contained no original work and was a purely mechanical list of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there may be originality in the selection, organization, or presentation of a list of facts. A typical dictionary does not include &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; word that anyone has ever uttered or written, but only those words which meet that dictionary's criteria for inclusion. The application of those criteria probably does count as a degree of originality sufficient for copyright to vest. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/499/340.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the aforementioned decision&lt;/a&gt; also says this (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This protection is subject to an important limitation. The mere fact that a work is copyrighted does not mean that every element of the work may be protected. Originality remains the sine qua non of copyright; accordingly, copyright protection may extend only to those components of a work that are original to the author. Patterson &amp;amp; Joyce 800-802; Ginsburg, Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information, 90 Colum.L.Rev. 1865, 1868, and n. 12 (1990) (hereinafter Ginsburg). Thus, if the compilation author clothes facts with an original collocation of words, he or she may be able to claim a copyright in this written expression. Others may copy the underlying facts from the publication, but not the precise words used to present them. In Harper &amp;amp; Row, for example, we explained that President Ford could not prevent others from copying bare historical facts from his autobiography, see 471 U.S. at 556-557, but that he could prevent others from copying his &amp;quot;subjective descriptions and portraits of public figures.&amp;quot; [499 U.S. 340, 349]   Id. at 563. Where the compilation author adds no written expression, but rather lets the facts speak for themselves, the expressive element is more elusive. The only conceivable expression is the manner in which the compiler has selected and arranged the facts. Thus, if the selection and arrangement are original, these elements of the work are eligible for copyright protection. See Patry, Copyright in Compilations of Facts (or Why the &amp;quot;White Pages&amp;quot; Are Not Copyrightable), 12 Com. &amp;amp; Law 37, 64 (Dec. 1990) (hereinafter Patry). No matter how original the format, however, the facts themselves do not become original through association. See Patterson &amp;amp; Joyce 776.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This inevitably means that the copyright in a factual compilation is thin. Notwithstanding a valid copyright, &lt;strong&gt;a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement.&lt;/strong&gt; As one commentator explains it: &amp;quot;[N]o matter how much original authorship the work displays, the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking. . . . [T]he very same facts and ideas may be divorced from the context imposed by the author, and restated or reshuffled by second comers, even if the author was the first to discover the facts or to propose the ideas.&amp;quot; Ginsburg 1868.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am uncertain how the boldfaced clause would apply to a dictionary or word list in particular. In general, it would seem to suggest that you could selectively pull from one or more word lists, and come up with your own original list of words, so long as it's not substantially the same list as someone else's. But it's difficult to say exactly how much your word list would need to differ from theirs. You may wish to consult a copyright attorney for more specific advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T18:31:16.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10678" CreationDate="2020-11-08T18:49:13.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit foundation. It has no owners, similar to how natural persons have no owners.&#xA;Instead, the foundation is controlled by a board that is elected by the foundation's members. A company could effectively take over a foundation by getting its employees elected into the board, but they would have to convince the members first – not particularly likely for such a lively foundation. Thus, fears about an imminent takeover are unfounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various companies sponsor the Apache foundation. For example, Atlassian contributes licenses for its Jira and Confluence products. Apache and Atlassian have something to do with each other in the sense that they use each other's software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache software is generally offered under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, which allows commercial use and reselling. If Atlassian offers its own products based on Kafka or Apache HTTPD, they are totally allowed to do that, just like anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache Kafka project is currently led by Jun Rao, who originally developed Kafka at LinkedIn and co-founded Confluent (not Confluence!). Confluent was founded by Kafka developers. This is not a case of corporate takeover of an open source project. This is more like the ideal open source story: that some developers build awesome open source software &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; are able to finance themselves by working on this software. For example, Confluent offers Kafka training and adds value-add software on top of Kafka. While close cooperation between a company and a foundation's open source project would raise eyebrows e.g. at GNU, it is perfectly normal in the more enterprise-friendly open source world around the Apache, Eclipse, or Linux foundations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T18:49:13.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10662" CreationDate="2020-11-09T20:11:05.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the documentation for the &lt;code&gt;branding&lt;/code&gt; option only mentions Cloud platform users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/configure/editor-appearance/#branding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/configure/editor-appearance/#branding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The “Powered by Tiny” product attribution is required for users on the Tiny Cloud Community Plan. Product attribution is optional for premium users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the following documentation page goes into more detail for self-hosted, open source users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/general-configuration-guide/attribution-requirements/#freeandopensourceusers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.tiny.cloud/docs/general-configuration-guide/attribution-requirements/#freeandopensourceusers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per clause 6 of the LGPL 2.1, users using TinyMCE under the LGPL are required to give prominent notice that TinyMCE is in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That pages goes into detail as to Tiny's specific attribution requirements and recommendations. I have also raised an issue with the Tiny Docs team to get parity and clarity between these two pages moving forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20961" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T20:11:05.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10662" CreationDate="2020-11-10T05:11:36.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While @MadHatter 's answer make sense (and should be accepted and I think is correct), @TinyLincoln is correctly reporting TinyMCE's interpretation of the LGPL.&#xA;I had a chat with TinyMCE's team meanwhile and their response is as following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is mandatory to show the branding when using the open source&#xA;version of Tiny and would require a commercial contract to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, this is true for community cloud as well as community self-hosted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Using it is free, it is that you will need to show branding (recommended way is to show in footer/statusbar of editor itself or anywhere else visible in page)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20920" LastEditorUserId="20920" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T08:00:11.820" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T08:00:11.820" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10687" CreationDate="2020-11-11T02:38:32.310" Score="23" ViewCount="6628" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain an open source numerical computing library.  I license my project under BSD-3.  Another developer has copied 90% of the source code to a new project with the same name, while changing the project to MIT license, with no reference to the original BSD-3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do reference my GitHub username in the README, but I am still not comfortable having my work copied without any of my copyright notices intact, and with a different license.  I know that BSD-3 is a permissive license, but two things stick out to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of my copyright notices are present in the new project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its    contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project lists me as a &amp;quot;collaborator&amp;quot;, when I do not endorse this new library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20972" LastEditorUserId="20983" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T20:24:01.503" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T20:24:01.503" Title="Can someone re-license my BSD-3-licensed project under the MIT license, remove my copyright notices, and list me as a &quot;collaborator&quot; without consent" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10685" CreationDate="2020-11-11T07:03:09.667" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD-3 license is a permissive license, but even permissive licenses have restrictions that must be observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By removing your copyrights and license, the person who copied your code has violated the BSD-3 license you used to distribute the code. You have all the right to demand that they reinstate your copyrights and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people don't understand how copyright works and perform infringing actions out of ignorance. Because of that, I would start with a friendly note to the other developer informing them that they are infringing your copyrights and that they need to restore your copyrights and license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the other developer does not respond favorably to a friendly note, you can take more formal legal steps, such as sending a Cease and Desist Letter, or sending a DMCA takedown notice to the hosting provider of the other's repository. As those are legal steps, you should consult a lawyer when taking them to ensure you get the legal mambo-jumbo correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T07:03:09.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10685" CreationDate="2020-11-11T07:21:14.937" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD&lt;/a&gt; licence requires (in clause 1) that your copyright notices be preserved, and that some licence text be reproduced, whenever your code is copied.  But it does not require that that licence text actually apply to the copy.  You can see the sort of language that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; require that, in copyright licences such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c; 3BSD doesn't have any such language.  I have written about relicensing at more length &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, but when looked at from a list-of-conditions-on-the-copyright-grant standpoint, MIT and 3BSD are pretty much identical, so the change here is nearly zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still not comfortable having my work copied without any of my copyright notices intact&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right to object to this.  The people who've decided to remove your copyright notices are simply wrong to do so, your &amp;quot;collaborator credit&amp;quot; notwithstanding.  You intimate that your work might have been published on github, which complicates matters very slightly, but if people have forked your 3BSD-licenced code, removed your copyright notices, and are distributing the result to all and sundry, &lt;strong&gt;they are violating your copyright&lt;/strong&gt;.  The usual remedy is a cease-and-desist letter, for which you will need to instruct a lawyer.  As you are the rightsholder, the possibility of a DMCA take down notice to github applies, but that will still work better (if it works at all) when you've got a lawyer involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and with a different license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you didn't release your code under a licence that forbade that, and since the licence they've used is pretty much identical to the one you chose, I don't see this as a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project lists me as a &amp;quot;collaborator&amp;quot;, when I do not endorse this new library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;moral rights&lt;/a&gt; jurisdictions, this is generally wrong, and understood to be so.  In other jurisdictions, I am a lot less clear that it is an issue; if you could show clear personal damage as a result of this &amp;quot;credit&amp;quot; a libel action might be a possibility, but it would be very expensive and uncertain.  I would focus on the copyright notice issue, which seems to me a very clear-cut wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T08:29:30.350" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T08:29:30.350" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-11T12:23:39.047" Score="4" ViewCount="1146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to develop an application which uses a 3rd party framework under Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, I would like to comply with the license and give attribution to the authors via LICENSE/NOTICE files, but im not sure how to do it (edit: and &lt;strong&gt;whether it's required at all&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 License states that a copy of it must be provided every time the work (be it source code or binaries) is distributed. I guess it applies when my dependencies are handled by the package manager (NuGet in this case, it's a .NET Core app), but there's no &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt; place to put the LICENSE file, since there's no actual &lt;em&gt;project&lt;/em&gt; in my directory tree. And since there's no &lt;em&gt;logical&lt;/em&gt; place to put it, I wanted to ask &lt;strong&gt;how it's usually done in similar cases?&lt;/strong&gt; Do I just throw a bunch of LICENSE files (one per external library) into my directory tree and that's it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I've read that NOTICE file is a place where I could state which 3rd party libraries are used in the project, but from what I understand it's not mandatory, that's why I focused my question on the license text (i.e. LICENSE file) specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: After giving it some more thought, I came to the conclusion that listing a package in the package manager's listing file is not equivalent to shipping it with the project. That makes it even less clear for me in terms of including the license text / not including anything at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20977" LastEditorUserId="20977" LastEditDate="2021-08-22T11:49:09.520" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T11:49:09.520" Title="Apache 2.0: What licensing-related steps do I have to make when using software via package manager?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-11T15:09:28.510" Score="1" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back I made a game and uploaded it's project files on Github and added a MIT license to it. So I was just looking at it and realized that the font I am using in it had some sort of license file included in it when I first downloaded it. And in my github project, I forgot to add that license file. Nevertheless, I went to Google fonts from where I downloaded the font. It was this one -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it has an Apache License, Version 2.0. But the thing is that in the license file there is this field where I don't understand what it says. It seems like it is asking us to write our name, their name or what. It is very confusing. Also it asks for a notice, which I kinda get it. But still I am very confused how to add it to my project. Because I don't want to get into any legal trouble.&#xA;So can I just put the license text file into the folder of the fonts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is in the license, nowhere it says it is of Google or Open Sans. That's the thing. The license included with the fonts, looks more of like a blueprint to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And talking of that, I also realized that since I made this game using Godot Engine which is under MIT license. So I assume I have to put the license of that as well? So how will I add it??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20980" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T15:09:28.510" Title="Github, how to add license of fonts I am using in a project?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10697" CreationDate="2020-11-11T19:23:19.990" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I started to develop a 'Sudoku Solver' using Python. Of course, there are many Sudoku solvers already available as open source projects, but I did not want to use any of those, because I was looking for a  '&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;just for fun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;' project. Therefore, I start the development of a 'Sudoku Solver', just to see how it goes.&#xA;I needed some data to test my program, therefore I searched the web, and I found plenty of Sudoku games, publicly available, free to solve, but from the copyright point of view '&lt;strong&gt;All Rights Reserved&lt;/strong&gt;'. I also used some free Sudoku games available on Android.&#xA;The development went pretty well, and I successfully found solutions for both classic Sudoku and for a plethora of Sudoku variants, for which I could not found existing open source solvers available. Now I am considering to share the code for the Sudoku solvers as open source software, most likely using a permissive license like MIT, which means the code can be used for commercial purposes.  The Sudoku games (All Rights Reserved) I used during development as test data, from a multitude of public sources and authors, will not be incorporated into the public project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doing so, am I infringing the copyright of Sudoku authors somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8417" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T10:08:29.277" Title="Can I privately use copyrighted materials as test data for public projects?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10659" CreationDate="2020-11-11T20:59:18.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 is less nuanced than GPLv3 in terms of source code availability.  It prescribes in s3 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program [...] in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although you're only distributing a compiled copy of somebody else's source, you are still obligated to distribute source as well, either alongside the binary, or on demand.  It'll probably be simplest if you put a link to the source alongside the download link for the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say also that the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPL software is [a] separate executable and will be part [of] a commercial solution&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  I presume you're aware of the degree of separation required between the GPL software, and your software which invokes it, to avoid your software becoming a derivative work of the GPL code, and thus subject to a requirement to distribute under GPL.  But if not, you should acquaint yourselves with the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T20:59:18.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10644" CreationDate="2020-11-12T00:35:04.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to amon's very good answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important trick for vendor is to force whatever the competitors are making into a commodity (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joel Spolsky called that&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;commoditize a products’ complements&amp;quot;). If your competitor's product is a commodity, the buy decision is made mostly  on a price. And free is unbeatable price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what Microsoft did with PC: make PC a commodity to run Windows software like Office (and in this way, destroying IBM PC business). And this is why IBM in return invested so much in Linux: to make server OS a commodity, and to make profit on services on top of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Google makes the browser a commodity, provided for free, it can focus on harvesting personal info to sell more ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="883" LastEditorUserId="4657" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T20:32:31.697" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T20:32:31.697" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10685" CreationDate="2020-11-12T03:02:06.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question title [1] refers only to the relicensing issue. It does not refer to the other issues (copyright notices and endorsement), which have been addressed in the other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the relicensing issue is given such prominence in the title, here is an answer dedicated to this issue. The question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am still not comfortable having my work copied … with a different license. I know that BSD-3 is a permissive license, but …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s tempting to respond:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But nothing. That’s what “permissive” means. Other developers are allowed to use a different licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This glosses over a subtle point. Other developers are allowed to apply a different licence to their project as a whole, but your licence still applies to your contributions within that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does the other developer you refer to acknowledge the point I made above? Let’s check the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of my copyright notices are present in the new project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest that the other developer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; including the list of conditions and disclaimer, just not the copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the answer to the relicensing question is: &lt;strong&gt;Yes, of course they can relicense your project under a different licence.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I am referring to the title prior to my suggested edit, which as not been accepted at the time I posted this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T03:02:06.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T03:32:45.493" Score="7" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;Moved from the discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10687/20982&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, which makes the following claim about BSD licences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3BSD licence requires (in clause 1) that your copyright notices be preserved, and that some licence text be reproduced, whenever your code is copied. But it does not require that that licence text actually apply to the copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to me that seems very unlikely to be true, for the following reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By requiring the preservation of the specific licensing terms, without explicitly saying &amp;quot;those terms are to be included as a reference to the original author's licence only, but should not be taken as binding&amp;quot;, it seems fairly clear that the BSD asserts the same licence applies to copies, with or without modification. A licence notice's language specifically asserts that a work is covered by the given licence. That is a face value reading of the notice's language. Requiring that copies carry the same language without saying it isn't binding necessarily asserts the copies are covered by the same terms, set forth by that language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it were true that copies don't need to be covered by the same licence, then the notice requirement would be trivially sidestepped by simply making a verbatim copy, then stating that it was in fact relicensed under a different license that does not carry the same requirement. Since BSD explicitly does not distinguish between copies &amp;quot;with or without modification&amp;quot;, that would be perfectly within the rights given. As it's unlikely that such a reading was intended, I think better evidence is needed to support this claim.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that in practice, when BSD-covered derived work is incorporated into code under a different licence, it isn't so much that BSD stops applying to it, as it becomes embedded in the other work, and BSD does not prohibit adding further restrictions and terms (licensing and otherwise) to the resulting work, so long as its requirement of copyright and licence notice is satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20982" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T08:45:08.987" Title="Does the BSD licence implicitly apply to derived work?" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T09:31:04.157" Score="-1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say I want to give users the rights given by MIT license but I want to resrtict illegal use and translation to any other language for example. There can be two ways to do it :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modify MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide an EULA with the MIT license.&#xA;Which one is better?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20988" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T14:10:48.090" Title="Best way to add modifications over a pre-existing license" Tags="|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T09:42:56.210" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written code in a project and now we want to publish it and are okay with everyone using it to their liking (e.g. research, companys as a tool in their daily business (&amp;quot;commercially&amp;quot;), ...). However, we do not want anyone to sell the code as is and if someone publishes it on their servers or something, they should use the same license as we did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have done some research and reading but I'm no native speaker so sometimes it's difficult for me to understand what the license covers. For now it seems like GPL is what I'm looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance and best wishes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;awake&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20989" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:21:33.210" Title="Question regarding selling code under GPL(?)" Tags="|gpl|commercial|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10690" CreationDate="2020-11-12T10:08:29.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are not distributing the Sudoku games that you used as test data, then you are not infringing on the copyrights of their authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you have written a generic Sudoku solver, then your solver is not a derived work of the games you used to test it. That means that your solver cannot infringe upon the copyrights of those game's authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of infringing copyrights is distributing a work without being authorized to do so and that could be the case if you include those &amp;quot;All Rights Reserved&amp;quot; games in your distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T10:08:29.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T10:18:46.310" Score="-1" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use an library called Toemsel.Network which makes networking job more easier, but its licensed under lgpl v3 which says make your source code open. I use dynamic linking for using library. Downloading package on nuget.&#xA;Can i bypass lgpl problem by downloading dll of library from external site on setup program and automatically place to game folder ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20991" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:05:08.923" Title="Can i use an lgpl v3 licensed library in disclosed source code game project" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10694" CreationDate="2020-11-12T10:56:50.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 3BSD licence requires (in clause 1) that your copyright notices be preserved, and that some licence text be reproduced, whenever your code is copied. But it does not require that that licence text actually apply to the copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this quote from @MadHatter is subtly wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the 3BSD license is a permissive license that allows a recipient to redistribute a (derived) work under a license that contains additional requirements and/or restrictions on the code. But that is, as far as I can tell, not an actual re-licensing of the BSD code and the 3BSD license would still be applicable to that code, in addition to the additional requirements/constraints imposed by the other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefor, it is more correct to say that &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; licenses apply to the code, where redistribution has to comply with the requirements from both licenses. This is different from the code being dual-licensed, where the recipient can choose which license terms to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as the 3BSD license does not grant the right to sub-license the code, the additional requirements can only be applied in the form of a &amp;quot;secondary license&amp;quot;, where that license is used for either some other part of the application or for a modification to the code and the license includes requirements that are claimed to apply to the entire codebase. This means that the secondary license is indirectly applicable to the BSD code and if you can successfully separate the two, then the additional requirements also no longer apply to the BSD code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T10:56:50.797" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10698" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:05:08.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license requires that the library and modifications to the library are made public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you dynamically link to the library, then your game can remain closed source, even if you distribute the library in the same package. You just have to make sure that users of your game can replace the Toemsel.Network library with a different, compatible, version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:05:08.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10696" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:21:33.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if someone publishes it on their servers or something, they should use the same license as we did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you allow modifications, then you need a copyleft license to achieve that goal. The GPL or AGPL licenses would be a good possibility. The AGPL license should be considered if it is possible to use your software in a SaaS offering and you want to keep it open-source also in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also opt for a closed-source license that does not allow modification nor sub-licensing. Then others can only distribute the software as-is and under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we do not want anyone to sell the code as is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement is not compatible with open-source licenses, because open-source licenses are not allowed to exclude commercial usage of the code, which includes selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, copyleft licenses like the GPL are not useful for building a business case on selling individual copies of the software. As recipients of GPL software also get the right to redistribute, your first buyer can also be your first competitor who can easily ask a lower price that you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, even though the GPL does not forbid selling the software, it is often used to discourage such practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:21:33.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T13:30:00.097" Score="3" ViewCount="2572" Body="&lt;p&gt;As MongoDB introduced their own &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq#consistency&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;server-side-public-license  model&lt;/a&gt; for community version I wonder in which use cases community version is allowed to be used in production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different discussions on the net and mongodb official page shows differences between different versions (community vs enterprise), but what I miss is clear statement for the simple use case of community version beside trying it and playing with it locally for the learning purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can community version of the 4.x MongoDB be used in production at all? &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/a/42993642/304270&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are interpretations that answer to this question is negative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; be used in production and typical simplified setup of application with database might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;FrontEnd -&amp;gt; BackEnd -&amp;gt; Database&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My simplified understanding of the new license is following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I expose MongoDB server to customers directly, I would need to publish source code of whole setup.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I use MongoDB in custom made docker image (with my homebrew backup/dump solution), in FE-&amp;gt;BE-MongoDB setup, in the cloud &amp;amp; production environment and my customers are consuming FE, that doesn't oblige me to publish whole source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct or I missed something important? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20992" LastEditorUserId="20992" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T14:11:25.133" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T14:53:56.193" Title="MongoDB community license usage" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10695" CreationDate="2020-11-12T14:10:48.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license gives recipients of the software unrestricted rights to make modifications. That makes it a contradictory statement that you want to give users &amp;quot;the rights given by MIT license&amp;quot; and at the same time that you want to restrict certain modifications, like translation to another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your desires are contradictory, they cannot be fulfilled at the same time. Depending on what you value higher, you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can go with the unmodified MIT license, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hire a lawyer to draft a license for you that has the restrictions you desire and will hold up in court. Such a license will most likely not be accepted as an open-source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two options you mention are most likely not going to work in the way you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A copyright license is a legal document and it is surprisingly hard to get it to say exactly what you want without being overly broad. For example, compiling is a mechanical translation of the source code into machine code. That is a translation from one language to another, but is that also a translation you want to forbid? And how about a mechanical translation between source code languages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As an EULA is based on contract law and a copyright license on copyright law, those two can interact in a very surprising manner. For example, I can decline the EULA and then use the software under the permissions given to me by the MIT copyright license without being bound by the restrictions contained in the EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A contract requires the explicit agreement from both parties to be enforceable, but a copyright license like the MIT license is a one-sided offer of additional rights from the rights-holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T14:10:48.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10703" CreationDate="2020-11-12T14:53:56.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the SSPL, based on the license text and the MongoDB FAQ, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you use MongoDB, or a modified version of it, in a website/web-application that does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; off data-storage services to its users, then the SSPL license works the same as the GPL license. You can use the community edition without problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; offer data-storage services using the MongoDB Community Edition in your backend, then the SSPL requires that you offer all the source code for all the software needed to build a duplicate service and that source code must be offered under the SSPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any of the code you must offer this way is under an SSPL-incompatible license, which includes the (L|A)GPL licenses and most proprietary licenses, then it is not possible to fulfill this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it means that the differentiating factor for your service can only lie in the hardware you have to run it on, because every potential competitor is entitled to a copy of your full-featured software to jump-start their business with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I expose MongoDB server to customers directly, I would need to publish source code of whole setup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you expose MongoDB directly to customers, either you are offering a competing service to the cloud offerings from MongoDB itself, or you have essentially created a front-end only web-app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, you must definitely publish the source code for the whole setup under the SSPL license (which might not be allowed by the licenses of the tools you used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, you are probably giving your business secrets away to the your users, but if you use that MongoDB database just to store the inventory of your webshop for example, then that does not trigger the provisions in s13 of the SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I use MongoDB in custom made docker image (with my homebrew backup/dump solution), in FE-&amp;gt;BE-MongoDB setup, in the cloud &amp;amp; production environment and my customers are consuming FE, that doesn't oblige me to publish whole source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you are offering your users through that FE. If you are, for example, offering a backup service for their files, then I can see that such a service might trigger clause s13 of the SSPL and require you to publish the source code for the whole setup, including your home-brew backup/dump solution and possibly even docker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T14:53:56.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10741" CreationDate="2020-11-12T21:54:19.323" Score="0" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a license to use in a software project that is developed by two parties. The MIT license looks like a good choice because both parties have full rights and few restrictions. Both parties could agree on not publishing the software without mutual consent. How could this mutual consent be formalized? Must the license be rewritten or is an additional contract for the restriction to non-public sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20997" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T02:20:43.567" Title="MIT license for non-public use between two parties?" Tags="|mit|commercial|law|license|private-changes|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10709" CreationDate="2020-11-13T07:46:36.023" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on an open source video game and would like to mix licenses within the core project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License all &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; I write as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License all original &lt;em&gt;assets&lt;/em&gt; I make (space ships, character models, textures, etc) as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use &lt;em&gt;third party assets&lt;/em&gt; from providers such &lt;a href=&quot;https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/faq/mixamo-faq.html#accordion-container-1-trigger-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mixamo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthdata.nasa.gov/collaborate/open-data-services-and-software/esds-open-source-policy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NASA&lt;/a&gt; within the core project. I will modify these third-party assets and redistribute them along with this project where allowed by their own respective licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include explicit notices for everything that is not AGPLv3 licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can tell AGPLv3 is quite restrictive - does it allow the above combination? The dev builds will exclude&#xA;almost all of these assets or have simple placeholders, but the production builds will include all assets as the full product offering&#xA;(albeit free of charge), and be distributed through various platforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does AGPLv3 allow this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21000" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T08:16:13.893" Title="Can I mix GPL code with assets modified under different licenses?" Tags="|licensing|mit|agpl-3.0|exceptions|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10708" CreationDate="2020-11-13T08:16:13.893" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not allow this for what copyright law considers to be a single work. If any part of the work is licensed under the AGPL, then the AGPL requires that the entire work is distributed under the terms of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not a given that a game engine and the assets of the game are a single work under copyright law. If the game can function equally well with completely different assets, like the simple placeholders you intend to use for dev builds, then copyright law will likely view the game engine and the assets as different, independent, works that happen to be bundled together in your full product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Independent works can have completely independent license terms, so what you propose seems to be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to look out for: If you don't write &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the source code yourself, but you use third-party libraries, then you need to make sure that those libraries have a (A)GPL-compatible license. It is not a completely settled debate if using a third-party library always creates a single derived work that includes both your code and the code from the library, but the safe option is to assume it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T08:16:13.893" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-14T07:49:05.630" Score="5" ViewCount="1297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that some, if not all, widely used electronic voting systems (e.g., Diebold, Sequioa, Dominion) use closed-source software. If so, how can the public be sure that a closed system isn't rigged? What is the justification for not opening their source code? Doesn't the public have a right to transparency? And how can a method of simply counting votes possibly be considered proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21019" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T22:55:28.050" Title="Do major electronic voting systems use closed-source software?" Tags="|law|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10711" CreationDate="2020-11-14T08:56:21.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of moving parts here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the justification for not opening their source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more of a question to the customers (in this case - the government) than the manufacturers. I don't know any specific details about any voting system, but generally speaking, if the government purchases anything (in this case - a voting system) from a private vendor, it should publish a request for tender with the specifications of the system it wishes to purchase. If publishing the system's code as open source isn't listed there as a requirement, the vendor is free to use whatever proprietary license it wishes. In that case, the question becomes why a specific vendor chose a specific closed license for their software, which will boil down to their business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how can a method of simply counting votes possibly be considered proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A voting machine does much more than applying a &lt;code&gt;++&lt;/code&gt; operator to a variable - you need to develop an (administrative) way to input the candidates on the ballot, a way to record votes, handle fault tolerance (e.g., what if the power is lost?), error handling (what if someone attempts to vote for two candidates on the same ballot?), accessible interfaces (can the machine be handled by a visually impaired individual), fraud detection algorithms (hopefully!), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T08:56:21.853" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-14T20:45:53.390" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use code of Cholesky decomposition as shown &lt;a href=&quot;https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Cholesky_decomposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page licenses all its code under GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that to appropriately include it into something I'm building I need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Include license text,&#xA;Include license header in appropriate file that containing this Cholesky decomposition.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is who do I list as an author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright header starts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright  YEAR  YOUR NAME.&#xA;&#xA;Permission is [...].&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page is a wiki-style collection of multiple collaborations. This specific page (page section) was written by many people on many different dates. Clearly I need to specify who has (had?) the copyright as highlighted by this sentence in the license text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way&#xA;to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible&#xA;for modifications made by others.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21024" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T20:45:53.390" Title="Wiki under GNU Free Documentation License - who is the author?" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-13T12:50:48.097" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a modular text extraction framework (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dankito/TextExtraction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/dankito/TextExtraction&lt;/a&gt;) that I like to put under the permissive Apache License 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the separate modules is using latest iText version which is licensed under AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I have put that module under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is now, do I also have to put the UI module under AGPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it links the AGPL module statically (like with Maven or Gradle)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it links the AGPL module dynamically? (You can add it as plug-in at runtime, no compile time dependencies to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21087" OwnerDisplayName="dankito" LastEditorUserId="7343" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T09:28:24.087" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T09:28:24.087" Title="Using (A)GPL library in Apache License 2 licensed application" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10711" CreationDate="2020-11-14T22:35:09.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some security chips, you need to sign an NDA just to get the datasheet. Drivers you only get once you send the vendor your own public key for encryption. Just those NDAs might stop a company from publishing the source code - if that source would inadvertedly disclose details under an NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17946" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T22:35:09.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10676" CreationDate="2020-11-15T13:39:12.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;They use the same license as the video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T13:39:12.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10676" CreationDate="2020-11-16T07:15:04.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If these generated captions are mechanically created from (the audio track of) a video, then YouTube cannot claim any copyrights on those captions and therefor also not impose any copyright license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean the captions are free of copyright, but their copyrights are fully owned by the copyright holders of the video (or possibly the copyright holders of the audio track).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law is intended to protect the human creativity that goes into creating something. As a purely mechanical transformation does not involve any human creativity (in &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; the transformation), such transformations are generally excluded for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T07:15:04.650" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10722" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-16T11:03:59.253" Score="15" ViewCount="3396" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have written a proprietary program called MyProprietaryTool. The code has clear licenses on top of each file stating that it is proprietary code. (It's Python, so the code is what will be distributed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in one of the files I import a GPLv2 licensed package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 is clear about this: I have to release the whole program as GPLv2 if I want to distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that if I don't, I am subject to lawsuits because I violated the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... what rights does the receiver of my code have? All files have a header that states that it's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; GPL and forbids redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The receiver can sue me to release the code under GPL, or report me to the FSF so they can sue me and ask for damages. But the code remains proprietary (even though what I did was illegal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the above, but the receiver also has the right to redistribute my code because since I use GPL protected code, all of my code also becomes GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's all about semantics here: what does it mean &amp;quot;if you include GPL protected code, your code also becomes GPL licensed&amp;quot;? Does it mean that you are legally obliged to release all your code as GPL? Or does it mean that all your code becomes GPL without taking any action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes that sentence is also worded differently. For example here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9516/21035&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9516/21035&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;If your code works with the GPL program, then the whole program must be released under GPL&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases that means pretty much the same, but there is a slight semantic difference, which I think can have big implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who can shed some light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21035" LastEditorUserId="21035" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T08:34:42.197" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T08:34:42.197" Title="If you distribute GPL-code as non-GPL, can the receiver redistribute it as GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|law|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-16T11:31:25.650" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;All non-source-code and/or source-code &lt;em&gt;public content licenses&lt;/em&gt; I have came across are free or open source (FOSS) which reduces the effect of &amp;quot;copyright&amp;quot; to minimum (although not vanish copyright);&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples for such &lt;em&gt;public content licenses&lt;/em&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Public domain licenses&lt;/em&gt; (FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Creative Commons licenses&lt;/em&gt; (possibly FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;GNU General Public License&lt;/em&gt; (FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I know that there are &lt;em&gt;private content licenses&lt;/em&gt; which are not FOSS, I wonder what about public ones;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Do public content licenses which are not FOSS (which increases the effect of &amp;quot;copyright&amp;quot; to maximum) exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21036" LastEditorUserId="21038" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T08:53:33.123" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T08:53:33.123" Title="Do public content licenses which are not FOSS exist?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2020-11-16T13:25:21.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... what rights does the receiver of my code have? All files have a header that states that it's &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; GPL and forbids redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The receiver can sue me to release the code under GPL, or report me to the GNU foundation so they can sue me and ask for damages. But the code remains proprietary (even though what I did was illegal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the above, but the receiver also has the right to redistribute my code because since I use GPL protected code, all of my code also becomes GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the GNU foundation is a copyright holder of the GPL code, or you replace &amp;quot;GNU foundation&amp;quot; with the actual copyright holder of the GPL code, both scenarios are possible and it depends on the jurisdiction where the case is tried which one is more likely to happen. A third outcome of such a trial could be that in the jurisdiction in question, the receiver has no standing to sue over the GPL violation and the case gets dismissed for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the likely outcome in most jurisdictions is that you will be ordered to stop distributing the infringing code, possibly in addition to having to pay damages. But I vaguely recall that a court in Germany already ruled once that the recipients of the infringing code actually received it under the GPL license and were allowed to exercise all freedoms that come with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that your code does not automatically become licensed under the GPL. That would only happen as a result from a court order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T06:44:38.397" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T06:44:38.397" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-16T14:52:45.203" Score="1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any publicly-addressed content license which is not just a mere custom legal notice is a &lt;em&gt;public content license&lt;/em&gt; because it was developed by one entity for licensing generally &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; content by generally &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public content licenses can be, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public domain licenses (FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons licenses (Possibly FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU General Public Licenses (FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Digital Right Management license (non FOSS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because every license is eventually a piece of content; I assume it also needs a license; using a license to license itself would lead to circular logic - is that a problem in the content licensing world? If so, one solution is to ship any public license with just a mere custom legal notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21038" LastEditorUserId="21038" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T15:38:50.413" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T14:53:29.697" Title="Can a license license itself?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10723" CreationDate="2020-11-16T18:58:38.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there do exist licenses that broadly endeavor to make a work freely available (and often modifiable and redistributable, too) but are not FOSS licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples, see the &amp;quot;Nonfree Software Licenses&amp;quot; section on the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Various Licenses and Comments about Them&lt;/a&gt; page, many of which are obviously intended to grant a high degree of freedom but are nevertheless not FOSS for one reason or another. The page usually explains what particular point(s) cause each license to be nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:58:38.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2020-11-16T20:06:33.243" Score="16" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 is clear about this: I have to release the whole program as&#xA;GPLv2 if I want to distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be the FSF's position, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that if I don't, I am subject to lawsuits because I&#xA;violated the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; subject to lawsuits.  In this particular case, however, there is a reasonably high risk that a court would find that you had indeed infringed the copyright of the owners of the GPL module, and a very low likelihood that such a suit would be thrown out early as frivolous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... what rights does the receiver of my code have? All files&#xA;have a header that states that it's not GPL and forbids&#xA;redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver has only the rights in your proprietary code that you have licensed to them, or that they have independent of your distribution of the software.  They cannot compel you to distribute your code under a different license or to distribute the source of the GPL module.  They &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; do not have the right to redistribute your code under different terms than your agreement with them grants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can probably obtain the source of the GPL module from elsewhere, under GPL terms, in which case they would be at liberty to redistribute that module under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can take a wide variety of measures to try to persuade you to relicense your code or do anything else, really.  That you have violated the rights of the owner of the GPL code gives others some leverage over you, but whether it gives anyone other than the module owner standing to &lt;em&gt;sue&lt;/em&gt; you over that violation depends on the jurisdiction.  It would not do under U.S. copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The receiver can sue me to release the code under GPL, or report me to the GNU foundation so they can sue me and ask for damages. But&#xA;the code remains proprietary (even though what I did was illegal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code remains proprietary.  The receiver might report you to the FSF, but unless the FSF owns the module, they are in no better position than the receiver with respect to whether they can sue you themselves.  Their position might even be worse, as you did not distribute your program to them.  They might support the owner in suing you, however.  It is possible that a settlement or judgement in such a lawsuit might result in you losing some or all of your rights in the proprietary code or being compelled (by the court) to license it under GPL-compatible terms, but that by no means certain even in the event that you lose.  An injunction against distributing your program and / or an award of monetary damages seems more likely to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the above, but the receiver also has the right to redistribute my code because since I use GPL protected code, all of my&#xA;code also becomes GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your code does not automatically become subject to the GPL just because it is a derivative of GPL software.  Not even if you distribute it, and absolutely not if you do not distribute it.  The GPL is a copyright license; it does not have that kind of effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9078" LastEditorUserId="9078" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T20:25:50.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T20:25:50.913" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2020-11-16T21:13:04.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a problem for mathematicians, not for lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first problem is that you assume all content needs a license. That's directly denying the Public Domain, or any reason that copyright may not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if certain content would need a license in order to be copied, that doesn't mean it needs a license. The consequence is simply that the content can only be copied by its author, as the author doesn't need a license. This is actually fairly common; a painting typically does not need a license. The normal use is to hang the painting on the wall, and you can do that without a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even if a particular work &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; have a license, the details of that license may be private to the licencor and licensees. So you can hardly ever assume the absence of a license, even when nothing is publicly known about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a type-theoretical note, FOSS is Free and Open Source &lt;strong&gt;Software&lt;/strong&gt;. Since contracts are not software, they're by definition not FOSS either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T21:13:04.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2020-11-16T22:12:03.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that this turns up anywhere, and licences (being not software) don't need a FOSS licence. However,&#xA;I don't think it would be a problem, and here is why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does not stop you from reading a document, that you have, or from running a program that you have. It only stops you from making copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore you can read the licence.&#xA;You can then use your now freedom to make copies. So long as you follow the rules set out in the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T22:12:03.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2020-11-17T00:21:00.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However... what rights does the receiver of my code have? All files have a header that states that it's not GPL and forbids redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver has the rights to each protected element in the code that you distribute that the author (or rights holders) of that element chose to offer it under. You cannot license any element you do not hold the rights to, so elements offered only under the GPL are necessarily licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver can sue me to release the code under GPL, or report me to the GNU foundation so they can sue me and ask for damages. But the code remains proprietary (even though what I did was illegal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what would happen under US law. Since you did not license your code under the GPL, it is not licensed under the GPL. You infringed someone else's copyright, and &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; can sue you. But it's extremely unlikely that compulsory licensing would be the remedy a court would order. (But it's not impossible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above, but the receiver also has the right to redistribute my code because since I use GPL protected code, all of my code also becomes GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver does not have the right to redistribute your code because nobody with the authority to license your code granted them any license to redistribute it. Theoretically, a court could order you to license your code under the GPL as a remedy for your GPL violation, but that's very unlikely under US law. (Again, not impossible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T00:21:00.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10734" CreationDate="2020-11-17T00:26:44.563" Score="17" ViewCount="35735" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been using Firefox for a while now and I am quite satisfied by it. I have always heard that it is open source, and I recently tried looking on GitHub to see if there was some sort of repo with the source in it, however, I wasn't able to find such a thing. Is the Firefox source code available to view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21042" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T14:12:29.877" LastActivityDate="2024-03-24T11:22:03.243" Title="Is Firefox really open sourced?" Tags="|github|floss|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10722" CreationDate="2020-11-17T01:00:27.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a number of years since I looked at GPL licensing, but the last time I did, we all sat down with our attorney and asked about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we came up with (in his opinion, which has NOT been tried in a competent court) is that all of the unassociated proprietary code was protectable and ours. We could not claim any form of protection on the GPL licensed code. Period. He felt confident that Gnu trying to challenge that all of our code had to be GPL could be defeated in court - so long as we did NOT claim any aspect of their code as being proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where there was a grey area was HOW we were using the GPL code. Given that the GPL code is represented by some function f(gpl), then all software that was f(x) could be clearly protected as proprietary. It's the code that's f(y,gpl) that's &lt;em&gt;really, really hard to protect,&lt;/em&gt; because &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; depends on &amp;quot;gpl.&amp;quot;  In other words, he wasn't sure if f(y,gpl) couldn't be clipped and used by anyone freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end (before the company was sold to someone bigger), what we did was remove all GPL dependencies so that there was no argument to be made. It is, unfortunately, the one and only guaranteed solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BTW, you are not actually asking about a programming feature. You're asking a legal question. I am NOT an attorney. I am only relating my own personal experience with a similar situation. Unless a respondent specifically identifies themselves as an attorney, you should NOT arbitrarily rely on their advice. You should hire an attorney with GPL experience. As my retired-attorney father has said repeatedly, anyone can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether or not they win is often irrelevant as you'll be drained of every penny you have fighting the suit. All the love in the world, but you've been warned.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T01:00:27.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2020-11-17T01:09:26.190" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, this is a pretty good question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU may or may not consider its license to be licensed by its own license (yes, that's circular, and it can give you a headache), the more common problem is &lt;em&gt;copyright.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The originator of the license (or terms of use, or any other form of contract explicit or implicit) has automatic copyright protection for their written licenses. In other words, you don't have the right to simply copy-and-paste a convenient chunk of license (or an entire license) for your own commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21043" LastEditorUserId="21043" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T14:24:38.383" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T14:24:38.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10731" CreationDate="2020-11-17T08:36:50.420" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firefox is open source. It isn't hosted on GitHub, though, or even managed in Git - it's managed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mercurial-scm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mercurial&lt;/a&gt; and self-hosted at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T08:36:50.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10694" CreationDate="2020-11-17T08:45:08.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's a semantic issue here, which may or may not mask a legal one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you make content available to me subject to the conditions of the unmodified &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD licence&lt;/a&gt;, then I may avail myself of most copyright-controlled rights (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  In return, I have two obligations (the third, to retain from claiming the original author endorses my work, is a requirement that applies regardless of licence):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must obey those requirements to avail myself of the specified rights.  Further, I cannot give others rights I do not myself have, so when I modify the work and redistribute it, I may not fail to place those obligations on the recipient(s).  I may, however, add further obligations if I so choose, as I have written &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;).  Thus, I may convey the code to you on the conditions shown above, plus the conditions that you give me a thousand pounds and agree never to give a copy to anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semantic issue is whether you would describe such code as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;being conveyed under the 3BSD licence&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  &lt;strong&gt;If you wouldn't&lt;/strong&gt;, as I wouldn't, then as above it's clearly permissible to take 3BSD code, modify it and convey it on, under conditions which are no longer accurately described by the 3BSD licence, so there is clearly no requirement that it should remain under the licence.  &lt;strong&gt;If you would&lt;/strong&gt; describe the code discussed above as still being under the 3BSD licence, then &lt;em&gt;in the way you use that term&lt;/em&gt; I agree with you, and there's no question to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal issue only arises if you think that the 3BSD licence requires that downstream recipients must be subject to the conditions of the the 3BSD licence &lt;strong&gt;and no others&lt;/strong&gt; (that is, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;subject to the 3BSD licence&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; as I, and others, use the term).  You've indicated that you do not think that, so I'll stop here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T08:45:08.987" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10738" CreationDate="2020-11-17T13:30:42.603" Score="1" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a program for data analysis as a part of a bigger bioinformatics pipeline. Source code of the program is my own and I licensed it under Apache 2.0 license. However, I need to include two GPL 2.0 licensed files: source codes for methods in R language: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SurajGupta/r-source/blob/master/src/appl/optim.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/stats/src/zeroin.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;. These are two mathematical methods which I use in my tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I set Apache 2.0 for my whole project? It seems most reasonable for me that my bioinformatics method is licensed as I want it and, if that would be necessary, I can add a copy of GPL 2.0 into the directory alongside the two files I use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the matter is a little more complicated: the &lt;code&gt;optim.c&lt;/code&gt; file is very slightly modified by me to suit my computations. Do I have to take any more actions besides adding a statments in the source code: &amp;quot;this file has been modified by me, for the original version see...&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21050" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T14:11:06.920" Title="Inclusion of GPL 2.0 code into my Apache-2.0 program" Tags="|licensing|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10737" CreationDate="2020-11-17T14:11:06.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I set Apache 2.0 for my whole project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is a strong copyleft license that requires that the whole application must be made available under the terms of the GPL license. By choosing to copy those functions from the R language into your own project, you have pretty much slammed the door on yourself and you are effectively required to license your program under the GPL license, version 2 or 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the Apache 2.0 and GPL 2.0 licenses are incompatible, which means that you are not allowed to distribute a project where parts of the code (possibly received via a library) are under the Apache 2.0 license and parts (again possibly in a library) are under the GPL 2.0 license. This means that if you also use a third-party library under the Apache 2.0 license, then you must use the GPLv3 license for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T14:11:06.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10725" CreationDate="2020-11-17T14:53:29.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because every license is eventually a piece of content; I assume it also needs a license; using a license to license itself would lead to circular logic - is that a problem in the content licensing world? If so, one solution is to ship any public license with just a mere custom legal notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that the text of a copyright license is itself also protected by copyright.&#xA;Most copyright licenses do not acknowledge that fact and thus don't contain a license for the text of the copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very strict reading of copyright law would mean that only the author of a copyright license would be allowed to reproduce the license text. But judges are not machines that literally apply the the law. They are humans who can also look at the circumstances. If a license text gives a recipient the right to reproduce and redistribute a work that is covered by the license, then the recipient of the covered work must by necessity also receive a license to reproduce the license text verbatim, even if that was not spelled out explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those licenses that do acknowledge copyright protection of their text, they invariably have a rather restrictive license for the license text, ranging from only allowing verbatim copies to allowing you to re-use the license terms under the condition that you call the license something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Releasing the text of a license (open-source or not) under permissive terms is something that can cause great confusion because it will invariably result in multiple, widely different, licenses that go by the same name. The end result is that those licenses will be shunned by any project that takes itself serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T14:53:29.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-17T20:29:18.313" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;My project is &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; licensed and 3rd party code is all either &lt;code&gt;ISC&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; licensed which are both compatible licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I maintain project code licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html#maintaining-file-scope-copyright-notices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per file&lt;/a&gt;, that is each source includes a license comment on top of a file, each file is a subject to it's own Copyright and license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However entry project as a whole is &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; because 3rd party (non &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;) code is sublicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem now is that I want to include another 3rd party code (a single file) which is &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net/licenses/mslpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Limited Public License&lt;/a&gt; is not OSI approved because of a restriction which state that the &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed software/code is permitted to run only on Microsoft Windows OS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(F) Platform Limitation- The licenses granted in sections 2(A) &amp;amp; 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create&#xA;that run on a Microsoft Windows operating system product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problem with that because the software (project) as a whole is not cross platform and can run only on Windows anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue with &lt;code&gt;MS-MPL&lt;/code&gt; is that it does not permit sublicensing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form,&#xA;you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of&#xA;this license with your distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering between 2 options and I'm not sure whether either one or both options are valid thing to do to keep my project under single license as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed file into project, and put license and Copyright comment into this file just like every other file in the project does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relicense entry project (my own work) as &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; and let 3rd party code stay as it is, &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ISC&lt;/code&gt; licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problem with first option is that entry project can't be published as &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; licensed because it contains a &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed file which can't be sublicensed and does permit porting code to other systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second option looks less problematic but problem is again that entry project can't be &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; licensed because it would contain &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; code which opposes restrictions introduced by &lt;code&gt;MS-LPL&lt;/code&gt; license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be easily wrong on these 2 options, maybe there are some other options I should consider?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17248" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T20:29:18.313" Title="MIT and MS-LPL license compatibility options" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|ms-pl|isc|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10707" CreationDate="2020-11-18T02:20:43.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it would require private use, then it's not a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make your own license in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T02:20:43.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5274" CreationDate="2020-11-18T10:09:46.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing makes Y GPL, short of the author of Y licensing it under GPL or a court order requiring them to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a GPL code in Y without licensing Y under GPL makes such use illegal. This only affects the author of Y if they explicitly enable such use, e.g. they distribute Y alongside with X, or Y is distributed alone while X is a well-known GPL library one could expect to be installed on a target system. This would not turn Y license into GPL automatically, but it would open the author of Y to lawsuits, and releasing Y under GPL could be one of the possible outcomes. Alternatively, the author of Y could chose to pay damages to their users, retract the non-compliant version of Y and refrain from distributing Y until it is modified in a way to make it compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Y is distributed with a closed-sourced version of X, there will be no violation even if an open-source version of X exists and users could technically switch to it by altering Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2024-04-04T11:10:52.670" LastActivityDate="2024-04-04T11:10:52.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10744" CreationDate="2020-11-18T11:15:52.010" Score="10" ViewCount="2727" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say there is a MIT Licensed repository on github, then by definition all the files that belongs to the repository is owned by the copyright holder of the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I fork the project and create some new files in the repository then who will be the owner of all the newly created files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the newly created files will be owned by the original copyright holder(because he owns the whole repository), or the files that I created will be owned by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case I will be the owner of all the files that I created, can I add a copyright notice at the top of each file containg my name in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21061" LastEditorUserId="21061" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T12:09:11.537" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T08:46:21.410" Title="Who will be the copyright owner of a new file in a forked repository on github?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|github|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10743" CreationDate="2020-11-18T11:34:23.357" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question suggests that you regard copyrights as property rights.  This is a completely understandable misconception - big content creators push this agenda quite hard - but it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a misconception.  Copyright is instead a system of time-limited monopolies on certain acts which the law grants to copyright holders for the ultimate purpose of encouraging creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Alice creates content, she doesn't own it, but she has a copyright interest in that content; she is a rightsholder therein.  It is appropriate, though not a requirement, that she alert the world to this interest with a &lt;code&gt;(c) 2020 Alice&lt;/code&gt;-style declaration, preferably at the top of each constituent file.  If she publishes it on GitHub, let's say under the MIT licence, she still has a copyright interest in every copy of that content that is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, when you fork that repository and edit a file the result is a file in which &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; people now have a copyright interest - you and Alice.  It is appropriate, though not a requirement, that you signal this interest to the world by inserting into the file a declaration such as &lt;code&gt;(c) 2020 Vivek Singh&lt;/code&gt;, preferably up by Alice's declaration.  Any new file you create which contains new code which is derived (in copyright terms) from the existing code (which is likely to be most of the new files you create) should have both copyright declarations at the top.  Any new file which contains only new code with no copyright relationship to the existing code should have your copyright declaration at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those files which contain both your copyright declarations, both of you are rightsholders in the file, and the consent of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; of you is required to do things with that file that are controlled by copyright (including but not limited to copying it and modifying it).  Alice has indicated her consent by licensing the content to the world under the MIT licence; how you licence the modified version will indicate to the world what, if any, rights you grant it.  You will also need to make a clear license declaration in files with only your declaration in, to clarify the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T07:40:48.347" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T07:40:48.347" CommentCount="23" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10667" CreationDate="2020-11-18T18:29:56.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The server side app is under the GPL, not under the AGPL, so no, you do not need to distribute source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T18:29:56.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-18T21:04:41.857" Score="5" ViewCount="1537" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating software which includes (PHP library for generating PDF documents on-the-fly) to export invoices which falls under GNU Lesser General Public License, the open source product is called tcpdf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean for me? I plan on charging for my software. This software makes up a very small part of our entire software function. If I utilize this in my software do I have to release my full source code of my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21065" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T00:53:00.337" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T13:00:52.863" Title="If I use an LGPL library do I have to release the full source code of my project?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10667" CreationDate="2020-11-19T07:43:56.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As all parts in this setup (client-side, server-side, Asterisk) only communicate with each other over standard communication mechanisms for communicating between different processes, I believe it is correct to state that they all communicate &amp;quot;at arms length&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a test used by the FSF to determine if your server-side application should be considered a derived work of Asterisk and the outcome of that test is that it isn't a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that your applications and Asterisk are independent works for copyright purposes and their licenses do not affect each other. As a result, you are completely free in choosing the licensing terms of your own applications and you can choose to keep the source code private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could even create a distribution package that includes Asterisk and still keep your applications closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T07:43:56.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-19T10:35:44.460" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use the open source font Metropolis as main font for my webpages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, apparently there has been a legal issue with similarities to Gotham.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/metropolis-font-repo-missing/69415&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/metropolis-font-repo-missing/69415&lt;/a&gt; for more infos. The author Chris Simpson had to put his Github repo to private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if there now are any legal consequences for new and old projects which actively use this font. I actually still see it in use of many big players too, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vmware.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.vmware.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21067" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T10:35:44.460" Title="Webdev: Open Source font and legal issues" Tags="|law|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10751" CreationDate="2020-11-19T15:46:19.743" Score="1" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some times ago I've received a legal issue from monotype.com. They told that I was using font Helvetica Neue in my iOS app since 2015 to 2020 and now I need to pay for this font for all these years. I was shocked by that. I thought that this font is free for using in iOS app and it always was. Also, this font &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/#preinstalled&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preinstalled&lt;/a&gt; in iOS and macOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me and answer the question - can I use font Helvetica Neue in iOS 14 App for free?&#xA;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21074" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T00:59:05.593" Title="Helvetica Neue font in iOS 14 App" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10750" CreationDate="2020-11-19T17:46:42.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is legal if you use the font preinstalled in iOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Monotype is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2021-08-04T00:59:05.593" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T00:59:05.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13559" CreationDate="2020-11-19T20:45:44.523" Score="9" ViewCount="1049" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to make a python package I have written publicly available on GitHub as source code. I am being advised that I should add a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; detailing all the third-party packages that my code depends on. This notice should include the package names, their copyright notices, and their licenses. Note the dependencies here are made almost exclusively through python &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rationale for this advice appears to be the requirements in clause 4 of the Apache license and the second paragraph of the MIT license regarding distribution. The advisor believes this covers any scenario where I require these third-party packages to be present for my software to run. However, this seems a very odd use of the word &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; to me as I am not bundling their code in source or binary form with my source code. At the most, I refer to the third-party packages in the &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statements, a python &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; file, and a &lt;code&gt;requirements.txt&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the MIT and Apache licenses create this burden on any publicly available code that uses them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I distributing or redistributing these third-party packages in a legal sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20772" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-12-30T18:48:56.963" LastActivityDate="2023-03-26T13:23:04.890" Title="Does importing a python package in my source code constitute redistribution of that package?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|distribution|redistribution|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10754" CreationDate="2020-11-20T03:27:52.677" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;How, with no company or non-profit organization to own an open source project, can I arrange for the project community to hold the ownership of the web site, vs. one person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple in theory, but someone has to pay the server bill (not a lot, cost isn't my concern), someone holds the keys to the domain name, and while one could hand out SSH access to any number of admins, some person or company must be the owner-in-name of the VPS instance or other hosting platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, we've got a former project owner that wants to move on, and is happy enough for us to take over the site. But it's been difficult to contact him 'til now, and I'd like to plan for the project to avoid that in future. One guy's absence shouldn't torpedo a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the &amp;quot;hit by a bus&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;won the lottery&amp;quot; problem: an open source project has a problem when its site owner is no longer interested or available, but perhaps unwilling or unable to cede control to others. Were the owner to suddenly shuffle off the mortal coil, the domain, server, everything could be tied up in probate, and even deleted or domain sold before the community could migrate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a generally well-known way to hold the site in community trust without a company or non-profit set up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have googled quite a bit, but the results always assume I want to learn to build a site, or start an open source project. The query to find good info is probably difficult to structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T07:27:24.913" Title="How can an open-source project share web site ownership?" Tags="|website|project-management|community|project-hosting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10753" CreationDate="2020-11-20T07:27:24.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've already realised that digital credentials are the easy part of the problem to solve.  They can be held by multiple people, each of whom can then perform authoritative activites with them.  There are even secret-sharing protocols, such as those that allow &lt;em&gt;any-M-of-N&lt;/em&gt; holders to collaborate to reconstruct the secret and act with authority.  Holding property (eg, group funds) and entering into contractual relationships (eg, being the domain name registrant) are the tricky bits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't really a question about open-source, per se, but you're right that the problem often afflicts open-source projects that have started to fledge.  The gold-standard solution is to form a body with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal personhood&lt;/a&gt; to do these things, with rules that specify which person or people have the authority to act for the body in this regard.  How you do this, the reporting, tax, and other obligations of the body, and similar questions, are all local jurisdictional issues, and you don't tell us which jurisdiction you're in.  But it's generally a fair amount of trouble to do this, which you clearly know, as you've asked how to do without it (in paragraph 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some jurisdictions have the concept of an unincorporated association; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/unincorporated-associations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mine does&lt;/a&gt;.  As Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unincorporated_association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article on the subject&lt;/a&gt; so pithily puts it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Unincorporated&amp;quot; indicates that the association is not a legal person ... an unincorporated association cannot own property (even its own funds): the members must appoint someone, usually a treasurer or committee, who will hold the property as a trustee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So although the organisation cannot be the domain name registrant, a member acting as a trustee can.  This is a lighter-weight structure than something with legal personahood, but a more useful arrangement than a member acting on his/her own behalf, as the organisation can (eg) according to its rules replace an unresponsive or hostile trustee, then approach the registrar to have the registration transferred to the new trustee.  In my jurisdiction, such associations can even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.barclays.co.uk/business-banking/accounts/community-account/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open bank accounts&lt;/a&gt; (that's the link from my own bank; many other equally-capable banking organisations are available).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we can advise on the rules for your specific jurisdiction, but my advice is to ask local sports clubs, musical organisations, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macram%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;macramé&lt;/a&gt; societies, and the like, how they do this where you are, and follow their example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there are also some umbrella organisations that exist to provide this infrastructure for fledgling free software projects, but again this will be jurisdictionally-dependent, I don't know of any in my jurisdiction, and asking for offsite resource pointers is off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T07:27:24.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10756" CreationDate="2020-11-20T10:30:03.623" Score="5" ViewCount="2136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had developed a Java application which is connected to MySQL Workbench by using &lt;code&gt;mysql-connector-java-8.0.21.jar&lt;/code&gt; file. When I deploy the project and send source code to the client he says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license must not have a licensed GNU/ GPL / Unspecified that has a disclosure obligation (it is okay to have MIT / BSD / Apache without a disclosure obligation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the GNU/GPL licence to MIT or BSD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is, how to change the licence of the project or how to change the licence of library files like &lt;code&gt;Mysql connector.jar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I need a open source licence for the source code, So I need to change the licence libraries (used in project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21081" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T15:45:48.887" Title="How to change the licence of Java project from GNU/ GPL to MIT / BSD / Apache" Tags="|gpl|bsd|gnu|java|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10755" CreationDate="2020-11-20T11:27:20.377" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot change the license of code from others, such as &lt;code&gt;mysql-connector-java&lt;/code&gt;. That license is set by the author of that particular component (Oracle company).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your client stated the requirement up front, you have a problem. But otherwise you can just decline the request, and state that this is outside your control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&#xA;The use of the term &amp;quot;disclosure obligation&amp;quot; in this context suggests that the client does not understand the law. But if the client specifically named the GPL as an example of banned licenses before agreeing on the contract, then the misuse of the term &amp;quot;disclosure obligation&amp;quot; does not invalidate the contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T11:27:20.377" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-20T14:16:39.470" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a case when in a software project the 3rd party source code is placed in between &lt;code&gt;#if 0 ... #endif&lt;/code&gt; (and hence, is not compiled). How does this affect the legal aspect (ex. license selection) of the software project? Shall the license of the software project be compatible with the license of the 3rd party source code in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extra question: Does the 'legal world' define and differentiate between terms &lt;code&gt;active source code&lt;/code&gt; vs. &lt;code&gt;inactive source code&lt;/code&gt; (in between &lt;code&gt;#if 0 ... #endif&lt;/code&gt;)? Where is to read about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17644" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T16:06:22.493" Title="Legal aspect: active source code vs. inactive source code" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10755" CreationDate="2020-11-20T20:43:10.387" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/mysql/mysql-connector-java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mysql-connector/j&lt;/a&gt; is licensed as GPLv2 by Oracle but has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSS Exception&lt;/a&gt;. If you want to distribute your software as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSS&lt;/a&gt;, you can  choose any license &amp;quot;that is OSI-approved and/or categorized by the FSF as free&amp;quot;. Otherwise you must use a different library or buy a commercial license from Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; change the license of &lt;code&gt;mysql-connector/j&lt;/code&gt; since you are not the owner of its copyright (Oracle is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="964" LastEditorUserId="18618" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T18:29:17.407" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T18:29:17.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10761" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11163" CreationDate="2020-11-21T01:23:55.303" Score="6" ViewCount="1423" Body="&lt;p&gt;so I've made an app using a popular library called OpenCV (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opencv.org/license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opencv.org/license/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its built on android and with the version I'm using it states that the licensing is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenCV 4.5.0 and higher versions are licensed under the Apache 2 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or if I use the older version its:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenCV 4.4.0 and lower versions, including OpenCV 3.x, OpenCV 2.x, and OpenCV 1.x, are licensed under the 3-clause BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I get a little worried in this, I read up that OpenCV automatically uses FFMPEG which requires a licence, but then I saw another thread where this is not the case for Android?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also worried whether OpenCV uses any third parties automatically that I don't know of, I've seen a few online referring to an xml document, and a few other things, but I'm not entirely sure how to check if its in my app and the forums I see this on are from 2012 so I'm unsure if things have changed since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it helps, my code is based on the facial detection part of the sample code from the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opencv/opencv/tree/master/samples/android&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies in advanced if this is the wrong place to post this, I wasn't sure if its coding related, law related or if there's a licence thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21096" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T01:49:21.027" Title="Can I use OpenCV for commercial sales?" Tags="|licensing|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-20T10:11:48.663" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had developed a Java application which is connected to MySQL Workbench by using &lt;code&gt;mysql-connector-java-8.0.21.jar&lt;/code&gt; file.&#xA;When I deploy the project and send source code to the client he says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license must not have a licensed GNU/ GPL / Unspecified that has a disclosure obligation (it is okay to have MIT / BSD / Apache without a disclosure obligation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the GNU/GPL licence to MIT or BSD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is, how to change the licence of the project&#xA;or how to change the licence of library files like &lt;code&gt;Mysql connector.jar&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because I need a open source licence for the source code, So I need to change the licence libraries (used in project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21081" OwnerDisplayName="Atif Rizwan" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T02:22:22.693" Title="How to change the licence of Java project from GNU/ GPL to MIT / BSD / Apache" Tags="|java|gnu|bsd|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-11-21T21:50:55.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10755" CreationDate="2020-11-20T10:36:40.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple license styles at play here;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT/BSD/Apache-style license style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MySQL connector, assuming you mean MySQL Connector/J, is dual-licensed; You can either choose the commercial license (you will have to pay for this), or the LGPL license. Licensing is a thing the authors of a product do; you can't change the license. If the task at hand demands a certain license, you ask the authors if they offer it, and how much you need to pay to get this; if it's too much for your wallet or this license is not available, your only resort at that point is to either change the requirements, or, remove that product from your codebase entirely, and e.g. switch to PostgreSQL (a different DB engine), for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that LGPL isn't the same as GPL. It's more like MIT/BSD/Apache-style licenses than GPL is, so one way out may simply be to ask your client's lawyers if LGPL is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For future consideration, always check with the client what kind of license restrictions they have. For example, if MIT/BSD/Apache is the only way, then &lt;strong&gt;you cannot use MySQL&lt;/strong&gt; here. Period. MySQL is not licensed like that and Oracle (the owner of MySQL) doesn't offer it. In that case, it's possible a commercial license would have sufficed (so, make sure to charge the client to take into account you'll need to acquire a commercial license). Alternatively, take into account that you'll need to spend some time learning about using different tools (such as PostgreSQL, whose license is MIT/BSD/Apache-style), and bill accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need more information about whether or not the LGPL of MySQL and MySQL Connector/J is compatible with your client's needs, or what's going to happen if you ignore either a license or your customer's written requirements, you should ask a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="rzwitserloot" LastEditorUserId="282" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T15:45:48.887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T15:45:48.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10770" CreationDate="2020-11-21T05:41:28.650" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; demands we must provide a copy of AGPL code we run online.If someone makes online virtual machine service and someone runs AGPL software on it is the online VM provider obliged to follow AGPL and distribute source code of is servers ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21088" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T22:10:41.277" Title="Making an online compute solution and AGPL" Tags="|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10755" CreationDate="2020-11-21T08:28:36.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/&lt;/a&gt;, you are free to use any approved open source license for &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; code even if it is using the GPL'd MySQL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license used by recent versions of mysql-connector-java is described here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an excerpt of the LICENSE file provided with the connector package (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing Information User Manual&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MySQL Connector/J 8.0&#xA;__________________________________________________________________&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License Information User Manual contains Oracle's product license&#xA;and other licensing information, including licensing information for&#xA;third-party software which may be included in this distribution of&#xA;MySQL Connector/J 8.0.&#xA;Introduction&#xA;Last updated: August 2020&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensing Information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a release of MySQL Connector/J 8.0, brought to you by the MySQL&#xA;team at Oracle. This software is released under version 2 of the GNU&#xA;General Public License (GPLv2), as set forth below, &lt;strong&gt;with the following&#xA;additional permissions&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distribution of MySQL Connector/J 8.0 is distributed with certain&#xA;software that is licensed under separate terms, as designated in a&#xA;particular file or component or in the license documentation. Without&#xA;limiting your rights under the GPLv2, &lt;strong&gt;the authors of MySQL hereby grant&#xA;you an additional permission to link the program and your derivative&#xA;works with the separately licensed software that they have included&#xA;with the program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without limiting the foregoing grant of rights under the GPLv2 and&#xA;additional permission as to separately licensed software, &lt;strong&gt;this&#xA;Connector is also subject to the Universal FOSS Exception, version 1.0&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;a copy of which is reproduced below and can also be found along with&#xA;its FAQ at &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purchasing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mysql.com/fr/about/legal/licensing/oem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MySQL commercial license&lt;/a&gt; is an alternative. It will allow you to use a proprietary license for you own code and so be free to keep it unpublished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as you do not own MySql code and libraries, you have no right to change its own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: &lt;em&gt;I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice; I do not claim that the above is accurate; don't make any business decisions based on stuff you read from strangers on the Internet, including me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="680" LastEditorUserId="680" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T23:43:49.163" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T23:43:49.163" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10771" CreationDate="2020-11-21T17:19:45.943" Score="2" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ported a MATLAB repository to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OverLordGoldDragon/ssqueezepy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python&lt;/a&gt;, with former having this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ebrevdo/synchrosqueezing/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this&#xA;list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this not being a plain fork but rewritten in another language, I've implemented multiple fixes, performance optimizations, functionality extensions, and readability and documentation improvements to the point that some functions hardly resemble original. Further, I'll be adding more functions entirely of my own &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; from other projects with their own licenses. By percent, it'll be approximately (with 3 &amp;amp; 4 only growing in time):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;20% of original's rewritten in Python with minimal changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;30% of original's with significant or 'total' changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;20% entirely new functionality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;30% from other projects with their own licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I credit the authors' relevant publications and hyperlink to repository in every method docstring, also reference both in README. Do I still need to include the whole license copy in my license (to-be Apache 2.0)? Then also for functions I take from other projects with same licensing, no matter how few?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21059" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T22:27:43.793" Title="At what point is software 'different enough' to exclude BSD license notice?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-21T19:44:08.703" Score="-1" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I find the GPLv2 license text in Ubuntu 20.04?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T22:01:25.430" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T22:01:25.430" Title="Where is GPLv2 located in Ubuntu?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10768" CreationDate="2020-11-21T20:28:05.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution. Packages install their licensing information into the file &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/&amp;lt;package&amp;gt;/copyright&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the full text of some common licenses is installed into the &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/common-licenses&lt;/code&gt; directory. This includes the various GPL variants. These files are provided by the &lt;code&gt;base-files&lt;/code&gt; package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This part of Ubuntu/Debian should be extremely stable across versions, but I only checked for Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian Buster.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T20:28:05.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10765" CreationDate="2020-11-21T22:10:41.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. The AGPL is more targeted: &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; someone &lt;em&gt;modifies&lt;/em&gt; an AGPL-covered program, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; they must offer the program's source code to all users who &lt;em&gt;interact remotely over a network&lt;/em&gt; with that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is a copyright-based license: it draws its legal power from the copyright of the program's authors. It cannot have any effect on other unrelated software. So we need to think about which programs are a “covered work” under the AGPL. There is some disagreement on what is part of a program (e.g. whether libraries or  scripts are part of the program). However, it is widely accepted that an operating system or a virtual machine platform is a different work/program from the software running within the VM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also dubious whether the VM provider would have any legal duty regarding open source software running on their VMs. The person running an AGPL program (“operator”) is responsible to the AGPL program's copyright holders (“authors”) for license compliance. There is no relationship between the VM provider and the authors. If it were a license breach to run the AGPL software on these VMs, that license breach would likely be the fault of the operator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general rule, Open Source licenses like the AGPL will never affect other, unrelated software. This is a reason why MongoDB's SSPL cannot be an Open Source license. The SSPL takes the AGPL but widens the “remote network interaction” part and changes the concept of “source code” to cover the entire software stack. So using SSPL-licensed software could make license compliance difficult with problems similar to those suggested in your question. But that wouldn't be the fault of the VM provider, and the AGPL doesn't have such issues in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T22:10:41.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10767" CreationDate="2020-11-21T22:27:43.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must keep the BSD license notice intact for as long as your project is derivative of BSD-licensed software, for example because it still contains some BSD-licensed parts. Whether a project is still derivative after a rewrite is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4345/theseus-paradox-applied-to-code-copyright&quot;&gt;somewhat unclear as discussed in other questions here&lt;/a&gt;. But if you aren't really really sure that you've entirely replaced all old parts, you should assume that your project is still derivative. This is not primarily about licenses: this is about the original authors' copyright in this software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same reasoning applies when taking functions from other projects: you're only allowed to take them if you comply with their license.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; For licenses like MIT or BSD this is very easy because you just have to keep the license notice intact somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: or if you're sure that the functions are so trivial that they are not eligible for copyright under your country's copyright laws.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using the Apache 2.0 license, the place for these third party license notices is the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file. The Apache license has special rules that require everyone to keep the relevant contents of that file intact and to make the file available to all users. This way, your LICENSE file only has to contain the Apache text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crediting the original projects doesn't matter. It is of course a very good idea to credit the original projects, and it is required e.g. in an academic context. But for the copyright and licensing aspects, it only matters that you comply with the licenses. So you might want to do both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;credit the original project in a docstring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fulfil the license obligations by copying the BSD license notice into the NOTICE file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T22:27:43.793" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10366" CreationDate="2020-11-22T06:11:04.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the license on the original set of word patterns?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Just pre-compiling a LaTeX file to speed up it's use, should not put the output under the LPPL.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In other words if you are the creator of the original file before it was pre-compiled, you can use it how you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally the LPPL is used for projects that want to make sure that programs distributed under a name/version are identical to each other.  In other words you can't distribute something claiming be &amp;quot;XXX&amp;quot; unless it is identical to the orignal &amp;quot;XXX&amp;quot; distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means that if that pre-compiled file is part of another project that is licensed under the LPPL, you can not just include that single file unless there is another license that applies to its distribution.  On the other hand you could distribute the entire project, but only use certain files from it in your own project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15683" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T06:11:04.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10774" CreationDate="2020-11-22T16:35:47.963" Score="2" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've ported &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc%2B%2B-v3/include/std/type_traits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;type_traits&lt;/a&gt; from GCC to AVR-GCC with some major modifications to the code structure, style, and used some boost implementations along with some of my own implementations and would like to add my own copyright along with the FSF copyright notice as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2020 MyName.&#xA;Copyright (C) 2007-2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intentions are to post it on github as a standalone project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is I don't know if I'm allowed to because on the one hand you have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does the FSF require that contributors to FSF-copyrighted programs assign copyright to the FSF? If I hold copyright on a GPLed&#xA;program, should I do this, too? If so, how? (#AssignCopyright)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our lawyers have told us that to be in the best position to enforce&#xA;the GPL in court against violators, we should keep the copyright&#xA;status of the program as simple as possible. We do this by asking each&#xA;contributor to either assign the copyright on contributions to the&#xA;FSF, or disclaim copyright on contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also ask individual contributors to get copyright disclaimers from&#xA;their employers (if any) so that we can be sure those employers won't&#xA;claim to own the contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if all the contributors put their code in the public&#xA;domain, there is no copyright with which to enforce the GPL. So we&#xA;encourage people to assign copyright on large code contributions, and&#xA;only put small changes in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make an effort to enforce the GPL on your program, it&#xA;is probably a good idea for you to follow a similar policy. Please&#xA;contact licensing@gnu.org if you want more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I required to claim a copyright on my modifications to a GPL-covered program? (#RequiredToClaimCopyright)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to claim a copyright on your changes. In most&#xA;countries, however, that happens automatically by default, so you need&#xA;to place your changes explicitly in the public domain if you do not&#xA;want them to be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you claim a copyright on your changes or not, either way you&#xA;must release the modified version, as a whole, under the GPL (if you&#xA;release your modified version at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding they contradict each other, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; prohibits adding my own copyright and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#RequiredToClaimCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second&lt;/a&gt; allows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21110" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T16:47:09.350" Title="Am I allowed to add additional copyright on modified code that originally the FSF released under GPLv3" Tags="|gpl-3|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10773" CreationDate="2020-11-22T16:47:09.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may do so, provided you abide by the license of the repository you forked or the code you (re)used. For (L)GPL that means to release the whole code under the same license (or compatible one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two statements only seemingly contradict eachother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first statement is a requirement the FSF has when you like to &lt;strong&gt;contribute directly to one of their projects&lt;/strong&gt;. That is, if you want to create patches or contributions which shall be merged into the project itself. They do want a written consent to transfer copyright or the rights to the changes as far as allowed by laws to allow a future change of license without the need to aquire consent by every party who previously contributed to the project. This is a method frequently applied to allow a project to remain functional while having many contributors which might make single contributions and leave afterwards. This question and paragraph about copyright assignment to the FSF does not apply for forks or code re-use outside of repositories of their ownership - like your repository. There you only have to abide by the license terms (of the GPL, LGPL or whatever is used at the time of forking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second statement is a general statement on how copyright law works - if no other statements or contracts are made to change the defaults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T16:47:09.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10776" CreationDate="2020-11-22T17:07:11.843" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am attempting to write a Hobbyist OS and found that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/a-darwish/cuteOS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CuteOS&lt;/a&gt; project is very useful for reference and libraries. The only issue is: it's under the GPLv2, and from my understanding if you use a library which is under GPLv2, your software has to be too, which I don't want it to be.&#xA;Is that true? Is there a work-around like what Linux uses for proprietary blobs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thx!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21111" LastEditorUserId="21035" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T07:56:34.097" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T07:56:34.097" Title="GPL libraries on my software" Tags="|gpl|copyright|gpl-2|software-development|operating-system|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10775" CreationDate="2020-11-22T18:50:30.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AFAIK:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You cannot create a non-GPL'ed derivative work over the GPL'ed base work. However, interpretations of what is “derivative work” differ. As a common denominator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;cannot link a GPL'ed library&lt;/strong&gt; to your code (without making it GPL'ed too). (Although there are different opinions of this topic, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU_General_Public_License /  Linking and derived works /  Libraries&lt;/a&gt; in Wikipedia, but at least the Free Software Foundation says that you cannot link — neither statically nor dynamically.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, you &lt;strong&gt;can execute a GPL'ed executable&lt;/strong&gt; from your code (without making it GPL'ed too). But only unless the communication between your program and an executed program is “too tight”, for example Free Software Foundation says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ / What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Isn't not forbidden to have GPL'ed and non-GPL'ed parts in a same distribution (of course, unless the parts violate the copyright themselves, e.g. when non-GPL'ed parts link to GPL'ed ones) — see the same question in the FSF FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice the following trick is sometimes done to use a GPL'ed code from non-GPL'ed: you can write a GPL'ed wrapper-executable around the GPL'ed library. So your code communicates with a separate GPL'ed executable (instead of linking to the GPL'ed library). However, the nature/purpose/tightness of communication also matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sometimes GPL'ed and non-GPL'ed parts are distributed separately, i.e. one part is initially distributed and then it downloads the other one per user request (this makes to feel that the second part is not really a strong dependency but something like an add-on, and therefore the first part isn't a derived work). However, AFAIK, this makes sense only in the opposite case — when a GPL'ed code uses a proprietary one (and the proprietary one might have specific restrictions); and the GPL itself doesn't forbids distribution as a part of aggregate (see #2 above).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15968" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T18:50:30.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10778" CreationDate="2020-11-22T22:54:42.063" Score="5" ViewCount="1168" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTICE:&lt;/strong&gt; Not A duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10773/am-i-allowed-to-add-additional-copyright-on-modified-code-that-originally-the-fs&quot;&gt;Am I allowed to add additional copyright on modified code that originally the FSF released under GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;The previous question answered if I'm allowed to copyright modifications to software published by the FSF at all. The current question tries to find out if the FSF applies the same rules regarding copyright to forking as they do to contributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and found the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does the FSF require that contributors to FSF-copyrighted programs assign copyright to the FSF? If I hold copyright on a GPLed&#xA;program, should I do this, too? If so, how? (#AssignCopyright)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our lawyers have told us that to be in the best position to enforce&#xA;the GPL in court against violators, we should keep the copyright&#xA;status of the program as simple as possible. We do this by asking each&#xA;contributor to either assign the copyright on contributions to the&#xA;FSF, or disclaim copyright on contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also ask individual contributors to get copyright disclaimers from&#xA;their employers (if any) so that we can be sure those employers won't&#xA;claim to own the contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if all the contributors put their code in the public&#xA;domain, there is no copyright with which to enforce the GPL. So we&#xA;encourage people to assign copyright on large code contributions, and&#xA;only put small changes in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make an effort to enforce the GPL on your program, it&#xA;is probably a good idea for you to follow a similar policy. Please&#xA;contact licensing@gnu.org if you want more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding I must disclaim copyright or assign it to the FSF if I'm contributing to FSF-copyrighted programs. Does the same apply if I fork the project in order to modify it and port it to another compiler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21110" LastEditorUserId="21110" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T13:59:49.313" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T13:59:49.313" Title="Can I fork libstdc++ without disclaiming copyright for the modifications I make?" Tags="|gpl-3|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10777" CreationDate="2020-11-23T00:42:10.367" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a legal concern, but one of project policy. What this FAQ item says is essentially: if you submit contributions to the GNU project, they will not use them unless you first assign copyright to the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to make modifications to GNU code and retain copyright on your modifications, but do not expect them to be accepted back into mainline GNU code. (This may not be something you want to do anyway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T04:27:12.517" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T04:27:12.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10780" CreationDate="2020-11-23T08:56:58.960" Score="5" ViewCount="1352" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Non-commercial use&amp;quot; could mean two different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't use the software in a commercial/business context, but only for personal use (i.e. at home)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In the case you modify/fork the project, you are not allowed to make a commercial use of it, i.e. sell it&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it's not very clear how &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; open-source licenses (such as CC BY-SA-NC) deal with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there licenses that &lt;strong&gt;allow the use in a commercial/business context&lt;/strong&gt; (ex: you can use BetterExcel++ for your business) but &lt;strong&gt;disallow to sell copies&lt;/strong&gt; of the software or modified versions (you can't sell your own fork of BetterExcel++) of the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linked topics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/179383/open-source-license-that-prevents-re-selling&quot;&gt;Open Source License that prevents re-selling&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/419264/non-commercial-licenses-how-to-distinguish-use-of-software-in-a-commercial-con&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; closed question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This question is precisely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; since the latter uses &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; as a general term, whereas &lt;em&gt;the very goal&lt;/em&gt; of my question is to analyze what &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; means in popular open-source licenses, and see if &amp;quot;using it for my business&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;forking and selling the forked version&amp;quot; can be distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10491" LastEditorUserId="10491" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T08:44:35.303" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T21:39:35.037" Title="Open-source license (probably not FLOSS) that allows &quot;use in a commercial context&quot; but disallow &quot;to sell the software or modified versions&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|non-commercial|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-11-24T08:29:58.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2020-11-23T09:18:11.800" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no open-source licenses that forbid selling copies of the software, because that kind of restriction is not allowed in a license that is recognized as an open-source license by the community/FSF/OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; open-source licenses that make the business model of selling copies of the software very unattractive. These licenses are strong copyleft licenses, like the GPL. These license have the condition that any (re-)distribution of either the original or a modified software must be done under the same license and that gives each recipient the right to distribute the software further at whatever price they want to ask. That means your customers are also your competitors who can easily sell under your price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T18:48:44.997" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T18:48:44.997" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10779" CreationDate="2020-11-23T12:00:48.770" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As explained by @BartvanIngenSchenau in his answer, it seems that the answer is no, under the OSI/FSF definition of open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the license described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/179383/open-source-license-that-prevents-re-selling/179385#179385&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; (BSD license + additional clause) fits the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or the following license which is technically  open-source or &amp;quot;source available&amp;quot;, while not being OSI/FSF open-source. It is based on the MIT license, modified with a free-of-charge-redistribution-only clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of&#xA;this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to use, copy, *&#xA;modify, publish, distribute free of charge, incorporate in a free of charge      *&#xA;package, copies of the Software or a modified version thereof, either in source  *&#xA;or binary form, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do    *&#xA;so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS&#xA;FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR&#xA;COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER&#xA;IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN&#xA;CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10491" LastEditorUserId="10491" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T21:39:35.037" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T21:39:35.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T17:21:08.140" Score="5" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work on a third-party open source project (partly GPL 3, partly Apache 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to disclose my changes right away (but publish them in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to require a hired worker whom I want to show my code to sign a non-disclosure agreement for my changes? Would it contradict to the license? (My main changes are in an Apache 2 licensed file.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T10:44:58.283" Title="Non-disclosure agreement for an open source project" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2020-11-23T17:44:52.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is another option here, potentially: Move the external &lt;em&gt;documentation&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;out&lt;/strong&gt; of the application entirely. (And out from behind the paywall, even.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, set up a web service that publishes the documentation, adapted for display but not combined with anything else or remixed in any way. (Simply formatted for presentation on the site, which as you say is typically presented as OK within even the more stringent readings of the CC terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, your application has a resource from which it can pull up any relevant documentation sections / excerpts whenever needed. You could even set up a pipeline that lets you give back to the original documentation source, by passing on community-sourced enhancements collected via the open-access site. (For instance, say you (re-)publish the documentation as a set of wiki pages. Users would be able to make corrections and improvements to the documentation content. If you explicitly state that contributions are made under the same license terms, then anything submitted can be floated upstream.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this goes without saying, but you should only consider taking this path if you &lt;em&gt;genuinely&lt;/em&gt; intend the sister site to be an open-access resource for the upstream project's documentation. (Which still makes good business sense for your project, I would argue, simply because anything that benefits &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; project also benefits &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; project in turn. Standard rising-tide stuff.) In no way should you even consider creating such a site merely as a front / &amp;quot;legal shield&amp;quot;, to APPEAR as if you're satisfying the Share-Alike provisions of the CC license and wish to contribute back. Because that would be a dick move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20949" LastEditorUserId="20949" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T23:12:41.327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T23:12:41.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10796" CreationDate="2020-11-23T18:08:20.130" Score="6" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;h2&gt;My intention&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to write a desktop GUI program using Qt (which is itself is licensed under GPL) that interfaces a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scryfall.com/docs/api&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;REST API&lt;/a&gt; and I want to use a strong copyleft license, preferably GPLv3. (I use the GPLv3 for all of my personal projects and they commonly share re-usable parts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The API Terms of Usage include this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not require anyone to make payments, take surveys, agree to&#xA;subscriptions, rate your content, or create accounts in exchange for&#xA;access to Scryfall data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My program will download data from said API during run-time and display information obtained using it. It will not ship any data obtained from it as part of the source code and setup bundles (if any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The problem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL, like any OSI-approved free software license, explicitly allows re-selling the application and commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I do not and will not intend to ever sell this piece of software to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My assumption/interpretation:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The program downloads and displays (parts of) the information obtained via API calls, thus it ”grants access to Scryfall data”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Selling the program (if done by a third party) violates “You may not require anyone to make payments […] in exchange for access to Scryfall data.”, thus the program can never be sold by anyone. It it were sold, the seller were requiring a payment for granting access to the data provided by the API, therefore violating the ToS.&#xA;But compliance with the API ToS then violates the GPLv3, which explicitly prevents further restriction, aside from the ones made by the license itself. Thus this clause in the ToS contradicts the GPLv3 (and possibly any other F/L OSS license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it is not possible to write free/libre open source software interfacing said API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation right or wrong? I.e. is it possible to write GPL-licensed software interfacing the non-profit API or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21119" LastEditorUserId="21119" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T19:35:07.377" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T10:46:30.930" Title="Accessing a non-commercial API with Software under strong copyleft (e.g. GPLv3) possible?" Tags="|gpl-3|non-commercial|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10782" CreationDate="2020-11-23T18:31:17.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, so verify this yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the GPL FAQ:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you do not let it escape, you don’t have to provide the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the GPL does not evict your own copyright on your changes, thus it should be possible to exert your copyright and demand non-disclosure, but only for the bits you personally hold the copyright of.&#xA;You could state that the modified version is a proprietary modification and your changes are covered under &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;, thus prevent re-distribution of your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the co-worker leaks the code they perform a copyright infringement, and the code won’t be properly “released”. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#StolenCopy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#StolenCopy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don’t understand why you would need such an NDA for changes to a GPL-licensed program/library. It sounds like you want to work against the intended purpose of the license. But this is up to you, so I won’t question it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21119" LastEditorUserId="21119" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T19:06:20.483" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T19:06:20.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10793" CreationDate="2020-11-23T19:27:27.163" Score="1" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I make a software that generates code like a website creator can I automatically assign a lisence to it with copyright held by some person?Basically can a software generate code and then lisence it to someone under MIT lisence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21109" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T08:32:35.650" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T08:32:35.650" Title="Can mechanically-generated code be licensed?" Tags="|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10711" CreationDate="2020-11-23T22:55:28.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just an fyi:  Most operating systems that run the Internet (Linux) and most Web servers (Apache) and programming languages (i.e: Python, Javascript, others) are open source and many open source projects are free to use. Importantly, the operations are well understood with training and personnel available to operate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, not having in an electronic open source election backbone that can collect all votes whether federal state or local is unforgivable.  Additionally, an open source voters registry would allow a voter to audit their own submission regardless of how that submission originated (ie: scanned ballot, online entry, or voting machine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, certain personal data would need to remain secret, while other data is publicly available. These kinds of rules could easily be implemented by open source developers. Such developers work free of charge! There actually would be no or very low governmental investment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe an open source blockchain application would be the perfect solution. There are some available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21122" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T22:55:28.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-24T05:18:06.063" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;Up until recently I thought that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#:%7E:text=Copyleft%20is%20the%20practice%20of,works%20created%20from%20that%20property.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; supporters totally reject the concepts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://insights.newscred.com/content-licensing-the-ultimate-guide/#:%7E:text=Content%20licensing%20is%20a%20legal,across%20desktop%20and%20mobile%20platforms.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;content licensing&lt;/a&gt; but now I know that they don't totally reject these and their main goal is to promote the usage of content licenses which &lt;em&gt;reduce copyrights amount to a possible minimum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a more radical approach against copyright than copyleft (such that goes one step further to reject any kind of copyright AND/OR content license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21126" LastEditorUserId="21126" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T05:23:25.563" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T21:40:57.057" Title="Is there a more radical approach against copyright than copyleft?" Tags="|copyleft|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10791" CreationDate="2020-11-24T07:37:45.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can try to reject the notion of copyrights and licenses, but that quickly runs into practical problems with the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all countries that have ratified the Berne convention on copyrights (which is nearly all of them), copyright law stipulates that as soon as you write down your thoughts, then that record is protected by copyrights to the highest extent. There is nothing you need to do to get copyright protection and even nothing that can prevent it. The only exception is if you are writing something that is explicitly called out in the law to not be covered by copyright protection&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As copyright protection is automatic, the only way around it is to grant a license to others to perform actions that are otherwise reserved to the copyright owner, or to disclaim all rights and to dedicate your work explicitly to the public domain (which is not possible in all jurisdictions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first option would be contrary to the stated intention of rejecting copyrights and licenses. The second option might work, but I am not sure how well you could build a community/movement around it. It will not prevent the &amp;quot;believers in copyrights&amp;quot; from using your code, because code in the public domain is free to use for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[1]: Those exceptions are typically government documents intended to be widely circulated and copied, like law texts&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T07:37:45.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10786" CreationDate="2020-11-24T08:27:12.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holder can issue a license. So the question would be whether you are a copyright holder of the generated code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not a copyright holder just because your software generated some code. Instead, there would have to be your creative elements in the generated code, for example if copyrightable code snippets you wrote were copied into the output.&#xA;Detailed criteria on what is and isn't copyrightable would depend on jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also consider that there could be multiple copyright holders involved, e.g. you for your snippet but also the generator's user for the user's snippets. You cannot claim copyright for the user's parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, code generators want the generated code to be used as freely as possible. They would typically offer such code snippets under very liberal licenses, possibly requiring no attribution. This problem doesn't just exist for website generators, but also for compilers or parser generators. The MIT license might not be ideal because it requires the license notice to be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a website generator that is not intended to be part of the open source community, an alternative could be to use contract law to require some attribution to remain on the website, such as a “made with SomeGenerator” link in the footer. While open source licenses generally require copyright notices to be preserved, they are generally unsuitable for requiring advertisements to be preserved. But all of this depends on the goals of the website generator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T08:27:12.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10795" CreationDate="2020-11-24T09:28:21.150" Score="0" ViewCount="974" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I license my project with MIT-license, could someone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fork the project and distribute the binaries as a paid software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;just have a quote of my original license in the &lt;code&gt;Help &amp;gt; About&lt;/code&gt; dialog box, as required by &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and keep it closed source? without &amp;quot;sharing it alike&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10491" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T10:21:40.560" Title="Can someone fork a MIT-licensed project, distribute the binaries as a paid software, and keep it closed source?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10794" CreationDate="2020-11-24T10:21:40.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone displays the original license in a dialog box as you described, they have fulfilled the requirements of the MIT license. Therefore they can also enjoy all the rights granted by it (one of which is to sell the software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want that, you can use a copyleft license like the GPL. Those licenses still grant the rights to sell the software, but they have additional requirements which guarantee that the software remains open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19001" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T10:21:40.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10784" CreationDate="2020-11-24T10:46:30.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Selling the program (if done by a third party) violates “You may not require anyone to make payments […] in exchange for access to Scryfall data.”, thus the program can never be sold by anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation of the API license is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By selling a copy of your application, you are asking money for a piece of software (which happens to be able to access Scryfall data), but you are not asking money for accessing the data itself. It could very well be that the buyer doesn't even want to access Scryfall but wants to modify the program to access some other data source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the API license is forbidding is that you add some kind of in-app purchase option for accessing the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T10:46:30.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6639" CreationDate="2020-11-25T07:55:22.757" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading code and then writing it down from memory, whenever you're writing down the exact code or not, can be considered &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot; and thus could be subject to copyright (IANAL, but as far as I can recall the definitions of derived work and fair use remain fuzzy and subject to interpretation; in this specific case, and particularly if the resulting code keeps a similar structure, I would find it quite hard to claim fair use of the original work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your best approach to ensure that the work cannot be considered derived work is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room design&lt;/a&gt; technique: have one person read the code and produce functional specifications, then someone else who've never even glanced at the original code write his own implementation, thus ensuring no code from the original work can even accidentally taint the resulting project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course offers no protection from patent infringements if the algorithm is covered by valid patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21134" LastEditorUserId="21134" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T20:00:56.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T20:00:56.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10835" CreationDate="2020-11-25T12:07:32.630" Score="6" ViewCount="2151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a Python script (a .py file) that I'd like to publish and license correctly. My script imports&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;numpy (3-clause BSD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;matplotlib.pyplot (Matplotlib license [BSD-compatible])&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;os and argparse (PSF Version 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not modify any of those modules; I want to publish the .py file only (no binaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to license my script with as little restrictions as possible but of course without violating any licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To my (limited) understanding of the above mentioned licenses, and comparing my question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9326/what-are-the-license-obligations-if-just-importing-licensed-code-without-modifyi&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, I can license my script under 3-clause BSD OR MIT (both would be fine by me) without violating any licenses. Is that correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to include any text of licenses of the imported modules anywhere in my script? I am under the impression that I do not have to include any.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem like an easy question to answer, but searching the web and the module's web pages, I could not find an answer that wasn't too technical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Since English is not my native language I have some trouble understanding license texts. I never published any software and I am neither a software engineer nor a lawyer, so I am unfamiliar with technical/legal terms, for example (but not limited to) what counts as 'distributing' software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#/media/File:Floss-license-slide-image.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this diagram&lt;/a&gt;, MIT is incompatible with BSD. So &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; I am restricted by the licenses of the software modules I am importing, then I cannot choose MIT if I import BSD software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21136" LastEditorUserId="21136" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T10:25:00.990" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:11:26.237" Title="3-clause BSD or MIT license for software that imports numpy and matplotlib?" Tags="|mit|bsd|license|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T13:50:04.873" Score="12" ViewCount="4434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wrote a commercial program, and I publish its complete source code on my website. I retain all rights to the source code. No one gets any distribution or usage rights. They only have the right to look at the source code. My question is: can my program be considered &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;? I mean, the source code is publicly available, in stark contrast to all the commercial software out there whose source code is not publicly available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding, the source code of PGP used to be available for anyone to download. PGP is not free software. The source code was published by Symantec to facilitate peer review. Can PGP be considered open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I am not talking about source code leaks. I am talking about the case where source code is published by the copyright owner without granting anyone any distribution and usage rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastEditorUserId="1177" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T13:12:02.553" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T15:34:09.617" Title="Is a software open source if its source code is published by its copyright owner but cannot be used without a commercial license?" Tags="|source-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-11-28T17:05:12.090" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10802" CreationDate="2020-11-25T14:03:37.760" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, of course it is NOT open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generally-accepted definition of open-source is the one by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list on the linked site of the OSI is a bit more verbose and fleshed-out, but the important part is: For a software to be allowed to be called open-source it needs some form of (ideally OSI-approved) license which grants the users right to use the source for whatever purpose, to modify it and distribute modified copies of the source and the resulting binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scenario you describe is not open-source, but best described euphemistically as &amp;quot;source available&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;open core&amp;quot;, or similar, depending on how exactly employed. There are companies which allow you access to their source under NDA and when you pay (e.g. atlassian), but that doesn't grant you any further rights either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T14:03:37.760" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T09:53:37.613" Score="4" ViewCount="2077" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a software that uses some MIT and Apache licenses.&#xA;The source code is not open source and all the third-party software is downloaded from Nuget as a reference (I'm not including the source code in my project or modyfing it).&#xA;Do I have to include some license information somewhere in my project or documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem as a trivial question, but I'm looking for direct answer for an hour now without success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="asdfok" LastActivityDate="2022-04-21T16:02:15.247" Title="How to include licenses for packages downloaded with Nuget?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10804" CreationDate="2020-11-23T17:15:29.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;NuGet's official docs have &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/msbuild-targets#packing-a-license-expression-or-a-license-file&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this section on including a license expression or file&lt;/a&gt;, if you're packing an SDK style project. License expression won't work for you, because I believe only open source licenses are included in the SPDX specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, in your project file, you'll need a property which tells NuGet what the path to the license file will be once packed, and an item to tell NuGet which file on disk to put in the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre class=&quot;lang-xml prettyprint-override&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;PropertyGroup&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;PackageLicenseFile&amp;gt;LICENSE.txt&amp;lt;/PackageLicenseFile&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/PropertyGroup&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;ItemGroup&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;None Include=&amp;quot;licenses\LICENSE.txt&amp;quot; Pack=&amp;quot;true&amp;quot; PackagePath=&amp;quot;&amp;quot;/&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/ItemGroup&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still using a nuspec file, &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/nuspec#license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; explains how to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9199" OwnerDisplayName="zivkan" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T17:15:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-26T01:25:36.030" Score="2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made a python library that imports an LGPL licensed python library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My library does not modify the LGPL library, but it cannot operate without the import.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my library a &amp;quot;combined work&amp;quot;, as defined in the LGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is, then regarding section 4.b of the LGPL license, do I include the GPL and LGPL license documents as text files? Is there a convention for naming these files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; The following post explains the concept of an LGPL combined work: &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitdepth.thomasrutter.com/2009/01/17/looking-at-the-lgpl-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Looking at the LGPL license&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas Rutter, 17 January 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding, my library does not qualify as a combined work, because I do not actually modify the LGPL library code, and I do not redistribute it. Is my interpretation correct? In my documentation, I suggest to the users of my library a modification that they can themselves make to the LGPL library to optimize performance. From my understanding, this is still not a combined work, because I do not actually distribute the LGPL library - I assume that the user already has access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume likewise that my library is not a combined library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer to the thread &lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/439136.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Using LGPL code for commercial application&lt;/a&gt;  (December 2004) seems to support my understanding that compliance with the LGPL library is in the distribution of my library. So my library can import the LGPL library, but the LGPL license does not force me to do anything because I do not modify and distribute the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please correct me if I'm wrong, or let me know if I am right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21146" LastEditorUserId="8601" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T16:27:03.080" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T16:27:03.080" Title="How to include license information for library that imports LGPL licensed library?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10899" CreationDate="2020-11-26T10:14:27.247" Score="2" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a marketing website using React and the ecosystem around it (Webpack, Babel, etc.). The site is shipped as a minified client-side bundle. NPM tells me there are a gazillion dependencies and sub-dependencies involved, some only during the build step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to attribute all dependencies including sub-dependencies and build-only dependencies? How would I attribute OSS that is involved? I wouldn't exactly want to shove this into our customers' faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I have never seen a giant OSS license disclaimer page on any website built with React or &amp;lt;popular front-end framework&amp;gt; before. Large-scale SaaS companies such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://stripe.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://stripe.com&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://shopify.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://shopify.com&lt;/a&gt; don't list the OSS that is part of their marketing pages products or I at least cannot find it (which is kinda the point of attribution, right?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: There are no copyleft licenses involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21150" LastEditorUserId="21150" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T10:44:40.983" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T12:05:03.713" Title="OSS Attribution for Marketing Site built with React" Tags="|attribution|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10802" CreationDate="2020-11-26T12:58:11.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can PGP be considered open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  It is a commercial proprietary licensed software.  Even PGP Corporation doesn't claim it is open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand GNU Privacy Guard (abbreviated GnuPG or GPG) which could be described as the FSF's implementation of the OpenPGP specification is definitely open source and has a GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13818" LastEditorUserId="13818" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T02:24:25.460" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T02:24:25.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10900" CreationDate="2020-11-26T17:46:18.990" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a large proprietary application, a portion of which is a collection of microservers written in Go. We're considering the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a Go microserver, with a GPL license, on top of a particular GPL'ed application's C API.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Call the server via REST or equivalent RPC (as we do all of our other microservers) from other application components.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd be more than happy to contribute the Go server to the community. Would this impose any requirement on us to GPL our own client code that calls this server?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21152" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T12:10:34.380" Title="License compliance for a closed source client calling open source server interface to open source library" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10821" CreationDate="2020-11-26T17:57:14.027" Score="4" ViewCount="2365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to package a piece of software which only states its licence through a file called LICENSE in its repository. Said file contains the GPL 3.0 verbatim. What isn't clear is whether this means &amp;quot;GPL-3.0-only&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;GPL-3.0-or-later&amp;quot;, so I wonder, which of these variants is the &amp;quot;default&amp;quot; one if it is not specified which the software is offered by the terms of? The source files do not specify any licencing information in their headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14633" LastEditorUserId="14633" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T14:36:47.017" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T14:36:47.017" Title="If a piece of software does not specify whether it is licenced under GPL 3.0 &quot;only&quot; or &quot;or-later&quot;, which variant does it &quot;default to&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10802" CreationDate="2020-11-26T21:34:01.940" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, if the source code is available but can only be legally used for testing or auditing purposes then yes it is open source, but it is NOT free software. This is basically the position that the Free Software Foundation has promoted ever since the term &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; was coined. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Their essay&lt;/a&gt; on the topic might be a little dated because today (as seen on this site) the popular definition of open source is essentially the same as the definition of Free Software given by the FSF, but it's still the position of the FSF:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official definition of “open source software” (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and is too long to include here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software. It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects. Nonetheless, their definition agrees with our definition in most cases.&#xA;However, the obvious meaning for the expression “open source software”—and the one most people seem to think it means—is “You can look at the source code.” That criterion is much weaker than the free software definition, much weaker also than the official definition of open source. It includes many programs that are neither free nor open source.&#xA;Since the obvious meaning for “open source” is not the meaning that its advocates intend, the result is that most people misunderstand the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest reasons to have source code available is to ensure that the software can be audited to ensure it doesn't have any security flaws or back doors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF and their GPL license is more about ensuring that a developer or a software corporation cannot profit from software by using a license and secret source code to ensure that the software cannot be copied and used or modified by someone else for free. So in their opinion any license that prevents someone from taking software and using it for themselves for free with full developer privileges is bad, and it isn't worthy of even being called open source, even if it is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21161" LastEditorUserId="21161" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T15:23:16.593" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T15:23:16.593" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10813" CreationDate="2020-11-26T23:18:48.447" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; phrases are a method of dual-licensing. All dual-licensing must be explicit. If you receive some software under one license that does not explicitly mention any other licenses, then you can only use and distribute it under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is best if the code itself names the license, there are many projects that do just include a LICENSE file. If that's what you have, and the license is GPL 3.0, then the answer is simple: you have not received dual-licensed code, and can only redistribute it under the GPL 3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T23:18:48.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2945" CreationDate="2020-11-26T23:52:20.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add my understanding of OSL 3.0.&#xA;The point is that OSL 3.0 license applies to &lt;em&gt;Derivative Works&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSL 3.0 Approach To Derivative Works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSL 3.0 is far simpler, with the entire copyright and copyleft bargain stated in a short  § 1 that echoes the provisions of 17 USC 106 and similar copyright laws. Section 1(a) authorizes licensees to make &amp;quot;copies [of the Original Work], either alone or as part of a collective work&amp;quot;, and § 1(b) authorizes licensees &amp;quot;to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the Original Work, thereby creating derivative works (&amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot;) based upon the Original Work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then § 1(c) requires any copies of that Original Work and any Derivative Works that are distributed to be distributed under OSL 3.0 and, for those works, the Licensor promises to provide Source Code [§ 3]. In this way, the OSL 3.0 license remains with the work and all its subsequent versions, and that software always remains open source. That's reciprocity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of Derivative Works in § 1(b) is particularly important. For one thing, that defined term includes no reference whatsoever to linking or to any other technical manner of making programs interoperate. The verbs used in § 1(b) [&amp;quot;translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange&amp;quot;] reflect the kinds of activities that we generally do to create derivative literary or other expressive works, and those things—not functional linking—create Derivative Works as defined in this license. As a result, linking an unchanged Original Work with another independently-written work does not, absent more, create a Derivative Work subject to § 1(b); such an act is merely the incorporation of a copy of that Original Work into a collective work, authorized by § 1(a).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source Code Disclosure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the Source Code of the Original Work or the Source Code of a modified (altered, etc.) Derivative Work must be disclosed. [§§ 1(c), 3] The GPLv2 and GPLv3 ambiguities about linking are gone from OSL 3.0. The avoidance of technical terms of art such as &amp;quot;linking&amp;quot; and a definition of &amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot; that relies on well-understood copyright verbs, are some of the reasons why OSL 3.0 imposes a less-burdensome reciprocity requirement than GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;·       &lt;strong&gt;If linking (by whatever technical means) can be accomplished by making and using unmodified copies of the Original Work, then 1(a) and 1(c) permit that; only the Source Code of the Original Work must be disclosed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;·       &lt;strong&gt;Otherwise, if modifications (or alterations, etc.) to the Original Work create a Derivative Work, then 1(b) and 1(c) permit that; only the Source Code of the modified (or altered, etc.) Derivative Work must be disclosed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;·       As for independent works (in the copyright sense), or the independent components of collective works, the OSL 3.0 grant of copyright license in § 1 does not affect those works at all or place any source code requirements upon them. That independent source code need not be disclosed. In this respect, OSL 3.0 is more like LGPL than GPL in its effect, although it accomplishes that with far fewer words and far less uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made the most interesting part of the text in bold style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OroCRM is a CRM system built with extensibility in mind.&#xA;There's no need to modify it's source code in order to change the way it works.&#xA;In other words there's no need to create a &lt;em&gt;Derivative Work&lt;/em&gt; from the &lt;em&gt;Original Work&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So according to the license you are free to build your solution on top of OroCRM (if you're not going to modify its code) and provide access to it via SaaS without a need to make your solution Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21164" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T23:52:20.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10817" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10820" CreationDate="2020-11-27T01:35:22.400" Score="2" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an MIT licensed project and I want to use a BSD-3 library as a package. The BSD-3 library will only be used for implementation purposes, so the users of the MIT project will not be able to use it directly. No files will be copied from the BSD-3 library, just the package used via a build tool (e.g. Gradle) that will be hosted on maven central, so the compile can pass. Furthermore, I will be publishing the MIT project on maven central as a package, and from there on, people can do whatever they want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that possible? Or I must change the MIT to BSD-3? I know that if something is licensed under BSD-3 it can't be re-licensed into MIT (although the opposite is true), but does the same apply with linking too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I open up a .txt file in the MIT project and start writting code. In that code I make calls to functions that exist in the BSD-3 library, but there are no implementations, no packages and definitely&#xA;no function copy pasting from the BSD-3 libary to the MIT project, just characters in a .txt file. Of course, it will not pass the compile because of missing function definitions.&#xA;The question here is: Am I really using the BSD-3 library? Am I obligated to its license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the anwser is: Yes you are using the BSD-3 library and therefore you are obligated by its license, then the anwser to the main question is that I can't link a BSD-3 library to an MIT project. But, if the answer here is No, then there just might be hope, so let me demonstrate the next case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a file that does not compile is useless, so you add a non-transitive depedency on the BSD-3 library, so the compiler can actually understand all those function calls.&#xA;Does that depedency addition make it impossible for the project to be MIT licensed? Isn't a depedency like saying: &amp;quot;Hey, this is code with some symbols in it that make no sense. But, you can make sense of them using that library, here's the link to it.&amp;quot;. I guess, declearing a depedency does not count as redistributing the libary, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user20241" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:15:35.493" Title="Can I link a BSD-3 library to an MIT project?" Tags="|licensing|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T05:22:57.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;This risks offending some. I don't mean to. I'm seriously wondering about this. And it's not at all specifically about PHP; it's just that this is such a major, critical software project which is beyond important to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, PHP 8 was finally released as &amp;quot;GA&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;General Availability&amp;quot;). That means it has gone through numerous alpha, then beta, then &amp;quot;release candidate&amp;quot; stages, each one supposedly being tested by tons of people all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as I had updated (from 7.4.12), the error log started getting flooded with errors related to &lt;code&gt;imap_msgno()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Bad message number&lt;/code&gt;. I've already separately asked about this specific issue, searched around all over, and tried to solve it myself by wasting hours upon hours of my time and energy trying to at least temporarily &amp;quot;patch&amp;quot; it. Nothing works. It makes no sense. The error shouldn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the changelog, nothing indicates any changes to this function. Yet my code worked perfectly for years with tons of different PHP versions, until now with PHP 8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like something which must have been found out if people actually test the pre-GA releases of PHP. But do they actually?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is this just a &amp;quot;show&amp;quot; which looks good but in reality, only an extremely small number of people ever run these pre-release, unstable versions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't blame them -- after all, I don't, myself. And for good reasons. I don't want to subject my data to horrible bugs and glitches which corrupt/leak/mess with it. But somebody must do it... right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time that this happens. Some version of PHP 7 caused a pretty serious glitch which also seems to me like it would've been found out if people had actually tried it before the &amp;quot;sharp&amp;quot; release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I'm not complaining that others aren't subjecting themselves (and their users/dependents) to all this pain to spare me from it. I'm just very skeptical to the idea that there's this large, enthusiastic crowd all over the world hard-testing each release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is particularly unfortunate because it's a new MAJOR version of the language. I was genuinely very excited for this long-awaited milestone, and now it feels awful if I have to downgrade back to 7.4.12 and wait for 8.1 or something for this bug to be fixed. The IMAP functions are not obscure but integral for many, and I don't even understand how a bug like this can happen when there were no changes to the functions I use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21167" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:06:22.617" Title="Is the entire beta/release candidate process of open source projects mostly just &quot;for show&quot;?" Tags="|source-code|project-management|collaboration|community|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10818" CreationDate="2020-11-27T07:32:50.523" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this question is going to survive the community much longer, but I personally think it contains a genuine question that admits of an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PHP8 isn't in any major distro yet (that I'm aware of).  I see that some custom build repositories like &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpms.remirepo.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Remi's Repo&lt;/a&gt; have it available, but it's not the default version even for users of those repos; it'll be some months, I should think, before PHP8 makes it through the distros' slow-turning wheels into major use.  If you were complaining about having just installed Fedora 35 (which I am assuming will be the first version of Fedora to carry PHP8, and which won't release until October 2021, &lt;em&gt;ceteris paribus&lt;/em&gt;) then my answer might be somewhat different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software has bugs; it's a fact of life.  As the distro people import these new versions, and &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; development communities (the rawhide users, Remi's users, and the like) find the bugs, more fixes will make their way back to upstream.  By the time it's been through that mill, the PHP that makes it out to ordinary end-users like me will be much refined.  &lt;strong&gt;That is the free software life-cycle&lt;/strong&gt;; you seem to be confusing it with the life-cycle of commercial software (though in my experience that often goes general-release with some pretty nasty bugs in it, which is why seasoned sysadmins don't install .0 versions of &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; on production kit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say all this not to make light of your frustration, but to clarify that &lt;strong&gt;by downloading and building PHP8 on the day of general release, you are an early-adopter&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it has gone through numerous alpha, then beta, then &amp;quot;release candidate&amp;quot; stages, each one supposedly being tested by tons of people all over the world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who, exactly, are these tons of people supposed to be?  We've established that, by the normal lifecycle and release flow of free code, you're an early adopter.  PHP8 has been available in one form or another since &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/php/php-src/releases/tag/php-8.0.0alpha1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;8.0.0alpha1&lt;/a&gt; on 23 June, but if I understand you correctly this is the first time you've tried to engage with it.  &lt;strong&gt;You are exactly the sort of person whose ability and experience would have been invaluable to the project for building alpha, beta, and release-candidate versions and feeding experiences and bug reports back&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with nearly every other group of free software developers, the PHP people aren't malicious, slipshod, or uninterested; they wouldn't knowingly and deliberately ship general-release code that had show-stopper bugs in it.  But they're only human, and can test only a finite number of scenarios on a finite number of setups.  Every project relies on a peripheral circle of people who have the interest and ability to build development versions and test them in their own setups, feeding back the bugs they find so they can be reproduced, triaged, and hopefully fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take your point about not wanting to corrupt your data, but (a) I really hope you have backups, because dodgy versions of PHP aren't the only things that can corrupt it, and (b) virtualisation/containerisation is now routine, and allows everyone and his dog to have development copies of their production environments, which are ideal for testing this sort of thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think my point is: you're exactly the sort of person who has the ability and the desire to build and test development versions of PHP.  If you aren't engaging with the PHP development process, what makes you think there are thousands of other people with the same skillset who will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T08:06:22.617" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:06:22.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10817" CreationDate="2020-11-27T08:15:35.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your MIT project makes calls to a BSD-3 library, then you are using that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the MIT and BSD-3 licenses are both permissive licenses that don't put any restriction on how code that is covered by them can be used. There certainly isn't any requirement that library code can only be used by code under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And calling a function from a library does not change it's license in any way. The license covers under what conditions you may create copies and make changes to the code, but calling a function is something else than making a change to the function's implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:15:35.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10813" CreationDate="2020-11-27T08:31:51.410" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 license itself states on the topic of later versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;14. Revised Versions of this License.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section explicitly mentions two cases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No version number mentioned: You can choose any published version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot; phrase is present: You can choose the referenced version or a later version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case that a version number is mentioned but without the &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot; phrase is not explicitly mentioned in the license text, but the most logical conclusion that follows from the cases that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; mentioned is that this should be interpreted as &amp;quot;mentioned version only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If a piece of software states it is under the GPL 3.0, without the phrase &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot;, then it is GPL-3.0-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:31:51.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10813" CreationDate="2020-11-27T09:54:03.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source files do not specify any licensing information in their headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, there is an argument to be made that the files are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; licensed under the GPL at all, so the question as to whether it is &amp;quot;GPL v3 only&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;GPL v3 or any later version&amp;quot; becomes moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That probably isn't what the person releasing the code intended, but I would personally be wary of using any code which contains this kind of ambiguity about its license status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T09:54:03.993" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T09:54:27.413" Score="2" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;My closed-source java project uses dependencies with Apache License (Apache Commons etc.). The license permits it fully to my understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, that because of some technical decisions, the delivery version is shaded, producing a single target jar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do such a jar constitutes a 'derivative product', or it is considered static linking, as long as the package structure is unaffected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I handle the licenses? In most libraries, it's META-INF/LICENSE.txt, and it's overwritten by shade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8922" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T12:05:17.073" Title="Shading dependencies with Apache License" Tags="|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T11:26:30.777" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose my project A is licensed under AGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I choose to include stuff (a filter list actually) from different sources, which are licensed under GPLv2, CC-BY 4.0, and I have combined them in a single (pickle) file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I go about it? Do I need to show every addition, deletion, etc. to the list? Or just providing the pickled file (having the python set) is enough with GPLv2 license provided with the file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21174" LastEditorUserId="21174" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T11:42:53.210" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T11:42:53.210" Title="How do I go about having stuff licensed differently in a project licensed under a different license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|relicensing|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10823" CreationDate="2020-11-27T12:05:17.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of technologies you use for distribution, you must comply with the license. The Apache license requires that you include a copy the license text + NOTICE file with your software. The appropriate mechanism for this could be the JAR's META-INF system, but it might be more appropriate to (additionally) put copies into your software's documentation or an integrated help system. If the previous LICENSE file is overwritten, you should perhaps add the original licenses back explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb: wherever you assert your own copyright (license files, splash screens), you should also mention third-party copyright in bundled software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When shading Apache-2.0 licensed dependencies, you are modifying these dependencies and are additionally required to add “prominent notices” to this effect, see clause 4(b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your JAR contains the libraries, the JAR can reasonably be understood as a derivative work of all the libraries and your own code, regardless of static vs dynamic linking discussions (that likely have no legal relevance anyway). An alternative view would be that a JAR is just a ZIP archive that contains different libraries alongside each other. However, that would not free you from having to comply with the Apache license – you would still have to include the license + notices. For Apache, your obligations are pretty much the same in either case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T12:05:17.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T13:33:47.347" Score="-2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I distribute my software for free, under the MIT licence.  This says there is no warranty, but in some jurisdictions there is a mandatory warranty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.accc.gov.au/business/treating-customers-fairly/offering-warranties/warranties-against-defects#warranties-against-defects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.accc.gov.au/business/treating-customers-fairly/offering-warranties/warranties-against-defects#warranties-against-defects&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index_en.htm&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these laws can I issue a $0 refund?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21088" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T15:28:53.227" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T07:23:29.430" Title="Refund laws in europe and austrailia" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10802" CreationDate="2020-11-27T15:34:09.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is open source. It is not free, but it IS open source. Such distinctions have been noted for decades. Just because OSI says one thing has NO bearing on the literal meaning. Some people here claim the &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; definition of open source is not met by the condition you specify, but such people are willfully deciding what SUB-population decides what is popular. Sorry, but PLENTY of people have an interest in understanding or auditing code without modifying it, publishing it, or using it. Just because those people are ignored by a lot of folks responding here does not eliminate the usefulness of literal open source software that you cannot reproduce but nonetheless you can read. For example, take voting machines. If you could read voting machine code, you could learn to trust it. That is a VERY critical issue, certainly not trivial. And if the voting machine code were openly shared, despite any strong protections, then it would be OPEN SOURCE. My phone backup software from Samsung is not published. It is not open source. If they published it - if it was open source - I would be able to figure out the format of the data. With that, I could selectively access the data for backup retrieval without needing to modify, sell, or even reuse their code. I could care less if that is not enough for someone else who DOES want to modify or borrow their code. If I had such open source from Samsung, I would be THRILLED. It would still be useful and still be OPEN SOURCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21178" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T15:34:09.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10829" CreationDate="2020-11-28T04:05:58.393" Score="-1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've scraped tonnes of sites. I'm making these datasets for public use. I've been using GPL-v3 license for other software tasks but I don't know what license should I put for datasets. I prefer a strong copyleft license, would somebody recommend what license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21184" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T08:44:52.890" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T13:51:59.203" Title="What license should I put in my datasets?" Tags="|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10828" CreationDate="2020-11-28T13:51:59.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The person(s) who went through a creative process to create the data are the ones that hold the copyrights to the data and they are the people that get to determine under what license they want to publish their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the data in the data sets are just simple facts that are recorded without any creativity involved, like measurements of physical properties or sports results, then the data is not protected by copyrights at all and nobody can impose a license on that data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, depending on the type of data in your datasets, either it is not covered by copyrights and can't be licensed, or you need to ask the person who created the data for what license &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; prefer to have on the data. And that could very well be that you are not allowed to distribute the data at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T13:51:59.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10826" CreationDate="2020-11-28T14:23:18.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under those warranty laws, you are required to repair or replace faulty goods or you must give a (partial or full) refund if the goods turn out to be irreparable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, those laws refer to goods, as in primarily physical products. I am not sure to what extent a software-only product is actually covered by those laws. (Edit: Based on the comments, it appears they are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that software-only products do fall under those laws, then they would first require you to fix any bugs that are reported by consumers and to provide the fixed version to those consumers at no cost. As your product is already zero cost, your compliance to the law would be met if you take bug reports seriously and give feedback about updated versions. You would be fulfilling your obligations by replacing the faulty product with a repaired one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T07:23:29.430" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T07:23:29.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-29T05:10:26.863" Score="5" ViewCount="1084" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name would suggest it's not FOSS, but source available, which is a pretty low bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I read about it, they seem to suggest that it's really only source available for specific use cases being monetized by Redis Labs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, technically speaking, what's the right classification for RSAL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="19026" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T10:04:24.927" Title="What kind of license is Redis' RSAL (Redis Source Available License)?" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|cloud|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10743" CreationDate="2020-11-29T08:46:21.410" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the newly created files will be owned by the original copyright holder(because he owns the whole repository), or the files that I created will be owned by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each author owns the copyright in each element of protectable expression that they authored, until or unless they assign that right to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case I will be the owner of all the files that I created, can I add a copyright notice at the top of each file containg my name in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a file contains significant protectable expression that you authored, it is entirely appropriate (though not required) for you to add a copyright notice informing the world of this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T08:46:21.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10831" CreationDate="2020-11-29T10:04:24.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there is a kind of classification for open-source licenses, the classifications don't really extend beyond open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best classification that I can come up with for the RSAL is that it is a source-available license that allows usages that don't compete with Redis Lab's business. But that classification of course only contains the one license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T10:04:24.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10801" CreationDate="2020-11-29T21:11:26.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not modify any of those modules; I want to publish the .py file only (no binaries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you will not be &lt;em&gt;including copies of&lt;/em&gt; numpy and Matplotlib, then you need not concern yourself with their permissive licenses. Neither license imposes restrictions on derivative works such as your script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see this, let's start by walking through the BSD license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [year] [someone]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a standard line indicating that [someone] published this in [year] and they own the copyright. It doesn't make very much legal difference in practice, because that is already the default state of affairs anyway. Under modern law, nearly everywhere on Earth, copyright automatically vests the moment you save a file to your hard drive. A notice such as this does provide a few ancillary legal benefits (such as making it harder for infringers to claim they did not realize the file was copyrighted), but it does not cause the file to become copyrighted, because that is automatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are doing (probably) qualifies as &amp;quot;use,&amp;quot; so it is permitted if you follow the remaining instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inapplicable. You don't plan on &lt;em&gt;redistributing&lt;/em&gt; source code. All the source code you will distribute is original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inapplicable. You don't plan on distributing binaries at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inapplicable. You have not indicated that you plan to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A warranty disclaimer in ALL CAPS]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically just means &amp;quot;don't sue us if the code causes a problem.&amp;quot; You should &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; include a similar disclaimer in your publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's do the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [year] [someone]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit more explicit than the BSD license, but it clearly grants you permission for the things you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you're not distributing a &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;substantial portion&lt;/em&gt; of the library, so this does not apply to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Another warranty disclaimer]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we come to the PSF license, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html#psf-license-agreement-for-python-release&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;slightly longer&lt;/a&gt;, but ultimately it comes down to the same legal analysis we've seen twice already: You are not doing anything which would trigger any of the specific requirements of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; You can distribute your script under whatever terms you choose. If you want to package numpy or Matplotlib with your script, then you need to include their licenses, but they do not &amp;quot;infect&amp;quot; the rest of your distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:11:26.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-30T04:45:19.047" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a developed a Book using outputs from parts of code from a MIT licence repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where would I show or put the copyright licence? On the product? Or create a website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or because it is not longer software the MIT licence is invalid? Alongside the physical book, I will also be publishing a digital copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, the book does not contain the code but is derived from the output from the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21203" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T21:03:55.633" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T21:03:55.633" Title="Licensing for a physical product developed from MIT code" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-11-30T07:50:07.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do not distribute the source or the programme itself of an MIT-licensed programme, you do not have to show the copyright license. If you like to acknowledge the software's role in creation of the book, do that in its acknowledgement section, possibly with a link to the sources (that's the decent thing to do, IMHO).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; is short and IMHO hard to mis-understand. Excerpt quote of the relevant paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such: place it (or better keep it) where you distribute the software with which you created the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T08:00:04.890" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T08:00:04.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10417" CreationDate="2020-11-30T15:38:13.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Implications of using GPL-licensed client-side JavaScript?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gets explained very well on this page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://greendrake.info/#nfy0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://greendrake.info/#nfy0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does using JavaScript code on a website constitute distribution of the code to the website visitors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GPL'ed client-side JavaScript &amp;quot;infect&amp;quot; the server-side code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to GPL my client-side JavaScript code if I am using a GPL'ed library in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.Yes.No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20452" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T15:44:22.643" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T15:44:22.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10848" CreationDate="2020-11-30T21:12:24.970" Score="2" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use in my program (closed source code) binary (GPL v3) which is used by execute it with parameters and read output/log of this execution. Can I do it? If yes, what information should I include to my software if I have to? Of course my software will distributed with included binary (GPL v3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21210" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T06:58:11.390" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T06:58:11.390" Title="Can my proprietary program use a GPLv3 binary?" Tags="|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-01T00:41:45.333" Score="13" ViewCount="9582" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to start an MIT licensed project for a Web Server like Apache and Nginx, but primarily targeting the Windows Platform. Those that don't understand open source software are calling me crazy to do such a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question that comes up is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT licensed project and killing me off?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if by that time, I have an established brand, the large company can 'out market' and 'out brand' me as they have more money to spend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" LastEditorUserId="15302" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T23:55:15.220" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T16:38:49.693" Title="What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT project and killing me off?" Tags="|mit|software-development|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2020-12-01T07:00:09.630" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not much which would disallow that. The MIT license is pretty liberal and as long as one obeys the requirement to display the copyright notice in the product appropriately, there's not much one could do against that other than offering the better product and/or service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the excellent answer by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/175/congusbongus&quot;&gt;congusbongus&lt;/a&gt; in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1165/examples-of-companies-undercutting-smaller-companies-using-foss&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt; as well as the answer by Eric. Marketing/Advertising is not everything, especially in the vicinity of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="21233" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T23:05:35.710" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T23:05:35.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2020-12-01T10:22:47.560" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, this is against the spirit of open source; if you don't want people exploiting your work without paying you, don't use open source licenses in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rebranding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, you do have one option: you can protect the branding itself by registering the name as a trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Red Hat&amp;quot; is a trademark. Other people can't call their releases &amp;quot;Red Hat&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source components of Red Hat Linux (almost all of which are from third parties anyway) have been released as &amp;quot;Fedora&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Centos&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT licensed project for a Web Server like Apache and Nginx, but primarily targeting the Windows Platform&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there might be some people who want to use it, the commercial market for it is likely to be absolutely tiny and the main deterrent to other companies will be the lack of customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I worked on one of the last third party closed source cross-platform webservers, Zeus, in the early 2000s, and even then it was obvious that Apache were going to dominate except where performance was absolutely critical. The main question you'll face is why to use your webserver rather than IIS - or as is popular these days, a standalone app running node.js or Razor Pages etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="583" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T10:22:47.560" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2020-12-02T01:33:06.210" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &amp;quot;Business Model Generation&amp;quot; by Alexander Osterwalder helped me understand a) how businesses actually work, b) how selling software actually works, and c) how open-source companies (among others) do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7723797-business-model-generation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7723797-business-model-generation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, any company is going to need developers, maintainers, and marketing. In an open-source company, the development and maintenance is partially pushed onto others, and a significant part of the core business becomes about building loyalty, trust, and a following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think hard about what your role would be in a successful open-source company - there are several options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20757" LastEditorUserId="20757" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T12:18:21.637" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T12:18:21.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10847" CreationDate="2020-12-02T03:53:08.153" Score="-1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Visit about:preferences on firefox and search fonts.Almost every font that is listed is proprietory.How does firefox use them though they are open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21109" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T04:44:27.227" Title="How does firefox use proprietory fonts?" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10846" CreationDate="2020-12-02T04:44:27.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those fonts aren't part of Firefox. They're your computer's system fonts. There's no rule that says open-source programs can't use proprietary resources that happen to be available on the system where they're installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11403" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T04:44:27.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10840" CreationDate="2020-12-02T06:52:47.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends a bit on how your program and the GPL program communicate with each other, but most likely you can do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF uses the concept of communication &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot; and when two programs communicate at arm's length with each other, then they are considered independent programs whose copyright licenses don't affect each other. Two programs communicate at arm's length if they use a communication mechanism that is typical for communicating between independently running programs (commandline arguments and stdin/stdout are examples of that) and if the two programs don't communicate complex data structures. It is that latter part which I can't tell from the question, but it is a-typical to communicate complex data structures over stdin/stdout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it must really be two programs, which means that the end-user must be able to replace the GPL program with a different version after the package has been installed on their system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the information you need to include, you must include a copy of the GPLv3 license that comes with the GPL program and you must tell your users how/where they can obtain a copy of the GPL source code. For the GPLv3, that could be a link to the project/repository where you obtained the binary from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T06:52:47.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T15:56:02.100" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a project, licensed under terms similar to CC BY-NC-SA. It is not open source by definition, as no commercial use is allowed. I can of course put it on GitHub, and make the source code open to the public. If I am the only copyright holder there is no problem. However, what about if there are public contributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In detail, my question is, if there is a way to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply acceptance of the code to be licensed under the same non-open source license; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply an unconditional, solely transfer of copyright to the project owner; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use signed statement/agreement upon contribution to achieve the above purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the scope of this question is about legal feasibility. It does not involve 'whether anyone would be like to be such a contributor' or 'if such practice is good or bad in terms of business or community'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21229" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T07:00:42.080" Title="Is it legally possible to accept public contributions under a non-open source license?" Tags="|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T21:49:22.983" Score="7" ViewCount="1487" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are already lots of questions about FFmpeg licensing but I could not find one for my specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making an application which is able to play video files using FFmpeg (through a LPGL component &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/unosquare/ffmediaelement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ffmediaelement&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently use binaries from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds/releases&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I picked a release with the following name: win64-&lt;strong&gt;lgpl&lt;/strong&gt;-shared-4.3.zip&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is &lt;strong&gt;only for decoding&lt;/strong&gt; I have three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it ok to use this library with closed source software (I guess LGPL allows it)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any codec licensing issue (x264 and x265 are disabled)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I distribute the binaries with my application or at worst provide a link to let the user download them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any help, this is so difficult to understand this matter!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I cannot afford to hire a lawyer ...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21234" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T08:03:56.483" LastActivityDate="2023-01-26T08:03:56.483" Title="Using FFmpeg only for decoding in closed source commercial application" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|patents|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10849" CreationDate="2020-12-03T07:00:42.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply acceptance of the code to be licensed under the same non-open source license; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt; is a copyleft licence, this will probably work.  s3b1 requires anyone sharing an adapted version of the work - which would include a contribution or patch derived therefrom - to do so under CC BY-NC-SA &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;or a BY-NC-SA Compatible License&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  That last is the wrinkle that would make me nervous about using the licence to achieve this, as you might end up having to track a bunch of compatible licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply an unconditional, solely transfer of copyright to the project owner; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  I believe that some jurisdictions require copyright assignments to be in writing, and therefore explicit.  Even when this is not the case, a click-through assignment is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1882/458&quot;&gt;thought to be unreliable&lt;/a&gt;, so a mere licence statement noting that such an assignment has implicitly happened would be hard to defend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*use signed statement/agreement upon contribution to achieve the above purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the gold standard, the common and well-understood practice, and the route I'd advise you to take.  You don't need to go for a full copyright assignment: a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that specifies that contributions are made under CC BY-NC-SA, possibly also including a clause that permits you to relicense if you wish to retain that ability, will suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the answer linked above notes, it doesn't need to be a hand-signed agreement; digital signatures will generally do, and have the handy side-effect that the crypto keys exchanged as part of the process can be usefully used for other purposes (signing contributions, securely distributing secrets, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T07:00:42.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2020-12-03T10:22:19.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a book on FreeBSD 20 years ago.  And today I make money from Windows Desktop, Windows Server, Ubuntu and FreeBSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to keep in mind that Windows Server costs money so nobody is going to buy it just to bang around on and have fun with.  They buy it because they have an app that lists it as a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You take for example Clearview software, they have products that require Windows Server + IIS + SQL Server.  (SQL Express works fine)  However, IIS, as you know is a very poor web server for a lot of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, Microsoft supports it like the dickens.  If a developer at Clearview runs into a problem they pick up the phone and call Microsoft and Microsoft goes out of their way to fix the problem maybe even doing significant programming work for the Clearview developer.  That is why Clearview doesn't support Oracle or Apache on Windows or any of that; just Microsoft products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though you hand out the code for a free Windows web server, since IIS ships at no cost with Windows Server already, it is zero-cost vs zero-cost and the decision will then be made on who provides more support.  And that's Microsoft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a huge need for OSS on Windows.  But not for products that go head to head against Microsoft products that are zero-cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21238" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T10:27:14.117" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T10:27:14.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2020-12-03T12:56:29.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a liberal license as MIT usually means you assume one of the two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your project will stay most popular, because you do most of the work and add nice features and forks will only follow your lead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do not care about someone forking off. When someone wants to improve your product, why shouldn't they? They do work for you (and other users), so what did you lose from someone else investing work into your project (even when it is rebranded)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want strong guarantees that you will be able to keep up by using their additions in your product as well, you need to use a strong copyleft license like the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastEditorUserId="8162" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T16:38:49.693" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T16:38:49.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-03T14:37:01.990" Score="4" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;... there came one question up in my mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can ActiveState forbid me to use python versions downloaded from this page &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/downloads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.python.org/downloads/&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially for Windows and Linux?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask, because they are listed as authors in the license.txt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken from here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.0/python-3.9.0-embed-win32.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.0/python-3.9.0-embed-win32.zip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Ioi Kim Lam.&#xA;Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Tix&#xA;Project Group. Copyright (c) 2004 ActiveState&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software is copyrighted by the above entities and other parties.&#xA;The following terms apply to all files associated with the software&#xA;unless explicitly disclaimed in individual files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors hereby grant permission to use, copy, modify, distribute,&#xA;and license this software and its documentation for any purpose,&#xA;provided that existing copyright notices are retained in all copies&#xA;and that this notice is included verbatim in any distributions. No&#xA;written agreement, license, or royalty fee is required for any of the&#xA;authorized uses. Modifications to this software may be copyrighted by&#xA;their authors and need not follow the licensing terms described here,&#xA;provided that the new terms are clearly indicated on the first page of&#xA;each file where they apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21242" LastEditorUserId="21242" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T15:19:08.217" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T15:52:42.610" Title="Can ActiveState forbid me to use python?" Tags="|copyright|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10854" CreationDate="2020-12-03T15:05:24.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not by virtue of exercising the copyright on their contributions, no.  They could if you were an employee of theirs, or if they had some other valid grounds for being able to forbid you, but not simply by virtue of their copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ActiveState have already unilaterally granted you the right to use that code through the above licensing declaration.  Like all free licences, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;that licence is irrevocable&lt;/a&gt; once you've relied on it, which you have done by availing yourself of a copy.  The PSF could suddenly decide to cease distribution of Python altogether, but that wouldn't affect the licence status of copies already distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T15:52:42.610" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T15:52:42.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10850" CreationDate="2020-12-03T18:19:05.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are you trying to row upstream on this?  If you cannot afford the legal advice then do the right thing and isolate the GPL stuff from your software - have your software exec the video decoding part of it that's compiled with GPL code.  Then point your product's installer to wherever the binaries are along with documentation on how to obtain and install the binaries for years later from now when the hoster of the binaries takes them away and your installer can't download them anymore.  Many programs do this for example &amp;quot;rufus&amp;quot; does this with the different Linux bootloader codes it downloads them behind the scenes if the user needs them.  As a benefit to this your users can recompile the video playing portion with the x264/265 portions enabled if they have videos in those formats and they don't care about licensing issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21238" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T18:19:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10850" CreationDate="2020-12-04T07:40:55.617" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is only for decoding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is irrelevant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to use this library with closed source software (I guess LGPL allows it)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL and GPL don't forbid any &lt;strong&gt;usage&lt;/strong&gt;, so clearly yes. Those licenses impose restrictions for the &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of software, not for their usage,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any codec licensing issue (x264 and x265 are disabled)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should check if you are using some of the optional parts of ffmepg which are under GPL. Check the licensing docs which comes with ffmpeg, it contains a list of those parts. Don't expect others to do this for you, only you know precisely which parts of ffmpeg you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the binaries with my application or at worst provide a link to let the user download them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can distribute the unmodified binaries of a library under LGPL together with your application without the need to put the latter under LGPL or make your product Open Source. You need to do this in a form, however, that a user can always replace the LGPL lib by another version if they like to. Check and follow the exact license terms which are coming with ffmpeg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GPL stuff, you have to be more careful, but if you distribute a software which has the &lt;em&gt;optional&lt;/em&gt; feature of using GPL modules which you don't distribute by yourself, but let the user of your application download and install by himself, you are usually safe (but beware, IANAL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I picked a release with the following name: win64-lgpl-shared&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the name, I would expect that is what you are after - a version without the GPL parts, as a shared library (which might be exchanged later). But you should either check by yourself that this package contains what this name pretends, or ask in an ffmpeg forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://video.stackexchange.com/questions/14802/can-i-use-ffmpeg-in-a-commercial-product&quot;&gt;Can I use FFmpeg in a commercial product?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FFmpeg License and Legal Considerations&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="2402" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T09:04:52.410" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T09:04:52.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10731" CreationDate="2020-12-04T09:10:39.533" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Firefox is 100% open source.&#xA;Its source code is available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding to Mureinik's answer, here is few additional information on open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important part for any open source project is its license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Making a source code available in the public domain doesn't make a software open source.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The author(s) has to give the permissions to the user to freely use it, modify it, and redistribute it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This permission can be given by adding any Open Source License to the source code. It is generally a file with the name LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firefox is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt; open source license.&#xA;Thus it allows us to freely use it, modify it, and redistribute it, hence it 100% open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21252" LastEditorUserId="21252" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T18:32:50.207" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T18:32:50.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-04T12:07:50.433" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that it is commonly believed that cooking recipes and &amp;quot;software recipes&amp;quot; (source codes) differ from other kinds of potentially-computer-memorized-data (such as a romantic song or a romantic book and so forth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does a &lt;em&gt;cooking recipe&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;software recipe&lt;/em&gt; (source code) differ from other kinds of data in general and works of art in particular?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Why are &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; more subjected to &amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; approaches than, say - songs, books, movies and series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21255" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T12:07:50.433" Title="How does a cooking recipe and a software recipe (source code) differ from other kinds of data?" Tags="|software|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10886" CreationDate="2020-12-04T16:28:10.820" Score="4" ViewCount="1030" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that both are similar in terms of copyleft (at file-level), compatibility with GPL family of licenses (only the first derivative of the files would need to be dual-licensed under the terms of both GPL and [E/M]PL), patent grants, and trademark use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference I know is MPLv2 code is also implicitly licensed under any future versions of the MPL license (and these future versions of the MPL can only be released under the stewardship of the Mozilla Foundation), whereas EPLv2 has no such requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some other differences which need to be considered when choosing MPLv2 and EPLv2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21257" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T12:25:13.947" Title="What are some differences between MPLv2 and EPLv2?" Tags="|mpl|epl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-05T09:56:48.400" Score="-1" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Password vaults, which utilize public and (likely passwordized) private keys to host and protect &lt;em&gt;principally-non-human-memorized-passwords&lt;/em&gt;, are a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SaaS&lt;/a&gt; that remotely  stores and supplies password data to a user over a network. They have become quite common in the last five years; I even had a case when two information security &amp;quot;experts&amp;quot; (the best word I can use two describe them in that context) were surprised to know that I don't use a password vault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Richard Stallman (who is the founder of the FSF) is totally against SaaS, so I ask:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Does the Free Software Foundation's definition of &amp;quot;Free Software&amp;quot; disallow the use of password vaults (which are always SaaS)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21265" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T03:31:24.907" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T14:53:54.703" Title="Does Free Software Foundation's guidance about SaaS disallow usage of password vaults?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2020-12-05T12:23:49.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: under the FSF's definitions, I'd say the remote storage of encrypted passwords is too simple and too secured of an operation to count as problematic SaaS. However, modern password managers may do much more than this core functionality, which could run contrary to the FSF's recommendations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy//po/who-does-that-server-really-serve.ko-en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FSF regards SaaS as an issue&lt;/a&gt; that is distinct from proprietary software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SaaS and proprietary software lead to similar harmful results, but the causal mechanisms are different. With proprietary software, the cause is that you have and use a copy which is difficult or illegal to change. With SaaS, the cause is that you use a copy you don't have. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaS will be solved by developing free software for servers. [...] But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect you as the server's user from the effects of SaaS. They give freedom to the operator, but not to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF's issues might be restated as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With SaaS, you give away your data to an external operator, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You cannot modify a SaaS offering, even if the source code is free (instead, you must modify the free code and make your &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; service), so your computing done on someone else's service is done in a way that you cannot control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the FSF makes it clear that not all network services are objectionable SaaS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does avoiding SaaS mean you refuse to use any network servers run by anyone other than you? Not at all. Most servers do not raise this issue, because the job you do with them isn't your own computing except in a trivial sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original purpose of web servers wasn't to do computing for you, it was to publish information for you to access. Even today this is what most web sites do, and it doesn't pose the SaaS problem, because accessing someone's published information isn't a matter of doing your own computing. Neither is publishing your own materials via a blog site or a microblogging service such as Twitter or identi.ca. The same goes for communication not meant to be private, such as chat groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, could the remote components of a password vault be said to be &amp;quot;doing your computing for you&amp;quot; in any substantial way? It seems like a password vault service has two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A client to generate, encrypt, decrypt, and output your passwords&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A service to store and serve encrypted passwords to the client&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Functionality #1 has no network component, so we can be sure it is not problematic SaaS. #2 handles an extremely simply use case that neatly matches the FSF's acceptable use of a network service &amp;quot;publish[ing] information for you to access&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Functionality #2 needs only to store encrypted blobs of data. It is possible for a service to do this without giving away your sensitive data (since it is encrypted before submission) and without preforming any other computation beyond storing and re-serving that encrypted data upon request. In fact, these requirements are so easy to satisfy, they can be abstracted onto any arbitrary storage provider: one practical example is KeePass, a FOSS password manager, which supports a number of external services (Dropbox, OneDrive, as well as arbitrary network locations via FTP and SSH) to store and serve your encrypted passwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this means that remote storage and retrieval &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be done in line with the FSF's recommendations: there does exist (both in theory and in actual fact) a password manager with remote storage that the FSF would find unobjectionable. However, it is also completely possible for a particular software/service to supply vault functionality in a way that does not conform to the FSF's recommendations. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any storage model that does not let the user enforce privacy of their passwords with cryptographic certainty is worthless from a privacy perspective. If the service remotely holds or generates either cryptographic keys or unencrypted passwords, then there can be no guarantee that the service respects the privacy of your passwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A storage model that doesn't let you retain your passwords locally puts you at risk of the service failing to give you your own passwords one day (e.g., either because they went bankrupt or you didn't renew your subscription).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T14:53:54.703" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T14:53:54.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10861" CreationDate="2020-12-06T07:01:32.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With great respect to apsillers' analysis, and with complete submission to the observation that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;if you want to know what Stallman thinks on a particular point, you need to ask him&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, I'm not quite so sure that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the act of using a service to store encrypted passwords is one that the FSF finds unobjectionable&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Quoting from the same essay that my colleague quotes, I note the view that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;SaaS does not require covert code to obtain the user's data. Instead, users must send their data to the server in order to use it. This has the same effect as spyware: the server operator gets the data. He gets it with no special effort, by the nature of SaaS&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't have more clearly summarised what I think is the major problem with online password stores: that you send them your secrets, and they promise to look after them.  When cleaved, this problem falls into two issues: firstly, that the service has access to your secrets, and secondly, that if the service goes away (business fails, servers go down, etc.) you don't have access to your secrets.  In my analysis of these issues from a free-software standpoint, I should clarify the alternative: a personal GPG keypair, used to encrypt a file of stored passwords (which is stored on as many of your computers as seems prudent) and used to decrypt same when access to one is required.  I'm a consultant sysadmin, so I have a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of secrets to look after, and that's what I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of the two issues seems unsurmountably problematic.  No doubt all those secrets are strongly encrypted at-rest by the SaaS provider, but &lt;em&gt;who has that encryption password&lt;/em&gt;?  If they do, they have access to your secrets.  If only you do, then you've simply swapped the problem of storing one password securely with the problem of storing another, and worse, you have no control over the strength of the algorithm chosen for this, nor over how long the key is, nor how securely it's generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue seems similarly problematic: if you want to survive the loss of the online password manager service, you have to have kept a secure-but-accessible copy of all your passwords somewhere else, and then you're left with a &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; complex setup than the free alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the FSF writes in that essay on how to avoid the SaaS trap: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;For the simple case, where you are doing your own computing on data in your own hands, the solution is simple: use your own copy of a free software application.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;  I can't think of a more clear example of &lt;em&gt;doing your own computing on data in your own hands&lt;/em&gt; than storage of your important secrets.  Until someone can take Dr. Stallman's mind on the question, I am &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; from convinced that the FSF would be happy with online password storage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-06T07:21:31.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T07:21:31.290" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10688" CreationDate="2020-12-06T13:16:20.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're shipping the dependencies, then you must fulfil their license terms, such as including the license notices with your software. How to do this properly depends on the context of your software. E.g. the license notices might be included in documentation files &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like Python does&lt;/a&gt;, or a software with a GUI might show them in an info panel like most web browsers do. In case you are using the Apache-2.0 license yourself, the NOTICE file is the logical place for third party notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a rule of thumb, you should reference third party component licenses wherever you assert your own copyright (because you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the sole copyright holder for the resulting software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are merely declaring dependencies in a configuration file but are not actually distributing the dependencies (e.g. if you are merely distributing source code), then I don't think that their licenses would be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tricky case in between is what happens in the case of dynamic linking, where the dependencies are distributed by the package manager according to your configuration and are only combined with your software at runtime. This can be argued either way, but the safest option is to assume that the mechanism of distribution (using a package manger) is less relevant than the outcome (causing dependencies to be distributed and loaded for your program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T13:16:20.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10865" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-06T17:35:10.550" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oracle corporation states that their 3 Berkeley DB family products Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB Java Edition and Berkeley DB XML are each offered under the OSS Affero General Public License. I have to imagine that suggests that the source code ought to be available in a source code repository somewhere. Or if not in a publicly visible repository at least available in full current distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked through all of the repositories at github.com/oracle and I don't see any of the Berkeley DB products being represented there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially interested in the Java Edition product. Oracle is offering a full distribution download of 7.5.11 and maven central is offering a more recent version 18.3.12 and that does include a source code jar, but the entire test suite, which does ship with 7.5.11, is not available for 18.3.12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there have been breaking changes between the 7.5.11 release and the 18.3.12 release and I have been having a very hard time re-engineering the older test library to work with the latest code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would appreciate any assistance in locating a full distribution of the latest source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21270" LastActivityDate="2020-12-06T17:35:10.550" Title="does anyone know the location of Oracle's 3 different berkeley db source code repositories?" Tags="|source-code|open-source-definition|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-12-15T13:24:37.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T05:59:41.003" Score="1" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been designing an interesting new project that is based on a graph database: to put it simply, what I'm going to sell (SaaS) is an API with access to a graph database, which is implemented in neo4j.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given neo4j's license(s) - which I'm totally confused about to be perfectly honest - am I allowed to do that, using the &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; Edition? Or should I get an Enterprise license? (If this is the case, then given the extraordinarily high costs, I would have to find another graph database engine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help will be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(UPDATE) As a sidenote, I've contacted the official Neo4J support and almost a week later, no answer whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21276" LastEditorUserId="21276" LastEditDate="2020-12-12T13:51:40.230" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T11:14:14.680" Title="Using Neo4j for SaaS" Tags="|gpl|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T11:17:14.480" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open source project for an academic competition. Our customer requires us to use for our product the LGPL v.2.1. We have to use QR codes in part of our application, and we found different libraries, all licensed under the Apache License v.2.0. I read that the LGPL and the Apache License are incompatible in these versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: does the incompatibility applies only when &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the code from both, or also in using the &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt; without touching the source code? That is, can we use an Apache library in an LGPL project, if we use it &lt;em&gt;as it is&lt;/em&gt;, without incorporating, but just using/linking to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all who want to answer and help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21278" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T11:17:14.480" Title="Linking to Apache v.2.0 software in LGPL v.2.1 project" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2022-02-11T11:20:07.010" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T17:25:22.210" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a little java programme in Java 8 that uses a lot JAXB stuff that I ship as a free JAR, licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users that have installed Java 9/10 installed need to use jvm parameters to run it. Users that have installed Java 11+ cannot run it &amp;quot;out of the box&amp;quot;.&#xA;To make Java 8 to 15 users happy, I'd like to include the necessary JAXB jars with it. I searched and tried JAXB RI 2.3.3 from the Eclipse Jakarta project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locally, I tried to pack three JAXB-JARs into my jar and got it running under Java 11 and 12 after a few modifications in &lt;code&gt;MANIFEST.MF&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;code&gt;jaxb-impl.jar&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;jakarta.xml.bind-api.jar&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;jakarta.activation.jar&lt;/code&gt;. Those seem to be binary-only...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I ship it that way or does that violate GPL or Eclipse Jakarta JAXB's License (EPL1)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask more specificly: Do I have to put all JARs from JAXB-RI into it even if the programme doesn't need them? Do I have to put their source codes into it as well (if yes: where can I find them?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21283" LastEditorUserId="21283" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T14:40:49.643" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T14:40:49.643" Title="How I do pack JAXB 2.3.3 with my open source programme?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T21:15:52.190" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing a plugin for GPL Software/ am using the GPL-licensed API to develop the interaction between the plugin and the software. I'm therefore having a dependency added to this API in my pom.xml (maven).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's just the plugin I don't have to publish the APIs classes and don't include them in my jar or github repo or similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I develop an application that depends on another project licensed under GPL. As I intend to write multiple projects based on this library, I write my own library to hold some shared code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 2a:&lt;/strong&gt; This shared-code-library does not contain any of the GPL-Code or classes, only a reference in its pom.xml and references to it in its code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Case 2b:&lt;/strong&gt; My main project is published with the GPL-classes to make it easy to run for the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As far as my understanding goes, my code has to be GPL-Licensed in all of these cases. That's not my question. If I'm wrong, constructive input on this is appreciated anyway.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is:&lt;/strong&gt; Do I have to include any information on the license of the dependencies (and the GPL-license itself) in cases 1 and 2a? I'm pretty sure its required in case 2b. &lt;em&gt;Case 2b is provided more or less to make it easier to differentiate from case 2a. If I'm wrong, constructive input on this is appreciated anyway.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9326/what-are-the-license-obligations-if-just-importing-licensed-code-without-modifyi&quot;&gt;This topic&lt;/a&gt; is similar but talks about BSD and MIT licenses, where this procedure apparently doesn't fall under distribution. From what I've read (and I'm not particularly well informed on this tbh) GPL sometimes feels a bit nitpicky on some other topics (i.e. if API usage counts as a modified version, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2947/am-i-forced-to-release-my-project-under-gpl-even-though-no-gpl-source-is-includ&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;). What do you think is the case in this situation?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additional context to justify my question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've since found a maven plugin that helps me to include the licenses in the final jar file (no matter if the library is included or not). There is no real point for me to exclude them in case 1 and case 2a if I already researched the maven plugin for case 2b anyway.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The point is that I'm currently publishing to github packages in a private repo. As far as my understanding goes, as soon as I make the repo public, all the packages (and all versions) will go public as well. This means that I would have to delete the old alpha and beta releases before going public, if license files were required. That might not be too big of a deal, but I'd like to preserve the projects history for anyone thats interested in it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21287" LastEditorUserId="21287" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T07:56:57.533" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T07:56:57.533" Title="Do I have to include licenses of my libraries if I don't publish them?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|dependencies|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T22:24:20.620" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can proprietary software which makes use of LGPLv3 libraries be leased to users for a period of time in exchange for a fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the user modifies the program to allow relinking with altered LGPL DLLs, is he entitled to continue using the modified software (which would include the proprietary software) after the lease period has ended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15899" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T08:11:06.327" Title="LGPL Software Rental" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10871" CreationDate="2020-12-08T08:11:06.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only requirements that the LGPL effectively places on the proprietary software are that the users must be allowed and able to replace the LGPL portion of the product and that they must be made aware of those rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in the LGPL that forbids a time-limited license or contract on the proprietary part of the product. This also means that you cannot extend (one-sided) the time limit on the product by just replacing the LGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T08:11:06.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10884" CreationDate="2020-12-08T08:19:37.453" Score="1" ViewCount="357" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to publish a GPL3 piece of software I wrote. That software uses OpenCL, and in its normal use one typically links the software against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenCL/specs/2.2/html/OpenCL_ICD_Installation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khronos OpenCL ICD&lt;/a&gt;. The ICD lets the user then select an OpenCL backend (such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, …) at runtime and in a streamlined fashion depending on the locally available compute resources and needs. The Khronos OpenCL ICD is permissively licensed (BSD-2-clause). As is Intel's backend (MIT). However, Nvidia's backend is proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My intention is to distribute my software, and for modifications &lt;em&gt;to it&lt;/em&gt; to be covered, under the GPL. Depending on one's view of linking and GPL, one might consider linking as modification. The license specifically allows linking to &amp;quot;proprietary system libraries&amp;quot;, but specifically &lt;em&gt;disallows&lt;/em&gt; the use of &amp;quot;GPL-compatible wrappers&amp;quot; to indirectly utilize proprietary non-system libraries. I would &lt;em&gt;not want to restrict&lt;/em&gt; a user from distributing a version of my code that he or she intends to be used with for example Nvidia's OpenCL backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My instinct is that the OpenCL ICD is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;just a wrapper&amp;quot;. It has at least one reasonably useful GPL-compatible backend. I therefore conclcude that my software really does link with just the ICD, and any further choice of backend from there on is the user's choice and not relevant for my software's licensing terms. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: While &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8505/gpl-application-lgpl-plugin-properietary-code&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; is relevant, I don't think it covers my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20502" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T08:40:11.767" Title="Linking GPL software with &quot;indirection library&quot; with both GPL-compatible and proprietary backends, in constrast with wrapper library" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T10:16:42.193" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use scapy for my commercial project but scapy is licensed GPLv2. I use scapy as a parser for packets and I wonder if it is OK if I create a separate wrapper module using scapy and get input and pass output via ZeroMQ or another Message broker. I am OK with licensing my wrapper module under GPL but do I have to license my other components/modules under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21293" LastEditorUserId="617" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T10:48:40.723" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T10:48:40.723" Title="Use GPL licensed software externally?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-12-18T07:25:54.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10875" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10876" CreationDate="2020-12-08T13:09:28.040" Score="6" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have 2 small C programs (each is the inverse of the other) and a common header, &amp;lt;500 lines of code total, and it seems a waste to include a whole license file, so I've just written this comment at the top of all 3 files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* © 2020 Lucy Phipps&#xA;Do anything&#xA;Keep this notice&#xA;No warranty */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do I need more than this from a legal standpoint, especially if I'm planning to reuse it with future projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the MIT, BSD and ISC licenses all have a long paragraph in all caps just for the warranty disclaimer, with &amp;quot;as-is&amp;quot; (in quotes) and a list of adjectives for damages that could be caused. Am I reasonably safe without that? The zlib license doesn't include such a paragraph, but it's been called a &amp;quot;crayon license&amp;quot;, which is apparently a bad thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in regards to the &amp;quot;keep this notice&amp;quot;, does the fact that it's written in the source code itself sufficiently imply that I only want the copyright to be in the source and don't mind so much about binary copies, or should I say it explicitly so people don't have to pull the license out of my code and put it in a .txt file for distributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the programs themselves are simple wrappers for 2 existing libraries, zlib licensed and BSD 3-clause licensed respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: basically I want something equivalent to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-1-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt; but in as few characters as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/landfillbaby/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/landfillbaby/licenses&lt;/a&gt; copyright isn't real&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21294" OwnerDisplayName="landfill baby" LastEditorUserId="21294" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T08:30:28.770" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T08:30:28.770" Title="Do I need a longer license than this for a small program?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10875" CreationDate="2020-12-08T19:12:49.063" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments hit on a lot of these points, but let me try to provide a more comprehensive response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you have a strong reason to do so (and character count of your file header comments is not a strong reason), you should stick with one of the well-known software licenses.  Your header just needs to mention the license that it is covered under and you include the license text as an additional file.  This will actually reduce your overall header character count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two main reasons to do this: ease of use and ensuring your bases are covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ease of Use&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sticking with a well-known open source license will make it easier for organizations to use your open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because some organizations may only permit development teams from choosing to use open source dependencies that have a pre-approved well-known license.  While there's usually a step out process that they could potentially follow to get approval to use software with a custom license, most developers will simply look for an alternative library that has a license that meets their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Organizations make these decisions because it's best practice when preparing to release a piece of software to do a full review of any 3rd party dependencies to ensure license and export compliance.  Corner cases like custom licenses may require their legal department's involvement in this process, and it is complex and time consuming for the legal department to understand a wide variety of software licenses and their potential interactions with each other.  So pre-approved lists of software licenses are born out of a need for efficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Covering Your Bases&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to the recommendation to never roll your own crypto: there are simply too many intellectual property complexities for the average person to get it right if they roll their own license.  Getting it wrong may expose you or users of your code to unexpected liability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intellectual property rights are complex and vary from country to country.  The well-known licenses have benefited from scrutiny from legal minds in many countries and have clauses that are carefully designed to convey the rights you want to convey while protecting against a whole host of issues that you may not have ever even heard of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, one of the more subtle issues is moral rights.  I always struggle with moral rights, but it's one of the whole reasons why licenses exist that do what you're trying to do rather than people just putting code out in the public domain.  I think this answer does a good job of explaining the idea: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9873/18378&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9873/18378&lt;/a&gt;.  The TL,DR version is that people may not be able to grant some of the rights they think they are granting so good open source licenses include additional language to work around this as best as is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18378" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T19:12:49.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10879" CreationDate="2020-12-08T22:47:09.580" Score="0" ViewCount="1279" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to this excellent page:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache License permits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patent use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Private use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing code to accompany a book. I intend to make the code available only to readers of the book - people who have purchased a copy of it. I want the readers to be able to use the code freely in their projects - commercial or non-commercial. The only restriction is that I don't want them to start redistributing the code  - for example cloning the repository and putting it up on GitHub with their name on it - that would be plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that fits my requirements? Or is there a license with Apache terms minus the distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21297" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T18:45:48.260" Title="Permissive license that prohibits redistribution of code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10877" CreationDate="2020-12-09T00:39:33.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since redistribution is core feature of free software and open source software, we can say for sure that no FLOSS software license will satisfy your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One alternative that may satisfy you is to use a copyleft license like the GPL so that recipients may distribute modifications as long as those modified forms are distributed with source code under the same GPL copyleft terms. Verbatim and modified forms must retain your copyright notice (but that is standard for virtually all FLOSS licenses). This would allow virtually all non-distributive uses but limit distribution to cases where the redistributor shares their full source code under terms that allow you to do the same yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, it sounds like you may as well license rights to the code at the time you sell each copy of your book, so that only people who purchased the book from you may enjoy rights beyond ability to read the code. You should consult with a lawyer to do this in a rigorous way (to ensure licensing correctly either transfers or doesn't upon resale of physical books, to ensure licensing is done correctly for both sale of electronic and physical books, to ensure that the rights you intend to license exist and can be licensed in your jurisdiction, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T12:14:20.237" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T12:14:20.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-09T06:36:04.433" Score="6" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to use a command-line tool on a docker image that our SaaS application has used to deploy some microservices. This command-line tool is licensed under AGPL and one of our microservices requires that to be installed on the docker image. Which of the following scenarios would be applicable to my case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have to release the entire SaaS application under AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have to release the corresponding microservice only under AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I only need to release the docker build file (source code to build the docker image) under AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't need to release anything under AGPL as I am only using the tool in an independent way via shell&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script is called Ghostscript which is a quite popular script when it comes to modifying pdf files. I'm considering to use it to merge a few pdf files into a single pdf file. The licensing details of this script can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ghostscript.com/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21303" LastEditorUserId="21303" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T11:29:38.173" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T09:25:30.267" Title="Use of SaaS application with using a AGPL script as a command line tool" Tags="|license|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:58:11.987" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to develop &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; (or Apache 2.0)&lt;strong&gt;-licensed software&lt;/strong&gt; using an &lt;strong&gt;LGPL library&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As far as I understand this is allowed as long as I'm distributing the library in a separate jar file and loading it from my MIT-licensed jar.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I could have &lt;strong&gt;my project&lt;/strong&gt; (source and compiled jar without dependencies) &lt;strong&gt;under MIT or Apache 2.0 license, am I right?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I now were to publish the &lt;strong&gt;jar-with-dependencies&lt;/strong&gt; (jar that contains all class files for my program and the used libraries; produced by maven) I'd need to do so &lt;strong&gt;under LGPL or GPL&lt;/strong&gt; if I understand it correctly. Would this affect the license for my sources and the compiled jar without dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'd like to make the process as easy as possible for people with smaller technical knowledge (therefore the bundled jar) but would also like to use a very permissive license for anyone to use the project.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible? What precautions should I take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Similar topics:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10400/distributing-lgpl-library-openal-as-part-of-the-mit-licensed-game-engine&quot;&gt;This topic&lt;/a&gt; is similar but I think it doesn't specify if I could also distribute compiled classes under MIT next to the LGPL licensed classes in the jar with all dependencies.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5175/including-untouched-lgpl-library-in-a-mit-licenced-project&quot;&gt;This topic&lt;/a&gt; talks specifically about the source but once again not about compiled classes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21287" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-28T18:15:50.070" LastActivityDate="2023-04-28T18:15:50.070" Title="Source and jar without dependencies under MIT, runnable jar with dependencies under GPL" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|java|maven|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10882" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:08:56.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing refers to licensing under more then one license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T06:27:13.343" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T06:27:13.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10883" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:08:56.250" Score="0" Body="Dual licensing refers to licensing under more then one license." OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T06:27:16.163" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T06:27:16.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10873" CreationDate="2020-12-09T18:10:37.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; shares address space with a GPL'd component, whether it was linked statically or dynamically, the whole binary falls under the GPL unless there's a specific exception for it (such as the system library exception, or the Linux kernel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syscall clarification&lt;/a&gt;), and you have to provide GPL'd source for everything whenever you distribute those binaries. This is clearly stated in section 1 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. &lt;strong&gt;For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone makes a binary which dynamically (or statically) links to the Nvidia backend, that backend is subject to GPL requirements, including source code and GPL licensing. Since the Nvidia backend is proprietary, it will not be possible to comply with those requirements, and consequently the binary cannot be distributed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way around this is to use a different license. There are at least two good options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lesser General Public License&lt;/a&gt;, which is largely identical to the GPL, but may permit this sort of linking depending on how your program is structured. For example, the LGPL might not permit linking to libraries which you call into. However, if the external library calls into your code, even just from a slim wrapper &lt;code&gt;main()&lt;/code&gt; function, then this would probably be acceptable (as it would &amp;quot;make use of an interface provided by the Library, but [not be] otherwise based on the Library&amp;quot;). Any other code which the external library links to could then be considered an extension of &amp;quot;the Application.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/a&gt;, which is similar to the LGPL, but explicitly operates at the level of &lt;em&gt;files&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;programs&lt;/em&gt;. Some users may find this clearer to reason about, and it does not suffer from the complexities of the LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third, less preferable option, is to use the exception mechanism in section 7 of the GPL to permit linking with proprietary backends and &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; proprietary backends. These exceptions are difficult to write well and can create legal uncertainty, so I would only recommend that as a last resort. The main advantage of this approach is that you get to specify the exact set of linking you want to allow, whereas LGPL and MPL permit essentially unlimited linking (albeit the former may require minor program restructuring).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2020-12-11T08:40:11.767" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T08:40:11.767" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10877" CreationDate="2020-12-09T18:45:48.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prohibiting redistribution makes the software non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The furthest you can go is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero General Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T18:45:48.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10860" CreationDate="2020-12-09T19:02:31.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The EPL is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#EPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not compatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;. The MPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is compatible with the GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that reason I would recommend the MPL if you could choose between the EPL or MPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T19:02:31.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10458" CreationDate="2020-12-09T23:36:03.977" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to make the source code available for private use does not apply to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the GNU Affero General Public License requires making the source code available for &lt;em&gt;network use&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the companies employees use the software over a network, and source code is not given to them, this is okay in the GPL, but not the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T23:36:03.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10889" CreationDate="2020-12-11T20:49:22.760" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the limitations and constraints if one wants to implement the same idea in different languages requiring different licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it more concrete, say some algorithm should be implemented in R (under the GPL3 license) and Python (under the MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm in particular interested in the following scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R and Python package are developed jointly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;R package already exists, Python package is developed later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python package already exists, R package is developed later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases 2. and 3. the the goal is to re-use the existing content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My presumptions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not problematic at all&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is problematic because the Python package would be derived work and thus not compatible with a license change to MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is not problematic because the MIT license is permissive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are my presumptions correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to re-implement / port GPL code to MIT with re-using the already existing content? Is this possible at all, or should does everything be written from scratch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21326" OwnerDisplayName="BayerSe" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T22:10:49.180" Title="Implementing the same idea under GPL and under MIT" Tags="|licensing|gpl|porting|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10888" CreationDate="2020-12-11T21:41:10.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder on the code, you can do anything you like with it. It doesn't matter if you've published it under the GPL, you are always free to dual-license it under the MIT license, as proprietary code or any other license you feel like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In legal terms, you publishing code under a license grants additional rights to people other than you in how they use the code. It it no way restricts what you can do with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" OwnerDisplayName="Philip Kendall" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T21:41:10.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10866" CreationDate="2020-12-13T11:14:14.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Community edition is available under a GPL license, which allows use for any purpose including commercial use. And if you don't give anyone else a copy of Neo4j and don't modify the software, the GPL doesn't impose any further obligations on you. So use in a SaaS setting seems perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you might find that the feature set of the Community edition is insufficient for your use case, in particular with regards to security and backup features and development tooling. Obviously, Neo4j the company is interested in up-selling you to their enterprise edition or to their own database as a service offering. This is the usual open-core business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, no parts of Neo4j are under the AGPL license. Prior to version 3.5 the source code for the enterprise edition was available under an open source license, but they &lt;a href=&quot;https://neo4j.com/blog/open-core-licensing-model-neo4j-enterprise-edition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stopped&lt;/a&gt; that practice in 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T11:14:14.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10893" CreationDate="2020-12-13T14:59:14.487" Score="4" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a proprietary desktop app that uploads images, and a proprietary web app that displays the images. Can I use a GPL image server for these images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reasonably sure the answer is yes, and the following question seems to verify that, but I wanted to triple check...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5995/proprietary-desktop-application-that-works-with-agpl-licensed-server-application&quot;&gt;Proprietary desktop application that works with AGPL-licensed server application&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21329" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T16:43:22.293" Title="Using GPL image server with proprietary applications" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10758" CreationDate="2020-12-13T16:06:22.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a fairly hypothetical scenario and I don't think there's good caselaw on this. Obviously, the &lt;strong&gt;source code&lt;/strong&gt; does contain the third party code and is a derivative work. Thus, the source code licensing will have to comply with the third party license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a good argument that any &lt;strong&gt;binaries&lt;/strong&gt; built from the source code will not be derivative of the third party code. Then, the binary licensing is independent from the third party license. This is not self-evident though, since the binary is usually just a different format for the source code. If this scenario was to be discussed in court, it would likely need an &lt;strong&gt;expert witness&lt;/strong&gt; to explain how the compilation process only translates some parts of the input, and that the binary in question does not contain any of this third party code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project can make it &lt;strong&gt;much more obvious&lt;/strong&gt; whether third party code is included by moving the third party code into &lt;strong&gt;separate files or plugins&lt;/strong&gt;, and potentially loading them as necessary. By deleting the third party files and getting the essentially same compilation output, it can be more easily demonstrated that the third party code is not being used. It is also easier to manage licensing on a per-file basis, especially if you add machine-readable license identifiers to every file, or at least have a separate license file for a directory with third party content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T16:06:22.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10891" CreationDate="2020-12-13T16:43:22.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL imposes requirements when you convey/distribute GPL-covered software.&#xA;These requirements trigger regardless of whether the software is in source or binary form, whether the software is distributed in source or in part, or whether the software was modified – but your precise obligations depend on this.&#xA;The GPL does not impose any obligations when merely running the software, without giving anyone else a copy.&#xA;You are perfectly free to run the software for any purpose, including commercial purposes and when interacting with the software through proprietary applications. Thus, using GPL software on your server comes with practically no obligations. A lot of popular server-side software is GPL-based, such as Wordpress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some open-source licenses do require extra care when running them on a server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The AGPL is exactly the same as the GPL, except that it also triggers requirements when you modify the software &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; let other people interact with that modified software remotely over a network. This is usually not a problem for stand-alone AGPL programs, but has far-reaching consequences when using an AGPL library as part of your backend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Cryptographic Autonomy License is a novel open-source license that tries to ensure that end users remain in control of their data, as necessary so that end users can actually run the software for themselves. This potentially imposes obligations even when running unmodified versions of the software, but the requirements are in line with other legal obligations you'd have anyway for running a public service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many non-open source licenses that do impose very tricky requirements. E.g. the SSPL is difficult to comply with in specific use cases. The non-free “commons clause” can forbid certain uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect you mention in your question is that a non-free application will interact with the GPL software. Here, the question is whether the two parts effectively form a single program. But as long as the two parts are clearly separate programs and are not linked into a single process, the GPL does not affect your proprietary parts. If the GPL server is stand-alone, everything is fine as discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mere Aggregation&lt;/a&gt; explains the FSF's opinion on this: “pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs”. HTTP requests would also be a case of such mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T16:43:22.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10894" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10895" CreationDate="2020-12-14T06:40:55.880" Score="9" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zspitz/PandocFilters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;filter&lt;/a&gt; -- an external program which takes input from the main executable, parses it, potentially modifies it, and outputs the modified data -- for the GPLv2-licensed &lt;a href=&quot;https://pandoc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pandoc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My filter is MIT-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pandoc itself has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/tree/master/test&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of files used for automated tests&lt;/a&gt;. I would like to use the same files to test the filter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest option would be to copy the test files from the Pandoc repository to my own repository, where they can be used by the CI server. These files aren't intended to be executed in themselves, and aren't used in &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; execution, but only when building a new version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a violation of the terms of GPLv2, because my filter isn't GPLv2-licensed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does my filter's having an MIT-license make it better?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7503/21332&quot;&gt;Implications of using GPL licenced code only during testing&lt;/a&gt;, but in my case I'm not just using a GPLv2 library during testing, but copying actual test source into my own project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21332" LastEditorUserId="21332" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T11:42:18.817" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T11:42:18.817" Title="Reusing test input files from GPLv2 project for automated testing" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10894" CreationDate="2020-12-14T07:28:05.800" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, you choose these files because they they contain the characteristics you want to test against and they are conveniently already available. But otherwise, you could use any file at all (with the right characteristics) in your test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is an indication that those files are just input data for your filter and that your filter does not derive from them in the copyright sense. That means that your filter and those test files are independent works for copyright purposes and that their licenses do not affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you make it clear that those test files are under the GPLv2 license and you comply with all GPLv2 requirements with regard to the test files, you are fine. You are completely free in your choice of license for your filter application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T07:28:05.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-14T10:30:10.230" Score="-2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone give an example of software that is distributed as &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; service and product and how to classify, if i have to eventually, under one category?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21334" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:23:03.990" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:23:03.990" Title="Software as both product and service?" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10897" CreationDate="2020-12-14T10:54:24.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone give an example of software that is distributed as both service and product&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example that comes quickly to mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wordpress&lt;/a&gt;.  It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distributed under GPLv2+&lt;/a&gt;, so you can take a copy and install it on your own website, as very many people do.  Most major distros repackage it, to make doing your own installation very easy (CentOS 7: &lt;code&gt;yum install epel-release ; yum install wordpress&lt;/code&gt;).  However, you can also buy Wordpress site hosting as a service, from many providers (&lt;a href=&quot;https://uk.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.resellerclub.com/wordpress-hosting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example 2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/web-hosting/wordpress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example 3&lt;/a&gt;, and I should stress these are taken from the results of a duckduckgo search and their selection implies no endorsement whatsoever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how to classify, if i have to eventually, under one category&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, I don't understand that question.  If you mean &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;how do I decide whether I'm distributing software or offering SaaS&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, the question to ask yourself is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;am I giving copies of software to people to run on their own computers, or am I running it on my own computer and letting them use it?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T10:54:24.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10809" CreationDate="2020-12-14T12:05:03.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are responsible for complying with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the licenses for the software that you distribute. You're not only giving users a copy of your immediate dependencies, but are giving them a bundle with your entire dependency graph. Software that you only use during the build process doesn't matter though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't have to be a big nuisance. E.g. a separate page or dialogue with the license notices might be appropriate. As a rule of thumb, you should attribute third party components wherever you assert your own copyright, because you are not the sole copyright holder for the code you are distributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're absolutely right that such attributions are rather rare in the frontend world. This has multiple factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most JavaScript libraries are under rather permissive licenses that merely require license notices to be preserved (in the source), but do not require additional notices directly to the recipient.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historically, JavaScript was distributed as source code (that already included the license notices). This has changed with minification and transpiling, but frontend developer &lt;em&gt;culture&lt;/em&gt; has not caught up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since NPM makes it very easy to assemble huge dependency graphs without ever noticing the involved licenses, many frontend developers are not aware of their rights and obligations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just because other sites get away with ignoring attribution requirements doesn't mean that it's legal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mobile app ecosystem and the native software ecosystem has a far more rigorous license compliance culture. All current browsers ship with many open source components, and provide very good examples for attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Attribution” here means that you reproduce the copyright and license notices of the involved components, as required by the individual licenses. Some licenses may have additional requirements, e.g. Apache-2.0 requires you to also show the contents of a NOTICE file to users if such a file exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T12:05:03.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10811" CreationDate="2020-12-14T12:10:34.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that for any program that contains GPL parts, recipients must be able to receive the complete corresponding source code of the entire program under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that your scenario won't impose further compliance obligations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you are not necessarily giving anyone else a copy of your GPL-covered server. When there are no recipients, there are no GPL compliance obligations. This is potentially different for the AGPL, which gives remote users the same rights as recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;your different services are likely to be separate programs, not multiple parts of a larger distributed programs. It is not entirely clear where one program starts and the other ends in the eyes of copyright law, so it's best to keep a bright line between your services. Communicating via network protocols such as REST APIs can be a good indication of this separation, but it possibly also matters how “intimate” the exchanged data is. See also the section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mere Aggregation&lt;/a&gt; in the GPL FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T12:10:34.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-14T14:44:44.543" Score="6" ViewCount="1448" Body="&lt;p&gt;WordPress is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordpress.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensed&lt;/a&gt; under (GPLv2 or later). WordPress states that all plugins hosted under the WordPress Plugin Directory &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#1-plugins-must-be-compatible-with-the-gnu-general-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;must be&lt;/a&gt; licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a Free version of our plugin that is licensed under GPL and published in the WordPress Plugin Directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have a Pro version of our plugin that we offer to our Free users, that adds extra functionality and features. To get the Pro version, the user has to create an account on our website, pay and download a .zip file of the Pro version of the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to GNU&lt;/a&gt;, as the copyright holder I can release the same software under two different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't consider our plugin to be a derivative of WordPress, because it was built from scratch: We didn't fork anything from WordPress and built a new version of it - it's brand new work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the Pro version of my plugin that the user downloaded from my website must be licensed under GPL as well? Can I license it under a proprietary license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21335" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T13:29:05.843" Title="Can my paid WordPress plugin have a proprietary license?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|proprietary-code|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10901" CreationDate="2020-12-14T16:28:03.493" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll answer my own questions based on my own investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the&#xA;Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate&#xA;works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to&#xA;those sections when you distribute them as separate works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding, a plugin that I write myself and I sell as a standalone deliverable is a separate work, thus not bound to GPL2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21335" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T16:28:03.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10904" CreationDate="2020-12-14T17:58:15.103" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not going to distribute the binary ever. The program or the library is not mine. Will it be a problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21338" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T23:05:39.070" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T23:05:39.070" Title="Is statically linking MIT/X licensed software with a GPLv2 library is illegal?" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10903" CreationDate="2020-12-14T18:34:36.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The X11 license permits virtually anything, as long as you retain copyright notices and mention that X11 permissions apply to some portion of your software. This is compatible with virtually all other licenses, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;including the GPL&lt;/a&gt; and even proprietary licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you are not distributing the software, compatibility with the GPL does not even matter, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL obligations only apply upon distribution of the software&lt;/a&gt;. However, rest assured that with the MIT/X11 license, you will be free to distribute your software as well, if you choose to do so in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T18:34:36.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-14T19:22:27.717" Score="-2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a website that you could use that provided a very simple list in layman's terms of what's required from an open source license. Then it provided a link to the license. Can anyone tell me what it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I don't think this is asking for recommendations because I'm looking for a specific website, not a recommendation for websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T20:15:35.253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:08:34.750" Title="What's the website that gives a very simple list of what's required of an Open Source License" Tags="|open-source-definition|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2020-12-15T21:46:33.307" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-14T19:41:50.407" Score="2" ViewCount="854" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing a game. I want to publish its code online (i.e. GitLab, GitHub, etc.) in order for people to review it, learn and get ideas from it. But I also want to be able to sell it at a later point. And because I want to be able to sell it, I don't want to make it too permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of two vague ideas for this, but I'm not sure if they would work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specifically license it as &amp;quot;Proprietary&amp;quot;. (Is that even an actual license?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use dual licenses, as some other applications and libraries do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does any of these options work, or is there another way? And since it's a game, are there any special rules for content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21339" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T19:23:58.340" Title="What is a good license model for a game that I want to both sell and show publicly?" Tags="|proprietary-code|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10910" CreationDate="2020-12-14T20:09:23.600" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is only one program available in a very niche category of desktop software. It's non-FLOSS and does not have some features that I need. I made my own version that has all the features of the existing software plus some additional features that the users of the existing software have been requesting for 10+ years. I want to release my program free in cost and GPL, and expect a lot of users to migrate to my software. Thing is, from the looks of it, the current program's business is one dev, one designer, and one customer support rep. I'm not trying to start a business and would feel bad if I released my program for free because it could effectively kill their company. Would releasing my software as free in cost be unethical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21331" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T20:23:42.087" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T07:37:09.457" Title="Is it ethical to release free, zero-cost software if it will destroy the competitive market?" Tags="|commercial|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-14T21:06:01.780" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Python software package &lt;em&gt;Foobar&lt;/em&gt; that, amongst other things, uses &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnuplot.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnuplot&lt;/a&gt; for displaying graphs on the command line. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnuplot#Distribution_terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The gnuplot license is open-source&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#gnuplot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but not compatible with the GPL,&lt;/a&gt; so if I were to license &lt;em&gt;Foobar&lt;/em&gt; under the GPL, nobody could legally use it. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licenses is the gnuplot license compatible with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15610" LastEditorUserId="15610" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T22:21:09.847" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T22:21:09.847" Title="gnuplot license compatibility" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10906" CreationDate="2020-12-15T02:17:56.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing GPL and a commercial license might make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People can use the software in open source projects free of charge, but have to pay for a commercial license to use the software in proprietary projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T02:17:56.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10907" CreationDate="2020-12-15T07:37:09.457" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider, for a moment, a camp for the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;re-education&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; of political prisoners, otherwise-innocent critics of the current repressive regime.  A revolution happens, an enlightened regime comes to power, and the camp is closed.  All the guards, administrators, cooks, and carpenters lose their jobs.  Is this of net benefit to society, or is it a net loss?  Please note that I'm not equating &lt;em&gt;writing proprietary software&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;running a prison camp&lt;/em&gt;, I'm merely noting that more analysis is required than &lt;em&gt;someone lost their job&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software is generally thought of as a net gain to society, principally because it empowers its users (to use the software as they wish, to share it without fear, to improve it to better suit their needs, and to share the improved version).  It is true that free software restricts the programmer's ability to get paid, but it does so by removing the whip hand that proprietary rightsholders exert over their users: &lt;em&gt;pay me what I demand, or you cannot use the software&lt;/em&gt;.  Stallman, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.linfo.org/manifesto.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU manifesto&lt;/a&gt;, addressed the issue of programmers getting paid in a free software world when he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming&#xA;[...]&#xA;Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is not an argument against the change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you release your software as zero-cost proprietary software, that is arguably dumping, and will in the long run probably not help all that many people.  But if you release it as &lt;em&gt;free software&lt;/em&gt;, the users will be empowered.  Some will likely continue to use the proprietary version, but they'll do so out of choice, because it offers them tangible benefits.  If your version is successful, more users may be willing to pay for support than you can provide; it is possible that the old vendor's programmer, who probably knows more about coding this task than anyone besides you, will step into that breach, and make a nice living out of servicing a need.  It's possible whole new industries will spring up around your code.  You won't know until you try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T07:37:09.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10905" CreationDate="2020-12-15T10:11:32.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &amp;quot;what's required from an open source license&amp;quot; you mean &amp;quot;what are the requirements from a license so it can be considered an open source license&amp;quot;, the OSI website provides a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of open source&lt;/a&gt;. By definition, a license that isn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as approves by OSI&lt;/a&gt; is not an open source license (although that doesn't mean such licenses can't be used, or don't have other merits, of course!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &amp;quot;what's required from an open source license&amp;quot; you mean &amp;quot;what is required from me in order to use license XYZ&amp;quot;, I think you meant &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;. Several other sites, most notably, GitHub (when you click through a project's license), also take their definitions from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T10:11:32.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10905" CreationDate="2020-12-15T13:57:53.353" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Requirements for free software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirements for open source software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution: The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source Code: The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code: The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of &amp;quot;patch files&amp;quot; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software: The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Be Technology-Neutral: No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T23:08:34.750" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T23:08:34.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10906" CreationDate="2020-12-15T17:46:15.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question you have to ask yourself is &amp;quot;what makes the game unique?&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most games are a combination of code (the actual programme) and art assets (graphics, music, sound...). They do not necessarily need to form a single entitiy, but can be licensed differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing to mind, besides the license, is the name of the game. If you want to be able to market it exclusively, you will like to register it as trademark or similar, so that you have exclusive right to use that name. Others with access to the source will have to choose a different name when they distribute binaries (e.g. like with firefox where all software is open source, but you may not re-use the name).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a copyleft license like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;, or possibly even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; if the game requires a server-side part, might make it difficult for anyone without access to the art assets to make a business without investing a lot into creation of the arts. Examples for these kind of approach are games like &lt;a href=&quot;https://ryzom.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ryzom&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start to accept patches from the outside you will become bound by the chosen license yourself, too - unless you make contributors sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt; before in which you make them grant to you or the project the right to use the code also under other TBD licenses. With a CLA signed, you could word it such that you can be allowed to choose an arbitrary license later - even a non-open source one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically answering your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Proprietary&amp;quot; is no license in particular. It just means &amp;quot;most rights reserved&amp;quot; and most often includes &amp;quot;you may not pass on the software to other people&amp;quot;, and you distribute it under your own specifically-worded terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you can do that. As the sole copyright owner you don't even have to decide that now as you can always change the license for &lt;em&gt;future&lt;/em&gt; releases. Just be aware that you cannot revoke an OSS license on already released versions. If you are popular enough and the community big or engaged enough, they might then decide to fork from the last available open source version and continue the project without your consent and without any legal leverage on your part (that's after all the whole point of open source licenses).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T19:23:58.340" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T19:23:58.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10916" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-15T13:37:56.993" Score="4" ViewCount="1089" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to be a Udemy instructor to make money. As you predict, I need softwares such as OS, Hypervisor, IDE, web browser, screen video recorder, etc.  That's why, I'll use/run open source softwares for the courses I'll prepare to not encounter violation of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure whether using open source software for this purpose is legal or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" OwnerDisplayName="arastirma hesap" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T07:54:08.723" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T07:54:08.723" Title="Is it legal to use/run open source software for any purpose?" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10916" CreationDate="2020-12-15T14:10:16.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can use open source softwares for this purpose no matter under which license it is. There are some changes in the license for Europe but I don't think that they had put any restriction for such uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you will use a software which is under GPL, LGPL, MOZILLA, ECLIPSE, BSD, MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Palash Tekam" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T15:23:01.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10916" CreationDate="2020-12-15T15:45:14.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Open source&amp;quot; is a vague description of a kind of license where the actual source code is made freely available &lt;em&gt;provided&lt;/em&gt; that you meet certain conditions (ones other than &amp;quot;pay me some money&amp;quot;). To know exactly what you can and cannot do, you have to read the terms of the license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This license&lt;/a&gt; (CC-NC 4.0) disallows commercial use, whereas &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this license&lt;/a&gt; (CC-BY 4.0) allows commercial use. Before abandoning hope, you have to read the actual license, because CC-NC says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards&#xA;commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this&#xA;Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other&#xA;material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital&#xA;file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no&#xA;payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out that they mean &amp;quot;you can't re-sell this software&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;you can't use this software in your job, you can only use it for personal entertainment&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many licenses purporting to be &amp;quot;open&amp;quot;, so you just have to read the license and see what the license says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6726" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T22:07:57.157" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10916" CreationDate="2020-12-16T00:47:58.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software published under a Free or Open Source license do not put any restrictions on how the software can be used - that is one of the fundamental freedoms in both the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However that doesn't mean that your actions using FOSS software can't be illegal. It is illegal to commit fraud, identity theft, piracy, etc, whether you are using open source or proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T00:47:58.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10921" CreationDate="2020-12-16T01:53:58.663" Score="10" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at an open source project that handles OData calls against APIs. I'm thinking that it would make a great starting point for a new library aimed at an industry-specific API that is closely (but not exactly) based on OData that I will be working on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an open source developer, I have built quite a few libraries and apps, but I haven't borrowed from another project so directly before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a guide to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;properly crediting the original devs / library as I move forward&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ensuring the licenses are compatible (I'd probably stay with MIT, which is the original)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;letting the original team know what my intentions are and why I'm using their work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what I'm proposing is strictly legal and within the scope of the open source movement, but I am curious if there's an accepted etiquette  for these situations. I've had my code lifted wholesale and used in essentially identical projects that people are charging money for, and I don't want any misunderstanding like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T09:41:50.880" Title="Forking / Cloning an active open source project" Tags="|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10920" CreationDate="2020-12-16T09:41:50.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what I'm proposing is strictly legal and within the scope of the open source movement, but I am curious if there's an accepted etiquette for these situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you publish code under a licence, that licence expresses the sum total of your expectations of users.  Since the code you're reusing is under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the MIT licence&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and that is the extent of the credit that's required.  Because MIT is so permissive, your licence choice is very wide; but you've indicated you intend to stick with MIT, which is fine.  As for contacting the original team, there is neither requirement for nor expectation of this, but it seems likely that they'd be interested to hear what people are doing with their code, so a note to the project mailing list, once you have something worth displaying, would probably be courteous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've had my code lifted wholesale and used in essentially identical projects that people are charging money for, and I don't want any misunderstanding like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you published that code under a permissive free licence, it sounds to me like the misunderstanding was yours: you thought you hadn't given people the right to take your code and make money out of it, but you had.  If you published it under a copyleft free licence, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; the people who used it did so under an incompatible licence, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; copyright infringement occurred, and you should take legal advice.  But even the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has no problem&lt;/a&gt; with people selling free software (as long as they deliver freedom with it).  There exist licences that look like free licences but forbid any commercial exploitation, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;they are in fact non-free, and off-topic here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T09:41:50.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10923" CreationDate="2020-12-16T09:47:13.787" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a project that is very clever and I would like to build my own but using some of their ideas. That's basically what I did but now the code is similar, because we follow the same idea, but I did not reuse any of their code, I've handwritten it entirely, but now it looks similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to mention where the original idea come from, and include their copyright license, even if I did not use any of their code? I have just written mine myself but it looks similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21353" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:21:00.143" Title="Reusing the original idea of a project without mentioning it" Tags="|copyright|license|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10922" CreationDate="2020-12-16T10:21:00.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The right to produce adaptations of a copyrighted work (aka &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt;) is one of the rights reserved to the copyright holder in Berne Convention countries.  The rightsholder may usually licence it to others if (s)he chooses to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've read this program, then set out to produce your own program that implements the same ideas, and by your own admission &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it looks similar&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; to the original work.  I can't say with certainty whether or not what you've produced is an adaptation of the original work, but &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't like to bet against it.  So let's assume that it is, for the rest of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the original work is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD&lt;/a&gt;, which says that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Since your work is an adaptation of the original, you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; distributing the original work, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;with modification&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Three conditions are given for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't sound like you were planning to contravene (3), so that issue doesn't arise.  You haven't told us whether you'll be distributing your project in source or binary form, but when you do, the conditions that you must satisfy are clearly spelled out above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:21:00.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T13:26:19.357" Score="1" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the Open Source Licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and want to know whether these are valid globally or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I am from Turkey. Are these licenses valid for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T14:01:30.723" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T14:01:30.723" Title="Are Open Source Licenses valid globally?" Tags="|licensing|law|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10924" CreationDate="2020-12-16T13:57:11.793" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL/DR: Yes, Open Source licenses are valid in Turkey and nearly globally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source copyright licenses are based on copyright law. While each country has its own copyright laws, there is an international agreement (the Berne Convention) in which countries have agreed to have certain commonalities in their copyright laws. Turkey is one of the signatories of that convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are still differences in copyright laws (like if moral rights are recognized in their own right), the functioning of the Open Source licenses is based on the common pats of the copyright laws and thus they are effective in all countries that follow the Berne Convention (which in nearly all countries in the world). For the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#List_of_countries_and_regions_that_are_not_signatories_to_the_Berne_Convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;countries that don't follow&lt;/a&gt; the Berne Convention, you would have to check their specific laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="17991" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T10:48:26.867" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T10:48:26.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T14:26:59.260" Score="-3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;OSI (Open Source Initiative) says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't understand what the rights exactly are in this definition. So that, I wonder software under one of the OSI-approved licenses (they can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) allow anyone to use/run it for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, can I prepare a course (which shows the software's symbols/logos/icons/screen video records, use of it or its functions) with software under one of the OSI-approved license and sell it on Udemy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T15:51:32.703" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T15:51:32.703" Title="Does a software under one of the OSI-approved licenses allow anybody to use/run it for any purpose?" Tags="|licensing|license|osi|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10926" CreationDate="2020-12-16T15:40:16.097" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very definition of &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; as defined by the OSI is, that the software may be used by anyone for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, if you only use open source software which uses one of the OSI-acknowledged FLOSS licenses (e,g. GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache), you are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main differences in the licenses lay in the terms and conditions which apply when you distribute it and especially distribute modified versions of the software, be that in binary or source code form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T12:10:54.040" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T12:10:54.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10929" CreationDate="2020-12-17T10:42:25.977" Score="4" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I create a Creative-Commons-licensed work, say CC-BY-SA 4.0, and I include some CC0/public domain content:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to explicitly mark the public domain content as such?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the entire work be licensed as CC-BY-SA 4.0 given that some of the content has an even less restrictive license and &lt;strong&gt;especially&lt;/strong&gt; given that I am not its original author?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17991" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T11:18:08.127" Title="Can I use public domain content in my CC-BY-SA-licensed work?" Tags="|creative-commons|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10928" CreationDate="2020-12-17T11:18:08.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a work is in the public domain, then you have the right to do just about anything you can think of with it. The CC0 license tries to give you the same rights to the largest extent possible under the applicable law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those rights include incorporating the CC0/public domain work in a larger work, which is under a different license, without indicating that some parts are not created by you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you don't have to indicate that parts copied from a CC0/public domain source are not by your hand, you also don't have to indicate which content is CC0/public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all practical purposes, your entire work should be regarded as being under the CC-BY-SA license (or whichever other license you choose), but I would not litigate people who appear to have copied only the content that was under the CC0/in the public domain without following your license. For all you know, they obtained a second copy of that content under the original terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T11:18:08.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10930" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-17T12:53:43.440" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about changes made to open source projects when these changes are not submitted back upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is different from &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/forking&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;forking&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;forking&lt;/a&gt;, which is the process of creating a new open source project (or at least repository) from an existing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T13:15:52.763" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:15:52.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10931" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-17T12:53:43.440" Score="0" Body="For questions about private change to otherwise open source projects" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T13:15:14.877" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:15:14.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T15:57:18.043" Score="-1" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is understood from the Open Source Initiative's definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt; that the software under the licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; can be used/run for any purpose. For example, it is understood that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/HeidiSQL/HeidiSQL/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HeidiSQL&lt;/a&gt; is under GNU General Public License v2.0 and it can be used/run for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some software are under multiple licenses. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/veracrypt/VeraCrypt/blob/master/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/veracrypt/VeraCrypt/blob/master/License.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VeraCrypt is multi-licensed under Apache License 2.0 and the TrueCrypt License version 3.0, a verbatim copy of both licenses can be found below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is running/using VeraCrypt for any purpose still valid in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T10:51:55.770" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T10:51:55.770" Title="Does multi-licensing disable &quot;use/run for any purpose&quot; right?" Tags="|law|license|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10932" CreationDate="2020-12-17T16:13:49.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licences do not inhere in software, they attach to software (or, to be more precise, to the recipients of software) through the act of conveyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a complex way of saying that what &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; licence some other person gets software under has no effect on you and the licence under which you get it.  If you get &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt; under a free licence, let's say the GPL, then you have the freedom to use it for any purpose (as well as the other freedoms that free software comes with, and the conditions that the GPL applies to them).  Just because somebody else gets &lt;code&gt;libfoo&lt;/code&gt; under a proprietary licence (say, one that lets them build it into a software product without honouring copyleft, but only up to ten thousand copies) that doesn't mean that your freedoms go away.  Similarly, your freedoms don't automatically transfer to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title question can't be answered, because it assumes that software just sits there, with rights associated with it, which it doesn't.  Instead, &lt;strong&gt;the rights you have with respect to a piece of software will depend on the licence terms presented to you when you got your copy of the software&lt;/strong&gt;, and they won't depend on any licence terms presented to anybody else when they got their copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T07:17:44.367" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T07:17:44.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T20:12:15.213" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am conflicted about the licensing for one of my projects. My goals for the license are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; similar to the GPL, with one notable exception. I want to remain the sole copyright owner - to keep options like potentially commercially licensing the project under another license open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding, all would be fine with just the GPL, except for contributions. The way all the big projects work is, by requiring contributors to sign a CLA/CTA - which to be frank is hugely unrealistic for 99% of contributors to do for something like a simple bug fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is certainly similar to this one &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7195/cla-as-an-exception-to-the-gpl&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; The main differences being a) Exclusive copyright and b) enforceability; is a comment on a PR enough? ('Do you agree with the terms as stated in...?' 'I do'). Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21376" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T01:07:59.947" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T01:07:59.947" Title="Copyright Transfer by License?" Tags="|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10934" CreationDate="2020-12-17T20:43:39.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason that all the big projects have CLAs or similar is precisely because they have been advised by their lawyers that a comment on a PR or similar &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; enough to protect them. You can make your own judgment based on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T20:43:39.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10937" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:48:53.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T10:48:53.893" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:48:53.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10938" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:48:53.893" Score="0" Body="For questions about distributing open source projects via the JavaScript package manager 'npm', or other open source questions about using packages found there." OwnerUserId="642" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T13:15:21.880" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:15:21.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10947" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:28:56.267" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to do a feasibility study for doing a plugin that implements a 2D geometry solver in various programs. The solver is GPL v3. Some of the programs are GPL themselves but some are not, like Illustrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My plugin is distributed online, not as a part of a commercial application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My source is also distributed online, and complies with GPL Licencing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But you can not actually run said plugin without the commercial application as its a plugin for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this ok?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21392" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T15:57:22.893" Title="GPL in Plugin for a open source application" Tags="|closed-source|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10943" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:58:44.647" Score="2" ViewCount="1389" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qt decided to remove offline installers for open source users. But we can still install Qt 5.15.x LTS with Debug Informations using Online Installer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However they also say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Starting with Qt 5.15, long term support (LTS) will only be available to commercial customers&lt;/strong&gt;. This means open-source users will receive patch-level releases of 5.15 until the next minor release will become available. This means that we will handle Qt 5.15 in the same way as e.g. 5.13 or 5.14 for open source users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But same guys also say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt 5.15 is available &lt;strong&gt;now for all our users. For our open source users, it will be supported in the same way as other regular Qt releases until the release of Qt 6.&lt;/strong&gt; For commercial customers, Qt 5.15 will be long-term-supported (LTS) for three years with regular bug fix releases beyond the release of Qt 6. 26 May 2020&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I am very confused. I as an open source user am able to download &lt;strong&gt;Qt 5.15.2&lt;/strong&gt; from online installer with Debug Information. But they say its not for open source users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, If I use Online installer and download Qt 5.15.2 can I use it as an open source? Or I am only allowed to use &lt;strong&gt;Qt 5.14.x&lt;/strong&gt; as an Open source user so should I downgrade my app to 5.14.x?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21393" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T07:51:22.337" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T07:51:22.337" Title="Can Qt 5.15 or 5.15.x can be used as open source? Because they say yes and no" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10942" CreationDate="2020-12-20T07:47:15.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You misunderstood the statements from Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt 5.15.x is available to both Commercial and Open Source users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after version 6 or 5.16 has been released, only Commercial users will receive further bugfixes on Qt 5.15. If you are an Open Source user and you are inconvenienced by a bug, you must upgrade to the next stable version to get a fix for the bug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T07:47:15.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T13:50:46.013" Score="3" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;GCC has a special exception that doesn't force you to use GPL for programs compiled with GCC. If I for example had program foo, how can I apply the classpath/GCC/linking exception to it as well? Do I have to modify the GPLv3 adding the exception or make a separate file stating the exception? Do I have to put a notice on every file that there is a special exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21404" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T00:17:37.423" Title="Adding GPL classpath exception to program" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10941" CreationDate="2020-12-20T15:57:22.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot use the GNU GPL in a plugin for a non-GPL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can use the GNU LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T15:57:22.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11228" CreationDate="2020-12-20T21:21:10.760" Score="5" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing my first real project on Github (in Python) and I'm using functions from two other repos (which I'll call foo and bar) as well as rewriting some of their modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 1: separate my code and theirs, rewrite what I need and import the rest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structure on my computer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.&#xA;├── foo&#xA;├── bar&#xA;└── mypackage&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structure on Github (When someone clones my repo then they need to clone foo and bar as well)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.&#xA;└── mypackage&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Option 2: mix my code and theirs, such that it may be indistiguishable that I used another code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structure on my computer and on Github:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.&#xA;└── mypackage&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like option 2 is simpler since my code is standalone, but I also feel like it does not make clear what I reused and what I coded myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course in both options I would mention foo and bar in my README. Foo has licence Apache 2.0 and bar has licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: which option should I choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21406" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T08:34:48.387" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T08:34:48.387" Title="How to reuse code in GitHub without passing other code as mine?" Tags="|github|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10944" CreationDate="2020-12-21T00:17:37.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GCC has a special exception that doesn't force you to use GPL for programs compiled with GCC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct. Its &lt;em&gt;output&lt;/em&gt; does not have to be under the GPL. Similarly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an image created with Photoshop doesn't need to follow the license that Photoshop is distributed under, even if fancy filters are used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a picture taken and edited with an Apple iPhone isn't owned by Apple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a document created with Microsoft Word doesn't need to be distributed under the same terms as MS Word itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These all deal with what the program produces &lt;em&gt;at runtime&lt;/em&gt;. GCC adds its own bits of code to the final binary, so it needs the exception to ensure that those small functions don't cause the whole program to be under the GPL. If this applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Programs that use your library must use the GPL, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your program includes part of itself in its output, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The part that is included is enough to be copyrightable (e.g. some bits of JSON/XML probably doesn't), and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you don't want to place only those specific bits under a more permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you can consider using some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/COPYING.RUNTIME&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception&lt;/a&gt;. However, it's written very specifically for GCC, and mentions its name and behavior several  times, so you'd need to modify it to fit your program. To apply it, add the full text somewhere in your project, and add the specific bits of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/16e2427f50c208dfe07d07f18009969502c25dc8/libstdc%2B%2B-v3/libsupc%2B%2B/exception.h#L17-L23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard copyright header&lt;/a&gt; to every source file in which it applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you seem to mix in your question the &amp;quot;GCC Runtime Library Exception&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;GNU Classpath&amp;quot; exception. If you actually want the latter, and you instead want to allow others to link to your library without being considered under the GPL, use LGPL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if you truly do not want to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1413/11536&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;permit modifications of the combined work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and confuse many people who aren't familiar with GPL2 + classpath exception, then use &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt; as your LICENSE, and add &amp;quot;with the Classpath Exception&amp;quot; in your copyright header in each source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11536" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T00:17:37.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10956" CreationDate="2020-12-21T03:04:41.470" Score="2" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some open-source things I’ve made, and I am trying to get a license that prohibits the redistribution of them. By this, I mean when I publish it to wherever I do, I don’t want to permit others to download my software and publish it on their own website, without crediting me or putting my links. They are Minecraft function packs and maps which can be accessed easily, and I publish them onto a site with my own download link. Some people download these projects and put them up on their own site, without permission, removing all credit, changing the link, and sometimes they copy the description I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve been looking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/&lt;/a&gt;, but no license there fits what I’m looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21408" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:20:46.473" Title="Finding a license that prohibits distribution" Tags="|license-recommendation|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T08:51:02.537" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at including a library from Github on my next project that has different tiers. It claims that the lowest free tier is licensed under GPL 2, however to use advanced functions you need to pay for a license. This is a pretty standard model on Github. The interesting thing though is that all the code for the advanced functions are included in the same package in Github, and there is a license file that explicitly states &amp;quot;(app) is licensed under the&#xA;GNU General Public License v2.0... etc&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, in the source of the main file there is the license below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;@license&#xA;   &#xA;This version of [app] is distributed under GPL 2.0 license and can be legally used in GPL projects.&#xA;&#xA;To use [app] in non-GPL projects (and get Pro version of the product), please obtain Commercial/Enterprise or Ultimate license on our site https://[url] or contact us at [email]&#xA;&#xA;(c) [company]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading on this is that if I download the code and all the advanced functions are included along with the GPL 2 license, then there's no legal reason to pay for the license? Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not advising that they should not get paid, they worked hard and deserve their due, I'm curious about the legalities here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21410" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T18:06:14.290" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T19:03:20.323" Title="Can I use the &quot;pro&quot; features found in open source code if it's GPL 2?" Tags="|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T09:49:08.220" Score="4" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a YouTube video in which I would like to include some images that have CC-BY-SA (v3 and v4) licenses. I understand that my video would then be considered a derivative work and that I would have to use a compatible license for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, YouTube only allow two different choices: YouTube Standard License and CC-BY. Would it be enough to set the license on YouTube to CC-BY and then write in the description that the license is CC-BY-SA (v4 probably) and link to the license, attribute the original creators etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will this somehow override the less restrictive CC-BY license or will this be an infringement since I have set the video to CC-BY?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21411" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T12:04:40.073" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T13:24:14.023" Title="Using CC-BY-SA (v3 and v4) content in YouTube video" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T13:06:43.557" Score="1" ViewCount="515" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to sell course(s) on Udemy by using Ubuntu. As you predict, there will be everything what the Ubuntu has (such as screens, icons, logos, symbols, tools, softwares etc. and their use) in the course videos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I want to know this is legal or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer is suggested but I don't think that it is enough for my question because I can't see a clear definition such as &amp;quot;Ubuntu is under GPL&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Ubuntu is open source&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Ubuntu is free&amp;quot; on ubuntu.com. Therefore, I can't determine an answer for the question I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubuntu.com/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ubuntu.com/licensing&lt;/a&gt; is another cause to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu is a collection of thousands of computer programs and documents created by a range of individuals, teams and companies. Each of these programs may come under a different licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ubuntu contains licensed and copyrighted works that are not application software. For example, the default Ubuntu installation includes documentation, images, sounds, video clips and firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the application software installed by default is free software. In addition, we install some hardware drivers that are available only in binary format, but such packages are clearly marked in the restricted component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T12:45:59.653" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T12:45:59.653" Title="Can Ubuntu be used to make money?" Tags="|commercial|law|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-12-22T12:05:12.163" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2020-12-21T13:24:42.647" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that since you are not reselling the software you should be fine. And also, since the default installation is free, you are not doing piracy by giving for free paid content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I've seen many Udemy course using Ubuntu, Windows or MacOs and since they're still on Udemy, so you shoulden't worry too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still worried about it, consider reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubuntu.com/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubuntu licensing webpage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20666" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T13:24:42.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10952" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:12:12.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should choose the YouTube standard license and then add in the description the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:12:12.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10950" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:20:46.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would not be a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can choose the GNU GPL which will allow redistribution, but it has to stay open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:20:46.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10951" CreationDate="2020-12-21T18:17:55.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this depends what you mean by &amp;quot;the library&amp;quot;. You can use anything which is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DHTMLX/dhtmlx-suite-gpl/tree/master/codebase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the codebase itself&lt;/a&gt; as that is licensed under the GPL. However, all the JavaScript in the sample code (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/DHTMLX/dhtmlx-suite-gpl/blob/master/samples/list/common/list.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;list.js&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) is not available for you to use as it is explicitly marked as covered by their commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I suspect you'll also find that the features of the &amp;quot;Pro&amp;quot; version (e.g. &amp;quot;Multiple Gantt/Scheduler instances on a page&amp;quot;) are not in the GPL source on Github, so you can't use those because the code just isn't there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T18:17:55.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10962" CreationDate="2020-12-21T18:21:29.370" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to write a songbook (LaTex, Lilypond) of christmas/seasonal songs and am looking for the right license to pick.&#xA;Some parameters of the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book currently is planned with songs in the public domain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am toying with the idea to include songs from other open-source projects with free licenses (like &lt;em&gt;Unlicense&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I might slightly alter some songs (at least the chords)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book will be collaboratively created between me and some few friends&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am planning to place the contents in a private github/gitlab repository&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book will not be published freely, only a few copies for the collaborators will be created&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book will not be used for public singing, only for domestic music&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to pick a license, if I don't plan to publish the book?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be a good license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens, if I don't pick a license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens, if I want to include non-free songs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21415" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-06T09:54:26.777" LastActivityDate="2023-07-06T09:54:26.777" Title="Appropriate license for songbook shared with friends" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10961" CreationDate="2020-12-21T19:29:07.147" Score="3" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a project that's based on apache 2.0 open source code.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know that I should include a NOTICE file and the license, but my question is where should I place them? in the code or inside the built application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21381" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T05:33:28.127" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T05:33:28.127" Title="Where should I place the NOTICE file and the license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10960" CreationDate="2020-12-21T21:24:04.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Place it in the root directory of your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T21:24:04.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10959" CreationDate="2020-12-21T21:34:31.630" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to pick a license, if I don't plan to publish the book?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be a good license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Creative Commons license is appropriate for non-software works. Use their &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license chooser&lt;/a&gt; to choose a CC license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens, if I don't pick a license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens, if I want to include non-free songs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to ask for permission to the song's copyright holders first if you'd like to distribute the song with the song book.  Merely linking to the song on YouTube or another site is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T06:32:10.890" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T06:32:10.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2020-12-21T21:44:18.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should be OK. The software is, itself, free and, even if it were not, you are not selling it or giving out copies, so that, too, shouldn't be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing you need to pay attention to is not to misrepresent your content as official &amp;quot;Ubuntu&amp;quot; content. The Ubuntu brand is owned by Canonical and they will come after you if you make content that could be mistaken for something Canonical may be sponsoring (which, I assume, it's not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21417" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T21:44:18.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10965" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-22T15:09:00.057" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a desktop app. It's a passion project today, but I'm hoping it'll be part of my path to becoming a full time indie dev.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my development process, I've benefited a lot from looking at the design/architecture/etc. of open source software, and using it as learning material that inspired my own original work. I found this hugely beneficial and inspirational, so I want to &amp;quot;pay it forward&amp;quot; by letting others have access to my source code, so that they can learn from it just as I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I want to monetize this app to make a living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't like the user experience of  ads.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want to gut my app and move functionality to a server, just to force people to pay for ongoing subscriptions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also don't think a &amp;quot;it's free, but commercial support is paid&amp;quot; model like that of&#xA;Red Hat or Canonical would work, because my app is geared towards end-users who wouldn't want to pay for support contracts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus, I think I'll most likely go with a &amp;quot;paid app, with a free full-featured trail&amp;quot; model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem like conflicting desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's roughly the things I'm looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want users to have to pay for the app to download and use the official (released by me) binary, distributed through the app store, my own website, or other official channels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want users to be able to build their own binary, modify the source, tinker with it, etc. even without paying for a user license, but &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; for personal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time they've done that, I'm willing to let them have it. Hopefully the proximity to the tools/source will nudge them towards poking around the code and learning about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, I don't want a company to create a build, and use it internally as a way of circumventing the app's price.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't want users to be able to build a binary, and gut the licensing, and redistribute it (though that'll obviously happen ‍☠️, I still don't want it to be legally allowed)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also don't want a company to create a build and use it internally, without paying for user licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to disallow users from voluntarily contributing changes if they so wish, but I don't want them to have any expectation of an ownership stake in the commercial app's revenue, or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could easily make this work by open-sourcing parts of the app e.g. the backend, while withholding the parts necessary to make it do anything useful (e.g. the UI). But this sucks, because it's intentionally hamstrung, and hides the UI source, which might be interesting/helpful to some.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that threads this needle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21426" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T15:09:00.057" Title="Sell app, but make source available for the curious" Tags="|license-recommendation|commercial|monetization|paid-software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-12-23T06:15:18.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10967" CreationDate="2020-12-22T19:14:10.033" Score="2" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;The repository of an open-source Apache 2.0 licensed project I'm forking is huge and has a giant commit history, so, for the sake of saving space, I want to just to squash all commits, preserving all the file structure and, of course, the license and contributors list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it an OK action? From what I read and deduced it's totally fine - the license is about the product itself, not about the commit history. Still, I want to be 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2381" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T19:26:14.357" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T19:26:14.357" Title="Am I allowed to squash commits in repository with Apache 2.0 license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|forking|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10966" CreationDate="2020-12-22T19:22:33.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, the Apache license allows you to modify the source code as long as you document your changes. You could view squashing the commits as such a change, and document it by stating something like &amp;quot;This project is forked from XYZ, with commit history .. squashed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T19:22:33.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10968" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10973" CreationDate="2020-12-22T19:27:36.940" Score="5" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a library/cli-tool for bundling dependency licenses into a single file.&#xA;Currently, I'm trying to collect licenses of: direct dependencies, transitive-dependencies and &lt;strong&gt;direct &lt;em&gt;dev&lt;/em&gt;-dependencies&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I'm trying to collect licenses of packages, that are installed in node_modules.&#xA;Transitive dev-dependencies are not installed by the package manager, because of the very nature of dev-dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm worried, whether or not code portions of those transitive dependencies somehow can be included in installed packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: Project &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; depends on Package &amp;quot;B&amp;quot;. Package &amp;quot;B&amp;quot; has Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot; as a dev-dependency. Code generated by Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot; in Package &amp;quot;B&amp;quot; includes not only simple transpilation result, but also some polyfill for a function, that is not available in older browsers, from Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot;.&#xA;But, because Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot; is a transitive dev-dependency, it is not installed in node_modules of Project &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;, so without manually installing it, Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot;-s license cannot be properly obtained, can it? Even if we could, we will have to look for Transpiler &amp;quot;C&amp;quot;-s dependencies/dev-dependencies too, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this hypothetic case, we have only one transitive dev-dependency, but, in real-world scenarios, there could be hundreds. There could be several versions of the same package defined as a transitive dev-dependency in different packages. By manually installing transitive dev-dependencies for collecting license information, these transitive dev-dependencies could have their own dev dependencies, which will be needed to be installed too. This process will have to be repeated until all transitive dev-dependencies of all transitive dev-dependencies are installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is: Should I care for collecting license information about transitive dev-dependencies?&#xA;And if I should, to which point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already care for regular transitive-dependencies, but I'm worried for transitive dev-dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21429" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T13:09:19.333" Title="Should I give attribution for transitive dev-dependencies?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10972" CreationDate="2020-12-22T19:54:18.450" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says the Linux Foundation was a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, so Linus doesn't seem involved in the founding of the foundation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When and how did Linus join the Linux Foundation? More broadly, what's his relationship to the Linux Foundation? Do they simply sponsor his work or is he an official employee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15321" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T05:56:35.713" Title="When and how did Linus Torvalds join the Linux Foundation?" Tags="|linux-kernel|history|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5726" CreationDate="2020-12-22T23:10:36.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not the case if you use PySide instead of PyQt.  PySide uses LGPL so your Python code can be whatever license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.learnpyqt.com/tutorials/pyqt5-vs-pyside2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PyQt5 vs PySide2: What's the difference between the two Python Qt libraries?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference in the two versions — in fact the entire reason&#xA;PySide2 exists — is licensing. PyQt5 is available under a GPL or&#xA;commercial license, and PySide2 under a LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are planning to release your software itself under the GPL, or&#xA;you are developing software which will not be distributed, the GPL&#xA;requirement of PyQt5 is unlikely to be an issue. However, if you plan&#xA;to distribute your software without distributing the source you will&#xA;either need to purchase a commercial license from Riverbank for PyQt5&#xA;or use PySide2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license does not require you to share the source code of your&#xA;own applications, even if they are bundled with PySide2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21431" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T23:10:36.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10394" CreationDate="2020-12-22T23:22:18.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can include the documentation in your application if the application is licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of two licenses BY-SA is compatible with, the other being the Free Art License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T17:55:57.980" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T17:55:57.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10969" CreationDate="2020-12-23T05:56:35.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Linux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, he moved to Open Source Development Labs around June 2003, and when they merged with the Free Standards Group &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Standards_Group&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 2007&lt;/a&gt; to form the Linux Foundation, he became part of the Foundation as a consequence of the merger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the LF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801/201723189349305852/IRS990&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2016 tax filing&lt;/a&gt;, he's described (on p.8) as a &amp;quot;key employee&amp;quot;, with the job title &amp;quot;Fellow&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T05:56:35.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10968" CreationDate="2020-12-23T13:09:19.333" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a really tricky scenario, which is why automated license compliance tools can only go so far. Your analysis seems generally correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I would expect that the license of B doesn't just cover B's original source code, but also B's transpiled code (at least if B is distributed in transpiled form). This would neatly sidestep the issue of transitive dev dependencies. However, this points to a more general problem: license metadata might not be accurate, another reason why automated tools only go so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are designing a general-purpose tool, it might be useful to add an &lt;em&gt;option&lt;/em&gt; that also triggers analysis of dev dependencies and transitive dev dependencies, by fetching metadata for tools mentioned in the package metadata (no need to actually install them). By default, I would not expect dev dependencies to have any direct effect on the licensing status (although, as you correctly explain, especially polyfills could violate this expectation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T13:09:19.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10974" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10976" CreationDate="2020-12-24T03:10:42.207" Score="13" ViewCount="3061" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about free vs open source software that's more about practical implications from the user's perspective. I'll explain the mindset first before the actual question, so you can understand specifically what I'm referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I want a system that's free of closed source software, as much as possible. So I want to be completely aware of closed-source software when deciding on an installation. For example, I may either not install the app, or use a sandboxed form (like snap/flatpak), or as last resort install it anyway and be aware that I'm &amp;quot;trusting&amp;quot; the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, when I say closed-source, I'm talking about executable code specifically - stuff that runs on my processor, that may raise security or privacy concerns - not about closed-source assets, media or other file formats that are &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot;. I'm also not talking about hardware or network services external to my machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's say I'm installing a program or library in a package manager (e.g. using apt, snap, npm, etc), and I see that the main package has a FLOSS license, but I didn't check the licenses of every dependency it has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the package itself may be open source, it's often possible that it depends on closed-source software (and maybe even include closed-source code as components?). &lt;strong&gt;Which licenses give me a guarantee that I'm not indirectly installing closed-source code together with the main package?&lt;/strong&gt; In particular, among:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU AGPL, GPL, LGPL; 3.0, 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD-3-Clause, BSD-2-Clause, MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I presume only the GNU licenses (at least AGPL and GPL, not sure about LGPL) would give me that guarantee by just inspecting the main package, is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addionally, what if I inspect the license of every dependency, would all FLOSS licenses give me that guarantee? Or would the permissive licenses still allow a package to include and run closed-source components (code) within them, even though the package's license is considered OSS (assuming only that license is specified on the repo)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can a Free Software package have a dependency that runs closed source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can an Open Source repository include and run closed source code or components?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20142" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-24T10:12:40.347" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T04:57:52.013" Title="Which licenses give me a guarantee that a software I'm installing is completely open-source, free of closed-source dependencies or components?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|dependencies|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10974" CreationDate="2020-12-24T03:52:52.250" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which licenses give me a guarantee that a software I'm installing is completely open-source, free of closed-source dependencies or components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, a license cannot do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem.  Anyone can attach put any license file into their project repo that they want to.  The text of the license file may assert that that everything in their repo and/or every dependency is open source.  But that asserting something doesn't  make it true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses cannot give that kind of guarantee.  People can.  But people can make mistakes ... or be mischievous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as @apsillers pointed out (below), an assertion that a codebase is fully open source (in the sense that you mean) could be correct at the time it was made and then become incorrect later on.  For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;problematic code or dependencies could be added to the project after its initial release, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one of the existing project dependencies could become problematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a real guarantee, you need to check for yourself ... or get a trusted third party to check for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what if I inspect the license of every dependency, would all FLOSS licenses give me that guarantee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  It is not what the (dependency) license says that matters; see above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, when I say closed-source, I'm talking about executable code specifically - stuff that runs on my processor, that may raise security or privacy concerns ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, this is definitely not something that any open source licenses deals with.  Security and privacy concerns can only be addressed by code auditing, etcetera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FLOSS makes auditing easier, because you have the source code to examine.  But it is unwise to assume that problems will be picked up by someone else ... in a timely fashion.  Just about every security patch in the Linux ecosystem is proof that FLOSS doesn't &lt;em&gt;automatically&lt;/em&gt; give security, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13818" LastEditorUserId="13818" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T04:57:52.013" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T04:57:52.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10974" CreationDate="2020-12-24T04:04:41.863" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;No Open Source license does that. Even the GNU GPL license allows one program to interact with another non-free program via pipes, sockets, streams etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the licenses can't do this, there are Linux distributions where the distribution creators make a commitment to only including free software, for example the Debian &lt;em&gt;main&lt;/em&gt; package repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T04:04:41.863" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10978" CreationDate="2020-12-24T18:39:58.363" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed a project and I want to make the source code publicly available. I want everyone to be able to use the code as they see fit when used for developing end products (not sure if this is the right term, I mean software that is aimed at consumers), but I want to disallow people making tools aimed at developers and companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license that does this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21445" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T18:56:51.350" Title="Which license allows usage in end products (aimed at consumers) but not tools aimed at developers and companies?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2020-12-28T18:12:11.940" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10977" CreationDate="2020-12-24T18:56:51.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there are no open-source licenses that meet your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An open-source license is not allowed to discriminate in what the software is used for. An open-source license can't forbid commercial usage and by the same token it can't forbid usage in a product aimed at non-consumers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T18:56:51.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="310" CreationDate="2020-12-25T05:10:40.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think technically speaking it's more likely that &amp;quot;free software&amp;quot; is a subset of &amp;quot;open-source software&amp;quot; because the freedoms of modification and distribution of such, as defined by FSF's four essential freedoms, require the access to the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, as two institutions in the reality, FSF and OSI may have different criteria for software licenses which result in counterexamples to the above technical relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21451" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T05:10:40.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-25T07:38:06.273" Score="5" ViewCount="1203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library which is a template-rich C++ library. All templated functions and classes are defined inside headers. It also has some non-templated functions, which are implemented inside headers and included in the program when a special macro is defined. I also want to offer a dynamic library (and possibly a static library too) with all non-templated functions and classes (included in the library source files from headers with the help of the preprocessor). I want to license it under GNU LGPLv3, but I'm not sure is that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, LGPL is OK for header-only libraries. But what about dynamic and static linking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16895" LastEditorUserId="16895" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T11:47:21.717" LastActivityDate="2023-07-12T10:42:30.250" Title="Is LGPL OK for mostly header only library?" Tags="|lgpl|linking|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10974" CreationDate="2020-12-25T07:56:14.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not directly answering the question, but the Free Software Foundation maintains a list of Free GNU/Linux distributions &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedom 1&lt;/a&gt; is stated that &amp;quot;Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&amp;quot;, I believe that all the distributions listed there are fully open-source too (otherwise the precondition of freedom 1 would not hold)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T07:56:14.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10980" CreationDate="2020-12-25T10:41:29.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can definitely use LGPL 3 for both static and dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way a program is &amp;quot;linked&amp;quot; to your library doesn't change the conceptual relationship between them - another author's application uses your library to perform some functionality. They are allowed to redistribute your library in order to perform this functionality but must state so, must note your copyright and must make the source available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T10:41:29.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10984" CreationDate="2020-12-26T07:31:47.360" Score="3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Project A&amp;quot; is released under LGPL ver 2.1 or, at user's discretion, above. This project is part of a bigger platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Contributor A&amp;quot; submitted a highly-popular merge request to project A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maintainers refused to merge for 2 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasons: we are in code freeze, so not accepting merges for RC version and there is no dev version because we don't have time for dev branch. The code should be based on project B (one of the maintainers is also a maintainer of project B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this two years the contributor worked and submitted much more code, applauded by the community along the way (highly requested features).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the 5000th &amp;quot;we are in code freeze&amp;quot;, finally fed up, the contributor deleted his merge request and asked the maintainers to not use his code anymore in any way in project A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributor was banned from the project, the community revolted, the maintainers uplift the ban, the Code of Conduct Committee jumped in from nowhere and reinstated the ban against contributor A and other members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the meantime &amp;quot;contributor B&amp;quot; open another merge request with contributor A's code, which he had saved in his PC, describing this new merge request as based on the work of &amp;quot;someone&amp;quot; who &amp;quot;withdrew permission which is not legally valid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new merge request based the code on &amp;quot;project B&amp;quot; (the other project for which one of the maintainers of &amp;quot;project A&amp;quot; work) and is fully supported by the maintainers, who, we are told, made &amp;quot;a significant amount of effort [...] into reviewing and testing the work and building on top of it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributor's A posted messages asking them, again, not to use his code (or find an agreement). The maintainers are deleting his messages as well as messages from the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is all of this common / accepted practice by the open source community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If not, what can be done to make them stop using his code, or at least force them to recognize the efforts of the original contributor, who wrote a lot of code over 2 years, and now they are calling him just &amp;quot;someone&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will informing the &amp;quot;project aggregator&amp;quot; work (the bigger project on which project A is part of)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will informing the platform that hosts the source code work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I tip the press (phoronix, for instance) about all of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with contributor A in any way. I don't know him, I never talked to him. I am just disgusted on what is happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: cross-posted on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/59522/can-the-maintainers-of-a-lgpl-project-use-contributed-code-after-the-original-co&quot;&gt;Law StackExchange&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; ramifications of doing what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Project A has no Contributor License Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributor A submitted files with header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file is part of &amp;lt;PROJECT NAME&amp;gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 20XX-20YY &amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR NAME&amp;gt; &amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR SURNAME&amp;gt; &amp;lt;&amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR EMAIL&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;PROJECT NAME&amp;gt; is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;PROJECT NAME&amp;gt; is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;License along with &amp;lt;PROJECT NAME&amp;gt;; if not, see&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 20XX-20YY &amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR NAME&amp;gt; &amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR SURNAME&amp;gt; &amp;lt;&amp;lt;CONTRIBUTOR EMAIL&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is being maintained, at least for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastEditorUserId="21452" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T08:20:17.437" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T08:45:53.890" Title="Can a LGPL project use contributed code after the original contributor withdrew it and was banned from the project?" Tags="|lgpl|contributor|contributor-agreements|pull-request|problem-contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10983" CreationDate="2020-12-26T08:45:53.890" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be a copyright violation here. The code was pretty clearly released under the LGPL, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;open source licenses are (almost certainly) irrevocable&lt;/a&gt;; it doesn't matter that the patch was never accepted, the code was still released under the LGPL, so as long as the appropriate copyright notices are being maintained (and it seems like they are), Contributor A cannot stop his code being used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should Contributor A be given more prominent billing for their change? Maybe. That's a social issue, and social issues are hard, particularly when a relationship has broken down. While some jurisdictions do have &amp;quot;no disparagement&amp;quot; requirements, these are generally accepted to be a restriction against negative comments rather than a requirement to include a positive comment - e.g. if the project had added a line into the documentation saying &amp;quot;Contributor A is a big pile of poo&amp;quot;, that would be an issue, but I've never heard of a work being forced to include something like &amp;quot;Contributor A is the saviour of this project&amp;quot; against their will due to that kind of legislation. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8040/why-does-the-clause-3-of-4-clause-bsd-makes-it-incompatible-with-gpl&quot;&gt;4 clause BSD license, which did include this kind of clause, is incompatible with the GPL family, and was generally also found by the community to be more hassle than it was worth&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you raise this issue with the project aggregator or the press? Sure. Will anyone care? That's not something we can tell you. The hosting site almost certainly won't care though as there's no copyright violation here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T08:45:53.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-26T12:14:10.337" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a good understanding of GPL, LGPL, dual-licensing, etc. However I have a specific doubt about the meaning of &amp;quot;linking&amp;quot; in the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The library is released under the LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are not the original copyright holder (or not entirely the owner, due to contributions received under the LGPL)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You want to sell a Pro / Enterprise version of the library under a commercial license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clear: if you need to modify the source code of the library, then you cannot release it under a commercial license (LGPL clearly covers the derived work - i.e. the Pro / Enterprise version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;what if the Pro / Enterprise version only &amp;quot;imports&amp;quot; /  &amp;quot;includes&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;requires&amp;quot; the community version, without modifying its source code? In that case, can I use a commercial license for the Pro / Enterprise version and say that the LGPL does not apply to the new code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I use the word &amp;quot;import&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;include&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;require&amp;quot; because I am talking about languages like Javascript, PHP or Ruby that don't have the concept of &amp;quot;linking&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21423" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T14:07:50.263" Title="Does LGPL allow Pro / Enterprise versions of the same library?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10985" CreationDate="2020-12-26T14:05:51.110" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GNU LGPL is the same as the GNU GPL, but it allows inclusion in a non-GNU GPL-licensed application. But the library itself has to still be available under the terms of either the GNU GPL or the GNU LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T14:05:51.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10985" CreationDate="2020-12-26T14:07:50.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL ensures that the library will always remain under the LGPL. Since you are not the sole copyright holder, you cannot relicense the library under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not prevent linking the LGPL-covered library with a proprietary library, which is then sold. It is also permissible to bundle the LGPL library with the proprietary library, assuming all other provisions are complied with (corresponding source code, no additional restrictions for the LGPL component, ability to use the library with a modified LGPL component, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this kind of architecture is perfectly fine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IKMXL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IKMXL.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram: the application can call the LGPL library directly, or through a proprietary wrapper&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this assumes that the proprietary wrapper is clearly a different creative work, and is not derived from the LGPL library in the sense of copyright law. In your scenario, the proprietary component only adds &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; code. But that new code might still be derivative, or may actually form a single program with the LGPL library. This could e.g. be the case if the proprietary component accesses internal data structures of the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important part is that the LGPLv3 only exempts “applications” from the usual GPLv3 conditions, where an application is defined as “any work that makes use of an interface provided by the Library, but which is not otherwise based on the Library.” As long as the proprietary library only interacts with the LGPL component through the LGPL's component's interfaces, things should be allright. E.g. it would be fine to &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; the LGPL component and use the resulting objects, but it might not be fine to override object prototypes or to monkey-patch the LGPL library's interfaces to insert hooks for the proprietary wrapper. Ultimately, what constitutes a derivative work is not entirely clear but would be for a court to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T14:07:50.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10974" CreationDate="2020-12-27T04:11:54.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have noted, someone distributing software cannot change substitute their license for whatever license a third part distributed the third-party software under. So no license can offer any assurance there's no third-party components with a more restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no substitute for examining all third-party pieces and their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I have been faced with this task, I start with looking for conventions for placing license information. Text named LICENSE or LICENSE.*, in the distributed media, in directories touched by the installer, inside composite files like .zip, .jar, .war, .rar, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I do this by hand to get a collection of licenses, from which I make a set of regular expressions to classify each detected license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should include looking for the word &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; in any text file (case insensitive), to detect misses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I implement a scanner that scans all the locations where a license could occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Run it, then look at the report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;False positives from the &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; check go in a list of location exceptions to ignore, or a regex in the classifier that maps it to ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Repeat, until you have eliminated false positives. Address any real positives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the final result is a report listing what software components were found for each license type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can extend this to flag any software component for which no license is identified at all. How you identify &amp;quot;component&amp;quot; will depend on your context; it could be executables in a directory, .jar files, subdirectories of a designated directory, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diligence on this is about as much as you can do to avoid false-negatives.&#xA;Again, this can go in a list of exceptions once you have verified the status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reducing it to a repeatable script is important for several reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evidence of due diligence in case of legal issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Repeatable searches as the software evolves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Capture and tracking of your progress in detection. In a large system, it needs a systematic approach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly recommend separating data from code. That is, the list of exceptions and directories to scan and classifiers, to the extent possible, should be in declarative form in a data file. The code then loads this information to drive the scan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code needed isn't very complex, and most of the work is in identifying the places to search, classifying licenses, tracking down missing licenses, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to addressing your concerns with proprietary software, such a tool can help you to comply with open-source license terms that require various forms of acknowledgement, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing you may wish to examine in your scan, is code signatures. Check that code is signed, that the signature is valid, including that either the certificate is within its validity dates, or there is a time stamp from a TSA that indicates it was signed within the validity dates, that it is a code signing cert, with a trusted CA in the chain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsigned code needs extra vetting, and you should consider signing it yourself once vetted. Ideally, use a different cert than you use for your own code. A signed manifest then completes the picture, allowing substitutions to be detected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new or substituted third-party component can then be caught and examined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A signed manifest that includes the SHA-1 or similar of the scanning tool and data gives attestation to it having been scanned by that version of the tool, as solid as your protection of your private key. Git tree IDs work well for this. You can also use them to limit the amount of rescanning needed. If the tree ID is the same as is recorded in the prior manifest, a rescan over that tree is not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21466" LastEditorUserId="21466" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T04:27:09.383" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T04:27:09.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10991" CreationDate="2020-12-28T11:48:51.260" Score="7" ViewCount="2554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently found an open-source class library that declares that it &amp;quot;has the permission to prohibit a certain individual from using it&amp;quot; and I can't stop wondering if I published an open-source project/software under AGPL license then can I make the same declaration? or is it just an invalid statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21480" LastEditorUserId="9554" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T13:35:53.453" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:12:50.063" Title="Is it permitted to prohibit a certain individual from using software that's under the AGPL license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|agpl|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10990" CreationDate="2020-12-28T13:01:11.997" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;AGPL is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI approved license&lt;/a&gt;. An open source license cannot permit who can use it, as per section 5 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but the terms of the AGPL and the statement mentioned in the question that &amp;quot;The author [sic] has the permission to prohibit a certain individual from using it&amp;quot; seem to contradict each other. Which one takes precedence and which one is invalid is beyond me, unfortunately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T18:25:42.393" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T18:25:42.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10993" CreationDate="2020-12-28T14:25:35.980" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to write a toy interpreter for a programming language as a hobby project hosted on GitHub. The official implementation of the language is licensed under GPLv3. I have read some of its code to study how the parser works. But of course I won't copy or use any single line of its official implementation. Nor will I put my hobby project in any commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I use a different license for my own project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to reference the official implementation somewhere in my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21483" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T14:41:02.567" Title="Study existing GPLv3 licensed code while working on my own project" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|github|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10992" CreationDate="2020-12-28T14:41:02.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, you can use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are not using it at all, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, but as good practice you should refer your inspirations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like to highlight what you said about copying code, it's a tight line because you are getting inspired by that code. Just take caution about how you write the code, and don't fall in a copyright problem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16185" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T14:41:02.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10990" CreationDate="2020-12-28T16:39:34.280" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are two ways to interpret what you propose.  Either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) you make the software is available to all under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, except John Smith, who may not take a copy under any terms, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) you make the software is available to all under AGPLv3, with the additional proviso that John Smith is never allowed to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of (a), anyone who isn't John Smith may take a copy under simple AGPLv3, and then give a copy to John Smith.  In the case of (b), anyone who isn't John Smith may take a copy, ignore the additional restriction under AGPLv3 s7, and pass an unencumbered copy on to John Smith.  Thus neither interpretation has any practical force, and they can both be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible interpretation (c), that the software is available under some kind of licence which is AGPLv3 with an added durable proscription on use by John Smith, can be ignored, since such a licence can't legally exist (line 2, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T16:39:34.280" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10997" CreationDate="2020-12-29T10:32:24.400" Score="5" ViewCount="440" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatiblity overview compiled by the GNU foundation&lt;/a&gt; does not mention the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Distribution License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this license compatible with the AGPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T10:55:17.120" Title="Is the EDL v1.0 GPL-compatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10996" CreationDate="2020-12-29T10:55:17.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Eclipse Distribution License (EDL) is just an alternative name for the BSD 3-clause license, listed by the GNU project as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ModifiedBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;modified BSD license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a highly permissive license that is widely compatible with other licenses, including the GPL and AGPL in all versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T10:55:17.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10980" CreationDate="2020-12-29T13:02:12.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You, the library author, can publish your library under any valid license, and as far as we know, the LPGL 3 is considered a valid license. The question you need to focus on is not &amp;quot;is the LGPL OK to use for &amp;lt;library of type x&amp;gt;&amp;quot;, but instead &amp;quot;does the LGPL have the intended effect on &amp;lt;library of type x&amp;gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point of the LGPL is (in my opinion), that the users of your library can use the library in non-(L)GPL products, so your library can get used in more places. At the same time, the LGPL ensures that the users of the product where your library is incorporated still have the the same freedom for working on the code of your library and using a modified version of your library &lt;em&gt;as if&lt;/em&gt; this third-party product were GPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In LGPL v3, section 3 limits the freedom provided to downstream users in the case that there is significant code in header files: That code gets compiled into the executable, and authors of programs that uses your header files is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; required to open-source their code. The only requirement is to notify the downstream user about the use of the LPGL library and to include the LGPL &lt;em&gt;and the GPL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; in the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the LGPL works is that the author of a program using an LGPL library needs to enable the downstream user to replace the object code from the LGPL library used by arbitrary different object code. As the contents and logic of the header files enter the application itself, not (only) the object code of the library, the downstream user can not replace the header parts of the library. If a library is mostly header-only, there is only little &amp;quot;freedom to adapt/extend/fix the LGPL library in non-GPL products&amp;quot; remaining. Basically, the LGPL v3 has the same effect on header-only libraries as a permissive license like MIT or two-clause BSD, allowing anyone to link your library, as long as you are credited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are happy with this effect of the LGPL v3, you should consider using MIT or BSD directly instead of using the LGPL v3, because both of these permissive licenses are easier to understand and mentioning LGPL may scare potential users of your library. On the other hand, if you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; happy with LGPL v3 working that way, and want a more strict copyleft requirement, consider these choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use GPL v3 instead. This forces the authors of programs using the library to publish them using (L)GPL compatible license terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use LGPL v2.1, which forces the author of a program using your library to release enough of the source code so that all non-trivial functions in the header files can be replaced, which allow significant changes on your library in an otherwise closed-source program. &lt;em&gt;Make sure you do not include the &amp;quot;or, at your option, any later version&amp;quot; clause in your LGPL v2.1 license declaration, because that would allow authors of program using your library to &amp;quot;upgrade&amp;quot; to LGPL v3 and get to use the headers &amp;quot;for free&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;With LGPL v3, the LGPL text is not a complete license, but it contains only a set of clauses that explain in what way it is different from the GPL v3, and includes the GPL v3 &amp;quot;by reference&amp;quot;. So to convey terms in completeness, you need to include the GPL v3 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15279" LastEditorUserId="15279" LastEditDate="2023-07-11T22:36:08.097" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T22:36:08.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10990" CreationDate="2020-12-29T13:26:30.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am the sole copyright holder, I can distribute under any license I wish. Now &amp;quot;AGPL with one exception&amp;quot; is not AGPL obviously. I don't know about AGPL, but the GPL license is protected by copyright, and comes with a license that allows you to copy it unchanged, but does NOT AT ALL allow you to make any changes. Assuming AGPL is the same, you have no permission to use the text of the AGPL with modifications, like your one person exception. You are allowed to pay a lawyer to write a new license for you from scratch that would have the exact same meaning as &amp;quot;AGPL with exception&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To make this clear: A license is a written document, and like any written document has its own copyright, and can come with its own license. The GPL license is NOT GPL licensed for very good reasons, because the creators of the GPL license want to avoid people creating chaos by making slightly modified &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses follow the pattern: &amp;quot;You may make copies and modified copies, which you would not be allowed to do without a license due to copyright law, as long as you follow the terms of the license&amp;quot;. If you start with AGPL licensed code, modify it, and distribute it with your &amp;quot;AGPL except John Smith&amp;quot; license, you are most likely in violation of the AGPL license and your distribution is copyright infringment. However, if I received that code from you, I do NOT have a license that allows me to give a copy to John Smith, and John Smith isn't allowed to receive it from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I or John Smith are sufficiently annoyed with the situation, we can find and contact a copyright holder of the original AGPL licensed code, and that copyright holder can sue you for copyright infringement. You then have the choice to go back to the original AGPL license (and I can distribute to John Smith), or to stick with your license, pay damages for copyright infringement, and I do still not have a license to distribute to John Smith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T13:26:30.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10990" CreationDate="2020-12-29T14:18:18.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I am not a lawyer and therefore this is not &amp;quot;legal advice&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really received the program under the terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL v3&lt;/a&gt;, then look at section 7, third-to-last paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered &amp;quot;further restrictions&amp;quot; within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I am not a lawyer, I suspect that if the copyright holder says you don't have permission to copy their software, then you don't have permission to copy their software; however, since they are giving every other member of the public permission to copy their software and delete the restriction, your friend could download the software, remove the restriction which prevents you from being allowed to have it, and then distribute that copy to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T14:18:18.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10990" CreationDate="2020-12-29T22:05:24.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The owner of the complete source code is not limited to the list of official versions of any license. It is possible to write the license in the way &amp;quot;All terms of the known GPL license apply for everyone except John Smith&amp;quot;. Changes are not permitted in the licenses but should be possible to reference them in any context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However such licenses are not GPL, AGPL, Apache, whatever and would be illegal to name them so. They are just different licenses. They probably cannot be called Open Source either while all other users apart John Smith may not bother too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence that library you address cannot be under AGPL. It is under own specific license. If they anyway claim it &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt;, FSF probably would not be happy at all after knowing this. But if they write &amp;quot;mostly similar&amp;quot;, this means exactly that much - mostly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T22:12:50.063" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:12:50.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11004" CreationDate="2020-12-30T06:39:22.020" Score="3" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose someone is writing a proprietary software that uses a shared or dynamic library that is licensed under the GNU LGPL license. If he wants to change the LGPL library code, he make some functions and declares those functions in a separate header file and include that header file in the LGPL code and use those functions to change the LGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here is the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible for him to license that header file in LGPL but implementation to proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21501" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T19:38:15.137" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T19:38:40.003" Title="Is it possible to license that header file to LGPL but implementation to proprietary license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11003" CreationDate="2020-12-30T08:28:01.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the header file and the corresponding implementation are closely related enough that if one is under the LGPL license, then the LGPL requires that the other is also under the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And putting the header file also under a proprietary license is not going to work either if the existing LGPL code needs to be modified to use that new header file. Modifications to the LGPL code must be made under the LGPL license and any additional files you introduce that way must be formally under an LGPL-compatible license and effectively under the LGPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T19:38:40.003" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T19:38:40.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2020-12-30T13:17:46.077" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR; Get your Java runtime from &lt;a href=&quot;https://adoptium.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adoptium&lt;/a&gt; (the new name of AdoptOpenJDK). It basically uses the same sources as the Oracle JDK and is licensed as GPLv2 with classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand this must all seem quite confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of January 2019 you will need a license for commercial use of the Oracle JRE (what was known as the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; Sun JRE) from Oracle. I'm not a lawyer so what &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; encompasses in the view of Oracle I'll leave to the lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oracle JRE is mostly just a distribution of OpenJDK. OpenJDK is actually the name of the project when Sun opensourced their Java (ie. what is now Oracle JRE) as GPLv2 with classpath exception. I say &amp;quot;mostly&amp;quot; because some parts of the Sun's Java couldn't be opensourced because Sun themselves licensed them from other parties. For example the font rendering engine was such a component. This was replaced with an opensource alternative in OpenJDK. This encompasses a very small amount of functionality. And the functionality is still there in OpenJDK, it's just provided by different implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why would you want to use Oracle's Java implementation? Well if you have software which only works with the original Java JRE. This doesn't happen very often but there is some badly written Java software out there which does some dumb assumptions about the JRE it is running on. Or if you want the commercial support Oracle offers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness there are also other Java distributions you can use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon Corretto&lt;/a&gt; Amazon's OpenJDK distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJ9&lt;/a&gt; This actually offers a different JVM (Java runtime) then OpenJDK does. It is the opensourcing of IBM's Java runtime implementation called J9 which replaces Hotspot (the OpenJDK JVM).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All Linux distributions, all the BSD's (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc), etc. all distribute their own package of OpenJDK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21504" LastEditorUserId="21504" LastEditDate="2021-09-11T15:44:03.497" LastActivityDate="2021-09-11T15:44:03.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-30T16:46:26.257" Score="3" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a specific case where the software is licensed under LGPL but its API is licensed under GPL, which of these should addons (that use the API) follow?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Additionally, if it's LGPL are addons required to follow the same license (or compatible ones) like they would under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project for reference here is: Minecraft's Spigot, where the server implementation CraftBukkit is under LGPL but the API Bukkit is under GPL. &lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21506" LastEditorUserId="21506" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T23:57:47.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T13:38:09.610" Title="Software under LGPL and API under GPL, which license do addons follow?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11013" CreationDate="2020-12-31T00:15:10.523" Score="4" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across Stack Overflow's license a week ago, which I had no idea about. Seems they use CC BY-SA there (before, 3.0, now, 4.0). If I'm publishing code there, it's because I want anyone to do whatever people want with it. Get it to some app to be sold, change it, improve it, get it on a free app, whatever, I don't care. If I did care, I'd put them on GitHub or similar with some license. I might find it cool to have credit in case the person just copy-pastes the code (which is perfectly fine for me), but not a big deal, I don't mind not having it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I came across a person's idea of putting the license they want their code snippets to be used with, on their Stack Exchange profile, as I did with mine. But I think I may have chosen the wrong license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which license should I choose? I've heard about CC0, WTFPL and Unlicense. But all of those seem to have problems. Unclear, badly written, always something. Then there are other licenses, like MIT, GPL, Apache... But I'm not sure those are intended for what WTFPL means, but seem not to be able to provide. What's actually the best license for &amp;quot;WTF you want to do&amp;quot; but that actually works...? So I can put that on GitHub little projects and Stack Exchange profile and on any other places I find that the code is just for people to do whatever they want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I don't understand too much of this. I started to read a bit about this a day or 2 ago, so I don't really know what all the licenses do and I'm not used to this, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21510" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T10:01:51.990" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T10:01:51.990" Title="License for public &quot;WTFYW to do&quot; code snippets on Stack Overflow and other places?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|github|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11014" CreationDate="2020-12-31T08:46:56.843" Score="2" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am including the PostgreSQL JDBC driver (&lt;a href=&quot;https://jdbc.postgresql.org/about/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2&lt;/a&gt;) in my project in binary form (which I got from their website). I copied the license text in my repo, however I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github repo&lt;/a&gt; for the driver and they give attribute to other code. Do I have to copy those licenses and give attribute to them too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user21512" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T15:38:33.197" Title="Should I give attribute to transitive dependencies if I am using a package in binary form?" Tags="|license|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11010" CreationDate="2020-12-31T15:29:12.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC0 is an excellent instrument for making it possible for everyone to use a software. It effectively disclaims all copyright you may have to the fullest degree possible. Thus, if you want anyone to use your code without further restrictions (including without any requirement to attribute you), then CC0 is an excellent choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some downsides to CC0. While CC0 is well-suited for software (unlike the other CC works), it &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; releases copyright but explicitly not any patent rights. Even if a software is available under CC0, a recipient of the software might not be able to use or modify it if the software is covered by a patent. Whereas many licenses are silent on the patent issue (and might include an &lt;em&gt;implied&lt;/em&gt; patent license), CC0's explicit retention of patent rights means that it might not ensure downstream usability. When the CC0 was discussed in the Open Source Initiative license review process, this patent issue prevented a consensus from being formed on the question whether the CC0 was an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should not prevent you from using CC0. It is the best available instrument for releasing copyright to the fullest degree, and is much more rigorous than the confusingly-drafted Unlicense (which did eventually get OSI approval in recognition of its wide use, despite these problems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to users who care about patent rights (even if you don't care about patents at all), it would be considerate to offer your software under multiple licenses and instruments, at the user's choice. For example, offering your code under CC0, MIT, or Apache-2 (at the user's choice) would make your code acceptable to most downstream users. This kind of dual-licensing is fairly common, e.g. most Perl-related code is dual licensed under Artistic OR GPLv2, and most Rust code is dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache. The only hitch is that CC0 disclaims copyright to the fullest degree, whereas MIT and Apache depend on your copyright. I'm not sure how these aspects would interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point Stack Exchange had planned to migrate any code snippets to an MIT-style license that wouldn't require attribution, but that initiative was shelved after legal difficulties became apparent (can't retroactively relicense CC-BY-SA content) and community response was somewhat negative (this was back when SE still listened to users). Thus, offering an additional license in your profile is the best way to open up your code to more users, though users might not be aware of this opportunity, and the status of such extra licenses when people edit your posts is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T15:29:12.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11012" CreationDate="2020-12-31T15:38:33.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have to fulfil the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the software that you distribute, including transitive dependencies. So if you distribute the pg-jdbc binaries, you also have to comply with all the licenses for all the software in those binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is common in the Java world to include all licenses within the JAR. As long as this license information is correct, this vastly simplifies keeping track of which licenses cover parts of the software. You can likely extract these licenses programmatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, different licenses have very different requirements. Some licenses not only require that a copy of the license is preserved with the software, but also that the license is made accessible to users of the software. Hiding the license in a JAR isn't really accessible to end users. Therefore, it could make sense to show these licenses in a manual for your software, or in an interactive help screen of your software. What is appropriate depends a lot on what your software is doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T15:38:33.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-31T21:21:23.420" Score="5" ViewCount="1091" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL is mostly intended to address &amp;quot;software that runs over a network&amp;quot;. However, that is pretty much most software today. And even if not, it seems to me that in light of a piece of software that never runs over a network, wouldn't the AGPL effectively do exactly the same as the GPL does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, shouldn't the AGPL be the default or would there be something that is detrimental or disadvantageous compared to the GPL?&#xA;Or to rephrase it, is there any reason to &lt;strong&gt;ever&lt;/strong&gt; use the GPL over the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17991" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T21:26:30.120" Title="Is there any reason not to always use the AGPL over the GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11015" CreationDate="2020-12-31T21:26:30.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using the AGPL can prevent use of your code in some places where the GPL is acceptable; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google comes to mind&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license places restrictions on software used over a network which are extremely difficult for Google to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally companies who make their money providing SaaS won't mind GPL but may well recoil violently from AGPL.  Arguably, this is because their customers will never be in a position to demand anything under GPL (as the companies distribute no software) but might well be in a position to exercise rights under AGPL (because they do interact with it over a network).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be completely happy with that, and that is of course fine.  Nevertheless, it's a definite difference between the two licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T21:26:30.120" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-31T21:28:27.467" Score="-5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that I sell Angular course on Udemy. In this case, I wonder whether I have to add Angular's MIT license text to my course or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have to do this, is it enough to add the license link (&lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://angular.io/license&lt;/a&gt;) to course description on Udemy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How I use the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I tell how to install it, how to create an app, how to use Angular features, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I show the original text in &lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://angular.io&lt;/a&gt; and in sub-pages from web browser&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't change source code and the text in &lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://angular.io&lt;/a&gt; and in sub-pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I just use the ready system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T11:20:38.463" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T11:20:38.463" Title="Have MIT license text to be added if software is just using?" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11017" CreationDate="2021-01-01T08:06:35.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I read what you've written above, none of the course materials distributed to students contain MIT-licensed code, nor anything that would make them derivatives of the code in copyright terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming this to be correct, then as I read it, you are not obliged to reproduce the licence statement and copyright lines.  The rights given to you, which include usage, are given on condition that you reproduce those texts when you reproduce verbatim copies, or substantial portions, of that software.  Since you are not reproducing copies or substantial portions of the software, the obligation has no effect in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are reproducing enough of their documentation (eg, the content at &lt;a href=&quot;https://angular.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://angular.io/&lt;/a&gt;) to require a copyright licence, then as the above page says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Documentation licensed under CC BY 4.0.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so you will have CC BY attribution requirements.  More detail may be found about these &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Detailed_attribution_comparison_chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but as I read them, a mere link pointer will not suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T10:22:16.003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T10:22:16.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11020" CreationDate="2021-01-01T13:02:00.120" Score="3" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed an application that on one of its screens has a map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to display the results, I'm using Leaflet where I load into it the tiles from OpenStreetMap (OSM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their policy&lt;/a&gt; it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heavy use (e.g. distributing an app that uses tiles from openstreetmap.org) is forbidden without prior permission from the Operations Working Group. See below for alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clearly display license attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do not actively or passively encourage copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Calls to &lt;strong&gt;/cgi-bin/export&lt;/strong&gt; may only be triggered by direct end-user action. (For example: “click here to export”.) The export call is an expensive (CPU+RAM) function to run and will frequently reject when server is under high load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recommended: Do not hardcode any URL at tile.openstreetmap.org as doing so will limit your ability to react quickly if the service is disrupted or blocked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recommended: add a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap&lt;/a&gt; to allow your users to report and fix problems in our data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to know what heavy use is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my understanding, each user will use this map for something like 1 time in a week for about 2min each time. Is it not intended to be a navigation application, just to show the user a basic current location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16345" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T13:18:04.457" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T14:23:50.093" Title="OpenStreetMap usage" Tags="|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11019" CreationDate="2021-01-01T14:23:50.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text pretty clearly says to me that you are not allowed to do this.  It doesn't say that distributing an app that makes heavy usage of tiles is forbidden, it says that heavy usage of the server is forbidden, and the explicit example of such usage it gives is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;distributing an app that uses tiles from openstreetmap.org&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, which is exactly what you are proposing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wiki gives other tile servers that you might embed in your app, but you'd need to check their usage policies, and possibly come to a commercial deal.  Alternatively, you can set up your own tile server(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T14:23:50.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11022" CreationDate="2021-01-01T16:40:12.177" Score="-1" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a library for c++ on github. I want to release it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mit license&lt;/a&gt;, but several times i use lines of code like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;string&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;cout &amp;lt;&amp;lt; &amp;quot;whatever&amp;quot;;&#xA;string myString;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project will not contain any binaries, only source code + makefile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am not directly copy + pasting stl, only assuming that local compilers will have it, what legal blurb /licensing details do I have to include?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/228187/licensing-using-standard-c-library&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is a similar question, but it has to do with C standard library, which is released (as I understand it) under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21523" LastEditorUserId="21523" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T18:15:39.677" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:18:50.900" Title="Licensing using c++ strings and cout" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11021" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:18:50.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you are not distributing any copy of a standard library, there are no licensing details for the standard library that you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; include, as you can't know which implementation your users will use and whatever you state would likely be incorrect for some users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would change when you start to distribute binaries, because then you know which implementation of the standard library those binaries were built against and thus what licensing requirements apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:18:50.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T18:35:35.263" Score="3" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pitschr/knx-link&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an open source library&lt;/a&gt; that is designed to be used by other open source projects; not by end users. Currently it is licensed as GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main goal is that every project that uses my library &lt;strong&gt;must be open sourced&lt;/strong&gt;. For me personally it doesn’t matter if the other project that uses my library is licensed on e.g. Apache-2.0 or MIT as long the project used by the end-user is open sourced on e.g. GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on different licenses I see that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPLv3 would not be the right choice as it allows to be linked by a proprietary software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3 seems be too strict for me, as enforces that other software needs to be licensed as GPLv3 as well. Furthermore, GPLv3 doesn’t allow to be used by a project which is licensed under Apache-2.0/MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0 and MIT licenses seems not be the option for me as they can be used by proprietary software directly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find the right license for my purpose. Again, it is totally fine to use my library as long &lt;strong&gt;the end-user project/software itself is open source without enforcing that it needs to be licensed under GPLv3 as well&lt;/strong&gt;? My main goal is to support the open source community only!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I alone with the idea? What is the best way to achieve? Which license would be most suitable for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21532" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T07:29:42.747" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T16:14:21.607" Title="Finding right license to support open source community only. GPLv3 too strict, LGPLv3 too permissive" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T08:42:51.093" Score="1" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Boost license, if I include any of the source code in the Boost library in my own, I have to include a copy of their license alongside my library (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;including&amp;quot; the license mean I simply have to include a single file of the license alongisde my ENTIRE library, stating that I used SOME Boost code with my library, or would I need to include the license above, for example, with every function or file where I used Boost code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17794" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T09:18:19.643" Title="Requirements for including Boost source code in your own library" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11024" CreationDate="2021-01-03T09:18:19.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you copy files or functions with a Boost license into your own project, there are a number of things you must do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each copied function or file must have a comment with the original copyright notice and a statement which license applies. If you copied an entire file, those things should already be present. If you create an entire file with only functions under the Boost license, this comment can be placed once in the file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least one copy of the entire text of the license must be present in your repository in a place where it can be easily found by people interested in knowing the license terms that apply to each part of your library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T09:18:19.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11023" CreationDate="2021-01-03T09:46:55.633" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two fundamentally different takes on open-source licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the permissive ones like MIT, Apache etc which - roughly speaking - don't care what happens to their sources as long as the credits are maintained and communicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And there are the more strictly open source licenses, the copy-left&#xA;licenses, which want to make sure that any derivative remains also&#xA;open source, most notably the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is usually chosen by the (initial) authors for a reason that s/he wants the first or the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such a license as you seek might be crafted, but serves little use: A permissively-licensed project would not want to make use of a license that can only be used in open-source projects; its license was chosen particularly such that proprietary use is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project already with a copy-left license does not need such a license either - it could as well use the GPL which ensures just that: be open source and stay open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it might even be argued that a license that may be used only in an open-source project already exists: the GPL. Most open source licenses are compatible with the GPL in the sense that they may be used in a GPL-licensed project (by simply changing the license to GPL for the derived / combined software - even when notable exceptions exist like the incompatibility with Apache or MPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-16T07:03:38.327" LastActivityDate="2023-06-16T07:03:38.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2021-01-03T14:18:43.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like this question and how in a lot of fields in Computer Science the answer depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put my idea of a &amp;quot;real project&amp;quot; and how to customize other projects for your feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before all, the first question is &amp;quot;What is the Object of your project?&amp;quot;, in other words, is it a real project because you are starting to work with passion or it is a real project because your objective is to have a community that works with your project and supports your project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to create a project to have a community, I suggest you Option one, in particular, create your custom fork and make the change in this fork, and add this fork as a submodule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you can offer customization of the library for another user, you can maintain the code update with the main branch of the library. However, this required a lot of work to support libraries. The last but not least, I suggest this option if you have the intention to maintain the project in the time, in other words, if you are ready to fix the bug and resolve community issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your objective is to create a real project but don't work to maintain it or you don't care about the library (that you are forking) bugs, option two is easier to implement but I don't preferer this solution because it is unclear. In my opinion, it's not good for future contributors that need to learn your source code, because if inside the project there are different projects together it is difficult to understand for new people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is, depend on the object of your project, there is not a good way to do this operation without knowing the goal, but there is a responsible way to do that if you believe in opensource and believe in your code that is developing I think that the options one is the good way to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16907" LastEditorUserId="16907" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T00:06:29.043" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T00:06:29.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T15:21:54.863" Score="2" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;When one looks at GitHub, permissive licences like &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;BSD-3&lt;/code&gt; are favoured over the weak and strong copyleft licences from the &lt;code&gt;GNU&lt;/code&gt; libraries (for instance, back in 2015, MIT-licensed repositories accounted for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.blog/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;twice&lt;/a&gt; as many repositories as all &lt;code&gt;GNU&lt;/code&gt; licences combined). Also, there seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trend&lt;/a&gt; towards permissive licences against copyleft ones over the past few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking aside that the popularity of a licence encompasses many different aspects&lt;sup&gt;[Note 1]&lt;/sup&gt; that go beyond the scope of what we can humanly assess here, &lt;strong&gt;what are some of the downsides to copyleft licences that would make a developer wary of choosing them for their software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[Note 1]&lt;/sup&gt; Two reasons I came up with that are likely to account for their popularity are the ease for a small developer to simply provide a short, simple and direct permissive licence like &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt; instead of having to go through and learn &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the lawful/verbose details on &lt;code&gt;GNU&lt;/code&gt; licences, as well as corporations providing the backbone of their frameworks with permissive licences, but then likely developing their own closed-source versions built upon them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, what I am trying to understand here is not the incentives to choosing a permissive licence, but rather the &lt;em&gt;disincentives&lt;/em&gt; to choosing a copyleft one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21539" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T21:28:44.420" Title="What are the downsides to copyleft licences?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T19:35:46.907" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would to attribue some of the OpenSource libraries that I'm using in my project but I found my self having problems in doing so since it is not written clear (in my opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/android-async-http/android-async-http&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/android-async-http/android-async-http&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I click on the NOTICE.txt file it says inside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Android Async Http Client library&#xA;Copyright (c) 2011-2015 James Smith &amp;lt;james@loopj.com&amp;gt;&#xA;https://loopj.com&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2015-2019 Marek Sebera &amp;lt;marek@msebera.cz&amp;gt;&#xA;htts://msebera.cz&#xA;&#xA;This product includes software developed by&#xA;The Apache Software Foundation (https://www.apache.org/).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While if I click on the Wiki tab it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The Android Asynchronous Http Client is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.&#xA;Read the full license here: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if so, how do I attribute then? From my knowledge Apache 2.0 attribution should be from the following form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;code&gt;https://loopj.com&lt;/code&gt; for example should be part of the name of copyright owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/firebase/geofire-android&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/firebase/geofire-android&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When opening the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, it just shows the &lt;code&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/code&gt; license. How can I know the year and name of copyright owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16345" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T19:35:46.907" Title="Correctly attributing github libraries without specific mentioning" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|license-notice|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2021-01-04T12:16:35.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following only applies to Java SE.  (Not Java ME, EE, Oracle databases, etc.  Not Android.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From Java 9 onwards, most Java distros do not come in a JRE only form.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;However, there is &lt;em&gt;no distinction&lt;/em&gt; between JRE and JDK in what the licenses permit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are many different providers of Java.  Each one (in theory) can have different license terms.  However we can simplify this to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oracle Java is subject to Oracle's proprietary licenses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OpenJDK-based Java is subject to GPLv2 + &amp;quot;Classpath exception&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some other proprietary Java releases &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be subject to other (3rd-party) licenses.  (I am not going to cover these, since it is most likely not relevant to the OP.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Oracle Java&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Java 8 and older releases that were released prior to April 16, 2019 allow free use for any purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All releases since April 16, 2019 require a subscription be paid, unless your &lt;em&gt;usage&lt;/em&gt; is are covered by the following exclusions.  (The following text is taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/au/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oracle Java SE Licensing FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For full information and terms, refer to the OTN License Agreement for Java SE. The OTN License Agreement for Java SE for current Oracle Java SE releases allows them to be used, without cost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For personal use on a desktop or laptop computer, such as to play games or run other personal applications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For development, testing, prototyping, and demonstrating applications, including to use by/with profilers, debuggers, and&#xA;Integrated Development Environment tools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For use with some approved products, such as Oracle SQL Developer, or as an end user of a software application created by an approved&#xA;product. (referred to as “Schedule A” and “Schedule B” Products in the&#xA;OTN License Agreement for Java SE)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With identified Oracle Cloud Infrastructure products.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ elaborates on what &amp;quot;personal use&amp;quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;OpenJDK-based Java&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes the official OpenJDK binary releases, and any other releases built (by 3rd-parties) from the OpenJDK sources or a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These Java releases are covered by the GPLv2+classpath license.  There is no fee for their use, and there are no limitations on what the software can be used for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Your customer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer is using an old Oracle Java release (prior to April 16, 2019), they can continue to use without paying a fee.  (If they upgrade to a current release, it changes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer is using an OpenJDK-based release, they can use it without paying a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer is using a current Oracle release (including recent Java 8 releases) they will &lt;strong&gt;probably&lt;/strong&gt; need to pay for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/au/java/java-se-subscription/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Java SE Subscription&lt;/a&gt;.  They could avoid this by switching to an OpenJDK-based release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 - The &lt;em&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/em&gt; is amendment to the GPL that relaxes the GPL's restriction concerning (dynamic) linking with non-open code.  The effect is to mean that Java code that you write and then build / run using OpenJDK Java is NOT constrained to have any specific license.  The &amp;quot;Classpath&amp;quot; name is a reference to the GNU Classpath project.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13818" LastEditorUserId="13818" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T07:56:15.767" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T07:56:15.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11028" CreationDate="2021-01-04T15:22:21.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my point of view is all related to the reciprocal complexity that some copyleft licenses requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other hand, most of the GitHub projects are small projects that has low complexity and don't need copyleft licenses or the maintainer don't have the knowledge to decide/understand which copyleft license to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16185" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T15:22:21.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11267" CreationDate="2021-01-04T18:55:44.267" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have code written in R, an interpreted language. The R interpreter and most R libraries are under the GPL. What are the limits upon my code, if I want to distribute it while keeping it proprietary and non-GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21568" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T12:06:55.123" Title="Call GPL functionality from non-GPL interpreted code" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|distribution|source-code|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-04T20:52:26.597" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, ReactJS ships with MIT FB license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will plan create a repository with code based on using ReactJS as dependency in my SPA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my app, I want want to use another open-source license, but React MIT lisence require link to original copyright. Should I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use text of original license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;link it in each file of project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;or can I create some like 3rdparty.txt in root of project and&#xA;copy/paste the original lisence text from github (react/LICENSE at&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;master · facebook/react · GitHub)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a correct way to do it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T17:44:17.020" Title="How correctly specify ReactJS license in my SPA repo and contribute it?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-04T22:57:32.623" Score="1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will plan write project for portfolio for free use with no modifying source code of dependencies and publish it on github. Dependencies is openjdk (gplv2+cpe), spring (apache 2.0), hibernate (LGPL 2.1), postgresql (under own license postgresql lisence) and angular (mit). Can i use it together in one project and which type of final license i should use for this project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T07:20:35.140" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T20:17:52.547" Title="Can i use multiple licenses in my free project?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11036" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11040" CreationDate="2021-01-05T08:05:26.173" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am watching &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this address&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Stallman at TEDxGeneva 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At minute 5:04, it talks about a compelled PS3 update. Sony, he said, compelled the users to update their PS3 system, threatening them to take away other functionalities if they don't (in particular, the functionality to be connected to the internet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have some bibliographic reference of this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is that such a scandal? I mean, I get his point. He points that the user should be free to decide for himself/herself whether to update or not. But it also seems to me that the PS3 may had some kind of software bug which would allow people to be hacked if connected to the internet, or to cheat in online games. So if they don't update their system it would seem reasonable to forbid online gaming, for example, to avoid people cheating and being undetected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T19:54:48.413" Title="What does Richard Stallman refer to when he talks about a PS3 compelled update?" Tags="|freedoms|software-use|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11036" CreationDate="2021-01-05T09:17:32.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think he's referring to the 4.66 &amp;quot;mandatory&amp;quot; update, which is pretty well-documented out there on the internet.  Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://gearnuke.com/ps3-mandatory-firmware-update-4-66-released/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one report&lt;/a&gt; I found on (what seems to be) a gaming site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sony has officially updated the PS3 firmware to 4.66. This is a mandatory firmware update which is required to be able to connect online on the PlayStation 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a scandal because if you own hardware, it should be up to you to decide what code it runs, and when and if it updates.  How many meetings have I seen interrupted by people whose Windows laptops just suddenly decided to update themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that releasing software with bugs in is problematic, but it's also very likely unavoidable, and the correct response is not to strongarm your users into applying updates on your schedule.  In any case, from a free-software standpoint, the model that requires you to participate in distributed gaming by  paying for a device which you then don't control, and which can therefore be relied on to dob you up if you try to use it in a way which others might not approve, is a broken model.  Using that model to justify forcing me to apply updates is anathema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, although I accept that some updates are motivated by usability fixes, proprietary corporations have a &lt;strong&gt;very bad&lt;/strong&gt; track record when it comes to restricting themselves to mandating only those updates which relate to user wellbeing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: the OP makes a good point about the &lt;em&gt;social&lt;/em&gt; cost of individuals not keeping up with patches.  If society, &lt;em&gt;en bloc&lt;/em&gt;, finds it of net benefit to require that people keep up with their patches, then society is free to make regulations to require it.  But those will come through the normal social processes of regulation - debate in legislatures, drafting committees, press scrutiny - and so on; not through some corporation declaring &lt;em&gt;ex cathedra&lt;/em&gt; that it has unilaterally decided that a particular patch must be applied For The Good Of All.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If as a society we were to engage in such an exercise, I'd venture that the software creators would be required to yield much corporate ground (in terms of eg scrutiny, control, benefice) in return for the power to mandate that a particular update be applied.  And such a tradeoff would, to my mind, be right and proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T11:37:03.420" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T11:37:03.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11039" CreationDate="2021-01-05T10:40:33.547" Score="2" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understood Apache 2.0 is not compatible c GPLv2, but OpenJDK uses GPLv2 with CPE. Apache 2.0 allows linking CPE allow linking. So can I use it together without modification code of OpenJDK: OpenJDK (GPLv2 + CPE) and Spring (Apache 2.0)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or can I use OpenJDK under GPLv3 + CPE, because GPLv3 is compatible with Apache 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to publish a free Spring MVC application on GitHub. Which type of license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T15:32:28.113" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T15:32:28.113" Title="OpenJDK GPLv2+CPE and Spring (Apache 2.0). Can I use them together?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11038" CreationDate="2021-01-05T13:34:09.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Class path Exception (CPE) used by OpenJDK essentially states &amp;quot;As long as you use the classes covered by the CPE unmodified and only load them via the standard class-path mechanism, we don't care what license your code uses. It is all considered compatible.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the class-path mechanism is the default for loading Java classes, as long as you don't do anything special to load the classes supplied by OpenJDK, you don't have to worry about its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that for your code you only need to worry about the compatibility with the Apache license of Spring and the licenses of any other libraries you might use. You correctly indicated that the Apache 2.0 license is incompatible with the GPLv2 license, which rules that one out for your own code. But otherwise, you are free to choose any license that fits your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T13:34:09.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11036" CreationDate="2021-01-05T15:54:43.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is surely a reference to the PS3's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OtherOS feature&lt;/a&gt;, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-update/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;removed in firmware update 3.21&lt;/a&gt; around April 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When originally released, the PS3 could boot and install Linux-based operating systems. This functionality was removed after release. The PlayStation blog says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consumers and organizations that currently use the “Other OS” feature can choose not to upgrade their PS3 systems, although the following features will no longer be available;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ability to sign in to PlayStation Network and use network features that require signing in to PlayStation Network, such as online features of PS3 games and chat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Playback of PS3 software titles or Blu-ray Disc videos that require PS3 system software version 3.21 or later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Playback of copyright-protected videos that are stored on a media server (when DTCP-IP is enabled under Settings)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use of new features and improvements that are available on PS3 system software 3.21 or later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is an overstatement to say a non-updated PS3 could not access the Internet at all, it is true that it would be locked out of all Sony-provided network-based features (and altogether locked out of any future games/media that required a sufficiently high firmware level).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a significant scandal, since it permanently removed a major advertised function of the system. (It even launched a 7-year-long legal battle, which Sony settled in 2017, though I don't think a conclusion was decisively reached if Sony was legally in the wrong for their removal of an advertised feature.) Sony said the system could run Linux-based systems and be used as a gaming machine. This update, more or less, forced users to choose one or the other: they could enjoy use of all games' network features only if they submitted to Sony's removal of the OtherOS feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sony stated this was done for security reasons, which may be true, but they made no future effort to remedy security issues to keep or restore the OtherOS feature. This is in congruence Stallman's point: any feature that becomes inconvenient for a proprietary software vendor to maintain (or to allow to continue to exist), no matter how major, can be removed at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T19:54:48.413" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T19:54:48.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11043" CreationDate="2021-01-05T17:56:12.990" Score="2" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we go to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubuntu.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ubuntu website&lt;/a&gt;, the first reference to Linux is mid-way through the page, as can be seen in this screenshot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Erryl.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in &amp;quot;More than Linux&amp;quot;, the word &amp;quot;Linux&amp;quot; is written without the registered trademark symbol ®.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This violates rule number 1 of The Linux Foundations &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/the-linux-mark/#toggle-id-12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rules&lt;/a&gt; on the proper use of the registered Linux® trademark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each web page, advertisement, or publication, the first prominent appearance of LINUX should feature the “circle R” character adjacent to the X, as follows:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux®&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the Ubuntu web page, we can read that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;© 2021 Canonical Ltd. Ubuntu and Canonical are registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no trademark attribution to The Linux Foundation. This violates rule number 2 of The Linux Foundation on the proper use of the Linux® registered trademark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the end of your web page, advertisement, publication or media broadcast, include the following text in a legible font and size:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation does not sue Canonical, and other distributions that abide by the same practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why they don't sue everybody here on StackExchange that uses the Linux word for the first time in their post without the ®? Or don't put the attribution at the end of their post?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Linux should gain in the desktop market, can The Linux Foundation and Linus Torvalds one day just wake up and sue everybody?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T18:58:21.697" Title="Why Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation should not sue distributions for trademark infringment?" Tags="|law|linux-kernel|intellectual-property|linux-distribution|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11042" CreationDate="2021-01-05T18:58:21.697" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering that Canonical has a Silver Membership in the Linux Foundation, I think it's safe to assume the Foundation is aware of its use of the mark in Ubuntu marketing and has either granted tacit or explicit permission for this deviation from their trademark guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the Linux Foundation doesn't just &amp;quot;sue everyone,&amp;quot; there are two cases you identify in your question that are different in important ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;General use of the trademark in written discussion about the Foundation or the software: trademark law affords a monopoly on the mark &lt;em&gt;in commerce&lt;/em&gt; to identify the &lt;em&gt;source of a good or service&lt;/em&gt;. A trademark holder may not use their trademark monopoly to suppress linguistic use of the mark altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use of the mark in the marketing for a specific product/service: now we are firmer ground for the basis of a suit. However, note that principle of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use_(U.S._trademark_law)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;nominative fair use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; for trademarks (N.B.: completely unrelated to the standard for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; fair use&lt;/a&gt;) allows people to identify the use of a product of some particular brand, even in commerce, if the use of the mark accurately refers to the source of the product. However, such nominative users must take care to indicate that they are not themselves the source of the named brand, which might be a difficult standard to meet in a court of law. A court will examine the likelihood of the use causing &amp;quot;consumer confusion&amp;quot; among those who see it, which even diligent clarification may not be able to avoid for some uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real reason the Linux Foundation does not sue anyone who fails to meet their trademark guidelines in commerce is that it would be a disastrous public relations move, possibly scaring people from using Linux-based systems outright, without affording any real benefit. Considering that distributions' use of the Linux mark is generally (1) accurate (i.e., the using product really does substantially use the kernel called &amp;quot;Linux&amp;quot;) and (2) does not threaten to dilute their trademark (i.e., the users of the mark are not trying to claim something else is Linux or that they represent the Linux project), it is largely harmless to leave alone any uses that neglect to add a circle-R to their use of the Linux mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T18:58:21.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-04T21:40:29.090" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a researcher at a university with a guest status. I am not employed though and the work I do is my own. The software I develop belongs to me. For &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility#Reproducible_research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reproducible research&lt;/a&gt; I want to publish some of my software on github and I am searching for an appropriate license. Reproducible research means that other researcher can look at my code and try it out (on my data, which I also need to provide) to see if the claims of my publication are true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want it to be open source (in the strict sense), because I do not want to allow companies to use it for profit. I only want to publish it to enable reproducible research, but I want to keep as much of the rights for myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to keep the right to have (copies) of my work licensed under different licenses so that I am able to use it myself any way I want in the future (e.g. commercially) or give copies with more permissive licenses to other people. I interpret &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/36565/36090&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/36565/36090&lt;/a&gt; such that I - as the copyright holder - can do that no matter which license my &amp;quot;first&amp;quot; license is, but I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not want to actively encourage contribution to the software (it is not supposed to be a widely usable library), but I am not against it either. If there is no license that allows contribution I don't mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a law-novice it seemed to me that the CC BY-NC-SA or the CC BY-NC-ND license might be right for me, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creative commons licenses state&lt;/a&gt; that they should not be used for software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, I am searching for (1) an alternative to CC BY-NC-SA and (2) an alternative to CC BY-NC-ND for software. But - again - as a law novice I am not sure if that is actually right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21592" OwnerDisplayName="Make42" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T20:26:38.433" Title="Software license for non-commerical reproducible research" Tags="|copyright|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-01-05T21:40:33.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11028" CreationDate="2021-01-05T21:28:44.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's one specific example: in corporate environments where a company has in-house software that they want to keep proprietary, it would be a disaster if someone uses an external library in a way that legally requires the company to reveal the source code of its in-house software. When using an external library that has a copyleft license, if the library gets linked with the in-house software which is then distributed, that's exactly what would happen. While it is possible to avoid it by being careful not to link the wrong things together, it's much &lt;em&gt;easier&lt;/em&gt; to avoid it if you don't use the copyleft software at all. That often provides a strong incentive to avoid copyleft software at a private company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses like the MIT license do not carry that risk, so companies are generally much more willing to use software that is under a permissive license in their products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, if you're writing a piece of open-source software and you want it to be used as widely as possible (i.e. by private software companies, if the companies find it useful), then that goal is much better served by publishing the software under a permissive license than under a copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T21:28:44.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11047" CreationDate="2021-01-06T03:44:26.150" Score="6" ViewCount="1290" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading the C4 explanation and I like many of its directives. &lt;a href=&quot;http://socialarchitecture.science/c4-deep/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://socialarchitecture.science/c4-deep/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking to create a OSS project that aims to be C4 certified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one reason, I like to have a MIT license and I will start off with myself as the first maintainer. I think those two will be against the C4 guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I like to ask is inside the C4 guidelines there is this part about how &amp;quot;All patches are owned by their authors. There SHALL NOT be any copyright assignment process.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to keep this guideline. Does MIT explicitly forbid this? And if MIT license allows this, do I then need all contributors to explicitly give permission for me to have ability to relicense in future? Like the way ZeroMQ does it under RELICENSE &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/tree/master/RELICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/tree/master/RELICENSE&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21590" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T20:06:51.000" Title="If I use MIT, and I like authors to keep copyright of their patches, does MIT forbid this and do I need them to relicense back their contributions?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11046" CreationDate="2021-01-06T11:08:44.637" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright transfer and licensing are two very different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a copyright &lt;strong&gt;transfer&lt;/strong&gt;, you literally transfer the rights on what you have written to another person or organization. You literally give up your right to have a say in what happens to your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a copyright &lt;strong&gt;license&lt;/strong&gt;, you give someone else the rights to perform some actions that under copyright law only the owner of the copyrights may perform. The license may also stipulate some requirements that must be followed when exercising the granted rights. Unless the copyright license grants exclusive rights, you keep all your rights that you had on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default convention with open-source projects is that all contributors remain the copyright owners of their contributions and they grant a license to all other contributors and all users. You need to have specific legal agreements with each contributor in order to get them to transfer their copyrights to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most copyright licenses do not include the grant to arbitrarily change the license of the project. Thus, if you want to change the license, you need to seek the explicit approval of &lt;strong&gt;every&lt;/strong&gt; copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T13:39:22.200" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T13:39:22.200" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11046" CreationDate="2021-01-06T20:06:51.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See Bart van Ingen Schenau's answer for discussion of why the MIT license is not a copyright transfer or assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license violates the &lt;a href=&quot;http://socialarchitecture.science/c4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C4 guidelines&lt;/a&gt; anyway, because of this requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project SHALL use a share-alike license such as the MPLv2, or a GPLv3 variant thereof (GPL, LGPL, AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Share-alike&amp;quot; in this context is a synonym of copyleft, and it means that a license must require all derivative works to be released under the same or a substantially equivalent license. The MIT license contains no such requirement, so it is not a share-alike license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the C4 guidelines are ultimately just one community's opinion. You don't have to follow them if you find them unhelpful for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T20:06:51.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11034" CreationDate="2021-01-07T17:44:17.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You just need to keep the notice in the source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to put anything in your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T17:44:17.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11035" CreationDate="2021-01-07T20:17:52.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OpenJDK is licensed under the GNU GPL, therefore you must use the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other libraries you listed are licensed under GNU GPL-compatible licenses, except for Spring, licensed under Apache 2.0, incompatible with the GNU GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you should use the GNU GPL, but do not use Spring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T20:17:52.547" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-07T23:10:15.403" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repository that is licensed under MIT license. The repository is still private, but I want to make it public soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there is a file (a Makefile), that is licensed under&#xA;GNU LGPL LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;##    //   #    This file is distributed under the terms of the         ##&#xA;##         #     GNU Lesser General Public License Version 2.1          ##&#xA;##         #     (see LICENSE file for the text of the license) &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I don't want to have the repository licensed under GNU license, but rather under MIT license I would like to confirm whether I should remove this file before publishing the repository, or if having this single file would force me to license everything under GNU LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21600" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T09:39:33.450" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T15:26:35.703" Title="GitHub Repository with MIT license with one file under GNU license" Tags="|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11052" CreationDate="2021-01-07T23:43:44.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL doesn't require that the software as a whole is licensed under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T23:43:44.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11008" CreationDate="2021-01-07T23:58:46.607" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anything that uses GNU GPL-licensed software must be licensed under the GNU GPL or a compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T13:38:09.610" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T13:38:09.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2021-01-08T00:13:14.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has the answer to your question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the interpreter just interprets a language, the answer is no. The interpreted program, to the interpreter, is just data; a free software license like the GPL, based on copyright law, cannot limit what data you use the interpreter on. You can run it on any data (interpreted program), any way you like, and there are no requirements about licensing that data to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the interpreter is extended to provide “bindings” to other facilities (often, but not necessarily, libraries), the interpreted program is effectively linked to the facilities it uses through these bindings. So if these facilities are released under the GPL, the interpreted program that uses them must be released in a GPL-compatible way. The JNI or Java Native Interface is an example of such a binding mechanism; libraries that are accessed in this way are linked dynamically with the Java programs that call them. These libraries are also linked with the interpreter. If the interpreter is linked statically with these libraries, or if it is designed to link dynamically with these specific libraries, then it too needs to be released in a GPL-compatible way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another similar and very common case is to provide libraries with the interpreter which are themselves interpreted. For instance, Perl comes with many Perl modules, and a Java implementation comes with many Java classes. These libraries and the programs that call them are always dynamically linked together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A consequence is that if you choose to use GPLed Perl modules or Java classes in your program, you must release the program in a GPL-compatible way, regardless of the license used in the Perl or Java interpreter that the combined Perl or Java program will run on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T00:13:14.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11061" CreationDate="2021-01-08T15:15:34.397" Score="4" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;h2&gt;My site&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My site is like a gallery of SVG files from different sources, with different licenses. In a way similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flaticon.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.flaticon.com/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When clicking on an item it will show on a modal together with some info and a link to the correct license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I create a service like I've described above, with SVG files with the different licenses below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Share Alike&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I'm worried about is SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, I don't remix them. I keep them on the same website, but you download them one by one, not all as a whole. Am I correct or wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;NoDerivatives&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does sound like I can't build a website around an SVG file with this license. Correct or wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I place the different SVG files with these licenses on the same site? If not, which licenses will not work and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13810" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T22:52:57.920" Title="Can I create a SVG site containing files with all these licenses?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|license|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11052" CreationDate="2021-01-08T15:26:35.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the Makefile is not a part of the software you are creating, but only a script used in the build process, the two are separate works as far a copyright is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With separate works, the license of one does not affect the license on the other. This means that you can distribute your code under the MIT license and at the same time the Makefile under the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just have to make it clear where you mention the licensing of your project that the repository also contains parts that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T15:26:35.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11057" CreationDate="2021-01-08T22:45:23.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will be fine. Each of these images will have their own license, however as long as you meet the conditions (i.e. for CC: proper attribution, non-commercial use if -nc, etc.) it's not an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but you download them one by one, not all as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;If you're providing a separate download (i.e. you are splitting images that were previously distributed together into separate downloads / archives / etc.), you are in fact transforming the content. Just ensure that your 'split' images / downloads contain a copy of the appropriate license (and attribution) and you'll be meeting that condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'm going to do some more research on the above for you, so take the preceding paragraph with a grain of salt right now! &lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: As long as you're not changing the content of the images, you're not transforming them or creating a derivative. From the CC website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I reuse an excerpt of a larger work that is licensed with the NoDerivs restriction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NoDerivs licenses (BY-ND and BY-NC-ND) prohibit reusers from creating adaptations. What constitutes an adaptation, otherwise known as a derivative work, varies slightly based on the law of the relevant jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All CC licenses grant the right to reproduce a CC-licensed work for noncommercial purposes (at a minimum).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use-considered-an-adaptation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is so permissive that I wouldn't worry about it too much - Just include a copy alongside any MIT licensed images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license is much the same (AFAIK), but I'm much less familiar with it in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt; make sure that any downloads (at least, zips that you link) contain the appropriate license - a download counts as distribution. I would argue that if someone downloads the image through alternate means (right-clicking --&amp;gt; Save as, etc.) that the link on the page would cover you. IANAL, but you're not violating the spirit of the agreement at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21610" LastEditorUserId="21610" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T22:52:57.920" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T22:52:57.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11063" CreationDate="2021-01-09T11:25:36.623" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SNAP (Stanford Network Analysis Project) consist of software libraries and network data sets. The software libraries are distributed under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://snap.stanford.edu/snap/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://snap.stanford.edu/snap/license.html&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SNAP is distributed under the BSD license. This means that it is free for both academic and commercial use. Note however that some third party components in SNAP require that you reference certain works in scientific publications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://snap.stanford.edu/snap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://snap.stanford.edu/snap/&lt;/a&gt; states this specifically for the source code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete source code for the core SNAP and GLib libraries is available under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this license apply to the network data sets, do they fall under a different license (or multiple different licenses), or is their license unspecified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7566" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T13:10:51.460" Title="What is the license of the SNAP data sets?" Tags="|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11062" CreationDate="2021-01-09T12:41:30.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The datasets are not part of the code and as such not covered by the source code license; they are also not distributed as a bundle but offered separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The data sets don't have a particular license specified (as far as I can establish) - and as such they fall under normal copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the data set pages a citation recommendation is given. Many (or all?) offer directly a bibtex entry and a bibliographic source for their origin, thus a way to cite their usage when being used in work which is the basis for scientific, technical or other publications. As such they seem offered for use to anyone - but as no license is given any further distribution (commercially or non-commercially) is prohibited unless explicitly granted (no license = no rights beyond what the general law allows; and that's not much).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-01-09T13:10:51.460" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T13:10:51.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11065" CreationDate="2021-01-09T13:40:25.610" Score="0" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MlFe0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MlFe0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of the forum software: &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.aseprite.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://community.aseprite.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen many communities with identical design, suggesting that they use the same self-hosted software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that an open-source software and, if so, which is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21613" LastEditorUserId="21642" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T18:38:26.530" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T18:38:26.530" Title="Which open-source community software is this?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-01-13T22:36:45.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11064" CreationDate="2021-01-09T23:38:30.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discourse&lt;/a&gt; forum software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2021-01-09T23:48:44.693" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T23:48:44.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11073" CreationDate="2021-01-09T23:46:27.357" Score="3" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basic Information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Blender add-on which enables the use of Blender with a piece of hardware (i.e., a lightfield display). Blender and the use of the specific Python API, which is required to write Blender add-ons, is licensed under GPL. In order to communicate with the lightfield display on the software level the manufacturer of the display provides a compiled, closed-source DLL under a non-GPL license. &lt;strong&gt;The add-on cannot provide the main functionality without this DLL.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No piece of third-party software can be written for this 3D display without this DLL. Since this DLL and the API calls it provides are fundamental to communicate with the display in general, me (and the manufacturer as well) consider this DLL to fall under the &amp;quot;system library exception&amp;quot; of GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Issues / Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the copyright-owner of the closed-source DLL would grant me the right to distribute the DLL in its compiled form (.dll, .dylib, .so, etc.), while the DLL remains closed-source, non-GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it GPL compliant to distribute this DLL &lt;strong&gt;within&lt;/strong&gt; the add-on package or would GPL force me to let the user install this library? This question can be generalized to more general terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it GPL compliant to distribute any non-GPL, closed-source linked library, which falls under the system library exception, with GPL code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My understanding&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I would interpret GPL, that this is allowed, since I couldn't find any clause that prohibits distributing a system library in the GPL license, I couldn't find a reliable definite answer to this. I would appreciate if someone could answer my question and cite the corresponding text passage in GPL or any other official statement, from which the answer to my question can be clearly derived. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; There is also a passage in the GPL FAQs, which I would interpret in favor of my understanding, but I am not totally sure if I read it correctly. So any comments on this are welcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL-incompatible libraries you want to use meet the criteria&#xA;for a system library, then you don't have to do anything special to&#xA;use them; the requirement to distribute source code for the whole&#xA;program does not include those libraries, &lt;strong&gt;even if you distribute a&#xA;linked executable containing them.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#SystemLibraryException&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone confirm that this FAQ statement means that system libraries may be distributed with GPL code? And does this also count for non-compiled executables like Blender add-ons which are always distributed as python source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21616" LastEditorUserId="21616" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T00:15:17.440" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T06:30:06.050" Title="Understanding GPL: Blender Add-on + System Library" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|proprietary-code|python|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11066" CreationDate="2021-01-09T23:53:26.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it GPL compliant to distribute any non-GPL, closed-source linked library, which falls under the system library exception, with GPL code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A library distributed with the program does not fall under the system library exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T23:53:26.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11076" CreationDate="2021-01-09T23:57:47.617" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I was building an open-source solution and wanted to create a hosted version as the business side of things.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What license would be best for me to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably allowing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other users to use the open-source solution for personal or even internally (for a company) without any warranty or liability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But not for commercial use of the software like the hosted solution (to remove direct competitors). Or at least not be able to say that they are the &amp;quot;official hosted&amp;quot; solution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the pros and cons? Do you think I should reconsider the 2nd point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I'm sorry if what I am asking is too business-oriented, please help me see things differently then.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21617" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T08:44:07.163" Title="Licensing an Open-source Project and a Hosted version" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|business|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2021-01-10T00:01:50.393" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could choose any license. As the copyright holder, you are free to do whatever you want with your own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20911" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T00:01:50.393" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11072" CreationDate="2021-01-10T05:13:16.553" Score="0" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downloaded &lt;a href=&quot;https://themes.3rdwavemedia.com/bootstrap-templates/startup/prettydocs-free-bootstrap-theme-for-developers-and-startups/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this template&lt;/a&gt; for my website &amp;amp; built my website over it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The template license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Bootstrap template is 100% FREE as long as you keep the footer attribution link. You do not have the rights to resell, sublicense or redistribute (even for free) the template on its own or as a separate attachment from any of your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following this, i have not removed the footer attribution link. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now, i want to release my website &amp;amp; also open-source it on github (to host it with gh-pages).&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can i add copyright notice in the footer along with that attribution link, in my html pages?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am i allowed to add a license (GPLv3) to my open source code ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18120" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T07:38:54.743" Title="Can i add copyright and license to a web template with a license?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11070" CreationDate="2021-01-10T07:38:54.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have the rights to ... redistribute (even for free) the template&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The right to copy the software is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software, so that template is non-free.  Moreover, the licence is explicit that you may not sublicense the template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards using the template in your website, this seems to be permissible, provided that (as you say) you maintain the prescribed footer text.  You have contributed to the website, so adding your own copyright line is definitely in order.  But when it comes to open-sourcing the work on GitHub, I don't see that you have the rights to copy the template to GitHub in the first place, and you definitely don't have the right to redistribute it under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say how intimately tied-up in your work this template is.  If it's trivially-removable, then you can redistribute your work under GPLv3 (via GitHub, if you please) as long as you leave the template out of it, perhaps replacing it with a notice that a copy of PrettyDocs is required to make it work, and a pointer to where the user can get one.  If what you've done makes your work a derivative, in copyright terms, of PrettyDocs, then your work is all compromised, and you cannot redistribute it in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a useful lesson to be learned here, it may be that next time you start a work with the intent of making it free software, you should found it on &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; software, not merely &lt;em&gt;zero-cost&lt;/em&gt; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T07:38:54.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11066" CreationDate="2021-01-10T08:21:52.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with JNic above.  I note your edit regarding the distribution of binaries linked to System Libraries, but I think you are misunderstanding this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ entry you quote makes it clear that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a library is a System Library, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; the mere choice to distribute a copy of said Library along with your work doesn't prevent you from availing yourself of the System Library exception.  It does not, however, exempt you from the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; tests of whether something is a System Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 holds that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form. A “Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The DLL is clearly essential to the use of &lt;em&gt;this particular 3D display&lt;/em&gt;.  Does that make it a System Library?  I would hold not, because the display is not an &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;essential component&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; of this operating system.  You can easily buy a computer running the OS in question without this display, and the DLL in question is not then required to make it work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure it pleases the manufacturer of this display to regard their DLL as a System Library, for this lets them continue to distribute hardware which requires proprietary drivers without suffering one of the normal penalties, namely free software not working properly (or at all) with their hardware.  I am therefore not persuaded by their stance; if they're really so keen to be interoperable, let them free up their drivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the GPL as I think JNic does: since your work is required by the Blender licence to be under GPLv3, you may not distribute this DLL with your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T08:21:52.480" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11092" CreationDate="2021-01-10T22:33:56.047" Score="3" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a C++ library for Arduino. The source code have the following specificities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it includes headers, uses functions, macros, and structures/classes (and their methods) from LGPL libraries (Arduino.h from the Arduino Core, Servo.h from the Servo library)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it uses GCC macros like &lt;code&gt;__AVR_DEVICE_NAME__&lt;/code&gt;. Such macros are also used by the Arduino.h&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it uses linker variables&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is used for all Arduino boards (AVR, megaAVR, SAMD). So the AVR and ARM toolchains are involved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to choose a permissive GPL-compatible or LGPL-compatible open-source license such as the Modified BSD license. Is it possible here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unclear to me how GPL and LGPL are restricting my license choice here. Looking at the AVR and ARM toolchains licenses in Atmel Studio folder (AVR8_toolchain_License.txt, ARM_toolchain_License.txt), it appears that they include many libraries like binutils that are either GPL or LGPL (or sometimes both, which is unclear), either 2.0 or 3.0 or both (this is also unclear), and GCC has the GCC Runtime Library Exception. Few libraries are under permissive licenses such as MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is unclear if including Arduino.h is not including GPL code/libraries behing the scene that would also restrict my choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21622" LastEditorUserId="21622" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T20:12:21.493" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T10:40:11.910" Title="Choosing a license in Arduino environment" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|bsd|license|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11066" CreationDate="2021-01-11T08:08:36.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give another angle on the issue: If you need to distribute the DLL together with your Blender plugin, then the DLL can &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; be regarded as a System Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of a System Library is that it is such an important part of the target system that it is distributed together with that system and you must be able to assume that the library/driver is present on any system that supports the hardware in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even then, there might be arguments that the DLL is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; not covered by the System Library definition of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T06:30:06.050" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T06:30:06.050" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11068" CreationDate="2021-01-11T08:44:07.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses are not allowed to discriminate against fields of endeavor. That means you cannot use an open source license for your code and use that license to prevent competitors from opening shop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; possible with various open source licenses are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL requires that modified versions must be under the AGPL license and their source code must be offered to those that receive the binary and those that interact with it over a network. That means that if a competitor uses and improves your software, you get to use those improvements as well in your hosting solution. This does not prevent competition, but any competitor must outbid you on marketing and/or the price/quality ratio of their subscription plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license has a mechanism for giving attribution beyond the normal copyright notices (the NOTICES file). This mechanism could be used to direct people to your hosting solution as the &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; hosting solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T08:44:07.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11078" CreationDate="2021-01-11T16:45:47.900" Score="3" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is derived from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11066/understanding-gpl-blender-add-on-system-library/11073?noredirect=1#comment28053_11073&quot;&gt;a previous question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a Blender add-on which enables the use of Blender with a piece of hardware (i.e., a lightfield display). Blender and the use of the specific Python API, which is required to write Blender add-ons, is licensed under GPL. In order to communicate with the lightfield display on the software level the manufacturer of the display provides a compiled, closed-source DLL under a non-GPL license. Still, the DLL can be downloaded at no cost by everyone wanting to develop software for this display. The add-on cannot provide the main functionality without this DLL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to @MadHatters answer, this DLL cannot be considered a system library, because it is not a &amp;quot;Major Component&amp;quot; of an operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Central Issue:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GPL allow the use (linking) of such a DLL with a GPL-licensed software, if I only convey the add-on and let it to the user to install the DLL on his/her own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My current understanding:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my current understanding it - unfortunately - would be not allowed by GPL. I base my understanding mainly on the following FAQ statement to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does the GPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read it, the mere linking of the GPL-licensed add-on with the non-GPL DLL makes &lt;strong&gt;this DLL and the add-on a combined work which is to be put under the GPL as a whole&lt;/strong&gt;. As a consequence, I would need to convey the source code of any non-GPL DLL I link to. No matter, if I convey it with the add-on or demand the user to do install it separately. In contrast to that, the &lt;strong&gt;Lesser GPL&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly states on the very same question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2) If you dynamically link against an LGPLed library &lt;em&gt;already present on the user's computer&lt;/em&gt;, you need not convey the library's source.&lt;/strong&gt; On the other hand, if you yourself convey the executable LGPLed library along with your application, whether linked with statically or dynamically, you must also convey the library's sources, in one of the ways for which the LGPL provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences in the answers implies, that distributing the add-on and linking to the DLL, which is downloaded by the user separately, would be fine - &lt;strong&gt;but only in the LGPL, not in the GPL&lt;/strong&gt;. However, due to Blenders licensing, all Blender add-ons using Blender's Python API need to be under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the case of GPL it is stated&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that.&#xA;[...] Only the copyright holders for the program can legally release their software under these terms. [...] But if you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them. You have to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;strong&gt;that further underlines that one may not link against a non-GPL library - no matter if it is already on the user's computer or not.&lt;/strong&gt; Second, since only the copyright holder (in my case: The Blender Foundation) may define such an exception, I cannot. And since my add-on is a derived works of the Blender Python API (since my add-on uses this API), I have no chance to distribute the add-on without violating the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I need to be answered:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation correct and am I really not allowed to link any closed-source library which does not fulfill the system library exception to a GPL software, if I am conveying a GPL software of someone else, which I only modified? Is that true, even if the closed-source, non-system DLL is zero-cost and either freely downloadable by the user or already present on the users PC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did I grasp the difference between GPL and LGPL correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;May I never distribute the add-on or is there something I can do without violating the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21616" LastEditorUserId="21616" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T13:06:46.400" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T06:19:53.927" Title="Understanding GPL &amp; LGPL: Free Software with zero-cost, proprietary libraries" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|proprietary-code|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11077" CreationDate="2021-01-12T08:56:43.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my interpretation correct and am I really not allowed to link any closed-source library which does not fulfill the system library exception to a GPL software, if I am conveying a GPL software of someone else, which I only modified? Is that true, even if the closed-source, non-system DLL is zero-cost and either freely downloadable by the user or already present on the users PC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct. The only way you can link to a closed-source library from GPL code is if it falls under the exception for System Libraries or if all relevant copyright holders&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt; agree to add an exception to the GPL for using that particular library in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is not concerned with the cost of software (it is entirely acceptable to ask money for GPl-licensed software), but rather with freedom. In particular the freedom to inspect and improve the software you have and to distribute those improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* The relevant copyright holders also come from GPL-licensed libraries.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did I grasp the difference between GPL and LGPL correctly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you did not, but it is a subtle point that many people miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is written in such a way that a closed-source project can link to an LGPL library, but the LGPL project itself cannot depend on closed-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the LGPL license itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice [...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- section 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “Combined Work” is a work produced by combining or linking an Application with the Library.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- section 0&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 also mentions some restrictions that you must obey, which boild down to that you must inform your users about the presence of LGPL code and give them the right and possibility to replace the LGPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May I never distribute the add-on or is there something I can do without violating the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can convince the vendor of the DLL that there is a business case in supporting your plugin (or other GPL software), you might be able to convince them to relicense the library with a GPL-compatible open-source license. After that is done, you can use that new version of the library in your plugin and release it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T06:19:53.927" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T06:19:53.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-12T22:46:08.400" Score="0" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Or, If you distribute a &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; software under GPLv3, do you lose the GPLv2 license?)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume a program (software X, created by developer/group A) that is licensed using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html#SEC4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the usual &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot;&#xA;phrasing&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA;of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gives the user (say, developer B) a possibility of creating a modified version (fork Y) of the software and redistributing it&#xA;under GPLv3 only. This appears to be what is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an interpretation was presented to me that by doing so, the user (the one creating the fork, developer B) loses the license to the software under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; &lt;strong&gt;keep intact all the notices that refer to this License&lt;/strong&gt; and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.&lt;/strong&gt; However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be read to say that by distributing the software (the modified version of it, fork Y) under GPLv3 only and by removing the mention of GPLv2, the user (developer B) would be in violation of the bolded parts of section 1 and section 4, since GPLv2 does not provide the option of doing that. Hence, the user (same B) would lose their rights under the GPLv2 license according to section 4. (They would presumably still have the rights given by GPLv3, since that license was not violated; but that is another matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Losing the rights under GPLv2 might matter if the user (developer B) would want to subsequently distribute the (original) software (X) again using the original &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; clause, perhaps after making modifications  to it. Losing the GPLv2 rights would appear to preclude that. This could also mean that a user (B) making a GPLv3 fork (Y) of a &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; software (X) could not distribute patches or modified versions of the pre-fork version (either original software X as it was, or derived works X'), making it harder for them to contribute back to the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, this interpretation appears to be against the intent of a &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; provision, and a similar problem would seem to appear with any dual-licensing involving GPLv2 (or indeed any other license that uses similar language). However, I'm not sure I can rely on lay logic to refute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the question: Is there any merit to this interpretation, and&#xA;if not, what considerations apply to refute it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, as comments were made that the question was unclear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that a group A of developers have created software X, which is distributed under &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot;. Developer B creates patches X' for the software, distributing them both back upstream, and to the public himself, under the same &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; clause. So far so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, consider that B wants to fork the software, and they choose to distribute fork Y under GPLv3 only. This is still obviously fine as such, &lt;em&gt;but does doing this lead B into conflict with the parts of GPLv2 quoted above, and prevent him from further distributing the original software X (or further modified versions X'' of it) under GPLv2, or &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, group A itself is unaffected by this as far as their software X is concerned, and third parties C could still get X with the &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; clause directly from A. Also, the forked software Y would still be GPLv3 only to both original developers A and the third parties C, as B had made their changes available only under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21636" LastEditorUserId="21636" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T14:47:26.090" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T14:47:26.090" Title="How does dual licensing combine with &quot;You may not [distribute] except as expressly provided under this License&quot;?" Tags="|gpl-2|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11084" CreationDate="2021-01-13T05:07:37.363" Score="4" ViewCount="1349" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that the GNU GPL v2 and Apache License v2.0 are considered incompatible. The FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License List&lt;/a&gt; explains that this is &amp;quot;because [Apache] has some requirements that are not in that GPL version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions.&amp;quot; This seems to be referring to sections three (patent license termination upon litigation) and nine (must hold Contributors harmless when providing a warranty).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GPL, section 7 seems to cover the indemnification issue by allowing you to supplement the GPL with a term &amp;quot;Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of [added] material by anyone who conveys the material&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't see anything that addresses the patent termination issue. How is the GPL v3 compatible with Apache v2.0's patent license (and license termination) scheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21639" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T09:21:33.127" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T03:42:21.053" Title="Why is the GNU GPL v3 compatible with the Apache License v2.0?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11080" CreationDate="2021-01-13T07:29:45.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right that if you modify the license notices to remove the reference to GPLv2, then you lose the right to use and distribute the software under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't believe you lose &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rights to the software. You still have the rights granted to you under the GPLv3 (which you effectively got under the &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; part of the license notice), or any alternative license that the software was explicitly dual-licensed under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you get some software under &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; and you explicitly 'upgrade' that license to GPLv3, then that upgrade is irrevocable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another, more common, way to benefit from the &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; clause is to use the &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; software in a GPLv3 codebase without changing the &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot; designation on the parts that are used wholesale. The GPLv2 itself is incompatible with the GPLv3, but the &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; clause still allows such usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T07:29:45.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11082" CreationDate="2021-01-13T09:03:43.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to GPLv3's &lt;a href=&quot;http://gplv3.fsf.org/rationale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third-draft rationale document&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 compatibility of the Apache license patent termination clause&#xA;was accomplished in Draft 3 by the second specific example of an impermissible further restriction given in the third paragraph of section 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, this specific example reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means that, should someone engage in the sort of patent lawsuit described in Apache2 against the conveyor of code under GPLv3, the plaintiff's GPLv3 licence - including the patent licence in s11 - would terminate under s8 paragraph 1.  Thus, they do appear to be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T09:03:43.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11088" CreationDate="2021-01-13T12:00:48.597" Score="0" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing an open source project licensed under Apache License 2.0, I wonder how can I license the precompiled binaries with the same license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21644" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T13:04:21.663" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T14:10:53.537" Title="Licensing binaries of open source project with Apache License 2.0" Tags="|licensing|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11080" CreationDate="2021-01-13T13:06:11.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP having considerably clarified the question, I'm rewriting my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob receives some software from Alice under GPLv2+, and chooses to redistribute it under GPLv3.  You want to know if Bob has now lost his right to use the software under GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has not.  He was given the choice about which terms he could receive the software under, and until he does something that requires him to accept any of the possible terms on offer, such as distributing copies (GPLv2 ss 0 and 5, GPLv3 s9) he doesn't have to decide which terms apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he does choose, &lt;strong&gt;those terms govern the act of redistribution&lt;/strong&gt;, and the licence obligations thereby imposed will apply to those downstream recipients.  This means he may give the code to Carol under GPLv2, to David under GPLv2+, to Ellen under GPLv3, and to Frank under GPLv3+, all at the same time.  Should he choose to distribute it solely under GPLv3, it is those acts of distribution that are regulated by the terms of GPLv3; Bob still retains a copy, licensed to him under GPLv2+, which he may at a later time use under such of those terms as he at that later time chooses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you choose to take the view (perverse, to my mind) that Bob's choice to redistribute under GPLv3-only has deprived him of the benefits of GPLv2 with respect to his current copy, Bob can simply go back to Alice, and get a new copy, on the original terms.  I can find no basis in copyright law for any viewpoint that regards Bob as being somehow &amp;quot;poisoned&amp;quot; with respect to GPLv2, and thus permanently incapable of having those rights again with respect to this piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T14:46:34.410" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T14:46:34.410" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11085" CreationDate="2021-01-13T13:15:20.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LICENCE file has no particular special meaning, though it is one conventional way of indicating applicable licence terms.  In this particular case, you're using the Apache2 licence, which accords special status to any &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file that accompanies the download; so &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you choose to use a licensing file in the tarfile that contains the binary and associated libraries, I'd call it &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also use declarative text on the web page, if any, that distributes the binaries.  Or you could have a click-through for people downloading them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your obligations are to be clear and unambiguous about the terms on which you're letting people have source and/or binaries.  How you do that is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T14:10:53.537" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T14:10:53.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-13T15:15:25.680" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a website which sells a WordPress theme licensed under GPL that has this in their terms on the checkout page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our products are licensed under the GNU General Public License (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&lt;/a&gt;) version 2.0 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not provide access to the installation of our products as a hosting service provider or a reseller, and you may not provide to others as part of a “Software As-a-Service” (SaaS). You may not bundle it and resell it as a commercial, off the shelf, license or product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal? I thought that the GPL gives you the right to resell and host it as a SaaS if you desire so.&#xA;Can I be legally bound to their terms and conditions and their GPL at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21646" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T15:51:44.533" Title="Site that sells GPL code has extra terms that say I can't resell it. Is this legal?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11089" CreationDate="2021-01-13T15:51:44.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's legal - assuming they're the sole rightsholder, they may make their code available on any terms they choose - but it's completely ineffective.  You may elect to take it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; (as it says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPLv2 or later&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) then, under the provision of s7 that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you may remove the other restrictions they placed on it, and use it under the normal terms of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T15:51:44.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:47:53.230" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I developed an application and it's time for me to give the required attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a general question. If for example, I use an open-source library called X which uses open source libraries Y and Z, do I need to give attributions to them also or only to X which will direct by itself to Y and Z?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will give an example. There is an API for android developers called &lt;code&gt;Including Open Source Notices&lt;/code&gt; that allows you to use it as part of the application and once you build the application, it checks all of the components that are used in it and creates the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use this tool, it gives me licenses such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2005-2011, The Android Open Source Project&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2014 Google Inc.&#xA;&#xA;Chinese/Japanese Word Break Dictionary Data (cjdict.txt)&#xA;&#xA;UTF-8 Library&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, it seems to be so much into the program and I never saw that an Android application gives attribution to Android Studio or to the font that the program itself uses. It seems to me like giving attributions to Windows because the computer turned on when I wrote the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16345" LastEditorUserId="16345" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T19:07:04.293" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T19:07:04.293" Title="Giving attributions to &quot;inner&quot; open source" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11074" CreationDate="2021-01-14T10:33:47.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can license your library with any LGPL-compatible open-source license. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this explaination&lt;/a&gt; which states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] applications that use the library don't have to be [distributed under LGPL]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is very permissive from the perspective of an application developer. Anyway, you cannot sub-license the 3rd-party library (arduino). If you want to distribute the library (modified or unmodified), you have to license the library under the terms of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; To avoid misunderstandings: you can even use the library in non-compatible licensed code as long as you don't redistribute the library under different  terms than LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastEditorUserId="18005" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T10:40:11.910" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T10:40:11.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11095" CreationDate="2021-01-14T23:16:00.433" Score="5" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL; DR&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are considering creating a series of dependency modules (UI, repository patterns, etc) as separated Android libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could we use a permissive license (Apache 2.0, BSD-2 or MIT) despite statically linking them into another AGPL v3.0 &lt;em&gt;app&lt;/em&gt; project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Details&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Android Clean Architecture&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the many reasons for adopting architecture on &lt;a href=&quot;https://fivenyc.medium.com/android-architecture-part-1-every-new-beginning-is-hard-132a65507f48&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android apps&lt;/a&gt; is simplify testability isolating the business cases code from modules that require Android dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://miro.medium.com/max/1000/1*Sc3A7xcC1A0JOFGCOp2thA.png&quot; alt=&quot;Android Clean Architecture, by Five Agency&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Business cases (or interactors) are implemented like &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Nsjsiz2A9mg?t=900&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;command pattern&lt;/a&gt; instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no Android framework dependencies at the &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; module, the network/cache and sensors boilerplate moved into &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;device&lt;/code&gt; modules respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the current model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All modules depended on &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; because &lt;code&gt;app&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;device&lt;/code&gt; implement interfaces defined by &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; depends on &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; interfaces only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;device&lt;/code&gt; depends on &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; interfaces only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;app&lt;/code&gt; depends on &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; module&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;device&lt;/code&gt; are injected into &lt;code&gt;app&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Permissive vs Strongly Protected Licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;code&gt;*.deb&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;*.rpm&lt;/code&gt; packages in a common Linux distribution, Android apps required static linking to its dependencies. Unless you are using a permissive dependency, the viral nature of (L)GPL forces the developer publish the whole app content, i.e. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;thou shalt not use AGPL, GPL or LGPL dependencies.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide-image.png&quot; alt=&quot;opensource-flow-img&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Mexican standoff&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given &lt;strong&gt;only &lt;code&gt;data&lt;/code&gt; uses a AGPLv3.0 library&lt;/strong&gt;, could we:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Release &lt;code&gt;device&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;domain&lt;/code&gt; as a Apache 2.0? project&lt;/strong&gt;  (My guts say &lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Release &lt;code&gt;app&lt;/code&gt; as another Apache 2.0? project&lt;/strong&gt; (My guts say &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention is allow other developers use our code (like Airbnb &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/airbnb/epoxy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epoxy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/airbnb/MvRx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MvRx&lt;/a&gt;) at their projects, but keep &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; the core technology under &lt;strong&gt;AGPL v3.0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6600" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T08:42:33.943" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T08:42:33.943" Title="Is it possible statically linking Apache 2.0, BSD-2, or MIT libraries to AGPL v3.0 binaries?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|lgpl|agpl-3.0|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11094" CreationDate="2021-01-15T07:39:26.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what you've written, I'm not entirely clear about the problem.  I'm going to assume that you're the sole rightsholder in &lt;code&gt;{data,domain,app,device}.gradle&lt;/code&gt; (forgive the regexp) and that &lt;code&gt;data.gradle&lt;/code&gt;, though written entirely by you, is linked to a third-party AGPLv3 library.  Thus &lt;code&gt;{domain,app,device}.gradle&lt;/code&gt; are unconstrained with respect to licence, but &lt;code&gt;data.gradle&lt;/code&gt; must be distributed under AGPLv3.  Given that the intent is for all four of your modules to be compiled into a single binary, you want to know what your options are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first important point is that &lt;strong&gt;licences do not inhere in code, they attach to recipients through the act of conveyance&lt;/strong&gt;.  The second important point is that the FSF has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;something to say&lt;/a&gt; about this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL says that the whole combined program has to be released under the GPL. So your module has to be available for use under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you can give additional permission for the use of your code. You can, if you wish, release your module under a license which is more lax than the GPL but compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when you release the combined binary, and complete corresponding source, this must indeed be under AGPLv3 (&lt;em&gt;per&lt;/em&gt; ss 4-6), but that does not prevent you from also releasing &lt;code&gt;{domain,app,device}.gradle&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;separately&lt;/strong&gt; under more-permissive but compatible licences (which would include Apache2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I understood the question correctly, and does this answer it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T08:39:56.517" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T08:39:56.517" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11101" CreationDate="2021-01-15T08:08:16.440" Score="11" ViewCount="1999" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company&#xA;“distribution”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for&#xA;itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop&#xA;a modified version and install that version through its own&#xA;facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that&#xA;modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations&#xA;or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies&#xA;to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We make software for internal use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The company operates in several countries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is one registered company in country A, one in country B. Country A is outside the EU, country B is inside the EU.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All internally created software is developed and used by people in both countries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we use GPL-licensed libraries in the software we produce, what rules apply?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21663" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T01:56:41.997" Title="According to the GPL FAQ use within a company or organization is not considered distribution. What is the legal definition of a company/organization?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11099" CreationDate="2021-01-15T11:22:20.590" Score="39" ViewCount="4170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take as an example the Italian app &amp;quot;Immuni&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/immuni-app&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/immuni-app&lt;/a&gt;), used by the government to trace contacts exposure against COVID-19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since many people were afraid about how the app would have used the phone location, contacts, etc.. the entire source code has been published on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is: is there any guarantee that the published app has been built starting from that source code? In other words, potentially the app could be different from the source code, adding some exploits or privacy breaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21664" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:22:10.900" LastActivityDate="2023-09-05T23:13:03.573" Title="What guarantees that the published app matches the published open source code?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-15T11:41:26.513" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general problem, I'm not aware of a robust way to validate that a given binary matches a given source repository (see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/q/38466&quot;&gt;this discussion on Security.SE&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, it boils down to a question of trust.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The most reliable solution is to build the given sourcecode yourself and not rely on the published binary (although you still have the question of whether you can trust third party APIs the program uses, the compiler and toolchain, etc). A more realistic option for most users (especially the non-tech-savvy ones) is to check downloadable binary's checksum again a published checksum. Then again, if you don't trust the party publishing the checksum, this is of course meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T12:30:57.447" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T12:30:57.447" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-15T11:51:06.827" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Mureinik's excellent point, there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;general move&lt;/a&gt; towards reproducible builds in FLOSS, which provides a useful halfway house between &lt;em&gt;build it yourself&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;distributor publishes a single checksum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the build toolchains are reproducible (that is, a given toolchain repeatably compiles a given set of reproducibly-buildable sources into bitwise-identical binaries) then a distributed solution becomes possible: a small number of enthusiastic and capable individuals can each systematically rebuild an app from a given set of sources, and each can publish checksums of their resulting binaries.  If many such independent sources agree, users can easily verify correctness of their own copies by checksumming those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T08:55:11.587" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T08:55:11.587" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11096" CreationDate="2021-01-15T13:37:19.377" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question in the title (&amp;quot;What is the legal definition of a company/organization?&amp;quot;), that depends on the laws in the concerned countries and may also depend on how the company is exactly structured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will assume that the part in country A and the part in country B are legally independent companies that are both subsidiaries of a larger holding company. Please correct me if that assumption is incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the companies in A and B are independent legal entities, which would be the case if my assumption holds, then as far as the GPL is concerned they are two different companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you share GPL code with coworkers from the other company, you are distributing GPL code to them and all requirements of the GPL apply. This means that you have to offer the source code to &lt;em&gt;the company&lt;/em&gt; that received the compiled binary. If you are developing the code together, that should not be a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to publicly distribute source code, unless you also &lt;em&gt;publicly&lt;/em&gt; distribute binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T13:37:19.377" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-15T18:14:49.030" Score="2" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a work is published under, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, does this mean the work or one of its (appropriately licensed) derivatives can never be sold in a physical medium, even if the price asked for it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;merely covers the production costs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;covers the production costs plus some amount that will be donated to some sort of charity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume all derivatives are also provided free of charge in a suitable electronic format (does this even matter?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to find an answer from CC, but this doesn't seem to be spelled out anywhere, including their &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17991" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T13:36:08.863" Title="Does a non-commercial license like CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 preclude a work to be sold for money?" Tags="|monetization|non-commercial|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-15T23:22:04.427" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: You can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a famous paper &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://users.ece.cmu.edu/%7Eganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reflections on Trusting Trust&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Ken Thompson about how &lt;em&gt;the compiler itself&lt;/em&gt; could be inserting the malicious code, including when compiling itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way would be to build the app yourself, or have it built by some entity you fully trust for this. Maybe you don't have the knowledge or tools yourself, but have a friend who is able to do that. Or you have the monetary means to hire someone which does this for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Note all of this is easier for the Android version, doing the same for iOS apps would be harder, since it is only possible to install from the official App Store. In order to install an unofficial version you would need an Apple developer certificate or a jailbroken device)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could also install it from a third party, such as from &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://f-droid.org&lt;/a&gt; repository (it doesn't seem to be there currently, but since the app is AGPL, it could be added¹). That moves the trust from &amp;quot;the developer build the published app from the given code&amp;quot; to the third party running the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by MadHatter, there is a trend for reproducible builds, which really helps trust issues (but is harder to achieve). Usually, different compilations of the same code will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; result in the same binary, even when using the same version of libraries, compiler, target, etc. Often, there are changes such as timestamp or the order of files which result in slightly different resulting binaries. We talk about a reproducible build when different people reach to the same program. If you installed an app from source X and hash &lt;code&gt;9dfd069921782a66fe0b52eae6c20fa75e669cff&lt;/code&gt;, but the same program, built from the same code by other unrelated people also result in the same program with hash &lt;code&gt;9dfd069921782a66fe0b52eae6c20fa75e669cff&lt;/code&gt;, that strongly hints that the result of compiling that code is the given program (or a conspiracy between them!). That would even allow you to compile it &lt;em&gt;post-facto&lt;/em&gt; and verify that the program you installed with hash &lt;code&gt;9dfd069921782a66fe0b52eae6c20fa75e669cff&lt;/code&gt; is the same you obtained when compiling it yourself a week later (although, if it didn't match, it might have already done its evil wrongdoings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you don't directly use an unofficial built, that they publish the code has two other benefits to take into account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, they are more incentivized to play fair. If their app sent home a copy of your contact list, by itself that would be bad. But if they claimed that the code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-android/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt; and then modified the application to additionally send them a copy of your contact list that would be much worse. Not only would they be doing that (for which they might come up with a reasonable explanation) but also purposefully concealing their wrongdoing lying about the code!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could they do that? Yes, technically they could. But also, the blowback (if found) could be devastating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the risk not only lies in the potential modifications added on the compilation step, but also in the original code itself. By opening their code, that for review by other people, they are more clear about what they it is doing (including potential bugs or unintended security issues). It still doesn't help if nobody reviews the code and finds them, but the theory is that, &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;, someone would hopefully find them. This should also make the developers a bit more aware when coding the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ At least in theory, it might have problematic dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastEditorUserId="30903" LastEditDate="2023-09-05T23:13:03.573" LastActivityDate="2023-09-05T23:13:03.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11096" CreationDate="2021-01-16T01:56:41.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key insight is probably that a company counts as a person, legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you (personally) copy a GPL'd program from one of your own computers to another, you don't need to give yourself source. You're not distributing the program each time you run &lt;code&gt;cp&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're running doing that copy as part of employment, you're doing it as part of the company. Legally, the company is doing it. So the same conclusion applies. It's not a distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, handing it off to a different company (even under the same umbrella) may well be, but since you say all the companies do development, all the companies likely have the source code (or at least access to it), so the GPL source requirements are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm general though, what distribution means is a country-specific legal question — something the company's lawyers should provide an answer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T01:56:41.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-16T06:30:29.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is malware on it then it will one day become detected. If it becomes detected then you can only imagine what also happens to the company's reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21676" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T06:30:29.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-16T06:37:21.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your guarantee is political, not technical. If a government publishes an app that collects some personal information in the background, nothing much will happen if that’s later revealed. But if a government publishes source code and claims it’s the code for their app, but it’s later revealed that the published app wasn’t based on that source code, it will be a scandal; heads will roll and people will be sacked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2404" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T06:37:21.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11109" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11345" CreationDate="2021-01-16T12:13:30.233" Score="16" ViewCount="13259" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-copy-left licenses are popular. AFAIK their point is mostly to protect the developers from being sued over loss of money or life (compared to no license at all). But I am neither a lawyer nor have enough free time to read those licenses in their entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the main features of the most popular permissive protocols?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21678" OwnerDisplayName="Vorac" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-12T13:18:58.843" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T13:18:58.843" Title="What are the practical differences between MIT, Apache and BSD licenses?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11103" CreationDate="2021-01-16T13:36:08.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of this is entirely unclear. The NonCommercial clause is intent-based, and relies on a concept of ”commercial advantage“ that is not further defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, a NC-licensed work can be provided free of charge but still for a commercial purpose, e.g. if a CC-BY-NC-SA licensed photograph is used on an advertisement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the covered work is also available electronically free of charge is not relevant, since here the physical/non-electronic use also has to comply with the license. The NonCommercial clause doesn't require that the covered work is &lt;em&gt;available&lt;/em&gt; in a non-commercial context, but that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; reproduction or sharing is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; done for NonCommercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is however some flexibility in the definition of NonCommercial. It means “&lt;em&gt;not primarily&lt;/em&gt; intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation” (emphasis mine). In particular, a for-profit business can use material under the NonCommercial clause even though it might have an indirect commercial advantage from this use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that it is acceptable to sell NonCommercial works at cost. Since there is no profit, there would likely be no commercial advantage. While there would be a monetary compensation involved, the goal of an at-cost sale is not to make money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundraising for charity is very likely NonCommercial. The CC-BY-NC-SA doesn't prevent payment, it just prevents commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again: all of this is entirely unclear. Uses that are not obviously allowed by the license carry some risk. If the work in question only has a single copyright holder, it may be feasible to ask them for explicit permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This difficulty in establishing what is and isn't commercial is part of the issue why there are no good “open-source but not for certain purposes” licenses. Instead, truly open licenses (like CC-BY-SA) do not discriminate against any field of use. Even when restrictions like a NonCommercial clause are well-intentioned, they tend to create legal uncertainty and will likely have the effect of excluding some uses that the licensor intended to allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T13:36:08.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11111" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11118" CreationDate="2021-01-16T15:09:45.660" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;So it can be fairly established that this is infringement of copyright, but I'm unsure how to handle this. I've considered making a PR to the project that forked the other projects and adding the licenses/copyright (so that it can be merged to the &amp;quot;second&amp;quot; fork with permission of the person that added code) but wouldn't I have to get permission from the people that contributed to the &amp;quot;first&amp;quot; fork?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21681" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T07:41:57.900" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T07:59:59.747" Title="What if a project forks a number of projects, but doesn't include the license or copyright that was used -- then another project forks the fork?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11120" CreationDate="2021-01-16T21:22:37.117" Score="0" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write a small program in the R language, connecting to DB (hence using packages), that I'd like to sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it will connect to DB, on internal networks, that can't be hosted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to replace all GPL-alike packages to MIT ones... but R in itself is GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that I can't write a program, and sell it, at all in R?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE --&lt;/strong&gt; To be sure that the program won't be easily copied, or played with, I do want / need to keep the sources closed.  For example, to hinder anyone from commenting the code about the need for a valid product key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bonus:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a template for &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21689" LastEditorUserId="21689" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T15:36:01.987" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T15:36:01.987" Title="No way to write a commercial product in R?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11113" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11128" CreationDate="2021-01-10T19:18:49.657" Score="2" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to build a permissively-licensed web site, but preserve copyright for art assets included in the repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do open software licenses differentiate between code and art assets/content? Recognizing that all licenses are different, are there any useful general guidelines for what is and isn't covered by a software license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21709" OwnerDisplayName="Chris Keefe" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T11:39:43.260" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:39:43.260" Title="Licensing open-source code and art assets" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T06:51:42.120" Score="2" ViewCount="415" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither a native english speaker nor a law expert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making a development tool, which allows user to export and redistribute standalone binary from the tool. The exported binary contains my tool's name and logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the license &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt;, I understand clearly what the former two clauses mean, but for the third:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it conflict to that the software encourages users to keep and show my tool's name and logo in their redistribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21743" OwnerDisplayName="pipipi" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T07:26:59.903" Title="Does the 3-Clause BSD license allow this" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11114" CreationDate="2021-01-17T00:15:09.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be any &amp;quot;endorsement&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;promotion&amp;quot; happening here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18501" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T00:15:09.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11111" CreationDate="2021-01-17T07:59:59.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found it's helpful to be concrete, so here's my scenario: Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave all write individual pieces of code &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;, and publish them under a variety of mutually-compatible free licences.  Emily combines them all with some code of her own into a project which she publishes without any licence/copyright details.  Frank picks this code up, further modifies it, and publishes the resulting code.  You ask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it can be fairly established that this is infringement of copyright, but I'm unsure how to handle this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principal offender here, it seems to me, is Emily.  Even if the original four works (A-D) were published under permissive free licences, there is a requirement in nearly all cases to preserve copyright notices and licence texts.  If any of A-D was published under a copyleft licence, then in addition the whole of E would need to be so published.  So Emily's done a Bad Thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second offender here is Frank.  Since Emily's code contains no licensing information at all, Frank &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;has no permission&lt;/a&gt; to copy it, much less to modify it and distribute the modified code.  If you're ever in Frank's position, &lt;strong&gt;do not do this&lt;/strong&gt; - we have other questions here from people who founded projects on uncertain copyright foundations, and caused themselves trouble further down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand you're trying to work with Emily's codebase, to bring it retrospectively into compliance, so that Frank can rebase off it onto a better footing.  That's a pretty good idea, but it may be a lot of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;wouldn't I have to get permission from the people that contributed to the &amp;quot;first&amp;quot; fork&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you mean Emily's code, are you saying there were other contributors besides Emily (and implicitly, Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave).  If there were, you're likely right: it's clear Emily has taken a very loose approach to copyright, so the chance of her having had a good CLA in place for those other contributors is nearly zero.  If this is the case, the job is probably too big too tackle; find another project to contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the only people whose permissions you &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; need are Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave.  They have already given permission for the re-use of their work, by using free licences.  If Emily's codebase can come into compliance with the conditions of those licences, their permission has already been given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T07:59:59.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11130" CreationDate="2021-01-17T09:49:17.587" Score="4" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making an open-sourced font that is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://moji.or.jp/ipafont/license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IPA Font License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;, and I would like to include some glyphs from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scripts.sil.org/OFL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL Open Font License&lt;/a&gt; font. Are these 2 licenses compatible and how should I release the font? Would I be forced to use one of the License only or can I license the font with two license in one font file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21697" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:55:55.277" Title="Question on compatibility of SIL Open Font License with IPA Font License" Tags="|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11112" CreationDate="2021-01-17T11:36:08.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just because a language and its toolchains are licensed under the GNU GPL does not mean that any software you create with it also needs to be GPL-licensed. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop nonfree programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you still have to be careful with the libraries you are using. When you create a program which uses a GPL library, then the whole program needs to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T11:46:56.043" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T11:46:56.043" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11127" CreationDate="2021-01-17T13:16:18.657" Score="1" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is Pelican Static Site Generator &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.getpelican.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blog.getpelican.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it takes directory structure with mainly *.RST files (&amp;quot;blog source&amp;quot; written by me) on my HDD and creates another directory structure there, containing mainly static *.HTML files derived from them (&amp;quot;blog&amp;quot;) - basically kind of compiler&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &amp;quot;blog&amp;quot; is then copied to some web server and served by Apache (or othe server)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pelican it is licensed by AGPL-3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to create different Static Site Generator (maybe named GiGeOSP) roughly based on the same idea and doing something simmilar, but with widly different managing files, generating indexes, set of features etc. etc. but the result will be again &amp;quot;new blog&amp;quot; not much different from the previous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION:&lt;/strong&gt; Do I understand correctly, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GiGeOSP must be licenced AGPL-3.0, if it uses part of Pelican&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;none of &amp;quot;blog&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;new blog&amp;quot; is legally bounded to mention by which software was created and not have to link their respective sources (while it would be nice)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &amp;quot;blog&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;new blog&amp;quot; may have any licence I wish to use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as there is none interaction of users of the blogs with the generators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blog HTML code is generated just once for each version/release on my home computer, then transferred as whole to another server (by scp, or floppy discs, or CD ... does not matter how), where the generator is not even installed on the server so when user open it in web browser, it just get the static HTMl, but is not in any connection with the generator (my home computer maybe off, or even destroyed at the time)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aditional questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if I only got the basic idea, how Pelican works (collect files, use docutils to parse it and jinja to apply some templates to get result) and which general libraries it uses (docutils and Jinja) and then write GiGeOSP from scratch, can I use another licence by my choise (probably just GPL)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is OK to release generator under one licence (GPL) and set of templates under other (CC-something), if the generator does not make sense  without &amp;quot;some&amp;quot; templates, but not necessary those I write?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11411" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T10:42:43.863" Title="How is Static Website affected by fact that it was generated by AGPL-3.0 tool?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11126" CreationDate="2021-01-17T22:07:13.207" Score="2" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a videogame using a proprietary license. It would utilize the SDL library and POSIX. From my understanding, every modern platform uses POSIX except for Windows. To fix this, when building for Windows, I want to link with Cygwin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cygwin.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cygwin&lt;/a&gt; is licensed under the LGPL with special exceptions for linking proprietary software. If I wanted to distribute this software via a platform like Steam, and distribute Cygwin with it, and link my proprietary game with it, could I?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21103" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:14:59.023" Title="Cygwin in a commercial application (LGPL with exceptions for linking)" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T23:13:58.330" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an idea for an android app and I'm interested if it is legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically there are sites where people upload their recipes for vape juices, and all of these recipes fall under this specific licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to do is to create an app that collects all of these recipes. Sort of an archive, and it would also have a calculator for quick mixing. Later on I would add possibility of user creating accounts and adding new recipes etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, is this legal if I give the appropriate credits to each recipe? And could I put adverts on the app or would this fall under commercial use? Also what if some functions of the app would cost money(this would not hide any recipes behind this &amp;quot;paywall&amp;quot;) such as users adding new recipes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21706" LastEditorUserId="1084" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T17:31:27.250" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T17:31:27.250" Title="Do adverts break NC clause of Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence" Tags="|non-commercial|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11123" CreationDate="2021-01-18T00:22:32.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's OK, if you don't sell the app, have no ads and no premium content or in - app purchases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do either of the above, it is quite clearly a commercial use: you use it to generate profit in terms of ad revenue or using them as means to direct users to&amp;quot;premium content&amp;quot; or by selling the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to the 'no commercial' clause : The way on how to use the work for your profit is irrelevant, only the fact that you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact line between commercial and non - commercial usage is drawn by the courts and thus depends on jurisdiction. E.g. see this video podcast from one of Germany's well - known lawers in media laws, citing a ruling that usage on a website of a public radio station is illegal and awarded damages to the creator of the CC-NC - licensed content: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Ejy9U9Df_gU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/Ejy9U9Df_gU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said I am reasonably confident that the ruling will go this way often in other jurisdictions, too, as the intent of the license is to prevent other people from taking commercial advantage of the work - in whatever form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T00:27:37.623" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T00:27:37.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-18T02:29:26.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, the binary could be reverse-engineered and shown to implement the source code. Some &amp;quot;paranoid&amp;quot; people might actually try to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is: is there any guarantee that the published app has been built &lt;strong&gt;starting from that source code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, if you reorder two lines of code the compiler might still generate the same machine code, although I don't think that is really relevant to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is this practical?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reverse-engineering something is hard. But reverse engineering &lt;em&gt;if you have the source code&lt;/em&gt; is much easier than reverse-engineering something without source. It becomes less practical the larger an application is, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Near-enough is good enough&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's hard to prove that a binary &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; built from some source, there are lots of easy ways to prove that a binary &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; generated from that source. For instance, if it calls into an operating system API that the source code doesn't, you immediately know something fishy is going on. If you run the app in a debugger and it does something &amp;quot;suspicious&amp;quot; you can restrict your analysis to the relevant part of the source code and determine whether the binary checks out. Maybe in a debugger you can see it uses certain APIs in the background at random times that it shouldn't, sends more data than expected (e.g. voice data), or connects to unusual domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's face it, if the app were passive listening, using your camera when it shouldn't, or recording how you use other apps, this would be pretty obvious to a security analyst monitoring the app. And for big-deal apps like this, I'm sure some people do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21708" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T02:29:26.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11122" CreationDate="2021-01-18T09:32:54.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you statically link to the Cygwin library, the linking exception allows you to just distribute your application without consideration for the fact that you use Cygwin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you dynamically link to the Cygwin library and include that DLL in your distribution, then you have to comply with the LGPL requirements for distributing LGPL code. This means you have to include a copy of the license used by Cygwin and you have to tell your users where they can get a copy of the sources of Cygwin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T12:14:59.023" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:14:59.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11121" CreationDate="2021-01-18T10:42:43.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license of a program has no effect on the license of the material processed with the program. For example, I can write a blog post with Emacs (GPL-licensed), convert it to HTML with Pandoc (GPL-licensed) and serve the pages from the Busybox HTTPD server (GPL-licensed) or from within a Wordpress instance (GPL-licensed). And none of these affect the license of my content in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This holds true for all open-source licenses. However, contracts such as EULAs might include usage restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the output includes GPL-covered material, then the GPL would apply. E.g. if a static site generator were to use GPL-covered templates or copy GPL-covered JavaScript into the output, things would be more tricky. In practice, GPL-covered tools use more permissive licenses for snippets that will be copied into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also addresses another part of your question:&#xA;Yes, it is perfectly normal that data files used with a GPL tool are under a non-GPL license. From the perspective of a static site generator, themes or templates are just data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL and AGPL are the same in this regard. The AGPL only has different effects from the GPL when you modify an AGPL-covered software and allow users to remotely interact with the modified software over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, your understanding of the situation seems correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T10:42:43.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11113" CreationDate="2021-01-18T11:10:43.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses aren't all-or-nothing. However, its useful to keep material under different licenses clearly separate. For example, your web site might have multiple directories: &lt;code&gt;backend&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;js&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;assets&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;content&lt;/code&gt;. You could then clarify that different licenses apply to different parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Pretty Website&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright 2021 Some Person&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material in &lt;code&gt;backend/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;js/&lt;/code&gt; is licensed under the MIT license, see &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.MIT.txt&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material in &lt;code&gt;assets/&lt;/code&gt; is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND license 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, with the exception of the following assets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;assets/stock-photo.jpg&lt;/code&gt;: public domain image from &lt;a href=&quot;https://example.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some Website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;assets/wikipedia.png&lt;/code&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg&lt;/a&gt; by Nohat (CC-BY-SA 3.0 license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The material in &lt;code&gt;content/&lt;/code&gt; is all rights reserved, and included for reference only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In textual files, it might be possible to clarify the file's license with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;machine-readable SPDX-License-Identifier comment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, it will be less confusing to have different repositories for parts under different licenses. If there's only one applicable license, automated tools (like the auto-detected repository license field on GitHub) will be more accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in any case, you do retain your copyright. Open-source licenses work &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; you have a copyright: you as the copyright holder give certain permissions to the public. You are not bound by your licenses yourself. E.g. you can give a copy of your code to one person under the GPL license, another copy to someone else under the MIT license, and even sell a proprietary non-exclusive license to a another party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:10:43.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11098" CreationDate="2021-01-18T11:36:05.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the specific case of Immuni, note that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-android/issues/18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feature request&lt;/a&gt; for reproducible builds is open since last May (more or less when the app came out). Add your thumb-up to that page if you think that this is important, but for now it seems that the devs just don't care and there is not sufficient push from the public to ask for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Italy is light years behind other countries such as Germany when it comes to public awareness of issues like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9666" LastEditorUserId="9666" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T11:46:22.390" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T11:46:22.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11119" CreationDate="2021-01-18T12:55:55.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these 2 licenses compatible and how should I release the font?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the IPA Font License Agreement and the SIL Open Font License are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; compatible with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses require that once a font is released under that license, then all modifications must also be released under that license. The OFL even explicitly states that a derived work must be entirely under the OFL license and no other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a new font that is in part based on an IPA font and in part on an OFL font, then the only way to obey the restrictions that both licenses put on you is to keep the new font entirely private (no distribution at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:55:55.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11135" CreationDate="2021-01-18T23:29:46.333" Score="8" ViewCount="907" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the sole maintainer of a relatively small open-source project. I have wanted to add a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;code of conduct&lt;/a&gt; for some time, but I have two concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am the only maintainer, and I have not seen people interact vary much in bug reports and the like. If people are most likely going to have an issue with me, and I am also the one that the issue should be reported to I do not think the code of conduct would be very effective.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even in the event of an issue being reported that I can deal with, it should be able to be reported through confidential channels. GitHub does not have those&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; and I do not have a dedicated domain or email address.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to add a code of conduct for a smaller project, and what can I do to enforce it properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; They do have a way of confidentially reporting security vulnerabilities which I guess could work, but might end up confusing people.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21655" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T08:17:02.147" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T23:10:08.687" Title="Enforceability of codes of conduct for smaller projects" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T00:29:27.483" Score="0" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose a compatibility layer is developled that can use Windows driver binary directly in Linux kernel (feasibility of such a layer is another story which is also discussed bellow), then GPL doesn't apply to the driver, or every Windows driver should be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is that although the driver can be linked into Linux kernel and used, the developer of the driver develop the driver for Windows, not  for Linux, and the binary is generated without any Linux binaries. It is the end user that do the link to Linux kernel, that shouldn't force the developer to release the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if so, &lt;strong&gt;is this sort of a vulnerability of GPL&lt;/strong&gt;? Suppose the compatibility layer exists, then to develop a Linux kernel driver without release the source, you just need to develop a Windows driver and release it for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This compatibility layer should be very hard to develop, but at least it is not impossible for some specific type of driver if the Windows driver source is available, especially for the drivers whose developer intend to let the driver work with the compatibility layer and develop and test it in that way (but it can't use any specific API in the compatibility layer for sure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21723" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T09:37:56.140" Title="Does GPL apply to proprietary software that is linked in through a compatibility layer" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11171" CreationDate="2021-01-19T01:14:24.940" Score="-2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow up of my existing question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11132/does-gpl-apply-to-proprietary-software-that-is-linked-in-through-a-compatibility&quot;&gt;Does GPL apply to proprietary software that is linked in through a compatibility layer&lt;/a&gt;, but has a new major focus (i.e. the shadow Linux).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a Linux-like kernel (i.e. &amp;quot;shadow Linux&amp;quot;) is developed from scratch, which use a very similar kernel data structure and intra-kernel APIs as Linux kernel. But this new kernel is released under permissive open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then driver (or kernel modules) developed for shadow Linux don't need to release their sources. But considering the similarity of the kernel of Linux and shadow Linux, it is very straightforward to develop a compatibility layer in the Linux kernel that can let Linux to use proprietary driver binaries for shadow Linux directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now if you want to develop a driver for Linux without releasing your code, you just need to develop a driver for the shadow Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible (not considering the difficulties of the development of the shadow Linux)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The shadow Linux can't replace Linux which take too much effort to develop. To simplify the development of the shadow Linux, it doesn't include anything that is not needed to develop a kernel module/driver, and it contains a lot of bugs and performance issues and is not a production level kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) To prevent any copyright issues about Linux, althought the shadow Linux kernel's data and API structure is very similar to Linux, they are not the same, e.g. not the same name and even structurally redesigned but still allow a compatibility layer to be developed with ease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21723" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T21:58:36.140" Title="GPL and &quot;shadow Linux&quot;" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11136" CreationDate="2021-01-19T06:23:04.390" Score="0" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to license my website and it's source code under creative commons while preventing commercial use but allowing other use cases such as non-commercial use and making sure than anyone can contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21725" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T07:32:45.693" Title="Can I license my commercial app and web app's source code under Creative Commons?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11131" CreationDate="2021-01-19T07:58:06.283" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Codes of conduct aren't just about the relationship and interactions between the community members and the maintainer(s), but about the interactions between all community members - e.g., what language is or isn't appropriate when posting to a mailing list (if you have one), what are and aren't appropriate comments on a PR (and remember - non-maintainers can and should review PRs), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IMHO, even given the limited resources you have, having a code of conduct makes sense. At the very least, it indicates to the community that you have a standard of behavior you hold yourself (and everyone else) to, and are willing to take feedback and modify your behavior when you fail to uphold it. It's not perfect, but it's still better than not having any CoC at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T07:58:06.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11134" CreationDate="2021-01-19T10:01:54.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory you can, and some projects use a CC-NC license for that reason.&#xA;But it's not a very good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the CC-NC license is NOT Open Source. While it provides some user freedoms, it does not provide essential software freedoms like the ability to use the software for any purpose. I understand that freedom is explicitly not your goal, but it's important to understand that a project with such a license is largely outside of the Open Source ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more important issue is that Creative Commons licenses are about creative works in general, but have no provisions for the special needs of software. In particular, CC does not distinguish between a software and its source code. If you publish your source code, someone else can use it for any non-commercial purpose and merely has to attribute you. They don't have to release their versions under the same license, and they don't have to publish their modified source code at all. The reciprocal variant CC-BY-NC-SA fixes the first part of this, but still doesn't require that source code of modified versions is published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the question of license reciprocality. When someone contributes to a project under some license, the general expectation is that the inbound license equals the outbound license: the project contributors received a license from the project that allows them to perform modifications, and they return their modifications under the same license. Here, the project would receive CC-BY-NC licensed contributions by default. In general, the project contributor would be copyright holder for their contributions. If you use the contributions, you are also bound by the license, including the NonCommercial terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid this, project maintainers that want to retain full control over the project rights will generally require contributors to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Depending on the exact terms of this agreement, the project maintainer wouldn't be bound by the project's license. Templates for a reasonable CLA can be found at harmonyagreements.org. However, the use of CLAs implies more bureaucracy than a normal open source project. It has to be clear who receives the license in the CLA. An individual, who may die? Or perhaps a corporation?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It's also necessary to get contributors to sign in a legally meaningful way. Is that a checkbox on a website? Or do they need to mail physical documents? Not insurmountable, but the details will depend on your jurisdiction, and that means all of this is more of a question for lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1: Software projects projects are not legal entities and cannot receive any rights. For open or source-available projects driven by a company, that company would want to receive the rights. Larger, more established community projects often found a non-profit foundation to manage these legal matters – also good for company-started projects that want to demonstrate their independence. Smaller open source projects with such needs might instead apply to an umbrella foundation like Apache or Software Freedom Conservancy. But they are picky about the projects they support.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using non-open-source licenses and CLAs also makes it less likely to receive contributions at all. Unless your project is really awesome, why should someone spend effort on your project, when there are other projects with less restrictions? Why should someone give you more rights through a CLA than they would get themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine to use CC-NC if you understand the effects of doing this, but it's usually not a brilliant idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T10:01:54.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11131" CreationDate="2021-01-19T10:04:21.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just picking up on one bit not covered in Mureinik's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people are most likely going to have an issue with me, and I am also the one that the issue should be reported to I do not think the code of conduct would be very effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One suggestion I would have here would be for you to find a trusted friend who could act as a at least somewhat impartial mediator in these cases, something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think that LarsW has not appropriately handled any CoC issues, please contact M.Y. Friend &amp;lt;my.friend@example.com&amp;gt; who will examine the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason behind this being one of your friends is that it has to be someone who you both respect their views and is also able to be honest with you in situations when you have done it wrong, even if that does somewhat compromise their impartiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T10:04:21.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11131" CreationDate="2021-01-19T23:10:08.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; a code of conduct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub suggests you add one, but this isn't a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_conduct&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A code of conduct can be an important part in establishing an inclusive culture, but it is not a comprehensive solution on its own. &lt;strong&gt;An ethical culture is created by the organization's leaders who manifest their ethics in their attitudes and behavior.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How people actually interact in your project is more important than whether it has a code of conduct. If you don't have an issue with conduct in your project, which is what seems to be the case, you don't need to expend effort to put in place a formal structure to deal with situations that are likely to never arise at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be more productive to put your energy toward building the library/product itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18078" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T23:10:08.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11141" CreationDate="2021-01-20T09:54:33.750" Score="1" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source github Library that i need to use for work, however there is no LICENSE file in the repository. The library itself is a derivative work (porting to another language) of a library with MIT license. In this scenario, can I used the library under the terms of MIT license or is it not allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21735" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T11:14:50.100" Title="What is the license for derivative work of a project in MIT with no license file" Tags="|licensing|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-01-22T22:14:40.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11140" CreationDate="2021-01-20T11:14:50.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Irrespective of what something was derived from: no license = no license, thus nothing beyond normal copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might come to a different conclusion for a derivative of something licensed under a strong copyleft (like GPL) which requires that derivatives grant the same rights as the original wrt distribution of sources and binaries. Yet even then it's legally grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the same cannot be said and assumed for projects derived from a project with a weak copy-left license like MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such everything which was said in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;this question and its answer&lt;/a&gt; applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T11:14:50.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11147" CreationDate="2021-01-20T16:55:10.937" Score="3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first question in this forum so please accept my apology if I did not comply with the expected rules. I am starting as a developper and I am interested in using the code proposed by Tim Hall in VBA-JSON v2.3.1 that I found at &amp;quot;https://github.com/VBA-tools/VBA-JSON&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went through the MIT Licence information and that seems to be fine even if I package this code in a product that I later sell. However, when I look at the notice in the code I found that there is another licence in it (Based originally on vba-json (with extensive changes)) and after reading (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt;) it seems all fine; however there is no mention of the terms &amp;quot;All right reserved&amp;quot;. But in the code of the &amp;quot;.bas&amp;quot; file before the notice from the BSD-3-Clause there is this mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2013, Ryo Yokoyama  All rights reserved.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, what does &amp;quot;All rights reserved&amp;quot; means? Do I have the right to include this library into another product, and sell it, if I respect the clause of the BSD 3 Clause or do I need I need to get an express authorization from Ryo Yokoyama?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read several articles from this forum discussing the issue around the term &amp;quot;All right reserved&amp;quot; but I am still confused.  Thanks in advance for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21739" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T16:14:06.010" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T19:27:40.217" Title="VBA-JSON v2.3.1 -&gt; Licencing question -&gt; meaning of “All rights reserved”" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11132" CreationDate="2021-01-21T09:37:56.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GPL apply to proprietary software that is linked in through a compatibility layer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the GPL also puts requirements on transitive dependencies. In particular the requirement that the source code must be available under a GPL-compatible open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you were to create a compatibility layer to load (closed-source) Windows device drivers into Linux, the result of that combination can only be distributed under the GPL license and as you don't have the rights to do so with the Windows device driver, you don't have permission to distribute the combination at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first sight, you might say &amp;quot;well, ok. The driver isn't distributed with a Linux distribution anyway and just needs to be installed by the user.&amp;quot; But take into consideration that selling/giving a computer containing that combination is also a for of distribution that invokes the GPL requirements. Thus, a computer manufacturer/seller can't pre-install those Windows drivers on a Linux system and the (possibly non-technical) end-user has to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all just considering the licensing aspects. I won't even start on the technical aspects or the social ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T09:37:56.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-21T14:02:32.227" Score="-4" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was finally (after like a year) a new minor version of VLC released. Neither the program itself, nor the website, says one single word about what changes have been made. I've spent like an hour now browsing their site and there is just nothing. Nothing. Look: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.videolan.org/vlc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.videolan.org/vlc/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can there not be a changelog? Is this even an open source project at all? I keep hearing praise about this program, yet it's the most buggy and poor media player I've ever used and its website doesn't even have a changelog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21749" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T15:22:50.460" Title="Where is the VLC changelog?" Tags="|software|website|software-development|floss|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-01-22T09:19:24.333" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11145" CreationDate="2021-01-21T15:22:50.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;VLC is a bit more complicated than most pieces of free software.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.videolan.org/Git#Getting_VLC_or_x264_source_code_via_Git&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Their wiki&lt;/a&gt; describes how you can use &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; to download a copy of the entire source tree, at which point the changelog can be had with &lt;code&gt;git log&lt;/code&gt; (I've tried it, and it works).  No doubt if you're more experienced with &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; than I am (and nearly &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; is more experienced with it than I) you can get a great deal more information about what was changed, when, by whom, and (I suspect) why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the downloaded directory, in addition to the source, I get a COPYING file, which is GPLv2, so yes, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; free software.  I'm sorry it's not packaged as you were expecting, but everything you've asked for &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T15:22:50.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11142" CreationDate="2021-01-21T16:10:51.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As apsillers has pointed out, we already have a lengthy discussion of the history and function of the &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; label over in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.  However, you say you've read that, and remain unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect (as I see it) of saying &lt;code&gt;(c) Fred Bloggs 2021 All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; in a piece of code which is accompanied by (say) an MIT licence declaration is to comprehensively muddy the waters.  It is much like giving someone a piece of cake with a leaflet that explains how the cake is a gift for them to use as they'd wish, whilst simultaneously saying &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;this is my cake, you must not do anything with it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  You would be confused in such a scenario, I guess - and that's probably why you're confused here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in practice you're safe to use this code.  Firstly, the github code is already a derivative of the original seven-year-old google code; if the original author (Ryo Yokoyama) was going to get annoyed about it, (s)he would probably already have done so.  Secondly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/vba-json/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original google code&lt;/a&gt; was clearly published under 3BSD, so if the original author decided to kick up a fuss, you would have an excellent defence based on the clear licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to be absolutely super-duper 100% sure, then yes, you will need to get in touch with Ryo Yokoyama and ask him/her for permission to remove the &lt;code&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/code&gt; from his/her code.  Or find some other, less-ambiguously-licensed code to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T16:10:51.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11166" CreationDate="2021-01-22T15:00:29.107" Score="1" ViewCount="1425" Body="&lt;p&gt;MPL v2, GPL v3 and other licenses alike require giving users access to source code. Having read both licenses, I did not come across specific examples of how to disclose source code, so my question is targeted at specific cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Desktop applications does access have to be provided through the user interface (GUI), or can it just be through program files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mobile apps - is listing the names of libraries in-use sufficient? I have seen apps do this with MPL v2 licensed libraries without providing hyperlinks to the source; are users expected to look up the names?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code hosted on a CDN - how do end users know what the hosted content is licensed under in the first place? Does the same license automatically apply to the hosting provider (since the code was 'distributed' to them first)? And if it does, is the hosting provider solely responsible for releasing source code to the end user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code embedded in hardware - in hardware such as game consoles, screen readers and airplane entertainment systems where 'tinkering' is limited, how would GPL'd code be given to the user, if at all? In the case of assistive technology, does accessibility have to be taken into consideration?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Experience or knowledge in any one of the cases would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14456" LastEditorUserId="14456" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T14:53:47.533" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T15:12:21.523" Title="What counts as disclosing source for software licenses?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyleft|source-code|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11177" CreationDate="2021-01-22T18:40:24.477" Score="0" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to build a commercial website in Angular 5. Can I do so without needing to pay anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the node.js license consists of a lot of other components and each of them has their own set of paragraphs. Do I need to list any licenses on my website to give credit to the developers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to go through the license agreements but did not get very far before I started to not understand most of the jargon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21761" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T13:28:23.947" Title="Using Angular and Node.js to build a commercial website" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11156" CreationDate="2021-01-22T22:00:01.743" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently making a small script that you use in the browser to get the current user's IP address (I use it with a WebRTC chat), and as I noticed that all popular packages that get an IP address through WebRTC are outdated and no longer work, wanted to Open Source the module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as packages that get a user's public &lt;strong&gt;AND&lt;/strong&gt; private aren't necessarily used for Real Time Communications (used mostly in malicious scripts that log the users IP without it showing in the network tab in the console, but I want to help the small group of people needing this in a video chat or text chat), so I want my package to be completely bulletproof. However, I also want it to be licensed under the MIT license, so what should I do to make it legally &amp;quot;bulletproof&amp;quot; (impossible for anyone to sue me for any reason or do anything bad like that)? Also, is there any caveats around open sourcing something that could potentially used maliciously? I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/diafygi/webrtc-ips&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/vitalets/webrtc-ips&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; different GitHub repositories that seem like they don't do anything other than a license, should I just do the same? Could someone do something bad to me if I only provide a license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21763" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T09:30:59.040" Title="What should I do to make my open source project legally sound?" Tags="|github|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2021-01-23T10:35:31.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. I copyrighted my work before releasing it under, I think, the GPL. Not sure you can guarantee nobody will sue, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#automatic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright office lists various advantages of copyrighting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21754" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T10:35:31.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-23T17:23:00.267" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have downloaded a project from CodeProject, which is bound by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CPOL&lt;/a&gt;. I've modified some its files to fix bugs, as well as adding files of my own for other features. I am planning to release my modifications under the MIT license. However, is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to section 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) &amp;quot;Derivative Work&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work or upon the Work and other pre-existing works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) &amp;quot;Executable Files&amp;quot; refer to the executables, binary files, configuration and any required data files included in the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;f) &amp;quot;Source Code&amp;quot; refers to the collection of source code and configuration files used to create the Executable Files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;h) &amp;quot;Work&amp;quot; refers to the collection of files distributed by the Publisher, including the Source Code, Executable Files, binaries, data files, documentation, whitepapers and the Articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to section 5b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may distribute the Executable Files and Source Code only under the terms of this License, and You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy of the Executable Files or Source Code You distribute and ensure that anyone receiving such Executable Files and Source Code agrees that the terms of this License apply to such Executable Files and/or Source Code. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that alter or restrict the terms of this License or the recipients' exercise of the rights granted hereunder. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties. You may not distribute the Executable Files or Source Code with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the &amp;quot;Derivative Work&amp;quot; under a different license? And if yes, can I only license the files I modified or can I license the project as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does my new project have to be licensed under the CPOL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am modifying the project itself, and not linking it into another program, unlike in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1923/can-i-use-codeproject-code-in-a-gpl-project&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I've found a relevant question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/335296/cpol-derivative-code-translation-and-mit-licensing&quot;&gt;Software Engineering Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, however the answer &amp;quot;Contact the author or review the license with a lawyer&amp;quot; is not possible, as the author have abandoned this project for more than a decade (there have been prior questions about the license unanswered).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21771" LastEditorUserId="21771" LastEditDate="2021-01-24T03:49:10.160" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T07:19:01.850" Title="CPOL derivative works limitations" Tags="|mit|cpol|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-23T18:30:41.373" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;if I build something under GPL/AGPL license, am I obligated to share that code if I have users using this service event when I am the owner of the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21773" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T18:30:41.373" Title="Do I need to share source code with GPL/AGPL if I am the owner?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-01-26T12:02:33.363" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9210" CreationDate="2021-01-23T19:56:06.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between a font software and a typeface. A typeface is the design of a font, and a font software is the digital realization of that design, usually in the form of a ttf/otf file. Also note that &amp;quot;Font Software&amp;quot; is a defined term in the OFL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to question two, there may be a difference depending on whether you are distributing a vector or a bitmap format. In particular, the vector format is probably considered a derivative work of the font software, and a bitmap format is probably not. OFL-FAQ 1.1.1 would support the idea that the requirement to distribute the license along side the font does not apply to artwork created using an OFL font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T19:56:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11176" CreationDate="2021-01-23T21:27:58.083" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;when using AVR or ARM toolchains for Atmel microcontrollers, is using GCC macros such as &lt;code&gt;__AVR_...__&lt;/code&gt; or linker variables making my code GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know GCC is covered by &amp;quot;GPL 3.0&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;GCC Runtime Library Exception&amp;quot; but I am not sure if this exception covers the use of small macros like above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the linker is ld from binutils, which is covered by &amp;quot;GPL 3.0&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21622" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T13:16:11.713" Title="Does the use of GCC small macros and linker variables make my work GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|license|gcc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11150" CreationDate="2021-01-24T09:30:59.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want it to be licensed under the MIT license, so what should I do to make it legally &amp;quot;bulletproof&amp;quot; (impossible for anyone to sue me for any reason or do anything bad like that)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence, like most free licences, includes a substantial disclaimer.  To the extent that local law permits you to disclaim responsibility, the use of any major free licence accomplishes this.  There are usually certain kinds of responsibility that can't be disclaimed, but I'm not aware of any successful actions against free software authors for faults in their software (that said IANAL/IANYL, and I'd be very pleased to hear of any documented examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, [are] there any caveats around open sourcing something that could potentially [be] used maliciously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not AFAIK specifically about open-sourcing it, no, but the act of creation can get you into trouble.  For example, creating tools for what the press calls &amp;quot;hacking&amp;quot; can be an offence.  In my jurisdiction (England and Wales), the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (as modified by the Police and Justice Act 2006) provides that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (CMA 1990 s3a(1)) where s1 offences include causing &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; when &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the access he intends to secure ... is unauthorised&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-sourcing your tools doesn't make this any less an offence - and arguably makes it considerably easier to detect and prove.  There is, however, a requirement for &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; to be shown; I don't see that it would be enough to argue that you should have been aware that your tool could be used maliciously.  Some of those offenders presumably used &lt;code&gt;bash&lt;/code&gt; in the commission of their offences, and I don't see any warrants being sworn out against &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programmer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian Fox&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T09:30:59.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11157" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T12:40:11.737" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a fully running application in Spring Boot that I like to share with the community of open source, so individuals can contribute to it and companies can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm accustomed to open-source dependencies, where I go to a central repository (E.g. Maven Repository) get a certain version of a certain jar and add it as a dependency to my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I like to contribute is a whole working application. How will it be distributed? The same way? A runnable JAR that whoever wants to use will download and run?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the process of turning a certain application version from a github tag into a jar in a repository (E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21779" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T22:34:12.847" Title="How to donate a complete working project to the open source comunity?" Tags="|github|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11158" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T17:37:39.947" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;as in the title - is it allowed to modify the &amp;quot;Java.exe&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;javaw.exe&amp;quot; files? Like with Resource Hacker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to change the executable icon but I am not sure if it is legit. I mean it is just some changes in the metadata - not the Java Code/functionality itself. That's why I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason is because of the default java icon I can't get rid of in the Task Manager on Windows devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use AdoptOpenJDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not answerable easily at least some tips would be nice or anything I can look at except the licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21781" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T01:09:23.277" Title="Is it allowed to modify the java.exe file" Tags="|license|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11157" CreationDate="2021-01-24T22:34:12.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your questions are a bit fuzzy in some points but I'll try my best to clarify all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off all your title question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to donate a complete working project to the open source comunity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most jurisdictions, donating is considered as a form of gift for a specific purpose. For example you can donate books to a local charity or donate money to a non-profit organization. I think what you mean is to share your application, your code and your effort with the community, to help people with a specific problem, to gain intrerest in your project and to find fellow developers to work on your project together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How you do that is ABSOLUTELY your choice! It's your code, so you are the copyright holder. As long as distributing your code does not violate the law, you are free to share it with anyone you like. It only gets complicated with other peoples code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which leads to the next question: Dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm accustomed to open-source dependencies, where I go to a central repository (E.g. Maven Repository) get a certain version of a certain jar and add it as a dependency to my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't exactly ask it, but I'd like to say something about the deps as well. You say you use maven to add them to your project. This is fine as long as you comply the licence conditions of all 3rd-party code you use. This means that you have to look at the libraries you use and check if you are actually allowed to use them in the way you do and if you have to give attribution or if there is a copyleft that has to be met. But this depends heavily on the licenses and your usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next is distribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How will it be distributed? The same way? A runnable JAR that whoever wants to use will download and run?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maven is often not a very good way to distribute applications. I'd recommend using a open source host like github, gitlab, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of them allow very simple release deployment using releases, which may also contain prebuilt jars or installers. But main deployment artifact in open source is the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And your last question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the process of turning a certain application version from a github tag into a jar in a repository (E.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very tech-specific question and is not open source related. However, it can also not be answered without further knowledge of your code and you goal. In general, you use the java compiler and utils, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/15/docs/specs/man/jar.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my answers can help you with your project! Cheers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T22:34:12.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-25T00:42:59.807" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to build an Android app under some open source license but I want to use this same app as a basis for a proprietary software in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I will have two softwares:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My Software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My Software Pro&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My Software&amp;quot; will have an open source license and will be made free to download in Google Play store and maybe will have adds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My Software Pro&amp;quot; will be the same app as &amp;quot;My Software&amp;quot; but with added features and no adds and it will not be open source and will be a paid app on Google Play store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I really want to know is which of the common open source license will better fit in this model to be used as &amp;quot;My Software&amp;quot; license? And which of the license will allow me to do this? I know I can do this with Apache License v2 but can I do this with LGPL v3? What are the pros and cons of choosing one over the other for this app delivery model? Are there better open source licenses out there for using with this model of software distribution and commercialization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T13:59:33.000" Title="Free App and non free Pro app source code licensing model" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|distribution|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11158" CreationDate="2021-01-25T01:09:23.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is legal since the AdoptOpenJDK jdk is open source. You don't even need to hack it, you can build it from it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-jdk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To build is easy. Just follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk-jdk/blob/master/doc/building.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;instructions&lt;/a&gt;, but you will have to dig with the sources a little to find where to change the icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T01:09:23.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10761" CreationDate="2021-01-25T01:49:21.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache 2 is a permissive license and you're just using OpenCV as a library so i think the answer is yes, you can sale an app that uses OpenCV as a library and your app don't even have to be released under Apache 2 license. In fact you could use a comercial license for your app if you want it to.&#xA;But it is good to take a look at the licenses of the OpenCV third party dependencies  too to see if all then are as permissive as Apache 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be good to consult a lawyer if you want to be really sure about it as I'm not a specialist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T01:49:21.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11161" CreationDate="2021-01-25T13:59:33.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder to &amp;quot;My Software&amp;quot;, then any license allows you to do as you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What any open-source license also allows is that anyone can take your open-source version, remove the adds and then publish the modified version again. If that is not acceptable, then you should not use an open-source license and the rest of the answer becomes moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you start accepting contributions from others, then the differences in licensing terms between the various licenses start to play a role and you need to start paying attention to the license under which your contributors provide their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of situations to consider then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have set-up a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that every contributor must sign and which gives you the explicit right to use the contribution in your Pro version under the closed-source license of the Pro version. This option gives you a lot of rights, but it is also a barrier for potential contributors to start contributing and there can be a substantial amount of legal red-tape involved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You use a permissive open-source license (like the Apache 2.0 license) without using a CLA. These licenses allow you to use the contributions in your Pro version without having to make the source code of the Pro version public, as long as you follow some rules that are spelled out in the license. That is mostly regarding attribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You use a copyleft open-source license (like the (A|L)GPL) without using a CLA. In this case, you cannot use the contributions in your Pro version, unless you make the Pro version also open-source under the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T13:59:33.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11148" CreationDate="2021-01-25T15:12:21.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Desktop applications does access have to be provided through the user interface (GUI), or can it just be through program files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that the source code can be obtained from within the application or even that it gets installed on the end-user's system together with the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application is typically downloaded from a website, then it is already enough to put a download link for the source code next to the download link for the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other means include providing a download link for the source code in a reasonable location in a dialog/screen of the application or to provide a means to contact you to ask for the source code and ship is on a physical medium (like a CD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mobile apps - is listing the names of libraries in-use sufficient? I have seen apps do this with MPL v2 licensed libraries without providing hyperlinks to the source; are users expected to look up the names?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, just mentioning the names of the libraries is probably not sufficient to cover the requirements from the license. If the library's name is accompanied by a version number, the license and a link to the repository that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code hosted on a CDN - how do end users know what the hosted content is licensed under in the first place? Does the same license automatically apply to the hosting provider (since the code was 'distributed' to them first)? And if it does, is the hosting provider solely responsible for releasing source code to the end user?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the hosting provider just provides some internet-accessible space without controlling what the space is used for, then that provider is not a recipient of the code (it is not distributed to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person/organization who placed the code there is fully responsible for compliance to the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code embedded in hardware - in hardware such as game consoles, screen readers and airplane entertainment systems where 'tinkering' is limited, how would GPL'd code be given to the user, if at all? In the case of assistive technology, does accessibility have to be taken into consideration?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With embedded code, it depends a bit on what kind of user-interface the device offers. If the user-interface is capable of showing larger amounts of information, the device can show the licensing information and where/how to obtain source code on its user-interface. If that is not possible or considered undesirable by the manufacturer, then the information should be provided in the documentation that accompanies the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T15:12:21.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11170" CreationDate="2021-01-25T19:33:35.840" Score="13" ViewCount="3325" Body="&lt;p&gt;My open source project is released under Apache2 License. I want people to use the library under Apache2 however I don't want people to copy the ideas/algorithms when they're building products similar to my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I add a statement in README file detailing out the restriction then will it be okay? Does having a statement in README file is legally enforceable if needs arise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading through all the great answers I agree it is a terrible idea for many reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21790" LastEditorUserId="21790" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T19:21:39.800" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T16:06:31.023" Title="Restricting the open source by adding a statement in README" Tags="|restrictions|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11168" CreationDate="2021-01-25T20:07:46.207" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't want people to copy your ideas and algorithms you should not use an open source licence at all. Putting some kind of statement in your README would just add contradiction to your files. Apache 2 license grants the permissions you don't want to grant, using it and saying the opposite in another place would just be confusing and contradictory. If you don't want people to copy the ideas and algorithms of your library, no open source license will fit your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T20:07:46.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11168" CreationDate="2021-01-25T21:08:58.380" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're technically allowed to do this, but at that point your project is no longer Apache-licensed. You've created a new set of licensing terms, which are no longer open source. It would be in your interest to make this distinction clear, as to avoid confusion by people who look at your project. In particular, it would be confusing to have a LICENSE file with the Apache terms – put your custom license there instead, possibly with the Apache license as an appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that ideas are not copyright-protected. Certain methods can be patented, but in general the only available protection for general ideas or methods is a &lt;em&gt;trade secret&lt;/em&gt;. Which requires that you keep it secret. Which is incompatible with making the library's source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should therefore re-examine your reasons for publishing this code, and for considering an open-source-ish license. There are good reasons for going open source, but it's also perfectly legitimate if your needs are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T21:08:58.380" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11133" CreationDate="2021-01-25T21:58:36.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I interpret the question your plan is that you have your own API &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; ABI (&amp;quot;shadow linux&amp;quot;) with a permissive license. The ABI is then implemented in linux which may be used to insmod kernel modules compiled for &amp;quot;shadow linux&amp;quot;. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right with that, at least in theory. There are no actual violations of the terms, because no GPL code is used in the module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are examples of this being done already, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NDISWrapper&lt;/a&gt;. It implements a compatibility layer for proprietary windows drivers in linux. Totally legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also implement a virtual machine and run proprietary byte code in kernel space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT: Why even bother? It is already common practice to write proprietary kernel modules. It is illegal, yes. There are efforts to prevent this, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/287056/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. But that doesn't seem to stop companies from using binary blobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding holes in licenses is not that hard. There will always be possibilities to exploit copylefted code, but that doesn't mean you should do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T21:58:36.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11173" CreationDate="2021-01-26T04:07:02.140" Score="20" ViewCount="24973" Body="&lt;p&gt;I usually work with public open source repos and I am in the habit of adding a license.md file to such repos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am currently working on a private repo and wondered whether a license.md file is recommended or whether its pointless given that the repo is private. If a license file is recommended please could you explain why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any input gratefully received. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note this question strictly relates to private repos not public ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21802" LastEditorUserId="21802" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T14:10:10.813" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T18:53:58.930" Title="Is a license recommended for a private repository or is it pointless?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11172" CreationDate="2021-01-26T06:35:22.493" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are 100% certain that you will never publish your code, then you will also never need to add a license. But that kind of software is not called open source ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if chances are that you will eventually gain the confidence to disclose your project you should add it as early as possible to have it in your whole git history. You always publish your whole git history and if someone decides to check out older revisions, they might be confronted with copyrighted code. You could also rebase a licence into the whole repo, but why not do it right at the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T06:35:22.493" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11152" CreationDate="2021-01-26T07:05:11.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is rather hard to answer since there are few to no precedents about the CPOL. This is often the case for less common licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The straightforward answer would be &amp;quot;No, you cannot&amp;quot;. Simply because of the statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not sublicense the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no lawyer. There might be another ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still publish &lt;strong&gt;additional&lt;/strong&gt; code with a different license (that is non-derivative work). But not &lt;strong&gt;modificated&lt;/strong&gt; existing code that contains original code. You could also licenseThis is mostly useless, because nobody will be able to use code modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to contact the author and explain your concerns. They might even like your idea of giving the project a second life and support you by granting you a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastEditorUserId="18005" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T07:19:01.850" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T07:19:01.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9610" CreationDate="2021-01-26T12:56:59.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd assume that Microsoft simply does have an &amp;quot;explicit written authorization from the company&amp;quot;. As long as you don't share the library, you're fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With one exception. You just shared a part of the library. If I were you, I'd not actually worry about it, but technically you disclosed a part of the file publicly...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can probably use the header under the terms of the applying Microsoft EULA, but you should be aware that it is most certainly &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; open source compatible, so your problem might have a much larger scope than you might think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2219/can-i-use-a-proprietary-library-in-my-gpld-program&quot;&gt;this Question&lt;/a&gt;, which is about using proprietary libraries in GPL-code, although I don't know what license you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastEditorUserId="18005" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T20:02:27.297" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T20:02:27.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11155" CreationDate="2021-01-26T13:16:11.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, GCC macros and linker variables are covered by the GCC Runtime Library Exception, see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] in this way, the header files and runtime libraries covered by this Exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no clues that the built-in libraries should not be part of the exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T13:16:11.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11149" CreationDate="2021-01-26T13:28:23.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can use it without paying anyone. Angular is published under the terms of the MIT license, which contains the phrase &amp;quot;free of charge&amp;quot;. This holds for almost everything you could do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for further details on the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T13:28:23.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11168" CreationDate="2021-01-26T16:53:40.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, ideas and algorithms are protected by patents, not copyright (at least that's what I was taught in that class we had as CS majors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure, but my gut feeling is that the FOSS community takes a dim view of software patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure how other FOSS licenses interact with patents, but Apache 2 license &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; contains wording which grants the user of the software a license to use your patents as used in the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17946" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T16:53:40.467" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11168" CreationDate="2021-01-26T21:15:22.240" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer,as well as everything else, its not likely to be enforceable, simply because you didn't present it as part of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at your idea, and start from basics, the license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your software will have some license attached. You've suggested Apache2. So somewhere there will be a file that makes clear, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;this following text below, is the license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, or else, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;in this named file is the license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The user has to know that that's the license. As an extreme example if your source code is 6000.files and contains a file called &amp;quot;/tmp/cache/trash/oldcode.php&amp;quot; that actually contains unannounced and without header, the license text, and nothing points to it as being such, probably no court will agree its binding on a user, because that's just not reasonable to assume. (They might instead stipulate that this means no license was granted, but the point is, the license must clearly be identifiable as such, by a reasonable user, to be enforceable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to provide a file or document that's clearly and obviously &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; license. That could be a top level file or directory called &amp;quot;LICENSE&amp;quot;, or a config file item that you have to change to &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; to confirm you read a specific named file, for it to run, or a first-run UI. I've seem all 3 of those, used.  But the user has to agree to something specific, in a legally unambiguous definite way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that file is the Apache2 license terms, it won't include your clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it includes your clause, then its a custom license not an Apache2 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you try to stuff your custom terms in a README file, firstly there's no legal obligation or reason a conscientious user would have had to read and agree that file.  So its not legally binding.  Secondly the license is this other file over here - it says so! - so clearly that README whatever it says, and whatever anything else.says, it isn't the license agreement or any part of it, because the license is this text here, which doesn't state that other text is to be included. (And if it did, then once again it wouldn't be the Apache2 license text..)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It fails whatever you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Your 2nd legal problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2nd legal problem is that you are trying to DIY a legal text. That means that aside from any issue of user reluctance about a modified/custom license, and aside from stuffing text in some other file and trying to claim &amp;quot;its part of the license anyway&amp;quot;, you have a second problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to be able to define, in terms adequate for a court to take note, exactly what may and may not be done with your code. Exactly how the restrictions will.work, to draw a precise line what makes it valid or invalid use, no ambiguity or inadvertent errors in a legal sense that could make it unenforceable. I honestly would say, don't even think of it.  Even the simplest term is not obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:  Say you just wanted to say &amp;quot;not be used in any company with over 10 employees&amp;quot;.  Simple, right? How can that simple a clause have a loophole? But what about a 1000 staff company with a separate group company of 9 that would use it on behalf of them all? What if they have 8 staff but outsource all the rest to a contractor with 500 staff on their project? Just making the point, legal text stuff is NOT for amateurs.  Even seeming simple terms are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;And finally your 3rd legal problem&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated, you can't copyright/license a pure idea anyway. Only a specific implementation of it (your own code).  Meaning you can't copyright the idea of a database, an audio editor or a file archiver, the idea of a bubble sort, or a technique for identifying faces in an image. You cant stop someone else seeing the concept and figuring out their own way to do it, on their own clock, to compete with yours. You can only copyright Postgresql, Sony Vegas, or gzip, if you created those, or &lt;em&gt;your specific code&lt;/em&gt; for a bubble sort or face ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastEditorUserId="9696" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T16:06:31.023" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T16:06:31.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11186" CreationDate="2021-01-27T11:00:18.000" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a little Quiz App. To get questions I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://opentdb.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Trivia DB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All data provided by the API is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read a little bit about the license but I'm not sure if my app is an adaption of the work and therefor I have to publish it under CC-BY-SA 4 as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app queries a question from the database, shows it to the user, and lets him chose an answer. It doesn't modify the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Follow up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9366/using-modified-cc-by-sa-4-0-images-in-app&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to provide a download link for your modified emojis. For license compliance, it is enough that you don't forbid further modification if someone has scraped your modified emoji from your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean if I have to make the app CC-BY-SA, I don't need to publish the source, and if so, how do I mark the app as CC-BY-SA in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:14:48.170" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:14:48.170" Title="Do I have to open source my app if I use unmodified API data licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|license|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-27T13:09:02.673" Score="2" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;My program is commercial, but the AGPL library would be a back end solution; only the output from that web service is being used.  I was told that since I am not modifying the library I do not need to purchase a commercial licence, which makes sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, what if my program is being used on hardware sold to my customers (with the back end solution as mentioned above) running on that network and not through my servers, does that mean I am &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; the AGPL software and hence require a commercial license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help regarding the interpretation of usage of software licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;. The webservice is free (although my program is proprietary and commercial) but I do not wish to release my source code.  Does that mean I need a commercial licence for the AGPL software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21755" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T07:12:18.670" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T12:28:19.560" Title="Can I use a software published under AGPL as an unaltered webservice without either publishing my source code under AGPL or buying a licence?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-27T16:29:42.063" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a question for a long time on how to license my project. I would really appreciate your guidance to help me choosing the right licenses for my specific case. My main goal is to make available the source code for free use but also to prevent any commercial use or monetary gain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a detailed description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project is written in python and it uses some packages/frameworks with the following licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache License, Version 2.0, GNU General Public Licence (v2), and MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, what licenses should I obtain to (jointly with these last) make my code available for free usage and disallow any commercial use? If I ever want to sell my software to a private company, how should I proceed? Can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21826" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T22:09:32.760" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T22:09:32.760" Title="How to license my software which already includes other software licenses?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11183" CreationDate="2021-01-27T21:58:47.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Due to it's strong copyleft, it is not possible to use anything else but GPL. That is unless you eliminate the GPL dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL allows commercial use so you can not prevent that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However no licence you could ever choose will disable your right to sell the software later if you find a willing customer. It's still your copyright. Although some jurisdictions do allow selling the whole copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T21:58:47.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T02:20:28.923" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what license I should use for a programming tutorial on a website. It will have a mixture of text, media and code snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I want to allow others to copy/modify my tutorial only if they give attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would Creative Commons or MIT be suitable for my purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21833" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:34:10.547" Title="License for programming tutorial on website" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11181" CreationDate="2021-01-28T09:44:53.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments, if the data is part of the code the copyleft &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; apply. But that is rather a gray area because including the data would not necessarily imply a derivative work. Better ask the original author and/or a lawyer :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just pull the data in runtime, you are perfectly fine with any license otherwise possible. That's what CC is for!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that you will have to comply to the &amp;quot;BY&amp;quot; in both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T09:44:53.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T14:00:52.907" Score="-3" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does installing proprietary hardware drivers onto a Debian system disable my right to run/use it for any purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as an example, can Debian be used to prepare paid Linux courses if proprietary drivers are installed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21349" LastEditorUserId="21349" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T15:46:27.457" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T15:46:27.457" Title="If I install a proprietary hardware driver onto my Debian system, do I then lose the right to run it for any purpose?" Tags="|free-software-definition|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11190" CreationDate="2021-01-28T15:20:19.760" Score="2" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;within a project that involves distribution of software that will (on recipient side) then be flashed into a hardware component, i have to make the different libraries available under the same distribution package (.zip).&#xA;the package is composed of proprietary code, plus MIT, plus BSD, plus GPLv2 and the source files of these will be included inside the zip in separate subfolders together with the respective licenses. A make file will also be part of the package. Recipient will then have to compile the sources and flash into the hw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern is that having a GPL component inside the distribution package will contaminate the proprietary code turning it into GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would this be the case? or since they are distributed as separate components (although inside the same zip), the above will not happen and i only need to take care of complying with the respective license terms of each component?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4325" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T15:32:45.913" Title="Distribution of different oss libraries in the same zip file" Tags="|gpl-2|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11189" CreationDate="2021-01-28T15:32:45.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;addresses the issue&lt;/a&gt; of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, when it writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason why aggregation in a ZIP file should be any different from aggregation on a CD-ROM.  So no, unless there is some &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; reason why you should have to release your proprietary code under GPL (such as, for example, the proprietary code being derived (in copyright terms) from the GPL code) then the mere act of packaging the two of them together in a ZIP file doesn't suddenly create such a reason; at least not as I see it (though IANAL/IANYL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T15:32:45.913" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11199" CreationDate="2021-01-28T15:59:43.617" Score="2" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knows whether the current Coreference Resolution model on AllenNLP is commercially usable. All I know is that it is based on SpanBERT and SpanBERT itself has a CC-BY-NC license, but I am not sure whether this license is passed through to the trained model by AllenNLP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Model card can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://demo.allennlp.org/coreference-resolution/coreference-resolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Coreference Resolution is for non-commercial use, do you have recommendations for other Coreference Resolution models? I have tried Spacy's neuralcoref and it performed poorly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21837" LastEditorUserId="21837" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T08:16:16.220" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T14:18:13.177" Title="Using pretrained AllenNLP Coreference Resolution model commercially" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11188" CreationDate="2021-01-28T16:28:47.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will depend on the proprietary licence on the driver.  Most commercial software comes with certain restrictions on its operation and use; for example, Microsoft's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/product/ForallSoftware/MPSA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard terms&lt;/a&gt; provide that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Customer may not (and is not licensed to) use the Products to offer commercial hosting services to third parties&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had installed a proprietary driver that included a licence term that said, for example, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Customer may not use this Product in any part of an educational process&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then if the preparation of your (paid) Linux course used the hardware that used that driver, you might well be in violation of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a free software issue, except inasmuch as if you start installing random bits of proprietary software onto your hitherto-free system, you can start loading yourself up with all sorts of unpleasant licence terms.  Don't do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T16:28:47.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11195" CreationDate="2021-01-28T22:10:55.127" Score="0" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;For license on software, users who download the software must abide by the license, usually in something like a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file. I don't need to ask them to fax me a signed document or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For CLAs, I noticed that it's somewhat common for projects to require you to email/fax them a signed document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can I not just communicate that policy with the &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING.md&lt;/code&gt; by saying this?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By submitting contributions, you agree that you are only submitting contributions that you have authored and you agree to assign copyright of those contributions to [project owner] so they may adjust the license of the project in the future, if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9985" LastEditorUserId="9985" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T22:25:36.957" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T23:39:19.317" Title="Can a CLA be agreed to implicitly, like a license?" Tags="|copyright|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11194" CreationDate="2021-01-28T23:39:19.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;CLAs are contracts and have to comply with the contract laws in the relevant jurisdictions. Furthermore, contracts that license, transfer, or assign copyrights might have additional rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A contract generally requires a meeting of minds: that both parties intend to enter the contract. This can happen implicitly. But if one party later wants to rely on that contract (here: to prove that they actually hold the rights to do what they are doing), it would be great to have that agreement in writing. For example, if the project is run by a startup and the startup is acquired, the new owner will require a due diligence audit that typically requires a meticulous check of all IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to copyright, there is some broad international agreement about how copyright works, but massive differences in the details. For example, a contract like “you agree to assign copyright of those contributions to [project owner]” is not possible in many jurisdictions, especially some civil law jurisdictions where copyright is inalienable other than through expiry. Instead of a transfer or assignment of copyrights, there would have to be a license. But the license may have to be put in writing, and may require consideration in return for the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what if we exclude people from contributing if they can't enter the transfer agreement? Good idea, except that the project owner will want to make sure that any transfer they've gotten is in fact valid. If the contributor signs the agreement, that would be good evidence towards its validity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do open source projects not go through that effort for every contribution? There's a license involved anyway! Yes, but a LICENSE file is a much more obvious place for legally relevant material. In particular, it would not be possible to modify the software without receiving the open source license first, so we already know that any contributor must have accepted the license. And since open source licenses are generally symmetric (they do not advantage the project maintainer more than other contributors), the issue of consideration is less pressing (e.g. US case law recognizes that open source licenses have non-monetary consideration, and German copyright law exempts public gratis license from the mandatory compensation scheme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a copyright transfer or license agreement has two important aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the recipient must actually receive the necessary rights, ideally in a verifiable way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the contributor should document that they actually have the necessary rights to enter such a license or contract&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of these is for lawyers to sort out, though there are some CLA templates such as Harmony Agreements. To be effective and reliable legal instruments they are much more involved than the short paragraph you propose, and they require explicit acceptance by the contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other aspect is also relevant for projects that don't want extra rights for the project maintainer, but do want to ensure that all contributions have been made legally. Such projects might require contributors to sign a Developer Certificate of Origin, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux DCO&lt;/a&gt;. The level of bureaucracy depends on the risk appetite of the project, e.g. Linux just requires a special notice in Git commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T23:39:19.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11198" CreationDate="2021-01-29T08:22:29.470" Score="3" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall watching an interview with John Romero somewhere, or reading an article somewhere, a few years back in which it was clued that when ID Software made Doom there was a discussion if to make it open source or not so that gamers with adequate knowledge could mod and expand the game and thus keep the community growing and that eventually the developers agreed to make it &amp;quot;partially open source&amp;quot; or something of that sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Doom open source? Would the original license it had on its first release be considered FOSS by any standard today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21845" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T08:56:32.833" Title="Was Doom 1 (1993) open source?" Tags="|open-game-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11185" CreationDate="2021-01-29T08:30:34.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends on your required protection. If you really want to put an actual code license on the examples, you can of cause use the MIT license for that, although MIT does not require attribution as you require.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a tutorial is normally not primarily code, but rather a sum of images, text, code and maybe some personal experience and creativity. In my opinion the CC-BY-4.0 might be better suited for this application. Code examples should be sufficiently covered by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T08:30:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11196" CreationDate="2021-01-29T08:56:32.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Doom was initially published as closed source and unfree software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_source_code&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this fan-made wiki&lt;/a&gt;, the doom source code was initially published in 1997 under a proprietary license. This is long after the initial release and still had a non-free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They eventually decided to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/source/doomsrc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;revise the release&lt;/a&gt; and publish it as GPL, which definitely IS FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T08:56:32.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11191" CreationDate="2021-01-29T10:15:47.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have found a trained-state corpus suitable for use with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/SpanBERT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SpanBERT&lt;/a&gt; tool, and want to know if you can use the combination inside your corporation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect not.  SpanBERT is, as you say, distributed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, and the trained-state corpus has no licence declaration on it at all.  That means you have no rights to download a copy of the former for commercial purposes, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;no rights at all&lt;/a&gt; to use the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact definition of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;commercial purposes&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is strewn with thorny interpretational problems, but the discussion is (a) off-topic for this site, and (b) irrelevant anyway, because of the absence of &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; permission to use the latter.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T14:18:13.177" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T14:18:13.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11182" CreationDate="2021-01-29T12:28:19.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the AGPL code resides on a physical device that you are distributing to your customers, then that counts as conveyance under section 6 of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are then obliged to either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a copy of the source code for application containing the AGPL code along with the device (e.g. on a CD), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a written offer to send the sources or to make them downloadable. This offer must be valid for at least 3 years and as long as you provide support for the device.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple fact that your device contains (A)GPL code does not mean that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; code on the device needs to have its source published. It is entirely possible to also have proprietary applications running on the device. The normal criteria for determining if something is a derived work apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T12:28:19.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T19:37:19.507" Score="4" ViewCount="2017" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a Linux based OS for a VR headset that I'm developing. From what I understand, the Linux kernel uses the GPL-2 license which allows for commercial use but it also requires you to publish your source code. How is Tesla able to sell a physical product that runs on a Linux OS while also being able to keep their source code private and how can I do the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21858" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T07:18:20.830" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T07:18:20.830" Title="How do you sell a hardware product that uses the linux kernel?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|proprietary-code|closed-source|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T20:31:24.030" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one &amp;quot;document only&amp;quot; opensource project under MIT license.&#xA;So it is only text files under Markdown syntax with useful info for people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in language A (human language, not programming)&#xA;I want to make similar one, but for my native language (Ukrainian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Creative Commons share-alike (cc by-sa 4.0) is more suitable for such kind of projects, but worry could I then use some translated part of that another project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because in &amp;quot;common case&amp;quot; (not for MIT or any other opensource licenses) translation is authored by translator ( but author should permit translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21859" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T18:01:53.250" Title="Translate the text under MIT to CC BY-SA project" Tags="|mit|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2021-01-30T22:25:15.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What e.g. Google does with Android (Linux-based) is to publish the open source pieces (the kernel plus any patches, libraries, ...), while keeping propietary pieces (like programs running on said kernel) private. That is legally OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that GPLv2 &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; allow you to make it so no modified kernel can be installed on the device (for example, ship it on an embedded ROM, or require a signed piece of software). Look around for the discussion around TiVo and Linux for the gory details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of any important decision to make, &lt;strong&gt;ask your own lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, and make sure she is knowledgeable on open source and software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might consider switching to some BSD kernel, they have less strings attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T22:25:15.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2021-01-30T23:33:17.497" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL only applies to &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt; of the GPL-covered software. In particular: if you modify the covered software, or if you include the covered software (whether in whole or in part) into another software such as by copying code or by linking a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not extend to other programs, even if those other programs communicate with the GPL-covered program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is perfectly possible to create proprietary applications that run on the GPL-covered Linux kernel. This is quite common. I was just playing a proprietary game on my Linux-based system. Android smartphones run proprietary Google software. And many cars run a proprietary user interface on top of a Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be different for drivers. In general, Linux drivers must be GPL-covered as well. In fact, every kernel module must declare its license in a metadata field, and will not get access to kernel methods if it has a GPL-incompatible license. As an extra permission (that goes beyond what would be required by the default GPL), non-GPL kernel modules still get access to basic features. So if Tesla had created a kernel module that e.g. acts as a driver for special hardware in the cars, they would likely have to open-source that as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, many vendors that use embedded Linux are not particularly forthcoming with the source code of the Linux kernel they are using. Sometimes this is ignorance about the license conditions, sometimes this seems to be wilful obstruction. Either is a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tesla has started releasing Linux source code in 2018, almost five years after they were initially asked. That they moved forward is in large parts thanks to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-ccs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T23:33:17.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11222" CreationDate="2021-01-31T13:26:07.713" Score="2" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is related to GPLv3 and GCC runtime exception. I need to include GCC source code in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an author of an embedded library that is intended to be built using GCC C++ compiler from &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the build process, linker complains that certain functions from GCC compiler are undefined. I realized that I need include two files from GCC source code, &lt;code&gt;mutex.cc&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;future.cc&lt;/code&gt;, to have my project build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two files, &lt;code&gt;mutex.cc&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;future.cc&lt;/code&gt;, are part of GCC C++ STL implementation. The license inside of those files says GPLv3 and include the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC runtime library exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, the code from those files would be included in the prebuilt GCC stdlibc++ library. However, for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-rm/downloads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain&lt;/a&gt;, those files are excluded in the tool's build configuration (technically, the files are included, just the required functions are excluded due to conditional build). The two files are not delivered with the released binary version of GCC. I needed to download them from GCC source code repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End users, in order for their project to build, need to include source code of my library and the two GCC files in their build. My library does not modify the two files, does not add or remove functionality. The files will stay as they are. If they were linked with stdlibc++, I would not need the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand GCC runtime exception allows the end users not to publish source code (closed-source?) of their product even if some parts of GCC code is included during the compile or build process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the situation when the end user has to include this code explicitly? Is the exception still triggered or this automatically force him to use GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answer to 1 is GPLv3 is needed - What if I rebuild the GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain, including the required files and publish my modification with GPLv3 with GCC runtime exception? Users would need to use my version of the compiler. Will this still force users to use GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answer to 1 is no, GPLv3 is not needed - Can I release my library as MIT and, for simplicity, include the two files in my repository? Is dual license possible? Is dual license needed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code in the two files is simple. I could potentially provide my implementation of the files. What would I need to avoid doing this to avoid GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any other way for the user to use those two files without falling into GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21865" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T06:55:28.043" Title="Explicit linkage of GCC STL source code in end user's code - GPLv3 + GCC runtime exception" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|license|source-code|gcc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11210" CreationDate="2021-01-31T16:48:50.360" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use paulscode sound system (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paulscode.com/forum/index.php?topic=4.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.paulscode.com/forum/index.php?topic=4.0&lt;/a&gt;) in GPL-3.0 licensed open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library has the following license (it seems it is custom written license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The SoundSystem License:&#xA;&#xA;You are free to use this library for any purpose, commercial or otherwise.&#xA;You may modify this library or source code, and distribute it any way you&#xA;like, provided the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;1) You may not falsely claim to be the author of this library or any&#xA;   unmodified portion of it.&#xA;2) You may not copyright this library or a modified version of it and then&#xA;   sue me for copyright infringement.&#xA;3) If you modify the source code, you must clearly document the changes&#xA;   made before redistributing the modified source code, so other users know&#xA;   it is not the original code.&#xA;4) You are not required to give me credit for this library in any derived&#xA;   work, but if you do, you must also mention my website:&#xA;   http://www.paulscode.com&#xA;5) I the author will not be responsible for any damages (physical,&#xA;   financial, or otherwise) caused by the use if this library or any part&#xA;   of it.&#xA;6) I the author do not guarantee, warrant, or make any representations,&#xA;   either expressed or implied, regarding the use of this library or any&#xA;   part of it.&#xA;&#xA;Author: Paul Lamb&#xA;http://www.paulscode.com&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is such a license compatible with a license like GPL-3.0 or are there any parts making it incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With compatibility, I mean dynamically linking to the JAR of the library for the use in GPL-3.0 licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also JOGG plugin part of the library, with only this written for the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;J-Ogg License:&#xA;&#xA;You are free to use, modify, resdistribute or include this software in your&#xA;own free or commercial software. The only restriction is, that you make it&#xA;obvious that your software is based on J-Ogg by including this notice in the&#xA;documentation, about box or whereever you feel apropriate:&#xA;&#xA;&amp;quot;This software is based on or using the J-Ogg library available from&#xA;http://www.j-ogg.de and copyrighted by Tor-Einar Jarnbjo.&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is the compatibility with this license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any tips on what to look for when dealing with &amp;quot;custom open source&amp;quot; licenses in sense of GPL-3.0 compatibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6777" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T17:25:39.590" Title="GPL 3.0 license compatibility with this custom license" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11209" CreationDate="2021-01-31T17:25:39.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license is GPL-compatible if it allows you to do everything that the GPL allows you to do, and if the license doesn't impose requirements or conditions other than those which the GPL also has or allows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of the licenses you've shown are permissive licenses and seem open source, similar to the MIT or BSD licenses. They seem to provide you with the necessary rights. Where the licenses impose extra conditions (such as the J-OGG license requirement to provide a certain attribution notice), this seems compatible with the GPLv3 section 7 “additional terms” mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T17:25:39.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11205" CreationDate="2021-01-31T18:01:53.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license doesn't limit any such use, so that should be (legally) fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the authors did choose the license for a reason, common courtesy would dictate to keep any derivatives (like a translation certainly is) under the same license. At very least, contact the original authors and ask. They'll probably also want to keep track of translations and other derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T18:01:53.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-31T23:46:43.747" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a modern alternative or similar license to the Common Public Attribution License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the specific license attributions that I am looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A requirement that the Original Developer is attributed in distributions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Network use is counted as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Express grant of patent claims&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks and tradenames included are still exclusive property of the original developer and can only be used within permission of the owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code can be modified and used freely under those terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21869" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T13:03:38.223" Title="Modern Alternatives for the Common Public Attribution License" Tags="|license-recommendation|license-notice|relicensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11216" CreationDate="2021-01-31T23:56:28.697" Score="4" ViewCount="1531" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Berne convention no one can copy / reproduce materials unless an author granted permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; licenses open copying / composition / distribution among compatible licenses relying on copiright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But some EULAs talk not only about copying but restrict when, where I can run / debug / study software. It is not about copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me to understand why any should not only discuss copying but also usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should FOSS licenses explicitly allow to compile code and run executables?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;International law seems doesn't define what is software and how it can be used. We understand that we can read book or listen to the music recording. Why we need to state that an application can be launched?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11497" LastEditorUserId="11497" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T00:02:57.303" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T16:19:14.053" Title="Right to launch an application with FOSS license" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="217" CreationDate="2021-02-01T04:00:21.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another consideration that led me to adopt the 3-clause BSD license for my open source contributions is that, unlike the MIT license, it names the license grantor. Apart from the necessity of doing so to the enforceability of the third clause and to the validity of the copyright declaration included therein, I believe that the license should name the grantor to make it enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The foregoing is my personal belief; I am not an intellectual property lawyer, regardless of the fact that I am the author of four applications now pending before the USPTO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21872" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T04:00:21.747" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11213" CreationDate="2021-02-01T04:07:18.087" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a typical computer, when you run a program you copy it from permanent storage (disk or equivalent) into RAM. A copyright holder that were being difficult could attempt to argue that running a program was therefore equivalent to copying it, with all the obligations that implies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine most courts would look fairly scathingly at this kind of shenanigans, but explicitly putting the permission to run the software into the license removes any possibility of people trying that argument. This increases confidence in the open source software, because there is less chance you will run into difficulties, and is therefore a good thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T04:07:18.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11213" CreationDate="2021-02-01T05:06:30.730" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the Free Software and Open Source definitions include the freedom to run programs for any purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Definition&lt;/a&gt;: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;: 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any software that comes with a EULA that puts restrictions on how you can run and use the software cannot be FOSS. If it claims to be released under a FOSS license then that's a worrying incompatibility that you'd want to be resolved before using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T10:42:08.210" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T10:42:08.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-01T09:56:05.393" Score="1" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official Oracle MySQL connectors&lt;/a&gt; seem to correspond with these GitHub repositories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-cpp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mysql-connector-cpp&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-nodejs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mysql-connector-nodejs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mysql-connector-python&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all contain a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-cpp/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that specifies that the connector &lt;em&gt;is released under version 2 of the&#xA;GNU General Public License (GPLv2)&lt;/em&gt;, but with the following additional permissions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distribution of MySQL Connector/C++ 8.0 is distributed with&#xA;certain software (including but not limited to OpenSSL) that is&#xA;licensed under separate terms, as designated in a particular file or&#xA;component or in the license documentation. Without limiting your rights&#xA;under the GPLv2, the authors of MySQL hereby grant you an additional&#xA;permission to link the program and your derivative works with the&#xA;separately licensed software that they have included with the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without limiting the foregoing grant of rights under the GPLv2 and&#xA;additional permission as to separately licensed software, this&#xA;Connector is also subject to the Universal FOSS Exception, version 1.0,&#xA;a copy of which is reproduced below and can also be found along with&#xA;its FAQ at &lt;a href=&quot;http://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://oss.oracle.com/licenses/universal-foss-exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the scenario of a backend of commercial closed-source website. Would the backend be allowed to use these connectors to connect to a MySQL instance, or would the usage of the connectors require to open source the entire web application backend code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18209" LastEditorUserId="18209" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T12:09:55.370" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T12:09:55.370" Title="Can the official MySQL connectors be used in a commercial closed-source backend?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|closed-source|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11213" CreationDate="2021-02-01T16:19:14.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some open source licenses do specifically grant the right to run the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the MIT license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;without limitation the rights to &lt;strong&gt;use&lt;/strong&gt;, copy, modify, merge,&#xA;publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD licenses say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution &lt;strong&gt;and use&lt;/strong&gt; in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A software license agreement can put restrictions on when and how the software can be used. The EULA of a proprietary software might forbid you, for example, from using the software when you stop paying your monthly subscription fees or from using an educational version in a commercial setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when it does that, then it is usually no longer considered an open source license (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the OSI definition&lt;/a&gt;) or free software license (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF definition&lt;/a&gt;), because both definitions require that anyone who receives the software can use it without restrictions and for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T16:19:14.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-01T18:04:54.437" Score="2" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let say you were to develop an embedded device powered by Debian, Ubuntu, etc. The device is plug an play. There is no need for the customer to SSH into your device and make modifications. However, does the GPL license require me to give the customer full access to the Linux system in case s/he wanted to install security updates, add/remove packages etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, let's say I buy a Roku box for my TV. Am I entitled to get Linux access to the Roku box so that I can maintain and run security updates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21881" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:36:39.627" Title="distributing a linux server for commercial use" Tags="|gpl|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11219" CreationDate="2021-02-01T18:26:41.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I entitled to get Linux access to the Roku box so that I can maintain and run security updates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7020/what-exactly-is-tivoization-and-why-did-linus-torvalds-not-like-it-in-gplv3&quot;&gt;Tivoization&lt;/a&gt; and is considered by some (not including Linus) that it is a &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; in the GPL v2 which is fixed in GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T18:26:41.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11223" CreationDate="2021-02-02T01:09:19.087" Score="9" ViewCount="719" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Main question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; actually a valid license for work in the public domain&lt;/strong&gt;? Would it cause problems in some jurisdictions? Is there a better option to publish US-public-domain uncopyrightable code so that people can just use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work for the U.S. Government and sometimes develop software that I want to release open-source. This is totally allowed by my employer and even mildly encouraged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crucial question is, &lt;em&gt;which license should I use&lt;/em&gt;? My goal is simple: allow the greatest number of others to be able to use my code, with the least amount of hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complication comes because U.S. Government work product is &lt;strong&gt;not copyrightable&lt;/strong&gt; as it is in the public domain. In the past I have used the &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; as a kind of beefed-up public domain declaration. But since then I have learned that &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/147111/what-is-wrong-with-the-unlicense&quot;&gt;there are various problems with public-domain declarations and the Unlicense in particular&lt;/a&gt;. In summary, public domain only applies in the U.S. and doesn't even make sense in other countries such as Germany, and (as a result) some companies have a blanket policy to not use code released under Unlicense or WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently discovered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; license, which is considered &amp;quot;public-domain equivalent&amp;quot;, is allowed by companies such as Google, and (unlike CC0) is listed by the Open Source Initiative. Note that the 0BSD text linked here does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; include any copyright statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Additional reading&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The helpful reader may be tempted to suggest I ask my employer what to do. If you are familiar with government work, you should not be surprised to discover that (1) there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://dodcio.defense.gov/Portals/0/Documents/FOSS/2009OSS.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an extensive document&lt;/a&gt; and even &lt;a href=&quot;https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an FAQ&lt;/a&gt; which both fail to answer my question, and (2) my local agency was unable to provide any further clarification and was annoyed that I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21884" LastEditorUserId="21884" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T06:24:02.250" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:31:26.820" Title="Can the 0-clause BSD license be used for public domain work?" Tags="|public-domain|unlicense|0bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11208" CreationDate="2021-02-02T06:55:28.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the situation when the end user has to include this code explicitly? Is the exception still triggered or this automatically force him to use GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the linking exception will remain in effect, as long as neither you nor the end-user rely on the specific implementation in those files, but only that they provide &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; implementation for a set of functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answer to 1 is GPLv3 is needed - What if I rebuild the GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain, including the required files and publish my modification with GPLv3 with GCC runtime exception? Users would need to use my version of the compiler. Will this still force users to use GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing your users with a modified, GCC-based toolchain does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; force your users to use the GPL license (unless you deliberately removed the linking exceptions from the library part you distribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If answer to 1 is no, GPLv3 is not needed - Can I release my library as MIT and, for simplicity, include the two files in my repository? Is dual license possible? Is dual license needed?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If those GCC files are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; automatically built when someone builds your library and they are merely included so that your users don't need to hunt the internet for those files, then that is called &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;. Your library and the GCC files are considered to be independent works as far as copyright is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that your library can use any license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code in the two files is simple. I could potentially provide my implementation of the files. What would I need to avoid doing this to avoid GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are now aware of the implementation of those files, it can be tricky to create a new implementation that would not be considered a derived work of the GCC version. You would need to prove somehow that you didn't copy the GCC implementation, with your memory as an intermediate, or you would have to prove that there is only one way to write those functions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T06:55:28.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11221" CreationDate="2021-02-02T12:31:26.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is 0BSD actually a valid license for work in the public domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically not, because you are trying to give a copyright license on something that isn't protected by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it cause problems in some jurisdictions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am no lawyer, but I can see it causing issues in the US if someone takes issue with the fact that a public-domain work carries a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a better option to publish US-public-domain uncopyrightable code so that people can just use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would give the work a &amp;quot;dual license&amp;quot; along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This work is produced on behalf of the US government and is hence in the public domain. If such a public domain work is not recognized in your jurisdiction, you can consider it to be licensed under the following license: &amp;lt;0BSD license text&amp;gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it clear the work is intended to be in the public domain, and gives a very permissive license for those cases where public domain doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:31:26.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11219" CreationDate="2021-02-02T12:36:39.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, does the GPL license require me to give the customer full access to the Linux system in case s/he wanted to install security updates, add/remove packages etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on the version of the GPL license involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use only software under the GPLv2 license (and the Linux kernel is GPLv2), then you are not required to give your customers the means to perform software updates by their own with unofficial software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use software under the GPLv3 license, then the license requires that you also give your customers the means (in the form of signing keys, etc.) to perform updates with their own versions of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:36:39.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8562" CreationDate="2021-02-02T12:45:48.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering the correct way to bundle the executable file in my Git source control&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct way is not to do that at all. Instead you should write your GUI in such a way that it makes no assumptions where the CLI tool is located and write in your documentation (e.g. your README.md) which CLI tool you are wrapping and give a pointer to the project of the CLI tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T12:45:48.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11212" CreationDate="2021-02-02T13:03:38.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me as if you want &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A requirement that the Original Developer is attributed in distributions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 s4 provides that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so the original developer's (and subsequent contributors') copyright notices must be conspicuously maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Network use is counted as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 s13.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Express grant of patent claims&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 s11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks and tradenames included are still exclusive property of the original developer and can only be used within permission of the owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 s7e permits this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code can be modified and used freely under those terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 ss 2,4,5, and 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T13:03:38.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-02T15:57:11.490" Score="4" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a commercial product that ships with a custom embedded Linux distro (similar to Yocto), and am in the process of collecting the copyright and license notices to comply with the GPL requirements. I intend to extend an offer to provide the sources and mention the GPL on the user interface of the program. I should also mention that the user will not access the command line, rather interact via a web interface, and because of that /usr/share/licenses/ is empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it my understanding from GPL-2.0 §1 that I should mention the copyright, license and warranty terms of all GPL'd programs shipped, which for me means the Kernel, bootloader and all the extra SW packages that form the distro. This is proving to be an utter nightmare to collect, with a lot maintenance effort. I have encountered the following problems so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of packages with no clear info of copyright holders, either with no AUTHORS file, or the AUTHORS file is empty and no clear mention in a README. One has then to dig lots of source files headers, where no distinction between authorship and contribution is made (this can lead to a few dozen names per package). This is also very tiresome and error prone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some packages (e.g. binutils or dropbear) have lots of slightly different licensed and authored components, which gives half a page long notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some packages are free, but require a copyright notice, adding to a very lengthy list of information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with software updates it is possible that some packages have a newer GPL/LGPL version, more contributors, or some are added/removed, causing a considerable maintenance effort. At the moment I have about ~120 different SW Modules (OS, bootloader and packages managed by the lightweight package manager).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I really have to mention all that information for all those packages? A google search shows a lot of 1 Paragraph GPL notices, but that seems to fall very short of the requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How is this usually done in custom/embedded distros? I am certainly not the first one to ship a commercial product with a custom distro.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I were to provide the licenses on /usr/share/licenses/, would that help me fulfill the requirements? I assume not, at least because in my case that would be inconspicuous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any idea on how can I make this process less laborious?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21894" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T16:04:57.333" Title="Custom Linux distro Copyright and license notices" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|copyleft|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2021-02-02T16:14:05.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have actually a 3rd possibility to structure your code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;project root&#xA;  +--- your code&#xA;  +-+- 3rd party&#xA;    |--- project A&#xA;    |--- project B&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form is used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/tree/master/src/3rdparty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/file/tip/mercurial/thirdparty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;projects&lt;/a&gt; where files from 3rd-party libraries are included for simplification or where maybe some small custom adjustments to interfaces need be done or a very specific version is needed to not deal with varying ABI / API or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to create a sub-project which contains your 3rd-party dependencies. That has the advantage that it is more clearly separated, and the disadvantage that one has to clone at least two repositories. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/p4lang/third-party&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; examples for this approach, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might (and possibly should) consider to add the 3rd-party stuff as sub-modules, if they remain unmodified. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4960960/git-how-to-clone-a-3rd-party-library-into-a-subdirectory-of-my-apps-repository&quot;&gt;this answer in another thread&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T16:14:05.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T21:19:33.060" Score="0" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a Linux-based OS for a VR headset that I'm developing. From what I understand, the Linux kernel uses the GPL-2 license which allows for commercial use but it also requires you to publish your source code. How is Tesla able to sell a physical product that runs on a Linux OS while also being able to keep their source code private and how can I do the same?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21858" OwnerDisplayName="at0micV3n0m" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T17:08:18.523" Title="How do you legally sell a hardware product that uses the Linux kernel?" Tags="|linux-kernel|operating-system|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-02-02T21:13:53.603" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11229" CreationDate="2021-01-31T10:47:39.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the GPLv2 doesn't require you to publish the source code, it requires that you provide a written offer to provide the source code, valid for 3 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I am not a lawyer but some will says that publishing source code is not complying with the GPLv2 because it states that this has to be done &amp;quot;on a medium customarily used for software interchange&amp;quot; which, at the time of the GPLv2 was a CD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Tesla is distributing their source code, here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/teslamotors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/teslamotors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Alexandre Belloni" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T10:47:39.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-03T10:51:06.260" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache v2, MIL, GNU, and many others. They all have certain conditions you have to follow. But in what cases? What if I want to use Apache v2 (for example) software that generates... let's say images. And I use these images in a commercial project. I mean I used the software for a commercial purpose. Do the conditions of the OSL apply in such a case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20948" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T10:51:06.260" Title="In what cases do open source licenses conditions apply?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-04T21:00:41.797" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11235" CreationDate="2021-02-03T11:55:34.533" Score="10" ViewCount="3359" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original program is open sourced under GPL v3, but asks for a fee to use it. I did not pay for it, but I'd like to share the no-fee version I compiled with my college friends (obviously under GPL v3). Can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21905" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T07:07:56.770" Title="Can I share a cracked version of a program originally under GPL v3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11242" CreationDate="2021-02-03T12:16:44.113" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am starting to work on open source projects and make contributions on some well known projects. I wanted to know how well this is for me professionally and how can you come about creating connections with other people on open source project hosting sites such as github etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21906" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T11:11:17.363" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T11:11:17.363" Title="How to create connections with contributions?" Tags="|contributor|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11233" CreationDate="2021-02-03T13:17:56.523" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL allows any use, including commercial use. And the author or distributor is not required to provide sources to anyone, but only to those which he distributed to the programme in binary form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However anyone who obtained the binary of a GPL-licensed programme legally, is entitled to receive the source code. And the GPL license allows to make modifications as long as they are clearly marked and attributed and the modified version does give credits whom credits are due (thus copyright notices must be retained, but can be ammended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if you obtained the source code under a GPLv3 license, you are totally allowed to modify it, use it in compiled and/or source form as you see fit. You can also distribute it as long as you abide by and fulfill your obligations as stated in the license itself, namely to also make available the source to your modified version at least upon request to the recipients of your modified binary version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be difficult, if you just hacked the executable instead of modifying the source and compiling that - and then you'd probably be in a grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind though, just because a previous version of a programme was licensed and distributed under GPL, does not mean that the currently-distributed version by the original author is distributed under GPL. Whether or not a license change is allowed depends on who holds the actual copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous example where a license key restriction was introduced in GPL-licensed code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rhodecode.com/open-source&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhodecode&lt;/a&gt; which hence was &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/609709/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forked&lt;/a&gt; under the name &lt;a href=&quot;https://kallithea-scm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;kallithea&lt;/a&gt; which removed the license restriction introduced at that point and kept the programme free and open-source. Since then, rhodecode reverted its decision at least partially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:17:56.523" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11238" CreationDate="2021-02-03T19:14:06.223" Score="22" ViewCount="6796" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elastic built the tool, AWS redistributed it and is dominating the market. Elastic is probably going to struggle and slowly die because they are bad at business. However, they built a great tool and should probably be rewarded for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I'm thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;$tool is open source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users can modify $tool for private use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users can ship $tool as part of their business and earn money with it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users can provide $tool as a service but are required to donate a tiny fraction of the revenue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;examples:&#xA;$tool = redis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you've got an e-commerce that uses redis as part of the infrastructure, no required contributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you've created a hosting/cloud provider/professional tools and you charge your customers for your redis hosting, so you are required to make small contributions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without getting into the problem of what contributions are (man-hours/donations/% revenue) and how to quantify it. Is that ethical, or possible in open source? Is there a license for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for your opinions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21907" LastEditorUserId="21907" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T13:28:44.393" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T13:28:44.393" Title="How to avoid being AWSed?" Tags="|licensing|open-source-definition|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-03T19:27:49.590" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unclear to me whether all components that comprise JavaFX are open-source. Statements on this that I found around the web seem to be unclear too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjfx.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official OpenJFX website&lt;/a&gt; seems to imply that it is fully open-source, but doesn't go into detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX#License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JavaFX Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of the core JavaFX runtime are still proprietary software and its code has not yet been released to the public, however developers and executives behind the technology are moving toward a full opening of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is based on two deeply outdated links and it's unclear which parts were proprietary at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are all components of JavaFX open-source now or not? And if not, which ones aren't and are those non-essential?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T19:27:49.590" Title="Is JavaFX fully open-source?" Tags="|license|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11236" CreationDate="2021-02-03T21:42:07.657" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many reasons why people and companies are involved with open source. Often, these conflicts occur because a business running a project is using a license written by people with totally different goals. Suggestions for more “fairness” also tend to misunderstand how the Open Source ecosystem is a massive network, and it's difficult to ascribe a clear value to single nodes in that network. There is not and cannot be an Open Source license that charges a fee for certain uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;History and Values of Open Source&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software / Open Source community draws from distinct but closely related roots which I have to briefly cover here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A kind of primordial open source culture developed around Unix and especially BSD. The original Unix was never open source, just source-available. However, it was common in this academic culture to share programs in source form and to modify them further. At this time, the programs itself were not generally seen as valuable. The BSD project eventually rewrote the proprietary Unix parts. Licenses from this time include the BSD license, and the MIT/X11 license, all very permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the context of this culture, Stallman developed the concept of &lt;em&gt;Free Software&lt;/em&gt;. The focus of this concept is that everyone including end users should have the freedom to inspect and modify their software, to use it for any purpose, and to share these modifications. This requires restriction of intermediaries so that they can't strip away rights. This is achieved via a copyleft mechanism in licenses. In this tradition the GPL license was drafted, with later variants such as the AGPL. Free Software was surprisingly successful, e.g. see Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that creating and using Free Software is not just good to individuals, but for businesses as well, for example by building upon publicly available components and by collaborating shared software. The term &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; is a business-friendly rebranding of the Free Software concept. This line of thought was also widely successful, e.g. Firefox/Mozilla was an open sourcing of Netscape software. Foundations like Apache or Eclipse also create massive value across the industry by getting multiple companies to collaborate on “neutral ground”. Without NPM, there wouldn't be today's web development industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within this success of open source, there are two economically important consequences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a sufficiently successful and industry-relevant open source project, it's possible for the main developers to earn a living e.g. by selling related consulting services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Selling proprietary software is difficult when there is so much gratis Open Source software around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why some companies offer Open Source projects and then stop&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For both of these reasons, there have been a number of companies that had an open source project as their main product. Elastic and Redis are some great examples of companies that were formed to provide an economic basis for the main project developers. MongoDB was also formed around Open Source as its business plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these mentioned projects were very successful, and the companies running these projects were definitely not starving. An Open Source product means they had a massively wide conversion funnel towards their paid offerings, though they would only be able to capture a tiny sliver of the available market share. This is fine! Open Source is not a zero-sum game, but a scenario in which &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; can succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that tiny sliver leads to envy, especially when another company is able to capture much more value of the project without contributing to it. This isn't a problem for a company that just wants to feed the main project developers, but it is a problem for a startup that needs more growth in order to satisfy investors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some companies like MongoDB tried asymmetric licensing: they would receive all rights to project contributions, but others would only receive the more restrictive AGPL license. The idea was that the conditions of the AGPL would be unattractive to business users especially in a cloud context, thus funneling them towards MongoDB's paid offerings. But this plan was partially flawed. Indeed, the cloud giants like Amazon never did use MongoDB's AGPL code. However, the AGPL is written to maximize end user's Software Freedom, not to discourage commercial use. The use of asymmetric licensing is also an indication that MongoDB never cared about the value from collaborating on Open Source, only about the potential of Open Source to fill their conversion funnel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To their credit, Elastic did not use the AGPL but the very permissive Apache License. This allowed pretty much any use by anyone else, including by Amazon. Instead, Elastic used an Open Core business model where extension modules were kept proprietary. However, Elastic is a publicly traded company with an about USD 15 billion valuation. They have a product that's massively successful in the enterprise space, but need to grow further. Stockholders don't like it when a company gives away a large slice of their value to a competitor. Thus, Elastic had to find a way to deny future value to Amazon. To be clear: Elastic was not struggling with paying the bills. Elastic was and will be successful because it's product is so popular, in part also thanks to AWS. This relicensing was necessary for Elastic in order to accelerate future growth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Even small payments would undermine Open Source&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to circle back to the point that Open Source is not a zero-sum game. Ideally, &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; wins. Requiring service providers to pass on some of their earnings to the projects that enable these earnings runs against all of the open source roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the academic root, the value I derive from a software is independent from the value anyone else derives. If I open-source software, I can do that because I have already benefited from creating the software, and my benefit is not diminished if others benefit as well. Actually, other's improvements could be a benefit in of itself. And if no one else contributes, that's fine as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the software freedom root, the focus lies on end user freedom. For this, it is essential that the software can be used for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; purpose without restriction. Users should be able to run the software without needing a lawyer and an accountant. Also, users should be able to participate anonymously, without having to hand out payment details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the open source root, both of the above concerns apply. Collaboration is valuable, and bureaucracy to keep track of fees would impede mutually beneficial collaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Apache web server had required web hosters to pay license fees, we probably wouldn't have the massively valuable internet we enjoy today. If hosters funded further development of Apache, it would be because it was immanently valuable for them, not because they were forced by licensing. The same considerations could apply to ElasticSearch today, except that this project is controlled by a single enterprise and is not maintained by a collaboration of multiple interested parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While charging for software is not in contradiction with Software Freedom or Open Source principles, this is only unproblematic when the charge is attached to a particular distribution event. If recipients further downstream would also be required to pay up, this would be a bureaucratic nightmare impeding collaboration and value creation for all involved, except those at the top of the pyramid. It's worth pointing out that ElasticSearch was not created in a vacuum, but is based upon loads of other open source software such as Apache Lucene. Does Elastic contribute a “fair share” of its $15B valuation to the Apache Foundation? Probably not. And would Apache be required to forward this income to its hundreds of contributors? What if a contributor changed their email address, would the money be instead saved in a custodial account? Who would maintain that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Extending Open Source&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many attempts to extend or redefine Open Source to address some of these concerns. E.g. MongoDB developed the SSPL license, but it's clearly just intended to harass certain users into buying a commercial license. Some people such as Kyle Mitchell tried solving the payment problem with more tech, but couldn't achieve network effects. There have also been extensions for suggestions towards more “ethical” licensing, to prevent certain undesirable uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But all of these attempts misunderstand why the Open Source ecosystem is successful as a whole. The ecosystem of fairly standard licenses provides a level playing field that allows collaboration with low friction, and produces massive value for everyone involved – both to those that contribute and to those that don't. It is not without problems (there are many essential but unsexy projects that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; struggling with funding), but introducing more friction won't improve the success of this ecosystem – it will just lead to some parts of the ecosystem to break off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T21:42:07.657" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11233" CreationDate="2021-02-03T22:22:02.397" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr: Yes, you can.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The original program is open sourced under GPL v3, but asks for a fee to use it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't make any sense. If the program was distributed to you (in either binary or source form) under the GPL, then you have a license to use it without paying any kind of fee. Once the software has been licensed to you under the GPL, this permission &lt;em&gt;cannot be revoked&lt;/em&gt; unless you violate the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Section 2 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are additionally allowed to change it and use said changed version without any further restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have a license to distribute said changed version of it to whoever you want without paying any sort of fee, so long as you continue to license said distribution under the GPL (same version or newer) and preserve the copyright notice. If you distribute a compiled version of it, you're required to also make the source code available to whoever you distributed it to, also under the terms of the GPL. These rights are covered in Sections 5 and 6 of the GPLv3 (or Section 4 if you're distributing a verbatim [unmodified] copy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like whoever distributed this to you under the GPL didn't understand the GPL. Or hoped you didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in short, &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, you can modify it to remove the part asking for payment and you can additionally distribute the modified version of the work - in either source or binary form - to anyone you want, so long as the distribution remains under the terms of the GPLv3 (or newer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="966" LastEditorUserId="966" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T07:07:56.770" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T07:07:56.770" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11241" CreationDate="2021-02-04T09:35:52.147" Score="29" ViewCount="8584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been using open-source software, and, the open-source Community is great at maintaining such projects. But, I have observed something in smaller open-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I demand some feature or complain about some vulnerability, small or big, there is always someone who says &amp;quot;Instead of reporting/demanding this, why not just create a PR with the demands fulfilled&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it wrong to demand changes in open-source projects? Can't the users demand changes and the maintainers/contributors work on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21613" LastEditorUserId="21613" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T16:26:11.767" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T19:33:49.303" Title="Is it wrong to demand features in open-source projects?" Tags="|ethics|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-04T09:50:06.323" Score="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I tell you that I require you to cease posting here, immediately come round to my house, and cook me lunch.  Your first response might, very reasonably, be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;who on earth is this person and why should I spend my time and energy fulfilling his agenda instead of my own?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that demanding new features in open-source projects is wrong; it's that demanding &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; from other people is wrong, particularly from people who have already given their work away to the world, and are continuing to give their time and energy to improve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific community bargain with free software is that you get the freedoms to run the code, to modify the code, and to distribute both verbatim and modified versions.  You are not entitled to &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; other than that: not bug-fixes, not new features, not documentation, not support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, most people who write software and give it away are keen that other people should run it, and are interested to hear about how other people use it now and could use it better [1].  But there is a world of difference between &lt;em&gt;being open to community suggestions&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;being required to service community demands&lt;/em&gt;.  If the response you've had to previous demands is a polite rebuff that perhaps you should do the work yourself and contribute it back, then my principal surprise is that people were that courteous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you decide to approach some project with your suggestions and requests, remember that you do so as a supplicant&lt;/strong&gt;, hoping that people who owe you nothing will choose to spend further time and effort making the changes you want, &lt;strong&gt;rather than someone with any entitlement whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Though this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://jedimark.net/2019/02/08/sleepyhead-project-shutdown/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not always true&lt;/a&gt;.  Sometimes the author views the relationship as strictly one-way: (s)he's giving away what (s)he's made, and as long as you honour the licence, (s)he has no interest in hearing from you, and may take it amiss if you try to get more involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T10:35:17.973" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T10:35:17.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11234" CreationDate="2021-02-04T11:44:32.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in every other place: talk to people and communicate about the matters at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually FLOSS is a meritocracy... so to become a member means to become engaged consistently and positively and constructively and people will start to remember you - especially if you tackle the nasty bugs - that usually is valued more than to just go there to push your shiny super-duper features you deem necessary to scratch your own itch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a good way to start is to go to the issue trackers. Often you may find issues marked as &amp;quot;good first issue&amp;quot; etc. Start with those to familiarize yourself with the project, how things are handled, and the code base. Then move on to more complicated issues which interest you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also make use of the other communication channels a project might have, be that IRC, discord, mailing lists or whatever. Initially listen more than talk yourself. That way you will learn how things are expected to be handled. Every community is different. Avoid the toxic ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T12:07:42.873" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T12:07:42.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-04T18:37:42.847" Score="4" ViewCount="565" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the requirements of the LGPL v2.1 license is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a lot of C projects use &lt;code&gt;glibc&lt;/code&gt;, it seems like they would need to include some attribution. In practice, I don't see this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that it is because the source code isn't specifically designed to use glibc so much as any implementation of libc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in source form, I believe the source code is just &lt;code&gt;work that uses the Library&lt;/code&gt;. Once compiled and linked against glibc (even dynamically), it should become a &lt;code&gt;derivative work of the Library&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you build a program with &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt; on virtually any major Linux distribution, it links to &lt;code&gt;glibc&lt;/code&gt; explicitly -- I don't believe you could simply replace the .so with another libc and expect it to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doesn't linking with glibc then make the resulting binary have attribution requirements for glibc? If not, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21920" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T14:00:30.100" Title="glibc is LGPL - shouldn't virtually every Linux C project include attributions for it?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-04T18:51:50.007" Score="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker but to me &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;demanding&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; implies having authority. A policeman can demand that you show your hands; a teacher can demand that the students be quiet. A parent can demand that the children wash hands before dinner. If you indeed use that word or behaved like the authorities in these examples you imply having authority over the people you address. Since you do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; they find your demand an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imposition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;imposition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And consider that I'm a German, from Berlin, typically among the rudest people around (Americans feel attacked when we tell them in no unclear terms what they did wrong — something we love — and we have serious communicative trouble with many Asians).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative attitude would be that of making a polite &lt;strong&gt;suggestion.&lt;/strong&gt; A suggestion is constructive: It doesn't focus on the perceived deficiency as much as on a solution (even if it's only in form, not in substance). Therefore it is less hostile and invites a goal oriented dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading your complaint about EchoJS's lacking account verification I suppose that you find it unsalvageable, which means that you don't have any suggestion how to improve it. In that case you can still ask a &lt;strong&gt;question&lt;/strong&gt; along the lines of &amp;quot;are there any ideas how to integrate account verification in the existing framework?&amp;quot;. That is still more than a complaint; presumably, if your issue is indeed virulent, others also are motivated to solve it, and may join a brainstorming thread instead of becoming defensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14461" LastEditorUserId="14461" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T14:21:07.167" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T14:21:07.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-05T00:07:30.850" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's refocus the question to address the security aspect of  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/echojs/echojs/issues/12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/echojs/echojs/issues/12&lt;/a&gt; (other great answers already address the tone of &lt;em&gt;demanding&lt;/em&gt; a fix and calling for a volunteer project to be shut down).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I complain about some software vulnerability there is always someone who says &amp;quot;Instead of&#xA;reporting/demanding this, just create a PR&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never seen a software project say, &amp;quot;You fix it!&amp;quot; after somebody reports an in-scope security vulnerability. OTOH, they'll probably say &amp;quot;You improve it!&amp;quot; if you make a feature request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they care about the security of their users and they will take responsibility to fix it, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they've decided that security is an out-of-scope feature, and your security report is actually a feature request to increase security (and a bug report against their docs, which should call out security limitations -- thanks @supercat!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it wrong to complain about some software vulnerability in public forums?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt; If you're going to communicate about security vulnerabilities without straying outside the law&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, you have a responsibility to know about &lt;strong&gt;Responsible Disclosure&lt;/strong&gt;. Google has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;short policy, easy to read&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Echo JS doesn't have a fancy GitHub template educating you about avoiding unethical hacker behavior, but let's take a look at what happens when you report a issue at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/new/choose&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another project&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cCBUJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cCBUJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;New issue dialog with choices Bug Report or Report a security vulnerability&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That linked Security Policy says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Security issues and bugs should be reported privately to the Microsoft&#xA;Security Response Center (MSRC), either by emailing&#xA;secure@microsoft.com or via the portal at &lt;a href=&quot;https://msrc.microsoft.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://msrc.microsoft.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please do not open issues for anything you think might have a security&#xA;implication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's good advice for every GitHub repo you interact with: &lt;strong&gt;Please do not open issues for anything you think might have a security implication.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the US, I don't know of criminal laws against sharing vulnerabilities, but you don't want to end up in a civil lawsuit proving you aren't responsible for claimed damages. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/whitehat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook's Responsible Disclosure&lt;/a&gt; promises that &amp;quot;Facebook will also not pursue legal action for against you for clear accidental or good faith violations of its policy or these terms.&amp;quot; which I think clearly implies what irresponsible disclosure might lead to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13333" LastEditorUserId="13333" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T20:36:21.133" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T20:36:21.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11260" CreationDate="2021-02-05T09:52:30.250" Score="0" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I have a python application which uses different packages, which are licensed under different OpenSource Licenses.(MIT, LGPL, GPL, and other OSS licenses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to create a bundle for Windows using cx_freeze, which packs all of the packages and respective DLLs into a single folder which can be shipped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some of the packages (namely poppler) are GPL, I have to put my application under GPL as well, right? I assume, using the DLL and python wheels is considered as linking in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is now the correct way to handle all the other licenses in the shipped file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must I include the license statement of every library in the bundle?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be sufficient to only have the license files in the public repo?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to mention the licenses in my (GUI) application as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21935" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T00:50:12.293" Title="How to handle license files in cx_freeze'd python applications" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-notice|python|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-05T13:04:19.327" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is wrong to demand anything of open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source developers tend to first and foremost implement features or work on bugs that are relevant to themselves; and secondarily they will work on features that bring the software further along because the changes are useful and &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; (subjectively speaking, in the opinion of the developer). Also, unless they are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; mellow people, they react quite fiercely towards demands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the correct way to reach your goal is to lead the developers to &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to have the feature you're interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means: create a ticket or user story in their bug/task tracking system, and explain what happens (or what does not happen), why you would like it to change, and what the benefit for everybody is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When explaining why you would like it to change, do not be purely personal - this is not for your own sake; but use your own case as merely an illustrative example why the feature would be useful to many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="6142" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T13:52:58.400" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T13:52:58.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11255" CreationDate="2021-02-05T14:12:50.167" Score="5" ViewCount="1099" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we say that some license X is (one-way) compatible with another license Y, I gather that we often intend for compatibility to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_relation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transitive&lt;/a&gt;; that is, given some other license W which is compatible with X, W is also compatible with Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens to be the key property of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;partial orders&lt;/a&gt;. A partial order has two other properties which seem trivial to establish. First, any license is trivially compatible with itself. Second, if two licenses are each compatible with each other, then the licensed software can be offered equivalently under both licenses simultaneously; this equivalence is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisymmetric_relation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;antisymmetry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to detail my question, I think that in an ideal world, yes, license compatibility is a partial order. But that's not the world that we find ourselves inhabiting today. &lt;strong&gt;What counterexamples show that license compatibility is not a partial order?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main pragmatic purpose of this question is to establish the degree to which we are allowed to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boolean algebra&lt;/a&gt; (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) to compose many licenses together. Given how often folks informally do this, I would not be surprised to learn that I am not the first person to ask this question. Prior questions have involved informally considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/326/dual-license-compatibility&quot;&gt;unions of single licenses&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8702/would-a-multi-license-consisting-of-all-possible-non-exclusive-licenses-work&quot;&gt;unions of license families&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18097" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T23:28:23.587" Title="Is license compatibility a partial order?" Tags="|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5478" CreationDate="2021-02-05T15:06:19.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to other answers. Some Open Source licenses do impose conditions and obligations regarding output work.&#xA;But you can't really generalize all Open Source licenses on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example GPLv3 explicitly states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only&#xA;if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a hypothetical document constitute a covered work? i.e. is it based on the software? - No. Thus it is not covered by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand a program compiled with GCC and linked against its runtime library would be such covered work since it is based on the runtime library.&#xA;To solve this GCC uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13770" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T15:06:19.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T15:55:04.473" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that SaaS applications are considered to be &amp;quot;distributed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; when they are used, what about LOB applications? For example an eCommerce site which has a sales application, a support forum application and an internal inventory application?  Where the three may share some common code, but are hosted separately (possibly on different servers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would using an AGPL library/binary in the forum software result in requiring either the inventory application or the sales application to be AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21955" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T15:56:46.700" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T15:56:46.700" Title="LOB applications and AGPL" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-05T17:04:49.963" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not wrong to ask for features in open-source projects. Preferably in a gentle and well-educated manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the people maintaining it are under no obligation to fulfill that. Quite often, you might find that they don't implement it right away, but it stays there, awaiting someone motivated enough to do it (this could range from yourself coding it to someone being paid to code that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also, there are cases where a request will be outright rejected. not just the cases where the issue is invalid (such as reporting that something is missing that is actually available) but there are also cases when people request Very Bad Ideas™.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if providing a patch (which would &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; speed things up), it's possible that it can be rejected, on the basis on the idea itself, or the way it is being (mis)implemented. Still, Opensource allows you to use such patched version for yourself. In some projects it is common to have highly patched versions, which are kept in-sync across updates (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/wikis/PatchList&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mutt&lt;/a&gt;). Sometimes this can end up in creating your own fork with the feature you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's take a look at the problematic &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/echojs/echojs/issues/12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/echojs/echojs/issues/12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is phrased in a somewhat bitter tone, but it could be a useful report. &lt;em&gt;Up until when you post the code to exploit it&lt;/em&gt;. I'm not saying full disclosure is &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; wrong, that's a big debate. However, by doing this you are clearly not making friends with the developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others mentioned, this should have been preferable to send privately to the developers (through a mail to a designated security email address, directly to them, a restricted issue…).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, I wouldn't consider a big problem publishing in public the description itself of the vulnerability, the implications of &amp;quot;there is no captcha stopping spam accounts&amp;quot; are obvious (and it was probably already in their roadmap). But publishing the code in an open issue tracker in the first interaction comes as rude. Just saying instead &amp;quot;I have a 16-line proof of concept I can provide you&amp;quot; would have been much nicer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, some communities would like that a security issue was told completely in the open. You could do that with Linux with the blessings of Linus himself, although in practice issues found generally go through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.15/admin-guide/security-bugs.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;security&lt;/a&gt; (and there are strict limits on embargo times on &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss-security.openwall.org/wiki/mailing-lists/distros#list-policy-and-instructions-for-reporters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;linux-distros&lt;/a&gt;, for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could have been told, &amp;quot;please share your code&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I cannot reproduce your claim, could you give us more details&amp;quot;. And that would have been a completely different scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, there is the &lt;strong&gt;big&lt;/strong&gt; issue that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/echojs/echojs/issues/12#issuecomment-773976522&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you had been exploiting the vulnerability&lt;/a&gt; before reporting (or so they think). In a completely unwarranted way and without authorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that from time to time, someone reports a vulnerability and, &lt;em&gt;after being ignored or told it's not a vulnerability&lt;/em&gt;, they exploit -not without controversy- that &amp;quot;non-vulnerability&amp;quot; to prove their point (examples include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/one-way-get-facebooks-attention-hack-zuckerbergs-personal-page-6C10952867&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.com/2012/03/05/github_hack/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;…).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, exploiting a &lt;strong&gt;live, production system&lt;/strong&gt;, without authorization, much further than would be needed to confirm the issue (which shouldn't be tested there, anyway) and telling everybody how to do further harm… It would be delusional to expect them to be happy about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had you needed to first test the vulnerability, you should have prepared a local install, and test it on that laboratory you own. Or, in some cases, there are public test instances which are &lt;em&gt;explicitly designated&lt;/em&gt; as allowing vulnerability testing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if you were (wrongly) testing in the production site, absent explicit consent to do otherwise, the proper action would have been to stop any further action once it's confirmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Additionally, do remember that even &lt;em&gt;attempting&lt;/em&gt; to attack a site might be illegal on the applicable jurisdiction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is akin to you telling a car company they should make their cars bulletproof, since a bullet which came into the hood/bonnet (in an easy way you explicitly detail) makes the motor of the car explode, bursting in flames… through an open letter published in the newspaper… the day after you have been shooting to cars on the city center all day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‎​&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, albeit it pales in comparison to the above, I would also like to bring attention to a problem with the attitude you showed. Such as the final phrases&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision is up to you, whether you want to run such a community, or, shut it down, at least temporarily, fix these problems and run it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saying that it's the duty of users to not spam is just transferring the burden. If you refuse to take action now, it's just bad for all users, People can manipulate votes to favour bad posts without ever getting caught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or in the replies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that even without all that exploitation, had I informed you all about this, no one could have cared any less about this issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You came angry and confrontational, demanding things from people which don't get even paid for that, after wreaking havoc in the community. That's quite a different scenario than what you asked above. Taking all of that into account, and reading their patient responses, I would consider your issue was &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; well received by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastEditorUserId="21926" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T06:40:30.817" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T06:40:30.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11251" CreationDate="2021-02-05T23:28:23.587" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, license compatibility is generally transitive but does not quite form a partial order in the mathematical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viewing license compatibility as a partial order makes sense in the context of copyleft licenses like the GPL. These require that the software as a whole must be available as the same license. Thus, if we include compatibly-licensed software into a GPL-covered program, the entire program is effectively licensed under GPL. And any GPL software can also be used in an AGPL-covered program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This view stops making sense with more permissive licenses. Here, the licenses do not impose any requirements on the program as a whole, but can freely provide permissions and impose conditions. The licensee will then effectively have the intersection of permissions, and the union of conditions to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an abstract example, consider the following made-up licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, subject to the following condition:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;X-Attribution&lt;/strong&gt;, a made-up combination of 0BSD + MIT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, subject to the following condition:&#xA;If the software is modified, the modified version shall only be distributed (a) under any OSI-approved license, or (b) in a manner that doesn't prevent installation of the unmodified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;X-Compat&lt;/strong&gt;, a made-up combination of 0BSD with a core feature of the Artistic License)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A software that combines software under these two licenses is licensed under neither of these alone, but under both in combination. The relicensing mechanism of X-Compat clause (a) cannot be used to switch to X-Attribution because X-Attribution is not OSI-approved. However, the licenses are clearly compatible: nothing prevents a licensee from complying with both license conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we might say that “X-Attribution is-compatible-with X-Compat” and “X-Compat is-compatible-with X-Attribution”, but the licenses are not equal. This violates the antisymmetric condition you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be possible to find a practical example of this issue with more exotic permissive licenses, e.g. involving the Artistic License, Attribution Assurance License, or SIL Open Font License. But I haven't checked this in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more rigorous definition would consider that the compatibility relation should not consider compatibility between two “input” licenses, but possible changes to licensing that a covered software can undergo. Here, it would be more precise to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X-Compat is-compatible-with (X-Compat AND X-Attribution)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X-Attribution is-compatible-with (X-Compat AND X-Attribution)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, we can say for some licenses with explicit relicensing provisions there wouldn't be an AND operator on the right side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-2.0+ is-compatible-with GPL-2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-2.0+ is-compatible-with GPL-3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL-3.0 is-compatible-with GPL-3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This post uses the &lt;code&gt;AND&lt;/code&gt; operator as defined in SPDX license expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T23:28:23.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-06T00:26:24.460" Score="5" ViewCount="778" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope this is the right place to ask these questions. If not please help me find a place so I can safely ask these questions without simply getting an off-topic label. I will describe two situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a Java application that I distribute. I wrote most of the code and used some BSD, MIT license, which doesn't require me to open source my software. Now I have another feature, and I found an open-source solution which is GPL. I can't use it directly without making my software open-source GPL. But how about I convert this GPL Java code or C code to lua? and then my software includes LuaJ, which interprets the lua code. I can make the lua code GPL. The GNU GPL website did mention &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot; in brackets. This lua code is controlled by the LuaJ which compiles it to byte code on the user's computer and runs it. I can also go to the extreme to make it so the user put the link to the lua code inside my software so it can download it. Or does the software automatically download it after installed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a device that runs Windows and it needs to run the software which I wrote. It's not open source or GPL. I need a certain functionality so I found a GPL source code for it. Can I put a Virtual Linux on the device so it will launch a virtual Linux and run this GPL software inside the virtual machine and then communicate with my proprietary Windows software? Is it still legal for me not to GPL my Windows software? The virtual machine, and the image is prebuilt and loaded on the device's storage, with my software binary for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21975" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-09T10:12:04.033" LastActivityDate="2023-07-09T10:12:04.033" Title="Can Non GPL software use GPL code in virtual machine or interpreter" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-06T07:53:25.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure you (for whom English is presumably a second language) understand what the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demand#h2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;demand&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to ask or &lt;strong&gt;call for with authority&lt;/strong&gt; : claim as due or just&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt;, however, English &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; your first language then you're be a rude and presumptuous jack a$$ for &lt;strong&gt;demanding&lt;/strong&gt; that someone else do something for you for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9737" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T07:53:25.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-06T08:46:28.190" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The goal is to allow user to use a USB that is ext-4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand Minix 3 is similar to BSD, and ext-4 is GNU GPL. So as a user, I can port ext-4 to Minix 3 and make it GPL so I can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, what if I want to sell a device (computer) to other users? The device contains Minix 3 and this ported GPL ext-4. Does it make Minix 3 GPL now that Minix 3 communicates with the ext-4 tightly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21946" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T08:46:28.190" Title="Port GPL EXT-4 to MINIX 3" Tags="|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11256" CreationDate="2021-02-06T15:58:47.687" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is not specific to any technology like Java vs Lua, Windows vs Linux. To determine the scope of the GPL, we have but one question to consider: does this form a single program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is not for the GPL to answer, it is a question for copyright law. However, the GPL authors have opinions on this question, which I regard as sufficiently authoritative in this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To determine whether something forms a single copyright-covered work, the GPL authors suggest that a program forms a single work, including any files or libraries. Whether two processes that communicate with each other form a single program would depend on what/how they communicate. If they have deeply intertwined shared state, then that would point towards being a single program. An interpreter or compiler is a program that processes another program as data. The compiler and the program being compiled clearly do not form a single program. In the case of an interpreter, things can be more tricky since the interpreter may offer various libraries to the interpreted program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following, I provide a brief analysis of your two scenarios. TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You will not find a GPL loophole. The idea “user clicks a button to load GPL-covered Lua code” will not work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can use GPL software in a proprietary system if the two are clearly separate programs (think microservices).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can run GPL-covered software on Windows. A Linux VM likely just complicates compliance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scenario 1: Using GPL-covered plugins in a proprietary application.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your first scenario, you are proposing that a proprietary software adds a Lua-based plugin system, which would then be used to load GPL-covered plugins. Since the GPL is technology-neutral, it doesn't matter which language or system is used to load the plugins: Lua scripts, JAR files, or DLL files will all lead to the same conclusion. The GPL FAQ contains multiple entries relating to plugins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would depend on how the plugin and the main program communicate. It is likely that the plugin and the host program would form a single program in your case, since your Lua runtime environment would likely allow the Lua code to call into your application and/or your application to call into the Lua code. In contrast, they would likely be separate programs if the Lua code is executed in a standalone process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPluginsInNF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I apply the GPL when writing a plug-in for a nonfree program?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they would form a single program, then no. Slightly simplifying: The GPL requires that you make all dependencies of the GPL-covered program available. You are proposing to rewrite the GPL-covered code to fit your application's plugin system, which would make your application a dependency of the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were the sole copyright holder of the plugin, you could add a GPL exception to allow this case. However, you are not the sole copyright holder since you are using existing GPL code, and therefore cannot grant such an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can I release a nonfree program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not really different from the above cases. If your proprietary application is specifically designed to load a GPL-covered plugin, there's a good argument that it's derivative of this GPL-covered code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your application merely has the ability to load plugins which could be GPL-covered, then the user would be able to create (but not necessarily distribute) a GPL-covered plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You propose that the user could trigger the loading of the plugin. I don't think this will change anything: if you provide an application with a plugin system, a matching GPL-covered plugin, and offer instructions for the user to load this plugin, there's a pretty good argument that your application would have to be available under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scenario 2: Using GPL-covered software on Windows.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your second scenario, you are concerned about running GPL-covered software on Windows. You are proposing to run this software in a Linux virtual machine, and then have your proprietary application communicate with the virtualized GPL-covered software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's perfectly acceptable to distribute proprietary and GPL-covered software side by side. This is sometimes called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/a&gt;. You just have to make sure to comply with the GPL license for the GPL-covered parts, e.g. you must not make the use of the GPL parts conditional on accepting an EULA, and you must not prevent modifications to the GPL-covered components, and you must provide the corresponding source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it seems that your proprietary software and the GPL-covered software may be communicating “at arms length” and therefore are two separate programs (compare the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;). The GPL is technology neutral, so running the two programs in different processes vs running them in different virtual machines makes no difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you are allowed to run GPL-covered software directly on Windows. While the GPL generally requires you to make all dependencies available under the GPL, the GPL-3.0 exempts “System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work”. For example, a GPL-covered program can use Windows System Libraries like the Win32 API. The GPL-covered software could also require gratis but generally available tools such as the proprietary Visual C++ compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do distribute a virtual machine image, note that you must comply with the licenses for all of the software contained in that image. This can be rather tedious, as you'd have to consider all software including the Linux kernel and programs in the userland. Busybox provides a minimal userland which can simplify compliance, alternatively you might want to use a BSD userland instead of using GNU tools. Certain Linux distributions such as Debian are very good at managing licenses for software installed through Debian's &lt;code&gt;main&lt;/code&gt; packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T14:35:37.160" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T14:35:37.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11249" CreationDate="2021-02-06T16:28:24.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must comply with the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the software that you distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must I include the license statement of every library in the bundle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if that is required by a license in your bundle. Most open source licenses including MIT, LGPL, GPL require this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be sufficient to only have the license files in the public repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, most licenses require that the notices are included with every copy of the software, i.e. directly together with your bundle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the GPL offers various mechanisms for providing the corresponding source code to recipients. In general, offering the source code for download free of charge from some server (e.g. a public code repository) would likely be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to mention the licenses in my (GUI) application as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on the license. My opinion is that this is the right thing to do, regardless of what the license says. In particular, you should mention the open source licenses in any place where you assert your copyright, since you are not the sole copyright holder of the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain licenses such as Apache-2 and GPL-3.0 have explicit requires to show some notices in the user interface, but the details depend on the license. E.g. the vanilla GPL does not require you to add such notices to a user interface, but you have to preserve existing appropriate legal notices, and you may be required to add notices under the GPL's additional terms mechanism. If you combine GPL-3.0 covered software with Apache-2 covered software, you would effectively have such an additional term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T16:28:24.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9610" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:28:27.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Microsoft was mixed up with sublicensing of others products which they bundled into SDK you are in trouble even without any notices in files headers. Like buying stolen doesn't legalize ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to read EULA of SDK. It might point to 3rd parties and their conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It it requerment in USA to mark copyright rights in each work. In Europe is doesn't make sense as almost all joined Berne convention and you get the rights on a creaton regardless providing special marking or registering copyrights in any body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So probably MS got sublicense from Intel but they incorporated work without altering &amp;quot;standard boilerplate copyright&amp;quot; header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify situaton read conditons and contact legal department both of MS &amp;amp; Intel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11497" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:28:27.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11185" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:34:10.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider to use separate permissive license for code snippets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows to copy &amp;amp; incorporate your code into others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't put attributon requerment for the code, it adds only headache of mentoning your name, usually tutorials are trivial to bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On other hand text and other creative material might require attributon, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11497" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:34:10.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11256" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:37:08.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that interpreter provides an isolation and would just give some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I distribute a program including LuaJ and some lua script, is that one program? I would say so. And if I publish the lua script I wrote for it  to be GPL, does it mean that LuaJ is GPL? I hope we see the problem here. That should not change what license LuaJ is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Roblox application is one program, which has a lua interpreter which is tightly coupled with the application. If I release a part that uses GPL lua code (I wrote them and made them GPL), does it make roblox GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21946" LastEditorUserId="21946" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:12:17.120" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:12:17.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-06T21:19:45.950" Score="1" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm designing a web service where one part of it will be licensed as AGPLv3 (Affero GPLv3) because of a dependency. But I want to make the other part of that system proprietary. The users will be able to interact with the whole system publicly and use both parts. The two subsystems/components will also interact with each-other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd publish the original-derived part's source code but I'd like to have the other part as a proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license says that OS and library dependencies are fine to use if interface+implementation is opensource but it doesn't say exactly if I can use network/lib dependencies without declaring their source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it possible to have a documented/generated/extracted interface which describes system interaction which I'd then use as a part of my system? Which would be closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the question boils down to &amp;quot;can I use Liskov substitution&amp;quot; without a need to opensource both implementations of the interface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to host it as a service. Original-derived code would be opensourced but there would be part of the code that wouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I depend on closed-source network dependency from opensource part?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I depend on closed-source non-system library from opensource part?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to provide a stub/toy implementation of the features if I create an interface to manage my new feature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21994" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T09:53:07.920" Title="Does AGPLv3 prohibit to have a proprietary part of a service?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11264" CreationDate="2021-02-07T09:14:31.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, let's dispose of the &amp;quot;System Library&amp;quot; exception.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s1 defines a &lt;em&gt;System Library&lt;/em&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anything, other than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that Major Component ... A &amp;quot;Major Component&amp;quot;, in this context, means a major essential component (kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system (if any) on which the executable work runs ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the work you're trying to define thus is one of the works you're writing, then it's not &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a major essential component of the OS&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and you can't use this exception to exempt part of your work from the AGPL's requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether you can design your project as two separate works - one AGPL (in this case, by necessity) and the other proprietary (in this case, by choice) - which function together to deliver a service is addressed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. I have no permission to use that software except what the GPL gives me. Can I do this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system ...&#xA;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and nonfree programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arm's-length communication is not well-defined, but is generally accepted to include interaction via fork-and-exec, with no complex code-specific structure passed between them.  So if you can design your project to allow for this kind of distant interaction between the AGPL portion and the proprietary portion, it is permissible to do this, and it will avoid your needing to open up the proprietary code.  If, however, one part calls the other as a library service, or complex code-specific structure is passed between them over a network (by way of examples), then they are not separate works, and the AGPL requirement will extend throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T09:53:07.920" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T09:53:07.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2021-02-07T12:06:55.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase the quote from the FSF given in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11056/258&quot;&gt;answer by JNic&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license of the interpreter itself is of no concern. The interpreter and the software executed by it are independent works as far as copyright is concerned and their licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to keep your application proprietary, you cannot use any GPL-licensed library and that would include the standard library of the implementation language and any transitive dependency.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T12:06:55.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11243" CreationDate="2021-02-07T13:08:21.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, you ship an executable that can &lt;em&gt;dynamically-load&lt;/em&gt; a C runtime library, and you don't link the library into the executable.  When you do that, the user may runtime-link against &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; C library they have available, and you have no need to reproduce the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;statically-link&lt;/em&gt; your binary, then you are distributing the covered work, and you must include the notice (and also ensure your program is available in unlinked form, so that users may update/replace the standard library objects within it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T13:08:21.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-07T20:24:03.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt;?  Who knows - that depends very much on personal position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it &lt;em&gt;helpful&lt;/em&gt;?  I'd argue not.  If you're not writing the code yourself, you need to persuade someone else that they want to make the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A time-honoured means is to offer payment - but don't assume that alone will convince anyone, no matter how large the amount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more constructive way (assuming you have the capability) is to propose a patch - and be prepared to accept criticism and update the patch before it's accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The weakest way is to suggest that a change would improve the code and hope that the maintainer agrees strongly enough to implement that change herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Demanding&lt;/em&gt; a change would very likely just be ignored (or at best, politely rebuffed) in most development communities I've seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T20:24:03.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6877" CreationDate="2021-02-07T22:13:50.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To complement other answers: That it is open source doesn't mean that it will be continuously updated, or at all. The owner of the code can also take e.g. version 2.5 and state that from the following version 3.0 forward the code is propietary. Sure, you can take older open source versions, even build on them and create your own fork. This has happened, see e.g. StarOffice, which was opened as OpenOffice and donated to the Apache foundation but a GPLed fork LibreOffice came to be. Eventually the original died off. Or SSH, which was open source and went closed, the last open version giving rise to OpenSSH (probably the most popular SSH version by today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T22:13:50.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-08T10:41:22.600" Score="3" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to create a license and copyright notice for an embedded device using Raspbian Lite as operating system, running a custom application developed by me. The device is sold as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I browsed a lot of questions and answers, but I'm still not sure, if I have to include information about ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) ... the operating system itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) ... every apt package that was already installed in the stock download?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) ... every apt package that I installed later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;include information&amp;quot; I mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naming the copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adding the license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite sure that the answer to c) is &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, but not sure about a) and b) (and if &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, how to manage this enormous effort).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it matters: the application only lives in user space and the user has no direct access to operating system resources, he can only interact with my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22021" LastEditorUserId="22021" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:36:32.287" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T11:36:32.287" Title="License notice for embedded device - include operating system and apt packages?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2021-02-08T11:30:35.073" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's simple: if you distribute software, you have to abide by the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you thus sell a device with different software on it, you have to abide by all the licenses concurrently, that includes the OS. Usually includes at least making available the copyright / credits and license information to the user in some way. For copy-left licensed software (thus GPL) it also requires to make available the corresponding source code to your customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For embedded devices with no reasonable user interface this often is done in a form where the complete source code for all packages in the very same version as used on your device is made available in a download folder or an archive for download on the manufacturer's website (thus yours in your case). If possible, the license information for the individual packages should be available directly and it might communicate the URL under which its sources can be found. In a mobile phone there's an about section. On a wifi device it might send in its acknowledgement or welcome message the version, a special package... whatever fits the application, the (general) license and an URL for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course offering it in form of packages for a package manager would improve the situation for customers interested in meddling with the software - but that is not a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T11:31:48.903" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T11:31:48.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11240" CreationDate="2021-02-08T19:33:49.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it wrong to demand changes in open-source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maintainer(s) of the project don't owe you anything.  They are under no obligation to do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this analogy.  Alice makes chocolate chip cookies for her family every Friday and, he makes some extras to give to folks in the neighborhood.  Bob loves Alice's cookies, and one day Bob tells Alice &amp;quot;I like cookies with walnuts, and I'd like the cookies to have walnuts on them.&amp;quot;  Alice explains that her family likes them without walnuts, but she would be happy to give Bob the recipe so he can make his own.  She doesn't know if the recipe would work with walnuts, but it's a good starting point.  Bob doesn't like this answer.  He tells Alice again that he expects her to make cookies the way he likes them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can agree that Bob is out of line for expecting Alice to change how she does things for him, much less demanding it.  So too it is with open source maintainers and users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3745" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T19:33:49.303" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-08T20:53:18.830" Score="2" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I commercialize a SaaS Web Application that uses a component licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://ckeditor.com/ckeditor-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKEditor5&lt;/a&gt;) or under &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://materialdesignicons.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Material Design Icons&lt;/a&gt;), where and how should I give attribution for those components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are never distributed as source code, though they are running in the browser as bundled, minified JavaScript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Angular build process generates a file named &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; listing all components and all licenses. It's deployed on the web server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that sufficient or should there be a &amp;quot;3rd party components&amp;quot; section in the SaaS' &amp;quot;Terms of Service&amp;quot;? If so, what should be listed? Is a simple link to the &lt;code&gt;3rdpartylicenses.txt&lt;/code&gt; mentioned above sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22029" LastEditorUserId="22029" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T20:52:08.123" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T20:52:08.123" Title="How to give attribution for Open Source Licenses used in commercial SaaS web-applications?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|attribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T04:35:07.710" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using some JavaScript code under the BSD 3-Clause License. However, the minified version that they provided does not assert the said license.&#xA;Is it fine if I just copy the license provided in their repository and place it in the same directory of their code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22034" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T04:35:07.710" Title="How should I put attribution or license when using a minified version of code which does not assert copyright?" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11278" CreationDate="2021-02-10T04:30:04.473" Score="7" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the past few years, Microsoft has been increasingly endorsing the Linux Kernel. They allow running a stripped down version of GNU/Linux distros in Windows, and Microsoft Azure uses Linux nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if Microsoft decides to make a version of Windows with the Linux Kernel, and continue to release it as a proprietary operating system (and only release their kernel under GPL2)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose they say, &amp;quot;Our kernel is free and open source (you can look up here for the source), but the rest of the OS is non-free (and we won't allow you to modify or redistribute it)&amp;quot;. Can they legally do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastEditorUserId="20205" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T13:16:24.133" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T12:43:28.500" Title="Can Microsoft legally release a version of Windows with the Linux kernel as a proprietary operating system?" Tags="|license|linux-kernel|microsoft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11277" CreationDate="2021-02-10T07:49:57.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, they can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the kernel is licensed under GPLv2 with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note?h=v5.1.3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;syscall exception&lt;/a&gt;, which says that the kernel's &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;copyright does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;of the kernel, and does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; fall under the heading of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  So Microsoft could certainly found a new proprietary OS on the Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, this is already routinely done on Android phones: the kernel is Linux (or, at the very least, a derivative of the Linux kernel, and thus must also be covered by GPLv2) but user-space is packed with proprietary programs running on a partially-proprietary OS (think of all the Google-specific bits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's chance in a million of this happening, but I can't see any licensing bar to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T07:49:57.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11306" CreationDate="2021-02-10T14:09:34.807" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have under development a commercial library of controls for a UI framework. An open source (MIT licenced) project wishes to use these controls and we want to let them use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess my questions are simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to license commercial software to a MIT-licensed project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the best way to do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any good examples of where this happens already?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22047" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T10:03:46.667" Title="Licensing commercial product for open source MIT project" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11281" CreationDate="2021-02-10T14:56:32.843" Score="4" ViewCount="1241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6142/include-library-dependencies-licenses-as-well&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and am well aware that you are required to also include your project's dependencies' licenses besides your own in any open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you are supposed to include them. Obviously you can't have multiple files named &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, so what do you do instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22049" LastEditorUserId="22049" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T11:11:21.887" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T18:46:26.750" Title="How should you include your dependencies' licenses?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11280" CreationDate="2021-02-11T18:46:26.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no schematic rule which fits all. Do something which fulfills the license terms and fits the way you distribute your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. the MIT license requires&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL suggests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short&#xA;notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;program&amp;gt;  Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.&#xA;This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical commands &lt;code&gt;show w&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;show c&lt;/code&gt; should show the&#xA;appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your&#xA;program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would&#xA;use an “about box”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you can even have one LICENSE file. You can have folders with one each. You can rename them to like original_project_LICENSE... whatever. Just be clear in what you do and what refers to what modules or parts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T18:46:26.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-12T11:47:59.580" Score="3" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about making my own video games and want them to be open source and on game consoles as well. I know that GPL is not an option because companies like Nintendo and Microsoft don't allow GPL plus license incompatibility with stuff like signing an NDA. All I want is that you must make public the source code at all times. Which license should I pick?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22068" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T15:16:13.487" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T00:22:43.680" Title="Software license for game consoles?" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11283" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11285" CreationDate="2021-02-12T18:18:08.510" Score="10" ViewCount="8996" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a not open source project. As I truly respect the ideas behind the free software movement, I would like to also make my own works open source whenever possible. However, I am not the sole owner of the piece and thus I must take into consideration the business interests of the company as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software in question is a web application which would be used within an organization or provided to the organization as a service (which our company is doing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would need to find a license which would make it impossible for somebody else to offer it as a service, but would still allow others to use it in some other way (for instance as a self-hosted version or at least have access to the source code). I see it is not very open-source-minded, but still better than 100% proprietary code which it currently is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am therefore wondering &lt;strong&gt;if there are any licence which would be more restrictive than GPLv3, but would still qualify as free software&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, is there such a &lt;strong&gt;license which would require not only the source code to be public, but also all the data which flows through the application to be public&lt;/strong&gt;? Would it be free software? How hard would it be to create such a license by oneself without juridical background?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, are there any good licenses in between free software and full proprietary options? For instance, something which would allow the use of software for none-commercial purposes only? In other fields the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial&lt;/a&gt; is widely used, but I have header it is not recommended for software. What other options there are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20282" LastEditorUserId="20282" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T16:23:31.320" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:01:57.967" Title="Choosing the most restrictive open-source license" Tags="|gpl-3|creative-commons|proprietary-code|restrictions|license-creation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2021-02-12T18:22:44.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero General Public License v3.0&lt;/a&gt; is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately doesn't hit the mark completely. Although it does mandate that users who interact with the licensed material via network are given the right to receive a copy of the source code, it doesn't mandate publishing the data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20682" LastEditorUserId="20682" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T18:35:34.740" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T18:35:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2021-02-12T20:53:10.153" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no free software / open source license that will satisfy your requirements. These licenses generally focus on the freedoms of end users, they are not trying to restrict anyone. The freedom to use software for any purpose (including to compete with your offerings) is considered essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a freedom-preserving license with the purpose of restricting freedoms can work to some degree, but it will generally end with disappointment. It's perfectly acceptable if your software won't be open source, as long as it's not misleadingly labelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;AGPL&lt;/strong&gt; is a copyleft license that is useful for preserving end user freedom in the context of SaaS software. If the software operator modifies the software, they must make the source code available to all remote users. This license used to be popular in the “we're open source but don't want SaaS competition” space. But that doesn't work: this license doesn't prevent SaaS offerings at all. It merely requires that users get access to the source code, but only if the source code was modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL)&lt;/strong&gt; is an extension of this approach. It also enables the user to get access to their data stored by an SaaS offering, so that they could actually migrate to a self-hosted solution. While this limits lock-in effects of SaaS, this too doesn't prevent SaaS competition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;CC-BY-NC / CC-BY-SA-NC&lt;/strong&gt; licenses are not considered free or open source. They are very good licenses for creative works, but have two problems: They are less suitable for computer programs because they do not differentiate between the source code and other forms of the program. And the exact scope of the “NonCommercial” clause is fairly unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other licenses that provide for some openness without the freedoms implied by open source. Those are sometimes called &lt;strong&gt;source-available&lt;/strong&gt;. One of those approaches is to publish without any license, all rights reserved (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;what is the default license?&lt;/a&gt;). The SSPL is a non-free license that strongly discourages SaaS use, but is otherwise like the GPL. The Business Source License allows only non-production use, but automatically converts into an open-source license at some point in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you &lt;strong&gt;create a suitable license yourself?&lt;/strong&gt; I would beg you not to. Open source licenses have to consider copyright and contract law. They generally have to work in international jurisdictions, not just the legal system at home. They have to be good for the duration of copyright, which is often over a century in total. Drafting a good license is &lt;em&gt;difficult&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many licenses that were written by well-intentioned amateurs, but this might introduce important oversights or even fatal flaws in their license mechanisms. Sometimes, they may fail to properly impose some license condition. Or they are written so unclearly that they might not be granting the rights they intend to grant. Sometimes, these licenses are created by recombining phrases and sections from existing licenses in a cargo-cult fashion, without understanding their connections. Such DIY licenses are often called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;crayon license&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like to create open source code without jeopardizing commercial interests, it might be better to move away from the license question to the question &lt;em&gt;which parts&lt;/em&gt; can be published freely. Some parts of your software might be actually valuable to you – the functionality that sets you apart from competitors. And some code is unique to your situation – it doesn't matter if it's open source or not because it's useless to anyone else. However, there may be some modules that are useful but not particularly valuable to you, for example a configuration library or some frontend widget. Open-sourcing those might be possible without significant problems. You are most likely already making use of many open source tools and libraries. Instead of creating a new project, you could also consider with the maintenance of those (since this will ultimately also benefit you), or you could upstream new features that would help you with your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T20:53:10.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2021-02-14T01:45:34.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this page [1], these are the most restrictive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;European Union Public License 1.1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;European Union Public License 1.2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GNU Affero General Public License v3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Software License 3.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I use &lt;em&gt;Open Software License 3.0&lt;/em&gt; with my projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://choosealicense.com/appendix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="676" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T01:45:34.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11301" CreationDate="2021-02-14T08:10:18.860" Score="1" ViewCount="483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to deploy a SaaS application (Licensed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;) and offer to 3rd parties with my own pricing model. I have few doubts with respect to the license and future development on the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can i deploy the SaaS code and earn money through my pricing model?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can i make styling changes on the existing code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can i remove attribution from the footer (Powered by x) from all pages and provide credits within a dedicated page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If i create additional modules / enhancements on the application, do i need to open source them? I have scenarios where some of my clients want few specific customization on the application, which they're not willing to make open. I'll not share the code, will enable such module for specific clients.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If i need to open source, can i do it on-demand rather than publishing on github?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22080" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T07:34:59.600" Title="Deploy GNU GPLv3 licensed SaaS application with custom pricing and closed source enhancements" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T11:57:58.490" Score="1" ViewCount="687" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of using the following library in a website I am building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/imazen/imageflow-dotnet-server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/imazen/imageflow-dotnet-server&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is licensed under the AGPLv3 license. However, I am not 100% clear whether this means if I use it at all then I have to make my entire website open source, or whether I only have to do so if I actually modify the library. Can anyone clarify in simple terms what AGPLv3 means in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22081" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:19:50.763" Title="Understanding AGPLv3 and if I need to OpenSource" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11292" CreationDate="2021-02-14T15:28:09.387" Score="4" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many open source communities that provide good and effective tools and ecosystems for their users. In fact, there is not doubt that the best programming tools available in this age, follow a pattern of a core open source software system that provides the essential functionalities, and a plethora of open source modules and extensions to the core module, so that the end developers can easily tailor their solution to their specific needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In almost all cases this works perfectly, with well maintained extensions that are open source and free for everybody to use and extend. For example, I have never seen a closed source or paywalled module for Python, npm. Ruby on Rails, for Java, all the modules needed to make your application work are there to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are some specific open source communities, where eventhough there is an open source core module, it is practically unusable unless the user buys a plethora of closed-source extensions. I call these communities &amp;quot;Open Source In Name Only&amp;quot; (OSINO), since their objective seems to be to lure foolish developers into thinking that the ecosystem is open, while in reality it is impossible to use the software even for the most basic use-cases, unless you either spend hundreds of dollars in extensions, or spend hundreds of hours implementing all the missing functionally over undocumented source code. Some notorious examples are Wordpress, where you can't even have two languages in your website, or prestashop, where you have to buy extensions even for basic tasks such as accepting credit cards, or for allowing the user to edit his order while it is in the checkout cart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common pattern for these communities is to make it as difficult as possible to determine beforehand if a module is free or not, using shady tactics like not allowing to search by the cost, not disclosing all anti-features that the &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; version of the module provides, etc. To give an example of this, there was a wordpress theme that was &amp;quot;free&amp;quot;, but you had to buy the premium version if you wanted it to scale on mobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how can an open source community protect itself from devolving into a OSINO? Is there anything that either the core developers, or the community around the software can do to prevent such practices in their ecosystem? What defence do the developers or the end-users in open source communities have in order to in order to protect their community from this, and how have some communities managed to achieve this while others have not? And how can an end-user easily determine that the software they intend to use is really open or an OSINO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22085" LastEditorUserId="22085" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T15:39:59.667" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:48:18.920" Title="How to protect communities from devolving into &quot;open source in name only&quot;?" Tags="|closed-source|community|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2021-02-14T15:58:48.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The developers behind the Timescale database are attempting to do something in this direction with their license, see e.g. the post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their blog&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;I am unable to judge, whether this has any chance of surviving in a legal court, but I think it is an interesting attempt anyway ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22086" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T15:58:48.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11293" CreationDate="2021-02-14T16:50:50.677" Score="2" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; as used by MongoDB is a license based on GPL, but not OSI-approved, thus programmes under that license would e.g. not fall under the topic of this community here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, reading through the license it reads indeed very much similar to the GPL. The notable difference is, that for SaaS applications, you have to release basically the whole setup under SSPL (§13):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program&#xA;or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs&#xA;that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a&#xA;service, including, without limitation, management software, user&#xA;interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software,&#xA;monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting&#xA;software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service&#xA;using the Service Source Code you make available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a very nice answer to the question I meant to aks originally on the differences between those licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-and-the-open-source-definition&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, in practical terms: How does that work cleanly for a service which makes use of different components, which are subject to different licenses which might be incompatible with SSPL? As an example it might feature a project development software like Redmine (license GPLv2) with MongoDB as backend. I definitely would have no permission to relicense the other 3rd-party packages and services which I didn't write myself and I use on a site. Is there any accepted take on this? Or is this (technically) putting the user at a legal risk, even when I provide source for my whole website and service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:11:08.880" Title="How to interpret the SSPL terms on licensing the service under SSPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl|sspl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11289" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:06:26.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no particularly good solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source software needs maintenance, which has costs – at the very least, it will cost time. This is a &lt;em&gt;tragedy of the commons&lt;/em&gt; scenario where everyone benefits from contributions, but it's not generally advantageous for anyone to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A potential solution is that one entity shoulders almost the entire cost, in exchange for some kind of (temporary?) monopoly over the project. In an open-core context, a company controlling a project can control which features makes it into the “official” version, thus ensuring a niche for their proprietary addons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as the project license is Open Source, there is a balancing factor: this monopoly only exists with acquiescence of the community. Someone else can take over the maintenance responsibility and fork the project, and the community can migrate to that fork as the new “official” version. This is somewhat rare, but notable examples include the X server (two times!) and OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. More generally, competition for mindshare can encourage continued openness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the community, it is important to recognize certain risk factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open core is a kind of moral hazard, since the privileged maintainer is disincentivized to support Open Source features that would compete with their proprietary offerings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, open core can be a good compromise between openness and economic viability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) paired with copyleft licensing tilt the balance of power towards the original maintainer, since no alternative maintainer can compete with them on an equal playing field. Through the CLAs, the original maintainer is not bound by the public license and will always have more rights over the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, a CLA can be a good compromise to make it economically viable to make some project Open Source – this is still a contribution to the commons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, certain factors are more conductive to project health (but not necessarily project success):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project is controlled by a diverse consortium of for-profit actors, or by a non-profit foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, a single for-profit actor can also be a good steward of a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The project has copyleft licensing &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; any CLA, or permissive licensing. That way, no actor has a substantially more privileged position with regards to copyright/IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the combination of CLAs with copyleft licensing does have legitimate uses, e.g. for the GNU project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding such factors can help with deciding what projects to depend upon, and deciding what projects to contribute to. Individuals within the Open Source ecosystem can &lt;em&gt;vote with their dependencies&lt;/em&gt;, as a kind of Open Source pendant to voting with your wallet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A solution that will not work is if every user of Open Source software were taxed in order to contribute to the upkeep. Such a tax will only work if it is mandatory, but mandatory fees are fundamentally opposed to Open Source values. Perhaps this means that the Open Source concept is inherently unsustainable. Perhaps there is an Open Source bubble with far more software being Open Source than actually economically viable. It definitely means that companies should be compelled to “voluntarily” contribute to Open Source maintenance for PR reasons, and that actual tax money should generally &lt;a href=&quot;https://publiccode.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;benefit&lt;/a&gt; Open Source rather than proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not addressed your issues with confusing marketing, where it's difficult to determine what is Open and what is not. Misleading marketing is not specific to Open Source. One thing that can help is to access software through channels that vets Open Source licensing, or at least requires clear (and machine-readable) indication of licensing. On Linux, the Debian packages are a good example of vetting for license compliance. Package managers like NPM generally have machine-readable license metadata (though NPM is a bad example since the license metadata is frequently incorrect). On a social level, it is important to insist on clarity about what is truly Open and what is not. For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; is a fantastic license for what it wants to achieve – but it sure isn't Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="427" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T18:05:39.937" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T18:05:39.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11291" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:11:08.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different licenses have different conditions. The GPL triggers requirements when distributing a covered work (in whole or in part, in modified or unmodified form). Additionally, the SSPL triggers requirements when offering the software as a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using an SSPL-covered software as &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of a software system, without offering this SSPL-covered software as a service to third parties, then §13 SSPL won't apply. A database that supports a web application – but is not directly accessible to users – is a typical example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two licenses do not affect other software (except per §13 SSPL). You can run SSPL- and GPL-licensed programs together, as long as they are clearly separate programs. Their license incompatibility would become an issue only when you trigger §13 SSPL, or when you combine SSPL- and GPL-covered parts into a single program and try to distribute the combined program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MongoDB is correct in their argument that their switch to the SSPL will not have affected &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; users. However, it is still a non-Open license that (a) effectively makes certain uses impossible, and (b) has the unusual feature of potentially extending to unrelated software. The risk in the SSPL is that operators of the software must understand the impact of §13, as to not accidentally trigger this trap and land in a situation where compliance is literally impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:11:08.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:57:28.030" Score="2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently creating installers/builders which will allow a specific Linux distro to be installed in a bunch of different container frameworks (Such as Docker). The distro is licensed under GPL3. Do installers/builders count as derivative? It doesn't feel like it would. Can I license these builders however I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distro itself is created with a build script. In order to get my project working, I must run their build script. I have not yet had to modify it but I might need to. That seems like it would be a separate project/license situation though and the base builder I create will still be free of GPL? Currently, my installer downloads the distro's build script and runs it as part of its magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20706" LastEditorUserId="20706" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T22:08:48.527" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T06:26:12.073" Title="Is an installer/build script a GPL3 derivative work?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11282" CreationDate="2021-02-15T09:40:02.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the copyright holder&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; of all the code you wish to release apart from that owned by Microsoft/Nintendo, you have a couple of options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release your code under the GPL, but with an exception allowing linking with console manufacturer's code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual license your code. The version that you give to the console manufacturers can be binary-only, and you can publish a separately licensed version under the GPL. This GPL published version may not be very useful as it won't really produce a working executable, but this would allow anybody else to port your game to a different platform, or just to pick out sections of your code for use in their GPL programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important thing to note here is that you cannot use any &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; GPL code if you do this, as you do not have the right to add the exception or dual license that code. Also, while both these ideas work in terms of the GPL, you would have to check whether the console manufacturers would be happy with them; that's not something we can advise on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Or you can get the agreement of all the copyright holders.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T09:40:02.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:03:54.487" Score="2" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard that you must document all your changes and modifications to a software under the GPLv3. Is this true? If I'm not distributing this software, do I have to document my changes/modifications. How are you supposed to do this? Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track&#xA;changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to or software&#xA;including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available&#xA;under the GPL along with build &amp;amp; install instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From tl;dr legal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22324" OwnerDisplayName="YummyChocolate123" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:25:53.713" Title="Do you need to document your changes/modifications to a program under GPLv3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11297" CreationDate="2021-02-15T10:25:08.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license says verbatim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that if you make a derivative program, you shall make explicit that it's a different one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that any change within the same program shall be tracked. That was most likely an interpretation from a lawyer that isn't familiarized with software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" OwnerDisplayName="Alberto Salvia Novella" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T10:25:08.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11294" CreationDate="2021-02-16T06:26:12.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your installer/builder just takes the build script of the distro as input and it can work with any build script (i.e., your installer/builder does not contain knowledge that is specific to the build script of a particular distro and that can only be learned from looking at GPL-licensed code), then your installer/builder is an independent work as far as copyright is concerned and you are completely free in your choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need to make changes to the (GPL-licensed) build script of a distro to make it acceptable for your installer/builder, then that modified build script is a derived work of the original and needs to be released under the GPL license. That does not affect the license status of the installer/builder itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T06:26:12.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11288" CreationDate="2021-02-16T07:14:38.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license contains all the same terms and conditions that the GPL license also has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you use an AGPL licensed library, you must make the entire (C#) application available under the AGPL or GPL license. And that also means you must make the source code available to those who interact with your website under clause 13 of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T07:14:38.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11287" CreationDate="2021-02-16T07:34:59.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirements of the GPL are fairly simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any modifications, enhancements or additional modules must be licensed under the GPL (and use only code under a GPL-compatible license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone who receives a copy of the application code has the right to receive the source code. This source code will be distributed under the terms and conditions of the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no requirement to distribute anything to the general public (unless you choose to make your application downloadable for the general public).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that as long as you offer your application only as a SaaS offering, you don't have to publish anything. If you provide a copy to a customer to run on-site, then &lt;em&gt;that customer&lt;/em&gt; gets the right to have a copy of the source code of their version under the GPL license. If you choose your customers wisely, the chances are low that they will then use that copy to start competing with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T07:34:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11288" CreationDate="2021-02-16T08:19:50.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's the point of the license, that if you use the software for building a broader one everything for running it shall be warranted to be libre too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL only requires that if you publish the software, but AGPL goes a step further and requires it if you use the software as an Internet service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the Imageflow Server has dual licensing, for those who don't want to publish the code. Then you pay for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/imazen/imageflow-dotnet-server/blob/main/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU licenses&lt;/a&gt; say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an&#xA;executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including&#xA;scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or&#xA;general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are&#xA;used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part&#xA;of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files&#xA;associated with source files for the work, and the source code for&#xA;shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is&#xA;specifically designed to require. Such as by intimate data&#xA;communication or control flow between those subprograms and other&#xA;parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:19:50.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11289" CreationDate="2021-02-16T08:31:48.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By using the &lt;strong&gt;GNU General Public License&lt;/strong&gt; as the only binding factor between the organization and developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License which explicitly requires all the surrounding code needed to build, install and run the software to be libre too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an&#xA;executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including&#xA;scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware that the company can also request developers to sign a &lt;strong&gt;separate agreement&lt;/strong&gt; that will waive part of their copyright rights. Hence allowing the company to publish their contributions in some other license, and with that allowing proprietary extensions to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if &lt;strong&gt;you haven't&lt;/strong&gt; signed anything like that, the company MUST publish their extensions under the copyleft license. As they have to preserve the license for your contributed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why many companies like Apple like Open Source software that is under the &lt;strong&gt;MIT, BSD or LGPL&lt;/strong&gt; licenses. They use contributions to back up their proprietary solutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" LastEditorUserId="16525" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T08:48:18.920" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:48:18.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11283" CreationDate="2021-02-16T09:01:57.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You fear that the competence will take your software as it is, and make a competing product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in practice this is not viable if it is under the Affero License, as by just creating a service connected to the Internet they would need to publish their software. Hence you could borrow it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality libre technology forks gets traction only if who creates them goes purposely against the wishes of most of its users, by blocking important contributions to its code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16525" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:01:57.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11305" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11307" CreationDate="2021-02-16T09:06:06.147" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to freely distribute a software I developed, very demanded in a specific research and academic field. That's why it's important for me to distribute it freely at least in binary form (easy to installed and ready to be used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software uses several third-party libraries, &lt;strong&gt;all of them under some kind of open-source license (MIT, BSD, etc.)&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;But this software &lt;strong&gt;also includes a distribution of the R software and several packages for R and it's linked to R dll's&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;I know R and those packages are released under GPL3, so my software should have too. That's no a problem for me to provide my source-code under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is: what if some of the third-party libraries I use are released under some open source licence but which is not totally compatible with GPL3?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If that's a problem to distribute my software under GPL3, can I proceed in some way to avoid the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Replacing the free third-party libraries I use by GPL3-compliant only ones is not an option, many of them are very complex and the only available ones for the needed functionality)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22092" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T11:38:02.827" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T06:41:45.060" Title="Freely distributing software with third-part libraries and including R engine and packages" Tags="|gpl-3|derivative-works|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11279" CreationDate="2021-02-16T10:03:46.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we've discussed above, when you say &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;we want to let them use [our library of controls]&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, the devil is in the word &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt;.  If you're asking &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;can we let the members of this project run our code without having to pay for it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, then the answer is of course &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;yes&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I suspect that what the project wants is to incorporate your library into their project, which they distribute freely.  At this point, one of two things happens: either you give them the right to redistribute your code under the MIT licence they use, in which case, your library's going to turn up in competing commercial projects quicker than you can say &amp;quot;AGPL&amp;quot;; or you allow them to use your library but only distribute it in binary form, in which case their project becomes non-free, and I suspect, non-usable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to license commercial software to a MIT-licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; it's not possible to license it under a weakly-free licence like MIT &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; retain control of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best way to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Best&lt;/em&gt; is a subjective word.  If it were me, I'd agree they could use my library, but only under a strong copyleft licence, such as GPLv3, or even AGPLv3.  That might well mean they had to distribute their project under the same licence, a consequence that they'd have to decide whether they could endure.  But it would mean that no competitor could scoop your library out of the MIT project code and lock it straight back up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any good examples of where this happens already?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples, yes, but again, &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; is a subjective word.  Examples I consider good you might consider terrible, because of the licensing implications for the formerly-proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T10:03:46.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2021-02-16T12:30:08.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what if some of the third-party libraries I use are released under some open source licence but which is not totally compatible with GPL3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License compatibility is very black-and-white. Either a license is compatible with the GPLv3 or it is not. There is no such thing as &amp;quot;partially compatible&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give some piece of mind, the MIT and BSD licenses that you mentioned are both compatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's a problem to distribute my software under GPL3, can I proceed in some way to avoid the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you used some third-party software under a license that is not GPL compatible, then that is indeed a problem to distribute your software under GPL3. There are then only two options to proceed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove the code that is not GPL compatible from your project, possibly replacing it with something that &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; GPL compatible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carefully analyze the licenses of all packages/libraries that you believe to be under the GPL to check if they are not actually under a &amp;quot;GPL+exceptions&amp;quot; license or that there is some other way in which your software is not bound to the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example for point 2, even if you bundle the R interpreter with your software, that does not automatically make one a derived work of the other. And if they are not derived works, their licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:30:08.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11309" CreationDate="2021-02-16T14:11:08.023" Score="1" ViewCount="1820" Body="&lt;p&gt;github link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/stleary/JSON-java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/stleary/JSON-java&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license reads, &amp;quot;..&lt;strong&gt;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil&lt;/strong&gt;. ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a hyperlink in overview of github link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not_Evil%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not_Evil%22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...Google determined that the license was not compliant with the definition of free and open source software, which does not permit any restriction on how software may be used... Crockford's license is intended to mock potential users of his software[15] and has caused problems for some open source projects &lt;strong&gt;who mistook the license for an open source variant of the MIT license&lt;/strong&gt;...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it cause any legal problems if we are using this library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22091" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T16:51:44.250" Title="Is org.json a free/open source library?" Tags="|license|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11308" CreationDate="2021-02-16T16:46:57.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF says of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JSON License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This [&amp;quot;not-for-evil&amp;quot; term] is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible, but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly it is not open source because it conflicts with term 6 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of this license by some FLOSS project is as roughly as problematic as any other non-FLOSS license. It introduces a non-free term in how the software may be used, just like a license that restricts, e.g., commercial use of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the project is otherwise permissively-licensed, this doesn't cause a legal problem, but only a practical one about how the resulting software may be used (i.e., only for &amp;quot;good&amp;quot;, rather than for all purposes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the project uses a copyleft license like the GNU GPL, this does introduce a legal problem. The GPL applies to the work as a whole, and the GPL forbids the introduction of restrictions beyond what the GPL itself requires. If a project maintainer accidentally included code under the JSON License within the distribution of a GPL-licensed work, copyright holders of the GPL-licensed parts could take legal action for violation of their software's GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the FSF notes, it's possible that this not-for-evil term might be altogether legally void. If that possibility proves true in any particular jurisdiction, then the JSON License would, in effect, be a FLOSS license in that jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T16:51:44.250" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T16:51:44.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:12:44.767" Score="4" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a .net core self-contained application for an embedded linux device. The software is part of the device image and won't be sold standalone nor it is downloadable in binary or source code form. As far as I know, .net core is licensed under MIT, but with all its dependencies to native libraries and nuget packages there are a lot of questions. However, not all of them are specific for .netcore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nuget packages usually include a LICENSE file. Does this license cover everything coming with that package (including other nuget references and third-party libraries)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nuget packages often contain a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICE file. Is this just for information or is this just another &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; file which must be considered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As I only deliver binaries (everything produced via dotnet publish), is it enough if I have the license information for each file in the publish folder or do I have to include licenses of packages which don't result in a file in the publish folder? (Currently I have about 200 packages detected, but only 20 of them have a direct link to a file in the published folder).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone recommend a good website/book about the topic. It seems there are a lot of tools and information for programming languages like C where (typically) no package managers are involved and licenses are available in the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22102" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T11:42:21.423" Title="License requirements for self-contained dotnet (.net) core in embedded linux" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|microsoft|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11335" CreationDate="2021-02-16T20:33:30.290" Score="4" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a open source tool that consists of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Web-Frontend (Angular project)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Backend (Java project)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python Lib (Python project)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both, Web-Frontend and Python Lib communicate with the Backend service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish this tool on GitHub and provide it as open source. However, I am thinking of the best way to do it regarding mono vs. multi repos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My biggest concern at the moment is that if I split it in many repos, then it might end up in a mess, if contributors developed a feature that consists of multiple PRs in all of the repos. This would be a pro for having only one repo with different projects inside. However, this might become a problem for providing the Python lib as a package itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone has solved similar issues and can tell me more pros / cons or good practices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22104" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T04:43:02.543" Title="Mono vs. Multi Repository for Open Source Project on GitHub" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11362" CreationDate="2021-02-17T11:31:24.567" Score="1" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem description:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in the case of &lt;code&gt;alpine linux&lt;/code&gt;, there are &lt;code&gt;APKBUILD&lt;/code&gt; scripts which reference the source files, the complete source code can be easily fetched with the &lt;code&gt;abuild fetch&lt;/code&gt; command from the &lt;code&gt;apline-sdk&lt;/code&gt;, this does however not include the dependencies required to build and compile the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I would include the complete source code referenced in the &lt;code&gt;APKBUILD&lt;/code&gt; script, the &lt;code&gt;APKBUILD&lt;/code&gt; script itself and the same for all runtime dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the following part of the gplv2 (section 3) correctly providing the build and compile dependencies is not necessary if they can be installed through the package manager from the target operating system (Alpine Linux).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source&#xA;code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any&#xA;associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to&#xA;control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a&#xA;special exception, the source code distributed need not include&#xA;anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary&#xA;form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the&#xA;operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component&#xA;itself accompanies the executable.[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to provide the build dependencies listed in a package build script to comply with GPLv2 even if they can be installed through the targeted OS package manager?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10768" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T16:00:02.633" Title="Do I have to provide the build dependencies listed in a package build script to comply with GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-17T13:34:20.993" Score="6" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;For long running projects, having many developers added over the years, it may be necessary to remove inactive developers for security reasons. *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do active &amp;amp; long-running open-source projects have a policy for removing commit access from inactive developers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is something nearly every active open-source project would have to deal with.&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unlike closed source software that is unlikely to have volunteer contributors.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other projects must have run into this before, so knowing what they found works well is useful information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* having a large number of people able to modify your source code increases the attack surface of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="160" LastEditorUserId="160" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T11:11:08.297" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T11:11:08.297" Title="How do active open-source projects manage removing inactive developers?" Tags="|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11313" CreationDate="2021-02-17T23:05:54.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; is subjective. You could just make a rule that anyone who hasn't made contact with the dev team for a year gets removed, and they can be added back later if they ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But another solution would be to restrict direct commits entirely. Github (and the other hosting services probably have something similar) lets you block all direct commits to your master/main branch, and instead all changes must go through pull requests. You can then add further restrictions, such as requiring a certain number of code reviews, or signed commits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T23:05:54.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11313" CreationDate="2021-02-18T13:02:00.610" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an example of an active &amp;amp; long-running open-source project, I will use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, you don't get commit access to the repositories all that easily. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/devel/join/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the guide on how to contribute&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributing.&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&#xA;You don't need to be an official Debian Developer to carry out just about all of these tasks. Existing Debian Developers acting as sponsors can integrate your work into the project. It is generally best to try and find a developer who is working in the same area as you and has an interest in what you have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Debian provides many teams of developers working together on common tasks. Anybody can participate on a team, whether an official Debian Developer or not. Working together with a team is an excellent way to gain experience before starting the New Member process and is one of the best places to find package sponsors. So find a team that suits your interests and jump right in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Joining.&lt;/strong&gt; After you have contributed for some time and are sure about your involvement in the Debian project, you can join Debian in a more official role. There are two different roles in which you might join Debian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Debian Maintainer (DM): The first step in which you can upload your own packages to the Debian archive yourself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Debian Developer (DD): The traditional full membership role in Debian. A DD can participate in Debian elections. Uploading DDs can upload any package to the archive. Before applying as an uploading DD you should have a track record of maintaining packages for at least six months. For example uploading packages as a DM, working inside a team or maintaining packages uploaded by sponsors. Non-uploading DDs have the same packaging rights as Debian Maintainers. Before applying as a non-uploading DD, you should have a visible and significant track record of work inside the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, you have to prove that you are willing to really commit to the project before you get the rights to upload stuff. Once people have gone through that process, it becomes less likely that they will suddenly disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as even dedicated volunteers sometimes take a leave-of-absence or stop entirely, there is a process in place on how to do that gracefully, which can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/developer-duties.en.html#retiring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/developer-duties.en.html#retiring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to leave the Debian project, you should make sure you do the following steps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orphan all your packages, as described in Orphaning a package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove yourself from uploaders for co- or team-maintained packages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you received mails via a @debian.org e-mail alias (e.g. press@debian.org) and would like to get removed, open a RT ticket for the Debian System Administrators. Just send an e-mail to admin@rt.debian.org with &amp;quot;Debian RT&amp;quot; somewhere in the subject stating from which aliases you'd like to get removed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Please remember to also retire from teams, e.g. remove yourself from team wiki pages or salsa groups.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important that the above process is followed, because finding inactive developers and orphaning their packages takes significant time and effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if someone has put considerable time and effort into a project, it is likely they have also made friends among the other maintainers/developers and they would likely inform those if they are planning to stop contributing to the project for whatever reason. That again reduces the number of unannounced disappearances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, you can have a policy that if somebody doesn't check in with the project for an X amount of time (without prior notice) that their accounts will be revoked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Debian_Maintainer_retirement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;policy for Debian&lt;/a&gt;, which @MadHatter was kind enough to supply, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following each Debian release, all DMs who did not make an upload during the cycle for that release will be automatically retired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: after the release of Stretch, DMs who did not make an upload since the release of Jessie will be retired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T08:21:49.270" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T08:21:49.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11318" CreationDate="2021-02-18T21:09:51.533" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to make an SDK library to connect to an specific API and I found a library under the BSD 3-Clause &amp;quot;New&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Revised&amp;quot; License and copyrighted by the author that I could &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot; and just change the names of the classes, URLs, and parameters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't be sure reading about thsi license if I could copy this library and change it as I'd like refering to the original author and library without any concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22118" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T10:54:01.000" Title="Can I create a copy of the BSD licensed SDK library to connect to another API and have another name?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11317" CreationDate="2021-02-18T23:00:10.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may if you give credit but don't claim that they endorse your changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I'm somewhat baffled... a license can IMHO not be more concise and clear and it's not even bad legalese... It's short enough to quote it in its entirety here (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted&lt;/strong&gt; provided that the following conditions are&#xA;met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from&#xA;this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to changes:&#xA;&amp;quot;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice&amp;quot;. So yes, you may amend copyright notices in the sources with your own, but you MUST keep the original one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T10:54:01.000" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T10:54:01.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11082" CreationDate="2021-02-19T03:42:21.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache's position&lt;/a&gt; is that their v2.0 license is compatible with GPL v3.0 &lt;em&gt;but only in the forward direction&lt;/em&gt;. That is, you can embed Apachev2-licensed software in GPL v3.0 licensed projects, but not the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22121" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T03:42:21.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11305" CreationDate="2021-02-19T04:18:03.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Free Software Foundation would say codes that will work with R.dll need to follow GPL license when distributing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ref) &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22122" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T06:41:45.060" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T06:41:45.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-19T18:07:52.373" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;My android application has some com.google.android.gms.play-services-* libraries as dependencies.   Let's take play-services-ads-19.7.0 as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://maven.google.com/web/index.html?q=play-services#com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads:19.7.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google's maven page&lt;/a&gt; states, that license of that library is &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.android.com/studio/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Android Software Development Kit License&lt;/a&gt;, but in downloaded aar file in AndroidManifest.xml there is Apache 2.0 notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, which is final? Is it any or both of these licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it Android SDK License for play-services-* and ASL2.0 for some third party libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22135" LastEditorUserId="22135" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:04:36.360" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:04:36.360" Title="Which license is final for google's android play-services? ASL2.0 or Android SDK?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|android|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="173" CreationDate="2021-02-19T20:35:30.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The software might be considered &amp;quot;collective work&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I'm not sure, but this is a distinction that might be worth looking into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48375/using-images-with-cc-by-sa-license-in-slides-or-a-thesis/48382#48382&quot;&gt;https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/48375/using-images-with-cc-by-sa-license-in-slides-or-a-thesis/48382#48382&lt;/a&gt; is for the image in book/thesis, which I believe is analogous for the software case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC By-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt;, there was clear distinction between &amp;quot;derived&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;collective&amp;quot; work, and it was explicitly mentioned that if you include an image in a book, the book is a &amp;quot;collective work&amp;quot;, not derived, and does not need to be CC By-SA. So the image in game might be analogous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Collection&amp;quot; means a collection of literary or artistic works, such as encyclopedias and anthologies, or performances, phonograms or broadcasts, or other works or subject matter other than works listed in Section 1(f) below, which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations, in which the Work is included in its entirety in unmodified form along with one or more other contributions, each constituting separate and independent works in themselves, which together are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation (as defined below) for the purposes of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was somewhat tested in US court for an Atlas at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group,_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v. Kappa Map Group, LLC&lt;/a&gt; where a 2.0 image was used as a cover of an Atlas, with attribution on the back cover, and no infringement was found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is hard for me to be sure if the &amp;quot;a single image in book/game case&amp;quot; is actually a collection or not. Can a collection have a single item? Are the icons of your UI a collection? Intuitively it does not feel like it, since their main goal is not to showcase the items, but rather to integrate into your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, depending on the type of software, it might not be feasible to have a clear attribution for every image within the media itself, think e.g. of a video game. This makes it feel even less like a collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 4.0 the term &amp;quot;collective work&amp;quot; was dropped, and things became even less clear, although most people are guessing that hasn't changed, although I could not find clear evidence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7022/using-cc-by-sa-music-in-a-podcast/7036#7036&quot;&gt;Using CC BY-SA music in a podcast&lt;/a&gt; suggests that this distinction in 4.0 is simply delegated to your local law, or in other words, as a lawyer, and kind of reduces the usefulness of a license in the first place. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collective work wiki page&lt;/a&gt; has comments on it for several countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1849/does-the-cc-by-sa-license-require-that-source-code-of-derivative-works-be-shared&quot;&gt;Does the CC-BY-SA License require that source code of derivative works be shared?&lt;/a&gt; asked specifically about sharing source code, and people there said it should not be needed. Though if were considered derived work, the binary would have to be freely distributed without DRM&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/92536/is-it-legal-to-use-creative-commons-art-in-a-commercial-game/189293#189293&quot;&gt;https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/92536/is-it-legal-to-use-creative-commons-art-in-a-commercial-game/189293#189293&lt;/a&gt; is about the game subset more specifically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1072" LastEditorUserId="1072" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:44:46.003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:44:46.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11332" CreationDate="2021-02-20T18:43:56.800" Score="4" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do know that license conditions must be applied if I want to distribute my app. But, if my app is a frontend and I use GPL3 licensed library on it, does that count as distributed? Do I need to make my frontend disclose source as it is one of the license conditions of GPL3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22139" LastEditorUserId="22139" LastEditDate="2021-08-20T09:48:27.933" LastActivityDate="2021-08-20T09:48:27.933" Title="Web Frontend uses GPL3 Library" Tags="|gpl-3|commercial|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11328" CreationDate="2021-02-21T17:56:49.623" Score="7" ViewCount="2252" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is very similar to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/435/what-happens-if-stolen-software-is-published-as-open-source&quot;&gt;What happens if stolen software is published as Open Source?&lt;/a&gt; – but it doesn't exactly answer my question. This is also a thought experiment with no real companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say there is a company: Acme Corporation. They've released a new IoT device that uses a technology made by the company Foobar Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cool as they are, Acme Corp. decided to release the whole source code for this new IoT device – including &lt;strong&gt;confidential&lt;/strong&gt;  source code from Foobar Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's say Wile E. Coyote, Acme's most loyal customer, bought this IoT device and downloaded the source that's publicly and officially available on Acme's website, and then Mr. Coyote found the confidential Foobar Inc. source code. Some of the code from Foobar Inc. is under GPL, but others are marked as confidential. Some of the code from Foobar Inc. only has copyright headers, but has no GPL license nor Confidential headers and is also available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should Mr. Coyote report this leaked source code to Foobar Inc.? Let's say most of the code is under GPL, should he report it to the Free Software Foundation? Or should he contact Acme Corporation and ask them whether the code that they publicly released was meant to be released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22147" LastEditorUserId="22147" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T22:13:15.293" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T22:13:15.293" Title="What happens if a company releases third-party confidential code as open source?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11327" CreationDate="2021-02-21T20:22:31.207" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mr. Coyote should talk to his lawyers ASAP. While he was unaware that the code he was using was a copyright violation, he could make a reasonable defense against punitive damages. However, now he &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; aware (or has a strong suspicion) it is a copyright violation and continues to use it, a court will look far less favourably on him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unrelated to that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say most of the code is under GPL, should he report it to the Free Software Foundation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; the FSF do not police the use of the GPL. If code is distributed under the GPL which should not have been, that is a matter between the copyright holder (Foobar Inc.) and the person distributing the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T20:22:31.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-21T21:41:04.057" Score="-1" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the proper approach for copying a file from an Apache v2 licensed project to a different Apache v2 project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand, I would keep the header license attribution for the source project, but would I add a second license header to the file for the Apache v2 licenses project the file is copied into?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22148" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:53:38.077" Title="Copying Apache v2 files to another Apache v2 project" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2021-02-22T08:46:43.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have written a program &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;, except that it uses a third-party library which has been made available to you under the terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.  You want to know if distributing your program, linked to a copy of the library, counts as distribution of the library, and what it means if it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it does count as distribution of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to make my frontend disclose source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do have some obligations, but they do not (strictly) include that one.  Firstly, you will have all the GPLv3 s4 and s6 obligations in respect of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you have the same obligations with respect to your code depends on whether the resulting binary is a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; of the library, in copyright terms.  This is not a settled question; we have a question that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;summarises why it should be&lt;/a&gt;, and one which &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;summarises why it shouldn't be&lt;/a&gt;.  Like the FSF, I hold that it should be, and is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is so, then you have similar obligations (ss 5 and 6) in respect of your code, which include: it must be distributed under GPLv3, and the source must be available (also under GPLv3) to people who get copies of the binary.  The program doesn't have to arrange for this itself; you can distribute source alongside the applications, or you can give it out on demand; your options are laid out in GPLv3 s6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T09:32:44.080" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:32:44.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11329" CreationDate="2021-02-22T09:53:38.077" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your obligations when copying a file from an Apache v2 licensed project are the same, regardless of the license of the target project. You have to retain the license, copyrights and any additional attributions from the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the target project also uses the Apache v2 license, then you can merge the two NOTICE files and you only have to have a single copy of the license text and the license header in the source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T09:53:38.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11339" CreationDate="2021-02-22T03:06:12.760" Score="1" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am preparing some source codes for a course that I intend to teach at Udemy, which will be paid for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the codes I'm writing used a few lines from a Kaggle kernel, which is under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do, if necessary, about this piece of licensed code in my product? Should I enter any extra information about this use of a licensed piece of software? If so, how should this be done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22160" OwnerDisplayName="Higo Felipe Silva Pires" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T07:03:40.463" Title="Partial use of Apache 2.0 licensed code" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11311" CreationDate="2021-02-22T17:25:06.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Monorepos have become very popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@Jakeherringbone/you-too-can-love-the-monorepo-d95d1d6fcebe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;since google does it&lt;/a&gt;.  I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://devops.stackexchange.com/a/9529/739&quot;&gt;not a fan for most situations&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monorepos seem to make sense for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;large organizations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;complex projects without any easy compartmentalization&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;folks that have lots of CI/CD experience and they're happy to customize tools to work with the monorepo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't sound like you're a large organization.  I'm guessing you don't have much complexity since you're just starting out.  So the questions boils down to: do you have deep talent in CI/CD to develop custom tools for working with the monorepo challenges?  If not, you should start with repos that are dedicated to a particular projects, mostly in one language.  You're not stuck with this forever.  If you decide later to merge things, you can bring the repos together into a monorepo.  But by then you'll have a clear idea of the requirements for reach component and know how much work it will be to get them to play together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T04:43:02.543" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T04:43:02.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11327" CreationDate="2021-02-23T00:07:06.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Acme Corp. has created an unholy legal mess, both for themselves, Mr. Coyote, and Foobar, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acme Corp. has committed two acts of copyright infringement: Obviously Foobar's code, which they were not allowed to copy at all. But also all the GPL licensed code: Acme created a derived work of the GPL licensed code. They couldn't distribute it under the GPL license because they had no right. And because the couldn't distribute it under the GPL license, distributing the GPL licensed code was also copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition their claim that the software is GPL licensed is false (Mr. Coyote might have bought the product just to get the GPL licensed source code, so was defrauded), so Mr. Coyote might sue them, and it puts Mr. Coyote in a position where he might unknowingly commit copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Acme, Inc. should have done one of two things: Either negotiate a license from Foobar to allow distributing Foobar's code under the GPL. Or release their product without Foobar's code. What they did instead was illegal, stupid, and most definitely not cool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T00:07:06.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11334" CreationDate="2021-02-23T07:03:40.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are writing code to be distributed as part of a set of teaching materials, and you have incorporated within it some third-party code licensed to you under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the third-party code makes your program a derivative work of the Apache2 code.  Section 4 of the Apache2 licence says you may do this, and places the following conditions on such use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conditions a, c, and d are self-evident, and b will be satisfied if you add your own copyright notice to the file(s) in question - which you should be adding to all the code you write anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are unwilling or unable to honour those conditions, then you will need the permission of the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will also need to decide what licence to place on the derivative work.  Life will be simplest if you choose Apache2, since you are distributing a copy of that licence anyway, but you are free to choose something like GPLv3 if you want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T07:03:40.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11341" CreationDate="2021-02-23T07:49:11.843" Score="0" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our company is developing an enterprise application that is essentially a set of different applications (microservices). Some of these microservices are based on node.js while others are based on Python. For obvious reasons, we use packages from npm and pip. These packages are licensed differently as well assorted over MIT, BSD and Apache. There are few that are based on GPL variations as well (like AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we use AGPL licensed dependencies in our applications? If not, we will look for alternatives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we need to include licenses and copyright information of dependencies in our distribution? If yes,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to do it for services with no GUI?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to do it for services with GUI?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22170" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T19:19:38.910" Title="How to include licenses of dependencies in commercial closed-source proprietary software?" Tags="|commercial|license|closed-source|dependencies|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11340" CreationDate="2021-02-23T08:11:23.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to repackage somebody else's free software as part of your own proprietary offering is arguably not very on-topic here, and in any case the precise obligations will depend very much on the licensing and usage detail of each such contributory piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in &lt;em&gt;very broad&lt;/em&gt; outline: avoid AGPL.  You are OK with GPL &lt;em&gt;if and only if&lt;/em&gt; you aren't distributing your software to &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; outside your organisation.  You are OK with permissive free licences like MIT, BSD, and Apache, and if you distribute, you should take care to honour the relevant copyright notice / licence text / NOTICE file / changelog labelling and preservation requirements.  There are no special requirements for GUI programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should also hire an actual lawyer, with a practice in this field, to review your eventual choices.  Don't bet a company on a random opinion from an internet Q&amp;amp;A board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T09:37:11.297" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T09:37:11.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11343" CreationDate="2021-02-23T09:33:00.417" Score="4" ViewCount="406" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to submit to Debian a software licensed under GPL3. However, the software bundles &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/blanket/blob/master/SOUNDS_LICENSING.md#sounds-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;various sound tracks&lt;/a&gt; released under different licenses (mostly CC0, CC BY, Public Domain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does Debian policy allow submitting such a software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How to write the Debian copyright file in this case, when the real name and the email addresses of the authors of the sound track are not available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T11:07:46.180" Title="Debian packaging a GPL software with CC0 and public domain sounds" Tags="|license-compatibility|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11342" CreationDate="2021-02-23T11:07:46.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Debian policy allows submitting such a software. It is common practice to publish multimedia assets for open source software as CC. CC0 is just fine (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;), even more restrictive licenses are okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is often done in games. For example, Debian includes &amp;quot;Supertuxcart&amp;quot;, which uses lots of assets published as CC0 and CC-BY-SA. &lt;a href=&quot;http://svn.code.sf.net/p/supertuxkart/code/stk-assets/textures/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See this example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second source also answers your second question. There are some copyright holders mentioned without e-mail addresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T11:07:46.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-23T23:09:05.833" Score="1" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a project on GitHub uses two OS licenses, Apache/EPL or Apache/AGPL, does one license govern over the other or do both govern equally and together? My main confusion is how the two licenses interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22174" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T21:44:49.123" Title="Multi-Licensing with open source licenses" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11109" CreationDate="2021-02-23T23:49:51.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will mainly talk about the practical consequences and not go into the nitty gritty. By GPL compatible I mean that a GPL project can use your code (NOT you can use GPL code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and BSD 2 clause licenses have similar requirements: keep the license file. The BSD 3 clause license adds a term to the BSD 2 that prevents someone from claiming false endorsement. These three licenses are compatible with GPLv2 and v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license requires you to keep the license file, the NOTICE file if there is one, and show notice for modified files. It also addresses some patent-related issues, so companies use it a lot. It is compatible with GPLv3 but not v2 (due to the patent clauses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an old BSD license that has an clause related to advertising. Don't use it because it's not GPL compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, the ecosystem you are working with has a license that is used most often to begin with, and I would stick to that. For example, I would use MIT for Nodejs packages. If you are working on an application, some would recommend using the Apache 2.0 license because it covers patent issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T23:49:51.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11344" CreationDate="2021-02-24T14:22:50.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, this is called &lt;code&gt;Multi-licensing&lt;/code&gt; when you want a particular product to have more than one condition. Any product can have more than a single license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Open Source it has its own term which is called &lt;code&gt;dual-licensing&lt;/code&gt;, and its use-case is similar to that of the general team &lt;code&gt;Multi-licensing&lt;/code&gt;, we do this when we want our open source project to have two separate conditions for our open source project to be used, if the Apache license is blocking some certain use-case that you would like to use the OS project for, you check for the second license if it supports it before using it the way you would like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/dual-licensing-for-open-source-components-yeah-or-meh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; to understand better how &lt;code&gt;dual-licensing&lt;/code&gt; works in OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21279" LastEditorUserId="21279" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T10:36:02.903" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T10:36:02.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11350" CreationDate="2021-02-24T16:14:38.070" Score="5" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to convert library, which is licensed under Apache 2.0, to another programming language. The port will be initially pretty straightforward, i.e. I'll keep classes hierarchy and identifier names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By no means I want to compromise copyright of original authors or change the license. Should I just copy LICENSE file and state in readme that this is a port? Or should I keep copyright comments in the code? In latter case, should I keep only original authors in copyright or add myself too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22184" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T23:45:34.727" Title="Translate Apache 2.0 licensed code to another language (keeping license)" Tags="|apache-2.0|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11340" CreationDate="2021-02-24T17:48:40.870" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL licence concerns modifying source code, not using dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you write a piece of software which has a dependency from PyPI that is released under AGPL, you have not modified the dependency so the licensing of the software you have written is not affected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you incorporate some code from another work released under AGPL into your software (not as a dependency but as part of the software), AGPL comes into force if you ever serve your software outside of your organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice! This is an opinion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22185" LastEditorUserId="22185" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T19:19:38.910" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T19:19:38.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11348" CreationDate="2021-02-24T18:14:03.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on section 4 of the license, you need to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep original copyright comments&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mark the files as changed (eg. modification copyright XXX XXXX)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep or reproduce the text of the Apache 2 license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep the NOTICE file if it exists&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make sense to leave in the readme that you have created a port.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Clarified that the license text, not the LICENSE file, needs to be kept, because some projects places in the Apache 2 license in the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastEditorUserId="17687" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T23:45:34.727" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T23:45:34.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11353" CreationDate="2021-02-25T11:49:19.503" Score="-1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I tried to download the official node.js source debian packages, as described &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my largest surprise, their source repositories are simply &lt;em&gt;empty&lt;/em&gt; (although they are part of their official apt source download list).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (not debianized) node.js source code can be downloaded, that is okay. But their package repository, while it contains &lt;code&gt;deb-src&lt;/code&gt; entries in the apt configuration file, it has no source packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki&lt;/a&gt; scan shows, node.js is originally in MIT license. In the case of GPL, I think it would be an obvious case, but with MIT license I am not so sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we consider it as a license breach? If yes, what would be the steps to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="106" LastEditorUserId="106" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:19:09.747" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:19:09.747" Title="The official node.js deb package repository has no source packages, is it a license breach?" Tags="|mit|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11352" CreationDate="2021-02-25T14:29:00.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt; provides that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted ... to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software ... subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the absence of any language requiring the provision of source.  So no, in this case, no licence is being violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T14:29:00.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-26T09:08:29.547" Score="4" ViewCount="2149" Body="&lt;p&gt;nextcloud.com is a forked project of owncloud.com and now selling under &lt;a href=&quot;https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/&lt;/a&gt; (Both projects are licensed under GNU AGPLv3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I fork nextcloud or ownCloud, rebrand it (Keep my changes available on GitHub) and sell it just like what nextcloud is doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22201" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:46:06.960" Title="Can I sell GNU AGPLv3 Base Project" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2021-02-26T09:36:23.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, and you don't even need to make your changes available on GitHub.  The GNU Project's attitude to selling free software is summarised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this piece&lt;/a&gt;, and they are very much in favour of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do, however, need to convey a copy of the complete corresponding source code (CCS) to each of your customers (ie, those to whom you convey the product), as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; ss 4-6.  In addition, should you run your own instance, you will need to convey CCS to anyone who interacts with your instance over the internet and who subsequently requests such a copy (AGPLv3 s13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, keeping all development in public, on some site like GitHub, will be a good way to fulfil these requests - but if GitHub folds, your obligations don't fold with it.  There are some other obligations of which you should be mindful, including but not limited to the requirement to preserve existing copyright notices; you should review the AGPL with your lawyer to avoid any oversights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I were going to do this, I'd take care to warn my customers that they, too, will have s13 obligations to the users of &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T09:55:40.897" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T09:55:40.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11358" CreationDate="2021-02-26T13:00:46.200" Score="3" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am the copyright holder of a project licensed under the MIT license, can I change the name in the copyright notice? For example after a name change or changing to/from a pseudonym.&#xA;Note that (unlike the other questions that have been posted about this) this is not about someone else's project, but one that is owned exclusively by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22203" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T13:30:19.600" Title="MIT license change own name as copyright holder" Tags="|mit|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11357" CreationDate="2021-02-26T13:30:19.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder, then the answer is very simple: You are not bound by any license, so you are allowed to do anything you want including those things that most licenses forbid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are not the sole copyright holder (e.g. you accepted contributions from others), then things become more complicated but not all is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are only a few copyright holders, you can just formally ask for their approval to make those changes to the copyright notices. And some jurisdictions also allow in their copyright laws that factual errors in copyright notices are corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lastly, copyright notices don't carry that much legal weight nowadays. At best, they are an aid in establishing who owns the copyrights and if you can make a plausible case that you used that name/pseudonym around the time mentioned in the copyright notice, then that should be sufficient to establish you as a copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T13:30:19.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11355" CreationDate="2021-02-26T18:46:06.960" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No,you cannot sell software that is licensed under GNU AGPLv3.  That is made clear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this piece&lt;/a&gt;.  As they make clear, everyone can get the software for free and the license prohibits you, the copyright owner, from stopping your users using it for free.  As soon as you give a copy to one person, the license gives them the right to put it on the internet for anyone to download and use for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So technically, I suppose, you can sell the first copy.  After that you cannot sell the software because you cannot demand payment from the software's users.  You can only request donations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like selling your spot on a nearly-empty public beach.  Technically legal, but as you won't get any takers I think the answer is really that you can't sell your spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22208" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:46:06.960" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11363" CreationDate="2021-02-26T21:01:28.797" Score="0" ViewCount="793" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that when a software is proprietary, then its source code is &amp;quot;legally defended&amp;quot; and hence not released to the general public in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the terms proprietary software and closed source software synonymous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22209" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T19:01:56.047" Title="Are the terms proprietary software and closed source software synonymous?" Tags="|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11312" CreationDate="2021-02-27T10:04:35.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me, there are two issues here.  One is the &lt;em&gt;system library&lt;/em&gt; exception, and the other is whether one's regular GPL source provisioning obligations can be satisfied by pointing to a third-party repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly&lt;/strong&gt;, regarding the &lt;em&gt;system library&lt;/em&gt; exception, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s3 does indeed contain the language you quote.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s1 contains a similar exception, but it makes it clearer.  For GPLv2, note the phrase &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;normally distributed ... with the major components of the operating system&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  For a library to avail itself of this exception, it is not enough that the source is already available through the OS's regular installation mechanism; the library in question must be part of the normal installation of the OS.  &lt;code&gt;libc&lt;/code&gt;, core Windows DLLs, and the like, are system libraries; many other libraries are not.  You will have to make the call about the specific libraries you're thinking of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly&lt;/strong&gt;, if you decide that the specific build dependencies of your package are not covered by the system library exception, and therefore that you do have source provisioning obligations, then you have asked whether those obligations are fulfilled by pointing to the OS's standard source-distribution tools.  I attended, and wrote up for LWN, a very interesting talk addressing &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/781246/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that very question&lt;/a&gt; at the 2019 Copyleft Conference in Brussels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise the talk, Intel decided to honour its source-provisioning obligations through the archive servers of an organisation called Software Heritage.  Intel's lawyers didn't see a problem with that, and (to my recollection) neither did anyone else at the conference: but with the caveat that pointing to someone else's source repos doesn't magically turn your obligation into theirs.  If SWH's servers all go down, the obligations would still apply to Intel, and it would have to find another way to satisfy them; if you decide to point people at source hosted elsewhere, and it stops being so hosted, your obligations remain, and you will have to find another way to honour them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T16:00:02.633" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T16:00:02.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11361" CreationDate="2021-02-27T14:04:46.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, “proprietary software” is not necessarily “closed source” – there is also software that is proprietary yet still has source code publicly available. But it depends on exact definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Open Source&lt;/strong&gt; software describes programs that provide their recipients with &lt;strong&gt;Software Freedom&lt;/strong&gt;. This includes the right to use the software for any purpose, to modify it, and to share it in original or modified form under the same terms. Access to the source code is precondition for being able to modify the software and thus a precondition for Open Source, but access to source code is not the defining feature of Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses work &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; the software is copyrighted. It is not public domain. However, public domain software can also be Open Source if the source code is available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proprietary software&lt;/strong&gt; is software that is not Open Source. That means it is not available under licenses that provide Software Freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proprietary vs Open Source is not a completely binary choice, it is more of a spectrum. Whereas Open Source is clearly defined, there are many variants of proprietary software with some degree of openness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This includes software that is truly closed source because the software is never externally distributed (e.g. backoffice or SaaS software), or software binaries that are made available to users under a non-Open license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For some software, source code is made available subject to NDAs or other contracts, e.g. so that partners can debug their software. The original UNIX operating system was always distributed in source form. Microsoft makes Windows source code accessible to some researchers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But there are also cases where proprietary source code is made publicly available. This might be done for a community edition of the software, or in order to enable public review of the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proprietary software where the source code is publicly available is sometimes called &lt;strong&gt;Shared Source&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Source Available&lt;/strong&gt;. Such software is still proprietary and cannot be used or modified for any purpose. In particular, software without any license can only be looked at, but not modified or copied: the default license under copyright is “all rights reserved”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are variants of software that are neither Open Source nor quite proprietary. The term “proprietary” implies that the rights are retained by the software's owner. However, there is software without such a singular owner (so not proprietary), but also without providing Software Freedom to recipients (so not Open Source). Such licenses are also covered the &lt;strong&gt;Source Available&lt;/strong&gt; term, though there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/mjasay/status/1351719147927859204&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;need&lt;/a&gt; for a separate term to accurately describe this space. Here, we often see licenses that are mostly open but want to prevent certain uses, e.g. the SSPL license, the Creative Commons NonCommercial license variants, or licenses from the Ethical Source movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T19:01:56.047" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T19:01:56.047" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11365" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11368" CreationDate="2021-02-27T19:42:27.647" Score="4" ViewCount="1072" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a firmware for embedded devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project contains many libraries, plus one main executable that uses all the libraries. Each component is compiled individually. In the final step, all components are statically linked together to create one monolithic firmware image that gets flashed to the CPU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to use the LGPL license for my core libraries and the MIT license for the main executable that uses the libraries. My goal is to enable developers to create their own custom proprietary libraries from scratch and add those libraries into a derivative firmware without triggering a source release (provided they can make the addition without modifying my core libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the code for the main executable be MIT/BSD licensed even though it is &lt;em&gt;statically&lt;/em&gt; linked to LGPL libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the combination of LGPL + MIT (or BSD) accommodate for the creation of proprietary additions as described above, while requiring copyleft for the core libraries specifically (which is where most of my effort was spent)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastEditorUserId="1205" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T21:52:34.187" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T13:44:41.470" Title="How to use LGPL with embedded firmwares?" Tags="|mit|lgpl|bsd|copyleft|firmware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-28T07:48:13.913" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;My client wants to use an opensource ERP named &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/odoo/odoo/blob/14.0/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odoo&lt;/a&gt;. However modifications like name, UI and languages support would be required. Also the license need to be private onwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is permissible under the LGPLv3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this client wants to implement the modified version of this ERP to other subsidiary companies. Off-course the changed name of the ERP would be used. So is it any sort of a violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22217" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T07:26:03.877" Title="Can we modify LGPLv3 license based ERP and change the license to private?" Tags="|gpl-3|copyright|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11366" CreationDate="2021-02-28T09:40:53.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, but you still might be allowed to do what you ask in the subtext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot change the license of (L)GPL - covered code, if you didn't write it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do, of course, is to agree in a contract for software development that you hand over your modifications to a 3rd party (your client) under the condition that you do not hand it over to other parties. That has nothing to do with the license itself though - it's simple contract law for your work-for-hire. Yet you have to hand over the source code of the LGPL-covered code (at least on request) to your client (and all other parties whom you distribute the binaries to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to your client: It certainly depends on jurisdiction, but usually a company is legally a single body, so the license terms for conveying a piece of software do not apply. Yet one might enter a grey area already with companies and subsidiaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They certainly may not convey the rebranded (modified or unmodified) software to other 3rd parties under a different license than LGPL. The difference of the LGPL to the GPL is here - in short terms - that the LGPL - licensed software can be used as a module or library to a proprietary-licensed software. Yet any changes to the LGPL-licensed part must remain under LGPL and thus the LGPL terms apply, and sources must be made available, if distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, given your question that they ask you to make adoptions to an ERP system: sure, any branding, user-specific UI etc, they are of little interest to anyone; just changing config files to suit your setup and swapping art assets for rebranding is not making changes to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet if you develop general improvements to open-source software, you might want to talk to them, consider to push upstream what you can for good reason: Contributing the non-company and non-setup-specific improvements and fixes to upstream to give back to the project you and they use will reduce cost of ownership in the mid- and long term: Thus it will be &lt;strong&gt;their profit&lt;/strong&gt; as it will &lt;strong&gt;reduce maintenance and update costs&lt;/strong&gt; and possible later contractor costs to make changes to their existing themes and needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T07:26:03.877" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T07:26:03.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11365" CreationDate="2021-02-28T17:02:32.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a Lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4, subsection D of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-3&lt;/a&gt; requires (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code &lt;strong&gt;in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work&lt;/strong&gt;, in the manner specified by section 6 of the GNU GPL for conveying Corresponding Source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and (b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 clarifies the combination with non-LGPL works (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may place library facilities that are a work based on the Library side by side in a single library together with other library facilities that are not Applications and are not covered by this License, and convey such a combined library under terms of your choice, if you do both of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) &lt;strong&gt;Accompany the combined library with a copy of the same work based on the Library, uncombined with any other library facilities&lt;/strong&gt;, conveyed under the terms of this License.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) Give prominent notice with the combined library that part of it is a work based on the Library, and explaining where to find the accompanying uncombined form of the same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says the following about static linking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main requirement here is that the people receiving a distributed copy of the firmware must have the option to modify the LGPL-licensed portions of the code and then use their modified version in place of yours to get a fully-working final firmware image (&amp;quot;fully working&amp;quot; barring any mistakes in their modifications).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the source code for all components is available and can be built, then that is sufficient to meet this requirement for the LGPL-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some components are proprietary or contain proprietary modifications, then those components must be provided as individual object files that can be re-linked to the (potentially modified) LGPL-licensed components by the end user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing object files (&lt;code&gt;*.o&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*.a&lt;/code&gt;) alongside the distribution, as well as the instructions to combine those objects into a final firmware image, should be sufficient to meet this requirement for the LGPL-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastEditorUserId="26118" LastEditDate="2022-01-20T13:44:41.470" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T13:44:41.470" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2021-02-28T17:02:32.580" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11344" CreationDate="2021-02-28T21:44:49.123" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the owner of the copyright, it is your prerogative to allow others to do the things covered by copyright law (notably copying and distributing further) under whatever conditions you'd like. You can offer the recipient several alternative sets of conditions (i.e., use it under GPLv2, or under Apache, or..., or you are allowed --presumably for a fee-- to use it in ways the preceding don't allow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T21:44:49.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11371" CreationDate="2021-03-02T02:09:07.070" Score="1" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Our question more specific would be&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if the whole work has to be published (a must) under GPLv.3 or LGPLv.3 as the used gettext.inc, gettext.php, streams.php are GNU GPLv.2 or later and Smarty is LGPLv.3 or if the whole work could be distributed also under a commercial license which is not compliant with GNU GPL principals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would it be good and is it even possible to license the combined distribution under AGPL as the application is a social network script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In particular the critical included parts are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;gettext.inc - GNU-GPLv.2+,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;gettext.php - GNU-GPLv.2+,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;streams.php - GNU-GPLv.2+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all 3 contain the same copyright notice in their files which clearly states &lt;strong&gt;GNU GPLv.2+&lt;/strong&gt; (&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/neo22s/php-gettext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/neo22s/php-gettext&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2005 Steven Armstrong &amp;lt;sa at c-area dot ch&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2009 Danilo Segan &amp;lt;danilo@kvota.net&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Drop in replacement for native gettext.&#xA;&#xA;This file is part of PHP-gettext.&#xA;&#xA;PHP-gettext is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and as to be considered too for:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jquery-ui.touch-punch - GNU GPLv.2,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jquery-ui.triggeredAutocomplete - GPLv.2,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;both contain a &lt;strong&gt;Dual License&lt;/strong&gt; while it is not clearly stated which of those licenses they are actually using in that particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dual licensed under the LGPL-2.1+ or MIT licenses&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and perhaps:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;jquery.form - GNU-LGPL-2.1+,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tinymce.js - GNU-LGPLv.2.1,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HTMLPurifier - GNU-LGPLv2.1,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PHPMailer - GNU-LGPLv.3,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smarty - GNU-LGPLv.3,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is what we found in the FSF FAQ:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL, am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then distribute and sell that new program commercially?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL, am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then distribute and sell that new program commercially? (#GPLCommercially)&#xA;You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program? (#GPLPlugins)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22229" LastEditorUserId="22229" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T02:49:01.620" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T07:10:41.987" Title="Do we have to choose a GPL License when we use MIT, GPLv.2+, LGPL2.1, LGPL3, Apache 2.0 licensed libraries in our distribution?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|license-recommendation|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11370" CreationDate="2021-03-02T07:10:41.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the whole work has to be published (a must) under GPLv.3 or LGPLv.3 as the used gettext.inc, gettext.php, streams.php are GNU GPLv.2 or later and Smarty is LGPLv.3 or if the whole work could be distributed also under a commercial license which is not compliant with GNU GPL principals?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are using a library/package under the GPLv2+ license, the license terms on that library/package require that you also use the GPLv2, GPLv3 or AGPLv3 license for the whole work. You are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to distribute it under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be good and is it even possible to license the combined distribution under AGPL as the application is a social network script?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to license the work under the AGPLv3, due to a special clause in the AGPL license that allows combining it with GPL libraries/packages. Otherwise, the extra conditions in the AGPL regarding distribution on remote usage would have been incompatible with the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is desirable or not to use the AGPL license is something we cannot give advice on. That is completely up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T07:10:41.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11373" CreationDate="2021-03-02T08:41:05.943" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have decided to take over an open source (MIT license) project that hasn't been maintained in 4 years, but I want to maintain it on GitLab (as opposed to current GitHub). I have decided NOT to fork the project, but instead clone it and rebrand it and publish it under a different name. Even though this is generally frowned upon, the reason is that I also plan to make extensive breaking changes to the code and alter its API surface substantially and I do not want to mess with existing user base but instead offer them a documented way to modify their projects if they want to. So there would never be any future upstream or downstream changes to or from original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now comes my conundrum. The project contains MIT license which I plan to fully honor and inherit, and MIT license mentions only the original author. For start I intend to implement changes as per answer on &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/277688/if-i-fork-a-project-on-github-that-is-licensed-under-mit-how-do-i-handle-the-at&quot;&gt;If I fork a project on Github that is licensed under MIT, how do I handle the attribution and copyright notice?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, aside from him, there are about a dozen contributors whose code is part of the project. I will preserve the original git history, so they are all mentioned in the git chain, but I need to know if I am required to list them all now in my MIT license? Especially since only one of them has GitLab account, the rest are just listed in contributors section by nick/email (on GitHub its easier because they are directly attributed on the project page). Did the original author make an oversight by not including them in the license file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22349" OwnerDisplayName="mmix" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:21:18.420" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:21:18.420" Title="Transfer of MIT project to another repo/site" Tags="|mit|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11372" CreationDate="2021-03-02T09:59:31.280" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, let's clear up some terminology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have decided NOT to fork the project, but instead clone it and rebrand it and publish it under a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; generally means &lt;em&gt;exactly what you're doing&lt;/em&gt;: taking a project, and creating your own derivative work with different stewardship. You are doing so as allowed by the copyright holder according to the terms in the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub's use of &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; is rather unhelpful, because a &amp;quot;GitHub fork&amp;quot; is actually just an additional copy of the git repository hosted on their servers, often not intended as a &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; in the traditional sense at all. I presume they wanted to distinguish between &amp;quot;cloning&amp;quot; to your local machine and &amp;quot;forking&amp;quot; on their server, but as far as git - and copyright - is concerned, there is no such distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, let's dismiss some irrelevant details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to maintain it on GitLab (as opposed to current GitHub)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially since only one of them has GitLab account&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as copyright and licensing are concerned, where you host the files, and what user accounts exist there, are irrelevant. The license should be &lt;em&gt;distributed with the code&lt;/em&gt; - if I get a zip file of your project, the relevant license should be in that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now onto the key question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, aside from him, there are about a dozen contributors whose code is part of the project. [...] Did the original author make an oversight by not including them in the license file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, I think you are right: every author who didn't legally reassign their copyright holds copyright to their contributions to the project. However, it's common to simplify the copyright notice to only list major contributors, or include a catch-all like &amp;quot;and other contributors&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples of MIT licenses from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_using_the_MIT_license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list of MIT-licensed projects on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab&lt;/a&gt; (they also have a contribution agreement, but it doesn't appear to assign copyright, only the right to re-license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2011-present GitLab B.V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/8.x/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laravel&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) Taylor Otwell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;node.js&lt;/a&gt; lists multiple licenses in one file, among which I found the following copyright lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright Node.js contributors. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright Joyent, Inc. and other Node contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2012-2018 by various contributors (see AUTHORS)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2007 - 2018, Daniel Stenberg with many contributors, see AUTHORS file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4186" OwnerDisplayName="IMSoP" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T10:20:19.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11377" CreationDate="2021-03-02T22:23:58.467" Score="3" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may seem to be a bit silly question, but I couldn't find a strict definition that would address my specific situation (I appreciate I'm not the first to experience it though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a library licensed under Apache 2.0 for which I'm going to make improvements. My approach is not modifying the original code of the library but rather make a some wrappers/adaptors and also some classes that may copy up to 75% of the functionality of the original library, but are in fact independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is basically whether these partially copy-pasted classes are considered modifications of the original code. They are not replacing the original files, but live independently from it in the new library I'm working on. When someone wants to use my library, they will need to use the original unmodified library too. However my library is still based on the original code and my gut feeling suggests I should keep the original copyright notice to meet Apache 2.0 license's requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22234" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T10:04:34.533" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T10:04:34.533" Title="Definition of a modified code" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-03T02:21:26.087" Score="0" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a tool that heavily utilizes Git (without linking against parts of it, or using any of its source files in the code) through the cli interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would still like to license it under the same terms as git itself, which has a little bit 'weirdly' formulated version of GPL v2: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/COPYING&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in particular the&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as this project&#xA;is concerned is &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; particular version of the license (ie v2, not&#xA;v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, in order to allow a migration to GPLv3 if that seems like  a&#xA;good idea, I also ask that people involved with the project make&#xA;their preferences known. In particular, if you trust me to make that&#xA;decision, you might note so in your copyright message, ie something&#xA;like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file is licensed under the GPL v2, or a later version  at the&#xA;discretion of Linus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;might avoid issues. But we can also just decide to synchronize and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;contact all copyright holders on record if/when the occasion arises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: for a repository that is going to be hosted on github, what's a propper way of &amp;quot;inheriting&amp;quot; this license? i.e. what should I put in the license file and what should I put in the header of each file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also a bit confused as to why most of git's source files don't contain any header about the license at all, while some just contain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (C) 2005 Junio C Hamano&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/306ee63a703ad67c54ba1209dc11dd9ea500dc1f/builtin/write-tree.c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/git/git/blob/306ee63a703ad67c54ba1209dc11dd9ea500dc1f/builtin/write-tree.c&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * GIT - The information manager from hell&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright (C) Linus Torvalds, 2005&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: Is that the proper way of doing it? i.e do all files in that repository automatically inherit the license from the license file, no matter what's written in he file header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3: There are also files that have the MIT license in the header (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/66e871b6647ffea61a77a0f82c7ef3415f1ee79c/git-p4.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/git/git/blob/66e871b6647ffea61a77a0f82c7ef3415f1ee79c/git-p4.py&lt;/a&gt;) but these files still received changes after that within this repository - so does it even  make sense that it has the MIT license in the header (since I'd assume if the answer to Q2 is 'yes' that file would not be available under MIT anymore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20172" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T11:01:10.093" Title="GPL: How to &quot;inherit&quot; license from another project?" Tags="|gpl|mit|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11375" CreationDate="2021-03-03T09:44:15.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1: for a repository that is going to be hosted on github, what's a propper way of &amp;quot;inheriting&amp;quot; this license? i.e. what should I put in the license file and what should I put in the header of each file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is your intention that parts of the project can only be re-used in different projects under the terms of the GPLv2 license until and unless you re-license your entire project to another version of the GPL, then the header of each of your files should mention the license as &amp;quot;GPLv2 only&amp;quot;, but you can accept contributions that mention the license as &amp;quot;GPLv2 or later&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project-level license file should be the text of the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part you quoted from the git COPYING file is not actually a change in the license. It is rather a comment on how people can indicate in advance that they trust a particular person to make decisions on upgrading the license version from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Unless you are a public person who is widely trusted in such matters, don't expect people to name you in such a way and then there would also be little point in adding such a note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2: Is that the proper way of doing it? i.e do all files in that repository automatically inherit the license from the license file, no matter what's written in he file header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proper way is to add the GPL license header to all files. If you don't follow the proper way, then it can be up to a judge to weigh all the evidence and decide which license actually applies to a particular file. As judges are humans, it is not always predictable how they will rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q3: There are also files that have the MIT license in the header (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/git/git/blob/66e871b6647ffea61a77a0f82c7ef3415f1ee79c/git-p4.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/git/git/blob/66e871b6647ffea61a77a0f82c7ef3415f1ee79c/git-p4.py&lt;/a&gt;) but these files still received changes after that within this repository - so does it even make sense that it has the MIT license in the header (since I'd assume if the answer to Q2 is 'yes' that file would not be available under MIT anymore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, those files are indeed currently under the GPLv2 license. However, if parts of them were under the MIT license at the time those files were added to the project, then the terms of the MIT license require that you preserve the MIT license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best course of action in such cases is to also add the GPL license header to the file, at least when the first modifications under the GPL license are made, and to put a comment next to the MIT license text that it is kept only to satisfy licensing requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T09:44:15.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11374" CreationDate="2021-03-03T09:48:26.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is basically whether these partially copy-pasted classes are considered modifications of the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you copy code (written by someone else) to a new file, then you are effectively copying your license obligations along with it. It does not matter that the original code also still exists somewhere, possibly even in the same project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T09:48:26.527" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:57:37.737" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am thinking about porting a commercial PlayStation game which had its entire development leaked. This game is SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge. The source code as well as all its development assets were leaked in 2016 after Climax sold quite a bit of their development assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code is still up at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/philosophofee/SBSPSS/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, and the development discs including the final source code are up at &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sbspdevarchives.7z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be okay to pack art assets? I'm thinking of making this port open source. If this can't be done, should I just have users supply their copy of the source and compile it their self?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this question to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22239" LastEditorUserId="22239" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T23:06:49.773" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T23:06:49.773" Title="Can I pack art assets from a leaked source code repository?" Tags="|proprietary-code|porting|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-03-05T06:57:59.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11379" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-04T04:52:47.543" Score="10" ViewCount="1418" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing contract work. I'm being asked to sign a standard (AFAICT) agreement that assigns all intellectual property I create to the employer. The context of this work is typical Python and Go codebases: the codebases themselves are proprietary, but they have open-source dependencies listed in requirements.txt and go.mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The employer is potentially open to changing the agreement to meet my needs. Is there language I can insert that carves out an exception for patches I make to the open-source dependencies, so that I can retain copyright to them and contribute them upstream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22241" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T06:58:52.590" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T14:05:13.380" Title="Excluding open-source contributions from work-for-hire" Tags="|copyright|commercial|law|ownership|contracts|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11380" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-04T06:43:13.587" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to create a GitHub repo containing a summary of commands to be used as a reference. Some of these commands with a combination of unique flags have been used in the source code of a GitHub project that uses GPL v3, which informed my repo. The command reference I am creating has some commands that are based on this repo. Can I still use GPL v3 even though my repo does not contain source code or is there a more relevant license for my case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22242" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T08:29:37.093" Title="Using GPL v3 for GitHub repo with no source code" Tags="|gpl-3|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11379" CreationDate="2021-03-04T06:57:04.767" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there language I can insert that carves out an exception for patches I make to the open-source dependencies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, but you've missed out the second requirement: that it be acceptable to the people who are paying for the work.  We can't say whether any given proposal will be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My standard terms say that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Copyright in all original code, configuration files, documentation and copy is and remains the property of the Company, and these are provided to the Client under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (or, at the Client's discretion, any later version).&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  If you can get them to sign that, your problems are over.  If they balk, consider restraining that language to refer only to the work you do on the listed open-source dependencies (eg, change &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all original code, configuration files, documentation and copy&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all work on libfoo, barsnake, and gobaz&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they won't go for that, you might try reversing the rider so that it obliges them to make all the work you do on those libraries available to you under the terms of whatever free licence will best enable you to contribute the work upstream.  That way you won't have the copyright, but you will still have the code, and the right to contribute your changes in it to the projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you might try adding a similarly-constrained rider that commits them to contributing the work upstream in a fixed timeframe after payment.  I wouldn't hold out too much hope in that option, because you don't want to end up suing your client for specific performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T08:32:54.753" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T08:32:54.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11380" CreationDate="2021-03-04T08:29:37.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL defines the term Source Code as &amp;quot;the preferred format for making changes&amp;quot;. This means that if your repository just contains some documentation files in a readily editable format (text, markdown, OpenOffice, MS Word, etc.) then those files count as their own source format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T08:29:37.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11379" CreationDate="2021-03-04T14:05:13.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll preface this with the usual caveat: IANAL. However I've agreed to, written, edited and audited lots of contracts for software projects that include 3rd party code (not just open source but also libraries from companies like Microsoft and Apple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without looking at the actual clauses in the contract we can't be sure if you need additional clauses to clarify code ownership. However, given the broad description given a lot of it is already stated in the contract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;agreement that assigns all intellectual property I create to the employer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is an accurate description of a contract clause then it implies that code that &lt;strong&gt;you did not create&lt;/strong&gt; such as open source libraries do not belong to your employer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, be very careful when reading contracts. Some wording in some contracts can be interpreted slightly differently by the courts compared to what you think it means. And this can differ by region, country and even states. If you know a lawyer, try to ask them to check the contract and explain the clauses for you. Even then take note that IP law, especially copyright, is complicated and even IP lawyers can disagree with each other and the courts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are worried, you can make the implication more explicit and add a clause or clarification that all libraries used require the owner to adhere to the respective license agreement for them. If the owner need to pay for a license (eg, using Adobe's or Google's library) then they'll need to make sure they pay for it. If the owner need to license the code as GPL, then they'll need to make sure they comply. When hired for a project I normally include something like this so I don't get stuck paying for a Windows or Mac OS license out of my pocket for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T14:05:13.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7934" CreationDate="2021-03-04T14:35:16.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers already posted are all correct in that &lt;em&gt;the main pledge of open-source software is the license itself&lt;/em&gt;. After all, the license is the only thing, legally speaking, that makes sure you abide by your promised terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, there are numerous badges you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use to show that your pledge to open-source&lt;/strong&gt;. Like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/graphics/gplv3-with-text-136x68.png&quot; alt=&quot;GPL Badge&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://opensource.org/files/OSI_Approved_License.png&quot; width=&quot;86&quot; /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use these as badges for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22248" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T14:35:16.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T04:26:00.573" Score="5" ViewCount="1561" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand all the responsibilities of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does redistribution mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;publicly placing a windows .exe using the BSD licensed library for users to download on a website(free and commercial)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;sharing the exe with friends (free and commercial)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can redistribution even mean just packaging your project into a exe because you are like rearranging the files into one executable??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we required to include the license in readable form in an exe in the project application itself or just in the project folder like a readme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if people forget to include the notices for some libraries? Is it required for copyright owners to try to get the user to correct it first or you can pay fines or something at any time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22252" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T13:12:34.853" Title="In the BSD license, what does &quot;redistribution&quot; mean?" Tags="|copyright|bsd|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11388" CreationDate="2021-03-05T05:32:37.077" Score="3" ViewCount="405" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I make an app with &lt;a href=&quot;https://cordova.apache.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache Cordova&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://capacitorjs.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ionic Capacitor&lt;/a&gt; (likely fork of Apache Cordova I think), is put license notices on the source code is sufficient enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen an app that did notices each license inside it so the user can read it easily. It did not not built with Cordova, but I mean it's an example of license noticing on mobile app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8sMdn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8sMdn.png&quot; alt=&quot;img&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Cordova is web-based. The packaged app will be include the source code. And the source code (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ionic-team/capacitor/blob/main/core/cordova.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;cordova.js&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) is already notice the license on top of it. Even though we have to extract the packaged app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hpwQC.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hpwQC.png&quot; alt=&quot;img&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is does the license comment count as license notices so I don't need to license notice again or I still have to make it like the app above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22139" LastEditorUserId="22139" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T08:21:31.543" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T08:21:31.543" Title="Apache Cordova License Notice" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11385" CreationDate="2021-03-05T06:57:08.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does redistribution mean publicly placing a windows .exe using the BSD licensed library for users to download on a website(free and commercial)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sharing the exe with friends (free and commercial)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That also is redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can redistribution even mean just packaging your project into a exe because you are like rearranging the files into one executable??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that sounds more like compilation.  If you're not conveying the program to another party, whatever you are doing, it's not redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we required to include the license in readable form in an exe in the project application itself or just in the project folder like a readme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3BSD licence&lt;/a&gt; says that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're distributing an executable (without accompanying source) then it seems to me that including the required text &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;in the project folder like a readme&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; would suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if people forget to include the notices for some libraries? Is it required for copyright owners to try to get the user to correct it first or you can pay fines or something at any time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you redistribute without honouring the terms of the licence you are violating the original rightsholder's copyright.  The consequences of that are entirely a function of your local copyright laws.  In practice, an aware rightsholder will often ask you to correct your error before taking things further, but they don't have to give you that opportunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T06:57:08.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11386" CreationDate="2021-03-05T07:57:11.180" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache Cordova is under the Apache-2.0 license. This means that when building an app with Cordova:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you MUST give recipients a copy of the Apache license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you MUST NOT remove the existing license notices for Cordova in the Cordova source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you MUST give recipients a copy of the NOTICE file, if it exists (it does)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, a recipient is anyone who receives a copy of your app, in particular users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in which format do you have to provide a copy of the Apache license and the NOTICE file? The purpose here is that an ordinary user can actually read that information. I think it is not sufficient to only keep this information in the source code, even for web apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; just create a license screen for your app where ALL licenses and notices for ALL open source dependencies are shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically for the location of the NOTICE file, the Apache license allows you to pick any of the following places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(formatting mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated into normal English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can combine the NOTICE files from Apache-licensed dependencies into a single NOTICE file that you distribute alongside your program files. For an app, this won't really apply since the user can't easily access your app's installed files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you give the recipients the source code for your app along with the app, it is sufficient if the NOTICE is in the source code. For an app, it would be fairly unusual to include the source code alongside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you provide documentation alongside your app, you can put the NOTICE in this documentation. For an app, this might be satisfied with a built-in documentation system, but likely not with documentation loaded from a separate website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For programs with a user interface, you can show the NOTICE wherever such third party notices normally appear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have shown an example of an app that has a “Licensi Open Source” screen, presumably accessible in the settings or another menu. This is the normal approach for including third party notices in an app. If you also have such a screen and include the Apache License and the Cordova NOTICE file, that would satisfy the Cordova license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do license headers in source files count as license notices? It depends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;yes, if distributing the actual source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no, they do not satisfy the Apache license notice requirements when distributing non-source forms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note: even though the &lt;code&gt;cordova.js&lt;/code&gt; file is JavaScript, it is not the complete Cordova-JS source code. Your &lt;code&gt;cordova.js&lt;/code&gt; file is likely a minified and bundled version of Cordova. For example, the file you've screenshotted clearly strips out comments when compared with the actual source code. The Apache License defines the Source as “the preferred form for making modifications, including but not limited to software source code, documentation source, and configuration files”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T07:57:11.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11385" CreationDate="2021-03-05T13:12:34.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Redistribution happens whenever you make the work accessible to another party. It doesn't matter if that party is anyone who knows about your website or one specific person. It also doesn't matter if the work is distributed as part of a larger work. It also doesn't matter if you altered the work and by how much - as long as it is based on the original, the license conditions apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you don't fulfill all the conditions mandated in the license, then you don't have the permission to redistribute it. When you are doing it anyway, then you are committing a copyright violation with all the usual legal consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the copyright owner of the library is nice, they will contact you and ask you to correct your mistake. When they are not so nice, then they might ask their lawyer if they can sue you and for how much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T13:12:34.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11399" CreationDate="2021-03-05T16:42:44.630" Score="3" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's about an app that was created in a student project (in Germany) and will be soon released in the Google Play Store and also published on GitHub as OSS under the MIT license. The app features illustrations that some of the students created themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are now unsure about the legal situation with these illustrations: using just the MIT license, is it allowed to use/modify/distribute only the illustrations of the OSS without touching the program code at all? Is it possible or necessary to add additional copyright notes to them, in the app itself or somewhere inside the GitHub project (e.g. Creative Commons with author attribution) or are they automatically under the MIT license as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance if anyone is familiar with this topic :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22257" LastEditorUserId="22257" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T16:53:47.133" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T17:32:36.193" Title="Legal Aspects of Illustrations in Open Source Software (MIT License) - Adding Copyright Notice?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T21:50:22.997" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I would like to retain copyright over conceptually while releasing the prototype code. It's a novelty digital clock. I posted some videos of the prototype online and some people asked for the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really care about protecting the technology within the code as any half decent programmer could work that out pretty easily. And I have no problem with people recreating the project as long as they don't start selling it. It's mostly about preventing anyone from stealing the idea and / or design to sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do I even need to license the code, assuming that copyright law will protect me from that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22260" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T10:19:44.197" Title="How to opensource code while protecting the product that runs on it" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11392" CreationDate="2021-03-06T10:19:44.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I would like to retain copyright over [my project] conceptually&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is the root of your problem.  To quote from the first paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikpedia's summary&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  So when you try to share the copyright on the expression (ie, the program) while retaining the copyright on the underlying concept, you set yourself up for failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Novel ideas can be protected when expressed in an invention [1] by a &lt;em&gt;patent&lt;/em&gt;.  If you think your machine embodies a patentable idea, then you could apply for a patent on it; how to do that is ouside the scope of this site, and will almost certainly involve paying a patent lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide not to avail yourself of patent protection, then given what you say about the simplicity of your code, I think that whether or not you decide to free the code will have little impact on whether the market promptly replicates your product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] For a very elastic definition of &lt;em&gt;invention&lt;/em&gt; which includes biomolecules and, in particularly insane jurisdictions, business methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T10:19:44.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11401" CreationDate="2021-03-06T14:34:08.910" Score="-2" ViewCount="3019" Body="&lt;p&gt;so I want to use the code in GitHub to help with my project, I don't sell the code or others I only need the output for my project. in the readme file, the project is built upon A, and B (other GitHub projects). I look in the MIT license of the GitHub project. and what it says is that this project (the one I want to use) is free to use the same with project A also free to use, but project B has Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. so can I use it because the current project allows me or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22267" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T16:57:46.953" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T09:31:06.410" Title="Can you use code on GitHub for commercial purposes?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|commercial|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11397" CreationDate="2021-03-06T16:38:18.590" Score="6" ViewCount="957" Body="&lt;p&gt;The company that I work for, develops a Linux-based in-house distro, which powers some hardware-based equipment. The project that I am working on, has some proprietary kernel modules, and proprietary user-space components, which contain important business logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are currently in the process of integrating a graphics card, for which we need to compile an out-of-tree GPLv2 kernel module (we have the source code available). As our kernel version is a bit old, we will most likely need to patch the driver, so that it compiles against our kernel. We might also need to patch it, if we find some bugs in the existing code, or if we find some optimizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I modify the driver, what are my obligations, according to the GPLv2 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough, if I publish the driver source code, along with the modified patches if anyone asks for them,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or does the license also extend to the other (proprietary kernel modules and userspace) components in the system?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the proprietary components (kernel and user-space), make use of the driver, through standard OS interfaces (i.e ioctl calls.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having to release the (modified) source code (or patches) for the graphics card kernel module is fine for my company, but releasing all the existing proprietary code as open-source is a deal-breaker. I would definitely intend to talk my company into upstreaming any optimizations that we find, but some patches may be just in order to compile the code, and make it work without crashes on our kernel. So, the chance for the latter category of getting upstreamed, might be close to zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person responsible for the Legal part in my company, seems to interpret the license in the most risk-adverse way, but I am not entirely sure that he understands software. Basically, if I were to follow his opinion, my only option would be to ask the company that produces the graphics card, to license to us the driver under a separate  (non-GPLv2) license. I'm not sure if this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option that I would think of, is some kind of trickery, so that we move all our existing code from our kernel modules into user-space, and keep a kind of dummy code in the kernel, that we can release under GPL. But this  seems too extreme to me,  and I would leave it as a last resort option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like to know who might sue the company in case of breach of GPL. Is it only the company that produces the graphics card ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't have a lot of experience in dealing with open-source I would like to ask the members of the community, if they found themselves in a similar situation, and what would they advise me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22268" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-04T14:10:04.920" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T14:10:04.920" Title="Can I modify a GPLv2 licensed kernel module without having the rest of my software GPLv2?" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-kernel|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-07T00:01:50.693" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at potentially building an API-as-a-service around Conceptnet Numberbatch, which has the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Basically, just an API that would provide roughly the same inputs and outputs as the model itself, and users would pay on a per-request basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is something like that permitted under ShareAlike? Would I need to open source the code that serves the API?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22271" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T16:48:34.897" Title="Can I build a paid API service that directly sells the output of a library with a ShareALike license?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11395" CreationDate="2021-03-07T02:32:10.010" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Userspace is fine.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the syscall exception&lt;/a&gt;, regular programs that interface with the kernel &amp;quot;by normal system calls&amp;quot; are not subject to GPLv2 obligations. If your userspace program interfaces with the kernel in a more intimate fashion than &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; system calls, then this exception might not apply, but the vast majority of userspace code falls under this exception and is not subject to the kernel's licensing rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Proprietary modules might not be.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have developed a proprietary kernel module, it may or may not be a derived work of the kernel. This is a gray area, and there have been some high-profile disagreements over it in the past (particularly with regards to the ZFS filesystem). In general, it is safest to assume that the GPL covers any and all kernel modules, or to consult a copyright attorney for specific advice on your individual module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The graphics driver has no bearing on any of this.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either your proprietary kernel module is subject to the GPL, or it isn't. The existence and disposition of the graphics driver does not affect any of your obligations with regards to other kernel modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming, of course, that you have not reused any of the graphics driver's code in the proprietary modules, and that the proprietary modules are fully independent of the graphics driver. If this is not the case, then the proprietary modules might also be a derivative work of the graphics driver, in addition to being a derivative of the kernel. That doesn't change any of your obligations, it just means a larger set of people will be able to sue you if you violate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you distribute a single kernel containing both your proprietary modules and the graphics driver, then that binary might be a derivative of both the kernel and the graphics driver, meaning you would be liable to the maker of the graphics driver in addition to the Linux kernel contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, there's simply no obvious way for the graphics driver to &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; your proprietary modules from &amp;quot;not subject to the GPL&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;subject to the GPL.&amp;quot; The bottom line is that you need to make sure that your proprietary modules comply with the GPL, regardless of whether you decide to add this graphics driver or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The GPL attaches at time of distribution, not at time of creation.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you never distribute any of your software to third parties (employees &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;don't count&lt;/a&gt;), then none of the GPL's obligations attach, meaning you can do whatever you want as long as you never distribute the software. If you do distribute your software, then the GPL's obligations attach &lt;em&gt;with respect to that distribution,&lt;/em&gt; meaning that you are only required to provide source code to the recipient, not &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to the general public&lt;/a&gt;. However, since you will be giving the software to the recipient under the GPL, they will be able to exercise all of the usual GPL rights, including the right to further redistribute it to third parties or to the general public. This right &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cannot be restricted or abrogated by a separate agreement&lt;/a&gt;, as the GPL expressly prohibits such &amp;quot;additional restrictions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who would sue you?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't violate the GPL, probably nobody.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you redistribute code under a more restrictive basis than what the GPL requires, then the upstream copyright holder (i.e. the Linux kernel contributors, individually or collectively) can sue you for breaching the GPL and infringing their copyright. But if they never find out about it, then such a lawsuit is unlikely in practice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your downstream recipient is unhappy about being cut out of their GPL-required rights, then they might contact an upstream copyright holder and ask them to file suit. There has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/may/16/vizio-remand-win/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at least one case&lt;/a&gt; of a downstream recipient directly suing for specific performance, but that case has yet to be decided. The legal theory is not wholly implausible, but it will depend on a number of unsettled legal issues, including whether the GPL is a contract and whether specific performance is available as a remedy. This is also likely to vary with jurisdiction, so you should consult an attorney if concerned about this possibility.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unless your code is a derivative work of the graphics driver, whoever wrote that driver probably has no claim against you, regardless of whether you violate someone else's rights or not. As with the downstream recipient, they might not be happy that you violated the GPL and might notify the upstream copyright holders. And, as mentioned above, if you distribute a single binary kernel with their driver and also your proprietary modules, then that may create liability as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T19:00:42.270" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T19:00:42.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11396" CreationDate="2021-03-07T16:48:34.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms of the CC BY-SA license do not forbid you to make money of the work or a derived work. The main requirements are that you give proper attribution and that a derived work is licensed under the CC BY-SA license (or a select few other copyleft licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From where I sit, I can't tell if your service would be a derived work of Conceptnet Numberbatch, but if it is, you can only distribute your project by giving the recipients the same rights that you received. The CC BY-SA license does not require the distribution of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T16:48:34.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11391" CreationDate="2021-03-07T17:32:36.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you only mention the MIT license in your GitHub repository, then the default assumption will be that everything in that repository is licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license allows the artwork to be re-used completely independently of the program code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is very unlikely that the program code and the artwork are derived works of each other, it is entirely possible to give them different licensing terms. You just have to make it very clear which license applies to which portion of the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, for example, write your LICENSE file like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application and the artwork in this repository are provided under different licenses. The artwork, which is all located in the folder /artwork, is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application code and associated documentation is under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Insert copy of MIT license text here&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Insert copy of CC BY 4.0 license text here&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T17:32:36.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11394" CreationDate="2021-03-08T09:31:06.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have found code on GitHub which you wish to run, and use the output as part of a commercial endeavour.  The code is under a mixture of licences, including MIT and CC &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-NC-4.0&lt;/a&gt;.  You want to know if you have a licensing issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FAOD, you cannot use this code as part of your commercial project.  It seems very likely to me that the GitHub codebase is, in copyright terms, a s1a adaptation of the BY-NC-4.0 code, and s2a1b forbids the use of such when&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (s1i).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can likely use the &lt;em&gt;output&lt;/em&gt; of this program as part of your project.  It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;generally understood&lt;/a&gt; that the licence under which you received a piece of code does not extend to covering its output; the output is instead generally a derivative work of, and thus covered by any licence on, the inputs.  So provided the inputs were all your own work, then unless this program does something like copying part of its own code to its output stream, you can use the output as part of your commercial endeavour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, IANAL/IANYL, so you should seek professional legal advice before you bet a company on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T09:31:06.410" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11404" CreationDate="2021-03-09T16:57:46.627" Score="3" ViewCount="353" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if publishing some code on github is considered a distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5223/22276&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that it would be :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is considered redistribution. If not what would?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11389/22276&quot;&gt;that answer&lt;/a&gt; states :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution happens whenever you make the work accessible to&#xA;another party. It doesn't matter if that party is anyone who knows&#xA;about your website or one specific person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if it makes perfect sense that a public repository shall be considered a form of distribution, isn't there a flaw here ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean : Github has it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#5-license-grant-to-other-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;right to fork&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; policy, so that would mean that any project on a public Github repository gives automatically full redistribution rights to anyone ?&#xA;What if the license limits the redistribution (only allow distribution of modified software, or allow unmodified redistribution only another name) ?&#xA;Then the simple action of forking the repository would be against the license, because it is not &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt; modified, or otherwise stated, the license would conflict with github ToS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that also mean that any form of contribution through a fork-and-pull approch would be considered redistribution, and so that any contributor shall take care of fullfilling every distribution criteria of the license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22276" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T01:32:58.627" Title="Publishing code on github considered (re)distribution?" Tags="|licensing|github|derivative-works|distribution|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11403" CreationDate="2021-03-09T18:10:03.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;would mean that any project on a public Github repository gives automatically full redistribution rights to anyone ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that anyone may copy the work verbatim to a new repository on the website GitHub.com. GitHub's ToS do not require uploaders to allow any other kinds of redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the license limits the redistribution (only allow distribution of modified software, or allow unmodified redistribution only another name) ? Then the simple action of forking the repository would be against the license, because it is not yet modified, or otherwise stated, the license would conflict with github ToS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems basically correct. However, any license that allowed (otherwise) verbatim redistribution only under a new name would probably not be a FLOSS license. If Alice gives you work Foobar, you should be able to pass on Foobar to Bob without fiddling with its name first. A license that doesn't allow such verbatim redistribution isn't FLOSS and isn't particularly important to GitHub. But you are correct thst if such a (non-FLOSS) license does exist, it could not be used on GitHub, since the redistribution terms are incompatible with what the GitHub ToS requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a license allows the distribution of modified forms only under a new name, that's not a problem: just make sure you change the name before you make any other changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that also mean that any form of contribution through a fork-and-pull approch would be considered redistribution, and so that any contributor shall take care of fullfilling every distribution criteria of the license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that seems basically correct. Pull requests create a modified work that is made available to others (at minimum, on the originating branch), so distribution occurs when another person accesses them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T01:32:58.627" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T01:32:58.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11409" CreationDate="2021-03-09T22:47:34.947" Score="1" ViewCount="816" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently made &lt;a href=&quot;https://arifr1234.github.io/wikipedia-graph/index.html?pages=Computer%20programming%7CStack%20Overflow%7CStack%20Exchange&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; website, hosted on Github. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/arifr1234/wikipedia-graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Repo&lt;/a&gt;)**&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website uses multiple MIT-licensed (or similar licenses) 'code':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several SVG icons from Wikimedia commons (&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_External-link.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icon 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OOjs_UI_icon_help-ltr.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icon 2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OOjs_UI_indicator_search-ltr.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icon 3&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Code I copied and significantly modified from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://observablehq.com/@d3/force-directed-graph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Observable Notebook&lt;/a&gt; which is ISC licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The d3.js library (BSD 3-Clause) (which I don't think is relevant, but I'm listing it anyway).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After a lot of research, I came to the conclusion that I need to have the following text:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Copyright 2017–2020 Observable, Inc.&#xA;&#xA;    Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any&#xA;    purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above&#xA;    copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.&#xA;    &#xA;    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES&#xA;    WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF&#xA;    MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR&#xA;    ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES&#xA;    WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN&#xA;    ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF&#xA;    OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;    Copyright (c) 2011–2013 VisualEditor team &amp;lt;https://git.wikimedia.org/blob/mediawiki%2Fextensions%2FVisualEditor.git/master/AUTHORS.txt&amp;gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    Copyright (c) 2011–2017 OOjs UI Team and other contributors &amp;lt;https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/GOJU/browse/master/AUTHORS.txt&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;    of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal&#xA;    in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;    to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;    copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;    furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;    &#xA;    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;    copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;    &#xA;    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;    FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;    AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;    LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;    OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;    SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Written in:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The About Page (and I should create one).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LICENSE.txt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any existing documentation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;README ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And most importantly in a comment at the beginning of the .html and .js files (I have only one for each)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which parts of the text are necessary and what can be discarded?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I forgetting something that needs to be added?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions (1) and (2) again regarding the places to put the text in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General remarks and suggestions are also more than welcome :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I copied the permission notice only once for each license type (once for MIT and once for ISC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I copied the copyright notice only once for each author (Icon 2 and Icon 3 are both by &amp;quot;OOjs UI Team and other contributors&amp;quot;, so I wrote &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2011–2017 OOjs UI Team and other contributors&lt;/code&gt; only once)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22297" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-02T08:35:08.840" LastActivityDate="2023-05-02T08:35:08.840" Title="Several beginner questions about using MIT-licensed code" Tags="|mit|license-notice|attribution|website|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11408" CreationDate="2021-03-10T06:31:18.020" Score="5" ViewCount="859" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to use some code licensed under Apache License 2.0 in some API. How shall I include the license notice that is required by Apache License 2.0? The API is a RESTful API, which is documented on a webpage. Shall I simply add the license notice somewhere on the same webpage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T08:38:30.257" Title="How am I supposed to include a license notice if I use some code licensed under Apache License 2.0 in some API?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11407" CreationDate="2021-03-10T06:59:46.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have taken some code licensed to you under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt; and made a derivative work implementing an API.  You intend to run a single instance of this work on your own server so that others can interact with it.  You wish to know what your licence obligations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, as I read it, you have nearly none.  All the obligations of Apache2, including preservation of the licence text and inclusion of any provided &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file, are in s4, which begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You aren't distributing copies of your derivative work.  You have reproduced a single copy, but as long as the server-side code contains, somewhere, text that satisfies the requirements of s4, you have met your obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most free software licences only impose obligations when code is transferred to another party.  The desire to extend the benefits of these obligations to people who were merely interacting with the software over a network was a major factor in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;developing the AGPL&lt;/a&gt;, and the AGPL remains unusual among free licences in extending your obligations to people who merely interact with covered code running on your server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-10T08:38:30.257" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T08:38:30.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11405" CreationDate="2021-03-10T07:44:33.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most importantly in a comment at the beginning of the .html and .js files (I have only one for each)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each file that you copied third-party code into must indeed contain a comment at the beginning with the copyright and permission notices for all the copied code, in addition to the copyright and permission notices for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, that is sufficient to satisfy the MIT, ISC and BSD licensing conditions for the javascript and/or html portions you copied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the icons, the situation is a bit more complex, because the license information is probably not contained in those files themselves but carried alongside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The About Page (and I should create one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For icons and similar items, it is customary to have an About page mentioning the copyright and licensing information. And if you are creating an About page, it is a nice sign of goodwill to mention there also the copyright and licensing information for the third-party javascript and html (in addition to the comments in the source files), or to have a link to those projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your About page, you should mention which copyright and permission notices refer to which items. You could, for example, organize it like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;About&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2021 Ari Friedman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Third-party licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Icons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;Icon 1&amp;gt;: Copyright notice 1; Licensed under MIT license (text below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;lt;Icon 2&amp;gt; &amp;amp; &amp;lt;Icon3&amp;gt;: Copyright notice 2; Licensed under MIT license (text below)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT License:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; include MIT license text here&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ISC License:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;lt; include ISC license text here&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T07:44:33.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-10T17:38:13.253" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in the midst of writing software using LGPL libraries, which will be part of an image for a device. &lt;strong&gt;Am I obliged to provide object files for different (micro)architectures&lt;/strong&gt; than the device the software will be distributed with? Or is it enough to offer the object files compiled for the particular device the customer acquired?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17946" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T04:43:11.803" Title="LGPL and different architectures" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11412" CreationDate="2021-03-10T23:03:54.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the GPL or LGPL, whether version 2 or 3, requires you to offer object files of any kind whatsoever. Instead, both versions of both licenses impose conditions on distributing object files, under the assumption that you already wanted to distribute object files in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When distributing object files, you are expected to provide the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For each binary or object file, the corresponding source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the program as a whole, any other files or scripts which are required to compile, modify, and/or execute the program. As an exception, you (usually) don't need to provide the &amp;quot;major components&amp;quot; or system libraries for the underlying operating system or programming language (the actual language is rather more complex; consult the text of the license which applies to you for the full details).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All of the above must be in &amp;quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&amp;quot; In other words, no obfuscated or minified code (unless you also supply the unobfuscated original), no generated code (unless you also supply whatever you used to generate it), and so on. Object code doesn't qualify as &amp;quot;preferred,&amp;quot; unless your (the developer's) entire process for creating it consists of firing up a hex editor and doing everything by hand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the (L)GPL version 3, you must also provide anything that is required to run modified versions on a given piece of consumer hardware, but only when such hardware is sold or leased alongside the GPL'd software in the same transaction. You are not expected to port your software to every system that could conceivably run it. This is mostly intended to cover cases where a manufacturer creates nonstandard hardware and software and sells them as a unit (e.g. a gaming console, a smartphone, etc.); if the software is GPL'd, then that manufacturer is required to make it reasonably straightforward for its consumers to create and use modified software on that hardware.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL carves out some &lt;em&gt;exceptions&lt;/em&gt; to requirement #1, allowing you to distribute object files which would (under the GPL) need to be accompanied with their source code, but it does not say that you must provide any additional object files which would otherwise not be present.* Version 3 of the GPL (and therefore the LGPL, which incorporates it by reference) does require you to provide &amp;quot;installation information&amp;quot; for user products when you distribute software and hardware simultaneously, but only with respect to the particular hardware that you distributed. So if your object files are somehow required for the hardware to function, and you sold or leased that hardware alongside the software, then you might need to provide those object files, or their source code if they do not fall under the LGPL's application exception. But that would be quite an unusual situation, because if those object files are required for the software to function, then you probably would have included them anyway (because you wanted the software to function, right?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Caveat: As pointed out in the comments, if you are statically linking everything, you may be required to provide object files to allow re-linking with a modified LGPL'd library. This is an unusual way of distributing software, but it could come up. Regardless, you still only need to provide object files that directly correspond to the contents of the statically linked binary, not random other object files for unrelated pieces of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T04:43:11.803" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T04:43:11.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11415" CreationDate="2021-03-11T04:55:29.650" Score="14" ViewCount="3510" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been developing an open source project independently before, which is under Apache-2.0 License. With the deepening of development, the function of the project has been enriched, so I plan to modify the name of this project. But I don't know whether the operation of changing the name will cause some trouble, for example, the project code before name change cannot be protected by the license. What should I do to properly change the name of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22302" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T18:56:56.037" Title="If I am going to change the name of my open source project, what should I do?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2021-03-11T08:16:43.657" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't need to do anything. Open source licenses derive their power from copyright law, and neither copyright law nor the Apache license itself care about the name under which a product is released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this a different way: if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; took your code and released it under a different name, something I am perfectly entitled to do so long as I maintain the appropriate attributions, that clearly shouldn't affect the licensing status of your code, so it isn't going to affect it if you do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T08:16:43.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2021-03-11T15:10:04.863" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding on Philip Kendall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses don't stop working because you changed a name. The product also isn't &amp;quot;stuck&amp;quot; on the specific license. It only regulates what OTHER people can do with the software. Ever notice how these licenses usually don't have a name in them? Because they usually apply to the software, or even just the piece of work they were found/bundled with. Changing the name would not change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What YOU as the author can do with it is near limitless (in regards to loosening restrictions). And this includes taking 99% of the code and re-releasing it under a new name (and potentially even a new license). Or doing nothing but changing the name in the github repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only counterpoint: This would not stop anyone from sharing your old code under the old name (as long as within the original license), but you cannot stop that now anyway. Please also make sure that your branding change is very public and that it is reasonably easy for anyone with the old name to a) find it under the new name and b) verify that it is indeed the same project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13169" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T15:10:04.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11414" CreationDate="2021-03-12T01:23:52.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a real-world example of what you're wanting to do, the Firefox browser was originally named &amp;quot;Phoenix&amp;quot; and then &amp;quot;Firebird&amp;quot; before settling on its current name.  Nothing really changed except for the branding, logos, and artwork.  Your license document should be updated to include the new name of the program, but other than that it should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a practical standpoint, you may want to treat this like you're creating a fork.  If your current project exists at &lt;code&gt;github.com/TeamFrobozz/libFoo&lt;/code&gt;, publish the new version at &lt;code&gt;github.com/TeamFrobozz/libBar&lt;/code&gt; and restart the versioning at v1.0.  Make the old project read-only and update its readme with a big message at the top that says something along the lines of &amp;quot;This project is no longer being maintained and has been replaced by [link to new project]&amp;quot;.  Make sure the readme for the new project clearly states that it is a &amp;quot;continuation of &lt;code&gt;libFoo&lt;/code&gt; as of v4.2&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest headache will be that users of your project will have to do more than simply drop in a new version of the library.  Anything that references the project or file names (&lt;code&gt;#include&lt;/code&gt; statements, build scripts, installers, etc) will have to be updated with the new name.  If your project exposes an API that includes the project name in the names of functions or constants, then references to those will have to be updated as well.  I recommend writing up a short &amp;quot;porting guide&amp;quot; that outlines what changes are needed for a user to switch from your old version to the new one.  If your project has a sizeable user base and in this process you discover that the porting process is non-trivial, you might reconsider renaming your project.  Many software projects have grown far beyond their original purpose but have retained their original names. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoLAN&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;VLC&lt;/a&gt; (VideoLAN Client) was originally designed to stream video across a local network, and the humble &lt;code&gt;tar&lt;/code&gt; program now does far more than archive data on tape drives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T01:23:52.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2033" CreationDate="2021-03-12T09:14:10.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The new version of Unifont can be embedded freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of Unifont version 13.0.04, the fonts are dual-licensed under the&#xA;SIL Open Font License (OFL) version 1.1 and the GNU GPL 2+ with the&#xA;GNU font embedding exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://unifoundry.com/unifont/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://unifoundry.com/unifont/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22314" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T09:14:10.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11227" CreationDate="2021-03-12T16:04:57.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The easiest solution is to just ship the open-source code alongside the product&lt;/strong&gt;, in a SD card or USB Stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deeply embedded open-source code inaccessible by the user is the very definition of inconspicuous. Also there may be size/performance/configuration restrictions hindering compliance on such platforms, unlike say a Ubuntu OS, where the user can interact with the software directly on a powerful computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there are a lot of packages where the authors do indeed gpl the code, but do no bother with copyright and authorship clarifications. Most of the time that is fine because the user is the one actually manipulating, compiling or inspecting the code, but not here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By shipping all the open-source code (assuming you have a clear separation between open-source and proprietary modules) you are not giving away anything really, in terms of your commercial interests - it is not where you add value to the product, but you can save yourself the nightmare of collecting the authorship and copyright (and licensing btw, there are (L)GPL-X.Y, BSD, MIT, unspecified and custom licensed software pieces all across such complex items as a Linux distro) information. Instead, give everything away, let the user know about it (those 1 paragraph disclaimers you mention) and sift through it if he wants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically it is still not legally clear if you are fully compliant, because you are not disclosing the copyright information properly in the disclaimer to the user, but you show effort and you change the possible legal consequences from licensing royalties to a less severe compensation for damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, although I did consult with one on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21894" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T16:04:57.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-12T10:41:27.777" Score="4" ViewCount="1207" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intro:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Recently I'm working on an electron based application that is free to use but also has subscription based services.&#xA;It came to my attention that ffmpeg is shipped with electron, which has GPL/LGPL licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My quetion is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I legally able to still distribute the application and be licence-compliant with ffmpeg without owning any proper licence to it? I thought chromium dealt with the licencing on this topic since so many applications nowadays are shipped with using electron and chromium under the hood.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I compile/build electron to make it licence compatible (in case its not?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a lot of research and I found out the followings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;ffmpeg is shipped with chromium, they built their own version of ffmpeg and it seems they also have licence for it. Although that might be that they just push the responsibility down on the software developer/company who distributes their application with chromium.&#xA;Chromium licence for ffmpeg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/+/703e920bb75053bf6b87d41d198cbbfbce3fb7ad/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/+/703e920bb75053bf6b87d41d198cbbfbce3fb7ad/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apparently ffmpeg has a checklist of how to be licence compliant. Does that mean if I do all these steps, I can still distribute the application and can legally use it? Licence checklist for ffmpeg: &lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;checking out some popular electron applications like Discord, Figma, Slack, etc... they ALL have ffmpeg included cause of electron when you install them. I wonder how they made it legal? I don't see any of these checklists done on any of these popular applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm know very little regarding licences, so any help would be incredibly huge help for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Iamisti" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:57:05.743" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:57:05.743" Title="Electron, Chromium and ffmpeg licencing confusion, how to build electron with licence compatible ffmpeg?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11420" CreationDate="2021-03-12T23:01:50.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;FFmpeg as a base line is available under GPL v2, GPL v3, LGPL v2.1 or LGPL v3. So you have the choice. Including a version of FFmpeg which adheres to the LGPL (whatever version) allows it to be included as a module in proprietary applications or those with a weak copylieft like MIT, if you fulfill the LGPL license requirements (they are not really that complicated). The steps necessary to achieve this are outlined in great detail in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license complience checklist&lt;/a&gt; which you linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind though, this means you CANNOT use any GPL-licensed module or codec and you CANNOT use any non-free or proprietary codec either. Binaries of FFmpeg or VLC are distributed on their own websites under the GPL license which allows them to compile-in more modules (those which are GPL-licensed) and fulfill the license requirements. If you need these modules in your application and consequently compile with &lt;code&gt;--enable-gpl&lt;/code&gt;, you must release the whole application which links to these FFmpeg libraries under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T23:01:50.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T15:29:55.350" Score="2" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to Java programming and I've recently read this article from Oracle(from September 2018). &lt;a href=&quot;https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-releases-for-java-11-and-later&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/oracle-jdk-releases-for-java-11-and-later&lt;/a&gt;. What does this mean? From the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Binary Code License for Oracle Java SE technologies (“BCL”) has been the primary license for Oracle Java SE technologies for well over a decade. The BCL permits use without license fees under certain conditions. To simplify things going forward, Oracle started providing open source licensed OpenJDK builds as of Java 9, using the same license model as the Linux platform. If you are used to getting Oracle Java SE binaries for free, you can simply continue doing so with Oracle’s OpenJDK builds available at jdk.java.net. If you are used to getting Oracle Java SE binaries as part of a commercial product or service from Oracle, then you can continue to get Oracle JDK releases through My Oracle Support (MOS), and other locations. Starting with Java 11, Oracle will provide JDK releases under the open source GNU General Public License v2, with the Classpath Exception (GPLv2+CPE), and under a commercial license for those using the Oracle JDK as part of an Oracle product or service, or who do not wish to use open source software. This combination of using an open source license and a commercial license replaces the historical “BCL” license, which had a combination of free and paid commercial terms. Different builds will be provided for each license, but these builds are functionally identical aside from some cosmetic and packaging differences, described in detail below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that OpenJDK 8 is still under the BCL license? I get my Java from Amazon which is a distribution of OpenJDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22324" LastEditorDisplayName="user24913" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T10:25:41.097" LastActivityDate="2022-01-29T12:05:35.573" Title="What is the difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-2|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T16:51:03.157" Score="2" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I read that OpenJDK is under the GPLv2 with linking exception. What is a Classpath exception and a linking exception? The JDK that I'm using(Amazon Corretto which is a build of OpenJDK) is under the GPLv2 with Classpath exception. Are these 2 the same thing? Also, what is a assembly exception? Is OpenJDK fully covered by a classpath  exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first answer to this post confuses me&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/515/what-is-a-class-path-exception&quot;&gt;What is a class path exception?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22324" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T16:51:03.157" Title="What is the difference between GPL classpath exception and linking exception?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-2|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T17:34:43.913" Score="-3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to make an app, and I'm actually serious about it. I'm using electron, so I know my source code is guaranteed to be leaked. I was thinking of making my app open source, but at the same time I don't want someone to steal it and republish it. Is there some sort of license preventing people from using my code, but at the same time keep my app open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22325" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T07:21:23.120" Title="Is there a license to make your code open source, but at the same time for people not to be able to use the code?" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-03-14T08:47:04.573" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11424" CreationDate="2021-03-14T07:21:23.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A corner stone of open-source licensing is that anyone and everyone is allowed to redistribute or republish the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want that, then you must not use an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To protect your project from re-publication, any license that does not allow redistribution is sufficient, or even no license at all. It does not matter if people can obtain your source code or not, it matters what they are allowed to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T07:21:23.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T14:01:31.250" Score="0" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm newbie in web-development. I want create a project for demo my work skills: GitHub repository with source codes and working application on some hosting service. My project is a single page application - catalog of big cities: MongoDB (from cloud service Atlas)  + Django (back-end) + React for (front-end). So licenses: SSPA for MongoDB, Django (own license) and MIT for React.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know which type of license I should choose for my project and which licenses is compatibile with components licenses list. Can I start my project under MIT, GPLv3 or Apache 2.0 with these components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T01:11:37.567" Title="Can I start my project under MIT, GPLv3 or Apache 2.0 with these components?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11427" CreationDate="2021-03-15T01:11:37.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You'll have to check the licenses of the pieces you want to use, and see if they are compatible with the license you want to select. E.g. the FSF has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; discussing compatibility of licences with GPL, the Open Source Initiative also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; detailing licenses. David A. Wheeler wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever you end up doing, do heed David's admonition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; You should make sure the pieces you'll use are under GPL-compatible licenses too (even if their licenses allow your specific use), for much the same reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T01:11:37.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11422" CreationDate="2021-03-15T01:20:24.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my (non-lawyer) eyes this reads as they promising it goes/stays GPL + CPE or you can get it under BCL (for a fee) if the above license isn't compatible with your intended use (quite farfetched, but still).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T01:20:24.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11431" CreationDate="2021-03-15T11:52:56.360" Score="0" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find information that JSON license is not campatible with GPL. I need to use OpenJDK for development on Java, and use json format for web-development. OpenJDK have components for working with JSON and it was licensed under GPLv2 with linking exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can I use json format on my projects, that will be distributed under GPL? Why JSON license is uncompatible with GPL, but json format using in GPL licensed project like OpenJDK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I mistake and it about only original implementation of JSON and not about other implementation of encoders and decoders?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T12:20:25.270" Title="Why JSON license is uncompatible with GPL, but json format using in GPL licensed project like OpenJDK?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11430" CreationDate="2021-03-15T12:20:25.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Crockford's JSON license is used in some of his JSON-related software. This license does not affect other JSON implementations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright protects expression, not ideas. A standards document or a description of a data format involves copyright protection for that document/description, but not for the ideas described therein. Unless there are patents involved (which can protect ideas that are inventions), anyone can implement the specification, in this case the file format. Even if the file format itself had a license, many jurisdictions have copyright exceptions for interoperability purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the normative description of JSON is not Crockford's website, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-404/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ECMA-404 standard&lt;/a&gt;. The standards document is published under a license that explicitly allows implementing the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T12:20:25.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11439" CreationDate="2021-03-15T21:42:55.603" Score="3" ViewCount="4374" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel contains binary blob (&lt;a href=&quot;https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). Linux Foundation and Linux kernel developers issued a statement about that (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/tab/device-driver-statement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;, notably the kernel developers statement was not signed by Torvalds).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What those blobs do? Are they just legacy drivers for legacy hardware or do much more?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/selibre/linux-libre/index.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux libre&lt;/a&gt; provides a version of the kernel free from binary blobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find out if my PC would work when I install Linux-libre?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I tried installing linux-libre kernel and, although my laptop boot, the WiFi doesn't work. I made a diff between the linux kernel and the linux-libre kernel. linux-libre kernel has removed the firmware of my WiFi card because it is a closed-source proprietary binary blob. The driver I'm using is called iwlwifi. The kernel module of the driver is free software, but the firmware is proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastEditorUserId="21452" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T09:59:27.253" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T09:59:27.253" Title="What does the binary blob in the linux kernel do?" Tags="|linux-kernel|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T08:59:37.030" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a JAVA library, that will use an LGPL library. The LGPL library is a library that provides an API to create charts, whereas my library will provide a more high level API like creating a Window with a chart inside it. For example, I could have the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Proprietary windowWithChart = CreateWindowChart();&#xA;LGPLChart chart = windowWidthChart.getChart();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I distribute my library as a JAR, is it mandatory to use an LGPL license, or can I use a proprietary license ? I'm wondering if my work could be considered as &amp;quot;a work using the LGPL library&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;a work based on the LGPL library&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T08:59:37.030" Title="Distributing a proprietary library that uses an LGPL library" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T12:57:17.120" Score="2" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;The repository for something that I need to use has 2 license txt. One which is the LGPL and the other the GPLv3. I heard from a member of their Discord that this is because the LGPL is an extension to the GPL, so a copy of the GPL is always in the repository of a LGPL product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both txt have a description that reads &amp;quot;We're LGPL&amp;quot; though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22324" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T13:30:09.947" Title="In repositories, does software under the LGPL include a copy of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11434" CreationDate="2021-03-16T13:30:09.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL Version 3 uses the GPL-3.0 Additional Permissions mechanism to add a linking exception to the GPL. The LGPL-3.0 is not a standalone license, but rather a standardized GPL exception. Therefore, yes, any project under the LGPL-3.0 must include the GPL license text as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, earlier LGPL versions are standalone licenses and only require a copy of the LGPL to be provided, not a copy of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T13:30:09.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T15:51:30.853" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok, firstly, to clarify when I say minor, I mean someone under the age of majority in the US. In this case his father reached out to me regarding a sort of mentor/apprenticeship, so I know I have his approval (but do I need more? like something in writing?). Since It's open source, I don't need to pay him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sort of CYA's do I need to have in place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1060" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T12:43:47.287" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T12:43:47.287" Title="How can I handle minors as contributors?" Tags="|contributor|contributor-agreements|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11436" CreationDate="2021-03-16T16:02:02.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Treat them like you handle anyone else: with respect and with kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't assume evil intentions when you can assume ignorance. Teach people how to behave and how you expect contributions instead of berating them. Lead by (good) example. Tell people that you will have an open ear and are willing to listen, if they have any issues concerning behaviour or proceedings in your community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are willing to mentor her/him and give special introductions and advice: then by all means do so - if s/he wants it. Teach the ropes as far as they are willing to go, as far as desirable and necessary. Do that via the usual platforms you employ in your community. Give them things like 'good first issue' to work on to get a feel how it goes, to enable success stories for them and learn it by doing actual work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T16:07:31.403" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T16:07:31.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1247" CreationDate="2021-03-17T00:20:54.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Version 4 of CC BY-NC license explicitly says the user cannot share adapted material for Commercial purpose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 2.a. License grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the&#xA;Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free,&#xA;non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the&#xA;Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. reproduce and Share the&#xA;Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes&#xA;only; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material for&#xA;NonCommercial purposes only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11055" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T00:20:54.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11432" CreationDate="2021-03-17T08:58:01.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the binary blobs in Linux are in device drivers, and most of those are in WiFi drivers.  Their function is to be the operating code for the hardware on the device; unless they're loaded when the hardware is initialised, the hardware will not function.  It is unfortunate that WiFi manufacturers, in particular, have chosen this method of operation; but they have.  Different Linux distributions have taken different approaches to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fedora ships blobs, having &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/714524/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;decided that&lt;/a&gt; '&lt;em&gt;everything needed to be free software ... it was a popular and well-received move, but it broke everyone's WiFi, because (at least at that time) just about every WiFi driver in the world required the loading of a binary firmware blob into the hardware. No one was keen to see Fedora become known as &amp;quot;the distro everyone used to use until they needed WiFi&amp;quot;, so [they] changed the requirement to &amp;quot;must be free software, except for firmware needed to make free software work&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;' (full disclosure: I wrote that article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Debian ships blobs, but is careful to &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=firmware&amp;amp;searchon=names&amp;amp;suite=stable&amp;amp;section=all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;separate them out&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;em&gt;contrib&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;non-free&lt;/em&gt;, according to the availability and licence status of their sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://pureos.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PureOS&lt;/a&gt;, just don't ship them.  The FSF maintains &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list&lt;/a&gt; of these, which links also to their discussion of why some other distros (and some other OSes) failed to make the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have found, one consequence of using a fully-free distribution is that you have to be extremely careful what kind of computer you buy if you want to use WiFi.  If you want to know whether any given system will run without binary blobs, you will need to find out the chipset of every single system component, and check that fully-free drivers are available for it.  You will also need to run with the microcode that your CPU ships with, and you should expect to have lots of fun with your motherboard's BIOS.  It is very unlikely any off-the-shelf system will meet these criteria, so you're likely to end up building your systems from components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I wish that (WiFi) device vendors would stop doing this.  But until they do, I am glad that free software gives me &lt;em&gt;choices&lt;/em&gt; - I can decide how pure I want to be, and how much functionality I'm willing to give up in service of that goal.  And so can you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T08:58:01.167" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-18T13:41:03.130" Score="3" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation is following: There is a project (lets call it A), standard MIT licensed but long abandoned. I created a rebranded fork, fully MIT compliant, called B. Another person, lets call him Jack, created one of his own forks, called C, also MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have made, and will make substantial changes to B, but one of the changes I want to do was also implemented by Jack in his C repo. instead of reinventing hot water, I want to include his specific feature into my repo, and of course give credit. I tried contacting Jack out of curtesy, but there was no response (though I think this shouldn't really matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Potential ways I am thinking about are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add his repo as additional remote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a branch of my master and cherry pick commits from his repo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since this will create conflicts and unbuildable state, harmonize his code with another commit of my own&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add Jack to AUTHORS file which I added and now maintain for all other contributors, past, present and future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will leave his commits as they are and part of B's git chain, but it is more work for me to resolve everything since API surface no longer matches that of project A (which C inherited and just expanded).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option I am considering is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just copy/paste changes from his repo I need, avoiding conflicts and modifying to fit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When committing, change commit message and add Jack as &lt;code&gt;Co-authored-by:&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add Jack to AUTHORS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be faster for me, but would remove him as a direct commit author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both ways I believe he would be attributed. But I guess primary question is: Am I even allowed to do that? As in merge outside up/down/stream without Jack's explicit permission?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if allowed, which way would be allowed/best?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22349" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T14:35:13.317" Title="Merging parts of another, parallel, fork [MIT]" Tags="|mit|derivative-works|attribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11440" CreationDate="2021-03-18T14:23:50.907" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are thinking very much about Git, and not at all about the existing MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can just copy Jack's code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You do have explicit permission – the MIT license under which you received Jack's code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This license only has a single condition: that you keep Jack's copyright + license notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to preserve Jack's Git history you'll have to do some complicated merging, but you're not required to do that. It is perfectly acceptable that Jack is not the commit-author of some commits that involves Jack's code. The MIT license is not about some abstract notion of “attribution”, but very specifically about Jack's copyright and license notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would just copy the relevant pieces of code from Jack's project. If they are a somewhat self-contained (e.g. an individual function or file) then I'd add a comment near them to explain their origin. In any case, I would update your existing license file to also include Jack's copyright + license notice. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;libfoo-fork is a library for doing foo and bar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2021 mmix&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[MIT license text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;libfoo-fork is based on libfoo-original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2012 Original Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[MIT license text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The routines &lt;code&gt;foo_fantastic()&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;bar_better()&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;foobar.c&lt;/code&gt; are based on libfoo-jack:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2018 Jack&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[MIT license text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T14:23:50.907" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11440" CreationDate="2021-03-18T14:35:13.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are certainly allowed to merge MIT/X11/Expat-licensed code into other code under the same license. (You are allowed to merge such permissively licensed code into virtually anything, including copyleft or proprietary code as well.) As long as you keep the copyright notices and license text, you may do just about anything you like. You could eschew git altogether and distribute some of B's code and C's code together as tarball of files with no history whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a git-workflow perspective, there may (or may not) be some benefit to keeping C's development history. If you are very skilled at using git, it may be helpful to be able to rollback to specific commits in C's history for testing or debugging purposes. However, this is a fairly niche need, and the additional complexity of a git merge in your history may outweigh the flexibility you gain by keeping the full history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another benefit could be if you anticipate ongoing independent development from C, which could require repeated future merges with C's remote code. In that case, using git to manage the frequent merges in their own branch could be quite helpful, to save you the trouble of making the same compatibility fixes each time you pull C's code into B. However, since C appears to abandoned, this need is not particularly important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, as someone with midling git skills, I'd directly perform the modifications on my local copy and push up C's changes as a single commit, but either way is a valid option, from both a legal perspective and a project-management perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T14:35:13.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11444" CreationDate="2021-03-18T17:10:44.687" Score="2" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I can access a source code with a BSD license, who, if anybody, do I need to ask permission to use/modify/commercialize/redistribute the code (under BSD license conditions)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license allows redistribution but I do not understand what the steps of the redistribution process are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&#xA;The BSD license in question is a standard 3-clause BSD license &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in the license does it discuss grounds for obtaining the source code. Does this mean that I am free to use/modify/commercialize/redistribute the code (under BSD license conditions) no matter how I got the source code? Or is there some official redistribution process to get the software from the copyright holder/owner? (asking permission, formal documents, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22352" LastEditorUserId="22352" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T19:01:36.127" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T19:15:45.943" Title="Redistribution of BSD source code" Tags="|bsd|license|software|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11443" CreationDate="2021-03-18T19:15:45.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've correctly inferred, it does not matter how you acquired the source code. &amp;quot;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted&amp;quot; without regard to how you acquired the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to get permission. Permission has already been granted when the copyright holder chose to license their work under a BSD license. Suppose you did contact the author for permission, and they wrote back, &amp;quot;Sure! I'll go ahead and allow you to use and redistribute that software, with or without modifications, as long as you follow these requirements: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice.... etc.&amp;quot; Such an email would grant you no permission that you don't already possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license allows redistribution but I do not understand what the steps of the redistribution process are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirements are spelled out fairly plainly in the list of conditions, and depend upon the method of redistribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you reproduce the license text, copyright notices, and disclaimer, in source code and/or documentation, depending on what you're distributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that proprietary or copyleft software may also include BSD license notices if they make use of BSD-licensed code. This means that if you see a BSD license attached to a project, you should carefully note what code it does (or does not) apply to within the project as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T19:15:45.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11446" CreationDate="2021-03-19T09:52:24.100" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a modification of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rpart/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R package rpart&lt;/a&gt; for researching purposes. The license is GPL-2 | GPL-3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modification is simple but it is critical for another package that I have developed. I would like to upload it to Github for reproducibility purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should I acknowledge the authors of rpart? Is a forking in github enough? Can I include myself as an author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I obliged to use GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22357" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T15:21:11.850" Title="Modifying an R package with GPL-2 | GPL-3. What is the correct workflow?" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11445" CreationDate="2021-03-19T15:29:30.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You should maintain their copyright notices intact; this is required by eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s4.  You can do this by forking their repository, or copying it to another git hosting service, or publishing tarballs; the GPL doesn't care about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you preserve them.  As for acknowledging yourself, you should &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; a copyright notice of your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  GPLv3 s5c says you may convey &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a work based on the Program&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; but you &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  GPLv2 has comparable language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T15:21:11.850" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T15:21:11.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11447" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11451" CreationDate="2021-03-19T21:33:26.383" Score="3" ViewCount="1408" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised to see people are selling GPL'd software on Microsoft Store. An example is GIMP. GIMP is GPL'd opensource image editing tool. There are some vendors on Microsoft Store have repackaged GIMP and are selling it there. Is it legitimate to do that without violating the GPL license? If there is a GPL software only available in form of source code, is it legal to build it to executable form (like Windows App), package and sell it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22362" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T16:23:56.317" Title="Is it legal to repackage GPL software and sell it on Microsoft Store, like GIMP?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-20T10:10:44.753" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;To create executables to run on iOS platforms, the intended way is to use Apple's XCode to build them. XCode is available for free to run on MacOS devices. But, assuming that Apple's terms allow the distribution of an executable application built using XCode using LGPLv2 source code, would the LGPLv2 also allow distributing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I wonder whether section 6 of the license may forbid this, as it says that all data and utility programs required to reproduce the executable. As a special exception, it is allowed to leave out components that are normally distributed with the operating system. It explicitly mentions compilers, but XCode is not normally distributed with the iOS operating system (which normally does not come with a compiler at all), but can be ran on MacOS platforms. It could be considered as a part of the whole development ecosystem Apple provides, but when strictly talking about the iOS platform alone, it is probably not something that is distributed with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ScummVM&lt;/a&gt;, a software that is licensed under the GPLv2 (which contains a similar requirement in section 3), includes an iOS port for some time already. So there seems to be some way of legally distributing (L)GPLv2 licensed software despite of this license term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone can provide a bit of clarification on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it's a topic that is frequently brought up when talking about open source software on Apple iOS devices: This question is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; about App-Store-related issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22364" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:41:53.177" Title="Do (L)GPLv2 licenses allow the distribution of derived binaries using Apple's XCode?" Tags="|lgpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11448" CreationDate="2021-03-20T11:41:53.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are very few (consumer-oriented) operating system distributions that come by default with a compiler. Even most Linux distributions have the compiler as an optional component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of clause 6 of the LGPLv2.1 is that if you receive a closed-source application that uses an LGPL library, then you get the rights and means that an average developer who tinkers with software for the platform in question is able to create a new executable that uses a new version of the LGPL library. Tools that such a developer would normally have at his disposal or would have easy access to, do not have to be included in the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, I believe XCode counts as a &amp;quot;major component&amp;quot; that does not have to be distributed along with the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:41:53.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11447" CreationDate="2021-03-20T11:47:54.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is legal to sell GPL-licensed software as long as you keep the terms and conditions of the GPL. Those terms and conditions are that you cannot use a different license than the GPL (which gives the recipients certain rights with regard to making changes and redistribution) and that you make the source code available to the recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is often seen as unfriendly to commercial use, because I can buy one copy of a GPL application from you and then re-sell copies of it for a lower price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T11:47:54.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11447" CreationDate="2021-03-20T12:07:41.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, absolutely, and it is important that the GPL allows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF encourages people to sell free software&lt;/a&gt; when possible (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. &lt;strong&gt;Often the same program is available in both ways from different places.&lt;/strong&gt; The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly possible that the situation you describe is predatory, insofar as it sells for a fee what could easily be had without a fee. But that may not be generally true for this category of behavior, and this specific case may not even be particularly predatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To you, the availability of this software in the Microsoft store is not valuable, so you would not pay money for it. That may not be so for someone whose nation's firewall or whose employer's system policy forbids downloading or installing software from particular places. If Microsoft's store is the only place they can get the GIMP, they might happily pay the fee rather than figure out how else to get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if that's not actually true of this particular case, it is true of similar cases. The ability to redistribute the software through different channels (and compiled to run on different architectures) is important to ensure enduring and widespread availability of the software, and the GPL allows redistributors to charge money to do so. The GPL, as a legal tool, cannot distinguish between &amp;quot;predatory&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;non-predatory&amp;quot; prices for any particular act of redistribution; we can only rely on the market to sort such matters out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you object to the price being charged for some free software through some redistribution channel, the GPL (or any free license) gives you the freedom to build and offer your own copy for whatever lower price you want. In this way, the price will eventually (but not instantly or uniformly) approach zero across all distribution methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that any particular distribution channel may impose GPL-incompatible requirements (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11455/50&quot;&gt;see another answer on this question&lt;/a&gt; that explores this extensively), but there is no problem in general with compiling or distributing GPL software for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T13:37:34.230" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T13:37:34.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11453" CreationDate="2021-03-20T16:05:42.260" Score="6" ViewCount="3858" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here in Stack Exchange we have mentioned some cases of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4395/21539&quot;&gt;lawsuits&lt;/a&gt; involving open source projects that allegedly breached patents and were sued. I'm curious, however, in the opposite case: &lt;strong&gt;has anyone been sued for &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; following the terms of an open source software that has been used?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible examples narrow down to GPL-related software, since the copyleft terms create the precedent for someone to &amp;quot;breach&amp;quot; the licence. So, in other terms: has anyone used/altered a GPL-licenced software, hasn't released its source code and thus has been accused of not following the licence's terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21539" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T16:09:44.620" Title="Have there been any lawsuits involving breach of open source licences?" Tags="|gpl|law|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11452" CreationDate="2021-03-21T16:09:44.620" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there have been lots of lawsuits involving open source licenses. The GPL is a very popular license and been involved in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Legal_status&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;large share of that litigation&lt;/a&gt;. The result is that open source licenses and the GPL have been recognized as effective and enforceable licensing tools in many jurisdictions around the world. However, it might not be possible to enforce these licenses in individual cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll highlight some interesting cases or campaigns below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;SCO (2003): “The GPL is invalid and unconstitutional! But wait, we're using it…”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SCO–Linux controversies&lt;/a&gt; are hilarious in hindsight, and too complex to summarize quickly. The core issue was that SCO considered itself to be the true owner of Unix (they're not), and went around suing anyone for being involved with any Unix-ish operating system, including Linux. Linux uses the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2003, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SCO sued IBM&lt;/a&gt; because IBM added features to Linux that SCO thought violated their rights. In this context, there was a brief time where SCO both distributed a Linux version under the GPL license (which is only possible if the GPL is valid), while simultaneously claiming that the GPL is entirely invalid (??) because the GPL would violate the US constitution (????). They soon removed this claim in an amended filing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this isn't a precedent (and final appeals are still awaiting judgement), SCO's attacks were one of the strongest attacks on Linux copyright &amp;amp; licensing status. Linux and its GPL license have survived, SCO is no longer in business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Wallace (2005): “The GPL is an illegal price-fixing scheme!”&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL software is usually provided at no cost. In 2005, Wallace tried to sue the FSF for creating the GPL. The argument seemed to be that the GPL encourages pooling and sharing of IP, leading to predatory pricing. This would crowd out other market actors. However, the lawsuit was filed pro-se, without assistance from a lawyer. The case was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060320201540127&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thrown out&lt;/a&gt;, though more on procedural grounds than on the merits. In any case, the judge found that the GPL is good for competition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]he GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Jacobsen v Katzer: open source licenses are enforceable in the US&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Jacobsen v Katzer&lt;/em&gt; (US, 2006–2010) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), a company had used open source code under the Artistic License, without complying with its terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company argued that the license consisted of an (unconditional) license grant, plus some contractual terms like having to retain attribution notices. It would be possible to sue for this breach of contract, but there wouldn't be any damages since the software was made available at zero cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the court found that the terms of the license did protect economic interests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, program creators may generate market share for their programs by providing certain components free of charge. Similarly, a programmer or company may increase its national or international reputation by incubating open source projects. Improvement to a product can come rapidly and free of charge from an expert not even known to the copyright holder. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions set forth in the Artistic License are vital to enable the copyright holder to retain the ability to benefit from the work of downstream users. By requiring that users who modify or distribute the copyrighted material retain the reference to the original source files, downstream users are directed to Jacobsen's website. Thus, downstream users know about the collaborative effort to improve and expand the SourceForge project once they learn of the &amp;quot;upstream&amp;quot; project from a &amp;quot;downstream&amp;quot; distribution, and they may join in that effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jacobsen v. Katzer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20080813083&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;535 F.3d 1373&lt;/a&gt; (Fed. Cir. 2008).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the license terms were found to be enforceable &lt;em&gt;conditions&lt;/em&gt; of the license, not just contractual terms. Not complying with the conditions means there is no license, no license means copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This result applies to all open source licenses. The licenses can impose conditions, and violating these conditions results copyright infringement. While the judgement explicitly calls out Creative Commons, the same reasoning applies to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Busybox compliance campaigns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Busybox is a minimal “userland” for Linux systems, i.e. a collection of basic command line tools. It is licensed under GPLv2, and frequently used in embedded Linux systems like WiFi routers or TV boxes. So the device manufacturers also provide the complete corresponding source code for Busybox – at least after a bit of “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;assistance&lt;/a&gt;” from the Software Freedom Law Center or the Software Freedom Conservancy. Most of these cases were settled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such cases are fairly controversial in the community, and escalating to legal means is seen as pretty aggressive – the focus should be license compliance, not punishment. On the other hand, many distributors of GPL-covered material don't seem to care unless actively threatened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Linux compliance campaigns&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are similar efforts for other GPL software, in particular Linux. The Software Freedom Conservancy is the primary actor in this space. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2018/may/18/tesla-incomplete-ccs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conservancy had been lobbying Tesla&lt;/a&gt; since 2013 to release the GPL code used in their cars, which led to first (but incomplete) code being released in 2018 (!). As far as I know there is no litigation involved here despite the clear GPL violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gpl-violations.org project by Harald Welte is a similar actor, which has e.g. successfully enforced the GPL on Linux and netfilter/iptables in German courts. The project claims that they launched 100 cases between 2004 and 2006, with a 100% success rate. Some opponents have unsuccessfully tried to claim that the GPL was invalid. In one case they joined with the FSF Europe to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/activities/avm-gpl-violation/avm-gpl-violation.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;successfully defend the right to modify embedded GPL software&lt;/a&gt; on routers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Developers don't always have standing to sue.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen above, there have been many successful GPL enforcement actions. However, can a single developer sue for GPL violations regarding their contributions in a huge project like Linux? The answer is not always yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware&lt;/a&gt; (Germany, 2015?–2019). Hellwig is a prolific Linux contributor and was supported in this lawsuit by Conservancy.&#xA;VMware's ESXi hypervisor has a kernel that mainly consists of the proprietary vmkernel component, but loads the GPL-covered vmklinux module that includes code from Linux. Hellwig argued that vmklinux includes parts of Linux he modified, that vmklinux and vmkernel form a combined work, and that therefore vmkernel should be open-sourced as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The court (and various appeals) denied these claims because Hellwig could not show that his copyright (≠ the entire Linux copyright) had been violated. Hellwig would only have copyright in his &lt;em&gt;modifications&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;contributions&lt;/em&gt; to the program, not in the entire modified program. Since Hellwig could not meet the necessary burden of proof to the court's satisfaction, he did not have standing to demand any injunction against VMware. So the lawsuit was denied on mostly procedural grounds. The court did not rule on interesting questions like whether dynamic loading of GPL code would violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the court was not satisfied with the Linux Git history, with a blame-view of Linux files (showing most recent contributor for each line), and with a diff between Linux files and vmklinux files. The court was missing a direct explanation for which parts vmklinux Hellwig would have a modification copyright. This is further complicated because the committer for a line of code is no evidence for the copyright holder for that modification, e.g. if the commit merely moved code to a different place. Furthermore, the inclusion of Hellwig's copyright notices in vmklinux did not prove that any of Hellwig's actual code had been copied (it only indicated that his code &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have been copied).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while GPL as a license is clearly enforcible (as shown here with examples from the US and Germany), actually enforcing on a specific software can be pretty difficult, especially in a very collaborative context where it's not clear who wrote what. And even when violations are clear, it can take many years to get companies to compliance (e.g. see the 5-year delay in Tesla &lt;em&gt;starting&lt;/em&gt; to comply).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T16:09:44.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T08:37:23.207" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;i want to estimate &lt;em&gt;machine learning models with R&lt;/em&gt; and i need to use it in a production environment, i'll work with &lt;em&gt;Azure Datascience Virtual Machine or Azure Machine Learning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i use , for ex., &lt;em&gt;caret&lt;/em&gt; library for models and &lt;em&gt;tidyverse&lt;/em&gt; for etl, can i have problem with licenses,&#xA;i read taht R libraries for the major have GPL3 licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that with &lt;em&gt;python&lt;/em&gt; there aren't problems if i use ml models in productions and commercial use, for examples scikit-learn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is licensed under a permissive simplified BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about R that have GPL3 licenses for major packages? i read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that licenses can make me problems for commercial use?&#xA;What does using a model developed in R where the library has a GPL3 license entails?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hope it' clear my question&#xA;thanks in advance&#xA;have a nice day&#xA;MC&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22386" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T10:39:20.690" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T10:39:20.690" Title="clarify R licenses: machine learning models, developed with R in Azure, possible for commercial use?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|license-recommendation|commercial|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11447" CreationDate="2021-03-24T16:35:54.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As others have already stated, &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; (GPLv2) or &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; (GPLv3) software by selling it is explicitly permitted by both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;as long as the terms of the license are not violated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Any licensee is completely free to sell GPL software and make money off of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complication stems from the additional legal and technical restrictions app stores tend to impose. As a particularly infamous example, Apple purged their app store of all GPL-licensed software in the early 10s because they were found to violate the terms and conditions of the GPLv2. As the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;put it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problem is that Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time, Microsoft also banned all GPL software from their store (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/02/windows-phone-marketplace-bans-the-gpl-and-the-app-store-should-too/?comments=1&amp;amp;post=21349352&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reported&lt;/a&gt; by arstechnica):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Excluded License&amp;quot; means any license requiring, as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of the software subject to the license, that the software or other software combined and/or distributed with it be (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge. Excluded Licenses include, but are not limited to the GPLv3 Licenses. For the purpose of this definition, &amp;quot;GPLv3 Licenses&amp;quot; means the GNU General Public License version 3, the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3, and any equivalents to the foregoing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, the situation has improved drastically since the early 10s. Both companies have revised their EULAs to be more compatible with the GPL. Apple for example has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;emended their EULA&lt;/a&gt; to allow sellers to override their standard EULA:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any App that you acquire is governed by the Licensed Application End User License Agreement (“Standard EULA”) set forth below, unless Apple or the App Provider provides an overriding custom license agreement (“Custom EULA”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Microsoft has done something similar with their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.microsoft.com/en-aq/store/standard-application-license-terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EULA&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ENTIRE AGREEMENT. This agreement, any applicable privacy policy, any additional terms that accompany the application, and the terms for supplements and updates are the entire license agreement between you and application publisher for the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From all of this, a person can reasonably conclude that anyone is allowed to resell GPL software on Microsoft's store AND Microsoft is allowed to distribute said software as long as the end user can fully exercise their rights. Generally, this holds true on x86-64 platforms which tend to be open platforms. There might be legal issues with selling GPL-licensed software for the XBOX platform and ARM-based systems which tend to be locked down by Microsoft via DRM and thus completely running afoul of section 10 paragraph 3 of the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last year, I actually emailed Mr. Stallman, the primary author of the GPLv3, asking him about his opinion on this specific issue. He &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9515/17566&quot;&gt;seemed to believe&lt;/a&gt; that the way App Stores currently distribute GPLv3 software to locked devices violates the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Selling GIMP for x86-64 Windows is probably okay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is still unclear if the seller is allowed to sell GIMP for XBOX, ARM-PC or any other device where Microsoft locks down the device or requires the device be locked by OEMs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. YMMV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17566" LastEditorUserId="17566" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T16:23:56.317" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T16:23:56.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T18:45:25.600" Score="2" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I intend to release a software product (package) that shall include an executable (binary) that makes use of a library licensed under GPL v3.&#xA;The executable is not linked (neither statically nor dynamically) to any other part of my software package. It shall run as an independent executable on the cutomer's target system.&#xA;So my  conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since this is a &amp;quot;derivate work&amp;quot;, I will have to offer the source code of my additions and / or modifications  to this derivative work under the same license (GPL v3) and to provide it on demand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The remainder of my software product is not &amp;quot;infected&amp;quot; in terms of &amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; and I am entitled to release it it under my own license conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no &amp;quot;crosstalk&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;infection&amp;quot;) from the GPL v3 based component in my delivery package that would require me to release my whole software package under the GPL v3 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please confirm if my assumptions are correct ?&#xA;If not so, is there any chance to deliver derivate works on GPL v3 licensed libraries at all without taking the risk to be obliged to publicly release all my IPR by doing so ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@madhatter: the gpl v3 software is linked to a chromium based browser as a fuctional extension. The browser will be launched by a shell script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastEditorUserId="22400" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T08:45:41.517" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T08:45:41.517" Title="Use of a derivative of aGPL v3 licensed software as a single binary in my product" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11458" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:14:55.737" Score="18" ViewCount="3531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's imagine that for a reason the FSF publishes a new version of the GPL (v4) that would basically be a BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would that entail for the code licensed under GPL v2 or v3 ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer to the clause of these licenses that allows anyone to move to a newer version of the GPL. (they are not strictly speaking part of the license but are often added to the license by free-software projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18367" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T04:28:44.897" Title="Is it possible that a future GPL version removes copyleft?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2021-03-26T12:30:58.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11457" CreationDate="2021-03-24T23:29:47.960" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The crucial statement there is &amp;quot;terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, if the FSF should decide that a future version of the GPL should look more like a BSD-style license, a software released under GPL v3+ would then be eligible to be distributed under that newer version and exercise the rights accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short: if you fear that the FSF will backtrack on the strong copyleft in any future GPL license, then you should not employ the term &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot; but license your software exclusively under a particular GPL version (e.g. the linux kernel does choose GPL v2 only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T23:29:47.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11456" CreationDate="2021-03-25T07:17:14.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your conclusions are correct, under the assumption that the communication between the GPL executable and the rest of your software package is &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot;. This effectively means that your software package must communicate with the GPL executable using communication channels that are typically used to communicate between independent applications and that you must not exchange complex data structures that would be specific to the GPL executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T07:17:14.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T07:55:04.543" Score="1" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a public GitHub repo, with multiple folders containing different plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I able to license each of those plugins separately, or does the whole repo have to be licensed as one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the plugins is a modification to an MIT licensed plugin. This is obviously nice and permissive, but I don't want to have to include the original copyright holder for this plugin on every other plugin.&#xA;Is it enough for me to put a separate license file in the folder of the plugin in question, and then license the rest with a license file in the main repo?&#xA;Or would I need to license each plugin separately in their own folders?&#xA;Or would I need to host this particular plugin in a separate repo? (absolutely not ideal)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22407" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T01:53:40.303" Title="MIT License - Can I license part of a repo?" Tags="|mit|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T09:25:24.840" Score="9" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some helm charts (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/minio/charts/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/minio/charts/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;) are using AGPL license. Helm chart is an instruction for helm &lt;a href=&quot;https://helm.sh/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://helm.sh/&lt;/a&gt; to deploy a cloud application to kubernetes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a large cloud based proprietary application, it uses helm charts for deployment. It is deployed both to cloud administered by my organization and to onprem installations administered by clients. In the second case the helm charts are distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to include an AGPL-licensed helm chart for minio as part of umbrella helm charts for my product. Does it require me to open source all helm charts for my application(actually they are already distributed in open source)? Does it require me to open source the whole code of my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words - where ends the &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; for AGPL-licensed helm chart for minio?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22410" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T09:25:24.840" Title="Helm charts with AGPL licenses" Tags="|gpl|agpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11457" CreationDate="2021-03-25T11:51:59.660" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;If code is licensed strictly under a specific version of the GNU GPL, future versions have no effect for that specifically-licensed code. For code that is licensed under &amp;quot;version 3 or any later version,&amp;quot; then recipients could choose to apply (a possibly more permissive) GPLv4, whenever one comes into existence, and enjoy whatever permissive terms that new version affords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, this is not a pure hypothetical: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2659/50&quot;&gt;FSF has historically done something similar with the GFDLv1.3&lt;/a&gt;. (GFDLv1.3 allowed -- with careful time constraints -- wiki site operators to switch users' works under GFDL1.2-or-later over to the usually GFDL-incompatible CC BY-SA 3.0.) This case was done very carefully, but it does highlight that some action that is disallowed by one version of a GNU license may be allowed in a future version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could instead specify a proxy to authorize the use of future GPL versions. The relevant legal mechanism is detailed in section 14 of the GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if there is another entity you trust to represent your interests better than the FSF, then you could say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version that is approved by [identity of proxy].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T03:49:51.893" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T03:49:51.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11463" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-25T17:15:34.940" Score="9" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 14 of the GPLv3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the statement that new versions will be similar in spirit legally binding on the FSF? Suppose someone releases software under &amp;quot;GPL 3 or any later version&amp;quot;. Then GPL version 4 is published, and they feel that it violates the spirit of GPL 3. &amp;quot;Similar in spirit&amp;quot; seems like a very subjective matter, would they have a cause of action against the FSF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the kinds of freedoms allowed by the GPL, it might be difficult to prove damages even if the new version violates the spirit, so maybe this would be moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8948" LastEditorUserId="8948" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T13:36:49.833" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T13:36:49.833" Title="Is the &quot;similar in spirit&quot; provision of the GPL legally binding?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11463" CreationDate="2021-03-25T19:12:23.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such a license term is clearly not legally binding on the FSF, since FSF is not a party to the license. But the “similar in spirit” clause may limit how the “or any later version” clause  can actually be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abby the author publishes a work under GPL-3.0-or-later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FSF publishes a hypothetical GPL-4.0 license with unreasonable terms, e.g. requiring a donation to the FSF before the software can be modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ufuk the user wants to use Abby's work in a manner that requires a license, e.g. in order to publish a modified version. Ufuk can choose the following licenses that Abby seems to offer:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-3.0-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-3.0-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-4.0-or-later&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-4.0-only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, the meaning of “or any later version” is constrained by S14 GPL-3.0. A new or revised GPL version in the meaning of that paragraph is “similar in spirit”. The hypothetical GPL-4.0 is not similar in spirit, and might not be a new or revised GPL version for the purpose of that paragraph.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus, there is a somewhat reasonable argument that Ufuk cannot choose any GPL-4.0 variant. If Ufuk were to do so anyway, Abby may be able to successfully sue Ufuk for this breach of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This can really be argued in either direction. If it ever comes to such a scenario, it would be a most interesting legal case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While the FSF is not bound by the license (which is solely between Abby and Ufuk), they may have a more indirect responsibility. For example, the license may constitute a promise by the FSF that future versions will be “similar in spirit”. If Ufuk had depended on that promise but then was successfully sued by Abby for a GPL-3.0-or-later violation because of choosing a hypothetical GPL-4.0 variant, then Ufuk might have a case against the FSF.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even though the FSF's judgement is not always the best, they still seem to care about Software Freedom. A successor license that is very different in spirit seems to be unlikely. As past evidence for responsible license updates by the FSF, consider that the GPL-3.0 did not directly include AGPL style provisions which are more controversial. Instead, they made AGPL-3.0 into a separate license, and created a GPL-3.0 → AGPL-3.0 upgrade path.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T19:12:23.340" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11468" CreationDate="2021-03-26T00:12:24.460" Score="19" ViewCount="14511" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rather than create my own software, can I just take existing GPL software and provide a cloud service around it? Will that be legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15246" LastEditorUserId="20983" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T07:57:20.543" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T00:43:56.127" Title="Can I use GPL software to provide a commercial cloud service?" Tags="|gpl|cloud|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11467" CreationDate="2021-03-26T00:57:26.490" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can indeed. GPLv2 and GPLv3 only require that you distribute the source code when you're distributing the binaries. In the case of software-as-a-service you're not distributing binaries and, as such, you're under no obligation to distribute your source code either. This is sometimes referred to as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SaaS loophole&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22249" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T00:57:26.490" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11460" CreationDate="2021-03-26T01:53:40.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author, you are free to license each of your works (here: individual files, directories, even versions of the above) as you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But make sure you don't create a nightmare of twisty little licensed pieces, all looking alike, for your would-be user. Presumably you want to make your work as widely useful, easy to use and build upon as possible. The license(s) you select should work in this sense. Also check out David A. Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and read up e.g. on OSI's page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenses&lt;/a&gt; and similar discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T01:53:40.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5247" CreationDate="2021-03-26T04:06:49.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen in multiple places project owners choosing to stick with GPLv2 to prevent the FSF from releasing a license that the project owners don't agree with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not prevent the FSF from releasing whatever licence they like, but it does prevent such licences from applying to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any real licensing dangers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, except for the danger that the copyright owner will disagree with the new licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;associated with this ability to seemingly change your project's license at will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delete the word “seemingly”: the FSF &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change the project’s licence, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; under the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It must be done via a new version of the GPL, which would apply to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; projects that chose GPLv2+ or GPLv3+, and which would become the recommended licence for most new projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Affected projects must have opted into this by choosing GPLv2+ or GPLv3+, as opposed to GPLv2-only or GPLv3-only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the FSF were to release &amp;quot;GPLv4&amp;quot; and it's just the exact text of the MIT license what would happen to projects that are licensed under GPLv3+? Could they be licensed under the terms of &amp;quot;GPLv4&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is what the ‘+’ in “GPLv3+” means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this only means that any additional &lt;em&gt;permissions granted to the licensee&lt;/em&gt; in GPLv4 are available, including the right to distribute modified versions under difference licences. Any additional &lt;em&gt;obligations imposed on the licensor&lt;/em&gt; in GPLv4 do not take effect, unless the licensor explicitly licences the project under GPLv4. The relevant text in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; section 14 is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later license versions may give you additional or different permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; does not have corresponding text. But the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2OrLaterPatentLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you convey GPLed software, you must follow the terms and conditions of one particular version of the license. When you do so, that version defines the obligations you have. If users may also elect to use later versions of the GPL, that's merely an additional permission they have—it does not require you to fulfill the terms of the later version of the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's just the exact text of the MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting example, because it does not seem to be in the spirit of GPLv3, as required by GPLv3 section 14:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there is a bit of ambiguity here, as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11463/20983&quot;&gt;Is the “similar in spirit” provision of the GPL legally binding?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there restrictions within the GPLv3 that prevent this from happening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this would basically be impossible. The copyright owner is always free to licence the work under whatever other terms they like, unless they grant an exclusive licence. It seems unlikely that a public licence could be an exclusive licence, and it would definitely go against the spirit of free software licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T04:06:49.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11457" CreationDate="2021-03-26T04:28:44.897" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that a future GPL version removes copyleft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we read this together with the body, we find two closely related interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible that a future GPL version (say v4) is a non-copyleft licence?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible that GPLv4 will make works already licenced under GPLv2 or GPLv3 “non-copyleft” as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is not so easy to answer, since future GPL versions are supposed to be in the spirit of existing versions, and removing copyleft does not seem to meet this condition. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11463/20983&quot;&gt;Is the “similar in spirit” provision of the GPL legally binding?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for the purpose of this answer, let us assume that a non-copyleft GPLv4 is released and is considered valid. What happens to works already licenced under GPLv2 or GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the works are licenced under GPLv2-only or GPLv3-only, then, of course, the answer is “nothing”. But if the works are licenced under GPLv2+ or GPLv3+ (that is, the licensor has included a licence notice like the one quoted in the question), then licensees may exercise any permissions granted under GPLv4, including the permission to distribute the works under different licences. That is, the answer to the second question is “yes” (assuming that the answer to the first question is “yes”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T04:28:44.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4077" CreationDate="2021-03-26T05:21:09.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question, as stated, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the Linux kernel be released under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, of course. If all the copyright holders involved agree to release the kernel under GPLv3, or any other licence, then they can do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the real question seems to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the Linux kernel be &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question stated, Wikipedia says “no”. So what about that &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;COPYING&lt;/a&gt; file? I will come back to that, but first, let us get this out of the way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can GNU release linux-libre under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, GNU (which presumably refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt;) cannot release Linux-libre under any licence (other than GPLv2), because they are not the copyright holder and the copyright holders have only granted permission for GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, back to that COPYING file. The current version is just a stub, but there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160412064155/https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;snapshot dated 12 April 2016&lt;/a&gt; in the Wayback Machine. This snapshot did indeed contain the text quoted in the question; what does this mean? Nothing, by itself. We need to consider the &lt;em&gt;context&lt;/em&gt; of this text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By convention, a licence or licence notice in a file called COPYING in the top level of a repository applies to that repository, &lt;em&gt;unless otherwise stated&lt;/em&gt;. In this case, it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; otherwise stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix: How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it clear that the text quoted was merely instructions for applying a licence, not the actual licence for this repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holders took no other action to apply GPLv3, so &lt;strong&gt;no, the Linux kernel cannot be used under GPLv3&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T05:21:09.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11467" CreationDate="2021-03-26T05:37:50.450" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the GPL is a free software licence, and one of the properties of free (as in freedom) software is that you can use it for anything, including providing commercial online services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not only legal; it is common. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/502/%c3%81ngel&quot;&gt;Ángel&lt;/a&gt;’s answer provided some &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11493/20983&quot;&gt;good examples&lt;/a&gt;. A comment on the question mentioned the LAMP stack (half of which – Linux and MySQL – is GPL v2). Other examples are KVM, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/kvm.git/tree/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenced under GPL v2&lt;/a&gt;, and OpenVZ (which is apparently GPL v2 as well, but it is split over many repositories so I have not verified this), both of which are used to provide VPS services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one thing you should watch out for: the Free Software Foundation also released a licence called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL (Affero General Public Licence)&lt;/a&gt;, which is similar to the GPL. It adds a requirement to distribute (on request) source code to users who interact with the software over a network, even if those users never receive a copy of the object code. The AGPL addresses the concern you raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-take-a-gpl-product-and-make-a-commercial-cloud-service-from-it#comment28916_11468&quot;&gt;your comment&lt;/a&gt; on the other answer, about people locking up GPL’d software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastEditorUserId="20983" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T09:13:25.193" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T09:13:25.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11475" CreationDate="2021-03-26T16:28:01.303" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;All BSD licenses start with the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the part &amp;quot;with modifications&amp;quot; mean legally? Common sense suggests that if you fixed a typo or added a function/argument/type, then this is a modification. But what about the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You completely rewrote everything and changed every single line. Is it still modification? Even if there's nothing left from the original code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You haven't copied the code but implemented it on your own (by memory or reading slides from someone's presentation). Is it still considered a modification?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You were inspired by some code and wrote your own version of the solution from scratch. Something can be similar but it's an entirely different solution. Is it still a modification?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14043" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T20:16:59.967" Title="What does &quot;with modifications&quot; mean in BSD licenses?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11474" CreationDate="2021-03-26T20:16:59.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; dilemma. Ultimately, I think that this question would ultimately be up to the courts. If it was a jury trial what could you convince the jury of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not a modification. Consider SSH. It's an IETF standard, which is for the purposes of this discussion comparable to slides from a presentation. And yet closed source implementations of SSH exist. Another example: SCP. There is no IETF standard for SCP. The standard &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the OpenSSH implementation. And yet closed source implementations exist of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not a modification. I mean, you might need to be mindful of patent violations if doing this with code that has been patented but in-so-far as BSD licensed code is concerned...  no - it's not a modification. Consider Bitcoin. Licensed under the MIT license (which has a similar modification clause). Ethereum was pretty clearly &lt;em&gt;inspired&lt;/em&gt; by BitCoin but I don't think anyone under the sun would call it a modification of BitCoin anymore than iOS is a modification of Android (or vice versa).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22249" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T20:16:59.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T08:33:04.947" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a program that I intended to release as MIT[0].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I noticed that one of dependencies is GPLed. Fortunately I only use it via a system call to make final production step of graphics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my code is like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;    os.system(&amp;quot;svgis draw &amp;lt;FUTHER PARAMETERS&amp;gt;&amp;quot;)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I call &lt;code&gt;svgis&lt;/code&gt; program using a system call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exact code is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matkoniecz/tactile_patterns/blob/master/patterns/generate.py#L34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/matkoniecz/tactile_patterns/blob/master/patterns/generate.py#L34&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[0]as in this case code is mostly trivial anyway. And I am not sure whether interesting parts where work went are actually copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T08:33:04.947" Title="Can I start GPLed program within my code without making my program GPLed?" Tags="|gpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2021-03-27T09:15:49.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11476" CreationDate="2021-03-27T08:33:04.947" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/110380/call-gpl-software-from-non-gpl-software&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/110380/call-gpl-software-from-non-gpl-software&lt;/a&gt; that directs to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, in general I can call a GPLed program with any software, without violating GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though in some cases where one program would be effectively created (&amp;quot;if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough...&amp;quot;) then it would not count as starting a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T08:33:04.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11467" CreationDate="2021-03-27T12:34:11.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three general flavours of the GPL around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL forces you to hand out source code to any user of your software upon request. For the AGPL, it doesn't matter, if the users downloaded the software as a binary to their machine or if they use it over a network on your server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires you to hand out source code only, if you provided a binary. For software running on a server, you don't need to provide source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is the least restrictive: If you use LGPL code in a project, and distribute binaries, you only need to provide the source code of the LGPL parts, and the ability for the user to run the binary even after updating / upgrading the LGPL parts. This requirement is usually fulfilled by dynamically linking against LGPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in your case, where you want to run a proprietary cloud service based on free software: Yes, you can do that with GPL software, but not with AGPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please keep in mind, that GPL and AGPL are &lt;em&gt;infectious&lt;/em&gt;: If you have 500,000 lines of your own code and 5,000 lines of GPL code in a project, the whole joint work is still GPL. And if there are 1,000 more lines of AGPL in that project, it will even be AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL on the contrary does not take over your code: You may link against LGPL libraries, most notable Linux/GNU libc, and don't loose any rights to your proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22429" LastEditorUserId="22429" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T12:09:41.090" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T12:09:41.090" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4318" CreationDate="2021-03-27T14:19:43.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I charge the customer for software? This includes selling the software as well as charging for technical support?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; is a free software licence, and you are always allowed to do these things with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free (as in freedom) software&lt;/a&gt;. In fact, GPL v3 section 4 explicitly covers both of these issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may charge any price … for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support … for a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the software is known by name 'ABC', can I change the name of software to 'xyz'.This may include changing the logo, name on the UI?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you are always allowed to do this with free software. However, this produces a derivative work, and some licences, including GPL v3, have special rules for derivative works. GPL v3 section 5 covers derivative works; in summary, you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add notices about the changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Release your modified version under GPL v3 (or AGPL v3 – see section 13).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure that interactive user interfaces display the appropriate notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to provide the copy of source code voluntarily? I am fine to provide the source code if some body asks for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL v3 section 6 covers this. In summary, when you convey object code, you must either include a copy of the source code or information about how to obtain the source code. The details depend on how you convey the object code and whether the distribution is commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it necessary to publish the modified source code if I host it in the cloud?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, GPL v3 &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; requires &lt;em&gt;publishing&lt;/em&gt; source code. The most you might need to do is, when you convey the object code to someone, convey the source code as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SaaSS&lt;/a&gt; (or, as most people call it, SaaS), you do not need to convey the source code at all. But if you, say, implement the service as a webpage that includes JavaScript, then the JavaScript part would count as conveying and be subject to all the usual rules of conveying. Under GPL v3, this would include making the modified source code available, as discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also watch out for the similar licence &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; (Affero General Public Licence), which was designed specifically for this situation. That licence would require you to make the modified source code available to users in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T14:19:43.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11482" CreationDate="2021-03-27T15:40:55.423" Score="20" ViewCount="6880" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I want to use GPL-copyrighted software in a closed-source project. With actively maintained projects I can contact the copyright holders to see if I can work out an agreement with them. But what about abandoned projects? Imagine the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I clone the abandoned GPL repository and publish it with a MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I notify the copyright holders that I re-licensed their work, using whatever contact information is available. If they reply and oppose, I simply remove the repo, or put the GPL license back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I get no reply, I go ahead and start working on my commercial software referencing the MIT repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When my commercial software is released, if the original copyright owners show up claiming their rights, I invoke the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;laches&lt;/a&gt; defense, arguing that the late action of the copyright owners now causes undue financial harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the re-licensing of the original GPL repo be considered the violation that sets starts the clock for the laches (and later, the statute of limitations) in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2021-06-08T00:12:52.397" Title="Can I relicense an abandoned GPL project if the copyright owners are no longer responsive?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|relicensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11480" CreationDate="2021-03-27T16:46:16.910" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not allow for that. You need to wait 70 years after the copyright holders' deaths to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that respect it is no different from a closed source license: If you want to change the license, you need permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back around 2000 Larry Lessig had a lecture where he explained there are may works, where we cannot contact the author (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)#Chapter_13._Eldred&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)#Chapter_13._Eldred&lt;/a&gt;). IIRC some of these works were films, that a company wanted to restore and then publish to the world. But since they could not get permission they did not dare risk going ahead, and some of these films are now so deteriorated that they no longer can be restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lessig argued for a copyright reform, so you would &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to be contactable or lose the right - which is basically what you are also arguing for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11595" LastEditorUserId="11595" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T17:47:52.883" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T17:47:52.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11480" CreationDate="2021-03-27T17:18:58.403" Score="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL, and software licensing in general, must be understood in the wider context of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only the copyright holder of a software can issue a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have no rights to the software, except through the license (and except for copyright exceptions in your jurisdiction).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL does not give you the right to re-publish the software under any different license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of your question is a creative argument that copyright could be forfeit by an inactive copyright holder. Indeed, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a problem when copyright holders cannot be contacted. Copyright protected works where the author is unknown or cannot be contacted are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;orphan works&lt;/a&gt;. Some countries have special laws that do offer some copyright exceptions for orphan works, but usually just to non-profit uses like in museums or archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your plan will run into the following problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only the copyright holder can issue a license. You are not the copyright holder and therefore cannot issue the MIT license, regardless of whether the GPL is in effect or whether the copyright is actually enforced. But this detour over the MIT license is a red herring. It does not bring you additional rights. Directly including the GPL software in your proprietary software would have the same effect of a copyright violation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are planning to commit a copyright violation, and to stop the violation when caught. This has the critical flaw that the copyright violation was already committed. This might happen quickly enough that your laches defence wouldn't apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since you are doing this copyright infringement wilfully and for commercial gain, there might be a public interest in pursuing this as a crime, without involvement of the copyright holder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are trying to bypass copyright law, even though there is legislation that provides an actual path to use the work (wait until expiry of copyright, or find an actual copyright exception, or use an orphan works mechanism). Additionally, you were offered to use the software through the public GPL license, but declined this license. It is very difficult to argue that you should be able to bypass laws and licenses just because you don't like them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Requirements for a laches defense differ drastically between jurisdictions. In general, it is required that the plaintiff did not take action although they knew or should have known about your violation. You are trying to ensure this by notifying them through any available contact information. However, this might not work. For example, I cannot be expected to know about a letter to a decade-old address. Thus, the period for laches would likely begin when the copyright holder &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; learns about your violation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Furthermore, the common law laches doctrine generally requires that the defendant was acting in good faith. Laches cannot protect wilful infringement. Yet here, you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; proposing wilful infringement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While a successful laches defense might save you for past infringement, you would still have to cease the copyright violation from then point onward.&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The laches defense relates to your purported infringement, not the copyright itself. Copyright cannot be forfeit except through expiry (or in some countries: some act of dedication into the public domain). There is good caselaw that publishing software under an open source license is not a public domain dedication. Thus, I think your use couldn't invalidate the copyright and at most provide a temporary defense for your violations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laches does not generally prohibit injunctive relief against future infringements. Your argument that stopping future violations would cause “undue financial harm” is unconvincing since you knew from the start that you had no right to use the software, and furthermore since licensing a different software library instead would not cause undue harm. However, you might be safe from injunctive relief if any future legal action against you would be covered by the same laches argument, or if future action would relate to the same infringement. Here, the interesting question would be if only the original act of incorporating the GPL-covered library was the infringing event, or also each later act of distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is the GPL-specific problem that recipients of the GPL-covered code might be third-party beneficiaries of the license, and could therefore have standing to sue you for compliance (but not for copyright violation). But as far as I know, this theory hasn't been tested.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, any larger community-driven GPL project has contributors (and therefore copyright holders) that are unknown or cannot be contacted. From a software freedom perspective this is a good thing, since it makes it impossible to change the license to a more permissive one without removing their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T14:45:49.983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T14:45:49.983" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T22:29:39.290" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am watching &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XTHdcmjenI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this talk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 9:54 the speaker says that there is GPL software in the iPhone (he says &amp;quot;you will see the GNU Public License&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it true?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doesn't GPL forbids redistribution in proprietary software?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T12:36:49.773" Title="Does the iPhone contains GPL-ed software? If so, is it legal?" Tags="|gpl|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11487" CreationDate="2021-03-27T23:33:08.623" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I guess I can have all my GitHub Sponsors donations go through Open Collective, which would result in Open Collective taking 10% of the money that my sponsors are paying me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is...  how does this benefit me as an open source maintainer of a project with a bus factor of one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Near as I can tell Open Collective's big selling point is that it offers accountability in how money is spent. So am I supposed to log how many hours it takes me to work on a particular feature and then create an invoice on Open Collective that I can use to withdrawal funds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to pay me $100 / hr or so I'll log my hours with glee, however, I'm not logging my hours  for $10 / month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe I'm supposed to set a dollar amount for a given feature? If it's a feature that takes all of 5m to implement it seems like it'd be excessive red tape to create an invoice and if it's a feature that takes 6 months to implement...  I mean, I guess I could create an invoice for $60 ($10 / month) but idk it just seems like a lot of red tape unless you're making enough money to justify 1040-ES's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had multiple developers making substantive contributions I could see it being more meaningful in that it could provide transparency in how the funds are being distributed. But with my bus factor of one project all the donations to my project go to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22249" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T07:31:56.383" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T11:08:39.453" Title="Does opencollective have any point for an open source project with a bus factor of one?" Tags="|finance|donations|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11483" CreationDate="2021-03-28T01:28:51.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is sort of True but it is not the normal GPL. (and after listening to a bit more I would note that the speaker is showing that Apple uses Free software and that is a good thing and is not commenting on legalities - which a simple reading of the question here might guess is what the OP is asking)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On iOS 14 I see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a couple of copies of the LGPL which you can link to but if you change its code then you need to release the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANd the GPL - but it is for libstdc++. This is as per &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Code: GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3, with the addition under section 7 of an exception described in the “GCC Runtime Library Exception, version 3.1” as follows (or see the file COPYING.RUNTIME):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... The purpose of this Exception is to allow compilation of&#xA;non-GPL (including proprietary) programs to use, in this way, the&#xA;header files and runtime libraries covered by this Exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7866" LastEditorUserId="7866" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T12:36:49.773" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T12:36:49.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11485" CreationDate="2021-03-28T07:31:29.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure the question admits of a definitive answer, but when I look on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opencollective.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Collective&lt;/a&gt; at some of the projects I use I can get a feel for how much support is spent on equipment compared to how much is used to directly reward developers, and that's a pertinent factor in my decisions about which projects I will duct my support towards.  If you simply say &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I'm the developer, send me money&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, with no auditable means for me to drill down into how you're using it, I confess I am less likely to support you.  So one advantage to the Open Collective approach is that you may well raise more support; 90% of £200 is better than 100% of £100.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the considerable overhead of creating a legal person (or, if &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10754/458&quot;&gt;your jurisdiction permits it&lt;/a&gt;, an unincorporated association) and opening a bank account in its name.  Otherwise, all funds will have to be received by an individual, who may well then have tax and reporting liabilities for &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; those funds.  So there's the advantage of not (ncecessarily) having to do that, or at least not so much of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there's the question of how you're going to receive donations from other countries; almost any payment processor you can think of will take fees comparable  to those you complain about in your question, and direct credit card handling is impossible for most individuals.  There's always PayPal, but the internet is littered with horror stories (&lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3380226/paypal-withholding-my-money&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;random example&lt;/a&gt;) from people who've found funds they thought they were clear to disburse retrospectively reclaimed by PayPal, with no right of appeal.  So card handling is a helpful provision, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is a slam-dunk.  You may well decide you can live without all of it.  But the option is there for those one-man-bands that wish to avail themselves of it, and clearly some do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T11:08:39.453" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T11:08:39.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11480" CreationDate="2021-03-28T09:01:31.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are ways around this, depending on the version of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier versions of the GPL made it possible to build the code into a standalone executable or a DLL which could be dynamically linked. With a suitable license you could legitimately fork the software, maintaining its GPL license, and being careful with how you call/execute that code. You would have to release the changes you make on that fork, as usual, but the &amp;quot;secret sauce&amp;quot; of your application will be the code you've written from scratch on top of these libraries, and releasing the GPL'd libraries will not make your own application less &amp;quot;open&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later versions of the GPL do not permit this, requiring you to GPL your application as well if it calls or executes GPL code in any way. You'll need to check the details of exactly which GPL license you're dealing with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license on the open-source code may not be changed. Simple as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laches, in my understanding, requires the copyright owner to have known of your fork and actively delayed taking action. If you actively conceal the fact that you have broken copyright and used this code, it cannot apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T09:01:31.183" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T15:20:09.380" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to publish a small android app as open source. I use 2 libraries. One is licensed under &lt;code&gt;Apache License v2&lt;/code&gt; the other one is under &lt;code&gt;EPL1.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially I wanted to license my work under &lt;code&gt;GPLv3&lt;/code&gt;, but I read &lt;code&gt;EPL1.0&lt;/code&gt; is not GPL compatible.&#xA;The developer of that library wrote me I could do what I want, but I'm reluctant to do this. I asked him if he could re-license it under &lt;code&gt;EPL2.0 with secondary license&lt;/code&gt; since this would render it compatible, but it is unsure whether he will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project is written in java and I use that library not through a .jar, but I have copied the source into my project in a library directory (the source in that dir is even with the latest one of the author, I removed the unneeded files and binaries but kept readme &amp;amp; license). In case you are wondering, I don't use the jar because to publish the APK on F-Droid app store they ask to remove jars/binaries and to ship the source code instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does using this &lt;code&gt;EPL1.0&lt;/code&gt; library this way effectively prevent me from licensing my work under &lt;code&gt;GPLv3&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In that case, would it actually be possible for me to use his work with my app licensed under &lt;code&gt;EPL2.0 with secondary license GPLv3&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22438" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T16:31:53.217" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T16:31:53.217" Title="EPL1.0 lib used in GPLv3 or in &quot;EPL2.0 with secondary license&quot; program" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|epl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11491" CreationDate="2021-03-28T19:09:37.310" Score="39" ViewCount="4200" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/34602/12957&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; on Chess Stack Exchange comes from the lead developer of a webapp for learning chess that integrates a version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://stockfishchess.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stockfish&lt;/a&gt; (a popular chess-playing program &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/Copying.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;released under GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;) transpiled into Javascript and minified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The developer makes some claims about the GPLv3 terms that conflict in part with my understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no license issues here. GPU [presumably a typo for GPL] requires only the release of the source code if you receive the software. In [app name]'s case, the server is hosted internally. All you get are web pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically you do have the code because the whole UI in JavaScript is being sent to your web browser. Check your Google Chrome network tab, you will find all the JS source code there! We are doing client side JS Stockfish integration, so we can't stop you from copying the minified but working JS code. However, we are not going to give you the code like in GitHub format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JavaScript files are script files they are not a binary program. GPL doesn’t work here. Unless there is a statically linked binary here GPL doesn’t have any influence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the developer claims that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributing their (presumably modified, at least because of the transpilation?) version of Stockfish in minified form only is sufficient to comply with GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They do not need to distribute the (non-minified) source of the rest of their webapp, even if it is Javascript that calls Stockfish directly and integrates with the engine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL only &amp;quot;kicks in&amp;quot; when one distributes binaries, not Javascript code, because Javascript code is already source code (even if minified).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these claims correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9666" LastEditorUserId="9666" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T15:08:22.287" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T16:24:09.473" Title="Minified GPL code inside Javascript webapp" Tags="|gpl-3|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11490" CreationDate="2021-03-28T22:09:12.813" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Argument #2 has credibility, depending on many factors. The other two arguments you present in your question are not correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dealing with arguments #1 and #3 first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the poster's own words, the GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;requires only the release of the source code if you receive the software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and indeed you have received it! If a minified form of GPL-licensed code resides on the user's computer memory, &lt;em&gt;they have unambiguously received that code&lt;/em&gt; and they are entitled to receive the source code, i.e., whatever is the &amp;quot;preferred form for making modifications to it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The minified code is certainly not the source code. The first sentence of section 1 of the GPLv3 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case they describe is unambiguously distribution, and material being distributed is not source code as the GPL defines it, so it must come with corresponding source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with less certainty, argument #2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is less clear is how much code needs to be shared under the GPL. Certainly the app's author is responsible for making sure the user can get the source code for Stockfish itself. The author is also responsible for sharing under the GPL the source form of any code that forms a derivative work with the GPL engine. Any material that is a separate work under copyright law does not need to be under the GPL nor have corresponding source. The conditions under which some code forms a new derivative with a library can be unclear, and can vary by jurisdiction and specific technical process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is all minified together in a single file, I'd say there's a strong argument to be made that it's a derivative work. However, running Stockfish on a separate process (as a Web Worker, perhaps) helps the argument that it's a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, chess programs can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Chess_Interface&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Chess Interface&lt;/a&gt; (UCI) to communicate moves, which allows logical components to be strongly decoupled from UI components. The use of UCI is probably not inherently sufficient to prove the separation of works -- i.e., if I consider the question, &amp;quot;Can two pieces of code which communicate through UCI ever possibly be arranged to force them to be a single work under copyright?&amp;quot; from an adversarial perspective, I must admit my answer is, &amp;quot;Yes, such configurations exist&amp;quot; -- but the use of a standard interface surely strengthens the argument for separation considerably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in general, there is an open question, for me, of &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; needs to be provided because it forms a combined work that resides in the user's memory. The amount of distributed GPL material is clearly nonzero, but it may (or may not) extend beyond Stockfish itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T14:52:17.440" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T14:52:17.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11467" CreationDate="2021-03-28T23:12:26.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can. You can for instance provide a machine running a Linux kernel (GPLv2), with a web server using GnuTLS (LGPLv2.1+) and a web site built on Wordpress (GPLv2+).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a business point of view, you should however take into account whether that is accessory or the main value of your service and which additional value you are providing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it would seem unlikely that a custom OS you coded from scratch performed better than using Linux (or other existing OS), and the actual OS is unlikely to matter for the service you will be providing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; you provide is available by existing software (which is perfectly fine), you should mind which value you are providing versus your competition. Do you offer local support? Is it part of other services? Do you have a better expertise than other companies? (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Automattic&lt;/a&gt; employing the main Wordpress developers) Are you much cheaper? Your business may flourish without any of them, but you may then rely on an higher demand than provided by the competitors which provide more value (however that is perceived by your clients) than you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although more noticeable when using FOSS, note these are things you must mind as well even if everything you offered was your own proprietary code. You may have built an acceptable blog software, but a competitor using Wordpress (and thus with less investing) might be providing a service as good or better than yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastEditorUserId="502" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T00:43:56.127" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T00:43:56.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11490" CreationDate="2021-03-29T10:19:59.070" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s certainly not correct to claim minified JavaScript is source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL (both version 2 and 3) defines ‘source code’ as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t matter if the program is a binary executed by the CPU or text interpreted by a JavaScript runtime; what matters is that the structure of the program be legible to someone who might want to modify it. Minified JavaScript is clearly not a form that conveys this structure clearly, and so it cannot be considered ‘source code’ according to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also an explicit position of the FSF (who authored the license) that minified JavaScript does not constitute ‘source code’. Richard Stallman writes in ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The JavaScript Trap&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code of a program means the preferred form for programmers to modify—including helpful spacing, explanatory remarks, and meaningful names. Compacted code is a bogus, useless substitute for source code; the real source code of these programs is not available to the users, so users cannot understand it; therefore the programs are nonfree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21336" LastEditorUserId="21336" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T16:24:09.473" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T16:24:09.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2223" CreationDate="2021-03-30T07:25:38.017" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi and thank you to Lazlo Monda for providing the close to useful answer,well the main reason coz LGPL hardware cannot be used for protecting your creations its mainly because lawmakers are a bunch of corrupted &amp;quot; a.s.s.e.s &amp;quot;for example lets say i assembled an AC generator without the need of a gasoline motor,but instead using an electric motor, and do not want to patent it coz my idea is knowledge should be available to everyone without paying a dime,well in my modest opinion few things would happen if my generator is protected by a license like LGPL &amp;quot;at least from my point of view&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 Governments world wide will lose alot of money if we citizens quit paying electric bills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 multinationals and corporations producing electricity and selling to citizens would go bankrupted in a very short time if at least half of the citizens on their home had 1 generator i just described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those just mentioned are the reality of facts,useless turn a blind eye on reality and facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last but not least,well patenting a generator that doesn't need a gasoline motor to generate electricity would be sunk immediately coz there are way too much financial interests at stake starting the interests of oil companies ending with the interests of corrupted politicians and public employees that work on patent offices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last thought well we live in a world that is basically driven by capitalists like JP Morgan Goldman &amp;amp; Suchs,i do not believe that those 2 just mentioned would allow a nobody like me to spread the knowledge a they end up loosing alot of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again for sharing what you found Lazlo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22465" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T07:25:38.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T15:13:12.690" Score="0" ViewCount="629" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there's this app which is licensed under GPL-3.0 and there is a piece of code in that application that I like to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My app is not by any way a copy/modification of the this app. Since the two apps are completely different I don't feel like it's a derivative work...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I heard that &amp;quot;if you include a library that is licensed GPL then you must license your own program GPL&amp;quot; and that's why I don't know if I know must license my app as GPL-3.0 or not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read on GPL-3.0 but just got more confused...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the code I want to use is 20 or so lines of code, I don't know if that helps...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make my app and release it as MIT on GitHub can I???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22472" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T15:30:28.550" Title="What counts as derivative work in GPL-3.0?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11499" CreationDate="2021-03-30T15:30:28.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: you must release your code under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a derivative work is defined by copyright law. Assuming the 20 lines of code are non-trivial&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, then they are entitled to copyright protection in their own right, and therefore the GPL applies to them. That means the terms of the GPL apply and if you use them you must release your whole app under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA; 1. if they are trivial - e.g. a list of the integers 1 to 20 - then why are you copying it?&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T15:30:28.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T18:01:50.100" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 14 of the GPL(v3) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revised Versions of this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License “or any later version” applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of the GNU General Public License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later license versions may give you additional or different permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a later version.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &amp;quot;versions&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of the GNU General Public License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Program.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22324" LastEditorUserId="22324" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T20:59:57.363" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T20:59:57.363" Title="Section 14 of GPL(v3)" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11501" CreationDate="2021-03-30T19:43:21.313" Score="5" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Versions&amp;quot; means a potential GPL v3.1, v4, v5 and so on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Revisions&amp;quot; is not used in the text you have quoted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the &amp;quot;proxy&amp;quot; paragraph, it is possible for you, the copyright holder to license a program with something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or &lt;strike&gt;(at your option)&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;strong&gt;at Philip Kendall's&lt;/strong&gt; option any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the bold text replaces the &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; struck through text. That would make me the proxy, and the paragraph specifies what counts as me exercising that option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T19:43:21.313" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11504" CreationDate="2021-03-30T23:28:57.713" Score="-1" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very soon going to submit my master's thesis, which consists of a manuscript and code. I plan to publish the code with an MIT license on a public GitHub repository. Because the manuscript also serves as conceptual, scientific and technical documentation to the code (a long whitepaper of sorts, if you will), I would like to add the manuscript to the GitHub repository. However, I'm concerned that doing so would effectively publish my manuscript under the MIT license as well, as that makes explicit mention of (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] this software and associated &lt;strong&gt;documentation files&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like publishing the manuscript under the MIT license would not be desirable - I don't think you'd want &amp;quot;copying, merging, publishing, distributing, sublicensing and/or selling copies of&amp;quot; a scientific document &amp;quot;without restriction&amp;quot;. (Not that I think my manuscript is so extraordinary that anyone would try to sell it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my concerns about the manuscript being included in the MIT license unfounded, one way or the other? If not, what would be the right approach in this case? Should I add an explicit exemption for the manuscript to the license, or should I include an additional license just for the manuscript, and if so, which one? Thank you for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22479" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T06:11:12.007" Title="Thesis manuscript inside MIT-licensed project" Tags="|license-recommendation|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11503" CreationDate="2021-03-31T06:11:12.007" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not an academic. If you want an answer from an academic's point of view, you should ask over at our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a licensing viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with having your manuscript under the MIT license, especially if it is a good description of the design and/or behaviour of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone forks your repository to make improvements to the code (like adding new features), it would be a shame if they can't keep the documentation that comes with it up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the MIT license does require that all license and copyright statements are kept intact, so it is not like someone can take your work and pass it off as completely their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the MIT license does not specifically cater for the academic practice of citations. How that works out in practice is something the people over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Academia&lt;/a&gt; should be able to tell you. And your university might also have rules about under which terms a thesis should be published, which may conflict with the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T06:11:12.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11506" CreationDate="2021-03-31T10:41:03.700" Score="1" ViewCount="1544" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was checking the license compatibility of some open source software and I found out that sometimes software is released with a weird license like GPLv2+ / LGPLv2.1+. I'm not sure about the &amp;quot;plus&amp;quot; meaning. Does it mean &amp;quot;this and newer&amp;quot; version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libavahi-common3: &lt;a href=&quot;https://gopro.com/content/dam/help/open-source/HERO6-GoPro_Open_Source_Software_Notice_v5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gopro.com/content/dam/help/open-source/HERO6-GoPro_Open_Source_Software_Notice_v5.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FFMPEG: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nanit.com/uk/legal/open-source?locale=en-GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nanit.com/uk/legal/open-source?locale=en-GB&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this nomenclature is also on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#:%7E:text=License%20compatibility%20is%20a%20legal,licenses%20to%20be%20distributed%20together.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18676" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T11:33:58.900" Title="Meaning of Plus symbol in GPLv2+ / LGPLv2.1+" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11505" CreationDate="2021-03-31T11:31:20.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean &amp;quot;this and newer&amp;quot; version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The + symbol is used to informally indicate that the license is the specified version or any later version. It is so much shorter than the phrase &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot;, although that is what you should still use in the official license indications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This usage is only common with the GPL suite of licenses, because those licenses do support the notion of newer versions coming out, but they don't have an automatic license-upgrade. Instead, it is left to the original authors to decide if license upgrades are supported or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T11:31:20.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11505" CreationDate="2021-03-31T11:33:58.900" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are looking at the wrong thing to determine what license applies to software: what you've linked are statements by GoPro and Nanit where they make some assertions. It doesn't matter if GoPro say &lt;code&gt;libavahi-common3&lt;/code&gt; is released under the &amp;quot;GPL v2&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;GPL v2+&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Fuzzy Aliens From Space License&amp;quot;, because they are not the copyright holders of &lt;code&gt;libavahi&lt;/code&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to know what license(s) are applicable to &lt;code&gt;libavahi&lt;/code&gt;, you should look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/lathiat/avahi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avahi source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;1. Well, it matters to GoPro because they will be in trouble if they do not comply with the terms of the license but it doesn't matter to you.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T11:33:58.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-01T16:15:36.683" Score="1" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does The Unlicense require you to credit the original creator of the code? When I was doing research it was unclear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22518" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T17:27:41.107" Title="Does The Unlicense require you to credit the original creator of the code?" Tags="|unlicense|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11509" CreationDate="2021-04-01T17:27:41.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Unlicense is intended as a public domain dedication that allows any use without any conditions. The Unlicense is actually written a bit contradictory so it's not clear if it actually achieves this purpose in a portable manner across jurisdictions, but that has little bearing here. This leads to the following alternatives, that purely depend on copyright and contract law in your jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the public domain dedication works, there no longer is any copyright for the code and the original author has no particular right to be credited. Nevertheless, I would suggest you reference the original author and keep a copy of the Unlicense as proof that you're allowed to use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the public domain dedication doesn't work, the Unlicense still allows you to “copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software”, and without any conditions. Nevertheless, I would suggest that you reference the original author and keep a copy of the Unlicense as proof that you're allowed to use the code – just treat it equivalently to the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a small but non-zero chance that the Unlicense's contradictory drafting renders the entire Unlicense ineffective, in particular if an ineffective public domain dedication is &lt;em&gt;inseverable&lt;/em&gt; from the permission to use the software. Should this be the case, you cannot use the software at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, you may live in a jurisdiction that protects &lt;em&gt;moral rights&lt;/em&gt; – the right of an author to be recognized for their work. Rules on public domain works differ here, with some countries terminating moral rights when the economic aspects of copyright end, whereas some countries recognize indefinite and inalienable moral rights (e.g. France). (For this reason, CC0 is a much better tool for public domain dedications than the Unlicense, since CC0 also contains a promise that any unwaivable moral rights will not be enforced.) So if you are in France or similar countries, you'd have to attribute the author anyway, regardless of what the license says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean for you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that you can just use the software without any conditions or attribution requirements, in particular if both you and the original creator are in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, it's sensible to treat the Unlicense equivalently to the MIT license (keep author attribution and the Unlicense text in all copies of the software). This is useful compliance documentation for you, satisfies moral rights if they apply, and also works if the Unlicense doesn't actually work as a public domain dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is theoretically possible that the Unlicense is entirely defective so that the software cannot be used, though I'm not aware of a jurisdiction where this would be the case. (Such a jurisdiction would have to not recognize public domain dedications, consider licenses inseverable by default, and interpret licenses literally instead of following the licensor's intent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T17:27:41.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11512" CreationDate="2021-04-01T21:12:48.900" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;in GPL FAQ there is this statement just after the notice example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper&#xA;mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand if this is mandatory, since in the notice states you must only insert the year and the author name and surname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18676" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T08:09:22.120" Title="Add author email in GPL notice" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11511" CreationDate="2021-04-02T08:09:22.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note that the text you quote doesn't appear in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but comes from the advice section at the end of the GPL entitled &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  This section, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7683/458&quot;&gt;as I understand it&lt;/a&gt;, is a collection of best-practice advice on publishing your code under the GPL, rather than a set of legal requirements.  You don't even have to include &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7131/458&quot;&gt;your real name&lt;/a&gt;, or a copyright notice, if you don't want to: the real core of the advice is to make it unambiguously clear to potential users that they are receiving the code under a particular version of the GPL, so they know what their rights are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only binding exception I can think of is if you're distributing code which is based on someone else's GPL-covered code, and which is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;baked into&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; a physical product, and you are not distributing source at the same time (a &lt;em&gt;section 6(b) distribution&lt;/em&gt;, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;).  In this case, the product must be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this applies, then I think one of your consequent obligations is to give real, current, and durable contact details so that someone who wishes to take you up on the offer can do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T08:09:22.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-02T16:34:36.220" Score="0" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a software that in its theoretical form would use logos from several different financial companies to enhance user experience and identification. I intend to use their websites' favicons and since they are not original material and cannot be included in the software's licence, how would I disclaim these copyrighted images inside the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that we are talking about 20+ potential companies, would it be one or two I would include directly in the &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; of the project pointing to all rights reserved to each company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I sense is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would have a general disclaimer in the &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; stating that logos are copyrighted by their respective owners;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point out to another file in the repository where each copyright is thoroughly listed and disclaimed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;where&lt;/strong&gt; would this file be placed, how should it be &lt;strong&gt;named&lt;/strong&gt; and how should it be &lt;strong&gt;structured&lt;/strong&gt; in terms of disclaimers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Obs]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; I don't know the precedent for this in open source software, so should including these images be simply a no-go for the project, feel free to drop in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21539" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T06:16:03.137" Title="Where to disclaim multiple third-party copyrights in project?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11515" CreationDate="2021-04-02T20:40:28.333" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused with this product (freeboard) licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On their website they specifies pricing:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://freeboard.io/#pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://freeboard.io/#pricing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While on GitHub it says MIT License, ok for  Commercial use&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Freeboard/freeboard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Freeboard/freeboard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to download and use locally a business?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22527" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T21:57:51.690" Title="Freeboard - MIT license vs Pricing reality" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11514" CreationDate="2021-04-02T21:57:51.690" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can take the MIT licensed code from Github and use it for a business (or any other purpose for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will of course have to pay for hosting, the time to configure it and install it, make sure somebody is monitoring it for security issues, find a way to upgrade it when a new version is released, and a whole load of other tasks. Given all that, you may find it more cost-effective to let somebody else (possibly freeboard.io) manage it all for you - which is the service they offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T21:57:51.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11517" CreationDate="2021-04-03T17:20:39.833" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to release a library with LGPL license. However I had discovered that many time ago I copied and pasted in the library a header file defining some constants. This file was found on the internet, no license on top of it, I don't know how released it. As such, the unknown author holds the full copyright (berne convention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do? Can't I release the library under LGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The constants represent the mapping of audio notes and their frequency, nothing &amp;quot;secret&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;hidden&amp;quot;, so if needed, I may change the name of the constants (I know, it's embarrassing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18676" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-10-03T12:22:53.577" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T12:22:53.577" Title="About unlicensed files" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11516" CreationDate="2021-04-03T20:07:38.870" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the default license is “all rights reserved”. On the other hand, facts are not copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If any reasonable representation of these facts would result in the essentially same header file, there is an argument that there is nothing copyrightable in the header file (compare the US &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;merger doctrine&lt;/a&gt; concept, though there's similar case law in the EU). Copyrightable aspects might also involve the structure and organization of the file. In particular, if you're in a jurisdiction that recognizes database rights (such as the EU), a collection of facts can be copyrightable as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, if this was as fairly small snippet (e.g. &amp;lt; 10 lines) I'd probably feel sufficiently comfortable using it without any license. For example, I've often copied code snippets that have no reasonable other representation like “array with the first 100 primes” or “declaration for a PI constant”. Just yesterday, I “plagiarized” the structure of a C assert() macro from the GNU libc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your particular example, you could likely take the frequencies from publicly available sources such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and write your own header file, avoiding all of these concerns. Yes, Wikipedia is also copyrighted, but you would merely use it as a source of facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T20:07:38.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11519" CreationDate="2021-04-03T22:00:03.773" Score="4" ViewCount="874" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to make my work public by using GPLv2-Only. This because its pretty clear with the copyleft: Use my work for whatever purpose you want, but if you change it or make it better, give it back ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course is my personal opinion and other people have other licensing preferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I work a lot with other projects, so i use other peoples libraries and integrate them into my solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mainly MIT and GPLv3+. If i use their work, i assume i need to publish under the same license, so if they used the permissive license MIT, so does also my code need to be published as MIT, same for GPLv3+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be clear, i am not touching the libraries I'm adding to my project, i just add my code to it and create a program of it. If possible i would like to keep my code GPLv2-Only, which respects the ownership and usually makes great open source projects! (Go GNU/Linux ;-))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is this compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.) My-GPLv2-Only-Solution + MIT Lib&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.) My-GPLv2-Only-Solution + GPLv3+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22532" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T15:31:18.347" Title="GPLv2-Only Compatibiliy" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11518" CreationDate="2021-04-04T03:35:34.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.) My-GPLv2-Only-Solution + MIT Lib&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is compatible. The combination must be licensed as a whole under the GPLv2, and the MIT parts do not impose any restrictions that make this as-a-whole licensing a problem. You can follow both licenses simultaneously, so they are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.) My-GPLv2-Only-Solution + GPLv3+&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This combination cannot be legally distributed, because the GPLv2 says the work as a whole must be GPLv2-licensed, while the GPLv3+ says the work as a whole must be at least GPLv3-licensed. You cannot satisfy both requirements simultaneously (notably, the GPLv3 imposes requirements that are additional to GPLv2's, and the GPLv2 does not allow this) so you cannot distribute these components together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are willing to license under the GPLv3 (or GPLv2+), then you can combine your work with GPLv3 libraries. If you remain under GPLv2 only, the world of GPLv3+ libraries is not available to software you wish to distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say your chief concern is with copyleft, so I'll note that the GPLv3's copyleft terms are identical to those in GPLv2. Version 3 introduces important updates to its existing mechanisms, e.g., allowing source sharing over a P2P network and allowing compatibility with other licenses' terms that forbid unauthorized trademark use. It is true that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3 includes some significant new mechanisms&lt;/a&gt; like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v3PatentRetaliation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;limited patent retaliation&lt;/a&gt; and disallowing use of GPLv3 code in hardware devices that refuse to run unauthorized changes (called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tivoization&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;). However, even significant changes such as these do not affect copyleft source-sharing obligations, which are, again, identical to those in GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, both GPLv2 and GPLv3 only impose copyleft requirements when someone distributes your software. Anyone is free to make private modifications and may offer those changes only to other people who actually receive the software (which may possibly be set of zero people). This means that companies may &lt;a href=&quot;https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/the-saas-loophole-in-gpl-open-source-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use GPL software to offer network services&lt;/a&gt; without distributing the software or source code. If you want to prevent this case, you may license your code under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, which requires source disclosure to anyone who interacts with a modified version of the software over a computer network. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8432/is-gpl-linking-to-agpl-possible&quot;&gt;AGPLv3-licensed software can be combined with GPLv3 software&lt;/a&gt; by special explicit allowance in both licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T15:31:18.347" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T15:31:18.347" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-04T04:33:50.260" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone have suggestions on how to get development help on an open-source project?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've got some funding but not enough to hire someone yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been considering offering 'bounties' for specific tasks.&#xA;But the tasks aren't too big - so writing up the task, sizing it, posting it, evaluating the work, and paying the bounty would probably take as long as the development would.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's just a bunch to do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another idea was to pay 10 people to create a project using the framework, then write-up a one page document on ways to improve it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It's mostly Java/Spring and React js, so it would be helpful to target developers with those skills - but I'd also like feedback from others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the framework I'm referring to -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/savantly-net/sprout-platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/savantly-net/sprout-platform&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22531" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T04:33:50.260" Title="Should I pay someone to help me with an open source project?" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-04-11T10:14:08.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11518" CreationDate="2021-04-04T12:39:28.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the GNU Project advises against using the term “MIT licence”, as it is ambiguous. See their comments on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Expat&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X11&lt;/a&gt; licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, on with the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to make my work public by using GPLv2-Only. This because its pretty clear with the copyleft: Use my work for whatever purpose you want, but if you change it or make it better, give it back ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, I try not to question the OP’s opinion. But in this case, I will. Why not GPLv3-Only? This seems equally clear on the copyleft aspect, but greatly increases compatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If i use their work, i assume i need to publish under the same license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you need to publish under a &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt; licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, say you combined an GPLv2-Only work with an MIT work and released the combination as GPLv2-Only. Your users would need to comply with the GPLv2 requirements, and in doing so would automatically comply with the MIT requirements too. This is all legal; these licences are &lt;em&gt;compatible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But GPLv3 requires modified versions to be under (A)GPLv3 as well. And GPLv2 requires modified versions to be under GPLv2. So you cannot comply with both licences at the same time; these licences are &lt;em&gt;incompatible&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible i would like to keep my code GPLv2-Only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use an MIT library, this is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use a GPLv3 library, you need to release the combination under (A)GPLv3. From this, users can extract your code, which will still be under (A)GPLv3. So it is not possible to keep your code GPLv2-Only. It can still be GPLv2, just without the “only”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T12:39:28.427" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11525" CreationDate="2021-04-06T10:37:42.090" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an Open Source project arrives at a certain size the discussion about creating an organization / foundation may come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems however that the common practice is to join an umbrella organization (FSS, Apache SF, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_software_organizations#Umbrella_organizations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etc&lt;/a&gt;) for FOSS instead of creating a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at this process the following question arises (to me):&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What are the advantages and disadvantages of joining an umbrella organization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/813/when-is-it-necessary-for-an-open-source-project-to-be-backed-by-an-organization&quot;&gt;When is it necessary for an open source project to be backed by an organization&lt;/a&gt; - it seems to only touch on the fund-raising benefits of an organization/foundation in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22546" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:31:46.103" Title="What are benefits and drawbacks of joining an umbrella organization?" Tags="|organisation-support|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11524" CreationDate="2021-04-07T02:12:54.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A foundation will have a lot of overheads so similar projects joining together can be more efficient. Both monetary overheads, such as paying lawyers, insurance, accountants, auditors; and time commitments, such as meetings, applying for tax deductible status, compliance issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joining a foundation also lets you take advantage of the expertise of others. You can borrow policies (privacy, copyright, licensing, code of conduct, potentially even something like child safety, etc), and procedures (contributor licensor agreements, server management, invoice reimbursement.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many foundations let individual projects operate largely autonomously, within the above structures and policies. If a project has its own community presence then there probably aren't any downsides to joining a hands-off sort of foundation that provides legal support and not much more. But if it's the sort of project that would benefit from cooperating with sister projects, or if it wants the foundation to draw attention to it, then it may find that a smaller, more focused/topical foundation is better than a larger generic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T08:31:46.103" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:31:46.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11528" CreationDate="2021-04-07T09:40:14.310" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;We planned to build a machine with integrated Raspi running on Raspian Buster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To control the machine we developed a web-based software using .net core 5.0, no part of the software is GPL-ed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we sell the system as a whole, do we have to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Release the source code of our software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pay, in any way, for Linux?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pay for the Chromium Browser that is used to interface with the Web-based software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22582" LastEditorUserId="22582" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T14:51:03.693" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T20:08:13.240" Title="Do I have to pay for Linux and Browser on commercial hardware product?" Tags="|gpl|debian|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2021-04-07T15:27:19.330" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is up to whoever makes the purchase, but it is better to notify him before the sale process ... that the source code will remain with you to work on developing it, provided that you take a percentage of the program's profits upon each new discovery, and God bless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22586" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T15:27:19.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11526" CreationDate="2021-04-07T19:22:38.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have written some application code &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;.  This code is linked to the Microsoft .net runtime libraries, which are themselves under an MIT licence (as you, and others, note above).  You intend to distribute this as part of a commercially-available appliance, running on a Raspberry Pi which will itself be running Raspbian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_OS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;now known as&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Raspberry Pi OS&lt;/em&gt;).  You want to know what your licensing obligations are, and particularly whether you have any obligation to distribute your code under a free licence.  You also want to know whether you have any obligation to pay the upstream providers (of, eg, Raspbian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking first at your executable, the MIT licence on the .net core libraries does not oblige you to open up the source of your application.  The mere fact of your application being distributed alongside GPL code (including, but not limited to, the Linux kernel) doesn't extend GPL obligations to your code, which is either merely aggregated with it for the purposes of distribution, or falls under exceptions such as the kernel's syscall exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you are still distributing a whole selection of free software, some GPL, some under more permissive licences, when you distribute your appliance.  This will impose certain obligations on you with respect to provision of source for &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; free software, labelling, preservation of notices, and the like.  We cannot possibly list all those obligations here; it's your responsibility to know and comply with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not obliged to buy any sort of commercial licence to use Raspbian or Chromium in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, of course, IANAL/IANYL; if you're going to bet a business on this strategy, you should consult a lawyer professionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T20:08:13.240" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T20:08:13.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11539" CreationDate="2021-04-07T22:55:34.410" Score="1" ViewCount="527" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final term of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zlib license&lt;/a&gt; state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; lists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft  No&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand the above quoted term, it means that the source code must retain its license when redistributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two possible ways I can see that this would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be considered copyleft:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;from any source distribution&amp;quot; refers to verbatim copies, and thus a modified version, or a project created using the zlib-licesned software, would not be bound by this restriction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not considered copyleft because, while the zlib license would remain in effect, it does not have to be the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; license in effect, so, for example, you could add a term that required those who distribute binaries of modified versions of the software to also distribute the source, while not directly conflicting with any of the three requirements given.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation of the license correct? Why would it then not be considered a copyleft license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21041" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T19:42:31.980" Title="Why is the zlib license not considered copyleft?" Tags="|copyleft|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11537" CreationDate="2021-04-08T06:26:30.450" Score="11" ViewCount="6269" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of our projects are CC0 licensed and I had been researching across the web to find any information regarding the legalities of this, and to retain the original author's moral rights. I have not been able to find information on the dos and don'ts of this approach though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is fine under the MIT license but I am not sure what is possible with the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22592" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T06:41:58.140" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T08:50:39.580" Title="If I fork a lib that is MIT / Apache 2.0 dual license, can I change it to CC0 for redistribution?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|cc0|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11531" CreationDate="2021-04-08T07:04:21.800" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, it is not fine to relicense content under either of those licences to CC0.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; includes a pretty strong waiver of moral rights, which are not mentioned in either the MIT or Apache licences.  In jurisdictions which recognise moral rights and permit them to be disclaimed, you have thus exercised a right which was not given to you by the original licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T07:04:21.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11538" CreationDate="2021-04-08T09:09:05.350" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software component under a custom open-source license requires certain third-party GPLv2, Apache2, and MIT Linux packages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv2 package is not part of the component but is usually used to integrate the component with Linux infrastructure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache2 and MIT packages include runtime and SDK used to write the component.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Linux distributions do not contain these packages in their repositories and require to sign external packages with the private key embedded in these distributions (key is generated and handed to developers by distribution maintainers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to sign these packages (with no modifications to the code) and then publish them on a public website or in a separate package repository devoted to this specific software solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensing.&lt;/strong&gt; Does the fact that I sign and distribute runtime &amp;amp; SDK used to write the component oblige me to change the component's license to MIT / Apache2?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Signing.&lt;/strong&gt; Is the signing of these packages allowed? Is it considered a modification?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution.&lt;/strong&gt; Can I distribute signed packages? As far as I know, there are no limitations on distributing modified or unmodified versions of software in any of these licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Private key distribution.&lt;/strong&gt; Do I need to distribute private keys used for signing as well?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22595" LastEditorUserId="22595" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T10:40:14.397" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T20:34:30.770" Title="Sign and distribute unmodified GNU GPLv2, MIT and Apache2 Linux packages" Tags="|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|license|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11535" CreationDate="2021-04-08T09:10:32.307" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a commercial application that leverages several available components (spring, hibernate, etc.).&#xA;There are certain components that have multiple licenses associated with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these components have the &lt;code&gt;CDDL 1.1 + GPL 2.0&lt;/code&gt; license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Javax.servlet-api 3.0.1 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://javaee.github.io/servlet-spec/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jersey-json 1.9-ea04 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/javaee/jersey-1.x/blob/master/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of such dual-licensed/multiple licensed components, how should we proceed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should we oblige with the obligations of all the licenses?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or can we select one of the multiple licenses and adhere to the obligations of the selected license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22597" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T09:36:52.190" Title="How to manage multi-licensed components in a project" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11534" CreationDate="2021-04-08T09:36:52.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you note, there are two ways to interpret a licence grant of &lt;code&gt;A + B&lt;/code&gt;.  Firstly, that &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; the terms of &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the terms of &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; apply to the conveyance, at the recipient's discretion; secondly, that the requirements (and other terms) of &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; apply to the conveyance.  The first interpretation is more common in the free software world, but that doesn't mean you can rely on it being so in this case.  The author is being rather unhelpful in not spelling out which they mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, in this case we are helped by the CDDL &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CDDL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;being &lt;em&gt;incompatible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL.  A licence is incompatible with the GPL if it is not possible to follow the requirements of both the GPL and the other licence at the same time, so the second interpretation of &lt;code&gt;A+B&lt;/code&gt; is in this case a logical impossibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think (though IANAL/IANYL) therefore that, at least until the author clarifies their intention, you are safe to rely on the first interpretation, and you may use this code under &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; the terms of the CDDL &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the terms of the GPL, at your preference.  Make sure you're clear with your downstream recipients about which one you've chosen (ie, remove all references to the other licence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T09:36:52.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11531" CreationDate="2021-04-08T11:55:18.397" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, you do not have the right to re-license the work of anyone - you have to keep at least the obligations from the license under which you receive the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's compare that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC0 basically is a short version of &amp;quot;do whatever you want, no conditions whatsoever&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT and Apache are both permissive licenses. Their gist basically is &amp;quot;do whatever you want - on the condition that you keep the copyright notice and make it accessible on all works which are a derivative of it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you may use works under those two licenses for any purpose, and you do not need to disclose source code. But you are required to keep the original copyright under all circumstances - or you have no license to use it at all. And that's a an obligation you would remove and which you have no right to remove as you are not the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely it's no problem if you distribute MIT-licensed content or derivatives under a GPL license (copyleft). That has the same requirement for keeping the credits intact and making them available - and imposes further restrictions on (re)distribution - something the original MIT license allows you to do.&#xA;A similar argument can be made with GPLv3 and Apache2-licensed code but a bit more complicated due to some patent clauses and indemnification requirements in the Apache license - requirements which you are not allowed to remove by any relicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T10:23:14.620" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T10:23:14.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11533" CreationDate="2021-04-08T12:09:11.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the fact that I sign and distribute runtime &amp;amp; SDK used to write the component oblige me to change the component's license to MIT / Apache2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, software under Apache 2 or MIT/Expat/X11 licenses may be used within software under virtually any license. These are &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; licenses which means they don't impose many requirements (other than attribution) and they don't require other code to be licensed in any particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be aware that the GPLv2 imposes requirements when it is distributed with other code in such a way that it forms a derivative work: the whole new derivative work must be licensed under the GPL. The information you supply here doesn't clearly suggest that case is happening -- especially since you're packaging and distributing the components separately, and the GPLv2 component appears to be optional -- but I mention it because it is quite similar to the concerns you ask about in your first question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the signing of these packages allowed? Is it considered a modification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signing is allowed, and it is probably not a modification. Cryptographically speaking, a signature is the output of some operation &lt;code&gt;Sign(input, private_key) =&amp;gt; signature&lt;/code&gt; and it does not preserve any of the original expression of the input. A signature itself isn't a derivative work under copyright, and placing a signature (which has no creative expression) alongside a work probably doesn't make a derivative either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are absolutely allowed to produce and distribute a cryptographic signature by performing a &lt;code&gt;Sign&lt;/code&gt; operation using some freely-licensed code as input. Even if it did result in a derivative work (which it does not), the licenses allow you to prepare and distribute derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute signed packages? As far as I know, there are no limitations on distributing modified or unmodified versions of software in any of these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct, all free and open source licenses allow distribution of the licensed material in modified or unmodified form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to distribute private keys used for signing as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you may keep your private key private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible way the answer to this might ever be &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; is if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are using software under the GPLv3 (or AGPLv3),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Embedded in a hardware device that can run modified code, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That device uses your signature to decide what code to run or not run (i.e., the device will refuse to run unsigned or wrongly-signed code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in which case, the GPLv3 requires you to give users some way to produce their own valid signatures. From the information you've provided, you do not meet even one of these three criteria; you do not need to share your signing key.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T20:34:30.770" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T20:34:30.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11529" CreationDate="2021-04-08T19:42:31.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia page on copyleft&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is the practice of granting the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created from that property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is considered copyleft if the rights granted by the license must remain in force even when modifications to the work are made. This is something else than having to preserve a license notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, I can take a piece of software under the zlib license, make changes to it and redistribute the changed version as a binary only under a no-derivatives allowed closed-source license. This is all within the rights granted by the zlib license.&#xA;In doing so, I am granting the recipients of my modified software fewer rights than I got from the authors of the zlib software and that is something a copyleft license would not allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T19:42:31.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11513" CreationDate="2021-04-09T06:16:03.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more I think about this question, the more I think you have a bigger problem than simply &lt;em&gt;I have no right to redistribute these logos under a free licence&lt;/em&gt;.  I think the real problem is that you have no right to redistribute them &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are, as you point out, copyright images.  I can see nothing inherent in the nature of a favicon that grants you permission to hoover up a bunch of them from random corporate websites and include them in your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think you're allowed to do this &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, and thus the question of how to do it in a particular way becomes irrelevant.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T06:16:03.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11531" CreationDate="2021-04-09T19:37:03.823" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR; You must distribute any derivative work in source code form such that the originally licensed portion of the derivative work continues to be bound by (at least) one of those two licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you have the option of which of two licenses to use, you can choose to conform to the restrictions of the less restrictive of the two licenses.  However, the two licenses say basically the same thing about relicensing.  Both state that you must include that license as part of any redistribution of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that one's pretty clear.  The way I read this, the MIT license will continue to apply to the portion of a derived source code distribution that was initially bound by the license. The MIT license takes a little more thought to come to the same conclusion...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license states that the Copyright Notice and the Permission Notice from the license must be included in any distributed derivations of the work.  But if you look closely, you'll discover that the MIT license consists of exactly those two notices.  By that reasoning, it also requires that you distribute any derivative works such that the MIT license continues to apply to that portion which was originally licensed by the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So neither license allows you to remove it from derivative source code distributions, and so it must apply to the derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22617" LastEditorUserId="22617" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T08:50:39.580" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T08:50:39.580" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-10T22:47:57.600" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in touch with the one contributor of this project. The owner seems to be absent and there is no license. The only contributor is the developer I am in touch with. Would all of the copyright go to the developer or is there shared copyright with the owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to further clarify: 100% of all code has been written by the developer and no lines of code have been committed by the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22631" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T07:45:20.510" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T07:45:20.510" Title="Repository with no license declaration and a single contributor, who isn't the owner" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-04-12T08:47:54.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11543" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11544" CreationDate="2021-04-13T07:26:55.503" Score="6" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the license point of view:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is it possible to use a plugin written under &amp;quot;LGPLv3+&amp;quot; in a program protected by &amp;quot;GPLv2&amp;quot;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The plugin is built as a &amp;quot;.so&amp;quot; library and at runtime linked to the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22660" LastEditorUserId="14614" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T05:22:40.343" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T05:22:40.343" Title="Is it possible to use a LGPLv3 plug-in in a GPLv2 program?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|gnu|linked-libraries|plugins|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11543" CreationDate="2021-04-13T07:39:15.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is predicated on the assumption that dynamic linking does make a derivative work for copyright purposes, which is not a settled issue (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;contra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).  That said, in my opinion, you may not do this.  &lt;em&gt;Any&lt;/em&gt; additional code used in a GPLv2 program falls under &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; s2b, which says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; permits on-the-fly relicensing under GPLv3 (more accurately, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; GPLv3, with a set of optional extra permissions), but that's no help, because the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLv2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;say that&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;GPLv2 is, by itself, not compatible with GPLv3&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#LGPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;directly address your point&lt;/a&gt;, and say that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;LGPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 by itself&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the original work had been GPLv2+, you could have taken it under GPLv3, and (as the FSF agree) there would have been no problem.  But it's not, so you can't.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T07:39:15.680" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T16:46:03.343" Score="0" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licensing is absolutely not my topic and I'm currently trying to learn about it while developing my game. I'm trying to implement the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;espeak-ng&lt;/a&gt; library into my game, so I can use it to generate robot speech in game. Only problem is that said library is licensed under GPL-v3, and based on what I've learnt, that means that if I want to link this library at compile time with my game, the GPL license &amp;quot;spills&amp;quot; over to my game aswell, meaning that I'd have to open the source of my game - which is pretty suboptimal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, since the original author of that library is unreachable, I can't acquire a linking exception for the library. Hence, I'm trying to see what my possibilites are. I've read that I could write a seperate executable which links to the library, and release that executable as GPL-v3. Advantage would be that I could ship this .exe with the game and I'd have to communicate with it using any form of inter process communication, like sockets, pipes, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be a solution, although I'd like to know the details. I'm also wondering whether it's possible to not use a seperate executable, but a runtime dependency .dll which gets delay-loaded by the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm open for discussion and eager to learn more about this topic. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22664" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T18:24:42.650" Title="Possibilities to use a GPL-v3 licensed library in a closed-source game" Tags="|licensing|gpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T17:56:14.837" Score="5" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I distribute an open source software (licensed under MIT or Apache if that matters) that includes/uses a resource that is licensed under CC-BY, and I provide proper attribution. Do users of said open source software also need to take care of providing attribution to use this resource when using my open source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do I need to have users attribute to me, such that it would then be visible that I attributed to someone else? (ie: I have to inherit the license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read something about as long as the software is considered a new and not derivative work then it's fine to not attribute if using my software. This particular resource is very small/minor compared to my work and could easily be replaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22665" LastEditorUserId="22665" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T18:10:51.163" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T16:01:46.860" Title="CC-BY &quot;inheritance&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11545" CreationDate="2021-04-13T18:24:42.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you ship your game together with the library, in one file, then obviously that file is a derivative work of the library, therefore that file must be distributed under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You would clearly be combining the library and the game to form a larger program, so this exception would not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was so easy to work around the GPL, people would not use the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T18:24:42.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11546" CreationDate="2021-04-13T18:42:56.460" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If downstream users of your project distribute it without including attribution for the CC-BY-licensed work, they are in violation of the terms of that CC-BY-licensed work. This is an obligation that copyright holder of the work has asked for as part of allowing redistribution of their copyrighted work. If someone redistributes the work without meeting that obligation, the copyright holder of that work could sue them and probably win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the work is incorporated into a single project alongside your MIT-licensed code does not change CC-BY's obligation to attribute the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read something about as long as the software is considered a new and not derivative work then it's fine to not attribute if using my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you (or anyone else) distributes the author's CC-BY-licensed work without attribution, that is &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; copyright infringement. By default, redistribution of someone else's copyrighted work is not allowed, and in this case, redistribution without attribution ignores the terms under which the author has allowed redistribution of their work to occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many jurisdiction-specific defenses to &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; copyright infringement, but they are complicated and situation-specific (how are you using the work? is it sufficiently transformative? is your use critical or academic in nature?) but it takes close reading of a jurisdiction's past case law on the subject to know whether any such defense applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have also read that CC BY works can be included within a larger, differently-licensed work. This is true: a work that includes CC BY work within it need not be licensed under CC-BY as a whole; you can choose different terms for your downstream modifications. However, the CC BY requirement still applies to the CC-BY-licensed bit, and you must continue to attribute its author. By contrast, CC licenses with a ShareAlike element (like CC BY-SA) require derivative works to be licensed as a whole under those same terms. That requirement does not apply to CC BY works without an SA component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular resource is very small/minor compared to my work and could easily be replaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So be it: if a downstream re-user &lt;em&gt;actually does&lt;/em&gt; modify your project such that it no longer includes that CC-BY licensed work, then they have no obligations to the author of the replaced work anymore, because they are not distributing the work. Until such a replacement actually occurs, they may only legally redistribute the work if obeying the author's CC BY requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T16:01:46.860" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T16:01:46.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11549" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T19:03:21.403" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A plugin is a piece of software that extends the capabilities of another piece of software via an internal interface for interaction with such extensions. It can add additional functionality or modify the existing functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14614" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T05:22:08.283" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T05:22:08.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11550" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T19:03:21.403" Score="0" Body="A plugin is a piece of software that extends another piece of software via an internal interface." OwnerUserId="14614" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T05:23:19.603" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T05:23:19.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11552" CreationDate="2021-04-14T13:04:07.113" Score="5" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;Training at work regarding software licensing instructed us that we should not use code from any project using a license that requires sharing modifications such as the GPL. We can use Linux as an OS for example, but we can't make a change to the kernel to support a work project since that would require sharing that change in code form. We can use LGPL libraries, MIT-licensed libraries, etc. since they allow linking from closed source code, but we can't make changes to those libraries to support work projects for the same reason (if the license requires changes to the library itself to be open-source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're a relatively new org so our departments aren't yet &amp;quot;mature&amp;quot;. We have a single legal consultant (who did this training) who is not an employee. One question that came up more than once was use of code on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow states that code posted to the site is licensed under CC-BY-SA. The &amp;quot;SA&amp;quot; part is the problem, as it is generally interpreted to be similar to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I take a snippet of code from SO in &lt;em&gt;unchanged&lt;/em&gt; format, I can state that I acquired it from SO and place a link to the post in the code (that covers the &amp;quot;BY&amp;quot; part). But CC-BY-SA doesn't make it clear if this now requires the entire code base to be licensed under CC-BY-SA, or just the part that I pasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's even grayer if I use SO code but modify it to suit my purposes. In the broad sense, CC-BY-SA would then require me to release my changes (although I'm not sure exactly where I'd do that). However, if the changes made to the code involved anything proprietary, that of course presents a problem for the org. But even something as simple as changing a string in the code could be seen as a modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, our &amp;quot;consultant&amp;quot; has no solid advice because of the ambiguity of CC, but suggests &amp;quot;you might want to consider perhaps not using code from StackOverflow&amp;quot;. (The consultant didn't even really seem to know much about SO itself, suggesting he's likely not a developer and focuses strictly on legal issues) As developers, we all of course heavily rely on SO even if for advice and guidance on how to perform some task in code. Amongst us devs, barring use of SO is enough to make some of us seek employment elsewhere because it is such a valuable resource. Of course, SO is not the only website that publishes sample code; even some books license their sample code under CC licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things even more complicated, sometimes a snippet of code from SO is a single line of code. Sometimes this single line of code is the best or most efficient way to perform the task at hand in the language in question. Now that I've looked on SO and learned that technique, is using the code now considered CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I can't imagine how you could develop code these days under these conditions. If you can't use any code you got from SO in a closed-source project, and if even learning how to do something from SO might require you to license your implementation under CC, basically we can never work for an organization that requires closed-source code! (This may seem to be a logical extreme, but then again, the legal consultant did basically tell us to always assume the worst case and steer clear of any ambiguities.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I'm not seeking actual legal advice, but am interested in how others have approached or addressed this situation. SO is so popular that I haven't yet met a modern developer who hasn't used it for advice. But closed-source software is alive and well all over the place. From a legal perspective, is it honestly the case that everyone writing closed-source code for a business cannot legally use code (or even reference code) from SO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T13:30:23.073" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T14:56:12.423" Title="Company policy says no code under license requiring sharing source can be used. Stack Overflow is CC-BY-SA. Does this mean we can't use SO at work?" Tags="|commercial|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11551" CreationDate="2021-04-14T14:38:43.310" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are broadly correct that if your program includes CC BY-SA code from someone else, you must license the entire program under CC BY-SA. Note that this doesn't actually force source disclosure -- unlike the GPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1718/50&quot;&gt;you may place your binary only under CC BY-SA, and keep your source code private&lt;/a&gt; -- but it would require unrestricted downstream redistribution of your binary under CC BY-SA terms, which your company might not like if you were hoping to have a monopoly on selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sometimes a snippet of code from SO is a single line of code. Sometimes this single line of code is the best or most efficient way to perform the task at hand in the language in question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the heart of the theory under which you can sometimes redistribute CC BY-SA code from Stack Overflow in your closed-source project. We know the CC BY-SA license places conditions on your reuse of copyrightable material, but it is also true that copyright protects only creative expression, not ideas. Under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.paulweiss.com/media/1851041/mergerdoct.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;merger doctrine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in copyright legal theory, if there are a very limited number of ways to express an idea, then those expression are not copyrightable: the expression and the idea are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line between ideas an expression is not simple, and copyright can protect code that has been completely rewritten but is structurally similar, if the structure being preserved contains creative expression. However, very simple tasks usually only have one or two sensible expressions in any given programming language, so they are not protectable under copyright. Another way of considering it is that code is copyrightable insofar as it deviates from the obvious or creatively synthesizes multiple ideas into a new program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one end of the spectrum, looking up how to sort a list in descending order or draw a rectangle to a screen in a particular language or library is not protectable under copyright, so you may use it without abiding by a copyright license. If the code is more complex, it is probably copyrightable. However, most code on Stack Overflow is meant to be didactic: it is meant to demonstrate some kind of general approach or algorithm. In that case, the text of any particular implementation is copyrightable, but the logic of the algorithm is not. If you can understand the algorithm and then implement it yourself, you could possibly have your own novel copyrightable expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the line between the &amp;quot;idea&amp;quot; of a program versus &amp;quot;expression&amp;quot; is decided by the courts using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;abstracts&lt;/em&gt; out the ideas from the expression, &lt;em&gt;filters&lt;/em&gt; out the non-copyrightable components, and then &lt;em&gt;compares&lt;/em&gt; the remainder. The particulars of where case law draws lines between protectable and non-protectable expression is far outside the scope of this answer; Wikipedia links to relevant case law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Stack Overflow code, you might ask, &amp;quot;If I understood the concept being represented in this answer perfectly, what would my implementation look like?&amp;quot; If the answer is obviously that your implementation would necessarily be identical (because it's a matter of calling &lt;code&gt;foo.sort(reverse=True)&lt;/code&gt; and that's it) then you may certainly use the code as-is. If the code is more complex, and your implementation would likely differ, then write your own implementation based on a robust comprehension of the principles demonstrated in the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T14:56:12.423" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T14:56:12.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-14T16:36:57.770" Score="1" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility#Specific_incompatible_licences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incompatible&lt;/a&gt; with the ODbL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The confusing thing about ODbL is that it seems to pertain to entire databases, rather than to individual works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible then to have a database that contains both ODbL data as well as CC BY-SA data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, do I understand correctly that this can be worked around by having two wholly separate databases, one per license, and simply combining the content from both databases on the front-end? (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ODbL license&lt;/a&gt; states that &amp;quot;A work that constitutes a Collective Database will not be considered a Derivative Database,&amp;quot; so I assume so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7000" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T16:36:57.770" Title="Can a database include both ODbL and CC BY-SA works?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|open-data|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11555" CreationDate="2021-04-15T07:40:22.577" Score="3" ViewCount="1856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually find MongoDB's SSPL license quite hard to understand, especially when thinking about what might constitute &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;„offering MongoDB as a service“&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I do understand that the primary intention is to prevent Amazon etc. from offering the MongoDB product as part of their cloud service without disclosing the source code AND without paying for it, the terms of the license could very well have an impact in other scenarios as well. Maybe someone who understands could explain in which cases the source code of which modules would have to be made public under the terms of the SSPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; We create a &lt;strong&gt;classic web application&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. a web shop that is used by human users through a web page. This shop application uses MongoDB as it’s main database, meaning that all product orders etc. are stored in a MongoDB database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; We add a &lt;strong&gt;machine callable web service&lt;/strong&gt; to that shop from a), so that for example mobile applications or other modules can consume the shop API and place orders, make transactions etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;c)&lt;/strong&gt; We offer &lt;strong&gt;MongoDB as a direct 1:1 service&lt;/strong&gt; called „SuperDB“ :-) with an API identical to MongoDB. Then the shop from a) or b) uses „MySuperDB“.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;d)&lt;/strong&gt; We create a &lt;strong&gt;„MMORPG Game Server Framework“&lt;/strong&gt;, where multiplayer game objects (i.e. „Entities“) are managed by our server. Within that framework we allow our clients to upload code to customize the behavior of these server managed entities. Our Clients code is run on our server. It does not access MongoDB’s API directly, but through our „Entity-API“. All entities are persisted / processed with MongoDB. Game clients (e.g. browser apps) make use of our service via web API calls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e)&lt;/strong&gt; like d), but now the &lt;strong&gt;Game Entity Framework uses „MySuperDB“&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would greatly help us to understand in which cases and WHY source code would have to be made public according to the terms of the SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22682" LastEditorUserId="22682" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T07:46:45.150" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T09:04:26.027" Title="MongoDB's SSPL license: what does &quot;offering as a service&quot; actually mean?" Tags="|license|agpl|sspl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11554" CreationDate="2021-04-15T09:04:26.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lack of clarity around the SSPL's definition of a “service” is part of the reason why this isn't a good license. The SSPL does provide a definition, but it might have a surprising scope. Below, I first recap some discussion on this definition, and then try to apply the SSPL's definition to your scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the OSI license-review process of the SPPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2019-January/003933.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB's then-CTO Eliot Horowitz explained the definition of “service” as follows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of “making the functionality of the Program . . . available to third parties as a service” that we included in the second sentence of Section 13 is meant to describe the concept of offering the Program as a service in three ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a technical perspective: “enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of [MongoDB] remotely through a computer network”;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a value-based perspective: “offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of [MongoDB]”; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a functional perspective: “offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of [MongoDB].”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Replacements and elisions are part of the original. Note that the SSPL combines these three tests with an “or”, not an “and”.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-December/003889.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, “making the functionality of the Program … available to&#xA;third parties as a service”  includes running the software on behalf of&#xA;someone else where they are the one using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you correctly observe that the word “service” can have various&#xA;meanings, referring to software as a service is very common today and well&#xA;understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the opinion of Horowitz, this definition of “service” is more about providing a service to a third party, less about running the software as a service/microservice in the technical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-December/003864.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lawrence Rosen&lt;/a&gt; have argued that this definition of “making available” is unclear: the “value” of a service cannot be calculated, and what a program “accomplishes for users” is subjective and addled by marketing. “You have created, at least in part, an unenforceable FOSS license with a nicer definition than AGPL of &amp;quot;program as a service&amp;quot; that still doesn't help much. :-)”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can try to apply the SSPL's criteria to your scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; A web application that uses a SSPL-covered database is not making the functionality of that program available as a service. This webshop does not enable third parties to interact with the database, does not derive its value primarily from the database (but from being a webshop), and does not provide the purpose of the covered program (the webshop doesn't act like a database).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; Adding an API doesn't change this. The API allows third parties to interact with the webshop, not to use the webshop API as a database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;c)&lt;/strong&gt; Offering the SSPL-covered program as a service under a different name would meet the SSPL's definition of a service. You would enable third parties to interact with the functionality of the covered program. This service would derive its value almost entirely from the covered program. And the service accomplishes the primary purpose of the covered program, being a database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the offered service is actually a completely unrelated software that merely offers the same API as an SSPL-covered database for interoperability purposes, that might be perfectly fine. For example, AWS DocumentDB is such an interoperable database. This database could only fall under the SSPL if it was a derivative work of the SSPL code. Many jurisdictions value interoperability and provide explicit legal protections or supportive case law, e.g. Oracle v Google in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;d)&lt;/strong&gt; An API is added to allow persistence of objects, this persistence is backed by a SSPL-covered database. This is a scenario where I find the SSPL quite difficult. Public communications by MongoDB indicate that they wouldn't think this falls under the SSPL's concept of a service. However, I find that difficult to reconcile with the actual license text, which can be reasonably interpreted to consider that to be the offering of a service. In particular, the persistence API effectively allows interaction with the SSPL-covered database through a thin translation layer, and achieves the primary purposes of a database. While this particular API might not derive its value primarily from the database, that is not the only factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e)&lt;/strong&gt; Just renaming a backend service won't change anything, the same arguments as in c) and d) apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T09:04:26.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T09:57:21.867" Score="2" ViewCount="1373" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a (GitHub) project that I want to open-source with BSD 3-clause license and I am using some code parts and files from Apache 2.0 licensed projects. So I have three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this possible? Is Apache 2.0 license allows the use in BSD 3-clause projects? (This looks like a basic question but somehow I couldn't find any answer for this.) If it is not possible should I just use the Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have some files taken from an Apache 2.0 licensed project (not the whole project) and I modified those files. As far as I understand, I need to indicate my changes at the beginning of those files. So how should my boilerplate notices be? Is the following correct? Or should I put the Apache 2.0 notice to the top and add BSD's and my modifications?:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//BSD 3-clause boilerplate notice&#xA;//A summary of my modifications&#xA;//Apache 2.0 boilerplate notice of the original project&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have a submodule inside my project which is an Apache 2.0 project that I forked and made some changes. Again, what should I do for this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22684" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-10T08:15:02.490" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T13:58:18.300" Title="Can I use Apache 2.0 licensed project inside my BSD 3-clause licensed project?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11700" CreationDate="2021-04-15T11:26:08.843" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made an app for iOS and before publication I have to make view, where I list all used 3rd party libraries licenses. Unfortunately, I cannot find license for GoogleSignIn SDK for iOS. This package is made by Google, but I can't find any informations about license of even license file in installed pod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://cocoapods.org/pods/GoogleSignIn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pod www site&lt;/a&gt; field &amp;quot;License&amp;quot; is filled with value &amp;quot;Custom&amp;quot;, but after clicking it I'm redirected to implementation tutorial. Pod description also says to check this &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/ios/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;integration&#xA;instructions, documentation, support information, and terms of service.&amp;quot; but I don't see any informations about license. What should I do with this package? Should I list it in licenses view without any license details?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22687" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T06:55:40.907" Title="GoogleSignIn license in my app's licenses list view" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11560" CreationDate="2021-04-15T11:27:15.663" Score="5" ViewCount="1173" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OpenSSL double license is available at: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/source/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openssl.org/source/license.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and I am not sure whether I am more confused by the license agreement than I am scared of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am working on a game that will encrypt and decrypt its local save files using OpenSSL. That's it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following acknowledgment:&#xA;&amp;quot;This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project&#xA;for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openssl.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.openssl.org/&lt;/a&gt;)&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean I need to add some credits screen to my game, which shows the following acknowledgement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second license further states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this package is used in a product, Eric Young should be given attribution as the author of the parts of the library used. This can be in the form of a textual message at program startup or in documentation (online or textual) provided with the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to comply with the double license, do I need to give two acknowledgements in my app to OpenSSL and to Eric Young? Is there something else that I am missing and/or am I understanding the license correctly if I want to use OpenSSL in my game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user17359" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T12:50:13.197" Title="What needs to be done to comply with OpenSSL double license?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T11:46:36.463" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to use Hunspell lib which is under MOZILLA PUBLIC LICENSE 1.1 for proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/&lt;/a&gt; it says in 3.5. Required Notices: &amp;quot;You must duplicate the notice in Exhibit A in each file of the Source Code.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this really apply to all of my source code files? Let's say I already got 200 files in my project BEFORE I add the Hunspell source files for my static build. Would I really have to update all of these previously existing 200 files and add Exhibit A - Mozilla Public License? This seems to be a very big effort. Or is the adding of add Exhibit A only necessary for Hunspell source files that I changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22686" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T17:00:07.453" Title="MOZILLA PUBLIC LICENSE 1.1: Do I have to update all my source code files in a proprietary software project if I include a lib with MPL v1.1?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11558" CreationDate="2021-04-15T12:50:13.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a software is distributed under several different licenses, then you are usually allowed to choose which license offer you take up; you then have to abide by all the terms and conditions of the license - but not necessarily by all of the other license offer you did not take. This is common for dual-licensed software where one form is a copyleft licensed (e.g. GPL) and the other is a commercial license which have wildly different requirements on the licensee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/source/license-openssl-ssleay.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this particular case is different&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: the license file states that the source is governed by both licenses concurrently. Thus you have to abide by both and fulfill both conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license requires to show the copyright, the conditions and the attributions in both binary and source distributions. So in essence you have to display the whole license text or at least make it available on a separate page accessible by a link in a summary copyright overview for the different parts for your game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means for your first question of displaying the attribution: yes, it means exactly that: you have to give credits to OpenSSL in the form they require, thus basically have in the credits or about section of your game acknowledge the contributions from OpenSSL by including the (nearly) full license statement verbatim as required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA; *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA; *    the documentation and/or other materials provided with the&#xA; *    distribution.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I'd probably do that 2-stage, one in the overview which reads like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 1998-2019 The OpenSSL Project.  All rights reserved.&#xA;This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project&#xA;for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/)&#xA;&#xA;This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young&#xA;(eay@cryptsoft.com).  This product includes software written by Tim&#xA;Hudson (tjh@cryptsoft.com).&#xA;&#xA;OpenSSL license (opens on separate page)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this short copyright notice I would link to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openssl.org/source/license-openssl-ssleay.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full license text&lt;/a&gt; of the OpenSSL source you use to build your game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to show the copyright notice in the same place in a similar fashion you display your own authorship and other credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T12:50:13.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11569" CreationDate="2021-04-15T13:53:43.693" Score="1" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a Modbus library for use on microcontrollers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internally, I am using an (apparently) heavily-modified version of &lt;code&gt;libmodbus&lt;/code&gt; (slightly-modified from the version that comes with &lt;code&gt;ArduinoModbus&lt;/code&gt;) and a slightly-modified version of &lt;code&gt;ArduinoRS485&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Both of these libraries are licensed under LGPL-2.1.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They are stored under my &lt;code&gt;src&lt;/code&gt; directory, and &lt;code&gt;#included&lt;/code&gt; into &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; library's source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume, then, that this does not count as &amp;quot;linking to the library&amp;quot;? (only linking to the library makes you work exempt)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which means that I have to license my entire library under LGPL-2.1 or 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't like how restrictive the LGPL is, and I would prefer MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22689" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T08:43:49.680" Title="Can I use a (modified) LGPL-2.1 library in my MIT-licensed library?" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11559" CreationDate="2021-04-15T17:00:07.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the MPL has a per-file copyleft, so any file that does not include MPL material does not need the notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must duplicate the notice in Exhibit A in each file of the Source Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where Source Code is the source form of Covered Code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Source Code&amp;quot; means the preferred form of the Covered Code for making modifications to it, including all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, scripts used to control compilation and installation of an Executable...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if Source Code is the source form of Covered Code, what is Covered Code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Covered Code&amp;quot; means the Original Code or Modifications or the combination of the Original Code and Modifications, in each case including portions thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Covered Code (for which you must supply Appendix-A-annotated Source Code) is made of your Modifications on top of the Original Code. But Modifications are limited to files that contain some quantity of MPL-licensed Original Code or previous Covered Code (i.e., something previously published under the MPL before now):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Covered Code is released as a series of files, a Modification is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Any addition to or deletion from the contents of a file containing Original Code or previous Modifications.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b. Any new file that contains any part of the Original Code or previous Modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So any file which contains on MPL-licensed material is not a Modification, and is therefore excluded from Covered Code. The set of files which must be annotated with Appendix A is limited to the source forms of file with Covered Code only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T17:00:07.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11564" CreationDate="2021-04-15T19:25:26.090" Score="1" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;After working on a project in flask, I wondered if I should include as a third-party license, the licenses of the installed packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain myself better... I installed flask and other packages with different licenses in a virtual environment, this means that in my repository on github I have to refer to their licenses to avoid problems with copyright? Or doesn't make any difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22695" OwnerDisplayName="MyName" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T02:54:44.723" Title="Should I include the license of packages used for a personal project?" Tags="|github|package|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11563" CreationDate="2021-04-15T22:43:18.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, the expectation for the license file in a repository is that it covers the main project, not external dependencies.  If the repository includes vendored dependencies, you should include the licenses of those vendored dependencies, which most programs that vendor data automatically do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're just using modules referred to by some sort of manifest file and downloaded by a tool by the user to build or run your program, you usually don't include those in your license file.  It's expected that people interested in those licenses will query the package archive or repository for that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="bk2204" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T22:43:18.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T12:46:56.557" Score="0" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a wordpress plugin but I have no knowledge of licensing. I have already read the wordpress article - &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-basics/including-a-software-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Including a Software License&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; under wordpress plugin handbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to just write following lines in Header section? -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{Plugin Name} is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 2...&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with {Plugin Name}. If not, see {URI to Plugin License}.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anything else also required like signing up on GPL site or buying some subscription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ankit" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-16T08:44:22.187" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T10:07:55.683" Title="How to license my wordpress plugin after development under GPL?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11565" CreationDate="2021-04-18T08:55:55.663" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a brief summary of what you need to do to release a program under one of our licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get a copyright disclaimer from your employer or school.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give each file the proper copyright notices. Make sure to clearly identify which versions of the license users can use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a COPYING file with a copy of the GNU GPL or GNU AGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also add a COPYING.LESSER file with a copy of the GNU LGPL, if you use that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put a license notice in each file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Optionally) make the program display a startup notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(If using the AGPL) make the program offer copies of its source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL, or the Affero GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page then gives a more detailed explanation of each bullet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license notice mentioned above could have the form of the comment block given on the wordpress page you linked to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no need to register anything nor are there any subscriptions or fees to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T08:55:55.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11561" CreationDate="2021-04-19T08:43:49.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I read it, you are right, your library must be released under LGPLv2.1(+).  You've based it squarely on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.libmodbus.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libmodbus&lt;/a&gt; code, which is indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;+, and by s2c you must release your modified version of the library under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry you'd prefer to write an MIT-licensed library, but you chose to modify LGPL code, and so the old adage applies: if you want to get to there, don't start from here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T08:43:49.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-19T09:56:13.037" Score="4" ViewCount="897" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I use a Logo (Image file) from Github Repository with an MIT License, without violating any copyright terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22716" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T16:06:45.763" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T15:27:43.070" Title="Can I use a logo (Image) from a GitHub repository with an MIT License?" Tags="|mit|copyright|github|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11586" CreationDate="2021-04-19T11:50:51.670" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding choosing a license for my R package. I started putting together some R functions that I wrote during my Master's thesis. One of the function I want to include is a modified version of a function from a GPL-3 licensed package, which differs from the original by only a few lines of code. My idea was to add the package as a public repository on my GitHub to allow people from my lab to install and access it easily. At first, I thought about a private repository, but since most of the people I worked with do not have a GitHub account, that is not a viable solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have absolutely no experience with licensing and legal issues, but if I understand the copyleft concept underlying the GPL licenses correctly, I am allowed to share modified versions of other GPL-licensed packages as long as I also release them under the same GPL license and share the source code. Is my interpretation correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22717" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T14:22:25.737" Title="R package licensing when using modified functions from another GPL-3 package" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11588" CreationDate="2021-04-20T11:40:33.207" Score="3" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have forked and modified a legacy open-source NPM package for my personal use. And I thought publishing my modification might be useful for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;heavily modified&amp;quot; in my case is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Convert the code into modern JavaScript&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aim to run on a different platform (originally intended to run only on Node.js but my modification intend to also compatible with client-side JavaScript)&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to client-side limitations some functionality has been removed but still retains the functions that are the main goal of this package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall: The modified package is not compatible with original version and cannot be merged together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have contributed to few open-source project but never forked and publishing it as a separate project. So, here's my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The LGPL-3.0 allow the modification and distribution on conditions to disclosure source and state changes.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to just stated in the readme as &amp;quot;forked of ...&amp;quot; and about the modification I made?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Publishing on NPM&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does &amp;quot;disclosure source&amp;quot; means to list original author as the package author? Or can I publish it under my name with author as contributors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional infos&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The package is 7 years old and not actively maintained (the last commit is 7 months ago)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The package is licensed under the LGPL-3.0 License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22726" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T06:08:10.020" Title="Publish a heavily modified version of forked NPM package" Tags="|lgpl|forking|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-20T11:54:20.740" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;If somebody has participated in an open source project, and has previously contributed several lines of source code &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; all those lines have now been completely rewritten and/or deleted so that all earlier contributions by that person have been effectively erased, does that person still hold copyright on the derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e., certainly a full rewrite of a project will assign all copyright to those who have contributed to the rewrite only, but does this apply to individual contributions within a project as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22729" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T13:53:06.560" Title="Do you retain copyright in a project even if all your code has been rewritten?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11570" CreationDate="2021-04-20T15:27:43.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, verify that the image is indeed MIT-licensed. The project's README (or other documentation) may specify different licenses for code versus other media assets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the image is indeed MIT-licensed, then there is no copyright restriction against using the image, as long as you abide by the license's terms. Namely, you must preserve the license text and copyright notice(s) somewhere in your project and/or documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the MIT license is a copyright license, so you may still be forbidden from using the image in a certain ways under &lt;em&gt;trademark&lt;/em&gt; law. In particular, take care not to use the logo in way that suggests endorsement by or explicit cooperation from the original project. Trademark is a monopoly on the right to use names, words, images, and even color combinations to identify the source of a good or service. Even if you have the right to reproduce the logo under copyright, you may still be liable if your use confuses consumers about the source of your application or service, so you may wish to take pains not to cause such confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T15:27:43.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T00:31:11.590" Score="1" ViewCount="579" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forked a Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 licensed app and made some changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to publish the app, but I want anybody who uses my code to have to adhere to GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since GPL v3 is more restrictive than MPL, can I just change the License file to GPL v3? If not, what other changes would I have to make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15780" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T06:36:49.520" Title="Can I change a Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 project I forked to GPL v3?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-3|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T08:46:40.943" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently working on a research project in a subfield of computer/data science that concerns a topic whose research seems to have worrying correlations with the U.S. National Security Agency due to its potential to be used to track relationships people. In fact, many of the work I am referring to seems to be authored by current NSA engineers on academic journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming I am willing to disclose the work (which, to be honest, is far from groundbreaking or useful) of my paper on such topic through an open license, say &lt;em&gt;CC BY-NC-SA 3.0&lt;/em&gt;, does an easy way exist to prevent a particular entity - in this case the National Security Agency - from (mis)using parts of a scientific paper in their work with near-obvious moral implications? Let us assume, for the scope of this question, that such work will be written and released following legislation from the European Union.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this would be quite complicated to do with legal validity, so my question aims to be more theoretical/ideological than related to any specific work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22741" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T08:25:37.853" Title="Can I prevent the National Security Agency from using my work?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|software|ethics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11578" CreationDate="2021-04-21T09:09:58.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could modify any license to add your personal exception; of course in licenses like GPL or BSD you would not be compatible with the original license but that is not an issue for you.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In general I saw a license against ALL military use, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/199055/open-source-licenses-that-explicitly-prohibit-military-applications&quot;&gt;“Open-source” licenses that explicitly prohibit military applications&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are instances of blocking a particular entity or person, I think one of the biggest example is Black 3.0, that explicitly says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make it's way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't know how sound this would be in court, especially if it can be seen as blocking a particular race, gender, religion, age and probably some more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22742" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2021-08-09T08:25:37.853" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T08:25:37.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T11:37:32.280" Score="-3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;How Free Office / Libre Office / Apache Office resembles Microsoft Office ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did they committed a breach of copyright and cheated Microsoft Office?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, why till date, Microsoft is not taking any actions against them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Microsoft forgiven their cheat or is it that Microsoft cannot do anything against them and is bearing that pain and cheat silently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22744" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T15:39:58.313" Title="Free Office/Libre Office/Apache Office" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|law|microsoft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T12:07:02.300" Score="-2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to license a project that allows anyone to license it under AGPL-3.0, but with the option to license it under Apache-2.0 for non-commercial use only. Are there any hidden pitfalls I may have missed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I need a CLA to allow upstream contributions to be licensed under both? I am trying to avoid requiring copyright assignment from contributors. If I do have a CLA, I would prefer it to be something simple along the lines of &amp;quot;Yes, you can license this under either AGPL3.0, or Apache-2.0 for non-commercial use.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this idea make sense? If not, is there an alternative licensing that would solve my woes? The network-use requirements of the AGPL are essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22745" LastEditorUserId="22745" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T12:23:27.070" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T04:43:17.120" Title="AGPL, with Apache-2.0 option for non-commercial use" Tags="|licensing|contributor-agreements|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11578" CreationDate="2021-04-21T12:13:53.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No you cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright does not regulate use of information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Criminals and state actors operate under different rules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different kinds of “IP”. Copyright is well-known, but does not cover ideas or methods. Copyright is more about protecting creative expression. Thus, copyright protects your paper as a literary work, but not any methods or techniques discussed in the work. For such protection, you'd need to apply for a patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creative commons licenses derive their enforceability through copyright. They do not try to place additional restrictions on a creative work. Instead, the starting point is that all copyright-covered works are “all rights reserved” by default. CC licenses open this up a bit and offer public licenses under basic conditions like attribution, share-alike, or non-commercial limitations (which, again, only refers to actions like copying the document, not to actions like using information in the document).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another problem in this scenario is that you're trying to prevent use by a national security agency. While (in a western context) these should operate under the rule of law and are bound by the laws of their country, they still have substantial privileges. If they deem your ideas relevant for national security, they will find a way to use those ideas regardless of whatever license you use (would be a great loophole for terrorists otherwise). This issue is similar to licenses that try to outlaw criminal use. That's extremely pointless because criminals (who by definition don't abide by all laws) are unlikely to value a copyright license more than the laws they break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle it would be possible to create a contract that only gives permission to receive a copy of your paper if the recipient agrees to not use the information in that paper in a specific manner. This would use your position as a copyright holder as leverage to push through contractual conditions the other party might not like, similar to EULAs. However, contract law depends very much on the country – what counts as a contract in the EU might not count as a binding contract in the US. Even if so, discovering a contract breach and enforcing the contract against a spy agency might prove rather difficult. A paper with such a license would also be unpublishable in an academic context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can we do? There are various “ethical” licenses that include field-of-use restrictions, but it's questionable whether they are even valid and enforceable. And they definitely no longer qualify as Open Source. Personally, I think that it's important to recognize problematic uses of sharing software and knowledge publicly, but also to recognize the good that can come from this. I hope that on balance, the good outweighs the bad. In some cases, it might be better to not publish stuff. However, publication of problematic techniques can also inform research into counter-measures. For example, I was recently able to use a repository with published attack code to verify that a security mitigation was effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, this comes down to your personal ethics. But the decision is more about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; you publish. We cannot really depend on copyright licenses to enforce ethical behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T12:13:53.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11580" CreationDate="2021-04-21T13:00:07.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under current legal precedent in the United States, LibreOffice et al. did not commit copyright infringement. Look to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int%27l,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lotus v. Borland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for the U.S. precedent allowing duplication of interfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code used to create each computer program is copyrightable and may not be duplicated without permission, but the functional components of the rendered interface are not protected by copyright. Therefore, making a completely new computer program, with completely original source code, that merely looks visually like an existing program (at least as far as functionality is concerned) is not a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T14:08:46.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T14:08:46.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T13:14:53.537" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish my website on Github. However, I want to keep all copyrights/trademark rights for the non-code content (images, texts, logos etc.), while putting the source code under an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that possible? If so, how can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11151" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T06:58:32.263" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T06:58:32.263" Title="Can I reserve all rights of website non-code content despite putting complete website (code &amp; content) on Github?" Tags="|license-recommendation|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2021-04-25T06:58:48.703" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11581" CreationDate="2021-04-21T14:01:50.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any hidden pitfalls I may have missed here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let us be clear that you want a choice of the AGPL or your own, proprietary license, and not the Apache 2.0 license. Saying &amp;quot;Apache 2.0 for non-commercial use only&amp;quot; is a bit like giving someone a bike and saying, &amp;quot;You have free license to take and ride this bike anywhere in the world you like,&amp;quot; and then immediately saying, &amp;quot;By the way, that permission to ride that bike anywhere only holds if you stay on my property; you can't take it away from my house.&amp;quot; The Apache 2.0 license allows commercial reuse, so you want to make important modifications to it that make a fundamentally different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may license your work under whatever terms you like, but please don't call them by a name that doesn't apply -- especially a name trademarked by the Apache Foundation. Free and open source licenses categorically never disallow commercial use, so you will need to look elsewhere (or perhaps hiring a drafting lawyer) to settle on the exact text of your legal terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will I need a CLA to allow upstream contributions to be licensed under both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan to take outside contributions, you should definitely get your contributors to agree to a CLA, especially if you plan to use a non-FLOSS proprietary license option. You could require that contributors license their contributions under those same two licenses, or you could require that contributors license their contributions under a very permissive license to &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; only, so that you may use their contributions under any different terms in the future. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docracy.com/0pmrhl5zsdf/individual-contributor-license-agreement-template-cla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this sample CLA&lt;/a&gt; simply grants broad rights to the project without mentioning a specific license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T04:43:17.120" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T04:43:17.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11571" CreationDate="2021-04-21T14:22:25.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your interpretation is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you received a package under the GPLv3 license, then any modified versions you publish (make available to others) must also be published under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have multiple, independent, packages in your repository, then you can either&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use the same license for all of them (which would have to be the GPLv3 license if one of them must be under the GPLv3 license), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you can specify a different license for each package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second option gives you more flexibility, but is also slightly harder to set up correctly. As the GPL license appears to be quite widely used in the R community, the first option might be good enough anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T14:22:25.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11580" CreationDate="2021-04-21T15:39:58.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One can hardly copyright the idea of an application which allows to write documents or which allows to do calculations on and in a table or to create and display presentations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, Microsoft's products have nothing in common, least of all any code which a copyright claim would have to be based on, with the competing products which are not dictated by the function itself. As such Microsoft has no claim whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T15:39:58.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11573" CreationDate="2021-04-22T06:08:10.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source that you are required to disclose according to the LGPL is not the project you forked from, but the source code of your package. And the LGPL defines source code as &amp;quot;the format that is preferred for making modifications&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stating in your readme which package you forked from and what changes you made to it is not wrong, but it is not what is required by the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;state changes&amp;quot; requirement of the LGPL is usually satisfied by either maintaining a CHANGELOG file, which lists the changes for each version, or through the revision history of your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When publishing on NPM, if you publish a non-source (e.g. minified) package, then the recipients must be able to easily find the corresponding source code of that package. I am not familiar enough with NPM to know what the customs are, but that could mean mentioning your repository in the package documentation or publishing a separate source code package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL does not have any requirement who should be mentioned as author or contributor of a package on NPM. As far as the LGPL is concerned, the relevant authorship information is contained in the copyright lines in the source code and those need to be preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T06:08:10.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11576" CreationDate="2021-04-22T06:36:49.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; change the license to GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL2.0 is a per-file strong copyleft license, with an opt-out provision to incorporate MPL-licensed files into a larger project that is under the GPL license. This means that if you only made changes to files containing MPL-licensed code, then you cannot change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the author of the MPL code oped out of the GPL compatibility (by adding the phrase &amp;quot;Incompatible With Secondary Licenses.&amp;quot; to the license notice), then you cannot change the license or use it in a GPL-licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be able to publish your app under the GPLv3 license, your app must contain at least one file that does not contain any MPL-licensed code and that is already or can be licensed by you under the GPLv3 license. That triggers the compatibility clause in the MPL license and causes the MPL-licensed code to become dual-licensed under both the MPL and the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T06:36:49.520" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11574" CreationDate="2021-04-22T09:35:25.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think my esteemed colleague has said all that's really necessary in comments &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;, but it would be good to have this in an answer.  The question you ask is known, philosophically, as that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Ship of Theseus&lt;/a&gt;: if you replace all the parts of a thing, is it any longer the original thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any definitive answers in copyright jurisprudence.  We address the question in a number of places on this site, including (but not limited to) &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6499/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4345/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11474/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/10141/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  My personal view on this is that, unless &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special care is taken&lt;/a&gt;, even a complete reimplementation may well create a copyright derivative of the earlier work, and the rights holders of the earlier work will continue to have a rights interest in the reimplementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T13:53:06.560" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T13:53:06.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11578" CreationDate="2021-04-22T23:05:24.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you do this? Yes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will they abide by it? Quite possibly not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it still worth doing? Maybe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long answer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone who cares about a fair and just society, it's important to remember than a license is one of many tools in your tool box, so you need to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) How will this tool serve my goals?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) What other tools would be better used and should I be using those instead / as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this technically possible?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. But as others have pointed out, there are legal and practical challenges to this being effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who do you want to exclude?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also want to consider the scope of this limitation. Are you specifically only concerned about the NSA using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about regular law enforcement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sheriffs departments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The KGB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Australian Signals Directorate (aka ASD, a kind of Australian version of the NSA)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't exclude the ASD, then are you happy with the NSA asking the ASD to use your work on their behalf to achieve the same end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this tool serve my goals?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the NSA doesn't want to abide by your terms, what will they do about it and what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could mean you mounting a court case, it could mean them lobbying law makers to change the laws, it could mean they just use it and don't tell anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not these things work in themselves is not the only question. If you work with organisations that advocate for civil society rights, these actions give them tools to garner publicity and public support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If law makers were to try and change law to make law enforcement agencies above certain laws, you can see how there's an opportunity to start a public conversation there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What other tools are better used?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what you've described, it sounds like your work does not substantively advance the field, in that case, maybe the NSA will already have the tools they need at their disposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case, the better protections against the misuse of such tools is to work with organisations in the field to influence public support for curtailing such operations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, what the government institutions can and cannot do is governed by what society is willing to permit / tolerate. Working to build broad enough support to change that may ultimately be a more effective and long term way of preventing what you fear your tool will be used for (and the way you choose to license it and fight for that license may be a tactic in that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to consider the trajectory of ideas like defund the police (which were around long before last year, but used political moments to advance support).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/319308/software-license-which-discriminates-on-ethical-grounds/319317?noredirect=1#comment828133_319317&quot;&gt;thread discussing ethical licensing&lt;/a&gt; may be of interest on the technical aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11067" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T23:05:24.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-23T18:33:22.227" Score="5" ViewCount="788" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Python application that is not under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to add style checking to my automatic test suite, and I would like to use pylint instead of pep8 because it provides more options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I realize that pylint is GPL licensed. More specifically, it's GPLv2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder, if pylint is only used by the testing suite i.e. whatever that's under &lt;code&gt;./test&lt;/code&gt;, but can never be invoked from my main program, is it still counted as OK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the best I can do to ditch pylint and use pep8 instead which has Apache license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22756" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T08:22:52.720" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T08:22:52.720" Title="Can a non-GPL Licensed Python Application use Pylint as part of its test suite?" Tags="|gpl-2|python|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2021-04-24T09:48:14.593" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can definitely use Pylint to check a program under any license. However, integrating Pylint into a test suite might require a bit of care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pylint is a program that reads some files, analyzes the files, and prints out various warnings. Those files happen to be another program, but there isn't really any connection between Pylint and the program being checked. In particular, they are not combined into a single creative work. Thus, there are no copyright concerns and consequently the GPL license does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a test suite this might be a bit different. If we have a test that combines the program being checked with Pylint (e.g. by using Pylint not as an application but as a library), it might be that this test can only be distributed under the GPL, and that the program being checked would require a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, I'd therefore suggest to not use Pylint as a library, but to keep it as a clearly separate program. Instead of &lt;code&gt;import pylint&lt;/code&gt; this distinction can be maintained more clearly e.g. with &lt;code&gt;subprocess.run(['pylint', ...])&lt;/code&gt;. Personally, I also find it a bit unusual to integrate a linter directly into a test suite, and would rather have a shell script that manages various quality assurance tasks (including linting and unit tests).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Pylint and pep8 aren't really comparable. Whereas pep8 mostly just checks some basic formatting issues, Pylint also supports rich semantic checks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T09:48:14.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11597" CreationDate="2021-04-24T19:48:42.560" Score="4" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;What (if any) are the implications of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recent Supreme Court decision in Oracle v Google&lt;/a&gt;. It sets precedent that APIs are fair use. But how does this work with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, imagine the following scenario. I create a library A that uses library B. Suppose library B is released under GPL. My understanding of GPL (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that it requires library A to be released under GPL. But if all I'm using from library B is its API, then why can't I, under fair use, release library A under MIT? When a user compiles the code using library A (and B under it), then the compiled code has to be GPL, since it's including more than just the API of library B. But it seems like the source code to A itself could be any license I like. After all, one could one day create a library C that implements the API of B, but is itself MIT. Then user-compiled code that includes A+C could remain MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my thinking on this off, or is it really the case that my hypothetical library A could be released under MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. This questions is related to, but different from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/762/what-are-the-implications-of-the-google-vs-oracle-case-on-the-state-of-public-a&quot;&gt;earlier question about the case&lt;/a&gt;. The obvious difference is that the Supreme Court decision is new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6223" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T09:31:27.817" Title="Implications of Google v Oracle decision for GPL" Tags="|gpl|law|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11596" CreationDate="2021-04-25T09:31:27.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, to compare the Oracle v Google case with your example, the Oracle code would be similar to library B and the Google code would be comparable to library C. The equivalent of library A would be a normal Java library written by a third party (i.e. not part of the JDK or Android).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decision by the US Supreme Court has very little to no impact on the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyleft aspects of the license show in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once a piece of code is subject to the GPL, it must remain under that license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When GPL code is combined with other code, the terms and conditions imposed by the GPL must be observed also for the other code, even if the actual license of that code doesn't have those terms and conditions. However, only the copyright holders of that other code can actually &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; the license to be GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid complicated licensing situations (especially if the build process actually copies some API code of library B), it is commonly recommended that you license your library A under the GPL, but that is not strictly needed. A GPL-compatible license is sufficient for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is actually affected by the ruling of the US Supreme Court, except perhaps where content of a header file of library B gets copied into library A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the ruling of the US Supreme Court &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; affect is the creation of library C, where it has become easier to study the API of library B without being affected by the GPL license of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T09:31:27.817" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11600" CreationDate="2021-04-26T07:33:29.213" Score="3" ViewCount="453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a library which is licensed under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the library was licensed under MIT. I changed to AGPL because some commercial companies did use the library without commiting bugfixes to the main branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I would like to grant a &amp;quot;special license&amp;quot; to a single person which did help me developing the library. This person should be allowed to use the library (and any future versions) in a closed source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible? If yes, &lt;strong&gt;how do I grant less restricted licenses to others&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22773" LastEditorUserId="22773" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T07:56:38.513" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T11:36:38.760" Title="Grant less restricted license from an AGPL project" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|relicensing|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11598" CreationDate="2021-04-26T07:45:55.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the only developer，you can do. You have a dual license for your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22774" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T07:45:55.000" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11598" CreationDate="2021-04-26T08:14:13.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have taken code licensed under MIT, and with another person (let's call her Charlie) produced a derivative work which you normally distribute under AGPL.  You wish to give Charlie the right to use this in a closed-source product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do this.  You cannot free Charlie (or yourself) from the obligations of the MIT licence, but that licence is no bar to Charlie's use of the code in a proprietary product.  The simplest way is probably to give Charlie a copy of the entire work under the MIT licence (though you and Charlie between you can license your rights on any terms you like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you do this there is a risk that Charlie will redistribute the work under the MIT licence, thus producing a publicly-available copy of the work that doesn't come with the AGPL obligations that copies obtained from you generally do.  This might be avoided if you were to give Charlie a copy under MIT (for the original rights) and some mutually-agreeable proprietary licence that permitted redistribution but only in binary form (for your rights).  Such a licence, however, would be non-free, and thus off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T11:36:38.760" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T11:36:38.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11623" CreationDate="2021-04-27T02:01:44.550" Score="2" ViewCount="849" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using ASP .NET Core environment on alpine docker container (&lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-aspnet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-dotnet-aspnet&lt;/a&gt;) and worried about license violations, as there are some GPL-licensed alpine OS packages in the same container.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/usr/share $ apk list | grep GPL&#xA;WARNING: Ignoring APKINDEX.2c4ac24e.tar.gz: No such file or directory&#xA;WARNING: Ignoring APKINDEX.40a3604f.tar.gz: No such file or directory&#xA;libfdisk-2.35.2-r0 x86_64 {util-linux} (GPL-2.0 GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.0-or-later BSD Public-Domain) [installed]&#xA;less-551-r0 x86_64 {less} (GPL) [installed]&#xA;pango-1.44.7-r2 x86_64 {pango} (LGPL-2.1-or-later) [installed]&#xA;glib-dev-2.64.6-r0 x86_64 {glib} (LGPL-2.1-or-later) [installed]&#xA;blkid-2.35.2-r0 x86_64 {util-linux} (GPL-2.0 GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.0-or-later BSD Public-Domain) [installed]&#xA;libcom_err-1.45.6-r0 x86_64 {e2fsprogs} (GPL-2.0-or-later AND LGPL-2.0-or-later AND BSD-3-Clause AND MIT) [installed]&#xA;mcookie-2.35.2-r0 x86_64 {util-linux} (GPL-2.0 GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.0-or-later BSD Public-Domain) [installed]&#xA;libcap-ng-0.7.10-r1 x86_64 {libcap-ng} (GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.1-or-later) [installed]&#xA;hexdump-2.35.2-r0 x86_64 {util-linux} (GPL-2.0 GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.0-or-later BSD Public-Domain) [installed]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official description shows dependent alpine OS packages which .NET requires (&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-alpine#dependencies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-alpine#dependencies&lt;/a&gt;), and those libraries seems not to be copyleft (Non-GPL or GPL with GCC exception).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are no descriptions that how .NET Core uses/links other alpine OS packages (except for the packages described in the official page) which may be distributed under GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a lot of people using .NET Core, it should be safe, but I will be happy if I can find some evidences that show my original sources (on .NET Core) will not be affected by GPL-licensed OS packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are not there any links between .NET Core and GPL-licensed alpine OS packages? Or are they regarded just as system-call?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edited: I am planning to distribute the container to customers as my product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22786" LastEditorUserId="22786" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T08:34:43.693" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T21:55:04.013" Title="How should I deal with GPL-licensed alpine os packages when using ASP .NET Core?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11602" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11603" CreationDate="2021-04-27T02:24:15.040" Score="8" ViewCount="2467" Body="&lt;p&gt;So essentially, I once downloaded some script off &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ralfholly/git-autocommit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;, forgot about it, then thought &amp;quot;Why not modify it!&amp;quot; and thus now decided to push it to my github account...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is though, do i keep the copyright details in the code? What do i do with it?&#xA;I didn't fork it because i thought it would be weird to fork it just to add my own modification to it, and preferred to start &amp;quot;fresh&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did do the following though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the same license as the original author, which is the MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give due credit at the end of the readme on the original repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what else should i do? Should i just add my own name and dates in the copyright details of the script with theirs or? Any advice/feedback welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know i could do &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2391/22787&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but i believe that only apply to forks as mentioned. I also didn't keep the &amp;quot;brand&amp;quot; name and changed the name of the project (but kept the copyright details in the modification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know i could do &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10744/22787&quot;&gt;this too&lt;/a&gt; but the advice mainly suggest to &amp;quot;put it at the beginning of the file&amp;quot;, while the current copyright notice is put in the middle (which is the one printed on screen when listing flag options)...Does that still apply here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/secemp9/git-autoeverything&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the repo i made for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22787" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T05:45:46.023" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T06:14:27.557" Title="What should I do with the copyright details in a codebase when modifying it when it wasn't forked?" Tags="|mit|copyright|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11602" CreationDate="2021-04-27T05:58:39.490" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this may be one of those cases where people get confused about copyright because they're caught up in the mechanics of github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have downloaded a copy of a piece of code licensed under MIT, modified it, and uploaded the resulting code to your github account.  You are now maintaining a separate copy of a piece of someone else's code, which may change differently to the copy they are maintaining.  This &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a fork; just because it wasn't done through github's &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; tool doesn't make it not a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But fortunately, we don't need to get caught up in semantics, because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;'s obligations are unaffected by what you, or I, or indeed my local restaurant, calls a fork.  It says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted ... to ... modify..., distribute ... and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the licence text is clear.  You do need to preserve their copyright notice, though you should add an appropriate one of your own.  You are not obliged to distribute your work under the MIT licence, but it's good that you wish to do so, and it will mean that you're automatically including a copy of the MIT licence text, as the actual licence for your new, combined work, thus satisfying the other obligation placed on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T06:14:27.557" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T06:14:27.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11622" CreationDate="2021-04-27T16:06:20.447" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: I'm working on an old software project which dates back to 1988. I collaborate with its main author who created the program back then and originally published it under non-free license in the early 1990s. In 2021 we have rewritten the program and decided to publish it as free software under terms of the GPLv3. There have been several scientific papers published during that time and several other people contributed to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1. Years range in the Copyright notice. It is stated in the GNU GPL guide to either list all the years separately or as a range, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1990 Author &amp;lt;e-mail&amp;gt;&#xA;    Copyright (C) year1-year2 Author &amp;lt;e-mail&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter is valid if there has been a significant contribution in every year in that range which doesn't seem to be the case. It's a long time now and it's been a process. Is it justified to make it 1988-2021 in this case? Or rather should we only point the year it's been released to the public, say: 1992, 2021?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2. Is the following multiple Copyright lines acceptable if we want to keep the authors in each source file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Copyright (C) 1988,1992 John Doe &amp;lt;john@mail.com&amp;gt;&#xA;    Copyright (C) 1992,1995 Jane Doe &amp;lt;jane@mail.com&amp;gt;&#xA;    Copyright (C) 1998-2021 Jack Doe &amp;lt;jack@mail.com&amp;gt;&#xA;    ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim is to comply with the free software standards as understood by the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20657" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T06:42:17.667" Title="Dealing with multiple contributions in a 30+ years old software project" Tags="|gpl|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11609" CreationDate="2021-04-27T22:32:57.347" Score="0" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, given what i asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11602/what-should-i-do-with-the-copyright-details-in-a-codebase-when-modifying-it-when&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I was wondering if i should leave the old project's name after a fork, in the copyright detail in the code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, I did it like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#Copyright 2015 by ....&#xA;#Copyright 2021 by ....(where my name is)&#xA;#Licensed under the terms of the MIT License, see LICENSE file.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at the top of the file. Now should i add the project's name too since i changed it when i forked it/modified it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#OldProjectName, Copyright 2015 by .....&#xA;#NewProjectName, Copyright 2021 by .....(my name here)&#xA;#Licensed under the terms of the MIT License, see LICENSE file.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this do or is there a better way to handle this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22787" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T07:49:32.680" Title="Should I keep the old project's name in the copyright details after a fork?" Tags="|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-28T05:58:54.590" Score="0" ViewCount="690" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Our situation - LGPLv2.1 Libraries = LGPL for whole work?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our distribution Package contains libraries which are licensed GNU LGPLv2.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;jquery.form - dual licensed GNU-LGPL-2.1+ - MIT,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* triggeredAutocomplete (jQuery UI autocomplete widget)&#xA; * 2012 by Hawkee.com (hawkee@gmail.com)&#xA; *&#xA; * Version 1.4.5&#xA; * &#xA; * Requires jQuery 1.7 and jQuery UI 1.8&#xA; *&#xA; * Dual licensed under MIT or GPLv2 licenses&#xA; *   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&#xA; *   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tinymce.js - GNU-LGPLv.2.1,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HTMLPurifier - GNU-LGPLv2.1,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;both licensed LGPLv2.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE&#xA;           Version 2.1, February 1999&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The LGPLv2.1 writes in 2c,d&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and&#xA;distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1&#xA;above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The modified work must itself be a software library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices&#xA;stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;c) You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no&#xA;charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;d) If a facility in the modified Library refers to a function or a&#xA;table of data to be supplied by an application program that uses&#xA;the facility, other than as an argument passed when the facility&#xA;is invoked, then you must make a good faith effort to ensure that,&#xA;in the event an application does not supply such function or&#xA;table, the facility still operates, and performs whatever part of&#xA;its purpose remains meaningful.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For example, a function in a library to compute square roots has&#xA;a purpose that is entirely well-defined independent of the&#xA;application.  &lt;strong&gt;Therefore, Subsection 2d requires that any&#xA;application-supplied function or table used by this function must&#xA;be optional: if the application does not supply it, the square&#xA;root function must still compute square roots.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole.&lt;/strong&gt;  If&#xA;identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Library,&#xA;and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in&#xA;themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those&#xA;sections &lt;strong&gt;when you distribute them as separate works.&lt;/strong&gt;  But when you&#xA;distribute the same sections &lt;strong&gt;as part of a whole which is a work based&#xA;on the Library, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of&#xA;this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the&#xA;entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote&#xA;it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Questions:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What exactly does that mean for our case and the whole application which is using libraries licensed under LGPLv2.1?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do we have to license our whole work under LGPLv2.1 when we use&#xA;these libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can we license our work under another GNU GPL license instead of LGPLv2.1 i.e. AGPLv.3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be good to license our whole work under another license than LGPLv2.1 to avoid that people now a.) include our work into their proprietary works or b.) link dynamically to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Our Conclusion until now&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A conclusion which might be wrong so please correct our view if necessary but please explain us why in an understandable example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because we use those LGPLv2.1 libraries and distribute them together with the rest of our application we have too license our work under at least LGPLv2.1 but we could license the whole application we distribute in one package also as GNU GPLv.2 or later, GNU GPLv.3 or AGPLv.3 because of the compatibility of GNU GPL Licenses but we can't license our whole Application under a proprietary license which isn't 100% compatible with any of the GNU GPL licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We think that licensing the whole application under AGPLv.3 would give us the still the biggest control over the code we have created and initiated as all others would need to publish their code too who build on the code we have created by ourself. We would always be a bit ahead of other &amp;quot;copies&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an explanation, our script is a social network script and will be used in networks, perhaps even as SAAS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would not be advised to invest to much energy to change now those libraries as already a complete Versions of the whole application Code which include those libraries had been distributed until Version 3.0. And before even also GNU GPL code and libraries were part of it which had meanwhile been replaced with another MIT licensed library with similar functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if we would now change all libraries to MIT and no more GNU GPL libraries our code we distributed until now would be licensed und LGPLv2.1 and because of the previous included GNU GPL code even GNU GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our view might be wrong but we can cope with the results I think but really need help to find now the correct license for our whole work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application itself is also using &amp;quot;Smarty&amp;quot;, which is licensed under GNU LGPLv.3 where the parts mentioned in 2c,d are not existing (or we missed them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22229" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T19:35:13.497" Title="Do we have to choose the GNU LGPL v2.1 license libraries for our distribution?" Tags="|lgpl|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11606" CreationDate="2021-04-28T06:21:20.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@NordineLotfi You can use either of those ways but the easiest way is by just replacing the Project Name - Don't use the same name for your own project! -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Project Name (the name you give to the project)&#xA;# Copyright 2021 by (here your name)&#xA;# Copyright 2015-2021 by list the previous copyright owners, &#xA;           if there are more than one you might have &#xA;           to list more or them in a separate line&#xA;# Licensed under the terms of the MIT License, &#xA;  see LICENSE file (the copyright notice from the previous developer(s).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fait to the previous developers I would also set up a page or file where you simply list all developers who contributed to make your application possible including the licenses of the used libraries. This makes it also much easier for future devs who like to use YOUR code in their applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Open Source Licenses like GNU GPL and MIT we should have nothing to hide at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22229" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T06:21:20.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8616" CreationDate="2021-04-28T06:33:43.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have the chance to look to a Divi Theme - you will notice a CREDITS.md file which lists all those people who contributed and the licenses of their code. In the code itself you need to list the ones who previously contributed to the code as a copyright (xx.xx.xx) Name of Developer / Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep I mind that it can be very important to know all people who have ever contributed to an application or library just in case you want to change its license to something else all of them need to agree with no exception!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it is very recommended to keep a proper Credits file and a proper Changelog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22229" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T06:33:43.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-28T11:21:17.740" Score="1" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an authoritative, clear and up-to-date document on what exactly a person or an institution has to do for the so-called &amp;quot;license snippets&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;license notice&amp;quot; for software projects. I am asking about the &amp;quot;license snippets&amp;quot; which have to be put into each file that are part of open-sourced software (e.g. on github).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for licenses like &lt;code&gt;BSD3&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;Apache&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;MIT&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;GPL3&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;LGPL3&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For what licenses are such &amp;quot;license snippets&amp;quot; mandatory?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they are mandatory, do they require a Copyright statement with a 'year'? (something like &lt;code&gt;COPYRIGHT 2010-2021, my company&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the exact rules for each of these licenses on the &lt;strong&gt;update&lt;/strong&gt; on the &lt;em&gt;copyright-year(s)&lt;/em&gt; for the license snippets? Whenever a change is made to that specific file? Whenever a new release is created? Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, as there are many open-source projects on github, there should be somewhere an authoritative, clear and up-to-date document which really and clearly states how to handle those &amp;quot;license snippets&amp;quot; for the different licenses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastEditorUserId="22800" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T12:15:36.617" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T13:14:02.310" Title="Where can I find a final, authoritative, clear list of how to handle &quot;license snippets&quot; for common licenses?" Tags="|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|license|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11613" CreationDate="2021-04-28T14:41:42.693" Score="2" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open source project with an MIT license. The project takes markdown and parses it into HTML pages. (I know it's been done before but I was bored) And I'm a little confused on how people would be able to follow the attribution requirement with the license. All it does is generate the HTML, so I'm not sure if people should have a code comment giving attribution or something. I know this might sound like a noob question but licenses are just beyond me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22768" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:55:40.197" Title="How would people be able to credit my open source software that generates HTML?" Tags="|mit|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11612" CreationDate="2021-04-28T14:55:40.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we discuss in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, the output of a piece of free software is not generally governed by the licence on the piece of software.  So if someone is taking your tool and using it to generate HTML from their own markdown, then publishing that HTML, the MIT licence doesn't govern those HTML pages, and they are not required to attribute you on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people start distributing copies of your tool, then they are required to preserve your copyright notices (and some other text besides), and that's how you'll be attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:55:40.197" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11620" CreationDate="2021-04-28T18:55:31.783" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a GPL sound library I'd like to provide as an option in a game which will be released under MIT license. My plan is to create a generic, abstract audio interface in the engine, which can dynamically link to any implementation of the user's choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One implementation could use an MIT-compatible audio backend, while another would use a backend based on the aforementioned GPL'd audio code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These implementations would technically be separate projects, and are not included with the source code of, nor are a dependency of, the core software. My concern is about distribution with the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be allowed to distribute (source + dll) the audio interface implementation - that uses the GPL'd code as a backend - with my software binary distribution, and make it the default audio option?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22805" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T12:27:25.300" Title="Using a GPL library in a separate module that's included with the main program" Tags="|gpl-2|distribution|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11608" CreationDate="2021-04-28T19:35:13.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we use those LGPLv2.1 libraries and distribute them together with the rest of our application we have too license our work under at least LGPLv2.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as your software has some application component that contains no LGPL-licensed code (but depends on an LGPL library), you may distribute that application component linked to LGPLv2.1-licensed libraries and license it under nearly any terms you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is described in sections 5 and 6, reproduced partially below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 . A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot;. Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, linking a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a &amp;quot;work that uses the library&amp;quot;. The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6 . As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and &lt;strong&gt;distribute that work under terms of your choice&lt;/strong&gt;, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In view of this allowance to chose any terms you like (so long as they allow reverse engineering and combination with modified libraries), you do not have to choose a GPL-family license for your own code, though you may still do so, if you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T19:35:13.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11606" CreationDate="2021-04-29T07:49:32.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the copyright lines, it doesn't matter what project the relevant code was originally added to. There is also no legal requirement to mention or reference to the original project name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of goodwill, it is common to mention what project you forked from. This could be done in a README file for example. If you consider it relevant, you could also mention when the fork was created, so people can see which copyright lines are inherited from the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T07:49:32.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-28T14:06:13.513" Score="2" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see people comparing the GPL with a Classpath exception to the standard LGPL. Does this mean that LGPL already has the Classpath exception or some language already similar enough to it? If not, can it be added in the same way the exception can be added to the GPL or would the linking language already present in LGPL not allow this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22736" OwnerDisplayName="Ramzi Bechara" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T12:19:22.027" Title="Is it possible/necessary to add Classpath Exception to LGPL?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|linking|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11618" CreationDate="2021-04-29T12:19:22.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Classpath Exception has a similar intention to the LGPL: to keep the covered work itself under GPL-like terms, while allowing linking with non-GPL components. In particular, this allows such works to be integrated with proprietary software. However, there are some differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How they are applied: The Classpath Exception is an additional permission that can be added to any GPL-family license. Similarly, LGPLv3 is an additional permission for GPLv3. However, the LGPLv2 is an standalone license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What they require: The Classpath Exception is a lot more permissive than the LGPL. The LGPL requires that the recipient can modify the LGPL-covered parts and re-link the software to use the modified version, which effectively requires dynamic linking and/or the absence of some integrity checks. The Classpath Exception does not require this ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, I could imagine a project that uses GPLv3 + LGPLv3 + Classpath Exception, though the LGPL would be largely redundant in that constellation. Similarly, GPLv2 + Classpath Exception would likely be a bit more permissive than the LGPLv2. I've never seen LGPLv2 + Classpath Exception, but in theory that combination could make sense as well. Whether to use the Classpath Exception depends on your licensing goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T12:19:22.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11614" CreationDate="2021-04-29T12:27:25.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the main program is combined with the GPL-covered plugin, the software as a whole would be covered by the GPL. Since you're using the MIT license for your main program, this is perfectly possible: the MIT is a GPL-compatible license. However, you will also have to pay attention with other dependencies, e.g. Apache-2.0 is not compatible with GPL-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not the ability of your program to load a GPL module that brings the GPL into play. The GPL will only apply to your software if it is combined with the GPL module. I would argue that this occurs by distributing the two components together in a manner that will load the GPL component by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on the FSF interpretation of the GPL, in particular the GPL FAQ entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can I release a nonfree program that's designed to load a GPL-covered plug-in?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. While your program is MIT-licensed (and therefore not nonfree) the same reasoning applies. Either the two components form a single program or they don't. If they don't, GPL is irrelevant. If they do, the program as a whole is subject to the GPL. The potential “loophole” is to keep the two components as clearly distinct programs, in particular by running the sound library as a separate server and only interacting with it e.g. over a socket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T12:27:25.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11611" CreationDate="2021-04-29T13:08:29.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to separate the license terms from the license itself, and from other notice requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license terms are about what the recipient is allowed to do with the covered work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license says “this work is covered by those license terms”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There might be other notices. Copyright notices are usually not legally necessary, but provide nice attribution (“I wrote this!”) and also indicate that a valid license was given (“Because I wrote this, I am the copyright holder and am allowed to issue you this license”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are asking about &lt;em&gt;license snippets&lt;/em&gt;, you're likely asking about the kind of license headers that are often plastered into each file of a project. These notices usually contain a copyright notice plus the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many permissive licenses (MIT, ISC, BSD-3-clause) are so short that we use the full license terms as the license notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many longer licenses such as the GPL licenses or Apache-2.0 contain an appendix that suggests a license block that you can use in this manner, while keeping the license terms in a separate file. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX license list&lt;/a&gt; collects license terms that are Open Source or open-source-like. If you click on the entry for a license, there's a section about the “standard license header” for that license, if it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About copyright notices: There are international agreements such as the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement. Nearly all countries&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; have signed one of these agreements. These treaties say that copyright is automatic, without requiring copyright notices. Why then are copyright notices so common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of more banal reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They provide nice attribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They make it feasible to track when copyright will expire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They prevent a defense of innocent infringement (if there's a notice an infringer can't reasonably believe the material was free of copyright)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing or falsifying notices is still pretty illegal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more importantly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's just really common in the Free and Open Source software community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This community and its licenses are strongly influenced by the United States.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The US were &lt;em&gt;really late&lt;/em&gt; to join Berne, and did previously require copyright notices in order to have copyright protection. This ended as late as March 1, 1989. By that time, there were already lots of licenses, projects, and communities that we'd now consider “open source”. E.g. the MIT license was drafted &lt;a href=&quot;https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9263265&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;around 1984&lt;/a&gt; and the first GPL version was published in February 1989.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appropriate format of copyright notices ultimately depend on national law, though US conventions are common. The GNU maintainer handbook has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section on copyright notices&lt;/a&gt; which explains some conventions, though it notably deviates from the format prescribed in US law in some details (such as allowing ranges of years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, copyright notices are handled fairly flexibly. Sometimes the years are never updated. Sometimes the name in the copyright notice is something like “the FooBar project contributors” which is not a person and unable to actually be a copyright holder. However, I prefer this over listing concrete names (such as the name of the project's original author) to avoid the impression that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the listed persons would be copyright holders – unless there's a CLA/CTA involved, every contributor is the copyright holder for their contributions, regardless of what the notice says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_copyright_agreements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;except&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;East Timor,&#xA;Eritrea,&#xA;Ethiopia,&#xA;Iran,&#xA;Iraq,&#xA;Marshall Islands,&#xA;Palau,&#xA;Somalia,&#xA;South Sudan.&#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T13:14:02.310" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T13:14:02.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11604" CreationDate="2021-04-29T21:39:18.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1.&lt;/strong&gt; The FSF/GNU has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty clear guidelines&lt;/a&gt; on how to format copyright notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] add each year in which you have made nontrivial changes to the package. (Here we assume you’re using a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every revision installed is also immediately and automatically published.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] You can use a range […] if and only if: 1) every year in the range, inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; and 2) you make an explicit statement in a README file about this usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the FSF guidelines are probably more detail-oriented than necessary. E.g. I have seen no software that actually implements the third condition and explains the notation in the README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other parts are very good and very important: don't use a range unless there were copyright-relevant changes in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, just add another Copyright notice line. In any case, only the most recent year is really relevant. However, do not delete or falsify old notice lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the years indicate changes or publication? A &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/64574&quot;&gt;tricky question&lt;/a&gt; which I'm not qualified to properly answer, but I think using the years of changes is the more relevant approach. The GNU manual quoted above hints towards publication being relevant, but this might be outdated advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2.&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, adding separate lines for separate contributors is a common practice and is a good idea. However, it is not &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; that the copyright notice accurately reflects the exact copyright holders. Contributors have copyright regardless of whether they added a notice. I discuss some background in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11621&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;But you seem to have contributions from before 1989, which, if made in the US, might not be covered by copyright at all.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preferred solution would be to add a legally meaningless but more accurate notice like “Copyright 2021 the FooSoftware contributors”, and to credit contributors in a separate file like AUTHORS. I would feel uncomfortable retroactively adding copyright notices for long-ago contributions since this is (a) not necessary, and (b) runs into the risk of creating an invalid or misleading notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems that you're in contact with all copyright holders, and are thus able to create accurate and detailed notices. I assume you're in contact with all of them since only the copyright holders can issue a license such as the GPL. You need all of the copyright holder's consent, or have to remove the contributions of contributors who don't consent. (There are legal theories that you don't need everyone's consent, but it's a bad idea to test such theories.) In some cases the individuals who contributed might not be the copyright holders who can grant a license, in particular if their contributions were made in the course of their employment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T06:42:17.667" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T06:42:17.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11601" CreationDate="2021-04-29T21:55:04.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the packages your mentioned are available under the LGPL, not just the GPL. The LGPL says that dynamic linking is fine. Since you're not compiling these binaries into your .NET app, there doesn't seem to be an issue with the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you distribute a container image, you're distributing all the software contained in that image. The GPL and LGPL say you're allowed to do that (c.f. “mere aggregation”), but you have to include a copy of the license, and have to make the source code of these GPL/LGPL-covered components available. How to make the source code available depends on the exact license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I find thinking about container image licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7015&quot;&gt;mindbogglingly complicated&lt;/a&gt; and, as a consequence, avoid distributing container images other than through purely internal private registries. Since you have customers who shall receive the image, you don't have this luxury. The Microsoft image you've mentioned is one of the few that takes their responsibilities here seriously. The README on Docker Hub links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/containerregistry/blob/master/legal/Container-Images-Legal-Notice.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this generic notice&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/containerregistry/blob/e0da5d8025b6893fd4a76683f22eb1044513f6df/legal/Container-Images-Legal-Notice.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permalink&lt;/a&gt;) which links to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/containerregistry/blob/master/legal/Linux-Legal-Metadata.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these instructions&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/containerregistry/blob/e0da5d8025b6893fd4a76683f22eb1044513f6df/legal/Linux-Legal-Metadata.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permalink&lt;/a&gt;) that explain how to find the licenses for software in the image and how to get the source code. I recommend you essentially copy that approach, though it may be good to actually go through that process and keep a copy of the source code of all included software on file. If you have heightened compliance requirements, it may be a better idea to build your image completely from scratch, thus ensuring that you can precisely control what software is in the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T21:55:04.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-30T12:48:47.233" Score="0" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;When using a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL License&lt;/a&gt; in a github open-source project, you have the possibility to choose a license in github yourself. When you edit a license file github shows you a button with the text &amp;quot;Choose a license template&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do so for LGPL, github creates a file for you with the name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENSE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL License&lt;/a&gt; yourself, it states that you need to have two files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;COPYING&#xA;COPYING.LESSER&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with some text in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what to do here? Use &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or use &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt;&amp;amp;&lt;code&gt;COPYING.LESSER&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T13:55:43.070" Title="What filename for a LGPL license for github projects?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11624" CreationDate="2021-04-30T13:55:43.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends a bit on the version of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 is not a standalone license, but an Additional Permission that can be applied to the GPLv3. Thus, your licensing documentation should include both the GPLv3 and the LGPLv3. This can be achieved by putting each into a separate file, or by putting both into the same file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2 is a standalone license. If you use it, you should place it into any reasonably named file and not include the GPL alongside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the file that contains the license terms is not so important, as long as it is crystal clear to recipients of the software which terms apply. For example, your README file should include a statement to the effect “This software is covered by that license”, and where to find the full terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, I am preparing software for publication where this license statement is contained in the README and LICENSE files, all source files list the SPDX license identifier, but the full license terms are included in the bundled documentation. The result is that Github can't detect the license in its GUI, but this makes it easier to deal with complex licensing situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T13:55:43.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-30T20:51:50.650" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose person X writes some library foolib, licensing it under the 3-BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person Y now takes the foolib sources and develops it further, making significant changes: More functionality, changes to existing API, partial rewrite of the internals etc.. But of course, it is still an evolved and changed foolib.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can person Y release their modified library under another license? e.g. GPL or LGPL? If so, what is the threshold to the amount of change necessary so that the original 3-BSD license doesn't &amp;quot;stick&amp;quot; to it, and its legal use is restricted to the terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not a dupe of the Theseus paradox question, as that one doesn't address whether I can distribute a derivative work under a different license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other related questions:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/75436/63497&quot;&gt;Relicense BSD 2/3-clause code to GPL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/304/can-i-take-bsd-licensed-code-and-distribute-it-under-gpl&quot;&gt;Can I take BSD licensed code and distribute it under GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it matters whether the library is source-only or object+headers, please mention this. Also if other aspects of the programming language matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastEditorUserId="14290" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T09:09:50.093" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T09:09:50.093" Title="Do significant changes to code allow a license change from 3-BSD to something else?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-05-01T08:40:47.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11628" CreationDate="2021-04-30T20:56:40.027" Score="1" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've written a 3-BSD library while working someplace for a few years; and myself and my workplace are copyright holders jointly. After leaving, I've continued development - on my own. Naturally, my previous workplace does not hold the copyrights on these changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I indicate this fact in the license notice? Should I have two &lt;code&gt;(c)&lt;/code&gt; lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T13:33:35.900" Title="How to indicate a change of copyright holders in modified work?" Tags="|derivative-works|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11627" CreationDate="2021-05-01T06:03:59.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The clearest way to indicate that your (former?) workplace has no copyright interest in the later changes is indeed to add a new copyright notice with only your name on it for those later changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you and your workplace worked on the library from 2018 to 2020 and you continued on your own in 2020, the copyright notices at the top of the file(s) could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;copyright (c) 2018 - 2020 einpoklum, workplace&#xA;copyright (c) 2021 einpoklum&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notices do not indicate exactly which part was modified by whom. They just give a broad indication who the copyright holders are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For details on who made which changes, the history of the repository is a better tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T13:33:35.900" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T13:33:35.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11630" CreationDate="2021-05-01T07:02:21.093" Score="-1" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;i wan to create SaaS for help people to solve different tasks.&#xA;Which licenses of plugins/libraries can i use in my SaaS?&#xA;A lot of examples describes a use of plugins and libraries with a software, but SaaS is other type of software.&#xA;Plugins and libraries will be used in background and will be used indirect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As i Understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can use in my commercial SaaS the following licenses without any problems.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;BSD / MIT / Apache&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What other types of licenses can I use in addition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I use all licenses with a check mark for commercial use if my code source not public visible(commercial)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In many conditions it is worth that I am forced to indicate copywriting. But where should I indicate it, if the use of these libraries occurs in the background and completely different services are sold to the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example here can see a full list with comparisons.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/solution/joinup-licensing-assistant/jla-find-and-compare-software-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/solution/joinup-licensing-assistant/jla-find-and-compare-software-licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T17:13:53.517" Title="Which licenses of Open Source plugins/libraries can i used in my commercial SaaS product" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11629" CreationDate="2021-05-01T08:36:51.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You propose to write software to be offered to others as SaaS on a commercial (and, presumably, proprietary) basis.  This software will not be entirely created &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;; you wish to use pre-existing freely-licensed software in the creation of your offering, and you have some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other types of licenses can I use in addition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All free software &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;can be used in a commercial endeavour&lt;/a&gt;.  There are non-free licences that forbid it, but as long as you stick to software licensed under an FSF- or OSI-approved free licence, you should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use all licenses with a check mark for commercial use if my code source not public visible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoid software under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;, or similar licences.  These licences require that people interacting with your software over a computer network be given the opportunity to receive full source code, so if you do not wish to share your source, you should not use software under such licences in preparing your offering.  It is possible to use AGPL-licensed software in preparing backend software that doesn't interact with users, but you will have a problem if the front-end becomes a derivative, in copyright terms, of the AGPL-covered software.  Whether this would be true in your case is a complex analysis that requires a complete and exact description of your offering, and probably professional legal advice; your best route is to steer clear of all AGPL- and similarly-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many conditions it is worth that I am forced to indicate copywriting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you mean &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;forced to indicate copyright&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; copywriting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/copywrite#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;something rather different&lt;/a&gt;.  The non-copyleft free licences that require preservation of copyright notices only apply when the software is distributed; since you are offering it as SaaS, this is unlikely to apply to you.  Licences that require formal advertising acknowledgment are non-free, so as long as you stick to free licences (see above) this shouldn't be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T13:41:10.773" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T13:41:10.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11634" CreationDate="2021-05-01T16:38:02.903" Score="4" ViewCount="2320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source project (under GPL license) that has some parts incorporated from other projects (that use MIT and GPL), and one of the provisions of both of these licenses is &lt;code&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software&lt;/code&gt; or something along those lines. However, I can't find any clear information on how to acknowledge copyright holders in my project on repository hosting sites like GitHub or elsewhere. Should I make a file and 'copypaste' these notices there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read somewhere that notices are no longer obligatory under Berne Convention (at least in countries that are signatories to the convention), but despite this I still want to properly acknowledge other's work I've used in my own project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22831" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T11:18:46.807" Title="How to properly attribute other's people work on GitHub?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|copyright|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11631" CreationDate="2021-05-01T23:26:53.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were using files from project1 with MIT license, and files from project2 with GPL license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would create two subdirectories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;project1: including the files from project1, and a file named LICENSE or COPYING containing the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;project2: same as above but for project2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would try to keep as separate as possible my code from their code, so that I could drop the dependency and the related legal obligations if needed, without losing all of my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also include the source code including the two folders in any distribution of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also include a notice at the end of the github pages which states something like &amp;quot;this project makes use of project1 and project2, see the related subfolders for copyright and licensing details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22834" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T23:26:53.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11631" CreationDate="2021-05-02T05:47:58.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depending on the language your project is developed in it may be the case that the GPL / MIT licensed code can be installed via a package management tool. Composer for PHP, NPM for NodeJS, RubyGems for Ruby, PyPI for Python, etc. In this scenario, attribution wouldn't be needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, you could look to other projects for inspiration. Here's what phpBB 3.0.x did:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/3.0.x/phpBB/includes/diff/diff.php#L19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/3.0.x/phpBB/includes/diff/diff.php#L19&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what WordPress does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-includes/SimplePie/Credit.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-includes/SimplePie/Credit.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what Joomla! does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/staging/libraries/phpass/PasswordHash.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/staging/libraries/phpass/PasswordHash.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like in a lot of these cases they're just copying the sources directly without any modification. They're not adding a LICENSE file to the subdirectories or anything like that. The license is in the comment block at the top and that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22249" LastEditorUserId="22249" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T11:18:46.807" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T11:18:46.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11631" CreationDate="2021-05-02T07:54:19.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read somewhere that notices are no longer obligatory under Berne Convention (at least in countries that are signatories to the convention)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to add a copyright notice to your work in order to be able to establish copyright protection. But once a copyright notice exists, most licenses do not allow you to remove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you copy (parts of) a file from a third-party project into your project, you should copy the license information that is present in that file along with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that license information contains the full text of the license, you don't need a separate file with licensing information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that license information only contains a referent to the license but not the full text, then you also need to include a file with the full license text at a location where a potential user of your code would look for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the third-party code is included directly into the source tree of your project, then the license file should reside next to the file containing the license for your code (or it could be the same file if it is the same license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copied (nearly) entire libraries and placed them in a distinct part of your codebase, then you should copy the license files that exist in the project as well and leave those in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T07:54:19.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11639" CreationDate="2021-05-02T14:03:26.800" Score="1" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to release a software package on GitHub (or any public repository) that uses Highcharts. Because of this, I am not sure which license to pick for my project. Here is some more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am in academia, so my project falls under 'non-commercial use' (if I understood correctly), and my project can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.highcharts.com/blog/download/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use highcharts for free&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While my project uses Highcharts, none of the Highcharts code is included in the repository. So basically it's a dependency, but it is not included anywhere in the repository itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these two points, I am not sure whether:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can pick whichever license I want, since none of the highcharts code is included. In that case, I guess that anyone forking the repository would have to make sure they respect the terms of the Highchart's license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a particular type of license I need to pick to avoid any legal trouble.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If things get too complicated, I am also thinking to rewrite some of my code to get rid of the Highcharts dependency, which I would prefer to avoid given how awesome this library is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if it reads like a dumb question, but it's the first time I have to do such things and could not really find information about this particular case online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22837" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T19:19:29.380" Title="What license to choose for an open source project using Highcharts" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11638" CreationDate="2021-05-02T15:12:21.240" Score="1" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a plan to use own project (Django backend + React SPA) under GPLv3 in my portfolio with repository on GitHub  for all parts of my project. My project is simple landing page with text data and pictures. I want to deploy this project in docker container on hosting's server. And I plan to use MongoDB in this container, but type of DB can be changed easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that licenses of django, react and docker are compatible with GPLv3 and I can publish my project under it. I have no plans to contribute MongoDB with my project, only use it on hosting and use like example in documentation. And of course, all components and modules with link to authors and original licenses will be listed in file COPYRIGHTS.md&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use this stack under GPLv3 with MongoDB that shipped under SSPL in docker container? And can I publish source code of my project (django+react) under GPLv3 on github?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T16:39:37.443" Title="Can I use my project with MongoDB in docker container and publish it on GitHub under GPLv3?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|bsd|sspl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11637" CreationDate="2021-05-02T16:39:37.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;MongoDB's SSPL license is not an open source license and is incompatible with the GPL, so it's good that you ask. But most likely, this license has &lt;em&gt;no consequences&lt;/em&gt; in your scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL triggers license conditions when you do one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you give someone else a copy of the SSPL-covered software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you create a derived work of the SSPL-covered software, for example by modifying it or by combining it with other code into a single program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you host SSPL-covered software as a service for someone else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are likely doing none of these things. While you might have SSPL-covered software and other software in a single container, that doesn't mean they form one program. Similarly, a web browser and a spreadsheet program don't form a single program just because they are installed on the same computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you were to publish your Docker image (e.g. by uploading it to Docker Hub) then you would be giving other people a copy of the software. For GPL- and SSPL-covered material, this would mean you'd have to give them the source code for these components as well. The easiest way to solve this is to not publish any Docker images. As an alternative, you could build the image on the server where it is deployed, or use Docker's export/import tool to transfer the image as a TAR archive. There is no issue when publishing a Dockerfile as part of your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T16:39:37.443" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11635" CreationDate="2021-05-02T19:19:29.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As HighCharts is not under an open-source license, you have some restrictions on which license you can use for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, you cannot use any of the licenses from the GPL suite (GPL, LGPL, AGPL). All of those licenses have the requirement that you have the right to apply the conditions imposed by the license also to your dependencies. The HighCharts license does not allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the (L|A|)GPL license, or other licenses that impose requirements of how your dependencies are distributed, you can choose any license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T19:19:29.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11654" CreationDate="2021-05-03T16:46:50.407" Score="5" ViewCount="2961" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a web template seller and use different tools / libraries / plugins such as Bootstrap 5, jQuery, select2, wowbook, etc. which are under MIT and Apache licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two licenses compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to add and use them together in my projects in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22847" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T07:56:26.333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T12:28:27.870" Title="Can MIT and Apache licenses be used together?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-04T09:50:07.893" Score="-1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a game. It is free-to-play. Is it legal to take the top-hat from the Emoji One (v1) icon set licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and sell it as an in-game cosmetic items?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://iconify.design/icon-sets/emojione-v1/top-hat.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://iconify.design/icon-sets/emojione-v1/top-hat.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22851" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T20:40:44.887" Title="Selling images licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 in game" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11675" CreationDate="2021-05-04T13:30:00.917" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project which uses unmodified libraries with MIT-like licenses. I don't include source code of these libraries in my project tree, just include some its configuration files which have full text of its license in the header comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release all parts of my project, not directly derived from this libraries, to public domain (e.g. with Unlicense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I just use note like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;unless otherwise noted this project is released under Unlicense&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; in LICENSE or README file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22853" LastEditorUserId="22853" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T14:02:18.157" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T17:35:16.630" Title="Can I use &quot;unless otherwise noted this project is released under XXX&quot;?" Tags="|linked-libraries|public-domain|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6971" CreationDate="2021-05-04T15:21:38.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it's official, but they do exist at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/idleberg/Creative-Commons-Markdown/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/idleberg/Creative-Commons-Markdown/&lt;/a&gt;.  It seems well maintained, at least at the time of this writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They welcome changes so if anything looks wrong, report it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18296" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:21:38.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11647" CreationDate="2021-05-04T14:05:46.010" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to publish the source of a program which borrows some code from project A. Years ago, A's maintainers forked it from project B (which has no apparent license) and licensed it as MIT. Several months of development later,  B's author approached A and and demanded that A's code be licensed with non-commercial requirement. A's maintainers complied by changing the license of B to CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. However, a range of commits with the MIT license are still available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Are the old commits in project A with MIT still considered MIT? If so, I'd be able to publish my codebase under MIT instead of using CC-BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22856" OwnerDisplayName="Phil Kang" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:09:54.097" Title="Are old copies of &quot;mistakenly licensed&quot; OSS still subject to their previous licenses, even after &quot;fixing&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2021-05-04T18:21:49.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the old commits in project A with MIT still considered MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that code was never licensed under the MIT license: the individual(s) that made that offer to you never hard the right to make it in the first place. You may as well ask if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deed to the Brooklyn Bridge that you bought&lt;/a&gt; in an alleyway is still valid, even if the state of New York told you it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the final answer here depends on the terms of the agreement between B and A. I suppose it's not impossible that B said to A, &amp;quot;If you license your code under CC BY-NC-SA, then I'll allow you to offer my code under the MIT license,&amp;quot; but I would not assume that was the case until I'd verified that agreement with B. It's possible (and I'd wager more likely) that B said something closer to, &amp;quot;I'll allow you and only you to distribute my code, under terms that don't allow downstream redistribution, if you license your code under CC BY-NC-SA.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the most recent revision of the code doesn't indicate that the code is under an MIT license, I would assume B has never allowed any version of their code to be used under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T18:21:49.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2021-05-05T07:17:45.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A had “no apparent license”. Without a license, you can do what copyright law allows you to do, which is very little. So It was not legal for B to publish A under the MIT license. Legally, it was never published under that license. Instead, you were duped into thinking it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now A is offering a license. B can now be published with a valid license, but not with the MIT license. What it means to you is that you used B without a license (without knowing) and now you can use it with a license. You may need to change how you use B obviously. But then you didn’t have a license to use it at all n&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T07:17:45.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11650" CreationDate="2021-05-05T13:49:14.113" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's have one guy who have been working on game and published it as GPL open source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time, community forks popped out, while original author got increasingly tired of his project and eventually doesn't work on it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a lot more time, several forks have overshadowed original game by being more polished and whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does GPL allows the transfer of original project's ownership to most popular fork so original author could finally rest and let derivative to be main project for community?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22859" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:01:31.120" Title="Can original author transfer rights for GPLv3 project to other person?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|forking|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11649" CreationDate="2021-05-05T14:01:31.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;With the GPL, there is no need for any &amp;quot;transfer of ownership&amp;quot; in a legal sense. Anybody can pick up the code and make any changes they like to it, so long as they make those changes available in accordance with the license - and this is what the forks in your example have already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a community which has formed around the original codebase, but communities will find their own path, independent of any legal ownership. The original owner is perfectly at liberty to say &amp;quot;this codebase is discontinued, go see Fork X for a better version&amp;quot;, but that's nothing to do with anything legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing the original owner &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; want to do is to transfer the copyright on their (and only their) contributions to the original codebase to another entity. This would give the other entity the right to relicense the code in future (to a non-GPL license) should this be desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:01:31.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11646" CreationDate="2021-05-05T14:04:16.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Material that is published under &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license at all is &lt;strong&gt;copyrighted,&lt;/strong&gt; and that copyright ought to be formally registered with the government.  Whether or not it has been registered, however, it is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;owned.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;  And, &amp;quot;ownership has its privileges.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of those privileges is that the owner can choose to license it any way he likes, and he can change that license at any time.  When someone &amp;quot;forks&amp;quot; the code and does something else with it, they are creating what is called a &lt;strong&gt;derivative work.&lt;/strong&gt;  The creator of a derivative work is entitled to obtain his own copyright on the derivative he has created, but it is subordinate to the original work. There are certain things that he can do, and others that he can't. For example, he can't do what this person attempted to do: namely, to replace the copyright terms with a less-restrictive (or even, &amp;quot;meaningfully different&amp;quot;) one, thereby compromising the legal rights of the owner of the &lt;strong&gt;intellectual property&lt;/strong&gt; from which the derivative work was derived.  The owner had a legal right to demand the change, and the offender – who &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in the wrong – had no choice but to promptly comply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although these &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; licenses are designed to be &amp;quot;open,&amp;quot; they have sharp legal teeth.  They have been tested and upheld in courts all around the world.  When you &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;own&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; something, you can be as &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; or as restrictive as you care to be.  You still have &lt;em&gt;enforceable&lt;/em&gt; rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/derivative-works-under-u-s-copyright-law.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article by an IP attorney&lt;/a&gt; for a much better discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17444" LastEditorUserId="17444" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T14:09:54.097" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:09:54.097" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11653" CreationDate="2021-05-05T17:07:54.653" Score="5" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC0 is often criticized for its patent clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, many other licenses (e.g. BSD, MIT) don't even mention patents, so presumably, they have the same weakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, presumably, I can hold a patent for an algorithm, and distribute its implementation with a short permissive license like BSD. I can't see in the BSD text any conflicts with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why CC0 is criticized for its &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; patent clause, and not approved by OSI, whereas short permissive licenses like BSD, MIT, ISC, etc. are not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22853" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T09:33:47.723" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T09:33:47.723" Title="Why is CC0 criticized for its patent weakness whereas other licenses aren't?" Tags="|patents|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11652" CreationDate="2021-05-05T20:23:09.520" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;BSD and MIT don't mention patents, but have language that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/6810&quot;&gt;can be reasonably interpreted&lt;/a&gt; as an implied patent license. You can't use, publish, distribute, and/or sell software and deal with it without restriction if the rightsholder hasn't given you the necessary rights. The necessary rights include copyrights and patent rights. Note that the MIT license doesn't explicitly mention copyright either!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC0 explicitly says that it doesn't include any patent license, so there is no scope to argue for an implied patent license. The result is that a patent-encumbered software that is otherwise in the public domain per the CC0 device cannot be used, shared, and modified freely. Such terms fail to provide Software Freedom, so CC0 cannot be approved as Open Source. If the CC0 had been silent on the matter of patents or would have at least included a minimal patent license, then CC0-covered software would clearly be Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unfortunate result is that there's no good tool to release software into the public domain in a manner that ensures Software Freedom. The CC0 is &lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt; except for its exclusion of a patent license. While the Unlicense has been legacy-approved by the OSI in the meanwhile, it's a pretty shoddy license, doesn't  mention patents, and might not actually work as a public-domain equivalent grant in many jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this isn't a design flaw of the CC0 device. It's great at its job of releasing copyright and related rights into the public domain to the fullest extent possible under applicable law. If a rightsholder also wanted to release their patent rights they could use a separate but similar device. But there's a fundamental difference between copyright and patents: whereas copyright is automatic and must therefore be explicitly released, patents are only granted upon request. If someone goes through the trouble of securing a patent, it's unlikely that they would then want to publicly release all their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T20:23:09.520" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11640" CreationDate="2021-05-06T09:57:39.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the MIT and Apache licenses are compatible with each other and you can use dependencies under one of them in a project under the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT and Apache license are both permissive licenses and the requirements each imposes upon you are not forbidden by the other license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T12:28:27.870" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T12:28:27.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11656" CreationDate="2021-05-07T17:30:47.623" Score="1" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have researched this question quite a lot on stackexchange but my thoughts are inconclusive, the different licenses involved and options by the distribution vendors are giving me a headache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is basically if there is any way around the high fees the distribution vendors are charging for their professional solutions if one is just casually (by casually I mean low volume sales but with commercial intent, not as a private hobby) developing and selling embedded devices (i.e. 20-30 devices p.a.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Now to my concrete case:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'd want to setup an embedded device and want to use a FOSS operating system (Debian, Ubuntu, any non commercial Linux distribution for instance) in a commercial setup, i.e. as a gateway computer. These are typically licensed with parts of GPL, LGPL, GPLv2, GPLv3 and other, more permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I automatically install (and most definitely update) a database on this system with the package manager but the package repository itself provided by the database developer. Suppose the database and all its accompanying software is licensed with Apache 2.0, BSD or MIT license. And suppose I do develop a program that gets executed on this operating system. The program should perform operations in connection with the OS, i.e. make IO operations from Ethernet to the database, maybe provide a server but there is no compiling or heavy shell scripting (maybe only to start an update routine) involved, perhaps a ssh connection may be used for maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wanted to sell a pre-configured device with a FOSS OS, some Apache 2.0 and MIT licensed programs and own compiled source code along with the system to a customer. Do I then have to disclose my source code to customers, according to the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not (meaning the stated above is in accordance to the GPL): Which pitfalls might occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes (meaning the stated above would violate the GPL and I'd need to disclose my source code):&#xA;Does providing the device (the embedded device is kept as a property of mine) and just charging a monthly/yearly service fee change the situation (I think, as far as I understand this answer (although in &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/47048&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4205&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; case the device was intended to be lend) here, not)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar case is discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11272&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this case the aspect of maintenance and (re)installing/updating system components (i.e. if a security risk bug is fixed and a system program need to be updated) is not addressed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7080&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; gives an insight to the above problematic. But my question remains: Is using the system's package manager to update system parts in an automated fashion and using system interfaces considered &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;intimate enough&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; or is this perfectly in accordance to the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8904&quot;&gt;In this answer&lt;/a&gt; I understand that if I do what I stated above I have to be prepared to provide full source code for 3 years&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to thank you for taking the time reading through this wall of text and furthermore thank you in advance for providing me with an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22890" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T12:18:13.223" Title="Selling / Providing Customers a Service on an Embedded Device with an Open Source OS" Tags="|gpl|distribution|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11655" CreationDate="2021-05-08T12:18:13.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wanted to sell a pre-configured device with a FOSS OS, some Apache 2.0 and MIT licensed programs and own compiled source code along with the system to a customer. Do I then have to disclose my source code to customers, according to the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you do not have to disclose your source code to your customers, assuming your own application does not link to any libraries under the GPL license (LGPL or GPL+linking exception is fine), and assuming you did not copy any (L)GPL-licensed code into your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Linux system libraries all have an exception in their license that allows you to create/distribute a user-space application under a license that is not compatible with the GPL license of the kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For package managers, your application is just data they install on the system and thus the licenses of the packages are not affected by the license of the package manager itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not (meaning the stated above is in accordance to the GPL): Which pitfalls might occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you have to take into account is that you are required to inform your customers about the various licenses that apply to the third-party components in your device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you must provide the source code of all GPL parts in your device (or a written offer to send it) to your customers and if any code is under the GPLv3 license, then you also have to provide the information a customer needs to update/replace those parts themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T12:18:13.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11629" CreationDate="2021-05-09T17:13:53.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to entirely avoiding AGPL and similarly-licensed software, you need to carefully consider how your choice of which licenses to accept and which to reject will affect your ability to evolve your business model in the future. For example, if you &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; distribute your software to a customer (ie, an on-premises business model) then &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the distribution clauses in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the licenses of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the software you are using will suddenly apply. Be very, very sure you have examined these sorts of scenarios in-depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And consult an experienced copyright lawyer before doing anything risky, if this project will constitute a significant expenditure of time and/or source of income for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2863" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T17:13:53.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11659" CreationDate="2021-05-10T09:36:36.663" Score="10" ViewCount="2916" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I am creating an Android app that uses a Java module called core-ui which is licensed under GPLv3. If I am right, GPLv3 imposes to use the same license in my project as the license of the module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I plan to release this app to the public and that I made modifications to the source code of the Java module :&#xA;Does my &lt;strong&gt;entire&lt;/strong&gt; project need to be under the GNU GPLv3 or may I only release the modified module ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note : I wrote every other component of the app&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22838" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T10:05:41.910" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:56:33.667" Title="Does whole project need to be under GPLv3 when using a GPLv3 library" Tags="|gpl-3|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11658" CreationDate="2021-05-10T10:13:34.920" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes:&lt;/strong&gt; The GPL doesn't just extend to that particular component but to the entire program that includes GPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you publish your app, you will have to publish your app as a whole under the GPL and provide the Corresponding Source for the entire app. But this just means that any other parts need a GPLv3-compatible license. For example, you could publish the code you've written yourself under LGPL, Apache, or the MIT license instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you include a GPL component in your software, it is insufficient to only publish the Corresponding Source for that component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T10:29:38.310" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T10:29:38.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11668" CreationDate="2021-05-10T13:43:35.290" Score="0" ViewCount="591" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/3547937/1462295&quot;&gt;this question on StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt; I would like to use the Windows icons (previously) included with Visual Studio as part of a Windows GUI application; the icons would be used as part of the interface, for example, a &amp;quot;save&amp;quot; button. These icons are now downloaded separately from Visual Studio and come with a &amp;quot;EULA&amp;quot; file. I'm trying to figure out if use of these icons is compatible with a GPL3 project. I can't find a version to link to online so I've included the text of the license below; you can find the original in the download from link &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35825&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35825&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts I'm not sure about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• require distributors and external end users to agree to terms that protect the Distributable Code at least as much as this agreement; and,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use, modification or distribution, that (i) the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or (ii) others have the right to modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MICROSOFT SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO 2019 IMAGE LIBRARY&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These license terms are an agreement between Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) and you. They apply to the software named above. The terms also apply to any Microsoft services or updates for the software, except to the extent those have different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IF YOU COMPLY WITH THESE LICENSE TERMS, YOU HAVE THE RIGHTS BELOW.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a.  &lt;strong&gt;General.&lt;/strong&gt; You may use copies of the software images to develop and test your applications.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b.  &lt;strong&gt;Third Party Software.&lt;/strong&gt; The software may include third party applications that are licensed to you under this agreement or under their own terms. License terms, notices, and acknowledgements, if any, for the third party applications may be accessible online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://aka.ms/thirdpartynotices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://aka.ms/thirdpartynotices&lt;/a&gt; or in an accompanying notices file. Even if such applications are governed by other agreements, the disclaimer, limitations on, and exclusions of damages below also apply to the extent allowed by applicable law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISTRIBUTABLE CODE.&lt;/strong&gt; The software contains images that you are permitted to distribute (“Distributable Code”) in applications you develop as described in this Section.  (For this Section the term “distribution” also means deployment of your applications for third parties to access over the Internet.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. &lt;strong&gt;Right to Use and Distribute.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Images.  You may copy and distribute images from the Image Library in applications you develop with the Visual Studio family of products.  Your use of the Images must be in accordance with the use descriptions associated with the Images.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third Party Distribution. You may permit distributors of your applications to copy and distribute the Distributable Code as part of those applications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. &lt;strong&gt;Distribution Requirements&lt;/strong&gt;. For any Distributable Code you distribute, you must&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;add significant primary functionality to it in your applications;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;require distributors and external end users to agree to terms that protect the Distributable Code at least as much as this agreement; and,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Microsoft from any claims, including attorneys’ fees, related to the distribution or use of your applications, except to the extent that any claim is based solely on the Distributable Code.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c.  &lt;strong&gt;Distribution Restrictions&lt;/strong&gt;. You may not use Microsoft’s trademarks in your applications’ names or branding in a way that suggests your applications come from or are endorsed by Microsoft; or modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use, modification or distribution, that (i) the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or (ii) others have the right to modify it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DATA&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a.  &lt;strong&gt;Data Collection&lt;/strong&gt;. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation.  There are also some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications. If you use these features, you must comply with applicable law, including providing appropriate notices to users of your applications together with a copy of Microsoft’s privacy statement. Our privacy statement is located at &lt;a href=&quot;https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=824704&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=824704&lt;/a&gt;. You can learn more about data collection and use in the help documentation and our privacy statement. Your use of the software operates as your consent to these practices.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b.  &lt;strong&gt;Processing of Personal Data&lt;/strong&gt;. To the extent Microsoft is a processor or subprocessor of personal data in connection with the software, Microsoft makes the commitments in the European Union General Data Protection Regulation Terms of the Online Services Terms to all customers effective May 25, 2018, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/gdpr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/gdpr&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SCOPE OF LICENSE&lt;/strong&gt;. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;work around any technical limitations in the software;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the software, except and to the extent required by third party licensing terms governing use of certain open source components that may be included in the software;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove, minimize, block or modify any notices of Microsoft or its suppliers in the software;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use the software in any way that is against the law; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;share, publish, rent or lease the software, provide the software as a stand-alone offering  for others to use , or transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EXPORT RESTRICTIONS&lt;/strong&gt;. You must comply with all domestic and international export laws and regulations that apply to the software, which include restrictions on destinations, end users, and end use. For further information on export restrictions, visit  &lt;a href=&quot;http://aka.ms/exporting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://aka.ms/exporting&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SUPPORT SERVICES&lt;/strong&gt;. Microsoft is not obligated under this agreement to provide any support services for the software. Any support provided is “as is”, “with all faults”, and without warranty of any kind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ENTIRE AGREEMENT&lt;/strong&gt;. This agreement, and any other terms Microsoft may provide for supplements, updates, or third-party applications, is the entire agreement for the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;APPLICABLE LAW&lt;/strong&gt;.  If you acquired the software in the United States, Washington law applies to interpretation of and claims for breach of this agreement, and the laws of the state where you live apply to all other claims. If you acquired the software in any other country, its laws apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CONSUMER RIGHTS; REGIONAL VARIATIONS&lt;/strong&gt;. This agreement describes certain legal rights. You may have other rights, including consumer rights, under the laws of your state or country. Separate and apart from your relationship with Microsoft, you may also have rights with respect to the party from which you acquired the software. This agreement does not change those other rights if the laws of your state or country do not permit it to do so. For example, if you acquired the software in one of the below regions, or mandatory country law applies, then the following provisions apply to you:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a.  &lt;strong&gt;Australia&lt;/strong&gt;. You have statutory guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law and nothing in this agreement is intended to affect those rights.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b.  &lt;strong&gt;Canada&lt;/strong&gt;. If you acquired this software in Canada, you may stop receiving updates by turning off the automatic update feature, disconnecting your device from the Internet (if and when you re-connect to the Internet, however, the software will resume checking for and installing updates), or uninstalling the software. The product documentation, if any, may also specify how to turn off updates for your specific device or software.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c.  &lt;strong&gt;Germany and Austria&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(i) &lt;strong&gt;Warranty&lt;/strong&gt;. The software will perform substantially as described in any Microsoft materials that accompany it. However, Microsoft gives no contractual guarantee in relation to the software.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(ii)    &lt;strong&gt;Limitation of Liability&lt;/strong&gt;. In case of intentional conduct, gross negligence, claims based on the Product Liability Act, as well as in case of death or personal or physical injury, Microsoft is liable according to the statutory law.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Subject to the foregoing clause (ii), Microsoft will only be liable for slight negligence if Microsoft is in breach of such material contractual obligations, the fulfillment of which facilitate the due performance of this agreement, the breach of which would endanger the purpose of this agreement and the compliance with which a party may constantly trust in (so-called &amp;quot;cardinal obligations&amp;quot;). In other cases of slight negligence, Microsoft will not be liable for slight negligence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. THE SOFTWARE IS LICENSED “AS-IS.” YOU BEAR THE RISK OF USING IT. MICROSOFT GIVES NO EXPRESS WARRANTIES, GUARANTEES OR CONDITIONS. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED UNDER YOUR LOCAL LAWS, MICROSOFT EXCLUDES THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LIMITATION ON AND EXCLUSION OF REMEDIES AND DAMAGES. YOU CAN RECOVER FROM MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS ONLY DIRECT DAMAGES UP TO U.S. $5.00. YOU CANNOT RECOVER ANY OTHER DAMAGES, INCLUDING CONSEQUENTIAL, LOST PROFITS, SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This limitation applies to (a) anything related to the software, services, content (including code) on third party Internet sites, or third party applications; and (b) claims for breach of contract, breach of warranty, guarantee or condition, strict liability, negligence, or other tort to the extent permitted by applicable law.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It also applies even if Microsoft knew or should have known about the possibility of the damages. The above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you because your state or country may not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental, consequential or other damages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22916" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T12:32:31.057" Title="Is the Visual Studio 2019 Image Library compatible with GPL3?" Tags="|license-compatibility|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11658" CreationDate="2021-05-10T18:01:36.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Depends on whether your application is a derivative work of the modified module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for example you create an application using the BSD libedit library, using the &lt;code&gt;char *readline(const char*)&lt;/code&gt; interface and later someone links your application to libreadline, the linked application is not a derivative work of the module and the linked binary can freely be redistributed, even though the first and most common implementation of &lt;code&gt;char *readline(const char*)&lt;/code&gt; is in the GPL licensed libreadline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that GPL might still put restrictions on the redistribution of the dependency. So for example someone redistributing the linked application along with libreadline, the mere act of distributing libreadline, a freely redistributable component, is something that can only be done if complying with the GPL. So even though the linked binary is not a derivative work, it can be a copyright crime to distribute along with libreadline. However, distributing libreadline and the linked binary separately is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software foundation, the creator of the GPL license, would like everyone to interpret it in such a manner that mere linking creates a derivative work. This is not necessarily the case. A counterargument could be the availability of a compatible interface in a non-GPL component. So you could ensure the validity of the counterargument by creating your own module with a compatible interface -- but that's a lot of effort and why would you use the GPL version of the module if you have rewritten it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost everyone agrees that for running in separate address space and communicating with pipes is not derivative work. However, if the data structures communicated over said pipes contain specific internal details of the program, someone could successfully argue that too intimate communication could make even a program that communicates over pipes a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in practice if you are distributing an Android app, you are distributing the dependency module at the same time, so you have little options than to comply with GPL even if you don't like the strictest interpretations of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is too worth mentioning that inline functions can somewhat complicate the situation in C language programs -- in such a case, including a header could make the linked binary a derivative work even though the source code is not a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Linux kernel authors have devised their own way of marking some functions GPL functions, so that all modules using them should be categorized as under GPL. However, a court is not bound by such an interpretation. Yet, it may be wisest to be cautious and not willfully create a component that provides access to GPL-only functions using an interface that is claimed to be not under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T18:01:36.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11663" CreationDate="2021-05-11T03:41:28.883" Score="21" ViewCount="2556" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a scenario that's been rattling around in my brain for a while.  Consider the following example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Josh, at Widgets Tech, goes to the internet and finds some code (GizmoLibrary) licensed MIT, and uses it in their code.&#xA;A year or two go by, and GizmoLibrary has become deeply intertwined with almost every section of Widgets Tech's codebase.&#xA;Abruptly, Widgets Tech gets an angry email from Gadget Corp.  Turns out, the person who put GizmoLibrary on the internet had no authority to do so, and Gadget Corp (the owners of the code) have no intention of letting anybody else use their proprietary code, paid or otherwise.&#xA;Widgets Tech doesn't have the resources to rewrite their whole codebase from scratch; if GizmoLibrary goes away, they're going under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens?  It doesn't seem like Widgets Tech has done anything wrong - they had no way of knowing that code was improperly licensed.  It seems bad for Gadget Corp to be able to pull the plug on them.  (And indeed, it seems like there's a possibility of abuse, here - &amp;quot;accidentally&amp;quot; post code where a competitor might find it, then pull it from them, costing days of work or more.  A little tricky to pull off, but I don't doubt that more complex shenanigans have occurred.)  On the other hand, Gadget Corp &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; own the code, and in theory they can decide who gets to use it.  Is there any clear ruling on this?  Let's assume United States, since that's where I live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22923" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:05:51.260" Title="Hypothetical conflict - incorrectly licensed code" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11662" CreationDate="2021-05-11T05:32:41.693" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right in your assessment: Widget Tech has a problem as it will need to replace the illegally-used library with something else. It may not be eligible for damages if you cease to do so immediately as it was acting in good faith. But they have no recourse to demand a license or release of the code or continued use of it. Neither company has done something wrong, if the code by Gadget Corp was released by a 3rd party under a wrong license, e.g. through a hack or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some jurisdictions it will even be criminal to wilfully release your own code under a &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; license (possibly under a different identity) to only claim later that you didn't do so and someone else put it on the Internet in malice under a wrong license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A court might also consider how long and publicly visible your code was on the Internet if you (Gadget Corp) claim that the code was released without your permission. Yet you as user might also be required to do some minimum sanity check on the eligibility and authenticity of the library you use (thus taking an MIT library from a hackerz forum known to be source for leaked data and sources might not be in your own interest as a foundation for your crucial product). Otherwise one might argue that Widget Tech did not do their due diligence in research to see whether they built on / used stolen intellectual property (you may not trade with obviously stolen items either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T17:05:51.260" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T17:05:51.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11662" CreationDate="2021-05-11T05:42:00.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are referring to is called Contributory Infringement. Yes, Widget Tech (and possibly Josh himself) are liable for their use of the proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case you are describing (exciting narrative BTW), is indeed rather complicated and would definitely pay out for the lawyers involved. The most probable outcome of such a scenario would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the person who put GizmoLibrary on the internet gets fired and sued&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gadget Corp accepts the fact that they can't fully undo the damage, makes the best of it and Widget Tech buys a proper licence from Gadget Corp&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Josh gets in a lot of trouble and will think twice before using software he finds on the internet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T05:42:00.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11662" CreationDate="2021-05-11T06:10:07.237" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Other answers deal well with your principal question, but the secondary deserves a little attention, though it's easier to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, it seems like there's a possibility of abuse, here - &amp;quot;accidentally&amp;quot; post code where a competitor might find it, then pull it from them, costing days of work or more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this comes down to the licence as presented in this &amp;quot;accidentally posted&amp;quot; copy.  Either it has none, in which case Widgets Tech &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;knows perfectly well&lt;/a&gt; that it has no rights to use the library.  Or Gadget Corp published it alongside a licence declaration that permits re-use, in which case Gadget Corp, being the rightsholder, has indeed distributed a freely-licensed copy, and thus Widgets Tech is well within its rights to use the library as described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T06:10:07.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T10:31:55.893" Score="0" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, there can be issues with (L)GPL-licensed software in code-signing contexts where modified code is not allowed to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose an organization (for example, a company or a university) uses (L)GPL-licensed software on its own devices. The devices can be used by employees or students internally, but is not distributed to the external public. For security reasons, the organization uses a strict code-signing setup for these internal devices, restricting the software that runs on the devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, is the organization required to comply with the distribution or conveying terms from the (L)GPL licenses with respect to the software it installs to the internal devices? The organization might even want to release the source code of its modifications to the (L)GPL code to the public, but having to allow arbitrary modifications to the software with respect to the internal devices might require a BYOD-capable environment since the software on the devices would not be trusted anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I found, GPL-licensed software on devices that are privately lent does not have to comply with GPL software distribution requirements ([1]). But in this case, this might not apply because it is not a private sitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, commercially lending devices for private use will make the installed software subject to the GPL software distributions requirements ([2]). But maybe this does also not apply here since the devices would not be lent by the organization for the purpose of being used privately, but they would be strictly supplied for internal, work- or study-related purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you think? Would (L)GPL licenses make code signing based security policies unusable in such cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LaptopLoan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LaptopLoan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4181/lend-distribute-iot-device-containing-gpl-software&quot;&gt;Lend/Distribute IoT device containing GPL software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22364" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T11:16:15.113" Title="(L)GPL software on devices provided for internal use" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11666" CreationDate="2021-05-11T11:16:15.113" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know with enough confidence what the situation is with regard to the students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to employees of the organization, when they are provided with a copy of (L)GPL-licensed software, with the understanding that that software is provided to them so they can perform their duties on behalf of the organization, then that software is considered to remain within the same legal entity and the organization does not have to give any GPL-related rights to their employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am not certain about is if these rules for employees apply equally to software provided to students for their education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T11:16:15.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11660" CreationDate="2021-05-11T12:32:31.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license of these icons is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; compatible with the GPL. The GPL meets the definition that the Microsoft EULA uses for &amp;quot;Excluded license&amp;quot; and the EULA states that the icons may not become subject to such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not all is lost. If you can write your application in such a way that it reads the necessary icons at runtime from separate files, then the application and the icons are independent works as far a copyrights are concerned and the GPL will not extend to the icons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are then even allowed to have them in the same repository and distribute them together, as long as you make it very clear that the icons are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subject to the GPL but that they are under this Microsoft EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T12:32:31.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11701" CreationDate="2021-05-11T14:44:42.650" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;AFL license states that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Licensor agrees to provide a machine-readable copy of the Source Code of the Original Work along with each copy of the Original Work that Licensor distributes.&#xA;[...]&#xA;As an express condition for the grants of license hereunder, You must treat any External Deployment by You of the Original Work or a Derivative Work as a distribution under section 1(c).&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this mean that source code of derivative work shall be made&#xA;available even?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this remain valid whatever license we choose to use?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22937" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T15:30:24.940" Title="AFL - obligation to distribute source code of derivative work?" Tags="|copyleft|afl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11680" CreationDate="2021-05-11T15:29:32.007" Score="0" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a plan create non-commercial React SPA like a demo of my skills for own portfolio. Source code of my work will be available on GitHub under GPLv3. I want to use parts of text materials from Wikipedia articles with link to the source like a page content. Can I do these without additional actions and which type of license for text content I should use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T06:15:24.793" Title="Can I use together React SPA under GPLv3 with materials from wikipedia under CC-SA 3.0?" Tags="|gpl-3|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11662" CreationDate="2021-05-11T16:49:37.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is most likely a disclosure of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trade secret&lt;/a&gt; which, even in the USA, does not have the same level of legal protection in every state. Until the moment of disclosure, Gadget Corp considered the code commercially valuable because no-one else had access to it, and they also very likely took reasonable efforts to keep the code secret. These reasonable efforts might include IP/nondisclosure clauses in employment contracts, but there's no universal definition of &amp;quot;reasonable efforts&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after the code was disclosed, Gadget Corp have lost that trade secret. They haven't lost the right to prosecute the employee who disclosed it, though: the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20090502172238/http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2008/tc20081118_067329.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biswamohan Pani&lt;/a&gt; might be a good example. Pani used Intel's secret information while being on &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Intel and AMD's payroll simultaneously. AMD, who might have benefited from the information that Pani stole, were not prosecuted or (as far as I can tell) made to pay damages to Intel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the issue of how Gadget Corp might find out that Widgets Tech is using 'their' code. Sure, receiving a legal letter from Gadget Corp is likely to trigger an immediate code review at Widgets Tech. As long as the code wasn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_Computer_Controls,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clearly marked for a limited purpose&lt;/a&gt; as belonging to Gadget Corp or got from a source that Widgets Tech might reasonably assume was illegitimate, this would be very hard to prove. If Widgets Tech were feeling particularly cocky, they might respond by citing &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lettersofnote.com/2013/08/07/arkell-v-pressdram/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arkell v. Pressdram&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not unknown for a trade secret owner to neither confirm or deny the loss of their proprietary information. Consider Yum! Brands non-response to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/ct-kfc-recipe-revealed-20160818-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discovery of the original KFC secret recipe&lt;/a&gt;: would they really wish to confirm that someone else could make their product, and that they were lax in preserving secrets crucial to shareholder value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any actions and results would very much depend on the advice of both company's legal counsels and their boards' appetite for risk. But I wouldn't want to be the (former?) employer who leaked the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5895" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T16:49:37.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11676" CreationDate="2021-05-11T16:56:04.060" Score="35" ViewCount="6984" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble wrapping my head around why copyleft libre software advocates say they advocate for &amp;quot;free as in free speech&amp;quot; software, rather than monetarily free software, when it seems like copyleft would lead to all libre software becoming monetarily free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice makes a video game that incorporates some software under the latest copyleft license, and charges some reasonable price for it, Bob could easily and legally buy one copy of the game, a cheap website domain, and allow anybody to download a copy of his copy, if they'll go to his website where he hosts some ads. Since there's a way to profit from this by ad money, there'd likely be dozens of Bobs. Because Bob's copy of the game is indistinguishable from Alice's original copy, why would anybody buy the game from Alice when they could just get it from Bob? Or copy it from a friend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Alice charges for the game, very few people will actually buy it, because it will eventually become free by redistribution. &lt;strong&gt;So why call copyleft software licenses &amp;quot;free as in free speech&amp;quot; and not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;free as in free beer&amp;quot; when it seems they will &lt;em&gt;inevitably&lt;/em&gt; become &amp;quot;free as in free beer?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22939" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:20:20.833" Title="Under copyleft, why distinguish between &quot;free as in free speech&quot; and &quot;free as in free beer&quot;?" Tags="|commercial|copyleft|redistribution|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11644" CreationDate="2021-05-11T17:35:16.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can write whatever you want, as long as you respect the licences of any external pieces you include/use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, you want any user of your code to be able to find out easily, and without any ambiguities, what is going on. It isn't that much of a hassle to add a &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; file (or a section thereof) spelling out what license(s) apply to which parts of the code, perhaps giving relevant URLs or including relevant licenses verbatim in separate files (perhaps in a &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt;directory?). If you write it out or not, the work to clarify the status of each piece (just to make sure &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; don't commit any transgressions by using foreign code) has to be done anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T17:35:16.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-11T17:45:58.683" Score="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've noticed that if a piece of software is &amp;quot;free as in speech,&amp;quot; it will probably become &amp;quot;free as in beer&amp;quot; too. That's completely true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing, however, is that the converse is not true. If a piece of software is &amp;quot;free as in beer,&amp;quot; it will not automatically become &amp;quot;free as in speech.&amp;quot; There are a lot of things that you can't necessarily do with software that's &amp;quot;free as in beer&amp;quot;: you can't necessarily modify it or give copies of it to other people (whether the copies are modified or unmodified).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The free software community wants to create software that people &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; modify and give copies of to other people (both unmodified and modified copies). That's the reason for distinguishing &amp;quot;free as in speech&amp;quot; from &amp;quot;free as in beer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T17:45:58.683" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T02:27:19.100" Score="2" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a way, to have the, from my perspective all-important, libraries such as gmp, mpir, mpfr be used in a license that fully supports code-signing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My perspective is that of a curious researcher. My main lines of thoughts are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These libraries are so good and so widespread that they are used in many very important software systems. I consider them (critical) infrastructure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These libraries have recently changed to LGPL3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL3 requires that any software system build on these libraries must allow the user to compile her own (self-compiled) version of the library and link it to the software system. The software must still be able to run fully functional as before.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Big software companies use code-signing to ensure that only authorized, signed software is run in their networks. This helps to mitigate the risk of malware infections for their customers. The process of deploying software is in these settings often automatized.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, 3) seems to inherently contradict 4). The software company cannot safely sign binaries of LGPL3 building blocks. The problem is that in these situations, according to 4) users should also be able to create signed code that will run equally fine on the companies network. To enable users to sign code, there must under these circumstances&#xA;a) either be a process to allow specific users to obtain signatures on their binaries (which seems impossible to automatize efficiently in a secure manner)&#xA;b) or the signing key must be available to many users (which defeats the purpose of signing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is my understanding correct?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that I am surely not the first to realize this tension between different strategies to improve the state of software development more broadly - open source development and code-signing. Is there a consensus answer that should be common knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the software community deal with these two apparently contradicting paradigms?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here are the ways that I can see to nevertheless use these awesome libraries in a project that does apply code-signing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use older versions of the software that were published under LGPL2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;re-implement the functions in the header files using free libraries like openssl. This however, would come at a huge speed disadvantage and is likely to result in buggy and less secure code. (I wonder if there are similar projects that have tried to achieve this for any LGPL3 library. I am not aware of such an endeavor - so this makes me feel that either this idea is totally flawed from the get-go or that it's still too early for such a project to have taken place.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;find forks that specifically conserve the state of an older version of some library (while possibly at the same time extending it in other ways).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there another way that you can see? Are you aware of ways others have used in the past to achieve the same goal?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Although libraries like gmp, mpir already have licenses, could one imagine additional extra licenses for such purposes? I have found an example here that introduces a static linking exception:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wiki.zeromq.org/area:licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://wiki.zeromq.org/area:licensing&lt;/a&gt; which seems to address this specific purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="SevenUp" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T11:02:20.293" Title="LGPL 3 vs Code-Signing: gmp, mpir," Tags="|code-signing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-12-10T06:50:27.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11643" CreationDate="2021-05-11T20:40:44.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I presume you want to sell (licenses to) software that &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the icons, not the icons themselves. As long as you don't modify them, and tell your users where to get them (and possibly change them for others) and state clearly under what conditions they are being used I believe you are in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T20:40:44.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-12T02:08:07.757" Score="14" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is why most Open Source vendors sell service plans rather than software.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the nature of Open Source licenses would allow anyone to download and install the software for free, and to in turn give free copies of the software to other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, most Open Source vendors don't sell the software itself - they sell service plans. You can install the software for free, but if you want their help with installing, using, or modifying it, you need to pay them. Often, they sell these support packages to businesses who use this software for their business, and the support they sell would help the business get things working again if the system goes down and begins costing the company money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15254" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T02:08:07.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11672" CreationDate="2021-05-12T06:15:24.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming your SPA doesn't literally depend on this particular Wikipedia content (any content can work and you just choose this particular content because of reasons), then the SPA and the content are independent works as far as copyright is concerned. This means that their respective licenses do not affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to keep the content you copied (and possibly modified) under the CC-BY-SA license and you need to show that license information to the users of your app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your repository, you also need to make it clear that different parts are under different licenses (code under GPLv3, content under CC-BY-SA 3.0) and how one can identify what is code and what is content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T06:15:24.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-12T12:49:03.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While someone who had bought a piece of copyleft software only distributed by the author for paying customers &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; indeed redistribute it for free, it doesn't necessarily follow that someone &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the software is copyleft, the party developing and selling that software can ask their clients (more or less) nicely to please not redistribute it. If the clients are mostly businesses, they might care more about getting the software they want and leave it at that instead of trying to undermine the business model of their provider. Also, having already paid, they'd have nothing to gain themselves from redistributing the software without cost. All the benefits would go to others, including probably their competitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, were they to get caught, they might lose some goodwill in the eyes of the provider, affecting that relationship, and possibly leading to issues the next time they'd want to renew their service contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a somewhat-known case, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://grsecurity.net/download&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;grsecurity patches&lt;/a&gt; to the Linux kernel have been available for paying customers only for a few years now, and at least I haven't heard they'd been publicly leaked. Some of the things the patchset does have been reimplemented in the main Linux tree, but I haven't followed the details too closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/721848/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grsecurity goes private on LWN.net&lt;/a&gt; for a longer discussion. (Notably, the comment thread there is also somewhat sensible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21636" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T12:49:03.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-12T13:37:26.347" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually I think this rule is coming from the ages before internet was available for everyone. Like 29 years ago you could buy a few floppy disks with linux on it. And that the vendor could charge you was only legal because it was 'free as in speech' and not 'as in beer'. At that time copying software was not effortless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21810" LastEditorUserId="21810" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T11:18:39.193" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T11:18:39.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11684" CreationDate="2021-05-12T15:27:33.577" Score="0" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask a more general question and then I'd like to ask a more detailed one based on my specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I'm writing a software I'm planning to release under the terms of the AGPLv3 (or the GPLv3) and that software uses data taken from Wikipedia in order to work (basically, the software would take real data from Wikipedia and then use it to generate fake data.&#xA;All the &lt;em&gt;text&lt;/em&gt; on Wikipedia is under CC-BY-SA 3.0. I understand that I can use the data provided that I release any derivative work under the same (or compatible) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now have the general question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I put the data in a text file and then I tell my software to go fetch that data from that text file, is the software defined a derivative work of the data? What if I hard-code that data in a source code file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the data my software generates under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license? I understand that the output of a (A)GPLv3 program is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under the (A)GPL, but is it so with this license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then to the more specific question: the data I'd like to use from Wikipedia is composed of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World country names&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;World country flags (I took the main colors of the world country flags out either from the image&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;City names of different countries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Names and surnames of people of different countries (I'd like to use them even unmodified)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first point I'm pretty sure the list of world countries is public knowledge and hence in the public domain.&#xA;For the second point, while the images of the flags are public knowledge (even Wikipedia acknowledges so), the description from where I extracted some color information (see, for instance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Latvia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &amp;quot;flag colors&amp;quot; section of this page&lt;/a&gt;) would be under the CC-BY-SA license.&#xA;For the third and fourth points... I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that I do not want to distribute my software under the CC-BY-SA license because even Creative Commons itself acknowledges it's not a good idea. Instead, I'd like to use either the GPLv3 or the AGPLv3 (if possible, both with the &amp;quot;or later&amp;quot; clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22950" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T16:02:00.990" Title="CC-BY-SA 3.0 and (A)GPLv3" Tags="|gpl|cc-by-sa|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11683" CreationDate="2021-05-12T16:02:00.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The important point to focus on is that, with certain exceptions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;the licence on a piece of software doesn't affect the outputs of that software&lt;/a&gt;.  Instead, the outputs are generally a derivative work of the inputs, so the licence on the outputs (if any) will be governed by what rights and obligations the program's user has with regard to making derivative works of the inputs (s)he feeds to the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exceptions generally come into play when the program copies large chunks of itself into its outputs, which doesn't seem to apply in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I answer this general question first because hopefully I can then avoid the specific ones.  You say your main concern is that you &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;do not want to distribute [your] software under the CC-BY-SA license... Instead, [you]'d like to use either the GPLv3 or the AGPLv3&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  In this case, my opinion is that you are perfectly free to do exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are distributing input data sets (flag images, city names, etc.) alongside your software, you will need to check that you have the right to do so, but as long as you do, you don't need to worry any further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T16:02:00.990" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-12T23:04:48.547" Score="1" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a plan to use on my page content mix under different license sources: text materials from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0, and some images from Flickr under CC BY 2.0  and most part of images from pixabay under original license, which is based on Creative Commons' public domain deed CC0. All links to source pages will be given. Can I finally publish all content under CC BY-SA 3.0 without additional actions or maybe I should use different type of license like CC BY-SA 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is I correctly understand CC licenses inner compatibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blockquote&#xA;For example, CC BY is one-way compatible with BY-SA. You may adapt a BY work and apply BY-SA to your contributions, but you may not adapt a BY-SA work and apply BY to your contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quoted text available under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastEditorUserId="21571" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T18:53:17.093" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T19:08:35.873" Title="Content mix under CC BY 2.0 and CC BY-SA 3.0. Which type of final license should I use?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-12T23:16:52.690" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a piece of code of my own that I want to use in a company that I'm working on.&#xA;How can I protect it from being owned by the company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going to make it public yet, so is it a good idea to upload it to github with a GPL licence&#xA;in a private repo so I have proof of it being developed before I started working with it in the company? and being GPLed I protect it from being included without my consent on future project in the company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also, can I re-licence it to the company to let them use in the future or to get paid to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22961" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T09:14:18.957" Title="upload own GPLed project in a private github repository" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-13T00:10:06.483" Score="1" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release as GPL a compiler which target language is opensource but not GPL. its  license only says: &amp;quot;These files are made available to you on an as-is and restricted basis, and may only be redistributed or sold to any third party as expressly indicated in the Terms of Use for COMPANY NAME&#xA;(c) COMPANY NAME. Used under license.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: with 'target language' I mean my compiler generates code that is defined and a virtual machine running it is implemented in a repository that has that license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22961" LastEditorUserId="22961" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T05:18:55.590" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T23:14:14.827" Title="making a GPL compiler for a non-GPL target language" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11686" CreationDate="2021-05-13T09:14:18.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will assume that you have developed this code &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt;, and thus are the sole rightsholder in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licences do not inhere in software, they attach to the recipients through the act of conveyance.  So if you upload it to a repo that nobody can see or access, saying that you are doing so &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;with a GPL licence&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is fairly meaningless.  The important bit of this plan isn't the licence, it's the third-party date stamp, which could be used later to prove you'd written the code before you started working for the company in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, depending on your jurisdiction, the nature of your relationship to this company, and the details of your contract with them, this may not help.  In most jurisdictions there is the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2730/who-owns-the-copyright-to-code-which-the-author-was-paid-to-write&quot;&gt;work-for-hire&lt;/a&gt;.  This may or may not have the effect of giving the rights in your pre-existing code to the company; but if you work on it as part of your involvement with the company the codebase may end up hopelessly rights-encumbered, and be effectively unusable by you afterwards.  In some employment contracts things are even worse, and the company becomes the rightsholder in &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; you do while an employee, creating the above problem, in spades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the problem as I see it is not proving that you were sole rightsholder in this code before you started working for the company, it's proving that you're still the sole rightsholder after you've worked on it for them.  We do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11379/excluding-open-source-contributions-from-work-for-hire&quot;&gt;some questions&lt;/a&gt; here that address this, but it comes down to being contractually explicit about what rights in the codebase you are transferring to the company, and what rights you reserve.  If you duck this question now, don't assume that you can pull a big reveal later, expose the earlier repo, and the company will just shrug and walk away.  And, of course, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T09:14:18.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2021-05-13T10:03:53.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a general understanding that the license of a program does not apply to data processed with it. Blender being Open Source does not restrict licensing for scenes created with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Technically, it could be argued that compiled software is a combined work as the compiler contains code fragments that are copied to the output file in the appropriate order and with substitutions applied, so some compiler writers feel the need to clarify this, but my (layman) opinion is that this is unnecessary, as the fragments are a description of an interface that is not an original work of the compiler authors, so it would be very difficult to claim a contribution here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For runtime libraries, it is likely that you will need a license exception similar to what &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libstdc++&lt;/a&gt; is doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T10:03:53.217" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-13T14:04:50.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers here are great, and this one won’t be better, but there is a point that hasn’t been addressed in any of them and can be pertinent to this conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because Bob's copy of the game is indistinguishable from Alice's original copy, why would anybody buy the game from Alice when they could just get it from Bob? Or copy it from a friend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, they might do this, &lt;em&gt;because they want to give Alice money for the game she made&lt;/em&gt;. This is, in fact, &lt;strong&gt;extremely&lt;/strong&gt; common—most of the projects on Kickstarter are predicated upon it, since generally speaking the “rewards” you receive for contributing are pretty clearly not really worth their cost (and that’s before we even get into the risk of the project going uncompleted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s also a common facet of tabletop roleplaying games, which is where I have the most experience with it (I’ve done some freelance work in the field). The overwhelming majority of most games can be gotten freely, legally, on websites. Much of the industry uses the “Open Game License” for their work, at least as far as the game rules are concerned, and the OGL is more-or-less what it says it is.¹ There are still companies selling those products, and there are still people buying them, because people want to support those companies and see more of those products get made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sold versions may have some perks—artwork, usually, since that’s basically never licensed under the OGL—but the books can be quite expensive,² and the meat of them is freely and legally available, and they’re certainly widely pirated if you really want those perks, and people still pay for them. I did work for one company which even did quite a bit of social-media style outreach on 4chan, a notable hive of scum and villainy that included links to pirated copies of the company’s work at the top of each (relevant) discussion. They got sales from 4chan, despite the fact that it was literally easier to download the pirated copy than it was the paid-for copy (the company’s online store sucked).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it can be possible to have a “free as in speech” product that is nonetheless not “free as in beer.” That product will almost-certainly also be available “free as in beer” elsewhere (assuming it’s popular enough), but people may still be willing to pay for it just to support the creators. This can be generosity, a sense of gratitude or reciprocity or appreciation, or even selfish if it’s believed to be necessary to get more content from the creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I am not a lawyer and not super “up” on open-source licenses, so I don’t know if there might be some snags in it that are considered non-open. It’s not copy-left, either, though in practice very few people have tried to create things licensed off of the OGL without licensing the new material under the OGL as well—in fact, I’m not aware of a single case of that.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Though not nearly expensive enough to cover the cost of making them to any degree of quality, if you’re not one of the few big names—and, I suspect, often even if you are: there is really &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; little money in the industry.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22970" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T14:04:50.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2021-05-13T15:06:53.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like some of the other answers, &amp;quot;it depends&amp;quot;. There are situations that seem to not require licensing a work as GPLv3 even if the binary it uses is GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently encountered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://winscp.net/eng/docs/library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WinSCP .NET Assembly and COM Library&lt;/a&gt; which uses a GPLv3 binary and does not require the main work to be GPLv3. Because the GPLv3 binary is used as an executable and the main work is a wrapping library that does not link to it but simply makes calls into the binary via its scriptable API, it apparently does not fall into the same category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I moved this answer from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11658/does-whole-project-need-to-be-under-gplv3-when-using-a-gplv3-library/&quot;&gt;another related but different question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22936" LastEditorUserId="22936" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T12:41:01.793" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T12:41:01.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2021-05-13T17:51:27.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm to understand this right, this question seems to be about generating code in a target language, where the language itself someone's closely-guarded intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the language is not even publicly documented. Let's go with the assumption that one needs to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to know anything about this language, including possibly even its very existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute an open-source compiler whose output is in some secret language that cannot be discussed with others and requires a non-disclosure agreement to learn about, then your work probably violates the non-disclosure agreement by revealing that language, regardless of what copyright and licensing notices are in the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source compiler you're redistributing is imbued with knowledge about the target language. It contains logic which can output pieces of that language to make a coherent utterance in that language. That logic is based on knowledge can only be obtained under NDA. So by redistributing the compiler, you're leaking the knowledge, breaking the NDA. The NDA forbids you from sharing knowledge with parties that are not under the same NDA, regardless of how you share that knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licensing of your compiler, and the copyright notices you put on the target output written in the proprietary language, are not directly relevant. If your compiler leaks secret information obtained under NDA, it doesn't matter whether your compiler is copylefted open source, or whether your compiler is closed-source &lt;code&gt;.exe&lt;/code&gt; file for Windows given to users under a shrink-wrap EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an area where, if circumstances are compelling you to proceed with redistributing such a compiler, you need lawyers. Likely, though, they will tell you the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T17:51:27.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-14T00:04:47.413" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make a distinction between free software (as in software you can download for free) and free software (software where you are free to use it how you want). You could also charge for the use of free (as in speech) software, but as you said it would likely be taken advantage of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the term freeware exists your average person would still say free software when referring to software they got for free. You can't expect everyone to understand the &amp;quot;proper terms&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22979" LastEditorUserId="22979" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T20:20:20.833" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:20:20.833" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11694" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-14T01:16:53.287" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title says, can I use the output, a jpeg image, of a software which states it can be downloaded free of charge for academic, government, nonprofit, and personal use, but which requires a licence for commercial users, in an art project that may be sold for profit? In short, does this make me a commercial users, as the license form specifically requires company information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22981" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T05:49:18.680" LastActivityDate="2022-02-12T18:06:05.660" Title="Can I use the output of a free for personal use software that requires a license for commercial use in an art project" Tags="|licensing|commercial|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-02-14T16:18:47.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-14T01:28:23.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another hypothetical counterexample you can imagine is custom software written by a contractor/consultancy. (Although my guess is that's usually covered by a transfer of copyright from supplier to client.) The client pays the contractor to make them an e-shop; the contractor retains the right to use the code they made as they see fit; and the client is mandated to pass on their copy of the code on the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly a bit unrealistic, but if the code in question doesn't really involve sensitive trade secrets it doesn't make a lot of difference to the client -  they pay money to have features they wish added to the software, which isn't necessarily too valuable to a competitor. (Seeing as it would be adapted to that one client's specific needs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically there's a whole lot of code written in the world of which only one &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot; ever changes hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22980" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T01:28:23.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-14T09:48:48.403" Score="1" ViewCount="717" Body="&lt;p&gt;How to &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; a license to a source-code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I have written a piece of code that is very efficient and has many commercial applications. I have published the code on my website, and I want to add a license to it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So, can I just write that &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;This code is published under &lt;em&gt;&amp;lt;this&amp;gt;&lt;/em&gt; License&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, or am I supposed to do something more?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, if the license is open-source (like MIT License), then do I have to inform the publishers of the license that I am using their license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22986" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T18:09:04.240" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T12:35:21.180" Title="'Adding' a license to a source-code" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2021-05-14T11:27:39.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's as simple as that. All you need to do is declare the license you are using and add a copy of that license to the source repository. Note that for most licenses, you'll also need to specify the copyright holder and the year the copyright took effect in the licsece's body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T11:27:39.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2021-05-14T11:41:51.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licencing a piece of code is as simple as that: just state that the code is under the license, and you're done. Usually it's a good idea to add author information, too. The whole point of the exercise is that any other person can unambiguously know the origin of the code and the license (thus permissions granted) for its usage. There is no formal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, for ease of use, it's customary to put into the source files at the header a short copyright notice (thus license name and author) and accompany the whole source code with a COPYRIGHT or LICENSE or NOTICE file which spells out the authorship and especially the license in detail. This standard form makes it easy on two accounts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each file lists at the top what license (type) it uses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anybody can get the full info from a dedicated file with a (semi)standardized name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two things make quick assessment of whether I (as user) can use the code for my purpose instead of going through a whole repository and looking at each file separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No open-source license will (and can) require that any user has to inform the creator. Such a condition would fail the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert-island-test&lt;/a&gt; and because of that, such license would not be considered open-source. Most licenses will require though that the original creator is credited at least in the form that their copyright notice is retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T12:35:21.180" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T12:35:21.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11674" CreationDate="2021-05-14T14:14:29.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people hear that a product or service is free, their natural assumption is that this refers to the price. If someone charges them to download a Linux distribution, they'll feel cheated -- &amp;quot;Hey, I thought Linux was free software!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction is then made to address this common misunderstanding. &amp;quot;We didn't mean the price is zero, we meant that the software is free from restrictions on what you can do with it.&amp;quot; This has been abbreviated to &amp;quot;free as in speech vs. free as in beer&amp;quot; to make the distinction clear by using simple, well known phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8948" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T14:14:29.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11557" CreationDate="2021-05-15T06:55:40.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO (and admittedly IANAL/IANYL) it's all a mess.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs/blob/master/Specs/d/4/0/GoogleSignIn/5.0.2/GoogleSignIn.podspec.json&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;podspec file&lt;/a&gt;, hosted on github, says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;license&amp;quot;: {&#xA; &amp;quot;text&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Copyright 2019 Google&amp;quot;,&#xA; &amp;quot;type&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Copyright&amp;quot;&#xA;},&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is remarkably unhelpful, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;gives you no rights at all&lt;/a&gt;.  It also points me to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dl.google.com/dl/cpdc/4d5ad0c02cd38abf/GoogleSignIn-5.0.2.tar.gz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source tarball&lt;/a&gt;; when I download and unpack that, I find no occurrences of the word &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt;, but a lot of this sort of thing in the header files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* Copyright 2012 Google Inc.&#xA;*&#xA;* Use of this SDK is subject to the Google APIs Terms of Service:&#xA;* https://developers.google.com/terms/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;those terms&lt;/a&gt;, I find nothing about copyright licensing - they're all concerned with constraining how you use the Google-hosted API that the code is designed to interface with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How I read this is that Google doesn't care what you do with the code.  Unless you're willing to build an entirely new internet authentication infrastructure yourself, all you can do with it is interface with their service, and all they care about is how you do that.  But using this code is a gamble; nothing stops them turning round later and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cease-and-desist&lt;/a&gt;'ing you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're willing to take that gamble, I don't think you have any acknowledgment or notification obligations at all.  If you're not willing to take that gamble, then avoiding centralised sign-in services in favour of federated ones (like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307647/support-for-openid-ended-on-july-25-2018&quot;&gt;much under-used&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenID&lt;/a&gt;) seems to me a much better way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T06:55:40.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11671" CreationDate="2021-05-15T15:30:24.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#AcademicFreeLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;characterise&lt;/a&gt; the AFL as a free, non-copyleft licence.  You are right that AFL3 s3 obliges that a copy of the original source be provided also, when the original work is distributed in any other form.  But to consider your specific questions, I note that AFL3 s1b grants the right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to translate, adapt, alter, transform, modify, or arrange the Original Work, thereby creating derivative works (&amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot;) based upon the Original Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making it clear to me that the term &amp;quot;Original Work&amp;quot; doesn't include &amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot; (as one would, in fairness, expect it not to).  Section 1c goes on to grant the right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to distribute or communicate copies of the [...] Derivative Works to the public, under any license of your choice that does not contradict the terms and conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I see no obligation to provide the source of derivative works, and if you do, I don't see any obligation for you to apply the AFL to them also.  However, as ever, IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T15:30:24.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11710" CreationDate="2021-05-16T21:11:38.557" Score="2" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;License in question is GNU GPLv3 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Abstract Context:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have written a software A that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;downloads a docker image of software B as part of the procedure to install software A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;runs the docker image of software B locally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;calls API of software B, assuming that software B is up and running before software A starts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; Software B is under GNU GPLv3. Is the distribution of software A affected/restricted in anyway by the GPLv3 license of software B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt; Distribute a software that downloads docker image of Neo4J (community edition is under GNU GPLv3 licensed) and runs it as data store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not distribute binary/docker-image of software B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is a clear boundary between software A and software B, in that software A invokes an API provided by software B, which is the intended use of software B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not need to care much about the fact that software B is under the the GNU GPLv3 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will be nice if you can &lt;em&gt;provide reference pointer&lt;/em&gt; to support your answer. Thank you very much!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23018" LastEditorUserId="23018" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T21:19:06.683" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T13:44:14.967" Title="Distributing software that downloads and uses GPL-licensed software" Tags="|gpl|gnu|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11706" CreationDate="2021-05-16T23:53:48.757" Score="26" ViewCount="5430" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say a company modifies a GPLv3 software. All it's employees can use the modified software and have access to the modified source code.&#xA;The company's employees don't have the right to distribute the modified software outside the company because it violates some employee contract or an NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this modified work considered a &amp;quot;private&amp;quot; copy of the company or is it a violation of GPL freedom number 4: &amp;quot;the freedom to distribute the modified software&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23015" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T11:43:05.023" Title="Can an NDA block GPL freedom number 4?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|license|nda|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11703" CreationDate="2021-05-17T01:12:47.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL allows any use, as long as you (or the company) complies with the conditions. They state, in t nutshell, that you can do as you please, but &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you distribute (outside the company, in this case) they must distribute full source. In your scenario, there is no outside distribution, they'd be in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note IANAL, don't even play one here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is a very unlikely case. The risk and probably hassle going forward (say they later might want to build a commercial, closed product, on the &amp;quot;internal tool&amp;quot;, or share it with e.g. a collaborating entity -- a provider or a client), they get a lot of trouble cleaning it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T01:12:47.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11702" CreationDate="2021-05-17T01:14:50.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like &amp;quot;mere use&amp;quot; of B. You could even ship both together (&amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;, there is no intimate relationship between A and B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T01:14:50.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11703" CreationDate="2021-05-17T01:20:19.700" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSF believes, in the jurisdictions they have considered, that the transfer of GPL-licensed software by an employer to an employee, for the fulfillment of their responsibilities as an agent of the employer, does not constitute distribution, so any conditions that GPL imposes on distribution do not apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;#InternalDistribution&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop a modified version and install that version through its own facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the employee's responsibility is to modify or use the software, I see that as being covered by this explanation. (But I'm not lawyer and don't know much about employment law; I can only relate the opinions of the FSF's lawyers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="21336" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T11:43:05.023" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T11:43:05.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11703" CreationDate="2021-05-17T09:45:55.277" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you receive an open source application from your employer, it hasn't been distributed to you, but to your employer, so you haven't received any rights through that distribution. (However, I have been told that handing software to contractors might be different, so the employer should be careful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you had rights, you don't have the source code. Even if you are physically capable of doing so, you are not allowed to just &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; someone else's source code. You might have the right to ask for it, but until you get it, you don't have it. And if you don't have the source code, you are incapable of legally distributing the software under the GPL license because you cannot possible fulfil your obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if you are in a position in the company where you could &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; take the company's source code and hand it to someone, only then can you legally publish anything under the GPL license. Even then you could be fired if you are acting against your obligations as a paid employee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Exactly which law” - first, copyright law. Second, anti-hacking laws. Third, employment contracts. Fourth, you don’t have any rights to the code, so you can’t legally give it away under GPL license. In summary you will get fired, they will get you for unauthorised access to a protected computer, and everyone will go after you for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastEditorUserId="454" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T09:59:52.860" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T09:59:52.860" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11709" CreationDate="2021-05-17T10:08:14.513" Score="0" ViewCount="1448" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an application. I want to open source my application for non-commercial use in Github(I guess GPL v3). And I want to retain the rights to redistribute the same software with some additional features as Closed Source(which GPL doesn't allow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Only I should be allowed to distribute Closed source version of the Open Source application while others can use it for non-commercial use. Is there an Open Source license or combination of licenses which allows this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not possible I'll have to go closed source, which I very much like to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank You&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23025" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T13:17:26.460" Title="Open Source license which allows only me for commercial use" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-05-17T14:40:08.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11708" CreationDate="2021-05-17T12:49:15.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every open-source license allows commercial usage. Every open-source license &lt;em&gt;has to&lt;/em&gt; allow commercial usage as one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fundamental requirements&lt;/a&gt; is that any usage is allowed for any purpose (§6 in the linked document).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such your request for an open source license which forbids commercial usage cannot be fulfilled for this inherent contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you as the sole copyright holder, have all rights to distribute your software under any license you wish. That includes the right to distribute it under the GPL. And to distribute the same or another, modified version under a proprietary license concurrently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind though, that this right ONLY applies to software where you hold the complete copyright. Thus, if you want to go this path, you MUST NOT accept any contributions from the outside which are provided to you under the license terms of the the GPL. You might accept contributions under a permissive license like BSD or MIT which allow usage in closed-source software and which are compatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T13:17:26.460" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T13:17:26.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11702" CreationDate="2021-05-17T13:44:14.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not distribute binary/docker-image of software B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is a clear boundary between software A and software B, in that software A invokes an API provided by software B, which is the intended use of software B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of those considerations are actually irrelevant, or partially so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your work needs to be licensed under the GPL depends entirely on if it is considered a derived work of a GPL-licensed work. If you distribute the GPL work or not is not part of the consideration.&#xA;For example, if I create and distribute a patch to the Linux kernel, then that patch must be licensed under the GPLv2 license, irrespective of whether I distribute it on its own or together with the rest of the Linux kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, having a clear boundary between the two software products by its own is not sufficient to avoid that software A gets considered to be a derived work of software B. There is also a clear boundary between an application and the third-party libraries that it uses (and even stronger among the third-party libraries themselves), but if one of those libraries is under the GPL license, then the entire application, including &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; libraries are affected by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sufficiently clear boundary is a boundary that is only crossed by a communication mechanism that is commonly used for communication between independent applications. Fortunately for you, socket communication fits that bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Software B is under GNU GPLv3. Is the distribution of software A affected/restricted in anyway by the GPLv3 license of software B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, software A is not affected by the GPL license of software B. They communicate with each other using mechanisms that are sufficiently abstracted that they are considered to be independent from each other in terms of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As distribution format is not a consideration, you could even bundle the docker image of software B with your installation media of software A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T13:44:14.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-17T14:32:59.320" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm extracting a sub-dataset from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gharchive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GH Archive&lt;/a&gt; dataset. The GH Archive dataset, I quote, &amp;quot;includes material that may be subject to third party rights.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my sub-dataset, I never extract &amp;quot;contents&amp;quot; (file contents, commit messages...), only metadata. Here's the exhaustive list of stuff I currently extract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repository name,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;repository metadata such as stars count, forks count, watchers count,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commit author(s), i.e. their github login,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commit &lt;code&gt;created_at&lt;/code&gt; datetime&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under what license can I offer my sub-dataset? For example, would I be able to commercially sell this data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a follow-up, same question but for this additional data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;user email (if available), user bio, user city/country, user company.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any place I can get official licensing information for this type of data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20321" LastEditorDisplayName="user24913" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T10:25:53.587" LastActivityDate="2021-09-01T10:25:53.587" Title="Under which license is GitHub metadata (repo names, commits metadata...)?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6512" CreationDate="2021-05-17T15:58:04.910" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your code is supposed to run on an iPhone: Apple won't allow you to use shared libraries, only static libraries, if you want to put your application on the app store. And with shared libraries, you have ONE application, which you will need to license under the GPL according to the GPL rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T15:58:04.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-18T07:33:07.907" Score="-1" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm making an application which uses the python module PySide2 which is under LGPL. What I'm planning is to sell my program and make it non-distributable by making a unique password-identification mechanism. Such as a client-server system where a unique IP address receives only one password. Does my program still hold LGPL in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to PySide2 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;PyPi : &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homepage : &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.qt.io/PySide2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.qt.io/PySide2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23042" LastEditorUserId="23042" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T09:20:20.040" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T08:25:36.737" Title="Can I distribute my program under LGPL if it has a password identification mechanism?" Tags="|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11718" CreationDate="2021-05-18T10:31:14.157" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a software called vnpy on github that's in chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a translated copy to english. The goal is to keep their MIT license but just for that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're wondering: Should we make a subdirectory in our codebase of prototypes, put the MIT license there (so that it applies only to code in that folder). Or make a new repo with this translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the main question is: can you somehow signal that a license applies only a subdirectory, and what are best practices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23044" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T16:19:06.553" Title="MIT License for a translation" Tags="|mit|copyright|license|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11711" CreationDate="2021-05-18T12:11:45.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is something to take up with the data's owners (github folks, in this case). You also have to consider third party rights, and privacy concerns (as noted by @planetmaker's comment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the ramblings of random dudes on the 'net should &lt;strong&gt;never&lt;/strong&gt; be taken as authoritative answers until checked carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T12:11:45.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11685" CreationDate="2021-05-18T12:24:03.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cited Creative Commons page states that CC-BY-SA 2.0 and later are compatible with CC-BY-SA-4.0, and CC-BY is broadly compatible with CC-BY-SA. CC0 is essentially public domain, so it is also compatible. So you can use CC-BY-SA-4.0 for any modifications if you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, as a courtesy to whoever gets the package, you should state details on the licences of the original, unmodified pieces and how to get them. Just for orderliness, consider keeping the pieces in separate directories. Even better would be to keep your changes separate (as many projects using git do, with the projects used just as submodules).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note IANAL, even less your lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T12:24:03.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11715" CreationDate="2021-05-18T16:19:06.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Placing a note in &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; or such that &amp;quot;directory &lt;code&gt;xyz&lt;/code&gt; is under licence BLA-4.1.2, see &lt;code&gt;xyz/BLA.txt&lt;/code&gt; for details&amp;quot; should be plenty (and copyright notes in the different files, as appropiate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the translation? Add translations for messages and documentation? Rework so that messages are in English? Work to use something like GNU's gettext(1), as discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Internationalization.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;? Translate program's identifiers, comments? Something else? Note that the different tasks range from &amp;quot;no to minimal interference with the code&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;more or less rewrite all&amp;quot;, and the legal implications could be very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T16:19:06.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11694" CreationDate="2021-05-18T16:26:08.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use the program to create something you want to sell (and do so by using said program in the way it is supposed to be used, not e.g. just to show it's colorful splash screen on some computer in the background)), I'd say that is clearly commercial use. No, &amp;quot;the image created is a tiny part/will be licensed separatately for free&amp;quot; probably won't cut it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T16:26:08.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11703" CreationDate="2021-05-18T17:40:44.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL gives you no rights at all when you receive source code.  The only one who can grant you any rights is the person giving you the source code.  If this person hsa been given the source code licensed under the GPL, it means that they got it under the condition that they may only distribute it to third parties under the conditions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot, on your own, assume that they intended to give it to you under the conditions of the GPL and passing the source code on may put you in breach of your contractual obligations/conditions with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have no right to demand they comply with the GPL: only the person holding copyright to the code can enforce compliance.  You may choose to tell on them to the copyright holders and those may take legal steps for enforcing compliance.  It may not leave you in good standing with your contractual partners.  Whether they have legal avenues against you for exposing their behavior will very much depend on jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user23051" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T17:40:44.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11722" CreationDate="2021-05-19T04:30:24.870" Score="4" ViewCount="880" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I am the owner of an open source project, and I want to publish my code under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect myself to be the main contributors, but I want to stay open to others' contribution. At the same time, I wish I can have full control of the project, such as changing the license of the project in the future in case if I change my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the typical way is to use a Contributor license agreement to transfer copyright to me, but I don't like this approach since this is a bit tedious and discouraging. I know the feeling, personally I gave up contributing to some open source projects because it requires signing stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is the approach in my head, maybe I can publish my code under GPL, while accepting other contributions under MIT license. Is this possible? How can I make this clear to the contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23055" LastEditorUserId="23055" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T09:41:05.340" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T09:41:05.340" Title="Dual license (GPL: my contribution, MIT: others' contribution) in an open source project?" Tags="|gpl|mit|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11721" CreationDate="2021-05-19T07:31:26.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To take the question in reverse order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;maybe I can publish my code under GPL, while accepting other contributions under MIT license. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF are clear&lt;/a&gt; that contributions to GPL codebases can be under more-permissive licences than GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I make this clear to the contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where it all falls down, it seems to me, because you say you're trying to avoid a CLA.  However, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10137/458&quot;&gt;has been said here&lt;/a&gt;, CLAs are particularly useful for permissively-licensed projects in clarifying from minute one the terms under which contributions are made, since the project licence doesn't require any particular terms.  You want contributions to your copyleft-licencsed codebase to be made under permissive licences (so that you can later distribute them under less-permissive terms if you choose), which means you need a CLA in place so that contributors make clear the terms under which they're contributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, as you're trying to do something out of the ordinary, you more than most need to be very clear with everyone, &lt;strong&gt;and have them be very clear in turn&lt;/strong&gt;, about what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T09:07:08.827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T09:07:08.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11713" CreationDate="2021-05-19T08:25:36.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a third-party LGPL library/module in your system, there are just a few requirements you have to fulfill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to inform your users that you use that library/module and that it is under the LGPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must give your users the right and means to replace the LGPL library/module with a different version (that uses the exact same interface).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in these requirements prevents you from using a product-key or phone-home licensing scheme for your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, even the GPL license does not forbid you to use a product key or similar. The rub there is that you must give your users the right to remove the check for a valid product key and distribute that version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T08:25:36.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11711" CreationDate="2021-05-19T09:08:41.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don’t need one. (Probably. I’m just a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.c2.com/?LanguageLawyer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language lawyer&lt;/a&gt;, not a regular lawyer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub is a US company, and since you didn’t use the spelling ‘licence’, I assume you are US-based as well, so I’m going to work with the assumption that only US law applies. Under this assumption, it’s probably safe to assume that those metadata are in the public domain, you don’t need a license for them, and you cannot license them to anyone else yourself &lt;strong&gt;under copyright law&lt;/strong&gt;. If you included things like contents of commits or user avatars, those may be potentially copyrightable, but mere names, dates and addresses are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that under the US legal tradition, copyright has been applicable only to results of creative effort, and not to mere collections of otherwise uncopyrightable information, however large. The relevant clause of the US Constitution that enables the creation of copyright and patent laws only authorises it to ‘promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts’; a more direct legal justification is the court case &lt;em&gt;Feist v. Rural&lt;/em&gt;, which established that mere aggregation of data does not create copyrightability. The US also does not recognise &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights in a way that some other jurisdictions (especially those in the EU) do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, other kinds of laws and agreements may still be applicable. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Database License&lt;/a&gt;, for example, attempts to implement copyleft-like provisions under contract law. There are some important differences from copyright law, however: the most important is that you can’t force someone to follow a contract they haven’t agreed to. If you share information with A under a contract, and A shares that information with B, there is little you can do to compel B to respect the contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be privacy laws that apply, but which I have not touched upon above at all. Because this data set is based on already-public information, their applicability seems rather doubtful to me, but I would still consult a real expert to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21336" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T09:08:41.397" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11726" CreationDate="2021-05-19T10:22:42.143" Score="1" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a GPL web app. Somebody forks it, adds some back end changes and hosts it. In theory, the person installing it is the user so they need the modified source code, not the people signing up to the web page. But what happens to the JS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically if I as a user log into to a web page, I download the JS which is under the GPL and then I execute it in the browser. That makes me a user, right? As a user, I have the right to the full source code, not just the JS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the downloading of JS count as 'interaction over the network' and not as 'distributing the source code'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: this is what makes me think it's not distribution &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-question-on-gpl-licensing-and-the-current-wordpress-debacle/3355/11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://meta.discourse.org/t/a-question-on-gpl-licensing-and-the-current-wordpress-debacle/3355/11&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23015" LastEditorUserId="23015" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T11:11:12.853" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:16:03.240" Title="Why doesn't the loading of GPLed JS in the browser count as distribution?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11725" CreationDate="2021-05-19T11:30:54.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Discourse is a web application, GPLv2+-licensed, containing JavaScript elements which are downloaded by clients onto their browsers.  It seems to me that this absolutely is distribution, and that you are therefore entitled to reuse this JS code under GPLv2+.  What you're not entitled to is a copy of the code for the server-side application, for this isn't distributed (hence, as you note, the existence of the AGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL only entitles recipients of binary code to GPL'ed access to the source corresponding to the binaries that they have received.  In this case, the code downloaded is javascript (JS), which may already be source code.  If it's minified JS, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11494/458&quot;&gt;there is an argument&lt;/a&gt; that you're entitled to the unminified source (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, as GPLv2 s3 has it).  You are not, however, entitled to the source for binaries which have not been distributed to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you ask about GPLv3 s5c.  This section says that anything distributed to you must be under GPLv3; it doesn't say that anything, in particular, has to be distributed to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL doesn't say that code received under it, and works based thereon, must be distributed.  It only says that when they are, they must come with usable source that corresponds to the binary distributed, and that this source must be under GPL.  The problem that then arises with SaaS is exactly why the AGPL was invented.  If the GPL worked as you wish it to, there would have been no need for the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T12:42:29.120" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T12:42:29.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-21T09:29:03.483" Score="-1" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to release my software under stronger copyleft than GPL (and AGPL), namely I would like to impose the burden of releasing sources of any derivative work, even the work intended for internal usage only, when such derivative work has a definite and non-test-related usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would basically count as more restrictive version of AGPL (which does this to the extent of webserver code), while I would like to cover also this example cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Derivative work of my code is used in research projects to produce artifacts (e.g. plots of some measurements derived using such code). Then I want that the derivative work must be released under the same license, and made available to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A company wants to use parts of the software in a tool for internal usage (only to be used by employees and never by external users, so that would not qualify under AGPL terms), then the license requires the company to publicly release the source code of the derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But crucially temporary modification of the code for testing purposes or until the derivative work has not fulfilled its intended usage (e.g. the research plots have not yet been published or the internal usage tool is in pre-alpha stage) can remain closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if there exists a license with such requirements, and if not whether it would be sensible in my use case to add clauses to GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23076" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:13:08.347" Title="Extremely copyleft licenses enforcing redistribution of source code intended for internal use" Tags="|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11727" CreationDate="2021-05-21T10:17:27.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different licensors have different intensions. But licensors issuing Open Source licenses are generally trying to maximize Software Freedom. Copyleft licenses try to maximize Software Freedom by ensuring that every &lt;em&gt;recipient&lt;/em&gt; or user of the software has full rights e.g. to share this software further and to modify it. Modification requires access to the source code, though. Overbearing source disclosure requirements jeopardize these freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 connects the source code obligation to conveyance of the software. AGPL also requires an offer for source code when the user interacts remotely over a network with a modified copy. The Cryptographic Autonomy License goes further, requiring such an offer to anyone who the work was made perceptible to, if this would otherwise violate the licensor's IP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all these licenses are enforceable because they are rooted in copyright law. If I copy a software, I need a license of the copyright holder. They can attach conditions to that license, or also refuse it. The copyright holder can't prevent me (on the basis of copyright) from doing stuff that isn't covered by copyright, such as writing a review of the software or publishing the output of the software. To do that, we'd need a contract such as an EULA. Creating such a contract in an enforcible manner while still allowing modified versions to be freely shared is an extremely difficult problem. In any case, using such a contract to restrict what the user can do instead of permitting what would be otherwise prohibited by copyright would likely violate the principles of Software Freedom or Open Source, e.g. compare OSD #6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such clauses would also have practical problems. If I publish a paper that includes a diagram created by a software, and the licensing of this software requires me to publish the software, a big question is: &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;. Clearly, I can't include the software's source code in the paper or in the diagram. I could publish it for some duration at some URL that is listed on the paper, but this won't guarantee that this URL would be accessible later, or that the original author's of the software which I modified would learn about these modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license were to require notification or publication, this could also fail some tests established in the Debian community for open source/free software licenses. In the &lt;em&gt;Desert Island Test&lt;/em&gt;, we have to consider whether someone can comply with the license if they don't have internet. In the &lt;em&gt;Chinese Dissident Test&lt;/em&gt;, we have to consider that publication of the fact that someone is working on politically sensitive software could lead to repression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary, I don't know of an Open Source/Free Software license that satisfies your requirements, and I have severe doubts whether such a license could exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T10:17:27.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T10:12:45.757" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using some code from Material Design Lite's example portfolio. The html and css is under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License, but the repository states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exception to this license, all html or css that is generated by&#xA;the software at the direction of the user is copyright the user. The&#xA;user has full ownership and control over such content, including&#xA;whether and how they wish to license it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what the above blockquote means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23089" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T16:24:15.283" Title="What is the portfolio repository trying to say?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10952" CreationDate="2021-05-22T13:24:14.023" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the site where you upload your work to requires you to select a license from a limited list of licenses and the license you want to (or are required to) use isn't in that list, then it is best to select the license that is closest to your desired license but is more restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can explain in a comment or description what the actual license is. That way you are giving people more rights than they were expecting based on the license indication given by the platform and that is an easier sell than trying to take rights away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For putting CC BY-SA works on Youtube, this means selecting the Youtube standard license (which is pretty restrictive) and then mentioning the CC BY-SA license in the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the CC BY-SA license is a share-alike license, it is advisable to mention this license also in the credits portion of the video, so the license remains clearly indicated even if the video gets re-distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T13:24:14.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11727" CreationDate="2021-05-23T17:13:08.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is very unlikely such a license would have any legal traction. Copyright, on which software licenses are based, has mostly to do with copying/distributing the work, internal use is not distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And nobody in their right mind would license that way, just to get subjected to the firehose of &amp;quot;I changed line 427 to see if...&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Oops, rewriting lines 442 through 493 to quell our compiler warnings bombs out with...&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I, for one, would steer &lt;em&gt;well way&lt;/em&gt; from such software. What is I can't comply with the reporting requirement because the 'net is down here today? The licensor dropped off the 'net for good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:13:08.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11687" CreationDate="2021-05-23T23:14:14.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What could be distributed under some (not specified) &amp;quot;terms of use&amp;quot; is not the &lt;em&gt;language&lt;/em&gt;, but some tool (i.e., an interpreter or compiler) or some other program. Those terms of use could make quite a difference, from &amp;quot;you aren't allowed to do anything&amp;quot; to (essentially) &amp;quot;do as you please&amp;quot; BSD style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about it this way: If you write some program in said language by hand, what are the restrictions on distribution of that program? More or less the same applies to what your compiler writes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also check the conditions on e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bison&lt;/a&gt;, it has special provisions because bison written parsers contain a sizeable portion of bison's source code. Maybe you'll need to add similar wording if you take pieces of the &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; (really, say examples or code snippets from the documentation, description or definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T23:14:14.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11736" CreationDate="2021-05-24T15:08:51.310" Score="7" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a project that only includes a copy of the GNU GPLv2 accompanying it that I wish to combine with &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-or-later.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU General Public License v3.0 or later&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-or-later&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; code. Assume that simply including a license file applies it globally to the whole project. For clarity, there are no other notices besides the text of the GPLv2 itself in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html#section9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 § 9&lt;/a&gt; states, &amp;quot;[i]f the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.&amp;quot; Does including the GPLv2 license text count as specifying a version number? That is, can I relicense it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-or-later.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU General Public License v3.0 or later&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-or-later&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hunch is that it's a &amp;quot;no,&amp;quot; since, by providing the text of the GPLv2, the copyright holder is implicitly specifying you can use it under &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU General Public License v2.0&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;GPL-2.0&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and, absent &amp;quot;or any later version,&amp;quot; that means &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;GNU General Public License v2.0 only&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;GPL-2.0-only&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Would this be correct reasoning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23069" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T15:26:09.650" Title="If a project only includes a copy of the GPL, can it be relicensed under any version?" Tags="|gpl|law|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11735" CreationDate="2021-05-24T15:26:09.650" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your hunch of &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; seems correct to me. The GPL FAQ has this to say about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LicenseCopyOnly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;standalone copies of the GPL without an explicit license grant&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it enough just to put a copy of the GNU GPL in my repository?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just putting a copy of the GNU GPL in a file in your repository does not explicitly state that the code in the same repository may be used under the GNU GPL. Without such a statement, it's not entirely clear that the permissions in the license really apply to any particular source file. An explicit statement saying that eliminates all doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A file containing just a license, without a statement that certain other files are covered by that license, resembles a file containing just a subroutine which is never called from anywhere else. The resemblance is not perfect: lawyers and courts might apply common sense and conclude that you must have put the copy of the GNU GPL there because you wanted to license the code that way. Or they might not. Why leave an uncertainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author failed to annotate that their code is under the GPL &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;, but included a copy of the GPL then it seems to me there are only two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The code is not actually under any version of the GPL, because there isn't a strong enough indication that the copy of the GPL terms included in the repository was intended to apply to the particular piece of code under consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; sufficient evidence that the GPL license terms included in the repository do in fact apply to that piece of code, in which case those terms apply to the code. I cannot interpret this case as doing anything &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; exactly specifying which GPL version applies to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T15:26:09.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-25T21:14:43.960" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Avahi, including the C client library, is licensed under the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my system, (and I believe everywhere) &lt;code&gt;libavahi-client.so.3&lt;/code&gt; links to &lt;code&gt;libdbus-1.so.3&lt;/code&gt;.  DBus is licensed under a dual license, &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.ometer.com/2007/07/17/gpl--afl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL OR AFL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AFL is documented as being &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#AcademicFreeLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incompatible&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/a/5756/23122&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; explains that software licensed under the LGPL is required to be compatible with the GPL, thus Avahi cannot link with DBus under the terms of the AFL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Avahi cannot link to DBus under the terms of the AFL, it must be linking to it under the terms of the GPL (this is how dual-licenseing works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if Avahi is linking to DBus under the terms of the GPL, it must be GPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have written above is my understanding, and I am looking for confirmation if my understanding is correct or why I am wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23122" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2021-05-26T14:55:41.917" LastActivityDate="2023-04-24T03:03:35.400" Title="Is the avahi-client license incompatible with its dependency on DBus?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6654" CreationDate="2021-05-26T06:45:46.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are fine with disclosing which libraries you use, you can write alongside your own licensing information something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This app uses library A, which is made available under the MIT license, and library B, which is made available under the Apache 2.0 license. See below for the license texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;MIT license text&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;lt:Apache 2.0 license text&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want to disclose the names of the libraries, it would have to be something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This app contains software under either the MIT or Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T06:45:46.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11737" CreationDate="2021-05-26T09:18:15.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL can be &amp;quot;upgraded&amp;quot; to the GPL. Quoting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL v3.0, section 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you may convey a copy of the modified version [...] under the GNU GPL, with none of the additional permissions of this License applicable to that copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T09:18:15.950" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11747" CreationDate="2021-05-26T12:34:41.123" Score="1" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am fairly new to actual open source licensing, since I usually just add the Unlicense to all my Github repositories, just to have it completely permissive for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently started a small github pages webpage for me and my friends, as a sort of small writing project. We use the static webpage as a sort of hub, that everyone can access from anywhere and read the things others write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am struggling to find a license, that could cover this webpage though. We don't care about source code, but if possible would like that the stories written be under CC 4.0 (such that Source and author have to be named when shared).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stories are just plainly added in a  Element in static html pages for the sake of easy adding from non tech savvy friends, which makes it part of the source code technically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research here, I found that maybe dual licensing is the way to go here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my current try on adding a license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT License / CC-BY 4.0 Dual License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2021 (Name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[MIT License text] (excluded for brevity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY 4.0 License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images and texts that are not directly associated with source code (this includes any written &amp;gt;stories, author introductions, maps, etc.) may be used under CC-BY 4.0 International.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See full information at:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;A Summary of the conditions of this license are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[CC License Text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to completely uncopyright the source code, while keeping any non source content under CC-BY 4? I neither want nor need the copyright of any of the source code, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23130" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T11:02:58.157" Title="Separately licensing source code and website content" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-26T13:29:17.513" Score="1" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm open sourcing a proprietary codebase (license TBD, probably Apache) were all files have the header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;company name&amp;gt;. All rights reserved.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should this line be preserved in addition to the license header, or replaced by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to use a DCO rather than CLA for external contributions (if that makes any difference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23138" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T15:10:56.813" Title="Should the license header be preceded by the copyright holder?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11729" CreationDate="2021-05-26T16:24:15.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It says what it says. The tool's output is not covered by the license of the tool. Same as the output of a video editor is not covered by the license of the tool. Or a compiled program is not covered by the licence of the compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exception is needed, as the tool (probably) injects a lot of its own code into the output. This will make the output a derivative work. The exception allows you to use the tool without this restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1084" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T16:24:15.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11743" CreationDate="2021-05-27T09:47:10.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is good to have a copyright notice next to the license notice in your files. That give the users of your code some indication who the rights holders are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A properly formatted copyright notice has the format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;rights holder&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the year is a list or range of years in which (copyright-significant) changes to the file were published and &lt;code&gt;rights holder&lt;/code&gt; is the name of the person or legal entity that owns the copyrights on those changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are multiple contributors at different times, then you can have a separate copyright notice for each of them. If there are really many contributors, people tend to combine the list or rights holders in a smaller number of copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;All rights reserved&amp;quot; indication you have I would recommend to drop, as it is contradictory to the license indication that follows and can cause confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T15:10:56.813" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T15:10:56.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11742" CreationDate="2021-05-27T11:02:58.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research here, I found that maybe dual licensing is the way to go here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, dual-licensing will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have the desired effect. When you dual-license something, the &lt;em&gt;recipient&lt;/em&gt; gets to choose which license they want to conform to, so I would be able to take a writing of you and re-publish it under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to completely uncopyright the source code, while keeping any non source content under CC-BY 4?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you can clearly and unambiguously indicate which license applies to what, you can use different licenses for the content of your webpage and for the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could write your licensing as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Content and the HTML code for the page structure are separately licensed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The content is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The code for the page structure is licensed under the Unlicense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;license texts&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T11:02:58.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T15:59:47.723" Score="4" ViewCount="1153" Body="&lt;p&gt;The developer life becomes incredibly complicated once you work in commercial companies. Recently, I ran into the problem that I wanted to install the Python packages &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/turbodbc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;turbodbc&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/sktime/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;sktime&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/tslearn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;tslearn&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. All are speeded up by using C-functions under the hood. &lt;code&gt;pip&lt;/code&gt; builds these functions when installing the packages. If you lack of a proper C compiler (apparently only &lt;a href=&quot;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Microsoft C++ Build Tools&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are “proper”), you run into the error message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;distutils.errors.DistutilsPlatformError: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 or greater is required. Get it with &amp;quot;Microsoft C++ Build Tools&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is surprisingly a quite common issue reported on stackoverflow, but all answers recommend to just install the tools, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/49477/microsoft-c-build-tools-2019-not-allowed-for-use-with-visual-studio-code&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Microsoft C++ Build Tools&lt;/em&gt; require a Visual Studio License, i.e. “Community”, &lt;em&gt;Professional&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Enterprise&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Now, while the tools are freely available for open-source development under the &lt;em&gt;Visual Studio Community&lt;/em&gt;, the question is if the license also applies for building the (developed) software on a different system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a snippet from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Visual-Studio-Licensing-Whitepaper-Aug-2020.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Visual Studio Community 2019 is a free, full-featured IDE for any developer building non-enterprise apps across any platform or device.&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Organizations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any number of users may use the software to develop and test device drivers for the Windows operating system.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with &amp;gt;250 PCs or &amp;gt; $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted for employees as well as contractors beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am left absolutely puzzled. While the license seems to be very clear, I am unsure if the build process still belongs to the development of a software (in this case the open-source library that enthusiasts with no relation to me have written). And, &lt;strong&gt;why should one like to develop something free &amp;amp; open-source, if part of the community&lt;/strong&gt; (OK, the commercial part of the community) &lt;strong&gt;would need to buy something from a giant like Microsoft to install (a one-time action) their software/library?&lt;/strong&gt; Nonetheless, the &lt;em&gt;Microsoft C++ Build Tools&lt;/em&gt; seem to be the standard in developing C-based Python libraries. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.python.org/moin/WindowsCompilers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MinGW is only supported up to Python 3.4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, do not to get side-tracked with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS Build tools&lt;/a&gt;, which are open-source and released under the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23153" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T07:53:29.613" Title="Commercial license required to build Python packages with Microsoft C++ build tools?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T17:39:59.217" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I develop a WordPress theme/plugin, and release it under a GPL license, can my plugin/theme incorporate (include) a third party library that is licensed under AGPL v.3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, does my plugin/theme also need to be AGPL licensed? Or, just the changes (if any) I make to the third party library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about if I eventually commercialize the product (via paid support), are there any other important implications I should know about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, I'm familiar with the implications of commercial WP plugins/themes and the GPL. I'm just wondering what (if any) further implications there are if the plugin/theme incorporates a third party AGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: After posting this question, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&lt;/a&gt; . Just above the table it says &amp;quot;Each place that the matrix states GPLv3, the same statement about compatibility is true for AGPLv3 as well.&amp;quot; so I assume I'm all clear but would love to hear confirmation. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23154" LastEditorUserId="23154" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T17:45:54.870" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T17:45:54.870" Title="Can a GPL'ed WordPress plugin/theme incorporate an AGPL library?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11748" CreationDate="2021-05-28T05:00:15.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the three packages you link to above, one (turbodc) is under the MIT licence, one (sktime) is under &amp;quot;an OSI-approved licence&amp;quot;, and one doesn't make much effort to tell me the licence at all.  A strong copyleft licence, such as the GPL, would likely have something to say about licensees releasing code that would only build under a proprietary compiler, without providing that compiler; but there's no evidence that any of these modules is under such a licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for me, this comes back to personal choice, and the consequences thereof.  You (either you personally, or your employer) chose to run a proprietary OS.  If it was your employer, you should turn round to them and point out that if they don't buy proper tools for you to work with, you won't be able to work at maximum efficiency.  If it was you, then I'm afraid you've just run into one of the consequences of trying to use free toolchains on proprietary OSes: at some point down the stack, the free shades into the non-free, and if you're using software under licences that don't much care about the exact location of that border, you may get caught up in border-crossing issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T05:00:15.493" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11767" CreationDate="2021-05-28T15:04:20.543" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote code for an employer which, I feel, would benefit from being released under a copyleft (e.g. LGPL) or permissive (e.g. MIT) license.  The code is of general utility and exists well outside the company's business line.   In order to not waste management's time, I want to clearly articulate the benefits of using a libre license in this case while relieving any possible concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have compiled the following benefits, ranked by what I believe make reasonable &amp;quot;business sense&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Offload maintenance costs&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. Linus's Law: &amp;quot;Many eyes make shallow bugs&amp;quot;) - A libre license allows for more testing by both end-users and developers.  Bugs are more likely to be exposed and, because the code can be used by other developers (with a vested interest), have fixes offered.  This can offload maintenance costs.  A concern may be that revealing bugs and working with others whose interests are not in line with the company's would divert engineer time.  While there is truth to this, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_mythical_man-month&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mythical Man Month&lt;/a&gt;, every libre license clearly states that the software comes with no warranty and, therefore, no obligation to act on any issues raised.  The company has discretion on which issues to address.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Free marketing&lt;/strong&gt; - The company's name can be attached to a tool which others find valuable.  This creates a positive association with the company.  A reasonable concern might be that a negative association is created because of bugs, etc.  However, as the tool is actively used at the company and solves a real problem, this feels unlikely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community goodwill&lt;/strong&gt; - Much of the company's internal software is developed using FLOSS.  Releasing source code perpetuates the &amp;quot;scratch my back, I scratch yours&amp;quot; nature of libre software.  It constitutes a fair trade which, broadly, ensures more software is released that the company can utilize.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are other benefits of using a libre license?  Conversely, what concerns may need consideration/reconciliation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18694" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T07:26:29.887" Title="Arguments for using a FLOSS license" Tags="|licensing|benefits|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11762" CreationDate="2021-05-27T16:29:41.550" Score="1" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to redistribute the compiled binaries and headers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opencv/opencv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCV&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that I'm going to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download some compiled release from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opencv.org/releases/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCV's Releases page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create my own repository which will contain the downloaded binaries and headers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a couple of small scripts in addition to the unmodified binaries and headers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license files and notes should I include into my repo if I want this repo to be available for any kinds of usage without any limitations excepting the requirement to mention me as the author in all dependent projects of this repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current guess is that my repo should contain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text of the MIT licence in the &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notes about my scripts (which are a kind of very minor update for the original OpenCV library) and reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opencv/opencv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original repo&lt;/a&gt; mentioned as an author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main concern here is whether I need to copy &lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;COPYRIGHT&lt;/code&gt; files from the OpenCV repo or I can just mention them in a free form in my &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt;? Are there any strict forms to format such licensing information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Maybe I shouldn't worry about these licenses concerns in the open-source world at all...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23182" OwnerDisplayName="Andrei K." LastEditorUserId="21639" LastEditDate="2021-06-02T17:25:54.353" LastActivityDate="2021-06-02T17:25:54.353" Title="How should I format licences to redistribute Apache 2.0-based project?" Tags="|licensing|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11756" CreationDate="2021-05-28T23:33:13.817" Score="0" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a public repository on GitHub with project and source code under GPLv3. Can I freely drop repository and close project if I don't want to develop it. And after some years maybe I want publish it again. Can I freely create new repository and publish source code again under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T04:34:11.733" Title="Can I delete or recreate my repository freely if it have code under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11755" CreationDate="2021-05-29T04:34:11.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the code is entirely yours, your choice to license your own work under the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2077/50&quot;&gt;does not limit your own rights in how you may distribute/modify your own code&lt;/a&gt; . By releasing under the GPL, you have given others certain rights to distribute and modify your work, but you have not lessened your own rights. You may cease or resume distribution of your work whenever you please (but cannot demand other GPL recipients do the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you rely on someone else's GPL'd code in your project, then you are required to obey that other author's GPL requirements. However, the GPL largely only places requirements whenever you do perform distribution. You may choose to cease redistribution at any time and relieve yourself of GPL requirements at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one narrow except to this is if you have distributed someone else's GPL'd binary code with a written offer for source, which must be honored for three years. (This is not a typical distribution case.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T04:34:11.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T06:44:40.967" Score="0" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to license some code such that people can make modified works from it and profit from that, but they can't just take my work verbatim and profit from it. Right now I'm really leaning towards the Artistic License 2.0; however, I can't tell if people who make a Modified Version are permitted to charge a licensing fee or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute a Modified Version in Compiled form without the Source, provided that you comply with Section 4 with respect to the Source of the Modified Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Section 4 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source (&lt;em&gt;either gratis or for a Distributor Fee&lt;/em&gt;, and with or without a Compiled form of the Modified Version)...[italics added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this ambiguity was addressed in-depth in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6338&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, and it looks to me like if you interpreted the license the way Allison Randal did, where you just apply any of the three &lt;em&gt;conditions&lt;/em&gt; of Section 4, you would not be stopped from charging a license fee for your Modified Version (however I still agree that it is rather ambiguous).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, is Randal's interpretation something that would legally hold? If so, why? I could counter-argue that the part I italicized in the main paragraph of Section 4 prohibits anyone from charging a licensing fee on Modified Versions, if Section 6 really says that the compiled form of Modified Versions is to be treated exactly as the source form of Modified Versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, am I right that Randal's interpretation (just using any of the three conditions) actually allows that someone could charge a licensing fee for a compiled form of their Modified Version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, is there a (serious) license out there that better (see: less ambiguously) describes what I am trying to achieve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23161" LastActivityDate="2023-05-04T04:09:41.240" Title="Can I sell licenses for a modified version of Artistic License 2.0 licensed software?" Tags="|artistic-license-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11769" CreationDate="2021-05-30T05:28:06.237" Score="4" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to better understand the GNU AGPL. The only thing the AGPL is concerned with beyond the GPL is remote interaction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume someone writes a shell (akin to &lt;code&gt;bash&lt;/code&gt;) and licenses it under the AGPL. I then modify the shell and run the modified version on a server that other people have e.g. SSH access to. (I think this example is general enough to apply to other scenarios, such as a GUI app over VNC.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to suggest my modified version need not make any offer of source in this case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a program is not expressly designed to interact with a user through a network, but is being run in an environment where it happens to do so, then it does not fall into this category. For example, an application is not required to provide source merely because the user is running it over SSH, or a remote X session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems my modified version is not required to offer up its source code by the &amp;quot;remote interaction&amp;quot; clause alone. However, there are other copyleft requirements of the AGPL, which take effect when I convey the modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;propagate&amp;quot; a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot; a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: [copyleft provisions about releasing source etc.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that if I allow users to get a copy of my modified version (through e.g. &lt;code&gt;scp&lt;/code&gt;), I have &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; the modified version to them, and the various copyleft obligations of doing so now apply. In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That users can &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; use the program over the network means little, since the program is not designed as such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I permit users to obtain a copy, then I have &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; the work to them, and the copyleft provisions of section 5 apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I don't permit users to obtain a copy, it seems I haven't &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; the work and would be safe from section 5 at least. (Interaction over a network alone &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; does not constitute &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; a work. I may have propagated it, but this seems to have fewer strings attached.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this understanding correct? Am I only obligated to offer source (and other such copyleft provisions) when I allow users to obtain a copy of the AGPL software in this type of scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a_guest's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5384/21639&quot;&gt;series&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5395/21639&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt; on an image converter that could become part of a web service. I believe this is a different problem - a_guest is worried about protecting their own program from becoming a component of a larger proprietary work, whereas this question deals with AGPL software available over a network &lt;em&gt;in a sense not covered by section 13 of the AGPL.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21639" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T08:45:04.747" Title="What sort of requirements apply to (A)GPL software on an SSH server?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11761" CreationDate="2021-05-30T07:14:01.100" Score="2" ViewCount="833" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, I have a &lt;code&gt;index.js&lt;/code&gt; file (copyrighted), I minify it using UglifyJS and store in &lt;code&gt;index.min.js&lt;/code&gt; file, but my copyright notice is removed, should I add it again in &lt;code&gt;index.min.js&lt;/code&gt;?&#xA;If yes, Can I automate it?&#xA;If yes, How can I automate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23164" LastEditorUserId="23164" LastEditDate="2021-06-01T01:34:48.360" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T01:46:40.593" Title="Should I include copyright in a minified distribution of my js file?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2021-05-30T09:20:04.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should keep copyright and license notices in minified files as well. In case you haven't written the code entirely by yourself but have also included code under open source licenses (like MIT or BSD), you are legally required to preserve such notices. As an alternative to keeping the notices within the files, you could also have a separate page that contains open source license notices and attributions – but it would still be good to have a link to the attribution page within the JS file itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the UglifyJS documentation, it will preserve comments that contain a &lt;code&gt;@license&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;@preserve&lt;/code&gt; annotation. Alternatively, you can pass a regex to the &lt;code&gt;--comments&lt;/code&gt; command line option to identify comments that should be retained in the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be good to think about why you minify your JavaScript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To obfuscate code? Stripping out comments could be sensible, but aside from that minification doesn't prevent anyone from un-minifying the code and reading it. If the code is open source anyway, this doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To reduce bandwidth? Minification is good as a first pass for compression. However, it doesn't replace actual compression algorithms. So keeping a license header is unlikely to produce noticeable overhead, especially if you bundle imports into a single minified file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T09:20:04.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2021-05-31T05:03:17.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the file is &lt;strong&gt;entirely&lt;/strong&gt; your own work, without dependencies that aren't public domain, it's technically not required to preserve anything in the minified version. However, keeping a copyright notice in won't hurt anything, and is probably a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the file contains work from others, you are bound by whatever license you received that work under. This will almost certainly include a copyright notice or other form of attribution. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11760/21639&quot;&gt;amon's answer&lt;/a&gt; explains how this can be done with UglifyJS specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should note that some licenses such as the GNU GPL family distinguish between distributing the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; for a work and other forms of a work. For example, the GPLv3 defines &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; for a work as &amp;quot;the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minified JavaScript is certainly not the &amp;quot;preferred form for making modifications&amp;quot;.  As such, if you yourself are distributing a minified version of software under this sort of license, you may have obligations beyond mere attribution to handle. Without knowing what exactly you're doing it's hard for me to say what these obligations are, but they usually involve making the source code available to recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21639" LastEditorUserId="21639" LastEditDate="2021-06-01T01:46:40.593" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T01:46:40.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11753" CreationDate="2021-05-31T05:23:57.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Maybe I shouldn't worry about these licenses concerns in the open-source world at all...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; you take license concerns seriously, you are usually legally required to. Do not brush them off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are doing sounds like redistribution of OpenCV (in object form) under section 4 of the Apache License. This &lt;strong&gt;requires&lt;/strong&gt; you to &amp;quot;give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&amp;quot;. I would not remove or alter OpenCV's &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;COPYRIGHT&lt;/code&gt; files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for licensing your scripts - you could simply paste the Expat license at the top as a comment. You could also distribute the whole thing (binaries, headers, and your scripts) under Apache 2.0. Apache is about as permissive as Expat, and this would also make the requirement of giving recipients a copy of the Apache license simpler to meet.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You are by no means &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; to make your scripts Apache licensed, but it's practically simpler in this case and you're already planning to put them under something similar anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21639" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T05:23:57.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-31T07:04:26.790" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is possible to just make a modified kernel open source but not the operating system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23170" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-05-31T13:14:52.080" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T13:14:52.080" Title="Can you make an Operating system runs top of linux kernel but closed source?" Tags="|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11763" CreationDate="2021-05-31T07:56:56.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer - yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kernel is it's own project, and as long as you follow the license terms, you can publish your own modified version without having to publish a whole operating system around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T07:56:56.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11758" CreationDate="2021-05-31T11:28:32.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That users can technically use the program over the network means little, since the program is not designed as such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If we can believe the GPL FAQ, then if the program itself is not aware that the user is on the other end of a network connection, clause 13 of the AGPL does not trigger and you are not required to offer the source code based on that clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I permit users to obtain a copy, then I have &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; the work to them, and the copyleft provisions of section 5 apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The normal GPL provisions apply in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I don't permit users to obtain a copy, it seems I haven't &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; the work and would be safe from section 5 at least. (Interaction over a network alone explicitly does not constitute &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; a work. I may have propagated it, but this seems to have fewer strings attached.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your users can only interact with the program over an SSH connection, but not copy the binaries to their own machine, then you have neither conveyed nor propagated the program. You have no obligation to provide the source code to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-03T08:45:04.747" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T08:45:04.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11757" CreationDate="2021-05-31T12:20:49.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to license some code such that people can make modified works from it and profit from that, but they can't just take my work verbatim and profit from it. Right now I'm really leaning towards the Artistic License 2.0; however, I can't tell if people who make a Modified Version are permitted to charge a licensing fee or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Artistic License appears to disallow the charging of &lt;em&gt;license fees&lt;/em&gt;, as in a monetary compensation for receiving the rights granted by the license, but it does not disallow other forms of monetary compensation. The only real effect of this is that you have to be careful when you ask someone to pay you and how you bill it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, it could be problematic to first provide the code and then ask for payment when the user wants to make changes to or redistribute the code they received earlier. But it would be fine to offer the code through a paywall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that applies to the Standard Version, Modified Version as well as aggregated works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address your desire that others cannot profit from your verbatim work, to my knowledge there are no open-source licenses that allow unchanged redistribution only if you don't make a profit out of it. It is also very hard to impossible to establish when someone is making a profit versus just covering their costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-05-31T12:20:49.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11751" CreationDate="2021-06-01T07:09:12.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a book on how I created a multi-million-dollar business with open source software. I was the original developer of the FOSS PDF library iText that was available under the MPL/LGPL for 8 years (2000-2008). This resulted in extreme popularity of the library and a great brand-awareness. The argument &lt;strong&gt;free marketing&lt;/strong&gt; is certainly valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, maintaining the library, answering technical and legal questions from users, was very hard to combine with my day job. Sure, I received plenty of help from a handful of developers, but when I did the math (&lt;em&gt;help from the community&lt;/em&gt; minus &lt;em&gt;requests from the community&lt;/em&gt;), the result was negative: I was spending more time on helping the community when compared to the time I gained thanks to the community. Based on that experience, I would be careful when using the arguments &lt;strong&gt;offload maintenance costs&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;community goodwill&lt;/strong&gt;. In theory, they are valid, but in practice, they aren't always true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there are several other, more business-oriented reasons why it's a good idea to distribute (part of) the codebase as FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to create a company to monetize the library in 2008. That company almost went bankrupt for different reasons. One reason was that my son was diagnosed with cancer; I spent more time in hospital than at my desk. The other reason was my lack of experience developing a business. Fortunately, I received help for the latter. I was advised to change the license from the MPL/LGPL to the AGPL (which I did in 2009) and I was able to grew the business for 0 to 10M euro revenue in less than 10 years (the company hit the 10M euro mark in 2017). In the meantime, I have realized an exit. I am no longer with the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the lifetime of the company, different people within the organization questioned whether the product should remain open source. Allow me to quote from chapter 24 of my book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Board members, salespeople, and part of management were always&#xA;suggesting that we should make iText closed source, but I defended&#xA;keeping iText open source with the following arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thanks to iText being FOSS, we succeeded in reaching markets we could never reach if iText were proprietary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wherever iText was used, even illegally, no other FOSS or non-free PDF products were used. This gave us the opportunity to convert&#xA;non-paying users into paying customers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;FOSS had become mainstream. Several companies and governments adopted a policy that the software they paid for should be open&#xA;source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Closing the source code would hurt our existing iText community and scare away potential code contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially reason 3 could be a good argument to convince your employer. Several customers have adopted a &lt;em&gt;comply or explain&lt;/em&gt; policy, in the sense that they want vendors to make their code available as open source (comply), or provide sufficient arguments why they choose not to do so (explain). Your employer might want to prepare the company for a future in which this policy becomes more ubiquitous. This is not something you do overnight. It requires planning and a clear strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, if I hadn't left the company, I might have considered making the library available under a more permissive license, as I explain in chapter 21:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted DITO [a low-code solution that was created as an alternative to using iText] to create as much value as possible for the company and&#xA;chose to bring it to the market using a SaaS business model. If DITO&#xA;succeeded in generating sufficient revenue, I considered releasing the&#xA;core iText library under a permissive license hoping that it would&#xA;become the de facto reference application for PDF, possibly&#xA;eliminating the need for any other FOSS PDF library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many companies use open source as a business model. I have written an article describing eight ways to monetize FOSS that I have tried and tested over the years: &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/ossurvival/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Survival, a Story from the Trenches&lt;/a&gt;. This article was inspired by what I wrote in chapter 16, the chapter that concludes the second part of my book (&amp;quot;Building Free and Open Source Software&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fragment from that chapter that is not in the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Aitken has an interesting view on the evolution of FOSS. He&#xA;identifies four generations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generation I started with the thought leaders we discussed in Chapter 8 and 9—people such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric&#xA;Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others, who wanted to make software free&#xA;and allow anyone to contribute to the improvement of the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generation II consisted of people who began to commercialize open source and launched the first commercial open source companies. I&#xA;didn’t make Andrew’s list, but people who preceded me were, for&#xA;instance, Mårten Mickos, who commercialized MySql and sold the company&#xA;to Sun Microsystems, and Marc Fleury, who sold jBoss to Red Hat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With Generation III, the creation of FOSS shifted from individual developers to IT companies. Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and Netflix are&#xA;examples of companies that open-sourced part of their code. Obviously,&#xA;they didn’t do that out of idealism, otherwise Google wouldn’t have&#xA;had any problem making the applications that used iText open source.&#xA;The main reason was self-interest: by allowing other companies to use&#xA;their source code, they benefited from all the improvements that were&#xA;added to that code by developers they didn’t have to pay.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Generation IV is characterized by large global corporations such as Capital One, Lloyds Bank, and Walmart, whose core business&#xA;traditionally wasn’t IT, but who saw the benefits of making the source&#xA;code of their software open source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could argue: if companies such as Google, Netflix, Capital One, Walmart... find it interesting to open source part of their codebase, why wouldn't it be interesting for your employer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another fragment, taken from the same chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a SaaS business is always a great idea. It’s also great if&#xA;you’re willing to share part of the underlying technology as FOSS,&#xA;just like the companies that mark the third generation in the&#xA;evolution of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their main business isn’t selling software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Facebook’s main business is selling ads; the users are Facebook’s product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Google offers SaaS (software as a service) as well as IaaS (infrastructure as a service)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amazon sells books and other products, but also offers IaaS with Amazon Web Services (AWS)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Microsoft paid hundreds of millions for Xamarin and then made the technology available as FOSS, driving developers toward MS Visual&#xA;Studio and Azure, which are paid services&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Companies such as TCS and Infosys sell projects in which they use FOSS abundantly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, these companies are perceived as FOSS heroes because they&#xA;distribute plenty of FOSS products using a permissive license. They&#xA;can afford to do so because they have a business model in place that&#xA;generates sufficient money—selling products that are very different&#xA;from the FOSS product, but they’re not sharing out of charity. The&#xA;more developers adopt their FOSS products and frameworks, the more&#xA;these corporations strengthen their position in the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These fragments were taken from the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entreprenerd: Building a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt; (released in May 2021).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2021-06-01T07:26:29.887" LastActivityDate="2021-06-01T07:26:29.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11758" CreationDate="2021-06-02T09:09:09.963" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After careful thought, I find I cannot agree with &lt;a href=&quot;/a/11765&quot;&gt;my colleague's answer&lt;/a&gt;.  It is certainly true, as you show, that the GPL FAQ says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s13 doesn't apply if &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a program is not expressly designed to interact with a user through a network, but is [merely] being run in an environment where it happens to do so&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that s13 doesn't include that language.  It says only, as you also note, that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Note the difference between &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;expressly designed to interact through a network&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;supporting interaction through a network&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  The latter is clearly a broader test; arguably, &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; broader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were this to go to trial, the FSF might reasonably be expected to file an &lt;em&gt;amicus&lt;/em&gt; brief propounding their interpretation of their licence.  The problem there is that courts &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0HBOY8b2doENEhMU3FsWGthMFU/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sometimes reject&lt;/a&gt; such briefs.  Courts sometimes feel that a licence should be interpreted based on what the licence says, not what its authors later say about it; a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;four corners&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; interpretation, as the linked order puts it.  So there's no guarantee that the FSF's viewpoint would even be admissible, much less persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And without that you're back to the test in AGPLv3 s13.  One could argue that coding an application specifically to run on an OS that is globally-known to support network interaction out of the box, then hosting it on an internetworked example of such an OS, while failing to add tests to prevent non-local users from invoking it, was sufficient to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;support interaction through a network&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  I don't say that such an argument would be persuasive, but it could certainly be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my feeling is that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you modify AGPL software, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you host it in such a way that it's possible for someone to use it who isn't seated in front of the hosting system at the time, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; you should be prominently advertising source availability to your users, and ready to satisfy requests for it.  It's just easier and safer all round, and I'm glad to hear that you would do exactly that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2021-06-03T08:43:02.780" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T08:43:02.780" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11772" CreationDate="2021-06-03T00:54:07.423" Score="3" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am considering using QT for a commercial hardware product. The product will have a Raspberry Pi Compute Module and will run standard Raspberry Pi Linux OS. It will load our application, which will dynamically link to standard QT library on the OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue is that one of the requirements of the LGPL is for us to provide the instructions on how to replace the QT library. We can do that, but it would require the user to kind of disassemble the product and potentially damage the casing to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't mind doing that, but would that comply with the license requirements? Do we even have to do it? Can we simply provide the source of the QT library and let the user know that if they were to replace it it would work, and they can do so by changing these files on the RPi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23188" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-03T06:54:05.257" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T13:21:28.507" Title="Is it possible to use QT under LGPL for a hardware commercial product?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2021-06-03T07:39:01.147" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you've interpreted the requirements correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you consider the intent of LGPL, it makes sense: users should have the freedom to replace the library with a better implementation.  Without the means to transfer the improved implementation to the device, then they would not have this freedom, so the LGPL really needs to mandate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, it's better if you can provide a connector (e.g. USB type B socket) over which the updates can be transferred without having to disassemble the product.  You probably want that for your own field updates, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T07:39:01.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11770" CreationDate="2021-06-03T13:21:28.507" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it would require the user to kind of disassemble the product and potentially damage the casing to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the LGPL is concerned, if you can have a fully functioning device after updating the Qt libraries, then it doesn't matter to what degree the user needed to damage the device to gain access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there might be other requirements, like product safety, based on which you may want to limit the amount of damage that would be done when opening the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But cosmetic damage or a broken &amp;quot;warranty void if broken&amp;quot; seal definitely complies with the LGPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-03T13:21:28.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-03T13:46:52.060" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I slightly modified some libraries from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, published them in the form of apps on the Google Play Store and monetized them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The libraries are licensed under &amp;quot;BSD 2-Clause &amp;quot;Simplified&amp;quot; License&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Apache License 2.0&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to my understanding of both of these licenses: I am allowed to modify, publish (even in the form of apps) and monetize as I did without any consequences. But, just to be sure, my questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my understanding correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And do I need to perform any extra procedures to be fully compliant with these licenses? The screenshots below mention the &amp;quot;license and copyright notice&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;state changes&amp;quot; conditions. It is not really clear how that would be applied in my case (if it needs to be applied); can someone please advise?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is how the libraries' licenses look like in GitHub:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GveK5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GveK5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iEaK7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iEaK7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate your guidance and please don't hesitate to ask for more details. Thank you for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Human" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T08:52:56.273" Title="Published &amp; monetized apps on the Google Play Store using GitHub libraries licensed under &quot;BSD 2-Clause &quot;Simplified&quot; License&quot; and &quot;Apache License 2.0&quot;" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1165" CreationDate="2021-06-04T06:01:34.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question I posed above is a bit ambiguous. Did I mean a larger player using FOSS and retaining the FOSS license to crowd out the competitor or did I include straight up copyright infringement? Many years later, I think the original intent of the question was the former (bigger player pushes out smaller player while still maintaining the FOSS license) but I didn't clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In lieu of this, here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an example of Sun Microsystems stealing FOSS&lt;/a&gt;, stripping the original author's name and licensing information off of it and claiming their own copyright on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brendan Gregg, of Sydney Australia, circa 2005 had been creating FOSS scripts to extend DTrace. A visiting Sun consultant was demoing new functionality to Gregg wherein it became apparent the visiting consultant was demoing Brendan Gregg's own software to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a choice quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of my tools had even included the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Author: Brendan Gregg  [Sydney, Australia]&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, here he was, in Sydney, Australia, trying to sell Brendan Gregg's tools to Brendan Gregg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the Australian Sun staff interrupted: &amp;quot;Those say copyright Sun Microsystems.&amp;quot; Most of my tools had my own copyright and a GPLv2 or CDDL license. But these only had Sun's standard copyright message, and the open source licenses had been stripped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You deleted my name! And the copyrights and licenses!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other Aussie added, to the VIP: &amp;quot;You can't do that.&amp;quot; A silence fell over the room as the magnitude of what had happened sunk in. While some at Sun were encouraging open source contributions and building a community, others were ripping off that same community. Taking their work, changing the licence and copyrights, and then selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20210604051229/https://brendangregg.com/blog/2021-06-04/an-unbelievable-demo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org link&lt;/a&gt; to future proof against link rot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T06:01:34.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11773" CreationDate="2021-06-04T08:52:56.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, your understanding is correct that you can use libraries under those licenses in your monetized app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And do I need to perform any extra procedures to be fully compliant with these licenses? The screenshots below mention the &amp;quot;license and copyright notice&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;state changes&amp;quot; conditions. It is not really clear how that would be applied in my case (if it needs to be applied); can someone please advise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the licenses, you must inform the users of your app that it contains code that is subject to the 2-clause BSD or the Apache 2.0 license and you need to reproduce the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably, this information is shown in a screen that also contains your copyright and licensing information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to create goodwill with the open source community, you not just mention that &amp;quot;some code&amp;quot; is under those open source licenses, but you actually name the libraries and under which license they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither the BSD nor the Apache license has a requirement for distributing source code, so you don't have to do anything in that respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-04T08:52:56.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11776" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11778" CreationDate="2021-06-04T12:54:45.880" Score="0" ViewCount="699" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does a licence for a product such as Express JS take account of the most onerous licence in its dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We only develop in JavaScript and use NPM for module management; does NPM itself do any checks that a module's licence covers its dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if as a company we only need to be concerned with the top-level licence, or do we need to manually check all the dependencies and sub dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24193" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-06-05T16:33:46.913" LastActivityDate="2021-06-05T16:33:46.913" Title="Do I have to worry about software dependency licence management?" Tags="|licensing|dependencies|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11776" CreationDate="2021-06-05T10:18:36.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could argue that in theory, if Express, for argument's sake, is licensed under the MIT license, it shouldn't depend on anything that conflicts with that license, but that statement essentially boils down to you trusting their process. At the end of the day, you are distributing a product, so you are accountable for everything you distribute, including transitive dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-06-05T10:18:36.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11776" CreationDate="2021-06-05T12:45:10.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You distribute your product. Thus you are liable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Draw whatever conclusion you want. Usually you want to make sure that your product and all the dependencies you use really are under a license which is compatible with what you ship. Just checking the top-level license does not cut it in the least and might make you target of possible copyright infringement claims. That might be much more uncomfortable and expensive than exercising care in choosing dependencies carefully and checking their license status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue becomes possibly clearer when you think about the fact that not all dependencies are necessarily required, but that there can be optional dependencies, providing certain functionality which not everyone needs or wants (for whatever reason, possibly even licensing reasons). One of the best examples for this is ffmpeg or VLC which come with a huge amount of possible plug-ins and dependencies - proprietary and all kind of open-source licensed ones. But you have the choice; one can even compile versions which may not be distributed due to incompatible, mutually-exclusive licenses of the different components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically libraries (and programmes) all have their own licenses, which need not be the smallest common denominator of any libraries they make use of themselves. That allows replacement of dependencies by interface-compatible ones which might offer enhanced functionality, different license etc - giving the users overall more flexibility and choice to fit their needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: you as company will have to exercise the same care and process that any large(r) Linux distribution such as Debian does for the software packages they offer: vetting the installer packages for licenses of the programme and all dependencies contained in the package so that they can deliver correct information. Distributing software for commercial interest, you might want to exercise possibly even greater care than a not-for-profit organization might do where a claim of wilful copyright infringement is harder to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the NPM module management is certainly a good way or tool to help you checking it and going through the list - but you should not rely on its information as it does not give you any guarantee. Just because &lt;em&gt;someone on the internet&lt;/em&gt; said it's ok or whatever license, doesn't mean it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-06-05T13:06:06.710" LastActivityDate="2021-06-05T13:06:06.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1165" CreationDate="2021-06-05T13:45:15.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The late &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pieter Hintjens&lt;/a&gt;, responsible for ZeroMQ, included an interesting story in the ZeroMQ manual. He gave it the title &lt;a href=&quot;https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/chapter6/#Eat-Me&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eat Me&lt;/a&gt; and it's about the proud developer of some software that he released under a permissive license. He was happy giving talks about his project and doing a consultancy gigs here and there. He even hired an employee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a more commercially oriented company took his project and released it under a copyleft license. That company respected all the legal obligations of the permissive license, so everything they did was correct from a purely legal point of view, but Patrick was extremely unhappy with the situation and abandoned working on open source in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As similar scenario almost happened to me too. I am the original developer of iText, an open source PDF library which I originally released under the MPL/LGPL. This library was used in Google Analytics, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. Google would upgrade to the newest version on a regular basis. I was extremely proud that Google found my software interesting enough to use it. The fact that I didn't make any money with it, wasn't important, or so I thought. However, as more companies started to use iText, it was getting harder and harder to combine my work on iText with my day job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then one day, my wife came back from the hospital with our son, informing me that our boy had been diagnosed with bone cancer. Life became hell, but that didn't stop people from sending me tons of mails, asking for help with their project. Even when I explained that I had other worries, some people could be very persistent. In one case, I mailed the employer of one of the developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the mail I received from that employer (in Dutch):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hKzoj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hKzoj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mail from Colruyt&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of translating this mail, allow me to share a page from my book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SteOu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SteOu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Page from the book Entreprenerd&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: I live in Belgium and a Belgian company preferred involving TCS rather than its own IT division (because TCS was less expensive). A developer at TCS used my software and asked me to solve a problem for free. Unfortunately, the developer at TCS failed to provide me an &lt;a href=&quot;http://sscce.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSCCE&lt;/a&gt; that would allow me to reproduce the problem. When I contacted the Belgian company and proposed to work for them directly, which would probably solve their problem, I was told there was no time and no budget to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have to start looking for a way to generate money with iText. As I had no clue how to do that, I thought Google would be willing to help me out with some advice. See Chapter 13 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entreprenerd&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mCQDC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mCQDC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Fragment from the book Entreprenerd&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was one of the mails I received from Chris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nqRau.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nqRau.png&quot; alt=&quot;Mail correspondence with Chris DiBona&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was extremely frustrated to discover that everyone was very happy to use my software, but no one seemed to care enough to help me out finding a way to ensure the further development and the future of iText.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remembered the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google open source guru: 'Why we ban the AGPL'&lt;/a&gt; in which Chris DiBona was quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This might sound a little jerky, but a lot of the [available] AGPL&#xA;software, we don't need to use,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It addressed areas where we&#xA;already have software. So there isn't a lot of call for it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people I had eventually hired to help me with the business used this article to convince me to change the license from the MPL/LGPL to the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/db5WB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/db5WB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Fragment from the book Entreprenerd&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google had been updating its applications with new versions&#xA;of iText on a regular basis but stopped doing so as soon as iText changed its license to the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the license change, Google had four options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Continue using old versions of iText that were still MPL/&#xA;LGPL free of charge for as long as possible&lt;/em&gt;. That could&#xA;work because it’s impossible to change a FOSS license&#xA;retroactively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Continue using the latest versions of iText free of charge.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;In this case, they would have to release the complete&#xA;source code of all its software containing iText as&#xA;(A)GPL software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Continue using the latest versions of iText in a closed source&#xA;context. This required entering into a commercial&#xA;agreement with iText to avoid having to disclose their&#xA;source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Replace iText as soon as possible with another library.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Obviously, they would have to find one that could be&#xA;used free of charge and without having to meet any&#xA;copyleft conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google initially chose the first option.&#xA;Even today, Google is still using the more than ten-year-old&#xA;iText 2.1.6 by 1T3XT in Google Calendar.&#xA;Google certainly didn’t want to release its code for Analytics&#xA;and Docs as AGPL software. There were some negotiations&#xA;about a license for Google’s use of iText in Docs, but those&#xA;didn’t amount to anything.&#xA;For Google Analytics, Google chose the fourth option.&#xA;Initially, it replaced iText with a library called Cairo, which&#xA;was a huge step backward in terms of the quality and usability&#xA;of the reports. Cairo was later replaced by Skia PDF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I received plenty of angry mails and insults for the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2UpYR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2UpYR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Fragment from the book Entreprenerd&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Developing a business for iText was quite a rollercoaster, but eventually, I managed to win the Belgian Edition of Deloitte's Fast 50, meaning that iText Group was the fastest growing technology company in the country. In less than 10 years, we went from a revenue of 0 to more than 10M. Eventually, I was able to sell the company for a grand total of about $50M.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/ossurvival/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Survival: A Story from the Trenches&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, there's also the book. I've made &lt;a href=&quot;https://leanpub.com/entreprenerd/c/SE-OS-2021-06&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a coupon with a reduction&lt;/a&gt; (valid until June 30) for those who are interested in reading the full story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2021-06-07T08:23:11.990" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T08:23:11.990" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11781" CreationDate="2021-06-05T17:02:08.390" Score="4" ViewCount="908" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a project that happens to use a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of open-source third-party libraries by different authors. Most of these libraries use the same license (mostly MIT, with the occasional Apache or BSD license here or there). My LICENSE.txt file will likely be incredibly long and repetitive, but I'm not going to skip out on compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I use a lot of libraries that are released under the exact same license, must I include the text of the license once for each library?&lt;/strong&gt; Or can I just include the license once, plus the &lt;em&gt;unabridged&lt;/em&gt; copyright statement (author, year, license name, etc.) for each library? Or does that depend on the license itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I understand that some licenses have named variations (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;     BSD-3-Clause&lt;/a&gt; vs. &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Military-License.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3-Clause-No-Military-License&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause&lt;/a&gt;). For the purpose of this question, I consider named variants to be different licenses entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5006" LastEditorUserId="5006" LastEditDate="2021-06-05T21:33:53.350" LastActivityDate="2021-06-05T21:33:53.350" Title="If I use a lot of libraries with the exact same license, can I condense the required attributions and notices?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|license|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11780" CreationDate="2021-06-05T20:12:01.177" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In principle, you can deduplicate the licensing terms. However, this is most appropriate for lengthy licenses with a clear name, e.g. Apache-2.0 or the GPL licenses. These are designed to be kept in a separate files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For shorter licenses in the MIT or BSD families, there might be small differences that you would technically have to preserve. If you want to deduplicate those, don't do it manually. Personally, I don't think that deduplication for smallish licenses is very useful, in particular if you assemble your licensing documentation automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, you can at most deduplicate the license terms. You must not abbreviate copyright notices. Where licenses are kept in a separate file, it is also common to provide a short license notice, e.g. the GPL “This program is free software” notice. For those, the same concerns as with short-ish notices apply: yes, you could deduplicate these, but there might be subtle differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you only have to include the license for a library if you include that library with your software, for example if you provide pre-built binaries or if you vendor these dependencies. Merely referencing other libraries in your source code doesn't impose requirements on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-06-05T20:12:01.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5010" CreationDate="2021-06-06T16:07:23.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the answers have looked at this topic overwhelmingly from the perspective of what is legal or illegal. Obviously this is valuable and is what matters in the end, but I think that approaching this from an ethical standpoint might be helpful, even to come to a legal conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For use of an unmodified AGPL (or GPL for that matter) library, you need to show that your work is not derivative: that is, that the work can function without the library. This is unconditional unless you distribute the work also under the same license (copyleft).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spirit of the (A)GPL is to give modifications (which includes additions such as an application wrapper around a library) back to the community by making the derivative work open source. Thus when it comes to embedding a modified version of the library's source code in your closed-source application, the (A)GPL does not allow this, because you are not giving back those modifications to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, if you make modifications to the (A)GPL library and open-source those modifications, but then are able to satisfy the non-derivative criterion for your application w/r/t that modified, open source library, usage of the modified library would be perfectly acceptable. After all, the purpose of the (A)GPL is for modified versions of the code that are also open-sourced to be on the same footing as the original; that is the definition of copyleft. Therefore by open-sourcing your modifications to the AGPL library (whether through a middleman or not, though I find the middleman unnecessary), you use the resulting also-AGPL library under the exact same conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to say is that the other answers focus far too much on the &lt;code&gt;closed-source server-side application&lt;/code&gt; and not enough on your intent to open-source the modifications to the AGPL library. Again, as long as you use the modified library—that is required to be open source and licensed under the same AGPL license—under the terms of its license, you are in the clear here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;To adapt this to your specific situation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL library X contains a bug that no one is fixing, but that makes my closed source application useless as long as it isn't fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you depend on the library that much then your work is derivative and the usage of the library is not allowed regardless of whether it's modified or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I don't want to share my own code, but I want the bug to be fixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this is not allowed in any situation. What I don't understand is that you say that the middle man would publish the modified library under the terms of the AGPL (and thus open source)—so why do you say you don't want to share the code? Isn't that contradictory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;So to answer your question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use the middleman loophole to reduce AGPL to LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously you cannot use the modified library in your closed-source application (under any circumstances) without publishing the modification. If you do publish the modifications, they are under the AGPL as well due to copyleft. In none of these situations does the library magically become LGPL. You still must use the library under the terms of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24201" LastEditorUserId="24201" LastEditDate="2021-06-06T16:14:22.710" LastActivityDate="2021-06-06T16:14:22.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11784" CreationDate="2021-06-07T04:49:04.600" Score="2" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a server that allows for anyone to do processing on different vector files. One feature we are planning is to allow them to convert SVG's with text elements to paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to do this accurately, we need to have the fonts they use installed on our server. Therefore it would require us to also have some licensed fonts installed on our server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm wondering is, how does the font's license affect this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that, since our server is only a pass-through (e.g. the user of it explicitly asks to convert licensed font X), it would be the user's responsibility to make sure that the end use of the converted work is used accurately (and they hold a license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would imagine that our server holds the same responsibility as, say, Illustrator or Inkscape. E.g. it can replicate licensed fonts even if the end user does not own a license (even though they should).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any input would be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24207" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T06:47:29.660" Title="Converting fonts to curves for other companies' drawings: Font Licensing?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11783" CreationDate="2021-06-07T06:47:29.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends purely on the licensing of the fonts. While Open Source font licenses such as the OFL won't impose restrictions, proprietary fonts might only be available under contracts that impose usage limitations. A lot of software – including Inkscape – circumvents these issues by not bundling any fonts and instead using whatever fonts are installed on a local system. But since you provide a service rather than a locally installable software, you cannot take this “shortcut”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that font licensing is pretty complex, and varies dramatically between jurisdiction. The typeface may or may not be subject to copyright or similar rights such as design patents. The name may or may not be trademarked. However, the font itself is a computer program and clearly subject to copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the font license is primarily concerned about the font as a computer software which renders the glyphs, your argument that users should be responsible for figuring out licensing is not convincing. It is not the user but you who has installed the font on your server. The resulting appearance of the typeface might not be subject to the font license. Of course, you could asks users to upload any non-free fonts they want to use, but that may not be compatible with the licenses of these fonts – talk with a lawyer first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some SaaS products like Google Docs have a similar issue as you. What they do is to license basic fonts such as Times New Roman, to offer a vast library of Open Source fonts, and to commission some custom typefaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T06:47:29.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11787" CreationDate="2021-06-07T08:02:34.050" Score="1" ViewCount="1472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure to say about it here (but for the now it’s place most focused on law in SE). Recently I found a guy on routinehub who said that all his app is copyrighted. He made app fully and only from existing files copyrighted by apple. Was this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This guy is this one if something: &lt;a href=&quot;https://routinehub.co/shortcut/9029/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://routinehub.co/shortcut/9029/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;documentation of MDM (which was tried to copyright) is here : &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM-Protocol-Reference.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM-Protocol-Reference.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24210" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-06-07T18:51:52.560" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T18:51:52.560" Title="Can someone else copyright for themselves already copyrighted things?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11785" CreationDate="2021-06-07T08:48:32.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You posit that A writes code and publishes it, then B takes it, makes copyrightable modifications to it, and republishes the resulting work.  You ask what the copyright position in this resulting work is, and whether such activity is lawful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result would indeed be copyrighted, as the Berne Convention requires, but the rights would vest in more than one entity.  Both A &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; B now have a copyright interest in the resulting work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making a derivative work, as B has done in this case, is an activity normally controlled by copyright.  Whether B's activity is lawful depends on the &lt;em&gt;licence&lt;/em&gt; under which A made their work available.  If A made it available under a permissive free licence (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt;), then A has granted permission for such derivative works to be made and published.  If A made it available under a copyleft free licence (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;) then A has granted permission for derivative works to be made and published, subject to B observing certain conditions (including but not limited to publication of source, and relicensing under GPLv3) which B's failure to observe would invalidate, rendering B's activity a violation of A's copyright.  If A didn't publish under a licence that permitted derivative works (such as most proprietary licences) then B is violating A's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot tell from the information you have provided what Apple's licence on the original work was, so we cannot say which scenario applies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T08:48:32.453" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11785" CreationDate="2021-06-07T08:52:10.553" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all his app is copyrighted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is almost certainly true, in the sense that probably all the code is covered by copyright protection and that one or multiple persons or companies hold those copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as you write something down and it meets a very simple test of creativity (there is more than one way to write it), then what you wrote is protected by copyrights and others may only make changes/additions to it with permission (a.k.a. a license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He made app fully and only from existing files copyrighted by apple. Was this legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is impossible to tell, because we don't know if and what permissions Apple gave for the use of the relevant files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T08:52:10.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-07T14:42:41.630" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please assume the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a GPL software (G), which provides API to write plugins to this software (GP).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a closed-source / proprietary software (P), which has an openly documented JSON messaging protocol, i.e., the manufacturer of (P) defined specific commands of the form &lt;code&gt;{'command': 'get info', 'type': 'text'}&lt;/code&gt; to enable communication with (P).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(P) is an interface to a piece of hardware (not really a driver, but similar) designed for the mere purpose to deliver and receive information from other programs via the defined JSON command strings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now write a plugin (GP) for (G), which communicates with the proprietary software (P) over the documented JSON protocol. (GP) and (P) exchange both simple text data and image data over this protocol. For example, (P) delivers some device information to the plugin (GP) upon requests. (GP) processes the information, prepares a image in a specific format based on the received information, and then sends this image to (P).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the proprietary software (P) and the GPL'ed plugin (GP) considered mere aggregates and can, thus, (GP) be published? Or would publishing (GP) violate the GPL, because it communicates with the proprietary software for which I don't have the source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21616" LastEditorUserId="21616" LastEditDate="2021-06-07T14:58:54.273" LastActivityDate="2021-06-07T14:58:54.273" Title="Documented protocol of proprietary software + plugin of GPL software" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-08T16:51:00.787" Score="-1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;it was some time ago but, yeah, my emojis (yes, emojis, not a joke, that's not even funny) ruined my github account (i just got flagged). for the now i was trying to use other platforms/solutions (external server on my pc, google drive/mega cloud, etc.) but idk for how long i need to wait for community to be &amp;quot;unlocked&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my problem is that there exist this repo: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gamejolt/gamejolt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/gamejolt/gamejolt&lt;/a&gt; , i have some thing to people who made it (not even only me, they ruined themselves), so i made emojis similar to theirs one, for the now my emojis are hosted there: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mega.nz/folder/SQx1SSQJ#GmDxGwLJhlX1p1UytBj80A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;. all theirs repo is under mit and there isnt even said anything about other licenses. i made only SIMILAR emojis to theirs one and licensed it under CC-BY-SA-4.0 (for them to prevent some updates). was this legal? could they flag me? or this flag was because of yellying at them under issues page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24210" LastEditorUserId="24210" LastEditDate="2021-06-08T18:37:20.690" LastActivityDate="2021-06-08T19:01:08.213" Title="a problem with SIMILAR emojis to existing ones" Tags="|mit|github|cc-by-sa|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11792" CreationDate="2021-06-08T18:27:37.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creating and distributing similar emoji, after you have seen the original images, is surely a derivative work under copyright law, which requires permission from the original copyright holder. The images have apparently been licensed under a permissive MIT license, which would give you permission to make a derivative work and redistribute it, but there are several things to be aware of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As you identify, there is a LICENSE file but no formal guidance about which components the license applies to. However, the language in the README makes it pretty clear to me that this was intended to apply to the entire repo (&amp;quot;This is the whole frontend for Game Jolt... We wanted to make it open source...&amp;quot;) and I hope a court would agree (but I'm not a lawyer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the emoji are indeed covered by that MIT license, then you may use them, modified or unmodified, under the terms of that license grant. That requires that the &amp;quot;copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot; You may make a derivative but must keep the copyright notice and MIT terms attached to your images somehow. Keeping them alongside in a separate file, as is done in the original repo, is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you didn't do this when you shared your derivative, then you were in violation of the license's requirements and infringed the author's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is permissive in that it allows inclusion of MIT-licensed work in differently-licensed work. It is quite common for MIT-licensed work to be included in someone else's proprietary closed-source work and in GPL/copyleft work. You may place &lt;em&gt;your own copyrightable changes&lt;/em&gt; under another license, as long as you also include the MIT-required notices that allow use of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it another way, you may not relicense the original MIT work, but that MIT license does not forbid distribution alongside/containing differently-licensed modifications. You may rely on the MIT grant of rights to prepare a derivate (as long as you abide by MIT's requirements) and simultaneously offer your changes under CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what can be done about GitHub, I'm not sure. Assuming you abided by the requirements of the license, you might be able to report abuse to GitHub (or, as an extreme option, possibly sue the author for false statements that have caused you harm). If you didn't include the required notices, then unfortunately you did commit copyright infringement, and the author took a surprisingly harsh but ultimately permissible response for your failure to do so. I don't know what GitHub's policy is about reinstating accounts after infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot get your account reinstated, there are numerous other services that provide free, version-controlled hosting. Notably, &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitlab&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bitbucket&lt;/a&gt; are well-known direct competitors to GitHub that offer free service tiers. When you do move your work somewhere else, make sure you include the appropriate notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I don't know what transpired between you and this other author, but if this author had your account disabled as a first step, rather than first asking you to add the MIT-required notices, then they may not understand that they have given you permission to make derivates. If they complain even after you add the required notices, then you may need to explain to them the rights they have granted you by attaching the MIT license to their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be concerned about including the permissive language of the MIT license alongside your more restrictively-license CC BY-SA work, because you are afraid someone may use it under the MIT license only. This is a common point of confusion about derivates that use work under the MIT license: you must preserve the license and copyright notice, but you may offer modified work under more restrictive terms. In short, the MIT terms apply, but you you also add more restrictive terms on top of those terms that apply to your modifications only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify this, you might make a single LICENSING file that begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The files in this directory are the combined work of the Game Jolt authors and Hacks Norris, who has modified them. You are free to modify and redistribute  these emoji yourself, provided you comply simultaneously with both licenses below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the MIT license, under which Game Jolt is offered, and also&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0, under which Hack Norris's modifications are offered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot satisfy both licenses simultaneously, you may not redistribute them and/or your modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then include both sets of licenses and copyright notices, yours and Game Jolt's, in sequence within that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-06-08T19:01:08.213" LastActivityDate="2021-06-08T19:01:08.213" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-08T20:37:40.757" Score="2" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the light of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/grafana-loki-tempo-relicensing-to-agplv3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;new AGPL Grafana license&lt;/a&gt;, can we still use &lt;strong&gt;unmodifed&lt;/strong&gt; Grafana served as a docker image on cloud as the visualisation component of our commercial service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding so far is that it is OK to continue using Grafana, based on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ubunlog.com/en/grafana-cambio-de-la-licencia-de-apache-2-0-a-agplv3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who use unmodified versions Grafana on their services or post&#xA;the change code (for example, Red Hat Openshift and Cloud Foundry)&#xA;they will not be affected by the license change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even in the worst case looks like we can use the Enterprise Edition, as mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://grafana.com/blog/2021/04/20/qa-with-our-ceo-on-relicensing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for those that don’t intend to modify the code, simply use our&#xA;Enterprise download. This is a free-to-use, proprietary-licensed,&#xA;compiled binary that matches the features of the AGPL version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts/experience on Grafana AGPL is welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24235" LastActivityDate="2021-06-09T15:10:14.910" Title="Can I use unmodified Grafana as the visualisation component of my commercial service?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11801" CreationDate="2021-06-09T12:15:29.747" Score="-1" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many developers, students, etc. put their code on GitHub without any links to authors of used components and licenses. I tried find a new job and yesterday HR ask me create Rest API with django + drf and publish it on GitHub. I read that if repository doesn't have any license it means that it is 'forbidden all'. Does it mean that if the repository exists without any license that is NO distribution? On my portfolio I have all links to authors and base licenses. But if I need quickly create a project and demonstrate it to hirer I don't have time to create links to the authors or licenses, maybe after demonstration I can create it or simply drop or hide project. Is it violation too if it only short time demo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I violating the terms of the licenses (like Apache 2.0, MIT, GPL) when I publish my project that uses dependencies like Django, React or Spring Boot  on GitHub without any license or copyrights and links to authors of used components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastEditorUserId="22986" LastEditDate="2021-06-12T19:57:52.970" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T23:01:02.553" Title="Am I violating the terms of the base licenses when I publish my project on GitHub without any license and/or links to authors of used components?" Tags="|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|github|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11795" CreationDate="2021-06-10T06:34:04.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use third party software inside your own programs, and it is licensed (which it most likely will be if it is available to the general public) the requirements for use will be depend on the terms of the license. This will differ from one work to another. For example most proprietary software will not require you to do much of anything, providing that you paid for that license beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opensource licenses are different. There are a few different types of license available. Different versions may have different requirements from users. Three things, however, will always be required. First of all, you need to have a copy of the license. Just like a driver's license is proof that you are allowed to drive, a software user license proves that you are allowed to use that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of these requirements sort of implies the second. That is, you are required to be bound by and/or to carry out any terms to which you agree on that license. This is where  the &amp;quot;mention the author in your work thing comes in.&amp;quot; Note that this requirement isn't &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; a requirement of open source licensing. It isn't written somewhere in the ten commandments of opensource (or in any law) that you must do anything printed on a license to use the app. However, remember, having a &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; license &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; required by law. Therefore, Developers only need to state &amp;quot;this license is only valid if these demands are met.&amp;quot; It isn't that much different than proprietary. Paid purchase is more or less just another demand prerequisite to license validation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the third rule (requirement) is not only important, it is the very heart of open-source. It states that you must include the open-source. Believe it or not, this is where open-source gets it's name! (and water is indeed wet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just means that, no matter how you decide to distribute your application, be it via package manager, as a clickable download from a website, on CD-ROM via snail mail, or by any other method, the source code has to be somehow publicly available. If you distribute a java app as a jar, you need to either include a copy of the source code, provide a link to it, or at least provide directions for how to obtain it. Note that in the case of included third-party software, this was already the responsibility of the original developers. Therefore, it should have already been included (or pointed to) as part of the software package that you received. However, since you are now using that code, and since it is still open-source, the requirement falls on you to make sure that it stays in tact. Just ask Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other requirements,&lt;/a&gt; laid out by the Open-Source Initiative, but at the end of the day, they are just a standards group. When I refer to open-source, I am speaking of the free and often community-built, but licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24259" LastEditorUserId="24259" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T23:01:02.553" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T23:01:02.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-10T21:06:18.210" Score="3" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first time posting here and I'm sorry if any of my questions are silly. This is my first time dealing with open source code and licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a small game engine and I decided to use this person's tutorial as my starting point. His engine is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, too, decided to put my engine under the same license, but I don't have any intentions of distributing my engine/ code in any way. I am building this engine (which I may not even finish) purely for educational and self enrichment purposes, but since I will have the code on GitHub I know that anyone can access it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't exactly fork this person's engine over to my project, what I'm doing is following along with his tutorial from day one starting from the ground up and reimplementing his ideas into my own using methods and design patterns that I'm learning/ want to explore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On occasion, I do take some of his code to use if, for example, I don't have an interest in learning how to program a particular subsystem or if at the moment I don't have an idea for how I would reimplement something as my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I go about applying the license to these individual code files that I'm taking from the developer? If they are in a folder is it enough to include the license in the folder or do I have to include the license in each file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I understand that I must include a report with all the changes done to files I modify? Where would this file go and what constitutes modification vs. my own work. Say, for example, I use someone's algorithm under the Apache 2.0 license but rewrite about 85% of it to work for my use case and keep 15% of it original. At what point would something count as being original rather than modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24275" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T14:03:10.373" Title="How exactly do I comply with open source software under Apache 2.0 if I'm only using some code and not all?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-11T11:28:24.957" Score="5" ViewCount="424" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently ran into a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/%7Eleojia/projects/pencilsketch/pencil_drawing.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;research paper&lt;/a&gt; which explains a technique of image-processing. Now, the paper just explains the process and is not based on any specific coding-language, but we can say that explains the algorithm used for that image-processing technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper was not published under any specific license, or it is not specifically mentioned. So, I do not know whether it is copyrighted and patented or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I write a code based on that paper, can I publish it on GitHub or another website under any open-source license or am I legally barred from doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5670/using-code-from-research-paper-under-different-license&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question, but that does not answer mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22986" LastActivityDate="2021-06-12T08:38:09.067" Title="Licensing a code based on a research paper" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11795" CreationDate="2021-06-11T13:34:31.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I violating the terms of the licenses (like Apache 2.0, MIT, GPL) when I publish my project that uses dependencies like Django, React or Spring Boot on GitHub without any license or copyrights and links to authors of used components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy code under such a license into your repository, or if you create a deployable package that physically contains such code, then you must include a copy of the relevant license and copyright texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is in addition to complying with other requirements the license may impose upon you (like using GPL-compatible licenses for all parts of the code if any part is under the GPL itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just refer to the dependencies in your code and use a package manager to retrieve them from wherever, then you are not required to have the corresponding license and copyright texts in your repository itself. And there is no open-source license that requires you to have links to the authors or sites of your dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-06-14T07:52:51.693" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T07:52:51.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11799" CreationDate="2021-06-11T13:52:54.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I go about applying the license to these individual code files that I'm taking from the developer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the file contains a comment with a reference to the license and a copyright notice, then you must keep that intact. Also you must make sure that the full text of the license can easily be found within your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start making changes to a copied file, there are two possibilities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are using the same license for your own code, add a copyright notice of your own next to the existing copyright notice(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are using a different license for your own code, add your copyright and licensing information above the existing block and separate the two with a statement along the lines of &amp;quot;this file contains code under the following license:&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I understand that I must include a report with all the changes done to files I modify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the Apache 2.0 license does not require that you keep a detailed record of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; you changed. The license only requires an indication &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; you changed something and that is accomplished by adding your own copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] what constitutes modification vs. my own work. Say, for example, I use someone's algorithm under the Apache 2.0 license but rewrite about 85% of it to work for my use case and keep 15% of it original. At what point would something count as being original rather than modified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not start out with an empty file, then every change you make to that file is &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; a modification and your work. If you look at a more granular scale, then when you add a new function from scratch to an existing file, then the function is your original work but at the same time it is a modification of the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-11T13:52:54.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11800" CreationDate="2021-06-12T08:21:37.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start by saying that the nice thing to do, is to inform the authors of the research paper that you're creating software that implements the technique they described. They might be very happy to see that their work was useful. You might even get help (or contributions) from them, especially if you release your code as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the legal part of my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt; I am not a lawyer. I am merely repeating what I have heard from lawyers, namely that the authors of the research paper can protect their work with copyright, trademarks and patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Copyright&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, authors get this right automatically, at the moment they put the first words (or the first lines of code) on paper (figuratively speaking: online publications also count).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless they've licensed their work to you (e.g. by releasing it under an open source or a creative commons license), you infringe this right if you make a literal copy of (parts of) their work. There's something called &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot; which implies that you can take snippets of their work, e.g. to quote them literally, explicitly referring to the original work, but the line between infringement and fair use isn't clearly defined in the law. When there's discussion, you'll often see that a judge is involved to decide whether something was allowed under fair use or should be considered an infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does this apply to you?&lt;/em&gt; Probably not. You are reading their description of a mechanism and you are going to create new, original code without literary quoting parts of the research paper. That's not a copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I like to document my code. If I were you, I would love to add parts of the text of the research paper in the comment sections of my code so that people who want to contribute know the rationale that led to the implementation. However, I would always ask for permission from the authors before doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Trademark&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the authors are creating a commercial product based on their research, they can trademark certain names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once bumped into this problem with RC4. The RC4 algorithm used to be a trade secret owned by RSA until it was (allegedly) published on a news group. From that moment on, everyone was allowed to write implementations of the algorithm. I used such an implementation in my open source project, and I created a constant named &lt;code&gt;RC4_ENCRYPTION&lt;/code&gt;. This was not allowed because although the alleged RC4 algorithm can be used, it was illegal for me to use the name RC4 because that name is trademarked by RSA. I didn't infringe any copyright in my code, but I did infringe a trademark. I had to solve this problem by changing the name of the parameter into either &lt;code&gt;ARC4_ENCRYPTION&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;ARCFOUR_ENCRYPTION&lt;/code&gt; where ARC4 stands for the &amp;quot;Alleged RC4&amp;quot; algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does this apply to you?&lt;/em&gt; I don't think so. I didn't read the full paper, but at first sight, I didn't see any ™ or ® symbol in the text related to the mechanism they describe. I leave it up to you to read the paper more thoroughly, looking for those symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI: you can put ™ behind any name you use in business, indicating that you intend to use that name in a commercial context. You can only put ® behind such a name if you effectively registered the trademark with the USPTO. Once you have registered a trademark, you have the obligation to defend it. If you don't defend it, you can lose your legal rights on the trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Patents&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents are the most tricky potential issue. You can't patent source code (it's already protected by copyright), but you can patent the mechanisms that are later expressed in source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a mechanism to be patented, the mechanism needs to be new. If there is &amp;quot;prior art&amp;quot; that already describes the mechanism and that was available in the open, you won't be able to patent your invention. Suppose that the mechanism isn't patented yet, the publication of the paper makes it extremely hard to patent the mechanism in the future. If you would file a patent for the mechanism, a patent office will search for &amp;quot;prior art&amp;quot; and probably find this paper because it's available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal note: filing a patent, obtaining and maintaining it costs plenty of money. At the start of my career, I didn't have that kind of money, so I chose to protect my inventions by publishing my work as open source. By making the source code and the mechanisms I designed publicly availably, I protected myself against attempts by third parties to patent my inventions. I didn't want to end up in a situation where a big corporation with a big wallet would sue me for infringing a patent they filed on an invention I made. (Often, the &amp;quot;first to patent&amp;quot; has a better legal position than the &amp;quot;first to invent&amp;quot;; in any case: I wanted to avoid legal troubles and going open source was the best option for me at the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does this apply to you?&lt;/em&gt; I didn't see any reference to a patent in the paper—but I admit that I didn't fully read it. At the end of the paper, I noticed the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work described in the paper is supported by a grant from the&#xA;Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region&#xA;(Project No. 413110).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chances are that this grant implied that the work was created for the greater good, to advance science. Patenting the work would go against this philosophy, but you can't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should try finding out if the mechanism is patented before you start implementing it. That's the tricky part. I have written patents myself, and before writing them, I tried finding out on my own if what I had invented already existed. Being an engineer, I had a hard time searching existing patent databases, so I involved a lawyer to do this in my place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I started this answer by saying &amp;quot;inform the authors that you're creating software that implements their technique.&amp;quot; While doing so, ask them if you can use their copyright to copy snippets of their text into your code, and also ask if there are any other issues that might prevent you from implementing the mechanism they documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2021-06-12T08:38:09.067" LastActivityDate="2021-06-12T08:38:09.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11805" CreationDate="2021-06-12T12:41:36.770" Score="12" ViewCount="853" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I currently stumbled across an interesting case of a combination between a proprietary software and a GPL software, which I am trying to understand: There is the GPL software Blender - a well-known 3D creation software. Then there is a proprietary render engine OctaneRender developed by OTOY. OTOY distributes a modified version of Blender, the &amp;quot;Blender - OctaneRender edition&amp;quot;. OTOY claims that this constellation is GPL compatible with the following reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conform to GPL rules, the OctaneRender® for Blender® plugin consists of two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OctaneServer®&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The full Blender – OctaneRender edition®&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OctaneServer® is the server for getting the TCP/IP render-commands and scene data from the client, rendering the scene, and returning the rendered image to the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Blender – OctaneRender® edition is the special compilation of Blender®, which includes the internal OctaneRender® module. The module collects the Blender® scene data and communicates with the OctaneServer® as the client by sending the data to the server, getting the rendered image from it, and showing that image to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a way GPL is not violated by OctaneRender® for Blender Plugin: as the source-code of Blender – OctaneRender® edition (which is under GPL) is available for users of the Plugin, and the source-code of Otoy‘s proprietary closed-sourced OctaneServer® does not need to be published, as OctaneServer® is not linked to Blender and works with render-clients through TCP/IP communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interpretation - Agree or Disagree:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Agrees:&lt;/strong&gt; I understand, that this can be interpreted as GPL compatible in the sense that - using the wording of the Free Software Foundation - both the closed-source OctaneServer and the &amp;quot;Blender - OctaneRender edition&amp;quot; developed by OTOY communicate &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;at arms length&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; over a well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;socket / communication protocol&lt;/a&gt;. They could, thus, be considered a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disagrees:&lt;/strong&gt; On the other hand, however, both Blender and OctaneServer exchange what could be considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;complex internal data structures&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;: the Blender scene data. (as stated in the quote above). That, in turn, would make them a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;single, combined work&lt;/a&gt; according to Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which of my interpretations is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If that constellation is fine, why is OTOY using a completely own Blender version when they could - technically - also just distribute a Blender plugin instead? I know, your answer might be &amp;quot;ask OTOY&amp;quot;, but I am interested in: Do you see any legal reasons that would make it more reasonable to modify the complete software instead if using a plugin (which itself, would be a derived work of Blender)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21616" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T13:02:18.697" Title="Proprietary Software + GPL: A case study with OctaneRender and Blender" Tags="|gpl|law|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11804" CreationDate="2021-06-12T18:29:41.283" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question already contains the relevant analysis, and without knowing details about their protocol there's nothing to add here. So this is a case where the software &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be compliant, and is not obviously non-compliant. Ultimately, this is not for the FSF or me but for a court to decide. So we'll never know unless and until a Blender copyright holder sues OTOY. Due to the way how the GPL is structured, only copyright holders but not end users have standing to enforce the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the software is distributed as a bundle rather than a plugin: there's probably no licensing reason for this. However, there might be non-licensing reasons such as ease of installation or lock-in effects desired by the vendor. There could also be technical reasons, e.g. if the necessary integration is not possible using only a plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-06-16T13:02:18.697" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T13:02:18.697" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11808" CreationDate="2021-06-13T04:02:37.350" Score="5" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say you created a website and it's open-source under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A month later, I changed it to GPL-3.0 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A month passed again, someone forked my project in GitHub and is making money off it via donations (buymeacoffee). He removed the license in his forked repo's README and just added a section where he credited my repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website I made also uses libraries under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, a local news site featured him, where he claims &amp;quot;he started to build the website out of boredom and took him three weeks to build&amp;quot; without mention of the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be an ethical solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24300" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditorDisplayName="user24913" LastEditDate="2023-05-04T11:49:43.223" LastActivityDate="2023-05-04T11:49:43.223" Title="What to do if someone forked my project and removed its license?" Tags="|gpl|mit|github|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11806" CreationDate="2021-06-14T07:51:42.400" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He removed the license in his forked repo's README and just added a section where he credited my repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a violation of the copyright license under which he forked your repository. By violating the license, this person is also violating your copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this person is violating your copyrights, you have the right to seek remedy for those violations. The ethical way to seek remedy is to first ask this person nicely to restore the license that was present at the time they forked the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they don't respond to your request (or refuse to restore the license), then you can escalate and make a formal complaint with GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the news coverage, there is nothing to gain there for you. The news organization is not responsible for the claims made by the person they interview. And from the little information you gave, the claims appear to not be of such a nature that you can compel them to retract or amend the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T07:51:42.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11813" CreationDate="2021-06-14T13:44:52.147" Score="-1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;With &lt;a href=&quot;https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/xiph/releases/flac/flac-1.3.2-win.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this zip&lt;/a&gt; file, it contains both the &lt;code&gt;metaflac.exe&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flac.exe&lt;/code&gt; that I would like to bundle with software that I intend to sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://xiph.org/flac/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://xiph.org/flac/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unclear here as it says refers to the libraries as free for all. And the remaining software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it that those two are under the GNU licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone has had experience before with the &lt;code&gt;metaflac.exe&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;flac.exe&lt;/code&gt; licence that would be great.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24309" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-14T19:30:44.613" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T19:30:44.613" Title="Metaflac.exe and flac.exe license with commercial software" Tags="|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-13T08:43:19.030" Score="1" ViewCount="687" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been working with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/KnowsCount/qiokian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt; lately involving  the usage of &lt;code&gt;live2d&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;code&gt;live2d&lt;/code&gt;, however, is licensed under GPLv3, so in my understanding I must include the GPLv3 licence file in my repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the file is very large in size—to wit, 35kb. This is takes even more storage than my code... So, can I get rid of the license file, whilst making sure I have declared it in my &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; like &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;license&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;GPLv3&amp;quot;,&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="KnowsCount" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T14:16:19.727" Title="can I get rid of the GPL-v3 LICENCE file if I use GPL-v3 licensed code but declare it in `package.json`?" Tags="|npm|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11810" CreationDate="2021-06-14T14:16:19.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You must keep the whole license. Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 4, &amp;quot;Conveying Verbatim Copies&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you [...] give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T14:16:19.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11809" CreationDate="2021-06-14T14:39:01.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The document you link notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference implementation libraries are licensed under the New BSD License ... In the source code these libraries are called libFLAC and libFLAC++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not quite &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;free for all&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but certainly permissively licensed.  However, it also makes clear that the files you list aren't the libraries.  So yes, the executables you wish to extract are GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-06-14T14:39:01.137" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-15T15:04:05.773" Score="1" ViewCount="1000" Body="&lt;p&gt;quick question, i'm doing research into open source software and i was wondering if  open source software be proprietary? if so, what examples exist? what examples exist of source code that is open source but also proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how would that work? how would the source code be available but the program also be proprietary? wouldn't the users just take the source code and compile the program themselves as opposed to paying for it? thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24316" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T15:46:47.083" Title="can open source software be proprietary? if so, what examples exist?" Tags="|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11814" CreationDate="2021-06-15T15:46:47.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First let's establish what is meant when we talk about open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code that is published without any license attached to it, is open but proprietary. The copyright of that code belongs to the developer who wrote it. You need to obtain permission from the author to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This author can release that code under a license. If that license is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) then that code isn't only open, it's also open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code that is open source can't be proprietary. The original author still had the coyright (that's inalienable in many jurisdictions), but with the open source license the author grants at least 10 rights (defined by OSI) to everyone who obtains a copy of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among those rights are the irrevocable freedom to use, to redistribute, to create derived works, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is proprietary code that is distributed along with the binaries under a different license (e.g. the Business Source license used by MariaDB for clustering databases), but although that code is open, it isn't open source because the Business License wasn't approved by OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T15:46:47.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2094" CreationDate="2021-06-15T16:08:52.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;@schily and @apsilly nailed it. If I understand their answers correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who understand clause 0 is void believe that compatibility is possible :)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But it's popular to surmise they are not compatible because fear is contagious and some not like risks :(&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's never been tested in court so is vapour-fear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16646" LastActivityDate="2021-06-15T16:08:52.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11823" CreationDate="2021-06-15T20:09:35.533" Score="1" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company uses WordPress (GPL license), a child theme of a theme and plugins under GPL and just a few code snippets under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the GPL license is the stronger license (MIT license is a permissive license) it's therefore applicable license if I understand it correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we have some parts of the web application licensed under GPL and then the whole program becomes GPL, do you still have to insert the MIT license information at the points where you inserted it normally into the code?&#xA;Isn't this misleading for anyone who doesn't know that the whole project is under GPL or how should he know what part of the code is MIT and what is GPL when it is in one file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that the code that encloses the MIT snippets is then also MIT, because they extend this and do not belong to the GPL parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a common solution for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24318" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-16T05:18:00.450" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T05:48:19.523" Title="How to use GPL-licensed project with MIT code snippet license correctly?" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|license-notice|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-16T00:27:03.677" Score="1" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL tries to guarantee that a piece of software, and all derivative versions of that software, will allow anybody to use, study, modify, and distribute the software however they choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the first three parts -- being able to use the software however you want, study the source code however you want, and modify the software however you want -- are great, and I'd like to license my work under a copyleft license that will protect those freedoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the freedom to &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; the software however you want can be a problem. As discussed in posts &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-free-and-open-source-projects-be-monetized&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11674/under-copyleft-why-distinguish-between-free-as-in-free-speech-and-free-as-in&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, this clause forces you to use a Kickstarter, Patreon, pay-what-you-want, or support-services business model, as selling the software itself is no longer profitable. Not every independent creator has the option of using these business models, so I don't want to &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; them to allow free distribution of their software if they don't want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;what copyleft software licenses are there that &lt;em&gt;mandate&lt;/em&gt; that a program, and all its derivatives, allow users to access source code, use, and modify the program however they want, but &lt;em&gt;do not mandate&lt;/em&gt; that they be able to &lt;em&gt;distribute&lt;/em&gt; it however they want?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22939" LastEditorUserId="22939" LastEditDate="2021-06-16T00:34:15.080" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T02:45:34.223" Title="Copyleft licenses that do not mandate free distribution?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-16T04:27:54.653" Score="1" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use the lgpl licensed javascript library, do I have to release a closed source web application that is using it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like it's unnecessary, as long as I don't modify the source of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to use wysiwyg lgpl javascript in a commercial closed source environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A closed source web application is never distributed (depending on how the definition of distribution applies to web pages) and the end user only has access to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find gpl and lgpl very confusing as they apply to the web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't understand what constitutes &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24324" LastActivityDate="2021-06-19T16:28:25.247" Title="How does the LGPL apply to the Web and define distribution?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11819" CreationDate="2021-06-16T05:16:01.220" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There can be no such free licence, because the distribution of unmodified and modified copies are two of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software (the OSI definition protects those rights similarly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming by &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; you mean a licence that requires derivative works to be under the same licence, CC's &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-NC&lt;/a&gt; licence allows distribution &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;for NonCommercial purposes only&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and therefore probably comes closest to what you've asked for.  Some software is distributed under this licence, but being non-free, further discussion of it is off-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T05:16:01.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11818" CreationDate="2021-06-16T05:48:19.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL (v2 in this case, but v3 contains similar language) allows you to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that [... you] cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence says that you may&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the GPL requires that it continue to apply, while the MIT licence requires only that it be copied.  The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is clear that&lt;/a&gt; the GPL must apply to the work as a whole, so if you wish to continue to distribute portions of it under a more permissive licence (either because you are the rightsholder, or because you got them under more permissive terms) you should do so separately from the main work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice is to reproduce the MIT licence text in the main work under a banner that clearly says something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following text is included pursuant to a condition of an upstream licence, and does not represent the current licensing status of this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note this discussion applies to the MIT &lt;em&gt;permission notice&lt;/em&gt;, not the associated &lt;em&gt;copyright notices&lt;/em&gt;.  It is important to reproduce the copyright notices &lt;em&gt;in situ&lt;/em&gt;, as they continue to correctly represent the rightsholder status of the derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-06-16T05:48:19.523" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11862" CreationDate="2021-06-16T14:43:13.387" Score="1" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanted to create a site with acknowledgments/attributions for all the packages used in my project (that's even required for the MIT licenses). So I thought about using &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; for that purpose. But as I saw &lt;code&gt;package-lock.json&lt;/code&gt; I started doubting which licenses I have to credit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Package&lt;/code&gt; contains all directly used files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Package-lock&lt;/code&gt; also contains the dependencies of these files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24329" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-06-26T10:55:49.897" LastActivityDate="2021-06-26T10:55:49.897" Title="Use package / package-lock for acknowledgments?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|dependencies|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11832" CreationDate="2021-06-16T23:07:53.597" Score="2" ViewCount="1700" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating an API for a website. An interesting Node.js &lt;strong&gt;package&lt;/strong&gt; I would need is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL-3&lt;/a&gt;. that package is a binding library that speaks to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-2&lt;/a&gt; licensed &lt;strong&gt;software&lt;/strong&gt; (compiled binary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for quite some time and I wasn't confident about my understanding of the AGPL and GPL license with how I would need to use them - too many different interpretation of both licenses it seem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the software and the package would be on the same machine. The client (website) sends a request to the server. The server uses the AGPL library to get some results, might change/adjust/add or remove values and then send the data to the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read, for both license that I may, or may not need to disclose the code.  I read both licenses but I get lost and confused very rapidly. I put my understanding further down below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rephrasing everything to be safe:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Website calls API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;API includes multiple things/services and only a subset of resources/a single service need this package (and therefore this software)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;API uses package to determine some values.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Package calling the software is AGPL 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software is GPL 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data is returned to the API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The API might make some corrections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Data is returned to the website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some statements - to be extra clear:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will not make modification to the Node.js package or the software it's calling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will allow free access to the website (rate limited)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will not allow access to the API to the public (the website still need to call the API)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would maybe charge a small amount to access some part of the website, eventually&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would like to &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; allow access to the API (rate limited/free tier and paid tier) in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The API is vast and cover a lot of various services. The package above would only by a single service.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The API (the fastify server) is a single source code right now&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions - If my understanding is wrong:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a)Which license in this requires me to open-source the REST API source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b)What would change if the package was LGPL-3.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to open-source the website?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not to sound harsh, but if I do need to open-source the REST API, what can I do to either not do it (except not using the package and/or software) or limit what will be open-source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any other considerations, notes or tips?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was longer than intended, sorry. Editors feel free to clean this up if needed - thank you)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24332" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T08:10:49.450" Title="Can I use a AGPL/GPL package and software for closed-source backend API?" Tags="|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11829" CreationDate="2021-06-17T04:15:55.277" Score="10" ViewCount="4917" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a license that fit in the following points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Software source code will be public so anyone can read it or use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone can contribute or add modifications to the source code (&lt;code&gt;pull request&lt;/code&gt;) providing an express grant of patent rights.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License must allow to publish the software in any app market or to be distributed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License &lt;strong&gt;must protect against forking the source code and publishing or distributing the same version (changing name and authors) without modifications&lt;/strong&gt;. Anyone can fork the original source code, modify how it works and distribute that new version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial and private use is allowed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New versions must keep the same license. So any forked version has the same protection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License should be distributed with the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After checking GNU/GPL, Mozilla, Apache, etc. I don't really know which one covers all points. Especially I don't know if any of them protect against distributing the software with other name but without any modification. I would like to make the source code public and allow new modified versions of it, but I don't want that someone just copy the project and distribute under its name without making any modifications on how it works or what the software does. I want that in case a person wants to distribute the exact same software, he/she refer third people to the original or distribute the software keeping the original name and a reference to the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any license that covers all points? Does this kind of license have sense? Will be still an open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24334" LastEditorUserId="24334" LastEditDate="2021-06-17T04:25:10.770" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T00:09:43.497" Title="Which license can protect a software to be distribute without changes under a different name?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11827" CreationDate="2021-06-17T07:14:20.513" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;This license isn't going to do what you want it to, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I get the code, I add one space to an error message. It's now a modified version, so I can distribute it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I get the code. &amp;quot;My friend&amp;quot;, Khilip Pendall, makes a modification which adds a bug to the code and distributes it under your proposed license. I take &amp;quot;Khilip&amp;quot;'s version, remove the bug and distribute it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T07:14:20.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11827" CreationDate="2021-06-17T08:29:19.923" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;My colleague has posted an excellent explanation of why a licence that does exactly what you've asked for would be pointless.  It would also be non-free, because the right to distribute both non-modified and modified copies of software are two of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that you want &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;in case a person wants to distribute the exact same software, he/she refer third people to the original or distribute the software keeping the original name and a reference to the original authors&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Might I ask if you've considered using a copyleft licence like the GPL?  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s4 permits the distribution of verbatim copies of software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which makes it pretty clear that the original author has to be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;conspicuously and appropriately&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; credited.  If the only change a distributor were to make was to rename the software, they would still be obliged to distribute the source code, and that source conveyance would still be covered by s4, so your copyright notices would need to remain.  Anyone changing the name &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; removing your &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;conspicuous&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; copyright notices would be in breach of the licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the name doesn't have to be kept, but the reference to the original authors does.  Would that suffice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T08:29:19.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11827" CreationDate="2021-06-18T00:04:08.867" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds to me like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; would fit the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software source code will be public so anyone can read it or use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is less a matter of license and more a matter of how you decide to host your repository. Your license can give users a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; to access the source, but forcing people to use a public repository (github, etc) is impractical. That's one reason the GPL still makes a reference to distributing source code on request by mailing out copies on disk/CD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can contribute or add modifications to the source code (pull request) providing an express grant of patent rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0's big selling point over BSD/MIT is that it requires that sort of patent grant (see section 3 and to a lesser extent section 5).  Here, such a grant is &lt;em&gt;automatic&lt;/em&gt;, so you don't have to keep track of contributor release agreements, etc.  The contents of a pull request or submitted patch are my changes, thus I own the copyright and do not need your license's permission to submit them. If I choose to submit them, section 5 automatically licenses those changes under Apache 2.0 and sections 2 and 3 give the upstream project and end users all the permissions they need to use those changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License must allow to publish the software in any app market or to be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 permits redistribution &amp;quot;in any medium, … in Source or Object form&amp;quot;, so publishing it via app store should be fine in and of itself.  If the app store in question requires additional restrictions to be placed on the user, then you'll have a problem.  A redistributor does not have the legal right to take away something that the copyright holder has granted.  That's going to be a problem no matter what license you use.  The &lt;em&gt;copyright holder&lt;/em&gt; can dual-license the code to meet the app store's restrictions, but a mere redistributor cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License must protect against forking the source code and publishing or distributing the same version (changing name and authors) without modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell exactly what you're getting at here, but there seem to be several aspects of the license that apply.  The copyright-related grants in section 2 do not give the recipient permission to remove the copyright notices that contain your name, and copyright law prevents the recipient from claiming any of your code as their own. Section 4 requires all &amp;quot;copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices&amp;quot; in the source code to be retained, with the exception that you can add an &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; copyright notice that only covers any changes you've made (existing notices must stay intact).  Author information that you include in a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file is required to be retained as well, and must be distributed along with both source and binary copies. If you want to make sure people know where to find the original, add a link to your website/repo in the &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to prevent someone from distributing a verbatim copy (zero modifications) is probably not something you want to waste time on.  A source that distributes unmodified copies is also called a &lt;em&gt;mirror&lt;/em&gt;, and those are generally considered beneficial.  Without the ability to redistribute verbatim copies, your software couldn't be included in a Linux distribution's package manager (for instance).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone can fork the original source code, modify how it works and distribute that new version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 gives the right to &amp;quot;reproduce and distribute copies&amp;quot;, including modified copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial and private use is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rights granted to the user in sections 2 and 4 are not qualified. They apply to commercial and non-commercial use cases equally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New versions must keep the same license. So any forked version has the same protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 technically allows a modified version to be distributed under a different license, in the sense that you can add additional rights. For example, I could sell the software to my customer under a modified license that includes the right to a year's worth of support services (from me) or that obligates me to provide access to old versions of the program for 5 years after the initial release date.  The recipient still keeps all their original rights and protections, but may also get a few more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License should be distributed with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 requires you to &amp;quot;give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&amp;quot;.  That applies to both source and object form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastEditorUserId="9682" LastEditDate="2021-06-18T00:09:43.497" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T00:09:43.497" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11826" CreationDate="2021-06-18T08:10:49.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a)Which license in this requires me to open-source the REST API source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license on the third-party package requires you to make the entire API software subject to the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b)What would change if the package was LGPL-3.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the API software as a whole would not be required to be under an open-source license. Your only requirement then would be that if you distribute the API software itself, then the recipients of the software must be able (and allowed) to replace the LGPL parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to open-source the website?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you do not need to make the website open-source. Only the API software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not to sound harsh, but if I do need to open-source the REST API, what can I do to either not do it (except not using the package and/or software) or limit what will be open-source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To limit what must be under the AGPL license, you could try to make 2 REST APIs. One open-source containing the functionality where the AGPL package is involved and a separate one that does not involve the AGPL package. For this to work, you will have to maintain a very clear separation between the two APIs, all the way from source code repository to deployment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-18T08:10:49.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-19T10:32:29.260" Score="0" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say someone made software, put it up on GitHub under the GPLv3 License, but then had an EULA that is not supplied with the binaries on GitHub, do you have to follow the EULA, or the GPL? And do they have to supply the source code with the binaries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24353" LastEditorUserId="24353" LastEditDate="2021-06-19T10:58:46.173" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T15:45:48.177" Title="Can you release binaries on GitHub, and have it under an EULA?" Tags="|licensing|eula|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11821" CreationDate="2021-06-19T15:18:50.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;How the GPL applies in a Web context is not clear to me, either. Despite being served in discrete chunks as a result of distinct HTTP network fetches, does copyright law consider the application as a whole one work? It's unclear to me and not well-defined by existing case law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the operation of the LGPL (rather than the GPL) can remain happily agnostic to the outcome of this question, since its copyleft extends only to a library and not to a whole application that uses the library. If your application uses an LGPL library in a way that the application code merely &amp;quot;combines with&amp;quot; the library (rather than modifies the library directly), you need only abide by copyleft requirements for that library and not your whole app. (See the phrase &amp;quot;Combined Work&amp;quot; throughout the LGPLv3 to understand its definition and copyleft requirements.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the LGPL is to allow use of LGPL libraries within closed-source proprietary applications, while still requiring disclosures of changes within the LGPL library itself. I would assume the an LPGL library file that provides WYSIWYG functions or objects for use elsewhere in your JavaScript application would not create copyleft obligations beyond the library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How distribution applies to the Web is usually quite simple: if something ends up in RAM or storage on a user's computer in any form, then it has been distributed to them. If a piece of code lives on your own server and is never transmitted to a user in any form, then it has not been distributed. The client-side code of your application is distributed; each component that is (L)GPL-licensed must be accompanied with source code or with prominent offers for source code (but obviously any components &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; covered by copyleft licenses need not satisfy those copyleft requirements). Your server-side code is not distributed and creates no copyleft obligations (unless you use code under the much-stronger AGPL.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-06-19T16:28:25.247" LastActivityDate="2021-06-19T16:28:25.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11819" CreationDate="2021-06-20T02:45:34.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL and other copyleft licenses &lt;em&gt;allow&lt;/em&gt; further distribution (under the same terms), they can't force anybody to distribute any changes they do in-house (as I understand what the relevant copyright laws say). They are crafted to ensure the code is always distributed so the recipient can use, study and change it at will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T02:45:34.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-20T18:16:46.057" Score="2" ViewCount="1437" Body="&lt;p&gt;Says &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement is known as the &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; requirement, after the title of the section where it occurs. In AGPL discussion, there is a corresponding &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; design problem, based on three fragments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network&amp;quot;: Because users are usually represented by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;user agents&lt;/a&gt;, this means that even automatic requests need to be satisfied&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(if your version supports such interaction)&amp;quot;: This paragraph only is engaged if the software is designed to take advantage of the AGPL's anti-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SaaS&lt;/a&gt; features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software&amp;quot;: Most vendors don't have such customs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many fora, this &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; requirement is discussed as an obstacle to practical enforcement of the AGPL. The reasoning is simple: Software isn't designed with the AGPL in mind, and thus is not able to fully utilize its protections. As a thought experiment, however, let's imagine some software which intends to fulfill the requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Program shall be a package manager which transmits packages and source code via peer-to-peer connections&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All interoperable versions of the package manager, including modified versions, communicate with a single common protocol which features &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;signature-based&lt;/a&gt; authentication&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Specifically, when two peers communicate, they request zero or more signed bundles of data from each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a unique way to request that a peer deliver a signed bundle for its own source code, the Corresponding Source, using its own key&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A peer publishes a package by explicitly licensing and signing a bundle and then &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agreeing out-of-band&lt;/a&gt; to have other peers request the freshly-signed bundle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose that the Program is licensed under AGPLv3 and that its subroutine for signing bundles requires them to be licensed under AGPLv3 as well. Then we have placed any user into the following position: If they modify the Program, their modified version must reply to requests for the Corresponding Source of their version by transmitting a self-signed bundle with the Corresponding Source. In terms of enforcement, &lt;strong&gt;have we enforced the AGPLv3 in a manner which solves the &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; problem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reasonable complication is that this all should probably be not &amp;quot;AGPLv3&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;AGPLv3 or later&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An objection which is reasonable but not quite right is to point out that users cannot be forced to use AGPLv3 merely in order to participate in the ecosystem. To be pedantic, users can be required to use AGPLv3 in order to publish packages, but not merely to author packages; further, this can be an extremely one-sided arrangement, as in the automatic licensing clauses in terms of service offered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://tosdr.org/en/service/274&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://tosdr.org/en/service/297&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18097" LastEditorUserId="18097" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T15:25:13.013" LastActivityDate="2021-06-24T05:58:51.007" Title="Can a package manager solve the AGPL &quot;remote network interaction&quot; problem?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|enforcement|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11842" CreationDate="2021-06-20T22:57:43.160" Score="-1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a part of the GNU GPL 3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;  0. Definitions.&#xA;&#xA;  &quot;This License&quot; refers to version 3 of the GNU General Public License.&#xA;&#xA;  &quot;Copyright&quot; also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of&#xA;works, such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semiconductor masks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&#xA;  &quot;The Program&quot; refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this&#xA;License.  Each licensee is addressed as &quot;you&quot;.  &quot;Licensees&quot; and&#xA;&quot;recipients&quot; may be individuals or organizations.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pointing at the part that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Copyright&quot; also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of&#xA;works, such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;semiconductor masks&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are semiconductor masks &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; under copyright, or is this just an easter egg?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22678" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T23:24:51.167" Title="Are &quot;semiconductor masks&quot; under copyright in the GNU GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11841" CreationDate="2021-06-20T23:24:51.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL (and other licenses) work under the umbrella of copyright law(s), it is the relevant law which tells if something is copyrightable, not the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as my non-lawyer understanding goes, semiconductor masks certainly are creative works (they could be done in lots of different ways, human work/creativity goes into making them), so they are under copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-06-20T23:24:51.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11835" CreationDate="2021-06-20T23:32:05.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can certainly distribute code under GPL freely (e.g. via github) while selling licenses (EULAs) with additional rights (create closed derivatives, for instance) using other channels. You just have to make sure you have &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rights to whatever you license separately (i.e., you have to get everybody who contributes changes to the public version write over the rights to you if you want to incorporate it into the EULAed package). This is usually called a CLA (Contributor Licence Agreement) to be formally accepted by any contributor before you integrate the contribution,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T15:45:48.177" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T15:45:48.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11847" CreationDate="2021-06-21T09:26:12.000" Score="4" ViewCount="712" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently programming an app with flutter and have already listed all the licenses I use from the packages on an individual license page in the Settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also used the &lt;code&gt;google_font&lt;/code&gt; package.&#xA;Unfortunately I noticed that the developers of the license did not add a copyright notice to this one using the Apache 2.0 license. I always add the license as a whole with an appendix. At the beginning there is a passage that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or&#xA;implied.    See the License for the specific language governing&#xA;permissions and    limitations under the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfortunately, this has not been filled out. Can I simply list the license no copyright notice?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pub.dev/packages/google_fonts/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The whole license I am listing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24317" LastEditorUserId="24317" LastEditDate="2021-06-21T11:06:32.877" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T21:00:23.577" Title="google_font license (Apache2.0) has no Copyright what to do?" Tags="|license-notice|source-code|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11846" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11848" CreationDate="2021-06-21T11:04:45.417" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently programming a Flutter mobile app and a website.&#xA;I use code from the MIT license on the website and the app. In the app I also use code under the Apache 2.0 license and the BSD 3 clause.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am modifying all of these codes. Some more and some less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed, if I have the licenses and copyright notices correctly in my project, &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; to add a comment or mark the modifications that I made?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This question relates to all 3 licenses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24317" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T21:19:49.720" Title="Do you have to be mark the changes when modifying code under MIT, Apache2.0 or BSD?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|bsd|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11845" CreationDate="2021-06-21T11:12:34.040" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 4(c) lists the only obligations you have with regards to copyright notices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are zero of such notices to retain, then retaining zero such notices fully satisfies this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file then you must reproduce that as well, per 4(d), but in this case, there does not appear to be any &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-06-21T21:00:23.577" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T21:00:23.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11846" CreationDate="2021-06-21T21:19:49.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should add e.g. &amp;quot;(c) 2021 Joe R. User&amp;quot; to the file headers (where you find such comments) to mark that you've made some changes, and claim your rights to them formally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the licenses. They don't ask to mark any changes you do, so you don't have to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But think of your gentle reader, a few years down the road and half a world distant (or even yourself, in a few weeks ;-): You want them to understand what is going on, perhaps do some changes in a different way or elide them altogether. Today presumably you keep the code under some version control system like &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;hg&lt;/code&gt;.  Make small, self-contained changes (not &amp;quot;weekly dump of changes&amp;quot;), write clear commit messages (not &amp;quot;Updated&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;New version&amp;quot;), perhaps add in a &lt;code&gt;Changelog&lt;/code&gt; file with an overview of changes. Import any upstream packages marking their origin, version and so on clearly. If you update the base package, mark any relevant import commits clearly as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of any would-be user: Make sure to chase down any licenses that apply, record your findings and keep copies of the licenses at hand. This is also important for your protection: it isn't fun to get sued for inadvertently violating some license or software patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-06-21T21:19:49.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11851" CreationDate="2021-06-22T15:10:32.457" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of GPL2 license make impossible that a proprietary software like &amp;quot;Viscosity&amp;quot; could possibly include a GPL2 code like OpenVPN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But going to their page, they clearly state that they are based on OpenVPN. Following the legal documentation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparklabs.com/company/legal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sparklabs.com/company/legal/&lt;/a&gt; it is not clear how they solve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How OpenVPN can be legally included in Viscosity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7062/embedding-gpl-code-in-proprietary-software&quot;&gt;Embedding GPL code in proprietary software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21915" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T12:49:45.413" Title="How Viscosity VPN integrates OpenVPN with GPL2 license?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|gpl-2|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11850" CreationDate="2021-06-22T15:44:58.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a huge difference between &amp;quot;based on the OpenVPN code&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;configures the OpenVPN client&amp;quot;. As you say, something which is based on (derived from) the OpenVPN code must be licensed under the GPL. On the other hand, something which simply configures the client (probably by writing config files) is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; with the OpenVPN code and can be under any license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's likely Viscosity configures the OpenVPN client, rather than being based on the OpenVPN code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-06-23T12:49:45.413" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T12:49:45.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11855" CreationDate="2021-06-22T17:10:36.903" Score="-2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I legally allowed to modify (remove bloatware, rewrite functions etc.) to leaked code and release it online for free? I don't intend to license anything, it's just mostly for a personal project to extend windows XP compatibility to some modern applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24369" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T10:06:40.467" Title="Modifying and releasing Windows-XP code" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2021-06-23T10:07:12.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11850" CreationDate="2021-06-23T00:34:42.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading what they offer it looks to me like this :They ship a network security solution. That consists of several pieces of software. One of them is Openvpn. Others are config tools for the VPN and network settings etc. As such it falls under the clause that they ship aggregates of different programmes which may well have all their own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I cannot verify without actually buying their stuff though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T00:34:42.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11852" CreationDate="2021-06-23T10:06:40.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The operative word here is &lt;strong&gt;leaked&lt;/strong&gt;. Microsoft never intended to release the code for Windows XP or to make it open.&#xA;If it was illegally distributed, and continued distribution of it, modified or not, would also probably be illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-06-23T10:06:40.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-23T22:30:12.710" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was found in a situation where some author published a binary which was widely used. Unfortunately he never shared the source despite marking the program as GPL (version not specified). Despite multiple people asking he never respond to the questions about publishing the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the author vanished and people try to modify his work by binary patching. In my understanding the binary became the preferred way of editing here. For the context I should add here that the code is a Linux kernel module and is not a derivative of any existing code to my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to disassemble the binary, start adding symbols back and redistribute the original binary + disassembled C source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24375" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T12:04:15.800" Title="Distributing GPL binary which has no source and unresponsive author" Tags="|gpl|open-source-definition|linux-kernel|binaries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11840" CreationDate="2021-06-24T05:58:51.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In AGPL discussion, there is a corresponding &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; design problem, based on three fragments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&#xA;3. &amp;quot;some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software&amp;quot;: Most vendors don't have such customs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess this is the point where most people see the core of the design problem, and that is because the requirement is being interpreted incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; require an in-app facility to download the source code of the application. The requirement is that you offer access to the source code and that you do so in a manner that is recognized by a software developer as a mechanism to obtain source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous ways to satisfy that requirement, including providing a link to a publicly accessible repository or providing a link to a zip file or tar-ball with the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would not satisfy the requirement is that people would have to send HTTP requests like &lt;code&gt;GET /index.php&lt;/code&gt; with a specific content type to avoid the file being interpreted by the server. That is not a customary means of copying software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they modify the Program, their modified version must reply to requests for the Corresponding Source of their version by transmitting a self-signed bundle with the Corresponding Source. In terms of enforcement, have we enforced the AGPLv3 in a manner which solves the &amp;quot;remote network interaction&amp;quot; problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot enforce the AGPL requirement of providing access to the source code with technical means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I modify the Program and choose to honor the protocol requirements of responding to that special command with the Corresponding Source of my version of the Program, then I comply with the requirements of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, if I modify the Program to drop support for that protocol and use a different protocol, then that modification is fully allowed by the AGPL. Within the new way(s) of interacting with the Program, I now have to find a way to tell my users how to obtain the Corresponding Source to satisfy the requirements from the AGPL. If I don't, then the only way to enforce compliance is through legal means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-24T05:58:51.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11858" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11859" CreationDate="2021-06-25T03:33:42.113" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using icons from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tabler/tabler-icons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for my web project.&#xA;This is the file I used for one of the icons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!--&#xA;This file was licenced under the following license:&#xA;&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2020 Paweł Kuna&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;--&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;svg xmlns=&amp;quot;http://www.w3.org/2000/svg&amp;quot; class=&amp;quot;icon icon-tabler icon-tabler-messages&amp;quot; width=&amp;quot;24&amp;quot; height=&amp;quot;24&amp;quot; viewBox=&amp;quot;0 0 24 24&amp;quot; stroke-width=&amp;quot;2&amp;quot; stroke=&amp;quot;currentColor&amp;quot; fill=&amp;quot;none&amp;quot; stroke-linecap=&amp;quot;round&amp;quot; stroke-linejoin=&amp;quot;round&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;path stroke=&amp;quot;none&amp;quot; d=&amp;quot;M0 0h24v24H0z&amp;quot; fill=&amp;quot;none&amp;quot;/&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;path d=&amp;quot;M21 14l-3 -3h-7a1 1 0 0 1 -1 -1v-6a1 1 0 0 1 1 -1h9a1 1 0 0 1 1 1v10&amp;quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;  &amp;lt;path d=&amp;quot;M14 15v2a1 1 0 0 1 -1 1h-7l-3 3v-10a1 1 0 0 1 1 -1h2&amp;quot; /&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/svg&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is this a good place to put the license? Is there a better way to place this license in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24386" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T05:38:18.770" Title="Am I licensing this code correctly?" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11858" CreationDate="2021-06-25T05:38:18.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a legal viewpoint, it is entirely correct to have the license text in the file that is being licensed itself. If you received the file like that, then that is another reason to keep the license text there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a readme file in your project where you state something about the license of the project, you could add a short paragraph there that you are using these icons and that they are under the MIT license. This is not a requirement and more of an acknowledgement of the work of others than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T05:38:18.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11861" CreationDate="2021-06-25T11:02:57.413" Score="1" ViewCount="896" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work on an Android app which is only used by customers. Anyone can download the app from the Play Store but if they don't have credentials then they will just see a login screen and won't be able to get past that. (Registration process is handled separately and not in the app.) My app uses multiple open source libraries and I will have a button which opens the list of open source licenses. Ideally I don't want to have to add this button to the login screen as it has a fairly clean design. Is it acceptable to add the button to my app's &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; screen which is only accessible post-authentication? This will however mean that people who are not customers will not be able to access this license information, but there would be nothing they could do with the app anyway. Are there some precedents here with how other major apps have approached this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24395" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T20:44:40.093" Title="Can I have open source notices in my app which are only displayed after authentication?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11860" CreationDate="2021-06-25T20:44:40.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would strongly suggest that compliance-related information is immediately accessible, without requiring a log in. This includes documents such as your contact details, your terms of service, your privacy policy, and yes, open source attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of most open source licenses is that you have to at least attribute the various open source components you are using. This attribution is due whenever an end user receives your app, even if they are not logged in. For example, the Apache License 2.0 is quite clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your app includes the Apache-covered Work, thus the end user who has downloaded your app is a recipient of this Work even if they're not logged in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be sufficient to provides these notices and licenses in documentation for your app, for example by linking it from the app description in whatever app store you use. But I'm not necessarily convinced that this would always be compliant with all open source licenses. Including these notices directly with each copy of the app, and making them accessible to the typical user without any hurdles, is the safest path towards license compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T20:44:40.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11825" CreationDate="2021-06-25T22:16:49.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, your project relies on functionality supplied by some package X. It doesn't matter if your code relies on it directly or if it relies on package Y which in turn relies on package X - the bottom line is that without package X, your project wouldn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short - you need to acknowledge all the packages you're using, whether directly or indirectly, so &lt;code&gt;pacakge-lock.json&lt;/code&gt; may be a good place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T22:16:49.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-26T12:09:11.160" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere in 2018, it was a big deal when Chinese company Creality made their Ender 3 printer 'truly open source', as acknowledged by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://certification.oshwa.org/cn000003.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source HardWare Association&lt;/a&gt;. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKjivPRI_S0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this YouTube video&lt;/a&gt; by Naomi Wu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Ender 3 V2 came out, the upgraded version of the Ender 3, I'd thought the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ender 3 repository&lt;/a&gt; would be updated with the new files. However, this never happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the speech by Naomi starting at 1:10, I'm quite surprised by this. But after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their GPL license&lt;/a&gt;, I can't see them doing anything wrong either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://certification.oshwa.org/requirements.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following requirement from OSHWA&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ensure that all of the creator’s own contributions to an open source product using the certification mark are shared as open source in accordance with the agreement and these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not sure how a new version works with respect to keeping the original license intact or whether this is a derived work. This could all be a matter of misunderstanding based on the definition of the work and the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct that the files of the Ender 3 V2 were never released?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were either the GPL-3 or the OSHWA requirements violated by releasing the V2 without releasing their files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, perhaps more to the point, does the license of the original work still hold on the V2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T17:20:49.420" Title="Is the Ender 3 V2 licensed under the same license as the original?" Tags="|gpl-3|commercial|open-source-definition|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11865" CreationDate="2021-06-25T12:26:44.843" Score="3" ViewCount="2351" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the website, I use these SVG icons embedded in HTML &lt;a href=&quot;https://feathericons.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://feathericons.com/&lt;/a&gt;. They are under the MIT license. Should I mark the author somehow? How should I do it? Is it enough if I add something like this in HTML:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;!-- Svg icons by https://feathericons.com/ --&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;!doctype html&amp;gt;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I need to write something like this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/feathericons/feather/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/feathericons/feather/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;? If so, where should I write it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="test" LastActivityDate="2021-06-26T19:54:06.707" Title="Using icons with MIT licensing on the website" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11864" CreationDate="2021-06-25T12:40:13.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok it is not a solution but debate; What you have done so far is all good in its sense but it is not in direct view of person receiving the content aka user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good approach would be to place the licencing information in about us or term of use/EULA section if you go down this path. These very sections of website list and detail what is what and how it impacts the user.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Make a sub heading called third party licences and list all you need to list in that section. Make the primary link public on all pages and you are good to go.&#xA;Some examples below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmfl7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmfl7.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y1Xi8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y1Xi8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note, if I am crafting large enough application I would always use this keeping everything tidy up in one place. I was originally motivated to adopt this approach seeing how Microsoft and other legacy companies turned page towards Open source and how they reflected the library information. Obviously they had brains who would have thought it over so there is merit by virtue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Syed" LastActivityDate="2021-06-25T21:28:19.717" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11867" CreationDate="2021-06-27T03:01:15.933" Score="8" ViewCount="3689" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since everyone can sell open source software, modified or unmodified, at any price, under GPL and MPL as long as I know, can I do it without providing the source code since the recipients are just &amp;quot;end users&amp;quot;, I'm already selling a lot of copies of installer downloaded straight from their official builds. I am not providing the source code but providing the license text files together with the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough to put an instruction text file on how to obtain a copy of the source code?&#xA;Like &amp;quot;To get a copy of the full source code of this software, you can go to github.com,......&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24415" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-06-27T05:37:57.017" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T12:18:11.563" Title="Can I sell UNMODIFIED Open source software without providing the actual source code?" Tags="|gpl-3|source-code|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11866" CreationDate="2021-06-27T05:49:30.783" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; directly addresses your question, so no speculation is required.  Conveying unmodified code is covered in s4, and conveying other forms than source code in s6.  s6 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source.  Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that telling people who download your code that the source is available on github, and providing a link to the repository, satisfies that obligation, provided they are told prominently, clearly, and at the point of binary download.  Tucking this notification away in a file buried five levels deep in your documentation, called &lt;code&gt;wombat_equivalence.tex&lt;/code&gt;, will not satisfy this requirement.  Note also that if github goes offline or the original author deletes the repository, that's your problem, not your users'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 contains similar language at the end of s3.  I'm less sure about MPL but I'd be surprised if it were not also similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In passing, I don't quite understand why you think that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the recipients are just &amp;quot;end users&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; would make any difference, here.  The GPL doesn't distinguish between developers who need source code and end-users who don't: to it, all users are developers &lt;em&gt;in potentia&lt;/em&gt;, and are protected accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-27T12:18:11.563" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T12:18:11.563" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11872" CreationDate="2021-06-27T14:47:54.347" Score="3" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's this open source project I'm forking. The original was released under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to introduce additional features based on a different open source project, but this second project is released under MPL-2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that legally allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24420" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T09:35:38.137" Title="Can I use source code released under MPL-2.0 in a software released under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11870" CreationDate="2021-06-27T20:13:45.873" Score="5" ViewCount="828" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently programming a mobile app that is &lt;strong&gt;not under&lt;/strong&gt; the GPL.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the mobile app correspond with a website that is &lt;strong&gt;under GPL Version 2 or higher&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt; In my case the mobiel app send &lt;strong&gt;request via POST-method&lt;/strong&gt; and then &lt;strong&gt;fetches data&lt;/strong&gt; that is displayed as json on the website.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Would the license be AGPL, I'm pretty sure that the mobile app also would be under the AGPL.)&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;How is it in my case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24317" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T23:27:24.087" Title="If I use a mobile app that fetches data from a website under GPLv2+ is the app also under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11869" CreationDate="2021-06-27T23:27:24.087" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license of an application and the license of data that application produces &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be independent&lt;/a&gt;, and are only interrelated if the data includes executable code from the executable itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware designs, can I require that these designs must be free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison ... would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in this specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the data served by the application is pre-existing (i.e., it was not directly created by the application) it may happen to be under a copyright license itself (e.g., consider an application that serves the text of user-submitted copyrighted stories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, a requesting application that receives some data from a web app is almost certainly not a derivative of the serving web app, not a derivative of the served data, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the web app were AGPL-licensed, that would only impose requirements for code that is part of the server-side application, not clients that interact with it; generally, clients under any license may interact with an AGPL-licensed service, because they are separate works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T23:27:24.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11873" CreationDate="2021-06-28T09:25:54.653" Score="10" ViewCount="2731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11867/24427&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and started wondering about this particular part of the GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I understand from the above is that, under the GPL, you can not charge £10 for the main product, and separately charge £1,000,000 for access to the source code (possibly as a deterrent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how does this work with dual licencing? As far as I understand you are free to dual licence GPL code, (as long as it does not involve external GPL'ed code for which one does not have the rights and would then cause conflicts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this mean that a loophole to the above quote exists, where a company could release their product under two licences, and charge £10 for the commercial licence variant, and £1,000,000 for the GPL one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24427" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T00:55:51.380" Title="GPLv3: &quot;Provide source at no further charge&quot; - is dual licencing a loophole?" Tags="|gpl-3|dual-license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11868" CreationDate="2021-06-28T09:35:38.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; in Q14, &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, with three requirements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MPL software isn't incompatible with GPL, either because the original author specifically mark it as such, or it was originally released on MPL 1.1 without dual/tri-license with GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's actually combined with GPL software, instead of merely switching the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MPL-licensed part of the source code is available to your direct recipient under both MPL and GPL. Those from their downstream can elect to use MPL-only or GPL-only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in your scenario point 2 is clearly covered, all you need is to ensure the second project never specifically excluded from licensed under GPL by the original author and you're willing to provide the MPL part under both MPL and GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU's GPL compatibility note&lt;/a&gt; confirms the compatibility&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3.3 provides indirect compatibility between this license and the GNU GPL version 2.0, the GNU LGPL version 2.1, the GNU AGPL version 3, and all later versions of those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and gives a specific example for point 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parties who release original work under MPL 2.0 may choose to opt out of this compatibility by including a sentence in the license notices that says that the work is “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses.” Any software that includes this notice is not compatible with the GPL or AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6478" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T09:35:38.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2021-06-28T09:46:49.290" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is perfectly acceptable to dual-license under GPL and proprietary terms, and to charge more for the GPL terms. This is hardly a loophole. In that scenario, the licensor could also decide to not offer under the GPL at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a company even use such a licensing scheme? The benefit of a dual-licensing scheme is typically that a gratis open source license begets developer mindshare and goodwill, but copyleft licenses are unattractive for many commercial products. Thus, other companies might be prepared to pay &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; for a non-GPL license. Under such a strategy, it wouldn't make any sense to charge more for the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that the GPL license is public. If the original company sells a GPL license for £1M, the licensee could freely share the software and source code with anyone else at no cost. In practice, this means that no one charges for GPL software in the first place (though some projects charge for the convenience of pre-built binaries). Grsecurity is a notable example of an actor who tries to &lt;a href=&quot;https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-contributory-infringement-risk-for-customers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourage&lt;/a&gt; such subsequent sharing, by threatening to withhold security updates from licensees who share the GPL-covered material. This might be a GPL violation, but that hasn't been litigated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T09:46:49.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11874" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-28T17:53:49.200" Score="17" ViewCount="6185" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is related, but it is different to this one: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4221&quot;&gt;How can I forbid shady resale practices?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that a small team or startup (company &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;), develops a good software project, which works in a browser (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.), called here &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (from website), and they release it under a FOSS license (i.e GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can be used at no cost. &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; wants to use a business model for open-source software, such as professional services, branded merchandise, donations, crowdfunding to add new features, etc. (I will use the term &amp;quot;collateral business&amp;quot;, for short)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because company &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; has limited money (since the project novelty, it has poor notability), they cannot pay enough publishing services to increase the notability of &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and hence it is difficult to reach the pretended collateral business conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the company &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;, a medium or big size one and more prominent, takes the source code of &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, makes modifications, mainly to adapt the software for &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; image, not in software functionality, and releases the &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; work on a different website &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the company &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; has more resources (money, workforce, etc), it is much easier to promote &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, reaching notability and eventually achieving the conditions for the collateral business model. &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; has also much more notability (as a trademark) at which &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; can be attached to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; becomes a success, and &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; cannot. Even worse, given the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; success, &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; appears to be a clone of &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, when it is actually the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that company &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; has no violated any license, if they released the derivative source code under the conditions of the license (using the same license, giving credit to the original authors, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even thought the new source code refers to the original authors, final users rarely inspect the license of the software they are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Could this scenario be considered unfair?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how can it be avoided? The following are several options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. Company &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; can release &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as closed-source at the beginning, and release it as FOSS when it has reached enough notability. It comes with another situations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.1. Would releasing &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; as closed-source affect its notability/success? I think it would not too much, because as I said, people tend to not read licenses in order to check whether the product is FOSS or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A.2. Even if were closed-source, being a website, the sources are available because there are not &amp;quot;compiled&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;object&amp;quot; form of web content (excepting, maybe minified/obfuscated JavaScript).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. Adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. I have doubts, because the prominent opinion is that using it makes the entire software not FOSS. Also, it says about &amp;quot;selling the software&amp;quot;, but in this case, neither &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; nor &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; pretend to sell the product, but using it for &amp;quot;collateral business&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. Using other (or combinations of other) FOSS licenses. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4224&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whether there is any other license you could've used&lt;/strong&gt; for &amp;quot;The idea is that a seller would have to give full disclosure so that buyers would know which features of the software they are actually paying for, versus what they can already get for free.&amp;quot;: Well, the MIT license already covers that. There's also the LGPL, BSD, Apache license and Mozilla Public License that do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they also say about &amp;quot;selling&amp;quot; the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can the &amp;quot;Collateral business&amp;quot; be (legally) considered part of &amp;quot;selling the software&amp;quot;? (if so, options B and C could apply)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you know a scenario that prevents the &amp;quot;predatory&amp;quot; scenario described above? It is preferable (but not mandatory) if it uses FOSS licenses (or a combination of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24432" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T04:14:42.047" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T04:14:42.047" Title="How can I deal with this (predatory?) scenario?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|commercial|floss|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11874" CreationDate="2021-06-28T18:40:34.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of the non-FLOSS Commons Clause would probably prevent this insofar as it prohibits collecting &amp;quot;fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software.&amp;quot; Rebranding the software and selling merchandise is probably allowed, but any paid service or support is probably not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't see this as being a large problem. I am not an expert in business plans, but I note the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It must be well-known to paying customers that &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is also open source, because &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; had to offer the source to them under the GPL. I would not expect paying users to believe that &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a &lt;em&gt;clone&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; but rather that it may be a fork of it. Indeed the situation is actually the opposite, but I don't think it matters much: if &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; can convince customers they can competently offer services around &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, I think they can demonstrate similar competence around &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. They can truthfully claim to have been offering solutions in the &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; problem space for longer than &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; prudently selected a copyleft license, they can pull down any useful changes &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; makes and include them in their own offering. In the words of the GNU Manifesto, about a free operating system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GNU will remove operating system software from the realm of competition. You will not be able to get an edge in this area, but neither will your competitors be able to get an edge over you. You and they will compete in other areas, while benefiting mutually in this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people trust &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, then &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; can usefully claim their offering is powered by identical code and supported by experts in the domain. It is quite possible &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; could never have achieved the level of success and public awareness that &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; enjoys with &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and their status as a competent competitor to &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; may be advantageous marketing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for selling branded merchandise, I see &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; relying mainly on their &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;-related trademarks, and folding &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; into the family of &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; trademarks. I think &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; will be able to succeed in capitalizing on their marks about as well as if &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; had never gotten involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-06-28T19:29:09.700" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T19:29:09.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11874" CreationDate="2021-06-28T19:22:50.187" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Open Source is not about fairness, but about Software Freedom. It is irrational to publish Open Source, and to be then surprised that others are exercising their freedoms. Once a company has clear expectations about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they want to do Open Source, they might be able to use tools such as CLAs or trademarks to that effect. In the best case, such an adversarial viewpoint isn't even needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-is-not-a-business-model-and-your-business-will-fail-if-you-think-that-it-is/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source is not a business model&lt;/a&gt;. Open Source might be &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of a business model though. As a corollary, Open Source is simply not a good fit for some business models. It might be better to not make some software Open Source at all rather than be disappointed that other actors are actually using the freedoms you granted them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the defining feature of Open Source might be the freedom to fork. If &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; is not a good steward of the Open Source project, other actors such as &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; must be able to step up and run a fork of the project. For example, when OpenOffice was sold to Oracle, the community was not happy about that and continued development under the term LibreOffice. Some actors try to prevent this e.g. through Contributor License Agreements that privilege themselves over the community, but in the end one shouldn't run an Open Source project if one has a problem with the limited control. In the end, all that the original developer of an Open Source project could control is the trademark. For example, there are many Firefox forks, but only one “Firefox” because Mozilla holds the trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us back to your scenario. If &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; wants to publish open source software for some reason, it makes no sense to &lt;em&gt;fear&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; might fork it, because this would be &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;'s good right. Attempts of &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; to monopolize economic exploitation rights would render the result Not Open Source (which is fine, but out of scope here). Instead, common strategies include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Collaboration. If both &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; derive value of the software and publish their modifications under compatible licenses, then they could work together and merge each other's forks. In order to benefit from the other party's contributions, they would both have an interest in coordinating with each other and not diverging their code bases too far. A successful example of this is Linux, where many companies that would otherwise be competitors work together because they all benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The danger here is that one party does the majority of the work. This party might feel exploited (e.g. see the Elastic v Amazon spat). The party doing the majority of work could also steamroll the other party, and ignore their needs. This is a danger to small companies stewarding an Open Source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Open Core or Dual Licensing. &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; has an advantage because they have intimate knowledge of the software. They might use their experience to create useful extensions, which they then sell under proprietary terms. They might also use their copyright control to dual-license the software under more commercially friendly terms. As long as this is reasonably priced, no other commercial actor will have an interest in competing with that offering. It makes no sense for &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; to start a competing development (expensive!) if they could just license the technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that such approaches generally rely on &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; having a monopoly on the project, e.g. via a CLA so that they are not bound themselves by the license terms. &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; will also find that even the most copyleft Open Source license will not prevent competing commercial use. Thus, many actors that have tried these models have switched to licenses that are Not Open Source (especially in the database space).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks. In an Open Source project, the trademark is the only IP that is typically not licensed out. As already mentioned, Mozilla uses this to make sure that Firefox always refers to their software, not to potentially dodgy forks. This is generally unproblematic: if someone wants to start a competing project, they'll have to pick a different name. Perl also has an interesting license that effectively says “either you publish your modifications as Open Source, or you'll rename your program so that it won't interfere with the Standard Version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, you have already pointed to a huge limitation of this: trademarks are only worth something if they are recognized. A fledgeling project would not have widespread recognition. But I don't think that is a huge issue since communities are not typically interested in names, but in whoever seems a reasonable steward of the project. I've already mentioned the OpenOffice → LibreOffice migration. As a more recent non-software example, consider the Freenode → LiberaChat exodus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses help here in so far as that they require attribution of the original. Both Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0 have explicit provisions for retaining reasonable attribution notices. If &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; forks &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;'s project, they would still have to include &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;'s notices in all copies of the software. Downstream users can then decide for themselves whether they would rather stick with the original by &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, or if the modifications by &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; are a value-add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To finally address your specific questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does “selling a software” mean? Nothing. Whatever it means, an Open Source license &lt;em&gt;will not&lt;/em&gt; prevent it. The Commons Clause defines “Sell” very broadly, also including collateral business such as consulting, but the Commons Clause is very much Not Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can predatory behaviour be prevented? I don't think so. I think there's a lot of disappointment from companies which have a business plan like “1. Open Source. 2. ???. 3. Profit!”. That cannot work. Instead, I think the proper approach is to ground the expectations about what doing Open Source means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a company interested in increasing Software Freedom, and just wants to make enough money to feed its devs? That's probably doable without a lot of regret (though there are many counterexamples – making money from systems-level software is especially hard).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a company using the Open Source offering as a sales funnel towards paid services? The math may or may not work out, but it's irrational to be disappointed when another company starts eating a large slice of the sales pie.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a company only doing Open Source for “personal” use? Yeah no, they'll be severely disappointed when other companies exercise their rights under the Open Source terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, it might also be worth considering that most Open Source projects are not wildly successful. By itself, code is worthless. Projects are of social, not technical nature. Unless a community forms itself around the code, it doesn't really matter if the code is open source or not. This also means that just throwing some code on GitHub is usually irrelevant (and I have published many irrelevant projects!). A company will not save money by doing Open Source, because there are no droves of highly experienced but bored devs just waiting for an opportunity to contribute something. Fostering Open Source communities takes real effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the “trick” is to be aware of the limitations of Open Source. If a business cannot succeed when other actors exercise their rights, then maybe an Open Source strategy just isn't a good fit for the business. Sometimes this can be addressed by legal mechanisms such as trademarks. Often, this can be addressed by redefining success – competition doesn't have to mean that I starve. While I would love to see &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; Open Source in the world, this is just not always sensible given the market realities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-06-28T19:22:50.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2021-06-29T00:35:57.407" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the &lt;strong&gt;originator&lt;/strong&gt; of the work, then you can license it to as many people as you want, under as many different license agreements as you want. The GPL imposes conditions on the licensee, not on the copyright owner!&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The fact that you give &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt; access to your code under the GPL license for one price has no bearing whatsoever on the license conditions (and price) you give to someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause of the GPL that you're asking about binds &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people who receive your work under the GPL. It does not bind &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;, so it is totally irrelevant to any other license agreements you might make.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, people are usually interested in loopholes to the GPL because they want to make use of GPLed code owned by &lt;strong&gt;other people&lt;/strong&gt;, without having to release the source of their own modifications. In this scenario, you cannot do what you propose, because you have no authority to distribute &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; the binaries under the commercial license (regardless of price). You can decide not to distribute at all, or you can distribute under the GPL for any price you like (necessarily including source code in the same price). Those are your options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual-licensing isn't really a &amp;quot;loophole&amp;quot;. It doesn't somehow &amp;quot;get around&amp;quot; any obligations of any license agreements, it just makes use of the fact that you are not a licensee of your own work; there &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; no license terms governing your use of it. If you do actually have obligations under the GPL (because you're a licensee of someone else's GPLed work), then you can't dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It is possible for two parties to make a contract where one party will &lt;em&gt;exclusively&lt;/em&gt; license their work to the other. That contract would restrict them from also giving the work to other people under other licenses, but there is no such contract involved in typical uses of the GPL. Certainly it's not in the GPL itself, which is merely a one-way grant of permissions to distribute the work under certain conditions, not a two-way exchange of obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Technically you can even give binaries of your own original code (not a derivative work of anything else) &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the source code, licensed under the GPL. The fact that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; gave them permission to distribute the binaries as long as they also distributed the source does not obligate you to give them the source. You're the owner! You don't need anyone's permission to distribute your own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it's a pointless thing to do, because the effect is just that they can't distribute the binaries (since they don't have the source, and you only gave them permission to distribute the binaries if they also distribute the source). You might as well just use a license that says &amp;quot;Do not distribute&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1120" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T00:35:57.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2021-06-29T00:55:51.380" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this mean that a loophole to the above quote exists, where a company could release their product under two licences, and charge £10 for the commercial licence variant, and £1,000,000 for the GPL one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. For two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is in no sense a loophole. You could just not offer it under the GPL license at all. What benefit would you get by also offering a GPL version over not offering a GPL version at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everyone who gets the commercial license variable would automatically have the GPL one no matter what you do. As the GPLv3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties with this License.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proprietary version is a &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; because the GPLv3 says a &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the Program&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;any copyrightable work licensed under this License&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by distributing the proprietary version, you are distributing a &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; and thus the recipient of the work automatically receives a GPLv3 license to that work. By placing the work itself under the GPL, you agree to grant anyone who has a lawful copy of that work (or anything derived from it) a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But point two is largely academic since you are the only license holder, so there would be nobody to enforce the GPL license against you. You wouldn't be harming anyone by distributing code without accompanying GPL rights since you could do that anyway by simply never offering a GPL version at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T00:55:51.380" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11856" CreationDate="2021-06-29T12:04:15.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law is interesting because it's at the boundary of criminal and civil law. But in this case, the criminal side can be safely ignored. Criminal prosecution has a  higher standard of evidence, and this case is murky enough that there is insufficient public interest for the State to press charges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with the civil side, as apsillers already noted. The original author can sue for two main reasons: to stop an infringement, and to claim damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first demand (stop infringement) is something you don't need to worry about, because that would just put you back in the default situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The damages claim is therefore the only one that deserves further analysis. Again, aspillers had a good comment: estoppel and laches may be available as defenses. But that is further down the line. The original author first needs to explain in the suit what action of yours was not permitted. That claim would be, in legal terms, the creation of a derivative work. Technically, that takes the shape of disassembled C code, but legally the particular shape of the derivative work does not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; defense of yours will be that regardless of the GPL version, you have the permission to make derivative works. Estoppel and laches are additional defenses - if you had permission anyway, there was no copyright violation. But this is a legal technicality: was the GPL offer direct permission or merely a promise thereof?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, the burden of proof is on the claimant, and courts tend to take a rather dim view of claimants that caused problems for themselves. It would have been trivial &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to mark the program as GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T12:04:15.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11880" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11888" CreationDate="2021-06-29T12:29:42.590" Score="3" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made one site and want to publish on GitHub, though this site has copyrighted images and names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched and found the MPL 2.0 that theoretically will protect this licensed images and names but I'm still not sure about it. I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the entire FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt; but I didn't understood what it will protect for sure and where I have to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/#:%7E:text=You%20may%20also%20add%20additional%20accurate%20notices,copyright%20holder%2C%20but%20this%20is%20not%20necessary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;add the notices of copyright ownership that I have&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is any other open source license that allows other people to use the code of my site but not the images and names? Or every license is already like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still new on the open source world so I don't really understand what other people will be able to use or not when I publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24443" LastEditorDisplayName="user24913" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T10:25:46.053" LastActivityDate="2021-09-01T10:25:46.053" Title="Adding an open source license to a website with licensed images/names" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|github|website|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-27T04:51:48.617" Score="2" ViewCount="768" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a website using Django and I have used getbootstrap4.3 in my website. &lt;a href=&quot;https://getbootstrap.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the official website&lt;/a&gt;, they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stated like this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;It requires you to:&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the license and copyright notice included in Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript files when you use them in your works&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't understand this, what is a copyright notice, and where I should include it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Rishwik Kandhi" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T06:12:27.777" Title="What is this Keep the license and copyright notice included in Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript files when you use them in your works?" Tags="|python|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11881" CreationDate="2021-06-27T15:14:35.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't understand this, what is a copyright notice [?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice is the notice given by the original authors and/or copyright holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written to give anyone (potentially including you) notice about the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See as well the dictionary or encyclopedia of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're concerned about legal matters, contact a lawyer on your behalf, they should be able to educate you about the international meaning as well about the differences that apply to you as human locally where you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I should include it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read the sentence again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep the license and copyright notice included in Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript files when you use them in your works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should keep the already included notice in Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript files when you &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; them in your works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written there all verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're concerned about the legal meaning of any of these words incl. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;included&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; please contact a lawyer on your behalf. Lawyers are normally educated well enough that they next to legal matters can also help with reading texts as they need to do that a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're still in education, another idea might be to talk with your tutor or professor about how to understand sentences like these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the Bootstraps' project did made this as an FAQ, so the information you can find on that page is meant to make it easier for you - not more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16080" OwnerDisplayName="hakre" LastActivityDate="2021-06-27T15:14:35.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11874" CreationDate="2021-06-29T13:21:30.900" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this scenario be considered unfair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It is simply a bad business plan of company A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL and other open source (as in freedom, not beer) licenses are exactly what they are. There is no &amp;quot;if, when or but&amp;quot;. One reads the license, follows it to the letter, and that is that. There is no moral, ethics or fairness here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company A was able to read the GPL, they applied the GPL out of their own volition. Nobody forced it on them, certainly not company B. Company A had all the information beforehand - they knew they were small, they knew that they probably would not be able to be able to use the software to gain financial benefit. They just failed from a business point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody can take the software away from A. They are free to keep trying to come up with a working business plan. They can join forces with the other company (i.e., pull B's fork back into A's code base and thus benefit from all the improvements). If B manages to have success off the software, then not because B somehow stole anything from A. B cannot force any user of the software to use their fork, except by throwing out better quality code (which, in turn, A can always pull back and merge in their original fork).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If B decides to, for example, create a paid service on top of the software, then the software is still free. B cannot lock users into their version of the software using their paid service - any user can always get the open source software. This is fair; B is providing a service, and is getting paid for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-06-29T15:46:07.840" LastActivityDate="2021-06-29T15:46:07.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11881" CreationDate="2021-06-30T06:12:27.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the FAQ entry is referring to are comment blocks like this one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*!&#xA; * Bootstrap v5.0.2 (https://getbootstrap.com/)&#xA; * Copyright 2011-2021 The Bootstrap Authors (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/graphs/contributors)&#xA; * Licensed under MIT (https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/main/LICENSE)&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is telling you that you must not delete them from your copy of Bootstrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice is the line starting with the word &amp;quot;Copyright&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license that allows you to use the Bootstrap files (the MIT license) has as one of its few conditions that you must keep the copyright and licensing information intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-06-30T06:12:27.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-29T15:02:46.143" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using the first time the open-source library. I have to export some files of costumer as a ZIP, seems the ZIPFoundation looks great to use it. I read the license which wrote it is free, but the line which wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means I have to add in code or I have to show alert to end user when using zip, that copy right belong to this person (seems strange but I want to be sure :) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Steven" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T02:38:48.850" Title="Using ZIPFoundation Library in e-commerce app, do I have to copy the license and add inside the code?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11885" CreationDate="2021-07-01T02:38:48.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is not strange at all. It is a requirement of basically every license that authorship is acknowledged. Open source does not mean 'free to use without any obligation'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the right thing to do is to display in the 'about' tab, the readme or on the same place you show your copyright also the copyright notices of 3rd party software used - like this licenses information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean you have to spring a separate pop - up into your users face when they save to zip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-07-01T02:38:48.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11880" CreationDate="2021-07-01T14:22:31.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Open Source Initiative website FAQs:&lt;br/&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#copying-and-identity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/faq#copying-and-identity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does Open Source mean anybody else can use my name and logo?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, at least not any more than they could otherwise. Open Source is about software source code, not about identity. That is, letting people use your code under an Open Source license is not the same as letting them use your trademarks or other identifying attributes, except insofar as they would be permitted to anyway (for example, in nominative use doctrine). There are many companies and other organizations that release open source code while exercising tight control over their trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks and other marks of attribution are primarily about preventing public confusion over identity and provenance, and therefore trademark regulation is useful in Open Source software in the same way it is useful generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the approved licenses they list should be ok if you want to keep exclusive rights of other content like images and names. And they list the MPL 2.0 license. It's independent, and you have to make sure they're licensed as you want. But I'm not a lawyer, I was just looking for the same information which I found there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15272" LastEditorUserId="24443" LastEditDate="2021-07-03T09:38:59.720" LastActivityDate="2021-07-03T09:38:59.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11874" CreationDate="2021-07-02T01:21:55.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what way is this unfair?  You gave &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; the software under the condition that they follow the terms of the license.  As long as they're obeying the license, they're doing exactly what you asked.  Are you upset that they're making money?  If that's the case, use a license that expressly forbids commercial use.  You can't simultaneously give someone permission to do something and also be upset that they're doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a strong copyleft license like the GPL, &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;'s version is a derivative work and thus must also be released under the GPL.  Whoever buys the first copy can re-distribute it for free, so &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;'s business model isn't going to pass the sniff test with the legal department.  They'd have to provide some sort of value-add that can't be duplicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; case, you're talking about &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; creating a commercial website that's powered by your software.  There's more at play here, though.  &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; is also paying for the infrastructure hosting their site, creating content for the site, handling customer orders, etc.  None of that was copied from the original project, &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt; is adding real value to the original and there shouldn't be a problem with them profiting from that additional work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this software is for a website, I recommend looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-(agpl-3.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; which is designed for web software.  Source code for &lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;'s version would have to be made available to anyone who &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; the website, not just those who get a copy of the website software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastEditorUserId="9682" LastEditDate="2021-07-02T01:37:19.450" LastActivityDate="2021-07-02T01:37:19.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-04T12:17:14.810" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have built an application using Windows Forms Desktop Application in C++/CLI, I am also using NuGet Package for MySQL.data as well as I am using MySQL code for the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to add a license to the project so which license should I add??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Windows Forms comes under MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NuGet Package comes under Apache 2.0 license according to Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MySQL code and connector comes under GPL v2 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I am confused if Windows Forms Application uses .NET or .NET Framework and both are under what type of License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24478" LastEditorUserId="24478" LastEditDate="2021-07-05T03:11:30.483" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T11:02:30.270" Title="License for Windows Forms Application in C++/CLI and MySQL" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-04T14:30:35.313" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just finished creating a program and I want to license it under Creative Commons - Share-A-Like license. It's my first creative commons licensed software. However, I did purchase two images for the splash screen from an image stock provider. The requirements for the images are that I re-license the image if the image is viewed more than one million times. Would it be possible to still license the software under Creative Commons and exclude those images from the share-a-like or does Creative Commons encompass the entire program with no options of exclusion? Has anyone else used stock photos in their Creative Commons projects? If so, how do did you work around this issue? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24479" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T21:33:44.063" Title="Does Creative Commons allow for the exclusion of stock images that are included in a program?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11893" CreationDate="2021-07-04T21:33:44.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a lot more research I found the answer right on the Creative Commons website. The quick answer is....DO NOT use the Creative Commons license for the software. It's not a good choice. Instead, use a license by either the Open Source Initiative or the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source Initiative: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Free Software Foundation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Directly from Creative Commons FAQ section:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;`We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software.&#xA;Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good&#xA;software licenses which are already available. We recommend&#xA;considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation&#xA;and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific&#xA;terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important&#xA;to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many&#xA;software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to&#xA;software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works.&#xA;Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major&#xA;software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed&#xA;work with other free software. Existing software licenses were&#xA;designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of&#xA;rights to the Creative Commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way&#xA;compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3).&#xA;This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which&#xA;content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it&#xA;difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special&#xA;considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism.&#xA;Read more about it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and&#xA;acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC&#xA;licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for&#xA;separate artistic elements such as game art or music.`&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24479" LastActivityDate="2021-07-04T21:33:44.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-06T09:43:10.883" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a programme X licensed under the GPL, to which I am the sole contributor and copyright holder. I distribute the binaries for X and provide the source code online as required by the license. Then, I have a change of heart, and want to relicense under a proprietary license. I know I can make future versions closed source, but I come across a problem if I make older versions closed source - I have distributed binaries which come with a license that requires access to source code - and not just that, but it also requires the provided source code be licensed under the GPL! This effectively makes it impossible to relicense the older versions of X, unless...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I change the license of binaries that I have already distributed to this proprietary license? The binaries will have been distributed with the text of the GPL and a notice that they are licensed under it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is an entirely hypothetical question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24498" LastActivityDate="2021-07-06T09:43:10.883" Title="Can the license of a previously distributed binary be changed?" Tags="|gpl|law|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-07-06T10:23:08.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-07T00:25:39.843" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a &lt;em&gt;fork&lt;/em&gt; of a software distributed under the &lt;strong&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;. This software has many components, one of them is its UI, where It's possible to find the creator's logo and other information about the developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;strong&gt;APL2&lt;/strong&gt; permit that I &lt;strong&gt;create a fork of this project&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;develop my own UI&lt;/strong&gt;, in order to use &lt;strong&gt;my logo and extended components&lt;/strong&gt;, and include all copyright/original developers' information in an &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; section of all other components that I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24505" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T08:11:05.007" Title="Create a new UI for an Apache 2.0 software" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11896" CreationDate="2021-07-07T08:11:05.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is fully permitted to completely change the UI on a Apache 2.0-licensed project and to change the look&amp;amp;feel, logo's and where the attribution information is shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T08:11:05.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11900" CreationDate="2021-07-07T12:05:33.990" Score="4" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to release my first &amp;quot;big&amp;quot; project on Github, and although I want it to remain open-source and I have no plan of selling it, I want to try to make this licensing stuff right for my next projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the story, I'm writing a program in Python, inspired by an original program developed in C under the GPL license. I've written my project from scratch and most of the code is mine but some parts of my code are C code that I translated in Python from the original project and other parts of the code are inspired from the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have researched information on licensing for the past two days and from what I understand my project is considered as a derivative work from the original project. According to that, my project also needs to be under GPL, which I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part where I'm a little bit lost is where do I attribute the original author in my project? In addition to the LICENSE file containing the GPL text, I have created a NOTICE file which basically contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{MyProject}&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) {Date}  {My Name}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portions of {MyProject} contain code derived from, or inspired by {Original Project}&#xA;({Original project link}) under the GNU General Public License&#xA;(GPL) version 2 or later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright {Data} {Original author's name} {author's email}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then I copy/pasted the licensing stuff in his own LICENSE file (which says his project is under GPL but it is not the GPL text you get from the website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this enough? Or should I put the author's copyright in all my source code's headers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have seen in various posts and threads, you need to do that when you are directly modifying the original source code, where you can put your copyright on top of the original copyright and describe the changes you have made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in my case all of the project structure, files, and code are different, and putting the original author's copyright in my files' headers would not make a clear distinction between what is my original work and what is copyrighted to the author of the original project, because the original parts of code I derived for my project are split in small chunks across my source files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think the NOTICE file I have created is sufficient to attribute the original author's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24510" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-07T10:48:16.827" LastActivityDate="2023-07-07T10:48:16.827" Title="GPL and original author's copyright text in completely rewritten code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|copyright|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-07T13:31:29.480" Score="7" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/is-onlyoffice-restricting-our-freedom-with-their-faq-agpl-v3/9482#9482&quot;&gt;Is ONLYOFFICE restricting our freedom with their FAQ? (AGPL v3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4971/what-are-the-attribution-requirements-of-the-agpl-license?rq=1&quot;&gt;What are the attribution requirements of the AGPL license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but can't come to a definitive answer - how can I require attribution &lt;strong&gt;visible to the end user&lt;/strong&gt; for the derived works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If competitors are going to monetize my software, I want to (at least) get attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I understood from the referenced questions/answers is that s7(b) of the AGPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;strong&gt;Requiring preservation of&lt;/strong&gt; specified reasonable legal notices or&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal&#xA;Notices displayed by works containing it&lt;/strong&gt;; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;allows me do add additional terms to require attribution, but how can I require it to be visible for the end user of the web application (instead of shown in the source code or some other barely visible place) for all the derived works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ideally with the link and logo.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like Algolia does with &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Search by Algolia&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K9IhR.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/K9IhR.png&quot; alt=&quot;Search by Algolia&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is not possible, what can I do with the AGPLv3 to be close to that, or which Open Source license covers this use case, I'm sure it's a common scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24512" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T13:31:29.480" Title="Require attribution with AGPL" Tags="|gpl|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|attribution|agpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11898" CreationDate="2021-07-07T20:27:16.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have research information on licensing for the past two days and from what I understand my project is considered as a derivative work from the original project. According to that, my project also needs to be under GPL, that I understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly correct. The bits of code that you translated from C to Python are almost certainly a derivative work of the original; bits of code that were &amp;quot;inspired&amp;quot; from the original project may or may not be, depending on how close the &amp;quot;inspiration&amp;quot; was. Independent sections of code that you wrote from scratch without any reference to the original project are not a derivative work of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;should I put the author's copyright in all my source code's headers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any sections of the code which are derivative works of the original should maintain the original copyright statement. As above, there are some grey areas here but I'd certainly say that any files which contain code directly translated from the original should maintain the original copyright statement. Anything you've written from scratch doesn't need it, and the &amp;quot;inspired&amp;quot; sections are the grey area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, you could just put the original copyright statement on everything. The only time this could become an issue would be if in the future you wished to relicense the code you have written yourself under a different license, when such a statement could be taken as evidence you were not the sole copyright holder and therefore did not have the right to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-07-07T20:27:16.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11902" CreationDate="2021-07-08T03:14:22.037" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a library that uses libdwarf (licensed as LGPL 2.1). Suppose I modify the CMake files to get it to build with a different MSVCRT. What do I need to release and am I required to license it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24526" LastActivityDate="2021-07-08T09:55:06.347" Title="Does modifying build files (not source code) constitute a derivative work?" Tags="|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11901" CreationDate="2021-07-08T09:55:06.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Build scripts are part of the software. More precisely, build scripts are part of the Corresponding Machine-Readable Source Code as defined by the LGPL 2.1 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Source code&amp;quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For a library, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the &lt;strong&gt;scripts used to control compilation&lt;/strong&gt; and installation of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your software that includes LGPL components, you can distribute your software as a whole under any terms you want. But you must provide the source code for any LGPL-covered components, and must enable recipients to replace these components. Typically, this means that LGPL components will be included as dynamically loaded libraries. Since the source code as defined by the LGPL includes build scripts, you will also have to disclose your changes to the build scripts, and you can only license your changes under the LGPL as well (or a compatible license such as GPL). Note that you have to provide the source code for LGPL components regardless of whether you modified those components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But only if you distribute the software. The GPL/LGPL licenses do not require you to disclose changes to software that you don't share. Indeed, the goal of the GPL/LGPL licenses is not that people are forced to disclose their source code, but that end users have the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-07-08T09:55:06.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T15:47:37.787" Score="-1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a senior year project hosted on GitHub, including CAD files, code, and a written paper (PDF) that describes my work. I would like to ask what copyright or permissions I should include on this in order to have correct protections on my work. I do not mind people referencing my work or basing their own work off of mine, but I do not want people to be able to take my code or paper and present it as their own. Thank you for your advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I think my concern is more on my written work rather than my code, as the latter is more difficult to &amp;quot;monitor&amp;quot; or protect that. The paper I care more about making sure it can be shared and available online but attributed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24535" LastEditorUserId="24535" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T10:19:09.160" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T11:09:48.167" Title="What copyright/permissions to use for a publicly available student paper online (GitHub)?" Tags="|copyright|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11903" CreationDate="2021-07-09T16:31:22.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't have to do anything. Any work which requires some ingenuity or creativity (and a student project's text, CAD files or code certainly qualify) is automatically covered by copyright laws. Copyright law only defines the &lt;em&gt;exceptions&lt;/em&gt; to this general rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it comes to choosing a license, it is in academia common to use a creative commons license for text. There are different flavours, but each requires attribution when the work is being shared or used otherwise. The most common in this context (at least in the areas I venture) is the simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; which allows to share and modify and do whatever - on the condition of giving credits to the original author. See details in the link above. If you want to be a bit more restrictive on the conditions, checkout the other creative commons licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-07-11T11:09:48.167" LastActivityDate="2021-07-11T11:09:48.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-09T19:34:21.663" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you know a license, if possible approved by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, that's very similar to the MIT license but has explicit trademark use protection like the MLP 2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zkhT6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zkhT6.png&quot; alt=&quot;MLP 2.0 license on GH&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24536" LastActivityDate="2021-07-09T19:34:21.663" Title="MIT license alternative with explicit trademark use protection" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|license-notice|license|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-07-12T08:48:46.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11892" CreationDate="2021-07-12T08:47:22.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with the packages you have listed, but you have confirmed that one of them is a library, so I will assume all the others are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is debate about whether dynamically-linking your work to a library makes your work a derivative, in copyright terms, of the library.  We have questions here that present the arguments &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo?rq=1&quot;&gt;that it does&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ?rq=1&quot;&gt;that it doesn't&lt;/a&gt;, but the answer at the moment is that nobody knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I believe that it does, and in any case it's a safer bet to behave as if it does until the question is resolved.  The MIT and Apache licences oblige you to preserve copyright notifications and some licence text, although they don't require that the derivative work be covered by those licences.  The GPL has more obligations, which include applying the GPL to the derivative work as a whole.  So on this analysis, the answer to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to add a license to the project so which license should I add?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is &amp;quot;GPLv2&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T08:47:22.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11909" CreationDate="2021-07-12T09:36:47.090" Score="8" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iausofa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Astronomy Union's Standards of Fundamental Astronomy&lt;/a&gt; is a software library providing an authoritative suite of functions useful in astonomonical and geospatial calculations. It is officially available in C and FORTRAN flavours, and there are a variety of unofficial wrappers &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?q=SOFA%20astronomy&amp;amp;type=Repositories&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available&lt;/a&gt; in various languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most popular Github project based on SOFA, with a whopping 14 stars, is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/abrudana/wwa/blob/master/WorldWideAstronomy/license.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS Reciprocal License&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/abrudana/wwa/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;readme&lt;/a&gt; file also separately includes the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iausofa.org/tandc.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SOFA software license&lt;/a&gt;. Other projects have chosen, e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sisl/SOFA.jl/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; or have simply included the SOFA license with no other licensing declared (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ZoussCity/sofa-sys/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;e.g.&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm new to open source projects, both releasing and including/adapting, and understanding the implications of licensing fills me with anxiety. Especially when it comes to including work such as SOFA which seems, if I'm reading the license right, to be beer-free but not quite free-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is in two parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are the requirements of the SOFA license (royalty-free use, modification permitted with stipulations) compatible with most/any/some of the fully FOSS licenses, where the SOFA code is included without modification, as in the libraries linked above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Acknowledging that the SOFA license explicitly states that &amp;quot;&lt;code&gt;third-party modifications are discouraged&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;, if one were to re-implement some or all of the SOFA functionality &lt;em&gt;natively&lt;/em&gt; in another language, would the choice of license this was released in be limited by the SOFA license conditions? I.e., how much freedom can the creators of derived works based on my own SOFA-derived work have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible I'm worried about nothing, but while I understand code just fine, I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; (yet) understand the fine points of licensing rights and derived works!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24544" LastEditorUserId="24544" LastEditDate="2021-07-12T10:01:47.177" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T10:09:12.900" Title="SOFA software license compatibility with FOSS/CC licenses" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11908" CreationDate="2021-07-12T10:09:12.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware that OSI has taken any position on the SOFA licence, but I can see a number of reasons why it might not be regarded as a free licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3c provides that &lt;em&gt;The names of all routines in your derived work shall not include the prefix &amp;quot;iau&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sofa&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  This seems to me at odds with freedom four of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;, the freedom to improve the software in any way you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 provides that &lt;em&gt;You shall not cause the SOFA software to be brought into disrepute, either by misuse, or use for inappropriate tasks, or by inappropriate modification&lt;/em&gt;.  This seems to me at odds with freedom one, the freedom to use the software for any purpose, as well as with freedom four.  The SOFA authors don't say what &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;inappropriate tasks&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are, but I can imagine that using the routines in (say) a piece of astrological software wouldn't make them happy.  In any case, it doesn't matter exactly what tasks or modifications they wish to proscribe, only that they reserve the right to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the requirements of the SOFA license (royalty-free use, modification permitted with stipulations) compatible with most/any/some of the fully FOSS licenses, where the SOFA code is included without modification, as in the libraries linked above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm right about SOFA code being non-free, there's no bar on combining it with code covered by a permissive free licence (eg Apache, MIT), but you couldn't combine it with code under a copyleft licence (eg GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if one were to re-implement some or all of the SOFA functionality natively in another language, would the choice of license this was released in be limited by the SOFA license conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SOFA s3e requires that &lt;em&gt;These requirements must be reproduced intact in any source distribution and shall apply to anyone to whom you have granted a further right to modify the source code of your derived work&lt;/em&gt;, which reads to me a lot like a (crayon) copyleftish licence.  As I read it, the SOFA authors intended you to have to release derivative works under the SOFA licence.  A port of this code to another language is almost certainly going to be a copyright derivative of the SOFA code, so you would have to release it under the SOFA licence also, as would those who produced works which were derivatives (in copyright terms) of your port.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T10:09:12.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2021-07-12T20:03:39.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I Am Not A Lawyer, but I don't see why this would be any different from &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; executable code. You need to distribute the source code for your app. Both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are clear on the definition of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do you prefer to modify the neural network by starting from the neural network blob, or would you train a new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that it could be faster to update a neural network by starting from an existing network and doing more training. You can add new code to an executable file, too, but that doesn't mean it's the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it - it's &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; to have the original source code. If you can re-train the neural network from scratch, you can make more kinds of modifications, like changing the number of layers. For this reason I think you should consider the training code and data as &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; of the neural network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@apsillers has said that the neural network might not be copyrightable in the first place, since it's the output of a mechanical process. However, I don't think that's relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall why your program has to be GPL to begin with. Because you are using GPLed code you must comply with the license &lt;em&gt;of that code&lt;/em&gt;. The license &lt;em&gt;of that code&lt;/em&gt; says that if you make a derivative work &lt;em&gt;of that code&lt;/em&gt; - and your whole app is a derivative work - you must only distribute it under the terms of the GPL. If you distribute your app under the terms of the GPL, that means you must distribute the source code for the entire app, including the neural network part. The whole app is certainly a copyrightable work, even if particular parts of it might not be copyrightable by themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, if it wasn't copyrightable by virtue of being the output , that would just mean it wasn't copyrightable &lt;em&gt;by you&lt;/em&gt;. If you use a computer to (&amp;quot;mechanically&amp;quot;) convert a .mp3 file to .wav, the copyright holder of the .mp3 file also owns the copyright to the .wav. It's not held by you, and it's not held by nobody. If this argument is valid, it would mean the neural network's copyright would be held by whoever held the the training data's copyright - assuming that the training data was in fact copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@apsillers has also questioned whether a neural network model counts as code. I don't think that's relevant, either. The GPL applies to the entire app, not just the part that is labelled &amp;quot;code&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the GPLv2 gives you permission to distribute your work in source code form, or in &amp;quot;object code or executable form&amp;quot;. The latter is a bit ambiguous, but it could be interpreted to mean that &amp;quot;object code form&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;executable form&amp;quot; are the same thing. In that case, you wouldn't have permission to distribute derivative works in non-code forms at all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 is clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Object code” means any non-source form of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so your network has to either count as &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; in the GPLv3 - no ifs or buts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2021-07-12T20:03:39.210" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11941" CreationDate="2021-07-16T12:16:27.987" Score="4" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it compatible with the GPL to construct (and distribute in binary and source form) a GPL licensed program with a &amp;quot;programming language&amp;quot; that only I have the compiler for and which I do not license to anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. something called C$ that compiles to MSIL with my own proprietary tool, but which does not compile with a C# compiler. The App would however use other modules (by other authors) that I use in the App and redistribute under the terms of the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course anyone using the App would be given the C$ source code as the GPL requires - just not the compiler. This way nobody could effectively compile or use the GPLd parts of the source code written by me in C$, and I could use GPLd modules as I please without effectively making the source code of my Application usable for anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would that be compilant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22682" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T08:06:08.843" Title="Require proprietary compiler / transpiler / preprocessor for GPL source code" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2021-07-22T08:26:44.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11915" CreationDate="2021-07-16T20:11:50.117" Score="1" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project with MIT license. The idea of dual licensing came up several times and I wonder if it's possible to add a second license next to MIT that obligates companies e.g. with larger than $1,000,000/year revenue to pay some fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that dual licensing is usually done with GPL licenses to &amp;quot;unlock&amp;quot; the restrictions of the GPL license but I haven't found any cases for MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10775" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T05:32:53.490" Title="MIT + commercial licence? Is it possible?" Tags="|mit|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11914" CreationDate="2021-07-16T20:25:27.720" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dual licensing is usually done with GPL licenses to &amp;quot;unlock&amp;quot; the restrictions of the GPL license but I haven't found any cases for MIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because there are no restrictions in permissive licences that would justify payment to unlock.  Taking the part of a hypothetical licensee and hir derivative work, I can see why I might pay to avoid the obligation to honour the GPL with respect to my derivative, as the requirement to make source available under the GPL would weaken my control of my product.  But why on earth would I pay solely to avoid the requirement to reproduce the text of the MIT licence and your copyright notice on page 8,752 of volume IV of my manual?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the usual &amp;quot;dual licensing&amp;quot; situation involves potential licensees deciding which of the two licences they wish to honour: the no-cost copyleft one, or the with-cost one that allows them to lock their product up.  The choice you suggest, however, cannot be given to large corporations, otherwise they'll just choose the zero-cost MIT-licensed option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't have a scheme that offers your work under one of two licences (MIT or paid-for) depending on the revenue of the licensee, because as the CTO of EvilCorp I'll just get my 17-year old nephew (whose annual income is £235.50 and two packets of wine gums) to take a copy under MIT, then pass an MIT-licensed copy on to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you're really asking about, it seems to me, is whether you can have a single licence that acts like MIT but only to potential licensees whose annual income is below a certain threshold.  I'm not very confident that you could, though it is possible: but such a licence would certainly be non-free, and so we can give no further advice on it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T05:32:53.490" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T05:32:53.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11916" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11917" CreationDate="2021-07-17T16:25:57.970" Score="6" ViewCount="786" Body="&lt;p&gt;WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol which is licensed under GPLv3. Am I right to assume that they should legally be required to publish their source code since they use the Signal protocol on binaries shipping to end user devices? Or is it common for library developers to offer/&amp;quot;sell&amp;quot; licenses to companies that wish to use GPLv3 code without having to disclose the full product source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24588" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T16:56:42.953" Title="Can you purchase the right to distribute GPLv3 code without disclosing source code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11916" CreationDate="2021-07-17T16:56:42.953" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I write some program from scratch, I can choose to license as open source under e.g. GPLv3, and simultaneously license it for a stiff fee for use in closed source applications, no GPL strings attached. I could even get tired of it all and sell all rights. If my project gets third party contributions, I'll have to make sure the relevant rights are transferred to me. That isn't exactly popular among open source enthusiasts, for obvious reasons. This was the path taken by e.g. Qt (of KDE fame) and the business model behind MySQL. Not very successfully, I might add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As comments note, what can be copyrighted is a specific work, like a program or a text describing a protocol. If somebody studies the protocol description and builds a program implementing it without including any of the description (i.e., no example code or such), the result is not bound at all by the description's copyright. Same with &amp;quot;clean room reimplementation&amp;quot;: A team studies the program and writes up a specification, which is handed to another team that implements the specification. The result is not bound by the original's copyright, as it legally isn't derived from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T16:56:42.953" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-17T17:52:27.010" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say programmer Ed has made program foo and the program is licensed under the GPL license. If Ed updates his program, is that now a derivative or modified work? What if John contributes to upstream, is that also now a modified work? Or is a program only a modified or derivative work if the original author had nothing to do with it? My confusion is where something is considered a modified or derivative work. Sometimes I want a binary for a certain platform to be under GPL and some platforms a more liberal license, but don't know if I can't relicense code I wrote because I previously licensed it under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24591" LastActivityDate="2021-07-17T17:52:27.010" Title="If the original author updates their program, is it now a modified work?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-07-18T12:53:30.910" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11920" CreationDate="2021-07-17T18:19:21.367" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'd like to develop an end-user application with which you can create some kind of artistic work (say presentations or drawings). As a fan of the open source idea, I'd like to open-source the full program's source code under a copyleft license (thus, requiring derivative works to be distributed under the same free license as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For end-users and educational institutions, this will be enough. However, for professional works (made by companies), I'd like to take a fair price for that same piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dual Licensing&lt;/a&gt; concept is based on the idea that it will be impractical for commercial companies to distibute derivative works of the software, as it would have to be open-sourced as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this artistic software though, I'm not particularly worrying about companies modifying and re-selling the software, but instead that the &lt;strong&gt;resulting works&lt;/strong&gt; would be created with the copyleft-version instead of the commercial version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it would be easy to just restrict the copyleft version's functions and put like some disturbing watermark on the user's creations. But I don't want to go this cheap way.  Is there any licensing model out there that covers this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24592" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-17T20:08:55.590" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T13:35:46.267" Title="Dual Licensing for Artistic Software" Tags="|licensing|commercial|multi-licensing|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11919" CreationDate="2021-07-18T07:08:15.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your idea is not going to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License terms for a copyrighted work can only be set/dictated by someone who has a copyright claim on the work. And just as Microsoft doesn't have a copyright claim on the documents you write with MS Word, in the same way you don't have a copyright claim on the artistic works created with your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For copyright purposes, a work and the software used to create it are completely independent of each other. The only exception to this is if the software includes a copyrightable portion of itself in the work you create with it. In that case, the resulting output most likely is a derivative work of the software, giving you a copyright claim on (parts of) it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you might think about padding the output with portions of the program just to get a copyright claim, but that will in practice also not work effectively. As your software is open source, others have the right to remove the code that pads the output (or the code that adds the conspicuous watermark) and distribute the modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to monetize your open-source software, it is better to think in terms of selling support contracts rather than selling copies of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-18T07:08:15.123" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11922" CreationDate="2021-07-18T10:57:52.330" Score="9" ViewCount="2309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a growing project which is a platform for 3D printers. The project contains printable parts and bills of materials. I defaulted to releasing it under GPLv3 without much thinking but since it's not software I'd rather have it under CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I release a new version of the platform some of the parts are modified to achieve new features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I deploy a new version of my platform under CC BY-SA? previous versions will forever be under GPLv3 on GitHub. The tricky thing here is that the new CC version will contain parts from the previous versions and additionally the new, modified parts are based on the old GPL parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my head the licence does not apply individually to each part as those are useless on their own - it's the whole platform that is versioned and licenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only accepted two commits, which fixed broken links in the documentation of the platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all boils down to me doing something for the world, it's a passion project and I don't want it do be a legal nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24599" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-07-20T08:59:17.163" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T08:59:17.163" Title="Changing my own non-software project from GPLv3 to CC BY-SA" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11921" CreationDate="2021-07-18T11:43:32.690" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have accepted two other small commits to this project, but apart from those you are the sole rightsholder in your work.  Moreover, although IANAL/IANYL, because the two commits simply correct the target text of some links in the documentation, it seems likely that they do not qualify for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4481/as-owner-of-gpl-library-can-i-break-the-licensing-terms/4482#4482&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, as the sole rightsholder you are not bound by your own licence terms.  Just because you offered the work to people last week under the terms of GPLv3, you are not required to do so next week: you could offer it under different terms, or put it into the public domain, or refuse to convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can't do is take away the rights granted under GPLv3 to those who received the code from you under those terms.  But changing the licence to CC BY-SA going forwards seems completely fine to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-07-18T11:43:32.690" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11921" CreationDate="2021-07-18T19:44:48.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the accepted answer states, you should be fine doing this as you appear to be sole copyright holder. Were you not sole copyright holder, you would need either copyright assignment statements (this is actually one of the things that a lot of contributor license agreements include, but usually for different reasons) or explicit permission from each other copyright holder to change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own reasoning is not quite correct, though. Each individual part of a project is under the license, whether or not it’s usable as-is without other parts, and any parts that are identical between the old (GPL licensed) version and the new (CC-BY-SA licensed) version are technically available under either license at the user’s discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Font Awesome is an excellent example of how individual parts are separately licensed (albeit also a very good example of how &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to run an open source project). They have three separate licenses, one for the icons (CC-BY 4.0), one for the fonts (SIL OFL 1.1), and a third for the ‘everything else’ (a standard OSI MIT license). None of these three parts are useful on their own, yet they still have separate licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MySQL is probably the best example I can think of of something available under multiple licenses simultaneously. You can either pay Oracle for a special OEM-style license that lets you use it directly in your own proprietary projects, or you can use it under the GPL and deal with the implications of that (namely, that you can’t include it in a proprietary project without meeting the requirements of the GPL). The same principle applies when changing the license of a piece of code. As long as it remains unchanged it’s usable under either the old or new license at the user’s discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11382" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T11:27:14.143" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T11:27:14.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11926" CreationDate="2021-07-19T01:52:10.877" Score="2" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a port of a codebase (Java) to another language (Python), with some modifications. The Java codebase is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. Understandably, the Python codebase will also be CC BY-NC-SA, but what's not clear to me is whether I can write a book that goes into the implementation details and theory, and sell that for commercial purposes, assuming the Python codebase is published on Github or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24605" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T04:54:50.980" Title="Writing a book, for commercial purposes, about a derivative work, of my own doing, of a CC BY-NC-SA project" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11925" CreationDate="2021-07-19T04:54:50.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your book does not contain any actual code snippets or transliterations of the code into English (i.e. code translated to sufficiently descriptive pseudo-code), but it only describes the ideas contained in the code, then your book is not a derived work in the sense of copyrights and you are not constrained in how you publish and license the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the book does contain snippets of code, then it becomes a question if your use of the code in the book falls under a copyright exemption, like fair use, or not. In many countries, copyright law contains exemptions of copyright protection, allowing small portions of a copyrighted work to be copied to, for example, provide context in a critique about the work. If your code snippets fall within the criteria of such an exemption can only be definitively be determined in a court of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T04:54:50.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11863" CreationDate="2021-07-19T14:30:47.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, V2 is a completely different product. It does not appear to ever have been Creality's intent that the OSHWA certification for the original Ender 3 apply to the Ender 3 V2. Ender 3 is OSHWA certified; Ender 3 V2 is not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as V2 only makes use of copyrighted material authored by Creality, or available under a permissive license, there is no problem not releasing the source code associated with V2: permissively licensed code may be distributed in binary form only, and Creality may choose any license terms whatsoever for any work they authored themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3/issues/58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GitHub issue&lt;/a&gt; it appears that Ender 3 V2 may include a physical circuit whose design is released under the GPL. However, physical circuits are not copyrightable insofar as they are &amp;quot;useful articles&amp;quot; under copyright law: copyright cannot limit the reproduction of the functional components of a system. The written/visual work to express a circuit design may be copyrighted and licensed under the GPL, but the underlying function and useful structure of that circuit is not copyrightable, so it does not extend to an actual fabricated chip built from that design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the chip design could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_design_protection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;protected as a semiconductor mask&lt;/a&gt;, which affords ten years of exclusive rights in the United States. If such a law applies, then during the term of protection, the GPL would apply to the use of the mask output chip in whatever capacity the mask-rights monopolize implementation of the mask on a chip. There are any number of possibilities: possibly the owner of the GPL'd circuit design never applied to the government for such a monopoly, possibly the semiconductor-mask law is not relevant to that design, possibly Creality's legal team mistakenly only considered jurisdictions without such laws, possibly the author of the design does not live in a jurisdiction with such a law, or possibly the protection on that circuit design is older than ten years and has expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2223/50&quot;&gt;Using the (L)GPL as an open-source hardware license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-07-19T17:20:49.420" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T17:20:49.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11932" CreationDate="2021-07-19T14:54:30.050" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a software simulation for my Bachelor's Thesis. For a statistical routine for the simulation, I adapted code from an LGPL v2.1 or later licensed library, without including the library, just the rewritten routines that I adapted for my use. For another statistical routine, I rewrote part of a GPL v3 library code in another language, again without including the library. For a graphical interface, I git cloned an MIT licensed library and used its headers, as well as adapted a part of its example code to render my simulation. For a fast math library, I downloaded an MPL2 licensed header-only library and included its headers. This makes the entirety of the project compilable and runnable without any shared libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to publish this code for transparency and in order for my results to be reproducible by others. The way I understand it from reading the copyright notices, I can use the MPL2, MIT and LGPL v2.1 or later code from GPL v3 code, but I cannot use GPL v3 code from anything else but GPL v3. Since I need to license my GPL v3 code modifications as GPL v3 and only my code (not any adapted code or other library code) uses this GPL v3 code, there is no interaction between GPL v3 code and the library code that I am using. There is also no interaction between any two libraries' code (one library does not call the other), each library only interacts with code written by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I was thinking of doing the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep the original licenses for the code that I did not write myself (the libraries themselves)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For any files that have code that I modified or adapted (GUI code, statistical routines), also keep the original licenses (each such file contains code adapted from only 1 library)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License the entire project GPL v3 since the other libraries can be used from GPL v3 but not the other way around&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I have a copy of the libraries inside my project's source as I described (with their original licenses and attribution intact), or since I did not create them I must rewrite my code to use shared libraries and not include their sources?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is licensing the entire project GPL v3 feasible in this way, or does it conflict with the other licenses? If conflicts exist, what are other licensing paths that I could take? Should I license the entire project or should I license each file written entirely by me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I missing something? Do I need to do anything else besides preserving the copyright notices and licensing my code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally do not care what license the code that I wrote has as long as the code is open source so that other people can download it, run it and reproduce the results. I simply want the entire project to have a license that is good from a legal perspective and compatible with the licenses of the libraries that it uses. It would be much better if I do not have to change my code to use shared libraries since everything was compiled together until now and is stable and the results are deterministic. This may not be the case with shared libraries that changed things such as order of calls to the random generator that is passed to them. Furthermore, the GPL v3 library did not expose what I needed and is in an inconvenient language, so I need to rewrite that in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24613" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T03:09:46.103" Title="How to publish research source code that modifies GPL v3 and LGPL v2.1 or later code, as well as uses MIT and MPL2 code?" Tags="|licensing|mit|gpl-3|lgpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11921" CreationDate="2021-07-19T16:51:14.423" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who receives a future version will be able to use the rights granted by the GPLv3 or the rights under the CC BY-SA. A grant of GPLv3 rights is irrevocable. Here's what you agreed to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all future versions of this software are covered works. That's what you agreed to when you placed those earlier versions under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties with this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you already agreed that every time you give someone a copy of a future version, they automatically receive a GPLv3 license &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that lasts for as long as you hold copyright on the works you chose to place under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can grant CC BY-SA rights in addition if you want. But you can't prevent people from treating future versions as GPLv3 releases if they wish to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2021-07-19T16:51:14.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11935" CreationDate="2021-07-19T21:54:40.693" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a contribution to an MPL 2.0-licensed project a while ago. I am not the maintainer of this project, I don't own it and I'm not affiliated to it in any way (apart from this specific benevolent contribution I made in my spare time). I did not sign a CLA, I just made the PR to GitHub and that PR was merged and released a few days later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I realize that the contribution I made to this MPL 2.0 project months ago could be useful to other projects that I may or may not own, and which are under different licenses (GPL 3.0, public domain, proprietary, Apache 2.0, …). Am I allowed to take the contribution I made to the MPL 2.0 project and redistribute it somewhere else into public domain without the maintainers agreement and without the MPL 2.0 license notice? Obviously, I would only redistribute the code from &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; contribution and not the modifications others may have made to my code since then. Am I still the legal &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot; of the code I wrote back then although it was published in an MPL 2.0 codebase first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24618" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T11:30:27.343" Title="Can I redistribute to public domain a contribution I made to an MPL 2.0 licensed project?" Tags="|relicensing|license|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11929" CreationDate="2021-07-20T03:09:46.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole can only be distributed under the intersection of the rights granted, i.e., the most restrictive licence of the pieces. That would be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure you include all licenses, and state where each piece of your chimaera comes from (so any would-be enhancer/user of the code knows the provenances and attached restrictions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T03:09:46.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7790" CreationDate="2021-07-20T10:21:36.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it may be late now but if you still have that version of the binary module, you can ask for the source code by emailing to legal@crowdstrike.com. Apparently they have now switched to proprietary kernel modules but if you have a version of the older binary with GPL license, you can ask for the source code. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/CrowdStrike/community/issues/24#issuecomment-840248373&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21680" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T10:21:36.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-20T10:36:33.890" Score="1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt; gives me permission to distribute a &amp;quot;work based on the Library&amp;quot; in object code form, provided that I also distribute &amp;quot;complete corresponding machine-readable source code&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Corresponding&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;machine-readable&amp;quot; are not explicitly defined. However, &amp;quot;complete source code&amp;quot; is defined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Source code&amp;quot; for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For a library, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;complete source code&amp;quot; specifically refers to these three things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that compiling the library requires some file which is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; source code for a module, an associated interface definition file, or a script to control compilation and installation. An example could be a proprietary compiler, a proprietary compiler extension, a third-party interface definition file (thus not associated with any module in the Library), or a data table used by a compiler extension which is neither a control script nor source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears I am not obligated to distribute this file together with the binary copy. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 uses similar wording about executables, so this question is also relevant to the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt; specifies &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code&amp;quot; (emphasis mine), with certain exceptions for operating systems and language implementations, so I believe it does not suffer from this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T10:36:33.890" Title="Can I distribute a LGPLv2.1 derivative work whose source code doesn't compile?" Tags="|lgpl|gpl-2|source-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11931" CreationDate="2021-07-20T11:30:27.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I still the legal &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot; of the code I wrote back then although it was published in an MPL 2.0 codebase first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. It is actually quite hard to lose your copyrights. You have to explicitly and knowingly sign them away and just contributing to a project is not enough to lose your rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder to some code, then there are no restrictions in changing the license of the code or offering it to different people/projects under different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the sole copyright holder, because your code depends on code written by others in such a way that it is considered a derived work, or because others have contributed to your code, then the license terms under which the work done by the others become relevant and in most cases those license terms do not allow you to unilaterally change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-20T11:30:27.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11938" CreationDate="2021-07-21T08:23:24.490" Score="1" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out if GPLv3 copyleft is triggered for the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A company has a backend service written in a dynamically typed programming language. The service has a bunch of dependencies, including a module under GPLv3 license. The GPLv3 module is linked dynamically into the backend service's main program. The service exposes some public API endpoints, exchanging JSON-based data.&#xA;The company also has a mobile client distributed via major digital distribution platforms. The mobile clients use the backend's API endpoints to operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the backend service the company is running be considered a private copy of GPL covered work so that copyleft isn't triggered in this case and the company doesn't have to convey (distribute) a source code of its service to the public?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be the backend service program and the mobile client considered as two independent programs (taking into account that they are exchanging JSON data)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any real court cases supporting the answers for 1 and 2? (I do understand that jurisdiction may matter here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How AGPLv3 for the dependency module would change the outcome?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Backend service is a modified version of GPL covered work (dynamically linking considered as modification, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Backend service isn't conveyed/distributed, because the interaction is done over the network (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Mobile client and the backend are considered two separate, independent programs, because the interaction is based on simple JSON data, with NO source code, code generation, complex internal data structures involved in exchange (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the copyleft isn't triggered in this case, the company has a right to run its software on the backend as a private copy.&#xA;The copyleft would trigger if the backend service dependency would be under GNU Affero General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure. Any help is highly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24580" LastEditorUserId="24580" LastEditDate="2021-07-21T10:52:32.757" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T09:37:20.917" Title="Is copyleft triggered for a backend service with GPLv3 dependency dynamically linked, if the backend exposes public API endpoints for mobile client?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|copyleft|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11937" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-21T10:05:00.430" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the key provisions of most open source licenses is the requirement to reinclude the license text in derived works. For example, the BSD licenses (all forms) say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt; &amp;lt;COPYRIGHT HOLDER&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice most software acknowledgements precede each license with the name of the library that it comes from, but note that there's no requirement for that in the license text: it requires the copyright holder to be named, but not the specific project. For example, the notice above might just say &amp;quot;Copyright 2021 Google&amp;quot; and leave you with no idea which of the many libraries from Google was used (and it might not be obvious if it's a proprietary program in binary form). I can imagine a program acknowledgements that says &amp;quot;includes software under the following licenses&amp;quot; and lists many licenses like this, but without a heading for each one saying where they came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I read this correctly? Obviously it's not very fair, either to the original authors or software users, to omit that information, but it seems like it would be legal to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also interested in other permissive licenses (e.g. Apache, MIT). The ones I've read all seem to have the same problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15956" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T11:53:11.187" Title="Requirement to name original library / project when acknowledging" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11936" CreationDate="2021-07-21T10:22:25.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that: a. Backend service is a modified version of GPL covered work (dynamically linking considered as modification, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They call it a combined work, but close enough, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. Backend service isn't conveyed/distributed, because the interaction is done over the network (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct. This is the infamous difference between the GPL and the AGPL (Affero GPL). If the code had been licensed under the AGPL, you would be required to distribute the backend's source code because you are providing access to the backend over a network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. Mobile client and the backend are considered two separate, independent programs, because the interaction is based on simple JSON data, with NO source code, code generation, complex internal data structures involved in exchange (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is the only part that may be tricky. As a developer I would generally assume this is the case. However, note that JSON &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be used to encode complex, internal data structures. The FSF's opinion is based on the semantics of the communication - that is, the nature of the data that is being exchanged - not whether you used JSON or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider JSON A:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;    &amp;quot;searchResults&amp;quot;: [&#xA;        {&amp;quot;productId&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;1&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;name&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Flour&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;productId&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;2&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;name&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Sugar&amp;quot;}&#xA;    ]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not intimate. Anyone could write code to generate or parse that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider JSON B:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;    &amp;quot;sid&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;04591623&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;qbref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;67942267&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;data&amp;quot;: [&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QZ&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634234&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pid&amp;quot;: 1},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QZ&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634235&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pid&amp;quot;: 2},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QS&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634236&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pst&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Flo&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QS&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634237&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pst&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;r&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QS&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634238&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pst&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;u&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QS&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634239&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pst&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;S&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QS&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634240&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;pst&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;ga&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QR&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634242&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;concat&amp;quot;: [&amp;quot;85634236&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;85634238&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;85634237&amp;quot;]},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QR&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634243&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;concat&amp;quot;: [&amp;quot;85634239&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;85634238&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;85634240&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;85634237&amp;quot;]},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;PRO&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634244&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;p&amp;quot;:&amp;quot;85634234&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;l&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634242&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;PRO&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634245&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;p&amp;quot;:&amp;quot;85634235&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;l&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634243&amp;quot;},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;QNH&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;IATA_JFK&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;alt&amp;quot;: 1030},&#xA;        {&amp;quot;fmt&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;REP&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bref&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;67942267&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;chunks&amp;quot;: [&#xA;            {&amp;quot;type&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;chunk&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;base&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;85634244&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;count&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;2&amp;quot;},&#xA;            {&amp;quot;type&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;end&amp;quot;},&#xA;        ]}&#xA;    }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what the heck is this?&lt;/em&gt; It's some kind of memory dump of C structures expressed in JSON. You have no idea what this means unless you reverse-engineer it or you wrote it in the first place. What's a sid? What's a bref? Why is one of them not a number? What are these format codes? And pid and pst and p and l and alt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that to understand a format like this you have to understand the program that wrote it (or reverse-engineer the format). Presumably you would not reverse-engineer your own format but rather look at the code which writes this data in order to understand how to read it. In my interpretation of the FSF's opinion, they believe this constitutes &amp;quot;intimate communication exchanging complex internal data structures&amp;quot; and therefore makes the front-end a derivative work of the back-end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not to be construed as legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastEditorUserId="483" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T09:37:20.917" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T09:37:20.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-22T06:13:50.437" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Windows Forms Project written in C++ CLI with MySQL Database integration. I have created a Setup File using INNO Setup but I need to include MySQL.Data.dll to deploy the application, so should I provide any license for it like GPL2 or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if I upload my source code on GitHub, but only Source Files and Project files(.sln, .vcxproj etc) are uploaded then what License should I use for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe for GitHub part I can use MIT License since Windows Forms has become Open Source and also I am not providing any .dll in repo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Setup File I believe that I do not need to add any license for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. This is a college Project but I need to follow all good and ethical practices&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24488" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T07:15:23.630" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T07:15:23.630" Title="Setup file installs DLLs" Tags="|mit|gpl-2|license|microsoft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11912" CreationDate="2021-07-22T08:06:08.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel that congusbongus' accepted answer pretty much nails it (thanks @brandin for the link):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2688/&quot;&gt;Do you violate the GPL if you provide source code that cannot be compiled?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compiler would have to be freely (or maybe &amp;quot;easily&amp;quot;, like in the case of Visual Studio) available, otherwise one could argue that an important part of the &amp;quot;corresponding source&amp;quot; (even if it does not specifically mention compilers) is unavailable and thus the GPL is violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that a court might not only take the letter of the license but also it's spirit into account. Yet it is not crystal clear and would have to be tried in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22682" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T08:06:08.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11943" CreationDate="2021-07-22T08:24:01.940" Score="3" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would &lt;strong&gt;distributing a commercial closed source application&lt;/strong&gt; along with a GPLd standalone binary, which the closed source application calls trigger the requirement to license whole app under GPL? &lt;em&gt;(For example: a user friendly video converter that calls GPLd FFmpeg in a separate process, without linking, to do the actual conversion in the background and which is an essential part of the whole commercial package)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be consensus that &lt;strong&gt;linking to a GPL licensed library&lt;/strong&gt; constitutes a derivative work and triggers the GPL requirement to license the code that links to the GPLd code under the terms of the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be consensus that merely &lt;strong&gt;calling a GPL licensed standalone executable&lt;/strong&gt; (like GPLd FFMPEG) does not constitute a derivative work and does not trigger the requirement to license the calling code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But:&lt;/em&gt; Does &lt;em&gt;distributing GPLd software together with closed source software&lt;/em&gt; also trigger GPL obligations in respect of my program's source code, even without linking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22682" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T08:40:22.433" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T20:35:44.127" Title="Is GPL copyleft triggered by distribution alone?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|license|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11942" CreationDate="2021-07-22T08:39:27.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In answer to the question in the &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: GPLv3 (like earlier versions) is definitely triggered by such distribution, as this constitutes making copies of a copyright-protected binary, an act normally reserved to the rightsholder and his/her licensees.  GPLv3 is quite clear about the terms that apply to your license to distribute, when in s2 it says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conveying unmodified binaries is covered under s6 (which in turn includes s4).  This obliges you to convey the binary under the terms of GPLv3, and also to provide &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;corresponding source&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; under those same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In answer to the question in the &lt;em&gt;body text&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: you ask whether, by distributing a program which invokes a GPLed binary through fork-and-exec, and by distributing that GPLed binary alongside your program, your work becomes a derivative of the GPLed binary, thus obliging you to distribute the source of your program under GPL also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF shed some light on this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, which suggests to me that as long as your program is simply calling the GPL'ed binary, and passing it (eg) a video file in a standard, well-documented format for transcoding to another standard format, your distribution of the two programs together is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and GPL obligations do not extend to your program also.  If your program passed complex state to and from the GPL program, this would be a sign that the two works were not really separate, and GPL obligations would extend to your program also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that under all circumstances you would have source-distribution obligations in respect of (in the case of your example) ffmpeg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T20:11:26.617" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T20:11:26.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11937" CreationDate="2021-07-22T08:55:21.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have I read this correctly? Obviously it's not very fair, either to the original authors or software users, to omit that information, but it seems like it would be legal to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have read it correctly and it is indeed legal to omit mentioning which third-party code a particular license statement refers to (assuming the project's is not referenced in a copyright line).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also not aware of any widely used licenses that have a requirement to mention the source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mentioning where you got the code from or which library you are using is primarily a gesture of goodwill and not a legal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects mention their copyright line as &lt;code&gt;Copyright &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;, The &amp;lt;project&amp;gt; developers&lt;/code&gt;. Mostly this is done because they believe the list of names would be too long, but it can also be a way to ensure your project name gets acknowledged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T08:55:21.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-22T18:42:29.107" Score="1" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a copyleft license. My issue with GPLv3 is that it is so hard to understand. I don't want to license my work under terms I do not even understand. Fundamentally, I don't understand it because it, as a strong copyleft license, has to clarify many more legal nuances. So, my thought was to look for a weak copyleft license because I assume these are less complex. I read through MPLv2 and it makes sense and seems great for my purposes. Then I got to section 10.2 and was disappointed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.2. Effect of New Versions&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You may distribute the Covered Software under the terms of the version&#xA;of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software,&#xA;or under the terms of any subsequent version published by the license&#xA;steward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, this means Mozilla can change what copiers can do at any time. I think this is horrible. I am looking for a solution to this problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could remove section 10.2 and rename the license per section 10.3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.3. Modified Versions&#xA;If you create software not governed by this License, and you want to&#xA;create a new license for such software, you may create and use a&#xA;modified version of this License if you rename the license and remove&#xA;any references to the name of the license steward (except to note that&#xA;such modified license differs from this License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/221375&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; the primary downside to doing so would essentially be that Mozilla could potentially be disinclined to provide legal council to me if requested. Is a modification like this advisable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could find another license. I have searched but haven't found a similar one. What is a similar license that doesn't have this bad clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24638" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T22:20:35.980" Title="Ways to avoid section 10.2 of MPLv2" Tags="|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11945" CreationDate="2021-07-22T19:21:56.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fundamental problem with all copyleft licences is that they &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to have a fair amount of legal boilerplate in them.  GPLv2 puts it rather well, to my mind, when it says in the preamble&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Restricted copyleft licences are likely to be as least as bad, since they now have to define the bits of the software that are copylefted, instead of just &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want a simple licence, go permissive.  If you want a copyleft licence, the GPL is actually pretty simple to work with, provided you're not trying to play fast and loose with it: make sure that everyone who gets a copy of your binary also gets the complete source code, and make sure that it's clear they get all of it under GPL, and you'll be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't, however, start making up your own licences.  If you do, then for all practical purposes you might as well not bother freeing your software, because most people who will think about reusing it aren't going to parse the licence either.  Everyone out there understands the major copyleft and permissive licences, so they can sidestep reading them when they see the licence tag.  If they have to stop and research what Anonomos Public Licence v1.35 lets them do, they're not going to bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2021-07-24T22:20:35.980" LastActivityDate="2021-07-24T22:20:35.980" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11942" CreationDate="2021-07-22T20:08:21.673" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be consensus that linking to a GPL licensed library constitutes a derivative work and triggers the GPL requirement to license the code that links to the GPLd code under the terms of the GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weird, because that's obviously wrong. Linking to a library is how you use it in the ordinary way. Just like you don't need a license to read a book, you don't need a license to use a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a controversial point and it's very likely your comment is based on a misunderstanding. Here's how GNU puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Merely agreeing to the GPL doesn't place any obligations on you. You are not required to agree to anything to merely use software which is licensed under the GPL. &lt;em&gt;You only have obligations if you modify or distribute the software.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There also seems to be consensus that merely calling a GPL licensed standalone executable (like GPLd FFMPEG) does not constitute a derivative work and does not trigger the requirement to license the calling code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right, again it's ordinary use. Under US law, the right to the ordinary use of a work is a right every lawful possessor of a work has unless they give it up through some agreement they actually agreed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But: Does distributing GPLd software together with closed source software also trigger GPL obligations in respect of my program's source code, even without linking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distribution requires a license. If you could copy and distribute works without a license, the music and movie industries would be very different. So you do have whatever obligations the GPL imposes on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the GPL defines a &amp;quot;covered work&amp;quot; as, effectively, a derivative work. So the question is whether the closed source software is a derivative work or not. But if the closed source software was a derivative work, you'd have GPL obligations even if you didn't distribute it together with the closed source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, distributing an aggregate work doesn't change your GPL obligations over distributing the pieces of the work separately because the GPL only extends to derivative works and whether a work is a derivative work isn't changed by aggregate distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2021-07-22T20:35:44.127" LastActivityDate="2021-07-22T20:35:44.127" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-06-17T12:52:36.690" Score="3" ViewCount="967" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently programming an app with flutter and have already listed all the licenses I use from the packages on an individual license page in the Settings. The question I am now asking myself is do I have to add the license for Flutter and Dart too to this list?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the darts license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flutter/engine/master/sky/packages/sky_engine/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flutter/engine/master/sky/packages/sky_engine/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the flutter license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the page where I found the information: &lt;a href=&quot;https://flutter.dev/docs/resources/faq#which-software-licenses-apply-to-flutter-and-its-dependencies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://flutter.dev/docs/resources/faq#which-software-licenses-apply-to-flutter-and-its-dependencies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24317" OwnerDisplayName="Vincent Musk" LastActivityDate="2021-07-23T02:40:29.053" Title="Do I need to add Flutter and Dart license into the app?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11949" CreationDate="2021-06-17T13:16:12.900" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, as far as i know, you don't need to explicitly add these licenses.&#xA;But if you want &lt;strong&gt;to be 100%&lt;/strong&gt; safe i would just add them as it's not that much work for you to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Dany Tulumidis" LastActivityDate="2021-06-17T13:16:12.900" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11953" CreationDate="2021-07-25T10:23:18.417" Score="0" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to include in my closed-source program a dependency library under &lt;code&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/code&gt; to be linked dynamically.&#xA;The MPL dependency is basically simply imported in the source code of my program and used as is, with no modifications.&#xA;I'd like to distribute the resulting &amp;quot;larger work&amp;quot; to my customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I got it right, I can ship my &amp;quot;larger work&amp;quot; under proprietory license without giving the source code away.&#xA;But I must inform my customers that the software they receive contains MPLed dependencies and the links to their source codes.&#xA;Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how it's usually done? Is it okay to put a list of such dependencies with the URLs to their repositories to the Legal notice section of my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24580" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T13:32:29.273" Title="Distribution of a larger work containing unmodified MPLed dependencies: is informing receivers needed?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11952" CreationDate="2021-07-25T13:32:29.273" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I got it right, I can ship my &amp;quot;larger work&amp;quot; under proprietory license without giving the source code away. But I must inform my customers that the software they receive contains MPLed dependencies and the links to their source codes. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct, in so far that the MPL requires you to inform your users where/how they can obtain the source code for the MPL portions of the application. Although a link is very convenient, other mechanisms like sending an email or snail-mail letter are also allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how it's usually done? Is it okay to put a list of such dependencies with the URLs to their repositories to the Legal notice section of my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Legal notices&amp;quot; section is a very common place to mention the third-party software you use and their licenses. However, just linking to their repositories might not be sufficient to meet your source code distribution requirements (in the long term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your obligation is to make the source code available of exactly the version you use in your software and this obligation does not end when the original project dies or stops distributing that version (or in another way makes it impossible to determine which source code is part of that version). You can start with a link to the original project, but you should have a backup plan in case someone contacts you and claims that the link you provided doesn't work anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T13:32:29.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10804" CreationDate="2021-07-25T13:57:53.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't store the code bin your repository, then you don't need to have a specific mention of the license of those dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when you distribute a binary that contains (compiled) code of those dependencies, then you must must mention those dependencies and their licenses either in the documentation that comes with the binary or in a screen with licensing information that is part of the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-25T13:57:53.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T01:14:30.840" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use and adapt a part from the source code of an open-source (Java) project Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA (3.0) into my project :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the &amp;quot;ShareAlike&amp;quot; requirement means I'll have to release my project under the same Licence. But, does that include the compiled binaries (which is publicly distributed to people) and the source code too ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this because I would not want my source code to be public / open-source for now, but I'm okay to license the compiled product under CC BY-SA. It should be allright as these binaries are the only &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; product, and my source code is still private for now ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In advance, thanks for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24660" LastEditorUserId="24660" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T01:36:49.073" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T11:59:31.007" Title="CC BY-NC-SA &quot;ShareAlike&quot; (source vs binaries)" Tags="|licensing|license|copyleft|cc-by-sa|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11955" CreationDate="2021-07-26T02:11:08.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The binaries are a derivative of the source, so the answer is a blanket yes. And CC-NC-SA does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allow to just publish the derivative binaries as closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T02:11:08.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11955" CreationDate="2021-07-26T02:24:56.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The binaries are derivative of the source, so if you choose to distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you choose to publish source code that is derivative of CC BY-NC-SA, your code must be distributed under that same license. However, there is no requirement that you publish your modifications in source form, even when publishing a binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in contrast to source-sharing copyleft licenses like the GPL, which require that binaries be accompanied by &amp;quot;corresponding source.&amp;quot; No version of CC BY-NC-SA has any such requirement, so you need only ensure that your distribution of the binary comply with the particular requirements of the license: i.e., attribute the authors, do not charge money for it, and allow others to redistribute it further under the same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC Wiki has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility_analysis:_GPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comparison table between ShareAlike terms and the GPL&lt;/a&gt; which clearly indicates SA terms do not compel source sharing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T11:59:31.007" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T11:59:31.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T02:39:35.750" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written two Java desktop programs that I would like to license under GPLv3 and distribute as executable JARs on Gitlab. The programs use Maven for dependencies and pull in GPLv3 and LGPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never licensed or distributed software and am worried about meeting the licensing requirements of the libraries. I have read many answers here and about the web but I'm afraid I still don't feel like I have a good handle on the complexity involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my parent programs are licensed under GPLv3 and their source code available on Gitlab alongside the JARs, does that meet the requirements of the GPLv3/LGPL libraries I am using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24661" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T06:47:49.610" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T06:47:49.610" Title="Does licensing a parent software under GPL v3.0 satisfy the licensing requirements of GPLv3/LGPL libraries used?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|java|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T03:34:47.623" Score="1" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine that I used a person's &amp;quot;creative commons&amp;quot; licensed video for making a youtube video and uploaded it to youtube. Then after some time, the person decided to change the video's license from &amp;quot;creative commons&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Standard Youtube license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that scenario, will I get copyright strike for using someones video which is not under cc license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24542" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T03:34:47.623" Title="Will I get copyright strike for Using creative commons video if the license is changed by the owner?" Tags="|copyright|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11982" CreationDate="2021-07-26T06:17:11.630" Score="12" ViewCount="3543" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Java framework that I would like to distribute with GPL V3 but as long as users have an active free subscription to certain site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to do so ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification - What I am distributing is a Java based framework that developers will use through maven in their code &amp;amp; build process. the subscription to site is actually not required to use the code. My goal is to use the developer base for future capabilities that I want to build into my site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22883" LastEditorUserId="22883" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T16:08:30.653" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T12:31:06.873" Title="Distribute program with GPLv3 but need a subscription - How can this be made possible?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-26T06:34:28.033" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly permissible to distribute under GPLv3 software for using a service, access to which is restricted to registered, or even paying, users.  Scrolling down my Android phone, the first example I come across is &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stypox.mastercom_workbook/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mastercom Workbook&lt;/a&gt;, a GPLv3+ client which is used to access the workbook functionality of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mastercompro.it/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mastercom&lt;/a&gt;'s professional offering.  If your school doesn't use Mastercom, the free client would initially appear somewhat useless.  There are many other examples of free client software for restricted services for Android, and doubtless even more in other fora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allowing people to download freely-licensed code which cannot be used &lt;em&gt;as-is&lt;/em&gt; except by registered or paying users is fine, because downloaders could also reuse parts of the code in other projects, or they could write their own backends for it, or they could do other things with it that neither you nor I can imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T06:34:28.033" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11958" CreationDate="2021-07-26T06:46:21.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my parent programs are licensed under GPLv3 and their source code available on Gitlab alongside the JARs, does that meet the requirements of the GPLv3/LGPL libraries I am using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GitLab repository is also the location where your users would go to download the binaries, then that is indeed enough to meet the GPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your users download from another location, you need to inform them about the GitLab repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T06:46:21.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12313" CreationDate="2021-07-26T07:49:21.610" Score="7" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;larger work&amp;quot;, i.e. if a work under license X should be considered a separate program or a part of the larger work, GNU GPL license and its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ section&lt;/a&gt; go deep defining the difference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basically means that if semantic of the communication between, say, backend software and a frontend software is intimate enough (see an example &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11938/24580&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) they may be considered as one larger work, and distribution of the frontend part would mean the distribution of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found nothing related to &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;larger work&amp;quot; in other copyleft licenses and their FAQs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder if the principle described in GPL FAQ is something related to GPL-family of licenses only or it may be considered &lt;strong&gt;universal&lt;/strong&gt; and can be applied to, say, MPL too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be that a privately run backend service containing &lt;code&gt;Mozilla Public License&lt;/code&gt; dependency is considered distributed (&amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot;) to users if the frontend part is distributed and semantics of the communication between the backend and the frontend falls under &amp;quot;intimate enough&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24580" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T15:27:08.333" Title="Is a principle to distinguish &quot;mere aggregation&quot; vs &quot;larger work&quot; described in GPL FAQ universal?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-26T12:22:34.940" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you do not depend on any GPL license grants to distribute your software (i.e., you are the sole copyright holder and/or you make use of no one else's GPL'd code), you may achieve this by not offering your code under the GPL at all, but under some other homemade license that prevents redistribution and otherwise grants rights similar to the GPL. Insofar as this would be a nonfree license, and insofar as removing the permission of redistribution requires a substantial rewrite of terms, I cannot advise how to rigorously construct such a license; consult a lawyer experienced in drafting license agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do depend on others' GPL-licensed code and therefore must license under the GPL (or you simply really do want to use the actual GPL for reasons of community compatibility or popularity), read on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to offer your GPL'd code for download to subscribed users only, you may do so: you, as a legal entity, can offer copies to whomever you want or don't want. The set of people to whom &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; personally offer copies can be limited to those people who have paid you money, or given you their email address, or have listened to your timeshare presentation. However, the GPL requires that you cannot stop other people from &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; offering the code simultaneously, once they receive it, to whomever &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; like. The GPL does not compel you to share copies of your software (but does compel you to share corresponding source if and when you do choose to share your software), but it does not allow you to forbid downstream recipients from sharing their copies further, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, you can limit when a user can download the software &lt;em&gt;from you&lt;/em&gt;, but you cannot limit when a user can download (or offer for download to others) the software generally. If you add terms to your software that forbid freedom of redistribution, you will violate any GPL grants from upstream authors that your software depends upon for you to distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you plan to publish regular updates, users may find it worthwhile to offer you contact information so they can be notified about updates and get them quickly. Other users may prefer to get updates from another recipient without giving you their email address; the GPL does not allow you to prevent this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is your plan to write code that uses a network service as a natural part of its functionality, you may certainly make that network service require authentication, and you may charge money for access. For example, if your code interacts with your network service to remotely save data, or communicate with other users, your service can refuse to carry out those actions if the user fails to provide proof of payment. However, users can always modify the code to interact with a different service instead, or modify the code so it no longer makes use of a network service at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your plan is to add code that interacts with a network solely for the purpose of performing a payment-check without supplying any value to the software, you can expect downstream users will modify the code to remove that network interaction immediately, and the new version without the network gatekeeping code will be much more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T15:57:33.707" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T15:57:33.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11968" CreationDate="2021-07-26T15:47:37.467" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is a statement in a legally binding contract between two parties that says that one party is going to retain all source code and is not required to provide source code as part of the contract, but it turns out that parts of that source code are GPL-licensed, is that a direct conflict between GPL and the contract, especially if the other party is requesting the source? In that case, which takes precedence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24667" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:10:11.033" Title="Does GPL supersede legal contract?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8161" CreationDate="2021-07-26T15:56:47.910" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;DL;DR;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT in an almost encrypted way says that we don't need to attribute, see prove:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/311309/319915&quot;&gt;stackexchange.com/a/311309/319915&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/strong&gt; is widely known for attribution(s) need-less-ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;But&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;You must retain, in the Source form ... all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="anon" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-04T05:37:38.250" LastActivityDate="2022-09-04T05:37:38.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11966" CreationDate="2021-07-26T16:10:11.033" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let A be the party who is distributing the binary (you don't say this is what's happening, but you say that A is not distributing source, and there's not much else that they can be distributing except the binary) and B be the party who is receiving the binary, but not (as per contract with A) the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind (and IANAL/IANYL) it depends on who the rightsholder for the GPL-licensed parts is.  If A is the rightsholder on the GPL-licensed portions of the code, they are entirely within their rights to do this, because &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2078/458&quot;&gt;the copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, A is not the sole rightsholder in the GPL-licensed portions of the code, then they have a problem, because if they distribute a binary without complete corresponding source, they are violating the copyrights of the other rightsholders (let us call them &amp;quot;C&amp;quot;).  GPLv3 s12 is very clear that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the point is not that the GPL &amp;quot;trumps&amp;quot; the contract between A and B, but that the contract between A and B doesn't trump the conditions on A's distribution licence from C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C would be entirely within his/her rights to sue A for breach of copyright if A was distributing C's GPL-covered works in a binary-only form, regardless of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they were doing so.  Whether B could sue for source access in such a case is jurisdictionally-dependent, and moreover complicated by B's having previously agreed not to receive source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T16:10:11.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T16:30:48.300" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Their fork in question is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/weiluntong/ProtonVPN-server-load&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/weiluntong/ProtonVPN-server-load&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My original upstream code is: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/twenty5151/ProtonVPN-server-load&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/twenty5151/ProtonVPN-server-load&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I am aware of the two related questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9658/can-someone-fork-my-gpl-licensed-project-and-re-license-it-under-mit-or-bsd/9660&quot;&gt;Can someone fork my GPL licensed project and re-license it under MIT or BSD?&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7221/relicensing-a-fork-of-a-gpl-project-and-source-code-distribution-requirements&quot;&gt;Relicensing a fork of a GPL project and source code distribution requirements&lt;/a&gt;. However, the situation here is that they have significantly modified the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that in principle, it is a violation of the GPL. However, upon reviewing their changes, there is very little similarity to my upstream version. In their commit &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/weiluntong/ProtonVPN-server-load/commit/b70b23ae4a80dab63d5cba66f1ea9059cb31e5da&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;message&lt;/a&gt;, they noted that it is &amp;quot;sufficiently derivative&amp;quot;, but I think they meant &amp;quot;sufficiently original&amp;quot;. Indeed, my original code has three files in total, and their fork has completely removed my code. Their core logic &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/weiluntong/ProtonVPN-server-load/blob/1463b3697c0f67d6a297a35b7dbf54528b28575f/protonvpn_server_load/vpn_servers.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; essentially shares no original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are their claims of &amp;quot;sufficiently original&amp;quot; valid and does that justify the license change? Is it a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; of the GPL code anymore? How much does the code need to change to become &amp;quot;original work&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/81705/rewriting-gpl-code-to-change-license&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/81705/rewriting-gpl-code-to-change-license&lt;/a&gt;, the structure of the code is different, but two names/lines have been reused verbatim (out of the entire repo):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;response = requests.get('https://api.protonmail.ch/vpn/logicals')&#xA;servers_dict = json.loads(response.text)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think using requests.get on the url or loading its json is copyrightable work, but the names have not been changed, therefore it is still a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot;? Or can it still be considered Fair Use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24669" LastEditorUserId="24669" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T19:12:11.153" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T19:12:11.153" Title="Can someone fork my GPLv3 code, rewrite the entire thing, and change its license to MIT?" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2021-07-27T15:34:58.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11971" CreationDate="2021-07-26T17:10:56.593" Score="0" ViewCount="3612" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some discontinued library mentions the MIT license only in their readme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/krispenney/FCAlertView&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/krispenney/FCAlertView&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do license mentions in &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; file without actual &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file mean same in court?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="11200" LastEditDate="2021-07-26T18:38:30.870" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T18:38:30.870" Title="Is License mentioned in README enough" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-07-28T10:48:46.240" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11970" CreationDate="2021-07-26T17:25:47.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's OK to not have any license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1721&quot;&gt;Without any license, the default is that all rights are reserved&lt;/a&gt;. If someone other than the author wants to use this code, they have the obligation of obtaining a valid license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For open source projects, there are a variety of conventions to unambiguously indicate licenses. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;separate files named like &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license headers in individual files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a section in a &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;machine-readable metadata such as &lt;code&gt;SPDX-License-Identifier&lt;/code&gt; headers or package manager metadata&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If an author follows one or more of these conventions, it is likely that a court will find that the author intended to issue the license. Special files such as a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; do not have magic legal power, they are just one industry convention among many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, things become difficult if there is &lt;strong&gt;conflicting information&lt;/strong&gt;, and the linked project is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the README, it is said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FCAlertView is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, no LICENSE file exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the source code files, we instead find “all rights reserved” copyright headers without any mention of an MIT license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2016 &amp;lt;the author&amp;gt;. All rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project in general also suggests that the author is not very experienced, so they might not fully understand the consequence of issuing an MIT license for their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while there are indications that the software is available under the MIT license, there are also indications to the contrary. It would therefore be unwise to use the code without obtaining clarification about the licensing status from the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-07-26T17:25:47.407" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-26T17:44:01.557" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a proprietary application that loads into its WebView a remote, self-hosted GPLv2 licensed web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that loading a resource via WebView will not violate GPL (the web browsers do it all the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is I want to also inject some CSS styles (which are distributed with the properiatary app) into the WebView that hosts the remote GPL content. The CSS styles may target ids/classes specific to the GPLed web app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it ok to inject CSS like this, or is this violation of GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it's not ok, what if I generate the CSS at runtime, character by character. I.e. each character of the css would be an element of an array and then joined and injected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My question is about GPLv2, but out of curiosity - would this be any different for GPLv3 and AGPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(similar to 2) - what if the CSS is hosted remotely and the app downloads it at runtime? (and later stores the css file in user data directory).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer possible questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL app is self-hosted and I have permissions to use it, so this is purely a software licensing question - it's not like I'm embedding someone elses web app&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot apply CSS modifications to the GPL app directly for various  reasons (and it's not that I don't want to release those tiny modifications, it's a technical issue). The styles have to be injected from my proprietary app&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17943" LastEditorUserId="17943" LastEditDate="2021-07-29T11:28:36.157" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T11:28:36.157" Title="Proprietary app injecting CSS into a remote self-hosted GPL web-app in WebView" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-27T06:37:55.743" Score="11" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to sponsor an open source project on behalf of our &lt;em&gt;company&lt;/em&gt; – that is an important detail. The project (Yarn) has both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opencollective.com/yarnpkg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Collective&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sponsors/yarnpkg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub sponsors&lt;/a&gt;, two questions I basically have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is either of them better for &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt;? Let's say we contribute $100/mo., will they get the same amount through both platforms or are there any deductions / fees?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is either of them better for &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;? I've only ever sponsored as an individual so I'm not sure if our accountant will want to see some sorts of documents (an equivalent of an invoice I guess) or similar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24677" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T07:21:27.317" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T03:58:38.883" Title="Pros and cons of Open Collective vs. GitHub Sponsors?" Tags="|finance|donations|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-27T13:47:15.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am working on a Java framework that I would like to distribute with GPL V3 but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything after the &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; is incompatible with all versions of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL basically legalizes &amp;quot;piracy&amp;quot; (because legally it is not &amp;quot;piracy&amp;quot; if you have given your users permission to distribute your code). Any user of your code can post it on his own github or put it on a thumbdrive or upload it to a torrent site for others to download and you have given permission for them to do so because your code is GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...distribute with GPL V3 and &lt;strong&gt;ask the user to subscribe to a certain site if they download from me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that GPLv3 have explicitly given that user permission to re-upload the code for his friends to download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.. the subscription to site is actually not required to use the code. My goal is to use the developer base for future capabilities that I want to build into my site&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is perfectly fine. Lots of libraries ask you to register to download the official version. As the copyright owner of the code (or indeed, as someone who downloaded the code) it is perfectly fine to require a registration before downloading. It is even OK to require users to pay before downloading (see RedHat Linux - not the owner of the Linux kernel but GPL allows them to sell it). &lt;strong&gt;What you can't do is sue the user if they re-upload it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T13:47:15.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-27T16:18:51.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you license your client under GPLv3 and distribute it to the general public, then you have to be aware that the general public is allowed to do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They can create a clone of your subscription service (paid or free) and give their users a slightly modified version of your software (still licensed under GPLv3) which connects to their service instead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your subscription service is not actually required for the program, then they can modifying your software so it no longer needs a subscription and distribute that modified version (still licensed under GPLv3, of course).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; do is release something under GPLv3 and then add an additional condition on exercising their rights under the GPLv3 (like &amp;quot;only use while you are subscribed to my service&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;do not modify to use a different service&amp;quot;). This is explicitly forbidden by Section 10 of the GNU GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright owner and your software does not contain any 3rd party GPL code, then you can of course invent your own license terms with any additional restrictions you want. But then you can not call your license conditions GPL. And you can not call your project &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; because your license condition would be a &amp;quot;Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&amp;quot;. And you can not call it &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free software&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; either, because users can not &amp;quot;run the program as they wish, for any purpose&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;change it so it does computing as they wish&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2021-07-27T16:26:54.967" LastActivityDate="2021-07-27T16:26:54.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-28T02:58:21.600" Score="4" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#Decision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google v. Oracle decision&lt;/a&gt; raises an interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that a proprietary application which dynamically links to a GPL-licensed library is considered a derivative work and has to distribute its source along the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what if said application could load &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; DLL that conformed to the GPL'd library API, based on a user-specified configuration (or placed into a specific location)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor of the application could even provide a stub implementation with basic functionality and low performance, and let the users replace it with the GPL'd library &amp;quot;should they wish to do so&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor is off the hook since the application they distribute does not contain any GPL-licensed code, and does not technically require it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users are off the hook since they don't distribute anything, and the GPL places no restrictions on use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like a loophole to me.  Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24701" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T14:32:48.940" Title="A loophole in the linking clause of the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-28T04:14:02.373" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this comment today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Python decides to add a &amp;quot;direction&amp;quot; parameter to sort() they do something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2.7: sort(list)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2.8: sort(direction, list)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't upgrade from 3.2.7 to 3.2.8 without breaking things, because there is a new parameter. Here's how Peel (and all sane languages) add a &amp;quot;direction&amp;quot; parameter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perl 1.2.1: sort(thing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perl 1.2.2: sort (thing, direction=ascending)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the new version, if you don't pass the argument to specify new optional behavior, you get the old behavior by default! That way things don't break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the first time I hear about this, but it seems really strange. Can somebody explain this decision once and for all? Surely it must have been motivated by some sort of reasoning, and not just &amp;quot;break things on purpose&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that things will (almost) inevitably break eventually or with major version changes, but this really seems like they &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; it. Plus it was a &lt;em&gt;minor&lt;/em&gt; version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24707" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T04:14:02.373" Title="Did the Python developers ever explain why they made such &quot;obvious&quot; breaking changes between two minor versions?" Tags="|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-07-28T07:50:40.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11978" CreationDate="2021-07-28T07:10:48.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is similar to how BSD &lt;code&gt;editline&lt;/code&gt; (a clone of GPL &lt;code&gt;readline&lt;/code&gt;) came to be... as long as the library is written to &lt;em&gt;specification&lt;/em&gt;, not by code inspection (&amp;quot;clean room reimplementation&amp;quot; or similar), this is perfectly legal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T07:10:48.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-28T14:43:53.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you can do (as the copyright owner of the source code, which is not itself bound by GPL dependencies) is release both a GPL distribution and a different &lt;em&gt;commercial&lt;/em&gt; distribution for paying customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, suppose your library is targeted to other software developers, they are free to use it if they release their software under the GPL. But if they plan to build a closed-source commercial product that depends on your library, then they have to pay for a commercial license and get the commercial subscription-based distribution (which might contain special add-ons and functionality not available in the GPL version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24719" LastEditorUserId="24719" LastEditDate="2021-07-28T14:53:16.510" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T14:53:16.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11984" CreationDate="2021-07-28T16:28:50.843" Score="1" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source Repository license:&lt;/strong&gt; Business Source License 1.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Destination Repository license:&lt;/strong&gt; MIT. This is an open-source repo, sort of a library, having a lot of contributors. Code here is used by a lot of people in their production projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Amount of code copied:&lt;/strong&gt; 10 lines (it's basically a util function source code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2 id=&quot;reason-zjpw&quot;&gt;Reason&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm aspiring to make an open-source contribution to a repo, and 95% of the code in my contribution is written by me while I've copied 10 lines from a repo which is unfortunately BSL 1.1 licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now my contribution is private, I have not yet made the PR. The reason I'm concerned is that earlier I have seen license conflict issues and maintainers don't want to get into that hassle so they hesitate to merge the PR, and PR stays open forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2 id=&quot;how-do-i-proceed-06yu&quot;&gt;How do I proceed?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can I credit the source repository in my contribution code/github pull request text (it has multiple authors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this is a problem, should I re-implement that 10 lines of code myself? (honestly, I don't prefer this, I always like to mention credits for anyone's work I'm using. But if it prevents me from making my contribution I have to do it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24722" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T16:44:28.890" Title="Is copy of code snippet from BSL 1.1 licensed repository to an MIT licensed repository allowed?" Tags="|mit|github|bsl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11983" CreationDate="2021-07-28T16:44:28.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two questions you need to answer here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can you simply re-use BSL 1.1 code in an MIT licensed codebase - or in legal terms, are the licenses compatible?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is simple &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;; the BSL states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Licensor hereby grants you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and &lt;strong&gt;make non-production use of the Licensed Work&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis). The MIT license lets you do just about anything with the code, including running it in production, so the licenses are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the 10 line fragment of code actually copyrightable on its own?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is potentially trickier and dependent on the copyright laws in individual jurisdictions, rather than anything to do with the licenses themselves. If the 10 line fragment isn't sufficiently original (e.g. a list of the integers 1-10) then it isn't covered by copyright so it can never be a copyright violation to do anything with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is non-trivial, it probably is covered by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I re-implement that 10 lines of code myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, although you now need to be very careful as you have looked at the BSL implementation in detail and it may be difficult for you to prove that your implementation is actually truly original and not a derivative work of the BSL implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If at all possible, the safest would be for you to write a specification of what the function should do and then get &lt;em&gt;somebody who has never looked at the BSL implementation&lt;/em&gt; to implement it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T16:44:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11978" CreationDate="2021-07-28T17:11:01.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Supreme Court did not rule that APIs are not copyrightable, just that, if they are copyrightable, Google's use is &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot;; your use might not be &amp;quot;fair use&amp;quot;; there are also other countries which aren't under the jurisdiction of the USA's Supreme Court and don't even have fair use exceptions. So you'd be on somewhat thin ice to rely on that ruling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using common sense, if you copy the API from someone else's library and put it into your library, your library is now a derivative work of that one... unless any of the usual exceptions apply (e.g. the API is too trivial to be copyrightable). You are quite clearly basing your work on theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library implements some standard specification, you could write your replacement library based on that specification instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2021-07-28T17:11:01.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2021-07-29T05:53:51.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for all the encouraging debate. None of the answers addressed the precise question so I am sharing my understanding here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no real practical way to enforce a subscription through the license and it would be rendered meaningless since users can make alternate copies available under gpl-3. There are some provisions for additional terms in gpl-3 ( clause 7 ) but my understanding is they may not put additional restrictions. This very clause brought up the potential options and this question in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since my ultimate goal is to promote active community adoption of the framework we will stick to  GPL3 in its original form to alleviate any concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We will encourage free signups to our site through alternate means such as training, blog content and such. Infuture if the framework takes off and developers really appreciate our work, we will offer commercial licensing in exchange for a subscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this answer will help future decision making process of other developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22883" LastEditorUserId="22883" LastEditDate="2021-08-04T12:31:06.873" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T12:31:06.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-29T06:16:06.103" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a GPL web app. I want to make style modifications to it by injecting CSS code. The   injected code aims to change some styles, but not all. For example, it will completely change the style of buttons, or the style of sidebar menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The injected code does not make use of any of the GPLed CSS code. Can this be considered a derivative work or is it the case of treating code as data?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the injected style will contain CSS ids and class names that may be specific to the GPLed app, so I guess it makes use of the original app html structure, but not css.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is a purely theoretical question. My real use case is slightly different - I host the remote GPL web app in a WebView of a proprietary application and I want a clean way to customize the looks of the GPL web app in the WebView without open sourcing my properietary code that is above the WebView. I have considered a solution to release the CSS modification under GPL and have my app download them at runtime and inject to the WebView (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11972/proprietary-app-injecting-css-into-a-remote-self-hosted-gpl-web-app-in-webview&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt;), but I'm not sure if that's ok legally, so I'm asking a more general question if CSS is derivative or just data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17943" LastEditorUserId="17943" LastEditDate="2021-07-29T13:45:22.673" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T13:45:22.673" Title="Does injected CSS code count as derivative work?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-07-29T08:32:32.583" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was left there for four hours before I discovered it. Obviously, I fixed that with a force push.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else can I (or should I) do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24726" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-07-29T13:31:59.417" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T09:00:47.423" Title="I accidentally left a crude, personally-insulting debug print line in a public pull request" Tags="|source-code|etiquette|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11988" CreationDate="2021-07-29T09:28:21.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different projects have different etiquette and different social contracts, so YMMV. Personally, I'd comment on the PR and apologize with something down the lines of &amp;quot;the previous version of this MR contained inappropriate language that was expressed out of frustration. It was never meant to be pushed publically and I apologize to anyone who found it offensive.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T09:28:21.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7806" CreationDate="2021-07-29T19:33:34.610" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on the license itself. Some OSS licenses allow you to just mention or attribute the license (Creative Commons being one of them), which would be as simple as putting a badge in your readme or just putting a &amp;quot;This software licensed under X license&amp;quot; at the bottom of the document), other licenses require the exact license terms to be located inside the repository (MIT and GPL both require this, last time I looked them up), and some more restrictive licenses have their own requirements. Reading up on your chosen license is important, and these restrictions are usually found near the beginning of the terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24729" LastActivityDate="2021-07-29T19:33:34.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11988" CreationDate="2021-07-30T09:00:47.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing. Just remove it. If anyone complains about it, just say you've removed it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T09:00:47.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11996" CreationDate="2021-07-30T10:54:15.207" Score="3" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a dataset built on top of Wikipedia dump, which comes in Huggingface Dataset library. The Wikipedia dump is licensed under CC BY-SA and the Huggingface Dataset is licensed under Apache-2.0, but there is no license specified for the dataset I want to use. My question is, can the dataset be licensed under more restrictive license? Or can I assume, that it has the same license as Wikipedia dump?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24737" LastActivityDate="2021-07-31T04:44:23.593" Title="Can a dataset built upon another have more restrictive license?" Tags="|licensing|open-data|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11978" CreationDate="2021-07-30T11:51:59.607" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like your question is somewhat related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plugin Q&amp;amp;A on the GPL FAQ page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program? (#GPLPlugins)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting feature of this answer is that describes a situation which is a &amp;quot;borderline case&amp;quot;. From that, you can see that your program falls squarely on the full GPL side of that borderline: the communication with your .dll sounds like it's far more intertwined than just &amp;quot;invoking the ‘main’ function&amp;quot;, and the importance of the .dll sounds like it's greater than just being a &amp;quot;plugin&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15956" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T11:51:59.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11978" CreationDate="2021-07-30T14:32:48.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ruling in Google v. Oracle largely confirmed what the free software community already believed and hoped: the reuse of interfaces is (at least under some circumstances) permissable. It is exactly this permission that allows the reimplementation of proprietary components as free software. The principle may be extended to cover reimplementing GPL'd software under a different license; however, an author who reimplements source-available software (as all GPL software is) must take care not to read the original non-interface code lest it influence the authorship of the new code and create a derivative work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as your software reuses the API of some other software for reasons of interoperability, this probably would be found to be permissible under the same fair use factors covered in Google v. Oracle. The fact that the new reimplemented component can be replaced by a GPL module is not a problem nor a revelation brought on by Google v. Oracle; I would argue it has been an assumed copyright principle that free software authors have relied upon for decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-07-30T14:32:48.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11992" CreationDate="2021-07-31T04:44:23.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general it is certainly possible, but &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; licenses, such as the SA (&amp;quot;share-alike&amp;quot;) CC licenses, require derived works to be provided under the same license, so the derived work cannot be more restrictive (or less restrictive, for that matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With datasets it might be a little more complicated in that creating a dataset from a copyrighted work might not require permission from a copyright holder, in which case the dataset author does not have to follow the requirements of the license and can license the dataset however they wish. Whether that's the case depends on the jurisdiction and the way the original work was used to create the dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11249" LastActivityDate="2021-07-31T04:44:23.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-01T23:20:36.950" Score="4" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am plan to use big non-modified parts of text from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 3.0 in new text material also licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0: just copy paste it into new material. Than i want create a list on links of the sources with additional notice about license for every source in special part of site about legals: &amp;quot;...This project with great thanks for all authors uses following content listed below. Text materials from Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0...&amp;quot; (and next full list of links to wiki). Is it right and does it enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that I am not modify text just copy parts of that, so I don't need to other additional notifications. Is it right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally. Which type of penalty I can get if I violate CC BY-SA 3.0, for example, create wrong notifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATED&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, peoples! I modify landing page. In header at begin of page &amp;quot;All the legal information and links to the data sources you can get by clicking to “i” icon on the top-right corner&amp;quot;. Than in the &amp;quot;legal window&amp;quot; listed all links to articles with version of page when info was copied (DD-MM-YY) and link to authors (history of edits) like this (en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki&amp;amp;action=history). I made it list of sources like showed in exampled in Wiki: authors, license, time, link to dynamic page. How do you think is enough and no need additional actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastEditorUserId="21571" LastEditDate="2021-08-04T07:45:49.657" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T07:47:32.617" Title="Questions about CC BY-SA 3.0 text adaptaion and penalties for violations" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11998" CreationDate="2021-08-02T00:05:11.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks fine to my non-lawyer eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Penalties are that you can be sued (or threatened to be sued) by Wikipedia for copyright violation. What they would ask in form of reparation is anybody's guess, but I'd suspect they just politely ask you to fix whatever you did wrong, only resorting to the above if you don't comply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it is up to them. It might be wise to contact them and ask in detail. If in any &lt;em&gt;relevant&lt;/em&gt; doubt, you'll have to hire your very own lawyer  specializing in open source licenses to look into the matter in detail (yes, stuff that we geeks consider a completely irrelevant detail might be legally crucial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-08-02T00:05:11.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12002" CreationDate="2021-08-03T22:07:07.940" Score="2" ViewCount="739" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wanting to find a way to indicate visually, as shorthand, that certain projects I'm publishing fall under one license or another. On the actual GitHub page for each project, the full license name and text file is present, but for my web page I'm looking for something minimal — a small icon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons has created clearly defined logos for each of their licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. All that MIT offers is &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.mit.edu/graphicidentity/download-logos.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; with general logos for the Institute (and the ZIPs can't even be downloaded due to a website issue, nor does it look like they were &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; downloadable when I visit the page in the Wayback Machine, but I digress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does MIT definitely intend for people to use these logo variants for the license, as has been done on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, or just for the institution of MIT? If no answer is forthcoming here, I will write MIT and put their response as an answer to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24769" LastActivityDate="2021-08-03T22:39:50.353" Title="What is the official logo for the MIT License?" Tags="|mit|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12001" CreationDate="2021-08-03T22:39:50.353" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license has no logo. It originates from the 80s, were graphical computing was far from mainstream and licenses were discussed in memos written by typewriter. While the license was drafted in the context of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nowadays the MIT as an institution isn't really involved or affiliated with the license. I would feel that using the MIT logo for this license would be quite misleading. Some people outright avoid the term “MIT license”, and prefer “Expat license” or “X11 license” instead. But it would be equally misleading to use the X Consortium logo for the license. If you're interested about the history of the license, consider reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9263265&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Origin of the “MIT License”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons license suite is unusual for having official icons, but it makes sense in the context of those licenses. For example, the Creative Commons icons make it possible to indicate licensing status on a graphic or photo where there's no space for legal text. They were also designed for an international context where people might understand these icons but not English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since licenses other than the Creative Commons licenses don't really have logos, you should just stick to text. However, there are various services to create “badge” or “shield” style icons that you can include in your documents. They have no advantage over text but might be pretty and colourful. For example, the following icon was created with &lt;a href=&quot;https://shields.io/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://shields.io/&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;live: &lt;img src=&quot;https://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-green&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&#xA;mirror: &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yxrge.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-03T22:39:50.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12005" CreationDate="2021-08-04T08:17:53.567" Score="-1" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it ok to completely rebrand a software under osl 3.0 (change its logo, footer etc.) and sell it as SAAS, providing the original source code and modified source code both on the GitHub to public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24773" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T11:17:24.903" Title="Rebranding and selling software under osl 3.0" Tags="|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12003" CreationDate="2021-08-04T11:17:24.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OSL 3.0 license is an open-source, copyleft, copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the license gives you the right to make any change you like and to distribute the result or to use it in any way you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it is a copyleft license, when you distribute copies of the modified software, you must do so under the same (OSL 3.0) license and you must give the recipients of the software access to the source code. If you use it in a SaaS offering, this is only relevant for the portions that get executed on the user's computer, as only those portions can be said to have been distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it may be a good idea to completely rebrand the original, because the OSL license does not give you trademark rights to the branding of the original software. Without rebranding you would have to negotiate those trademark rights separately. Just make sure you keep the license and attribution information in the source code intact, as that is required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-04T11:17:24.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-05T04:16:52.620" Score="3" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning on starting a free software project in C that deals with creating maps of astronomical data; as such, I will be working very frequently with FITS files. One of the best libraries for manipulating FITS files is CFITSIO for C, but I am somewhat concerned regarding licensing. I'm planning on using the GPL license for my project, and I am aware that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NASA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF does not see NASA's Open Source License v1.3 as &amp;quot;free&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;; however, it appears CFITSIO doesn't use this license and instead uses the following license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (Unpublished-all rights reserved under the copyright laws of&#xA;the United States), U.S. Government as represented by the&#xA;Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. No&#xA;copyright is claimed in the United States under Title 17, U.S. Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to freely use, copy, modify, and distribute this software&#xA;and its documentation without fee is hereby granted, provided that&#xA;this copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty appears in all&#xA;copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DISCLAIMER:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS' WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;EITHER EXPRESSED, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED&#xA;TO, ANY WARRANTY THAT THE SOFTWARE WILL CONFORM TO SPECIFICATIONS, ANY&#xA;IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR&#xA;PURPOSE, AND FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY THAT THE&#xA;DOCUMENTATION WILL CONFORM TO THE SOFTWARE, OR ANY WARRANTY THAT THE&#xA;SOFTWARE WILL BE ERROR FREE. IN NO EVENT SHALL NASA BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;DAMAGES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL OR&#xA;CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, ARISING OUT OF, RESULTING FROM, OR IN ANY WAY&#xA;CONNECTED WITH THIS SOFTWARE, WHETHER OR NOT BASED UPON WARRANTY,&#xA;CONTRACT, TORT , OR OTHERWISE, WHETHER OR NOT INJURY WAS SUSTAINED BY&#xA;PERSONS OR PROPERTY OR OTHERWISE, AND WHETHER OR NOT LOSS WAS&#xA;SUSTAINED FROM, OR AROSE OUT OF THE RESULTS OF, OR USE OF, THE&#xA;SOFTWARE OR SERVICES PROVIDED HEREUNDER.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a hunch that this ticks off the boxes for a free software license, but I am unsure. I'd appreciate any advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/NASA-1.3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to NASA OSA v1.3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to CFITSIO website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24789" LastActivityDate="2021-08-06T13:32:01.490" Title="Is CFITSIO free software/GPL compatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12008" CreationDate="2021-08-05T09:39:24.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit tricky. At first glance, the license looks very much like the MIT license, which is GPL-compatible. However, the CFITSIO license might only allow non-commercial use, which is not GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license contains three paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;statement of copyright&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;grant of permissions and statement of license conditions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;disclaimer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The disclaimer is standard fare and amounts to “you don't get to use NASA for any reason relating to this software”. The statement of copyright is more complex than a single line “Copyright 2021 NASA” due to the way how copyright for government works is handled in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permission grant (and license conditions) is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to freely use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation without fee is hereby granted, provided that this copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty appears in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare this with the permission grant (and license conditions) of the MIT license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, the critical difference is the scope of “without fee” and “free of charge”. In the MIT license, the grant of permissions is explicitly free of charge. The permissions include selling copies of the software. In the CFITSIO license, permission is granted to “distribute this software … without fee”. Forbidding for-profit distribution goes against the Open Source Definition and is incompatible with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; might not charge for the GPL software. But if you were to publish a software under the GPL that includes the CFITSIO routines, you would be giving &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; people permission to sell the CFITSIO software. You have no right to do this, so you cannot include CFITSIO in an Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solution might be to create a not-fully-open-source software. You could publish your software under GPLv3 plus an additional permission under section 7 to link with CFITSIO. This is also suggested in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ entry “What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?”&lt;/a&gt;. But this only works if you are the only author of GPL-covered code in the software. You will not be able to include GPL-covered code from other people, since it wouldn't be covered by this exception. Understanding the exact consequences of such an exception might be worth a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, consider writing a separate tool that uses the CFITSIO routines to a data format that your main GPL-covered software can understand. This conversion tool would have to be licensed separately. While you can make it freely available, it wouldn't be Open Source or Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-05T09:39:24.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12008" CreationDate="2021-08-06T13:32:01.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to disagree with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12009/258&quot;&gt;answer by @amon&lt;/a&gt; on the interpretation of the permission grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to freely use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation without fee is hereby granted, provided that this copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty appears in all copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reading of this grant is that the &amp;quot;without fee&amp;quot; part means that you don't have to pay NASA to use the CFITSIO package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my reading is correct, then the license is a GPL-compatible permissive open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the other interpretation in the other answer, I recommend that you ask NASA for clarification on how the license &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted according to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-06T13:32:01.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T11:17:17.317" Score="1" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a (somewhat hypothetical) question regarding GPL on embedded systems. I know there are quite a few of them already out there, but I didn't find some which apply to this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off: I know the internet is not a lawyer, the question is mostly out of curiosity about legal concepts. I don't want to find a loophole in GPL to exploit, in my particular case, all company-specific code on the devices is plaintext python anyway, so customers could just mount the SD card and change whatever they like. Also, the company &lt;em&gt;will have&lt;/em&gt; professional legal advice, no matter what comes out of this discussion. The thought just arose while researching a bit on this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following scenario: Customers pay a subscription fee to access a webservice where they can configure and query particular devices. For example, imagine the devices are monitoring air temperature + humidity at locations specified by the customer and send the data back to the server through, e.g., LTE network through an embedded router. The customers then can view the data on the webservice. The devices contain company code to communicate with the server, reading the sensors etc., which might be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, customers leasing devices containing GPL code still counts as &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; and hence one has to provide the GPL code. However, in this scenario, the devices do not become property of the customer: They do not lease / pay for the device, only for the service, the devices are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the main product, they are just means to facilitate the service. The devices are physically present at some location (e.g., customer's premises) and remain in property of the company. To make the example even more &amp;quot;extreme&amp;quot;, lets say that customers do not install the devices themselves, they order an employee of the company to put the device at an appropriate place. So they do not ever have contact with the device nor is the device in any way connected to their network. They are physically present on the customers premise but nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does GPL apply here? Does the situation change if the devices also provide some interaction with the local environment (display something, flip some switches via GPIO etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize / generalize, my question boils down to &amp;quot;what exactly counts as distribution&amp;quot;? In my understanding, it should be about any variant of ownership / property, I cannot see how it could be (solely) tied to where the object that physically runs the code is, otherwise moving things would probably be extremely interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you could then probably exploit this by &amp;quot;renting&amp;quot; a server rack (or anything similar) at the customers location and putting whatever box inside of it + lock it from access. But then, how is this different from renting a server at a hosting company and putting GPL code on there, only offering the customer a web interface? GPL does, as far as I understand, not cover the product of such code, i.e. input / output. In other words: If I use GPL code on a webserver backend, I don't have to distribute the code IIRC, neither to the hosting company nor the customer, because I am not distributing the code, it does not leave the boundaries of what is mine (even though the server running it is rented). But then, if the customer does not rent the device, he simply allows me to place my property (the device) on his premises (and possibly allows me access to the local infrastructure) I'm not really distributing, am I? If so, why? And how is it different from rented servers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8903/use-gplv3-library-in-a-closed-system-no-software-distribution?rq=1&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; seems somewhat related, however slightly differs in the sense that users interact with the &amp;quot;black box&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24800" LastEditorUserId="24800" LastEditDate="2021-08-07T15:13:29.243" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T19:02:42.967" Title="GPL on physical devices as a service" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T15:26:57.710" Score="0" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask a question about package licenses in R. I have a package in R (in GitHub), and I offer a course on how to use it, as well as other topics in my professional field, which have been selling a lot. However, I came across a copy of my course, using the package I created, without being consulted. Is there any way to restrict commercial use of my package exclusively for courses (but without excluding other commercial uses)? I researched but I didn't find a clear answer about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24803" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T18:32:39.113" Title="License for R Package in GitHub" Tags="|license|package|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-08-08T05:35:53.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12014" CreationDate="2021-08-07T18:32:39.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to restrict commercial use of my package exclusively for courses (but without excluding other commercial uses)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a restriction is only possible when you (ask a lawyer to) create your own license. But such a license will not be considered an open-source license and it will hinder adoption of your package by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is also another route. Under copyright law, the R package and the course materials are completely separate things and they can be licensed independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you can license the R package under an open-source license and at the same time license the course materials under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; license (which is not an open-source license as it forbids commercial use and the making of derivative works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T18:32:39.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12013" CreationDate="2021-08-07T19:02:42.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The situation may depend on how the contract with your users is formulated. If your users &amp;quot;rent&amp;quot; space to you for placing the device, then in my view the situation would probably be seen as similar to renting server space to run your GPL application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you provide the devices to your customers as part of the service you provide, it would probably be seen in a similar light as an internet router that you get to use as part of the service delivered by your provider. For those devices, it has been established that it counts as distribution in the GPL sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the final verdict is that your GPL software is being distributed, that means that you need to &lt;em&gt;offer&lt;/em&gt; to give the source code, but you don't have to actively provide it to the customers that don't ask for it. And also, you don't need to keep supporting a device if the software got changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the customers are businesses, chances are that your customers have no interest in putting different software on the devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-07T19:02:42.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12019" CreationDate="2021-08-09T00:04:49.130" Score="11" ViewCount="1802" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed an Android app with Kivy, which I'd like to publish in Google Play. Now, I'd like to use certain MIT-licensed data, which will ship as part of the app. Is this legal? As far as I understood, I need to include the copyright notice, but I do not understand how to do it. Is it enough to just put the MIT license text inside the 'about' screen of the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24808" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2021-08-10T01:58:05.690" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T01:58:05.690" Title="MIT-licensed data as part of Android app" Tags="|mit|android|google-play|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12017" CreationDate="2021-08-09T07:31:19.053" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT-licensed data is a bit of a weird case, but yes, showing the MIT license text would be all you have to do for compliance with the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is very much intended for software, not for other copyrightable works. Data by itself is not copyrightable, but the data might represent copyrightable creative works, or the data may be a database and your jurisdiction recognizes database rights (e.g. the EU but not the US). But lets ignore copyrightability of the data and assume that the MIT license is meaningful and valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the MIT license requires from you is that “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.” For mobile apps, including these notices in your app's about-screen is indeed the common way to do that. For example, you might have text as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ExampleApp is Copyright 2021 Example Author, all rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ExampleApp includes various third party material:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some Data Set&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2018 Database Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted [… MIT license text]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in doubt, a good way to do it can be to emulate other apps that are probably compliant. In my experience, web browsers such as Chrome or Firefox do a pretty good job of displaying open source licenses properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T07:31:19.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12020" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12021" CreationDate="2021-08-09T17:49:27.047" Score="2" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose Product X, produced by for-profit Company X, is released in two versions, a GPL &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; version with full source available and a paid commercial version for which source is not offered. The commercial version is built from the same codebase as the GPL version but includes a number of &amp;quot;commercial features&amp;quot; only available in this paid version. The business model of Company X is selling the commercial version and supporting that commercial version, while offering the GPL version on an as-is community-supported basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What stops me from taking Product X's community edition source code, adding the commercial features myself (based solely on the descriptions on the product comparison page for Company X), changing the name of the program (to avoid branding issues?) and re-releasing my version with the added features under the GPL? Suppose I started my own business providing support for my version, but for a lower price than Company X? Would Company X have any legal recourse against me for &amp;quot;stealing their customers&amp;quot; assuming they could reasonably prove that they lost many customers to me since I'm offering a better deal (free program vs. paid, cheaper support)? (For example, assume they had statistically significant survey results indicating people left for my product, while simultaneously demonstrating a significant loss in sales)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, suppose I simply copied Company X's business model. I take the GPL version and only add in functionality for plugins, releasing this plugin-enabled version under the GPL. Then I release my own paid plugin under a commercial license. Now I undercut Company X by charging less for both the commercial plugin and for support. (Come to think of it, this feels like it could be a way to violate the spirit of the GPL...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps is Company X in GPL violation for even doing this business model in the first place with a GPL community edition and a commercial product based on the same code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T18:05:32.597" Title="Are there possible legal issues with implementing the &quot;pro&quot; features of a paid product in that product's GPL version?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12020" CreationDate="2021-08-09T18:05:32.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What stops me from taking Product X's community edition source code, adding the commercial features myself [...], changing the name of the program [...] and re-releasing my version with the added features under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely nothing. One of the freedoms that open source software gives you is exactly this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would Company X have any legal recourse against me for &amp;quot;stealing their customers&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. (Disclaimer: legal jurisdictions vary. I can't see how this would stand up in an English court, but I'm not a lawyer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take the GPL version and only add in functionality for plugins, releasing this plugin-enabled version under the GPL. Then I release my own paid plugin under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can do this though. It's pretty clear that the core code and the plugin form one body of work and so the GPL would apply equally to the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps is Company X in GPL violation for even doing this business model in the first place with a GPL community edition and a commercial product based on the same code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming they are the copyright holder of all the GPL code in the product (or have appropriate licenses from the copyright holders), they are fine as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way/&quot;&gt;copyright holder is never obliged to follow the terms of the GPL&lt;/a&gt; - the GPL is a grant of additional rights &lt;em&gt;to other people&lt;/em&gt;, not a removal of rights from the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T18:05:32.597" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7138" CreationDate="2021-08-09T22:01:19.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do I have to accept license agreements for the Android SDK?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't! Just use SDK builds from &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website instead&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rebuilding Android development tools from source, dropping non-free EULA and assessing reproducibility. &lt;a href=&quot;http://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zero EULA clicks required if you do so. That's the beauty of open source software: anyone can slap an ugly T&amp;amp;C screen on a piece of code and then anyone else can come in and remove it, without needing the permission of literally anyone in the world :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16497" LastActivityDate="2021-08-09T22:01:19.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12026" CreationDate="2021-08-10T17:36:36.137" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found this useful package for cloud native applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's name and site is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kumahq/kuma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kuma&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that, the name(Kuma) is a very sensitive organ in my language. A womans private part, (Swahili version).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From their website, that name means Bear in Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to request a name change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are the ways to proceed in asking for a name change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think using Issues pane is not good for this kind of claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24820" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:20:41.497" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:20:41.497" Title="Open Source Package Name" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12025" CreationDate="2021-08-10T18:01:22.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to request a name change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can request almost anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, what are the ways to proceed in asking for a name change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best is probably to contact one of the project admins privately and sound them out as to whether they would consider a name change; you do this privately because doing it as a public issue on Github is likely to produce more noise than value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, be very prepared for the admins to say &amp;quot;sorry, we're happy with the current name&amp;quot;. Bringing this back to open source briefly, you of course have the option to create your own fork of the project with a different name; if the community believe that your name is more appropriate, they can then choose to move their efforts onto your fork rather than the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-08-10T18:01:22.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12032" CreationDate="2021-08-11T00:52:21.847" Score="4" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;New technologies like GitHub Copilot or OpenAI Codex use public code to train their models to generate code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license to enforce open source upon output trained from public code? Is there a new license in the works? I don't want to prohibit training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I previously thought that current GPL compatible licensed code was enough but I've seen some cases of it being violated under the guise of fair use, with models outputting code without any attribution and relicensed in non-compatible ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL added a requirement to close the server-side loophole, is there a license that covers the new &amp;quot;AI scraping/training loophole&amp;quot; or a new clause perhaps be added to account for AI-training? (i.e. if you train a model using the given code, your model must also allow others to download the source code/training set/model corresponding to the output)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24823" LastEditorUserId="24823" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T01:21:07.800" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T03:51:22.433" Title="License to enforce open source on derivative work from AI training such as GitHub Copilot or OpenAI Codex?" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-07T00:21:53.780" Score="2" ViewCount="501" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a commercial product that will be will be available as a SaaS for now, but later on might be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for SaaS, using GNU libraries seems like a no issue since there is a loophole, however if I decide to distribute, I need to release my entire source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What my team and I are trying to do is to use gettext library, specifically the .mo files in our product. We might also generate these files using MIT licensed libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that, if we generate these .mo files, and our product uses system libraries (from PHP/C++ maybe) to get the translations that are loaded into my product, does that mean I have to release my library as GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a similar quesiton here which doesn't have a definitive answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/52225/does-the-acceptance-of-a-software-licence-constitute-a-contract-can-such-a-cont&quot;&gt;Does the acceptance of a software licence constitute a contract? Can such a contract be closed without using said software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget about license acceptance, if I download and use a GPL library, that is not directly within my compiled source code, am I bound to release my software under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can get around the first point, generating .mo files, by creating a seperate product that I can license under GPL, and consuming that product over the web (webservice) which means I won't be bound by GPL for my main product. That's done, and my company doesn't mind releasing such product under GPL since the use cases are limited and it isn't strictly unique to our product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the second question, if I ever use a function offered by gettext to get the value of translation, does that mean the whole product is now GPL? Using a web service for this might also be a loophole but considering performance this would be the worst decision we can make here. We would be better off building something from scratch or maybe better yet finding a MIT or Apache licensed product and contributing to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Jake" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T22:44:24.510" Title="Using GetText (GNU) license in a commercial product (For now SaaS)?" Tags="|software|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12029" CreationDate="2021-08-08T16:32:58.453" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the USA, you are allowed to do certain things if either US copyright law allows it, or if you have a valid license that allows you to do it. The GPL is not a contract in the USA, but a license, telling you &amp;quot;you are allowed to do things that copyright law alone wouldn't allow to do, if you do certain things that the license asks you to do&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to check: Are you doing things that copyright law allows you to do? If yes, then the GPL doesn't matter. One case would be using a GPL licensed application to create a datafile, and using that datafile (exception if the application puts GPL licensed code inside the datafile; in that case you could manually remove that code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second you check: Are you doing things that the GPL license allows you to do without you having to do anything in exchange? For example, using GPL licensed code in an application that you don't distribute is allowed by the GPL license (even though it is not allowed by copyright law), so you can do that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third you check: Do you have a different additional license to do things? There's a lot of code that you can use according to the GPL license without payment, but where you can pay the software vendor for a different license. So if you have a different license, you are fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And last, if you do something that is allowed by GPL but not by copyright law, and the GPL has conditions that you need to fulfil, then you need to do that to avoid copyright infringement. And that's the point: If you don't follow the terms, you commit copyright infringement. Nobody can &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; you to follow the GPL terms. They can make it &lt;em&gt;wiser&lt;/em&gt; to follow the GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germany, the GPL is actually considered a contract. A slightly strange contract, where one side doesn't care if there is any evidence that there is a contract. If the same case went to court in Germany instead the USA, the judge would ask you &amp;quot;did you agree to the GPL&amp;quot; - and nobody can usually prove whether you did or didn't. Then you have the choice: You say &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; and have to follow the GPL terms, or you say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; and have likely committed copyright infringement. You would do whatever gives the best result for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" OwnerDisplayName="gnasher729" LastActivityDate="2021-08-08T16:38:35.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12029" CreationDate="2021-08-11T06:34:11.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if we generate these .mo files, and our product uses system libraries (from PHP/C++ maybe) to get the translations that are loaded into my product, does that mean I have to release my library as GPL? [...] If I download and use a GPL library, that is not directly within my compiled source code, am I bound to release my software under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; the GPL makes it clear that mere use of covered code is without obligation (GPLv3 s2: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may make, run [...] covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  But if you later decide to convey this code to others, then see below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I ever use a function offered by gettext to get the value of translation, does that mean the whole product is now GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, nobody really knows.  The question of whether dynamic linking to a library creates a derivative work is currently an open question in international copyright jurisprudence; we summarise the arguments &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;for&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;against&lt;/a&gt; elsewhere on this site.  My firm belief, like the FSF's, is that it does create a derivative work, and if it does, and you decide to release your work to others, then &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c makes it clear that your obligations will include releasing the whole work under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T06:34:11.340" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12028" CreationDate="2021-08-11T08:55:07.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The issue here is that licenses by necessity derive their power from copyright law, so can apply &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in situations where the output is legally a derivative work of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is by no means clear that in legal terms a model which is trained on a given set of data is a derivative work of that data - and if it's not, anyone is free to ignore the license on any publicly available data set when using it to train a model; it would be possible to restrict this sort of thing by contract, but that's getting into a very different area. The issue of data, models and derivative works will almost certainly be a topic which evolves over the next few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T08:55:07.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12037" CreationDate="2021-08-11T13:50:20.223" Score="0" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case I want to clone a project from github that has the Apache License and that contains a NOTICE text file, what shall I do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt; does contain a paragraph on what to do, but to me that looks like some gibberish a lawyer has problems understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would therefore appreciate if someone can explain - in Engish - what the heck this paragraph means, and what I have to do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-08-11T14:21:33.167" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T13:29:24.827" Title="When cloning a Apache project from github and that project contains a NOTICE text file - what shall I do?" Tags="|apache-2.0|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12065" CreationDate="2021-08-11T17:35:42.297" Score="-2" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the Dlib library free? Because at the company we have plans to use it to recognize documents with Python, and we were thinking of using this lib without a headache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24828" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T10:10:24.830" Title="Is the Dlib library free?" Tags="|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12036" CreationDate="2021-08-11T19:15:49.900" Score="1" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the case I want to fork a project from GitHub that has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL3.0&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL3.0&lt;/a&gt; license, what do I have to do? The original license text might contain the &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; that is required (keep those files, change these files), but as I am not a lawyer, and English is not my first language, I do not understand what is written there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate if someone could summarise what needs to be done exactly - in plain English - in the terms of the license, when I fork a GPL/LGPL project in GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastEditorDisplayName="user24913" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T10:25:49.983" LastActivityDate="2021-09-02T13:10:55.327" Title="When forking a GitHub project which has the GPL3.0 or the LGPL3.0 license - what do I have to do exactly?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12035" CreationDate="2021-08-12T06:59:42.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a fork of a LGPL or GPL licensed project, the requirements are actually quite simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must use the same license for your forked project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must keep all copyright notices (lines with the word Copyright, a (range of) year and one or more names) intact. You are allowed to add your own copyright notices on files you modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you must keep all references to the (L)GPL license intact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if you add new files, you should add a comment block to them with copyright and licensing information. Preferably in the same style as the rest of the project uses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And actually, only the first point is somewhat specific to the (L)GPL licenses. The other points apply to the large majority of open-source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-09-02T13:10:55.327" LastActivityDate="2021-09-02T13:10:55.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12033" CreationDate="2021-08-12T07:17:56.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That paragraph of the Apache licence states that the attribution information in the NOTICE file must be made available also to the recipients of your cloned project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license allows three ways of making the information available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a NOTICE text file that you distribute along with your project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contained in some other way in the source code or documentation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;shown in the UI of the application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can choose yourself which (one or more) of those mechanisms you want to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the paragraph states that you can add attributions and that you can remove attributions that refer to parts of the original project that are no longer present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-08-12T13:29:24.827" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T13:29:24.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-12T12:24:54.410" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are building a product with 100s of OSS dependencies. We want to fully comply with the OSS license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume our product has a direct dependency &amp;quot;DDep_v1&amp;quot; under MPL-2.0 license, and &amp;quot;DDep_v1&amp;quot; itself has a direct dependency &amp;quot;TDep_v1.8&amp;quot; .&#xA;Now TDep_v1.8 has a vulnerability, which is fixed in TDep_v1.9, and therefore I want to change DDep_v1 to point to TDep_v1.9 (instead of _v1.8). No other changes at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question:&#xA;Is the mere change of the version of the dependency a modification of DDep_v1 that makes it a 'Derivative Work' with all its implications (notice of modification, etc)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any publications on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is not limited to the MPL-2.0 license, I just use it here as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T06:41:20.963" Title="Change of version of Dependency: Does it constitute a Derivative Work?" Tags="|derivative-works|license|dependencies|version-number|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12041" CreationDate="2021-08-12T13:03:11.000" Score="2" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of proprietary software, there is usually a dedicated screen which one can navigate to and view all such notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about cases where we design a device with very limited user interface, not suitable to display the license and use an MIT-licensed library as part of the firmware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would including the notice in the manual be enough, provided we ship the manual with each unit? Or even adding a license leaflet, separate from the manual, which is shipped with each unit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately, what about firmware updates? For example, we digitally ship an update (potentially changing included libraries), would having a license file accompany it be enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17946" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T13:57:50.903" Title="MIT notice in firmware for devices with no user interface" Tags="|mit|license-notice|firmware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7307" CreationDate="2021-08-12T13:13:59.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are running your web app (as a service) on your own server (or a server under your control) regardless if public or in-house, then you are not actually distributing/publishing anything, you are just offering the service.&#xA;Under the MIT license if you are not distributing the code then you have no obligations. (under AGPL license it would be very different)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T13:13:59.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12039" CreationDate="2021-08-12T13:57:50.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There virtually is little other choice of making the users aware of an embedded device without any interface. Thus if you do as you suggest you should be on the safe side to fulifll the obligations from the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute update packages they will probably come as a zip file or similar which includes the actual binary, maybe an installer, and instructions - and also a license where you put the apporpriate notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you feel generous you might even offer for download on your webpage the sources of (the open source parts of) your software - which then also includes the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T13:57:50.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12043" CreationDate="2021-08-11T04:43:06.640" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made an android library and published it on GitHub as an open source library. Now I want to add the Apache license to it, but I don't know how to apply for the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I get the Apache license for my Android library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24849" OwnerDisplayName="Yaqoob Bhatti" LastActivityDate="2021-08-12T18:58:05.300" Title="How to license a software library using the Apache license?" Tags="|android|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12042" CreationDate="2021-08-11T07:04:06.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's free to use for everyone.&#xA;You just need to add &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NOTICE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; files to the repo like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://infra.apache.org/apply-license.html#new&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official doc says&lt;/a&gt;. Also, it's recommended to have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#headers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a brief copyright header&lt;/a&gt; for each source file that is licensed under Apache2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Aleksei Potapkin" LastActivityDate="2021-08-11T07:04:06.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-13T03:04:22.717" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to become a creative commons record label that publishes music with PRS but licenses them under CC by SA 4.0? Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24848" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T06:37:04.013" Title="Sell music instrumentals under CC by SA 4.0 with attributes" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12044" CreationDate="2021-08-13T06:37:04.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, but mostly, as I read it, it is not possible.  When you join the PRS as a writer, you agree to their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prsformusic.com/join/writer/prs-standard-terms-of-assignment-writers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard terms of assignment for writers&lt;/a&gt;, which amongst other things say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2a] you transfer to us absolutely for all parts of the world the rights which belong to you on the date of this Agreement or which you may acquire or own whilst you remain our member&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4c5] you promise to refrain from licensing any of the rights and from otherwise dealing with rights which you have transferred to us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The limited case I can see that would work is if you published your work under CC BY-SA, then joined the PRS and assigned this work to them.  Since free licences are generally &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;irrevocable&lt;/a&gt;, anyone who had already got a copy of the work under those terms would retain their rights, including that of sharing under the same licence terms.  But &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; would have undertaken not to publish it to any more people under those terms when you assigned it to the PRS - indeed, you would no longer have the rights in order to so license them - so you would have to stop distributing it under CC terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't crazy.  The PRS exists to centrally collect and distribute licensing fees, that is to say payments that need to be made in order for third parties to secure a copyright licence to perform or physically copy music.  But if this music is licensed under CC BY-SA, everyone already has those rights (subject to certain accompanying obligations), and there is no additional need for a payment to secure them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T06:37:04.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2021-08-13T07:32:14.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is not always so easy. Some dependencies have a mix of files with different licenses, and they are difficult to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as an example: When you look at org.springframework.security:spring-security-crypto it clearly seems to be an Apache 2.0 licensed library. However it includes 1 file which is under ISC license: BCrypt.java&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is difficult to determine how much diligence developers have to show in searching/finding cases like this in dependencies of their software, or if it is enough to rely on the declarations of the project itself in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I know the question is old, but still want to add my 2c]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T07:32:14.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9593" CreationDate="2021-08-13T15:39:34.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The legal language of GPL3 does not refer to 'machine readable' or 'plain readable'. In order to accommodate both (and to comply with the license terms) you should include the machine readable SPDX into every single file and in addition have a license.md with the complete language of the license, the copyright and other attribution notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe, in the future (GPLv4 ?), we will see license language change to allow relying only on SPDX statements. But for now the thinking is: A few 100 Bytes of legal language in each project is not a burden for anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T15:39:34.220" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-13T15:58:56.467" Score="4" ViewCount="962" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, the LGPL v2.1 (and the subsequent licenses) allow an user to link a proprietary program to the LGPL licensed library as long as the open source library can be modified and re-linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what happens if one wishes to link an LGPL software &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; a proprietary library? I am also confused about why LGPL treats everything as a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there is a scientific software routinely used in my field, which is released under the LGPL v2.1. When compiled, the source code produces an executable (and also a library that &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; softwares can link to). Now, the software needs a BLAS and LAPACK routines, which can be provided by Intel MKL a.k.a. Math Kernel Library. However, Intel MKL is proprietary code. Their simplified software license does allow redistribution of everything (headers, static libraries, dynamic libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the thing is that the scientific software does not provide precompiled binaries and only provides source code, which I think causes a lot of problems to beginners in the field. So, I want to distribute precompiled binaries of the software linked to Intel MKL (for free of course). The linking can be static or dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do this? I am new to open source, so an explanation in simple words would be the most helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4357/how-can-lgpl-and-proprietary-licenses-be-combined&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt; here that is similar, but I do not understand how linking to the library and from the library are different. I have tried reading the LGPL v2.1 license, but there does not seem to be anything distinguishing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24855" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T06:29:35.863" Title="Is it possible to link an LGPL v2.1 software with a proprietary library?" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12038" CreationDate="2021-08-13T19:51:06.173" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, a change in your dependencies is not a modification of your product and not considered a derivative work. Your product has not changed in any way beyond a minor documentation change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the change in the dependency requires modifications to the source code of your product, that would constitute a &lt;a href=&quot;https://semver.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patch update under semantic versioning&lt;/a&gt;, or a more substantial update depending on the scale of changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even disregarding that, a change in the licensed software by the holder of the property (the &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work.'&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24729" LastActivityDate="2021-08-13T19:51:06.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12052" CreationDate="2021-08-14T11:47:45.127" Score="1" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I (or a company where I work) use a source code part from an open source project licensed under a permissive license like MIT or Apache 2.0 it is clear I can modify, edit etc it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear for me, is it mandatory to have the resulting&#xA;product also under a permissive open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If it is not mandatory&lt;/em&gt;, how it differs from &amp;quot;do whatever you want&amp;quot;, I mean except, the expectation to show the original license when&#xA;distributing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Say the company does not distribute it at all, just uses it in modified form as a part internal commercial production process, say banking industry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24860" LastEditorUserId="24860" LastEditDate="2021-08-14T12:23:08.933" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T15:08:21.940" Title="What are the *restrictions* in permissive licenses like MIT or Apache 2.0?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|license|permissive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12050" CreationDate="2021-08-14T12:41:03.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear for me, is it mandatory to have the resulting product also under a permissive open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, no.  You are required to distribute the licence text, but there is no requirement comparable to eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3's&lt;/a&gt; s5c, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  However, you may not free your downstream recipients from the permissive licence's obligations, and the easiest way to do this is to redistribute under the same licence, or a less-permissive one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not mandatory, how it differs from &amp;quot;do whatever you want&amp;quot;, I mean except, the expectation to show the original license when distributing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must also generally preserve copyright notices, and Apache2 has some additional text about not enforcing your patents against licensees.  But apart from that, you pretty much can do what you want: hence &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say the company do not distribute it at all, just uses it in modified form as a part internal commercial production process, say banking industry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most permissive licences don't distinguish between your obligations on modification, and your obligations on redistribution, so not distributing makes little difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T12:41:03.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12050" CreationDate="2021-08-14T12:42:09.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear for me, is it mandatory to have the resulting product also under a permissive open source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, this resembles a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;copyleft license&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (in contrast to a permissive license) which allows redistribution of derivatives only under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is not mandatory, how it differs from &amp;quot;do whatever you want&amp;quot;, I mean except, the expectation to show the original license when distributing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It largely does not differ (except in the ways you've identified). That's why it's called a permissive license: it broadly permits things. A permissive license that does not even require attribution or preservation of the license text is sometimes informally called an &amp;quot;ultra-permissive&amp;quot; license (e.g., the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say the company does not distribute it at all, just uses it in modified form as a part internal commercial production process, say banking industry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, virtually all free and open source (FLOSS) licenses allow this with no obligations; permissive licenses allow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is outside the scope of your question about permissive licenses, but two notable exceptions to the above rule are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Affero GPL (AGPL)&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/holochain/cryptographic-autonomy-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL)&lt;/a&gt; which place certain obligations to network users. (The AGPL, for example, requires that if you modify the work, you must make the modified source available to each person who interacts with the software over a network.) The AGPL and CAL do not belong to the category of permissive license, and could probably be called the FLOSS licenses with the most substantial requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-08-14T15:08:21.940" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T15:08:21.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12053" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-14T19:33:12.887" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to what said in the GPL FAQ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#SubscriptionFee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#SubscriptionFee&lt;/a&gt;), GPL does not allow to run GPLed programs on a device that will &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;stop operating if customers do not continue paying a subscription fee&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, while most cloud computing require users to continue paying the fee in order to use the service continuously. It's pretty normal to see a cloud server running GPLv2 or GPLv3 programs. Is this really violating the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24862" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T20:09:14.540" Title="Can I run programs that are released under GPL on cloud servers?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12048" CreationDate="2021-08-14T20:03:11.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably yes. LGPL allows linking to a program with an incompatible license, and the keyword is &amp;quot;linking&amp;quot;.&#xA;If you are the copyright holder of your program, you can even publish it under the ordinary GPL with a written exception (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the question of why LGPL is treating everything as library, I believe that's because of it was originally called &amp;quot;Library GPL&amp;quot; (now &amp;quot;Lesser GPL&amp;quot;), and was designed to be used on certain libraries. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are writing a very important program, that will be better to ask a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24862" LastActivityDate="2021-08-14T20:03:11.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-14T21:57:13.363" Score="6" ViewCount="1877" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.automotivelinux.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Automotive Grade Linux &lt;/a&gt;, which is an open-source project based on Linux for automotive applications. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Open-Source-im-Auto-Automotive-Grade-Linux-als-Google-Alternative-5074121.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This (German) news article&lt;/a&gt; says that you have to pay money to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.automotivelinux.org/about/members/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;member&lt;/a&gt; of AGL. However, I can't find out the licence of the project and what it means to be a &lt;em&gt;member&lt;/em&gt;: Do you need to be a member to use the code legally? Is this membership only required for commercial usage, so mainly for car manufacturers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/automotive-grade-linux/docs-agl/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A docs repo&lt;/a&gt; was published under the Apache 2.0 Licence. However, it may only cover the documentation, is from 2016 and read-only. So I'd like to find official, recent information about the &lt;em&gt;current&lt;/em&gt; licence state of the AGL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a look on multiple pages on their site, like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/start/getting-started&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;getting started guide&lt;/a&gt; for example, without being able to find the exact information about this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't refer to &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; licencing information about Linux and other OS projects. I mean this specific to this project in the direction of: &lt;strong&gt;When I want to use AGL, what are the conditions and (if applicable) restrictions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18848" LastEditorUserId="282" LastEditDate="2021-08-16T09:09:20.413" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T09:09:20.413" Title="Which licence(s) is Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) using?" Tags="|licensing|license|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12055" CreationDate="2021-08-14T22:23:06.060" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, a Linux distribution does not have a single license, as it is an aggregation of various separate components. While I haven't looked at ASL specifically, taking some pretty common components across any Linux distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The kernel itself is licensed under GPL v2 only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;core utilities&lt;/a&gt; are under GPL v3 or any later version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html#psf-license-agreement-for-python-release&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PSF License Agreement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nginx is under the 2 clause BSD license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc, etc, etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some distributions may then add things which are free-as-in-beer but available only in binary form, and some may add things which are not free-as-in-speech or free-as-in-beer and you have to pay for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there is no single set of conditions you have to obey when using AGL. If you distribute AGL to a third party, you have to individually obey the conditions on each component - for example, you would have to make the full source to the kernel available on request, but for nginx all you would have to do is to provide a copy of the 2 clause BSD license with appropriate copyright statement; for any non-free components, that's an issue for you and your lawyers to work out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-08-15T20:53:03.050" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T20:53:03.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12055" CreationDate="2021-08-15T12:23:03.990" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Different components of AGL have different licenses though all the ones &lt;strong&gt;I saw&lt;/strong&gt; when browsing their git repository are open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one of the links you posted their git repo can be accessed at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.automotivelinux.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://git.automotivelinux.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The home page lists all available modules/components. Each component is it's own git repo. As per standard practice in open source projects each component's codebase has a LICENSE file in addition to a README file that describes the license the code is under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clicking around I found that you can view the files in each project by clicking on the &amp;quot;tree&amp;quot; tab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the example phone app built with AGL is licensed under the Apache license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.automotivelinux.org/apps/phone/tree/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://git.automotivelinux.org/apps/phone/tree/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 2.0, January 2004&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly the sound manager and the window manager also appear to be under Apache license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.automotivelinux.org/staging/qlibsoundmanager/tree/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://git.automotivelinux.org/staging/qlibsoundmanager/tree/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://git.automotivelinux.org/staging/qlibwindowmanager/tree/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://git.automotivelinux.org/staging/qlibwindowmanager/tree/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to browse all the components individually to find out under what license they are distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1119" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T12:23:03.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12055" CreationDate="2021-08-15T13:01:13.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anyone is free to access and use the deliverables of the project, and everyone is invited to contribute back to the project.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.automotivelinux.org/about/join-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Join - Automotive Grade Linux&lt;/a&gt; page of the AGL's website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a formal license; as @slebetman says, you'd have to review the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in each repository to have legal coverage. However, as a statement of intent for the AGL organization as a whole, I think it answers your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I conclude that being a Member of AGL provides a company with other benefits. Perhaps being able to &lt;em&gt;approve&lt;/em&gt; contributions to existing code, or to start new app projects for the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24865" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T13:01:13.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12048" CreationDate="2021-08-15T19:56:44.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what happens if one wishes &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; link an LGPL software to a proprietary library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aim of the GPL (and to a slightly lesser extent the LGPL) is that a recipient of the (L)GPL-licensed code has the right to make changes to &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; part of the code. For that reason, the GPL stipulates that the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; project must conform to the terms and conditions of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 is an &lt;em&gt;extension&lt;/em&gt; to the GPLv3 (and the LGPLv2.1 is a separate license with a similar change compared to the GPLv2) that adds an exception to the requirement that all code must follow the GPL terms and conditions. That exception is carefully written such that it is unidirectional and only gives the code that has a dependency &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; the LGPL code permission to remain non-free. The permission does not extend to dependencies &lt;strong&gt;of&lt;/strong&gt; the LGPL code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to distribute precompiled binaries of the software linked to Intel MKL (for free of course). The linking can be static or dynamic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without an additional exception to the LGPL license, you are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to distribute a binary version of the software that depends on the Intel MKL. Such an exception is a change in the license and can only be given when &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders agree with it. That might be a problem if the software depends on a third-party LGPL component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you use dynamic linking and your binary can work with a number of dynamically loaded/linked libraries providing the needed BLAS/LAPACK routines, and you provide multiple versions of that library (where some are under a GPL-compatible open-source license and some are not), then it is less clear-cut that your binary depends on code with a GPL-incompatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side benefit, you can also serve people that don't use Intel hardware and thus can't benefit from the Intel MKL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also confused about why LGPL treats everything as a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license is intended to be used for software that is used as a sub-component in a larger software application. Those sub-components are typically libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is not intended to be used in a larger application, then the exception granted by the LGPL license does not have added value and you could just as easily use the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T19:56:44.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12053" CreationDate="2021-08-15T20:09:14.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With cloud computing you don't buy a &amp;quot;device that stops operating&amp;quot; when you stop paying the service provider. Instead you buy a time-share of some hardware to run your software on (where 'your software' means that you control which software gets executed on your behalf). Thus you don't pay for the right to run GPL software, but rather for the hardware resources you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T20:09:14.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12063" CreationDate="2021-08-15T21:14:24.427" Score="0" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;On my site I am using this fonts Roboto and Open Sans from Google Font which available under Apache 2.0 License. I added special link to source code of index page. Than I published code on GitHub under GPLv3. Is publishing of site source code optional or necessary? Is I must publish code under open-source license and create link to original source license of this fonts in root of my repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21571" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T22:33:32.937" Title="Using of google fonts on my project. Is I need some legal actions?" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12061" CreationDate="2021-08-15T21:36:28.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, You don't need to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24870" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T21:36:28.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12061" CreationDate="2021-08-15T22:33:32.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fonts are free to use, so simple use should not need anything special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a courtesy to users and would-be hackers that look at modifying your code, you should add a note (e.g. in a &lt;code&gt;README&lt;/code&gt; file) that you are using fonts/code, instructions on how to get them and add the relevant licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-08-15T22:33:32.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12067" CreationDate="2021-08-16T09:45:03.383" Score="2" ViewCount="1268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a website that uses MIT licensed libraries for JavaScript (THREE.js, Chart.js, js-yaml). The librairies are loaded through CDNs so their source files aren't explicitly present in the source code of the project. However I am using some scripts from THREE.js's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/dev/examples/js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;public examples&lt;/a&gt; directly in my project source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project also contains a file which is a modified script from a GPL licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL terms, I must put a global GPL license on the project. Is that fine considering the MIT licensed parts ?&#xA;If not, what license should I use ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24875" LastActivityDate="2021-08-17T07:49:39.877" Title="Which license for a project combining MIT libraries and GPL modified files?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12034" CreationDate="2021-08-16T10:10:24.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The DLIB license seems to be this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davisking/dlib/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/davisking/dlib/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt; (pls correct me if I'm referring to the wrong 'dlib project).&#xA;The license appears to be permissive, so most users will likely consider it a 'no headache' license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cross-checked the license terms against the '4 essential freedoms' &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&lt;/a&gt; and indeed the Boost Software License 1.0 appears to fulfill all of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are requirements you need to fulfill if you want to use code under this license. It is not in Public Domain, so you should be sure to understand the requirements and fulfill them when you use the DLIB library in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T10:10:24.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12064" CreationDate="2021-08-16T12:06:17.193" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you should not put your entire project under the GPL license. At least you don't need to.&#xA;The file, which includes or modifies GPL-licensed code needs to be put under the same GPL license. Other files are not affected by the copyleft requirements. There is a description in the Q&amp;amp;A how to determine if 2 parts are separate or should be considered a single 'work' &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL has a long list of requirements &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&lt;/a&gt; . Please be sure to read and understand what is asked from you when you deliver source and/or object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several different versions of the GPL license, Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, AGPL... So if you need a specific answer you need to ask a specific question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is compatible with GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&lt;/a&gt; , so if you have both MIT and GPL code in the same file you may license the entire file under GPL. Be sure to have to copyright attribution notices of all parts included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2021-08-16T13:18:04.977" LastActivityDate="2021-08-16T13:18:04.977" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12064" CreationDate="2021-08-17T07:38:21.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL terms, I must put a global GPL license on the project. Is that fine considering the MIT licensed parts ? If not, what license should I use ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project as a whole indeed needs to be under the GPL license, as you use (or depend on) some GPL code. But if there are parts (files, components, etc.) that can be distributed independently of the GPL code as well, then those parts may have a different, GPL-compatible license. The MIT license is such a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license is GPL-compatible if it allows you to apply the terms and conditions of the GPL in addition to the terms of the original license and that combination does not result in a contradiction in what you are/aren't allowed or required to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep the licensing situation manageable, it is strongly recommended that if you copy GPL-licensed code into your project, or if you add a mandatory GPL-licensed dependency, that you use the GPL license also for your own code. Third-party code that you copy into your project should keep its original license statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-08-17T07:49:39.877" LastActivityDate="2021-08-17T07:49:39.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12069" CreationDate="2021-08-20T17:42:35.050" Score="3" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; is a license that specifically allows you to include source code licensed under it, in any program without restrictions, provided users are given a copy of the MPL-licensed code, and the license is reproduced. This is in a way a step between the LGPL, which requires you to give users a method by which to modify the library (i.e. dynamic linking), and more permissive licenses like MIT/BSD, which don't require the disclosure of source code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library that's intended to be shipped along with programs that use it, since newer versions of the library likely won't be compatible with programs using older versions. The most convenient (and common) method to accomplish this is static linking. I'd like to avoid forcing application authors to either open all of their code or ship another file along what would otherwise be a single .exe/ELF, but I'd also like to make sure any modifications to this library remain open source. In this sense, the MPL seems like a perfect fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not aware of any libraries that use the MPL, nor any mentions of it online. This makes me worried that this license either might not apply to libraries, or might just not be very useful for the purpose. Can the MPL be used for libraries? If so, is it effective in making sure the source code remains open? Are there any pitfalls to using this license for a library? Are there any examples of big open-source libraries using this license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24897" LastEditorUserId="24897" LastEditDate="2021-08-20T17:55:32.757" LastActivityDate="2021-08-21T11:47:44.720" Title="Licensing a library under the MPL" Tags="|licensing|law|license|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12068" CreationDate="2021-08-21T11:19:51.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to share a fragment from my book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entreprenerd: Building a Multi-Million-Dollar Business with Open Source Software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as an introduction to my answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DKije.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DKije.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I developed two PDF libraries. I started writing the first one (&amp;quot;rugPdf&amp;quot;) in 1998 and I chose the LGPL when I released it. The MPL was written in the same year, but I wasn't aware of its existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I released a second PDF library (&amp;quot;iText&amp;quot;) in 2000 and I used the same license as before (that is: the LGPL) because I didn't know any better. That second library was much better—and subsequently more popular—than my first attempt. This popularity resulted in feedback from different legal departments that aired the same concerns that you mention in your question. These &lt;em&gt;valid&lt;/em&gt; concerns made me offer the library under a dual license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users who wanted to use iText under the LGPL, could continue doing so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users who preferred the MPL, could use it under the MPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is custom with the MPL and the LGPL, people who improved the library contributed their improvements back to the project, improving the software for everyone. In 2006-2007, I did a &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/chapters/c11.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;research project for Ghent University, Actuate, and the Eclipse Foundation&lt;/a&gt; regarding the IP of the codebase. The deliverable of this research project was a detailed list of every third party contribution and contributor. That was quite an extensive list, but it was less extensive than you'd probably wish. Based on personal experience, I have stopped believing in the fairy tale of &amp;quot;make it open source and everyone will cooperate!&amp;quot; In reality, most developers are very happy to use your software, but only a handful will actually help you improving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2009, I changed the license of new versions of iText to the AGPL after almost giving up on the project. Without a business model and financial revenue, it was no longer possible to further develop and maintain the library, but that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/chapters/c12.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another story&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fork of the pre-2009 library, renamed to &lt;em&gt;openpdf&lt;/em&gt;, is still available under the MPL, but obviously, its functionality doesn't come close to the breadth of functionality iText offers today. &amp;quot;No financial revenue&amp;quot; equals &amp;quot;No means to fund a dedicated time of developers to keep up with the PDF specifications and to answer the ever-increasing demands of the market.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summarized:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the MPL is extremely suited for libraries. I used it with success for many years in my project, and a fork of my project still uses it today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pitfall 1&lt;/strong&gt; is believing that you'll get plenty of code contributions. I hope for you that I'm wrong, but just compare the evolution of the functionality of iText (developed either by paid developers, or by partners in the context of iText-as-a-Platform) with the evolution of the functionality of openpdf (maintained by people who work on a voluntary basis). Although it looks like openpdf is still actively developed, it didn't keep up with the evolution of the different PDF standards (e.g. the PDF/UA standard released in 2012 and ISO 32000-2 released in 2017).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pitfall 2&lt;/strong&gt; is the difficulty of building a business with a library that is released under the MPL. Make sure you have a business model in place where you fund the development and maintenance of your MPL library with another project or another sustainable source of revenue. For a longer article on business models for open source, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://entreprenerd.lowagie.com/ossurvival/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Survival: A Story from the Trenches&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISCLAIMER:&lt;/strong&gt; I am the original developer of iText and the original founder of the iText Group companies, but I sold those companies in three parts in 2015, 2018, and 2020. Today, the companies are fully owned by three private equity companies backed by Peter Thiel, and I am no longer affiliated with any of the iText companies or projects. Neither am I affiliated with openpdf, despite the fact that they still use my name in their package names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="27" LastEditDate="2021-08-21T11:47:44.720" LastActivityDate="2021-08-21T11:47:44.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12074" CreationDate="2021-08-22T13:37:59.870" Score="3" ViewCount="1679" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I’ve come across several different programs on Github that are licensed under one of the Creative Commons noncommercial licenses and even after reading several articles on Wikipedia and Creative Commons Wiki and several threads here on Stack Exchange I still don’t fully understand what I can’t or cannot do with such a software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll start with a hypothetical scenario. Assume a text editor licensed under one of the noncommercial CC licenses. Am I allowed by its license to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use such editor to do commercial work as an employee of for profit organization (e. g. create commercial software artifacts)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use such editor at home to create a work with the explicit intent to sell such work (e. g. write short story and try to sell it to newspapers/magazines)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use such editor at home to create a work, that might be exchangeable for monetary compensation in the future (e. g. write a short story for the fun of it with no intention of selling it now but keeping the doors open for commercial possibilities in the future)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the answer to any of the preceding questions change with generative art software? To make it more concrete and specific I have found a name-generating software licensed under CC-BY-NC that takes a list of name as input and produces a list of similar sounding names as output. If I use my own lists of names as input, can I use outputted names in the use cases mentioned above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the reading I've done so far, I'd guess that all aforementioned uses are allowed by the license but I'm not really sure about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, I’m aware of the fact that the practice of licensing a source code under one of the Creative Commons license is discouraged but regardless I have to respect the license chosen by the copyright holder. I’m also aware of the fact, that noncommercial licenses are not considered free and as such are probably off-topic here but I’ve read several historical threads discussing this very subject on this site so I hope it’s OK to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24911" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-02T09:32:15.127" LastActivityDate="2023-04-02T09:32:15.127" Title="Allowed uses of a software licensed under CC-BY-NC license" Tags="|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12073" CreationDate="2021-08-22T16:02:05.550" Score="6" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at the BSD0 license right now, and it looks pretty nice as something that works better than Public Domain in terms of jurisdictions and wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the benefits, however, of using Public Domain/Unlicense over BSD0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unlicense: &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is free and unencumbered software released into the public&#xA;domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or&#xA;distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled&#xA;binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any&#xA;means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors&#xA;of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the&#xA;software to the public domain. We make this dedication for the benefit&#xA;of the public at large and to the detriment of our heirs and&#xA;successors. We intend this dedication to be an overt act of&#xA;relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this&#xA;software under copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR&#xA;OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,&#xA;ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR&#xA;OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, please refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;BSD0: &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD Zero Clause License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for&#xA;any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL&#xA;WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED&#xA;WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL&#xA;DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR&#xA;PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER&#xA;TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR&#xA;PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user24913" LastEditorUserId="5708" LastEditDate="2021-08-22T16:31:14.077" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T20:14:55.943" Title="What are the benefits of Unlicense/PD over BSD0?" Tags="|public-domain|unlicense|0bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12071" CreationDate="2021-08-22T16:35:36.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Unlicense&amp;quot; and/or public domain are not valid in some jurisdictions (in much of Europe you aren't allowed to give away &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rights). If you look at the BSD licenses (and others), you'll see that they explicitly disclaim warranties, limiting liabilities for the donor. It is no fun to write code, donate it to the world, it gets used by somebody who then sues you because the software caused some (real or imaginary) harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software licensing is a specialist area of law, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T16:35:36.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12071" CreationDate="2021-08-22T20:14:55.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Public domain (PD)&lt;/strong&gt; indicates a copyright status, for example that copyright has expired or was relinquished by the copyright holder. While this provides for maximum permissiveness, giving up copyright is not recognized in some jurisdictions. For example, I live in Germany and would not be able to contribute to a Public Domain “licensed” project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public Domain is not Open Source or Free Software. Software Freedom means that the software can be used, modified, or shared without restriction. But software is covered by multiple types of IP, in particular copyright and potentially patents. PD relates to the absence of copyright restrictions, but the software could still be non-free if it is encumbered by patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Unlicense&lt;/strong&gt; is an attempt at creating a “license” that serves as a PD dedication, and to include a fallback license in case PD is not recognized. It has found widespread use in some communities, and has since gained approval as an Open Source license in recognition of its use. But it is a very bad and amateurishly written “license”. For example, that copyright is relinquished “in jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws” is an oxymoron since many (nearly all!) jurisdictions recognize copyright, but many do not recognize PD dedications. While everyone understands what the Unlicense is trying to do, I'd suggest to use different legal devices for a PD dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;CC0&lt;/strong&gt; device is a professionally crafted PD dedication including proper fallback licenses. The Open Source Initiative couldn't get a consensus on approval since this device doesn't ensure Software Freedom. But if you're looking for a PD dedication, CC0 is the best known way to do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;0BSD&lt;/strong&gt; license is a minimal variant of the ISC license. It just grants certain rights that are necessary for Software Freedom and adds some disclaimer boilerplate. But it does not impose any explicit conditions, such as having to preserve the license notice. This license is an excellent license if you want to allow unrestricted use, but want a standard copyright license and not a PD dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the differences from the perspective of various actors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From the perspective of a downstream user, PD/Unlicense/CC0/0BSD are all effectively equivalent as long as no patents are involved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are patents, 0BSD and maybe the Unlicense are preferable since they give explicit permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From the perspective of a contributor, copyright licenses might be preferable over PD dedications. They (a) might not be able to relinquish copyright, or (b) might prefer to keep copyright including moral rights (in some jurisdictions, an unwaivable right to be credited).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, patents are a huge issue in more enterprise-oriented Open Source. This is why I recommend the Apache-2.0 as a permissive license. It looks lawyerly and scary, but is very well drafted and has terms that discourage patent trolling. The main reason not to use Apache-2.0 is its incompatibility with GPL-2.0 projects. Unfortunately its length seems to discourage some, so that the seemingly simpler MIT, BSD, or ISC licenses are more popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T20:14:55.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12070" CreationDate="2021-08-22T20:39:27.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are not alone in finding the NonCommercial CC variants confusing. It is really difficult to define what NonCommercial is supposed to mean, and it's quite likely that the copyright holder had a different opinion about this than you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the NonCommercial definition in the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've de-emphasized the second part of the definition because it relates to file-sharing which is not relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's see how this definition squares against your scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed by its license to use such editor to do commercial work as an employee of for profit organization (e. g. create commercial software artifacts)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the purpose of that use would be directed towards commercial advantage. Thus, it likely isn't NonCommercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed by its license to use such editor at home to create a work with explicit intent to sell such work (e. g. write short story and try to sell it to newspapers/magazines)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the purpose of that use would be directed towards commercial advantage. Thus, it likely isn't NonCommercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed by its license to use such editor at home to create a work, that might be exchangeable for monetary compensation in the future (e. g. write a short story for the fun of it with no intention of selling it now but keeping the doors open for commercial possibilities in the future)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not sound like the use of the software is made with the intention of commercial advantage, at least at the time of the use. Thus, the described activity might fall within the NonCommercial definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's important to understand for which grants of rights under the Creative Commons license the NonCommercial aspect would even be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-NC is a copyright-based license. It only gives you some rights you wouldn't have under the defaults given by copyright law. It doesn't take rights away that you already have.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC-BY-NC gives you the right to reproduce, modify, and share the licensed material, but only for NonCommercial purposes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright and the CC-BY-NC license do not regulate mere use, such as executing a program. The NonCommercial definition is not relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in all your scenarios you could &lt;em&gt;run&lt;/em&gt; the CC-BY-NC covered program, but you wouldn't be able to distribute it. For example, an employer who makes &lt;em&gt;copies&lt;/em&gt; of the editor software and gives them to its employees might be violating the NonCommercial clause. And you wouldn't be allowed to &lt;em&gt;modify&lt;/em&gt; the software for freelance writing purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction between use vs reproduction is not obvious. Whoever chose the CC-BY-NC license for the editor probably wasn't aware of that distinction. The Creative Commons licenses are intended for general creative works like texts, images, or recordings. They can lead to unintuitive results when applied to software. I'd recommend that you avoid using a software if your use would be clearly against the author's intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About name generating software: the above discussion holds just the same: you can run the software without restriction, but only reproduce, modify, and share the software for NonCommercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-22T20:39:27.893" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-23T13:10:33.367" Score="5" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are building an embedded system where performance and startup time is important and space is sparse so I had the idea to statically link to a LGPL licensed library AND - in case a .so of this lib is present - prefer the dynamically loaded library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The system is only used internally and by external service providers doing contract work for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this compliant with the LGPL terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Specifically this section is interesting 4.d.1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library.&#xA;A suitable mechanism is one that&#xA;(a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and&#xA;(b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section does not make any statement regarding the &lt;em&gt;additional&lt;/em&gt; static linking. Both a) and b) should still be satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24920" LastEditorUserId="24920" LastEditDate="2021-08-24T11:30:38.060" LastActivityDate="2021-08-24T16:37:58.703" Title="LGPL dual linking possible?" Tags="|lgpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12075" CreationDate="2021-08-24T16:37:58.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is legally fine, but not technically feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're proposing that a library is linked into a binary both statically and dynamically, with the statically linked version serving as a fallback in case no dynamically loadable library has been provided. This seems to meet the LGPL-3.0's definition of a “suitable mechanism”. The phrasing of that definition says you must be able to operate properly with a dynamically loaded library provided by the user, not that it must be possible to remove the old version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is easier said than done. You might have to effectively implement your own static and dynamic linker for this to work. With static linking, calls are resolved at compile time, and optimizations such as inlining are possible. This would be incompatible with your goal of linking the library dynamically instead. The dynamic linker would also need to know that this library is optional. An alternative might be to load the library explicitly via dlsym() and to make all calls through a function pointer table that you create yourself, but that might be error-prone. There could also be interesting conflicts if the library in question uses global variables or has initializers/finalizers. All that I know about ELF points toward this approach being a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most realistic approaches are going to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just use dynamic linking. This is going to be the easiest solution by far. Relocation is cheap compared to the effort of combining static with dynamic linking, unless you're operating at massive scale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Just use static linking, and recompile with modified library versions if necessary. It seems that the software in question will only be used within your organization and by its agents, not e.g. by customers or external partners. It is questionable whether the LGPL would even impose any conditions in this scenario.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-24T16:37:58.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12078" CreationDate="2021-08-25T17:53:29.183" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;I own a new software development company, and I developed some software that I want to sell in the future, but for now, I want to give it out free but still want my company accredited in some type of way. Should I make my code proprietary from the start and put my logo on it or should I make it open-source until i decide to sell it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, how do I brand a piece of software if I decide to go open-source? Should I just put my company name in a comment in source code? Or should i still put a logo in the GUI? Or is it not possible to credit the developing company in open-source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24938" LastEditorUserId="17472" LastEditDate="2021-08-26T03:47:20.530" LastActivityDate="2021-08-26T03:47:20.530" Title="How do I pick the best suited license for my software?" Tags="|license|proprietary-code|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12077" CreationDate="2021-08-25T22:33:30.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the copyright owner of the source code. You are fully within your rights to license your software as you see fit. Even if this means &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multi-licensing&lt;/a&gt;. When multi-licensing, you offer end users/developers multiple options to license, in which you can either dictate the conditions of which license needs to be used, or simply allow them to choose which license they wish to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to sell in the future, but for now I want to give it out free&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is no problem, even if you choose to multi license from the start of distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note though, if you choose to release under an open source license to begin with (e.g. MIT) and then change the license later on, code released up to that point (or if it used by others up to that point) does not change, and can remain under the license it was original released with. This means current users may still meet the conditions of a non-proprietary license and thus can still carry on using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course caveats if you were to put conditions in the original license, however this may defeat the purpose of the open-source license you use in the first place (e.g. permissiveness for MIT) in which case it may be better to release under say GPL to prevent others from 'closing' any source they use rather than a permissive MIT/BSD style one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but still want my company accredited in some type of way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even for permissive licenses such as MIT and BSD, any conditions you state must be met, and this includes reproduction of the license text (and they usually include disclaimers and accreditation). This ensures that any accreditation would be reproduced by subsequent parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i make my code proprietary from the start and put my logo on it&#xA;or should i make it open-source until i decide to sell it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this is a question only you can answer. For me personally this usually boils down to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do I want others to be able to use what I have done however they see fit with me simply knowing that they know I wrote it. In which case permissive license, but I also fully expect others to be able to capitalise on my hard work without me seeing any monetary benefit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do I want to see what everybody else can do with my code, not worry about getting credit (Directly that is. I'm sure if you really wanted to prove you wrote it, source control history would no doubt shed some light on the authors/contributors), but also sleep well knowing that (although there will be people who do benefit financially, by building and distributing it) I could potentially keep track who is monetising it. In which case a copyleft license.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note, open-source does not mean you cannot sell it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in fact in the case of GPL, it is actively encouraged&lt;/a&gt;). Code may be open-sourced, but this in no way implies that it can be used. It just removes the physical barrier of code visibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source is a bit of an umbrella term, and it could be argued that the many open-source licenses available are effectively different interpretations of the definition of 'open-source'. To me, it literally means that source code written by myself or my company, is visible by parties outside of my company. How they are allowed to use this open-sourced code is down to how I choose to license it (if at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, how do I brand a piece of software if I decide to go&#xA;open-source? Should I just put my company name in a comment in source&#xA;code? Or should I still put a logo in the GUI? Or is it not possible&#xA;to credit the developing company in open-source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could certainly get credit no matter which license used, but branding is something which would probably require you to add clauses to licenses such as BSD or GPL, which state that your logo must be displayed, or any affiliation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, You are the author, you are the copyright holder, you dictate the conditions of any license you wish to release under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be aware though, if you add clauses like this to a permissive license, it's no longer permissive. Likewise if you do this to a GPL one, while it probably could still be described as copyleft (IANAL), it certainly would no longer be GPL. So legally speaking, you (or they) wouldn't have the same rights as if you retained the GPL in its original form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17472" LastEditorUserId="17472" LastEditDate="2021-08-25T22:54:51.717" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T22:54:51.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12029" CreationDate="2021-08-25T22:44:24.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF is clear on this&lt;/a&gt; -- if your code links to a GPL library your code must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HOWEVER,&lt;/strong&gt; The gettext runtime libraries are under the LGPL not the GPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gettext.git;a=blob;f=gettext-runtime/COPYING;h=9045d4cd3fdc2f192776f6663ff5411ded29f8a1;hb=refs/heads/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See gettext-runtime/COPYING&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you may rely on dynamic linking to the system gettext libraries to be in compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The gettext-runtime package is partially under the LGPL and partially under&#xA;the GPL.&#xA;&#xA;The following parts are under the LGPL, see file intl/COPYING.LIB:&#xA;  - the libintl and libasprintf libraries and their header files,&#xA;  - the libintl.jar Java library,&#xA;  - the GNU.Gettext.dll C# library,&#xA;  - the gettext.sh shells script function library.&#xA;&#xA;The following parts are under the GPL, see file COPYING in the toplevel&#xA;directory:&#xA;  - the _programs_ gettext, ngettext, envsubst,&#xA;  - the documentation.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2936" LastActivityDate="2021-08-25T22:44:24.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12081" CreationDate="2021-08-25T22:52:25.417" Score="8" ViewCount="2748" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache license exists as a permissive open-source license as opposed to MIT/BSD license with the perceived benefit that it also protects authors from patent violations. Although I think I read somewhere the rationale behind it was more to prevent exploitation from patent trolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Apache come into existence due to a specific reason? Was there a particular case that warranted the evolution of MIT and thus creation of the Apache license? and given this, is it still safe to use MIT/BSD these days, or should something more aligned with Apache be used (assuming I want to release with a permissive, do anything style license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Apache protects the author from patent violation, what would happen if there was indeed a patent violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm guessing while the author cannot be 'sued', a cease and desist or equivalent could be issued preventing the inclusion of the violation in future distribution, however I really don't know?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17472" LastEditorUserId="3745" LastEditDate="2021-08-31T11:18:20.633" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T11:18:20.633" Title="Given the existence of the Apache license, and the reasons for it over MIT/BSD license, is it still safe to use MIT/BSD?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|bsd|patents|apache-1.1|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12080" CreationDate="2021-08-26T06:34:54.843" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant clause from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt; is s3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a ... patent license ... If You institute patent litigation ... then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a work by a single author, so licensed, that clause doesn't protect the &lt;strong&gt;author&lt;/strong&gt;: it protects the &lt;strong&gt;users&lt;/strong&gt;.  It tells people who receive the work under that licence that they can use it, free of any fear that the author will turn round and assert an infringement claim against them related to any patents the author may hold.  It is true that the licence granted terminates if the user sues the author for violating the user's patent, but that doesn't protect the author from that lawsuit, it only means that that user cannot continue to enjoy his/her licence to the author's patents whilst so suing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Apache2 isn't is some kind of special patent sauce that you can sprinkle on a piece of software you just wrote to protect you against later claims that you have infringed anyone else's patents.  It doesn't, and cannot, do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, then, I think the answer to your question is yes, the MIT/BSD/etc. licences do still have a place, depending on the desires of the author.  They are simpler than Apache, and if you as author don't have any patents in your name (as, let's face it, most of us don't) you have nothing to licence under Apache s3, so they are functionally equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-08-26T09:56:16.670" LastActivityDate="2021-08-26T09:56:16.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12090" CreationDate="2021-08-26T18:59:59.203" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my freetime I've started to develop this retrocomputing project. The nature of the community is such that as likely as not just going to pass around binaries and modify them as even attempt to comply with any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what I'd like to do is place a license on it such that they can indeed lawfully do exactly that, but any changes made are tied in and I can freely disassemble any modified binaries and apply whatever changes I like from them back to the source code. (Keeping credit if possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a well-known license suitable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T14:17:15.460" Title="License where somebody can distribute modified binaries but if they do I can disassemble them and help myself to the changes" Tags="|copyleft|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12082" CreationDate="2021-08-27T02:14:04.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any old open source license allows doing this as long as you get the binary under that license (i.e., not e.g. a BSD package modified and distributed under a closed license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is quite nonsensical to go screwing around with the binary if source is available (even if it is assembly or a similar low-lewel representation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T02:14:04.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10860" CreationDate="2021-08-27T04:10:17.880" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading through both licenses, I found several minor differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As stated by techboyg5, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License Version 2.0&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;compatible with the GPL&lt;/strong&gt; by default unless provided with the notice described in MPL Exhibit B (see MPL section 1.4), while the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-2.0/EPL-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License - v 2.0&lt;/a&gt; is by default &lt;strong&gt;incompatible with the GPL&lt;/strong&gt; unless provided with the notice described in EPL Exhibit A (see EPL section 3.2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The patent retaliation clause of the two licenses differs in the rights it revokes from the user who initiates litigation against a contributor to the licensed software for patent infringement claims. Under the EPL, &lt;strong&gt;only the rights to other patent claims&lt;/strong&gt; otherwise infringed by use of the software are revoked from the user instituting patent litigation (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-2.0/EPL-2.0.html#general&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL section 7&lt;/a&gt;, paragraph 2), while under the MPL, &lt;strong&gt;all rights, both to intellectual property and patent claims, are revoked&lt;/strong&gt; upon initiating patent litigation (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#termination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL section 5&lt;/a&gt;.2). The MPL excludes counter-claims and cross-claims from patent retaliation, while the EPL includes both. The MPL therefore provides a stronger deterrent against suing for patent infringement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The MPL recommends the notice in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#exhibit-a---source-code-form-license-notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL Exhibit A&lt;/a&gt; to be provided on each file of source code (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#definitions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL section 1&lt;/a&gt;.4), while the EPL requires the full license to be distributed with the program (see the EPL license header). Legally, this does not make a difference, but practically, source code borrowed from a program is &lt;strong&gt;more likely to retain a clear reference to its license under the MPL&lt;/strong&gt; rather than the EPL as the license information is stored within each file. As both licenses are applicable to the source code at file-level scope, the MPL makes reuse of covered code easier. (Note that the MPL also allows use of a single license file if including the license in each file is not possible or undesirable; see MPL Exhibit A.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference I know is MPLv2 code is also implicitly licensed under any future versions of the MPL license (and these future versions of the MPL can only be released under the stewardship of the Mozilla Foundation), whereas EPLv2 has no such requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the MPL v2.0 and EPL v2.0 allow contributors to optionally release code either under the license by which it was originally released or under future published versions of the respective licenses. As far as I can tell, neither license implicitly upgrades to a future version. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#effect-of-new-versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL section 10.2&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/epl-2.0/EPL-2.0.html#general&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL section 7&lt;/a&gt;, paragraph 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24948" LastEditorUserId="20911" LastEditDate="2022-09-20T12:25:13.947" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T12:25:13.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12087" CreationDate="2021-08-27T16:16:44.303" Score="4" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a web app and would like to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CKEditor5&lt;/a&gt; with its non-commercial license (GNU General Public License Version 2 or later). I've read through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but am still not sure I understand my obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My frontend is a React app which is being compiled alongside a CKEditor5 build, so I'm pretty sure I'm obligated to make all of that source code publicly available. But what about my backend code that the frontend interacts with through a REST API, can I keep it closed source? I can't find any clear explanation of what the boundary is of GPL license infectiousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10180/how-much-of-my-code-becomes-gpl-if-i-use-some-gpl-code-and-how-different-does-my&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; seems similar where the answer states &lt;code&gt;all code in your application must have a GPL-compatible open-source license and the project as a whole (including the binaries) must be distributed under the GPL license.&lt;/code&gt;, but what defines the boundaries of the &amp;quot;project&amp;quot;, can I consider two pieces of code communicating over a REST API to be separate projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17025" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T20:18:07.403" Title="Does a GPL package in my frontend require my backend to be GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12086" CreationDate="2021-08-27T20:18:07.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are running the software on your own servers and only allowing other people to interact with it, you are not distributing or conveying the software so the GPL restrictions do not apply. (If you are using software covered by the AGPL the restrictions would apply)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you are distributing it to your users as a compiled Electron desktop app that frontend code that includes CKEditor code would be covered by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the application requires the backend to work it likely that the frontend and backend should be considered part of a single combined work and thus must all be covered by the GPL. see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLWrapper&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLWrapper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2936" LastActivityDate="2021-08-27T20:18:07.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12092" CreationDate="2021-08-28T00:55:16.033" Score="2" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a project that includes a section with an implementation on Docker, but Docker is based on Apache 2.0 license. I saw that Apache 2.0 is incompatible with GPLv2 and I want my project to be based on GPLv2 or BSD licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I want to know if there is a problem if I include Docker in my project and the License is GPLv2 or BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24960" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-08-28T10:45:06.957" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T21:33:00.837" Title="Is Docker (Apache 2.0) compatible with GPLv2 or BSD Licensed projects?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="233" CreationDate="2021-08-29T17:40:37.260" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github's terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, in particular point 4: &amp;quot;You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content...&amp;quot; and 5: &amp;quot;By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).&amp;quot; There are more details in the cited document, you should read it carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Official&amp;quot; sites for Python and such give similar detailed conditions for sharing content. They are &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; careful not to get into a legal quagmire, or lure their users into one. See also the StackExchange and Wikipedia conditions for contrast. A wiki set up by a local user probably doesn't go as far as spelling out conditions, in which case the default applies: You have &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; rights whatsoever to use the contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-08-29T17:40:37.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12082" CreationDate="2021-08-29T20:39:57.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the binary is under an open source license, you would have rights to disassemble it and distribute the results (optionally modified). However, with a permissive license like BSD or MIT/X11, people who use your work have no obligation to license their modifications under that same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a copyleft license like the GPL, people can distribute their changes only under the GPL as well, and they must provide their full corresponding source code (or else you can take legal action against then, or at least credibly threaten to do so). However, this is quite a bit more than you want!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A middle ground might be the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which requires that modified binaries must be distributed under the same license, but not necessarily be accompanied by corresponding source. That way you can be sure that you have full rights over the binary you receive, and others don't have to worry about distributing their source code if they don't want. CC BY-SA also means downstream redistributors can't monopolize their copy -- all recipients have the same redistribution and modification rights as the person they got it from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that someone might carelessly or maliciously say, &amp;quot;I didn't say you could use my modifications! Stop or I'll sue you.&amp;quot; In that case, you can answer back, &amp;quot;I said you could redistribute the contents of my original binary only if you shared modified forms freely. If you aren't interested in doing so, I can sue you right back.&amp;quot; It sounds like community norms will prevent matters from getting to such a point in the first place, but this is the legal safety net CC BY-SA provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-08-30T14:17:15.460" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T14:17:15.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12091" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-30T16:27:44.360" Score="3" ViewCount="1697" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use CMS distributed under GPL-v3 licenses. I am building a web application with closed code and my app invokes via REST API backend under GPL-v3. Question: is it legal to use GPL-v3 along with a client app with closed code and charge money for the app. I am not changing the code of CMS just using it as is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24975" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-06-26T05:17:19.253" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T05:17:19.253" Title="GPL-v3 using along with closed source via REST API" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12088" CreationDate="2021-08-30T21:33:00.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For open source licenses, license compatibility only matters when we are integrating multiple components into a single program. For example, when linking a library with a program, or copying a code snippet into our code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Docker is typically used as a separate tool without integrating code from Docker into your software. As long as it's a separate program, the license doesn't really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7015&quot;&gt;interesting considerations&lt;/a&gt; for the licensing of the software within a Docker image though – each image is essentially half of a Linux distro, with lots of separate programs under lots of different licenses, possibly distributed across multiple image layers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to combine code in a manner that would create a derivative work in the sense of copyright law, then we need to think about license compatibility. While Apache-2.0 generally has pretty good compatibility, it is incompatible with GPL-2.0. The two licenses have patent-related clauses that contradict each other, so it's not possible to combine them. Sometimes, the GPL code is actually licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, in which case choosing the GPL-3.0 license resolves the incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start of this answer, I restricted the response to “open source licenses”. This is important because there are popular non-open-source licenses that can lead to licensing issues even for separate programs. Notably, the SSPL (used by MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and others) can affect your entire software stack in some scenarios. If those scenarios apply, it's typically impossible to satisfy all licenses. The CC-BY-SA-NC license is another popular non-open-source license that is highly incompatible, but at least it doesn't have an absurdly broad scope like the SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-08-30T21:33:00.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-08-31T17:32:19.080" Score="5" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to release a book under a simple license.  The GPL license is quite intimidating for non-lawyers and way too long.  TL;DNR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spirit, I want something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author and title must not change, and the license must apply to all derivatives.  Everyone is free to tinker as they wish, provided that it is clear who made changes and that this person is fully identified and reachable by email.  [I do not want someone to insert false claims and pass them off as if I made them.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Anything else important that I forgot?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a widely available open-source license that I can refer to and then use the above paragraph as basic explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24983" LastEditorUserId="24959" LastEditDate="2021-09-02T18:34:21.210" LastActivityDate="2021-09-02T18:34:21.210" Title="Simple 1-Paragraph Book License?" Tags="|license-recommendation|books|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12093" CreationDate="2021-08-31T17:58:13.610" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written, your license would not be an open source license. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The requirement to keep the title unchanged is a restriction on translating the book into a different language, failing the &amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&amp;quot; clause of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; (OSD).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The requirement to be &amp;quot;fully identified&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;reachable by e-mail&amp;quot; stops people who do not wish to identify themselves, or who cannot or do not wish to use e-mail, making changes. This fails the &amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&amp;quot; clause of the OSD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;; it even comes with a handy summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T17:58:13.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12093" CreationDate="2021-08-31T18:43:02.853" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;With great respect to my colleague, although what you require wouldn't meet the open-source &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; definition, it is understood that things are somewhat different in fields of creative endeavour.  In particular, it's understood that creative works shouldn't purport to put one creator's words in another creator's mouth.  Such a restriction would make a work of code unfree, but it's not so widely accepted that it's an inappropriate constraint for creative works such as books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, you might wish to consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation Licence&lt;/a&gt;.  As Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All previous authors of the work must be attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All changes to the work must be logged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All derivative works must be licensed under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of the license, unmodified invariant sections as defined by the author if any, and any other added warranty disclaimers ... and copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using this licence and declaring the title page to be an invariant section, I think most of what you want is achievable.  Those releasing modified editions will have to create new title pages (s4a), but your old title page will have to be reproduced verbatim, indefinitely, inside the work (s4l).  The principal lacuna is the requirement to be reachable by email; a licence that mandates a particular technical solution is unlikely to garner support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accept that the GNU licences are big and complex, but I encourage you to think of them as well-understood black boxes; people generally know their rights and obligations with respect to GNU-licensed content, so the textual complexity doesn't usually cause a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-08-31T18:43:02.853" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12091" CreationDate="2021-09-01T07:56:44.773" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer. Seek professional legal advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL-3 code must remain open. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; states that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license? (#IfLibraryIsGPL)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because the program actually links to the library. As such, the terms of the GPL apply to the entire combination. The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It therefore depends on whether you are distributing the GPL software with your product or creating an entirely distinct product. As the intention of any API is to allow interaction from distinct systems, I think that if your product interacts with a REST API, as opposed to directly calling library functions, it could be seen as a distinct product. As I say, you can either,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;seek professional legal advice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;avoid the issue entirely by releasing your source under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-compatible licence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR; It depends. Ask an actual, IRL, human lawyer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note (a); most people put too much weight in their source code. Code is not where the value lies, the value is in the data. Even the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/12/coding-in-the-open/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UK GDS&lt;/a&gt; has decided that open is best. Unless you are working on some sort of Secret Squirrel stuff, open source your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note (b); if you are using an open source project in your business and making money from it, contributing to that project either financially or by making your code open source too&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;feels&amp;quot; like the right thing to do&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ensures the work you rely on continues to be maintained&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why you see so many large companies sponsoring those projects. AmEx, for example, sponsors Django.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21531" LastEditorUserId="21531" LastEditDate="2022-06-22T13:21:43.660" LastActivityDate="2022-06-22T13:21:43.660" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12099" CreationDate="2021-09-01T19:35:34.557" Score="-1" ViewCount="1460" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is key differences between Apache and LGPL licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they both permissive and have same level compatibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24991" LastEditorUserId="24991" LastEditDate="2021-09-13T14:14:05.933" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T14:15:14.150" Title="Apache and LGPL differences" Tags="|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-09-13T05:31:45.310" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-01T20:30:13.233" Score="-1" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a tool that will be distributed as a Rust crate and NPM package over the network, and a program will be running on a public blockchain. I'll be using other Apache 2.0 licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to use AGPLv3 to enforce open source derivatives, but would also like to require promotional attribution for the end user (e.g. clearly visible &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;by CompanyName&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; on user interface where the tool is used, not just copyright notices in the source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a license that matches my needs, something like AGPLv3 with an explicit user interface (rather than just a source code) attribution requirements?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of making a compromise and using Apache 2.0 with the NOTICE, but I'm not sure if I can require such an attribution via the NOTICE mechanism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read many answers across the stackexchange network (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8161/license-that-requires-attribution-to-end-users&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), but couldn't come to a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24512" LastEditorUserId="24512" LastEditDate="2021-09-01T22:14:19.897" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T15:11:07.150" Title="License to require promotional attribution to the end user" Tags="|licensing|gpl|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12097" CreationDate="2021-09-02T19:15:19.890" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a comparision between licenses: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL is not permissive, while Apache 2.0 is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL had certain things copylefted, while Apache permissive for all categories except Trade Mark grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL copy-left categories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Modification&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sub-licensing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL linking - going with restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24991" LastEditorUserId="24991" LastEditDate="2021-09-13T14:15:14.150" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T14:15:14.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-02T23:00:03.447" Score="-2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to make a web application that has a membership fee and has a proprietary algorithm.&#xA;Customers would not have access to the code, so I wouldn't be distributing it or selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the basic functionality I need is found in existing Windows Applications under the GNU GPL2 license.&#xA;Can I look at that source code for ideas for how I would code my web application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25000" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-09-03T11:36:22.037" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T15:29:23.430" Title="Can I make a proprietary web application using ideas from the source code from an desktop application that is under the GNU GPL2 license?" Tags="|gpl-2|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12100" CreationDate="2021-09-03T11:43:39.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the basic functionality I need is found in existing Windows Applications under the GNU GPL2 license. Can I look at that source code for ideas for how I would code my web application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although ideas are not protected by copyright (and therefor not subject to a copyright license), it is very hard to draw the line between reading someone else's code, extracting ideas from it and implementing those ideas, and copying the other person's code and modifying the copy to fit your project. And what makes it even harder to draw the line is that reproducing the code from memory is also considered copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that copying &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; protected by copyright law and you need a copyright license to do it. The GPLv2 is a copyright license that allows you to make copies, but it also attaches some strings to that right and in particular that the entire project where the copy ends up needs to be open-source (and effectively under the GPL license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the bottom line is that you should not read GPL-licensed code to get inspiration for how to implement something, unless your project is already under the same GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T11:43:39.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-03T13:59:26.960" Score="0" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the commons practices for licensing a Javadoc JAR file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the Javadoc is automatically generated, is it legally possible to license it under a project-specific license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, how to license the project-specific contents that are included in the Javadoc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For information, I'm using Gradle as a build tool, it generates the Javadoc as a build task and I would put the license file in the META-INF folder of the Javadoc JAR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25004" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T23:17:07.900" Title="Licensing a Javadoc JAR file" Tags="|licensing|java|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12100" CreationDate="2021-09-03T15:29:23.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I look at that source code for ideas for how I would code my web application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, of course you can!&lt;/strong&gt; Ideas are not restricted by copyright, so everything else in your question is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a few issues that you should consider, discussed below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12101/20983&quot;&gt;Bart van Ingen Schenau&lt;/a&gt; discussed, it is easy to cross the line into copying actual code. In fact, this process should be carried out by two independent teams: one reviews the existing code and records ideas (or specifications) in a general form, and another team writes new code based on this record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Windows Applications&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The platform is irrelevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the basic functionality I need&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How basic is it? If other people reviewed the GPL-licenced applications, might they conclude that your paid version does not add value?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Customers would not have access to the code, so I wouldn't be distributing it or selling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was really true, then the GPL would protect you, even if you were actually copying code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it true? Web applications normally have both server-side and client-side code. You need to make sure the client-side code – which you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; distributing – is not “tainted” by the issues discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of completeness, note that all of this analysis would apply to most other free licences as well, including GPL3, but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; AGPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T15:29:23.430" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6234" CreationDate="2021-09-03T19:07:53.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my considerable surprise, I recently discovered that somebody has created a so-called &amp;quot;BSD Protection License&amp;quot; which appears to be designed to specifically solve this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the license may be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/BSD_Protection_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-Protection.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is quite lengthy, so I won't quote it in full, but I will summarize it as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows verbatim redistribution of the software &amp;quot;as you receive it&amp;quot; in much the same way as the GPL, the MIT license, and most other open source licenses. This clause does not specifically mention the disposition of any source code, so presumably if you receive binaries without source, you can redistribute them as such. You're required to include a copy of the license and a copyright notice. This is all fairly typical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It allows redistribution of modified software, under a license which &amp;quot;expressly prohibit[s] the distribution of further derivative works.&amp;quot; This is highly unusual for an open source license, but by itself it does not make the license non-free, as long as the license provides an alternative option.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It also allows redistribution of modified software under the same license (i.e. copyleft). The modifications must be clearly indicated, which the GPL also requires, and copyleft extends to &amp;quot;any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof&amp;quot; - no exception for &amp;quot;mere aggregation.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opinions vary on whether this is a free license. The Fedora wiki page, linked above, tersely describes it as &amp;quot;Free, but GPL-incompatible,&amp;quot; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/10/msg00379.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; thinks it's non-free, because the scope of its copyleft is even broader than that of the GPL. They also didn't like the wording of the &amp;quot;implied acceptance&amp;quot; section and suggested reusing the GPL's wording instead. Both of those problems are arguably fixable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how effective it would be... that's unclear to me. If you keep the arguably non-free expansive copyleft, then it's certainly never going to be incorporated into a GPL project in any way, but this copyleft will extend to and prohibit all sorts of perfectly reasonable conduct, which could be problematic. For example, if somebody packages together your software with a bunch of other, unrelated software (e.g. in a Docker container or Linux distro), the license would arguably infect the entire package, which is probably not what you want and might create gratuitous license conflicts. If the copyleft were weakened, then it might strike a more appropriate balance here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, however, I'm not really impressed by this license. The sole beneficiaries of the &amp;quot;take proprietary&amp;quot; option are, presumably, developers who want to get into the business of selling the software. But since the &amp;quot;take proprietary&amp;quot; option is extended to the world at large, those developers would just end up competing with each other. If they would have used the GPL with a CLA, they could've gone proprietary without any competition (other than the inevitable non-relicensed fork, of course). If you want to take parts of the software proprietary and release other parts under copyleft, you can do that with a CLA too. And, of course, it's much harder to get people to contribute to your open source project when your license is screaming at the top of its lungs that you intend to take their contributions and go proprietary. So the license does not appear to provide substantive advantages over the CLA model, from the self-interested (greedy) perspective of the person choosing a license for their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2021-09-03T19:07:53.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12098" CreationDate="2021-09-04T15:11:07.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many open source licenses require reasonable attribution, but no Open Source / Free Software license will require prominent/promotional attribution. Let's talk about why that makes sense, and what the common Open Source options are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Requiring prominent attribution is typically a bad idea.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software has a life cycle. It is written, used, reused, discarded, potentially over the time frame of a century. Attribution requirements are uninteresting in case of verbatim copies of the software, but very tricky when we look at modified versions of the software. Or more precisely: when we look at &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt;. It might seem ethical to require prominent attribution when an application is modified in minor ways. But the same license conditions would apply if we only take a minor routine from the covered software and include it in a completely different program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's say I've written an educational program that allows kids to experiment with geometry. I want all copies and modified version of that program to feature prominent attribution to me. Now someone else is creating a computer game, which needs some geometry manipulation in order to render the scene. The game developer would like to reuse some of my math functions. But would it be fair to require that the game must feature prominent attribution to me, just because the game happens to be derived from a few dozen lines of code I wrote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that requiring prominent attribution is not fair, and does not scale well. If we had to prominently attribute every Linux contributor or every LibreOffice contributor or every Firefox contributor, everyday software would become completely unusable. We must also consider that copyright typically lasts for life + 70 years, so often over a century. License conditions must be good for all that time. A license condition that might make sense in the 2020s will probably already be outdated in the 2030s, and hopelessly archaic around 2100. In particular, if an attribution is intended as an advertisement, there will probably be nothing to advertise for after a few decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the question of how a license would define prominent attribution. If it is not specific, interpretations will differ. If it does prescribe specific ways for attribution, it will likely become outdated soon and limit use of the software in unfortunate ways. E.g. if a license from the 80s had required attribution in a printed manual, it wouldn't be possible to distribute such software over the internet. If a license today would require attribution on every screen, it already couldn't be used on non-visual software such as voice assistants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where license terms either require very onerous attribution or prescribe specific technologies for attribution, they violate the Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition. Free/Open Source software is about more than access to the source code, but also about the freedom to share and modify software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the Software Freedom perspective, onerous attribution requirements would violate at least Freedom 3: the freedom to distribute modified versions to others. At the very least, prominent attributions might be perceived as ads, but requiring the attribution to be preserved in a prominent place would deprive users of the freedom to modify the software for any purpose they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the Open Source perspective, there are additional concerns such as OSD #10: the license must be technology-neutral. OSD #3 also says that people who modify the software should be able to distribute their modifications under the same license terms, which means that they should also be afforded prominent attribution, which leads to the scalability problems outlined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Popular Open Source licenses support reasonable attribution.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is completely reasonable to expect that end users of the software get to know what kind of open-source components are included in the software, and who contributed to them. To this end, popular open source licenses support some level of attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-2.0 license has a NOTICE file mechanism. Every contributor can add attribution notes to the NOTICE file, as long as they don't appear to modify the Apache license. Any modified version of the software must provide the (relevant sections of the) NOTICE file to end users: “within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear”. For example, apps typically have a screen in their settings where such contents are shown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 license family (including AGPL-3.0, LGPL-3.0) has an “additional terms” mechanism that allows you to add certain kinds of license terms. Per section 7(b) and (c), it is OK to add terms that require “preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it” or terms that prohibit “misrepresentation of the origin of that material”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Apache-2.0 NOTICE style files could constitute reasonable legal notices. The term “Appropriate Legal Notices” is defined in the license to be displayed through a “convenient and prominently visible feature” that is part of an “interactive user interface”. But such notices might be far less prominent than expected, e.g. an entry in a menu would be sufficient. As an example, the Firefox browser includes material under GPL-3.0. The desktop version has an entry under Help &amp;gt; About Firefox that shows a screen that links to the &lt;code&gt;about:license&lt;/code&gt; page that displays all required notices. I think this meets the GPL's definition of providing a prominently visible feature for showing appropriate legal notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What can you reasonably do?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to stick with a common open source license, then making use of the (A)GPL-3.0 Additional Terms mechanism sounds sensible. But take into account that the GPL tries to maximize user freedom, and does not permit restricting downstream users with onerous attribution requirements. The GPL tightly restricts the scope of additional terms, and terms that go too far are ineffective. Drafting such Additional Terms is best done by lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also completely acceptable if you decide that using a Free Software / Open Source license is not a good fit for your needs. FOSS is very much about maximizing other people's freedoms, and licenses that are about other people's freedoms can be at odds with popular business models. In that case, you would likely have to get a lawyer to draft custom licensing terms that fit your needs perfectly. There are some “source available” licenses though. While they are great for transparency and for developing collaboratively in the open, they fail to provide the software freedom that is at the core of Open Source. Most source-available licenses I know are not focused on attribution, but on restricting for-profit uses (e.g. Business Source License, SSPL, Commons Clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-open source license could also be preferable from a reputation management standpoint. If you allow your software to be modified but still require promotional attribution, there could be modifications that you do not want to be associated with (e.g. political views, hate speech, illegal or obscene material). Open source licenses are generally considered to be irrevocable (unless breached). A custom (but non-FOSS) license could be written to restrict permissible uses, thus avoiding undesirable associations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-09-04T15:11:07.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12108" CreationDate="2021-09-04T23:58:05.477" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some operating systems include applications that the user can't uninstall or even disable; things like gaming applications, map applications, translation applications, photo arrangement applications (not gallery per se), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a movement calling for the eradication of this forcing practice in which manufacturers actively seek to force customers to use certain applications? Is the &lt;em&gt;Free software movement&lt;/em&gt; the only such movement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25016" LastActivityDate="2021-09-05T10:09:55.357" Title="Operating system manufacturers forcing users to use certain applications" Tags="|enforcement|operating-system|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12107" CreationDate="2021-09-05T10:09:55.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's certainly not the case that the only people that care about unbundling applications from the operating system are the free software folks - for example, see the various actions against Microsoft who certainly made it hard to use Windows without Internet Explorer for a number of years (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US case&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EU case&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I don't believe there is a particular movement focused on this narrow aspect of software freedom - the free software movement don't just want the ability to stop using App A and replace it with App B, but instead the ability to modify App A to the users' needs. I'd argue that the &amp;quot;freedom to run your own apps&amp;quot; probably isn't going to do what you want it to - if the original app makes use of proprietary bits of the lower levels of the operating system (as is definitely the case on iOS and pretty close to the case on Android with Google Play Services), you're not going to be able to get the required functionality. This is why it's important for software to be free &amp;quot;all the way down the stack&amp;quot;, not just at the application layer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-05T10:09:55.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12113" CreationDate="2021-09-07T10:59:05.467" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I co-develop a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSS DNS client&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/serverless-dns/serverless-dns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DNS stub-resolver&lt;/a&gt; which builds blocklists based off of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nextdns/metadata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;nextdns/metadata&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; repository. Recently, I happened to notice that there's at least one AGPLv3 blocklist (&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.com/ZeroDot1/CoinBlockerLists/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ZeroDot1's &lt;code&gt;CoinBlocker&lt;/code&gt; list&lt;/a&gt; specifically) that the &lt;code&gt;nextdns/metadata&lt;/code&gt; repository links to (and which the NextDNS resolver) and our FOSS stub resolver uses it, but under a different name viz. &lt;code&gt;Cryptojacking Protection&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do SaaS DNS resolvers (like NextDNS and us, RethinkDNS) that use these blocklists (host files) violate AGPLv3 (when the SaaS code itself is not distributed under AGPLv3)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I combine/merge an AGPLv3 host file (blocklist) with other host files and distribute the combined/merged host file (blocklist), do I have to make the source code that was used to combine/merge the host files available under AGPLv3, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I retroactively remove traces of any AGPLv3 licensed blocklists from my SaaS, do I stop violating AGPLv3? That is, can I &lt;em&gt;undo&lt;/em&gt; violation and keep my code under existing licenses (MPLv2 and Apache v2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24995" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-09-08T12:07:05.917" LastActivityDate="2021-09-08T12:07:05.917" Title="AGPLv3, (DNS) Host files, and DNS SaaS" Tags="|agpl-3.0|copyleft|agpl|floss|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12112" CreationDate="2021-09-07T12:19:52.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does your application actually depend on that particular repository to function, or could it work with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; repository that contains appropriately formatted and named blocklists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I expect it would be the latter and in that case, there is no problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do SaaS DNS resolvers (like NextDNS and us, RethinkDNS) that use these blocklists (host files) violate AGPLv3 (when the SaaS code itself is not distributed under AGPLv3)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The blocklists are just data for the SaaS DNS resolvers and the respective licenses do not affect each other. This is the same as that the license of a word editor does not affect how you can license the document you wrote with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I combine/merge an AGPLv3 host file (blocklist) with other host files and distribute the combined/merged host file (blocklist), do I have to make the source code that was used to combine/merge the host files available under AGPLv3, too?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. The answer is the same as for the first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, it is even questionable if the hosts file from the CoinBlocker list is actually protected by copyright at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright protect the creative expressions of a human and if the hosts file is just a list of data without any creative content, then it is not subject to copyright protection at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the AGPL license indication on the repository does not have any meaning for that particular file and can be ignored (for that file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T12:19:52.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-07T13:46:56.167" Score="-2" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of software license for a program that I want to have open source (to gain the trust of the user) but that I do not want to be copied, redistributed, or forged, or used under another name, etc ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading about the MIT and GNU GLP licenses but they all allow forging and parallel use even if they require mention of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16432" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-09-08T12:06:47.257" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T20:52:49.530" Title="Is there some kind of software license for an open source but copyrighted program?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12114" CreationDate="2021-09-07T13:55:13.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright applies to the work, even if it's released under an open-source license. Copyright laws are what enable the author of the work to choose to be able to release it under an open-source license. Even if your software is released under an open-source license, someone still holds the copyright to it (or, perhaps, different people to different pieces if you've accepted outside contributions without an agreement in place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You won't find an open-source license that prevents copying or redistribution. These are some of the fundamental attributes for an open-source license, as defined by the OSI in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; as well as the FSF in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of Free Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll have to find a different license type, other than a free software license or open-source license, if you want to provide the source code to customers or users while limiting what they can do with that source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T13:55:13.037" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12114" CreationDate="2021-09-07T14:37:19.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; applies - unless the very few exceptions the law defines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses are uni-lateral &amp;quot;contracts&amp;quot;, thus means by authors / creators / programmers / ... to give other people permissions to use or distribute a programme (or other work), under certain conditions which are not automatically granted by the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The law defines a few exceptions to the protection of intellectual property, and the details vary a lot between jurisdictions. By the Berne convention, copyright protection ceases after a certain period has passed &lt;em&gt;after the death&lt;/em&gt; of the creator. And there usually are certain limits imposed which allow citations or deny copyright protection for trivial works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, copyright law, of course, applies to all open source licenses - a license cannot superseed the law; it is a statement by the authors to grant users or recipients additional rights. An open-source license is - roughly-speaking - the software equivalent of a sign on your acre of land which reads &amp;quot;free camping, if you don't litter and don't bother others&amp;quot;. Open-source means, that the freedoms granted to users &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;include usually&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably it is NOT the freedom to distribute anything under your name which you did not create; that also includes that changes to content you published under an open-source license (as allowed by freedom 4) must be marked or such versions must at least be clearly marked as modified (and possibly renamed) - yet attribution to your work must be granted. As such &amp;quot;forging&amp;quot; or mis-representation is not allowed with any open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also notably, an open-source license intention is NOT to &amp;quot;create trust&amp;quot; with whatever user. It's about enabling people to make their own decision, to apply their own judgement and to not require them to trust anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you want to require that your work is NOT distributed at all or used whereever without your consent, nor want to allow people to make modification to the sources of your programme, we are not talking of open-source anymore at all - far from it. That's what every proprietary license does. Consult a copyright layer to draft a proprietary license or EULA for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the &amp;quot;trust issue&amp;quot;: you can, of course, make your source code available and impose whatever restrictions you want on its use by your non-open-source license. But unless you allow people to actually build the software from scratch, the &amp;quot;trust issue&amp;quot; is not really resolved either as there is no means for them to verify that you actually provide the source code which corresponds to the binaries you distribute. Debian solves this issue with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reproducable builds&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-09-07T14:44:10.977" LastActivityDate="2021-09-07T14:44:10.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-08T14:44:45.740" Score="-3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain how to contribute code to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ntp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NTP project&lt;/a&gt;? They do have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ntp-project/ntp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github repository&lt;/a&gt;, but it does not seem very up-to-date, with only one branch. They also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://bk.ntp.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bitkeeper repository&lt;/a&gt;, with two branches &lt;code&gt;ntp-dev&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ntp-stable&lt;/code&gt;. It's a little more up-to-date (15 months old). Also why is the stable &lt;strong&gt;newer&lt;/strong&gt; than the development branch. Seems kind of odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25044" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T16:09:08.620" Title="How can I contribute source code to the NTP project?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12117" CreationDate="2021-09-08T18:39:13.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The internal dynamics of a project are their own business. I've seen some that only publish stable versions on github (or such), others that are just distributed as tarballs (and you can send patches to the maintainer). Some, like TeX (used to) be handled just by the lead developer, who collected bug reports and proposed patches, and took a look at what has accumulated some few years apart. A development branch that is abandoned while the stable/main branch marches on is not unheard of. There is no (can't be, really) any general rule applicable to all projects, from my own small for-fun, just local ones to huge international collaborations like the Linux kernel, with company-internal developments with their own dynamics in between. Some packages just are &amp;quot;done&amp;quot;, the relevant standards haven't changed in quite some time, and all bugs (ha!) have already been tracked down and fixed by now, for others there just is no interest in working on them anymore. Sometimes a new group clones an abandoned (or almost) project and marches on, often (but not always) under a new name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2021-09-10T16:09:08.620" LastActivityDate="2021-09-10T16:09:08.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12121" CreationDate="2021-09-12T14:42:15.890" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are making use of the following tools in our software, and not modified any of these tools. Tools 1-3 are used directly in my software. Tool 4 is used for reference, but included as part of our software distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Z3:MIT License &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ANTLR:BSD 3-clause license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/antlr/antlr4/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wolfgang:BSD 3-Clause &amp;quot;New&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Revised&amp;quot; License &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/iig-uni-freiburg/WOLFGANG/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/iig-uni-freiburg/WOLFGANG/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ITS-Tools : GNU GPLv3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/yanntm/ITS-Tools-MCC/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/yanntm/ITS-Tools-MCC/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; - we use this only to see if it gives the same results as our tool.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to make my software binary available publicly (not the source code yet, as it still needs fine tuning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which software licenses would be suitable in this case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I make this closed source, as I am not modifying any of the above tools?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I support open-source, but not ready to publish the source of this software yet as it still is a work in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is for an artifact submission as part of a research paper, I am required to submit everything described in my research, hence I need to include Tool 4 in my artifact as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25065" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2022-04-28T11:39:54.510" LastActivityDate="2022-04-28T11:39:54.510" Title="What is the appropriate license that I should pick for my software?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2021-09-13T22:33:48.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have two different classes of tools here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tools 1-3 (Z3, ANTLR and WOLFGANG): you are using these directly in your program, so the license of your program must be compatible with the licenses of all three of these.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tool 4 (ITS-Tools): as this is something which is clearly a distinct entity from your program, this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aggregation&lt;/a&gt; and has no bearing on what license you use for your program. You must of course comply with ITS-Tools' license if you distribute it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for your program, it must be compatible with both the MIT and 3-clause BSD licenses. Both these are &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; licenses which let you license your program under any license, so long as you obey the conditions of the license, which are basically to include a copy of the MIT and BSD licenses with appropriate copyright lines with your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which software licenses would be suitable in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As above, basically anything you choose, including closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I make this closed source, as I am not modifying any of the above tools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and no. You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make your program closed source, because the MIT and BSD licenses allow you to do so. However, this is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because you are not modifying the tools - for example, if you were actually directly using ITS-Tools in your program, even unmodified, you would have to make your program open source (this is the &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; aspect of the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-13T22:33:48.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2021-09-14T01:37:50.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you mean by &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; of the programs mentioned? I'm not familiar with all of them, but at least ANTLR is a program that is used to generate programs given a specification (a LL parser generator and a bunch of helpers). If the others mentioned are similar tools, you need to check the licenses of the &lt;em&gt;generated&lt;/em&gt; files. Only if you use (pieces of) the programs as part of your program (and not as separate entities, just being called) do you have to check the program's licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. GCC compilers are under GPL, but the generated object code is yours. Executables generated by GCC are usually yours too, due to special dispensations in the compiler's library code included in executables. Ditto for bison, GNU's LALR (and other) parser generator, the generated parser includes a sizeable part of bison's source, and can be used under a special dispensation. I.e., if I write e.g. a Scheme to C compiler and a script frontend that calls my compiler and compiles the result with gcc, that is mere normal use of gcc and thus my script (and Scheme compiler) are free of gcc-related restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-09-14T01:37:50.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12038" CreationDate="2021-09-15T06:41:20.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the question: Is the mere change of the version of the dependency a modification of DDep_v1 that makes it a 'Derivative Work' with all its implications (notice of modification, etc)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if you are creating a derivative work from a purely legal standpoint, but from a practical perspective, I would treat your modification as if it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the viewpoint of good software engineering practices, if you make a change to any file of DDep that affects the build output (or what gets bundled), then you should give that modified DDep a new version number. And once you give your new build of DDep a separate version number, then for all practical purposes it should also be considered to be a Derivative Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for giving the changed build a new version number is to make sure you can prove to the relevant stakeholders that the correct version of each (transitive) dependency will be picked when you re-build your product. But once you have created DDep_v1-mycompany, it is way easier to treat it as a Derivative Work than to argue that it is legally the same as DDep_v1 even though a change has been made that warrants a new version number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-09-15T06:41:20.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-17T12:44:33.043" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking to release an open-source SDK, all of which uses novel code OR dependencies that are MIT/Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the business model, I would like to sell commercial-use licenses for use with the SDK, allowing people to use the library in their for-profit applications. Simultaneously, I would like there to be a free non-commercial use copyleft license (i.e., GPL) that allows people to build free, open-source software using the SDK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a proper license that will work for this arrangement? Looking specifically for a commercial SDK license, since GPL is easy to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25098" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T12:44:33.043" Title="Dual license GPL/non-commercial + commercial SDK license" Tags="|gpl|commercial|copyleft|dual-license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12132" CreationDate="2021-09-17T15:25:28.630" Score="2" ViewCount="817" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a precise answer to the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;how do I fulfill the Boost license requirements when using functions contained in the boost header files and compiled libraries&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Boost license can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I am missing something obvious, all the answers to similar questions that I see (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12040682/licensing-requirements-boost-qt-creator&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) are somewhat vague. For example, the above question has an answer that reads, in part,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which means that if you did not made any changes in original Boost&#xA;Library you only need to have Boost License file in your source code.&#xA;This is your only restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;strong&gt;precisely&lt;/strong&gt; does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the Boost license says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, ...,&#xA;must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part,&#xA;and all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or&#xA;derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object&#xA;code generated by a source language processor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which copyright notices? All the Boost source files have different copyright, as they are by different authors. The answer above doesn't address this clause of the Boost license, unless the Boost license text counts as some generic attributation of copyright? Relatedly, does mere inclusion of the headers and use of their functions constitute a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the information is conflicting and I am not sure which out of the following options, if for example, I have a project in a Github repository, allows me to meet the Boost license requirements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of the Boost license in the repository, maybe with a link to it in the README stating that the use of Boost is under that license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of the Boost license in each and every one of my actual source code files (*.cpp, *.hpp) wherever a Boost function is used, or where the headers are included?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The precise copyright of each header/library used by author/library is listed somewhere in the repository&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The precise copyright of each header/library used by author/library is listed in each and every one of my actual source code files wherever a Boost function is used, or where the headers are included.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be best, would be an &lt;em&gt;example&lt;/em&gt; of some repository/code which uses the Boost libraries/header files in like this and is known to be compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25100" OwnerDisplayName="user3353819" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T18:37:13.507" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T07:01:16.517" Title="Meeting the Boost license requirements" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12129" CreationDate="2021-09-17T15:47:28.597" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license is a very simple, BSD-style license. It's conditions (apart from the obvious &amp;quot;you can't delete/change copyright notices that aren't yours&amp;quot; as the law states) are very clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add a file &lt;code&gt;Boost License&lt;/code&gt; and a file detailing where (what version of Boost, etc) all affected files come from. Add your own copyright notices to any modified files, note them in the mentioned list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T15:47:28.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12129" CreationDate="2021-09-17T16:13:28.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyright applies to &lt;em&gt;copying.&lt;/em&gt; If you merely link to functions defined in the compiled library, you are not copying anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some debate around whether linking does not, in general, constitute some form of copying; but in this specific instance, the license section you quoted specifically exempts compiled object code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, from your list of possible interpretations, interpretation 1. is the correct one in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to redistribute (possibly modified) copies of the library's source files, the more detailed copyright restrictions would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8208" LastEditorUserId="8208" LastEditDate="2021-09-17T16:22:24.250" LastActivityDate="2021-09-17T16:22:24.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12129" CreationDate="2021-09-19T07:01:16.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how do I fulfill the Boost license requirements when using functions contained in the boost header files and compiled libraries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends on if you copied parts of the Boost libraries into your repository or if your project just assumes they have been downloaded to the build machine beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Boost license is a very permissive open-source license and it places no requirements on you if you just use a library without making a copy of its source code. You are not even required to mention the library or its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; make a copy, then the license requires that you also have the Boost license text present in your repository and that you keep the copyright notices that relate to the parts you copied intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the phrase &amp;quot;the Software&amp;quot; in the Boost license refers to the software and documentation that was licensed with the Boost license. It does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; refer to any larger project that might use the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-09-19T07:01:16.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12136" CreationDate="2021-09-19T17:37:27.980" Score="1" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to understand opensource licenses as a hardware dev.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I'm not fully understanding GPLv3 about Tivoization part.&#xA;So If I use GPLv3 software parts, Do I obligated to design PCB that allows future re-flashing for end users?&#xA;(I sometimes like to design PCB with breakable parts that'll used only once to flash code like these &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nFg2Z.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nFg2Z.jpg&lt;/a&gt; -&amp;gt; it's for saving precious space in application, also not my photo)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25114" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T07:29:11.423" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T07:46:37.783" Title="As a hardware developer (like arduino board etc.) does one have to license PCB's files under GPL if the included software uses GPL licensed parts?" Tags="|gpl-3|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12135" CreationDate="2021-09-20T04:30:43.917" Score="8" ViewCount="726" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source licenses&lt;/a&gt; have a limitation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/#trademark-use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark use&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that they &amp;quot;do not grant trademark rights, even though licenses without such a statement probably do not grant any implicit trademark rights.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAgrh.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAgrh.png&quot; alt=&quot;Trademark use limitation&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to whom does this limitation apply to? Does it prevent the trademark, such as the name and logo of the project from being used or modified; or does it stop contributors from registering their own trademarks regarding the name and logo of the project (or in other words, to patent the project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a clearer explanation for the trademark use limitation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25117" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T06:50:44.757" Title="What does trademark use limitation mean in open-source licenses?" Tags="|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12134" CreationDate="2021-09-20T06:50:44.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it prevent the trademark, such as the name and logo of the project from being used or modified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;limitation&lt;/em&gt; does not prevent this - but this is because it is the default in law for any names, logos etc which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Ability_to_register&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;meet the threshold to count as a trademark&lt;/a&gt;; it it likely that the names and logos of most open source projects do not meet that threshold. What choosealicense is doing here is classifying licenses into two sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those which make this explicit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those which do not make this explicit and instead rely on the default in law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realistically, the difference here is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; moot, but if it's something that you have a specific concern on for a specific project, you should take professional advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or does it stop contributors from registering their own trademarks regarding the name and logo of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very unlikely that contributors would be able to make a successful trademark claim for the name and/or logo of an open source project. They are, by their very nature, something available &amp;quot;in the commons&amp;quot; and not indicative of a particular relationship. So again, this is not prevented &lt;em&gt;by the limitation&lt;/em&gt; but instead by the very nature of trademark law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or in other words, to patent the project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patents and trademarks are very different things. Do not confuse the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T06:50:44.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12133" CreationDate="2021-09-20T07:46:37.783" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a hardware developer (like arduino board etc.) does one have to license PCB's files under GPL if the included software uses GPL licensed parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. From a copyright perspective a hardware layout and a software application are completely independent works and their licenses don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I'm not fully understanding GPLv3 about Tivoization part. So If I use GPLv3 software parts, Do I obligated to design PCB that allows future re-flashing for end users?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the Tivoization part of the GPLv3 means is that if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have the possibility to re-flash the PCB, then you must not employ techniques that limit that possibility to you alone, but anyone who can make the correct connections to the PCB should be able to re-flash it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you design your PCB such that it can only be flashed once, or that the software resides in actual ROM memory, then that is not a problem for the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T07:46:37.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12138" CreationDate="2021-09-20T08:17:52.797" Score="6" ViewCount="1634" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop a specific module from a GPL 3 software in a partnership with a third company to share the costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we each use it for our companies (meaning internal use) without having to publish the code?  Or would this partnership be considered as &amp;quot;external use&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we use it as &amp;quot;internal use&amp;quot; without publishing the code, why would it be considered as a violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25120" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T08:23:45.377" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T14:19:42.967" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;internal use&quot; in the GPL 3?" Tags="|gpl-3|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12137" CreationDate="2021-09-20T14:13:28.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, GPLv3 doesn't mention &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;internal use&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; at all, so the answer to the question in the title is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, we already have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11096/according-to-the-gpl-faq-use-within-a-company-or-organization-is-not-considered&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that discusses whether sending code from one company, A, to another company, B, constitutes distributing it, and thus triggers GPL obligations.  It concludes that it does, because A and B are separate organisations, even in the context of the question where A and B are wholly-owned by the same parent company, and so the analysis holds in your case, when A and B are unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked question also examines what &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; has to say about how internal use &lt;em&gt;within a single company&lt;/em&gt; doesn't constitute distribution, but notes that it's clear that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;when the organization transfers copies to other organizations or individuals, that is distribution&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, which agrees with our analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: when company A gives a copy to company B, this is distribution, and the copy must come with full source code and GPL rights.  However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; also notes that you  are not &lt;em&gt;obliged&lt;/em&gt; by the GPL to share your code; it simply requires that when you do share your code, it must be done so under the terms of the GPL, and so with full source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It therefore seems to me that, as long as both companies have full source code under GPL, each can share copies with its own employees under the traditional restrictions of employment, and have them develop and improve it, for internal use by both companies A and B.  &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, should either company choose to give a copy of this code to some third-party, this conveyance will need to be done under GPLv3, with full source and all GPL rights provided.  Third-party, in this case, includes not only potential customers, but also contract resources retained by either A or B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-09-20T14:19:42.967" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T14:19:42.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-20T16:25:05.820" Score="0" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;With proper references and credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I am using couple of pictures, one as an e-book cover and the rest for decorating the head of various chapters. The pictures are insignificant for the scientific e-book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25128" LastEditorUserId="25128" LastEditDate="2021-09-22T09:48:29.840" LastActivityDate="2021-09-22T09:48:29.840" Title="Can I use a CC BY-SA 4.0 Picture in my CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Book?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|cc-by-nc-sa|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12114" CreationDate="2021-09-20T20:52:49.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of software license for an open source but copyrighted program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. All open source licenses. If the program weren't copyrighted, there would be no need for a license in the first place. Also, pretty much all programs are copyrighted, unless the author has been dead for more than 70 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some kind of software license for a program that I want to have open source (to gain the trust of the user) but that I do not want to be copied, redistributed, or forged, or used under another name, etc ...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Such a license &lt;em&gt;cannot possibly exist&lt;/em&gt;, because it would violate several clauses of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. Free Redistribution&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Derived Works&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one thing that &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be prevented, is &amp;quot;forging&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of &amp;quot;patch files&amp;quot; with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastActivityDate="2021-09-20T20:52:49.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12140" CreationDate="2021-09-21T06:40:05.397" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot put additional restrictions on the picture, and re-licensing it with a 'non-commercial' restriction would be incompatible with the 'share alike' in the CC BY SA 4.0 terms.&#xA;The definition of 'Adapted Material' in the license language of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; is very broad. Your book would be 'Adapted Material' according to the license terms and therefore would need to be following the 'share alike' requirement, so with the same license or any of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt;. Please see also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2021-09-21T06:44:03.733" LastActivityDate="2021-09-21T06:44:03.733" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-23T01:43:02.593" Score="17" ViewCount="3005" Body="&lt;p&gt;MPL 2.0 license allows for using open source code in part of a 'larger work' (the closed source), where the 'larger work' is contained in separate files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is an efficient way to maintain an open core project in Git, where closed code is only contained in separate files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, the solution also satisfies these needs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;contribution to open source code can be done in the open&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;close source code files do not end up in the open source repository, but&#xA;still have revision control&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;working on the entire project (open +&#xA;closed source code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25149" LastEditorUserId="25149" LastEditDate="2021-09-23T16:46:41.940" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T03:37:03.880" Title="How do you work with open core code efficiently in Git?" Tags="|github|mpl|git|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12143" CreationDate="2021-09-23T02:47:08.510" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most version control systems (like &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt;) don't allow to split the repository into &amp;quot;visible&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;invisible&amp;quot; parts. What you can do with &lt;code&gt;git&lt;/code&gt; is to have the public part in one repository, publicly accessible, and the private part in another one. The second, closed, one can then include the first, public, one as a submodule (see &lt;code&gt;git-submodule(1)&lt;/code&gt;). The submodule has to be a subdirectory, which shouldn't be a restriction, and probably helps with wider use. The parent (user package) can request a specific version of the (independently developed) submodule, so it isn't at the mercy of random changes in that one either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T02:47:08.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7625" CreationDate="2021-09-23T13:42:34.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the git suite are (somewhat hard to use, that's SVN for you) is &lt;code&gt;git svn&lt;/code&gt;, that allows bidirectional communication with an SVN repository. You could use that for your work, or just clone the readonly repository and contribute patches (&lt;code&gt;git format-patch&lt;/code&gt; is your friend) upstream. Just make sure you develop on a separate branch, which you keep up to date with upstream (&lt;code&gt;git pull -r&lt;/code&gt;, rebase the branch on upstream). Be careful, rebasing creates versions that never existed, you'd have to check this doesn't introduce problems (in the end result, in intermediary steps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T13:42:34.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-23T20:59:19.163" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there are certainly already many questions on this topic - I have also read through quite a few, but unfortunately still do not understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in the process of deploying an RShiny app on the web. The goal is to use the app commercially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to run the app over my own infrastructure and ShinyProxy, Docker etc - at a later date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For now, I would go the easier route via AWS and RShiny Server. However, RShiny Server is AGPL licensed. What does that mean for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that I can use RShiny Server commercially without any problems - as long as I don't change anything in the source code - even without having to make the rest of my source code available, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole licensing issue is difficult to understand for a layman - I hope you have a tip for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25157" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T20:59:19.163" Title="AGPL license - RStudio Server" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|gnu|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12149" CreationDate="2021-09-23T22:51:48.413" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found an article with links to compare license types, but as there are so many, it's still very hard to decide, so I will have to keep reading, but what I hope to find are answers to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which license is the broadest scope of application and most permissive, such that I can develop many things as individual and stand alone components of a greater whole vision combining these elements, without having to look at multiple license types to suit individual components, and possibly needing a different license type between the components and the whole?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;having found this license type, is it possible to convert one license type to another, so that any starting points available through other people's projects, can be converted to this common license type, and thus take advantage of that coding shortcut, without sacrificing the simplicity and freedom all these components require to help them go ahead?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Further information:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the code I want to develop is itself &lt;strong&gt;not a product for sale&lt;/strong&gt;, and while I would want at some stage to release that code, in the short term, I need to keep it private only to a trusted development team, so that other people's vested interests do not sabotage or undermine in any way the objectives I am pursuing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the purpose of all the components is to construct stand alone elements of a whole integrated system, meaning that each provides a function relevant to the whole, but its individual function is also something of purpose even without that whole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the reason for the privacy and security concerns is because this is the result of a 30 year academic obsession of mine with the quantification of ecological and social justice and sustainability via the principles of ecological systems modelling and thermodynamics, as a basis for non-species-biased, non-property/trade/currency-based, and non-hierarchical ( anarchic ) justice economics and politics ... so there's a huge amount of work at stake already, even before any coding begins, and the objectives and principles of the whole vision are for the betterment of the world, and so I do not trust this project to just be completely open source from day one, as we live in a world full of people with vested interests who would sabotage and undermine ( both intentionally and unintentionally ) anything which is either perceived as a threat to their interests ( whether it's actually a threat or not ), or where they see advantage in redirecting a project towards their own ends ( and they're foolish enough to think they can second guess 30 years of obsession in a matter of minutes or hours without any comprehension of the reasons for any decisions made )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;so I am looking for a means to short cut development time, by way of using existing code, without being restricted to a licensing choice being made by others from that existing code, and without being required by any licensing choice to have to expose this code to the open source community as a whole, until it is developed enough to the point of being able to protect itself from interference&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternative Question:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if what I am seeking as a solution to my dilemma is not possible within the way the licenses work, is there some other way of achieving this goal, or will I be forced to code everything from scratch?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25159" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-10-08T09:56:00.997" LastActivityDate="2021-10-08T09:56:00.997" Title="Choice of and conversion between licenses" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12143" CreationDate="2021-09-23T23:02:01.573" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common solution I've seen is to design the core for extensibility and put the closed-source elements into extensions.  Since the closed-source portions of the product interact only through the extension interface, the source code for them doesn't need to be stored anywhere near the core's source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, an open-core web application might come with a basic database-based authentication system, while the paid version adds the ability to authenticate against LDAP or Active Directory.  The basic system would be part of the public Git repository, while the code for the paid extensions would be stored in a private repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2021-09-23T23:02:01.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12147" CreationDate="2021-09-23T23:06:40.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you don't distribute further, the license (permissions you give third parties) is quite irrelevant. If you want to publish it, then the license becomes relevant. And what license(s) you select depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want it to be shared freely, but not be used for closed developments, use a copyleft license. If you want maximal reach, select a BSD style license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @MadHatter mentions in a comment, you certainly have to comply with the licenses of any pieces from third parties you use/include/adapt in your package. This will obviously limit (or even dictate) the license selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the site &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosing a license&lt;/a&gt; is of help here. If at all possible, choose a widely used license, that has been reviewed by competent lawyers, and think through how you will handle external contributions: Either the Linux model (each contributor keeps ownership over their work; simple to handle, but gives &lt;em&gt;each&lt;/em&gt; of them some veto power over the whole) or the GNU model (have all contributions written over to some central authority; more bureaucratic hassle, many would-be-contributors won't go for this). Whatever you do, heed David A. Wheeler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advice&lt;/a&gt; on licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastEditorUserId="2686" LastEditDate="2021-09-24T17:04:36.320" LastActivityDate="2021-09-24T17:04:36.320" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12143" CreationDate="2021-09-25T03:31:23.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This situation is common at large software companies which contribute to open source projects, so there are some tools you can find specifically to migrate between open and closed repositories. I have used these tools. They generally work like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have your internal repository. This could be a monorepo containing an open-source subproject, or it could be just an internal fork with some confidential parts to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have your external repository. This could be a public repository on GitHub, containing the open-source contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You use software to migrate commits from the internal repository to the external one, and vice versa. Metadata may get added to these migrated commits so the tools can recognize the original commit from a migrated commit. For example, Copybara will add &lt;code&gt;GitOrigin-RevId: &amp;lt;hash&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; to the bottom of a commit message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m aware of two tools that do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/copybara&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copybara&lt;/a&gt;: Written by Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebook/fbshipit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fbshipit&lt;/a&gt;: Written by Facebook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These systems allow you a lot of flexibility in pushing internal changes to public repositories, and accepting public contributions and integrating them into your internal repositories. They are, perhaps, flexible to a fault—you may need to spend some time experimenting with them and trying different configurations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that these tools are not super well-supported tools with discussion forums. For example, you can’t download a pre-built binary for Copybara, you have to get Bazel to compile it. And you can’t just run fbshipit, you need Hack (Facebook’s PHP derivative, which doesn’t run on all platforms). There is no “Copybara” tag on Stack Overflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these tools &lt;em&gt;do work&lt;/em&gt; and I use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25176" LastEditorUserId="25176" LastEditDate="2021-09-25T03:37:03.880" LastActivityDate="2021-09-25T03:37:03.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12155" CreationDate="2021-09-26T04:58:29.377" Score="-1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm licensing my project under MPL 2.0, but I have a certain directory for utilities that I don't want to be under copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I put an MIT license in the said directory, can it override the MPL 2.0 on the root of the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25185" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T15:38:14.943" Title="Is it possible to have an MIT-licensed directory inside an MPL 2.0 repository?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12161" CreationDate="2021-09-26T05:54:40.893" Score="0" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm editing an Android program which under GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to let it send and receive encrypted packet, so I added a library project which encrypt and decrypt packet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main project is under GPLv3 license, so MUST I make the library project open source while I don't want ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. The main project call a service in library project, and transfer packet to the service to en/decrypt packet, so the en/decryption is in different process. Does it mean that I can make the library project closed source while it doesn't violate GPLv3 ( because of process isolation ) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25186" LastEditorUserId="25186" LastEditDate="2021-09-26T06:02:36.027" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T16:07:05.923" Title="Can I make my own Android library project source closed while it's being used by a GPLv3 main project?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12153" CreationDate="2021-09-26T07:20:48.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Effectively yes, although I suggest you are much more explicit about exactly which material you intend to place under each license than just throwing some license files in some directories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, there is no real concept of an &amp;quot;MPL 2.0 repository&amp;quot; - copyright (and thus open source licensing) exists at a more granular level than that of a repository. This often means at a file level, although it could in theory be even more granular than that. The MPL strongly encourages you to add a specific notice (that in Exhibit A) to each file you intend to be covered by the MPL. The MIT license is less prescriptive than this, but if you are intending to have a repository with mixed licensing it will make things much clearer for any consumers of the repository if you include a specific statement &lt;em&gt;in each file&lt;/em&gt; making its licensing clear rather than relying on their location in the tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T07:20:48.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-26T20:06:36.120" Score="0" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not well versed in trademark law, but I assume trademark usage allows for redistribution of official binary releases. Does this trademark allowance extend for builds of the official source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, can I apply the trademark of a project if I build it unmodified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25190" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T21:18:30.640" Title="Can an apache-licensed project's trademark be used in a binary of the official source?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12156" CreationDate="2021-09-26T21:18:30.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the only realistic answer to your question is some combination of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no-one knows&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which jurisdiction(s) do you care about? Trademark law is not nearly as homogeneous globally as copyright law is, so you may get different answers in different places.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;talk to your lawyer when you have a specific trademark in mind, with the exact wording of any usage guidelines released by the owner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous case here is almost certainly Firefox, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian rebranded for many years as &amp;quot;Iceweasel&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; after disputes with the Mozilla Corporation. Now while &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the issues there were about Debian wishing to apply changes to the official source, that was by no means the only point of contention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to &amp;quot;unmodified source&amp;quot;, you will want to consider the old chestnut of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Erdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Trusting Trust&lt;/a&gt;: just because you and I start from the same source doesn't mean we get a binary with the same functionality, and what happens if that different functionality is (for example...) for all instances of the string &amp;quot;Stack Exchange user noname&amp;quot; to be replaced with &amp;quot;Smelly Poo-Poo Head&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-26T21:18:30.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-27T09:34:31.750" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to use source code from Oracles Java documentation, which contains the following license information. Since I'm not used to publishing my code, but I have to this time, I have no idea of the implication this has on the software license I can publish the code under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2011, 2014 Oracle and/or its affiliates.&#xA; * All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms.&#xA; *&#xA; * This file is available and licensed under the following license:&#xA; *&#xA; * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA; * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions&#xA; * are met:&#xA; *&#xA; *  - Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright&#xA; *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA; *  - Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA; *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in&#xA; *    the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA; *  - Neither the name of Oracle nor the names of its&#xA; *    contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived&#xA; *    from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA; *&#xA; * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS&#xA; * &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA; * LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR&#xA; * A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT&#xA; * OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,&#xA; * SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT&#xA; * LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,&#xA; * DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY&#xA; * THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA; * (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE&#xA; * OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My boss asked me if we can publish it under CC BY-NC-ND.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use the code from Oracle and publish the project under afformentioned license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Followup question, What do I have to look for regarding imports?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25194" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T10:06:16.173" Title="What are the restrictions for software licenses if I use source code from the Java documentation?" Tags="|license|java|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12154" CreationDate="2021-09-27T16:07:05.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may license your library under any terms you like.  What you may not do, however, is distribute a binary that results from linking your library into code you received under GPLv3, unless you obey the GPL's requirements.  These include distributing complete corresponding source code (GPLv3 s6), which would include your library, and all of it must be under GPLv3 (GPLv3 s5c).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute a binary which dynamically links to your library, picking up the library code at run-time, then the question is not yet settled.  We have a question that summarises the arguments why &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;you would not need to license your library under GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, and one that summarises the arguments &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;why you would&lt;/a&gt;.  My personal opinion (which matches &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF's&lt;/a&gt;) is that you are making a combined work based on the GPLv3 codebase, and therefore that you would need to distribute your library under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-09-27T16:07:05.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-28T11:55:25.610" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a GUI Java-based application using swing and am thinking of using the MIT license, though when reading the licenses stated in the components of java swing I see that they are licensed under the GNU General Public Licensed version 2. From what I understand from reading about these licenses is that I cannot use a permissive license like MIT if I'm using code under the GNU license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar question has been asked here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3111455/releasing-code-containing-java-swing-what-license&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3111455/releasing-code-containing-java-swing-what-license&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The answer that they received is that it is possible to use any license that they want provided they only use swing library and not actually use or modify the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understood, GNU license is a copyleft license meaning that usage of the code forces the developer to use the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why then is it possible to use the MIT license when using the swing library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25205" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-09-28T16:21:04.503" LastActivityDate="2021-09-29T11:11:38.970" Title="Using GNU General Public Licensed code in an MIT Licensed application" Tags="|mit|license|gnu|java|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-28T13:59:18.623" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about a very complicated GitHub open source project, how to manage pull requests. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pulls?page=39&amp;amp;q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; there are close to a thousand pull requests .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could the k8s administrator validate the correctness of those pull requests?  How could they efficiently verify and merge them to master?  In short, I want to know how the k8s administrator can manage such a complex project, and if there is more than one, how they divide the work to control so many pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15115" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-09-29T09:27:28.303" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T18:15:30.313" Title="How could a large open source project manage the Pull Requests?" Tags="|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12162" CreationDate="2021-09-28T20:45:44.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; consensus is the Stack Overflow answer you have linked to is incorrect; linking to a library creates a derivative work and therefore the GPL applies to the combined work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;You can see some arguments in favour of this view here&lt;/a&gt;. Unsurprisingly, this is also the view of the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the opposing view, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;see this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-28T20:45:44.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12162" CreationDate="2021-09-28T23:30:03.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever you form and distribute a derivative of a GPL work, you must license that new derivative, as a whole, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingWithGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Your code, in isolation, can be under the MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, but when it is combined and distributed with GPL-licensed code, that combination (probably) forms a derivative work which must be licensed as a whole under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the character sequence &lt;code&gt;import javax.swing.*&lt;/code&gt; is not linking against a GPL'd library; indeed, many occurrences of that particular statement even predate the availability of a GPL-licensed Swing library. However, the distribution of such an import statement (and associated classes) alongside a copy of a GPL-licensed implementation of those namespaced classes probably does constitute distribution of a derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the OpenJDK in particular is licensed with a classpath exception, which allows linking together independent modules to form an executable without licensing the whole work under the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module.  An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with the classpath exception, you need not license your resulting executable under the GPL, but must otherwise respect the source-sharing requirements of the modules that are licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-09-29T11:11:38.970" LastActivityDate="2021-09-29T11:11:38.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-29T11:27:01.170" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a mirror site provides binary download for GPL software (e.g. Git for Windows, when mirrored from GitHub Releases), is it mandatory that the site provide source code tarball or zipball as well? Or is it acceptable that source codes are added only on popular demand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know of, many mirror sites exist for &lt;em&gt;users'&lt;/em&gt; convenience, so many popular OSS are redistributed without accompanying source code because few users are interested. This (fact) led me into thinking about this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25214" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T08:02:31.137" Title="Do mirror sites have to provide source code alongside binaries for (L)GPL software?" Tags="|gpl|redistribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12166" CreationDate="2021-09-29T13:42:13.010" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither your suggested options are required. The available options for distributing a GPL v2 program such as Git are enumerated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3 of the license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option (a) is essentially what you are suggesting, but it would certainly be valid for the mirror sites to do (b). In most cases, I would imagine that the mirror sites distribution would count as &amp;quot;noncommercial&amp;quot; so they could simply forward on any offer they received when getting the binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-09-29T13:42:13.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-29T15:50:38.383" Score="2" ViewCount="1541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing a CMMS software. To allow pictures and other documents to be stored, I would like to use an Amazon S3-compatible API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To allow this, I was thinking of using Min.io server which offer such Amazon S3-compatible REST API. min.io is distributed under AGPL 3.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All my components are hosted on kubernetes nodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I don't perform any modification on the min.io image and just use the proposed API, do I still need to open my CMMS source code ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems quite similar to this question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8201/if-i-use-a-public-api-endpoint-that-has-its-source-code-licensed-under-agpl-in-m&quot;&gt;If I use a public API endpoint that has its source code licensed under AGPL in my app, do I need to disclose my source?&lt;/a&gt;) the only difference is that both software are hosted at the same place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this count as a derivative work or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25217" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2021-10-05T07:57:14.880" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T12:22:47.290" Title="Does using an AGPL 3.0 software via its REST API force to disclose source from calling software?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-10-05T20:04:47.383" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12170" CreationDate="2021-09-29T17:03:41.187" Score="3" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a program using the STmicroelectronics STM32_USB_Device_Library. I'd like to make this program open source, preferably under a GPL license, though I might consider MIT or BSD. This program is written by me on my lonesome, so there's no restrictions regarding my employer or other parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the STM32_USB_Device_Library is covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.st.com/SLA0044&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SLA0044&lt;/a&gt; license. This license has a very specific clause against subjecting this software to any &amp;quot;Open Source Terms&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No use, reproduction or redistribution of this software partially or totally may be done in any manner that would subject this software to any Open Source Terms. “Open Source Terms” shall mean any open source license which requires as part of distribution of software that the source code of such software is distributed therewith or otherwise made available, or open source license that substantially complies with the Open Source definition specified at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.opensource.org&lt;/a&gt; and any other comparable open source license such as for example GNU General Public License (GPL), Eclipse Public License (EPL), Apache Software License, BSD license or MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that this clause might at least be (L)GPL-incompatible, as those licenses enforce some &amp;quot;open source terms&amp;quot; upon the final binary (that being the requirement to release the source code), but I'm not sure if that's what this clause means. There's also the following clause, which specifically denies the GPL's freedom 0, that might cause similar compatibility issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This software or any part thereof, including modifications and/or derivative works of this software, must be used and execute solely and exclusively on or in combination with a microcontroller or microprocessor device manufactured by or for STMicroelectronics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, assuming I'm fine with applying clause 4 to the resulting binary, what does this mean? Can I release my (L)GPL-licensed project (or program using (L)GPL libraries) using this library? Is there any difference between GPL and LGPL in this scenario? What about if I were to license my code to MIT or any other more permissive license? Can I ship this library's source with the program sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24897" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T15:24:36.373" Title="Open sourcing code using SLA0044 libraries (STmicroelectronics license)" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12169" CreationDate="2021-09-30T06:28:35.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The SLA0044 is a zero-cost licence; it permits redistribution and use without payment, but it doesn't give users most of the freedoms associated with free software.  It is also, as you have pointed out, aggressively keen to stay that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read it, you can't meaningfully release your code under GPL, since your code requires the library to build into a binary.  You can &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt; you're doing so, but since you are forbidden to permit your users to exercise their advertised rights to use the resulting program for any purpose, or to redistribute its Complete Corresponding Source under GPL, you won't &lt;em&gt;in fact&lt;/em&gt; be doing so.  It would simply be confusing, and should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A non-copyleft free licence (BSD, Apache, MIT) or a per-file copyleft licence (MPL) would probably be OK to distribute your code under, alongside the library, but you still have to be &lt;em&gt;extremely clear&lt;/em&gt; with your users that there's a poison pill embedded in it, in the form of this non-free library.  I think you would do better to distribute your code free and clear under one of the licences above, without the library, and include a big pointer to the library and tell people they need to download it themselves.  Make it clear why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only speculate why the manufacturers have chosen to license their library in this way, but if it's an essential component of any software for this chip, and if there's no free software equivalent, it seems to me that the chip is unsuitable for free software, and should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="24897" LastEditDate="2021-09-30T15:24:36.373" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T15:24:36.373" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12172" CreationDate="2021-09-30T11:04:04.643" Score="5" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;my question is hopefully clearly stated in the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have released software with the GPLv2 only license but later changed my mind and wanted to relicense it under GPLv3 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this possible since I am the only creator? Am I allowed to do that when nobody has seen/downloaded the code yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25222" LastActivityDate="2021-10-02T13:55:33.693" Title="Relicensing from GPLv2 only to GPLv3 and later" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12171" CreationDate="2021-09-30T11:14:29.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licences do not inhere in code; their obligations attach to recipients through the act of conveyance.  So yes, as long as you're the sole rightsholder, you can take code you were distributing under GPLv2 and distribute instead under GPLv3+.  You can even distribute it under both licences simultaneously, if you want, though it will be confusing so you probably shouldn't.  People who had it under GPLv2 (if any) will continue to use it under those terms, unless they choose to come back and get a new copy under the new terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will be in an odd spot if you accept contributions, since those who had their code under GPLv2 will be obliged to contribute their changes under GPLv2, while those who had it under GPLv3+ will be obliged to contribute under GPLv3 or GPLv3+, depending on which set of terms they chose to have apply to them.  It will probably be simplest to get a CLA from contributors that allows you to use their contributions under any combination of GPLv2/3/later you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-10-02T13:55:33.693" LastActivityDate="2021-10-02T13:55:33.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12163" CreationDate="2021-09-30T13:43:12.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Large bazaar-style open source projects usually don't just have one but many maintainers who review pull requests. Those often specialize in specific sub-modules of the application, so they have a better view of what is and isn't an appropriate contribution for that particular module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2021-09-30T13:43:12.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-09-30T22:28:59.457" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are trying to use a package released by a commercial entity for use with one of their reporting software. I think it was closed source at one point then they converted it to a &amp;quot;Community&amp;quot; release and re-released it as a open source project on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the problem I'm facing is that the project is released under &lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/strong&gt; license but when I looked through the sources, some of the files under the &amp;quot;lib&amp;quot; folders have &amp;quot;CC BY-NC-SA&amp;quot; license at the top of the source file like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/**&#xA; * CC BY-NC-SA License&#xA; * (...) by (...) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.&#xA; * Based on a work at http://github.com/(...) &#xA; *&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this work in terms of licensing? Does this make the whole project Non-Commercial? Or, does this get overridden by the Apache 2.0 license at the project level?&#xA;By the way, the author of the source mentioned above is also part of the team that released the top level project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20174" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T17:44:11.040" Title="Package that includes a library file with non-commercial license" Tags="|license-compatibility|commercial|license-notice|license|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-01T08:58:47.053" Score="-2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm getting ready to open source a project that facilitates the deployment, maintenance, and orchestration of data platforms on just about any architecture (locally, on any cloud of your choosing, on your personal server farm etc.). Given the nature of the project, there is a chance that cloud providers might eventually want to offer this software as a service. I am perfectly fine with commercial enterprises using this software freely as part of their own internal tooling. However, I was wondering if there was any way to require the purchase of a paid license in the case where a cloud provider might offer this software as a service. The relatively recent SSPL from MongoDB seems to have taken a first step of formalizing &amp;quot;as a service&amp;quot; when it comes to licensing. I also really like the added requirement that any such service provider must provide their (modified) source code. Here are my questions then :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be possible to use a modified version of the SSPL to impose a fee only in the scenario where the software is offered as a service ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any way to extend this requirement to also apply to the API implicitly defined by my code ? Simply put, can a paid license still be required if the hosted service reproduces my API but entirely with their own code ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On a more subjective note, is such a practice generally frowned upon by the open source community ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25225" LastEditorUserId="25225" LastEditDate="2021-10-01T09:14:20.850" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T14:09:51.053" Title="Can I impose the requirement of a paid license if and only if my software is offered as a service?" Tags="|commercial|cloud|sspl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-01T10:49:44.720" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an open-source FPGA project that targets multiple FPGA development boards. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gergoerdi/clash-pong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The project itself&lt;/a&gt; is licensed MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one of the targets, the VGA-to-HDMI encoder chip included on the board requires some boot-up configuration via I2C. The vendor documentation includes an I2C master implementation for this purpose. The file starts with the following header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Permission:&#xA;//&#xA;//   Terasic grants permission to use and modify this code for use&#xA;//   in synthesis for all Terasic Development Boards and Altrea Development &#xA;//   Kits made by Terasic.  Other use of this code, including the selling &#xA;//   ,duplication, or modification of any portion is strictly prohibited.&#xA;//&#xA;// Disclaimer:&#xA;//&#xA;//   This VHDL or Verilog source code is intended as a design reference&#xA;//   which illustrates how these types of functions can be implemented.&#xA;//   It is the user's responsibility to verify their design for&#xA;//   consistency and functionality through the use of formal&#xA;//   verification methods.  Terasic provides no warranty regarding the use &#xA;//   or functionality of this code.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I add this file to the project, it would only be used when synthesizing for a Terasic/Arrow DECA development kit, so naively it should match the criteria of the license. However, the inclusion with the source code could, itself, be construed as &amp;quot;duplication&amp;quot;. But there is no way to &amp;quot;use [...] this code [...] in synthesis for [...] Terasic Development Boards&amp;quot; without including the file as the synthesis input!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use this I2C implementation in the Terasic target-specific parts of my FPGA project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4120" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T13:44:52.917" Title="Including design reference implementations with open source program" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|proprietary-code|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12174" CreationDate="2021-10-01T17:44:11.040" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no universal rule. You have to file a bug and ask.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, it is probably safest to assume that the &lt;em&gt;most restrictive&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;most specific&lt;/em&gt; license terms apply, unless there is some indication that the author intended to dual-license (i.e. that they wanted to let you choose which license terms to follow). In this case, that means you're probably safest in assuming that the individual files are CC-BY-NC-SA as indicated, and not under the Apache license. It is possible that the author(s) intended to let you choose between the Apache license and the CC-BY-NC-SA license, but this would make very little sense as the Apache license is much less restrictive than CC-BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project really should have some sort of README or LICENSE file which explains these issues more explicitly. If they have a copy of the Apache license in the project root, but some of the individual files have a different license, then it's unclear what the Apache license is meant to apply to. If you can't find any clear explanation of the licensing terms and what falls under them, you should file a bug and ask for this information to be documented somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1717/532&quot;&gt;Creative Commons licenses were not intended to apply to software&lt;/a&gt;. Using them for software, as this author has apparently done, is generally not recommended. In particular, the ShareAlike condition does not require licensees to release their source code, unlike (say) the GPL, so ShareAlike licenses are less effective than the GPL in most contexts. This isn't really something you can fix, but the authors of this software should probably reconsider their choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2021-10-01T17:44:11.040" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-04T07:41:06.577" Score="-2" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;HI I found that an Android uses the Same Kernal of Linux same of (Linus Torvalds) which contains Non-free blobs (proprietary code) as per my research these blobs can be harmful as Linus Torvalds tells in his wordings that it is on the user to use or not but they will never remove it when asking by FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways my question lie in the category of is it risky to use an Android because it uses Linux Kernal I am not saying it is legit or not I know it is legal at all so please do not make my point in other words...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found Replicant (Without any Free Binary Blob) OS but it is not supported many new devices it supports older devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any good suggestions are welcome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25242" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T12:42:15.093" Title="Android to Fully Libre (FOSS)" Tags="|proprietary-code|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-04T09:10:14.887" Score="-2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a new media/format of presenting video, but is not a 'technology' but a concept, a design system.&#xA;I want to release the idea for free for anyone to develop, use etc.&#xA;What kind of license should I use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15375" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T05:56:26.880" Title="What license should I use for releasing a design system free for everyone to use, adapt, develop etc.?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12179" CreationDate="2021-10-04T09:22:30.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's risky to use any computer.  Zero-day exploits are found all the time, and we're all essentially defenceless against them until they're disclosed and fixed.  But it's risky to cross a road, and yet we all do it; the question is always &lt;em&gt;are the benefits worth the risk&lt;/em&gt;, and sadly, nobody can answer that for you, because nobody can tell you how much you'll value the benefit, or deplore the downsides if the risk bites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, binary firmware blobs: what benefit, and how risky?  Much modern hardware, particularly that dealing with wireless signal transceiving and processing, tends to use closed-source firmware blobs that the drivers load upon hardware initialisation.  It's a great shame, but it's a fact of modern life, and if you want to do WiFi, or 3+G wireless data, you will find that your choices of usable hardware are much reduced if you're not prepared to do it.  So the benefit is being able to use most modern wireless hardware, as you've found out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The downside is that you simply can't know what the firmware is making the hardware do.  Since most modern hardware communicates via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMA&lt;/a&gt;, your firmware could be getting your hardware to exfiltrate chunks of your main memory under cover of normal operations.  It probably isn't, but it's hard to know for sure.  You rather have to trust the vendor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still get things done if you're not prepared to run firmware blobs, but you'll be spending a lot of time vetting and sourcing hardware, and you won't be keeping up with the latest and greatest.  Then again, if you're using non-free hardware - hardware where you don't have the schematics, the board layouts, the details of what's inside all the silicon packages, and the like - you're going to have to trust the vendor even if the firmware is completely open.  Malicious hardware attacks are &lt;a href=&quot;https://bgr.com/tech/china-hardware-backdoors-sophisticated-chips-used-in-us-bound-tech/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by no means unknown&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should you use firmware blobs?  Are you happy to do that?  Only you can say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T09:22:30.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12163" CreationDate="2021-10-04T18:15:30.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a variety of ways to validate pull requests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some projects expect there to be an accepted issue before a PR is submitted.  So, you can check the PR easily to see if it connects to an existing issue and then see if that issue is one that the team has said can move forward.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hopefully on any large project there are a slew of tests integrated into some CI/CD system.  Automation may even be setup so that a merge is blocked if these tests are failing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delegation, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12173/990&quot;&gt;Philipp mentioned&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastActivityDate="2021-10-04T18:15:30.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12180" CreationDate="2021-10-05T05:56:26.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to copyright, your specification and the code that implements it are two completely unrelated things. This means that whatever copyright license you choose for your specification, it has no effect on the license an implementer can use for their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to enforce an open-source implementation of your specification, then you must look to contract law (and probably a very strict closed-source license on your specification to prevent further distribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you want others to freely build upon your specification and you are not really bothered if someone creates a closed-source implementation, then you could choose an open-source license for your specification. For example one from the Creative Commons family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T05:56:26.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12168" CreationDate="2021-10-05T12:17:27.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; Section 13 only requires you to publish the sourcecode of an AGPL-licensed program if you &amp;quot;modify the program&amp;quot;. When you host an AGPL-licensed software as-is, then you have no further obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; modifying min.io, that provision only applies to &amp;quot;users interacting with it remotely through a computer network&amp;quot;. But your users are not interacting with min.io. They are interacting with your CMMS which then interacts with min.io. So you do not need to give your sourcecode to your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if you &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; modifying min.io and if your users &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; interacting with min.io directly, you still would only need to open-source your modifications to min.io, not your own application. Two applications communicating with each other via webservices well-satisfied the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;communicating at arms length&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; definition of when two interacting programs do not count as a combined work according to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2021-10-05T12:22:47.290" LastActivityDate="2021-10-05T12:22:47.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10083" CreationDate="2021-10-08T09:45:57.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/240204/how-can-the-authenticity-of-releases-on-github-and-gitlab-be-ensured-can-their&quot;&gt;how the authenticity of releases on GitHub and GitLab can be ensured&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: people could sign releases with GPG and publish &lt;strong&gt;hashsums&lt;/strong&gt; of the built release binaries so others can confirm them to be valid or invalid. They could do so by cloning the repository and building the release from the source code themselves and checking if the hashsums match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant to such efforts is &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproducible-builds.org/contribute/debian/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the reproducible-builds project&lt;/a&gt;. I think packages relevant to the project like compilers should be improved so that such validations are always reliably possible no matter what your build context is, meaning that the builds are deterministic and the binaries perfectly consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, they'd also need to check if the source code in all the files matches what is displayed in the repo because otherwise, it could still include backdoors/malware that's not publicly visible on GitHub/GitLab/the public repo website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the maintainers don't do so you could even publish the hashsum/s yourself in an issue in the repository asking the maintainers to publish hashsums, it's as easy as running &lt;code&gt;sha512sum ./filename&lt;/code&gt;. I don't know why it isn't required or done automatically by GitHb/GitLab or common practice. You only have to also trust maintainers if they only signed their release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hence, I think amon's answer is false.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13675" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-29T08:50:50.193" LastActivityDate="2023-05-29T08:50:50.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-07T11:23:56.413" Score="3" ViewCount="2127" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am using a library that is licensed under Apache License 2.0, do I need to credit the author in my application? If yes then where exactly in the application (in description of play store or any other area in app itself)? And how exactly should I credit the author (by just providing the link to license)? Please help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked and even the glide and picasso libraries are licensed under Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Parwez Akhter" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T12:19:30.493" Title="What should I do if I am using an Apache License 2.0 library in my android application?" Tags="|android|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12190" CreationDate="2021-10-07T11:33:25.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are releasing the source code of your application you need to include a copy of the apache license in your source code (note if the library itself already has a copy of the license thats enough).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its also good practice to credit the author yes, include somewhere in your application (perhaps an about page) a list of libraries used and their owners/which license they fall under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25280" OwnerDisplayName="DevWithZachary" LastActivityDate="2021-10-07T11:33:25.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-09T14:23:03.913" Score="6" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking at creating a proprietary USB driver in Rust to interface with a USB product via libusb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a big fan of Rust static linking because it simplifies deployment but it doesn't fit very well with LGPL dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's obvious that the simplest way to comply with LGPL is to load libusb dynamically!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exception in LGPL v2.1 leaves a few options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or&#xA;link a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; with the Library to produce a&#xA;work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work&#xA;under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit&#xA;modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse&#xA;engineering for debugging such modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen suggestions that this means you can comply by providing a way for users to build their own libusb to use with the proprietary driver. This can apparently be achieved with Rusts rlib library files, but since Rust does not have a stable ABI this will be very tricky to use and doesn't seem in the spirit of LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third option I'm currently considering is to ship a driver which statically links to libusb, but also allows users to dynamically load their own build of libusb at runtime via an environment variable. This would make deployment easy and would give users the option of using their own build of libusb, but would it comply with LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25288" LastEditorUserId="25288" LastEditDate="2021-10-09T17:58:08.703" LastActivityDate="2021-10-10T07:03:48.843" Title="Options for complying with LGPL when building proprietary Rust binaries" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12195" CreationDate="2021-10-10T03:25:08.560" Score="0" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if I could get clarification on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/a&gt; licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose if I uploaded to my Github repository a &lt;code&gt;.pdf&lt;/code&gt; of a technical book I've written and want to share. According to &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt;, if someone were to fork the repository, they would still be bound by the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt; to not modify (create a derivative) and redistribute that derivative, correct? Forking a repository isn't a workaround to get out of the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone where to change the format, for example, from &lt;code&gt;.pdf&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; (which I don't mind), because of the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt; licence, they would have to leave the book text, they can't modify it, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25293" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T05:33:42.470" Title="Attempting to understand CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12194" CreationDate="2021-10-10T06:43:42.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose if I uploaded to my Github repository a &lt;code&gt;.pdf&lt;/code&gt; of a technical book I've written and want to share. According to &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt;, if someone were to fork the repository, they would still be bound by the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt; to not modify (create a derivative) and redistribute that derivative, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct. Forking a repository does not magically erase the license that you have attached to the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone where to change the format, for example, from &lt;code&gt;.pdf&lt;/code&gt; to &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; (which I don't mind), because of the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND 4.0&lt;/code&gt; licence, they would have to leave the book text, they can't modify it, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, although changes in the format are allowed by the license (in section 2(a)(4), entitled &amp;quot;Media and formats; technical modifications allowed.&amp;quot;), I believe that a conversion from PDF to plain text is not a clear-cut case of such an allowed format change. I believe that this change affects the nature of the work in such a way that it creates an Adapted Material, which the creator wouldn't be allowed to distribute due to the CC BY-NC-ND license. That does not prevent you from giving separate, additional, permissions to people who make such radical conversions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T05:33:42.470" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T05:33:42.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12192" CreationDate="2021-10-10T07:03:48.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third option I'm currently considering is to ship a driver which statically links to libusb, but also allows users to dynamically load their own build of libusb at runtime via an environment variable. This would make deployment easy and would give users the option of using their own build of libusb, but would it comply with LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a licensing perspective, this would be compliant with the LGPL, if you can guarantee that there is no way that the dynamically linked version of libusb calls into the statically linked version of libusb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a technical perspective, it is no so easy to link a library both statically and dynamically into an executable. You will inevitably get multiple definitions for each symbol in the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can apparently be achieved with Rusts rlib library files, but since Rust does not have a stable ABI this will be very tricky to use and doesn't seem in the spirit of LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, the LGPL doesn't care about ABI stability. As long as the ABI is not so unstable that rlib files can't be transferred from one system to another, you are fine. You just have to mention which version of the Rust compiler to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-10-10T07:03:48.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12200" CreationDate="2021-10-10T09:40:18.473" Score="0" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing my first open source software, but choosing the appropriate license is getting difficult for me (maybe because of the bad suggestions I have read on the internet). My program uses the following libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ElectronJS&lt;/a&gt; (MIT License)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;highlight.js&lt;/a&gt; (BSD 3-Clause)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it also uses locally installed &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gcc&lt;/a&gt;(not packed with my software but, is expected that the user has installed it on their own). Is gcc's GPLv3 license also has to be taken into consideration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone recommend which license template should I choose while uploading my project on GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't mind modifying and/or redistributing of my application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am a complete beginner to this field, any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25296" LastEditorUserId="25296" LastEditDate="2021-10-11T11:17:39.297" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T11:17:39.297" Title="Which licenses are to be considered when developing a software" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12197" CreationDate="2021-10-11T06:40:41.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone recommend which license template should I choose while uploading my project on GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have provided us too little information to answer this part of your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You indicated you have no problem that others modify and/or distribute your software. That is a permission given by all open-source licenses. The next question is how you feel about someone making a modification and distributing that without giving you the right to include the modification also in your version. If you are fine with that, you can use a permissive license, like MIT, BSD or Apache. If you want that modifications are given back to the community, you should look for a copyleft license, like the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to your own wants, you also need to look at what restrictions you accepted by using third-party software in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things you need to look at for licenses that can affect your choice in license are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;code you copied from someone else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libraries you use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;frameworks you use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or more in general, code that ends up in your product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing you can safely ignore are tools you use only in the process of creating your software, such as editors and compilers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses don't put a restriction on the license you can choose for your own code or the project as a whole. They may have requirements for attribution that you need to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses have the common characteristic that modifications need to remain under the same license. The main differences are in what is considered a modification. For example, the MPL only looks at which file is modified, while the GPL and AGPL require that the program as a whole needs to be distributed under that license (and every part must be under a compatible open-source license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-10-11T06:40:41.227" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12202" CreationDate="2021-10-11T07:49:54.097" Score="5" ViewCount="2931" Body="&lt;p&gt;My colleague and I are writing a software named hin2n-ios, which is an implementation of n2n (a peer to peer VPN software) on iOS platform. So it is inevitable to call or use the code of n2n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the n2n software is under GPLv3. But I don't want to make our software ( main project at least ) under GPLv3 or open-source by some reasons. Is it possible ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the hin2n-ios is almost developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25186" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T07:11:27.187" Title="How to make my iOS project source-closed while it must use open source code?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12201" CreationDate="2021-10-11T09:01:55.847" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly no way if we talk GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use GPLv3 code in your project or you use it for reference for a re-implementation or port, you are bound by the license. That's the point of a license: you are given permission to use the code on the conditions stated in the license. Without license you would not have legal access to use it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you call the n2n code via library calls or copy code from that project into your project, you are bound. If n2n offers a well-defined public API and operates as a separate programme, available separately and which you call, then you can interact with it via API and not be bound by its license (then it's a mere aggregation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implementation state of your software is insubstantial for this question as is a limitation by whatever app store - that's why you should consider licensing questions before you do any work so that you can possibly work around copyright issues, like choosing different libraries to rely on or implementing a library with a similar effect in a clean room re-implementation process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple does a big dis-service to the community with its app store guidelines, but there is no legal way to put code exclusively GPL-licensed in Apple's app store (I tried. They flat-out refuse and removed it from the app store): It is problematic as the app store puts additional restrictions on the usage in its TOS which are not compatible with the GPL (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this summary&lt;/a&gt; by the FSF). You will have to get a license exceptions by the n2n authors - or re-implement a similar library without ever looking at the n2n code (cleanroom implementation) - a thing you probably cannot do anymore as you are aquainted with its code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-10-12T08:28:53.680" LastActivityDate="2021-10-12T08:28:53.680" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8879" CreationDate="2021-10-12T12:59:15.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a short discussion on this with representatives of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation Europe&lt;/a&gt; in 2017 or 2018 where we came to the conclusion that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons license&lt;/a&gt; could be well suited to publish trained models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25315" LastActivityDate="2021-10-12T12:59:15.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12201" CreationDate="2021-10-12T17:40:50.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have some very strong misconceptions about the AppStore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple won't reject your app because it is opensourced (just add the open source license as your own license). BUT Apple will reject your app if one of the copyright holders complains. Including the copyright holders of the original open source code. That's not because there would be anything wrong with your app (only some expensive lawyers can decide that) but because Apple doesn't want to be involved in anything that could go to court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you publish your app as opensource, the copyright holders might complain. Or they might not complain. Whether they are right or wrong, I couldn't decide. However, if you publish NOT as opensource, then 1. they WILL complain and your app WILL disappear from the app store, and 2. If they sue you for copyright infringement, they will win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, note that you can't put opensource code on the AppStore for money. That's because Apple on one hand says that any payment is not for the app itself, but for the license to use it, and GPL on the other hand says that you can charge any amount for the app itself, and a reasonable amount for the source code, but you can NOT charge for the license. Therefore, any open source app on the app store must be free (as in free beer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Joshua: Nobody knows if Apple can or cannot permit it, but if a copyright holder complains (and the open source authors are usually copyright holders), then Apple will remove the app. So are you sure that a lawsuit actually happened? Note that for any open source app, you can demand the source code, and recompile it on your own computer, without needing any keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastEditorUserId="454" LastEditDate="2021-10-13T07:11:27.187" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T07:11:27.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-12T21:42:38.733" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;So I want to use some code under GPLv3 for a project do we have to use GPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The project I’m making costs money am I allowed to have free GPL code in a paid project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to make my source code on GitHub or can I have it so they have to buy it to get it/request it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25319" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-10-13T13:29:31.490" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T13:29:31.490" Title="Help with GPL license" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12207" CreationDate="2021-10-13T06:52:13.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Basically, yes, you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is absolutely fine to sell GPL-covered code, but you must deliver freedom along with the binary.  That is, you must deliver the complete corresponding source also, and both source and binary must be covered by GPLv3, which will allow recipients to share them (whether modified or unmodified) with others, on those same terms.  Note that, as Gnasher729 points out below, though you may charge for the binary, you may not charge extra for providing this source, except in one case, where you may only charge on a reasonable-cost-recovery basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3, like GPLv2 before it, requires only that source be available to those who have received the binary, so no, you don't have to put it on GitHub.  GPLv2 (s3b) was OK with simply offering source to any of your customers on request; GPLv3 in s6b restricts that option to people who ship software inside physical products, so unless you're doing that, you will need to provide source to all customers who purchase the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, note that you are not allowed to try to contractually restrict what source recipients can do with that source - they must get it under the terms of GPLv3, and that (in s10) says that other restrictions can be ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-10-13T07:23:19.877" LastActivityDate="2021-10-13T07:23:19.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12226" CreationDate="2021-10-15T06:41:47.990" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan on using a LGPL licenced library for my work (my projecte will be MIT). I only use a subset of the library files though, since I plan on statically linking the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to provide the whole source code of the library with my project even though I dont use it completely? (E. g. there is also the source code for a shell tool in it which I also not need).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The build process happens when installing the package (nodejs) and can be retriggered. The source files of the LGPL work are therefore also provided an can be modified and replaced (which is a requirement for LGPL). So on first thought it would be ok to ship only a subset of files, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25343" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T09:32:41.117" Title="Do I have to ship a LGPL library as a whole?" Tags="|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-15T12:03:55.383" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of packages in R (and I'm assuming in other languages as well) are licesed as &amp;quot;License: GPL-2 | GPL-3&amp;quot;. Others as &amp;quot;GPL (&amp;gt;= 2)&amp;quot; and others as &amp;quot;MIT + file LICENSE&amp;quot;.&#xA;What does the &amp;quot;|&amp;quot; operator exactly mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If e.g. in a setting someone wants to avoid GPL-2 licenses explicitly, is a software-component (like an R package) licensed under &amp;quot;GPL-2 | GPL-3&amp;quot; still fine to use or does that always depend on GPL-2 as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any sources appreciate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25347" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T12:03:55.383" Title="How is &quot;GPL-2 | GPL-3&quot; to be interpreted?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|copyleft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12190" CreationDate="2021-10-15T12:19:30.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually find that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2 License&lt;/a&gt; is pretty easy to read and understand. The clauses are clearly worded.&#xA;Here is a pretty short summary of your obligations (you better read the original!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must always give a copy of the Apache License (regardless if you distribute your SW as source or compiled)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must always identify if you have changed any of the source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the source code of your program you must keep all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices of the original library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is a NOTICE file in the library, you must ship all applicable parts of it with your software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T12:19:30.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12176" CreationDate="2021-10-15T13:44:52.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit tricky, I would like to offer a few approaches. I am assuming that you can ship the synthesized code freely, and your question only relates to sharing the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Whenever you distribute the part of the code which includes this Terasic code, you should always include the permission and disclaimer language. You should keep the Terasic code under their license and not include it in the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) My reading of the 'Permission' language is that where you use their code clearly for 'synthesis for [all] Terasic Development Boards ...' (that's a condition), then this permission includes the distribution. The first appearance of the word 'use' is a verb, and this verb is not well defined and can be interpreted mean anything, including distribution. 'Other use of this code...' refers to cases that are not for the purpose of 'synthesis for [all] Terasic Development Boards ...' and you seem to state that this is not possible with your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) You may want to reach out to Terasic and ask them for guidance and clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) I am not a FPGA expert, but if there is a way to ship your code via GitHub and instruct the users to download the Terasic code themselves and include it before synthesis, then you could bypass the issue with shipping the Terasic source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T13:44:52.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12175" CreationDate="2021-10-15T14:09:51.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do that. Please go to a lawyer and let him/her draft such a commercial license for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not expect this group here to help. We are here to support the understanding of OSS, not of commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be sure to check all of the licenses of the real open source code you might be using/including in your project and to fulfill all of the requirements which these licenses impose on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T14:09:51.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12153" CreationDate="2021-10-15T15:38:14.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you add the MIT license in that directory and in addition add proper &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifiers&lt;/a&gt; in each of the files in order to create an unambiguous situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T15:38:14.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12217" CreationDate="2021-10-15T15:50:27.780" Score="3" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a followup to my &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12194/25293&quot;&gt;earlier&lt;/a&gt; question, I'm having trouble understanding the section about derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About The Licenses&lt;/a&gt; concerning CC BY-NC-ND:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only&#xA;allowing others to &lt;strong&gt;download your works and share them with others as&#xA;long as they credit you&lt;/strong&gt;, but they &lt;strong&gt;can’t change them in any way or use&#xA;them commercially&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take that to mean, you can download the work in whatever format it's offered in, but &lt;strong&gt;cannot modify the work itself&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part I'm confused about is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution under terms section&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;indicate if changes were made&lt;/strong&gt;. You may do so in any reasonable manner,&#xA;but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your&#xA;use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate that you're allowed to create a derivative (make changes), as long as you give credit to the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but under NoDerivatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you remix, &lt;strong&gt;transform&lt;/strong&gt;, or build upon the material, &lt;strong&gt;you may not&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;distribute the modified material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a contradiction, you can either modify the work and share, once you give credit or you can't modify or distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone clarify it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a licence that's &lt;strong&gt;most restrictive&lt;/strong&gt;. In other words, accept my work as it is, you cannot modify or create a derivative and distribute it. Is the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-NC-ND&lt;/code&gt; the correct licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25293" LastEditorDisplayName="user25293" LastEditDate="2021-10-15T15:59:11.790" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T18:26:01.013" Title="Attempting to understand CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 followup" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12216" CreationDate="2021-10-15T16:03:42.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be helpful to read the actual license text. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page that you link to&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;. Disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the text for &amp;quot;Attribution&amp;quot; is identical on all of the licenses. It's a more human-friendly summary of what is allowed. Continuing to read the human-readable summary makes it clear that remixing, transforming, or building upon the material prevents distribution. Reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the full legal code of the BY-NC-ND license confirms this&lt;/a&gt;. In Section 3 License Conditions, under Attribution, it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, You do not have permission under this&#xA;Public License to Share Adapted Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the CC licenses, BY-NC-ND is the most restrictive available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2021-10-15T18:26:01.013" LastActivityDate="2021-10-15T18:26:01.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-16T19:37:57.823" Score="-1" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am part of a community website, which is seen as disrespected by many people who do not know much about the community. People in the community hide their real identities by using pseudonyms and not talking about their real lives. Outside of the community, many do not mention that they are part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I do not want to disclose more about the website, but it is not illegal but just not understood very well by outsiders)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have written a tool, which is probably very useful for people in the community, and I wonder how to publish it as open source software while remaining anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two problems when publishing the tool. First, I do not want outsiders to know that I participate in that community. Second, I do not want to reveal to people inside the community that I am a software developer to hide this detail of my real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best way to publish the tool and get people to know it exists and how to use it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not want to create developer accounts (e.g. GitHub) with my pseudonym inside the community because I do not want to reveal to insiders that I can write such programs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not want to publish it using an identity I usually use because people should not find me in the community.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot advertise it in the community when I am the only one who knows it exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I may like to get feedback and support it if people need help to use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I have considered, which don't seem like a good solution to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using more than one account is not welcomed there, probably to prevent people from abusing their anonymity on the site. And advertising a software with a new account from an anonymous VPN IP could even be considered spam.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best thing would be if people find the tool themselves and it becomes popular because people who have been on the site for a while recommend it to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25359" LastEditorUserId="25359" LastEditDate="2021-10-17T09:18:08.783" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T17:09:58.710" Title="How to publish a software for use with a disrespected website?" Tags="|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12220" CreationDate="2021-10-16T21:20:15.100" Score="2" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand the table (mentioned at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&lt;/a&gt;) correctly, I can use either 'LGPLv2.1 only' or 'LGPLv2.1 or later' for my code if I want to include code from both 'GPLv2 only' and 'GPLv3'. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ydfmJ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ydfmJ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I also include code from a 'BSD-3-Clause License' into my 'LGPLv2.1 only' or 'LGPLv2.1 or later' code? Given how permissive BSD-3 is, it seems like it can be included for my LGPL code but I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So assuming the above is true and LGPLv2.1 (the two types mentioned above) can be used, how do I make my LICENSE file? Do I first include the notice for LGPL and then add a separate file that contains the BSD LICENSE? Is that all or am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25360" LastActivityDate="2021-10-16T21:40:40.143" Title="How do I license my code that needs to include code under 'GPLv2 only', 'GPLv3' and 'BSD 3'?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|gpl-2|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12219" CreationDate="2021-10-16T21:40:40.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you are misinterpreting the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top-left entry you've highlighted (&amp;quot;I want to copy code under GPL v2 only&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;I want to license my code under LGPL v2 only&amp;quot;) says that if &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are the copyright holder of some code which you which to release under the LGPL v2 only, then you can copy some GPL v2 code and distribute the binaries - and in that case, the combination is under the GPL v2 only. This is not the same as your case where you are trying to combine multiple pieces of code on which you are not the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, you can't do what you want - code released under &amp;quot;GPL v2 only&amp;quot; is done so deliberately so it cannot be combined with GPL v3 code. You will have to find a replacement for one or the other pieces of code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-10-16T21:40:40.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12218" CreationDate="2021-10-16T22:59:23.703" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simple: create a new identity to develop and the same identity to make it known in the community (thus join the community with a 2nd account) . Use your previous account in the community as before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you must, also use separate VPN to access these accounts to disallow identification via IP number comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-10-16T22:59:23.703" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12218" CreationDate="2021-10-17T17:09:58.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could create a new identity for development and then, with your other identity inside the community, pretend that you just stumbled upon that open-source tool you created with the secret identity. That way, nobody has to know that you are the author of the tool, and you don't have to possibly violate community rules by having two accounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(since I don't have enough reputation to post comments, I put my two clarification questions below)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you mean that other people in the community won't use the tool if they think that it has been created by people outside of the community? Are you afraid that because the tool is so specific to the community, that people will think that it has been developed by someone within the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13209" LastActivityDate="2021-10-17T17:09:58.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12229" CreationDate="2021-10-17T18:43:00.970" Score="6" ViewCount="2057" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a github repository that I plan on making public, and I'm in the process of choosing a license for it. It's a Python project that utilizes a number of open source libraries. The code for those libraries are not actually part of my repo, but my users will inevitably install those libraries when installing my own repo. Usually when describing obligations licenses talk about &amp;quot;this software in modified or original form must ...&amp;quot;, but I'm tempted to think my own software is not a modified form of theirs simply for depending it. How do the licensing obligations of these dependencies transfer here ? Do they even matter, as I am not actually modifying or shipping their software, but I am building software whose installation procedure requires installing those libraries first, as detailed in my &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; ? If so, what exactly does the license apply to ? If one of the libraries is copy-left, does this mean my own license must be copy-left as well, or just that I have to point my users towards their license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25225" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T14:15:15.747" Title="Do the licenses of dependencies matter if the dependencies are not actually shipped by my software?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-18T02:12:35.653" Score="13" ViewCount="4929" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, for example, assume an independent software developer has created a library and has licensed it under GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The developer is then contracted by a company to develop a software product for the company. The developer uses his library in the course of completing the job and includes the library in the final product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of the development for the company, the developer added new features to the library that were needed for the project, and fixed some library bugs. So now, the library has been modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, can the developer use the modified library on his next project for another customer, or does the company own the new library features and bug fixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that the time required to add the new library features and bug fixes was billed to the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25369" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-10-18T06:56:16.890" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T10:00:52.017" Title="GNU GPL v3 - If the author of a GPL software library makes changes under paid contract to a company, who &quot;owns&quot; the changes?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-18T04:01:12.717" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, if something is completed as &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot; then anything produced as part of that work belongs to the hirer, not the hired. However (and this is a very big however) there is enough uncertainty around exactly what counts as &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot; that you should always spell this out explicitly in any contract. This is all independent of the GPL or any other open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the independent developer didn't make it very clear while completing the work that they were depending on a GPL'd piece of code (whether their own or someone else's), then they have at best been unprofessional and are possibly in breach of contract. If that's you, talk to a lawyer as soon as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the developer use the modified library on his next project for another customer, or does the company own the new library features and bug fixes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the GPL, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The company owns the new code created, and has agreed to release that code under the GPL. In that case, the company must follow the requirements of the GPL when using the library (because the original unmodified code is available to them only under the GPL), and it is free for the developer to use as it would be any other code written by a third party and released under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The developer retained the rights to the code created (either in whole or the changes specific to the GPL code) and has released the changes under the GPL. The company must follow the requirements of the GPL when using the library, and the developer can do whatever they like with the code when it comes to other clients.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The company owns the new code created, has not released it under an open source license, and has been granted a separate license to use the code in the library (of course only possible if the developer has the right to do this, normally meaning they are the sole copyright holder of the code). The developer may not re-use the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dramatically different conclusions above are exactly why IP ownership needs to explicitly covered in any software development contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-10-18T06:56:29.287" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T06:56:29.287" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12210" CreationDate="2021-10-18T09:32:41.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring below to sections in the license language of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL_v2.1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe 2 options are open to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) You may distribute the entire library (all the files, even those you are not using) under Section 1 of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) When you are selectively ship only part of the library (the parts you need), then this would be considered a modification of the library, and Section 2 of the license would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion is that in your situation it would be easier to work along the path shown by Section 1 (no modification). But it is up to you, the license provides both options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T09:32:41.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-18T13:22:07.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's tricky. What would have been best if customer and author had figured out what exactly they want, and a contract had been signed to specify that. As it is, there are lots of unknowns; I would suggest the author should ask the company nicely for a gpl-licensed copy of the code and he is mostly in the clear (mostly because he is not the sole copyright holder anymore); if people get angry then in the worst case this ends in a costly court case. So be nice to save lots of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, under which license did the company get the original software? If the author is the sole author or agrees with the other authors, it could be any license, including obviously the gpl. Whether the company downloaded the software themselves doesn't really matter, the copyright holder can always give permission to use a different license. I know of one case where a company ordered software with the intent to have all rights to the software, the developer gave them gpl-licensed software, and had to pay damages because that was not what was in the contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, who has the copyright on the changes? In the case of &amp;quot;work from hire&amp;quot; most likely the company that pays. But something that could be argued about in a court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the company distributing the software by hiring someone to modify it? That can be argued for and against. Very good for increasing court cost. Obviously the author will have no rights until the software is distributed, so that makes a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if the author makes a copy of the software with his changes? He has no right to do this. Even if the gpl forced the company to give someone source code, that doesn't give anyone the right to &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the author is fine if (a) the company understood that the delivered software would be gpl licensed, and (b) the company voluntarily allows the author to take a copy of the modified software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is much better handled beforehand with a contract. And if there are disagreements between company and author, you'd have to be very careful to avoid ending up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T13:22:07.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-18T13:54:29.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really a question for a lawyer; however, some thoughts on how it should work out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the library was a preexisting work by you as the author, and the contract did not specify any additional licensing or assignment of copyright over that work aside from the existing public license, I think you're fairly safe using any minor changes, especially bug fixes, you made. Often these are not of sufficient magnitude and originality to even merit copyright consideration. (For example even the FSF is happy to overlook very small fix contributions for the purposes of copyright assignment policy, because their lawyers are confident that such small changes are not a legal risk.) Also, it's not like you could redo them &amp;quot;black box&amp;quot; without being &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot; by already having done them before, and you almost certainly were not compensated well enough for &amp;quot;being locked out of fixing your own library&amp;quot; to be a consequence of the work you did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You really should spell this out ahead of time. (Next time, do that!) I have standard contract terms I use with any clients for open source work where it's specified that any changes made to open source software will follow the preferred licensing and copyright assignment policy of the upstream project for the software being modified (which, in many cases, happens to be me). If you don't have conflicting license obligations (to other contributors) not to do this and it's useful to the client, you can also offer a more permissive (basically unlimited) license to use and sublicense the result. This can help with concerns by their lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T13:54:29.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12223" CreationDate="2021-10-18T14:15:15.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use Dependencies (direct or transitive) and you are not actually including this code of dependencies into your distribution, but you are just referencing it (and the user of the software will have to download and install it), then you can consider the information about the dependencies as metadata related to your code. So in your own license.txt you do not have to (for example) include all of the attribution notices and license terms of these dependencies that you are not distributing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License-compatibility, however, is a separate thing. If you include strong-copyleft-licensed libraries as a dependency, then it is likely that your own code also needs to be licensed under the same strong-copyleft license. This has to be looked at in each individual case. For GPL (as a mainstream example of a strong-copyleft license) you will need to carefully study the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidance of FSF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very often, libraries are not exclusively licensed under strong-copyleft licenses, you can frequently see that they are dual- or tri-licensed. In such case you can usually select the license terms (from the 2 or 3 offered options) that you want to have applied in your project. You will just have to clearly identify that in your project and in your license.txt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T14:15:15.747" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-18T21:31:19.920" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers dance around this or only mention it in the comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL only requires source code to be made available to those that receive binaries. If the binaries have not been distributed to you (outside the scope of your contract to modify the code), most likely you do not have permission to use the modifications you made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18378" LastActivityDate="2021-10-18T21:31:19.920" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12236" CreationDate="2021-10-19T08:50:43.190" Score="2" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago, I wrote a small program to automate a simple task. At the time, I released the program under the GPL license. I'm the sole author of the work and it was not created for hire (I was not under employment contract while making it or being paid for it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've been contacted by someone who has reused and incorporated the work, who at the time did not notice it was licensed under GPL. I've been asked if I'd be willing to release the work under another license so they can keep using my work as part of a closed source commercial project. (Something they wrote at work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not against this, but am I even allowed to do that? Am I free to rescind the share-alike requirement of GPL by just issuing the same work under another, more permissible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I say &amp;quot;I release this to you under $license additionally?&amp;quot; I was thinking cc0 to completely wash my hands of it, but is that even possible? I don't want to expose myself to any liability doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11419" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T05:55:55.263" Title="I previously released a work under GPL, can I release the same work under another license?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-19T09:38:46.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To understand the problem, it makes sense to spell out the parties involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The original library author, who owns the copyright on the original library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The company who hired the library author for the enhancements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A third party&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between the first two parties, a contract exists (possibly verbal). The ownership of the enhancements is a matter of contract. Since the library author owns the copyright, this contract can ignore the GPL altogether, or it might explicitly reference the GPL. This is a private matter between those two parties, where the law gives them a lot of freedom. The GPL cannot possibly restrict the library author/copyright owner from exercising those legal rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the third party, however, the GPL only covers the publicly distributed binary. Only that part of the source code is covered by the GPL grant. The third party is unaffected and generally unaware of that contract for enhancements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2021-10-19T09:38:46.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12231" CreationDate="2021-10-19T09:47:09.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, as you are the sole author, you can release your work under any license and you can change the license at your will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you cannot change the licence retroactively, you cannot say &amp;quot;Version x.y.z which was under GPL from today is under your-needed-license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think that the the simplest solution is for you to relase a x.y.z+1 version under another license (or a dual lincese if you wish) and as long as they use that new version, they are in the clear legally even in the future or against some third part that can challenge them about licensing issue.&#xA;(being a closed source commercial product, you can not care if they use it, but some of their competitor can try to provoke some legal issues to them, even if I don't see how)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5475" LastEditorUserId="5475" LastEditDate="2021-10-19T10:40:10.000" LastActivityDate="2021-10-19T10:40:10.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-19T14:05:50.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can remove the GPL entirely from this question. So much that it may even fit better at law.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, suppose that instead of a GPL library, Joe is the owner of some proprietary library he licenses to his customers. Then Joe is hired to do some work for a company, and in the scope of this work, he decides to include his library in the work he was hired to do, and as part of such work he had to modify the library. See? The problem is exactly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the library was originally under GPL, the company is not necessarily bound by it, because when Joe chose to use the library he owns, at very least he implicitly licensed it to the company (as part of the work contract) for whatever use it was the end goal of the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Joe or the company later decide they care about the copyright ownership of either version of the library, if they can't come to an agreement, the court will have to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20993" LastEditorUserId="20993" LastEditDate="2021-10-22T10:00:52.017" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T10:00:52.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12237" CreationDate="2021-10-19T15:40:15.070" Score="3" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose Robert Smith has a repo with a README file containing this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Authors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Smith&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert Smith's website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code copyright Robert Smith. Code released under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have cloned Robert Smith's repo and made changes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What modifications am I allowed to make to this section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I add my name to the list of authors?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do I have  to mark my name as a contributor?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will I have to write 'original author' in brackets beside Robert Smith's name?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Am I allowed to change the license section from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code copyright Robert Smith. Code released under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code copyright Robert Smith and Off Kilter. Code released under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code released under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;Year&amp;gt; Robert Smith&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;Year&amp;gt; Off Kilter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I instead simply remove this Authors and License section in the README file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LICENSE file will remain unmodified except that my name will be added to the copyright section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25394" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T07:05:27.547" Title="What modifications to the Authors and License section in the README file of a cloned repository are permissible under an MIT License?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12231" CreationDate="2021-10-20T05:55:55.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can license the work under new terms to everyone or just to this one person, as you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to release a new version to add a license. If you did, then companies that sell licenses to use their software would have to bump the version number every time somebody bought one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I free to rescind the share-alike requirement of GPL by just issuing the same work under another, more permissible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You aren't rescinding anything. The person you're granting the new license to never accepted the terms of the GPL. The GPL has no power over them. The only reason anyone chooses to follow the requirements of the GPL is that it grants them some rights if they do. Using the software doesn't automatically make them subject to the GPL, it just makes them guilty of copyright infringement if they don't abide by the GPL and their use isn't covered by some other license or by fair use, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This person did infringe on your copyright. As the sole copyright owner you can handle that by simply choosing not to sue them. If you want to bind yourself legally to never suing them, then... why are you being so nice? It's their fault they infringed, if I were you I'd ask for some money. But if you want to tie your own hands for whatever reason, then I'm not sure how you'd do it. You should ask at the Law SE, or see if there's an existing question there that covers it. A new license can prevent future infringement, but I don't think you can make it retroactive such that the earlier infringement never happened. I may be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25397" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T05:55:55.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12235" CreationDate="2021-10-20T06:05:55.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Authors and Licence section in a README file has no legal status, so you can do with it whatever you want, including removing it completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only effective requirement of the MIT license is that you must preserve the license text itself and the copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-10-20T07:05:27.547" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T07:05:27.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12239" CreationDate="2021-10-20T08:56:33.473" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I develop a software that is licensed under BSD-4, but has some optional modules that rely on different existing third party libraries (TPL) which are licensed under AGPL v3 . The optional modules can be enabled or disabled (default) during the compilation process.&#xA;The distributed binaries for my software always have these modules disabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For using the modules I ask my users to obtain such TPL and I provide the means to integrate it in our software (typically -DTPL_USE_FOO=ON/OFF, -DTPL_FOO_LIBRARIES=..., -DTPL_FOO_INCLUDES=...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some find that process too difficult and have asked me to ease this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have implemented a solution that can download or use the source of the TPL from the internet or the user machine, compile it, and include it in the module. I intend to provide the compile instructions for the TPL as part of my code to avoid problems with flags, targets etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under scenario, and after reading the aGPL license (specially the parts referring about the &amp;quot;propagate&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot;) I have some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - Am I violating the AGPLv3 of the TPL by providing a mean to automatically download it as a part of my software building process if the optional module that uses it is enabled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - Am I violating the AGPLv3 of the TPL by providing the compile instructions for such library as part of the building process of my code if the optional module that uses is enabled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - Would I unwarily be extending the AGPLv3 license to my software by including any of the processes above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25398" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-10-20T09:16:18.860" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T09:31:43.903" Title="Providing compiling instructions for AGPLv3 software as part of a BSD licensed code" Tags="|bsd|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12238" CreationDate="2021-10-20T09:31:43.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The library is indeed AGPL.  Using it requires(*) the entire piece of software into which it is linked to be released under AGPL.  The &amp;quot;entire piece of software&amp;quot; will definitely be the whole of the plugin module that uses it; depending on the degree of integration between your core software and its modules, it may well be the whole of your codebase.  You can find more guidance on that in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the integration between core and modules is tight enough that it makes the whole program a derivative work, this doesn't mean that your code always has to be released under AGPL.  But when a user is supplied with code that includes that module, the entire codebase must be supplied to them under AGPL (as planetmaker notes above).  In such a case, you can freely include the library source, which at least makes that part of your life easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, some (though not me) may think this makes the library bit of a poison pill, but the tetgen licensing FAQ you kindly link to is clear (q2) that the tetgen developers are aware of this, and intend it.  If you don't like it, don't use that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Assuming the FSF's views on dynamic linking and the GPL are correct.  Though I personally believe they are correct, the issue is not settled.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and others linked therefrom, for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T09:31:43.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-20T09:32:02.173" Score="0" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downloaded a audio clip licensed under Attribution 3.0 (it literally just said &amp;quot;license: Attribution 3.0&amp;quot;). I am using this in a JavaScript game. Where should the attribution go? Can I do it inline with the source code or is it normally put in the readme file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I downloaded the file its name was quite long with awkward characters (like &lt;code&gt;my~sound_example.com-32423111.wav&lt;/code&gt;). I renamed it to &lt;code&gt;my_sound.wav&lt;/code&gt;. When attributing is the original filename, current filename or the intended title by the author used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T19:26:41.250" Title="How to give attribution to media that is used in game" Tags="|attribution|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2021-10-20T15:32:18.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer also depends on what laws apply. In Germany the author owns the changes but might grant the changes under a different license to their employer depending what stands in the employment contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25399" LastActivityDate="2021-10-20T15:32:18.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12248" CreationDate="2021-10-20T22:03:37.857" Score="6" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding FFmpeg binary distribution and libx265 and GPLv2/3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FFmpeg documentation says that libx265 is GPLv2-or-later - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org/general.html#x265&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ffmpeg.org/general.html#x265&lt;/a&gt; -  but the x265 project itself states it is GPLv2 (only)  (when used in a Open Source project, and not using the commercial license) - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.x265.org/x265-licensing-faq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.x265.org/x265-licensing-faq/&lt;/a&gt; . The practical implication of this for binary distribution, as understand it then (if the FFmpeg documentation is wrong), is that one can not release a distribution of FFMpeg under GPLv3 - only GPLv2, if including libx265. Or, Am I missing some reasoning regarding libx265 and FFmpeg binary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: for easier reasoning, let's avoid thinking about other libraries and their license, and just focus on using only libx265 with FFmpeg in a distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10907" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T11:57:28.580" Title="FFmpeg, libx265 and GPLv2/3 binary distribution" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-22T09:18:03.703" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a template for writing a certain kind of report (say a Word file that offers instructions and a structure). I now want to avoid that someone commercializes that template, so I'd share it as CC-BY-SA-NC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, does that now also apply to the reports created starting from that template? For that use, I would just want an attribution. Is there an easy way to accomplish this? This would seem to be a situation that webpage template designers might find themselves in, but I haven't yet found a clear example ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25413" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T09:31:39.260" Title="(CC) Licensing a template with more protection for template than derived works" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12245" CreationDate="2021-10-22T09:31:39.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My gut feeling is you can't get what you want.  Assuming that works created from a template are derivatives of that template, you're saying you'll distribute your template CC BY-NC, but with an exception that derivative works are simply under CC BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice can then take the template, make a significant addition to it, and release that (it, too, being a derivative) under CC BY.  Bob can then take the derivative template, remove Alice's changes, and release something that's identical to your CC BY-NC original, but with only a CC BY licence on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on the other hand, works created from a template are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; considered derivatives of it (which I doubt), then you have no control over such works as a result of your copyright in the template, and cannot even insist on attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-10-22T09:31:39.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12249" CreationDate="2021-10-23T04:57:45.337" Score="3" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;My software depends on and links to a third-party open-source library licensed under the MIT license. No copyright notice is present in the LICENSE file, the README file, or any of the source files. However, my understanding is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/2a8807e889a43c6b89eb6f2736907afa87ae592f&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all contributors to such projects are copyright holders&lt;/a&gt;, and that the MIT license requires reproduction of its copyright notice even if it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8308/license-but-no-copyright-notice-how-to-attribute-correctly&quot;&gt;implicit&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How might I provide attribution to such a third-party library? Would it be sufficient to have a copyright notice like &amp;quot;Copyright (c) the CoolLibrary contributors&amp;quot; or would I need to list out every contributor individually even when there are dozens (or more) of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25423" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T10:29:55.503" Title="How to provide attribution when numerous contributors hold copyright" Tags="|mit|copyright|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12242" CreationDate="2021-10-23T11:57:28.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turned out that The FFmpeg documentation is correct here - libx265 is under GPLv2 or later, which means it can be used as in the use case example in the question - i.e under GPLv3!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a user has to look at the source code headers of the X265 code itself to be sure that it is &amp;quot;or-later&amp;quot; (and not &amp;quot;only&amp;quot;) - so an suggestion issue was added to the project, that they add the &amp;quot;or-later&amp;quot; in their license FAQ. &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265_git/issues/607/license-faq-enchancement-suggestion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265_git/issues/607/license-faq-enchancement-suggestion&lt;/a&gt;. Thanks for the input @planetmaker&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10907" LastActivityDate="2021-10-23T11:57:28.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12247" CreationDate="2021-10-24T10:29:55.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As noted in the question you linked to, the MIT license requires that you preserve the existing copyright notices. It does not require that you add/invent any missing copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are just linking to the library and you are reproducing the licensing information for the documentation of your binary-only distribution, then you can just write something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software uses CoolLibrary, which is under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;MIT license text&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without adding copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy code under the MIT license, which doesn't have any copyright notices, into your project, then it might be a good idea to add a copyright line like &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) the CoolLibrary authors&lt;/code&gt; to make it abundantly clear that the copyright line that follows with your name on it doesn't claim the copyrights for the whole file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T10:29:55.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12251" CreationDate="2021-10-24T17:27:04.963" Score="4" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m trying to understand the limitations of ‘programs’ licensed under AGPL, and the more I read, the more I am confused. I’d very much appreciate it if someone can help me with the following questions.&#xA;I’m trying to keep as less technical details as possible, but I have to provide some for context and to highlight edge cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s assume there is a program’s source code licensed under AGPL 3.0. The program itself is a rest service. Source code consists of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;modules with business logic. Uses inversion of control, very easy to inject new functionality into original logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;modules that implement access to infrastructure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;modules that configure dependency injection for A and B wrt to provided configuration. Configuration can either use business logic from A, or inject 3-rd party binaries that implement an appropriate interface without updating\building the whole product (something like plugin support)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;service that configures web interface and configures all above with json-configuration file. Business logic-wise, there is one line call to the module (section #3) that configures everything based on config files. Default config files are almost empty and the service does nothing. The 3rd party can update config files according to their needs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the service is available as a docker image, with default config files (mentioned above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just in case, tech stack is .NET; all source code is part of one visual studio solution; the service is ASP .NET service; module means class library visual studio project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 3rd party wants to use this service. What obligation do they have in the following cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If 3-rd party pulls a docker image, copy their own configuration files to the image, deploy it to their infrastructure, and use it as part of their public-facing web app. Must they publish configuration files and/or modified docker containers? In other words, can AGPL treat significant configuration changes as software modifications?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Corresponding Source&amp;quot; for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in this case, config files are needed to run object code properly. On another hand most (if not all) server applications require config files. Does it mean that every service under AGPL requires publishing sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same case as #1, but they copy their own business logic modules into the docker container business logic and inject them into the solution. Must they publish the module’s source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If 3-rd party implements its own service using modules A, B, C without modifications inside of code. But they implement some extra business logic (in a separate module) and inject it into the original logic. Then deploy it into their infrastructure and use it as part of a public-facing web app. Must they publish the source code of their service and extra modules? The key point here is that the original modules aren’t changed\updated. Extra functionality is built on top of existing modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same case as #3, but modules A, B, C are available via a package manager (nuget in the current case)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same case as #3, but instead of using it in its own product, 3-rd party wants to sell the binaries in any form (docker image, nuget packages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same questions as #3, #4, but they use service as part of an internal application available inside the corporation’s network only. Does it change the answers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25404" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-11T15:13:53.017" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T15:13:53.017" Title="Service with rich configuration abilities under AGPL License" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12250" CreationDate="2021-10-24T21:01:21.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No, the configuration files are not part of the work; reading a text configuration file is in general not &amp;quot;intimate data communication&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, if the injected modules engage in intimate data communication with the covered work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, ditto; while there is some debate over whether linking creates a derived work in copyright law, &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/232146/136413&quot;&gt;the general consensus&lt;/a&gt; (and certainly that of the FSF) is that it does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No change - the AGPL doesn't care where you got the other bits of code from, the same requirements apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No change - the AGPL doesn't care if you sell it or not, the same requirements apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is unclear. While using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;something internally within an organisation is not distribution&lt;/a&gt; and therefore the majority of the (A)GPL does not apply, section 13 of the AGPL requires you to make it available to &amp;quot;all users&amp;quot;. It is potentially an open question as to whether the users in that case are separate entities entitled to the code, or whether they are part of the organisation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-10-24T21:27:52.880" LastActivityDate="2021-10-24T21:27:52.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-24T23:16:14.007" Score="20" ViewCount="5144" Body="&lt;p&gt;If not, are there any other good options for me to effectively allow use by everyone for almost any reason? I'd prefer to take a hands-off approach as opposed to attempting to place anything in the public domain, which seems to be quite painful and controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25430" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T18:56:53.830" Title="Can the MIT license be applied to music?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12252" CreationDate="2021-10-25T07:07:54.163" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can&lt;/em&gt; it be applied? Yes. But it would seem unhelpful to make anybody using the music to repeat the contents of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; which makes multiple references to &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;; that is at best going to confuse anybody receiving the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, there are licenses designed for more general creative works; the best known of these are the Creative Commons licenses. You likely want either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution&lt;/a&gt; license (commonly known as CC-BY) if you want to keep the MIT-like behaviour of requiring attribution, or potentially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creation Commons Public Domain Dedication&lt;/a&gt; (slightly less commonly known as CC0) if you're not concerned about receiving attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-10-25T09:16:38.257" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T09:16:38.257" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12252" CreationDate="2021-10-25T16:11:55.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; is generally used to absolve the creator of any potential liability, offering the software/product for use &amp;quot;as-is&amp;quot;. While music (esp vocals/lyrics) can be viewed as controversial or harmful by some listeners, depending on the country &amp;amp; its laws, artists/creators may be protected from prosecution (First Amendment protections, in a US context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just like various US cases where music creators were challenged under obscenity laws, separate from any intellectual-property claims, I don't think any license you use actually protects you from listeners' potential claims of harm down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best you can reasonably do, is to choose a license that restricts type/scope of use (Creative Commons has several, here's their &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license chooser&lt;/a&gt;), and add your own additional clause requesting that users ask you for permission for any uses beyond that. Such an approach doesn't free you from liability, but at least gives you more control over how your music will be used, so you can hopefully avoid any problematic applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25438" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T16:11:55.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12262" CreationDate="2021-10-25T21:10:56.597" Score="2" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a C++ program that uses an unmodified as-is 3rd-party library that's licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/CPAL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Public Attribution License v1.0 (CPAL)&lt;/a&gt;. I want to distribute my program along with the 3rd-party library without open-sourcing the rest of my program (the &lt;strong&gt;larger work&lt;/strong&gt;). In order to achieve this, it seems sufficient that I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide the name and logo of the 3rd-party library in a splash-screen on startup of my C++ program (§14, §Exhibit B)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a copy of the CPAL license in addition to the source of the 3rd-party library to the user (§15, §3.1, §3.2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've encountered some contradictory information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#cpal-not-allowed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google prohibits internal use of CPAL-licensed software&lt;/a&gt; because it is &amp;quot;AGPL-like in crucial ways&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL-licensed software is also prohibited&lt;/a&gt;). No clarification is given, however Google seems to imply, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.zalando.com/docs/resources/licensing/#strong-copyleft-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like another company states&lt;/a&gt;, that the CPAL, like the AGPL, has a &amp;quot;strong copyleft&amp;quot; provision, which would force larger works that use CPAL code to be open-sourced and use the triggering license for the rest of the larger work. This contradicts &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/CPAL-1.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another source&lt;/a&gt; which describes the CPAL as &amp;quot;weak copyleft&amp;quot;, like the Mozilla Public License (MPL) that it's based on (MPL code is accepted by Google), which would require open-sourcing only the CPAL library and any modifications to it (the &lt;strong&gt;covered work&lt;/strong&gt;), and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; requiring open-sourcing the larger work that said library is used in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the scope and trigger of the CPAL's copyleft? Are my bullet-points sufficient for complying with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25442" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T13:39:01.890" Title="What is the scope and trigger of the the copyleft provision of the Common Public Attribution License v1.0 (CPAL)?" Tags="|licensing|distribution|cpal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12102" CreationDate="2021-10-25T23:17:07.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a similar requirement and found a solution - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/poi/commit/e66486bc8a22c92ad7a21befc452e7786611fdcb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/apache/poi/commit/e66486bc8a22c92ad7a21befc452e7786611fdcb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;javadocJar {&#xA;    metaInf {&#xA;        from(&amp;quot;$projectDir/../legal/LICENSE&amp;quot;)&#xA;        from(&amp;quot;$projectDir/../legal/NOTICE&amp;quot;)&#xA;    }&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25443" LastActivityDate="2021-10-25T23:17:07.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12252" CreationDate="2021-10-26T03:17:03.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You certainly &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; use the MIT license for a piece of music, but it's probably not a good idea.  Software licenses are very different than licenses for so-called &amp;quot;cultural works&amp;quot; (things like art, music, or literature).  In the early days of free software, these differences caused problems for several software projects who used licenses that were designed for cultural works and did not provide the same freedoms/protections when applied to software.  I'm not aware of any specific cases the other way around, but you'd be much better off selecting a license that was designed specifically for cultural works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license includes a long section that talks about how the software has no warranty, etc.  That entire paragraph doesn't really mean anything in the context of a piece of music and would simply be confusing.  It's also a significant portion of the license text.  If you removed that paragraph you could also remove the clause that requires the disclaimer to be reproduced in any copies of the work.  By the time you removed all the irrelevant content, you'd end up with a very different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a number of available licenses that you can use that are designed for cultural works - not software - and should give you better protection with fewer hidden gotchas.  Select one based on your specific needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL-style licenses (derivative works must use a similar license):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:LAL-1.3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Art License&lt;/a&gt; - Analagous to the GPL, but designed for artistic works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; - Requires attribution and derivative works must use the same license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT-style licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY&lt;/a&gt; - Requires attribution only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MirOS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MirOS License&lt;/a&gt; - Variation of the MIT license designed to be more broadly applicable (refers to generic &amp;quot;works&amp;quot;, not programs). Specifically worded to meet certain European legal requirements but should also work elsewhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:WTFPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Absurdly&lt;/em&gt; simple license.  Grants the most rights in the fewest possible words.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/License-Notices-for-Other-Files.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unnamed GNU license for support files&lt;/a&gt; - This is what the GNU project uses for small non-code files (READMEs, etc). It's two sentences, and essentially what you'd get if you removed all the software-specific stuff from the MIT license. Unlike the other GNU licenses, this one is not viral.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free use, but no derivative works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antoyo/vim-licenses/master/licenses/verbatim.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Verbatim Copying License&lt;/a&gt; - Extremely simple license that allows free use and copying, but does not permit changes.  If you roll your own license, this is a good starting point.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public domain equivalents (grants all permissions, while also &lt;em&gt;forfeiting your own rights&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; - Releases the work into the public domain in locales where such a thing is possible. In other areas, it provides the legalese necessary to have the same effect.  Some locales won't let you give up certain rights, but CC0 ensures that won't limit what others can do with the work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; - Same concept as CC0 but with simpler wording.  Specifically references software, but change the word &amp;quot;software&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; and the first three paragraphs should be all you need.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide to use one of the Creative Commons licenses, make sure you use one that has the &amp;quot;approved for free cultural works&amp;quot; badge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For cultural works, I recommend one of the MIT-style licenses (the unnamed GNU license in particular) over a public domain style license.  They give users the same permissions, but you avoid giving up any of your own rights as the creator.  Those rights might be important later if (for instance) someone wants to publish your work as part of a compilation and needs an explicit authorization from the copyright owner.  They also help ensure that you are properly credited as the creator, which is an important tradition in the music world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T03:17:03.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-26T06:22:23.197" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed an ASF contributor mentioning this on issue tracker of a library that ASF disallows downstream LGPL dependencies. I traced down ASF's policy to this page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html&lt;/a&gt; . It mentions LGPL under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Category X: What can we NOT include in an ASF Project? &amp;gt; Places restrictions on larger works: &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my understanding of LGPL is correct, then you can use LGPL dependency as a library in a project that has any other license (even a proprietary license), and you incur no additional obligations unless you're making modifications to the library itself. This is understanding is also echoed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License#Differences_from_the_GPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here on wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. Is my understanding correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, I don't understand why someone would not want to include a LGPL library. I ask this from the point of view of say someone who's developing libraries to release under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover it seems that ASF allows several &amp;quot;weak copyleft&amp;quot; licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#weak-copyleft-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#weak-copyleft-licenses&lt;/a&gt;, which may help in answering my question by narrowing it down to &amp;quot;what do the allowed set of licenses have that LGPL doesn't have?&amp;quot;, but I haven't been able to answer that myself either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20695" LastEditorUserId="20695" LastEditDate="2021-10-26T06:27:51.053" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T06:27:51.053" Title="Why does apache software foundation disllow inclusion of LGPL libraries in its projects but allows other &quot;weak copyleft&quot; lecenses?" Tags="|lgpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-26T12:51:28.843" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a new kind of graphical library for the web. It's roughly analogous to an animation library such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://esotericsoftware.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spine&lt;/a&gt; in that it will ship with an editor for creating graphical assets and a runtime &amp;quot;binary&amp;quot; for using those assets in e.g. a game. I'd like to open-source my code in such a way that anyone who publishes a game using it must also release the assets created or manipulated by my library under a copyleft license like CC-BY-SA. The purpose would be to encourage the community to grow a collection of free assets to go along with my free tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later I may provide an alternative commercial license for those that find my conditions too restrictive (i.e. dual licensing). Commercial license holders would not be required to release their assets. I don't believe this is relevant for my question but I'm mentioning it here just in case I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a software license that specifically covers derived assets in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (followup based on comments): If I cannot dictate terms for the created assets, could I instead dictate a license for the released game (which by necessity integrates my runtime code)? Wouldn't this work assuming I release the runtime under e.g. the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25452" LastEditorUserId="25452" LastEditDate="2021-10-26T13:49:00.863" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T05:30:01.067" Title="Is there a copyleft license that applies specifically to assets created using my software?" Tags="|copyleft|assets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12260" CreationDate="2021-10-26T13:04:47.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a software license that specifically covers derived assets in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless those created assets contain a copyrightable portion of your software, the assets are not derived works of your software (just like a document you write in MS Word is not a derived work of MS Word). If it is not your work nor derived from your work, you have no rights to dictate licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I cannot dictate terms for the created assets, could I instead dictate a license for the released game (which by necessity integrates my runtime code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If you use the GPL or AGPL license, then that forces the game engine to be under that same license. It might still be possible to construct the game engine in such a way that the game-play aspects (rules, visuals, audio, etc.) are still independent works of authorship as far as copyrights go and would not be affected by your (A)GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2021-10-27T05:30:01.067" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T05:30:01.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12256" CreationDate="2021-10-26T13:39:01.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the scope and trigger of the CPAL's copyleft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CPAL is what I would call file-based copyleft: Once code is licensed under CPAL, it needs to stay under that license and modifications to the same file must also be licensed under CPAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my bullet-points sufficient for complying with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem that Google likely has with the license are in the Additional Terms, because those also have requirements around network use that become problematic for companies like Google, like having to show the attribution on every session a user opens with Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T13:39:01.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-20T16:25:51.657" Score="4" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to add code from an Apache 2.0 software to my own code base which is MIT. I know that generally these are compatible but my worry is how to add the Apache 2.0 code with the appropriate modifications, remarks, new files and licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My plan was to simply make a new folder with the Apache code in my own code copy their license and code (and my modifications there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to do anything else? Where does the &lt;code&gt;notices.md&lt;/code&gt; file go and what do I add to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also need to include a copyright. Where does that go? Where do stating the changes to the software go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This page &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&lt;/a&gt; recommends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Must&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include Copyright&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describes whether the original copyright must be retained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including the full text of license in modified software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;State Changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stating significant changes made to software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Include Notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the library has a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; file with attribution notes, you must include that NOTICE when you distribute. You may append to this NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References from my research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-the-MIT-license-compatible-with-the-Apache-License-Version-2-APLv2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Is-the-MIT-license-compatible-with-the-Apache-License-Version-2-APLv2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-Apache-licensed-source-code-and-redistribute-it-as-MIT-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-Apache-licensed-source-code-and-redistribute-it-as-MIT-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4102/can-i-copy-code-licensed-under-apache-2-to-a-project-licensed-under-mit?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Can I copy code licensed under Apache 2 to a project licensed under MIT?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9262/what-happens-when-a-mit-licensed-project-uses-apache-2-0-drivers-to-connect-to-g&quot;&gt;What happens when a MIT licensed project uses Apache 2.0 drivers to connect to GPLv3 databases?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25395" OwnerDisplayName="Charlie Parker" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2021-11-03T08:24:12.197" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T09:47:20.393" Title="What type of notices and licenses do I need to add when adding (and modifying) code from an Apache 2.0 codebase to my own MIT codebase?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12252" CreationDate="2021-10-26T18:56:53.830" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can as well make your music royalty free while still retaining all copyrights and rights to be known as the author. It would not be impossible to have there be exception if you want. If you are Ok with your music being used on YouTube but don't want it used in a porno for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25456" LastActivityDate="2021-10-26T18:56:53.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12268" CreationDate="2021-10-27T06:10:42.627" Score="0" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nuta/kerla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Kerla kernel&lt;/a&gt;. It's dual-licensed under the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses. If I were to create a fork of that, would I be allowed to change my fork's license to the GPL? Until today, I was very confident that the answer to this was &amp;quot;obviously yes&amp;quot;, but in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qg4h8l/kerla_a_new_operating_system_kernel_with_linux/hi3u9is/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Reddit thread&lt;/a&gt;, the consensus seems to be that this isn't allowed, and I have no idea why. What am I missing here? Isn't the whole point of permissive licenses that relicensing is allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11403" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T02:18:34.740" Title="Are you allowed to create a GPL fork of an MIT/Apache licensed project?" Tags="|relicensing|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-27T08:00:46.860" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say an algorithm is published and then afterwards it is implemented under GPLv3. Although the algorithm is mostly abstract, it does refer to specifications from a de facto standard in order to do its job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, the stages are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Algorithm is published&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Implemented in GPLv3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does implementing the algorithm under GPLv3 restrict its, i.e. the algorithm, re-implementation under permissive licenses? Are the latter derivative work if they are purely based on the original algo and not on whatever mods were added in step 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25460" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T09:35:49.010" Title="Regarding an algorithm, its implementation under GPLv3 and permissive licenses" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12266" CreationDate="2021-10-27T08:17:24.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can implement the algorithm multiple times with different license schemes, as long as you don't copy the code from another implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you copy code then you need to adhere to the requirements imposed by the existing license, and in the example you mention above you would not be able to use code from a GPL-3 project in an implementation licensed under a permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to check under which license conditions the algorithm itself is published. 'De Facto Standard' does not automatically imply that it can be used for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2021-10-27T09:35:49.010" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T09:35:49.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12265" CreationDate="2021-10-27T09:22:47.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read through the entire part of the Reddit thread related to 'permissive license' and I found that there is a lot of emotions and very few facts in the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question is: Yes, you can re-license a fork. There is a lengthy &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page listing many licenses and their compatibility with various versions of GPL&lt;/a&gt;. I recommend you read that and find the frame conditions for what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-10-27T09:22:47.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12240" CreationDate="2021-10-28T19:26:41.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no single hard and fast rule. Here is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the license&lt;/a&gt; has to say about attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution (&amp;quot;Attribution Parties&amp;quot;) in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., &amp;quot;French translation of the Work by Original Author,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author&amp;quot;). &lt;strong&gt;The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors.&lt;/strong&gt; For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if your game has a credits screen, then you must at least credit the author on that screen. Similarly, if you have a list of contributors in the manual or in other auxiliary materials (such as a readme file), you must include attribution there. If you don't have any credits whatsoever, then this requirement doesn't specifically attach, but you still have to give attribution in some &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; fashion. For example, you might put a file in the installation folder, or you might display a notice on startup. Exactly what counts as &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; will vary depending on the specifics of your game and how you are distributing it. In general, it's usually a good idea to err on the side of greater visibility, where reasonable, so as to avoid disputes with the original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T19:26:41.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-28T21:08:29.043" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing in several open source projects, particularly smaller ones, that it is discouraged to ask for a timeline or deadline for a particular feature or release, because &amp;quot;it'll be ready when it's ready&amp;quot; and everyone working on it is a volunteer working in their spare time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this concept called? Are there any articles or other resources that explain it? I searched around but couldn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25475" LastActivityDate="2021-10-28T21:08:29.043" Title="In open source software, what is the concept of &quot;ready when it's ready&quot; called?" Tags="|contributor|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-29T07:49:46.957" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Slion/Fulguris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fulguris&lt;/a&gt; which is in conflict with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jamal2362/Styx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Styx&lt;/a&gt;. Both projects are MPL 2.0. Fulguris is a fork of the decade old &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/anthonycr/Lightning-Browser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lightning&lt;/a&gt; and Styx is just a rebrand of Fulguris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Styx completely destroyed the git history. The guy running it keeps copying new code over from my repository to his removing my name in the process. Looking at Styx repository you can hardly track down any of the actual authors, myself included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this copyright infringement?&#xA;If it is copyright infringement how easy would it be to fix it? Can I demand the whole git history to be restored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked the same question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.community/t/is-commit-author-name-stripping-copyright-infringement/207078&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub community forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25464" LastEditorUserId="25464" LastEditDate="2021-10-29T13:19:08.353" LastActivityDate="2021-10-29T13:19:08.353" Title="Is commit author name stripping copyright infringement?" Tags="|copyright|github|mpl|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12271" CreationDate="2021-10-29T08:11:52.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say the specific act of removing git history is unlikely to be copyright infringement; the restriction in the MPL (section 3.4) is against removing or altering copyright notices, and a git commit username/e-mail/etc is definitely not a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However this case is messy because (as far as I can see) you haven't followed the MPL closely. In particular, the definition of Covered Software in the MPL (section 1.4) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means Source Code Form to which the initial Contributor has attached the notice in Exhibit A&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you don't seem to have added the notice in Exhibit A to any(?) of the source files in the repository. You could also have added a copyright notice to each file (as suggested in Exhibit A), and removing those would definitely have been a copyright violation. I suggest you go through, add the Exhibit A notice and an explicit copyright statement to each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-10-29T08:11:52.203" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-29T13:58:39.723" Score="0" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Slion/Fulguris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fulguris&lt;/a&gt; which is in conflict with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jamal2362/Styx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Styx&lt;/a&gt;. Both projects are MPL 2.0. Fulguris is a fork of the decade old &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/anthonycr/Lightning-Browser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lightning&lt;/a&gt; and Styx is just a rebrand of Fulguris. See also that other open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12271/is-commit-author-name-stripping-copyright-infringement&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the future to prevent such abusive rebrands to fail to properly credit Fulguris and its contributors I want to make sure they have a legal requirement to prominently display something like: &amp;quot;Powered by Fulguris&amp;quot;, hopefully making sure users of rebrands are aware of where they are coming from and who is actually providing them with the good stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering using CPAL as it seems it was designed for that purpose. I'm also considering modifying MPL 2.0 by adding a badgeware close much like CPAL is a modification of an earlier MPL version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably won't bother with a full relicensing as I would need to try get in touch with all 67 contributors which could be taking a while. Instead I'm thinking both license could live side by side as long as it is well defined to which files they apply. Any new file would fall under that new CPAL like license and I think I should also be able to relicense all existing files for which I have sole copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that seems right to you? Any tips and advice are most welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25464" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T12:37:54.083" Title="Move away from MPL 2.0 to something like CPAL" Tags="|relicensing|mpl|cpal|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-29T21:54:01.737" Score="2" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to sell an Electron desktop application that uses a JS library under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License 1.0&lt;/a&gt; license. One of the conditions is to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/epl-1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disclose source&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not totally clear to me what it means: do I have to provide the source code of the entire application along with the binaries (so the application has to became open source as well), or do I have to disclose only source code related to that library (so anybody can easily modify that specific part). If the latter is true, how should I proceed it in practice, considering it's an Electron application ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to use that EPL 1.0 library &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot;, there will be no modifications (eg: source code changes) made to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: after some research, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8466/can-i-use-the-epl-licensed-library-paho-for-a-proprietary-project-and-not-disc?rq=1&quot;&gt;a question&lt;/a&gt; that seems to be very similar to mine. It looks like what is important is how the library is used and if it's considered as a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25484" LastEditorUserId="25484" LastEditDate="2021-10-30T17:55:05.967" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T23:41:19.603" Title="Can I sell an Electron application that use a library under Eclipse Public License 1.0 without disclosing the source code of the entire app?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-30T12:23:11.603" Score="13" ViewCount="1733" Body="&lt;p&gt;Situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A web based project, providing network service is currently under GPL license. Some people have made a fork and are hosting their forked service without sharing the code, which original project do not want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Objective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making sure that &lt;strong&gt;new&lt;/strong&gt; version of the project can't be forked, closed and hosted as it currently is. Of course, current version will not change and this is not the objective here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL license seems to be the way to go, but that requires relicensing the code, however, as far as I understand, changing the license from GPL to AGPL could be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Actually changing the license of the project. This require an agreement of all main contributors, which, while possible, may be lengthy. One time small contributions from contributoirs not willing to switch could be reimplemented without much issues&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relicensing some core module or even a single important file in the code. This will require people willing to host a closed source version of the code to remove this part, which can be made quite hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just stating in the license that starting from a certain commit, all code is now AGPL. This is the simplest solution in terms of effort and will render any new version fully unusable by closed source fork, and over time, all parts of the code would become AGPL. I'm not sure this is something that can be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me know what you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25487" LastEditorUserId="25487" LastEditDate="2021-11-01T14:36:07.890" LastActivityDate="2021-11-12T09:13:18.367" Title="How to change the license of a project from GPL to AGPL" Tags="|gpl|website|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12276" CreationDate="2021-10-30T19:47:15.473" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important point you need to consider is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;software licenses are irrevocable&lt;/a&gt; - i.e. once you have released a specific version of the code under the GPL, it is available under the GPL for ever, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that your first two options (relicensing some or all of the existing codebase from GPL to AGPL) won't do what you want it to do - the people that have received the existing codebase under the GPL will still be able to use it under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your third option - just stating that the code is licensed under the AGPL - you cannot do without the permission of all copyright holders, because you do not have permission to change the license on any code to which you are not the copyright holder. And even if you did do this, it still wouldn't stop people using the GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what can you can do? You can license any &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; code you write under the AGPL. At this point, anything which includes the new AGPL code could be used only under the terms of the AGPL; the people using the GPL version would then have two options if they wish to keep up with any new functionality you release: either to switch to using the AGPL version with all that implies, or to fork the code from the last GPL version and do independent development of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-10-30T19:47:15.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="51" CreationDate="2021-10-31T08:30:10.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://repology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Repology&lt;/a&gt; can be a useful way to show in which software packaging repositories a given project is packaged for, which indicates that users have created packaging control file(s) for the software, a non-trivial task, and have it accepted by the maintainers of the packaging system, again not trivial.  Then, how often are those control files being maintained can give a unique perspective on how widely used the software is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each packaging system which is distributing the software, it is useful to determine whether it hosts all of the files, in which case the upstream download links will not see those users.  Packaging system might provide some stats for downloads by its users, but many do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nuitka/nuitka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/nuitka/nuitka&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://repology.org/project/python:nuitka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://repology.org/project/python:nuitka&lt;/a&gt; , which shows a handful of distrubutions have built packages for it, and they are all not keeping their package updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with a more common package like pyflakes: &lt;a href=&quot;https://repology.org/project/python:pyflakes/versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://repology.org/project/python:pyflakes/versions&lt;/a&gt; , appearing in lots of packaging distributions, and many are up-to-date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It includes many of the C/C++ packaging systems (e.g. Vcpkg), and Windows packaging systems (e.g. Chocolatey), so isnt only Linux Distros. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://repology.org/project/azure-cli/versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://repology.org/project/azure-cli/versions&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://repology.org/project/7zip/versions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://repology.org/project/7zip/versions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25491" LastEditorUserId="25491" LastEditDate="2021-10-31T08:39:21.010" LastActivityDate="2021-10-31T08:39:21.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12280" CreationDate="2021-10-31T09:57:39.960" Score="0" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I googled a bit and found that a copyright notice isn't actually required anymore which I prefer as I'd rather provide a text like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Project is open-source and made by the following contributors: *github list of contributors link*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now when I read up on the Apache License 2.0 it says that anyone that would like to use my code would have to list my copyright notice... except I don't have one. How would that work? Do I have to provide a copyright notice for others to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25493" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T12:41:30.693" Title="Can I use a license without providing a copyright notice myself?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12279" CreationDate="2021-10-31T22:15:13.250" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;US law no longer requires a copyright notice since March 1, 1989.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However note that while copyright notice are not required in US law, they are still recognised by US law, and it is beneficial to add them.  If someone removes the optional copyright notice, they are committing an additional federal crime of concealing the infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good Open source licenses are written to be enforceable in jurisdictions worldwide, and written so they trigger many parts of the law to offer maximum protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Reasons_to_include_an_optional_copyright_notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Reasons_to_include_an_optional_copyright_notice&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many licenses allow the implementer to include a custom bit of text.  Sometimes it is called the advertising notice, or attribution notice.  For Apache 2.0, special consideration is given to a file called &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot;, which is where you would put the following text to ensure that it can not be removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Project is open-source and made by the following contributors: *github list of contributors link*&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, while not mandatory, it is Apache-2.0 best-practise to add a short &amp;quot;header&amp;quot; to every source file in the project so there can be no doubt the Apache license applies to that file.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#apply&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0#apply&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25491" LastEditorUserId="25491" LastEditDate="2021-11-02T12:41:30.693" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T12:41:30.693" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-10-31T22:23:27.737" Score="0" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Black Duck Open Hub provides analytics for Open Source projects, and has entries for organisations, found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openhub.net/explore/orgs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.openhub.net/explore/orgs&lt;/a&gt; , allowing a collection of projects and interesting analytics of affiliated and non-affiliated contributors to those projects, and also analytics of what non-org projects those contributors collectively also contribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I can not find the process to create an organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a thread in the old forum system where people could ask for an org to be created, and occasionally someone at Black Duck would do a batch of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new forum system at &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.synopsys.com/s/black-duck-open-hub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://community.synopsys.com/s/black-duck-open-hub&lt;/a&gt; seems dead and I don't see a similar thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25491" LastEditorUserId="25491" LastEditDate="2021-11-01T02:57:05.837" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T03:14:20.257" Title="How to create an organisation in Black Duck Open Hub?" Tags="|community|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12282" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-01T13:48:09.773" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all I would like to apologize for my post here. However, I don't know where else to ask these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of my projects, I use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.campwoodsw.com/sourcemonitor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SourceMonitor&lt;/a&gt; software from Campwood LLC. The author, &lt;a href=&quot;https://campwoodsw.com/emcomp/about-us/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jim Wanner&lt;/a&gt;, is now retiring from software development. I have contacted him and he is willing to make SourceMonitor available as open source software. I am doing my best to assist him in achieving this goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently three problems that I don't know how to solve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is hard to find developers to join this project. I have contacted some (German) magazines to publish an article. I offered them to write an article about the reasons for using SourceMonitor and some points for future challenges of the software, but nothing happened. How to find interested developers for this project? I thought of posting on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_mailing_list&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LKML&lt;/a&gt; the question. Probably that's not the right place, though, not to mention how this community might respond.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are legal issues with licensed code and/or licensed products that have been used for the project so far. Maintaining this project is not easy as a result. In other words - there is a lot of work to do to get rid of the licensed code and tools used so far. The solution is the same as for the first point - there is a lack of dedicated developers. Where can you find some?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The transfer of intellectual property is also a problem. The code was created by Jim and the copyrights are held by his company, Campwood Software LLC. He is willing to transfer the rights to the community. But that takes a lawyer - and kind of money. Jim found a lawyer and had a document drawn up. But I don't understand enough English to check it out. Especially whether it's appropriate for open source. I did some research on Google, but the results are meager. I have asked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/index.de.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSFE&lt;/a&gt; for legal assistance and am waiting for a response. Additionally, I have contacted a few other lawyers - but they don't want to do the job. How to find lawyers who are knowledgeable about this type of issue? How to solve the problems with the costs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I appreciate any advice and suggestions to help achieve the goal of an open source SourceMonitor project. Are there any people here who have experience with something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25502" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-02T08:53:45.840" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T08:53:45.840" Title="Software becoming open source" Tags="|project-management|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12281" CreationDate="2021-11-02T03:14:20.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do see your recent 31st October post on the OpenHub forum. The usual response time from this team is 1-2 working days. 31st being a Sunday, you should expect a response by today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25506" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T03:14:20.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12282" CreationDate="2021-11-02T03:36:01.783" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Github code search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/search?q=campwoodsw.com&amp;amp;type=code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;campwoodsw.com&lt;/a&gt; has 200 results.  Some of those results are people that have developed custom processes/tools which rely on SourceMonitor, and so are people could/should be approached, as they likely have an interest in having SourceMonitor becoming OSS.  e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/juj/GitSourceMonitor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/juj/GitSourceMonitor&lt;/a&gt;, user &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/juj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/juj&lt;/a&gt; . (..And how to reach out to a user like 'juj' is a separate topic.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25491" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T03:36:01.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12282" CreationDate="2021-11-02T06:59:06.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To start with the licensing side, to make a project open-source does not require a transfer of intellectual property. Making a project open-source is just changing the terms under which the software is delivered to be the terms of an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To change the license of some piece of software, you just need an agreement between all parties that have a copyright interest in that software on what new license to apply (possibly in addition to the existing licenses). For all code for which the copyrights are fully held by the Campwood Software LLC company, the company can just decide to change the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third-party code might be a complication here, and it should be checked if the license under which that code is being used (and included in the product?) is compatible with the open-source license being considered for the rest of the code. If the license on the third-party code prohibits inclusion in an open-source project, then that code must be removed (or re-licensed under a more permissive license) before the project can be made open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding finding contributors, that is a problem for the large majority of open-source projects. As we are talking about an established product here, one option would be to inform the current users of SourceMonitor about the move to open-source and to ask if they might be willing to assist in the support and maintenance of the project. Those people have a vested interest in seeing the product continue to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T06:59:06.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12159" CreationDate="2021-11-02T10:06:16.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in my comment above, the license terms are similar (but not the same) as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3 license&lt;/a&gt;. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-bsd-3-clause-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nice page&lt;/a&gt; which explains what you can and can't do with BSD licensed code, which includes using it with another license, even proprietary/commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the general answer to your question is: Yes, you can use the code in the way proposed in your question. But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...as a personal comment, I would like to add that I think the Creative Commons licenses are not well suited to software/code. They are more tailored for works of artists, writers, photographers, musicians, and the like. I recommend you to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/777/why-shouldnt-creative-commons-licenses-be-used-for-software&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T10:06:16.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12275" CreationDate="2021-11-02T23:41:19.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is where many people get confused with EPL 1.0: The definition of 'Contribution' and 'Contributor' are different. 'Contribution' appears to mean what is commonly known as creating a derivative work, while 'Contributor' means the person or organization distributing the program (changed or unchanged). This confusion is probably one of the reasons why they made EPL 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your 'Edit' in the question points to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8466/can-i-use-the-epl-licensed-library-paho-for-a-proprietary-project-and-not-disc?rq=1&quot;&gt;other question and answer&lt;/a&gt; which points to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#epl-derivative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ of Eclipse Foundation related to EPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, so this is not actually applicable to your situation. The correct link would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion, however, is the same. As you see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#COMPILEWOMOD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you can use the library without the requirement to provide your own source code. Just follow all the steps in the 'Requirements' of the license. The term 'Program' here refers to the code of the JS library you are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-02T23:41:19.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12263" CreationDate="2021-11-03T09:47:20.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use (and modify) the codebase of the Apache component under the Apache license. You cannot re-license the Apache code to use MIT in the future, because there are addnl restrictions in the Apache license (stating changes, trademark use) which do not appear in the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always recommend to have one file licenses.md (or .txt or whatever) either in the top folder or in a 'licenses' subfolder, and include everything in that one file. In addition you should put a 'notices.md' into the same folder with the copyright attribution, list of changes etc. Some people put the notices in the same file with the licenses, but I think that makes it very difficult to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T09:47:20.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6591" CreationDate="2021-11-03T10:54:04.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I can't agree with the other answer to this question.  The normal GPL-style obligations in the AGPL (ss4-6) are engaged by the conveyance of the software (all three sections read &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may convey... provided that...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  Both GPL and AGPL define (in s0) &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;propagation&amp;quot; as including &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;distribution (with or without modification)&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing copies within a corporation is therefore propagation, but doesn't constitute conveying and thus doesn't engage ss4-6, because the copies remain within a single legal entity (the corporation), and thus no other parties are involved.  The GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is clear&lt;/a&gt; on the subject, when it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company “distribution”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't any kind of &amp;quot;exemption&amp;quot; for internal use, it's simply an observation that because there's only one party involved (the company), no conveying has occurred, and thus ss4-6 are not engaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of AGPL s13 is very different.  It says nothing about conveying; its requirements are engaged by the acceptance of an offer of interaction with a modified version over a computer network:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network ... an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unaffected by any limitations arising from the definition of conveying.  The GPL FAQ also makes no mention of them, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedModsAGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A company is running a modified version of a program licensed under the GNU Affero GPL (AGPL) on a web site. Does the AGPL say they must release their modified sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero GPL requires that modified versions of the software offer all users interacting with it over a computer network an opportunity to receive the source. What the company is doing falls under that meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no similar language there &amp;quot;exempting&amp;quot; internal usage, or restricting its analysis to websites that are publicly-accessible.  By your own admission, you are offering users interaction with &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a modified version of a program licensed under the GNU Affero GPL on a web site&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  I see no reason to think that they cannot benefit from AGPL s13 simply because you work for the same company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T10:38:58.827" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T10:38:58.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-03T12:39:42.400" Score="3" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really don't know much about the licenses. I am working on a project which I might upload on a website. So I have a few questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can someone ever steal my code and commercially use it if I put my repo open-source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that's really the case, what license should I use or how should I prevent it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any more suggestions by understanding my situation as I have no knowledge in this context?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main objective is to keep my website to be opensource and upload it on a domain and make sure no one steals my code or replicates a site just like it without mentioning me or giving me any credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: maybe I didn't explain correctly. For example, there are tons of libraries out there right? I can't just clone and upload the same code with the same functionalities with a different name and I am the author of that library and benefit from that. Can I? I want it to be open-source and want it to be open to contributions. But I am just concerned for anyone to clone my code and upload it as their own completely. You know as their own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25513" LastEditorUserId="25513" LastEditDate="2021-11-05T18:44:02.020" LastActivityDate="2021-11-05T18:44:02.020" Title="Choosing License of GitHub Repository" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyright|github|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12290" CreationDate="2021-11-03T12:59:51.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your requirements are incompatible with being open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone ever steal my code and commercially use it if I put my repo open-source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making your code open source, you are allowing people to do many things with it, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use/&quot;&gt;including commercial use&lt;/a&gt;. Assuming they abide by the conditions of the license, this would not be &amp;quot;stealing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's really the case, what license should I use or how should I prevent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should talk to your lawyers and get them to draft a proprietary license for you which meets your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main objective is to keep my website to be opensource and upload it on a domain and making sure no one [...] replicates a site just like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability to replicate a site just like yours &lt;em&gt;is a fundamental tenet of open source&lt;/em&gt;. You cannot have open source software without allowing people to replicate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-03T12:59:51.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12293" CreationDate="2021-11-03T19:56:08.747" Score="7" ViewCount="1351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I currently have a project that is licensed under LGPLv3. I would restrict its use so, if the library is used by financial people, war projects etc the license falls into GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, this kind of mixed license will be considered GPL-compatible? Second, I can simply create my license and point to the text of LGPLv3 and GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25516" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T14:32:02.553" Title="Can I have a GPL-compatible license that change by use?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|restrictions|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12292" CreationDate="2021-11-03T20:49:20.670" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you can create your own license that delegates to the GPL/LGPL as appropriate. However, this will not work as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software / Open Source (FOSS) community thinks that discriminating by use case or by user is not a good thing to do. For example, the Free Software Definition starts with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Definition similarly requires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5. No discrimination against persons or groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for these constraints is both practical and value-oriented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prevention of such usage restrictions in the FOSS context can be seen as an expression of libertarian values. It is entirely reasonable to disagree with them, and to try to discourage uses you consider less desirable or unethical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But FOSS software does not exist in isolation – it exists in a network of actors. It is here that the practical reason for such prevention of usage limitations emerges, and this is also precisely why your approach won't work as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume you create some software S and license it under a Capitalism Discouragement License that gives different rights and obligations to different recipients. Depending on some conditions, the license either converts to the GPL or LGPL for the recipient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a Big Bad Business that receives the software S from you would have to comply with the GPL, an indie developer gets the terms of the LGPL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if that indie developer exercises their rights under the LGPL, modifies the software (resulting in S-Prime) and publishes S-Prime? Per the terms of the LGPL, they can publish the resulting software S-Prime under the LGPL as well. The Big Bad Business could then obtain S-Prime under the terms of the LGPL, and circumvent the limitations you had tried to impose on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, FOSS licenses must also work as intended when the software is modified or redistributed by third parties. License choice clauses can result in unexpected changes to the rights recipients have in the software, depending on the path through which the recipients obtained the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the GPL family of licenses contains clauses that prevent additional restrictions. So you couldn't construct a license that amounts to “LGPL, except for these extra restrictions”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is construct a novel license that borrows a lot from the GPL/LGPL but is a legally distinct license. For example, the non-FOSS SSPL license is based on the AGPLv3 but changed some key sections. However, your resulting novel license might not be considered Open Source and your software wouldn't find adoption with Open Source projects. This can be avoided with a conversion clause to your most restrictive license option, if that option is recognized as open source. For example, if &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; can use the software under the terms of the GPLv3, your software could be treated as effectively-GPLv3 licensed by other projects. Of course, you wouldn't be able to upstream modifications from GPLv3-only forks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are interested in Open Source-ish licenses that try to leverage copyright licenses for the furtherance of ethical beliefs, take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethicalsource.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Organization for Ethical Source&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, while I'm sympathetic to the idea, I don't believe it can be successful. Open Source was successful precisely because of the lack of usage restrictions, enabling otherwise conflicting actors to work together to build a Commons that benefited everyone. There is now a huge ecosystem of Open Source software. It is not likely for a similar ecosystem of Ethical Source to emerge because the values expressed by such licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://dustycloud.org/blog/noncommercial-doesnt-compose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;will often be incompatible&lt;/a&gt;. A prospective user of software under an Ethical Source license would first have to determine whether their use would be allowed under the license, which would require a consultation with a lawyer for all non-trivial cases. For example, you want to discourage “war projects” but a lot of software is dual-use: e.g. encryption protects military secrets, but also protects the privacy of billions of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2022-01-05T14:32:02.553" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T14:32:02.553" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12300" CreationDate="2021-11-04T07:26:33.333" Score="4" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I try to read or learn about licensing, it ends in a massive headache for me. Hence, I'm asking here, hoping to finally get some peace of mind about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I have a little program I'm working on. I put it on GitHub and license it under MIT. That is, I create a LICENSE with the legal text and put it in the project root. Now the coding begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Working with mp3s is complicated --&amp;gt; com.mpatric.mp3agic (MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Java's layout managers are unusable --&amp;gt; com.miglayout.miglayout-swing (BSD 3-clause (or GPL))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swing looks bad --&amp;gt; com.formdev.flatlaf (Apache 2.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated before, my code is on GitHub and I'd like to relase the program as a pre-built package there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I (or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mojohaus.org/license-maven-plugin/add-third-party-mojo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;maven plugin&lt;/a&gt;) just make a file, say THIRD_PARTY, put the artifacts and their licenses there, add the file on GitHub, package it with the program, and everything is fine?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or do I have to make sure that I use a license for my program that works (i.e. that is &amp;quot;compatible&amp;quot;) with all of my dependencies? If so, what would that license be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify, I only use the project as dependencies, i.e. in my pom.xml there's a part that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dependencies&amp;gt;&#xA; &amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;com.mpatric&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;mp3agic&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;   &amp;lt;version&amp;gt;x.x.x&amp;lt;/version&amp;gt;&#xA; &amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA; ...&#xA;&amp;lt;/dependencies&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; to do now, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; to do it might be a seperate question depending on the &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps the question is better phrased as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my project (licensed under A) depends on libraries/artifacts (licensed under B, C, D etc.),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a) do the dependencies influence the choice for the license of my project&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) is distributing something like a THIRD_PARTY file containing info on which dependency uses what license along the source and binaries all I need to do here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;EDIT 2&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turns out that the &lt;code&gt;maven-notice-plugin&lt;/code&gt; seems to be for NOTICES only which doesn't seem like something I want right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then tried both the &lt;code&gt;license-maven-plugin&lt;/code&gt; and the &lt;code&gt;attribution-maven-plugin&lt;/code&gt; They both, in essence, generate files saying &amp;quot;this project (link) uses this license (link)&amp;quot;. This is closer to what I want, but looking at other program's THIRD_PARTY files or equivalent thereof, they include the EXACT text of the project's LICENSE file. For example, the mp3agic section would read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) 2006-2013 Michael Patricios http://github.com/mpatric/mp3agic&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would be my understanding of the phrase &amp;quot;this permission notice shall be included&amp;quot;. Seems like I have to download the licenses myself and put them in a directory. A minute of work for each dependency, but that's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25521" LastEditorUserId="25521" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T19:25:47.947" LastActivityDate="2021-11-05T09:51:47.087" Title="Using maven artifacts without going insane over licensing" Tags="|licensing|github|dependencies|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12166" CreationDate="2021-11-04T08:02:31.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have to look at the different versions of GPL separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; you find this sentence: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This allows 2 interpretations: a) either the source code needs to come from the same place as the binary, or b) the link to the source code must be near to the link to download the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; you find this language in section 6 d): &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This is much more verbose and clearer: as long as you make sure that the sources can be downloaded on the other server you are not obliged to offer the download yourself, you just need to provide the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the language in GPL v2 is not 100% clear I tend to interpret it in the direction as it is written in GPL v3.  But if you want to be on the very safe side you should host the source on your mirror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T08:02:31.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-04T09:28:05.717" Score="4" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at open sourcing a web app and I want to make sure that any improvements made by a third party make it back into the source. Living in Europe, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL&lt;/a&gt; seems like an attractive multilingual alternative to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;. However, I am unable to find any information about whether or not the SaaS/ASP Loophole closed with Art. 13 of the AGPLv3 (Remote Network Interaction) persists with the EUPL. As far as the specific wording goes, the EUPL states in Art. 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Provision  of  Source  Code&lt;/strong&gt;:  When  distributing  or  communicating copies  of  the  Work,  the  Licensee  will  provide  a machine-readable copy of the Source Code or indicate a repository where this Source will be easily and freely available  for as long as the Licensee continues to distribute or communicate the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that &amp;quot;communicating copies&amp;quot; also includes any remote interaction, therefore closing the loophole but I am not well versed in these matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25453" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T10:27:17.177" LastActivityDate="2021-11-10T10:13:18.610" Title="Does the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) close the SaaS/ASP Loophole?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|eupl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12296" CreationDate="2021-11-04T09:44:26.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't possibly see how this could trigger in the SaaS case. You are not in any way communicating a copy of the work, that sits firmly on the servers not under your control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T09:44:26.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12296" CreationDate="2021-11-04T09:52:48.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having been through several rounds of comments with the OP (and earlier versions of this answer, for which many thanks, quadratecode) I've come to the position that the EUPL does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; apply to SaaS in the way that the AGPL does.  However, it's also clear that the licence authors think it does; they have so written in guidelines and other prefatory material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that they haven't written anything in &lt;em&gt;the licence text itself&lt;/em&gt; that clearly and unambiguously achieves that aim, in the way &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s13 does; instead, they've tried to interpret (and to a lesser extent, redefine) &amp;quot;distribution or communication&amp;quot; in such a way that it covers SaaS, which no other free licence does.  Furthermore, they use some very odd language to achieve that end (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Distribution ... is ... making available, online or offline, copies of the Work or providing access to its essential functionalities&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), language which appears in no other free software licence I know, and which is itself undefined in the EUPL.  New language definitions, which require courts to lay down new interpretations, are not as good an idea as using simple language that clearly covers the desired activity (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely ... an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Courts have a strong tendency to read licences on their faces, that is to say, they look only to the text of the licence to determine rights and obligations.  In some cases, courts have &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2017/07/06/cc-amicus-brief/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly refused&lt;/a&gt; amicus briefs from the authors of the licences who wished to clarify the intended interpretation of their text.  In short, if it's not in the licence, you can't rely on it, no matter what the licence author says about their intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the OP's own admission, the issue of SaaS applicability is very unclear until the prefatory and guideline material is consulted, and on that basis, I would not expect a court to leap to the conclusion that SaaS is a covered activity.  I'm not saying it wouldn't, but it seems a lot less reliable a conclusion than in the case of AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-05T09:19:24.013" LastActivityDate="2021-11-05T09:19:24.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12296" CreationDate="2021-11-04T11:29:56.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answering my own question is not ideal. However, after further research, I was able to find the answer in the official documentation of the EUPL, available &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-guidelines-faq-infographics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/c15c9e93-27e1-11ec-bd8e-01aa75ed71a1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidelines&lt;/a&gt;, published on July 2021, contain the following paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the licence covers all forms of distribution (including SaaS)&#xA;and will be convenient for works that are combined (i.e. by linking) with other components. (p. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Distribution:&lt;/strong&gt; Most licences do not set out the way in which software&#xA;is distributed. Most copyleft licences imply that when the programme is provided through a network (as a service) and not installed on a host or desktop device owned/controlled by the user, there is no distribution, and&#xA;publishing the source code is not required. Only some commonly used reciprocal licences, &lt;em&gt;such as the EUPL and AGPL require modified derivatives to be published, such as in the case of SaaS&lt;/em&gt;. (p. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensor Obligations:&lt;/strong&gt; [...] In order to avoid extra and unnecessary effort in distributing unmodified copies, or if a recipient provides unmodified functionalitie online via a network (SaaS), it is sufficient to provide a link to the repository where the original code is available. (p. 6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the decision to cover SaaS/ASP by designating &amp;quot;providing access to its essential functionalities&amp;quot; as distribution or communication was made with license version 1.1 in the year 2009, as stated &lt;a href=&quot;https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/eupl-or-gplv3-comparison-t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clarification worth mentioning is the modification of article 1 to improve the management of on-line activities such as “Application Service Providers” (ASP) or “Software as a Service” (SaaS). These activities have been more explicitly included in the scope of the copyleft effect: the EUPL could therefore be described as an “affero-like” licence (AGPLv3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EUPL covers SaaS (Software as a Service): if an internet service provider modifies the licensed software to distribute online services (as Google does), this is “software distribution”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: In summary, Art. 1 EUPL (Definitions, linked in the answer by @MadHatter) and Art. 5 EUPL (Obligations of the Licensee, linked in the OP) taken together are intended to provide coverage for SaaS/ASP. This interpretation of the law however - at least to me - only becomes sufficiently clear when consulting the guidelines (linked in this answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25453" LastEditorUserId="25453" LastEditDate="2021-11-04T14:52:30.160" LastActivityDate="2021-11-04T14:52:30.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12294" CreationDate="2021-11-05T09:07:42.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to differentiate 2 cases: a) you have your code on GitHub, and b) you distribute your code (e.g. executable) including the dependencies, e.g. as pre-built packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case a) you it is sufficient to list the dependencies properly. You need to declare your own license and copyright notice. I recommend (not required) to have SPDX identifiers in each of your files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case b) where you are also distributing 3rd party code, you need to include a license.txt file. It is common to have your own license statement at the top and below that you include the required information from the dependencies. An example can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The language in the licenses of your dependencies tells you what to include. You can also split the license file, separating your own and the 3rd party licenses, but I don't recommend that. Having it in one file is easier for the recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your dependencies have their own direct or transitive dependencies, then you need to also include the information for those. For the dual-licensed code of dependencies please be clear w.r.t. which one license you are selecting out of the available options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For big projects I have seen license.txt files with several 10s of thousands of lines. To create these you need tools. For your small project with 3 dependencies it likely is most efficient to compile it manually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2021-11-05T09:51:47.087" LastActivityDate="2021-11-05T09:51:47.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12292" CreationDate="2021-11-06T15:40:44.563" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Yes' is the answer to all of your questions. The legal implications are complex, but there is no reason why you cannot do what you set out to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The model that would work is called 'dual licensing' so no 'conversion' license is required. You simply offer GPL for some use cases and a more restrictive license for others. For example, you could license your code to the general public under GPL and also under (say) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://socialdomain.net/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social domain license&lt;/a&gt; for other use cases. This offers a GPL compatible version and a non-GPL compatible version, at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply create software S and license it in a way so it does not have to 'convert' to GPL by dual licensing it with GPL and a social domain license. Large scale business sector entities will have to use the GPL, while everyone else uses the social domain license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the exact license coupling you choose, the opportunities for circumvention will depend on the lengths a corporation is prepared to go to, since they can always &lt;em&gt;'clean room'&lt;/em&gt; any code under any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source was successful precisely because it was on the side of well resourced corporations who crave interoperability with their proprietary systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A social domain license with restrictions preventing things like arms sales or military operations would keep any corporate lawyer at a military aerospace company awake at night. License terms can ban encryption across the board, but could also just ban encryption for users in the military sector based on their self-reported &lt;a href=&quot;https://unstats.un.org/unsd/classifications/Econ/isic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISIC code&lt;/a&gt; or publicly available business description for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25531" LastEditorUserId="25531" LastEditDate="2021-11-10T10:38:37.403" LastActivityDate="2021-11-10T10:38:37.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5422" CreationDate="2021-11-06T17:35:50.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put the jsModal license either in the public directory tree where you reference the script e.g. &lt;code&gt;src/js/LICENSE.txt&lt;/code&gt;. The requirement to provide a copy of the license may also be satisfied by including a link to the license in comments of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice can be put anywhere in the source code to satisfy the copyright notice requirement. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/open-source-javascript-compliance-tips-87720/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ref&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25531" LastEditorUserId="25531" LastEditDate="2021-11-12T18:09:17.467" LastActivityDate="2021-11-12T18:09:17.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12304" CreationDate="2021-11-07T13:27:58.227" Score="7" ViewCount="1816" Body="&lt;p&gt;At my previous job I was responsible for building and maintaining a library in their ecosystem. The project is mature in the sense that no major new features are being implemented. It is still maintained, which means that bugs are fixed and every now and then minor enhancements are made. To give a sense of the maturity: the project has some 30k sloc, and currently about 100 lines are changed per month. These small changes do require relatively much work (a couple of hours a week, even when you have written almost the entire code base).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company has no expertise to maintain this project, and I see they are now introducing new bugs and failing to fix existing bugs. Because I use this library in other projects I expect to have to continue to maintain it at least in the near future. I don't want my previous employer to benefit commercially from this work, for two reasons: (1) to not provide free labour on principle; (2) to motivate them to train somebody to eventually maintain the library themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is licensed under a 2-clause BSD license. My old employer has several projects under such a license, and earns money from (subscriptions to) some closed-source projects. These projects are only available to a few clients, who receive the source code. You can imagine something like the Blackboard educational software business scheme, but on a smaller scale, and clients are responsible for their own instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My idea is to fork the project and provide it under a GPL 3.0 license. I understand that all code written before the fork will then also still be available under the original BSD license, but code committed after the fork should only be available under GPL 3.0. The idea is that if the company would want to use my fork, they are making a derivative that also would have to be licensed under GPL 3.0 (at least under &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF's understanding of derivative works&lt;/a&gt;). They will not want to open source their application, so they cannot use my fork. My concerns with this are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I make my changes of 100 lines a month under GPL 3.0, the company may look at that, and implement the same patches with some minor changes (e.g. replace a &lt;code&gt;for&lt;/code&gt; with a &lt;code&gt;while&lt;/code&gt;) under their 2-clause BSD license. This is the easy way out, because the major job is to figure out what needs to be changed, not how to write it down. Am I in any way protected from this happening? Do I have some kind of intellectual property on the change that extends beyond the exact implementation to the ideas behind it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The company distributes their software only to selected clients (and I am not one of them). Would they in that situation still be required to open source their application to the general public? And how would one go about proving that they use my fork / requesting their source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these concerns valid? Are there better ways to solve this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25536" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-08T08:09:22.317" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T08:52:16.433" Title="Preventing commercial exploitation of small changes that require a lot of work" Tags="|gpl-3|license-recommendation|commercial|bsd|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12303" CreationDate="2021-11-07T16:01:21.827" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;implement the same patches with some minor changes (e.g. replace a for with a while) under their 2-clause BSD license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While copyright is based on the &lt;em&gt;implementation&lt;/em&gt; of an idea, it is broader than the exact implementation of an idea. Anything which &amp;quot;starts&amp;quot; from your code is a derivative work of your implementation and would therefore be covered by your copyright and hence the GPL - the technical term here is &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot;. While there is no exact threshold for a derivative work (and it will vary by jurisdiction), taking someone else's code and just making trivial changes to it is clearly a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would they in that situation still be required to open source their application to the general public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Any GPL obligations to supply the source code to a work apply only to entities who have legally obtained a copy of the binaries. You do not have a copy of the binary so have no right to the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-07T16:01:21.827" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12265" CreationDate="2021-11-08T02:18:34.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Forking' is covered by the terms of service of whatever git platform is used. You could 'fork' a fully copyrighted codebase if the author signed up to a public git hosting service where they gave that permission. The right to relicense that fork for general conveyancing is (plausibly) implied by some permissive licenses but to be sure it would have to be made explicit in the license and MIT only offers the right to sublicense, which is about offering the software under more restrictions, not less. Permission to relicense work from the original authors under MIT I think is a highly opinionated implication - it depends on who you are talking to within the industry or company, since it's not been a matter of case law AFAIK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25531" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T02:18:34.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12303" CreationDate="2021-11-08T02:24:13.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given your preference to restrict certain purposes, the GPL family of licenses will not help you achieve your aims. Comparing the GPL with other FOSS licenses is not more worrying than using other FOSS licenses, but then no FOSS license can help you with your goals. Compared to other licensing regimes, like the ones on &lt;a href=&quot;https://socialdomain.net/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the list I have curated&lt;/a&gt;, your choices will be in more alignment with your preferences and goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reduce anxieties about being exploited, you will need to fix your work to a license that (at a minimum) explicitly disallows the purposes that concern you most - eg. commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As side notes: if there is only one way of doing something - like writing (pseudocode) &lt;code&gt;var A = a++&lt;/code&gt; for an increment then writing &lt;code&gt;var B = b++&lt;/code&gt; is not copyright infringement. Also, the &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; of doing something is more about software patents, while copyright protects &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; ideas are &lt;em&gt;expressed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your concerns are valid but if I am reading your goals correctly then I think the best way to solve this problem is to find a license that explicitly states the restrictions you want, and then fix your work to whatever license offers you that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25531" LastEditorUserId="25531" LastEditDate="2021-11-09T08:52:16.433" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T08:52:16.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12273" CreationDate="2021-11-08T12:37:54.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I strongly suggest that you do not alter or modify any license language to create your own, like you suggested above (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I'm also considering modifying MPL 2.0&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). That should only be done by lawyers. And any proprietary license has negative impact on the re-use of your code by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CPAL is in a niche, not many are using it. You need to be very sure if you actually want to go that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the re-licensing path, which you have been considering, I suggest you add verbose license and attribution notices in &lt;em&gt;EACH&lt;/em&gt; of the files in your project. These should actually survive any forking (see section 3.4 of MPL v2.0). That would be in addition to the license.md and notice files you are anyhow using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T12:37:54.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12303" CreationDate="2021-11-08T15:02:24.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company distributes their software only to selected clients (and I am not one of them). Would they in that situation still be required to open source their application to the general public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, and this seems to be one of the most commonly misunderstood things about the GPL. The GPL only requires that source be available to users of the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you're not providing &amp;quot;free labor.&amp;quot; You contribute to open source projects because it benefits you; in this case pretty directly because you're using the library in your own project. Whether it benefits others is incidental and irrelevant. If it's easier to fork it than keep up with the new bugs they're introducing, then by all means fork it. Let them do the work of merging your changes if they want to. But don't try to deny them the use of it out of spite. Remember, you're only able to use it at all because they put it under an open source license. They're placing no demands on how you use or maintain your version, and you can't expect to place any demands on how they maintain theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25126" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T15:02:24.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12309" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-08T18:11:35.490" Score="2" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine I have an LGPL application A that has dlopen-based plugin system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different parties of people that write the plugin for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugin B is licensed under GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugin C is proprietary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine following cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugin B is shipped with some linux distribution D together with application A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plugin C is released on their own website as binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2a. Binary is compiled against the binary version of application A that is compiled from source code by themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2b. Binary is compiled against binary from this linux distribution D.&#xA;(Essentially two outcomes in 2.a/2.b are same because there's not API/ABI change)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any violations in the 3 cases above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that linux distribution that distribute application A and plugin B which essentially redistribute their own version of application A under GPL. As long as application A is GPL-compatible (LGPL in this case), there is no problem.&#xA;I'm not sure about 2a and 2b, but my guess is that 2a is fine and 2b is not ok.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25544" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T00:07:55.770" Title="LGPL application and plugins under different licenses" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12309" CreationDate="2021-11-08T23:44:52.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Case 1 is trivial: since D can ship application A under GPL terms, the combination of A and B can legally be distributed under GPL terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 2 is almost as trivial: there's simply no (L)GPL violation in shipping something that does not contain (L)GPL code. For any Open-Source license to work, it must grant a permission for something that's barred by copyright law. According to copyright law, C is fine, so the author of A has no legal basis for a complaint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2021-11-08T23:44:52.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11963" CreationDate="2021-11-09T07:37:38.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot assume that the definitions and examples that have been published in relation to GPL are universal and also applicable to other licenses. If that was the case then you would see respective wording on the webpage of these other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The answer to Q11 in the MPL 2.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is pretty clear is pretty clear about your second question. The answer is: &amp;quot;No&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T07:37:38.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11677" CreationDate="2021-11-09T08:06:09.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is interesting, and yes, you are not the first one to think about it. There is a similar question answered &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6177/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-with-signed-c-assembly&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GiveUpKeys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQs&lt;/a&gt; are pretty specific about your question. Only when you use a combination of HW and SW to prevent execution of the code &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TwoPartyTivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you run into issues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T08:06:09.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11963" CreationDate="2021-11-09T08:20:59.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principle is universal, in the sense that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; licence that tries to place restrictions on how you can use what copyright law defines as a derivative work will be limited by how copyright law defines &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt;, and the reach of such licences will therefore be co-extensive.  The FSF FAQ admits that it uses the legal boundary when it writes &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, such universality is of less import because most major free licences don't define their reach as the full extent of derivative works according to copyright law.  Most go less far: the permissive licences are pretty &lt;em&gt;laissez-faire&lt;/em&gt; about what you can do with derivatives, while the MPL's approach is often described as &lt;em&gt;per-file copyright&lt;/em&gt; (as s1.10.b taken with s1.4 excludes new files, containing only newly-written code, from being &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Covered Software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Some go even further, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt;, which attempts to extend its reach to your backup software and your NAGIOS box (s13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the concept is universal, but the GPL family are the only major family of licences (that I know of) that use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-09T15:27:08.333" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T15:27:08.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11556" CreationDate="2021-11-09T08:30:38.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bunch of questions which we need to look at in their parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i) the BSD-3 license is not the most recent version. You should &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consider the BSD-2 license&lt;/a&gt;. This will help with the re-use of your code, as in several projects this is the preferred BSD-style license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ii) The Apache 2 license has restrictions, which are stricter than any BSD license. Therefore you cannot just copy code from an Apache 2 project and insert it into your BSD-licensed files. That would be a violation of the Apache license. Instead you could license your entire project under the Apache 2 license. You can, however, mix files under BSD-2 or BSD-3 licenses with other files under the Apache license in your project. This is messy and depreciated, but not forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iii) for the requirements w.r.t. the notice files there is a nice answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2782/apache-2-0-license-notice-changelog?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;iv) For the sub-module which is forked from an Apache project, I suggest you keep everything in the Apache license. This is by far the most obvious and easiest path forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-04-08T14:59:00.307" LastActivityDate="2022-04-08T14:59:00.307" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-09T13:55:24.980" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in form from the first. The transformation, modification or adaptation of the work must be substantial and bear its author's personality sufficiently to be original and thus protected by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Documenting software does not by itself make the documentation a derivative work of the software being documented.  For example, someone can write a book on how to use a certain library.  With normal licenses, nothing stops the author to include example code snippets on how to use the library, yet remain free to license the book as they please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this apply to a Jupyter Notebook?  A Jupyter Notebook could be considered as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literate programming&lt;/a&gt;; a piece of software liberally commented performing a certain role.  This would make it a derivate work — if it needs a GPL-library to run, it would need to be licensed appropriately.  Or a Jupiter Notebook could be considered documentation: the main purpose is not, after all, to produce functionality, but rather to educate the reader on how to use software.  In this interpretation, the notebook is documentation with a lot of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5052/33&quot;&gt;Do I need to license a Jupyter Notebook that uses a forked AGPL library?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but that one doesn't raise the question about documentation at all&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-11-09T15:12:52.113" LastActivityDate="2021-11-12T09:16:53.343" Title="Is a Jupyter Notebook documentation or might it be a derived work?" Tags="|derivative-works|documentation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12315" CreationDate="2021-11-09T14:40:21.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As always, this depends on what is considered a derivative work, which is a legal question rather than a licensing one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have a substantial notebook which is 99% code and is clearly tightly coupled with the libraries it is using, then that is almost certainly a derivative work of the code. If I have a notebook which is 99% documentation and just contains some trivial code snippets, you could probably argue it is not a derivative work of the code. Something in the middle is a grey area, and different jurisdictions may make different rulings so there is no simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-11-09T15:11:48.957" LastActivityDate="2021-11-09T15:11:48.957" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12321" CreationDate="2021-11-10T03:54:12.393" Score="4" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;[0] From my understanding via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html&lt;/a&gt; that to ASF/Apache 2.0, BSD 3-Clause is a Cat-A license, thus I could include a BSD 3-Clause upstream project under my Apache 2.0 licensed project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] For code file headers, on those that come from the BSD 3-Clause licensed project, I could add my copyright lines on top of the existing BSD 3-Clause with Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are [0] and [1] correct? If they are correct could you please help point me some examples on doing so? If incorrect, could you please help hint and guide me on how to do it properly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what are you trying to do? Include as dependencies, link, copy-paste, distribute as binary, ...? The link you have referenced is only for &amp;quot;Apache Software Foundation projects&amp;quot;; is that what you are working on? Is there any addnl info you can give us so that we can accurately assess your situation and think about an answer? –&#xA;by Martin_in_AUT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry I didn't put it clearly, our product is open-source in apache 2.0 and now we will include this component (in BSD 3-clause) with our own folk, where our copyright with apache 2.0 will be appended, there will be also binary distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25555" LastEditorUserId="25555" LastEditDate="2021-11-11T04:25:52.410" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T08:13:57.117" Title="How should I append my license on file headers in case BSD 3-Clause to Apache 2.0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-10T07:25:14.990" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have this project that I want to make public on git hub for a potential employer, problem is the project contains licensed pictures from site like stock images , I don’t want to be responsible  for those pictures misuse any idea what is the best license on git, the project contains external libraries as well… I just want to show case it … If any one can make use of code I have no problem but I don’t want the pictures in to be redistributed some how…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25557" LastActivityDate="2021-11-10T07:25:14.990" Title="What is the right license if I don’t want to be responsible for pictures" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12296" CreationDate="2021-11-10T10:13:18.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks obvious that the definition in EUPL article 1 (unmodified in all EUPL versions so far) assimilates &amp;quot;communication&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; and therefore targets and covers SaaS:&#xA;&amp;quot;- Distribution or Communication: any act of selling, giving, lending, renting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, or otherwise making available, on-line or off-line, copies of the Work or providing access to its essential functionalities at the disposal of any other natural or legal person.&amp;quot;&#xA;The guidelines published in September (dated July 2021) are totally in line with the definition and not in contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastActivityDate="2021-11-10T10:13:18.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12276" CreationDate="2021-11-10T10:19:24.590" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are asking is a solution which is moving away from the 'nice' open source path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are asking for a solution which prevents forking, but forking is one of the core freedoms of OSS. The only mainstream license I am aware of that does that is CC-BY-ND (or CC-BY-NC-ND), but there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good reasons why Creative Commons licenses are not ideal for software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other path I see to fulfil your requirement is the SSPL license, but again SSPL is highly disputed in the OSS community, it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/node/1099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not considered an open source license&lt;/a&gt;. SSPL forces those, who use the licensed code as SaaS, to offer their source code to everyone. This is different from AGPL, where the source code only needs to go to those that are using the SaaS service. But again, you are not going to find a lot of friends by going the SSPL route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that you might be stuck between a rock and a hard place, and if you want to achieve the objectives stated in your question there is no nice way out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-10T10:19:24.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12317" CreationDate="2021-11-11T08:13:57.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license compatibility of BSD-3 and Apache in your case is OK. I am sure you are aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2552981/44683095-98ee0080-aa45-11e8-8970-cfb0bc51f240.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this graphics&lt;/a&gt; which appears in different versions all over the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't change the BSD-3 files then you should just leave them intact (and leave them in their existing license) and if you have not changed them then please don't add your copyright to them. If you are only copying parts of the BSD-3 project, then be sure to include the license.txt (or other file) which contains the license, copyright and other attribution notices!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you change the BSD-3 licensed files or copy code into your project, you need to fulfill condition 1 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute binaries you need to fulfill condition 2 of the BSD-3 license for any BSD-3 code you have used, regardless if you modified it or not. That is not much different from the requirements in section 4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt;. You can put the information for both parts into one single file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where you have files with different license terms within your project, it is helpful to have clarity in the header of each file. Please consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX Format&lt;/a&gt; for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-11T08:13:57.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12315" CreationDate="2021-11-12T09:16:53.343" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL but I have worked with many on this specific topic. From those past discussion, the majority (but not all) consider the stuff you have done as content rather than code, and so not either derivative or combined works. If you apply the same principle to open source editors or compilers - would using these create combined/derivative works? They don't, and for good reason - no one would use them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25581" LastActivityDate="2021-11-12T09:16:53.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-12T15:40:25.750" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project for the STM32 platform that I would like to open source under the GPL v3 license, however some of the libraries provided by ST that are required are license under their SLA0044 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.st.com/SLA0044&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.st.com/SLA0044&lt;/a&gt;) which states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;5.  No use, reproduction or redistribution of this software partially or totally may be done in any manner that would subject this software to any Open Source Terms. “Open Source Terms” shall mean any open source license which requires as part of distribution of software that the source code of such software is distributed therewith or otherwise made available, or open source license that substantially complies with the Open Source definition specified at www.opensource.org and any other comparable open source license such as for example GNU General Public License (GPL), Eclipse Public License (EPL), Apache Software License, BSD license or MIT license.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I be able to add an exclusion under Section 7 of GPL v3 which excludes the ST libraries and specifies that they are licensed under a separate license? and if so how would I word that exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25584" LastActivityDate="2021-11-14T12:48:55.537" Title="Combining GPL v3 with SLA0044" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12325" CreationDate="2021-11-12T21:55:50.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that you can't do what you want.  Anyone receiving the binary under GPLv3 has the right to ask for Complete Corresponding Source under GPLv3 (GPLv3 s6, et al.), which you cannot provide, because you can't give them the necessary libraries on those terms - SLA0044 s5 is pretty clear about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for a GPLv3 s7 additional permission, I don't think that will fly.  I agree it can be written, and work, for the copies you distribute, but s7 notes that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;When you convey a copy of a covered work, you may at your option remove any additional permissions from that copy, or from any part of it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  However, you can't give recipients the right to redistribute it with your &amp;quot;additional permission&amp;quot; removed, so the situation ends up with the potential to confuse end-users who expect the GPL to work like, well, the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, ST have been pretty clear that you can't write GPL software involving their libraries, so you probably shouldn't try to.  You may want to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12169/458&quot;&gt;another ST0044 question&lt;/a&gt; for further suggestions on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-14T12:48:55.537" LastActivityDate="2021-11-14T12:48:55.537" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-14T18:59:03.110" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;As my graduation work I'm working on a simple web application. I read a bit through documentation for licenses but my head hurts from it. All I know is that I don't want GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on making the initial work open source. But I also want to be able to fork it and distribute that fork as a closed source program (someone else or even myself). Aka be able to use it as a template. I'm writing it from scratch (with occasional help from stack overflow) and (since I'm a beginner) am writing it in basic PHP, HTML with Mysql/MariaDB and a tiny bit of JS (the less javascript the better, no nodejs or bootstrap etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best license to release it under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25600" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T07:03:16.803" Title="What license for my own web application so its forks can be closed source?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12327" CreationDate="2021-11-15T07:03:16.803" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all you should check if your university/school has put up any rules about the licenses under which students can publish their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you need to check for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license compatibility&lt;/a&gt; with any of the OSS components you are using. You are mentioning databases, but there might be other libraries you are using and you need to make sure that you respect the requirements of these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After having considered the first two items you can pick any license that matches these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the only author of the software you can later use the code with any other license, even proprietary or commercial. Having said that, you will have to respect the licenses of any 3rd party code you are including. For example, if you are using a library which is under the GPL license, then it is unlikely that you will be able to turn your own code into a closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original publication of your code with the original license does not go away, other people will still be able to use your code once published under an OSS license, even after you have decided to re-use your code for a proprietary/commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-15T07:03:16.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12332" CreationDate="2021-11-15T08:55:25.900" Score="1" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, as the maker of the software, I have the right to dual licensing the software as I wish, be it both an open source license and a proprietary closed license at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm unsure about the ramifications if I publish the code on Github under the GPLv3 license, getting some contributions from users that wanted to help fix some issues or add translations, and these changes making it into the proprietary version of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does it work in this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the sake of clarity I'll offer an example, if I am writing software that I plan to release on Windows for free under the GPLv3 license and also plan to release a macOS version for a fee using the same code base under a proprietary, non-open source license, do I retain the right to do that even though the Windows code under GPLv3 has gotten contributions from other Windows users? Naturally, I would have to change some things in the code for it to work properly on macOS but these changes would not make it to the Windows version source code since it's irrelevant to that platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to wrap my head around the implications of these and if someone can break down how this would work, I would greatly appreciate it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16175" LastActivityDate="2021-11-16T00:24:02.943" Title="Can I dual license my software that is on Github with a GPLv3 license?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|copyleft|intellectual-property|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12336" CreationDate="2021-11-15T20:02:07.890" Score="3" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a web-app that has a pretty big .json database file baked into it with a lot of images associated with it. The database &amp;amp; it's images will be frequently updated alongside the main web-app itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I apply a different license for the .json database file &amp;amp; it's images? I'd like to use Apache 2.0 for the main web-app itself and a Creative Commons license for the database &amp;amp; images but how would I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered using &lt;code&gt;git submodule&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;git subtree&lt;/code&gt; but I generally dislike having to create a seperate repository for it as it makes the codebase a lot more complex than it should be so I'd like to see if multiple licenses would be an option and how it would work first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25493" LastActivityDate="2021-11-17T16:12:56.097" Title="Different license for JSON files and images" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12330" CreationDate="2021-11-15T20:37:28.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a case where you release a Windows version of your own, original software, &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt;. You release &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; under the terms of the GPL. You are free to offer &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; under other licenses, with or without further modifications, because you are the copyright holder. (See, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2077/50&quot;&gt;So the GPL doesn&amp;#39;t restrict the creator of the software in any way?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, someone makes a fork of your &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt;, called &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;. Let's suppose &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; includes &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; plus changes by some other author Alice. Alice can distribute &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; only under the terms of the GPL, since it includes your own GPL'd material. However, you can only use &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; under the GPL as well, because it also contains Alice's GPL'd work; you are not the sole copyright holder on &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask about the case where you go on to produce fork &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; for Macs. So long as &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; is a fork of &lt;code&gt;W&lt;/code&gt; and not a fork of &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;, you still have sole copyright ownership of &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;. If instead it is the case that some of Alice's material is included in &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;, then you each hold your own respective GPL-licensed pieces of &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; and cannot act as unilateral copyright holder for the purposes of, e.g., issuing new licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible test to see if this true might be: would your code in &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; still be identical if you had never seen &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;? If not, there's a strong possibility some form of Alice's material from &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is within &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Socially, this puts you in the position of only accepting modifications with applicability to &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; only. Imagine someone submits a new business logic that would be portable to both &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt;. This might be a very challenging position to be in legally and socially: if a pull request to &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt; is a great feature that isn't specific to Windows, you might introduce outside copyright if you copied that feature to &lt;code&gt;M&lt;/code&gt; because you've already seen this other programmer`s implementation of this broadly-applicable feature. (Proving that your implementation of a feature is solely your copyrightable work, after you've seen another implementation of the feature, is a tricky legal line to walk.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-11-16T00:24:02.943" LastActivityDate="2021-11-16T00:24:02.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-16T12:20:15.200" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I rewrote an algorithm (small one 100-200 lines), written in some programming language and licensed under Apache 2, in another programming language, should the new code be considered as a derivative work or as a separate work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And should the new code be licensed under Apache 2 or anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that APACHE2 says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25605" LastEditorUserId="25605" LastEditDate="2021-11-16T13:26:38.353" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T07:54:34.677" Title="Does the Apache 2 licence include the implementation of algorithms?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12333" CreationDate="2021-11-16T12:37:48.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you looked at the actual code (as opposed to a description of the algorithm), it is almost certainly the case that your work is a derivative of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any other code under the Apache license, you can license your code under any license you wish so long as you comply with the requirements of the Apache license for the code which is derived from the Apache licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-16T12:37:48.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12333" CreationDate="2021-11-16T14:14:00.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A transcription into another language is usually considered a derivative work. So the programme in the new language must choose a license compatible with the original programme, IFF it is a re-implementation where the developers use the  existing code as reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may choose any license, if you never looked at the other programme's sources and just re-implement the idea and functionality (a so-called clean room re-implementation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-11-16T14:14:00.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12331" CreationDate="2021-11-17T16:12:56.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can put the database and the images in a subdirectory of your project and identify in a licenses.txt within this subdirectory that all parts are there licensed under CC-BY. To make it perfect, you can additionally include a SPDX identifier in each of the files (if the file format allows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should inform others in the license.txt of your GitHub project that it is under Apache license with the exception of files in that certain subdirectory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using 3rd party images you should include their license and attribution language in an 'About' page of the web project. Obviously that is also a good place for the information about your own code and images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should increment the version number of your project on GitHub with each change in the database or images, even if the code remains unchanged. I would increment the minor version or one level below (e.g. from x.y.2 to x.y.3) for that, but that's up to you. Obviously, if you use your own project for a website and you change the pictures there without feeding each change back into the GitHub project, then you don't need to bother with the sub-versioning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-17T16:12:56.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12333" CreationDate="2021-11-18T07:54:34.677" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear when you read the language of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2 license&lt;/a&gt;, especially the definitions of 'Work', 'Derivative Works', and 'Source'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot; shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object form, that is based on (or derived from) the Work&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. And the definition of 'Source' even includes documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if you do an indirect conversion, even if you (or somebody else) looked at the original source of the algorithm, converted the algorithm into a flow chart (or pseudo-code), that would be a Derivative Work because it is documenting the original Work. Therefore any code you create based on such a flow chart would also be considered a Derivative Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip and planetmaker have very well answered the question w.r.t. the direct conversion from programming language A to B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T07:54:34.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7872" CreationDate="2021-11-18T11:56:24.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general license information needs to be placed in LICENSE not NOTICE. Also there is no need to list copyright information in NOTICE. There only a few instances where copyright info needs to be listed, for instance where software was donated to the ASF and the original copyright notice removed from the original code headers or the original code headers and copyright notice was relocated with permission. Some licenses require information to be placed in NOTICE but they are in general incompatible with the Apache license. If your project is not an ASF project, in general there is no need for it to have a NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25622" LastActivityDate="2021-11-18T11:56:24.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-19T13:08:41.197" Score="2" ViewCount="995" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to fork a project licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Section 4.(b) states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original source code files do not contain any license header. So when I modify a file, how should I format the prominent notice? Is it enough to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2000-2021 OriginalProjectName contributors&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(c) 2021 My Name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more context: Each file in the original project has been modified by 1-4 people, depending on the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should be done if I merge a patch someone else sends me? Should I add their name to the license header too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25625" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T09:21:58.200" Title="Satisfying Apache 2.0 section 4.(b) when forking a project" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12342" CreationDate="2021-11-19T13:10:11.660" Score="5" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a sense this question is an extension to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6034/how-should-i-mark-a-source-file-with-gplv2-as-a-derivative-work/6035#6035&quot;&gt;How should I mark a source file with GPLv2 as a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish a project where it frequently occurs that files are drived works of multiple GPLv2-licensed original files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;each original file carries a GPL preamble with a copyright notice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some files carry additional/secondary copyright notices below that preamble, probably predating the original project's move to GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the GPL preamble of each file states that the header and copyright notices must not be changed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the copyright notices in the GPL preambles slightly vary in the year and occasionally in the holder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in one file the copyright notice is even missing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I believe that the right way would be to proceed like answered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6034/how-should-i-mark-a-source-file-with-gplv2-as-a-derivative-work/6035#6035&quot;&gt;How should I mark a source file with GPLv2 as a derivative work?&lt;/a&gt;, but clearly state from which original files the file is derived and list each file's preamble, including the additional/secondary if present. Each such preamble entry would be &amp;quot;decorated&amp;quot; with the original filename to track where it comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some files derive from 20 or more original files. So all the individual preambles would bulk significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it acceptable to &amp;quot;compress&amp;quot; the list by stating the GPL preamble only &lt;em&gt;once&lt;/em&gt;, with the combined years and copyright holders form all the files it is derived from?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it acceptable to just list the various secondary copyright notices below that GPL preamble without indicating which comes from which original file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it acceptable to unify duplicates from that list (merging the specified years), as this means that it wouldn't be tracked any more which notice stems from which file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some other (entirely different?) policy to handle such cases?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All questions assuming that the policy to combine the file preambles is explained at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that whatever the answer is, it is probably applicable to GPLv3 as well. However it would be good if an answer would drop a note on whether it also applies to GPLv3 if known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25617" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T14:37:31.643" Title="How should I mark a source file (with GPLv2) as a derivative work from multiple files?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12341" CreationDate="2021-11-19T14:37:31.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The requirement to keep the copyright notices intact is to ensure that people cannot make an (implied) false claim of authorship by listing only themselves in the copyrights when actually they built upon the work of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement to keep the license notices intact is to inform the downstream recipients of the rights they get with regards to the software they received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL licenses do not require you to prove the provenance (where you got it from) of the code you copied. Or at most on the project level (which project did you get it from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to &amp;quot;compress&amp;quot; the list by stating the GPL preamble only once, with the combined years and copyright holders form all the files it is derived from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is acceptable to group all the copyright lines together (without indicating where you copied each notice from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also acceptable to merge all the GPL license preambles into one. If the various sources mention different versions of the GPL or some leave out the &amp;quot;or a later version&amp;quot; part, then it becomes more tricky because you may have an incompatible set of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all preambles without the &amp;quot;or a later version&amp;quot; mention the same version, then you must mention that in your preamble, also without the &amp;quot;or a later version&amp;quot;. If that is not the highest version number among all preambles, the licenses are incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, you mention the highest version you found among the preambles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to just list the various secondary copyright notices below that GPL preamble without indicating which comes from which original file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is fully acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it acceptable to unify duplicates from that list (merging the specified years), as this means that it wouldn't be tracked any more which notice stems from which file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is fully acceptable to have only a single copy of each license in that list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated above, the copyright lines also don't have to stay with the license text, but they can all be listed together. It is inadvisable to make changes to those copyright lines other than to move them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T14:37:31.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12350" CreationDate="2021-11-19T16:10:08.240" Score="5" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a project under Apache 2.0 which has an abondoned pull request. I plan to use this code, fix it and merge into my proprietary fork of the main project. This fork is a part of a bigger proprietary project which my company plans to sell. I am aware that GitHub's Terms of Service &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10044/5601&quot;&gt;specify that all pull requests are subjected to the license of the repository they belong to&lt;/a&gt;. I can try contacting the PR author &amp;amp; ask them their opinion, but what if they won't respond?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25626" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2021-11-19T17:00:01.720" LastActivityDate="2021-12-01T19:23:26.727" Title="Can I use an unmerged pull request to an Apache 2.0 project in my proprietary fork?" Tags="|apache-2.0|github|closed-source|pull-request|permissive|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12343" CreationDate="2021-11-19T20:05:01.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Particularly referencing GitHub's Terms of Service, it is highly likely that the PR can be considered to be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and therefore your company could happily use it in your proprietary project (assuming you give appropriate attribution etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &amp;quot;highly likely&amp;quot; is not &amp;quot;certain&amp;quot; (and &amp;quot;highly likely&amp;quot; is just the statement of some guy on the Internet). There is clearly an increased risk of using the code from the PR than there would be of using code which is clearly and definitely licensed under Apache 2.0. Only you and your company can weigh up that increased risk against the value of using the code from the PR; you may wish to consider taking professional advice on this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T20:05:01.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12346" CreationDate="2021-11-19T21:33:19.357" Score="1" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;For GitHub projects that are not using a license like MIT that let you copy code without having to copy the terms of the license forward, how does it affect that the yml code included in their GitHub Actions workflows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this code covered by the license the project uses, or is does GitHub have a clause in their Terms of Service for GitHub Actions workflows that supersedes the license and makes the yml code for said workflows exempt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Vopel" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T08:24:09.770" Title="Licensing for Github Actions workflows yml code" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12345" CreationDate="2021-11-19T23:22:31.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only the copyright holder can decide the license of a work.  When one uploads to GitHub, one grants GitHub some rights to use the code (e.g., to store and process it, to copy it, etc.) which would otherwise be infringed by copyright, but those rights don't include allowing others to exercise those rights without restriction.  If that were the case, many users would not be willing to upload their code to GitHub, and in many cases, uploading content to GitHub would violate the terms of the license if there were outside contributors who hadn't agreed to those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically, the license in a repository covers the entire project including CI scripts and other tools, but if you're unsure, you should ask.  Asking politely about licensing in an appropriate forum to make sure you understand is generally fine and most projects will appreciate that you are trying to do your best to honor the terms of their license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the MIT License does require you to reproduce the copyright and license as a condition (that's the second paragraph).  However, if your project is already MIT licensed, you can just add the copyright notice to your existing copyright notice, since you're already distributing the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="bk2204" LastActivityDate="2021-11-19T23:22:31.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12340" CreationDate="2021-11-20T09:21:58.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the NOTICE file needs to include information about your modifications and information about the copyright holders that contributed to the code (all of the code, even the old parts). If it does not yet exist then you should consider adding one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is good practice in Apache projects to have a NOTICE file, examples how they can look can be found everywhere, for example in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dlcdn.apache.org/spark/spark-3.2.0/spark-3.2.0-bin-hadoop3.2.tgz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPARK project&lt;/a&gt;. But if it is only a few lines of information then you can keep that in each file with the license header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should read the entire &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache license&lt;/a&gt; and if you have questions consult the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone sends code or patches to you and you include that in the project, then this should be properly recognized and recorded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/specifications/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX format&lt;/a&gt; for your license header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A last comment: please be generous in giving credits to other contributors to your project, in the same way as you would expect others to honor your contributions in their projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T09:21:58.200" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-20T15:37:09.747" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• License and copyright notice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I add notice to LICENSE file like the following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2021 me&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to...&#xA;&#xA;-----&#xA;&#xA;                              Apache License&#xA;                        Version 2.0, January 200...&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• State changes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My software is not fork of it, so I will not do anything related to this, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24583" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T15:37:09.747" Title="How can I use Apache License-2.0-licensed software in my MIT-licensed software?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-11-25T16:54:45.353" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-20T19:52:50.300" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to develop and share an application for commercial usage (closed source only). This application only &amp;quot;lives&amp;quot; inside a Docker Image. This Docker Image is based an own Dockerfile which inherits from the official Ubuntu Focal Image from Docker Hub and includes my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to share this custom Docker Image with my software to Docker Hub. So the user can pull it from Docker Hub, start a Container Instance and can use the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The application itself should require a license key to use it when opening it and the source code should not available for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside the Ubuntu base Image there are lots of Ubuntu packages and programs by default of course. Each of them has their own license (like GPL/GPL-2/GPL-3/... which can be found in /usr/share/doc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, as I understand, a GPL license force me to license my own application as GPL or/and my source code (or Dockerfile?) needs to be shared for others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Application do not use any GPL licensed „source code“. It only execute some GPL licensed programs inside the Ubuntu base Image like „adduser“ from the default Ubuntu as it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the main questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Is it possible to share my own application for commercial usage &lt;strong&gt;as closed source&lt;/strong&gt; in the Docker world? Or do I’m limited by the licenses programs / packages like GPL which are included inside the Ubuntu Image when only &amp;quot;executing&amp;quot; some of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) Is there any difference if i do not use any Ubuntu program / package (Neither source code nor any execution or referencing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Docker is an „medium“ / „platform“ for sharing software. So I find it difficult to understand the correct license relation of Docker, the base Images (Ubuntu, their Dockerfile, their programs, their packages) and my own Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25636" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T19:52:50.300" Title="How does software licensing works for Docker Images on commercial usage?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|gpl-2|license|docker|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-11-24T07:37:28.330" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12343" CreationDate="2021-11-20T22:49:50.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only do GitHub's terms of service codify that the submission would be covered under the Apache 2 license, so too does the Apache 2 license itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Contribution&amp;quot; shall mean any work of authorship, including the original version of the Work and any modifications or additions to that Work or Derivative Works thereof, that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner or by an individual or Legal Entity authorized to submit on behalf of the copyright owner. For the purposes of this definition, &amp;quot;submitted&amp;quot; means any form of electronic, verbal, or written communication sent to the Licensor or its representatives, including but not limited to communication on electronic mailing lists, source code control systems, and issue tracking systems that are managed by, or on behalf of, the Licensor for the purpose of discussing and improving the Work, but excluding communication that is conspicuously marked or otherwise designated in writing by the copyright owner as &amp;quot;Not a Contribution.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 . Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions.  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as Alice submits a PR to an Apache-2-licensed work via a pull-request system managed by a copyright holder of that licensed work, Alice has already agreed, by submitting her contribution in this way, that her contribution is under the Apache 2 license (unless explicitly marked otherwise).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-11-20T22:49:50.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12364" CreationDate="2021-11-25T12:00:25.797" Score="5" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see someone has remixed and adapted CC-BY-3.0 licensed material, only to then publish it under CC-BY-SA-3.0. Thus making the license stricter. Is this allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I look up what CC-BY means, I find one clause that says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this exactly mean (apart from mitigating issues with for example DRM)? It sounds to me like adding -SA to the license is the same as applying legal terms that legally restrict others from doing something the license permits. But if I interpret it like this, it would mean CC-BY is already SA by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25652" LastActivityDate="2021-11-27T12:28:58.270" Title="Remixing CC-BY and changing license" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12355" CreationDate="2021-11-25T13:15:22.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; (Creative Commons - With Attribution) is quite clear and simple:&#xA;you may use and distribute this work for any purpose, unmodified or unchanged without any charge on one condition: give appropriate credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as you give appropriate credits to the original author or creator, you may distribute it under all licenses which in turn also require to give credits (thus basically only public domain and similar is excluded). This means you may incorporate CC-BY licensed content also into works with a less permissive license, like CC-BY-SA (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-include-a-work-licensed-with-cc-by-in-a-wikipedia-article-even-though-they-use-a-cc-by-sa-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see the FAQ on this&lt;/a&gt;), MIT or GPL as long as you keep the attribution and license information for the CC-BY licensed part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute it unmodified, you shall distribute it under the original CC-BY license. For this purpose, re-sizing or re-encoding for images or movies often already counts as modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-11-25T13:15:22.740" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12358" CreationDate="2021-11-25T16:18:14.580" Score="8" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oracle Berkeley DB Java edition source is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb-downloads.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb-downloads.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can check in the source that it's under Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Oracle states &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/berkeleydb/berkeleydb-licensing.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The our open source license permits you to use Berkeley DB, Berkeley&#xA;DB Java Edition or Berkeley DB XML at no charge under the condition&#xA;that if you use the software in an application you redistribute, the&#xA;complete source code for your application must be available and freely&#xA;redistributable under reasonable conditions. If you do not want to&#xA;release the source code for your application, you may purchase a&#xA;license from Oracle. For pricing information, or if you have further&#xA;questions on licensing, please contact us at&#xA;berkeleydb-info_us@oracle.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's my &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Distribute-changes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;understanding&lt;/a&gt; that code under Apache 2.0 license can be reused in commercial products for free. How is it possible then to require a commercial license for such use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if Oracle can require that, does it mean that it affects also code based on Berkeley DB JE, that one releases? How does that make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18966" LastActivityDate="2021-11-26T16:56:03.583" Title="Dual licensing of Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition: how is possible to require a commercial license?" Tags="|apache-2.0|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12357" CreationDate="2021-11-25T17:20:56.880" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oracle is being (deliberately?) confusing. Whereas their Berkeley DB product is made available under the AGPL which does require making the source code available upon redistribution, Berkeley DB &lt;strong&gt;Java Edition&lt;/strong&gt; is Apache-2.0 licensed and has no such condition. I'd trust the licensing that is explicitly given on the download page, rather than Oracle's summary that is clearly intended to scare businesses into acquiring a paid license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be worth considering that Oracle is in the business of &lt;em&gt;selling&lt;/em&gt; licenses. They are not interested in enabling easy and safe use of their software under an open source license, but do frequently offer such licenses for historical or reputational reasons or to build an ecosystem around their products. Sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://goomics.net/62/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parodized&lt;/a&gt;, they are known for enabling downloads for free, but then auditing customers to find license violations and pressuring them into expensive license contracts. This benefits from unclear and confusing licensing terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of downloading your software from Oracle, consider using a package manager with clearer license management instead. For example, Debian also packages this software for their Linux distribution. It is worth noting that the open source community forked Berkeley DB before it was relicensed, e.g. Debian packages the (severely outdated) version 5.3 of the native library and version 3.3 of the Java Edition, both under the GPL-style “Sleepycat” license. Due to the Oracle licensing shenanigans, many projects have transitioned from Berkeley DB to LMDB (permissive open source license) which also has good Java bindings. Further alternatives for native programs include SQLite (public domain) or RocksDB (Apache-2.0), both of which have Java/JNI bindings. In Java, HSQLDB (BSD license) can also be nice, but it's a full SQL database instead of a key–value store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-11-26T16:56:03.583" LastActivityDate="2021-11-26T16:56:03.583" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-26T03:15:40.737" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a code snippet that is licensed ritchey permissive license 10 but the newest version of the license available is 12. Is it bad that I'm using an outdated license? Can I upgrade to the latest version like with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25668" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-11-26T07:53:01.183" LastActivityDate="2021-11-26T08:29:09.817" Title="Is there any danger in using an outdated license version?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12359" CreationDate="2021-11-26T08:29:09.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found Versions 10 and 11 on &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesdanielmarrsritchey.blogspot.com/search/label/documents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, but I could not find V12 (does it exist?). The license language states &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The material must entirely remain solely under this license.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; which seems to be a clear expression of intention of the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally find the license language unclear. You can also see the discussion points in &lt;a href=&quot;http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2021-February/005117.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this and adjacent threads&lt;/a&gt;. And none of the Ritchey licenses made it on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of approved licenses by OSI&lt;/a&gt;. If I were in your position I would try to replace the code snippet in question by something which comes under a better license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.T.W: With GPL you cannot automatically upgrade to the latest version, that's only possible if the license says &amp;quot;or any later version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-11-26T08:29:09.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12363" CreationDate="2021-11-27T08:57:18.370" Score="-3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;A rumor states that some person perhaps named Arpan Mukherjee has contributed some coding rules inside Linux kernel. If you did met that person, please tell (e.g. by email to &lt;code&gt;basile@starynkevitch.net&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I did not found any document mentioning coding rules for the Linux kernel (I &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt;-ed the entire source tree of &lt;code&gt;linux-5.13.12&lt;/code&gt;) and that name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also did not found coding rules under &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernelnewbies.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://kernelnewbies.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in taking inspiration from existing coding rules (in written English) for defining some of them in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I glanced inside some files of the Linux kernel and was unable to guess any kind of coding rules. But found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; (without any name like Arpan)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GTK project, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.misra.org.uk/misra-c/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MISRA C&lt;/a&gt; standards, are defining coding rules or guidelines (&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/guidelines/programming/coding-style.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for GTK).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2021-11-27T09:18:26.500" LastActivityDate="2021-11-27T12:13:51.313" Title="coding rules in the linux kernel" Tags="|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12362" CreationDate="2021-11-27T12:13:51.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The kernel's coding style is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Documentation/process/coding-style.rst&lt;/a&gt; in the official repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that file dates from 2016, it is just a reformatting of the pre-existing &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/CodingStyle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Documentation/CodingStyle&lt;/a&gt; which has existed since at least the late 1990s; I can't easily find the exact date it was first created because the Git history &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; goes back to the initial import into Git in 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-11-27T12:13:51.313" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12355" CreationDate="2021-11-27T12:28:58.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Commons licenses make a distinction between the original material you received under the license, and the modifications you make. There are different license conditions for using the original versus how you can license your modified work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restriction you quote only applies to the original. You cannot take a CC-BY licensed work and, without adding anything of your own to the work, add restrictions that limit how others can use the CC-BY licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the CC-BY-3.0 and CC-BY-4.0 variants explicitly. Their language differs, but they have equivalent passages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;CC-BY-4.0&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted section “no additional restrictions” is paraphrased from section 2.a.5.B of version 4.0 of the license. To quote it in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No downstream restrictions.&lt;/strong&gt; You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of defined terms here, importantly &lt;strong&gt;Licensed Material&lt;/strong&gt;. It is defined in section 1.f:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensed Material means the artistic or literary work, database, or other material to which the Licensor applied this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be contrasted to &lt;strong&gt;Adapted Material&lt;/strong&gt; in section 1.a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Licensed Material, adding downstream restrictions is forbidden. For Adapted Material, it is OK to choose any license as long as it doesn't conflict with the CC-BY license condition of giving attribution (section 3.a). Notably, CC-BY-SA-4.0 doesn't conflict with CC-BY-4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;CC-BY-3.0&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mentioned this license version in the question. The same argument as for version 4.0 applies, albeit with different terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding prohibition on downstream restrictions is in section 4.a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. […] You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. […] You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.  […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the defined term is the &lt;strong&gt;Work&lt;/strong&gt; which is defined in section 1.f:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Work&amp;quot; means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be contrasted to an &lt;strong&gt;Adaptation&lt;/strong&gt;. It is defined in section 1.a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work, […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While version 3.0 does not &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; authorize choosing a different license for the Adaptation, it is clear that the quoted restrictions only apply to the Work. Adaptations have a different set or restrictions in section 4.b, which is just about providing attribution. The CC-BY-SA-3.0 license does not conflict with the conditions in the CC-BY-3.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-11-27T12:28:58.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12343" CreationDate="2021-11-27T12:49:55.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pull from the fork, not from the PR itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PR must be coming from another GitHub repo which would be a fork of the main one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That fork must also have a LICENSE file along with commits you are interested in, making it clear that code in PRs is licensed under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2021-12-01T19:23:26.727" LastActivityDate="2021-12-01T19:23:26.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12367" CreationDate="2021-11-29T17:30:08.903" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a website which hosts some GNU Emacs manuals in a more accessible format. To do so, I convert the HTML pages at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html&lt;/a&gt; to Markdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this count as a &amp;quot;modification&amp;quot;? I am not changing any of the content of the manual (barring some links), but the new format is undoubtedly &amp;quot;modified&amp;quot;, and since I'm not that terrific of a programmer I cannot ensure that every single word remains unchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think that a different markup format would not constitute a modification, as the HTML versions of the manuals do not appear to have a different license than the TeXInfo versions, but since my process is a little more crude I'm really not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like it to count as a verbatim copy as I don't feel like licensing the manuals myself (feels somewhat strange as I add very little).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25695" LastEditorUserId="25695" LastEditDate="2021-11-29T17:45:16.300" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T21:29:20.263" Title="Does changing the markup language of a document count as a &quot;Modified Version&quot; under the GFDL?" Tags="|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12366" CreationDate="2021-11-29T18:04:24.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, if it is not verbatim, it is a modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is especially true, if you are 'changing links' and cannot ensure that every single word remains unchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, where is the issue with stating that your work is an adoption of &amp;quot;linked site&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;whatever markup&amp;quot;? Those being GNU manuals, they will be FLOSS licenses, so use the same license as the original, preferrably link to it, and state that you did the adoptation to the new format and all is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said, depending on your jurisdiction, these modifications you mention &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; not require any consent beyond the permission to distribute it verbatim - as long as your work exclusively only constitutes technically necessary adoptions to display it as needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-11-29T21:29:20.263" LastActivityDate="2021-11-29T21:29:20.263" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-30T02:39:12.537" Score="-4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a programmer, I always felt unconvinced by the slogan that &amp;quot;all software should be free&amp;quot;. Why should software be free when housing, education, groceries, books, movies, music and utilities are not? What is it about the product of my labor that requires it to be free when the product of other people's labor is not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &amp;quot;libre&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; is not relevant here, because the former implies the latter, in practice -- just ask RedHat about CentOS/AlmaLinux. They really sell tech support, not libre software. It's impossible to sell &amp;quot;libre&amp;quot; software to consumers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &amp;quot;rivalrous&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;non-rivalrous&amp;quot; is not relevant here either: Many of the products I mentioned are also non-rivalrous: books, movies and music are electronic these days. The cost of one extra consumer of TV cable? &lt;em&gt;Negative!&lt;/em&gt; (watches ads, does not bother customer support)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only part of the existing answer that's not just calling out these irrelevant distinctions (as of this edit):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because of the unique position software holds in running critical systems in our lives and our world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many other things are just as critical. Imagine living without books, housing or food, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not demand that authors give &lt;em&gt;books&lt;/em&gt; away for free and make money via donation pages, speeches and consulting fees instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5988" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:24:38.963" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:24:38.963" Title="Why should software be free when housing, education, groceries, books, movies, music and utilities are not?" Tags="|economics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2021-12-03T20:52:03.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12368" CreationDate="2021-11-30T12:38:26.370" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect your question is predicated on the idea that universal software freedom might result in software development labor becoming economically worthless. This conclusion isn't correct. In a hypothetical world with complete software freedom, software is still valuable and money would still flow to developers in exchange for software development labor. (This money is separate from and in addition to any incidental money they might receive for support services or tutorials.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, be aware of the adage &amp;quot;free as in free speech, not free beer&amp;quot;: free software, as the FLOSS community uses the term, may be both distributed and enhanced for any fee you set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Free software&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not pertain to price&lt;/a&gt; but indicates the freedom to copy and modify the software. Free software is an ideology that pertains to freedom to control the software that you rely on (rather than the other way around): it includes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freedoms to inspect it, copy it, and improve it&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These actions aren't applicable to many of the commodities you list. Software is economically &lt;em&gt;nonrivalrous&lt;/em&gt;: one person's use of some code does not naturally prevent another person's simultaneous use of that code. This is in contrast to rivalrous commodities like a car, which can only be driven by one person at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free software is not an economic ideology: it is completely agnostic to whether software is sold for a fee, or given away free of charge. Of course, allowing unrestricted redistribution of some piece of software renders obsolete most monopoly-based business models, which charge per copy, but this hardly means money cannot be made developing software that respects user freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question asks about what economic leverage a software developer may still have over the product of your labor without leveraging a copyright monopoly. Take care not to conflate copyright with natural law. For rivalrous physical goods, the model is quite straightforward: you sell the good to a person so they may have it, instead of someone else. This physical arrangement doesn't apply to nonrivalrous software which may be copied endlessly at no disadvantage to any other holders of the software. Instead, we have legal instruments which invent a kind of legal restriction to imitate the economic reality that the physical world provides for rivalrous goods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ideology of free software does not say you may not make money from your software. Indeed, the truly rivalrous quantity in software is development effort: a developer can only do so much in a day, and there is untold demand for new software functionality to exist. Development effort is naturally, rivalrously valuable, and the principles of economics demand that developers get paid for what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who say &amp;quot;all software should be free&amp;quot; mean that all software ought to respect users' freedom to view, modify, and share the systems that power their lives. In a prospective world where all software does so, software will still be valuable, even if it can be copied freely, and those who create and improve valuable software  will still get paid for their labor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'd like to highlight that your question is one of ideology (i.e., you object to the notion that &amp;quot;all software should be free&amp;quot;), but this not an ideology shared even among all people who write free software. If you are simply looking for arguments from those who advocate the specific ideology &amp;quot;all software should be free&amp;quot;, then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt; is a reasonable place to start, which also contains a modern footnote about the economics of free software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also highlight that you mention a few nonrivalrous things in your list: music and movies. For rivalrous goods, the reason they cannot be &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; in the same sense as freedom-respecting software is clear: physical goods cannot be modified and copied in the same way software can. But this doesn't hold for music and other media, which is similarly intangible and nonrivalrous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think some advocates for universal free software would also say other nonrivalrous digital goods &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; likewise be free to copy and modify. Others might not, choosing to draw the line at software only, because of the unique position software holds in running critical, life-or-death systems in our lives and our world: it can control how accessible and accountable our government is, the security and accessibility of our financial assets, and the ability to communicate with one another without interference or eavesdropping, to name a few examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, art is also a critical part of our lives, so some are in favor of making art vastly more free as well, and do not draw such a strong distinction. See Lawrence Lessig's &lt;em&gt;Free Culture&lt;/em&gt; for an argument in favor of vastly reducing the scope and duration of copyright for art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not demand that authors give books away for free and make money via donation pages, speeches and consulting fees instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But free software -- even according to proponents universal software freedom --  does not demand such a standard of software developers. Selling support, or tutorials, or speaking engagements is one economic situation that may naturally arise by meeting the moral imperative to make software free. However, the unchanged economic reality is that the labor put into making software is valuable, and people and companies will pay developers to make software, even if no one can feasibly charge a fee per copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the federation of developers who work on the Apache web server, who are well paid by their respective companies to make a software product that is ultimately given away free of charge. The companies all need the software to work well and meet evolving demands, so they all pay to have software that meets those demands. The status of Apache as freely-available, free-of-charge software does not harm the well-paid developers who continue to create it daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This argument does not rely at all on the idea of selling support or software-adjacent goods. I am speaking directly about the value of the labor of writing software, as you identify in the first paragraph of your question. Advocates of support-based economic models make a different argument than that one that I make here in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many other things are just as critical. Imagine living without books, housing or food, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, those things are also critical, but are either rivalrous (so the principles of software freedom categorically cannot apply to them), or else they are a nonrivalrous good addressed in the above section about art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-12-04T03:37:32.240" LastActivityDate="2021-12-04T03:37:32.240" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-30T13:34:27.720" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12366/does-changing-the-markup-language-of-a-document-count-as-a-modified-version-un&quot;&gt;a question concerning the meaning of &amp;quot;Modified Version&amp;quot; in the GFDL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Context: I have created a website which hosts a collection of (as concluded in the previous question) modified versions of GFDL documents. I (and others) would like to possibly include other manuals there as well, some of which are licensed under the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, if at all, is this possible without the express consent of the GLPed manual's copyright holder(s)? In order to display the text on the website, I need to convert the original source code to Markdown, creating a &amp;quot;Modified Source Version&amp;quot; as per section 5 of the GPLv3, which means I am required to &amp;quot;license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like this comes down to whether my website constitutes an &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot; in the sense of the GPLv3 (Section 5) or the GFDLv1.3 (section 7) or a &amp;quot;Collection&amp;quot; in the sense of the GFDLv3 (Section 6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GPLv3 sense of &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot;, they do somewhat &amp;quot;combine to form a larger program&amp;quot;(GPLv3 Section 5) namely the set of manuals/website called &amp;quot;Emacs Docs&amp;quot;, however they are somewhat independent, as when we interpret &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; in the GPLv3 to mean &amp;quot;The Manual&amp;quot;, the works do not per se form a larger &amp;quot;Manual&amp;quot; together, as the website simply provides access to the modified versions of said manuals without claiming to be one cohesive manual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the website does not count as an Aggregate, I am required to license it under either the GFDLv1.3 or the GPLv3, which would include either relicensing GFDLv1.3 manuals as GPLv3 or vice-versa, both of which do not seem possible given the limitations the GFDL places on modification (invariant sections).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems then that my only option (if my website does not constitute an aggregate) would be to dual-license it under GFDL and GPL, which seems like a hassle I would not like to deal with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25695" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T19:08:57.163" Title="Can I include GPLv3 licensed documentation in a collection of GFDL licensed documents, or: what are the limits of an &quot;Aggregate&quot; in GFDLv1.3/GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|gfdl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12370" CreationDate="2021-11-30T15:08:59.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is pretty clear that your website, which puts different manuals side by side (and does not merger the manuals into one larger document) is an aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; are pretty clear that what you are planning to do would be OK if it was put on a CD-ROM. Your website is not much different in terms of making things available, so what is OK for a &lt;em&gt;CD-ROM or other media&lt;/em&gt; will also count for your distribution on a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W.r.t. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GFDL&lt;/a&gt; there seems to be something like a definition for 'Collection' in Section 6 &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; which I am interpreting that a collection can only apply if all the documents that are combined are under the same license. As this is not the case, according to your description, your website will be an Aggregation under the terms of GFDL. (Unfortunately the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FDL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is not very helpful for this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may have your website itself under any license as long as you do not restrict anyone from exercising their rights based on the licenses of the documents you are incorporating. So as an example your website ('HTML') might be under the Apache License and you may use 3rd party JavaScript with compatible licenses, while the documents themselves remain under the licenses provided by the original authors (GPL or GFDL as the case may be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2021-11-30T19:08:57.163" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T19:08:57.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-11-30T15:31:31.993" Score="8" ViewCount="3199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a piece of software that I plan to distribute. In my code, I use a GPL licensed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to apply the GPL to my software even if I did not do any changes to the above mentioned GPL library? Or would this condition trigger only in the case of its modification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25700" LastEditorUserId="138" LastEditDate="2021-12-02T05:54:11.260" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T15:24:15.370" Title="Using an unmodified GPL library in non-copyleft code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12372" CreationDate="2021-11-30T16:10:02.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opinion of the FSF&lt;/a&gt;, you could only distribute your software under the terms of the GPL. Your software as a whole includes the GPL-covered library and is thus derived from the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL triggers conditions both on modification and on distribution. But modification is not just about editing the library's source code. The GPL-3.0 defines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your software can be considered to be a work based on the GPL-covered library and is, for all practical purposes, a modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been lengthy debates over whether this argument still holds if the library is dynamically linked, or if the software is not compiled. There are people who argue that the GPL might not apply to your program. But it's safer to assume that the GPL does in fact apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL applies to your software as a whole, this doesn't mean that every component must use the GPL license. Components could also use compatible licenses. So you wouldn't have to license your source code under the GPL terms, and could instead choose a compatible open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-11-30T16:10:02.663" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12372" CreationDate="2021-11-30T17:10:17.880" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a add-on answer to amend what @amon explained in his answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the point of releasing a library under GPL: Any program which wants to make use of it also needs to be distributed under terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most practical purposes, a ready-built program is always a derivative of the libraries it makes use of and thus the distributed binary must fulfill all conditions of all libraries it uses. And it is often a good idea if the same is true for the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the authors of a library did not care about GPL for programs using it, but only the terms for the library itself, they would have chosen the LGPL or in some cases the GPL with a linking or class path exception as their license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-12-02T15:24:15.370" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T15:24:15.370" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-02T07:55:56.477" Score="-1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Open-source library called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/KodingKhurram/animate.css-dynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;animate.css-dynamic&lt;/a&gt;, with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/KodingKhurram/animate.css-dynamic/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My copyright statement says &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright (c) 2021 Mohammed Khurram&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, while in license notices I have written &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright (c) 2021 Mohammed Khurram (KodingKhurram)&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is this considered valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25711" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-12-02T08:04:23.870" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T08:09:38.573" Title="Can I include online alias along with my full name in license notices in files" Tags="|mit|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12375" CreationDate="2021-12-02T08:09:38.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can add your copyright statement in whatever form you like - it can be with your name, your pseudonym, both or completely skip it. You choose what or if anything at all you want to have written there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the copyright statement is to indicate the authorship of the code. This allows other people who re-use your code based on the license to attribute and acknowledge you.&#xA;Further and conversely, if you don't add a notice which in some way identifies you, it might be later on harder to claim that it was your work, as will it be harder to judge if some other project uses without license code from your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T08:09:38.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-02T10:15:27.307" Score="5" ViewCount="1534" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a Python library under an MIT license (let's call it &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt;). I have, however, come across what may be a minor hurdle. I want to include an optional GPL-licensed dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three circumstances. Consider two libraries, &lt;code&gt;mitlib&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt;. Both &lt;code&gt;mitlib&lt;/code&gt; provide the same functionality, but &lt;code&gt;mitlib&lt;/code&gt; is licensed under an MIT license and &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt; under a GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Circumstance 1:&lt;/strong&gt; I have a function with the signature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from mitlib import utility_func&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;def func(x, use_gpl=False):&#xA;    if use_gpl:&#xA;        try:&#xA;            from gpllib import utility_func  # Overwrite mitlib.utility_func in this scope only&#xA;        except ImportError:&#xA;            raise ImportError(&#xA;                &amp;quot;gpllib is not installed, but it is needed to run func with use_gpl=True. &amp;quot;&#xA;                &amp;quot;Install gpllib by running pip install gpllib.&amp;quot;&#xA;            )&#xA;&#xA;    return utility_func(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my understanding (based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7291/optional-gpl-dependency-in-commercial-python-application#7331&quot;&gt;Optional GPL dependency in commercial Python application&lt;/a&gt; and that this is almost what &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.sparse.linalg.use_solver.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;scipy.sparse.linalg.use_solver&lt;/code&gt; does&lt;/a&gt;), this approach allows me to license &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt; under a MIT license , since I do not actually copy any code from &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Circumstance 2:&lt;/strong&gt; There is no permissively licensed alternative for &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt;, so my function has the signature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;try:&#xA;    from gpllib import utility_func&#xA;except ImportError:&#xA;    HAS_GPLLIB = False&#xA;else:&#xA;    HAS_GPLLIB = True&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;def func(x):&#xA;    if not HAS_GPLLIB:&#xA;        raise RuntimeError(&amp;quot;Cannot run func without installing gpllib first. To install, run pip install gpllib.&amp;quot;)&#xA;&#xA;    return utility_func(x)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, to my understanding, more complicated (based on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2139/can-i-license-python-project-under-3-clause-bsd-while-it-has-gpl-based-dependenc/2148#2148&quot;&gt;Can I license Python project under 3-clause BSD while it has GPL-based dependencies&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt; now directly depends on &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt;. However, &lt;code&gt;func&lt;/code&gt; is only a small part of &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt; that only some power-users will use, and not an integral part of my library. Also, the rest of &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt; will still work without installing any GPL-licensed code. I could, in fact, move all code that depend on &lt;code&gt;gpllib&lt;/code&gt; GPL-licensed plugin library. However this would fragment the codebase further, and I would prefer not doing this. Can I have all code in &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt;, or should I separate it into &lt;code&gt;mylib&lt;/code&gt; and a GPL-licensed plugin &lt;code&gt;mylib_gpl&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Circumstance 3:&lt;/strong&gt; My library is fully MIT-licensed, however, I have an example script that uses GPL-licensed code. Can I then license only the example script with a GPL-license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25712" LastActivityDate="2022-01-02T08:01:35.107" Title="Best way to include GPL-licensed code in an MIT-licensed library" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|copyleft|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-02T14:35:41.413" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;If two people work on code together, what is to stop one of them from making it open source? Is the sole impediment the risk of legal action by the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25715" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T16:02:09.487" Title="What happens if one developer makes code developed by several people open source?" Tags="|law|ownership|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12383" CreationDate="2021-12-02T15:56:31.440" Score="2" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a project, and there is a code that I would like to use, from here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Set&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Set&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is over CC0 licence, all fine, I would like to keep that licence, but at the same time I would like to change the license for the rest of the file, is there a way to do that? maybe add the first licence, then the code, other licence, and more code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25717" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-03T09:49:15.987" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T09:49:15.987" Title="1 File with two Licenses" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12378" CreationDate="2021-12-02T16:02:09.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. But there might be more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you release material under copyright with authorization, the only recourse is the (other) copyright holders dragging you to court and suing you on grounds for copyright (and maybe trade secret) violation for damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on jurisdiction and the extend and effect of your infringement you might also be subject to prosecution by the state itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that constitutes &amp;quot;only&amp;quot; depends - just think of the file sharing lawsuits. It's exactly the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;more part&amp;quot;: As you didn't have the right to distribute the material under the license, the possible recipients might also have a case to sue you for damages - if they relied on the license and thus might not be able to continue to use the software which they started to build a business on. After all they never received a valid license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2021-12-02T16:02:09.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2692" CreationDate="2021-12-03T01:00:12.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;REUSE&lt;/a&gt; provides a standardized way for declaring the license of each file. To use REUSE in your hypothetical project, here’s what you would do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a folder called &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file into the &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; folder. Name it &lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-only.txt&lt;/code&gt;. The name should be &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an SPDX license identifier&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Put a copy of the MIT license in the &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; folder. Name it &lt;code&gt;MIT.txt&lt;/code&gt; (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/faq/#license-templates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for caveats).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the top of each GPL licensed file, put&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-FileCopyrightText: [year] [copyright holder] &amp;lt;[email address]&amp;gt;&#xA;SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-only&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the top of each MIT licensed file, put&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-FileCopyrightText: [year] [copyright holder] &amp;lt;[email address]&amp;gt;&#xA;SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To license an entire directory (without including metadata in each file), &lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/faq/#bulk-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use a DEP5 file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25722" LastEditorUserId="25722" LastEditDate="2021-12-28T17:16:36.170" LastActivityDate="2021-12-28T17:16:36.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12377" CreationDate="2021-12-03T07:30:47.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe your problem is similar to what has been solved in many cases before, for example where software to deal with PDFs would rely on the prior installation (by the end user) of Ghostscript, or where software for the conversion of audio files requires the prior installation of Lame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If gpllib is an independent program with its own stand-alone functionality, possibly with CLI, which you are using, then your approach will work and not infringe the GPL license (from my quick look at the Pingouin website this is the case). If, however, gpllib is a classic library that always demands other software to call it through an API, then a very close analysis would need to be done, and possibly you would need to license your own code under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To support your position you could always deliver mitlib with your code and use it as a fallback functionality and allow the user to configure the use of gpllib (if already installed) in the user settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T07:30:47.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12379" CreationDate="2021-12-03T08:37:00.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should only have one license for each file. It is very confusing if within one file different parts have different licenses (I am not talking about dual-licensing here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to keep it with 2 different license terms is to keep it in 2 separate files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of any code under CC0 license (or other public domain license terms) is to make it easy to embed it into anything else and to allow it to be distribute it with other license terms. That is the intention of the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be good and generous (and I am a fan of that), when you include public domain code in your project you could give credits and add a link to the place where you copied the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T08:37:00.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12385" CreationDate="2021-12-03T08:56:31.163" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider a company A which buys software from company B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That software contain code owned by company B, also some open source libraries licensed under Apache license or MIT license, but no GPL and variants stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company A modified that software under permission of company B, added some component licensed with GPL or GPL variants, but use that software for commercial purpose, not to distribute that software to any third part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that legal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25726" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-03T09:43:39.007" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T09:51:28.780" Title="GPL and variants use case question" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12384" CreationDate="2021-12-03T09:43:05.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To restate the issue, B has taken some free but non-copyleft software and produced a modified version, which they are distributing as a commercial (and therefore proprietary) product.  A has bought a copy from B, and acquired their permission to modify it for in-house use.  A's modifications include the addition of some GPL software.  You want to know if all this is lawful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The in-house use and modification of software received under GPL is perfectly lawful; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoDistributionRequirements&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ is clear about this&lt;/a&gt;, as are many other sources.  You tell us that B has licensed the right to make derivative works of its software to A, so A is clear on that score also.  The resulting combination of B's product, GPL libraries, and in-house work by A is clearly un-redistributable, but in-house usage of it should be fine (note that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;in house&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; probably doesn't include contractors, who cannot lawfully receive copes of this code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL/IANYL, though, so A should take professional advice before betting a business on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-03T09:51:28.780" LastActivityDate="2021-12-03T09:51:28.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12394" CreationDate="2021-12-03T15:20:50.030" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to upload my project to GitHub and have questions regarding license/credit attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project is an Arduino (specifically NodeMCU ESP8266) project, which mainly includes two external libraries. One of which is licensed under Apache 2.0 and the other under MIT. Additionally, it also uses 'core' libraries such as &amp;quot;ESP8266WiFi.h&amp;quot; that come with the ESP8266 platform (which are also licensed?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read about this online but most of it confuses me. I have several questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How should I attribute the copyright in my GitHub repo? Do I create one &amp;quot;LICENSE&amp;quot; file and put &amp;quot;This project uses X library from Y author and here is the copy of the full license..&amp;quot; and then repeat the same thing under it for all the libraries used?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I determine which libraries I use get attributed and which don't? Won't the list be endless? For example should I include attribution to the ESP8266 core library that is inherently used in every ESP8266 project? And do I attribute to the level 2 libraries (i.e. the libraries that my included libraries are using)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is copyright attribution on a GitHub project like this important, and if omitted will get me into trouble? My project is just a simple uni project and I just want to upload it for my portofolio :(.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25728" LastActivityDate="2021-12-06T11:47:51.343" Title="Arduino GitHub project - what is the scope of copyright attribution and how to include it?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|github|law|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-04T07:06:43.327" Score="3" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hercules-390/decNumber-icu-368/blob/master/ICU-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;. Can someone elaborate &amp;quot;NONINFRINGEMENT&#xA;OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS&amp;quot;? What is being implied here? It's confusing to me. I will choose the answer with most votes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24957" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-04T08:05:02.313" LastActivityDate="2021-12-04T08:32:04.060" Title="What does the ICU License state about third party rights?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12387" CreationDate="2021-12-04T07:58:55.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I read it, it means that if your use of IBM's software causes somebody else to sue you for infringing their rights (whether copyright, patent rights, trademark rights, or, I suppose, the right to pass unimpeded upon the highway) IBM have in no way warranted that this will not come to pass.  Had IBM given you such a warranty, and had some third-party then successfully sued you, you would have reasonable grounds for a suit against IBM, to recover at least some of your costs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence reads very much like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt;; I rather suspect the ICU came out of passing MIT through IBM's legal department, who have tightened up some of the language a little.  Both ICU and MIT licences disclaim &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; warranties; but in the non-exhaustive list of such warranties that follows, MIT disclaims all warranties of non-infringement, which is a broader disclaimer than ICU's (a mere warranty of non-infringement of third-party rights).  So if MIT's warranty disclaimer is valid (and I have no reason to think it not so) then so is ICU's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-04T08:32:04.060" LastActivityDate="2021-12-04T08:32:04.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12390" CreationDate="2021-12-05T02:08:36.343" Score="1" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making an open-source software that is an alternative version of another very popular software, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postman.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Postman&lt;/a&gt;. The inspiration reflects mainly on user interface and concepts. No source code was copied from this software, I wrote my own entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched about copyright licenses and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.postman.com/legal/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their terms of service&lt;/a&gt; say (Section 8):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and your Users shall not:&#xA;(...) create any derivative works based on the Services;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also (Section 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You acknowledge and agree that Postman (...) have and retain all legal right (...) in the Services including but not limited to any ideas, concepts, inventions, systems, platforms, interfaces, tools, utilities, user interface, algorithms, logic, formula, scripts, work flows, processes, software, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it gets more complicated because some parts of their code are open-source on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/postmanlabs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, under Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/238802/406145&quot;&gt;related question answer&lt;/a&gt; argues that &amp;quot;Copyrights are about the actual source code, not about the ideas/concepts that are represented in that source code.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I infringing their license by creating my software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25736" LastActivityDate="2021-12-05T08:11:36.237" Title="Does copyright infringement apply to user interfaces in a software?" Tags="|copyright|license|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12389" CreationDate="2021-12-05T08:11:36.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This answer is based on US law; your legal system may differ.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You acknowledge and agree that Postman (...) have and retain all legal right (...) in the Services including but not limited to any ideas, concepts, inventions, systems, platforms, interfaces, tools, utilities, user interface, algorithms, logic, formula, scripts, work flows, processes, software, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the items listed are nonsensical. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 102(b)&lt;/a&gt; clearly states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as copyright is concerned, there is no legal right for them to &amp;quot;retain&amp;quot; in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is just &lt;em&gt;barely&lt;/em&gt; possible that they are referring to patent rights rather than copyrights, but you have to explicitly apply for patents. If they own a patent, then this sort of disclaimer is redundant to patent law, and if they don't, then they have no rights to protect. However, since you say they have released portions of their software under the Apache license, then they have already &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1881/532&quot;&gt;given you a patent license&lt;/a&gt; with respect to those portions of the software. Whether this license covers the user interface (and if not, whether any patents have actually been granted) is something you will need to determine yourself. Personally, I would be rather surprised if someone really patented a user interface, but stranger things have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2021-12-05T08:11:36.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12396" CreationDate="2021-12-05T17:55:21.190" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a FLOSS project using Leaflet that needs more raster base layers but we have some requirements. One of them is to only use &lt;em&gt;Free Cultural works&lt;/em&gt;. Here the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://freedomdefined.org/Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://freedomdefined.org/Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, a Free Cultural Work is a content or a multimedia file that users can copy, edit and share &lt;strong&gt;without any restriction&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. Wikipedia contents, OpenStreetMap, StackOverflow, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example OpenStreetMap tiles are OK because its license—the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Database license&lt;/a&gt;—allows everything, as soon as you give a simple credit backlink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other hand, it's not clear to me if Mapbox Studio (AFAIK a derivative version of OpenStreetMap) respects our specifications. In theory it should since OpenStreetMap is copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take some PNG tiles from Mapbox Studio. Are these &lt;em&gt;Free Cultural Work&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is this PNG tile, from Mapbox Studio, a &lt;em&gt;Free Cultural Work&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mapbox Studio PNG tile example&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBgO7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBgO7.png&quot; alt=&quot;mappa di Palazzo Madama, Piazza Castello, Torino, da Mapbox Studio in italiano&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: It's true that I've uploaded the above image in StackExchange, but do not consider that PNG tile under the same license of StackExchange or anyway do not consider it Free without further explanations. I am reasonably sure that we can use that single above image for &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; here on StackExchange. I mean, just to explain what we are talking about without becoming mad. But I suggest to consider the whole work as all rights reserved Mapbox in the meanwhile, without further explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can I copy, edit, share it, &lt;strong&gt;without any restriction&lt;/strong&gt;, as long as I give a nice credit to Mapbox (e.g. from Leaflet standard credit system)? So, even for commercial purposes or military purposes etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, we are also ready to pay for Mapbox Studio to get a Free Cultural Work license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you again. Their terms and conditions are quite scattered and I didn't understand it what applies to these images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it can be useful in determining competence in TOS, Mapbox Studio PNG tiles are generated using an URL like this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/mapbox/streets-v11/tiles/17/68337/47113?access_token=${accesstoken}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. I've migrated this question from StackOverflow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25741" LastEditorUserId="25741" LastEditDate="2021-12-06T09:08:49.470" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T08:53:44.723" Title="Mapbox Studio raster PNG tiles license (open or not?)" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-06T08:46:01.000" Score="2" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have a work which consists of a source code and some license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code can be a program (e.g. written in C) but also an image (e.g. written in SVG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This source code can be converted (compiled) to a compilation.&#xA;By &lt;em&gt;compilation&lt;/em&gt; I mean the output of the compiling process. This is a technical term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compilation is the binary form. This can be machine code or a JPG/PNG/... file for SVG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the source code the license is always easy to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me name the examples PHP, Cygwin and Ubuntu.&#xA;Their compilations can all be downloaded (PHP installer, Cygwin installer and Ubuntu iso).&#xA;Do these have the same license as the source code?&#xA;Does the compilation have the same license if I compile them myself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the compilation a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please answer this question in general and for these licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL / LGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla Public license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25746" LastActivityDate="2021-12-10T12:06:25.857" Title="Does the compilation always have the same license as the source code?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12392" CreationDate="2021-12-06T09:33:43.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question definitely has an interesting underlying curiosity, but I don't understand the exact question. I try to explore them here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I compile a program on my side to workaround all author's copyrights?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is: &lt;strong&gt;Nice try. Not as default.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compiling a software is not a creative action. You may have some authorship rights on some creative compiling customizations, but you &lt;strong&gt;can't&lt;/strong&gt; just &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; all the copyrights by simply compiling it by yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the license of your compilation should be assumed as the same of the source code itself and vice-versa, without any other clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nice try anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By saying this, it is possible that the author is telling you weird things like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;you can do whatever you want but only if you recompile it by yourself and if you remove my logos and my names etc.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; or other weird conditions involving compilation. Almost only in that case, yes, by compiling it you have different rights. Otherwise, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I'm the author of an image made with GIMP (which is under the GNU General Public License, so it's FLOSS software) are these images mine? or they belong to GIMP, under GNU GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is: &lt;strong&gt;Nice question. Normally your creative product is just yours.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use whatever tool to create an indipendent and original and creative stuff, you are almost surely the copyright holder of that output and so &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; decide the license, not GIMP or Photoshop authors. But the author can surely create particularly precise conditions to deny you this kind of use of the tool (for example saying: &lt;em&gt;the final user cannot use my software if it wants to generate images for this list of uses ...&lt;/em&gt;). That's a limitation on the software itself, causing limitations on the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the GNU Affero General Public License which is interesting for this. In practice, if you visit a site whose server is under the GNU AGPL, just reaching &amp;quot;its output&amp;quot; (the HTML) triggers the license of the software. So, if you have made modifications to, let's say Mastodon, even if you hide your software on your servers, however, visitors must have all the rights you have, so you have to give the source code of your Mastodon modifications etc. Anyway, also in this case, the license does not affect the contents themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the content decides its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answers are valid for all the licenses you cited, but modifications to the question and on this answer are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25741" LastEditorUserId="25741" LastEditDate="2021-12-09T11:30:12.727" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T11:30:12.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12386" CreationDate="2021-12-06T11:47:51.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You only need to give credit and license notices for code that you distribute. If your repository contains only your code, you don't have to do anything regarding credits and you can just have a single LICENSE file with the license for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you also have a copy of the third-party libraries in your repository (either in source or binary form), then it is easiest if you organize your repository similar to this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|- &amp;lt;folder(s) with your code&amp;gt;&#xA;|- LICENSE (license for your code)&#xA;|- ...&#xA;|- 3rd-party&#xA; |- libA&#xA; ||- &amp;lt;files of LibA, including their LICENSE file&amp;gt;&#xA; |- libB&#xA; ||- &amp;lt;files of LibB, including their LICENSE file&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that you put all third-party libraries in a structure under a common folder that (by its name) indicates that everything beneath it is written by others. The sub-folders then contain the library code and the corresponding license files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-12-06T11:47:51.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12399" CreationDate="2021-12-07T08:21:29.307" Score="6" ViewCount="975" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To what extent can we verify the identity of a particular mobile device, over NFC, in an entirely transparent manner?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following situation: A large organization currently handles access control with ID cards, which must be scanned for entrance into protected areas. However, for various reasons, they desire to move ID verification to a phone-based system. Individuals would scan their phones, using NFC, to verify their identities. (Yes, there are many drawbacks to this approach, along with some benefits. For the purposes of this question, please assume that the transition is inevitable.) Furthermore, the organization wishes to only allow each member exactly &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; device for identification. It should be prohibitively difficult to spoof the identity of one device with another device, even for the owner of both devices. Put another way, it should be nearly impossible to duplicate one ID across devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With proprietary software, this is somewhat possible, as the organization can install keys that are unknown even to the individual user, and/or force the phone to generate its certificate based on its own IMEI. But what about in open-source software? It seems that any private key could just be duplicated to other devices, and IMEI's could just be copied over. Yet, as an end user, I would much prefer having an open-source security option on my personal device than proprietary software managed by the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best idea I've come up with, so far, was to sign each unique identification attempt with the private key of the device's SIM card. As far as I know, that private key is difficult to access and sufficiently unique to each device (or, at least, to each SIM card). Yet, I don't know enough about mobile programming to say whether custom apps could easily get the SIM card to sign something. Additionally, I understand that a program could forward the identification request from a secondary device to the original device, then return the signature back to the NFC reader, though perhaps making the sign-in attempt time-sensitive could help that to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, in a nutshell, is there any way to easily verify a device's identity in an entirely open-source, transparent manner?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, if there is any open-source software already available for this, I'd love to hear about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this question is better for security.stackexchange.com, please let me know; I'd be happy to move it over. Many thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; If not the SIM card, I'd love to hear alternative ideas. For example, I considered sending a text to the device for each authentication, but the time delay and reception requirement would be prohibitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 2:&lt;/strong&gt; Yet another option might be to use the secure element of the NFC chip itself. Is it easy to get the NFC chip to identify and cryptographically verify itself to the reader (e.g., by signing a prompt from the reader)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit 3:&lt;/strong&gt; For context, this is a university setting, and the end-users are students. They already have NFC student ID cards, but they've been lending them out, against university policy. The university wants to move to a phone-based system to keep them from masquerading as each other as often (yes, it will still happen, but it will likely be less common, as people like to keep their phones close). Consequently, they want the identification/verification information locked to one device. I am curious whether this could even possibly be done in an open-source way, as I wouldn't want my university installing a proprietary app on my phone. Biometrics are similarly a too-invasive option, for my taste. It's an odd situation, to be sure. I'd personally prefer to stick with ID cards, but if the university is moving this way, I want to see if it can be done non-invasively and transparently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Final edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Thank you to all for your useful answers! I selected the answer that I believe best aligns with open-source principles while providing a practical solution. Now to make an open-source HSM company.... Thanks again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18947" LastEditorUserId="18947" LastEditDate="2022-01-28T15:32:55.510" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T15:32:55.510" Title="Is it possible to verify device identity transparently?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12391" CreationDate="2021-12-07T08:53:44.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;OpenStreetMap raw geospatial data is stored in a database and covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license terms that make this database open&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mapbox is using this data for the purpose of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rendering visual maps&lt;/a&gt;. The database license of OpenStreetMaps does not cover the renderings (the visual maps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The visual maps created by the current version of Mapbox software are not free and are subject to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mapbox.com/legal/service-terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal terms of Mapbox&lt;/a&gt;. Earlier versions have been covered by a free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want free renderings you might need to look for another tool, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list is available here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T08:53:44.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-07T10:23:17.537" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the place to start is the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/opposing-drm.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thoughts&lt;/a&gt; on Digital Restrictions Management, which note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then came Treacherous Computing, promoted as “Trusted Computing,” meaning that companies can “trust” your computer to obey them instead of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once of the key aspects of free software is that free devices obey their owners, not their programmers.  That means that you &lt;strong&gt;must not&lt;/strong&gt; put the secrets that permit the user access onto the user's device, if that device is running only free software; you will not be able to prevent the user from exfiltrating them if you do.  Basically, if the user can trust their device, you can't trust it, and vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not mean that you can't build a secure system around free software, only that it will at some point also involve a device owned by the owner of the secrets, &lt;em&gt;which interacts with external systems through open, published protocols&lt;/em&gt; in order to allow the user's free software to use the secrets therein without exposure of those secrets.  In all such setups, the identification chain passes through the user's free devices but terminates in a device owned by the party whose secrets it houses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SIM cards are a perfect example of this; they are devices owned and supplied by the GSM network operators, preloaded with secrets known only to those operators, but which (at least in my case) can allow the free software running on my phone to use those secrets to authenticate to the GSM network without my ever knowing those secrets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem for you is that you don't know those secrets either, and the network operators won't tell you, so you can't base your security system on them.  If you mandated dual-SIM phones for your users, you might be able to base an open system on the crypto operations of the second SIM, which SIMs you would have to program and distribute to your users.  Other than that, I don't think general-purpose free phones have support for crypto HSMs, so you're onto a two-device solution, which will be operationally messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-07T10:28:47.077" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T10:28:47.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-07T11:26:36.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The operator of a system that requires security will want to rely on the safe storage of its credentials and on the control over (or at least trust in) the cryptography that is used to protect it. For mobile operators this is the SIM card which provides both secure storage and encryption capabilities. For payment systems this is the chip on the credit card, or the trust into the secure storage areas in the phones (with HSM or not). That's why most banking and payment apps first check if the OS on the phone is still in its original state and would stop working if the phone was rooted. For access control systems it is usually the physical storage of credentials in access cards or tokens, where the card's communication to the access control reader is encrypted (e.g. 3DES for MIFARE DesFire cards) and the company that operates the access control system controls the key (sometimes they even use key-diversification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is 'security by obscurity', the way to store things and the encryption methods are usually published. There is just an additional hardware layer on top to make it more difficult to fake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: The operator of a service needs assurance that everything is fine, and the idea of open source seems to remove one layer of security, that's why it is not going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.t.w. almost everything can be spoofed, you can even replace the IMEI of your phone. The IMSI might be a better approach, but I am unclear how an access control reader can ensure it is being presented the actual IMSI of a phone. I am not aware that the encryption mechanism of the SIM card (and its private key) is available to apps on the phone through an API. This might open it to brute-force attacks. You might find more details on the SIM card in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.stackexchange.com/search?q=SIM+card&quot;&gt;IS Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T11:26:36.697" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-07T22:18:01.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure why you're making this about some exotic phone identification.  Android keystore can generate key material the user does not know or have access to the private portion of.  This is probably best served if the key material is a public/private key pair of your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The user submits the public key as a part of their profile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When authenticating to a system the app can take a challenge value or the current time and sign it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The verifier takes the user id, grabs their public key and verifies the signature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private keys in the android keystore, if not by default, I think can be set to refuse to be exported.  ie it cannot be copied.  This is not fool proof as a rooted device may get access to keystores.  If you solution is deeply concerned about copying it should only accept devices with TrustZone/HSM as this gives hardware assurances the keys cannot be copied.  Keys generated in this way (especially by TrustZone/HSM) are tied to the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Android implementation is open source to a point. TrustZone implementations are less open but generally only represent common cryptographic primitives when used from the context of keystore operations.  With enough work one could in theory build a TrustZone app and open source it I guess.  If the underlying key is stored in a secure way and is ideally bound to the hardware no amount of reading the source code will help any nefarious user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have similar assurances in iOS key management but a lot less openness in it's operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25310" LastEditorUserId="25310" LastEditDate="2021-12-07T22:24:34.527" LastActivityDate="2021-12-07T22:24:34.527" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-08T03:03:41.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want to be able to trust something on an end users device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short answer&lt;/strong&gt; - the end user controls the device. They can in principle, for most purposes, root it and hide the rooting from your detection, copy any data that can physically be copied between devices, and alter any data that can't be copied, when read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the phone isn't rooted, recovery can be used or written (TWRP or similar), which won't show up and will effectively allow universal access at least until reboot, on many common devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't trust your app, the phone OS, recovery, to detect or report accurately or truthfully, any data, against a moderately determined user, with even moderate enthusiast skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can you trust? Literally, only anything in the machine that cannot be altered by the user, and cannot be misreported, moved, or falsified.  If such things exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's in effect, maybe challenge-response protocols for some kind of encrypted secrets container that isn't accessible beyond its APIs even on a totally exposed device, &lt;em&gt;and can't be moved to another device&lt;/em&gt;. Not much else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, most phones aren't designed for such purposes, and may not provide that capability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with so much else security, all you can often do is raise the barrier. Not prevent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T03:03:41.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-08T03:48:22.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to answer your indirect question of &amp;quot;what's the best way to do this using a mobile phone&amp;quot;, I think it's important to understand &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you're wanting to make this transition in the first place.  Presumably your current system has some shortcoming, and it's hard to recommend a specific solution without knowing exactly what problem this overall effort is trying to solve.  For that reason my answer is fairly generic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As MadHatter wrote, your crypto secret would have to be stored somewhere where the free software could never access it.  Free software means the user could replace it with a modified version that allowed them to back up their credentials.  Even proprietary software can't guarantee the secret doesn't get duplicated, since rooting a phone gives you a lot of access to hook into a program's internals and alter its behavior.  This probably means means you'll need a secret that's stored in a hardware security token of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SIM cards can be cloned, and the NSA and GCHQ have famously intercepted them at the factory and cataloged their private keys so that they can decrypt and listen in on mobile phone conversations.  Even if your threat model doesn't include nation-state threats, those SIM databases can get stolen and published.  Many of the encryption methods used by SIM cards have been broken (or at least weakened).  There's not a good way to authenticate against the NFC chip itself, programmable NFC chips exist and it's not difficult to program one to spoof another.  Specialty chips that do that sort of thing might exist, but not in commodity phone hardware.  Every piece of hardware identification that I know of on a mobile phone can be spoofed in one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the safest thing is to store your crypto secrets in is a hardware security token, like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.identiv.com/products/logical-access-control/fido2-security-keys/nfc-plus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;USB dongle&lt;/a&gt;.  That meets your security requirements, but likely locks you into using the vendor's proprietary software (and hoping that their software supports all your devices).  Not to mention, they make security keys that support NFC, so adding the phone into the equation is just extra complication for no benefit.  At that point your NFC-enabled security dongle is just a more expensive, more complicated version of your existing security cards, so this isn't necessarily an improvement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on your description, you already have cards that meet all your security requirements.  It seems like the path of least resistance would be to put your access card between your phone and your phone case (or get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B07SZJJ7YD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;case with a card slot on the back&lt;/a&gt;).  You get all the security of the existing device, and access is still a simple tap of the phone.  Not to mention, a solution like that would solve a laundry list of other issues: phone doesn't support NFC, battery is dead, got a new phone, users don't like the extra hassle of turning NFC on and off every time they go through a door, doesn't work on protected areas where mobile devices are prohibited, etc.  There's a reason those NFC cards are so popular.  They're extremely cheap, easy to control, and avoid a whole lot of problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T03:48:22.837" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12395" CreationDate="2021-12-08T16:12:15.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the organization wishes to only allow each member exactly one device for identification. It should be prohibitively difficult to spoof the identity of one device with another device, even for the owner of both devices. Put another way, it should be nearly impossible to duplicate one ID across devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is almost what &lt;strong&gt;Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF)&lt;/strong&gt; do; From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A physical unclonable function (sometimes also called physically unclonable function, which refers to a weaker security metric than a physical unclonable function), or PUF, is a physical object that for a given input and conditions (challenge), provides a physically defined &amp;quot;digital fingerprint&amp;quot; output (response) that serves as a unique identifier, most often for a semiconductor device such as a microprocessor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are NFCs that implement PUF some listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nfcw.com/technology/physical-unclonable-function-puf/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Check your NFS's support on this. If you use NFS with PUF then you can uniquely identify each device and make sure that it is not cloned (duplicated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that you back up the phones and the system in the usual way not using the PUF mechanisms and secret since they are unclonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that PUFs are almost everywhere, from paper to FPGAs to ASIC to CMOS/CCD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25761" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T16:12:15.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-08T18:04:50.403" Score="0" ViewCount="2354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I downloaded a version of SheetJS here &lt;a href=&quot;https://unpkg.com/xlsx@0.17.4/dist/xlsx.full.min.js&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unpkg.com/xlsx@0.17.4/dist/xlsx.full.min.js&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's basically a version of xlsx that allows me to export an excel document and allows me to manipulate data from the export excel. I'm using this software for commercial purposes and am implementing it in a project. I'm using the community version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the licensing agreement, however I'm not really that legal savvy to understand if I'm able to use the software or not. This is the link to the license : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25764" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T18:54:27.197" Title="Is using SheetJS free for commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|law|software|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12403" CreationDate="2021-12-08T18:54:27.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the widely-used Apache License 2.0, which allows you to redistribute the work, whether modified or unmodified, for any purpose, as long as you preserve the original author's copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One existing Q&amp;amp;A on complying with this license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4758/requirements-for-using-an-apache-licensed-library&quot;&gt;Requirements for using an Apache-licensed library&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-12-08T18:54:27.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12407" CreationDate="2021-12-09T09:37:30.037" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I publish a project under AGPLv3 terms with a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; and code headers stating the terms, the year and the author. From what I understand, I am the sole licensor of this project and not bound by the terms of the license. E.g. if I choose to continue the development, I am free not to publish any further changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By default, pull-requests are licensed under the same terms as the repository they are contributed to (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#6-contributions-under-repository-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub's T&amp;amp;S&lt;/a&gt;), meaning that if I accept pull-requests, the project now contains AGPLv3 licensed code from different authors (licensors). In doing so I have therefore also become a licensee to these other authors, making me bound by the terms of AGPLv3. Provided this premise holds true – and please correct me if it does not –, what kind of implications does this have for me as the original author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it correct that I will now have to publish any further changes made to the project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to alter the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; and the code headers since there are now multiple authors contributing? Do I have to include additional &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.md&lt;/code&gt; files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a way to ensure that I stay the sole licensor of the project while still accepting PRs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25453" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T10:13:43.413" Title="What are the implications of accepting pull-requests to an AGPLv3 project under the same license?" Tags="|github|agpl-3.0|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12405" CreationDate="2021-12-09T10:13:43.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it correct that I will now have to publish any further changes made to the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.  But if you choose to distribute it, you will be obliged to fulfil the licence's obligations, including making source available under AGPLv3 to recipients of the binaries.  In addition, any user interacting with your hosted copy of the modified version is entitled to ask for full source, under AGPLv3 s13, and you'll be obliged to provide it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to alter the LICENSE.md and the code headers since there are now multiple authors contributing? Do I have to include additional LICENSE.md files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to add the contributors' copyright headers alongside your own, at least in the file(s) modified by their contributions.  &lt;code&gt;LICENCE.md&lt;/code&gt; files have no particular copyright meaning, so what you do with them is up to you; though I would have thought out of politeness it would be nice to add their copyright header alongside your own there, also, even if it's limited, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2019-2021 Quadrate Code&#xA;Some parts also (c) 2021 Pat Contributor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to ensure that I stay the sole licensor of the project while still accepting PRs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, before you accept or even examine their contributions you can have all your contributors sign Copyright Licensing Agreements which grant you the right to relicence their contributions.  Once that's done you can use those contributions under (eg) a permissive licence rather than having to accept the AGPL.  Search on this site for &amp;quot;CLA&amp;quot; to read much more information about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2021-12-09T10:13:43.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12392" CreationDate="2021-12-09T15:00:42.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Converting code to another format doesn't introduce any new creative expression to that code&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, nor does it remove any creative expression (except, I supposed, non-functional comments). Code compiled to object form has the same copyright status as its source form, just as translation applies to any other copyrighted work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The production of a translation involves a derivative work&lt;/a&gt;, so its creation and distribution is an exclusive right belonging to the copyright holder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. (17 USC S.101)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For code under any FLOSS license (a category to which all your example licenses belong), the copyright holder has granted permission to produce and redistribute the code in a translated object form. For some licenses, this permission may be accompanied by requirements. Notably, the GPL allows the distribution of code translated to object form only if it is accompanied by corresponding source. For example, GPLv3 gives the permission to distribute non-source &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot; translations in section 6, which begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you receive source code without permission to produce or distribute compiled object forms, then you may not produce or distribute object forms of that code. It is the right of the copyright holder to forbid this, if they wish. Fortunately, all free and open source licenses do allow this, so if you receive FLOSS-licensed source code, you can be sure the copyright holder has already given this permission. The license(s) governing the compiled form of some source code is whichever license(s) give you permission to do anything with that binary that would normally be an exclusive right of the copyright holder. In the case of all FLOSS licenses, the permissions afforded to source forms are identical to those afforded to binary forms (with the caveat that copyleft licenses may also impose source-sharing obligations on the distribution of object forms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final note: you say &amp;quot;compilation&amp;quot; is a technical term, which is true in both the domain of language-syntax theory (&amp;quot;the output of a compiler, which is a system for translating a set of syntactic expressions into a different language&amp;quot;) and the domain of copyright law (&amp;quot;a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials&amp;quot;). I don't think you've done so, but take care not to confuse how the two different domains use this term in different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that the mechanics of compilation may introduce multiple works into the same binary file (e.g., libraries and application code together). You must abide by the copyright holders' licenses associated with each component you include in any binary you distribute.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-12-10T12:06:25.857" LastActivityDate="2021-12-10T12:06:25.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12412" CreationDate="2021-12-10T12:44:55.513" Score="10" ViewCount="3214" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you publish Solidity code, you can include machine-readable license identifier in the beginning of the file. Usually, it looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT&#xA;pragma solidity ^0.8.7;&#xA;...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, sometimes I see the mark &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt;. Referring to Solidity doc, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not want to specify a license or if the source code is not open-source, please use the special value UNLICENSED.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/latest/layout-of-source-files.html#spdx-license-identifier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/latest/layout-of-source-files.html#spdx-license-identifier&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT, there is also similarly-named UNLICENSE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unlicense.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the Unlicense?&#xA;The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going in the SPDX spec, again there's no option of &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt;, only &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSE&lt;/code&gt;, which seems to be the same as Unlicense.org. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/umpcf.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/umpcf.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of spdx.org list of licenses featuring only UNLICENSE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the real difference between them? Is there any source where I can verifiably check if &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt; means what it's supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most important, can I use the code marked &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25777" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T15:33:05.147" Title="Is there a difference between unlicense.org and SPDX UNLICENSED?" Tags="|unlicensed-code|unlicense|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12410" CreationDate="2021-12-10T14:01:18.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two statuses are about as far apart as could be.  Having no licence means, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;as we've said before&lt;/a&gt;, that you have no rights to use the code at all.  Being licensed under the Unlicense means that you have about as many rights to the code as the author can grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the texts are close (&lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt; for the former, &lt;code&gt;Unlicense&lt;/code&gt; for the latter).  Some might say they're confusingly close.  But they are different, and moreover the former seems to be a Solidity convention, not an SPDX official identifier.  So with care you can be sure which of the two licensing regimes applies to any piece of Solidity code bearing one of these identifiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-12T21:10:16.813" LastActivityDate="2021-12-12T21:10:16.813" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12410" CreationDate="2021-12-10T14:04:49.260" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the format &lt;code&gt;SPDX-License-Identifier: UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt; is an &lt;strong&gt;invalid&lt;/strong&gt; SPDX license expression per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/SPDX-license-expressions/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX spec&lt;/a&gt;, because the identifier &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt; is not part of the SPDX license list. While well-intentioned, Solidity has here caused potentially dangerous confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SPDX project is concerned about machine-readable annotations for FOSS licenses (free/libre or open source software). &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1721&quot;&gt;By default, software is “all rights reserved”&lt;/a&gt;. For such software, it makes no sense to add an SPDX tag. Yet, the Solidity documentation is suggesting to refer to such all-rights reserved software as “unlicensed”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Unlicense is a license or license-like legal device that tries to do the very opposite of “all rights reserved”: it is a very permissive license that allows any use, and may even be equivalent to a public domain dedication that &lt;em&gt;relinquishes&lt;/em&gt; any copyright. It's a bit confusingly written and has a confusing name so I don't recommend that anyone should use the license, but it's popular with people who don't like to think about licensing and want their software to be used however anyone wants, without limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Solidity's nonstandard &lt;code&gt;UNLICENSED&lt;/code&gt; identifier is &lt;strong&gt;VERY DIFFERENT&lt;/strong&gt; from the SPDX &lt;code&gt;Unlicense&lt;/code&gt; identifier. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/issues/12251&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Solidity issue #12251&lt;/a&gt;. Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/spdx/spdx-spec/issues/49&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX-spec issue #49&lt;/a&gt;, it would have been better to represent unlicensed software with &lt;code&gt;NONE&lt;/code&gt;, but that's not yet part of the formal SPDX license identifier syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-12-12T13:58:22.930" LastActivityDate="2021-12-12T13:58:22.930" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-10T16:30:51.123" Score="1" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project that has a dependency on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y&lt;/a&gt; which depends on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/language-tags&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language-tags&lt;/a&gt; which depends on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mattcg/language-subtag-registry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language-subtag-registry&lt;/a&gt; which holds data under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The data in question is basically a mapping of language names to their abbreviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus Black Duck says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are required to include a notice in product documentation with certain requirements as specified by the license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I'm trying to find out if this applies to my situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term 'notice' appears twice in the License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.3 [...] if you Publicly Use a Produced Work, You must [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Produced Work&amp;quot; - a work (such as an image, audiovisual material, text, or&#xA;sounds) resulting from using the whole or a Substantial part of the Contents (via&#xA;a search or other query) from this Database, a Derivative Database, or this&#xA;Database as part of a Collective Database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So none of the relevant data is flowing into the final project but it is used to produce the resulting work. Or is it? It is just part of my workflow after all but not required for the build...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25780" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-11T10:37:54.907" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T07:21:04.040" Title="Do Dev Dependencies go into a produced work?" Tags="|derivative-works|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12420" CreationDate="2021-12-10T22:58:23.650" Score="3" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;My organization wants me to standardize several datasets using a common data format before we use them. Namely, two datasets with their own GitHub repos have different licenses (&lt;code&gt;AGPL 3.0&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;CC-BY-4.0&lt;/code&gt; respectively). If I were to put both standardized datasets into a single repo, which license would I choose for my &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file? I read in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12019267/multiple-licenses-in-a-single-license-file&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question that you can only have a single license per &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file. So is it possible to do something like so,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# the GitHub repo&#xA;LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_A   # contains AGPL 3.0 license&#xA;LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_B   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license&#xA;README.md               # other repo files...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be an acceptable workaround or must I have separate repositories per license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25782" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T07:33:03.193" Title="Use of multiple licenses in a single GitHub repo" Tags="|github|agpl-3.0|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-12T09:59:29.063" Score="0" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok so i have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Risa123/FPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project&lt;/a&gt; which requires &lt;a href=&quot;https://jmeubank.github.io/tdm-gcc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gcc&lt;/a&gt; to work. I would like to distribute gcc binaries together with program for sake of convenience. What are legal requirements for this. Should i add copy of gcc license (GPLv3).&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Found answer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25786" LastEditorUserId="25786" LastEditDate="2021-12-12T11:05:16.700" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T15:29:59.500" Title="distributing gcc together with program" Tags="|license|distribution|gcc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12436" CreationDate="2021-12-13T06:45:54.560" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have containerized an application that runs on .Net Core. &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian#dependencies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The official page says&lt;/a&gt;, .Net Core needs &lt;code&gt;libc6&lt;/code&gt; as its dependency when run on Debian OS, so I have explored its license to pass my company's legal process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find a copyright file of that, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;* Most of the GNU C library is under the following copyright:&#xA;&#xA;    Copyright (C) 1991-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;&#xA;    The GNU C Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;    modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;    License as published by the Free Software Foundation;&#xA;    &amp;lt;snip&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;* The utilities associated with GNU C library is under the following&#xA;  copyright:&#xA;&#xA;    Copyright (C) 1991-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;&#xA;    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published&#xA;    by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License, or&#xA;    (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure which part of the software &lt;code&gt;utilities&lt;/code&gt; refers to, does this mean &lt;code&gt;libc6&lt;/code&gt; will be GPL-licensed? If not, how should I interpret this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22786" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T08:23:05.053" Title="What is the license of libc6:2.28-10 on debian (buster)?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12413" CreationDate="2021-12-13T07:21:04.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming this plugin for ESLint is only used in your build process, then the warning from Black Duck is a false-positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With linters like ESLint it is safe to say that removing them from your build system will have no effect on the created output. That is a very strong indication that no copyrightable portions of those tools end up in the final product and therefor that the product ,can also not be affected by the license of the tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T07:21:04.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12415" CreationDate="2021-12-13T07:33:03.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it possible to do something like so,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# the GitHub repo&#xA;LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_A   # contains AGPL 3.0 license&#xA;LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_B   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license&#xA;README.md               # other repo files...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is possible, but you will need to have some way to indicate which files belong to dataset A (and thus are subject to the AGPL) and which files belong to dataset B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is not actually a legal requirement to have a LICENSE files at the top-level of your repository, you could also go for a repository layout like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|-- Dataset A&#xA;| |- LICENSE   # contains AGPL 3.0 license&#xA;| |- ...       # content of dataset A&#xA;|-- Dataset B&#xA;| |- LICENSE   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license&#xA;| |- ...       # content of dataset B&#xA;|-- README.md  # Other files that don't belong to either dataset&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A totally different option is to put your entire repository under the AGPL 3.0 license. This is possible because the CC-BY 4.0 license allows you to use a different license for a transformed work (like, after changing dataset B to the common format).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-12-13T07:33:03.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12422" CreationDate="2021-12-13T12:03:03.730" Score="2" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an embedded Linux PoC device that has been developed and designed in house to help produce a product that is then sold. The device weighs produce then etches a marker on the bottle indicating the date, time and some other information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The in-house embedded Linux device runs some custom binaries to perform its job. Within these services there are some libraries that leverage MIT licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before actually using this device for anything beyond the PoC (and starting to write my own libraries completely non-derived from MIT ones) I wanted to know;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How (if required) would I have a copy of the MIT license available?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally this would be referenced in the documentation for the device, but I am not selling the device nor does it even have documentation. I cannot believe that I would have to list the MIT license on the etched bottle either. If it does need to be displayed somewhere where? I cannot imagine that Coca Cola has zero MIT code in any of their production plants - how do they apply MIT in these situations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25793" LastActivityDate="2021-12-14T17:20:24.243" Title="Applying MIT License to Internal Embedded Linux System" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12421" CreationDate="2021-12-14T17:20:24.243" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be suffering from 2 misconceptions: (i) the obligations which would be required to fulfill the MIT License, and (ii) the obligations related to in-house use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad i: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The MIT License&lt;/a&gt; says &amp;quot;...The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. ...&amp;quot;. This means that you need to include that in your software, but not on the output (in your case: the etching in the glass) of the software. This concept is similar in basically all of the Open Source Licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ad ii: You describe that the machine is for in-house use, you are not selling the machine, you are selling the bottles. With most of the OSS licenses some of the requirements are linked to distribution of your software. As long as you don't distribute/sell the software (or the machine with the software) there is nobody you need to notify about your use of the software and its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is good also for in-house software use to properly identify the components you are using and their licenses, so that any colleague working on this in the future will know (when looking at the source code). Also sometimes business models change and your company might start to sell the software or the machine. Then you need to provide proper attribution and license language to the customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-14T17:20:24.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-15T09:58:27.637" Score="-3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;How web design programs let users edit HTML elements and gives CSS? Do they have a permission(license) for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about HTML5 and CSS licensing. I know we can use them in our websites but i wonder that design programs let users design elements(input, a, button) and take the CSS code. So,this is the question. Do they have any license about HTML5 and CSS for commercial use? Because I think they are selling them indirectly.(it can be right or wrong i do not know that i am asking that)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if i want to create a program that let users edit designs(css) of html elements, components by selecting them with names(like &amp;quot;choose input field&amp;quot;) and sell code, design? So, in that case is there a license should i get from somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25805" LastEditorUserId="25805" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T12:20:24.890" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T22:58:37.440" Title="How web design programs let users edit HTML elements and gives CSS? Do they have a permission(license) for that?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12423" CreationDate="2021-12-15T10:15:02.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The programmes don't take any code and modify that on their own. They work in this sense like a text editor which also doesn't need a license to edit a text. It's the user who feeds it data to take care whether they are allowed to do what they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HTML and CSS as standards are open standards. If your question is about that, it would be a duplicate as it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/238724/what-license-is-html-released-under&quot;&gt;asked and answered here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T10:29:36.393" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T10:29:36.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-15T13:07:01.987" Score="12" ViewCount="1570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused about the licensing. In the LICENSE file it says that the repository is under MIT license.&#xA;But in the header of some js files there is a copyright notice with apache-2.0.&#xA;Does this copyright notice affect the licensing?&#xA;What is the copyright notice in the file header?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25808" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2021-12-16T08:12:46.497" LastActivityDate="2021-12-16T08:49:13.540" Title="Does a copyright notice in a file header affect the licensing?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12429" CreationDate="2021-12-15T14:31:59.063" Score="5" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (a) uses at run time a copy of the Library already present on the user's computer system, and &lt;strong&gt;(b) will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e) Provide Installation Information, but only if you would otherwise be required to provide such information under section 6 of the GNU GPL, and only to the extent that such information is necessary &lt;strong&gt;to install and execute a modified version of the Combined Work produced by recombining or relinking the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the authors of Combined Work must provide a way to update Combined Work on user's computer/device so as to allow the user to run a modified version of Combined Work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I make firmware for an embedded device and use LGPL library (by dynamic linking), do I have to provide a way to update the firmware on the device so that a user can replace the library with a modified version and then run it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is true, is it applicable only for LGPL version 3 license? Because I don't see &amp;quot;e)&amp;quot; clause in LGPL version 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25795" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T17:19:13.397" Title="Does LGPL require to provide a way to update the program?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6333" CreationDate="2021-12-15T15:16:32.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is what official &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; of CC0 creators says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC and the Free Software Foundation suggest that if you choose to apply CC0 to software, you include the following notice at the top of each file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;PROGRAM NAME&amp;gt; - &amp;lt;DESCRIPTION&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written in &amp;lt;YEAR&amp;gt; by &amp;lt;AUTHOR NAME&amp;gt; &amp;lt;AUTHOR E-MAIL ADDRESS&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[other author/contributor lines as appropriate]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software. If not, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25795" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T15:16:32.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12426" CreationDate="2021-12-15T16:05:33.477" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the authors of Combined Work must provide a way to update Combined Work on user's computer/device so as to allow the user to run a modified version of Combined Work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You must make it possible for the user to relink the application's code (in your choice of object or source form) to a modified version of the LGPL library. This does not have to be done on the device itself. LGPLv3 4(d)(0) requires that you &amp;quot;Convey the Minimal Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, and the Corresponding Application Code...&amp;quot; but does not require that that conveyance nor linking actually occur on the same hardware. It is sufficient if the user can do so with a cross-compiling tool chain, emulator, alternative hardware, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if I make firmware for an embedded device and use LGPL library (by dynamic linking), do I have to provide a way to update the firmware on the device so that a user can replace the library with a modified version and then run it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there exists no way to update the firmware at all, then you do not need to add one. Section 6 of the GPLv3 limits when Installation Information must be supplied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can update firmware, you must instruct your users how to make use of this functionality (but only to the extent necessary to update the library). If you cannot update firmware, then the (L)GPLv3 does not require anything for this section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you correctly note, (L)GPLv2 does not require supplying Installation Information in any case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T17:19:13.397" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T17:19:13.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12423" CreationDate="2021-12-15T16:49:21.590" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the W3C:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...may not be conditioned on payment of royalties, fees or other consideration&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes HTML|CSS has license(ROYALTY FREE).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25805" LastEditorUserId="25805" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T19:10:33.323" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T19:10:33.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12425" CreationDate="2021-12-15T17:16:24.753" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; simply means legal permission to do something from a rightsholder. The relevant question is: if the rightsholder sued you for exercising some right (e.g., copying or modifying their copyrighted work), could you prove to a court's satisfaction that you actually had permission to do that? The mismatch between licensing statements makes me uncomfortable saying what a court might decide about what rights had been licensed to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, this mismatch makes me strongly suspects some Apache 2 files have been taken from another upstream program by this downstream developer, who has licensed their new work under MIT, possibly without satisfying their attribution/license-preservation requirements. I would certainly investigate if the Apache 2 labeled files have been taken from another project. This is generally allowed by the Apache 2 license, but requires keeping copyright notices and the Apache 2 license text, which I can't be sure has happened here. I would hold off on using this code until I identified the original author of each file, verified how they licensed the file, and ensured that my use complied with the requirements of each of those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-12-15T22:01:56.567" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T22:01:56.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12423" CreationDate="2021-12-15T22:58:37.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the user just selects RGBA color values, size dimensions, etc., then mapping these user specifications onto a set of style attributes and HTML like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.myButtonStyle {&#xA;    height: 80px;&#xA;    background-color: rgba(255, 0, 0, 1)&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;&amp;lt;button class=myButtonStyle&amp;gt;User wrote this text&amp;lt;/button&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;probably does not cause the program to generate novel copyrightable output beyond the user's own input.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the copyright-law concept of the &lt;em&gt;merger doctrine&lt;/em&gt;, when a concept that is so simple it can only be expressed in a limited number of ways, those expressions are not copyrightable. There are a very limited number of ways to express a button in HTML, and even fewer ways to specify its color and size dimensions in CSS. The program's selection of &lt;code&gt;height:&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;background-color:&lt;/code&gt; attribute names to prefix the user's input isn't a decision that is sufficiently creative to merit copyright protection over the program's contribution to the output. Thus, no license is necessary, because there is no copyright-protected expression to license to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program instead provides a sufficiently creative template file, with a structure complex enough to merit copyright protection, into which the user has simply dropped in a bit of text and images, then the resulting output might be a derivative of the program's original template. In that case, the program would need to specify how the resulting output may be modified and redistributed m (One expects the permissions granted will be fairly broad, or else not many people will choose to use the output of such a program -- it is for this exact reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF discourages use of the GPL for template files&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2021-12-15T22:58:37.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12425" CreationDate="2021-12-16T08:49:13.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an ideal world each project would have a homogeneous license for all its files, and components from other projects (and under other licenses) would be in dependencies or the like. But life is what happens while we make other plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the real world we see some projects, which have files copied in from other projects, and which have other licenses. As an example I often use org.springframework.security:spring-security-crypto , it clearly seems to be an Apache 2.0 licensed library. However it includes one file which is under ISC license: BCrypt.java . This fact is not declared anywhere except within that specific file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Situations like this are difficult to avoid for those using the software, for the development team of the library it would be easy to include the information in their LICENSE or NOTICE file. On the other hand, if the license declaration, the license language and the attribution notices are all included in that file they are likely complying with the legal requirements. Hopefully someone has checked if the different licenses are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is sometimes unavoidable, your question rightly focuses on how to deal with it. The answer is simple: You should respect the license and comply with its requirements. Where there is a specific license declaration in a file it overrides the license declaration of the entire project (which has been made for all files without such individual declaration).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @apsillers has stated in his answer, if you are unclear where the code comes from, or if you are unclear about the compatibility of the licenses, you should hold off using the code until you are certain that your questions have been satisfactorily answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-16T08:49:13.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-17T00:39:56.753" Score="1" ViewCount="1265" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I'm developing a web application, and I'm using a ton of npm packages while doing that. All of those packages are free and open source, and they are distributed under common licences as MIT, GPL, BSD etc. &lt;strong&gt;I'm not modyfying any of the packages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of those licences require me to include licence text or url, and authors in a source file. Hence, I have two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the code is part of the backend server, and it is never distributed anywhere, and runs only on my computer, should I include the copyrights note somewhere? If I should do so, then where?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some code is used in the frontend - it is sent to the client, and the client's browser executes it. I understand that in this case, I have to include a copyright notice somewhere. However, all the packages already include licence somewhere in them, so maybe I don't have to do that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25832" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T09:13:53.787" Title="Using npm packages in a project and their licences" Tags="|copyright|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12418" CreationDate="2021-12-17T08:23:05.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The library is the part that is linked into your program, the utilities are standalone executables (like &lt;code&gt;ldconfig&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;ldd&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for these is shipped together, so some files in the source code package will be LGPL licensed, others will be GPL licensed. From a practical point of view, there isn't much difference between those for source code files, as the differences between GPL and LGPL concern dynamic linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are permitted to link against the library under the terms of the LGPL (so you're in the clear there), and you are allowed to execute utility programs in a separate process under the terms of the GPL (this case is explicitly mentioned there as &amp;quot;we do not consider this to be creation of a derived work.&amp;quot;), so invoking &lt;code&gt;system(&amp;quot;ldconfig&amp;quot;);&lt;/code&gt; is safe as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you're not allowed to do is nonsensical stuff like &lt;code&gt;dlopen(&amp;quot;/sbin/ldconfig&amp;quot;, ...);&lt;/code&gt; that would bring code licensed under GPL into your process. This would be a questionable construct on a technical level as well, so there is little chance of accidentally violating the license here. The distinction can become relevant if you modify the C library, which as far as I've gathered, you're not planning to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="745" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T08:23:05.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-17T08:48:03.657" Score="1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to include all source codes in javax.naming.directory package of OpenJDK and use them.&#xA;The files have comments such as below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 1999, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.&#xA; * DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.&#xA; *&#xA; * This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it&#xA; * under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as&#xA; * published by the Free Software Foundation.  Oracle designates this&#xA; * particular file as subject to the &amp;quot;Classpath&amp;quot; exception as provided&#xA; * by Oracle in the LICENSE file that accompanied this code.&#xA; *&#xA; * This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT&#xA; * ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or&#xA; * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License&#xA; * version 2 for more details (a copy is included in the LICENSE file that&#xA; * accompanied this code).&#xA; *&#xA; * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License version&#xA; * 2 along with this work; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,&#xA; * Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.&#xA; *&#xA; * Please contact Oracle, 500 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 USA&#xA; * or visit www.oracle.com if you need additional information or have any&#xA; * questions.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I use them(not jar, but java files), should I disclose my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24323" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-17T09:29:08.010" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T09:29:08.010" Title="Gpl with classpath exception" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12435" CreationDate="2021-12-17T09:13:53.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses have different scopes and different impacts, that's why there are so many different licenses. You will have to look at each of the licenses separately. Most obligations for you would only be triggered as soon as you distribute your software, some if you modify any code of libraries, some if you combine components of one (copyleft) license with other components with different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is very generic, therefore you have to check how it applies to your situation and the specific npm packages you use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a backend server, which is under your control and where the code is not distributed to others, the use of OSS does not count as 'distribution', so you will not have to comply with respective obligations in the licenses. However, if your backend server is also serving 3rd parties, then you will need to check if you have included code which is under the AGPL or similar licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the frontend server you have to consider 2 separate cases: a) code which only runs on the server; and b) code which is sent to the browser of the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a) similar considerations apply as for the backend server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For b) you have to carefully consider all aspects of the OSS licenses. Not only HTML/XML code is affected here, but also Javascript, databases, images, text, etc. Depending on the license language you will have to identify the authors/copyright holders, provide a copy of the license language and possibly of Notice files (you can easily do that in an 'About' page on your frontend server). Even if some of that information is included in the headers of the files you are distributing, this is not the place where 'normal users' would search for it, and often it is incomplete (license language and/or notice files missing). You will also have to check the license compatibility of the different components. Some licenses don't go well with each other (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://gplv3.fsf.org/wiki/index.php/Compatible_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-17T09:13:53.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12443" CreationDate="2021-12-17T18:05:55.053" Score="9" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the legal point of view there are two types of work done by multiple authors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Joint authorship&lt;/em&gt; - when the authors create inseparable work, and the contributions of the authors are interdependent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Collective work&lt;/em&gt; - usually a compilation of works of multiple authors. Each part is separately copyrighted. As example it can be a newspaper or a magazine that consists of articles written by independent authors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each type of work provides different rights for the authors. In joint authorship each author shares copyright on the whole work with other authors. In collective work each author owns copyright only on his individual contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is it related to software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume I'm the original author of some open source software project and someone (a contributor) sends me a pull request (a contribution). If I accept the contribution, what is the copyright status of the project now? Is the software project considered as joint authorship or collective work? Is it for whole software or just for the files that the contributor changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rights of the original author? What are the rights of the contributor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it is possible to require the contributor to sign Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which may obligate the contributor to do copyright assignment of the contributions to the original author. But what is default when there is no CLA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to think that software with contributions is joint work since contributions are usually inseparable of the whole software (unless it is a plugin or a driver). On other hand I heard that contributors own copyright only to their contributions as it takes place in collective work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25795" LastEditorUserId="25795" LastEditDate="2021-12-18T03:48:56.960" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T05:15:35.753" Title="Does contributing to software project make it joint authorship or a collective work?" Tags="|law|contributor|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2021-12-20T11:25:10.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a broad question, as many different situations (e.g. addition to/modification of existing file vs. addition of a new file) and many different jurisdictions might influence the outcome. The following assumes that there is no Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could view the situation of a project like this: There is a status A at a certain point in time t(A), with all of the copyright owners at the time. Then another person P comes at a later time t(B) and modifies the software of status A, creates a pull request and it becomes status B. Status B can be viewed as a derivative work of status A and the parts added/changed by P has his/her copyright in those changed/modified parts and needs to be added to the project’s list of contributors/copyright holders. With many pull requests to a project, this concept would be called ‘serial derivatives’ and each programmer would own his/her part(s) of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright ownership part of the project can —over time and with large projects— become difficult to track and maintain. Therefore many developers consider the situation more like a ‘joint authorship’, so everyone is part of everything. This has advantages and disadvantages, particularly in the areas of enforcement, and there it is important to look at the specific jurisdiction of the case (but as we know many OSS projects are with international contributions, so it is difficult to determine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both approaches are possible, and in the absence of a Contributors License Agreement there is no clear cut way to determine which one is right. If you are able and willing to read what lawyers have to say on this subject, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2999185&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; might be helpful for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-20T11:25:10.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1958" CreationDate="2021-12-20T22:10:38.660" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an old issue, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/security-advisories/about-coordinated-disclosure-of-security-vulnerabilities&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub now recommends&lt;/a&gt; you to open a new issue on the related repository to ask for a preferred security contact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't a security policy in place, the most efficient way to establish a private means of communication with maintainers is to create an issue asking for a preferred security contact. It's worth noting that the issue will be immediately publicly visible, so it should not include any information about the bug. Once communication is established, you can suggest the maintainers define a security policy for future use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25864" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-21T03:34:37.240" LastActivityDate="2021-12-21T03:34:37.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-22T16:32:00.687" Score="2" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan on using an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/kieler/elkjs/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL 2.0 Library&lt;/a&gt; in an Apache License 2.0 project as a dependency for the UI. I won't be modifying the source code but I believe when we do &lt;code&gt;npm install&lt;/code&gt; to install the library, the source code is also downloaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this prevent me from using the EPL 2.0 library and if not do I need to mention the license in each and every file where I use this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25879" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T08:49:08.317" Title="Using EPL 2.0 library as a node module in APL 2.0 project" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|license|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12445" CreationDate="2021-12-23T08:49:08.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;EPL v2 is a bit confusing to many, as the definitions are not exactly what would be expected. Nevertheless, it is clear. For example “&lt;em&gt;Contributor&lt;/em&gt;“ means a person or entity that Distributes the Program, while “&lt;em&gt;Contribution&lt;/em&gt;“ is the act of modifying the Program. Then there are separate definitions for “&lt;em&gt;Derivative Work&lt;/em&gt;“ and “&lt;em&gt;Modified Work&lt;/em&gt;“ which is not commonly seen in other licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EPL v2 and Apache v2 are not fully compatible in the sense that you cannot re-license unmodified EPL-ed code under the Apache 2 license. However, you can very well have them side-by-side in your project. So what you plan to do (files with EPL v2 code in an Apache 2 project) is perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you do that, you will have to create a LICENSES.MD file which identifies that you are using this library, the full language of the EPL v2 license, and the source code of the library (or a link to where it can be downloaded). Best practice is to have one licenses.md file for your entire project, where you identify the different parts with their respective licenses (no need to add this note to each and every file of your project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not remove or alter any copyright, patent, trademark, attribution notices, disclaimers of warranty, or limitations of liability (if any) that come with the EPL project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T08:49:08.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-23T10:04:32.567" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have questions about Java licensing Well, after many court hearings with Oracle vs Google, I analyzed this topic again and I would like to ask you about a few things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oracle was accusing Google of copying the Java API SOURCE CODE and API documentation, not of using the API itself, right?&#xA;Does this mean that if I want to make a different version of Java (all the same, just all java. * Packages aren't called java. * Just anothername. *) Then does that violate Oracle's rights as well? Do I have to rely on openJDK and the GNU GPL to do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is Java owned by Oracle as a language (including API)? It's not that they control it (make changes etc) or that they have a trademark for the word &amp;quot;Java&amp;quot;. Can only they fork it to a different name and use all APIs outside of the Java ecosystem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2021-12-23T10:04:32.567" Title="Java Licensing Question" Tags="|gpl|copyright|law|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-24T21:54:03.587" Score="2" ViewCount="683" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have taken a source file named &lt;code&gt;foo.c&lt;/code&gt;, written by John Smith in 1999, with email address &lt;code&gt;jsmith@some.where.org&lt;/code&gt;, which was published under the terms of, say, GPL v2. Now, I'm making some changes to &lt;code&gt;foo.c&lt;/code&gt;, and want to publish it myself, in 2022. One of the changes I'm making is adding doxygen comments, and specifically, a file-level doxygen comment block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should my license block look like, in terms of doxygen commands, their repetition, and use of spacing and indentation not to incorrectly break the linkage between text and command? Naturally, it needs to be both clear to the reader and communicate all required information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Answer by example would be nice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14290" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T23:37:32.130" Title="Idiomatic format for a doxygen file header with license, author and copyright info?" Tags="|copyright|derivative-works|license-notice|documentation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12451" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12456" CreationDate="2021-12-25T16:46:34.007" Score="2" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets say I have a web page where I use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensed video and use it for non-commercial purposes. Particularly, I do not charge for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the same webpage I have other video content that I made myself and I sell it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first content is popular and users like it then the video will attract more users to my website and possibly they can buy second video. Somehow the first video might play a marketing role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this scenario happens do I violate CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states that: CC’s NonCommercial (NC) licenses prohibit uses that are “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not understand much details what &amp;quot;primarily intended&amp;quot; means in terms of law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25900" LastActivityDate="2021-12-26T10:39:33.827" Title="Indirect benefit using CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensed content" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12453" CreationDate="2021-12-25T17:20:37.533" Score="1" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;From FreeBSD License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this means the license should be reproduced on redistributions(with or without modifications) of original work but not on the entire derived work which makes it like a weak copyleft license. then why it is considered to be a permissive license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25902" OwnerDisplayName="pixo" LastActivityDate="2021-12-26T10:15:53.580" Title="Why FreeBSD License is considered a permissive license instead of weak copyleft license?" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2021-12-25T17:59:35.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand them, the two terms &amp;quot;copyleft license&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;permissive license&amp;quot; are not exclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;permissive license&amp;quot; is any license which permits use without specific individual permission from the user CC-By and CC-0 are permissive licenses, because they permit people to reuse the content without directly askign for permission. They also permit many other things as well. I would call even the CC-BY-NC-ND license permissive, although it forbids commercial use and the making or derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license specifically requires reusers to grant to others permission on the same terms as they have been granted.  The CC-BY-SA is a copyleft license in this sense. Many copyleft licenses also require that if a work under the license is incorporated into a larger work, the entire work must be distrusted under the same license. These are sometimes called &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; licenses. The GPL is of this sort. Some people only use the term &amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; for this sort of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, I think pretty much all copyleft licenses are also permissive, but not all permissive licenses are also copyleft. It might with some work be possible to create a copyleft license that was not permissive, but I don't know of any, and it would seem rather pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Permissive software license&lt;/a&gt; defines a &amp;quot;Permissive software license&amp;quot; as one that grants reuse rights, and also allows a user the right to re-license the work including placing it under a proprietary license, nd cites the BSD license. By this definition no copyleft license is permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FreeBSD or 2-clause BSD license requires that a copyright notice and the 2 condition's be included when a work is redistributed. It does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; require that the work be distributed under the FreeBSD license, or a similar license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FreeBSD project  has said that software releases under the FreeBSD license may be re-licensed under a proprietary license. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project - GPL Advantages and Disadvantages&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Bruce Montague includes the statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the GPL, which is designed to prevent the proprietary commercialization of Open Source code, the BSD license places minimal restrictions on future behavior. This allows BSD code to remain Open Source or become integrated into commercial solutions, as a project's or company's needs change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a copyleft license at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14404" OwnerDisplayName="David Siegel" LastActivityDate="2021-12-25T17:59:35.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12458" CreationDate="2021-12-25T20:55:34.130" Score="3" ViewCount="819" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24023/isc-vs-mit-vs-simplified-freebsd-what-is-the-difference-between-these-licenses/&quot;&gt;Was wondering after I had seen this answer on ISC vs BSD vs MIT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If both explicit &amp;amp; implied rights are the same and the permissions mentioned in the ISC are also found in MIT, including to sub-license it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would there be a problem with adding a commit in a fork that simply adds the extra parts to make it MIT while leaving the copyright header alone? (It would also keep in the permissions granted alongside the copyright notice to not violate the apparent terms)&#xA;Or would you have to have both in the COPYING.md file without having a single license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In effect I want to migrate code from a project I found that is&#xA;essentially 'dead' from ISC to MIT after forking it, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;none of the code was originally committed by me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and I don't know the original authors either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;For example:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attempting to have Licensing As:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;✅ . &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT text as Body but Keeping The Original Copyright Header with old name &amp;amp; date&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (instead of my own)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;&#xA;    〃Copyright (C) 20xx, &amp;lt;PLACEHOLDER@NA.NA&amp;gt;〃&#xA;    &#xA;     &#xA;    &#xA;    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and/or associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;),         &#xA;    to deal in the Software without restriction, &#xA;    including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, &#xA;    and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, for any purpose &#xA;    &#xA;    subject to the following conditions: &#xA;    The copyright notice and the permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. &#xA;     &#xA; &#xA;  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;❌. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;changed away from the original ISC:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;&amp;gt;     〃Copyright (C) 20xx, &amp;lt;PLACEHOLDER@NA.NA&amp;gt;〃&#xA;&amp;gt;     &#xA;&amp;gt;     Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted. provided that&#xA;&amp;gt; the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all&#xA;&amp;gt; copies.&#xA;&amp;gt;     &#xA;&amp;gt;     THIS HAS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF&#xA;&amp;gt; MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE&#xA;&amp;gt; FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY&#xA;&amp;gt; DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS,&#xA;&amp;gt; WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION,&#xA;&amp;gt; ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS&#xA;&amp;gt; SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA; &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My apologies in advance if this isn't formatted in an ideal way, this is the first time I've attempted to ask a question on here  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25901" LastEditorUserId="25901" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T02:38:33.137" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:31:11.690" Title="Can any project under ISC have the license migrated to MIT text by me if it possibly meets the criterion? (+the permissions listed within MIT License)" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|license-notice|license|isc|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2021-12-26T10:15:53.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;OSI has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#permissive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of 'permissive'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; license is simply a non-copyleft open source license —&#xA;one that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify, and redistribute, but&#xA;that permits proprietary derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq#copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of 'copyleft'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Copyleft&amp;quot; refers to licenses that allow derivative works but require&#xA;them to use the same license as the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is agreed by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free BSD License is essentially equivalent to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#2-clause_license_(%22Simplified_BSD_License%22_or_%22FreeBSD_License%22)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2-clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt; (in some citations there is an additional disclaimer) and it is clearly permissive. The language &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;must retain the above copyright notice&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; does by no means imply that the distribution of code needs to be under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-26T10:15:53.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12451" CreationDate="2021-12-26T10:39:33.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am referring to the license language shown on this page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt; , not to the human-readable summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are trying to do looks like 'Collective Work' as defined in 1.a . Rights for collective works are granted in section 3.a .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a restriction that is especially relevant for you in section 4.c &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This language is broad and includes/covers the rights granted in 3.a. This means that if your website is meant to provide a commercial advantage to you (and this covers the selling of other videos), then you do not have the rights to use any free content licensed under cc-by-nc-sa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-26T10:39:33.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-20T18:44:37.760" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;One question about GCC and GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to use library's headers with BSD-like license inside GCC project(-fork)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is a BSD-library named A (libA), which describes some IR-A. The libA has a method compileModuleA. While working this method loads (dlopen) a some extern dynamic-libraryB (by path and name from text config-file) and call another compileModuleB-method (dlsym) from dynamic-libB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there is a translator from GIMPLE to IR-A and a call of compileModuleA in GCC(-fork). GCC is linked with libA and includes libA-headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So libA knows nothing about GCC and libB projects and their headers. The libB uses only libA headers and realizes method compileModuleB. GCC uses only libA headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GCC      libB&#xA;   \    /&#xA;    libA&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can the libA be under BSD-license, and the libB be under non-open source license? Is such scheme valid with GCC under GPL3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(First posted question on stackoverflow. The proper way is to post or search on stackexchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By following &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/can-plugins-for-closed-source-software-use-gpld-libraries?rq=1&quot;&gt;Can plugins for closed source software use GPL&amp;#39;d libraries?&lt;/a&gt; lets add some clarifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substitutes libB to executable toolB, libA's callback to vfork/exec of toolB and a sending IR-A by a socket (as text for example). The toolB parses IR-A text (without linking with libA) and compiles it to a target assembler and send assembler back by socket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(addition:)&#xA;GCC-GPL prints assembler's text. Llvm-BSD prints assembler's text. So as for me assembler is &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; language. Assembler's text may be printend by GCC-GPL and then translated to object code by llvm-as-BSD (at theoretically). For usability just technically llvm-as may be called by vfork/exec and assembler's text/object code can be send by socketpair without temporary files. And now I think that it is a legal usage. For example if GCC-GPL prints llvm-IR (by internal GPL-module) and sends llvm-IR to llc it is a legal too, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was my mistake from the begining? (One of them :))&#xA;Llvm-IR is used by many passes and it is a &amp;quot;high-level&amp;quot; IR (in fact it is a very similar to C). So adding a bridge from llvm-IR to some another IR just before MachineCode-transformation gives a functional compiler &amp;quot;library&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, GIMPLE-IR, if I am rigth, has different stages (early, medium, later and etc). And also the huge part of common functionality (lowering) works on RTL (with different stages too). That is why I think now that a bridge from (early)-GIMPLE to &amp;quot;extern&amp;quot;-IR by printing a text is possible in legal sence. (Of course it is very hard work with certain circumstances, but not rocket sience at all.) But probably such scheme gives only a C/C++ frontend without many important functional parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25916" OwnerDisplayName="Павел" LastEditorUserId="25916" LastEditDate="2022-01-18T02:57:25.040" LastActivityDate="2022-11-14T23:05:45.650" Title="A use of BSD-headers and linking with BSD-libraries in GCC project" Tags="|gcc|plugins|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2021-12-27T14:08:52.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people are considering the ISC license and the MIT license as equivalent w.r.t. the rights, conditions and disclaimer. I am a subscriber to that position. You can find respective opinions &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/157476/isc-license-advice&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-the-MIT-and-ISC-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others mention that there is a distinct difference, as MIT mentions 'sublicensing' while ISC does not mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the ISC License states &amp;quot;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or &lt;strong&gt;distribute&lt;/strong&gt; this software &lt;strong&gt;for any purpose with&lt;/strong&gt; or without &lt;strong&gt;fee&lt;/strong&gt; is hereby granted.&amp;quot;(emphasis added) Most people will say that this language covers all situations that would otherwise be described as 'sublicensing', and in the absence of any language preventing sublicensing it can safely be assumed that it is included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the words &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;have its license edited to MIT's text&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; you appear to refer to the process of re-licensing the project. I believe it is good practice to seek the consensus of all significant contributors before you consider re-licensing a project. If you are the only contributor the decision-making is easier. If you cannot achieve consensus you might need to fork the project. But then, with the rights, conditions and disclaimer being equivalent, you would be able to re-license from ISC to MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2021-12-27T14:08:52.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12439" CreationDate="2021-12-27T20:30:00.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some info I got after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2999185&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the article&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;A Theory of Joint Authorship For Free and Open Source Software Projects&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;Pamela S. Chestek&lt;/em&gt;) provided in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12443/25795&quot;&gt;the answer&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Martin_in_AUT&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the US copyright law doesn't divide works into two types: joint authorship and collective works. Instead it &lt;strong&gt;divides authorship into two types&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;divides works into five types&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are only &lt;strong&gt;two types of authorship&lt;/strong&gt; recognized in US copyright law, &lt;strong&gt;sole authorship&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;joint authorship&lt;/strong&gt;. Copyright subsists in a &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; of authorship. &lt;strong&gt;Five types of works are mentioned in the Copyright Act&lt;/strong&gt;, three expressly defined and two terms used but not defined.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those types of works are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Initial work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Compilation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Collective work - subset of compilation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derivative work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revision - derivative work with insignificant changes that are not enough to form new copyrighted work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each type of work can be sole authorship or joint authorship. So it possible to have collective work with joint authorship. But in this case the authorship is associated only with the selection, coordination and arrangement of the constituent works, not with the works themselves, they are separately authored. The same is with derivative work. It can be joint authorship, but the authorship is associated only with modifications to the original work, not with the entire derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later the author of the article raises the question similar to the question of this topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free and open source software is unlike almost any other kind of copyrightable work because there can be a monumental number of authors all contributing to the same body of code. &lt;strong&gt;The question becomes how to understand the authorship of a work when a number of different people have modified it over time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Assume that there is a simple work of software, a single file, created by a sole author. The sole author elects to make the software available under an open source license in a public code repository like GitHub. Also assume that the original author plans to accept changes suggested by others but will not be asking for a formal contributor license agreement or an assignment of the contributor's copyright. Another person copies the original source code as allowed by the license, makes changes throughout the file as allowed by the license, and submits a pull request suggesting that the original author modify the initial work by making the same changes to it. The original author does. Assume that the change is significant enough that the contribution is copyrightable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author states that the answer to the question is that it is separately authored derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The traditional view is that each person who contributed copyrightable content to the file is the sole copyright owner of their contribution&lt;/strong&gt;. Now recall the types of second generation works that copyright law recognizes—the revision, the derivative work, and the subset of a compilation, the collective work—and consider how this contribution affects the initial work. The file with the new changes is no longer the initial work because it has been modified. It may be a revision, although that would not create any new copyright. &lt;strong&gt;It is not a collective work because&lt;/strong&gt;, under our hypothetical that this is a single file, &lt;strong&gt;the contributions are not &amp;quot;separate and independent works,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; they have been blended together and are inseparable from the initial work. The only possibility left is that &lt;strong&gt;it is a &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; of the initial work&lt;/strong&gt;—meaning there are now two works, the initial work and the newer derivative work.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now consider the next contribution by another author. The result will be the same, an initial work, a subsequent derivative work created by making the first change, and now a second derivative work created by making the second change. Now consider how it looks when there are 13,500 authors and 8 to 9 changes made per hour.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thus software with contributions is a chain of sequential/serial derivative works with each contribution usually being sole authorship.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contributing to software project makes it neither joint authorship nor collective work. It makes a new derivative work where the contribution is copyrighted by the contributor and the original work is copyrighted by original author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to emphasize again that a contributor doesn't hold copyright to the entire derivative work but only to his/her changes to the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Although the phrase &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot; means the combination of the pre-existing work and the modifications, the new author's rights do not extend to any of the pre-existing copyrighted work; the new author's copyright extends only to what is different from the pre-existing work and must itself have sufficient originality to be copyrightable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this the author lists the drawbacks of the traditional view. It takes large part of the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively open source software can be viewed as a single work with joint authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For there to be joint authorship, the authorship contributed by the two or more participants is either &amp;quot;inseparable&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;interdependent.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Inseparable&amp;quot; means that the works cannot be separately identified, for example, the collaboration of two playwrights on one play. &amp;quot;Interdependent&amp;quot; means that, while the contributions may be separately identifiable, they are written pursuant to an express or implied agreement that the product will be regarded as an indivisible whole, such as the words and music of a song. Perhaps an example of the first in software is the single file with revisions by different authors, and an example of the second is a collection of files that creates one functioning software program.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, even after reading the article, I still do not understand what has to be done to make software joint authorship. Should it be declared in some kind of agreement or not. What the author says about this in her article is that authors should have an intent to combine their contributions into single whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For a work of joint authorship, all authors have to intend that their contributions be merged into a single whole.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the case of free software, proof of the intent to create a joint work is not a problem; it is almost the sina qua non of the open source software project. The word &amp;quot;collaboration&amp;quot; is used so often to describe open source code development that it is almost a trope. The licenses themselves sometimes reflect a joint development ethos. For example, the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 defines &amp;quot;Contributor&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;each individual or legal entity that creates, contributes to the creation of, or owns Covered Software,&amp;quot; suggesting that many authors are contributing to the same work. The terminology used in open source software, “contributing upstream,” “inbound” and “outbound,” suggests a common pool of code shared by all. Nevertheless, it is perceived as a legal status to be avoided.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joint ownership theory has its advantages and disadvantages that are presented later on in the article and take another large part of the article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I think that one of the disadvantages is that all authors have the same amount of rights to the whole software even if contributions of some authors are insignificant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25795" LastEditorUserId="25795" LastEditDate="2021-12-28T15:40:42.120" LastActivityDate="2021-12-28T15:40:42.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12464" CreationDate="2021-12-28T21:37:46.497" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a reimplementation for a different language of a software library that is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2015/copyright-software-and-document&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W3C Software Notice and Document License&lt;/a&gt;. The original library contains a NOTICE file. As my project is heavily influenced by the original I would assume that it constitutes a derived work (which I want to publish under the MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I therefore wanted to ask for some advice on how to properly attribute the original library. Is it enough to include the text &lt;code&gt;This software or document includes material copied from or derived from [title and URI of the W3C document]. Copyright © [YEAR] W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, Beihang).&lt;/code&gt; from the license in my README and the license text in the LICENSE file? Or do I have to create a NOTICE file myself (containing the text from the original NOTICE) and/or add the above mentioned copyright statement to every source code file in my library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25923" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T09:39:29.013" Title="Attribution when deriving from a W3C Software Notice and Document License work" Tags="|licensing|mit|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-29T12:03:35.110" Score="8" ViewCount="1973" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our embedded system comprises a Xilinx ARM-based system on chip (MPSoC). Xilinx-provided BSP includes U-Boot (which is licensed under GPL 2). We do not modify it in any way, do not link to it, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that such use of U-Boot does not constitute derived work and does not subject our software to GPL 2 requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25928" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2021-12-29T12:27:51.150" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T05:35:43.333" Title="GPL implications of using U-Boot" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12462" CreationDate="2021-12-29T13:17:48.070" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the assumption that your software is perfectly standard userspace type software which starts running well after the kernel has booted etc, then I would agree with your assessment - your software is an independent work from U-Boot, so your product is an aggregation and the GPL does not extend to your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside, this does not exempt you from the requirement to provide the source to U-Boot itself when someone you have distributed it to requests it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2021-12-29T13:17:48.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12461" CreationDate="2021-12-29T17:06:56.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The W3C license you linked to does not mention a NOTICE file, so there is no requirement to have or keep such a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to attribute the original library is to have the text &lt;code&gt;This software includes material copied from &amp;lt;original library&amp;gt; (&amp;lt;link to repository&amp;gt;). Copyright © [YEAR] W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, Beihang).&lt;/code&gt; in both your README and LICENSE files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You put it in your README to have the attribution in a location where it will be almost certainly seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; put it in your LICENSE file, just before the copy of the W3C Software Notice and Document License itself to make it clear why that license text is placed there and to avoid any possible confusion if your code might be dual-licensed or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2021-12-29T17:06:56.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12462" CreationDate="2021-12-30T05:25:41.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;U-boot's license requires you to provide the source-code for U-boot (including any modifications you made) to anybody that asks for it. U-boot typically doesn't interact with your system after booting, and neither will its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, GPLv2 software is OK to ship on a product that also includes closed-source software. It won't force you to give away your proprietary code, as long as all you're doing is running GPLv2 binaries or dynamically linking against GPLv2 libraries (note: the topic of linking is up for some interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 software is a bit stricter, and requires you to provide users with a way to modify the filesystem that holds any GPLv3 code. So if you need to have encrypted updates or something, try to steer clear of GPLv3 software. But GPLv2 is usually OK as long as you're OK giving out any modifications you made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25933" LastEditorUserId="25933" LastEditDate="2021-12-30T05:35:43.333" LastActivityDate="2021-12-30T05:35:43.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12466" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12467" CreationDate="2021-12-30T18:20:36.737" Score="2" ViewCount="867" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a java library, which will be released in maven central. My project depends on few others, the dependencies look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dependencies&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;org.slf4j&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;slf4j-api&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;version&amp;gt;1.7.32&amp;lt;/version&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;org.junit.jupiter&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;junit-jupiter-api&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;version&amp;gt;5.8.2&amp;lt;/version&amp;gt;&#xA;         &amp;lt;scope&amp;gt;test&amp;lt;/scope&amp;gt;&#xA;     &amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dependencies&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the last few days i am hindered by handling the licenses of these dependencies.&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;SLF4J for example is MIT licensed and the license states - The  above  copyright  notice  and  this permission  notice  shall  be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. How exactly should i include the SLF4J license in the artefacts? Do i even need to include it, considering that normally artefacts don't contain their dependencies?&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Similarly i am not sure how to handle test dependencies, do i need to include licenses and agreements for them, considering they are only used during the test stage of builduing asrtefacts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25934" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T22:14:28.593" Title="Handling licenses of dependencies" Tags="|license-notice|maven|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12466" CreationDate="2021-12-31T02:43:58.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you noticed, the MIT license requires that its text be included in all &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;copies or substantial portions&lt;/strong&gt; of the Software&amp;quot;. So, if you distribute a &lt;em&gt;copy&lt;/em&gt; of part or all of SLF4J, either on its own or as part of some larger program or package, you need to include the MIT license with that distribution and indicate that the license applies to the copied part. But if whatever you distribute does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; include SLF4J itself, the MIT license does not impose any requirements on that distribution: you wouldn't have to include the copyright notice and license text for SLF4J in a distribution that does not actually contain SLF4J.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes for any other dependency covered by the MIT license. Other licenses might have some requirements you need to fulfill even if you're not distributing the dependency itself, though. The classic example is the GPL, which requires that the dependent software (i.e. your program that depends on a GPL library) &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; be licensed under the GPL - at least, it probably does, depending on just how tight of a dependency it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7356/529&quot;&gt;Do I need to include the license for all dependencies declared in a setup.py?&lt;/a&gt; which is much the same question in the context of Python instead of Java (but the language doesn't matter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="529" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T22:14:28.593" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T22:14:28.593" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-12-31T06:53:42.813" Score="7" ViewCount="623" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, LGPL mandates that the respective licenses are featured in file and in app visual representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is a simple distribution matter, but the latter is a gui feature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume the software product is in beta version, and the respective gui facilities are not yet implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such a scenario, it ok to provision licensing information via a simple runtime mention (&amp;quot;uses X library, for more information see license file&amp;quot;), with only the file as a source for the full license text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T11:12:04.973" Title="LGPL obligations implementation in beta versions" Tags="|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12468" CreationDate="2021-12-31T08:19:03.167" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compliance stuff isn't a nice-to-have feature. The LGPL provides no exceptions for beta releases. However, the LGPL is technology-neutral and does not directly require you to implement a GUI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must reasonable notices about the open source components that you use. How to do this depends on the nature of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For a graphical application:&lt;/strong&gt; Moving license notices to a separate screen or file is fine if the user has the actual ability to access these. I'd have doubts about that for a mobile app, though it's probably fine in a desktop context. In essence, I would expect this test case to pass:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Given that I am an end user&#xA;And I am on the copyright notice screen&#xA;When I click on the license notice link&#xA;Then a window with the license notices appears&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a mobile context, showing a plaintext file with a web view is probably the easiest way to get this done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth emphasizing that you must provide the license notices alongside the app. Unless this is a web app, it's not sufficient to load the license notices from a web server. This should work fully offline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For a non-graphical application:&lt;/strong&gt; If the software provides an interactive user interface (e.g. a REPL or command line) then it should show a short message about license information to the user. For example, the GDB debugger is a GPLv3 program that shows the following message upon starting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright (C) 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later &amp;lt;http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&amp;gt;&#xA;This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.&#xA;There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.&#xA;Type &amp;quot;show copying&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;show warranty&amp;quot; for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(With respect to notice requirements GPLv3 and LGPLv3 are generally equivalent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software is non-interactive, you don't need such notices. It would likely be sufficient to include the license notices in a file, but to inform the user how to find this file. That means, I would expect the license notices to be part of the included documentation files that are shipped with the program. E.g. if you release your software as a ZIP archive that users can unpack, having a LICENSE file in the archive would be an obvious way to store such information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL also requires much more than just showing the license notices. You must offer the source-code for the LGPL-covered components. You must make it possible for the end user to modify the LGPL-covered components. In a desktop context, this is most easily achieved by distributing the LGPL-covered component as a separate library (e.g. DLL on Windows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2021-12-31T09:36:41.377" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T09:36:41.377" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12468" CreationDate="2021-12-31T09:52:18.650" Score="-3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, LGPL mandates that the respective licenses are featured in file and in app visual representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Linux, the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; executable can act as a command line application, a GUI application, or some web service. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt;. And I believe the LGPL does not &lt;em&gt;mandate&lt;/em&gt; showing licensing info at every run. &lt;a href=&quot;http://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; does not do so. It can accept plugins (LGPL licensed) like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bstarynk/bismon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bismon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With X11 applications, you need to use &lt;code&gt;getenv(&amp;quot;DISPLAY&amp;quot;)&lt;/code&gt; to find out &lt;em&gt;at runtime&lt;/em&gt; if your executable is running with or without a GUI (e.g. an X11 server).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;code&gt;/lib/libc.so.6&lt;/code&gt; is both a shared library and some LGPL licensed executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License info should be &lt;em&gt;easily&lt;/em&gt; shown. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU sed&lt;/a&gt; gives it with &lt;code&gt;sed --version&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://frama-c.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frama-C&lt;/a&gt; (LGPL licensed) gives it only on its website - but not thru the command line. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; gives it with &lt;code&gt;gcc --help -v&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, and you need legal advice. Details are country specific (different in Amsterdam, in Paris, in Moscow, in San Francisco) and may depend upon your work contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume the software product is in beta version, and the respective gui facilities are not yet implemented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implementing a program argument like &lt;code&gt;--help&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;--license&lt;/code&gt; is very easy. It probably could be helpful in a lawsuit. My habit is to implement that first (with a &lt;code&gt;--version&lt;/code&gt; option).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the license info is not required to be given with a GUI interface. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt&lt;/a&gt; has classes to help so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to contact me by email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T11:12:04.973" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T11:12:04.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12461" CreationDate="2021-12-31T10:45:39.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am creating a reimplementation for a different language of a software library that is licensed under the W3C Software Notice and Document License. The original library contains a NOTICE file. As my project is heavily influenced by the original I would assume that it constitutes a derived work (which I want to publish under the MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legally, I am not sure it is a derived work. &lt;strong&gt;Ask your lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;. But for ethical reasons, it probably is. A counter example is obvious: many C compilers (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://clang.llvm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clang&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyCC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinycc&lt;/a&gt;, etc...). They all are doing the &amp;quot;same thing&amp;quot; but are legally not a derived work (the same ideas are implemented in several of them). Another counter example are Unix shells (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bash&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dash&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://zsh.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zsh&lt;/a&gt;...). A lot of them are able to run the same scripts (POSIX shells).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://musl.libc.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;musl-libc&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU libc&lt;/a&gt;. They implement the same API. They have different licenses and copyright owners and contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another examples are GUI libraries like FLTK, GTK, etc. All of them are able to show windows on screens. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://wt-toolkit.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt&lt;/a&gt; have very similar APIs. But Wt show quasi windows in a web browser, but Qt is showing windows on a graphic server (e.g. Xorg).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In France (where I work and live) you could become member of &lt;a href=&quot;https://april.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;APRIL&lt;/a&gt; and ask them. They do have legal expertise and political influence in favor of open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to add some copyright notice in every source file (like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; suggests). Things are more complex for bootstrapped compiled implementations. I usually generate a GPL comment in generated C or C++ code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="2250" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T09:39:29.013" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T09:39:29.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2021-12-31T12:17:03.683" Score="-1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before coining free software concept(in 1983),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the software(before 1970's) released with free source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father (Dimitri Starynkevitch, died in 1993) developed the PAF compiler on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAB500&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CAB500&lt;/a&gt; in the early 1960s in France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, the CAB500 computer could be sold (before 1965) with the &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; of PAF on punched tapes, or at least printed in books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later my father worked at IBM. on the PL/1 compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PAF compiler was not free software, it was just sold with the computer (probably in source form, printed in books). I believe customers could buy IBM 370 mainframes with source code of PL/1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had the privilege to type PAF programs on an old CAB500 computer at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.palais-decouverte.fr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palais de la Découverte&lt;/a&gt; in the mid 1970s (as a teenager). Some parts of it are visible (in 2021 or 2022) at Paris &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arts et Métiers museum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC, source code was then considered more like an art, e.g. like music or mathematical proofs or books, than as something patentable. And before Internet, source code was sent on magnetic tapes or punched cards by trucks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T21:15:16.190" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T21:15:16.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12468" CreationDate="2021-12-31T22:10:17.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, LGPL mandates that the respective licenses are featured in file and in app visual representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say that exactly. LGPL-2.1 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the library is used in it. You must supply a copy of this License. &lt;em&gt;If the work during execution displays copyright notices&lt;/em&gt;, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to a copy of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine). It doesn't say you have to put the whole license text in the GUI, and if there are no copyright notices in the GUI at all then it doesn't obligate you to add one — only, if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a place in the UI that displays a copyright notice, then it has to include the notice for the library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL-3.0 says effectively the same thing in a less easily quotable format: you need &amp;quot;prominent notice&amp;quot; of the use of the library, you need to include the license (both LGPL-3 and GPL-3) and let the user know how to find it, and you need to include the library's copyright notice in your UI if and only if there is some part of the UI that displays a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1062" LastEditorUserId="1062" LastEditDate="2022-01-01T01:29:47.187" LastActivityDate="2022-01-01T01:29:47.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12450" CreationDate="2021-12-31T23:37:32.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; know if there's a standard for this, but given that (as I write this) nobody else has answered, I might as well....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I've typically seen in source files which have documentation comments is that the license information is included in a &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt;, non-documentation comment block. I think this makes sense, since the generated documentation is meant to be read by programmers, and they won't care about the license information (or at least, that's not what they'll be looking for in the documentation). The file-level documentation comment should explain things like what's in the file and how it relates to other files; basically, things that will be useful to someone who wants to understand how the code is organized. That doesn't include licensing info (unless licensing is the reason for organizing code into files in a certain way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your example, that might look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* foo.c&#xA; *&#xA; * Copyright 1999 John Smith &amp;lt;jsmith@some.where.org&amp;gt;&#xA; * Modifications copyright 2022 einpoklum &amp;lt;einpoklum@example.com&amp;gt;&#xA; *&#xA; * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA; * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA; * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA; * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA; *&#xA; * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA; * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA; * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA; * GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA; *&#xA; * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA; * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA; * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.&#xA; */&#xA;&#xA;/**&#xA; * This file contains the Foo struct and functions that act on it.&#xA; *&#xA; * ...(more documentation)...&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2021-12-31T23:37:32.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12468" CreationDate="2022-01-03T04:51:01.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If it's not conveyed to end users outside your organization, you don't need any legal information. (L)GPL gives you the right to do anything as long as it counts as &amp;quot;private use.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20625" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T04:51:01.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12481" CreationDate="2022-01-03T15:19:32.527" Score="3" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons explicitly states that GPL3 is compatible with CC-BY-SA 3.0. However, there is no information on its compatibility with Apache 2.0. Currently, I am hosting Apache licensed content on a CC-BY-SA 3.0 (It's not ideal, I am aware), and want to make sure that I'm not facing any licensing incompatibility. Would sublicencing Apache 2.0 licensed content on CC-BY-SA 3.0 content would cause issues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user25958" LastEditorDisplayName="user25958" LastEditDate="2022-01-03T15:27:26.837" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T10:51:11.543" Title="Is CC-BY-SA 3.0 compatible with Apache 2.0?" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|law|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-03T19:34:47.847" Score="9" ViewCount="2228" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a framework that implements some business logic for a niche organization. That project is open source, pushed to gitlab and uses a LGPL v3 licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want, is to extract the business logic in the form of BPMN diagrams and reimplement everything on a different framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not be copying/touching that framework, all the code will be mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, will my code be derivative work and can I publish it on any licence I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25960" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-04T12:11:56.067" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T17:02:11.053" Title="Extracting business logic from a LGPL v3 project and rewriting my own, is my work considered derivative?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12478" CreationDate="2022-01-03T20:34:57.257" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theory, no - the copyright exists in the specific implementation of the code, not the algorithm in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, it's going to be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; hard for you to forget everything you've read in the LGPL code when reimplementing them in your framework, and even harder for you to &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; you didn't directly copy anything from the LGPL code. This is why &amp;quot;clean room&amp;quot; reimplementations are best done by two people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person A looks at the code and creates the specification of what the code should do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person B looks at the specification (&lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; at the original code) and writes their own version of the code. Ensure all communications between Person A and Person B are documented so you have a trail showing there was never direct transfer of the original code to Person B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-03T20:34:57.257" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12477" CreationDate="2022-01-04T10:51:11.543" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are not directly compatible. Two licenses A and B are compatible if both licenses allow the combination to be covered by licensing terms that don't contradict each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Implicit and explicit compatibility.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this compatibility is achieved through explicit compatibility paths. E.g. the Creative Commons licenses have license version upgrade clauses, and CC-BY-SA-4.0 is one-way compatible with GPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases this compatibility is achieved implicitly because the license terms don't conflict. For example, the MIT license is compatible with the Apache-2.0 license: all the MIT license requires is that the license notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the software. This can be achieved in an Apache-2.0 licensed software by including the MIT license notice in a NOTICE file. And even without the notice file mechanism the two licenses would be compatible because neither license prevents other components from having different licenses – quite unlike copyleft licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The CC-BY-SA-3.0 is a copyleft license.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In clause 4.b, permissible licenses for Adaptations are listed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) this License;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US));&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Creative Commons Compatible License&amp;quot; means a license that is listed at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;that has been approved by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License,&#xA;including, at a minimum, because that license:&#xA;(i) contains terms that have the same purpose, meaning and effect as the License Elements of this License; and,&#xA;(ii) explicitly permits the relicensing of adaptations of works made available under that license under this License or a Creative Commons jurisdiction license with the same License Elements as this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That website currently mentions that “no non-CC licenses have been designated as compatible with BY-SA 3.0”. It is worth noting that the Apache-2.0 cannot be a Compatible License because Apache-2.0 has no ShareAlike style license element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list of allowed licenses for Adaptations is exhaustive. It is not allowed to modify the CC-BY-SA license terms. For example, it is not allowed to add terms that require preservation of additional attribution notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Issues with Apache-2.0 to CC-BY-SA-3.0 one-way compatibility.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this background, we can consider whether Apache-2.0 material could be included in a CC-BY-SA-3.0 work. At first glance, this seems to be the case: section 2 gives permission to sublicense the Apache-2.0 covered material. However, such sublicensing cannot circumvent the conditions of the license. There are many details where I think that the Apache-2.0 terms might be incompatible with CC-BY-SA-3.0. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache-2.0 license requires a NOTICE file to be preserved, if present. Additionally, Apache-2.0 requires retention of all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices in the Source form of the Work, if it is distributed. This goes far beyond the CC-BY-SA-3.0 concept of attribution in clause 4.c. The CC-BY-SA-3.0 does not allow corresponding license terms to be added (compare discussion of clause 4.b above).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache-2.0 license includes a patent license along with termination conditions. The CC-BY-SA-3.0 does not discuss patents and arguably has different license termination conditions in clause 7.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Apache-2.0 license requires that all recipients of the Work be given a copy of the Apache-2.0 license. The CC-BY-SA-3.0 has no mechanism to preserve a large block of text – it doesn't even expect the CC-BY-SA-3.0 terms themselves to be included.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is possible to argue that Apache-2.0 has terms that cannot be fulfilled via the CC-BY-SA-3.0, so that there's no one-way Apache → CC compatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Opposing arguments in favor of Apache-2.0 to CC-BY-SA-3.0 compatibility.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to make different arguments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The attribution requirements are in fact compatible, and the patent clauses don't conflict because CC-BY-SA-3.0 doesn't address patents, whereas the Apache-2.0 patent termination clause only affects patents and not the copyright license. The Apache license copy is not a problem because it can be given as a link, and CC-BY-SA-3.0 attribution can include the preservation of links.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A specific Apache-2.0 covered work might not have any contributors that hold patents and might only have notices that also fall within the scope of CC-BY-SA-3.0 attribution. Then, there would be one-way compatibility to CC-BY-SA-3.0 for that specific work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel somewhat uncomfortable with those arguments. The safest path is to assume that the licenses are not compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Indirect compatibility via GPL-3.0 is unlikely to help.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of this discussion of &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; compatibility, it is clear that there's an indirect compatibility path:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0 is one-way compatible with GPL-3.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adaptations of CC-BY-SA-3.0 material can be licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adaptations of CC-BY-SA-4.0 material can be licensed under GPL-3.0 as it is explicitly recognized as a compatible license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, CC-BY-SA-3.0 material that has undergone multiple adaptations can be combined with Apache-2.0 covered material, if the combination is covered by the GPL-3.0 license. Unlike the CC-BY-SA licenses, the GPL-3.0 has an “additional terms” mechanism that can be used to smooth over minor differences like specific attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the site in question expects content to have a CC-BY-SA-3.0 compatible license in the sense that the content can be used under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-3.0, then this indirect compatibility doesn't help. The CC→GPL compatibility is one-way only, and it is not possible to use GPL material under CC license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Copyright exceptions are worth considering.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever considering license conditions, it can also be a good idea to take a step back and consider whether the licenses even apply. Copyright law typically allows some use of copyrighted material without a license, e.g. &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such exceptions might apply e.g. if you're not copying large parts of code, but are only reproducing short snippets for discussion/analysis, where your own content clearly dominates. For example, if I were to write a blog post about some internals of the Docker engine, I would feel comfortable quoting short snippets from the Docker source code &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; fulfilling the Apache-2.0 license conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whether it would be appropriate to rely on such exceptions depends on the specific laws in your jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the site you're submitting content to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T10:51:11.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-04T11:11:45.740" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use for the creation of an application that I plan to add to Google play (free to use) some code that is licensed under a CC0 license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tedbarnett/read-exif-in-unity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/tedbarnett/read-exif-in-unity&lt;/a&gt;). However this code use the work from an other licensed code (CPOL license &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.codeproject.com/info/cpol10.aspx&lt;/a&gt;). I was wondering how I was supposed to deal with this situation: Am I allowed to use the code and if I am how exactly should I proceed to publish my application on Google play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25962" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-04T11:14:54.673" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T00:03:50.327" Title="Use of CC0 licensed code which used CPOL licensed code" Tags="|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12478" CreationDate="2022-01-04T16:04:48.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and yes, in theory, but consult a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleanroom development is the historical answer to this question when dealing with a very litigious author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An answer I've heard in the past is you can probably get away with first writing test cases to the spec and then writing code to make those test cases pass.  But you must resist the temptation to look at existing code during this process.  This sounds a bit like this diagram thing you're talking about.  Again, consult with a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright isn't magical, it's intention is to prevent people from profiting unduly from someone else's work.  You must do enough work to convince the copyright holder (or the court if it gets that far) that it is your own work you are profiting from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25310" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T16:04:48.190" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12478" CreationDate="2022-01-04T16:50:29.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;BPMN diagrams can be created on many abstraction levels. You could create a BPMN diagram that is an exact detailed translation from the existing LGPL code, and then it would be a derivative work. On the other hand you could create a BPMN diagram which is on a very high level (your words '&lt;em&gt;business logic&lt;/em&gt;' hint in that direction) and then your diagram would just reflect the idea but not the implementation, which would likely not be a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no clear cut answer to your question, it depends. Things could become clearer (towards not being a derivative work) if you use the (high-level) BPMN diagram to model the processes (with modeling tools), then adding changes/improvements to the BPMN diagram before actually implementing it in software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-01-06T17:02:11.053" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T17:02:11.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-04T17:07:50.640" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some specific usage examples I would like to learn, regarding of using some open source libraries inside a &lt;strong&gt;commercial closed source product(binary, executable)&lt;/strong&gt;. Most of the answers online cover only open-source products, and license compatibility. This resulted in me opening this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Openssl / libssl / libcrypto&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it okay to use these libraries from the system. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;openssl/evp.h&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;openssl/err.h&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;openssl/conf.h&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, libraries themselves are not distributed, but every Unix system has them, and is used from the customers' computer. I have seen this usage in an MIT licensed library, never mentioning the license of openssl anywhere. Is this normal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Openssl (static linking)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, to get around versioning problems, static linking is applied. In this example, libraries would be distributed with the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. -static-libgcc, -static-libstdc++&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know, the GCC compiler, gives the rights to the compilation output to the developer. But if one is trying to avoid runtime library version problems, these libraries can also be included in the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Not including the license notices of an included project's own dependencies&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you are using an MIT license open source project, in a binary I described above. You include the project's license notice, but not the other 30 different MIT licensed projects that the first one already includes (therefore depends on). Is it the first project's responsibility to mention them in their website, etc. Or should I dig out every dependency that project includes, and mention them myself ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would these usages be copyright infringements? I know these libraries provide some exceptions for non-violating usage. Do these require copyright notices with the exception mentioned? I looked up these exceptions, and they were really confusing for me, couldn't understand if they applied to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I apologize for combining many questions into one, but separating them would require explaining the topic over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25965" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T08:40:31.513" LastActivityDate="2023-04-27T08:40:31.513" Title="System libraries and exceptions regarding closed source distribution" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|license-notice|closed-source|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12482" CreationDate="2022-01-04T23:38:51.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I drilled down into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/47486/Understanding-and-Reading-Exif-Data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the project you linked&lt;/a&gt; and saw that there is sample code, which is licensed under CPOL 1.0. In your comments to your question you mentioned that this CPOL-licensed code is directly copied into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tedbarnett/read-exif-in-unity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0-licensed project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this should not be. CPOL-licensed code must not be re-licensed as CC0. When you (fork and) re-license you can only reduce freedoms and add restrictions, not the other way around; but CC0 would be removing restrictions compared to CPOL. I believe we are witnessing a license-incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to use this code (and there is no alternative) I would directly address the re-licensing question with the developers of the 2 projects and ask for their thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you could fork the CC0 project, remove the CPOL code from it, and implement that same CPOL code as a dependency directly in your own project. You can then license your own project with any license that is compatible to CPOL and any other dependencies used in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-04T23:38:51.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-05T00:50:04.450" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Android app contains many libraries licensed under Apache 2.0. According to my understanding, when publishing the app, it is enough to add the following sentence in the app's description: &amp;quot;This app contains libraries licensed under Apache License 2.0&amp;quot;, am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not legally required to actually name all the used libraries, according to my understanding of Apache 2.0, please correct me if I'm wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25972" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T16:17:14.460" Title="Is it legally required to name used libraries under Apache 2.0 when publishing an Android app?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12487" CreationDate="2022-01-05T09:18:56.140" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your assumption is wrong. You need to comply with the entire language of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache license&lt;/a&gt;, and for your case I recommend you carefully read Section 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy way to comply with the requirements is to have an 'About' page in your app, where you list all of the information related to the libraries you are using, in accordance with the list included in Section 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T09:18:56.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-05T14:46:37.170" Score="2" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many R packages, seem to follow the note from &lt;a href=&quot;https://r-pkgs.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R packages&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A name of a license “template” and a file containing specific variables. The most common case is MIT + file LICENSE, where the LICENSE file needs to contain two fields: the year and copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and include only a file of this form (this particular is taken from popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/magrittr/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;magrittr&lt;/a&gt; package)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;YEAR: 2019&#xA;COPYRIGHT HOLDER: Stefan Milton Bache and Hadley Wickham&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without a full text of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on here? Does it violate MIT license requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25977" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-05T15:14:02.270" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T17:18:00.977" Title="MIT license in R packages" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12489" CreationDate="2022-01-05T15:24:18.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The R site is reasonably clear that if &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; wrote the code, and you receive it under the MIT licence, then you are obliged to reproduce the licence text (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the only restriction is that the license must be preserved&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The section you quote from is about &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; licensing decisions, that is, how to licence code you've written.  But if you're the sole rightsholder, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;no licence you choose is binding on you&lt;/a&gt;.  So you can lawfully choose to distribute your code, telling people it's under the MIT licence, without actually including a copy of the licence text.  Doing so might not be enormously helpful to the rest of the world, but no licence has been violated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should someone choose to reuse that code, their obligations are less clear.  The MIT licence obliges the re-user to reproduce the licence text, but if none was provided, one could argue that the obligation was void.  On the other hand, if you were a nice, well-behaved developer, you might well choose to restore that text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-05T17:18:00.977" LastActivityDate="2022-01-05T17:18:00.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-06T04:13:57.503" Score="-1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have learned python and SQL and want to start with open source contributions, is the knowledge of python enough (along with git) to contribute or is there something else as well that I need to learn? Where can I find projects as a beginner to kick start my open source journey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25982" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T12:15:07.950" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:37:03.577" Title="What are the prerequisites for contributing to my first open source project?" Tags="|python|software-development|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-06T12:24:50.350" Score="1" ViewCount="693" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently writing a library that encrypts sqlite database(It's hard to install sqlcipher on windows).&#xA;Can I choose MIT even if I use pysqlite3 that is licensed under zlib?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25987" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-01-06T14:07:20.570" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:46:47.357" Title="Can i put my opensource project under MIT License if i used zlib library?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12492" CreationDate="2022-01-06T13:50:31.093" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have taken the pysqlite3 library and are modifying that to add your encryption feature, then you should keep the original zlib license, because it is just easier if a project is under a single license. And the zlib license is not that different from the MIT license anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you are pulling in pysqlite3 as a dependency into your project, then the zlib license places no requirements/limitations on the licenses you can choose for your project. So, you can definitely choose the MIT license in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-06T13:50:31.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12497" CreationDate="2022-01-06T17:49:02.577" Score="-1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open-source GitHub project and I want to license the contents of it under &lt;code&gt;Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: CC BY-NC-ND&lt;/code&gt; so what should I include under the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would just be the name of the license be enough, or is there any content of the aforementioned license that should be pasted in the license file? If so what should be the contents of the file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25906" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T11:14:31.563" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T11:14:31.563" Title="I have a license in mind but what should I include in the license file?" Tags="|github|creative-commons|attribution|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-07T02:54:12.307" Score="1" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently learned how to modify Linux distros. Now I want to be able to share my modified versions with others. I want to do so in a legally correct way. I see a set of related questions, I put them all here, if they are better be asked separately, please comment about it below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to read what web search and links provided, namely: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11227/custom-linux-distro-copyright-and-license-notices&quot;&gt;Custom Linux distro Copyright and license notices&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/308476/can-you-legally-sell-modified-versions-of-linux-distros&quot;&gt;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/308476/can-you-legally-sell-modified-versions-of-linux-distros&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://askubuntu.com/questions/720735/can-one-modify-ubuntu-and-publish-it-as-their-own-linux-distro&quot;&gt;https://askubuntu.com/questions/720735/can-one-modify-ubuntu-and-publish-it-as-their-own-linux-distro&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/kg6int/what_is_the_difference_between_a_linux/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/kg6int/what_is_the_difference_between_a_linux/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see a problem on a general level as: I got intellectual property, it is a set of files that represent many software, art works and names. How am I supposed to find out which parts are covered by which licenses? When I start a distro (Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch) I don't recall a need to read and agree to a legal stuff unlike for e.g. Microsoft Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For software it is mostly GPL and that is covered in the found links to large extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I leave links to Fedora, Ubuntu repositories or do I need to provide another way to access source code? I've read advice to include all source, but obviously just leaving links to repos is easier. I see Mint distro uses Ubuntu repos, but maybe they got a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; to do that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Icons, wallpapers, etc. I've searched the drive for &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; and found in &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/common-licenses&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;CC0 1.0 Universal&amp;quot; (which is AFAIK public domain) and some &amp;quot;Artistic License&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How to find out which works are public, which are not?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names: &amp;quot;Fedora&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Mint&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I understand correctly that a flavour need approval for distribution from original distro distributor (that approval for some distros may be granted for all in advance, what distros allow that?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I remove original distro name from &amp;quot;my distro&amp;quot;, then I'm on a safe side, correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please cover any other issues I have not identified yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25022" LastEditorUserId="25022" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T03:02:02.117" LastActivityDate="2022-01-16T17:04:03.593" Title="distributing your own linux flavour (or modified distro) - copyright, trademark issues" Tags="|licensing|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12498" CreationDate="2022-01-07T07:20:15.407" Score="1" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently packaging up my python software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I listed down all the packages that it uses and found out that a package, which is called xz, &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=blob;f=COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uses multiple licenses&lt;/a&gt; (public domain, LGPLv2.1+, GPLv2+). I wish to avoid using GPLv2+ as it requires disclosure of the entire source code. Is there a way in using the XZ package without the disclosure, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Methods Tried&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried uninstalling the package, as it was installed by itself when I was installing other packages. I found out that the package was a prerequisite for many other packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(DeloymentEnv_Fresh) C:\Users\PC-2001-044&amp;gt;conda uninstall xz&#xA;Collecting package metadata (repodata.json): done&#xA;Solving environment: done&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;## Package Plan ##&#xA;&#xA;  environment location: C:\Users\PC-2001-044\anaconda3\envs\DeloymentEnv_Fresh&#xA;&#xA;  removed specs:&#xA;    - xz&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;The following packages will be downloaded:&#xA;&#xA;    package                    |            build&#xA;    ---------------------------|-----------------&#xA;    pycparser-2.21             |     pyhd3eb1b0_0          94 KB&#xA;    sqlite-3.37.0              |       h2bbff1b_0         785 KB&#xA;    ------------------------------------------------------------&#xA;                                           Total:         880 KB&#xA;&#xA;The following packages will be REMOVED:&#xA;&#xA;  blosc-1.21.0-h19a0ad4_0&#xA;  brotli-1.0.9-ha925a31_2&#xA;  bzip2-1.0.8-he774522_0&#xA;  charls-2.1.0-h33f27b4_2&#xA;  cloudpickle-2.0.0-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  cycler-0.10.0-py36haa95532_0&#xA;  cytoolz-0.11.0-py36he774522_0&#xA;  dask-core-2021.3.0-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  decorator-5.1.0-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  freetype-2.11.0-ha860e81_0&#xA;  giflib-5.2.1-h62dcd97_0&#xA;  hdf5-1.8.20-hac2f561_1&#xA;  imagecodecs-2020.5.30-py36hb1be65f_2&#xA;  imageio-2.9.0-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  jpeg-9d-h2bbff1b_0&#xA;  kiwisolver-1.3.1-py36hd77b12b_0&#xA;  lcms2-2.12-h83e58a3_0&#xA;  libaec-1.0.4-h33f27b4_1&#xA;  libopencv-3.4.2-h20b85fd_0&#xA;  libpng-1.6.37-h2a8f88b_0&#xA;  libtiff-4.2.0-hd0e1b90_0&#xA;  libzopfli-1.0.3-ha925a31_0&#xA;  lz4-c-1.9.3-h2bbff1b_1&#xA;  matplotlib-base-3.3.4-py36h49ac443_0&#xA;  networkx-2.5-py_0&#xA;  olefile-0.46-py36_0&#xA;  opencv-3.4.2-py36h40b0b35_0&#xA;  openjpeg-2.4.0-h4fc8c34_0&#xA;  pillow-8.3.1-py36h4fa10fc_0&#xA;  py-opencv-3.4.2-py36hc319ecb_0&#xA;  pyparsing-3.0.4-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  pywavelets-1.1.1-py36he774522_2&#xA;  pyyaml-5.4.1-py36h2bbff1b_1&#xA;  scikit-image-0.17.2-py36h1e1f486_0&#xA;  snappy-1.1.8-h33f27b4_0&#xA;  tifffile-2021.3.17-pyhd3eb1b0_1&#xA;  tk-8.6.11-h2bbff1b_0&#xA;  toolz-0.11.1-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  torchvision-0.11.1-py36_cu102&#xA;  tornado-6.1-py36h2bbff1b_0&#xA;  xz-5.2.5-h62dcd97_0&#xA;  yaml-0.2.5-he774522_0&#xA;  zlib-1.2.11-h62dcd97_4&#xA;  zstd-1.4.9-h19a0ad4_0&#xA;&#xA;The following packages will be UPDATED:&#xA;&#xA;  pycparser                                       2.20-py_2 --&amp;gt; 2.21-pyhd3eb1b0_0&#xA;  sqlite                                  3.36.0-h2bbff1b_0 --&amp;gt; 3.37.0-h2bbff1b_0&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Proceed ([y]/n)? n&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;CondaSystemExit: Exiting.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, if the other packages uses XZ's package, doesn't it mean that they are required to be licensed GPLv2+ as well (which they aren't; they use permissive license such as BSD, apache 2.0, etc.)? I'm I missing a piece of the puzzle here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much in taking your time to answer my question :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25528" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T05:28:26.790" Title="Using Conda's XZ package for proprietary use" Tags="|licensing|gpl|proprietary-code|python|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12494" CreationDate="2022-01-07T09:42:17.133" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 4.a of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC-ND license&lt;/a&gt; clearly says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; Therefore it is not necessary to include the entire language of the license in your files, just a link is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be helpful to include an &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/resources/use/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifier&lt;/a&gt; in the files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should not be left unmentioned that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9242/why-does-creative-commons-recommend-not-using-cc-by-licenses-for-software&quot;&gt;Creative Commons licenses were not created for software&lt;/a&gt;. They were developed for other types of content, like text, pictures, music, videos...  You may want to reconsider your choice of license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T09:42:17.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12496" CreationDate="2022-01-07T10:16:06.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] xz, uses multiple licenses (public domain, LGPLv2.1+, GPLv2+). I wish to avoid using GPLv2+ as it requires disclosure of the entire source code. Is there a way in using the XZ package without the disclosure, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the COPYING file of XZ, different parts of that project are under different licenses. The majority of XZ is in the public domain and only some scripts and command-line tools are under the GPL or LGPL licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project just uses the liblzma library, then you are not affected by the (L)GPL license in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project uses any of the scripts or command-line tools, then you must make sure that you invoke them as an external program. In such a way you can use GPL-licensed code without having to disclose your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if your project makes changes to the GPL-licensed scripts are you required to publish those changes under the GPL license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T10:16:06.980" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-07T11:38:36.677" Score="2" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;For more than a year now, I've been developing a paid, commercial application that is based on an existing project posted on GitHub and licensed as MIT.&#xA;In addition to integrating this project into my own application, I actively contribute to testing the GitHub source project and send bug reports and ideas for improvement to the original developer using e-mails.&#xA;Because the development of my own application is based on and very much depends on this project posted on GitHub, I want to ask some questions about how to use and license projects on GitHub:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible for a project that is posted and licensed as MIT to disappear from GitHub at some point? If so, what happens to the copyright of the applications that were developed based on it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the author of a project posted on GitHub change the type of license from a permissive one (such as MIT) to another, more restrictive way of licensing?&#xA;I ask these questions because I would not like to have legal issues related to copyright in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="bioan" LastEditorUserId="7343" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T13:29:59.633" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:43:01.187" Title="Developing a project based on a GitHub MIT license project" Tags="|mit|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12502" CreationDate="2022-01-04T15:00:48.390" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;KEA-Dhcp comes with Netconf support and a number of &lt;code&gt;Yang&lt;/code&gt; modules. The KEA-Dhcp package is distributed under Mozilla Public License v2.0, my question is how does the license apply to modifications or changes in the &lt;code&gt;Yang&lt;/code&gt; files? If I decide to extend or modify the models, am I supposed to return the changes in the open source domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The models are in &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/tree/master/src/share/yang/modules&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/tree/master/src/share/yang/modules&lt;/a&gt;  kea-*.yang files don't seem to contain any license/copying information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since those files are not really source code and not compiled with gcc, I'm not sure if normal licensing terms apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any advice and comments, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25998" OwnerDisplayName="Mark" LastEditorUserId="25998" LastEditDate="2022-01-07T14:10:41.980" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T07:28:50.717" Title="Kea DHCP: how is MPL 2.0 license applied to Yang models change" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12499" CreationDate="2022-01-07T13:38:35.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely.  GitHub, like any other free software distribution site, doesn't give any kind of warranty about future availability.  The rightsholder could take it down, GitHub could cease trading, any number of circumstances could cause that project to disappear from that site.  If that happens, the copyrights remain with the existing rightsholders, just as they do if the project doesn't disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes.  The rightsholder can decide to start distributing his/her code under another licence, eg GPL, and may at the same time decide to stop distributing under MIT.  What the rightsholder &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;cannot do&lt;/a&gt; is take away rights already granted to existing recipients of the code in respect of the code they received; but current versions can be made unavailable to potential new recipients, and future versions can be made unavailable to everyone, should the rightsholder so decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the rightsholder were to switch to a copyleft licence, you would have to stop interaction with the project, and in particular you couldn't use new versions of the project code to base your proprietary offering on.  But assuming you've based your current offering on entirely-MIT-licensed code, then as long as you honour the (very light) obligations of the MIT licence, you can't be stopped from continuing to offer your current offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T13:38:35.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12500" CreationDate="2022-01-07T16:43:51.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Yang files (as per your link in the question) are in a directory structure, where (a few levels up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/tree/master/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/tree/master/&lt;/a&gt;) there is a license file, which covers the entire tree with sub-folders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can therefore assume that the files in the sub-folders, including these Yang files, are also covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL v2 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, these Yang files perfectly fit the definition of 'Source Code Form' in the MPL v2 license language, therefore you should treat them accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you find other suitable Yang models/modules elsewhere on the web (try GitHub!) then you will need to comply with the license terms of those files, which might not necessarily be MPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify a file under MPLv2 license, then the modification needs to be under the same license. You don't need to give your modifications to the KEA project, but you need to give the source code to all the recipients of your software. However, if you add your own Yang files you are not bound by the license of other (KEA) files, you can decide the license terms on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-01-12T07:28:50.717" LastActivityDate="2022-01-12T07:28:50.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12512" CreationDate="2022-01-07T20:09:00.497" Score="12" ViewCount="2191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a proprietary app that will mainly &lt;s&gt;use a dynamically linked&lt;/s&gt; execute a GPL-licensed  FFmpeg binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if I can design the app in a way that it downloads the binary dependency from a public server either automatically or by clicking on a button, instead of making the users download it by themselves off the internet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this infringe the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26000" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-01-08T05:22:24.597" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T18:36:43.397" Title="Can my proprietary app automatically download a GPL-licensed binary?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-07T22:31:58.557" Score="1" ViewCount="305" Body="&lt;p&gt;There haven't been any significant incidents on FOSS software developers turning evil and pumping their software with malicious code. But each person is different, with different intentions. While I can't imagine myself doing anything horrible, some people build up reputation, only to crush it by committing a self-beneficial act and dive into the ocean depths, leaving others with sad reality and frustration. I'm convinced that FOSS software published by anonymous developers is trusted, only because it's FOSS and all this culture surrounding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, both intentional and unintentional damage is just damage. Now what GPL states, is that the copyright holder is in no way responsible for any damages. Does that literally mean, that if I stored my credentials on  a GPL-licensed password manager, Bitwarden and they happened to anyhow intentionally compromise me, I wouldn't be able to sue them and win the court case as I wasn't given any warranties, that it will work as intended? Same thing, if some guy added a zero-day malicious code into his software, that antivirus isn't able to detect yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proprietary software vendors take responsibility for what they made and will be fined for anything malicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26004" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T10:51:04.783" Title="Are there any real punishments for intentional malicious behavior in GPL or any other &quot;no-warranties&quot; licensed software?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|software|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-07T22:34:52.360" Score="2" ViewCount="632" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is software on GitHub which has with it the GPLv3 license file. Now, I am not going to mention which software to protect its devs from backlash. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The devs have mentioned that they do not wish to allow nonstable libraries from being loaded into their software, in a sense, locking it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this go against the GPL and the GPLv3? Will they need to switch to a new license to continue development?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26005" LastEditorUserId="282" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T02:08:20.937" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T02:08:20.937" Title="GPLv3 restricting end user" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12505" CreationDate="2022-01-07T22:49:08.193" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This depends on exactly what they've said. If it's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd rather you didn't use non-stable libraries with this product. If you do this, we won't help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that's absolutely fine, and very similar to the position the Linux kernel community take with non-open source modules in the kernel. Even something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We'd rather you didn't use non-stable libraries with this product. If you do this, we'll block your account on our forum and will never reinstate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is fine (legally anyway). They can make a modified version of the GPL which forbids this - but in that case it may not be called the &amp;quot;GNU General Public License&amp;quot; and it would be incompatible with the GPL itself, so they couldn't use any GPL code in their product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they can't do is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not use non-stable libraries with this product. If you do this, you are in breach of the license and we will sue you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or at the very least, such a term can be ignored in accordance with Section 7 of the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T22:49:08.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12504" CreationDate="2022-01-07T23:03:42.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least in the UK, a license cannot override the law. If you do something &lt;em&gt;actively&lt;/em&gt; malicious, you expose yourself to potential penalties, both civil and criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the &amp;quot;no warranty&amp;quot; clauses in open source licenses is to ensure that the bar for (successful) legal action is set much higher - in order to win the case, you would have to show that I had actively attempted to damage you/you business, rather than it just being due to incompetence on my part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-07T23:03:42.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12504" CreationDate="2022-01-08T00:10:13.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the United States, the disclaimer only disclaims &lt;em&gt;warranties&lt;/em&gt; which are a specific kind of protection that applies to products sold to consumers. Vendors can offer whatever warranties they like to attract customers, e.g., &amp;quot;if your product breaks in the next three years due to faulty production quality, we will replace it.&amp;quot; But U.S. law also automatically grants certain implicit warranties unless they are waived by the vendor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Warranties, as a legal instrument, protect consumers from faulty products and deceptive sales tactics. If the software has deliberate defects or malicious &amp;quot;features&amp;quot; (e.g., malware) then we need not rely on warranties to pursue legal action: in such a case, the author has surely violated a number of civil and criminal laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T00:10:13.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12491" CreationDate="2022-01-08T07:10:50.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The is no general recipt, every project is different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose a project you like, choose a project you have some knowledge about the techniques and languages used, choose a project you find useful or joyful yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at how things work in that community. Look at the issue list and start with submitting fixes for simple problems, often marked as 'beginner', 'good first issue' or similar. Ask, and submit your fix for review in the preferred way in that community. Respond to feedback and implement suggested changes. Rinse and repeat. Always mind: no-one owes you anything, also not when you submit patches or do other stuff. Be kind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T07:10:50.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12503" CreationDate="2022-01-08T08:41:01.787" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably need to ask a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend having some &lt;em&gt;documented&lt;/em&gt; way to be able, in your application, to change the binary path (or the download URL)  of that FFmpeg binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider contacting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF&lt;/a&gt; and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/contact.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FFmpeg authors&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T08:41:01.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12503" CreationDate="2022-01-08T08:46:49.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can easily create an installer which first downloads and installs the GPL-licensed binary and then installs your own proprietary app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is similar to the one answered here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12377/best-way-to-include-gpl-licensed-code-in-an-mit-licensed-library/12382#12382&quot;&gt;Best way to include GPL-licensed code in an MIT-licensed library&lt;/a&gt; and the answer seems to apply to your problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T08:46:49.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12503" CreationDate="2022-01-08T08:47:02.607" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could, but I wouldn't bother.  Your application invokes a GPLed binary via  fork-and-exec, and as we have written many times here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6104/458&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), that means it's likely a separate work for GPL purposes.  So shipping a copy of ffmpeg with your binary won't oblige you to release your binary under GPL, and it will ensure you can control the version that people get, and where it gets installed (so your binary can find it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that you will have GPL obligations in respect of the binary you're shipping, but they're not terribly onerous, and to my mind much outweigh the support liabilities of pointing people off to a separate website to install the GPL binary, with all the many slips that can come between &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; cup and the user's lip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-08T12:35:10.937" LastActivityDate="2022-01-08T12:35:10.937" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-08T14:45:23.840" Score="3" ViewCount="680" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should I put the complete text of BSD or MIT license to every file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For longer licenses like GPL or MPL, there is a license notice. It is relatively short text that says what license is selected for the file. Just license notice instead of long text of the license is placed to each file. For MPL it is just 3 lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public&#xA;License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this&#xA;file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GPL it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/License-Notices-for-Code.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;longer&lt;/a&gt; but some authors just use only the first paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public&#xA;License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I couldn't find license notice for BSD and MIT licenses. What can I use instead? Can I just add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This program is published under 2-clause BSD License. Refer the COPYING file for the full text of the license.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there better / commonly accepted wording of generic license notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about license text itself? Suppose I put the license text to separate file named COPYING. The BSD license says: &lt;em&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain &lt;strong&gt;the above copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. But If I put copyright notice to the license file, it will cover license text itself, not my program. But I don't own license text. Also sometimes it is impossible to specify all authors of the program because there are many of them and each file is copyrighted by different authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use the following text as copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The program that is the subject to this license is copyrighted by its authors.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I guess it is not valid copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can remove the copyright notice and the requirement to retain &amp;quot;the above copyright notice&amp;quot;, but it won't be BSD license after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other options? I really don't want to copy BSD license text to every file since it is quite long and it is against DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25795" LastEditorUserId="25795" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T11:52:30.957" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T11:52:30.957" Title="License notice for BSD and MIT licenses" Tags="|mit|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12513" CreationDate="2022-01-09T08:42:32.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I put copyright notice to the license file, it will cover license text itself, not my program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking this specific point, I understand your concern, because of licences like the GPL where the licence text itself is under a more restrictive licence than code covered by the licence, and redistribution of modified versions of the licence text is often not permitted.  But in the case of the MIT and BSD licences, authorities (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the OSI&lt;/a&gt; (for MIT) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Linux Foundation&lt;/a&gt; (for BSD)) advise putting &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; copyright notice at the head of the licence text, not the copyright notice of the licence's authors.  Such a practice is well understood, and is unlikely to be read by anyone as an attempt to &amp;quot;land grab&amp;quot; the licence text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise against using a copyright notice of the form you suggest (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The program that is the subject to this license is copyrighted by its authors&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), not because it's not valid - as we have discussed before (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7133/458&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;), the copyright notice has almost no function in modern copyright law, nearly anywhere in the world - but because it's unusual, and therefore potentially confusing.  You don't want people to have to stop and think hard about whether they can really use your code under the terms you intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't want to copy BSD license text to every file since it is quite long and it is against DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would advise you not to worry too much about that.  The BSD licence text is less than 600 bytes, and that doesn't really signify in the modern world.  For any significant source code, the indents from the left margin will take more space than that, and you don't see people advocating for left-justified source to save bytes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, it's (again) really helpful to downstream users to have the licence status clear in every file.  You don't know when someone will find that one file you've written, with a single function in it, is exactly what they needed to provide the missing brick in the project they're building.  Later, someone else may admire the elegance of your function implementation, and seek to reuse it from that new project.  A clear copyright/licence statement at the head of it can be a big help when deciding on reusability, even though it's now out in the world on its own, separate from the body of your original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T08:42:32.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12513" CreationDate="2022-01-09T08:47:59.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I couldn't find license notice for BSD and MIT licenses. What can I use instead? Can I just add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This program is published under 2-clause BSD License. Refer the COPYING file for the full text of the license.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there better / commonly accepted wording of general license notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD and MIT licenses are short enough that you don't need a separate license notice. You can just replicate the actual license text in each file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That also resolves the issue with the mention of the &amp;quot;above copyright notice&amp;quot;, because that phrase then naturally refers to your own copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of having the full license text in each source file is that it becomes harder to accidentally separate the code from the legal text that explains what recipients are allowed to do with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I would recommend to &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; have a COPYING or LICENSE file with the text of the license and your own copyright notice. That would cover the files that don't support license texts/notices within the file itself and as a convenience for people that want to find out what license applies to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T08:47:59.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-09T09:35:10.990" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a javascript library is licensed under BSD-3, but the license itself isn't distributed with any versioned releases from the author (only a copyright notice and a link to the main site) should I modify the distributed files and include the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer is no to the above question, would I need to if I intended to modify the release copy that I was given?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I would include it if I was modifying original source and compiling my own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A specific example would be Quilljs &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/quilljs/quill/releases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/quilljs/quill/releases&lt;/a&gt; which includes the license in the source but not in the compiled releases (quill.tar.gz).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26017" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T09:35:10.990" Title="When should I include the BSD-3 license since it's not explicitly included in the releases?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-01-09T10:15:39.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12517" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-01-09T11:03:13.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Non-commercial usage is variously defined as usage that is not primarily for-profit, usage in organisations that are defined as non-profit-making according to local taxation practice, and usage that doesn't involve taking money.  Other definitions exist, and there is no general agreement about which is applicable, and whether the whole idea is desirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common ones are Creative Commons' BY-NC-SA and BY-NC-ND.  We have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/q/76/458&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; about whether these and related licences are on-topic for this site, and at the time of writing the accepted answer is that they are often not.  That is not to say that every question about non-commercial licenses is off-topic, but if all you want to know is how to licence your code in such a way that nobody can make any money off it, this may not be the place to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T11:11:36.820" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T11:11:36.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12518" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-01-09T11:03:13.950" Score="0" Body="Non-commercial refers to licences that prohibit commercial use, according to some definition which is usually particular to the licence in question." OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T11:03:13.950" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T11:03:13.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12519" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is deprecated, as covered in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/885/how-should-the-open-source-tag-be-used&quot;&gt;this meta posting&lt;/a&gt;, and it would help if it were no longer used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12520" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" Score="0" Body="This tag is deprecated and should not be used." OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" LastActivityDate="2022-01-09T12:14:25.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6122" CreationDate="2022-01-10T06:39:57.970" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dynamics of Interaction of GPL code with proprietary code has to be looked into for derived works as it differs on a case-to-case basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per GPLv3, You MUST include Install Instructions and the user should have the capability to recreate the same. This condition might lead to providing proprietary information as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any modifications to or software including (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made available under the GPL along with build &amp;amp; install instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a high probability of publishing your proprietary code due to these strong copyleft license obligations in general (only a lawyer can always provide concrete answers on your case of proprietary-GPLv3 usage)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9383" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T06:39:57.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12524" CreationDate="2022-01-10T11:34:17.083" Score="13" ViewCount="2997" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this code that I want to use:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ObjectivitySRC/PVGPlugins/blob/master/NonBSDPlugins/DataMineReader/dmfile.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ObjectivitySRC/PVGPlugins/blob/master/NonBSDPlugins/DataMineReader/dmfile.h&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is on top and states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   If you do use this code please do two things:&#xA;   1) Acknowledge my contribution&#xA;   2) Send any changes, enhancements, etc for me to add&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the &amp;quot;please&amp;quot; terms make each requirement non mandatory, hence making this similar to a Zero-clause BSD ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not know how is &amp;quot;me&amp;quot; in the context, but one woudl reasonnably assume that this the main contributor listed below: &amp;quot;Jeremy Maccelari&amp;quot;, which I can acknowledge. However, the listed email adress do not work. How am I supposed to send this person any changes ? What am I expected to do here for ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there an example of a classic open source or FSF license asking the modifications to the code are sent to someone specifically instead of being put simply open source or distributed under the same license ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25487" LastActivityDate="2022-12-17T13:05:11.487" Title="Trying to understand an old custom license" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12523" CreationDate="2022-01-10T13:10:51.743" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;For (1), the only answer is &amp;quot;nobody knows&amp;quot; (apart from possibly the person who wrote the license). Given that, I would therefore be conservative and assume that it is a mandatory requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) and (3) are a very good indication of why an open source license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as defined by the OSI&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; include such a requirement; the normal example here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;, but (2) indicates the reverse problem: if the maintainer ever drops out of contact, then it is impossible to fulfil the requirement and the code becomes unusable (or at least, undistributable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T13:10:51.743" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12523" CreationDate="2022-01-10T13:43:48.433" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a corporate environment I would advise my colleagues not to use this code for the reason that it is an unconventional license and the legal interpretation is not clear. This would even be in case it is a transitive dependency. You might want to keep this in mind if you plan to use this code in software which would be used by corporations. (This is on top of Philip Kendall's answer, with which I fully agree)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the practical side, however, if you list the original author in the attribution notices of your software, possibly adding the GitHub-link, there is nothing in these license terms that would lead corporations into a 'fatal situation' (e.g. being forced to publish proprietary code due to copyleft terms). The failure (due to inability) to notify the original author about changes, enhancements could easily be cured, if that was ever brought to court by the original author. If you were concerned about this you could try to do this communication of changes by creating a pull request in GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-10T13:43:48.433" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-10T20:25:22.650" Score="4" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, another license question. I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite like using LGPL to cover my libraries, as I really don't care what users do with the library; however, I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; care about the users sharing any improvements they have with the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I was under the assumption that if a user does use my library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rest of the code isn't affected by the License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a user &amp;quot;distributes&amp;quot; their code with a modified version of the library, they need to make the source of the modified library available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I've been recently made aware that LGPL's &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; (or rather, v3 uses the language &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot; but same difference) only covers cases where the software built with the LGPL'd bits is distributed directly to the end user (whether it be a compiled application or a simple tarball), NOT necessarily a case where the LGPL'd bit is used to provide a service over the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And given that most of my (npm) libraries are really geared towards web applications, it would mean that the &amp;quot;hey please make your modifications available&amp;quot; bit really wouldn't apply to people who use one of my libraries in their web app, which kinda ruins the whole point I went with LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And obviously, yes, the AGPL covers this specific use case; however, as I've said above, I really don't care what the users do with this library (i.e. the rest of the code that imports this library). I don't care if they commercialize it, license the rest of the code in restrictive terms, whatever. I just want the improvements to the software to be available to everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen discussions on HN where people have expressed similar needs, and they've discussed a potential &amp;quot;ALGPL&amp;quot;-like license (i.e. LGPL, but also covers the web app use case); however, there was no specific recommendations about such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, does there exist a license where you basically let people do whatever with the code that imports your library, with copyleft &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for the library (and doesn't affect the rest of the code) and a requirement to make available the changes/source code to the modified library and the modified library only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, none of the &amp;quot;popular&amp;quot; open source licenses cover this, and I really haven't seen much discussion about such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(On browsing choosealicense.com, I have found &amp;quot;Open Software License&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;European Union Public License&amp;quot; which do cover the &amp;quot;network use counts as distribution&amp;quot; bit; however, I'm not an expert at reading legalese - I've tried - and there really isn't much online discussion about these licenses so I'm not sure whether these are appropriate for my use case and don't contain any &amp;quot;surprises&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26030" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T10:25:18.563" Title="LGPL that covers network-distributed use cases/web applications?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|lgpl|agpl-3.0|eupl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12523" CreationDate="2022-01-11T07:19:38.133" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not a license, as it grants no rights.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By default all works are copyrighted and their allowed use is limited unless the rights owner gives you further permissions. Licenses grant further permissions and contain language such as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Permission is hereby granted -- subject to the following conditions --&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Redistribution and use -- are permitted provided that --&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file does not grant such permissions, so you can only use it within fair use limits of your jurisdiction. If you do use it, the author has some requests. In that case the requests are entirely voluntary, if you already have the fair use rights by the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T07:19:38.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12491" CreationDate="2022-01-11T10:32:19.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every project is different. So before you can contribute to a project you need to find out a couple things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What open source license do they use? Do you understand what it does and does not allow people to do with your code and are you OK with that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do they even accept outside contributions? There are lots of projects maintained by companies which are published under open source licenses, but the company does all the development by themselves and does not bother with external contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they accept outside contributions, do they require you to fill out and sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contributor license agreement&lt;/a&gt; which clarifies the copyright and liability questions of your contributions? Where and how do you need to send it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the process for getting your change into their project? Some projects just accept pull requests from random strangers on GitHub, but others might want you to contact them first on a mailing list, Discord, Slack, IRC channel, forum, weekly Zoom conference or whatever other communication medium they prefer where they want to speak with you about your contribution first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are their code conventions and style guidelines? Projects with lots of contributors can often get messy. One countermeasure for that is to have some guidelines how code should look and expect all pull requests to adhere to them. When you didn't read them, then your code will probably not measure up to their standards and will likely get rejected.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might now wonder where you can find all that information. Many projects contain a file named &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTING&lt;/code&gt; which explains all that. And when you are lucky, it might not be totally outdated. Others might have a section about this topic on their website. But again, every project is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2022-01-11T11:02:21.057" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T11:02:21.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12504" CreationDate="2022-01-11T10:51:04.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the question is still 'hot', I just wanted to point you to this current case, where a npm library has been made unusable by the official maintainer of the library, and it causes many hiccups (while it does not seem to be actual malware (in the traditional meaning of the word)). &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/18323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/issues/18323&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a protest against use of OSS by big companies &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20210704022108/https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://web.archive.org/web/20210704022108/https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/issues/1046&lt;/a&gt; without properly getting paid (even though the developer offered the code under the MIT license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, GitHub has blocked this developer. It will be interesting to see if there is any legal action as a follow up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T10:51:04.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12523" CreationDate="2022-01-11T15:27:43.343" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12527&quot;&gt;As jpa notes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;there is no license here.&lt;/strong&gt;  The notice you've quoted grants no right to redistribute the code, with or without modification.  (And yes, I checked the full comment at the top of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ObjectivitySRC/PVGPlugins/blob/master/NonBSDPlugins/DataMineReader/dmfile.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original file&lt;/a&gt;; there's no license grant there either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could possibly try to read an implied license to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; the code, in some manner such that &amp;quot;acknowledging&amp;quot; its original author and making &amp;quot;changes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;enhancements&amp;quot; to it is meaningful, into the notice you've quoted, on the basis that without such a license the requirements listed are meaningless.  But that's a rather shaky claim, not only because such use would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; necessarily need to involve redistribution of the code — e.g. internal use in a company or private use for academic research purposes could easily qualify — but also because there's &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt; no reason to presume that the notice isn't just a restriction on or a restatement of some actual (free or non-free) license the author may have granted, or intended to possibly grant, elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, it does seem plausible that the author did in fact intend to grant such an implicit license, or at least did not intend to exercise their right to restrict use and redistribution of the code or derivative works of it.  (It would've been so much nicer if they'd just bothered to include some actual words saying so, like &amp;quot;you are free to use and redistribute this code, with or without modifications, for any purpose.&amp;quot;)  If so, it's unlikely (but not, of course, impossible) that they'd suddenly turn around and sue you for distributing it, even if you have no proper license for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, the question becomes what you consider to be the easiest and safest option.  Personally, I would probably proceed in something like the following order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The best option, if feasible, would be to &lt;strong&gt;contact the original author&lt;/strong&gt; (and any later contributors) and get them to release the code under an OSI-approved license such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt;.  (The maintainers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ObjectivitySRC/PVGPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the project you linked to&lt;/a&gt; would probably appreciate that too, since that's their default license.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly that's a bit trickier to do if you don't have a working e-mail address for them, but you can always try to track down some more up-to-date contact info for them.  In fact, in your case just &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Jeremy+Maccelari%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Googling the author's name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; turns up active Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles that all seem to belong to the same person — a software developer currently living in London, UK.  A bit more searching makes me about 99% confident that this is indeed the same person who originally wrote your code, even if they've changed jobs and moved to a different country in the mean time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, this tends to be easier if the person you want to track down has a distinctive name, like here.  If the author happened to be named John Smith, this would be a lot more difficult.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you can't track down the author(s), or if they refuse to grant you a suitable license, the second option to consider would be &lt;strong&gt;reimplementing the code yourself&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; not to accidentally leave any old copyrighted code in, you could do a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;: document what the code should do and write a comprehensive test suite for it, and then hand the documentation and tests over to someone else who hasn't seen the original code and ask them to reimplement it from scratch.  This can take some time and money, but the up side is that not only will the resulting code be 100% novel and free of unclear license issues, but it will also have comprehensive documentation and tests. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, a full clean room rewrite may be overkill unless you know the original author to be highly litigious.  Typically, an experienced programmer should be able to analyze the behavior of a program (or a component of one) and reimplement its functionality in their own preferred programming style without duplicating any distinctive and copyrightable aspects of it.  (Of course, either way, the old and new implementations will still e.g. implement the same API, which will likely lead to some similarity.  But such minimal copying for the sake of interoperability is typically considered permissible under fair use or equivalent legal doctrines in other jurisdictions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If neither of the previous options seems feasible (and you still need the feature the code provides), the last option would be to &lt;strong&gt;just use the code&lt;/strong&gt; as it is, and accept the risk that comes from the license ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, you should try to encapsulate such dubiously licensed code into a separate module, away from the rest of your code, so that if the original author ever shows up and complains about you using it (or if someone refuses to accept your code because of the unclear licensing), you can just yank the problematic code out with minimal damage to the rest of your codebase.  (Of course, if the code was providing an essential feature, you'll then be forced to reimplement it anyway, but at least you won't have to rewrite the &lt;em&gt;rest&lt;/em&gt; of your software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T15:27:43.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12531" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12533" CreationDate="2022-01-11T18:53:32.683" Score="0" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since licenses could also be viewed as IP, is it possible to release a license under another (or even the same) license, which could impose conditions on the usage of said license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26039" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T11:05:15.527" Title="Can a license be licensed?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12531" CreationDate="2022-01-11T21:40:46.190" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;All (non-trivial) licenses are copyrighted so &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; use you make of them is subject to the terms under which they are released. For example, the GNU GPL v3 explicitly states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other licenses may not be quite as explicit about the terms under which they are released, but the same principle applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-11T21:40:46.190" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12496" CreationDate="2022-01-13T05:28:26.790" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/conda-forge/xz-feedstock/issues/26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue on XZ conda-forge package's repo&lt;/a&gt; that corresponds to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person posted determined that xz package does not include the scripts that are licensed under GPL, so there may exist a discrepancy with XZ conda-forge package licensing. At most, the package is licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25528" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T05:28:26.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12535" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12536" CreationDate="2022-01-13T07:44:01.093" Score="2" ViewCount="379" Body="&lt;p&gt;tqdm package seems to mention 2 types of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the license for tqdm's package&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;`tqdm` is a product of collaborative work.&#xA;Unless otherwise stated, all authors (see commit logs) retain copyright&#xA;for their respective work, and release the work under the MIT licence&#xA;(text below).&#xA;&#xA;Exceptions or notable authors are listed below&#xA;in reverse chronological order:&#xA;&#xA;* files: *&#xA;  MPLv2.0 2015-2021 (c) Casper da Costa-Luis&#xA;  [casperdcl](https://github.com/casperdcl).&#xA;* files: tqdm/_tqdm.py&#xA;  MIT 2016 (c) [PR #96] on behalf of Google Inc.&#xA;* files: tqdm/_tqdm.py setup.py README.rst MANIFEST.in .gitignore&#xA;  MIT 2013 (c) Noam Yorav-Raphael, original author.&#xA;&#xA;[PR #96]: https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/pull/96&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) v. 2.0 - Exhibit A&#xA;-----------------------------------------------&#xA;&#xA;This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the&#xA;Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.&#xA;If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this project,&#xA;You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;MIT License (MIT)&#xA;-----------------&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2013 noamraph&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of&#xA;this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in&#xA;the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to&#xA;use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of&#xA;the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,&#xA;subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS&#xA;FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR&#xA;COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER&#xA;IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN&#xA;CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the tqdm package falls under MIT, while the license file only falls under MPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25528" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T07:56:52.000" Title="Python's tqdm package license" Tags="|mit|mpl|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12535" CreationDate="2022-01-13T07:56:52.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This repository contains files with 2 different licenses. Some files are under MIT license, some under MPL. They co-exist in the same package. This does not appear to be a dual-licensed situation, where you can choose which one you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T07:56:52.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12531" CreationDate="2022-01-13T11:05:15.527" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, e.g. a lawyer can create a tools to build licenses from blocks text. It may license you to build one license, or maybe more licenses, including also your address or the court which should handle disputes. Movies, musics have similar &amp;quot;templates&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go to a lawyer to create a new license, you may get a restriction on the use (just for one project you agreed), so yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just it makes not much sense for open source: you can remove all code and create a new project, so you can use the old license and you still conform on it. If you cannot do it, the original license is not open source. Also the &amp;quot;restriction of court&amp;quot; is often not be considered open source (excess burden on distributor/modifier of code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also if you change the license text, the code is still licensed with the old license. So you may deceive the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4224" LastActivityDate="2022-01-13T11:05:15.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-13T12:30:40.313" Score="3" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been modifying an open source Apache 2.0 licensed project and now I want to re-distribute the code under the same license but under MY SET OF REPOS as the original company isn't wanting my changes part of theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The catch is that the original company has copyright on their name and they've used it at many places as the package name, class names etc. Even some folders / paths are named with their company name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to remove those to make it a more neutral approach. Doing so changes 90% of the files, there are about 250 files in total.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per Apache 2.0 License, I need to add significant changes in the file itself. What is the best way to do it, considering :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will re-distribute source code = Yes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will change package name in approx 250 files and make more modifications in future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have no copyright or notice file anywhere except their package.json which mentions their company name, which I am ready to keep intact, but no-where else in the code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, What exactly should I write if I have to write a notice on top of each 250 files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26060" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-02-17T17:15:15.083" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T20:00:00.017" Title="Apache 2.0 License redistribute with package/class name change" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|license-notice|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-14T07:16:06.167" Score="10" ViewCount="2052" Body="&lt;p&gt;An existing project which is licensed under Apache-2-with-Commons-Clause-1.0 should be advanced.  A client wishes to pay me to write code in order that the code could be contributed to this project. Is payment for such work permitted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26067" LastEditorUserId="26067" LastEditDate="2022-01-14T08:23:43.090" LastActivityDate="2022-01-16T02:27:47.410" Title="Is it permitted to develop for money on a commons clause project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|commons-clause|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12541" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; licence adds a restriction on sale, which it does define, to software otherwise covered by a free licence.  A work so covered is no longer free software, according to the FSF's definitions, so the Clause has not been entirely well-accepted by the community.  That also means questions about it may not be on-topic here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12542" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" Score="0" Body="The Commons Clause licence is usually combined with a pre-existing free licence in order to forbid the sale of the covered work.  Its use makes the work non-free." OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T08:02:21.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12540" CreationDate="2022-01-14T08:17:29.770" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; talks about the development work itself, for which you would be paid. It only talks about the distribution of the software package under this license. So yes, payment for your contribution efforts is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs to be mentioned that any license with the Commons Clause is not Open Source. It is not compliant with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of OSI&lt;/a&gt; and others. This category of licenses is called 'Source Available' (and strictly speaking it is out of scope of this site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T08:17:29.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12540" CreationDate="2022-01-14T08:19:08.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Commons Clause 1.0, among other things, forbids you to offer paid services in relation to the software. That would include offers to extend the software with new functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, being hired (and receiving compensation in any form) to make changes to the software would be a violation of the Commons Clause 1.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a bit of a grey area when you are an employee of the company and you are asked to make changes to that software as part of your job. I can see wiggle room in the text of the Commons Clause that that might be allowed, but I am not sure if the authors of the software or a judge will look at it the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T08:19:08.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12540" CreationDate="2022-01-14T09:42:20.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you probably can do this.  Before I go on, I must note that (a) IANAL/IANYL, and (b) I'm assuming (1) you're not an employee of the payer, so work-for-hire isn't an issue, and (2) you're writing your code without reusing any pre-existing code, third-party free libraries, etc.  If (b)(2) is not true, this answer doesn't apply, and frankly, I think you've got an insoluble problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoCl licence&lt;/a&gt; says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without limiting other conditions in the License, the grant of rights under the License will not include, and the License does not grant to you, the right to Sell the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For purposes of the foregoing, “Sell” means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that your code does &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;derive value entirely or substantially from the function of the Software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, since it's written solely to enhance the Software.  Your authorship of the new code constitutes &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a product or consulting service&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; in that context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what CoCl says you can't do is be compensated to provide these &lt;em&gt;to third parties&lt;/em&gt;.  You (as Licensee) and the Licensor, between you, are the parties of the first and second parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's any bar on your contributing the code to the project, and being paid to do so, provided the project is the sole rightsholder in the existing code.  They will probably want to remain so, so it's likely the contribution will involve a Copyright Transfer Agreement, but that's a matter between you and the project, come contribution time.  Make sure your contract with the payer specifies that you retain copyright to the work, so that you're free to do that if required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-14T09:56:07.427" LastActivityDate="2022-01-14T09:56:07.427" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12540" CreationDate="2022-01-15T01:29:59.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause FAQ&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commons Clause only forbids you from “selling” the Commons Clause software itself. You may develop on top of Commons Clause licensed software (adding applications, tools, utilities or plug-ins) and you may embed and redistribute Commons Clause software in a larger product, and you may distribute and even “sell” (which includes offering as a commercial SaaS service) your product. &lt;strong&gt;You may even provide consulting services (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fossas/commons-clause/issues/4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see clarifying discussion here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/strong&gt;. You just can’t sell a product that consists in substance of the Commons Clause software and does not add value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clarifying discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fossas/commons-clause/issues/4#issuecomment-415600945&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;includes&lt;/a&gt; this rationale from Heather Meeker, who drafted the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consulting would not be &amp;quot;a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software.&amp;quot; The value of consulting doesn't derive from what the software does (&amp;quot;functionality&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26073" LastActivityDate="2022-01-15T01:29:59.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12526" CreationDate="2022-01-15T20:39:11.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a particularly good solution. I would give up on trying to achieve a network copyleft effect in your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL-3.0 lets you define additional permissions per section 7. Indeed, the LGPL-3.0 is implemented as a set of additional permissions for the GPL-3.0. In principle, you could take the LGPL-3.0 and rewrite it to extend the AGPL-3.0 instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But despite the LGPL-3.0 being implemented as a GPL-3.0 exception, it is not widely perceived as such – it is generally treated as a standalone license. Using the LGPL exception for a different base license would confuse people, and there would not be any valid SPDX identifier to describe this resulting license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This combination might also fail to achieve your license objective. The GPL/AGPL/LGPL have a set of conditions that apply when &lt;em&gt;conveying&lt;/em&gt; the software. The AGPL does not change the concept of conveyance, but instead adds separate conditions in section 13 relating to remote network interaction with a modified version. In a web backend context, the usual GPL/AGPL/LGPL conditions about conveyance will not trigger, and the LGPL exceptions will not modify the AGPL section 13 conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instead, you would likely have to create a novel set of additional permissions per AGPL-3.0 section 7 that use the LGPL-3.0 approach but also relax the section 13 conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, the LGPL-3.0 takes the approach of defining the new concept of “Minimal Corresponding Source” as opposed to the GPL-3.0 concept of “Corresponding Source”, then adds more liberal terms that only require the Minimal Corresponding Source but not the entire Corresponding Source to be provided when conveying the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, it would be possible to add an exception that offers alternative terms to section 13 of the AGPL-3.0 so that only the Minimal Corresponding Source would have to be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no such widely-recognized exception currently exists. It would have to be a new development. We as software developers are not really qualified to do that and are prone to creating “&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;crayon licenses&lt;/a&gt;” that might have problems that are not obvious to us. Such an exception should instead be crafted by a lawyer who has experience with open source licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment, there was a  mention of an AGPL-3.0 exception for the Genode OS Framework. I think this exception is not drafted properly because it only provides an LGPL-style effect that relates to conveyance, but it doesn't address section 13 of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are various other licenses that include a “weak network copyleft” effect. For example, the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL) has a built-in Combined Work Exception. This license and exception is OSI-approved and has an SPDX identifier. However, the license contains terms that add limitations on managing user data with a software that falls under this license. Such terms might go against your licensing goals. In any case, it's a niche license without an established community, so downstream developers might not be willing to take the risk of using software under such a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such ecosystem concerns are worth considering. As one of your licensing goals, you have stated that you want a reciprocal effect so that modifications can be integrated into an upstream project. However, another licensing goal likely is to promote adoption of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some degree, these factors are at odds with each other: reciprocal/copyleft licenses are less attractive to downstream developers and limit use. Unusual licenses might act as a deterrent, since a downstream developer wouldn't be sure about what conditions a license would entail. In fact, you voiced similar concerns about the OSL and EUPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it can be reasonable to decide that even though you would like a network copyleft effect, a more permissive license that does not involve network copyleft might be better for your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Software Freedom perspective, one might consider which license choice maximizes software freedom for &lt;em&gt;end users&lt;/em&gt;. Network copyleft is good for end user's Software Freedom. Unusual license choices would hinder downstream use of the software, so that the software in question would never make it to end users – who would then be deprived of Software Freedom as well. In pseudo-math, this relationship could be described as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;total license freedom = freedom for end users × freedom for downstream developers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The total freedom will approach zero if either end user or downstream developer freedom approaches zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me personally, this means that I don't consider copyleft licenses appropriate in every circumstance – more permissive licenses or even proprietary software might have a larger positive effect for end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-01-15T20:39:11.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2022-01-15T20:55:52.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; the license of a project for which you are not the sole copyright holder, in the sense that you could &lt;em&gt;replace&lt;/em&gt; the license with another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ISC license is permissive though. So you can add your own changes under a license of your choice, for example under the MIT license. The software in question would then contain both the ISC and MIT license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot remove the ISC license notice because the license clearly requires that “the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies”. Even if the MIT and ISC are semantically equivalent, you are required to preserve that particular notice. You could only remove the ISC license notice once you've removed all of the original's copyrightable aspects from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-01-15T20:55:52.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12540" CreationDate="2022-01-16T02:22:29.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the copyright to the commons-clause licensed code is fully owned by a single legal entity (which I'll simply refer to as &amp;quot;the project&amp;quot;), they can just grant you &lt;strong&gt;an explicit exemption to the Commons Clause.&lt;/strong&gt;  Under the circumstances you describe, I see no reason why they wouldn't want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code has multiple copyright owners (either because there are multiple contributors who didn't all transfer their copyright to the project, or because the code was forked from or otherwise based on earlier commons-clause licensed code with a different copyright holder), however, things are different.  In that case, another contributor to the project could claim that you are, in effect, &lt;strong&gt;selling an improved version of &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; commons-clause licensed code&lt;/strong&gt; to a third party (the project) without their permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The way the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commonsclause.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commons Clause&lt;/a&gt; is phrased, it probably doesn't matter whether you're literally selling the improved code or simply providing a paid service to write said code.  Either way, it still counts as Selling under the definition given in the Commons Clause.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point, the question becomes whether or not the value of your improved version of the code &amp;quot;derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software&amp;quot; written by the (hypothetical) objecting developer(s).  Unfortunately, that seems like a nontrivial question.  There is an argument to be made that it does not, since you're presumably &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; getting paid for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; improvements to the code, and not for the original code itself (which the project already has full access to anyway).  But there are also potential counterarguments that could be made, especially if your improvements are only things like bugfixes or other changes that have no intrinsic use or value without the pre-existing code.  Would I trust myself to predict how a court would rule on such a case?  No, not really, especially not without knowing a lot more about the details of the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to be safe, you really should try to get permission from &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the copyright holders of the existing code.  If there are thousands of them, or if some of them can no longer be contacted, well, then you may have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, note that the worst thing that a potentially objecting copyright holder could do is sue you, personally, for copyright violation.  They cannot sue the project for buying your services, since the Commons Clause only prohibits selling, not buying, and even if you're found to have violated the license by asking for money for your contributions, &lt;strong&gt;the code that you've contributed will not be tainted&lt;/strong&gt; by the violation.  Even in the worst case, the project will still have a valid license (or CTA) from you to your contributions, and from all the other contributors to theirs, and can legally distribute and build on the combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Strictly speaking, the specific license underlying the Commons Clause &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; impose additional conditions that would &amp;quot;taint&amp;quot; the combined code and make it undistributable in such circumstances.  But I'm not aware of any Open Source licenses that would do such a thing, and certainly I see nothing in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt; that I believe could have such an effect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the end, it all comes down to whether or not you're willing to personally take the risk that someone owning the copyright to part of the existing code, who you haven't managed to get explicit permission from, will find out about you getting paid for your contribution and disapprove of that so strongly that they're willing to spend the time and money to sue you for what's likely to be meager and uncertain returns at best.  In most cases, I'd rate the likelihood of that as pretty low.  That said, if there happened to be e.g. a hostile fork involved in the history of the project, and if some of the original authors were still angry about it, I &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; reconsider that risk estimate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastEditorUserId="998" LastEditDate="2022-01-16T02:27:47.410" LastActivityDate="2022-01-16T02:27:47.410" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12495" CreationDate="2022-01-16T17:04:03.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a bit complicated because you want to do something that a lot of people usually work on.&#xA;Let's define what &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; is. A GNU / Linux distribution is a specific set of tools linked by the installer.&#xA;Remember that this collection of software is AGGREGATION, which means it may (and must) include software under a non-GNU GPL (even incompatible) license, as well as proprietary software. An example is Intel / AMD blobs so that you can run distro on a computer newer than 10 years.&#xA;Remember that a distro should contain its own repository. Do you have your own repo, are you able to create one? If not, use the ones from the original distro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giving the source is ABSOLUTELY FUNDAMENTAL. If you are using Fedora work then tag them whether you have to or not.&#xA;Under the GPL, you become responsible if you link to the sources. If the authors of the link suddenly remove the page, you are responsible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; mean? If you can see them, they're public. But I will assume it was in the public domain. Well, you have to search the internet, not your local drive. See the copyright notice, pages of the given distro. But if you're making your own distro, consider buying / creating your own unique wallpapers. Alternatively, you can find a random photo on your phone that you took a while ago (e.g. in summer) and add a caption on Gimp using some nice font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use Fedora names in your distro as your principal name, you are likely violating trademark law (unless you do so for non-commercial purposes, then use of these names may not violate trademark laws depending on the country).&#xA;Of course, it's safe to change the name everywhere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had anything to advise you, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add all sources, links, copyright notices, license information, etc., regardless of license, wherever possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change all names as it goes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are using GPL software, give all links and (ideally) distribute the source code in zip / 7z / tar archives&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Search for source copyright information.&#xA;If you have any questions about a specific problem, feel free to post a comment and I will help you&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-16T17:04:03.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-17T06:40:21.080" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;consumer software&amp;quot;, I mean stand-alone software that an end-user would directly download and use on a desktop or phone. No business or corporation involved. I have read these questions on the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/88/how-can-free-and-open-source-projects-be-monetized&quot;&gt;How can free and open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1255/how-is-selling-floss-packages-for-monetary-compensation-a-viable-strategy&quot;&gt;How is selling FLOSS packages for monetary compensation a viable strategy?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/100685/making-money-with-open-source-as-a-developer&quot;&gt;Making money with Open Source as a developer?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical recommendations are to sell a service, sell support, sell customization, or sell consulting if there are a lot of configuration options. However, all these options assume B2B sales. An end-user for consumer software expects to pay a fee and use the program with minimum friction. For well designed software, they may never need to look at the help menu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software itself is the product, I cannot think of a viable FLOSS business model nor am I aware of existing commercial consumer software that is FLOSS. &lt;a href=&quot;https://encodable.com/tech/blog/2006/02/25/Why_the_GPL_is_Incompatible_with_Commercial_Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It also seems like others have come to the same conclusion as me.&lt;/a&gt; I did find, however, examples, of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.destructoid.com/lugaru-shamelessly-resold-without-consent-on-itunes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial consumer software that was resold at a price lower than the original.&lt;/a&gt; IANAL, but from my understanding of FLOSS licenses, you &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; restrict someone's ability to sell your FLOSS code in any fashion. So no matter what, if you're just selling software, someone else can always undercut your price. &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/253925/how-to-avoid-being-forked-into-oblivion-by-a-more-powerful-contributor&quot;&gt;Also, someone could fork your code and build a competing product.&lt;/a&gt; Which is partly the point of FLOSS, but from a business point of view, reduces your competitive advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open-core model&lt;/a&gt; which seems like the next best option for commercial consumer software. But again, all the examples I've found are libraries or SaaS companies. You could also argue that the open-core model restricts user freedom, but I haven't found any commentary from an expert on the matter. Apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2617/21331&quot;&gt;some programs have open source code, but proprietary content and assets&lt;/a&gt;, but this only seems appropriate for software that's orientated around entertainment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research, if you can only sell your software, there are nearly no FLOSS options you can build a business around. If this is accurate, unfortunately, that means they're nearly no ways to respect user freedom if you can only sell software. Can someone prove me wrong? Because otherwise this conclusion is kinda depressing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21331" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T13:47:57.390" Title="How to respect user freedom when selling consumer software without services?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|monetization|ethics|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-17T07:50:39.583" Score="3" ViewCount="715" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on a software project which makes heavy use of the Red Hat Newlib as the C standard library. We now need to figure out the license of basically every third-party software component we use in the project in order to comply with our open source software policy. This of course includes the Newlib libraries, e.g. libm.a and libc.a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Newlib is a collection of software from several sources (as stated in COPYING.NEWLIB), I don't really know which license listed in the license file applies to which code file. For example: The project uses strncasecmp() which is defined in newlib/libc/string/strncasecmp.c in the Newlib GitHub repository. In the source file, no license information can be found. The generic license file COPYING.NEWLIB lists 56 different licenses from different institutions and individuals. But there's no real information which license applies to which part of Newlib. So I'm kind of lost at this point. I don't think I have to comply with each and every license listed in COPYING.NEWLIB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has someone faced the same problem and can me give some guidance here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26088" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-17T08:00:02.433" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T19:01:59.970" Title="How to figure out licences of Newlib" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12552" CreationDate="2022-01-17T09:39:38.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each file contains specific copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because there are files, that are licensed under GNU LGPL/GPL, you should learn how does it work. If you use files licensed under GPL, your app must be GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's library, if you use it, you should include COPYING.Newlib to your executables.&#xA;Note that AT&amp;amp;T uses term &amp;quot;BSD License&amp;quot;, so you should ask &amp;quot;What version of BSD License? 2-Clause, 3-Clause?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;IT'S NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Because of date of copyright, I found the BSD-License terms at historical OSI website (year 2002), so probably it's apply: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20020627100357/http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20020627100357/http://opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;IT'S NOT LEGAL ADVICE TOO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2022-01-17T09:46:32.910" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T09:46:32.910" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12565" CreationDate="2022-01-17T12:17:16.657" Score="4" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a program that uses several open source components. First off, it's written in python. Second, I use the modules &lt;code&gt;subprocess&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;argparse&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;os&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;datetime&lt;/code&gt;.&#xA;Since my work asked me to find a way to do what the program does and we plan to deploy that program on the PCs of our customers, I guess it's in a commercial context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understand the PSFL, I am allowed to propietarize derivations. My goal is to disallow any use, modification or distribution of that program that is not explicitly allowed by our company. May I use a simple, standarized EULA for that? And if yes, who's the Licenser? Me or my workplace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a different note, would I be allowed to distribute the program if I left the company? My contract does not cover anything regarding code I've written during my time there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I forgot to mention: When I compile the .py-script into a .exe, the modules and my code get bundled into a single file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13631" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T21:55:20.887" Title="Propietary licensing of open source code" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12551" CreationDate="2022-01-17T13:47:57.390" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the central objectives of FLOSS is to place all recipients on roughly equal footing as the original author, as far as legal rights to modify and sell the software are concerned. As you've identified, most FLOSS business models rely on promises based on your technical or social authority (e.g., you promise to customize the software or fix the software if it breaks). Such promises are often critically important to businesses -- making them an ideal market for those who develop a FLOSS product -- but are generally not interesting to home consumers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since FLOSS licensing is engineered to ensure that all recipients are in an identically good position to sell (or give away) the software as you, you will not succeed in selling the software unless the set of recipients is very small. The ideal time to sell your free/open source software artifact, therefore, is before it is released, when the set of recipients is zero. Making use of a crowdfunding site like, e.g., Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon, allows you to collect funds &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; you release your software and everyone becomes as viable a vendor as you. You can also release major feature updates in such a fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, that's it! Other FLOSS-adjacent business models exist like selling a physical device powered by FLOSS, or support contracts, or fastest access to the latest version, but in terms of the software itself, you don't hold any rights in your FLOSS itself worth selling that cannot also be sold by another recipient who decides to compete with you. This leaves the models of customization and of selling software before release, only the latter of which is of interest to consumers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T13:47:57.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12554" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:23:29.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You want to use standard library in closed-source products. It's a normal thing and it's allowed by the PSF.&#xA;PSFL is free license and non-copyleft. It requires to do some things like give credits or place that license text in your program as a notice (no as license for your software). You can do that making file &amp;quot;THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.TXT&amp;quot;.&#xA;I recommend you to read python license:&#xA;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.python.org/3/license.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May I use a simple, standarized EULA for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if yes, who's the Licenser? Me or my workplace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute the software, you are the licensor. If your company do that, they are licensors. But to distribute code, you/company must have permission to do that or hold copyright to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a different note, would I be allowed to distribute the program if I left the company? My contract does not cover anything regarding code I've written during my time there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In most countries) No contract may restrict you for using YOUR code when you are in the company. So if you make program at home (NOT IN COMPANY) but at the same time you are an employee, the code is your, so you're the licensor. But if you make program in company as a part of product produced by You in the company, company holds copyright and you can use that product under the EULA or work on it in company ONLY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PSFL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. This LICENSE AGREEMENT is between the Python Software Foundation (&amp;quot;PSF&amp;quot;), and&#xA;   the Individual or Organization (&amp;quot;Licensee&amp;quot;) accessing and otherwise using Python&#xA;   3.10.2 software in source or binary form and its associated documentation.&#xA;&#xA;2. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License Agreement, PSF hereby&#xA;   grants Licensee a nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide license to reproduce,&#xA;   analyze, test, perform and/or display publicly, prepare derivative works,&#xA;   distribute, and otherwise use Python 3.10.2 alone or in any derivative&#xA;   version, provided, however, that PSF's License Agreement and PSF's notice of&#xA;   copyright, i.e., &amp;quot;Copyright © 2001-2022 Python Software Foundation; All Rights&#xA;   Reserved&amp;quot; are retained in Python 3.10.2 alone or in any derivative version&#xA;   prepared by Licensee.&#xA;&#xA;3. In the event Licensee prepares a derivative work that is based on or&#xA;   incorporates Python 3.10.2 or any part thereof, and wants to make the&#xA;   derivative work available to others as provided herein, then Licensee hereby&#xA;   agrees to include in any such work a brief summary of the changes made to Python&#xA;   3.10.2.&#xA;&#xA;4. PSF is making Python 3.10.2 available to Licensee on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; basis.&#xA;   PSF MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.  BY WAY OF&#xA;   EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PSF MAKES NO AND DISCLAIMS ANY REPRESENTATION OR&#xA;   WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE&#xA;   USE OF PYTHON 3.10.2 WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.&#xA;&#xA;5. PSF SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO LICENSEE OR ANY OTHER USERS OF PYTHON 3.10.2&#xA;   FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR LOSS AS A RESULT OF&#xA;   MODIFYING, DISTRIBUTING, OR OTHERWISE USING PYTHON 3.10.2, OR ANY DERIVATIVE&#xA;   THEREOF, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF.&#xA;&#xA;6. This License Agreement will automatically terminate upon a material breach of&#xA;   its terms and conditions.&#xA;&#xA;7. Nothing in this License Agreement shall be deemed to create any relationship&#xA;   of agency, partnership, or joint venture between PSF and Licensee.  This License&#xA;   Agreement does not grant permission to use PSF trademarks or trade name in a&#xA;   trademark sense to endorse or promote products or services of Licensee, or any&#xA;   third party.&#xA;&#xA;8. By copying, installing or otherwise using Python 3.10.2, Licensee agrees&#xA;   to be bound by the terms and conditions of this License Agreement.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this license applies only to python v.3.10.2. For previous versions see source link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2022-01-17T21:55:20.887" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T21:55:20.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:31:11.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you fork this project, you can add MIT license for &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; changes and &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; code. The original code will be licensed under ISC license.&#xA;If using ISC license is the problem for you, I recommend to add MIT license as &amp;quot;LICENSE&amp;quot; and ISC License in &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot;. But it's nonsense and it makes using the code more complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:31:11.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:33:42.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's trademark, not copyright issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend you adding &amp;quot;Changelog.txt&amp;quot; file, because you didn't modified file, but it's name. But if you modify class names, you should change that class name in other files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then add a changelog in that files &amp;quot;Updated classes names&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:33:42.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12499" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:43:01.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright holder &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; change a license of the software, but the code what was licensed under MIT license, will be still MIT-licensed, so:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you forked that software AND you DON'T update it, you can ignore all license changes, because you don't use new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you ofter or even sometimes update that software, you should see LICENSE file before updating and update or not depending on new license (if (A)(L)GPL or another copy-left license, better option is to stay on old version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If project will be removed, you can redistribute your copy of it under MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:43:01.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12492" CreationDate="2022-01-17T14:46:47.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use MIT license for your code. So all users using your code must use it under MIT license, but if they touch that library, they can use it under zlib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full package will be in mixed-license form (Some code is MIT, some zlib licensed). Executable will be under the zlib license, because zlib is more restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T14:46:47.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12457" CreationDate="2022-01-17T15:21:08.943" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand the question, so if I misinterpret something please correct me in reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is libA under BSD license, and libB under BSD license and libA or libB is merged with GCC, you may take all code you want from both libA and libB and use it under BSD license. But if you take GCC code that is merged with e.g. libA, all the work is GPL'ed, but you still may extract libA code and use it under BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that GCC may be used only as tool, not real library, so using GCC with libA and libB to compile them will not make them GPL'ed, because of technical nature of compilers or special exceptions to the GNU GPL granted by FSF (e.g. g++).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that assembly code generated by GCC &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be GPL'ed when you used GCC libraries e.g. c++ library etc. but if you use external libraries under other license, the assembly code won't be GPL'ed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2022-01-18T14:14:47.067" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T14:14:47.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12416" CreationDate="2022-01-17T15:29:59.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your software does't require GCC to work (except for compiling source), you may distribute GCC with source or even binaries without licensing your app under GNU GPL, but you must send a source code and GNU GPL .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your app won't be licensed under GNU GPL (if you don't want), because it's independent program, so placing it with GCC is aggregation, not derivative from GCC, so you don't have to do that. Even, compiling app with GCC doen't make your app GPL'ed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(answer just for clarify)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS POST IS NOT A LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T15:29:59.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12554" CreationDate="2022-01-17T21:36:26.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have written a program that uses several open source components. First off, it's written in python. Second, I use the modules subprocess, argparse, os and datetime. […] My goal is to disallow any use, modification or distribution of that program that is not explicitly allowed by our company. May I use a simple, standarized EULA for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you may do this.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundationLicenseFaq&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python Software Foundation License FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;Can I bundle Python with my non-open-source application?&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Unlike some open source licenses, the PSF License allows Python to be included in non-open applications, either in unmodified or modified form. See also this &lt;a href=&quot;http://python.org/psf/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;more detailed overview&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only requirement is that you include some licensing and trademark related boilerplate text in your documentation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h5&gt;If I bundle Python with my application, what do I need to include in my software and/or printed documentation?&lt;/h5&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must retain all copyright notices found in the code you are redistributing and include a copy of the PSF License and all of the other licenses in the Python &amp;quot;license stack&amp;quot; with the software distribution. The &amp;quot;license stack&amp;quot; is a result of the history of Python's development as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;described here&lt;/a&gt; (this page also lists all licenses in the stack).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separate from the issue of copyright, the name “Python” is also a trademark. You should include the notice “&amp;quot;Python&amp;quot; is a registered trademark of the Python Software Foundation” in the appropriate part of your documentation or About box and place the “®” symbol after the first mention of “Python” in your documentation. (For example: “Python® is used as the scripting language for...”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if yes, who's the Licenser? Me or my workplace?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever owns the copyright to the code being licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usually&lt;/em&gt;, if you're working as a programmer and writing the code as part of your job, it should be fairly safe to assume that it's your employer, either because the code counts as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;work for hire&lt;/a&gt; under your local laws or because there's an explicit copyright transfer agreement included in your employment contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, weird edge cases do occasionally come up, e.g. in cases involving poorly written (or completely missing!) employment contracts, code written by people not primarily employed as programmers, or code that an employee has originally written for personal use in their free time and later used at work.  And those cases can sometimes end up being really messy.  If you're still not sure who owns the copyright to your code, all I can suggest is asking either the folks over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; or (for a more reliable answer) a local lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a different note, would I be allowed to distribute the program if I left the company? My contract does not cover anything regarding code I've written during my time there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you, rather than your employer, really own the copyright to your code, and haven't signed an agreement transferring the copyright to your employer or granting them an exclusive license to it, then yes, you can do whatever you want with your code after (or even before!) leaving the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that would generally be a rather bad situation for your employer, since without a copyright transfer or a license, &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't be legally allowed to use the code they paid you to write without asking you for permission.  So, unless your employer seriously messed up, this is unlikely to actually be the case.  Again, if you suspect that it might be, I'd recommend consulting a lawyer familiar with the relevant copyright and employment laws in your jurisdiction before trying to do anything your (former) employer might object to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, as I mentioned above, in some cases code written as part of your job might be considered &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot;, with its copyright belonging to your employer, even in the absence of an explicit contract saying so.  However, the conditions for this to apply vary a lot between different jurisdictions, so my suggestion to consult a local lawyer still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastActivityDate="2022-01-17T21:36:26.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-18T08:50:10.797" Score="11" ViewCount="5354" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following text in licenses to some software I am considering to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you&#xA;# distribute this file as part of a program that contains a&#xA;# configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under&#xA;# the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you&#xA;# distribute this file as part of a program that contains a&#xA;# configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under&#xA;# the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program. This Exception is an additional permission under section 7&#xA;# of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (&amp;quot;GPLv3&amp;quot;).&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you&#xA;# distribute this file as part of a program or library that is built&#xA;# using GNU Libtool, you may include this file under the  same&#xA;# distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused.. if I switch my main application to use Autoconf or Libtool, then I can bundle GPL code under proprietary terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26103" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T23:19:48.347" Title="Can I disregard GPL just because I use autoconf?" Tags="|gpl|license|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12567" CreationDate="2022-01-18T09:50:32.457" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exception says that “you may include it”, where &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is the build scripts generated by autoconf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a broad GPL exception that would apply to any GPL-licensed software. The autotools authors are not the copyright holders of other GPL-licensed software and are therefore not authorized to issue such exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Autoconf needs such an exception for the generated scripts because Autoconf itself is GPL-licensed. The generated build scripts include code from autoconf, so by default those build scripts would be GPL-licensed as well. This would introduce onerous obligations for people who distribute source code that should be configured/built with autoconf. This exception avoids those problems, and ensures that autoconf can be used in any kind of project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar problems occur in all softwares that contain templates or include copyright-eligible fragments into their output. It is thus common for such projects to have similar exceptions. E.g. the GCC compiler has a similar exception, and the Boost license places no conditions on distribution in compiled form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T09:50:32.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12526" CreationDate="2022-01-18T10:25:18.563" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote: &amp;quot;I have found ... the &amp;quot;European Union Public License&amp;quot; which do cover the &amp;quot;network use counts as distribution&amp;quot;; however, I'm not an expert at reading legalese - I've tried - and there really isn't much online discussion about this license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find information on the EC-owned site &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.joinup.eu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.joinup.eu&lt;/a&gt; (looking for the &amp;quot;EUPL collection&amp;quot;) and free legal support through the joinup contact form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EUPL works like the LGPL in the case of combined work, adding that communication to the public or providing remote access to software functionalities is a form of distribution, like in the AGPL.  But the EUPL is “more copyleft” than the LGPL because the list of compatible licenses is specified (it is not in the LGPL and may include proprietary licenses).&#xA;For the EUPL, in case a compatible license can be applied to a combined work, the compatible license will prevail, but this is “Should the Licensee’s obligations under the Compatible Licence conflict with their obligations under the EUPL” therefore obligations that are not in conflict, like the coverage of SaaS and the obligation to provide the source code are persistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastActivityDate="2022-01-18T10:25:18.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12567" CreationDate="2022-01-19T13:19:45.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you&#xA;distribute this file as part of a program that contains a&#xA;configuration script generated by Autoconf, you may include it under&#xA;the same distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph refers to &lt;em&gt;the one file&lt;/em&gt; it is found in - not the entire software product you found it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's saying that you can distribute &lt;em&gt;that one file&lt;/em&gt; under the same terms as the rest of &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; product, so that you aren't forced to distribute your product under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; giving you permission to distribute anything other than that one file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26108" LastActivityDate="2022-01-19T13:19:45.150" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-19T16:13:01.973" Score="1" ViewCount="1235" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Can-I-use-Apache-licensed-source-code-and-redistribute-it-as-MIT-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; tells me not to use MIT under my license when redistributing the Apache 2.0 source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, if Apache 2.0 or GPL source code is not included, only when specified in the header file and used as a library? (Build file distribution x)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//if something.h is apache2.0 license&#xA;#include &amp;lt;something.h&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;something.use()&#xA;// and this code under mit&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26112" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-01-20T11:18:46.030" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T11:18:46.030" Title="Can i use Apache-2.0 in a project licensed as MIT?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-20T00:25:00.533" Score="1" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;We've created a project where the bulk of it (70%) is proprietary code. The remaining is code that is public under MIT license. Can we still publish our codebase under a BSL (Business Source License) license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26116" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T20:57:00.730" LastActivityDate="2022-06-24T22:06:20.607" Title="Project contains some code snippets under MIT license - can I publish the repo under BSL?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-20T13:46:58.853" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of publishing my project (VSCode extension; binary and source) under LGPL. My code &amp;quot;statically links&amp;quot; a static library that is licensed under 3-clause BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does that work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does it work @ source?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does it work @ binary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. Can I use 3-clause BSD licensed code in a LGPL project?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5420/26118&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; I understand that I can use a 3-c-BSD library within a GPL project. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. How do I &amp;quot;implement&amp;quot; the license for the source?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to add a license file directly next to the library location?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to add the license statement somewhere in the root directory of the project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;3. How do I &amp;quot;implement&amp;quot; the license in the binary?&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I &amp;quot;ship&amp;quot; the 3-BSD license with my binary? Do I simply add a license text file that I distribute with the binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h4&gt;Notes&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other questions of kind get comments like &amp;quot;ask a lawyer&amp;quot;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I don't expect a legally binding answer&lt;/strong&gt;. But a rationale to the answer would be very nice. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;If we all need lawyers to get through the free software license jungle we could stop it altogether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26118" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T13:46:58.853" Title="How do I use a 3rd party 3-clause BSD license in a LGPL project?" Tags="|lgpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12567" CreationDate="2022-01-20T23:11:38.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I switch my main application to use Autoconf or Libtool, then I can bundle GPL code under proprietary terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, unless in the very unlikely case that the specific GPL code in question grants you that right as its own special exception.  Only someone who controls the rights to a given project can offer you license terms for that project, no matter what technologies are involved.  A third party cannot grant you an exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are looking at are special terms in the licenses of various scripts from the Autotools that are copied (usually by the Autotools themselves) into the project source tree, with the intent that they be distributed with the project.  This copying and redistribution serves the Autotools' design goal of providing for independent software distributions.  That is, you don't, in principle, need to have the Autotools themselves installed to build a project that has an Autotools-based build system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although these scripts are part of the Autotools, the Autotools maintainers do not want to limit the Autotools' use to GPL-licensed projects.  Each license exception is therefore granted to allow the script in which it appears to be distributed as part of an autotools-based build system for any project (the &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;this file&amp;quot;).  That also explains why the various exceptions carry a limitation to projects with an Autotools-based configure script or that are built with libtool, and why it specifies that the scripts may be distributed under the same terms as the rest of the project: the exceptions are tailored to be as narrow as possible while serving their purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a related issue revolving around the &lt;code&gt;configure&lt;/code&gt; script generated by autoconf and the &lt;code&gt;Makefile.in&lt;/code&gt; templates generated by automake.  These generated files contain significant pieces of code that belong to the respective tools, and they are intended to be distributed with the project.  I take these to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12568/9078&quot;&gt;what @amon means&lt;/a&gt; by &amp;quot;the build scripts generated by autoconf&amp;quot;, but &lt;strong&gt;these are not the files to which the license exceptions in question apply&lt;/strong&gt;.  Instead, each of these files bears its own, much more permissive license grant.  For example, from a configure script generated by autoconf 2.69:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright (C) 1992-1996, 1998-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;#&#xA;#&#xA;#&#xA;# This configure script is free software; the Free Software Foundation&#xA;# gives unlimited permission to copy, distribute and modify it.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, although it is not an absolute rule, the FSF is pretty consistent about putting copyright statements and statements of rights directly in the files to which they apply, and it is their recommendation that others do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9078" LastEditorUserId="9078" LastEditDate="2022-01-20T23:19:48.347" LastActivityDate="2022-01-20T23:19:48.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12591" CreationDate="2022-01-21T00:39:49.930" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions® has published an open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/can/usb/etas_es58x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;driver&lt;/a&gt; for their ES58X products. Based on this published code, I want to create an open-source hardware which is compatible with that driver. I want to get new VID/PID of course. The device would then be compatible with their proprietary software after a small change of their windows software. (a registry key as an example which defines VID/PID). Is it legal for me to do that?&#xA;In general, is it legal to create a compatible open-source hardware for a proprietary software? The hardware is created by just sniffing the USB traffic between PC and device and guessing the protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26124" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-21T15:18:58.140" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T14:24:18.623" Title="Is it legal to create an open source hardware based on an open source driver but closed source software?" Tags="|license-compatibility|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12580" CreationDate="2022-01-22T02:46:24.920" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been building a GPL v3.0 licensed user script for use in browser extensions like Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, Violentmonkey, etc. I would also like to state in the documentation that it can also be used in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/quoid/userscripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Userscripts Safari extension&lt;/a&gt; as well. However, I want to avoid violating the GPL's requirement against linking GPL code with non-GPL software, and due to Apple's legal requirements, Safari extensions cannot be released in the App Store under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation says that &amp;quot;A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;), which means that they don't both need to be GPL-licensed. Does a user script count as an example of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clarification about this would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-01-22T16:57:18.867" LastActivityDate="2022-01-22T16:57:18.867" Title="Distributing GPL-Licensed JavaScript for Userscripts Safari" Tags="|licensing|gpl|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12579" CreationDate="2022-01-22T08:37:45.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The important aspect to consider here is the joint distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't do that, it's always the end user who does combine the works themselves. And every user is entitled to do as they please, if they habe a license for every single piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple doesn't do that either. Getting around these bear traps is one of the reasons they don't allow gpl in their app store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if they were distributed together, the extension already active, the Wer game to look at the section you quote. The answer depends on the actual Api used, how intimate is the integration. Ultimately this would need a court ruling to be sure. It is a bit of grey area, yet the common browser api where the user can activate and deactivate extensions are usually able practically believed to be abstract enough to not trigger this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-01-22T08:37:45.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-22T14:10:24.993" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a software house and we've used log4j 1.2 in a lot of our older code. Following the recent Logshell incident (which I know doesn't concern log4j 1.2 directly), we've considered migrating to the latest secure release of log4j i.e. 2.17.0 and later. However, we would like to be able to do that without having to change our existing code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across the log4j-1.2 API bridge which allows us to use log4j2 in the background through the same API as log4j 1.2. However, our custom code uses PropertyConfigurator to configure the logger through log4j 1.2 format properties files, and the API Bridge does not offer an implementation for it. Therefore, our company wants to develop an implementation for the PropertyConfigurator class ourselves. I realize that there is experimental support offered for log4j 1.2 configuration files in log4j 2.13.0 onwards, but we would prefer to have our own implementation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Log4j API Bridge: &lt;a href=&quot;https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/log4j-1.2-api/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/log4j-1.2-api/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that since log4j (including the API bridge) is under the Apache 2.0 license, it is legal to modify the code and even sell it as a proprietary product as long as I retain the original copyright, license, notice files in the code/artifact and also include a statement of significant changes. However, I also understand that we are not allowed to use trademarks such as the &amp;quot;log4j&amp;quot; name in the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 License explained &lt;a href=&quot;https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-licenses-101-apache-license-2-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-licenses-101-apache-license-2-0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to confirm if it is okay to develop and sell this product under a new name (product name, group name, artifact name), while still retaining the API and package name (org.apache.log4j) from log4j 1.x API. Retaining the package name is essential in order to avoid changing our code base which depends on log4j 1.2. Furthermore, how can I know exactly what is part of the trademarks for log4j? Also are there other conditions that we would be required to meet. Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26143" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T13:30:06.343" Title="Log4j 1.x API Modification Apache License" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-23T08:34:49.400" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an app that I want to make open source, as in the literal definition of the code being public. Github says that if you don't apply a license, it's copyrighted by default. I want that, to be the only one who can distribute the app, sell it, etc. Customers can download the code and build it if they're tech savvy enough but otherwise I'd like to charge a buck for an easy .zip/.dmg download link on a website. But I'm also open to contributions if in the future someone wants to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.guide/legal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.guide/legal&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;If you don’t apply an open source license, everybody who contributes to your project also becomes an exclusive copyright holder of their work. That means nobody can use, copy, distribute, or modify their contributions – and that 'nobody' includes you.&amp;quot; That last part stumps me. They can contribute code but I can't use their contributions so it's like why did they even contribute. I want contributors to retain credit for their work, but I don't want someone to be able to distribute and sell my work just because they added one line of code to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see what I'm saying? I'm not trying to get put out of business here by my own app's doppleganger somewhere out there on the web. By all means, make my app better and put it on your resume, but forfeit your selling rights to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user26151" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-01-23T16:29:00.800" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T16:29:00.800" Title="Why can't I distribute my application und a license of my choice when I accept contributions?" Tags="|copyright|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-01-23T08:42:29.563" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12584" CreationDate="2022-01-23T12:49:19.113" Score="1" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; clause 6d states the following (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source &lt;strong&gt;in the same way through the same place&lt;/strong&gt; at no further charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering what exactly &amp;quot;same place&amp;quot; entails here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's suppose I'm hosting a website to distribute an LGPL-licensed dll file packaged with my non-LGPL application binary. Is it sufficient for me to include the download link for the proper version of the dll's source code in a README as part of my binary application distribution? Or do I need to have a download link for the proper version of the dll's source code on the same webpage that hosts the download for my binary distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25423" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T14:44:13.073" Title="GPL/LGPL: Is it sufficient to only put the Corresponding Source's download link in the binary distribution?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12583" CreationDate="2022-01-23T14:44:13.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sufficient to offer the download only to your customers or the people who receive the binary from you. If the people do not receive the corresponding source code with the identical download (thus one file), you have to make sure to offer a solution these customers can obtain the source code &lt;em&gt;for the exact version they got&lt;/em&gt; even in the future. The time span to consider at least usually is three years after the last distribution of the binary built from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same place could be for instance your website or another location &lt;em&gt;you control&lt;/em&gt;, link mentioned in the README you ship. On the website you offer the source downloads for each version you distribute(d). You should not rely on a 3rd-party ressource to remain active and available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you force your customers to get the complete corresponding source code along with your binary &lt;em&gt;with each download&lt;/em&gt; (thus bundling them in a single zip file for both), you probably are good. However, this then would have to be the case for each patch and update you distribute as well; your customers might not appreciate the additional unwanted download each time, and you might not want the additional traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-01-23T14:44:13.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12586" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-24T13:44:52.007" Score="3" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about consequences of html files being under GPL license (v2 or v3).&#xA;I am aware that it is not recommended to apply the GPL license to documentation. However, a typical use case is that a blog or technical documentation contains significant amounts of program code (snippets, examples, cited comments) from a GPL-covered project.&#xA;I am further aware that these use cases are mostly covered by fair use principle. This is about the cases that are beyond fair use principle. It is about being legally as safe as possible if in doubt. It is about the legal situation that remains robust beyond fair use principle and good will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct to assume that if fair use does not apply, one has to consider the html file a derived work of the source files of the used program code? In that case I wonder how some concepts from the GPL license apply to html (see following questions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What patterns in an html file are considered static or dynamic linking as referred to in the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hyperlinks? (I believe not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linked content visible on the rendered page like images, etc?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linked Javascript? (I believe, only if executed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;linked css?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;content in an iframe?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL'ed html injected via Javascript DOM manipulation by a non-GPL'ed Javascript?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would believe that there is no static linking in html at all; it would be similar to copy/pasting the content into the html and is therefore not distinguishable from a combined derived work. But I suspect some of the mentioned patterns might be considered dynamic linking.&#xA;Or is static/dynamic linking a concept inherent to programming languages and does not apply to html at all? However, one might consider html a programming language that programs the browser to render a certain page.&#xA;I assume that depending on what is considered dynamic linking, permits from LGPL would apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is serving the page considered distribution? I believe &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. Then, what obligation would one have to make the source code available, given that html is already its own source (assume no obfuscation is used)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a) Would one have the obligation to make the original program source code available from which code samples were taken? That might significantly increase the required webspace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3b) I suspect that just serving the pages might not be considered sufficiently user friendly to access sources, especially if the content is spread over multiple pages. Would one have to offer a compact download option for the whole site (e.g. as a zip file)? Or would it be okay to do nothing at all beyond just normally serving the pages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would the GPL license require all other content on the page to be GPL-compatible? (This has some overlap with question 2).&#xA;Depending on how question 2 is answered, linked non-GPL content on a GPL html page might be subject to the terms discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.GPL.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.GPL.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;E.g. an overall blog logo could be a trademark and therefore be hardly feasible to be put under GPL. Also css might have trademark character. Also ads are likely infeasible to be required GPL-conformal. Wouldn't this imply that ads are impossible on the same page with GPL-covered content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How would the concept of an &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.GPL.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.GPL.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt; apply to websites? I believe that this would depend on the content semantics. Multiple html pages that belong to the same article would be considered one program while separate articles on separate pages are like separate programs. In terms of question 3 one would have to provide source downloads (e.g. as .zip if the article consists of multiple pages or files) only for articles containing GPL-licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like this topic to focus on client-side technology to keep it separate from AGPL questions.&#xA;Let's assume&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that pages are not generated from (GPL-licensed) PHP code or (GPL-licensed) html templates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are just some html files, css files, images, Javascript files stored on and served from some standard webserver (assume Apache if that should be relevant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that no obfuscation is used, i.e. all html and Javascript files can be considered to be their own source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;no GPL-licensed Javascript is functionally used by the page (the page may however contain code snippets/examples/comments from such a Javascript). The focus here is on GPL'ed &lt;em&gt;html&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe Javascript answers apply to some extend; I don't know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please excuse if I overlooked duplicates of this question during my previous search. I found some answers about GPL'ed Javascript but I am not sure how far they can be applied to GPL'ed html.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: After some more thought and after seing that this question is not so trivial, I think it is would be good to know fundamentally whether html (without Javascript) is considered a &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; in GPL terms. Because if it is no program, no rules for statically or dynamically linking it as a library can apply, right?&#xA;So far, I only found some opinions on this, e.g. on reddit. Consent seems to be that html is a &lt;em&gt;document&lt;/em&gt; in nature, not a &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does someone know evidence that pure html is not considered a &lt;em&gt;program&lt;/em&gt; in GPL terms? Same with css?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25617" LastEditorUserId="25617" LastEditDate="2022-01-26T22:25:37.063" LastActivityDate="2022-01-27T16:24:26.937" Title="Consequences of html files being under GPL license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|source-code|website|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12589" CreationDate="2022-01-25T01:08:45.750" Score="0" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;What action(s) are recommended in such a situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some actions I considered, but can't quite figure out if they're optimal/adequate to open source mentality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forking the repo.&lt;/strong&gt; I fear I might be stuck if the main repo regains traction and I can't PR my possibly many new features. I seriously wanted to continue contributing to the repo; should I somehow try and make my fork the more popular one? How?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Looking for a new similar library.&lt;/strong&gt; This is obviously always an option, but it's not always possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Letting people know.&lt;/strong&gt; Regardless of how upset I may be, I would very much like to prevent this happening to other devs who consider contributing to the repo. Should I try to raise awareness about it? How? Should I just move on?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1275/26161&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; makes me believe that the best option is to make a competing fork for social reasons, but I'm unsure given the blocking from the main organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any past experiences (with results) would be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my specific context below. Spoilers because although I think it's relevant to the question as an example, I don't want it to be seen as a rant or be the main focus of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; In the past few months, I've been trying to contribute to a public&#xA; repository (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) with a relatively inactive maintainer.&#xA;&#xA; After my first pull request, the maintainer &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api/pull/38#issuecomment-992132531&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kindly asked me&lt;/a&gt; to&#xA; write tests for my new feature:&#xA;&#xA; &amp;quot;Thank you for your contribution. This will need tests and a minor change to make the error sniffing more defensive, but it's a great&#xA; start.&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA; They've deleted the original issue (#37), but in it I replied that I&#xA; hadn't seen similar tests from them on a similar feature, and didn't&#xA; know how to make one myself.&#xA;&#xA; Few months later I push a second PR to increase coverage of the first&#xA; one I did, and the maintainer asks me the same question, to which I&#xA; reply (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api/pull/39&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slightly bluntly&lt;/a&gt;) the same thing: &lt;em&gt;I didn't know how&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&#xA; They/he proceeded to block me from the organization, close the issue,&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api/commit/e4e38840904ad14eafc4eae7e4e2882a28e9765e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;redo my code&lt;/a&gt; in a way that doesn't work, and I am now stuck in&#xA; this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26161" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T08:43:05.290" Title="How to approach being blocked from a repository you use and contributed to?" Tags="|contributor|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-25T01:39:09.763" Score="-5" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just wasted countless hours over weeks just trying to get LibreOffice to use a dark theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made numerous searches, looked through the entire UI, manually gone hunting for &amp;quot;the usual suspects&amp;quot; in terms of paths on the system, I've read the half-hearted installation instructions for the &amp;quot;Dracula&amp;quot; color scheme found online, I've read official manual pages that mention two different paths, both which do nothing when I place .soc files there, I've of course restarted the program itself and the machine many times, I've read questions and answers online that claim that you are supposed to use the paths mentioned, but these are not picked up/looked at/detected/cared about by LibreOffice, I've asked on Stack Exchange but nobody was able to answer, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the first time. In fact, this has been my consistent experience thousands upon thousands of individual times for all kinds of open source/free software over 20+ years now. Too many to even start listing them, but it was the same thing with Notepad++ and getting to to &amp;quot;understand&amp;quot; custom functions/constants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's always the same thing: if there is any documentation at all, it's grossly outdated and completely useless as a result. There is no help to be had. Even if somebody responds, or has written something online years ago vaguely related to the problem, they usually themselves don't know the answer. It truly is like nobody cares. But &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; do they not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious answer to this is that they aren't getting paid money, so why would they care? But if they are involved in a &lt;em&gt;non-profit project&lt;/em&gt; in the first place, should they not know about this and actually care because they want it to be good? I don't understand why they just seem to like to pretend as if this is this fantastic, idealistic thing when in reality, nothing works and is just plain awful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be paying for commercial software if I had money. It would've saved me so much headache and pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26162" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T19:45:59.640" Title="Why are open source projects so broken and apathetic if they are run by idealists?" Tags="|software|project-management|community|documentation|philosophy|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-01-26T07:55:59.737" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12587" CreationDate="2022-01-25T07:36:59.083" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Forking is always an option in open source environments, and does not hurt. On platforms like GitHub it's actually the preferred way to create a pull request by uploading your own repository with the suggested changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However in a situation you describe you should ask yourself what your goal is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it to have the software do what you want for &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; purposes? Then all is fine. You have your repository. You have it contain your changes. And you can update it with code from the original project by means of occasional merges. And you can use your repository to share this change with others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it to prove the maintainer of the original project wrong to not accept your PR as-is? That hardly works, and often is a fruitless endeavour without winners. Also don't make a technical disagreement a personal vendetta.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is your goal recognition of your effort? Do the same as in (1), when your contribution is not valued in the original project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally: accept that people don't need to agree with you. Also when you submit patches or pull requests, maintainers or other developers do not owe you anything, nor do they need to accept your contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, if maintainers or other devs tell you that you need to amend a PR by xx, you should first try to work with them and try to fulfill their change requests to your PR. Ask for guidance or help on how to implement the requested changes, if that is unclear or you lack experience in that part.&#xA;Of course, you can argue that it is a separate thing (then the reply could be that it is, but still belongs together). You can argue it being technically wrong and suggest an alternative. But accept that a 'not this way' is a possible answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beauty of open source is the possibility and ease to fork a project and to share one's own modifications. Communicate well, interact with people in a friendly and respectful way. Help people scratch their itch with your project (or also other project), and your fork(s) may gain traction, and your contributions will receive appreciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I explicitly advise to NOT go and try to &amp;quot;warn&amp;quot; other people of someone being an incompetent jerk or similar. It reflects just as badly on you as it does on the person you try to call out and definitely will not help you prove your point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T08:43:05.290" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T08:43:05.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12581" CreationDate="2022-01-25T13:30:06.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license obviously grants the right to use and modify the code, even for commercial purposes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/list/#unreg_l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache has trademarks&lt;/a&gt;, including &amp;quot;Apache Log4j 2&amp;quot; so if you plan to use that for something proprietary you will want to contact the Apache Software Foundation first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the org.apache tree and package names indicate that it is an Apache Software Foundation project, so naming your own in the same way (I doubt if that is even possible) will cause confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T13:30:06.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12575" CreationDate="2022-01-25T14:24:18.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 license for the code of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/net/can/usb/etas_es58x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the drivers here&lt;/a&gt; only applies to the software and any derivative work which is also software. So when you build the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hardware&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hardware&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hardware&lt;/a&gt; you are not restricted by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your hardware might include some code (in a processor, ROM, FLASH or otherwise) for the implementation of the USB protocol, and this code might be a derivative work of the existing code, possibly code from the drivers mentioned above or from the proprietary software you mentioned. Your question does not mention which part of the protocol you plan to reverse-engineer based on the sniffing of USB traffic. If it is the part covered by the GPL-licensed drivers I would not bother and just re-use the source code of these drivers as much as possible, it will be a derivative work which you have to license under GPL anyhow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you are trying to reverse engineer the protocol parts that are not under an open license, but instead are originating in proprietary software, then you will have to carefully check the license terms of this proprietary software. Many license agreements for proprietary software include a clause that forbids reverse-engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to license the hardware under an open license, then you might want to consider license terms which are suitable for hardware, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_Open_Hardware_Licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CERN Open Hardware Licence&lt;/a&gt; or another license suitable for hardware, as most OSS licenses for software are not particularly suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not be guessing about the impact of you changing a registry key on the user's Windows system. If you receive the user's explicit consent for that it will likely be fine, as I do not think that the value of any specific registry key would be copyrightable. The user might just drop out of the warranty clause of the proprietary software, but that's another thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T14:24:18.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12572" CreationDate="2022-01-25T15:01:42.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can basically do whatever you want with the MIT-licensed code as long as you identify the code and the author properly as required by the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Business Source License can be considered as a proprietary license (source-available license) in the first years, until at the 4th anniversary the 'Change License' comes in place, which is usually GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © yyyy, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files&#xA;(the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction,&#xA;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,&#xA;publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software,&#xA;and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,&#xA;subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T15:01:42.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-25T15:40:02.987" Score="35" ViewCount="9093" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was seeing a lot of news about the colors.js library. I would like to know if the open source license entitles the developer of the colors.js library to make it dysfunctional and create the damage to the community (as we all have seen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26166" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-01-29T07:33:49.783" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T15:15:39.863" Title="Do Open Source Licenses allow authors to corrupt their own code, like in the colors.js case?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12596" CreationDate="2022-01-25T16:57:03.913" Score="3" ViewCount="996" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the process of including a library's code to my private commercial use, I noticed that the repository's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; was not properly applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find this (filled out) boilerplate notice on any of the repository's files (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api/blob/main/aurora_data_api/__init__.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure about what exactly I should do. Is this still legally considered as a valid license? The Apache 2.0 license appendix does mention (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To apply the Apache License to your work&lt;/strong&gt;, attach the following boilerplate notice, with the fields enclosed by brackets &amp;quot;[]&amp;quot; replaced with your own identifying information. (Don't include the brackets!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4151/26161&quot;&gt;This answer&lt;/a&gt; seems to completely disregard that statement of the appendix however, which confuses me a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in any case, what are the implications of any future changes made to that license's appendix (i.e. removing it) by the original maintainer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26161" LastEditorUserId="26161" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T17:09:19.237" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T19:57:26.540" Title="Is an Apache 2.0 license with missing appendix notice on files valid?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-25T17:25:56.670" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, if nothing else because there is no judge of what is &amp;quot;dysfunctional&amp;quot; and what is &amp;quot;removing legacy features&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'd argue you're thinking about this the wrong way: the damage was caused by people downloading and using code without verifying that it was fit for purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T23:57:48.177" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T23:57:48.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12594" CreationDate="2022-01-25T19:24:07.450" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The appendix is a set of instructions. It is intended to describe the recommended best practice for licensing your own code under the Apache License. It is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; part of the license itself. Failing to follow those instructions does not necessarily invalidate the license, but it may create legal uncertainty depending on the specific fact pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pragmatically, this is a matter of how much legal risk you (the consumer/user) are willing to take on. When you use someone else's code without a valid license, you infringe their copyright, and they can sue you for damages. A license eliminates this risk by giving you permission to use the code. From the perspective of risk mitigation, there are three basic questions you need to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How likely is it that the rightsholder will sue me?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How likely is it that they will be able to convince a judge that the license is invalid?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How expensive is a lawsuit likely to be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to evaluate these things on your own, because nobody else knows your exact business situation and risk tolerance, but in general, risk is lower in cases where you have an explicit statement, (presumably) written by the rightsholder, claiming that the license applies (which is the case here, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cloud-utils/aurora-data-api&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the README&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;Licensed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.&amp;quot;). When you have such a statement, it is weak evidence that the rightsholder is not interested in suing you, and more importantly, it is strong evidence that the rightsholder actually intended to give you a license, that the license is valid because of that intent, and if the license is somehow invalid, that you may nevertheless have equitable defenses such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;estoppel&lt;/a&gt; and/or innocent infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where the rightsholder merely dumps the text of a license into a file called LICENSE or COPYING, with no licensing statement in the README or the comments of individual files, there is less evidence of intent, and so the risk is mildly higher. However, judges generally don't like this sort of trickery, and overall risk is still not that high in my subjective opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More risky is the case where there are multiple licenses in the same repository, and no clear statement of which license applies to which file(s). If you get sued, your lawyer will likely argue that the entire repository was multi-licensed, and that you could choose which license to follow, but it's less clear to me how a court would rule in that case. A judge might rule that the conflicting licenses are insufficiently clear to establish intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if there is no license at all, then by default, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/532&quot;&gt;no permissions are granted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T19:24:07.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12588" CreationDate="2022-01-25T19:37:23.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read your question as, &amp;quot;Why are free and open source projects difficult to use and lack documentation?&amp;quot; This is fundamentally a matter of the economics of available development resources, so I'll approach the question from this angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with a comment above that people contribute to free and open source projects for a wide variety of reasons. A few of them include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they have a personal need for software that performs some specific functionality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they think proprietary software is unethical and want to develop a replacement for some specific piece of proprietary software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are paid by their employer to improve a piece of open source software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd expect (without actual supporting data) that the first reason is the most common, if only because it's so easy for any developer to say, &amp;quot;I wish I had software that did X; I'll start writing it today.&amp;quot; As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s02.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eric S. Raymond says&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to imagine free and open source software is developed in pursuit of an idealistic vision to create the perfect software, or to rid the world, once and for all, of proprietary software. Perhaps that's true for some deeply idealistic developers, but I'd say most people who write it (and even the idealists, when they're actually sitting down to put fingers to keyboards) are just trying to make software that is good enough to scratch their personal itches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, everyone has different needs, and the software as it exists may fail to meet those needs, or fail to properly document how to use it. The problems, from the perspective of developer, might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's difficult to know what other people's problems are with your software/documentation, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once you do understand what problems exist, it's challenging to balance developer time between making the software that you planned to make against fixing deficiencies identified by others (or just balancing which of those externally-identified deficiencies to fix first!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Documentation is an especially thorny problem to fix, because it's often &amp;quot;good enough&amp;quot; if you already have a sufficiently prerequisite good knowledge: if you already know how to make the software do X, or already know exactly where to look, or already know how to set environment variables, or already know how to set compiler flags, etc. Instead, it's great to write documentation that is complete, and accessible for a particular audience, and helps refer more novice users to the right prerequisite resources! That's what great technical writing can do, but not all developers are up to such a challenging task of technical writing, or aren't interested in spending what precious time they have on technical writing over the (more immediately-gratifying) task of writing code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this can leave users such as yourself in a very bad position! These pain points arise because the software might be able to do what you want -- and it will do it for the author and inner circle of developers who know how the software operates -- but they haven't taken sufficient care to make the software accessible to you, and outsider with whatever level of technical expertise you have. From such a position, it's easy to see how developers might laud the greatness of their software while simultaneously creating an environment in which it's difficult for others to use, as you identify in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once substantial advantage is that you have the ability to scratch you own personal itch here: if you wish to save others the pain of using the feature you've struggled to use, then you can write your own documentation and submit it for inclusion in the project. Or, if the feature doesn't yet exist, you (and, perhaps anyone else who want to participate in your crowdfunding effort) can pay someone to modify the source code and make it exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-01-25T19:45:59.640" LastActivityDate="2022-01-25T19:45:59.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T00:35:12.693" Score="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source licenses apply to other people. They do not apply to the author and copyright owner of the project. The author/owner can always do whatever they want. Software licenses can't prohibit the authors from making large changes to software, nor can they determine whether a change is 'good' or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="190" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T00:35:12.693" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T02:05:30.887" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are really two separate issues here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the developer allowed to sabotage their own code? - Yes, because it's their own code. The license has nothing to do with this, because the license does not bind the copyright holder in the first place (and typical open source licenses don't have a &amp;quot;don't release broken code&amp;quot; clause anyway).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the developer be held liable for sabotaging their own code? - Maybe, depending on jurisdiction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, and some other common law jurisdictions, the warranty disclaimer at the end of a typical open source license completely eliminates liability for damages arising from broken code. This is the case even if the developer &amp;quot;has been advised of the possibility&amp;quot; of such damages - which to my non-lawyer mind rather strongly implies that arguments of the form &amp;quot;[developer] knew that their changes were going to break things, and made those changes anyway&amp;quot; are invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in many other jurisdictions, the implied warranty cannot be disclaimed, and the developer can in theory be held liable for damages arising from their intentionally defective software. The practicality of doing this is going to vary quite a lot, however, because the plaintiff needs to show that the code caused some actual monetary harm. On the other hand, depending on jurisdiction and relevant law, the defendant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_liability&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;may or may not&lt;/a&gt; be allowed to argue that the plaintiff was negligent in using the defendant's software without independently auditing it, which may &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_negligence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reduce or eliminate&lt;/a&gt; the defendant's liability. There is also the more practical issue that the defendant may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_proof&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;judgment proof&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T02:05:30.887" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T08:03:28.083" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Marak/colors.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;colors.js&lt;/a&gt; is distributed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt;. According to this license (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, &lt;strong&gt;WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY, &lt;strong&gt;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&lt;/strong&gt; AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the disclaimer is amost exactly the same in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL License&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE PROGRAM “AS IS” &lt;strong&gt;WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND&lt;/strong&gt;, EITHER EXPRESSED OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY AND &lt;strong&gt;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18642" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T08:03:28.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T09:50:55.537" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could very well depend on which kind of &amp;quot;corruption&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can write a library, and then &amp;quot;corrupt&amp;quot; it in a way that makes it obviously unusable. If you downloaded my corrupted library instead of the previous version, and tried to use it, you would notice immediately that it is broken. You are in the same state as if you never had downloaded my library in the first place. That kind of change is quite low risk for the developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can write a library, and then &amp;quot;corrupt&amp;quot; it in a way that makes it less obviously unusable. For example, any function that could produce an error in the wrong circumstances &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; produce an error. You can build your own product with my library, but as soon as you start testing, you will notice that it fails. That is still low risk for the developer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can write a library, and then &amp;quot;corrupt&amp;quot; it in a way that makes it slightly buggy. For example, any function that could produce an error in the wrong circumstances &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; produce an error on every thousandth call. You can build your own product with my library. It will go through your testing (quite likely). But customers will start complaining to you because sometimes your application doesn't work. If that is done intentionally, I might be in legal trouble. I don't know that any disclaimer would necessarily protect me against intentionally causing damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can write a library, and then &amp;quot;corrupt&amp;quot; it in a way that serves criminal purposes. For example, you use my library in a banking application, but the new version sends any credit card number that the user enters to my email address. That is most likely totally illegal, but not because of any license terms, but because it's just illegal to do independent of open / closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T09:50:55.537" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-26T13:20:26.330" Score="2" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I have understood, LGPL-licensed libraries must either be linked dynamically or there must be a mechanism to swap them out of the resulting work. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0-or-later.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 4d of the LGPL license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in traditional Java tech stacks, everything is pretty much linked dynamically, which means &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLJava&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are no issues with LGPL&lt;/a&gt;. Comes in GraalVM with ahead-of-time compilation to create native images, essentially a way to compile Java programs statically (it performs &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/BuildOutput/#inlining-methods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inlining&lt;/a&gt; as one of its build steps and works under the closed-world-assumption).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it then seems that GraalVM thus either needs to implement some mechanisms to swap out the LGPL-licensed libraries of native images (which I have not found) or that the source code for native images needs to be distributed. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hibernate.org/community/license/#use-in-graalvm-native-images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the maintainers of a prominent LGPL library called Hibernate don't seem to identify any issues&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the folks at Hibernate turning a blind eye to encourage people using their library or did I miss something? Isn't there a compliance problem when using LGPL'ed libraries in GraalVM native images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26181" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T14:28:43.317" Title="Impact of GraalVM native images compilation on LGPL-licensed libraries" Tags="|lgpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12602" CreationDate="2022-01-26T14:28:43.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me it then seems that GraalVM thus either needs to implement some mechanisms to swap out the LGPL-licensed libraries of native images (which I have not found) or that the source code for native images needs to be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL does not require that you can directly replace the LGPL-portion of an executable. It only requires that someone with the engineering skills and knowledge can re-create the executable with a modified LGPL part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As GraalVM uses a JAR file as input to create the native image, people can already satisfy the LGPL requirements by providing a JAR file of their application in addition to the native executable from GraalVM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you need to run the modified version through GraalVM again is not an issue for LGPL compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T14:28:43.317" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T19:10:37.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the answers describe the legal angle well: most (but not all) open source licenses have an explicit no warranty cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the development perspective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a given library is critical to you, you should vet a new version before accepting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you vetted the version and realized that it's deliberately broken for your use-case, there is nothing stopping you from fixing the issues or reverting to an earlier release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might even develop and distribute your own version. This last part is an important one. While the original developer can remove an old feature, you can decide to maintain it and possibly develop your fork in a different direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26193" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T19:10:37.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-26T20:02:48.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A license is something that a &lt;strong&gt;content creator&lt;/strong&gt;, who creates a work, can use, to specify how &lt;strong&gt;other people&lt;/strong&gt; are allowed to use that work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it usually has &lt;strong&gt;nothing to do with&lt;/strong&gt; whether that work is good or bad, works or doesn't for some specific purpose, or anything else about its actual or intended purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is purely about what others are allowed to do, or not do, with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it isn't that the license makes the creator entitled to do anything. Its more that &lt;strong&gt;the license literally is not about what the creator can do, in the first place&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastActivityDate="2022-01-26T20:02:48.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-01-26T22:49:22.743" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;What license to use for a template ?&#xA;As an example, let's say an MS Access template.&#xA;I want people to use/share it but only to store data, commercially or not, but isn't it a 'modification' of the original 'file' (MS Access is kind of a file...)?&#xA;I also want attribution for the work.&#xA;And I don't want people to fork my template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26196" LastActivityDate="2022-01-27T07:04:00.510" Title="Which license to use for a template that you cannot modify (structure) and must attribute, but which can be used freely : fill with data, images...?" Tags="|license|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12606" CreationDate="2022-01-27T07:04:00.510" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The freedom to modify is one of the fundamental requirements of open source, so &lt;em&gt;in the context of this site&lt;/em&gt;, the answer is &amp;quot;no such license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-01-27T07:04:00.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12586" CreationDate="2022-01-27T16:24:26.937" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking your question part by part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is unwise to assume &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; applies, because the extent of that defence varies widely between jurisdictions, and internet-accessible content is generally distributed worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;HTML linking (hyperlinking) and library linking are very different things, and discussions about static-vs-dynamic linking apply to the latter, not the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Copyright and trademark issues in web-based content&amp;quot; is too complex a question to be answered in general; each case would need to be examined on its merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think anybody really knows.  Copying someone else's content to your server and redistributing it definitely has copyright implications.  From the Perfect 10 judgement, &lt;em&gt;supra&lt;/em&gt;, it seems that merely framing another's site, and hyperlinking, do not have copyright implications.  Aggregating content from multiple sources on a single webpage probably doesn't make derivative works &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but if you start mixing the content, that may no longer hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-01-27T16:24:26.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-28T11:00:42.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To untangle the legal consequences, it is important to understand and each new version of a Open Source library is a release that is legally independent of any previous or future versions of itself. (Unless its licence says otherwise.  I have never seen such a licence)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First an author releases some versions of some software and it is good.  These releases remain.  When using github, they will be available as long as the repository is not deleted.  And even if it is deleted from github, you can get a copy from anybody who has one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the author has released a new version.  This version is deliberately broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people, who trusted that author, will let their automatic package system update the library and now their whole system is broken.  Very funny.  Hah hah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fix all this, all it takes is for everybody to go back to the previous version.  The licence of that version is not changed. The functionality is not changed.  In the grand scheme of things, this was a minor annoyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now we know not to trust that author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2971" LastActivityDate="2022-01-28T11:00:42.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-01-28T20:16:39.107" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Opensource projects (in particular GPLv3+ licensed ones, like &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt;) have no warranty, and might not even have any well defined purposes. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; is so large a project that its purpose is not evidently defined: it is a &lt;em&gt;collection&lt;/em&gt; of compilers. It did happen in the past that the Linux &lt;a href=&quot;https://kernel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kernel&lt;/a&gt; had some unspecified or wrong behavior (e.g. some driver crashing the kernel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And open source developers are allowed to make software bugs (mistakes). I think that even proprietary software developers can make bugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, a bug is renamed as a feature. Sometimes, a requested feature trigger other bugs (in previously non-buggy code). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rice's theorem&lt;/a&gt; is related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some countries (in France, see article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000030939438/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;323-1&lt;/a&gt; du Code Pénal) software has some legal limitations and legal barriers. These apply to both open source and proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;, but I understand that it is people's behavior, not open source software, which can be illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to contact me by email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2022-01-30T15:07:58.660" LastActivityDate="2022-01-30T15:07:58.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12616" CreationDate="2022-01-31T11:48:19.777" Score="8" ViewCount="1802" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an individual freelancer, I'm writing some code for my customer's commercial closed-source project. The customer don't mind me to open-source this code, but they would like the code to be available for use only in open-source projects, but not in commercial projects, or at least not in closed-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to continue maintaining the open-source version of this code and use it in my other open-source projects. As well as I plan to continue cooperation with this customer and fix problems with the closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current ideas are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a GPL fork from the initial release of the code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pros: easy;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cons: if someone submits a patch to the GPL fork, I can't port it to the private fork, because the patch is GPL; I can port only my own patches;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make a GPL fork and also ask contributors to sing &lt;s&gt;CLA&lt;/s&gt; CTA for transferring rights to the patches to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pros: all patches from GPL fork can be ported to the private fork;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cons: nobody likes signing &lt;s&gt;CLA&lt;/s&gt; CTA; also I'm not sure how to make the signing process correct - first because I'm an individual, second because IANAL;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maintain a single version of the code licensed under GPL with a special exception for specific customer (company)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pros: single repo to both projects is ideal!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cons: I can't find examples of such exceptions - are there? Does GPL allow it at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think about this ideas and are there better solutions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3398" LastEditorUserId="3398" LastEditDate="2022-01-31T16:14:19.667" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T13:58:11.837" Title="Maintaining open- and closed-source versions of same code" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|exceptions|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12614" CreationDate="2022-01-31T12:10:23.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The customer don't mind me to open-source this code, but they would like the code to be available for use only in open-source projects, but not in commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This triggers me that it seems that your customer thinks that you are creating a work-for-hire for them and that they (the customer) will own the copyrights on the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is imperative that you first get clarity on who owns the copyrights on the code that you write for this customer, because that lies at the basis for what your options are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your customer owns the copyrights, you &lt;strong&gt;can not&lt;/strong&gt; decide on which license will be used for that code in your own projects. You must ask your customer under what license terms they are willing to give you the right to further use the code. You can &lt;em&gt;propose&lt;/em&gt; some common open-source licenses as options, but none of them will forbid commercial usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyrights, then the option with the fewest headaches is to just maintain a GPL version and give that also to your customer.&#xA;The drawback for them is that they need to provide (access to) the source code when they want to sell the product on. The advantage is that they have the right to make changes without involving you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T12:10:23.760" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12614" CreationDate="2022-01-31T12:36:38.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bart's excellent answer covers most of the points I'd have made, but you do ask about contributions, and I think that's worth addressing as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That issue rather hinges on whether you see the projects as divergent: the commercial project uses the code you wrote (and which the company owns), and does its own thing with it; meanwhile, you are reusing that code in a GPLed project, which accepts contributions, and develops on its own.  In such a scenario, contriibutions are simple: they'll be made under GPL, and the whole of your open project will remain under GPL.  This is, to my mind, the best scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand you see the projects as evolving in parallel, where the company wishes to continue to use contributions made by third-parties to your project in their commercial codebase, that could get really problematic.  You will have to decide whether to restrict contributions to your project to people willing to sign a CLA that permitted the company to reuse contributions under a commercial (ie, non-free) licence.  This could get quite messy, and it seems likely to me that your project would quickly get forked, the fork being happy to stay GPL-only and thus requiring no CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-01-31T12:36:38.907" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12614" CreationDate="2022-01-31T23:26:44.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright owners aren't bound by their own licensing terms. If your customer owns the copyright to the code (as you suggested in a comment they would), then they can license it under the GPL, and still do whatever they want with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyright, you can dual-license the code. Each user accepts one of the licenses and ignores the other. The GPL can't prevent that because anyone who chooses a different license can ignore everything the GPL says. You don't need to modify the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to accept patches from people who aren't willing to dual-license or transfer copyright, then you'll have to maintain two codebases. I don't think you should worry about what the closed-source license or CTA should look like, because YANAL. The company could benefit from the free third-party contributions that open source projects tend to attract. If they want that benefit then they ought to do the work associated with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25397" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2022-02-01T13:58:11.837" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T13:58:11.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12618" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12620" CreationDate="2022-02-01T05:44:21.007" Score="9" ViewCount="2297" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Android app that I'm investigating adding the GPL3 license to. I have images and vectors that I do not want others to be able to use, as they are a part of my app's brand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want others to be able to read/modify/distribute the code but I'd like to protect the branding of the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can protect these assets from being used? Or by adding this GPL3 license am I opening my app up to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26246" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T13:50:27.100" Title="Can I keep images and other non-code assets copyrighted in a GPL codebase?" Tags="|gpl-3|android|assets|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12618" CreationDate="2022-02-01T07:32:27.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For protecting the branding of your app, you should look into registering a trademark. Trademark protection is all about protecting your branding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next to that, images and the like are typically not related to the code in terms of copyrights. That means that the code and the images can be distributed under completely different (and potentially incompatible) copyright licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use different licenses for different parts of an app, then it is very important that you make it abundantly clear which parts fall under which license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T07:32:27.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12618" CreationDate="2022-02-01T08:37:17.213" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar question has been asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/155178/can-i-provide-a-gpl-app-with-different-licenced-logo&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 7 (especially 7.e) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.de.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; provides the basis for what you want to do, as it allows the limitation of rights for trademarks and logos. It will be difficult to argue that for all graphics/images in the app, or even for the color scheme, but where a trademark/logo can be reasonably assumed you can restrict the use. By the way, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Registration&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark does not necessarily need to be registered&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach: You could distribute the app in a container where the GPL-ed code is separate from the graphics, and the image files are distributed under a different license (for example a Creative Commons or proprietary license). In that case you would not even need to refer to Section 7 of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T08:37:17.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12618" CreationDate="2022-02-01T19:08:02.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since your adding the license to your own app, you can do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make &amp;quot;template&amp;quot; versions of the logo, colorscheme, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make the public build use these&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Give the codebase the ability to read in the branding from on-disk files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At package step, ship the branding files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very similar the process that Mozilla uses for Firefox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No comment on whether you can merge in other GPL stuffs when doing this. That's just barely beyond my reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastActivityDate="2022-02-01T19:08:02.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12618" CreationDate="2022-02-02T13:50:27.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us make it simple: as the copyright owner, you can apply whatever licences you like, to whatever parts of your repository you like (if you were using material licenced by others, it would be different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you can exclude the images, and whatever other files you like, from the GPLv3 licence. As others have said, you should make it very clear which parts are covered by which licence, perhaps by not including the branding with your source code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But protecting your brand requires more than that. In my time on Wikimedia Commons, I saw many cases where logos were deemed to not be copyrightable to begin with. In that case, excluding them from GPLv3 is moot. So, as others have said, look at trademarks as well as copyright (do not be fooled by the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“intellectual property”&lt;/a&gt; – copyright and trademarks are very different).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20983" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T13:50:27.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12593" CreationDate="2022-02-02T15:15:39.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Open Source Licenses allow authors to corrupt their own code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's pretty much asking if F/OSS licenses allow an author to create some code, distribute it, then later decide to stop distributing it, possibly replacing it with some new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that's allowed should be obvious, but it has nothing to do with licenses. More with the fact that in most parts of the world, anyone is allowed to do programming, and to distribute their own creations, or not to. Programming isn't an occupation that requires a particular training or certifications that would carry some requirements on what you can do (like doctoring or lawyering might be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licenses only have to do with what rights the author gives &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt;. What you can do with a work created by someone else is limited by copyright statutes, and they basically say that you can't (re)distribute a work without permission. The open source and copyleft licenses give that permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a case like colors.js, there's the additional question of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dev-corrupts-npm-libs-colors-and-faker-breaking-thousands-of-apps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github killing the author's account and restoring the old version of the code&lt;/a&gt;. That's also more about Github&#xA;usage terms than the license. The old version was distributed under a free license, so Github (or anyone else) has permission to distribute it under those terms, even if&#xA;the original author doesn't like to distribute it any longer. (If they can just kill someone's account because they don't like what they did is a different matter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, one could also try to pin a liability for any resulting damages on the library author, but that might a bit hard to do. After all, no user of the library is&#xA;required to automatically pull new versions of it without verifying their operation. Doing just that seems rather negligent. Add on the fact that&#xA;there was no contract between the library author and the user, no compensation, and (as other answers have noted) free and open source licenses usually disclaim any warranty anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21636" LastActivityDate="2022-02-02T15:15:39.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-04T13:00:17.590" Score="2" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I'm using a MIT library in my project, can I license my project under GPLv3 license? And which libraries Im allow to use if I want to license my project under GPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25790" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T19:30:36.473" Title="If I'm using a MIT library in my project, can I license my project under GPLv3 license?" Tags="|licensing|mit|gpl-3|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12624" CreationDate="2022-02-04T19:30:36.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT License is compatible with GPLv3. You can find a simple graph &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility#/media/File:Floss-license-slide-image.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way how GPL compatibility is determined can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. And there is even a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of FSF with compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-04T19:30:36.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12627" CreationDate="2022-02-05T08:14:52.670" Score="2" ViewCount="851" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache-2.0 and MPL-2.0 contain a clause that if you sue the project/user for infringement of your patent, all of the licenses you have been granted are terminated (though the exact rights terminated vary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apache-2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grant of Patent License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... If You institute patent litigation against any entity ... then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;MPL-2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Termination&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.2. If You initiate litigation against any entity by asserting a patent infringement claim ... then the rights granted to You by any and all Contributors for the Covered Software under Section 2.1 of this License shall terminate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, this clause exists to prevent the situation as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;: well-known and de facto standard open source project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;: patent holder of &lt;code&gt;PatentedAlgorithm&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; contributed code including his &lt;code&gt;PatentedAlgorithm&lt;/code&gt; to the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;. Later, &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; institute patent litigation against the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; because they are using his &lt;code&gt;PatentedAlgorithm&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, if the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; uses Apache-2.0 or MPL-2.0, &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; will no longer have the right to use the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; and this discourages him from suing the &amp;quot;Project&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what happens in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Case 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt;: random contributor of the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;B&lt;/code&gt; contributed code including &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt;'s &lt;code&gt;PatentedAlgorithm&lt;/code&gt; to the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;. Later, &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; institute patent litigation against the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; because they are using his &lt;code&gt;PatentedAlgorithm&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found some answers about this topic, but I don't think I understand them completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6809/what-exactly-does-if-you-litigation-is-filed-from-apache2-license-mean&quot;&gt;What exactly does &amp;quot;If You […] litigation is filed&amp;quot; from Apache2 license mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7543/interpretation-of-the-patent-clause-of-apache-2-0/7544&quot;&gt;Interpretation of the Patent clause of Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this given that my understanding above is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; lose his right to use the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; in Case 2 even though a completely unrelated person contributed his patent to the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If 1. is true then does &lt;code&gt;A&lt;/code&gt; have to give up every patent that is submitted to the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt; if he wants to use the &lt;code&gt;Project&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26271" LastActivityDate="2022-02-05T09:43:42.117" Title="Apache-2.0 and MPL-2.0: To what extent does &quot;license termination when instituting litigation&quot; applied?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|mpl|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12626" CreationDate="2022-02-05T09:21:24.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me say that 'algorithms' are very hard to protect by patents in many jurisdictions, most patents are for 'System and Methods'. So let's assume the patent of Company A is a methods-patent, where the code of the project implements the method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentences you quoted above are so-called 'reciprocity clauses'. If you stop granting your rights to others, then all others are allowed to withdraw their rights from you. The Apache license is somewhat 'softer', as it only terminates the patent licenses, while Section 5.2 of the Mozilla license terminates all rights under the license, which is much harsher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A patent holder would not sue the Project, because the code itself does not infringe the patent. It is the implementation and operation of the code that would infringe the patent. Therefore, a patent holder would need to sue individual users that implement the code of the project in their products or services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 1: Contributor A has contributed their patented algorithm, and therefore (i) under Section 2.1 b. of MPL-2 and (ii) under Section 3 of the Apache License any user of the project has a valid patent license to use the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 2: Firstly I want to say that the 'random contributor' should not be blamed for contributing code that is covered by a 3rd party patent, because nobody can know all patents in all countries; even with an expensive FTO analysis you cannot be 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in Case 2 Company A files patent claims against a user of the project, then a) under the Apache License company A will lose all patent licenses of all other contributors, but will continue to be able to use the code, while b) under the Mozilla license Company A will lose all rights to use/modify/distribute the software under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Q2: Company A would not have to give up their patent rights in order to continue to use the project code. Under the Apache license the continued use is anyhow OK, as the reciprocity clause only withdraws the other patent licenses, and --unless there is a strong 3rd party patent of another contributor-- Company A will not have an issue. Under the Mozilla License --assuming that Company A is an actual user of the project and not a NPE-- Company A will avoid arguing their patent claim against the infringing user by referring to the Project code, Company A will argue based on the functional description of the infringing product or service and (if the patent is strong enough) will win the case likely without direct impact on their own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note: IANAL, and patent cases are different in many jurisdictions, and therefore you should not take this as legal advice or as a prediction of your chances to win an actual case. Please seek advice from a real lawyer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-02-05T09:43:42.117" LastActivityDate="2022-02-05T09:43:42.117" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12635" CreationDate="2022-02-05T17:03:11.657" Score="2" ViewCount="859" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently developing a software in Python which is importing functions of libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was asking myself: &lt;strong&gt;do the licenses of the libraries I use in my software apply to my code?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if not, &lt;strong&gt;can I put a license on my code on my behalf?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code of the libraries &lt;strong&gt;isn't&lt;/strong&gt; in my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I use :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/python-nmap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pypi.org/project/python-nmap/&lt;/a&gt; (GPL 3.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/python-whois/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pypi.org/project/python-whois/&lt;/a&gt; (MIT)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/plasticuproject/hibpwned&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/plasticuproject/hibpwned&lt;/a&gt; (LGPL 3.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26275" LastEditorUserId="17616" LastEditDate="2022-02-09T18:12:35.780" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T18:12:35.780" Title="Can I put a license on my code if it uses external libraries?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|linked-libraries|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12917" CreationDate="2022-02-05T20:09:04.930" Score="2" ViewCount="525" Body="&lt;p&gt;After researching GNAT's Ada compiler licensing, I'm very confused. I understand AdaCore's GPL 3 license requires distributing the source if it's linked to the runtime, while FSF's GPL 1 offers an exemption from the restriction, as described below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL (no linking exception)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;gnat-ce - GNAT Community edition. A release of AdaCore GNAT for free software developers, hobbyists, and students. The run-time libraries provided with GNAT Community are licensed under GPLv3 without linking exception. It supports Ada 2012 only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL (with linking exception)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fsf-gnat - Free Software Foundation compiler for the Ada programming language which forms part of the GNU Compiler Collection. It supports all versions of the language, i.e. Ada 2012, Ada 2005, Ada 95 and Ada 83.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear to me, however, if the two distributions code bases are the same or different for Ada 2012. To add to the confusion, I've encountered BSD distributions of GNAT, which is odd since BSD has its own license. If the code bases are different, to what extent are the differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they're the same, how can the two licenses seemingly contradict each other? Specifically, how is it possible to change the runtime restriction by another party by merely redistributing the same code under another license? I was under the impression that only the copyright holder can do so, which leads to my last question. What stops any developer from changing the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10123" LastEditorUserId="10123" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T19:00:54.750" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T19:00:54.750" Title="Confused about GNAT's contradicting licensing terms" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|fsf|gcc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-05T21:39:03.867" Score="1" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use a small dataset that a university professor posted on his web page (a list of English words). The data is part of a larger corpus of data that accompanies a textbook (written by said professor). On the web page, it say that &amp;quot;Public-domain sources for all programs and data of [software described in the book] are freely available.&amp;quot; I want to use this data in a piece of open-source software that I am creating, which I intend to license under the MIT license. I plan to include a copy of the data with the software source code (which I will ultimately post to Github).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I legally allowed to do what I have described above?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, how should I cite the data? I was thinking of writing a few sentences about (1) the link to the data itself (2) the citation of the textbook (3) the quote from the professor's web page that says &amp;quot;Public-domain sources for all programs and data of [software described in the book] are freely available.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if I want to make my own modifications to the data before publishing it as part of my software (e.g. removing certain undesirable words from the list)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26276" LastEditorUserId="26276" LastEditDate="2022-02-05T22:48:09.123" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T13:44:20.570" Title="Can I use &quot;public domain&quot; data in MIT-licensed software?" Tags="|mit|relicensing|public-domain|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12630" CreationDate="2022-02-06T13:44:20.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should check if the dataset you found on the website is actually the version which the professor published in PD. The language &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Public-domain sources for all programs and data of [software described in the book] are freely available.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; indicates to me that this might not be the case and you might have to ask for the public-domain-version of the dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is in public domain, then you don't even need to mention from where you took it. But being polite and giving proper credits to the professor is always a good idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the dataset is actually in public domain, then you can obviously do whatever you want, even add or remove parts of it. That might be necessary to accommodate legal requirements in different countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T13:44:20.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-06T11:48:43.810" Score="5" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to fork a project on GitHub that was last updated &amp;quot;Three Years Ago&amp;quot; according to GitHub, I've written to the author and not gotten a response - so I &lt;em&gt;assume&lt;/em&gt; the project is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the project and what it stands for, I use it every day in fact, so I'd like to continue a version of it, at least. The project has been licensed under GPLv2, is it possible for me to upgrade my forked version to GPLv3? I'm new to open-source licensing - usually I just write plugins under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice you might have would be appreciated - this will be my first project of any kind, let alone an open-source one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Brandon Powell" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-02-12T11:46:41.720" LastActivityDate="2022-02-12T11:46:41.720" Title="Question about upgrading GPL license on a forked project" Tags="|licensing|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12632" CreationDate="2022-02-06T20:17:53.597" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If every GPL-licensed piece of the project &lt;em&gt;including its dependencies&lt;/em&gt; contains the option to use a later version of the GPL, then yes, you can use the GPL v3 (or any hypothetical later version). Generally, this will be indicated by the suggested phrasing from the GPL v2 in each source file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA;of the License, &lt;strong&gt;or (at your option) any later version&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis), but other wordings could in theory be used. If a single piece of the project does not allow you to upgrade to GPL v3, then you cannot do this unless you replace that piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've written to the author and not gotten a response - so I assume the project is dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, this is irrelevant from a legal point of view. One of the fundamental tenets of open source is that you can fork it, and this is independent of whether a project is actively developed, gets a commit once in a while, seems to be dead, is officially declared abandoned by its developers or any other state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-02-06T20:17:53.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-07T01:26:08.743" Score="0" ViewCount="570" Body="&lt;p&gt;I followed a YouTube tutorial where the presenter explains how to make a game that runs in a web browser. The video showed him typing (and explaining) the code. I copied several lines of code. I have  made bug fixes and enhancements. I'm wondering if I can show my code online, for example on GitHub? The YouTube tutorial made no indication of licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical matter I would have no issue if the other contacted me and told me to take it down. Also I found other people who have posted the code they made from following the video online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26282" LastEditorUserId="26282" LastEditDate="2022-02-07T04:30:23.757" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T07:20:50.450" Title="If I made a program from following a YouTube tutorial that does not specify a license, can I share it?" Tags="|github|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12628" CreationDate="2022-02-07T03:38:14.017" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can license code that you own under any license you wish, no exceptions. Even if your code is just a patch, you own copyrights to that patch and therefore you may license it however you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some licenses, namely GPL (but also proprietary licenses), introduce some restrictions on distributing the binaries or other kinds of compilations. Some combinations may produce a result that is illegal to distribute (sometimes even use) together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, you may license your code under a permissive license like MIT, but if you, or someone else, will want do distribute a compilation, he will have to license a compilation under a GPLv3 license and deal with its requirements. And just as you can use more permissively licensed libraries in your GPL code, you may also choose to license individual files under a lesser license, while licensing your whole package under a more restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note, that if you bundle a library in your package, this means you are distributing it, and you are only allowed to distribute it under terms of its license. Just referencing other library, or including scripts to install it doesn't qualify as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am not a lawyer, this isn't a legal advice, it may differ in your jurisdiction, but I tried to accurately describe the general consensus of the open source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26284" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T03:38:14.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12634" CreationDate="2022-02-07T07:20:50.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the code shown in the video on YT does not have a license (i.e. the presenter did not tell you that it is for example under Apache license), then you do not have a license to use this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube Terms&lt;/a&gt; clearly say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licence to Other Users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also grant each other user of the Service a worldwide,&#xA;non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to access your Content through the&#xA;Service, and to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute,&#xA;modify, display, and perform it) only as enabled by a feature of the&#xA;Service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this no user can assume that any content can be used for anything other than watching the video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an option to post YT videos under CC license. As you have not mentioned that in your question I assume that this is not the case, so the usual T&amp;amp;Cs of YT apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T07:20:50.450" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12638" CreationDate="2022-02-07T15:23:52.520" Score="0" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have taken concepts and code snippets from two libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 using BSD3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1 using Apache 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and make modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says must include copyright and license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache 2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says must include copyright, license, state changes and include notice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what should i do? and how do i go about doing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;UPDATE&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/users/532/kevin&quot;&gt;@Kevin&lt;/a&gt; answer, I am leaning towards this implementation that's inspired by vscode &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/ThirdPartyNotices.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thirdpartynotices&lt;/a&gt; and github's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/linguist/tree/master/vendor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguist&lt;/a&gt; arrangement of their vendor grammars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;i will have a THIRDPARTYNOTICES.md similar to the vscode version but will also include description of what was copied from the individual third party libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the github linguist use of vendor followed by yaml files inside seem to indicate a specific kind of configuration and arrangement specific to third party licensing tooling. i don't mind using the same but only if i knew what it is and whether it works for python source code. for now i will simply keep a vendor folder and then put a README.md inside for future to add in the yml files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21590" LastEditorUserId="21590" LastEditDate="2022-02-08T04:35:35.940" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T07:50:12.377" Title="I have taken concepts from two libraries: 1 using BSD3 license and 1 using Apache 2" Tags="|apache-2.0|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12637" CreationDate="2022-02-07T16:30:29.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &amp;quot;concept&amp;quot; you simply mean that you were &lt;em&gt;inspired&lt;/em&gt; by these libraries, but did not use any actual code from them, then your code may not be a derivative of either of them in the first place. If this is the case, then &lt;strong&gt;you have no obligations&lt;/strong&gt;, although it would be polite to put links to those libraries in your README.md or some other place where users will see them. This is because abstract ideas and concepts are not subject to copyright protection in most countries. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 102(b)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if &amp;quot;concept&amp;quot; refers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_(C%2B%2B)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C++ &lt;code&gt;concept&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (or the same in another language), or if you have actually copied (and/or modified) code from both libraries, then you must include the text of both licenses, and in the case of Apache you must specifically indicate that you have changed the original. If the Apache library has a file called &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; or something similar, you must include a verbatim copy of that file, either in a similar file (in the case of source distributions), or in the documentation and other ancillary materials that are provided along with binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, you may license the resulting software under whatever license you choose. Neither Apache nor BSD3 is a copyleft license. If you choose to use a third license, then your own LICENSE or COPYING file should clearly indicate that the Apache and BSD3 license texts apply to the upstream distribution, and not to your library. If you want your library to be maximally &amp;quot;polite,&amp;quot; it would be good practice to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dual-license&lt;/a&gt; your library under both Apache and BSD3, so that the upstream projects can take your code and use it freely, but you are not required to do this if you do not wish to. To do this, it is enough to simply add a notice at the top of the LICENSE file saying something like &amp;quot;This library is available under both the Apache and the BSD license, as shown below. You may select the license of your choice.&amp;quot; You would then include the text of both licenses, perhaps with a separator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-02-07T16:30:29.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12644" CreationDate="2022-02-08T01:09:58.177" Score="0" ViewCount="315" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose that I created a command-line tool with a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I create a GUI, for the command-line tool, using a GPL/LGPL-licensed library/framework such as Qt, does the copyleft apply to the (code of the) command-line tool or the GUI made by the library/framework only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's say that I have created a command-line tool that converts an Excel file into a csv file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, I created a GUI for this command-line tool using Qt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the copyleft apply to the code I wrote for the command-line tool or the code that I wrote for the GUI only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26283" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T09:48:28.830" Title="Proprietary command-line tool with GPL/LGPL GUI" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-08T04:40:10.673" Score="2" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying how other libraries handle third party software licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that github linguist has a separate folder called vendor and inside it uses git submodules and yaml files &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/linguist/tree/master/vendor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/linguist/tree/master/vendor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice this pattern of using vendor/licenses and having yaml files inside in other libraries as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thinking esp with the yaml files, it's meant to be consumed by some kind of tooling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a standard? What tooling is this? Can i use it for python code libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21590" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T10:06:07.157" Title="Is there a special tooling that github linguist is using for third party software licensing?" Tags="|licensing|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12637" CreationDate="2022-02-08T07:33:47.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your (now modified) question you write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i will have a THIRDPARTYNOTICES.md similar to the vscode version but will also include description of what was copied from the individual third party libraries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it pretty clear: you will have to choose a license which is compatible with each. Your work &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a derivative of these third-party libraries. Copying anything is far beyond 'implementing a concept'. Implementing a concept means &amp;quot;I want to write something which does X or Y, as such the idea to get something to achieve X, possibly by usign a certain well-known algorithm&amp;quot;. If you start to copy anything, this is not a concept anymore, it's an implementation you take over at least partially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what do you have to do?&#xA;Of course you have to credit the original libraries by taking over their copyright notices. You also add your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you choose a license for your code, compatible with MIT and Apache2. Luckily for you they are both quite permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that could be, for instance, be Apache2 (as MIT doesn't have the patent clause, it is not an option). The patent clause in Apache2 limits somewhat your choice for other licenses and puts some obligations on you to keep the NOTICE file but also copyright notices in unmodified parts of the code. Thus due to these additional requirements, choosing MIT (or some other similarily permissive licenses) does not work, but e.g. GPLv3 would work as well. Further, as Apache2 is also a permissible license you could also even choose a proprietary license - provided you obey either license with the credits / NOTICE as they require.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-02-08T07:50:12.377" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T07:50:12.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12648" CreationDate="2022-02-08T08:00:28.073" Score="7" ViewCount="3004" Body="&lt;p&gt;Licenses often distinguish between &lt;em&gt;commercial use&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-commercial use&lt;/em&gt;. I found different sources discussing this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://motivationjob.com/advices-skills/what-is-commercial-and-non-commercial/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is commercial and non-commercial?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4245/commercial-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Does Commercial Software Mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Related question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7923/17616&quot;&gt;Classifying Commercial and non commercial use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The tags &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/commercial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;commercial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;commercial&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/non-commercial&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;non-commercial&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;non-commercial&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still don't know how to decide if I use a software commercially or not. Is there a &lt;strong&gt;canonical&lt;/strong&gt; check list on how to decide whether the usage of a software is commercial or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 1&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bundle different software products together and sell them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure, that this is commercial use, because it is &lt;strong&gt;sold directly&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 2&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use software to create a product, that I sell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also commercial use, in my opinion, as the software &lt;strong&gt;directly supports the financial gain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 3&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use software to maintain the IT infrastructure of a company so that the employees can use the IT infrastructure to create products, which the company sells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure here. The use of the software does &lt;strong&gt;indirectly support the business&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example 4&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a software developer, I can use all my SE tools directly on my computer to create software, that I sell. But I can also use all my SE tools inside a VM hosted by any hypervisor (e. g. VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, Hyper-V etc.). If I use that hypervisor software, is that commercial usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure here. The use of the hypervisor might &lt;strong&gt;indirectly support the financial gain&lt;/strong&gt;. But if it does not really matter, if I use it or not, does it really support anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples are just examples. I'm not looking for specific answers to them. As stated, I'm looking for a canonical check list. I mean, developers who distinguish between &lt;em&gt;commercial use&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;non-commercial use&lt;/em&gt; of their products, what do they intend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17616" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T04:51:26.677" Title="How is 'commercial use' of software defined?" Tags="|commercial|license|non-commercial|software-use|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12642" CreationDate="2022-02-08T08:57:35.207" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Non-commercial&amp;quot; is always tricky, as it is not black or white. Actually, this is also one way of reasoning that any restriction of the purpose puts a license out-of-scope for open-source (and thus actually makes this question border-line on-topic – but it's IMHO interesting to discuss the boundaries of non-commercial in order to discuss the boundaries of open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license page&lt;/a&gt;, you find the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Selling the software in a bundle&lt;/strong&gt;: Grey area. It depends on the price, I'd reckon, and whether the price is mostly asking for compensation of the compilation and conveying the software or whether it is actually done with quite a profit margin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage to create products for sale&lt;/strong&gt;: Not allowed. This is the definition of commercial usage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Usage within a business, but not directly used in product creation&lt;/strong&gt;: Not allowed either, most likely. This is also commercial usage. You use it to maintain your business, thus to increase your profit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Used to host a VM, in which products are created for sale&lt;/strong&gt;: Not allowed either, most likely. This is the same case as (3) except the business type.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52000AG0048&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union's directive&lt;/a&gt; says (supporting the above conclusion, especially for #3) and #4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(42) When applying the exception or limitation for non-commercial educational and scientific research purposes, including distance learning, the non-commercial nature of the activity in question should be determined by that activity as such. The organisational structure and the means of funding of the establishment concerned are not the decisive factors in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, 'non-commercial' is defined by the nature of the endeavour, and not by the actual place where it is being used. So there can be cases in (3) and (4) where the use is allowed, if it is used in a part which does not deal with generating profit directly or indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have even been rulings in Germany by lesser courts that usage of stuff (e.g. photos or graphics with a CC-NC-license) on a low-traffic private website counts as commercial usage on grounds that they display ads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="24959" LastEditDate="2022-02-08T22:01:40.757" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T22:01:40.757" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12639" CreationDate="2022-02-08T09:48:28.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The copyleft requirements could apply if the GUI is considered a derived work of the command-line tool. To determine that, you need to consider how closely related they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GUI just invokes the command-line tool as an external process and the GUI could have been written by someone who only has access to the command-line tool's executable and public documentation, then the two applications are considered to be independent in terms of copyright and their respective licenses do not affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GUI actually incorporates source code from the command-line tool, or the GUI uses knowledge about the internals of the command-line tool, then the situation becomes more complicated and it also becomes relevant if the GUI used GPL-licensed parts of Qt or only LGPL-licensed parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T09:48:28.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12650" CreationDate="2022-02-08T13:05:15.663" Score="3" ViewCount="1237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello i was making a c plus plus program and the &lt;strong&gt;program uses some files of a project licensed under GNU GPL Version 3.0&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the program( i created) completes and i license it under GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an excerpt from the license of Pawn Programming Language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The software toolkit &amp;quot;Pawn&amp;quot; (the compiler, the abstract machine and the support&#xA;routines) is copyright (c) 1997-2017 by ITB CompuPhase, and distributed under&#xA;the &amp;quot;Apache License&amp;quot; version 2.0, which is reproduced below, plus an exception&#xA;clause regarding static linking.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So like that my license should start like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The software (My Software Name) is copyright (c) 2022 by **My Name**, and distributed under the &amp;quot;GNU GPL License&amp;quot; version 3.0, which is found in file COPYING.txt.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is in the above paragraph should i use My Name or &amp;quot;The Original Author of the some files which i have made use in my Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In individual files of the program, i learned that i have to put&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA;    Copyright (c) 2022 My Name&#xA;    Copyright (c) 2004-2005 Original Author&#xA;    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;    (at your option) any later version.&#xA;    &#xA;    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;    GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;    &#xA;    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;    along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;*/&#xA;    class CGamemode&#xA;    {&#xA;    private:&#xA;    //&#xA;    public:&#xA;    void GameInit();&#xA;    ...&#xA;    }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So i repeat my question which is as the whole project can it be first licensed under my name with GPL v3 and subsequently show that it uses parts of Project created by Author licensed under GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 9. Feb 2022&#xA;The excerpt from Pawn programming language is shown as license file which the Pawn program uses. Pawn is licensed under Apache 2.0 that i know. Infact, i use Pawn source files in my project. I also make use of a project SA-MP, which is a multiplayer modification of game. This SA-MP is licensed under GPL v3. As that is so, my whole program can be licensed under GPL v3. The question is under whose name.-My name or SA-MP team. Can i license it under my name and give credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26296" LastEditorUserId="26296" LastEditDate="2022-02-09T07:56:16.003" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T08:24:01.547" Title="Can i modify a GPL v3 project and distribute it under GPL v3 license with my name?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-08T13:43:06.510" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've looked at other topics related to this question, but mine is quite different from others so I'm not sure about the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I am building a website that will provide SAAS for users. In my source code, I am using parts of another source code released under GPL v3. Not an external library, but code completely integrated into mine (around 5-10% from all of the code). Users will interact with the website on a subscription basis. I am not selling the code, just providing a service. In this case, I've understood that I'm not obliged to provide my source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if what the following case: I provide another subscription, where the users will be able to download 1 file and placed it on their website. This file will be 100% my code and will appear let's say as a widget and will allow the user and other visitors on their website to use the service I provide, directly from within their site. But at this point, this will not be a &amp;quot;service&amp;quot; but a kind of delivery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this scenario must I provide my source code? I think the answer should be NO because I'm still providing a service. If the user' subscription ends, he will not be able to do anything with that file anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, the open-source code I'm thinking to use will be no more than 5% of the end code. It's some class methods related to processing post data from forms, that implements a bit higher level of security and cleaning of the post data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26297" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T14:35:05.703" Title="Should I provide my source code if I use GPL source code combined into my subscription service code?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12646" CreationDate="2022-02-08T14:35:05.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your first example you are right, providing a SaaS solution does not count as 'delivery' in the context of GPLv3. That would be different if it was AGPL, but apparently that's not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your second example, where your users download 1 file (the 'widget', 100% your code) from your website, which will enable them to access the SaaS offering, this one file seems to be able to run individually and separately from your SaaS offering, and therefore it is not affected by the requirements to disclose source code based on the 3rd party GPL code you are using in that SaaS solution. Only if you provide this one file also under GPL (your choice) you would be required to disclose the source. This is assuming that the widget is not actually loading code from your SaaS service, but is loading only data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not matter if you use 90%, 10% or 1% of 3rd party code with a GPL license, the copyleft-impact on your own code is always the same for 'covered work' (i.e. derivatives, modifications, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-08T14:35:05.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12642" CreationDate="2022-02-09T04:51:26.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately you won't find the canonical checklist that you're looking for, as laws for these sorts of things vary from place to place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I've seen, scenario #1 (interpreted in the sense of selling a CD containing multiple third-party programs) isn't generally &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; because it's not &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; at all.  You're not &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the software, you're &lt;em&gt;redistributing&lt;/em&gt; it.  That's a different beast altogether, and is frequently subject to different terms than use.  &amp;quot;Use&amp;quot; would mean some activity involving running the software yourself.  If this scenario involves bundling in the sense of bundling a bunch of Python libraries with the code for your commercial program, then that's a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt; which will generally have separate rules as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scenarios #2 and #3 are generally considered commercial use.  Even though #3 is indirect, internal use is still commercial use if it's used to support, run, or manage the business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm understanding scenario #4 correctly, then it's likely also commercial use.  You're using that VM for the express purpose of doing commercial software development.  That's not particularly different than the &amp;quot;internal use&amp;quot; scenario #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like these definitions are a bit vague, but in practice it's not quite that bad.  Licenses that care about the distinction between commercial and non-commercial use will (typically) explicitly define what they mean by &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot;.  In the event of vagary in a contract, courts traditionally rule in favor of the person who &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; write the contract.  If a company wants their license to be reliably enforceable, they'll explicitly define terms like &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; that aren't defined by law.  For example, the &amp;quot;free for personal use&amp;quot; version of TeamViewer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teamviewer.com/en-us/free-for-personal-use/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;personal use&amp;quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;any tasks within your personal life for which you are not&#xA;being paid. Connections between personal devices at home&#xA;or helping friends and family remotely qualify as personal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial use is not limited to tasks for which you are&#xA;being paid. Connections to or from corporate networks,&#xA;connections to or from recognized server operating systems,&#xA;and providing support to customers and colleagues all fall&#xA;under commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, they consider anything running a server OS as &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot;, even when that same use case would be &amp;quot;personal use&amp;quot; under a desktop OS.  These are the sorts of nuances that the license creator will have to explicitly define.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license for &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/V-Sense/DeepNormals/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DeepNormals&lt;/a&gt; explains that they mean &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;includes, without limitation, incorporation in a commercial&#xA;product, use in a commercial service, or production of other&#xA;artefacts for commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples seem to correspond to your scenarios #1, #3, and #4, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in general, you'll have to read each license's details to see what exactly they mean when they say &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;non-commercial&amp;quot; use.  Your locale might also have specific laws that govern the interpretation so if there's any doubt at all, it's best to either ask a lawyer or find another piece of software that has a more free license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T04:51:26.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-09T05:40:23.163" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a repository that uses the GPL and I want to include code from a repository under the MIT license. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that MIT and GPL licensed code can be freely combined; however, I am unsure about the exact way to go about this. Does this mean that I have to include the MIT license somewhere in my repo, and if so, where would I put it? Can I just include the code without worry since my repo is under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26303" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T05:40:23.163" Title="Using code licensed under an MIT license with code licensed under the GPL" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|gpl-3|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2022-07-17T08:45:02.803" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12645" CreationDate="2022-02-09T08:24:01.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the question revolves around a misunderstanding: that a piece of software is &amp;quot;licensed under somebody's name&amp;quot;.  It isn't, so the issue of whether you can &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;licence this work under your own name&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is a non-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have created a work that incorporates parts from many other works, distributed to you under a variety of free licences (in your case, Apache2 and GPLv3).  This is a perfectly normal thing to do in the free-software world, so don't panic.  Each of those licences will have certain obligations, &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of which you must now follow with respect to your derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have observed, you will need to preserve all existing copyright notices.  In files that you have modified, you will need to add your own copyright notice to the existing list.  If the pre-existing Apache2 code includes a &lt;code&gt;NOTICE&lt;/code&gt; file, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt; s4d obliges you to preserve (parts of) it, and best-practice would suggest that you add yourself to any list of rightsholders therein.  As you have used GPLv3 code, your project must be distributed in its entirety under GPLv3; if the Apache2-derived code contains any references to its licence status, these should be updated to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-02-09T08:24:01.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-10T09:20:40.423" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am doing some voluntary programming work for a not for profit - and it will be far faster if I re-use several thousand lines of boilerplate code I have previously written for commercial projects owned by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to provide free, in perpetuity and non-exclusive rights to use the software - but I do not want them to have the ability to sell it or share to third parties or in anyway prevent my continued use of the code. I thus want to give limited permission to use - but retain copyright and permission to publish the code to myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of an 'off the shelf' or example License that would be suitable or at lease close to this need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps. I know the license I am seeking is not 'open source' - but I posted this question over at Software Engineering and they said it was in scope here but not there..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26316" LastActivityDate="2022-02-10T09:20:40.423" Title="License for donating software to not for profit - non exclusive" Tags="|license-recommendation|law|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-02-10T15:19:23.460" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12654" CreationDate="2022-02-10T21:25:54.660" Score="9" ViewCount="2154" Body="&lt;p&gt;unDraw is a website providing free &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SVG&lt;/a&gt; graphics. It advertises itself as having an &amp;quot;open-source&amp;quot; license. But looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://undraw.co/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its license&lt;/a&gt;, I have doubts, so I'm asking here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All images, assets and vectors published on unDraw can be used for free. You can use them for noncommercial and commercial purposes. You do not need to ask permission from or provide credit to the creator or unDraw. More precisely, unDraw grants you an nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use the assets provided from unDraw for free, including for commercial purposes, without permission from or attributing the creator or unDraw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks good to me. For a novice like me, it seems quite open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license does not include the right to compile assets, vectors or images from unDraw to replicate a similar or competing service, in any form or distribute the assets in packs or otherwise. This extends to automated and non-automated ways to link, embed, scrape, search or download the assets included on the website without our consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am skeptical regarding this. It seems individual images can be used and redistributed as anyone wants, but the collection of images as a whole cannot be redistributed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it even possible to have a license regarding the collection of images that is different from the license of each individual image, and even &amp;quot;supersedes&amp;quot; the sum of each file's license? Would such a thing be acceptable regarding to the OSI definition, or to Debian's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, I have seen similar licensing (limiting the collection as a whole) for photo sharing websites &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixabay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pixabay&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsplash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unsplash&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26319" LastEditorUserId="16904" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T10:13:53.580" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T10:13:53.580" Title="Is unDraw really &quot;open source&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|redistribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12653" CreationDate="2022-02-11T06:54:31.073" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://undraw.co/license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The license of unDraw&lt;/a&gt; is a proprietary license for content (not software). It is not similar nor does it follow any FOSS license, and the non-compete clause apparently is in conflict with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI definition of Open Source, particularly clause 6&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#redistribute&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freedom to redistribute, as declared by FSF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the broad intention of the non-compete clause of the unDraw service is clearly stated in the license, while it could become tricky in the real world details, as the term '&lt;em&gt;similar or competing service&lt;/em&gt;' is not clearly defined. What if you had a bigger service (also with other images, or adding videos), what if you charged a fee, would that still be directly competing? What if someone accidentally collected (from other sites) and re-distributed some graphics, that originally came from unDraw?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this shows once again: If you plan to write a license you need to involve an experienced lawyer. Or otherwise you should just re-use an existing license that is widely accepted in the industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T06:54:31.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12640" CreationDate="2022-02-11T10:06:07.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could just ask the linguist team to find out which tools they are using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a large number of tools available which intend to help developers with documenting the libraries and dependencies they use, the respective licenses, and with fulfilling the requirements (delivering source code, copyright attribution, license language, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are commercial tools, many of which are just an add-on to tools that focus on vulnerability management and you can tell that the FOSS License Compliance is not the initial focus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many open-source solutions which (to my knowledge) as of today are good in some areas (some are just for certain programming languages or DevOp environments, but by far not universal tools, e.g. when you try to provide a licenses.md for an entire container (like Docker).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt;, but we should not forget other projects like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/licensee/licensee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Licensee&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/oss-review-toolkit/ort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSS Review Toolkit (ORT)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ScanCode toolkit&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fosslight&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSLight &lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mojohaus/license-maven-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License Maven Plugin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Jasig/maven-notice-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maven Notice Plugin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jinnovations/attribution-maven-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attribution Maven Plugin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License Finder&lt;/a&gt;. This list is in no particular order and does not claim to be complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not used all of these, and I am not recommending anything for any particular purpose. Obviously the times have gone where you had to do all of that manually, check yourself which tool is best for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you know of any tool that is missing in the list you might want to leave a comment under this answer. This should, however, not be used to promote commercial tools and please do not post judgements (like Tool_A is the best, Tool_B is no good).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-11T10:06:07.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12658" CreationDate="2022-02-15T06:21:36.170" Score="6" ViewCount="1399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a company license frontend components developed using open source javascript(JS) frameworks(e.g. Vue, React or Next JS) that are downloaded and accessible anytime a user accesses the site that uses those components?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25954" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T07:43:09.603" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T07:43:09.603" Title="Can a company license frontend software developed with open source frameworks?" Tags="|licensing|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12657" CreationDate="2022-02-15T08:30:48.410" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally: a license for software tells you what permissions you have in using and distributing said software. If you produce a piece of software that incorporates other software, you have to look at the license of that software and see whether you are willing to fulfill the conditions as written down in the license. The conditions will make a distinction between you using it for yourself and you incorporating the source code in order to write and distribute your own software. The latter case is interesting, as the use of 3rd-party libraries or source code like from frame works means you have to comply with the license of these when you distribute your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In open source one usually distinguishes two type of licenses: the permissive licenses (like MIT, BSD, Apache,...) and the strong copyleft (like GPL). And for libraries there's somewhat a 3rd kind, strong copyleft with linking exception (like LGPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the permissive licenses is that one can make use of the source code on the condition to keep and notify about the copyright without obligation to make the sources public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the strong copyleft licenses is that you can only make use of this software when you apply the exactly same conditions, thus usually make use of the very same license for your own software. It usually implies that you have to make source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gist of the strong copyleft with linking exception is that you can make use of the library without publishing the sources of your software, if you do not modify the library. The need to make sources public only applies when making modifications to the library itself. Often there are other conditions like you need to allow users to replace the library with a functionally equivalent one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mentioned frameworks Vue, React and Next JS are all under the MIT license. MIT is a permissive license. So anyone is free to make use of that source code in whatever project - on the condition that the recipients of the software are informed about the use of the framework and its license, thus an appropriate copyright is given in a reasonable place. For Vue it reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License (MIT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) 2013-present, Yuxi (Evan) You&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in&#xA;all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it's totally fine to use these frameworks (Vue, React, Next JS) in proprietary software if you fulfill this one condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind though, a permissive license may not apply for &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; framework. E.g. for Qt the situation looks quite different. Thus always look at the license of source code and libraries you use when you develop. And don't use those where you don't intend to fulfill the conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T10:19:32.500" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T10:19:32.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12663" CreationDate="2022-02-15T14:17:16.903" Score="22" ViewCount="6960" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to open-source world. I have contributed some code to an open-source project licensed under GPLv3 but with no contributor agreement license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it legal for the original author to upload the project somewhere else and delete the commit history of contributors (despite my code contribution still being there in the new uploaded project)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26359" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-02-18T10:51:08.427" LastActivityDate="2022-02-18T10:51:08.427" Title="Is it legal for the author of an open source project to remove history of contributors' commits?" Tags="|gpl-3|contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8346" CreationDate="2022-02-15T16:14:31.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MongoDB&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see MongoDB Jira &lt;a href=&quot;https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/DRIVERS-717?filter=-9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26363" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T16:14:31.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12659" CreationDate="2022-02-15T21:53:31.333" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly all free software licences require the preservation of existing copyright notices.  If the author of a piece of GPLv3 software accepted your modified version, then since this code had to be conveyed under the terms of GPLv3, the author is required to preserve your copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly no free software licences concern themselves with the minutiae of source-code control systems, so nearly none of them make any reference to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;commit messages&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, nor are there any requirements to preserve the artefacts of a particular source-code control system.  This is unquestionably a good thing, since otherwise projects would be full of &lt;code&gt;foo.c,v&lt;/code&gt; files we could never remove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should go back to the author, apologetically point out that GPLv3 s5a &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; you to add a copyright notice to the file(s) you modified (and in which you now have a copyright interest), and ask if you could add those in a separate pull request.  Strictly speaking, the author isn't obliged to accept them, but most people in free software understand that the copyright notice is the standard currency of acknowledgement - and that source-code control system artefacts aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-02-15T22:07:11.570" LastActivityDate="2022-02-15T22:07:11.570" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-16T02:59:34.637" Score="3" ViewCount="790" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a dataset I would like to publish - it is likely people will want to use this dataset to train machine learning models. I would like to ensure that any models trained using this dataset are freely available, and perhaps (if possible) further restrict that the code used to train these models is published. Similar to a GPL license or CC-BY-SA. Is there a license I can publish these data under that will do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26367" LastEditorUserId="26367" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T16:20:00.573" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T16:20:00.573" Title="Share-alike style License for data that will be used to train machine learning models" Tags="|derivative-works|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12664" CreationDate="2022-02-16T07:24:25.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intention you describe in the question is very copyleft. Not only the data and derivative works (modified data) should remain under that license, but also the models that are trained using the data, and also the code which is used to for training the models using your data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your attempt to force as much as possible (basically anything that touches your data) into the open-source space is risky and might backfire. The headwind comes from license-incompatibility between your data license and on the other side the license of the models, which might prevent that your data is getting used at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, your license for data might not be suitable for models, which are more like software/code, so you would need to decide which (copyleft?) license you would want to force upon the code of the models. Again this is something users will not welcome and where license incompatibilities will strike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of any license that has the features you are proposing. The licenses commonly used for data are &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Data Commons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOSS licenses for software (such as GPL) are not suitable, as the are drafted to protect code, not data. The CC BY-SA  and the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) are as far as you can get with currently available (commonly used) open source licenses. If you want to get more you might need to contact a lawyer to draft a proprietary license for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9246/license-for-json-database-that-prevents-proprietary-use&quot;&gt;similar question&lt;/a&gt;, which you might want to consider for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T07:24:25.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12678" CreationDate="2022-02-16T07:43:35.470" Score="8" ViewCount="1176" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many projects, e.g. GitLab, BitWarden, EasyRedmine, use open source software licenses. Their code is publicly available, and the services can be self-hosted.&#xA;Of course they can charge users for providing the infrastructure and hosting the cloud service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following I'll use BitWarden as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BitWarden also &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitwarden.com/help/licensing-on-premise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;charges users for self-hosting&lt;/a&gt; such a service, although with client and server code being &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;, it can (at least partially) be hosted on-premise for free, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.makeuseof.com/how-host-self-host-bitwarden/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;people do it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The (A)GPL parts of the software seem to be sufficient for some users, so the non-cost-free parts rather seem to provide advanced features for enterprises.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As defined &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, it is not allowed to charge royalties for the software under &lt;em&gt;approved open source licenses&lt;/em&gt; such as &lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;AGPL&lt;/em&gt;, and BitWarden complies with that by publishing some modules (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server/tree/master/bitwarden_license/src/CommCore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CommCore&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server/tree/master/bitwarden_license/src/Sso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sso&lt;/a&gt;) with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/bitwarden_license/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does that license model work in practice/technically?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code under those &lt;em&gt;non-cost-free&lt;/em&gt; folders &lt;em&gt;Sso&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;CommCore&lt;/em&gt; seems still to be provided with sources.&#xA;How can BitWarden prevent a company from running it for free if the code is available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;if there is a license check in the provided source code, imho it could just be removed (*).Is BitWarden relying on users being honest (i.e. it's a business model based on trust, or on disproportionate costs for self-hosting)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or is there a way to enforce the usage of a license by some technical means (even if sources are available)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) &lt;em&gt;I have no intentions of doing so, this is just for the sake of understanding the business model and technology. It may be illegal to remove a license check if the code is published is under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/LICENSE_BITWARDEN.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BitWarden license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10584" LastEditorUserId="10584" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T20:23:19.900" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T08:36:31.327" Title="Open source licenses and royalties" Tags="|licensing|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12666" CreationDate="2022-02-16T08:31:39.973" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that license model work in practice/technically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, pretty well.  Given a company that produces a free-software product which they will also host for a charge (ie, SaaS), users have options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the end-user could download the code, install it on a server, and so service their user base.  This requires a fair amount of sysadmin expertise, which isn't free.  The server must be provisioned and hosted, backups must be arranged, the server OS must be kept in-patch, and periodically version upgrades will be required.  If the server is physical, someone will need to tend to the hardware, too.  Monitoring will need to be arranged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this is free; companies that don't have the in-house skills for this, or who for some other legitimate reason don't want to do it in-house, will be happy to pay the SaaS provider to do all this for them.  There are economies of scale, here, too; if my company is the author of FooWiki, I can probably host a few thousand instances of it for significantly less than a few thousand times the cost of all the above, and these savings can be passed on to end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the availability of the code provides an essential backstop against lock-in: if the SaaS provider is taken over by GraspingCorp, and the prices go up by a factor of eight, I as the end-user can simply re-evaluate my cost model, conclude that self-hosting is now the better option for me, exfiltrate my data, and host it all myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users have freedom and options, and the provider has a revenue stream.  To my mind, it's one of the better corporate models for free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think your question also touches on the licensing legalities of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open-Core model&lt;/a&gt;, but an analysis of that can be complex, depending on whether the distributor is the sole rightsholder, the degree of integration between the AGPLed parts and other parts, the terms of acceptance of any third-party contributions to the code, and other factors, so I don't propose to do that here.  Removal of licence checks from free software is completely lawful, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T09:22:05.393" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T09:22:05.393" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12552" CreationDate="2022-02-16T14:15:34.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The generic license file COPYING.NEWLIB lists 56 different licenses from different institutions and individuals. But there's no real information which license applies to which part of Newlib. So I'm kind of lost at this point. I don't think I have to comply with each and every license listed in COPYING.NEWLIB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Newlib is part of the product you are distributing, then you definitely have to comply with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only escape here is if you can indicate all portions of the code that is covered by one of those licenses and you can prove that those portions are not part of the product you distribute, then you are not bound by that license. But that can be a really hard exercise, especially when some code evolved over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if your use of Newlib is exclusively because it provides the implementation of the C standard library on the Red Hat platform, but your application can run on any Linux system with whatever C standard library that system provides, then you can safely ignore Newlib.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T14:15:34.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-02-16T15:23:05.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;EUPL is short for “European Union Public Licence” which has been developed by the European Union and is available in 23 languages (legally equivalent). The licence texts can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec_impl/2017/863/oj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18723" LastEditorUserId="18723" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T22:47:08.327" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T22:47:08.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-02-16T15:23:05.000" Score="0" Body="Question related to the European Union Public Licence." OwnerUserId="18723" LastEditorUserId="18723" LastEditDate="2022-02-16T22:47:17.023" LastActivityDate="2022-02-16T22:47:17.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12676" CreationDate="2022-02-18T19:26:18.423" Score="10" ViewCount="1195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've forked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.google.com/archive/p/protpy/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;protpy&lt;/a&gt; package into &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MartinThoma/propy3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;propy3&lt;/a&gt; in order to make it usable for Python 3 users. I'm not a user of that package myself and have no clue of protein computations. However, in order to make it useful and ensure it works, I ended up spending way more time on it than I originally thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now people want me to add a license file. Several attempts to reach the original authors were unsuccessful, so I cannot simply align with them what they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original website mentions &lt;code&gt;GNU GPL v2&lt;/code&gt;, so I will put the forked project under &lt;code&gt;GNU GPL v2&lt;/code&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the original authors are still the authors of this package, as most of my changes are not affecting what the package does, but how it's structured / how it works / adding tests / dealing with community support. However, I do want to change some interfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I wonder: Is it even ok to leave them in the &amp;quot;author&amp;quot; field? Should I add myself to them? Should I remove them from the author field and mention in the README that this was forked from them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3618" LastActivityDate="2022-02-18T22:33:11.797" Title="How do I deal with authorship after a fork?" Tags="|law|forking|ethics|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12675" CreationDate="2022-02-18T22:33:11.797" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have forked a GPLv2 package, and created a derivative work therefrom.  You are curious about the licensing and copyright arrangements for the new work.  Fortunately, neither of these are in any doubt; the original authors have made their requirements clear simply by releasing their work under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 s2b requires that the modified work be released under GPLv2, which apparently is what you intended to do anyway, so that's good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both you and the original rightsholders have a copyright interest in this modified work.  You should add your copyright notice to any files you have edited, alongside the existing copyright notices.  Any files you have created &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; should bear your copyright notice at the top.  If in addition you want to collect this all into a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file that's up to you, but it's not required.  You do need to include a copy of the GPL, if it's not already there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-02-18T22:33:11.797" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-20T04:32:56.363" Score="4" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently using &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/wikimedia-gadgets/types-mediawiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a library&lt;/a&gt; that was licensed under the GNU General Public License (particularly GPL v3.0). This library consists mostly of types for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software that is also under the GPL&lt;/a&gt; (but not written in TypeScript). My code is currently written in the Apache License 2.0, which is only one-way compatible with the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I'm aware, TypeScript doesn't actually emit information about types when transpiling to JavaScript. In this case (to my knowledge), the output program never actually carries any of the original library source which is under the GPL. However, I'm still technically using those types whenever transpiling code (and likewise is marked as a dev dependency in my &lt;code&gt;package.json&lt;/code&gt; file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean I can keep my code licensed under the Apache License, or is this indirect relation enough to cause a GPL violation (and no longer counts as mere aggregation)? Additionally, will importing the type (through &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt;) possibly have any difference compared to using types declared by the library in global scope (by placing the library within the &lt;code&gt;tsconfig.json&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;includes&lt;/code&gt; section)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26412" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T04:32:56.363" Title="Are you required to license code under GPL if you're using TypeScript types from a GPL library?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12666" CreationDate="2022-02-20T08:36:31.327" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;BitWarden's staff members answered the question after I've put it on their community forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of BitWarden (and I assume other companies/projects do the same),  &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-business-model-open-source-non-free-shared-source/38360/4?u=stsc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are no technical countermeasures&lt;/a&gt;, and the business mode works because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;social and legal constructs keep those large-scale malicious attempts at bay, and without measurable impact on the business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10584" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T08:36:31.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-20T14:00:29.450" Score="5" ViewCount="2047" Body="&lt;p&gt;I searched for a library to manage browser scrolling. I came upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://wowjs.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wowjs.uk/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the bottom, it says it's free, and on its &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/graingert/WOW/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub page&lt;/a&gt; the license is MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's a project that is forked from &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matthieua/WOW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and if you go to the source repository's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.delac.io/WOW/#pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; you see that it's priced for commercial usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How this could be? How can a fork override the original pricing policy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I safe using the fork in my commercial projects for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26415" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-02-21T10:35:16.093" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T11:03:19.887" Title="How is the wow.js fork free, while the original project is not free?" Tags="|mit|github|forking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12679" CreationDate="2022-02-20T14:14:21.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT is a permissive license and essentially allows closed-source forks. Unlike copyleft licenses like GPL family it does not put restrictions on whether the source code must be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This aside, nothing prevents anyone from asking a price for open-source software. It's just does not make sense for copyleft licenses as the first person purchases the software will be able to get the copy of the source code and will be able to distribute it without restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastActivityDate="2022-02-20T14:14:21.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12679" CreationDate="2022-02-20T14:18:17.883" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Until 21st February 2016, the &lt;code&gt;matthieua&lt;/code&gt; version was licensed under the MIT license; you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matthieua/WOW/commit/68639b73f2467f2c66612a2fc23dfb0e505f5783&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the commit which changes the license to GPL v3 here&lt;/a&gt;. The GPLv3 is of course still an open source license, although deliberately one with more invasive compliance conditions than the MIT license. It appears that the vendors of the product also make it available under a proprietary software license; purchasing such a license enables the purchaser to ignore the GPLv3 requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;graingert&lt;/code&gt; version was forked at (essentially) the last commit before the license change, so is still available under the MIT license; that the license has changed on later versions is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;irrelevant&lt;/a&gt; for continued use of the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I safe using the fork in my commercial projects for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use either MIT or GPLv3 code in commercial projects without paying a fee to the copyright holders, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;all open source licenses allow for commercial use&lt;/a&gt;. Both place some restrictions on what you do which are detailed in the respective licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-02-21T11:03:19.887" LastActivityDate="2022-02-21T11:03:19.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-02-20T15:01:52.217" Score="1" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a website using Bootstrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to credit Bootstrap since it has MIT license?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If so, how can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26417" LastEditorUserId="16642" LastEditDate="2022-02-23T13:06:33.147" LastActivityDate="2022-02-23T13:06:33.147" Title="Credit Bootstrap on website" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12684" CreationDate="2022-02-20T20:46:33.410" Score="21" ViewCount="3776" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project licensed under the LGPL-3.0. A major contributor recently stopped contributing, and is now requesting all their contributions to be removed from the project. All the code in the project is under copyright under the LGPL-3.0. I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5855&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, but it didn’t make it clear for this situation whether the contributor had copyright over their work. Can someone request their code to be removed from a project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26420" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T08:58:20.120" Title="Contributor asking to remove their contributions" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12683" CreationDate="2022-02-20T21:21:48.883" Score="33" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it didn’t make it clear for this situation whether the contributor had copyright over their work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because it doesn't need to be made clear - contributors &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; own the copyright on their work, unless there was a formal copyright assignment to another entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that isn't the relevant question here. As the copyright holder, they gave you (and everyone else) a license to use their work, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;that license is irrevocable&lt;/a&gt; - so long as you abide by the terms of the license, you can continue using their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone request their code to be removed from a project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can request it; you are legally free to ignore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important disclaimer: I don't normally stick the &amp;quot;I am not a lawyer&amp;quot; disclaimer on posts here, because the vast majority of stuff around open source licenses either has actually been upheld in a court of law (in some jurisdictions anyway), or is so close as to be universally accepted to be true as to not be a serious threat. The irrevocability of licenses is not &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; at that level; if someone really wanted to argue it, they could probably at least make your life quite painful, and potentially very expensive as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T08:58:20.120" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T08:58:20.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12687" CreationDate="2022-02-23T14:32:46.527" Score="9" ViewCount="1604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think my case is covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/10743/26449&quot;&gt;Who will be the copyright owner of a new file in a forked repository on github?&lt;/a&gt;, but I want to be sure that it applies in my situation, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forked a project licensed under a 2-clause BSD-style license. The LICENSE file contains a header, followed by the actual license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the following license applies to all files in this repository:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright (year) (authors)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The files in the repository have no copyright or license information themselves.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I edited some of the files in this repository, but forgot to update the copyright until later. In this situation, can my committing new code to the repository without updating the copyright notice be interpreted as transferring copyright to the original authors? Or should this be interpreted as a situation in which the original authors and I share copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what does this mean for the license? Is my added code covered by the same license, or is it unlicensed because I did not update the copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user26449" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T08:59:25.773" Title="Who owns copyright if I place code in a repository but do not update the copyright notice?" Tags="|copyright|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12686" CreationDate="2022-02-23T16:28:39.870" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question in the title of your post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who owns copyright if I place code in a repository but do not update the copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You own the copyright in any code you wrote. This is always the case, you never give up copyright unless you formally transfer your copyright to another entity, which will generally require a signed contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this may not actually be the relevant question here - for open source code, who the actual copyright holder isn't doesn't matter too much because the open source license grants everybody the same rights to use the code. This is the question you ask here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what does this mean for the license? Is my added code covered by the same license, or is it unlicensed because I did not update the copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is that it is unclear. There is a reasonable argument to be made that you obviously intended to make your contributions available under the BSD license, therefore they are. Alternatively, you could argue that because you didn't make your intentions clear the default position should apply and your contributions are unlicensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that on Github specifically &lt;em&gt;and only on Github&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10044/5601&quot;&gt;their terms of service make it clear that your contributions would be under the BSD license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T08:59:25.773" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T08:59:25.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12683" CreationDate="2022-02-23T17:20:20.043" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat complicated since contributing code to a project is not the same as licensing code in a particular manner to the project.  Outside of any more explicit agreements, commits to a central public repository can certainly be considered as an understanding that the code will be distributed under the then current project license.  In that case, anybody taking the code from the project can &amp;quot;sublicense&amp;quot; that work back to the project under the license they received it under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially the cat is out of the bag.  However, that does not preclude the original author from pursuing legal steps to obtain their goals even though it might ultimately render this pursuit a failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The threat of lawsuits is a deterrent that does not fully depend on the ultimate success of such a lawsuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while it is certainly a good idea to know your legal standing, this is only one criterion for picking your next action, and dealing with the situation with a suitable amount of diplomacy may well pay off.  You really need to take inventory of how important that contribution may be for the future of the project, how important the goodwill of the past contributor may be, and then offset that with the costs of the hassle your disagreements may cause.  And once you know where you want to go, you need to work with the past contributor in the manner that will most likely cause the least damage to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user26451" LastActivityDate="2022-02-23T17:20:20.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12690" CreationDate="2022-02-23T18:31:39.657" Score="19" ViewCount="2583" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attempting to hire contractors to develop code using open-source framework with Apache 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reviewing our legal contract, the contractors are hesitant to sign because they want to donate framework bug-fixes and new widgets (checkboxes, drop-down lists, etc.) to open source effort, which aren't proprietary. Legal department is OK to carve out specific exceptions in contract, but contactors can't view code until signing contract, and even then, likely won't know where the bugs are that need fixing, or which widgets will need to get developed in next 1-2 years to add to the contract up front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some language we can drop into the contract to satisfy both parties? How do others address what seems like a basic concern with open source frameworks? Both parties agree in principle with each other's concerns, yet unable to &amp;quot;fix&amp;quot; the legal wording to move things forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6590" LastEditorUserId="15663" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T11:37:52.963" LastActivityDate="2022-02-27T02:29:29.500" Title="Legal wording to exempt bug fixes to open-source framework from NDA?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|law|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12689" CreationDate="2022-02-23T20:22:09.947" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;To a very real extent, this is always going to depend on there being good faith between the parties. If working with someone I knew and trusted, I'd be happy with a clause along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fixes which both sides agree are general improvements to framework X and not specific to company Y's business may be released under the Apache 2.0 license at the contractor's discretion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's less good faith, you may be able to agree on a neutral third party who could adjudicate any disputes. I don't think you can really carve out specific exemptions into the contract ahead of time, software is just too complicated for that to work (and too easy to game any metrics people might come up with).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T08:19:04.583" LastActivityDate="2022-02-24T08:19:04.583" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12704" CreationDate="2022-02-23T21:54:04.377" Score="5" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an simple addon/xml theme for some software that is GPL licensed.&#xA;No modifications were ever made to the GPL licensed code during this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone took one of my images and is claiming that because the software it was intended to be used with is under a GPL license, anything that comes with it can be taken and cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I claim copyright on that image and/or any other part of my addon as it does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; modify any part of the original code under the GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I stop people from taking what I create just because it's used with software that is GPL licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26452" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-02-24T11:37:29.540" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T14:31:39.457" Title="Does the GPL apply to my files that are used alongside (no part of) a GPL item" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12694" CreationDate="2022-02-25T12:05:40.860" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might not be a very &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; question, but I thought I might find in this forum the right people for the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a mortal human being creating a PDF with the license terms for a product is not an easy task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can hire a lawyer for it. However, I was wondering... if the kind of license I want is &lt;strong&gt;exactly the same as the license of another product&lt;/strong&gt; out there... can't I just copy their license and change a couple of things such as the name of the product and company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is copying someone else's license allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit of context:&#xA;I would like to have the same non-commercial license of another open-source project I saw.&#xA;And perhaps even the commercial one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks! ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14342" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T13:30:26.153" Title="Copy license terms from other product?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyright|commercial|license|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12692" CreationDate="2022-02-25T13:30:26.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would have helped if you had provided a link to the license you want to &amp;quot;re-use&amp;quot;.&#xA;Some licenses contain specific clauses which deal with your question. for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this&#xA;license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the license of the other product contains a clause like this it will be easy for you to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other cases it is not so clear cut. For example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; does not have a statement concerning the use of the license language. The OSI webpage says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License Copyright: Unknown. License License: Unknown. License Contact:&#xA;Unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases like this I would just check how the majority of other users of that license deal with it. Or, if possible, contact the author of the license language for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no precedence and there is no way to contact the author of the license, I would not reuse it for my own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T13:30:26.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12689" CreationDate="2022-02-25T13:39:07.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember a NDA can only be enforced if the company is able to convince a court there has been harm done to the company or is likely to be harm done by the person breaking the NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bug fixes to a open source framework being released seems low risk, but &amp;quot;particular UI component&amp;quot; being created and released is much harder as they are more likely to help a competitor or give away information about the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the wording in the contact the large company has a legal department that can make life costly for the contactor if the company so wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the issue of how much time the contactor is spending doing work that would be done quicker if it was not going to be released as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hence let's reverse the problem&lt;/strong&gt;, the company clearly does not wish to have high costs each time a new version of the open source framework is released,  hence &lt;strong&gt;require&lt;/strong&gt; the contractor to whenever possible get any &amp;quot;private&amp;quot; changes to the open source framework included in the next public version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A implementation of a &amp;quot;particular UI component&amp;quot; that is common in other frameworks seems like something the client would rather not have to maintain of a new version of the framework breaks it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4786" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T13:39:07.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12689" CreationDate="2022-02-25T23:42:40.757" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Making it contractual is a bad idea&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contractors are there to work on what your company needs. They aren't there to play with frameworks. There's a very real risk (and I've personally seen it) that they use your company's time for their own interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the contractors are making changes to open-source software for your company, it's perfectly reasonable that the changes get pushed back - when your company agrees that there isn't more urgent company work to be doing. Or it's also perfectly reasonable for the company to let the contractors clone the Git repos for that open-source software, after first checking that nothing company-specific has been dropped in there, and let the contractors handle the push back on their own time. Both of those are informal arrangements, relying on goodwill on both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the contractors are so keen on this that they're looking for some legal provision, that rather blows goodwill out of the water. And more than that, I think it's very unlikely they'll be prioritising the company. Unless they have some truly rare skills, this is starting to sound like trouble you don't need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16289" LastActivityDate="2022-02-25T23:42:40.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12689" CreationDate="2022-02-27T02:29:29.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If that's what you and they both want, then why not say so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could something more like this, work? It might need polishing, but as a concept approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bug fixes and general enhancements to any software X which is (1) used under license by company Y, but (2) not specific to company Y's  business or proprietary software, may at the contractor's sole discretion, be released under a license appropriate to software X (&amp;quot;First License&amp;quot;), provided that if required at company Y's sole discretion, it shall be dual licensed to company Y in a manner appropriate for company Y's business (&amp;quot;Second License&amp;quot;). Such Second License only to act to ensure company Y may rely upon use of the code in its business, and not to restrict any rights and obligations provided to any third party (being neither company Y not the contractor not their heirs, assigns or representatives) in the First License, and in the event of conflict the rights and obligations of third parties provided in the First License shall prevail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9696" LastActivityDate="2022-02-27T02:29:29.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12700" CreationDate="2022-02-28T18:11:37.167" Score="6" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;My workplace uses an open source project with an AGPL 3.0 license. It's been abandoned as far as I can tell – no commits for 5 years aside from a handful of contributed pull requests (the most recent of which was 3 years ago, by me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've created a fork of the project and started rewriting large swaths of the 20 year old codebase. My primary intention is to make it more usable and reliable for my company's internal use. But the fork is public on Github so anyone could theoretically download it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project consists of PHP code, and the footer of every page displayed to the user contains a notice that the software is AGPL licensed, as well as a copyright notice from the original developers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foo 2.0 is licensed under the AGPL 3. Copyright (C) 2004-2015 - FooBar S.L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the first page seen after logging in contains not only this notice but the full text of the AGPL 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, do I have any obligation to leave this old copyright footer in place on each page? Would it be sufficient instead to display this information when a user first logs in? In either case, should I keep the existing wording? (I'm not sure how resilient copyright is, compared to the AGPL which I know is fairly permanent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26481" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T06:55:03.297" Title="Copyright notices in a forked AGPL codebase" Tags="|copyright|agpl-3.0|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12699" CreationDate="2022-03-01T06:55:03.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not simply fade away over time. It is there to stay, even if a project appears to be abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are doing appears to be a derivative work of the original project, which is &lt;em&gt;called a &amp;quot;modified version&amp;quot; of the earlier work or a work &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the earlier work&lt;/em&gt; in the AGPL license language. You will have to keep the old copyright notice and add your own new copyright notice, and display it in a license.txt (or similar) file. But this is not enough! The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL License&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to&#xA;produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the&#xA;terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these&#xA;conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7.&#xA;This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to &amp;quot;keep intact&#xA;all notices&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License&#xA;will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional&#xA;terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how&#xA;they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the&#xA;work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if&#xA;you have separately received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive&#xA;interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work&#xA;need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if you run the code on a server for 3rd parties, there are additional requirements in the AGPL license, which I assume you have read and understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T06:55:03.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12702" CreationDate="2022-03-01T12:22:10.187" Score="2" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured it's time to add a license to a project I've been working on for some time. I'm interested in a copy-left license. The project is a web application that can be built and self-hosted on a &amp;quot;home server&amp;quot;, etc. I assume that due to the fact that it is a kind of service, the ,,distribution'' is equivalent to a ,,service on a server'', the AGPL will be an adequate license. However, my doubts concern external dependencies. All external libraries are used as dynamic libraries (DLL) downloaded from the Nuget platform when building the application, all these libraries use permissive licenses (eg. MIT, ISC, BCD-2, Apache 2.0). One of the libraries, on the other hand, uses several licenses, it is the Apache 2.0 license and the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). My question is, in this case, is it possible to apply the AGPL license on my code, also taking into account that the distribution of the code looks such that anyone can clone the project from the repository and build it on their own server/computer? How do I specify that I would like to use the library with these two licenses as Apache 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that it is also worth noting that I do not change the source code of the dependencies in any way because i use it them in the form of compiled DLL files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a link to the file where I have listed all the third party libraries used:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Krzysztofz01/AccessPointMap/blob/license/NOTICES&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26485" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T16:02:33.520" Title="Usage and compatibility of AGPL in the context of permissive licensed dependencies" Tags="|license-compatibility|multi-licensing|agpl|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12701" CreationDate="2022-03-01T16:02:33.520" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, in this case, is it possible to apply the AGPL license on my code [...]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is possible to apply the AGPL license to your code. All of your dependencies allow you to use them under a (A)GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that one dependency is also available under a (A)GPL-incompatible license (Ms-PL) is of no consequence because it is dual-licensed and you get to choose which license terms you want to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I specify that I would like to use the library with these two licenses as Apache 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned each library and its license(s) separately in your NOTICES file, you could just mention CsvHelper as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://github.com/JoshClose/CsvHelper (Apache 2.0 / MS-PL)&#xA;Dual licensing under MS-PL and Apache 2.0&#xA;Used under the Apache 2.0 license&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-03-01T16:02:33.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12691" CreationDate="2022-03-02T02:52:15.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a fuzzy area. Consider retaining legal counsel&lt;/strong&gt;, to the extent that it's worth fighting over (i.e. if you only spent a couple of hours of work on this, consider how much a lawyer is going to cost, and seriously evaluate whether you want to bother).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what you have described, it &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; like the GPL'd software is rendering some sort of XML into a user interface, in the same way that a web browser renders HTML into a document or website. Since nobody in their right mind claims that HTML is a derivative work of the web browser that happens to display it, it sounds to me as if this person doesn't have a leg to stand on. However, there are complicating factors to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the XML useful independently of the software? For example, are there other programs that can (usefully) consume the same XML?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the XML written to some publicly-specified API?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was the XML published with the express consent of the person who created it? If not, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's not under the GPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the archive containing the XML also contain a copy of the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the XML was published by the same person who created it, was there a README document clarifying which parts of the archive were available under which license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the XML was published by a different person, did the creator specifically know that there would be a GPL license in the archive?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did the creator intend to happen w.r.t. licensing, and is there credible and specific evidence of this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who created the GPL'd software, and what do they think of this dispute?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above questions will influence the answer to this question in significant ways. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The XML may or may not have been released under the GPL. This is primarily a function of whether the creator intentionally placed it under that license, but specific requirements might vary by jurisdiction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reuser may or may not have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;estoppel&lt;/a&gt; rights, if they reasonably believed the XML was released under the GPL, and the creator or publisher caused or contributed to that belief.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The XML may or may not be a derivative work of the software. This is a function of copyright law, and might vary by jurisdiction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various limitations or exceptions to copyright, such as fair use and the merger doctrine, might apply depending on (again) jurisdiction and other specifics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the XML is a derivative work &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; it was not released under the GPL, then it's a license violation, which entitles the creator of the software to sue you. It does not magically cause the XML to become GPL-licensed (but that's one possible outcome of a lawsuit).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the creator of the software is unwilling to sue you, then it is unlikely that anyone else can sue you, either.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T02:52:15.710" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12691" CreationDate="2022-03-02T14:31:39.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Written in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RetroFE is a frontend for launching old arcade games etc and the XML is used to show pictures etc on screen. Nothing in the XML actually contains any output from RetroFE. Tags in the xml are passed to RetroFE's xml engine to display images etc on screen and control animations of said images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this information, the XML file is input to the RetroFE application in the same way that a source file is input to the compiler or a DocX file is input to MS Word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such input files are considered to be independent works of the program that reads them. That means that the license of RetroFE does not affect in any way how you can license the input files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone took one of my images and is claiming that because the software it was intended to be used with is under a GPL license, anything that comes with it can be taken and cannot be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim from that person is wrong on so many sides that I don't know where to start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the GPL license is a &lt;em&gt;copyright license&lt;/em&gt;, which means that it is only effective for material that can be copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while the GPL has a &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; aspect, that works via the concept of derivative works and input files to an application are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; derivative works of that application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I claim copyright on that image and/or any other part of my addon as it does not modify any part of the original code under the GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can claim copyright on anything that you create (unless you have a signed contract that causes other rules to apply to a particular work). The context in which you create something can only dictate under what terms you can make it available to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, there is not even a restriction on what licensing terms you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I stop people from taking what I create just because it's used with software that is GPL licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you most definitely can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-03-02T14:31:39.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12713" CreationDate="2022-03-06T11:38:49.390" Score="-2" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/asianirish/common-potato/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/asianirish/common-potato/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;You can use this code freely as long as you completely agree with the text of this license and include this license in your code distribution&#xA;&#xA;Putin, go fuck yourself!&#xA;Путин, пошёл на хуй!&#xA;&#xA;IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED FOR YOU&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any tips to fix/improve it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26478" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-06T11:42:04.457" LastActivityDate="2022-03-06T16:02:01.493" Title="Is this license compatible with LGPL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-03-06T19:53:16.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12712" CreationDate="2022-03-06T15:56:43.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, this licence has &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;all the same problems&lt;/a&gt; associated with any other crayon licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, and also fatal to my mind, is that it doesn't specify what rights are given.  It says that one may &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;use this code freely&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but both &lt;em&gt;use this code&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;freely&lt;/em&gt; are ambiguous in English.  Compare that with (to pick a random example) the MIT licence's grant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That takes about sixty words to say what takes you six, and there's a reason for that: to avoid legal ambiguities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, we come to the requirement to agree with a political statement in order to avail oneself of the licence grant.  I have some sympathy with this, but I think it's doomed to failure, because there's no central register of human beliefs, and people are allowed to change their minds.  What will you do if someone uses your code, then claims they don't hold the required belief, you sue for copyright violation, and their defence is that they held the required belief at the time they used the code, but no longer do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the problem that this licence may be un-free.  The closest analogue I can find, the JSON licence that required &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the use of the software for good, not evil&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, was held by the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to be non-free&lt;/a&gt;.  If your licence is un-free, it's off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short I think there are too many problems with this licence to have any chance of talking about its compatibility with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; standard free licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-06T16:02:01.493" LastActivityDate="2022-03-06T16:02:01.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12715" CreationDate="2022-03-07T16:20:06.190" Score="32" ViewCount="5254" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2 notice&lt;/a&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA;Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions roughly: why is the mailing address included here (instead of say email address, or website), and for what purpose are they saying 'write to'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I did not receive a copy of the GPLv2 with 'the program', and I wrote to  that address, are they going to send me a copy of the license or is their intention to try to get the original developers to include the license?  (Or something else)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit July 2022: I actually wrote to the address and received a reply. I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.mendhak.com/gpl-v2-address-letter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;posted about it here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15662" LastEditorUserId="15662" LastEditDate="2022-07-25T20:21:02.957" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T20:21:02.957" Title="Why does GPLv2 include a mailing address (51 Franklin Street) in the license notice?" Tags="|gpl-2|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12714" CreationDate="2022-03-07T16:51:58.263" Score="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may help to remember that version 2 of the GNU GPL was published in June 1991.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage#/media/File:Internet_users_per_100_inhabitants_ITU.svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, only 11% of people in the developed world had internet access in 1997, and I can assure you that in 1991 it was very much fewer than that.  Most university research users had it, though often not undergraduates; outside academia, it was really quite unusual to find access either from work or from home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could in those days still buy all the GNU software on tape, from the FSF, and I have personally worked for companies that chose to do that.  Since those weren't cheap, but the software itself was free, many people would snarf a copy from someone else, who'd got it from someone else, who'd got it from their milkman (joke); or you'd call a friend who was doing a PhD at somewhere with a good connection, and they'd FTP down a bunch of sources and stick them on a tape for you; or you'd get a floppy from a friend, which had enough space for the source you wanted, but not much more than that (1.2MB on a good day, until those super-wizzy three-and-a-half inch discs came in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under those circumstances, it was quite common to unpack source tarballs full of &lt;code&gt;.c&lt;/code&gt; files that started&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) yyyy  name of author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA;of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA;Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but which contained no actual copy of the GPL, because it had become detached at some point in the delivery chain.  If that happened to you, and you weren't familiar with the GPL - which was a pretty revolutionary licence when it was written - then you'd need to know your rights and obligations, which meant getting a copy of the GPL.  If you really couldn't get a copy anywhere else, you could get one by writing to the FSF, enclosing an SAE or International Reply Coupons if you were well brought-up, and they'd send you back a copy of the GPL.  It was a public service they offered, to help spread this revolutionary idea of copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-07T16:57:46.517" LastActivityDate="2022-03-07T16:57:46.517" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4695" CreationDate="2022-03-08T07:56:22.990" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; for a normal Linux distribution. Of course you may create a customized Linux ISO with your proprietary binaries and such cannot be distributed, but makes no difference if by Bittorrent or carrying CDs on the back of a camel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if not part of the distributed image, for usual distributions all source code under GPL is available for download. GPL does not require to bundle the source code with binaries, or distribute the source code only, while this is often done for convenience reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; only requires to provide the offer to share the source code, valid for three years. It is enough to include the link or address where the source code could be obtained, by everyone who wants. All usual distributions do have such links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2022-03-08T09:40:57.260" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T09:40:57.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12717" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-08T11:28:33.707" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider that I write some code which generates 3D models, and release it using the GPLv2 license. Someone else then sees value in my code but wishes to change it and so they modify it to their specific purposes and use it to create some 3D models which they then sell as part of their business. Does the fact that the models were created using GPLv2 licensed code require that the modifications made to the code be released as open source, or can the modifier keep their changes private but sell the models? Does GPLv2 allow me to protect their right to create commercial products with it whilst enforcing that their modifications on the code cannot be released commercially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26534" LastActivityDate="2022-03-08T11:28:33.707" Title="Are works created using GPLv2 licensed code considered derivative of the code?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-03-09T07:25:34.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-09T21:03:48.110" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would answer the question with yes. Because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First licensor A gives B software under opensource license. A wants to have anything to do with it anymore and is not permitted to revoke. B distributes and continues licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL v2 states that distributor needs to provide binary and source code under a GPL v2. I.e. he reapplieds GPL v2 to code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is your view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26546" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T10:54:29.950" Title="Does every distributor of unchanged opensource software become a licensor?" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12719" CreationDate="2022-03-11T07:19:47.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does every distributor of unchanged opensource software become a licensor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Only people with a copyright claim on the software can become licensors and if you distribute the software unchanged, as you received it from someone else, you do not have a copyright claim on the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by giving licensees the right to re-distribute your software, you are also giving them the right (or even the obligation in case of a copyleft license) to extend &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; license to the people that they distribute to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by distributing software under an open-source license, you are licensing that software to every future recipient, regardless of the channel through which they receive the software and regardless of what changes of heart you might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T07:19:47.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12719" CreationDate="2022-03-11T10:54:29.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer really depends on the license terms. There are massive differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt;, for example, there is clause 10 which says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This clearly indicates that if you just distribute unmodified source code, then the recipient will have the license from the original licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;European Union Public License (EUPL-1.2)&lt;/a&gt; you will find the definition of 'Licensor' to state &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;‘The Licensor’: the natural or legal person that distributes or communicates the Work under the Licence.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; So here, by virtue of distributing source code under the license, you become the licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other FOSS licenses, which are silent about this point, or give both options, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, which provides (among others) the rights to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...publish, distribute, sublicense...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, my reading in the case of publish and distribute is that you do not become licensor just by distributing the unmodified code, however when you sublicense it it is obvious that you are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T10:54:29.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12724" CreationDate="2022-03-11T19:25:02.400" Score="5" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that I created and released under the GNU GPL License v3.0. Today a user of the software contacted me and presented me with a list of improvements and the code necessary to implement them. If I want to add these modifications to the source code in the next release, how do I legally and fairly recognize his contribution in doing so? Am I allowed to release the project with his modified code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my naiveté, it seems to me as though I would be licensing the software to him, and he would be licensing the modified licensed software back to me... kinda' circular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance and thank you especially for your patience!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26567" LastActivityDate="2022-03-16T11:15:09.527" Title="Adding user contributed code to repository under GNU GPL 3.0 License" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12723" CreationDate="2022-03-11T20:38:01.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have created a work &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; and made it available to the world under GPLv3, being the sole rightsholder therein.  Someone has taken it and made a modified version, which they have chosen to convey back to you, also under GPLv3 (as they must).  You and this contributor are both rightsholders in the modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contributor is obliged by GPLv3 s5a to add &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;prominent notices stating that [they] modified it, and giving a relevant date&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, the usual form of which are copyright notices added to your own, thus reading eg (in the files (s)he has modified):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c) 2020-2022 H. Airbrain&#xA;(c) 2022 A. Contributor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly may incorporate his/her changes into your project for its next release.  You should retain his/her new copyright notices, and that is the extent to which his/her contribution must, and is expected to, be recognised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note in passing that as you are no longer the sole rightsholder in this codebase, you may no longer unilaterally decide to relicense it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-11T21:23:53.510" LastActivityDate="2022-03-11T21:23:53.510" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12737" CreationDate="2022-03-12T10:26:38.920" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;My goal is to make a contribution to an open source Python project hosted on GitHub, which has an Apache 2.0 license. To do so, I wrote a few lines of code. However for a specific feature of my contribution, I called a python module installed through pypi, which has a LGPL-3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I asked the author of the Apache 2.0 licensed library about the possible incompatibility of the two licenses he told me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just point to the the optional LGPL library in setup.py file I believe it's fine. You don't even have to change the license here. It is separate code. This library is even an optional part (kind of language-support plugin) and even GPL is allowed to license code separately in the case of plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This setup.py mentioned above has an extras section where optional libraries will be installed (linked?) if the user specifies them during install.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this contribution possible at all, without any repercussions?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should I include a license notice to the sub-directory where this LGPL-3 module is called (if included during setup)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26569" LastEditorUserId="26569" LastEditDate="2022-03-12T13:30:42.507" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T16:10:33.153" Title="Contributing own code partially relying on a LGPL-3 python module, on an Apache2 Project?" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|lgpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-14T05:40:33.173" Score="1" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this type of question isn't allowed here, but I am quite curious about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't know, NirSoft is some sort of dev that has created a lot of software for use on Windows primarily. They've got everything from a browser cookie viewer to a BSOD dump viewer. All of these products are free as in price, and don't seem to collect any user data at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why has the source code for any of these pieces of software not been released? There seems to be nothing stopping Nir Sofer from just releasing the source code, so why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has been inactive for quite a few years, but even when he was active he never released the source code. I really wish I could contact him, but I suspect his email is now defunct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26584" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-14T06:42:17.800" LastActivityDate="2022-03-14T06:42:17.800" Title="Why exactly is NirSoft's software not open source?" Tags="|proprietary-code|source-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-03-14T08:41:42.433" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12723" CreationDate="2022-03-15T14:17:43.617" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant question is, under which license they provided their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may implicitly have provided it under the license of the project, but this may be not that clear and unclarity may result in legal problems. Very minor corrections may not have a copyright at all, e.g., when someone points out a typo there is probably not much to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answer explains how to add the code when it is GPL (compatible) licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory someone could send a patch without any license (thus not granting the right to use it at all) or with an incompatible license, their code is at first just a piece of text that is copyrighted by them. Using it together with your code may be prohibited in this case, what would make it mostly useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful licenses for them would include GPLv3 and compatible. They can, for example, decide to make it available under BSDL. This would mean, that the combination of your product and their code would only be usable under GPL, but their code alone can be used together with other projects without the restrictions imposed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting aspect is, that the GPL is about distribution. Even when the code may not be distributed together with your product, you (and they) can use the combined product yourself as long as you do not distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the theory. Now for the practical aspect: Ask them to tell you under which license it can be used and suggest to use a GPLv3 compatible one explaining that you otherwise cannot include it into the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the discussion: A simple case in which a patch may have an unclear, more permissive, or more prohibitive license would be that your GPLed program is a fork of a BSDL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I may have written a patch that applies to the BSDL program and can be used with your GPLed program as well because let's say it did not modify that file after the fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the BSDL, I can both have my patch BSDL, and you can still add it to your program or have it under a proprietary license that still follows the BSDL terms. The BSDL does not prohibit the use in proprietary codes but only has some less restrictive requirements like crediting the authors. (Read the license for full details)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, you're not allowed to combine it with your code. Combining it with the pre-fork code would probably make the derived work licensed under my proprietary license or just be disallowed, depending on the terms of my more restrictive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the final recommendation is: &lt;em&gt;Make sure to have people tell you how their code can be used.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, it will be something like &amp;quot;It can be used under your project's license&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;You are free to use it however you like&amp;quot; anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastEditorUserId="8162" LastEditDate="2022-03-16T11:15:09.527" LastActivityDate="2022-03-16T11:15:09.527" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-16T02:17:51.077" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to hire artists to create some assets for an open source game project. I'd like all the assets I use to also be released under a compatible open source/free content license (e.g. Creative Commons), so that the entire project is open source. I'm happy to pay for the work to be created and released publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the best/correct way to go about this? Some potential artists I've spoken to aren't familiar with open source licensing, which is understandable as they're used to working for private proprietary projects. Should just I ask them to agree to release the work under the terms I choose? Or ask that they assign the copyright to me, and then I release it as I see fit? I don't have any experience hiring someone so I don't know what the &amp;quot;done thing&amp;quot; is in this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the right way to show proof that the assets were released under the stated license and/or assigned to me? As in, should I use a contract, or is a simple agreement via email sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance - I hope this isn't too vague a question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="23180" LastActivityDate="2022-03-16T06:33:34.257" Title="What is the correct way to hire someone to create open source assets?" Tags="|artistic-works|contracts|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12730" CreationDate="2022-03-16T06:33:34.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, the short-but-accurate answer is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;any way that works&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; as long as the matter is definitely dealt with, and the desired outcome achieved, all is well.  But you might like a bit more than that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're working with suppliers who don't understand open source, they will expect to transfer the copyrights to you, usually on payment, and at that point you can distribute them under any licence you please.  If you're working with suppliers who both understand and care about it, they will expect to supply the assets to you under a mutually-agreed free licence, so you can then redistribute them as you need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The critical issue is not which model you're using, but that the contract &lt;strong&gt;very clearly&lt;/strong&gt; spells out what's going on.  This cuts through all confusions, including work-for-hire complications I haven't even mentioned.  Make sure that in the former case the contract specifies that you get the copyrights, and in the latter case, that it specifies the exact licence (name, version number) which applies to the delivered assets.  What you really do not want is uncertainty in this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-03-16T06:33:34.257" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-16T09:12:40.230" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to make an annotation tool for deep learning using PyQT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trained models are sold on the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My annotation tool is not sold with the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so, Customer can't see my annotation tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The annotation tool I created is only used inside the company (with few co-worker) for preparing training dataset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, is a commercial license required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26597" LastActivityDate="2022-08-14T09:04:35.267" Title="Do I need QT Commercial License for annotation tool?" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12745" CreationDate="2022-03-16T22:15:52.967" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;The manuscript I will be working on is an original work that I am currently starting by myself. I am writing the work in LaTex, and the manuscript will have code blocks included within the text. I have decided to license the entire manuscript, the text and code, under CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Currently, I am the only contributor, but I anticipate adding individuals to the current version/edition before its finalized. Everything is being stored in a public repository on Github so all current progress will be shown immediately; thus, the early inclusion of licensing statements. In addition to adding the licensing statement to my manuscript, I am adding it to the readme file for the source code GitHub repository, as I have seen others do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Should I include or not include the licensing statement any where, listed or not listed above&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Can I just add contributors to the licenses statement as they add material provided its the same version/edition?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Current&lt;/em&gt;- This work by Devon Oliver is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When someone else contributes&lt;/em&gt;- This work by Devon Oliver and XXXXXX is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. In later editions, if they occur, I assume credit just has to be given to original authors and add a new license statement with all current authors is added after? I assume it is done similar to this example &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12723/adding-user-contributed-code-to-repository-under-gnu-gpl-3-0-license&quot;&gt;Adding user-contributed code to repository under GNU GPL 3.0 License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any help and references, I am new to this and want to set everything up correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26603" LastActivityDate="2022-03-18T21:21:03.090" Title="How do I add contributors to the attribution/ownership part of the CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing statement of my work?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|contributor|collaboration|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12734" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12736" CreationDate="2022-03-17T02:45:09.913" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning on writing a science text under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The text will contain code blocks for commonly preformed analysis from the relevant field of study. Additionally, it will use common packages from R and Python. I only want to ensure that text remains open and free to use to ensure that it doesn't end up exclusively behind a pay wall like all other texts covering the topic of interest. The code in the code blocks in the text are generally adapted from established code or there are only few ways to wite it because it's a specific analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are as follows;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given that the text and LaTex code used to build the document will be licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 license, if someone use the publish code blocks in their analysises do they also have apply CC BY-SA 4.0 license for any works that use the analysises and code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should I license only the text, the LaTex code, and images under CC BY-SA 4.0 license and specify the code blocks are licensed under a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to (2) is &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, what are good license options to allow individuals to use the code blocks without any restrictions or requirements? Also what the most appropriate way to specify the license in this case or are there examples? Alternatively, can I specify that code examples in the text are excluded from the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26603" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-17T06:21:00.570" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T12:30:48.553" Title="Does CC BY-SA 4.0 license apply to statistical analysis based on code blocks in CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed document?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12732" CreationDate="2022-03-17T07:53:54.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your objective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PyQT is distributed under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/PyQtLicensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;variety of licenses&lt;/a&gt;, and you can basically select the one that fits best for your purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could select the GPL license, and then run your tool as a service on a server accessible to your customers (SaaS), which does not count as distribution under the terms of GPL. This way you would not therefore need to disclose your own code to your customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could again select the GPL license, distribute your product (including PyQT code) to your customers, and establish a pay-per-use model, where your customers pay you for each trained model they create. In this case you likely have to provide the source code to your customers under the GPL license (and eventually allow your customers to modify the code to by-pass your business model).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could select the commercial license and distribute your product (including PyQT code) to your customers, and establish a pay-per-use model, where your customers pay you for each trained model they create. In this case you would not have to provide the source code to your customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more possible ways for you to implement you business model, the common thing for all of them is that as soon as you distribute the application under GPL you have to provide the source code of your app, and to avoid that you can select the commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T07:53:54.740" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12734" CreationDate="2022-03-17T12:30:48.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-could-i-copyleft-a-document-that-contains-a-substantial-amount-of-both-code&quot;&gt;have already dealt with&lt;/a&gt; the question of how best to licence a free document containing a mixture of prose and code, but I think you have a bigger problem.  When you write that the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;code in the code blocks in the text are generally adapted from established code&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The code I'm writing would be hard to call my own at times and I think some would fall under fair use, but not all&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, you seem to be suggesting that quite a lot of the code in your book is adapted from someone else's code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes your code a derivative of their work(s), which is something you generally need permission to make.  In some cases the original code may be permissively licensed, in which case you probably only have attribution and possible text-reproduction obligations.  In some cases it may be under a copyleft licence, in which case you may have no choice about how you license your adaptation.  In some cases it may not be licensed to you at all, in which case you have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;no rights to use it at all&lt;/a&gt; in this way, or nearly any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; as a defence, but many jurisdictions have distinctly limited &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt; rights, or indeed none at all.  I would strongly advise against relying on that defence for a work which is distributed over the internet, at least not without taking professional legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, you may well not have any choice about which licence to distribute your chunks of code under, and you may have no permission to distribute them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T12:30:48.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12725" CreationDate="2022-03-17T16:04:17.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to assume for the purposes of this answer that (a) linking to a module makes a derivative work of that module, and (b) this is as true for interpreted as compiled languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say that the library author said that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;even GPL is allowed to license code separately in the case of plugins&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not necessarily true&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, this doesn't matter, because the module in question is LGPLv3.  That licence allows you to link the module, unmodified, to other code without having to distribute that other code, or the resulting executable, under GPLv3.  So the project can continue to be Apache-licensed, in the main.  The project will have full LGPLv3 obligations with respect to that module if they distribute it (which include but are not limited to distribution of the code and copies of both the GPL and the LGPL), but otherwise it seems to me that you can do what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-17T16:10:33.153" LastActivityDate="2022-03-17T16:10:33.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12739" CreationDate="2022-03-17T19:11:20.573" Score="1" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen the similar question here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;url=https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8058/does-the-gpl-doesnt-cover-the-ouput-of-a-program-also-apply-if-the-output-is%23:%7E:text%3DIn%2520general%2520this%2520is%2520legally,their%2520data%2520using%2520your%2520program.&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjKkNO16M32AhWKkokEHf5_BHcQFnoECAQQBQ&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw1RMWjcd41JBt4NEfEf0auD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;the GPL doesn't cover the ouput of a program&amp;quot; also apply if.....&lt;/a&gt;. However, I think the use of LaTex to write a book with code examples that were licensed under Gplv3 is a different case. There is also this similar question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7550/how-could-i-copyleft-a-document-that-contains-a-substantial-amount-of-both-code&quot;&gt;How could I copyleft a document that contains a substantial amount of both code and prose?&lt;/a&gt;, but they didn't have code examples in text already licensed under Gplv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I was to write a book in LaTex and,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protect its source code and by proxy the text to be printed in pdf format with Gplv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It contained code examples in text previously covered under Gplv3 to be printed in pdf format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems like the pdf will also be covered,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because the source code contains all text in the pdf book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adapted code blocks in the source code that are printed in the pdf book are covered  under gplv3 per the terms of the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no user defined inputs and the output is always the same because its just compiling and producing the pdf book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation incorrect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26603" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-18T08:23:41.107" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T14:16:06.660" Title="Is the PDF output of LaTeX code licensed under GPLv3 also covered?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|source-code|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12738" CreationDate="2022-03-18T06:31:17.713" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As apsillers says very clearly in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8058/does-the-gpl-doesnt-cover-the-ouput-of-a-program-also-apply-if-the-output-is&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;the GPL doesn't cover the output of a program&amp;quot; also apply if the output is source code?&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the license of a program's output data is a function of the license on the particular input data used to produce that output, rather than a function of the license on the program that performed the input-to-output conversion&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Not only is the case you quote - using LaTeX to produce a PDF of a program's source code - &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; an exception to this rule (as you suggest), it's one of the more perfect examples of the rule I have come across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if you take GPLv3 source code and so typeset it, then yes, the output PDF will most definitely be covered by GPLv3; if you did the same with CC BY-SA code, the output PDF will be covered by CC BY-SA or a specified compatible licence; and so on.  In no such case will the output PDF be covered by the Latex Project Public Licence simply because it was made with LaTeX, whose distribution and modification is governed by the LPPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-03-18T08:51:52.990" LastActivityDate="2022-03-18T08:51:52.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12741" CreationDate="2022-03-18T11:00:38.103" Score="15" ViewCount="2606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very vague impression regarding the GPLv2 license that any project which borrows code from a GPL project needs to be open source too. Now I have a situation that I read part of a GPL project's code and there are around four functions that I would like to borrow for our commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I converted it into another language and also removed/modify some code in order to fit our project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it illegal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26613" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2022-03-21T06:58:54.217" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T12:18:37.133" Title="Am I allowed to convert some functions from a GPLv2 project and use it in a commercial project?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12740" CreationDate="2022-03-18T11:39:39.043" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: maybe illegal, trending towards probably illegal. Almost certainly too high a risk for a sensible company to take on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First things first: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;open sources licenses allow for commercial use&lt;/a&gt; so you can absolutely do this &lt;em&gt;if you are prepared to abide by the GPL for your project&lt;/em&gt;. I suspect you are making the common error of using the term &amp;quot;commercial software&amp;quot; when in fact you mean &amp;quot;proprietary software&amp;quot;. The rest of this answer assumes you mean proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is as always &amp;quot;is your code a derivative work of the GPL code?&amp;quot; That is something which is a question of copyright law and will actually vary according to the jurisdiction in which any potential legal action occurs, but as a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; rough rule of thumb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you did a &amp;quot;mechanical&amp;quot; translation from one language to another, similar to taking each line of code and changing it into the same line of code in another language, then your work is almost certainly a derivative work and you must abide by the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you did a more &amp;quot;hands off&amp;quot; translation, for example just taking the API definitions from the GPL code and making the implementation from scratch in your code, it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; not be a derivative work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at this stage it's going to be incredibly hard for you to prove that you weren't influenced (even unintentionally) by having seen the GPL code so I would not be prepared to take the risk. Just find a non-GPL source of the functionality you need and use that instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-03-18T11:39:39.043" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12738" CreationDate="2022-03-18T12:11:07.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is possible to put the entire PDF under GPL license, I would not do it. The reason is that any distribution of the PDF itself would trigger the requirement to also provide the source-code of the PDF. See the ansers in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gnu.ist.utl.pt/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhyNotGPLForManuals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-FAQ&lt;/a&gt;. Of course you could have a license statement in the PDF which points to the download-page for the PDF-source-code. But GPL is not made for books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just use code snippets under GPL and not the complete code of a library or app, you could claim to use it under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLFairUse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair-use rights&lt;/a&gt;, and then you can put your book under any license (even commercial) you want. I have seen that concept used a lot in printed books, you just should not overstretch the fair-use goodwill and provide proper license and attribution language. There is an answer to another question on this site, which explains the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9316/quoting-gpl-licensed-text-in-presentation-slides&quot;&gt;'right to quote'&lt;/a&gt;, which might also be interesting for you to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way would be to create the book as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Aggregate'&lt;/a&gt;, where you clearly identify each source-code snippet with the appropriate license and attribution (you can do that with a foot note and put the boring language into an exhibit). This way you can have the code of the software you copied in with its original (GPL) license, and you can put the rest of the book under a license that is more appropriate for literature, such as CC-BY-SA. In the same way you can also include code snippets from other software with licenses that might be incompatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-03-19T14:16:06.660" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T14:16:06.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-18T19:12:29.270" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I gave a friend of mine a piece of code that I wrote that I put under the WTFPL license. This was only available in private, between him and me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He took it and published it and changed the license to GPL (which is fine for me), but also mentioned me and mentioned that I gave it to him under WTFPL and that he has not done any changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody now come and publish it under a different license? I never publically released it as WTFPL, even though it is publically known to have been released under that license in private. But every derivative has to come from his GPL licensed repository, which is the only one publically available. But still, there it's publically written that I originally wrote it under WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26617" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T03:19:52.517" Title="Can code that has been given under the WTFPL license and then changed to GPL be changed to anything again after that?" Tags="|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12743" CreationDate="2022-03-18T19:59:50.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone wants to take your friends work that includes your work that is licensed under the GPL then they would have to publish under GPL or GPL compatible license.&#xA;However, given that no one has distributed the original copy with original license beyond the op and their friend. It seems that other users by default would only be able to work from the GPL version as that is the only one they have access  to and thus subject to its license and not the WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26603" LastEditorUserId="26603" LastEditDate="2022-03-19T03:19:52.517" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T03:19:52.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12733" CreationDate="2022-03-18T21:21:03.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listing all names right there in the notice is not scalable if there are many contributors, but the CC-BY-* 4.0 license seems fairly flexible on the details of “reasonable attribution”. The license requires the following elements to be preserved &lt;em&gt;if they are present&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ii. a copyright notice;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;iii. a notice that refers to this Public License;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;iv. a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;v a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, other people must “indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These requirements can be met “in any reasonable manner based on the medium”, in particular using URLs or hyperlinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that you are creating a LaTeX document and have (a) ample space and (b) the ability to place hyperlinks, I would suggest the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have a short and easily copyable attribution notice that identifies the original author, and other contributors as a group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have an acknowledgements appendix in the document where contributors can add their name, if they wish so. Note that the CC-Attribution concept does not require all authors to be attributed, it only requires notices to be preserved if they exist.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a short notice might look like the following, with links indicated in Markdown syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Example Book&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt;https://github.com/example/book&amp;gt;&#xA;by [&lt;em&gt;Original Author&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Example Contributors&lt;/em&gt;][1]&#xA;is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license][2].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: internal hyperlink to the appendix with acknowledgements&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also include this notice in the README file, with the link to the acknowledgements adjusted accordingly. Adding a license file just so that GitHub autodetects the license is probably not useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The acknowledgements appendix would then provide space for everyone to list their name, possibly as a copyright notice if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acknowledgements&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following people have contributed to the &lt;em&gt;Example Book&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright 2021-2022 Original Author&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[Some Contributor](&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/octocat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/octocat&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyright 2022 Random Contributor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(and possibly others)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here's a great tip for running open source projects: you're not required to accept contributions. If a potential contributor decides to be difficult and has highly unusual attribution desires that are difficult to accommodate, you don't have to merge their contributions. How you run your project is not bound by the license you grant others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To directly answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Should you add notices anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say yes. This makes the licensing status clear. If you don't add such notices, others are not required to preserve them. A good notice that also links to the license is helpful to others because their copies will be license-compliant by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you just add contributors to the notices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, definitely. But if you have more than two or so, this might not be scalable and I'd move to a separate appendix with acknowledgements, as outlined above. I'd probably defer this until the first contribution, though.  Attributing large-scale contributions directly in the notice still seems sensible, e.g. if someone serves as an editor for a new edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you add &lt;em&gt;separate&lt;/em&gt; notices for future contributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-* license does not impose a specific form, so you could do that – a single notice will be way less confusing, though. Adding multiple &lt;em&gt;copyright notices&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly fine, though. A typical CC attribution line does not have the structure of a classic coyright notice, so I'd keep them distinct. Both CC-BY-* and GPL expect copyright notices to be preserved &lt;em&gt;if they exist&lt;/em&gt;, but unlike CC, the GPl actively encourages adding copyright notices in its notice template.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-03-18T21:21:03.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12746" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12751" CreationDate="2022-03-19T14:22:57.823" Score="9" ViewCount="2006" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quote from the FOSSA blog, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fossa.com/blog/apply-license-open-source-software-project/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Apply a License to Your Open Source Software Project&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, if your dependencies are distributed under open source&#xA;licenses different than the one you are using for your own library,&#xA;the resulting obligations on your users, from a legal perspective, are&#xA;going to be determined by the strongest license across all of your&#xA;dependencies, and their dependencies, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I know the licences of all the dependencies (and their dependencies, ad nauseam) of my project, how do I determine which licence is the &amp;quot;strongest&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the summary of all the licences involved in project I'm working on is (generated with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-checker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licence-checker&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;├─ MIT: 284&#xA;├─ ISC: 33&#xA;├─ CC0-1.0: 29&#xA;├─ BSD-2-Clause: 17&#xA;├─ Apache-2.0: 7&#xA;├─ BSD-3-Clause: 5&#xA;├─ (MIT OR CC0-1.0): 4&#xA;├─ Python-2.0: 1&#xA;├─ CC-BY-4.0: 1&#xA;├─ CC-BY-3.0: 1&#xA;└─ 0BSD: 1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I determine which licences I'm able to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are bonus brownie points for a tip on a toll which can sort licences according to their &amp;quot;strength&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26623" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2022-03-21T19:10:31.767" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T19:10:31.767" Title="How can I judge the &quot;strength&quot; of a licence?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12740" CreationDate="2022-03-19T15:18:38.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the accepted answer, I'd like to point that the answer to your question highly depends on the nature of the function too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a recursive factorial in Java:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;public static long fact(long n) {&#xA;  if (n &amp;lt;= 1)&#xA;     return 1;&#xA;  else&#xA;     return n * fact(n - 1);&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you stole this from a GPLv2 project, it's going to be hard for the original author to argue that you did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL but with any copyright claim comes the question of how &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; the work is. Have you copied functions that are pretty clever and bring a unique solution to a problem? Is the problem solved itself very unusual...? Or is it like my factorial example above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26624" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T15:18:38.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12740" CreationDate="2022-03-19T17:55:32.220" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the stated main intentions of GPL is to force applying it to every project that makes any use of any GPL code. I don't know &amp;quot;the letter of the law&amp;quot;, but since forcing you was precisely what was intended and you're asking &amp;quot;Am I forced to?&amp;quot;, the answer is &amp;quot;Yes, you're forced to.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26626" LastActivityDate="2022-03-19T17:55:32.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12740" CreationDate="2022-03-20T05:27:34.383" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though this question has already been answered, one point has not been addressed. Is your project for external distribution? If not, it's a moot point since distributing the application internally is not &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; so it doesn't confer GPL obligations. (Exception: the Affero GPL is a &lt;em&gt;use license&lt;/em&gt; rather than a pure distribution license; it considers interaction with servers to be like distribution, so it may confer additional obligations if the project serves clients outside the company.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9668" LastEditorUserId="9668" LastEditDate="2022-03-21T12:18:37.133" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T12:18:37.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12746" CreationDate="2022-03-20T08:44:27.407" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no simple answer to this I'm afraid; licenses are just too complicated for there to be a single linear metric you can use to &amp;quot;rank&amp;quot; them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to do this is to read each license, understand what the requirements to do under that license and follow those requirements. The licenses you've listed are generally what are considered permissive licenses which don't require much more than:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include a copy of the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reproduce any copyright notices from the dependency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;but you must read the licenses yourself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for which license you can use, permissive licenses generally don't restrict the license you can choose for your work so you are free to release your own code under any license you like - this is in contrast to copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL family which do force you to use a specific license (or one from a set of licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T08:44:27.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12746" CreationDate="2022-03-20T10:14:05.917" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking about “strength” is a simplification. Recipients must comply with all the licenses of all the components that are part of the program, and you cannot choose a license that makes compliance with licenses of the other components impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have seen license compatibility diagrams like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide-image.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;em&gt;David A. Wheeler&lt;/em&gt; is licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the left are “weaker” licenses, to the right we have “stronger” licenses. The compliance obligations for the program as the whole are determined by the “strongest” components. It is worth noting that some licenses are not connected by arrows, meaning that combining these licenses is not possible. For example, it is not possible to have a GPL-2.0-only and an Apache-2.0 component in the same program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license list you have shown can be categorized as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;public domain dedications (CC0): these impose absolutely no compliance obligations and are compatible with everything&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;permissive licenses (MIT, ISC, BSD-2-clause, BSD-3-clause, Python-2.0, 0BSD): these just require attribution, and are therefore highly compatible with everything.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD-3-clause also prevents you from using the author's name for promotional purposes, but you probably wouldn't have that right anyway&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python-2.0 is an amalgamation of multiple licenses over Python's history, but can be treated as a typical permissive license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creative Commons Attribution licenses (CC-BY-3.0, CC-BY-4.0): these are essentially permissive licenses, similar to MIT or BSD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0: also a permissive license, but with added clauses about patents that make it incompatible with some other licenses, notably with GPL-2.0-only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are essentially permissive licenses. For your own components, you can choose whatever license you want, including keeping your software proprietary, except that you cannot choose the GPL-2.0-only license for your components as this would be incompatible with the Apache-2.0 component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can also choose “weaker” licenses for your own components, but this will not affect the effective license obligations for the program as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what licensing you choose for your components and for the software as a whole, you will have to comply with all license conditions from all the licenses. This generally involves providing a copy of the license notices from all components to the recipients of the program. For the Apache-2.0 license, you would also be required to provide a copy of the NOTICE file, if present. How to provide these notices depends on the context of your program. Maybe the notices should be provided in documentation alongside the software, maybe the software should have some interactive feature that displays these notices. For example, many mobile apps have an entry for Open Source notices in their settings screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-03-20T10:14:05.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12740" CreationDate="2022-03-21T10:24:05.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's best for everyone involved, including yourself, your career, and the company employing you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read the source code. Find out how the source code works. When you know how it works, write it yourself. Without seeing the original source code. That way you are not copying anything, so you are not committing copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just take some GPL licensed code and add it to your project, then you have the choice: You license your project under the GPL license, or you admit that you committed copyright infringement and can be sued. If the copyright holder of the GPL licensed source code finds out (how could that happen? Well, maybe your colleague calls them and tells them), not only is your company in trouble, but your career is in &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; trouble. So you will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; do this without talking to your company's lawyer (unless it is common knowledge in your company that the whole product is GPL licensed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if the product is GPL licensed: Many companies use &amp;quot;dual licensing&amp;quot;. I can download their source code for free under the GPL license, or I can get a license with full product software for lots of money. If the company does that, they can't just use someone else's GPL licensed code, because then they are not allowed to do dual licensing anymore which kills the business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Don't do it unless you talk to your lawyers. And very often lawyers are expensive, so your boss will tell you not to do it, because it's cheaper you write it yourself, than copying and getting your lawyers involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2022-03-21T10:24:05.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12765" CreationDate="2022-03-24T22:25:13.973" Score="1" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the title states, if I take one code project that is under a zlib license, and incorporate it into a GPL3, Apache2 or MIT-licensed codebase, do I have to remove the license from the code project prior to incorporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, do I also have to change the license of the original code project, in order for the licensing to not conflict with the larger GPL3/Apache2/MIT codebase (since they now share the same code)? Or can I effectively 'grant' use of the code (if I'm the sole owner) under those licenses, without changing the license of the original code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise I am in essense asking 3 different questions here due to the differing conditions of the 3 licenses, but I appreciate any general advice given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;zLib is a more permissive license than the others, and is stated to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26659" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-03-25T09:59:34.337" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T09:12:19.623" Title="Do I have to remove the license on zLib-licensed code project in order for it to be integrated into a GPL3, Apache2 or MIT-licensed codebase?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|apache-2.0|relicensing|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-03-25T04:45:12.253" Score="5" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use SPIDEV (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/spi/spidev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/spi/spidev&lt;/a&gt;) via direct I/O access from the userland. I believe that I have the legal right to commercialize an application using SPIDEV run by the Linux Kernel without the need to disclose the source code of my application, thus keeping it private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you please confirm my understanding is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26663" LastEditorUserId="9042" LastEditDate="2022-03-26T01:29:37.413" LastActivityDate="2022-03-26T01:29:37.413" Title="Commercialize Linux Application with SPIDEV" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12758" CreationDate="2022-03-25T07:38:23.557" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have access to a learning material(docs/solutions) which is licensed under &lt;code&gt;XYZ Training - ABC Product Copyright (C) 2019 - 2021 XYZ. All rights reserved. The software in this package is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License&lt;/code&gt;. This material talks and provides steps on how to write/build efficient software coding by using a &lt;code&gt;ShipYard company usecase&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come up with a new learning material that covers around 80% (steps) of the above material using a different but similar (Manufacturing company) usecase. My material (docs/solutions) is created from scratch has different content and have not copied any diagrams/pictures/flows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name and order of topics of the new learning material are also different compared to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish my material and commercial it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If required I can give appropriate credits to the original material at the beginning of my material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26664" LastEditorUserId="26664" LastEditDate="2022-03-25T07:55:32.997" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T10:16:36.807" Title="Doubts with CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 learning material" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12757" CreationDate="2022-03-25T10:16:36.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that you've written this new work yourself, invented new scenarios, created all the diagrams, etc., the question is whether it is in any way a derivative work of the XYZ material.  If it is, you've got a problem, because the licence on the XYZ material doesn't allow the creation of derivative works (ND), so creating one infringes XYZ's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The perfect defence against such an allegation is that you haven't read the material involved.  That is why many professional authors and others in the content creation business have publicly-stated policies against reading unsolicited material; it's not logically possible to have been influenced in your creation by a work you've never seen.  Unfortunately, that defence is (by your own admission) not open to you.  That doesn't mean that your work is necessarily derivative, but it puts you on the back foot in defending yourself against such an allegation, were it to arise.  At this point, the only real advice we can give is to get your material professionally evaluated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If required I can give appropriate credits to the original material at the beginning of my material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the XYZ material been under (eg) a CC BY licence, that would not just have been courteous, but a requirement.  Since it's not, all you're doing by including such a credit is pasting a target on your own back.  Worse, were a lawsuit to arise, your inclusion of this credit could be seen as an admission that your work owed its existence to the original XYZ work, and thus an admission of liability (depending on the precise language you used).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T10:16:36.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12756" CreationDate="2022-03-25T10:19:45.590" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the Linux' community's understanding that userland code is not affected by the Kernel's GPL license. In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;interacting with the Kernel through syscalls is fine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by extension, interacting with the Kernel through special filesystem objects (device files, procfs, sysfs) is also fine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This understanding is codified in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note?id=9376ff9ba298c983062a12cbbafde506a4eaea71&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux-syscall-note&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that paragraph “this copyright” refers to the Linux Kernel copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no particular understanding of what SPI is, but it seems that the SPIDEV driver merely exposes some virtual devices in the filesystem, with which your userland code can interact with syscalls such as read() or ioctl(). Thus, having a program that interacts with SPIDEV filesystem objects will have exactly the same GPL consequences as a program that interacts with /dev/tty or /dev/null fileystem objects – no compliance obligations whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T10:19:45.590" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12761" CreationDate="2022-03-25T11:55:40.553" Score="5" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that you can commercialize GPL'ed software by selling it under the condition that you distribute the source code with the sold product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now thinking about the case where you don't sell a hardcopy of the code, but a license that allows you to use the code for, say, a year. Is this model compatible with the GPL at all?&#xA;I'm thinking that with the GPL'ed source code available the user could simply remove all license checks in the software and use it for free from there.&#xA;Is this correct or is there a (legal) way to say &amp;quot;You can use it, but only for a certain amount of time&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15610" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-03-26T14:58:52.530" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T07:50:58.463" Title="Sell expiring licenses for GPL software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12760" CreationDate="2022-03-25T12:02:04.623" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can do that. But - as you conclude yourself - it is also everyone's right to take the source, remove any license check, and distribute the version without license checks.&#xA;A restriction on how long a person may use the source code is not compatible with the GPL, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's exactly what &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.rhodecode.com/rhodecode-enterprise-ce&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhodecode&lt;/a&gt; tried to introduce - and found out the hard way by having it forked after quite a bit of drama and eventually by the FSF as &lt;a href=&quot;https://kallithea-scm.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;kallithea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T12:02:04.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12760" CreationDate="2022-03-25T22:20:24.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now thinking about the case where you don't sell a hardcopy the code, but a license that allows you to use the code for, say, a year. Is this model compatible with the GPL at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt; You can sell media or distribution services around GPL software, or copies of the software, provided that you comply with your own obligations under the GPL that attend such activity.  These include, but are not limited to, providing access to the source code.  But you are talking about &lt;em&gt;relicensing&lt;/em&gt; a GPL program, and you cannot do that unless the code belongs to you in the first place, or you have been granted that right by the owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code belonged to you then the question would be moot, because you could just offer a non-GPL license, so I'm supposing that it does not belong to you. Many GPL projects grant the right to relicense under a newer version of the GPL, but no GPL-licensed software I have ever seen grants the kind of right you would need for relicensing in the manner you propose.  That brings us back to &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You did specifically ask about licensing, but perhaps you had in mind instead to build and distribute derivative programs to which you have added time-based lockouts.  As derivatives of GPL programs, these would need to be distributed under the GPL, and that would obligate you to provide source.  As such, yes, people who wanted to do so could remove the lockouts.  But since we're assuming that the original code is not yours in the first place, others could also just bypass you to get pristine code from the upstream source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9078" LastEditorUserId="9078" LastEditDate="2022-03-25T22:25:35.600" LastActivityDate="2022-03-25T22:25:35.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12760" CreationDate="2022-03-28T07:50:58.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot do what you have suggested in the question, because you cannot relicense GPL-licensed code and take away one of the freedoms (perpetual/irrevocable license) granted by GPL and replace it by an expiring license. In fact, by trying to re-license the code in the wrong way, you would lose your own rights under GPL to use the upstream libraries linked in your software (GPLv2 Section 4; or GPLv3 Section 8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several ways to monetize OSS but they are a bit more complex than your proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monetizing OSS always depends on providing something in addition to what the recipients already have (recipient already has the source code, the perpetual license, the rights to modify and distribute).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early days of OSS there was no internet. People were lacking basic access to software. You would have to use your modem and your POTS telephone line to connect to a BBS to download software at incredibly slow speeds (2400 to 56.6k bps). Some of you might remember. In these times it was valuable to be able to buy OSS on CDROM, and I think quite a few computer magazines only survived in those times by adding a new CDROM to their printed magazines each month. A fair OSS business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays in large parts of the world, internet access is not a problem, thus the distribution business largely went away. The a common way to make money with OSS today are hosting (SaaS solutions), customization, service and support, and freemium offerings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are countless SaaS solutions on the market building on OSS, for example ElasticSearch or OpenStack, and the market is growing with the surge of cloud solutions. So the customers' needs you are fulfilling (for money) is the need for hosting the solution and its maintenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other areas, web hosters are providing WordPress as part of their hosting offerings. The customer pays for a smoothly running managed solution which is always being kept up to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With code customizations you tailor OSS to fulfill the exact needs of one (or a few) customers. For example that could be a database connector for a special client database or a tool to analyze data. You would be paid for your development work, timely bug fixes, further modifications, etc. Actually your customer might not even care if the solution is closed or open source (they just want a reliable solution), as they would anyhow not distribute it (it would just aid their competitors). In addition you could offer a help-line via phone or chat. Payment for this 'maintenance, service and support' could be effort-based (by the hour), time-based (monthly fee), user-number-based (number of seats or pay-per-use) or any other useful metric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very common way to make money with OSS is freemium solutions, which usually consist of a core of functionality that is based on OSS, and a set of advanced features, which is closed source and only available for money. There are a number of variations of the model, where the free and the paid solution are two separate executables or one solution (with the use of a license key), or where a limited number of software runs (e.g. 5) per month are with all features and if you want more (i.e. 6 or more) you have to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the above works in full compliance with the open source licenses. You would be delivering the source code at no cost. The customer has the right to modify (but their own development teams might have too much overhead or cannot be deployed quickly). The customer has the right to distribute (but refrains from that because the solution might include some of their own trade secrets). You just have to identify and provide the added value for which the customer is willing to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-03-28T07:50:58.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12755" CreationDate="2022-03-29T09:12:19.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the title states, if I take one code project that is under a zlib license, and incorporate it into a GPL3, Apache2 or MIT-licensed codebase, do I have to remove the license from the code project prior to incorporation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ZLib license gives anyone the right to include the code into a differently licensed project, but only the copyright holders can (jointly) decide to remove the ZLib license from the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is already well-known to be available under the ZLib license, then even if you are the sole copyright holder who incorporates it into a differently licensed project, I would recommend that you do it in the same way as a non-copyright holder would do it. The main reason for this is that is completely avoids questions if you had the right to drop the ZLib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or can I effectively 'grant' use of the code (if I'm the sole owner) under those licenses, without changing the license of the original code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As sole copyright holder, you always have the freedom to offer your code under additional licenses (even licenses that are incompatible with each other) and you can make that decision at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-03-29T09:12:19.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12768" CreationDate="2022-03-31T07:04:59.227" Score="-3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am programming three things, an API, an Android app, and a front-end web React app.&#xA;The whole system will be sold to a company for money, I have no problem with them modifying the source code to fit their needs and making my system communicate with their APIs, but I don't want them to copy my system and give it to other companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want this license to only allow them to do whatever they want with my source code only for their own uses, but not for selling it or sharing it with others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which license I should use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26704" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T08:21:18.870" Title="No distribute, only for self modifications license" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2022-03-31T19:00:34.843" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12767" CreationDate="2022-03-31T08:21:18.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You will need a proprietary license, what you are asking is not possible with an open source license. You might want to contact a lawyer to draft a license (without sublicensing rights) for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the upstream libraries (and their licenses) which you use in your apps and API, a proprietary license may not be possible. If you use libraries which have a copy-left license you likely have to license your own software under the same license. If, however, the libraries you are using are under a permissive of PD license, then you can go the way described in the 1st paragraph of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-03-31T08:21:18.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12770" CreationDate="2022-03-31T20:05:17.823" Score="3" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am learning PyQt5 and was reading about it an PySide and I was wondering about something regarding the licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PyQt is available under the GNU GPLv3 and a commercial license.&#xA;From my understanding, if I use PyQt under the GPL license, anything and everything I publish onto which I used PyQt, regardless if I changed PyQt's code, must have its source code published, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26708" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2022-04-01T09:44:54.600" LastActivityDate="2022-04-01T09:49:58.990" Title="Question about PyQt license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12769" CreationDate="2022-04-01T09:49:58.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your understanding is mostly correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use PyQt under the terms of the GPLv3 license, then the license terms dictate that you use effectively the same license also for the code you wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the actual publishing of the source code, you only need to give the source code to the people that received the binary from you. So, if you are only creating applications for yourself (for your amusement and/or education) that you don't share with anyone, then you also don't have to publish the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-01T09:49:58.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-02T23:32:21.230" Score="4" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NautCommunity/Naut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fork&lt;/a&gt; of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Axel--/Naut-for-reddit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repository&lt;/a&gt; that hadn't received a commit in ~4 years. Three weeks ago (and after a 7 year hiatus), the repository owner deleted the MIT license in the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commits I made to that fork were made months before the deletion of the license, so I should be legally fine. However, I'm curious as to the legal status of a repository that deleted its license. Am I legally able to commit to my fork? Do I have to delete my license.txt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26715" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T06:59:59.970" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T06:59:59.970" Title="What is the legal status of a repository that deleted its license?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12771" CreationDate="2022-04-03T10:14:48.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;Open source licenses are irrevocable&lt;/a&gt; so therefore you can use any code which was at any point in time available under the MIT license - which in your case pretty clearly means anything up until the license was deleted from the repository. That code is available to you under the MIT license, so you must still comply with the conditions of the license; in particular, this means you must &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; delete your copy of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code (if any) added to the repository after the deletion of the license file &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;is not available for you to use&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-04-03T10:14:48.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-05T17:41:34.910" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I start with a working GPL project. I wholesale gut out modules and rewrite them from scratch. Sometimes my rewrite would combine a few modules into one module. Other times my rewrite would subdivide a module into a few more modules. So I don't even preserve the modular structure. I'd do this until nothing remains of the GPL code. As I go I'd be modifying the interfaces a bit as well, so even interfaces between modules would be unrecognizable from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the strategy. I'm just using the GPL project as a test harness as I insert my rewrites. It would be kind of a dwindling test harness.&#xA;In this case, where there would be no GPL code left in my project, do I have any obligations under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLCommercially&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, but it is about making mods not replacing all code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26729" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-05T19:51:36.187" LastActivityDate="2022-04-05T19:51:36.187" Title="If I start with GPL code then gut out and rewrite a few modules at a time until there's no GPL code left what are my obligations under GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2022-04-21T01:32:20.577" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12775" CreationDate="2022-04-06T04:47:45.683" Score="-1" ViewCount="6698" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Product &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; which is a closed source, i.e. the repository is private and wont want to make it as a public repository.&#xA;Product &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; can also use/dynamically link Library &amp;quot;X&amp;quot; and Library &amp;quot;Y&amp;quot; which are open sourced licensed, i.e. Apache 2.0, MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to commercially sell the Product &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; with still keeping the source code closed. Can I use/ apply Apache 2.0 or any other OSS license to Product &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26735" LastEditorUserId="26735" LastEditDate="2022-04-06T07:37:43.450" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T11:19:48.780" Title="Can I use Apache 2.0 for closed source product?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12774" CreationDate="2022-04-06T11:19:48.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do not apply an Open Source license unless you actually want recipients of the software to have the freedom to use, modify, and share your software as they  want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The default under copyright law is “all rights reserved”. This is a problem for Open Source / Free (Libre) Software where we want everyone to have Software Freedom. Therefore, different Open Source licenses exist that try to maximize Software Freedom, albeit with different strategies. Since these Open Source licenses contain fixed terms and all guarantee a baseline of rights, everyone can easily know what rights they get, which helped build a large ecosystem of Open Source software. In particular, all Open Source licenses allow commercial use, and allow recipients to modify and share the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-2.0 license is a “permissive” license, which means that Apache-2.0 covered software components can be freely combined with proprietary software. It is perceived as enterprise-friendly, and for example used a lot by the Android project. When other people/companies modify the Apache-2.0 covered software they don't have to keep the same license (they can make their modified versions proprietary) but merely have to provide certain attribution notices. The Apache-2.0 does not require that anyone makes their source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems you fully intend for your Product A to stay proprietary. Then, it makes no sense to license it under Apache-2.0. You would be giving other people permission to do things you don't want them to do. For example, the Apache-2.0 allows others to rebrand and re-sell your software. When the libraries you use are available under permissive Open Source license, you are under no obligation to choose an Open Source license for your own software. How a software is developed (publicly or privately) is not directly related to proprietary vs FLOSS licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what you actually want is an EULA, terms of service, or similar contract that gives users permission to do what you want them to do, but not more. Since this depends a lot on your specific business goals, there cannot be a “one size fits all” document. Instead, you would likely have to ask a lawyer to draft a custom EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, there is a small niche of software where the source code is proprietary, but binaries are made available under permissive Open Source licenses. For example, the Mattermost chat server uses a dual-licensing approach for its source code, but binaries are available under the permissive MIT license. This makes it possible to deploy the server without users having to review and accept a custom contract. In principle, people could reverse-engineer the MIT-licensed binaries and create a competing system without being bound by the source code license, but it seems Mattermost is not concerned with that. I'm just mentioning this for completeness – this is probably not a good business strategy unless you really know what you're doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-04-06T11:19:48.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-07T02:03:30.033" Score="0" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Naïve question, I know, but what exactly is the standard for licensing code under GLPv3? Where should I list the copyright and the license? What specifically do I include at the top of each source file? Where and how do I list the license in full?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26740" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T12:09:54.583" Title="How am I expected to list my code's copyright and license under GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12776" CreationDate="2022-04-07T08:30:28.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; comes with a section which reads &amp;quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&amp;quot;. Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively state the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;lt;br&amp;gt;&#xA;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;program&amp;gt;  Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.&#xA;This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical commands &lt;code&gt;'show w'&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;'show c'&lt;/code&gt; should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, your program's commands might be different; for a GUI interface, you would use an “about box”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T12:09:54.583" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T12:09:54.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12779" CreationDate="2022-04-07T10:47:31.120" Score="0" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is, can you publish the code under Business Source License(BSL 1.1) as a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1.) Natural person(not a registered company)&#xA;2.) Anonymous (Pseudoanonymously)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up; Can I publish the code licensed via BSL 1.1 under the pseudonym as a natural person(not a registered company)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSL 1.1 for reference;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.com/bsl11/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mariadb.com/bsl11/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the copyright be still valid if the licensor is a pseudonym and the owner of the pseudonym is a natural person (not a company)? Of course under the assumption, you could later prove you are the rightful owner of the license/ you were the one behind the pseudonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26743" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-04-07T13:00:56.863" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T13:00:56.863" Title="Can you publish as a natural person/anonymously/pseudoanonymously under Business Source License(BSL 1.1)?" Tags="|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12778" CreationDate="2022-04-07T12:29:51.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the copyright be still valid if the licensor is a pseudonym and the owner of the pseudonym is a natural person(not company)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The validity of a copyright claim is not dependent on the license that is used, but only on what the copyright law in the relevant jurisdiction states.&#xA;Fortunately, the Berne convention has largely harmonized the copyright laws in the signatory countries (which is nearly all countries in the world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright can be held anonymously or under a pseudonym by natural persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i publish the code licensed via BSL 1.1 under the pseudonym as a natural person(not a registered company)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The BSL license does not restrict in any way who can apply the license to their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-07T12:29:51.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11556" CreationDate="2022-04-10T13:58:18.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both BSD-3-clause and Apache-2.0 are &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; Open Source licenses. They permit combining code under these licenses with other code, especially also with each other. Both licenses would continue to apply for their respective parts, so it would not be quite correct to state that your project would be BSD-3-clause licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, the license conditions from the Apache-2.0 subsume all BSD-3-clause conditions so that to comply with both licenses, recipients (not you) would have to mostly comply with the Apache-2.0 license, and only add a copy of the BSD-3-clause notice to Apache's NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to choose the Apache-2.0 license for your contributions, but it would maybe simplify license compliance a bit for other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you modify Apache-2.0 covered code, “You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files”, but you don't have to describe the changes. This might be as simple as adding a copyright line in the file header. But since you want to license your modifications under a different license, your idea of prepending the new license notice is entirely appropriate. Here is how I would write such a license header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;foo.c is part of ExampleProject&#xA;&amp;lt;https://example.com/myproject&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  Copyright 2022 How_To&#xA;&#xA;  Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, ... (rest of BSD-3-clause)&#xA;&#xA;This code is based on OriginalProject&#xA;&amp;lt;https://example.com/original&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;  Copyright 2021 Original Authors&#xA;&#xA;  Licensed under the Apache License, ... (rest of Apache-2.0 header)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such headers, it is common to put the most recent notice on top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are not modifying Apache-2.0 covered code but are merely distributing unmodified copies, then things are simpler. Different scenarios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A Git submodule is not a copy but merely a link. I don't think that adding an Apache-2.0 covered submodule would trigger any license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you include a copy of the Apache-2.0 covered code into your project (for example, if you create a tar archive of your source code including the submodule), then you must comply with the Apache-2.0 license. Which here, just means including a copy of the Apache-2.0 license and the NOTICE file, if present. The upstream project likely already has this, but check to make sure. If you have a LICENSE or README file, I would add a note to mention that the code in a particular folder is governed by a different license, and where to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute non-source versions of the software (such as pre-compiled executables) then you must comply with the licenses of all included components. This usually means including license notices (and the NOTICE files, if present) alongside the software in a ZIP archive or similar. Other software might have a help menu entry to show the notices, or have a &lt;code&gt;--version&lt;/code&gt; command line flag that explains where to find the full license. As a rule of thumb: wherever you give notice of your license + copyright, you should also mention the license + copyright of other components as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you do have forked/modified the project you're including as a submodule. Then you have to give notice of your changes in the forked/modified version. Instead of adding the BSD-3-clause notice header, you might instead add a copyright line with your name to the files that you touched. These modifications don't change anything when it comes to including the sub-project into your larger project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize the answers to your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you include parts from Apache-2.0 software in your project? Yes, but then your code will not be BSD-3-clause only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How should you mark modified Apache-2.0 covered files? Your idea of adding your own license notice on top of the Apache-2.0 notice is on the right track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can you handle licensing for a submodule that you forked from another project? With respect to the contents of the submodule, modifying an Apache-2.0 covered project is equivalent to including Apache-2.0 covered parts into your code: you have to give notice that you made modifications, but are otherwise free to decide. In practice, keeping the Apache-2.0 license for those parts would be easiest. When bundling or compiling your software together with the submodule it's pretty much the same story, but it would be good to ensure that recipients know which parts are governed by which license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-04-10T13:58:18.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-10T23:16:45.787" Score="10" ViewCount="3468" Body="&lt;p&gt;Problem statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see innumerous patents being filled with vague and generalized descriptions, with most of them never coming to fruition. Humanity as a community suffers because of these patent lockers, who hold onto human advancement for years for meeting their own individual needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expected solution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way (preferably free) by which people can contribute their idea to the public domain? If enough people can log their ideas under the public domain, then everyone can benefit from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent trolls can think of about a hundred ideas. But if thousands of brains contribute their hundreds of ideas in the public domain, then humanity can greatly benefit from it. The goal is to put every idea that the human brain can think of into the public domain. If a corporation wants to make a profit they can, as it's royalty free and everyone can pick it up and make better products out of that idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26758" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2022-04-12T06:48:26.157" LastActivityDate="2022-04-12T06:48:26.157" Title="Is there a website where one can register an idea, as an open source one?" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12781" CreationDate="2022-04-11T07:09:52.400" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mere act of publication of an invention serves to put it into the public domain for patent purposes, thus rendering it unpatentable.  The body of pre-existing ideas that might help thus invalidate a patent is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prior art&lt;/a&gt;, and the idea of publishing your own invention in order to prevent other entities patenting them is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;defensive publication&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've had a patentable idea, and embedded it in a software implementation, the act of freely publishing your software will serve as defensive publication, particularly against later software implementations.  It certainly helps if you use one of the large, centralised repositories for software development, because it eases the task of people doing large, automated prior art searches, and because you get third-party-verifiable timestamps on everything, but the important thing is to publish.  The FSF maintains a list of the &amp;quot;freeness&amp;quot; of various contenders, which can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And although your concept is laudable, remember that ideas are not generally patentable, only their implementations.  That's another reason that having a piece of free software embodying your novel idea is an important step towards freeing up that idea for the general benefit of humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-11T09:41:24.523" LastActivityDate="2022-04-11T09:41:24.523" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12789" CreationDate="2022-04-12T11:23:57.097" Score="9" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not my work. I am free just to walk away, but would be interesting to know if any better solution could possibly exist. I do not name the project because discrediting it is not between my goals. I just want to help the open source community by publicizing the known and recommended ways to solve my problem, that is for me real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is popular, has many users, so understandably they accept new contributions via merge requests and code review, at least from newcomers. I have opened four requests for them without any evil intention expecting to join an interesting community. Two were rejected and one is now stuck deep in the review swamp without big hope to push it through. Only the first one has been merged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see the reasons of rejection as quite frivolous: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I think this should be fixed in a completely different way&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (but the fix works, is clear to understand and does not break anything, why would you rather live with that bug?), &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I think this is superniche and we do not need this feature&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (why do you keep this entry in Bugzilla if you do not even accept it already implemented?), &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I think the error message you proposed is still difficult for the users to understand&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (the message it replaced is so mangled that &amp;quot;no meaning can be inferred&amp;quot; as written in bug report not by me), &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;this bug is not relevant when code runs in a sandbox&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (and what? in many cases it still does not) and the like. Plus &amp;quot;code style issues&amp;quot; not documented anywhere (what is written down, I attempt to follow). Still, looks like there is more than one person working on the project. How do they find a common talk between themselves? I think that some developers either do not get the code reviewed or just get very shallow check. How to get into this circle with the goal to be productive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to make very small changes, assuming this would leave little room for any criticism. Nope, small changes attract the most of negativism. But any more complex changes, obviously, leave a lot of room to think that something could be different and also resolving merge conflicts eat lots of work while you fix that is not broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I worked in some notable open source projects in the past, but it was at the time when this pull request pipeline was not so tough. Changes were sent as patch files into mailing list first, and if nobody objected much (that usually was the case) most of serious developers had rights to commit into master. Reverting committed patch was big event seldom done. Now looks like any elite developer is free to say veto for whatever reason comes to they mind when the contributor even has no right to discuss (when I attempted once the request was immediately closed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that call of complete rewrite, I was generally responsive to proposals from reviewers, not that they propose to rename a variable and I stick to my version regardless what. It still feels like carving the code in stone: I would be five to ten times more productive if left alone just on my own, instead of endlessly changing one working version of the code into another that is I agree not worse but looks just about the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I maybe fork the project? It is under GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a way to get respect in this community and do something constructive there or should I just leave them? My level in general should be good enough for them; I am software engineer working multiple years with the programming language they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T08:14:09.210" Title="When joining open source project, how to get out of the code review swamp?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12785" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12787" CreationDate="2022-04-12T21:34:27.320" Score="3" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to release a specific niche database application as open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My only concern is that any potentially beneficial changes to the project are made available to &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; users of the application. The one requirement I wish to place on any user of the project, is to contribute back any changes that have been made, regardless of whether software distribution (GPL), or network access (AGPL), has taken place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research, the license that seems to come closest to meeting this requirement is the Reciprocal Public License, but given how rarely it's used in practice, I question if this is actually the right license for the use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the Reciprocal Public License, is there a more appropriate way to accomplish this mandatory source sharing goal for a database application, while still keeping the application open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18604" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T09:07:03.343" Title="Mandatory Source Contribution For Open Source Database" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12788" CreationDate="2022-04-13T06:57:51.333" Score="4" ViewCount="1009" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can proprietary-licensed software (that will be distributed, alongside with the hardware) use GPL software (distributed from package manager)?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's basically scientific-measurement-device, that manipulates image from usb-camera.&#xA;Tools that will be used for image processing are &lt;code&gt;ffmpeg&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;imagemagick&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;gnuplot&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;cat&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;cut&lt;/code&gt; etc (that will be installed using the package manager). These software sources won't be modified at any point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it OK to use propriety license on how we process the data?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: in python (bare with me, it's just for the demonstration)&#xA;/I know all of following can be done with pure Python, but that is not the question/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;os.system(&amp;quot;ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -i /dev/video0 -vframes 1 -video_size 640x480 test.jpg&amp;quot;)&#xA;os.system(&amp;quot;convert test.jpg -crop 110x270+230+70 cropped.jpg&amp;quot;)&#xA;os.system(&amp;quot;convert cropped.jpg -resize 1x270! out.txt&amp;quot;)&#xA;os.system(&amp;quot;cat out.txt | cut -d')' -f1 | cut -d'(' -f2  | gnuplot -p -e \&amp;quot;set term png;plot '&amp;lt;cat' with lines \&amp;quot; &amp;gt; test.png&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is above code considered,  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;aggregation&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? or &lt;code&gt;derivative&lt;/code&gt; of GPL software? or seperate software? Could you explain me what is considered &lt;code&gt;aggregation&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;exec&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;pipes&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;rpc&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;function calls within a shared address space&lt;/code&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addtionally, what is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;arms's lengths&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? Is above 4 lines of python code considered &lt;code&gt;arm's lengths&lt;/code&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and nonfree programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, Is above 4 lines of python code considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;combined program that has INTIMATE communication&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? what exactly &lt;code&gt;intimate communication&lt;/code&gt;? and Does image data considered &lt;code&gt;complex data structure&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, English is not my native language, and don't fully understand these paragraphs in GPL's FAQ. I, personally, like F(L)OSS, but license selection is above me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Is above 4 lines of code considered &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLWrapper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;Wrapper&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?. And GPL licenses are irrelevant to 4 lines of code? what exactly &lt;code&gt;Wrapper&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25114" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-15T07:49:41.997" LastActivityDate="2022-04-15T07:49:41.997" Title="Can proprietary-licensed software execute shell commands that are probably GPL licensed?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|proprietary-code|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12785" CreationDate="2022-04-13T09:07:03.343" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such an Open Source license cannot exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses require a reciprocal license to &lt;em&gt;recipients&lt;/em&gt; of the software, so that those recipients have full rights to further use and modify the software. The Reciprocal Public License, the AGPL, and the Cryptographic Autonomy License extend this to some or all users of the software, so that they retain Software Freedom with respect to the software that they use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what no OSI-approved Open Source license will require is publication of modifications. If I modify the software for purely internal use, I won't be required to disclose my work. I as the copyright holder of the modifications still have the right to decide whether other people get access to my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Debian community has developed license evaluation criteria to determine whether a license qualifies as Free and Open Source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among of these are the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desert Island Test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: It should be possible to comply with the license even if I can't communicate with other people. That means it is OK for a license to require reciprocal licensing to people who already received my modified version, but it's not OK to require publication of private modifications, and most certainly not OK to require sending modifications to specific recipients such as the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another criterion is the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DissidentTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dissident Test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: Compliance with a license should not jeopardize the safety of someone making modifications. For example, if making modifications would &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; sending these modifications upstream, then this might disclose that someone is a user of this software. This sounds unproblematic for database software, but Open Source licenses must work equally well for all kinds of software, including more politically sensitive kinds like VPN, encryption, and security tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your specific case, it would be good to think about your licensing goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you actually want to grant Software Freedom to others via an Open Source license? If users enjoy Software Freedom, others will still be able to maintain the software if you don't – the project will be somewhat independent from you. Since Software Freedom implies a freedom to create forks, the concept of having a particular Original Author is less meaningful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What benefits do you want to achieve through Open Source licensing? For example, such licensing can encourage wider adoption due to the use of well-understood standardized terms instead of custom contracts, and due to some degree of vendor-independence (see the Software Freedom point above). But this goal would be jeopardized if you choose a highly unusual license, especially if you choose a non-Open Source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One aspect that you mention is that users can benefit from each other's modifications. While this is not guaranteed via copyleft licenses, it generally works well as a &lt;em&gt;cultural&lt;/em&gt; norm. The driving factor is typically going to be laziness, not license obligations: for most organizations, maintaining a custom patches for a software or doing a complete fork requires more effort than living with a suboptimal software – or than upstreaming their improvements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do you want to happen with modifications that are not useful? You could write a non-Open-Source license that requires all modifications to be offered to you. But, I'd believe that if your software becomes popular you'd be swamped with irrelevant or broken modifications. More likely, your software would not become popular because it would be missing out on Open Source network effects.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you decide that you want to keep the software Open Source but want to maximize the likelihood that useful modifications are shared with the community, it would probably be better to achieve this through technical and social means than through legal instruments. Especially for software like databases that are mostly used internally (ignoring DBaaS use cases), all Open Source copyleft licenses will more or less be the same and won't trigger their license requirements. Technical and social means could include things like making contribution easy (from a process &amp;amp; legal perspective), and thinking about what kind of plugin interfaces you offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Linux kernel makes it possible to load kernel modules, but will only offer full functionality to modules that declare themselves as GPL-licensed. People are encouraged to contribute their modules upstream because Linux does not provide any compatibility guarantees for these plugin interfaces – only the modules managed upstream are guaranteed to work. There are still lots of proprietary kernel modules, including some that hack around the GPL compatibility check, but overall it's a strong ecosystem. It is also advantageous that some new features can be thoroughly tested internally before they are proposed for inclusion in the upstream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T09:07:03.343" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12786" CreationDate="2022-04-13T11:57:40.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can propriety licensed software (that will be distributed, alongside with the hardware) use GPL software (distributed from package manager)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, as long as your code and the GPL code communicate &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communication &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot; implies a couple of things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The communication is between separate executables&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The communication uses communication channels that are typical for communication between separate executables (like sockets, files, command-line arguments, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The proprietary code does not have knowledge of implementation details of the GPL code, but only uses the documented interfaces (i.e. the proprietary code can be written without ever having seen the GPL source code).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The proprietary code can work with any executable that provides the expected interface (name, command-line arguments, etc.) and behavior.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your example python script ticks all the boxes for communicating &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot;, so you are free to license that in any way you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is above code considered, &lt;code&gt;aggregation&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;aggregation&amp;quot; is used when distributing software and means that multiple software packages, which are unrelated to each other in copyright terms, are being distributed together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would create a single zip file of your application together with the tools it uses, then that can be described as an aggregation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Is above 4 lines of code considered Wrapper? [...] what exactly Wrapper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, a Wrapper is a piece of software specifically written to try to bypass the requirements of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your example does not have that intention, it is not a Wrapper within the context of the GPL FAQ entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might qualify under other definitions of the term Wrapper, but those definitions are not relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And GPL licenses are irrelevant to 4 lines of code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is relevant as soon as copyright protection applies to the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no lower limit in the lines of code you need to write before copyright protection applies, but a minimal creative effort must have been used to create the code. But the bar on that is pretty low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T11:57:40.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2022-04-13T13:47:20.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears that you want to help with the best intentions, but you don't help in the way the maintainers would want you to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to find out what the maintainers would like you to do and how, you need to get in touch with them. Find out where they communicate and how, and try to join the discussion. I can't help you with that, because every project has its own unique communication culture and I don't even know which project you are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you start to implement your solution to one of their problems, propose your solution to them on their preferred communication platform and find out if that solution is acceptable to them. When your solution gets rejected anyway, then contact the person who rejected it and ask them directly to elaborate on what you would need to change in order for them to accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it's frustrating to have to talk with everyone about every little fix. But software development is teamwork. When people don't communicate and everyone just does what &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; think is best, then the whole codebase will sooner or later become a mess of inconsistent code styles, conflicting architectural patterns, features which don't properly build upon each other and a general lack of clear direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should you fork the code and just do your own? Well, there is an old proverb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you start your fork, then you will notice that you are going to make really fast progress over the first couple days. But there is only so much you can do as a single person. You are going to run out of low-hanging fruits to pick, and start to face the really complicated and tedious problems which take much longer to solve. You won't have time to properly promote your fork, so many end-users will probably not know that it even exists. Development of the main version will move on, so you will have to merge changes from upstream, which will conflict with your own changes. The conflicts will be both on a technical and a conceptual level, because you and the upstream team didn't communicate. Soon you will wish for people to help you out. So you will have to take other people onto the project. And then you are going to notice that you run into the same tedious communication overhead you wanted to avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2022-04-13T14:19:59.363" LastActivityDate="2022-04-13T14:19:59.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12793" CreationDate="2022-04-18T00:02:51.247" Score="0" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;pandasgui allows commercial use under the MIT license but I noticed the library used includes PYQT5 which is under the GPL v3 licence how is that possible ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26811" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-21T12:32:43.337" LastActivityDate="2022-04-21T12:32:43.337" Title="How can i use pandasgui commercially if the pyqt library used is not free for commercial use?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|copyright|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12792" CreationDate="2022-04-18T08:06:13.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;PyQt5 is dual-licensed under the GPLv3 and under a proprietary commercial license. With dual-licensed software, you as a user get to choose which license conditions you want to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can choose to use PyQt5 at no charge under the GPLv3 conditions, or you can choose to buy a commercial license that allows you to create closed-source products using PyQt5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pandasgui has decided not to make the choice for you which PyQt5 license to use, but to license the pandasgui code in a way that is compatible with both license choices for PyQt5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The critique I have on pandasgui is that they could have mentioned this dependency on a (potentially) GPL-licensed package more clearly in their documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T08:06:13.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6777" CreationDate="2022-04-18T08:30:44.367" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conditions for CC-BY-SA in the current version 4.0 (but 3.0 is the same) are specified on &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt; . They state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you [...] build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The complicated term here is &amp;quot;contribution&amp;quot;. If you have a 200,000 lines commercial project and you include a 2,000 line CC-BY-SA library into it, is your big commercial project a &lt;em&gt;contribution&lt;/em&gt; to that library? Well, I would say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, and I go so far to say, that most people, including most lawyers and most judges, would answer &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; to that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;contribution&lt;/em&gt; is usually something, that people give with the intention to give and to improve a bigger piece of work. Both of that is not true for your library inside your bigger work. Yes, the 2,000 line CC-BY-SA library included in your 200,000 line work would clearly be a contribution to that work, &lt;em&gt;but not the other way round&lt;/em&gt;. Your big work will in most cases not be considered a contribution to that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a house and then you build a city, you would say, that the house contributed to the city, but you would not say, that the city contributed to the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if in the process of creating your work, you also improve on the library itself, that would usually be considered a contribution to the library. And then, you have to publish the improved library, even, if you use the whole work only for yourself, because you have build upon the library. Unlike LGPL, where you only need to publish source code of improved libraries, once you distribute a work containing that library, CC-BY-SA forces you to publish those works, that you contributed to, once you build anything (useful) out of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22429" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T08:30:44.367" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-18T10:37:38.533" Score="0" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been using mysqlclient package for MySQL DB connection in Django and recently realized mysqlclient is in GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it fine to use mysqlclient package in a private repo for a commercial product? What I understand is that it's fine to use LGPL libraries while GPL one is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26813" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-04-18T13:42:40.907" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T14:36:12.427" Title="How can I use mysqlclient for db connection in django for commercial application?" Tags="|gpl|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2022-04-18T19:20:18.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding on to Philipp's accepted answer above, I'd like to suggest that rather than see the objections as &amp;quot;frivolous&amp;quot; that you try to understand the reasons for them, and then work towards that goal. You're trying to be part of a team, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You gave some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think this should be fixed in a completely different way&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you wondered&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the fix works, is clear to understand and does not break anything, why would you rather live with that bug?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third option. You can redo the bug fix in the way that the maintainer requested it. Is there technical reason not to do it that way? If so, then explain your reasoning, because that can be valuable. If not, you can go ahead and do the fix in the way they've asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think this is superniche and we do not need this feature&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and you wondered&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;why do you keep this entry in Bugzilla if you do not even accept it already implemented?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a good question. Maybe they're not aware of it still being in Bugzilla. You could say &amp;quot;If this feature isn't going to be added, could you close the ticket? It's confusing to someone new like me.&amp;quot; Maybe you could add a note to the ticket &amp;quot;On 2022-04-18, MAINTAINERNAME noted in email that this feature should not be added.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think the error message you proposed is still difficult for the users to understand&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can ask how it might be improved, or what is difficult for the users? Explain that you want to help, and with some guidance on their intent, you could come up with something better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all these cases, it requires you as the prospective team member to assume that those running the project are competent and have good intentions. Assume that any differences in understanding are because of knowledge you don't yet have. Work to overcome that knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are projects out there run by people who don't know what they're doing, but that should be the conclusion of last resort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3745" LastActivityDate="2022-04-18T19:20:18.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12795" CreationDate="2022-04-19T14:36:12.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license effectively states that if GPL-licensed code is used in a product (either directly or pulled in through a library or package mechanism), then the whole product must comply with the terms and conditions of the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply said, those terms and conditions state that every &lt;em&gt;recipient of the product&lt;/em&gt; must be offered the source code and they must get the same modification and distribution rights as you have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the product does not get distributed (and in a workplace setting, that means not being distributed outside the company/legal entity that created the product), then you can do what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the product gets provided to others (for free or for a price), then you must do so under the terms and conditions of the GPL license, which means that you must offer access to your source code and you must allow your buyers to redistribute the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T14:36:12.427" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-19T19:26:26.667" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is simple: How should I shorten the text of GNU GPLv3 (674 lines) for adding it to the top of all the source files in a repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here is a piece of text added to the top of a source file in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/KDE/kdenlive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kdenlive repository&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA;    SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2017 Nicolas Carion&#xA;    SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-only OR LicenseRef-KDE-Accepted-GPL&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an appropriate format for writing such a piece of text for every source file? And is it necessary to add it to the files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26824" LastActivityDate="2022-04-19T19:26:26.667" Title="How to shorten the GPLv3 text" Tags="|gpl-3|github|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-04-19T19:46:31.933" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12800" CreationDate="2022-04-20T06:22:12.893" Score="6" ViewCount="2047" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3 license text&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;e) Provide Installation Information, &lt;strong&gt;but only if you would otherwise be&#xA;required to provide such information under section 6 of the GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;and only to the extent that such information is necessary to install&#xA;and execute a modified version of the Combined Work produced by&#xA;recombining or relinking the Application with a modified version of&#xA;the Linked Version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the &lt;strong&gt;bolded&lt;/strong&gt; portion mean? Does it mean that providing installation information is only required if licensed under the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a proprietary software links to LGPLv3-licensed library, it does not have to provide installation information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that LGPLv3 is not against tivoization, unless licensed under GPLv3 too (by viral effects)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Embedded device makers who use secure boot for security or safety reasons, usually avoid using any software licensed under GPLv3 or LGPLv3 or AGPLv3, in order to avoid legal issues related to secure boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-04-20T06:53:21.980" LastActivityDate="2022-04-20T07:26:40.977" Title="Is LGPLv3 against tivoization? Or only GPLv3?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12799" CreationDate="2022-04-20T07:26:40.977" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 license is an extension of the GPLv3 license that grants certain additional permissions (like using the code together with proprietary, undisclosed code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause 4e you quoted just reiterates that if you are in a situation where the base GPL license requires that you provide Installation Information, then the LGPL license also requires that you provide that Installation Information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation where Installation Information needs to be provided is when the software is conveyed in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-20T07:26:40.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1357" CreationDate="2022-04-20T10:55:10.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 2 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; states that the GPLv2 license applies to the whole. However, section 3 of the GPLv2 states that as a special exception, this does not apply to system libraries that come with the operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if a GPLv2 software is linked to and is dependent on a library that is Apache 2.0-licensed, then the combination of these would have to be licensed as a whole under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library itself, when used in this combination, would be licensed under the terms of both the Apache 2.0 License AND the GPLv2 &lt;strong&gt;simultaneously&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 License imposes patent-related terms and conditions (in sections 3 and 9) which the GPLv2 does not have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 of the GPLv2 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients'&#xA;exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, the Apache 2.0 License conflicts with GPLv2, because Apache 2.0 has additional terms and conditions on patent, while GPLv2 does not allow imposition of further restrictions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why a GPLv2-licensed software cannot be linked to a Apache 2.0-licensed library, unless the GPLv2-licensed software is licensed as &amp;quot;GPL version 2 or later&amp;quot;, in which case the combination can be relicensed under GPLv3. The Apache 2.0 License is compatible with GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL2) avoids this problem by allowing the licensee to relicense the whole software under GPLv2 (one of the Secondary Licenses defined in MPL2). This means that when the GPLv2 software is linked to a MPL2-licensed library, the combination or the whole would be licensed under GPLv2 alone and the terms of the MPL2 (including the patent-related terms) are no longer applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... this License permits You to additionally distribute such Covered&#xA;Software under the terms of such Secondary License(s), so that the&#xA;recipient of the Larger Work may, at their option, further distribute&#xA;the Covered Software under the terms of either this License or such&#xA;Secondary License(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LLVM project solved this problem by adding a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LLVM-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special exception&lt;/a&gt; to the Apache 2.0 License that waives conflicting terms and conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, if you combine or link compiled forms of this Software&#xA;with software that is licensed under the GPLv2 (&amp;quot;Combined Software&amp;quot;)&#xA;and if a court of competent jurisdiction determines that the patent&#xA;provision (Section 3), the indemnity provision (Section 9) or other&#xA;Section of the License conflicts with the conditions of the GPLv2, you&#xA;may retroactively and prospectively choose to deem waived or otherwise&#xA;exclude such Section(s) of the License, but only in their entirety and&#xA;only with respect to the Combined Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third solution is dual-licensing under Apache 2.0 and a GPLv2-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-04-22T08:08:38.423" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T08:08:38.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12804" CreationDate="2022-04-20T17:38:04.857" Score="2" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;h3&gt;My case:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My app is proprietary full-stack server app that will be distributed as closed source. I  want to package my app into an VM. The VM have Ubuntu installed which contains Linux (GPL v2 licensed). And there is also my app installed. So, my client can setup my app by just have a copy of the VM and run it easily. And it might be also comes with VirtualBox (GPL v2 licensed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL; DR:&lt;/strong&gt; My app will be closed source and distributed with copyleft OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this case counts as mere aggregation or derivative work? Does this violates the GPLv2 license? And also, what is the criteria that a case counts as mere aggregation or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22139" LastEditorUserId="22139" LastEditDate="2022-04-20T17:44:28.777" LastActivityDate="2022-04-21T07:56:39.727" Title="Using copyleft software (GPL v2) and distribute it with proprietary software" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|proprietary-code|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12803" CreationDate="2022-04-21T07:48:04.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is the criteria that a case counts as mere aggregation or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; gives you the formal answer here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. there is no &amp;quot;bright line&amp;quot; which you can point to and say that something one side of the line is aggregation and something the other side of the line is a combined work. It is something which can evolve with time, and can have different meanings in different jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, distributing a piece of software with an operating system is just about the clearest case possible of something being aggregation. All the components communicate only via &amp;quot;arms length&amp;quot; mechanisms with no deep knowledge of the internals of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, remember that if you distribute a VM image, you are still responsible for being in compliance with the licence of every single binary, both GPL and otherwise, contained in that VM image - e.g. if you give me a Linux VM image, you must also give me the option of receiving the exact source of the kernel image used, the exact source of every GPL utility installed on the filesystem and so on. Think carefully about how you are going to manage this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-04-21T07:56:39.727" LastActivityDate="2022-04-21T07:56:39.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12811" CreationDate="2022-04-21T08:00:43.850" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;A client asked me to write a WP plugin that is just for their website - it won't be on the repository. Basically it contains a form, place-able with a shortcode, and then sends the collected entry data to a third party private API - essentially nobody except my client has any use for the plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it mandatory to use the GPL, just because it is a plugin for one specific Wordpress-installation? Is it allowed to use a different license? My problem is, that the client pays for the development and has their customized set-up and doesn't want it to be open source. So is there a different license I could use? If yes which one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26844" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-08-17T08:44:05.443" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T08:44:05.443" Title="Non Wordpress-repository Plugin license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|plugins|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12809" CreationDate="2022-04-21T17:16:37.963" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is very similar to Canada Customs'  &amp;quot;form is protected A when completed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a LaTeX style file and template that is basically a fill-in-the-blanks form (specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://web2.acbl.org/documentLibrary/play/ConventionCard.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this form&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use it for my own cards, which are currently in the project (because the people I play with need to see them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to release the  under GPL v3, but I don't want deceitful people to change &amp;quot;my&amp;quot; cards and present them as evidence that I play something other than what I do (I'm happy to have them used as additional examples).  I assume that I can limit the license to the files in the source directory, and leave the output directory (tex and pdf) locked down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &amp;quot;create a card&amp;quot; is basically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copy the template (which I want to have open, to allow modifications or cleanup)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fill in the blanks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;uncomment the boxes that need to be checked&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;build.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this one is basic, but I can't find it on a search: do the .tex files that are &amp;quot;filled in templates' count as modified files under GPL license if released?  If so, then under the GPLv3, is there any way to say &amp;quot;you can't modify these tex files, build a new card and imply it's what I do&amp;quot;?  Obviously, a similar question applies to anyone else who uses this for their own cards - after all, they won't want me to change them and claim it was what they do, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21926" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T19:07:10.757" Title="GPL v3: Limiting publication of personalized examples/filled in templates" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12808" CreationDate="2022-04-21T19:05:08.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a bunch of issues here, not all of which are copyright or GPL specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do the .tex files that are &amp;quot;filled in templates' count as modified files under GPL license if released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say very much yes, they are clearly dependent on the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are the sole copyright holder of the original template &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;you &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; are completely free to ignore the GPL on that work&lt;/a&gt; and can release your filled in templates under any license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;under the GPLv3, is there any way to say &amp;quot;you can't modify these tex files, build a new card and imply it's what I do&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; the GPL specifically prohibits any further restrictions on the use of derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However: there may be other legal prohibitions against this, independent of copyright law, just as there may be legal prohibitions against me making a convention card completely independent of your template, putting your name on it and publishing it. However, that question is off-topic here but potentially on-topic at &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Law SE&lt;/a&gt; - the answer will almost certainly vary by jurisdiction though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-04-21T19:05:08.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12805" CreationDate="2022-04-22T07:16:07.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For this kind of code it may be useful to just license the code as GPL, pack it as a zip file and wait for the unlikely event of someone explicitly requesting the code. Most licenses (like GPL) don't require you to make access easy. If it is as customer specific as you say, there's nothing to hide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BUT (!)&#xA;Although it might be a fair solution for you, this method is much too often used by companies that just want to use free stuff and never contributing to the community. Open sourcing on paper but then complicating the access as much as possible is just really bad. Don't ever do this if your code contains anything meaningful that might be reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ALSO (!)&#xA;Releasing your code in an readily accessible repo comes with benefits. People will see your code and report potential flaws in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think about publishing it. Source code takes just a few bytes of storage in the cloud and even if just a single person finds something interesting, you may have saved them A LOT of effort. Remember the times when YOU found something obscure that you would never have thought to find on the internet ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18005" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T07:16:07.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12805" CreationDate="2022-04-22T07:46:03.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wordpress is distributed under GPLv2+, and I'm working on the assumption that Wordpress plugins are sufficiently tightly-integrated with the main program to constitute derivative works (more can be read about the FSF's position on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to go with GPLv3 for your plugin.  We discuss &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5573/458&quot;&gt;elsewhere on this site&lt;/a&gt; the much-clearer provision that GPLv3 makes for sharing covered code for the purposes of hosting and ongoing maintenance without having to do so under normal GPLv3 requirements.  So the client will be able to share it with both their web admin company, and any future maintainer, without having to &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-22T15:24:21.533" LastActivityDate="2022-04-22T15:24:21.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12813" CreationDate="2022-04-23T19:36:56.560" Score="4" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a Mac app that I'm planning to release on the Mac App Store. I would like to use a MIT library that contains a statically linked LGPL2.1 library. My understanding, is that in order to keep your application closed source, you must allow the user to replace the LGPL library in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, I have two questions regarding the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since the MIT library statically links to the LGPL library, would I also need make the MIT library replaceable? The MIT library complies to a single binary when built. I assume this would be the best solution, but I'm not sure if this is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would putting the MIT library in the application resources folder (as apposed to the app binary itself) be enough to allow the user to replace the library and satisfy the LGPL license? Basically the user could open the .app package and replace the library without having to modify the apps executable. Alternatively, the app could look in it's application resource folder for the library, and if the user put an alternative version there, load it. The app would then include information on how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would doing the above satisfy the LGPL license while also being able to be released on the App Store?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26854" LastActivityDate="2022-04-24T08:54:02.363" Title="Including a MIT library that contains a statically linked LGPL library within a Mac app" Tags="|licensing|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12812" CreationDate="2022-04-24T08:54:02.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you've correctly understood, the intent of the LGPL is that all recipients can modify and replace the LGPL-covered parts of the software. This typically either means linking the LGPL components dynamically, or providing object files or source code for your software so that recipients can re-link or re-compile your software with their modified LGPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your scenario seems slightly more complex because you only have an indirect dependency on the LGPL component via a library that is otherwise MIT-licensed. But instead of calling this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a MIT library that contains a statically linked LGPL2.1 library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would probably be better to view this as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a library that statically links MIT-covered and LGPL-2.1-covered components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the viewpoint of your entire application, you should effectively treat this entire library as LGPL-2.1 covered. Your idea to use dynamic linking to make it possible for the recipient to replace the entire library (including the MIT components) is therefore appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a viewpoint within this library that statically links the different components, you are only required to make it possible for the recipient to replace the LGPL-covered parts. However, given that the other parts are already Open Source as well, there doesn't seem to be any downside in providing the source code for the entire library and letting the recipient replace it entirely. This will likely be the simplest solution to achieve compliance, and will not raise additional security issues compared to just letting recipients replace the LGPL-covered parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of your question asks about how to let the user provide their modified library. The LGPL is technology neutral and does not prescribe a particular mechanism – any way that lets the recipient exercise their rights is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am not familiar with macOS development, and would expect your solutions to have different security implications. For example, loading executable code from a directory that is writeable by other processes would be a simple attack vector for malware. In contrast, modifying an .app might be impossible if there are write-protections, checksums, or app signatures involved. I am mentioning these concerns because your goal is not just to create software legally, but also to make it comply with the Apple App Store conditions (which are out of scope here). Without further constraints, I'd probably suggest that users directly modify the .app bundle as this seems conceptually simplest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-04-24T08:54:02.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12815" CreationDate="2022-04-24T11:03:27.893" Score="3" ViewCount="1063" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across articles that have been published under CC-BY, that I would like to translate into English to give them a wider audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll credit the original author and link to the original piece, obviously. However, can I sell commercially the translation that I create to English-language publishers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Edit: thank you, amon, kaya3 &amp;amp; planetmaker: much appreciated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26866" LastEditorUserId="26866" LastEditDate="2022-04-25T14:16:14.567" LastActivityDate="2022-04-25T14:16:14.567" Title="Can a piece of writing created under CC-BY be translated for commercial purposes?" Tags="|cc-by|writing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12814" CreationDate="2022-04-24T13:30:49.817" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can do this. In the following, I'm using CC-BY-4.0 terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license's definition of Adapted Material explicitly includes translations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are granted the right to produce and Share such Adapted Material.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This right is subject to conditions. However, the only condition of this license is to retain/provide Attribution to the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no conditions that would prevent commercial purposes (this is not the NC NonCommercial license variant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no conditions that would require you to keep the same license (this is not the SA ShareAlike license variant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This generally holds for all CC-BY license versions, though they might use slightly different terminology. Two caveats though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different license versions have slightly different attribution requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Different license versions impose different consequences when the license conditions are breached, possibly including immediate termination of the license without a chance to remedy the breach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some material is presented as being Creative Commons licensed without consent from the copyright holder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it would be good to make sure that the original articles were actually published under that license by that author, and that you are complying with the specific attribution requirements for the given version of the CC-BY license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-04-24T13:30:49.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12820" CreationDate="2022-04-25T13:41:45.327" Score="-1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Signal Mobile app for iOS&lt;/a&gt; for messaging is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL Version 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be permissible to implement some add-on library (some new authentication mechanism, say) under a different license (perhaps not even open source), and publish a modified version of the mobile app still that links against that library. In effect, the modified mobile app would contain the as software under a different license; but it would still honor GPL v3 as &amp;quot;container&amp;quot; (and it would have to do so under the rules of this license)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just wondering. I cannot think of a reason right now why such a combined scheme would not be permissible under the license terms of this mobile app in particular (and GPLv3 in general). Is there a general term for this kind of arrangement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt; Here is a more detailed description of a possible use case in reaction to a question that was raised as comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider my team has developed a new &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIDO2_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FIDO3&lt;/a&gt; library that uses novel &amp;quot;brainometric&amp;quot; sensors for authentication. For instance, when a user thinks the thought &amp;quot;Yes, I want to log in&amp;quot;, the FIDO3 library can reliably determine that the thought originated in the user's brain and was based on a voluntary decision. Obviously, the FIDO3 library has to do a lot of fancy signal processing of EEG data to make this happen, so this is stuff that I may not want to open-source yet, let alone under GPL v3. (So far the concrete example is a joke, of course, but I hope it makes the general point clearer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to ship a modified version of the Signal app that supports FIDO3 authentication. For instance, the modified version will have to come with some new display element that says &amp;quot;Please think the following to log in ...&amp;quot;. My understanding is that the code for this new app has to remain as open source and under GPL v3. So presumably there would be a project &lt;code&gt;rookie099/Signal-iOS&lt;/code&gt; on GitHub where one could e.g. &lt;code&gt;grep &amp;quot;Please think&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; without obstacles. The code in that project would also have to call out to and link (in some manner) with the FIDO3 library, in order for the modified app to function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question with respect to this specific example is: granted that the code for the modified version of the Signal app remains under GPL v3, can it call out (link against) the FIDO3 library even if that one remains under a different license (and is perhaps not even published as open source.) So if it does, can I still publish the modified app? I suspect the answer will be yes, because the Signal app presumably already relies on a whole range of libraries with different licensing schemes (including libraries belonging iOS itself.) But then I don't know for sure, nor do I know the right &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; to describe this situation in IT-legal terms, hence this question. (Clear enough now?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26873" LastEditorUserId="26873" LastEditDate="2022-04-26T06:37:44.783" LastActivityDate="2022-04-28T09:07:17.533" Title="Extend GPL v3 software with library under other license" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-04-25T19:53:32.367" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is another try of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12808/gpl-v3-limiting-publication-of-personalized-examples-filled-in-templates&quot;&gt;my previous question&lt;/a&gt;.  Still trying to find a license that will be open source, but protect the end documents (which are personal) from the templates (which are blank).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a LaTeX package that consists of a .sty file (basically, a huge form drawing) and a template file (which is all the blanks to be filled in and all the checkboxes to potentially check) - that, obviously, requires the sty file to build, but is separate from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like the style file to be under CC-BY-SA or equivalent - you can change it, but if you release it, you make it clear what's yours and what's mine, and you allow anyone else to go from there); but filled-in templates need to be owned and controlled by their creators (Blank #1 is &amp;quot;your names&amp;quot;; they must be protected from others misrepresenting what's on the form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I plan on releasing the template file as CC-BY (no -SA), to achieve this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm actually planning on releasing my filled-in forms as CC-BY-NC-ND - I don't care if you see them (in fact, the whole point behind filling in the forms is for others to know what my partner and I do), but you don't get to change them and still claim they're mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LaTeX is strange, as it isn't really source code in the traditional sense (it's a &amp;quot;document preparation language&amp;quot;), and the produced documents aren't really &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot;, so this kind of falls through the cracks.  But is this pairing going to work, and is it going to do what I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21926" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T08:24:41.410" Title="Using CC-BY-SA style file with a CC-BY template (to allow filled-in-templates to be private)" Tags="|cc-by-sa|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12819" CreationDate="2022-04-26T03:24:45.703" Score="13" ViewCount="5486" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an MIT-licensed repository which has been copied entirely, just replacing the author's name. I've heard that MIT takes away most copyright and permits free use, but if anyone can copy code and even just replace my name with theirs, what is the point of the MIT License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I submit a DMCA takedown notice (to GitHub) in my case? Do I even need a lawyer for this? As a student, I can't afford to and I cannot even allow such copying. This discourages open source developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26875" LastEditorUserId="7343" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T13:00:31.760" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T13:00:31.760" Title="If my repository uses a MIT license, can I submit a DMCA takedown for someone who copied it?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|dmca|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12818" CreationDate="2022-04-26T07:32:33.587" Score="49" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard that MIT takes away most copyright&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is absolutely not correct; the MIT License (and all other open source licenses) rely on copyright law to be effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and permits free use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT License permits use only within the conditions specified in the license. While that means you can do it without spending money, it is inaccurate to describe it as &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; (particularly within the open source community where &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; is an overloaded term).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to the point in hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a MIT licensed repository which is entirely copied just replacing the author name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what did they do? The requirement in the MIT License is not very long (&amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;). Therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they replaced your name &lt;em&gt;specifically in the copyright notice&lt;/em&gt;, then they are in violation of the license and you would be able to submit a claim against them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they replaced your name anywhere else (e.g. there was a bit of text in the program which says &amp;quot;This software was written by the great programmer user18915229&amp;quot; and they changed it to &amp;quot;This software was written by the great programmer SomeOtherPerson&amp;quot;), that is absolutely fine - at least legally. Ethically it's questionable, but that's out of scope here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T07:32:33.587" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12816" CreationDate="2022-04-26T08:05:11.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question with respect to this specific example is: granted that the code for the modified version of the Signal app remains under GPL v3, can it call out (link against) the FIDO3 library even if that one remains under a different license (and is perhaps not even published as open source.) So if it does, can I still publish the modified app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license requires that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; code in the application is made available under the GPL or a compatible open-source license. The only exception is the code that comes with the operating system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your FIDO3 library is not part of iOS, the combination of the closed-source FIDO3 library and the GPL license Signal application violates the requirements of the GPL license and cannot be legally distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-04-26T08:05:11.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12816" CreationDate="2022-04-27T10:39:27.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can distribute derivative works of the Signal app as long as they are under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including your version that includes a copy of FIDO3_Brainometry. You can distribute that app under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can't distribute it under any other license, except AGPLv3 as mentioned in section 13 of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you'd need the permission of the authors of FIDO3_Brainometry as well, not just the permission of the authors of the Signal app. If it's closed-source, that's the same as saying they don't give you permission to distribute it as GPLv3. So they can sue you for copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyright to FIDO3_Brainometry, then of course you already have permission. You still have to use GPLv3 or AGPLv3 so as not to infringe the copyright of the Signal app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must distribute your derived work under the GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c) &lt;strong&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way&lt;/strong&gt;, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastEditorUserId="483" LastEditDate="2022-04-28T09:07:17.533" LastActivityDate="2022-04-28T09:07:17.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12818" CreationDate="2022-04-28T17:08:51.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned earlier, I would strongly suggest that you reach out to the offending party. If they literally took credit for your work and have been &amp;quot;caught red-handed&amp;quot;, they are likely to remedy the problem quickly and without you needing to resort to legal remedies. I would suggest creating an issue in the offending github repository and perhaps even a PR correcting the attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter has the advantage of creating a record or your requested changes and could help you build a copywrite claim if necessary. It also exposes the potential plagiarism to the community in which the offending code is being used. In other words, start small and escalate as necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26905" LastActivityDate="2022-04-28T17:08:51.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12817" CreationDate="2022-04-30T08:43:19.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically you can look at the form (template, structure and layout) and the form data (which users enter into the form) as 2 separate things and you can assign different licenses to each part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not familiar with LaTeX .sty files, so I explain this based on the PDF format, which I know much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The PDF Format (ISO 32000) is a container format which incorporates many different parts in one document: headers and metadata, text w/ markup and graphics (in multiple layers), fonts, form structure and form data, digital signatures, etc. All of that can be in one PDF file, but no reasonable person would assume that if you publish a PDF file with (for example) a CC-0 license this same license also necessarily covers the fonts included in the PDF file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In PDFs the form data can be stored in the AcroForms or XFA standard (XFA is depreciated), and can be kept in separate files or within the same container. (B.t.w.: When you open a Microsoft office document (e.g. docx) with a compression utility like 7zip you will see that this is also a container format with a clear folder structure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, we have established that a form (for example in PDF format) is not a homogeneous file, but instead it is a container with many different parts inside which might have different licenses (for example you can have CC-BY-SA for the template and anything else for the data filled in to the form).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the form data clearly references (must reference) the structure of the form itself, and therefore would be considered a derivative work, the author of the form is free to state that the form data remains property of the person filling in the form. This would be a statement defining an exception from the share-alike requirement of the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new situation comes as soon as the step of printing is involved, because the content structure in the container is completely flattened by this process (flat as ink on paper). But you still can have the separation between the template and the filled in data by writing (printable) your copyright and license statement in the footer of the form itself, so it is preserved even when it is printed, scanned or otherwise processed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A side note: when you work with forms and have people fill in personal data, which you then collect, you must comply with the applicable privacy laws and you might need to mention your privacy policy somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-05-02T08:24:41.410" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T08:24:41.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12827" CreationDate="2022-04-30T08:46:47.387" Score="7" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can OS project published on Github be dual licensed for AGPL and EUPL 1.2?&#xA;If so, what technically needs to be done for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14862" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-04-30T11:34:28.300" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T15:39:10.997" Title="Dual licensing AGPL 3.0/EUPL 1.2" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|eupl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12826" CreationDate="2022-04-30T09:18:43.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;So long as you are the sole copyright holder (or have the consent of all copyright holders), you can license code under any combination of licenses you like, including mutually incompatible ones (e.g. a closed source license and the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to do this, you should just follow whatever the instructions are in each license - e.g. adding the appropriate notice into every source file for the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-04-30T13:10:22.227" LastActivityDate="2022-04-30T13:10:22.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-01T20:58:12.077" Score="1" ViewCount="3391" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I code out a very small python program (like no more than five hundred lines of code): I download relevant packages about PyQt5, opencv, numpy, math and matplotlib at anaconda using update commands. In the code, I import PyQt5 them to code out some interface and import other libraries to do some very basic commands (i.e. I do not make changes to the source code.) At the end of the day, I use PyInstaller to convert everything I coded to exe to sell it to someone else for a price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to keep everything legal, do I need any kind of license for what I am doing? If I do need license, which one(s) do I need? I am kind of lost in all kinds of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26925" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-05-02T14:53:41.053" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T16:03:18.153" Title="PyQt5 Commercial License" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|commercial|python|psf|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12830" CreationDate="2022-05-01T22:08:42.163" Score="5" ViewCount="910" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to modify an existing IETF RFC (Request for Comments) Standard and I was wondering what license they would fall under. I assume they are under something similar to the Unlicense but I want to be 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how would I properly attribute the RFC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26420" LastEditorUserId="26420" LastEditDate="2022-05-01T23:13:49.550" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T07:25:00.973" Title="What license do IETF RFC standards use?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12829" CreationDate="2022-05-02T07:25:00.973" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume they are under something similar to the Unlicense but I want to be 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry, but you are 100% wrong if nothing else because &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 1&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1969, &lt;em&gt;41 years&lt;/em&gt; before the Unilicense was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For RFCs published after 2008 or so (I can't find the exact date), RFCs are licensed with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://trustee.ietf.org/documents/trust-legal-provisions/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IETF Trust Legal Provisions&lt;/a&gt; which is definitively not an open source license - it allows unmodified distribution and quoting but not modification. This is often preferred for standards documents as you don't want randoms publishing &amp;quot;Version 2&amp;quot; of your standards document and labelling it &amp;quot;Official&amp;quot;. More details on the reasoning behind the license are in &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5377&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 5377&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5378&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RFC 5378&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RFCs published before 2008 are under an ambiguous license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T07:25:00.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12828" CreationDate="2022-05-02T14:52:16.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licenses for the packages you mentioned (I am assuming you are using always the latest available version and PyQt5 will be used under the free license) in the question are the Apache License, the PSF License and GPLv3. The one with the strongest restrictions appears to be GPLv3, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the other licenses are compatible with it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; you will have to put your entire software under the GPLv3 license, which means that among a few other things you will have to provide the complete source code to the recipients/customers of your executable. Please read the entire license language to be sure that you comply with all of the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-05-02T15:16:09.123" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T15:16:09.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12826" CreationDate="2022-05-02T15:39:10.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed one case where, as the original or sole copyright holder, dual licensing EUPL / AGPL makes sense, since the two licenses are both copyleft and similar on the key point of covering &amp;quot;network distribution&amp;quot; or SaaS. The EUPL has more compatibilities with other licenses and - because under EU law - has no &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; effect in case of linking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T15:39:10.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12828" CreationDate="2022-05-02T16:03:18.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I want to keep everything legal, do I need any kind of license for what I am doing? If I do need license, which one(s) do I need?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, to create and distribute a program that uses/is based upon work of others you need to have a copyright license from those others that allows you to do those things. Such a copyright license always has some strings attached to it, ranging from having to give attribution to the persons whose work you used to having to make your work open-source or having to pay money for the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PyQt5 comes with two licensing options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPLv3, which costs no money but requires that you distribute your software under the same terms. Those terms include that recipients are allowed to make changes and to redistribute the software (with or without changes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercial licenses, which do cost money but in return allow you to keep your own code private&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other packages you mentioned are available under permissive open-source licenses, that don't put restrictions on the licenses you can choose for your own code. They mainly require that you include a copy of the license with your software or documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-05-02T16:03:18.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-03T08:40:11.467" Score="6" ViewCount="1552" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using a product whose code is covered by GPL2. All fine except that when a major update is released, it relies on database changes which are effected by a script (sometimes hundreds of lines long) which is not included in the GitHub repository. The authors are only willing to provide this script to those who subscribe to their extended support/partnership package. Are they entitled to apply this restriction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26934" LastActivityDate="2022-05-03T14:26:22.863" Title="Is database migration script covered by GPL?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12835" CreationDate="2022-05-03T10:40:58.140" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You receive the binary and the code under GPL. So you have the source code for the software you use and are allowed to make whatever modifications you desire. The license does not make any comment on updates whatsoever; in particular there is no reference that you are entitled for easy upgrades from one version to the next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A script to faciliate upgrade from one version to another, working on a database, is in principle just an external tool to allow you to upgrade your data structure for digestion from one version of your software to another. It's nothing special. It could also just be a migration script from one software to another completely unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing such migration tool only needs knowledge of the public API for the database - so it's usually fine to consider it not a derivative of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, even if that were not true, one would have to look at the copyright ownership: If the company or person releasing the programme is the sole copyright holder, they are not bound by the license themselves and can choose to release any part under whatever license they choose (or not at all). If they are not - the previous paragraphs apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-05-03T14:26:22.863" LastActivityDate="2022-05-03T14:26:22.863" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12835" CreationDate="2022-05-03T13:53:14.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The approach you describe in your question very much looks like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'freemium' business case&lt;/a&gt;. You get something for free, but if you want to use all features (in your case: migration of data from one version to the next) you need to pay a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This business model is usually OK, and if it is the case (an assumption, you seem to indicate this) that the authors of the free database and of the script are the same individuals (copyright holders), then there is not even the question about code overlaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the authors are OK to do this, I cannot see any GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-05-03T13:53:14.777" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-03T21:59:08.753" Score="5" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following Github Repo that makes it possible to build your own Yubikey with an Arduino Leonardo device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pagong/arduino-yksim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/pagong/arduino-yksim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty cool.&#xA;However I am wondering if using this is legal at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YubiCo is a company and they sell sticks with the YubiKey OTP feature. The verification process happens through their servers. Somehow I can't quite imagine that the company YubiCo tolerates that their processes and products could be easily replaced by open source products?&#xA;Maybe they have any patents or utility models? And I was not able to find any licensing information which makes sense since official firmware seems to be closed source. So I guess it makes sense that no licensing information is available since the yksim project is a reverse engineered thing?!&#xA;But I'll admit quite frankly: I have no idea of all this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would also like to use this library and possibly also for my customer projects, but I need to know whether this is really allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope someone can help me here and I know that the internet is no source for a 100% sure legal advice. But maybe someone has a clue or a hint for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned the the library it based on an Open Source lib that was published by Yubico itself.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Yubico/yubico-c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Yubico/yubico-c&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26939" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-06-19T19:38:05.233" LastActivityDate="2022-06-19T19:38:05.233" Title="Is it legal to &quot;simulate&quot; Yubikey OTP authentication with an Arduino in own product?" Tags="|law|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12840" CreationDate="2022-05-03T22:11:32.890" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the author of a codebase, I understand that I have the right to decide how to license my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I write a library of code and release it under the pure GPL, that means that anyone else using my library of code must release their entire project under the GPL (the LGPL would prevent that requirement, but for this argument I'm using the normal GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I then use that same library of code in a &lt;em&gt;closed-source, proprietary&lt;/em&gt; program that I am selling commercially? Naturally, I would not include any mention of the fact that the code is otherwise released under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, for anyone else, doing that would be against the GPL, but since it's &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; code, can I legally do it? My immediate assumption would be yes, since it's my own code, but would like to hear if there's any comments on that scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar example that I believe I've actually seen done in practice is &amp;quot;community vs. commercial&amp;quot; versions of the same program, with the community version being released as open source and the commercial version being proprietary. However I can't immediately say I've seen this in a situation where the community version is &lt;em&gt;GPL&lt;/em&gt; licensed. (It's usually MIT or something similar, which already permits use in closed-source proprietary software.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastActivityDate="2022-05-04T07:27:12.753" Title="Can you dual-license your own code, e.g. release a library as strict GPL (not LGPL), but then use that library in your own proprietary program?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-05-06T13:00:46.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12839" CreationDate="2022-05-04T07:27:12.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the only relevant copyright holder then yes you can use your code for both a GPL release and as part of your proprietary project. However, if anyone else contributes to your GPL release and you accept their additions with GPL duties on them, then you mustn't use any of this combined code in a proprietary application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be worked around by requiring copyright assignment to you, which allows you to wield sole copyright over things you didn't write yourself. Such assignment is considered a more severe undertaking than simply releasing code under some particular usage conditions. For example, the FSF does ask for copyright assignment for some of its GNU projects, and they have some forms prepared which you and your employer are supposed to print out, sign, and send them by post. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE-110.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's an example&lt;/a&gt; of such forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a GPL project actually require contributions to have their copyright assigned to you? I suppose you could require that anyone who doesn't want to assign copyright of contributions to you must fork the project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and yes. You are not required to accept any contributions if you don't like or don't want them, whatever the reason. And yes, people can fork your GPL releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(can you legally make it part of the pull-request process, e.g. &amp;quot;by submitting a pull request you hereby transfer all rights to the code to the copyright holder&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreeing to release something under the license already used by the project, especially if it is a copyleft license, is a much less severe action than assigning copyright. You probably would want something in writing at least, that specifically lists the assignment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you can ask contributors to license their additions to you under more permissive usage conditions or even to release them to the public domain. Such contributions could be included in your proprietary release too (honoring all the attribution requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then you would have no rights to use the forked versions in your proprietary project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the additions in a fork are available to you only under the GPL then, yes, you are not allowed to use them in your proprietary project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16767" LastActivityDate="2022-05-04T07:27:12.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12838" CreationDate="2022-05-04T10:58:21.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;IANAL so I obviously can't give you a legal answer, but this sort of thing would seem to fall under reverse engineering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's possible to observe the behavior of a product and then copy that behavior simply from the observations alone, it'd be pretty hard (but definitely not impossible - well-funded lawyers have plenty of ways to make someone's life hell) to argue that you are doing anything wrong. This is exactly why we have the PC market today - we can thank Compaq for their reverse engineering efforts on the IBM PC and their legal win regarding the practice, which basically set the stage for the entire modern PC industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if your product depends on the original product - i.e. if you are accessing the servers to duplicate the functionality - you might have a licensing issue, because it's likely the original product's license probably included language about when and how you may access the servers. (In the Compaq case, it might be compared to designing a clone PC and then installing legitimately acquired IBM ROM chips - definitely less illegal than blatant copyright infringement, but there could still be a license preventing the ROM from being used outside a genuine IBM PC system, similar to how it's against the license to install macOS on a Hackintosh PC.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone had developed a Yubikey clone that was 100% interoperable and indistinguishable from Yubikey (i.e. it &amp;quot;just worked&amp;quot; with anything designed for Yubikey authentication) and &lt;em&gt;sold it commercially&lt;/em&gt; I doubt that entity could get away with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of examples of open-source libraries that copy functionality from commercial products that &amp;quot;get away with it&amp;quot; simply on the basis that it's pretty difficult to strike down an open-source project in its entirety, but that also doesn't make it &amp;quot;legal&amp;quot;. There's also the issue of jurisdiction - just because a piece of code is illegal in one place doesn't make it illegal everywhere. A good example is the DeCSS code - it's open source, but there's plenty of legal issues surrounding its use, to the point where most popular Linux distros require you to jump through a couple hoops to get it installed, and without it you can't even play a DVD on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Yubikey, as others have suggested it looks like it's largely built on open standards, so writing code to simulate a Yubikey is likely already easy to do in the first place. I'd imagine the biggest issue would be if that code accesses their servers in some way that is against an acceptable use policy, but even then that's just a risk you choose whether you want to take or not - even an AUP (or parts of it) could be deemed unenforceable or unlawful, but until it's challenged you wouldn't know. Plenty of very popular projects (e.g. Youtube-DL/yt-dlp) access servers in a manner against the AUP, and it's up to the server host to enforce the AUP, but even lack of enforcement does not imply legality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately it's up to you to decide if using some code or some project is OK with you. If you're in a position where legal issues are an actual concern, the only way to deal with it is to consult with a lawyer who specializes in these sorts of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastActivityDate="2022-05-04T10:58:21.213" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2022-05-04T11:13:24.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding on to the above: A GPL project is still protected under copyright, and the &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; version is still under the control of the copyright holder(s). They still have the right to include or reject any contributions to the master codebase they choose to, for whatever reasons they want. Rejecting someone's code because &amp;quot;I just don't like you&amp;quot; is still a valid reason, albeit a spiteful one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side note: I think there might be some issues if you're blatantly being racist/homophobic/etc. in your contribution acceptance, but as long as you haven't specified such discrimination in your license, the only real consequence for that behavior is likely to be bad will for the project and maybe having code hosting providers remove you for ToS or something.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does suck to get rejected especially when you're trying to contribute to the open source community, and especially when you're doing it for free, but that's still the nature of open-source. As others have said, you can either engage with the project owners to see if you can argue your case or work within their boundaries, or you can move on to other projects - there's thousands of projects to contribute to, and if you're feeling negatively towards a project there's no need to stick with it - as you said, you can always walk away at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your contributions are extremely significant, a fork might be worth it. You can still pull in upstream changes (you should, in fact, lest your fork quickly become irrelevant and out of date), but odds are if it's a very major project your fork will get little attention unless it's &lt;em&gt;radically&lt;/em&gt; better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastActivityDate="2022-05-04T11:13:24.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12844" CreationDate="2022-05-05T20:30:38.440" Score="1" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to write commercial, closed-source applications using &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/abpframework/abp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abp.io&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that abp.io is licensed as LGPL, LGPL is primarily seen as a license for libraries, and abp.io is a framework, not a library - does that mean that any code I write on abp.io has to be licensed as LGPL and made available to the public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26959" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Carpenter" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T10:01:46.337" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T10:01:46.337" Title="What is the impact of the LGPL license on building solutions using abp.io?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12843" CreationDate="2022-05-06T07:24:17.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the LGPL license is often used for libraries, the license text/conditions do not in any way restrict the license to only libraries. It is even possible to license an application under the LGPL license, even though in that case the additional permissions compared to the GPL license are pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know abp.io so I can't judge the technical feasibility (which depends on how invasive a framework is into your code), but license wise you can create a closed-source application using abp.io, as long as the recipients of the application have the right and possibility to replace abp.io with a different, compatible, version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T07:24:17.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-06T08:14:17.157" Score="3" ViewCount="2578" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a company in which I'm developing a Qt application. So when I install Qt using the online installer it asks me to mark a checkbox saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an individual person not using Qt for any company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://computerscience.chemeketa.edu/guides/qtcreator-setup/oslicense.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://computerscience.chemeketa.edu/guides/qtcreator-setup/oslicense.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is kinda uncomfortable to me. I have the impression I'm doing something wrong here. So what's the correct approach to use Qt while working for a company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's the correct approach to use Qt for free? Should I avoid using the online installer (to avoid the checkbox)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I get Qt source code and build it? Should I install using vcpkg?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11499" LastEditorUserId="11499" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T11:06:24.297" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T12:06:31.083" Title="Can Qt be used in company project?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12845" CreationDate="2022-05-06T08:48:01.423" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Qt is a whole ecosystem which comes with development tools, libraries, frameworks which do not all use the same license options. Often they offer two: an open source license under GPL or LGPL, and a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, of course you can use Qt in a company project. All you have to do is abide by the license you choose. Thus you have to make a choice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;use Qt under (usually) GPL royalty-free, and accept that you can only distribute your software under GPL, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;purchase a proprietary license which allows you to distribute your software under whatever license you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either case: Check the licenses of the individual modules you plan to use (many are available under GPL, some LGPL, maybe there are a few different ones; iirc a proprietary license is available for each). And then make an informed decision. Choose to buy a proprietary license if you are not comfortable to release your Qt-based software under terms of the GPL. The decision process is not different whether you work privately on the software or in a company - yet maybe it impacts the price of the proprietary license option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check the license options for each feature of Qt in an overview: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/product/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/product/features&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT to add and IANAL: Thus if you want it free-of-charge, it depends:&#xA;Your software likely must also remain open source, thus GPL-licensed when developing with Qt. Additionally and especially in the development tool section there then will be a few modules which you cannot use as they have no open source license. However all base packages of the framework seem to be under LGPL. So with some care one might be able to produce a binary which only makes use of LGPL-licensed libraries and thus could be licensed proprietarily provided you abide by the LGPL requirements, especially to allow replacement of those linked libraries to your customers by one of their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T12:06:31.083" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T12:06:31.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-06T17:14:53.657" Score="0" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions about Magick.NET license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As the title says, I'm making apps that use the Magick.NET library. Since Magick.NET is under the Apache 2 license, I wonder if I have to append Apache 2 license to my apps directly or can I have it on my website and link to it in my app?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since Magick.NET originates from ImageMagick, Should I add ImageMagick license to my apps? I don't use ImageMagick, just only Magick.NET.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: My apps are commercial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26957" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-05-06T18:08:49.837" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T18:18:41.993" Title="I'm using Magick.NET in my apps, should I append license to my app directly or can I link it through my website?" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12847" CreationDate="2022-05-06T18:18:41.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt; is quite wordy, but Section 4(a) is honestly very clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means &amp;quot;give them a copy of the license&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;link to the license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to ImageMagick, if you are distributing ImageMagick itself, you must comply with its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-05-06T18:18:41.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-07T00:02:55.057" Score="2" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/product/features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt Modules and Tools for Designers and Developers&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;if I choose LGPL then under Development Tools I see QtCreator is disabled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL v3: With LGPLv3 license option you can use the essential libraries and some add-on libraries of Qt. LGPLv3 allows for keeping your application source code closed as long as all the requirements of LGPLv3 are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I conclude I'm allowed to use QtCreator while working for a company, if I'm using LGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping the application source code closed is mandatory in the project I'm working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an employee of the company. AFAIK company wants to sell the resulting software product, keeping application source code closed. I'm simply linking to the Qt libraries, not modifying them and recompiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11499" LastEditorUserId="11499" LastEditDate="2022-05-08T04:40:10.263" LastActivityDate="2022-05-09T13:09:14.530" Title="Am I allowed to use QtCreator while working for a company, if I'm using LGPL?" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-07T00:46:13.007" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a company where I'm developing an application based on a number of Qt components. We want o keep application source code closed and use Qt for free, I understand that means use Qt under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now is time to distribute our application (to other legal entities). Can I pack it with Qt Installer framework?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11499" LastActivityDate="2022-05-07T00:46:13.007" Title="Qt Installer Framework to distribute closed source project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2022-05-07T13:22:32.923" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2022-05-08T23:52:05.903" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Indeed, as observed above, if you add effects to the song (the effects would make no sense if the song wouldn't exist), you're creating a derivative work.&#xA;You don't need to create a separate medium for it to be counted as a derivative; a mere reproduction would suffice (otherwise, everyone would be allowed to cover any song since, when you're playing live, you're not creating a new medium).&#xA;As a test, a derivative work may be copyrighted (when legally allowed by a license, of course), thus, if you think your work has enough creative input to be considered a new piece of art, it's a derivative, and if the original work was non-derivative, it's an illegal derivative.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for the loop -- which was the main reason I landed here --, I still have my doubts... Since you have no creative intention to create a new art object, I wouldn't consider it a derivative -- you can't copyright a loop --, but the license seems ambiguous and who knows what a judge would decide... And there's the matter with the adaptation... I consider it two different things, but the license treats ND as prohibiting adaptations and considers synching adaptation... But what is synching? As noted above, if you just start the movie with the audio and do nothing else, is it adaptation? One may say it's not because you didn't do anything else further, but what if this is exactly what you wanted to synch? What if you edited the movie in order to synch with the song that was left exactly as it was released?&#xA;So, I think this is one of the cases that unless see bring actual judicial decisions related to the matter in hand, we'll be just speculating...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: upon further reflection, we have also to consider the scope of the meaning of derivative/adaptation. If you consider derivative only the same artistic form, a looped song would not, obviously, be a derivative song, but if you consider the other art form as a whole -- for instance, a game --, since the loop was integrated into it, the game becomes a derivative: it was in part derived from the song. Thus, upon this interpretation, a song released under a ND license forbids its use in any derivative art form, including loops integrated in other media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26974" LastEditorUserId="26974" LastEditDate="2022-05-09T01:15:00.110" LastActivityDate="2022-05-09T01:15:00.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12849" CreationDate="2022-05-09T13:09:14.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering only free licences, the core Qt libraries are available under LGPLv3.  You can link those into a binary which is distributed under a proprietary licence, though there are some fairly-onerous conditions that we detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/search?q=LGPL%20link&quot;&gt;other posts&lt;/a&gt; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;QtCreator is only distributed under GPLv3, but it's an IDE, and it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5478/458&quot;&gt;generally understood&lt;/a&gt; that the licence on a piece of software doesn't extend to covering its output.  Were that to hold in this case, your use of QtCreator to make your binary would have no licence implications for the binary.  But some programming tools copy parts of themselves into their outputs, and in those cases, if there are no &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4270/458&quot;&gt;specific exemptions&lt;/a&gt; in the IDE's licence, a GPLv3 IDE would require a GPLv3 binary.  You will need to determine if this affects QtCreator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative is to pay Qt for the commercial licence which allows you to do what you want without having to worry about this whole issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-05-09T13:09:14.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12858" CreationDate="2022-05-10T10:45:41.517" Score="12" ViewCount="3015" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working in the healthcare reimbursement (&amp;quot;mutuelle&amp;quot;) in belgium and I wrote a network application that use an AGPL package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this application will be just used internally to provide the possibility to the insured peapol to digitally sign some forms in our agencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in other word, the software will not be be sold but it will be used to achieve our business cases if I can say like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a little bit lost with the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have I to do exactly to be in order legally?  Is our situation considered like a commercial usage ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26979" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-05-10T12:00:30.967" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T07:14:22.177" Title="AGPL library usage for an internal software" Tags="|agpl-3.0|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12857" CreationDate="2022-05-10T12:15:47.890" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the architecture of your software. If the AGPL-licensed package is just used in an back-end application on a server, and not exposed to 3rd party interaction (through a proxy or not does not matter), then this back-end application can be considered as 'internal use' and you will not have to provide the source code. You mentioned 'internal use only' but it is unclear from your description which criterion you chose to determine that. If the AGPL-licensed package is running on the frontend of a customer-facing server, then you would be required to provide the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends also on the legal structure of your 'agencies'. If the agencies are wholy-owned subsidiaries of the insurance, then the interaction of their PCs with the server-application can be considered internal use, and thus you won't have to provide the source code. That is true even if consumers, who come to the agency's office, interact with the agency's PC to for example sign a form. It would be different, however, if the agencies are not owned by the insurance, independent legal entities, in this case, if the AGPL-licensed app is running on the frontend of a server and the agency is interacting with that, then you would have to provide the source code to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume your insurance has a law department. They will anyhow want to know if you are using strong-copyleft software. Consult them. And consult your company's OSS Policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;W.r.t. the question if AGPL requires the delivery of source code to the users (especially company-internal users), 2 things have to be considered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) The Preamble of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL v3.0&lt;/a&gt; emphasizes the word ‘public’ in the sentence “&lt;em&gt;Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.&lt;/em&gt;” I believe that the intention is that running AGPL-licensed software on a company intranet should have the same effect as running the same software on an employee’s computer. And there it would clearly be considered as ‘Internal Distribution’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) The other item is that §13 only refers to ‘modified versions’. If the AGPL-licensed software runs without modifications (and without combining/linking it with other code) there is no need to offer the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T07:14:22.177" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T07:14:22.177" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-10T15:42:03.520" Score="3" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my enterprise project I use as a transitive dependency&#xA;&lt;code&gt;io.github.swagger2markup:markup-document-builder:1.1.2&lt;/code&gt; which has an &lt;strong&gt;Apache-2.0&lt;/strong&gt; License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the problem is one of its transitive dependencies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nl.jworks.markdown_to_asciidoc:markdown_to_asciidoc:1.1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;has an unknown license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&#xA;Can I use it in an enterprise project? Is it Apache 2.0 or is this its category (Markdown) and the license is unknown? And how to find the real license of that library? I was not able to find any GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the code, the Markdown to ASCII functionality is not used so I can just remove it from the classpath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S1TKT.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S1TKT.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.swagger2markup/markup-document-builder/1.1.2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.swagger2markup/markup-document-builder/1.1.2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Xelian" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-05-24T06:52:04.920" LastActivityDate="2022-05-24T06:52:04.920" Title="Find a library license markdown_to_asciidoc?" Tags="|java|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2022-05-11T06:16:06.543" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] the problem is one of its transitive dependencies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;nl.jworks.markdown_to_asciidoc:markdown_to_asciidoc:1.1&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is with unknown license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that the license is not known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use it in an enterprise project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use it as long as you have a license that allows you to do, and you comply with the terms of the license. Since you don't know what the license is, I doubt that is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this has nothing to do with whether or not the project is an &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot; project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it with Apache 2.0 or this is its category (Markdown) and the license is unknown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand. First you say the license is unknown, then you ask whether the license is unknown? Yes, the license is unknown, that is the whole premise of your question in the first place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how to find the real license of that library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ask the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not able to find any github repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement for a copyright holder to publish a GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can do some detective work. On the Java platform, package names are built using a convention where you take the reverse DNS name of a domain that is under your control. So, it stands to reason that &lt;code&gt;jworks.nl&lt;/code&gt; must be a domain which is under the control of the author (although not necessarily the copyright holder) of the package in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to WHOIS data, that domain is currently still registered. However, the registry data is not very useful because the domain was obtained through a domain reseller and thus the contact information is that of the reseller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is actually a webserver running and serving a site at &lt;a href=&quot;http://jworks.nl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://jworks.nl/&lt;/a&gt;. On that site, you can find a &lt;a href=&quot;http://jworks.nl/contact/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contact form&lt;/a&gt; where you can find the company running the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, if you take a closer look at the site, you will notice that it seems the company went out of business in 2015. The Google Maps plugin on the contact form is broken, and there are no news and blog articles after 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of the last blog articles on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://jworks.nl/blog/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; is an article introducing the very library you ask about: &lt;a href=&quot;http://jworks.nl/2015/06/22/converting-markdown-to-asciidoc/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Converting Markdown to AsciiDoc&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and it contains a link to the GitHub repository: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this repository contains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc/blob/master/LICENCE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENCE&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/a&gt; stating that the code is under the Apache License 2.0. [This is also a possible explanation why the license is unknown: the automated license scanner couldn't find the file because it expects the American English spelling.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we are still not done! The license file did not exist in the repository from the beginning, it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc/commit/0963bd1800428fe38e03b06174af70f68e4f9e97&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;added in a later commit&lt;/a&gt;. So, we have to check whether the version of the code you are using was covered by that license. The version you are using is from December 4th, 2017, whereas the license file was added on May 19th, 2016 and was never changed since then. So, it is reasonable to assume that version 1.1 is covered by this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot be sure, though, because there is no guarantee that the binary artifact you are using was, in fact, built from this code. The only way to be sure is to ask the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="739" LastEditorUserId="739" LastEditDate="2022-05-11T10:05:14.437" LastActivityDate="2022-05-11T10:05:14.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12859" CreationDate="2022-05-11T06:38:23.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;mvnrepository.com&lt;/code&gt; search engine is not a canonical source of information, and in this case also contains dead links. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source code repository&lt;/a&gt; clearly indicates that this software is licensed under Apache-2.0, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc/issues/26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue #26&lt;/a&gt; mentions that it's not currently published to Maven. Someone on that issue re-published an old version of the package as &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.maven.org/artifact/ca.szc.thirdparty.nl.jworks.markdown_to_asciidoc/markdown_to_asciidoc/1.0/jar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ca.szc.thirdparty.nl.jworks.markdown_to_asciidoc:markdown_to_asciidoc:1.0&lt;/a&gt; instead, which also provides correct metadata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache license is of course free to use for commercial purposes, as long as you provide a copy of the license whenever you distribute this software to a third party. JAR files typically include licensing information as well when you open them as a ZIP file – if you already had a copy of the library you could have accessed its metadata directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had not found any licensing information, then you would not have any rights to redistribute the software. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a general remark, it might not be wise to add any dependencies that were last updated in 2017. Some software is completely done at some point and will have no further reason for change. But this is fairly rare – especially markup formats are often a moving target, and might even have security issues in case of improper escaping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-05-23T19:58:50.613" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T19:58:50.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-12T01:25:16.130" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the license for code examples in the JDK's documentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/12/docs/api/java.base/java/nio/file/FileVisitor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The code examples present in this javadoc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, in general do code examples embedded in documentation always fall under the main license for a project unless explicitly stated otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22149" LastEditorUserId="22149" LastEditDate="2022-05-12T13:39:36.123" LastActivityDate="2022-05-12T13:39:36.123" Title="JDK Documentation Examples Licence" Tags="|license|java|documentation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-12T16:39:35.743" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to publish my custom SpamAssassin plugin under the MIT licence on GitHub but I am not sure if it is possible. SpamAssassin is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0 and vast majority of other plugins I saw were also using the Apache 2.0 licence. I am not modifying any SpamAssassin files, so I do not need to create any NOTICE file (user would just add my files to the their SpamAssassin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of my reading and understanding of these lincences, it should be possible. I am not experienced in this issue so I just wanted to make sure not to make any licensing sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is, is it possible to licence my plugin under MIT?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26996" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T04:26:36.147" Title="Can I publish my SpamAssassin plugin under MIT licence on Github?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12869" CreationDate="2022-05-14T12:35:40.390" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an open issue in a GitHub repository requesting a permissive license for the project to be used by other people. It was answered by saying that they will put an MIT License, but was not done yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no license files in the project nor any notice within its files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it safe to fork the project, add an MIT license.md file and send a pull request of the License to the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27010" LastActivityDate="2022-05-16T13:20:56.170" Title="Can I send a pull request of a License file to a project?" Tags="|licensing|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12868" CreationDate="2022-05-15T08:09:39.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using code base of OpenVPN (GNU GPLv2 license) in proprietary closed source project is under consideration.&#xA;OpenVPN uses OpenSSL (Apache License 2.0).&#xA;Changes in OpenSSL are needed only (OpenVPN will be intact).&#xA;So OpenSSL has permissive license (allows changing of license of proprietary project) and OpenVPN - strong copyleft - license can not be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If changes will be in OpenSSL only is it legal to distribute part of proprietary project as closed source (hide changes in OpenSSL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27015" LastActivityDate="2023-02-14T09:28:26.137" Title="Closed source project based on OpenVPN/OpenSSL" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12867" CreationDate="2022-05-15T11:05:49.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the GPL license on OpenVPN, you must make available the source code of anything which forms a combined work with OpenVPN. If the rest of your program communicates only &amp;quot;at arm's length&amp;quot; with the OpenVPN code (e.g. via a subprocess communicating via command-line arguments only) then you have a reasonable case that OpenVPN is a separate work and the GPL does not extend across the boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given the nature of OpenVPN and OpenSSL I strongly suspect OpenVPN is tightly coupled with OpenSSL, in which case the GPL does extend across the boundary and you must distribute the changes to OpenSSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, if any vendor ever tried to ship me a product which contained their own modifications to OpenSSL, I would immediately be asking them to provide, at their cost, an independent security audit showing that they haven't screwed things up. Don't write your own crypto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-05-15T11:05:49.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12865" CreationDate="2022-05-16T13:20:56.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;we have already said&lt;/a&gt;, since there is no licence attached to this code, the starting position is that you have no rights to copy or use it.  However, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1154/458&quot;&gt;we have also noted&lt;/a&gt;, GitHub's terms of service &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; anyone publishing publicly on the site to permit other GitHub users to locally-fork the code, using the site's fork button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you definitely have a right to create a GitHub-hosted fork of the code, in order that you can add the licence and submit a pull request (which as Philip Kendall notes above, anyone may do for any reason!).  But you may not distribute this code to anyone else, so a public repository would be a mistake (and, indeed, a violation of the original rightsholder's copyright).  I don't know if the GitHub site mechanics let you submit a PR from a private repo, but if they don't, GitHub-forking is not the way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that the rightsholder has already expressed a clear desire to release this code under MIT.  Licensing doesn't &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; anything more than a clearly-expressed grant on the part of the rightsholder, so if (s)he has been clear about releasing the existing code under MIT, and has so far simply failed to add the actual licence text, then you could reasonably take and use it under those terms now.  That is ground whose solidity you will want to be sure of before you stand on it, though, and you don't link to the project or to that discussion, so we can't comment on the specifics of this particular case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-05-16T13:20:56.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4186" CreationDate="2022-05-17T05:33:41.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems clear to me that a song licensed with a CC-ND (no derivatives) clause does not allow remixing the work in a larger work such as a game.  So looping the song without editing the content of the song is fine, but &lt;strong&gt;including it in a game is not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most CC-ND content I've looked at is attached to an email address that is dead, so even contacting the author to get permission under a different license isn't an option.  I recommend you look elsewhere.  There is plenty of CC-0 and CC-BY content that welcomes re-mixes including inclusion in a game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27026" LastActivityDate="2022-05-17T05:33:41.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12874" CreationDate="2022-05-19T15:02:53.080" Score="8" ViewCount="941" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few years ago, I've designed a low-cost scientific instrument and published all schematics, building instructions and necessary scripts in open source under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA). By releasing this in open source I wanted to make this type of technology more accessible to others. Since this was published, a few companies contacted me, improved my design (which is great!) and started to sell the improved version as one of their products (which is also fine by me, and allowed by the CC BY-SA license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In their advertisements/press releases, some of these companies mentioned that they built their instrument based on an existing design, but don't make any reference to my original design/paper. &lt;strong&gt;Is this allowed by the CC BY-SA license?&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons website&lt;/a&gt; clearly states&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and&#xA;indicate if changes were  made. You may do so in any reasonable&#xA;manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or&#xA;your use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Would it be appropriate for me to contact these companies and ask them to add reference (links) to my original design?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CC BY-SA license indicates that it is fine to modify the design of the original material but that the new product must use the same license as the original. &lt;strong&gt;Does it mean that I can ask for all the schematics of their commercial product?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25803" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-05-19T15:22:21.117" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T17:49:03.197" Title="How to provide credit when modifying a design with a CC BY-SA license?" Tags="|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12872" CreationDate="2022-05-19T16:18:06.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky situation... and I'm not sure whether this has been debated in any court yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally: If they base their work on your work, and the license for your work is under CC-BY-SA, then they do violate your license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you quote correctly the CC website, people or companies who use your work hence are obliged to reference you and link to your original in an appropriate manner (how that can work in a concrete situation depends really on the type of work and the way it is being represented. But it must be such that is available to their customers / recipients of the work and that the license is clear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The share-alike part even demands that derivatives are subject to the same license terms. So that basically answers your 2nd question: yes, you can ask that the derived work is shared under the same terms. What you cannot ask for though, is any intermediate work. The CC licenses don't require people to share any sources, intermediate sketches, production plans etc. And here it is where it really get's hairy. IANAL and my personal take on the situation is: you can ask them to share the finished product with you under CC-BY-SA - something they might not like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical difficulty might be to prove that they used your work as basis for the instrument they ship. That may or may not be easy. And depending on how this is answered you may be successful in asking them to at least acknowledge your work in a fitting manner and maybe convince them to honour the CC-BY-SA part in making the improvement details of the instrument's plans public, too. They might simply count on you not being willing to go to court over this and rip you off. Asking often does not hurt, but in legal conflict some ways of doing so might even eventually be to your detriment; so you might want to even seek legal council before approaching them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T16:18:06.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12872" CreationDate="2022-05-19T16:18:41.980" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons licenses are copyright-based licenses, but copyright doesn't really apply in a hardware context. So, while there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a copyright in the schematics, and all copies or modifications of the schematics would then have to feature attribution as per the CC-BY-SA license terms, the objects created from the schematics are not encumbered by the license. So it is likely that the companies would be able to sell the instruments without being required to provide attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Open Hardware licenses tend to do is to cover the licensing of schematics and firmware, not the design itself. However, copyright is not the only kind of IP. When patents (for novel inventions) or design patents (for ornamental design) have been granted, these can be licensed in a way that also exerts control over the objects created accordingly. Read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware#Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Licenses&lt;/em&gt; section in the &lt;em&gt;Open-Source Hardware&lt;/em&gt; Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for a brief discussion of hardware licensing issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the instruments were a creative work that is afforded copyright protection, then the creative works – but not necessarily advertising for the works – would have to carry attribution per the CC license terms. The ShareAlike term only mandates that further modifications of the creative work are permitted, but not that intermediate works or source forms are provided. For example, assume a “photoshopped” image that is CC-BY-SA covered. The license will not require that the Photoshop project file is shared as well. Since the CC licenses are intended for general creative works, this aspect is quite different from software-oriented copyleft licenses like the GPL that do require a source form to be provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2022-05-19T17:49:03.197" LastActivityDate="2022-05-19T17:49:03.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12885" CreationDate="2022-05-20T08:34:57.043" Score="3" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are developing a web application (REST API backend + frontend, both Python/Flask if that matters).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to distribute it as a free software and we'd prefer a GPL license over a less restrictive MIT/Apache license so that other users share their improvements / modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the application runs on a server (SaaS), we chose the AGPL licence so that users modifying the software to provide a service with it are required to share their modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want both backend and frontend to provide a plugin interface. Plugins inherit a base plugin class which is merely an empty shell with placeholder attributes, but also core objects, such as objects responsible for database and authorization layers, so that plugins can add model entities / database tables. I guess this means the plugins are derivative work of the core (this is discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1181/17421&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would like to allow proprietary plugins. What are our options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there such thing as a LAGPL (lesser affero) licence? I guess we could make it up but I'd rather stick to existing licences. Besides, if it doesn't exist, there must be a good reason and perhaps my assumptions are incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I miss something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to put it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to allow derivative works to be proprietary (the main use case being plugins) but ideally we'd like people modifying core functions to share their modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we pick the LGPL license, and since the application runs on a server, therefore can be used to provide a service while being installed on provider server, not client computer, does this mean the service provider will be able to do any modifications to the core without being affected by the GPL clause (because it is not Affero)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17421" LastEditorUserId="17421" LastEditDate="2022-05-20T08:50:29.333" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T10:40:37.650" Title="How can an AGPL web application allow proprietary plugins?" Tags="|lgpl|website|python|plugins|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12784" CreationDate="2022-05-20T09:27:37.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a brief summary of the communication problems that forced me to abandon the contribution to the project under discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to find the relevant architect on IRC and discuss in depth the planned changes. It is your responsibility to find the right person to talk with, to catch the moment when he is online and not too busy and discuss with him, not with random persons that just happen to be in the chat room. Somebody who can dedicate only few fixed hours per week just do not have resources for such a communication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For some reason these architects do not respond to comments on bug requests and discourage the usage of the mailing lists. Communication means that keep the history of previous messages are not preferred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code review talks are kept very brief, questions and suggestions are not even answered, so the following attempts to rewrite as asked tend to miss the target again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While there are few (conflicting) documents on the basic coding rules, the internal architecture of the project and the right ways of using it is not documented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons probably can be viewed as belonging to the category &amp;quot;poorly managed&amp;quot;, or maybe aiming to the different group of contributors. Maybe they would accept something like valuable algorithms or support for additional file formats but they are not interested in lower level changes like fixing simple bugs, even if these do exist and do get fixed. This takes about as much time of the reviewer as the time of the contributor, so even a complete well working patch is not as much of the help as it may look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forking in such cases is probably an option if you want to work on exactly that piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2022-05-23T08:14:09.210" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T08:14:09.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-20T18:14:39.363" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a large codebase licensed under GPL. There is another codebase I found one specific file to be useful in, and the whole codebase is under Apache 2. I cannot change the license of my project, nor include their entire project as a submodule, since it is very large. Additionally, I will be modifying the code from that file significantly. How do I approach adding this to my project. Is it sufficient just to leave the copyright header (that also specifies the license)? Or do I need to also include their license file somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27053" LastActivityDate="2022-05-20T18:14:39.363" Title="Including Apache 2 Licensed Code in Project" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12880" CreationDate="2022-05-21T08:43:34.483" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most permissive liscense known to me, Creative Commons Zero disallows patenting of the source but I would like to grant all permissions except warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27048" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-05-21T09:30:21.223" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T10:45:54.470" Title="Which open-source license allows everything except warranty?" Tags="|copyleft|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12879" CreationDate="2022-05-21T10:45:54.470" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably looking for a permissive Open Source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common permissive license might be the MIT or ISC licenses. They allow all kinds of uses and have a warranty disclaimer, but require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some ultra-permissive licenses that get rid of the attribution requirement. For example, the 0BSD license is the ISC license minus the attribution requirement. The Boost license eliminates its attribution requirement for binary versions, but not for the source code of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some devices that try to dedicate the work into the public domain, such as CC0 (and arguably the Unlicense). But it's important to understand what public domain means here: it means that the work is free from copyright restrictions, but it completely ignores other kinds of IP such as patents. It is in principle possible that a software is public domain, but that other people can't use or distribute it because it implements a patented technique, for example a proprietary media codec. Normal Open Source licenses like the MIT license give broad permission to actually use and distribute the software, without restricting their grant to certain kinds of IP such as copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, this distinction only really matters if one of the copyright holders in the software is also a patent holder. No license can grant a right to use someone else's patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, you voiced the concern that CC0 “disallows patenting of the source”. This is a misunderstanding on multiple levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC0 only touches on copyright. It explicitly ignores patent-related issues. It does not grant or forbid anything in relation to patents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patents are granted for novel inventions. Source code itself is not patentable, but software might implement a patentable invention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the invention must be novel, patents won't be granted if there's prior art for the invention. Thus, publishing a software which implements an invention, before a patent application for the invention was filed, counts as “prior art” which means that no patent should be granted. In some cases, the inventor can apply for the patent some time after publication. In any case, only the inventor but no third party can apply for a patent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, any publication of software regardless of license or copyright status prevents later patenting of the inventions therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With patents, there is some concern about “submarine patents” or “patent treachery”: that someone might (secretly) hold a patent for a technique, then make software using this patent freely available – but without actually granting a patent license. Later, they might shake down users of the software for patent royalty payments. This scenario is feasible with CC0 since CC0 explicitly ignores patent issues, which is also why CC0 is not recognized as an Open Source license. Typical permissive licenses like MIT or ISC do not mention patents, but their positive grant to use and distribute the software is generally construed as an implicit patent license. To provide legal certainty, some licenses include explicit patent licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the Apache-2.0 license is a permissive license that says contributors grant a license for any relevant patents. It also contains a clause to deter patent trolling: if anyone claims that the licensed software constitutes a patent infringement, their patent license through the Apache-2.0 license is terminated so that they might not be able to use the software themselves. Thus, the Apache-2.0 license is very popular in an enterprise context such as Android where multiple patent-wielding actors must peacefully work together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize this discussion, I'd recommend the following licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want a well-written permissive license that explicitly covers patents, use Apache-2.0.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want a simple permissive license, use MIT, ISC, BSD-3-clause, or BSD-2-clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want a simple permissive license without an attribution requirement, use 0BSD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to release copyright, use a public domain dedication tool such as CC0 – with the understanding that this might actually give less rights to users than a permissive license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-05-21T10:45:54.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-22T13:58:13.433" Score="2" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a platform for LiveChat, commonly this LiveChat is embedded in other sites via a js script so the live chat widget is displayed in the host websites, therefore it allows communication with the agent's. The platform itself is licensed with AGPLv3 which includes the backend, frontend, and embeddable live chat.&#xA;My question is regarding the license stickiness, so, if a third party is using my platform commercially under the terms of the AGPLv3 but is using the embed script in their client sites. would those clients need to comply with the AGPLv3 too? so would they need to disclose the source of their own sites as they will be using the embeddable script?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27059" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-05-22T18:15:13.063" LastActivityDate="2022-05-27T06:55:36.280" Title="Is AGPLv3 &quot;sticky&quot; for commercial clients's clients? (embeddable script)" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-22T21:04:59.877" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a modified version of open-source code licensed under MPL 2.0 in my own open-source code, also licensed under MPL 2.0. But I'm unsure about the specific standard format for specifying the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I specify copyright notice in this case? To be more precise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the exact format for writing the previous author and myself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I insert the entire source code of the version I'm trying to modify as a comment in my own code? And if yes, is there a more straightforward but still legal way to do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does it matter if the copyright notice is at the beginning of a file or in the end?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I mention the entire license text or can I just provide a link to a license? And what is the exact text for saying this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are the rules different if my code is not licensed under MPL 2.0?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I find out these rules in general for any combination of two licenses: the original code and my own code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14043" LastActivityDate="2022-05-22T21:04:59.877" Title="What is the standard format for the MPL-2.0 license modification notice?" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12884" CreationDate="2022-05-23T08:04:40.630" Score="3" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;While developing the game, I need a method that changes the rendering type of the material, but the corresponding method is in the internal class StandardShaderGUI, which I don't have access to. I wanted to just copy the code, but I saw the Unity Reference-Only License, after reading the text of this license I still don't understand whether I can copy some code from the repository if I change it a bit or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://unity3d.com/legal/licenses/Unity_Reference_Only_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://unity3d.com/legal/licenses/Unity_Reference_Only_License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27060" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T01:03:56.563" Title="Is it allowed to copy code under the Unity Reference-Only License?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12883" CreationDate="2022-05-23T08:37:10.993" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The licence seems to me pretty unambiguous when in s1 it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity, while display, performance, and reproduction on the Repository Service through its functionality is allowed, no other distribution or modification of the Software is permitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you're not allowed to copy some code from the repository whether you modify it or not.  As I read it, this software is source-visible but non-free, and should be avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T08:37:10.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12876" CreationDate="2022-05-23T10:40:37.650" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is, to my knowledge, no such thing as the Lesser AGPL, and trying to invent one on the fly is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;not a good idea&lt;/a&gt;.  But the Linux kernel has an interesting GPL exemption that may be relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's fully documented &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the kernel source&lt;/a&gt;, but the practical upshot is that the kernel rightsholders have made it clear that programs that use the kernel via normal system calls aren't considered derivative works, and therefore don't need to adhere to the kernel's GPL licence.  This exemption has been around for many years, is well-understood and often-used (there are &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; non-GPL kernel modules out there), and it hasn't caused problems during its lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were to finalise and document your plugin API (which is a good idea anyway) you could do the same thing yourself, and make it clear that any program using the documented plugin API wasn't considered a derivative work and therefore didn't have to honour the core work's AGPL with respect to its own code.  You would need to make sure that contributors to your core application recognised the advertised exemption, so that your core application could still honour that exemption, but a simple CLA is no bad thing anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-05-23T10:40:37.650" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-24T16:28:22.910" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know AppleJavaExtensions-1.4.jar is under Apple License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/AppleJavaExtensions/Listings/README_txt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/AppleJavaExtensions/Listings/README_txt.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wonder that AppleJavaExtensions-1.4.jar is free or not when it is included in commercial SW?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In consideration of your agreement to abide by the following terms, and&#xA;subject to these terms, Apple grants you a personal, non-exclusive&#xA;license, under Apple's copyrights in this original Apple software (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Apple Software&amp;quot;)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this question, I want to know the meaning of &amp;quot;personal&amp;quot;.&#xA;Does it mean that it cannot be used for company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please let me know as possible.&#xA;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24323" LastEditorUserId="27257" LastEditDate="2022-06-19T19:37:02.903" LastActivityDate="2022-06-19T19:37:02.903" Title="AppleJavaExtensions-1.4.jar is free or not for commercial use?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12886" CreationDate="2022-05-25T07:11:01.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I confess I'm not a legal expert, and don't fully understand the implications of that word; hopefully, someone will come along who is, and does.  But until then I don't think you need to be too worried, because the MIT licence starts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any &lt;strong&gt;person&lt;/strong&gt; obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the personal restriction there also; nevertheless, MIT-licensed software is used, copied, and modified by corporations every day.  I could go off on a discussion about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;legal personhood&lt;/a&gt;, but I think the MIT licence text is the most convincing exhibit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apple licence text allows licensees to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;to use, reproduce, modify and redistribute&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; under conditions very similar to those of permissive free licences.  As I read it, you're fine to use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-05-25T10:18:16.943" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T10:18:16.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1043" CreationDate="2022-05-25T07:42:09.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, joining the open source project allows to get necessary skills like following coding standards, accepting the code review process, understanding the documentation, understanding and extending the code base that is not yours and the like. In any professional development later this is likely will be required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you need to know the programming language and related technologies first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be really be reserved for the difficult cases of CV: bad choice of profession early in the life, no money to support the education, stupid education system only giving right to study in the university (maybe informatics) for a few percent of the best (maybe in French), etc. The path of the self-learner is very difficult and not advised for case you have a choice to do this differently. But it is passable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2022-05-25T07:42:09.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12890" CreationDate="2022-05-25T09:55:33.327" Score="5" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a flutter plugin on pub.dev that is licensed under MIT, but in its build.gradle for Android building it references another library that seems to be a fork of a GPLv2 library. In turn, I would have thought the plugin would also have to be GPL meaning they incorrectly licensed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I then noticed the build.gradle uses jitpack in order to download compiled artifacts of the GPL library. In the past I have heard that a program under another license can legally interface with a compiled GPL binary as long as the program itself isn't linked with it (eg: using std pipes) as long as a copy of the GPL license is included and where to find the binary's source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this likely what is happening in this case, or should the plugin be licensed under GPLv2? I've seen a few plugins that seem to do this same thing, are these all violating the GPL or have I got that wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Okay so I've been asked to add some more specifics of the actual plugin in question. The plugin I am talking about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_openvpn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flutter_openvpn&lt;/a&gt;. It is MIT licensed, but on its Android side uses a fork of ics-openvpn, which is a GPLv2 library for Android. This is the fork I am talking about, and as you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Topfreelancerdeveloperr/flutter_openvpn_library_updated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it too is correctly released under GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the build process, the build.gradle uses jitpack so that the GPL library is compiled into an aar before being used by the plugin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;rootProject.allprojects {&#xA;    repositories {&#xA;        google()&#xA;        jcenter()&#xA;        maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA;dependencies {&#xA;        implementation 'com.github.Topfreelancerdeveloperr:flutter_openvpn_library_updated:3361996fa1'&#xA;    }&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the plugin then creates an instance of the VPN object in this library from its own code and passes some parameters to it. Since its instantiating an object of the library this should come under GPL right? Or does this specific use case allow for the MIT license in the plugin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the iOS side I'm ignoring that for the sake of this question, I'm just interested in whether the Android build process abides by GPL rules or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: After some thinking I had a theory. Is the MIT license legitimate since the online source code only contains a reference to the repository of the GPL library, but upon use of the plugin when this GPL dependency is downloaded does the whole application become GPL? It seems like that could be what's going on, but if so that can be very misleading for people using plugins like this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27072" LastEditorUserId="27072" LastEditDate="2022-05-25T16:32:09.457" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T03:37:14.600" Title="Is this flutter plugin wrongly licensed under MIT?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12889" CreationDate="2022-05-26T03:37:14.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL obligations attach when you do one of two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute a verbatim copy of something that was licensed to you under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute a derivative work of something that was licensed to you under the GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant questions are, therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you want to distribute anything at all? For both you and the plugin author, the answer is (presumably) &amp;quot;yes.&amp;quot; If you were just making an app for your own private use, then the inquiry would end here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will you distribute verbatim copies of anything that is licensed under the GPL, whether in source or in binary form?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Will you distribute anything that could be considered a derivative work of something licensed under the GPL, whether in source or in binary form?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the answer to (1) is &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; and the answer to either (2) or (3) is also &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; then GPL obligations attach, meaning you have to provide source code and license the resulting distribution under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the plugin itself, the answer to (2) is clearly &amp;quot;no,&amp;quot; because they are not distributing copies of the GPL'd library. The answer to (3) is, in my opinion, unclear. There are arguments both &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1187/532&quot;&gt;in favor of&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1188/532&quot;&gt;against&lt;/a&gt; this position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't matter &lt;em&gt;to you&lt;/em&gt;, because you presumably want to distribute a copy of the library bundled together with your application. That means you'll be doing (2), and so the GPL's obligations attach, unless you can claim it as &amp;quot;mere aggregation,&amp;quot; which the GPL (version 2) describes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. &lt;strong&gt;But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, the boldfaced sentence probably means you can't call it &amp;quot;mere aggregation,&amp;quot; because your code and the library form a combined whole (your app).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-05-26T03:37:14.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12895" CreationDate="2022-05-26T21:45:42.340" Score="3" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find some very specific Angular UI components that I can only find in PrimeNG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never used it before,  it looks simple enough to implement, the only problem that I'm having is that I tried to read the MIT license and I got confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I want to use the free version of PrimeNG on my commercial website, do I need to add PrimeNG to the thank you page? Currently I don't have a thank you page.. should I create one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what I need to modify on my website to be able to use PrimeNG legally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any information regarding this issue would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;update&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand with the MIT license, what do I exactly need to add to my commercial website (if anything) to legally use the free version of PrimeNG. I tried to read the MIT license agreement and it confused me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27080" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-09T10:12:00.293" LastActivityDate="2023-07-09T10:12:00.293" Title="What to implement in my commercial website in order to legally use PrimeNG MIT license?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12881" CreationDate="2022-05-27T06:55:36.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In GPL (and AGPL) there is no distinction between commercial or non-commercial distribution. The rules apply in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you client creates a website that embeds the JS code, which is under AGPL license (regardless where that code comes from, your server or your client's server. No distinction between 1st party or 3rd party), it is the act of conveying a covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only remaining question is: Is just the JS code the covered work or is it the entire webpage (&amp;quot;html code&amp;quot;) or even everything on the server as well? You should use the guidance in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; to determine this, and potentially ask your customers to do the same. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3960/if-a-part-of-the-client-side-code-is-licensed-under-gpl-does-the-server-side-co&quot;&gt;answer to the related question here&lt;/a&gt; might be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the JS code works stand-alone and is just embedded in the webpage of your customer 'in a frame or better iframe', then you can likely assume that you are dealing with an 'Aggregate'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-05-27T06:55:36.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12894" CreationDate="2022-05-27T12:22:00.023" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm basically developing a Game with a background music licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY 3.0&lt;/a&gt; along with couple of other music/sound effects.&#xA;Now suppose a YouTuber/Gamer in future decides to publish a walk-through video of the game, will he get in trouble for not attributing the Music creator in his/her video if someone reports it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27087" LastEditorUserId="27087" LastEditDate="2022-05-27T13:05:18.993" LastActivityDate="2022-05-27T17:01:31.027" Title="Would a YouTuber fall in trouble for recording a walkthough of a Game that uses music licensed under CC BY 3.0?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|creative-commons|attribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12893" CreationDate="2022-05-27T17:01:31.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is entirely up to the person who owns the copyright on the music (which is nearly always the same person who you are required to attribute). If this person decides to make an issue of it, then they can ask YouTube to take down the video. You have no say in this process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, someone who has licensed their work under such a permissive license is more likely to just contact the video creator and ask for attribution in the description (which is a standard form of attribution on YouTube). However, there have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2022/02/08/copyleft-trolls/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reports&lt;/a&gt; of copyright trolls uploading material under permissive licenses, and then finding and suing people who make small mistakes in attribution. Cory Doctorow has written about this problem &lt;a href=&quot;https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at length&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be aware of the differences between versions. Under CC 3.0 licenses, any breach automatically terminates the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License. Individuals or entities who have received Adaptations or Collections from You under this License, however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under CC 4.0 licenses, the license restores itself automatically if the breach is cured within 30 days of being notified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. This Public License applies for the term of the Copyright and Similar Rights licensed here. However, if You fail to comply with this Public License, then Your rights under this Public License terminate automatically.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b. Where Your right to use the Licensed Material has terminated under Section 6(a), it reinstates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;automatically as of the date the violation is cured, provided it is cured within 30 days of Your discovery of the violation; or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;upon express reinstatement by the Licensor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 6(b) does not affect any right the Licensor may have to seek remedies for Your violations of this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no such restoration term in 3.0, so in theory, once you violate a 3.0 license, you have to ask the copyright holder to give you a new license, and they can refuse. In either case, the copyright holder has the right to sue over the violation if they are so inclined, but in the case of 4.0, they can only sue over the past breach, and cannot prohibit ongoing use once the breach is cured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-05-27T17:01:31.027" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12891" CreationDate="2022-05-27T20:19:56.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of what you must do, the relevant section of the MIT license is just this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your website contains a copy of the Angular component, so this applies to you. Therefore you must take the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; copyright notice and permission notice as supplied with the component and include that in your software. Typically, people will do this by having a &amp;quot;third-party licenses&amp;quot; page which includes all the licenses from open source software they are using, but this is not a strict requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-05-27T20:19:56.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12897" CreationDate="2022-05-28T14:11:52.753" Score="3" ViewCount="889" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the [organization] nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's this mean? Suppose package X contains an algorithm that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I applied to a task then published a paper. Am I not allowed to say &amp;quot;we applied package X on this task&amp;quot;, or, when referring to the paper (not within the paper), &amp;quot;the paper used algorithm part of package X, developed by A and B&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I forked into my own package, Y, under MIT license, and built significantly upon. Eventually I might say, &amp;quot;Y is great!&amp;quot;, while also mentioning somewhere (or in same sentence) that it has built upon X. Am I to either never mention X, or never praise my own work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21059" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T15:26:56.857" Title="BSD-3, third clause clarification" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12896" CreationDate="2022-05-28T15:26:56.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This clause clarifies that the names of contributors cannot be used to promote versions of the software that they didn't author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider an imaginary Xunil operating system authored by a well-known Tinus Lorvalds and published under BSD-3-clause. I can now freely go around and give (or even sell) to other people copies of Xunil and tell them that they can trust it because Lorvalds wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But under that license I cannot add my own modifications and then advertise my modified version as Lorvalds' work. For example, I might introduce bugs or backdoors into the operating system. Lorvalds is not responsible for them, I am. As far as the license is concerned I'm totally allowed to create and distribute my buggy insecure version, as long as I leave other contributors like Lorvalds out of my promotional efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not modify the attribution requirements, that the copyright and license notice (including Lorvalds' copyright statement!) must be preserved in the source code and in documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of your scenarios is affected by this license term, because your “X” is the name of the software, not the name of the contributors. Of course you are allowed to mention that you used a certain software. Of course you are allowed to state that your modified version is based on X. Of course you can advertise your modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think this clause of the BSD license is usually superfluous because the aspects it prohibits may already be prohibited by personality rights. However, issues such as personality rights and trademarks differ substantially between jurisdictions, so that clarifying this issue in the license can have value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to BSD-3-clause, the Apache-2 license only touches on trademarks, not on contributor names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if Xunil were Apache-2 licensed, and if there were a trademark on that name, then I wouldn't be allowed to &lt;em&gt;advertise&lt;/em&gt; my buggy insecure version as “based on Xunil™”. But I would be allowed (and required!) to disclose this in the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T15:26:56.857" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12899" CreationDate="2022-05-28T21:35:58.490" Score="4" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license attached to the script/software reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Software code created by U.S. Government employees is not subject to&#xA;copyright in the United States(17 U.S.C. §105). The United&#xA;States/Department of Commerce reserve all rights to seek and obtain&#xA;copyright protection in countries other than the United States for&#xA;Software authored in its entirety by the Department of Commerce. To&#xA;this end, the Department of Commerce hereby grants to Recipient a&#xA;royalty-free, nonexclusive license to use, copy, and create derivative&#xA;works of the Software outside of the United States.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this &amp;quot;open-source&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pseudo-open-source&amp;quot;(i.e., not technically&#xA;open-source, but functionally operates the same) given the license&#xA;statement and the public availability of code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean for U.S. citizens, this software essentially contains&#xA;no copyright and is free and open to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this partially due to the freedom of information act? This sub-bullet is not essential and is more of a gee-whiz question?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of copyright or lack thereof, what can I do with this&#xA;and ethically what do I need to do or should do to give credit to&#xA;the authors of the software. The U.S. Government is technically the&#xA;authors if I am reading it write, but the code is associated with a&#xA;peer-review paper by government employees; do I cite the peer-review article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26603" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T09:55:11.977" Title="Question on license for piece of U.S. Federal Government produced software" Tags="|licensing|software|license-file|software-use|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12898" CreationDate="2022-05-28T21:53:48.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is open source in that it meets the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;: it allows free redistribution and it allows derived works, without any restrictions which would violate any of the other clauses. (For avoidance of doubt, the Open Source Definition is how &lt;em&gt;this Stack Exchange site&lt;/em&gt; defines &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot;; other groups may use other definitions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean for U.S. citizens, this software essentially contains no copyright and is free and open to use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No (but yes): it means that within the jurisdiction of the United States, the software contains no copyright. A U.S. citizen in the United Kingdom would still have to obey UK law, and the U.S. government could in theory obtain copyright for the work in the UK, at which point it could not be freely copied in the UK. However, the separate grant makes that distinction largely irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this partially due to the freedom of information act?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it is due &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.congress.gov/search?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22cite%3APL94-553%22%7D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Act for the general revision of the Copyright Law&lt;/a&gt; from 1976. (Actually, it probably predates that but you'd need some legal scholars to dig into the history of Title 17 of the U.S. Code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of copyright or lack thereof, what can I do with this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ethically what do I need to do or should do to give credit to the authors of the software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a question which is going to be dependent on your field. In a commercial setting, no-one is going to worry if you don't cite every piece of software you use when doing your work. In an academic setting, the standards are very different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-05-28T21:53:48.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12898" CreationDate="2022-05-30T09:55:11.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license language is only clear in the United States of America, where no copyright applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of USA the situation is unclear, because many aspects are not covered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) the rights granted by the Department of Commerce are not stated to be perpetual and irrevocable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) the license language does not provide the rights for the recipient to re-distribute the software or derivative works. There is also no sub-licensing right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) The license is applicable to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Software code created by U.S. Government employees&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but the rights granted outside of USA seem to only apply to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Software authored in its entirety by the Department of Commerce.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I the only one who sees a gap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the software has first been published on a server in USA, will then the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Sale Doctrine&lt;/a&gt; apply and would that even have an impact on international distributions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be safe to take the code, create a derivative work (in the US), put that derivative work under MIT license and distribute it internationally? Probably yes, but I am not really sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think this is unequivocal Open Source. I think it needs further clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-05-30T09:55:11.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-05-31T21:29:38.060" Score="2" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a tool for internal use in my company using Python and several Python packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tool uses different kinds of Python packages, all of which have one of GNU Public License, Lesser GNU Public License, Apache 2.0 license, BSD-3 license, MIT license or MPL 2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have checked that everything is free to use for commercial use, which took a long time, and I have already added a copy of all the licenses to the internal distribution, stating that for licenses that require to state changes, the repository contains the track history with every change introduced. This is all visible in the help files, under the licensing section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am concerned about the copyleft side of these clauses, I understand that as long as the tool remains internal and the code available for everyone to use or modify, there is no breach of these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this tool is ever distributed outside of the company, due to licensing of third-party packages the source code would need to be made available due to the GPL license, which is fine as it would be distributed via Wheels which already contain the source code, however, this is not planned and unlikely, it is meant to be used only internally and it is not meant to be a product to be sold, but rather a tool to be used internally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably many developers in the same scenario, be it with Python or any other language and its packages, developing tools for internal use, I would like to ask you how have you handled this in your company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27118" LastActivityDate="2022-05-31T21:29:38.060" Title="Internal Python application and Python packages with multiple licenses" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|lgpl|mpl|python|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9537" CreationDate="2022-06-01T00:01:56.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bootstrap itself is licensed under the MIT license, but not necessarily the themes other people create. You have to follow the license that comes with the theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the MIT license, you can combine MIT licensed code with code that falls under another license. But that does not mean the MIT license applies to the rest of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like the GPL where the GPL license applies to derivatives. With the MIT license, people who create derivatives can release their changes under any license they want. The new license applies to their contributions only, and the MIT license applies to the original author's work only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Bootstrap themes that are not created by Bootstrap are not licensed by Bootstrap. The MIT license from Boostrap only applies to stuff that Bootstrap created. Any other author can license their work as they see fit and charge you for their theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T00:01:56.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12904" CreationDate="2022-06-01T07:13:49.347" Score="0" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a FOSS project and would very much prefer to release it under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To consider, it is a C program, using a MIT licensed library, a MIT licensed executable packaged in the files, and an Apache 2.0 licensed program, that I issue system calls to. And this where things get confusing for me. If I call the Apache 2.0 program using system(), is this something I have to consider in my license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'll be very helpful if someone can guide me to the right license, keeping the aforementioned things in mind. Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27120" LastEditorUserId="27120" LastEditDate="2022-06-01T07:53:02.387" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T11:50:56.017" Title="MIT License technicalities and compatibility with Apache 2.0" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12903" CreationDate="2022-06-01T11:20:45.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses are both permissive licenses that put no or very little restriction on what licenses you can use for your own code (even if that code is a modification to MIT/Apache 2.0 licensed code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, if you invoke third-party code through the normal ways of calling a separate executable (and the &lt;code&gt;system()&lt;/code&gt; function is one of those ways), then the third-party executable is considered to be completely unrelated to your code in copyright terms, so you can completely forget about that code's license when determine what license to use for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-01T11:50:56.017" LastActivityDate="2022-06-01T11:50:56.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12908" CreationDate="2022-06-08T01:42:56.193" Score="12" ViewCount="4455" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I require a SEO link to my site (with that my software installed) from every installation of my software, does it make my license not FOSS? Can I use GPL components in so licensed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you recommend an existing license with such the requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd formulate it like &amp;quot;You are obliged not to remove or in any way hinder (e.g. adding &lt;code&gt;rel=&amp;quot;nofollow&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; and likewise) the link to the author's site.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7699" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T19:03:02.313" Title="Is requiring a link to my site allowed for a FOSS license?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license-notice|license|linking|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2022-06-08T07:20:38.343" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's break down this question in parts and start with the FOSS licenses common ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The common things about FOSS licenses are that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one is required to keep the copyright notices of previous authors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one must not misrepresent another person's work as yours and vice versa&#xA;(which in essence combines to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IWantCredit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;being honest of who did what&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL as a strong copyleft license goes a step further and additionally requires that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;any work which makes use of it is also required to distribute the source under the same conditions (and no additonal restrictions!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the first question, including GPL - licensed components and adding additional restrictions: No, that does not fly. You cannot require active code or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#OrigBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertisement&lt;/a&gt; in any specific form. You can only require the proper attribution, and you must keep the conditions on distribution without making them stricter. The GPL FAQ has a few answers on various &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#RequireCitation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;restriction&lt;/a&gt; scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be different, if you include a &amp;quot;library&amp;quot; under the LGPL; in that case you might still be allowed to choose whatever license you fancy provided you allow users to replace the library by whatever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more permissive licenses have no such restrictions either - they only require proper attribution and allow you to distribute your code even under proprietary licenses (including no distribution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There cannot be any FOSS license with a restriction of required advertisement like you suggest as it fails the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;: such software would not work in an environment where links don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this said, I'd still recommend to use the GPL. Add an appropriate copyright notice to your files like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2022 Porton from &lt;a href=&quot;http://my-fancy-software.example.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://my-fancy-software.example.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and if you feel like add these links where you consider them appropriate. Also  add in the readme a kind request like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like this software and want to help its continued development, please support us by keeping the links to our software or linking us in this form: (add the code snippet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-08T07:55:38.110" LastActivityDate="2022-06-08T07:55:38.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2022-06-08T13:10:36.653" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea to force users of the software to advertise the original author is not new. It was first seen in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:BSD-4-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;4-clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt;. There was a lot of criticism about the advertising clause, and it was removed (leading to BSD-3 and BSD-2 licenses). This advertising clause is also incompatible with GPL. I would not recommend anyone to use BSD-4 as the license for any new code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, what you can do is to put your URL into the copyright attribution language into a notice.txt file, which will then need to be kept and reproduced by everyone if that is required by the respective license. For example §4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 License&lt;/a&gt; includes language enforcing that, and this is GPL compliant. But it might not show up as prominently as you wish, and while your URL in the notice.txt might show up there, it does not necessarily need to be included as a clickable link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-06-08T21:52:59.480" LastActivityDate="2022-06-08T21:52:59.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9721" CreationDate="2022-06-10T02:09:01.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If possible, keep the code from each project separated, but that is not always possible, especially if you are integrating multiple scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Combining Code from Multiple Projects&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, you have to leave the copyright notice and permissions notice intact for MIT licensed works, but it is a good practice to create an organized list of software that is used with their corresponding licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of practices that seem to work well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Putting a copy of all of the licenses in a &lt;code&gt;licenses&lt;/code&gt; subdirectory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a file that lists all of the works used in a project, their licenses, and the version used. It usually links back to each project's home page or repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does a couple of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, it helps you stay in compliance with the MIT license because there is less of a possibility of the MIT license being accidentally deleted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondly, it gives you and future developers a reference list of where various pieces of code came from.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thirdly, it lets you know what versions of each software were used, so if there are security vulnerabilities in particular versions, you can see if you need to upgrade them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If Each Individual File Has a Copyright Notice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where each file has its own copyright notice and reference to the MIT license, you have to keep that intact, even if you modify it (unless you totally rewrite it, but that is not what we are talking about here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify the file or add code to a file, and the original file has its own copyright and reference to the MIT license, you can add text stating that the original file was based on the MIT licensed code; and that changes that were made are copyright by you (or your organization) and subject to a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contains code from &lt;code&gt;{MIT licensed project name}&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;{keep their copyright notice and permission notice intact.}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been modified by &lt;code&gt;{your name or your project or your organization}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;{Your copyright notice and reference to your license.}&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like this would make it clear that the new code falls under a new license, while still retaining the previous copyright notice and permission notice as required by the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You only have to include something like this if the license is in each and every file, and not a separate license.txt file (or something similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: you only add your copyright notice and license to the file, &lt;em&gt;if and only if&lt;/em&gt; you actually modified the file. Otherwise, you are falsely claiming the copyright of someone else's work. Only add your copyright notice and license to files you actually modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very least, you have to include the original copyright notices and permission notice (i.e. their MIT License). But presenting that information in a more organized way would be helpful for future references and future developers and administrators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T02:09:01.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-10T02:34:17.123" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one is to release a new open source project using a license like Apache 2.0 or MIT, or any other, and this project uses some files or parts of code, that can be slight modified for a proper use or as they are, how to specify the license attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's suppose there is the following code structure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;File 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;File 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;File 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;File 4&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;... over other 20 files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But File 2 is all my code, except one or two lines of that project code&#xA;File 3 is fully code from the other project, with possible small changes to adapt to my project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I post the full license of the Apache project on the beginning of File 3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about File 2? How to indicate that part of the code has another license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27171" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T02:34:17.123" Title="Some files or parts of code Apache 2.0 into new Open Source project" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2022-06-10T12:59:24.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I require a SEO link to my site (with that my software installed) from every installation of my software, does it make my license not FOSS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. I'm going to disagree with the other answers and claim that this is outright a non-free license. If the requirement were just to ship an advertisement with the software, it would be &amp;quot;obnoxious&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;odious&amp;quot; like the legacy BSD advertising clause. But if it's actually governing the functionality of the software and requiring you to keep odious functionality that the user does not want, it lacks freedom 1 (&amp;quot;freedom to...change it so it does your computing as you wish&amp;quot;) and arguably lacks part of freedom 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the clause only applied to distributing modified versions, including the odious behavior by default in such distribution, it would probably still be FOSS since you could just also include instructions on how to remove it (see some legacy &amp;quot;nasty license&amp;quot; software that only allowed distribution of original source along with patch files, not modified sources) but would still be user-hostile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="463" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T12:59:24.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-10T17:47:58.383" Score="4" ViewCount="1325" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have developed a Python program with a Qt GUI, using the PySide2 bindings. We have so far used the LGPL option of Qt. We were happy with this, as we believe we understand our rights and obligations under the LGPL pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently must consider changing to what Qt calls the &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; licensing (nice misnomer, but ok). I cannot describe the reason in detail, sorry, but be assured it is quite silly and not interesting. We are not using any of the commercial libraries such as QtCharts, and we will not do so in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We would very much like to retain the option to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Revert back to LGPL licensing in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pass parts of our source code to colleagues, who do not have a Qt &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; license and do not wish to have one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Borrow code from these colleagues to incorporate in our program.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Split off sub-libraries from our source code, possibly releasing them as non-free open-source or free open-source software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Qt FAQ at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/faq/tag/qt-commercial-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/faq/tag/qt-commercial-licensing&lt;/a&gt; notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We have started to develop a product with an open source license - How can we upgrade to a commercial Qt license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can convert from developing under open source to commercial terms and conditions by contacting the Qt Company. The commercial license does not by default allow using of code created under open source license, thus you will need to contact the Qt Company to help you with the transition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am rather worried about the phrasing. Do anyone know what Qt typically imposes as part of this transition? In other words, what freedom do we give up by buying a commercial library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note there is a similar question at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4308/changing-qt-library-licence-for-application-from-lgpl-to-commercial&quot;&gt;Changing QT library licence for application from LGPL to commercial&lt;/a&gt; that asked &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; Qt can do this, not &lt;em&gt;what conditions&lt;/em&gt; they typically impose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance for your comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27175" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T08:19:14.937" Title="Converting a Qt program from LGPL to &quot;commercial&quot; and back" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12907" CreationDate="2022-06-10T19:03:02.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the GPL3 allows what you're asking for. Section 7(b) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5(d) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your work need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&amp;quot; is defined as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster defines &amp;quot;preservation&amp;quot; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a: the activity or process of keeping something valued alive, intact, or free from damage or decay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you display a copyright statement, license notice, and attribution to yourself as the author, along with a link to your website, on the &amp;quot;user interface&amp;quot; of your application (the HTML as shown to the end user), the GPL3 allows you to legally require that it be &amp;quot;preserved&amp;quot; on all modified versions, which I believe prohibits both removing and altering the requirement (so adding &lt;code&gt;rel=&amp;quot;nofollow&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; would be illegal modification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="631" LastActivityDate="2022-06-10T19:03:02.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-11T13:32:33.063" Score="-3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release my proprietary software as open source but don't want people to use it with the same purpose as I do, for example imagine you have made a video streaming app but you want to be the only one to use it for cooking videos. How should I go about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27177" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T13:59:54.350" Title="Disallowing FOSS code to be used for certain purpose" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2022-06-12T12:04:28.527" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12915" CreationDate="2022-06-11T13:59:54.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot. One of the fundamental principles of open source (as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;) is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T13:59:54.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12629" CreationDate="2022-06-11T15:52:55.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm not a lawyer, this is just my personal understanding. I'm not speaking as an employer of any organization, just as a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no distinction between Ada Runtime and C/C++ Runtime in GCC sources. They use the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Code bases are the same in the sense as if you clone GCC FSF, change it, release changed code and say &amp;quot;this release has the same code base as FSF GCC!&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If code has &amp;quot;GPL with exception&amp;quot; license, everybody could remove the exception and release code under pure GPL license. This is fine and legal. This doesn't contradict the license. So you can fork C++ GCC, remove GCC exception from C++ runtime files and release it as &amp;quot;GCC Community Edition&amp;quot; under GPL (without a exception). [This doesn't work in backward direction however, you can't get GPL code and release it with GPL with GCC exception, if you are not a copyright holder.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any GNAT (or GCC) released under BSD license and I strongly doubt that there is any such product. (It's better to say I'm sure there is none).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.adacore.com/a-new-era-for-ada-spark-open-source-community&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NO&lt;/strong&gt; GNAT Community Edition&lt;/a&gt; any more. I hope now people stop asking license questions and start writing Ada code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27178" LastActivityDate="2022-06-11T15:52:55.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12919" CreationDate="2022-06-11T19:58:12.380" Score="-4" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past years, I wrote much C source code, parts of which might also be useful to others. So I would like to restructure this code in a way such that it makes sense to publish it on Github and people can use it in a &amp;quot;usual&amp;quot; way. I guess, this would mean that there are certain structure conventions C libraries should be adapted to. However, I could not find out anything about this and, since I am unexperienced with using code of others, I do not see whether a given C library on Github is well structured or not. How do I determine whether a given repository has a good structure and I should take it as an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are mainstream conventions for directory structures of a C repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are mainstream conventions how new data types should be introduced?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a rule of thumb when multiple .c files should be compiled together and when they should be linked together?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a rule of thumb when different libraries, which are mutually dependent, should be put in the same or in different Gibhub repositories?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27181" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T07:41:36.643" Title="Structuring C libraries" Tags="|github|source-code|project-management|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-06-12T12:01:16.690" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12918" CreationDate="2022-06-12T07:41:36.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While there are a lot of Open Source C libraries, there are no particularly strong conventions for distributing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the GNU and Linux ecosystems, it is reasonably common to use Autotools as a build system, so that users can download your source code and then run&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./configure&#xA;make&#xA;sudo make install&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to build and install the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But many developers do not like globally installed libraries, and would instead vendor your project (copying your files into their source tree) or use a Git-Submodule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make this simple, it is typically best if your projects do not have further dependencies, or at least make those dependencies very clear so that other developers can install them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ties into your question #4: If you can split thematically distinct parts into different projects, that's probably a good idea. This is the library-level equivalent to the OOP “interface segregation principle”, that users of your libraries should not be forced to depend on functionality they don't need. But since dependency management is such a pain for C projects, combining different parts into a monorepo is often the lesser evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding #1, there are no strong conventions for project layouts. You will see everything from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a bunch of &lt;code&gt;.c&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;.h&lt;/code&gt; files in the top level of a project, without any directories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a separate &lt;code&gt;include&lt;/code&gt; directory for public headers (that dependent projects should add to their include path)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;code&gt;src&lt;/code&gt; directory for the .c files and internal headers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the repository contains multiple distinct libraries, separate directories for those libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do anything unusual, &lt;a href=&quot;https://matklad.github.io/2021/02/06/ARCHITECTURE.md.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;consider writing an architecture guide&lt;/a&gt; to help others navigate the code base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding #2, there are no special concerns for Open Source vs other code when it comes to introducing data types. As with all C projects, it makes sense to give those type names a project-specific prefix to prevent name clashes. As you evolve the layout of types, it is good to keep API- and ABI-compatibility in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If your library is intended for static linking or is header-only, ABI compatibility doesn't matter. However, developers will appreciate API-stability so that they can upgrade to a new version of your library without having to update their code. For example, adding a field to a struct which is defined in a header file will break API compatibility, unless you provide a function or macro to initialize a default value for that struct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Libraries intended for dynamic linking should be clear about their ABI compatibility guarantees, so that dependent code can use new versions of your library without needing a full recompilation. Anything that affects function signatures or struct layout will likely break binary compatibility. But there are well-known strategies to help here, such as using incomplete types in your header files so that dependent code can only handle pointers to such types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding #3, there's generally the expectation that one .c file is one compilation unit. If you want to combine a lot of code into a single compilation unit for linkage reasons (i.e. so that all the code has access to some &lt;code&gt;static&lt;/code&gt; functions, enabling stronger optimizations), then I'd use the preprocessor to include those code fragments into a single .c file. Note that passing multiple .c files to a single compiler invocation (&lt;code&gt;gcc -o foo file1.c file2.c&lt;/code&gt;) is just a shorthand for compiling and linking those files separately. It would be unusual to see this shorthand in build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T07:41:36.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12913" CreationDate="2022-06-12T08:03:20.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story short, if you used Qt under LGPL (or GPL, no matter which), you can switch to commercial-license anytime, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; only if you are owner of entire code written (like being employer of developers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or,&lt;/strong&gt; if you have clear and unambiguous evidence that all non-employees who contributed approve the re-use of their code under the new license (beside old license, I mean, usage of old license can not be avoided, unless explicitly approved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; that above assumes that the employment contract forces employees to approve whatever their employer's choice of license is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you can't take a specific individual's approval, well, that's an entirely different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11200" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T08:19:14.937" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T08:19:14.937" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-12T09:26:33.180" Score="4" ViewCount="1078" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL clearly states that in the case of interpreters, if the interpreter is linked against a derived work, and the interpreted program code reaches those bindings, then the licensing extends to it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about a more intermediate representation? Think of it less of a &amp;quot;program&amp;quot; and more of a &amp;quot;save file&amp;quot;, out of which the runtime can produce a program on the fly, which it can then execute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the license obligation still extend to the save file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T10:01:58.040" Title="A clarification on a GPL &quot;interpreter clause&quot; corner case" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12921" CreationDate="2022-06-12T10:01:58.040" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL clearly states that in the case of interpreters, if the interpreter is linked against a derived work, and the interpreted program code reaches those bindings, then the licensing extends to it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it does not. I suspect you are referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InterpreterIncompat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;em&gt;the FAQ is not the GPL&lt;/em&gt;; it is &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; the FSF's opinion as to some consequences of using the GPL. The FAQ certainly expresses the FSF's desires and was probably written in conjunction with some reasonably good lawyers, but it has no legal standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question you need to answer is (as always) &amp;quot;is the representation a derived work of the GPL-covered work?&amp;quot;, and that is a question of copyright law, independent of the GPL or any other licenses. There is no bright line here and in the long run it would be a question for a court to decide. I can certainly imagine cases both side of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T10:01:58.040" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-12T15:34:17.880" Score="16" ViewCount="3484" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say Alice has Project A, which is licenced under the AGPL, and Bob has Project B, which is also licenced under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob sees a function in Project A that looks very useful, and wants to copy it to Project B, citing the original source in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can Bob do this, or is it against the terms of the AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26723" LastEditorUserId="27200" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T15:13:28.543" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T14:27:10.937" Title="Can I copy some AGPL code to my AGPL project?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12923" CreationDate="2022-06-12T17:44:40.760" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Put simply: yes, this is allowed. The entire point of open source software is to allow it to be re-used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the requirements are slightly more than &amp;quot;citing the original source in a comment&amp;quot;, or at least the comment must have a very specific form in that it must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL section 4&lt;/a&gt;); &amp;quot;an appropriate copyright notice&amp;quot; here means reproducing the copyright notice from the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code&amp;quot; (section 4 again)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty&amp;quot; (section 4 again)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program&amp;quot; (section 4 again), although Bob will have been doing that anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&amp;quot; (section 5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T17:44:40.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7424" CreationDate="2022-06-12T22:25:12.947" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Essentially if a project does not have MIT or Apache 2 license it probably best not be called open source. If you have to ask about if you can use an open source project means it’s plain old money grab project pretending to be open source. It’s time wasting, disingenuous and disrespectful to whole open source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27193" LastActivityDate="2022-06-12T22:25:12.947" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12923" CreationDate="2022-06-13T06:36:45.550" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Philip wrote: Yes, that's possible (subject to certain conditions, which I won't repeat here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note, though, that this will make it harder for Bob to re-license his code with a different license in the future: As long as it's only his own code, he can distribute it under as many licenses as he wishes. For example, many projects offer both a free GPL version and, for a fee, a version without a copy-left requirement for inclusion in closed-source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as Bob includes AGPL'ed code written by Alice, this is no longer possible without getting permission from Alice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27195" LastEditorUserId="27195" LastEditDate="2022-06-13T13:42:19.717" LastActivityDate="2022-06-13T13:42:19.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12929" CreationDate="2022-06-13T18:48:24.863" Score="1" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a simple MIT licensed project and need to include a about 10 lines of GPL3 code (some math stuff that needs to be the same). I know that i need to change the license of my project, give credit to the author and indicate changes made to the code. Is a simple comment with a github link to the code enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user27204" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T12:47:33.687" Title="How to properly give credit to gpl3 code snippet" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-14T02:33:45.653" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently, i'm facing a problem with library licensing in web development. I have my web project in MIT license. Now i'm trying to use library(javascript) that using BSD 2 License (Source from Github).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After explore the information, MIT and BSD 2 License are similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have license.txt contain MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i append the txt inside with BSD license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i create new txt file &amp;quot;BSDLicense.txt&amp;quot; that contain BSD License? Also, should i call copyright for every external JS file that contain the library ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27208" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T02:33:45.653" Title="How to implement BSD Licensed library to MIT License project?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12927" CreationDate="2022-06-14T11:24:26.767" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The attribution, IMHO independent of the license, should be done in the usual manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;State the copyright at the header of the file(s) or, if it is only a tiny part in a big file, you can also add or move their copyright statement to the documentation of the function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally you will want to amend the public copyright notice of your programme by theirs, indicating that parts (possibly which part) is their copyright.&#xA;If you modify the borrowed function you can indicate that by describing it as &amp;quot;functionality XXX based on work by...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;...derived from work by...&amp;quot;. You could also structure your credits in a similar way &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob/master/CREDITS.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like OpenTTD&lt;/a&gt; with sections on current team, retired team and 'thanks to' where people are listed with significant one-time contributions (of whatever kind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the most important take-away here is: If you work in good faith to ensure that people (users and developers) can know who contributed what, you will be fine. Just communicate clearly to your users &lt;em&gt;from whom&lt;/em&gt; you took code, and acknowledge that. If you maintain a VCS reasonably, and add a copyright message to files or functions, then the changes you made to the original code are readily documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this IMHO is good practice also for permissive licenses like the MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, and as you acknowledge yourself, you cannot legally include GPL-licensed code into your MIT (or other permissively-licensed) code-base. I really appreciate that you mind this difference as the GPL goes quite a bit beyond the requirements of the permissive licenses; it's a strong copyleft license, and often chosen on purpose. Additional to the requirement to credit the copyright holders as outlined above, the GPL requires, that ALL code derived from it is also offered to the recipients of the software under terms of the GPL or similar conditions. Thus, if you would want to include GPL-licensed code into an MIT-licensed codebase, you would have to approach the authors of the GPL-licensed code and get a special license where each allows you to release their code under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-06-14T12:47:33.687" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T12:47:33.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-14T15:55:34.527" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that MySQL (community edition) and MariaDB are under GPL v2 license. Does it mean that it is not allowed to build proprietary database storage engines for them? It is inevitable that one needs to link the storage engine with the database, and thus GPL requires the linked storage engine to be GPL-ed. Or did I miss something?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, there are a few (rather obscure) proprietary storage engines for these databases out there, including (old versions of) TokuDB, and a few others listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://fromdual.com/mysql-pluggable-storage-engines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, how can they keep the source code closed while not violating the GPL license?&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;To clarify, I certainly care about distributing the resulting binary, as we know that not releasing source code for private use or even exploiting the so called &amp;quot;SaaS loophole&amp;quot; is allowed by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27216" LastEditorUserId="27216" LastEditDate="2022-06-14T19:12:20.947" LastActivityDate="2022-06-14T19:12:20.947" Title="Does MySQL / MariaDB allow proprietary (i.e. close-sourced) storage engines?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|plugins|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-15T14:54:24.987" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a library which is a derivative work of openjdk that's released under GPL 2.0 with Classpath Exception, so my library is obviously GPL 2.0+CE too. I'd like to write tests for my library using testng and wiremock which are licensed under Apache 2.0, thus incompatible with GPL 2.0. As far as know, I'm not allowed to use those libraries in GPL 2.0 code, but do my tests need to be GPL? Can I release main library under GPL 2.0 and tests under i.e. MIT? And here is one interesting bit, openjdk has links to Apache 2.0 libraries in their GPL 2.0 code. Does it mean they themselves breached GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27227" LastActivityDate="2022-06-15T14:54:24.987" Title="Using Apache 2.0 libraries to test GPL 2 library" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12938" CreationDate="2022-06-15T17:40:19.617" Score="2" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently working on a new MIT licensed project (with Creative Commons License for documentation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project uses a combination of Java and Kotlin and is built with Gradle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All files have ben annotated with tags such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022 Anthony Accioly&#xA;SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022 Anthony Accioly&#xA;SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF reuse tool&lt;/a&gt; to download the proper licenses to a &lt;code&gt;LICENSES&lt;/code&gt; folder and verify compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project has a lot of direct and indirect Gradle dependencies under several different &amp;quot;permissive&amp;quot; Open Source Licenses (none of the dependencies is licensed under GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll be distributing the source code on GitHub, and I also intend to use GitHub actions to assemble fat jars and publish binary releases (which will include binaries of most dependencies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12466/handling-licenses-of-dependencies&quot;&gt;Handling licenses of dependencies&lt;/a&gt; I assume that I don't need to do anything else with the source code, as I'm not copying or modifying any of the underlying libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the final jar will actually bundle dependencies, i.e., I believe that I'm ultimately &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; dependencies with my build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Do I need to do anything else in order to comply with license and usage terms of dependencies? And if so, can I automate it somehow? For instance, would something like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/resources/use/#documents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX Document&lt;/a&gt; with license information and copyright notices for each &amp;quot;package&amp;quot; be sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27056" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-16T09:18:30.963" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T09:18:30.963" Title="SPDX And Copyright notices. Do I need to do anything about dependencies?" Tags="|mit|copyright|license-notice|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-15T21:36:08.923" Score="1" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked every AAC- and FFmpeg-related question on the entire StackExchange and it's not yet clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my project, I provide some audio-only content, encoded in AAC, to the end users.&#xA;Some parts (not all) of the content are available &lt;strong&gt;only&lt;/strong&gt; to the users with a &lt;strong&gt;paid&lt;/strong&gt; subscription to the app.&#xA;The software I distribute only does the audio playback (mobile iOS &amp;amp; Android audio player apps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, to prepare that content (i.e. convert from some format to AAC) I use the encoders (FFmpeg), which happens once per audio file.&#xA;No encoding or decoding logic is a part of the user-facing flows, i.e. the users consume only the audio files that were (or were not) encoded to AAC sometime in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.via-corp.com/licensing/aac/aac-faqs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQs&lt;/a&gt; that distributing the content is free, but prior to distributing this, I need to encode it to AAC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I need to care about the license fees or patents because of using FFmpeg on the backend side to prepare the content before distributing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, is there a way to avoid this, e.g., using the other &lt;strong&gt;free&lt;/strong&gt; encoder (not FFmpeg)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no free encoder can help, will compiling the FFmpeg myself help?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the use of free software like ExoPlayer (Android) or AVPlayer (iOS) be treated as &amp;quot;decoding&amp;quot;? i.e., can the paid audio player app be treated as a &amp;quot;distributed software that provides the paid decoding functionality&amp;quot;? i.e., do we need to pay the license fees for the app that plays AAC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the audio content itself is mine, so I own all the rights)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPD for &lt;code&gt;4.&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/issues/2103#issuecomment-262781362&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;good quote&lt;/a&gt; from the ExoPlayer members: by adding ExoPlayer to dependencies, no encoder or decoder is actually bundled to the software we distribute. On iOS it's even a system library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27230" LastEditorUserId="27230" LastEditDate="2022-06-16T15:43:01.637" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T15:43:01.637" Title="FFmpeg &amp; AAC licenses &amp; patents" Tags="|commercial|law|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-16T06:19:27.640" Score="5" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed that some projects on GitHub are &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://treeware.earth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Treeware&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-methods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-methods&lt;/a&gt; (originally MIT license). The README says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This package is Treeware. If you use it in production, then we ask that you buy the world a tree to thank us for our work. By contributing to the Treeware forest you’ll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.github.com/jamesmills/add9a716c17628494e58f684b2615c66&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license example&lt;/a&gt; linked from Treeware's website (&lt;a href=&quot;https://treeware.earth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Website&lt;/a&gt; footer -&amp;gt; Resources -&amp;gt; Treeware licence example) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're free to use this package, but if it makes it to your production environment you are required to buy the world a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder legally whether these projects can still be considered GPL compatible. Even though MIT license is GPL compatible, the Treeware condition limits the use of this software (e.g. people with little budget may have a hard time satisfying the Treeware requirement). Since there are two licenses in the same project (MIT and Treeware), can the user pick which one to use? Or do both licenses need to be satisfied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, can these projects be considered open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17318" LastEditorUserId="17318" LastEditDate="2022-06-16T15:22:47.563" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T08:54:00.107" Title="Is treeware GPL compatible?" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2022-06-16T07:48:40.730" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The API Dev Tools example &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; GPL compatible (and open source) because it is a request (&amp;quot;we &lt;strong&gt;ask&lt;/strong&gt; that you buy the world a tree&amp;quot;, my emphasis) not a requirement. This is no different from &amp;quot;if you find this project useful, please consider making a donation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example you quote is not GPL compatible because it is a requirement and therefore a &amp;quot;further restriction&amp;quot; as defined by Section 7 of the GPL v3. Similarly, it is not open source because it fails the &amp;quot;no restriction against fields of endeavour&amp;quot; test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there are two licenses in the same project (MIT and Treeware), can the user pick which one to use? Or do both licenses need to be satisfied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, both (all) licenses need to be satisifed. It is possible to simultaneously release code under two individual licenses - which does allow the use to choose - but this will be made clear in the cases when this applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T07:48:40.730" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2022-06-16T08:46:39.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://treeware.earth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;treeware website&lt;/a&gt; is clear, it is a 'condition of use&amp;quot; on top of the other license (in this case MIT). This is more than a simple request for a donation. Conditions like this are not compatible with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/APIDevTools/swagger-methods/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;project's license file&lt;/a&gt; just states it is straight-forward MIT, so you could fork this project (according to the MIT license) and get rid of the treeware restriction. The GitHub page says &amp;quot;This package is Treeware.&amp;quot; but it is stated nowhere that the treeware condition would survive this transition if you fork it and make a new package out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a corporate environment this setting with Treeware would be too much in a greyzone, and I would advise my developers not to use the package at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T08:46:39.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12933" CreationDate="2022-06-16T09:03:24.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you distribute binaries, or a JAR with all the dependencies, you will need to do more. You will need to compile a file &amp;quot;3rd_party_licenses.txt&amp;quot; which lists all the direct and transitive dependencies, and which also includes the respective license name, the copyright attribution (sometimes called 'notices'), and for some licenses also the entire license language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have compiled files like this with more than 100,000 lines of text (for a big project). You can see examples of files like this when you type &amp;quot;about:license&amp;quot; in Firefox or &amp;quot;chrome://credits/&amp;quot; in Google Chrome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T09:03:24.037" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12939" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12940" CreationDate="2022-06-16T10:52:02.213" Score="2" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use code from project A that was licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later in project B, which is also going to be licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. What should the license headers in the source files look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a detailed description of how to cite permissively licensed code here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html&lt;/a&gt;. The suggestion is to include the following phrase in the header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This file incorporates work covered by the following copyright and permission notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like overkill if I'm using GPL-licensed code in a GPL-licensed project (I'd have to put the GPL-3.0-or-later license header into each source file twice). Is there a better way to do it, or should I still follow this pattern? What should the license header look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20213" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T11:09:52.523" Title="How to use code licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later in a project licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later?" Tags="|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12939" CreationDate="2022-06-16T11:09:52.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The document you link to is specifically about best-practice if you are combining works under different licences (where the licences permit this combination).  You aren't doing that; you are combining two works under identical licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to maintain all existing copyright notices, adding your own in any files that you have added copyrightable content to.  But you don't need to duplicate the licence notice itself, since the resulting work is under a single set of licence conditions (GPLv3+).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-06-16T11:09:52.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-16T11:34:18.570" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;The authors of a project whose code I wish to use and is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later have failed to provide a copyright notice. I know what their GitHub organization is. How should I cite their work? Should I just &amp;quot;make up&amp;quot; a copyright notice? Should I leave it out entirely? What years should the copyright notice span?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20213" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T03:15:27.537" Title="Citing project with license but without copyright notice" Tags="|gpl|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12935" CreationDate="2022-06-16T11:34:49.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Can projects with a Treeware requirement be considered open source?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;OSD&amp;quot;) published by the Open Source Initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rule 1 of the OSD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. &lt;strong&gt;The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violated, since the Treeware license [requires] that I &amp;quot;buy the world a tree&amp;quot; using the Ecologi web site, and this action requires paying a fee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rule 6 of the OSD:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;a specific field of endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, it may not restrict the&#xA;program from being &lt;strong&gt;used in a business&lt;/strong&gt;, or from being used for genetic&#xA;research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Treeware license is conditioned on whether you use the software &amp;quot;in production&amp;quot;. That's what Rule 6 is about -- so Treeware cannot condition a [requirement] like this that depends on whether you use the software in production or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is Treeware GPL-compatible?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's GPLv2, the Treeware notice is not compatible. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; states in section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose &lt;strong&gt;any further restrictions&lt;/strong&gt; on the recipients'&#xA;exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Treeware introduces a further restriction, since normally, users of GPL programs would have the right to use the program in a production environment as well, even if they did not buy the world a tree. Treeware says that if you use the program in production, that you [must] buy the world a tree. That is a further restriction on the software's use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, Section 7 says that you may remove such further restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Program as you&#xA;received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;governed by this License along with a term that is a further&#xA;restriction&lt;/strong&gt;, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for a GPLv3 program that includes the Treeware license term, Section 7 says that you may remove the Treeware term, if you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is the Treeware condition optional or required?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major problem with Treeware is that it's not generally clear whether the phrase &amp;quot;buy the world a tree&amp;quot; is a supposed to be required thing to do or an optional thing to do. For example, the version on the Treeware web site is worded this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This package is Treeware. &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you use it in&#xA;production, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; we &lt;strong&gt;ask that you&lt;/strong&gt; buy the world a&#xA;tree [with a hyperlink to plant.treeware.earth, which eventually leads to Ecologi.com] to thank us for our work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, in the above version, the phrasing indicates what action is to be done, on the condition that you use the software in a certain environment (&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; you use it in production, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; ...&amp;quot;). So I would interpret the phrase &amp;quot;then we ask that you buy the world a tree&amp;quot; in this version as a thing that you are being asked to do if the preceding condition is true. In other words, it's a requirement in the case that you use the software in a production environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the &amp;quot;buy the world a tree&amp;quot; suggestion in Treeware turns out to be an optional clause, then this would most likely resolve any doubts about GPL compatibility and Open Source compliance. If we do a quick search on GitHub we can find that there are indeed multiple ways that the Treeware condition is worded in practice. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fyggi/laravel-simple-uuid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/fyggi/laravel-simple-uuid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're free to use this package, but if it makes it to your production&#xA;environment &lt;strong&gt;you are required to buy the world a tree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version of Treeware seems to be clearly GPL-incompatible, and not Open Source, because the &amp;quot;the buy the world a tree&amp;quot; requirement is clearly required by the license text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Astrotomic/ignition-github&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/Astrotomic/ignition-github&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're free to use this package, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; if it makes it to your production&#xA;environment &lt;strong&gt;I would highly appreciate you buying the world a tree&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this version of Treeware, it's more likely that it could be considered GPL-compatible and Open Source-compatible, because phrasing the request in this way seems to signal the intention of making the clause optional. I personally would be more comfortable with the above wording if the word &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; were removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present, I cannot find any projects who have commented about Treeware in particular, but there is a license which contains a similar optional condition which is in the wild, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beerware&lt;/a&gt; license. In the Beerware license text, the licensee is asked to buy the author a beer, but that suggestion is clearly made optional in the license text. Because it is an optional clause, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/Beerware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fedora Project consider the Beerware license to be Free and GPL compatible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contra proferentem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can I fork the software and then remove the Treeware license from my forked version?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most open source licenses, the answer is probably yes. If you read the Treeware license itself, there is nothing written there that requires that you retain the Treeware notice itself when you copy and modify the software. So, according to most open source licenses, there's nothing preventing you from copying the project and deleting the Treeware notice in your version, effectively creating your own non-Treeware'd version which does not include that requirement/suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-06-17T08:54:00.107" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T08:54:00.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-17T02:14:17.167" Score="1" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL or AGPL restrict programs from talking to other programs with other licenses via API? (i.e. transferring data.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person 1 has Software A which has a GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person 2 has Software B which has an MIT License (Expat Version)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Person 3 has Software C which has a proprietary license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone creates a program that can interact with other programs, but the other programs are installed and used by end-users or other developers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the MIT licensed work and the proprietary licensed work communicate with a GPL licensed work via API?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of the software is integrated together (other than the API).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each person has their own web hosting account(s).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The data is provided by the users and the software only processes and presents it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each person may or may not have modified their versions of the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each person may or may not be conveying their versions of their software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if all three programs are run by the same person, but each software is separated and possibly even hosted separately? Does that change anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example use cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone creates multiple programs under multiple licenses and wants them to talk to one another. A user chooses which software they want, and installs each separately. Each software package can operate independently and is not dependent on the others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, is GPL software restricted to only being used with GPL software, or can it interact with other software as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the mere act of using an API force a user to license their work under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastEditorUserId="27049" LastEditDate="2022-06-17T02:26:54.260" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T02:26:54.260" Title="Can GPL or AGPL talk to non-GPL software (via API, for example)?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12957" CreationDate="2022-06-17T02:52:56.813" Score="1" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the GPLv3 license, it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Additional permissions” are terms that supplement the terms of this&#xA;License by making exceptions from one or more of its conditions.&#xA;Additional permissions that are applicable to the entire Program shall&#xA;be treated as though they were included in this License, to the extent&#xA;that they are valid under applicable law. &lt;strong&gt;If additional permissions&#xA;apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately&#xA;under those permissions&lt;/strong&gt;, but the entire Program remains governed by&#xA;this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the MIT licensed code, if used separately, is still MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the original copyright holder of the original MIT licensed software continue to distribute that software under the MIT license if all or part of their work is incorporated into another project that has a GPL or AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, MIT licensed project A is included in GPL licensed project B, but project A remains an independent project that does not include GPL code. Can project A stay MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the code that is MIT licensed be extracted from the GPL project if it has not been modified and it is clear that that particular code was MIT licensed? (&lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;that part may be used separately under those permissions.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastEditorUserId="27049" LastEditDate="2022-06-18T08:08:45.490" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T12:28:44.500" Title="How does using MIT Licensed code in a GPL or AGPL work affect the original licensed work?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5097" CreationDate="2022-06-17T03:08:11.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is very permissive, but it does not allow others to &amp;quot;legally claim ownership&amp;quot; in any way, shape, or form. It allows people to use the software, modify it, and even distribute it, but that is not the same as &amp;quot;claiming ownership.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it would be a violation of the license if someone claimed they created the original code, as the license clearly states that the copyright notice and permission notice must remain intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no ambiguity about the copyright at all. In fact, the copyright notice is stated in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person can add their own code, and the code that they create would be copyrighted by them since they created it. But this copyright does not extend to the original code, which is still copyrighted by the original copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it becomes a mess is when people fail to document which code came from where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is so permissive that leaving the existing copyright and permission notices intact is usually sufficient to comply with the license, but it is better if the source of each code and its version history is documented somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T03:08:11.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12941" CreationDate="2022-06-17T03:15:27.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You probably should not modify or add their copyright notice. If you make a mistake, there could be legal implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably best to just give the information you have about them, including a link to their repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-17T03:15:27.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-18T08:38:41.560" Score="6" ViewCount="1414" Body="&lt;p&gt;My website used TailwindCSS, and other OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;TailwindCSS (generated the css) (imported via npm install)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;typed.js (imported via &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;script src=&amp;quot;&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/script&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/typed.js/2.0.12/typed.min.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/typed.js/2.0.12/typed.min.js&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, I must include the license and copyright notice &lt;code&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will one page for listing OSS (and the license) used in my website be enough? Like at &lt;a href=&quot;https://discord.com/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://discord.com/licenses&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to add the (used) library's dependencies too? If yes, is there any tools that can automatically generate the license page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27257" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-06-18T13:41:22.337" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T13:41:22.337" Title="Where should I include the license and copyright notice into my website?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6185" CreationDate="2022-06-18T12:07:47.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to mitigate this issue is to clearly and conspicuously include the URL to the official website and/or repository in multiple places in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who makes a copy and does not change anything (or very little) is not going to bother changing these references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GitHub in particular, make sure you have a README.md file that links back to the official project. GitHub displays that file automatically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps mention that to get the latest version, go to a particular URL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone forks your project and makes significant changes, they are welcome to change these notices. But they should be using a different name for the project in that case. And that is a different scenario than discussed in the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T12:07:47.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12948" CreationDate="2022-06-18T13:37:52.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both Tailwind CSS and TypedJS appear to be licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;. It is good practice to have the license and copyright attribution on one page of your website (usually somewhere close to the 'About' page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both CSS and JS code is actually delivered to the browser, so this qualifies as distributing a copy according to the terms of the MIT license. Therefore you are actually required to provide the license and copyright information to the visitors of your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, you should also include the information for the direct and transitive dependencies. They will likely also have a permissive license compatible with MIT. If it is just a handful of dependencies it is likely the easiest to do that manually. If it is a large number you  might want to use a specialized tool such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt; or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T13:37:52.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-18T20:25:27.060" Score="7" ViewCount="1740" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to make my lecture notes free, and available to all, but would like to be given credit if others use part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be copyleft, GPL, CC, or others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a proper notice to insert on the first page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27262" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-06-26T05:17:57.733" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T05:17:57.733" Title="Need samples of copyleft notices" Tags="|copyleft|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12951" CreationDate="2022-06-18T21:38:11.810" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are confusing at least two concepts here. Looking at your list of suggestions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;copyleft&amp;quot; is not a license itself, but a property of some licenses which means that any derivative works must use the same (or a very similar) license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; is not a license itself, but a family of copyleft licenses which includes the &amp;quot;base&amp;quot; GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License and the GNU Affero General Public License (and multiple version of each of those licenses). However, the GPL family are best suited for licensing code so would probably not be recommended for lecture notes.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GNU Free Documentation License does exist and is intended for use with documentation. However, it is a license with very marginal use (and some potentially problematic clauses) so is probably not a good choice unless you have a very strong reason to use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;CC&amp;quot; is not a license itself but a whole family of licenses, which include:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC0, which waives all rights to the fullest extent allowed by law.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Creative Commons Attribution License (generally known as &amp;quot;CC-BY&amp;quot;), a non-copyleft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Creative Commons Attribution-Sharelike License (&amp;quot;CC-BY-SA&amp;quot;), a copyleft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;NonCommercial&amp;quot; (-NC) and &amp;quot;NoDerivatives&amp;quot; (-ND) versions of the above; these are not open source licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common choice for a &amp;quot;requires credit&amp;quot; license for documentation would be CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. If you wish for any derivative works to be made available under a Creative Commons license, you would want CC-BY-SA; if this isn't important to you, you would want CC-BY. The Creative Commons website includes guidance on how to indicate your work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-18T21:38:11.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-19T00:18:05.027" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I submit a large PR to repository X. Later, I close the PR and make my own repository that uses some of X's code, and give X due attribution in the NOTICE file and function docstrings. At time of dispute, my repository is private and not distributed, though I can change that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I explicitly forbid it, is X allowed to 1) reopen the PR and commit it to X, 2) use code in my PR to publish an academic work? This &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2611/21059&quot;&gt;related Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; doesn't answer my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21059" LastActivityDate="2022-06-19T00:18:05.027" Title="Does a BSD-3 repository own Pull Requests?" Tags="|licensing|github|bsd|contributor-agreements|pull-request|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12955" CreationDate="2022-06-19T05:56:29.257" Score="2" ViewCount="1232" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of academic research, a company holds a GitHub account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Researchers come and go, and many create a repository related to their research project, using open-source licenses such as GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understood correctly, the code authorship belongs to the researcher, but the intellectual property belongs to the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, should the repository be published on the researcher's account and then forked on the company's, or rather the other way around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happens in France, in case it matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6730" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T06:33:55.120" Title="GitHub repository ownership when working for a company" Tags="|github|forking|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12954" CreationDate="2022-06-19T07:14:51.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a legal point of view, it doesn't matter. You should ensure that the copyright statement in each file correctly names whichever entity owns the copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From an academic credit point of view, you should follow whatever standards exist in your field, but I've never seen one which cares about the implementation details of a specific hosting platform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-19T07:14:51.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12954" CreationDate="2022-06-20T06:33:55.120" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all you need to respect what is agreed between the company and the researcher. Usually there is a written contract. Some companies allow publication, others don't. Some have a specific policy about the licenses under which the research results may be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, the copyright is owned by the one who pays. In the case you describe it seems to be the company who pays, therefore they need to be given the copyright attribution. The agreement between company and researcher might give some rights to the researcher, a license, possibly with sub-licensing rights. That should be part of the agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases there is a joint funding (public and private) for the researcher. Research foundations, subsidies for companies, innovation partnerships, research grants Schemes, etc. where part of the pay for the researcher comes from the public sources. These settings have their own rules about ownership of the work product, and the rules are very country-specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After considering all of the above, it will be clear how a publication on GitHub can be done, who owns the copyright, who owns the right to apply for patents, which OSS licenses may (or may not) be used. There is no 'one size fits all' rule. You should ask the legal department of the company which employs you as a researcher to provide you with all the relevant documents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T06:33:55.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12944" CreationDate="2022-06-20T12:28:44.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the original copyright holder of the original MIT licensed software continue to distribute that software under the MIT license if all or part of their work is incorporated into another project that has a GPL or AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, MIT licensed project A is included in GPL licensed project B, but project A remains an independent project that does not include GPL code. Can project A stay MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The fact that project B includes code coming from project A does not affect in any way the license of project A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Project B has to ensure that their license terms are compatible with those of project A (which is the case when MIT licensed code gets used in a GPL licensed project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the code that is MIT licensed be extracted from the GPL project if it has not been modified and it is clear that that particular code was MIT licensed? (i.e. &amp;quot;that part may be used separately under those permissions.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, that is what the bolded section of your quote from the GPL license means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T12:28:44.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-20T15:24:09.960" Score="0" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;After talking to a lot of people, they seem to give the impression that once the data goes into a GPL licensed program, it can only be extracted from that program by GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am told that a plugin or addon has to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have even been told that anything with a &amp;quot;shared data structure&amp;quot; counts too. So you can't access the same database either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have even claimed that it goes so far as to include APIs, meaning that your program has to be GPL just to use an API of a GPL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if those claims are true, how do you get data out of a GPL or AGPL program legally? The data is not GPL, just the software. The data should not be held hostage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has to be some legal way to get data out of a GPL program or otherwise interact with a GPL program's data, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27049" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T19:47:15.477" Title="How do you legally get data out of a GPL or AGPL program?" Tags="|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12958" CreationDate="2022-06-20T19:47:15.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they seem to give the impression that once the data goes into a GPL licensed program, it can only be extracted from that program by GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cannot possibly be correct. The GPL (and any other open source license) fundamentally derives its power from copyright law, so the &lt;em&gt;absolute&lt;/em&gt; maximum of its reach is the same as the absolute maximum reach of copyright law: any derivative works. If something is not a derivative of the GPL'd work, then it simply isn't covered by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact boundary of a derivative work is something which is jurisdiction and case dependent, but a good rule of thumb is &amp;quot;if the work could exist without the original, it is not a derivative work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am told that a plugin or addon has to be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/8087/5601&quot;&gt;top voted answer&lt;/a&gt; on the question you are using (in a comment) as your source for your claims makes it very clear it is not as simple as this. It all depends on the degree of &amp;quot;entanglement&amp;quot; between the two components, and again comes down to whether the plugin is a derivative of the main program or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have even been told that anything with a &amp;quot;shared data structure&amp;quot; counts too. So you can't access the same database either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are misinterpreting &amp;quot;shared data structure&amp;quot; - in this context, it means &amp;quot;actually using the same bytes of memory&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;uses the same schema&amp;quot;. Again, your argument simply cannot be true because the data is (in almost every case) not a derivative work of the program that produced it, so the license of the producing program is irrelevant in copyright terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have even claimed that it goes so far as to include APIs, meaning that your program has to be GPL just to use an API of a GPL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to provide a citation for this; put simply, people that claim this do not understand either the GPL or copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-06-20T19:47:15.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12961" CreationDate="2022-06-21T02:57:37.850" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any existing license can a person can use to distribute a document that allows reuse, derivative works, and free distribution, under the condition of it being licensed under the same or a similar license, but without requiring attribution to the original author? The common choice for share-alike seems to be CC-BY-SA, which does require attribution, but what if you want to be able to supply your name as author on the original work, but not impose mention of your name on all derivative works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that note, all the other CC licenses also seem to require attribution. Why is that? Does it somehow naturally follow from the other aspects of the license anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how the GFDL would fare with this, but regardless there may be other practical issues with it like requiring printing the license text with each copy of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27279" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T11:17:58.483" Title="Copyleft/share-alike non-attribution licenses?" Tags="|creative-commons|copyleft|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12960" CreationDate="2022-06-21T06:48:45.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Only a copyright holder (that's usually, but not necessarily, the author) can legally require a license being honoured. Thus without being able to prove that you are a rightsholder, you cannot enforce a license, and you have no ground to force anyone treat your work in a certain manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For copyright law being useful to you as copyright holder, you need to be able to prove that you are the rightful holder of the copyright. A copyright statement puts a nametag on the code - whether that's your real name or a pseudonymous one, does not matter too much as long as it is something you can prove somehow (e.g. also via a commit history which uses that pseudonymous name). If you now have code with no attribution attached whatsoever, it will be easy for anyone to 'claim' original ownership by attaching such a copyright note there - and this does not even need to be malice, but just someone who would like credits (and in the absence of your note, everyone will assume on first sight, that they are also the original creator).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, you as author decide how you want to see yourself credited. If you choose to not include any copyright notice anywhere, and just the license, you essentially have the information you ask for: code with a license, but no authorship directly named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-21T11:17:58.483" LastActivityDate="2022-06-21T11:17:58.483" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-21T18:41:23.563" Score="-1" ViewCount="4175" Body="&lt;p&gt;i have a question.&#xA;Can i copy code (500 lines) from an open source python pip library under MIT license, modify the code and add my (100 lines) and then publish it as not open source and charge people money for it?&#xA;I can add license.txt to my code, and not claim any right for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27289" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2022-06-22T04:26:39.197" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T11:03:56.333" Title="Can i copy MIT licensed code and then publish it as my own?" Tags="|mit|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-21T22:59:51.543" Score="1" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a set of libraries or framework that has been under development for more than a year by my team. We are finally nearing the completion of a few of these projects and want to release them as open source like I have with my personal projects. I want to limit commercial uses (including SAAS providers) from using the libraries. For personal and non-profit uses, I feel AGPL would be perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current idea is to use AGPL, but add an exemption to the license (as owner of the library), that allows owner to sell or provide licenses to use the library to others who do not need to follow AGPL. Owner of the library can sell the software to someone using it commercially or give it for free for a start up. The recipients of this license will not need to adhere to AGPL and can use the library without releasing their source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For contributors, they will need to sign a CTA to transfer copyright to the library owner. This will also apply to all forks who are bound by the same license. Larger impacting Contributors and Fork maintainers will also get exemption to AGPL to use in their commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding on the following questions, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7546/provide-customers-an-agpl-alternative&quot;&gt;Provide customers an AGPL alternative&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any pre-defined open source license that generally fits what I am requesting here including holding ownership over forks? Even if it does not fit everything, it's easier for everyone if its a known license compared to writing a completely new license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27292" LastActivityDate="2022-06-24T09:18:30.820" Title="Is there any license which is based off on AGPL, but provides exemptions for the owner to allow others use it under a different license?" Tags="|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|ownership|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12964" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12966" CreationDate="2022-06-22T02:21:46.647" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have downloaded the SDL2 libraries source code and noticed that I do not use the majority of what is in there. However, there are licenses in there under the ZLib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is whether I can remove files and the licenses going with those files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27293" LastActivityDate="2022-06-22T06:11:51.480" Title="Can I remove files that I do not use under ZLib license?" Tags="|license|zlib|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12963" CreationDate="2022-06-22T06:01:50.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Current idea is to use AGPL, but add an exemption to the license (as owner of the library), that allows owner to sell or provide licenses to use the library to others who do not need to follow AGPL. Owner of the library can sell the software to someone using it commercially or give it for free for a start up. The recipients of this license will not need to adhere to AGPL and can use the library without releasing their source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder of the project, then you do not need to add an exemption to the license, because you already have the right to distribute the project under any license you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For contributors, they will need to sign a CTA to transfer copyright to the library owner. This will also apply to all forks who are bound by the same license. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any pre-defined open source license that generally fits what I am requesting here including holding ownership over forks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement cannot be part of an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic idea of open-source is that people are allowed to make improvements to your code and to publish that improved version. But if the license requires that you transfer your copyrights to Corp.A, that effectively forbids publishing new versions once Corp.A ceases to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your own repository, a CTA works because you have the right to determine under what conditions code from other people gets added to &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; repository. Your repository is your exclusive property and having open-source code in it does not change in any way that you can set any arbitrary condition you like on what code will get added to that repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why people would sign a CTA to have their code added to your repository, instead of having it only on their fork, is because they want to have their changes in the official version of the product, instead of only in one of a large number of unofficial builds that all differ slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-06-22T06:01:50.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12964" CreationDate="2022-06-22T06:11:51.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is whether I can remove files and the licenses going with those files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all copyright licenses state, in one form or another, that you must keep the license notices and/or license text.&#xA;What is meant is that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for the notices in a source file, you must keep those notices as long as there is any content in the file that is covered by the license referred to in the notice. As soon as all covered content is deleted, you can also delete that notice and/or remove the file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for license files, you must keep them as long as there is any content in the project that is covered by the license. As soon as you removed the last content that was governed by the license from the project, you can also remove the file(s) with the license text and attribution notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-06-22T06:11:51.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-22T13:53:04.247" Score="4" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this popular open source project that maintains a language specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original maintainer also maintains most of the programming-language specific libraries like Ruby, JavaScript and Python. Other members from the community have contributed other programming-language implementations, such as .NET, C++, Elixir, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That latest changes to the specification were done six years ago, and, although the specification did not officially reach an official v1.0 release, this specification was taken advantage of in most cloud-vendors CLI tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since that time, the original maintainer ignored pull requests and issues and never offered feedback despite repeated attempts to contact him through his various projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last year, I assessed interest from the community and offered to maintain the spec and steward change proposals with the goal to bring improvements. Seemed the community was interested but I could not follow through due to time and priority constraints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, early this year, I committed to maintain the spec and steward change proposals going forward. With help from members of the community, we actually forked the various repositories and did the following changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rebranded the language specification to &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;popular-language&amp;gt; Community Edition&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Created a process from which accepted enhancement proposals automatically generate the public-facing website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gathered most requested changes, categorized them and initialized discussions with the goal to have the community vote and provide feedback.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I reached to all past interested members of the community. This was a clumsy step on my part as it was sometimes interpreted as SPAM. One piece of feedback I had from members of the community, though, was to know if this was a hostile takeover and if, indeed, we had tried to reach the original maintainer before working or our own fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s when the original maintainer chimed in and offered to continue working towards his original implementation. Although by this time we had broken the fork relationship, I actually published all the relevant changes we had made in our forks around typos to the website, modernized automated generation tooling, references to implementation libraries, etc. as pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was one month ago and the original maintainer did not offer feedback any more. He did not acknowledge a simple question as to whether he needed help or more time or anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage, I feel stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, our work on the &amp;quot;community&amp;quot; fork is effectively stalled.&#xA;On the other hand, the original specification project does not appear to be maintained in a sustainable way nor with a steady-pace as was evident from the past six and half years history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a correct way to proceed forward with our fork without coming across as too aggressive and not alienate the community?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27297" LastEditorUserId="27297" LastEditDate="2022-06-22T14:00:37.643" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T09:30:11.460" Title="What would be a polite / correct way to take over a mostly abandoned open-source project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12962" CreationDate="2022-06-23T07:54:57.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT licence permits you &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; provided that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wish to modify and then distribute/sell copies of the modified version, which is permitted.  The proviso is that you must include the copyright notice of the original rightholder(s), and the text of the MIT licence.  Note that there is no requirement that this text be applicable to your customers; only that it must be included.  You can, if you like, include it surrounded by (eg) a warning that it is included pursuant to an upstream licence condition but does not itself fully represent the licence of the purchased product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly OK for you to apply a proprietary licence to the code you are shipping, this being code you received under the MIT licence and then modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-23T11:03:56.333" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T11:03:56.333" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12968" CreationDate="2022-06-23T09:30:11.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proper way is to fork the project and to make it clear that the new project is a fork of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, this means that the new project should brand itself with a name that is distinct from the original project. Some examples of this currently in use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;XFree86 vs. XOrg.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OpenSSL vs. LibreSSL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GraphicsMagick vs. ImageMagick.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firefox vs. Basilisk.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jenkins vs. Hudson.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MariaDB vs. MySQL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vim vs. Neovim.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new name may contain hints that the new project is forked or related (e.g. GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick both spell 'magick' with 'ck'; Jenkins and Hudson are both English surnames; and so on), but the new name should be sufficiently distinct, to avoid confusion and to avoid creating the impression that one is trying to mislead the 'legacy' users of the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, one cannot really &amp;quot;take over&amp;quot; an open source project. The code is free to copy, modify and redistribute, though, so of course one can fork it and continue it in a new direction, at a new pace, with a new development strategy, and so on, if one wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That latest changes to the specification were done six years ago, and, although the specification did not officially reach an official v1.0 release, this specification was taken advantage of in most cloud-vendors CLI tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it's a programming language, this makes clarity even more important. People that are currently relying on language &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; or implementation &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; in a production environment may well prefer the stable nature of &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; (stable in the sense that the spec is changing slowly) over new features that may be offered by &lt;strong&gt;X′&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you will adopt a development goal to ensure that &lt;strong&gt;X′&lt;/strong&gt; remains backwards-compatible with &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt;. However, when it comes to a programming language specification and/or implementation, ensuring full compatibility is often easier said than done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rebranded the language specification to &amp;lt;popular-language&amp;gt; Community Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This naming scheme seems potentially problematic to me. Appending words such as 'community', 'professional' and 'enterprise' to an existing name X is often done when the same product X is released with a modified feature set or a different licensing model. Examples: Visual Studio Professional/Community, PyCharm Professional/Community, CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you decide to refer to &lt;strong&gt;X′&lt;/strong&gt; as &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; Community Edition&amp;quot;, it's possible that some original users of &lt;strong&gt;X&lt;/strong&gt; will be confused by this naming choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related questions and answers:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11606/should-i-keep-the-old-projects-name-in-the-copyright-details-after-a-fork&quot;&gt;Should I keep the old project's name in the copyright details after a fork?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1929/can-you-reuse-a-projects-name-if-the-project-is-mit-licensed&quot;&gt;Can you reuse a project's name, if the project is MIT licensed?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2022-06-23T09:30:11.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12963" CreationDate="2022-06-24T09:18:30.820" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You wrote &amp;quot;Is there any license which is based off on AGPL, but provides exemptions for the owner to allow others use it under a different license?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case you agree that your copyright will be regulated under the European legal framework, the EUPL-1.2 may answer your question in so far it covers SaaS or remote distribution of the software and allows merged derivatives to be distributed under one of the compatible licenses listed in the EUPL appendix.&#xA;This compatible license will then be applicable to the derivative only and will prevail on the EUPL in case of license conflict. But as none of these listed compatible licenses (including the GPL) are in conflict (= prohibit) the coverage of SaaS and the publication/sharing of source code in such case, these EUPL obligations will persist, even if the license applied to the derivative is the GPL or the MPL (and not the AGPL).&#xA;This may look a little bit complex, but it is a way for EUPL licensors to allow others to distribute merged derivatives under a different license, while preserving the obligation of reciprocity (source code publication and sharing) in case the distribution is done remotely or as a service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastActivityDate="2022-06-24T09:18:30.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12973" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12975" CreationDate="2022-06-26T19:01:28.577" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understood correctly, every derivative of a GPL-v3 licensed software is imbued with the GPL-v3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that I have to disclose the code I used for the infrastructure that runs the GPL app? What about the web UI, the bash scripts etc. etc.? What if I don't use code per se to interact with the GPL-v3 licensed software (rest API, something else)? Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27334" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T20:03:49.467" Title="Is it possible to monetize the hosting of a GPL-v3 licensed app?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-26T19:52:31.110" Score="3" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very confused about how the MIT license works in detail. In layman's terms, I understand the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you distribute copies of MIT source, then you must include the license, and the rights in it are granted to the receiver.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you modify MIT source (which is permitted) then you can distribute the modifications[1], but the derived work is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; automatically MIT.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license only speaks in terms of copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must modified copies include the MIT license? Note that the modified copy might not even contain any code in common with the original - for example, if it was translated into another language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any distinction when the code has not been modified per se, but is merely included as part of a larger work (e.g. suppose you copied an MIT file and pasted it inside a closed-source project)? I believe that the combined work is, technically, a derived work of both parts. If the answer to the first question is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, then what about this case? (if it's &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, then there is surely no distinction in this case)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, does the MIT license thus included actually convey any rights? I think it must do, or I can't understand how the license worked for the original work. But I also think it must not, because if it did then my translated MIT library would appear to automatically be MIT (which is wrong).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that the modified work is intended to be distributed as something other than MIT - for concreteness, let's say it's fully proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]: Incidentally, I don't see how this is implied exactly by the license text, but it seems everyone (including me) accepts it's allowed. The license refers only to &amp;quot;copies&amp;quot;, so it looks like what it &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt; is that you can modify copies and distribute copies, but not that you can distribute modified copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20382" LastEditorUserId="20382" LastEditDate="2022-06-26T20:11:36.960" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T20:34:45.167" Title="What must you include in a derived work of an MIT project?" Tags="|mit|license-notice|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12973" CreationDate="2022-06-26T20:03:49.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your title says &amp;quot;monetize&amp;quot; but your question makes it clear you ask more precisely about copyleft obligations and source disclosure (which aren't concerns that are strictly aligned with monetization). If you really ask about monetization, the GPL specifies no limits on how much you may charge for a transferring copy, or any other permitted action (e.g., making modifications, or hosting a copy online for a client or users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL requires you to offer the source code to any recipients to whom you give (including as part of a sale, or gratis) a copy of a GPL-licensed binary file. Most network services do not involve giving a copy of a binary file to users of the service, so the source-sharing obligations of the GPL does not apply merely because a computer sending some network traffic to a user has privately executed GPL-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is GPL-licensed code sent to the user as part of, e.g., a web UI, then that component would carry GPL source-sharing requirements, which might extend to the other client-side code components, depending on how your jurisdiction's copyright laws view how they interact with one another and do/don't create a new derivative client-side work. Client-side GPL code would very likely not impose source-sharing requirements on any server-side code that is never sent to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Affero GPL (AGPL) is a different, more strict license that &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; impose source-sharing requirements in this network case, but you've asked about the GPL, not the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T20:03:49.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12974" CreationDate="2022-06-26T20:34:45.167" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the text of the MIT license, quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;. I have changed angle brackets to square brackets so that it renders correctly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [YEAR] [COPYRIGHT HOLDER]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must modified copies include the MIT license? Note that the modified copy might not even contain any code in common with the original - for example, if it was translated into another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It costs you nothing to include the license, other than a tiny amount of UI that you can bury in a settings menu. There is no reason to avoid doing this, and there might be legal risk associated with it. If you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to omit the license, I can only advise you to consult an attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I also think it must not, because if it did then my translated MIT library would appear to automatically be MIT (which is wrong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is not a copyleft license. It never requires you to give any sort of license to the recipient, and explicitly permits you to give them a different license if you so choose (that's what &amp;quot;sublicense&amp;quot; means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In return for this rather generous allowance, the MIT license merely asks that you give the recipient a copy of its text. This is a purely informational requirement so that the recipient knows where the software originally came from; it does not cause your downstream work to also be licensed under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-06-26T20:34:45.167" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10365" CreationDate="2022-06-29T07:14:59.147" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The makers of GSL are clear about their intentions. GSL is licensed under GPL v3 and they explain clearly &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/doc/html/intro.html#gsl-is-free-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how and why they want to have it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way GSL is integrated and works in programs is intimate, anything that builds on GSL is a 'covered work' as defined in GPLv3. The makers of GSL have not added a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Linking Exception'&lt;/a&gt; to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that you are not distributing the GSL yourself, but you are depending on it --in the absence of a Linking Exception-- does not provide you with a way out of your obligations. Your software will also have to be licensed under GPLv3 as soon as it is compiled. I do not see any way out, these are the terms, take it or leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only distribute the source code of your software and you see the need for licensing it under a license other than GPL, then I suggest you dual-license it with GPL (making it clear that the compiled software would be) and another license of your choice which fits your additional needs on top of what GPL can do for you. Please be aware that this addnl license might add confusion among the recipients, and a simple GPL license statement would be much clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the code is all yours, and you are concerned about your own usage of your code after you published it under GPL, then you can be relaxed. You can re-license your own work at any time, see the questions &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-project-be-relicensed&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7533/can-i-relicense-my-own-gpl-code-into-apache-mit?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-06-30T09:04:33.297" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T09:04:33.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10365" CreationDate="2022-06-29T07:45:10.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While other posts here make excellent points, the FSF's line is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; that your code, written to be linked to a GPL library, must be released under the GPL.  They require only that (a) the combined work, if released, be released under the GPL in its entirety, and (b) your work, if released separately, be released under the GPL or a GPL-compatible licence.  They have always been clear that you can give away &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; rights to your work if you wish to, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, when they write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a library is released under the GPL (not the LGPL), does that mean that any software which uses it has to be under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, because the program actually links to the library. As such, the terms of the GPL apply to the entire combination. &lt;strong&gt;The software modules that link with the library may be under various GPL compatible licenses&lt;/strong&gt;, but the work as a whole must be licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while your work is (to my mind) definitely a derivative of the GPL library, when it is distributed on its own I would argue strongly that you are fine to distribute it under a permissive free licence if that is what you wish to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that there is then some danger that a third party comes along, removes the GSL calls from your code and replaces them with their own, then locks up the resulting product with a proprietary licence.  If you use the GPL for your code it avoids that risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-06-29T12:49:09.953" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T12:49:09.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-29T20:13:05.463" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;i am wondering which conditions apply if i want to use an Open Source cryptographic library embedded in a proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software will be proprietary and shall implement a digital signature verification. This verification may be implemented by the means of an Open Source library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intent is to rely on an Open Source cryptographic library such as OpenSSL, LibreSSl, GNUTLS... which may fulfill this purpose of digital signature verification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does one of this library (or one another) be permissive enough in order to let this digital signature verification being implemented, without implying that overall code and binary getting Open Source, and without implying that end user shall be notified of the cryptographic library being used ? We won't be able to notify the end user of the license (embedded software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27357" LastActivityDate="2022-06-29T20:13:05.463" Title="Licence and requirements for Open Source cryptographic library usage" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12985" CreationDate="2022-06-29T22:53:38.147" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across a web application project on GitHub that uses AGPLv3 as it's primarily licensed, but a sub-folder of the project is provided under a proprietary license. This contains the code for certain &amp;quot;enterprise&amp;quot;/paid-for features. This sub-folder is not dual-licensed, just provided under a custom proprietary license (Preventing production use).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell from looking at the code, since I have not downloaded &amp;amp; built the application, the AGPLv3 portion appears to rely on the sources in the proprietary sub-folder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I respect that they can license code as they'd like, being the copyright holder, but is such a required proprietary section compatible with the freedoms provided in the AGPLv3?  I'm not sure how the AGPLv3 applies to the application as a whole vs as parts of source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the AGPLv3, this looks most relevant (Section 7, paragraph 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If additional permissions apply only to part of the Program, that part may be used separately under those permissions, but the entire Program remains governed by this License without regard to the additional permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on that you could argue the AGPLv3 would apply to that sub-folder, being part of &amp;quot;the entire Program&amp;quot;, but it could also be argued that everything but the proprietary section was provided as &amp;quot;the entire Program&amp;quot;, albeit an incomplete one. If it provides context, the application is actively marketed as &amp;quot;Open Source&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27360" LastActivityDate="2022-07-01T01:27:46.353" Title="Can an AGPLv3 licensed application be provided with a proprietary portion?" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-06-30T12:59:02.720" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an API that I use for commercial purposes. I find out today that I have dependencies with licence types: BSD (3-Clause), BSD, Apache, and MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused as the BSD (3-Clause) license states that: &amp;quot;The BSD UNIX license states one may copy, modify and redistribute the code so long as one retains a copy of the original copyright statement.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am not modifying my dependencies, they are part of the source code. Hence, I wonder if I should notify our users/clients about the code dependencies that we use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27364" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-07-03T09:33:31.073" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T09:33:31.073" Title="API source code has a dependency with BSD license" Tags="|license-compatibility|source-code|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12983" CreationDate="2022-06-30T14:20:06.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you should!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise you become liable of copyright infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use the code only on the conditions laid out in the license. The BSD license asks you to credit the authors by retaining their copyright statement and disclaimer and communicating that to both, recipients of your binary as well as the recipients of your source code (if you distribute the latter, you don't need to distribute the sources):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright YEAR COPYRIGHT HOLDER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-06-30T14:20:06.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12981" CreationDate="2022-06-30T23:37:27.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the entire work is written by a single copyright holder (or multiple copyright holders working together in concert) then there is no problem. It may be the case that &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, as a recipient, cannot further redistribute the application, because distribution of an AGPL-licensed app with AGPL-incompatible components would cause an AGPL violation. But this is only a problem for you because the set of rights granted to you do not allow the inclusion of proprietary components in an overall AGPL work. The copyright holder was free to do so because their distribution did not rely on any license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can still make use of your AGPL rights by removing the proprietary components and including the AGPL-licensed parts in your own AGPL-licensed application (which may in some way resemble the original or do something else entirely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 7, paragraph 1 says that if there is a section of code that is &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; permissively licensed (e.g., under an MIT/Expat or BSD license) then that permissive code's inclusion within a larger AGPL work does not diminish those more permissive rights for that particular part. This is not the case you have here, which concerns a less-permissively licensed component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-07-01T01:27:46.353" LastActivityDate="2022-07-01T01:27:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-01T09:36:13.957" Score="5" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider this scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to implement my own version of some awkward functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The same functionality is implemented in at least one open source library (which allows copying).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My code is written from scratch and not derived from any open source library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wish to make use of this at work - so technically it becomes a &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot; and the copyright for my implementation belongs to my employer - even though I did it outside normal working hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I could not get this work so I asked a question on stackflow which is basically &amp;quot;how do I implement this functionality?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question was not answerable without reference to my implementation so I included the relevant almost functional code in the question*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;With the help of an answer I was able to get the code working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The answer which helped does fully answer the question. However, I am now in a position to answer it myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to do so by publishing a complete annotated example as a project on github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would involve publishing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a working implementation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my unit test suite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;assigning a license - E.g. BSD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle this would be useable in its own right. Live code is better than 'copypasta'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q Is it 'safe' to do this without getting permission to open source from my employer&lt;/strong&gt;?&#xA;I would very much like to do this the proper way. However, I have been trying to get the company to define an open source policy for many years without success thus far. I hold little hope of this happening in a timely manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some relevant points&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;code to do this is provided in at least one open source library with a license that allows copying - so it is does not meet requirements for originality of IP&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is essentially only one way to implement this functionality correctly - so fair use or Scènes à faire might apply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is sufficiently awkward to implement that a good Q&amp;amp;A pair on stackoverflow would be beneificial to the community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my jurisdiction is the UK.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming it is trivial (de minimis) would publishing my test suite affect that?&#xA;Would it be safer to publish just the minimal example on stackoverflow (making it CC-by-SA)?&#xA;How can I tell if it is sufficiently trivial that copyright rules won't apply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens down the line if wish to make alterations to the open source project independently of work for my employer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a general question but the one which prompted it is this one (where I was trying to implement a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2020/05/17/relative-pointers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relative pointer&lt;/a&gt; type in C++, of which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/doc/html/interprocess/offset_ptr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;offset_ptr&lt;/a&gt; from boost is perhaps the most well known example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/72356447/1569204&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/q/72356447/1569204&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5059/what-is-defined-as-trivial-code-when-licensing-a-project/5061#5061&quot;&gt;What is defined as trivial code when licensing a project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/216029/found-a-better-solution-to-a-problem-at-work-should-i-deter-from-posting-the-c?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/216029/found-a-better-solution-to-a-problem-at-work-should-i-deter-from-posting-the-c?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-worry-about-copyright-issues-for-code-posted-on-stack-overflow&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-worry-about-copyright-issues-for-code-posted-on-stack-overflow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/can-i-legally-use-code-i-found-on-a-forum/4037#4037&quot;&gt;Can I legally use code I found on a forum?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant concepts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis#Copyright&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingdom_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_United_Kingdom_law&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*could even publishing the broken code in my question technically be considered a copyright violation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="5925" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T17:07:14.183" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T17:07:14.183" Title="Legality of publishing code for a stackoverflow answer as an example implementation" Tags="|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-01T21:55:49.577" Score="3" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that you are a service provider (like AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Heroku for example) and you decide to offer a database that is licensed under the AGPL as a managed service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you need to release only the modifications made to the AGPL software (the database)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you need to release also the code that you use to &amp;quot;manage&amp;quot; that software (launch new instances, backups, updates, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Or you need to release the code of your entire platform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion the expression &amp;quot;if you modify the Program&amp;quot; only refers to the first point (which is the most intuitive interpretation), but I would also like to hear your opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21423" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T12:57:20.873" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T12:57:20.873" Title="AGPL and cloud providers" Tags="|agpl-3.0|agpl|cloud|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12987" CreationDate="2022-07-02T12:04:23.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cloud Service Providers would have no issue with providing an AGPL-licensed database for their customers. The only thing they would need to do is provide to their customers any changes to the source code (item 1 in your question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the AGPL license of the database, Cloud Service Providers would not need to provide source code of any of their underlying software (launch new instances, backups, updates, etc.), nor the code of their entire cloud management platform (items 2 and 3 in your question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The customers of the Cloud Service Providers, however, usually prefer services, which are under a permissive license. That's why Amazon for example forked Elastic Search, to avoid forcing their customers to use software under SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-07-02T12:04:23.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12594" CreationDate="2022-07-03T19:57:26.540" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source Announcement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some software components of this product incorporate source code include&#xA;the following Open Source License(s).&#xA;Apache License Version 2.0&#xA;BSD 2.0&#xA;unRAR License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;                    Apache License&#xA;             Version 2.0, January 2004 &#xA;            http://www.apache.org/licenses/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE, REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;License&amp;quot; shall mean the terms and conditions for use, reproduction,&#xA;and distribution as defined by Sections 1 through 9 of this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Licensor&amp;quot; shall mean the copyright owner or entity authorized by&#xA;the copyright owner that is granting the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Legal Entity&amp;quot; shall mean the union of the acting entity and all&#xA;other entities that control, are controlled by, or are under common&#xA;control with that entity. 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THE AUTHOR WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR DATA LOSS,&#xA;DAMAGES, LOSS OF PROFITS OR ANY OTHER KIND OF LOSS WHILE USING&#xA;OR MISUSING THIS SOFTWARE.&#xA;&#xA;5. Installing and using the UnRAR utility signifies acceptance of&#xA;these terms and conditions of the license.&#xA;&#xA;6. If you don't agree with terms of the license you must remove&#xA;UnRAR files from your storage devices and cease to use the&#xA;utility.&#xA;&#xA;Thank you for your interest in RAR and UnRAR.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Alexander L. Roshal&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;- Network Storage Manager&#xA;Copyright 2017, Rapid7, Inc.&#xA;&#xA;License: BSD-3-clause&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,&#xA;  this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;&#xA;  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;  documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&#xA;  * Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors&#xA;  may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software&#xA;  without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27376" LastActivityDate="2022-07-03T19:57:26.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5479" CreationDate="2022-07-04T11:39:39.933" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;.NET is open-source and under the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent organization to foster open development and collaboration around the .NET ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you can build your  &lt;a href=&quot;https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/free&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own version of .NET from source code&lt;/a&gt;, most developers use the free, officially supported releases that are built and tested on Microsoft-maintained servers in Azure and supported just like any Microsoft product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The programming languages, compilers, libraries, and runtimes that make up the .NET platform are all free. There are no licensing costs, including for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The latest versions&lt;/strong&gt; of .NET are all open-source and maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27380" LastEditorUserId="27380" LastEditDate="2022-07-04T12:27:58.277" LastActivityDate="2022-07-04T12:27:58.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12993" CreationDate="2022-07-05T11:25:44.467" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;My situation is the following. I'm about to submit an article to a journal with the goal of having it published in that journal. The journal distributes its content under CC BY 4.0. While writing this article I ran into a (math) sub-problem which I couldn't solve myself. So I asked a question on Math SE and it got an answer which solved the problem. The answer contains a description of the required steps (mathematical aspects) as well as a code snippet which verifies the assumptions with the help of a computer program (this code is required to complete the proof). For completeness, I would like to include the content of this answer in my article; the proof it demonstrates is required for my work to be complete (otherwise my conjecture stands without proof). However, Math SE content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 which seems to be more restrictive than CC BY 4.0 since it additionally requires ShareAlike. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creative commons&lt;/a&gt; website provides the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ShareAlike&lt;/strong&gt; — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; mentions that &lt;em&gt;ShareAlike&lt;/em&gt; also allows publication under a compatible license. The page lists &lt;em&gt;Free Art License&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;GPLv3&lt;/em&gt; as compatible with CC BY-SA 4.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to my question(s). Am I allowed to include the Math SE answer's content into my article and have the journal redistribute it under CC BY 4.0? Based on the above findings, my feeling is that I am not allowed to do that (or that the journal is not allowed to redistribute that content and thus would have to reject the article). Which brings me to my second question. In the case that I am not allowed to include the Math SE content, what are my options? For my article to be complete I need a proof of the specific sub-problem similar to the one which has been given in the Math SE answer. I didn't manage to come up with another proof myself (that's why I asked the question). Even if I rephrase that Math SE answer, I guess, including it without proper attribution still poses a copyright infringement (and after all, there is the code snippet which I can't really rewrite; at least not its purpose and what it's doing). Have I reached an impasse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A glimmer of hope?&lt;/strong&gt; One option that comes to my mind is that in my article I just state &amp;quot;this is the problem (description-goes-here) and it has been proved here [citation]&amp;quot; (i.e. not including the proof). However, the problem description is not simple and in order to make it more accessible for the Math SE users, I have rephrased it by removing any domain knowledge / notation (i.e. on Math SE it stands as as pure, generic math problem, but it originated from a specific physics problem with dedicated notation etc.). So for the readers of my article it will be difficult to connect the cited answer to the original problem. So this would require me to rephrase the problem inside my article so it has the same form as the one on Math SE. That, however, feels awkward because to the reader it will seem like an unnecessary excursion / transformation which further inflates the article; the readers will ask themselves, why didn't the authors stay within the physics domain and just adapted the proof accordingly; that would have been so much easier to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7904" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T15:15:16.187" Title="Can content licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 be redistributed under CC BY 4.0? If not, what are my options?" Tags="|license-compatibility|cc-by-sa|redistribution|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-05T12:03:36.290" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an aiohttp server that will call python modules or shared object libraries. SOME of those modules or so's might be governed by GPL-3 licensing. The parent aiohttp server that does routing to those modules or so's is governed by aiohttp's Apache2 license. Some of the other modules or so's will be under a liberal MIT license, or even possibly a proprietary license for that matter. I will call the GPL-3 licensed modules or so's by means of a Worker, as explained here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://aiomultiprocess.omnilib.dev/en/stable/guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://aiomultiprocess.omnilib.dev/en/stable/guide.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That documentation indicates that those modules or so's will be run under a separate process. Does this sound sufficient for no claim to be made that the Apache 2 licensed router or other non-GPL-3 modules/so's are infringing on the GPL-3 licenses of those other modules or so's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;==================================================&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found out one thing: Apache 2 is compatible with GPL-3. So that addresses conflicts with the parent process running aiohttp,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe aiomultiprocess is doing under the hood a fork of those separate &amp;quot;Worker&amp;quot; processes, so it should be in the clear for GPL-3 (except for processes using licenses that have sweeping claims, like Affero or some proprietary ones out there...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now it's down to whether other separate forked &amp;quot;Worker&amp;quot; process threads running various licenses can coexist with process threads running GPL-3 and Apache 2. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; so; feel free to weigh in here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI: the additional aiomultiprcoess component is MIT...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27384" LastEditorUserId="27384" LastEditDate="2022-07-05T19:07:34.023" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T19:07:34.023" Title="gpl-3+aiohttp license integrity" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12991" CreationDate="2022-07-05T15:15:16.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are ultimately two distinct aspects here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;copyright concerns and the terms of the CC BY-SA license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;academic practices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to include material which you did not author yourself into a paper, you need a license. Here, you received material under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Due to the ShareAlike license component it is a “copyleft” license that requires that all derivative works use the same (or a compatible) license. You do not have the right to distribute it under a different license such as CC BY 4.0. License compatibility is a directional relationship. While you can include CC BY 4.0-licensed material into a CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed work, the inverse does not hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the license only matters if your use would be copyright infringement without the license. Some uses are covered by copyright exceptions (but I wouldn't want to rely on that here). Also, copyright only covers creative &lt;em&gt;expression&lt;/em&gt;, but not ideas. This means that you can summarize others' work without needing a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academic practices are out of scope of this site, but it's worth pointing out that you cannot publish other people's work, regardless of licensing concerns.  If those people's contribution meets the criteria for authorship, then it may be appropriate to publish the paper together. Otherwise, it would be appropriate to &lt;em&gt;cite&lt;/em&gt; their work. In the context of a citation, it may be appropriate to reproduce small fragments verbatim, and such fragments might be covered by a copyright exception in your jurisdiction, but you shouldn't copy the entire work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically speaking, this leaves you the following options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You co-author the paper together with the person who contributed an essential part of your proofs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You ask the other person for a separate license so that you can include their material into the CC BY 4.0 licensed paper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You identify a copyright exception allowing your use, for example § 51 UrhG in Germany.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You cite the other person's work and summarize key aspects in your own words, without reproducing the material.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-07-05T15:15:16.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12986" CreationDate="2022-07-06T08:00:25.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have wished to develop some code to do a particular job of work.  Having read an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open-source&lt;/a&gt; codebase that does a similar job, you developed your own code, with the assistance of others on a SE website.  You wish to further develop this code as part of your paid employment, and include the result in your employer's proprietary codebase.  Your employer has no clear open-source policy, and has shown some resistance to engaging with the idea.  At the same time, you wish to place the work you've done on GitHub, under some kind of open-source licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the basis of what you've told us, it seems to me that the code you've developed thus far is arguably copyright-entangled with the open-source library (NB I don't say it is; I only note that your admission has made your defence against any future copyright-violation lawsuit harder).  Further, your code is almost certainly subject to the SE CC BY-SA licence.  Any further solution to this problem you develop risks similarly entanglements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You raise a number of legal defences, though I am unpersuaded by at least some (fair dealing exemptions in the UK apply only for non-commercial research or study, most of the jurisprudence on &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;only way to implement&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is not from England and Wales and so not binding here, and as Bart says &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; is a very low bar to have cleared).  But the key problem with all of them is that they are defences: you have to press ahead with potentially-infringing behaviour, wait for the rightsholder to sue, then raise those defences in court.  You may be willing to do that for the GitHub project (though the Boost licence is an MIT-clone, so a GitHub project under CC BY-SA or a mutally-compatible licence such as GPLv3 would be a strong possibility), but your employer may be very much less willing to shoulder that risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this point, I think you would be unwise to use this work (or any obvious derivative thereof) in a work scenario, and &lt;strong&gt;extremely&lt;/strong&gt; unwise to do so without your employer's clear, written assent.  If you get this assent, I would abandon any plans to publish the work on GitHub or elsewhere; it's very much an either/or situation.  If you don't get the assent and wish to proceed with open-source publication, this becomes instead an ordinary licence compliance question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T12:22:30.147" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T12:22:30.147" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12996" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-06T13:04:09.523" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aivanf.com/destiny-garden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a video game with many easter eggs and references&lt;/a&gt; to science, technologies, philosophy, and some movies, tv series, animated series, video games, franchises of fictional universes, settings, etc... The references are presented in the form of similarly named/looking characters, items, quests &amp;amp; tasks. Such easter eggs and references are quite popular in video games in tribute to the loved and respected works, to share the fun with your players, and I want to understand how to bypass possible legal troubles, especially because some copyright holders of those settings may be very intolerant to violations of their copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to distribute my game as a paid closed-source binary software on platforms like Steam, Itch.io. The references are inessential parts of my game, hence it's not plagiarism, though I'm afraid they can make the game to be considered as a derivative work. Thus, I see a couple of possible ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Deny references, so the game isn't a derivative work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking about adding the following text to the license/titles/credits of the game:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No trademarks or intellectual property belonging to third parties is used, no identification with protected or registered records is intended or should be inferred. All copyrights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it might be OK for minor references or copyright holders indifferent to easter-egging their artworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Distribute references as mods&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some games have fan-made mods that add references (character skins, items, quests, etc.) to other games, movies, franchises. Such mods are distributed for free (quite often with no license) and I haven't heard about any attention of the copyright holders – how does this work in the terms of law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to make my game modifiable, therefore I can release some game content with those references in the form of such fan-made mods. Thus, the mods will be separate software, so that my game is free from blaming of being a derivative work and can be freely monetised, meanwhile the mods will be derivative works but have no monetisation and freely distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other ways, thoughts, recommendations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;My question is not about open source nor even code, but it's about software and licenses, so I hope here's an appropriate place to ask it :) And please, don't recommend me to ask the copyright holders for a permission/license :D&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27387" LastEditorUserId="27387" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T14:47:09.330" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T14:47:09.330" Title="Can I develop a video game or mod related to 3rd party artwork?" Tags="|copyright|commercial|derivative-works|law|trademark|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-06T14:24:30.033" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hello-world-copyrighted-ido-tuchman?trk=articles_directory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; discuss the question of whether a &amp;quot;hello world&amp;quot; program is protected by copyright.&#xA;It comes to the conclusions that it is not (under US copyright law) because most of it is required by the implementation leaving only the phrase &amp;quot;hello, world&amp;quot; which by itself is too trivial to be copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the same reasoning would apply for my jurisdiction which is the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know how to reason about this.&#xA;At what point does something become non trivial so that copyright applies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I think should not matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;names of variables or functions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the order of operations where the order does not matter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things I am less sure of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;commentary describing what the code is doing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adding a unit test suite&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adding a build system&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a specific example in mind but am making that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12998/5925&quot;&gt;separate question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The point of the question here is if you are working your employer owns the copyright. Obviously it is correct to ask permission to publish from your employer. This question asks if it is necessary for trivial cases such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking a question on stackoverflow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;publishing a project or 'gist' explaining how to do something (which might also be an answer to  stackoverflow question).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/156/how-can-i-determine-if-some-code-i-want-to-release-as-opensource-is-already-lice&quot;&gt;How can I determine if some code I want to release as opensource is already licensed or proprietary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5059/what-is-defined-as-trivial-code-when-licensing-a-project?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What is defined as trivial code when licensing a project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/129053/can-i-adapt-code-i-wrote-for-work-and-release-it-as-open-source&quot;&gt;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/129053/can-i-adapt-code-i-wrote-for-work-and-release-it-as-open-source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12986/legality-of-publishing-code-for-a-stackoverflow-answer-as-an-example-impementati/12995#12995&quot;&gt;Legality of publishing code for a stackoverflow answer as an example impementation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastEditorUserId="5925" LastEditDate="2022-07-06T14:49:39.647" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T14:49:39.647" Title="When does an implemention cease being trivial and become covered by copyright?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-06T14:48:53.277" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hello-world-copyrighted-ido-tuchman?trk=articles_directory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; discuss the question of whether a &amp;quot;hello world&amp;quot; program is protected by copyright.&#xA;It comes to the conclusions that it is not (under US copyright law) because most of it is required by the implementation leaving only the phrase &amp;quot;hello, world&amp;quot; which by itself is too trivial to be copyrightable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the same reasoning would apply for my jurisdiction which is the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this reasoning also apply to implementation of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2020/05/17/relative-pointers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relative pointer&lt;/a&gt; type in C++, of which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/doc/html/interprocess/offset_ptr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;offset_ptr&lt;/a&gt; from boost is perhaps the most well known example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this should not be covered by copyright but would like to hear the wisdom of the internet.&#xA;My reasoning is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;originality does not apply because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A relative pointer is well known concept&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are existing open source implementations available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is only one way to do this properly because, the C++ standard requires a useful offset pointer implementation to implement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pointer traits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iterator traits&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and an allocator supporting the pointer for it to be useful with STL types like std::vector&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While more much complex than the requirements for &amp;quot;#include &amp;lt;stdio.h&amp;gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;main()&amp;quot; in a C hello world program the logic seems the same to me. How you write such a thing is entailed by the language specification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation is I would like to post an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72356447/what-are-the-requirements-for-implementing-an-allocator-with-a-fancy-pointer-whi#72753383&quot;&gt;my own question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a solution at work so the copyright rests with my employer.&#xA;The correct thing to do is get permission from them before publishing.&#xA;However, my employer currently does not have an open source policy.&#xA;I am trying to engage with them over this but it could take some time and my never happen.&#xA;However I believe this piece of code is trivial so it ought to be a courtesy or a matter of being ethically correct rather than being a legal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preferably I would like to publish it as a living project with a unit test suite and build system.&#xA;If it is trivial I am unclear if this would enough to render it non-trivial. For example, the tests are entailed by the functionality I am trying to test though my choice of test framework is not.&#xA;Likewise adding a trivial build system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked the general question separately as - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12997/5925&quot;&gt;At what point does something become non trivial so that copyright applies?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;The general question may be hard to answer definitively so this question covers a specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/156/how-can-i-determine-if-some-code-i-want-to-release-as-opensource-is-already-lice&quot;&gt;How can I determine if some code I want to release as opensource is already licensed or proprietary?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5059/what-is-defined-as-trivial-code-when-licensing-a-project?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;What is defined as trivial code when licensing a project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/129053/can-i-adapt-code-i-wrote-for-work-and-release-it-as-open-source&quot;&gt;https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/129053/can-i-adapt-code-i-wrote-for-work-and-release-it-as-open-source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12986/legality-of-publishing-code-for-a-stackoverflow-answer-as-an-example-impementati/12995#12995&quot;&gt;Legality of publishing code for a stackoverflow answer as an example impementation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5925" LastActivityDate="2022-07-06T14:48:53.277" Title="Is an offset pointer implementation trivial enough not to be covered by copyright?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-07T08:38:29.550" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to binary-include(only to package it into release in build, not include it in the source) an EPL v1.0 library in my Apache 2.0 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I will do are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ensure the lib is not code/binary placed in source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clarify that in the released package, this lib is included and the lib is under EPL v1.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;license the project in Apache 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? If possible, could I have any examples(projects) on doing so to be referred :).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ref:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12445/using-epl-2-0-library-as-a-node-module-in-apl-2-0-project&quot;&gt;Using EPL 2.0 library as a node module in APL 2.0 project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2552981/44683095-98ee0080-aa45-11e8-8970-cfb0bc51f240.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2552981/44683095-98ee0080-aa45-11e8-8970-cfb0bc51f240.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25555" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-07T08:56:53.027" LastActivityDate="2022-07-07T08:56:53.027" Title="Binary-only include Eclipse Public License: EPL 1.0 into a Apache 2.0 project" Tags="|apache-2.0|epl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-07-10T09:17:52.610" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13001" CreationDate="2022-07-08T13:06:27.993" Score="7" ViewCount="1024" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interesting project&lt;/a&gt; for self-hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umbrel is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license.&#xA;TL;DR — You're free to use, fork, modify, and redestribute Umbrel for&#xA;personal and nonprofit use under the same license. If you're&#xA;interested in using Umbrel for commercial purposes, such as selling&#xA;plug-and-play home servers with Umbrel, etc — please reach out to us&#xA;at partner@umbrel.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this seems proprietary/commercial software? OpenWashing?&#xA;It seems not approved by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensource.org&lt;/a&gt; and Debian guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11520" LastActivityDate="2022-07-08T14:24:31.533" Title="PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license is proprietary software?" Tags="|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13000" CreationDate="2022-07-08T14:24:31.533" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 license&lt;/a&gt; is not a free license as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;defined by this site&lt;/a&gt;. It is a source-available license, and you have a license for distributing the code (e.g. useful for JS of a website). But it is unclear under which terms you can distribute derivative works, because there are no sub-licensing rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would stay away from any code under this license, unless I am certain to only use the code for personal, non-commercial purposes. Please note that even a personal website with so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Affiliate-Links'&lt;/a&gt; might be too much and put you outside of the scope of the 'permitted purpose'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-07-08T14:24:31.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-08T14:53:07.427" Score="5" ViewCount="1697" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users' freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation added these clauses because they did not like that companies &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;like TiVo&lt;/a&gt; were able to use GPL'ed software on their devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; has the following requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL is &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/SSPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not considered an open source license&lt;/a&gt; because it is deliberately almost impossible to comply with for hosting providers. Why, then, is the GPLv3 considered an open source license even though it is deliberately almost impossible to comply with for TiVo, Nintendo, Sony, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, it doesn't seem like most Linux distro's comply with it either. You can buy a laptop, install Linux on it, create a user account without access to &lt;code&gt;sudo&lt;/code&gt; or equivalent, lock the UEFI/BIOS with a password, and give the laptop away to someone else while only telling them the password for the unprivileged account. It seems to me that the GPLv3 is being violated here, because the user cannot install other software on their laptop. Yet, almost every Linux distro supports unprivileged accounts (GNOME even has parental control settings)! Does this mean almost every Linux distro violates the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6141" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T14:20:43.353" Title="Why don’t unprivileged user accounts violate the GPLv3?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13002" CreationDate="2022-07-08T15:07:10.423" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the source you link to says that the principal problem with the SSPL is that it &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, not that it's almost impossible to comply with.  It may well be that, too, but that's not the reason that Fedora says they have taken against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the GPL is not almost impossible for a hardware vendor to comply with.  It's easy to comply with it: the vendor needs to stop locking their devices down so their users can't modify the software running on them.  If the vendor doesn't want to do that, fine, but they can't ship GPLv3 software on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can buy a laptop, install Linux on it, create a user account without access to sudo or equivalent, lock the UEFI/BIOS with a password, and give the laptop away to someone else while only telling them the password for the unprivileged account. It seems to me that the GPLv3 is being violated here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't thought too deeply about it, but you may be right (though note that although some of the software included in most Linux distros is GPLv3, the Linux kernel itself is not).  If you are right, it means the person who did all those things to the laptop before conveying it was indeed violating GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, almost every Linux distro supports unprivileged accounts (GNOME even has parental control settings)! Does this mean almost every Linux distro violates the GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, because a distro is not a device.  It's just software.  Sitting at rest, on its DVD, with source packages, it denies no rights to its users.  Only if someone installs it on a user-hostile device which they distribute is the GPLv3 then violated, and the person violating it is the device distributor, not the distro author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you ask in a comment below &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why is the button there to begin with?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  The answer is: because that button has legitimate uses, too.  As a parallel example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TPM&lt;/a&gt;s can be misused to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59931.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lock down my hardware&lt;/a&gt; so it can't boot the OS I want; but they can also be used to &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/768419/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;increase the security of my crypto keys&lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure: I wrote that article).  A good licence (like a good law; take note, Parliament and others) doesn't proscribe a technology merely because it can be used badly, but instead proscribes the bad uses of that technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-09T16:43:14.883" LastActivityDate="2022-07-09T16:43:14.883" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13002" CreationDate="2022-07-09T12:20:57.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even though it is deliberately almost impossible to comply with for TiVo, Nintendo, Sony&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you think it's impossible? They just have to give users more access to the device they bought. That is quite possible - in fact, the developers have such access by default and go out of their way to prevent users from having the same access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Nintendo &lt;em&gt;doesn't want&lt;/em&gt; its users to have access to their own purchased devices is nothing to do with whether the GPL is valid. It just means they can't use GPL software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL is not considered an open source license because it is deliberately almost impossible to comply with for hosting providers. Why, then, is the GPLv3 considered an open source license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the discrimination argument is a bad one. The intent behind the SSPL appears to be to create an even stronger version of the AGPL, which is reasonable on the face of it. However, there are other arguments against the SSPL, namely that &lt;a href=&quot;https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/SSPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;its main effect is to create uncertainty around legal requirements&lt;/a&gt;. It's not obvious whether using SSPL software requires a company to open-source &lt;em&gt;every piece of software used by the company&lt;/em&gt;. That seems like a pretty good reason not to consider it a &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastEditorUserId="483" LastEditDate="2022-07-10T10:30:08.720" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T10:30:08.720" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13002" CreationDate="2022-07-09T17:31:37.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Setting aside the question of when exactly a transfer of ownership of a laptop occurs and setting aside the fact that the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2, not GPLv3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Performing a transfer of ownership of a laptop whose GPLv3-licensed OS can only boot a unprivileged account will not violate the GPLv3's Tivoization requirements, unless you also separately lock down the hardware to prevent the installation of new operating systems (i.e., perform the act of making the hardware &amp;quot;Tivoized&amp;quot;). The GPLv3 requires only that the device's owner be able to &lt;em&gt;install and execute a modified version of the GPLv3 software on the hardware&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Installation Information&amp;quot; for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to &lt;strong&gt;install and execute modified versions&lt;/strong&gt; of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems primarily like a matter of what the laptop's BIOS allows, not how the OS is configured. The OS does not get a say in what OS replaces it or is a coresident OS. In general, I'd expect selling a laptop with a locked BIOS is sufficient to violate this condition even with admin access to the OS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly most desktop Linux distros allow the OS to install modified versions of itself, so if you don't grant a recipient the ability to use that OS-upgrade functionality &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you lock the hardware (e.g. BIOS) such that you can't install any new OS, then indeed that union of lockdowns together are sufficient to violate the GPLv3's Tivoization requirements. If the laptop contains a well-docunented approach to resetting a BIOS password via hardware switch, you may still yet avoid avoid a violation if a court views this information as a well-understood normal use of that laptop hardware. If the laptop doesn't include a well-documented reset mechanism, then you have indeed created a Tivoized device that doesn't let its owner install a new OS, so I'm unsurprised the Tivoization requirements would be violated in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another pressing concern is that transferring ownership of any GPL software on a laptop requires providing or offering the source code for each GPL-licensed binary whose ownership is transferred. However, this consideration doesn't pertain much to unprivileged accounts or to the GPLv3 in particular; that issue may arise equivalently for GPLv2 or v3 systems sold to a new owner with full admin access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Fedora 's rejection of the SSPL on the grounds of discrimination, I can see the logic (it names a specific industry whereas other licenses do not), but I agree I don't find it particularly persuasive. I agree their reasoning seems much more steeped in the cultural difficulties that would arise from admitting the SSPL under the definitional umbrella of FOSS licenses. However, just as the Debian Free Software Guidelines build specific interpretation on top of the Free Software Definition (e.g., the desert island test, the dissident test), so too is Fedora free to provide their own interpretation of the OSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll also agree with another answer here and say that I object to the SSPL on the basis that its requirements are so far-reaching that they might be legally unenforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, I find the OSD's point #9 more relevant to rejection of the SSPL as open source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SSPL imposes requirements on &amp;quot;management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software,&amp;quot; which seems likely to be out of compliance with point #9. For example, if SSPL-covered software runs a service that produces some data, and a separate piece of software asynchronously backs that data up to a remote drive, the SSPL places requirements on the unrelated backup software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T14:20:43.353" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T14:20:43.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13007" CreationDate="2022-07-10T01:28:24.850" Score="7" ViewCount="1168" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a project on GitHub that I really liked, and have since forked and modified it. It's currently licensed under Apache 2.0. Can I release my modified project as a project with a new name under GPLv2? If yes, how would I credit the original contributors (aside from preserving git history)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21000" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T16:26:57.643" Title="Can I convert an Apache 2.0 project to GPLv2" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13006" CreationDate="2022-07-10T08:39:54.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike the BSD, MIT, and ISC licenses, the Apache 2.0 license is not compatible with the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the Apache Software Foundation:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite our best efforts, the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license. The Apache Software Foundation believes that you should always try to obey the constraints expressed by the copyright holder when redistributing their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the Free Software Foundation:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this license is not compatible with GPL version 2, because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions. The patent termination provision is a good thing, which is why we recommend the Apache 2.0 license for substantial programs over other lax permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to prevent others from keeping modifications to your code to themselves, you can relicense under the MPLv2, the EPLv2, or the more restrictive GPLv3 instead. This will also prevent the original project from using your improvements though (unless they drop the Apache license too), so that may not be very nice towards them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6141" LastEditorUserId="21807" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T16:26:57.643" LastActivityDate="2022-07-11T16:26:57.643" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13009" CreationDate="2022-07-10T17:17:18.190" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologize for my limited English skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A web app with GPLv3 license on GitHub, I plan to use it and hopefully Ads revenue can help pay for the VPS and my time of maintaining it. By using it, I will modify the web app codes like logo/banding/contact information/features to suit my need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of GPLv3 is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kn9ts/cbe95340d29fc1aaeaa5dd5c059d2e60/raw/a59913f620010b175cb2e2eaaf75ced35245f4bc/GPLv3.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kn9ts/cbe95340d29fc1aaeaa5dd5c059d2e60/raw/a59913f620010b175cb2e2eaaf75ced35245f4bc/GPLv3.md&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1. Anyone can copy, modify and distribute this software.&#xA;2. You have to include the license and copyright notice with each and every distribution.&#xA;3. You can use this software privately.&#xA;4. You can use this software for commercial purposes.&#xA;5. If you dare build your business solely from this code, you risk open-sourcing the whole code base.&#xA;6. If you modify it, you have to indicate changes made to the code.&#xA;7. Any modifications of this code base MUST be distributed with the same license, GPLv3.&#xA;8. This software is provided without warranty.&#xA;9. The software author or license can not be held liable for any damages inflicted by the software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I will never sell my site and my modifications of the code, What exactly do I need to do to meet the restriction of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;6. If you modify it, you have to indicate changes made to the code.&amp;quot;&#xA;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;7. Any modifications of this code base MUST be distributed with the same license, GPLv3.&amp;quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q1, In order to indicate changes made, do I need to share my modification on Github?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2, Let's say someone found my site, they would like to buy some features which I developed as plugins,(the web app supports plugins) how does GPLv3 play in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27417" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T19:26:22.837" Title="Web app with GPLv3 license, What does it mean by &quot;6. If you modify it, you have to indicate changes made to the code.&quot;?" Tags="|gpl|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13008" CreationDate="2022-07-10T19:19:34.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Point #7 in this summary is a subtle misstatement: it would be better phrased as, &amp;quot;If (and only if) you choose to distribute modifications of this code, you MUST do so under this same license, GPLv3.&amp;quot; Your obligation to share your source code is limited to the particular recipients to whom you distribute your modifications (and then those recipients have an obligation to share source only with anyone &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; choose to share their version of the program with, etc.). If you distribute your software to no one, you have licensing obligations to no one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it is important to distinguish between code that runs privately on your server and code that travels over the network to users' computers, like HTML or client JavaScript. GPL'd code that is never sent to anyone carries no obligations, but any GPL'd code that is sent to a user has been distributed and carries GPL obligations. For the entirety of the copyrightable work that is sent to the user which makes use of GPL'd code, you must make human-readable source code available under the terms of the GPL. This does not include server-side code but might include your entire front-end codebase, depending on how your jurisdiction decides that separate Web components make a new combined copyrightable work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone wants you to add features to your service, you are free to contract with them to do so for any price you agree upon. Since your customer will not receive the server-side code (unless you freely elect to give it), you do not need to share the modified service code. You will need to share any modified GPL'd client-side code, for any and all users who use the service, but this would be true whether the new features were made for hire or privately thought up and implemented by yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for requirement #6, you need only indicate &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; changes were made, not what those changes are in particular. This is traditionally done simply by adding a year-dated copyright notice with your name or pseudonym, &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2022 Jo Smith&lt;/code&gt;, one a new line alongside any other preexisting copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-07-10T19:26:22.837" LastActivityDate="2022-07-10T19:26:22.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13012" CreationDate="2022-07-11T12:23:43.363" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm starting to work on a new UI application written in C#, so the MVVM pattern invites itself. However, I have little experience working with it and I need to learn a bit more before I can use it. The good starting point is to structure my project (folder hierarchy, etc.) after a project made by people who know what they are doing. My friend suggested me a project written in the same framework as the one I am planning to use, and the project also uses MVVM, however, the project is licensed under GPL whereas I'd like to keep my project under the more permissive MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question here is twofold, but that's only due to my own curiosity - one could otherwise answer this with a simple &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can an implementation of a design pattern (especially the project's structure and folder hierarchy) be even licensed?&lt;/strong&gt; I can faintly remember some discussion I saw regarding game design which got concluded with the &amp;quot;gameplay can't be copyrighted, only the look and feel can&amp;quot;. Here, the &amp;quot;gameplay&amp;quot; seems to be like design patterns to my layman understanding.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If it can be licensed, is taking inspiration from it (i.e. using my own classes, elements and names, but under the same structure) enough to require me to use GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could probably say &amp;quot;just sweep it under the rug, no one will know&amp;quot;. That might be true, but I'm genuinely curious... also it'd be immoral, so I'd rather take time to research everything myself instead of taking the shortcut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27426" LastEditorUserId="27426" LastEditDate="2022-07-11T13:04:04.867" LastActivityDate="2022-07-12T09:32:39.267" Title="Is a project structure covered by that project's license?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13010" CreationDate="2022-07-12T09:32:39.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The GPL License&lt;/a&gt; has (among others) a few definitions which are relevant for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now the question is if your software, which copies the structure of the GPL-ed project (folder hierarchy, etc.), is a &lt;em&gt;work based on the Program&lt;/em&gt;. Or in other words, if the folder hierarchy, etc. is actually covered by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no clear yes/no answer. If the structure is straight-forward, maybe partly suggested by the development framework, universally applicable, or even trivial (all macros in the folder /macros, all images in the folder /graphics, ...) then I would say it is not copyrightable. If, however, there is great sophistication in the structure, if it is highly optimized and required for the good performance of the Program, then there is room to argue in favor of a copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your detailed questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything can be licensed, even things that are not covered by copyright protection. Instead you should ask if you can be sued when you use it without license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Taking inspiration from it' means that you are copying an idea. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ideas are not copyrightable&lt;/a&gt;. And unless the structure (the structure alone) you are copying qualifies for copyright protection, you should be fine any you will not be required to license your program under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-07-12T09:32:39.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-14T16:49:20.010" Score="1" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;we are using an opensource web application for front end UI of our software which is AGPLv3 based.&#xA;The software also has middleware and back end data base as well&#xA;The modified software will be sold commercially as a whole package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question :&#xA;Should we expose the modified front end source code only to our customers/users or to anyone ? if so how ? should we include source code along with binary distribution or put it on github or somewhere to download ?&#xA;Should we expose the middleware and back end also ? or only front end derivative of the work ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;thanks&#xA;Manju&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27445" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-16T20:25:45.680" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T20:54:24.163" Title="Modified version of AGPLv3 software in commercial use - What to expose" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13016" CreationDate="2022-07-14T17:10:12.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to make the offer for the actual source code used, clearly and available at no additional charge to all users of your software (you are not required to make it generally available, but if it is a public server, everyone visiting it, needs to get the offer, thus the offer has to be identically public, made on the place users interact with your software):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;§6 d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this requirement only affects the front-end or whether it also encompasses the middleware and the backend, or any combination thereof is hard to tell in this generality; the answer depends on whether these parts form one programme (then AGPL applies) or stand on their own and only interact via standard APIs (then individual licensing applies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-07-14T17:10:12.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13018" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13020" CreationDate="2022-07-15T15:23:24.223" Score="2" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a library and released it under the MIT license. Another developer and I started another project that depends on my library; it is also under the MIT license. I want to relicense my library under a copyleft license. I've already switched it to LGPL, but I'd rather use the full GPL. The other developer of the project that depends on it is not willing to relicense his code. Is there a way for me to relicense my library under GPL, and add something like this to my repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to use unmodified copies of the Software as needed to enable full functionality of the &amp;quot;ExampleProgram&amp;quot; software available at [link], or any derivative works thereof. This permission is granted in addition to any other permission granted by any other license applied to the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastEditorUserId="27453" LastEditDate="2022-07-15T18:40:12.950" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T21:04:53.217" Title="Relicensing a library to GPL when an MIT-licensed program depends on it" Tags="|gpl|mit|license-compatibility|lgpl|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13018" CreationDate="2022-07-15T19:04:09.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are the sole author of library A, formerly released under MIT, and currently released under LGPL.  A is used by project B, in which you and developer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carol&lt;/a&gt; are the sole rightsholders.  You wish to relicense A under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear a fork is imminent.  If you relicense A to GPL, the joint project it depends on will either have to use only pre-existing, MIT/LGPL-licensed versions, or re-license under the GPL.   Assuming Carol chooses the former, at that point there will be parallel versions of A and B under development, distributed under different licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going forward, the hard work is almost all going to be on Carol's side: any improvements you make in A or B will need to be clean-room re-engineered by Carol in order to add to his/her non-GPL fork of A or B respectively.  Meanwhile, any improvements Carol makes to his/her version of B, you may promptly incorporate in your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of thing does happen.  Some might say it's a shame, but it seems part of the licence ecosystem to me.  We'll see how dedicated Carol is to non-copyleft licensing when you're able to reuse all of his/her changes with nearly no effort, when the reverse will very much not be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; if you want Carol to be able to continue to use A without making any licence changes to B, leave A LGPL.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;As we have said before&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;do not under any circumstances try to invent your own licence&lt;/strong&gt;.  The uncertainty alone will cause people to avoid your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the strategy doesn't work.  Here's a thought experiment for your licence above: I take the code to B, and remove all but a not-quite-&lt;em&gt;de-minimis&lt;/em&gt; amount of the content, then create on that an almost-entirely new work, D, which being a copyright derivative of B, can also use library A on non-GPL terms.  Now my friend Eric takes D, removes the last vestiges of B, and creates a work F, which being a copyright derivative of D, and thus of B, can also use A on non-GPL terms, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11574/458&quot;&gt;even though F is completely different from B&lt;/a&gt;.  To permit it to one+derivatives is to permit it to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really want A to be GPL, re-license, and risk B failing.  If you really want B to succeed, leave A as LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-15T21:04:53.217" LastActivityDate="2022-07-15T21:04:53.217" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-16T12:38:42.160" Score="0" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute a header only library and I think that the spirit of the LPGL license is very much what I want. In particular, however, I want that a 3rd party that uses my library and modifies it, shares these changes. Does the LGPL license, and if so which versions, cover this requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27460" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T13:00:54.257" Title="Correct license for header only library" Tags="|lgpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13021" CreationDate="2022-07-16T13:00:54.257" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No free licence can require that someone who modifies your library share those changes; see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6836/458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for more discussion of that issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; will do for you is require that if anyone modifies your library, and they distribute the modified library either on its own or as part of an executable program (proprietary or otherwise), they must make the source of the modified library available to those downstream recipients, and they must license it under LGPLv3, or GPLv3, when they do so (LGPLv3 s2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical upshot of this is that the changes they make end up being available to the community, and if they're LGPLv3-licensed, you'll be able to incorporate them back into your library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will that suffice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T13:00:54.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-16T13:48:04.683" Score="4" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The plugin's dev has put a lot of work into it, so I don't wanna talk bad about the plugin!! I'm only working in IT since 2 years and from his Github profile he seems way more experienced, so don't take this as any argument against this plugin. I just want to know in general, how can you make sure that a 3rd party plugin is safe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question:&lt;/strong&gt; How can I ensure that this plugin &lt;code&gt;https://pub.dev/packages/veridflutterplugin&lt;/code&gt; is not made by a hacker with bad intention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I read to all files in the plugins code: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AppliedRecognition/Ver-ID-Flutter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/AppliedRecognition/Ver-ID-Flutter&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and if I don't find any suspicious line of code there + if I compile the code by myself and add it to my project directly -&amp;gt; can I then be sure that the plugin is safe??&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the plugin I could let the users of my app scan an ID or passport + take a selfie and compare the faces of the ID and the selfie to get the user's data and verify the user. This is really awesome and exactly what I need for my app where user's are allowed to rent out items and where I need to have their real identity in case the item gets damaged or stolen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fear that if this plugin was written with bad intention the creator could get all my users' ID infos + their selfies, e.g. by sending the info from my app to their server without me noticing, which would enable the plugin/the dev to authenticate at other online services that also use the ID + selfie authentication process, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shuftipro.com/document-verification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://shuftipro.com/document-verification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some things that I find a bit suspicious about the plugin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pub.dev/packages/veridflutterplugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it has 0 stars on pub.dev&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the website linked on the pub.dev site doesn't work / gets blocked by my browser bc unsecure: appliedrec.com/&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to use the plugin you need to authorize the plugin developer to &amp;quot;Act on your behalve&amp;quot; on your github account:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sBit8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sBit8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Github auth request to use veridflutterplugin&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27461" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T16:23:11.487" Title="How to know if you can trust a third party open source plugin? (flutter)" Tags="|plugins|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-16T15:45:22.897" Score="0" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lots of projects on GitHub have a GPL3 License, as it's easily created by their software when you want to add a license and you choose GPL3. However, unlike the MIT license, you don't put your own name in the license. Furthermore, the GPL3 license text says you can't modify it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fsf.org/&lt;/a&gt; Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the reasons this file can't be modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, where should one put in a GitHub repo the information that you can find in an MIT license, e.g., the copyright that belongs to the person who created the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF has the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IWantCredit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ and answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL? (#IWantCredit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can certainly get credit for the work. Part of releasing a program under the GPL is writing a copyright notice in your own name (assuming you are the copyright holder). The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub's &amp;quot;add a license&amp;quot; feature doesn't cover this dimension of GPL. How is this done properly. Is it a &amp;quot;Copyright&amp;quot; file that's separate? Are there examples of GitHub repos where this has been done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My reason for asking is I want to reuse a GPL3 repo and give credit to the original author. However, their own repo doesn't have their copyright info (and I think it's pretty common with GPL3 on GitHub).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is related, but significantly different from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11898/12766&quot;&gt;GPL and original author&amp;#39;s copyright text in completely rewritten code&lt;/a&gt;, because the answer there doesn't explain where the copyright info is stored (in each source file, in a LICENSE.md, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12766" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T18:10:52.517" Title="What file(s) (on GitHub) should have the copyright owner's name for GPL3?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-notice|software-use|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13023" CreationDate="2022-07-16T16:23:11.487" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can't tell you what to trust. You mentioned stars for that package on a review website. Looking for social proof is a common way to decide whether something is trustworthy, but of course that is not foolproof. A lot of software with few users is perfectly fine, and some software with lots of users is really problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A big problem with concepts like “trust”, “security”, and “privacy” is that everyone has different requirements. Something that I find acceptable might be unacceptable to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also not a purely technical problem – certain aspects of security/privacy/trust are instead managed through contracts or other legal means and certifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular instance, I have the following observations to make:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the Flutter plugin might be Open Source, the iOS/Android SDKs required to use that plugin are most certainly not. You cannot view the full code of their libraries. Additionally, you will need to request an API key, and the SDK docs mention that your key is only free for the first 30 days…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are concerned that the library might send information to some server. There's no way to tell up front, but that is probably exactly how that plugin works anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Normal B2B software makes it fairly clear how it works, in particular how data flows and what runs server-side. This is important for understanding pricing, for SLAs, and for privacy/compliance processes. Normal companies also have a clear sales pipeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company you found is far from transparent in this regard, which is a bit suspicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is very good that you are suspicious when an app requests permissions to “act on your behalf”. Overbroad permissions are a great way to compromise your systems. Unfortunately in this case, this is mostly a really confusing dialog on GitHub's part. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/authorizing-github-apps&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentation on Authorizing GitHub Apps&lt;/a&gt; is really confusing, but indicates that this is standard text, part of all authorization flows, and doesn't actually grant any permissions. There doesn't seem to be a way to properly preview what permissions you actually grant. However, permissions are scoped per-repository and so far the only data requested is your email, so this is possibly safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I'd stay clear of that plugin, simply because they are not really transparent about what is going on. I'd also like to point out general issues with facial recognition. Such technology is often less accessible, especially for low-vision users. Facial recognition typically performs worse on people of color. Collecting biometric data is fairly privacy-invasive, and might bring you in conflict with privacy laws in some jurisdictions in which you might operate. I'm for Europe, where such use of facial recognition would almost certainly be straight-up illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T16:23:11.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13024" CreationDate="2022-07-16T18:10:52.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to put the copyright at the start of each source file, according to the answer at &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/281951/51948&quot;&gt;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/281951/51948&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the correct way to apply the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; source code file, insert the following in a comment (fill in &lt;code&gt;*program name*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*your name*&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;*years*&lt;/code&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; This file is part of *program name*.&#xA; Copyright (C) *years* *your name*&#xA;&#xA; *program name* is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA; the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or&#xA; (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA; GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA; along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Put a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENSING&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; or something like that in the root of the project folder. Put the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; GPL&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is the official text) in&#xA;that file. The file must contain the verbatim GPL; do not change it in&#xA;any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12766" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T18:10:52.517" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13016" CreationDate="2022-07-16T20:54:24.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are doing, in terms of the license, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are modifying the software. Then you must comply with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 13 of the AGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; the modified version. Then you must comply with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 5&lt;/a&gt; and/or the following section (6) depending on whether you're &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; source or binaries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with sections 5 and 6. Basically, these sections say that, for each person or organization who receives the modified software from you, you have to do all of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License the software to them under the terms of the AGPL, and tell the recipient that you have done so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide source code, either because you're only conveying source code in the first place, or in addition to binaries/object code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tell the recipient that you modified it, and provide a copy of the original copyright notice as well as any similar legal notices that were present in the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the original has a UI, and the UI can display a notice telling the user about the copyright status of the software, you must not remove or disable access to that UI element. You may modify or rearrange the UI, but the element must still be accessible somewhere, unless you have completely removed the UI altogether (e.g. because you turned a complete program into a library).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the software is intended for use in a particular piece of consumer hardware, and sold together with that hardware as a single transaction, then you must provide the recipient with the practical ability to run modified versions of the software on the hardware, unless the hardware is designed in such a way that nobody could possibly run modified software on that hardware (e.g. because it's physically burned into ROM).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't charge an additional fee for any of the above as separate add-ons, but you may charge a base fee for the entire transaction as a whole. In practice, this is rarely commercially feasible because your clients can immediately turn around and give your software away for free, but if you can find a way to make it work, the license allows you to charge such a fee, as long as you don't charge extra for exercising the rights listed above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conditions are more or less the same as those of the regular GPL. Note that the above is a simplification of the actual legal requirements. You should read the license for a full understanding of exactly what these terms mean, or consult a copyright attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Importantly, none of these requirements apply to anyone other than you and the recipient. If some third party wants access to the source code, for example, that's their problem (but see below!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's move on to section 13, which has no GPL equivalent. Section 13 is short enough that we can quote the relevant paragraph in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, this is saying that, if your software has the ability to be remotely used over a network (e.g. a web application, a server, etc.), then your modified version of the software must make it practically possible for the client (the person at the other end of the network) to receive a copy of the modified source code, for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-07-16T20:54:24.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13031" CreationDate="2022-07-17T03:59:11.030" Score="5" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written some code in Mathematica, and want to make these codes available in GitHub when my paper would be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release Mathematica notebooks under GPL3?&#xA;Mathematica itself is a proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If GPL is not an appropriate license (because Mathematica is not a free software), what would be an appropriate license to release Mathematica code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be happy if fellow researchers modify and redistribute my code, but I don't want someone to distribute a binary executable which might produce the same graphs, where the users not be able to see the code anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastEditorUserId="20205" LastEditDate="2022-07-17T08:45:56.377" LastActivityDate="2022-07-21T15:50:57.883" Title="Can I release Mathematica codes under GPL, given Mathematica is a closed source software?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13030" CreationDate="2022-07-17T07:13:58.823" Score="0" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GPLv3 project and MIT licensed code that would be useful and I want to use said MIT-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heard that MIT is GPLv3 compatible but at the same time MIT license requests not removing it, so I am unsure how I can satisfy both licenses.  Should MIT code continue to be marked with MIT license (only part of code that was used - easy when it is a single file or folder)?  Or can I freely mix it with GPLv3 code and drop MIT license mentions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6450" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-18T06:55:49.977" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T06:55:49.977" Title="How mixing MIT-licensed code with GPLv3 project works?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13029" CreationDate="2022-07-17T08:49:24.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have created a work that incorporates parts from several other works, distributed to you under a variety of free licences (in your case, MIT and GPLv3). This is a perfectly normal thing to do in the free-software world, so don't panic. Each of those licences will have certain obligations, &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; of which you must now follow with respect to your derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have observed, you will need to preserve all existing copyright notices. In files that you have modified, you will need to add your own copyright notice to the existing list.  The MIT licence obliges you to preserve its licence text, but does not require that it govern the distribution of the resulting project, so you should include it in a way that reflects that (perhaps in a file called &lt;code&gt;LICENSE.OLD&lt;/code&gt;, starting &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This text is included pursuant to the obligations of an upstream licence and must be retained in any derivatives, but it is not the licence applicable to this code&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).  As you have used GPLv3 code, your project must be distributed in its entirety under GPLv3; if the MIT-derived code contains any references to its licence status, these should be updated to reflect that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T08:49:24.940" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13028" CreationDate="2022-07-17T10:48:41.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can release source code under the GPL and people can modify and redistribute that source code under the GPL and use it to build binaries for their own use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if your users distribute binaries they will likely be in violation. To distribute binaries built from GPL code users must also provide the &amp;quot;corresponding source code&amp;quot;, which the GPLv3 defines as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source includes interface definition files associated with source files for the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require, such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no lawyer but I don't think Mathematica fits any of the exceptions and clearly wolfram won't allow distribution of Mathematica's source code under the GPL. So I would consider binaries built with Mathematica from GPL code to be un-distributable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T10:48:41.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13033" CreationDate="2022-07-17T18:37:48.320" Score="6" ViewCount="1135" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an open source project which had Apache 2.0 license, has now changed its license to non-commercial use license, can we use a previous release(when it was free for commercial use) of the project for commercial purpose in a production environment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27471" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T20:02:08.693" Title="Can we use a previous release of an open source project when it had Apache 2.0 license for commercial purpose?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|open-source-definition|bsl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13032" CreationDate="2022-07-17T20:02:08.693" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. If you have access to a copy of the software that was licensed under Apache-2.0, then you can continue to use that software under Apache-2.0 even if newer versions use a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, running an old version of a software might not be a good idea, since you will be cut off from bugfixes and security fixes. Since this is Open Source, you aren't forced to stick with the original author – you could perform maintenance tasks yourself, or hire a third party to make necessary changes. In many cases, it might be sensible to migrate to an entirely different software. Of course, for commercial users it often makes most economic sense to stick with the same software and pay for a new commercial license…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical example of a software that was licensed away from Apache-2.0, consider Elasticsearch. When Elasticsearch changed its license to the non-Open-Source SSPL, Amazon continued development of the last Apache-2.0 covered version, essentially forking the project. For trademark reasons, that fork was renamed to OpenSearch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-07-17T20:02:08.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13036" CreationDate="2022-07-18T05:54:39.737" Score="3" ViewCount="1638" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have code that is under the license AGPL v3.0 can we change it to BSL v1.1 (Business source license)&#xA;The AGPL v3.0 says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this&#xA;license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does this mean we should not change the license or should not change the code? if what i am thinking is right then we should not change the license.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;But if we want to change the license of code that is under AGPL v3.0 to BSL v1.1 then what do we have to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Summary by &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sCsul.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sCsul.png&quot; alt=&quot;GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 summary&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27474" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T06:43:13.393" Title="Can we change licence from AGPL v3.0 to BSL v1.1?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13035" CreationDate="2022-07-18T06:42:21.953" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can relicense your code away from the AGPL if you are the sole copyright holder. More precisely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All copyrighted material that is supposed to be part of the new version must have a license that is compatible with the new license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where this is not possible, the copyright holders must be asked for consent, effectively granting you a new license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For those parts where &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are the copyright holder, you can do whatever you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, you cannot relicense someone else's AGPL project, unless they agree to the relicensing. In contrast, you can relicense your own project, if any libraries/changes/components from other people have licenses that are compatible with the new license. If other people contributed to your AGPL project, and if they didn't sign a CLA granting you wider rights, then those contributions would be AGPL-licensed to you, and you would be unable to change the license unless the contributors agree to the relicensing or if you remove their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part of the AGPL/GPL that you cite is often misinterpreted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;em&gt;license of the license document&lt;/em&gt; – you cannot insert clauses into the AGPL and still call it the AGPL. This sentence does not prohibit you from publishing your work under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T06:42:21.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13035" CreationDate="2022-07-18T06:43:13.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right that that warning at the top of the AGPL text applies to the AGPL text, not the code to which the licence applies.  Quite intentionally, the licence text is invariant, so all documents calling themselves the &amp;quot;GNU Affero General Public Licence&amp;quot; have to be the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of the licence is designed to apply to the covered code (rather than to itself).  One such is s5c, referring to the distribution of modified source versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy.  This License will therefore apply [...] to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is s6, which says that the same condition applies to non-source-code distributions.  The upshot is that you cannot relicence this code away from AGPL to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other licence, without the explicit permission of the rightsholders.  While none of us can guess whether they will give this permission, their choice of the AGPL - traditionally the most copyleft-y of the copyleft licences - suggests to me that they won't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-07-18T06:43:13.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13038" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13039" CreationDate="2022-07-18T15:24:18.627" Score="8" ViewCount="2464" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project using GPL-3.0-or-later doesn't include a copyright notice, does it violate the license? What would the consequences be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking because &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IWantCredit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IWantCredit&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the main &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file in a repository already contain the copyright, or should copyright be handled on a file-to-file basis? (Most project &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; do this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20213" LastEditorUserId="799" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T19:52:44.930" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T19:52:44.930" Title="Does software released under GPLv3 require a copyright notice?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13038" CreationDate="2022-07-18T15:56:57.303" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on why you're releasing under GPL.  If you're the sole rightsholder, and so &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;not bound by the GPL&lt;/a&gt;, the obligations of GPLv3 s5a don't apply to you, and you can release without any particular text at all.  If, however, you're required to release your work under GPLv3 by virtue of it being a derivative of a GPLv3 work, then s5a applies, which in turn invokes s4, which requires that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7131/458&quot;&gt;previously argued&lt;/a&gt; that pseudonyms are acceptable, so this requirement is by no means onerous with regard to privacy, and I can't immediately think of any other reason why one should be reluctant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible consequences of GPL violation are too complex and ramified to go into here, but you should avoid knowingly doing it if you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the main LICENSE file in a repository already contain the copyright, or should copyright be handled on a file-to-file basis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing magical about a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file, neither in copyright law, nor in most licences.  Regarding copyright notices, the rubric of the GPL is clear that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file [...] and each file should have at least the “copyright” line and a pointer to where the full notice is found&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because others (as you note) sometimes play a bit fast and loose with this, that is no reason not to follow best practice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-19T07:45:05.490" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T07:45:05.490" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-19T16:10:16.650" Score="4" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have build ffmpeg (4.3) libraries configured for LGPL on multiple OS's looking to be called from my own code using ffmpeg filters to deinterleave video.&#xA;below is the configure command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;./configure --disable-static --enable-shared --disable-iconv --disable-libxcb --disable-zlib --disable-bzlib --disable-lzma --disable-doc --disable-debug --disable-x86asm --disable-asm --enable-filter=bwdif --enable-filter=w3fdif&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However testing out the filters even though not enabled I can call the yadif filter and various other filters that are GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the ffmpeg build lists itself as LGPL am I allow to redistribute - or is given the bug in ffmpeg build options would this violate there licensing.&#xA;Note the GPL filters are not called from my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27488" LastEditorUserId="27488" LastEditDate="2022-08-22T09:01:06.847" LastActivityDate="2022-08-22T09:12:43.717" Title="Bug in FFmpeg build allows GPL filter use from an LGPL build can I distribute FFMPEG as LGPL" Tags="|lgpl|gpl-2|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13038" CreationDate="2022-07-19T16:30:22.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; distribute under the GPL v3.0 without a copyright notice. But there is a problem: Just because I see &amp;quot;licensed under GPL v3.0&amp;quot; doesn't mean it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; actually licensed. It could have been created by some joker who thinks it's funny to distribute someone else's closed software with a GPL v3.0 notice (it's not funny, because this can create a huge mess).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the copyright notice, I have at least someone to ask whether it's indeed GPL v3.0 licensed by them. (Very important if you have company lawyers making sure that everything is 100% legal. And they have someone to sue if someone lied about the GPL license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2022-07-19T16:30:22.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-20T05:47:55.707" Score="7" ViewCount="2816" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project is licensed under &lt;code&gt;GPL-2.0-or-later&lt;/code&gt;/&lt;code&gt;MPL1.*&lt;/code&gt;, to what extent could the FSF/Mozilla releases a new version that imposes obligations or removes protections for licensors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could a future version replace the normal warranty disclaimer with something like &amp;quot;The authors accept full liability for any damages caused by the software&amp;quot; (or even just removing it)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could a future license impose requirements on the licensor? As an extreme example, consider terms like, &amp;quot;By using this software, the licensor agrees to pay you, the licensee, $100&amp;quot;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider especially jurisdictions that have affirmed the GPL's status as a contract in addition to a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Could future versions contain targeted forms of the above terms, like, &amp;quot;Only if this software is being licensed by 9t8, then licensor agrees to pay licensee $100&amp;quot;? Or any other criteria, like &amp;quot;if this software was downloaded from GitHub.com&amp;quot;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the licenses themselves contain any limits on what future versions might allow or require?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does contract law have an obvious consideration that might limit the introduction of such terms (e.g., the option to nullify a radically different contract terms offered automatically by &amp;quot;or any later version&amp;quot; language)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, some of these examples are more far-fetched than others, but I'm interested in the legal bounds of what is actually possible (rather than socially likely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27493" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-07-21T14:58:05.567" LastActivityDate="2024-04-05T05:56:37.073" Title="Could a license that allows later versions impose obligations or remove protections for licensors in the future?" Tags="|gpl-2|license|mpl|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13044" CreationDate="2022-07-20T07:08:45.770" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some risk, but perhaps not as much as you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, let's say the FSF release v4 of the &amp;quot;GNU GPL&amp;quot; which has identical wording to the MIT License. At this point, it is the case that anyone could take code released under the earlier versions of the GPL and licensed with the &amp;quot;or later versions&amp;quot; and ignore the copyleft aspect. While the FSF aren't likely to make that v4, they may make a v4 with clauses you don't like, much as some people don't like some of the clauses in the GPL v3 so you are taking on that risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even if the FSF released a v4 which was just v3 of the GNU GPL which an additional clause &amp;quot;9t8 must pay everyone receiving this software $100&amp;quot;, that would have no effect as it goes beyond the bounds of what a copyright license can enact and would require an explicit agreement from you, just the same as if I released some software under the &amp;quot;PK License&amp;quot; which had the same clause without you agreeing to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &amp;quot;or later versions&amp;quot; gives you some protection as well. For example, if you think tivoization is bad, allowing people to upgrade code from GPL v2 to GPL v3 is a good thing. Basically, it comes down to whether you think it is more likely that there will be a &amp;quot;bug&amp;quot; in the license, or the organisation owning the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T07:08:45.770" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13046" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-20T08:04:37.597" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;If person A creates a work under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RPL-1.5&lt;/a&gt; and person B creates a work based on person A's work, person B has to notify person A with the changes. If person A then uses these changes and continues to develop more changes, will they be required to now notify person B as well or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27497" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-07-20T16:27:26.413" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T16:27:26.413" Title="Does the Reciprocal Public Licence require notifications only to be given to the first original licensor?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|license|copyleft|software|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13041" CreationDate="2022-07-20T09:30:18.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the short answer would be no I can not distrubute the Code if it has GPL functionality thanks to AMON for answering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The responsibility of checking wether the code is LGPL is on the distributor -  ffmpeg.org/doxygen/3.2/md_LICENSE.html which lists all GPL files (thanks Brandin) can be compared to see which files were used by checking the logs created when compiling to see the linked files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to yadif - as I am using a version of ffmpeg that has since changed it to LGPL it is available to distribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in regards to other various other filters I found manually disabling the --disable-&amp;quot;filter&amp;quot; removed them from the builds.&#xA;Again checking the list of complied files to ensure no GPL files were used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27488" LastEditorUserId="27488" LastEditDate="2022-08-22T09:12:43.717" LastActivityDate="2022-08-22T09:12:43.717" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13044" CreationDate="2022-07-20T16:46:13.963" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be referring to the following part of the standard GPL license notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or&#xA;(at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this text is merely the license &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt;.  You're informing the user which license applies to the covered work.  This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; part of the license itself.  The actual text of the GPL license does not include this ability to automatically upgrade to a newer version.  The only thing in the actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; that's similar is the following from section 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program&#xA;specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and&#xA;&amp;quot;any later version&amp;quot;, you have the option of following the terms and&#xA;conditions either of that version or of any later version published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a&#xA;version number of this License, you may choose any version ever&#xA;published by the Free Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Key here is that the second sentence starts with &amp;quot;if&amp;quot;.  The &amp;quot;any later version&amp;quot; part of the standard license notice is not a requirement.  If you want to make your work available under &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2 and nothing else&lt;/a&gt;, you should be able to use a license notice that's worded something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;the Free Software Foundation; version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're uncomfortable with the risks associated with an unpredictable future license, you can always switch.  Linux originally was &amp;quot;GPL v2 or later&amp;quot;, but key core developers were wary about this exact risk and changed it to &amp;quot;GPL v2 only&amp;quot; before v3 was released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; is a bit better about all of this.  Section 7 describes &amp;quot;additional permissions&amp;quot; that can be added to a license, a concept that seems to cover the &amp;quot;or later version&amp;quot; clause in the license notice.  Section 7 gives you the explicit option to remove any additional permissions when you redistribute the software (effectively making it easy to drop the &amp;quot;or later version&amp;quot; bit).  Also, section 14 includes a paragraph that may have been intended to assuage this particular fear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later license versions may give you additional or different&#xA;permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any&#xA;author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a&#xA;later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for the GPL at least, it looks like the amount of damage a future version could do to you personally is limited.  Future versions might give new permissions to users, but can't force you (the author) to do anything you haven't already agreed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL&lt;/a&gt; is different.  Section 10.2 of the license says that the software can be redistributed &amp;quot;under the terms of any subsequent version&amp;quot;.  That part isn't an optional term like it is with the GPL, so there's more risk in this case.  The MPL does include this in section 2.4, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No Contributor makes additional grants as a result of Your choice to&#xA;distribute the Covered Software under a subsequent version of this&#xA;License (see Section 10.2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That will limit the surprises that can happen with a future license version, but (IMO) doesn't seem to be as strong as section 10 of the GPL v3.  Older versions of the MPL did not include this clause, and the risk there would be significantly higher.  Any booby traps in future licenses would only apply to people who were still using the old versions and haven't upgraded to versions that contain these protections.  That's a pool of people that gets smaller every day, and a small target pool makes such shenanigans less likely to be attempted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, the only organizations that can release new versions of these licenses (FSF/Mozilla) have published &lt;em&gt;vast&lt;/em&gt; amounts of software under every version of said license.  Doing something like removing the warranty disclaimer would hurt themselves more than whoever they were trying to attack and makes this sort of treachery vanishingly unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastEditorUserId="9682" LastEditDate="2022-07-20T22:18:59.650" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T22:18:59.650" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13050" CreationDate="2022-07-20T18:13:39.287" Score="-1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a project with an Apache License v2 I intent to include a (heavily) modified source file of the Linux kernel, the file in question is &lt;code&gt;list.h&lt;/code&gt;. I am aware that the Linux Kernel is GPL v2 meaning that it requires software that includes it to have the same GPL v2 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true? If so, does it applied to a single heavily modified source code file shipped with another permissive OSS license such as Apache License v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27503" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T20:44:12.820" Title="Using Linux Kernel Bits in a Apache License v2 software" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13049" CreationDate="2022-07-20T20:44:12.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking a GPL-licensed file, modifying it (regardless how much), and distributing it under an Apache license is a blunt copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL applies &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/linux/list.h&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;to the file&lt;/a&gt;, and all of its derivatives. There is no way to legally circumvent the license - and you very likely will not get the permission of all copyright holders to re-license that file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So either license your project as GPLv2 only and you can make use of that file, or do without that file, or don't ever distribute your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T20:44:12.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10129" CreationDate="2022-07-20T20:49:04.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well it's been a few years but maybe it can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the official Flutter showLicensePage feature (&lt;a href=&quot;https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/showLicensePage.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/showLicensePage.html&lt;/a&gt;) which shows the licenses of the packages you are using in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27504" LastActivityDate="2022-07-20T20:49:04.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13044" CreationDate="2022-07-20T22:04:16.713" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly not; not in terms of the Question, anyway.  It might be safe if you could explain exactly what all later versions might allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18334" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-04-05T05:56:37.073" LastActivityDate="2024-04-05T05:56:37.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13044" CreationDate="2022-07-21T15:36:20.720" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a future update could impose restrictions on future licensors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to consider here that the typical Open-Source license explicitly covers redistribution. That means that the original licensee becomes a licensor themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now these &amp;quot;upgrade clauses&amp;quot; allow the future licensor to redistribute the software under a new license. That binds them, but not the original licensor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is generally not considered a problem, since these upgrade clauses are often optional. Redistribution under the old license remains possible. And if the new license is unreasonable, that's exactly what will happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2022-07-21T15:36:20.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13028" CreationDate="2022-07-21T15:50:57.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, Open Source licenses do not require that the runtime environment required for your Open Source work is also Open Source. The most common example is Open Source software for Microsoft Windows. This is widely accepted, and Windows obviously isn't Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical reason is that the Windows libraries are considered &amp;quot;System Libraries&amp;quot;. By the same logic, the Mathematica libraries used by your workbook should also be considered &amp;quot;System Libraries&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supporting this argument is the fact that you do not modify Mathematica, nor was Mathematica specifically designed or adapted to run your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2022-07-21T15:50:57.883" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-21T16:24:40.083" Score="1" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering adding an MIT licensed library to my code as a raw C file. Currently, my library is only licensed under my LGPL license. If I was to add this MIT licensed C file and its corresponding header to my project, how would I implement the license, and would my users also need to add the license to their own code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27516" LastEditorUserId="27493" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T07:36:35.160" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T07:36:35.160" Title="Should I include the licenses of my dependencies' dependencies?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13057" CreationDate="2022-07-21T21:04:05.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will assume that the LGPL library in your second sentence refers to your own code and that you plan to distribute the MIT library with your library. You will have to include somewhere in all your distributions (most likely in a LICENSE file) a notice like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;License for MIT Library&#xA;=======================&#xA;&amp;lt;paste MIT library's original license here&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone decides to use your library and include the MIT library's content in a distribution, they will probably* have to include that notice in the distribution as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this restricts how you can license any of your LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*There is/was a small amount of ambiguity whether binary distributions of MIT software need to include a notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27493" LastActivityDate="2022-07-21T21:04:05.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10172" CreationDate="2022-07-22T11:57:17.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt; requires that you provide the scripts that are used to compile and install the executable. It doesn't talk about authorization keys and it doesn't require the the end user to be provided the ability to install and execute the modified software in a specific product or device. As long as the scripts allow it to be installed &amp;quot;somewhere&amp;quot;, the terms of the license is fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source&#xA;code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any&#xA;associated interface definition files, &lt;strong&gt;plus the scripts used to&#xA;control compilation and installation of the executable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; does require the the end user to be provided the ability to install and execute the modified software in a specific product or device (i.e. the &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot;) where the original version of the software is installed in and executes in. It also explicitly includes &amp;quot;authorization keys&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods,&#xA;procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that&#xA;User Product&lt;/strong&gt; from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The&#xA;information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of&#xA;the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with&#xA;solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many companies developing embedded products are completely opposed to inclusion of any software licensed under GPLv3 or LGPLv3 or AGPLv3, due to the Tivoization clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-07-22T11:57:17.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13061" CreationDate="2022-07-22T11:45:38.943" Score="4" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that if we link closed source code with GPL library then closed source will be considered as a derived work of GPL and it needs to be distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Linking is the technical process of connecting code in a library to the using code, to produce a single executable file. It is performed either at compile time or run-time in order to produce functional machine-readable code.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are licenses which provides exception for linking like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; (e.g: glibc library)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closed source code is linked to the virtual library of Linux kernel linux-vdso.so.1 during runtime. Since Linux kernel is GPLv2 License, so will it make the closed source running on Linux to be considered as a derived work of GPLv2 (Linux Kernel) ? Is there any exception ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27520" OwnerDisplayName="Varadhan Work" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-02T09:05:05.590" LastActivityDate="2022-08-02T09:05:05.590" Title="linking closed source with linux-vdso.so.1" Tags="|gpl|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13060" CreationDate="2022-07-23T04:23:08.817" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The linux-vdso-so.1 library is provided by the Linux Kernel for making system calls more efficiently. See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58657036/where-is-linux-vdso-so-1-present-on-the-file-system&quot;&gt;Where is linux-vdso.so.1 present on the file system&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Linux Kernel is licensed as GPLv2 with an explicit system call exception mentioned in the file COPYING:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The Linux Kernel] [b]eing under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2&#xA;only, according with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LICENSES/preferred/GPL-2.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an explicit syscall exception, as stated at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant statement in the Linux-syscall-note exception is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without that exception, one could interpret the GPL to mean that a program which links with that library in order to make system calls might be considered by the GPL to be a &amp;quot;work based on the Program&amp;quot; (i.e., a work based on Linux), which would effectively disallow all closed source programs on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the exception only mentions user programs. In discussions of operating systems, user programs or user mode refers to an operating system's non-privileged mode of operation which does not have direct access to the hardware. Drivers and low-level components of an operating system such as the process scheduler are typically not user mode programs, so the exception would not apply to that sort of program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2022-07-23T04:23:08.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13063" CreationDate="2022-07-24T05:27:41.490" Score="3" ViewCount="474" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a library is licensed under the MIT license but has patented algorithms in its source, can I just pull out the source files I need that don't contain any of the aforementioned material and reference them directly in my project? In addition, the source files to be used are going to be used without any modifications. On top of that, do I need to do anything extra in the attributions portion of my theoretical software, such as specifying that no portions of this software are using any of the patented algorithms? I don't even know what the legalese for that will even look like if that is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On normal occasions, I just tend to list it down as-is like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Library Name&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Copyright Notices&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Link to Github repository or Website&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;MIT License Text&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first time I have encountered something like this, and unlike OpenCV where users can simply specify to put in the non-free flag when building its library, the one I'm currently looking at doesn't have that option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27527" LastEditorUserId="27527" LastEditDate="2022-07-24T06:04:50.437" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T09:48:12.553" Title="Using a Library Under MIT License with Patented Algorithms" Tags="|licensing|mit|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13062" CreationDate="2022-07-24T09:48:12.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can I just pull out the source files I need that don't contain any of the aforementioned material and reference them directly in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The MIT license allows you to modify the licensed work in any way, which includes deleting bits you don't want/need and incorporating it into other works. (The same in fact applies to any open source license)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do I need to do anything extra in the attributions portion of my theoretical software, such as specifying that no portions of this software are using any of the patented algorithms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not &lt;strong&gt;required&lt;/strong&gt; by the license; all that is required is what you are currently doing: to include the copyright and permission notices in any derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it may still be a good idea to note that the patented algorithms have been removed as this will give any consumers of your software (both end users and other developers if you choose to release the source) confidence that your software is not patent encumbered and can in fact be used freely. Of course, be very sure you have actually removed all the patented code!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T09:48:12.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13067" CreationDate="2022-07-24T14:01:14.823" Score="7" ViewCount="2562" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anything like that exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, let's say: if someone want to use my code in his MIT project, he can use is under MIT license. If he wants to use it in his GPL project, the code will be licensed to him under GPL. If his project is licensed under multiple OSI-approved licenses, the code will be multi-licensed to him. He is just forbidden to mix it with a proprietary code. He cannot re-license his codebase to a proprietary or any non OSI-approved license as long as my code is there. Is there some license that behaves like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why not MIT? Because it can be included in proprietary code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why not GPL? Because it turns everything into GPL, and I want something quite opposite: turning my code into everything OSI-approved that it's being used in :) .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27528" LastActivityDate="2022-07-26T18:12:03.980" Title="License allowing mixing code only with code licensed with any of the OSI-approved licenses, getting &quot;infected&quot; by these licenses (kind of reverse GPL)" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13066" CreationDate="2022-07-24T16:10:38.543" Score="4" ViewCount="817" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an open source discord bot which I've built myself and I liked a feature of another proprietary discord bot.&#xA;So can I implement almost similar feature to my bot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will that violate copyright rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26513" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:49:02.057" Title="Adding features that are similar to a proprietary program" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13065" CreationDate="2022-07-24T16:15:05.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Copyright covers the expression of an idea, not the idea itself - in&#xA;software terms, that means that the code (and things like visual and audio assets) is covered by copyright, but functionality cannot be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is nothing to do with open source though - the answer would be exactly the same if you were building your own proprietary bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T16:15:05.843" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13064" CreationDate="2022-07-24T16:48:43.493" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are suggesting is essentially impossible; fundamentally, there are two types of open source license: permissive and copyleft. Permissive licenses, like the MIT License, &lt;em&gt;deliberately&lt;/em&gt; allow people to re-use the material in non-open source projects. Copyleft licenses do not allow this and ensure the material remains &amp;quot;open forever&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot via some trickery convert a permissive license like the MIT License into a copyleft one. If you want copyleft behaviour, &lt;em&gt;just use a copyleft license&lt;/em&gt; (or multi-license under a set of copyleft licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-07-24T16:48:43.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13065" CreationDate="2022-07-25T09:49:02.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your user interface is very similar to the program you are copying, this may violate the copyright. And, of course, if your program's name is too similar, as it would be just misspelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be also software patents but the patents are not automatic. The owner of the idea must have the patent filled in before and the patent should not replicate some idea or algorithm that has been already known. Some countries like EU have very serious restrictions on what can be patented. It is not as obvious as when stripping copyright protection from the movie and then offering it for download.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2022-07-25T09:49:02.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13073" CreationDate="2022-07-26T15:27:52.380" Score="-1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently taken some time to study different licenses and I was wondering: If I have a open source project and other people contribute, how do I receive the copyright? Or is it possible to not only be allowed to use/modify/etc. the contributed code but to force the contributors to transfer their copyright to the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27539" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T15:05:51.720" Title="How to retrieve copyright from contributors" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-07-27T11:53:29.683" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13064" CreationDate="2022-07-26T18:12:03.980" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not quite what you want, but has a similar effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Public domain&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use dedication to public domain if it's possible in your jurisdiction, or simply use either &lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;  or &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your code will be usable in any open source project, as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your code will be also usable in any closed source project, or anywhere at all and you cannot control it anymore. This contradicts your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9680" LastActivityDate="2022-07-26T18:12:03.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-26T21:21:37.290" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, it is well accepted that, for programs that are licensed under the GPL, the output of a program does not necessarily have to follow the GPL. This is confirmed by the &amp;quot;Basic Permissions&amp;quot; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL version 3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output from running a&#xA;covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its&#xA;content, constitutes a covered work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, is it the case that the only reason the GPL doesn't necessarily need to be followed for an output is because the GPL says so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I mean is: after reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License v2&lt;/a&gt; today, it seems it doesn't say anything about outputs generated by the program. So let's say I have a compiler licensed under the MPL v2, and I use this compiler to generate some executable called A. Does A need to follow MPL v2 terms, since MPL v2 doesn't say it does not apply to outputs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using MPL v2 as an example, but this question could be applied to any software license. Am I always allowed to assume my output can follow a different license, or does it completely depend on the license of whatever generated it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27556" LastEditorUserId="27556" LastEditDate="2022-07-26T21:27:13.960" LastActivityDate="2022-07-26T21:27:13.960" Title="Is an output of a program (almost) always not bound to its generator's license?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-07-27T10:56:59.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13070" CreationDate="2022-07-27T08:32:06.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To receive the copyright from contributors on their contribution(s) to your project, you need to ask them to sign a legal document called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_transfer_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Transfer Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CTA). This agreement must have legally accepted signatures, so that often means dealing with actual paperwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A CTA makes all the code yours to do with as you please. That could be a detractor for some people that otherwise might consider contributing to your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just want to have some additional rights, for example to distribute contributions made to a copyleft community edition also in a closed-source commercial edition, then you can ask your contributors to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contributor License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (CLA). A CLA is also a legal document that requires legally recognized signatures and it typically grants you a permissive license in how you can use the contribution, without the contributor giving up their rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the most common way of running an open source project is to just accept contributions under the same license as what you distribute the project with. And if you use a license with built-in upgrade possibility (like &amp;quot;GPLv3 or later&amp;quot;), that does not hinder you in following the defined license upgrade path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-07-27T15:05:51.720" LastActivityDate="2022-07-27T15:05:51.720" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-07-27T11:48:20.560" Score="3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the case of MySQL. This software is Dual-Licensed, of which, one license is GPLv2 the other is a somewhat costly enterprise license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the following criterion, what are my obligations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am deploying a system on an air gapped network of a customer on servers I am providing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I intend to use the GPLv2 version of MySQL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I provide the source code of MySQL Community Edition to my customer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My software communicates with MySQL using an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql-net/MySqlConnector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT Licensed Connector&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm trying to understand, is whether given 3, my software is also governed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most relevant portion of the GPL FAQ would be:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it then goes onto say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the question then shifts to whether such communication is sufficiently intimate, which is lovely and vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27560" LastEditorUserId="27560" LastEditDate="2022-07-29T09:40:29.537" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T13:00:03.067" Title="Complying with MySQL GPLv2" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13078" CreationDate="2022-07-30T00:31:37.543" Score="7" ViewCount="1252" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was working through a problem I was having with MinIO, I noticed that in a bug report on Github, one of the project owners made this comment to a bug reporter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also remember if you are using MinIO AGPLv3 version under commercial project you are violating the licensing terms here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are advised to get a subscription from us to get a license exception from us &lt;a href=&quot;https://min.io/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://min.io/pricing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13137#issuecomment-912069897&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/minio/minio/issues/13137#issuecomment-912069897&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not sound accurate to me. Based on my understanding of AGPL, it exists to prevent GPL software from hiding behind a SaaS wall - an AGPL product that's offered as a service must also have its source code available, since offering access via a website could be deemed as not &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; the application and thus possibly not triggering the GPL source code availability requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this comment seems to imply that MinIO's developers are stating that if you simply &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; MinIO itself in a commercial context, you must purchase a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person reporting this bug didn't really get too deep into their usage scenario in the parts that I read, but to me simply using MinIO as a backend for S3-compatible storage in a project shouldn't run afoul of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know that users of normal GPL software often become confused as to whether simply using a GPL program in the context of a larger program (e.g. using FFMPEG within a commercial video platform) requires the entire project to be GPL - the general consensus seems to be that if you're using a &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; interface (e.g. you're executing the FFMPEG binary from your project, but you're not compiling or integrating FFMPEG directly into your code) then you should be fine using GPL binaries in a commercial application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the same apply to the AGPL? In this context, if someone is using MinIO to provide an S3 storage backend for a commercial project, other than making the MinIO source available, does that organization have to 1) AGPL their entire project, or 2) purchase a commercial license from MinIO, in order to be in compliance? Assuming you are not modifying MinIO at all, you're simply running a copy of it and accessing its public API (in this case, S3) from your own application, I fail to understand how using MinIO in a commercial project could be &amp;quot;violating the license terms&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, does this mean that MinIO is possibly violating the AGPL itself by trying to coerce users into purchasing a commercial license? It's perfectly fine to offer multiple licenses, but as I understand it the user always has the choice which license to use; the AGPL expressly allows commercial use of an AGPL project, so other than that MinIO can refuse to provide any extra services to such a user, I don't see how it's a &amp;quot;violation&amp;quot; of the license. If this bug poster chooses to use the AGPL version in a commercial context, the worst that should seem to happen is the user is not entitled to any SLA or support - the dev could close the issue as &amp;quot;we won't address this since you're commercial&amp;quot; - but that still isn't a violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;dr: Is it valid for a provider of an application with a dual license model (AGPL and paid commercial) to coerce or &amp;quot;force&amp;quot; users to purchase a commercial license if they are using the AGPL version in a commercial context, assuming the user is abiding by the AGPL itself by offering source for all AGPL code they are using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11496" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T12:16:00.820" Title="Can a company offering a dual-license AGPL/paid commercial product require commercial users to purchase a commercial license?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13077" CreationDate="2022-08-01T13:13:26.757" Score="4" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am making a small side project to make a few dollars. The project basically consists of a couple of RESTful endpoints. My endpoints use various libraries released under MIT and BSD 3-clause licenses, and I was wondering if and how to cite the original authors of the aforementioned so as not to run into problems given the commercial nature of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, my endpoints are made in Flask, which is technically released under BSD 3-clause. The same argument applies to Numpy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27594" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-02T09:04:49.663" LastActivityDate="2022-08-02T09:04:49.663" Title="REST Endpoint using MIT and BSD 3-clause license libraries" Tags="|mit|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13076" CreationDate="2022-08-01T14:12:27.120" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two licenses that you mention are permissive licenses that are not &amp;quot;internet aware&amp;quot;. The main requirements that those licenses have is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you do not delete copyright and/or license statements from your source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you include a copy of the license text in the documentation that you provide to the recipients of your software (when it is distributed either in source or binary form).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses place absolutely no requirements on you when you provide remote access to the software (over the internet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to be really nice, you can always mention the used third-party components and their licenses in your published API documentation, but there is no requirement to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T14:12:27.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13075" CreationDate="2022-08-01T15:40:42.077" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have found some code that is released under AGPL, but the supplier says that commercial use isn't permitted.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9805/can-i-license-my-project-with-an-open-source-license-but-disallow-commercial-use&quot;&gt;Like us&lt;/a&gt;, you're aware that a licence cannot be both free (as per the FSF's definitions, and ours) and prohibit commercial activities.  You wonder what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience, there are generally two scenarios that pan out like this.  One is that the company &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt; it's releasing its product under (eg) GPL, but the licence is in fact a modified version of the GPL, or GPL plus additional conditions, or some other way to try to weasel out of the freedoms they're supposed to be giving.  The other is that the company really has released under a free licence, but hasn't fully understood what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/minio/minio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub site&lt;/a&gt; is clear that the licence is AGPLv3; their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; page contains the AGPLv3 text, verbatim, and GitHub have even helpfully added a summary at the top that says commercial use is permitted.  So I conclude that this is an example of scenario two: the company simply doesn't realise that they can't prohibit commercial use of the code they have so released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will happen when they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; realise is anyone's guess.  If the company is the sole rightsholder, they may simply pull the code, or change the licence; so you might be well-advised to take your own copy of this source, under the current terms, now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt;: no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T15:40:42.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13081" CreationDate="2022-08-01T18:58:19.120" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say a project was called projectMIT and it was written in python. it was not maintained and as of now, it is publicly archived on github. Someone re-wrote it as project(MIT)-rust with WTFPL license. (In the readme of the project(MIT)-rust, it says it was an inspiration of projectMIT.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if we would like to use the project(MIT)-rust (or projectWTFPL-rust) as part our own project,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are some nice ways to give both, projectMIT and project(MIT)-rust, credit while we are using projectWTFPL-rust?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or can an MIT project re-license with another license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27869" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-02T09:03:32.080" LastActivityDate="2023-08-29T19:40:07.823" Title="Found a project with WTFPL, but I think it is a translation of another MIT-licensed project" Tags="|mit|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13079" CreationDate="2022-08-01T19:22:39.240" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you believe the WTFPL project is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work of the MIT project, you should not use it as it is a copyright violation, and it cannot be legally distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you have provided little evidence to support your assertion that it is in fact a derivative work; &amp;quot;inspired by&amp;quot; certainly does not meet that threshold. There is no simple test you can use here to determine if it is a derivative work or not, some cases will clearly be one side of the line or the other, other cases will be hard (and may be ruled differently in different jurisdictions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-01T19:22:39.240" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13079" CreationDate="2022-08-02T08:18:33.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't disagree with Philip's answer, which is composed almost entirely of good points.  But I also don't see the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirements of the MIT license are pretty easily satisfied.  If you were to restore to your codebase the license text, and the original project's copyright statements, you'd've satisfied it.  If you were to add in the copyright statements from the intermediate WTFPL-licensed project, you'd've satisfied your requirements in the original question (credit for all preceding authors), as well.  You could license your own codebase under any MIT-compatible licence you pleased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree that the WTFPL is unusably woolly, but its choice is certainly strongly indicative of the intermediate author's desire not to constrain what happens downstream.  It seems unlikely to me that either set of authors would have a beef with you, were you to do as I suggest; and it seems &lt;em&gt;vanishingly&lt;/em&gt; unlikely that either would get anywhere proceeding against you for copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-08-02T08:18:33.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13086" CreationDate="2022-08-02T18:11:32.603" Score="5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a Discord bot is licensed under the AGPL, do users in the Discord server have to have access to the source code? It only sends messages; it's not an interactive bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T08:56:59.747" Title="AGPL-licensed Discord bot" Tags="|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13084" CreationDate="2022-08-02T19:24:38.573" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently forked a relatively new GPLv3 project on GitHub, as it had seemingly been abandoned not long after its creator had published it, and I wanted to make some improvements, as it was in a fairly broken state and I had a use for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got in touch with the creator of the project to talk about where he was at with it, as I had more or less rewritten everything, having none of their code remaining in my fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our visions of the project differed, so we decided to create a new working branch under the original project for a new project that was more advanced and in line with my vision, as the original creator wanted to have joint ownership of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original creator has since copy-pasted my contributions (mostly verbatim) to this new project into his own, old project with zero attribution to me. Do I have any recourse here? I do not plan on taking any action, though I would like to know what my position is under GPLv3, or if this is rather a moral violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We did recently have a bit of a spat lately over some commercial interest in the project, which we reached an agreement on, and I'm wondering if this is a way to get back at my position in that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I just really don't want to work with the guy any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27611" LastActivityDate="2022-08-02T20:15:37.327" Title="Can GPLv3 contributions to a separate project be used without attribution?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|copyright|commercial|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13083" CreationDate="2022-08-02T20:15:37.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that this is a copyright violation by the other person; the only right they had to use your copyrighted code was under the GPL v3, and that requires (amongst other things) appropriate attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your first action at this point should be to formally notify the other person that you consider them to be violating the GPL by not including attribution to you; they then have 30 days to remedy the breach (see Section 8 of the GPL v3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they do not remedy the breach, your options are at that point are what they would be for any other copyright violation; practically, this means you could file a notice of copyright violation and get your property removed from the project. You could in theory sue for actual damages, but the only people likely to make any money from that are the lawyers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes that you did properly attribute your code when contributing it, ideally with the full template as suggested by the GPL, but at bare minimum with a copyright statement along the lines of &amp;quot;Copyright (c) 2022 waterfall123&amp;quot;; if you didn't do that, it gets murky as it could be argued you voluntarily gave up your right to be attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This also assumes you did not sign any kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/contributor-agreements&quot;&gt;contributor agreement&lt;/a&gt; and there is no way any work you did could be considered &amp;quot;work for hire&amp;quot; i.e. you were not paid for writing the code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-02T20:15:37.327" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13140" CreationDate="2022-08-02T20:37:29.407" Score="3" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have downloaded code that is under the &lt;strong&gt;MIT license&lt;/strong&gt;, and will modify parts of the code, as well as rename classes, namespaces and files, and I plan to relicense the code under one or all of the following licenses: &lt;strong&gt;LPL-1.0.2 (Lucent Public License version 1.0. 2)&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;MS-RL (Microsoft Reciprocal License)&lt;/strong&gt; and possibly close the code and make it &lt;strong&gt;proprietary&lt;/strong&gt; (a case to consider).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would like to know if I have to leave the original author's copyright notice in each file of the code and make my modifications or if I can use a single LICENSE.md or LICENSE file with the original license with the name of the original author?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As for changing the names of classes, namespaces and files, could I change it, relaunch it on github/gitlab and then send it to nuget.org under a new name, new author and new license, without infringing the original author's copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27612" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-08-25T13:34:49.200" LastActivityDate="2022-08-25T13:34:49.200" Title="MIT license modify package and names" Tags="|licensing|mit|relicensing|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13082" CreationDate="2022-08-03T08:56:59.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you modify the bot and then install that modified copy on a computer network (such as Discord), then in that case, you must ensure that the source code of the modified version is &amp;quot;prominently&amp;quot; available to those users that can receive messages from the bot (i.e. the users of Discord who could receive messages from your bot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the Affero GPL says in Section 13 that if you &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; an AGPL-licensed program and make that program available to users on a computer network, that you must provide the source code of the modified version to those users:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, &lt;strong&gt;your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network&lt;/strong&gt; (if your version supports such interaction) &lt;strong&gt;an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/strong&gt; by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(GNU Affero General Public License version 3, Section 13. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have noted in your question that the communication with your bot is in one direction only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The bot] only sends messages; it's not an interactive bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, receiving information from a computer program could be considered as a form of one-way interaction. In the case you describe, it's possible that users could send messages to the bot, but that the bot is simply not programmed to respond to those messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that the author of the original code presumably made a specific choice to license the code under the Affero GPL. The intended purpose of choosing the Affero GPL as opposed to the vanilla GPL is explained in the Preamble (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL-3.0&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many developers of free software are heartened and encouraged by the&#xA;resulting cooperation [resulting from licensing their software under the GNU General Public License]. However, in the case of software used on&#xA;network servers, this result may fail to come about. The GNU General&#xA;Public License permits &lt;strong&gt;making a modified version and letting the&#xA;public access it on a server&lt;/strong&gt; without ever releasing its source code to&#xA;the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically &lt;strong&gt;to&#xA;ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available&#xA;to the community&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above text is from the Preamble, so technically, that text itself is not binding. Nonetheless, reading it allows one to clearly see that the intention of an author choosing the AGPL is to make the source code (of modified versions) available to any users who can &amp;quot;access&amp;quot; the software (i.e. to use it) via a computer network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the word &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; is used with a special definition in the (A)GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &amp;quot;modified version&amp;quot; of the earlier work or a work &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the AGPL, this means that if you don't modify the work -- for example, if you install an exact copy of a program (the AGPL Discord bot, for example) and make that exact copy available on a network, then it's possible that you wouldn't need to do anything special to comply with Section 13 of the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as soon as you make modifications or enhancements to the program, then Section 13 becomes relevant, and you need to ensure that users who interact with it (e.g. users who can receive and/or send messages to it) are given the chance to get the Corresponding Source of your modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2022-08-03T08:56:59.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13089" CreationDate="2022-08-04T08:00:29.473" Score="4" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clause 3 (D) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/MS-PL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, &lt;strong&gt;you may only do so under a license that complies with this license&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what are the FSF-approved and OSI-approved licenses that comply with the Microsoft Public License? Can I use a Microsoft Public License library together with 2/3/4-clause BSD, X11 (MIT), Apache 2.0, or MPL 2.0 (with Exhibit B) licensed code to produce an executable which I then distribute to others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-08-04T10:57:30.253" LastActivityDate="2022-08-07T05:15:19.713" Title="Which open source licenses comply with the Microsoft Public License?" Tags="|license-compatibility|microsoft|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13087" CreationDate="2022-08-04T10:57:15.780" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Binary-only distributions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you make a binary-only distribution (that is, you distribute the program solely &amp;quot;in compiled or object code form&amp;quot; in the words of the License), then the MS-PL says that you may do that, as long as the other license does not require distribution of the source code as well. So, basically it means that the other license cannot be something like (A)GPL or MPL, since those licenses require source code distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the MS-PL is the condition that if you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, then you may do so &amp;quot;only under this license&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute &lt;strong&gt;any portion of the software in source code form&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;you may do so only under this license&lt;/strong&gt; by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you release your program solely in executable form (&amp;quot;in compiled or object code form&amp;quot; in the words of the License itself), then the MS-PL itself says that you may do what you describe in the next sentence (&amp;quot;If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from the licenses you mentioned, using an MS-PL library together with BSD, X11/MIT or Apache 2.0 code would be fine, since those licenses also allow binary-only distributions. MPL 2.0 probably would not work, because that license requires distributing the source code as well; however, see below for a possible technical workaround, if you really want to attempt this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ms-pl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ms-pl&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mend.io/resources/blog/top-10-microsoft-public-license-ms-pl-questions-answered/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mend.io/resources/blog/top-10-microsoft-public-license-ms-pl-questions-answered/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Source code distribution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some programming languages and environments, there may be a technical workaround to deliver the &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; of the main program (under a license other than MS-PL) while also satisfying the MS-PL license requirement for the MS-PL portions of the program:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute &lt;strong&gt;any portion of the software in compiled or object code form&lt;/strong&gt;, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For programming languages that support combining portions of compiled or object code together with other source code, you could conceivably arrange your project tree in such a way that the MS-PL portions of the code are maintained only in compiled or object code form (for example, only .o files for the C/C++ code, only .class files for compiled Java code, only .pyc files for compiled Python code, and so on).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such an arrangement would be technically possible, but it would make it very inconvenient to make changes to the MS-PL portions of the main program. Also, such an arrangement would be forbidden by licenses like the GPL, which require releasing the complete corresponding source code of the entire program, including all components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-08-07T05:15:19.713" LastActivityDate="2022-08-07T05:15:19.713" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13074" CreationDate="2022-08-04T13:00:03.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As described in the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7877/mysql-for-commercial-web-application?rq=1&quot;&gt;this question here&lt;/a&gt;, the database and the rest of the application are usually separate from each other, so you can consider them as 'Mere Aggregation' in line with the GPL FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connector is part of your software, so if the connector was under GPL as well, then you would need to put your entire software under GPL. However, you mention that the connector you plan to use is under the MIT License, which (as you know) is a permissive license. Therefore you can put your own software under any license you like, as long as you provide proper license and attribution notices for the connector (and any other OSS component you might be using).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T13:00:03.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13092" CreationDate="2022-08-04T17:14:16.750" Score="3" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 section 4e:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provide Installation Information, &lt;strong&gt;but only if you would otherwise be required to provide such information under section 6 of the GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;, and only to the extent that such information is necessary to install and execute a modified version of the Combined Work produced by recombining or relinking the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 section 6 goes on to say &amp;quot;Install Information&amp;quot; only applies for a &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not releasing a &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot;, can I sell a &amp;quot;locked down device&amp;quot; (e.g. tivoization)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27627" LastEditorUserId="27627" LastEditDate="2022-08-04T20:20:15.260" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T20:20:15.260" Title="Does LGPLv3 Tivoization apply to non &quot;User Products&quot;?" Tags="|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13091" CreationDate="2022-08-04T19:23:33.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I read it, yes, that's correct.  Note, however, that the decision about whether something's a &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot; isn't left to you.  GPLv3 says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “User Product” is either (1) a “consumer product”, which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of coverage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A product is a consumer product regardless of whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant mode of use of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you're sure that your device doesn't constitute a consumer product, cannot reasonably be used as a consumer product, and is neither intended nor sold for incorporation into a dwelling, then the &amp;quot;anti-tivoization&amp;quot; provisions don't apply to your device.  You'd better be really, really sure about that before relying on it, though, and I'm not aware of any case law to help you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-08-04T19:23:33.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13094" CreationDate="2022-08-05T07:48:08.113" Score="4" ViewCount="1316" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planing to release a software I have written as donationware (free to download, donate if you want to support the development).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is bundling and (dynamically) linking to another software that is licensed under GPLv3, which means I have to release my own whole software under GPLv3, which I am now learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know GPLv3 requires to &amp;quot;disclose the source&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does that mean that I have to bundle the source code with my release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or simply provide a means for anyone to obtain a copy of the source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If so, to what extent? Does the code need to be open on the Internet (Github), or a link to a ZIP archive as download, or are you even allowed to specify &amp;quot;Email me to obtain the source code&amp;quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27635" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T08:40:51.657" Title="With GPLv3, do I have to bundle the source code with my deliverable or &quot;provide a means&quot; to obtain it?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13093" CreationDate="2022-08-05T08:35:13.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know GPLv3 requires to &amp;quot;disclose the source&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does that mean that I have to bundle the source code with my release?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sources don't necessarily need to be bundled together with the binaries. The options you have are listed in Section 6 (Conveying Non-Source Forms). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6 of the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the code need to be open on the Internet (Github), or a link to a ZIP archive as download, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic rule is that if you offer the binaries (or &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot; in the language of the GPLv3) on the Internet (either &amp;quot;gratis or for a charge&amp;quot;), then you must ensure that the Corresponding Source is also available online &amp;quot;at no further charge&amp;quot;. See Subsection 6d for the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the sources don't necessarily need to be &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; to the Internet (e.g. they could be behind a paywall), but it means that once you give someone access to your server to download the binaries, then you must also offer the same person access to the Corresponding Source at no additional charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The server that hosts the sources may be operated by a third party (e.g. GitHub) but you are responsible for ensuring that the sources remain available from that server. Also, in this case, you must provide &amp;quot;clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 6 also gives you non-Internet based ways to convey the sources, but only in some scenarios. For example, if you are distributing the binaries embedded in a physical product, then it's allowed that you distribute the Corresponding Source on a physical medium only (e.g. a CD, a DVD, a USB-stick, etc.) and that means that you wouldn't necessarily have to make it available online. See Subsections 6a and 6b for the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... or are you even allowed to specify &amp;quot;Email me to obtain the source code&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the GPLv2, this option was generally allowed and it's called a written offer. Under the GPLv3, however, providing (only) a written offer is only allowed if you are distributing the software as part of a physical product, or if you received the software itself with a written offer only. See Subsections 6b and 6c for the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-08-05T08:40:51.657" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T08:40:51.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13095" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13097" CreationDate="2022-08-05T15:15:26.850" Score="7" ViewCount="735" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working at Pl@ntNet which contributes a lot of plant observations (around 20M)  online under &lt;strong&gt;cc-by-sa&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the app, a user can edit their profile and change their display name. But doing so will currently not change their already published data author name. Meaning that for a given observation published by an individual named &amp;quot;Hugo&amp;quot;, the user changes their profile name to &amp;quot;Bob&amp;quot;, the observation already published stays in &amp;quot;Hugo&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did check the CreativeCommons.org FAQ and all the materials on creative common website and did not find any reason why we couldn't update the past published data to update the user name, if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions is:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;➡️ Can we update the displayed name of the author on their past work (here observations) when whe update their name in the present?&#xA;If we can, under which conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of user creation (observation) &lt;a href=&quot;https://identify.plantnet.org/weurope/observations/1013811167&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://identify.plantnet.org/weurope/observations/1013811167&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Term of use of the service &lt;a href=&quot;https://identify.plantnet.org/terms_of_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://identify.plantnet.org/terms_of_use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27638" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-08-08T09:16:50.500" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T09:16:50.500" Title="CC-By-SA: Can the author update his past creation when updating his name?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13095" CreationDate="2022-08-05T15:26:32.943" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That mostly is a matter of your own TOS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under CC-BY-SA, of course, the requirement is to keep the attribution and users of the content to give appropriate credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a bit of assumption: In your case, you are the distributor to which people upload the content. I assume you allow upload by users only on the condition that they are the copyright holder and that they upload the content under CC-BY-SA where the attribution is done under the (current) username.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, you can have in your TOS a clause which states that content will always be attributed to the current user name. Failing to have this in the TOS you are not allowed to update or change the attribution - but you can, of course, ask people to agree to new TOS and re-license their content under their new or current nick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively go the easy way, and give them a separate field to define how they want to see their work credited, a field separate from their nickname on your site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Mind, this is not legal advice, just my understanding of how things work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T15:26:32.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13095" CreationDate="2022-08-05T17:54:39.440" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kind of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt;, we see the Section 3(a)(1)(A) requirement to “retain” the Licensor's “identification”, “including by pseudonym if designated”. So you should retain the user's chosen name in the form that you received it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this identification is not immutable.&#xA;For example, Section 3(a)(3) also requires: “If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.”&#xA;Since you're dealing with electronic records, changing the attribution information is reasonably practicable.&#xA;For example, Stack Overflow supports this by “dissociating” posts from a username when the account is deleted, replacing the alias/name with the numerical ID.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a narrow reading of the CC BY-SA 4.0 supports that you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; retain the old username on the content licensed to you, at least until the user requests the attribution to be removed entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since you will already need the ability to edit attribution information on old content, it would definitely be compliant (and the courteous thing to do) to allow users to change their displayed names retroactively.&#xA;I don't think that the CC BY-SA would in any way prevent you from updating old attribution information, especially when this update is requested by the user/rightsholder themselves.&#xA;A change of username can be reasonably understood as a request to update the attribution information on old content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Creative Commons rules on attribution did not appear randomly.&#xA;These attribution requirements are essentially a contractual version of &lt;em&gt;moral rights&lt;/em&gt; that are common in copyright laws (other than in US copyright law).&#xA;For example, German copyright law says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has the right to be identified as the author of the work.&#xA;The author may determine whether the work is to bear a designation of authorship and which designation is to be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this does not contain a limitation such as “at the time of publication”.&#xA;I think that France has similarly strong recognition for moral rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional concerns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Users might change their legal name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's the internet.&#xA;Usernames might contain offensive or illegal content.&#xA;Systems should be built with the capability to moderate accordingly.&#xA;However, it would violate the CC BY-SA terms (and possibly moral rights) to change the username at your discretion, so that content from offending users would have to be removed entirely if they don't change their name “voluntarily”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Difference in Version 2.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;This answer assumes the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, since the question didn't specify a version.&#xA;However, the site in question seems to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 2.0&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;This version has different attribution requirements (see section 4(c)), and does not explicitly recognize the author's right to request attribution to be removed.&#xA;This does not affect whether the author has a right to remove or change their attribution per moral rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-08-05T17:54:39.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13098" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-06T08:29:27.077" Score="3" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I create software that uses a library licensed under the GPL. If I distribute the software including the library, the software would have to be licensed under the GPL as well. But what if I distribute the software without the GPL library? Can the software then be closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I could achieve this by distributing the software without the GPL library, and making it download the GPL library's object files (for dynamic linking) from a third-party source when the software first starts up. In this way, I am not &amp;quot;distributing&amp;quot; the GPL library, so I do not have to comply with the terms of the GPL. The software can then remain closed source. Does this violate the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: By &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot;, I mean the GPLv2 or GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T05:41:50.337" Title="Can a program that uses a GPL library be closed source if it is distributed without the GPL library?" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|closed-source|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13095" CreationDate="2022-08-06T21:58:54.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to be completely on the safe side add a check box in the user name change dialog asking whether the old attributions should be changed.  In this case no one will be able to complain, neither these who think you're not allowed to change it nor those who think you must.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I agree with the most upvoted answer in that changing it would be the correct thing to do if you don't want to implement two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14678" LastActivityDate="2022-08-06T21:58:54.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-07T08:09:25.543" Score="0" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the Mac OS X platform, there is an open source resource editor utility called &lt;a href=&quot;https://bdesgraupes.pagesperso-orange.fr/tools.html#rezilla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rezilla&lt;/a&gt;. For those that are unfamiliar, a lot of the Rezilla utility’s functionality is similar to that of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ResEdit resource editor&lt;/a&gt; on the classic Mac OS platform.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When creating and editing resources with Rezilla, it appears that sometimes the resource’s data will include data that is supplied by Rezilla or generated by Rezilla as opposed to being inputted by the individual who is using Rezilla. Some examples where this may be happening are listed below. It is possible that there are other instances that are not mentioned in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  - For ‘dftb’ resources, there is a 2-byte version field at the start of the resource that is given the value of 0. In addition, each data item entry (entry type 1) in a ‘dftb’ resource starts with a 6-bit “Reserved (6 bits)” field that has the value 0. In an entry, the “Font number” field may have the default value of 0. It might be the case that the “Font number” field does not have any effect if the “Use font” setting for the data item entry is not turned on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- For a ‘DITL’ (dialog item list) resource, according to a programming book, each item in the list has a 4-byte reserved field that precedes the 8-byte display rectangle data. It may be the case that this reserved value is all zeroes by default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  - For a ‘dlgx’ resource, there is a 2-byte version number that appears to be given the value of 0. After that, there is a 28-bit reserved field that appears to have the default value of 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  - For a ‘DLOG’ resource, there is a 4-byte RefCon field. This field may be given the value of 0 by default.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- For a ‘MENU’ resource, according to a programming book, there is a 2-byte menu ID field and then there are two 2-byte placeholder fields that are intended to hold the menu width and menu height after the resource’s data has been loaded into memory. Perhaps these two placeholder fields are given a default value of 0 when a ‘MENU’ resource is created in Rezilla. Also, in a ‘MENU’ resource there is a 2-byte field for the menu definition resource ID and after that there is a 2-byte placeholder value. After the data for the menu’s items, there is a 1-byte placeholder field at the end of a ‘MENU’ resource. For each of the menu items in a ‘MENU’ resource, there are fields for optionally specifying an icon, a keyboard equivalent, a marking character, and a font style for the item. My guess is that the defaults for a menu item would be no icon, no key equivalent, no marking character, and a plain style.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a ‘MENU’ resource is being edited in Rezilla’s ‘MENU’ resource editor, there are actions that will cause Rezilla to conveniently create a corresponding ‘xmnu’ resource for the menu. From what I can tell, the ‘xmnu’ resource that Rezilla creates for a ‘MENU’ resource has an entry for each menu item. If a menu item is a separator line, the ‘xmnu’ resource has a skip item (entry type 0); otherwise, the ‘xmnu’ resource has a data item (entry type 1.) For a data entry in an ‘xmnu’ resource, there may be certain defaults for the fields in the entry. For example, no command ID may be specified and the Reference constant 1 and Reference constant 2 fields each have the value 0.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- When entering text into a string in a ‘STR#’ resource, it is possible to add line breaks by pressing the Return key and it is also possible to paste in text from elsewhere that includes line breaks. When a ‘STR#’ resource is saved, it may be that Rezilla uses a carriage return character (ASCII code 13) in the resource data to indicate a line break. From what has been said elsewhere, the classic Mac OS platform (prior to Mac OS X) would use a carriage return (ASCII code 13) to indicate a line break and Unix platforms would use a linefeed character (ASCII code 10) to indicate a line break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  - When entering text into a ‘TEXT’ resource with the ‘TEXT’ resource editor in Rezilla, it is possible to add line breaks by pressing the Return key and it is also possible to paste in text from elsewhere that includes line breaks. When a ‘TEXT’ resource that was edited in the ‘TEXT’ resource editor is saved, it may be that Rezilla uses a carriage return character (ASCII code 13) in the resource data to indicate a linke break. From what has been said elsewhere, the classic Mac OS platform (prior to Mac OS X) would use a carriage return (ASCII code 13) to indicate a line break and Unix platforms would use a linefeed character (ASCII code 10) to indicate a line break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  The information in the Rezilla utility version 1.1 indicates that the Rezilla software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or any later version. My understanding is that the license requires all copies of Rezilla to be licensed under the GPL version 2 or later and for all derivative works of the Rezilla software to be licensed under the GPL version 2 or later.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the previously mentioned details about resource types, there is the following question: If I use the Rezilla software to create a ‘dftb’ resource or a ‘DITL’ resource or a ‘DLOG’ resource or a ‘dlgx’ resource or a ‘MENU’ resource or a ‘STR#’  resource or a ‘TEXT’ resource or an ‘xmnu’ resource (or multiple instances of such resources), is the resource a derivative work of the Rezilla software (which would mean that the resource’s data would be subject to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later) or is it permissible for me to distribute the resource(s) to others under my own non-GPL licensing terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27650" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T05:58:13.077" Title="On Mac OS X, if a resource is created or edited with the GPL-licensed Rezilla utility, is the resource a derivative work of the Rezilla software?" Tags="|derivative-works|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13103" CreationDate="2022-08-08T19:17:39.810" Score="1" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;What license should we use on a new linux distribution? I'm new in licensing and this really confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most &amp;quot;direct&amp;quot; programs, like desktop and the kernel itself, are licensed under GPLv2 but other stuff mostly plymouth themes and themes are licensed under GPLv3. So what license do we have to use? I read the entire day on what license to use, first we wanted to use GPLv2 then GPLv2+ now were at the point of saying GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up this really confuses me as i think I'm primarily not understanding the seperation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what license would you use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: it may get even complexer when i look at the mit software that is going to be preinstalled and the one theme that uses CC-BY-SA-4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27655" LastEditorUserId="27655" LastEditDate="2022-08-08T19:25:52.973" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T20:18:35.850" Title="What GPL license to use on a Linux distro" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13102" CreationDate="2022-08-08T20:18:35.850" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Linux distribution does not have &amp;quot;a license&amp;quot;. It is an aggregation, and contains multiple components, each of which have their own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-08T20:18:35.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13098" CreationDate="2022-08-10T05:41:50.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I distribute the software without the GPL library? Can the software then be closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your software cannot be closed source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the executable that your end-user runs on their device contains any part that is subject to the GPL license, then that license requires that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; parts are available under a license that grants the same rights as the GPL. This means that if you make use of a GPL-licensed library, then you must distribute your application under a GPL-compatible open-source license even if you don't distribute the library together with your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T05:41:50.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13101" CreationDate="2022-08-10T05:58:13.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright protection is designed to protect the creative expressions of an author. If there is no creative expression, then there is also no copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the output of an application, the only way that the authors of the application can have a copyright claim on the output is when that output contains creative expressions that can be traced back to those authors. The main way in which that happens is when parts of the application are copied into the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the information that Rezilla automatically generates, I can find nothing in there that shows any creativity and certainly no copies from parts of Rezilla itself. That means that the output is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work and not bound by the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-10T05:58:13.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-10T14:43:05.440" Score="3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/brianrisk/SYNTHBLAST&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;SYNTH*BLAST retro-futuristic tank game&quot;&gt;FOSS project&lt;/a&gt; on Github and am interested in retaining the trademarks to the project name and graphic elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Apache 2.0 license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor,&#xA;except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the&#xA;origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way to declare trademarks, copyrights etc. in code repositories?  For example, do project owners typically have a &amp;quot;COPYRIGHT.md&amp;quot; file?  Or is there typically a &amp;quot;Trademarks&amp;quot; section of the &amp;quot;README.md&amp;quot;?  (I've never seen this before.)  Are there any templates/good examples/best practices for how to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27668" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-23T07:33:25.063" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T07:33:25.063" Title="Making trademarks in an open source project on Github with Apache 2.0 License" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13109" CreationDate="2022-08-11T02:27:54.373" Score="13" ViewCount="4085" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use the &lt;code&gt;7-Zip&lt;/code&gt; program to do some archive manipulation and creation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have an app that has a proprietary closed source license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For this scenario, I would include the &lt;code&gt;7-Zip&lt;/code&gt; program in its entirety as a dependency of my application (bundled with the install), and call the application from my code via shell execution (e.g. CLI OS calls, not library imports into my source code natively).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would use Node.JS to call the OS API to run 7-Zip's executable.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To the best of my knowledge this isn't statically or dynamically linked but I may be lacking in knowledge of this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to publish the part of my code that calls the external application because my app is using the external app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27675" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T08:59:11.003" Title="Do I Need to Publish my Source Code because of LGPL?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13108" CreationDate="2022-08-11T09:29:10.157" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;7-zip &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.7-zip.org/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is principally published&lt;/a&gt; under LGPLv2+, with an additional restriction relating to reimplementing the rar algorithm.  As I read it, this additional restriction comes nowhere near affecting your proposed use of 7-zip.  As a result, I don't think you have a problem, for two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, fork-and-exec is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12786/458&quot;&gt;generally considered&lt;/a&gt; to keep your program far enough away from GPL (sic) code that the GPL's requirement to license your own code under it, as a derivative work, doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the whole point of LGPL is to allow the use of covered code as a library module without that requirement applying to your code; so even if &amp;quot;fork-and-exec while passing a file name to compress/decompress&amp;quot; wasn't arms-length enough to avoid such a requirement, LGPL would except you from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPL does still have some requirements.  You're required to be clear about the LGPL status of 7-zip, to provide its source to your users on demand, and to allow your users to upgrade their installed version of 7-zip without breaking its interaction with your program (which, assuming 7-zip doesn't release any backwards-incompatible upgrades, fork-and-exec should make easy).  Decide which version of LGPL you will be operating under, and read the license carefully.  But my feeling is that, if you do that, you should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-12T08:59:11.003" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T08:59:11.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-11T11:22:26.087" Score="2" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a game. Leaving aside all the game development things, I want to create a library implementation for its API, basically so I give some random guy on the internet the ability to modify the game without writing source code for it. Currently, the entire game is licensed under the GPLv3 (or later), however, I want the library to use the MIT or another permissive license, so not everybody has to comply with the GPL license to write a simple plugin for it.&#xA;There are three questions I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is that even doable under the same project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, can I write the library seperately, and then make the game link into it always? If yes, does it &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be on a seperate repository, folder or not associated at all with the game?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assuming 2 is a yes, are there any catches?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind this library is pretty much mandatory for the game to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27677" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-11T14:52:47.247" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T06:29:43.440" Title="License a project under the GPLv3, but license a library to communicate with it under the MIT. Is it possible?" Tags="|licensing|mit|gpl-3|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-11T11:48:39.607" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;// Example in c++:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;string cmd1 = &amp;quot;sudo dmidecode&amp;quot;;&#xA;string cmd2 = &amp;quot;sudo nethogs -t -s -a -d 1&amp;quot;;&#xA;string cmd3 = &amp;quot;sudo intel_gpu_top -J&amp;quot;;&#xA;&#xA;FILE *pipe = popen(cmd1.c_str(), &amp;quot;r&amp;quot;);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;// Example in java:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;String cmd1 = &amp;quot;sudo dmidecode&amp;quot;;&#xA;String cmd2 = &amp;quot;sudo nethogs -t -s -a -d 1&amp;quot;;&#xA;String cmd3 = &amp;quot;sudo intel_gpu_top -J&amp;quot;;&#xA;&#xA;ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder();&#xA;builder.command(&amp;quot;bash&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;-c&amp;quot;,cmd);&#xA;                &#xA;Process p=null;&#xA;if(debugThreadsLow) {System.out.println(&amp;quot;execute: &amp;quot;+cmd);}&#xA;try {&#xA;    p = builder.start();&#xA;} catch (IOException e) {e.printStackTrace();return null;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is now: do i need to care about the license of dmidecode, intel_gpu_top or nethogs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or include, for each program i parse, the license in my project?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27678" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-11T14:54:00.597" LastActivityDate="2022-08-11T14:54:00.597" Title="Do i need a license, for parsing a command/program that is not written by myself?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2022-08-12T21:37:43.127" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13114" CreationDate="2022-08-11T19:03:05.590" Score="2" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 2.3 a) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt; States:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;no patent license is granted by a&#xA;Contributor:&#xA;&#xA;(a) for any code that a Contributor has removed from Covered Software&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does code a contributor has &amp;quot;removed from Covered Software&amp;quot; mean? Does it pertain to retracting code the Contributor made available using the MPL 2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This whole section is hard to follow for me but I'm curious about what happens when a Contributor retracts their code from the Covered Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that if a Contributor licensed some code in the past, who ever received the code with that license can continue using it regardless of filing of a patent or the Contributor removing the code from the most recent version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27674" LastEditorUserId="27674" LastEditDate="2022-08-12T18:36:38.960" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T18:36:38.960" Title="What does Section 2.3 a in the MPL 2.0 mean?" Tags="|mpl|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13110" CreationDate="2022-08-12T06:29:43.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your comments I understand that the game and the plugin(s) will run in the same process. In that case, the GPL license of the game also exerts its influence on the plugins, regardless of how permissive you make the license on the interfacing library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To achieve your goal of keeping the game open-source, while allowing closed-source plugins, you can add a special permission to the license of your game. Something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an additional permission, plugins that link to  through its plugin interface are not required to comply with the requirements that the GPL license would otherwise put on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a separate license on the interfacing library is technically possible, but I would advise against it when the rest of the project is under a strong copyleft license, like the GPL. The reason is because the separate license only really becomes effective when the code gets copied to another, independent, project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T06:29:43.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13112" CreationDate="2022-08-12T08:11:49.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text of the license is here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 2.3 can only be understood in context with Section 2.1 b. 2.1 b is a general statement that a license is granted (i.e. the contributor may not charge any royalties for his/her contributions nor for the Contributor Version to which he/she contributed), while 2.3 limits the scope of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part of the &lt;em&gt;Contributor Version&lt;/em&gt; is critical here, because it means that you grant a patent license even for functionality earlier contributed by others as soon as you contribute something (even something minor or unrelated to the patented functionality) to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.3a covers the case that a Contributor removes code (you could call it a &lt;em&gt;'negative contribution'&lt;/em&gt;). From the license context it is clear that this refers to code of another contributor, because if that code was part of the Contributor's own contribution the license for that functionality would already be in place since the time of that earlier contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Section 2.3a just clarifies the license situation in case of a 'negative contribution'. This could be important in the case when a Contributor actually owns a patent right (for functionality x) which they don't want to license for free, and where someone else included code for functionality x into the project.  If then the Contributor wants to contribute some code for functionality y (unrelated to functionality x), then the Contributor might want to remove code related to functionality x from the Contributor Version in order not to be forced to license their patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-12T08:14:43.240" LastActivityDate="2022-08-12T08:14:43.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2022-08-12T09:01:43.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nyrahul/ebpf-guide/blob/master/docs/gpl_license_ebpf.rst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eBPF Guide: eBPF and GPL Licensing&lt;/a&gt; specifically addresses this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding eBPF Programs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kernel eBPF verifier ensures that in case GPL helpers are referenced in your eBPF program, then your eBPF program can only be successfully verified if also declaring your eBPF program to be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if you try to use GPL-only helper in a eBPF not declared as &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-kernel verifier will spit out the bytecode with an error [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Regarding User Space interacting with the eBPF Program&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As correctly pointed out here in another answer, does a user space program interacting specifically with your GPL'ed eBPF program will also come under GPL? Again, this is specifically addressed in the above mentioned eBPF guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the user-space code which links with ebpf kernel code using maps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is tricky! GPL license says that if the userspace app is tightly coupled with the kernel space app using for e.g, shared memory or dependent APIs then the userspace app must be made available as GPL code. Since the userspace ebpf components interact with the kernel space component using maps and syscalls, doesn't this require userspace ebpf apps to be GPLed too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a twist here! Kernel license makes an exception that any user-space component which interacts with kernel using system calls need not be called a &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;. Userspace ebpf code interacts or accesses the kernel space bpf maps using system calls and thus may not be tied with GPL licensing.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover user programs that use kernel&#xA;services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use&#xA;of the kernel, and does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fall under the heading of &amp;quot;derived work&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27686" LastEditorUserId="27686" LastEditDate="2022-08-13T18:54:58.590" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T18:54:58.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7109" CreationDate="2022-08-13T02:27:02.270" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some code for an algorithm that is published on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the one who created the code and published it on Wikipedia, you are the copyright holder and therefore you can do anything you like with the code such as distributing it with a different license, or revoking your license on a subsequent version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27674" LastActivityDate="2022-08-13T02:27:02.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-13T22:20:04.530" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I get Wiktionary data (e.g. only the list of words) and I label them into 50 categories (e.g. colors, adjectives, etc.) and publish them on website A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, I need to provide attribution to Wiktionary as my work is an adaptation, and offer the same license, which means website A would be also operating with CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And let's say, another person takes my 50 categories and creates sub-categories based on them (e.g. branches them to 300 sub-categories by keeping my 50 categories at the top). As this is an adaptation of my work, it should provide attribution as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my question is, how should website B attribute?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1: Attribute to Wiktionary only, as it is the ultimate source of data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2: Attribute to website A only, so the attribution cascades (website B to website A, website A to Wiktionary, so website B can be traced to Wiktionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3: Attribute to both Wiktionary and website A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27699" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T07:09:11.100" Title="How to give attribution for an adaptation in CC-BY-SA context?" Tags="|attribution|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-15T21:08:44.870" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the license of following screenshot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;StreetComplete&lt;/a&gt;? In this case only image licenses are relevant, some CC-BY-SA 3.0 and some CC-BY-SA 4.0 and some less problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how the entire screeshoot should be licensed and attributed? List of licenses for each image segment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xpk4x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xpk4x.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_statue.jpg       CC-BY-SA 4.0      Rabax63&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garibaldi_Monument.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Garibaldi_Monument.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_bust.jpg         CC0               Jebulon&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotelis_Valaoritis_bust_National_Garden_Athens,_Greece.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotelis_Valaoritis_bust_National_Garden_Athens,_Greece.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_plaque.jpg       Public Domain     Geotek&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bleaklow_Plaque.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bleaklow_Plaque.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_war_memorial.jpg Public Domain     Stanfordsiver&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Women_of_World_War_II.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Women_of_World_War_II.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_stone.jpg        Public Domain     Ola / Ojp&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorial_stone_of_battle_of_Liljendal.18080224.ojp.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Memorial_stone_of_battle_of_Liljendal.18080224.ojp.JPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_obelisk.jpg      CC-BY-SA 4.0      Leserättin&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KatCC-BY-SAharina-Denkmal_(2).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KatCC-BY-SAharina-Denkmal_(2).jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_stele_wooden.jpg  CC-BY-SA 3.0      Assenmacher&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Infostele_Chronik_der_Mauer_mit_Adolph_Philipp.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Infostele_Chronik_der_Mauer_mit_Adolph_Philipp.JPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_stele_stone.jpg  CC-BY-SA 4.0      Alta Falisa&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:18_June_1815_%E2%80%93_Waterloo_%E2%80%93_27th_(Inniskilling)_Regiment_of_Foot,_stele.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:18_June_1815_%E2%80%93_Waterloo_%E2%80%93_27th_(Inniskilling)_Regiment_of_Foot,_stele.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;modified by Matija Nalis to remove wreath&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;memorial_type_sculpture.jpg    CC-BY-SA 4.0      Adrian Tync&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katowice_alpinists_monument.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katowice_alpinists_monument.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6450" LastEditorUserId="6450" LastEditDate="2022-08-16T07:10:39.363" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T11:19:32.443" Title="Can I mix CC-BY-SA 3.0 and CC-BY-SA 4.0 artwork? How to license output of such mix, such as a screenshot? Is it even having a license?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13121" CreationDate="2022-08-16T08:07:20.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the considerations for this answer is, whether this combination of pictures (with all the changes performed on the individual pictures, such as cropping, captions, etc) make it an adaption or not. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-an-adaptation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC has published some guidance&lt;/a&gt; and it is not black and white. The following is based on my assessment, that it is an adaption. (See the link below for the implications if you think it is just a collection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0 will be perfect for this combination of photos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the files that are anyhow under &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; this is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not do a side-by-side comparison of CC-BY-SA 3.0 v. 4.0, I am relying on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statements by CC about compatibility&lt;/a&gt; which says that modified content originally under 3.0 can be licensed under 4.0 (see Section 4.b in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the nature of the licenses, files in PD or under CC0 can be used in works licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 (see the chart &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-combine-material-under-different-creative-commons-licenses-in-my-work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is not necessary, in order to make it clearer for downstream users of your combined work and because it is a nice gesture towards the initial artists, and because you anyhow need a list to comply with the CC-BY-SA content, I would include the names of the creators of the pictures in PD and under CC0 in the list of attributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within CC's training material they have an entire section on &lt;a href=&quot;https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/4-4-remixing-cc-licensed-work/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;remixing CC-licensed work&lt;/a&gt; including how to distinguish adaptations / remixes vs. collections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to read the following guidance by Creative Commons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#how-do-i-properly-attribute-material-offered-under-a-creative-commons-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guidance on Attribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution#This_is_a_good_attribution_for_material_from_multiple_sources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best practices for attribution&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking/Creators/Marking_third_party_content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marking/Creators/Marking third party content&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T11:19:32.443" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T11:19:32.443" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13121" CreationDate="2022-08-16T08:20:42.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overhauled answer&lt;/strong&gt;: I don't think anybody knows for sure, though I am indebted to all those who have offered intelligent and insightful commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue seems to me to hinge on whether the combination of several images into a single image makes a derivative work, or simply a collection of original works.  This distinction is important because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it's simply a collection, all the elements can be distributed under their existing licences.  Moreover, they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be so distributed, because since both CC BY-SA 3 and CC BY-SA 4 unmodified content must remain under its original licence there is no one licence that can cover all these works, while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;if it's a derivative work, you can uprate the modified CC BY-SA 3 content to CC BY-SA 4, and publish the single resulting work under CC BY-SA 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it doesn't hinge on is that you've made an image, rather than a printed item.  It also doesn't hinge on the time you put into &lt;em&gt;selecting&lt;/em&gt; those images; your decision doesn't impart creative expression to your selection any more than spending ten hours looking for your preferred timsort implementation counts as input into the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arguments in favour of derivative work are ably made by my colleague in his answer, and the comments thereon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arguments in favour of simple collection include &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9219/458&quot;&gt;Drauglis&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://thepequodblog.blogspot.com/2016/04/can-you-crop-image-under-creative.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an analysis&lt;/a&gt; that suggests simple cropping doesn't constitute protectable input.  But I also note that the judgement in Drauglis noted that the CC work was used unmodified, which may limit its application here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does that leave you?  The preponderance of the argument leans towards derivative work, thus enabling a single licence, but it's not a slam-dunk.  However, I note that &lt;em&gt;even in the case of a derivative work&lt;/em&gt; there is no bar on using the existing licences in all cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want simplicity and are prepared to take some risk, license your resulting image under CC BY-SA 4.  If you want no risk, license the constituent images under their original licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T10:31:40.647" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T10:31:40.647" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13120" CreationDate="2022-08-16T23:05:46.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary uses &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version 3.0 of the CC-BY-SA license&lt;/a&gt;, which requires any reuser to attribute the &amp;quot;Original Author.&amp;quot; The Original Author is defined as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Original Author&amp;quot; means, in the case of a literary or artistic work, the individual, individuals, entity or entities who created the Work or if no individual or entity can be identified, the publisher; and in addition (i) in the case of a performance the actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and other persons who act, sing, deliver, declaim, play in, interpret or otherwise perform literary or artistic works or expressions of folklore; (ii) in the case of a phonogram the producer being the person or legal entity who first fixes the sounds of a performance or other sounds; and, (iii) in the case of broadcasts, the organization that transmits the broadcast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is very straightforward. You must provide a list of each person who created any of the content you are using, and attribute the work to those people. Because Wiktionary does not employ its editors, it is not the author of any of its entries for copyright purposes, so you can't (shouldn't) attribute those entries to Wiktionary itself. You can get a list of the people who worked on a given Wiktionary article by looking at the page history (click &amp;quot;history&amp;quot; in the top right of the page), and refer to them by their usernames. Note that the license also has other requirements besides attributing the authors. The full requirements are spelled out in section 4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for intermediate re-publishers, you should only attribute them if they creatively contributed to the final work that you will be distributing. If they're just hosting a copy of Wiktionary's content, then that doesn't qualify them for authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally: Section 4 states that you must satisfy these obligations in a manner &amp;quot;reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing&amp;quot; - which means that, for example, it might be sufficient to provide a hyperlink to the Wiktionary history page(s) of the entry or entries you used (rather than having to reproduce their contents yourself). However, there are a number of caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wiktionary sometimes moves or deletes pages, and if they delete the page, its history will also go away. This might cause you to violate the license, and then coming back into compliance will be your problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Providing a hyperlink in printed or otherwise offline matter might not be &amp;quot;reasonable.&amp;quot; It is up to the court system in your jurisdiction to decide what counts as &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; in any given situation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the work was subsequently modified, you have to give proper attribution to the people who modified it as well, and this can further complicate things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2022-08-17T07:09:11.100" LastActivityDate="2022-08-17T07:09:11.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-17T16:51:46.890" Score="6" ViewCount="846" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could not really find a satisfying answer here yet, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6961/how-does-gpl-apply-to-neural-network-models&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; touches it but kind of reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For example the training framework for Yolo &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolov7/tree/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;v7&lt;/a&gt; is used to train a neural network using the config (cfg) file from the repo which is licensed under GPL-3 using custom data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now the model gets exported to onnx (or tflite or any other major inference runtime) and used with inference scripts that are completely self-written (inference done by onnxruntime, especially post-processing like decoding and nms self-written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is (2) now derivative work and must be distributed under GPL-3 too by using the neural network weights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27721" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-04T13:14:05.700" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T13:14:05.700" Title="Are weights of a neural network derivative work of the GPL-3 training framework?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-18T16:46:54.457" Score="5" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 defines a &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot; as a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “User Product” is either (1) a “consumer product”, which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of coverage. For a particular product received by a particular user, “normally used” refers to a typical or common use of that class of product, regardless of the status of the particular user or of the way in which the particular user actually uses, or expects or is expected to use, the product. A product is a consumer product regardless of whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant mode of use of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if industrial HMI devices fall under this definition of &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot;. For those that are unaware, HMI devices are typically used in industrial factories and/or other commercial uses. Here are a few examples from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/hardware/allen-bradley/human-machine-interface/graphic-terminals/panelview-5000.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rockwell&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.se.com/ww/en/product/HMIST6200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schneider&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What stumps me is the term &amp;quot;HMI&amp;quot; is quite vague. Some people would consider thermostats to be an &amp;quot;HMI&amp;quot;, which typically &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; found into a dwelling. However, I feel like industrial HMIs are a distinct product, separate from those typically found in a dwelling. I suppose it is possible for someone to use one of these devices to control their home A/C unit, however, this feels like a significant mode of use. Am I correct in my reasoning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27627" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-21T14:13:16.950" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T20:37:15.533" Title="Would industrial HMI devices be considered &quot;User Products&quot; for LGPLv3?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13128" CreationDate="2022-08-18T19:31:16.327" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD-3 License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A permissive license similar to the BSD 2-Clause License, but with a&#xA;3rd clause that &lt;strong&gt;prohibits others from using the name of the project&lt;/strong&gt; or&#xA;its contributors to promote derived products without written consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have such a scenario, project &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; (AGPL license) does not interfere in any way and does not use the source code of the project &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; (BSD-3 license). Project &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; has the functionality of parsing and analyzing JSON, CSV files generated by the project &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;. Do we break the BSD-3 license when mentioning the project &lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt; in the readme file of the project &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. when the name of the project is used?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26485" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-08-19T07:58:30.283" LastActivityDate="2022-08-19T09:42:22.643" Title="Using the name of a BSD-3 licensed project, when it is not a dependency" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13127" CreationDate="2022-08-19T09:42:22.643" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For reference, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the actual clause in the license is this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't prevent you using the name &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, but does mean you need to be careful about how you use it. You can almost certainly say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A parses the files produced by B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but would have to be careful about saying something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A is the recommended tool to parse files produced by B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as that could be taken to be an endorsement of A. There is no &amp;quot;bright line&amp;quot; here as to what is endorsement or promotion - just make sure you phrase your wording so a reasonable person couldn't think that B has in any way endorsed your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-19T09:42:22.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13126" CreationDate="2022-08-21T11:21:14.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term HMI is short for &amp;quot;Human Machine Interface&amp;quot;. As such it is indeed too generic to tell if it refers to a User Product as defined by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need to look at is what kind of system the HMI provides an Interface to. If that is a system geared towards home usage, then the HMI would be (part of) a User Product. If it is intended for an industrial setting, then not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that your reasoning is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-21T11:21:14.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13107" CreationDate="2022-08-22T22:14:01.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no consistent practice around this.  A few projects put a TRADEMARK.md file in their main repositories. More put a few lines in their README files.  The most common practice, though, is to put the trademark information on your project website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2022-08-22T22:14:01.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-23T18:32:02.307" Score="1" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a software for commercial purposes that reads and parses text files for further retrieval and analysis. To store the imported text files I would prefer to use Mongo DB. This DB had been published under a strong copyleft license (AGPL) once  and nowadays under a license (SSPL) that is even not accepted a &amp;quot;compatible&amp;quot; to OSS by the FSF.&#xA;Is there a way to deliver a package including my software and Mongo DB (under SSPL) without the threat that my (proprietary) SW would be infected via a copyleft with the obligation to make my own SW publicly available as source code as well? Would a separate delivery or just deployment of the binaries maybe do the job (e.g. like a Java program that requires to separately install a runtime on the system) ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T21:41:08.360" Title="Using Mongo DB in my embedded device as a backend service" Tags="|copyleft|agpl|sspl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13126" CreationDate="2022-08-23T20:37:15.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;if you would never personally consider to use this device at home - maybe instead of an iPad or an Adroid tablet or TVSet and..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...if you would possibly not change your mind towards considering it a user product even if you were able to privately purchase the device in an electronic shop ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My answer would be that it shall be NO USER PRODUCT.&#xA;The GPLv3 paragraph had nothing else in mind than fighting true consumer products like the Tivo STB at the point in time.&#xA;disclaimer: I am not a lawyer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22400" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T20:37:15.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13166" CreationDate="2022-08-23T21:31:07.783" Score="2" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have a solution to the problem below?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yes, I can reject at review time, but I'd rather have that taken care of prior to reviewing the PR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if github will support yml for pull request forms soon?  It does not appear to today.&#xA;I'll likely create an issue for this, but that doesn't solve my problem today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Problem&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;I need contributors to agree to the Contributor Agreement &lt;em&gt;prior&lt;/em&gt; to creating the Pull Request, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Potential Solution&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;If my pull_request_template could use yml and have a required checkbox, I'd be golden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- type: checkboxes&#xA;    id: ca-confirmation&#xA;    attributes:&#xA;      label: I have reviewed the [Contributor Agreement](../CONTRIBUTOR_AGREEMENT.md) and agree to be bound by the terms found there.&#xA;      options:&#xA;        - label: I confirm I have reviewed and agree to the Contributor Agreement.&#xA;          required: true&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T00:14:41.473" Title="How to require contributor to agree BEFORE creating a pull request?" Tags="|github|contributor-agreements|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13132" CreationDate="2022-08-23T21:41:08.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MongoDB is licensed under the non-Open Source “SSPL” license. However, this license is identical to the GPL or AGPL &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; when using it as a “service”. The GPL and AGPL would not prevent you from distributing such copyleft software alongside your proprietary programs, as long as they are separate programs. This is also a core part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the SSPL isn't Open Source is due to, among other issues, violating this clause in some scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is a “service” in the context of the SSPL? Per the license,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making the functionality of the Program or modified version available to third parties as a service includes, without limitation, enabling third parties to interact with the functionality of the Program or modified version remotely through a computer network, offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is (deliberately?) unclear. Is your use a “service”? Probably not, but it could also be argued differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you can make the business decision to accept this risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could buy a MongoDB commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could ask your customers to provide their own MongoDB-compatible database connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You could port your application to a different database that has clearer terms. There are many truly Open Source databases to choose from. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CouchDB is a popular document database and available under the permissive Apache 2 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PostgreSQL is a very popular and state of the art relational database. It is available under a permissive license, similar to MIT or BSD licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SQLite is public domain software and easy to embed into applications, making it unnecessary to distribute a separate server. Read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SQLite's “appropriate uses” guide&lt;/a&gt; – it is more a replacement for custom file formats than it is for client–server databases. But this sounds like it might actually be a great fit for your usecase.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't be fooled by the names of the “SQL” databases: nowadays they are very flexible and also offer first-class support for JSON data, making it possible to use them as a hybrid relational/document database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T21:41:08.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13134" CreationDate="2022-08-23T22:22:46.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Solution on a tangent: maintain a list of people who agreed to your CLA. This could be done in a separate file which also pull request could be made for by adding their name. Automatically check for every pull request  that the author of the PR is found in this file during your CI. Fail the builds with an appropriate error, if the author does not appear in this file. Only review those pr which don't fail, at least not this test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-08-23T22:22:46.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13139" CreationDate="2022-08-24T08:51:42.353" Score="2" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using AspectJ Weaver 1.9.9.1 in a project.&#xA;Regarding to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.aspectj/aspectjweaver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.aspectj/aspectjweaver&lt;/a&gt; it is published under EPL 2.0, but when scanning the sources I found &lt;code&gt;org\aspectj\apache\bcel\Constants.java&lt;/code&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/* ====================================================================&#xA; * The Apache Software License, Version 1.1&#xA; [...]&#xA;public interface Constants {&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the file Constants.java is part of AspectJ Weaver and not an external dependency, I wonder which of the two license notices is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the license a library published under the single point of truth for the complete library content, or can each file define its own license?&#xA;So in consequence: Do I have to scan all the source code for license notices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27777" LastEditorUserId="27777" LastEditDate="2022-08-24T09:05:08.347" LastActivityDate="2022-08-25T09:27:25.333" Title="AspectJ Weaver published license clashes with license notice in source code" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13137" CreationDate="2022-08-25T09:27:25.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Files under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-1.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache Software License 1.1&lt;/a&gt; are indeed compatible within projects under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt;. The Apache 1.1 license is rarely used nowadays, Version 2.0 is much more common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Software packages can include other files which they imported from 3rd party projects. They can directly use (=copy) these files, it is not necessary to create a dependency. In the Maven Repository this is very often not declared, and it is not even mentioned in the AspectJ Weaver license file in the source code. I found a few files like this in the source code, they include the license language and copyright attribution in line with the requirements of the Apache 1.1 license. While this is completely legal, it is not fine and easy to manage for developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To create the LICENSES and NOTICES files for your entire project it is best practice to use a scanning tool for the entire source code such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt; or the like. This will help you identify such &amp;quot;hidden treasures&amp;quot; in your source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-25T09:27:25.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13085" CreationDate="2022-08-25T13:29:31.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot do what you plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a copyright notice in a file you will have to retain that. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can, however, change the names of the project, the classes, namespaces and files, this is included in the permissions of the MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-25T13:29:31.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-25T16:13:34.963" Score="1" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company wants to use a project composed by many microservice that are AGPL licensed. We're not worried by about distributing the AGPL parts in open source of course, but some of our services remains proprietary. (I mean, the code was written by us and we just want to connect our backend services to the AGPL project for data analysis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By example, we have a service A which call a service B. Normally the open source projet do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A --&amp;gt; B&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in order to fetch data from A without making any modification on A, we have a proxy service C which acts as B. From C we code anything in order to use other proprietary services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the AGPL calls our service C instead of B but we can also redirect the request to B after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;A --&amp;gt; C or A --&amp;gt; C --&amp;gt; B&#xA;&#xA;or even A --&amp;gt; C --&amp;gt; ? (other services)&#xA;              |---&amp;gt; B&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we need to modify the docker-compose file to connect C or we need to deploy C with exactly the same configuration as B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly I think C is illegal here because C is on the same network and the user doesn't know anything from it, it acts like a black box that allows us to use our services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should I do ? Making the entired project open source ? Or do you think C is legal here ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27793" LastActivityDate="2022-08-25T16:13:34.963" Title="Is it legal to deploy a microservices based project using AGPL with some proprietary services when the AGPL code is not modified?" Tags="|docker|agpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13144" CreationDate="2022-08-26T03:09:45.563" Score="2" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking into the rules of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/CPL-1.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Public License&lt;/a&gt; and am wondering how far it's copyleft-ness extends.&#xA;AFAIK: With LGPL you can keep the library you wish to use in a separate .dll or .so, dynamically link you code against it and keep your program's source code undisclosed. When reading about CPL I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_License#Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this sentence on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CPL, like the GNU Lesser General Public License, allows non-CPL-licensed software to link to a library under CPL without requiring the linked source code to be made available to the licensee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is, that the situation is the same as with LGPL. You are allowed to dynamically link to it and not disclose you own source code. However, dynamic linking is not actually specifically mentioned. So could it be, that CPL allows you to also statically link the CPL licensed library and keep your source code unpublished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27799" LastEditorUserId="27799" LastEditDate="2022-08-26T05:42:50.807" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T08:59:09.063" Title="Does the Common Public License (CPL-1.0) require dynamic linking to keep source code undisclosed?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|copyleft|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-26T07:22:37.480" Score="8" ViewCount="1547" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/reference/mongodb-wire-protocol/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; on MongoDB website it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification is licensed under a&#xA;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. You may not use or adapt this material for any commercial purpose, such as to create a commercial database or database-as-a-service offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that if I want to create a commercial database or opensource database with DAAS offering, I cannot use this message structure, ie this series of 16 bytes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;struct MsgHeader {&#xA;    int32   messageLength;&#xA;    int32   requestID;&#xA;    int32   responseTo;&#xA;    int32   opCode;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they can, how did Amazon get away with it with their DocumentDB?&#xA;Additionally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FerretDB/FerretDB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FerretDB&lt;/a&gt; OSS, that implements MongoDB wire protocol, is licenced under Apache2. Does that mean that I can take FerretDB with its implementation of MongoDB wire protocol and offer as a service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27800" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T12:56:48.313" Title="Can MongoDB, Inc. really licence its wire protocol?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13142" CreationDate="2022-08-26T08:59:09.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be aware that CPL 1.0 is depreciated. If you are looking at code under CPL it is likely very old, so please check if you really want to use it as it might no longer be maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CPL uses confusing definitions w.r.t. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Contributor&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Contribution&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the overlap is smaller that one would expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also important to understand the definition of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Program&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which is the combination of all current Contributions, but it is not the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike GPL, CPL does not have far reaching definitions of 'derivative work'. It is broadly assumed that linking (static and dynamic) is not covered by the definitions of Contribution, i.e &lt;em&gt;'changes to the Program'&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;'additions to the Program'&lt;/em&gt; (Note 1), and only the source code of the &lt;em&gt;Program&lt;/em&gt; needs to be distributed, not the source code of the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can therefore go ahead with both static and dynamic linking of the CPL-licensed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note 1:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I am not aware of any court case in which this assumption has been finally verified and confirmed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T08:59:09.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13143" CreationDate="2022-08-26T10:53:18.590" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reasoning that FerretDB is relying on in order to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; the MsgHeader structure and other elements in the wire protocol (without complying with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BY-NC-SA&lt;/a&gt; license) is stated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FerretDB/FerretDB/blob/main/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;README.md&lt;/a&gt; document of FerretDB:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FerretDB (previously MangoDB) was founded to become the de-facto &lt;strong&gt;open-source substitute&lt;/strong&gt; to MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its early days, its ease-to-use and well-documented drivers made MongoDB one of the simplest database solutions available. However, as time passed, MongoDB &lt;strong&gt;abandoned its open-source roots; changing the license to SSPL - making it unusable for many open source and early-stage commercial projects&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the developers of FerretDB do not consider it to be an adaptation of MongoDB; they consider it to be a &lt;em&gt;substitute&lt;/em&gt; for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that if I want to create a commercial database or opensource database with DAAS offering, I cannot use this message structure, ie this series of 16 bytes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; in this manner, it is too broad/ambiguous of a word to consider in a copyright license. Even though that word appears in the note at the top of the MongoDB Wire Protocol Specification document, the document also states that the governing license for the specification is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that that license governs only the specifications document, not the facts inside it. For the example presented, the fact is that the MsgHeader structure contains 4 32-bit integers representing the message length, request ID, response &amp;quot;To&amp;quot;, and opcode. The only copyrightable element would be &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; that fact is represented in the document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you translate that fact into code in the language you're writing, and if there is only one way or only a few ways to express that fact in that language, then that must be excluded from a copyright analysis in my opinion, so I would not consider it to be therefore &lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;adapted&lt;/em&gt; from the specification, in the copyright sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all speculation on my part, but here are some other possible ways that the MsgHeader definition may have made its way into the FerretDB implementation (and probably any other software packages that understand this protocol) without it being an adaptation from the Specifications document:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The developers didn't use the above document in their development, but instead used an earlier published version (i.e. before October 2018) from a time when MongoDB's documentation and/or source code were available under an open source license that explicitly allows this particular use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The developers didn't use the documentation at all, but instead analysed MongoDB's message outputs themselves using protocol analysis tools and developed their own specification of the message header based on that analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The developers &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; make use the current protocol specification document, but did so in a way that does not require copyright permission. Even though the document says &amp;quot;you may not use this material for any commercial purpose&amp;quot;, a document license cannot prevent you from using the document in a way that is otherwise allowed by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/can-i-cleanroom-code-by-myself-if-public-specifications-already-exist&quot;&gt;Can I cleanroom code by myself, if public specifications already exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/81159/is-this-copyright-infringement/81169&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/81159/is-this-copyright-infringement/81169&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... how did Amazon get away with [implementing the protocol] with their DocumentDB?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the answer to this. But if the information in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas/lp/compare-mongodb-vs-documentdb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB Atlas vs. Amazon DocumentDB comparison page&lt;/a&gt; is accurate, then it appears as though the Amazon implementation is &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; (in a functional sense; not in a copyright sense) an earlier version of MongoDB, well before it was changed to the SSPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that MongoDB, Inc. also offers so-called &amp;quot;commercial licenses&amp;quot; with special terms. I suppose it's possible that Amazon has a special license from MongoDB, Inc. to put the protocol implementation in their product, but if that were true, then I'd be surprised that MongoDB is publishing the above comparison page in such an unflattering way to Amazon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-08-26T12:56:48.313" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T12:56:48.313" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13147" CreationDate="2022-08-26T11:16:01.003" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#ANONCONTR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php#h.973c2qv6zg27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL 2.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can a Contributor remain anonymous?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Except for those who simply redistribute the Program, each Contributor must identify itself as the originator of its Contribution in a way that later Recipients will be able to readily see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why can't the author be anonymous when the license is EPL-1.0 or EPL-2.0, although copyright law allows anonymous works to be copyrighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T13:48:53.457" Title="Why can't the author be anonymous when code is licensed under the Eclipse Public License?" Tags="|contributor|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13146" CreationDate="2022-08-26T13:48:53.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for the requirement for Contributors (here: Contributors that actually change the code) to not be anonymous comes from the patent license (Section 2.b in the license language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Contributor was a patent holder and at the same time anonymous, it would be impossible for a Recipient to benefit from the patent license they are entitled to. Even worse, a patent holder could anonymously introduce code into the Program that infringes his/her patent and then ask for royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of the license language (and the paragraphs in the FAQs you linked to) is to prevent this situation described in the paragraph above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-26T13:48:53.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-27T04:34:01.503" Score="4" ViewCount="1103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have made a copy of an open source project that is licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#apache-license-version-20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;, and I have made modifications to some of its files. I want to release my modified version to the general public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Apache 2.0 license clause 4(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I comply with the requirement to &amp;quot;carry prominent notices&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the files I modified have this header written by the original author of the project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2018 Acme Corporation&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA; * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA; * You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA; *&#xA; *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&#xA; * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA; * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA; * limitations under the License.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly do I add to this header such that it will carry a &amp;quot;prominent notice&amp;quot; that I have changed the file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T18:06:25.677" Title="How to comply with Apache 2.0 requirement to state that changes have been made to a file" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13170" CreationDate="2022-08-27T05:36:11.410" Score="3" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the author of an open source project which is licensed under the Unlicense license. I want to modify an HTML file from another open source project that uses the Apache 2.0 license, and add the modified HTML file to my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this behavior of mine is allowed. What should I pay attention to to achieve my purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27809" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-08-27T16:38:59.733" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T07:44:16.357" Title="How to use code under the Apache 2.0 license in an Unlicense-licensed project?" Tags="|apache-2.0|unlicense|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13148" CreationDate="2022-08-27T17:11:52.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, adding your own copyright line is considered to be a prominent enough notice that you modified the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, add a line &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2022 Flux&lt;/code&gt; next to the existing line(s) that have the same form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-27T17:11:52.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13154" CreationDate="2022-08-28T00:05:54.120" Score="14" ViewCount="3629" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is there no open source graphics (means today's AMD and Intel GPUs) driver for Windows which have at least the same level of functionality and performance as the open source Linux drivers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the huge work needed to develop the driver, is there other factors that prevents such driver to be developed? Such as (guess):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Windows driver need a different firmware on GPU and how to develop driver with that firmware is not published by AMD and Intel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't get enough information from the Linux driver and the published documents to develop a driver for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some proprietary documentation from Microsoft is needed to indeed develop a driver, i.e. although there is GPU driver documentation published but it is incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21723" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T09:20:11.270" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T14:17:07.360" Title="What is needed to develop a Windows open source graphics driver?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-28T08:27:22.813" Score="0" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some software are released under the GPLv3 &amp;quot;or (at your option) any later version&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (MPL-2.0) allows recipients of the software to use MPL-2.0 or any later version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.2. Effect of New Versions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may distribute the Covered Software under the terms of the version of the License under which You originally received the Covered Software, or under the terms of any subsequent version published by the license steward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happens if the license steward (e.g. the Free Software Foundation, or the Mozilla Foundation) goes rogue and releases a new version of the GPL or MPL that is wildly different in spirit to the previous versions of the license? For example, if the next version of the GPL or MPL is essentially a public domain dedication, will I be able to do anything to stop users of my software from applying the terms of the new license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastEditorUserId="21138" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T13:59:54.900" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T15:39:12.823" Title="What happens if I allow &quot;any later version&quot; of a license but later versions violate the spirit of the original license?" Tags="|gpl|relicensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2022-08-28T15:38:39.670" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2022-08-28T09:17:39.343" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it may be possible to develop such Open Source drivers for Windows on a technical level, economic and social realities mean that such a project would not get traction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's think about why there are Open Source graphics drivers for Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Part of that is the culture, with a sub-group of Linux developers and users insisting on Software Freedom, even if this means avoiding more convenient and more feature-rich proprietary software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, the Linux Kernel does not offer a stable interface for drivers. If drivers are upstreamed into the Linux Kernel, they will be maintained there, reducing the needed development effort. GPL-compatible Open Source drivers also get full access to all Kernel functionality. In contrast, externally maintained drivers might break with every Kernel update, and proprietary drivers only get access to a small subset of Kernel functionality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Having graphics drivers included in the Linux Kernel is a competitive advantage for some companies (e.g. Intel, AMD). For customers of that hardware, “it just works”. Thus, their official driver &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the Open Source driver. In contrast, customers of Nvidia hardware have to make do with the limited third party Open Source Noveau driver, or have to download and install the official proprietary Nvidia driver, which is sometimes less stable. It could be that Nvidia believes that their products are so attractive on their own (e.g. due to CUDA support) that Linux customers will jump through extra hoops to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Windows, all of this is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows users tend to consider Software Freedom less important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Windows offers more stable interfaces for drivers, making it feasible to maintain third party proprietary drivers that remain compatible with a wide range of Windows versions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no competitive advantage to be had for graphics card manufacturers to Open Source their Windows drivers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So given that satisfactory proprietary graphics drivers for Windows exist, and that Windows users generally don't prioritize Software Freedom, it would be very difficult for an Open Source Windows graphics driver project to attract users, let alone more developers. Note that the Open Source Linux drivers for Intel and AMD chips are developed mainly by Intel and AMD themselves. For Windows drivers, you'd be competing against the Intel/AMD/Nvidia teams that are better funded and have better knowledge of the system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T09:17:39.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13159" CreationDate="2022-08-28T10:26:44.060" Score="3" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; (EPL 2.0) allow recipients of code licensed under the EPL 2.0 to use the code under the terms of a newer version of the EPL? For example, when the Eclipse Software Foundation publishes EPL 3.0, will recipients of EPL 2.0 licensed code automatically get the choice to use the code under terms of EPL 3.0 instead of EPL 2.0? If the recipients make modifications to EPL 2.0 code, will they be able to redistribute the entire code under EPL 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T13:27:56.970" Title="Does the EPL 2.0 allow recipients to use code under the terms of any later version of the license?" Tags="|relicensing|epl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-28T10:45:40.773" Score="6" ViewCount="1079" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to release my code under the terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universal Permissive License (UPL), Version 1.0&lt;/a&gt;. According to UPL's FAQ, it is recommended that I include the entire text of the license at the beginning of every file that I release under the UPL. Since that is just a recommendation and the license text is rather long, I would prefer something shorter like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2022 Acme Corporation&#xA; * SPDX-License-Identifier: UPL-1.0&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX ID&lt;/a&gt; a sufficient replacement for the full text of the license? If not, I could add a human-readable line like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2022 Acme Corporation&#xA; * Licensed under the Universal Permissive License v1.0.&#xA; * SPDX-License-Identifier: UPL-1.0&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I also use a similar technique for other file-based licenses such as the MIT license or BSD license? e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2022 Acme Corporation&#xA; * SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright (c) 2022 Acme Corporation&#xA; * Licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License.&#xA; * SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastEditorUserId="21138" LastEditDate="2022-08-28T12:28:34.813" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T20:20:54.503" Title="Can I use the SPDX License Identifier in place of the full text of a file-based license?" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13156" CreationDate="2022-08-28T12:59:46.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license language states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and either this complete permission notice&#xA;or at a minimum a reference to the UPL must be included in all copies&#xA;or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When referring to the license, you may link to it&#xA;at &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl&lt;/a&gt; or you may also find a copy on&#xA;the Open Source Initiative web site at&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/UPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/UPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, just mentioning the SPDX license identifier is not enough to fulfill the requirements of this license. I recommend you put the SPDX identifier into each file and you add an additional LICENSE file to the project, which includes the entire language of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T12:59:46.420" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13155" CreationDate="2022-08-28T13:18:05.177" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recipients already have the choice to distribute the Program under a license different from EPL 2.0. There would not be an automatic update to EPL 3.0 (if it ever existed), it would always be at the discretion of the Contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3.1 b of EPL 2.0 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;REQUIREMENTS&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1 If a Contributor Distributes the Program in any form, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) ... [&lt;em&gt;truncated&lt;/em&gt;] ...; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) the Contributor may Distribute the Program under a license different than this Agreement, provided that such license:&#xA;i) effectively disclaims on behalf of all other Contributors all warranties and conditions, express and implied, including&#xA;warranties or conditions of title and non-infringement, and implied&#xA;warranties or conditions of merchantability and fitness for a&#xA;particular purpose;&#xA;ii) effectively excludes on behalf of all other Contributors all liability for damages, including direct, indirect, special,&#xA;incidental and consequential damages, such as lost profits;&#xA;iii) does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients' rights in the Source Code under section 3.2; and&#xA;iv) requires any subsequent distribution of the Program by any party to be under a license that satisfies the requirements of this&#xA;section 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So therefore any license that is in line with these requirements is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T13:18:05.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13155" CreationDate="2022-08-28T13:27:56.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the EPL 2.0 allow recipients to use code under the terms of any later version of the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, unless the EPL 3.0 is explicitly mentioned as an allowed Secondary License and the conditions for using such a license are fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without an explicit &amp;quot;upgrade path&amp;quot; from one license to another license, you cannot change the license of the code (at least not without express consent from all contributors) and different versions of a license are considered to be completely different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EPL 2.0 requires that the source code must be distributed under the EPL 2.0 license, unless the code in incorporated in a larger program. For compatibility with other copyleft licenses (in particular, the GPL), the initial author can grant the right to distribute the code under one of a named set of Secondary Licenses. If the EPL 3.0 would be named there, then the EPL 2.0 code could be incorporated into an EPL 3.0 project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T13:27:56.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13161" CreationDate="2022-08-28T20:02:16.807" Score="0" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;And how could they license Darwin as APSL if based on GPL v2 software?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/bash/blob/9817a9670495eb01c195f7f24e459db192c5111d/bash-3.2/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27818" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-29T09:22:54.107" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T09:22:54.107" Title="How can Apple distribute Bash (and other GPL v2 software) with macOS? Is it not a derivative work?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13160" CreationDate="2022-08-28T20:09:33.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the GPL v2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Mere Aggregation&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; entry in the GPL FAQ and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12803/using-copyleft-software-gpl-v2-and-distribute-it-with-proprietary-software&quot;&gt;Using copyleft software (GPL v2) and distribute it with proprietary software&lt;/a&gt; question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T20:09:33.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13156" CreationDate="2022-08-28T20:20:54.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text at &lt;a href=&quot;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl/#faq-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl/#faq-7&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;specfically&lt;/em&gt; addresses when/how to use a short form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... If using the UPL for JavaScript or other circumstances in which space is at a premium, you may use a reference to the license...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes on to give this example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA;** MyWidget version 1.0.&#xA;**&#xA;** Copyright (c) 2015 WidgetCo, Inc.&#xA;** Licensed under the Universal Permissive License v 1.0 as shown at https://oss.oracle.com/licenses/upl/&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could add the SPDX tag if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, I'd put the full license text in your &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27819" LastActivityDate="2022-08-28T20:20:54.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-29T13:55:42.930" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand when and where the copyleft of GPL v2|v3 applies, similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4666/license-for-r-scripts&quot;&gt;this OS question&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The way I understand it, is that if a &lt;strong&gt;derivative work&lt;/strong&gt; is created &lt;strong&gt;AND&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;distributed&lt;/strong&gt;, copyleft applies, eg. the code needs to have a GPL v2|v3 license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am having trouble understanding the definition of derivative work and distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's use a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Code in a GPL licensed scripting language without additional libraries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I create some code in R, which is a scripting language licensed under GPL v2 or v3  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see also Licenses&lt;/a&gt;), which &lt;strong&gt;solely uses R and no additional GPL-licensed library&lt;/strong&gt; (R allows to install and use further libraries with separate licenses).&#xA;Note that the program would be called from the command line like this &lt;code&gt;Rscript myfile.R&lt;/code&gt;, where Rscript is the executable of R and myfile.R is the code in text form that I have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I have to use a copyleft license (GPL v2|v3) for the code that I have written because my code is derivative work of R? Or could I license it under closed source licenses, as it neither extends nor modifies R and is being called from the command line with my code as an argument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# code.R&#xA;my_calculation &amp;lt;- function(...) {&#xA;  print(&amp;quot;Hello World&amp;quot;)&#xA;  # ...&#xA;}&#xA;my_calculation(...)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Same as above but with an additional GPL dependency&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say that the code from above uses another package that also has a GPL v2|v3 license (for example the RestRserve library &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/rexyai/RestRserve/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which is GPL &amp;gt;= v2 licensed&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;The package is not extended but used as intended, in this case to create and drive the functionality of a REST API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does including a GPL R library change the result of the first example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# code_with_dependencies.R&#xA;library(RestRserve)&#xA;app &amp;lt;- Application$new()&#xA;# ...&#xA;app$add_get(path = &amp;quot;/calc&amp;quot;, FUN = my_calculation)&#xA;# ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Same as 2. but with other packages that do not use GPL&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say I use 2. but do not use RestRserve (GPL) but plumber (same functionality in principal but MIT licensed) as my sole dependency. Would that mean that my code does not have to be copyleft licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4. Distributing the code&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I have a (hypothetical) customer &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; that wants to use my code but neither them nor me want to open source the code. When I send them only the code and instructions to download and install the R dependencies (such as via a Dockerfile, or a simple bash build script), can I license my code using a closed source license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Dockerfile&#xA;FROM rhub/r-minimal&#xA;RUN installr RestRserve&#xA;COPY code_with_dependencies.R code_with_dependencies.R&#xA;CMD [&amp;quot;Rscript&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;code_with_dependencies.R&amp;quot;]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU FAQ page&lt;/a&gt; but I couldn't find the right FAQs for these cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any answer/links to further understand this are greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27823" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T13:55:42.930" Title="Licensing in a scripting language - Copyleft" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13152" CreationDate="2022-08-29T14:17:07.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You would need to understand the hardware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nvidia and AMD and Intel don't publish much information about how their hardware works. It's all kept secret. The open-source drivers are based on reverse-engineering the official drivers, and experimentation, which are very difficult and slow processes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also why the open-source drivers aren't very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Nvidia recently started &amp;quot;open-sourcing&amp;quot; its drivers, but the way they did that is that the driver now runs on the GPU itself, as closed source, and the open-source part simply connects the application to the closed-source driver running on the GPU.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="483" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T14:17:07.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-29T14:19:06.447" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing software with a non profit organization and we would like to use the Qt framework to provide a GUI. This will be open source and free for everyone, for ever. Will we need to purchase a commercial Qt license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27826" LastActivityDate="2022-08-29T14:19:06.447" Title="Qt Licensing for non profit open source software" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13134" CreationDate="2022-08-30T00:14:41.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try the CLA Assistant webhook.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cla-assistant.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cla-assistant.io/&lt;/a&gt; is a free service which has you simply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Save your CLA at gist.github.com. Give a title and the text.&#xA;Point the hook at your repo.&#xA;Do the link to give the webhook permission to do a check during PRs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for every Pull Request (you can add exceptions for certain contributors if you want), it will check its database to see if this contributor email has signed the CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they have, things proceed as normal. You'll see a check passed with CLA accepted.&#xA;If not, it will present the CLA and ask for their github login to confirm acceptance.&#xA;It will send them back to the PR and note that the CLA is accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It even watches for updates to the CLA. It knows if a new version exists, and your next PR will trigger you to see and accept it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just what I needed.  It's working great for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27774" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T00:14:41.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-30T03:41:38.793" Score="1" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only difference between the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3-Clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2-Clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt; is that the 3-Clause BSD License has this additional clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the practical effect of this clause that makes the BSD 3-Clause different from BSD 2-Clause? Isn't it the case that people have to get permission to use another person's name to endorse a software, even in the absence of clause 3 of the BSD 3-Clause License? Does the third clause actually do anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastEditorUserId="21138" LastEditDate="2022-08-30T03:46:43.433" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T03:46:43.433" Title="What is the difference between the 2-clause and 3-clause BSD license?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2023-09-23T08:30:46.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13169" CreationDate="2022-08-30T06:17:53.427" Score="4" ViewCount="581" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have extracted Wikipedia's category tree, and I want to use it on a website I am working on. The category tree will be used to help users assign categories and in a few recommendation algorithms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about copyright. I did not find any terms covering the categories and their mapping, so I want to know if anyone is aware of any terms covering their use, or can I use the category tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27832" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T07:12:07.163" Title="Can I use Wikipedia's category tree in my website?" Tags="|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13168" CreationDate="2022-08-30T07:12:07.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The categories (and their mapping) are under the same license as the other text on Wikipedia, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 Unported&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, just follow the license, and you can use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4028" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T07:12:07.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13149" CreationDate="2022-08-30T07:44:16.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to include files under Apache license into your project under The Unlicense you should make it extra clear that this is a mixed situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must include all of the required information (copyright attribution, license language, ...) according to the Apache license in the header of the HTML file. The NOTICE and verbose license language can also be separate, but then at least you should have the copyright attribution and an SPDX identifier in the HTML file itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would be helpful to keep all the files related to the Apache licensed code in a separate subdirectory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The LICENSE file of your project should include a clear indicator, that there are files in this project under the Apache license (you could refer to the subdirectory with all the Apache-related files).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-08-30T07:44:16.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-30T18:17:41.803" Score="0" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;With permissive licenses requiring attributions (MIT, BSD, etc.), are attributions ONLY required if the OSS is distributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27838" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T12:13:15.307" Title="Is attribution necessary even if not distributed?" Tags="|attribution|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13176" CreationDate="2022-08-30T19:03:23.720" Score="6" ViewCount="1263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repo in GitHub which contains many different projects, each in its own folder and right now the license for this repo is &lt;strong&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I want to add another project to this repo, which is based on a code samples from a project under &lt;strong&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;, and according to this license, I must use the same license file if I borrow from the source which is under this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I put the MPL-2.0 license file in the folder which contains my new project, will it be right(license wise)? although the main repo will be still under Apache-2.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will such structure make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;├── project-1&#xA;├── project-2&#xA;├── project-3&#xA;├── project-4&#xA;├── project-5&#xA;|   └── MPL-2.0-license-file&#xA;├── Apache-2.0-license-file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27839" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-31T06:00:29.907" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T09:00:00.543" Title="Having one sub folder in a GitHub repo under a different license than the whole repo" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-08-31T03:00:41.057" Score="8" ViewCount="2176" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Free Software Foundation is of the opinion that a program that links a library is a derivative work of that library, so a program that links to a GPL-licensed library would need to be distributed under the terms of the GPL. That is what I understood from the following posts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;What are the arguments for considering dynamic links to constitute derivative works?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2157/is-it-allowed-to-dynamically-link-a-gpl-licensed-library-for-commercial-use&quot;&gt;Is it allowed to dynamically link a GPL licensed library for commercial use?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Eclipse Software Foundation has the opposite interpretation. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/faq.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eclipse Public License 2.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, merely using the interface of a library does not create a derivative work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.3. I’m programmer not a lawyer, can you give me a clear-cut example of when something is or is not a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have made a copy of existing Eclipse code and made a few minor revisions to it, that is a derivative work. If you’ve written your own Eclipse Platform plug-in with 100% your own code to implement functionality not currently in Eclipse, then it is not a derivative work. Scenarios between those two extremes will require you to seek the advice of your own legal counsel in deciding whether your program constitutes a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For clarity, merely interfacing or interoperating with Eclipse Platform plug-in APIs (without modification) does not make an Eclipse Platform plug-in a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: why are interpretations of &amp;quot;derivative works&amp;quot; confined to FAQs instead of being placed directly into the license text? If the definition of what constitutes &amp;quot;derivative works&amp;quot; were to be explicitly stated in the license text, there would be less need for all these opinions and interpretations. Why not explicitly state what &amp;quot;derivative works&amp;quot; includes and excludes like in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Derivative Works&amp;quot; shall mean any work, whether in Source or Object form, that is based on (or derived from) the Work and for which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work of authorship. &lt;strong&gt;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T07:45:39.877" Title="Why don't open source licenses give a more specific definition of &quot;derivative works&quot; to reduce ambiguity?" Tags="|gpl|license-notice|derivative-works|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13173" CreationDate="2022-08-31T07:45:39.877" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because open source licenses are copyright licenses, and copyright license do not get to define their scope as they choose; or more precisely there is a &amp;quot;maximum size boundary&amp;quot; to which the license can apply, with any attempts to reach beyond that boundary are null and void because the copyright in one work does not apply beyond that boundary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the precise size of that boundary and the specific terminology used varies across jurisdictions, there is a general concept that copyright applies only to works which are in a general sense &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the original work - for example, I can't claim that because I once wrote a program using the variable name &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; that all programs using the variable name &lt;code&gt;i&lt;/code&gt; are subject to my copyright; that's too big a reach in any jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, what licenses can do if they wish is to &lt;em&gt;reduce&lt;/em&gt; the size of that boundary, and exempt things which are legally derivative works from the provisions of the license. The Apache license as you note above does explicitly reduce its scope as you note above, while the GPL chooses not to do this. Both of these decisions are in line with the goals of the sponsoring organisations (the ASF and the FSF).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T07:45:39.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13172" CreationDate="2022-08-31T07:45:40.033" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a perfectly suitable solution. To be on the safe side, I'd add a note in the main license file saying something like &amp;quot;This license applies to the entire repo except for subfolders that have their own license file. In such cases, the license file in the subfolder takes precedence.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-08-31T09:00:00.543" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T09:00:00.543" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13171" CreationDate="2022-08-31T12:13:15.307" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For all practical purposes, requirements imposed on you by an open-source license only come into effect when you (re-)distribute the (modified) work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't distribute your changes, then nobody but yourself could ever notice if you followed the license requirements or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-08-31T12:13:15.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13179" CreationDate="2022-09-01T02:51:02.797" Score="15" ViewCount="5053" Body="&lt;p&gt;User Mark makes repository A and releases the code under the MIT license with their name in the license. User Jeff forks the repository makes some improvements and adds their name to the license file (still using the MIT license). Then Jeff makes a pull request to Mark's repository. Is it legal for Mark to remove Jeff's name from the license file without reverting the whole pull? If it is necessary to localize it to one country, please tell me the rule for the United States of America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27849" LastEditorUserId="27849" LastEditDate="2022-09-09T22:07:13.977" LastActivityDate="2022-09-09T22:07:13.977" Title="Is it legal to remove a contributor's name from the licence?" Tags="|mit|github|pull-request|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13178" CreationDate="2022-09-01T03:35:30.380" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it is not legal to remove the copyright notice of a contributor who has offered a copyrightable contribution under the MIT license. Jeff has offered his work to Mark under the MIT license and Mark must abide by Jeff's license grant in order to legally make use of Jeff's code. If Mark is not interested in preserving the copyright notice as required by Jeff's MIT grant, then Mark has not been afforded rights to reproduce or distribute Jeff's code under any other terms; to do so is a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Socially, it is probably a good idea to bring this to Mark's attention but assume this was done accidentally (merging code can be complex!) until Mark indicates otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Mark is probably not required to &lt;em&gt;add&lt;/em&gt; Jeff's copyright notice if Jeff neglected to add one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that if Jeff left multiple copyright notices throughout the project, then removing &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of Jeff's copyright notices, but keeping a nonzero number of them, is probably a legal grey area. (If Jeff was excessive in adding a wealth of notices, this is a reasonable janitorial task, but this could easily be a malicious, misleading thing for Mark to do under many circumstances; I don't know how a court might rule on any particular set of facts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-09-02T10:33:21.860" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T10:33:21.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-01T08:04:37.557" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;It needs to be included in the documentation, and in a fit of paranoia I started thinking about its copyright status&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually Commons documentation is useful but &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Screenshots&lt;/a&gt; is confusing and not really clear for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why license of software really matters? if it shows just a black triangle then it does not really matter what was license of code used to generate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Mac/Windows/Linux styling of window borders eligible for copyright? What about layout or icon in a title bar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For specific example - what is the license of following file which is a screenshoot of a Firefix console:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nMIqB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nMIqB.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reddit is irrelevant, copyright law has plenty of stupid things but random tracking cookie values are not copyrighted as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about icons, layout and so on? What is the license of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For bonus point: is this posting violating some license due to containing above image (probably no, fair use likely applies)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I should just declare &amp;quot;no copyright, if copyright applies then it is fair use and anyway anyone suing me over this can do 118818283 things more dangerous for me&amp;quot;. Though I planned to do a full copyright review of all graphical assets in a repository and my dumb script found also this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6450" LastActivityDate="2022-09-01T08:04:37.557" Title="What is the license of Firefox browser console debug panel?" Tags="|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13183" CreationDate="2022-09-01T18:42:31.467" Score="4" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a program and it is open source on GitHub. Part of this program is a file system, and I used an open-source file system called the &amp;quot;Simple File System&amp;quot; as design inspiration. My version, however, is simpler and more custom for my application. Anyone looking at what I did who knows how Simple File System works will see the similarities, but I wrote my own code and used the SFS documentation for guidance. How do I attribute SFS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22891" LastActivityDate="2022-09-01T20:47:15.777" Title="How do I attribute someone whose design, but not code, I based my stuff on?" Tags="|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13182" CreationDate="2022-09-01T20:47:15.777" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally, the question is whether your work is a derivative work of SFS. If it is, then you must do more than attribute SFS: you must follow whatever the license conditions are for the use of SFS - for example, if it is GPL-licensed then your code must also be GPL-licensed. If your code is not a derivative work, then there is no legal requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ethically, it's largely up to you. There are no particular standards around this, but it is of course considered polite to acknowledge influences on your design even if they don't reach the level of a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-09-01T20:47:15.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13178" CreationDate="2022-09-02T06:52:03.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In general, no&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only copy or make a derivative work of copyright material with permission. That permission is the MIT licence which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if what you used was not a &amp;quot;substantial portion&amp;quot;, then you technically don't need to provide the notice. However, you might have to defend that position in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/#:%7E:text=In%20its%20most%20general%20sense,permission%20from%20the%20copyright%20owner.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under US law you do not need permission if your use is fair use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case you describe, this isn't likely to be applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commonwealth countries have the doctrine of fair dealing which is, in general, less permissive than fair use. Other jurisdictions have broadly similar provisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27862" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T06:52:03.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13193" CreationDate="2022-09-02T11:28:24.823" Score="12" ViewCount="2617" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently made a PR on GitHub to a repo of a tutorial since I thought one of the comments was incorrect; but I was mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the contributors commented asking how it was incorrect. What's the correct way to say &amp;quot;Oops, my bad. Everything was correct after all&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27864" LastEditorUserId="18264" LastEditDate="2022-09-05T11:23:37.243" LastActivityDate="2022-09-06T07:12:01.917" Title="Etiquette for an incorrect Pull Request" Tags="|github|pull-request|etiquette|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13185" CreationDate="2022-09-02T11:31:45.757" Score="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oops, my bad. Everything was correct after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems absolutely fine to me. You could add &amp;quot;sorry for the distraction&amp;quot; or similar if you wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T11:31:45.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7307" CreationDate="2022-09-02T14:37:40.653" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is - it depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are using a SPA technology (e.g. - Angular), technically your code is downloaded per user's browser and should be listing/addressing any OS software/libraries being used that have an OS License. Fortunately with something like Angular, there is something built into the cli tools that generate a 3rdpartylicenses.txt file that gets deployed with the web app so it's accessible and can be viewed by your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27866" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T14:37:40.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5087" CreationDate="2022-09-02T16:49:19.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gcc license provides a very broad and irrevocable license for anyone and everyone to produce derivative works of gcc-licensed materials if those derivative works are not distributed.  It also provides a very broad and irrevocable license for anyone and everyone to distribute authorized collections of files which contain the gcc-licensed works and all applicable source code therefor via wide variety of means including publicly accessible https:// servers.  Further, the license has no authority over works which are not derived from any copyrightable portions of gcc material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the recipient of a GPL library and a closed-source library statically links them, the result would be a derived work which could not be distributable under the GPL, but the gcc license grants all the permissions necessary for to link the code if the resulting executable isn't distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a particular collection of files contains everything necessary to be a standalone authorized distribution of a gcc program or library, the gcc license would grant everyone in the universe, including the creator of a closed-source program that could be usefully linked into an executable that also contained the gcc library, to host those files on a publicly-accessible web server.  Further, a program that would automatically download the open-source library from the web server that contains it would not contain any copyrightable aspects from that open-source code, and would thus not fall under the authority of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the closed-source program were to interact directly with the GPL library directly, there could be some questions about whether it contained any copyrightable aspects of the GPL library within it.  Such a possibility could be disproved, however, by having the creator of the closed-source software publish an open-source &amp;quot;bridge&amp;quot; which communicated with its own API, and demonstrating that the software would work with a bridge that was modified to use a different library that had nothing in common with the GPL one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between static linking and dynamic linking is not the technical aspect of how code is loaded at run-time, but rather whether any derived works containing a mix of GPL and closed-source code are distributed.  A program which will dynamically link with a GPL library can be directly executable without containing any copyrightable portion of that library and thus being a derived work thereof requiring a license for distribution.  An executable program which is statically linked with the library, however, would be a derived work, and could thus not be distributed in executable form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2022-09-02T16:49:19.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13185" CreationDate="2022-09-03T00:21:06.430" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oops, I was mistaken, sorry! Thanks for your time.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27476" LastActivityDate="2022-09-03T00:21:06.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13185" CreationDate="2022-09-04T10:32:14.850" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/13186/327&quot;&gt;Philip Kendall's answer&lt;/a&gt;: After explaining and/or apologizing, don't leave the PR open. If you agree it's fundamentally redundant, close it yourself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uqHyE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uqHyE.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-09-06T07:12:01.917" LastActivityDate="2022-09-06T07:12:01.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13192" CreationDate="2022-09-05T03:43:27.910" Score="6" ViewCount="1329" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story short, I'm working on building the debian/copyright file for a massive package, and have ran into the following rather confusing phrase in the copyright header of one of the source code files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems straightforward, right? Welp, guess what. There is no GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's the GNU &lt;strong&gt;Library&lt;/strong&gt; General Public License version 2, and there's the GNU &lt;strong&gt;Lesser&lt;/strong&gt; General Public License version &lt;strong&gt;2.1&lt;/strong&gt;. The two licenses are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what license is this code under anyway? On one hand, maybe the user thought &amp;quot;LGPL-2&amp;quot; referenced a &amp;quot;Lesser General Public License version 2&amp;quot; and put that there without verifying that the license they were naming really existed. On the other hand, perhaps the use of the word &amp;quot;Lesser&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; indicates that they mean LGPL-2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, the escape clause &amp;quot;or (at your option) any later version&amp;quot; has been given here, so I can call it LGPL-2.1 if all else fails and I should still be close enough to right. But still, I'd like to know if I'm just missing something, or if this really is ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27885" LastEditorUserId="27885" LastEditDate="2023-02-12T12:48:05.820" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T12:48:05.820" Title="Ran into &quot;GNU Lesser General Public License version 2&quot; in a copyright notice - what license is this? LGPL 2? LGPL 2.1? Or...?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13191" CreationDate="2022-09-05T07:07:00.007" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you just want confirmation that you're seeing the issue correctly (and let's face it, we all need that at some time or another!), I can confirm my view that the rightsholders have conflated the naming schemes of two different versions of the LGPL, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Library General Public License, version 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1&lt;/a&gt;.  If memory serves, the principal difference between the two is the name change, which was intended to stop people thinking that the licence was for libraries, and start them thinking that it was for less-copyleft-protected software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comment that their designation of &lt;em&gt;Lesser GPL v2.0+&lt;/em&gt; allows you to unambiguously use it under Lesser GPL v2.1 (or, indeed, v3) seems an excellent way of sidestepping the problem of there being no Lesser GPL v2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think we can say any more than that here, and you've indicated that that's what you wanted to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-09-05T07:07:00.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13185" CreationDate="2022-09-05T08:42:06.373" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your suggested sentence is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want, you can also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thank the other person for spotting your mistake and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;explain &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you were mistaken.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you made the mistake, others might as well - after all, you mentioned that the repo is a tutorial, and tutorials are aimed at beginners. Maybe there's a way to improve the tutorial so that others won't make the same mistake you did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oops, my bad. Everything was correct after all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I initially thought that foo needed to be initialized to avoid frobnicating the bar, but after reading your comment and re-reading the code I realized that  baz was explicitly designed to handle uninitialized foos. Thanks for spotting my mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27195" LastActivityDate="2022-09-05T08:42:06.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4421" CreationDate="2022-09-06T07:56:04.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the recommendations by Philippe, you can also use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://foundation.llvm.org/relicensing/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License version 2.0 with the LLVM exceptions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SPDX identifier for this is &lt;code&gt;Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would allow compatibility with both GPLv3 and GPLv2, due to the following exception text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, if you combine or link compiled forms of this Software&#xA;with software that is licensed under the GPLv2 (&amp;quot;Combined Software&amp;quot;)&#xA;and if a court of competent jurisdiction determines that the patent&#xA;provision (Section 3), the indemnity provision (Section 9) or other&#xA;Section of the License conflicts with the conditions of the GPLv2, you&#xA;may retroactively and prospectively choose to deem waived or otherwise&#xA;exclude such Section(s) of the License, but only in their entirety and&#xA;only with respect to the Combined Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-09-06T07:56:04.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13198" CreationDate="2022-09-06T08:56:50.807" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have code in a language and want to convert it automatically using a tool to another language.&#xA;Is it considered a derivative work and should I follow the same license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it matter if it is MIT license or GPL for instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27891" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-09-07T06:22:11.400" LastActivityDate="2022-09-09T13:05:37.563" Title="Automatically converted code from one language to another changes the license of a code?" Tags="|gpl|mit|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-06T10:20:26.323" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use some open source HTML/CSS/JAVA code under a GPLv3 license to feed into my company website (start up).&#xA;I am not 100% clear whether I can use the open source code or at which stage I need to pay for a corporate license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Open source GPLv3 license - is my understanding correct that the website, which has information about the company and may go as far as letting customers book appointments but is not directly a product which is sold is not classified as commercial and as long as I make it clear in the code where the code is from, what changes I have made and publish my code under the same license, then I am legally fine to use the code free of charge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) In which case would I need to pay for a corporate license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27892" LastActivityDate="2022-09-06T10:20:26.323" Title="Open source HTML/CSS/JAVA code under GPLv3 license - implication if used for public company website?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-recommendation|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13195" CreationDate="2022-09-07T06:57:06.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you stay bound by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Porting code from one language to another is a derivative in a very similar manner than just taking the code and making modifications to it. As such you are bound by the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't necessarily mean you need to use the same license, but you need to choose a license which fulfills all obligations put on you by the original license. Thus if the original license is GPL, you most likely want to choose GPL. However if it is a permissive one like MIT, you can virtually choose any, provided you abide by the requirement to display the original copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-09-07T10:47:41.037" LastActivityDate="2022-09-07T10:47:41.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13195" CreationDate="2022-09-07T07:30:09.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you translate a project from one (programming) language to another by pure mechanical means, then you are creating a derivative work, but you are not vesting any (additional) copyright claims in the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples of a translation by pure mechanical means are compiling source into binary format or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transpiling&lt;/a&gt; between source formats. The common characteristic is that the process requires absolutely no creative effort from the person doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you can only do the translation if the license gives you the right to make derivative works and you are not allowed to change the license (as you have no copyright claim in the work, you have no standing to put license terms on it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2022-09-09T13:05:37.563" LastActivityDate="2022-09-09T13:05:37.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13200" CreationDate="2022-09-07T09:20:56.597" Score="14" ViewCount="4271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project on GitHub licensed under MIT. Some other person contributed to another unknown-to-me organisation on GitHub two months ago with a commit which copies a part of my code with just a few, very minor, line changes. This commit also adds another license and has no mention of me and my copyright statement and my license (so, of the original project). I also noticed him having other commits like &amp;quot;Copy some more libraries&amp;quot; what clearly is a malicious intent in my opinion, as this has been done more than just once. Initially I wanted to contact this person, but then noticed the same pattern with other projects where he adds another license (so he knows about licensing!), removes parts of the original code, sometimes changes the code, sometimes doesn't, and even names it similarly. After I noticed that pattern, I decided it would be silly to ask him to follow the licenses as he, most likely, understands what a license is as he licenses his code himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do in such a situation if I don't want this person to continue stealing other code from everywhere and licensing it on his terms like it is his own and make him follow the original project's license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27901" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T21:01:07.547" Title="MIT License Violation caused by copying source code partially or fully" Tags="|licensing|mit|github|license|dmca|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13199" CreationDate="2022-09-07T13:20:17.667" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;For those bits where the bad actor has infringed specifically &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; copyright&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, you can alert whoever is distributing the content. For content hosted in the US, that generally means a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dmca.com/faq/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DMCA Takedown request&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-policies/dmca-takedown-policy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github have further details on how to do this specifically for content on Github&lt;/a&gt;. Other sites/jurisdictions will have something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the more general case of infringing a third party's copyright, there's nothing directly that you can do. Your best bet is probably to contact the actual copyright holder and inform them of the issue; you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; try a public &amp;quot;name and shame&amp;quot;, but be very, very careful doing that as you don't want to end up in a libel case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. or things where you are acting as an authorised agent of the copyright holder - i.e. your lawyer acting on your behalf.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-09-07T13:20:17.667" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13203" CreationDate="2022-09-09T21:00:09.763" Score="3" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;An open source software is developed in a publicly-accessible source code repository. Starting from the first commit, the source code is licensed under the GPLv3. There is only one copyright holder. On the 10th commit, an official release of version 1 of the software occurs. Two commits later, on the 12th commit, the copyright holder changes the license from GPLv3 to the BSD 3-Clause license, and continues to develop the software. The repository is now at its 20th commit. The question: when the code was relicensed, was all the old code (commits 1 to 11) relicensed as well? If not, how should the copyright holder relicense the old commits without altering the version control history of the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-09-10T16:10:19.573" Title="Do old versions of code get relicensed when newer versions of the code are relicensed under a more permissive license?" Tags="|relicensing|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13206" CreationDate="2022-09-10T08:38:52.160" Score="1" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a side-project for C# based Windows Desktop app which depends on following two open source components (DLL libraries):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newtonsoft JSON library&lt;/a&gt; - MIT license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://system.data.sqlite.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/downloads.wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SQLite.NET library&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://system.data.sqlite.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/copyright.wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License, MS-PL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding this, I've got two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By using the above two components, will there be any restriction for licensing my own open source side-project? Can I license it using Apache or GPL, for example?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I distribute the above DLLs? Can I distribute them with the build (binaries) along with their own license copies?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4160" LastActivityDate="2022-09-12T07:18:05.087" Title="How to distribute licenses of linked DLL libraries along with the release?" Tags="|distribution|redistribution|microsoft|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13201" CreationDate="2022-09-10T14:37:10.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seem to me to be two questions here.  Firstly, the issue of relicensing, and secondly, the issue of version control systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is hard to answer, because it presumes that licences inhere in code.  They do not; instead, their rights and obligations attach to recipients of the code through the act of conveyance.  Once you think that way, the problem goes away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you have the right to relicense the code, then you can change, right now, the licence declarations in the current (and also, if you wish, in the old) versions.  Anyone who gets a version from you will get it on the terms stated in that version at the time that they get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Persons who already have copies of old versions have them under the terms that they were advised of at the time they took them.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;You cannot revoke those terms retrospectively&lt;/a&gt;.  If those terms, as free licences do, permit the licensees to further redistribute the code, then if they choose to do that it will be done on the terms of their choice, subject to the constraints imposed by the licence at the time of the original conveyance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is specific to your VCS, and we can't advise on that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-10T16:10:19.573" LastActivityDate="2022-09-10T16:10:19.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13202" CreationDate="2022-09-11T15:20:42.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both MIT License and MS-PL are very simple permissive licenses. It is very easy to follow the requirements for notices and declarations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can license your own code in any way you want, including Apache and GPL licenses. Linking to these mentioned dependencies does not pose any restrictions on you w.r.t. the selection of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you distribute your app and you include the DLLs, then you should include a LICENSES and a NOTICES file with the content as required by the license language for the DLLs. It is the easiest for everyone if you distribute these DLLs using their original licenses (there is no need to re-license these). MS-PL for example says in §3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all&#xA;copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present&#xA;in the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form,&#xA;you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of&#xA;this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of&#xA;the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under&#xA;a license that complies with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously very easy to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-09-12T07:18:05.087" LastActivityDate="2022-09-12T07:18:05.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10439" CreationDate="2022-09-12T20:58:31.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tldrlegal.com&lt;/a&gt; is a great source for summaries for these. For example, pasting &lt;code&gt;MIT license&lt;/code&gt; in the input form produces the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    A short, permissive software license. Basically, you can do whatever&#xA;    you want as long as you include the original copyright and license&#xA;    notice in any copy of the software/source. There are many variations&#xA;    of this license in use.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27934" LastActivityDate="2022-09-12T20:58:31.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-13T11:12:20.473" Score="-2" ViewCount="708" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a public github repository of a library/software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This library/software depends on other software/libraries (e.g. &lt;code&gt;matplotlib&lt;/code&gt; for python projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I choose a license for my github project?&#xA;Does it depend on the licenses of the used software/libraries I use for my library/software?&#xA;How to make sure I choose a correct license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-14T12:30:03.403" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T12:30:03.403" Title="How to choose a license for a github open-source software?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13208" CreationDate="2022-09-13T18:21:18.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I choose a license for my github project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You decide whether you want:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyleft license, meaning that anyone using your software must also release their code under an open source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A permissive license, meaning that your software can be used in non-open source software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a vast number of open source licenses exist, unless you have very specialised needs you would generally be recommended to use one of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft: GNU General Public License (GPL) or GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). The difference between the two is in whether accessing the software over a network allows the user access to the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permissive: one of Apache 2.0, MIT or BSD (2 clause or 3 clause) licenses. These are &lt;em&gt;effectively&lt;/em&gt; very similar; Apache 2.0 is much wordier and may potentially cover some edge cases that the other licenses don't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it depend on the licenses of the used software/libraries I use for my library/software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. If any of your dependencies are under a copyleft license, your software must be as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-09-13T18:21:18.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13218" CreationDate="2022-09-14T06:22:22.820" Score="2" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;In github I have a software repository which uses libraries at install time. These libraries are not included in the repository itself, but they are downloaded and installed when I install my tool (e.g. defined in &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; for python projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the license I choose for my github software repository depend on any license of the dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And where can I find a webpage that explains exactly that? When I search for &amp;quot;how to choose a license for OS projects&amp;quot; nowhere the licenses of dependencies are mentioned. That might imply that my above question is answered by a clear &amp;quot;YES&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is the an authoritative source somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related question with unclear answer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12223/do-the-licenses-of-dependencies-matter-if-the-dependencies-are-not-actually-ship&quot;&gt;Do the licenses of dependencies matter if the dependencies are not actually shipped by my software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: I have a github repository with one single file which is python code to create some graphics. This code is using two libraries the user has to install himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import external_library_to_compute_something&#xA;import external_library_to_plot_something&#xA;&#xA;# Read data from a file here, ask user input&#xA;&#xA;# Do some calculaions&#xA;# Maybe do some linear regression. Use a function of the first tool&#xA;a,b = external_library_to_compute_something.lin_reg(data)&#xA;# do some more calculations&#xA;&#xA;# Now create the plot; use a function of the second tool&#xA;myplot = external_library_to_plot_something.simple_plot(plot_data)&#xA;myplot.show()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to consider the licenses of the two tools&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;external_library_to_compute_something&#xA;external_library_to_plot_something&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YES or NO?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22800" LastEditorUserId="22800" LastEditDate="2022-09-15T10:30:35.483" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T11:42:25.590" Title="Does an open-source license depend on dependencies which are not part of a repo itself?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-14T08:41:10.893" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say program A is licensed under GNU GPL 2.0. I write a new program (B) which is heavily inspired by A. Both do pretty much the same thing with some small differences (B has a couple of old features removed and a new one added) and they look almost the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only meaningful differences are that B has been rewritten in a different language and had a general code cleanup. But in general, the way the program works is the same as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does B have to be licensed under GNU GPL 2.0 too? Or since it's not a direct copy of the original it can use any licence I want?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the original project will be mentioned in the README either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27950" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T08:41:10.893" Title="Which licence to use when writing a program based on an existing one?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13212" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13210" CreationDate="2022-09-14T12:37:48.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. No. It depends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to abide by the license of all libraries you use, including their respective dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at permissively-licensed libraries (MIT, BSD, Apache,...) or the LGPL (whose copyleft license is limited to the library) this does not limit your choice of license of the main programme as long as you abide by the attribution requirements and possibly the requirement to allow replacement by a ABI-compatible library in case of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are linking to GPL-licensed libraries it can be argued that your programme itself is a derivative of these libraries and that you have to choose a GPL license yourself. Even if your legal advise disagrees on this point, and you choose for your source code a different license, you WILL have to distribute your compiled binaries which include the GPL libraries under a GPL license. Essentially this means you can distribute your source code under whatever license you choose AND HAVE TO distribute it also under GPL, at least for those versions you ship compiled binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An authorative source? That is in the end only a court ruling which depends on the jurisdiction you seek advice for. However the FAQ, for instance, of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; is a good source, also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-09-16T11:42:25.590" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T11:42:25.590" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13199" CreationDate="2022-09-14T19:59:35.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What can I do...?&amp;quot; The decision tree starts with money: Any, and how much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source framework exists in pursuit of the summum bonum, the greatest good. Many (most?) of us who contribute follow the guidelines; stating our licensing terms and diligently abiding by those of others whose work we use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a user or group goes rogue, the amount of money involved determines the actions taken. If little-to-none, then you are most free to write a friendly note explaining the offense(s) and requesting/urging a change in practices. A cease and desist (C&amp;amp;D) order can later be sent if violations continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, a DMCA takedown request is unlikely to succeed unless the service provider has morals, a rarity these days, sadly. Then there is no further recourse that doesn't involve a net loss of funds. This because any judgements will take into account your damages. No damages, small rewards (if any). Satisfaction that the ship has been righted must be weighed against out-of-pocket costs. Was it, ultimately, worth it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author of stolen works, you may vehemently disagree with allowing your intellectual property to be used by crooks, but in the absence of financial harm, it will cost money to stop the infringement. Personally, I've realigned my motivation for all volunteer labor: &lt;strong&gt;Do it for the love of the work.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if substantial money IS involved, a copyright lawyer should be advising you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An earlier (more concise) answer was already accepted; I just wanted to provide a larger context. (Experience gained when an entire body of my work was stolen some years ago, before I understood the legalities.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27955" LastEditorUserId="27955" LastEditDate="2022-09-14T21:01:07.547" LastActivityDate="2022-09-14T21:01:07.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-15T08:18:06.563" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of creating a web app (details of which I'll give later) with the intention of participating in a hackathon hosted by Hashnode in conjunction with AWS Amplify (link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://townhall.hashnode.com/aws-amplify-hackathon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://townhall.hashnode.com/aws-amplify-hackathon&lt;/a&gt;), and the app is kind of required to be open source, which I would really love to do. But at the same time, I want to create a business out of it (if possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking rigorously about what the best way to go about this would be, but I don't seem to have figured it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The app I want to create is one that lets people create text tutorials/courses (not videos) in which people can enroll as students. I don't even know if this is a good idea, but I'm willing to do it. I came up with it when I wanted to create such a course myself but found no tool for it (some months ago). The app would include some features like chapter questions, e.t.c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem now is that the app must be open source, and I want to do business out of it. After pondering the situation, I thought it would be good if I used the model used by Automattic with WordPress, or Ghost with the open-source Ghost software. I would make the core of the software open source while creating a business by offering a one-click setup of the software on my own servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But based on the requirements (of the hackathon), AWS Amplify must be used. I must therefore build the core of the software with the platform, at least for purposes of the hackathon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question now is: do you think it would be a good thing to build the core of such software around AWS Amplify (a paid service)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users (developers) would be able to self-host the software on their own servers but have to use AWS Amplify to enable authentication, storage, e.t.c. This sort of thing is very common (as far as I know). Open source software like that usually uses an open source database and other open source backend software too. Ghost and WordPress are examples. They both use MySQL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I would have to build the software such that people who decide to self-host it would be able to use different backend platforms/software instead of just AWS Amplify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27962" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-15T08:45:46.337" LastActivityDate="2022-09-15T08:45:46.337" Title="Would it make sense to build an open source project around a paid AWS service?" Tags="|website|freeware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13210" CreationDate="2022-09-16T07:43:45.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have to consider the licenses of your dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you modified your question and included the code example it is clear. You are using the &amp;quot;import&amp;quot; function of Python. This is an equivalent of &lt;em&gt;Linking&lt;/em&gt; in other programming languages. Therefore your code perfectly matches the definition in GPLv3 &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based on the Program.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one of the imported modules is under GPL license, then you will have to put your own code under the same license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF is clear about that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the imported libraries have other licenses, then there might be a different impact, or no impact, on your selection of a license for your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, and there has always been the discussion if the fact that you are not distributing the GPL-ed code yourself, but ask the users of the app to download it themselves, will actually constitute the act of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;propagate a work&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. If you want to be on the save side you can just assume it does, if not you can contact a lawyer experienced in all the jurisdictions where you are distributing your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-09-16T07:43:45.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-18T05:52:40.383" Score="-2" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may or may not be participating in an argument and I hold the idea that a 100% open-source website is not a great idea. Suppose you are running a website with millions of users signed up. Is it feasible in any way to have every piece of code responsible for that website being open to the public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27984" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T07:55:20.290" Title="Is having an entirely open-source website a stupid idea?" Tags="|website|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-18T08:02:59.387" Score="-3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the answers I am refering to:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/how-to-put-the-themes-mit-license-information-on-my-website/32001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/how-to-put-the-themes-mit-license-information-on-my-website/32001&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: They talk about a difference between serving in a web page and sharing or selling a code. Remember a MIT license is a software license, so even if they are talking about themes they are talking about the code and software behind. So my question is if am just serving as the answers explain,Do I still have to attribute in a MIT license?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27974" LastEditorUserId="27974" LastEditDate="2022-09-18T13:52:27.943" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T17:00:33.850" Title="According to this web site unless I am sharing or selling my website code I dont have to attribute anything about the mit license, is that truth?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13220" CreationDate="2022-09-18T09:24:01.860" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is feasible to have the website source code (frontend, backend, administration tools) Open Source. High-profile examples of Open Source backend code include MediaWiki sites (e.g. Wikipedia), and Wordpress sites (the world's most popular CMS). In the past, the Reddit source code was also Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you don't see many large-scale &lt;em&gt;companies&lt;/em&gt; open sourcing all of their code. This is for business reasons, not for reasons of technology, security, or licensing. Many businesses benefit from offering a platform, especially in the social media space. Since platforms depend on network effects, it's somewhat of a “winner takes all” market and businesses will generally try to stifle competition. This is generally incompatible with Open Source, which invites collaboration and involves sharing value with competitors. More generally, Open Sourcing their websites or backends simply has no benefit to many businesses. And that's perfectly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T09:24:01.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13220" CreationDate="2022-09-18T09:43:22.197" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;With a little digging, I find that GNU &lt;a href=&quot;https://savannah.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Savannah&lt;/a&gt; is running entirely on free software, top-to-bottom, and currently has over 25,000 registered users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitLab used to be entirely free, passing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/news/gnu-releases-ethical-evaluations-of-code-hosting-services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU ethical evaluation&lt;/a&gt; in 2016, at which time &lt;a href=&quot;https://about.gitlab.com/company/history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitLab say&lt;/a&gt; they had &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;millions of users&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Amon points out, corporate projects tend not to open up their infrastructure, and community projects that scale up past that tend to federate rather than having a single monolithic million-user site.  By way of example, how many users does &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matrix&lt;/a&gt; have, nearly all of whom are running on an entirely free software stack?  Nobody knows, because there's no central Matrix server.  But when the matrix.org homeserver (which is just a single homeserver, albeit a very large one) was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/pwned/comments/bca7ge/matrixorg_chat_server_homepage_defaced_55m/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;penetrated in 2019&lt;/a&gt;, they said about 5.5 million accounts had their hashes exfiltrated, so I strongly suspect the Matrix user base is well into seven figures, more likely eight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So some have done it, and thereby provided useful and usable services, which for me at least proves it's not a stupid idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-18T12:04:34.817" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T12:04:34.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13221" CreationDate="2022-09-18T17:00:33.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Apart from the webserver itself and server side scripts,) HTML, XML, JS, CSS or whatever else your website sends to the browser to display the content is code, and you are distributing that code from the server to the client.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore there is no difference between 'serving a webpage' and 'sharing code'. It is the same. You must therefore respect the requirements of the MIT license for the 3rd party components of your website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-09-18T17:00:33.850" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13220" CreationDate="2022-09-19T13:48:41.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is feasible, but unless you want to make a point about your commitment to the open source philosophy, there is little reason to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your website is in most cases highly specific to your organization and its specific needs. So the code has little use to anyone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All your HTML and JavaScript that is executed in the web browser is source-available anyway due to the way the web works. (As long as you don't minify your JavaScript)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users have no way to confirm that the backend code you have on your public sourcecode repository is also the code that &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; runs on your backend. So if you want to convince the end-users that your website backend doesn't do any shady stuff, you won't convince them by publishing your sourcecode.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are very few open source licenses which require that you publish the code of a website backend which incorporates licensed code. The only license I can think of is the AGPL, and that one only requires to publish your sourcecode if you modify the AGPL code incorporated into your website backend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to build a security argument: See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linus's Law&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2022-09-19T14:05:06.547" LastActivityDate="2022-09-19T14:05:06.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-20T14:55:32.053" Score="1" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have confusion about how the GNU open source licenses and QT commercial licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the QT's pricing page&lt;/a&gt; it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute Qt binaries in conjunction with my desktop or mobile application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Distribution of Qt libraries in binary form in conjunction with the developed&#xA;application is allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the GNU's website it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are &amp;gt; free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This &amp;gt; applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified &amp;gt; version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to&#xA;make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that a commercial application I make that uses PyQt5 as its GUI MUST be open source with a GPL license? And If I want to keep its source code closed, I have to buy a commercial license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about other libraries under GPL license? If say, I used a simple library that tells me if 13 is even or odd in my project that I want to sell to people, do I have to make the source code open even if I don't modify anything in the library like adding the number 14 as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28003" LastActivityDate="2022-09-20T14:55:32.053" Title="Confusion about Licenses" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|commercial|distribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13240" CreationDate="2022-09-22T06:56:41.803" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;What responsibilities do I have to fulfill when using an MIT-licensed library in proprietary software?  How do I specify a license if my project is not distributed anywhere on sites, etc, and is a telegram bot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27843" LastEditorUserId="28036" LastEditDate="2022-09-28T07:26:41.400" LastActivityDate="2022-09-28T07:26:41.400" Title="Am I required to list the MIT library I'm using in my telegram bot application description?" Tags="|mit|license-compliance|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2022-09-25T19:36:37.510" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13229" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we reuse code made available under a particular free software licence, the licence places obligations on us.  Those obligations are often particularly associated with the act of onward redistribution of the resulting work.  They can range from simple preservation of pre-existing copyright notices, to preservation of further pieces of text, to the requirement to redistribute the resulting work under a particular licence, the latter being especially associated with copyleft licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're in a position when an upstream licence may be placing obligations on you, and you want to know what those are, and/or how you should comply with them, this tag is appropriate for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" LastActivityDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13230" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" Score="0" Body="Questions that ask about how to fulfil the obligations placed upon a user by a given free software licence, and how to comply with them." OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" LastActivityDate="2022-09-22T08:41:24.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-22T10:19:52.107" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been struggling to understand license compatibility and how it manifests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a program to which I wrote the codebase. this codebase then dynamically links to two different open source libs - one licensed under Apache v2 and the other LGPL 2.1. Can I distribute the program considering I comply with Apachev2 and LGPLv2.1 requirements? Or because Apache v2 and LGPLv2.1 are incompatible my program cannot link to these two libraries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I use the Eclipse Framework (EPLv2) and dynamically link to an Apache2 library. Can I distribute the program considering I comply with EPLv2 and Apache2 requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4325" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-15T09:17:28.307" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T13:06:45.563" Title="FOSS License Compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13235" CreationDate="2022-09-24T07:41:33.273" Score="9" ViewCount="4698" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was getting frustrated because I really wanted to use a GPL Family license for a piece of software I am developing. However, some of my target audience, OS Developers, are closed source (looking at you Microsoft and Apple), and by using my software they would have to make their software open source, so they wouldn't even consider my software. Also, my software would have to be Apache if I want to submit it to AOSP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easy option would be to use Apache licensing, but I still want by other users to be bound by GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think I came up with a &lt;em&gt;solution&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;I made by own boilerplate notice by snipping segments from different licenses, as well as adding my own wording. I want it to allow me to say several things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can choose between GPL (v2 or later) or LGPL (v2.1 or later), whichever you prefer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are an Operating System Developer, you can also choose Apache.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must follow these conditions or not redistribute my software at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you send me code, no matter what license you got it under, you license it under my boilerplate notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my notice, sorry about the name, one of my co-devs loves ducks and made be call it 'Quack Open Source License':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Begin Quack Open Source License, herein referred to as QOSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (C) [NAMES OF DEVS] 2022&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software is free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You&amp;quot; refers to a person or entity obtaining this software and corresponding source code&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Your Users&amp;quot; refers to any people or entities you distribute this software and corresponding source code&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;The authors of this software&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Copyright Holders&amp;quot; refers to [NAMES OF DEVS]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may obtain this software and its corresponding source code under the General Public License, herein referred to as &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot; for the purposes of this document, version 2, or at your option any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also obtain this software, at your option, under the Lesser General Public License, herein referred to as &amp;quot;LGPL&amp;quot; for the purposes of this document, version 2.1, or at your option any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YOU ARE GIVEN WORLDWIDE, NON-EXCULSIVE, ROYALTY-FREE PERMISSION TO OBTAIN AND REDISTRIBUTE THIS SOFTWARE AND CORRESPONDING SOURCE CODE BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS UNDER THE GPL OR LGPL ONLY IF YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO THE QOSL CLAUSE 1, 2 AND ANY CONDITIONS INTRODUCED BY THE LICENSE YOU CHOOSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 1: &amp;quot;If you obtain this software and corresponding source code under GPL or LGPL, you must also give your users the option to choose between the two by including the Quack Open Source License notice before any GPL or LGPL notices&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 2: &amp;quot;If you release changes to the authors of this software, you release your changes under the Quack Open Source License, not the license you obtained this software and corresponding source code under.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept Clause 1 and Clause 2, as you have not signed them, however accepting them is the only way to obtain this software and corresponding source code under the GPL or LGPL, so by obtaining this software and corresponding source code, distrubuting it to your users or submitting changes to the authors of this software, you accept the Quack Open Source License Clause 1 and Clause 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of Operating System Development, herein called &amp;quot;OS Development&amp;quot;, you may obtain this software and corresponding source code under any of the licenses listed above, or at your option, any version of the Apache License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;YOU ARE GIVEN WORLDWIDE, NON-EXCULSIVE, ROYALTY-FREE PERMISSION TO OBTAIN AND REDISTRIBUTE THIS SOFTWARE AND CORRESPONDING SOURCE CODE BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS UNDER THE APACHE LICENSE ONLY FOR THE PURPOSES OF OS DEVELOPMENT, AND ONLY IF YOU ACCEPT AND AGREE TO THE QOSL CLAUSE 2, 3 AND ANY CONDITIONS INTRODUCED BY THE APACHE LICENSE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clause 3: &amp;quot;If you obtain this software under the Apache License, for the purposes of OS Development, and redistribute it to your users or the authors of an Operating System, you must do so under the Apache License, NOT the Quack Open Source License. You MUST NOT include the Quack Open Source License notice before the Apache License declaration, regardless of if you have made modifications to the software. You may, at your option, include the following declaration, 'This software was obtained under the Quack Open Source License for the purposes of Operating System Development, and redistributed under the Apache License ONLY.'. This clause is overridden and superseded in any circumstance where it comes into conflict with the Quack Open Source License Clause 2.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not required to accept Clause 3 and Clause 2, however accepting them is the only way to obtain this software and corresponding source code, so by obtaining this software under the Apache License for the purposes of OS Development, distributing it to your users, sending it to the authors of an Operating System or submitting changes to the authors of this software, you accept the Quack Open Source License Clause 2 and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End Quack Open Source License (QOSL) NOTICE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm curious about – am I allowed to do something like this? I'll put it before any instances of GPL, LGPL and Apache, so is it legally binding? Or will I have to bite the bullet and use Apache?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28036" LastEditorUserId="15278" LastEditDate="2022-09-27T13:48:02.417" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T13:48:02.417" Title="Can I make my own license?" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|lgpl|law|apache-1.1|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2022-09-28T00:12:36.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13234" CreationDate="2022-09-24T07:53:21.387" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don't do this.  We already have an excellent Q&amp;amp;A on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;why you shouldn't use a crayon licence&lt;/a&gt;, and I strongly recommend you read it.  You can achieve most of what you want with existing licences, and the rest isn't even achieved by your licence.  Let's take it point by point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can choose between GPL (v2 or later) or LGPL (v2.1 or later), whichever you prefer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's easy; just distribute it with the statement &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may use this code under GPLv2+ or LGPLv2.1+, at your choice&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are an Operating System Developer, you can also choose Apache&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That won't work.  Any OS developer can take your code under Apache2, then give a copy to a non-OS-developing friend, which will also be under Apache.  You could try to distribute it under some kind of warped Apache-plus-redistribution-restriction, but nobody will use it (see linked answer above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must follow these conditions or not redistribute my software at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much all free licences require that you follow their conditions in order to redistribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you send me code, no matter what license you got it under, you license it under my boilerplate notice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's better handled by a compulsory CLA for contributors.  Anyone wants to contribute, you require them to sign your CLA, which gives you relicensing rights.  Whether they'll sign that, or whether they'll prefer not to contribute, is up to them, but that's the risk you run by choosing an odd licensing strategy.  We discuss the whole CLA-for-relicensing issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4092/how-to-accept-contributions-for-agpl-proprietary-dual-licensed-projects&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, and elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-09-24T09:28:04.793" LastActivityDate="2022-09-24T09:28:04.793" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13237" CreationDate="2022-09-25T00:03:17.723" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made some cool code that I want to contribute to both Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and other Linux distos, and perhaps even upstream at the Linux Kernel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that AOSP says that they want contributions under Apache 2.0: &lt;a href=&quot;https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And other Linux distos and the Linux Kernel want GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can dual license my code under both GPL and Apache so that I can give the Apache version to AOSP and the GPL version to other linux distos?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, what would I put at the top of my code when contributing, because AOSP request this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright 2022 The Android Open Source Project&#xA;#&#xA;# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA;# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;# You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;#&#xA;#      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;#&#xA;# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;# distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&#xA;# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;# limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I have to modify that in any way to mention that GPL is also supported?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you so much for your help in adavance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28036" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T02:39:15.937" Title="Issues with contributing the same code to projects who only accept different licenses" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|gpl-2|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13236" CreationDate="2022-09-25T02:39:15.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You as sole author can license it whatever you want under as many licenses as you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are only bound on the license of your code, if your code is based on other existing code. Then you have to follow the license of the one yours is a derivative of - e. g. when you copy code from another project which you did not write in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question makes it sound like you have some idea and solution for a common problem and want to supply a pull request with necessary changes to several projects. Just make your changes and submit the patch under the license you want, individually for each project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T02:39:15.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13231" CreationDate="2022-09-25T07:14:00.400" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I still kinda an Open Source noob, but this is my understaning of 'compatibility' in your circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2 and LGPL 2.1 are NOT compatible, however if the license said &amp;quot;any later version&amp;quot; like most GPL family   boilerplates, you can interept it as &amp;quot;LGPL 3.0&amp;quot; which IS compatible with Apache. If it doesn't say any later version, you cannot distrubte your code with both libraries. Otherwise, ensure that the license you put your own code under is compatible with the code of both libraries (I would recommend either Apache 2 or LGPL 3 for simplicity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes. These licenses are compatible, which means they don't contradict each other. Comply with both terms and you will be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a lawyer, so I don't guarantee the accuracy of this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28036" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T07:14:00.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13228" CreationDate="2022-09-25T07:37:11.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great Question! I'm not a lawyer, but think I have some idea. I've come up with several 'situations' of what your project might be, if your project is none of them please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the ways Google shows there Open Source dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is an interactive command line tool, think python3, make it print something like this when you start it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;My Really Cool Program v1.0&#xA;This program contains Open Source code, type info --foss to find out about them.&#xA;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then &lt;code&gt;info --foss&lt;/code&gt; would print something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Notice for the following library: CoolLib&#xA;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) [year from original license] [fullname from orginal license]&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal&#xA;in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights&#xA;to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell&#xA;copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is&#xA;furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&#xA;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE&#xA;AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,&#xA;OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE&#xA;SOFTWARE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is just a command line tool, not interactive, every time a command is run, make it print this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MyProject v1.0 Starting...&#xA;This program contains Open Source code, run 'command_name' --foss-info to find out more&#xA;Logs from your project...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running with the flag --foss-info would bring up the same thing as &lt;code&gt;info --foss&lt;/code&gt; in the previous example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your project is a graphical application, this would be a reasonable place to put the declaration (same as command line declaration) within your UI Hierarchy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Settings Section -&amp;gt; About MyCoolProj -&amp;gt; Open Source Licenses&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, if your program is some kind of chatbot, like a Telegram bot, when you first start a conversation with the bot make it print something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Hi! I'm xyz bot, and I can help with...&#xA;I'm based on Open Source software, send the message 'foss' to learn more.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sending the message 'foss' would output the same thing as in all previous examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To your point about not many people making declarations in bots, I'm pretty sure you have to include some declaration (its not just a legal issue, morally you are obliged to give credit), but it is definitely worth avoiding a potentially costly suit by including this declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People don't include declarations, and that's probably against the law. BUT the odds of the creator actually using the bot are low, and even lower when you consider them realizing their code was used. Most people can probably get away with no declaration (even though it is wrong), but it is right, both legally and morally to include a declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps, but again, I'm not a lawyer so I don't guarantee the accuracy of these claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28036" LastEditorUserId="28036" LastEditDate="2022-09-27T10:03:15.193" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T10:03:15.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13220" CreationDate="2022-09-25T07:55:20.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there are several factors at play here, and I can shine a light on the feasibility of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Security&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give you a code example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;function handleLogin(username: String, password_guess: String) {&#xA;   listOfPasswords = CoolFileManagerLibrary.open(&amp;quot;secrets.json&amp;quot;)&#xA;   cookies.add(listOfPasswords)&#xA;   ...&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This code is open source, but you don't have to make secrets.json open source (it is data not code), so it is feasible from this angle of the security persepctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let's say Hacker A finds a security vulnerability in CoolFileManagerLibrary, and posts it on a hacking site. Hacker B read your websites code, so they know that it uses CoolFileManager library, and exactly where your website uses it, so therefore can then exploit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is bad from that perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another negative security angle goes like this: Hacker C can read your code, and discovers a MASSIVE vulnerability. Your website adds the list of passwords to cookies. If they hadn't had access to your source code, it is highly unlikely that he would know this if he didn't have access to your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, there is a massive benefit of Open Source code in the security domain. White Hat Hacker D audits your code, and finds this issue (which he wouldn't have been able to find without source code). He reports it privately to you, and you fix it up. White Hat Hacker D doesn't even need to be a security researcher, they could just be an active member who contributes to your code, or a random person just browsing your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, from personal experience, you are more likely to encounter people like White Hat Hacker D, and less like Hackers A, B and C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Competitiveness&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you come up with a really cool website idea, maybe a forum website that is better than all other websites from some reason.&#xA;That's great, but if your code is open source, websites like, ahem, Stack Exchange can just copy all your code, and give you some tiny, hard-to-find credit. Suddenly your website isn't competitive anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a solution to this however. Just use a copyleft license like the GPL. If anyone copies your code, they also have to make their code open source, which would make their website open to this issue. I forget where I got this from, but I remember reading a quote like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyleft licenses like the GPL make your code like a can of toxic waste. Your competitors can touch it, but they probably don't want to.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It couldn't be more true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for reading, and I hope I have shone a light on the pluses and minuses of open source websites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28036" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T07:55:20.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-09-25T08:48:02.507" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;the &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; licence question&lt;/a&gt; - what if I'm the kind of individual who finds this whole copyright business infinitely annoying and frustrating, and don't want to deal with legalese AT ALL? What would happen if I just wrote my piece of code, put it up public on GitHub or wherever, and NOT include any kind of licence at all? Would that still amount to &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;free to use and modify&amp;quot;? My reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No licence means no restrictions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone can just take my code and use it and I won't be able to do anything about it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone has the audacity to take my code, slap a licence on it, and then sue &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; for violating &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; copyright, I still have proof (in the form of GitHub commits/arhive.org/whatever) that I had the code first, so they are lying about them being the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that our f...abulous legal system will probably still find a way to screw me over this, otherwise it would be a popular approach. But I'm curious about why exactly is this a bad idea and not being done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28039" LastActivityDate="2022-09-25T08:48:02.507" Title="Can software be distributed WITHOUT a licence?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2022-09-25T09:06:36.393" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13234" CreationDate="2022-09-26T00:01:48.523" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are an Operating System Developer, you can also choose Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an operating system developer. If I use your software, I will choose Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that one of the rights that I have under the Apache license is to sublicense without restriction on who I sublicense to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Subject to the terms and conditions &lt;em&gt;of this License&lt;/em&gt;, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, &lt;em&gt;sublicense&lt;/em&gt;, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I make your software available, it will be available under the Apache license to everyone. The Apache license specifically and intentionally prohibits this kind of discrimination precisely to prevent people from being able to make software open source but then limit who can use it and how they can use it -- which is precisely what you want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastEditorUserId="6062" LastEditDate="2022-09-26T09:20:27.683" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T09:20:27.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13234" CreationDate="2022-09-26T12:10:03.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every company who ever thought about GPL-licensed software has paid some lawyer to read it and give them advice. That is money well spent, because there are 1000s of useful GPL licensed libraries around, and with one expense the company now knows whether to, whether not to, or how to use GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create your own license, they have to spend the same money for &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; piece of software. Actually, they have to spend more because their lawyer has never seen this license before, and we can assume that the GPL license, unlike yours, has been written by experienced lawyers to make it easy to understand for a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, if I include one GPL licensed bit of software in my application, I know that I can include a second or third for fourth one. It won't cause me any trouble. But with different license, it's risky. The terms of your license might make it impossible to include GPL licensed code, for example. Or might require them to ask and pay another lawyer. So please, don't write your own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T12:10:03.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12552" CreationDate="2022-09-26T19:01:59.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usual I am not a lawyer statement applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The COPYING.NEWLIB file says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Each file may have its own copyright/license that is embedded in the source &#xA;file.  Unless otherwise noted in the body of the source file(s), the following copyright&#xA;notices will apply to the contents of the newlib subdirectory&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The COPYING.NEWLIB further mentions that some licenses apply to specific targets only, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(10) Stephane Carrez (m68hc11-elf/m68hc12-elf targets only)&#xA;(21) Free Software Foundation LGPL License (*-linux* targets only)&#xA;(22) Xavier Leroy LGPL License (i[3456]86-*-linux* targets only)&#xA;(24) Hewlett-Packard  (hppa targets only)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore if a file has an embedded license header then the specific license there applies, otherwise &lt;strong&gt;ALL&lt;/strong&gt; licenses in COPYING.NEWLIB apply, except those that are target specific and do not match the target used during compilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28057" LastActivityDate="2022-09-26T19:01:59.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13252" CreationDate="2022-09-27T14:18:59.453" Score="5" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my research of AGPL I have found that creating REST API around AGPL licensed library is enough to make it communication at arms length and as such it bypasses the need to publish all of your codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8201/if-i-use-a-public-api-endpoint-that-has-its-source-code-licensed-under-agpl-in-m&quot;&gt;If I use a public API endpoint that has its source code licensed under AGPL in my app, do I need to disclose my source?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12168/does-using-an-agpl-3-0-software-via-its-rest-api-force-to-disclose-source-from-c&quot;&gt;Does using an AGPL 3.0 software via its REST API force to disclose source from calling software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I was interested in using iText (which is offered under AGPL and Commercial licence) for free in closed source commercial software without disclosing the source code to the user or public, creating REST API and putting it in docker container should be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I have noticed is that the text on their website describes license in a way that is contradictory to that statement. (Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buying a license is mandatory as soon as you develop commercial activities distributing the iText software inside your product &lt;strong&gt;or deploying it on a network without disclosing the source code&lt;/strong&gt; of your own applications under the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/itext/itext7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/itext/itext7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to use the AGPL license correctly?&#xA;The AGPL license comes with a couple of restrictions you should be well aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not deploy it on a network without disclosing the full source code of your own applications under the AGPL license. &lt;strong&gt;You must distribute all source code, including your own product and web-based applications&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s a legal violation to use iText Community and our open source add-ons in a &lt;strong&gt;non-AGPL environment&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/agpl-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/agpl-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how is this contradiction resolved? Are they offering it under a AGPL license only under additional conditions, are they altering the license or is that just useless flavor text which describes their (potentially wrong) understanding of AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28075" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T14:56:20.477" Title="Software licence description doesn't match AGPL licence limitations" Tags="|licensing|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13251" CreationDate="2022-09-27T14:56:20.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone is in the dual-licensing business, it is in their interest to present the Open Source license as restrictive as possible, in order to convert more users into paying customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What iText is saying about the license is entirely correct, but vague enough to make you concerned that your usage might not be AGPL-compliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant aspect of the AGPLv3 is Section 13. Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the iText guidance confuses you it is about their talk of “source code” or “environment” which the AGPL refers to more clearly as “Corresponding Source”, and their talk about “deploying” whereas the AGPL talks more specifically about remote network interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many cases, there is no meaningful difference: if you deploy a web application that includes the iText library, then AGPL does require you to provide your application's source code to all users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But your actual scenario is more nuanced, where you have wrapped the AGPL iText library in a REST API that is not publicly exposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Section 13 will only trigger if users interact with the software remotely through a network. However, you are not letting users interact with the iText-derived application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that Section 13 does somehow trigger, we'd have to think about the scope of the Corresponding Source. Since AGPL is a copyright-based license, it will only affect programs or other creative works that are &lt;em&gt;derived&lt;/em&gt; from the AGPL-covered component. REST APIs or command line interfaces can help draw a bright line that shows that two programs are clearly separate and not derived. If that is the case – but it's not necessarily the case – then the Corresponding Source would only cover the AGPL-covered library and the REST API wrapped around it, but not the clients that connect to the REST API.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly to this iText-REST example, it is generally accepted that AGPL-covered database servers do not affect the licensing of software that connects to this server. For example, MongoDB was widely used in its manner before it changed its license to the non-Open Source SSPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-09-27T14:56:20.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13255" CreationDate="2022-09-29T13:00:09.557" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to use LGPL library for one of my projects. The problem is I need to modify several methods and call there platform-dependent functions covered by NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to do it legally without showing those NDA functions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create another library under another license, link it dynamically, modify the LGPL library and call NDA functions from the second library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the same using &lt;code&gt;dlopen()&lt;/code&gt; and kind of plugin mechanism, show the plugin mechanism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move proprietary calls to another application and provide the required data via IPC, show the IPC mechanism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28086" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T07:15:30.230" Title="LGPL library and proprietary dependencies / references" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1839" CreationDate="2022-09-29T14:08:01.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the answer marked as correct[1]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you distribute libstdc++ as an independent library, you will need to follow the terms of the GPL when doing so. For example, if you distribute the library itself in object code form, you will need to provide source code to your recipients using one of the methods listed in section 6 of GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Exception has to do with being able to combine (== link) stuff from GCC into the final binary without altering its license. But shipping libstdc++.so alongside your binary requires fulfilling the GPLv3 terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1-faq.en.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28088" LastActivityDate="2022-09-29T14:08:01.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13253" CreationDate="2022-09-30T07:15:30.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You cannot modify the LGPL library in such a way that it depends on proprietary code and still comply with the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; change the LGPL library in such a way that at the relevant places it uses a callback function that should/can be provided by the user of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a callback, there is no dependency, in the legal sense, on your NDA code, so there should also be nothing preventing you from publishing the modified library as the LGPL requires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T07:15:30.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13257" CreationDate="2022-09-30T16:20:10.747" Score="6" ViewCount="2510" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming my SaaS is not a play on &amp;quot;managed hosted version of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;agpl software&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Meaning, I just call the AGPL software without modifying it (binary call/import) - using it to get some part of my SaaS work done.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do I need to disclose my source code in that case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let's say I need to use a database or a package to interact with cloud providers that is AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21617" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T16:47:24.983" Title="Using AGPL package for a SaaS?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13256" CreationDate="2022-09-30T16:47:24.983" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 section 13 only triggers when both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you use a modified version of the AGPL-covered software; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;users are interacting remotely with that software over a network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corresponding excerpt from the AGPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the “Program” in this context? While you did not modify the AGPL-covered parts, you may have created a derivative work of the AGPL-covered component by incorporating it into your software system, which would be such a modified Program. The AGPLv3 defines modification as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot; a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of an exact copy. The resulting work is called a &amp;quot;modified version&amp;quot; of the earlier work or a work &amp;quot;based on&amp;quot; the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We therefore have to distinguish cases like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the AGPL-covered software is a clearly separate program, for example a database server to which you connect via some network protocol, a separate and self-contained microservice, or a separate command-line tool&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the AGPL-covered component is a library or code snippet, which you incorporate directly into your program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, we can evaluate the AGPLv3 section 13 conditions against different scenarios.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario: AGPL component is a clearly separate program.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Then, since you didn't modify the AGPL program, section 13 doesn't apply and you can effectively treat this software as GPL-licensed: you would not be required to provide any source code in that scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had modified the AGPL-covered component, we would have to consider whether users are “interacting with it remotely through a […] network”. This would depend on the nature of your services (e.g. whether your code is only a thin proxy around the AGPL-covered program). But probably, there would be no user interaction with the modified AGPL-covered component, and section 13 would still not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only if you modified the component and users are interacting with it, then you would be required to provide the Corresponding Source for that Program – but not the source code for your other, separate programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scenario: AGPL component becomes part of your program, e.g. by including it as a library.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Then your program is a derivative work of the AGPLv3-covered component. While you not have modified that component, the Program as a whole (including the AGPLv3 parts) is still a modified version compared to the original AGPLv3 component. And since users are interacting with your SaaS program, AGPLv3 section 13 triggers. You would be required to provide the Corresponding Source for the entire Program, including the parts that you have written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-09-30T16:47:24.983" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13259" CreationDate="2022-10-01T06:47:18.993" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume somebody writes software and distributes it to customers. Since any dependency under a copyleft license (such as the GPL) would require putting the whole software under a copyleft license, those are carefully avoided by checking license statements of all dependencies and (fully recursively) their dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine the following scenario: Dependency A is used, and according to the license statement, it is published under a permissive license (such as MIT, BSD or Apache). Now a contributor C writes some kind of new feature and puts a comment in the source code: &amp;quot;This feature is licensed under the GPL.&amp;quot; The main author / maintainer M of dependency A overlooks the comment and approves the pull request. Also, there is no contributor's agreement explicitly stating that all contributions must be put under the license that already applies to A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct to assume that while most of dependency A is under a permissive license, the new feature is under the GPL? This would imply that any software using A must meet all requirements of the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For anybody using dependency A, is there a practical way to check for subtleties like this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28107" LastEditorUserId="28107" LastEditDate="2022-10-01T08:56:05.753" LastActivityDate="2022-10-01T09:46:20.527" Title="Copyleft licensed part inside permissive software" Tags="|copyleft|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13258" CreationDate="2022-10-01T07:23:51.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, A is likely some kind of library, currently permissively licensed.  C has added a feature, which A's author has accepted, but C has made it clear his/her contribution is under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not enough for A to release the new version of the library as a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chimera#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chimera&lt;/a&gt;, with different parts under different licences.  (S)he must release the library in its entirety under GPL, which is generally thought to mean that software using it must also be under GPL (though as we make clear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; other &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;questions&lt;/a&gt;, this is not yet known to be true).  It you don't want to risk having to do that, don't use the new, relicensed version of A with your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, A is currently not something you can safely use.  A's author's failure to relicense should raise a big red flag that (s)he doesn't actually understand the ins and outs of free licenses, which should worry you because of your second question.  When you use this - or any other - library, you're relying on its author and distributor to correctly track the licensing requirements of everything that went into it, and to correctly express that in the license of the library.  Evidence that A's author doesn't fully understand free licensing is good reason to be worried that (s)he has not correctly tracked and expressed these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-01T09:46:20.527" LastActivityDate="2022-10-01T09:46:20.527" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13260" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-02T00:47:48.460" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I created a GPLv3 project that uses functions from several libraries and geckodriver.exe with different licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD3, MPL 2.0 (all GPL compliant)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I put the code and copy of geckodriver.exe on GitHub repository&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I added a LICENSE.txt file with the contents of the GPLv3 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I added a LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.txt with listing the libraries I used under what licenses they are and the contents of those licenses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I added headers in each .py file with information about the use of the GPLv3 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I added information about the GPLv3 license in the GUI of the program as well as the libraries used and links to their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I added &amp;quot;SOFTWARENAME (c) 2022 MYNAME under GPLv3&amp;quot; in GUI and headers in .py&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to do anything else? Am I doing something redundant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would like to create an .exe file of my aforementioned program in auto-py-to-exe so that everyone in my company can use it. My program is licensed under GPLv3 but uses libraries licensed under MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD3 and geckodriver.exe under MPL 2.0, can I just create an one big .exe file based on the code and gecko I shared on GitHub, whether statically or dynamically linked, and distribute it in the company or am I missing something? Should I also add the created .exe file to the repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28112" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T12:45:44.487" Title="GPLv3 and executables in GPLv3" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13262" CreationDate="2022-10-05T07:50:15.067" Score="3" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OCaml compiler and many other third-party OCaml libraries are licensed under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/preview/OCaml-LGPL-linking-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GNU Lesser General Public License, you may link, statically or dynamically, a &amp;quot;work that uses the OCaml Core System&amp;quot; with a publicly distributed version of the OCaml Core System to produce an executable file containing portions of the OCaml Core System, and distribute that executable file under terms of your choice, without any of the additional requirements listed in clause 6 of the GNU Lesser General Public License. By &amp;quot;a publicly distributed version of the OCaml Core System&amp;quot;, we mean either the unmodified OCaml Core System as distributed by INRIA, or a modified version of the OCaml Core System that is distributed under the conditions defined in clause 2 of the GNU Lesser General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this exception &amp;quot;removes&amp;quot; section 6 of the LGPL, how does it differ in substance from using a non-copyleft license such as the MIT or BSD licenses? What advantages are there to using the LGPL with this linking exception, when compared to using the MIT or BSD licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T09:55:57.887" Title="How does the OCaml LGPL Linking Exception differ from using a non-copyleft license?" Tags="|lgpl|exceptions|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13261" CreationDate="2022-10-05T09:55:57.887" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difference with using a permissive license, and also an advantage if you choose LGPL+linking exception, is that changes to the library (the OCaml Core System in this case) cannot be made under a closed-source license but rather must be made available under the LGPL (possibly with the same linking exception) when they are distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, the permissive licenses allow that subsequent changes are licensed under a closed-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-10-05T09:55:57.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13264" CreationDate="2022-10-05T20:32:17.097" Score="5" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have successfully developed an &lt;strong&gt;Android App&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Android Studio&lt;/em&gt; but the final thing which is disturbing me is that, my app contains code from a &lt;strong&gt;GitHub&lt;/strong&gt; repository that has &lt;code&gt;BSD license&lt;/code&gt; as given below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;BSD License&#xA;&#xA;For WhatsApp Stickers software&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) WhatsApp Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved.&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,&#xA;are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA; * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this&#xA;   list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;&#xA; * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,&#xA;   this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation&#xA;   and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&#xA; * Neither the name WhatsApp nor the names of its contributors may be used to&#xA;   endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific&#xA;   prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND&#xA;ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED&#xA;WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE&#xA;DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR&#xA;ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES&#xA;(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;&#xA;LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON&#xA;ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT&#xA;(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS&#xA;SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to use this above &lt;code&gt;BSD License&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question # 1:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i write Eg: &lt;code&gt;Copyright 2022 · Company Name · All Rights Reserved&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Some Rights Reserved&lt;/code&gt; in my app &lt;strong&gt;About&lt;/strong&gt; section/activity. Because i do not hold whole app copyright, some code is resued from a &lt;em&gt;GitHub repository&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question # 2:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i have to provide this above &lt;code&gt;BSD License&lt;/code&gt; in my app and have to mention the &lt;strong&gt;link&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;em&gt;GitHub repository&lt;/em&gt; from where i have taken the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question # 3:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should i also have to publish my app on a &lt;code&gt;BSD License&lt;/code&gt; or do I have a right to decide for myself as I wish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question # 4:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I violate &lt;code&gt;BSD License&lt;/code&gt;, will my &lt;strong&gt;Google Play Console&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Developer Account&lt;/em&gt;) license will be terminated permanently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28134" LastEditorUserId="28134" LastEditDate="2022-10-06T18:17:19.410" LastActivityDate="2022-10-06T18:17:19.410" Title="Reuse of source code having BSD License in Android App" Tags="|licensing|copyright|github|bsd|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13263" CreationDate="2022-10-06T06:31:09.413" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can and should add your own copyright notice, alongside the existing copyright notice which you should maintain.  The presence of both copyright notices will show that multiple authors have a copyright interest in the resulting work, which you do.  You shouldn't, and neither should the original authors, add &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; we discuss that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/4403/458&quot;&gt;elsewhere here&lt;/a&gt;, but the upshot it that it's a holdover from an early global copyright convention which has been entirely superseded, and is now seen as being actively unhelpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must preserve the license text, as that is one of the conditions on the BSD licence's copyright grant.  You do not need to link to upstream, though no harm is done if you choose to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You have no power to waive the conditions on upstream's grant, so you can't publish under eg CC0.  But you may add more conditions, so as I read it you may publish the whole resulting work under eg GPL if you wish to.  This is discussed in more length &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/4194/2870&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your developer account may doubtless be terminated for all sorts of reasons, some of which will be outlined in the agreement you have with Google.  Whether Google would choose to exercise these powers because you violated the BSD licence conditions, nobody here can say; it's up to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In general, you shouldn't ask large, multi-part questions here, but I do congratulate you on a clearly-written first question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-10-06T06:31:09.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13275" CreationDate="2022-10-07T00:33:14.433" Score="3" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This open-source code is an API (let's call it X-API), which is meant to be used by businesses running their own closed-source APIs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let other companies/individuals interact with X-API internally without having to disclose their own code (interact via server requests like GET, POST, etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But also prevent competitors from building on top of (or extending) X-API without open-sourcing their own code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be able to potentially license to Enterprise clients in the future to sustain product development&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any reason to prefer MPLv2 over AGPLv3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my understanding correct: if the users only use X-API internally via its server endpoints, then they don't have to open-source any of their proprietary code, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a specific reason Hashicorp has stuck with MPLv2 throughout their repos?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28143" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T07:46:33.193" Title="Is AGPLv3 or MPLv2 better for an open-source API meant to be integrated into closed-source customer APIs?" Tags="|license-recommendation|derivative-works|agpl-3.0|copyleft|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13267" CreationDate="2022-10-07T04:57:29.783" Score="3" ViewCount="1005" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD/MIT license only mentions things about redistribution. But I don't see any restrictions on the initial release of a BSD-licensed program. Is it possible that I write a program, but only release its binary under the BSD-3-Clause license? If so, why are BSD/MIT licensed programs considered to be open-source/free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28146" LastActivityDate="2022-10-17T06:34:19.367" Title="Release a BSD-licensed but closed-source program?" Tags="|open-source-definition|free-software-definition|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2022-10-07T06:00:09.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to release binary-only under a permissively-free licence?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, absolutely.  We have other questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/9425/458&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4847/458&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) here about that, but to me they boil down to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it's a bit weird, you probably shouldn't do it, but you can&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, why are BSD/MIT licensed programs considered to be open-source/free?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're not, necessarily.  Source code that you receive under BSD or MIT is considered to be free software.  Binaries would just be considered freeware, because although you're not paying for the binary, you aren't (in any meaningful sense) getting some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-07T14:47:19.267" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T14:47:19.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13270" CreationDate="2022-10-07T08:17:28.043" Score="5" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For my post, I assume that for software developers or authors of educational texts, an important part of choosing the proper license for their work is attribution&lt;/strong&gt;: as the original author, I would want my work to be attributed to me when it's reused. Furthermore, I may want to assure that it's not allowed for someone else to reclaim my work as its own without at least violating de terms of use of my publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that a lot of times Open-Educational Resources (OER) are linked to CreativeCommons (CC) without being actually compatible. I'll give two examples to illustrate my claim and would like to hear your comments handling the publication process in these examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example I&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that I want to publish the LaTeX-source code of some lecture notes I wrote as an OER. I want others to reuse the code for their own lectures but also for the produced artifact (the PDF) to carry the proper attribution. What license should I choose and for what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Idea (i): only release the PDF with a CC-BY license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that this is the standard scenario would be to opt for a CC-BY licensing of the PDF. If someone uses a passage from the PDF, proper attribution needs to be given. However, in this case, I should not publish the TeX-source as well under an open-source license, as the user could then just copy my TeX-source, and generate an &amp;quot;attribution free&amp;quot; PDF copy of my lecture notes basically reclaiming my work as their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Idea (ii): only release the Source-code with the &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; license&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the previous section, I think that it does not make sense to license the PDF if the source is also published under an open-source license. But which license should one then choose to assure proper attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Example II with a twist&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that I wrote some JavaScript code, in the sense of an interactive exercise/quiz for students. In practice, the JavaScript code is included on a webpage and used by students. I want other teachers to be able to use the quizzes in their course under the condition of attributing the source code to myself but without the need to link the exercise's source code (which contains at least a hint of a solution to the quiz). Is there a license that classifies for this scenario? I feel like under a CC-BY license for the JavaScript code, the quiz that is displayed in the web browser of the student could classify as a derivate and therefore must carry a proper attribution including a link to the original source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28032" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T12:40:34.517" Title="Are Source-code-based Open Educational Resources and CC-Licenses Incompatible?" Tags="|license|creative-commons|attribution|source-code|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2022-10-07T08:24:10.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A binary-only distribution of software is very common for commercial software, but it is also possible to distribute binaries with a permissive license like BSD or MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of this strategy might be in the ease of distribution and re-distribution. However, it might also be a double-edged sword, because the users don't know what's in it (possible malware, patent claims), so users will be hesitant to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive licenses commonly allow modifications, translations etc, and that includes reverse engineering and de-compiling. Therefore, for experienced programmers, there is a path to the source code related to the binary, unless code obfuscation techniques have been deployed (which again should trigger even more doubts among users).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So should a binary-only distribution be considered 'open-source/free'? Definitely not. It raises a lot of questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T08:24:10.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13268" CreationDate="2022-10-07T12:40:34.517" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may license both the PDF and (separately) the TeX-sources under a CC license. There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;statement that CC licenses are not useful for source code&lt;/a&gt;, but this is related to software and the TeX source code is different, it is a form of a document description language, and therefore CC licenses are useful. If you just care about Attribution, then CC-BY is fine, CC-BY-SA would be another option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have software (JavaScript) code in your document, then you can license that with a different license (e.g. MIT or Apache) if you want. A clear statement in the document is sufficient (e.g. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;All JavaScript code contained in this document is Copyright [myself] and licensed under the MIT license&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). If the code itself is not included in the TeX or PDF, but on a server, then you can just license it under (for example) MIT or Apache license by including the respective information in the header of each JavaScript source code file. That's very easy and straight-forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T12:40:34.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13266" CreationDate="2022-10-07T20:24:41.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open-source licenses are licenses suitable for releasing source code of computer software. Some of such licenses (like GPL) are &lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt;, they require you to release the source code of your own software based on open source code, others (like BSD) don't have such requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, most compiler toolchains include some source code. One example is ARM/Cortex core library CMSIS (Cortex Software Interface), which was initially released under a BSD-like license and later switched to Apache. Yet a lot of ARM software is commercial and closed source. All the authors have to do is to mention that their software includes code from ARM Ltd. to fulfill the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2022-10-07T20:24:41.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13276" CreationDate="2022-10-08T05:29:22.980" Score="4" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an App, and considering making it open source. However, I'd like to retain a certain level of creative control of the project-- is there a way I can make it so that, if it's forked, it can't be published under the same App name? Am I looking for trademark, not copyright, and how would I go about doing that? Is there any way to do it without paying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along with that, I'd like to make it so that any substantial copies require displaying something to the end user attributing it to the original project (not just in the source code), but using individual components wouldn't require that level of attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28155" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T10:33:37.940" Title="What is an Open Source license that prevents using the name of the software, and requires user-facing attribution if adopted?" Tags="|copyright|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13265" CreationDate="2022-10-09T09:12:58.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;AGPL is probably not a great idea.  Whilst I agree that interaction with the covered code via the (fully-documented) X-API is likely to insulate the interacting code from the full requirements of AGPL (and other strong copyleft licences) many companies are (rightly or wrongly) particularly suspicious of AGPL code, and forbid its internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MPL is a per-file copyleft licence without the remote-user-interaction language of the AGPL (eg, s13 of AGPLv3), so likely to be more successful for the purpose.  That said, it is in my opinion one of the less-well-understood free licences, and you may experience some pushback on that basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were me, I'd go for GPL with an explicit API exception (along the lines of the linux kernel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syscall exception&lt;/a&gt;) that makes it clear that use of your code via X-API does not create a derived work.  That's a well-understood mechanism that puts goal one front-and-centre (where potential business users can see it) whilst also achieving goal two.  Goal three is also easy provided you remain the sole rightsholder, or require a CLA from contributors that explicitly permits commercial relicensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific reason Hashicorp has stuck with MPLv2 throughout their repos?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of one, though as a developer of popular code, once you've picked a licence it can be quite difficult to change it.  You'd really have to ask them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T09:12:58.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13274" CreationDate="2022-10-09T10:33:37.940" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're talking about two separate issues: controlling the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; of a project, and requiring user-visible &lt;em&gt;attribution&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the below points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;of course you can register a trademark for your project name, though this might be expensive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;control of a name does not equal control over a project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some Open Source licenses have name-related terms, but I can't recommend them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nearly all Open Source licenses require user-visible attribution notices, and some make fairly detailed requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it probably doesn't make sense to distinguish between substantial copies vs individual components&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, I'd suggest thinking about whether you are more interested in permissive or copyleft licensing, and then pick one of the commonly used licenses like Apache-2.0 or (L)GPL-3.0, all of which have detailed attribution requirements. If appropriate, you could add further exceptions to those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Controlling the name of a project&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks are largely orthogonal to Open Source licensing issues, and indeed registering a trademark is a common way for large projects to maintain control over the “official” version. Generally, Open Source licenses only allow usage of trademarks as necessary for attribution purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're considering registering a trademark for your project, it would be useful to read up on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trademark policy history of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird&lt;/a&gt;. Mozilla uses exactly such trademarks to prevent unofficial builds to be distributed as Firefox/Thunderbird. However, the exact terms of this policy was incompatible with the policies of the Debian Linux distribution, so that Debian instead provided rebranded versions called “Iceweasel” and “Icedove”. This could eventually be resolved, though. Notable current Firefox forks include the Tor Browser and LibreWolf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Open Source licenses try to implement a trademark-like mechanism without having to register a costly trademark, but I don't think it's particularly advisable. As an example of this, the Artistic License 1.0 (used by Perl) allows forks of the projects to use the same name if they remain compatible to the upstream project, otherwise they must change the name, in particular the name of the installed executables. This allows users to install different Perl forks side by side. The SIL Open Font License 1.0 has a similar “Reserved Font Name” mechanism. But I recommend neither of these licenses for general purpose software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of wading into trademark or other naming issues, many licenses just require that changes to the upstream version are clearly marked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when related projects have distinct names, this can sometimes cause confusion for users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Oracle acquired Sun's OpenOffice.org and stalled development, nearly the entire community forked the project as LibreOffice. Thus, LibreOffice is the continuation of the OpenOffice project, despite having a name change. The rights to the name of the stagnant OpenOffice project were subsequently donated to Apache. Nevertheless, many people keep installing the dead OpenOffice software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GCC compiler almost had a similar history, with development stagnating under FSF leadership, and the community EGCS fork thriving. The community split was eventually resolved when the FSF blessed EGCS as the official GCC project and agreed to a community-led governance approach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;uBlock is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-completely-unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublock.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitely not&lt;/a&gt; associated with the excellent uBlock Origin adblocker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at these examples, I think the best way to stay in control of the project and the name (even without trademarks) is to keep an open ear for user needs and to welcome reasonable contributions. But even if development effort migrates to a different fork, many end users will stick with the original name that they recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When publishing apps in an app store, don't expect licenses or trademarks to prevent copycats. Even for proprietary apps, it is common for clones to spring up. Criminals don't care about your rights. The question is then less “are the imitators allowed to do that?” but rather “can you force the store to take down the imitations?”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Requiring attribution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all Open Source licenses require some degree of attribution, perhaps with the exception of 0BSD. The licenses should also generally be interpreted so that this attribution must be visible to end users, though not necessarily prominently. For example, the BSD-3-clause license requires such notices to appear “in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution”. For mobile apps, it is common to have a screen in the app settings that collects attribution notices for all Open Source components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the most commonly used licenses, the Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0 licenses have detailed requirements about how notices be presented to end users. The goal here is not necessarily to provide glory and fame to the original developer, but to inform end users about their rights to use, inspect, share, and modify some or all of the underlying components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-2.0 provides a NOTICE file mechanism. The contents of this file must be provided as a “readable copy” “in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 (and AGPL-3.0 and LGPL-3.0) allows verbatim copies to be shared as long as existing notices are kept intact. For modified versions, there must be “prominent notice” that the work was modified. If the software displays “appropriate legal notices” via some user interface, the modified version must continue to do so. Such notices are further defined in the license – in particular, obnoxious advertisements would not be appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interactive user interface displays “Appropriate Legal Notices” to the extent that it includes a convenient and prominently visible feature that (1) displays an appropriate copyright notice, and (2) tells the user that there is no warranty for the work (except to the extent that warranties are provided), that licensees may convey the work under this License, and how to view a copy of this License. If the interface presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a prominent item in the list meets this criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of such interactive notices, consider the output I see when I launch the GDB debugger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GNU gdb (Ubuntu 12.0.90-0ubuntu1) 12.0.90&#xA;Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later &amp;lt;http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html&amp;gt;&#xA;This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.&#xA;There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.&#xA;Type &amp;quot;show copying&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;show warranty&amp;quot; for details.&#xA;[...]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have elided the part of the message that links to the manual and explains how to report bugs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 also allows additional attribution- and name-related requirements to be &lt;em&gt;added&lt;/em&gt; to the license, if they are explicitly allowed under Section 7(a) through (f).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention that you want to distinguish attribution requirements between substantial copies and individual components. I think this is unlikely to work. First of all, any such boundary is difficult to define in a reasonable manner, so it is best to avoid such distinctions. Second, existing licenses do not really make this distinction and instead provide reasonable but fairly low-key attribution requirements for any kind of derivative work. So you'd have to create a custom license, which can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1445&quot;&gt;problematic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you really wanted to make such a distinction, you could add a rider to an existing license that provides an exception to its attribution terms. The GPL-3.0 license family explicitly anticipates such exceptions in Section 7. Just like the LGPL-3.0 is an exception from the GPL's requirement to provide the Corresponding Source Code for the entire application, you could create an exception from the license's requirement to provide attribution. In principle, a similar approach could also be applied to other license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-10-09T10:33:37.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T19:41:39.180" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have created a new Android project. Even at the initial state, there is a project template and a lot of necessary/unnecessary files created by Android Studio. Now I want to publish this project on GitHub, with a very permissive license (let's say The Unlicense). How would this work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I have the right to license my own code with whatever license I want. But there are files (libraries, assets, config etc.) that I don't own inside the project. Maybe they are licensed under a less permissive and incompatible license (for example Apache License) or don't have a license at all. Would it be right if I add a LICENSE file to my repo's root and put the license text for my license (for example The Unlicense) in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is not specific to Android Studio, it is just an example. Even some CLI tools initialize projects with such files as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28176" LastActivityDate="2022-10-12T19:41:39.180" Title="Licensing projects initialized from a template" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-12T20:37:04.597" Score="2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm considering releasing the source code of an App as Copyleft, but would like some individual components (just not the core project) to be used under a more permissive MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would this work? Can I have a top-level LICENSE file that's Copyleft, and then contain LICENSE files in sub-directories or at the top of files, and specifically state those directories (or particular files) are MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this cause issues for large organizations that scan for Copyleft software and prevent their developers from using it? I'd expect that, since it would be copied instead of downloaded through some package manager, it wouldn't be an issue for those developers, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28155" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-13T19:42:55.960" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T19:42:55.960" Title="Can I license certain components of my software as MIT, but have the overall software be Copyleft?" Tags="|gpl|mit|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13265" CreationDate="2022-10-13T07:35:36.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;MPL2 is a weak copyleft license that applies at file-level only i.e. only to your library files. It's a great license for the purpose that you have described. Your users can statically or dynamically link to your library with no issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use MPL2 without Appendix B, your competitors will be able to relicense it under LGPLv2.1 and circumvent the patent retaliation clause of MPL2. On the other hand, without Appendix B, software licensed under LGPLv2.1 and GPLv2 will be able to use your library without license incompatibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL, like GPL (without exception), is not suitable as it forces your users to release all of their source code, and not just extensions to your library. AGPL also has the remote-user-interaction clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other two suitable licenses are LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv3. Users would normally only dynamically link to LGPL-licensed libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPLv3 is overall better than LGPLv2.1, including for unusual linking methods (e.g. C++ template header-only projects), patent grant, patent retaliation etc. but it has the tivoization clause which some companies avoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're concerned about LGPLv3's tivoization clause, you can add on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0-linking-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3 linking exception&lt;/a&gt;, which waives the requirement of Installation Information (section 4e). With this exception, your users can also statically or dynamically link to your library with no issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If users interact with your software API only via sockets (inter-process communication), then you can simply use GPLv2 or GPLv3 too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The viral effects of GPL only applies to static and dynamic linking. It doesn't apply to communication via sockets/ IPC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPLv3 also has the tivoization clause, same as LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-13T07:46:33.193" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T07:46:33.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13279" CreationDate="2022-10-13T08:39:06.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. It's possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, your overall software (assuming it's a standalone server process and not a library), can be licensed under GPLv2 or GPLv3, both strong copyleft licenses, but an accompanying library to communicate with your server software through sockets, can be licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example, is that your overall software is a library licensed under LGPLv2.1, LGPLv3 or MPL2, which are all weak copyleft licenses, but you may include example code showing how to use your library, and this example code can be licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T08:39:06.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13279" CreationDate="2022-10-13T09:38:03.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible provided you're the sole rightsholder, but it's fairly pointless: anybody downstream who modifies the software will need to release it &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; under GPL, as per (eg) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s5c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes more sense is to release the whole of your app under GPLv3, but in addition package and release your libraries &lt;em&gt;separately&lt;/em&gt; under MIT, so that people wishing to use just those libraries can come and get them from you on permissive terms.  You might even want to put a note in your app's source that the libraries can be had directly from you on permissive terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you follow this path, and your software becomes popular and you start to get contributions, note that you will need to take care handling contributions from people who send patches to the library.  If they have the library as part of the whole app, those patches will be under GPL, and you have no power to vary that, and so cannot add them to your MIT-licensed version.  This can be overcome by ensuring that all contributors to your library complete a CLA that explicitly permits release of their contributions under GPL and/or MIT, as you deem appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-13T10:03:06.490" LastActivityDate="2022-10-13T10:03:06.490" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13284" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-13T17:08:24.683" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;A website lists numerous aggregate clauses for systems that include open source software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/open-source-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/open-source-software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In effect, rather than list the individual components and licenses, the aggregate clauses basically state, &amp;quot;We use open source software licensed under Apache, GPL, and other licenses.&amp;quot; However, they list neither the components, nor indicate what components subscribe to which OSS license, nor provide the full OSS license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.support.xerox.com/en-bz/content/44482&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xerox PostScript Driver&lt;/a&gt; includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE.  The Software may include code developed by one or more third parties (&amp;quot;Third Party Software&amp;quot;).  Some Third Party Software may be subject to other terms and conditions that may be found in an open source software disclosure package provided with the Software or available for download with the product documentation.  Notwithstanding the terms and conditions of this Agreement, the Third Party Software is licensed to you subject to the terms and conditions of the software license agreement identified in the open source software disclosure.  If the third party terms and conditions include licenses that provide for the availability of source code (such as the GNU General Public License), the open source software disclosure or the media on which the Software may be delivered will contain the source code or provide instructions where a copy of such source code can be obtained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For another example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/legal/legal_agreement/license_agreement/group0/eb/8e/f9/c1/9e/64/49/95/SLA0048/files/SLA0048.txt/jcr:content/translations/en.SLA0048.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SLA0048&lt;/a&gt; includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some portion of the software package may contain software subject to Open Source Terms (as defined below) applicable for each such portion (“Open Source Software”), as further specified in the software package. Such Open Source Software is supplied under the applicable Open Source Terms and is not subject to the terms and conditions of license hereunder. “Open Source Terms” shall mean any open source license which requires as part of distribution of software that the source code of such software is distributed therewith or otherwise made available, or open source license that substantially complies with the Open Source definition specified at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensource.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.opensource.org&lt;/a&gt; and any other comparable open source license such as for example GNU General Public License (GPL), Eclipse Public License (EPL), Apache Software License, BSD license and MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some vendors list each component's licensing terms, such as Oracle's redistribution of Debian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E56021_01/html/E24527/z40001041148957.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E56021_01/html/E24527/z40001041148957.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these software packages that have their own licensing terms pose a few practical problems. First, collating the list of licenses is worse than herding cats. Consider the following command:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;find /usr/share/ -type f -name &amp;quot;*copyright*&amp;quot; -exec grep -i &amp;quot;^license:&amp;quot; {} ; | sort | uniq -i&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This produces a long and inconsistent list of licenses (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writeurl.com/text/33u5sa1rtu89rmksr7mn/0amgcvy2f3l0a768jigu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://textdoc.co/ES8DPtQ0k1wMr9X5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharetext.me/ebyxhwrmr5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) that isn't guaranteed to be exhaustive. Moreover, it'd take over twelve hours to read all the &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; agreements. Nobody will spend two hours reading such agreements, much less twelve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are such aggregate license clauses legal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When redistributing a product containing software that has transient dependencies, must the End User License Agreement list all the constituent third-party licenses to end users?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it be sufficient to instruct the user where to find the licenses on the system for all the various components (e.g., &lt;code&gt;/usr/share/doc/*/copyright&lt;/code&gt;) as part of an aggregation clause in the EULA?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27946" LastEditorUserId="27946" LastEditDate="2022-10-18T16:53:25.287" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T06:03:17.610" Title="Are aggregate licensing terms legal?" Tags="|license|redistribution|eula|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13286" CreationDate="2022-10-14T08:55:15.893" Score="2" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a game and want to properly license it, but I don't know how handle these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I license the source code under &lt;code&gt;BSD-3.0&lt;/code&gt; and the artwork under &lt;code&gt;CC BY 4.0&lt;/code&gt;. This project depends on author A's library-X (licensed under &lt;code&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/code&gt;) to properly work, and one of the picture in this project (picture-Y.jpg) is downloaded from the internet, created by author B long time ago, licensed under &lt;code&gt;CC BY 2.0&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I license and credit them by adding two text file &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;credits.txt&lt;/code&gt; in my project directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contents of &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The source code of &amp;lt;My Game&amp;gt; is licensed under:&#xA;&#xA;The 3-Clause BSD License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright 2022 &amp;lt;My Name&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:&#xA;&#xA;1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&#xA;&#xA;2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&#xA;&#xA;3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&#xA;&#xA;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;The documentation and artwork of &amp;lt;My Game&amp;gt; is licensed under:&#xA;&#xA;CC BY 4.0&#xA;&#xA;This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contents of &lt;code&gt;credits.txt&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The &amp;lt;Library X&amp;gt; is created by &amp;lt;Author A&amp;gt;, licensed under:&#xA;&#xA;Apache License&#xA;Version 2.0, January 2004&#xA;http://www.apache.org/licenses/ &#xA;&#xA;Copyright 201X &amp;lt;Author A&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA;you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;&#xA;    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;&#xA;Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&#xA;WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;limitations under the License.&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;The &amp;lt;&amp;quot;Picture Y.jpg&amp;quot;&amp;gt; is created by &amp;lt;Author B&amp;gt;, licensed under:&#xA;&#xA;CC BY 2.0&#xA;&#xA;This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this game project properly licensed? If not, How to correct it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28188" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-10-17T13:16:31.833" LastActivityDate="2022-10-17T13:16:31.833" Title="How to license my game project's artwork and source code, and credit others' artwork, library?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13285" CreationDate="2022-10-14T13:08:45.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To a large extent, your project seems to be properly licensed, but I do have some remarks/improvements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The CC BY 2.0 image does not only need to have credits in your repository, but also in your game itself in a format that is accessible to players of your game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is good to clearly add an indication to your &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; file that there are differently licensed 3-rd party parts and that people should look look at the &lt;code&gt;credits.txt&lt;/code&gt; file to learn about those parts and their licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You should have a copy of the applicable license and a copyright line in each source file you created/modified to ensure the information doesn't get lost when the file gets separated from the rest of your repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same goes for your artwork, where you can add the information in the metadata of the files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-10-14T13:08:45.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-15T16:22:50.043" Score="1" ViewCount="1377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about MySQL Connector/j License. This is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). However, I do not fully understand this. If I program a thing, like in my case a Discord bot, and want to sell it with the code, for example, am I allowed to do that so easily? I have used this MySQL connector in my maven project. I have only found something about it if I change their code, which I don't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how the import from the connector looks like in my project with Maven (maybe you need it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;groupId&amp;gt;mysql&amp;lt;/groupId&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;artifactId&amp;gt;mysql-connector-java&amp;lt;/artifactId&amp;gt;&#xA;    &amp;lt;version&amp;gt;8.0.30&amp;lt;/version&amp;gt;&#xA;&amp;lt;/dependency&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28194" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-10-16T13:53:08.380" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T13:53:08.380" Title="MySQL Connector/J License" Tags="|licensing|license|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12457" CreationDate="2022-10-15T22:47:37.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand all the details but it sounds like GCC is one process licensed under GPL3 and it depends on libA, while toolB which depends on libB which depends on libA is another process, and it's non-open-source. libA is BSD-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the GPL3-licensed process interacts with the non-open-source process only via sockets. They don't share any memory space. Furthermore GCC has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linking exception&lt;/a&gt; for its runtime libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The viral effects of GPL3 applies to static and dynamic linking. It doesn't apply to interaction between processes through sockets or other IPCs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Totally different processes depending on the same BSD-licensed library doesn't propagate the viral effects of GPL3 unless the BSD-licensed library depends on software that's licensed under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it sounds legally compliant to me although I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-15T22:52:51.273" LastActivityDate="2022-10-15T22:52:51.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13287" CreationDate="2022-10-16T13:13:01.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MySQL Connector/j is distributed under the GPLv2 license with an additional FOSS permission. This means that you can use the connector only in a project that uses a recognized open-source license and where the source code is distributed to the users of the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-source licenses allow commercial use, but they give the recipients also the right to distribute the software further. This means that a business model that depends on selling copies of the software is not viable, because your first customer is allowed to re-sell the software (and do it at a lower price).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you are allowed to sell your Discord bot, but only with the full sources and under an open-source license. That in turn means that your customers can become your competitors as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-10-16T13:13:01.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13332" CreationDate="2022-10-16T14:44:28.007" Score="2" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where I have exactly to put the LGPL copyright notice? I mean, I know I have to put on the code, but do I have to put in the program interface? Or I can just put it on the file of code? And do I have to have a file with the copyrights notices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Pygame and PySimpleGUI, both licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS.: I’m creating a new project, not just modifying another one that already exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28087" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T10:17:04.190" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T10:17:04.190" Title="Where exactly I have to put the copyright notice of LGPL?" Tags="|lgpl|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-18T08:53:34.900" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote an application in Java. I have a JavaSE-1.8 (jre) execution environment in my project. Do I need any license to distribute the application for commercial purposes? Or does the client need any license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28213" LastActivityDate="2022-10-18T08:53:34.900" Title="Java Application for comercial use" Tags="|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13296" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13298" CreationDate="2022-10-18T15:05:53.860" Score="0" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been the only author (or at least the author of 99.9% of code) on a project that initially started as a masters research project at a research organisation. After completing my studies I was offered a full time position at the research org and the repository found its way into a product developed there. I continued development on it while there to improve it but I was still the only person working on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After several years I moved to another research company, and kept working on the project on the side (as part of my PhD) before finding a use for it at the new place. I received a little bit of cash (put aside for staff &amp;quot;pet projects&amp;quot;) to continue working on it during work hours and to develop use cases with colleagues. After a year or two I'm looking to move and the current company wants to tie up loose strings on the pet project. They're looking to clarify the licencing, authorship and ownership details of the project to avoid any issues down the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it started as a student project my initial licencing was a little bit scattershot. Some repo's have GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE on them, some have none, some have always been in my public git profile, some others are forked from the old companies git group.&#xA;What the new company is suggesting is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add an authorship/contributing file to each repo showing who has made commits (basically only me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add MIT licences (or any licence really) to each repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;List New Org, Old Org and Myself as &amp;quot;IP owners&amp;quot; of the codebase and show the dates that each started/ended funding the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First prize would be to receive a letter from Old Org and New Org stating that they accept the open source licence for the work (There &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be an issue with Old Org, they have a record of letting projects die rather than let go of control).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a best practice on how to open source old work that has been developed at multiple locations, through multiple source of funding? Is there any way to prevent this biting me a year or so from now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to questions/assumptions from @martin-in-aut:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i)   - All code is currently published to a public git repo with licences attached. This was originally forked from Old Org private repo after I left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii)  - All code developed while at New Org is published with OSS licences the enthusiastic permission of New Org. Before leaving Old Org manager was notified that OSS licences had been attached but code was not made public. There is nothing in writing from Old Org and their policies regarding OSS is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iii) - There is no attribution attached to any of the code, no patents or copywrite obtained. There have been a few journal papers published regarding the results where I'm the author but they don't make mention of the git repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28214" LastEditorUserId="28214" LastEditDate="2022-10-19T08:12:42.627" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T08:12:42.627" Title="How to open source a project developed at several companies by a single author" Tags="|licensing|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13284" CreationDate="2022-10-19T06:03:17.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These aggregate notices are legally OK, there is no reason why they are not as long as all the requirements of the individual licenses are fulfilled (e.g. delivery of a plain text copy of the license language where required, delivery of copyright attribution and notice files where required,...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aggregate license notices are not an EULA. Therefore the end user does not have to agree to each of the OSS licenses individually before receiving/using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where 'transient dependencies' are shipped with the software, all of the requirements of the licenses of these dependencies need to be fulfilled. The requirements are not limited to direct dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many OSS licenses it is sufficient to have the legalese, copyright attribution and notice files in a separate, dedicated subdirectory (if it is easy to be found by a reasonable person). However, some OSS licenses require that this information is visible somewhere in the GUI of the software (if a GUI exists). Therefore many projects have a page to display this (e.g. in Firefox the page about:license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are looking for software to help you identify the licenses used in a project, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt; or any tool recommended by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openchainproject.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Chain Project&lt;/a&gt; might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T06:03:17.610" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13296" CreationDate="2022-10-19T07:45:43.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you have seen yourself, it is a bit messy, but there is a path forward to analyze your position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have to make a few assumptions (and you have to verify if these are fulfilled).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) all of the code has been published (none is currently in a    private/corporate repository).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii) code that has been developed    while you were employee of an organization has been published with    the consent of that organization and they agreed that you put it    under the OSS licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(iii) the copyright attribution of all code    is correct (even for the 0.1% of the code that is not from yourself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume that (i) ... (iii) are all OK and you have something in writing which confirms that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tough questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Is there any code, which you developed during your employment (and&#xA;during working hours?) which has been published without attaching a&#xA;license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) What do the employment agreements say about such&#xA;software? Are there any policies and procedures w.r.t. 'pet projects'&#xA;which you have agreed to comply with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Have your employers provided&#xA;any copyright attribution to you for the code they took from your&#xA;project into their product? Have your employers respected the license&#xA;terms of the OSS licenses attached to your code when they released&#xA;their products?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) Do your (former) employers have an issue&#xA;with the project moving with you to new employers, because they&#xA;used a version for a commercial product? How is that position compatible with assumption (ii)?  You don't mention that your&#xA;first employer has interfered with it when you moved to the second&#xA;employer. Did your former employers take any action which indicates&#xA;that they have accepted the situation, e.g. has your first employer&#xA;continued to use the code from your own repo with the improvements&#xA;you developed while employed for the second employer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a), if there is code which does not have OSS license terms yet, but which is published and where you are the sole author, then you should chose a license and publish it on Git. If there is code from another author in this code without license, then you should either come to an agreement with the other author(s) or remove the code of the other author(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For b) you might need a lawyer to understand what you have agreed to. If there is a conflict with (ii) then you need a lawyer to understand which part prevails. This might become the ultimate roadblock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For c) this could provide support for you and your ownership claim for the code, or it could be a roadblock. If company A used your code and you were aware of it, and they did not respect the license terms (e.g. of GPL) but you never put them on notice then you might need legal advice. This point might pose a potential threat for your employer if they used GPL code in a closed-source product, so they might go ballistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For d) if you own the code, or if it was rightfully published with the consent of the employer, then you don't need any additional agreement with them. If they even have knowingly benefited from the code developed while you were employed elsewhere they have weakened their own ownership claim. But all of that depends on the answer to b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually it is best to seek a conversation instead of a fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T07:45:43.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-19T17:48:06.557" Score="2" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have acquired a source code that is &lt;code&gt;Copyright (c) XYZ&lt;/code&gt; according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 3-clause license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I modify this source code and protect the end result software under a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software#Legal_basis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proprietary license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does BSD 3-clause license allow gaining such protections for modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28222" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T18:55:50.070" Title="Does BSD 3-clause license allow gaining protection for modifications to the original source code?" Tags="|license|derivative-works|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13299" CreationDate="2022-10-19T18:55:50.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Code that is licensed under BSD-3-clause can be included into proprietary software, yes. But this doesn't change the license of the code you copied. It remains under the BSD-3-clause license, and with it the attribution requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viewed from a different perspective, yes, you are allowed to modify code licensed under BSD-3-clause, and you can license those modifications however you want. The modified software as a whole then has proprietary parts and BSD-3-clause covered parts. For end users, this effectively makes the software as a whole proprietary, but from your perspective you still have to fulfill the license conditions like providing the required attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like other permissive Open Source licenses (MIT, Apache-2.0, …), the BSD-3-clause requires that you give any recipients of the software a copy of the copyright+license notice, essentially providing the entire license header. Specifically, the BSD-3-clause requires in conditions 1 and 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Providing this attribution does not mean the entire software is subject to that license! Attribution notices are very common in mobile apps that include open source components, or in modern web browsers. I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7634&quot;&gt;previously discussed this in the context of the Apache-2.0 license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-10-19T18:55:50.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-19T21:57:13.020" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a commercial plugin that operates within an open source application licensed under the GPL. Most of my source code will be legible, however, the plugin will get an activation token from an external executable that validates the license key the user received on purchase from my web site. Am I legally required to share the source code of the external executable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28223" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T12:52:29.917" Title="GPL Licensing Using External Executable" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13309" CreationDate="2022-10-20T00:31:31.590" Score="0" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some code that I would like others to be able to use, share, build on it, &lt;em&gt;as long as they don't profit from it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across the commons clause license which seems nice but I don't know if that's compatible with the idea of &lt;strong&gt;ME&lt;/strong&gt; selling a service that derives directly from this code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like other commercial entities to be able to use this code for profit, if and only if they get a license to do so from me. Would this be compatible with commons clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28224" LastEditorUserId="28224" LastEditDate="2022-10-23T21:55:59.497" LastActivityDate="2022-10-23T21:55:59.497" Title="If I release some code under a Commons Clause license, can I still profit from it?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|commons-clause|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13301" CreationDate="2022-10-20T05:26:28.373" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the plugin communicates with the external executable via TCP or some other inter-process communication, the external executable would not be subject to the viral effects of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since the plugin is open source under GPL, someone could modify its source code to remove the license key check and recompile it, thus circumventing your license key check, and thus fulfilling GPL's promise of having truly free software (free as in freedom of speech).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-20T12:52:29.917" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T12:52:29.917" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-20T09:12:53.197" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;A project I'm maintaining is currently licensed under BSD-2-Clause-Views. I want to change it to the more widely used BSD-2-Clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause-Views.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause-Views.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made me think about this at all is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/136&lt;/a&gt;, which mentions that this license is specific to Free BSD software. The current license mentions the FreeBSD project explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the FreeBSD Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The project is in no way associated with FreeBSD. Is it fine to remove this notice without contacting previous contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28232" LastActivityDate="2022-11-23T06:06:40.997" Title="Is it possible to move from BSD-2-Clause-Views to BSD-2-Clause without contacting previous contributors" Tags="|bsd|relicensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-20T10:48:56.377" Score="4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm making a 3D rendering addon for Blender which is GPL 2/3 code that needs to communicate with non-GPL compatible library that does the rendering. I need some of this communication to be as fast as possible since this renderer provides real-time speed which I presume would be lost just because of final image transfer with e.g. socket based communication. Additionally, all renderers would benefit from users not having unnecessary slowdowns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have currently addon code that dynamically links to my shared library but I can't distribute that addon without making the library GPL compatible which is not possible currently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am planning to use socket communication to share data between the addon and the renderer without dynamic linking. However, to speed up image download from renderer to Blender and maybe some other functions, I am considering the possibility of using GPL2/3 System Library exception to dynamically link against libGL, which can then use my GL driver at runtime to share some data with GL commands. This would put my renderer on equal footing with all proprietary OpenGL drivers in terms of optimal ways of interfacing with Blender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Potential issues&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dynamically linking to libGL should satisfy GPL system library exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OpenGL driver here wouldn't necessarily be installed system wide however that should not be a problem since as I understand it GPL3 allows to even provide that driver with the distribution while GPL2 does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this OpenGL driver could run alongside a different OpenGL driver controlling the GPU. I'm not sure if this poses some kind of issue with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, technically, with this setup I could run all rendering inside the same process as Blender through that dynamic linking to libGL. I'm not sure if this poses an issue with GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this setup somehow violate GPL terms and thus not be viable or maybe be unadviced due to other reasons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28231" LastEditorUserId="28231" LastEditDate="2022-10-20T10:51:40.380" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T10:51:40.380" Title="Blender addon interface with non-GPL compatible renderer through OpenGL driver using system library exception?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|law|copyleft|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-20T21:42:25.653" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming I have a repo publicly available on GitHub with a license file, which covers some specific restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the license file is added at a later stage of the project and the most of the past commits of the repo don't have it included, does the license terms extends to those commits as well OR such scenario makes all work available in the past commits unlicensed (or &amp;quot;default&amp;quot;-licensed by GitHub rules)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How the same scenario works if I change the license later on (does it make different commits work under difference licenses)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13683" LastActivityDate="2022-10-20T21:42:25.653" Title="Does it matter which commit the license file is added with?" Tags="|github|license|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2022-10-21T07:11:16.587" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13310" CreationDate="2022-10-21T05:46:28.530" Score="9" ViewCount="1423" Body="&lt;p&gt;When making changes to an Apache licensed file, one should amend the file header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2022 Me, Myself &amp;amp; I&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the possibility to add the suffix &amp;quot;Not a contribution&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Copyright 2022 Me, Myself &amp;amp; I. Not a contribution.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this actually mean? From the license itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Contribution&amp;quot; shall mean any work [...] that is intentionally&#xA;submitted to Licensor [...]. [...] &amp;quot;submitted&amp;quot; means any form of [...]&#xA;communication sent to the Licensor [...] excluding communication that&#xA;is conspicuously marked or otherwise designated in writing by the&#xA;copyright owner as &amp;quot;Not a Contribution.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When would this be a good idea to do so, and what's the consequence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28237" LastEditorUserId="28237" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T08:59:36.217" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T14:01:24.700" Title="What's the use of Apache's &quot;Not a contribution&quot;?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13302" CreationDate="2022-10-21T07:38:57.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By default, only the holder of the copyright in a piece of software has any rights to make copies, changes or to incorporate it in something larger (which is seen as making a change). Copyright licenses are a mechanism to allow others to do such things as well, when they follow the requirements of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also means that if you are the sole rightsholder, then you are not bound to any license. As the rightsholder, you also have the right to offer different license terms to different users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as long as you did not accept any contributions from others under a license with the commons clause, you can use your code commercially yourself and you can offer commercial licenses alongside your commons clause license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-21T08:41:08.850" LastActivityDate="2022-10-21T08:41:08.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13308" CreationDate="2022-10-21T07:56:53.340" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license codifies the “inbound = outbound” principle, meaning that an Apache-2.0 covered project can expect that all contributions intentionally sent to that project are also provided under that license. This makes it easy to integrate such contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not everyone who interacts with the project wants to contribute, or is legally able to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider an Apache-2.0 licensed library that is hosted on some online platform (e.g. GitHub). An employee of SomeBigCorporation needs to report a bug to that project, and provides example code triggering the problem. What is the license of that code snippet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By default, the project could expect it to be Apache-2.0 licensed. The bug report with the code was “intentionally submitted” to the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, the employee might not have the rights to license that code snippet under Apache-2.0. Perhaps the SomeBigCorporation legal department has an onerous process that must be completed before Open Source contributions are allowed, or maybe such contributions are forbidden outright.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the bug reporter doesn't intend to license that code &lt;em&gt;under Apache-2.0&lt;/em&gt;, they can unambiguously indicate so by marking it as “not a contribution”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="28237" LastEditDate="2023-03-15T14:01:24.700" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T14:01:24.700" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13312" CreationDate="2022-10-21T22:53:41.147" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;A project I'm part of is forking the documentation of the original project which is licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We obviously want to pay full attribution, I just don't want to be on the wrong side of anything here and want to make sure it is done properly, the last thing we want is to have a licencing mess later on when the project is more mature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially we are taking the original documentation and listing it in an archive section on the new website and modifying the original content fairly extensively to serve as the &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; documentation. Therefore both the original and new docs come from the original project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just as simple as creating a new licence in the root repo LICENCE.md file with attribution i.e.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This work, &amp;quot;New Website&amp;quot;, is a derivative of &lt;code&gt;[Old Website](https://LinkToOldRepo.com)&lt;/code&gt; by Old Team, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. &amp;quot;New Website&amp;quot; is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 by New Team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume we are stuck with 3.0 as from what I understand it can't be upgraded to 4.0 easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28245" LastActivityDate="2022-10-22T08:45:57.143" Title="Dealing with forking a CC BY-SA 3.0 repo for modification" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13311" CreationDate="2022-10-22T08:45:57.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having the attribution just in your LICENSE.md file is not enough to satisfy the CC BY-SA license. The attribution must be part of the documentation itself, so that if I receive a paper copy (printout) of it, I still can see the attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in the documentation itself you should have a section mentioning the license and there you can also put the attribution to the old project and the license it is under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the license you can use for the new documentation, the CC BY-SA 3.0 license is forward compatible with later versions of the CC BY-SA license, so you can choose either the 3.0 or the 4.0 versions. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7430&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-10-22T08:45:57.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-22T10:41:09.987" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if i could, for example, distribute a commercial, closed source module for the Qt framework, that is licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does LGPL allow closed source third party modules that may make use of components of the framework itself (like algorithms or data structures, data types etc)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28248" LastEditorUserId="28248" LastEditDate="2022-10-23T13:28:42.660" LastActivityDate="2022-10-23T13:28:42.660" Title="Does LGPL allow closed-source third party modules?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-22T14:19:10.143" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have a video game, and the player can interact with a computer in the game to find a file. Suppose the player can view the contents of a file in the video game, but otherwise the computer is non-interactive. I.e., the player can browse directories and choose/view a file, but otherwise no programs will be &amp;quot;run&amp;quot; on the computer, nothing will be compiled in any sense, etc. This would, more or less, be no different than browsing source online -- you don't &amp;quot;do&amp;quot; anything with the source code in your browser except view it, you would have to download/copy it to use it in a program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example the entire video game would be &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; to the end user, but the game does not &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; enable &amp;quot;other parties to make or receive copies&amp;quot; of the GPL source code in the sense that you can't &amp;quot;transfer&amp;quot; the source code out of the video game to your computer (but you could copy it by hand if you wanted to...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The video game engine would not be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I include (in the above sense) files licensed under GPL (3 if I have to pick a version), without changing the license of the overall video game? Or would it be safer to use MIT etc licensed files only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22916" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T18:22:28.370" Title="Can I include GPL source code as a world building object in a video game without making the game GPL?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13316" CreationDate="2022-10-22T17:54:38.127" Score="1" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I typically release the projects I create under the BSD-3-Clause license, but also don't generally create a project which is &amp;quot;mine&amp;quot; using substantial parts of someone else's code. (Contributing to someone else's project is different; it's theirs, so they get to use whatever license they want, even for the code I contribute to them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time, however, I want to take some code released under the BSD-2-Clause license, heavily modify it (but not what it fundamentally &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;), and incorporate it into a new project with a similar-but-different purpose. To keep things simple, I want to release the entire project under just one license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, am I able to use the BSD-3-Clause as that license? If it isn't permissible to re-release BSD-2-Clause code under the BSD-3-Clause license, I'll release my modifications (and the rest of the project) under the BSD-2-Clause, but it would be nice to stick with my preferred license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done a bit of web searching on the subject, but turned up almost nothing. I appreciate any help or insights you can provide!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28250" LastActivityDate="2022-10-22T19:44:00.630" Title="May I modify source released under the BSD-2-Clause license and release the result under *only* the BSD-3-Clause license?" Tags="|license-compatibility|derivative-works|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13315" CreationDate="2022-10-22T19:44:00.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kind of, but the old code remains covered by BSD-2-clause and that requires you to keep that exact license version around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD-2-clause license has as condition 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the words “retain” and “this list of conditions”. You cannot modify or augment the list of conditions by inserting an extra clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are of course free to license your modifications (and the resulting project as a whole) under whatever license you want, including BSD-3-clause, but you still have to comply with the licenses for the other parts that you incorporated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, it's fairly rare that some software only involves a single license. It is totally normal that different parts are covered by different licenses. In case you want to track this in a machine-readable manner, I'd suggest including &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX-License-Identifier lines&lt;/a&gt; in your files, or by creating a &lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/spec/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;.reuse/dep5&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comment regarding your aside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Contributing to someone else's project is different; it's theirs, so they get to use whatever license they want, even for the code I contribute to them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your contributions are yours. You hold the copyright for them, and you alone decide how your contributions are licensed. The general expectation is “inbound = outbound” licensing, that contributions to a project are covered under the same license that the project is offered to others. Just as you are the project's licensee for the original version, the project maintainers become your licensee for your modifications. When projects want to receive your contributions under a different (usually more permissive) license, you'll typically have to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Full copyright transfers are very rare in the Open Source world, outside of some GNU projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-10-22T19:44:00.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-23T18:50:27.123" Score="3" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL3 defines correspond source as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean by &amp;quot;source code needed to ... run the object code&amp;quot;? Is this solely in reference to dynamically linked libraries, as mentioned later in the paragraph, or does this also include data files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that this is a practical issue since fonts and images are often licensed under free licenses incompatible with GPL (OFL, CC BY SA 3.0, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T23:02:04.390" Title="Is data part of corresponding source for GPL 3?" Tags="|gpl-3|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13305" CreationDate="2022-10-24T05:54:52.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, you need permission from previous contributors to relicense. In this specific case however, there is potentially a &amp;quot;loophole&amp;quot; where one could interpret the requirements for redistribution to include &amp;quot;the following disclaimer&amp;quot; to only refer to the next paragraph in all caps and understand it as singular, in which case one would conclude that the two licenses you mention are the same license, and therefore no relicensing is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17687" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T05:54:52.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13305" CreationDate="2022-10-24T06:05:34.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly OK to take content given to you under BSD2-Views and distribute it under BSD2.  While you have no power to relieve the conditions of the copyright licence chosen by upstream contributors, BSD2 contains exactly the same conditions.  The additional sentence in BSD2-Views isn't a condition of the licence, it's merely a reminder not to do something that people should already know not to do, and it may safely be dispensed with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T06:05:34.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13317" CreationDate="2022-10-24T10:05:04.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a way to license it together, and to keep the licenses separate, which is particularly useful when there is artwork or fonts with licenses incompatible to GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; includes this statement: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed game. In such cases, the license on the artwork/audio would dictate the terms under which video/streaming may occur.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This means that it is recognized by FSF, that there may be content within software under GPL that has a different license and GPL does not extend to these parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3#How_one-compatibility_operates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC Wiki&lt;/a&gt; states: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;When someone creates an adaptation of a BY-SA licensed work and includes it in a GPLv3-licensed project, both licenses apply and downstream users must comply with both licenses. However, Section 2(a)(5)(B) of BY-SA 4.0 allows anyone who receives the adapted material downstream to satisfy the conditions of both BY-SA and GPLv3 (i.e. attribution and ShareAlike) in the manner dictated by the GPLv3.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may, however, also license the artwork and fonts under GPL. There is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/297102/licensing-for-artistic-work-used-inside-gplv3-licensed-software/297427#297427&quot;&gt;opinion of FSF on this in Software Engineering Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; and what you can do to additionally cover trademark rights and other issues, however (unfortunately) they just don't touch the aspect of license-incompatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-10-24T10:23:23.700" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T10:23:23.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13314" CreationDate="2022-10-24T13:36:16.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your game is essentially a filesystem viewer, I would not expect the license of what is available to be viewed to affect the license of the viewer in general. The GPL FAQ clarifies that even a GPL programming-language interpreter can execute non-GPL code, because the external code is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;just data&amp;quot; to the GPL program&lt;/a&gt;. So surely merely displaying GPL code in a non-GPL viewer is similarly fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I will note that if you transfer GPL material to a user (even in not-easy-to-use form, like an image with the text of GPL work on it) you have to also make available the copyright notices and GPL license text, plus the source forms of any binary/object-form material you make viewable in this way. This doesn't affect the licensing of your viewer but simply imposes an additional set of items to make viewable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T13:36:16.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13314" CreationDate="2022-10-24T18:22:28.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; covers exactly this use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text&#xA;and/or art that comes from the program. Then the copyright on that&#xA;text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as&#xA;video games, would also fit into this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the art/music is under the GPL, then the GPL applies when you copy&#xA;it no matter how you copy it. However, fair use may still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have&#xA;artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed&#xA;game. In such cases, the license on the artwork/audio would dictate&#xA;the terms under which video/streaming may occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no, the GPL-covered code &lt;strong&gt;displayed&lt;/strong&gt; in the video game would not require you to put the entire game under GPL, but if there is a video stream (or a screenshot) that shows the code (and this might be outside of your control if a stream or screen shot is created), then this stream or screen shot might be under GPL. And in this case, you obviously have to comply with all the requirements of the license, i.e. include the license language, the copyright attribution, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recommendation is to not use GPL-ed code (or other GPL-covered content) as a world-building object in a video game, but instead use code under a permissive license, which reduces the requirements and grey zones you are exposed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-10-24T18:22:28.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13331" CreationDate="2022-10-25T08:07:12.417" Score="1" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GUI program that launches at start-up on a Linux machine. And this GUI can launch other applications like Spotify. I want to put this machine as a car's infotainment system of a vehicle that I'm planning to commercialize. Can I legally do this? What extra steps would I need to take if I can?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, it'll be a personal computer in your vehicle that can run many apps but with a special program that lets you view information about your vehicle. I am not altering the application itself nor making a replica.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking this because I'm sceptical about allowing an app like Spotify that uses proprietary codecs to be launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole GUI program would be open source under GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm sorry if this is not the place, I wasn't sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28012" LastEditorUserId="28012" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T08:56:25.950" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T02:32:18.487" Title="Launching an application from another application" Tags="|gpl|commercial|proprietary-code|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13325" CreationDate="2022-10-25T11:18:24.153" Score="7" ViewCount="2712" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of licenses that contain the term &amp;quot;binary distribution&amp;quot;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/LICENSE_1_0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/LICENSE_1_0.txt&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple permissive license only requiring preservation of copyright&#xA;and license notices for source (and not binary) distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this term precisely means? Specifically, can I use shell scripts (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/tools/build-and-test.sh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/boostorg/beast/blob/develop/tools/build-and-test.sh&lt;/a&gt;) without preservation of copyright notice? Do bash scripts count as both source and binary files? Or does &amp;quot;binary&amp;quot; means only something produced by the equally vague term &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28268" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T11:29:18.263" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T14:09:33.207" Title="Are shell scripts considered binaries for licensing purposes?" Tags="|licensing|software|binaries|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13324" CreationDate="2022-10-25T12:14:21.367" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The parenthetical &lt;code&gt;(and not binary)&lt;/code&gt; from the license summary you quote is derived from the end of the second paragraph of the Boost license (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including the above license grant... must be included in all copies of the Software... &lt;strong&gt;unless such copies or derivative works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the case of the Boost license, you are correct that &amp;quot;binary&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;machine-readable output of a compiler or other language processor&amp;quot;. You may correctly understand that a bash script does not fall in this category, unless you translated it into machine-readable code. Surely there are edge cases of what constitutes &amp;quot;machine-readable&amp;quot; or not, but a shell script is not one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you ask broadly about the term in the domain of licensing, I'll note that other licenses may outline their own definitions, depending on what they are trying to accomplish. For the Boost license, the intent here is to simplify requirements on transformations of the work for which license notices won't naturally be preserved automatically. For another license, like the GPL, &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot; means any form of a work that is not the &amp;quot;preferred form of the work for making modifications&amp;quot; to the work, because its terms aim to make it possible for downstream recipients to make modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T14:09:33.207" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T14:09:33.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13324" CreationDate="2022-10-25T12:32:52.727" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a definition in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; what 'source code' means, and I think this is basically the understanding in the entire industry, so not specific to GPL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of&#xA;a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shell scripts are very much plain-text readable and editable, so they are source code, even if they sometimes are machine-generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, 'binaries' are everything that is no longer in the form where it can be easily edited, such as code that has been for example compiled or obfuscated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of the Boost License focusing around 'machine-executable' is not very straight-forward, as it lacks clarity in case of (for example) scripting languages and interpreter languages, simply because the definition of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;machine-executable object code generated by a source language processor&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is not very clear for some programming languages (What is the machine? the cpu, the cpu + microcode, the OS, the OS + JRE, ...? What is a source language processor? And what if the code is on a machine where it cannot be executed (e.g. x64 code stored on an 80286 computer)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T14:42:41.460" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T14:42:41.460" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13328" CreationDate="2022-10-25T17:16:53.760" Score="2" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a github repository licensed under the MIT license. Can I download just 1 bash script and use it (execute) without copying the license file somewhere? The script itself doesn't provide any comments about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28273" LastEditorUserId="28273" LastEditDate="2022-10-25T17:26:36.673" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T17:39:45.710" Title="Can I download one file from GitHub without copying the license?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13327" CreationDate="2022-10-25T17:39:45.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Free and open source licenses like the MIT license you quote are copyright licenses: they permit you to do something that, by the default under copyright law, you wouldn't usually be allowed to do. For example, making and distributing copies of a work to other people, in original or modified form, is the exclusive right of the copyright holder of a work. A free/open license is an allowance from the copyright holder that permits you to do that, possibly with some requirements (like preserving license text, among other things).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, downloading and executing a copy of a work that the copyright holder has offered to you, without modifying it or distributing any other copies of it, does not require any special permission under copyright law. Therefore, you do not need to rely on the MIT license grant to do this action, so you similarly don't need to comply with any requirements included in the license grant. You do not need to keep a copy of the license unless you plan to redistribute the work to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T17:39:45.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13317" CreationDate="2022-10-25T23:02:04.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a test for deciding whether a data file is &amp;quot;needed&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Delete (or move) the data file (so that it's no longer visible to the software).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Without using or referring to the data file in any way, try to make a simple cosmetic change to the application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to recompile the application with the change (again without the data).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try to run the recompiled application (again without the data).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible outcomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the compiler halts with an error, the application crashes on startup, or there's some other catastrophic failure that prevents you from completing this process successfully, then the file is probably needed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you can't figure out how to complete this process without referring to the file (e.g. because it's a build script or something like that), then the file is probably needed.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; figure it out, but it's significantly harder than it would otherwise be, then it probably also qualifies as needed (that's like obfuscating your code, but you're obfuscating the process instead of the code - and the GPL forbids this).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the program starts up, but it can't do whatever it was designed to do, then it's more of a gray area. In most cases, this probably does not qualify as a &amp;quot;needed&amp;quot; file, because many programs are designed to operate on data files as input and output, and it's obvious that you do not need to provide e.g. image files with copies of Krita, or video files with copies of ffmpeg. On the other hand, if the file is something like a configuration file, which the program is incapable of automatically generating when it doesn't exist, then a case could be made that you have to provide some sort of default or baseline configuration so that the program can be used. The difference, I think, is that such a config file is expressly designed solely for use with the program, and serves no other useful purpose. It wouldn't make sense to think of the file as a separate work, independent of the program, so it gets included as part of the program. However, to my understanding, there is no clear case law on this point, so you may want to consult a copyright attorney for more specific advice tailored to your individual situation.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another important consideration is whether the user could reasonably come up with their own data files to replace the one you failed to provide. If the file has a digital signature or some other cryptographic protection, then (in some circumstances) you may not only be required to provide the file, but also the cryptographic keys required to make similar files work correctly. This is particularly relevant if the program will be sold as part of a consumer product (e.g. a phone, a game console, etc.). On the other hand, the mere fact that a data file was expensive to create does not, by itself, matter - you don't become obligated to provide such files just because it would be difficult or costly for users to make their own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-10-25T23:02:04.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13323" CreationDate="2022-10-26T02:32:18.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several issues need to be considered here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You need to determine whether you will be using version 2 or version 3 of the GPL. Under version 3, you would need to comply with the &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot; requirements of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 6&lt;/a&gt;, which are not present in version 2. In practice, that means you will (probably) need to allow users to install modified versions of your software on their cars' infotainment systems, and to provide any technical information (such as signing keys) which would be reasonably required to do so.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you will be combining software that is licensed under &amp;quot;GPL 2 only&amp;quot; with software that is licensed under &amp;quot;GPL 3 or later,&amp;quot; then you cannot comply with both licenses, and so you cannot distribute the resulting software at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (or your company) created all of the software from scratch (or based on other software that you ultimately created), then you are not bound by your own license, and can do whatever you want (including releasing the whole thing as proprietary, and not using the GPL at all).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spotify and other applications are (likely) protected by trademark law in most or all jurisdictions. While it is probably legal to use their names and branding to identify apps which they created, and to launch those apps at the user's request, you may want to consult a trademark lawyer just in case.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you will be providing those apps in a pre-installed state, rather than allowing the user to manually download them, you need to get a (copyright) license for that, independent of any trademark issues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is an Android-based system, then there are components of Android which are not open source (usually under some sort of Google branding) and which might be required for third-party apps to work correctly. You need to comply with the licenses of all components of your system.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if you are only using AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code, much of AOSP is under permissive (non-GPL) licenses, so you will need to display the associated copyright notices somewhere in your UI. If you are just building AOSP in a completely standard state, then this is usually somewhere under Settings &amp;gt; About Phone (or tablet/device/etc.). Look for &amp;quot;Legal Information,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Open Source Licenses,&amp;quot; or similar options.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL generally does not extend to unrelated software running on the same computer. If the user instructs your launcher to start a proprietary app, which is a wholly separate application, and not a part of the launcher itself, then that app is very likely out of scope for GPL purposes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given the legal complexity here, your company may want to consult a copyright attorney for more specific advice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T02:32:18.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13290" CreationDate="2022-10-26T09:23:38.870" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is not specifically required(*) by the license itself, the recommended practice is to include a file in your source code repository with a name that is easy to find such as LICENSE, LICENSE.GPL, COPYING, COPYING.GPL, etc. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;COPYING&#xA;README&#xA;source0.c&#xA;source0.h&#xA;subdir1/&#xA;    source1_1.c&#xA;    source1_1.h&#xA;    ...&#xA;component1/&#xA;    ...&#xA;component2/&#xA;    ...&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above example, you would conventionally place general information about your main program in the file README, and you would place the license terms in the file COPYING. This is only one possible convention -- you should adapt the convention if doing so is convenient for your particular program or programming environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If component1 and component2 are third-party components under some other license (e.g. LGPL, MIT, etc.) then normally you would include the licensing information of those components in those directories in the same manner that those components did to begin with (i.e. I would not change anything if it's not necessary). It may also be a good idea to mention in your own README or COPYING file the fact that your projects also includes subcomponents that are licensed under their own terms. To make your own maintenance easier, I wouldn't go into unnecessary detail here -- you can mostly leave it up to an interested reader to go into those subdirectories and investigate the specific licenses of those components if she chooses to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also a good idea to include a notice similar to the following in a comment inside each substantial source code file (of your own code) notifying readers of the copyright and license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// This file is part of Project FOO, a program for computing the BAR of BAZ.&#xA;// Copyright (C) 2022  Max Mustermann&#xA;//&#xA;// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;// the Free Software Foundation, ___either version 3 of the License, or&#xA;// (at your option) any later version.___&#xA;//&#xA;// This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;// GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;//&#xA;// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;// along with this program.  If not, see &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I copied that snippet from the bottom of the GPL license text itself, from the section entitled &amp;quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&amp;quot;. Notice that that part is outside of the license itself, so it is a suggestion, not a requirement of the license, to include such a comment. You could also reword the above comment to a shorter version if you wish, and many developers do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include the above notice, then you should look carefully at the portion in between underscores ___ in the above text: &amp;quot;either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&amp;quot; If you include that phrase, then recipients will be allowed to copy your code and then relicense it under GPL version 4 or later if such versions are ever published by the FSF in the future. Some developers don't want that, and would prefer to license their software only under a particular version of the license (e.g. Version 3). In that case, a more appropriate wording for that part might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3 as &#xA;// published by the Free Software Foundation.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible to leave out the comment entirely, since technically, nothing in Copyright law nor in the GPL itself requires you to include such notices in your own code, neither a copyright notice, nor a license notification. However, if you omit the copyright notice completely from your source code, it may create confusion for a redistributor, especially if he copies only a subset of the source code files from your project (which is generally allowed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible problem with including no comment at all is that the GPL requires a redistributor of your code to &amp;quot;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice&amp;quot; (See Section 4 of the GPLv3), and if the original files didn't have any notice at all in the first place, then it may be less than clear how to fulfil that requirement if the particular files that he wishes to copy had no notice originally. So, at the very minimum, I'd recommend that you at very least include a minimal copyright notice such as &amp;quot;Copyright (C) 2022  Max Mustermann&amp;quot; in a source code comment near the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using Pygame and PySimpleGUI, both licensed under LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since those components are licensed under the LGPL, it means that you are free to include them in your program and then license your main program itself under any terms that you wish (i.e. your program can be GPL licensed if you want, or licensed in some other way, including closed-source), as long as you comply with the LGPL terms for the LGPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... do I have to put [a copyright notice] in the program interface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may do so, but it is not required. If you decide to do that, then the GPL will require that further redistributors also preserve that notice in their version. The GPL calls this notice information &amp;quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&amp;quot;. The meaning of that phrase is defined in the GPL itself at the top of the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for PyGame and PySimpleGUI, as far as I know, neither of those has an &amp;quot;appropriate legal notices&amp;quot; portion in their code, so it means that you are not specifically obligated to mention them specifically in your GUI. However, it may be polite or informative for you to do this in an appropriate place, e.g. in an &amp;quot;About&amp;quot; dialog box in your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you add such a notice, then my reading of the GPL is that those notices would then themselves would then be considered &amp;quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&amp;quot; and would therefore need to be preserved in future versions (e.g. if someone forks your project).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;, the section entitled &amp;quot;How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) - If you read the GPL literally in Section 4, it's never explicitly required for the very first distribution of a program (i.e. the original distribution) to include the license itself with the program. However, you should really do so, because if you don't, then it will put a redistributor in a difficult position -- if the program is GPL licensed (e.g. if you have stated elsewhere, not as part of the source distribution itself, that the program is licensed under those terms), then the license clearly intends to allow him to distribute a verbatim copy under Section 4, but if he does this without adding a file (to attach the license itself), then it would become a technical violation of Section 4. (I think this technicality has come up in the past on the Open Source SE and was explained previously, but I cannot find the link at the moment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-10-26T09:52:39.913" LastActivityDate="2022-10-26T09:52:39.913" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13338" CreationDate="2022-10-26T12:31:01.443" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently involved in a project to produce a tool for carrying out certain types of standardised performance assesments on a specific type of industrial plant, that will soon be going open source. We have a potential problem because certain features of our software need real data, or very realistic synthetic data, to test against (i.e. the integration tests that validate that the results produced for a given plant configuration are correct given the assesment standard we are applying). We have access to real data from a whole range of different plants, but we only have permission to publsih a small sample of data from one plant, and very little chance of getting permission to publish more. The public data we have is enough to validate a lot of our core functionality, but we will still have features that cannot be tested without access to data which we can't publish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our options seem to be to not validate certain functionality at all, or to have a private test suite that we run as part of code review before accepting contributions, which has the obvious problem that we are asking contributors to make sure their changes pass tests which we can't share with them. Unfortunatly we're not really in a position to just not support plant configurations where no public data is available, or to demand that operators publish their data before we support their plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something other open source projects have encountered? Are there examples of best practices for dealing with this kind of problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28283" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T09:56:25.890" Title="Features in an Open Source Project that can only be tested against proprietary data" Tags="|contributor|closed-source|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13336" CreationDate="2022-10-26T20:22:37.277" Score="1" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a closed-source Java Card applet. But as a part of the functionality, I call a static &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LedgerHQ/ledger-javacard/blob/master/src/com/ledger/wallet/Ripemd160.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RIPEMD160 method licenced under AGPL&lt;/a&gt;. The static method can be compiled separately and loaded onto the Java Card as a library. I can then use the &lt;code&gt;.exp&lt;/code&gt; file from the compiled library, in order to call this compiled library function within my applet. The &lt;code&gt;.exp&lt;/code&gt; file provides the information about the interface of whatever just got compiled. Name of the function, where in memory it lives, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I distribute the AGPL-licenced function library and my applet under different licences alongside each other, so that my applet code remains closed source? Or would the fact that I'm calling the function from an interface of an AGPL piece of code force my code to also be GPL-compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have an intuition that I can keep my applet code closed source because what I'm doing is akin to system calls. So technically all software that is written for Linux and makes use of Linux system calls should be open-source now? I don't think that's true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could be missing something here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28287" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T15:10:32.030" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T15:17:33.340" Title="Can I write closed-source software that makes API calls to AGPL software?" Tags="|gpl|java|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-26T20:32:18.977" Score="6" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I made a program with Pygame and PySimpleGui, both licensed under LGPL. I didn´t modified them, just imported and used them on my code. Well, I heard somewhere that GPL 2 is not compatible with GPL 3, and the problem is: Pygame, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pygame/pygame/blob/main/README.rst&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt;, is on the version 2.1 of LGPL license, and PySimpleGUI, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI/blob/master/license.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this file&lt;/a&gt;, is licensed under LGPL 3.0. I know LGPL is more open than GPL, but can I use them in the same file of code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28087" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T09:41:43.760" Title="Can I use LGPL v2 and v3 in the same file of code?" Tags="|license-compatibility|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13334" CreationDate="2022-10-27T06:37:29.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. If your software makes API calls to that AGPLv3-licensed software, your software too becomes licensed under AGPLv3 due to the license's copyleft effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LedgerHQ/ledger-javacard/blob/master/README.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;README file&lt;/a&gt; gives the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All applet code is provided under the GNU Affero General Public&#xA;License v3 - for any question or commercial licensing, reach us at&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;email address&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That software is dual licensed under AGPLv3 and a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you want to close your source code, you need to buy a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T15:17:33.340" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T15:17:33.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13335" CreationDate="2022-10-27T06:51:06.827" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If both are libraries - one licensed under LGPLv2.1 and the other licensed under LGPLv3 - and both are used by your software as a library (i.e. your software is a &amp;quot;work that uses the library&amp;quot;), and your software is not a &amp;quot;work based on the library&amp;quot;, then the licenses of those libraries do not apply in a viral way to your software, and to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, any modifications to the LGPL-licensed library, or any &amp;quot;work based on the library&amp;quot; would automatically be licensed under the same license as the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, any dependency of those libraries need to have a compatible license with the license of those libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, please note that pygame's license header in the comments of source files (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pygame/pygame/blob/main/src_py/colordict.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) imply that it is licensed under LGPLv2.1-or-later. So, it may be compatible with LGPLv3 anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The file &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pygame/pygame/blob/main/src_py/colordict.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;colordict.py&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#    pygame - Python Game Library&#xA;#    Copyright (C) 2000-2003  Pete Shinners&#xA;#&#xA;#    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;#    modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public&#xA;#    License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;#    version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;#&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/pygame/pygame/blob/main/README.rst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;README&lt;/a&gt; file does not state this explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-27T09:41:43.760" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T09:41:43.760" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13333" CreationDate="2022-10-27T08:25:43.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only my opinion, but I suspect you won't have as much of a problem as you think.  Your mental model seems to be that once you release this codebase, developers will flock from far and wide with contributions that they can't test because they don't, themselves, have an industrial plant.  But free-software development isn't so much a bunch of solvers looking for problems; it's much more a bunch of people with itches, scratching them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who do not have their own industrial plants aren't very likely to be working with your codebase, and those who do will be in a position to test fixes.  It's definitely possible that big chunks of your codebase will be abstracted into other people's projects, but those will have different use cases, and different test data sets, accordingly.  Yes, it's also possible that in doing this, bugs will be discovered in your codebase, which may even be accompanied by fixes which are unusable because they won't pass the private test data, but even then, you'll have a bug logged in your tracker, and hopefully examples to trigger it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are minded to open up this code, I'd say: good for you.  Go for it.  Cross any later bridges as they appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-28T09:56:25.890" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T09:56:25.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13339" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13340" CreationDate="2022-10-26T12:44:31.873" Score="2" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;There once was a time when my team decided to avoid usage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/LIAAD/yake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a GPLv3 licensed library&lt;/a&gt; (without modification). I didn't really know a thing about licenses at the time, so I just accepted it as a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/213076/definition-of-distribute-in-relation-to-the-gplv3?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;Definition of distribute in relation to the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Now I can't stop thinking that we could have used the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was going to be used by the customer as a microservice for a web app. This (in my understanding) was going to be considered distribution only to the customer. So, I don't have to opensource the whole code on the internet, right? Well, my manager said that any person still could have come to the customer and said &amp;quot;I know you're using GPLv3. Give me your whole app code.&amp;quot; and they have to obey. I argued that the code must be shared only on distribution and/or modification. In the end, no one was convinced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read some more things like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/93269/using-gpl-libraries-without-modification-on-a-commercial-website-do-i-need-to-m&quot;&gt;Using GPL libraries without modification on a commercial website, do I need to make my source code available?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47032/can-i-use-gpl-software-in-a-commercial-application&quot;&gt;Can I use GPL software in a commercial application&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't have proof of me being right or wrong. So, my question is: Do I have to opensource the code of the whole web app or a particular microservice if a microservice uses a GPLv2/GPLv3 library (without modification)? Do I have to do it on demand from a random person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28305" OwnerDisplayName="bottledmind" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T11:40:10.593" Title="Commercial usage of a microservice with a GPLv3 library" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13339" CreationDate="2022-10-27T11:40:10.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to opensource the code of the whole web app or a particular microservice if a microservice uses a GPLv2/GPLv3 library (without modification)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a microservice uses a GPL licensed library (in the backend code), then &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; microservice needs to be distributed under the GPL license as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to do it on demand from a random person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No (assuming we are talking about GPL code in the backend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license only requires that you provide source code to those people that have obtained a copy of your binaries. And the GPL allows you to choose freely who you provide your binaries to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could happen is that one of your customers distributes the microservice further and that you get a request for the source code from one of those indirect customers. But a random person cannot demand the source code based solely on the knowledge that it is under the GPL (or another opensource) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to front-end code, the situation becomes completely different. Because front-end code is downloaded to the devices of your visitors, you are actually distributing the front-end code to them and that would entitle any visitor of your service to receive a copy of the sources of your front-end code if that code would be subject to the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-10-27T11:40:10.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13343" CreationDate="2022-10-28T12:49:30.687" Score="11" ViewCount="3519" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took an open source project that is published under the MIT License and I want to re-release it on an App Store. (After I updated the SDK and switched from JavaScript to TypeScript).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now the original developer (and only contributor) of the project contacted me and wants me to NOT release it to this App Store because he has a problem with this company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can he use legal means prevent this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28307" LastEditorUserId="16221" LastEditDate="2022-10-29T13:42:56.797" LastActivityDate="2022-10-31T15:33:37.017" Title="Can the author of an MIT licenced project prevent me from publishing to an App Store" Tags="|mit|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-10-28T13:28:35.517" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use &lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/node&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/node&lt;/a&gt; to build our apps in our private organisation. Due to rate limit of free usage, we are getting &amp;quot;Too many requests&amp;quot; error while pulling images from docker-hub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to clone this image and host it in our own internal private docker repo. As an organisation, are we going to face any license issue if clone &amp;amp; host in our repo ? Only our organization uses this image to build our own product, we are not re-selling/ re-distributing to some one else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28308" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-28T13:45:18.913" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T13:45:18.913" Title="Will there be license issue if I clone official docker node image and host it in private repo?" Tags="|docker|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13341" CreationDate="2022-10-28T20:11:03.783" Score="43" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can he legally prevent me from doing this even though his license says otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By releasing the source under an MIT licence, the rightsholder has explicitly given you permission to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  So: provided you comply with the obligations of the MIT licence, then no, (s)he cannot prevent you from doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-28T20:16:35.657" LastActivityDate="2022-10-28T20:16:35.657" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13344" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13345" CreationDate="2022-10-29T18:12:42.717" Score="6" ViewCount="755" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the context, I am involved in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.manim.community/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manim Community&lt;/a&gt; which develop Manim (originally published by Grant Sanderson), a Python library for creating explanatory math videos. Users of the library write Python code which creates videos &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that look like this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were discussing with a member how to license a Manim video in a way that creates a good open-source culture. The answer turned out not to be as straightforward as we hoped, because the software and the video are directly connected, and we would want the same terms to apply to both the video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example case that could cause a dispute: I license the code for an animation as GPLv3, but unless I state a license for the generated video, someone could take the code and sell the generated video. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Should the code always be accompanied by a creative commons license (i.e. dual licensing)? If so, how should it be chosen? E.g. what licenses would each of GPL, LGPL or MIT would require?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt; The community member I was speaking to would like to allow for reusing parts of the code, but not copying it verbatim. Is there a license that ensures such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3:&lt;/strong&gt; Our main concern is to encourage sharing and for what is free to remain free. What principles should be considered for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7764/what-is-the-way-to-handle-a-project-that-is-a-mix-of-software-and-non-software-i&quot;&gt;previous answers&lt;/a&gt; which are related to this but none that mentions Manim, so I think this post would be a good reference for others searching the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28033" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T03:59:26.060" Title="What should be taken into account when licensing software that generate video?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|cc-by|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13344" CreationDate="2022-10-29T18:49:28.870" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I license the code for an animation as GPLv3, but unless I state a license for the generated video, someone could take the code and sell the generated video. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this example)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are, at least, not completely right.  Unless the manim program is copying parts of its own source into the output, the output video is a derivative of the input instructions (the python code), not of the manim program (see, eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for a more detailed discussion of this point).  That given, a video that arises from GPLv3 python code (as interpreted by manim) is a copyright derivative of that python code, and so must itself be licensed under GPLv3, if it's made by someone other than the rightsholder in the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't mean it can't be sold.  The FSF are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;very clear&lt;/a&gt; that selling free software is fine.  But it means it has to come with freedoms, so the purchaser may use the video as (s)he pleases, copy it without restriction, modify it, and distribute modified works based on it - under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1&lt;/strong&gt;: any copyleft-licensed python code will lead to video that must be similarly licensed.  Permissively-licensed python code will lead to video with very few license restrictions, which certainly could be distributed under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2&lt;/strong&gt;: there is no such free license, as the right to make verbatim copies is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3&lt;/strong&gt;: a copyleft license on the python code will ensure that recipients of the resulting video have the right to do with as they would like.  If you don't want that to include selling it, you have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-29T19:12:48.713" LastActivityDate="2022-10-29T19:12:48.713" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13348" CreationDate="2022-10-29T21:56:10.610" Score="5" ViewCount="1498" Body="&lt;p&gt;So here's the situation: I'm working on a project where I have very specific needs and tasks in mind: A tool I can schedule/automate to archive all/latest Twitch VODS, clips, including chat logs for each for channels of my choosing. Most tools I've found either miss some bits (either no clips or no chats) or those that can do all are hard to automate/schedule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to find an existing Github repo (GPL v3) that basically already does everything I need as the core functionality. It just has a LOT of extra unneeded cruft thrown on top for my needs so I intend to fork and overhaul it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know Github specifically makes it hard to discover forks unless they get super popular (per their own documentation, it seems forks surface in the search API if their stars surpass the parent repo?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible I'd like to turn it into its own standalone repo so it is discoverable. I'm just trying to figure out the optimal way to do it keeping the following concerns in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keeping proper licensing and including proper credits and links to the original author/repo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would -like- to still be able to pull down any new updates from the parent repo, though this is optional and I have a feeling my modifications will get far enough to make it moot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fork has already been created and work has started. But if I can migrate it to a standalone repo, I definitely will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess my biggest question here is the licensing/attribution stuff and what would be some of the best steps to take to keep this legit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28319" LastActivityDate="2022-11-08T16:47:25.797" Title="Ideal way to 'fork' github project but keep it as a standalone repo and not a fork/proper licensing and attribution" Tags="|gpl-3|github|forking|git|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13344" CreationDate="2022-10-30T01:03:49.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quote part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ of GNU licenses&lt;/a&gt; below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware&#xA;designs, can I require that these designs must be free?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you&#xA;any say in the use of the output people make from their data using&#xA;your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her&#xA;own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More&#xA;generally, when a program translates its input into some other form,&#xA;the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was&#xA;generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if&#xA;substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in&#xA;your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above)&#xA;would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in&#xA;this specific case. .....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright&#xA;on the code of the program. So the license of the code of the program&#xA;does not apply to the output, whether you pipe it into a file, make a&#xA;screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text&#xA;and/or art that comes from the program. Then the copyright on that&#xA;text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as&#xA;video games, would also fit into this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the art/music is under the GPL, then the GPL applies when you copy&#xA;it no matter how you copy it. However, fair use may still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have&#xA;artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed&#xA;game. In such cases, the license on the artwork/audio would dictate&#xA;the terms under which video/streaming may occur. ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I use the GPL for something other than software?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can apply the GPL to any kind of work, as long as it is clear what&#xA;constitutes the “source code” for the work. The GPL defines this as&#xA;the preferred form of the work for making changes in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is answered by the third answer from the FAQ quote above, assuming we intend to use the GPL license to cover both software and video/ artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All open source licenses (based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt; by the Open Source Initiative) allow copying, redistribution and sale verbatim. However, copyleft licenses require modified source to remain open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question 3:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Encourage sharing and for what is free to remain free&amp;quot; is essentially what copyleft is all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL and MPL are copyleft licenses. I'm not sure if MPL can be applied to video or artwork or not, but GPL can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think if you apply the GPL to your software and your source videos or artwork that is used to generate the output video, then it fulfills most of your open sourcing goals under a single license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT and BSD are free, permissive licenses, not copyleft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-30T03:59:26.060" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T03:59:26.060" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13346" CreationDate="2022-10-30T01:15:56.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should Github-fork it if you intend to make minor changes and/or contribute by way of pull requests. You can merge from the parent repo easily this way too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you intend to make huge changes and create a derivative spin-off software, then it's better to create a new GitHub repository, change the name of the software and repo, but preserve the GPLv3 license and preserve existing copyright notices (as attribution) in addition to your own, as required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For e.g. LibreSSL and BoringSSL were forked, derived and spun off from OpenSSL although the license isn't GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-10-30T02:07:34.193" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T02:07:34.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13351" CreationDate="2022-10-30T11:52:54.393" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/85734/what-notice-should-bob-give-when-he-takes-a-web-app-under-apache2-changes-ui-an&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but without much attention; posting here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please write a bit of detail steps on how to follow Apache2 requirements for a new beginner, (whose native language is not English,) Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob found a web app on GitHub, it is with Apache License 2.0 license, and also builds on top of other projects with Apache License 2.0 license. Now, Bob would like to work on the UI and replace the entire database. When Bob hosts it later, what information/ licenses of Apache 2 should he include on that website to meet the Apache License 2.0 requirements? So far, Bob's understanding is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Conditions&#xA;License and copyright notice&#xA;State changes &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the exact steps Bob needs to do to meet the Apache-2 requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how to show the Apache2 License and copyright notice on the website (the unchanged web app doesn't have any Apache notice after build)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27869" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-10-31T11:16:42.000" LastActivityDate="2022-10-31T11:16:42.000" Title="What notice should Bob give when he takes a web app under Apache2, changes UI and the database, then hosts it?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13352" CreationDate="2022-10-30T13:44:55.147" Score="1" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;As author of AGPL / GPL project, do I need to keep previous versions, or only current one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example I made and published 50 versions of the project (via git). Can I delete previous modifications and keep only latest version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28325" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T19:55:26.057" Title="As author of AGPL / GPL project, do I need to keep previous versions, or only current one?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|source-code|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13349" CreationDate="2022-10-30T16:50:58.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache license requirements are on &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt; of the software to others (Section 4), not on using the software or allowing anyone else to access it. Therefore if all you are doing is hosting the software on your&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; server, you do not need to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1. Hosting software on a cloud server over which you have some kind of exclusive usage rights is generally thought not to be distribution - i.e. you can host the software on AWS/Azure/GCP without worrying about it. What you can't do is to give it to a customer for them to host on &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; server.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T16:50:58.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13350" CreationDate="2022-10-30T19:55:26.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you've been careful to keep &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the copyright notices that were added for contributors (as well as your own) I think you are fine to cease distribution of earlier versions.  One is under no obligation to distribute software one has received under GPL; the requirement is only that if you do distribute it, you must do so under the required terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-10-30T19:55:26.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13341" CreationDate="2022-10-31T15:33:37.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, the accepted answer is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a side note, though: if the employer strongly asserts ownership of this project (say the employee signed an agreement giving the employer ownership of all IP they created), then the code may not be MIT licensed at all and would have always been closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28336" LastActivityDate="2022-10-31T15:33:37.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13355" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the economic models, practices, and incentives of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13356" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" Score="0" Body="Questions about the economics of free and open-source software" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T07:52:31.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13358" CreationDate="2022-11-01T09:40:55.453" Score="4" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to provide my source code under CC0 on a GitHub repository that satisfies the following properties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It uses Apache 2.0 library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no source code or binary of the library in the repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I provide only code. It means I don't release a built binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, should I add a license which is stronger than Apache 2.0 and the copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/opencv/opencv/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the library license&lt;/a&gt; to the repository that has only the following C code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;opencv2/opencv.hpp&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;int main() {&#xA;    std::cout &amp;lt;&amp;lt; CV_VERSION &amp;lt;&amp;lt; std::endl;&#xA;    return 0;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find keywords of OpenCV but can't find any source code of OpenCV. Are keywords also copyrighted? Is it regarded as a derivative work if it has other reference sentence like &lt;code&gt;include&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28345" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-11-08T10:03:01.143" LastActivityDate="2022-11-08T10:03:01.143" Title="Can I provide my source code which uses Apache 2.0 library under CC0?" Tags="|apache-2.0|cc0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13357" CreationDate="2022-11-01T10:58:30.973" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be OK to publish your source code under &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license or other instrument you want, including a CC-0 public domain dedication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open-Source licenses are primarily copyright-based, not contract-based. Thus, they can only apply to the original creative work, and any derivative works. There is a good argument that if software code references some library but does not include any parts of the library in any form, then the code isn't derived from the library in the sense of copyright law. But there's a good debate to be had here, especially in an U.S. context since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google v Oracle dispute about API copyrightability&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the library is Apache-2.0 licensed, then any of this doesn't matter though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache-2.0 explicitly does not affect your code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even if it would apply, you would be largely free to do what you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache-2.0 license defines what it considers to be a “derivative work” that would have to comply with the license conditions. But part of the definition is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this License, Derivative Works shall not include works that remain separable from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of, the Work and Derivative Works thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your source code is completely separable from the Apache-covered library. It does not itself include any parts of the library (and only instructions to include parts during compilation). Your source code links to the library, and for this purpose naming parts of that library is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your source code is not affected by Apache-2.0, and you can license it however you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's consider what would happen if this provision didn't exist, and if your software did qualify as a derivative work of the Apache-covered library. For example, this might happen if you modify the library, or if you statically link it into a binary with your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, we would have to consider the license conditions in Section 4 of the license: we have to give users a copy of the license, give prominent notice of changes, keep intact all legal notices in the source code, and must give users access to the NOTICE file, if it exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of these conditions require you to license the derivative work as a whole in any particular way – unlike copyleft licenses like the GPL family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wouldn't be able to publish the derivative work as a whole under CC-0. Only the copyright holder can do that, and you are not the copyright holder for the Apache-covered parts. But you would be free to publish the parts that you wrote under CC-0. The result would be a software where some parts are CC-0 / public domain, with other parts being covered by Apache-2.0. This is actually a fairly common combination, especially on Android, where the public domain SQLite database engine is frequently used, with many other libraries using Apache-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T10:58:30.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10301" CreationDate="2022-11-01T14:38:20.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT/ Expat/ X11 license is not an explicitly named license, unlike the Apache License 2.0 or the Mozilla Public License 2.0 or the GNU General Public License. It may have been originated by MIT, but it was never explicitly called the &amp;quot;MIT license&amp;quot; by MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may modify and use the MIT license text without calling it by any name, and without using the name of any organization or person that you do not officially represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what about explicitly named licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The principle stated in section 10.3 below may apply to other explicitly named licenses, if it is explicitly allowed by the license text or some other official statement by the license steward, for e.g. the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/35435/15586&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on Law SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.1. New Versions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mozilla Foundation is the license steward. Except as provided in&#xA;Section 10.3, no one other than the license steward has the right to&#xA;modify or publish new versions of this License. Each version will be&#xA;given a distinguishing version number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;10.3. Modified Versions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create software not governed by this License, and you want to&#xA;create a new license for such software, you may create and use a&#xA;modified version of this License if you rename the license and remove&#xA;any references to the name of the license steward (except to note that&#xA;such modified license differs from this License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q21: Does the MPL 2.0 give me permission to make my own license by&#xA;changing the MPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes but, as with MPL 1.1, we strongly discourage you&#xA;from doing so. It will almost certainly make your software much less&#xA;popular and less widely used. Software developers and companies are&#xA;already aware of and understand popular licenses like the MPL. If you&#xA;create your own, they will have to perform a legal assessment of your&#xA;changes - and may conclude it's not worth the effort to do so. Or, you&#xA;may accidentally make your software incompatible with the Free&#xA;Software Definition or the Open Source Definition, or with the other&#xA;commonly-used free software licenses that MPL 2.0 is compatible with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like the MPL 2.0, just use it as-is - it is a clear, modern,&#xA;internationalized, generic license. There is nothing Mozilla-specific,&#xA;or specific to a particular country or project, in its licensing&#xA;terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on the problems that creating your own license&#xA;causes, see the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license proliferation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#mod-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0 FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MAY I RE-USE (AND MODIFY) THE APACHE LICENSE 2.0 ITSELF?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may re-use our license unchanged, and also modify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify it, you are on your own from a legal point of view, and&#xA;the result is NOT the Apache License, just a new license inspired by&#xA;ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the terms 'Apache License', 'Apache', and any similar&#xA;references to the ASF cannot appear in your modified license, other&#xA;than to state that it differs from the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, you cannot use 'Apache' in the name of the modified license.&#xA;Names like &amp;quot;Apache License with such-and-such clause&amp;quot;, for example,&#xA;are not acceptable, as they cause confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating a new license is a non-trivial task. If you do that we&#xA;recommend that you get your own legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I modify the GPL and make a modified license?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to make modified versions of the GPL, but it tends to&#xA;have practical consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can legally use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another&#xA;license provided that you call your license by another name and do not&#xA;include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the&#xA;instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in&#xA;wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe&#xA;may be similar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to&#xA;licensing@gnu.org for permission. For this purpose we would want to&#xA;check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified&#xA;license in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it. Such&#xA;a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL,&#xA;and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The&#xA;mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in&#xA;and of itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than modifying the GPL, please use the exception mechanism&#xA;offered by GPL version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-11-01T15:25:39.100" LastActivityDate="2022-11-01T15:25:39.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-03T11:43:31.383" Score="1" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do you decide the right time for the first-release of an OSS project ? Any insight on this would be very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8782" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T16:41:53.810" Title="First release of OSS project" Tags="|project-management|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1557" CreationDate="2022-11-04T09:55:50.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Humans.txt is a good candidate. It was made for websites but it could be used anywhere since it’s basically a list of contacts.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://humanstxt.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://humanstxt.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28378" LastActivityDate="2022-11-04T09:55:50.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13367" CreationDate="2022-11-05T13:00:10.193" Score="8" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say we have Work A licensed under CC-BY 4.0, made by Author A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Author B uses Work A to create Work B, attributing Work A: &amp;quot;Work A was created by Author A under the CC-BY 4.0 license (link to work A here). Work B is also under the CC-BY 4.0 license.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Author C comes along and wants to use Work B to create Work C. Do they need to attribute Author A as well as Author B? Or do they only need to attribute Author B?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 1, non-recursive: &amp;quot;Work B was created by Author B under the CC-BY 4.0 license (link to work B here). Work C is also under the CC-BY 4.0 license.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 2, recursive: &amp;quot;Work A was created by Author A under the CC-BY 4.0 license (link to work A here). Work B was created by Author B under the CC-BY 4.0 license (link to work B here). Work C is also under the CC-BY 4.0 license.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My own research&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the relevant legal code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Attribution.&#xA;&#xA;    If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:&#xA;        retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:&#xA;            identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);&#xA;            a copyright notice;&#xA;            a notice that refers to this Public License;&#xA;            a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties;&#xA;            a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;&#xA;        indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and&#xA;        indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, &amp;quot;identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and &lt;strong&gt;any others designated to receive attribution&lt;/strong&gt;, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are &amp;quot;any others designated to receive attribution&amp;quot;? What if the Licensor does not request anything other than licensing their work under CC-BY 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28383" LastActivityDate="2022-11-05T20:35:20.160" Title="Is CC-BY 4.0 attribution recursive?" Tags="|license-notice|license|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-05T13:34:43.423" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is not my native language so all the subtleties of licensing law are lost on me. I can't find what I'm looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial problem:&#xA;I have created an association and its website which proposes several useful tools concerning the video game world. It is a web application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Users offer to help me with the code and continue to evolve the website. He asks that the code is opened on Github. &lt;strong&gt;I'm afraid to lose the rights on the application if I accept their contributions, or worse that someone will copy the code and turn my free services into something paying by using marketing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My need for myself and the benevolent contributors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there any kind of License that accepts contributions without making the maintainer lose the rights?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this same License allow to protect the site from being copied for personal profit but accept that people copy the code of the site in order to help and contribute?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After my research, I have the impression that this doesn't exist and I'm at a dead end. Thanks for your help :(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28384" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T12:04:49.233" Title="License to accept contributions without losing the rights on the application" Tags="|licensing|proprietary-code|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13368" CreationDate="2022-11-05T11:54:35.767" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been thinking about creating some free/open source websites and publishing some free/open source mobile apps to the Google Play Store. The aim of the websites/apps are to provide things/information/tools etc. for helping others (perhaps like Wikipedia, but probably on a much smaller scaler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course I hope anything published would only be beneficial to users (and not cause harm), but I recognise nothing's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Poppins_(character)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;perfect&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mistakes&lt;/a&gt; happen, so was wondering &lt;strong&gt;what mechanisms are available to a person who (in the friendliest way possible) wants to disclaim liability or have users waive their ability to sue you etc.?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little familiar with open-source licensing (I believe these are designed to help people to distribute their code without any legal risks/implications for users and creators - indeed there are some &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-wtf-you-want-to-public-license-v2-(wtfpl-2.0)#summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to-but-it%27s-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-(wtfnmfpl-1.0)#fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://tldrlegal.com/license/the-don%27t-ask-me-about-it-license#summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenses&lt;/a&gt;) so not sure if I could use one of these for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks for any help! :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6774" OwnerDisplayName="andyandy" LastEditorUserId="6774" LastEditDate="2022-11-06T10:43:35.590" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T10:43:35.590" Title="Mechanisms to disclaim liability or have users waive their ability to sue you (for Wikipedia-like websites/mobile apps for good)?" Tags="|licensing|website|google-play|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13363" CreationDate="2022-11-05T20:35:20.160" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that by &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Author B uses Work A to create Work B&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; you mean that Author B makes work B which is a copyright derivative of work A.  Work C, then, is then a copyright derivative of both works B and A.  Authors A, B, and C are rightsholders in this work, and C will be violating A and B's copyrights if (s)he distributes this work without a licence to do so from both A and B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortunately, A and B have both granted such a licence, by publishing their works under CC BY 4.0, provided C attributes them both as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-11-05T20:35:20.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13366" CreationDate="2022-11-06T09:18:09.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least under UK law, the general consensus is that you don't need this kind of disclaimer: mistakes are not actionable unless grossly negligent, and that is a very high bar. Other jurisdictions may vary, you will need to talk to a legal professional if this is of serious concern to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, just about every open source license beyond the ultra-short ones like the WTFPL contains language designed to do what you want; for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT License&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar language exists in all of the BSD family of licenses, the Apache 2 license and the GPL family of licenses. These will possibly give you extra protection over something like the WTFPL. Honestly, I'd say your concern should be more over how you want your code to be used than the &lt;em&gt;incredibly&lt;/em&gt; remote possibility that someone tries to sue you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T09:18:09.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13364" CreationDate="2022-11-06T11:58:39.990" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are looking for, is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft&lt;/a&gt; license. It simply means that source code of modifications to a copyleft licensed software by a licensee, must be made available to users and recipients of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various copyleft licenses including GPL, AGPL, LGPL, EPL2 and MPL2. Some of these are strong copyleft licenses and some are weak copyleft licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it's a web application, both your points are addressed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt;, the strongest copyleft license that I am aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With AGPL, even web users of your web application (or modified versions of it by licensees) are entitled to receive the source code, based on the conditions of the AGPL. Modified versions of the source code cannot be closed, for as long as they are either distributed or hosted on a server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU AGPL Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why the Affero GPL&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; explains it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the&#xA;ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a&#xA;modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it&#xA;there, your server must also allow them to download the source code&#xA;corresponding to the modified version running there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the GNU Affero GPL is to prevent a problem that affects&#xA;developers of free programs that are often used on servers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose you develop and release a free program under the ordinary GNU&#xA;GPL. If developer D modifies the program and releases it, the GPL&#xA;requires him to distribute his version under the GPL too. Thus, if you&#xA;get a copy of his version, you are free to incorporate some or all of&#xA;his changes into your own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suppose the program is mainly useful on servers. When D modifies&#xA;the program, he might very likely run it on his own server and never&#xA;release copies. Then you would never get a copy of the source code of&#xA;his version, so you would never have the chance to include his changes&#xA;in your version. You may not like that outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using the GNU Affero GPL avoids that outcome. If D runs his version on&#xA;a server that everyone can use, you too can use it. Assuming he has&#xA;followed the license requirement to let the server's users download&#xA;the source code of his version, you can do so, and then you can&#xA;incorporate his changes into your version. (If he hasn't followed it,&#xA;you have your lawyer complain to him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-11-06T12:04:49.233" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T12:04:49.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13360" CreationDate="2022-11-06T16:41:53.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The wikipedia page &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Release early, release often&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (quoted below) explains this adequately, based on the 25 year old essay &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cathedral and the Bazaar&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Eric S. Raymond, that discussed good open source software engineering methodology (the &amp;quot;Bazaar&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Release early, release often (also known as ship early, ship often, or&#xA;time-based releases, and sometimes abbreviated RERO) is a software&#xA;development philosophy that emphasizes the importance of early and&#xA;frequent releases in creating a tight feedback loop between developers&#xA;and testers or users, contrary to a feature-based release strategy.&#xA;Advocates argue that this allows the software development to progress&#xA;faster, enables the user to help define what the software will become,&#xA;better conforms to the users' requirements for the software, and&#xA;ultimately results in higher quality software. The development&#xA;philosophy attempts to eliminate the risk of creating software that no&#xA;one will use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This philosophy was popularized by Eric S. Raymond in his 1997 essay&#xA;The Cathedral and the Bazaar, where Raymond stated &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Release early.&#xA;Release often&lt;/a&gt;. And listen to your customers&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This philosophy was originally applied to the development of the Linux&#xA;kernel and other open-source software, but has also been applied to&#xA;closed source, commercial software development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative to the release early, release often philosophy is&#xA;aiming to provide only polished, bug-free releases. Advocates of RERO&#xA;question that this would in fact result in higher-quality releases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-11-06T16:41:53.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13373" CreationDate="2022-11-07T05:51:26.043" Score="12" ViewCount="2815" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wish to share some documents in the .md format and to license them permissively. Do I need to specifically seek a license that specifically covers the scope of static documents, or can I use a license that generally applies to software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that &amp;quot;software&amp;quot; can and generally does include supportive documentation related to it - if the document I intend to share has no accompanying software or code within the same project, but  is supported and published by software, will a software license be legally applicable to my document(s)? Would files such as configuration files used by software constitute software itself, and thus validate the use of a software license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wish to allow open source collaboration in the creation and publishing of the document(s), will that affect what license I should choose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28394" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-11-07T18:19:48.267" LastActivityDate="2022-11-07T18:19:48.267" Title="Can FOSS software licenses (e.g. MIT, Apache, GNU, etc.) apply to documents without the need to be rewritten?" Tags="|collaboration|documentation|non-commercial|floss|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13372" CreationDate="2022-11-07T08:28:41.163" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practical answer is that if you want &amp;quot;open source documentation&amp;quot; you should probably just use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons license&lt;/a&gt;; you can choose between permissive (CC-BY) and copyleft (CC-BY-SA) licenses. The FSF do also produce a documentation-oriented license, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Free Documentation License&lt;/a&gt;, but use of that outside the core GNU ecosystem is just about zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-11-07T08:28:41.163" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13372" CreationDate="2022-11-07T10:12:07.337" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Philip's answer, for MIT-licensed software, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; can be applied to the documentation too (i.e. &amp;quot;associated documentation files&amp;quot;), but of course, it will be permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and &lt;strong&gt;associated documentation files&lt;/strong&gt; (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;the following conditions .....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-11-07T10:12:07.337" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13346" CreationDate="2022-11-08T13:00:30.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've dealt with this a couple of times.  Github has some limitations around forked repos, such as actions in a forked repo don't count toward your github activity in your profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way I've found to disassociate the forked repo from its parent is to contact &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.github.com/request&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github tech support&lt;/a&gt;.  They've always taken care of it within a day, but it has been years since I've tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="990" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-11-08T16:47:25.797" LastActivityDate="2022-11-08T16:47:25.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13380" CreationDate="2022-11-11T21:07:39.627" Score="26" ViewCount="4868" Body="&lt;p&gt;PDFs are inescapable, what surprises me is the lack of open-source tools available for interacting with them via some sort of API. One example which sticks in my mind was when I was using .NET to parse some PDFs and my program threw a TrialLimitMet error because I hadn't purchased a key to use in the Nuget package I was using. I've since struggled to find well maintained and extensive packages for NodeJS and Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that the PDF specification, from ISO, costs a non-trivial amount of money for someone just interested, which leds me to believe it might be restricting the number of open-source developers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before researching, it was my belief that Adobe &lt;em&gt;owned&lt;/em&gt; the PDF filetype, I know see that that may not be entirely true but they may&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason that this sort of, IMO unhealthy, ecosystem exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28435" LastEditorUserId="306" LastEditDate="2022-11-14T23:17:45.630" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T05:21:01.267" Title="Why are open-source PDF APIs so hard to come by?" Tags="|licensing|ownership|file-formats|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13379" CreationDate="2022-11-11T22:00:51.207" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;PDFs are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; complicated, but also have significant value – precisely because they are so ubiquitous. PDFs are&#xA;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; format for exchanging documents that shouldn't be edited (like invoices),&#xA;&lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; format for distributing layouted content like print-ready files,&#xA;and with PDF/A &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; format for long-term electronic archiving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Adobe has tons of extensions and special features in some PDF variants, those are rarely used. The worst PDFs I had to deal with used embedded macros to dynamically generated additional pages and QR codes based on form input, or embedded multimedia into the page. That is not normal. Many people don't even use Adobe software for viewing PDFs, so anything more fancy than basic forms is not going to work reliably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an open source ecosystem for dealing with PDFs. Tools like PdfTeX and Cairo can be used for PDF creation, Poppler for PDF parsing and rendering, Ghostscript for rasterization, iText for creation and manipulation. I'm not sure if LibreOffice has a custom PDF backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, many of these use copyleft licensing (AGPL or GPL). Some of these use a dual-licensing scheme, where users can pay for a proprietary license if they don't want copyleft licensing terms. And commercial users do pay, because a good PDF API is so valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incentives of all involved actors are (mis-)aligned such that a permissively licensed Open Source PDF library ecosystem is unlikely to spring up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PDF is a complex format, so that there's a high barrier to entry in this “market”. Development costs for a “good enough” PDF library are high. The cost of the specifications is only a small aspect, compared to the time investment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commercially motivated Open Source authors will have to run the numbers: is it cheaper to pay for development of a new PDF library, or is it cheaper to pay for a proprietary license for an existing library? Hint: PDF API vendors like iText know this and can price accordingly. This problem could be avoided by a large consortium (effectively crowd-funding creation of a new API), but so far no one has organized this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophically motivated Open Source authors are probably entirely happy with copyleft-licensed libraries. While there is also a community of people that strongly prefer permissive Open Source licenses over copyleft licenses (greetings to the OpenBSD crowd), PDF manipulation is neither an integral part of computing nor that terribly exciting to motivate some individuals to start and complete this kind of project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-11-11T22:00:51.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-12T20:47:43.857" Score="2" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I sell a robot, which contains Raspberry PI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or somebody sells a workstation, which contains a PC and Monitor and WiFi router, each running Linux inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or a car workshop sells cars with custom bodies installed on off-the-shelf chassis, which, most likely, have numerous chips inside, some of them running Linux.&#xA;(These days almost everything is secretly running Linux inside)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would these vendors comply with GPL-2, which requires that&#xA;&amp;quot; 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&#xA;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code,&#xA;....&#xA;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code,&#xA;...&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would a car mechanic even know what Linux is and which parts of his product contain it and where to get these sources?&#xA;Does anybody actually comply with these copyright requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some related questions:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4718/hardware-with-gpl-firmware&quot;&gt;Hardware with GPL firmware&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4731/legal-issues-about-embedded-linux&quot;&gt;Legal issues about embedded Linux&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4181/lend-distribute-iot-device-containing-gpl-software&quot;&gt;Lend/Distribute IoT device containing GPL software&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9674/selling-used-hardware-with-open-source-software&quot;&gt;Selling used hardware with open source software&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28443" LastActivityDate="2022-11-12T21:51:20.717" Title="How to comply with GPL-2 when selling aggregate hardware with Linux?" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13381" CreationDate="2022-11-12T21:51:20.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would these vendors comply with GPL-2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, you will find a written offer buried in very small print in one of the bits of paper you get with the device and immediately throw out. At least in the Western world, manufacturers are already required to provide various bits of information with their devices (information on harmful substances, information on recycling, etc), so adding an offer to supply the source code isn't actually onerous for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would a car mechanic even know what Linux is and which parts of his product contain it and where to get these sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He would pass on the information he received from the manufacturers of the component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody actually comply with these copyright requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes - picking one just because it's the manufacturer of the TV I can see right now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.samsung.com/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samsung have an entire site dedicated to providing GPL source&lt;/a&gt;; I don't actually know if I got a written offer for the source with the TV because I threw those bits of paper straight into the recycling but let's assume I did get an offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course various degrees of compliance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Major manufacturers are &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; pretty good about this because they have well-versed legal teams that really don't want them to be sued.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some manufacturers are in breach of the letter of the license (e.g. not supplying a written offer) but make some kind of effort to supply the source if it is requested.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some manufacturers just ignore any requests for the source because they haven't got the processes in place to supply the source. They may respond if pushed hard, or they may just hope the problem goes away (it often does).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some manufacturers have mistaken ideas that the GPL doesn't apply to them for some reason. Again, may respond if pushed hard or may just hope the problem goes away.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-11-12T21:51:20.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13390" CreationDate="2022-11-13T04:33:56.300" Score="3" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone on GitHub forked my OSS under a GPLv3 license and deployed it on Vercel to disguise it as their portfolio without making any changes of the source code.&#xA;(They embedded the service on their portfolio website using iframe(!))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that forking the source code and using/redistributing it under the license is not a problem at all. It is still okay to deploy it on a hosting service. But I really don't feel good if they disguised it as their own project as their achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it is possible to stop them from doing it or force them to show the copyright notice on his website?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28448" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-15T14:37:37.367" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T06:58:55.097" Title="Does software released under GPLv3 require a copyright notice to deploy it on a public hosting service?" Tags="|gpl-3|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13379" CreationDate="2022-11-15T05:21:01.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few years back I had as a task to find a simple way to customize customer on demand reports.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Perl, I coded a general parser that recognized standard tags in all of the reports and allowed for positioning, whereby files with the report ID, the customer and department allowed for search and replace within the report.  The ability to either have a text or image banner, or a company logo was added. there were also a bunch of other features that I begin to forget.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, Perl had over 150 routines for PDF production that were in general fully functional, documented and free available from CPAN.  In the end everything I was looking to do could be achieved rather quickly with what was available for Perl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28478" LastActivityDate="2022-11-15T05:21:01.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13854" CreationDate="2022-11-15T13:52:52.590" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nayuki/Bitcoin-Cryptography-Library/blob/master/java/io/nayuki/bitcoin/crypto/Ripemd160.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an implementation of the RIPEMD160 algorithm on GitHub&lt;/a&gt;, which I followed when writing my own implementation. Hence, I personally would consider my work to be a modification/derivative of this original. That code is a part of a project which is licenced under MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright © 2019 Project Nayuki. (MIT License)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Software is provided &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot;, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the Software or the use or other dealings in the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ALSO want to publish my code under the MIT licence, and attribute the above-mentioned project. How do I go about doing that in a neat way? What would the licence file look like? Anything I need to add to README.md? Do I have to include anything in the source code files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28287" LastEditorUserId="8969" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T11:04:42.383" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T11:04:42.383" Title="How would I go about crediting another project who uses the MIT licence, in my project for which I also use the MIT licence" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13383" CreationDate="2022-11-15T14:22:14.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that forking the source code and using/redistributing it [is okay under the GPL v3]. ... But I really don't feel good if they disguised it as their own project as their achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 has two mechanisms that you could use to disallow this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is in Section 5 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conveying Modified Source Versions.&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) If the work has interactive user interfaces, each must display&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appropriate Legal Notices; however, if the Program has interactive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;interfaces that do not display Appropriate Legal Notices, your&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;work need not make them do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that if you add a feature to your program that displays Appropriate Legal Notices, then re-users of the program must retain that feature and the &amp;quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&amp;quot; messages. The term Appropriate Legal Notices is defined at the top of the GPL v3 license; basically it's a &amp;quot;Copyright&amp;quot; screen or message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some flexibility on exactly how these are implemented, based on what kind of program it is (it must be interactive, though). You can see a hypothetical example of how such an Appropriate Legal Notice might look in an interactive terminal program at the bottom of the GPL v3 text (after the &amp;quot;END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&amp;quot; part).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second mechanism that the GPL v3 gives you is in Section 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (&lt;strong&gt;if authorized by the copyright holders of that material&lt;/strong&gt;) supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Requiring preservation of &lt;strong&gt;specified reasonable legal notices&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;author attributions in that material&lt;/strong&gt; or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) &lt;strong&gt;Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material&lt;/strong&gt;, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use Section 7, you will need to have authored the whole software, or basically the whole software (the License calls it &amp;quot;material&amp;quot;), or you would need permission from the Copyright holders to add an additional term to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you would need to write an &amp;quot;Additional Term&amp;quot; that corresponds to one of the items on that list in Section 7. Both items b and c would seem to possibly do what you want, but those items don't become active until you write and attach a specific term to your software license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should read it carefully, though, because at the end of that list, the GPL v3 says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered &amp;quot;further&#xA;restrictions&amp;quot; within the meaning of section 10.  If the Program as you&#xA;received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is&#xA;governed by this License along with a term that is a further&#xA;restriction, you may remove that term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if you try to add a term that requires something other than what is described in the items a-f in Section 7, then the end-user could consider that term an &amp;quot;additional restriction&amp;quot; and could therefore remove that term and ignore it if she wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use Section 7, I would recommend reading item c and then draft a specific requirement (&amp;quot;additional term&amp;quot;) that tries to accomplish that goal (&amp;quot;prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material&amp;quot;) as easily and reasonably as possible. It should be specific, though. If you just say &amp;quot;don't misrepresent the origin&amp;quot; or something too vague like that, then it's not clear what a re-user has to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making an exact copy and then hosting it somewhere is not necessarily misrepresenting the origin, for example. Also note that the GPL itself explicitly allows making exact copies in general. For the specific situation you described (someone embedded your software in an iframe), I'd suggest that you try to draft an Additional Term where you specify exactly what you want to happen if someone hosts your code inside an iframe, for example. Probably you should avoid specific technical terms if possible, though. For example, instead of saying &amp;quot;iframe&amp;quot; it may be better to refer to a more general description of it, such as &amp;quot;if you embed the Software on a Web page, then ...&amp;quot;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-11-16T06:58:55.097" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T06:58:55.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-15T19:55:39.323" Score="10" ViewCount="3991" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have three repositories on GitHub that I own. I made repository #1 open source under the MIT license. Repository #2 is mostly user graphical interface stuff, but I made it private without any license, because I want my programs to look unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want repository #3 to be open source, but it uses both repository #1 and repository #2. How should I license repository #3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28484" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2022-11-18T20:25:03.233" LastActivityDate="2022-11-18T20:25:03.233" Title="How can I license open source software with a closed-source component?" Tags="|closed-source|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-16T04:30:18.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you created and own the source code in all 3 repositories without any contributions from others, and without modifying others' projects, with the exception of the use of libraries, then you own full copyrights for the intellectual property in all those 3 repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, you can choose to dual license the software in your repositories. So, Repo #2 can be closed source, and Repo #3 can be open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please see &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/3979/26317&quot;&gt;Under what conditions can someone dual licence existing works?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of dual licensing software under open source and proprietary terms for software for which you own all the copyrights, are Qt and MySQL. These projects license the open source version under LGPLv3 and GPLv2, while also having providing the same software under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what open source license should you use for Repo #3? That's up to you. Since Repo #1 is MIT-licensed (which is free and permissive), you can choose any OSS license for Repo #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-11-16T04:36:04.833" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T04:36:04.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-16T09:49:55.790" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want repo #3 to be open source, but it uses both repo #1 and repo #2. How should I license repo #3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can license repo #3 under a permissive open-source license, like MIT or Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permissive open-source licenses do not place a restriction on the type of license that is used by the dependencies. You might get some flack from people for the fact that repo #3 depends on closed-source code, but that is only sentiment speaking. On the legal side, you are fully in the clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T09:49:55.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-16T16:15:07.810" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;While you can do this (with MIT at least, potentially others, but not a large choice), you're going to run into some fairly large issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there will be a lot of complaints, as in effect the final delivered product would not be open source as an offering, and there are a lot of purists out there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, nobody could run the open source code legally, unless you attach a license for the use of repo 2 (though potentially not its sources).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, a license permissive enough to do this is likely going to allow alteration and derivative works, which could then use repo 2 (in the same manner that repo 3 does) for something that could eventually be very different to the purpose of repo 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if you want to do this, there are many options available with differing degrees of complexity, but all of them will involve attaching some kind of license to repo two (though not an open source license), to control how it can and cannot be used. Until you put a license on the repo, nobody can use it except you &lt;em&gt;even if&lt;/em&gt; you are using it from MIT code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice the way to do this is normally to split repo two in half, and make an open source framework, and a closed source and proprietary resource/configuration pack to ensure a unique look and feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28494" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-11-16T16:40:25.117" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T16:40:25.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-16T22:00:25.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making repo #3 permissive is as easy as it would be for any other project. To make it copyleft, you need to add an exception to its license for repo #2 specifically. The FSF has a full FAQ on how to do this at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;, but the gist of it is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders of [name of your program] give you permission to combine [name of your program] with free software programs or libraries that are released under the GNU LGPL and with code included in the standard release of [name of library] under the [name of library's license] (or modified versions of such code, with unchanged license). You may copy and distribute such a system following the terms of the GNU GPL for [name of your program] and the licenses of the other code concerned{, provided that you include the source code of that other code when and as the GNU GPL requires distribution of source code}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that people who make modified versions of [name of your program] are not obligated to grant this special exception for their modified versions; it is their choice whether to do so. The GNU General Public License gives permission to release a modified version without this exception; this exception also makes it possible to release a modified version which carries forward this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11403" LastActivityDate="2022-11-16T22:00:25.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-17T05:33:19.830" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many licenses seem to say you can do whatever you want but must include the source with the binary (or credit if you're using MIT)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's two cases that come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firmware/software on hardware. I hear GPLv3 is designed for this case but I don't know what else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Running code on their own hardware as a SAAS? I may be interacting with it via the web but it doesn't seem licenses force them to show their code since they're not distributing the binary?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licenses may I use to say you can't use my code to power your marketplace/hardware unless you open source your marketplace/firmware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28499" LastEditorUserId="28499" LastEditDate="2022-11-17T05:35:22.873" LastActivityDate="2022-11-20T20:08:29.953" Title="License that says you must share changes if you use the code?" Tags="|licensing|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13396" CreationDate="2022-11-17T15:55:55.203" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licenses may I use to say you can't use my code to power your marketplace/hardware unless you open source your marketplace/firmware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want derived works to remain open-source, then you need to use a copyleft open-source license. The main relevant characteristic of a copyleft license is that the license has a requirement that derived works must use the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses come in different flavors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weak copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. LGPL): In these licenses, there is a restriction to which parts of a project the copyleft requirements apply. That could be file-based or that you can link a copyleft library still to a closed-source application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Strong copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. GPL): In these licenses, the copyleft part extends to the entire product. The produch as a whole needs to bew under the copyleft license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Internet-aware strong copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. AGPL): These a strong-copyleft licenses with an additional clause that requires source code disclosure to users accessing the application over the internet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-11-17T15:55:55.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-18T16:37:55.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own all code in your repositories, you can specify exceptions in the license. For instance, you can license your interfacing part under GPL and leave the implementation proprietary, simply stating &amp;quot;It is permissible to use the library XYZ&amp;quot;. This will not earn you too much respect and was more for cases when there is no open source replacement, but exceptions can be added to the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you do not own the whole code in the GPL part, you cannot add exceptions there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastActivityDate="2022-11-18T16:37:55.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13391" CreationDate="2022-11-18T17:37:00.180" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would seek to have deliverables that are similar to what would exist if the closed-source portions had been written by someone else and released under a license that allowed them to be freely incorporated into other programs if used unmodified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Acme Corporation releases a closed-source driver for a USB device under such terms, some programmer Bob who has no relationship with Acme Co designs a program to do something useful with that device.  Bob's program incorporates gnu-licensed code from other people, and Bob also wants to release everything under the most permissive license possible.  I don't think any common interpretation of the gcc license would say that Bob could only distribute his program if he could somehow convince Acme to open-source their driver.  I think a far more typical interpretation would say that if Bob's obligations would be satisfied if he distributes everything the Acme Corp. license would allow him to distribute, and building the program would not require access to information or resources which other people could not acquire on the same terms as Bob did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the USB device and its driver were designed by Bob, rather than an unaffiliated Acme Corp., I don't think it would be fair to say that Bob should have less freedom over how he uses the driver that he wrote, than would have when using a driver written by some unaffiliated entity.  If the driver is written and documented well enough that a typical competent programmer could figure out how use it in the same ways Bob's open-source programs does, and Bob's open-source code refrains from exploiting undocumented aspects of the driver in ways programmers without &amp;quot;insider knowledge&amp;quot; could not, I see no reason that Bob should have more obligations than Acme Corp. to release the code to his driver, if he distributes the program in a manner that would cause any incorporation of the driver into the executable to be accomplished on the recipient's machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a demonstration of good faith, it would probably be good for Bob to release an open-source &amp;quot;driver&amp;quot; which could interface with the main application even if it wouldn't be particularly useful as-is but would e.g. output to the console a description of all commands that would be to the external hardware, and receive from the console all responses the external hardware would receive.  Someone who wanted to interface with some other hardware device could then replace the console I/O with operations that would interact with the other device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people may squawk about &amp;quot;Tivoization&amp;quot;, but a key difference between the above scenario and a TiVo box is that anyone who wants to change aspects of the system which are under the control of open-source code would be free to rebuild the open-source portions and incorporate those changes into the overall system, and someone who wants to replace the closed-source portion with an alternative code package sharing the same API would likewise be free to do so.  Essentially, parts of the code whose authors want to allow piecemeal alteration by anyone and everyone could be altered piecemeal by anyone and everyone, and parts whose authors didn't want to allow piecemeal alteration could be removed by anyone who wanted to author a replacement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author of a closed-source portion of a program were to seek to prevent recipients of from making piecemeal alterations to the open-form portions, rebuilding, and using the resulting executable, such action would clearly violate the spirit and possibly letter of the open-source licenses, but allowing open-source and closed-source components to interoperate in ways that uphold the indicated rights would greatly expand the range of tasks that could be accomplished using open-source projects, compared with saying that such projects cannot be designed to interoperate with closed-source components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2022-11-18T17:37:00.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13403" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13404" CreationDate="2022-11-20T08:15:23.670" Score="5" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very confused by this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/raivo-otp/ios-application/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Processed Format&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modification, duplication, and (re)distribution of the Services in binary or published format (&amp;quot;Processed Format&amp;quot;) for any purposes and/or reasons is strictly prohibited without the explicit permission from Raivo OTP. Permission for modification, duplication, and (re)distribution of the &amp;quot;Service&amp;quot; in Processed Format can be requested via GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally understand very well why the developer does not want ready binaries to be distributed. He earns from Apple App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never seen such a license and wonder what the community can do if no more commits are made / the project is no longer active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the community have rights to a fork etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this still Open Source, even in the broadest sense, or even proprietary software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11520" LastEditorUserId="10776" LastEditDate="2022-11-20T16:55:42.617" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T22:35:14.567" Title="Raivo OTP Open Source? Strange &quot;Source Format&quot; and &quot;Processed Format&quot; stuff" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13403" CreationDate="2022-11-20T08:59:43.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not be an open source license as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, which is in turn the definition used by this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it fails clause 5 (&amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&amp;quot;); this is best illustrated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;desert island test&lt;/a&gt;: if I'm on the hypothetical desert island and want a bunch of non-technical users on the island to use the software, I cannot do that because I can't distribute the binaries to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-11-20T08:59:43.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13396" CreationDate="2022-11-20T20:08:29.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice and I am not your attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does not deal with &amp;quot;use,&amp;quot; and therefore, neither do many copyright licenses. When you see the word &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; in a license grant, that's a strong implementation that the license is or includes a patent license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law does cover distribution of copies, preparation of derivative works, public display, and a few other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL covers distribution of the work and derivative works, including distribution through physical hardware, but not including hosting on the server side of a server-client interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL, though section 13, also covers network interactions with modified versions of the work and derivative works of the modified version of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No copyright license will block all use cases because copyright law itself does not block all use cases, and licenses only exist to grant permissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2022-11-20T20:08:29.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14086" CreationDate="2022-11-21T11:50:34.713" Score="4" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;h3&gt;the brief&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to do &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, I would like to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the code has always the same license even if it is redistributed or sold etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the authors and contributors are cited even if it is redistributed or sold etc...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been browsing &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; to think about what license to use in my projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, I did all my code under the MIT license. While browsing the site, I saw the &amp;quot;GNU GPLv3&amp;quot; license and the internet variant &amp;quot;GNU AGPLv3&amp;quot;. I also saw the &amp;quot;Mozilla Public License 2.0&amp;quot; license, which just seems to add a trademark rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that the GPL3 license requires that any modification have documentation.&#xA;I found this rule pretty useful, especially for future pullrequest or contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read that the GPL3 and AGPL3 license requires that the source code should be distributed to the user.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;the project&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now I'm working on a plugin for KDE plasma desktop environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in this situation, I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://develop.kde.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their (Plasma KDE)&lt;/a&gt; library and package and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Qt/QtQuick&lt;/a&gt; library and package, in the form of import, like &lt;code&gt;import QtQuick.Controls 2.15&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;import org.kde.plasma.plasmoid 2.0&lt;/code&gt; and I distribute my code via &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bouteillerAlan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pling.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pling&lt;/a&gt; (par of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendesktop.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opendesktop.org&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the AGPL3 license good for my project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under the GPL3/AGPL3 license, is the fact of putting my code on GitHub in public enough to fill the request of distribution of the source code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to give the licenses of the used packages somewhere (Qt, QtQuick, plasma)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What happens if someone wants to contribute to my project? Do I have anything to do if they do (an obligation)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22712" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-27T08:39:50.170" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T19:11:24.173" Title="Which license I should use for public project?" Tags="|gpl|mit|license-recommendation|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13409" CreationDate="2022-11-21T16:41:58.123" Score="5" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;The terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL 2&lt;/a&gt; are quite terse and to the point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm unsure whether they are also unambiguous: Do they allow the licensee to do anything whatsoever? That's how the colloquialism &amp;quot;what the fuck you want to&amp;quot; would usually be understood. Or does it only allow the licensee to do things they actually &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to do (whatever that may mean), as a more verbatim reading would suggest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official FAQ, even despite not fully spelling it out, is quite clear that it assumes the former, i.e., that the license allows the licensee to do anything whatsoever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;By the way, with the WTFPL, can I also…&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh but yes, of course you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;But can I…&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes you can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Can…&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is the FAQ right about this? Or does the FAQ even &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; it right by definition, because it's been written by Sam Hocevar (who's also the author of the WTFPL 2, WTFPL's current version) and because the licensee can assume that licensor has also read the FAQ before applying the license, and thus that the intents of both, of the license author and of the licensor, is that the license shall permit any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the WTFPL allow me to do things I &lt;em&gt;don't want&lt;/em&gt; to do?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why this is relevant&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes one does stuff one doesn't want to: Either because it's one's job, or because one is otherwise forced to do it, or because one sees it at the lesser of two evils, or maybe even just accidentally. If these actions weren't covered by the WTFPL, that license might turn out to be much more restrictive (and easier to violate) than commonly assumed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might argue that in many of those cases, even though one might not &lt;em&gt;unconditionally&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;want&amp;quot; to do the respective action, one still &lt;em&gt;conditionally&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;wants&amp;quot; to do it, to avoid the consequences of not doing it (e.g. losing one's job). But relying on that argumentation seems risky, and it clearly doesn't apply to unwanted accidental actions. (And while accidental distribution is something one should carefully avoid anyway, accidental copying and/or modification can happen quite quickly and is harmless under most circumstances.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16752" LastEditorUserId="16752" LastEditDate="2023-04-29T08:47:32.120" LastActivityDate="2023-04-29T08:47:32.120" Title="Does the WTFPL 2 also allow the licensee to do something they don't want to do?" Tags="|permissive|wtfpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13408" CreationDate="2022-11-21T17:17:27.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The WTFPL clearly gives you permission to use the software in any manner that you would legally desire, thus making it effectively impossible be in non-compliance with the license. I do not think that a court tasked with interpreting the license would partake in philosophical discussions on the nature of motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a good time to consider that the WTFPL is a crayon license, a joke, a shitpost. It was not drafted as a serious license, and unclear use of terms is consequence of that. Even having an FAQ is part of parodying the GPL. While it is probably safe to use WTFPL-covered software, licensing new software under it should be avoided. The “I don't care about licenses” crowd would fare much better with something like 0BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does the FAQ even make it right by definition, because it's been written by Sam Hocevar (who's also the author of the WTFPL 2, WTFPL's current version) and because the licensee can assume that licensor has also read the FAQ before applying the license, and thus that the intents of both, of the license author and of the licensor, is that the license shall permit any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, that doesn't sound like a reasonable argument. Something is either part of the legally relevant document, or it is not. The FAQ are definitely not part of the license. While such writing by the drafter can help build an industry consensus about licensing matters, the drafter's opinion cannot tell us what other license-givers thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some jurisdictions also have the concept of &lt;em&gt;contra proferentem&lt;/em&gt; for interpreting contracts drafted by one party: if something is written unclearly, it may be interpreted &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; the drafter's intent. In such a context, you wouldn't be able to point to the FAQ as evidence for a particular interpretation. On the other hand, you could use this doctrine either way: either for arguing that the WTFPL allows any uses unconditionally, or alternatively for arguing that the WTFPL doesn't allow you to do things that you don't feel like doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-11-21T17:17:27.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6077" CreationDate="2022-11-22T07:59:42.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I checked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI license lists&lt;/a&gt;, almost all the License is written in English, except Mulan Permissive Software License v2 (MulanPSL - 2.0) [bilingually written in Chinese and English], Licence Libre du Québec version 1.1 [written in French, 3 licenses]. The translation could be considered the derivative work of the &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; version. What's more, if you or anyone are interested in the Chinese translation of the Open Source License, you may check the repository on GitHub:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenAtomFoundation/legal-license-translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/OpenAtomFoundation/legal-license-translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28549" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T07:59:42.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13412" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13536" CreationDate="2022-11-22T10:33:53.237" Score="3" ViewCount="932" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use piece of code from some other repo which is under MIT licence I can directly use/show their Copyright info in my repo. That part is OK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what happenes if I get several pieces of code from different repositories with different copyright, which all are under the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I keep all the copyright notes? Or should I create one of my own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14310" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T16:09:12.183" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T22:04:40.663" Title="How to put Copyright notice If I use several other code bases (MIT)" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5676" CreationDate="2022-11-22T17:04:12.747" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going over code is a decent way to teach yourself and I commend that you are wanting to contribute. First though, if you really just are excited to get out there and contribute perhaps the bugs you should be on the lookout for are simply &lt;strong&gt;grammatical and spelling errors&lt;/strong&gt; from within the code and in the project documentation (I see these issues quite often even in the biggest and well-known projects).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also requests in some projects on how new users might be able to contribute. Read the documentation of any project that interests you thoroughly (and check for spelling and grammatical errors!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Github helps you with &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/exploring-projects-on-github/finding-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source-on-github&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Finding ways to contribute to open source on GitHub&quot;&gt;ideas on how to find projects to contribute to and where to look&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28555" LastEditorUserId="28555" LastEditDate="2022-11-22T17:06:40.193" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T17:06:40.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-22T21:22:48.883" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm aware MIT license is permissive, I would still like to ask/verify how to proceed with forking code from .NET runtime libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reason to fork: in my specific case, code I'm interested in is &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; (not part of public API). If I want to avoid reflection, I see no other option than &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;) propose API change, &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt;) fork, modify &amp;amp; ship under different name but same license. I'm pretty sure changing public API won't happen (soon/ever), so &lt;em&gt;b&lt;/em&gt; it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.NET uses MIT license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/LICENSE.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repo&lt;/a&gt;), however additionally every file has following header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Licensed to the .NET Foundation under one or more agreements.&#xA;// The .NET Foundation licenses this file to you under the MIT license.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm bit unsure here is what to do with this header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep it in all files (including those containing my modification, possibly attributing my change to .NET Foundation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;keep it only in files I haven't modified (= removing header only from files I modified)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;remove from all files no matter what I modified&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan to distribute my modification under MIT license while mentioning origin of code - I see no issue here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other licenses within &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;.NET runtime 3rd party notice&lt;/a&gt;, however it &lt;em&gt;should not&lt;/em&gt; be relevant to library I want to modify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28557" LastActivityDate="2022-11-22T21:22:48.883" Title="Forking .NET library code (MIT license), how to treat individual file header?" Tags="|licensing|mit|forking|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-25T02:21:28.877" Score="1" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a software project that I will make as a proprietary software, which I will make a business model by providing service support to recipients or customers. In making target software, apart from using my own software/source code, I also plan to combine it with source code licensed under open source software licenses such as Apache 2.0, MIT, BSD 3 Clause and MPL 2.0 to complete the target software that I will be create, Is such a proprietary software model possible?, or only some (if not all) licenses allow to be combined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then do I have to state the original author or contributor of any source code that I use in the proprietary software that I will produce?, even if I do not modify the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xs2R6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xs2R6.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28576" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T04:05:10.720" Title="License compatibility for proprietary software" Tags="|license-compatibility|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13419" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13420" CreationDate="2022-11-27T21:28:21.000" Score="5" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning on releasing a web application which relies on two open source dictionaries. The first one is released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Wiktionary) and the second one is released under AGPLv3.&#xA;The dictionaries are bundled together with the application (but each in a dedicated source directory, if it matters). In each directory I've included the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options when choosing a license for my application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release it under AGPLv3 based on compatibility with CC-BY-SA 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0 -&amp;gt; CC-BY-SA 4.0 -&amp;gt; GPLv3 -&amp;gt; AGPLv3)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28596" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T02:03:37.350" Title="Licensing an application which uses both CC-BY-SA 3.0 and AGPLv3 content" Tags="|agpl-3.0|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13419" CreationDate="2022-11-28T02:03:37.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, that should work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC-BY-SA is rather simple compared to software licenses as it does not require any source distribution. So any license which allows usage under conditions to give credits and ensure that freedoms for distribution and adoption are retained should be fine. For CC-BY-SA and GPLv3 their respective stewards &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agreed&lt;/a&gt; that they are compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said: you can well license your code under one (e.g. AGPL), and keep the dictionaries under their respective licenses. You only have to indicate the licenses and copyright-and comply with the AGPL overall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this said:IANAL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T02:03:37.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-11-28T10:02:15.370" Score="10" ViewCount="5302" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's common for projects to state a particular license and then attempt to apply some caveats that remove some of the freedoms offered by that license. I'm wondering if there is any legal basis for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real world example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pdf.js is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 as shown here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;. This appears to be the standard license text with no variations noted either in that file or in the project's README.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the project's documentation is a polite but easily missed request not to just re-use the code as-is: &lt;a href=&quot;http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/getting_started/#introduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/getting_started/#introduction&lt;/a&gt; says &amp;quot;However, we do ask if you plan to embed the viewer in your own site, that it not just be an unmodified version. Please re-skin it or build upon it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the Apache license permits reuse of the code with no modifications at all (subject to other restrictions e.g. trademarks). Thus this request feels like a caveat/reduction/alteration to the main Apache license because it is attempting to remove a freedom expressly offered by the Apache license. Is there any legal validity to this? i.e. if I used the project under the AL2 license, is there any &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; reason why I should comply with the request in the second bullet point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As this is essentially a legal question, I'm looking for examples of where this situation has been examined before (e.g. has been tested in court) or references to the opinion of legal experts in this area. Opinions on whether honoring requests outside the license file proper is a polite thing to do or a standard practice among developers are potentially interesting but out of scope.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15387" LastEditorUserId="6207" LastEditDate="2022-11-30T14:11:11.520" LastActivityDate="2022-11-30T14:11:11.520" Title="Am I legally obliged to honor requests made outside the license file?" Tags="|licensing|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13421" CreationDate="2022-11-28T10:10:35.500" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, this is not a legally binding requirement. The pdf.js authors are absolutely aware of this which is why it is phrased as a request, not a requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, downstream authors are being asked to modify the UI so that end-users do not confuse the downstream version with the regular Firefox UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2022-11-29T17:14:56.973" LastActivityDate="2022-11-29T17:14:56.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13424" CreationDate="2022-11-28T12:47:13.863" Score="3" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have several open source projects and was about to upload another one (to github) when I started wondering about the licensee in the license text. Some of my existing projects use either my real name, my github handle, or no licensee at all (which it probably shouldn't). I fully own all these repos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After looking at other questions on this site, it seems using a pseudonym is fine although verifying the identifier of the author can be problematic. Regardless, I'm concerned what would happen if I change my pseudonym down the line as it is more likely that I would change my pseudonym/handle than my real name at some point. Would this suddenly invalidate the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of github, I believe they track name changes so I could be verified this way. Also, I could simply add a new line &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year_of_name_change&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;new_pseudonym_here&amp;gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; below the existing copyright notice to all my repos if I do change my pseudonym. Would this be sufficient in terms of a copyright notice/license? I guess people who have a copy of my code before the name change are only required to display the original pseudonym (if the license requires it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28601" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T15:52:39.340" Title="Name/pseudonym change in copyright notice in license" Tags="|copyright|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13423" CreationDate="2022-11-28T12:57:56.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You as the copyright holder are entitled to change how your copyright is displayed also for past revisions. The point is after all that you receive the recognition you deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option (but which also needs explanation) is to amend your existing copyright notice similar like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 1997-2022  Arno Nonymous / NordCoder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem in working with pseudonyms is to prove that your pseudonyms are both you, and that you thus are entitled to make the change. Given this consideration your suggestion to just add a new copyright notice with your new pseudonym is definitely the easiest and requires no explanation and justification anywhere and anywhen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 1997-2021 Arno Nonymous&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(c) 2022 NordCoder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-11-28T15:52:39.340" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T15:52:39.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2022-11-28T21:37:03.090" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Should people who take a Debian system, make some minor configuration tweaks, build an ISO and ship it to the public provide source code? technically yes. GPLv2 makes it pretty clear that access to copy source code should be from &amp;quot;the same place&amp;quot;, so unless you are going to count the whole internet as one place it seems pretty clear to me that if you distribute binaries you also need to distribute source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it further the interests of the free software community to go after such projects? probablly not. If resources are to be spent going after GPL violators it makes far more sense to spend those resources on going after software that has actually been modified rather than mere failure to provide copies of stuff that is already public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" LastActivityDate="2022-11-28T21:37:03.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13430" CreationDate="2022-11-29T10:24:27.363" Score="8" ViewCount="984" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask whether an otherwise standard 3-clause BSD license would remain GPL compatible if the following 4th clause is added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Altered versions (source code and/or binary) must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28612" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-12-06T12:27:32.733" LastActivityDate="2022-12-06T12:27:32.733" Title="If I add a misrepresentation clause to 3-clause BSD license would it remain GPL-compatible?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13421" CreationDate="2022-11-29T11:49:22.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project uses a particular license, then this license is the legally binding document. It cannot be amended by informal documents (such as project documentation) which are not expressly mentioned in the license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, authors can introduce caveats in the text of the license. Note that doing so would effectively change the license, which in turn implies using a different name for it. Using the original license name on a modified license text will likely be a trademark violation, and even if it's not, it would arguably constitute deception, which means such a license may effectively be unenforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2022-11-29T11:55:10.870" LastActivityDate="2022-11-29T11:55:10.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13421" CreationDate="2022-11-29T11:52:59.430" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing about an open-source licence that would make it &amp;quot;legally invalid&amp;quot; to add extra conditions to that licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holder can grant permission to use/redistribute/modify on any terms they choose. In many cases they choose to do so under the terms of a common licence like the GPL or Apache licence. However someone could also choose to add extra conditions: you may do whatever you like under the terms of this licence, &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; XYZ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not in principle invalid. It &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; mean it's not &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the GPL, or Apache; it's GPL-with-exceptions or Apache-with-exceptions, etc. And that in turn might mean it's no longer free/open source by the standards of the FSF or OSI. But as long as the conditions are legal in themselves they're still binding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all that: this only applies if the copyright holder is actually intending to make these conditions binding. In the example you give, it doesn't seem like that's the case: it's not attached to the licence or referred to from there or anything, and it's not phrased as a binding requirement. It's just a request which you have every right to ignore, but may choose to obey out of courtesy/gratitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably it's done in this way precisely because it wouldn't be open source if it was made part of the licence itself. They'd rather people not use the unmodified themes in that way, but it's more important to them to ensure that the project is open source even if that means risking that people do so nevertheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28613" LastActivityDate="2022-11-29T11:52:59.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13427" CreationDate="2022-11-29T12:29:45.603" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, such a license would be compatible with &lt;strong&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/strong&gt;. In particular, the GPL already has the following terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Section 5(a) is always required:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 allows certain additional terms to be added to the license. One of these is section 7(c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're looking for a permissive license with such terms that is GPL-3.0 compatible, consider just using the &lt;strong&gt;Apache-2.0&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Section 4(b):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Misrepresentation of origin is forbidden implicitly through section 6, but it's only enforceable if you have a trademark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a &lt;strong&gt;custom license&lt;/strong&gt;, please give it a custom name, and do not call it “BSD-something”. This also makes it easier for people to understand that your license would not have been FSF- or OSI-approved (even though I'm sure that it is compatible with the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-11-29T12:29:45.603" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13418" CreationDate="2022-11-30T03:49:51.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well Apache MIT and bsd are permissive so all they will require is copy right and license notice as well as stating changes to the Apache code simply by adding a notice. But your not required to disclose source for those files, now Mozilla license does require you to disclose the files that were used or modified to remain under the MPL but the binary could be under a different license. If you do modify the MPL files you need only disclose the files not the library or the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28626" LastActivityDate="2022-11-30T03:49:51.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-01T09:52:05.417" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a software package (R library on CRAN) distributed under GPL license, which makes use of Java classes. The classes are distributed, but for the sources, a README states: &amp;quot;for access to the java source of .class files, contact XXX&amp;quot;. The same author apparently developed both, so that it's not just a modified version of some GPL Java library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if it's possible to distribute part of a software package with a non-free license, while the package is itself under GPL. I have not yet contacted the author, and the Java sources &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be under GPL too, but it looks smelly: if they are, why not disrtibute them with the package? I would like to clarify what is permitted by the license first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmulti/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to the R package on CRAN&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user18966" LastEditorDisplayName="user18966" LastEditDate="2022-12-01T11:19:04.130" LastActivityDate="2022-12-01T11:19:04.130" Title="Distributing a GPL'd R package that includes java classes without sources" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7215" CreationDate="2022-12-01T11:00:56.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a project is licensed under the MPL-1.1-or-later (which it implicitly is, unless otherwise stated), you can redistribute it under the MPL-2.0. For this, replace the &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file and the licence headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a project &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; states that the licence is MPL-1.1-only, you are still allowed to do this. For this, apart from updating the headers, add the following notice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Source Code Form is “Incompatible With Secondary Licenses”, as defined by the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/Revision-FAQ/#upgrading-someone-elses-code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I am distributing code written by someone else under the terms of MPL 1.1. Can I distribute that code under the terms of MPL 2.0 instead of MPL 1.1? If so, how?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/#distributing-source-code-form-that-is-incompatible-with-secondary-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0: Distributing Source Code Form that is Incompatible With Secondary Licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28651" LastActivityDate="2022-12-01T11:00:56.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13443" CreationDate="2022-12-01T21:56:17.803" Score="5" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen several statements that the zlib license is compatible with the GPL. But this does not seem to be correct. The zlib license contains the following clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a license to be GPL compatible, it must not contain any restrictions on modifications that are not also found in the GPL. But the GPL has no restriction on modification that is analogous to the first part of this clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL contains the following clause (5a in 3.0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is a restriction on &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt;. You could comply with this term by never distributing your modified code or by adding such notices prior to distribution. But this would violate the zlib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how is the zlib license GPL compatible when it contains a restriction on modification that is not like any restriction found in the GPL and the presence of additional restrictions is what makes a license not GPL compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T14:28:26.323" Title="Why is the zlib license GPL-compatible" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|zlib|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-01T22:10:27.990" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to create a plugin, let's call it 'A' for Blender 3D and a software let's call it 'B' that communicates with plugin A through the network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Blender 3D has GPL license for the plugins, so the plugin 'A' MUST BE  GPL license. (see this site &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blender.org/about/license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.blender.org/about/license/&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software 'B' does not use any GPL code from Blender, or connecting to any lib from Blender, dynamic or static. Only process the data from the message from plugin A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I want plugin A to read the scene information and send to software B in a text format through the network. Then the software B will process the data got from the network and send it back to plugin A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The QUESTION:&#xA;Is the software B affected from GPL license? I know that the plugin A has to be in GPL license. But the software B can be any license????&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I raise here the question because I asked the legal team, and they are scared when they hear a GPL software! Or Am I missing something here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28657" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-11-25T12:27:29.647" LastActivityDate="2023-11-25T12:27:29.647" Title="License GPLv3 scenario for a plugin A for Blender 3D and software B that communicates with plugin A. What is the license for software B?" Tags="|gpl-3|copyright|commercial|proprietary-code|network-protocol|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13437" CreationDate="2022-12-02T06:32:55.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A closed source proprietary software can communicate with a GPL'd software via inter-process communication, including network communication over TCP/IP, without being subject to the terms of the GPL, if it's not exchanging intimate internal data structures that is found in the source code of the GPL'd software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the closed source proprietary software is a mere aggregate and not a derivative of the GPL'd software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of&#xA;“modified versions”?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed&#xA;together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to&#xA;create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the&#xA;other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is&#xA;that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits&#xA;users from exercising rights that each program's individual license&#xA;would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with&#xA;two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will&#xA;decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the&#xA;mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a&#xA;shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication&#xA;(what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are&#xA;communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-12-02T06:32:55.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13436" CreationDate="2022-12-02T08:01:50.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL License does not care what you do at home, you don't need to comply to the rules as long as you don't distribute any code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no difference between the impact of Restriction 2 of the ZLIB License and Section 5.a) in GPLv3 at the point of time when the software is distributed. Therefore the difference in the wording is no obstacle in GPL-compatibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-02T08:01:50.573" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-02T10:25:52.713" Score="2" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Web site for the Wordpress software indicates that the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 (or any later version of the GPL) from what I can tell. A thought that comes up is that when a user views a Wordpress-powered or Wordpress-based Web site, that the user could receive HTML markup and CSS styling data (among other things) that is licensed under GPLv2+. In addition, the user may receive GPL-licensed client-side scripting code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a search engine, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Startpage&lt;/a&gt;, which has a feature called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/en/anonymous-view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anonymous View&lt;/a&gt;. When a user has a list of search results after doing a search in Startpage, they can use the “Anonymous View” option by a search result to view that specific page in Anonymous View mode in Startpage. When a page is viewed in Anonymous View, the Startpage service remotely fetches the page and presents it to the user. Users can click hyperlinks in the page being viewed while remaining in Startpage’s Anonymous View. (A thought that comes up is whether the Startpage service alters or rewrites a Web page’s data when that page is viewed in Anonymous Mode and whether copies or modified copies of the retrieved Web page may be stored (hopefully temporarily) on servers that are part of the Startpage service.) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/en/anonymous-view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;More details are here&lt;/a&gt;. It is also possible to configure the Startpage service to &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/4521239495828&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specifically use&lt;/a&gt; US (United States) servers or to specifically use EU servers (EU probably referring to the European Union), or to use whichever servers are the closest or fastest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that I do the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I visit the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.startpage.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Startpage site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I go into the Startpage settings and I configure the Startpage service to only use EU servers. I indicate that the changes should be saved using a cookie. I then exit the Startpage settings page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do a Web search in Startpage and I receive a list of results.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Among the search results is a Web site that is not mine and that is Wordpress-based or powered by Wordpress. Perhaps the site also has a custom Wordpress theme and some custom Wordpress plugins that are GPL-licensed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I select the Anonymous View icon for the Wordpress-powered site and the Startpage service retrieves and loads the site in Anonymous View.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the Wordpress-powered site that is being shown in Anonymous View, I click on one of the site’s hyperlinks and the site goes to a different page of the same site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: At this point, am I still in compliance with the licensing of the GPL-licensed Wordpress software (in addition to any custom GPL-licensed theme or GPL-licensed plugins that the Wordpress-powered site has)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27650" LastActivityDate="2022-12-02T11:33:07.450" Title="Is it legitimate to access a Wordpress-based or Wordpress-powered Web site via the Startpage service’s Anonymous View feature?" Tags="|gpl|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13440" CreationDate="2022-12-02T11:07:32.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the website (the HTML code) is not under GPL License, even if the CMS (like WP) is. I believe that the question should be more generic. Something like: &amp;quot;Is a modifying proxy in compliance with GPL when it processes GPL-covered content of a website?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the modifying proxy does is taking the original website, copying the content (images, etc), changing the links, and providing this modified content to the user. The content is obviously changed (changed URLs), so the question is: does the proxy provide the respective source code? Yes, the source code is delivered in the HTML, JS etc. which it provides to the user. So no GPL-related problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be, however, an issue with the license of the website, its terms of use. If, for example, the author of the website had put the content under a CC-BY-ND License, then the proxy would be breaking the license, as the change in URLs can be considered a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a different consideration if such a modification could be considered to fall under 'fair use'. That would obviously depend on a multitude of conditions and side aspects, which cannot be easily covered by a generic answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-02T11:33:07.450" LastActivityDate="2022-12-02T11:33:07.450" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13436" CreationDate="2022-12-02T22:29:59.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see an issue, as the preservation (and introduction) of legal markings on modified forms, and a prohibition against misrepresentation, are permissible requirements to add to a GPL distribution, per GPLv3 7(b) and (c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note these Section 7 restrictions do not necessarily activate on distribution. A license term that applies only to private modification still fits within the definitions set forth in Section 7. I expect the allowances for additional restrictions are written in this broad way precisely to allow terms like the second term of the zlib license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppose Alice writes a zlib-licensed work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then Bob modifies that work, and releases it under the GPL. This is allowed because his GPL-licensed + zlib-licensed distribution has only extended normal GPL requirements by making GPL-permissible 7(b/c) restrictions.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is exactly how the addition-restrictions mechanism is intended to work, by allowing broad GPL compatibility with miscellaneous harmless (but technically restrictive) terms in other licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then Charlie makes further modifications to Bob's work. According to your reasonable, scrupulous read of the zlib license, Charlie must maintain modification notices at all times, even prior to distribution, per zlib requirements. Bob's GPL+zlib grant allows Alice to require this, and Bob's GPL terms allow this as an acceptable Section-7 restriction. Charlie (optionally) releases modified versions in the same way as Bob.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T14:28:26.323" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T14:28:26.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13447" CreationDate="2022-12-02T23:55:45.153" Score="2" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a GPLv2+ library that I want to use in my front-end SaaS web application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The library is a JavaScript library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are lot's of valuable front-end code in my SaaS web application that I cannot make them all GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption (correct me if it's wrong):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can use a Closed Source library in a GPL Application. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my solution (looking to see if it's a valid legal solution or not):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I move all of the valuable parts of the SaaS front-end into closed source libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I make the entire front-end application open source (GPL v2+)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The front-end application (which is open source by itself) references/uses to the open source library (the one that I wanna use) and closed source libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YRNNb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YRNNb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28667" LastEditorUserId="28667" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T00:31:21.520" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T13:38:42.217" Title="Can I create a GPL SaaS front-end application with lots of dependencies to Closed Source libraries" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13446" CreationDate="2022-12-03T06:06:25.463" Score="5" ViewCount="801" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Brazil Elections, they developed a modified Linux version called &amp;quot;UENUX&amp;quot; to run 570 thousand electronic vote machines, where the people go to Vote on those machines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they really mixed their code with a modified Linux distribution, I presume all code is &amp;quot;automatically&amp;quot; GPL-2.0. In this case, it's mandatory to open/release the code because people are using it in the voting machine? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(as a general question: &amp;quot;people that Just Use a product whose software runs under a GPL license, can require access to the source code?&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28668" LastEditorUserId="28668" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T06:25:22.003" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T08:34:12.887" Title="Using Modified Linux in an Embedded device, the source code must be opened?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13445" CreationDate="2022-12-03T08:34:12.887" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No: the GPL triggers on &lt;em&gt;distribution&lt;/em&gt;, not on use. The owners of the voting machines are the ones who the binaries have been distributed to so they can request the source code, but the end users cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is essentially the same as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11467/can-i-use-gpl-software-to-provide-a-commercial-cloud-service&quot;&gt;SaaS loophole&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T08:34:12.887" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13444" CreationDate="2022-12-03T13:32:47.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you cannot do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linking exception is something the copyright holder of a piece of code &lt;em&gt;and only the copyright holder&lt;/em&gt; can grant. Unless you are the copyright holder of the GPL libraries you wish to use, you cannot grant the linking exception so therefore the whole of the application must be under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could grant a linking exception allowing your front end code to be linked with &amp;quot;Closed Source Library A&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Closed Source Library B&amp;quot;, but that doesn't help you with &amp;quot;Open Source Library&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-03T13:38:42.217" LastActivityDate="2022-12-03T13:38:42.217" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-05T14:36:15.480" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I have been to open-source stuff and most of the time I license my projects under MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While open-sourcing projects, how do I &amp;quot;exclude&amp;quot; certain files and assets like &amp;quot;logos&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;databases&amp;quot;,etc from being open-sourced (Other words my Intellectual property) ? Like For Eg. If we have a built open source game lets say. How do I prevent game graphics, avatars, etc from being open-sourced but allow the game engine to be open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I have read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41898/how-do-you-choose-an-open-source-license&quot;&gt;How to chose a open source license&lt;/a&gt; And also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28685" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-05T15:12:34.680" LastActivityDate="2022-12-05T15:12:34.680" Title="Open Source - With Intellectual property" Tags="|distribution|open-source-definition|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13449" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13450" CreationDate="2022-12-05T16:43:17.303" Score="3" ViewCount="414" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an question about my understanding of Linking Proprietary software to LGPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding, one can link his/her software to LGPL lib via:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Statically: Proprietary &amp;amp; LGPL parts exists in 1 executable file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dynamically: Proprietary part exist in 1 executable file, and connect/calls to another binary file (aka Shared library) that contains LGPL part.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the programmer used method-&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;amp; wants to share the software), he/she must also give the &lt;strong&gt;Source-code&lt;/strong&gt; of the program. (Users must be able to change said LGPL library, and recompile the program). If the programmer doesn't want to share source, he/she should use method-&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When dynamically linking proprietary and LGPL-library, programmer can share only binary/executable of his/her proprietary part. And give instruction about how to install LGPL-library. (those files are usually &lt;code&gt;.so&lt;/code&gt; files right?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding correct?&#xA;and Are there any things that I'm missing out (&amp;amp; beware of it)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25114" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2022-12-05T18:04:39.473" LastActivityDate="2022-12-05T20:26:44.420" Title="Clarification on Proprietary software and linking LGPL libraries" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|linking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13449" CreationDate="2022-12-05T20:26:44.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rule of thumb is that the end user must be able to modify the LGPL-covered components, and to run your software with their modified LGPL-covered component. If the LGPL-covered component is a dynamically linked library (such as an &lt;code&gt;.so&lt;/code&gt; file on Linux), this is typically straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the LGPL-covered code is statically linked, then you must make it possible for the end user to relink the application with their modifications. You can satisfy this requirement by providing your source code, though it need not be under an Open Source license. Alternatively, you could provide the object code for your components, e.g. the &lt;code&gt;.o&lt;/code&gt; files on Linux. In any case, you should also provide the necessary build scripts to recompile or re-link the application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-12-05T20:26:44.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-06T21:39:52.640" Score="3" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;We plan to use clinical trial articles in one of the text annotation projects. This article mentions the license below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is an open-access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial, and no modifications or adaptations are made.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if we can use this article for text annotation and distribute the annotated text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11507" LastActivityDate="2022-12-07T08:24:01.920" Title="Can you use an open access CC-BY ND scientific article for text annotation?" Tags="|non-commercial|cc-by-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13452" CreationDate="2022-12-07T08:24:01.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you are not allowed to distribute any derivatives (edits, transformations, derived works) of the article, and a text annotation would actually be considered a derivative, and therefore a breach of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 2.a.1.B of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND license&lt;/a&gt; allows you to create derivative works (i.e. create the annotations), as long as you don't share it with 3rd parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, there is an exception in a law which would allow it (such as 'fair use' in medical research), then &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-creative-commons-licenses-affect-exceptions-and-limitations-to-copyright-such-as-fair-dealing-and-fair-use&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you may be allowed to do what you plan&lt;/a&gt;. You should ask a lawyer about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-07T08:24:01.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13455" CreationDate="2022-12-07T15:28:22.297" Score="6" ViewCount="1009" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was very curious about the way this project was published, under an &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce/blob/develop/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NPL license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand, this license is similar to the GPL v3.0, except that it adds an additional restriction: &amp;quot;You must add the &lt;strong&gt;powered by nopCommerce&lt;/strong&gt; text in each footer of the site&amp;quot;.&#xA;In addition, the site also indicates that you can purchase a license for copyright removal license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also noticed that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/nopSolutions/nopCommerce/blob/develop/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NPL license&lt;/a&gt; is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/category&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt; approved either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28698" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T04:40:09.133" Title="Is nopCommerce really open source?" Tags="|gpl-3|license|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13454" CreationDate="2022-12-07T15:55:25.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks very similar, to me, to the advertising clause of the old &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_(original_%22BSD_License%22)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four-clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; licence (4BSD), which required that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the &amp;lt;copyright holder&amp;gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OriginalBSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;describe 4BSD&lt;/a&gt; thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license with a serious flaw: the “obnoxious BSD advertising clause”. The flaw is not fatal; that is, it does not render the software nonfree. But it does cause practical problems, including incompatibility with the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That incompatibility is also not enough to render the software non-free; lots of other perfectly good free licences are incompatible with GPL (eg, EUPLv1.2).  The practice of selling exceptions from onerous free licences is also perfectly well-established, and doesn't by itself make something non-free.  That said, I note that the OSI haven't approved 4BSD, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you regard the FSF as the gatekeepers to &lt;em&gt;free&lt;/em&gt; software, and the OSI as the gatekeepers to &lt;em&gt;open source&lt;/em&gt;, nopCommerce is free but not open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of whether you should use it, I'd say the advertising requirement and the non-mainstream licence will likely be big turnoffs to downstream adoption of your software.  If you're just trying to write something to get a job done, you're fine to use nopCommerce, and don't forget to honour the requirement; if you're trying to start the next Apache project, steer clear of nopCommerce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-07T16:13:25.923" LastActivityDate="2022-12-07T16:13:25.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13454" CreationDate="2022-12-08T04:31:47.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The nopCommerce Public License states that it is GPL 3.0 licensed along with &amp;quot;Additional Terms&amp;quot;. In the GPL Section 7, &amp;quot;Additional Terms&amp;quot; are allowed to be added as follows (GPL v3 Section 7):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you&#xA;add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of&#xA;that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the&#xA;terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) &lt;strong&gt;Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or&#xA;author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal&#xA;Notices displayed by works containing it&lt;/strong&gt;; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or&#xA;requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in&#xA;reasonable ways as different from the original version; or&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards the GPL also says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All other non-permissive additional terms are considered &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;further&#xA;restrictions&amp;quot; within the meaning of section 10&lt;/strong&gt;.  If the Program as you&#xA;received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that &lt;strong&gt;it is&#xA;governed by this License along with a term that is a further&#xA;restriction, you may remove that term&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of the nopCommerce License apparently believe that their terms (to include &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot; on each screen and to hyperlink it to their site) are a form of author attribution or reasonable legal notice as defined in Section 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 7 technically allows you to remove the term if it turns out that the term is actually a &amp;quot;further restriction&amp;quot; as defined by Section 10:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the&#xA;rights granted or affirmed under this License.  For example, you may&#xA;not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of&#xA;rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation [for patents]...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, are the nopCommerce terms (to add the &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot; to each screen, and to hyperlink to their site) &amp;quot;additional terms&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;additional restrictions&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it could be argued either way for this case. On the one hand, the additional terms themselves don't seem to directly prevent anyone from exercising their GPL rights, so that is an argument in favour of the terms being considered Section 7-compliant. On the other hand, the fact that nopSolutions are charging a fee for a separate license seems to contradict Section 10, so that may be an argument in favour of defining the terms as &amp;quot;additional restrictions&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is nopCommercial Public License really open source?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI definition of open source includes this rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the additional terms specifically mention &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot;, then there seems to be a potential problem if an open source developer tries to extract parts of source code (which is presumably GPL-licensed) and then place that code in a different product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that developer have to then comply with the nopCommerce additional terms and therefore add &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot; to the completely different product that she is developing? If so, then the terms would seem to contradict Rule 8 of the OSI definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, GPL Section 7 gives the developer in this case a possible way out -- if she takes code from nopCommerce and uses it in a product which is clearly not directly related to nopCommerce, then at that point it seems quite likely that the &amp;quot;additional terms&amp;quot; are no longer reasonable at that point, and so she could remove those terms, since they are more clearly &amp;quot;additional restrictions&amp;quot; at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if the WordPress authors wanted to adapt some code from nopCommerce into their project, it doesn't seem reasonable that they would have to add &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot; to every page of WordPress, so WordPress (for example) would have a good argument to say that they could remove the &amp;quot;powered by nopCommerce&amp;quot; terms, when they adapt the code and place it inside their open source product. In practice, someone would actually have to be brave enough to try this and see how nopSolutions respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastEditorUserId="1159" LastEditDate="2022-12-08T04:40:09.133" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T04:40:09.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13460" CreationDate="2022-12-08T09:57:31.713" Score="11" ViewCount="2233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I'm writing a certain program, which I wish to license under strong copyleft license such as GPLv3. At the moment I have not used any 3rd party GPL code (I think there might be an LGPL library but I assume that's not an issue), so if I understand correctly I'm allowed to modify the license (Am I mistaken?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the main issue is that the program supports plugins loaded at runtime (binary DLLs) and presents a certain plugin API. I wish to allow 3rd parties to distribute non-GPL plugins if they wish, but only if they use the official plugin API and nothing else. To avoid any workarounds, I also want to forbid adding new API calls to the main program, or more accurately, adding such API calls would be allowed but any plugin using any such added calls would have to be GPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know whether that is possible and how do I add that permission to the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28703" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-08T11:16:55.700" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T22:42:19.527" Title="Allow non-GPL plugins in a GPL main program" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2022-12-08T11:09:58.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest you can use &lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0-or-later WITH GCC-exception-3.1&lt;/code&gt; for your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception 3.1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception text states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this Exception is to allow compilation of non-GPL&#xA;(including proprietary) programs to use, in this way, the header files&#xA;and runtime libraries covered by this Exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, adding new API would fall under GPLv3, but using existing API would be covered by this exception, if the plugins are considered &amp;quot;Independent Modules&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main part of the exception text reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have permission to propagate a work of Target Code formed by&#xA;combining the Runtime Library with Independent Modules, even if such&#xA;propagation would otherwise violate the terms of GPLv3, provided that&#xA;all Target Code was generated by Eligible Compilation Processes. You&#xA;may then convey such a combination under terms of your choice,&#xA;consistent with the licensing of the Independent Modules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T11:09:58.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2022-12-08T11:13:15.727" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you are the sole rightsholder, or have the consent of all other rightsholders, licensing under GPL-plus-exceptions is perfectly lawful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canonical example is probably the Linux kernel, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exceptions/Linux-syscall-note&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;makes clear&lt;/a&gt; that user-space programs that access the kernel via normal syscalls are not considered derivative works, and so are not required to be GPL-licensed, which allows proprietary software to run on Linux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd use the kernel exception document as a starting point, and write something similar that specifically says that plugins using only the following API calls (insert list) are not considered derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you accept contributions, you'll need to get contributors to accept a CLA that permits you to make this exemption for versions of the core code that include their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also want to forbid adding new API calls to the main program, or more accurately, adding such API calls would be allowed but any plugin using any such added calls would have to be GPL licensed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a problem.  Any modified version, such as one that added extra API calls, would be a derivative, and would need to be licensed under GPL; but you have no power to stop the downstream licensee from adding his/her new calls to the list of exempted calls.  You may, however, refuse to accept those into your version of the core software, or refuse to accept them unless the contributor agrees not to add the new calls to the exemption list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T11:13:15.727" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2022-12-08T11:22:15.600" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe possible, but could be tricky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the only copyright holder to the GPL-covered components of the software, you are free to add exceptions and additional terms to the GPLv3, as described in section 7 of that license. In fact, the LGPLv3 is just such a GPLv3 section 7 additional permission, allowing the component to be linked to proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing your own additional permissions is tricky, just like writing your own license is tricky. If in any way possible, strongly consider whether the existing LGPLv3 or other widely accepted GPL exceptions would be sufficient for your purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes, in principle you could write your own exception that only grants permissions to link with modules that use a specific plugin API. It is tricky to define that well, since it would be permissible (under the GPL) to change that plugin API, possibly widening it more than expected. It could be necessary to tie the license exception to versions published by you, but that would raise the question whether the resulting license is Open Source in practice (while it would certainly be GPL-compatible, the power asymmetry introduced by the exception could be argued to violate the Open Source definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is prior art for a GPL-covered program that loads non-GPL extensions, but only permits access to specific APIs: the Linux Kernel. All kernel modules must declare a license. If the module declares a GPL-compatible license, the module has full access to the kernel's APIs. For other licenses, only access to a restricted subset of APIs is granted. The enforcement here is primarily legal, but the kernel also uses linker tricks to enforce proper licensing on a technical level. The kernel also does not expect eBPF programs to have a GPL-compatible license, since these are essentially user-space programs executed in a virtual machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, it is probably best to side-step the in-process plugin question entirely. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;only allow GPL-compatible plugins, as would be the default here (compare also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ entry “If I write a plug-in to use with a GPL-covered program, what requirements does that impose on the licenses I can use for distributing my plug-in?”&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a plugin interface that makes it absolutely clear that the main program and the plugin are separate programs, and not combined into a single program. This is typically done by having the program and the plugin communicate over a simple protocol via pipes or sockets. For example, the program might offer a REST API on a localhost server. Personally, I think that such a clear separation could also be maintained within a process using sandboxing technologies such as WASM.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T11:22:15.600" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13462" CreationDate="2022-12-08T15:06:21.407" Score="3" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License v2.0&lt;/a&gt; is incompatible with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of dual-licensing or using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LLVM-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLVM Exceptions&lt;/a&gt;, I am thinking of defining an exception to the Apache license that is similar to what is found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2&lt;/a&gt; that confers it compatibility with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, as follows, in which I have copied and modified the text from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;======= Special exception to the Apache License v2.0 =======&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Larger Work” shall mean a work that combines the Work or Derivative&#xA;Works with other material, in Source form, that is not part of the&#xA;Work or Derivative Works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Secondary License” shall mean either the GNU General Public License,&#xA;Version 2.0, the GNU Lesser General Public License, Version 2.1, the&#xA;GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.0, or any later versions&#xA;of those licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, if the Larger Work is a combination of the&#xA;Work or Derivative Works with a work governed by one or more Secondary&#xA;Licenses, You may additionally distribute the Work or Derivative Works&#xA;under the terms of such Secondary License(s), so that the recipient of&#xA;the Larger Work may, at their option, further distribute the Work or&#xA;Derivative Works under the terms of either this License or such&#xA;Secondary License(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would this be acceptable? Or would it be considered a &amp;quot;crayon license&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be acceptable even if there's no SPDX exception identifier for my custom exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it be better for me to dual license my software as &lt;code&gt;Apache-2.0 OR GPL-2.0-only&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;Apache-2.0 OR LGPL-2.1-only&lt;/code&gt; instead of adding this custom exception?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good option, so that I can add on compatibility to all three GNU Secondary Licenses similar to the MPL2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-12-08T16:05:15.570" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T16:10:10.487" Title="Can I create my own exception to the Apache license? Is it good practice?" Tags="|apache-2.0|gpl-2|mpl|exceptions|crayon-licenses|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13461" CreationDate="2022-12-08T16:10:10.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It won't work.  If Bob takes your software and incorporates some code from third-party package C, which is under (eg) GPLv2, then although your exception allows Bob to relicense your code to GPLv2, the GPLv2 that applies to C wouldn't permit code from C to be relicensed to Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the recipient of the Larger Work may, at their option, further distribute the Work or Derivative Works under the terms of either this License or such Secondary License(s)&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is inoperative; the Larger Work may only be distributed under the terms of the Secondary Licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wwhat you're actually doing is permitting people to take your work under Apache2, GPLv2+, LGPLv2.1+, or AGPLv3+, at their choice.  That's a very decent thing to do, but you could express it much more clearly, and avoid crayon issues, by simply saying so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T16:10:10.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2022-12-08T20:28:25.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fundamental principle of GPL is that any distribution that contains GPL code written by anyone who has not agreed to alternative terms, must either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Merely include the code, unmodified, as part of an aggregation that is not a derivative work, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be a derivative work which is covered under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An additional principle is that there are no restrictions upon the production of derivative works that are not distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, one may distribute a quantity of code under whatever license one sees fit, along with an unmodified copy of GPL code, and instructions for how to produce a derivative work that combines them, but which may not be distributed.  If your code is designed in such a way that plug-ins would need to incorporate some of your copyrighted material, then you could impose whatever license terms you want on the material in question.  On the other hand, if you're intending that your code be freely distributable as opposed to commercially licensed, someone could distribute code for a plug-in which is complete except for your portion, along with instructions on how to incorporate the appropriate parts of your freely distributable code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you were commercially licensing code, recipients of such instructions would be required to buy a copy of your code before they could incorporate it into their plug-in, but if your code is deliberately freely distributable, I think you have to allow for the possibility that recipients might do things you don't like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T20:28:25.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13457" CreationDate="2022-12-08T22:42:19.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key thing is not really an exception to the license. The key thing is to make sure that the new code for the plugins is not a &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; of the original code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several things you should do to ensure this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide a clear simple documented interface and state clearly that any code examples in that documentation under a clear license like the MIT license which has no restrictions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;give an example plugin that people can start from and make the code of that example be under a different license such as, again, the MIT license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide further documentation and explanations of how to write plugins and make that documentation and any contents of it be under the unrestricted license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In creating these files and documents, since you are the original author of the program, you are clearly within your rights as long as you don't copy from (&amp;quot;derive from&amp;quot;) anyone else's code which you used in your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once these things exist, plugin authors can use them freely because they are under an unrestricted license and not under the GPL license. If you don't do this then plugin authors probably can find a way to do things similarly but it will be much more difficult and would have legal risk so they probably won't want to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28712" LastActivityDate="2022-12-08T22:42:19.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-09T00:14:37.667" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I sell computer with pre-installed software with Apache 2.0 License? Provided that I do not charge for software or license, only for hardware with some margin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28713" LastActivityDate="2022-12-09T14:13:11.993" Title="Can I sell computer with pre-installed software with Apache 2.0 License?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13465" CreationDate="2022-12-09T12:21:12.350" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly lawful to sell a computer with free software pre-installed.  Indeed, you may charge whatever you like; not just for the hardware, but for the software, too.  The FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;are clear about that&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you may not do is deliver it without user freedom, so you may not attempt to legally prevent the user from using, copying, modifying, and then redistributing the software thereon as they wish.  If the software is covered by a copyleft licence, such as GPL, you must provide the user with source code to assist them in this.  If the GPL is v3, you may not attempt to prevent the user exercising their freedoms by technical means (eg, DRM), either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-09T14:13:11.993" LastActivityDate="2022-12-09T14:13:11.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13471" CreationDate="2022-12-09T12:43:10.877" Score="5" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Context:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We want to create a repo inside our work's Github organization for a small OSS project. This will be done using my work email (not personal). I'm also not the organization creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Question:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering what would happen when my email/account is deleted in the future if I depart from my company. If I were to leave, I would want to transfer the repo ownership to a colleague and not contribute anymore to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will the repo and all commits disappear?&lt;/strong&gt; From what I've seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-your-personal-account/deleting-your-personal-account&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github Docs&lt;/a&gt;, all repos I create will disappear, but commits and other contributions to third-party projects will not change, they will just be attached to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ghost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghost User&lt;/a&gt;. Does this also apply when the repo is under an organization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the best practice when creating repos in a work organization?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other options considered:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also suggested the option of merging my personal and work accounts, with my work one as the primary email while I am in the company. If I leave, I can delete my work email from the email address list, as suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-your-personal-account/best-practices-for-leaving-your-company&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This way, my commits in the OSS repo would not be associated to a Ghost User. However, the team is worried that using personal Github accounts might appear unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence: Are there any guidelines &lt;strong&gt;how to ensure continued attribution&lt;/strong&gt; to me of commits made to an OpenSource project when my (work) account used to create the work gets disabled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28722" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T16:44:16.957" LastActivityDate="2022-12-24T16:44:16.957" Title="How to ensure continued correct attribution in an OSS project when contributed to with a work account" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13489" CreationDate="2022-12-09T14:50:08.330" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've developed a python project that depends on several open-source packages (e.g., &lt;code&gt;numpy&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;pandas&lt;/code&gt;). I want to distribute the project to end-users while ensuring the installation process is easy and does not affect the user's standard environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall idea is as follows: The users will install the &lt;code&gt;conda&lt;/code&gt; environment management system by themselves (if they don't already have it, as many indeed might). Afterward, they would run my installation script, which creates and initializes the environment (by installing the required packages) and then installs my project inside that environment (normally using &lt;code&gt;pip&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;strong&gt;Will using such an installation script mean that I'm distributing the prerequisites?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, would I need to include all the licensing, copyright, and notice information from all direct and indirect dependencies (according to their licenses) at an appropriate place in my project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it's completely fine by me in principle, but it becomes quite involved in practice. Nevertheless, I would like to ensure everything is according to the law, but I also do not want to do something unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;strong&gt;Would it be different if the users were given the installation instructions in the documentation and would therefore prepare the environment by themselves and install my package by themselves?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that if I bundled all the software together, then I would certainly be distributing it. However, I'm not sure whether using such an installation script would be considered as bundling the software together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28723" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T12:45:04.047" Title="Is using a script that installs prerequisites from external repositories considered distributing the prerequisites?" Tags="|license-compatibility|bundling|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13470" CreationDate="2022-12-09T20:29:44.460" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does non-distributed code using licensed code need to be licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: if a company (or a person) uses open-source code with an ISC license (no sublicensing allowed) for an internal app (or a personal project) that isn't shared or sold, should the app be licensed ISC too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28725" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-18T14:25:30.740" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T14:25:30.740" Title="Does licensing only apply to distributed code?" Tags="|license|proprietary-code|isc|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13469" CreationDate="2022-12-12T00:34:08.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does non-distributed code using licensed code need to be licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the vast majority of FOSS licenses, the answer is a simple &amp;quot;no.&amp;quot; Most FOSS licenses impose no restrictions on non-distributed code whatsoever. The main exception is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Affero General Public License&lt;/a&gt;, for which some obligations attach when the software is modified, regardless of whether you distribute it (see section 13 for details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For non-FOSS (proprietary) licenses, the answer is often &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; but it must be understood that there are limits to what you can put in a license, FOSS or otherwise. Unfortunately, those limits vary by jurisdiction. The US has a copyright exception under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 117&lt;/a&gt; which allows &amp;quot;the owner of a copy of a computer program&amp;quot; to run the software, even if that means making a temporary copy in RAM, as well as allowing the creation of backup copies and the making of copies as part of a repair process. However, it's unclear to me whether this applies to cases where a (non-FOSS) EULA says something like &amp;quot;the software is licensed, not sold&amp;quot; - is the end user still the &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot; in that case? Other jurisdictions probably have analogous exceptions, but the details will vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exception likely does apply to most FOSS licenses, but any FOSS license should allow the software to be run without restriction anyway, as this is freedom zero of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: if a company (or a person) uses open-source code with an ISC license (no sublicensing allowed) for an internal app (or a personal project) that isn't shared or sold, should the app be licensed ISC too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISC license&lt;/a&gt; is not a copyleft license, so the app does not need to be licensed ISC in any event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-12-12T00:34:08.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13467" CreationDate="2022-12-13T04:47:34.193" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your company policies will ultimately decide your behaviour - ask your management team if you're unsure. Your company likely owns related work you create, and may exercise their ownership to limit open sourcing. Where and how you create the repository does not change this legal ownership of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub recommends using a single GitHub.com account for all contributions, both at work and otherwise. It's not unprofessional to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you aren't required to use a managed user account, GitHub recommends that you use one personal account for all your work on GitHub.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-your-personal-account/managing-multiple-accounts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-github/managing-your-personal-account/managing-multiple-accounts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Will the repo and all commits disappear?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the repo is within a GitHub Organization, and you leave that Organization, the repo remains with all your commits. This is true whether you created the repo within the Organization or transferred it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the best practice when creating repos in a work organization?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can either create the repo directly in the Organization, or create it within your own account and transfer it (not fork it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, given the repo is within an Organization, multiple people or a team would be assigned access to it - so no transfers are required when you leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27566" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T04:47:34.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-13T08:06:57.960" Score="1" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License v2.0&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such&#xA;Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I take a software (Work) licensed under the Apache License v2.0, and create a Derivative Work and license it (the Derivative Work) as a whole under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the Derivative Work now be compatible to be combined with GPLv2 software, to become licensed under the GPLv2 as a whole, since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license is compatible with the GPLv2 license&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or would it remain incompatible, because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2 license is incompatible with the Apache License v2.0&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted paragraph requires compliance with the conditions of the Apache License v2.0 for the distribution of the Work, but not the distribution of the Derivative Work as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2022-12-14T03:34:15.330" LastActivityDate="2022-12-14T08:38:02.563" Title="License change for Derivative Works of Apache-licensed software, and GPLv2 compatibility" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|gpl-2|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13475" CreationDate="2022-12-13T17:10:24.567" Score="18" ViewCount="3197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a researcher you are making a modification to some GPL3-licensed software, and thus if you were to distribute the code, you would need to do this using the GPL (or a compatible license, but I'll just stick to GPL to simplify).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now imagine you submit an article to a scientific journal, and the reviewers, as part of the review process, request your code. From what I understand, you would need then to share this code under a GPL license.&#xA;Until here, no issues. The problem that I see is that most scientific journals have strict (and ethical) restrictions on what a review can do with the content they are reviewing, i.e., not being able to share the content in public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So wouldn't this create an incompatibility with GPL license? I mean, according to the license, the reviewer should be entitled to share it as they like, as long as the license is maintained and so on... Meanwhile, the journal review guidelines would act as a limitation on the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the big question is if this would indeed constitute a breach of the GPL license. Or would it mean that you can't submit your article to that journal, since their requirements could impose a limitation on the license itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could you make a case that you are not distributing the software when you distribute it to the reviewer in the first place (I know that for personal use or to use internally you don't need to make your code use GPL even if you are using/changing GPL software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28754" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T15:59:37.300" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T20:57:32.680" Title="Does this constitute a breach in GPL license? Article with GPL licensed software and Journal reviewer guidelines" Tags="|gpl|distribution|publishing|enforcement|ethics|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-13T17:55:31.157" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're essentially looking at the same situation as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; from the GPL FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your code is still licensed under the GPL (without any further restrictions) and the reviewer could distribute it without a breach of the copyright license they have received.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Due to a separate agreement, the reviewer is almost certainly going to choose not to distribute your code, because doing so would likely irreparably ruin their relationship with the journal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-12-13T17:55:31.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-13T18:04:09.893" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;You certainly are distributing the GPL-licensed work to the reviewer. &amp;quot;Internal&amp;quot; non-distribution conveyance only occurs between agents of the same legal corporation (&lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt;) because it doesn't leave the possession of the corporate person. That does not occur here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the simplest case, you are not forbidden to tell the reviewer, &amp;quot;I must tell you: I cannot and will not forbid you from distributing this software.&amp;quot; And the reviewer will surely say in reply, &amp;quot;Thanks, if early release of this software is worth forever destroying my academic career, I'll think about employing that option.&amp;quot; And there is no GPL violation: the reviewers badly &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to ensure that they do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; share your software, for the safety of their own careers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal specifics of more complex cases will probably come down to what specific contracts are enacted between the parties involved (you, the reviewer, and the journal publisher).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event that you give your code directly to a reviewer, and that reviewer has a separate contract with the publisher not to share reviewed material, I don't see a GPL violation here, because no distributor of GPL'd work is attempting to impose restrictions on redistribution. If the publisher acts as a proxy between you and the reviewer and gives the work to the reviewer themselves, and such a contract is in effect, then they probably commit a GPL violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that you give the work directly to the reviewer, and there exists a legal contract between you and the publisher asserting that you will not grant reviewers the rights to redistribute the software. This would put you in the position of either violating the upstream author's GPL grant or violating your contract with the publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible exception to this last case: the GPLv3 does handle this case for contractors hired to make modifications and for remote code-hosting/execution platforms (e.g., Amazon Web Services):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can say that reviewers fall under the broad category of parties who receive your code for &amp;quot;the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you&amp;quot; then the GPLv3 would allow this particular restriction. (The GPLv2 would not.) Whether or not reviewer feedback on software constitutes &amp;quot;making modifications&amp;quot; under this provision isn't clearly settled for me, but I can surely see a strong argument in favor of it (e.g., they might indeed offer improvements, and there isn't an expectation they'd want to redistribute the work further, much like a contractor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-12-14T15:07:06.010" LastActivityDate="2022-12-14T15:07:06.010" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13476" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13490" CreationDate="2022-12-13T21:37:23.847" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm modifying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pi-hole.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pi-Hole project&lt;/a&gt; a little bit, and plan to distribute this. I want to make sure what I'm doing is 100% correct to limit/prevent any legal issues. The Pi-Hole PHP code is licensed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://eupl.eu/1.2/en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL&lt;/a&gt;, and I plan on adding a new tab to the UI which includes copying/using their template/layout code and having my own code on top of that. Do I add it to the top of the page in a PHP comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question I have is the matter of source code distribution. Since the is EUPL, do I &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to distribute all code that is changing/based on the Pi-Hole code? If so, do I have to make it available (i.e. you have to contact me first), or do I have to have it on my site/GitHub/etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28758" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T09:19:56.697" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T09:33:46.093" Title="How do I indicate modifications for EUPL? Where do I distribute source?" Tags="|license|eupl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13503" CreationDate="2022-12-13T23:20:43.340" Score="-2" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently using the &amp;quot;text editor&amp;quot; (so to speak) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/tinymce/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinymce&lt;/a&gt;. And I'm building an open source project that I plan to upload to github once I finish it. My project is basically like wordpress (not literally a wordpress 2) but you can write notes, and other texts that require TinyMCE. And what I want is for my project to work even without internet, but I don't know how to do it since TinyMCE by default gives you an API that needs you to have internet to work. First I thought of copying the javascript that the TinyMCE API returns, but obviously before doing that I went to see the license to see how I can use the software. My program is going to be like a reminder or a calendar (I am not speaking literally) that is, it is going to be a private service for the user but that the user could install on his computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/legal/tiny-self-hosted-enterprise-agreement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-hosted application license&lt;/a&gt; would apply. Although I have already read the license, I do not fully understand it. And in something so important I would like someone to tell me if I understood correctly, in section 2.3 I understand that I can make a copy if I need it but NOT in production, but then if a user doesn't have internet and that copy is needed, can i use it? I hope I have explained myself correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28760" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T15:41:36.630" Title="TinyMCE license clarification" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13472" CreationDate="2022-12-14T08:38:02.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There may be a slight misunderstanding about licence compatibility here.  If two licences are compatible, it doesn't mean that you can take code released under one, and incorporate it into a project licensed solely under the other; it means you can combine it with code under the other licence and release the resulting work under a set of conditions which is the union of the sets of conditions of the two licences, and that no self-contradiction will arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When X licence is compatible with (eg) GPLv3, it means that no requirements in X contradict, or are contradicted by, any requirement of GPLv3.  Apache2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is incompatible&lt;/a&gt; with GPLv2 because Apache2 includes a patent licence and a termination provision thereon (s3), and GPLv2 includes no such provision, and requires that GPLv2 be the licence under which the entire derivative work is distributed (s2b).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining third-party Apache2 code with MIT code doesn't magically &amp;quot;cleanse&amp;quot; the resulting work from the Apache licence and its requirements, it merely doesn't make a work that cannot be distributed.  Should you make such a thing, you may either keep the parts separate and under their own licences (in which case the MIT portions may be used on their own as part of a later GPLv2 work), or you may combine the parts and distribute them under the union of the two input licences (in which case no part may be later removed for use in a GPLv2 work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-12-14T08:38:02.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-14T10:43:07.123" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isn't this a direct application of section 12 of GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;12&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Surrender of Others' Freedom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. For example, if you agree to terms that obligate you to collect a royalty for further conveying from those to whom you convey the Program, the only way you could satisfy both those terms and this License would be to refrain entirely from conveying the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have send the program to the reviewer under GPL license. But the reviewer has other obligations, namely the journal requires the reviewer not to share the content in any way. So the reviewer must comply with both requirements, which means that they can not share the program at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the GPL does not &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; a reviewer to share program. Anybody can obtain a GPL-licensed program and choose not to share it further. And if one has other obligations that forbid sharing program further, then the only choice left is not to share at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPD, based on the comments: the above refers to the situation for the reviewer. They will be in no problem, because GPL does not require them to be able to distribute the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it tangentially explains why &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; are not in any violation of GPL. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; are not placing any limitations on the reviewer, and the fact that the reviewer has any other limitations does not affect your actions. After all, these limitations are resolved by this section 12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more tricky situation may be for the editor, in case when they forward your program to the reviewers (usually you do not interact with the reviewers directly), because the editor will then have to send the program to the reviewer and require a non-disclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I believe that this can be easily solved if you do not sent a full program to the editor, but only a link where the program can be obtained (a link to a repository, Google Drive archive, etc.) The editor will then forward the link to the reviewer, and this will not constitute &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; according to the definition of the GPL (because &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; is a special case of &amp;quot;propagation&amp;quot;, which requires &amp;quot;[doing something that] would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law&amp;quot;, and simply sending a link would not constitute any infringement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Although the latter paragraph poses an interesting question per se, I've posted a separate question regarding it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13488/does-sending-a-link-to-software-constitute-conveying-according-to-gpl&quot;&gt;Does sending a link to software constitute &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot; according to GPL?&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28763" LastEditorUserId="28763" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T08:30:08.883" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T08:30:08.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-14T11:26:24.097" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, that would not be a breach of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So wouldn't this create an incompatibility with GPL license? I mean, according to the license, the reviewer should be entitled to share it as they like, as long as the license is maintained and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not true. The license merely states that if I, the researcher, convey a copy of my software to the reviewers, then I must (among other requirements) release my software under the GPL. (That's in section 5, &amp;quot;Conveying Modified Source Versions.&amp;quot;) The license doesn't say that the reviewers must &lt;em&gt;actually be able&lt;/em&gt;, all things considered, to share it as they like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if I give the reviewers &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; permission to redistribute the code, then I've satisfied the requirement that the GPL imposes on me, and so I'm not violating the license. The fact that &lt;em&gt;other people&lt;/em&gt; are forbidding the reviewers from distributing the code doesn't mean that I'm somehow violating the license. Those other people aren't violating the license either, because they're not distributing the software, so the license doesn't apply to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6927" LastEditorUserId="6927" LastEditDate="2022-12-14T11:33:40.667" LastActivityDate="2022-12-14T11:33:40.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13484" CreationDate="2022-12-15T06:34:55.573" Score="13" ViewCount="2832" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking though :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Learning MySQL and MariaDB&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[ Russell J.T. Dyer / O’Reilly / 2015 ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I came across a licensing Issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says [ Preface Section ] :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The software license, though, is now held by the MariaDB Foundation so&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that it cannot be bought by Oracle or any other corporation.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is related to the earlier Statement :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Displeased that Oracle took control of MySQL software, Monty started a new company&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Monty Program Ab) that has developed a fork of the software called MariaDB.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what changes are there between earlier &amp;amp; now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Oracle could buy Sun which bought MySQL (the Company) earlier , Oracle can still buy MariaDB (the foundation ) now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can the license being held by the foundation forbid Oracle from buying the Whole Entity ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28771" LastEditorUserId="18264" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T17:09:28.757" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T17:09:28.757" Title="MariaDB: How can the license being held by a foundation forbid Oracle from buying MariaDB?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13483" CreationDate="2022-12-15T07:49:35.333" Score="26" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the license being held by the foundation forbid Oracle from buying the Whole Entity ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it's not for sale.  This from the foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.org/certificate/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Certificate of Incorporation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOURTH: The Corporation is not authorized to issue, and shall not have, any capital stock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stock&lt;/a&gt; is the established way of owning a piece (or, if you own all of it, all) of a corporate entity; in the absence of any stock, you can't buy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The articles do allow that they can be changed by the board, as is normal, but they go on to state that one of the foundation's principal aims is to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;continue the development of, free public access to, and adoption of the open source database management software known as MariaDB&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so - even if it could be done - any attempt to pack the board of directors with hostile members to change this policy would likely be subject to legal challenge.  It also provides that if the foundation is wound up, the assets will be distributed solely to other non-profit organisations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rights are thus as tightly protected from corporate acquisition as any asset can be in a modern capitalist society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-15T10:18:23.860" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T10:18:23.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9021" CreationDate="2022-12-15T23:23:25.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This article shows Oracle's licensing arc from their Oracle Binary Code License (OBCL) to the Oracle Technology Network License Agreement which did not cover commercial use, to the Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions License (NFTC) which now appears to allow commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OBCL was in use up through Java 8u202 and the NFTC started being used for Java 17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28779" LastActivityDate="2022-12-15T23:23:25.603" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-16T07:20:35.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the big question is if this would indeed constitute a breach of the GPL license. Or would it mean that you can't submit your article to that journal, since their requirements could impose a limitation on the license itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time figuring out who is supposedly trying to impose a restriction here.  The 'ethical' restrictions on redistributing code sent to reviewers are, I assume, an attempt to protect the rights of the person submitting the paper and therefore the code to the reviewer.  If you are submitting binaries of code someone licensed to you under the GPL to anyone, you have the responsibility to afford them the same rights of redistribution of the source code.  If you are trying to 'protect' your modifications to this code by relying on the agreement between a journal and the reviewers to keep your code secret, after benefiting from the work done by the authors of the code you are licensed to use under the GPL, you are acting &lt;em&gt;highly unethically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is some agreement between you and the journal that the code can be copied and distributed to the reviewers, but then the reviewers are denied the rights to modify and redistribute the code, then again you are acting &lt;em&gt;highly unethically&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18350" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T07:20:35.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-16T08:29:36.693" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume the following scenario:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice obtains a GPL-licensed code and make modifications to it. However, she does not release the modifications to public, but instead uploads the modified code to Google Drive under a secret link, and sends that link to Bob (or uploads it to a private repository and sends Bob access credentials). Moreover, Alice allows Bob to share the link itself to whomever under any conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob sends the link to Charlie, additionally requiring that Charlie does not distribute the link, nor the software downloaded from that link, to anybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a violation of GPL, and if yes, who does violate and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Alice does not violate GPL because she does not place any restrictions on distibuting the code, and simply distributes it under GPL terms. Bob may be in violation, but... does he distribute the code at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simply forwarding a link to the software, even with additional restrictions, does not seem to fit under &amp;quot;propagation&amp;quot; (and thus &amp;quot;conveying&amp;quot;), because it can not make Bob liable for infringement. (At least, in many jurisdictions, see, e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4360/is-it-infringement-to-give-a-link-to-a-copyrighted-file&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/4360/is-it-infringement-to-give-a-link-to-a-copyrighted-file&lt;/a&gt;) Or can it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, I would say that Bob can forward a link to Charlie, even if he does not have &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; license for the software behind the link. So GPL should not be applicable to Bob's action at all, because Bob does not any license at all. Is this wrong, and if yes, then how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28763" LastEditorUserId="28763" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T11:54:28.520" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T11:54:43.740" Title="Does sending a link to software constitute &quot;conveying&quot; according to GPL?" Tags="|gpl|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13468" CreationDate="2022-12-16T08:55:31.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are fine going forward with the script. The script -executed by a user &amp;quot;U&amp;quot;- contains instructions to download and install certain software &amp;quot;SW&amp;quot; from a server &amp;quot;S&amp;quot; (which is not under your control) on a user device &amp;quot;UD&amp;quot; under the control of U.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The person/organisation providing the code on server S is responsible for compliance with all the license requirements related to distribution of the SW, for example providing 'copyright', 'license' and 'notice' files as well as source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are neither distributing the SW nor receiving it nor running the script, so you are out of the game. You are just providing a description in form of a script how to prepare the UD (=install the dependencies) in order to be able to run your python project. And there is no difference between providing the script and providing the same information in a document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Even though there is no legal requirement on you) to ensure that the users are able to execute all their rights under OSS licenses, it is good practice to create the script in a way, which will download the entire package with all files (i.e. 'copyright', 'license' and 'notice' files as well as source code where required), and not just the few files that are needed to run your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T12:45:04.047" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T12:45:04.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13476" CreationDate="2022-12-16T09:33:46.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to comply with all the terms of the EUPL license, which includes the obligations listed in section 5 (partially quoted here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution right: The Licensee shall keep intact all copyright,&#xA;patent or trademarks notices and all notices that refer to the Licence&#xA;and to the disclaimer of warranties. The Licensee must include a copy&#xA;of such notices and a copy of the Licence with every copy of the Work&#xA;he/she distributes or communicates. The Licensee must cause any&#xA;Derivative Work to carry prominent notices stating that the Work has&#xA;been modified and the date of modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the paragraph above you will want to have a section in the UI (maybe called &amp;quot;About&amp;quot;), which includes the attribution information of the original project as well as your own modifications. You might just amend what is already there from the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Provision of Source Code: When distributing or communicating copies of&#xA;the Work, the Licensee will provide a machine-readable copy of the&#xA;Source Code or indicate a repository where this Source will be easily&#xA;and freely available for as long as the Licensee continues to&#xA;distribute or communicate the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the paragraph above you are required to provide the source code of your derivative work. You can do that by providing a link to your website or GitHub repository. This is not optional, you have to provide the source code. If there is enough storage on the Raspberry PI you are shipping, then you may also include the source code in its memory (Flash or thumb drive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T09:33:46.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13488" CreationDate="2022-12-16T11:46:49.773" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'convey' means 'to make available to' or 'give the software to' in this context. So if you make a piece of software available by whatever means to another person, you need to have a license to be allowed to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL this means that you must make available the corresponding source code to all recipients of the software, and that you may not impose any additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice is fine and fulfills her obligations. The part with 'no additional restrictions' is where Bob is failing by stating that the software must not be shared further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly technical, Alice is only required to provide the source to people she distributes the software to. Thus she and Bob can both ask that the link to the sources is not shared further - but neither may require that the source is not shared further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given above situation, Bob may ask that the &lt;em&gt;link&lt;/em&gt; is not shared further, but he may not ask that the code and software is not shared further. The people who receive the software from Bob might then download the software from the link provided by Bob (or Alice) and would have to provide their own hosting of the code (or means to provide it to their 'customers') should they decide to pass it along to others. Each distributor must uphold their offer to provide sources for at least 3 years (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v3 §6b&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-16T11:54:43.740" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T11:54:43.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13469" CreationDate="2022-12-16T13:31:54.717" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually the answer to such a question is no because personal use of the code that is even licensed without a commercial underlay does not need a new license for the finished product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28787" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T13:31:54.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13473" CreationDate="2022-12-16T20:57:32.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem I see is not with sharing, but with attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The journal will have strict anonymity requirements, while GPL3 art 5.a forbids exactly that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified&#xA;it, and giving a relevant date.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2022-12-16T20:57:32.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-17T02:47:49.997" Score="1" ViewCount="996" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot; In the Font Awesome Free download, the CC BY 4.0 license applies to all icons packaged as .svg and .js files types.&amp;quot;. How can such simple and general purpose icons hold copyright? Also the license asks for attribution &amp;quot;Font Awesome Pro 6.2.1 by u/fontawesome - &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com&lt;/a&gt; License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com/license&lt;/a&gt; (Commercial License) Copyright 2022 Fonticons, Inc.&amp;quot;. Not sure where to put the attribution when I am using the icons on my website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is are those general purpose icon's svg code copyrighted? can I use them in a website without worrying about the license? If not, where do I put the attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user28793" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T19:58:28.827" Title="Using Font Awesome icons on my site" Tags="|copyright|license-notice|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13501" CreationDate="2022-12-17T05:40:01.207" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to make a bytecode viewer for Java 17 classfiles,&#xA;and distribute my work under some permissive license.&#xA;For convenience of implemenation, I'd like to include&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/jvms-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JVMS Chapter 4. The class File Format&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;into my repository.&#xA;So I glanced &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/spec-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Appendix A. Limited License Grant&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;but it was beyond my scope of understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please teach me whether and how it is compliant&#xA;to include the portion of JVMS in my derived work&#xA;and distribute my work under permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28794" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T14:24:19.483" Title="Is it legitimate to include Java VM Specification document in my derived work?" Tags="|licensing|java|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13499" CreationDate="2022-12-17T15:57:06.247" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&lt;/a&gt; to understand about GPLv3 but it seems I am more confused with the term source.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is the word source referring to source of the library or my entire project source.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In my project (C++ based) I if am using a library which is licensed as GPLv3, then do I need to release the source of this GPLv3 library only if requested or am I even required to release my proprietary source code.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Doe shaving header only, static linking or run-time linking have different bearing on the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28799" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T01:37:13.127" Title="Confusion regarding the term source in GPLv3" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13498" CreationDate="2022-12-17T21:16:07.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make sure you distinguish between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every programme which links to a library licensed under &lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt; MUST be released under GPL or compatible terms. Proprietary programmes may not be distributed if they link to GPL - licensed libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different, if you link to an &lt;strong&gt;LGPL&lt;/strong&gt; - licensed library where the license only extents to the library itself and only imposes the requirement on you to give your customers and users the option and possibility and instructions to replace the linked library by a modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The means (static vs. dynamic) to link a GPL-licensed library don't impact your license obligation. It matters for the LGPL case where you probably want to avoid static linking as that would in most cases make it impossible to replace the LGPL-licensed library; replacing a dynamically-linked library with a modified version is far easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-18T01:37:13.127" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T01:37:13.127" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13496" CreationDate="2022-12-18T14:24:19.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the license you linked in your question, you cannot include the specification in your offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License for Evaluation Purposes. Specification Lead hereby grants you a fully-paid, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, limited&#xA;license (&lt;strong&gt;without the right to sublicense&lt;/strong&gt;), under Specification Lead's&#xA;applicable intellectual property rights to view, download, use and&#xA;reproduce the Specification &lt;strong&gt;only for the purpose of internal&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;evaluation&lt;/strong&gt;. ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be OK for you to link to the original website with Oracle's information, but you cannot take it and distribute it yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T14:24:19.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13495" CreationDate="2022-12-18T14:48:14.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should never use 3rd party content without respecting the license under which the content is provided to you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the commercial license you have linked above, Font Awesome also provides fonts, icons and software under free of charge licenses, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com/license/free&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as you can see here&lt;/a&gt;. They have put lots of effort into creating the icons in different styles, therefore I don't see an obvious reason why there would be no copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very easy to include the required attribution information, demanded by the CC-BY 4.0 license, into the footer of your website, or in the 'about' page or somewhere else, where it is easy to find for the visitors. If you have any doubts please consult the CC FAQ at &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#attribution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#attribution&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T14:48:14.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13477" CreationDate="2022-12-18T15:41:36.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments above really provide all the answer that's needed, but in order that the question can be put to bed, I've presumed to summarise them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/legal/tiny-self-hosted-enterprise-agreement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-hosted application licence&lt;/a&gt; gives you nearly none of the freedoms normally associated with free software, and so is both unsuitable for what you want, and off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the authors also do an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tiny.cloud/get-tiny/#self-hosted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT-licensed version&lt;/a&gt;, which you can download from that link.  That is suitable for what you want; you may copy it without restriction, and you may incorporate it into your code or just ship it alongside, provided you honour the very gentle obligations of the MIT licence, which can be read eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2022-12-18T15:41:36.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13506" CreationDate="2022-12-18T23:50:22.377" Score="0" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to write a bytecode viewer for Java 17 classfile,&#xA;and distribute my work under some permissive license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to keep consistent my implemenation,&#xA;I'd like to link my code to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/jvms-4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;of&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Java Virtual Machine Specification (JVMS)&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;in some way.&#xA;The JVMS seems licensed under&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/spec-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Appendix A. Limited License Grant&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13496/is-it-legitimate-to-include-java-vm-specification-document-in-my-derived-work#answer-13501&quot;&gt;the answer for my previous post&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;I may not include the JVMS document file in my work directly.&#xA;But linking to the JVMS may be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have twofold plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, HTML parser program load the page,&#xA;extract data from the specification,&#xA;and transform it to skeleton code.&#xA;For example, the parser extract information from &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;pre class=&amp;quot;screen&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; tags&#xA;and convert it to method calls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, I would add some functionality to the skeleton code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, is it legitimate to publish my works in a permissive licnese,&#xA;possibly include both the parser and the skeleton,&#xA;or the skeleton only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28794" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T07:24:01.493" Title="Is it legitimate to extract data from Java VM Specification document?" Tags="|licensing|java|permissive|specifications|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13508" CreationDate="2022-12-19T06:09:39.873" Score="4" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a program (not GPL compatible) that performs static analysis against source code through some pattern matching, similar to a linter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way I could write unit tests for my program is to supply source code with specially formatted comments that contain assertions about my program's output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example syntax for such an comment might be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# ASSERT-{PASS|FAIL} {RULE_KEY}`&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might wish to test my program accurately detects unsanitized rendering of user input, per the following example &lt;a href=&quot;https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.2.x/quickstart/#html-escaping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taken directly from the flask docs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Original snippet:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from markupsafe import escape&#xA;&#xA;@app.route(&amp;quot;/&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&amp;quot;)&#xA;def hello(name):&#xA;    return f&amp;quot;Hello, {escape(name)}!&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above snippet is licensed under BSD (The whole Flask project appears to be), but for the purposes of this exercise, the snippet is licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Test Case Adaptation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;from markupsafe import escape&#xA;&#xA;@app.route(&amp;quot;/pass/&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&amp;quot;)&#xA;def pass(name):&#xA;    # ASSERT-PASS XSS&#xA;    return f&amp;quot;Hello, {escape(name)}!&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA;@app.route(&amp;quot;/fail/&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;&amp;quot;)&#xA;def fail(name):&#xA;    # ASSERT-FAIL XSS&#xA;    return f&amp;quot;Hello, {name}!&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say my analysis tool is a simple CLI program that takes the file path as input, and produces some JSON output, and the test tool compares the input source annotations with the output JSON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# ci-test-script.bash&#xA;&#xA;static-tool flask-xss-example.py &amp;gt; analysis.json&#xA;test-tool flask-xss-example.py analysis.json &amp;gt; test-results.json&#xA;&#xA;# Now check that test-results.json has the field correct: true&#xA;jq test-results.json # etc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;analysis.json&lt;/code&gt; might look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;   &amp;quot;fails&amp;quot; : [&#xA;      {&#xA;         &amp;quot;line&amp;quot; : 11,&#xA;         &amp;quot;key&amp;quot;  : &amp;quot;XSS&amp;quot;&#xA;      }&#xA;   ]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;test-results.json&lt;/code&gt; might look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{&#xA;   &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; : true,&#xA;   &amp;quot;assertions&amp;quot; : [&#xA;       {&#xA;         &amp;quot;kind&amp;quot; : &amp;quot;pass&amp;quot;,&#xA;         &amp;quot;key&amp;quot;  : &amp;quot;XSS&amp;quot;,&#xA;         &amp;quot;line&amp;quot; : 4,&#xA;         &amp;quot;match&amp;quot; : true&#xA;       },&#xA;       {&#xA;         &amp;quot;kind&amp;quot; : &amp;quot;fail&amp;quot;,&#xA;         &amp;quot;key&amp;quot;  : &amp;quot;XSS&amp;quot;,&#xA;         &amp;quot;line&amp;quot; : 10,&#xA;         &amp;quot;match&amp;quot; : true&#xA;       }&#xA;   ]&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance, &lt;code&gt;test-tool&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;static-tool&lt;/code&gt; are both statically compiled binaries with no dependencies on the GPL derived test case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to commit the GPL derived unit test to some code-base, maybe something that runs &lt;code&gt;ci-test-script.bash&lt;/code&gt; as CI for &lt;code&gt;static-tool&lt;/code&gt;, which parts of my program &amp;amp; its test infrastructure would be considered GPL licensed works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following post is related, however doesn't discuss the direct inclusion of GPL code for the purpose of test snippets: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4112/using-gpl-library-in-unit-test-suite-of-open-source-library&quot;&gt;Using GPL library in unit test suite of open source library?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28820" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T13:42:23.230" Title="Use of GPL licensed code in unit test source for verifying the operation of non GPL program that analyses source code" Tags="|licensing|gpl|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13504" CreationDate="2022-12-19T07:24:01.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/spec-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The license of this specification&lt;/a&gt; does not allow you to create derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you plan to do is to create a derivative work (&amp;quot;extract data from the specification, and transform it to skeleton code. [...] add some functionality to the skeleton code.&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did what you plan, you would be in breach of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T07:24:01.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13505" CreationDate="2022-12-19T13:42:23.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer includes a few if-then causalities which can easily be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are including (linking, dependency,...) GPL-licensed code in your program, then your program is a derivative work and therefore needs to be licensed under GPL (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are collecting/using snippets of GPL-licensed code into a list of test cases, which serves as an input-file when running your program, then this list of test cases will likely be considered a derivative work and therefore needs to be licensed under GPL (and you need to provide its source code, attribution language and everything else as required by the GPL license). However this does not affect your program itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you compile the list of test cases into the binary executable of your program, then the entire program would need to be GPL licensed (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-19T13:42:23.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10880" CreationDate="2022-12-20T08:44:02.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ghostscript is a perfect example for an 'aggregate' software as defined by Section 5 of the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ghostscript.com/docs/9.54.0/Use.htm#Help_command&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghostscript uses a command line interface&lt;/a&gt;, which is not an 'intimate communication' for the purposes of determining, if your program is a combined program with Ghostscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ describe it in detail&lt;/a&gt;. Based on the setup you described in your question above (and provided that you use Ghostscript only through the command line interface), Ghostscript code and the rest of your docker image is just a mere aggregation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-20T09:25:30.267" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T09:25:30.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13512" CreationDate="2022-12-20T15:36:58.627" Score="2" ViewCount="1265" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I still do not completely understand license language, and therefore the MIT license as being concise and very permissive seems to be a good example to learn on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Does &lt;em&gt;this permission notice&lt;/em&gt; refer to &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; sentence, or to the paragraph starting with &lt;em&gt;Permission is hereby granted...&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) What does &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; mean? Is it a very broad term and refers to any instance of me either importing, including, linking, ...any part of the Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.) Where exactly shall the copyright notice be included? For instance, if I import a Python module under the MIT license, do I need to put the copyright notice into my source code? If I import 10 Python libs, do I need to include 10 copyright notices? What about linking a lib in Java? Is it any different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.) What does &lt;em&gt;to deal in&lt;/em&gt; mean and how is it different from the other terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, more generally, but also applicable to MIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.) If I actually never put any 3rd party source code into my repository, but rather give a &lt;em&gt;pom.xml&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;requirements.txt&lt;/em&gt; and leave everything else to the user, am I liable in any way under any license? Since, stating that I my software needs this-and-that does not actually &lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; anything, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28837" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T08:03:28.847" Title="Understanding the MIT license" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13495" CreationDate="2022-12-20T15:42:29.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can such simple and general purpose icons hold copyright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as some (human) creativity has gone into creating something, it is protected by copyright. Even for icons that look simple and can be widely used, it took some creativity to create them and copyright law recognizes that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;can I use them in a website without worrying about the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time you use something that someone else has created, you need to worry about the license terms that give you permission to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In various countries, there are some exceptions to copyright law where you do not need permission (a license) to re-use something, but those exceptions are far less often applicable than many people think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, where do I put the attribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main requirement of the CC BY 4.0 license is that you give the requested (reasonable) attribution. Where you place this attribution is mostly up to you, but it must be somewhere where a user of your site can read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples where to put the attribution are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On an &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; page, together with your license terms and other attributions you might need/want to show.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a footer of your site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-12-20T15:42:29.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13510" CreationDate="2022-12-21T07:44:15.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Does &lt;em&gt;this permission notice&lt;/em&gt; refer to this sentence, or to the paragraph starting with Permission is hereby granted...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;the above copyright notice and this permission notice&amp;quot; refers to the &amp;quot;Copyright&amp;quot; line(s), the paragraph &amp;quot;Permission is granted...&amp;quot; as well as the paragraph &amp;quot;The above copyright notice shall...&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for final paragraph in the license, the capitalized text &amp;quot;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY ....&amp;quot; My opinion is that the requirement to reproduce the copyright notice and permission notice does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; explicitly include this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, you could probably omit the warranty disclaimer paragraph if you wish, without violating the MIT license itself. However, if you choose to omit this paragraph, you will be the one who takes any consequences for that omission. For example, if you're selling the software as part of a product and you have a legal reason not to disclaim the warranty, then you as the seller will then have the implied liability in that situation. Please check with a lawyer for the specifics if this situation applies to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) What does &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; mean? Is it a very broad term and refers to any instance of me either importing, including, linking, ...any part of the Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; in this instance means you may use the software generally in any way that would normally require permission under copyright law. If you read the whole phrase, the answer to the rest of your question will probably become clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;... including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;including without limitation&amp;quot; makes it clear to the reader that the following list is not exhaustive. That is, you are definitely allowed to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot;, to &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot;, to &amp;quot;modify&amp;quot;, to &amp;quot;merge&amp;quot;, and so on, the Software. But the phrase &amp;quot;including without limitation&amp;quot; makes it clear that other things not specifically on that list may be included as well as permissible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Computer programming concepts like importing, including, linking, and so on, tend to involve a combination of copying, modification (e.g. compilation to bytecode or link-time optimisation), and merging (since linking a piece of software to another effectively merges them). Since the MIT license specifically gives you permission to use, to copy, to modify, and to merge, then I believe it's safe to say that all of the computer programming techniques mentioned above (as well as others techniques that go by different names but which perform similar actions) are permitted as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.) Where exactly shall the copyright notice be included?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license text only requires that it &amp;quot;shall be included&amp;quot; without saying exactly where or how. To answer this question reasonably, I think we need to consider the details of how you are distributing the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you are shipping the software in a traditional way, in a box with CDs, DVDs, documentation, etc., then one way to include the MIT license text is to print it out and include it in the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the above situation sounds a bit old-fashioned today, but in fact it is still in current use in particular for automobile manufacturers, most of which include MIT licensed software somewhere in the automobile computer programming. A common practice for this industry is to include a small CD or DVD or some kind of medium along with the automobile user's manual, which reproduces the license text as required, along with any source code (if that is required for some of the open source software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For digital-only distribution (e.g. to download from an App store), there are various ways. A popular way in this situation is to include a menu item somewhere in the App (usually with a name such as About, or License Information) which shows all of the required information and reproduces any license notices as required within the application itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.) What does to deal in mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deal in means to supply something, usually for the purpose of a business. By using this phrase (&amp;quot;to deal in the Software&amp;quot;), I believe the authors were trying to make it clear that you are allowed to do all of the things for the purposes of a business as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[What if I don't distribute the software itself, ] ... but rather give a pom.xml or a requirements.txt and leave everything else to the user, am I liable in any way under any license? ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is one way of interpreting mechanisms such as pom.xml or requirements.txt: by mentioning package identifiers, URLs, etc. in these files, even though you are not distributing the software itself, you are still distributing computer instructions that cause that software to be downloaded, more or less automatically. Therefore, you should still make reasonable assurances that this process happens in a license-compliant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For software licensed under MIT, for example, you should try to ensure that any kind of instructions in your dependency file(s) also cause the package environment to download the MIT license text as well as required by that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T07:44:15.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13510" CreationDate="2022-12-21T08:03:28.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Does this permission notice refer to this sentence, or to the paragraph starting with Permission is hereby granted...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;copyright notice&amp;quot; in there refers to the line(s) stating who owns the copyrights of the software.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The term &amp;quot;permission notice&amp;quot; refers to the three paragraphs that make up the MIT license (the one starting with &amp;quot;Permission is hereby granted&amp;quot;, the one you quoted and the one in all-caps). Together those paragraphs is what gives you permission to do actions that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) What does use mean? Is it a very broad term and refers to any instance of me either importing, including, linking, ...any part of the Software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using software typically refers to executing it, but it can be argued that it can also mean that you include the software as a library in your project. The terms used in a license are not always rigidly defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.) Where exactly shall the copyright notice be included? For instance, if I import a Python module under the MIT license, do I need to put the copyright notice into my source code? If I import 10 Python libs, do I need to include 10 copyright notices? What about linking a lib in Java? Is it any different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright notice and MIT license should be included in files into which you copied code that was written by others and that was licensed under the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code just contains an import/#include/etc. of the third-party code, then you do not have to include their copyright and license notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4.) What does to deal in mean and how is it different from the other terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;to deal in&amp;quot; does not have a specific meaning. It is used here as an umbrella term for the terms mentioned later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.) If I actually never put any 3rd party source code into my repository, but rather give a pom.xml or a requirements.txt and leave everything else to the user, am I liable in any way under any license? Since, stating that I my software needs this-and-that does not actually do anything, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are always liable to ensure that all code used in your project has compatible license terms. That means that the licenses used for the various parts do not have requirements that conflict with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clearest case of conflicting requirements is a closed-source license that forbids making changes to a library and the GPL license that requires that you must have/give permission to change all code in the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not liable for the correct inclusion of copyright and license notices in third-party software that is not located in your own repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T08:03:28.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13514" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13520" CreationDate="2022-12-21T13:26:41.427" Score="10" ViewCount="2483" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr version Unlike most software licenses, the GPL (at least version 3.0) does not contain a choice of law provision. Why is this, and what provisions are in place to adjudicate disputes in the meaning, applicability, or enforceability of the GPL or sections thereof in the absence of an authoritative tribunal or legal system?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of software licenses provide a choice of law clause specifying that their terms shall be interpreted according to the laws of and enforced by the courts of a specific legal jurisdiction, typically the jurisdiction in which the software publisher is headquartered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the license for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.centresuite.com/Centre/Public/Eula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CentreSuite&lt;/a&gt; (a product I picked at random, no affiliation) provides that (emphasis in original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Governing Law and Jurisdiction.&lt;/strong&gt; You and Provider agree that all matters arising from or relating to the Provider’s provision of the Application(s), Related Services, Information, and your access to and use thereof, shall be governed by the laws of the State of Colorado and the United States, without regard to conflict of laws principles. You and Provider agree to submit to the exclusive personal jurisdiction and venue of the appropriate state or federal court located in Denver, Colorado, USA with respect to all such matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These clauses are quite common. Apple software generally includes a choice of law provision of California law. Microsoft prefers that their licenses be interpreted under the laws of Washington State, where they are headquartered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that these clauses are inserted in order to make enforcement of the license by the publisher easier and more certain. The publisher does not need to spend a large amount of time or effort figuring out how their license would be interpreted under the laws of Uzbekistan, Rwanda, or Argentina, as the user has already agreed that the license can only be interpreted and enforced under the courts of Colorado and the US federal government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that nowhere in the text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt; is a jurisdiction mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason why there is no jurisdiction mentioned in the GPL? On the one hand, it makes sense to not tie the GPL too tightly to the whims of any specific political entity, but it also makes me wonder whether there could be some jurisdiction out there whose laws or courts are likely to interpret GPL clauses in ways that are widely divergent from the ways in which they are generally interpreted, or even perhaps find entire sections of the GPL unenforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose I am in possession of the object code of a GPL 3.0-licensed work and I approach the distributor pursuant to Section 6 to demand a copy of the source code. The distributor responds that they are in Ruritania and that Section 6 is unenforceable in Ruritania under the No Mandatory Software Disclosures (Ruritania) Act 2022. What is supposed to happen? Does Richard Stallman lead an army of Space Marines to topple the Ruritanian government and install a puppet regime loyal to him? Does the FOSS community get together to boycott Ruritania and/or those who hide behind Ruritanian law to do something that the FOSS community does not agree with? Does everyone just sort of shrug and go back to whatever they were doing before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, if the Supreme Court of Ruritania rules that the word &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; in Section 0 of the GPL does not mean what it is generally supposed to mean in the FOSS community, but is actually restricted to &amp;quot;content on a physical medium registered with and physically present at a Ruritanian Depository Library or Accredited University of Software Sciences&amp;quot;, will the FOSS community respect that the act of Ruritanians sharing GPL software online outside of library and university contexts does not fall under GPL rules since copies of such software are not legally considered &amp;quot;works&amp;quot; in Ruritania?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do expect that &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; jurisdictions are going to interpret the GPL in &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt; the same way, but lawyers do not generally like the terms &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt;! One jurisdiction might adopt an originalist approach, interpreting the GPL according to how they feel Richard Stallman would have understood it when he first wrote it. Another might interpret the GPL as a living document whose precise meaning changes according to the consensus of the FOSS community. Other jurisdictions might impose their own rules in interpreting words or phrases of the GPL to comply with their own public policy, rules of interpretation, or political goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did notice Section 12, &lt;em&gt;No Surrender of Others' Freedom&lt;/em&gt;, but that refers to cases in which an author or distributor is legally constrained from complying with the GPL. It doesn't seem to apply when an author or distributor has been granted license (pun intended) under their local law to do things that the GPL purports to prohibit, fail to do things that the GPL requires, or interpret the GPL on terms other than those of the consensus of the FOSS community and/or the &lt;em&gt;ex cathedra&lt;/em&gt; pronouncements of Stallman and the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to ask this question is whether the terms of the GPL are supposed to be &lt;em&gt;objectively&lt;/em&gt; interpreted according to an existing set of principles of jurisprudence, rules and theories of interpretation and construction, etc. (e.g. by the standards of a specific jurisdiction or system of law), or whether the FSF and/or the FOSS community in general is open to different, regional, or idiosyncratic interpretations of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a practical example of interpretation, Section 8 of the GPL 3.0 specifies that a license may be restored &amp;quot;permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation&amp;quot;. Does the FSF and/or the FOSS community assert the right to define what &amp;quot;reasonable means&amp;quot; involves and what means are and are not reasonable, or do they delegate the determination of such to courts and tribunals around the world? Suppose someone has violated the GPL for some software I wrote and I am wondering if notification by singing telegram falls under &amp;quot;reasonable means&amp;quot;. Is this a question I should investigate through the open source community, e.g. by calling the FSF or posting on FOSS forums to gauge current community consensus on reasonableness, or is this a pure legal question for my lawyer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6207" LastEditorUserId="6207" LastEditDate="2023-11-17T16:18:40.743" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T16:18:40.743" Title="Why does the GPL not specify a jurisdiction or choice of law clause?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|law|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13514" CreationDate="2022-12-21T14:38:30.713" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is unusual for general-purpose open source licenses to have a choice of law clause. One example I am aware of is the EUPL 1.2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15. Applicable Law&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without prejudice to specific agreement between parties,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this Licence shall be governed by the law of the European Union Member State where the Licensor has his seat, resides or has his registered office,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this licence shall be governed by Belgian law if the Licensor has no seat, residence or registered office inside a European Union Member State.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while choice of law clauses can simplify legal remedies for some, they can also make such remedies unattainable for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, consider that the GPL were to specify that all claims regarding the GPL shall be brought before a court in Boston, MA, USA. This would be quite problematic if neither the licensor nor licensee has any connection to the US. It would make it effectively financially impossible to settle a GPL-related dispute between, say, two developers from Thailand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would run counter to the GPL's goal to ensure more software freedom for people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The EUPL is not such a dramatic case because it's not really a general-purpose license – it's primarily used for software that has been developed on behalf of the European Union, and software covered by the EUPL can be re-licensed under certain other copyleft licenses that do not carry a choice of law clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that open source licensing is largely based on a more egalitarian worldview where there shouldn't be strong power differentials between licensors and licensees. In contrast, a choice of law clause for proprietary EULAs clearly serves to uphold and enhance a power differential: discouraging users from starting litigation, and keeping legal costs low for the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You raise a good point that different jurisdictions can interpret licenses differently. But in this context, it is important to note that open source licenses are generally founded on copyright law, not on contract law. Whereas copyright law is harmonized through international treaties, even basic aspects of contracts differ wildly between jurisdictions (e.g. when a contract is entered, or whether consideration is required).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern open source licenses also take great care to define terms in a jurisdiction-independent way. Whereas the GPL-2.0 borrowed the term “distribute” from the US copyright law context, GPL-3.0 instead introduces the novel concepts “propagate” and “convey” and defines them in a manner that does not need to reference any particular jurisdiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this reference to “applicable copyright law” does mean that the GPL-3.0 might have slightly different scope in different jurisdictions, but there's a bit of a tradeoff here between creating a license that works reasonably well everywhere, and a license that works exactly as designed but only in some jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your Ruritania example, this means that parts of the GPL would be irrelevant in the context of Ruritanian law. There's nothing the GPL can do to change this: licenses or contracts can't override the laws in some jurisdiction. As a practical example of this, consider that North Korea is not party to many international copyright treaties, but is nevertheless a well-known user of GPL-covered software such as with their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Star OS Linux distribution&lt;/a&gt;. To put it mildly, I doubt that users of that OS have the freedom to inspect, modify, and share the OS as permitted by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-12-21T14:38:30.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13514" CreationDate="2022-12-22T08:17:16.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Especially the points about a uniform license worded in a way that it will (hopefully) be ruled everywhere similarly after are a strong argument - amon's answer explains this well. But there is one other point: &lt;strong&gt;often such clauses about choice of jurisdiction and choice of court will be void anyway&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it may be common in a b2b environment that such clauses are written into contracts, they may not be applicable when dealing with non-business customers, i. e. end users. At least in European law every end user has always the choice to go to court in their home country or in their country of residence, irrespective of what any eula or license tries to dictate. The same argument holds true for the choice of applicable law. I shall be surprised when similar laws don't exist in more countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T08:30:49.263" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T08:30:49.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13518" CreationDate="2022-12-22T12:48:03.100" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have inspected bsd3 license and it seems like a good permissive license for open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I have a question:&#xA;Do I need to distribute licensing of a software that I have used (bsd3 here) to develop a hardware? I will be distributing the hardware and software will not be acquired separately from the equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be like a open source bsd3 crc library that is used within the internal boot loader of a smart air drier. Does the company need to disclose licensing of the crc library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28853" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T23:17:17.323" Title="Distributing equipment that uses BSD3 licensed software" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13517" CreationDate="2022-12-22T13:09:16.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume the bootloader is part of every device and the CRC run when it is starting up: Yes you have to - or you would have no license to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD license is not too complicated (I abridged the disclaimer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2042 Amazing Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without&#xA;modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are&#xA;met:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from&#xA;this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY (...)&#xA;OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take the bootloader is part of the device you distribute; that means you distribute the software in binary form. And that means that clause §2 kicks in: you must notify your users about the software and copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The means is not given as it would be difficult to say so for all possible cases. For an embedded device without direct user interface it probably should go into the user documentation you ship along with your device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have some user interface (smart might imply this), you can provide an about option. For guidance look at your own phone. You will find some 'about' or 'licenses' section somewhere in the UI and settings where you can review the licensing of all the many libraries and programmes which make up the OS and related services of it. E.g. on my phone I find all these in listed by service under 'about' -&amp;gt; 'legal notes' -&amp;gt; '3rd party licenses'. Similarily you could look how your browser handles this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I read your question wrong and it is only a tool used to create the software and not installed or uploaded on the device (like a compiler), then no, tools are not part of what is being distributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-22T13:15:23.397" LastActivityDate="2022-12-22T13:15:23.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13514" CreationDate="2022-12-22T20:17:44.733" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;A direct answer as &lt;a href=&quot;https://gplv3.fsf.org/denationalization-dd2.html/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;given by FSF&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some have asked us to address the difficulties of internationalization&#xA;by including, or permitting the inclusion of, a choice of law&#xA;provision.  We maintain that this is the wrong approach.  Free&#xA;software licenses should not contain choice of law clauses, for both&#xA;legal and pragmatic reasons.  Choice of law clauses are creatures of&#xA;contract, but the substantive rights granted by the GPL are defined&#xA;under applicable local copyright law. Contractual free software&#xA;licenses can operate only to diminish these rights.  Choice of law&#xA;clauses also raise complex questions of interpretation when works of&#xA;software are created by combination and extension.  There is also the&#xA;real danger that a choice of law clause will specify a jurisdiction&#xA;that is hostile to free software principles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our revised version of section 7 makes explicit our view that the&#xA;inclusion of a choice of law clause by a licensee is the imposition of&#xA;an additional requirement in violation of the GPL.  Moreover, if a&#xA;program author or copyright holder purports to supplement the GPL with&#xA;a choice of law clause, section 7 now permits any licensee to remove&#xA;that clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21194" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2022-12-23T04:46:05.377" LastActivityDate="2022-12-23T04:46:05.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13514" CreationDate="2022-12-23T08:47:22.053" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and Provider agree that ... shall be governed by the laws of the State of Colorado and the United States ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a sentence makes no sense at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a company sells software in Germany, German laws apply; and if it sells software in China, Chinese laws apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody in some banana republic copies software, modifies it or uses foreign source code in his own project, the laws of that country apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No license can change this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According German laws (as an example) the only thing a license can do is allowing somebody to do something that requires the permission of the author of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license cannot forbid anything and it cannot say which laws apply and which laws do not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The lawsuits of Mr. Welte showed this...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another extreme example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the laws of some country do not forbid using foreign code in own programs without the permission of the author and/or copyright holder, you can ignore what the &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; says and &lt;strong&gt;legally&lt;/strong&gt; use foreign code in your software in that country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter what the license (GPL, EULA ...) says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2022-12-23T08:47:22.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-24T02:48:32.033" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of a server side web application which connects to a database, for example a blog that connects to a MySQL database. The database may have tables such as users, posts, comments, etc. With columns such as user.name, post.text, comment.date, etc. Exactly what you would expect for a blog. The blog software could have any license for the case of the question but I'll say MIT because it's generally uncomplicated and not open to interpretation. To what extent is third party software bound to MIT in this case if it is capable of pulling listings from the blogs database? Maybe for a rest api, maybe rss - the purpose doesn't really matter. It must connect to the same database, make queries based on the blog's database structure, and then do something with data fetched from the blog, and in cases may update the data, however does not use any existing code from the original blog software. The SQL queries may be inherently similar but not the same. Additionally, the third party software will not intercept requests meant for the original blog, and may even be extensible to work with other blogging platforms as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: To be compatible with multiple database servers with different SQL standards the blog platform uses an in house database framework to generate queries. Therefore there is no existing SQL within the blogs code base other than various schema files required for installation. Each query is generated on a per request basis during operation. However, by exploring the database in phpMyAdmin, a database administration tool, one can easily deduce the required queries to select, insert, and update required fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28859" LastEditorUserId="28859" LastEditDate="2022-12-24T06:44:33.987" LastActivityDate="2022-12-25T18:41:31.507" Title="What extent does a license cover database schema" Tags="|license|license-compliance|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13517" CreationDate="2022-12-24T19:24:54.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's common for binaries to create text files of the given license and attributions. While it's true that many applications have ui elements that display licenses, not all do. Specifically, some licenses permit clauses where as condition to using the software you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; provide some form of conspicuous notice of the license and attributions, where BSD just states &amp;quot;you must reproduce&amp;quot; without implying what form that reproduction must take (other than the actual text of the license) or how the user must be able access it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, distributors are not the only one bound by the terms of the various licenses of the software in a system they distribute, their users/clients are as well. You must provide reasonable access to such licenses and should require clients to accept the terms of those licenses as well as the terms of your own license. Otherwise, if at any point the client (or even their own clients/customers, etc) falls out of compliance with the terms of such license the client can claim they were not aware of the existence those terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: Additionally, open source licenses generally revolve around terms to permit modifying and redistributing the software, with generally little to no terms that extend to users in cases were the user is literally just using the software without actually copying. Even in cases where a notice must be made available to users, the user isn't required to view the element, it just must be reasonably visible. Even this is generally for attribution rather than any form of agreement on the users part. If I'm not mistaken, it only becomes important to make the license and attribution visible with most licenses when a user begins to directly interface with or otherwise use features explicitly relevant to the software unless otherwise stated in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, if the user just presses an 'On' button and the air dryer magically begins to operate, it is doubtful that the user would need to see the BSD license because the software isn't providing function that is explicitly relevant to the users operation of the dryer. As the user presses other buttons to change humidity, temperature, etc, the bootloader becomes even more irrelevant to the operation of the dryer. However, if the user is able to interface with the dryer in a way that they can instruct the bootloader to boot the dryer in a different state, such as to allow them to access some advanced mode to program it, the bootloader then provides functionality directly relevant to the use of the dryer. In this case the user should likely have the license made available and should have some form visible of attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, a Ubuntu user may never now that Grub is on their system until they configure a duel-boot, or instruct Ubuntu to restart in a state where they can choose to boot into safemode using Grub. At this point they will be met with a screen heading that says &amp;quot;GNU Grub&amp;quot;, but Ubuntu doesn't need to print the GPL to the screen to satisfy the terms. It is within Grubs rights to add a clause to require that a menu option be made available to for users to view attributions and it's license and still be compatible with the GPL, but Grub doesn't have such a clause and you won't find Grubs license unless you look for it. But the license is in fact available on every copy of each Ubuntu distribution, even if Ubuntu is pre-installed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28859" LastEditorUserId="28859" LastEditDate="2022-12-26T23:17:17.323" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T23:17:17.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13525" CreationDate="2022-12-25T08:46:03.250" Score="8" ViewCount="741" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use SVG icons which are licensed under CC BY 4.0 on my website. The CC BY 4.0 asks to give attribution. So, the question is do I give the attribution in the SVG code as &amp;quot;Icons provided by ... licensed under CC BY 4.0&amp;quot; or somewhere the user can see like the footer or the webpage? Also is the format &amp;quot;Icons provided by ..., licensed under CC BY 4.0&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28863" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T00:00:25.617" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T00:00:25.617" Title="Use SVG code licensed under CC" Tags="|copyright|license|license-notice|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13524" CreationDate="2022-12-25T11:25:20.830" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fair disclosure: I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short version:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'd do both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longer version:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The way I understand the CC license(s), the point is to make it very clear where the images you're using come from. Most users won't look inside the SVG code, they'll just use your website, so having a footer that mentions the attribution is a good idea.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the other hand, someone that will want to reuse those icons may very well download them and then in a later time use or modify them and not even remember where they came from, so adding the attribution inside the SVG code is also a good idea.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Since doing one doesn't prohibit doing the other, I'd just add the attribution in both places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2022-12-25T11:25:20.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13542" CreationDate="2022-12-25T17:25:45.437" Score="3" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license states - &amp;quot;In the Font Awesome Free download, the CC BY 4.0 license applies to all icons packaged as .svg and .js files types.&#xA;...&#xA;Attribution is required by MIT, SIL OFL, and CC BY licenses. &lt;strong&gt;Downloaded Font Awesome Free files already contain embedded comments with sufficient attribution&lt;/strong&gt;, so you shouldn't need to do anything additional when using these files normally.&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I download the icons (.SVG code which comes with commented attribution) and use it in a website will that be sufficient attribution? The CC BY 4.0 states to attribute in a reasonable manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not downloading the SVG icons and using it using &lt;a href=&quot;https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;react icons&lt;/a&gt; or their npm package &amp;quot;@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons&amp;quot;, will the license still be applicable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28863" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T03:11:54.740" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T09:22:54.090" Title="Using SVG icons with CC-BY-4.0 license" Tags="|copyright|license|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13522" CreationDate="2022-12-25T18:41:31.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You waive away the choice of license, but it makes a big difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright [YEAR] [COPYRIGHT HOLDER]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;not a copyleft license.&lt;/strong&gt; To the extent that any third-party software constitutes a derivative work of the blog software, at most the author simply has to include a copy of the license somewhere in the documentation and/or UI. That takes maybe 15 minutes of developer time, unless you get into a bikeshedding debate about how the UI should be presented. Because the cost of compliance is so low, most developers will choose to comply in any situation where there's even the slightest chance that it is necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the blog software is under the GPL or another copyleft license, then the cost of compliance is substantially higher, and so it is more likely that the developer will have to have a conversation with one or more lawyers about whether or not the software constitutes a derivative work and needs to be GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for database schemas in particular, this is a form of API. The copyright protection of APIs is probably limited or nonexistent in the United States, but we're not sure exactly how limited it is; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/18-956&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Google v. Oracle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for details. If the third-party software merely uses the schema to the minimum extent necessary for interoperability, that seems quite likely to be fair use under the aforementioned precedent (to the extent that schemas are protected at all, which is still an open question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other countries, the copyright status of the schema is similarly murky. The EU and UK protect the data in the database with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database rights&lt;/a&gt;, but this probably does not extend to the schema itself. Database rights are only likely to be infringed in cases where the person accessing or using the data did not originally collect or create it, so they are mostly the end user's problem, not the developer's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-12-25T18:41:31.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13524" CreationDate="2022-12-25T19:18:24.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is the format &amp;quot;Icons provided by ..., licensed under CC BY 4.0&amp;quot; correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. All CC licenses (other than public domain declarations like CC0), to my knowledge, require that you give a URL to the license, or the full license text. CC BY 4.0 does that in Section 3 a 1 C, where it says that you must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;CC BY 4.0&amp;quot; is neither the text of the license, nor a URI or hyperlink to the license. You can make &amp;quot;CC BY 4.0&amp;quot; a clickable link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&lt;/a&gt;, then it is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28397" LastEditorUserId="28397" LastEditDate="2022-12-25T19:25:10.467" LastActivityDate="2022-12-25T19:25:10.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13535" CreationDate="2022-12-26T06:08:39.983" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the CCL official website, it says BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with FAL and GPL 3.0 (one-way only).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, is it compatible with other licenses such as MIT and BSD licenses? Other license -&amp;gt; BY-SA 4.0 direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28869" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T21:21:16.447" Title="BY-SA 4.0 Bulk Compatible Other Licenses likes MIT, BSD3" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|bsd|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-26T08:18:46.943" Score="8" ViewCount="2735" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a decentralized community service, where it is critical for each client to run a &amp;quot;legitimate&amp;quot; build version in order for the service to operate properly. The client versions do not have to be identical, but must be guaranteed to be compliant with the service in order to function as intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unauthorized changes therefore will most likely have the intent to access information that the specific user is not authorized to access or alter functionality away from the intended. In the context of the client software, it just doesn't make practical sense for some modification to exist in one client, as it will be incompatible with the service on a network level anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such modifications are possible to not only tamper with the modifying user's copy of the program, but alter the functionality of other client's copies in unintended ways, which does constitute a violation of all those users ability to use the service as intended, and possibly even jeopardize their security, assets or intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would like to license my code in a way that explicitly prohibits any and all forms of illicit or malicious use or modification. Modifications are still possible, as long as they go through the official channel and are verified to be fully compliant by the community. The end user is still able to get his modifications in an approved code form and build and use that, but technically the user is not allowed to hack his copy of the client willy-nilly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this license requirement work with GPL licensed code? Because I don't recall there being much emphasis on legality of use in GPL, if any, and quite a lot of focus on &amp;quot;you are free to do whatever you want as long as you share your code&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does the GPL stand in this de facto &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;usage limitations&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; that says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;the user does not have the freedom to violate the freedoms of other users&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;? Maybe legality of use is outside of the GPL scope, and &lt;strong&gt;presumed&lt;/strong&gt; that users are implicitly mandated to abide community or legal rules, or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it GPL-ish form, the user is free to make modifications to the product, &lt;em&gt;provided that&lt;/em&gt; they do not impede other users' ability to use the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is this usage restriction compatible with GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T12:58:48.487" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T07:48:36.567" Title="Does license prohibition of illicit / malicious use or modification clash with GPL's freedom to modify?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|community|restrictions|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2022-12-26T10:05:34.940" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modifications are still possible, as long as they go through the official channel and are verified to be fully compliant by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make the software definitely not open source as it violates criterion 5 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DesertIslandTest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypothetical group on a desert island&lt;/a&gt; cannot modify the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T10:05:34.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2022-12-26T13:07:41.493" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simply put, a requirement to seek outside approval in order to make or deploy changes is not GPL-compatible, nor is it even a requirement within the definitions of free and open-source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of &amp;quot;freedom 1&amp;quot; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free-software licenses must afford&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to... change [the software] so it does your computing as you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; means each individual recipient of the software. If any license forbids a recipient from a particular kind of computation, it is not a free software license (and therefore also categorically not GPL-compatible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say this violates a very simple definition of &amp;quot;freedom&amp;quot; (namely, &amp;quot;you do whatever you want as long as it doesn't infringe on the freedom of others&amp;quot;), which is true: many kinds of freedom infringe on many other types of freedom all the time. The freedom of people to make modified clients without restriction conflicts with the freedom of other users to not encounter clients that have been modified in ways they don't like. This is a zero-sum game: you will never really have both freedoms at 100%. You prefer to optimize for the second freedom; free software licenses prefer to optimize for the first freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have also asked for a non-political example of why this matters, so here is one: suppose the authorizing body who blesses client modifications doesn't want clients to be able to transmit swear words. There might reasonably be a faction of users who want to be able to swear on the platform, and cannot. Or, in a less binary disagreement, there might be a spectrum of disagreement about what words are &amp;quot;bad enough&amp;quot; to be censored on the platform: is &amp;quot;crap&amp;quot; a swear that ought to be censored? Are regional swears (e.g., American-only, British-only, or Australian-only swears that don't even register as swear words to other English speakers) appropriate to censor, or is there only one region the authorizing body cares about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to see that the authorizing body might reasonably draw a line anywhere on any of these issues that other users will bitterly disagree with. Use of the GPL (and all free/open licenses) indicates a wish for users to be able to roll their own versions of the software to fit their own needs and preferences. You have a need (i.e., that the authorizing body of your decentralized service should override those preferences, for the sake of users who don't want to modify their client), so you don't wish to use a free software license for your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many jurisdiction-specific statutory laws that prohibit misuse of software and computer networks. It is not clear to me that, broadly, communication in a decentralized system between independent parties that doesn't conform to an authoritative standard meets any standard for computer misuse. If a particular use is illegal under some statute, the GPL doesn't interfere with that, and if some use is not illegal, the GPL doesn't attempt to implement its own holistic criminal code from scratch. The GPL enforces one single issue, i.e., downstream ability to modify and redistribute the software. Its author, Stallman, cares very deeply about that issue, but he also has strong opinions about many, many other unrelated issues. Nevertheless, freedom to modify is the issue being targeted in the mechanics of the GPL. I appreciate you and Stallman disagree about the net social good that arises from the GPL's strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that if a client sends and receives sensitive information but you rely on client compliance not to reveal that information, people could simply read the information off their system's own network interface, without any modification to the client whatsoever. If you don't want a particular piece of information to be visible to a particular client, never send that information to a client (or encrypt it in a way that particular client lacks the keys/credentials to decrypt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T16:58:24.450" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T16:58:24.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2022-12-26T18:00:59.410" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I received GPL licensed software and pass it to someone else, that is copyright infringement unless I follow the GPL license conditions. Telling the receiver they cannot use the software for criminal purposes is against the GPL and I can’t do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, using GPL licensed software to commit a crime is criminal. As is using proprietary software, or a gun, or a screwdriver to commit a crime. You don’t need to tell the recipient not to use the software for crime. And if you did, that wouldn’t stop them anyway. (&amp;quot;Don't do this or you go to jail&amp;quot; might stop someone. &amp;quot;Don't do this or you violate my license&amp;quot; won't stop a criminal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the third hand, if I add such a requirement, then the worst consequence for me is that the copyright holder sues me for copyright infringement. But would they do that? Is that a freedom for the end user that the copyright holder cares about? Some might out of principle. The mafia might have created open source software and intends to use it for criminal purposes. But most copyright holders wouldn't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And last, I'm not sure how legally binding such a restriction would be anyway. I'm very sure that I can't give you GPL licensed software and allow you to do things that GPL doesn't allow, meaning any such license that I give you is worthless. If I add restrictions you can try to get the software elsewhere without the restrictions, but I think my restrictions would be legally binding to you until then, although they might get me into trouble. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastEditorUserId="454" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T18:26:02.517" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T18:26:02.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13529" CreationDate="2022-12-26T21:21:16.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT license is probably compatible with CC-BY-SA, but only in one way (MIT-&amp;gt;CC-BY-SA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD 2 and 3 clauses also should be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD 4 clause may be compatible, but compatibility, in this case, is complicated. But... nobody uses BSD4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT and BSD licenses are permissive licenses with the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place all copyright notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;place license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(for X11 MIT version and BSD 3 clause) don't use my name for promoting a product without my permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Place all copyright notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Place license text OR URL to license text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Don't use my name in Your use of work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Copyleft&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA allows to use of external work because You must provide copyright notices, so just place MIT/BSD license text with work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most controversial thing is &amp;quot;Don't use my name without my permission&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just look out for licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT:&#xA;MIT license(Expat version, the most popular) does not include this clause, but the X11 version says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except as contained in this notice,&#xA;the name(s) of the above copyright holders&#xA;shall not be used in advertising or otherwise&#xA;to promote the sale, use, or other dealings in&#xA;this Software without prior written authorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD 3-clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA (human-readable summary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, &lt;strong&gt;but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, merging projects licensed under MIT or BSD licenses with CC-BY-SA 4.0 should be legal, and the result is CC-BY-SA 4.0 licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember to include all copyright notices and texts of licenses. I recommend placing also CC-BY-SA 4.0 license text. You can get it in text format from the CC website: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2014/01/07/plaintext-versions-of-creative-commons-4-0-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/2014/01/07/plaintext-versions-of-creative-commons-4-0-licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just download CC-BY-SA 4.0 legal code and place it into your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: this answer is not legal advice! I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T21:21:16.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13412" CreationDate="2022-12-26T21:30:07.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MIT license clearly says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, place ALL copyright notices and one license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When You take code for example from 3 repositories with the following licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Repository 1: MIT license, copyright notice: (C) 2022 Author of repo 1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Repository 2: MIT license, copyright notice: (C) 2022 Author of repo 2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Repository 3: MIT license, copyright notice: (C) 2022 Author of repo 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use MIT license for your project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just take all of these notices and place into LICENSE file like that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) 2022 Author of repo 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) 2022 Author of repo 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) 2022 Author of repo 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Here your notice]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and here MIT license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You want to use them in commercial product or product under another license, just make a NOTICE file with all copyright notices as above, but without yours. You can specify that You used code from those project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This is not legal advice! I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2022-12-26T21:30:07.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2022-12-26T23:02:41.977" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are approaching this the wrong way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you are assuming any wish to modify the software will be malicious, while in reality people will want to make all kinds of changes you hadn't anticipated at all, from having prefilled fields to a different background on Christmas season.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if a is possible for a malicious client to alter the functionality of other client's copies jeopardizing their security it is a vulnerability &lt;strong&gt;in your program&lt;/strong&gt; (the original one). You cannot rely on the other clients being honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, &lt;em&gt;attackers won't care about your license&lt;/em&gt;. If they can modify their client to profit from their other clients, sooner or later they will do so. Even if that violates the code license. &lt;em&gt;Even if they have no source code at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who care about the license are precisely those that are following the rules, the ones that want to improve the system so that e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scunthorpe locals&lt;/a&gt; can use it, &amp;quot;bypassing&amp;quot; a profanity filter. Or making it work with &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1172/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their weird workflows&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, the community that would have to approve the modifications wouldn't be able to test them to verify them, as they are not approved by the community. You may not reach to this catch-22, though, since no one would be able to (legally) modify the software to write the modification to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastEditorUserId="502" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T01:56:56.280" LastActivityDate="2022-12-27T01:56:56.280" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-26T23:55:51.717" Score="1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In web design, a common workflow exists where a designer creates a web site's theme within Photoshop which is then capable of exporting the design as HTML and CSS. Once granted copyright to the HTML the designer can license the templace as GPL or any open source license of their choice. However, I'm curious to what form of copyright is available to psd files and how (or if) this copyright may differ from the HTML produced by the psd design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a .psd file just a form of illustration, or are their additional rights granted by copyright due to their structural content etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this copyright extend to the resulting HTML. For example, if a customer purchases a .psd file from the designer and exports the design as HTML themselves, do the terms of the original psd copyright also apply to the resulting HTML, or vice versa if the designer only registers the HTML alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28859" LastEditorUserId="28859" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T00:02:59.357" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T13:00:06.007" Title="Can a .psd file be released with different terms if the resulting HTML template is GPL" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-comparison|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13545" CreationDate="2022-12-27T06:19:38.613" Score="4" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I build my site using create-react-app build, it creates a main.779c7054.js.LICENSE.txt which contains the license texts of the dependencies. In this case I am using Next.js and lets say I am using react-icons (licensed under MIT) by importing it to my component.js. The license says - &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;. Do I need to include the MIT license text manually? if yes, where do I add it? or is the text already there in the source of node_modules and I don't need to do anything about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I searched the build folder of the website created using Next.js I could find other license texts but there were no license text for react-icons package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; *&#xA; * Copyright (c) Facebook, Inc. and its affiliates.&#xA;...&#xA;&#xA; * Copyright 2017 Google LLC&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA;...&#xA;etc&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28863" LastEditorUserId="28863" LastEditDate="2022-12-27T06:28:43.503" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T09:31:29.317" Title="LICENSE text in build folder" Tags="|mit|copyright|license-notice|website|license-file|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13530" CreationDate="2022-12-27T14:27:21.193" Score="8" Body="&lt;h4&gt;Modifying and using the software is not the same thing as connecting to my network.&lt;/h4&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL and related free software licenses are about the rights to modify and distribute the software, not to connect to online services against the will of service administrators. Nowhere in the GPL does it give a licensee the right to connect to a network or server or use privately-owned online services. The fact that I have a GPL-licensed copy of GNU Emacs running on my PC does not give me the right to take over the servers of the GNU Project or FSF and use them to mine cryptocurrency or execute a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against a group I don't like. The appropriateness of such actions are defined by server/network policy and local law, not the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, your distributed network has policies. These policies are set and enforced through some sort of political process that you and your users will establish. Users who wish to modify your software in an &amp;quot;unauthorized&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;malicious&amp;quot; way are free to do so, but are not allowed to connect their modified clients to your network. Your network will enforce this policies with warnings or bans as applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, suppose your distributed network is for a massively multiplayer game. You and the community of players establish a vote-to-ban system where users caught using clients with &amp;quot;unauthorized&amp;quot; aimbots, map hacks, keyboard macros, or DoS functionality will be booted from the network and prevented from connecting their clients to the network in the future. These users will be free to start their own parallel &amp;quot;cheating allowed&amp;quot; network using their own computing resources if they wish to do so, and connect to that network using whatever modified versions of your client they wish to allow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might consider the possibility that a majority of users of your network will develop pro-cheating viewpoints and refuse to assist in the banning of &amp;quot;cheaters&amp;quot;, or even use the vote-to-ban system against those they feel are policing their behavior. This is an inherent problem in distributed networks, one that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no policy or license will fix&lt;/a&gt;. If you find yourself in a struggle with your users over what the policies or practices of the distributed network you all built on top of your software should be, then congratulations, you're a politician! Politicking is hard!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ángel mentioned, malicious users (who intend to cause trouble on your network) will not be deterred from doing so because it is against a license. The same argument applies in physical space - putting a &amp;quot;don't steal this&amp;quot; policy bumper sticker on your car won't protect you against car theft. If a municipality puts up a &amp;quot;Drunk drivers please do not hit children in crosswalk, City Code § 32.33.a&amp;quot; sign, will that actually prevent injuries and deaths? This places you right back in the role of policy enforcer that I mentioned above. If you want a network free of &amp;quot;cheating&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;exploits&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;hacks&amp;quot;, then you've got to administer and police it or find someone who will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6207" LastEditorUserId="6207" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T11:11:22.297" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T11:11:22.297" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13526" CreationDate="2022-12-27T14:29:29.600" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language in a free license icon is (slightly truncated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;xmlns=&amp;quot;http://www.w3.org/2000/svg&amp;quot; viewBox=&amp;quot;0 0 512 512&amp;quot; ...!--!&#xA;Font Awesome Free 6.2.1 by @fontawesome - &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;License - &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com/license/free&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com/license/free&lt;/a&gt; (Icons: CC BY 4.0,&#xA;Fonts: SIL OFL 1.1, Code: MIT License) Copyright 2022 Fonticons, Inc.&#xA;--...path d=&amp;quot;M96 0C60.7 0... ...V336z&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY 4.0 license demands &amp;quot;...provide a link to the license...&amp;quot; but the icon only provides an indirect link to the license (a link to a page which has a link to the license). So that's not exactly what the license says. But because &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way/2078#2078&quot;&gt;the original author is not bound by the license&lt;/a&gt; this is OK (even though it is not user-friendly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To repair that (without touching the code of each icon) you could simply include a statement in the 'About' page of your website (or somewhere else) stating something like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;some Icons by Font Awesome  &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com&lt;/a&gt;, Copyright 2022 Fonticons, Inc, License: CC BY 4.0 &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a text editor, which supports a 'batch find and replace' function, then you can easily modify the license language in each of the icon files and add the URL of the CC-BY 4.0 license before use with your website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-28T09:22:54.090" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T09:22:54.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13539" CreationDate="2022-12-28T09:31:29.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might want to manually add the the MIT license language at the end of the license.txt file (if it is not already there). Based on your description, React does not seem to be perfectly include everything that is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe each of the icons includes license and attribution language within their code. In that case it would not be necessary to add additional language in the licenses.txt and notices.txt files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-28T09:31:29.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9341" CreationDate="2022-12-29T10:51:25.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fair disclosure: I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote the license itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means you have to (re)distribute the license itself as part of your website, and can't just link to a 3rd party hosting the license. However, this doesn't mean it needs to be on the same page. It's perfectly fine to have a footer that links to the license on a different page (e.g. &lt;code&gt;/license&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T10:51:25.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13551" CreationDate="2022-12-29T12:30:00.623" Score="0" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've downloaded the qt online installer from: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/download-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/download-open-source&lt;/a&gt; to develop on Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: as long as we respect LGPL are we forced to buy a commercial license (for distribution of our client UI app or for development)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our product comes as a server deployment. We have a client UI application that ships with it offering an alternative to the web based configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28909" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T14:12:23.913" Title="QT on windows - limitations, restrictions, commercial products" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|commercial|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9341" CreationDate="2022-12-29T12:52:01.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can easily include the license and attribution information inside the metadata fields of the PNG file itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dev.exiv2.org/projects/exiv2/wiki/The_Metadata_in_PNG_files&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to a page with the technical information&lt;/a&gt;. Almost any app which can manipulate images will allow you to edit the metadata of an icon file in PNG format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My preference is to have the copyright and license information inside the source code of the files, because that will persist even when the files are downloaded, shared and re-used. That's better than having it in the page footer or 'about' page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to check, maybe the files which are offered from the website you linked in your question already include all the necessary information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13526/using-svg-icons-with-cc-by-4-0-license?rq=1&quot;&gt;similar question related to SVG icons with CC-BY license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2022-12-29T14:43:05.650" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T14:43:05.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13549" CreationDate="2022-12-29T14:12:23.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you can comply with the requirements of the applicable open source licenses, you don't need to buy a commercial license. The simple fact that your client software is deployed on Windows is not enough to need a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Qt components are available under the LGPL license, but some of them are distributed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for choosing the commercial license could be additional support that is offered with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T14:12:23.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10625" CreationDate="2022-12-29T19:51:29.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's more of an art than a science, but there are a few metrics that may be useful to look at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stars on GitHub. A star is essentially someone showing their appreciation and interest in the project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Watchers on GitHub. Watching a project essentially says you want to be notified of any change in the repository.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forks on GitHub. A fork is the starting point of someone (openly) working on a project in GitHub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted, none of these metrics are iron clad (e.g., you could watch a project but ignore updates from it, or fork a project and do nothing with this fork), but they are somewhat of an indicator of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also usually a good idea to normalize these numbers by comparing to similar projects, as the absolute numbers are sometimes hard to interpret. E.g., let's look at Python's &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/psycopg/psycopg2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psychopg2&lt;/a&gt; library for connecting to PostgreSQL databases. At the time of writing, it has 73 watchers, 464 forks and 2.8K forks. Is this a lot? a little? Hard to tell from the numbers alone. But if you compare it to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mysql/mysql-connector-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mysql-connector-python&lt;/a&gt; library for connecting to MySQL databases, you'll see similar numbers, but if you compare it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/IBM/db2-python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;db2-python&lt;/a&gt; for connecting to DB2 database, you'll see substantially smaller numbers. This is a strong indicator that PostgreSQL and MySQL are more popular databases to use in Python applications that DB2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2022-12-29T20:48:05.110" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T20:48:05.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13538" CreationDate="2022-12-29T20:57:20.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is &amp;quot;yes, the PSD file is almost certainly covered by copyright, and copyright generally works the same for all types of work, so the HTML and the PSD file are subject to more or less the same level of protection.&amp;quot; However, the long answer is a bit murkier than you might expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright laws differ considerably by jurisdiction. This answer focuses primarily on US law, because that is what is most familiar to me. Some of this will be applicable to other jurisdictions, but you may need to do additional research to figure out exactly what the law is in your particular location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under US law, there are several relevant issues to consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the past, US courts have occasionally held that a work's creative elements were inextricably intertwined with its useful elements. Such works are not subject to copyright protection, because copyright protection can only cover the creative elements of a work, and not the useful elements. The most well-known example of this rule is typefaces, which cannot be protected by copyright in the US.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;But there's an exception to the exception. &lt;em&gt;Vector&lt;/em&gt; font files (TrueType, OpenType, etc.) contain more information than just the literal shape of the typeface itself - they also use control points to precisely describe the shape and positioning of the Bézier curves that make up the typeface, and courts have held that these control points are a creative element which can be separated from the underlying shape of the typeface. So you can copyright a vector font file, even though you cannot copyright a raster (bitmap) font file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm not aware of any specific case law covering website templates. It is possible that a court might decide that a website template is not a &amp;quot;work of art&amp;quot; within the meaning of the statute, but instead a work of industrial design, similar to a typeface. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://casetext.com/case/eltra-corp-v-ringer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eltra Corp. v. Ringer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for the specific reasoning used when the Fourth Circuit determined that typefaces were not copyrightable. If a court did make such a determination, that would mean that you could not prevent others from copying the visual appearance or aesthetic of any given template.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, it is very likely that both the PSD file and the HTML file contain elements beyond the literal design itself (e.g. layer information), and those elements are likely subject to copyright protection regardless. So &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it is lawful to copy website templates, it likely has to be done the hard way - manually.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any portion of the HTML which is just mechanically created by Photoshop, without significant human input, is probably not subject to copyright at all, except to the extent that it is based on copyrightable elements of the PSD file. This is probably true in most or all jurisdictions, because copyright almost always requires human creation of some kind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The copyright on the (unmodified) HTML will be held by whoever owns the copyright on the PSD file. If the HTML is subsequently modified, then those modifications would create a derivative work, which would be owned by the person who created it. That person would need to comply with whatever copyright license is in effect in order to do this legally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2022-12-29T20:57:20.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13555" CreationDate="2022-12-30T07:47:41.107" Score="4" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use heroicons which is licensed under MIT in a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license states - &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I need to put a copy of MIT license text? If I put it as a comment inside the SVG icons they may get removed when deploying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28863" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T10:36:48.970" Title="Using heroicons in a website" Tags="|mit|license|license-notice|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13554" CreationDate="2022-12-30T10:23:57.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We already have a fair amount of advice on this, in our question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9341/how-to-show-mit-license-on-icons&quot;&gt;How to show MIT license on icons&lt;/a&gt;, but you've indicated you'd like a little more detail on what text to preserve.  If you go for the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;link to a licence page&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; option, that link should appear on every page that contains the icons (or better still, every page of your site), and the page itself should contain the licence text, as well as all upstream copyright notices (which will likely be of the form &lt;code&gt;(c) 2020-2022 Fred Developer&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've also indicated a preference for the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;link to a licence page&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; option since you're not confident that the icon metadata will be preserved on deployment.  Given that the licence obligations are yours to fulfil, if you're not sure of that, then a licence page is an acceptable way to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-30T10:36:48.970" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T10:36:48.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13538" CreationDate="2022-12-30T13:00:06.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright extends to all work which requires a certain amount of creative work. A PSD file definitely constitutes this, and that of course extends to the structure inside this file with its layers and additional information. Whether any additional protection  may need registration somewhere or not, may depend on jurisdiction - usually no such thing is required: you are the author, you have copyright without further ado.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, the author or creator is not bound by any license. They can choose to grant &lt;em&gt;other people&lt;/em&gt; certain rights or permissions in using and re-using their work.  This is done usually be choosing a license. And they can even give different people different and conflicting licenses for their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are bound by a license attached to a piece of work when it was produced by another person and you like to use it, distribute or incorporate into your own work. Then you may only do that according to the rights granted to you in the license you were given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to licensing a website when you are the author and create it from a PSD file: IMHO it is good practise to release the PSD file as part of the source of the website also under GPL. It is one of the intentions of the GPL to be provided with all the necessary sources in order to recreate the result. If the website can be created from a PSD file by choosing the proper script (e.g. by activating select layers and saving certain parts as images in whatever format) or export options, it would IMHO be good to provide this PSD file along with the instructions how to create the website from it as part of the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as long as you are the author of the website, and you consider only the exported form as source, then there is no-one who can come to you and require you to release your PSD file under GPL, or any license for what it is worth. Yet iff you release the PSD file at all under an open source license, GPL would be a good option, if the resulting webpage is licensed under GPL, too. If you want to release it more restrictively, that's your prerogative, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T13:00:06.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13558" CreationDate="2022-12-30T13:57:13.903" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was searching for a relational dataset on Kaggle for my SQL Data Analysis project &amp;amp; found one such dataset - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/olistbr/brazilian-ecommerce&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/olistbr/brazilian-ecommerce&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have downloaded the data and imported it into PostgreSQL and started my analysis. Later I thought of publishing my work, i.e SQL queries and the modified data on GitHub, but found that there was CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license mentioned for this dataset on Kaggle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I publish my SQL Queries + modified dataset on GitHub with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 as a license in the license.txt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28915" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2023-01-04T09:18:32.263" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T09:18:32.263" Title="Can I use a Kaggle Dataset with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license to create projects and publish it on GitHub?" Tags="|github|license-notice|redistribution|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13557" CreationDate="2022-12-30T14:28:25.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fair disclosure: I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, you can definitely redistribute both the original data and your derivative work (any modifications your performed or the SQL queries for the analysis) as long as you do so under the same license and provide attribution to the original work (usually a notice and a link back to the original data set).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T14:28:25.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10752" CreationDate="2022-12-30T15:09:20.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fair disclosure: I'm not a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're just requiring other (open source) libraries, you aren't redistributing them, you're merely stating what other libraries are required to run your project. The end user can install them from pip, from some other source or even re-implement them themselves (not that any reasonable user would do that, but it's a possibility).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you aren't redistributing the dependencies and aren't creating a derivative work you probably don't strictly need a &amp;quot;notices&amp;quot; files, although there doesn't seem to be any harm in doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When in doubt, I tend to err to the side of caution, but that's just me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As Daniel Widdis commented, providing this information, while not strictly required, can be very useful for your users. Your package may depend on packages with different licenses which may mean the end users need to adhere to different terms or restrictions than the ones obvious from your license file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T09:01:43.063" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T09:01:43.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-30T18:38:33.050" Score="1" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;let's say I am using Tailwind CSS (licensed under MIT) in my website by using the npm package &amp;quot;tailwindcss&amp;quot; which on build creates a css file. According to MIT - &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The css file that is created has a comment on top &amp;quot;/*&#xA;! tailwindcss v3.0.23 | MIT License | &lt;a href=&quot;https://tailwindcss.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tailwindcss.com&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;*/&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that sufficient? or do I need to include the whole MIT text or do I need to make a /license page and write about it there &amp;quot;tailwindcss is used in this website, licensed under MIT - full MIT license here&amp;quot;? if not, how do I do it correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw some sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://top10.netflix.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which seem to use tailwindcss but in the devtool sources only have the top line in the css &amp;quot;tailwindcss v3.0.23 | MIT License | https://tailwindcss.com&amp;quot; is that a violation of the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28863" LastActivityDate="2024-03-04T11:22:22.477" Title="Using Tailwind CSS in website" Tags="|mit|license-notice|license|website|license-file|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13560" CreationDate="2022-12-30T19:01:54.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a point where common web development practices deviate from the actual text of the license. The minified CSS file contains the text “MIT License”, but not the actual text of the license as required by the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all likelihood, nothing will come from this, especially if the minified CSS file was provided by the Tailwind project itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to be safe, you should fulfil the actual license conditions instead. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could edit the CSS file to include a license header.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could collect all open source licenses that you rely on into a separate “credits” page that is reachable e.g. via your site footer. Such separate pages are more common in mobile apps, though, and I've never seen this on a website. There are tools such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/licenses/#toc-yarn-licenses-generate-disclaimer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;yarn licenses generate-disclaimer&lt;/a&gt; that can generate such pages from package metadata, though I don't think it can help in this specific case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2022-12-30T19:01:54.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2022-12-31T00:18:01.530" Score="7" ViewCount="658" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend spent more than 7 years on an open-source mod for Minecraft under Apache License 2.0. Recently, a new mod was announced bearing mostly the same features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new-mod devs accidentally made their github repository public for a while, giving my friend a chance to look at their code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He found it too similar to his own mod's code. Adding the fact that a &amp;quot;months worth of code&amp;quot;, as he described it, was committed in a single day this lead him to believe that his code might have been redistributed without proper attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He posted a video about it but had to take it down since its github repo was made private and not under a public license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has been receiving hate even before he posted the video and even more so after. People have been calling his work as a &amp;quot;cheap knock off&amp;quot; to the new-mod. It bothers me to see him like this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've yet to hear the new-mod devs disclose any evidence to disprove his accusations. I understand they have the right to keep their code private but this creates reasonable doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it, they're at an impasse. My friend can't share proof to his accusations legally while the new-mod devs won't share proof to disprove his accusation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any legal means to resolve this peacefully? And could this be prevented for future projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28918" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2022-12-31T07:03:30.293" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T15:04:55.837" Title="Open-Source code made proprietary by someone else without proper attribution (Apache License 2.0)" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13562" CreationDate="2022-12-31T08:38:50.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your friend can ask the maintainer of the other project to clarify the situation and show where the required credit is given in line with the Apache license conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that does not work out, then your friend may address the issue by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-policies/guide-to-submitting-a-dmca-takedown-notice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;procedures of GitHub&lt;/a&gt; which are made for this purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all of that does not help your friend may consider involving a lawyer to enforce his/her copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2022-12-31T08:38:50.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13562" CreationDate="2022-12-31T16:12:07.720" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even in the event that your friend is correct, it sounds like the author(s) of the new mod have not yet released it, so they are not yet committing copyright infringement for failure to attribute any Apache-licensed work they used. It sounds like they may have briefly violated the original author's copyright by releasing their source code accidentally, but cured that violation immediately. Assuming they do release their mod in source or binary form without attributing the upstream author, it is up to that author to prove the use of Apache-licensed code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have a copy of the source, which could be very helpful in determining infringement, and I think you are correct in &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; sharing any part of that source code without the new developers' consent: it surely contains original copyrightable authorship, even in the event that it also has infringing material. The GitHub terms of service permit you to &amp;quot;view&amp;quot; public repos on GitHub, so you were not wrong to copy the repository into your local computer memory (which is how &amp;quot;viewing&amp;quot; works in an online context), but you are surely not permitted to share it further. You could begin by using tools for detecting code plagiarism; this could allow you to say, &amp;quot;Plagiarism Tool(s) X found YY% similarity,&amp;quot; giving mechanical weight to your claims without sharing the other developers'code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible the downstream devs misunderstand the license and are afraid that admitting use of Apache-licensed code will require them to license their own code in some particular way. Compliance with the Apache 2.0 license is extremely simple and does not interfere with the new developers' plan to offer a closed-source iteration of your friend's original mod. (Apache 2 is not a copyleft license; it does not require source disclosure!) Therefore, I would focus on explaining that your request for attribution is required by the code they've used but also practically harmless. They simply need to list the original author, unobtrusively, as one of several contributors to the project, by preserving their copyright statement and including a copy of the Apache license, but do not need to license their own code in any particular way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you come to them highlighting the simplicity of your request and with specific evidence of plagiarism, but they go on to publish the mod without attribution, I would probably hire a lawyer who could draft a cease-and-decist letter and who could more clearly outline how you may and may not use the now-removed source code to prove infringement. In the event their mod is hosted in the U.S., you could also issue a DMCA takedown request to whatever provider is hosting their mod. However, they could make a restoration counter-request, at which point you'd be back to contacting a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For binary distribution, the Apache 2 license requires preservation of any copyright notices present in a NOTICE file. If the original mod did not contain a NOTICE file, then unfortunately, the Apache license does not strictly require the new mod to preserve any copyright notices in the binary (but it does still require preservation of notices in any source distributions). However, it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; still require the distribution of a copy of the Apache 2 license text, and probably the best way to disambiguate the licensing of each component is for the new mod to say something like, &amp;quot;This software includes components with are Copyright 20xx-20xx [Upstream Author], and which are licensed under the following terms: ...&amp;quot; I would suggest asking for that, which lets the new mods meet their requirement to keep a copy of the license without introducing ambiguity while giving attribution to the upstream author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-01-01T15:04:55.837" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T15:04:55.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13566" CreationDate="2023-01-01T07:09:53.697" Score="8" ViewCount="974" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GPL3-licensed program that supports a specific line of hardware.  There is a GPL-2 program that supports a lot of hardware similar to the one I support. It was suggested to me that this other program use my code to add functionality for supporting that hardware I support.  I'm open to this.  How can it be done without violating either license?  I don't want to dual-license my program because I don't want the potential for unscrupulous people exploiting GPL2 loopholes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28926" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T06:39:00.683" Title="Incorporating GPL3 code into a GPL2 project" Tags="|gpl-3|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13565" CreationDate="2023-01-01T07:26:16.627" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As we discuss at more length &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/why-is-gplv2-incompatible-with-gplv3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible licences: that is, if you combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3, there is no licence that satisfies all the requirements of both upstream licences, and the resulting work cannot be distributed without violating someone's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to do what you want is to relicense your code under GPLv2 (if you are the sole rightsholder) or for them to relicense their project under GPLv3 (if they can).  If neither of you is willing or able to do this, code from the two projects cannot be combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note in passing that &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; their code is licensed not under GPLv2 but under GPLv2+, then the uplift to GPLv3 becomes trivial.  &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; if this route is taken, as you suggest it has been elsewhere, then we should be clear that the GPLv2+ project has had its licence uplifted, and is now GPLv3 (or GPLv3+, at their discretion) - &lt;em&gt;there is no way to combine GPLv2 code and GPLv3 code, and have the result be redistributable&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T06:39:00.683" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T06:39:00.683" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13569" CreationDate="2023-01-01T10:59:35.053" Score="2" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to convert a C# library (not written by myself) licensed under Apache License v2 to C++.&#xA;The original C# library has a LICENSE file with the Apache license information, however the individual code files have &lt;strong&gt;no license header or copyright notice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will have to modify every single line of code, but the modifications will be very minor (since the logic remains the same). If I want to add the apache license header to the code files, what should I put in the copyright field?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;// Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]&#xA;// &#xA;// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA;// you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA;// You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;// &#xA;//     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA;// &#xA;// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA;// distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&#xA;// WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA;// See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA;// limitations under the License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I put the author of the original library? My own name? Both? Do I add two license blocks, despite the original files having none?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28930" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T11:44:09.560" Title="What to put in header copyright notice after total conversion of library that didn't have license headers?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|apache-2.0|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13567" CreationDate="2023-01-01T14:38:58.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want to add a comment block with a license indication, you should definitely have a Copyright line mentioning the original author to avoid the impression that you exclusively own the copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the conversion from C# to C++ takes at least some minimal creativity from you, you can add a second Copyright line next to it with your name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the conversion is purely mechanical (a script could do it), then the conversion does not anything that is protected by copyright law and all copyrights remain with the original authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-01-02T11:44:09.560" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T11:44:09.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13567" CreationDate="2023-01-01T15:06:11.997" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 4 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Apache License&lt;/a&gt; is pretty clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without&#xA;modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You meet&#xA;the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution&#xA;notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that&#xA;do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must&#xA;include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within&#xA;such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any&#xA;part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places:&#xA;within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works;&#xA;within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the&#xA;Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative&#xA;Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The&#xA;contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do&#xA;not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices&#xA;within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an&#xA;addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such&#xA;additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the&#xA;License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for&#xA;use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any&#xA;such Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have to retain the copyright notice of the original author. If that was in a separate file you may move it into this modified file. Then add your own copyright notice right next to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifiers&lt;/a&gt; to the file (in addition to the verbose items listed above). These license identifiers are the state of the art way to support any future automation w.r.t. license compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-01-01T15:06:11.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6132" CreationDate="2023-01-02T14:41:58.403" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Under the GNU General Public License (GPL), you are free to use, modify, and distribute the software, as long as you make the source code available to your users under the terms of the GPL. This means that if you use a GPL component in your website, you will generally be required to make the source code of your entire website available to your users unless you fall under one of the exceptions to this requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few situations in which you may be able to use a GPL component in your website without having to GPL or disclose the source code of your entire site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the component is a JavaScript library that goes into one page, and you are not distributing the component to your users, you may not be required to make the source code of your entire site available. This is because the GPL only requires you to make the source code available if you distribute the software. If you are only using the component on your own site and not distributing it to others, you may not be required to make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the component is an executable program called by the backend via something like System.run(&amp;quot;component.exe&amp;quot;), and you are not distributing the component to your users, you may not be required to make the source code of your entire site available. As with the JavaScript library, the GPL only requires you to make the source code available if you distribute the software, so if you are only using the component on your own site and not distributing it to others, you may not be required to make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the component is a dynamic link library invoked at runtime by the backend, and you are not distributing the component to your users, you may not be required to make the source code of your entire site available. As with the other examples, the GPL only requires you to make the source code available if you distribute the software, so if you are only using the component on your own site and not distributing it to others, you may not be required to make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the component is a static library linked at build time with the backend, and you are not distributing the component to your users, you may not be required to make the source code of your entire site available. As with the other examples, the GPL only requires you to make the source code available if you distribute the software, so if you are only using the component on your own site and not distributing it to others, you may not be required to make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28939" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T14:41:58.403" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13572" CreationDate="2023-01-02T16:54:32.777" Score="8" ViewCount="1893" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be precise, I am referring to MySql source code which is available under GPL2. I want to make certain modifications in the code which is actually for some custom requirement.&#xA;The modified MySql server will be used as the database back-end tied to the web server so technically speaking the public will be using the modified server code.&#xA;I only expect to offer service thru the Internet and not product based upon the modified server code. Do I have to make the modified MySql server code available to the public or to anyone asking for it? What if I later decide to license the compiled modified code, do I have an obligation to give the modified source code also to the client who licenses it from me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28940" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T23:19:44.417" Title="Does modified server code, used in public website development, which is originally available under GPL2 have to be released to the public?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|source-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13571" CreationDate="2023-01-02T21:07:48.400" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, you do not 'distribute copies of free software' so you are not required to provide source code. This is how many service providers are able to integrate GPL-licensed code with their proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is however a requirement in AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: that said, think twice if you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; want to do this. Maintaining forks of large, complex software is hard. Even major software companies struggle to do that. E.g. many hardware vendors prefer if drivers for their hardware is accepted into mainline Linux, and pay people to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4286" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T21:07:48.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13571" CreationDate="2023-01-02T23:19:44.417" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using modified GPL-licensed software on the server side for services is unproblematic in terms of licensing. You do not distribute the software and you can do on your machine whatever you want without asking anyone without any obligations - that's granted by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you however later decide to pass on the binaries built from this modified sources, then yes, you are obliged to fulfill the requirements imposed by the GPL license: You yourself would be in license violation if you make no offer for the complete corresponding sources to the binary. If you convey the modified software, you are obliged to distribute it under GPL terms (or compatible). You may also not impose further restrictions on the usage and further distribution of these modified versions. Thus your clients are only bound by the GPL in using that modified software and they are free to offer it free-of-charge for everyone to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-01-02T23:19:44.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13577" CreationDate="2023-01-03T21:56:35.000" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I take a software (Work) distributed under GPLv3 compatible license, and create a Derivative Work. Can I distribute it (the Derivative Work) under GPLv3 license? If not, how can I make a Derivative Work part of a project distributed under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28956" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-04T08:37:48.873" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T09:22:18.027" Title="Changing the license of a derivative work" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13579" CreationDate="2023-01-03T23:56:34.720" Score="0" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a program named X. If I edit X, I have to make the source code of X open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have another program (say a web application) and I write my own code Y (which is closed source) and I embed open source X in close source Y, am I breaking the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;----- Why I am asking this-----&#xA;There was a program I will call A with the MIT license, a group of people took A and came up with X changing the license to GPL, I then took X and came up with Y (and made it open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I came up with Z (fully my own and all closed source) if I embed Y (via &lt;code&gt;Iframe&lt;/code&gt;) can I still legally keep Z close source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PLEASE NOTE: &lt;strong&gt;ALL&lt;/strong&gt; of Y is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lets assume that Z is hosted on domain Z.com and that Y is hosted of Y.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also planning to use Z commercially&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; If Y loads data from Z's server is it still allowed under GPL, if not if Y loads data from ZY (open source code for Z server for loading and saving data of Y) is it then allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28957" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-08T12:50:22.613" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T12:50:22.613" Title="GNU General Public License v3.0 Embedded Web Program Question" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|commercial|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13574" CreationDate="2023-01-04T07:45:28.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In brief, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very definition&lt;/a&gt; of a GPLv3-compatible licence is that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  If you are not the rightsholder in the GPLv3 code, then (by GPLv3 s5c) you &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; release the entire derivative work under GPLv3.  Since in this case you are the rightsholder, you do not &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to do that, but you very clearly &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T07:45:28.493" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13574" CreationDate="2023-01-04T09:05:00.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless the original license explicitly allows it, you can not drop the license of the original Work and replace it with the GPLv3.&#xA;What you can do is that you license &lt;em&gt;your modifications&lt;/em&gt; under the GPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the GPLv3 requires that you distribute the entire Derived Work under the GPLv3 license, it does not give you permission to go against the requirements of the original license. For a GPL-compatible original license, this means in effect only that you can't just throw away the original license text. (Although, officially it means you need to comply with the requirements of both licenses where it comes to code that was part of the original Work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-01-04T09:22:18.027" LastActivityDate="2023-01-04T09:22:18.027" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13575" CreationDate="2023-01-04T14:11:34.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I have a program named X. If I edit X, I have to make the source code of X open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement is not generally true. In case of all the commonly used open-source licenses, the mere editing does not trigger the requirement to publish (or offer) the modified source code. Only if the original license of X is a copyleft license, and only when you publish/transfer that modified program to 3rd parties, then you need to provide the (modified) sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I have another program (say a web application) and I write my own code Y (which is closed source) and I embed open source X in close source Y, am I breaking the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question depends on the type of open source license of X. For example, if the code of the web application you are referring to is all running on the server, and it is not transmitted to the web browser (html or Javascript code usually is), then you do not need to do anything, unless the open source license of X is the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your web application transmits code to the browser, and if X has a permissive open source license (MIT, BSD, Apache or the like) then you will just need to provide the copyright notice, attribution and partly the license language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If X is licensed under GPL, then it really depends which part of the web application is actually published/transferred to 3rd parties, and also how closely X and Y are communicating with each other. From the little detail you have provided it is not possible to provide an answer for that specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;----- Why I am asking this----- There was a program I will call A with the MIT license, a group of people took A and came up with X changing the license to GPL, I then took X and came up with Y (and made it open source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is confusing me, because in the 2nd paragraph of your question you wrote that Y is closed source and X is open source. In general it can be said that if X was licensed under GPL and you took it and created a derivative work of X (you call it Y), and (see above) if you publish/transfer Y to 3rd parties, then Y also needs to be published under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I came up with Z (fully my own and all closed source) if I embed Y (via Iframe) can I still legally keep Z close source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PLEASE NOTE: ALL of Y is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lets assume that Z is hosted on domain Z.com and that Y is hosted of Y.com&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the little information you provided, embedding Y via Iframe in Z and providing it on the same webpage, without further intimate communication between Y and Z, likely constitutes an 'Aggregate' so that the licenses of Y and Z do not influence each other. This is even more true if Y and Z are hosted on different domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am also planning to use Z commercially&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial use is not an obstacle to code under open source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: If Y loads data from Z's server is it still allowed under GPL, if not if Y loads data from ZY (open source code for Z server for loading and saving data of Y) is it then allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remote data communication between 2 servers does not have an impact on the licenses of the software running on each server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If you plan to fully integrate the code of Y in your web project Z, then you need to carefully consider the level of integration of the two parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just hosting the code for the Iframe on your own domain will not change much, if there was no intimate communication between Y and Z before, then this will not change. With  or  tags this will be similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you completely amalgamate the code of Y into Z, then you will have to consider Z a derivative work of Y, and therefore Z would need to be licensed under GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are grey zones in between, and you will have to judge yourself how your implementation matches the criteria. It might be helpful for you to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ related to 'Aggregation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-06T11:59:44.627" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T11:59:44.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13585" CreationDate="2023-01-05T06:32:48.557" Score="4" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using software licensed under the AGPL 3.0 license, which states that all changes to the project must be made open-source.&#xA;This particular software offers support for custom plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, does a custom plugin (that does not modify any source code) need to be made open source? As far as I can tell, nobody online (GitHub, etc) has any available to view - which would lead me to believe plugins don't fall under the AGPL 3 license for the software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28970" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-01-05T08:49:29.603" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T08:49:29.603" Title="Under AGPL 3.0, must a custom software plugin be made open source?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-05T02:14:49.303" Score="6" ViewCount="2381" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to allow users of my code to make derivatives, but disallow derivatives from imposing any restrictions on the usage of my code. Is there an existing license that would fit this specification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28974" OwnerDisplayName="linklinklink" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T14:24:10.010" Title="Are there any software licenses that allow for everything but changing the license or dual-licensing?" Tags="|copyright|software|licensing|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13581" CreationDate="2023-01-05T02:30:12.687" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache License 2.0 is one that should achieve what you need.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30779" OwnerDisplayName="alkema" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T02:30:12.687" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13581" CreationDate="2023-01-05T03:49:12.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the Ms-PL license follows the exact specifications listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under section 3 (D):&#xA;(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, &lt;strong&gt;you may do so only under this license&lt;/strong&gt; by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28974" OwnerDisplayName="linklinklink" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T03:50:02.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13581" CreationDate="2023-01-05T08:16:02.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; or its &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;non-commercial cousin&lt;/a&gt;, CC BY-NC-SA, do not allow changing out of the license for derivates as altering the license is violating the SA Part, unless it is essentially reworded. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There is no compatible license for the 3.0 version&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your application, the CC BY-SA 4.0 compatible &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; might be the better choice: it shares the force to stay in the license scheme and is worded even stronger in this regard, disallowing to put &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; different license on it. It is also very common in software projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28972" OwnerDisplayName="Trish" LastEditorUserId="28972" LastEditDate="2023-01-05T20:51:49.430" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T20:51:49.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13580" CreationDate="2023-01-05T08:35:17.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does a custom plugin (that does not modify any source code) need to be made open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That depends on how the plugin and the host-software interact with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the plugin system works in a way that the plugins are effectively separate applications that just get executed at a certain point in the workflow of the host application, then the plugin and host application are considered to be independent enough that the (A)GPL requirements don't extend to the plugins. In that case, you can choose any license you want for your plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the plugin system loads the plugins as a library into the host application and especially if there are function calls back and forth, then the (A)GPL license requires that the plugins are also published under a (A)GPL-compatible (open source) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T08:35:17.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13581" CreationDate="2023-01-05T10:02:41.990" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, you need a copyleft license, so that you can ensure derivatives would be subject to the same license conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, the license must prevent imposition of additional restrictions that are not found in the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are fulfilled by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;. Section 6 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further&#xA;restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also Section 10 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same conditions can be found in LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-05T12:02:02.857" LastActivityDate="2023-01-05T12:02:02.857" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13581" CreationDate="2023-01-05T21:17:47.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I voted up Ruben's answer, but also noticed a possible confusion in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;allow users of my code to make derivatives, but disallow derivatives&#xA;from imposing any restrictions on the usage of my code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you meant &amp;quot;disallow the copyright holder of the derivates from imposing any restrictions on the usage of their derivatives&amp;quot;, Ruben is correct; use the GPL. This is exactly what it was designed for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you meant &amp;quot;disallow the copyright holder of the derivatives from imposing any restriction on &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; use of my own code&amp;quot;, that just can't happen. If you own the copyright, licenses don't limit you. You can do whatever you want with your own code. That includes continuing to license it however you want. Your users will remain quite free to continue to use your code in accordance with the license(s) you gave them, no matter what someone else does with a &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; copy they made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the GPL comes in is if you don't want someone with resources swooping in, improving your code (or perhaps building a great product using it), and then requiring different license terms you had no input into in order to use their new improved &amp;quot;derivative&amp;quot; code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13327" LastEditorUserId="13327" LastEditDate="2023-01-06T14:24:10.010" LastActivityDate="2023-01-06T14:24:10.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13603" CreationDate="2023-01-07T12:33:02.953" Score="5" ViewCount="1137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no experience with licensing. I used GitHub to put a license in one of my repositories, which basically uses C. As I didn't want to impose restrictions (the code is a very small utility, I don't even care if someone wants to copy my code), I chose the one that was listed as 'most permissive' - MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I wanted to distribute my code as binaries as well. The code uses no external libraries except for the linux glibc (&lt;code&gt;libc.so.6&lt;/code&gt;). So, I used the option &lt;code&gt;-static&lt;/code&gt; while compiling with &lt;code&gt;gcc&lt;/code&gt;, so that the binaries do not complain on not finding proper versions of glibc. Now, I read somewhere that I will now have to use GPL license (or the one glibc uses). I can do this, but I don't really want to because I am a hobbyist programmer and hence want to keep it as permissive as I can; the program itself is very small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my questions are-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which license will I have to include after using static linking (LGPL-2.1, I suppose)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the source code be licensed under MIT and binaries under the license used by glibc?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the answer to (2) is yes, then is there any program that automates the process?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; I found this in one of the headers (which seems to be seem in all; this one is from &lt;code&gt;math.h&lt;/code&gt;):-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   The GNU C Library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;   modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;   License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either&#xA;   version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;   The GNU C Library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU&#xA;   Lesser General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;   You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public&#xA;   License along with the GNU C Library; if not, see&#xA;   &amp;lt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same I find at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Copying.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copying (The GNU C Library)&lt;/a&gt;. So, it turns out that glibc uses &lt;code&gt;LGPL-2.1&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28986" LastEditorUserId="28986" LastEditDate="2023-01-09T10:50:06.767" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T17:24:59.400" Title="How should I license my software if it links statically with glibc?" Tags="|licensing|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-08T09:51:36.177" Score="-1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some &lt;a href=&quot;https://elementor.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elementor&lt;/a&gt; templates but I don't know if they are GPL licensed. How can I tell which license they are under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28990" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-08T12:48:13.757" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T12:48:13.757" Title="How can I tell if Elementor templates are GPL licensed or not?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13589" CreationDate="2023-01-08T10:02:53.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the templates are GPL licensed, you &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have received at a bare minimum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A full copy of the GPL license itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Either the full source code to the template, or an offer to supply the full source code to the template&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you did not receive these, then the template is under a different license (or is GPL licensed and distributed in violation of the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T10:02:53.630" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-08T15:20:53.470" Score="1" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question would be: If I wrote software in Python and compiled it with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nuitka&lt;/a&gt; and would like to publish it under either the GPL v2 or MIT license for others, should I also attach the original .py source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in terms of &amp;quot;transparency&amp;quot; is the source generated by Nuitka already enough? I'd be a little jealous of the code I've written, but I'd also like to be transparent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28992" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-01-08T16:20:17.970" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T16:20:17.970" Title="Best way to release a Nuitka-compiled software?" Tags="|mit|gpl-2|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13592" CreationDate="2023-01-08T16:19:01.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL v2&lt;/a&gt; defines &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; as meaning (Section 3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, that is clearly the Python source; nobody wants to work on the generated C source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license does not define anything similar. However, I would say the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of open source would be to distribute the Python code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T16:19:01.950" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-08T20:11:11.983" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an analytics server that companies should be able to run as-is &amp;amp; interact with internally via APIs. I'd like for them to be able to use this tool without having to open-source their own code (unless they modify the tool).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example use-case would be: decide if a particular email or ip address is good or bad / pass or fail / etc. In other words, their own end users would not directly benefit from this analytics server, but the company would be able to get more info regarding their own users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is AGPLv3 fitting for this type of use-case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28143" LastEditorUserId="28143" LastEditDate="2023-01-08T20:48:19.037" LastActivityDate="2023-01-08T20:48:19.037" Title="Is AGPLv3 reasonable for an internal analytics API server?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-08T21:55:21.370" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a project make some New Zealand government data available to the public under the Creative Commons license. The access to the data will be directly to a &lt;strong&gt;PostgreSQL database&lt;/strong&gt; (read-only, of course). I'm unsure what would be an appropriate mechanism to ensure that anyone accessing the database could be made aware of its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One obvious mechanism would be to include a notice next to the connection parameters mentioning the license, possibly like &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/choose/non-web-popup?license_code=by&amp;amp;jurisdiction=&amp;amp;version=4.0&amp;amp;lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit &lt;a href=&quot;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&lt;/a&gt; or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not everyone connecting to the database might see this, but maybe that's just the same problem as people distributing a repository without the license file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="634" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-09T09:03:49.487" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T09:03:49.487" Title="How to effectively communicate the license of database content?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-09T01:11:50.757" Score="1" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use a specific library and this library uses other packages..&#xA;In the event that I have a license and copyright notice, is it obligatory for this library or for all sub-packages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to license and copyright notice to all packages or just this library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28995" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T01:11:50.757" Title="I use the npm package, do I have to specify the license for each package?" Tags="|copyright|license|npm|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13601" CreationDate="2023-01-09T11:59:02.970" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to reuse with attribution (and publish) a raster graphics file from GPL software. At the moment, I consider reusing either the software icon file or the software logo file. The latter is a part of the default theme distributed with the software. Both images are based on a graphic novel character and appear to be derivative works by the developer. The default theme also features a drawing of that character in full as the splash. The &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; states that the character &amp;quot;appears by kindly permission of&amp;quot; its author. There is &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; file with the text of the GPL version 2 license. So, are those images GPL-licensed or should they be considered copyrighted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software is &amp;amp;RQ which is an ICQ client written by Italian developer Massimo Melina. The source code used to be published on the developer's website but is also available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/andrq/files/3%20.%20CVS%20Snapshots/2004-03-08/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source Forge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comic book character is Rat-Man by Italian artist Leo Ortolani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the attribution wordings from the software:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ LC_ALL=C grep Ortolani * -r&#xA;aboutDlg.dfm:    Caption = 'Rat-Man appears by kindly permission of Leo Ortolani'&#xA;aboutDlg.dfm:      '- Leo Ortolani, he created the Rat-Man'&#xA;grep: distro/andrq.exe: binary file matches&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contents of the &lt;code&gt;license.txt&lt;/code&gt; file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;            GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE&#xA;               Version 2, June 1991&#xA;&#xA; Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;                       59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA&#xA; Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies&#xA; of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&#xA;&#xA;                Preamble&#xA;&#xA;  The licenses for most software are designed to take away your&#xA;freedom to share and change it.  By contrast, the GNU General Public&#xA;License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free&#xA;software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.  This&#xA;General Public License applies to most of the Free Software&#xA;Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to&#xA;using it.  (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by&#xA;the GNU Library General Public License instead.)  You can apply it to&#xA;your programs, too.&#xA;&#xA;  When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not&#xA;price.  Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you&#xA;have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for&#xA;this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it&#xA;if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it&#xA;in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.&#xA;&#xA;  To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid&#xA;anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.&#xA;These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you&#xA;distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.&#xA;&#xA;  For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether&#xA;gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that&#xA;you have.  You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the&#xA;source code.  And you must show them these terms so they know their&#xA;rights.&#xA;&#xA;  We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and&#xA;(2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy,&#xA;distribute and/or modify the software.&#xA;&#xA;  Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain&#xA;that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free&#xA;software.  If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we&#xA;want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so&#xA;that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original&#xA;authors' reputations.&#xA;&#xA;  Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software&#xA;patents.  We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free&#xA;program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the&#xA;program proprietary.  To prevent this, we have made it clear that any&#xA;patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.&#xA;&#xA;  The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and&#xA;modification follow.&#xA;&#xA;            GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE&#xA;   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION&#xA;&#xA;  0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains&#xA;a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed&#xA;under the terms of this General Public License.  The &amp;quot;Program&amp;quot;, below,&#xA;refers to any such program or work, and a &amp;quot;work based on the Program&amp;quot;&#xA;means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law:&#xA;that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it,&#xA;either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another&#xA;language.  (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in&#xA;the term &amp;quot;modification&amp;quot;.)  Each licensee is addressed as &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;.&#xA;&#xA;Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not&#xA;covered by this License; they are outside its scope.  The act of&#xA;running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program&#xA;is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the&#xA;Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).&#xA;Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.&#xA;&#xA;  1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's&#xA;source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you&#xA;conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate&#xA;copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the&#xA;notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty;&#xA;and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License&#xA;along with the Program.&#xA;&#xA;You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and&#xA;you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.&#xA;&#xA;  2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion&#xA;of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and&#xA;distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1&#xA;above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:&#xA;&#xA;    a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices&#xA;    stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.&#xA;&#xA;    b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in&#xA;    whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any&#xA;    part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third&#xA;    parties under the terms of this License.&#xA;&#xA;    c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively&#xA;    when run, you must cause it, when started running for such&#xA;    interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an&#xA;    announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a&#xA;    notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide&#xA;    a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under&#xA;    these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this&#xA;    License.  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You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,&#xA;under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of&#xA;Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&#xA;&#xA;    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable&#xA;    source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections&#xA;    1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&#xA;&#xA;    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three&#xA;    years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your&#xA;    cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete&#xA;    machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be&#xA;    distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium&#xA;    customarily used for software interchange; or,&#xA;&#xA;    c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer&#xA;    to distribute corresponding source code.  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The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions&#xA;of the General Public License from time to time.  Such new versions will&#xA;be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to&#xA;address new problems or concerns.&#xA;&#xA;Each version is given a distinguishing version number.  If the Program&#xA;specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and &amp;quot;any&#xA;later version&amp;quot;, you have the option of following the terms and conditions&#xA;either of that version or of any later version published by the Free&#xA;Software Foundation.  If the Program does not specify a version number of&#xA;this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software&#xA;Foundation.&#xA;&#xA;  10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free&#xA;programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author&#xA;to ask for permission.  For software which is copyrighted by the Free&#xA;Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes&#xA;make exceptions for this.  Our decision will be guided by the two goals&#xA;of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and&#xA;of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.&#xA;&#xA;                NO WARRANTY&#xA;&#xA;  11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY&#xA;FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.  EXCEPT WHEN&#xA;OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES&#xA;PROVIDE THE PROGRAM &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED&#xA;OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  THE ENTIRE RISK AS&#xA;TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU.  SHOULD THE&#xA;PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING,&#xA;REPAIR OR CORRECTION.&#xA;&#xA;  12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING&#xA;WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR&#xA;REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES,&#xA;INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING&#xA;OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED&#xA;TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY&#xA;YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER&#xA;PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE&#xA;POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.&#xA;&#xA;             END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS&#xA;&#xA;        How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs&#xA;&#xA;  If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest&#xA;possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it&#xA;free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms.&#xA;&#xA;  To do so, attach the following notices to the program.  It is safest&#xA;to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively&#xA;convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least&#xA;the &amp;quot;copyright&amp;quot; line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.&#xA;&#xA;    &amp;lt;one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.&amp;gt;&#xA;    Copyright (C) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt;  &amp;lt;name of author&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify&#xA;    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by&#xA;    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or&#xA;    (at your option) any later version.&#xA;&#xA;    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;    GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License&#xA;    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software&#xA;    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.&#xA;&#xA;If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this&#xA;when it starts in an interactive mode:&#xA;&#xA;    Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) year name of author&#xA;    Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.&#xA;    This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it&#xA;    under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.&#xA;&#xA;The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate&#xA;parts of the General Public License.  Of course, the commands you use may&#xA;be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be&#xA;mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program.&#xA;&#xA;You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your&#xA;school, if any, to sign a &amp;quot;copyright disclaimer&amp;quot; for the program, if&#xA;necessary.  Here is a sample; alter the names:&#xA;&#xA;  Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program&#xA;  `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.&#xA;&#xA;  &amp;lt;signature of Ty Coon&amp;gt;, 1 April 1989&#xA;  Ty Coon, President of Vice&#xA;&#xA;This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into&#xA;proprietary programs.  If your program is a subroutine library, you may&#xA;consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the&#xA;library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General&#xA;Public License instead of this License.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find any special information in the top directory where the icon file is located.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theme images are located in the theme directories. It is one of the key features of the software that it is completely themeable. Theme directories have INI files, which mention the theme author in the theme description. The INI file for the default theme states: &amp;quot;&amp;amp;RQ default theme, by Massimo Melina&amp;quot;. Nothing is stated about Leo Ortolani here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ran &lt;code&gt;identify -verbose&lt;/code&gt; as well as &lt;code&gt;exiftool&lt;/code&gt; on the images that interested me but found nothing about author or license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the compiled program, there is at least one more logo image in the &amp;quot;About&amp;quot; dialogue which is not themeable. I cannot find it in the available sources for some reason. It looks like the picture in the icon but has higher resolution and text with the name of the program &amp;quot;&amp;amp;RQ&amp;quot; over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28999" LastEditorUserId="28999" LastEditDate="2023-01-10T10:58:57.720" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T12:53:21.950" Title="Should the artwork attributed to third-parties and the derivatives of it be assumed proprietary or GPL in GPL software?" Tags="|gpl-2|derivative-works|attribution|logos|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-09T15:08:51.957" Score="1" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use these packages :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5Emz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5Emz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I want a license and copyright notice, do I do it for these packages only, or all the packages belonging to these packages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28995" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T16:10:14.093" Title="How do I make a License and copyright notice" Tags="|license|npm|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13598" CreationDate="2023-01-09T15:58:56.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you distribute software you need to include the license and notice information (as required by the respective licenses of the libraries) for all the direct and all transitive dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are wonderful open-source tools to help you with that task, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fossology.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FOSSology&lt;/a&gt; or other tools published by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Open-Source-Compliance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Chain Project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-09T16:10:14.093" LastActivityDate="2023-01-09T16:10:14.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13597" CreationDate="2023-01-10T12:53:21.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's an easy answer; sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything you've told us suggests strongly that Melina, the software's author, intended everything shipped to be covered by GPL.  What we can't tell is whether (s)he had rights to do that with the Rat Man character image.  We know that  &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Rat-Man appears by kindly permission of Leo Ortolani&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but what we don't know is what exactly that permission covered.  Was it just use?  Was it also verbatim reproduction as part of this software package?  Verbatim reproduction anywhere?  Creation of derivatives?  We just don't know.  It is very possible that Ortolani didn't even consider the question when giving his/her permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of any way you can resolve this other than asking Ortolani what exactly (s)he intended to allow, or Melina for full details of the discussion that led to permission being given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T12:53:21.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13588" CreationDate="2023-01-10T17:24:59.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL permits what you describe, but there are some formalities which you must observe. Specifically, from section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a “work that uses the Library” with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer’s own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License. Also, you must do one of these things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 above); and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable “work that uses the Library”, as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library. (It is understood that the user who changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified definitions.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b. Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library. A suitable mechanism is one that (1) uses at run time a copy of the library already present on the user’s computer system, rather than copying library functions into the executable, and (2) will operate properly with a modified version of the library, if the user installs one, as long as the modified version is interface-compatible with the version that the work was made with.&#xA;c. Accompany the work with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give the same user the materials specified in Subsection 6a, above, for a charge no more than the cost of performing this distribution.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;d. If distribution of the work is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, offer equivalent access to copy the above specified materials from the same place.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;e. Verify that the user has already received a copy of these materials or that you have already sent this user a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an executable, the required form of the “work that uses the Library” must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable from it. However, as a special exception, the materials to be distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, if you want to distribute binaries that use the library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your binaries must be under a license that &amp;quot;permit[s] modification of the work for the customer’s own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.&amp;quot; The MIT license meets this requirement, so you already intend to do this anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must provide a copy of the LGPL and notify users that you use a library licensed under it. This does not cause the LGPL to apply to your binary; it is an informational requirement only.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must provide object or source files so that an end user could re-link against a different version of glibc (or a different libc altogether). This is not (normally) required if your binary is dynamically linked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You also need to supply scripts or other materials that are required for compilation and/or linking, but you don't have to package things like the OS, the compiler, etc., unless those things are actually part of your software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-01-10T17:24:59.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-10T20:32:37.960" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;When smart contracts are deployed on the Ethereum network they are operated by multiple anonymous nodes of the network. Assuming that the code of the smart contracts is subject to the MIT license, if an Ethereum user now interacts with such smart contracts, what are the applicable legal terms, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, deployed smart contracts are similar to SaaS-solutions, with the main difference of being operated on a decentralized network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of OSS licenses is that they license the use of code but not the interaction with executed code i.e. OSS license do not apply to a user of SaaS-offerings, as the user is only interacting with the code but does not &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; the code. Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29012" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-11T15:22:45.790" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T15:22:45.790" Title="Applicable legal terms when interacting with smart contracts on the Ethereum network" Tags="|mit|terms-of-service|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13605" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13604" CreationDate="2023-01-11T10:24:33.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open Source Licenses are granting rights to do things, that --as worded in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;-- &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question can be broken down into 2 parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is copyright law relevant for the interaction with Ethereum smart contracts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is the rights holder that defines the legal terms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smart contracts are &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;described here&lt;/a&gt;. As you can see, smart contracts are not part of the Ethereum codebase, they are more like a macro within a spreadsheet, and that has its own copyright, independent from the platform that is used to edit/store it (i.e. independent from the copyright of e.g. Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, GoogleDocs, ...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the nature of a public blockchain, that it is replicated many times, one replica for every node. The content of the blockchain is public, any person with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/accounts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Account&lt;/a&gt; can read the entire content. Anyone who puts information on a public blockchain agrees to that (and should own all rights that permit such publication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the governing rules for the smart contract will be a) the Terms of Use / Terms of Service of the Ethereum Blockchain (with everything you agree to when creating an Account) as needed to put transactions on the blockchain, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; b) the rules of that specific smart contract you are interacting with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/138878/is-there-any-way-to-copyright-an-ethereum-smart-contract&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;, smart contracts have a SPDX license identifier tag, which --if present-- may tell you what you can do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-11T15:21:46.080" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T15:21:46.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13606" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13632" CreationDate="2023-01-11T15:48:41.510" Score="1" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently was in need for a place to store my passwords and stumbled upon bitwarden. After looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/bitwarden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in github&lt;/a&gt; I noticed that the code is partially licensed under AGPL and partially under a commercial license, the bitwarden license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the (A)GPL license has always been that one is not allowed to link with it unless the full product is under (A)GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently my understanding is not complete (I'm no lawyer and I can't imagine bitwarden didn't pass it past their lawyers), could someone explain why this allowed ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: Could I (or anybody) just remove the code that is under the bitwarden license and add code under my own license, just as bitwarden ?&#xA;If not ? Why can't I (or anybody) and can bitwarden ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29020" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-18T10:17:53.517" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T15:58:37.117" Title="AGPL and Bitwarden license" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6132" CreationDate="2023-01-11T17:59:29.723" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You do not need to disclose the source code of your website, ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You just need to disclose the source code of the Ckeditor if you make any changes to its internal libraries, components, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your users do not use CKEditor if you make any changes to CKEditor you need to make them public, like putting your modified CKEditor source on git.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29022" LastActivityDate="2023-01-11T17:59:29.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13609" CreationDate="2023-01-12T00:56:31.740" Score="8" ViewCount="996" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a private corporation decides to publish software under a permissive open source licence (for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT licence&lt;/a&gt;) there might still be a desire for that company's name and logo to be associated with the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously company name and logo are both the subject of copyright and trademark and the company has no desire to lose control of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that all company names and logos must be removed from the whole project, at least its source code (such as removing any copy of the company name or logo in a Git repo)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an obvious example, would that mean the copyrighted logo would need to be removed from the software's GUI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an extreme example, could putting a phrase like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This software was written by [company]&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; in the README.md be construed as putting the company name under the same MIT licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there something that must be done to protect the company's rights here? For example making a clear declaration of what is NOT covered by the MIT licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15283" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-01-12T20:04:29.863" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T20:24:33.453" Title="How do open source licences affect the incorporation of copyright / trademark logos names in a project?" Tags="|mit|copyright|trademark|logos|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13608" CreationDate="2023-01-12T08:10:10.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are open source licenses, which explicitly deal with trademarks by excluding them from the scope. You can find an overview of the licenses &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The specific wording in the licenses differ, and so do the other obligations imposed by the licenses. But there is a wide range for you to choose from. So you don't need to worry that the company logos and trademarks end up 'in the wild'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a company puts its logo into a github repository with software, the company should expect that it is taken and used. The company might exclude the logo from the open source license (or select a software license that does not cover trademarks), but imagine what happens if the logo remains in the software (worst case in the UI) while someone forks it and adds malicious functions to the code? I believe that each and every company that wants to protect its logos and trademarks will try to prevent this situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trademarks and company names also often appear in the names of repositories and libraries and in descriptions of libraries. I randomly picked &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/plcpeople/nodeS7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this example&lt;/a&gt; for illustration purposes, and nobody would seriously believe that the mentioned company name or the trademarks are covered by the permissive MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T08:10:10.893" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-12T11:18:26.233" Score="-1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;If some code is published in two different places by different people, one under the Apache license and one under no license, and I have no way to know which one is the original author (one of them could have copied the other, or both copied some other original source) - if I then copy the code from the person who published it under no license, and it later turns out that the one under Apache license was the original, and I didn't follow the terms of the Apache license - am I liable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24395" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T11:47:00.037" Title="If code is published in two places with different licenses and don't know which is the original" Tags="|licensing|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13610" CreationDate="2023-01-12T11:47:00.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't follow the terms of the Apache license - am I liable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite probably, particularly if it could be shown that you were aware there was uncertainty about the licensing and did nothing to resolve that uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then copy the code from the person who published it under no license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;this is definitely a copyright violation&lt;/a&gt;; you have basically no right to do anything with code published without a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T11:47:00.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13608" CreationDate="2023-01-12T11:52:27.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright and trademarks are two different things. A company name might be under trademark protection, even if it is a common noun, like &amp;quot;Oracle&amp;quot;. The name &amp;quot;Oracle&amp;quot; is not protected by any copyright license, and thus can not be put &amp;quot;under the MIT license&amp;quot; just by mentioning it in README.md. Nevertheless, mentioning the name in the README file might under certain circumstances violate the acceptable use according to trademark rules. Calling your database server &amp;quot;Free Oracle Database&amp;quot; in README.md is is most likely against trademark rules. On the other hand, mentioning in the same README that your product is &amp;quot;built on Oracle technology, but in no way endorsed by Oracle&amp;quot; is most likely fine, as the trademark &amp;quot;Oracle&amp;quot; is used just to refer to the company and/or product the trademark is meant to represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logos and (possible depending on jurisdiction) artificially invented company names on the other hand &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; protectable by copyright, so a LICENSE document should make clear that the MIT license does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; apply to &lt;code&gt;company_logo.png&lt;/code&gt;. In that case, the remaining parts of the source code may still be MIT licensed, but the complete source code repository is not, and furthermore the binary with that logo included is also &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; subject to the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining source code you may use under the GPL with a copyrighted company logo (example: YourProprietaryVideoEditor.exe has a splash screen containing that logo, and it links against ffmpeg in a configuration that includes GPL licensed code) will result in a non-distributable binary, unless you license that logo under GPL compatible &lt;em&gt;copyright&lt;/em&gt; terms. You still have &lt;em&gt;trademark&lt;/em&gt; protection on that logo, though. So I could take your video editing software, fetch the logo from it and start branding fridges with it, as you most likely didn't apply for trademark protection for &amp;quot;household appliances&amp;quot;, just for &amp;quot;software&amp;quot;, and maybe even for &amp;quot;clothing&amp;quot; to also have merchandise protected. I also can use parts of that logo to create another logo (a work derived from your logo) and use that for my product, if the logos are clearly distinct, for example cropping a film roll from that logo to be used as a part for an entirely new logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15279" LastEditorUserId="15279" LastEditDate="2023-01-12T20:24:33.453" LastActivityDate="2023-01-12T20:24:33.453" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-12T18:27:32.743" Score="2" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a translation assist &amp;amp; dictionary-like software to assist in translating Japanese to English. To help with this, dictionary datasets in XML format by &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would be immensely helpful, but they happen to be licensed under &lt;em&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V4.0)&lt;/em&gt;. They have their licensing directly available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edrdg.org/edrdg/licence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no qualms about properly crediting the incredible work of the group, but if possible, I'd like to license my software under another license, possibly a more software-oriented open source license like MIT, but my question here is to what degree can I couple my software to these datasets before it is considered derivative and must also be published under CC BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I correct in assuming that if I were to directly include these files in the distribution of my software, still as separate files, this would force the software too under CC BY-SA?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If I were to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; distribute the files bundled with my software but instead instructed potential users to go download these files from the original source to use them with my software make a difference?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the fact that my software would contain code specifically targeted to making use of these files (i.e. parsing the specific XML scheme found in them) make it a derivative regardless?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I wouldn't necessarily need to include any of the copyrighted data and you could argue that something like importing data from an XML file is generic enough that it could be used with any similar data set, I'm not aware of any other projects that'd use the exact same scheme, meaning if my software is specifically built to read data in this scheme, the connection to the data is rather obvious. In other words, does writing code that imports data in a specific XML scheme constitute a derivative work of the data which first introduced that scheme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further confusing the matter, the license page for the data also mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that provided the conditions above [namely, CC BY-SA V4.0] are met, there is NO&#xA;restriction placed on commercial use of the files. The files can be&#xA;bundled with software and sold for whatever the developer wants to&#xA;charge. Software using these files does not have to be under any form&#xA;of open-source licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC is considered an open source license, right? Does this part mean that even were the data to be distributed with any software, the software itself need not me under &amp;quot;any form of open-source license&amp;quot;, i.e. CC itself? This seems rather contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is my best option to enable use of this data with my software while ideally maintaining freedom of choosing the software's license myself, if any?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29032" LastEditorUserId="29032" LastEditDate="2023-01-12T20:31:42.513" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T14:04:20.427" Title="If I create software that can leverage a CC BY-SA data set, do I have to license the software under the same license?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|software|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13613" CreationDate="2023-01-13T03:02:08.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in assuming that if I were to directly include these files in the distribution of my software, still as separate files, this would force the software too under CC BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see why. Your software isn't derived from the creative content of those files, it just supports their format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to not distribute the files bundled with my software but instead instructed potential users to go download these files from the original source to use them with my software make a difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Either your work is derived from those XML files or it isn't. How you distribute it doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the fact that my software would contain code specifically targeted to making use of these files (i.e. parsing the specific XML scheme found in them) make it a derivative regardless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would probably be the strongest argument that it's a derivative. Assuming this XML format is widely used in other works, then you have a very strong argument that you aren't derived from those files, you just use the same format that they do. If that XML format is exclusive to those files and is creative and not purely functional, then the argument probably goes the other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the quick research I was able to do, it appears the format is covered by the license and not available by any other means. And, at least by my non-expert judgment, does seem that the format contains significant creative choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Develop your own format taking only function from their format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Offer your format under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make your software use your format and license it however you want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a tool to convert their format to your format and place the tool under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6062" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T03:02:08.157" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-13T06:34:39.663" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to modify a font that was released under CC BY 4.0 and relicense it under SIL OFL License (or a dual-license of CC BY 4.0 and SIL OFL like &lt;a href=&quot;https://linuxlibertine.sourceforge.net/Libertine-EN.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linux Libertine fonts&lt;/a&gt; did with GPL and SIL OFL)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are contributions from downstream (using OFL), may I ask them to agree to use CC BY 4.0 to merge back into upstream such to maintain both version compatibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21697" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T06:34:39.663" Title="Relicensing CC BY 4.0 font after modification under OFL" Tags="|cc-by|font|ofl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13618" CreationDate="2023-01-13T17:58:33.653" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13613/if-i-create-software-that-can-leverage-a-cc-by-sa-data-set-do-i-have-to-license&quot;&gt;follow-up question to my previous one&lt;/a&gt;. I'm considering writing a manual translation software, where the end user will be writing the entire translation themselves, but the software could offer definitions and explanations for words (not automatic translations!). In effect, the software would be a word processor with a built in searchable dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem comes from the dictionary material which I planned to use, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edrdg.org/edrdg/licence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is licensed under CC BY-SA v4.0&lt;/a&gt;. In my previous question people pointed out that any reproduction of the dictionary material within the program as well as any translation produced would be reproductive of the dictionary and need to also follow CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, forcing a specific, restrictive license like CC BY-SA on anything an end user would produce on this translation software would render it extremely unattractive if not downright unusable depending on their circumstances. I would want to make this software as free as possible, including the end user having full copyright control to anything they legally produce using the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this reading of the BY CC-SA V4.0 license correct?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If/if not, how could I ensure the end user has full rights to anything they produce using this software? Would I need to request the dictionary under some other, less restrictive license from its original producer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29032" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T20:35:15.067" Title="If a CC BY-SA V4.0 dictionary is used to look up meanings of words, is the resulting translation a derivative work?" Tags="|licensing|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13617" CreationDate="2023-01-13T20:35:15.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using a dictionary to look up words doesn't create a derivative work, as far as I'm aware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a dictionary is copyrighted, what is covered by copyright is maybe the description for the words, and the collection of the words as a whole (details depend on jurisdiction). Copyright protects expression of human creativity, and maybe human effort. Not subject to copyright are individual words or their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open licenses such as CC-BY-SA do not place additional contractual restrictions on you. Instead, they give permission to do something that would otherwise be prohibited by copyright (since the default copyright status of any work is “all rights reserved”). Here, using the dictionary to look up words doesn't impact copyright in any way, so the CC-BY-SA can be ignored in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; people “use” CC-BY-SA content when writing stuff, without apparent problems. For example, I used concepts from your CC-BY-SA 4.0 licensed question as the basis to write this answer. Wikipedia articles are also CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed, and I looked up a word for this answer in the Wiktionary. Specifically in the context of software, copyleft licenses are quite common, but this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/5478&quot;&gt;doesn't affect the licensing status of other creative works that are created with these tools&lt;/a&gt;. E.g. part of this answer was written with the GPL-3.0 licensed Emacs editor, running on a GPL-2.0 licensed Linux kernel, posted through the Firefox browser that contains LGPL-3.0 components. Yet this answer is not affected by those licenses, because it's not a derivative work of any of those other works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-01-13T20:35:15.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-14T20:50:23.997" Score="3" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am confused as to how to describe a web page from a theme licensed under the MIT license that I want to modify and use for my own private commercial purposes. I do want to have the copyright on what is mentioned on the page in terms of content, and not design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make sense to display both Copyright  and 'MIT License', or is it erroneous? Can you have the copyright of the content implemented on a publicly MIT licensed piece of software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29047" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T08:14:39.843" Title="Copyright a web page created from a MIT license theme?" Tags="|mit|copyright|license|law|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13623" CreationDate="2023-01-15T14:22:36.650" Score="1" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let X be an open-source software that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is distributed in source code only,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;depends on a software Y having MIT/ISC license, but just &amp;quot;imports&amp;quot; it, for example &lt;code&gt;import Y&lt;/code&gt; in a Go source, or &lt;code&gt;#include Y.h&lt;/code&gt; in a C source,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;doesn't redistribute Y in any form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the Y's license applies to X, so should X includes the Y's copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22853" LastActivityDate="2023-01-15T22:05:52.363" Title="Is importing a usage in MIT, ISC, or similar licenses?" Tags="|mit|license|dependencies|isc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-02-01T15:18:53.973" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-15T22:03:08.870" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is as much a technical issue as a license issue, but I would appreciate correction if any of my assumptions about how the licenses work are incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assume that I want to use a patch file from an open source project. That project is licensed under Apache, but the original project that is being patched is licensed under GPL3. The patch file has no specific license and no copyright information. I believe this makes the patch file licensed under the original GPL3 license, and that it is required that my project adds a license and copyright notice to the patch in order to use it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does one properly add a copyright and license notice to the .patch file, which is either a diff or a git diff? Is there a safe way to add a comment that's compatible with both systems? If so, where in the file should the comment be added? If not, should there be a separate file that specifies the copyright and license that in some way points to the patch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29057" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-01-16T09:36:36.883" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T09:36:36.883" Title="What is the proper way to add attribution to a gpl3 licensed diff/patch file?" Tags="|gpl-3|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13620" CreationDate="2023-01-15T22:05:52.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are required to comply with Y's license if and when you're doing something that copyright law doesn't permit by default. In particular, Open Source licenses usually trigger when you distribute or modify the software in any form (and in some more niche scenarios).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem like the X source code is a derivative of the Y software. You're not distributing the Y software in any part or form. Then, Y's license doesn't matter for the X source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Y's license would become relevant if you vendor Y's code (include it as part of the X source tree), or if you provide compiled versions that include Y in full or in part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Y's license is relevant, that doesn't mean that X has to use that same license. For “permissive” Open Source licenses, attribution is typically all that's required. For example, you might include a document that lists all third party components and their copyright and license notices. In case of MIT/ISC keeping the notices around for the recipient is pretty much all that's required, but other licenses might have more complex conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A useful mental model is not that X includes Y, but that you're creating software that includes the X and Y components. The combination of these components might have one overall license, but usually there's going to be a patchwork of licenses for the various components. Those licenses do have to be compatible with each other, but permissive licenses are highly compatible – they don't even require the software as a whole to be Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-01-15T22:05:52.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13619" CreationDate="2023-01-16T08:07:36.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a copyright perspective, the content and the design of a website are two different, independent things. It is certainly possible to have the content under a different license than the design. You just have to look at the Stack Exchange site, where the content is under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, but the design is under a closed source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MIT license on your theme is a very permissive license. The only real requirement is has is that you don't delete the license text and accompanying copyright information. If all of that is just in comment blocks or a separate license file, you don't even have to mention the license and copyright visibly on your site (although it can be a sign of goodwill to do it anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could put something like this on your site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Content: Copyright 2023 John Karkas. All rights reserved.&#xA;Design: Copyright 2023 John Karkas. All rights reserved; Based on MIT-licensed theme &amp;lt;link&amp;gt;.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-16T08:14:39.843" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T08:14:39.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-16T12:58:40.670" Score="0" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;As title. Can anyone help me confirming whether my intuition about whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/#licence-decision-diagram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the section &amp;quot;License decision diagram&amp;quot; of on Codeberg.org&lt;/a&gt; could be &lt;strong&gt;wrong&lt;/strong&gt;? Quoted those lines from the link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Do you either want to allow people to create proprietary (closed-source) projects with your code,&#xA; or do you expect your project to remain small (e.g. less than 300 lines)?&#xA;&#xA;   No --&amp;gt; Do you want to allow people to create a closed-source service,&#xA;          for example by using your code on a web server without releasing the source code?&#xA;          No --&amp;gt; We recommend using the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence&#xA;          Yes --&amp;gt; Do you want to allow people to use your code as a library and not&#xA;                  disclose the source-code of their main program?&#xA;                  No --&amp;gt; we recommend using the GPL-3.0-or-later licence&#xA;                  Yes --&amp;gt; we recommend using the LGPL-3.0-or-later licence&#xA;   Yes --&amp;gt; Do you want to be able to sue users of your code&#xA;           for patent infringement implemented in the code?&#xA;           No --&amp;gt; We recommend using the Apache-2.0 licence&#xA;           Yes --&amp;gt; We recommend using the MIT licence&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand why &amp;quot;be able to sue users&amp;quot; will imply I should choose MIT license, according to the &lt;em&gt;diagram&lt;/em&gt;. I thought MIT license is a permissive license that not intended to do that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't understand why &amp;quot;Do you want to allow people to create a closed-source service&amp;quot; will lead to the recommendation &amp;quot;we recommend using the GPL-3.0-or-later license&amp;quot;, according to the diagram. Isn't that GPLv3 a &lt;strong&gt;copyleft&lt;/strong&gt; license which, &lt;em&gt;if I understand correctly&lt;/em&gt;, would mean that any derivative of that original project should be copyleft one? So, I believe this section is completely wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I just started to learn about FOSS-related things recently so I still need some experts on this field to confirm for me before posting so comments / making PRs there to correct/improve the docs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25414" LastEditorUserId="25414" LastEditDate="2023-01-16T13:07:09.570" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T16:40:05.483" Title="I believe that the License decision diagram section of Codeberg.org is wrong" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2023-01-16T14:15:47.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-16T16:49:25.197" Score="1" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any continuously integrated forks of Mozilla Firefox that only use the open source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29064" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T16:52:10.880" Title="Are there any CI purified Firefox forks?" Tags="|software|forking|package|release|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-02-01T15:25:31.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13627" CreationDate="2023-01-16T16:52:10.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are several continuously integrated forks of Mozilla Firefox that only use the open source code. Some examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Waterfox:&lt;/strong&gt; This fork is based on the Firefox codebase but is optimized for 64-bit systems. It also includes some additional privacy features not found in the main Firefox build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pale Moon:&lt;/strong&gt; This fork is based on an older version of Firefox and is optimized for older systems and processors. It also includes some additional features not found in the main Firefox build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Basilisk:&lt;/strong&gt; This fork is based on the Firefox codebase but is focused on providing a more &amp;quot;privacy-respecting&amp;quot; browsing experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LibreWolf:&lt;/strong&gt; This fork is based on the Firefox codebase but is focused on providing a more &amp;quot;privacy-respecting&amp;quot; browsing experience and remove telemetry and other features that may compromise user's privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29066" LastActivityDate="2023-01-16T16:52:10.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10782" CreationDate="2023-01-17T10:44:58.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This frequently asked question seems to describe your need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;. For instance, you can accept a contract to develop changes and agree not to release your changes until the client says ok. This&#xA;is permitted because in this case no GPL-covered code is being&#xA;distributed under an NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also release your changes to the client under the GPL, but agree not to release them to anyone else unless the client says ok. In&#xA;this case, too, no GPL-covered code is being distributed under an NDA,&#xA;or under any additional restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL would give the client the right to redistribute your version. In this scenario, the client will probably choose not to&#xA;exercise that right, but does have the right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;― &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here some more facets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DevelopChangesUnderNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does the GPL allow me to develop a modified version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does the GPL allow me to distribute copies under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowModNDA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Does the GPL allow me to distribute a modified or beta version under a nondisclosure agreement?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25741" LastActivityDate="2023-01-17T10:44:58.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13606" CreationDate="2023-01-18T15:53:05.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bitwarden &lt;a href=&quot;https://contributing.bitwarden.com/contributing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;requires&lt;/a&gt; that its contributors complete a &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla-assistant.io/bitwarden/clients&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contributor agreement&lt;/a&gt; which includes a fairly bulletproof Copyright Transfer Agreement.  Assuming this has been applied across the board, it means that Bitkeeper is the sole rightsholder in its codebase.  As we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2078/458&quot;&gt;noted here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;the copyright holder is never beholden to the rules of the holder's own license grant&lt;/em&gt;, so although Bitwarden distributes this code under AGPL, they themselves are free to use it as they please, including in proprietary products, and in other ways that would not be permissible for a licensee bound by the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your edit, removing Bitwarden's code and replacing it with your own (with a view to freeing the code from the AGPL) is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11574/do-you-retain-copyright-in-a-project-even-if-all-your-code-has-been-rewritten&quot;&gt;fraught with difficulty&lt;/a&gt;, and is pretty much impossible to do single-handedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-18T15:58:37.117" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T15:58:37.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13639" CreationDate="2023-01-18T17:49:07.143" Score="7" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wizards of the Coast (publishers of the Dungeons and Dragons desktop role playing game) have for years operated under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Gaming License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The License: This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice indicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less, it says WOTC is allowing people to use their mechanisms (i.e. gameplay), as long as they don't use their copyrighted works (i.e. art, named characters, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A recent firestorm erupted when WOTC seemed poised to &lt;a href=&quot;https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/rpg-fans-irate-as-dd-tries-to-shut-its-open-game-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;update the terms of the license to collect royalties&lt;/a&gt;. As one of the OGL creators said at the time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 2002 interview, then-WotC VP and OGL architect Ryan Dancey said the OGL was &amp;quot;essentially exposing the standard D&amp;amp;D mechanics, classes, races, spells, and monsters to the Open Gaming community. Anyone could use that material to develop a product using that information essentially without restrictions, including the lack of a royalty or a fee paid to Wizards of the Coast.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting aside the controversy over the changes, is the OGL actually a type of Open Source license? Does it qualify as copyleft in any sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7343" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:31:58.710" Title="Is the Open Gaming License a type of open source license?" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13635" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13637" CreationDate="2023-01-18T21:32:46.220" Score="12" ViewCount="4432" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which License is best suited for my open source project. I am developing a web app (a template like) that has potential use in real life applications but also learning outcomes. I would like people to contribute and use if they want to, so I am between using MIT or GNU GPLv3. I know GNU is a lot more restrictive and could potentially scare people away from contributing but also I would like people to contribute and keep it open source. I would not mind people using my code, but I would want something in return, even a bug reporting would be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, and your experience or knowledge, which license would be more suitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit #1&lt;/strong&gt;: I want to choose a licensee that's going to make users more likely to contribute, not one that forces them to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;but I would want something in return&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification: I don't mean that I would require to do that, but would be desirable and not essential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29094" LastEditorUserId="29094" LastEditDate="2023-01-19T15:04:58.377" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T07:09:54.287" Title="Which license suits best when you want users to contribute to your code and not just take it as free beer" Tags="|licensing|mit|gnu|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13635" CreationDate="2023-01-18T23:03:43.983" Score="21" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would want something in return, even a bug report[ing] would be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This requirement is not compatible with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;, the definition of open source as used by this site; all open source software must allow truly free redistribution of the software with no expectation of &amp;quot;something in return&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-18T23:03:43.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13635" CreationDate="2023-01-19T05:03:35.493" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If your software is a web app of any kind, and if you absolutely require all changes to be made available, including to you, then you need to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a copyleft license affecting distribution and remote network interaction, meaning the source code of modified versions must be made available to those who receive a copy of the software, and to those who interact with it remotely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Section 13 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;interacting with it remotely through a computer network&lt;/strong&gt; (if your&#xA;version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the&#xA;Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some&#xA;standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if your web app is modified and used on an intranet not accessible by you, then you do not have the right to get a copy of the modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your web app is modified and used on the public Internet, accessible by you, then you have the right to get a copy of the modified source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very strong copyleft licensing makes perfect sense from the open source software developer's perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from the perspective of companies, permissive licenses tend to be preferred over copyleft licenses, as it would not restrict them in any way or potentially cause them legal trouble. So, the use of permissive licenses like MIT would encourage wider use of your software, compared to GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-01-19T05:09:44.673" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T05:09:44.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13633" CreationDate="2023-01-19T13:31:58.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;, this site uses two resources to guide its definition of whether something is &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; or not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four essential freedoms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't a perfect match for the OGL because they are both somewhat biased towards free &lt;em&gt;software&lt;/em&gt; rather than free content in general, but they can still probably act as a good starting point as to whether we think the OGL is &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;FSF's Four Freedoms&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating this to something like &amp;quot;the freedom to use the content as you wish, for any purpose&amp;quot;, this freedom would seem to me to be satisfied by the OGL Clause 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with no conditions attached to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This freedom is primarily based around the distinction between source and binaries for software; that's a distinction which isn't really relevant for tabletop gaming content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OGL's definition of &amp;quot;Use&amp;quot; is (from Clause 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Use&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Used&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Using&amp;quot; means to use, Distribute, copy [...] Open Game Content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That freedom would seem to be satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again from the OGL's definition of &amp;quot;Use&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Use&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Used&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Using&amp;quot; means to [...] edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game Content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That pretty explicitly allows creation of modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Open Source Definition&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being slightly more terse here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Free Redistribution: there are no restrictions in the OGL about OGL content being distributed with non-OGL content; in fact, this is very common for OGL content.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source Code: as per FSF Freedom 1, not really relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derived Works: as per FSF Freedom 4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Integrity of The Author's Source Code: not really relevant as this is again about a source/binary distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: nothing of this sort mentioned in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: nothing of this sort mentioned in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribution of License: no mention of additional licenses in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: no mention of specific products in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Not Restrict Other Software: even when &amp;quot;translated&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;License Must Not Restrict Other Content&amp;quot;, there are no restrictions of this kind in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License Must Be Technology-Neutral: no mention of anything of this kind in the OGL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;So, is the OGL &amp;quot;Open Source&amp;quot;?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above analysis, the &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; answer would be &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;. However, one major issue lurks: as noted on the FSF's page, it is absolutely crucial that any open source license is irrevocable, as a license is in many ways not worth anything if all your rights can be removed tomorrow. Is the OGL irrevocable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OGL grants &amp;quot;a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license&amp;quot; (Clause 4 again). I'm aware there has been an enormous amount of mostly amateur discussion specifically around the OGL as to whether a perpetual license is in fact irrevocable; that would seem to be a question which we'd only get a real answer on when a court rules in a specific jurisdiction. However, it remains a fact that the leaked draft of the OGL 1.1 did in fact try to revoke the OGL 1.0a, and whatever Wizards of the Coast may be, one thing they certainly do have is some good lawyers - if those lawyers believe it can be revoked, I'd say there's enough uncertainty about it that it could well be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore my conclusion would be that the OGL is not an open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T13:31:58.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-19T14:45:54.947" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a new project that will be open source, but want a fork to override some implementations just for me. (a package inside a Go project)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am the copyright holder of the project (upstream)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have chosen 3-Clause BSD, but I can change it to w/e, it's a new project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am looking at forking the project into a private repo (downstream) and making the changes I need&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I dual license the upstream work with BSD + Closed Source so the downstream gets both those licenses?  Or can I just change the license in the derived work from BSD to Closed Source, applying to only the changed features?  Would I have to explicitly state the license in every file at that point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't my forte and I appreciate any help in getting this right, thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29107" LastActivityDate="2023-01-19T14:45:54.947" Title="Can I close source a derivative work of an OSS project I am the copyright holder?" Tags="|bsd|closed-source|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-01-19T15:19:15.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13635" CreationDate="2023-01-19T20:30:48.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could consider using the Reciprocal Public License 1.5 (RPL-1.5) &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Please do not use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding deployment, under the RPL your changes, bug fixes, extensions, etc.&#xA;must be made available to the open source community at large when you Deploy in&#xA;any form -- either internally or to an outside party. Once you start running&#xA;the software you have to start sharing the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6.4. c. Source Code Availability. You must notify the software community of the&#xA;availability of Source Code to Your Extensions within one (1) month of the date&#xA;You initially Deploy and include in such notification a description of the&#xA;Extensions, and instructions on how to acquire the Source Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license forces users running the software to notify you/the community about changes to the code and where to find them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6.2 Description of Modifications. You must cause any Modifications that You&#xA;create or to which You contribute to be documented in the Source Code, clearly&#xA;describing the additions, changes or deletions You made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer. This is a lot stricter than the GPL, because there you are obliged to offer the source code on distribution only to the receiver of the derived work. Here users (that don't use it for personal use only) have to offer it via an electronic distribution mechanism that &amp;quot;is publicly accessible&amp;quot; and notify you about how to access it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that this is not very practical for most of your users as the software might be quite hard to combine with other code under different licenses. The only time I saw this licenses used it was accompanied with the offer to buy a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this is probably not what you want, since you state that you don't want to require/force people using your code to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29109" LastEditorUserId="29109" LastEditDate="2023-01-27T07:09:54.287" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T07:09:54.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13635" CreationDate="2023-01-20T06:47:42.623" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way you make people contribute to your project is not to have a license telling them to, but to make it &lt;em&gt;easy&lt;/em&gt;.  Seen from a developer's point of view it is much, much better to have any changes contributed back to the project, than to maintain a fork, so the incentive is there from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your project should be easily accessible, in a place where it is easy to report issues.  Here it is your job to take care of these issues in reasonable time, because having a large backlog will be a red flag to those experienced developers you want to attract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want actual contributions, you need to make more things easy.  The following should be considered an absolute minimum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources easily available, easily accessible (the README should be correct and tell me how to learn what I need to change things) and easily buildable so I can get things up and running myself in a standard development environment, including a debugger so you can set breakpoints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it should be easy to submit suggestions. These days many developers use Git, and know how to provide something you can merge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, something like GitHub (or Gitlab or Bitbucket etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also helps if the code is well-written and easily understood. Don’t be too smart - write clean, simple code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the license should reflect how you want your sources to be used.  LGPL is probably the simplest way to have people strongly considering submitting any changes back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1177" LastEditorUserId="1177" LastEditDate="2023-01-21T00:50:37.027" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T00:50:37.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13645" CreationDate="2023-01-21T11:38:47.247" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of asking this question in the NuGet project, but they redirected me here to ask generic questions. So I will ask here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to develop an application that will use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoshClose/CsvHelper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CsvHelper library&lt;/a&gt;, and on their website they told that it is free for commercial uses. But later I found that I can choose between two licenses, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MS-PL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Public License&lt;/a&gt;, that I can choose which one is more suitable for my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to not give the source code to the client, but if none of the licenses allow that, it is not a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I prefer to avoid that my customer could give the application to others, but I don't know if it is possible with this kind of licenses. Really it is not mandatory, I could allow it, but at first I would prefer to not allow that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Microsoft allows me to keep my source code as closed source, if I am not wrong, but I don't know if it allows all of my preferences, to not give the source code and to not allow distribution to 3rd parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29127" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-25T07:25:28.943" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T07:25:28.943" Title="csvhelper: questions about license" Tags="|apache-2.0|dual-license|ms-pl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13644" CreationDate="2023-01-21T16:48:34.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoshClose/CsvHelper/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;license.txt of this library&lt;/a&gt; clearly states that the library is dual licensed, you can therefore choose under which terms you want to use it, either Apache or MS-PL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both licenses allow that you can keep your own code as closed source, if you want, and you can sell your application for money under a license of your choice, provided, however, that you comply with the requirements that come with the license of your choice (Section 3 of the MS-PL, or Section 4 of the Apache license). That should not be difficult for you, you can achieve your objective with any of the 2 license options for the CsvHelper library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-01-21T16:48:34.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13648" CreationDate="2023-01-23T16:14:47.267" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my thesis dissertation, I need to use a picture to illustrate how Spark clusters are built. Ideally, I would like to reuse this picture for illustrating Spark components: &lt;a href=&quot;https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/img/cluster-overview.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/img/cluster-overview.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it allowed? Who am I supposed to ask permission otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FYI my thesis is purely academic and does not target any company or business usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29149" LastActivityDate="2023-01-23T16:49:53.997" Title="Use of Spark pictures" Tags="|artistic-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13647" CreationDate="2023-01-23T16:49:53.997" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spark.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hosting website&lt;/a&gt; makes it clear in the footer that the content is &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Copyright © 2018 The Apache Software Foundation, Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so you may use that diagram under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;those terms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-01-23T16:49:53.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-24T07:24:04.503" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm tossing around the idea of writing and publishing a book on the Amazon Kindle platform about Java or Python.  The name of the book would be something like &amp;quot;Basic and Simple Programming with Java&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Learn to code with Python&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would probably start with a chapter on how to set up an IDE, and have the book cover the basics such as variables, strings, conditionals, etc. using code examples. A simple example would be like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;String name = &amp;quot;Sally&amp;quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Python states that &amp;quot;Python is developed under an OSI-approved open source license, making it freely usable and distributable, even for commercial use&amp;quot;, so I assume the answer is yes for Python.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Java seems more legally complicated and I can't find anywhere if writing and publishing a book using and citing Java code is legally allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to commercially publish and use samples of different coding languages in a book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29153" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-01-24T07:48:32.240" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T07:45:36.980" Title="Is it legal to publish a book on about coding Python or Java on Amazon Kindle publishing?" Tags="|license-recommendation|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-24T11:30:03.560" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have written very small application in Visual Studio which uses 2 x FFmpeg commands and 1 x FFprobe command. We plan to include the two exe files as a resource when the application is packaged in an installer MSI file.&#xA;FFMPEG we use the “filter” command&#xA;FFMPEG to convert MP4 videos to AVI&#xA;FFProbe we use to get the video resolution&#xA;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html&lt;/a&gt; information and I would like to check if the 3 commands we are using above are covered under the  GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or later.&#xA;Thank you for your help :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29155" LastActivityDate="2023-01-24T11:30:03.560" Title="Use of ffmpeg and ffprobe exe files in application" Tags="|lgpl|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-01-25T07:53:48.870" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13652" CreationDate="2023-01-24T11:58:57.010" Score="10" ViewCount="2375" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of open integrated development environments which offer developer to make and compile software, such as the replit.com platform. Will the author of the code have full rights on the software or part of it will belong to the IDE creators because of using their server?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29156" LastEditorUserId="1029" LastEditDate="2023-01-25T06:47:24.580" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T06:47:24.580" Title="Author rights on software when using an online IDE" Tags="|software|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2023-01-24T12:45:52.490" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;we have said&lt;/a&gt;, and as you know, if the IDE is a piece of software you download and run locally, then generally speaking the IDE's licence has no effect on the licence under which your code can be released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, the IDE is purely web-based, and offered as SaaS (software as a service), then it will depend on the provider's ToS (terms of service).  There have certainly been some &lt;a href=&quot;https://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2014/05/13/worst-terms-of-service/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty awful land grabs&lt;/a&gt; in ToS history, and if the IDE provider you choose has something in their ToS that gives all rights in created code to them, well, you just gave your code away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SaaS has a number of dangers, and this is one of them.  If you don't want that, and you don't want to be reading endless ToS documents, don't use a SaaS IDE.  You can read the same argument made more cogently and at more length &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/who-does-that-server-really-serve.ko-en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-24T13:20:36.480" LastActivityDate="2023-01-24T13:20:36.480" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2023-01-24T20:48:47.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As of &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/commits/e2a2011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2022-02-27&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PDFs produced with latex and classicthesis shall not be considered derivative works of classicthesis in the sense of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More on this issue here &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/issues/123/gpl-suitable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/issues/123/gpl-suitable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's unclear if a lawyer would accept this, because doesn't GPL have clauses saying you can't modify GPLv2 and still call it GPLv2. Also the author hasn't even modified &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; to reflect that it's no longer GPLv2; or that GPLv2 is not covering certain files and certain targets (e.g., PDF, HTML).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14974" LastActivityDate="2023-01-24T20:48:47.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13649" CreationDate="2023-01-25T07:45:36.980" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Writing a book about Java or Python is not a problem w.r.t. the licenses of the programming languages. The book will be your own copyright (if you write it yourself), and it will not depend on the license terms which (for example) Oracle provides for Java.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever you have sample code, which you include in your book, you need to look at 3 cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the code is trivial and simple (a no-brainer) like the line mentioned in your question, then nobody can claim copyright, no matter if you write it yourself or if this is copied from elsewhere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;if the code is complex and you have written it yourself, then you can determine the license conditions. For example you could include it with the rest of the text of your book and state &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all rights reserved&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, or you could keep it separate and state that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;all code in this book, except when stated otherwise, is (C) &amp;lt; my name&amp;gt; and licensed under MIT license&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever you use non-trivial code copied from 3rd parties you have to comply with the license terms of that code as provided by the original author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that you find other on-line publications of renowned publishers  and check how it is done there and that you follow their example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T07:45:36.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-25T12:05:00.557" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;For instance, the BSD-3 Clause license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.) Imagining that I have 10 different libraries with this license in use, which all have different Copyright headers (due to different copyright holders), how do I treat this case? Do I reproduce the full license 10 times, or is it sufficient to have it once generically and mention the copyrights separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.) If I supply an sbom where there is a link to the license text (let's say in a GitHub repo, a tagged version corresponding to the version of the library which I use, or from a Maven artifact or so...), would this already comply to the BSD-3 and MIT clauses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28837" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T16:04:35.207" Title="BSD-3/MIT etc. - How &quot;often&quot; do I need to include the license text?" Tags="|mit|copyright|license|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13655" CreationDate="2023-01-25T13:21:20.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is sufficent to have one copy of the license language of each license in the licenses.txt , there is no value in reproducing the same language 10 or more times. The BSD licenses are still short, but imagine you would need to reproduce the Apache 2 or GPLv3 language 100 times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to, however, mention the correct license with each library's information, but &amp;quot;BSD-3&amp;quot; or an &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifier&lt;/a&gt; would be sufficient, if you then later have &amp;quot;BSD-3&amp;quot; as the headline of the actual license language in the appendix of the file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses demand that the 'notice.txt' file needs to be included, and some developers copy the license language into the notice.txt file (happens often in Apache 2 licensed projects). But in this case you can remove the license language from the notice.txt and deliver the license language in the licenses.txt. It just has to be included at least once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also needs to be noted that a link (URL or the like) to the license language is not sufficient for many licenses. The Apache 2 license for example states &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The SBOM has a different purpose and I recommend to keep the license language away from the SBOM in a separate file. SBOM files are (best case) for documentation, archiving, information flow along the supply chain (e.g. if you are a subcontractor delivering parts of the software) and for compliance information. The full text of all the licenses would just mess up this file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-25T16:04:35.207" LastActivityDate="2023-01-25T16:04:35.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13665" CreationDate="2023-01-26T18:58:27.307" Score="5" ViewCount="883" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading a whole lot and can't seem to find this specific question. I am currently making a software which will ideally be used to provide information to people that pay for consultations. This software uses a slightly modified project that I found and am using, which is licensed under GPL2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software will not be distributed to any customers, but rather they would pay to essentially provide me with data and have me walk them through all of the information that comes from that data. They would know from the start that they are not buying &lt;em&gt;the software&lt;/em&gt;, per se, but rather that it is just a tool to be used during the consultation, which is what they are paying for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Would this fall under distribution of the software or not? Since the software is the cornerstone of these consultations, would there be an argument to be made that they are essentially purchasing the software, and would I then have to provide them with the normal benefits purchasing something under the license provides?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29189" LastEditorUserId="29189" LastEditDate="2023-01-26T19:29:07.703" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T18:20:52.543" Title="Does the GPL require sharing source code if I charge for a consultation with the software?" Tags="|gpl|software|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-27T11:41:25.297" Score="4" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I own a one-person business and want to use it's name written in font licensed CC BY-ND as logo on papers send to my clients. Is it possible? Would I need to include a license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29192" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-27T11:44:36.163" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T07:57:57.267" Title="Can I use CC BY-ND font in company logo?" Tags="|license|license-notice|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13658" CreationDate="2023-01-27T13:15:46.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-ND&lt;/a&gt; is not commonly used for fonts, as there are specific open licenses for fonts, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&amp;amp;id=OFL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL Open Font License (OFL)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you should not be afraid of using this font for creating a logo or typesetting your name, because a document, even if completely written using a specific font, can never be a derivative work of that font. A derivative work would be if you take the font and use it to create another font, or if you take the font and convert it into another graphics format or font format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/a/59739&quot;&gt;similar question in Law SE&lt;/a&gt; which you might be interested to read. It supports my rationale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you are not distributing the work (the font) itself, nor distributing a derivative work (as explained above), you also do not have to include any attribution language (the name of the person who created the font) nor a link to the license language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;If you are planning to use the font not just in your logo (i.e. a graphics file type), but also in the text of your documents, then there are cases where this will actually result in distribution of the font itself. In such a case you will have to comply with the requirements as listed in section 4 of the license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An obvious example for this would be your website, where special fonts need to be provided on the server and will be downloaded by the browser. Less obvious is the document embedding that happens with popular file formats. See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-embed-a-truetype-font-in-a-document-883f5212-0c1a-28df-8bb1-21273fa67e7e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Microsoft Word&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/lo/text/shared/01/prop_font_embed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Libre Office&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/resources/embed-fonts-in-pdf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adobe PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-01-28T13:01:52.067" LastActivityDate="2023-01-28T13:01:52.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10731" CreationDate="2023-01-27T21:40:05.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is now a read-only mirror on GitHub:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which contains some helpful links to the Mercurial source, to a &amp;quot;How to Contribute&amp;quot; page, and to a page titled &amp;quot;Getting Set Up To Work On The Firefox Codebase&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3948" LastActivityDate="2023-01-27T21:40:05.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-01-29T15:58:09.083" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to release my software under an open-source license. I got a patent on the part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an open-source license that will allow people to use my software but will not grant a patent license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12659" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-01-29T17:13:42.930" LastActivityDate="2023-01-29T19:47:04.317" Title="Open source software that limits competition with a patent" Tags="|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ClosedDate="2023-01-29T21:58:48.837" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13657" CreationDate="2023-01-29T16:25:17.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, not for the use case you describe&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to keep in mind here: the &lt;em&gt;software application&lt;/em&gt; and its &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you modify the source code of a GPL software for your use, you are under no obligation to distribute your modifications &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; the software is part of the output (the product) of your consultation. Using a GPL licensed software to automate or process any kind of data also does not oblige you in any manner to make the processed data freely available to anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's consider some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 1&lt;/strong&gt;: Your client gives you some data to analyse. You use a GPL licensed software to analyse the data and offer the output of the data from the software as part of your analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL doesn't even come to the picture here because you are not modifying the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt; of the software application in any manner nor or you distributing it. You are simply using a software to do some work. If your clients wants to know how you do it, GPL doesn't force you to disclose to others that you are using a GPL software to analyse the data. Even if they ask you to share the GPL software with them, you have no obligation to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 2&lt;/strong&gt;: Your client gives you some data and they want you to offer them different analysis of this data. You customize an existing GPL licensed software that can process such data and create the different analysis the client wants. When the client gives you the data, you run it through the customised software, and only give them the output data feed from the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL license allows you to modify the software code. But since you are not &lt;em&gt;distributing&lt;/em&gt; the software to others, and only using it personally (even if for a commercial purpose), you are under no obligations to make the source code modifications available to anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example 3&lt;/strong&gt;: Your client wants to do some data analysis and they want you to create some algorithms / processes for them to generate different outcomes by varying the data. You customize an existing GPL licensed software that can process such data. You hand over this software to the client so that they can feed it different data and generate the various outcomes from it they desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this case, the GPL license obliges you to make all the modifications you made to the software code public to anyone who demands it (including your clients if they ask for it) since you have &lt;em&gt;modified&lt;/em&gt; and are &lt;em&gt;distributing&lt;/em&gt; this modified software to others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: Even if you distribute a GPL software, along with the source code of the modifications you made as required by the GPL, you are under no obligation to do it for free. You can still charge for it. But ofcourse, once the code is out there as open source, its commercial viability decreases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL doesn't prohibit you from making commercial use of any GPL licensed software. Nor does it oblige you to reveal to anyone that you are using a GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL doesn't force you to reveal any changes you make to a GPL licensed software &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you plan to &lt;em&gt;share&lt;/em&gt; these modifications / customisation with anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL doesn't prohibit you from charging for distribution or for your software skills in creating any code used in the GPL licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GPL does force you to make all source codes available to anyone who wants, if you distribute a GPL licensed software that you have created or modified in any manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: Always consult a local lawyer as country specific / locale specific laws vary, and some or all of what is said here may not apply in some countries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29203" LastEditorUserId="29203" LastEditDate="2023-01-31T18:20:52.543" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T18:20:52.543" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13661" CreationDate="2023-01-29T19:47:04.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of open source licenses on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for which it is indicated whether the license includes language about patents or not. In order to select the best one for you, you should consult a lawyer. IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your patent is valid only in the jurisdictions in which the local patent office has allowed the patent application, and only as long as you continue to pay the fees, maximum 20 years (usually). In all other jurisdictions your patent offers no protection for your invention, actually the publication of the patent will put your invention into public domain in all countries where you have no patent. (This is a bit oversimplified, please ask your lawyer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ecosystem for software patents is getting tougher and tougher, and in many jurisdictions the patent claims of software patents can not be enforced, a patent will not be granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also depends how closely your patent is covering the functionality of your software. Would it be a big change that is needed to escape your patent? Nobody can tell you that until you have finished litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent will not protect your software in a way that others cannot take it and learn from it or work on it. The patent will only protect you from the actual use of an implementation in the jurisdiction, in which the patent was granted. If you plan to put your code on GitHub people will be able to fork it, change it, use it, and the use will only stop if you are able and willing to stop them by expensive litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want other developers to contribute to your code then it seems counterproductive if you are hiding in the bushes with your patent. This will likely not motivate others to contribute their valuable time to your project. But please go ahead and find out yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-01-29T19:47:04.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13658" CreationDate="2023-01-30T07:57:57.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is specific to US law. If you are not in the US, you should consult your own country's law to determine the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright status of typefaces&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under US law, typefaces are not subject to copyright protection (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-202/section-202.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;37 CFR 202.1(e)&lt;/a&gt;), but the font files may be subject to copyright (see &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://casetext.com/case/eltra-corp-v-ringer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eltra Corp. v. Ringer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20160304054053/http://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-393.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this document&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20121107133050/http://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-443.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) to the extent that they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vector&lt;/a&gt; font files (OpenType, TrueType, etc.) rather than raster (bitmap) font files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to emphasize that this protection is extremely narrow. It does not cover the appearance or design of the font at all. It &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; covers the specific choice of control points or other vector instructions which are used to create the desired shape. &lt;strong&gt;If these control points etc. are not copied into your work in some way, then it is very unlikely that you have infringed the copyright of the font.&lt;/strong&gt; Here are some ways that might happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You embed an OpenType or TrueType version of the font into a document, using the relevant &amp;quot;embed fonts&amp;quot; option in your word processor's settings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You use &lt;a href=&quot;https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Styling_text/Web_fonts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Web Fonts&lt;/a&gt; to distribute copies of the OpenType etc. version of the font.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You create a vector image (e.g. an SVG or EPS file) which contains text in that font, and use &amp;quot;text to path&amp;quot; on that text - which has the effect of directly embedding the font's control points into your image file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You make your own version of the font by directly modifying the existing font. Note that converting it to bitmap and then manually tracing it will (probably!) eliminate the copyright infringement, but (if applicable) you might still violate the typeface's design patent (see below).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If don't do any of the above, then you probably haven't violated the copyright on the font, regardless of its license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of important caveats: Fonts and typefaces may be subject to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;design patent&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; protect the general appearance or design of the typeface. However, design patents have various limitations compared to copyright that makes them less appealing to designers (most importantly, they have much shorter terms and you have to explicitly apply for them). As a result, your font may or may not actually be patented, and if it is, that may or may not matter (in practice, I do not think this is likely to matter unless you are creating a similar font, but I'm not an expert). Additionally, if a font is used in a trademarked logo, the trademark on the logo may also restrict the use of that font for other logos - you can't use the Microsoft font to make a lookalike of the Microsoft logo, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T07:57:57.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13657" CreationDate="2023-01-30T10:29:06.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To explicitly state what I think you already know: the GPL requirements kick in only on distribution of the software; the GPL v2 itself explicitly states &amp;quot;The act of running the Program is not restricted&amp;quot; (Section 0). In your case, you are not distributing the software to your customers so you are not required to meet any GPL requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the software is the cornerstone of these consultations, would there be an argument to be made that they are essentially purchasing the software, and would I then have to provide them with the normal benefits purchasing something under the license provides?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; that would be a dramatic extension of copyright law in any jurisdiction I am aware of. The (viable) business model here is one in which you are using your knowledge to best interpret the software output rather than access to the software itself - your skills are what is being sold, not the software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Legal advice on the Internet is worth less than you paid for it, talk to an actual lawyer in your jurisdiction, blah, blah, blah)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T10:29:06.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13667" CreationDate="2023-01-30T12:04:14.080" Score="18" ViewCount="4399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us assume that I am forking an open-source Python library, modifying it, and using it in another closed-source commercial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license is Apache License 2.0 and I am including a copy of the license together with the source code. In the README file of my project, I acknowledge the original open-source project, too. I changed (slightly) the name of that library too. So far so good (I hope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the &lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; file of the open-source library, are listed the names and email addresses of the original authors and maintainers. What should I do with those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chose to list the maintainers as authors, and add me as the only maintainer. My reasoning is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I wanted the current maintainers to be acknowledged&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't want the users of my modified fork to bother the original maintainers by email. By users, I mainly mean my present and future colleagues.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is what I did good etiquette or should I leave everything as I found it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29217" LastEditorUserId="29217" LastEditDate="2023-01-30T12:53:05.723" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T13:24:39.363" Title="When forking an open-source project, what should I do with the maintainers' emails included in the source code?" Tags="|apache-2.0|forking|etiquette|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13666" CreationDate="2023-01-30T13:52:17.387" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you are going the correct approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you change the name of the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you acknowledge the previous authors and keep their copyright notices&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you add your own copyright info and contact options&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to avoid even accidential mis-information, you probably want to remove the contact info (e-mail and url) of the original authors outside places of the copyright notices. You must leave them intact where these info are part of the copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the setup.py you probably want to only have your contact info so that potential users contact you about issues with your fork. As author you might go for something like &lt;code&gt;author=LastStarDust and others&lt;/code&gt; to make it clear that you are not the sole copyright owner. Either way only your e-mail and url in the respective fields in setup.py.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can keep and link to the original authors website, e-mail and so on in the acknowledgment section of your readme. There you can also say that it is a fork of that project - I'd leave out their e-mail, though, and only use their website link. It would be annoying to them if they get questions about code which they didn't write and which they don't maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-01-30T13:52:17.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13669" CreationDate="2023-01-31T07:40:07.387" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;OS: Windows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to build an app for commercial usage which needs to call a library written in C. The only way (as far as I know) is writing a Node.js addon which needs Visual Studio Tools to build it. But the build tool is not free. Does it mean that I cannot use it for commercial usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if using another package like &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/node-ffi/node-ffi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/node-ffi/node-ffi&lt;/a&gt;? It's MIT licensed but still built via Visual Studio Tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29224" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-01-31T10:01:16.487" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T10:01:16.487" Title="Is it free to use Node.js with addon?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13668" CreationDate="2023-01-31T08:53:59.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as you aren't bundling VS Tools in your application, the fact that they aren't free is inconsequential. The built addon isn't a derived work of the toolchain, and you can distribute it under whatever license you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T08:53:59.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13666" CreationDate="2023-01-31T13:12:00.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Ask them&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of guessing, just ask the people on the list what they want. Send them an email stating you forked the project, and ask them how they want to be listed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name + email address&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name only&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give them the option to update their email address (and possibly their name) if they wish to do so. For emails which bounce, or people don't reply go for &amp;quot;name only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They should no longer be listed as current maintainers though. &amp;quot;Original authors&amp;quot; is a better listing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26456" LastActivityDate="2023-01-31T13:12:00.093" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9805" CreationDate="2023-01-31T21:51:26.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non commercial licenses are not open source. Additionally non commercial licenses are not free software, and do not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source has a single definition - the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;, created by the group that created the term open source - &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensource.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;There is no other other group that purports to define the term open source.&lt;/strong&gt; However as there's been some confusion about related movements and their organisations particularly in one of the other answers, I will discuss these other movements and organisation in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non commercial licenses are not open source as they conflict with part 6 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&#xA;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non commercial licenses are not free software, as they do not meet the  'Use' freedom of the free software definition&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Project&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not define open source&lt;/a&gt;, but rather a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;separate concept&lt;/a&gt; known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Non commercial licenses do not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Open Source Defintion was created from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFreeSoftwareGuidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian Free Software Guidelines&lt;/a&gt;. The Debian Free Software Guidelines &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;do not attempt to define open source, but rather to define what software can be included in the Debian Linux distribution&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;CC BY-NC 3.0 is not an open source license, software licensed by CC BY-NC 3.0 is not free software, software licensed by CC BY-NC 3.0 does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am mentioning this license  explicitly as one of the other answers incorrectly states that CC BY-NC 3.0 can be used for open source software. CC BY-NC 3.0 is a creative commons license, but CC BY-NC 3.0 is not an open source license, because CC BY-NC 3.0 does not meet the open source definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29174" LastEditorUserId="29174" LastEditDate="2023-06-14T19:29:39.147" LastActivityDate="2023-06-14T19:29:39.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-01T04:48:05.187" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've discovered that an open source project I was counting on, was nearly dead by seeing its issues: 80 blockers, 100 criticals, 800+ majors, and a decreasing number of contributions over years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another project, I had trouble using it. It has 2,600 issues (it doesn't prioritize them) opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a declaration, a guarantee, some kind of good practice label exists, that affirms that an open source team is especially committed to correct the issues its software encounters (assuming they have endorsed them to be of gravity &lt;em&gt;Major&lt;/em&gt; or more), prior to evolution of features? Or, at least, to correct them with an especially high frequency? With thresholds or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will avoid making mandatory for the user to provide a test case (or even an Unit Test, I saw that) before studying a bug, which is (in my mind) the major cause of never starting correcting issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21924" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-01T09:10:54.857" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T10:11:00.670" Title="Does some kind of &quot;Corrections over Evolutions/New Features&quot; quality label exist, giving guarantees about an open source team's behavior?" Tags="|software-development|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13672" CreationDate="2023-02-01T09:09:09.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, no such &amp;quot;quality mark&amp;quot; exists; nor, I think, is it likely to or desirable that it should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had an &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11240/458&quot;&gt;analogous question&lt;/a&gt; (though not, to my mind, a duplicate) here earlier, in answer to which I wrote that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the specific community bargain with free software is that you get the freedoms to run the code, to modify the code, and to distribute both verbatim and modified versions. You are not entitled to anything other than that: not bug-fixes, not new features, not documentation, not support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I stand by that position.  By making their software free, the developers have empowered &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to fix the bugs that annoy you; compared to proprietary software, that's a great freedom.  If you don't know how to fix them, you may pay someone else to do it; if that's too pricey, you may form a consortium of like-minded users who between them raise the funds for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways you can address bugs in free software that aren't available to users of proprietary software, but one of them is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to demand loudly that someone else fixes them for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-01T10:11:00.670" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T10:11:00.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-01T10:09:30.763" Score="6" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have changed MPL-2.0-based code for my needs under the proprietary project and already published these changes as PR in github.&#xA;But this PR is not in upstream yet (under review, not sure will be merged at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I still use this code or should I wait when PR will be merged and only after that i could use the code as a branch from upstream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29235" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-01T10:12:16.300" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T10:47:26.563" Title="Altering of MPL2.0-based code" Tags="|proprietary-code|mpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13674" CreationDate="2023-02-01T10:41:29.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have a proprietary software that is the &amp;quot;Larger Work&amp;quot; according to the license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In this proprietary software, you use the MPL2-licensed software (&amp;quot;Covered Software&amp;quot;) as part of the proprietary software, either as a library or statically-linked standalone source code files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that MPL2 is a file-level weak copyleft license. So the MPL2-licensed source code must be in separate files from the proprietary-licensed source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your proprietary software either in binary or source form to other parties (&amp;quot;recipients&amp;quot;), you must make the MPL2-licensed source code (with or without modifications) available to those other parties  (&amp;quot;recipients&amp;quot;), in order to fulfill the weak copyleft requirements of MPL2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to release your modifications to the original open source project or make them  publicly available, for e.g. on Github. Although so, making your modifications available on a publicly accessible forked git repository, say on Github, is one way to make your modifications available to third parties receiving your proprietary software (&amp;quot;recipients&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL2 license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1. Distribution of Source Form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All distribution of Covered Software in Source Code Form, including&#xA;any Modifications that You create or to which You contribute, must be&#xA;under the terms of this License. You must inform recipients that the&#xA;Source Code Form of the Covered Software is governed by the terms of&#xA;this License, and how they can obtain a copy of this License. You may&#xA;not attempt to alter or restrict the recipients’ rights in the Source&#xA;Code Form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2. Distribution of Executable Form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code&#xA;Form, as described in Section 3.1, and &lt;strong&gt;You must inform recipients of&#xA;the Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code&#xA;Form&lt;/strong&gt; by reasonable means in a timely manner, at a charge no more than&#xA;the cost of distribution to the recipient; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this&#xA;License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the&#xA;license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the&#xA;recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.3. Distribution of a Larger Work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may create and distribute a Larger Work under terms of Your&#xA;choice, provided that You also comply with the requirements of this&#xA;License for the Covered Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-02-01T10:46:50.727" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T10:46:50.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13674" CreationDate="2023-02-01T10:47:26.563" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MPL does not require that your changes are accepted by the upstream project. The requirement is that the source code is available and that it is licensed under the MPL 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can just refer your users to the actual github fork of the MPL project (the original or your fork) that you pulled the code from for your build and that would satisfy the requirements of the MPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T10:47:26.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13666" CreationDate="2023-02-01T13:24:39.363" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it would be good style to add a link om your forked code that points to the original project, include the original authors since they are still author of the forked project, and include the maintainers with a very strong comment that they are NOT maintainers of the forked project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people making changes to your fork would also want to change the original project or even prefer to change &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; the original project and leave it to you to take these changes or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T13:24:39.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13679" CreationDate="2023-02-01T18:12:36.533" Score="5" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the CC-BY 4.0 public license, section 3(a)(1)(B) says if you Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form) You must &amp;quot;indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;retain an indication of any previous modifications&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29241" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T19:17:52.153" Title="What does &quot;retain an indication of any previous modifications&quot; mean?" Tags="|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13678" CreationDate="2023-02-01T19:17:52.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say Acme Company release something under CC-BY. They put in a copyright line which looks something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2022 Acme Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then modify that thing, and in accordance with the license indicate I modified it, maybe something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2022 Acme Company&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Modifications by Philip Kendall, 2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you then want to modify my version further you must not delete the notification of my modification; i.e. your version must contain something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2022 Acme Company&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Modifications by Philip Kendall, 2023&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Modifications by Brian Lacy, 2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; just&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) 2022 Acme Company&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Modifications by Brian Lacy, 2023&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-02-01T19:17:52.153" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13681" CreationDate="2023-02-03T04:18:19.950" Score="9" ViewCount="2380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been programming for a few years and now I realized something important when using GitHub. I use GitHub to download and see how other people create apps and learn from their tutorials and examples. There are times when I copy and paste small sections of code to see how they work and if they are useful to any of my apps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But until now I realized that on GitHub each repository has a SOURCE CODE LICENSE AGREEMENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn how to create a WhatsApp-style app and I found it on GitHub &amp;quot; stream-chat-swift&amp;quot;, from what I'm seeing, analyzing, and learning from the repository code. But until now I saw that in its license it says that what I'm doing is illegal!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GetStream/stream-chat-swift/blob/develop/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/GetStream/stream-chat-swift/blob/develop/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make it clear that the app that is in the repository has never been completely copied and made an app for me, I only downloaded it to see its architecture and if I'm honest, I have copied small sections of code that I think can help me, But nothing more. It is illegal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that I only use the project on my desktop, I do not share it in the cloud or upload it to GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29257" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-02-03T18:58:43.707" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T18:58:43.707" Title="Can I reuse code from a GitHub repository with a &quot;source code license agreement&quot;?" Tags="|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13680" CreationDate="2023-02-03T06:24:33.120" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you copy someone else code into your own work, you make your work a &lt;em&gt;derivative&lt;/em&gt; of theirs, in copyright terms (with certain exceptions, which I don't propose to get into here).  The right to create derivative works is one of the rights that copyright law allows the rightsholder to control.  The licence you quote is clear that, for the code it covers, this right is restricted to certain purposes: you may&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;create derivative works [...] to build&#xA;unique scalable newsfeeds, activity streams, and in-app messaging via Stream’s&#xA;application program interface (“API”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which you aren't doing.  So yes, right now you're likely infringing someone's copyright.  However, you're not distributing copies of the resulting code, so it's not likely this will be discovered, and if by some mischance it were, you're doing very little harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, you have discovered that putting code on GitHub isn't the same as giving it to the world, for which I applaud you (we cover it in more detail &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1720/what-can-i-assume-if-a-publicly-published-project-has-no-license&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ).  If you want to be able to freely reuse other people's code, stick to code under permissively-free licences (eg MIT, BSD), which place very light (but non-zero) obligations on you if you create derivatives.  The obligations on reusing Apache-licensed code are also light, but somewhat more onerous.  The copyleft licences (GPL, MPL, etc.) are more complex to work with, but still permit the creation of derivatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally important is that all these licences permit the &lt;em&gt;redistribution&lt;/em&gt; of derivative works.  Sooner or later you're likely to want to share what you're doing with others, so being clear about what your obligations are should you do so is very important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-03T14:20:54.733" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T14:20:54.733" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13683" CreationDate="2023-02-03T14:35:52.843" Score="5" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say that I'm using art works protected by the Creative Commons &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; license. I then modify the art works so that they fit my personal requirements and include them in a commercial software which I sell to my customers. So far, this all seems to be in line with what the license mandates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the license also states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mind comes up with two different ways to interpret that statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; I decide that I want to share the modified art works I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to do so under the CC BY-SA license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license &lt;em&gt;forces&lt;/em&gt; me to share the modified art works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these two interpretations actually applies here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first interpretation applies, would I be allowed to reject requests to hand over the modified art works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; second applies, would I be allowed to charge money for the work that I invested into creating the modified art works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29260" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-02-05T09:22:33.230" LastActivityDate="2023-02-05T09:22:33.230" Title="Does the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license make it mandatory to share derived work?" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13682" CreationDate="2023-02-03T15:35:54.520" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;That summary is indeed ambiguous. CC BY-SA (and copyleft Open Source licenses in general) do not force you to share your work. Instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; you share your work, &lt;strong&gt;then&lt;/strong&gt; you can only do so under the same (or compatible) license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more clear in the full &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0 license terms&lt;/a&gt;. Section 3(b) describes the ShareAlike condition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the conditions in Section 3(a), if You Share Adapted Material You produce, the following conditions also apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where the “Adapter's License” is the license you use for the Adapted Material you create based on the CC BY-SA licensed original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a practical example: all StackExchange content is CC BY-SA licensed. I am allowed to take your question and create Adapter Material from it. I can keep my changes privately on my computer. No one can compel me to disclose them. However, if I share your answer with others, and if no copyright exception applies, then I'll have to do so under the terms of the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked some further questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first interpretation applies, would I be allowed to reject requests to hand over the modified art works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You decide whether to publish or otherwise share your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the first or second applies, would I be allowed to charge money for the work that I invested into creating the modified art works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The Creative Commons licenses do not prevent you from making money off the original or Adapted work, unless the license includes the NonCommercial clause (e.g. CC BY-NC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, everyone who buys the work from you also receives it under the CC BY-SA license. This gives the buyers the right to share the work themselves, gratis, and you can't restrict that. Because it is likely that others could legally get access to your work for free (once you've shared it), it is difficult to make money by selling copyleft-licensed works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-02-03T15:35:54.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13695" CreationDate="2023-02-03T22:00:02.430" Score="4" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a library I would like to license under MIT license (mostly to allow its use in proprietary software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using APIs of two other libraries, one under MIT, other under LGPLv3.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm just linking to these, no code is reused in my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use MIT license in this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mostly found answers and information regarding reuse of LGPL code, which must include LGPL license text, but here I'm only linking. Are there some other considerations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29266" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T20:28:36.903" Title="Using MIT license while linking with MIT and LGPLv3" Tags="|mit|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-05T13:57:19.203" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I engaged in a discussion on what would be the most befitting model for a piece of software sitting on top of an electronic voting system i.e. being in charge of collecting and summarzing results, detecting any fraudulent actions etc. The question was whether such a solution would be ultimately safer (and more reliable) if its source code was fully available to the public, if it was closed-source (therefore ensuring some additional &amp;quot;security by obscurity&amp;quot;) or maybe a hybrid approach?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd go for the first approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in my understanding, as long as we can ensure that the algorithms used are correct and safe it doesn't really matter whether the source code is publicly available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is vital that voting system is fair and has no surface for backdoor access. Unless we fully trust the manufacturer, there is no way to ensure that, other than making the code available&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;profit motif is not involved and so, hindering the competition from stealing/sneaking on the solutions used is irrelevant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to know your thoughts on the topic. The only &amp;quot;real-life&amp;quot; example of an electronic voting system software is the one employed in Brazil which, as far as I know, it's considered very good and safe, even though it remains closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29275" LastActivityDate="2023-02-05T15:32:10.240" Title="Is open-source a right model for secure, mission critical software?" Tags="|security|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13685" CreationDate="2023-02-05T15:32:10.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be useful to distinguish two separate aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;software is &lt;em&gt;Source Available&lt;/em&gt; if its source code is publicly available for inspection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;software is &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; if it is possible to use, modify, and share the software for any purpose. Access to the source code is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of election software is not only to correctly record and tally votes, but to foster confidence in the election process, e.g. by limiting opportunities for human mistakes and intervention, and by making voting more accessible. However, this requires that the voters have confidence in the software and hardware used for voting. Auditability of an election process is a core requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To achieve that purpose, it is tremendously helpful for the voting software to be Source Available, so that it can be inspected by anyone. However, this purpose can be achieved without the software being truly Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal belief is that voting software which isn't even Source Available fails to achieve the purpose for such software, since the election process would be less auditable than with hand-counted ballots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping details of the election process private does not improve the security and integrity of the process. Consensus in the infosec community is that a scheme should remain secure when everything about it is public, other than cryptographic keys (→ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kerkhoff's Principle&lt;/a&gt;). This does not imply that details about a security architecture must always be volunteered to the public – there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; marginal value in obscurity. However, full transparency does not compromise the security of a system (any more than it already is broken). Motivated bad actors &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; obtain access to the election software and will be able to analyze it, so one might as well make it Source Available to give the public an equal chance to analyze it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Open Source advocates claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (→ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linus' Law&lt;/a&gt;, though coined by ESR). I.e., making Source Available (and Open Source so that bugs can be fixed and tested by anyone) would help eliminate security issues, more efficiently than would be possible in closed source systems. This doesn't quite seem to be the case in general-purpose software. However, it is a valid argument when there is substantial public interest in the software, in particular with election software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-02-05T15:32:10.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13688" CreationDate="2023-02-06T07:57:23.457" Score="-2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why Dennis Ritchie created UNIX under BSD licence if he was rooting for open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm exploring UNIX history and can't understand why it was not open source. I understand that it was developed in Bell Labs, but is that significant reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29278" LastActivityDate="2023-02-06T11:03:52.110" Title="Why UNIX is not open source?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13687" CreationDate="2023-02-06T11:03:52.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commenters are raising a number of issues, all of which are excellent points, so I'll try to pull this together into an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thompson and Richie &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;started working on UNIX&lt;/a&gt; in 1969, and the first internal release was in 1971.  At this point it ran only on the PDP-11; if you happened to have a PDP-11, you could write off for a copy (presumably to Ken Thompson), and when it arrived, you could run it.  In 1975, Bell Labs realised that software did have value, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Unix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;started selling licences to Research UNIX&lt;/a&gt;; prior to that, although you could get a copy, you couldn't get a formal licence, so the question of licence terms is meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1976 is the date of Bill Gates' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous plea&lt;/a&gt; to Altair users to actually pay for his version of BASIC, instead of just giving copies to friends.  Prior to 1975/6, software was much more something that the tiny group of people who were able to improved and shared with the tiny group of people who could use it; if you could, you probably did, and you probably didn't care whether you should.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD Unix was first released&lt;/a&gt; in 1978, and was &lt;em&gt;not originally under the BSD licence&lt;/em&gt;, which was itself not published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;until 1988&lt;/a&gt;.  The modern concept of copyleft probably first appeared in 1985, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Manifesto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Manifesto&lt;/a&gt;, but even then was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not immediately so named&lt;/a&gt;.  Free software was not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;formally defined&lt;/a&gt; until 1986 and the GNU GPL was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first published&lt;/a&gt; in 1989.  &lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt; as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/open-source.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;near-synonym for free software&lt;/a&gt; didn't come into use until 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So hopefully by this point it's clear that UNIX could not have been initially released as &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; because it arrived years before any of the concepts that underpin it had been articulated, and nearly thirty years before the term itself.  In the excellent words of amon, the question is similar to asking why &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Martin Luther King&lt;/a&gt; didn't publicly support &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BLM&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-02-06T11:03:52.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-06T11:05:02.107" Score="2" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;My company is currently developing a commercial software for our clients (it will be offered both under a commercial license for SaaS and also a binary for on-site private network usage). This software uses 4 Unmodified (as-is) GPL and AGPL licensed Open-Source Software components internally. My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we include the GPL License details of these 4 open-source components and also indicate explicitly the location of the open-source codebase on github, is that enough for us to legally commercialize our software? Is it as simple as dropping the GPL licenses in the right folder such as &amp;quot;LICENSE&amp;quot; folder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not entirely clear if we are &amp;quot;legally&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;morally&amp;quot; covered. It's important to know that we will be taking full responsibility and providing support on issues/breaking changes (including the ones that occur within the open-source software - of course through community help and the owners of the open-source software). We will also give credits wherever due to the open-source projects and their owners &amp;quot;explicitly&amp;quot;. is that enough?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &amp;quot;best-practice&amp;quot; for commercial vendors who build their offering on top of Open-Source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information (edited after a recent exchange of comments):&#xA;Our SaaS software is composed of 4 components as listed below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 1 (Open Source MIT licensed) - deployed as container on k8s &amp;quot;cluster-1&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 2 (Closed Source) - deployed as container on k8s &amp;quot;cluster-1&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 3 (Open Source GPL licensed) - open-source unmodified binary built on alpine image deployed as container on k8s &amp;quot;cluster-1&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 4 (Open Source AGPL licensed) - deployed as container on k8s &amp;quot;cluster-2&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note in the above detail that there are 2 K8s clusters involved (Cluster-1 and Cluster-2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Component 1 and 2 don't seem to be the problem here. However, Component 3 is a single binary deployed as a container in the same cluster as Component 1 and 2. Component 4 is an independently operating service that needs to be deployed on an independent k8s cluster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: sources for Component 3 and 4 are &amp;quot;un-modified&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sourced as-is&amp;quot; from their original location on github. They are, however, packaged as containers (following original instructions of the author/developer as mentioned in github).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, each component is a different piece of software as mentioned above and exists or is managed or operated independently. Collectively they provide one SaaS offering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interactions (updated based on more comments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Components 1, 2 and 3 all provide a REST interface&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 1 is the only service that publicly exposes its REST endpoint. So, Component 2 and 3 are hidden from public access, but are proxied via Component 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 4 exposes JDBC and https (as well as REST) interfaces. They remain open for authorized admins, operators, users to directly consume the service. Also note that: Component 4 interfaces are not meant for direct public consumption and therefore not exposed publicly, but more for intra-component integration and internal administration/management purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Component 2 and 3 extensively interface with Component 4 via JDBC and REST&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diagram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/APd4o.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/APd4o.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;component overview&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29281" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-15T15:48:00.320" LastActivityDate="2023-04-15T15:48:00.320" Title="What is the best-practice for commercial vendors who build their offering on top of Open-Source software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|commercial|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13694" CreationDate="2023-02-07T08:18:18.683" Score="5" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could not find a good answer to this except &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-it-OK-to-use-closed-source-libraries-in-an-open-source-program&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe it's trivial, or maybe it's just uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to develop an open source application, and I am keen to use a GPL license, but I need to embed a third-party closed-source library. The wrapper to the library I write would be open sourced, but the binaries of the libraries would be closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am implying here that I have the right to use the closed-source library and that the owner of that library is aware of my intention to publish my code as open source. Think of an SDK as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: can I distribute my source code with a GPL license?&#xA;And, importantly, can I distribute the complete binary bundle, including both my code and the third party, with a GPL license (maybe specifying that it does not apply to that third party lib)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the GPL is &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; for what sits &amp;quot;on top&amp;quot; of the code with that license, that is: any derivative work, but not for what stays &amp;quot;below&amp;quot;, that is: any used library or lower layers functionalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is allowed, is it allowed by all versions of the GPL? If it is not allowed, which license would you recommend that is the closest, in spirit, to the GPL, but that would allow me to include third-party, closed source dependencies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29290" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-04-14T07:20:36.917" LastActivityDate="2023-04-14T07:20:36.917" Title="Can I link (and distribute) a closed source library within my (GPL) open source software?" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|dependencies|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13693" CreationDate="2023-02-07T14:46:07.830" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just out of curiosity, if I make a GPLv3 software that have source code that tell the program to read a file that is a proprietary artwork, but this artwork is not included in my project, does that violate GPLv3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I made a game project that look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;folder:My Game&lt;br&gt;&#xA;file:main.py&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright (C) 2023 My Name&#xA;# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later&#xA;&#xA;import os&#xA;&#xA;if os.path.isfile(&amp;quot;proprietary_artwork_package/game_conversation.txt&amp;quot;):&#xA;    print(&amp;quot;Thank you for buying the artwork package! Enjoy!&amp;quot;)&#xA;    f = open(&amp;quot;proprietary_artwork_package/game_conversation.txt&amp;quot;)&#xA;    print(f.read())&#xA;    f.close()&#xA;else:&#xA;    print(&#xA;        &amp;quot;Please buy the artwork of my game at https://www.some-membership-platform.com/my-support-page.html, extract it at the game folder to get the full gaming experience!&amp;quot;&#xA;    )&#xA;print(&amp;quot;\n\nThe end.\n\n\nCredit:\n\tAAA\n\tBBB\n\tCCC\n&amp;quot;)&#xA;print(&amp;quot;GPLv3 License stuff.&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;file: license.txt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;content of GPLv3 license&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this game project violate GPLv3 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28188" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:49:08.970" Title="Does reading proprietary artwork in the source code violate GPLv3 license?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13692" CreationDate="2023-02-07T17:02:24.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artwork and code are different things, and they can exist and be distributed independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The open source version of a number of games are example of these kind of behaviour (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openttd.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenTTD&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenDune&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://corsixth.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CorsixTH&lt;/a&gt;, etc) as are the converse relation with free and sometimes open source fan modpacks for proprietary games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the graphics need to be supplied in a well-defined format to be interpreted correctly by the programme (and which has to be documented to at least some degree) and thus there exists a public API by which they communicate with (or are 'digested' by) the programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-02-07T22:49:08.970" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T22:49:08.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13690" CreationDate="2023-02-07T18:23:04.387" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the GPL is &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; for what sits &amp;quot;on top&amp;quot; of the code with that license, that is: any derivative work, but not for what stays &amp;quot;below&amp;quot;, that is: any used library or lower layers functionalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your understanding is not correct. The GPL is &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; in all directions. Towards the top, the bottom but also towards the sides.&#xA;If you use some GPL code in your project, then &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; code in your project needs to be under a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are a couple of &amp;quot;escape hatches&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Libraries that are an intrinsic part of the OS you are targeting, like the C library, are exempt from the requirement to be open source. This makes it possible to write GPL software for Windows, for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If all the GPL-licensed code is your own, then you have the possibility to write an exception to the GPL license stating that people are allowed to link closed-source library X with your code without violating the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-03-03T10:20:30.573" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T10:20:30.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13684" CreationDate="2023-02-07T20:28:36.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7908/29266&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to an earlier question I think my usecase permits using MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is about LGPLv2.1 but as far as I know LGPLv3 is not dramatically different.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Using only library API and not modifying its code should constitute a &lt;code&gt;Combined Work&lt;/code&gt; and can be distributed under any license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29266" LastActivityDate="2023-02-07T20:28:36.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-07T21:24:04.073" Score="3" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m a bit confused with AGPL license, so I ask for advice. I read contradictory things on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make an android app. The backend will use AGPL modified material : &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stable diffusion WebUI&lt;/a&gt;. The backend will probably have some more stuff (like AWS integration code) AND will be usable without the front-end (it’s gonna be an API, a project in itself).&#xA;The front-end (android app) will be usable witout THIS specific backend (but will require a backend, IE an API who return images).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, tell me if any of these are wrong :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Almost sure of that) Everything related to the stable diffusion WebUI must be AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Quite sure of that) The whole backend (including AWS-related stuff) MUST be AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(No idea if it’s true) The android app itself (wrapping) can be distributed with an other license (for example CC-NC).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just making sure I get things right!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29298" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-14T22:41:51.080" LastActivityDate="2023-04-14T22:41:51.080" Title="AGPL : license of backend and frontend" Tags="|license-recommendation|agpl-3.0|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13698" CreationDate="2023-02-07T23:57:38.187" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a GPL library and an Apache-licensed library. I want to use the GPL library in my Apache library and for the Apache library to stay Apache. Is that even possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29299" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-02-08T08:15:11.943" LastActivityDate="2023-02-08T10:27:00.220" Title="Using GPL library in my own Apache library" Tags="|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13697" CreationDate="2023-02-08T10:27:00.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kind of, but probably not the way you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is OK if a software contains components under different libraries, for example if the the software contains your Apache-2.0 code and (A)GPL-3.0 code. However, it would be necessary that the licensing of this software complies with the licenses of all components, which would require compliance with the (A)GPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means if your Apache-2.0 component can only be used together with an (A)GPL-3.0 component, &lt;strong&gt;the practical effect is that the resulting software will have to comply with (A)GPL-3.0 conditions, &lt;em&gt;as if&lt;/em&gt; your library had been entirely (A)GPL-3.0 licensed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is probably fine if your library stays under Apache-2.0 terms, this might be confusing to some users of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few notes on related licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL limits the reach of the “copyleft” conditions to the LGPL-covered component itself, which makes it easier to combine components under various licenses.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(A)GPL-2.0-only is not compatible with Apache-2.0. It is not possible to combine a GPL-2.0-only component and an Apache-2.0 component into a single program, because these licenses have terms that contradict each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes in case you are the copyright holder for the (A)GPL-3.0 library:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder for the library, you can change its license to Apache-2.0, if you want. But it's important to consider what your specific licensing goals are – why did you choose (A)GPL-3.0 to start with, and why would you be OK with offering this functionality under Apache-2.0 instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are only interested in sharing certain parts between the two libraries, it may be possible to extract them into a third library that you license under a permissive license such as Apache-2.0. But again, this only works if you're the copyright holder for those parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-02-08T10:27:00.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13690" CreationDate="2023-02-08T11:34:19.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested in the comments, there are other two examples here that are basically asking the same question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4771/gpl3-project-with-epl-library&quot;&gt;GPL3 project with EPL library&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2233/gpl-v3-with-openssl-exception&quot;&gt;GPL V3 with OpenSSL Exception&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is basically that I could extend the GPL license with an exception for those GPL-incompatible libraries I want to import. A guideline is even offered for that: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main drawback is that my code would not be GPL any longer and could not include GPL code, unless I get a permission from the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29290" LastActivityDate="2023-02-08T11:34:19.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-09T04:51:37.993" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know if a software developer can potentially be sued for writing everyday boilerplate code or similar functions at 2 separate software jobs with different clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose a software developer writes source code for client A.  The contract the developer works under specifies that the source code belongs to the client after the developer finishes the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the software developer ends his/her work with client A and begins a new contract at client B.  The software developer is required in his/her job to implement some functions that are very similar to functions implemented in their work at client A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two source code projects (for clients A and B) written by the developer are very similar, and are both proprietary, closed-source projects.  The two software implementations are almost identical and converge on the same mathematical ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statistical ideas such as ‘standard deviation’ are used in software frequently.  Can client A or B claim that others are committing plagiarism or violating copyright law if other companies implement the same functions in their software releases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the developer be successfully sued by client A or B for having implemented the same (or very similar) functions at more than one company?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably common for software developers to re-invent the wheel independently of one another - intentionally or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point is software plagiarized?  An algorithm is an algorithm - implementing it could arguably not be done any other way than what is outlined in a standard algorithms text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to find answers to this type of question, but all I can find is references to hash-based plagiarism detectors (MOSS, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29312" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T04:51:37.993" Title="What constitutes source code plagiarism?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2023-02-09T14:00:12.787" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13689" CreationDate="2023-02-09T09:20:04.843" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your description of the system above it is clear that component 4 (with AGPL license) is not user-facing (towards public suscribers) and therefore the situation &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;users interacting with it remotely through a computer network&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (Section 13 of the AGPL License) does not apply. There is a discussion if Section 13 demands that the source code must be disclosed also to company-internal users, but I do not think so, I think the first paragraph of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer in the GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; is also applicable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The communication between Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 through JDBC and REST interfaces is a clear indicator, that the communication between the 2 clusters falls under the definition of an 'aggregate' as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for the communication between Component 1 and Component 3, the REST API successfully isolates the two from being a 'combined program'. They run independently and are not communicating through a close link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining interfaces are no-brainers, there is no impact on the licensing of your service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the setup described in your question above you only need to comply with the clauses of the MIT license towards the public. This means that you have the proper license and attribution language in the HTML interface of your service. This will also cover the JavaScript code that is under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no 'moral' obligation to give attribution to authors of the back-end software. This is rarely done and not expected. It might even cause confusion w.r.t. the scope of your actual obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-02-09T10:11:07.340" LastActivityDate="2023-02-09T10:11:07.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-09T10:51:35.483" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard that there are some known issues with publishing GPL software on App Store and GPL may be incompatible with restrictions placed by App Store.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EPL (Eclipse Public License) is another copyleft-like license that could serve as an alternative for GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it compatible with App Store? Are there any known issues or incidents related to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3398" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T17:29:44.887" Title="Is EPL compatible with Apple App Store?" Tags="|copyleft|epl|apple-app-store|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-09T12:40:16.443" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a license that's similar to the CC BY-SA license that allows people to use my code for whatever purpose as long as they license derivative works under the same license. The distinction between it and something like the GPL (and why I want a different license) is that the CC BY-SA allows you to release builds of software without the source code. This means that if someone releases a source-unreadble version people can reverse engineer and freely copy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue with the CC BY-SA license is that it's not suitable for software. There's no warranty disclaimer, and its applicability to software presents a lot of questions. Is there something with the terms of the CC BY-SA except for the usual fixings in a software license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Something I forgot to mention is that I want to emulate something close to the CC-BY-SA 1.0 license where there is no compatibility with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29316" LastEditorUserId="29316" LastEditDate="2023-02-10T16:43:41.537" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T13:18:57.067" Title="Is there a license similar to the CC BY-SA license that is copyleft but allows source-unreadable derivatives to be released?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-09T20:42:51.210" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to add to my Website the package &amp;quot;Font Awesome&amp;quot;. I would like to use only some font files (which are covered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/OFL-1.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SIL OFL 1.1 license&lt;/a&gt;) and the necessary CSS to use it.&#xA;It is OK to delete the other files and upload what remains to my website (keeping the original license, of course)? What I am supposed to do? Am I required to do anything else, like changing or editing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user29323" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-02-11T14:05:17.077" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T22:49:30.343" Title="Removing font files from Font Awesome - SIL OFL license" Tags="|licensing|font|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13703" CreationDate="2023-02-11T13:18:57.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that a license currently exists that implements your requirements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;copyleft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;full attribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;suitable for software distribution&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;no need to provide source code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;disclaimer of warranties&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;disclaimer of patent non-infringement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that if you require a license like this you should contact a lawyer to write it for you. Once you have done that you might want to submit it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/approval&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The License Review Process&lt;/a&gt; so that the world can use it (without OSI blessing many developers --especially companies-- will not want to touch the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-02-11T13:18:57.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13702" CreationDate="2023-02-12T17:29:44.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an apparent incompatibility between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/minterms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minimum Terms of Developer’s End-User License Agreement&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added) on the one side&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scope of License: The license granted to the End-User for the Licensed Application must be limited to a &lt;strong&gt;non-transferable&lt;/strong&gt; license to&#xA;use the Licensed Application...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL License (here as v3)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basic Permissions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of&#xA;copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated&#xA;conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited&#xA;permission to run the unmodified Program. The output from running a&#xA;covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its&#xA;content, constitutes a covered work. This License acknowledges your&#xA;rights of fair use or other equivalent, as provided by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey,&#xA;without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&#xA;You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having&#xA;them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with&#xA;facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the&#xA;terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not&#xA;control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for&#xA;you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and&#xA;control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your&#xA;copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the&#xA;conditions stated below. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes&#xA;it unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on the other side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EPL License&lt;/a&gt; is not a copyleft license, as it does not force derivative works to be under the same license. Therefore, if you include an EPL licensed library in your software you will be able to distribute it through the App Store using an EULA which is compliant with Apple's minimum terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the EPL license itself would not satisfy Apple's minimum requirements for an EULA, as it includes this language (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;GRANT OF RIGHTS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Subject to the terms of this Agreement, each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright&#xA;license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display,&#xA;publicly perform, &lt;strong&gt;Distribute and sublicense&lt;/strong&gt; the Contribution of such&#xA;Contributor, if any, and such Derivative Works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an (old!) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF article about the issue&lt;/a&gt;, but I am not entirely sure if Apple's rules have not changed in the meantime. This article lists a few more issues and incompatibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/9500/is-apple-allowed-to-distribute-gplv3-licensed-software-through-its-ios-app-store&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which pulls together the different items related to GPL (if Apple would be allowed to distribute GPL-licensed SW), but it does not cover EPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-02-12T17:29:44.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13711" CreationDate="2023-02-13T00:31:09.903" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume I have a repository with MIT licensed code where I have written the vast majority of the code but several others have made small improvements through pull requests over the years (including adding the MIT license itself, a decade ago!).&#xA;Am I allowed to transfer it to another maintainer or could I be somehow liable for transferring their IP? (I know this is highly unlikely, but I’m asking if there are any grounds for it)&#xA;Can they ask for their contributions to be removed if they don’t like the new owner? Basically, what are their rights in this case?&#xA;And what happens if the new owner turns out to be adversarial and removes the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29351" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T09:13:12.110" Title="Can I legally transfer a repository to someone else? (MIT license)" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-13T06:25:13.987" Score="6" ViewCount="1802" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to think that spreading the Free Software philosophy through advertising, as companies usually do, would be more moderate and more acceptable to people (more infectious) than spreading the Free Software philosophy in a coercive, copyleft-based way, such as the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I came up with the idea that instead of copyleft, there should be a permissive license like the Apache or MIT licenses, with only a new &amp;quot;Free Software Philosophy Advertising Clause&amp;quot; added.&#xA;This clause would say, for example, &amp;quot;In a prominent place in the software's user interface, you must include a short propagandistic phrase that promotes the basic philosophy of Free Software and a URL link to a longer educational statement&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;This Free Software philosophy advertising clause also applies to derivative works.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the validity of this idea*, I thought that someone had already thought of this idea. Is there a &amp;quot;Free Software Philosophical Advertising&amp;quot; license that already implements this idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* This idea has an evil &amp;quot;ends justify the means&amp;quot; quality from a free software perspective, and in practice it is doubtful that such a clause would work well in the examples given. At the very least, it will no longer be GPL-compatible and will not be OSI-approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added on 2/13/2023:&#xA;Or is there a movement somewhere to create a standard and compatible license based on this idea, to prevent the proliferation of advertising statements as it did with the 4-clause BSD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29354" LastEditorUserId="29354" LastEditDate="2023-02-14T01:52:21.113" LastActivityDate="2023-02-14T01:52:21.113" Title="Is there a &quot;Free Software Philosophy Advertising&quot; permissive license?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2023-02-13T08:55:19.303" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have essentially reinvented the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertising clause of the 4 clause BSD license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This product includes software developed by [the organization].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the 4 clause BSD license is accepted as an open source license, the 4 clause BSD license was generally found to be annoying because software using a number of 4 clause BSD packages ended up with a large number of clauses in the advertising. This &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be okay if there was one and only one &amp;quot;short propagandistic phrase&amp;quot; which was fixed in the license, but as soon as you allow the authors to choose the phrase, you'll be back in the 4 clause BSD situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T08:55:19.303" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13708" CreationDate="2023-02-13T09:13:12.110" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to transfer it to another maintainer or could I be somehow liable for transferring their IP?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing to remember here is that &amp;quot;ownership&amp;quot; of a repository is purely an administrative thing; transferring a repository does not of itself mean any transfer of IP occurs. You will continue to own the rights to any code you wrote and any other contributors will continue to own the rights to any code they wrote. The new maintainer will be exercising their rights under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can they ask for their contributions to be removed if they don’t like the new owner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No; it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;generally accepted that a grant of rights under an open source license is irrevocable&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what are their rights in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not much. Once you license your content under an open source license, you are largely giving up all control of it in the future other than the restrictions in the license itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what happens if the new owner turns out to be adversarial and removes the MIT license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then they would be committing a copyright violation, as the only right they have to use the software is under the MIT license, which requires that the license is distributed with the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T09:13:12.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-13T10:46:51.550" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to include some code from MIT- and BSD-licensed libraries in a proprietary package, but for reasons of performance (and just organising the code better) would like to take portions of the code and include them interspersed within my own, rather than having them as a separable dependency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the right approach to acknowledge this and incorporate the appropriate license files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were including them as a separable dependency I would just have a separate folder with the library, including the license file, but that doesn't seem possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of including a top-level folder named &lt;code&gt;third-party-licenses&lt;/code&gt;, that would contain the library license files, along with a &lt;code&gt;README.md&lt;/code&gt; file saying something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MyProductName includes code derived from Lib1, copyright Lib1Author, licensed under the MIT License.&#xA;See LIB1-LICENSE-FILE for details.&#xA;&#xA;MyProductName includes code derived from Lib2, copyright Lib2Author, licensed under the BSD License.&#xA;See LIB2-LICENSE-FILE for details.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that sound like an appropriate way to handle it? Are there other solutions that would be better practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit This a slightly different question than is answered at &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2312/how-should-you-put-attribution-into-your-project&quot;&gt;How should you put attribution into your project? &lt;/a&gt;, which seems to cover the situation where a new project is a rewriting of, or substantially based on, another single project, rather than where the new project includes small portions here and there from other projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29355" LastEditorUserId="29355" LastEditDate="2023-02-13T11:47:27.707" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T11:47:27.707" Title="Including portions of MIT and BSD-licensed code in proprietary software" Tags="|mit|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-02-16T11:02:45.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13713" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13718" CreationDate="2023-02-13T14:39:05.707" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, software open-source licenses are backed up by copyright law, but copyright law does not (in the US) apply to hardware. Does this mean that, before issuing any sort of open-source license for hardware, I need to apply for a patent first so that the license can be legally enforced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Let's assume for the purpose of this question that the jurisdiction is the US, and that the hardware in question is not covered by copyright law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29349" LastEditorUserId="29349" LastEditDate="2023-02-13T15:13:13.107" LastActivityDate="2023-02-16T17:59:37.503" Title="Do I need to patent before open-sourcing hardware?" Tags="|patents|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2023-02-13T16:45:34.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL (and related licenses) does something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the GPL has a preamble that is basically an advertising statement for the free software philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it has clauses (in GPLv3 search for &amp;quot;Appropriate Legal Notices&amp;quot;; in GPLv2 look at section 2c) about including information about licensing in the user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This basic idea could probably be adapted to do what you want, but I am not aware of anyone who has already done exactly what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28397" LastActivityDate="2023-02-13T16:45:34.143" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13719" CreationDate="2023-02-15T11:05:18.257" Score="0" ViewCount="887" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the use of Qt and its licenses because i'm so confused with it.&#xA;I want to make an application (Commercial and its own source code as private) in C++ which uses Qt and its libraries for the GUI (I don't want to modify it) and I want to use it in the Open Source version (not the commercial one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Qt Core libraries use a LGPL license as I can read from multiple forums and the official website, so if I publish only the part of the Qt code (maintain the mine as private) and follow the LGPL restrictions, for example with a template like that: &lt;a href=&quot;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://marketplace.qt.io/products/qt-lgpl-app-template&lt;/a&gt; will be any problem?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the other side, I want to make the GUI with the tool Qt Creator, because it is easier for me. But on the property website: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/product/features?hsLang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.qt.io/product/features?hsLang=en&lt;/a&gt; if you choose the LGPL license the Qt Creator is disabled except if you check in the filters for a GPLv3 license. But as I can read in their own GitHub repository: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/qt-creator/qt-creator/blob/master/LICENSE.GPL3-EXCEPT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/qt-creator/qt-creator/blob/master/LICENSE.GPL3-EXCEPT&lt;/a&gt; (in the Exception 1) and in other posts similar to mine: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7709/using-qt-designer-to-create-ui-design-for-closed-source-application&quot;&gt;Using Qt Designer to create UI design for closed source application&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use it for a private commercial application?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EDIT: I read here (&lt;a href=&quot;https://embeddeduse.com/2023/01/06/using-qt-5-15-and-qt-6-under-lgplv3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://embeddeduse.com/2023/01/06/using-qt-5-15-and-qt-6-under-lgplv3/&lt;/a&gt;) I can use the Qt Creator IDE to make my own files, I suppose '.ui' also are in this consideration...Without any restrictions of GPL, have I understood it correctly?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another question is...If I should follow the GPL rights in case of using Qt Creator...Can I do my application as private and commercial, but with the option to access the source code if you buy it, or the application should be free (inclusive if you don't modify the Qt libraries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29381" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-16T15:22:09.177" LastActivityDate="2023-04-16T15:22:09.177" Title="Use Qt Open Source with Qt Creator for Commercial and Private code application" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13713" CreationDate="2023-02-15T16:18:11.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, if you want to control how someone uses or reproduces a work you've designed, the law must first grant you a monopoly on some set of rights, and then you may choose grant some incomplete set of those rights to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright is one such kind of monopoly, covering the rights to reproduce and author modified form of certain categories of creative works. Largely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyright is limited to&lt;/a&gt; artistic works of a written, visual, auditory, or sculptural nature (but also, interestingly, includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hull designs for naval vessels&lt;/a&gt; as a special statutory exception). In general, copyright will not cover practically useful aspects of copyrightable works, and it calls these not-copyrightable objects &amp;quot;useful articles&amp;quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.gov/register/va-useful.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;U.S. Copyright Office says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object. Thus, a useful article may have both copyrightable and uncopyrightable features. For example, a carving on the back of a chair or a floral relief design on silver flatware could be protected by copyright, but the design of the chair or flatware itself could not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one kind of circuit design that is copyrightable, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/905&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;circuit mask works&lt;/a&gt;. The author of such a mask work is granted copyright monopoly, which can be licensed as any other copyright rights are, and used to limit distribution and reproduction to terms of your choosing, including when it is embodied in a physical manufactured circuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your circuit design does not constitute a mask work, then it doesn't fall under a copyrightable class of work, and insofar as it's designed for practical utility, it is not copyrightable. Without a copyrighted work, you cannot employ a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other applicable set of rights would be patent rights. If your circuit design is not eligible for copyright, it may still be patented, if it embodies a novel, patentable system. The system must have (1) some kind of new advantage over the state of the art and (2) be non-obvious to someone with &amp;quot;ordinary skill&amp;quot; in the art of circuit making. If your system meets this standard, you can undertake the process of applying for a patent, in whichever national jurisdictions, globally, you wish to have patent rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an expensive and complex process to determine what aspects of your design are patentable, draft an application with explanations and illustrations, and register your patent globally. If your patent is granted, then you can license out the right to employ your patented system to anyone you like, under whatever terms you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-02-16T17:59:37.503" LastActivityDate="2023-02-16T17:59:37.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13717" CreationDate="2023-02-15T17:17:02.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;With respect, this is not a great first question.  It has, as has been noted, way too many parts, and nearly all of them have already been answered here.  It looks rather as if you're after not information but legal advice, which we can't provide (and which you should go and pay for, if you're betting a business on this).  Nevertheless, in the hope of answering the question promptly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use the Qt libraries in a proprietary application, under the LGPL, provided that you honour the requirements of the LGPL; see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/8105/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use the Qt Creator under the terms of GPL to write a &lt;em&gt;de novo&lt;/em&gt; application which you then distribute under terms of your choice; see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/12849/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for more details.  Those terms may include fully-proprietary, GPL-with-paid-exceptions, and fully GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, after reading the linked questions fully, that leaves you with any remaining issues, could I ask you to be clear and explicit about them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-02-15T17:17:02.490" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13704" CreationDate="2023-02-16T15:29:12.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you only plan to use the font files that are covered by the SIL OFL 1.1 license, it is generally okay to delete the other files and use only what you need for your website. Modify the font files in any way, you may also need to indicate that your modifications are not endorsed by the creators of the font and that they are not responsible for any issues that may arise as a result of your modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fontawesome.com/license/free&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fontawesome.com/license/free&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution is required by MIT, SIL OFL, and CC BY licenses. Downloaded Font Awesome Free files already contain embedded comments with sufficient attribution, so you shouldn't need to do anything additional when using these files normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We've kept attribution comments terse, so we ask that you do not actively work to remove them from files, especially code . They're a great way for folks to learn about Font Awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25057" LastActivityDate="2023-02-16T15:29:12.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13724" CreationDate="2023-02-16T16:01:37.960" Score="13" ViewCount="3645" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is often asked from the licence perspective, but my issue is more about the practical aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some code I would like to open source, but there is in the repository some &amp;quot;internal&amp;quot; code (gitlab CI yml configuration, Maven internal repo settings, SonarQube integration, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to be able to maintain two versions of the repo, with some files pushed to my internal Gitlab instance, but not to the open-source repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is possible, but it would work like having a different .gitignore file for the two remotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this typically done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29395" LastActivityDate="2023-02-19T23:55:56.037" Title="How do you maintain an open-source and an internal version of the same code?" Tags="|git|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13721" CreationDate="2023-02-16T16:49:28.257" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't really a satisfactory solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Git was designed for a distributed group of people to work on Open Source software, so it doesn't really feature things like access controls. In particular, branches just describe different strands of development history, and aren't useful for describing different editions of the same software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One approach is to work on an internal repository, then regularly export snapshots to a separate, public repository. During this export step, you could ignore some files. But the two repositories must not share their Git history. Note that this approach will complicate dealing with outside contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible to to the inverse: work mostly on the public repository, but occasionally merge it into the internal repository. In principle, the internal view could just be another branch that you don't push to be a public repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a lot of projects that have some sensitive parts, it is more appropriate to define extension points in the Open Source version, and to implement the internal features as plugins. These additions might either be inserted at runtime, or during your internal &lt;a href=&quot;https://12factor.net/build-release-run&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;build process&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your examples relate to more to tooling around the software, not to the software itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider whether they should be part of the repository in the first place. Secrets should be never committed, not even for purely internal repos. Instead, CI environments offer tools to manage secrets such as API keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Consider whether you actually have to remove this configuration from a public version. For example, if you develop the project in an Open Source first manner, then you will likely want to run CI jobs on that version as well. Even if not, it can be OK to include files that don't have value outside of your organization (if they don't disclose anything sensitive).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quite often, such issues can be avoided by &lt;a href=&quot;https://12factor.net/config&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;keeping environment-specific details out of the repository&lt;/a&gt;. For example, instead of hardcoding a Maven URL, you might require developers to set an appropriate environment variable. Instead of having a complex CI pipeline, you might have a simple pipeline definition that just calls into an environment-independent build script that contains the actual steps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've linked to the 12 Factor App here, because it is a great (albeit dated) condensation of best practices mostly for web apps, SaaS, and cloud-native software. Many of those lessons are also applicable in an Open Source context, and also for different kinds of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-02-16T16:49:28.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13721" CreationDate="2023-02-17T15:24:29.007" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;IMO that's a fairly clear-cut use case for &lt;a href=&quot;https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;submodules&lt;/a&gt;. Basically, you structure it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;blockquote&gt; Gitlab CI&lt;br&gt;Maven settings&lt;br&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Submodule &lt;code&gt;public&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;blockquote&gt;Source code&lt;br&gt;...&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;br&gt;Glue code / directory info / symlinks to access public sources in the internal project&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way, you can work on the public code while compiling it according to the internal configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After making internal-only changes, you just commit them in the &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After making public-only changes, you commit them in the &lt;code&gt;public&lt;/code&gt; repo and then also make a simple commit in &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; that does nothing but update the submodule to the new &lt;code&gt;public&lt;/code&gt; HEAD.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After making changes that involve both parts of the code, you commit everything public in the &lt;code&gt;public&lt;/code&gt; repo and everything internal in the &lt;code&gt;internal&lt;/code&gt; repo along with the change of the submodule.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2023-02-17T15:31:10.510" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T15:31:10.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13721" CreationDate="2023-02-17T17:11:59.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suggest to really look at the &amp;quot;exceptional files&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gitlab CI yml configuration: Can be in a different git repository. You can configure gitlab to read it from there&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maven internal repo settings: Should be in &lt;code&gt;settings.xml&lt;/code&gt;, outside your git repo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other things: Look at the docs if you can separate it out, or consider using environment variables (as amon already suggested)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, not much really sensitive or bothering is left after thoroughly inspecting the relevant files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2023-02-17T17:11:59.927" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13727" CreationDate="2023-02-18T20:52:09.523" Score="17" ViewCount="2186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've arranged for a software provider to install a free and open-source application on a server. The application is licensed under GPL-3.0-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software provider has installed the software onto the server (the installation took a couple of days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software provider claims that the process to setup, install, configure, and implement the application is proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They consider the implementation process as copyrighted original creative work. They've also stated that their installation includes proprietary copyrighted components belonging to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They won't allow me to use a third party to backup the server as it will breach the copyright of their work/install. They would like to provide a server backup and charge a fee for doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL-3.0 license allow them to place this restriction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29424" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T14:37:19.253" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T20:35:19.650" Title="Is the process to set up, install, and implement GPL-3.0-only software considered proprietary?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-18T22:58:33.317" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They consider the implementation process as copyrighted original creative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how faithfully you've reported their exact words/meaning, but a process is not copyrightable. All copyrightable works consist of some sort of fixed tangible expression (text, video, sound, images). Furthermore, U.S. law (e.g., case law such as &lt;em&gt;Baker v. Selden&lt;/em&gt;) makes clear that the copyrightable expression of a system offers no monopoly on outside implementations or descriptions of the system itself. Other jurisdictions probably have similar rules but I can't say for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've also stated that their installation includes proprietary copyrighted components belonging to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This begins to approach plausibility. However, any work of theirs that is legally a derivative of the original GPL work can only be offered to you under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If their installation process makes use of (1) material of their original copyrightable authorship that (2) isn't a derivative work of the GPL software (for example, perhaps some proprietary general-purpose software of theirs, used to replicate execution of programs across multiple machines), then they may forbid you from distributing that completely-separate piece of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if this is the case, copyright can't prevent you from sharing not-copyrightable output of their tools. Trade secret law might enable them to forbid you from distributing the output of their own tools that exist independent of any GPL software, but (at least in the U.S.), this would require having you sign NDAs prior to letting you see anything they wish to claim is protected. Anything they wish to claim protection for under trade secret law could not be a derivative of any GPL work (at least, not without them being in violation of the GPL work's author's license terms and leaving them liable for copyright infringement). Additionally, I don't see how a privately-held backup would be problematic from an NDA perspective (in that you don't actually disclose it to a third party) but I also have low familiarity in this field of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what degree their installation process actually integrates with the GPL software. I can envision installation systems that are strongly derivative of the software, and other orchestration systems that operate agnostic to what specific software they install, and some types that exist somewhere in between. If their installation system is legally a derivative, under copyright law, then I see no legal way they can make it (or its byproducts) available to you under any terms beyond the GPL itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that they claim their &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; is copyrighted, despite this statement being a category error (processes are not copyrightable) suggests to me they do not have a rigorous theory of law in mind when trying to forbid you from performing backups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T15:15:57.870" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T15:15:57.870" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-19T09:49:19.560" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no easy answer based on the information you have given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly have a service agreement with the software provider, who installed everything on your server. This agreement is governing the service they provided to install the software (the GPL parts and the proprietary parts). It would also need to cover the rights of your service provider to install their proprietary software on your server, as well as other software (remote access/calling home, license management/kill switch, etc). You should carefully study that and talk to your legal counsel, especially if that agreement authorizes the software provider to impose any restrictions on how you manage your own server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You certainly have a license agreement for the proprietary parts of the software installed on your server. This license will tell you if you are allowed to create backups of the software. In certain jurisdictions such a backup is allowed by law (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/24104/is-it-illegal-to-backup-your-hard-drive-if-you-have-copyrighted-software-on-it&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; ), but this is more a legal question and not the scope of Open Source SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should ask the software provider for a SBOM for the entire installation and an explanation of the different parts, how they work together, and why they determined that their proprietary parts are not derivative works of the GPL-licensed parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have this entire information and there are open-source-related items open you might want to come back to us with another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-02-19T09:49:19.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-19T15:44:14.167" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Heavily revised.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, much less &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; lawyer, and this answer does not provide competent legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The software provider claims that the process to setup/install/configure/implement the application is proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's plausible, but irrelevant.  The software provider has executed their proprietary procedure on your server.  It's now done.  That the process is proprietary does not in itself place any obligations on you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They consider the implementation process as copyrighted original creative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That could conceivably be supportable (though more likely not), in the same sense that a performance of a symphony can be copyrighted.  But that's also irrelevant.  Any such copyright they have protects against you copying the performance, which you have no way to do anyway, having not recorded it.  Copying the contents of the server after the fact is not the same thing as copying the installation process itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've also stated that their installation includes proprietary copyrighted components belonging to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That could be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They won't allow me to use a third party to backup the server as it will breach the copyright of their work/install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning, you've clarified, that they &lt;em&gt;demand&lt;/em&gt; that you not engage anyone else for backup services, not that they can physically or electronically prevent you from doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first place, then, you should consider whether they have a leg to stand on under copyright law generally.  You didn't say where you are, but in the U.S., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Copyright Act permits you to make a backup (&amp;quot;archival&amp;quot;) copy of computer software&lt;/a&gt;, though not necessarily of other digital materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where you review your agreement with the software provider, or have your lawyer do so.  It is possible that the agreement holds that you waive your rights to make backups, or that it gives the software provider an exclusive right to provide backup services.  If it does not do either of these things, and if U.S. law or a law with similar provision for software backups applies, then no GPL-specific analysis is required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're not so lucky,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL-3.0 license allow them to place this restriction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL permit them to forbid you to make copies of their proprietary, &lt;strong&gt;non-GPL&lt;/strong&gt; components?&lt;/strong&gt;  The GPL does not apply to such components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL permit them to create a proprietary derivative of GPL software?&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, it does, but it does not permit them to convey a derivative of GPL software to a third party (you) under terms other than the GPL, which permits you to make copies as you like.  Furthermore, the provider would be obligated by &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; license to provide source to you on request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL prevent them from engineering a situation in which you have a copy of a proprietary GPL derivative whose rights they own?&lt;/strong&gt; No, it does not, though some gymnastics would be required.  This would involve provisions along these lines in your agreement with the provider: you agree that the provider is creating a derivative of the GPL software for you as a work-for-hire, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; you agree that after they install this derivative on your server, you assign all your rights in the result to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much depends on the details of your agreement with the software provider.  In addition to any provisions specifically about backups and copyright, you should pay attention to exactly what the provider agreed to install.  If they have installed more or different components than you specified, then they may have violated / failed to fulfill their end of the agreement.  Do read very carefully, however, as there could be a huge difference here between, say,  &amp;quot;PostgreSQL Server 15&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Joe's Software Shack database server bundle featuring PostgreSQL 15&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the options that may or may not be available to you are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Just go ahead with engaging whomever you want to make backups.  This is advisable only if it is permissible under applicable copyright law and in light of the details of your agreement the the provider (not the GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ask the provider to identify their proprietary components, so that you can remove them.  This carries a risk of rendering the software you wanted inoperable, which might then roll over to ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Demand that the provider reinstall with (only) the software the agreement specifies.  Of course, this assumes that the provider has done differently in the first place, which might not be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid performing backups (not recommended), or limit backups to pieces that you can be sure do not belong to the provider.  The database, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Engage the software provider to perform backups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wipe the server, and engage a more reputable software provider for the next one.  Note that you probably still need to pay the original software provider in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9078" LastEditorUserId="9078" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T06:29:35.837" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T06:29:35.837" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-19T19:13:06.173" Score="16" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've arranged for a software provider to install a free and open-source application on a server. The application is licensed under GPL-3.0-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've also stated that their installation includes proprietary copyrighted components belonging to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;you hired them to install a GPL-3.0 application on your server, but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;instead&lt;/em&gt; they installed the GPL-3.0 application &lt;strong&gt;plus&lt;/strong&gt; some proprietary component &lt;strong&gt;without your permission&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL (and you should double-check your contract first to make sure you &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; hired them &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; to install the GPL-3.0 application), but if we take your question at face value, &lt;strong&gt;they abused access to your server to install stuff you did not allow them to install&lt;/strong&gt;. This sounds (at least) like a breach of contract (again, if we take the wording in your question at face value) and (at worst) like something borderline illegal (depending on your jurisdiction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're generous, you might want to give them a chance to remove their crap and install (only) what you hired them to install. If you're not, lawyer up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27195" LastEditorUserId="27195" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T05:56:29.820" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T05:56:29.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13732" CreationDate="2023-02-19T19:25:26.560" Score="2" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a proprietary application and am considering using QtCharts, a GPL licensed low-level plotting library. The plotting aspect is not the IP we are trying to protect so I'm trying to think if there is a fair way to have my cake and eat it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm considering the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keep all our IP in proprietary libraries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the main application to a GPL compatible license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Have the main application load both our IP libraries and QtCharts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this isn't as open as FSF would like, but it is more than just a GPL condom. Someone could take the main application's source code and reasonably insert their own libraries to do something useful and more than just directly using QtCharts themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal? As authors of both the main application and the IP libraries I'm hoping we can grant ourselves the necessary exceptions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#FSWithNFLibs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). Does the answer change if the IP libraries depend on other libraries not written by us but with permissive licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** UPDATE **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I understand Phillip Kendall's point better now. Even if the main application is changed to a GPL license, use of QtCharts would prevent us from issuing the exception to use the proprietary library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the next logical step, for me it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Move IP to separate application (no GPL dependencies)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create an IPC library to talk to the proprietary application. This would be released under GPL with some sort of exception to use in the proprietary application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the GPL main application, using QtCharts, to use this IPC library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feels more like it is violating the intent of the GPL but legally is it on stronger footing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29309" LastEditorUserId="29309" LastEditDate="2023-02-20T00:22:08.027" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T01:59:35.883" Title="Yet another GPL + proprietary question" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13731" CreationDate="2023-02-19T20:34:15.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ question you link to is for a free application using non-free libraries, but your situation is the reverse: you want a non-free application using a free library. As you are creating a derivative work of the GPL library, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; obey the GPL for all code making up the combined work; you cannot grant an exemption to this because you are not the copyright owner for Qt Charts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to use Qt Charts in non-free software, you will need to pay for a Qt commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-02-19T20:34:15.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13721" CreationDate="2023-02-19T23:55:56.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google's tool for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/google/copybara&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copybara&lt;/a&gt;.  It's used within Google for exactly the cases you suggest -- as the readme says, &amp;quot;A common case is a project that involves maintaining a confidential repository and a public repository in sync.&amp;quot;  It's also handy for periodically importing changes from the public repository to the private one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29430" LastActivityDate="2023-02-19T23:55:56.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13731" CreationDate="2023-02-20T01:06:57.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create an IPC library to talk to the proprietary application. This would be released under GPL with some sort of exception to use in the proprietary application.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Change the GPL main application, using QtCharts, to use this IPC library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF takes the position that, if your proprietary application integrates with the &amp;quot;GPL main application&amp;quot; through a complex and intimate IPC interaction, then your proprietary application becomes a derivative work of the GPL application, and therefore of QtCharts. No amount of indirection through secondary libraries will fix that problem, according to the FSF. It also does not matter what license the IPC library is under, or what exceptions you may apply to it, because the problem is not with the IPC library itself, it's with the GPL application. While there is room for interpretation over whether the FSF is correct in this judgment, ultimately what matters is whether your application forms a &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/78442/323&quot;&gt;derivative work&lt;/a&gt; of the GPL'd application. If your application would be &lt;em&gt;incomplete&lt;/em&gt; without the GPL'd application, it may be difficult to argue that it is not a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical recommendation is to segregate the GPL'd component into a separate application altogether, and avoid intimate or complex IPC interactions. To do this, you should either use something like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gnuplot.info&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnuplot&lt;/a&gt;, which is a complete command-line application rather than a library, or you should repackage QtCharts into a similar command-line application, and then have your proprietary application invoke the plotting application as a separate process. There is no meaningful IPC in this arrangement, just a few command-line arguments and possibly input files consisting of simple data (e.g. x, y coordinates) to be plotted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF says that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;such an arrangement would &amp;quot;normally&amp;quot; constitute two separate programs rather than one program&lt;/a&gt;, although it should be stressed that this is ultimately just their interpretation of the license. If you get sued, a court would have to evaluate whether your proprietary application forms a derivative work of the plotting application, and nobody is going to give you an absolute guarantee about how a court would rule in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-02-21T01:59:35.883" LastActivityDate="2023-02-21T01:59:35.883" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-20T17:07:45.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They've also stated that their installation includes proprietary&#xA;copyrighted components belonging to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been in a similar situation before, and what they describe &lt;em&gt;could be&lt;/em&gt; completely legit.  Some service providers have proprietary, internal tools (analagous to Docker or Chef) that they use for provisioning and setting up virtual servers.  You wanted to use a program they haven't handled before, so they wrote a plugin to automate the installation process.  Your GPLed program is merely a data input into that plugin.  The plugin is a separate entity and can be licensed however the author wants.  Aside from protecting trade secrets, the source code to such a plugin would not be particularly useful to you since you don't have access to the tools that it goes with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, there's a big GPL trap here that the service provider risks falling into.  If the GPL program provides install scripts and parts of those scripts were used in the plugin, then the plugin risks inheriting the GPL.  The plugin would be safe if it, for instance, merely unpacked the program's zip file and executed the install script inside, or loaded the program as an OverlayFS image that was hand-built from a manual install.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They won't allow me to use a third party to backup the server&#xA;as it will breach the copyright of their work/install. They&#xA;would like to provide a server backup and charge a fee for&#xA;doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do a thorough deep-dive of this server, comparing it to one that you've set up yourself.  If some of their in-house software is still on the server, then you indeed may lack permission to copy it.  Some locales have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exceptions to copyright&lt;/a&gt; that cover backups.  If you can locate their in-house software and can see that it includes part of the original program's setup script, then you could argue that the GPL applies and you have full rights to it but the service provider is unlikely to agree unless you take it all the way to court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none of their proprietary software is still on the system or if what's still there can be removed, then they don't really have a good argument for preventing you from backing up your server (provided there's nothing about that in your contract).  I've had numerous service providers make similar claims that were just thinly-veiled attempts to upsell more services.  They tend to throw out techno-babble and pseudo-legalese, hoping that compliance seems easier than trying to figure out what your rights really are.  I generally try to come up with some requirement that their service cannot meet, like being able to access and restore the backup image after the service provider goes out of business and ceases to exist.  Once they see that there's no hope of upselling, they often become a lot more cooperative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that they claim their &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; is copyrighted, despite&#xA;this statement being a category error (processes are not copyrightable)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could simply be a poor choice of words.  A process itself is not copyrightable, but you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; copyright a program or script that implements that process.  I'm inclined to think that's what they meant, since the setup process they did is already complete and the only thing you have access to is the state of the system after the process.  If for some reason their proprietary software is still on the system, then you should definitely require them to remove it because you certainly do not want your production server to be running code some mystery code that's outside your control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T17:07:45.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13726" CreationDate="2023-02-20T20:35:19.650" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/united-states&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-states&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-states&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;united-states-container&quot;&gt;united-states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: I am not a lawyer. You should never take legal advice from anyone on the Internet. Even if I were a lawyer, I am not &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; lawyer, the only person qualified enough to answer definitively.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 117 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 provides that archival/backup of software you can legally use can be backed up by you, or any third party you authorize, provided you follow certain rules, namely that such archives are destroyed or transferred when the original is also sold or transferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, they cannot claim copyright because this is a work-for-hire (17 U.S. Code § 101). Since you hired them to perform some work, that work is now yours, and you own that software. They must transfer the copyright ownership to you, or they will be in breach of contract, since you do not own the software that they were hired to provide to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the software bits they added were proprietary, either you must get a license to use it, or the server would not be something you could use, as you don't have a license to use part of the server's software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they persist, I would consider talking to a lawyer about your options, because they almost certainly do not have any right to make the assertions they are claiming. This is a work-for-hire scenario, which means you own the final product, and therefore you, or any third party you choose, to maintain a backup of your server. Or, they've given you a defective product, because you cannot use it as deployed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="523" LastActivityDate="2023-02-20T20:35:19.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-22T03:22:25.437" Score="6" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking through the GPL FAQ, there is the question of if you can use the GPL license for non-software products, as long as it is clear what constitutes the source code. Of course, that does not mean it is advisable to do so. Asking mostly out of curiosity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about licensing original sheet music under the GPL license, and providing the source code along with it. If I were to do this, I would use Lilypond to generate the sheet music and since Lilypond is open-source and free there is no problem with this - anyone can access and modify the Lilypond code. And I like it that way. But what if someone took my music, but for whatever reasons did not want to use Lilypond to modify it so they translated it into a more common but non-free software such as Finale. As such, their &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; would be the finale project file, which as far as I know can only be opened with Finale which requires a fee for use (this may not be true, but for the premises of the question we will assume it is, since this is more of a conceptual question than a question about these specific details). It seems that providing sourcecode that can only be accessed or compiled with nonfree software violates the sprit of the GPL, but what about the letter? &lt;strong&gt;Are they required to translate their code back to Lilypond for distribution as required under the GPL, or does the Finale file still count even though a fee is required to even open it?&lt;/strong&gt; As an in-between, what if they translated it into a program like Musecore that is free and open source but requires entirely different procedures to modify (Musescore is graphical editing, Lilypond is actual code. Sort of like LibreOffice and Latex).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to address some questions in the comments:&#xA;To my knowledge, Finale project files cannot be opened without paying to use the Finale program. Please assume this is true for the purposes of this question, since this is more of a theoretical question with a specific example to explain the theory, than a question about the specific example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this restriction would be beyond what is required by a Creative Commons Share Alike license - that requires that the new thing made based on my thing be shared under CC-SA, but not that the files used to create it be shared, let alone be in a modifiable format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If GPL does not require that any derivative work of my music is released in Lilypond code or at least something free to modify, is it possible to modify it to make that be required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related, but not duplicate, since in this case the provided source can be compiled, just not for free: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2688/18881&quot;&gt;Do you violate the GPL if you provide source code that cannot be compiled?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Vaguely related, though in this case I think what the source code is is clearly established: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/741/18881&quot;&gt;With GPL, what does &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; mean for non-software?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Near duplicate, but not quite, since it is not about the format of the source files, only their existence: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/664/18881&quot;&gt;Is there a share-alike licence for media which specifies that the project files must be published as well as the finished media?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;More background on this:&#xA;While I do not work in the music industry, it is my impression that most professional music producing tools are paid software, so professional musicians would be mostly familiar with them. Likewise, since those are the industry standards, those are what are taught to music students (even grade school students - one of my very first music books came with a &quot;free&quot; CD of student-version Finale), and of course what is taught to students trickles down into what hobbyists sometimes learn if they are taught by well-meaning people who don't know any better that the only good tools you have to pay for. &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But, as stated, I do not work in the music industry and only write music as a hobby. There are free tools out there, and several of the are quite good. Musescore is the most popular, but it has become increasingly locked down - the software itself is free but access to other's music published on the website is not, there is some sort of pro subscription that gives you something or other, etc. It also is a graphical WYSIWYG type program, which I find annoying to deal with because it is hard to copy and paste and is generally a destructive style workflow. So I use Lilypond which is a plaintext based program that, for lack of a better comparison, is basically LATEX for music (I think it even uses a modified TEX engine on the back-end to make the PDFs). &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But that is not the point. While I do not care about performance or recording rights (or at the very least, they are outside the scope of the question), if I ever decide to publish something I have written, I would like to require that any published derivative work have the music and source files shared in an accessible format. This is to avoid anyone wishing to make a derivative work of the derivative work being forced to transcribe from the PDF sheet music into Lilypond or another program, which is tedious, time consuming, and error prone.It is much easier to give them the file used to generate the sheet music so that they may modify it directly. Apparently this is an uncommon thing to do, so it is rather hard to research the concept, let alone determine what if any standard exists for this. &#xA;&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18881" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-23T10:26:18.640" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T13:58:45.190" Title="Is it a GPL violation to provide source code in a format that can only be opened or &quot;compiled&quot; with non-free software?" Tags="|gpl|copyleft|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-22T03:27:54.900" Score="1" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;How could redistribution clauses common to copyleft licenses (paraphrased below) be applied to purely hardware products? i.e. products that contain no software or firmware but where all design documents are copyrighted under a strong copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to enforce the requirement that the product be provided to the users with access to all documentation and source information required to reproduce it? Additionally can this right be extended to modifications of that physical product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched SE and found one answer [1] which does indicate that the physical product cannot itself be copyrighted but it's not clear to me where the line is drawn in determining the extent of rights conferred to the user from the license used to create the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I released a copyleft piece of clothing (all design/manufacturing documents are copyleft), could I require that any manufacturer that produces it include the license, attribution, and documentation (or a link) &amp;quot;in the box&amp;quot; with the physical product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a retail store that acquired this product then be able to bypass the intent of these conditions by removing the documentation, license, and attribution from the box, packaging it back up, and selling it to a customer that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At what point would this restriction stop? Would a user/customer be able to re-sell or give the product to another user if they lost the license/docs? In the event they made modifications to this product (repairs, etc), would they need to document those changes to be able to transfer ownership of the product to another person and if so to what degree would they need to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1081/22149&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1081/22149&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="22149" LastEditorUserId="22149" LastEditDate="2023-02-22T05:20:17.183" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T12:50:59.870" Title="How do copyleft redistribution clauses fit in with purely hardware products?" Tags="|copyleft|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13743" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-22T10:12:24.937" Score="4" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL license, when a piece of software links to a GPLed library, the distributed binaries must be licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some corner cases, for example when instead of linking directly, you use a system of plugins, as described here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also some loopholes that allow to use GPL software on cloud services, as the binaries are not distributed and they run on the cloud instance. This is addressed by the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the situation when distributing the software in two pieces? One piece (lets call it A) uses the GPL library, and therefore is licensed as GPL, and another piece (B) which is linked to the first using some kind of local network communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29451" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-02-22T11:12:21.153" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T13:01:23.033" Title="GPL to non GPL software over local network" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13743" CreationDate="2023-02-22T11:41:01.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GPL license, when a piece of software links to a GPLed library, the distributed binaries must be licensed under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license says that &lt;em&gt;derivative works&lt;/em&gt; need to be GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not linking (and in which forms that happens) implies forming a derivative work is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not really consistently answered by relevant court cases, even in the U.S.&lt;/a&gt;, and let's not get started on the fact that there's more jurisdictions that the U.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that you'd be doing well playing it save, and assume the strictest interpretation (the FSF one), but if you have vested business interest in using a different interpretation, then you might be driven to other conclusions (which I don't necessarily share); there is more than one case of precedence for that working out well so far for the people doing it. I think the most prominent case might be Canonical (the Ubuntu company) shipping precompiled kernel modules of CDDL code (for ZFS support). So, because the GPL certainly isn't the best-written license out there, there's a lot of room for individual lawyers and judges to come to different conclusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some corner cases, for example when instead of linking directly, you use a system of plugins, as described here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally do not share the opinion of the FSF here: if I write, say, a video editor program that has video effect plugins, then the video editor doesn't become a derivative work of the &amp;quot;replace video with blackness&amp;quot; GPL plugin that I might add. FSF's wording is pathologically vague; they argue through &amp;quot;complex data structures&amp;quot;; I'd call a Ethernet/IP/TCP/HTTP2/HTML5+JSON stream a &amp;quot;complex data structure&amp;quot;, but it's &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; classical example for where it's OK to use a non-GPL program (a browser) with a GPL web server. &amp;quot;Complex&amp;quot; is an extremely relative term and has barely any normatively useful character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also some loopholes that allow to use GPL software on cloud services, as the binaries are not distributed and they run on the cloud instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not a loop hole – that's intentional. The output of GPL programs were never &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to be mandatorily GPL-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the situation when distributing the software in two pieces? One piece (lets call it A) uses the GPL library, and therefore is licensed as GPL, and another piece (B) which is linked to the first using some kind of local network communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the link I gave to the discussion what constitutes derivative works. I'd argue whether the method of linkage (static, dynamic linking, plugin derivative work, shared memory, network, printing-mailing-scanning…) has zero bearing on whether something constitutes a derivative work. Lawyers do argue the same way, but also the opposite way. It seems to be currently not court-settled in any relevant jurisdiction I'm aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2879" LastEditorUserId="2879" LastEditDate="2023-02-22T11:46:58.033" LastActivityDate="2023-02-22T11:46:58.033" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-22T19:17:26.877" Score="3" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages&lt;/a&gt;, almost every single package in Alpine Linux is versioned as &lt;code&gt;a.b.c-rd&lt;/code&gt; where &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;b&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;c&lt;/code&gt; &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; are numbers, &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; is the &amp;quot;patch release&amp;quot; of the version &lt;code&gt;a.b.c&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the name implies, I suppose the patch release is a bug or security fix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What about the licensing of the package? Is it possible that the license of a package is changing within a patch release, or can we ensure that the license is always the same within for a fixed &lt;code&gt;a.b.c&lt;/code&gt; version, whatever &lt;code&gt;d&lt;/code&gt; is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background is legal compliance: when we deliver a software based on Alpine Linux (delivered as Docker container), we need to ensure that the license of every single component is properly defined and delivered with our software. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But &amp;quot;clearing&amp;quot; a component requires getting the source code, and is always time consuming. I see &lt;a href=&quot;https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/496755/how-to-get-the-source-code-used-to-build-the-packages-of-the-base-alpine-linux-d/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; how to get the exact source code of a package, but this is much more complex that getting just the tag of the related GitHub repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for compliance purposes, if the license remains the same, I would like to take any package of version &lt;code&gt;a.b.c&lt;/code&gt; and ignore the release patch. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29456" LastEditorUserId="29456" LastEditDate="2023-02-22T19:48:46.837" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T10:16:43.480" Title="Alpine Linux and package versioning: can the license change in a release patch?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13745" CreationDate="2023-02-22T20:31:07.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Version numbers are, at best, a social contract between developers, packagers, and end users. You should not assume that version numbers will satisfy SemVer with respect to legal aspects like licensing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Package_policies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alpine Linux does document policies on package names, version numbers, and licensing&lt;/a&gt;, but these are too flexible to be useful for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should not assume that version numbers have any general meaning at all, other than maybe that they are a monotonically increasing sequence. I notice that there are Alpine packages including software I wrote, and the Alpine packagers did not reach out to me to check what I mean by the version numbers I chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are concerned about unexpected license changes, you may be able to write scripts that detect such changes. For example, you could extract the &lt;code&gt;license&lt;/code&gt; field from the APKBUILD file, though this is just package metadata and not the actual license. Packagers too are only human, and might fail to notice when this metadata has to be updated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want an easier time with Open Source license compliance, I would humbly suggest choosing a Linux distro with more thorough processes. Don't get me wrong, the Alpine project is &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt;, but the Debian community cares a lot about proper licensing, and has built-in mechanisms for distributing licenses and source code for packages. Ultimately, this is a business decision for you how much you care about container image size, license compliance, and the effort necessary to achieve those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2023-02-23T10:16:43.480" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T10:16:43.480" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13742" CreationDate="2023-02-23T10:23:38.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: &lt;em&gt;How could redistribution clauses common to copyleft licenses be applied to purely hardware products?&lt;/em&gt; They can't, and shouldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, it seems to me, is that hardware isn't software.  The very things that make the GPL more suitable for software (awareness of the existence of source code, requirement for its ongoing free availability) make it a lot less suitable for hardware, and arm-waving about the effective equivalence of source code and design schematics doesn't make it any better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you need is a licence specifically intended for FOSH (free/open-source hardware), such as the TAPR &lt;a href=&quot;https://files.tapr.org/OHL/TAPR_Open_Hardware_License_v1.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Hardware Licence&lt;/a&gt;.  You can read through that, see how it distinguishes between &lt;em&gt;documentation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;product&lt;/em&gt;, and how it handles both.  It's not a perfect licence, but at least it emerged out of community discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-23T12:50:59.870" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T12:50:59.870" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13743" CreationDate="2023-02-23T13:01:23.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OP: What is the situation when distributing the software in two&#xA;pieces? One piece (lets call it A) uses the GPL library, and therefore&#xA;is licensed as GPL, and another piece (B) which is linked to the first&#xA;using some kind of local network communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clearly answered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this GPL FAQ entry&lt;/a&gt;, especially the &lt;strong&gt;bolded&lt;/strong&gt; part below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inter-process communication, such as communication over sockets, would, in most cases, make B an aggregate of A, and so the GPL license of A will not apply to B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of&#xA;“modified versions”?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed&#xA;together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to&#xA;create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the&#xA;other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible. The only condition is&#xA;that you cannot release the aggregate under a license that prohibits&#xA;users from exercising rights that each program's individual license&#xA;would grant them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the line between two separate programs, and one program with&#xA;two parts? This is a legal question, which ultimately judges will&#xA;decide. We believe that a proper criterion depends both on the&#xA;mechanism of communication (exec, pipes, rpc, function calls within a&#xA;shared address space, etc.) and the semantics of the communication&#xA;(what kinds of information are interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;program.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; talks about &amp;quot;aggregates&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent&#xA;works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,&#xA;and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,&#xA;in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an&#xA;“aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not&#xA;used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users&#xA;beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work&#xA;in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other&#xA;parts of the aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T13:01:23.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13741" CreationDate="2023-02-23T13:58:45.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As long as the source code is readable for the recipients (i.e. not encrypted or password protected, not obfuscated) and actually qualifies according to the definition in the license language, it is fine to use a file format that is not generally used by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of&#xA;a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your case is a little bit like translating software into another new programming language. No doubt, it is a derivative work. Will I be required to provide you with free of charge set of development tools for this new programming language? Or will I be required to provide a back-translation of my derivative work into Java or C#? Nothing in the GPL License points into this direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical case:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let's assume for argument's sake a picture in PNG format under GPL license. PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 48-bit RGB or 64-bit RGBA colors). Let's assume I convert the colors of the picture into a 72-bit RGBA palette because I need that for a scientific analysis. It is clearly outside of the standard, and only my own software will be able to read it, but it is a derivative work for which I need to provide the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the GPL license states that --by creating this picture with non-standard palette, and providing it as a derivative work to downstream recipients-- I will have to publish software that enables the recipients of the derivative work source code to deal with the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example shows one of the limitations of GPL: it is tailored for software, and based on that GPL has some assumptions, for example that the source code is in a text format (and there are only a handful of file formats for that) and everybody can read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your specific case with the sheet music files: You will not be able to force a translation back into the format of your choice. Any source code format is fine. The musx file format seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://filext.com/file-extension/MUSX&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reasonably well documented&lt;/a&gt;. It might be proprietary (i.e. only used by one software), but there seem to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://fileproinfo.com/free-online-apps-tools/musx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;converters and tools&lt;/a&gt; to deal with it. (pls. note; I have not checked the accuracy or quality of the information on these pages)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-02-23T13:58:45.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-23T14:42:56.423" Score="3" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming I am building a solution that leverages &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ansible.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ansible&lt;/a&gt; to set up an environment for my application to live. If I package my solution in a server image that contains Ansible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will the use of Ansible as a tool (assuming it's packaged in the server image I distribute) considered as using it as a &amp;quot;library&amp;quot; and would it require me to open source my whole solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29460" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-02-23T14:47:42.237" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T09:09:14.267" Title="Ansible under GPLv3: can you redistribute it without open-sourcing the rest of my solution?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13755" CreationDate="2023-02-24T04:29:23.313" Score="1" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like permissive style licenses (e.g. BSD3) and dislike copyleft ones (e.g. GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to develop some OSS permissively, but I want to prevent people from forking it and relicensing it with copyleft. What good candidate licenses exist that satisfy this requirement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29467" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T10:01:00.127" Title="Permissive license that prevents copyleft" Tags="|licensing|permissive|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-02-24T13:36:41.483" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13752" CreationDate="2023-02-24T05:54:27.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Apache-1.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 1.1&lt;/a&gt; is a good choice to meet your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a free and permissive license, and it has the following condition which is not unreasonable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Products derived from this software may not be called &amp;quot;Apache&amp;quot;,&#xA;nor may &amp;quot;Apache&amp;quot; appear in their name, without prior written&#xA;permission of the Apache Software Foundation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the above clause renders it incompatible to be re-licensed under or included as part of software licensed under any license in the GPL family. You can find it listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache1.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL license incompatibility list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache License, Version 1.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a permissive non-copyleft free software license. It has a few&#xA;requirements that render it incompatible with the GNU GPL, such as&#xA;strong prohibitions on the use of Apache-related names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this incompatibility is that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; and other licenses in this family of licenses contain a condition similar to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, using Apache License 1.1 will not cause your software to become incompatible with other copyleft licenses such as Mozilla Public License 2.0 or Eclipse Public License 2.0, which are weak copyleft licenses anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using this method is generally not recommended, as it will make your software incompatible to be used by GPL or LGPL or AGPL-licensed software, as a library. But if your software is a standalone application and not meant to be used as a library, then it may not matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-02-24T05:59:29.383" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T05:59:29.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13750" CreationDate="2023-02-24T09:09:14.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, using Ansible as a tool or library in your solution would not require you to open source your whole solution. Ansible is licensed under the GPLv3, which is a copyleft license that requires you to share the source code of any modifications or derivatives of the Ansible codebase that you distribute. However, this does not mean that you need to open source your entire solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you distribute a server image that includes Ansible, you would only need to share the modified source code of Ansible itself (if any modifications were made).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If your solution includes any scripts or playbooks that are specific to your application and are not part of the Ansible codebase, those scripts may need to be released under an open source license compatible with the GPLv3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25057" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T09:09:14.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13752" CreationDate="2023-02-24T09:13:08.383" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're asking for a permissive licence that requires derivatives to be under the same permissive licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a term for licences that grant the same rights as permissive licences, excepting the right to distribute under additional terms - &lt;strong&gt;and that term is &amp;quot;copyleft licence&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.  I think it's important to realise this: the principal thing that distinguishes copyleft licences (as a class) from permissive licences (as a class) is the requirement to redistribute under the same licence.  All the other stuff, eg about source availability, is just stuff to give practical meaning to the requirement to redistribute under the same licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think you're going to find what you seek.  I acknowledge ruben2020's clever hack regarding Apache1.1, but I would contend that the &amp;quot;poison pill&amp;quot; naming restriction that prevents redistribution under GPL also makes the licence (strictly) non-free, for all that the FSF says otherwise, it being a restriction on freedom 4 (the modified redistribution right) by restricting naming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-02-24T10:01:00.127" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T10:01:00.127" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-02-24T19:44:18.197" Score="4" ViewCount="1076" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assume some GPL v3 code used to train some AI model (e.g. trained a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language model&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLaMA&lt;/a&gt;). Can I make any use of this model (e.g., use it in a closed-source program), or does it have to abide by GPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarification: The code that executed the training process was GPLv3-licensed. Let's assume that the input material has a friendly license (for the question focusing on the input material license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/q/11183/31&quot;&gt;Distributing machine learning models (e.g., word embeddings) based on non-sharable datasets&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastEditorUserId="210" LastEditDate="2023-02-24T20:12:27.483" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T21:23:35.687" Title="GPL v3 code used to train some AI model: can I make any use of this model, or does it have to abide by GPL v3?" Tags="|gpl-3|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13758" CreationDate="2023-02-24T20:54:13.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;points out&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright on the code of the program. So the license of the code of the program does not apply to the output, whether you pipe it into a file, make a screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text and/or art that comes from the program. Then the copyright on that text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as video games, would also fit into this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other question about output&lt;/a&gt;, in context I think the phrase &amp;quot;comes from the program&amp;quot; is a somewhat confusing way of writing &amp;quot;is &lt;em&gt;copied or derived from&lt;/em&gt; the program&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;is output from the program&amp;quot; (because then the exception would swallow the rule!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An AI model is &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; a big bag of statistical information related to the training inputs. It does not (typically) contain substantial portions of the training program, and is therefore not (typically) subject to the license of the training program. In some cases, AI models are &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pickled&lt;/a&gt;, and pickles do contain references to specific functions within the program that created them. But this is pretty &lt;em&gt;de minimis&lt;/em&gt; - pickles do not normally contain actual code, they merely tell the pickle library what code to invoke. Regardless, the use of pickles is discouraged for security reasons, so ideally this just doesn't come up in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more serious question is whether the model is subject to copyright protection at all. This is currently unclear. On the one hand, copyright law in most jurisdictions does not protect works unless they are the result of human authorship, and the US in particular does not recognize copyrights on &amp;quot;bare&amp;quot; collections of facts (see &lt;em&gt;Feist v. Rural&lt;/em&gt;). On the other hand, most European jurisdictions do recognize &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database rights&lt;/a&gt; independently of copyright, and those may apply in this case. Furthermore, the US does recognize a &amp;quot;thin&amp;quot; (as described in the aforementioned case) copyright on the selection, presentation, or organization of data, if it involves original creative work performed by a human (in this case, that might include the selection of training materials). To the best of my knowledge, no court has yet confronted this question, so we'll have to wait and see what happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-02-24T21:23:35.687" LastActivityDate="2023-02-24T21:23:35.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13761" CreationDate="2023-02-26T22:20:41.063" Score="3" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a Flutter developer, and it's documentation code samples are licensed under BSD-3, does that mean when learning from it and then applying that to my code I should include the license in my code (and how would I do that), or only when copying substantial blocks from the documentation into my code (which I do not do, I only read documentation to get a sense on how I should use the API),&#xA;The way I do it right now is by showing all licenses in the form of text of every package I use, and give the option to display it in my UI, including Flutter's BSD-3 notice, using a ready-made function, does that cover it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29486" LastEditorUserId="29486" LastEditDate="2023-02-27T10:34:29.247" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T10:34:29.247" Title="BSD-3 Licensing in Framework's Documentation" Tags="|licensing|bsd|documentation|software-development|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13760" CreationDate="2023-02-27T09:53:48.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3&lt;/a&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permissive license&lt;/a&gt;, which means that as long as you provide attribution to the original authors and as long as you provide the license language you can freely use it in your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are looking here at several different levels of use of the code from the documentation. Learning -- copying insignificant parts -- copying substantial blocks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic legal framework for software licenses is the copyright. So when you just learn from other code, but you don't copy it, then the licenses do not have any impact on what you are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for copyright to apply, the text/code must exceed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;threshold of originality&lt;/a&gt;. And here starts the grey zone, because this is not easy to determine, and it is not the same in all jurisdictions. If you are just copying simple no-brainer lines of trivial code, which everybody more or less does in the same way, then this code might not meet the threshold of originality, and you can use it without attribution and respecting the license terms. But again, this is a grey zone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as you are copying substantial blocks you will be above the threshold of originality and copyright applies, that means you have to have to fulfill the terms required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the 3-Clause BSD License it is easy to comply with the terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from&#xA;this software without specific prior written permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not need to put the license and copyright notice into the UI, it is sufficient to provide it (in a .txt or .md file) with the code you distribute. It is good practice to have these files in the top-level folder of the distributed files. If you want to have something in the UI, then please do that in addition to the plain text files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-02-27T09:53:48.160" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13762" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13772" CreationDate="2023-03-01T02:23:34.380" Score="13" ViewCount="2240" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to prevent mod developers from stealing code from other mod developers in my game. The best way that I know how is to only ever support mods that are open-source. I know about the SteamWorkshop but I can't seem to find anything about it that lets me do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a friend that is a mod developer for Minecraft. Recently his open-source work got privatized by another mod developer team without proper attribution. All through out the experience, he has suffered hate from the public. His mod was called a &amp;quot;cheap knock&amp;quot; off of the other mod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He got even more hate when he tried raising the issue getting called out as a liar even though he has proof which he cant share to the public. The other mod devs accidentally set their Github repo to &amp;quot;public&amp;quot;, giving him enough time to read thru the code and download a copy. He can't share any of it since they set their repo back to &amp;quot;private&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Refusing to escalate it to court (because nobody goes to court over Minecraft), he, his team, and people that used their mod publicly have been harassed. This has been going on for a few months now since the last time I checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit I also felt the effects over a few of my social platform accounts but I am more concerned about seeing my friends in this state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way to stop this from happening in my game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TBH, I just want to provide a way for my community to know the truth first before they try chewing out the wrong people(if I can't stop them from chewing out anyone, at least). From what I saw, most of the hate thrown at my friends came from the same people they try to impress (yes, they're still working on the mod despite all of this). Most of the community believes that they're in the wrong without fully understanding the whole issue and mostly because they couldn't present any solid proof to the crowd without breaking the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I see it it's all because of privatization. My friends can't properly speak about it to the public and neither the other side (without escalating it to court(and if this happens to my game I think it would ruin its experience)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any problems with mods getting monetized. As I understand it, privatization is a viable choice for people planning to monetize their code but I do understand that people can still monetize open-source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make it easier if I could offset mod management to some other platform. Is there a mod-sharing platform out there that I can set to only allow mods for my game to be posted with links to their open-source repo or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29499" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-11T09:37:49.313" LastActivityDate="2023-04-11T09:37:49.313" Title="Is there a way to only permit open-source mods for my video game to stop people from stealing code or at least enforce proper attribution?" Tags="|licensing|attribution|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13762" CreationDate="2023-03-01T07:54:23.587" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find myself thinking about the development of the calculus.  Newton invented it first but didn't publish, merely sharing his unpublished notes with a few hand-picked members of the Royal Society.  Leibnitz, meanwhile, invented it on his own; later than Newton, but he published promptly.  Newton accused him of plagiarism, and the issue developed into a full-court bunfight which ran for decades, if not centuries, to the benefit of nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for well over three hundred years we have known that the best way to establish primacy of discovery is to do your work in the public eye, and that if you choose not to, you may end up having a nasty fight about primacy later on.  Your first paragraph indicates that you know this, so I urge you to go with your gut: doing your development in public, particularly if it's on someone else's servers, makes any argument about exact dates of this-and-that completely pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do you, as the developer of the main system, assist in this (though I note in passing that it's not actually your job to do so)?  The easiest way is to publish your code under GPL, and make it clear that your plugin interface is not available for use by proprietary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-01T10:42:06.167" LastActivityDate="2023-03-01T10:42:06.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13762" CreationDate="2023-03-01T13:48:36.577" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Provide a legitimate route for mods to run on the game, and have it pull from public git repos&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming your game uses unity, or similar, there is little you can do to stop people modding it. There's all kinds of fun patchers that exist purely to get mods working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is build an easy, in built way of installing mods, and have that install only from public git repos. You can even go so far as to have your code check for a standard OS licence, and refuse to install it otherwise. Obviously, document all this in however you display the docs for modding the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could also add in stipulations to your game's licence about not creating mods that are not open source. This is only as powerful as your ability or will to enforce it. You can issue takedown requests for mods that breach it, have a law firm send cease and desist letters to people who create the mods, etc, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, though, I think you want to combine all these approaches with a public relations approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Make a super easy way of pulling in mods from github repos&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add legal clauses into your game's licencing about installing mods not via this method. Decide on the level of enforcement you are willing to take- i.e, is court an option? Is a cease and desist? is paying someone to comb mod forums and issue takedown requests? Enforcement can also be selective - i.e, if you have bad actors, or a mod that grows too big, then you can hit them at this point. Expect to alienate people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Explain, clearly and positively to the community why you have taken this approach. You're trying to make sure modders can be fairly recognised for their efforts, trying to make sure there's a community building mods that can learn from each other, etc, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expect this to work imperfectly. I don't know what your game is, but if it gets popular, people will not necessarily take the route you provide all the time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, this is going to be an extremely hard balance to strike. Too much enforcement and restrictions, and your game simply won't have a modding community, or at least veer more towards the &amp;quot;Aimbots and cheat mods&amp;quot; types of mods. Get the install mechanism wrong, and people will just build their own, without these restrictions. Get the community messaging wrong, and people will decide you're just a terrible person, and go build a different mechanism out of spite. Fail to respect the 4th point, and you'll burn out from playing whack a mole against mod authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit: If the goal is to prove creator priority, after some research, git might not be the best tool. Turns out you can modify git dates, and it works rather well, although a timestamp may be preserved on the server somewhere. I still think requiring pulling from git repos is a decent solution, however, I think at this point it's reasonable to include a clause insisting on unobsfucated source code in your licence agreement. I'd advise against trying to detect obsfucated code programatically, as a quick google got me into machine learning territory very quickly.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29505" LastEditorUserId="29505" LastEditDate="2023-03-02T09:48:14.237" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T09:48:14.237" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13766" CreationDate="2023-03-01T14:01:01.277" Score="7" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a library in my program and that library has a MIT licence. I don't download the library itself I just use it via a CDN provider.&#xA;Do I need to include the library's licence? If yes, how should I do it, where should I put it? (I'm using GitHub for this open source project.)&#xA;Do I need to include it to the downloads (Releases page on Github)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29506" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-01T14:43:25.163" LastActivityDate="2023-03-01T15:23:14.893" Title="Should I include the MIT licence of a library which I use from a CDN?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13765" CreationDate="2023-03-01T15:23:14.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only legal requirement you have is that you don't remove the license text and copyright statements from the files you download from the CDN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of goodwill, it is good to mention in your project documentation, for example in a readme file, that you are using this library, which license it uses and where the source code is hosted. There, you don't need to include the actual text of the license, but only the (common) name under which it is known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-01T15:23:14.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13762" CreationDate="2023-03-01T17:22:54.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. That usually doesn't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, most open source licenses have a clause that requires attribution. But if someone refuses to follow that clause, then the only way to get recourse is by going through the legal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you require mods to be distributed in sourcecode form only, there are tools that can be used to obfuscate sourcecode in a way that makes it hard to prove beyond doubt where it originally came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, requiring mods to be distributed as sourcecode also has other advantages. It makes it easier for players to confirm what the mods actually do and that they don't contain anything malicious. A good way to do that is by adding a scripting language to your game with a powerful API that allows anything modders would probably want, and then add a mechanism for loading mods in scriptcode form at runtime. Together with your own system for managing mods that is built into the game and easy to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming your scripting API is powerful enough and your interface convenient enough, there is no reason for the modding community to come up with launchers that use nasty binary code injection tricks like they have to use in games like Minecraft. Mods in form of script files will be the preferred way to mod your game, and there won't be a reason for anyone to build the technology that would be required for mods based on code injection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2023-03-01T17:29:18.157" LastActivityDate="2023-03-01T17:29:18.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13800" CreationDate="2023-03-01T22:52:23.010" Score="-3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In GitHub, it is possible to ask a question as an issue. There is even a default label named as &amp;quot;question&amp;quot; for issues like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Supposing this question as an issue is answered with a text comment inside the issue's comment section, should the issue be closed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In theory, I would say &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot;, since the &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, my experience is that if the issue is still open I believe it is easier for people to see it before asking the same thing again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your thoughts on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29513" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T21:50:23.320" Title="Should a GitHub issue with a &quot;question&quot; label should be closed once the question is answered at the comment section?" Tags="|github|issue-tracking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-03-05T11:39:23.517" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13771" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-02T10:52:26.843" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;My plugin dll depends on the presence of Microsoft Excel on a client computer. Excel is not part of the OS. The dependency is a 2 way transfer of data, the dll I created only works if run from inside Excel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code of my application is all open source. Other than the dependency on Excel, there is a dependency on another package. There are 2 (3) Scenarios I'm wondering about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scenario 1: If the non-Excel dependency is GPL, then my plugin must be GPL also, meaning I have to distribute source code of all my dependencies (except kernel/operating system stuff) - which I don't have for Excel. Does this mean I cannot reference the GPL package as my project cannot adhere to the license terms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scenario 2: I remove the second dependency and only depend on Excel. I want to make my plugin LGPL so other people can build it into their code. Again, can I &lt;em&gt;choose&lt;/em&gt; to make my code LGPL if it depends on something closed source; how could someone who derives a new plugin from my one (inheriting the LGPL license) disclose the full source of their transitive dependency to Excel?&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scenario 2b: I depend on Excel + derived code from an LGPL library, forcing me to inherit LGPL or GPL. I choose LGPL but can I adhere to that without Excel source code? Is this back to Scenario 1?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My end goal; license the plugin with a weak copyleft license like LGPLv3 or Mozilla License 2.0. Ideally allow me to derive code from another weak copyleft starting point (I have been gifted some code under GPL I may be able to negotiate it to LGPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29520" LastEditorUserId="29520" LastEditDate="2023-03-02T13:35:17.083" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T13:35:17.083" Title="Can my open-source package adhere to GPL/LGPL v3 if it has a closed-source dependency?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13762" CreationDate="2023-03-02T11:27:33.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @Philipp, @MadHatter and @Lupe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can gather from their answers, completely forcing Modders to be open-source would either risk alienating my community or be very tedious to implement thru physical code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That got me thinking, I should tackle this in a more social approach instead of only using technical and bureaucratic force (though, I will be using them in some degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will make it possible to raise my communities awareness of the risk of using privatized mods along with the implications of possible code theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do so I plan on implementing user notifications and prompts on installing mods with obfuscated code in-game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will also try to raise awareness thru the mod-sharing-platforms that I'm going to be supporting. Like on the SteamWorkshop's community header or something similar to other platforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to what @Lupe suggests, I will make sure to include it in my game's user licensing that mods should make their source available to the public without obfuscation from wherever they decide to host their mod download and where people can read it easily (I'll try and consult with a lawyer to put it in proper clause).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't stop people from creating privately owned code for mods (even though it would break contract) but it would let my community easily gain the facts enough to think on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Lupe pointed out, detecting obfuscation would be too complex of a task for its purpose of activating a notification. Instead, I think it would be best to just implement it as a reminder each time a user loads in the mods UI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The users should be cognitive enough to know where the mod they downloaded came from and whether or not it had privatized code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manual flagging a privatized mod would be great on a supported mod-sharing platform but I can't guarantee that privatized modders would host their mods somewhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29499" LastEditorUserId="29499" LastEditDate="2023-03-03T03:49:11.783" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T03:49:11.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13778" CreationDate="2023-03-02T16:48:48.243" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I am asking is: can other people create work / obligations for me to respond to written requests to package up and send some physical media (and collect a reasonable fee, etc.) for the source code of my GPL programs because they have been distributing them without the source &lt;strong&gt;even though in my original and current distros I include the source in the downloaded folder that contains the binaries&lt;/strong&gt; (but in their distro, which could be a much more popular source of download than mine, they don't include the source)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[For avoidance of confusion, I am referring to others distributing my GPL binaries without alterations and without them creating derivative works. Also, I am not referring to the use of any specific download sites like GitHub. This could be on any sites: mine vs. theirs].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29524" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T11:07:43.637" Title="If somebody else distributes my GPL program without the source code, am I liable to fulfil written source requests?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13802" CreationDate="2023-03-02T19:35:36.627" Score="2" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are using an open sourced (Apache 2.0 License) OCR framework/library for a website. User uploads an image to our web portal, we send that image to the backend, which hands over that image to the library, the library scans the image for text and outputs the same, which our server sends to the frontend to be displayed to the user as text contained in the image he/she had uploaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have made some custom changes to the library for our purpose. As far as we can see, there are two clauses we need to care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License and copyright notice.&lt;/strong&gt; Where do we show that here? On the frontend when the OCR text is displayed, like a footnote at the bottom of the textbox or something reading like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Made possible with {this library} under Apache 2.0 license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;? If not so, how and where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;State changes.&lt;/strong&gt; Where do we state the changes? We are maintaining the modified library code in our own repo (not Github yet). Where do we state it? On the front end, like the above - &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Made possible with a modified version of {this library} under Apache 2.0 license&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;? If not, how and where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29525" LastEditorUserId="29525" LastEditDate="2023-03-02T19:43:11.067" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T09:34:47.123" Title="How to handle Apache 2 license for backend use" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-02T21:36:06.490" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have an AGPL web application that supports themes for customization and someone uses the application with a given theme on the server. Does the theme need to have the same AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will hypothetically happen if WordPress was AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15927" LastActivityDate="2023-03-02T21:36:06.490" Title="Do you need to share source code of the theme when using inside web application that use AGPL?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11973" CreationDate="2023-03-03T03:58:38.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this articles which gives some answers: Open Collective's response to the introduction of GitHub Sponsors &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/open-collective/on-github-sponsors-5450b63caf7d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://medium.com/open-collective/on-github-sponsors-5450b63caf7d&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is Open Collective different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Open Source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fully Transparent&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Built for Projects&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiscal Sponsorship&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally:&#xA;GitHub is Microsoft, which has its own metrics in mind, and it will be difficult for them to be independent, regardless of the good faith of the folks involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that it's also possible to link GitHub Sponsors to Open Collective to centralize things: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oscollective.org/campagins-programs-and-partnerships/github-sponsors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.oscollective.org/campagins-programs-and-partnerships/github-sponsors&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opencollective.com/github-sponsors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opencollective.com/github-sponsors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29526" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T03:58:38.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13773" CreationDate="2023-03-03T11:07:43.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you did not distribute the binaries in or on a physical product (including a physical medium like a CD-ROM) that was accompanied by a written offer for the sources, then nobody can redistribute those binaries with a written offer &lt;em&gt;in your name&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial written offer for source code is only present when you distribute the binaries according to section 6b. The written offer can only be duplicated (on an incidental basis), when someone has received the offer under section 6b and re-distributes the code under section 6c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by what you wrote, you are conveying the binaries in accordance with section 6d, where the source code is very literally in the same place as the binaries. That leaves for other who want to re-distribute those binaries only two options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distribute them in the same way as you do: with the source code in the same package&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Host the source code for separate download themselves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T11:07:43.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13782" CreationDate="2023-03-03T11:20:27.280" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a customer uploading data to our embedded device. This data is compressed using LZO compression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there is GPL code available, and correct me if I'm wrong, but using that would require us to GPL all the application software in our embedded device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found an explanation of what the decompressor does &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/staging/lzo.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and it seems (fairly) simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can I just write my own LZO decompressor routine without getting swept up in the LZO GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29529" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-11T09:00:51.440" LastActivityDate="2023-04-11T09:00:51.440" Title="Can I write my own non-GPL LZO decompressor?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13783" CreationDate="2023-03-03T11:23:58.330" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a bit of a stupid question. But can I have login features (so send data to my server) and have my app be open-source? Or might this be a security risk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29530" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T12:08:39.300" Title="Can my app have login authentication and be open source?" Tags="|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13785" CreationDate="2023-03-03T11:39:43.080" Score="10" ViewCount="2761" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a project in a GitHub organization and made some commits there. Nobody else touched the repository. Since the default licence on GitHub is all rights reserved, do I maintain all rights to the project, even when it's in a organization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29531" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T13:18:09.683" Title="Who owns code in a GitHub organization?" Tags="|licensing|github|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13779" CreationDate="2023-03-03T11:56:14.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can I just write my own LZO decompressor routine without getting swept up in the LZO GPL license ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you base your implementation on a textual or mathematical description of the algorithm, and nowhere in the process do you read the source code of a GPL-licensed implementation, then it is certainly possible to write your own implementation without being bound to the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T11:56:14.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13780" CreationDate="2023-03-03T12:08:39.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is very much possible to perform a login action with an open-source app without incurring a security risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a secure system, the only thing that can not be made public are the credentials that are used to perform the login. Then you should think of usernames and passwords.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T12:08:39.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13781" CreationDate="2023-03-03T12:31:10.207" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitHub user accounts, including organization accounts, have nothing to do with legal ownership of the copyright of work posted under those accounts. Your copyright attaches automatically to any creative work you make in a tangible form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code that you authored, posted under any account, is still under your copyright. Conversely, code that you post under your account that you &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; author (e.g., because it's under a free/open license that allows reproduction) is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; under your copyright, but under the copyright of whoever authored it. The account of origin you choose to associate with code that you post to GitHub has no relationship to its legal status under copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you are an employee, contractor, or student of some organization or employer, they may under some circumstances get the copyright of what you author (according to your contract and/or when you act as an agent of the institution). This doesn't have anything specifically to do with GitHub organizations, but if you posted code under a GitHub organization that represents an organization with whom you have a legal contract, having posted the code under the organization account surely gives the appearance of intending to assign copyright (as you sometimes do as a contracted agent) to that organization. Whether or not  a court will agree that's what has happened depends on what your contract says and the contents of the repository. Again, this doesn't have to do with the GitHub organization account &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; but how that account relates to some other legal corporate entity with whom you have a preexisting contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T11:55:12.953" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T11:55:12.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-03T12:48:17.303" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some organization publishes a dataset yearly, under CC BY 4.0, some other organization now aggregates this data into a single dataset, which they post on their github repository that is under the GPL 3.0 license, it the license of this aggregated dataset CC BY 4.0 or GPL 3.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29532" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T07:02:24.043" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T07:02:24.043" Title="If data published under CC BY 4.0 is aggregated and published on a repository under GPL 3.0, what is the license" Tags="|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13789" CreationDate="2023-03-03T14:10:10.117" Score="16" ViewCount="3124" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I own a GPL-licensed software that is used as a component in other peoples user-facing software, can I issue a separate license so that my software can be used in a popular MIT licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In laymens terms, I don't want people to use my software commercially for free, but I want to be nice and allow a specific project that is MIT licensed to use and distribute my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this sounds like wanting to both eat the cake and keep it at the same time. Is this possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29533" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T17:26:36.773" Title="My code is GPL licensed, can I issue a license to have my code be distributed in a specific MIT licensed project?" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13788" CreationDate="2023-03-03T14:34:08.080" Score="35" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I own a GPL-licensed software that is used as a component in other peoples user-facing software, can I issue a separate license so that my software can be used in a popular MIT licensed project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own all the copyrights in that software (i.e., you have not accepted any contributions from others), and if you don't use any libraries that are under the GPL license, then you are within your rights to offer different licenses to different users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In laymens terms, I don't want people to use my software commercially for free, but I want to be nice and allow a specific project that is MIT licensed to use and distribute my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have given that project an MIT-licensed version of your software, you can not prevent others from taking that project, making changes to it (including, replacing everything except your code) and using that changed version commercially and without disclosing the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you may indeed have a conflict in your desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T14:34:08.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13790" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-03T15:42:31.987" Score="1" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an app is created with different library (all MIT) from different authors, than please advise following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do this app need to include all those licenses in the final binary release ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As the MIT license of these authors will be added, do this means the user of this app can resell this app again branding it as their own ?, considering below lines from MIT:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this software..... sell copies of the Software ....&#xA;&#xA;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all&#xA;copies or substantial portions of the Software.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26758" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T18:36:08.157" Title="If an app is created with libs from different author with MIT license, which one will be applicable?" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13790" CreationDate="2023-03-03T18:36:08.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have to reproduce the license text and copyright notices in your application. This does not have to be obnoxious but should (at least as good manners) be findable. Go to &lt;code&gt;about:credits&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;chrome://credits&lt;/code&gt; in your web browser right now to see a long, long list of such notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The MIT licenses does not need to apply to &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; software. This means you should notify recipients that you make use of others' MIT-licensed software (and who those other authors are, via their copyright notices), but you can license your application under any terms, as long as you preserve the MIT notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would, in fact, be most clear you said outright what specific MIT libraries you used, and what the notices are for each of them. This gives the clearest possible credit to the library authors and, at the same time, lets you make it clear that the MIT licenses apply to each library only, not to your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2023-03-03T18:36:08.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13788" CreationDate="2023-03-04T03:54:54.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ask a legal expert if you can grant a free, &amp;quot;source-available,&amp;quot; and irrevocable license to them. Also, one with a patent grant. Doing this isn't the same as using MIT license for that specific project because that would let people escape your copyleft. Instead, you're keeping your code copyleft while granting a separate, proprietary license which has some benefits of open-source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since people worry about abuses, I advise anyone trying to get open-source projects to take non-open code to do one extra thing. Release your behavioral specs, the API, and the data formats under an open, permissible license with patent grant. As in, they can legally and easily swap your code out for something compatible with less likelihood of breaking changes. Call it future-proofing a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example for clarity. Let's say your code is a parser. You define its inputs, invariants, outputs, tests, and error-handling in open specs (and/or API code) others can use. The storage of the result is JSON with a published format. Then, your actual implementation is not open. If they decide to drop it, they can use the same API's, output a result in the same format, and so on. There's less risk in a port. They might be more likely to adopt your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29538" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T03:54:54.827" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13781" CreationDate="2023-03-04T08:57:36.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitHub explains this in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#d-user-generated-content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms of Service&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You own content you create&lt;/strong&gt;, but you allow us certain rights to it, so that we can display and share the content you post. You still have control over your content, and responsibility for it, and the rights you grant us are limited to those we need to provide the service. We have the right to remove content or close Accounts if we need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that giving someone rights (&amp;quot;licensing&amp;quot;) is not the same as giving them ownership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29542" LastEditorUserId="642" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T13:18:09.683" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T13:18:09.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-04T12:25:06.293" Score="2" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I wrote a Java library and published it under AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I suspect that company A uses it for server side processing in their internet services. If my understanding of AGPL is correct, this would allow any users of the internet services to request the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company A says they do not use my library. If this were a &amp;quot;classical&amp;quot; software where binaries are distributed, I could probably decompile it and find some evidence whether this is correct or not. But for server side use on the internet, there is no way to find out (unless they do something stupid like leaking stack traces to the user).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So do I have any means for enforcing the AGPL in such a case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T12:35:30.580" Title="Is the AGPL practically enforceable?" Tags="|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-03-04T13:24:18.757" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13795" CreationDate="2023-03-04T12:35:30.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Enforcing&lt;/em&gt; the AGPL is just the same as enforcing any other copyright license - you bring a court case. At that point, both you and Company A would provide evidence and the court would make a decision. While that evidence may be easier for you to obtain in the case of distributed binaries, the mechanism is the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T12:35:30.580" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13798" CreationDate="2023-03-04T13:13:00.983" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The program I'm planning to use for obtaining the code coverage of my tests (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenCppCoverage/OpenCppCoverage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenCppCoverage&lt;/a&gt;) is licensed under GPL v3.0, which implies some obligations for those who modify or redistribute this code or part of it, mainly making the code that uses it GPL as well. As far as I understand the GPL license, the output of a GPL program is not covered by the license, which is only applied to the code itself, except for some cases, such as videogames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I will be using this tool for code coverage, I won't be modifying its code, and of course I won't be distributing it with my work ever, I understand that my use case falls under the category of only using the output of this program. In this specific case -no modifications, no redistribution-, in the event that I end up giving my work a commercial use, is the code whose tests are going to be processed by OpenCppCoverage under any kind of obligation listed by the GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29544" LastEditorUserId="29544" LastEditDate="2023-03-04T13:38:11.443" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T15:12:08.450" Title="Licensing of my code when using a GPL-licensed program for code coverage" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13797" CreationDate="2023-03-04T15:12:08.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Correct. You can use GPL-licensed developer tools to develop proprietary software. Use of Linux, GCC, Emacs, OpenCppCoverage all don't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be pendantic, it can depend on how these tools work. For example, some coverage tools work by instrumenting the software under test with additional code. If that additional code were GPL-licensed, the instrumented software could only be distributed under the GPL as well. However, that is quite irrelevant here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would be very unusual to distribute such instrumented binaries, and GPL only triggers requirements when you give someone else a copy of the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL-covered tools that inject code snippets typically include a license exception to avoid such problems (this is the case for GCC)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;OpenCppCoverage doesn't work that way. Instead, it runs the software under a debugger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T15:12:08.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13788" CreationDate="2023-03-04T20:31:09.013" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to keep the GPL restrictions on your software, while letting the MIT licensed project use it, you would have to give the project license terms that forbid including your software in their MIT licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are technical ways to handle such a separation of part of their dependency code from the main project code, allowing them to use your library without applying their MIT license to it, but it would be a significant hassle for them to deal with, and would come with legal risks if they make any mistake in handling it appropriately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can try to offer such a license to them, but I would expect them to decline unless your software handles something critical to their project and has no meaningful competition that they could use instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, if you want to let an MIT licensed project use your code, you will probably have to abandon any copyleft restrictions and just switch to the MIT license yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18444" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T20:31:09.013" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13769" CreationDate="2023-03-04T21:50:23.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This highly depends on your organization's workflow, and integration with other tools, but generally: yes, it should be closed, and if the issue is a common question, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/pinning-an-issue-to-your-repository&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;should be pinned&lt;/a&gt; for visibility. If it's something that leads to a longer discussion but can't be 100% resolved either through an answer or a code change, it could instead be &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/discussions/managing-discussions-for-your-community/moderating-discussions#converting-an-issue-to-a-discussion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moved to a discussion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15102" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T21:50:23.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13403" CreationDate="2023-03-04T22:23:30.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm the creator of Raivo. Unfortunately I had to apply these restrictions in the license, as people started to redistribute my app to the appstore and asking money for it or implementing ads. Redistributing the same app to the appstore is against the Apple guidelines, and a paid/ads version is not something I'd like Raivo to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried restricting this usage while keeping it as open as possible. If you'd like to use Raivo (source) in any good/ethical way, just send me a message and I'm happy to authorize you to use it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very open to changing the license to make it truly open source as well, as long as I'm able to control that it is not redistributed to the appstore (under a different name), especially when people make money of it. Not sure if that combination is possible though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29549" LastEditorUserId="29549" LastEditDate="2023-03-04T22:35:14.567" LastActivityDate="2023-03-04T22:35:14.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13774" CreationDate="2023-03-05T09:34:47.123" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use this Apache-licensed library only in the back-end, and you don't distribute that library (no matter if changed or unchanged) to third parties (e.g. no public repository on GitHub), then you don't have to do anything. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License&lt;/a&gt; only has obligations for you upon redistribution, but back-end use does not count as redistribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you ever plan to redistribute the library, you must include all items that are listed in section 4 of the license. This is usually done by means of text files (.txt or .md) within the root folder of the repository or container used for distribution. There is no need to have any of that in the UI and also no need to include any of that in the output (the OCR-ed text) of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T09:34:47.123" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13804" CreationDate="2023-03-05T17:00:22.920" Score="2" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I develop a commerical app in android studio and in my project I use some libraries that have MIT or Apache license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could possibly happens if I don't attribute the libraries that I downloaded from Github and modified the libraries according my uses in my app? Does my app get removed from the Google play store?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29561" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T18:45:43.417" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T18:45:43.417" Title="What happens if I don't attribute for a library that has MIT or Apache license?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13803" CreationDate="2023-03-05T18:44:46.963" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way you are legally allowed to distribute the libraries are if you comply with the terms of the license(s). Both the MIT and Apache licenses require that you attribute the libraries (and other restrictions), so if you do not attribute the libraries then you are committing a copyright violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not the people to tell you what Google might do if your app is a copyright violation, but they certainly won't want copyright violations to be available from the Play Store. On top of that, the copyright holders of the code you are distributing illegally could bring a court case against you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the obvious way to avoid all this is to ensure you are complying with the terms of the licenses for all code you're using.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T18:44:46.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5092" CreationDate="2023-03-05T18:52:55.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few well established licenses that are basically equivalent to the WTFPL plus a warranty disclaimer, you can choose from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/unlicense/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI approved&lt;/a&gt; - cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD - Zero-Clause BSD&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI approved&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mit-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT-0 - MIT No Attribution&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mit-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI approved&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that although the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; is a fine public-domain-equivalent license, its &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/2011/04/15/using-cc0-for-public-domain-software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creators explicitly&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recommend&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;against using it for software&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, CC0 is suitable for dedicating your copyright and related rights in computer software to the public domain, to the fullest extent possible under law. Unlike CC licenses, which should not be used for software, CC0 is compatible with many software licenses, including the GPL. However, CC0 has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative and does not license or otherwise affect any patent rights you may have. You may want to consider using an approved OSI license that does so instead of CC0, such as GPL 3.0 or Apache 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OSI cites &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/faq/#cc-zero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;concerns about the CC0's language on patents&lt;/a&gt; as main reason for not approving it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's Public-domain-equivalent license&lt;/a&gt; page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11103" LastEditorUserId="11103" LastEditDate="2023-03-05T19:01:29.387" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T19:01:29.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13807" CreationDate="2023-03-05T19:27:56.793" Score="9" ViewCount="2844" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which type of license doesn't require attribution? Is there a project on GitHub?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29561" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-03-07T08:09:04.337" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T08:09:04.337" Title="Which type of license doesn't require attribution in GitHub projects?" Tags="|github|attribution|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13806" CreationDate="2023-03-05T19:55:59.780" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly all Open Source licenses require attributions. Counter-examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt;, a license that imposes no conditions. Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/landley/toybox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toybox, a minimal Linux userland&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt;, though it is technically not a license and has problems when applied to software. Frequently seen for cryptographic reference implementations, though. Example: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blake3 hash function&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://unlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unlicense&lt;/a&gt;, which is an amateur version of the CC0 idea. Not a good license, but comparatively popular.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boost.org/users/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost license&lt;/a&gt;, when compiled into another software. Example: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/boostorg/boost&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boost project&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-03-05T19:55:59.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13811" CreationDate="2023-03-05T21:02:16.940" Score="3" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a project, that is licensed under AGPLv3. I want to use a few MIT licensed C libraries, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with AGPLv3 or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I'm not sure if the GPL-compatible licenses are also compatible with AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make sure that I can use the MIT licensed libraries with my code, can I do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26513" LastEditorUserId="26513" LastEditDate="2023-03-06T11:38:16.263" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T11:38:16.263" Title="Can I use a MIT licensed library with an AGPLv3 project?" Tags="|mit|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-03-06T07:00:14.067" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13806" CreationDate="2023-03-06T03:33:40.200" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are more licenses which don't require attribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/bsd-1-clause/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1-clause BSD License&lt;/a&gt;, for software in binary form. An example project using this license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/troydhanson/uthash&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;uthash&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mit-0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT No Attribution License&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, when compiled into another software, only if used together with either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LLVM-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLVM Exception&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLVM&lt;/a&gt; is an example project) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/Swift-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swift Exception&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apple/swift&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swift&lt;/a&gt; is an example project).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2023-03-06T08:50:04.590" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T08:50:04.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13809" CreationDate="2023-03-06T03:46:32.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;All listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3-compatible free software licenses&lt;/a&gt; are compatible with AGPLv3 also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3-compatible free software licenses&lt;/a&gt; are compatible with LGPLv3 also, for the case of creating a derived work based on the LGPLv3-licensed work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T03:46:32.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13806" CreationDate="2023-03-06T11:37:49.987" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WTFPL&lt;/a&gt; probably deserves a mention.  Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wtfpl.net/about/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entire text&lt;/a&gt; of the license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;        DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE &#xA;                    Version 2, December 2004 &#xA;&#xA; Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar &amp;lt;sam@hocevar.net&amp;gt; &#xA;&#xA; Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified &#xA; copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long &#xA; as the name is changed. &#xA;&#xA;            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE &#xA;   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION &#xA;&#xA;  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="998" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T11:37:49.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13788" CreationDate="2023-03-06T17:26:36.773" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume you are using the software under the GPL license but you are not the copyright holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, you are only allowed to publish the software if you license it under the GPL license, which means anyone receiving it can only publish it under the GPL license and do on. There are some more conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worst thing you can do is publish it under a different license without telling anyone and creating an almighty legal mess for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T17:26:36.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-06T22:10:52.487" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the main purposes of a CLA (contributor license agreement), as I understand it, is to allow some owner of the software to have full rights to relicense the code if desired. This is rather onerous on both the contributors and the owner. Rather than doing this, couldn't you just add some line at the top of your license, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;The following restrictions apply, unless granted explicit permission by &amp;lt;owner name&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not a lawyer and don't know how to write a license or contract, but hopefully the general idea is clear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I were to use a license text with this general idea, could it hold up? Can taking steps to make sure contributors are aware of this, such as by putting it prominently on the contributing page, help the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things I would want to allow, that seem like they should be fine as long as the general idea holds, possibly requiring some changes to license text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone wants to fork a project, they should be able to remove the owner from the license text (but not add a new one), such that the original owner cannot grant rights to derivative work (but contributions that do not remove the license text may still be relicensed by the original owner)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner should be able to charge money in exchange for granting a closed source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29572" LastActivityDate="2023-03-06T22:10:52.487" Title="Could a CLA be avoided by simply specifying in the license a particular owner who may grant closed source use?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|relicensing|multi-licensing|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" ClosedDate="2023-03-07T18:34:32.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-07T09:35:45.610" Score="0" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a commercial iOS application and recently I have made my mind to make it open source If I can find a proper license which fits my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This application is an end-product application, not a library or framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conditions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - I want to have contributors, but they are only volunteers, &lt;strong&gt;They won't have any rights and shares&lt;/strong&gt;. They are welcome to contribute for CV, learning  or any other personal purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - I want to be the &lt;strong&gt;only person&lt;/strong&gt; who has the right to publish the premium version on the Appstore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - If someone compiles my application, they are allowed to use it for their personal/educational purpose, but not for commercial use. for using commercial the must buy the premium version or ask the owner to give them rights for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 - They will be no guarantee if someone compiles the app and use that for personal or any other purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If It includes these conditions, can be even better&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 - No public forks can be developed or published separately in any other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 - No clone/copycat for other Operating Systems or devices are allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 - No one can use any parts of codes in their own softwares without mentioning the copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short and sweet, this is a completely protected commercial application ( like close source ), but it goes open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help or suggestion would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated:&#xA;I believe most of open source fans think OPEN SOURCE always means FREE. I believe open source is not always FREE. As I mentioned in comments, Cry Engine is open source, Unreal Engine is open source, but they are commercial!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29577" LastEditorUserId="29577" LastEditDate="2023-03-07T11:10:19.873" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T11:10:19.873" Title="What type of license is protected my source from publishing the compiled product for free?" Tags="|commercial|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2023-03-08T06:32:40.170" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13815" CreationDate="2023-03-07T10:54:27.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question as it stands has a straightforward answer: what you're describing is just not open source at all, but rather all-rights-reserved where the source code just happens to have been leaked. Of course you can do that, and maybe it's not &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; pointless because at least the available source code allows people to scrutinize your app before running it. (For now.)&lt;br&gt;What this certainly &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; accomplish is attracting contributors. Why would people contribute if they have nothing to gain from it? In fact, for all they know you could at any time decide to just rescind the open version again, taking the contributions into oblivion. And “CV”, come on – if somebody does open source for their CV then they also want the commits to be visible to potential employers. And coding for education can be done anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, with that model, individual hackers (or possibly shady companies) would if anything just illegally maintain their own private forks. Which is of course always a risk if the source has ever been available, but with the model you envision you're actively encouraging it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest &lt;em&gt;sensible&lt;/em&gt; approximation to what you actually want is probably to dual-license your project under both a proprietary licence, intended for most users, and also under a strong copyleft licence intended for programmers. I would recommend GPL-3 there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL licences, as well as all other proper open source licences, do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; restrict anybody from using the code, sharing it further, or even selling binaries based on it. However, they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; prevent distributing modified versions without also making those modifications available in source form. I.e. they're &lt;em&gt;mandating&lt;/em&gt; that contributors actually give their contributions back to you. This also goes some way from discouraging competitors from creating their own commercial version that would outsell yours, but it can't strictly speaking prevent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another catch is that the contributions will by default be under GPL-3 too, meaning you can't directly use them in your proprietary version yourself; however it is fairly established to add a copyright transfer agreement that anybody filing a pull request has to sign. Unlike a contribution to a purely proprietary project, people are typically ok with that, because the presence of the GPL version means that they're not just giving the contribution away for nothing and risk losing its use themselves: the open version will always stay available, even if you should withdraw your support. But as soon as you have the copyright, you can also dual-licence it back into the proprietary version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T10:54:27.870" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13495" CreationDate="2023-03-07T19:57:46.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From their &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/blob/6.x/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license file&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attribution is required by MIT, SIL OFL, and CC BY licenses.&#xA;Downloaded Font Awesome Free files &lt;strong&gt;already contain embedded&#xA;comments with sufficient attribution&lt;/strong&gt;, so you shouldn't need to do&#xA;anything additional when using these files normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29580" LastEditorUserId="29580" LastEditDate="2023-03-07T19:58:28.827" LastActivityDate="2023-03-07T19:58:28.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13819" CreationDate="2023-03-07T22:25:14.000" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I asked this on Reddit and didn't get a good reaction. I wasn't sure if this was the right forum, but I wanted to ask somewhere related.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly new to machine learning (and programming in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tensorflow website provides a lot of tutorials on how to use their tools, and general ML tutorials too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in building a machine translator using a transformer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tensorflow.org/text/tutorials/transformer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tensorflow has a tutorial&lt;/a&gt; to teach exactly that. I'll be using a different dataset, but I will be heavily copying the code provided in the tutorial and then sharing the finished project on Github. Of course, I do plan giving credit to the Tensorflow tutorial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to share this project on Github? Are there any legal issues that could come from this? I don't plan on commercializing this project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29582" LastActivityDate="2023-03-08T07:39:42.577" Title="If I do an ML project copying code heavily from Tensorflow's tutorials, am I still allowed to share it on Github (or other repositories)?" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13818" CreationDate="2023-03-08T07:39:42.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the linked page, it notes that content &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  Assuming you're not also copying chunks of expository text, your use of the code is governed by the Apache licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That licence grants you the right to make and distribute derivative works (which is what you will be doing, in copyright terms, when you use the code to make your program, and then when you share that program on (eg) GitHub), subject to certain obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many good summaries of those obligations, such as Bart's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11802/458&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, so I won't repeat them yet again, but as long as you honour those then what you propose sounds fine to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-03-08T07:39:42.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-08T17:33:21.250" Score="16" ViewCount="2527" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a simple 3D-printable object, which can be used as a medical aid. We would like to publish this object free to use to the public.&#xA;We would like to keep this object and further revisions and variations of it free and freely distributable. What we are afraid of, is that a company may create a patent around it, and prevent the use and distribution of our tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is publishing under one of the CC licenses enough? Which one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are no lawyers, so sorry if this is a bad question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29588" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-03-09T18:30:09.000" LastActivityDate="2023-03-15T06:51:46.437" Title="Protect public project from potential patents" Tags="|creative-commons|patents|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13821" CreationDate="2023-03-08T18:04:57.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;For something to be patentable, it must be innovative. You cannot patent something which is the same as something already published (under any license), because that is not innovative (&amp;quot;prior art exists&amp;quot; in patent language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, someone can take the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of what you've published and build a patent around it so long as they don't take your specific implementation of the idea. No copyright license can protect against that - copyright and patents are fundamentally different. If you want to stop that happening, you need to get your own patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-03-08T18:04:57.800" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13821" CreationDate="2023-03-08T18:11:11.453" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are touching 2 different topics with your question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a) Which is the appropriate license for hardware?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) How to prevent that someone else can get a patent for your device?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a) you might want to study this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware#Licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;. For your purposes you might want to start with a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tapr.org/the-tapr-open-hardware-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TAPR Open Hardware License&lt;/a&gt;. I believe that it is much better than the CC licenses for hardware because it was tailored for it and understands the difference between a description and the object made based on the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For b) you need to look at the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.engineering.com/story/intellectual-property-and-patent-strategy-defensive-publishing-explained&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Defensive Publishing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Nothing ever will be able to prevent that someone files a Patent Application for a specific idea. But with a clear and specific description of your device, the advantages, the rationale behind design choices, etc. you will be able to create &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prior Art&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which can prevent that the patent application will be allowed and that a patent will be granted. You could use the project documentation that comes with the 3D printable files for defensive publication purposes, or you could write a separate file / description, and for this description a CC license, e.g. CC BY-SA, would be appropriate. For more information about Defensive Publishing you might want to go to Patents SE, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-to-make-an-invention-un-patentable-easily/86#86&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-03-08T18:58:19.210" LastActivityDate="2023-03-08T18:58:19.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13828" CreationDate="2023-03-08T21:31:18.653" Score="3" ViewCount="1158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kykjF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kykjF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have developed a python script that makes use of a package hosted in PyPI. My code basically imports this package and uses some of its functions, together with some more functionality I developed. Now I want to distribute my script together with a &lt;code&gt;requirements.txt&lt;/code&gt; file, so other people can use it, let's say commercially or through a permissive license such as MIT. The catch is: the package I'm importing has a &lt;strong&gt;GNU GPL 2&lt;/strong&gt; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question basically is: even if I am not distributing or modifying the GNU GPL package in any way, &lt;strong&gt;am I forced to apply the GNU GPL license to my script&lt;/strong&gt;, because of the dependency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note again that the software I will distribute is just the script and the list of dependencies I developed, so no GNU GPL software is included in my distribution. However, the final user does need to install the GNU GPL software as a requisite to run my script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gone through the whole text of the license, and also through quite a few questions around here, but can't still find a clear-cut answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29590" LastEditorUserId="29590" LastEditDate="2023-03-09T09:54:33.410" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T11:40:19.660" Title="GNU GPL license in libraries in python requirements" Tags="|gpl-2|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-03-09T11:56:12.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-08T22:31:38.450" Score="2" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wrote a node express application to show database information for work.  The source code is not opened sourced, and I was thinking of using pm2 runtime to run the web application on the server. I'm a bit confused about the AGPL issue, and the online resource I've found doesn't seem to answer the question about the pm2 runtime.  I'm a bit confused when it comes to this scenario.&#xA;If I use pm2 runtime, would I be required to release my source code to comply with the AGPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29591" LastActivityDate="2023-04-08T09:05:55.713" Title="Using pm2 for private/commercial node express application" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13825" CreationDate="2023-03-09T08:21:22.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://pm2.keymetrics.io/assets/terms_conditions.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license document&lt;/a&gt; in Section 5.2 a) is very clear: You are dealing with the AGPLv3 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PM2 Runtime is a free open-source software, which is governed by the&#xA;AGPLv3.0 license (the “AGPL3 License”). Any use of PM2 by the users&#xA;shall be governed, and subject to the Terms and Conditions of the&#xA;AGPL3 License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL License states in Section 13, that when you offer a 'Covered Work' as a network service, you also have to provide the respective source code. The definition of 'Covered Work' is including &lt;em&gt;a work based&#xA;on the Program&lt;/em&gt; and the way to determine if your node express application is a 'covered work' is described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, by using pm2 runtime you have to comply with the AGPL license (at least for pm2), but you need to check if your own app is a 'covered work' or an 'aggregate', and based on that if your app also is subject to the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T08:21:22.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13825" CreationDate="2023-03-09T08:37:27.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick perusal of the PM2 documentation does not give me any indication that your application needs to include any code from PM2 or in any other way have knowledge that it is managed by PM2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that is correct, then your application is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work of PM2, which means that you are free to choose your own license terms for your application, independent of the PM2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the PM2 Runtime, you will need to comply to the AGPL license, but that only brings a burden if you made changes to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T08:37:27.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2023-03-09T11:40:19.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even if I am not distributing or modifying the GNU GPL package in any way, am I forced to apply the GNU GPL license to my script, because of the dependency?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is built around the idea that if any part of the program that gets executed by the end-user has the GPL license, then the program as a whole must be under the GPL license and the source code of all parts must be at least under a GPL-compatible open-source license. This is irrespective of how the various parts get distributed and from how many sources the end-user needs to collect the parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple fact that your code contains an import statement for the GPL library and makes function calls to the library is enough to conclude that your code is a derived work, as copyright law calls it, and that you need to comply with the terms of the GPL license under which you received that library. Those terms include the requirement to use the same GPL license for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T11:40:19.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13830" CreationDate="2023-03-09T20:21:54.297" Score="10" ViewCount="1756" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like some help/advice regarding a problem I'm facing with licensing options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently writing software for an open hardware project that uses cameras from various brands. I'd like (very much) that my program be released under a GPLv3 license &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; this is likely incompatible with most camera SDK licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not asking if I can embed those private libraries into my GPL program because I know I can't (even that thing under Section 7 is not really applicable because that would prevent me from using any third-party GPL lib after). What I'm asking is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If my GPL program accepts a feed from a named pipe (or networking or whatever) &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; I create another program, with a more permissive license compatible with the camera SDK licenses, that uses the SDK and feed the named pipe with the data; is this ok under the terms of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming 1 holds, can I distribute both programs together (I feel like it's going to be a big no) or should I distribute them separately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know trying to find loopholes is bad but I'd really love to have the SW be under GPL as the hardware is already under OHL v2 (which has very similar philosophy). One option would be to use OHL-W version for the software but that closes a lot of doors after and I'm not sure the OHL thing was even done thinking about computer SW...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Big thanks in advance for your insights. I'd also be interested for other solutions if anybody can think of one (like generic camera driver under GPL -- but I don't think it exists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29600" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-04-06T14:11:39.457" LastActivityDate="2023-04-06T14:11:39.457" Title="GPL with named pipes?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13829" CreationDate="2023-03-09T21:18:09.367" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The communication method you use is irrelevant; the question is whether your work forms a derivative work of the libraries. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ: What is the difference between an “aggregate” and other kinds of “modified versions”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and command-line arguments are communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs. So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are separate programs. But if the semantics of the communication are intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no &amp;quot;bright line&amp;quot; here which absolutely determines if something is a derivative work or not - and this could be something courts in different jurisdictions rule differently on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-03-09T21:18:09.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-10T02:01:12.603" Score="1" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are looking at an open source software's &amp;quot;General Public License&amp;quot; that says &amp;quot;if you distribute or publish a work containing modified software you must license at no charge to all third parties the whole of the work&amp;quot;. For performance reasons, we would need to move functions in this software from a C file to a header file and make them static inline, and also remove (or handle differently) a few global variables, otherwise it can't run multithreaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this language (and/or GPL in general), apply to that level of modification ? Is there a minimum allowed level of modification defined anywhere, for example adding comments ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional notes - this license says it's a General Public License but does not use the term &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot;. My objective is to learn whether, in general, GPL licenses allow any level of modification, even superficial such as comments, without requiring incorporating code to be freely published&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29601" LastEditorUserId="29601" LastEditDate="2023-03-10T20:34:52.027" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T20:34:52.027" Title="modifying code licensed under &quot;General Public License&quot; with static inline, removing global variables" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="19" ClosedDate="2023-03-15T05:54:45.390" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13831" CreationDate="2023-03-10T08:25:07.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL License has clear definitions of what constitutes a 'modification'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work&#xA;in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of&#xA;an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of&#xA;the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, all of the items you listed in your question constitute a 'modification', and you have to comply with the terms of the GPL license &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way/2078#2078&quot;&gt;unless you are the original author of that modified code&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T08:25:07.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13831" CreationDate="2023-03-10T10:34:16.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You described moving code, especially functions, from C files to header files, and also modifying header files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GPLv2 and GPLv3, this is clear. Whatever change you make to any of the source code or header files or build scripts, must be made available, as a whole, to recipients to whom the software was distributed in binary form. Also, if the GPL'ed software is used as a library by, or linked to, other software, then the GPL license would apply to that software too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're using an LGPL'ed licensed software, then it's a different story, especially with LGPLv2.1, as the change you proposed will affect other software using the LGPL'ed software (written in C) as a library, especially with respect to the number of lines of the inline functions and macros.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 5 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure&#xA;layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions&#xA;(&lt;strong&gt;ten lines or less in length&lt;/strong&gt;), then the use of the object file is&#xA;unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work.&#xA;(Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library&#xA;will still fall under Section 6.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, if the work is a derivative of the Library, you may&#xA;distribute the object code for the work under the terms of Section 6.&#xA;Any executables containing that work also fall under Section 6,&#xA;whether or not they are linked directly with the Library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-03-10T11:53:39.273" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T11:53:39.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13829" CreationDate="2023-03-10T12:13:11.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be great if there exists &lt;strong&gt;at least one&lt;/strong&gt; camera SDK that is compatible with GPL. Then you could make available a fully free distribution of the software, which is able to work with that specific camera. It would contain the GPL main program and a reference implementation of camera component, including a documented method of how they communicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you can provide alternative implementations for the camera interface component, based on proprietary SDKs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main advantages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to use and develop the project without dependence on any proprietary SDK. It also works as a reference implementation, to which the other components can be compared when debugging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The free distribution being able to operate by itself is a very strong argument in favor of it not being a derivative work of any proprietary library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may make sense to publish the camera communication reference implementation under a GPL-compatible non-copyleft license, such as MIT or BSD. This makes it usable as the base for proprietary implementations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T12:13:11.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13829" CreationDate="2023-03-10T15:40:09.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spirit of GPL is not to prevent you from writing open-source software which relies on someone else's closed-source software to perform its function. What GPL is trying to prevent is that you take someone else's GPL-licensed software, adapt it to work with your closed-source part, and get away with distributing the combined work without publishing your part of the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your GPL-licensed part can absolutely rely on existing closed-source code, pretty much like Cygwin relies on Win32 API. This doesn't give Cygwin users a claim to receive the Windows source code, nor does GPL forbid the distribution of Cygwin itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What GPL forbids is that someone designs a closed-source camera software that is only usable with a certain frontend that contains GPL-licensed code. This becomes especially important if the GPL-licensed code is not written by the same person as the closed-source part, so that the problem cannot be fixed by relicensing the GPL code under a different license, and the closed-source part must be released under GPL instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this answer is not actual legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T15:40:09.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-10T18:16:58.907" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use AGPL service w/o code changes to populate data in the Mongo database and then retrieve this data from DB via my own-written service, should I open-source the code of my service? My own-written service is publicly available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29605" LastActivityDate="2023-03-10T18:16:58.907" Title="If I use AGPL software (hosted on my environment) to populate DB data w/o any code changes, should I open the code of my software that does DB calls?" Tags="|licensing|license|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-13T22:37:16.213" Score="2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;When learning from different sources, some of which license their code, is re-applying those techniques and/or knowledge in my own projects considered copyright infringement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29486" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T19:04:50.410" Title="copyrights when learning from licensed code and then applying that knowledge to write your own code" Tags="|proprietary-code|source-code|software-development|intellectual-property|educational-resources|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13837" CreationDate="2023-03-14T05:49:49.067" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyright law protects tangible expression, and not the idea itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if one learns techniques or knowledge from open source software, and then rewrite on their own, without copying code, that is not copyright infringement, because it is copying the idea and not the expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, with open source software, especially those which are licensed under free permissive licenses (like 2-clause BSD, 3-clause BSD, MIT), you are also licensed to copy, use and distribute the software in any form, as long as attribution is included. In order words, both the idea and the expression can be copied, as long as there are no patents on the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the page &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://strebecklaw.com/idea-expression/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Idea vs. Expression – What is protected under copyright law?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Zachary Strebeck, Attorney-at-Law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under U.S. copyright law, “original works of authorship” are protected&#xA;for a limited time. Copyright gives the author the exclusive right to&#xA;copy, distribute, perform, display and create derivative works from&#xA;this original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originality shouldn’t be confused with novelty, however; there is no&#xA;requirement that the work has to be completely distinct from all&#xA;others, like with patents. The work must merely be an independent&#xA;creation of the author, even if it is substantially similar to that of&#xA;another author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Idea/Expression Dichotomy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One sticking point that often confuses non-lawyers is the question of&#xA;what is protected by copyright and what isn’t. According to Section&#xA;102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976, no “idea, procedure, process,&#xA;system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery” is&#xA;eligible for copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law generally protects the fixation of an idea in a&#xA;“tangible medium of expression,” not the idea itself, or any processes&#xA;or principles associated with it. The nuances of this distinction are&#xA;sometimes difficult to grasp, and the reality of the situation is that&#xA;the facts of each case have to be looked at individually. The concept&#xA;works as more of a continuum than a dichotomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-03-14T06:07:54.530" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T06:07:54.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13837" CreationDate="2023-03-14T19:04:50.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be copyright infringement, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 102(b)&lt;/a&gt; in the US. &amp;quot;Idea[s], [...] concept[s], principle[s and] discover[ies]&amp;quot; are not subject to copyright protection. While this text is specific to US law, the general notion is not, and you will find a similar limitation in the laws of most other countries, albeit with a different wording. Each country draws the line in a slightly different way, but most of them do draw a line of some sort. This is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idea-expression distinction&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, we live in a society. It is easier and safer for lawyers to tell you not to do something, than to tell you that you can do something. The idea-expression distinction is a gray area, especially since not every country interprets it in exactly the same way. It has therefore become common for lawyers to recommend clean-room engineering in situations like what you describe. In this process, one team of engineers reads the source code, and then writes a specification, which is used by an entirely different team of engineers to implement their own version. The idea is to totally wall off the original source code from the development process. It must be emphasized that this is a risk-minimization strategy, not a legal requirement. The law does not say that anyone who reads the source code of program A and then writes a similar program B must necessarily infringe on A. However, it is much easier to defend this practice if the person who wrote B is not the same person who read A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to prove infringement, courts (in the US) have held that two elements must be established:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The defendant had &lt;em&gt;access&lt;/em&gt; to the original work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The defendant's work is &lt;em&gt;substantially similar&lt;/em&gt; to the original work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of clean-room engineering is to cut off the inquiry at (1). In cases where this was not done, courts (in the US) have applied the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abstraction-filtration-comparison test&lt;/a&gt; to decide (2). This is a very complicated and fact-specific inquiry into the exact nature and scope of the similarity between A and B. It is understandable that lawyers do not wish to litigate this test out. I imagine it would be extraordinarily expensive to brief, research, and litigate all of the relevant issues in a real court case. Other countries may not use the exact same test, but the legal issues will nevertheless be complicated in similar ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you never read any source code at all, for fear of &amp;quot;contaminating&amp;quot; yourself, then you will likely struggle to develop as a programmer. Reasonable people do not sue each other over allegations that one engineer read three lines of code from a completely unrelated codebase six years ago. To a certain extent, this is a judgment call on your part. Do you think the person who owns that code is litigious? Are you planning on doing related work in the near future? Is the code under a relatively permissive license? All of these questions will inform your decision about how to proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-03-14T19:04:50.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13842" CreationDate="2023-03-15T09:56:51.523" Score="3" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my company, we have a library that makes use of a 3rd party library with an LGPL3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although our library does not extend or modify any of the 3rd party library's code, it provides some implementations for behaviour customization&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 3rd party library allows this customization, and this is done using Java's &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base/java/util/ServiceLoader.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ServiceLoader&lt;/a&gt;, where the library loads some custom implementation if it exists, else it will &lt;em&gt;default&lt;/em&gt; to its own implementation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of our worries about Java's &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.base/java/util/ServiceLoader.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ServiceLoader&lt;/a&gt; usage, is that there is no guarantee that our custom implementation will be the only one existing in the application's classpath, and therefore we can't guarantee that our implementation will be loaded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If an application that uses our library also needs the 3rd party library for their own custom work, our custom implementation may be wrongly loaded for that application, or vice-versa, our library may load a custom implementation that will break our expected behaviour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To work around this, we thought of &lt;em&gt;repackaging&lt;/em&gt; the Java packages of the library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm speaking about java packages, and not repackaging a means of distribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, the application base package is &lt;em&gt;org.third.party&lt;/em&gt; and our idea was to &lt;em&gt;repackage&lt;/em&gt; the library so that its base package would be something like &lt;em&gt;repackaged.org.third.party&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similar to what jersey has done with &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.bundles.repackaged/jersey-guava&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guava&lt;/a&gt;, as they repackage it internally&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not sure if they modify any of guava's code, but guava has an Apache 2 License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This would be done using &lt;a href=&quot;https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-shade-plugin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;maven-shade-plugin&lt;/a&gt; with the relocate option&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this change we could ensure that our library implementation wouldn't &amp;quot;clash&amp;quot; with other custom implementations, because the repackaged library would be looking for an implementation under &lt;em&gt;repackaged.org.third.party&lt;/em&gt; instead of  &lt;em&gt;org.third.party&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, our doubt here is if this is allowed by the LGPL3 license. If so, what do we need to do to ensure compliance with the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Although we are not explicitly extending and modifying the 3rd party library source code, this repackaging could be seen as code changes, since the repackaged library would have its Java package declarations and inner imports also changed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to the license, if any code change occurs, the source code must be made available - how should this be done? Should the source code be packaged together with the library, or it's only needed to make it available together with the repackaged library in a maven repository for example?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried searching StackOverflow/StackExchange for a similar question, but usually, the &lt;em&gt;repackage&lt;/em&gt; that other LGPL posts refer to is related only to redistribution, or users are explicitly modifying the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29636" LastActivityDate="2023-03-16T11:07:48.727" Title="LGPL 3 and Java package renaming" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13841" CreationDate="2023-03-16T11:07:48.727" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intention of the LGPLv3 license is that the users of your library are allowed and able to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;recreate the JAR file you provided&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;make improvements to the dependency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;use their version of the JAR file instead of the one you provided&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To meet the requirements of the LGPLv3, you should publish what you used as input (which version of which library) and how you created the re-packaged JAR file&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-16T11:07:48.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13846" CreationDate="2023-03-16T16:36:41.400" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed a process which I am in the process of patenting, and would like to release all or some of the implementation under an open source license (likely AGPL-3). I am trying to understand the relationship between patent protection and open-source licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my research/discussion with attorneys, it seems like much of the exclusive use protection of a patent is lost when releasing a codebase under an open-source license. This is fine. What is not clear to me, however, is whether the patent protection would prevent copycats from developing similar programs under totally different licenses, e.g. developing independent codebases using the patented process, potentially under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am comfortable with the code I release being used, and including a patent license, but I am not comfortable with others duplicating the process in their own (potentially proprietary) codebases. Am I correct in thinking that a patent + AGPL-3 would allow others to use my code under the same AGPL-3 license, but not to create separate programs under different licenses using the invention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my reading of the text of AGPL-3, it seems as though the license includes a patent license for all contributions made by the patent-holder, but not for additional work made by non-patent holders. In practice, that would mean that my contributions as patent-holder would be available for all to use, but others would be prevented from making contributions that infringe on the patented process. Can someone confirm that understanding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29658" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-09T14:07:19.247" LastActivityDate="2023-06-09T14:07:19.247" Title="AGPL-3 and patents" Tags="|agpl-3.0|patents|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13843" CreationDate="2023-03-17T05:08:09.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume you will place the source code in a public git repository, say on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the AGPLv3 license, you and anyone else contributing code to your software, would be copyright holders, who are also contributors. Anyone forking your public code repository and making changes to it (and making it public or accessible to software recipients), with proper attribution, would also be contributors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All contributors would grant the downstream recipient (basically anyone accessing the GitHub repo and anyone receiving your software in any form) patent license(s), which is the right to use patent(s), owned by any or all the contributors, which is otherwise infringed without this patent license grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that someone like me, who has no connection to you or your project, would be able to fork your public GitHub repository, make changes to the source code as I like, and legally use your patented process together with this source code that is in my own forked GitHub repository. Of course, I would have to make the derived software either public or accessible to downstream recipients of my version of your software, according to the conditions of the AGPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in effect, I would be able to fork, use, modify and create my own software (and commercial product) out of your software and your patent, as well as the relevant patents of all other contributors, but all of the source code that I modify or generate (that is a part of the derived work), must remain accessible to the recipients of my software and product, according to the conditions of the AGPLv3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means for you is that I can make a commercial product (owned completely by me) out of your patent and software, but you can take my changes back and incorporate it into your software and commercial product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-03-17T05:14:00.073" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T05:14:00.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13843" CreationDate="2023-03-17T07:52:11.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your advantage based on the AGPL license is, that you as the original author are free to also provide (closed source) licenses other than AGPL, which allow your potential customers to run services based on your software without having to disclose their source code. Others who use your AGPL-ed software (or its derivative works) are unable to offer this due to the copy-left features of AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's now look at the impact of patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL License&lt;/a&gt; in Section 11 states that every copyright holder (this includes you as the original author) is a 'contributor'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;contributor&amp;quot; is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this&#xA;License of the Program or a work on which the Program is based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that each contributor licenses their essential patents to all downstream users&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free&#xA;patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to&#xA;make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and&#xA;propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that all users of your AGPL-ed software, including downstream derivatives that you distribute, are licensed under your patents. But this obviously only is valid for your own code and its derivatives (including modifications contributed by others that would infringe your patents), the patent license is not valid for software with the same functionality that was independently developed from (not a derivative of) your code, a so-called &lt;em&gt;clean room design&lt;/em&gt;. (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6216/can-i-cleanroom-code-by-myself-if-public-specifications-already-exist&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once your patent application is allowed and a patent is granted you can enforce it and litigate against those that sell and/or use this independently developed software on the basis of patent infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you need to understand that a patent is only valid in one jurisdiction, there is no 'international patent'. So if you want patent protection in many jurisdictions you will have to file patent applications in all of them. And it is important to know that the patent applications themselves are basically in public domain, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_on_the_content_of_patents_and_in_the_context_of_patent_prosecution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;they don't have copyright in many jurisdictions&lt;/a&gt;. Therefor, by filing a patent application in a handful of jurisdiction you are publishing the 'recipe' of your 'secret sauce' in all jurisdictions free to use for everyone (only restricted if and when a patent is granted in that jurisdiction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, if you file your patent application for example at the USPTO, someone in Canada or Mexico might read the patent application and implement a new software based on it and offer it on servers located in their home country, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you then also file applications (based on your priority application) in Canada and Mexico, the other software provider might just move their servers to another country nearby, and there is nothing you can do about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if your process is really innovative you should not be too confident that your patent application will be allowed. In the last 10-15 years it has become more and more difficult to get software patents, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent#Jurisdictions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in some jurisdictions it is almost impossible&lt;/a&gt;. You should therefore seek guidance from a seasoned patent attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Filing a patent application can be a double-sided sword. You can get some protection in some jurisdictions, but you are also opening up everything for copycats in jurisdictions where you have not filed a patent application, or where your patent applications have been rejected by the patent office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should carefully consider the trade-offs between relying on the protection AGPL gives you vs. the additional protections and risks gained by filing patent applications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-03-18T08:26:06.147" LastActivityDate="2023-03-18T08:26:06.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13843" CreationDate="2023-03-17T08:14:39.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear to me, however, is whether the patent protection would prevent copycats from developing similar programs under totally different licenses, e.g. develop independent codebases using the patented process, potentially under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have received a patent for your process, you have received the exclusive rights, within the jurisdiction(s) covered by the patent, to use and implement that process. One of the additional rights you get as well is the right to give permission to others to use the patented process (giving a license).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you publish your software under a patent-aware open-source license, like the Apache or (L|A)GPL, then the copyright license also contains a patent license. This patent license gives people the right to use the infringing code that they received under one of those licenses. Granting a patent license in that way does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; grant people the right to independently develop infringing code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that a patent + AGPL-3 would allow others to use my code under the same AGPL-3 license, but not to create separate programs under different licenses using the invention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Due to the copyleft nature of the AGPL license, if you release your patented code under the AGPL, then any work created by others that infringes upon the patent must either be under the AGPL license, or it is a copyright or patent infringement that you can take legal action against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my read of the text of AGPL-3, it seems as though the license includes a patent license for all contributions made by the patent-holder, but not for additional work made by non-patent holders. In practice, that would mean that my contributions as patent-holder would be available for all to use, but others would be prevented from making contributions which infringe on the patented process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You hold a patent on your process&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You release, under the AGPL, a piece of software that is related to your patented process, but you leave out a key piece. In doing that, your software is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; covered by the patent you hold.&#xA;As the software is not covered by the patent, you don't (need to) grant a patent license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I create a contribution to your software that contains the key piece of your patent. As a result, the modified version that I created infringes upon the patent you hold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I don't hold the patent, I am not allowed to grant any patent license for the now infringing software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you don't include my contributions into your version of the software, you are also not required to give anyone a license to your patent and you can take legal action against me and those who received my version for patent infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only when you incorporate my contribution into your version, or if your code contained the infringing piece from the start, and &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; start distributing a version that infringes upon &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; patent are you required by the AGPL to grant a patent license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent license that you grant as part of the AGPL must give the recipients at least the same rights as they would have under the AGPL license for code that is not encumbered by patents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-03-17T11:57:21.687" LastActivityDate="2023-03-17T11:57:21.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13848" CreationDate="2023-03-18T20:43:32.270" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a project that gathers information from the internet and transforms it into a useful format, which I then make public as a CSV file. That project is licensed under GNU GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently had someone ask if their closed source program can read the CSV file from Github and use the data to display information to their users. Is this allowed under GPLv3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like the CSV file wouldn't be covered under GPLv3, but I'm not sure. Whatever I try to search for generally describes the case of distributing binaries of the source code itself, which isn't quite the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29683" LastActivityDate="2023-03-19T01:27:24.930" Title="If my GPLv3 program produces a useful CSV file, can closed source code use that file?" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-03-20T08:17:36.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13847" CreationDate="2023-03-19T01:27:24.930" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; answers this adequately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The output of a program is not, in general, covered by the copyright&#xA;on the code of the program. &lt;strong&gt;So the license of the code of the program&#xA;does not apply to the output&lt;/strong&gt;, whether you pipe it into a file, make a&#xA;screenshot, screencast, or video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The exception would be when the program displays a full screen of text&#xA;and/or art that comes from the program.&lt;/strong&gt; Then the copyright on that&#xA;text and/or art covers the output. Programs that output audio, such as&#xA;video games, would also fit into this exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the art/music is under the GPL, then the GPL applies when you copy&#xA;it no matter how you copy it. However, fair use may still apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that some programs, particularly video games, can have&#xA;artwork/audio that is licensed separately from the underlying GPLed&#xA;game. In such cases, the license on the artwork/audio would dictate&#xA;the terms under which video/streaming may occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-03-19T01:27:24.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13786" CreationDate="2023-03-20T01:28:44.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on a number of factors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the dataset subject to copyright or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;database right&lt;/a&gt; protection at all? In Europe, the general answer is &amp;quot;yes, it probably is protected by &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; database rights, and maybe copyright,&amp;quot; but in the US, this is dependent on the degree of originality in the selection, organization, or presentation of the dataset. Even if the US does recognize a valid copyright, it only attaches to those creative elements, and not to the actual data itself (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oyez.org/cases/1990/89-1909&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feist v. Rural&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and especially the rather lengthy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obiter_dictum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;obiter dicta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; the Supreme Court wrote in that opinion). If the data is not subject to any protection in a given jurisdiction, then the choice of license is irrelevant to consumers operating in that jurisdiction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the aggregation process involve creating or computing any new data, or did they &amp;quot;just dump all the data in one table&amp;quot; and call it a day? In the latter case, database rights may still attach to the resulting dataset, but they are irrelevant as consumers could simply get the data from the original source under CC BY, and aggregate the data themselves. However, if the aggregation process actually created new data, then it may be subject to its own independent copyright and/or database right, which is licensed under the GPL according to your question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the dataset accompanied by any software or other material? If so, that presumably has its own copyright status to consider, and is subject to whatever license it is originally distributed under.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T07:01:29.577" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T07:01:29.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13843" CreationDate="2023-03-20T19:42:45.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Citing the relevant portions of the AGPL for reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A contributor's &amp;quot;essential patent claims&amp;quot; are all patent claims owned&#xA;or controlled by the contributor, whether already acquired or&#xA;hereafter acquired, that would be infringed by some manner, permitted&#xA;by this License, of making, using, or selling its contributor version,&#xA;but do not include claims that would be infringed only as a&#xA;consequence of further modification of the contributor version. For&#xA;purposes of this definition, &amp;quot;control&amp;quot; includes the right to grant&#xA;patent sublicenses in a manner consistent with the requirements of&#xA;this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a reason to ask your attorney to make some dependent claims that would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be infringed by your program as is. Your attorney will know what that means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free&#xA;patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to&#xA;make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and&#xA;propagate the contents of its contributor version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the contents of your contributor versions are covered by the license. Anybody who wants to take that can modify it freely without worrying about the claims that were already licensed, but they &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; get permission to modify it to cover a new claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might ask, &amp;quot;what if they take my program, delete all but one of the files, change that file, and then write a whole new program around it -- then do they have a patent license?&amp;quot; Or, better yet, you might be asking, &amp;quot;what's the line between modifying my program and making a whole new program?&amp;quot; And that kind of confusion is why people pay lawyers money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, at least in that case, they're admitting that they modified an AGPL-licensed work, so they'll be bound by the AGPL, which... might be good enough for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be some fear that you sue somebody, and then they go and they download your AGPL code and try to get a patent license out of it to help them in negotiations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can always sue anybody, the question is whether or not you can win (or whether your case will be called frivolous and somebdoy will be threatened with sanctions, but nobody gets sanctioned, that's a long story). Ambiguity means that nobody's sure how the case will end, which means that you will more likely settle instead of actually going all the way through court, but how you negotiate the settlement depends on the way you both percieve the situation, which depends on subtle factors like that ambiguity, PR, procedural posturing, value of the code base and the patent, how intimidating your lawyers look, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the text might or might not matter. I am not your attorney and none of this has been legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2023-03-20T19:42:45.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13786" CreationDate="2023-03-20T22:04:42.477" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; not relevant here, unless the relevant copyright holder(s) contributed the data set and specifically signed a CLA or changed the license for the contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CC BY-SA is the one worth talking about. It might or might not actually apply to some portion of the data. Some of the data might or might not be copyrightable. The compilation (selected set) of the data might or might not be copyrightable. Does the data include software? Does the data include images? Do you have model releases for any pepole in the images? Are you in France, where Moral Rights might apply? Does the CC BY-SA licensor even have any of the underlying rights in the data at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Data licenses might be better for handling these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yeah, the GPL probably isn't relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not legal advice and I am not your attorney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T07:01:48.573" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T07:01:48.573" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-21T02:14:12.187" Score="-1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;For example, in the laravel project, when I run the command composer i, all the packages which were specified in composer.json will be installed in the vendor folder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as each of them already includes the license file in the source code, I don't need to worry about the &amp;quot;License and copyright notice&amp;quot; condition anymore because all of them already include the license file in the licensed material(which is the source code of that package) after installing via composer, right? If not, please show me how to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I can add my own license file for my project in the main source code and use it for whatever I want (private use, open source, commercial use...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29693" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T12:10:24.553" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T12:10:24.553" Title="Regarding the license's condition(MIT, BSD-3...), how to satisfy the condition &quot;License and copyright notice&quot;?" Tags="|mit|license|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-04-04T15:16:39.347" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13389" CreationDate="2023-03-21T06:25:50.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are building upon MIT-licensed code and retaining the same license, I recommend writing it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright © 2023 Bob Foobar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Copyright © 2020 Alice Margatroid&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Copyright © 2019 Project Nayuki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(MIT License)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the &amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Software is provided &amp;quot;as is&amp;quot;, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the Software or the use or other dealings in the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8969" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T06:25:50.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13853" CreationDate="2023-03-21T10:49:11.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct for source-code distributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you distribute your software in a binary format, then you should take steps to ensure the copyright and licensing information of the third-party code that is present in your binary is also available to the recipients of your binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your binary has a GUI, then you could arrange for a screen where all the copyright and licensing information can be seen by the user. Or you can distribute some documentation together with your binary that has the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T10:49:11.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13856" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13858" CreationDate="2023-03-21T18:58:02.450" Score="7" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I write, and publish sheet music for, a hymn under CC BY-SA, and it is sung in a church, and the church records their services, does the recording have to be CC BY-SA? If so, can I avoid this while still keeping modified versions of the sheet music under BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastEditorUserId="27453" LastEditDate="2023-03-21T22:35:51.807" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T07:53:51.553" Title="Does CC BY-SA affect recordings of performances of songs?" Tags="|creative-commons|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13856" CreationDate="2023-03-21T22:40:20.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/united-kingdom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-kingdom&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-kingdom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-united-kingdom-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;united-kingdom&lt;/a&gt; specific&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A separate copyright subsists in the recording than the sheet music. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988&lt;/a&gt;, the main piece of primary legislation around copyright in the UK, contains &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific rules around who is the author of a creative work (Section 9)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) In this Part “author”, in relation to a work, means the person who creates it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) That person shall be taken to be—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(aa) in the case of a sound recording, the producer;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Producer&amp;quot; itself is defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/178&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 178&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“producer”, in relation to a sound recording or a film, means the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the making of the sound recording or film are undertaken;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author of the work, the producer can license the recording under any terms they wish; they are not bound by your copyright on the sheet music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-03-21T22:40:20.253" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13856" CreationDate="2023-03-22T07:53:51.553" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/united-kingdom&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-kingdom&amp;#39;&quot; aria-label=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;united-kingdom&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot; aria-labelledby=&quot;tag-united-kingdom-tooltip-container&quot;&gt;united-kingdom&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst I greatly respect my colleague Philip Kendall, in this case I disagree with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several sets of rights to be considered, here.  There is the copyright in the original composition, there is a performance right, and there are recording rights (and those recording rights, as Philip rightly points out, vest in the producer of the work in the absence of any agreement to the contrary).  These rights are not mutually-exclusive.  That is to say, when it comes to distributing a recording of a performance of a copyrighted musical work, the interests of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; rightsholders must be taken into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the UK, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/prs-and-mcps&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PRS for music&lt;/a&gt; comprises the Performing Rights Society, who deal with the original author's interest in performances, and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, who deal with the original author's interest in recordings.  Both these schemes are voluntary; that is, they collect payments on behalf of original rightsholders who have joined them, and distribute them thereto.  If you haven't joined them, your rights cannot be licensed by a PRS payment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems clear to me that the rightsholder in an original composition does, in the UK system, have an interest in a recorded performance of a work.  I am aware of no analysis of whether those rights can be licensed copyleft-style, but I can also not see any obvious block to them doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, your case is interesting because you &lt;strong&gt;don't&lt;/strong&gt; want to enforce those rights.  In that case, I'd add an exception to my CC BY-SA licensing statement along the lines of the kernel linking exception:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE! This copyright does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; cover performances and recordings of the work.  I, Pat Someone, disclaim any copyright interest in such performances and recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that someone with musical training could transcribe your work from such a recording, and since that would be a derivative of a work in which you had disclaimed your interest, you would have no control over that transcription.  Hopefully, this is not a risk you're worried about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T07:53:51.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-22T08:00:01.150" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been implementing an Android application using Kotlin and thought of using the KOIN library for dependency injection. However, it is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license which has become a huge concern to me since I am unaware of what steps I need to follow to abide by its terms and conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've included the link for their license file:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/InsertKoinIO/koin/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/InsertKoinIO/koin/blob/main/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I really want to know is whether it is enough to include the license file in the source code when pushing the application to the play store, considering the application just has a single activity with a webview (No place to show the open source licenses)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29701" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-03-22T11:09:20.377" LastActivityDate="2023-03-22T11:09:20.377" Title="Will it enough only to include the Apache license file in the source code in android kotlin application?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|android|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2023-03-23T12:38:18.937" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13860" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-22T09:05:20.177" Score="17" ViewCount="4933" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of such issue (from the position of an open source/source available software developer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our days it is very easy to rephrase every text with the help of AI so that the meaning remains the same, but the text itself looks different. I see that currently it is possible to do the same with a source code as well (for example, using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPT-4&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm concerned that now such situation is possible. Some existing open source/source available code is processed by some AI tool (for example, which uses a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;large language model&lt;/a&gt; (LLM)) and the source is just 'rephrased' so that it provides the initial functionality, but just looks different (to some extent). Then this 'new' code may be claimed as different code and be published/used on a different license. It is quite an easy way to take open source code and after some relatively easy manipulations use it without any restrictions (for example, in proprietary software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is already possible, but I believe that AI possibilities will increase dramatically over time in this area and then open source/source available software which was developed through many years (or even decades) may be easily used without any limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interesting, is there any work in this area like altering the existing licenses to protect open source projects in the AI era?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29702" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T09:59:12.610" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T09:21:52.317" Title="How can I protect the code from being 'rephrased' by AI to avoid license limitations?" Tags="|license|relicensing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13860" CreationDate="2023-03-22T09:32:42.027" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure anything needs to be done.  Historically, the creation of a translation of a copyrighted work &lt;a href=&quot;http://cblesius.co.uk/articles/CopyrightAndTheTranslator-WhoOwnsYourTranslations.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;required the permission&lt;/a&gt; of the rightsholder.  Others have argued that a machine translation of a specific work is very likely just another form of translation, and very likely to be similarly-regulated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While an argument can be made that, theoretically, MT is not &amp;quot;translation&amp;quot; [...] a plain language reading suggests that machine translation performs what it says: translation. As such, machine translation of a text creates derivative work under the Copyright Act and [an MT service provider] may be liable for copyright infringement if that translation is unauthorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=940041&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt;, via &lt;a href=&quot;https://wordstodeeds.com/2012/06/22/legal-considerations-machine-translation-and-copyright/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;.)  The question of how to treat services like GitHub's Copilot, which make code suggestions based on an AI model trained on large numbers of freely-licensed codebases, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/28/23575919/microsoft-openai-github-dismiss-copilot-ai-copyright-lawsuit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently before the courts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existing free licences rest heavily on rightsholders' control of derivative works.  As long as the courts continue to find machine translations to be derivative works, the existing well-established rules around free licensing and derivative works will provide a clear licensing path for translations, and publishers of unlicensed translations can be dealt with through the existing methods for dealing with free-software licence violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the courts start to hold otherwise, it will put machine translations beyond the reach of copyright, and since free software licences are primarily copyright licences, there may not be much that can be done to them to fix the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-23T06:27:21.183" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T06:27:21.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13862" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-22T11:15:10.723" Score="3" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 is compatible with GPL 3.0, but how about AGPL? Can I relicense any Apache or MIT licensed software to AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29705" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T03:46:45.873" Title="Can I relicense an Apache- or -MIT-licensed software to AGPL (Affero General Public License)?" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13862" CreationDate="2023-03-23T03:40:07.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, all licenses that are compatible with GPLv3 are also compatible with LGPLv3 and AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if you compare the license texts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, apart from the Preamble, the rest of the license texts are virtually exactly the same, except Section 13. I say &amp;quot;virtually&amp;quot; because of the obvious differences of the names of the licenses, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 13 of GPLv3 and AGPLv3 license texts make them compatible with each other for linking, while adding the Remote Network Interaction clause to the AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the Apache License v2.0 is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible&lt;/a&gt; with the AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please note that you can relicense a work based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache License v2.0&lt;/a&gt; only when you create a Derivative Work out of it. The original Work would have to be distributed under the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based on Section 4 of the Apache License v2.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may&#xA;provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use,&#xA;reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such&#xA;Derivative Works as a whole, provided Your use, reproduction, and&#xA;distribution of the Work otherwise complies with the conditions stated&#xA;in this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-03-23T03:46:45.873" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T03:46:45.873" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-23T11:19:13.333" Score="-5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a JavaScript library and am wondering how I could license it such that developers/user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must include the license (or a link to it)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;can't minify the source code, but must include it as-is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must not bundle the file with other JavaScript files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any off the shelf licenses that fit the bill? How might I write such a license if not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My motivation is that I'd like my code to remain available at the point of delivery for &lt;em&gt;pedagogical&lt;/em&gt; reasons — in the spirit of the early web era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29714" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T11:58:08.480" Title="License for JavaScript which doesn't permit minification?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-04-04T15:16:59.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13864" CreationDate="2023-03-23T11:58:08.480" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are no (open-source) licenses that meet your requirements and I am not sure if it is possible to write a license for them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inclusion of the license in distributing the JS library, even to the browser of end-users, is not an issue. That is actually a requirement of all open-source licenses (even if developers don't always follow that requirement).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ban on minifying is not present in any open-source license. The best you can get with an off-the-shelf license is a requirement to tell where the source code can be obtained. You could (get a lawyer to) draft a license with such a restriction, but the chances are high that the license and thereby your library would not be accepted by the open source community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ban on bundling with other (JavaScript) files might actually step beyond the scope of copyright law and therefor what you can control with a copyright license. This requirement can also tremendously backfire, because it would also make it impossible to create a zip-file containing your library and some other libraries and send that around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T11:58:08.480" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13867" CreationDate="2023-03-23T15:02:12.590" Score="5" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some doubts about the sozu proxy that is under AGPL license. If I use the sozu binary as a proxy for my products (API, WebApp, etc.) without any mods or extensions, should I release my products also under the same license or can I leave them privately licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29717" LastEditorUserId="29717" LastEditDate="2023-03-23T15:14:01.497" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T17:11:55.450" Title="Doubt about the use of proxy under AGPL license" Tags="|agpl-3.0|free-software-definition|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13866" CreationDate="2023-03-23T17:11:55.450" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can probably use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL-3.0 is exactly equivalent to the GPL-3.0, except for section 13 which only applies “if you modify the Program”. You have not modified the AGPL-covered program. Thus, you can treat it as effectively GPL-3.0-covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL-3.0 license would not require you to publish your code just because you use GPL-3.0 covered programs on your backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you were to modify Sozu, or were to incorporate parts of Sozu code into your software, then running this modified Sozu software on your backend would trigger AGPL section 13, and you would have to offer your users the source code for the modified Sozu version (but not the source code for other programs you're using on your backend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the AGPL is entirely unproblematic for separate services that you use on your backend without modification. Back when MongoDB was still AGPL-licensed, people used it without blinking an eye. The situation is not materially different for a reverse proxy. But if you're concerned about this, use a different reverse proxy under a more permissive license, for example Nginx (Open Source edition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-03-23T17:11:55.450" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13874" CreationDate="2023-03-25T05:23:44.197" Score="2" ViewCount="540" Body="&lt;p&gt;I intend to publish the code for my thesis under an appropriate open-source license, such as GPL v3. The code consists of Python and compiled C code that either imports or is statically linked to certain python/other modules. I have not modified any of these external modules. However, I will not distribute any of the code or modules myself, leaving that task to the user during the installation process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it necessary to distribute all the licenses separately, or is that requirement satisfied when the user installs the modules themselves?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I release my code under GPL v3?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any other obligations or advice I should be aware of?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this is my first question on StackExchange, I hope that I have adhered to the general conventions when posing questions to the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;External   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Python&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Propietory&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Visual Studio 17 Community Edition&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Proprietary&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;matplotlib&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;3.4.3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;BSD/PSF&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;regex&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2019.06.08&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Python&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;wincertstore&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;0.2&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Python&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;pefile&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;2019.4.18&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;MIT&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;" OwnerUserId="29733" LastEditorUserId="29733" LastEditDate="2023-03-25T05:32:26.247" LastActivityDate="2023-03-26T14:56:57.057" Title="Do I need to distribute licenses for Python modules used in code that I release but don't directly distribute (i.e. users pip install modules)?)?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13870" CreationDate="2023-03-25T08:26:56.930" Score="5" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to use PCRE2 in my program, which is written in C (Licensed under GPLv3). PCRE2 is licensed under BSD license, with a few changes. Go to this page to see the license: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/master/LICENCE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/master/LICENCE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the bottom of the license, I see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;EXEMPTION FOR BINARY LIBRARY-LIKE PACKAGES&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second condition in the BSD licence (covering binary redistributions) does&#xA;not apply all the way down a chain of software. If binary package A includes&#xA;PCRE2, it must respect the condition, but if package B is software that&#xA;includes package A, the condition is not imposed on package B unless it uses&#xA;PCRE2 independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condition 2 is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright&#xA;notices, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the&#xA;documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it says that I will have to attribute if I &amp;quot;include&amp;quot; the PCRE2 library. What if I link (use) the shared library of PCRE2 in my program? Technically, no code of PCRE2 is &amp;quot;included&amp;quot; in my program, the shared library contains their code, which is separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I still need to attribute them if I do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26513" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T08:35:34.593" Title="BSD license attribution" Tags="|license-notice|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13869" CreationDate="2023-03-25T08:35:34.593" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to honour the licence obligations on the PCRE2 library if your program is, in copyright terms, a derivative work of that library.  I note the exception that you have provided, but as I read it, it's designed to except (for example) the users of libraries which in turn use PCRE2.  Your work is directly linking to PCRE2, so the exception doesn't, to my mind, apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we turn our attention to the status of &amp;quot;derivative work&amp;quot;, and whether your program acquires it by virtue of linking to the PCRE2 library.  Sadly, this isn't a settled question.  We have a couple of good summaries, one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-to-constitute-derivative-wo&quot;&gt;why your work is a derivative&lt;/a&gt;, and one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1188/what-are-the-arguments-for-considering-dynamic-links-not-to-constitute-derivativ&quot;&gt;why it isn't&lt;/a&gt;, and we can't give you a definitive answer either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me, I tend to favour the FSF's view that dynamic linking makes a derivative.  I also note that the obligations of the BSD licence are so slight that you might as well honour them anyway: it's small loss if it later turns out it wasn't really necessary, and a big win in avoiding copyright infringement if it turns out it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T08:35:34.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-25T11:22:29.783" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I created a program with two dependencies DepA and DepB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DepA is published under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991 and is called as an external program&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DepB is published under MIT License and is used via an API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I understand that GPLv2 and MIT are incompatible, I am not sure what that implies for my situation.&#xA;After all, e.g., package managers for linux distributions also include packages with incompatible licenses and, so, publishing cannot really be a problem.&#xA;I am also not modifying their code in any capacity.&#xA;Using one of them (depA) just as a program I execute from my program and the other (depB) by using a binding provided by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now want to dockerize my program where the dockerimage would contain DepA, DepB, and a binary of my program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to publish my binary and the dockerfile? (I suppose so)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I allowed to publish the resulting docker image? (I guess not)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If one of the two is insufficient, can I provide something in addition to make this work (like the source/binary/license files of the dependencies)? (I guess that providing the archives of the two packages used for building the docker image is sufficient)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I have to publish my source code when publishing the docker image? (I guess no)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I limited to a license for my source code/the docker image when publishing the docker image? (I guess no)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/publications/docker-containers-what-are-the-open-source-licensing-considerations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; article suggesting to let the users build the docker image themselves and only providing the docker file for that. Well, I am really not experienced with licensing and this appears to be a tricky situation to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29734" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T07:59:37.173" Title="Dockerization; licenses of dependencies MIT, GPLv2" Tags="|mit|gpl-2|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2023-03-25T18:44:04.993" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to GitHub, &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/exploring-projects-on-github/saving-repositories-with-stars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;star is used to bookmark, show appreciation, and for rankings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/top1000repos/status/1633738124357668865?s=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub developers star repositories mainly to show appreciation to the projects (52.5%), to&#xA;bookmark projects for later retrieval (51.1%), and because they used or are using the projects (36.7%).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The star button was born because once upon a time, people use fork to bookmark repos.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/aseemk/status/447151342495080448?s=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why does GitHub call it &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;bookmark&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJ6aj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJ6aj.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I created a web app that lists the &lt;a href=&quot;https://top1000repos.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;top 1000 GitHub repositories&lt;/a&gt; and shows the total thumbs up  of their top 5 closed PR/issues of the last 12 months. Determining if a repo is useful is tricky because usefulness is subjective and there's an overlap of &amp;quot;star to bookmark&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;star because I use this&amp;quot;. So it's better to just &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35092224&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;check the repos individually and if you think it's of no use to you, blacklist it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29738" LastActivityDate="2023-03-25T18:44:04.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13868" CreationDate="2023-03-26T14:56:57.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to distribute all the licenses separately, or is that requirement satisfied when the user installs the modules themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must comply with the licenses for all software where your use would otherwise violate copyright. In particular, you must comply with the licenses of all software components that you distribute. If you only publish source code but no binaries or pre-bundled packages, then you only have to consider the components in your source tree. A typical Python module does not contain other components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you probably don't have to distribute your dependencies' licenses. But this depends on the source code that you publish – I'm assuming that your source code / repository contains no third party material at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I release my code under GPL v3?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably yes. You can publish your own source code that is not derived from other people's code under whatever license you want. However, it could be that the resulting software as a whole (consisting of your components and other people's components) would be covered by incompatible licenses, making it impossible to legally distribute pre-built or bundled versions of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your list of dependencies mostly includes software under GPLv3-compatible licenses (Apache, BSD, Python, MIT, …), but a couple of entries that should be investigated more carefully:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;name&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;version&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;license&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;win-inet-pton&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;1.1.0&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Custom&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;emailvalidator&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;0.3&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Freeware&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Anaconda Python&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Propietory&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Visual Studio 17 Community Edition&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;17&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Proprietary&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that package metadata can be incorrect. E.g. win-inet-pton seems to actually have a public domain dedication (no copyright restrictions), and emailvalidator has utterly unclear licensing (but the package provides so little value that you can probably remove it). It is likely that the licensing of Anaconda and Visual Studio is quite irrelevant for you since they do not typically become part of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there were incompatible licenses, you would be able to issue a GPL exception under section 7 of the GPL-3.0. This works here because there are no other AGPL/GPL-covered dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any other obligations or advice I should be aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishing your own source code is fairly straightforward to do, even if running that source code would depend on other people's software. Licensing gets more tricky when you're creating derivative works from other people's software (for example, by modifying their software, by copying their code into your project, or by distributing binaries or packages that include their components), or when dealing with components with non-Open Source licenses, since their licenses/EULAs might have unusual usage restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-03-26T14:56:57.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13871" CreationDate="2023-03-27T07:25:32.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the MIT license is compatible with GPLv2. But as described in the following paragraph, this is irrelevant for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you combine these 'dependencies' with your own code (for DepA &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;called as an external program&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, for DepB &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;used via an API&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) qualifies even under the strict interpretation of FSF as '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/a&gt;'. So the licenses of these 'dependencies' do not have any influence on your choice of license for your own code. You could even use a closed-source license if you wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AggregateContainers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ for GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, the fact that you plan to put all parts into a docker container does not have any impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to publish my binary and the dockerfile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You need to include the license and attribution information (and the source code of the GPL licensed files) for the 'dependencies' if/when you distribute the code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to publish the resulting docker image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. You need to include the license and attribution information (and the source code of the GPL licensed files) for the 'dependencies' if/when you distribute the code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one of the two is insufficient, can I provide something in addition to make this work (like the source/binary/license files of the dependencies)? (I guess that providing the archives of the two packages used for building the docker image is sufficient)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to publish my source code when publishing the docker image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, based on the requirements of your dependencies' licenses you do not need to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I limited to a license for my source code/the docker image when publishing the docker image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. See the link above (&lt;em&gt;mere aggregation&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-03-27T07:59:37.173" LastActivityDate="2023-03-27T07:59:37.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13877" CreationDate="2023-03-28T07:38:15.290" Score="10" ViewCount="2431" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm searching with the wrong terms, but can the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE be removed from a software project like this browser extension? The commits in question are these&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/commit/90f2450c4f68504720f071fdc0c78321a7b85ce7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/commit/90f2450c4f68504720f071fdc0c78321a7b85ce7&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/commit/ffc34364ea2b3e3547923c015246c87587640052&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/commit/ffc34364ea2b3e3547923c015246c87587640052&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29751" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-03-28T08:54:58.183" LastActivityDate="2023-03-28T08:54:58.183" Title="Can the GNU LGPL be removed from a piece of software?" Tags="|lgpl|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13876" CreationDate="2023-03-28T08:22:57.800" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming the publisher is the sole rightsholder, yes, they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-project-be-relicensed&quot;&gt;perfectly free to relicense the work&lt;/a&gt;; however, they &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4012/are-licenses-irrevocable-by-default&quot;&gt;can't revoke the licence on existing copies&lt;/a&gt; that are already out there in the world.  If they're not the sole rightsholder, the consent of all other rightholders will be required to relicense.  That said, they've not exactly been &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/blob/master/src/build.js&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;consistent&lt;/a&gt; about removing the LGPL header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's less clear in this case is whether the current publisher is the sole rightsholder.  I can see examples (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/pull/325&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/igdownloader/InstagramDownloader/pull/309&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) of others contributing to the work, but we have no way of knowing whether a CLA/CTA was required by the publisher (the former might well grant permission for such relicensing, and the latter definitely would).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've had a contribution accepted into the work, and you've not completed a CLA or CTA, then it seems likely to me that your contributions were made under LGPL, and your copyright may now be being infringed.  If this applies, and you feel strongly about it, then consult actual lawyers and prepare for a fight.  Otherwise, third-party rights are a &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/747563/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thorny and jurisdictionally-dependent issue&lt;/a&gt;, so there may not be much you can do about it except stopping using the work. (Full disclosure: I wrote the last linked article, but I did not give the talk which it documents.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-03-28T08:22:57.800" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13860" CreationDate="2023-03-28T15:50:22.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not think that AI tools are used in the way you anticipate (to create 'translations' for the purpose to avoid copyright implications). AI learning usually happens by consuming code or language or pictures and extracting patterns and characteristics of that original source without saving a copy of that source. Due to the fact that the original sources are not stored by the AI, outputs are created by applying the patterns and characteristics of many sources, and therefore these outputs are not considered a derivative work of any specific input file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying legal concept for open source licenses is copyright. The owners of copyright in the code decide what may or may not be done with the code. Any permissions and restrictions by an OSS license can only cover the areas that would otherwise be forbidden under copyright law in the absence of a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does copyright law say?&#xA;Europe: &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019L0790#d1e961-92-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DSM Directive&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Article 4: Exception or limitation for text and data mining&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Member States shall provide for an exception or limitation to the rights provided for in Article 5(a) and Article 7(1) of Directive&#xA;96/9/EC, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 4(1)(a) and (b) of&#xA;Directive 2009/24/EC and Article 15(1) of this Directive for&#xA;reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works and other&#xA;subject matter for the purposes of text and data mining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reproductions and extractions made pursuant to paragraph 1 may be retained for as long as is necessary for the purposes of text and data&#xA;mining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter&#xA;referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their&#xA;rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means&#xA;in the case of content made publicly available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary this means that in Europe publicly accessible content is free to use for AI-learning unless there is a machine-readable ban on the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;USA:&#xA;Collecting data from 3rd party websites (so-called screen scraping) &lt;a href=&quot;https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is legal&lt;/a&gt; but the Supreme Court still has to decide on some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/28/23575919/microsoft-openai-github-dismiss-copilot-ai-copyright-lawsuit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AI specific cases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now what is allowed by the open source licenses? Here a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT License&lt;/strong&gt; gives a broad blank check for any use. I don't see how AI learning would be excluded &amp;quot;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2-clause BSD License&lt;/strong&gt; provides a very broad license &amp;quot;Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: ...&amp;quot; where the word 'use' can easily be interpreted to allow the use as input for AI learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache2 License&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.&amp;quot; The Apache license does not seem to specifically allow or disallow the use of code for AI learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPLv3&lt;/strong&gt; is very specific &amp;quot;You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force.&amp;quot; The term 'propagate' in this sentence has a very wide definition: &amp;quot;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy.&amp;quot; I think that would include AI learning. In addition, Section 7 of the GPLv3 license limits the types of restrictions that may be applied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OSS licenses have been written at times when AI and ML were far away. &lt;strong&gt;Would it be possible to add an anti-AI-learning clause to OSS licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole copyright holder of code you may set up any license with any restriction, but this would no longer be the MIT license or the BSD license, and others would often refrain from re-using your code due to the fact that it is a crayon license  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;How can a &amp;quot;crayon&amp;quot; license be a problem?&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;Existing code (with other copyright holders) cannot easily be re-licensed unless you have the consent of every copyright holder. GPL licensed code more or less excludes any such restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there an SPDX indicator or any other agreed way to disagree with AI-learning?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am not aware if specific &lt;strong&gt;SPDX ID&lt;/strong&gt; that would be a machine-readable bar against AI, but there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.spdx.org/g/spdx-ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX community talking about AI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;robots.txt&lt;/strong&gt; : You can prevent crawlers from searching your own website, and if the AI engine is friendly it will respect your wish. Obviously that will only work for your own website where you control the robots.txt and would not work for 3rd party websites where code is shared (such as GitHub).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;website T&amp;amp;Cs&lt;/strong&gt;: same as robots.txt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GitHub T&amp;amp;Cs&lt;/strong&gt;: GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and offers its own AI solution for code, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/features/copilot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github Copilot&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore GitHub has T&amp;amp;Cs which allow for sharing, and you agree to these before you upload any code. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section D.4 'License Grant to Us'&lt;/a&gt; you can find the words &amp;quot;This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers;...&amp;quot; which sounds like a blank check for AI learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;in summary&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes, you can protect your own code from being used in AI-learning, but current developments in copyright law, the lack of specific OSS licenses for that purpose, and the T&amp;amp;Cs of code sharing websites such as GitHub make it incredibly difficult for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-03-29T15:18:11.543" LastActivityDate="2023-03-29T15:18:11.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-29T09:50:48.440" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license text begins with &amp;quot;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and &lt;strong&gt;associated documentation&lt;/strong&gt; files&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are considered to be &amp;quot;associated documentation files&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the payment service Stripe releases their python library under the MIT license.  Does this mean that all of the documentation for that library on their 'docs' website is covered by the MIT license (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication?lang=python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29759" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T03:31:57.143" Title="What exactly does the MIT license mean by &quot;associated documentation&quot;?" Tags="|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13879" CreationDate="2023-03-30T01:02:00.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By convention, the MIT license in the LICENSE or COPYING file at the top directory of a source code repository applies to all files in that source code repository, unless a different license is explicitly applied to a specific set of files in that source code repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For e.g. libuv applies the MIT license to its overall source code repository, but explicitly licenses its documentation (presumably under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libuv/libuv/tree/v1.x/docs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;docs&lt;/a&gt; directory) under the CC BY 4.0 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libuv/libuv&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libuv&lt;/a&gt; README states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;libuv is licensed under the MIT license. Check the LICENSE and&#xA;LICENSE-extra files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The documentation is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license. Check the&#xA;LICENSE-docs file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If libuv did not specify CC BY 4.0, then the &amp;quot;associated documentation&amp;quot; part of its MIT license would also apply to libuv's documentation, &lt;strong&gt;only in that same source code repository&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T03:31:57.143" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T03:31:57.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-29T13:20:00.990" Score="3" ViewCount="523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a project for an application written in c++ that uses OpenSSL to implement encryption algorithms. I posted the project on GitHub, it is currently a private repo. There is an Apache 2.0 license added to this repo, but I heard about attaching a comment like . to each source file ( what about header files):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright 2003-2004 The Apache Software Foundation.&#xA; *&#xA; * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;);&#xA; * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&#xA; * You may obtain a copy of the License at.&#xA; *&#xA; * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&#xA; *&#xA; * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software&#xA; * distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; BASIS,&#xA; * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.&#xA; * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and&#xA; * limitations under the License.&#xA; */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to legally post the information that the project uses OpenSSL based on the Apache 2.0 license. I will add that the Open SSL source files were modified. Is the license file in the repo enough or do I need to add comments in the source file? Alternatively, maybe there is another way? Please give me any information&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29782" OwnerDisplayName="robur10A" LastEditorUserId="29771" LastEditDate="2023-03-30T08:13:14.193" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T10:14:24.543" Title="Using OpenSSL in Visual Studio project" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13860" CreationDate="2023-03-30T09:21:52.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming OP's concerns are a real possibility, and disregarding the good answer about legal approach by @MadHatter, an alternative for preemptive defense could be to use those same AI tools to create many translations of the open source code and publish them all under the same license before private agents can do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28365" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T09:21:52.317" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13881" CreationDate="2023-03-30T10:14:24.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/apache-2-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache 2 License&lt;/a&gt; is clear about the requirements you have to meet when redistributing any code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your own code you are not bound by this license, but it is good practice to do whatever is listed, because it simplifies the compliant use and re-distribution of your software by 3rd parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is enough to have the license and notice files in one easy to find location on your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition you can add an &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/resources/learn/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX ID&lt;/a&gt; to each file, as this eases the OSS license compliance when automation and tools are used for that. I highly recommend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-30T10:14:24.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-03-30T12:40:35.217" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making word game which is based on semantic similarity between words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that i need word vectors file. One of such file is available here, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet-numberbatch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet-numberbatch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That file will be used by simple rest server written in Python. That server will use Gensim Python package which allows reading such files and use them for calculations. Those files can come from many sources, as they share same format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That server would provide one method - calculating similarity (as number) between two words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My game will call that server method. So in my game I won't use that file directly nor will I distribute it. My game will just use calculated similarity from rest server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about how ShareAlike applies to my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to release my game code under CC BY-SA 4.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to release my server code under CC BY-SA 4.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29774" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-03-31T08:32:00.720" LastActivityDate="2023-03-31T09:24:10.327" Title="Using CC BY-SA 4.0 data file for calculations on rest server used by closed source game" Tags="|copyright|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12070" CreationDate="2023-03-31T09:05:56.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question surfaced again after almost 2 years, it deserves a close look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA license&lt;/a&gt; states in Section 2.a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;License grant.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You&#xA;a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;B. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material for NonCommercial purposes only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, this license does not grant you the right to run the software. This is one of the limitations of CC licenses, they are just not tailored for software, therefore they should not be used. The question now is what the author of the code meant when publishing the software? Was it intended to just be printed and used as wallpaper, or was the intention to enable recipients to run the software? If you received the software in object code it is highly likely that it is intended to be run (a presumption of the original author's intention?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's ignore the previous paragraph for a moment and assume that you decide to run the software. What does the 'NonCommercial'-restriction mean for your use case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The non-commercial restriction is related to a) &lt;em&gt;reproduce and Share the Licensed Material&lt;/em&gt; and b) &lt;em&gt;produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a) means that you cannot &lt;em&gt;share the software itself&lt;/em&gt;, while b) extends that (in software terms) from the source code to the object (executable) code. Please note that the emphasis is on the sharing (&amp;quot;and Share&amp;quot;), they don't apply for in-house use without sharing to 3rd parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; states an important principle of all software licenses: The license of the output created by a software when run is not dependent on the license of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you&#xA;any say in the use of the output people make from their data using&#xA;your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you should not be concerned, you may use the output of the software (the list of similar sounding names) also for commercial purposes, as the license of the software is not determining the license of the output. However, the question still remains open if the original author had the intention to allow the software to be executed on a computer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-31T09:05:56.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13884" CreationDate="2023-03-31T09:24:10.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The principles mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; work in both ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license of software does not create any implications on the license of the data processed by the software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license of data does not have any implications on the license of the software processing the data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to release my game code under CC BY-SA 4.0 license? &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to release my server code under CC BY-SA 4.0 license? &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-03-31T09:24:10.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13889" CreationDate="2023-03-31T19:13:14.330" Score="10" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;When MongoDB submitted the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Server Side Public License&lt;/a&gt; to the OSI for approval, the OSI has &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;publicly announced&lt;/a&gt; that they do not consider it an open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the FSF (or, if relevant, a prominent member) ever commented on the SSPL in a similar fashion? As of writing, Wikipedia states that it is not &amp;quot;FSF approved&amp;quot;, but despite my best efforts at searching, I can't find any comment from the FSF on the SSPL, not even in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of licenses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29788" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T16:33:28.177" Title="Has the FSF ever commented on the SSPL?" Tags="|osi|fsf|sspl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13888" CreationDate="2023-04-01T06:06:35.207" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dig some digging, and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-10/msg00806.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RMS confirming in Oct 2021&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, presumably meaning the FSF, had still not got around to considering the SSPL, saying that it wasn't a priority for them, and that he didn't expect they'd find it to be a free licence as and when they did get around to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was about a year and a half ago, and a full three years after the release of the SSPL.  Given how little discussion I've seen about the SSPL in the last 18 months, compared to the furore that surrounded its publication, I can't imagine that the FSF would have seen any good reason to bump it up the stack since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I freely accept that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and will be fascinated to see if anyone can dig up fresher data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-04-01T06:06:35.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13890" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13891" CreationDate="2023-04-03T01:54:15.473" Score="6" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/07/BSD-Patents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article by Kyle E. Mitchell&lt;/a&gt;, the biggest difference between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blue Oak Model License&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/preview/BSD-2-Clause-Patent.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License&lt;/a&gt; is that the former &amp;quot;gives even broader patent assurance&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the relevant section on patents in the BSD-2-Clause Plus Patents License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, each copyright holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software, where such license applies only to those patent claims, already acquired or hereafter acquired, licensable by such copyright holder or contributor that are necessarily infringed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) their Contribution(s) (the licensed copyrights of copyright holders and non-copyrightable additions of contributors, in source or binary form) alone; or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) combination of their Contribution(s) with the work of authorship to which such Contribution(s) was added by such copyright holder or contributor, if, at the time the Contribution is added, such addition causes such combination to be necessarily infringed. The patent license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except as expressly stated above, no rights or licenses from any copyright holder or contributor is granted under this license, whether expressly, by implication, estoppel or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the Blue Oak Model License:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this software that would otherwise infringe any patent claims they can license or become able to license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any significant patent rights that are granted in the Blue Oak License that are not granted in the BSD-2-Clause Plus Patents License? Any insight on this would be highly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-04-03T12:26:11.253" LastActivityDate="2023-04-03T12:28:01.097" Title="Blue Oak Model License vs BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13890" CreationDate="2023-04-03T08:34:40.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple language of the Blue Oak grant appears to give you more rights than the BSD License, but it might not hold up in court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD License states, in legalese, that when you own a patent and you make a contribution that causes the software you contribute to to infringe upon your patent, then you must give a patent license for the patent that is infringed upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it must be a contribution from the patent holder, they should abstain from making that contribution if they don't want to license their patent. That is a very clear and reasonable choice, where you can make a decision based on the costs and benefits of each option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Blue Oak patent clause on the other hand can be construed as to mean that if I am a contributor who has made a &lt;em&gt;non-infringing&lt;/em&gt; contribution with regard to a patent that I hold and someone else makes a contribution that causes the software to infringe, then I am supposed to have given a license to my patent. Even if my contribution was in no way related to that patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that interpretation is accepted, it would put a bomb under the whole concept of patents. And the risk of such an interpretation being accepted would make any organization holding a patent very reluctant to contribute to a project with the Blue Oak Model License, because you might just grant anyone the right to run away with your patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-04-03T12:28:01.097" LastActivityDate="2023-04-03T12:28:01.097" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13888" CreationDate="2023-04-03T16:54:02.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As your question acknowledges, the SSPL does not appear on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF's license list&lt;/a&gt;. Given how comprehensive this list otherwise appears to be, it is my interpretation that the SSPL's absence indicates that the FSF has not formally evaluated it. If they had, they would have put it on the list. The list contains many licenses which the FSF describes as non-free or otherwise problematic; licenses are not excluded from the list simply because the FSF disapproves of them. It is rather implausible to me that they would exclude the SSPL from this list, yet simultaneously take an official position on the license in a different forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, it is not clear to me how often they update this list. A date in the footer indicates March 4, 2023, but it looks automatically generated, and it might simply indicate that e.g. someone refactored the HTML or CSS without changing the contents of the list. It is possible that the FSF has gotten out of the business of evaluating licenses altogether (or at least, evaluating licenses that everyone already knows to be non-free, anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-04-03T16:54:02.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-04T10:31:24.990" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I use the material (GLSL code) in a project in which I use MIT licensed material with Resolume-Wire (an object-oriented application based on nodes) in the ISF (GLSL code) import element there, add additional Wire nodes/functions or two such ISF elements (one with MIT and another with CC BY-NC-SA license) or just add more functions from Wire. Compile this result to create a closed Resolume Arena plugin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So various such plugins created in a total project (about 65) and this project total is under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license published, is this so legal? Can I get from the MIT license holders, because of the so &amp;quot;co-used&amp;quot; material problems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to add that I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;include a listing of the plugins in table form with credits for the elements used in a PDF attached to the project. In this PDF I explicitly point out that the plugins are only to be used for Resolume-Arena and that they contain foreign material with MIT as well as CC and LYGIA licenses, and if someone is interested in the original code of these elements please go to the originals via the links in the PDF, inform yourself about the terms of use and if necessary download the foreign material there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No one can't my result, i.e. the plugins, be viewed in of such a way that the code used becomes visible again, when the plugins are passed on (is compiled)? Thus, the MIT or LYGIA licensed co-used material cannot be individually copied, freely distributed or used as such. After the compilation in Wire, the plugin is closed and the original material can (possibly) only be uncovered as illegally copied.&#xA;My CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license offers increased protection for the authors of the original elements used with MIT or LYGIA etc. licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I am also of the opinion that my process of creating, in particular the functional expansion and mixing, has created something new, where I, as its author, and I'am free to choose which license I use, and I also refer to the integrated elements and their licenses, please pay attention if you do at the place where I bought the material myself would also like to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to give a gift to the Resolume Arena users, contribute to this community and not cause or create problems or trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who can please give me answers and links to my protection&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29812" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-04-04T12:45:50.947" LastActivityDate="2023-04-04T12:45:50.947" Title="Combining material from various different licences under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license" Tags="|mit|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ClosedDate="2023-04-05T14:17:28.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-06T11:29:32.550" Score="-2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m planning to write an open-source OS. So these are the thing I want to include with my license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For non-commercial use, I give users unlimited rights to copy, distribute, edit my OS, but they must credit me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For commercial use, they can only copy, distribute, but not edit, and I will charge for additional cost, such as client access license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For two scenarios, the users mustn’t change the activation process, and these modified works don’t need to be open-source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I will divide it into editions, some are free completely, some others are partial free, as I mentioned above.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;What license should I choose? &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Thanks in advance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29824" LastEditorUserId="29824" LastEditDate="2023-04-06T16:29:37.790" LastActivityDate="2023-04-06T16:29:37.790" Title="Choosing appropriate license for my project" Tags="|licensing|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2023-04-06T12:33:25.413" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13894" CreationDate="2023-04-06T12:23:28.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Open source in the common definition does not discriminate between use cases of the software - so in this sense as asked the question is not about open source in the definition used on this site and as used by the OSI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a common business concept is to distribute the software under the terms of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;, thus a strong copy-left: any derivative software must be distributed also under GPL and sources must be made available on any software distributed. You could go even a step further and use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPL&lt;/a&gt; which imposes the requirement also onto hosting sites where users interact via a network interface with the software. In these cases companies often sell &lt;em&gt;a different&lt;/em&gt; license for commercial use which does not impose these restrictions for a fee under their commercial license. Of course they can only do that, if they hold the complete copyright - and that includes contributions from 3rd party should you want to accept any. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;QT&lt;/a&gt; is one of the examples with this business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-04-06T12:23:28.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-10T01:35:58.487" Score="7" ViewCount="1743" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wanna use a GPL-2 software library which is distributed in two flavors: GPL-2 and a proprietary license. The proprietary license is very expensive though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, there are no real commercial alternatives on the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only about 10% of my software will be based on GPL-2 code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to develop commercial software for which I sell a license for + service yearly (updated version) with the right for the customer to receive the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What right does the customer has concerning the code? Can he recompile and extend my software and sell it as I am doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which part(s) of the software is affected by the obligation to publish or give the code to the customer (the whole software, only the parts that use the GPL-2 code etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29839" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-10T07:27:15.250" LastActivityDate="2023-04-10T15:02:18.000" Title="GPL-2 licensing and commercial software (what rights has the licensee)?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13896" CreationDate="2023-04-10T10:33:33.677" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a copyleft open source license: it allows you to use and modify the GPL-covered software for any purpose. But when you create a modified version (such as by including GPL-covered code into a larger program), then you can only distribute that modified version under GPL terms, and all recipients/customers get the same freedom to use and modify that software for any purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to question 1 is yes, you can sell software based on GPL-covered components. However, you must not only give your customers the corresponding source code, but also the right per the GPL license to use and modify that software for any purpose. So, the customers would legally be able to re-sell the GPL-covered software (potentially including some or all of your code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it difficult to &amp;quot;sell&amp;quot; GPL-covered software. The cost for the software itself tends towards zero. Instead, business models around GPL-covered software tend to involve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selling support contracts – the RedHat model&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;consulting work to implement specific features&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;selling convenience, e.g. packaging binaries for easy installation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dual licensing – that's the model used by the library you'd like to use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open core (but for copyleft licenses that requires a kind of dual licensing)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible solution lies in your question 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL itself does not clearly explain the scope of its copyleft effect. Instead, this depends entirely on what copyright law in your applicable jurisdictions consider to be a derivative work. However, the general understanding in the open source community is that the GPL applies roughly on a per-process level. If a program is designed to link to a GPL-covered library (statically or dynamically), then the entire program would be GPL-covered – not just those specific components that interact directly with GPL-covered components. In particular, this means that you can't insulate a proprietary component from a GPL-covered component with a permissively licensed component in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the proprietary component and the GPL-covered components are in entirely separate programs, that would be fine. The GPL allows GPL-covered code to be distributed alongside proprietary software (&amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;). Thus, it might be possible to wrap the GPL-covered component with a generic command line interface or REST API, to publish that GPL-covered program, and to then interact with that separate program from your proprietary code. For example, you can write proprietary code that interacts with a copyleft-licensed database engine, as long as the database runs in a separate process and you only interact via the database's wire protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastEditorUserId="1212" LastEditDate="2023-04-10T15:02:18.000" LastActivityDate="2023-04-10T15:02:18.000" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13899" CreationDate="2023-04-10T15:14:43.700" Score="2" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to check if a file in GCC that is linked into my program, such as libgcc.a and crti.o, is covered by The GCC Runtime Library Exception. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-3.1-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, I should check its license header, but I couldn't find it in the GCC installation directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is written at the head of crti.S that it is covered by the exception, it seems strange to me to check the license by looking at the source code. Additionally, I couldn't find the license of a library (archive file) there. COPYING.LIB and COPYING.RUNTIME may be licenses of libraries, though they don't indicate which files they cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of files covered by the exception somewhere? Where can I find the license of a library in GCC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28345" LastActivityDate="2023-04-10T21:43:41.913" Title="How can I check if a library is covered by the GCC Runtime Library Exception?" Tags="|gpl|license|gnu|gcc|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13898" CreationDate="2023-04-10T21:43:41.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the FAQ, I should check its license header, but I couldn't find it in the GCC installation directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably a result of your distribution not including a copy of the source code. In many cases, the source code is split into a different package. For example, Debian provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/unstable/gcc-12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gcc-12&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/unstable/gcc-12-source&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gcc-12-source&lt;/a&gt;, and you can install either or both of these packages independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is written at the head of crti.S that it is covered by the exception, it seems strange to me to check the license by looking at the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is typical of GNU projects, as recommended by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF&lt;/a&gt;. While the FSF and the various GNU projects are nominally independent organizations, they are &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; closely-related, and tend to follow the same principles and practices, so if the FSF says to do something, a GNU project will usually follow the FSF's advice. While it may seem strange to you, this way of indicating licensing is in my experience fairly typical for larger FOSS projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I couldn't find the license of a library (archive file) there. COPYING.LIB and COPYING.RUNTIME may be licenses of libraries, though they don't indicate which files they cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to take this up with the GCC project. If they have not clearly stated the license applicable to some file, then we cannot apply the license on their behalf, because we do not own the copyright. I would suggest &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/bugs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;filing a bug&lt;/a&gt; stating that the licensing information is missing or unclear, and see how they respond. Alternatively, you can email gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org and ask for licensing information. In either case, be sure to clearly and unambiguously identify the file that you're confused about (i.e. do not just say &amp;quot;a library&amp;quot; - specify the exact path within their Git repository to an individual file or set of files).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-04-10T21:43:41.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13900" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13902" CreationDate="2023-04-12T00:46:41.160" Score="22" ViewCount="8302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s say that I paid a third-party company to develop a new application for me. I also make myself clear about the need to have the full property of the code at the end of the developing phase. I also made myself clear about being willing to keep the code for myself (and as I’m not a developer I don’t have any idea of what this means for the devs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a certain point, the software developer and I will start arguing and my sue will end in a loss because of details that are infringing our contract.&#xA;At this point, I still don’t have the property of the source code and I’ve never received a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My hardware developer in the meantime is producing a custom board that runs the compiled and last version of the software, so I just run it on that device and then I sell the whole device&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of us is aware that the software devs used some GPL and LGPL libraries.&#xA;After some time I finally see the code, but in an unofficial way (found a very old copy left by mistake by one of the devs and not corresponding to the last version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I meet one of the GPL copyright owners and while talking with him he figured out that I violated his copyright and caught me totally unprepared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The misunderstanding is coming from the fact that I mentioned his work while talking about mine, but the reason I knew about it was the unofficial copy of the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my point of view in this case I am one of the victims of the violation, as the developer should have handed me the code. In such case, I had also no way to determine the distribution terms to be used and in fact, I don’t need it because I do not distribute the software by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29856" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2023-04-12T15:50:18.947" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T19:49:57.793" Title="If I can't provide GPL source because a supplier did not provide it, am I at fault?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|lgpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13900" CreationDate="2023-04-12T05:23:49.263" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's a legal question, not an open-source one; the answer depends on jurisdiction and on how you fight legal battles. However in short, you are both, victim and offender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You distribute the software, and thus you are liable for it to fulfill all legal requirements. The deals you made with your (former) cooperation partner don't matter to your clients; for them you are the point of contact and the one who has to provide indemnification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your contracts with your (former) contractor only matters to you. Thus they are liable to you - but that's your problem - not the one of your clients; you distributed the software without proper licensing or fulfilling the license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T05:23:49.263" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13900" CreationDate="2023-04-12T06:12:24.627" Score="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add a little to planetmaker's excellent answer: I'm not entirely sure what loophole you think you've discovered, but assuming your contention is that you're released from your obligation to distribute source alongside the embedded binary by virtue of not having been given it by your upstream supplier, the GPL endorses planetmaker's view in (eg) GPLv3 s12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that if your code is indeed covered by GPL, and your upstream developer hasn't given you the source, then &lt;em&gt;all your devices must stay in the warehouse, and you may sell none of them&lt;/em&gt;.  The same would apply if other factors prevented you from distributing the source code; if, for example, your upstream developer had given you the source, but required you to sign an NDA to get it.  In both cases your upstream developer has done a wrong thing, but in neither case does his/her malfeasance excuse you from your obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-04-12T09:19:40.803" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T09:19:40.803" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13907" CreationDate="2023-04-12T14:27:51.217" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are analyzing the possibility of using &lt;a href=&quot;https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.jruby/jruby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JRuby library&lt;/a&gt; for some maintenance tasks in a private closed-source application that we are selling to a customer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the license information on their site &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jruby/jruby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/jruby/jruby&lt;/a&gt; they use a triple license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JRuby is licensed under a tri EPL/GPL/LGPL license. You can use it, redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eclipse Public License version 2.0 &lt;strong&gt;OR&lt;/strong&gt; GNU General Public License version 2 &lt;strong&gt;OR&lt;/strong&gt; GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are not modifying this library, and we only use it to run some maintenance scripts, so we do not think we should be considered a derivative project of any kind. As far as I know, if the license is LGPL we probably could use this library without providing the source code of our application (there would still be other obligations, such as mentioning this dependency, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does a triple-license mean? That I can choose which license I will be using? If so, can I use this library without opening our source code? Our customer strictly forbids this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29864" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2023-04-14T22:40:41.473" LastActivityDate="2023-04-14T22:40:41.473" Title="Using a library with triple-license from a private application" Tags="|lgpl|gpl-2|multi-licensing|epl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13900" CreationDate="2023-04-12T14:51:03.143" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a certain point the software developer and I will start arguing and my sue will end in a loss because of details that are infringing our contract. At this point I still don’t have property of the source code and I’ve never received a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever your misunderstanding of the GPL may be, you're misunderstanding contracts and lawsuits as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what you or your contractor sue each other over, you still paid them for their work, and you own that work. There is no point at which the contractor can legally refuse to hand over the source code. Unless you literally didn't pay them anything, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you did pay them though, and your &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot; involves a disagreement over payment/work, then your &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot; will always involve you being entitled to the work up to some date. They may not do any more work, and they may not give you the final version if you didn't pay for the last few weeks/months, but you'll still get the source code as of some date. That will be court ordered too, so they can't refuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16289" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T14:51:03.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13900" CreationDate="2023-04-12T16:06:35.243" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a comprehensive answer from &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyleft.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://copyleft.org&lt;/a&gt; with some added emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With ever-increasing frequency, software development (particularly for embedded devices) is outsourced to third parties. &lt;strong&gt;If you rely on an upstream provider for your software, note that you cannot ignore your GPL compliance requirements simply because someone else packaged the software that you distribute.&lt;/strong&gt; If you redistribute GPL’d software (which you do, whenever you ship a device with your upstream’s software in it), you are bound by the terms of the GPL. No distribution (including redistribution) is permissible absent adherence to the license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, you should introduce a due diligence process into your software acquisition plans.&lt;/strong&gt; This is much like the software-oriented recommendations we make in § 14. Implementing practices to ensure that you are aware of what software is in your devices can only improve your general business processes. You should ask a clear list of questions of all your upstream providers and make sure the answers are complete and accurate. The following are examples of questions you should ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are all the licenses that cover the software in this device?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From which upstream vendors, be they companies or individuals, did you receive your software before distributing it to us?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are your GPL compliance procedures?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there is GPL’d software in your distribution, we will be redistributors of this GPL’d software. What mechanisms do you have in place to aid us with compliance?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we follow your recommended compliance procedures, will you formally indemnify us in case we are nonetheless found to be in violation of the GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last point is particularly important. &lt;strong&gt;Many GPL enforcement actions are escalated because of petty finger-pointing between the distributor and its upstream.&lt;/strong&gt; In our experience, agreements regarding GPL compliance issues and procedures are rarely negotiated up front. However, when they are, violations are resolved much more smoothly (at least from the point of view of the redistributor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the cost of potential violations in your acquisition process. Using Free Software allows software vendors to reduce costs significantly, but be wary of vendors who have done so without regard for the licenses. If your vendor’s costs seem “too good to be true,” you may ultimately bear the burden of the vendor’s inattention to GPL compliance. Ask the right questions, demand an account of your vendors’ compliance procedures, and seek indemnity from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, any time your vendor incorporates copylefted software, you must exercise your own rights as a user to request CCS for all the copylefted programs that your suppliers provided to you. Furthermore, you must ensure that CCS is correct and adequate yourself. Good vendors should help you do this, and make it easy. If those vendors cannot, pick a different vendor before proceeding with the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken from &lt;em&gt;Copyleft and the GNU General Public License: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Guide&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech19.html#x24-15100018.2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 18.2&lt;/a&gt; Kuhn et al. License CC-BY-SA-4.0&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T16:06:35.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13900" CreationDate="2023-04-12T19:49:57.793" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recognizing that that OP may not be the last person to face the problem of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A third party developer (DEVELOPER) that embeds OSS into a (contractually) closed source application / project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A deteriorating relationship with the DEVELOPER such that it is not possible to get that DEVELOPER to rework the solution such that it doesn't embed any OSS components.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that it is probably not a viable position, just to ignore the GPL violation and &amp;quot;ship anyway&amp;quot;. Another strategy would be to work with the original author (AUTHOR) of the GPL software, by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Releasing the DEVELOPER from their liability to you, so that they can meet their obligations to the AUTHOR **.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide any details required to the AUTHOR to help them put pressure on the DEVELOPER to release the software (publically).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider financially supporting the AUTHOR to further this objective.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** - The DEVELOPER may be in an impossible position (of their own making) where they can't release the software because of your contract/NDA and they can't not release it because of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the original intent was to develop a closed source application - however by going the OSS path you may be able to bring your product to market (earlier) and give yourself the option to hire a different developer, to develop a new (closed source) version of the application later - if you need too - you may later decide the OSS model works for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Not a Lawyer/Not Legal Advice - I don't know what obligations to the AUTHOR and DEVELOPER you may have, so you probably want to consult a Lawyer before taking any action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29869" LastActivityDate="2023-04-12T19:49:57.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13903" CreationDate="2023-04-13T10:58:23.673" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;or&amp;quot; means that it is your choice which license you want to comply with. So you can pick any of those three licenses, follow its conditions and ignore any divergent conditions from the other two licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you can not mix and match conditions from multiple licenses. You have to follow at least one of the licenses completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastEditorUserId="14" LastEditDate="2023-04-13T12:56:25.700" LastActivityDate="2023-04-13T12:56:25.700" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13908" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13909" CreationDate="2023-04-14T15:17:38.470" Score="16" ViewCount="2376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got some code which produces some output files, this project is open source under GPLv3. I've also got some people reaching out to me and asking if they can use the output files (they don't care about the source code that generated them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm happy for them to use the output, as long as there is proper attribution clearly visible wherever they use it, such that their users can easily find their way to the open source project if they want to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I require that commercial consumers provide proper attribution to the project if they make use of the output of the project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1: Here's the project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty specific to South Africa, but basically it converts regularly published tweets by the state-owned electricity provider into internet calendars. The tweets announce when certain areas will be disconnected from the electricity grid, so having this data in your calendar is useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 2: I want there to be proper attribution, since I am wary of commercial projects simply putting the work behind a subscription feed or on a website with a million adverts, and them doing so without actually contributing anything to the project or improving the output in any meaningful way. This is why I want to require attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29683" LastEditorUserId="29683" LastEditDate="2023-04-15T10:52:31.533" LastActivityDate="2023-04-18T09:42:34.270" Title="How do I require commercial users of the output of my software to give attribution?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|attribution|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2023-04-14T18:31:35.423" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;the output of a program is not a derivative work of the program, and therefore the license of the program itself does not apply to the output&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you cannot, via an open source license or any other copyright-based means, require any kind of attribution in the output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-04-14T18:31:35.423" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2023-04-15T02:05:35.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be able to refactor your code to extract anything that is purely data. As such when you distribute the application you now distribute a binary and a data file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source and the binary would still be covered by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that if the application uses the data file to generate the output, the output would be a derived work of the data file, hence you could apply a different license to the data file which may (sort of **) achieves what you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** - If the user provides their own data file, clearly they no longer have to adhere to the license of your data file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a lawyer - I don't know if there are any caveats such as amount of data used to be considered a derived work / fair use exception etc - please talk to a Lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS, If this is a public OSS project could you provide a link so we have a better understanding of what you are trying to achieve/protect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29869" LastActivityDate="2023-04-15T02:05:35.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2023-04-15T13:51:33.273" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want there to be proper attribution, since I am wary of commercial projects simply putting the work behind a subscription feed or on a website with a million adverts, and them doing so without actually contributing anything to the project or improving the output in any meaningful way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you're after &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the GNU AGPLv3 license&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wouldn't prohibit &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; abusive use, but in combination with a TOS on your website, it would stymie most of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6130" LastActivityDate="2023-04-15T13:51:33.273" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2023-04-16T01:18:00.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Free Software&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that you are running into one of the four essential freedoms of free software. These are laid out by the GNU project on their website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is Free Software?&lt;/a&gt; (Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They go on to explain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. &lt;strong&gt;In this freedom, it is the &lt;em&gt;user's&lt;/em&gt; purpose that matters, not the &lt;em&gt;developer's&lt;/em&gt; purpose&lt;/strong&gt;; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Ibid. (Italics theirs, but bold mind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your desire to have the output of your program attributed is &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; purpose — that is, the developer's purpose. Your users' desire to freely reproduce the output of the program is &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; purpose. And as this has only to do with how the program is run, and has nothing to do with the program source code, it is covered by freedom 0. Thus, if you wish for your software to be free software by GNU's definition, you must not restrict in any way how your users run your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that this is purely philosophical — these words have no weight of law and are not a license. This is just an essay laying out GNU's idea of what it means for software to be “free.” It's also presumably the Free Software Foundation's opinion, because the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on free software&lt;/a&gt; links to the GNU page quoted above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, this is the definition of free software that the authors of the GPL and other free software licenses had in mind when writing their licenses. GNU maintains &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a non-exhaustive list of licenses&lt;/a&gt; that it considers to be consistent with its definition of free software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Open Source Software&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to GNU, the Open Source Initiative has a definition of “open source software.” It is similar but not identical to GNU's definition of free software. Criteria 5 and 6 are the most direct correspondence to GNU's freedom 0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Open Source Definition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not identical to GNU's freedom 0 — OSI's criteria are more limited and specific. It's not exactly clear to me if what you're suggesting clashes with these criteria, but I think potentially not, as long as your license required &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; to give attribution for output. (There is still the challenge of enforcing that in a license, but I'll talk about that later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like with GNU, this is just philosophy and not a license in itself, but also like GNU, OSI maintains &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a list of approved licenses&lt;/a&gt; that it considers to be consistent with its definition of open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Licensing&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can certainly look through the lists of licenses maintained by GNU and OSI to try to find a license that does what you want. I haven't looked, but I kind of doubt you'll find one. My own impression is that your goal is explicitly contrary to GNU's definition of free software, and implicitly contrary to the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of OSI's definition of open source software — but I'm definitely not a lawyer or expert on licensing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also look around for a non-free, non-open-source software license to use, but you'll be on shakier ground there. &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4543/is-the-mit-license-itself-copyrighted&quot;&gt;Software licenses are themselves creative works and are protected by copyright.&lt;/a&gt; Free and open source software licenses permit (and usually require) you to distribute them. Other licenses are going to be case-by-case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can't find an existing license you can use, you'll have to write your own. As described above, it won't be considered a free software license, and even if it meets the criteria of an open source license, it won't be an &lt;em&gt;OSI approved&lt;/em&gt; open source license unless you &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/licenses/review-process/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;go through their review process&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really knowledgeable to discuss the intricacies of how you would go about that, or the differences between copyright-based licenses and contract-based licenses, or non-US copyright law. I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; feel safe in saying it would be non-trivial. You should probably consult a lawyer, as you'll essentially be drafting your own proprietary software license — if you get it wrong, it will be unenforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Potential License Complications&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your goal may be particularly tricky because, as others have pointed out, your copyright over the program likely doesn't extend to the output that users produce &lt;em&gt;using&lt;/em&gt; the program. It's my understanding that most software licenses use copyright as the basis to enforce their terms, which would make it difficult for such a license to have terms restricting use of the program's output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the intricacy of &lt;em&gt;to whom&lt;/em&gt; the output should be attributed, assuming your license allows redistribution of the source code as with free and open source software. Would downstream contributors be able to add additional attribution requirements? Alternate attribution requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why I recommend that, if you decide to pursue this, you do it with the help of a lawyer. Your goal is to restrict how businesses can use your software, and those businesses &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; have lawyers. If you use a DIY license, they will find the holes if it's at all worth it to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15661" LastEditorUserId="15661" LastEditDate="2023-04-16T21:54:30.033" LastActivityDate="2023-04-16T21:54:30.033" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13914" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13915" CreationDate="2023-04-16T23:55:54.193" Score="7" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a new OSS project, I came across the AGPL 3.0 license (&amp;quot;GNU Affero General Public License 3.0&amp;quot;) for the first time, and I'm a little unsettled now as to what license I should (and legally can) choose for my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for background, my project uses both the iText 7 PDF library (AGPL 3.0), as well as the Flying Saucer iText 5 renderer (itself LGPL 2.1), which internally uses iText 5 (again AGPL 3.0). My project also uses additional libraries licensed under ASL 2.0, EPL 2.0, and BSD 2-clause licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4484&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I gather that my project needs to be licensed under AGPL 3.0 because it uses AGPL-3.0-licensed code. However, that seems to be contradicted by the Flying Saucer iText 5 renderer using LGPL 2.1 while also utilizing AGPL-3.0-licensed libraries (unless their choice of license is incorrect/illegal, which I'm not really sure about what consequences that would have for my own project?!).&#xA;Assuming that (from an AGPL 3.0 compatibility point of view), both AGPL 3.0 and LGPL 2.1 are an option, would either one raise incompatibilities with the ASL-, EPL-, and BSD-licensed libraries that I'm using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, my question is: how do I determine what license options I have for a project that uses libraries licensed under AGPL 3.0, LGPL 2.1, ASL 2.0, EPL 2.0, and BSD 2-clause?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't expect anyone to do my work for me, I'm happy to do the necessary research if someone could just point me towards how I would go about that in the first place)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18958" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T08:53:21.420" Title="Finding valid license for project utilizing AGPL 3.0 libraries" Tags="|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13914" CreationDate="2023-04-17T05:37:49.910" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll assume that the FSF is right about linking to a library making a derivative work, and the consequences thereof.  This isn't a settled question, and you can find more about it elsewhere on this site, but I'm going to assume it's so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LGPLv2.1 doesn't impose any requirements on the licence for your code.  It has some other requirements, but those would be met by licensing youyr code under AGPLv3.  I had some worries about the onward conveyability of the result, but the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility matrix&lt;/a&gt; suggests that an LGPLv2 library can be used with GPLv3 code without having to &amp;quot;trapdoor&amp;quot; the library to GPLv3, so I think use with AGPLv3 will be comparably fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BSD2 and Apache2 libraries will be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your biggest problem is the EPL2 library.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EPL2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility list&lt;/a&gt;, EPL2 code is only compatible with GPLv3 code if the EPL licensor offers the option of a secondary licence, and includes GPLv3 under that option; otherwise, they say, the licences are incompatible.  So as I read it, unless you're really lucky, and the EPL2 licensor has designated AGPLv3 as a permissible secondary licence, you can't use that library as you propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might try approaching the library's athor(s) and asking if they will so designate AGPLv3.  You might well strike gold; EPL is a copyleft licence, so their aims are already likely to be aligned with yours.  Otherwise, I fear you may need to do without that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T05:37:49.910" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13908" CreationDate="2023-04-17T07:32:44.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Chris Bouchard has laid out in great detail, Open Source generally specifically makes it possible for users to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; the program freely and without attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're running into the problem faced by commercial applications with a test, demo, student, hobbyist license. For example, the CAD program Fusion360 is extremely popular with 3D printing hobbyist, and very likely a healthy chunk of people use it frequently and exclusively to create models. The free (as in beer, not freedom) version of this software contains plenty of restrictions, both technically (i.e., with many functions disabled) as well as in legalese (e.g., output must not be used in commercial settings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author (AutoDesk, in this case) can do that because it is not an open license - it is a regular commercial, closed, license; they are adapting the license occasionally to fit their needs. For example, the feature set in the free license was reduced somewhat a few years ago because they found out that plenty of small businesses were using it instead of getting the cheapest paid version intended for such uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, TLDR: Open Source has no provisions for this, you'd have to close it &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; make the functions reduced enough that a licensee cannot abuse it (in your definition of that word, whatever it may be) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; probably introduce some licensing scheme based on regularly expiring license documents/codes that users have to renew regularly, which would give you a chance to change your rules or stop giving out free licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you've already open-sourced your software, it is too late for that (and it doesn't look like you're really interested in it, anyway, of course)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2023-04-18T09:42:34.270" LastActivityDate="2023-04-18T09:42:34.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13914" CreationDate="2023-04-17T08:53:21.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;MadHatter's answer pointed you to a roadblock in your project, based on license compatibility, or rather incompatibility, between EPL2 and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are options you can consider to overcome this 'situation' by removing a) the AGPL-licensed code or b) its copyleft implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could avoid the AGPL license of iText by choosing their&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://itextpdf.com/get-your-itext-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commercial license&#xA;program&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could try to replace the AGPL-licensed code by other code with a&#xA;more permissive license. One thing that comes to mind is &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdfbox.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache&#xA;PDFBox&lt;/a&gt;, but there might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://java-source.net/open-source/pdf-libraries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;other&#xA;libraries&lt;/a&gt; that&#xA;better fit your purpose and requirements.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You could use a PDF-library, which is accessible through a command&#xA;line interface or another loosely coupled connection, which will&#xA;ensure that this code and your other code are considered an&#xA;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aggregate&lt;/a&gt;'.&#xA;In this case, independent of the license of the PDF library, the&#xA;code of the rest of your project would not be impacted by any&#xA;copyleft implications of the license of the PDF library. Such&#xA;command-line tools might have to be installed independently from the&#xA;other app, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ghostscript.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghostscript&lt;/a&gt; is a typical&#xA;example for this category of software, available for some platforms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-04-17T08:53:21.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13921" CreationDate="2023-04-20T07:51:31.433" Score="19" ViewCount="6143" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that the licenses of e.g. code on Github are currently not observed when training AIs and that there are licenses such as AGPL that require the code to be disclosed. But is there already a license that explicitly prevents use (for training) by an AI, and if not, should one strive for something like that? Would that make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29923" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T16:03:49.657" Title="Is there a license like MIT that explicitly forbids the use of AI?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2023-04-20T08:45:12.930" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question here remains &amp;quot;is the AI model a derivative work of the training inputs?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is, then all the AI companies are already in violation of copyright and you don't need a specific license for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not - i.e. it is fair use - then a license saying &amp;quot;you may not use this to train an AI model&amp;quot; is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of April 2023, the answer to the question is very much unknown; it will need to be decided on by courts, who may make different decisions in different jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T08:45:12.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-20T11:54:54.710" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have developed material to teach a programming class. It is an old style class, thought for a teacher teaching to students, with slides and examples.&#xA;The material is made of a website, where the slides for the instructor are available, and of examples and tests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to make this material freely accessible to anyone who wants to use it for non commercial purposes. Instead, if there is someone who wants to use it with commercial purposes (e.g. a company that sells education services), I would like to be contacted first to agree on a certain sum of money to use it. Such money would then be devolved to non profit organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s there an &amp;quot;open-source&amp;quot; type of license that fits with this scenario?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29925" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T11:54:54.710" Title="License that grants free use for non commercial purposes but asks for some money for commercial use" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-04-21T15:56:13.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2023-04-20T19:10:12.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the output of an AI is a derivative work of its training input, then compliance with most existing licenses is likely to be difficult or impractical, because of the need for attribution, but this &lt;em&gt;only affects distribution&lt;/em&gt; of the output and/or the model (it's currently unclear whether a problem with the output would also affect the model itself). It does not prevent you from creating a model for your own private use. Furthermore, a future AI might be &amp;quot;smart&amp;quot; enough to be able to attribute things correctly, and such an AI would be fully compliant with the relevant licenses. If a license wants to prohibit the use of private models and/or fully compliant models, then it would have to prohibit the training process itself (see next paragraph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the output of an AI is not a derivative work of its training input, then such a limitation would require the license to prohibit training, which is not compatible with our usual understanding of Free and Open Source Software. It violates freedom #1 of the Free Software Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish&amp;quot;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSD&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFreeSoftwareGuidelines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DFSG&lt;/a&gt; requirement #3 (&amp;quot;The license must allow modifications and derived works...&amp;quot;), and possibly also OSD #10 (&amp;quot;No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface&amp;quot;). This is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because the AI is &amp;quot;learning&amp;quot; anything, but rather because the AI could serve as a tool for a human to modify the code. By prohibiting AI, you are prohibiting that human from modifying that code with that tool, which is simply Not Done in FOSS licensing (imagine, for example, a license prohibiting the use of a particular IDE, compiler, or version control system).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We currently do not know whether the output of an AI is a derivative work of its input, so we don't know which of those two paragraphs applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-04-20T19:19:13.630" LastActivityDate="2023-04-20T19:19:13.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-20T20:54:44.153" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a client that wants to opensource their project to receive contributions and leave the code as a public good. The software might be used by individual institutions, meaning each institution might have its own implementation running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the client also wants to have an agreement with each of the institutions that want to use the code and have their own software running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any opensource license that I can use for this? or another tool?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a bit lost reading a lot about opensource licenses, can you give me a few clues on where to dig more on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29929" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-04-21T06:33:50.170" LastActivityDate="2023-05-08T08:54:51.747" Title="I want to receive contributions to my project but have an agreement with third parties that wants to use it" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-21T11:56:50.917" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some languages don't care about indentation, developers can write all their code in one line. Apache license requires to add a copyright notice if someone else changed the code, if I only changed code indentation of languages that don't care about indentation, should I add a notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29705" LastActivityDate="2023-04-21T11:56:50.917" Title="Does Apache license require a notice if I changed code indentation?" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2023-04-21T12:49:24.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Distribution of the model is a legal question on its own. It's not obviously computer code, or a work of literature, or any of the other things that can be copyrighted. It might be similar to perfumes, something that by omission simply is not covered by Intellectual Property laws. And if the model is not a work in the sense of copyright law, then the output cannot be a derivative work either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="485" LastActivityDate="2023-04-21T12:49:24.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-22T16:31:56.477" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I import some header files (or Python modules) which are under GPLv3 into a source file that I would like to publish as Open Source (OS), and also signify that I have copyright on that specific file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can I actually possess copyright on a file within which I import GPL'd code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If yes, do I also need to re-add the origin GPL header from the original code which I import? I'd guess it is already covered since the original code should have it in it, already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference when I link object code against my source file regarding the former two questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this actually count as &amp;quot;modifying the work&amp;quot;, so I need to give appropriate notice that I modified the original work? In other words: Is there a difference between taking an original GPL'd source file directly and modifying it, in contrast to importing this file and writing my own code, but with the use of classes and methods from the imported file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28837" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-29T06:10:03.790" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T07:43:37.830" Title="Importing GPLv3'd code: Which copyright notice to add to my own code?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13930" CreationDate="2023-04-24T12:01:45.590" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found a translation of an ancient book, and the translation is now out of copyright and its scanned contents are being hosted publicly under a Creative Common 4.0 license. The scans are images, so I am planning on applying OCR to the scanned pages, save the contents as text, and provide better file formats for it (such as PDF, Mobi, EPUB, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to provide the code used to OCR the contents, the transformed text (LaTeX) and the final files (PDF, MOBI, etc) &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;for free and publicly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I was thinking of licensing the code and the LaTeX files as GPLv3, and then licensing the final output files as Creative Commons 4.0. I am planning on attributing the original sources and scanned content through the whole process. Is this the right approach or will there be a licensing conflict?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit 1: As per @Kevin answer, I double checked the license and found out it is actually a CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29953" LastEditorUserId="29953" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T22:52:11.100" LastActivityDate="2023-04-26T00:59:39.007" Title="Licensing for CC BY 4.0 content digitization" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13929" CreationDate="2023-04-24T20:39:13.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the translation (i.e. the text) is out of copyright, you can basically do whatever you want (the OCR'd text is supposed to be word-for-word identical to the uncopyrighted original text, so you don't have to comply with the license on the scan - for that matter, the scan may not even be subject to copyright protection in the first place). However, you should consider some common use cases, and ask yourself what rights you want the reuser to have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppose someone wants to change some of the formatting of your LaTeX, for example to meet the stylistic requirements of some publication. Do you want to force them to license the resulting document as GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suppose someone wants to reword the document, to bring it in line with a more modern variety of English (e.g. several decades in the future). Should they be forced to use GPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone who doesn't want to put up with your licensing restrictions can always just strip the LaTeX commands (so they just have plain text) and redo the formatting from scratch. Since the underlying text is out of copyright, they don't need to comply with the GPL. Does using the GPL really accomplish anything, other than inconveniencing people?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's my opinion that using a copyleft license is more trouble than it's worth in a case like this, but you may come to a different conclusion. If you really want to use the GPL, you could write an exception, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an exception, you may process this document through any LaTeX compiler, and distribute the resulting PDF or PostScript file(s) under [license]. If you modify this document, you may extend this exception to your version of the document, but you are not required to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Be sure to identify a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; Creative Commons license. Do not just say &amp;quot;Creative Commons 4.0&amp;quot; - otherwise someone might choose e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt;, which is probably much more restrictive than you wanted.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not thrilled with that option, for multiple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1451/532&quot;&gt;crayon license&lt;/a&gt;, and those are generally problematic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's specific to LaTeX and the PDF and PostScript formats. You might be able to remove those format specifications from the text, but that might make it so ambiguous or general that it becomes hard to tell what is permitted and what is not. Copyright lasts for a long time, often much longer than individual technologies. These three technologies have been around for a while, so they might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;less susceptible to obsolescence&lt;/a&gt; than other formats, but I still don't like tying the license to them, just in case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text is not under copyright, so you're not really protecting much in the first place. I just think this is too much legal complexity for too little benefit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the GPL, I would suggest a simple permissive license such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt;, or one of the other Creative Commons licenses. If you really want to be &lt;em&gt;maximally&lt;/em&gt; permissive, you could also choose &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-0&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-04-26T00:59:39.007" LastActivityDate="2023-04-26T00:59:39.007" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13931" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-24T21:23:05.153" Score="3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I run a small consulting firm and would like to configure some GPLv3 and AGPL software for a client (think HR, Accounting, ERP software). We mainly want to avoid Oracle or other ERP providers to save our client money, so if possible we want to go with open source. The GPL and AGPL software we will configure for them would only be used by my client internally. Neither they or we are offering it as a service. We are not hosting it for them (we will configure it on their provider of choice), but we will charge for maintenance of their system if they choose to pay us for that. We are also open with them about specifically what software we setup for them use and show them where to find the code on GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside the GPL code, we also distribute some software that we have written ourselves, and when we are ready, will deploy all of it together on a Kubernetes cluster for our client so that their business can use it. Our proprietary code does not use the GPL or AGPL code in any way, and exists completely independently. It is deployed separately, but on the same cluster. Additionally, the GPL and AGPL code we want to host for them will not be modified or touched in any way, and is only deployed for their internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some of the software I configure for my client is GPL or AGPL, will we have to release our own proprietary modules which have nothing to do with the GPL or AGPL code but are distributed and deployed alongside it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29957" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T14:27:06.607" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T21:30:46.593" Title="Can I configure open source tools (GPL, AGPL) for my client?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-24T21:48:05.143" Score="3" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any FOSS licenses that explicitly allow the use of the software as AI training data with no restrictions, and explicitly disclaim any copyright interest in the output of the AI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm effectively looking for the opposite of &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13920/is-there-a-license-like-mit-that-explicitly-forbids-the-use-of-ai&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T03:38:21.567" Title="Is there a license that explicitly exempts AI from all conditions?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13932" CreationDate="2023-04-25T03:11:09.143" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There surely are FOSS licenses that explicitly allow the use of the software as AI training data with no restrictions. For a start, consider every license that allows the set of &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; possible uses with no restrictions (e.g., ultra-permissive ones like the WTFPL and CC0).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the question you link, it's either the case that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a particular AI training routine abstracts away the copyrightable components of a piece of code sufficiently to be not infringing, or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a particular AI training routine does not do so and its output therefore is a derivative work of related input(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the event that case #2 holds, you want to grant permission for the use of your software as training input to allow the redistribution of the AI output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably this is fine to allow for a FOSS license (assuming you also grant freedoms for usual uses by human users/developers), but it will probably, in effect, allow ultra-permissive use of your code in all cases anyway. Suppose a particular model, trained on your software as input, reproduces it verbatim (or nearly verbatim). Your stated intent is that this should be allowed and you wish to disclaim any copyright interest in this output (i.e., your code itself). Therefore anyone may use this output without restriction by, effectively, running your code through a machine-learning-powered identify function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say ultra-permissive licenses are not merely &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; for your specifications but are also the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; set of rights you could effectively grant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-04-25T03:38:21.567" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T03:38:21.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13938" CreationDate="2023-04-25T13:20:27.630" Score="4" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are a manufacturer of CNC controllers devices (computer numerical control): this is a special type of computer designed to control Mills, Lathes, etc. We would like to add a new range of devices with Linux at it core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The CNC controller would be sold as a whole: the hardware with Linux and our proprietary software which include a driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be worth mentioning that the device is sold as a specific purpose embedded system, where the user mostly only interacts with our GUI, BUT, it can be connected to the Internet, a mouse, a keyboard, and eventually, the software could be upgraded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kernel of Linux seems to be (at least some of the Kernel Modules API) under GPLv2 (partially with a syscall-note), this seems like a full blocker for proprietary drivers. However, I can see several companies selling proprietary drivers (NVidia, Google...), so I am not sure how is this achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a big fan of open-source, but unfortunately, making our software public is not a possibility (and is not under my decision).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can a proprietary driver be installed with a Linux system and provided with a device?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Different points of view&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain a little bit more about why all this is so confusing to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Binary blobs&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;When I read about proprietary drivers on Linux, the solution usually pops as &amp;quot;Binary blobs&amp;quot;, which I understand to be a compiled version of the driver's proprietary code, loaded at runtime by a minimalist GPLv2 driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct, how is this different than LGPL loading dynamically a library? (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shipment of proprietary with GPLv2&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;If the limitation is that the blob shall not be provided together with the GPLv2 driver: is this a blocker to selling a device with Linux and the driver installed? (2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syscall-note&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Some sources mention that the only use of the syscall API (with Tovald syscall-note in the license) is legal. If this is true, it is not clear to me why some companies are having all those concerns making binary blobs, and why the mechanism of tainted kernels exists. (3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Limit between firware and software&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Finally, some texts mention that the limit between firmware and software is about the possibility to upgrade or install software on the device. Does this mean that we shall make it not possible (or at least not trivial) to upgrade our device in order to be compliant with Linux Kernel GPLv2 license? (4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Some related questions:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10322/develop-proprietary-linux-driver&quot;&gt;Develop Proprietary Linux Driver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21915" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-04-26T13:48:25.470" LastActivityDate="2023-04-26T13:48:25.470" Title="How to embed a proprietary driver with Linux on a device?" Tags="|gpl-2|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13931" CreationDate="2023-04-25T14:31:03.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot; as explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “aggregate” consists of a number of separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate, even when the licenses of the other software are nonfree or GPL-incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T14:31:03.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13931" CreationDate="2023-04-25T21:30:46.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you distribute the GPL and AGPL software to your client (IE by placing it on the client's servers), it will be licensed to the client under the GPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you link your proprietary software to the GPL or AGPL code, you may trigger clauses of the GPL or AGPL that require you to supply the client with your code under those licenses. When I say &amp;quot;link,&amp;quot; the real test is... More complicated, so if you're worried about this, hire an attorney in your jurisdiction, it shouldn't take too long, might be an hour of work, who knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the work is distributed to other clients, there may be other issues. If the AGPL code is modified at some point, there may be other issues still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not your attorney and this has not been legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T21:30:46.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13935" CreationDate="2023-04-25T22:27:20.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is kind of... an open problem. A lot of Linux systems find different ways to link binary blobs of proprietary drivers to GPL-licensed OS libraries, and... they might all run afoul the GPL, and people just kind of turn a blind eye because enforcing those issues might make Linux systems useless. Runtime linking = dynamically linking, which means the driver source code would be subject to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One common answer is to give the user the option of whether or not to install the proprietary driver. This might not actually legally help the company that owns the driver, or the distributor, but it might factor into everybody just turning a blind eye to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be ways to keep your driver code at arm's length from the GPL code using standard API calls that don't require linking, or something like that. This is a case-by-case question, and to dig into it, you'd want to hire an attorney and have your developers in the meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not your attorney and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6501" LastActivityDate="2023-04-25T22:27:20.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-04-26T08:50:52.637" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vicuna.lmsys.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vicuna&lt;/a&gt; is an LLM. It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ai.facebook.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLAMA&lt;/a&gt; fine-tuned on &lt;a href=&quot;https://sharegpt.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ShareGPT&lt;/a&gt; chats. Hence, it is trained on &lt;a href=&quot;https://openai.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenAI&lt;/a&gt;-generated data. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20230426084141/https://wikidocs.net/193294&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLAMA license&lt;/a&gt; prohibits commercial use. &lt;a href=&quot;https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenAI terms of use&lt;/a&gt; prohibit using OpenAI-generated data to create competing models. ShareGPT data is &lt;a href=&quot;https://domeccleston.notion.site/domeccleston/Privacy-Policy-73a5302dc77349a6892d632d975582bf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-disclosed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I want to use Vicuna to generate text that I want to use to train a language model. Does this model also have to be non-commercial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the Vicuna weights are &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot; with non-commercial Meta's and OpenAI's licenses. However, if I train my language model from scratch on open-source datasets and some Vicuna-generated text, will it also be &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot;, or not - because its training data doesn't contain any original OpenAI data and its weights are not fine-tuned from LLAMA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29965" LastActivityDate="2023-04-26T08:50:52.637" Title="Can I train a language model using Vicuna-generated text?" Tags="|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-04-26T10:44:25.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13935" CreationDate="2023-04-26T10:04:23.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a proprietary driver be installed with a Linux system and provided with a device?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first option to investigate is if you can create a user-space driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how the communication with the CNC machine works, this might mean splitting your driver in two parts: One part that just handles the communication with the hardware on its most basic level and runs in kernel space and another part that contains all the interesting intellectual property that you want to protect and runs in user space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are lucky and you are using a fairly standard protocol to communicate with the hardware, there might even already be a existing driver for the kernel space part. Otherwise, you would need to create your own driver under the GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the kernel and user space parts only communicate with each other over the syscall interface, then the syscall-note gives you permission to keep the user-space code under a GPL-incompatible closed-source library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-04-26T10:04:23.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13079" CreationDate="2023-04-28T14:02:21.517" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can take any MIT licensed code and change license to any. But you need to preserve the original code license text and copyright notice. You can put it to a separate folder and add to About program page.&#xA;Also use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;0BSD&lt;/a&gt; instead of WTFPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29980" LastActivityDate="2023-04-28T14:02:21.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13927" CreationDate="2023-04-30T07:43:37.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I actually possess copyright on a file within which I import GPL'd code?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The GPL does not deny you to own the copyrights on what you create, but the GPL does put limitations on under which terms you can distribute derived works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license works on the basis of copyright law. Under copyright law, if you are not the author of the code, you have very limited rights. For example, you are not allowed to make copies, changes or to build upon the code of others. And that includes importing the module into your own code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the code can give others permission to do some or all of those things by means of a copyright license. Such a license can have all kinds of strings attached to it, like that you have to pay money or that you have to distribute your code under the same license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license has as effective requirement that if you use a module that is under the GPL license in your application, then you must distribute your application also under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, do I also need to re-add the origin GPL header from the original code which I import? I'd guess it is already covered since the original code should have it in it, already.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don´t need to add the copyright statement from the imported module to your code, but you do need to put a GPL license header in your files to indicate they are licensed under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a difference when I link object code against my source file regarding the former two questions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this actually count as &amp;quot;modifying the work&amp;quot;, so I need to give appropriate notice that I modified the original work? In other words: Is there a difference between taking an original GPL'd source file directly and modifying it, in contrast to importing this file and writing my own code, but with the use of classes and methods from the imported file?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, you are not modifying the module you import, but you are creating a derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a GPL viewpoint, there is no practical difference between copying a file into your project and modifying it and importing a file and writing your own code to use the imported routines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a code maintenance perspective, there is a big difference and importing is highly preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-04-30T07:43:37.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9121" CreationDate="2023-05-01T08:00:13.017" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language of EPL licenses are confusing to many users, because the defined terms are not exactly what most people expect. For example if you look at the difference between the definitions of '&lt;em&gt;Contribution&lt;/em&gt;' and '&lt;em&gt;Contributor&lt;/em&gt;'. It is important to note that within the license language the term &amp;quot;the Program&amp;quot; only refers to the EPL-2 licensed code (or any modifications thereof), but not to the entire project that uses the EPL-2 licensed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q1: &amp;quot;Is EPL 2.0-licensed software still usable in the conditions above?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am assuming that the &lt;em&gt;conditions above&lt;/em&gt; refer to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;include software licensed under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 2.0 in commercial closed software&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3.1b allows you to distribute your closed-source software, which includes elements of EPL-2.0 licensed software, under certain conditions. The conditions are easy to fulfill, you just need to name the library, state the license, provide the source (section 3.1a), keep any existing any copyright, patent, trademark, attribution notices etc (section 3.3), and on behalf of all other Contributors disclaim all warranties and conditions. Nothing will put your proprietary know-how at risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'secondary license' is irrelevant for your use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q2: &amp;quot;... if I make significant changes that greatly modify the original code but depend on it, am I required to release everything? Is it possible to change the license in this case?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you change the original EPL-2 licensed program, you need to provide the source code of that modified program under the EPL-2 license. You cannot change the license of that modified program, but for your entire closed source project the answer to Q1 still applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q3: &amp;quot;What if I develop a separate module to be used with the software released under EPL 2.0?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can easily do that, the EPL-2 license does not create any implications on the licensing of your separate module.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-05-01T13:53:25.660" LastActivityDate="2023-05-01T13:53:25.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-03T10:04:48.933" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I made a library with which I distribute an opensource-licences-readme.txt file disclosing which open-source projects I have leveraged and including their copyright notices and other required info.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asked by a company that wants to use my library today if they also need to include this &lt;code&gt;.txt&lt;/code&gt; file in their product (theirs is a compiled commercial product for sale).  I'm unsure if it's just me that needs to do so, or if they are obliged to copy and redistribute the same license information that I provide, so I haven't been able to advise them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30022" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-03T13:30:57.157" LastActivityDate="2023-05-03T13:30:57.157" Title="Do people/companies using my library need to include my OSS licensing notice?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2023-05-03T19:14:32.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-03T17:57:09.140" Score="4" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about the share alike part of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license which states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The upper part of my book cover is an unmodified CC-BY-SA 3.0 image, covering about 60% of the cover, while the bottom 40% features stylized text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since I used the unmodified CC-BY-SA 3.0 image as part of my art cover, my question is whether the combined cover is still considered a remixed or transformed work, and therefore whether I need to share the entire book cover under a similar license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does slightly cropping the CC-BY-SA 3.0 image as part of 60% of my art cover affect the licensing conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30024" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-04T05:22:38.753" LastActivityDate="2023-05-04T05:22:38.753" Title="If I use a CC-BY-SA artwork as part of my book cover art, do I need to share my entire book cover art under a similar license?" Tags="|license|creative-commons|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-05T11:29:06.857" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost all my open source files has &amp;quot;All rights reserved&amp;quot; written along the usual &amp;quot;copyright © 2XXX My name&amp;quot; in the first line. I recently heard that, besides being obsolete, this is in contradiction with some permissive licenses, e.g. MIT, that I state in my projects. So, the question is:&#xA;Should edit all my code to erase the &amp;quot;All rights reserved&amp;quot; phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT for clarity:&#xA;My doubt is if I &lt;strong&gt;MUST&lt;/strong&gt; edit existing files, or I can leave them as they are, while obviously not including the ARR phrase in new files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25997" LastEditorUserId="25997" LastEditDate="2023-05-06T09:07:25.097" LastActivityDate="2023-05-06T09:07:25.097" Title="Should I get rid of &quot;All rights reserved&quot;?" Tags="|license-compatibility|copyright|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-05T17:41:31.343" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one uses an AI model licensed under CC-BY-SA (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPT-7B-Instruct&lt;/a&gt;) in a program, must the program by licensed under CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/#:%7E:text=CC%20BY%2DSA%3A%20This%20license,license%20allows%20for%20commercial%20use.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creativecommons.org&lt;/a&gt; mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SA  – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't know whether the program is considered an adaptation (aka, a derivative work) of the AI model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-05-07T08:48:16.893" LastActivityDate="2023-05-07T08:48:16.893" Title="If one uses an AI model licensed under CC-BY-SA in a program, must the program be licensed under CC-BY-SA?" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by-sa|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13951" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-06T20:37:00.193" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Example of such a clause in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://huggingface.co/spaces/CompVis/stable-diffusion-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative MLOpen RAIL-M dated August 22, 2022&lt;/a&gt; used by &lt;a href=&quot;https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You agree not to use the Model or Derivatives of the Model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In any way that violates any applicable national, federal, state, local or international law or regulation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see the point of that clause. I.e., I don't see what would change if the clause were to be deleted. Why do some open-source licenses have a clause stating that one can't violate the law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="210" LastActivityDate="2023-05-06T20:37:00.193" Title="Why do some open-source licenses have a clause stating that one can't violate the law?" Tags="|license|law|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2023-05-07T05:40:40.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-07T10:38:49.587" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am commercial software developer, and my piece of software dynamically calls the LGPL v2.1/LGPL v3 library. Am I allowed to notarize my installation package that includes LGPL dynamic loaded library binary?&#xA;Addidional Option b) To protect my software from replacing dynamic loaded library with some malicious code is it allowed with LGPL to verify library code sign? Veryfing checksum I believe is strictly not allowed with LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30044" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T08:22:02.577" Title="Can I notarize my MacOS package that contains LGPL dynamic library?" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|commercial|code-signing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13952" CreationDate="2023-05-07T11:10:04.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL v3, Section 4(d)(1)(b)&lt;/a&gt; requires that your program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will operate properly with a modified version of the Library that is interface-compatible with the Linked Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Very similar language exists in Section 6(b)(2) of the LGPL v2.1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verifying the checksum of the library will mean your program will not operate properly, so you are correct you are not allowed to do this; the LGPL is explicitly designed to allow users to replace the LGPL code when it is combined into a larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details of notarization are not entirely clear to me but the same principle applies: the user must be able to replace the LGPL code with an interface-compatible version and still run the software (and in the case of LGPL v3 software, still install the software as well). If as you say in comments it is possible to enable this with one simple command, I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that would be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-05-09T08:22:02.577" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T08:22:02.577" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13924" CreationDate="2023-05-08T08:54:51.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a client that wants to opensource their project to receive contributions and leave the code as a public good. [...] But the client also wants to have an agreement with each of the institutions that want to use the code and have their own software running.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two requirements are mutually-incompatible, not just with free software licences, but to some extent with software licensing generally.  Even if your client sells only individual licences to specified institutions, and those licences are standard proprietary licences (no permission to copy, modify, distribute copies, etc.), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mondaq.com/uk/licensing-syndication/192928/when-is-a-software-license-transferable-even-if-it-says-it-is-nontransferable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some jurisdictions hold&lt;/a&gt; that the licensee can sell their license on if certain conditions are met, even if the language of the licence says it's non-transferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time your client has bound the licence up such that the software can only be run by institutions with whom the client has an agreement, it will be so constrained that nobody in their right minds will run it, and it &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; won't qualify as an open-sourced, public good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your client can have the warm feeling that comes from creating genuinely-free software (in which case we can advise on the specific licence), or they can have the questionable feeling that comes from total control over how their creation is used.  They can't have both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-05-08T08:54:51.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13959" CreationDate="2023-05-09T11:01:05.580" Score="14" ViewCount="4668" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, we are now hearing about the 'Mojo' language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Julia, it is claimed to favorably compare to languages such as C (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open standard&lt;/a&gt;) and Python (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Software_Foundation_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with GPL&lt;/a&gt;); Julia being licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But what's the mojo license?&lt;/strong&gt; Shouldn't that be defined somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of writing this question, I couldn't find the answer either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on their GitHub &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/modularml/mojo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/modularml/mojo&lt;/a&gt; (no 'LICENSE' file)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in their FAQs, or even on their entire website &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojo_(programming_language)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the mojo license is left unsaid in so many places (as it seems) is very surprising and a priori doesn't bode well to be honest. For me, this is sufficient to stay clear from that language. Couldn't they add a license later, one that'd turn out to be proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30061" LastEditorUserId="30061" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T09:30:51.930" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T17:24:51.860" Title="What is the license of Mojo?" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13958" CreationDate="2023-05-09T11:33:47.880" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;em&gt;as of today, 2023-05-09&lt;/em&gt;, the only way to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; Mojo is via &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.modular.com/mojo/get-started.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the developer's playground&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mojo standard library, compiler, and runtime are not available for local development yet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With nothing being distributed, there's no &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; for a license at this time - personally though I would be very wary of investing time in a language where there isn't a freely available reference implementation; too much risk of a &amp;quot;bait and switch&amp;quot; where I suddenly have to pay $$$ to do what I want to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-05-09T11:33:47.880" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-09T07:01:06.850" Score="10" ViewCount="1693" Body="&lt;p&gt;My concrete example is IANA's tzdb version 2023c. As specified in &lt;a href=&quot;https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2023c/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2023c/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt; the case is clear &amp;quot;if the files date.c, newstrftime.3, and strftime.c are present&amp;quot;: The SPDX-License-Identifier is BSD-3-Clause then.&#xA;However I cannot find any public domain license for IANA or any general public domain license (perhaps with something as general as &amp;quot;This falls under public domain&amp;quot; or something comparable to that) in SPDX' license list &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/&lt;/a&gt;. There is a discussion on a forum from eleven years ago: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensuse-packaging.opensuse.narkive.com/7ulzl2g8/what-s-the-new-spdx-name-for-a-public-domain-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensuse-packaging.opensuse.narkive.com/7ulzl2g8/what-s-the-new-spdx-name-for-a-public-domain-license&lt;/a&gt;, but there doesn't seem a clearly fitting solution for me here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I see 3 different ways to proceed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use some public domain license, already listed as of now that seems like a close match&lt;/strong&gt; (9 May 2023).&#xA;Togan Muftuoglo suggests using CPL-1 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:2.375.36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:2.375.36&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;There &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; some specific public domain licenses listed: Common Public License 1.0 (suggested by Togan Muftuoglu), Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification, libselinux public domain notice, NIST Public Domain Notice, Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication &amp;amp; License 1.0, and Sax Public Domain Notice. Yet, these have very specific individual wording, so I wouldn't use &amp;quot;Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification&amp;quot; or the others in my case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't mention it at all&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;On the other side, Stephan Kulow mentions in the same discussion that &amp;quot;As Public Domain is basically the lack of license, spdx does not cover it.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:3.375.74&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:3.375.74&lt;/a&gt;). So should I just leave it out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Use a new Public-Domain&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;He also mentions their organization's solution (&lt;a href=&quot;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:3.528.34&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://narkive.com/7ulzl2g8:3.528.34&lt;/a&gt;): adding a new tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.1. I might also &lt;strong&gt;put a &amp;quot;Iana-Public-Domain&amp;quot; for request&lt;/strong&gt; to be added in the official SPDX license list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2. Also just using a &lt;strong&gt;custom and unofficial &amp;quot;Public-Domain&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't seem that &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the best solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30063" OwnerDisplayName="Peter" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2023-05-09T13:21:15.113" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T08:48:24.243" Title="Which SPDX-License-Identifier should I use for &quot;Public Domain&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|public-domain|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13960" CreationDate="2023-05-09T13:31:25.830" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Decisions/Dealing_with_Public_Domain_within_SPDX_Files&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Decisions/Dealing_with_Public_Domain_within_SPDX_Files&lt;/a&gt; SPDX policy is to treat these as custom licenses on a case by case basis. Due to the ambiguity of the term 'Public Domain' outside of uncopyrightable/expired works, the complexity of expiry/uncopyrightability across jurisdictions, and the variation of process for dedication, dedication to the public domain is a much more complex process than a sufficiently open license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such the way to handle it is like any other custom license: a &lt;code&gt;ExtractedText&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;LicenseCrossReference&lt;/code&gt; tag for the public domain declaration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the rights holder for the work, and not just annotating third party code, you should consider licensing the work under CC0. CC0 is a legally validated attempt to either dedicate to the public domain or as close to across jurisdictions in a standardized manner avoiding the above complexity. Then you can use the CC0 SPDX license value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18445" LastEditorUserId="18445" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T08:14:20.267" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T08:14:20.267" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13960" CreationDate="2023-05-09T13:41:18.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Public Domain' as a concept does not exist in all jurisdictions. For example Germany has the term 'Gemeinfreiheit', which is similar, but not the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reside in a jurisdiction, which accepts the concept of 'Public Domain, then your best bet might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; which attempts to cover both (and other similar) concepts in its wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can read in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Please note that CC0 is not a license; it is a public domain&#xA;dedication. When CC0 is applied to a work, copyright no longer applies&#xA;to the work in most jurisdictions around the world.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0 FAQ states&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;CC0 is a useful tool for clarifying that you do not claim copyright&#xA;in a work anywhere in the world. Because copyright laws differ by&#xA;jurisdiction, you might be granted an automatic copyright in&#xA;jurisdictions that you may not be aware of. By using CC0, you signal&#xA;to the public that you relinquish any such rights.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons have employed lawyers to create a legal tool, which is a public domain dedication in some jurisdictions and a license in others. CC0 is putting the simplistic &lt;em&gt;Public Domain&lt;/em&gt; into sophisticated words which are understood by lawyers around the world. Therefore re-use of the code would not be a problem even in large, commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a SPDX identifier (&amp;quot;CC0-1.0&amp;quot;), which you can use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you reside in a country, which does not support the concept of 'Public Domain' (e.g. Germany), then you should not touch it. Even if it is the declared intent of the rights holder to put the work into Public Domain, this might be invalid and thus insufficient in your jurisdiction for the re-labeling of 'Public Domain' into CC0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T08:48:24.243" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T08:48:24.243" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-10T06:34:46.477" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing an android app which uses two libraries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Library A (Apache 2.0 license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Library B (MPL-2.0 license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is it mandatory to cite these two libraries within the app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause 4 of the Apache 2.0 license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(d) If the Work includes a &amp;quot;NOTICE&amp;quot; text file as part of its distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed as modifying the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(b)&lt;/code&gt; does not apply because I haven't modified any source file of the library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(c)&lt;/code&gt; does not apply because I will not distribute the source code of my app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;(d)&lt;/code&gt; does not apply because the library does not have any NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I satisfy &lt;code&gt;(a)&lt;/code&gt; if I don't distribute my app source code? Should I create an about page which states that I'm using library A licensed under bla bla?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clause 3.2 of the MPL 2.0 license states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.2. Distribution of Executable Form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You distribute Covered Software in Executable Form then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) such Covered Software must also be made available in Source Code Form, as described in Section 3.1, and &lt;strong&gt;You must inform recipients of the Executable Form how they can obtain a copy of such Source Code Form&lt;/strong&gt; by reasonable means in a timely manner, at a charge no more than the cost of distribution to the recipient; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) You may distribute such Executable Form under the terms of this License, or sublicense it under different terms, provided that the license for the Executable Form does not attempt to limit or alter the recipients’ rights in the Source Code Form under this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same question: Should I create an about page which states that I'm using library library B and that is licensed under bla bla, giving a link to the original source code repository?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30066" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T07:32:51.760" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T07:32:51.760" Title="Is it mandatory to cite libraries used?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license|license-notice|attribution|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-05-16T04:56:22.867" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-10T11:18:49.123" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a software license, wrapper, or amendment that distinguishes between users of open-source and closed-source operating systems, aiming to balance the efforts of open-source users and discourage reliance on closed-source systems backed by BigTech companies. Open-source users often invest significant time and effort in learning and setting up their systems, contributing to the overall cause of promoting open-source adoption. Meanwhile, closed-source systems pose security and privacy risks, with many users remaining unaware of these issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept I'm interested in focuses on users running closed-source operating systems but does not impede anyone from accessing the project for free if they are willing to put in the effort of installing an open-source OS, dual booting, or running an open OS in a VM. This approach encourages users to improve their personal situation in terms of security, privacy, and self-sovereignty by exposing them to the concepts and incentivising them to dabble in OSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I believe this idea aligns with the principles of GNU, I acknowledge its incompatibility with copyleft licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One challenge with implementing this concept is handling the receipt and distribution of payments. I'm considering using a privacy-respecting cryptocurrency, like Monero, for payment and upstream distribution. As part of the license, we could create a package for various languages that aids in receiving the cryptocurrency and automatically passing it upstream, minimizing administrative work for participants once everything is set up. The module could also provide an instruction guide for the end-users on how to set up a wallet and purchase or mine the cryptocurrency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as far as I know, Monero does not support smart contracts, which means that each project would have to manually push the 50% upstream. Are there any other privacy-respecting cryptocurrencies that could automate this kind of functionality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a summary of the concept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users running the software on open-source operating systems can use it without any fees, acknowledging their time investment in learning and setting up these systems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Users running the software on closed-source operating systems are subject to a monthly fee after a trial period.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;50% of the collected fees are shared with the creators of open-source software packages used by the licensed project.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Payment to the creators of the packages used is dependent on them sharing 50% of their income from this source with the packages they use, creating a fractal-like distribution of income to fairly compensate all contributors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there is an existing license or mechanism (such as a wrapper or amendment) that already incorporates these ideas and acknowledges the incompatibility with copyleft licenses. If you know of any, please share pointers or resources that can help me understand the details and implications of using such a solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nothing like this exists, I would also appreciate hearing your thoughts on the feasibility of implementing this concept, potential challenges, compatibility issues, and suggestions for splitting the income fairly among the packages used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your help&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30069" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T11:18:49.123" Title="Seeking a software license to fairly distribute income among open-source contributors, discourage closed-source OS dependency" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-05-18T08:50:06.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13968" CreationDate="2023-05-10T12:05:57.210" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use Docker (just creating containers/images and running them without using the Desktop app) to develop internal tooling (so nothing that will be sold but that will be used internally to streamline and improve internal activities)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this use of Docker included in the free licensing or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I can't understand the various type of licensing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30071" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T09:00:10.323" Title="Docker for buisness" Tags="|license|docker|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-10T14:04:13.963" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it possible to sell open-source R scripts in Linux containers run with Podman on Windows and control the containers with closed-source graphical user interface (GUI)?&lt;/strong&gt; The straightforward and openly documented communication protocol between the GUI and the container will rely on command line. According to my best understanding, the setup could be considered as software aggregate as described here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, running the containers on Windows requires setting up the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL, or at least it seems to be the easiest way to get the things running). So, the R, Podman, and containers are open source, but the WSL has proprietary parts. The overall setup and mixture of licenses start to become quite complicated. Could the license-interpreter experts verify is the approach okay, and possibly clarify why the &amp;quot;license leakages&amp;quot; are or are not an issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make things even more complicated, the R is actually (or parts of it?) distributed under many other licenses than GPL as well. &lt;strong&gt;So, what is the practical approach here, pick up say GPL-2 from the many options and use it for further distribution in the commercial aggregate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.r-project.org/Licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, many options are available for the Rocker (Docker containers for R): &amp;quot;The Rocker Dockerfiles are licensed under the GPL 2 or later&amp;quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Thus, can I pick up the GPL-2 for the distribution in the aggregate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this discussion will help others as well who are figuring out similar cases. And because the cases vary, it would be awesome if someone could describe a practical step-by-step protocol/logic for dealing with the software licenses in small commercial projects. Assuming that there is at least some universal substance in the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for all the helpers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: it is difficult to find clear official information about the WSL license. The claim that the WSL has proprietary parts was obtained from wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This repo declares Creative Commons license, but I believe this refers only to the content of the repo used to track issues with WSL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the practical approach. &lt;strong&gt;Should the WSL be considered as a part of the underlying operating system running the commercial software, why the &amp;quot;environment's&amp;quot; licenses do not leak into my product?&lt;/strong&gt; Furthermore, the WSL will run only the open-source container and R scripts in it, separated from the proprietary GUI by the command-line interface. Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30072" LastEditorUserId="30072" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T07:02:50.377" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T06:32:40.367" Title="Commercial aggregate with open container and closed GUI" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|license|proprietary-code|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-10T21:17:33.647" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;A year ago I participated in a group project to develop a small game for a class. My work involved level generation, and I later reused the code I wrote for the group project in a separate personal project. The group project used the MIT license, while my personal project does not have a license applied to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is a bit misleading, as the only derived code from the group project was what I myself wrote. I made no use of anything in the group project outside of what I wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maintainer for the group project repo has requested permission to re-license to GPL3 instead of the MIT license. If the group project was re-licensed to GPL3, would my personal project be impacted in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30075" LastEditorUserId="30075" LastEditDate="2023-05-10T21:20:11.410" LastActivityDate="2023-05-10T21:20:11.410" Title="If an MIT licensed repo relicenses to GPL3, is my derived project impacted in any way?" Tags="|mit|gpl-3|relicensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-05-10T23:23:18.697" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13965" CreationDate="2023-05-11T09:00:10.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The core Docker runtime - for example, that available as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/docker.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;docker.io&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; package in Debian - is open source software, available under (mostly) the Apache 2.0 license, although with some subsidiary bits under other open source licenses. On a Linux system, this is all you need to run Docker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Docker Desktop&lt;/a&gt; - the &amp;quot;glue layer&amp;quot; which is required to run Docker natively &lt;em&gt;on Windows and macOS&lt;/em&gt; - is proprietary software which you may need to pay for depending on your use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T09:00:10.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13984" CreationDate="2023-05-11T10:48:12.530" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created an Android app implementing webview. In the webview, it is loading HTML files from the assets folder. The HTML files (and also associated javascript and css files) are GNU GPL v3 licensed and they are publicly available on GitHub. I have done that because the service should be available on PCs too, as a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, the Majority of Android libraries are Apache 2.0 licensed. Both of the licenses are incompatible with each other in my understanding. But since they function as separate entities, is it ok to use GNU GPL as the license or my Android app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like to mention that there is an occurrence where the app retrieves the value of an input field from webview. Does this affect them being called 'independent'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30081" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T14:26:14.460" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T01:44:25.770" Title="Can I use GNU GPL v3 in my free Android app?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13972" CreationDate="2023-05-11T11:11:24.387" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets assume I use ChakraCore in a project that I distribute like a web browser. Does that mean that I have to inlude all the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/chakra-core/ChakraCore/blob/master/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third party notices of ChakraCore&lt;/a&gt; in my shipped product? Basically a transitive dependency on licensed material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was somewhat surprised&#xA;to see that there are commercial games out there that are built using Unreal Engine or Godot but do not include any third party notice at all. Because the engines themselves use a lot of third party libraries I would expect that the licenses of all those&#xA;third party libraries propagates to the final product? Or is this not required because the mentioned engines are publicly available and people can indirectly figure out the third party libraries used in the shipped product? If not, why is no one suing the publishers of those games?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24867" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T11:35:40.300" Title="Propagation of third party notices" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13971" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-11T11:23:58.870" Score="10" ViewCount="1032" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I fell down Alice's Rabbit Hole when I discovered the same incorrect technical definition turning up in very many places such as blogs and Stack Overflow answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt; these all trace back to a bad version of a Wikipedia page: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=0.0.0.0&amp;amp;oldid=1123599090&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;last bad version ⚠️&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=0.0.0.0&amp;amp;diff=1124798294&amp;amp;oldid=1123599090&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diff from the edit that fixed it&lt;/a&gt;. It seems the incorrect Wikipedia article has adversely influenced some major software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cleared it up, being careful to cite sources and avoid the edit being contentious by moving the original wording under a heading to qualify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What concerns me now is that, months later, the old version appears to be still there in four other languages.  I speak none of these languages so am unable to correct the article myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Wikipedia have any process for flagging non-English versions as incorrect or otherwise in need of translation from English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, what options exist for flagging common myths on other language pages where I am unable to correct the page in the given language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I don't assume non-English pages are necessarily translations from English, just these pages all appear to have a common origin, and I would like the misinformation to be corrected in the similar pages in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15283" LastEditorUserId="15283" LastEditDate="2023-05-13T09:24:14.537" LastActivityDate="2023-05-13T09:24:14.537" Title="Is there a process for Wikipedia improvements to be translated" Tags="|wikipedia|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2023-05-12T23:07:58.570" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13970" CreationDate="2023-05-11T11:35:40.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes you will have to show those third party notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you include components into your software, you (and you alone) are responsible for complying with the licenses of those components. It doesn't matter here whether you included those components manually, or whether they were transitive dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the state of license compliance is … not good. Many software developers are not aware of their license obligations. However, &amp;quot;everyone else is doing it&amp;quot; isn't a valid defense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/complying_with_licenses.html#third-party-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godot manual explicitly calls out the need to show certain third party license notices&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/complying_with_licenses.html#third-party-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unreal Engine licensing terms&lt;/a&gt; also mention the need to comply with third party licenses, and explains where to find their licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Showing these licenses doesn't require excessive effort and doesn't have to result in awful user experience. Many professional apps have a menu entry that leads to a screen that contains all licenses, perhaps made easier to navigate via an accordion user interface. Some package managers like JavaScript's Yarn have built-in tools for generating such pages. Wherever you assert your own copyright in the application, also mention that some copyright is held by third parties, and link to that license notice page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being aware of all the licenses of all components can be helpful in case there are surprising license terms in there. While all Open Source licenses allow you to use, modify, and share the software for any purpose, there might be unusual notice terms, patent clauses, or copyleft mechanisms. I therefore think that it is sensible for a professional project to allowlist acceptable licenses, and to have an automated check during the build process to verify that no surprising licenses snuck in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T11:35:40.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6961" CreationDate="2023-05-11T12:13:42.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everybody here seems to forget that inside a saved model, besides the weights, there is a graph and a graph &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, you can think of it as a compiled version of a fragment of the original GPL program and so, IMO, the GPL sticks to it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17748" LastEditorUserId="17748" LastEditDate="2023-05-11T12:20:16.277" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T12:20:16.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-11T13:40:47.853" Score="2" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to C/C++.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I import , the license text looks as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&#xA;// Copyright (C) 1997-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.&#xA;//&#xA;// This file is part of the GNU ISO C++ Library.  This library is free&#xA;// software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the&#xA;// terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the&#xA;// Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)&#xA;// any later version.&#xA;&#xA;// This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,&#xA;// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of&#xA;// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the&#xA;// GNU General Public License for more details.&#xA;&#xA;// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional&#xA;// permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version&#xA;// 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.&#xA;&#xA;// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License and&#xA;// a copy of the GCC Runtime Library Exception along with this program;&#xA;// see the files COPYING3 and COPYING.RUNTIME respectively. If not, see&#xA;// &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA;&#xA;/** @file include/cstdlib&#xA; *  This is a Standard C++ Library file.  You should @c \#include this file&#xA; *  in your programs, rather than any of the @a *.h implementation files.&#xA; *&#xA; *  This is the C++ version of the Standard C Library header @c stdlib.h,&#xA; *  and its contents are (mostly) the same as that header, but are all&#xA; *  contained in the namespace @c std (except for names which are defined&#xA; *  as macros in C).&#xA; */&#xA;&#xA;//&#xA;// ISO C++ 14882: 20.4.6  C library&#xA;///&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the GPLv3 license. This applies to all libraries, e. g. , too. The files lie in &lt;code&gt;/usr/include/c++/9&lt;/code&gt;. Do I understand it correctly, that if I use any of the standard libs, my program needs to be GPL, too? How is this done in practice, when I dont want it to be GPL? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also googled and have done some research, but its still unclear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30082" LastActivityDate="2023-05-11T13:40:47.853" Title="C++ GPL Standard header" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13971" CreationDate="2023-05-11T18:15:31.787" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, there is no formal process here. Each Wikipedia is an independent project, so you cannot unilaterally demand that the other languages follow the English site's lead here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest one of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are confident in your knowledge of a given language, just fix it directly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; ability to communicate in that language, post a message to the article's talk page, identifying the problem and asking for assistance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you don't have any ability to communicate, try asking for help on the (English) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;village pump&lt;/a&gt;. They may be willing to give you advice or help you with translation, but please bear in mind that they cannot tell other projects what to do. I would suggest wording your post as a request for advice rather than as a request for action, because the latter may be seen as overstepping the English Wikipedia's bounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You might also take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babylon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babylon&lt;/a&gt; on Meta, but I'm not sure if it applies to a situation like this. I would suggest asking on the talk page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned in the comments, the site's &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Embassy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;local embassy&lt;/a&gt; may also be willing to help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T22:01:29.260" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T22:01:29.260" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13966" CreationDate="2023-05-12T06:32:40.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am answering to my own question after researching more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for &amp;quot;Windows subsystem for Linux&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;license&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;commercial use&amp;quot; did not help much. The best additional search term so far has been the &amp;quot;production environment&amp;quot; that helped me to find the link below. This is still a little bit vague, because the information is obtained from a FAQ page, not from a legal document. However, it is Microsoft's own interpretation, and they do not deny of using WSL in production environment (for me =commercially). They say it may not be technically the best option, especially for server use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#can-i-use-wsl-for-production-scenarios--&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/faq#can-i-use-wsl-for-production-scenarios--&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This further supports the earlier-mentioned practical approach of considering the WSL as a part of the underlying operating system why the licenses seem to be cleared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wsl.exe file was in the System32 folder with a bunch of other non-related files and directories. No relevant readme files etc were found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why I became cautious in the first place? I noticed that the use of the Windows base OS Docker images for production environment is expressively denied. Although the containers are of course quite different from WSL, as they try to virtualize the operating system itself excluding some underlying parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-windows-base-os-images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-windows-base-os-images&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30072" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T06:32:40.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-12T11:40:35.200" Score="2" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one is interested in the 'hosting is distribution' aspect of the license, but you don't want the anti-Tivoization, what are the alternatives to the GNU Affero General Public License?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20191123101252/http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original Affero General Public License&lt;/a&gt; version 1 is still around. It's incompatible with GNU GPL licenses. But, in a broken way? What are the consequences of that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only use non-GPL code or GPL code with library exception clauses, you can still distribute as .deb or AppImage, I suppose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I'll clarify my situation. I wrote the MQTT server &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flashmq.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FlashMQ&lt;/a&gt;. It's currently AGPL3, but I'm looking to change it. The reason is that for its original intent, it's a server program. And if it doesn't have network-copyleft, I might as well give it the unlicense, because who cares about distributing binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, now it's also going to be use embedded in IoT devices and they have laws to follow. GPL3 rules simply don't work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two cares:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any user interacting with FlashMQ needs to be able to see what they're interacting with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For anybody taking the project to host it; to quote Linus Torvalds with my addition: &amp;quot;I give you source code, you give me your (hosted) changes back, we're even&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of Torvalds, he said that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF lied to people when it comes to invalidating Tivoization&lt;/a&gt;, for the same reason mentioned in a comment below: people can fork the project and use the full AGPL3 and then I can't take back the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30089" LastEditorUserId="30089" LastEditDate="2023-05-13T02:36:58.763" LastActivityDate="2023-05-13T02:36:58.763" Title="Hosting is distribution - with Tivoization - alternatives to AGPL3" Tags="|agpl-3.0|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13977" CreationDate="2023-05-12T12:40:10.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you have a license that is slightly too strict for your purposes, you can combine it with a license exception. For example, the LGPL-3.0 is such an exception for the GPL-3.0. The A/L/GPL-3.0 license family allows the license to be combined with additional permissions (see section 7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to permit Tivoization, you could have a lawyer draft up a suitable exception from the relevant A/GPL-3.0 section 6 clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course you can also use the original Affero license – there's probably no &lt;em&gt;legal&lt;/em&gt; problem here. However, do note that the Apache-2 license is incompatible with older GPL-family licenses due to conflicting patent clauses. Using old licenses also misses out on other improvements in the meanwhile, for example with clearer definitions, and better adaptation to non-US jurisdictions. Finally, consider that unusual licenses make it more difficult to other people to use, modify, and share the software in novel ways, which would typically be the entire point of publishing it as Open Source.  AGPL-1.0-only is a dead end when it comes to license compatibility, though  AGPL-1.0-or-later would at least allow downstream changes to use the more well understood AGPL-3.0 terms instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of other network-copyleft licenses, though none are as popular with the AGPL-3.0. &lt;a href=&quot;https://blueoakcouncil.org/copyleft#network-copyleft-family&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blue Oak has a list of &amp;quot;network copyleft&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;maximal copyleft&amp;quot; licenses&lt;/a&gt;, though I think that list contains some licenses that aren't network copyleft, and some licenses that aren't Open Source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T12:40:10.340" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13958" CreationDate="2023-05-12T15:44:22.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to goldiegadde at &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/modularml/mojo/issues/84&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;issue #84&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mojo is not opensourced yet, see docs.modular.com/mojo/faq for further details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq.html#distribution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will Mojo be open-sourced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, we expect that Mojo will be open-sourced. However, Mojo is still young, so we will continue to incubate it within Modular until more of its internal architecture is fleshed out. We don’t have an established plan for open-sourcing yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not develop Mojo in the open from the beginning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mojo is a big project and has several architectural differences from previous languages. We believe a tight-knit group of engineers with a common vision can move faster than a community effort. This development approach is also well-established from other projects that are now open source (such as LLVM, Clang, Swift, MLIR, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no license at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30077" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-05-12T17:24:51.860" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T17:24:51.860" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-12T20:53:00.870" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some code of which I don't care that much about. That what I host online, has no license and as such should be in the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some projects contain files with:&#xA;&lt;code&gt;GNU Lesser General Public License&lt;/code&gt; (version 2.1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that projects containing files with such licence must have all source code available to the public (which I have).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must all source files in the same projects therefor also be provided with a GPL license or can I just keep my source codes licence-less as they are now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30092" LastActivityDate="2023-05-12T20:53:00.870" Title="If you use one file which has a GPL license, should all files get such a license?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13985" CreationDate="2023-05-12T21:37:47.797" Score="6" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an Open Source project under the LGPL 3.0 License. This project was created before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official text&lt;/a&gt; of the LGPL License used HTTPS in the URL for the Free Software Foundation website. I want to update the license included in the project to the new text, so it matches verbatim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to seek approval from all contributors to the project in order to update the URL to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, if that is the only change made to the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30094" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T08:58:51.777" Title="Updating the URL in the GNU LGPL 3.0 License" Tags="|lgpl|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13983" CreationDate="2023-05-13T07:09:24.377" Score="9" ViewCount="1117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am now working with some ~2005 C CLI code, licensed as GPLv2-only. I hope to do the following things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Port the code to a more recent environment (e.g. port to Ubuntu 22.04) (I only do this to try to get it running on a modern machine for doing the following steps)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Write a library in a different language (e.g. C#) based on findings made when doing (1) with the functionality of (1) (Note: not &lt;strong&gt;porting&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;coding&lt;/strong&gt; the same features with (possibly) entirely different code, &lt;strong&gt;without looking at the original code or (1)&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Port (2) back to C&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Build CLIs for both (2) and (3) in their respective languages (i.e. C &amp;amp; C#)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For (1) I'm certain I need to license it as GPLv2-only, but for the others I'm uncertain, and my goal is make my software available under the MIT/Expat License. Am I required to make them all GPLv2-only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30096" LastEditorUserId="30096" LastEditDate="2023-05-19T09:24:11.970" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T09:24:11.970" Title="Does reimplementing GPLv2 code in another language create a derivative work that also falls under the GPL?" Tags="|gpl-2|relicensing|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13982" CreationDate="2023-05-13T11:49:16.187" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. A derivative is a derivative. Porting existing code to another language also counts as making a modification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOT a derivative is a so-called blackbox implementation. That is the case when you look only at the behaviour of the library WITHOUT looking at the code and re-implement that; this might be argued still to some degree if you take the interface definition but not the implementation and implement the code without resorting to looking at the implementation at all (this was important in the quarrels between &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1421/how-is-oracle-suing-google-for-copyright-infringement-when-java-is-open-source&quot;&gt;google and oracle&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prominent example very similar to your question is where this became an issue was within the mercurial ecosystem. There the developers cracked down on re-implementations in other languages which their authors wanted to distribute under a permissive license without the original mercurial developers consent. Some original discussion from 15 years back is &lt;a href=&quot;https://mercurial.selenic.narkive.com/Fceyt1a8/in-pure-java&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-05-13T11:49:16.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13969" CreationDate="2023-05-14T01:44:25.770" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license is incompatible with the GPL version 2, but it is compatible with the GPL version 3, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article from GNU on compatible licenses&lt;/a&gt;. So you can combine the Apache 2.0 code with the GPL version 3 code, as long as you license your project under the GPL version 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T01:44:25.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13981" CreationDate="2023-05-14T08:58:51.777" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'd just make the update: this kind of &amp;quot;administrative change&amp;quot; is clearly within the spirit of both the the license and the open source philosophy, in that it ensures that people reading the license can get information about the license in a secure manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least in the UK, I believe a court would look very scathingly at anybody who tried to argue this kind of thing was a license violation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-05-14T08:58:51.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-15T09:27:42.613" Score="0" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few questions about MySQL licensing already out there, but none of them have a definitive &amp;quot;yes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; answer, so with the risk of being flagged as &amp;quot;duplicate&amp;quot;, I will ask my question as clear as possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can I bundle the MySQL Connector/J JAR file with my commercially (closed source) product?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Background: The MySQL Connector/J license is GPL2, which requires me to include MY source if it's a derivative work. But it's not a derivative work. It would be used as a library, not a compile-time dependency. Does this fall under &amp;quot;mere aggregation&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30109" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T09:27:42.613" Title="Include MySQL Connector/J in a commercial product" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ClosedDate="2023-05-22T08:14:53.650" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13231" CreationDate="2023-05-15T13:06:45.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[...] Can I distribute the program considering I comply with Apachev2 and LGPLv2.1 requirements? Or because Apache v2 and LGPLv2.1 are incompatible my program cannot link to these two libraries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL license allows you to (dynamically) link an LGPL library with code that has an incompatible license. So, as long as you don't modify the LGPL library with incompatible-licensed code and you follow the terms of both the LGPL license (for the LGPL library and to the extent that it applies to the code linking to it) and the Apache license (for the Apache library), you can distribute your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I distribute the program considering I comply with EPLv2 and Apache2 requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. Those licenses don't contradict each other so they are not incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-05-15T13:06:45.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2023-05-16T01:31:27.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL3 has provisions that let you link to the AGPL, though there are caveats that other answers have covered adequately so need no repeating here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL2 however you can not as the AGPL violates the following condition of the GPL2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each time you redistribute the Library (or any work based on the Library), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute, link with or modify the Library subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GP2L does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; require you make your sourcecode available if its user interface is merely accessibly over the web, it only requires it if you distribute the program. Since the AGPL DOES have this requirement , that requirement counts as a &amp;quot;further restriction&amp;quot;, and thus prohibits AGPL code linked to GPL2 code from further distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the GPL3 has specific language that permits this, although it behooves you to understand specifically how the resulting derivative work is actually licensed. The GPL2 does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30118" LastActivityDate="2023-05-16T01:31:27.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-16T08:34:49.057" Score="3" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have created a fork of a project that is releases under GPLv3 (As per LICENSE-file, GitHub and README).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, contributions that are from the community are licensed under MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now since I want to continue this project as a standalone one, I want to understand how I need to treat the upstream source code in regard to the community-license in that repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I allowed to strip away the MIT license and treat the full project as GPLv3? To me it is unclear if that license applies to the whole source code, or only the part the original maintainer wrote and the community-contributions are still MIT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, the upstream-project itself is just a fork of a different project, and that project was MIT originally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fine with using either one, but I want to stick to one license and remove the uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to the final question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I need to do to still adhere to the original licensee-requirements, and which license is the one I have to follow in my own project without breaking the license agreement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30120" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-05-16T08:53:24.620" LastActivityDate="2023-05-16T08:53:24.620" Title="Project and Contributions use different license - how to fork" Tags="|relicensing|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13990" CreationDate="2023-05-16T08:48:26.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regardless of license and copyright information: that's two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to retain any copyright information and must not strip or remove that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the license information, any MIT license is compatible with the GPLv3 (or other versions). So you may incorporate that code into a GPL codebase (but not vice versa). So in principle you may remove the license information and replace that with GPL one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it is good practice to keep the license information if no modifications are done and I would only do the replacement for the header of those files where modifications were or are done which then are under GPLv3. In the project's license file (which also is shipped with the binary) I'd only talk about the license for the overall project, thus GPLv3 (but retain and quote of course all copyright information).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-05-16T08:48:26.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13994" CreationDate="2023-05-16T20:50:55.290" Score="20" ViewCount="2669" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, you are not required to agree to the GPL to make personal use of GPL-licensed software. You are only required to agree to the GPL to redistribute the software. The GPL prohibits distributors that have licensed the software under the GPL from imposing additional restrictions on the software. Forcing users to agree to the GPL to make personal use of GPL-licensed software could be seen as imposing an additional restriction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some software installers require agreeing to whatever the license may be before using the software. That may be a proprietary license but it also might be the MIT license or the GPL. If the installer is provided by a non-copyright owner that licenses the software under the GPL, is it legal to distribute an installer requiring users to agree to the GPL before using the GPL-licensed software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is closely related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/174/for-what-reasons-should-you-make-the-user-agree-to-a-foss-licence-during-install&quot;&gt;this other question&lt;/a&gt; but is not covered by that question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13165" LastEditorUserId="13165" LastEditDate="2023-05-16T21:05:32.077" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T14:30:11.433" Title="Does requiring users to accept the GPL before using GPL-licensed software violate the GPL?" Tags="|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11282" CreationDate="2023-05-17T00:22:43.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've correctly determined that the developer agreements of modern video game consoles are incompatible with copyleft licenses such as the GNU General Public License. One approach is to keep the GPL and encourage your audience to purchase console-shaped personal computers that respect users' freedom to a greater extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure your game runs on handheld PCs with buttons, such as Steam Deck and some GPD Win model.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ensure your game runs on small-form-factor PCs with Intel and AMD graphics. Compared to a conventional desktop tower, these PCs are less likely to look out of place in the living room next to a television monitor. Test your game with a few brands of wired controllers for Xbox, which PCs running Windows or Linux can use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recommend this hardware on your game's website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have the capital, become a reseller of small-form-factor PCs with GNU/Linux and a TV-friendly program launcher preinstalled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another approach is to make a game for consoles more than 20 years old, such as the Sega Master System or Nintendo Entertainment System. Long-discontinued consoles tend to have thorough reverse-engineered public documentation and weak or no platform security. Examples of GPL software for NES include &lt;em&gt;Nova the Squirrel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Thwaite&lt;/em&gt;, and a port of 240p Test Suite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="548" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T00:22:43.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13992" CreationDate="2023-05-17T14:30:11.433" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;FSF has explained in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ClickThrough&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ on GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some software packaging systems have a place which requires you to&#xA;click through or otherwise indicate assent to the terms of the GPL.&#xA;This is neither required nor forbidden. With or without a click&#xA;through, the GPL's rules remain the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the fact that GPL does not place any obligations on the user of a software, agreeing to the license does not have any effect on personal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-05-17T14:30:11.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13996" CreationDate="2023-05-17T23:07:35.380" Score="13" ViewCount="4928" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13992/does-requiring-users-to-accept-the-gpl-before-using-gpl-licensed-software-violat&quot;&gt;Does requiring users to accept the GPL before using GPL-licensed software violate the GPL?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;That states that the GPL license does not apply any restrictions on the user. If that is the case what is there to stop a user from reverse engineering a GPL program and using the reverse engineered code in a non GPL license program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30131" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T22:28:53.553" Title="What's to prevent a user from reverse engineering a GPL program?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13995" CreationDate="2023-05-17T23:35:10.010" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, note that the Q&amp;amp;A you link says the &amp;quot;GPL does not place any obligations on the user of&amp;quot; some software. This speaks particularly about a &amp;quot;user&amp;quot; in contrast to a &amp;quot;distributor&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;modifier&amp;quot; of a piece of a software: a &amp;quot;user&amp;quot; merely executes the software as received by some upstream distributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; free to reverse engineer a GPL-licensed binary, though if the distributor did things properly, you should also have the source available, so reverse engineering would get you the same or worse results from what you're already free to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you mean &amp;quot;reverse engineering&amp;quot; in the sense of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clean-room reimplementation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; allow you to write code not covered by the GPL, because clean-room design avoids creating a derivative work under copyright law. This is because the author in the clean-room process works strictly from a behavioral specification (which is a procedure, not covered by copyright) constructed by others. People have been performing clean-room reimplementation for decades to produce new, identically-behaving code that isn't based on the material of the original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that a legally rigorous defense around clean-room design is difficult to construct practically. You must adhere strictly to a separation of behavior and expression, and you must document your methodology and specifications thoroughly enough to satisfy a court that the author of the new work had no exposure to the existing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you mean &amp;quot;reverse engineering&amp;quot; in the sense of running the binary through a decompiler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you believe that reverse engineering a GPL'd binary without looking the source will exempt you from a copyleft obligation to share your changes under the GPL, this is not so. Your reverse engineered source code is still a derivative under copyright law (just as, e.g., a machine translation of a human-language novel would be) so GPL requirements apply to distribution of the derivative work, whenever you choose to distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-05-18T14:32:01.490" LastActivityDate="2023-05-18T14:32:01.490" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13998" CreationDate="2023-05-18T09:24:10.377" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm analyzing the &amp;quot;Cea Cnrs Inria Logiciel Libre License, version 2.1 (CECILL-2.1)&amp;quot; software licence and don't clearly understand something. This licence has the following definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Software:&lt;/strong&gt; means the software in its Object Code and/or Source Code form and, where applicable, its documentation, “as is” when the Licensee accepts the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Initial Software:&lt;/strong&gt; means the Software in its Source Code and possibly its Object Code form and, where applicable, its documentation, “as is” when it is first distributed under the terms and conditions of the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Modified Software:&lt;/strong&gt; means the Software modified by at least one Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source Code:&lt;/strong&gt; means all the Software’s instructions and program lines to which access is required so as to modify the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Object Code:&lt;/strong&gt; means the binary files originating from the compilation of the Source Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Holder:&lt;/strong&gt; means the holder(s) of the economic rights over the Initial Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensee:&lt;/strong&gt; means the Software user(s) having accepted the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Contributor:&lt;/strong&gt; means a Licensee having made at least one Contribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Licensor:&lt;/strong&gt; means the Holder, or any other individual or legal entity, who distributes the Software under the Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for me it is not clear about Author rights due to this licence. Can Author distribute the source code with this licence and be able as it said in Licence's condition be the holder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Holder owns the economic rights over the Initial Software. Any or all use of the Initial Software is subject to compliance with the terms and conditions under which the Holder has elected to distribute its work and no one shall be entitled to modify the terms and conditions for the distribution of said Initial Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Holder undertakes that the Initial Software will remain ruled at least by this Agreement, for the duration set forth in Article 4.2.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full licence agreement is here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/cecill-2-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.org/license/cecill-2-1/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that it is a very tricky license because, in accordance with the 5th Article of it, the Licensor grants to the Licensee that he or she may sell the software. Citing this license:&#xA;&amp;quot;Article 5 - SCOPE OF RIGHTS GRANTED&#xA;The Licensor hereby grants to the Licensee, who accepts, the following rights over the Software for any or all use...&amp;quot; &amp;quot; 5.3 RIGHT OF DISTRIBUTION&#xA;In particular, the right of distribution includes the right to publish, transmit and communicate the Software to the general public on any or all medium, and by any or all means, and the right to market, either in consideration of a fee, or free of charge, one or more copies of the Software by any means.&#xA;The Licensee is further authorized to distribute copies of the modified or unmodified Software to third parties according to the terms and conditions set forth hereinafter.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30135" LastEditorUserId="30135" LastEditDate="2023-05-18T11:44:34.260" LastActivityDate="2023-05-18T11:44:34.260" Title="Does it mean that Author of the source code is equal to the Holder?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13997" CreationDate="2023-05-18T10:12:30.960" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the license is written that way in order to deal with two complications: works for hire, and moral rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Work for hire&lt;/a&gt; is a doctrine in many copyright jurisdictions that says that when copyrightable content is created by an employee in the course of his or her employment, the rightsholder is the employer unless special arrangements are made to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moral rights&lt;/a&gt; are rights affected by copyright other than economic-exploitation rights, which have varying degrees of recognition across different jurisdictions.  The use of the term &amp;quot;economic rights&amp;quot; in the definition of &lt;em&gt;Holder&lt;/em&gt; seems to be intended to sidestep the issue of moral rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is the author the holder?  It depends, but unless the issues above, or other issues, interfere, yes, (s)he probably is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-05-18T10:12:30.960" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14001" CreationDate="2023-05-18T11:55:55.797" Score="3" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that this license grants the Author the right of referencing its name in future modifications of Open-Source code. Does this license grant the Licensee the right to sell the modified source code without author's permission?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I interpret this:&#xA;Any use, modification, and distribution of the Standard or Modified Versions is governed by this Artistic License. By using, modifying or distributing the Package, you accept this license. Do not use, modify, or distribute the Package, if you do not accept this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(11) If your Modified Version has been derived from a Modified Version made by someone other than you, you are nevertheless required to ensure that your Modified Version complies with the requirements of this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(12) This license does not grant you the right to use any trademark, service mark, tradename, or logo of the Copyright Holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(13) This license includes the non-exclusive, worldwide, free-of-charge patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import and otherwise transfer the Package with respect to any patent claims licensable by the Copyright Holder that are necessarily infringed by the Package. If you institute patent litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim) against any party alleging that the Package constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then this Artistic License to you shall terminate on the date that such litigation is filed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30135" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-19T06:22:33.293" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T06:22:33.293" Title="What rights do Artistic 2.0 licence gives to the Author?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14003" CreationDate="2023-05-18T12:36:59.393" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two licenses are for open-source code. Does the CECILL-2.1 give rights to sell the open source code without author notification, as it says in Article 5?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.3 RIGHT OF DISTRIBUTION&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In particular, the right of distribution includes the right to publish, transmit and communicate the Software to the general public on any or all medium, and by any or all means, and the right to market, either in consideration of a fee, or free of charge, one or more copies of the Software by any means.&#xA;The Licensee is further authorized to distribute copies of the modified or unmodified Software to third parties according to the terms and conditions set forth hereinafter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL grant permission to the licensee to distribute the source code freely?&#xA;Are they both copyleft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30135" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-24T06:10:57.923" LastActivityDate="2023-05-24T06:10:57.923" Title="What's the difference between GPL licence and CECILL-2.1?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13999" CreationDate="2023-05-18T12:56:05.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do this license grant the Licensee the right to sell the modificated source code without author permittion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Artistic-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artistic License&lt;/a&gt; allows, in s4, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute your Modified Version as Source (either gratis&#xA;or for a Distributor Fee, and with or without a Compiled form of the&#xA;Modified Version) provided that you clearly document how it differs&#xA;from the Standard Version, including, but not limited to, documenting&#xA;any non-standard features, executables, or modules, and provided that&#xA;you do at least ONE of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a)  make the Modified Version available to the Copyright Holder&#xA;of the Standard Version, under the Original License, so that the&#xA;Copyright Holder may include your modifications in the Standard&#xA;Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b)  ensure that installation of your Modified Version does not&#xA;prevent the user installing or running the Standard Version. In&#xA;addition, the Modified Version must bear a name that is different&#xA;from the name of the Standard Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(c)  allow anyone who receives a copy of the Modified Version to&#xA;make the Source form of the Modified Version available to others&#xA;under&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i)  the Original License or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ii)  a license that permits the licensee to freely copy,&#xA;modify and redistribute the Modified Version using the same&#xA;licensing terms that apply to the copy that the licensee&#xA;received&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in s6 allows that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may Distribute a Modified Version in Compiled form without&#xA;the Source, provided that you comply with Section 4 with respect to&#xA;the Source of the Modified Version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, you may sell your modified version, as source or binary, without reference to the original rightsholder, provided that you follow those requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that this license grants the Author the right of referencing its name in future modifications of Open-Source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;author&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; you mean &amp;quot;original rightsholder&amp;quot;, (s)he is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;not bound&lt;/a&gt; by the terms of his/her own licence grant, so (s)he is still free to use that name as (s)he sees fit.  Others distributing modified versions must change the name, as per Artistic Licence s4b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-18T13:11:40.010" LastActivityDate="2023-05-18T13:11:40.010" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13995" CreationDate="2023-05-19T22:28:53.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What mainly prevents users from-reverse engineering GPLed programs is that they have the source code, so they can just read that instead of reverse-engineering. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether you read the source code, or reverse engineer machine code, and then produce a copy of that code, that copying activity is not a form of &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of the program. It may be deemed to be &lt;em&gt;reproduction&lt;/em&gt;: you're copying something from the program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're copying something from either the source or compiled form of a GPLed program, you're making a derived work which is still licensed under the GPL. If you redistribute it without reproducing the copyright notice, and obeying all the redistribution rules, it is infringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compiled code is a derived work of the source code, and is itself copyrighted and under the same GPL. You cannot evade copyright by working with binary code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being free to &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; a GPLed program in any manner doesn't amount to being able to &lt;em&gt;redistribute&lt;/em&gt; it, or any portion of it, under a different license and authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastActivityDate="2023-05-19T22:28:53.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14000" CreationDate="2023-05-20T17:17:17.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the CECILL-2.1 give rights to sell the open source code without author notification&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a characteristics of all open-source licences that the upstream authors don't need to be notified when someone exercises the rights received in the license. It can even be seen as one of the defining characteristics, because the license must not discriminate people who are unable to contact (all) upstream author(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL grant permission to the licensee to distribute the source code freely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. The GPL even requires that you cannot charge extra for distributing the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they both copyleft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, both licences mentioned are copyleft licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-05-20T17:17:17.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14005" CreationDate="2023-05-21T14:04:58.560" Score="13" ViewCount="1013" Body="&lt;p&gt;My current situation is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am building a card game and would like to make sure users can use it to make with it whatever they want without 'giving away' the game content. For this there are two logical parts: The game 'engine' and 'card packs'. I want the engine to be FLOSS, but the card packs independent of it (they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be foss, but should not be forced to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current idea is to have the following structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An 'API' library that is GPL3, which contains all definitions as well the behaviours of the game that is exposed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An 'engine' library that is AGPL, which links to the API (and thus makes the whole package AGPL, and they are compatible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Multiple card packs that link to the API, which due to the copyleft of GPL are now also under GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea being that only the server that includes the 'engine' would have to open-source any changes they made to it, as it will be directly interacted with by users. (Users would not actually directly send API requests to it, but that is AFAIK not relevant, as intermediaries do not have to AGPL'd in this situation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, users would not have an automatic right to the card packs themselves. If they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; purchase them independently, they get the right to the source code etc... but not by merely interacting with the server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Communication would thus be as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Player User] -&amp;gt; [Some Server, not AGPL] -&amp;gt; [Engine, AGPL] -&amp;gt; [Card Pack, not AGPL]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The engine itself could be considered like a virtual machine, which is agnostic about the 'code executed' on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the problem I have is how to interpret the information by GNU on this in their FAQ: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above situation, the Card Packs are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; linked, nor are they designated at build/compile time to be. However, at runtime they will be &lt;em&gt;loaded&lt;/em&gt; and treated as executable code and 'exchange' information, using the definition in the API library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, are there any obvious oversights/precedents that I have not been able to find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; discuss this with a copyright lawyer &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; officially releasing the code/game, I only wish to understand/do some groundwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30169" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-22T10:13:20.137" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T14:34:59.593" Title="How should a project be structured to be able to use an AGPL license, but allow non-free extensions to it?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14004" CreationDate="2023-05-21T20:11:04.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't do this by messing about with aggregation vs. combination, or GPL bits vs. AGPL bits, or any other &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it doesn't really cover the card decks&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; hack.  Instead, I'd put the whole thing under AGPLv3, keeping life simple, but add an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exception&lt;/a&gt; in the API library that says something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Name of project] is distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) with the following clarification and special exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Card decks loaded at runtime by [name of API library] are complex data structures read by the library and the larger game engine, and thus form part of a combined work based on this library and engine. Thus, the terms and conditions of the AGPL cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of [name of library] give you permission to load such card decks at runtime, regardless of the licence on the decks, without having the provisions of AGPL s13 apply to the card decks. If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of the library, but you are not obliged to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-22T14:34:59.593" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T14:34:59.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12863" CreationDate="2023-05-22T04:26:36.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should definitely be able to use the MIT license for your plugin. Even if you were to use Apache 2.0 code in your plugin or the plugin were &amp;quot;tightly coupled&amp;quot; with the program enough to become an aggregate work, you could still license your own contributions under the MIT as long as you also included the Apache 2.0 license notice for the code under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11640/can-mit-and-apache-licenses-be-used-together&quot;&gt;As Bart van Ingen Schenau answered in another question&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;the MIT and Apache licenses are compatible with each other and you can use dependencies under one of them in a project under the other.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T04:26:36.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-22T17:14:54.697" Score="8" ViewCount="6867" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm planning to make an open-source game engine/editor called the NWR Project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NotWhiteRice/the-NWR-Project&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/NotWhiteRice/the-NWR-Project&lt;/a&gt; I don't care if people copy the visuals, menus, etc., but I don't want people copying all of my source code and claiming it as their own work or using parts of it with ill intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't want to have rights to works made with my game engine and want them exclusively to the ones who made the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30179" LastEditorUserId="30179" LastEditDate="2023-05-22T17:18:46.800" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T20:36:13.407" Title="Is there a license that prevents someone from copying the entirety of the source code and claiming it as their own or using it with ill intent?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14008" CreationDate="2023-05-22T18:21:19.000" Score="29" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want people copying all of my source code and claiming it as their own work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any open source license will do this; even the most &amp;quot;bare bones&amp;quot; licenses (MIT, 2 clause BSD etc) require that anybody using the code maintain all copyright notices so it will always be clear that your work was used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want people [...] using parts of it with ill intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This depends what you mean by &amp;quot;ill intent&amp;quot;; if you mean &amp;quot;without giving appropriate credit&amp;quot;, this is covered by the previous point. If you mean &amp;quot;don't use the code for things which are morally wrong&amp;quot; (for some definition of &amp;quot;morally wrong&amp;quot;), no open source license will do this, principally due to the difficulty of defining &amp;quot;morally wrong&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-05-22T18:21:19.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14011" CreationDate="2023-05-22T20:56:25.690" Score="8" ViewCount="1059" Body="&lt;p&gt;If a program is licensed under GPL, I have the right to receive the source code along with the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if only commercial (non-free) compilers exist to compile the code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make it expensive to actually modify the program. But would it be in violation of the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T11:54:09.797" Title="Open source program - commercial compiler?" Tags="|gpl|source-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14010" CreationDate="2023-05-23T07:25:25.733" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no requirement that the compiler has to be open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the build scripts like Makefiles, CMakeLists.txt, Maven POM have to be open sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the compiler is not open source, somebody could take the GPL-ed source code and port it to be built using another compiler which is open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “System Libraries” of an executable work include anything, other&#xA;than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of&#xA;packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major&#xA;Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that&#xA;Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an&#xA;implementation is available to the public in source code form. A&#xA;“Major Component”, in this context, means a major essential component&#xA;(kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system&#xA;(if any) on which the executable work runs, or &lt;strong&gt;a compiler used to&#xA;produce the work&lt;/strong&gt;, or an object code interpreter used to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all&#xA;the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable&#xA;work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to&#xA;control those activities. &lt;strong&gt;However, it does not include the work's&#xA;System Libraries&lt;/strong&gt;, or general-purpose tools or generally available free&#xA;programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but&#xA;which are not part of the work. For example, Corresponding Source&#xA;includes interface definition files associated with source files for&#xA;the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically&#xA;linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require,&#xA;such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those&#xA;subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NonFreeTools&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; also states that &amp;quot;which programs you used to ... compile it ... usually makes no difference for issues concerning the licensing of that source code&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Can I release a program under the GPL which I developed using nonfree&#xA;tools? (#NonFreeTools)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which programs you used to edit the source code, or &lt;strong&gt;to compile it&lt;/strong&gt;, or&#xA;study it, or record it, usually makes no difference for issues&#xA;concerning the licensing of that source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you link nonfree libraries with the source code, that&#xA;would be an issue you need to deal with. It does not preclude&#xA;releasing the source code under the GPL, but if the libraries don't&#xA;fit under the “system library” exception, you should affix an explicit&#xA;notice giving permission to link your program with them. The FAQ entry&#xA;about using GPL-incompatible libraries provides more information about&#xA;how to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-05-23T11:54:09.797" LastActivityDate="2023-05-23T11:54:09.797" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14008" CreationDate="2023-05-23T16:18:07.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want people copying all of my source code and claiming it as their own work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much any license will require attribution, even MIT and most BSD variants. The exception is public domain licenses such as CC0 and 0-clause BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want people [...] using parts of it with ill intent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this would conflict with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF's freedom&lt;/a&gt; 0 (&amp;quot;The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose&amp;quot;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/osd/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSI's criteria&lt;/a&gt; 5 (&amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups&amp;quot;) and 6 (&amp;quot;No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor&amp;quot;), thereby making it often considered to not be Open Source, especially not FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some licenses that attempt to do this (mostly listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses&lt;/a&gt;), but I'm not sure how legally effective they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Buena Onda License Agreement: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/BOLA-License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/BOLA-License&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Begins with &amp;quot;However, if you want to be &amp;quot;buena onda&amp;quot;, you should:&amp;quot; (so probably not legally binding)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;1. Not take credit for it, and give proper recognition to the authors.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;5. Don't waste. [...] 6. Be tolerant.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;DON'T BE A D--K PUBLIC LICENSE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/dbad-license.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/dbad-license.md&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Begins with &amp;quot;Do whatever you like with the original work, just don't be a d--k. Being a d--k includes - but is not limited to - the following instances:&amp;quot; (in my non-lawyer personal opinion, I think this should be legally enforceable, but I don't actually know)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;1a. Outright copyright infringement - Don't just copy this and change the name. 1b. Selling the unmodified original with no work done what-so-ever, that's REALLY being a d--k. [...] 2. If you become rich through modifications, related works/services, or supporting the original work, share the love. Only a d--k would make loads off this work and not buy the original work's creator(s) a pint.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;1c. Modifying the original work to contain hidden harmful content. That would make you a PROPER d--k.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JSON License: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/JSON-License.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/JSON-License.md&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.json.org/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.json.org/license.html&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot; (from MIT license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that various organizations consider this license to be &amp;quot;non-free&amp;quot; because of the &amp;quot;Good&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Evil&amp;quot; clause: &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON&lt;/a&gt;, etc., as well as &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/45095/who-is-held-accountable-in-case-of-violation-of-json-licenses-specific-no-evil&quot;&gt;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/45095/who-is-held-accountable-in-case-of-violation-of-json-licenses-specific-no-evil&lt;/a&gt;. This would probably also apply to the other licenses in this list.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Happy Bunny License: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/happy-bunny-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/happy-bunny-license&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&amp;quot; (from MIT license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;Restrictions: By making use of the Software for military purposes, you choose to make a Bunny unhappy.&amp;quot; (this seems unenforceable)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do No Harm License: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/no-harm-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/no-harm-license&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/raisely/NoHarm&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This software must not be used by any organisation, website, product or service that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) lobbies for, promotes, or derives a majority of income from&#xA;actions that support or contribute to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sex trafficking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;human trafficking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slavery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indentured servitude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gambling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tobacco&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adversely addictive behaviours&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nuclear energy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;warfare&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weapons manufacturing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;war crimes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;violence (except when required to protect public safety)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;burning of forests&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;deforestation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hate speech or discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) lobbies against, or derives a majority of income from actions&#xA;that discourage or frustrate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peace&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;access to the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peaceful assembly and association (including worker associations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a safe environment or action to curtail the use of fossil fuels or prevent climate change&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;democratic processes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We define:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forests&lt;/strong&gt; to be 0.5 or more hectares of trees that were either planted more than 50 years ago or were not planted by humans or human&#xA;made equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deforestation&lt;/strong&gt; to be the clearing, burning or destruction of 0.5 or more hectares of forests within a 1 year period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Katharos License v0.1.0: &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/katharos-license.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/katharos-license.md&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/katharostech/katharos-license/blob/master/LICENSE_v0.1.0.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/katharostech/katharos-license/blob/master/LICENSE_v0.1.0.md&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;Notice: Licensee must ensure that everyone who gets a copy of any part of this Work from Licensee, with or without changes, also receives the License and the above copyright notice (and if included by the Licensor, patent, trademark and attribution notice). Licensee must cause any modified versions of the Work to carry prominent notices stating that Licensee changed the Work. For clarity, although Licensee is free to create modifications of the Work and distribute only the modified portion created by Licensee with additional or different terms, the portion of the Work not modified must be distributed pursuant to this License.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permitted Use of Work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Work shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, products, services or other uses that (i) lobby for,&#xA;promote, or support the following activities or materials or (ii) that&#xA;derive a majority of income from the following activities or&#xA;materials:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sex trafficking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;human trafficking&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slavery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indentured servitude&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;warfare&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weapons manufacturing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;war crimes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;violence ( except when required to protect public safety )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;weapons of mass destruction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sexually suggestive or explicit images, artwork, or any other media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;excessively gory and/or violent images, artwork, or any other media&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abortion&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;murder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hate speech or discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Work shall not be used by any person, entity, product, service or other use that (i) lobbies against, discourages, or frustrates the&#xA;following activities or (ii) that derives a majority of income from&#xA;actions that discourage, or frustrate the following activities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;peaceful assembly and association (including worker associations)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;democratic processes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compliance with Permitted Use of Work &amp;amp; Human Rights Laws:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Human Rights Laws. The Software shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, or other uses that violate any Human Rights Laws. “Human Rights Laws” means any applicable laws, regulations, or rules (collectively, “Laws”) that protect human, civil, labor, privacy, political, environmental, security, economic, due process, or similar rights; provided, however, that such Laws are consistent and not in conflict with Permitted Use of Work (a dispute over the consistency or a conflict between Laws and Permitted Use of Work shall be determined by arbitration as stated above). Where the Human Rights Laws of more than one jurisdiction are applicable or in conflict with respect to the use of the Work, the Human Rights Laws that are most aligned with the guidelines defined in the Holy Bible shall apply.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Hippocratic License 2.1: &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/Hippocratic-2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/Hippocratic-2.1.html&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/EthicalSource/hippocratic-license/blob/release/content/version/2/1/license.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/EthicalSource/hippocratic-license/blob/release/content/version/2/1/license.md&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;Notice. Licensee must ensure that everyone who gets a copy of any part of this Software from Licensee, with or without changes, also receives the License and the above copyright notice (and if included by the Licensor, patent, trademark and attribution notice). Licensee must cause any modified versions of the Software to carry prominent notices stating that Licensee changed the Software. For clarity, although Licensee is free to create modifications of the Software and distribute only the modified portion created by Licensee with additional or different terms, the portion of the Software not modified must be distributed pursuant to this License.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;Compliance with Human Rights Principles and Human Rights Laws. Human Rights Principles. (a) Licensee is advised to consult the articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Global Compact that define recognized principles of international human rights (the “Human Rights Principles”). Licensee shall use the Software in a manner consistent with Human Rights Principles. [...] Human Rights Laws. The Software shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, or other uses that violate any Human Rights Laws. “Human Rights Laws” means any applicable laws, regulations, or rules (collectively, “Laws”) that protect human, civil, labor, privacy, political, environmental, security, economic, due process, or similar rights; provided, however, that such Laws are consistent and not in conflict with Human Rights Principles (a dispute over the consistency or a conflict between Laws and Human Rights Principles shall be determined by arbitration as stated above). Where the Human Rights Laws of more than one jurisdiction are applicable or in conflict with respect to the use of the Software, the Human Rights Laws that are most protective of the individuals or groups harmed shall apply.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Hippocratic License 3.0: &lt;a href=&quot;https://firstdonoharm.dev/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://firstdonoharm.dev/&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/EthicalSource/hippocratic-license/blob/release/content/version/3/0/license.md&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/EthicalSource/hippocratic-license/blob/release/content/version/3/0/license.md&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;5. NOTICE: This section explains when a Licensee must notify others of the License. 5.1. Distribution of Notice: Licensee must ensure that everyone who receives a copy of or uses any part of Software from Licensee, with or without changes, also receives the License and the copyright notice included with Software (and if included by the Licensor, patent, trademark, and attribution notice). Licensee must ensure that License is prominently displayed so that any individual or entity seeking to download, copy, use, or otherwise receive any part of Software from Licensee is notified of this License and its terms and conditions. Licensee must cause any modified versions of the Software to carry prominent notices stating that Licensee changed the Software. 5.2. Modified Software: Licensee is free to create modifications of the Software and distribute only the modified portion created by Licensee, however, any derivative work stemming from the Software or its code must be distributed pursuant to this License, including this Notice provision. 5.3. Recipients as Licensees: Any individual or entity that uses, copies, modifies, reproduces, distributes, or prepares derivative work based upon the Software, all or part of the Software's code, or a derivative work developed by using the Software, including a portion of its code, is a Licensee as defined above and is subject to the terms and conditions of this License.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: There are various standard clauses, mostly based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN UDHR), as well as additional add-on modules.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD No Military/Nuclear License/Warranty (2014): &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Military-License.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Military-License.html&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License.html&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License-2014.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License-2014.html&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-Warranty.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-Warranty.html&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claiming: &amp;quot;1. Redistribution of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistribution in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ill intent: &amp;quot;YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT DESIGNED, LICENSED OR INTENDED FOR USE IN THE DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION, OPERATION OR MAINTENANCE OF ANY MILITARY FACILITY.&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;You acknowledge that this software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;You acknowledge that this software is not designed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13978" LastEditorUserId="13978" LastEditDate="2023-05-26T01:57:14.177" LastActivityDate="2023-05-26T01:57:14.177" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14015" CreationDate="2023-05-25T08:32:36.050" Score="6" ViewCount="1078" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I right that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft is not equal to Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA &amp;quot;This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.&amp;quot;) and such copyleft licenses as GPL allows commercial use somehow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Creative commons license gives rights among others to sell modificated code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the GPL copyleft and doesn't bar commercial use in future versions?&#xA;The GPL is a copyleft license, as far as I know. But it allows us to commercialize future code modifications without author notification, as I understood it:&#xA;&amp;quot;A “contributor” is a copyright holder who authorizes use under this License of the Program or a work on which the Program is based. The work thus licensed is called the contributor's “contributor version”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30135" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-25T11:35:19.257" LastActivityDate="2023-05-25T11:39:12.470" Title="How does GPL differ from CC BY-NC-SA?" Tags="|license|license-notice|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14013" CreationDate="2023-05-25T11:33:01.993" Score="13" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;CC BY-NC-SA is a copyleft-style licence (the &amp;quot;SA&amp;quot; bit), but there exist many other copyleft licences besides CC BY-NC-SA.  The GPL is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty clear&lt;/a&gt; that selling GPL-covered code is permissible; but it requires that freedom be delivered along with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nobody's entirely sure what &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;non-commercial&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; use, as defined by CC BY-NC-SA, involves, but I think there's general agreement that selling the source or binary versions of covered code isn't permitted.  Since it's a share-alike / copyleft-style licence (as you quote above), modified versions can only be conveyed under the same terms, so broadly: no, CC BY-NC-SA doesn't permit selling modified code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The GPL is a copyleft licence.  Since commercialisation of current versions is permitted, as the link above makes clear, it is also permitted for future versions; but again, it restricts the ability of those future developers to hold their customers hostage by refusing to give them the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four freedoms&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-25T11:39:12.470" LastActivityDate="2023-05-25T11:39:12.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14020" CreationDate="2023-05-26T14:33:38.533" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a common way to describe an actively-maintained open-source fork that wants to remain a fork because it makes changes that don't align with the upstream maintainer's desires?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example:&lt;/strong&gt; Alice is creating a relatively popular GPL-licensed DJing software that only works with a specific brand of controllers. It is clear from the README that supporting other controllers is out-of-scope, at least on the repository she maintains. Bob likes Alice's program but would like to adapt it to another brand of controllers. He makes a public fork, and wishes to continuously merge changes from Alice's version so his doesn't diverge too much and remains up-to-date with non-hardware changes. Bob isn't doing this in a hostile way, and may as well contribute back to Alice's branch (which actually relieves Bob from complex merge conflicts too, so it's beneficial for both of them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you call this? A &amp;quot;soft fork&amp;quot;, as mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6579/term-or-phrase-for-a-soft-fork&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;? I insist on the fact that Bob has no intent to open a PR on Alice's repository at any point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30215" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T16:29:09.107" Title="Term to describe an open-source fork that wishes to remain a fork" Tags="|forking|terminology|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14023" CreationDate="2023-05-26T20:28:52.130" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was recently brought to my attention that by posting anything to Stackoverflow, you irrevocably grant Stackoverflow a CC BY-SA 4.0 license to your posted content. I thought CC BY-SA 4.0 was comparable to the MIT license in the sense that it's very permissive, but then I read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/..&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/..&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote scared me, &amp;quot;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and I could be misunderstanding the law, but does this mean that if I post content on Stackoverflow that is a small piece of a proprietary project that I plan on keeping closed source, I can no longer keep the project closed source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this: &amp;quot;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original,&amp;quot; I've posted the content on Stackoverflow meaning it's granted to Stackoverflow under CC BY-SA 4.0. That means that my larger proprietary project is &amp;quot;build upon the material.&amp;quot; So if the larger project is &amp;quot;build upon the material&amp;quot; I posted to Stackoverflow, I have no choice but to release the source code of my proprietary application in its entirety???&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not okay with this. Is there any way I can get out of releasing the source code for all of my proprietary projects? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the CC BY-SA 4.0 license... Could someone clarify this for me? Preferably a lawyer or at least someone who is familiar with open source law?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30217" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T11:57:19.103" Title="I need clarifications on what rights I'm granting by the CC BY-SA 4.0" Tags="|copyleft|cc-by-sa|permissive|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14016" CreationDate="2023-05-27T09:27:36.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about language, language is evolving and is not used everywhere the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cloning a repository in order to submit a patch sure enough creates another copy of the project, and there are some changes not yet found in a released version of the project whose code you cloned - yet that does not constitute a fork in the classical sense. Copies made and edited in order to submit patches and changes are just that: branches or different versions of the very same project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fork in the usual or original sense is a project which took a specific version of a project and developed it independently. Thus at a later point in time, they share a common history up to a certain revision, but then the code diverged. The cause for the creation of a fork often are differences in the governance of a project (e.g. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice, or Jenkins from Hudson). For these cases the projects diverge often increasingly so that after a certain time the exchange of patches becomes increasingly more cumbersome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally a fork often is created when the direction a project takes with including or not including certain features. These forks with a slightly different code base are somewhat common for most major projects as not everyone can agree on every feature or omission - yet exactly this is the beauty of open source: you can and are allowed to fork it and create your own versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus depending on how permanent this separation is perceived, one might call these modified versions with some additional features, or patches or left-out patches not forks, but just &amp;quot;version&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;branches&amp;quot;. A typical example for such a long- or medium-term lived version would be an project which rejected a suggested implementation of a much-asked-for feature which did not meet its quality or other guidelines for inclusion - but which is maintained by one or some interested individuals, but not diverging much beyond maintaining this feature branch. Call it fork, call it feature-branch - it's the same, just with a slight different take on the relation between the core developers and the ones of that feature branch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-28T16:29:09.107" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T16:29:09.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2023-05-27T21:02:53.203" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this repo, which modifies popular open-source licenses to explicitly forbid the use of the source code in AI-training datasets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10986" LastActivityDate="2023-05-27T21:02:53.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-27T21:30:17.723" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading about BSD Lisenses on Wikipedia recently and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the article&lt;/a&gt; said that 4 and 3-clause BSD Licenses' texts are in the public domain. But there weren't any links that would prove this apart from the fact that they have Public Domain as their publisher in the article. So, is that really true?&#xA;Also, 2-clause BSD license doesn't even have Public Domain as it's publisher. Is 2-clause BSD license's text in the Public Domain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30223" LastActivityDate="2023-05-27T21:30:17.723" Title="Are 2 and 3-clause-BSD licenses' texts in the public domain?" Tags="|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14017" CreationDate="2023-05-28T11:57:19.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does this mean that if I post content on Stackoverflow that is a small piece of a proprietary project that I plan on keeping closed source, I can no longer keep the project closed source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means that the piece of code you have posted is available for reuse under CC BY-SA.  Assuming you are the sole rightsholder, then because &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;the rightsholder is not bound&lt;/a&gt; by the terms of his/her own licence grant, it does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; require that you only ever publish the rest of your project under CC BY-SA.  You may publish the entire project elsewhere under any other set of terms you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way I can get out of releasing the source code for all of my proprietary projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't post the entire codebase here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T11:57:19.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14008" CreationDate="2023-05-28T15:31:15.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I don't want people copying all of my source code and claiming it as their own work ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you mean technically lying about it — not giving you any attribution?  Most licenses require attribution, but it can be buried in a long file listing all open-source libraries that went into it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if I make a &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; derivative work that does almost nothing beyond calling your code?  And I give it a new name, present it on Steam as a game I designed, but it's actually 99% your assets, default behaviors etc.? &#xA;Most FOSS licenses allow all that as long &amp;quot;click here to see list of open source libraries used&amp;quot; is attributed somewhere, but the end-user impression can be quite misleading...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The D--K license mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14012/3055&quot;&gt;Solomon's answer&lt;/a&gt; is interesting in trying to make a distinction — &amp;quot;Don't just copy this and change the name&amp;quot; ; &amp;quot;Selling the unmodified original with no work done what-so-ever&amp;quot; — though I doubt it's  enforcable [IANAL]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deeper problem is FOSS normally views such re-packaging as a feature!  If you write a 10,000 lines library and I write a 3-line command-line tool invoking the library, that's fine (and a proof of friendly API design).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you want to limit that, there is tension with your other goal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't want to have rights to works made with my game engine and want them exclusively to the ones who made the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you could make a distinction based on the type of derived work?  Engine vs. game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For example, consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/exceptions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;GCC the compiler itself has GPL license, which has quite strong copyleft requirements; however they added special exception so when I do [my source]-&amp;gt;GCC-&amp;gt;[my binary], I can license the resulting binary however I wish, despite GCC injecting small portions of itself into it.  (with some tricky guards against abuse e.g. &amp;quot;my source&amp;quot; can't overlap with GCC's source code)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3055" LastEditorUserId="3055" LastEditDate="2023-05-28T20:36:13.407" LastActivityDate="2023-05-28T20:36:13.407" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-28T18:56:20.587" Score="3" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found some similar questions here and in other places, but nothing seemed to quite fit my use case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a JavaScript program that imports and uses another library which is licensed under MIT (but this question also holds with respect to other licenses). Since I only refer to the other library by imports, I do not have any copy of its code in my (GitHub) repository. First question: Do I still need to add the license of the used library? My guess is no, but it also does not hurt, so I will probably do it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, all of my source files and the distribution file of the library are packed into one single JavaScript file, which is the finished program. The script to do this is part of the GitHub repository, but the resulting file is not included in the actual git repository. Instead, it will be separately uploaded via GitHub's &amp;quot;release&amp;quot; feature. Second question: Where do I put the license notice of the external library? Is it enough to have it in the GitHub repository (which is linked to the release page and vice versa), or do I need to include a notice on the exact same webpage where the end user will download the program file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30229" LastActivityDate="2023-05-30T13:58:59.020" Title="Third party license in single-file distribution" Tags="|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14025" CreationDate="2023-05-30T11:48:18.060" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I still need to add the license of the used library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand what you've written above correctly, you are distributing copies of this library, so &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4936/should-you-give-attributions-to-the-libraries-your-library-uses&quot;&gt;yes&lt;/a&gt;, you need to include its licence;  and those of any libraries that library uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do I put the license notice of the external library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't really matter, as long as you include it both in the repository and in the distributed copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you need to include it in the former, because it is likely that your work is a copyright derivative of the library.  Remember that the decision in Google v Oracle wasn't that APIs aren't copyrightable, but that a particular usage of them was &lt;em&gt;fair use&lt;/em&gt;.  You could try to run a similar defence, but when you can sidestep it by reproducing a few hundred characters of text, it's simpler just to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the latter, you may be minifying your and the library's JS before distributing it, but you are still distributing the library, so you are still obliged to distribute the licence text as part of that.  Most good minifiers will allow you to specify comments or other text that is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; minified (see eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9275/458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, and those to which it links, for more details).  If you don't want to go to the effort of finding a decent minifier and shipping an extra few hundred bytes of human-readable licence statement with your JS, don't use someone else's copyrighted work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-05-30T13:58:59.020" LastActivityDate="2023-05-30T13:58:59.020" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-05-30T13:55:04.943" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;A colleague of mine is working with Matlab on a simulation of some sort. In order to enhance the simulation she needs a way of adding some additional data that can be easily generated using a GPL C++ library called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.openfoam.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenFOAM&lt;/a&gt;. What is the best way to preserve the closed source nature of the Matlab portion of the project, while also benefitting from the GPL library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave her the following advice after doing some research but additional feedback is more than welcome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simulation only uses the output data (e.g. a CSV file of some sort) so in my opinion she does not need to link her Matlab application to the GPL library (although it would definitely be more convenient even though it would require - beside the licensing issue - writing a wrapper for the library in Matlab). Instead she can create a simple command line tool that can be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;executed by Matlab itself as an external command (e.g. &lt;code&gt;system('gpl-tool.exe');&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;open sourced completely, since it's linking against the GPL library and is distributed in a binary form alongside the Matlab application&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effectively this would create two separate applications with the closed-source one depending on input from the open-source one. Each application can also function on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read that in some cases it may be problematic, e.g. when a developer adds a bogus client-server architecture to their application so that they can separate the open from the closed source part of their application. In the case of my colleague the two &amp;quot;components&amp;quot; can be run fully independently from one another with the only link between the two being e.g. that CSV file. However, currently, we are talking about creating two separate applications and not adding client-server communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be interested though if such a client-server communication is acceptable in this situation since I am also planning in converting her simulation into a web service for a cloud platform I am working on and that we will be hosting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30239" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-05-31T06:12:42.407" LastActivityDate="2023-05-31T06:12:42.407" Title="Is aggregation of GPL and non-GPL software possible?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|distribution|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14028" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14029" CreationDate="2023-05-31T16:20:58.183" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a repository of code that I have made pull requests and added code to, and that code that I have contributed is in the master branch. The code is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)&lt;/a&gt; license, as the title states. The code is for a website, and there is a website that is currently live that uses the code in the master branch of the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, suppose I wanted to make a fork of this repository, and create my own website using the modified fork. I understand that this is protected under the license, as long as attribution is added. Now suppose I want to monetize this website. As I understand, this is not allowed under the license, however, it is possible to get permission from the author in a separate agreement. My question is, if there are multiple contributors to the code that is in the master branch of the original repository, do I need express permission from each contributor? Am I considered part of the authorship in that regard, because I have contributed to the code that is currently in the master branch of the original repository? I'd like to know if the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; author of the code has sole control over that, or if that control is now spread between all contributors, once they have contributed code to the original repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30245" LastEditorUserId="30245" LastEditDate="2023-05-31T16:39:43.310" LastActivityDate="2023-05-31T21:57:26.403" Title="CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 rights as a contributor to the original repository on Github" Tags="|licensing|github|creative-commons|contributor|forking|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14028" CreationDate="2023-05-31T17:17:36.370" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the project had you and other contributors formally sign a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that outlines terms under which the project may use contributions, then the project maintainer can use contributions under the terms of that CLA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If contributors don't have to sign a CLA, then the only thing that affords those contributors the right to prepare/contribute derivatives, and for you to use those derivatives, is the CC BY-NC-SA license present on the work and its derivatives. That is to say: we can assume all contributors offered their improvements under the same terms or more permissive terms (a contributor may say &amp;quot;everyone may use my piece however they like&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central relevant legal question is: if you got special permission from some set of authors to use the work for NC-incompatible purposes, does there exist any contributor who could successfully sue you for unlicensed use of their copyrighted work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is one main author who already has CLAs in place to grant permission for the whole work, then you're set: the copyright holders of all contributions have given that main author permission to relicense their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the contributors are each &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-works.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;joint authors&lt;/a&gt; of the work as a whole under U.S. law, rather than authors of their individual sections, then any single joint author can license the whole work under terms of their choice. I have not extensively studied the subject so I don't know under what circumstances joint authorship manifests in a work. (A clear example of joint authorship is when two people work together to coauthor and co-edit a novel -- software development can sometimes resemble this, but I don't know what subjective tests to apply to decide for any given software project.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing either of those two cases, you will have to get permission from each author, or else risk liability for misuse of some author's copyrighted material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-05-31T21:57:26.403" LastActivityDate="2023-05-31T21:57:26.403" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14035" CreationDate="2023-05-31T19:59:18.410" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I copied some code from Stackoverflow early on in the development process, forgot to take it out, and published the finished website containing the code from Stackoverflow, is my website no longer allowed to be proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I re-wrote or removed the copied code? The thing that worries me is that according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&lt;/a&gt; which describes the CC BY-SA 4.0, &amp;quot;If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&amp;quot; That would make the entire proprietary code base compromised right? All of the code that I was counting on being proprietary can no longer be proprietary...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any legal emergency removal procedure where I can re-write or remove the copied code and therefore still be allowed to keep my code proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30217" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T13:26:44.480" Title="Can I sever proprietary code from a codebase that was published containing CC BY-SA 4.0 code?" Tags="|copyleft|proprietary-code|cc-by-sa|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-01T01:06:32.703" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I fork the source code &lt;a href=&quot;https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/net-analyzer/iftop/iftop-1.0_pre4-r5.ebuild&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, modify the code, and finally distribute the source code and the derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I change the copyright notice at the top from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright 1999-2022 Gentoo Authors&#xA;# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to myself like the below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright 2023 John Doe&#xA;# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I must keep the original line like the below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# Copyright 2023 John Doe&#xA;# Copyright 1999-2022 Gentoo Authors&#xA;# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30248" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T01:06:32.703" Title="Change copyright author after forking GPL v2 code?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-06-11T21:11:58.887" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14034" CreationDate="2023-06-01T06:57:39.980" Score="-2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've built an Android application in Kotlin, and it uses these libraries :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-core:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-camera2:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-lifecycle:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-video:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-view:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation &amp;quot;androidx.camera:camera-extensions:${camerax_version}&amp;quot;&#xA;    implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:1.10.0'&#xA;    implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.6.1'&#xA;    implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.8.0'&#xA;    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:2.1.4'&#xA;    testImplementation 'junit:junit:4.13.2'&#xA;    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.5'&#xA;    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.5.1'&#xA;    //Add Text Recognition Google ML Library&#xA;    implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-mlkit-text-recognition:18.0.2'&#xA;    implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-mlkit-text-recognition-common:18.0.0'&#xA;    implementation(&amp;quot;info.debatty:java-string-similarity:2.0.0&amp;quot;)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My doubt is this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These libraries are open-source and royalty-free or at some point I may get a payment request from Google or someone else.&#xA;This is because we cannot remove an application from the user's smartphone but only from the Play Store, so before publishing it I need confirmation of licenses and royalties on the use of these libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the complete list of licenses :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://opensource.org/license/mit/&#xA;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt&#xA;https://developer.android.com/studio/terms&#xA;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 &#xA;https://github.com/mojohaus/animal-sniffer/blob/master/LICENSE&#xA;https://chromium.googlesource.com/libyuv/libyuv/+/refs/heads/main/README.chromium&#xA;https://github.com/typetools/checker-framework/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&#xA;https://github.com/google/dagger/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&#xA;https://github.com/google/j2objc/blob/master/LICENSE&#xA;https://github.com/amaembo/jsr-305/blob/master/ri/LICENSE&#xA;https://github.com/google/jsinterop-annotations/blob/master/LICENSE&#xA;https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/blob/master/license/LICENSE.txt&#xA;https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-deps-trove4j/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&#xA;https://www-archive.mozilla.org/mpl/npl-1.1&#xA;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/1.1/&#xA;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&#xA;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html&#xA;https://github.com/stephengold/asm/blob/master/LICENSE&#xA;https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt&#xA;https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html&#xA;https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/terms&#xA;https://developers.google.com/terms&#xA;https://developer.android.com/studio/terms.html&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30047" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-06-12T06:56:40.117" LastActivityDate="2023-06-12T06:56:40.117" Title="Publishing an application on play store....licenses and royalties doubts" Tags="|licensing|mit|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14033" CreationDate="2023-06-01T07:04:28.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can save you some time reading through that list, and say your code is likely unpublishable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because it contains elements licenced under GPLv2, and also under MPL1.1 and NPL1.1.  The former is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;usually incompatible&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL, and the latter is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;always incompatible&lt;/a&gt; with the GPL.  There are others in that list that I suspect will be a problem also, but I stopped at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no licence terms under which you can lawfully distribute the resulting executable, and as a result, it may not be distributed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T07:04:28.837" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14030" CreationDate="2023-06-01T13:26:44.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is always worrying to have code with unknown provenance in the code base. Therefore it is a good idea to plan to remove/replace it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively you can search if that same code is from a published project (GitHub or the like) and research if that code is under a permissive license. If that is the case then you can just use that as a reference and comply with these license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the copied code actually distributed through the website (e.g. HTML or JS code), or is it part of the back-end and does not reach the visitors? The copyleft implications of CC BY-SA only apply when you are sharing the code with 3rd parties, and use on a back-end server is likely not 'sharing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please read &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6 &amp;quot;Term and Termination&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; of the license. Now that you have discovered the issue you need to act to cure it. I would not call it '&lt;em&gt;emergency procedure&lt;/em&gt;', it is just maintenance you have to complete within a short period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-06-01T13:26:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4887" CreationDate="2023-06-02T14:54:53.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/466878-putting-a-code-open-source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/466878-putting-a-code-open-source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This advice appears to conflict with an answer on MATLAB's help site, which says GPL is acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30258" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T14:54:53.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14038" CreationDate="2023-06-02T18:05:46.603" Score="6" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a repository of code that I would like to use to run a website. The code is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license, as the title states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that it is under a non-commercial license, as I believe I understand, I cannot make profit from the website. However, I am interested in knowing if I could accept donations from others to negate the cost of running the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/11110/30245&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it seems as though it could be possible. However, there is also someone else who answered a different question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12456/30245&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that makes me think twice. It seems as though it comes down to what the definition of &amp;quot;commercial advantage or private monetary compensation&amp;quot; is. I think that it would not give me a commercial advantage, but I am not sure if it would qualify as private monetary compensation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll contact a lawyer to get a professional view on it at some point, but I'm doing my best to research it myself first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30245" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T08:14:20.703" Title="Can I accept donations under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0?" Tags="|licensing|github|creative-commons|source-code|website|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14037" CreationDate="2023-06-02T19:11:31.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Version 4 of this license&lt;/a&gt; has pulled out the NonCommercial definition into a separate paragraph, which reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your website will be &amp;quot;primarily intended for or directed towards [...] monetary compensation,&amp;quot; then it violates this term. The next sentence clarifies that a barter exchange of one copyrighted work for another is not considered &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; in this context unless money changes hands. To my understanding, that sort of exchange is not unheard of in certain artistic communities, but it is not relevant to your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this really comes down to, in your case, is how &amp;quot;primary&amp;quot; your donations would be. If you're running the site for its own sake, and donations are just meant to defray costs, then you &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have a stronger legal leg to stand on (compared to e.g. running ads on the site and making a profit from it). If you incorporated a charitable organization or trust, that might also tend to help, but it must be emphasized that this provision contains no bright line carve-out for such legal entities. A trust or charity provides a legal framework for ensuring that donations are spent only on defraying costs and are not taken as profit, but the license doesn't automatically recognize that as &amp;quot;good enough.&amp;quot; In fact, the license does not explicitly authorize defraying costs at all, but you could argue that the donations are just a means to the end of running the website (and not the &amp;quot;primary&amp;quot; purpose of the website). It is unclear to me whether that argument would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A judge would have to look at the totality of the circumstances to determine whether you are &amp;quot;primarily&amp;quot; running the website for monetary compensation, and it is difficult to predict how the judge would rule. Such a ruling might also depend on the jurisdiction in which the case arises. You should consult a lawyer as your question suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-06-02T19:11:31.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14041" CreationDate="2023-06-02T20:26:32.403" Score="2" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was experimenting with Stackoverflow's API requests and I noticed this on my posts:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dFaX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dFaX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've mentioned in previous posts that while I respect CC BY-SA 4.0's intentions, I don't like the copyleft implications of CC BY-SA 4.0. I prefer a more permissive license such as MIT. Can I make my posts MIT licensed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some way to &amp;quot;opt in&amp;quot; to MIT license instead of CC BY-SA 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30217" LastActivityDate="2023-06-03T18:34:55.157" Title="Can I change the content license on my Stackoverflow/Stackexchange posts to something more permissive like MIT?" Tags="|mit|license|copyleft|cc-by-sa|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14039" CreationDate="2023-06-03T18:34:55.157" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Phillip Kendall mentioned, you can release your content under multiple licenses, as long as one of those licenses is the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The best place to state this is probably in your profile description. You may not need to necessarily mention the CC-BY-SA, as Stack Exchange's policy automatically releases all contributions under that license. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/users/2688027/multiplybyzer0&quot;&gt;The user MultiplyByZero&lt;/a&gt; provides an example of this, with code contributions being released under the Unlicense and text contributions under the Creative Commons Zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can state in your profile description that you release your posts under a different license or licenses, and others can understand that they can use your posts under either the license(s) you specified or the CC-BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastActivityDate="2023-06-03T18:34:55.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-04T10:55:07.227" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;If i am using the GNU-licensed software &amp;quot;Open Metronome&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/openmetronome/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sourceforge.net/projects/openmetronome/&lt;/a&gt;) to create the basic rhythm of my own music, I am wondering if I can freely distribute the resulting music (including commercially)? Or if I am bound by the GNU license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software basically creates a very simple beat based on your choices of instrument (clapsticks, bass drum, etc.) and the speed that you select (bpm). I am wondering if the sound of the instruments in this software is somehow copyrighted and would restrict me from using it freely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the OUTPUT of a GNU licensed program is generally not covered by the GNU license, but I also read that an exception is where the software contains any art or text that is also showing in the output. In this case, I am wondering if the sound recording of the different instruments would qualify as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30262" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:28:48.573" Title="GNU license for &quot;Open Metronome&quot; - what license applies to beats generated with it?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|copyleft|software|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14046" CreationDate="2023-06-04T10:56:25.240" Score="6" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone links to a Github or Gitlab repo in a Stackoverflow post, or a Github or Gitlab gist, is the contained content CC-BY-SA? Let's say I am the sole author of the code on Github/Gitlab?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a second senario: Let's say I am one of several authors in a Github/Gitlab repo, and the code is MIT licensed? Does the code still have to be CC-BY-SA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30217" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-06-06T08:14:26.047" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T08:14:26.047" Title="Is HTML-linked content still subject to the CC-BY-SA license?" Tags="|mit|github|cc-by-sa|gitlab|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14045" CreationDate="2023-06-04T11:18:45.193" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. HTML linking does not create a derivative work, so it is irrelevant what license the Stack Overflow post is under, it cannot possibly affect the license of the linked content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Otherwise you could never link from a Stack Overflow post to anything proprietary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-06-04T19:24:56.310" LastActivityDate="2023-06-04T19:24:56.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10280" CreationDate="2023-06-06T08:10:45.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming by your statement that you want &amp;quot;a GPL 2 license but for stuff like this where it is a image&amp;quot; that your primary concern is for a copyleft license, then yes, CC-BY-SA is probably the right answer: it is a copyleft license designed for &amp;quot;non-code stuff&amp;quot;, and the most common copyleft license used for that purpose, thus helping to reduce license proliferation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-06-06T08:10:45.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-06T13:30:39.853" Score="1" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to use a text file from a GitHub repository that is under MIT License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My repository is private and I'm distributing my software. My question is how can I use this file and put the right license on my repo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that I should create a LICENSE.md in the same directory as the text file and it should be clearly indicated which file this license applies to. Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, basically I have to only edit [year] and [fullname] tags on the MIT license text, like below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT License&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining&#xA;a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the&#xA;&amp;quot;Software&amp;quot;), to deal in the Software without restriction, including&#xA;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to&#xA;permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to&#xA;the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be&#xA;included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,&#xA;EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF&#xA;MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.&#xA;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY&#xA;CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,&#xA;TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE&#xA;SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30278" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T17:24:22.393" Title="How can I add a license for one file from a github repository?" Tags="|mit|license-recommendation|copyright|license|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14051" CreationDate="2023-06-06T19:24:06.063" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following Java project contains an Apache 2.0 license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/pdfbox-jbig2/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/apache/pdfbox-jbig2/blob/master/LICENSE.txt&lt;/a&gt; as well as a copyright header on every file in the project &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/pdfbox-jbig2/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/pdfbox/jbig2/Dictionary.java&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/apache/pdfbox-jbig2/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/pdfbox/jbig2/Dictionary.java&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to port the code, to for example an Apache 2 licensed golang project, what is necessary to meet the terms of the license? The files aren't being copied 1:1 but are derivative works in my understanding. Which of the following are required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attribute the source project in a NOTICES.txt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Update the license of the project to include a copy of the license of this project (so 2 licenses stacked on top of each other)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a copyright header to every &lt;code&gt;.go&lt;/code&gt; file corresponding to a &lt;code&gt;.java&lt;/code&gt; file in the source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30281" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T11:26:24.987" Title="Notices.txt or Copyright file header when porting code" Tags="|copyright|apache-2.0|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14050" CreationDate="2023-06-07T06:36:05.960" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the requirements of the license, you may move the Apache 2.0 license into a single license.txt and the notices (attribution) into a single notices.txt for the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more&#xA;contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... just says it is licensed under Apache, there are no addnl implications for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please consider adding &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/ids/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifiers&lt;/a&gt; to each file. These license identifiers are the state of the art way to support any future automation w.r.t. license compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-06-07T11:26:24.987" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T11:26:24.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14037" CreationDate="2023-06-07T08:14:20.703" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons published their interpretation of 'Non-Commercial' in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki page&lt;/a&gt;. However, these pages do not clarify your specific question about donations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a long &lt;a href=&quot;https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article about NC licenses&lt;/a&gt; on the Freedom Defined webpage, explaining all the things they perceive are wrong about the NC licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC emphasizes the difference between 'use' and 'user'. A &lt;em&gt;commercial user&lt;/em&gt; can still use the licensed materials for a &lt;em&gt;non-commercial purpose&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the important question is about the nature of your website. Is it commercial (directly or indirectly for your financial gain) or not? Will the donations really just cover the hosting cost and maintenance (partly or fully, on average), or is there a surplus that goes into your private pocket?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;code that I would like to use to run a website&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. CC suggests &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not to use their licenses for software&lt;/a&gt;, so there are gaps in what the license language covers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If this code is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; shared with the users of your website (i.e. the code is just in the back end and not part of the HTML of JS code delivered to the visitors), then the restrictions in Section 2.a.1 do not apply to you. You may run the code without restriction (for example under the terms of Article 5.1 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32009L0024#d1e338-16-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DIRECTIVE 2009/24/EC&lt;/a&gt;. But this depends on your jurisdiction, and you may want to consult a lawyer to understand what it means to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T08:14:20.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14056" CreationDate="2023-06-07T08:28:55.170" Score="3" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the CC-BY-SA is that if you use a snippet of CC-BY-SA code in a larger project, not only must you reveal the source code of your entire project, but you must also brand the entire project's code-base with the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern would be that if I, at one stage of a project, used a little snippet of CC-BY-SA code, my entire project would have to be CC-BY-SA, even if the original CC-BY-SA snippet was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the CC-BY-SA is only relevant when the project is published, but if I had a project in a CI/CD pipeline, it is always being &amp;quot;published&amp;quot; whenever a change is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of this theoretical example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You make a website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You deploy it in a CI/CD pipeline.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You keep makings commits (each one is immediately deployed)  .&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You copy code that's CC-BY-SA licensed not understanding the full implications (perhaps you thought CC-BY-SA only required attribution like MIT or CC BY 3.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You find out that the CC-BY-SA code snippet you used means the entire project must now bear the CC-BY-SA license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that if the author panics and removes the CC-BY-SA code snippet it's too late. The ENTIRE project has forcibly become CC-BY-SA. If the original CC-BY-SA code is removed it doesn't matter because every step constitutes as being published, binding the code base as CC-BY-SA. Furthermore, the entire project is now (for lack of a better term) infectious... If you say &amp;quot;I'll just start over,&amp;quot; you can't use ANY of your original code base at any commit, or your new app will also become &amp;quot;infected,&amp;quot; and then you'll have to start over again and not use any code from either project...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I am wrong. Is there any legal theory that can save the situation I described? I'd hate to think that any code base I've been working with that has touched CC-BY-SA code must be thrown out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30217" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T08:45:20.597" Title="Can CC-BY-SA code be removed from a larger code base and not have the remaining code bear the CC-BY-SA license?" Tags="|copyleft|cc-by-sa|source-code|publishing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14053" CreationDate="2023-06-07T08:38:15.407" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern would be that if I, at one stage of a project, used a little snippet of CC-BY-SA code, my entire project would have to be CC-BY-SA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is so, as it is with most copyleft licences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;even if the original CC-BY-SA snippet was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some, including me, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/10141/458&quot;&gt;would so argue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I had a project in a CI/CD pipeline, it is always being &amp;quot;published&amp;quot; whenever a change is made&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft obligations, like most obligations in copyright licences, trigger when something is done that would infringe someone else's copyright if not otherwise permitted.  It's not clear to me that merely putting the code into a CI pipeline is such an act.  Better to focus on conveyance, as GPLv3 has it: the act of giving copies to other people.  That &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; requires permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd hate to think that any code base I've been working with that has touched CC-BY-SA code must be thrown out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that, but the best advice we can give is to have a care about the licence status of the third-party code you use.  The practice of pulling in code from all over, willy-nilly, and only starting to worry about the legalities when the project is ready to ship, is as foolish as it is common.  If you're going to use someone else's work in your own project, licence compliance must be your highest priority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, if you accidentally use some copyleft code which you promptly remove as soon as you realise your error, and which you have never shipped to another person, it's unlikely that anyone will ever notice or care that you have done so.  But it could still be a technical infringement; instead of looking for loopholes in copyright, spend your time being careful about what code you reuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-06-07T08:38:15.407" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-07T20:45:13.743" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand the licensing limitations if I want to bundle code-server with my cloud application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;docs&lt;/a&gt;, Out of the box, &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; is simply &lt;strong&gt;VS Code in the browser&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; uses open source code of &lt;code&gt;VS Code&lt;/code&gt;, how does the licensing terms of &lt;code&gt;VS Code Server&lt;/code&gt; affect usage of &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; in a commercial application? As per &lt;code&gt;VS Code Server&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://aka.ms/vscode-server-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licensing terms&lt;/a&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;hosting &lt;code&gt;VS Code Server&lt;/code&gt; as a service is not allowed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you may not provide the software as a stand-alone offering or combine it with any of your applications for others to use, or transfer the software or this agreement to any third party.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I ship code-server &lt;a href=&quot;https://coder.com/docs/code-server/latest/helm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;helm&lt;/a&gt; charts with my commercial cloud application, will it be breaking VS Code Server's license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; is MIT licensed, and available for commercial use. Both &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;VS Code Server&lt;/code&gt; uses open-source code from &lt;code&gt;VS Code&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SgIpI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SgIpI.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30291" LastEditorUserId="30291" LastEditDate="2023-06-08T04:23:54.967" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T12:43:34.830" Title="Difference between licensing terms of code-server vs. VS Code Server" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14053" CreationDate="2023-06-08T08:45:20.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My concern would be that if I, at one stage of a project, used a little snippet of CC-BY-SA code, my entire project would have to be CC-BY-SA, even if the original CC-BY-SA snippet was removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully agree with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14054&quot;&gt;answer by @MadHatter&lt;/a&gt;, including the assessment that building upon the codebase that includes the CC BY-SA code, even if that change removes the original CC BY-SA code, cannot remove the CC BY-SA obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do see a way out of the situation without having to publish your product under the CC BY-SA license for all time, or being unable to publish due to conflicting licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That way out is to go back in time in your codebase to a commit before the first line of CC BY-SA code was added. From this point forward, you can start doing a cleanroom re-implementation of the features that were added after the introduction of the CC BY-SA code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The features need to be re-implemented in a cleanroom manner, i.e. without referring to the previous implementation, to ensure that you don't accidentally pull in again some code that is encumbered by the CC BY-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a cheap or easy process, so you should add measures to your development process to catch addition of code with an undesirable license as early as possible. Preferably before it actually gets added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T08:45:20.597" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14059" CreationDate="2023-06-08T10:36:51.270" Score="5" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in a situation where a company is interested in running an application of mine licensed under the AGPLv3. The company will repeatedly take inputs from multiple customers, and then return the outputs of the application to the customers. But instead of setting up a web app to do this, the company is thinking of asking customers to email in their inputs (as Excel sheets, in case that's relevant). The outputs will be emailed back, and also specify the sale of goods to the customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL licence is clear that it covers services offered over a network (e.g. a web app). But would this convoluted method over communicating via email still count as &amp;quot;interacting over a network&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any pointers, or thoughts, welcome!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30294" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T16:00:14.607" Title="Does AGPLv3 cover a company running an application via email correspondence?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|copyleft|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14055" CreationDate="2023-06-08T12:43:34.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if I ship code-server helm charts with my commercial cloud application, will it be breaking VS Code Server's license terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Despite the similarity in their names, &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;VS Code Server&lt;/code&gt; are two distinct products. If you obtain the &lt;code&gt;code-server&lt;/code&gt; product under the MIT license, you don't have to care about the licensing terms of other (similarly named) products. Even if those products actually share a lot of their codebase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the only questions that matter are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what license terms were attached to the copy of the software that you received.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when providing a download link to others, does that link point to a copy that can legally be offered according to the license terms attached to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T12:43:34.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14057" CreationDate="2023-06-08T15:07:35.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see any difference between using SMTP (email) versus HTTP (web) to submit inputs to the software. They are both application-level protocols used over a computer network; I don't see the license applying differently merely because of a change in network protocol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible difference, though, is whether the user's input is supplied directly into the program or not. Requests submitted via either HTTP or SMTP could equivalently be (1) fed directly into the program or (2) placed in a queue, where they are eventually interpreted and handled by a human, who employs the program to produce (and possibly share) output. Admittedly, this second case sounds more likely for inputs supplied over email.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certainly cases of the second category that I would not expect to carry AGPL obligations. If you email a photo to a person and ask, &amp;quot;Please run this photo through your AGPL program that applies various color filters to images, and send me back your top three favorite outputs,&amp;quot; then I think it's crystal-clear that the original person submitting the photo and receiving the three outputs back is not the person interacting with the AGPL photo-manipulation program. There are also cases that seem much closer to direct interaction: suppose the human in the middle doesn't apply any discretion or decision-making, but merely double-clicks on a script file twice a day to process an input queue. In such a case, it certainly sounds like the original submitter has a much more meaningful interaction with the program than the human who is merely acting as a biological cron job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is (as far as I know) currently no case law that approaches the question of what does or does not constitute &amp;quot;interaction over a computer network&amp;quot; under the AGPL, so I cannot begin to supply a legal test of what would fall inside or outside this category. Frankly, it's not clear to me if invoking the program via an &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; twice-daily cron job to consume network-supplied input, with no human involved, is sufficient to disconnect a user from &amp;quot;interaction&amp;quot; with the program. I can imagine different hypothetical standards that would include or exclude it, but no such standard exists yet in actual legal fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that the AGPL's network-based source-sharing obligations in section 13 only come into effect &amp;quot;if you modify the Program,&amp;quot; so if the company is only privately executing an unmodified copy of the program, they cannot have copyleft obligations, even if their case constitutes network interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-06-08T16:00:14.607" LastActivityDate="2023-06-08T16:00:14.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1958" CreationDate="2023-06-11T00:35:50.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the project has &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/security-advisories/repository-security-advisories/configuring-private-vulnerability-reporting-for-a-repository&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enabled private vulnerability reporting&lt;/a&gt; you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/security-advisories/repository-security-advisories/creating-a-repository-security-advisory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;create a private repository advisory&lt;/a&gt; directly in GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30307" LastActivityDate="2023-06-11T00:35:50.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-12T03:23:42.617" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am deploying a Qt project on Windows with MinGW which spits out a dozen or so DLLs that are required by Qt, but not directly by my project. Some of these are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pcre2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;zlib&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;harfbuzz&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;freetype&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iconv&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libpng&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;libstdc++&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I obligated to include licenses for these DLLs as well as the Qt license? What is stopping the Qt Foundation from adding extra 3rd-party libraries in future updates, such that my build system picks up a newer version of Qt, deploys my project and misses the extra licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What if I statically link all of these DLLs to Qt when I build the framework, so that I only include Qt DLLs in my project? Am I still required to include licenses for these projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to ensure I am respecting Copyright law but am rather confused... Note also that some of these libaries have completely different licenses from one another...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7645/should-i-attribute-open-source-dlls-that-i-ship&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but it does not explain what would happen if the libraries were statically linked instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30310" LastActivityDate="2023-06-12T03:23:42.617" Title="License requirements for DLLs that are indirectly required by Qt" Tags="|license|license-notice|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2023-06-12T05:59:15.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-13T19:36:03.703" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new to licensing and open source as a whole, so please be patient with me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say I have created an organization on Github that's called &amp;quot;Organization X&amp;quot;, under that organization I created a repository that's called &amp;quot;App X&amp;quot; (it's an open source project and basically, I call it a product).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that product, I'm looking for a license that does the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You're free to use the code inside the project, as far as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You give credit to the whole organization basically in the format of &amp;quot;Lines from 20 to 100 have been taken from App X that's under Organization X.&amp;quot; while also putting the Organization's and product's logo (that are clearly visible to everyone). Also if person Y takes the same code that person X took from Organization X (my organization), they should give credit to Organization X.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't take the whole product and republish (aka the source code) it. You can only take minor parts to use in your project, or product under whatever organization or company (basically anywhere). I mean as far as you do some &lt;em&gt;significant&lt;/em&gt; edits, it's OK to use the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't sell it in anyway or form (basically gain income from it in anyway). The whole product is free for everyone therefore you can't sell it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can't use the code in private projects, your project can be personal or even public to the whole planet but no private or closed-source projects. I mean it should be open-source too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can't use the organization's logo or product's logo in anyway. You should indicate that this is a different project and no relation between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I clearly searched for such licenses but couldn't find anything specific. Also, I'm wondering if someone violated any of the above rules what will happen or what should I do in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also is there anything important you think I missed? To summarize, &amp;quot;I want people to be able to use the source code while always giving credit, not gaining any income from it, and making it open source with an indication that there's no relation between them and my organization. They can't republish the whole source code again unless making some significant edits&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is the right site to ask such a question, correct me if I'm wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30326" LastActivityDate="2023-06-13T22:30:44.110" Title="A license that gives you credit to the code forever with minor changes" Tags="|license-recommendation|license|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2023-06-13T22:25:03.137" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5371" CreationDate="2023-06-15T06:34:42.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most suitable solution for collecting usage data in open source projects depends on the type of project and its user base. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Libraries/Frameworks: Leverage package manager statistics and engagement on platforms like GitHub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developer Tools: Utilize issue trackers and pull requests on collaboration platforms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Applications/Software: Incorporate analytics tools or opt-in telemetry within the software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Web-Based Projects: Use analytics tools like Google Analytics or Matomo for website tracking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Community-Driven Projects: Engage with users through mailing lists, forums, or dedicated channels.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choose an approach that aligns with user preferences, respects privacy, and complies with the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30323" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-06-15T08:01:24.530" LastActivityDate="2023-06-15T08:01:24.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2023-06-16T19:12:31.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;the answers posted by others actually make sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but if you came here after you tried compiling your first bpf program and it failed, then it is highly likely that you faced the same problem that I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might have also installed &lt;code&gt;bcc&lt;/code&gt; using apt which happens to be a &lt;code&gt;bcc/jammy 0.16.17-3.3 amd64   16-bit x86 C compiler &lt;/code&gt; just uninstall that and reinstall the &lt;code&gt;bpfcc-tools&lt;/code&gt; because the newer version of &lt;code&gt;bcc&lt;/code&gt; has this resolved as discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1804&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/issues/1804&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;alternatively you can add this line and recompile&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;char __license[] SEC(&amp;quot;license&amp;quot;) = &amp;quot;Dual MIT/GPL&amp;quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;char __license[] SEC(&amp;quot;license&amp;quot;) = &amp;quot;GPL&amp;quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;basically any license value of your choice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30348" LastEditorUserId="30348" LastEditDate="2023-06-18T16:24:58.193" LastActivityDate="2023-06-18T16:24:58.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14068" CreationDate="2023-06-18T05:55:00.880" Score="14" ViewCount="2927" Body="&lt;p&gt;The project I was working on is open source and uses the AGPL license. Every file has the AGPL header.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a personal project that I would like to commercialize. I really want to reuse a file from the open-source project, but I'm not sure if I am allowed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30356" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-06-18T21:49:00.930" LastActivityDate="2023-06-18T21:49:00.930" Title="While working at my last company, I wrote some code under the AGPL license. Am I allowed to reuse the code I wrote into my personal project?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14067" CreationDate="2023-06-18T07:24:45.147" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have two very different questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are you allowed to reuse the code in your personal project? Yes, &lt;strong&gt;if and only if the code was released to the public&lt;/strong&gt; - but you must then obey the AGPL as you are almost certainly not the copyright holder. If the code was not released to the public, you shouldn't have a copy of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can you commercialize your project? Yes, the AGPL allows commercial use, as must every open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-06-18T07:24:45.147" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-20T09:02:48.163" Score="7" ViewCount="999" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've started a FLOSS project and people are interested in helping out in different ways. I'm considering how to store information about these contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information like for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contact information&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Codeberg/GitLab username&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technical knowledge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Areas of interest and contribution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like do store information about the contributors&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in a privacy-minded way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in a practical way&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;including allowing contributors to see each others info&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and storing the information close to the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My own thoughts about possible options&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Option A: Public wiki page&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One option I see is to store public information on a publicly available wiki page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information would then be available to everyone, but maybe that is fine if the information shared in the document was already public? I'm thinking of things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;chat-room user name (the chat room is public)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what types of contribution the person wants to make (programming, testing, using and provide feedback, etc.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information that wouldn’t be stored:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;email&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Option B: Privately stored, only accessible by me&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would respect privacy for sure, but would not be so practical for the reasons above (under the Question heading)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Option C: Invite&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In previous projects I've been involved in, I've seen people storing this sort of information in a semi-private file that is shared by adding certain users (maybe in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Docs&lt;/a&gt; document, or hopefully a FLOSS option)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I see here is that every user that is listed in the file would have to be contacted each time a new person is added, so it will not be very practical if there are many contributors to the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6670" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-06-21T14:48:07.900" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:05:50.250" Title="How should I store contributor info ethically and practically?" Tags="|contributor|documentation|ethics|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14069" CreationDate="2023-06-20T15:32:58.797" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's good to have a thriving community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd advocate option D: Maintain a detailed readme file in the repository with a credits section, or a separate credits section with the contributors nickname in use, their real name (those who agree), maybe their e-mail (those who agree) and the areas of interest in which they work on. This can also include names of community moderators or whatsoever - they do not need to have an active code contribution to be listed there. E.g. I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/blob/master/CREDITS.md&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;what OpenTTD does&lt;/a&gt; works very well. I'd encourage new contributors in your usual communication / chat channels to add themselves to that list - or at least have them agree on or approve pull requests which change / add their info. Be generous with giving credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a invite-only group of core maintainers (e.g. in the discord and/or IRC and/or forums might be a good idea where you can discuss sensitive stuff (especially security). I'd not go around gathering more info officially about people than they publicly share in this credit readme or credits file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure, you might exchange telephone numbers or contact in other than the usual channels within a small group, if there is interest. Yet I'd not formalize that but consider that private information which this other person gave me for personal use like within a group of friends. That happens rather naturally when the group dynamics are positive and e.g. there is the desire for a real-world get-together in whatever combination of subset of interested people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said, I'd advocate to keep public all discussions which can be public in your usual publicly-accessible dev channel. You might consider to have or not have logs, though to (not) make it a permanent record. Thus use your private dev channel only for what really needs to be discussed there. If you keep reviews, project discussions, patch considerations public, then you provide a way for interested people who are not yet contributors to see what happens. It allows that you gather there a community who might not all contribute actively code but still provide useful input, e.g. by giving feedback, providing detailed tests, or doing some reviews etc. And it allows people who so far were only listening to chime in and become contributors when there is actually a topic they are interested in and which they feel they are capable to contribute to. Thus guide your community with clear communication and give feedback of which features or directions are considered good and which you don't plan to consider (and why).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know other projects which do not work as open as described here - and IMHO it shows in how active and community is; keeping it 'exclusive' seems mainly to serve the ego of those in power. It's the project's decision or the one of the maintainers, but IMHO it is not helpful in making the project grow and maintaining a vibrant community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-06-20T15:39:41.543" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T15:39:41.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14049" CreationDate="2023-06-20T17:24:22.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you use a file that is a code, add in the comments in this one file the entire MIT license with copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the file is text/markdown/html (in HTML you can also do solution described above), just create NOTICE(.md) file in global directory with that license (and notices). You can add github repo URL optionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is distributed under MIT license you can just copyright notice to the global LICENSE(.md) file from repo you used. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13412/how-to-put-copyright-notice-if-i-use-several-other-code-bases-mit/13536#13536&quot;&gt;How to put Copyright notice If I use several other code bases (MIT)&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not a legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-20T17:24:22.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14074" CreationDate="2023-06-21T10:35:21.930" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I distribute a program dynamically linked to a third-party LGPL-licensed library A, which dynamically links to another third-party library B (not necessarily LGPL), all of them distributed together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I want to want to make this program &lt;em&gt;just work&lt;/em&gt; as distributed. For example, the user may have &lt;code&gt;LD_LIBRARY_PATH&lt;/code&gt; set (intentionally or not), which contains another version of library B which is incompatible with the version of library A distributed. Therefore, I am tempted to set &lt;code&gt;RPATH&lt;/code&gt; for the program (even though &lt;code&gt;RPATH&lt;/code&gt; is deprecated and its use discouraged) so that it will override any &lt;code&gt;LD_LIBRARY_PATH&lt;/code&gt; set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems that this would violate LGPL, because from my understanding, LGPL requires that the user of the program be allowed to relink it to any version of library A. Am I correct? Should I prepare a wrapper script that prepends &lt;code&gt;LD_LIBRARY_PATH&lt;/code&gt; instead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11187" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-01T13:16:20.503" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T13:16:20.503" Title="LGPL and DT_RPATH compatibility" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14073" CreationDate="2023-06-22T07:35:07.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems that this would violate LGPL, because from my understaning, LGPL requires that the user of the program be allowed to relink it to any version of library A. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes and No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL requires that the end-user, given they have enough technical knowledge, is able to replace the LGPL-licensed portions with a different version of that code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the LGPL is concerned, that requirement is fulfilled if the end-user can overwrite/replace the binary of library A that you distribute with a different, compatible, version without breaking your application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-06-22T07:35:07.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-09T22:40:31.120" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a doubt about the AWS Code license, specifically, I've been using fragments of code from the AWS repository for the Javascript SDK v3 interacting with Cognito. In some fragments of code, for example here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/v3/latest/clients/client-cognito-identity-provider/classes/getusercommand.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaScriptSDK/v3/latest/clients/client-cognito-identity-provider/classes/getusercommand.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license for the Code is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/** Copyright Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.&#xA;SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 */&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being said, if I want to use this fragment inside my code (more extensive), do I have to keep this code license? What if I want to license all code (the fragment of AWS repository and my own code more extensive) with MIT license, can I do it ? Do I instead have to keep the Apache license in the fragment while I put my code under the MIT license?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, because I've to include source modifications as Apache License says, I should include them, the Apache 2.0 license, and a statement with any major change. The changes that I am going to introduce are not very significant, anyway, I prefer (if it's possible) to include these changes, but in what way can I do it? For, for example in the same file which includes the Apache license from AWS and the modified code ?, between comments lines, or how can I do it? Finally, if I decide to distribute the code with an MIT license, again, in what way, is it enough including the license file called &amp;quot;LICENSE&amp;quot; with my copyright? and the text of the license? for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MIT License&#xA;&#xA;Copyright (c) 2023 dcorralf&#xA;&#xA;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation, etc ... &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up, the final project will contain the Apache 2.0 License from AWS with a statement in case we add some changes, and this is for each file that uses code from AWS, and finally in the resulting code push to my Github repository, and add the MIT license file ? is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30407" OwnerDisplayName="David" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T23:19:38.437" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T05:26:39.017" Title="Code licensed by Apache 2.0 license with the AWS SDK for Javascript v3, maybe licensed by other license (MIT)?" Tags="|licensing|mit|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14077" CreationDate="2023-06-22T23:54:56.180" Score="6" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Context&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I have two projects called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Goal&lt;/strong&gt;: The Foo compiles to some sort of dynamic linking library such as a windows .dll and links to project Bar dynamically. And some of the headers files of the Foo project are included in the Bar project. And the Bar project links to the Foo project dynamically for getting the declarations. Below is a more detailed explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Project Foo contains the following two files:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interface.hpp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#pragma once&#xA;&#xA;#ifdef __WINDOWS__&#xA;    #ifdef BUILD_DLL&#xA;        #define API __declspec(dllexport)&#xA;    #else&#xA;        #define API __declspec(dllimport)&#xA;    #endif&#xA;#else&#xA;    #error only supports Windows!&#xA;#endif&#xA;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;iostream&amp;gt;&#xA;#include &amp;lt;string&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;class API Foo {&#xA; public:&#xA;  Foo();&#xA;  ~Foo();&#xA;  void greet(std::string name);&#xA;};&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Implementation.cpp:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;Interface.hpp&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA;void Foo::greet(std::string name) {&#xA;  std::cout &amp;lt;&amp;lt; &amp;quot;Hello&amp;quot; + name &amp;lt;&amp;lt; std::endl;&#xA;  return;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Bar Project contains a main.cpp file with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;#include &amp;quot;Interface.hpp&amp;quot;&#xA;&#xA;int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {&#xA;  Foo instance = Foo();&#xA;  instance.greet(&amp;quot;Nasir&amp;quot;);&#xA;  return 0;&#xA;}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What I'm Asking&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand if this project setup complies with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Specifically, I am seeking clarification on whether project Bar, being proprietary and dynamically linking to project Foo while including the interface file (Interface.h) for function definitions, adheres to the requirements imposed by the GPL.&#xA;If it doesn't adhere to the requirements imposed by the GPL, give me some guidance and resources or point-out what I am doing wrong and what I can do for a similar result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I am aware of the implications and restrictions imposed by the GPL when combining GPL-covered code with proprietary software. However, I am uncertain about the compliance aspect in the described scenario. I would greatly appreciate insights and guidance on ensuring compliance with the GPL within this context, considering the utilization of a controlled interface and dynamic linking between the Bar project (proprietary module) and the GPL-covered Foo project (library).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What did I try and what I’m expecting?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I Have Done My Research&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://mediatechlaw.mstreetlegal.com/2014/04/25/open-source-dynamic-linking-and-licensing-consideration-for-developers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;. And this is my main source of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;confusion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;I Have Produced the Confusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ensure compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL), I have utilized a controlled interface approach, where Foo provides an API (defined in Interface.hpp) that is explicitly declared as either dllexport or dllimport based on the build configuration. The Bar project includes Interface.hpp for accessing the function definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What Solution I’m Expecting&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My expectation was to clarify whether this project setup adheres to the requirements of the GPL. I am aware of the restrictions and implications of the GPL when combining GPL-covered code with proprietary software. However, I seek guidance and insights regarding the compliance aspect in this particular scenario. Specifically, I would like to understand if the dynamic linking of the proprietary Bar project with the GPL-covered Foo project, while including the interface file (Interface.hpp) for function definitions, complies with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this project setup does not conform to the requirements imposed by the GPL, I would appreciate guidance, resources, or suggestions on what steps I can take to achieve a similar result while ensuring compliance with the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30399" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T22:21:51.497" Title="Dynamically Linking a Proprietary Module to a GPL-Covered Library (C/C++)" Tags="|gpl-3|license|copyleft|proprietary-code|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14076" CreationDate="2023-06-23T06:58:48.940" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand if this project setup complies with the GNU General Public License (GPL). Specifically, I am seeking clarification on whether project Bar, being proprietary and dynamically linking to project Foo while including the interface file (Interface.h) for function definitions, adheres to the requirements imposed by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, your setup does not comply with the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license does not make any provisions for different forms of linking (static, dynamic, with or without a controlled interface). If you link to a GPL-licensed library, then your main program and all other code linked to it needs to comply with the GPL requirements, which implies that it needs to be licensed under a GPL-compatible open-source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three main ways to get into compliance, and which of those are open to you depends on whether or not you are the sole copyright owner of either Foo or Bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are the sole copyright owner of Bar (or there are few enough copyright owners that you can realistically get a unanimous agreement from all of them), you can change the license of Bar to the GPL license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you are the sole copyright owner of Foo (or there are few enough copyright owners that you can realistically get a unanimous agreement from all of them), you can change the license of Foo to a license that allows to combine it with proprietary code. That could be a permissive license, like MIT or Apache 2.0, or a weaker copyleft license like the LGPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can replace the Foo library with another library that has better licensing terms for your use case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that for changing a license, you need a positive confirmation from &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; copyright holders. A single one not responding already counts as a veto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FSF FAQ entry that is causing you confusion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface&lt;/a&gt;) proposes a variation on option 2 mentioned above. That variation is to change the license of Foo to &amp;quot;GPL + custom exception&amp;quot;, where the exception text gives the recipients of Foo additional permissions that they would not have with the GPL alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not mention it as a possibility, because writing such an exception is not easy and I expect you would end up with something similar to the LGPL license anyway. In that case, it is better to just go with the well understood LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-06-23T09:57:44.023" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T09:57:44.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14069" CreationDate="2023-06-23T14:44:11.060" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Common practice in the open source community is to have a file &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTORS&lt;/code&gt; in the root of the project's sourcecode directory that lists every contributor with all personal and contact information these contributors agreed to share with the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that contact information is personally identifiable information (PII), and as such sharing it with anyone without explicit permission is not just unethical but also illegal. That means that if you want to have some directory of contributors and share it among the team, then you need explicit consent of the people whose PII is in it. Which smart and privacy-conscious people won't give you, because they don't know who you are going to add to the project later and if they are comfortable with those people having their contact information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want people to be able to contact each other even if you should not be around and your usual project communication infrastructure should fail, then I recommend to encourage (but not obligate) people to share contact information with any project members they trust to not misuse or mishandle that information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T14:44:11.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14076" CreationDate="2023-06-23T22:21:51.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPL allows open-source software to be linked with arbitrary code, open-source or otherwise, provided that no derivative work of GPL code is &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; in ways which do not satisfying the GPL requirements, and which are not otherwise authorized by the author of the person whose work is incorporated into the derived work.  For purposes of this requirement, aggregations are not considered derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If e.g. one wanted to adopt a GPL chess program for use with a proprietary chess engine, one could write and publish as open-source an interface module which would interact with the chess engine and with the DLL, and publish the specifications for how the DLL works, along with an open-source sample implementation (e.g. a simple chess engine that makes arbitrary random modes).  Anyone who wanted to adapt that for use with a better chess engine, open source or otherwise, would be free to do so, provided that any closed-source code would be kept separate from GPL code until linked (likely at runtime) by the final recipient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the creator of the interface code were to write a closed-source DLL that exploited details of the interface which weren't clearly published, it could be argued that failure to publish such details meant the person hadn't really published the full and complete source code of the interface.  If, however, the person creating that interface publishes everything that would be necessary for anyone else to use it the same way as the author does, there's no reason the author should have any &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; freedom to write closed-source DLL for use with it than any other person would have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2023-06-23T22:21:51.497" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14081" CreationDate="2023-06-24T16:50:59.510" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Creative Common license (and other licenses as well) gives (or not) authorizations to other humans to use, adapt, and modify licensed work. However, more and more, the licensed work is being used by non-humans. Is it possible to give authorizations only to humans, and to remove all authorizations to non-humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, some code could be scrapped by a webbot, and used to generate a program following a question to, e.g., chatGPT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indirectly, would such a license be valid on GitHub? This repository web site has, among other condition of use, the indication that we allow Microsoft access to all the code stored there. As Microsoft does not specify how the code is accessed, it could be interpreted as &amp;quot;by all means judged applicable&amp;quot; by Microsoft which would extend to bot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indirectly, this question is with regard to open-source: Open to who? or open to what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30411" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2023-06-24T23:18:55.580" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T16:03:43.477" Title="Creative Common license excluding non-humans, excluding web scraping?" Tags="|licensing|creative-commons|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14080" CreationDate="2023-06-25T15:42:50.173" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't exclude &amp;quot;non-humans&amp;quot; from licenses because only humans are valid licensees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically, you could add other disclaimers to the CC licenses about what you forbid (i.e. people and organizations to use automated tools for xyz stuff), but in practice CC licenses defend against such restrictions + such use could infringe the &amp;quot;Creative Commons&amp;quot; trademark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a world where AI models and bots like the Wayback Machine are commonplace, why not just leave it at that and let people develop these technologies?&#xA;If any bot does not comply with the CC license (e.g. CC-BY 4.0) and does not attribute your authorship, and a human reproduces this content, then you can always claim the rights to be credited and require the human to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bots have no legal personality. You can eventually sue the person or organization that uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-06-25T16:03:43.477" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T16:03:43.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11023" CreationDate="2023-06-25T16:14:21.607" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only solution I see is to write an exception for GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL allows you to add an exception that is a special permission for additional things. This is useful and used in some projects (some libraries from GCC, OpenJDK).The LGPL (version 3) itself is an exception to the GNU GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can write an exception that allows you to combine works statically and dynamically and distribute them under your own licenses, but only if the license is (1) Free (according to the Free Software or Open Source Definition) (2) Is incompatible with the GNU GPL 3 ( if it is compatible then the exception makes no sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this has limitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone downloads a binary copy of your library from an application that uses it, he can reverse engineer it (your library is partly written in Java, which is relatively easy to decompile) and use the code under a different license. This can be prevented by forcing a special notice to be added to the license of such an application (e.g. &amp;quot;this program links the xyz library. Use of the xyz library is subject to the GPL&amp;quot;), but then it would be pointless if someone is copylefted and cannot legally add such a notice. However, looking at conditions (1) and (2), this would rather include CDDL or GPL derivatives or other rare Open Source licenses, and you shouldn't have a problem with someone using a code snippet of a decompiled library under another ideologically similar to GPL Open Source license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone modifies your library, they can remove this exception and distribute under plain GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, I think it's worth doing. So far, I don't have a ready-made template that you could use. If I find one or write one myself, I'll post it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T16:14:21.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14069" CreationDate="2023-06-25T18:05:50.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answers given by others are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creating &lt;code&gt;CONTRIBUTORS&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; and other files is common, especially in older projects like GNU or GNOME.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most often, however, these files contain the people who have done the most.&#xA;For example, GNU GCC stores maintainers of functions, ports, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a sample &lt;code&gt;MAINTAINERS&lt;/code&gt; file for GCC here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob_plain;f=MAINTAINERS;hb=HEAD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob_plain;f=MAINTAINERS;hb=HEAD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;see also the &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; file for GTK:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/main/AUTHORS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/blob/main/AUTHORS&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, when you host a project on GitHub or Gitlab, you are offered a contributor information service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitHub: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/viewing-activity-and-data-for-your-repository/viewing-a-projects-contributors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/viewing-activity-and-data-for-your-repository/viewing-a-projects-contributors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitLab: &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/#repository-contributor-statistics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/#repository-contributor-statistics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also write a program, e.g. a simple Python script, which will export the list of contributors from the Git repository and write it to a text file. You can check out this post on Stack OverFlow which shows how to do it with Git. &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9597410/list-all-developers-on-a-project-in-git&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9597410/list-all-developers-on-a-project-in-git&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it comes to storing detailed information (i.e. people's knowledge), I would not provide information about each person, but only about the most important ones. Then you can use README or other files including &lt;code&gt;MAINTAINERS&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:05:50.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14044" CreationDate="2023-06-25T18:28:48.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this program is very complicated. As you mentioned, the GNU GPL does not apply to exiting a program unless it copies itself there. So unless the samples you use are under the GNU GPL, neither will your music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I downloaded the &lt;code&gt;Samples_original.zip&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;Samples_Fluid.zip&lt;/code&gt; archives, and it looks like &lt;code&gt;Samples_Fluid&lt;/code&gt; &lt;strong&gt;SHOULD&lt;/strong&gt; contain Fluid SoundFont samples. I downloaded a copy of it from the Web Archive Wayback Machine (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20121015090653/http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/files/FluidR3122501.zip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20121015090653/http://soundfonts.homemusician.net/files/FluidR3122501.zip&lt;/a&gt;) and it looks like (in the FAQ, so not a formal license) you can use this soundfont, and donations are welcome but not required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various samples in &lt;code&gt;Samples_original.zip&lt;/code&gt;, for example from freesound. I looked at one of them (&lt;a href=&quot;https://freesound.org/people/FranciscoPadilla/sounds/22742/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://freesound.org/people/FranciscoPadilla/sounds/22742/&lt;/a&gt;) called 39 Hand Clap. It is licensed CC-BY-NC, i.e. non-commercial use. But after going to the Wayback Machine (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20111016150352/http://www.freesound.org/people/FranciscoPadilla/sounds/22742&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20111016150352/http://www.freesound.org/people/FranciscoPadilla/sounds/22742&lt;/a&gt;), I saw that it used to be available under the CC Sampling+ license (special license for sampling, see description &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, researching so many samples is a bit of work, so if you care, you'll have to check everything yourself. If you do, you can share your report with the OpenMetronome project by uploading your it to SourceForge discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For you, however, the safer option would be to make your own samples or find CC0 or other alternatives and replace the files from these archives. Just e.g. for hand clap, clap yourself and record it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find any music files in the source code, so the only sound that can come from these sources is synthesizer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:28:48.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10666" CreationDate="2023-06-25T18:56:29.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's ok. Your license must be only GPL-compatible (it can be GPL, but it's not mandatory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT and MIT-0 (the license you use) are compatible (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if you distribute binaries where PyQt5 is provided with the package, you must distribute that whole program under the GNU GPL, but you can specify that the original source is under the MIT (or MIT-0) license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not legal advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T18:56:29.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13407" CreationDate="2023-06-25T19:11:24.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;GNU GPL v3 is best for your case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPL is often used for backend applications, databases, and other similar server-side software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qt is licensed mainly under the LGPL; some parts are under the GPL (you can check &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html#gpl-licensed-addons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with KDE licensing (I know they use LGPL, GPL, and other similar licenses), but it should be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-25T19:11:24.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-26T06:16:51.660" Score="7" ViewCount="1300" Body="&lt;p&gt;Situation: I use LGPL licensed software to create some digital assets that contain original designs.  I don't modify the original LGPL software in the process; I just use it.  The primary use of the assets is the creation of physical objects, via machining or 3D printing.  I apply a strong copyleft license, say the GPL, to my copyright-able work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If end users manufacture and sell such physical objects, do they have to provide the GPL &lt;em&gt;along with the physical objects&lt;/em&gt; they go on to create using my digital designs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this is different than the situation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12260/is-there-a-copyleft-license-that-applies-specifically-to-assets-created-using-my&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;, which refers to assets being created from a software &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt;.  This is analogous to how I used the LGPL software to create my designs. In the case of my assets, I created the &lt;em&gt;exact design&lt;/em&gt; that the end product is to be created from.  That post references the &amp;quot;output&amp;quot; section of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLOutput&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL&lt;/a&gt;, which is helpful to read, but I can't determine whether or not the physical objects are &amp;quot;output&amp;quot; in the sense described there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same situation &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10837/licensing-for-a-physical-product-developed-from-mit-code&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;: the output doesn't contain substantial portions of the source (code); however, in my case, it seems like the design itself is &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; substantial portion, whether it is digital or physical in any given manifestation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My goal is to prevent a corporation from taking the design and mass producing it, without copyleft kicking in, and preventing knowledge of how it was created, and how to create it, from being spread.  I'd like people to know that they can make this physical thing too, and be referred back to my repository, allowing them to build upon my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could I get copyleft to propagate to physical output from an identical digital design, or one based on the digital design, and if so, what are the licenses that can accomplish this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: added information that will not alter the context of the answers thus far:  This design is for making a physical tool that has no artistic expression in a sculptural sense. It is purely utilitarian.  It is a new implementation of a more crude version of an existing tool, and adds a new mode of operation and more precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29091" LastEditorUserId="29091" LastEditDate="2023-06-27T16:54:44.293" LastActivityDate="2023-06-27T16:54:44.293" Title="Do physical assets created directly from GPLed, copyleft digital designs (not programs or libraries) acquire the same license?" Tags="|licensing|commercial|derivative-works|copyleft|hardware|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14087" CreationDate="2023-06-26T13:58:08.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly, creating any replication of a copyrighted design in any medium is either a verbatim reproduction or a derivative work, and requires permission from the copyright holder(s) to do legally. Sculpture and architecture are two statutorily-recognized kinds of copyrightable work, and creating either from a copyrighted expression in written or drawn form requires copyright permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the GPL is the only license you've afforded to reproduce your copyrighted design, then those who distribute reproductions of it must abide by those terms. This means that any time someone transfers ownership of a copy of it (in any form, whether digital, pictorial, or sculptural), that distributor has an obligation to also give the recipient the GPL text, plus a copy of the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it (with your copyright notices intact). If they fail to offer this to recipients, they commit copyright infringement for unauthorized reproduction of your work. Note that this requirement does not apply to mere public display of a copy of the work, since the GPL's copyleft requirements only come into effect upon transfer of a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very importantly, note that copyright is limited to creative artistic expression and does not extend to mechanisms with practical use. U.S. law calls these designs and devices &amp;quot;useful articles&amp;quot; and explicitly denies the application of copyright to the useful aspects of physical devices. This means that your design, insofar as it contains artistic expression, is reproducible only under the terms of the GPL, but anyone may create and reproduce their own version of the practically useful aspects of your design without relying on your copyright license: you do not have a monopoly on those aspects under copyright. You could possibly monopolize useful aspects under a patent, which is difficult and expensive to obtain, and only possible if your mechanism is a sufficiently novel invention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-06-26T16:50:30.673" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T16:50:30.673" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2219" CreationDate="2023-06-26T19:23:11.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you own the copyright to a piece of work you don't need a license to use it, therefore the GPL license doesn't apply to you (the copyright owner), but it applies to others. If you make your work public, people could use it in private, but they wouldn't be allowed to distribute it, unless they got rid of the proprietary libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30422" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T19:23:11.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8395" CreationDate="2023-06-26T20:30:01.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes; the TAPR Open Hardware License, as far as I interpret it (please correct me if I'm wrong). &lt;a href=&quot;https://tapr.org/the-tapr-open-hardware-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://tapr.org/the-tapr-open-hardware-license/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you already mentioned some of them, below are quotes from the description of the license; they are not the actual license text.  I'm including them here as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may distribute modified documentation or products based on it, if you:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;License your modifications under the OHL.* Include those modifications, following the requirements stated below.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempt to send the modified documentation by email to any of the developers who have provided their email address. This is a good faith obligation — if the email fails, you need do nothing more and may go on with your distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any time the OHL requires you to make documentation available to others, you must include all the materials you received from the upstream licensors. In addition, if you have modified the documentation:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must identify the modifications in a text file (preferably named “CHANGES.TXT”) that you include with the documentation. That file must also include a statement like “These modifications are licensed under the TAPR Open Hardware License.”* You must include any new files you created, including any manufacturing files (such as Gerber files) you create in the course of making products.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must include both “before” and “after” versions of all files you modified.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29091" LastActivityDate="2023-06-26T20:30:01.457" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14087" CreationDate="2023-06-27T01:16:20.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use LGPL licensed software to create some digital assets that contain original designs. [...] The primary use of the assets is the creation of physical objects, via machining or 3D printing. I apply a strong copyleft license, say the GPL, to my copyright-able work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If end users manufacture and sell such physical objects, do they have to provide the GPL along with the physical objects they go on to create using my digital designs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If the design in question is a piece of artistic work, then it's almost always yes (but &amp;quot;artwork&amp;quot; is not to be confused with technical patterns for printing, which is also technically called &amp;quot;artwork&amp;quot;). But if the object is only designed for practical use, e.g. in machines, usually no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, if the physical object is designed for utilitarian purposes, in other words, for practical use (e.g. a machine or its component), and that the object contains absolutely no visible artistic work, it's often not copyrightable. This remains true regardless of its license status, proprietary or copylefted. There are exceptions that require a case-by-case analysis (integrated circuit design is a notable example) but for the most part, these objects are not covered by copyright laws, especially in the US. Other parts of the world have similar laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What does the FSF say&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an answer for GPL, but it applies equally to LGPL and proprietary designs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: Can I use the GPL to license hardware? (#GPLHardware)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any material that can be copyrighted can be licensed under the GPL. GPLv3 can also be used to license materials covered by other copyright-like laws, such as semiconductor masks. So, as an example, you can release a drawing of a physical object or circuit under the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many situations, copyright does not cover making physical hardware from a drawing. In these situations, your license for the drawing simply can't exert any control over making or selling physical hardware, regardless of the license you use. When copyright does cover making hardware, for instance with IC masks, the GPL handles that case in a useful way. [7]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What do I say&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Useful Art Doctrine&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, copyright laws in general covers expression of ideas, but not ideas and facts themselves, this is known as &lt;em&gt;idea-expression dichotomy&lt;/em&gt;. U.S. copyright law is 17.102(b) says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why we often say that &amp;quot;algorithms are not copyrightable but their implementations can be&amp;quot; in software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, unlike software that exists solely as abstract information and thus extensively covered by copyright laws, physical objects do not follow the same rules. Copyright laws often distinguish a design blueprint and a physical object manufactured from that blueprint. If a blueprint is copyrightable, it does not necessarily follows that the physical objects manufactured using the blueprint are copyrightable too. For example, under US copyright laws, the &lt;em&gt;Useful Articles&lt;/em&gt; doctrine [1][2] states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “useful article” is an object having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. Examples are clothing, furniture, machinery, dinnerware, and lighting fixtures. An article that is normally part of a useful article may itself be a useful article, for example, an ornamental wheel cover on a vehicle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object. Thus, a useful article may have both copyrightable and uncopyrightable features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an intentional decision to draw the boundary between copyright laws and patent laws. Copyright mostly covers artistic and creative works, while patents mostly cover practical inventions such as machinery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it's also worth noting that in addition to the utility patent that we're familiar with, one may apply a special &amp;quot;design patent&amp;quot; to an object's decorative features. However, you cannot game the &lt;em&gt;Useful Articles&lt;/em&gt; doctrine by hiding a piece of invisible artwork inside the object, or trying to patent functional aspects the object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that case, the court denied a request for a preliminary injunction by the &amp;quot;inventor&amp;quot; of a plastic container for an electric dimmer switch, finding that the container followed precisely the contours of the switch that it enclosed, and was, therefore, &amp;quot;primarily functional&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;primarily ornamental.&amp;quot; [...] Power Controls, 806 F.2d at 240. Design patents sometimes issue and are then invalidated (for want of ornamentality) on articles that are concealed in use. A vivid example is a septic tank. See C &amp;amp; M Fiberglass Septic Tanks, Inc. v. T &amp;amp; N Fiberglass Mfg. Co., 214 U.S.P.Q. (DNA) 159 (D. S.C. 1981). In such cases the patentee is probably trying to capture some functional attribute. [3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to utility patents, the Patent Act &amp;quot;provides limited monopolies on product designs that are new, original, and ornamental. Congress created the design patent to promote products possessing&#xA;&amp;quot;grace and pleasing appearance.&amp;quot; The integrated circuit design, however, is concealed during its use and therefore has no appearance,pleasing or otherwise.'More significantly, chips failed to meet design patent standards because their design is dictated solely by function and not by cosmetic values.&amp;quot; Thus, design patents were also inappropriate for semiconductor [6]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Implication in Open-Source Hardware Design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The practical implication is that, since copyright laws are not intended to stop someone else from making the same object, in open-source hardware design, licensing terms are much weaker than its use in software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardware in general is not copyrightable [5] (excluding firmware and its exterior decorative arts or industrial designs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the hardware contains original innovations, a utility patent may be applied. If it contains decorative arts or industrial designs, it's copyrighted, and one can also apply a design patent. But if it's just an implementation of a preexisting design, and without artistic decorative features, it cannot be copyrighted nor patented, and there's almost nothing to stop someone else from replicating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Case Study - Integrated Circuit Design&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting case study is the copyright status of circuit layout in integrated circuits. Before 1984, chip designs could not be effectively copyrighted [4]. Because copyright laws, in general, do not cover the physical chip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a result, it was legal to inspect a chip under a microscope and create your own with the same patterns, as long as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chip was legally obtained.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Original engineering drawings were not copied without permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The circuitry on the chip was not covered by patents (which could be difficult to obtain, since many chips do not invent original circuitry, it's only the same thing on silicon).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The silicon was not created as a work of art (merely etching artwork does not count, see the discussion of &amp;quot;concealed in use&amp;quot; above).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chip does not contain copyrightable software as code (microcode is a borderline case, whether it was software or hardware was heavily debated in many legal cases).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the semiconductor industry in the 1980s was highly active with many authorized second-source chips and unauthorized clones alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wide range of uses for semiconductors in both new products and redesigned existing products created a huge market for this new type of electronic components. United States manufacturers feared a concerted effort by foreign semiconductor firms, especially the Japanese, to take over the U.S. market. Thus, U.S. manufacturers began to seek protection for their chips in 1979,51 As a first step, industry members tried to obtain protection by fitting their chips into existing categories of intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legislative investigators then turned to the Copyright Act, because its subject matter coverage seemed expansive enough to cover chips. Among the subject matter covered by this statute were pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, which appeared to include drawings made of a chip's layout. Copyright law also offered a way around difficulties posed by changes in technology, because the Copyright Act explicitly addressed derivative works. This avenue failed, however, because the Copyright Act as applied has distinguished between technical drawings and the objects produced using them. Although a technical drawing itself can be protected, the Copyright Act does not protect the objects made using the drawing. Thus the Act did not address the semiconductor manufacturer's main concern: prohibiting others from copying its circuit layout and selling the results.&#xA;A second difficulty in using the Copyright Act to cover chips was the &amp;quot;useful article doctrine.&amp;quot;65 Under this doctrine, the Copyright Act does not give protection to utilitarian objects unless their useful functions can be separated physically or conceptually from their aesthetic aspects. For example, a belt buckle that appears as a free-form metal sculpture is conceptually separable from its useful function. A mask work, however, functions only as part of the manufacturing process and has no real aesthetic aspects, making it a purely useful article. The Copyright Office has consistently denied protection to useful articles, and has refused to accept chips as copies of masks under the Copyright Act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After determining that existing intellectual property statutes could not appropriately be applied to mask works, Congress decided that the correct answer to the problem lay in a new &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; form of protection. Although the new act was modeled after the Copyright Act, it created a new form of industrial intellectual property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the high cost and strategic importance of the semiconductors industry, the non-copyrightable status of integrated circuit received special government attention after extensive lobbying from the industry. Thus, a special form of copyright was created just for integrated circuit layouts, named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Chip_Protection_Act_of_1984&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984&lt;/a&gt;. It has a term of 10 years. In 1989 similar laws were included in international trade agreements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same argument on the non-copyrightable status of chips also applies to other kinds of practical physical objects, such as machine parts. In particular, the argument on the non-copyrightable status of integrated circuit design can be applied to circuit board design almost in verbatim. So whenever you see a copyright symbol on a circuit board, it's probably nonsense, at least without firmware or software).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.gov/register/va-useful.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://copyright.gov/register/va-useful.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Useful_articles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Useful_articles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72830007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72830007.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;https://dashboard.lira.bc.edu/downloads/b1dbfd30-74a6-4358-9e39-82ef81e8c60e&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dashboard.lira.bc.edu/downloads/b1dbfd30-74a6-4358-9e39-82ef81e8c60e&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20120114234704/http://wiki.openhardware.org/Hardware_Isn%27t_Generally_Copyrightable&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://web.archive.org/web/20120114234704/http://wiki.openhardware.org/Hardware_Isn%27t_Generally_Copyrightable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[6] Semiconductor Chip Protection: Changing Roles for Copyright and Competition, James Chesser, &lt;em&gt;Virginia Law Review&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Mar., 1985), pp. 249-295, doi: 10.2307/1073018&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[7] &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLHardware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLHardware&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30424" LastEditorUserId="30424" LastEditDate="2023-06-27T02:40:21.543" LastActivityDate="2023-06-27T02:40:21.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14075" CreationDate="2023-06-27T11:39:06.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer will give you many cases, sometimes complicated, but you will notice many options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First: you need to check license compatibility. The MIT license with Apache 2.0 is compatible with the MIT-&amp;gt;Apache site. That means you can take MIT-licensed code, change it, and release it under Apache 2.0, but not vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use code snippets in multiple places, I recommend changing your license from MIT to Apache. That will be the easiest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theoretically you could make a comment on the lines with Apache code &lt;code&gt;THIS CODE IS NOT UNDER A MIT LICENSE, IT IS ON APACHE 2.0 (C) *here goes entire Amazon (C) line*&lt;/code&gt; or something similar, but that makes it harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use code in one file, maybe in several, you can mark the project as MIT, but those files as Apache 2.0. It's also bothersome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I recommend using the Apache license, or if you care about the MIT license, add a mention that any of your code that is not derived from the Apache licensed code is available under the MIT license (remember to include the MIT license file then), but it is It does not make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better option might be to add an MIT (full) license to files that are only yours and then add the ID &lt;code&gt;SPDX: Apache-2.0 OR MIT&lt;/code&gt; as well. Then, possibly, other people will be able to choose a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite these options, I still believe: change the license to Apache.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing is the summary of the changes. In fact, you can add a note about each edit and de jure I guess it's correct, but Git does it for you :)&#xA;You can also make a &lt;code&gt;CHANGELOG&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-27T11:39:06.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-28T22:29:28.583" Score="8" ViewCount="1935" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what is (not) a &amp;quot;machine&amp;quot; in GPL's &amp;quot;machine-readable source code&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL requires you to share (a) the preferred-form-of-the-work-for-making-changes-in-it,  yet at the same time (b) it &amp;quot;does not include general purpose tool&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In cases where the two laws conflict, which takes precedence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a simple example, if you develop code (nontext-based) using a code studio, do you have to share-alike release the  studio? (btw it might use functions that normal hardware don't have)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is an explanation of the file format all that is needed? (the same working idea as Google Takeout making their exports in practice  as unimportable as possible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another simple example: what happens to GPLed code (text-based) written in a custom language? Do you need to share-alike release the language definition? Including the compiler definition? Including a working copy (however unextendable in practice) of a compiler that can digest the code within reasonable time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6368" LastEditorUserId="6368" LastEditDate="2023-06-28T23:03:27.833" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T17:00:47.967" Title="What's the meaning (qualifications) of &quot;machine&quot; in GPL's &quot;machine-readable source code&quot;?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|agpl-3.0|patents|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14095" CreationDate="2023-06-29T06:58:08.970" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is not based on the actual license text of the GPL, but on my interpretation of the intent of the GPL and how that could/should work out in practice. In that way, it is a subjective answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL does not require that the infrastructure around a GPL-licensed program is available for free or gratis. The GPL is rooted in copyright law and within the restrictions of that law the GPL tries to ensure freedom for as much software as it can, but there are limitations on how far it can reach. Tooling to develop applications is outside the reach of the (GPL-licensed) application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides that, the GPL tries to regulate software freedom, but it does not actively regulate monetary compensation, except for one small aspect -- you can't charge an additional fee to provide the source code. It is completely allowable for the GPL license to charge a monetary fee for giving your software to someone else. The main reason why it doesn't happen is economic: You can't prevent your customers to provide that same software for a lower fee or no fee at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given all that, I believe that the fact that there is no gratis editor for a (graphical) language or no gratis implementation for a language is not an obstacle to releasing your software under the GPL license. It presents a technical obstacle to re-using and contributing to your software, but I don't believe this would violate the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if there is no editor or compiler available to the general public at all, not gratis nor paid, then I don't think there is a legal objection to using the GPL, but I would have moral objections and I would seriously question why you want to release that software as open-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T06:58:08.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-06-29T09:06:05.247" Score="-1" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am very new to web dev and trying to use the Sakai react template, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/primefaces/sakai-react&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/primefaces/sakai-react&lt;/a&gt;, as a starter to my startup project. Am I allowed to use it as much as I want for commercial use? Also, if I won't be publishing my code anywhere, how do I cite the Sakai MIT license? Or if I only want some component in it, is it wrong to copy and paste the code into my project? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30442" LastEditorUserId="30442" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T09:21:05.563" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T17:33:50.683" Title="How to use Sakai free template" Tags="|licensing|website|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-06-29T20:18:56.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14097" CreationDate="2023-06-29T12:21:25.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The MIT license allows you to do many things with the software. Examples listed are:&#xA;&amp;quot;use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&amp;quot; along with the right to allow others to do the same or less if you are doing a commercial project and creating a proprietary license.&#xA;The MIT license only requires you to copy this license and the (C) line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do this in a couple of ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;by uploading the &lt;code&gt;NOTICES&lt;/code&gt; file with full license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By putting the license text and copyright notice in the files you use and copy from the repository&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you also share your project under the MIT license, just copy the copyright notice and add it as described &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13412/how-to-put-copyright-notice-if-i-use-several-other-code-bases-mit/13536#13536&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not check the entire repository, but the repository has an MIT license and if there is no other license described in a file, then the file is legally subject to the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use the code under the MIT license, commercial, non-commercial, private, public for any purpose provided you include attribution.&#xA;Theoretically, you're fine if you don't include a mention in your private project, but remember that this is a license that you have to respect, so it's better to put this &lt;code&gt;NOTICES&lt;/code&gt; file in the project directory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: You are &lt;strong&gt;NOT&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to omit attribution. It is not legal, but no one knows that you omit attribution if your project is private. De facto, many people omit attribution before they test whether code works for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T17:33:50.683" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T17:33:50.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10746" CreationDate="2023-06-29T12:33:37.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your use of the library. LGPL was planned mainly for libraries compiled to machine code. LGPL requires you to publish the full code of a library (library is usually in another file like .dll, .so), but not your software. It is required to publish your software under LGPL or GPL only if you copy parts of the library into your code base. The LGPL &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; require that it is allowed and possible for an end-user (assuming they have enough technical knowledge) to rebuild the application with a different, binary compatible, version of the LGPL library. If you don't use the dynamic linking facilities of your OS, you may have to distribute source and/or object files corresponding to your code to facilitate that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But LGPL allows you to share your software as SaaS, because you don't distribute it (AGPL &amp;quot;repairs&amp;quot; this &amp;quot;legal loophole&amp;quot;). So, if your software is SaaS, you are probably safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software is distributed to users, and you only use library APIs from code, but require users to have libraries already installed, you are probably safe too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify a library and still link it dynamically, you must publish the library source code under the LGPL or GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use parts of library code in your software, you must distribute your software under the LGPL or GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the question is old, and you probably found the solution, but maybe this answer will help other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-06-29T13:00:52.863" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T13:00:52.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13260" CreationDate="2023-06-29T12:45:44.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only problem is that you want to use geckodriver.exe and distribute everything under the GPL. Users who want to use your project do not get the geckodriver.exe code, and therefore cannot fulfill the GPL's obligation to provide the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would do it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Created a separate repository with the geckodriver.exe source code and the compiled version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provided a script downloading the exe from the repository using git submodules or something else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use the GPL for everything else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see other ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If geckodriver.exe runs as a program by itself, you can consider it an &amp;quot;aggregation&amp;quot;, i.e. two programs are independent of each other, one can call the other, but they are independent of each other. Then you are subject to the MPL license for geckodriver and you have to release everything that requires the MPL separately.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Combine the code bases so that when you compile your program, the file geckodriver.exe will also be created.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Require user to download geckodriver on their own. Or you can make a special folder in your repository with a copy of the entire geckodriver repository of the version you want to use + the binary version&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The MPL allows you to link two programs to the GPL, but unless you modify geckodriver significantly, don't do it.&#xA;If you decide to use the geckodriver code base directly, remember the weak MPL copyleft and apply it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a bit complicated, but if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T12:45:44.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14095" CreationDate="2023-06-29T13:35:32.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;not an expert, but as an example '&lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-machine readable' could be scanned images of source printout, rather than text files to give to a compiler or interpreter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30446" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T13:35:32.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14095" CreationDate="2023-06-29T16:22:08.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license creates an obligation to supply content in digital form. It doesn't constrain in any way what that content is, what tools or equipment might be needed to take advantage of it, whether it is fit for any purpose, or whether it is even decipherable. You can release code under the GPL even though it's no use to anyone without access to a billion-dollar supercomputer. You can release code that will only run on vintage hardware that no longer exists. You can release your transcription of an ancient text that no-one knows how to decipher. It's entirely up to you what you use it for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Having said, that, I would always use a different open-source license in preference to GPL, because I simply don't buy into the GPL religion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3774" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T16:22:08.070" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14095" CreationDate="2023-06-29T17:00:47.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;machine-readable&amp;quot; contrasts with &amp;quot;human-readable&amp;quot;, and the distinction is mostly that the data is &amp;quot;machine-readable&amp;quot; if it is digital, or easilize digitizable, structured data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, an document in ASCII or UTF-8 in digital form would be considered machine-readable, while a printout of the source code on paper would not be, as that is not easily readable for a machine (even though OCR has seen vast improvements in the last ten or so years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, a screenshot of the source code will also not be considered &amp;quot;machine-readable&amp;quot;, because it is not &lt;em&gt;structured&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;information&lt;/em&gt; contained therein is not easily accessible for a machine, even though it is digital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some references, look at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatahandbook.org/glossary/en/terms/machine-readable/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opendatahandbook.org/glossary/en/terms/machine-readable/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatahandbook.org/glossary/en/terms/human-readable/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opendatahandbook.org/glossary/en/terms/human-readable/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_medium_and_data#Data&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_medium_and_data#Data&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there is a barrier between the editor used to write some piece of software and that piece of software. You can either develop free (GPL-licensed) software in a proprietary editor, but you can also develop proprietary software using a free editor such as Emacs. See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop nonfree programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them? (#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert her own data, the copyright on the output belongs to her, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it does not matter if the editor/programs used to compile/interpret/run or otherwise use the GPL-covered code is itself non-free, that is not a problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9413" LastActivityDate="2023-06-29T17:00:47.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-01T18:23:22.060" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is inspired by the ongoing discussion about Red Hat restricting access to source code repositories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know that you cannot restrict your customer's GPL rights by additional clauses or a separate contract. The question is whether it is legal to say: &amp;quot;If you ever use your GPL rights to publish the source code, we will terminate our contract with you and never offer you any services again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an open question to be determined by future court decisions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9029" LastActivityDate="2023-07-01T18:23:22.060" Title="GPL - retaliation instead of restriction?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-07-01T21:13:37.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14108" CreationDate="2023-07-03T16:26:23.197" Score="4" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to write a book that contains code examples and snippets but also entire algorithms from an Apache-2.0 licensed source, what do I have to do to comply with the licensing terms? Apache 2.0 states that the license text must be distributed along the work independent of the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot remember seeing a software development book that contained a full license text anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30472" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T11:41:27.933" Title="Writing a book that contains Apache-2.0 licensed code snippets" Tags="|apache-2.0|books|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-03T23:40:00.350" Score="5" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to license my creative works that are not code (including the project's documentation) under a license that is like the MIT license, but does apply to non-code. The CC BY is too big to fit anywhere (if modified) and has extra clauses about termination and DRM and other stuff I'm not comfortable with, while the CC0 obviously doesn't cover attribution and is also long if I were to modify and include it anywhere. Crude modification of the MIT license to show what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy&#xA;of this creative work (the &amp;quot;Work&amp;quot;), to deal in the Work without restriction,&#xA;including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, publish,&#xA;distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Work, and to permit persons&#xA;to whom the Work is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next&#xA;paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE WORK IS PROVIDED &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot;, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR&#xA;IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,&#xA;FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL&#xA;THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER&#xA;LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING&#xA;FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE WORK OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS&#xA;IN THE WORK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I DO NOT intend to use this! What I mean is I'm looking for a well-established license that's basically equivalent to this, and the CC0 happens to be too permissive, while the CC-BY happens to be too restrictive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30479" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-28T12:22:41.783" LastActivityDate="2023-07-30T02:36:20.187" Title="Simple free culture attribution license?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14106" CreationDate="2023-07-04T11:13:16.707" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't do this. I'm glad you want to make your creations available as free culture, but creating your own licenses is not good in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can create your own license, no one will forbid you to do so.&#xA;But ask yourself some questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I familiar enough with copyright law to write a license text that will work for my works and those of others?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If my license has errors, will I accept the loss of e.g. attribution?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do I want all my works to be available under a license that no one knows and will have to make an effort to read it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there justifications for another license and a contribution to license proliferation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If all answers are yes: Create your own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that CC-BY requires a license URL OR the text , so you can just write &amp;quot;This work (here the title if any) by (here your name) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. License: creativecommons.org/licenses/by /4.0&amp;quot;. It's so simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the license you provided: you still use the word Software in one place. In addition, the original MIT license when applied to creative works should also work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T11:13:16.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14105" CreationDate="2023-07-04T11:17:31.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The license language says that you must provide the license with the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are different ways how you can do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide the license language on your website if the book is&#xA;downloadable from that website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;provide the license language in an appendix to your book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that in case 1 you should include in your book a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#Apply-My-Software&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statement like this&lt;/a&gt; as recommended by ASF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please also don't forget to provide proper attribution to the authors of the code you are using in your book (usually you can find that in the notice file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T11:17:31.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14105" CreationDate="2023-07-04T11:19:25.410" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to include the full license text and meet other Apache license requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these are short pieces of code and only implementations of algorithms, check if they are not in the public domain, because they are not creative code but the implementation of simple algorithms. But it may depend on the jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option is to write to the creator and ask about custom license with only attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you want to be 100% compliant with the Apache 2.0 License, you need to provide the full text of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2023-07-04T11:41:27.933" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T11:41:27.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14112" CreationDate="2023-07-04T14:03:52.300" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a commercial Java product that is distributed as a .war file.&#xA;I want to add the source code of a class I found in a book to our code base. The book gives no license information for the included code (and also not in the companion Github repository).&#xA;I've been in touch with the author of the book and he wrote me that I can use the code however I like as long as I retain his copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now adding a copyright note as a comment to the class' source code is straightforward, but seems not enough for a product that will be shipped in binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read that adding a line to our own license file that goes with the .war file, saying &amp;quot;Part of this product includes code from  ...&amp;quot; would be enough, and it is not necessary to precisely specify what code is used where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this correct? Can anybody tell me the correct way to make such a copyright reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30487" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-05T06:06:01.967" LastActivityDate="2023-07-05T12:18:19.300" Title="Proper way to include Copyright information relating to a single Class file" Tags="|copyright|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8200" CreationDate="2023-07-04T23:42:18.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not to necro this question, but I've been reading about the concerns recently about pyinstaller packaging in LGPL libs.  I think I have a handle on the requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the LGPL requirement for distribution requires you to either provide source for those LGPL components with the program, or provide it on request by your customers.  In reality, since these are just off-the-shelf libs there's really no reason not to just have a link on your web site where whoever can download the source.  It has to be possible to build a lib from that source, and replace the one in the program with the patched library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, that's it.  cx_freeze seems to easily meet this requirement, your libs are in lib and the customer is free to replace those libs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concern with pyinstaller that's come up, you can use &amp;quot;--onefile&amp;quot; option and you have one single executable.  Neat!  But the LGPL libs are in there too with no documented way to replace them.   Without &amp;quot;--onefile&amp;quot;, all the stuff that goes in lib with cx_freeze goes in the top level directory with your executable in pyinstaller.  It's hideous, thus the temptation to use &amp;quot;--onefile&amp;quot; with it.  Due to this I've switched my build over to cx_freeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30490" LastEditorUserId="30490" LastEditDate="2023-07-04T23:46:56.970" LastActivityDate="2023-07-04T23:46:56.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14110" CreationDate="2023-07-05T12:18:19.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is usually a copyright notice at the beginning of the book. Check it out and you can write it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the code contained in this software is from the book [title]&#xA;by [author]. [all copyright notices here].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can use your &amp;quot;Part of this product includes code from&amp;quot; text too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Make sure that the author of the book can give you such permission. Sometimes the copyrights are transferred to the publisher instead of staying with the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-07-05T12:18:19.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-06T01:20:06.450" Score="2" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are trying to use a &lt;code&gt;HuggingFace Embedding model&lt;/code&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/multi-qa-mpnet-base-cos-v1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multi-qa-mpnet-base-cos-v1&lt;/a&gt; for an internal Large Language Model powered application. While reading the documentation it says (not verbatim):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the multi-qa mpnet model, of the training datasets used, some of them are not for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/allenai/gooaq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GOOAQ&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/soumikrakshit/yahoo-answers-dataset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo! answers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For GOOAQ, it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This dataset should not be used for any commercial purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one of the Yahoo datasets used for multi-qa-mpnet-base-cos-v1, in the &lt;strong&gt;readme.txt&lt;/strong&gt; file, it states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Yahoo! Answers corpus can be obtained through the Yahoo! Research Alliance Webscope program. The dataset is to be used for approved non-commercial research purposes by recipients who have signed a Data Sharing Agreement with Yahoo!.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;multi-qa-mpnet-base-cos-v1&lt;/em&gt; was also trained on &lt;strong&gt;MS MARCO&lt;/strong&gt; which also has the same licence issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this automatically mean that the model itself is &amp;quot;tainted&amp;quot; and therefore we cannot use it for embeddings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30495" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-06T05:47:17.533" LastActivityDate="2023-07-06T05:47:17.533" Title="Commercial usage of sentence-transformers/multi-qa-mpnet-base-cos-v1" Tags="|licensing|commercial|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14115" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-06T09:20:07.473" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a Github project licensed under Apache 2.0 that I would like to use in another project. This project contains libraries that seems to be proprietary and that the owner of the project might have bought to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the rights that I have on this project ?&#xA;Can I use the proprietary libraries and the code in my own project ?   Can I modify this project and use it ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand clearly what are my rights for proprietary libraries in an Apache 2.0 open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30498" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-06T09:51:45.653" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T19:00:50.107" Title="Are proprietary licenses in an Apache 2.0 usable" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14115" CreationDate="2023-07-06T09:50:54.603" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't link to the project, so I'm assuming that it's clear which file(s) are covered by the Apache licence grant, and which are proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache isn't a copyleft licence, so there are no grounds for suspecting that the author of the Apache-licensed portion intended to distribute these other files under any free licence at all, nor that (s)he sought the rights to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use the Apache-licensed content as you would use any other freely-licensed content; you may reuse some or all of it in your own project, provided you honour the terms of the licence.  But the non-Apache-licensed content you may make no use of at all; I would advise against even reading it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: you have now provided a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Ladder99/fanuc-driver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to the repo in question, which says that everything therein is under Apache2.  Because you've come across these DLLs before, you are disinclined to believe that.  I don't think you have any choice at this point but to ask the owner of the repo for clarification.  Either (s)he will confirm that they have those DLLs on terms that allow redistribution under Apache2, or they'll confess that they don't, and hopefully fix their licensing statement; but I don't think anyone else can resolve this one for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-06T19:00:01.273" LastActivityDate="2023-07-06T19:00:01.273" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14118" CreationDate="2023-07-06T13:43:49.813" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I had a stock photo site that contained a mix of free Creative Commons licensed photos and commercial stock photos (where I make a commission), would I be allowed to include photos licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know BY-NC-ND prohibits commercial use or derivative works, but I'm not clear on what the &amp;quot;boundary&amp;quot; is. If I'm not making money directly off the BY-NC-ND photos, but they are part of a larger web site which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; make money, is that considered commercial use? Or if I show a list of related photos under a BY-NC-ND photo, is that web page a derivative work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30500" LastActivityDate="2023-07-06T14:58:00.707" Title="Can I host CC BY-NC-ND photos along side commercial stock photos?" Tags="|creative-commons|non-commercial|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14117" CreationDate="2023-07-06T14:58:00.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is &amp;quot;no-one is clear where the boundary is&amp;quot;, particularly for the non-commercial bit; what is a derivative work is a bit better defined because there are extensive judgements on that matter - most jurisdictions allow some form of aggregation without it being a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-07-06T14:58:00.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-07T18:02:07.733" Score="4" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JakubMelka/PDF4QT/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF4QT&lt;/a&gt; is released under LGPL3+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you open a PR, the maintainer asks you to sign a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JakubMelka/PDF4QT/blob/master/CLA/Contribution_Licence_Agreement.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CLA&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this necessary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My code must be released under LGPL3+ as well, otherwise I'll fail to fulfill the license obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, by the fact that my own code is under LGPL3+, by the terms of this license, he can use in his own software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to ask also for birth date and address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21452" LastActivityDate="2023-07-08T01:28:58.087" Title="Is a CLA necessary?" Tags="|licensing|contributor|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14119" CreationDate="2023-07-07T19:09:56.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A CLA is indeed not necessary for PDF4QT to use your contribution under the terms of the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main purposes of this CLA are twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to potentially use the contribution under terms other than the LGPL in the future (see terms 2.3 - 2.5 for the perpetual, broad license you grant to the project, allowing them to relicense in the future)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;to reduce liability for unlawful contributions or contributions encumbered in a way that can't satisfy the first purpose of the CLA (i.e., term 3.1(b) is an assertion that you have &amp;quot;unlimited econommic rights&amp;quot; to your contribution). This deflects liability for contributions that infringe some third party's copyright, or are offered under a license that isn't compatible with the LGPL (or any other license the project might employ in the future).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm no lawyer but:) Especially in order to make second function of this CLA operate, I expect it can't effectively deflect liability for infringing contributions without a specific, well-known person to deflect that liability onto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-07-08T01:28:58.087" LastActivityDate="2023-07-08T01:28:58.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14126" CreationDate="2023-07-10T06:28:32.227" Score="5" ViewCount="457" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to decide on a license for some code I'm going to be open-sourcing shortly, and having a hard time choosing among the major licenses (as less common licenses are things people are not as used to). It comes down to a difference between my ideals in OSS and the two major schools of OSS thought - permissive licenses and the free software movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, my ideals are that of maximum benefit to those who might use my code (as well as attribution, but that's required by most licenses). This means being permissive with people's use of my code (I don't care what you combine it with or whether your program is open/closed, free/commercial) but copyleft with my code itself and any improvements made to my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on my understanding, GPL is out, as it is far too restrictive with how the code can be used. Permissive licenses are also out as they don't require improvements to my code to be released in a similar license that would ensure people could benefit from those improvements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My ideals are very similar to the LGPL, but there's one major sticking point: the requirement that users of the derivative work be able to modify my stuff in place. While this works well enough for dynamically linked libraries where there's a strong linking boundary, not only are some of the functions I intend to open-source not dynamically linked but they can be so interwoven into code they're linked to that it would be difficult even for me the author to upgrade somebody else's program to use a newer version of my code without having their full source code. This is because the case in question is for retro game code, where allocating large contiguous blocks of RAM and ROM to a statically linked library is a luxury you don't always have; often you fit the functions and variables anywhere you've got holes you can stick them, and my build (e.g. in my demo) may have a completely different RAM/ROM layout than another person's who uses my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just heard about the concept of GPL with linking exceptions. Are there any well-known such exceptions that could help me with this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: By &amp;quot;GPL with linking exceptions&amp;quot; I don't mean to exclude LGPL with linking exceptions as a possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30520" LastEditorUserId="30520" LastEditDate="2023-07-10T07:40:54.373" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T03:56:16.613" Title="GPL and Linking Exceptions" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|copyleft|linking|permissive|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14122" CreationDate="2023-07-10T07:15:10.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPL, at least v3, is simply the GPL with some exceptions.  So if you're thinking that the LGPL is very nearly what you need, why look to GPL+exceptions?  Surely, LGPL+exception is the way to go?  Perhaps an exception that says something like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;You may convey a covered work under this License without being bound by subsection 4(d) of the GNU LGPL version 3&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This language is copied pretty much directly from LGPLv3 s1, so will be reasonably familiar to those familiar with the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-10T13:37:05.237" LastActivityDate="2023-07-10T13:37:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-10T12:46:10.487" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using two libraries under Apache 2.0 license &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apache/opennlp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opennlp&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/chimbori/crux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crux&lt;/a&gt;. The source code of my Android opensource app will be on Github. And the app will be released on Google Play Store. What are all my obligations to these two libraries? (What to include in my source code on Github and in my app on Play Store). What is obligatory and what is optional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm using in my project &lt;a href=&quot;https://jsoup.org/license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jsoup&lt;/a&gt; as well, two times. Once on its own and another time via crux which uses Jsoup as well. Jsoup has MIT license. Is it sufficient for my project to have Apache 2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My app will be free and open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20416" LastEditorUserId="20416" LastEditDate="2023-07-10T15:40:51.753" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T16:43:08.553" Title="Obligations implied by the Apache 2.0 License for an open source project" Tags="|licensing|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14122" CreationDate="2023-07-10T15:42:43.353" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your position I would steer clear of anything related to GPL. Firstly, because some users are scared stiff of its consequences and avoid it like the plague. Secondly, because the GPL starts with a preamble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed&#xA;to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast,&#xA;the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom&#xA;to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains&#xA;free software for all its users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that represents a philosphical and ethical position that you clearly don't agree with, and although it's only a preamble and has no legal effect, it sets completely the wrong tone for the relationship you want to have with your users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3774" LastActivityDate="2023-07-10T15:42:43.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14122" CreationDate="2023-07-10T16:01:58.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0-linking-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-3.0-linking-exception&lt;/a&gt;, which I quote below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception to the GNU Lesser General Public License&#xA;version 3 (&amp;quot;LGPL3&amp;quot;), the copyright holders of this Library give you&#xA;permission to convey to a third party a Combined Work that links&#xA;statically or dynamically to this Library &lt;strong&gt;without providing any&#xA;Minimal Corresponding Source or Minimal Application Code as set out in&#xA;4d or providing the installation information set out in section 4e&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;provided that you comply with the other provisions of LGPL3 and&#xA;provided that you meet, for the Application the terms and conditions&#xA;of the license(s) which apply to the Application. ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other option is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL2)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a file-level weak copyleft license. Copyleft applies only to individual files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there's no concern about the linking method and other language-specific concerns like C++ header-only template libraries. As long as proprietary source code and MPL2-licensed source code are kept in separate individual files, it's good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MPL2 also doesn't have the Tivoization clause and other such restrictions that are a part of LGPLv3 and GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MPL2 is also compatible with LGPLv2.1+, GPLv2+ and AGPLv3+.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-07-11T03:56:16.613" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T03:56:16.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10980" CreationDate="2023-07-11T03:47:10.483" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not ok for LGPLv2.1, but it's ok for LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terms under Section 5 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt;, will cause applications using LGPLv2.1-licensed C++ template header libraries to themselves be licensed under LGPLv2.1, if those template functions are more than ten lines of code each. This effectively turns it into a strong copyleft license, pretty much like GPLv2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If such an object file uses only numerical parameters, data structure&#xA;layouts and accessors, and small macros and small inline functions&#xA;(ten lines or less in length), then the use of the object file is&#xA;unrestricted, regardless of whether it is legally a derivative work.&#xA;(Executables containing this object code plus portions of the Library&#xA;will still fall under Section 6.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, if the work is a derivative of the Library, you may&#xA;distribute the object code for the work under the terms of Section 6.&#xA;Any executables containing that work also fall under Section 6,&#xA;whether or not they are linked directly with the Library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv3&lt;/a&gt; fixed this problem by introducing Section 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Object Code Incorporating Material from Library Header Files.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The object code form of an Application may incorporate material from a&#xA;header file that is part of the Library. You may convey such object&#xA;code under terms of your choice, provided that, if the incorporated&#xA;material is not limited to numerical parameters, data structure&#xA;layouts and accessors, or small macros, inline functions and templates&#xA;(ten or fewer lines in length), you do both of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the object code that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered&#xA;by this License.&#xA;b) Accompany the object code with a copy of the GNU GPL and this license document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, please note that Section 3 of LGPLv3 does not free the application author from the obligations of Sections 4d and 4e, which requires the application author to provide a way for the recipient of the combined software to modify the LGPLv3-licensed library, relink it with the application and install it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a LGPLv3-licensed C++ template-only header library, this makes it really hard for the application author, as he would have to make the minimum application source code, that uses the library, available to the recipient of the combined software, so that the recipient may recompile and relink the application with his modified version of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, please note that application source code, and not object code, is required to recompile and link application software to its template source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may cause proprietary application authors to avoid using LGPL-licensed C++ template header libraries, as they may not wish to expose any source code of their proprietary application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/faq.html#faq.license.lgpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libstd++ FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL requires that users be able to replace the LGPL code with a&#xA;modified version; this is trivial if the library in question is a C&#xA;shared library. But there's no way to make that work with C++, where&#xA;much of the library consists of inline functions and templates, which&#xA;are expanded inside the code that uses the library. So to allow people&#xA;to replace the library code, someone using the library would have to&#xA;distribute their own source, rendering the LGPL equivalent to the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue can be circumvented by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-3.0-linking-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL-3.0-linking-exception&lt;/a&gt;. Please see &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14126/26317&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another alternative, is to use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL2)&lt;/a&gt; license, instead of LGPLv3, as the better alternative for C++ template header libraries. It's also compatible with LGPLv2.1 and GPLv2. This too is explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14126/26317&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, libstd++ solved this by using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC Runtime Library Exception&lt;/a&gt;, as linking exception to GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-07-12T10:42:30.250" LastActivityDate="2023-07-12T10:42:30.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-11T12:31:56.477" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I own a project called Luminol currently licensed under GPlv3 I'd like to distribute on Steam. If possible, I'd like to keep Luminol as GPLv3, mainly to ensure modifications of Luminol are public. I've benefitted from that clause personally before so I have very strong feelings about getting rid it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to have the source code public- free for anyone to compile, Aseprite style- and lock the Steam integration behind a feature flag, so the project isn't useless and can be compiled as DRM free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To do this though, I'd need to link against a proprietary library (steamworks), and GPL doesn't allow that, for reasons I understand and generally agree with. That's the main reason why I want to put it behind a feature gate- it doesn't make the source code entirely useless on its own and sort of keeps in the spirit of GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done a bit of searching around, and nothing seems to fit exactly what I'm doing- a lot of it is about linking proprietary code against GPL code, not the other way around. The few cases I have found were doused in a lot of legalese I have trouble understanding, and generally are about forks of gpl code, I think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can I do about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30536" LastActivityDate="2023-07-11T12:31:56.477" Title="Publishing GPLv3 code on Steam" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14131" CreationDate="2023-07-11T14:48:38.747" Score="4" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on an open-source project that is governed by the Apache License 2.0, and I want to make use of Java source code from OpenJDK 11, which is governed by the GPL 2 license with classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page on the Apache site says that AL 2 is not compatible with GPL 1 and GPL 2, it does not say anything about GPL 2 with classpath exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is really an extension of this great &lt;a href=&quot;https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/119436/what-does-gpl-with-classpath-exception-mean-in-practice&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;. Can source code under GPL 2 with classpath exception be used within a project that is under Apache License 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30554" OwnerDisplayName="Varad G" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-07-14T07:28:25.750" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T07:28:25.750" Title="Apache License 2.0 compatibility with source code licensed under GPL 2 with classpath exception" Tags="|licensing|gpl|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-13T06:55:20.457" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I correct in thinking that, if I am the original and sole author (and the code was not produced as a work for hire) of code contributed to an open-source project with a given license, I retain the rights to use that code however I please (including in violation of that license) and contribute it to projects with other, perhaps incompatible licenses (which presumably would result in the code being multi-licensed)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30520" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T07:51:22.213" Title="Do authors retain full rights to use code they contributed to an open-source project?" Tags="|license|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14129" CreationDate="2023-07-13T10:04:12.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can source code under GPL 2 with classpath exception be used within a project that is under Apache License 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way that code under the Apache 2 license and code under the GPLv2+Classpath can coexist in one application is when the GPLv2+Classpath code lives in a separate module that gets loaded via Java's Classpath mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all other situations, the Classpath Exception does not kick in and the analysis for why the Apache and GPLv2 licenses are incompatible applies. And the result of incompatible licenses is that you can't use the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-07-13T10:04:12.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14130" CreationDate="2023-07-14T07:51:22.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole rightsholder in the code you are contributing, &lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt; you do not also complete a Copyright Licensing Agreement (CLA) or a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA), then the position is as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2078/458&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;: you retain the rights to your contribution, and may still do with it as you wish.  There are potential complexities if you later try to do something that is sufficiently similar to the project to which you contributed, and that contribution was made under a copyleft licence, because you presumably will have studied that larger project carefully in order to made your contribution.  Thus, any future reimplementation you do might reasonably be suspected to be a derivative work of that larger project, and (if it were) thus also subject to those copyleft rules.  This may affect the choice of licence for that future project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, however, you've made your contribution and completed a CTA, then you are no longer the rightsholder, and have no more rights to your contribution than any other member of the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've made your contribution under a CLA, the position will depend on what, exactly, the CLA commits you to with respect to reuse of the code.  Were this the case, we could not comment further without seeing the CLA in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T07:51:22.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14142" CreationDate="2023-07-14T15:22:46.217" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a native application I would like to release under a copyleft license. The application embeds a Lua interpreter and exposes an application-specific interface to Lua code. I would like to release the application under a copyleft license and the Lua code under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the GNU FAQ I can't use the GPL as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;native application and Lua code have intimate communication and therefore constitute a single combined work&lt;/a&gt;. The LGPL might work as it defines a separation between the GPL and proprietary component.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is the terminology defined in &amp;quot;0. Additional Definitions&amp;quot; of the LGPLv3 literal or abstract? i.e. Given the definitions of &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; can I assign them to the components based on their role? Or are the terms literal i.e. &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; literally means executable program and &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; literally means linkable library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30557" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-19T19:13:56.620" LastActivityDate="2023-07-20T09:17:29.297" Title="How do I make a partially-free open-core product that permits custom plugins?" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|terminology|plugins|combined-work|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14124" CreationDate="2023-07-14T16:43:08.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standard Apache 2.0 license requirements apply.&#xA;You can read them in many places, but it boils down to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;do not claim authorship&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;show authorship and license text in source code and binary files&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;indicate changes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A detailed description can be found on many sites like &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/apache-2.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choosealicense.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what I suggest you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include in the &amp;quot;About the Application&amp;quot; section (if any) the &amp;quot;Open Source Licenses&amp;quot; section. You can see how this will look on your Android phone in the settings and about the phone in the &amp;quot;Legal information&amp;quot; section. This may vary on different phones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google also describes what to do.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://developers.google.com/android/guides/opensource&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://developers.google.com/android/guides/opensource&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-07-14T16:43:08.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-16T05:00:16.097" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nvidia releases some of its research works like Instant NGP with the source code. I was reading a paper and its license, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/NVlabs/CALM/blob/main/License.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Nvidia License&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and wondering if reimplementing the paper, for example in another reinforcement learning environment, would enable me to use it for a commercial work or relicense it and release the reimplmentation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will read the paper and also the source code. If I were to write the reimplementation from scratch, would that suffice as a non-derivative work? And what exactly does &amp;quot;separable&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;derivative works shall not include works that remain separable&#xA;from, or merely link (or bind by name) to the interfaces of,&#xA;the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30570" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-16T07:10:23.250" LastActivityDate="2023-07-16T07:10:23.250" Title="Are reimplementations of works with a non-commercial license usable commercially?" Tags="|license|derivative-works|non-commercial|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-07-16T14:08:19.423" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5162" CreationDate="2023-07-17T05:35:18.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Using natively compiled applications in Linux and Windows as example, two program executables sitting on the same storage medium and interacting with each other only through inter-process communication methods like TCP/ UDP or Unix domain sockets or pipes, or protocols on top of these, like DBUS or DDS or MQTT, can be, for most cases, considered to be aggregates. Aggregates are not combined work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, any form of dynamic (SO, DLL) or static linking  of an application to an independent library (which is not a standalone executable), where the application programmatically depends on the library but the library does not depend on the application, can be considered the case of combined work where the application is linked to a library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3's copyleft licensing conditions apply to the case of combined work above (with the special exception of system libraries), but it does not apply to the case of aggregates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile LGPLv3's copyleft licensing conditions applies only to the library and all its linked dependencies, but it does not apply to applications that use that library. It also does not apply to aggregates. However, it does have conditions towards the combined work, i.e. the recipient of the software must be able to modify the LGPLv3-licensed library and relink it to the application and install it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-07-17T05:35:18.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14141" CreationDate="2023-07-19T03:31:43.570" Score="4" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my dilemna:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I own proprietary software that generates HTML.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want my end users to use a GPL v3 open source licensed software that renders HTML in a special GUI. But I want to white label/modify the original GPL v3 software to match my brand, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand if I then want to distribute my modified executable I would have to provide the source code for it and open source it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am fine with doing this, but I don't want to release the code for my proprietary HTML generator software. My end users would simply run my modified EXE and drag and drop their html files that were generated from my software (runs on a website).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The HTML generator is separate from the modified .exe in terms of the GPL? Right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30595" LastActivityDate="2023-07-19T07:10:55.243" Title="&quot;Modding&quot; GPL Software and using in a multi-part commercial application" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-19T05:30:20.400" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;A small independent company develops an innovative product, licensed under GPL. A sizable investment of many months of R&amp;amp;D to bring the initial release, and a non-trivial cost to maintain and develop further. The product is therefore priced to cover the operational expenses of the original development team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Company B takes the product code, which it is free to do under GPL. It repackages the code, which it is free to do under GPL. And sells it at a significantly undercut price, which it is free to do under GPL. It has no trouble affording to since it has none of the development and maintenance cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is how does a fairly small, independent company survive on writing GPL software? What are the common business models and practices for operating under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clarification: The context is of an end user product designed to be simple and intuitive, rather than something complicated and difficult to deploy, manage and operate enough as to mandate perpetual paid commercial support, which is one of the ways fairly big and entrenched companies monetize open source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-21T16:53:11.603" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T16:53:11.603" Title="How does commercial GPL software work in practice?" Tags="|gpl|commercial|intellectual-property|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-07-28T08:10:27.913" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14139" CreationDate="2023-07-19T07:10:55.243" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The advantage of HTML is that it is a standardized markup language. If both the generator and the renderer try to follow that standard, and you also look towards that standard for determining which component is wrong when a page doesn't look as intended, then the generator and renderer are independent from each other in terms of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two applications are independent in terms of copyright, then their respective licenses also don't affect each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-07-19T07:10:55.243" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14133" CreationDate="2023-07-19T16:00:49.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the solution is to release your application code under LGPL, but not alongside the binary.  When a paying customer buys the executable, convey the whole thing (binary, application source, your Lua scripts) to them under the proprietary licence that you intend should cover your Lua scripts.  However, also tell them that documentation and full application code, under LGPL, can be found at such-and-such a git repository, along with your &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;starter plugins and samples under a public domain licence&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sidesteps the whole issue of (L)GPL expectations associated with the receipt of the binary, while making it clear that the LGPL codebase doesn't contain your Lua scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the offchance that a customer wants to sell or otherwise distribute their plugin, which you want them to be free to do, the LGPL as I read it will permit this - but you can add an explicit &amp;quot;plugin exemption&amp;quot; if you want to make it as clear as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as ever, IANAL/IANYL, so if you're going to bet a business on this, take professional legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-19T19:23:24.153" LastActivityDate="2023-07-19T19:23:24.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14144" CreationDate="2023-07-19T18:25:42.143" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am going to implement a &lt;strong&gt;closed-source, commercial application&lt;/strong&gt; that uses and &lt;strong&gt;links statically&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emelianov/modbus-esp8266/tree/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;modbus-esp8266&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; library which is released under a &lt;strong&gt;BSD New&lt;/strong&gt; license. At the same time, you can see in this library's files (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emelianov/modbus-esp8266/blob/ea2bd0e506b2c32755ca86edcd2ea95acc1b0855/src/Modbus.h#L9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;file1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/emelianov/modbus-esp8266/blob/ea2bd0e506b2c32755ca86edcd2ea95acc1b0855/src/ModbusTCP.h#L9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;file2&lt;/a&gt;) that it includes (#include) other libraries that are released under the &lt;strong&gt;LGPL 2.1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/cores/arduino/Arduino.h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arduino.h&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/libraries/ESP8266WiFi/src/ESP8266WiFi.h&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ESP8266WiFi.h&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not a lawyer) I assume, that the modbus-esp8266 is properly released under the BSD license according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7904/can-your-mit-library-use-an-lgpl-library&quot;&gt;this anwser&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of my application, I don't provide the ESP8266WiFi library for building because the functionality of the application doesn't need it and it builds fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Arduino.h file is needed by the application and is available by the system (the system is under LGPL and linked &lt;strong&gt;dynamically&lt;/strong&gt; with the application-libraries binary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As the application uses code indirectly (through the modbus-esp8266 lib) that is under LGPL 2.1 license from Arduino.h, do I have to comply with the LGPL license terms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Especially, do I have to let the end user to recompile the application-library object file with the parts under LGPL because of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;static linking&lt;/a&gt; of the modbus-esp8266 library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also find &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10467/understanding-lgpl-implication-on-include&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; which explains exemption from LGPL terms if the included header file contains code of limited type only (numerical parameters, data structure layouts ...). However, I am not sure if the provided header files falls under this restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30598" LastEditorUserId="30598" LastEditDate="2023-07-20T12:35:05.457" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T06:16:53.943" Title="Do I have to comply with the LGPL when using a BSD-licensed library in a closed-source application, which then uses other LGPL-licensed libraries?" Tags="|lgpl|bsd|closed-source|linked-libraries|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14143" CreationDate="2023-07-20T06:58:08.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As the application uses code indirectly (through the modbus-esp8266 lib) that is under LGPL 2.1 license from Arduino.h, do I have to comply with the LGPL license terms?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you have to comply with the LGPL license terms in relation to those (transitive) dependencies that are provided under the LGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you have to comply the the BSD license terms in relation to those (transitive) dependencies that are provided under the BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Especially, do I have to let the end user to recompile the application-library object file with the parts under LGPL because of static linking of the modbus-esp8266 library?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. You received the modbus-esp8266 library under the BSD license, which does not require that an end-user is able to replace the library with a different version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have to provide the means for an end-user to replace the Arduino (or ESP8266WiFi) library in accordance to the LGPL license terms that apply to those. But those terms do not require you to give warranty on a modified system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-07-21T06:16:53.943" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T06:16:53.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14133" CreationDate="2023-07-20T08:33:00.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is to release your native application (including the MIT-licensed Lua interpreter) under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classpath exception&lt;/a&gt; (quoted below). It is also used in a similar way to your use case, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://openjdk.org/legal/gplv2+ce.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenJDK&lt;/a&gt; for running Java applications on top of the OpenJDK JVM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lua apps can be proprietary, and it doesn't matter if they have &amp;quot;intimate communication&amp;quot; with the native application. There is also no requirement to provide the recipient with a way to relink the &amp;quot;independent modules&amp;quot; to the GPL-ed software, after modifying the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is&#xA;making a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and&#xA;conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole&#xA;combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you&#xA;permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an&#xA;executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent&#xA;modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under&#xA;terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked&#xA;independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that&#xA;module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or&#xA;based on this library. If you modify this library, you may extend this&#xA;exception to your version of the library, but you are not obligated to&#xA;do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement&#xA;from your version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second question with respect to &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; in the LGPL, I would say &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; refers to the LGPL-licensed library and all its dependencies, while &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; refers to any software, possibly an executable or even another library, that makes use of the LGPL-licensed library. The &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; programmatically depends on the &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot;, but the &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot; must not depend on the &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot;. The &amp;quot;Application&amp;quot; must not be derived from the &amp;quot;Library&amp;quot;, but merely using it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-07-20T09:17:29.297" LastActivityDate="2023-07-20T09:17:29.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14148" CreationDate="2023-07-20T17:08:01.457" Score="-1" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of my original nonderived projects are on GitHub and some projects are licenced under BSD, MIT or GPL. They use languages like Python, C and Java.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to create a new product that was derived from an open source product or library, or server does the GPL, MIT or copyright prevent me from saying &amp;quot;if you earn money with this derived software, you must pay something to support my work&amp;quot; but otherwise my parts of the software is free for personal, open source, charity and noncommercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it no longer open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would intend to make the instructions for building the DERIVED software public, the sources and binaries available and free to access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30510" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T12:39:59.690" Title="If I make extensive changes to open source software and open source my changes, can I charge for commercial use of the derived work?" Tags="|commercial|freedoms|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14147" CreationDate="2023-07-20T23:32:27.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it no longer open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct, what you describe is taking a free/open-licensed piece of software and then publishing a derivative of that work under a non-free/open proprietary license. I use &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/definition-annotated/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;, both of which consider it outside their definitions to have to pay a third party whenever one person distributes the software to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note there isn't any limitation, under these definitions, against &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;charging money for copies of your software&lt;/a&gt;. Rather, these definitions don't permit you to limit &lt;em&gt;others'&lt;/em&gt; ability to distribute or use the software, either for a price or gratis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does the GPL, MIT or copyright prevent me from saying &amp;quot;if you earn money with this derived software, you must pay something to support my work&amp;quot; but otherwise my parts of the software is free for personal, open source, charity and noncommercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the GPL and MIT licenses resolve this question differently. The GPL is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;copyleft&lt;/em&gt; license&lt;/a&gt;, which means the GPL permits you to distribute derivative works only if you do so under the GPL as well, with no other requirements. In this way, you cannot introduce non-free terms to your derivative of a GPL-licensed work. By contrast, &lt;em&gt;permissive&lt;/em&gt; licenses (like MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses) &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; allow you to distribute derivatives under less permissive terms, so you could introduce non-commercial terms (or any other non-free limitations) in the license for your derivative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even permissive licenses usually still require you to credit the upstream authors by preserving their copyright notices and original license terms, but do not forbid you from adding your own license terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that, within the FLOSS community, there can be a substantial cultural divide around whether allowing or forbidding the introduction of downstream limitations makes a license &amp;quot;more&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;less&amp;quot; free (i.e., either because it's so free that it even permits adding limitations, or because it's so free it would never admit any downstream limitations to that freedom).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of how you feel about this question, authors who license their work under permissive licenses have positively afforded you the right to carry out just such a plan as you describe in your question, and those authors who offer work under the GPL (or other strong copyleft licenses) have not allowed you do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-07-21T12:39:59.690" LastActivityDate="2023-07-21T12:39:59.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-21T14:09:36.397" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure if this is the correct stack-exchange for this matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're a small to medium company in the EU (about 70 employees). We develop and sell equipment and accompanying software for a very niche market segment. We also try to be very &amp;quot;agile&amp;quot; about it, as in &amp;quot;phone rings, customers ask for xyz, we make xyz happen asap&amp;quot;, regardless of whether its&#xA;a one off hack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This high velocity neglects proper open source licensing handling. For context, out of these 70 employees, only two are software engineers. So this particular topic is not on the very top of the management's priority list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the rough situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Customers receive a device and some software sold together as one product.&#xA;The software is running on-premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a web app running Django and the usual assortment of CSS/JS libraries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web app is supplied open-sourced, but that is not stated anywhere and is also not by design, rather out of convenience. The only open source related thing it does, it has an about page which states and links to the core components being used, i.e. Django, Python, Lodash and the likes.&#xA;It is certainly missing to disclose some of these, especially if you'd consider transitive dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a WPF (.net/c#) desktop app&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is closed source. It states the full license text and links to the homepage of two major components within the app itself in an about page/section. But again, probably not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; used (nuget) packages. For example, it does not state the usage of log4net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;within the device, touch panels running Raspbian and a QML (Qt5) interface&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, I guess, the tricky part. It is supplied as open source, but again, not stated anywhere. But you could just take a screwdriver and grab the SD-card from one of the raspberries inside. The whole usage of Raspbian is not stated anywhere, neither is the usage of Qt5 (LGPL in this case)&#xA;and various python libraries (most notably PySide2 and Raspbian itself which is afaik GPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I would like to do now (rather late than never) is basically do our due diligence in terms of fulfilling the licence requirements. I recently had a lengthy talk with a software compliance expert which essentially boiled down to &amp;quot;if someone really wants to mess with you&amp;quot;, there is the&#xA;potential danger of an &lt;code&gt;prohibition of sale via temporary injunction&lt;/code&gt;. Which could be devastating to a smaller company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am aware of the basics of how I would comply with i.e. a MIT or LGPL licensed part, what's a good approach for this particular scenario, where these parts, all the software and the device itself form  &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; product. I am assuming this is not an uncommon scenario, so there are probably some established ways or best practices' around?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possible solutions I could think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;state &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the parts and licenses somewhere centrally, i.e. on our homepage or a dedicated product page?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;similar idea, state all the licenses in a (pdf) manual?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;bite the bullet and list all parts and licenses where they are used? Especially on the touch screen we (as in our sales&#xA;and markets folks) would very much like to avoid having some 'About' button cluttering the constrained interface space&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So tl;dr, the question is how to comply with all the (licenses of) used 3rd party open source components in a manageable way, i.e. not putting hundreds of man-hours on it nor involving an expensive external advisor.&#xA;That is, not &lt;strong&gt;how&lt;/strong&gt; do I comply with license xyz (i can look that up, although tedious), but where would I ideally supply all that information, links, potential source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make matters worse, searching this stack-exchange also indicates I would have to include every transitive dependency as well.&#xA;Although it's good enough, if I understood correctly, if one of the first-order dependencies that I link to in turn links to its dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30618" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-28T12:23:00.753" LastActivityDate="2023-07-28T12:23:00.753" Title="Supply license information in a compound commercial product" Tags="|commercial|license-compliance|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14153" CreationDate="2023-07-22T19:55:34.060" Score="5" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I'm building an app consisting of a frontend, backend and database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The database software is AGPLv3.0 licensed and running on the database server.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The backend is proprietary, running on the backend server, and it communicates with the database.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The frontend is distributed to end users, it communicates with the backend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I required to distribute the database's source code (and/or the modifications I make to the database's source code) to end users?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIjil.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIjil.png&quot; alt=&quot;Diagram showing different components and their connections&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The backend is not a mere wrapper around the database, the exposed API has no resemblance to the underlying database, the end users consider themselves users of, say, a social network (and not a database hosting service).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30628" LastEditorUserId="30628" LastEditDate="2023-07-23T13:04:43.903" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T05:52:52.343" Title="AGPLv3 - Does indirect use over intermediary servers constitute &quot;distribution&quot;?" Tags="|gpl|copyright|agpl-3.0|copyleft|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14151" CreationDate="2023-07-23T15:06:41.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 13 of the AGPLv3 states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your&#xA;version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;Corresponding Source of your version ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says &amp;quot;interacting with it remotely through a computer network&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL, but since it doesn't explicitly state whether it refers to direct or indirect interaction, I would assume that it refers to both, to be on the safe side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-07-23T15:06:41.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14151" CreationDate="2023-07-24T05:52:52.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Addressing the question in the title: no, AGPL defines distribution (or &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;conveyance&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, as the licence has it) in s0, and no kind of use, direct or indirect, counts as distribution.  It's tempting to see AGPL as somehow extending GPL's distribution obligations to cover certain classes of use, but that is not how AGPLv3 s13 is written, and therefore not how it should be read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing the question in the body, while I hate to disagree with a colleague, I don't think such use constitutes &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;remote network interaction&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  The FSF addresses the issue in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ entry&lt;/a&gt;, thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program is expressly designed to accept user requests and send responses over a network, then it meets these criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see that as including remote use of a database server, unless users are interacting with it directly, eg via their own SQL queries.  Moreover, a principal thrust of newer (and, IMO, bad) licences such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt; is to extend AGPL so that it does cover remote, indirect use of software further down the stack.  Such an extension wouldn't have been necessary if the AGPL already included such use cases, and it's particularly telling (to me) that it was introduced by a database company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-07-24T05:52:52.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14156" CreationDate="2023-07-25T09:57:06.093" Score="5" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using some images that have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/a&gt; license in my website. Of course I apply the correct attribution as is required by the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am, however, confused by the &amp;quot;ShareAlike&amp;quot; section that states &amp;quot;ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not able to license the whole website of even page on which the image is displayed under the same license as the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does to &amp;quot;remix, transform or build upon the material&amp;quot; refer to changes or adaptations of the image, or would it mean I need to license the whole website on which the image is published, including any other images or texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30646" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-25T10:42:21.443" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T08:06:31.063" Title="When I use CC BY-SA media in a website, do I &quot;remix, transform, or build upon the material&quot;?" Tags="|copyleft|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2904" CreationDate="2023-07-25T15:25:03.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an update valid for newer version of Oracle JDBC drivers, Oracle states the following in its FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/it/database/technologies/faq-jdbc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.oracle.com/it/database/technologies/faq-jdbc.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can third party vendors distribute Oracle's JDBC drivers along with their own software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a third party software company (and Oracle partner) then please check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/oracle-free-license.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FUTC&lt;/a&gt; license and run this by your legal department and then contact your local Oracle sales rep for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FUTC license should allow redistribution, but considering how shady the FAQ is, I wouldn't do it unless you are an Oracle partner with a legal department. I think it's safe to have it as a source code dependency of your project, the tricky part would be distributing it as part of a binary release of your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14066" LastActivityDate="2023-07-25T15:25:03.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14154" CreationDate="2023-07-26T08:06:31.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does to &amp;quot;remix, transform or build upon the material&amp;quot; refer to changes or adaptations of the image&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amongst other activities, yes, it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would it mean I need to license the whole website on which the image is published, including any other images or texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the important question, I agree.  This takes us back, yet again, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Drauglis_v._Kappa_Map_Group,_LLC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drauglis v Kappa Map Group&lt;/a&gt;, which, whilst not binding anywhere, is nonetheless one of the few pieces of litigation we have that directly addresses the question of using a BY-SA image as part of a larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Drauglis, the court found that reuse of an unmodified or insignificantly-modified image on the cover of a road atlas did not require the whole atlas to be licensed CC BY-SA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the court focussed on images reused verbatim or with insignificant modifications such as minor cropping, it seems to me that the argument must apply equally to modified images.  However, this is not the place to make that argument, and I can only point you to the judgement as a guideline: if you reuse those images with minimal or no changes, you're probably OK not to release your whole website, or even the whole webpage on which the image appears, under CC BY-SA 4.0.  Don't forget the attribution requirements, though, and (as ever) IANAL/IANYL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-07-26T08:06:31.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14159" CreationDate="2023-07-29T08:34:01.093" Score="5" ViewCount="3149" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; How can we replace the GPLv3 requirements of source disclosure + explicit license copy with something more subtle like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;This work allows the users [...], and any derived work (recursively) allows all that too, independently of explicitly including this license.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Flexibilizing one to, for example, modify my work, compile and upload their binary, and be cool with it. But disallowing they to sue others that use their binary in any way. &lt;strong&gt;Does any license do that?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Background:&lt;/em&gt; For years, I've enjoyed creating private software projects to tackle my everyday problems, automate processes, and explore various ideas. Recently, I ended up taking an undergraduate course on computer science and got into academic research, which led me to start producing shareable software. However, so far, I have not found a software license that really satisfies my ideals of freedom. And given that I can choose &amp;quot;any&amp;quot; license to my software projects, I want to get the most possible out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to find a license that provides &amp;quot;the highest degree of user freedom&amp;quot;, i.e., allowing all users to share, modify, re-sell, and even attempt to reverse-engineer any product or service derived from my software – &lt;em&gt;Ideally&lt;/em&gt;, I would like to allow them to do almost anything, with one required exception presented below. Therefore without imposing unnecessary restrictions on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;I do see as any other user, a company that modifies my software and re-sells it&lt;/em&gt;. Therefore, while I recognize the benefits of open-source and will share the source code of my software projects, I'm not interested in mandating the sharing of source code for such derived works, or including my license file in their distributions, or requiring author credits, unless those very specific restrictions were indispensable for a copyleft license. The companies should be free to do as they please, like other users, with a &lt;strong&gt;single exception:&lt;/strong&gt; The users of the derived work should have the same permissions as the users of the original work. Therefore, the companies (and any other user) should not be capable of restricting this. (&lt;strong&gt;copyleft!&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am keen on exploring alternative legal license options to ensure copyleft but with less restriction to the (intermediate) users in relation to GPLv3/AGPL (e.g. not requiring source disclosure + explicit license copy). And I would like to ideally eliminate as much as possible the legal protections companies might claim over the derived works of my software with the aim of restricting their users. Without any safeguard, my concerns about preserving user freedom would reach only the direct users of my software. One possibility I thought of is expressed in tl;dr above, but I don't know if it really works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which existent licenses fit my criteria? I didn't find one in &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/appendix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The CC0 license is similar to MIT in the sense that it apparently does not have a strong safeguard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29897" LastEditorUserId="29897" LastEditDate="2023-07-31T17:42:37.840" LastActivityDate="2023-07-31T17:42:37.840" Title="&quot;Pure Copyleft&quot; Software Licenses? (with no additional restrictions)" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|copyleft|law|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14157" CreationDate="2023-07-29T08:41:34.940" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you'll square this circle.  You write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem I have with the GPLv3 and AGPL license is how they restrict the intermediate users, while the problem I have with the MIT license is how it allows the intermediate users to restrict the end users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in the preamble to the GPL, the authors write&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, the restrictions placed on intermediate users by copyleft licences (which you say you don't like) are the very reason that intermediate users can't restrict the activities of end-users.  Conversely, one of the freedoms given to intermediate users by permissive licences is the freedom to restrict the activities of their end-users (a practice that you also say you don't like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only have one of the two things you want: either the intermediate users are restricted from restricting end-users, or they aren't, in which case at least some of the intermediate users will restrict end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt; pursuant to comments below: then you have a problem, again. The intermediate users have the right to make derivative works, and the power to do so by virtue of having the source. If the end-users don't have the source of the binary they're using, the right to make further derivatives is useless to them. I think you need to decide that either (a) the end-users should have no such right (in which case, permissive licence), or that they should have both the right and the power (in which case, copyleft licence). Your insistence on giving them a right that they can't use is what's causing the licensing problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if an end-user tries, for example, to reverse-engineer their derivated version of my software, they cannot sue the end-user. Because they have no rights over the derivated work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you have to explicitly forbid the intermediate users from doing this, because otherwise, as joint rightsholders in the work they are distributing, they absolutely do have this right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's beginning to sound to me as if you want a licence that prevents intermediate users from acquiring any rights they might otherwise have in a derivative work.  &lt;strong&gt;But this is not how modern copyright works, so you aren't going to be able to find a copyright licence that achieves it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, we had &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/7365/458&quot;&gt;another question here&lt;/a&gt; where the author was, in essence, trying to create a different scheme of copyright, and create a licence that would propagate a little bubble of copyright-that-worked-as-(s)he-wanted-it-to along with his/her code.  I didn't think that was possible then, and advised against trying it, and I don't think it's possible now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-07-29T09:16:46.163" LastActivityDate="2023-07-29T09:16:46.163" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14157" CreationDate="2023-07-29T12:26:06.523" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14158/50&quot;&gt;another answer&lt;/a&gt; has done a good job articulating some philosophical incompatibilities in your requirements. I won't retread those concerns, but I'll make a feasible suggestion that might come close to your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like you want a copyleft license that will apply to a lineage of derivative works, forever, but which perpetually enforces downstream reverse engineering rather than downstream source availability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an unusual requirement, so I have an unusual suggestion: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license&lt;/a&gt; (CC BY-SA). ShareAlike terms are extremely close to what you describe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike terms must apply to any downstream derivative, so any recipients of any form of the work have the right to modify it and share/sell it under those same terms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike terms do not obligate source disclosure, so you may distribute a ShareAlike work without source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ShareAlike terms (and all Creative Commons licenses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/version4/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forbid the application of DRM&lt;/a&gt; in any way that would prohibit recipients from exercising their right to modify or redistribute the work.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license calls these &amp;quot;Effective Technological Measures&amp;quot; and the term refers to any technical measures whose circumvention would cause legal trouble for the clever person who broke them. (In particular, any DRM that would receive protection &amp;quot;under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, 1996, and/or similar international agreements.&amp;quot;) CC licenses require you to waive your ability to legally punish such circumvention, and neither may you introduce any DRM impediments that rise to this standard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1717/why-is-cc-by-sa-discouraged-for-code&quot;&gt;CC licenses are not recommended for software&lt;/a&gt;, but in this case the major issues don't apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code&amp;quot; -- in this case, this omission is a feature that does precisely what you want&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses&amp;quot; -- in fact, CC BY-SA 4.0 is an exception to this objection, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_GPLv3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is one-way compatible into the GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I should warn you this means others might take your software and incorporate it into a GPLv3 work. This doesn't diminish the availability of your software, but does admit the possibility of a fork that forces source disclosure. However, anyone who distributes a CC BY-SA derivative without source code need not worry about this outcome: no one can meaningfully release a fork of their work under the GPL because they cannot offer corresponding source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their final objection is that it doesn't grant patent rights. &lt;strong&gt;This is true&lt;/strong&gt;: any patentable systems implemented in your code or in any derivative will not be covered by the licenses, so could be used to control downstream distribution and modification.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-07-29T12:44:09.293" LastActivityDate="2023-07-29T12:44:09.293" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14106" CreationDate="2023-07-30T02:11:44.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can use the OSI-approved &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/fair/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fair License&lt;/a&gt;, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/Fair.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifier Fair&lt;/a&gt;. It meets your requirements of being a free permissive license for general creative works (not just software), that maintains copyrights and requires attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fair License (Fair)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Copyright Information&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is&#xA;retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is&#xA;notified of this instrument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your creative works are in individual human readable files, you can also use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_All-permissive_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU All Permissive License&lt;/a&gt; aka the FSF All Permissive License, with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/FSFAP.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX identifier FSFAP&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,&#xA;are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright&#xA;notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,&#xA;without any warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you want to license is documentation, you can also consider the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeBSD Documentation License&lt;/a&gt;. However, you may need to adapt it slightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-07-30T02:36:20.187" LastActivityDate="2023-07-30T02:36:20.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-07-30T02:28:21.260" Score="5" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across an extension version of the Whisper model from &lt;code&gt;OpenAI&lt;/code&gt; on GitHub, (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped&lt;/a&gt;) and I'm interested in using it in my Python project. However, before proceeding, I have a couple of questions regarding the legality and usage requirements associated with this model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Legal Concerns:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I want to ensure that I'm using this extension in compliance with OpenAI's terms and conditions. Could someone please clarify whether it's legal to make use of this specific extension version of Whisper and publish it on GitHub? I'm unsure about the licensing implications, and I want to be certain that I'm not violating any copyright or usage restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;API-Key Requirement:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When using OpenAI's official models, an API key is usually required to access them through their API. However, I'm not entirely certain if the extension version of Whisper I found on GitHub operates in the same way. Can someone clarify if an API key is necessary to utilize this extension? Or is it a standalone version that doesn't require API access?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the importance of complying with licensing and legal requirements, and I want to ensure I'm doing things right. If anyone has experience with this specific Whisper extension or insights on how to properly use it, I'd greatly appreciate your guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I've already reviewed the repository's README file, but the licensing information wasn't clear to me. Additionally, since the Whisper model is from OpenAI, I'm not sure if the API key requirement applies to this extension as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30666" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-07-30T05:54:46.053" LastActivityDate="2023-07-30T08:19:12.793" Title="Legal and Usage Questions about an Extension of Whisper Model on GitHub" Tags="|licensing|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14161" CreationDate="2023-07-30T08:19:12.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the model is legally published and distributed: &lt;code&gt;whisper-timestamped&lt;/code&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped/blob/master/LICENCE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published under the AGPL&lt;/a&gt; and is an extension to &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;openai-whisper&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published under the MIT License&lt;/a&gt;. That's all fine because the MIT License is compatible with the AGPL, and the AGPL as an open source license lets you use it for any purpose, including publishing it on Github.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone clarify if an API key is necessary to utilize this extension? Or is it a standalone version that doesn't require API access?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are support questions you should address to the project itself. It's perfectly valid and legal to have open source code which communicates with a non-open source server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-07-30T08:19:12.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14164" CreationDate="2023-07-30T12:23:25.960" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause-Patent.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent&lt;/a&gt; (also known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/bsdpluspatent/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD+Patent&lt;/a&gt;, not to be confused with Facebook’s shady BSD+Patents attempt) is relatively new among other BSD licenses but (arguably) a good alternative to a double MIT plus Apache 2.0 licensing approach. It is short, GPL-compatible, and explicitly addresses patent granting. And it is OSI approved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why do we have no 3-clause version of it? Does the 3rd clause of non-endorsement make it incompatible with a patent grant? Or is there any other reason? I’m genuinely curious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29813" LastActivityDate="2023-07-31T08:39:47.147" Title="Why don’t we have the BSD-3-Clause Plus Patent license variant?" Tags="|license|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14163" CreationDate="2023-07-31T08:39:47.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't have it (BSD-3-clause + Patent), because nobody created it and submitted it to OSI for approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But theoretically, it can be created and it would be compatible with GPLv2, if the BSD+Patent license is also compatible with GPLv2. I don't see the BSD+Patent license in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility list&lt;/a&gt;, although it is presumably compatible with GPLv2, since the offending clauses in the Apache License 2.0 were the patent termination and indemnification clauses which are not present in the BSD+Patent license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the &amp;quot;endorsement&amp;quot; clause is considered to be not useful, for e.g. by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NetBSD project&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The members of the NetBSD Foundation (i.e. its developers) no longer&#xA;considered clause 4 (the &amp;quot;endorsement&amp;quot; clause) to be useful in today's&#xA;software world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the Apache License 2.0 is so much more explicit and detailed in its requirements, for e.g. with respect to trademarks. It is a much better license than BSD+Patent. It's also compatible with GPLv3, AGPLv3 and LGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the GNU Foundation stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The patent termination provision is a good thing, which is why we&#xA;recommend the Apache 2.0 license for substantial programs over other&#xA;lax permissive licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add GPLv2 compatibility to Apache License 2.0, there are several better ways than  dual-licensing it with the MIT license (MIT OR Apache-2.0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/LLVM-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LLVM Exception&lt;/a&gt; (Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dual-licensing the Apache License 2.0 with either the GPLv2 or LGPLv2.1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-07-31T08:39:47.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14166" CreationDate="2023-08-01T18:31:20.237" Score="8" ViewCount="1826" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say we have repo A with a copyleft license like GPL. Let's say someone forks repo A to repo B and creates some modifications. Let's say the owner of B had no intention of contributing their changes to the upstream, but the original authors were interested in the modifications. Could the the authors of A (or some third party) legally &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot; the new code from the fork back to the upstream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, would attribution be required? (If we want to get into source control specifics, like Git, would it have to be the same commit?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30694" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T07:35:28.110" Title="Can someone other than the original author contribute downstream changes to an upstream repo?" Tags="|gpl|law|forking|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14165" CreationDate="2023-08-01T19:42:42.447" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, those changes could be added to any other repository - on the same conditions as the license asks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would not need to be the same commit or identically as the license is agnostic of the VCS used. But you would need to acknowledge the original author of that commit as usual. How to do that in practical terms might look different on circumstances. One might honour it in the commit message, could fudge the author data on commit, add it to the contributors list or as a note in the source itself at the appropriate place - or all of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-08-03T06:55:01.177" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T06:55:01.177" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14165" CreationDate="2023-08-01T20:11:23.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stepping back a bit, the fundamental point of open source is that &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; can take open source code and do &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this makes the answer to your question obvious: it doesn't matter if the code was written by the upstream author, the downstream author, the upstream author's best friend, the downstream author's employee, the upstream author's worst enemy &lt;em&gt;or anyone else&lt;/em&gt;: the upstream author (or the downstream author. Or anyone else) can take that code and use it however they wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-08-01T20:11:23.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-02T13:29:33.130" Score="5" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am about to release a new document class I developed myself. I am currently in disarray about what license can/should be used for such a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;default&amp;quot; license used for LaTeX code seems to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latex-project.org//lppl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LPPL version 1.3c&lt;/a&gt;, but it only cares about file names used in derivative works and maintenance succession of the original work. But I would like to use some kind of copyleft license, which imposes the right to redistribute modified versions of the document class, to reuse code of these modified versions in other projects and to backport these changes into an original project. But I don't want to use a license which would require to mention and redistribute this document class (or a link to it) with every PDF produced with it because it would be ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://bitbucket.org/amiede/classicthesis/issues/123/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the discussion&lt;/a&gt; about implications of the &lt;code&gt;classicthesis&lt;/code&gt; being licensed with GPL, as well as an answer and comments to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/69007/the-gpl-and-latex-packages&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and the detailed history of the controversy regarding LaTeX code licensing (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2011-FMi-TUB-tb100mittbach-lppl-history.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reflections on the history of the LATEX Project Public License (LPPL) — A software license for LATEX and more&lt;/a&gt;). What I have understood so far is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are different opinions about whether an article (its source code and/or produced PDF) typesetted using a document class licensed under GPL must be also under GPL. It seems like the FAQ answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WhatCaseIsOutputGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In what cases is the output of a GPL program covered by the GPL too?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on the gnu.org suggests that it is, but I am not sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It seems like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL license&lt;/a&gt; if used for a document class would still require a mention of usage of this document class in each produced PDF, which would be ridiculous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The LPPL license seems to be the only appropriate license for my case, but it is not enough for me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The question:&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a ready-to-use set of extending clauses for the LPPL which would make it a copyleft license? Or is it a terra incognita and consequences of trying to extend it this way are yet unknown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30701" LastEditorUserId="30701" LastEditDate="2023-08-02T16:17:53.007" LastActivityDate="2023-08-02T17:30:19.923" Title="Copyleft licenses for a (new) LaTeX document class" Tags="|license-recommendation|copyleft|lppl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14165" CreationDate="2023-08-02T14:39:43.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copyleft generally only applies when you redistribute the work or a derived work, but it doesn't &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; you to distribute it. If you made the copy just for personal use, repo B can be a private repo, and the authors of A (or a third party) would not be authorized to copy anything from it. The only redistribution requirement is that if you distribute object code you also have to distribute source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if repo B is made public, I think its owner is implicitly authorizing anyone to copy from it, and this must be done in accordance to the requirements of the original copyleft license from A. This is the nature of copyleft -- it requires that whenever you pass on a copy of the original work or a derivative, you also pass on the same license (or a similar license, so long as it maintains these requirements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the original license allows making derivatives without attribution, and you redistribute, you must also allow making derivatives without attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8948" LastEditorUserId="8948" LastEditDate="2023-08-02T20:23:50.153" LastActivityDate="2023-08-02T20:23:50.153" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14169" CreationDate="2023-08-02T17:30:19.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would recommend to use the GPL license with an additional permission for creating documents based on the document class/stylesheet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could for example use this as additional permission:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As additional permission under clause 7 of the GPLv3 license, you are allowed to create documents that use this document class or stylesheet as-is without following all requirements of the GPL license. Such a document can be published under any license of the author's choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it clear that you don't intend to extend the copyleft provisions to documents using the document class, without removing them for other cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-08-02T17:30:19.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-03T20:34:38.173" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a website on a platform - similar to WordPress - where the access to the website will be via paid subscription. I am selling to the end user a service. It is like I would replace WordPress editor with CKEditor and then restricted access to the website by a members plugin. The website is build using a proprietary web similar to wix. I have to pay for the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CKEditor is using &lt;a href=&quot;https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ckeditor.com/legal/ckeditor-oss-license/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is I can use CKEditor v5 but I want to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30715" LastEditorUserId="30715" LastEditDate="2023-08-04T06:30:03.090" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T06:30:03.090" Title="Can I use GPL 2+ (CKEditor v5) on a website with paid subscription?" Tags="|gpl-2|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-03T13:40:53.243" Score="1" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I work for a local county that will generate our local tax statements for free via a web service consumable by a public URL. For example, the web service would generate and stream the PDF using the URL below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;https://www.mycounty.com/taxstatements/2023/123345&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The service is an independent project of other systems in our organization and retrieves the data in our SQL Server database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To generate the PDF, I will be using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDFtk&lt;/a&gt; in the project. The product is GPL version 2. I've read countless discussions, and from what I understand is that as long as I dont distribute my project, I dont have to make my project source code available. But I'm not a lawyer, and I want to be 100% sure. Even on the PDFtk website, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you plan to distribute PDFtk Server as part of your own software, you will need a PDFtk Server Redistribution License. The exception to this rule is if your software is licensed to the public under the GPL or another compatible license.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a two-part question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I understand the GPL v2 license correctly that as long as I don't distribute my web service code, I dont break the license agreement with PDFtk and GPL v2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And if I did misunderstand&lt;/strong&gt; how GPL v2 works in conjunction with PDFtk, How would I make my web service GPL complaint? I have a GitHub repository that I can put the source code into. But how do I let the consumer know that the service they are using falls under GPL? Is it enough that they go to my service website, where I display some GPL information before the tax statement is generated? And if it is, what do I put?  And if not, what is the proper way to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really appreciate any help you can provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29591" OwnerDisplayName="adviner" LastActivityDate="2023-08-03T20:35:36.370" Title="Understanding PDFtk and GPL license" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14184" CreationDate="2023-08-04T07:27:56.100" Score="1" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using mostly LGPL or compatible libraries, but there's also a few that are available under GPL &amp;amp; compatible only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that GPL requirements apply to software distribution, in other words, I can link against GPL with no obligations whatsoever so long as I am not distributing but instead using the software internally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My product, as offered to 3rd party users in a binary form, excludes everything that is not LGPL compatible, and is distributed under a proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to distribute my software under my license terms, provided that all GPL options are disabled by default, all relevant code is disabled, and no linking against any GPL code takes place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or alternatively - does writing &lt;code&gt;#include &amp;lt;GPLcode&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; on a piece of paper make the paper subject to GPL requirements, since it does conceptually contain a references link to GPL code? Asking since a &amp;quot;text print&amp;quot; of code does technically satisfy providing a source copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastEditorUserId="16734" LastEditDate="2023-08-04T20:04:07.040" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T07:30:03.883" Title="Does GPL apply to optional and disabled code and no linking" Tags="|licensing|gpl|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14165" CreationDate="2023-08-04T07:35:28.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically in terms of the &lt;strong&gt;GNU GPL&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B has made a &lt;em&gt;derivative work&lt;/em&gt;.  The GPL requires that if B &lt;em&gt;distributes&lt;/em&gt; this work to A (e.g. by publishing on a web site or public VCS repository), then that B must grant A all the freedoms of the GPL in respect of that derived work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore A is entitled to make and publish a work derived from B's code (in this case, by incorporating parts of it into A's original).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A can copy B's code in any way, and make whatever modifications desired.  There's no requirement to preserve the form (such as the sequence of commits) any more than B was required to preserve the exact form of A's code earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; matter, A will probably find it helpful to take B's commits as they are, before making changes on top of them, especially if anticipating further contributions from B.  But nothing in GNU GPL requires that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13340" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T07:35:28.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14183" CreationDate="2023-08-04T08:40:52.583" Score="5" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11096/according-to-the-gpl-faq-use-within-a-company-or-organization-is-not-considered&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is making and using multiple copies within one organization or company&#xA;“distribution”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, in that case the organization is just making the copies for&#xA;itself. As a consequence, a company or other organization can develop&#xA;a modified version and install that version through its own&#xA;facilities, without giving the staff permission to release that&#xA;modified version to outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the organization transfers copies to other organizations&#xA;or individuals, that is distribution. In particular, providing copies&#xA;to contractors for use off-site is distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An independent public foundation (digital education) wants to develop software for its educators. The educators are not employees of the foundation, but they are registered members of the foundation, using the foundation provided software to implement the foundation's goals and objectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that software distribution &amp;quot;within the same organization&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify - in this case, it is a single legal entity with international individual membership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastActivityDate="2023-08-06T10:44:49.707" Title="Do public foundation registered members constitute &quot;organization&quot; in the GPL distribution context?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|distribution|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14181" CreationDate="2023-08-04T12:05:52.490" Score="3" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JesseTG/melonds-ds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dynamic library&lt;/a&gt; that's licensed under GPL 3.0. To simplify distribution, I'd like to statically link as many of the library's dependencies as possible. One of these libraries is licensed under LGPL 2.1 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I were to statically link the &lt;code&gt;LGPL-2.1+&lt;/code&gt;-licensed library in with my own &lt;code&gt;GPL-3.0&lt;/code&gt;-licensed library, would I be compliant with both licenses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5006" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T20:29:57.623" Title="Am I allowed to statically link a LGPL-2.1+ library into a GPL3-licensed library?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|lgpl|linked-libraries|linking|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14177" CreationDate="2023-08-04T16:31:12.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FAQ you cite is not a rule established by the GPL, but rather a reflection of the FSF's broad understanding of when transfer of a copy typically does or does not occur under copyright law. In other words: the GPL imposes copyleft obligations whenever the transfer of a new copy occurs from one legal person to another legal person, but the question of what does or does not count as distribution is not a question the GPL attempts to resolve.  The conditions under which this action occurs are informed by a particular jurisdiction's statutes and case law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the FAQ item says the organization is &amp;quot;making the copies for itself,&amp;quot; it refers to the cross-jurisdiction legal concept known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: the law typically understands corporations to have legal personhood. Agents acting in their capacity as an agent of the corporate person don't receive the copy as a &amp;quot;natural person&amp;quot; but merely as an arm of the particular &lt;em&gt;person ficta&lt;/em&gt; on whose behalf they act. In this way, the giver is the &lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt; and the recipient is the same &lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt;, so no transfer occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the natural persons to whom you give the software will receive the software as a natural person (causing copyleft distribution) or as an agent of your &lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt; (not causing copyleft distribution) probably comes down to the contractual relationship the person has with your corporation and how copyright/contract law has interpreted that relationship in past case law. I know that employment relationships generally imply membership within a corporate person, but since your relationship isn't employment, I can't speculate whether the terms of your contract imply &lt;em&gt;persona&lt;/em&gt; membership or not. You may wish to consult a lawyer to solidify the reach of your &lt;em&gt;persona ficta&lt;/em&gt; under your exact contractual case, and you could also ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; with specific information about jurisdiction and contract terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-08-06T10:31:35.763" LastActivityDate="2023-08-06T10:31:35.763" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14178" CreationDate="2023-08-04T20:06:12.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL 2.1+ can be &amp;quot;upgraded&amp;quot; to LGPL 3.0 due to the &amp;quot;any later versions&amp;quot; clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LGPL 3.0 is compatible with GPL 3.0 - more specifically, if you are compliant with the GPL 3.0 then you are automatically compliant with LGPL 3.0 as one option for distributing LGPL 3.0 code is to meet the GPL 3.0 requirements (Section 2(b)).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T20:06:12.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14178" CreationDate="2023-08-04T20:21:12.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 3 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt; allows it to be &amp;quot;upgraded&amp;quot; to GPLv2+. So any method of linking, or even direct copying of code, may be used when combining an LGPLv2.1-only or LGPLv2.1+ work with a GPLv3 work. The combined work would be licensed under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also confirmed by the compatibility matrix in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do&#xA;this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so&#xA;that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2,&#xA;instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the&#xA;ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify&#xA;that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in&#xA;these notices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-04T20:29:57.623" LastActivityDate="2023-08-04T20:29:57.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14177" CreationDate="2023-08-05T07:10:12.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidently, this boils down to whether the organization members fit within the local law definition of persona ficta, or in my case &amp;quot;jurisdictional persona&amp;quot; in direct translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the local law legal definition, a &amp;quot;jurisdictional persona&amp;quot; can be either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;countries, governments organizations and government corporations - under &amp;quot;public law&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;for profit corporations and cooperatives, non profit foundations and associations - under &amp;quot;private law&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I assume it is a safe bet that at least those will be valid throughout the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That alone doesn't indicate in the slightest that this applies to foundation members as well, it just establishes that the foundation itself has this legal status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disclaimer: the following is my personal interpretations of the law and its motivations, don't take that as factual legal advice.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, and as usual, law doesn't seem to say anything particular about it, and the only relevant legal information I found is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Representation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article 10&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The non-profit legal entity shall express its will and shall&#xA;conduct legal activities through its bodies. It shall be represented&#xA;by its managing body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) In the course of litigation between the non-profit legal entity&#xA;and its managing body, members of the managing body, respectively, the&#xA;legal entity may also be represented by one or several persons elected&#xA;by its general meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) A non-profit legal entity may partake in the work of a body of&#xA;non-profit legal entity through its representative or a person&#xA;authorized thereby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that a foundation's members are its only practical operatives, if they cannot legally act on behalf of the organization, then the organization cannot practically operate. So it doesn't make sense for the legal persona to not extend to the organization's operatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the effect of internationality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep track on tech subjects, and in a related context, I am aware of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gdpr requirements&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requirements to keep user / personal / private / financial data with the user's local jurisdiction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requirements to audit critical algorithms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requirements to use specific algorithms within a jurisdiction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;instances of epic failure to comply with licensing requirements from industrial giants&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I however cannot recall an instance where a tech corporation was required to open source its internal software to distribute it across branches in different jurisdiction as it expanded or jurisdictions fluctuated on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or an instance of a split company being required to do it to distribute internal code between the two sub-companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that can just be my exposure to information, so feel free to contribute such  known precedents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the time being, I don't find evidence to suggest that internationality on its own, be that on organizational or operative level, does in some way sever the legal persona representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain jurisdictions however seem to have an attitude toward foreign operatives, particularly in the field of political non-profits, and things like informational restrictions, but that's outside the scope of the question and there's not much to do about it neither anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, since member registration does feature contractual obligation, including the software purpose, usage, terms and conditions, that adds additional weight to my conclusion, both in the capacity of contractors and on explicit terms that they will be receiving and using the software exclusively  in the capacity of an operative of the organization implementing its goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem that anyone under contractual obligation that includes acting on behalf of the organization or using organization software on the use terms as provided by the organization and accepted by operative can fit in the &amp;quot;internal user&amp;quot; category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastEditorUserId="16734" LastEditDate="2023-08-06T10:44:49.707" LastActivityDate="2023-08-06T10:44:49.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14175" CreationDate="2023-08-05T07:30:03.883" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to distribute my software under my license terms, provided that all GPL options are disabled by default, all relevant code is disabled, and no linking against any GPL code takes place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes,  that is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, ffmpeg is distributed with different sets of encoders. When the GPL licensed encoders are included in the distribution, it is provided under the GPL license. If they are not included, a more permissive license is used.&#xA;Which encoders are included is a matter of build options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-08-05T07:30:03.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5664" CreationDate="2023-08-06T03:13:06.763" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the compatibility matrix in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, we find that the LGPLv2.1-only and the LGPLv3 are incompatible licenses. If code from software licensed under one of these licenses is copied to software licensed under the other license, the resulting combination must be licensed under GPLv3, according to the compatibility matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modifications of LGPLv2.1-only code must be licensed under the same license or GPLv2+. Modifications of LGPLv3 code must be licensed under the same license or GPLv3+. Hence the combination of the two must be licensed under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's different for the case of libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no issue if an LGPLv3 licensed library is used by an LGPLv2.1-only licensed software, or vice versa, according to the same compatibility matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like a software licensed under an incompatible license, may be used as a library, by an LGPLv2.1 licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, an Apache License v2.0 licensed library may be used as a library by LGPLv2.1 licensed library/ software. They must be separated components that can be linked to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking into the LGPLv2.1 license text, I surmise that the following section supports this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may place library facilities that are a work based on the Library side-by-side in a single library together with other library&#xA;facilities not covered by this License, and distribute such a combined&#xA;library, provided that the separate distribution of the work based on&#xA;the Library and of the other library facilities is otherwise&#xA;permitted, and provided that you do these two things:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany the combined library with a copy of the same work based&#xA;on the Library, uncombined with any other library facilities. This&#xA;must be distributed under the terms of the Sections above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Give prominent notice with the combined library of the fact that&#xA;part of it is a work based on the Library, and explaining where to&#xA;find the accompanying uncombined form of the same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-08T06:29:50.033" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T06:29:50.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12048" CreationDate="2023-08-06T03:16:42.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the compatibility matrix in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;, we find that the LGPLv2.1-only and the LGPLv3 are incompatible licenses. If code from software licensed under one of these licenses is copied to software licensed under the other license, the resulting combination must be licensed under GPLv3, according to the compatibility matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modifications of LGPLv2.1-only code must be licensed under the same license or GPLv2+. Modifications of LGPLv3 code must be licensed under the same license or GPLv3+. Hence the combination of the two must be licensed under GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's different for the case of libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no issue if an LGPLv3 licensed library is used by an LGPLv2.1-only licensed software, or vice versa, according to the same compatibility matrix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like a software licensed under an incompatible license, may be used as a library, by an LGPLv2.1 licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, a proprietary library may be used as a library by LGPLv2.1 licensed library/ software. They must be separated components that can be linked to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking into the LGPLv2.1 license text, I surmise that the following section supports this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You may place library facilities that are a work based on the Library side-by-side in a single library together with other library&#xA;facilities not covered by this License, and distribute such a combined&#xA;library, provided that the separate distribution of the work based on&#xA;the Library and of the other library facilities is otherwise&#xA;permitted, and provided that you do these two things:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Accompany the combined library with a copy of the same work based&#xA;on the Library, uncombined with any other library facilities. This&#xA;must be distributed under the terms of the Sections above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Give prominent notice with the combined library of the fact that&#xA;part of it is a work based on the Library, and explaining where to&#xA;find the accompanying uncombined form of the same work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-08T06:29:35.863" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T06:29:35.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12805" CreationDate="2023-08-06T18:20:58.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Folks, GPL is very clear that you only have to share the source code &lt;em&gt;if you are distributing the binary code outside your organizagtion&lt;/em&gt;, and then only to the recipients of your binary distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For plugins that run only on your own site, and are not made available to run by a third party, you have no obligation to distribute source code outside your organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Distributing outside your organization&amp;quot; has been deemed to include distributing to a support company or a contractor. Because of this, the GPLv3 suggestion above may be worth considering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30732" LastActivityDate="2023-08-06T18:20:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-07T03:36:04.400" Score="-5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to general public definitions, &amp;quot;general public&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot;. Yet the GPL seems to be entirely concerned with the freedom to make changes to software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;few software users care about modifying software&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;few of those who care have the ability to actually do it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;few of those who have the ability have the incentive to go through the steps to do it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the GPL claim to be intended for the general public, or take its interest and freedoms at hearth, yet though its oblations caters exclusively to the needs, abilities and resulting &amp;quot;freedoms&amp;quot; of a rather tiny and niche part of the general public &lt;em&gt;(to which the author of the license belongs)&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to stress that I do not consider &amp;quot;Because it says so&amp;quot; as a valid answer. Making a discriminatory public offering doesn't make it any less discriminatory just because it is being offered to the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to allegations that &amp;quot;I have misinterpreted&amp;quot; what the GPL name stands for on merit of putting imaginary delimiters in arbitrary places - that is not the case, as mentioned several times already, my interpretation on what the &amp;quot;general public&amp;quot; stands for is based on the content of mission statements, philosophies and whatnot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the top of the FSF &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; page - literally the title and the very first sentence :&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all&#xA;software users.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As our society grows more dependent on computers, the software we run&#xA;is of critical importance to securing the future of a free society...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Worldwide&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;all software users&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;free society&amp;quot; - all of those strongly imply &lt;strong&gt;the general public&lt;/strong&gt;, and nothing of what other users have suggested it may mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So perhaps a more interesting and insightful question will be why in the world would the allegedly competent and authoritative community on this site have such a hard time acknowledging something so obvious, so as to compulsively downvote absent provisional information, and meticulously seek to come up with pretty much any other possible combination of interpretations. That is so anti Occam's razor...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16734" LastEditorUserId="16734" LastEditDate="2023-08-08T03:45:31.803" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T17:33:58.363" Title="How exactly is the GPL &quot;general public&quot;?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14189" CreationDate="2023-08-07T06:04:39.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Software licensing agreements are typically expressed through contracts between one licensor and one licensee (even though the same contract is typically offered to multiple recipients).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, Open Source licenses like the GPL provide permissions to &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; to use, share, study, and modify the software for any purpose. Thus, this is a &amp;quot;public&amp;quot; license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct that only a small fraction of the public has the skills to modify software. However, the license also gives permission to use and share the software. That &amp;quot;sharing&amp;quot; part was especially relevant back when software was commonly shared between users on physical media like floppy disks or CD-ROMs. But regardless of whether a recipient exercises these rights, it is important that the rights are there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, OpenOffice was published mostly under the LGPL license. Most OpenOffice users did not have the skills to work on the code. But when the OpenOffice project stagnated after Oracle took over, the license gave developers the ability to fork the project and continue it under the LibreOffice name. LibreOffice continued to fix many security issues, improved compatibility with document formats, and added new features. Thus, end users benefited massively from the right to modify the software, even if they didn't personally exercise that right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German copyright law, gratis public licenses (including Open Source licenses) have special recognition since 2002. Authors typically have a right to equitable compensation, which cannot be contracted away. “The author may, however, grant to all a non-exclusive right of use free of charge.” This is known as the “Linux clause”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2023-08-07T06:04:39.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14193" CreationDate="2023-08-08T16:40:18.013" Score="2" ViewCount="2173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to make a &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/plymouth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plymouth theme&lt;/a&gt; with some pokemon images (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:0152Chikorita.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) from &lt;a href=&quot;https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulbapedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release the theme under GPL3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bulbapedia's Fair Use &lt;a href=&quot;https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Bulbapedia:Fair_use&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; seems confusing to me. Under this policy, can I reuse their images, giving due credit to them in the copyright file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I acknowledge these images in the copyright file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20205" LastEditorUserId="20205" LastEditDate="2023-08-09T12:07:08.960" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T12:07:08.960" Title="Can I reuse Pokemon images from Bulbapedia for making a boot screen theme in Ubuntu?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14192" CreationDate="2023-08-08T18:03:46.490" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No chance whatsoever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those images are copyright Nintendo and friends, and are not released under a free license of any kind. There are only two legal ways you can use the images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By obtaining a license from Nintendo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Under fair use doctrines. This is the basis on which Bulbapedia are using the images, and whether or not that is valid depends on what the images are being used for; you cannot place them under a free license.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Personally, I'd say Bulbapedia's fair use claim wouldn't stand up in courts in most jurisdictions but nobody really cares what I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T18:03:46.490" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14205" CreationDate="2023-08-08T18:07:48.347" Score="3" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing some software that utilises an AGPL-licensed library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This software will produce two outputs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;PDFs that will later be sent to users over a network.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A data feed that is sent to a separate third-party service, which the users may connect to in order to read the data.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case the data feeds can only be consumed; in both cases the user may not actively interact with the software I am developing in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When developing the software for these purposes, do I need to share the source code for it? I am not exactly sure what falls under what the AGPL describes as ‘remote network interaction’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30744" LastActivityDate="2023-08-11T18:51:23.603" Title="What counts as 'network interaction' when using AGPL-licensed software?" Tags="|license|law|agpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-08T23:07:28.873" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the past, and the practice still continues, programs covered by one of the GNU licenses, such as utilities from the GNU Project, have been ported to Microsoft Windows by linking to the &lt;code&gt;MSVCRT.DLL&lt;/code&gt; library. That's something frowned upon by Microsoft because it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=1273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;system library not intended for application use&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for this is that the GPL has a system library exception: GPLed programs can be linked to a proprietary library, if it's part of the target platform (and not a third-party piece that is separately installed). So linking to a redistributable Visual C/C++ run-time would be a GPL violation, but linking to the &lt;code&gt;MSVCRT.DLL&lt;/code&gt; that the operating system installation places into the system folder is okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, Microsoft developed a library that &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; fine for linking by applications, called the Universal C Run-Time. This is bundled in Windows 10 and 11. So it seems that a GPLed program running on Windows 10 or 11 can link to this library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Universal C Run-Time can also be installed on older Windows, as far back as Vista and Server 2008. &lt;strong&gt;Is there a GPL violation if a GPLed program developed for Windows 10, linking with the Universal CRT is run on older Windows where the UCRT has been installed as an add-on&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastActivityDate="2023-08-08T23:07:28.873" Title="Under what conditions can Microsoft's Universal C Run-Time be linked GPLed programs?" Tags="|gpl-2|microsoft|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14196" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-09T06:59:25.660" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I submit a scientific article under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; license to &lt;a href=&quot;https://arxiv.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arXiv&lt;/a&gt;, can I license derivative works (later peer-reviewed versions of the article) under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; license? I am dealing with Elsevier's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/biomedical-signal-processing-and-control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Biomedical Signal processing and Control&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://beta.sherpa.ac.uk/publication/15495&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherpa&lt;/a&gt; requires the latter for their open access publications. I then need to be careful about which license I choose for the submitted first version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt; 4.0 legal code states the following under Section 3.a.4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You Share Adapted Material You produce, the Adapter's License You apply must not prevent recipients of the Adapted Material from complying with this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The additional restrictions NC and ND of &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY-NC-ND&lt;/a&gt; do not seem the prevent attribution required by &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC-BY&lt;/a&gt;, but am I overlooking something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30747" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T06:59:25.660" Title="Is CC-BY-NC-ND compatible with CC-BY for scientific publication?" Tags="|creative-commons|cc-by|cc-by-nc-nd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-08-09T08:03:05.043" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-09T10:07:57.480" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GSDJVU&lt;/a&gt; is a CPL licensed driver for GhostScript (AGPL). &lt;a href=&quot;https://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to DjvuLibre&lt;/a&gt;, it is legal to download the source code for both and compile them, but not to redistribute the compiled program due to incompatibility between CPL and AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which clauses of the CPL and AGPL prevent redistribution of a program compiled from CPL and AGPL source code? DjvuLibre say it's due to their redistribution requirements, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CommonPublicLicense10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU don't mention this as a point of incompatibility&lt;/a&gt;. Would it not be possible to jointly license the compiled program under both CPL and AGPL? Or to create a new license for the compiled program that satisfies the conditions of both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, would any workarounds be possible, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating a wrapper for the GSDJVU drivers that call an external binary (i.e. the CPL licensed driver algorithms), and distributing the compiled GhostScript-with-wrappers under AGPL, and a separate GSDJVU driver binary under CPL? (assuming this is technically possible)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Creating a diff patch from GSDJVU that could be applied to compiled GhostScript executables, and distributing the diff patch under the CPL?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Distributing a script that downloads the relevant source code (both CPL and AGPL with suitable disclaimers) and compiles it to produce GSDJVU?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://djvu.sourceforge.net/gsdjvu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DjvuLibre say&lt;/a&gt; that GhostScript is also available under the GPL, but I haven't been able to confirm if this is still the case, unless they mean the interoperability between AGPL v3 and GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would make life much easier if AT&amp;amp;T did relicense GSDJVU under a GPL compatible license, but after more than 18 years of them failing to do so, it seems pretty unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30754" LastEditorUserId="30754" LastEditDate="2023-08-09T16:32:33.113" LastActivityDate="2023-08-09T16:32:33.113" Title="Are there any ways to distribute a program compiled from both CPL and AGPL source code?" Tags="|gpl-3|license-compatibility|agpl-3.0|relicensing|agpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-09T18:27:30.000" Score="7" ViewCount="4688" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking at opensource licenses and I feel a bit overwhelmed about AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's imagine that I would like to create a facebook clone. I would also like to self host my own object storage (for example min.io) in order to store user's picture. Min.io is distributed under AGPLv3 licence and what I found is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not matter whether it is free to use or a paid subscription for my users, but if I want to use an AGPLv3 distributed software, I have to distribute my own software under the same licence. So does it mean that I have to distribute my entire &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; project under opensource licence, even if I am just using it without any modifications and if I am running it on another server?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, even if commercial use is technically possible under AGPLv3, how is it possible to use it on a real world profitable company (I know that we should not confuse open source and free, but I can not wonder how I could make my &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; profitable if everybody can get all my code online)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please be easy on me since I am just going into opensource licences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Unik6065" LastActivityDate="2023-08-11T19:10:57.340" Title="AGPL3 and commercial use" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14194" CreationDate="2023-08-10T12:13:59.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL does not rigorously define the term &amp;quot;network interaction&amp;quot;, or as the AGPL itself states it &amp;quot;interacting with it remotely through a computer network&amp;quot;, and I don't think there is a legal precedent yet on how to interpret that phrase.&#xA;That means that we should turn to the ordinary English meaning of those words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;interaction&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;interacting&amp;quot;) implies that the user of the software has some control over what the software does and/or when the software does it. If the user is simply receiving data without any control over the data that is being sent to them, then that would most likely not count as &amp;quot;interaction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;network&amp;quot; part (or more correctly, &amp;quot;remotely through a computer network&amp;quot;) means that the interaction happens without other humans in the pipeline and that the user doesn't give the commands on a UI that is physically connected to the machine running the software.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sending an email that is automatically processed to send a PDF back might count as &amp;quot;interaction through a computer network&amp;quot;, but if the email is read by a human, who in turn causes the PDF to be sent, the interaction would no longer be through a computer network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-08-10T12:13:59.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14199" CreationDate="2023-08-10T16:25:59.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to think about this is that AGPL v3 is open source for open source applications. Commercial applications &amp;quot;generally&amp;quot; need commercial licenses. One way to keep your code proprietary is the purchase a commercial license from Minio. This takes care of the obligations associated with the AGPL v3 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of different interpretations of the AGPL v3 license and it is somewhat polarizing. Further, it does not have a lot of case law associated with it which makes the interpretation difficult. It is, however, an approved license by Open Software Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You probably don't need a license to get started, but you will need to resolve it by the time you launch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30766" LastActivityDate="2023-08-10T16:25:59.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-10T17:19:42.063" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with a very large JSON dataset licensed CC-BY-SA. I only need parts of this dataset, and some of the JSON field names are not especially descriptive, so I am re-naming them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the data will not be altered in any way. Does this count as &amp;quot;transformation&amp;quot; under the Share-Alike provision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am doing this work for a nonprofit that wants to make an API to share the data in a more user-friendly way. The source data is tricky to parse/use because of the large raw files and unfriendly markup. If they make this data available via API alongside other data that has different licenses, including proprietary ones, does this create a &amp;quot;compilation&amp;quot; and can they limit what users do with the data they request as part of the API terms of service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each piece of data is atomic: think of it as, say, a list of novels and opinions about them. So for the novel &amp;quot;1984&amp;quot; there might be eight opinions, some sourced from proprietary works, some from public domain works, and some from CC-SA works. The value is in having all the opinions together in one place, and the ease of use for the people who want to see it (the target users do not usually spend a lot of time managing large JSON datasets -- think teachers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this change if the end users can filter their API results to include only opinions from CC-SA licensed works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I haven't mentioned attribution because that's no problem, all the opinions will be cited and linked to their sources.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nonprofit's pro bono lawyers have come up blank on this, they mostly advise about tax law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30768" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-08-15T06:34:23.660" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T21:03:31.313" Title="does reformatting JSON count as 'transformation' for CC-SA?" Tags="|copyleft|cc-by-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-10T19:29:55.407" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello Open Source StackExchange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an open source developer looking to understand how to best get feedback on my open source projects. I am trying to choose effective and easy-to-use tools such that users will be able to easily engage with my project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see that most (if not all) projects use GitHub, and that many also use slack, discord, mailing lists and other methods of managing feedback and contributions to the project. Therefore, I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How did you decide the methods you would use to get feedback?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What has your experience with those tools been like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, what motivates you to contribute to an open source community/ project?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30740" LastActivityDate="2023-08-10T19:29:55.407" Title="Tools and methods for getting feedback and building community around open source projects" Tags="|community|etiquette|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14194" CreationDate="2023-08-11T18:51:23.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AGPLv3InteractingRemotely&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official FAQ&lt;/a&gt; answers this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It simply applies to software that accepts user requests over a computer network and responds to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In AGPLv3, what counts as “interacting with [the software] remotely through a computer network?”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the program is expressly designed to accept user requests and send&#xA;responses over a network, then it meets these criteria. Common&#xA;examples of programs that would fall into this category include web&#xA;and mail servers, interactive web-based applications, and servers for&#xA;games that are played online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a program is not expressly designed to interact with a user through&#xA;a network, but is being run in an environment where it happens to do&#xA;so, then it does not fall into this category. For example, an&#xA;application is not required to provide source merely because the user&#xA;is running it over SSH, or a remote X session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2023-08-11T18:51:23.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14199" CreationDate="2023-08-11T19:03:00.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's easy. If you look at min.io, it is actually available under AGPLv3 and a commercial license. They are two different licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if your software is to be licensed under a GPLv3-compatible license, then you can use min.io under AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you intend to make your software proprietary and closed source, then you need to buy min.io's commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to make money from your &amp;quot;facebook&amp;quot; (without making it open source and distributing it as such), then min.io needs to get their share of the money too, albeit upfront.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-11T19:10:57.340" LastActivityDate="2023-08-11T19:10:57.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14209" CreationDate="2023-08-12T08:00:08.690" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use iText in my application&#xA;Is the application considered open source if I put the AGPL3 license when publishing the application on Google Play only?, or I must to do something else to considered open source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30772" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T11:23:48.637" Title="Publish open source" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|open-source-definition|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14208" CreationDate="2023-08-12T11:23:48.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From your &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/14204/how-i-make-my-app-open-source&quot;&gt;earlier question&lt;/a&gt; (which you have since deleted) I note that your application has to be published under AGPLv3 because it uses an AGPLv3 library.  In consequence, one of your obligations is to convey your binary under the AGPLv3 licence, but there are others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of these is that you must also make the full source for your application available, including that of the associated library, in a comparable manner to the binary.  That doesn't mean you have to put the source up on Google Play as well, but it does mean you have to put it up somewhere, and you have to tell users of the binary about it.  Such conveyance must also be done under AGPLv3, meaning that the recipient is entitled to do what he or she wants with the code, provided he or she also honours the terms of AGPLv3.  This is not the only other obligation, but it's often seen as the largest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-08-12T11:23:48.637" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14211" CreationDate="2023-08-13T11:24:44.387" Score="10" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to sell a Java desktop application of mine to more schools after having success with one single school. Seems like it wouldn't have been a problem, if I haven't mixed different licenses up, but that's exactly what I did. It is no problem for me, to deliver my source code with the program itself when I distribute it to the customers, but the question is under what license I have to publish the program and if I can ask for payment directly or if I need to set up some kind of donation possibility. I am looking forward to your advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used the following dependencies with licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JXL: LGPLv2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JTattoo: GNU GPL v2.0+&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache Commons IO: Apache license 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache POI: Apache license 2.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is no problem for me that the customers are able to modify and redistribute my code, due to the fact that they don't have the knowledge of how to do any of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30788" LastEditorUserId="30788" LastEditDate="2023-08-16T13:49:03.447" LastActivityDate="2023-08-16T14:39:03.020" Title="Inter-compatibility of licenses" Tags="|gpl|apache-2.0|java|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14210" CreationDate="2023-08-13T12:27:43.983" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is based on the information in the currently newest information at time of writing, I quote it here for completeness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;JXL: LGPLv2&#xA;JTattoo: GNU GPL v2.0+&#xA;Apache Commons IO: Apache license 2.0&#xA;Apache POI: Apache license 2.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL v2 is incompatible with the Apache license 2.0, but the GNU GPL v3 &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; compatible. Luckily the JTattoo is licensed as version 2 or any later at your choice, so you may choose GNU GPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus &lt;strong&gt;you are allowed to create a derivative work of the JTattoo, Commons IO and POI libraries under terms of the GPL v3.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license of the JXL under the LGPL v2 does not change the conclusion above: A library under an LGPL license can be included into any work regardless of the combined work's license, even proprietary work. It however imposes the requirement that you allow and enable the recipients of your software to replace the LGPL-licensed library by another version of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case that condition is easily fulfilled: you (have to) offer the complete corresponding source code of the whole project anyway as that is a requirement directly from the GPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the original answer which is based on different license information quoted below. I leave it here for illustration that the details matter a LOT, and that it really pays to pay attention to individual licenses &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; using any software component:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;JXL: GPLv2&#xA;JTattoo: GNU GPL v3&#xA;Apache Commons IO: Apache license 2.0&#xA;Apache POI: Apache license 2.0&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a bit of bad luck, or a hard lesson to learn: if the dependency under GNU GPL v2 is NOT licensed as &lt;em&gt;or any later version of GNU GPL&lt;/em&gt;, you are out of luck, and you are not allowed to distribute the software &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GNU GPL v2 is not compatible with the Apache license v2, however the GNU GPL v3 is. Thus if you don't have the option to distribute Jxl under GPL v3, you will have to remove that dependency or replace it by something else. (If it is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JXL&lt;/a&gt;, you might incorporate the linked version under BSD3, and that is compatible again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus if you are allowed to distribute Jxl under GNU GPL v3, a strong copyleft license, this means in essence that you must offer the full corresponding source code under GPLv3 to your clients to enable them to build the software themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mind: look at the licenses of your dependencies &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; you incorporate them into your work, and check their compatibility with your license, so that you don't accidentally end up with anything you may not distribute to anyone. It may work on your PC, but otherwise have no permission to give the work to anyone else, including any client regardless of their interest in sources or whatever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-08-16T14:39:03.020" LastActivityDate="2023-08-16T14:39:03.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14210" CreationDate="2023-08-13T13:03:48.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an ambiguity about JXL: does it refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/jxl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceforge.net/projects/jexcelapi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that&lt;/a&gt; library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one in under GPLv2 while the second is under LGPLv2. And my guess is that you are using the second library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30789" LastEditorUserId="30789" LastEditDate="2023-08-13T13:20:03.653" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T13:20:03.653" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14210" CreationDate="2023-08-13T16:36:24.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We need to have two questions answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, how are each of the dependencies linked to or used by your software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, is JXL licensed GPLv2-only or GPLv2+?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first question is important, because dynamic and static linking causes all linked software to be subject to the conditions of the GPL license, while aggregates are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If communication to GPL'ed software is done only through inter-process communication like TCP, then they are considered to be aggregates with your software, and so the conditions of the GPL does not apply to your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second question is important in order to determine the overall license compatibility of the software. GPLv2-only software cannot be directly or indirectly linked with GPLv3 software. However, GPLv2+ software can be directly or indirectly linked with GPLv3 software, and the overall combination of it will be licensed under GPLv3. And GPLv3 is compatible with Apache License 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-13T22:45:25.943" LastActivityDate="2023-08-13T22:45:25.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14217" CreationDate="2023-08-15T10:20:40.117" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine I have a program which is licensed by GPLv3. Now will I be able to apply a second license for non-open one? It says that anyone who wants to copy, distribute, modify my program needs my acceptance (like proprietary software). And will it violate GPLv3's terms and conditions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29824" LastActivityDate="2023-08-15T22:19:32.833" Title="Dual-licensing model" Tags="|licensing|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1634" CreationDate="2023-08-15T10:28:25.350" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think only your friend can remove license if he doesn't give it to anyone else. And when you distribute something with GPL, you must carry it with the license as noted in every version of GPL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29824" LastActivityDate="2023-08-15T10:28:25.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14215" CreationDate="2023-08-15T22:19:32.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you wrote the program and are its author, you may grant such a second license. The GPL doesn't limit you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have accepted third-party contributions, ask them for permission or to sign a license or copyright transfer agreement (CLA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are concerned about doing anything with a GPL program that is inconsistent with the GPL, ask for permission from ALL contributors to the program. Once you get their consent, you can do what is stated in the consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-08-15T22:19:32.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14220" CreationDate="2023-08-16T22:44:08.790" Score="10" ViewCount="1452" Body="&lt;p&gt;The formatting issues described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1432952/why-do-plain-text-technical-articles-often-enclose-terms-within-backticks-and-si&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question on Stack Overflow (backtick &lt;code&gt;`&lt;/code&gt; at the start and a single quote &lt;code&gt;'&lt;/code&gt; at the end of the quotes) do also appear in the GNU GPLv3 license text (plain text &amp;amp; markdown version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I fix this issue in a copy by replacing the backticks with single quotes although it is not allowed to edit the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does &lt;code&gt;verbatim&lt;/code&gt; in this case allow formatting the text this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30804" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-08-18T18:50:01.093" LastActivityDate="2023-08-18T18:50:01.093" Title="Fix backtick formatting in GNU GPLv3 license" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14218" CreationDate="2023-08-17T07:00:16.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and I don't know if there is case-law around such changes, but I would expect that changing those back-ticks to regular quote characters would be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not changing the meaning of the text in any way, but only the presentation of it. In that way, this change is comparable to changing where the line break occur in order to have the text fit the width of your display area. To my knowledge, that re-flowing of a document is not considered a modification that is disallowed by copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the markdown version, the argument is even stronger than for the plain-text version, because de back-tick has a special meaning within the markdown format that could adversely affect the showing of the GPL license document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T07:00:16.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14218" CreationDate="2023-08-17T07:42:35.603" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I fix this issue in a copy by replacing the backticks with single quotes although it is not allowed to edit the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle, this kind of change would probably not be forbidden. 'Verbatim' means word-for-word or using exact words. By changing one punctuation mark to another, you are not changing, nor adding, nor deleting any words, so I would reason that your version still qualifies as a verbatim copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the change you propose may be unnecessary in this case. The GPLv3 is already available officially in multiple formats, including Markdown. The official formats are at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/#GPL&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU - Licenses - The GNU General Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official MD version fixes the issue in a more conservative way by using an escape character to escape the special meaning of the backtick character. Notice that the official version performs this escaping only in places where it is technically required (escaping is not required when using this character in a blockquote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T07:42:35.603" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14218" CreationDate="2023-08-17T13:21:47.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is complex to answer because while in your case changing the punctuation does not alter the interpretation, there are cases when this alters the meaning completely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man eating fish (&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Man_Licking_His_Lips_in_Anticipation_of_Eating_Snakehead.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image credit&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u0HHns.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u0HHns.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man-eating fish (&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whiteshark-TGoss1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image credit&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jgx3Hs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jgx3Hs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due that I would really look for, or ask if not found, the official translations or use escape codes if technically possible to have identical visual rendering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3662" LastEditorUserId="3662" LastEditDate="2023-08-17T16:35:00.923" LastActivityDate="2023-08-17T16:35:00.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14228" CreationDate="2023-08-20T18:42:35.020" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long story made short: Have a python based repo in Github currently. It relies on some external software in its compiled/executable form as a simple &lt;code&gt;popen&lt;/code&gt; call. Currently it relies on the user to manually include those. Wondering if it is acceptable in some way to just include these from the getgo into my repo? This other software is already open source under an MIT license and has its own Github repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A previous incarnation of my project started by someone else already did this and used the Git LFS feature. This functioned perfectly fine but for some reason at the time that I can't explain I wasn't quite happy with binary code especially from another repo being included. I'm now second guessing that if only for ease of end user access just cloning a single repo and being done. Additionally, that particular external software often changes enough between versions that my code needs to be updated to handle it. So in a way it would make more sense to maintain the currently supported version in-repo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28319" LastActivityDate="2023-08-21T07:16:48.430" Title="Allowances/rules for including binary/compiled files from another OSS project into my own repo?" Tags="|licensing|github|git|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-21T03:39:36.847" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPLv2.1&lt;/a&gt; license states in Section 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; with the Library to produce a work&#xA;containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under&#xA;terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of&#xA;the &lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt; for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for&#xA;debugging such modifications.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's assume here that the combined work, refers to a proprietary closed source software linked to a LGPLv2.1-licensed Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that the user who receives a distribution of the combined work, must be able to modify the proprietary closed source software for his own use and reverse engineer it for debugging such modifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, does this mean that the user must have the right to modify such proprietary closed source software for his own use (i.e. not distribute such modifications further), but the license does not require that the user should receive the source code to that proprietary closed source software?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I assume that the bolded word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; above refers to the &amp;quot;work that uses the Library&amp;quot; i.e. the proprietary closed source software in my example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-08-21T03:45:59.157" LastActivityDate="2023-08-21T03:45:59.157" Title="Right to modify proprietary software linked to LGPLv2.1-licensed library?" Tags="|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14223" CreationDate="2023-08-21T07:16:48.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the license on the third-party code allows you to re-distribute the binary (and all open-source licenses do allow that), then there is no (legal) reason not to include that binary in your repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you include third-party code in binary form in your repository, you need to follow the requirements that the license places on you for distributing the binary. For the MIT license, that means that you need to have a copy of the license text (unless the binary can reproduce the license itself). For other licenses it could mean that you indicate where the source code for that particular binary can be obtained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, it is a nice gesture of goodwill to indicate which project (with a link) the binary came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-08-21T07:16:48.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-21T15:44:02.983" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm making a personal website whose source code I intend to license under a permissive licence like Apache 2.0, for example, I might host the code on GitHub and use GitHub Pages to host the site. But on the site I'll include original articles/blog posts and music, some of which will by CC0, some CC BY-SA 4.0, and some all rights reserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might in the future host the site elsewhere so I can keep some code private and have some parts of the website unlicensed, so keeping all rights reserved (for example if I make a browser game and host it on mysite.com/game).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the best way to declare the licence clearly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30830" LastActivityDate="2023-08-21T15:44:02.983" Title="How to license website articles under a different licence to source code" Tags="|licensing|website|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-08-23T08:05:31.153" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-22T04:31:47.007" Score="-2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;when we find a GPL-3.0 license project on github.com, The project is BBS tool, it has the theme option. If we write our own theme. do we need to make our theme (source code) for that project public available? because of source code availability of GPL-3.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also that project the ability to install plugins. If we write our own plugins, do we need to follow the license compatibility of GPL, for our own plugins ? making our plugin source code public available? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30834" LastEditorUserId="30834" LastEditDate="2023-08-22T07:37:55.043" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:33:25.627" Title="With GPL3.0 license project on github, Do we need to make our theme (source code) for that project public available? and plugins written our own" Tags="|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-25T17:22:13.043" Score="-3" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing an application for geological research that I intend to sell for commercial purposes. With it I need a GUI too. I started using tkinter, but it seems to be, at least for me, somehow limited and does not support some of the core functions I need for the program (e.g. a MDI). Then I thought of Qt, which people say is very powerful, has lots of functions etc, but I am not sure about the &amp;quot;legal&amp;quot; aspect of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I just want to know if I can use Qt (for free) to develop a closed-source, commercially distributed application?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30860" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2023-08-26T02:48:31.457" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:21:57.820" Title="Can I use Qt for closed source commercial software?" Tags="|commercial|closed-source|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-08-28T06:39:41.467" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-27T09:36:45.560" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the attribution of icons for the PC application (Title, Author, Source and License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have icons from different authors and of course also with different licenses - CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, (commercial use allowed - some with backlink).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is an application (the icons are in the menu, toolbar, etc.), it is not possible to give attribution for each icon in that particular place. So is it possible to include attributions on the &amp;quot;About&amp;quot; page, or direct the user to the web page about the application, where this information would be provided?&#xA;The second option (website) would be better for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any experience with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for any advice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30865" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-08-27T10:05:32.193" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:07:08.957" Title="Icons attribution from various sources" Tags="|creative-commons|attribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14233" CreationDate="2023-08-27T20:07:08.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC license explicitly states that a work must be marked, but it does not say how this must &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Commons makes it clear that attribution can be conditioned by a specific context and medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion - yes - you can put all attributions in the &lt;em&gt;About&lt;/em&gt; section. See how Google does it in Chrome or Mozilla in Firefox (or any other browser). They do a special &amp;quot;Open Source Licenses&amp;quot; section. For CC-BY licenses, this also applies, because these browsers contain content under these licenses.&#xA;See details in Firefox at about:license or chrome://credits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can do a thought experiment: you're writing a book.&#xA;You want to use Creative Commons-licensed graphics in this book.&#xA;Do you have to list the CC licenses on every instance of each graphic? Can you just make yourself a copyright section somewhere at the end or beginning and put that in there?&#xA;You must do this within one work or materials attached directly to that work (e.g. in the description of a video).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you save this information in the app and use the icons in the app, it's a bit like writing the information elsewhere in the book (e.g. at the end of the book). If this argument appeals to you, I would like to point out that programs are often copyrighted &amp;quot;as literary works&amp;quot; (depending on the jurisdiction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you still have any doubts, you can check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Attribution_reasonable_to_means.2C_medium.2C_and_context&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creative commons wiki&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any other questions feel free to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:07:08.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14232" CreationDate="2023-08-27T20:21:57.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes... though not quite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Qt offers commercial and Open Source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most often it's LGPL, but some parts of Qt are GPL-only or not FOSS licensed at all.&#xA;If your product only uses LGPL modules, you must meet the LGPL conditions, i.e. include the source of the Qt libraries. See the GNU (L)GPL FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or the Qt FAQ &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations#lgpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use GPL modules, you must release the project's source code under the GPL license. Remember that binary files can still be sold, but anyone who gets the source code will be able to sell them further. There are strategies like paid support, but it's safer for you to just use the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find a list of Qt modules &lt;a href=&quot;https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. There is a section with GPL-only modules in the table. Or you can directly use this link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth saying that once you start working with Qt Open Source, you may have problems migrating to the commercial version and vice versa. However, Qt will help you with the migration, especially if you are migrating to a commercial version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have any questions for me or have encountered a problem using GPL modules, you can ask me questions here, or if you wish, you can contact me directly if you do not want to publish certain information publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal/financial/business or any other advice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:21:57.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14231" CreationDate="2023-08-27T20:33:25.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on your usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that even if you have to publish these themes/plugins etc. under the GNU GPL, you can choose &lt;strong&gt;any GNU GPL compatible license&lt;/strong&gt; (eg MIT).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you use the theme on your server, it is also debatable whether you need to share it at all. For example, Wordpress users do not post the source code for all parts of Wordpress, even though it is GNU GPLed &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10557/licensing-restrictions-for-a-wordpress-site-hosted-online&quot;&gt;details here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also depends on how the software is built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See these parts from the FSF FAQ:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even if you must publish your theme or plugin, it only applies when you distribute these works. You may freely use them for internal use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: If you specify what kind of software it is, I'll be able to help you more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, don't hesitate to ask questions or contact me directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T20:33:25.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14202" CreationDate="2023-08-27T21:03:31.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you transform depends on (1) what CC-BY-SA license you have in mind; (2) how you transform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't alter the text per se, it's not a derivative work in many jurisdictions because there are no creative parts altered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA used to base these modifications on this definition in some places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA 4.0 says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licenser. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY-SA 3.0:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Adaptation&amp;quot; means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image (&amp;quot;synching&amp;quot;) will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check if your use really changes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Including a work in a database does not always mean that the entire database must be covered by this license, because it is a reproductive collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of collections, in version 3.0 CC-BY-SA there are special definitions and conditions of the so-called. collection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Collection&amp;quot; means a collection of literary or artistic works, such as encyclopedias and anthologies, or performances, phonograms or broadcasts, or other works or subject matter other than works listed in Section 1(f) below, which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations, in which the Work is included in its entirety in unmodified form along with one or more other contributions, each constituting separate and independent works in themselves, which together are assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation (as defined below) for the purposes of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Version 4.0 also keeps the rule: own license for the collection, but the original work is under the CC license (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#if-i-create-a-collection-that-includes-a-work-offered-under-a-cc-license-which-licenses-may-i-choose-for-the-collection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#if-i-create-a-collection-that-includes-a-work-offered-under-a-cc-license-which-licenses-may-i-choose-for-the-collection&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a long presentation of the arguments, the collection argument seems to meet your expectations the most. Remember that if you are using part of the database under the CC license, and not creating the entire database from scratch, the CC-BY-SA terms may oblige you to share the database under the same license (sui generis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if You include all or a substantial portion of the database contents in a database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights, then the database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights (but not its individual contents) is Adapted Material, including for purposes of Section 3(b);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section 3(b) is a ShareAlike (SA) section.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from CC-BY-SA 4.0&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-08-27T21:03:31.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13075" CreationDate="2023-08-28T12:16:00.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The owners of AGPL-licensed software cannot coerce nor force users into acquiring commercial licenses. Nevertheless, it is essential for users to adhere to the terms outlined in the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When your software uses an AGPL library, it's imperative to grant users the ability to utilize their modified versions of the AGPL library (even when your software is served through a network, say, as a web application). Consequently, sharing your software's source code becomes necessary. If your software is proprietary in nature, an alternative option is available: you can procure a distinct license from the AGPL library owners, effectively exempting you from these obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following questions from the GNU-FAQ are potentially relevant:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedModsAGPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedModsAGPL&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer below is also relevant:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9806/21359&quot;&gt;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/9806/21359&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21359" LastActivityDate="2023-08-28T12:16:00.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2772" CreationDate="2023-08-29T08:06:51.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The GPL is 'viral' &amp;quot; is no more true than it is of all EULAs, and copyright in general. If you incorporate other people's work into your own, then you may only do so on the terms that they agree to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither GPL nor the Nvidia Source Code License (NSCL) allow you to change the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can write your own program that depends on two libraries, one on a GPL, the other on the NSCL. You can distribute your source code, and let the user build your program themselves. This way another person can edit your source to use different libraries if they wish to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that the entire FSF GNU project was developed in the space of Unix variants. It gradually replaced the proprietary components of the existing systems with free-and-open GPL components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30879" LastActivityDate="2023-08-29T08:06:51.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14243" CreationDate="2023-08-29T11:20:11.590" Score="6" ViewCount="1627" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a math professor, and I'm considering pushing my department to adopt &lt;a href=&quot;https://openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenStax&lt;/a&gt; textbooks. These are free, and the website says that they are offered under the CC BY-NC-SA license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://assets.openstax.org/oscms-prodcms/media/documents/Calculus_Volume_1_-_WEB_68M1Z5W.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the actual book&lt;/a&gt; lists some additional conditions on redistribution: the logo and &amp;quot;OpenStax&amp;quot; name are not to be reproduced, and an attribution is to be added on every page. As there is no .tex code (or similar) provided for the book, I don't see any way to produce modified versions, or in particular to produce a version without their logos or with the attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose that OpenStax gets shut down and stops distributing their textbooks, or that they start charging a lot of money for them. Would my math department be able to continue distributing old versions to our students for free?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30881" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-08-31T10:15:54.820" LastActivityDate="2023-08-31T10:15:54.820" Title="An open-source license that seems impossible to comply with" Tags="|licensing|cc-by-nc-sa|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14242" CreationDate="2023-08-29T12:13:04.610" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have received (copied) a text book under a certain license, and you can use this material forever (as long as you comply with the terms. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;license&lt;/a&gt; states &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This Public License applies for the term of the Copyright and Similar Rights licensed here. ...&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot; This license does not terminate if the licensor later decides to charge money or ceases to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the right place to recommend tools which allow you to copy or modify content from PDF files. But they exist. So you will be able to create (with some effort) .tex files, and you can create versions (adapted materials) of the book without the trademarks of OpenStax. However, you will still be required to provide attribution to the Rice University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Note: Edited below to include issues triggered by the Rice University's specific attribution requirements]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the webpage, the Rice University states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this title is published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0&#xA;license, which means that you are free to use and adapt, but not for&#xA;commercial purposes. Changes you make need to be shared using this&#xA;license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the PDF file, the Rice University explains how they would like to see the attribution requirement to be fulfilled: [Note_1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case of sharing the original or adapted material, whether in&#xA;whole or in part, the user must provide proper attribution as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you noncommercially redistribute this textbook in a digital format (including but not limited to PDF and HTML), then you must&#xA;retain on every page the following attribution: “Download for free at&#xA;[...] openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you noncommercially redistribute this textbook in a print format, then you must include on every physical page the following&#xA;attribution: “Download for free at&#xA;[...] openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you noncommercially redistribute part of this textbook, then you must retain in every digital format page view (including but not&#xA;limited to PDF and HTML) and on every physical printed page the&#xA;following attribution: “Download for free at&#xA;[...] openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you use this textbook as a bibliographic reference, please include [...] openstax.org/details/books/calculus-volume-1 in your&#xA;citation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here starts the problem. While the CC license (Section 3.a.1.A.v) allows the download link, I think this language &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Download for free at...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; does not qualify as proper attribution, which is usually mentioning the copyright holder of the materials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it is demanded that the download link is present on every page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 1: If you redistribute this textbook unmodified as a PDF, then you run into the issues that (a) there is a different message present on most of the pages (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This OpenStax book is available for free at [...] cnx.org/content/col11964/1.12&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) and (b) this message is not even present on every page of the existing PDF [Note_1]. So in order to comply with the attribution format required by the copyright holder, you would need to use a PDF editor to edit each and every page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Case 2: If you redistribute Adapted Material based on the PDF, where for example you copy chapters 2, 4 and 6 from this textbook while you write chapters 1, 3 and 5 yourself from scratch, then the requirement to have the download message on every page will be confusing and misleading, because that statement is factually wrong, your file cannot be downloaded from the link provided by Rice University.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The requirement for attribution on each and every page is also in contradiction with the CC license Section 3.a.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable&#xA;manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the&#xA;Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the&#xA;conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes&#xA;the required information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, when you download the textbook, modify it and distribute it further, the recipient is a 'downstream recipient' and you are bound to the CC license without any additional terms. Section 2.a.5.C states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No downstream restrictions. You may not offer or impose any additional&#xA;or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective&#xA;Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts&#xA;exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed&#xA;Material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that when distributing the adapted materials downstream, you are &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; allowed to impose the '&lt;em&gt;on every page&lt;/em&gt;' requirement of Rice University to any downstream recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You must comply with the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Where statements in the PDF are in conflict with the terms of the CC license you can likely ignore these statements because on the website the Rice University clearly commits to the CC license without any caveats.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you want to be friendly you may contact the support[at]openstax email address, point them to the discrepancies in their offering, and ask for clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note_1: This language is taken from just one of their files, it may vary in different files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this is not legal advice. IANAL, and courts in Texas sometimes have come to strange verdicts in cases related to IPR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-08-31T08:35:28.320" LastActivityDate="2023-08-31T08:35:28.320" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-08-31T15:43:07.917" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prior to the Copyright Act of 1976 (which, confusingly, only went into effect in 1978) the copyright rules were different. One of the things that was introduced was that after the beginning of 1978, software could be explicitly copyrighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what about software which was published before 1978? I've seen a variety of opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that it can't be copyrighted at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;em&gt;representation&lt;/em&gt; of the software can be copyrighted. For example, a magnetic tape containing the program. But the program itself can't be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;em&gt;source code&lt;/em&gt;, being a literary work, can be copyrighted, but the object code which can't be read by humans can't be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that it works the same way as it does today (although with an expiry date of publish + 28 + 28 years).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why this is interesting is that it may or may not make pre-1978 software public domain in certain circumstances, even if it was published with a copyright notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone actually know about any of this? Finding information on pre-1978 copyright is like pulling hen's teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15163" LastActivityDate="2023-08-31T15:43:07.917" Title="How did software copyright work in the US before 1978?" Tags="|copyright|public-domain|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2023-08-31T19:00:30.327" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-06T20:42:42.167" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building a web application in which I intend to keep the source code private and proprietary. The web application would be used by end users for personal profit. I plan on using Turborepo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://turbo.build/repo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://turbo.build/repo&lt;/a&gt;) by Vercel in order to speed up builds of my monorepo and using Terraform (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.terraform.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.terraform.io/&lt;/a&gt;) by Hashicorp for automating my infrastructure. Turbo is under the MPL 2.0 and Terraform is under the BSL. All of the other packages I intend to use are under the MIT or ISC license. I am confused about the constraints this puts on me. I am not going to make any changes to their source code at all, and don't even plan on distributing it, but both of these tools would be used in the build and deploy pipeline of my web app. Is there a difference between using these as build and development tools in my pipeline versus using them as packages in my own source code? Would this mean I need to reveal the source code or can I keep the project proprietary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30952" LastActivityDate="2023-09-07T08:16:11.917" Title="Can I use MPL 2.0 and BSL licensed software for a proprietary repo?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license|copyleft|mpl|license-compliance|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14255" CreationDate="2023-09-07T05:50:40.097" Score="8" ViewCount="1003" Body="&lt;p&gt;All contributions to the Stack Exchange Websites are &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing&quot;&gt;released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC-BY-SA)&lt;/a&gt;, either version 2.5, 3.0, or 4.0 depending on the post date. This applies to both code and other text in questions and answers. Code released under this license &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271293/use-stack-overflow-answer-in-gpl-software-how-to-ask-for-permission&quot;&gt;can be used under version 4 of the CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt; (while the original code remains under the older version if released as such) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be combined with the General Public License (GPL) version 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creative Commons recommends not using any of their licenses with software&lt;/a&gt;, because &amp;quot;Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under&amp;quot; them (&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the CC-BY-SA legal code&lt;/a&gt;). This means that a user could post a question or an answer with code to a Stack Exchange site and even if another user uses that code in a project licensed under the GPL version 3 and completely complies with the requirements of both licenses, the first user could sue the second user for patent infringement through a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;submarine patent&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who want to integrate Stack Exchange code in their GPL projects, is there anything they can do to protect themselves from possible patent trolling from the originators of the code on the Stack Exchange sites? I don't think this is likely to happen, but you can never be too careful with software licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastActivityDate="2023-09-07T15:39:26.207" Title="Stack Exchange's CC-BY-SA and Patents" Tags="|gpl|cc-by-sa|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14251" CreationDate="2023-09-07T07:24:27.307" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer to your question is &amp;quot;no, there's nothing you can do about it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then the same applies to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6810/why-doesnt-the-mit-license-have-patent-use-permission&quot;&gt;any MIT or BSD licensed code you use in your projects&lt;/a&gt; so the additional risk you're taking on here is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; minimal, unless someone is deliberately putting up patent-encumbered code on Stack Exchange with the intent of suing people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-09-07T07:24:27.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14250" CreationDate="2023-09-07T08:16:11.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a difference between using these as build and development tools in my pipeline versus using them as packages in my own source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes there is a difference. From a copyright perspective, your software is unlikely to be a derived work of your build tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your software is not a derived work of your build tools, you can also license your software completely independently from the licenses of your build tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-09-07T08:16:11.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14256" CreationDate="2023-09-07T08:35:52.417" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;Basically &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Hey, look, I felt your soft A lacked this so I made this Soft B. You can buy it and add it or do whatever you want with it but don't be a dick and give credit where it's due. Also there are a bunch of people who made forks so let them be. They can do whatever they want with them as long as they attribute original authors&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. What to do? Is there some existing license, CLA or something to do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What tools (licenses, agreements) are needed to make a software so that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the code is freely available* (something like &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; but I know there are some technicalities with what &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; actually means)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;forks can be created under something similar to LGPL-3.0 (must share source and additionally attribute original contributors)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can decide to sell &lt;strong&gt;my original&lt;/strong&gt; source to 3rd party without needing to contact the contributors and ask for their permission and without risk of someone declaring suddenly that they don't agree to selling and they want to take down their contributions. Fork owners can decide if they also want this or they want to be more open (contributors won't need to sign CLA).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you contribute to my source you will be attributed. This transfers to whatever fork.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When 3rd party buys it, they can include it in their software hassle-free with no need to reveal their source. They can then do whatever they want with that code, but keep attributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The transition from my hands to 3rd party hands is hassle free.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;forks can live on their own, neither I nor the 3rd party have a right to issue DMCA/C&amp;amp;D for them even after acquiring my original code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically the above things are (imo) the result of making the following scenario legally sound: &lt;strong&gt;Soft A&lt;/strong&gt; owned by big company &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;, I create &lt;strong&gt;Soft B&lt;/strong&gt; meant to work with &lt;strong&gt;Soft A&lt;/strong&gt; (without breaking their EULA/licensing etc). I can share my source, allow to make forks (they must include attributions though) and contributions, but in the future I can sell my &lt;strong&gt;soft B&lt;/strong&gt; (with contributions) to &lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; so that they can incorporate it hassle free into their codebase (must add attributions) and I can make that decision alone without contributors deciding against it. What they do with their bought source is none of my business. They cannot, however, require existing forks to be taken down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was initially thinking about LGPL-3.0 (forks must be open) with contributor license agreement (copyright transfer, like CAA), but I don't know if it's possible to later sell LGPL-3.0 without the need for 3rd party to open their source, or is it possible to sublicense that to them (and how). How to also force the 3rd party to attribute original authors/contributors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please don't bash me if the question is stupid, trivial or something, legality in software is a complicated thing and I find it hard wrapping my head around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30959" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-08T08:27:31.740" LastActivityDate="2023-09-08T08:27:31.740" Title="License like LGPL-3.0, but owner can sell source to 3rd party freely and contributors can't say no or revoke code" Tags="|licensing|contributor-agreements|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14251" CreationDate="2023-09-07T10:02:12.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is: Don't worry, there is no patent on software code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I agree with Philip's answer, there is another aspect which I think is more relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code is protected by copyright, not by patents. So-called 'software patents' are in reality 'system and method'-patents, they protect the way things work, not the code itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Code snippets on SE (under CC BY-SA license) are usually short and not complete executable programs. They are unlikely to implement a complete functionality that would constitute a patent infringement. The risk of code under CC BY-SA is not different from the risk that comes with any other code under BSD Licenses, Boost Software License, The Unlicense or MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is always a small risk that running certain software might infringe a 3rd party patent. But this risk comes from the entire software, not from the snippets it contains. And it depends on many circumstances (where it is run, how it is implemented, and the field of application). 5 components might separately each have no patent risk w.r.t. a certain patented method (and thus a patent license would not be given as each separate component alone does not infringe essential patent claims) , but if you combine them they might be a spot-on implementation of a patented method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, the author of software cannot be the victim of a patent troll, the risk lies with the person or organization that runs the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B.t.w.: The term '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;patent troll&lt;/a&gt;' has a very specific meaning. It refers to a company which owns patents and tries to monetize them without actually operating in the business fields covered by the patents they own (this is why they are called 'non-practicing entity'). Because they are non-practicing, it is very unlikely that a patent troll would actually be the author of such software. The real (very small) risk actually would come from companies operating in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-09-07T15:39:26.207" LastActivityDate="2023-09-07T15:39:26.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14254" CreationDate="2023-09-08T08:26:30.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the discussion in chat, it looks like a dual-licensing scheme will work best for you.  You will distribute your code under LGPL, but you will also sell a proprietary license for the early version of your code, in which you are the sole rightsholder, that allows non-free products to be made with your code while requiring attribution in those products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you wish to avoid requiring a CLA from contributors, you will need to be very careful, going forward, to distinguish between the sole-rightsholder version, which presumably will need bugfixes, and the contributions-accepted version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This achieves points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 above.  6 is questionable; recipients who take it under LGPL have a hassle-free transfer.  If anyone asks for the commercial option, well, I personally think that arranging commercial contracts is a major hassle, but if you don't, then it achieves 6 also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-09-08T08:26:30.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-08T11:46:46.337" Score="13" ViewCount="2616" Body="&lt;p&gt;GNU's website has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ section&lt;/a&gt; where they say what constitutes and what doesn't constitute a 'single combined program'. My current understanding is that, if you use GPL code in a 'single combined program', your whole 'single combined program' MUST be released under the GPL, as they say &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Is this interpretation enforceable in a court of law and reflected in the license, or is this just the way GNU would like you to think about it and you could realistically argue otherwise in court?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30971" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-08T12:36:47.473" LastActivityDate="2023-09-18T17:13:17.017" Title="Is GNU's stance on what constitutes a 'single combined program' universally accepted?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14257" CreationDate="2023-09-08T12:02:58.917" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to law, &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt; is ever proven until its been decided in a court of law - even if I walked up to someone in broad daylight and shot them dead in front of hundreds of witnesses, I &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; wouldn't have committed murder until I was found guilty by a court. Barring extenuating circumstances (insanity etc), it's of course incredibly likely that a court would find me guilty in that case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same principle applies to copyright law - while anybody, the FSF or otherwise, can opine on matters of copyright law, nobody has actually committed a copyright offence unless a court finds that, and every situation is to some extent unique. The FSF's opinion is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; pretty close to what courts in most of the &amp;quot;western world&amp;quot; would rule, but that doesn't mean it's universally true. (I don't know enough about e.g. the Chinese legal system to know how things would potentially go down there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I violate my own GPL license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;As the copyright holder, you are incapable of violating your own license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-09-08T21:49:48.427" LastActivityDate="2023-09-08T21:49:48.427" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14260" CreationDate="2023-09-08T13:11:59.450" Score="9" ViewCount="1019" Body="&lt;p&gt;Say I have a personal software project that I would like to be Open-Source. 100% of the source code for my version of that project is available online for everyone (e.g. on GitHub). I'd the like to grant/impose the following freedoms/restrictions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anyone is free to use my project, modify it, redistribute it (all the freedoms that GNU licenses usually grant).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone modifies my source code and redistributes it, they have to &lt;em&gt;make my source code and their changes&lt;/em&gt; publicly available.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone links to a (potentially proprietary) dependency in their modified version of my project and distributes it, they HAVE to make the modification that links to the dependency publicly available, BUT they do NOT have to distribute the dependency AND they do NOT have make the source code for the dependency public.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If someone incorporates my project or their own modified version of it in a larger work (i.e. simply add to my project/their modified version of it), as long as they comply with the conditions listed above, they can license their larger work however they want.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of point 4: someone modifies my work to fit their needs, publishes the entire source code of the modified version of my project, uses this modified version in a larger, proprietary, work and notifies the user about using the modified version of my work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What license should I choose in order to achieve this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30971" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-08T13:35:35.983" LastActivityDate="2023-09-08T14:00:24.173" Title="How should an Open-Source project that can be integrated into proprietary software be licensed?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14259" CreationDate="2023-09-08T14:00:24.173" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lets go over your licensing points one by one and see what restrictions they put on your choice for a license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 1 (Anyone can make changes and distribute them) suggests that you want an open-source license. That makes the question on-topic here, but does not otherwise limit your choice among the open-source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 2 (My code must remain open-source) points towards a copyleft license. The GNU licenses are popular examples, but there are others as well.y&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 4 (Ability to use in larger, proprietary, project) indicates that you want a &lt;em&gt;weak copyleft&lt;/em&gt; license. It is primarily your code and the changes to it that you want to keep open. This removes the GPL and AGPL licenses from the list of possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Number 3 (Ability to use a proprietary dependency) is where it becomes more difficult to give a recommendation. That also depends on where exactly the dividing line lies between &amp;quot;a modification to link to the dependency&amp;quot; and the dependency itself. Also, do you want to allow someone to write a proprietary replacement and change your (open-source) code to only be a wrapper around the proprietary code, or do you want to limit the proprietary dependencies that they can only hook into a defined part of the system (like a plug-in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two licenses that I would recommend for your consideration are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mpl-2-0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MPL 2.0&lt;/a&gt;: A file-based copyleft license. This means that the copyleft aspect of the license extends only to the code that was explicitly marked as subject to the license. It is possible to add extra files to a project under a different, potentially proprietary, license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This license meets all your requirements, if you don't mind that parts of the code linking a third-party proprietary dependency could be added through non-MPL files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/lgpl-3-0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL 3.0&lt;/a&gt;: A weak copyleft license.&#xA;This license does not actually meet condition 3, but there are ways to incorporate that and it is a very well-known license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to support condition 3 in the LGPL is through a mechanism called &amp;quot;additional permissions&amp;quot;: Next to the statements that the code is under the LGPL license, you add a paragraph stating what people are allowed to do that would not be normally allowed under the LGPL license. This could be used, for example, to allow linking with proprietary dependencies that make use of a plug-in mechanism that you provide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL+permissions option is more suitable if there is a fairly narrow use-case for proprietary dependencies that you want to allow and you can clearly articulate that in a &amp;quot;additional permission&amp;quot; paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to allow proprietary dependencies in a broader way, then the MPL would be the better choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-09-08T14:00:24.173" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14257" CreationDate="2023-09-08T21:03:17.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philip Kendall is technically correct, but here's some more practical not-technically-legal-advice-that-might-technically-be-wrong-in-court from a legal layman such as myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practical terms, the GPL restricts releases of software that links to (statically or dynamically) the GPL-licensed library or program and dictates that those releases must be released under the same license as the library. Or at least this is the commonly understood interpretation and what is written in the FAQ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL is essentially the same, but it allows dynamic linking without having to license the program using the dynamically linked library with the same license. (or if you want to get pedantic, it means that end users must be able to swap out the library for their own personal use, which could allow static linking if the user is able to re-compile the program to swap out the library for a different or modified version of that library)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some weird edge cases, like how running a commercial set-top-box on Linux is ok even though the Linux kernel is licensed with GPLv2 and it is not generally feasible to jailbreak the box to upgrade or modify the kernel. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but there's probably some case law on the matter or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what would qualify as a release, anything that is publicly available for download in any way would &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; count as a release for the purposes of the license. If the software is only on your local computer, private repositories, and cloud services that only you (or your company) have access to, then it would not count as a release (most likely) and would not need to comply with the license, even if they were part of a publicly accessible server.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL and SSPL and some similar licenses try to restrict the use of the software even in servers and managed services. Businesses that license their software in this way (e.g. Redis, MongoDB) are essentially trying to funnel people who don't want to stand up and manage their own clusters toward their premium enterprise services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyleft licenses like the GPL tend to be pretty infectious, so corporate legal counsels will typically advise against using GPL software in your code, if not outright banning it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your own personal editor setup and configuration is not a release and I highly doubt it's their intent to prevent end users from customizing their software. You are perfectly within practical limits of the license. Going after you for tinkering with your NeoVim setup would conflict with the entire GNU Free Software philosophy, so they wouldn't sue even if they technically could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all limitations of copyleft licenses only practically apply to commercial use or when combining multiple open-source projects that are licensed incompatibly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20141" LastEditorUserId="20141" LastEditDate="2023-09-18T17:13:17.017" LastActivityDate="2023-09-18T17:13:17.017" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14257" CreationDate="2023-09-09T22:26:20.093" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL FAQ is not part of the GPL, therefore it is not something that a GPL licensed program is relying on.  The FAQ is the opinion of the FSF, but it is not necessarily the opinion of the author(s) of the software (the ones granting the licence) nor a court.  Courts have varying rules about cases setting precedence and those vary from one jurisdiction to another.  In many jurisdictions the FSF would have no standing to partake in a lawsuit between the authors and a licensee of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the specific case of the GPL, one contention is the definition of 'linking'.  In Unix, there's a commonly-understood way things are done.  But consider a retrocomputer where third-party software can be provided on ROM chips or cartridges - there are no files, no linker tool, just lumps of binary code.  Plug in a utility ROM chip and call its functions from your code by their (known) address.  In Unix that may be called 'static linking' which is widely considered to cause the ROM to come under the GPL, but those computers operated in a very different way from Unix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, such questions would need to be decided by a court and, to my knowledge, nobody has tested them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30991" LastActivityDate="2023-09-09T22:26:20.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14263" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-13T20:41:25.670" Score="19" ViewCount="3536" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say Person A creates some code and licenses it under a GPL license. If someone (we'll call them Person B) then creates code which derives from Person A's code, but fails to obey the terms of the license and mark their modified code in a GPL compliant fashion, they're at fault and can be held accountable for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what happens if Person B, prior to being held accountable, tells a new person, Person C, that they can use their code with no restrictions? Person B is at fault for disobeying the license they were presented with, but Person C had no reasonable way of knowing that the code Person B gave them permission to use wasn't &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; theirs to give permission for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens to Person C's code in this situation? Are they forced to obey the terms of the license that were &lt;strong&gt;not at all&lt;/strong&gt; communicated to them because of Person B's breach of the license? Or are they somehow exempt from it because they weren't presented with the correct license? What rights does Person A have, and what rights does Person C have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an actual situation I'm dealing with, and I'm not sure how to proceed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31025" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-13T21:08:50.707" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T11:15:53.177" Title="GPL compliance when license was not provided? (You unknowingly derived from code that was in breach of GPL)" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14263" CreationDate="2023-09-13T21:23:41.010" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a software licensing standpoint, C has been in violation of A's licence terms throughout, although hitherto (s)he did not know it.  Whilst &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ignorance of the law excuses nothing&lt;/a&gt;, A would have to be pretty hard-hearted to do more than point this out (and to B also).  But once C has been clearly informed, (s)he must not continue to distribute this code in violation of the GPL.  To do so would be knowingly to violate A's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Organisations like the Software Freedom Conservancy &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;deal with this sort of situation&lt;/a&gt; all the time, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;general community principle&lt;/a&gt; is always to bring about compliance, rather than to seek any kind of compensatory remedy.  So as long as C brings him/herself into GPL compliance, the matter is very likely to end there.  If (s)he doesn't wish to, then as long as (s)he ceases distribution, again, the matter is likely to end there.  But there is no legal basis for your idea that C is permanently exempted from A's licence by B's error, and if C continues to distribute in violation, A will be entitled to take action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be grounds for C to make some kind of tortious claim against B; we can't say more because that will depend on jurisdiction and the particulars of the case, and moreover is off-topic for this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-14T10:11:21.330" LastActivityDate="2023-09-14T10:11:21.330" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14263" CreationDate="2023-09-14T12:33:55.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What rights does Person A have, and what rights does Person C have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person A&lt;/strong&gt; can sue Person B and Person C for copyright infringement if they can formulate a reasonable damage claim. For instance, if A is offering their software for free under GPL and for $20 under a proprietary license, they could sue B or C for $20 times the number of copies B and C have distributed. If A is not making any money with their software, claiming damages becomes hard/impossible in most countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Person C&lt;/strong&gt; could sue Person B for any damages that A claims from them, plus additional expenses to remove B's code from their software. However, if B has distributed their code under a typical permissive license such as MIT, they would have included a &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disclamer&lt;/a&gt; which frees them from responsibility towards C. Only if C can prove B's malicious intent they could sue them for fraud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C had no reasonable way of knowing that the code Person B gave them permission to use wasn't actually theirs to give permission for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is unlikely to hold in court as a defence. Assuming A have published their GPL software on the Internet, C could have used an open-source scanner to find out the origin of the code they received from B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2829" LastEditorUserId="2829" LastEditDate="2023-09-15T11:15:53.177" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T11:15:53.177" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-14T14:39:04.193" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am navigating licensing, and this is very confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I produced a lot of R code to analyze data for a research article that will be published on a peer-reviewed journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading here &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4666/license-for-r-scripts&quot;&gt;License for R scripts&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;I can understand that I would need to pay attention to the license type of the packages I used before choosing a license for my code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I have a few issues as the R packages I used have all different types of licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;gt; packageDescription(&amp;quot;ggplot2&amp;quot;, fields=&amp;quot;License&amp;quot;)&#xA;[1] &amp;quot;MIT + file LICENSE&amp;quot;&#xA;&amp;gt; packageDescription(&amp;quot;glmmTMB&amp;quot;, fields=&amp;quot;License&amp;quot;)&#xA;[1] &amp;quot;AGPL-3&amp;quot;&#xA;&amp;gt; packageDescription(&amp;quot;RColorBrewer&amp;quot;, fields=&amp;quot;License&amp;quot;)&#xA;[1] &amp;quot;Apache License 2.0&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list is quite long and I also have &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;GPL (&amp;gt;= 2.0)&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;GPL-3&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; .&#xA;So, I am now very confused on how should I license my code, as I am aware that not in all cases the different licenses are compatible with each other. For example, GPL v2 is not always compliant with GPL v3 and vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a way I can understand this and avoid of making mistakes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly I also have used packages with GPL V2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31033" LastEditorUserId="990" LastEditDate="2023-09-19T08:57:35.457" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T08:57:35.457" Title="License R code when using R packages with different license types" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|multi-licensing|publishing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14266" CreationDate="2023-09-14T15:02:11.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the licenses you list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;AGPL-3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache v2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;GPL v2+&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MIT is a very permissive license and can be combined with either of the other three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache v2 is a permissive license, but due to some patent indemnification clauses it is incompatible with GPL v2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL v3 is like the GPLv3 but with the further requirement that its terms also apply when users interact with the software over a network interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus from the mentioned licenses, your &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; choice to distribute software with libraries using all mentioned licenses, is the AGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that this is settled, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of licenses compatible with the (A)GPL v3&lt;/a&gt; as provided by the FSF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most noteworthy license you can NOT combine your work with (and still legally distribute it), will be libraries which are under GPL v2 only (thus without the option to choose a newer version of the GPL). You will be able to include any library under any of the usual permissive licenses like MIT, BSD, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May sound like a picky detail: you are not necessarily required to license your code under the AGPL v3 under these circumstances. But you may only distribute the whole software along with all the required libraries under AGPL v3 (as long as one of the required libraries is under AGPL v3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This said: AGPL v3 is not a bad license for science, rather on the contrary: it requires attribution as any open source license, and it requires users to share their code modifications when they distribute it, and also share it when they offer a service with it, e.g. a website which interactively calculates stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further: if you do not distribute any complete software, you basically can choose any license - but the &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; choice might make it un-distributable for everyone else, too. As such my recommendation remains to always to use a license which allows distribution with all libraries used included. In your case that would be AGPL v3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-09-15T08:27:33.330" LastActivityDate="2023-09-15T08:27:33.330" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14263" CreationDate="2023-09-14T15:16:38.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;C, who did not know about the license offered by A, could not have agreed to it and is not bound by it.  However, without a license from A to do so, C has no right to make and distribute copies of A's copyrighted work, or B's derivative based on A's work.  So avoiding the license A offers doesn't help C at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="758" LastActivityDate="2023-09-14T15:16:38.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14270" CreationDate="2023-09-14T20:51:05.227" Score="18" ViewCount="4836" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some Linux distros, such as PureOS, ship Firefox with the official branding. Others ship a debranded fork of Firefox, such as Trisquel's Abrowser. PureOS and Trisquel are both FSF-approved Linux distros that only ship 100% Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the debranding itself isn't required for Firefox to be Free Software since PureOS gets away with not doing it. I also assume that distros like Trisquel aren't debranding it just for fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there this discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this just vestigial because either Mozilla's terms of use for the branding, or the Free Software Definition, were different before and the build process was just never updated accordingly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some difference in policy between the distros that still requires it in some but not others, and if so, what exactly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or something else entirely?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11403" LastEditorUserId="24959" LastEditDate="2023-09-15T20:09:19.173" LastActivityDate="2023-09-17T07:17:25.073" Title="Why do some, but not all, 100% Free Software distros rebrand Firefox?" Tags="|forking|free-software-definition|trademark|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14269" CreationDate="2023-09-15T00:11:59.580" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mozilla requires that the product must be built unmodified or the changes made to the distribution be approved by them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debian&lt;/a&gt; considered parts of Firefox (the trademarked logo, and non-free artwork) a showstopper so that they used a rebranded Firefox without the proprietary logo and artwork. E.g., see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/10/msg00673.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion in the mailing list&lt;/a&gt; back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some distributions disable or modify certain aspects of the browser (e.g., the ad source on the default starting page or disabling some optional telemetry which Mozilla asks users about) which may or may not be compliant with Mozilla guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially it's a per-project decision whether you want to fulfill what Mozilla requires to distribute it approved or unmodified under their trademark Firefox or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thunderbird&lt;/a&gt;, or do you opt to not follow their guidelines, and then go for a rebranded version to your own liking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original issue between Mozilla and Debian has been resolved (e.g., see &lt;a href=&quot;https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pcworld.com/article/419749/iceweasel-will-be-renamed-firefox-as-relations-between-debian-and-mozilla-thaw.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), so that Debian uses (again) Firefox under its name, but that not necessarily applies to every distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-09-17T07:17:25.073" LastActivityDate="2023-09-17T07:17:25.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14272" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-16T21:24:36.433" Score="2" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider an executable program whose source is licensed under the MIT and/or Apache 2.0 license and that depends (directly &amp;amp; indirectly) on a number of libraries written by third parties that are each licensed under MIT and/or Apache 2.0.  (By &amp;quot;licensed under MIT and/or Apache 2.0&amp;quot;, I mean being licensed under terms that, when expressed as an SPDX license identifier, equal &amp;quot;MIT&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Apache-2.0&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;MIT OR Apache-2.0&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;MIT AND Apache-2.0&amp;quot;.)  This program is compiled into a single statically-linked binary containing compiled copies of each dependency (i.e., dynamic linking is not involved, except possibly for core language or OS libraries) and distributed to end-users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main question is this: Must the distributor of the binary provide the license and copyright information for each individual dependency alongside the binary?  Specifically, assuming the source code for each dependency includes one or more license and/or notice files containing the text of the dependency's license(s) plus copyright information, is it necessary to include each &amp;amp; every one of these license/notice files alongside the binary — either as separate files (possibly organized in a directory tree) or in a single structured file?  Are there other ways to satisfy the licenses' attribution requirements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="586" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T13:59:20.020" Title="Exact attribution requirements for distributing compiled binaries depending on MIT and/or Apache 2.0 libraries" Tags="|mit|apache-2.0|license-notice|distribution|dependencies|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-18T14:17:54.453" Score="-1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell GPL lets folks modify your code and sell it and MIT lets them do whatever they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I plan on charging for my application. I am okay if someone wants to tweak it and use it for their own or make it available for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't want them to take my code and charge people, or tweak my code and charge for the tweaked code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a license good for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31076" OwnerDisplayName="IMTheNachoMan" LastActivityDate="2023-09-18T15:37:26.110" Title="Is there a software license that says anyone can do what they want with it except sell it or sell modified versions of it?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2023-09-18T15:50:47.530" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-18T15:56:36.260" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to release a GPL licensed application framework and am planning on dual-licensing with a proprietary license. I'm wondering if the GPL classpath exception could be used as a basis for a simple license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like the ability to separate support contracts and other typical proprietary software license clauses, indemnities and such, from the simple permission to write proprietary software using the framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following example text is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception#The_Classpath_exception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL linking exception&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright holders of this library give COMPANY permission to link VERSION of this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of their choice, provided that COMPANY also meets, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. COMPANY may not extend this permission to its version of the library, whether the library has been modified or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this viable? Any pros or cons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14858" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-19T08:25:39.727" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T10:38:07.797" Title="GPL classpath exception as a basis for a simple proprietary license" Tags="|gpl|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14275" CreationDate="2023-09-19T10:38:07.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. I would strongly recommend against tacking such a &lt;em&gt;non transferable&lt;/em&gt; exception clause to the GPL. I don't see any pro and only a lot of cons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general expectation of GPL+exception is that you can re-distribute the work under the same license, but that is not the case for your exception. That alone will likely cause confusion and probably unintended license violations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way you have written your exception, with an explicit mention of the recipient and version, means that you will have a lot of administrative work to do, especially if you adhere to the common practice of mentioning the exception in every single source file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend that you do a proper dual licensing, with the plain GPL for the free version and a properly written proprietary license for the paid version. And as a license is a legal document, you should ask a lawyer to write your proprietary license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T10:38:07.797" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14272" CreationDate="2023-09-19T13:59:20.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check what the exact licenses involved say. If for binary distribution it says it has to be accompanied by text stating the copyright, and/or where to get source, shipping the binary containing the library is certainly binary distribution. Most open source licenses give details of what you need to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; whoever holds the rights has standing to do something about it, e.g. sueing the offender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, if the licenses are Apache, MIT, BSD or similar, this is most probably just an oversight or sloppyness. The courteous way forward is to send a note to the offender (copy the affected parties) stating the precise transgressions and suggest how to remedy them. Probably just adding a file stating the pieces, their versions and licence details is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2686" LastActivityDate="2023-09-19T13:59:20.020" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-20T17:15:50.307" Score="3" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written an application in Java and my goal is to distribute my software on a disc to be sold. I understand that this is a very complex process and am willing to take it on. Any advice or resources are much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do I provide the user with the JRE required to run my application?&lt;/strong&gt; There seem to be 3 main options as far as I have found, in order from most ideal to least:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the JRE (Or only necessary components of it?) with my software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Install the JRE along with my software using my application's installer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notify the user to install Java themselves and provide a download link to do so&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these are correct? Where can I learn more about the industry standards for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31100" LastActivityDate="2023-09-20T17:15:50.307" Title="How Do I Publish My Java Application On Physical Media?" Tags="|distribution|java|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2023-09-23T06:03:39.420" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14282" CreationDate="2023-09-23T06:05:58.557" Score="6" ViewCount="1288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an open source license that strictly matches the following criteria, could anyone suggest any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Must:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rename the project&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Disclose the source&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Include the original license (also cannot choose any later version of license)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cannot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hold authors liable (including warranty)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sublicense&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Use project name as trademark&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Register a software patent with the source code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27048" LastEditorUserId="27048" LastEditDate="2023-09-23T16:53:29.187" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T16:53:29.187" Title="Strong open-source license that forbids limiting innovation" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14281" CreationDate="2023-09-23T08:34:38.800" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, copyright, trademark, and patent issues &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.natlawreview.com/article/intellectual-property-what-are-differences-between-patent-trademark-and-copyright&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;are all separate things&lt;/a&gt;, with separate processes and applicable bodies of law.  I say this to clarify why it's a bad idea to try to handle, say, trademark issues in a copyright licence, and why it works much better to keep them separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A strong copyleft licence, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, will do most of what you want, and what it can't do is better done in parallel (see above).  Specifically, it will do &amp;quot;must&amp;quot; 2 and 3, and &amp;quot;must not&amp;quot; 1 and 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Must not&amp;quot; 4 &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/12896/bsd-3-third-clause-clarification&quot;&gt;does not need to be explicitly prevented&lt;/a&gt;, as it would constitute misrepresentation and is generally actionable anyway.  If you feel strongly about this, a GPLv3 s7d restriction may be specified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Must not&amp;quot; 5 is achieved by the simple business of publishing your source code.  At that point the source serves as prior art, which will prevent the issue of (in a perfect world) or can be used later to invalidate (in this world) any patent on a patentable concept expressed in the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Must&amp;quot; 1 and &amp;quot;must not&amp;quot; 3 are best done with a defensive trademark registration, and a separate trademark policy denying use rights to variants of the code; this approach is far from unknown &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribution-policy/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(example)&lt;/a&gt; in the free software world, though not universally loved.  A longer exposition of this idea, and a clarification of why it's not a good idea to try to do this in the copyright licence, can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/10379/license-that-allows-contribution-and-distribution-but-no-custom-builds/10380#10380&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T08:34:38.800" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2023-09-23T16:03:49.657" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might try &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyfarai.itcouldbewor.se&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copy Far &amp;quot;AI&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (full disclosure: I'm the current maintainer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31121" LastActivityDate="2023-09-23T16:03:49.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14286" CreationDate="2023-09-24T04:17:49.753" Score="3" ViewCount="1834" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the following apps on the Google Play store. They are traditional Linux apps for drawing, that are running on Android (with some modification to the source code, I believe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to ask, if the original licences for these products was the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), how is it, that, these are sold for a fee (although the fee is minimal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been changes to the GPL version 3 that supersede version 2 allowing the executable from the free code, free for copying and redistribution, to be sold at a fee (perhaps, if I download the code for these apps from GitHub, compile it myself, with Android Studio, on a Windows 11 PC, and install it to USB using &amp;quot;adb install&amp;quot; to my Android phone, then I can install these apps without paying for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, am I just paying compilation and distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dwH18.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dwH18.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;gimp and inkscape&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31213" OwnerDisplayName="Joselin Jocklingson" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-24T20:52:42.040" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T20:52:42.040" Title="Gimp and Inkscape on Android: licensing (GPL?)" Tags="|gpl|commercial|android|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14285" CreationDate="2023-09-24T07:12:05.007" Score="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if the original licences for these products was the GPL (GNU General Public Licence), how is it, that, these are sold for a fee (although the fee is minimal)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/11447/458&quot;&gt;have said elsewhere more clearly&lt;/a&gt;, it's perfectly OK to sell GPL software: that is, to charge for the conveyance of the binary.  What the vendor may not do is refuse also to transfer the complete corresponding source code to recipients of the binary, or to further charge for that.  Essentially, one must convey freedom along with the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the vendor in the above example(s) will give you all this on request will not be known until someone who's paid for the binary asks for it.  I have my suspicions, but that's all they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been changes to the GPL version 3 that supersede version 2 allowing the executable from the free code, free for copying and redistribution, to be sold at a fee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, GPLv2 allowed this also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the fee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Play store provides a mechanism whereby people can monetise software.  Economically speaking, it's probably unavoidable that some people will ignore the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I can charge for software I wrote&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; model, in favour of the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I can charge for software somebody else wrote&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; model; the overheads are lower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, am I just paying compilation and distribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not even that.  You can have single-click access to some five thousand (at time of writing) free software apps for Android via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://f-droid.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F-Droid&lt;/a&gt; repository, and its corresponding software management app (or equivalents).  Because it's specifically for free software, the issues of charging and privacy don't arise (no authentication is required, unlike Play Store), whereas the licence choice and app-related privacy issues are mentioned front-and-centre (at least in the official app).  You can run an entire de-Googled Android phone off this repo; I have, for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somebody once said (I'm sorry I can't find a link offhand) that proprietary software requires you to &lt;em&gt;pay&lt;/em&gt;, while free software requires you to &lt;em&gt;learn&lt;/em&gt;.  One could see this whole exercise as an excellent illustration of that principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-24T08:07:33.153" LastActivityDate="2023-09-24T08:07:33.153" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14287" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14288" CreationDate="2023-09-25T01:57:08.827" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License is known to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700363&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatible with the GPL version 2&lt;/a&gt;. Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/po/identify-licenses-clearly.pt-br-en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;software that is released under the GPL version 2 only is not compatible with the GPL version 3&lt;/a&gt;, is the BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License also compatible with the GPL version 3, or any later version? Or is it only compatible with the GPL version 2?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24986" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T09:17:31.150" Title="BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License and GPL Version 3 Compatibility" Tags="|gpl|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14287" CreationDate="2023-09-25T06:42:13.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/bsdpluspatent/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD2+patent&lt;/a&gt; is a fairly niche licence.  The author says it was designed to be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but fails to say what incompatibility has caused this work to be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I read it, (s)he's not saying &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This license is designed to provide a simple permissive license that is compatible with GPLv2, even though it's not compatible with GPLv3&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but is instead saying &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;This license is designed to provide a simple permissive license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 and which also has an express patent grant included, unlike Apache2, which although it has a patent grant is incompatible with GPLv2&lt;/em&gt;)&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We only have the author's word for it that it's compatible with GPLv2, because it's not listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL compatibility chart&lt;/a&gt; (see &amp;quot;niche&amp;quot;).  But assuming that (s)he's right, those same lists suggest that Apache's problem with GPLv2 is the inclusion of patent termination (s3) and indemnification language (s9), these being extra restrictions that are forbidden by GPLv2.  That is to say, it's &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; for patent-related language to be GPLv2-compatible than it is for it to be GPLv3-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Apache2 is compatible with GPLv3 even though it has such language, given that BSD2+patent is designed to be Apache2-without-the-GPLv2-hostile-bits there's no reason at all to think it's GPLv3-incompatible.  As for compatibility with later versions of the GPL, we cannot say until they're published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-09-29T09:17:31.150" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T09:17:31.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14292" CreationDate="2023-09-25T20:30:15.997" Score="4" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my understanding that when an executable program that depends (directly or indirectly) on libraries licensed under MIT and/or Apache 2.0 is compiled into a statically-linked binary that is then distributed to third parties, the binary must be accompanied by the individual licenses &amp;amp; copyright notices for all of the program's direct &amp;amp; indirect dependencies.  (If you can definitively confirm or refute this belief, please consider posting an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/14272/586&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.)  However, I've come across some software in the official Debian repositories that does not seem to properly honor these requirements.  I'd expect the Debian packagers to get licensing right, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specific example:&lt;/strong&gt; The program &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hyperfine&lt;/a&gt;, written in Rust. Rust libraries are usually statically-linked, so the compiled binaries that the Debian project distributes contain code from all of hyperfine's dependencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The webpage for the hyperfine v1.17.0 package in Debian Trixie can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://packages.debian.org/trixie/hyperfine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  Clicking on &amp;quot;Copyright File&amp;quot; on the right side of the page leads to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;debian/copyright&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; file that declares that the source files and the Debian packaging files are both licensed under &amp;quot;MIT or Apache-2.0&amp;quot;, and the copyright line listed for the source files credits only the author of hyperfine.  (Note that most if not all of hyperfine's dependencies are written by other authors.)  The file contains the text of the MIT license (separate from the copyright) and a reference to where the text of the Apache 2.0 license can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Downloading &amp;amp; inspecting a binary &lt;code&gt;.deb&lt;/code&gt; file for hyperfine (I picked the amd64 deb) shows that it contains the same &lt;code&gt;copyright&lt;/code&gt; file and no other copyright information, though the Debian &lt;code&gt;control&lt;/code&gt; file does contain an &amp;quot;X-Cargo-Built-Using&amp;quot; field listing the names &amp;amp; versions of the Debian Rust packages used to build the deb.  Note that these &amp;quot;built using&amp;quot; packages are only used at build time and are not listed as runtime dependencies (and so they are not installed when installing hyperfine from the Debian repositories). This is supported by the fact that running &lt;code&gt;ldd&lt;/code&gt; on the hyperfine binary only lists the glibc libraries as being dynamically linked, and so the other build-time dependencies (i.e., the third-party Rust libraries) are most likely statically linked into the binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a specific dependency of hyperfine's whose license I believe is being violated, consider the direct dependency &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/console-rs/indicatif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;indicatif&lt;/a&gt;.  The X-Cargo-Built-Using field for the binary package I inspected states that the hyperfine binary was built with indicatif v1.17.3, the source for which contains &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/console-rs/indicatif/blob/0.17.3/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file&lt;/a&gt;, consisting of a copyright line and the text of the MIT license.  This copyright line does not appear in the above-mentioned copyright file or anywhere in the deb file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is Debian handling dependency licenses for this package and others incorrectly, or is there something I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="586" LastEditorUserId="586" LastEditDate="2023-09-25T23:39:57.387" LastActivityDate="2023-09-27T15:49:45.337" Title="Is Debian violating the license requirements for this project's dependencies?" Tags="|license-notice|debian|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14289" CreationDate="2023-09-27T15:08:26.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked about this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;code&gt;debian-legal&lt;/code&gt; mailing list&lt;/a&gt;.  It is indeed a license violation, but fixing the tooling to automatically bundle dependencies' licenses is a non-trivial undertaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2023/09/msg00003.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The reply&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Wise&lt;/a&gt; follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your analysis is correct, some extra context for this problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you have identified applies to other statically linked&#xA;languages too, so I have updated the wiki page to link to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.debian.org/StaticLinking&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://wiki.debian.org/StaticLinking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem can be more generally stated as; Debian aggregates the&#xA;copyright and license of source files we distribute but does not trace&#xA;the path from source files to compiled files, and therefore does not&#xA;trace which source files each generated file was created from and as a&#xA;subset of that problem, does therefore not trace the flow of copyright&#xA;and license information and does not aggregate that information and&#xA;does not discover license incompatibilities in the generated files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This more general problem is very hard to impossible to solve, since&#xA;it would mean patching every single build toolchain and source package&#xA;to provide traces of the path from source files to compiled files and&#xA;then processing those traces to generate copyright info for binary&#xA;packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific problem with Rust/Go/etc static linking might be solvable&#xA;by a new debhelper command that would read the Built-Using and related&#xA;fields and then append each of them to the DEBIAN/copyright files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="586" LastEditorUserId="586" LastEditDate="2023-09-27T15:49:45.337" LastActivityDate="2023-09-27T15:49:45.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14309" CreationDate="2023-09-27T15:39:05.993" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v2.3/SPDX-license-expressions/#d3-simple-license-expressions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX simple license expressions&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v2.3/other-licensing-information-detected/#1013-examples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;License identifier field example&lt;/a&gt;, when creating a custom license that's not listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;licenses list&lt;/a&gt; (including exception), I could use &lt;code&gt;LicenseRef-ACME&lt;/code&gt;, where &lt;code&gt;ACME&lt;/code&gt; is my company name, or even, my project name in a repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when having to extract a license text from a header, to distribute that custom license as a separated file, I'm not sure about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license name that should be used (e.g. &lt;code&gt;LicenseRef-ProjectName&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The license file name that should be used (e.g. &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Custom fields in the license file to refer where I extract that text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read about &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v2.3/file-information/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DocumentRef&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure if it's the case, and how to use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31147" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T18:17:16.657" Title="How should be a SPDX license name when extracting from another file content?" Tags="|licensing|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14296" CreationDate="2023-09-27T21:26:22.067" Score="2" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am beginning to learn about open source software licenses. I am especially interested in how open source licenses interact with patents. I've seen the term &amp;quot;patent-granting&amp;quot; used several times to describe some licenses (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://google.github.io/opencasebook/patents/#explicit-patent-licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://security.ucop.edu/files/documents/resources/oss-chart.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but I can't find a clear definition. What does &amp;quot;patent-granting&amp;quot; mean, and what are its implications? Are &amp;quot;patent-granting&amp;quot; licenses supposed to grant users the right to use/modify/distribute not only the software but also any patents related to the software? If so, is there an opposite, i.e. an open source license that gives license to the code but not any related patents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate any examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31148" LastActivityDate="2023-09-28T08:08:08.607" Title="What is a &quot;patent-granting&quot; license?" Tags="|software|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14294" CreationDate="2023-09-28T08:08:08.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice writes a piece of code that (in the immortal words of GPLv2) &amp;quot;makes passes at compilers&amp;quot;.  It uses a novel technique that makes passes at n lines of code in O(sqrt(n)) time.  Alice applies for a patent on this, and let's say for the sake of argument the patent is granted.  She also publishes the code under, let's say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the MIT licence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob takes this code and uses it as the core of his new proprietary compiler-passer, taking care to preserve Alice's copyright notices and the text of the MIT licence.  From a copyright standpoint, this is completely lawful, because he has a copyright licence to do this, and has satisfied the conditions thereof.  But Alice then sues him for patent infringement.  From a free-software perspective, this is undesirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A patent-granting copyright licence is one that, in addition to copyright, also licences any patents held by the licensor and embodied in the code so licensed; examples include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2&lt;/a&gt;, in section 3, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, in section 11.  In both cases, those licences contain a grant for any patents that are licensable by the copyright licensor and which are embodied in the licensed code.  Bob can use that code, subject to the terms of the copyright licence thereon, without fear that Alice will sue him for patent infringement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, is there an opposite, i.e. an open source license that gives license to the code but not any related patents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes; &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC0&lt;/a&gt; is one such example, in section 4a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/133/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for more details about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-09-28T08:08:08.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14297" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-27T06:49:49.263" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many questions in here regarding licenses, however, I did not find this specific scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the following situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is an internal company software, which is used for producing physical products. In essence, one can imagine a simulation software used to test the mechanical stress resistance of the end product/mechanical part. We sell only the mechanical part, the software is purely internal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a software package under the GPLv2 license, which we would like to integrate into our internal software.&#xA;Question: will this mean that our internal software needs to be published? or are there any copyright issues in this case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="VsIHar" LastActivityDate="2023-10-01T19:01:41.163" Title="Using GPLv2 License in an internal company software that develops physical products" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14297" CreationDate="2023-09-27T07:06:26.260" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;With all the usual caveats regarding legal advice from non-professionals on the internet, the answer is absolutely, clearly, no: there is no issue with using GPLv2 software in such internal software at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key clause of the GPL is that anyone who receives this software from you is entitled to also receive the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two aspects to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One, your customers never receive the software or any part of it. They are, therefore, completely irrelevant to the licensing question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two, &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; in this case is not you, the developer, but since you are working on this on company time, it is the company. And since you only give the software to other people working on company time, &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; (the company) are keeping it to &amp;quot;yourself&amp;quot;, not distributing it, so the license doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31155" OwnerDisplayName="Sebastian Redl" LastActivityDate="2023-09-27T07:06:26.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14301" CreationDate="2023-09-29T12:05:08.910" Score="-1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the answers to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/1720/33&quot;&gt;What can I assume if a publicly published project has no license?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;If a repository has no license, then all rights are reserved and it is not Open Source or Free. You cannot modify or redistribute this code without explicit permission from the copyright holder.&lt;/em&gt; No surprise there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the project imports/extends/includes GPL-licensed code, then it has to have a GPL-compatible license.  For example, I believe my own GPL-licensed code can freely incorporate code that itself incorporates GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I assume a GPL-compatible license, just because the source code has imports/includes on GPL-licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T12:32:19.737" Title="A project states no license, but imports GPL code. Can I assume an implied license?" Tags="|licensing|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-09-29T12:48:39.633" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14299" CreationDate="2023-09-29T12:31:07.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the project imports/extends/includes GPL-licensed code, then it has to have a GPL-compatible license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes but no. It has to have a GPL-compatible license &lt;strong&gt;to be legally distributable&lt;/strong&gt;; the other possiblity (and perhaps the more likely one) is that the code is being distributed in violation of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T12:31:07.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14299" CreationDate="2023-09-29T12:32:19.737" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I assume a GPL-compatible license, just because the source code has imports/includes on GPL-licensed code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. If a project does not state a license, but it also imports/includes GPL-licensed code, then the only assumption you can safely make is that the project owner is in violation of the GPL license they received for their dependencies and that they should not be distributing their project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose project N (non-licensed) does not contain a copyright license, but it can be downloaded. Inspection of the code shows that it makes use of GPL-licensed library G.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is conceivable that project N really was intended to be closed source and that it should not have been distributed. In that case, the copyright holder of project N can remedy their GPL violation by stopping the distribution/downloads of their project and they are within their rights to take legal action against the people who use the not-licensed portions of project N for violation of their copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And that is not just because they could sue over anything and everything without regard for the chance of getting a ruling in their favor. There is actually a reasonable chance they would win.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-09-29T12:32:19.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14303" CreationDate="2023-09-30T19:03:43.273" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Python package has a dependency of an open-source package with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-LBNL.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD-3-Clause-LBNL variant license&lt;/a&gt;. It seems the only difference between this variant and the original BSD-3-Clause license is the addition of the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are under no obligation whatsoever to provide any bug fixes, patches, or upgrades to the features, functionality or performance of the source code (&amp;quot;Enhancements&amp;quot;) to anyone; however, if you choose to make your Enhancements available either publicly, or directly to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, without imposing a separate written license agreement for such Enhancements, then you hereby grant the following license: a non-exclusive, royalty-free perpetual license to install, use, modify, prepare derivative works, incorporate into other computer software, distribute, and sublicense such Enhancements or derivative works thereof, in binary and source code form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether I can license my Python package as BSD-3-Clause license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21285" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T04:19:56.693" Title="Is BSD-3-Clause Variant compatible with BSD-3-Clause?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|bsd|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14302" CreationDate="2023-10-01T05:45:17.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're not redistributing their code (or a modified version of their code, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/q/2998215/1340389&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;.pyc&lt;/code&gt; Python binary&lt;/a&gt; compiled from their code, etc.), then you can use whatever license you want. It doesn't need to be a BSD license or even an open source license. This is because the obligations of their BSD license, including this modifier, only attach when you redistribute their code (or a binary based on their code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are redistributing their code, then you can still use whatever license you want, but you must include a copy of their license and specify that it applies to their code. It is probably wise to preserve this addendum as-is rather than trying to &amp;quot;standardize&amp;quot; the license. You should also be as clear as possible about exactly what software is subject to the license (presumably, just the upstream package, and not any of your code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've modified their code, you will also need to decide whether you want to place the modifications under a different license. That is permitted, although you should read the addendum carefully if you want to do that, but in that situation, the &amp;quot;nice&amp;quot; thing to do is to use the same license that you received it under. You are not required to use the same license, but it makes things easier for everyone because we all have fewer licenses to think about. This is called &amp;quot;inbound = outbound,&amp;quot; and is a good rule of thumb for making FOSS contributions in general. If you have not made any changes or improvements to their code, then this does not apply to you at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses attach to &amp;quot;derivative works,&amp;quot; which may &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/10143/532&quot;&gt;imply circumstances other than direct code redistribution&lt;/a&gt;. However, you did not ask about those licenses, so I will not further discuss them in this answer. The BSD licenses (including this variant) use the word &amp;quot;redistribution,&amp;quot; and so it would be quite a strained reading to claim that you can violate a BSD license without actually redistributing anything. The license conditions simply do not attach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2023-10-03T04:19:56.693" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T04:19:56.693" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14297" CreationDate="2023-10-01T19:01:41.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would extend this a bit. First, if you don’t hand the open source code to anyone outside the company, you have no obligations whatsoever. However, if you hand it to a contractor who is not part of your company, that might count as distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one of your employees hands out the open source code against orders from the company, then &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; have the obligation to hand out your source code which would be copyright infringement, so doing that gets them into serious legal trouble, one way or another. Should they hand out your source code that’s worse because nobody is allowed to have your source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you distribute the open source code to just one person in the world, then everyone and their dog has the right to demand your own source code from you. You can avoid this by handing out the open source code together with your own code, and you have no further obligations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2023-10-01T19:01:41.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-01T19:40:13.330" Score="9" ViewCount="1662" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am taking a public domain text&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and applying some changes to it. It is possible I'll end up taking several texts from several sources, but all public domain. The nature of the changes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;changing some of the archaic words to modern synonyms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;structuring sentences much more idiomatically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;cosmetic changes to punctuation, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tagging words and such likes, so that the text can more easily be processed by computer programs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will end up with a text clearly derived from the first one(s), and attributed where possible. But it will not be the same text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can, or should, the resulting works be licensed under CC0? I'm looking for a way to waive any rights I have to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;1: The text is the Young's Literal Translation, which is attributed to Robert Young. So far as I understand, since this text is public domain, its use does not require attribution, making it technically compatible with the CC0.&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15229" LastEditorUserId="24460" LastEditDate="2023-10-02T20:06:56.823" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T16:52:08.190" Title="Can a derivative of a public domain text be licensed under CC0?" Tags="|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14305" CreationDate="2023-10-02T07:56:39.263" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The CC0 is a public domain dedication with a very permissive fallback license for those jurisdictions that don't accept public domain dedications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the description of your changes, they seem to be creative in nature. That gives you a copyright claim on those changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having a copyright claim on (some aspect of) the document, you have the right to issue a copyright license (at least for the parts covered by your copyright claim). As you effectively want to disclaim your copyrights, the CC0 license is a good tool to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T07:56:39.263" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-02T11:52:34.670" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;can a GPL binary, that have no source code released, be reverse engineered and that source be released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some devs get a project in GPL, implement new things, release the binary but do not release the source code...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, and if that binary that should have a source code, got reverse engineered? Is there any problem on creating a fork, still in GPL of couse, and releasing these sources for further development of anyone willing to help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ps.: why ppl do that? They dont want to comply with gpl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31190" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-02T12:32:40.023" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T12:32:40.023" Title="Can a GPL binary, that has no source code released, be reverse engineered, and that source be released?" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|binaries|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2023-10-02T12:31:28.683" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14293" CreationDate="2023-10-02T18:17:16.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/reuse/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reuse&lt;/a&gt; to validate my SPDXing and it's happy with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;code&gt;LicenseRef-ProjectName&lt;/code&gt;. Unless your work is owned by a company and you're planning on using the same license for all your projects, in which case &lt;code&gt;LicenseRef-CompanyName&lt;/code&gt; will indicate that to your customers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I create &lt;code&gt;LICENSES/LicenseRef-ProjectName.txt&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;reuse&lt;/code&gt; requires a copy of each license in the LICENSES folder).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No custom fields are required. The license file should be just the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in a file using that license I use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;# SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-ProjectName&#xA;# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright 2023 A. P. Hacker&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a validator and simply following their guidelines can take some of the administrative burden off your shoulders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T18:17:16.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-02T21:25:49.100" Score="2" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I did some research and could not answer the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does CC BY-NC ensure that the NC restriction is passed forward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think it should. Otherwise, someone could make a tiny change to the work and release under whatever license they please. Or it this intentonally allowed by the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What got me wondering is the following. Derivative work can be released as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All rights reserved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-NC-ND&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-NC-SA&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CC BY-NC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three would solve the issue, number 4 is self-referring. I would expect the last possibility to be somewhat regulated by the CC BY-NC license, but I could not see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I personally don't like NC licenses, but I am starting an Open Educational Resource project and would like to have at least a small understanding of each widely-used license in case people ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31191" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-02T21:58:08.770" LastActivityDate="2023-11-02T08:09:35.753" Title="CC BY-NC copyleft?" Tags="|copyleft|cc-by-nc|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14310" CreationDate="2023-10-02T21:57:11.480" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It pretty clearly does, yes, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CC BY-NC 4.0&lt;/a&gt; section 3(a)1(c):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must ... indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-10-02T21:57:11.480" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-03T02:16:37.163" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a repo in GitHub which contains many different projects, each in its own folder and each folder having its own license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at the root of project 5 is a restrictive proprietary license. There are no other files or executable in the root of this folder except a folder &amp;quot;src&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under &amp;quot;src/resources/ui&amp;quot; is the complete code of project 5 and an Apache-2.0-license-file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these circumstances, which license will apply for project 5, the restrictive proprietary license or the Apache-2.0 license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure is shown below?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;├── project-1&#xA;├── project-2&#xA;├── project-3&#xA;├── project-4&#xA;├── project-5&#xA;|   └── Proprietary-license-file (no other files except the src folder )&#xA;|       └──  src/resources/ui (contains Apache-2.0-license-file)&#xA;├── Apache-2.0-license-file&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31196" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-10-03T02:53:01.290" LastActivityDate="2023-11-02T07:04:20.460" Title="Complex mix of proprietary license and Apache 2.0 license with subfolders" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14314" CreationDate="2023-10-03T06:49:33.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire project is obviously intended to be under the restrictive proprietary license, while some (maybe all) of the components/libraries used are under the Apache license. But within this folder, which contains the file with the Apache license language, there may be other files with different --even proprietary-- licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully there is a clear indicator (possibly SPDX) in each file indicating the applicable license, as well as the other required information (attribution, maybe notice file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is your repo, then I suggest you add the necessary information so that it is clear and obvious for everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-10-03T06:49:33.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-03T11:14:06.977" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Unity project in a public repository (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/AdrianXuizGarcia/VirManDC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/AdrianXuizGarcia/VirManDC&lt;/a&gt;), and I want to make it open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Im not sure which license should I use... All code and assets are made by me, but I use some open source libraries (MRTK, uses MIT license, the project is oriented to Mixed Reality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think i cant use GPL or LGPL because it was made with Unity, the repo not only contains the code but all the stuff Unity needs to open correctly the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking in MIT or Apache, but im not sure... Has anyone any idea? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want the project to be as open as it can, while avoiding problems with Unity license or EULA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31202" LastEditorUserId="31202" LastEditDate="2023-10-03T14:20:07.797" LastActivityDate="2023-11-18T12:01:25.173" Title="Which Free-software license should I use in a Unity project located on a public Github repository?" Tags="|gpl|github|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14305" CreationDate="2023-10-03T20:12:32.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can always take a derivative of a public domain work and relicense it as whatever you want. People do this all the time with the Bible, fairy tales, old books, etc... Publishers will often republish old works under a new copyright; in practice this means that you cannot copy the republication without permission from the publisher, but you can still copy the original words and images without any restrictions. Disney has made an absolute fortune retelling public domain works under an &amp;quot;All Rights Reserved&amp;quot; copyright and has spent millions, if not billions, on lobbying the US government to ensure their copyrights do not expire so that they can continue to sell Snow White over and over, despite the fact that a significant chunk of their catalog is derivative works of the public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no legal obligation whatsoever to dedicate derivative works of public domain works to the public domain. It may be considered fraudulent to claim &lt;em&gt;authorship&lt;/em&gt;, but that does not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; prohibit you from claiming copyright, which in turn, would allow you to relicense it in whatever way tickles your fancy, including dedicating it to the public domain (or simulating such by licensing it as CC-0). You always own your own additions and modifications, no matter how small. While that doesn't stop others from going to the original source, it also doesn't stop you from relicensing derivative works of the public domain in whatever way you see fit. There are no compatibility issues because public domain doesn't come with a share-alike clause. There are no conditions. There are no limitations. It's public domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially cautious lawyers might not take this at face value (which is why e.g. SQLite offers licenses for cautious corporations despite being public domain, or why Nina Paley has had to sign waivers of permission to various universities despite her works being CC-0/public domain and therefore theoretically not needing such permission ever), but the idea of dedicating things to the public domain implies that you have waived the right to sue for copyright infringement, and the natural lapsing of copyright implies that there is nobody left to sue for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20141" LastEditorUserId="20141" LastEditDate="2023-10-04T16:52:08.190" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T16:52:08.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14323" CreationDate="2023-10-04T15:01:23.720" Score="8" ViewCount="5838" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume there is a project under GPL2-or-later license.  My understanding&#xA;is that anyone can take the project and make a fork with GPL2-only additions.&#xA;They could also take the project and make a fork with GPL3-only additions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what if a company wants to make a proprietary fork?  They can take the&#xA;project, and make half of their changes under GPL2-only and the other half of&#xA;them under GPL3-only.  Since those halves would be a derived work, normally it&#xA;would infringe, however since the copyright holder is the same entity, they&#xA;would not sue themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in addition, they could add into their customer contract a binding promise&#xA;not to sue them for the violation as well.  The result would be that no one&#xA;except their paying customers can legally use the final product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is a loophole so obvious, that I am sure it is not possible.  But I&#xA;would like to understand why it is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11203" LastActivityDate="2023-10-06T10:04:02.787" Title="Why it is not possible to create a proprietary fork of GPL?-or-later software?" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|gpl-2|copyleft|" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14319" CreationDate="2023-10-04T15:21:02.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv2+, or GPLv2-or-later, is shorthand for a licensing statement that says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or&#xA;modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License&#xA;as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2&#xA;of the License, or (at your option) any later version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(text taken from GPLv2 rubric)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original project being distributed under GPLv2+, this company can only make and distribute GPLv3-only modifications if they choose to receive the project under GPLv3 (if they were to choose to receive it under GPLv2, those modifications would be incompatibly licensed, and therefore undistributable).  The FSF clarify this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLv2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the compatibility list&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having decided to receive it under GPLv3, they cannot then distribute it with GPLv2-only modifications, for similar reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they were to choose to retain the v2/v3 option for downstream recipients, this would require their changes also to be GPLv2+-licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, if they decide to lock in a version of the GPL for their changes, they lock in a version for the whole codebase as redistributed by them, and that restricts which version they can lock their changes to.  If they decide against locking in a version, that requires them not to lock it in for their changes either.  To do otherwise is to violate upstream's copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T15:21:02.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14319" CreationDate="2023-10-04T15:28:16.853" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say &amp;quot;the copyright holder is the same entity&amp;quot; but this is true only for the changes introduced by the downstream distributor. There is also the upstream distributor who licensed their work under GPLv2-or-later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose Alice releases a GPLv2-or-later work, and Bob tried to release a modified work that includes both GPLv2-only and GPLv3-only additions. There exists no selection of Alice's choice of upstream terms under which Bob can release a modified work including both v2 and v3 components without causing a violation of one or the other of Alice's GPL grants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no Alice in this situation, and Bob really is the only copyright holder, then Bob can simply employ an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open core model&lt;/a&gt; saying, say &amp;quot;this part of my software is GPLv2+, and that part is proprietary; contact me for licensing arrangements&amp;quot; without any elaborate license gymnastics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2023-10-04T15:28:16.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14319" CreationDate="2023-10-05T12:21:27.987" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... it would infringe, however since the copyright holder is the same entity, they would not sue themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least in Germany (but it should be similar in the US), a license contains the conditions that &lt;strong&gt;others&lt;/strong&gt; (but not the author of some work) have to follow when using the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, the author of some work cannot infringe his own copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... they could add into their customer contract a binding ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the company does not call it &amp;quot;license&amp;quot;, the terms and conditions that must be accepted to use some work (= the complete software) &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; a &amp;quot;license&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, these terms and conditions (= license) contain the condition that says: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Only paying customers are allowed to use this software.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a license that is compatible to GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company does not infringe the copyright of the code written by the company, but it infringes the copyright of the original software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the author of the original software &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; sue the company!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2023-10-05T12:21:27.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14319" CreationDate="2023-10-06T09:13:09.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three pieces of code involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A:&lt;/strong&gt; Upstream software, license says &amp;quot;You can distribute under GPL2 or later&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; Additions, license says &amp;quot;You can distribute under GPL2 only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C:&lt;/strong&gt; Additions, license says &amp;quot;You can distribute under GPL3 only&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distributing A+B or A+C would be fine, but as you say, distributing A+B+C would violate one of the licenses. It's also true that the company wouldn't sue themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the copyright owner of A can still sue, &lt;strong&gt;because the combination A+B+C is not under GPL2, and it is not under GPL3 either&lt;/strong&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL section 12&lt;/a&gt; applies: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company could work around this by distributing the mutually incompatible components A, B and C separately, letting the user themselves combine them to A+B+C. But same separate distribution option is available to every receiver of the software, so this doesn't limit freedom of the users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastActivityDate="2023-10-06T09:13:09.803" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-06T14:56:46.910" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on an open source project (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/susanw1/zscript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zscript&lt;/a&gt;), and it is dependent on a (Apache 2 licensed) build plug-in (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/maven-nar/nar-maven-plugin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maven NAR&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have submitted some bug-fixes we needed to the plug-in's repo which have been accepted, but it's been a few years since there was a release, and my request for release status to their mailing list has had no response. In fact, the plug-in project essentially achieved most of its goals and the maintainers have drifted away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm just setting up a GitHub CI build, and of course the CI build won't work without an updated plug-in release, and right now we build from a local master snapshot against the time when our changes are released. So I'm musing over my options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I could offer to take over the plug-in project! But I'm not doing that - I don't have anywhere close to the bandwidth at this time. Maybe I'd kinda like to, one day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quietly absorb the plug-in code into our own codebase, and just copy the code in, give it a different disambiguating name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Create a fork, give it a new module name and create my own release to a public repo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the avoidance of doubt, none of these options would involve changing the license or copyright attributions. We're totally happy to retain the legal rights and intent of the nice people who built the thing - we'd put a very clear statement to that effect. Zscript is generally MIT licensed, but we'd make it clear that that didn't extend to the NAR bit, if we do option#2. Plus, I'll carry on trying to establish comms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't be the first people to encounter this situation. What do other projects do? Are there any common guidelines, pros and cons, prior examples, anything we &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(To be clear, I know how to do this stuff technically. I'm just unsure of the approach.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18242" LastActivityDate="2023-10-06T14:56:46.910" Title="Releasing a fork of a dormant project" Tags="|forking|release|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2023-10-06T16:10:03.360" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-06T20:29:03.023" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_a_CC_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Creative Commons Wiki page&lt;/a&gt; says of the embedded license: &amp;quot;you might specify what 'work' you're talking about&amp;quot; and gives the example of prefacing the license with &amp;quot;Except where otherwise noted&amp;quot;. How do I note otherwise? Let's look at two possible formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A book in which Chapters 1--5 are CC, but Chapters 6 and 7 are not.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough to include a note in the front matter stating which chapters are not CC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A website in which the blog article content is CC but other elements, such as the logo, are not.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a disclaimer need to be posted next to the logo noting that it is not CC?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31239" LastActivityDate="2023-10-09T13:47:53.230" Title="How can I denote content not covered under Creative Commons?" Tags="|creative-commons|website|exceptions|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2023-10-07T08:59:27.257" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;just do it, everything will be fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fuck lawyers and their stupid definitions of &amp;quot;conspicuous text&amp;quot;. all parts of your license are legally binding. even if the license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/milahu/mit-license/blob/master/mit-license/img/mit-license.en.lowercase.comic-sans.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comic sans text in an image file&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if you disagree with the &amp;quot;lawyers are idiots&amp;quot; part, then you probably have never been in a &amp;quot;court of law&amp;quot;, or you really believe that human laws are better than the laws of physics...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by default, all works are &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot; thanks to stupid copyright laws, so by default, people cant do anything with your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so if people want more freedoms, they just have to read your license (RTFL), to understand that they have &amp;quot;zero limits and zero warranty&amp;quot;. people should be thankful that you chose the &amp;quot;short and sweet&amp;quot; MIT license, compared to painfully verbose licenses like creativecommons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29724" LastEditorUserId="29724" LastEditDate="2023-10-07T09:46:57.140" LastActivityDate="2023-10-07T09:46:57.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14328" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-08T04:14:59.677" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can a UDK (unreal development kit, unreal engine) 3D interface be used to render the output of all the GPL text dungeon rpg games?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, lets say i implement a 3D AAA interface using UDK5 top quality.&#xA;Now, it will read the text output of GPL games where the hero is a &amp;quot;@&amp;quot; and orcs are &amp;quot;o&amp;quot;.&#xA;Then based on the previous turn, that 3D interface will rotate all 3D models properly (it will guess to where the models should be looking at, w/o talking to the gpl game).&#xA;The sfx and music could still play from the 2D text game or not.&#xA;The 3D interface would do a lot of guess work and would have a set of config files specific for each 2D text dungeon turn based game.&#xA;Its main view is isometric, but being 3d you could even go 1st person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does UDK5 or newer allow this kind of interaction with open source restrictive licenses like GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31190" LastEditorUserId="31190" LastEditDate="2023-10-08T17:01:48.197" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T06:31:12.500" Title="Can a UDK 3D interface be used to render the output of all the GPL text dungeon rpg games?" Tags="|gpl-3|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14326" CreationDate="2023-10-09T13:47:53.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In both examples you give, the best option is to clearly describe what part is under which license at the point where you give the various licenses that are applicable to the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a book, there is likely some front matter stating the copyright licenses. There you can state something along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2023 user5104897&#xA;Chapters 1 to 5 are licensed under &amp;lt;indicator of CC license, including a link to the license text&amp;gt;&#xA;Chapters 6 and 7 are licensed under &amp;lt;indicator of non-CC license&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;Text of non-CC license&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a website, it is customary to have a page with licensing information. This is where you can mention that the blog text is under a CC license and that other parts of the site are under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-10-09T13:47:53.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-09T14:06:19.920" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have a publicly accessible web service that uses AGPL software via a REST API in the backend, how does the AGPL apply to the service?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would I only have to make the AGPL sources of the backend service available to users, or would the AGPL also cover my own service, or is it not relevant at all since the AGPL backend is never directly exposed to the end user?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think making the backend directly available would definitely require me to provide access to the backend source, and thus providing it indirectly might require me to make the &lt;em&gt;backend&lt;/em&gt; source available, but is the AGPL &amp;quot;viral&amp;quot; for the intermediate services, or does it only apply to the AGPL licensed software itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall access is looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;User's browser &amp;lt;-- HTTP --&amp;gt; My Webapp &amp;lt;-- REST-API --&amp;gt; AGPL application&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is no problem to release the full source of the AGPL application, because it is used unchanged, and any minor changes that might be necessary can be released without any problem. However, I do not want to release my own web application under the AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure that the REST access is covered by the AGPL, but does the AGPL skip over the webapp, or does it become part of the webapp? If so, the question is which of the two variants applies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;1: User's browser &amp;lt;-- HTTP --&amp;gt; (My webapp &amp;lt;-- REST-API --&amp;gt; AGPL application)&#xA;2: (User's browser &amp;lt;-- HTTP --&amp;gt; My webapp) &amp;lt;-- REST-API --&amp;gt; AGPL application&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The webapp and the AGPL application are a new application covered by the AGPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The browser and the webapp are a union that accesses the AGPL application and only require the sources of the AGPL app to be public&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastEditorUserId="8162" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T18:57:55.880" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T18:57:55.880" Title="How does the AGPL apply to services used in the backend?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-10-11T15:52:20.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12883" CreationDate="2023-10-10T01:01:32.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As MadHatter said, the license pretty clearly says that you aren't allowed to modify that source code, nor do anything else that doesn't involve just lookin at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the root of your question (access to an Internal class), the best solution would be to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/advanced-topics/reflection-and-attributes/#reflection-overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reflection&lt;/a&gt;. For your specific case, you could do something like this to call the &lt;strong&gt;AssignNewShaderToMaterial&lt;/strong&gt; method:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Assembly thisAssembly = Assembly.GetCallingAssembly();&#xA;BindingFlags bindingFlags = BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic;&#xA;object? standardShaderGUIInstance = thisAssembly.CreateInstance(&amp;quot;UnityEditor.StandardShaderGUI&amp;quot;,&#xA;    true, bindingFlags, null, null, null, null);&#xA;&#xA;if (standardShaderGUIInstance == null)&#xA;{&#xA;    Debug.Log(&amp;quot;Could not find the StandardShaderGUI class. Aborting!&amp;quot;);&#xA;    return;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;Type standardShaderGUIType = standardShaderGUIInstance.GetType();&#xA;MethodInfo? standardShaderGUIMethodInfo = standardShaderGUIType.GetMethod(&amp;quot;AssignNewShaderToMaterial&amp;quot;);&#xA;&#xA;if (standardShaderGUIMethodInfo == null)&#xA;{&#xA;    Debug.Log(&amp;quot;Could not find the AssignNewShaderToMaterial method. Aborting!&amp;quot;);&#xA;    return;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;object[] parameters = {material, oldShader, newShader};&#xA;standardShaderGUIMethodInfo.Invoke(standardShaderGUIInstance, parameters);&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I assume you're trying to run your code in the Editor. If you're trying to access this class in a built version of the game, it likely doesn't exist because it's part of the UnityEditor namespace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need any more help, it might be best to ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/&quot;&gt;StackOverflow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31260" LastEditorUserId="31260" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T01:03:56.563" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T01:03:56.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14336" CreationDate="2023-10-10T05:44:30.097" Score="3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cc-by&lt;/strong&gt; derivative or original crediting for just a part of a  3D model?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lets say I got a car and I just want one tire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original work is the whole car, not only the tires, it could be  called like &amp;quot;foo car&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My derivative now is just one tire. I dont want in my project the whole car, only one tire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do I credit it? Do I keep the original credit? Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;foo car by dude is ... ccby&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But foo car is not there.. who reads the credits will think who created foo car forgot to add the other parts. &lt;strong&gt;Or am I free to be &lt;em&gt;descriptive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; about how I just extracted a part of the original work? Like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;foo car by dude is ... ccby. This project, by me, just extracted a part foo car without creatively modifying (only converted or adjusted to fit this project) the mesh (only decimated or remeshed) nor textures in a creative way (only down or upscaled) and is using only one tire under ccby. if you reuse this tire you must credit not me but dude, even if you use just an extracted  part of this tire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;foo tire is derivative of foo car ... under ccby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obs.: I understand minor adjustments, like blurring a texture, are not creative and doesnt allow me to publish as derivative right? It must be something clearly perceptible right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ps.: Btw, the answer for the above would also  apply to the case where i mix many extracted parts of many ccby works into a single model (like a chimera) rigged by me (or a mix of originals riggings)? Of course crediting everyone and detailing what part was taken from what model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31190" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T03:44:53.167" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T03:44:53.167" Title="cc-by derivative or original crediting for just a part of a 3D model?" Tags="|derivative-works|cc-by|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14328" CreationDate="2023-10-10T06:31:12.500" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what you describe and clarified in the comments, this 3D viewer is not tied to one particular game. It can be used with games with various licenses and even a transcript of table-top RPG games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that copyright wise, your 3D viewer is not a derived work of any of the games you view with it. The output from the game is just data that the 3D viewer reads in and uses to render a 3D scenery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If two works are copyright wise unrelated, then their respective copyright licenses also don't affect each other. This means that you don't need to care about the game's copyright license in choosing the copyright license of your 3D viewer. Even a strong copyleft license, like the GPL, on the game does not affect your choices for the license of the 3D viewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T06:31:12.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-10T06:59:55.040" Score="2" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;can a GPL service receive input requests from a  proprietary software and provide specific output results?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obs.: the gpl service is a local machine daemon that just listens for new files in a folder, it is not on a server, it is not networked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obs.: the proprietary software is closed source, not GPL, nor any other open source license, with sources that are not to be released to the public, neither to customers. It is private closed sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For ex.: i would like to create a service that listens to new files placed at folder &lt;code&gt;/MakeMePretty/request&lt;/code&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;now, the proprietary software will place a file there and listen at &lt;code&gt;/MakeMePretty/pretty&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it would all be very fast like one check per 0.05s and /MakeMePretty/ would be in the ram drive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;also, the request would have only generic hints on how specific the GPL listener should proccess the input data, otherwise i read that if you pass specific params to the GPL app, it would be considered like a library and would not be allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obs.: The dev is a person named something like Foo Barson. Foo Barson can release a proprietary closed source software's binary and Foo Barson can also release another software as GPL code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;service is a xBRZ image upscaler.  a gpl service, wrapping xBRZ lib, also implemented by Foo Barson and of course released in GPL.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;client is a UDK unreal engine game.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;case 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;client writes a request with a small file dimensions. And with a generic hint in the filename like &amp;quot;animal&amp;quot; &amp;quot;human&amp;quot; &amp;quot;object&amp;quot;, or may be a less generic &amp;quot;building_LOD_x2&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xBRZ service determines slow processing predefined specific detailed  config will be used to upscale the image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;case 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;client writes a request with a big landscape file dimensions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xBRZ service determines fast special  processing predefined specific detailed  config will be used to upscale the image.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an intentional indirect way to inform the GPL app to use specific params. The proprietary sofware can use the GPL service but does not depend on it to run (could it depend tho?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obs.: Clarifications as requested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL software service will be released opensource with precompiled binaries publicly; it is standalone, doesnt depend on the proprietary software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then, one day, the proprietary software, that also do not depend on that GPL service, will also be released.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work done by the GPL service could also be done by another app that provide acceptable results, thats the reason why the reqiests only have generic hints unrelated to specific things the service can prepare, but the service can be configured with presets that provide the specific proprietary software required results, and these presets can be used also by any other app thru the generic hints at least if they are also not gpl.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More clarifications (may be redundant):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are independent. They are released independently also. Each of them, the GPL service and the proprietary app, can run without requiring eachother.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the GPL service is listening, the proprietary app will capture and use the output in realtime.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The GPL service can be substituted by any equivalent service including a proprietary one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The requests are configured using generic hints, but the service is specifically configured with precise presets that are used based on the generic hints provided by any app making the requests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more clarifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the GPL service is a listener and wrapper that uses xBRZ lib/app.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;xBRZ is GPL, therefore that service must be GPL too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the GPL service is not a networked service, it is a daemon that listens for new files to be processed in the specified directory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That service will be published online on github independendly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That service will proccess any file placed there, independently if you exported it from gimp, or if any other app save it there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The service will never know what app made the request.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is it allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31190" LastEditorUserId="31190" LastEditDate="2023-10-21T14:53:52.790" LastActivityDate="2023-10-25T05:43:59.563" Title="can a GPL service receive input requests from a proprietary software and provide specific output results?" Tags="|gpl-3|lgpl|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14333" CreationDate="2023-10-10T07:02:30.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you take just a part of an original work to use in your work, it is good to be descriptive in your credits about using just a part of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go with your foo-car example, the credits could look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Stack of tires&amp;quot; by VeganEye, licensed under CC-BY.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Re-used and modified a part from foo-car by dude, licensed under CC-BY.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, if you want to be more explicit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Stack of tires&amp;quot; by VeganEye, licensed under CC-BY.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Re-used and modified left front tire from foo-car by dude, licensed under CC-BY&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form of descriptive attribution also extends nicely to the case where you combine bits and pieces from multiple works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T09:54:14.733" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T09:54:14.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-10T12:49:20.770" Score="5" ViewCount="3576" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does private GPL open source exist? If so, how it works if mixed with public GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I read that a company may sell a binary under the GPL, and only people who bought it can have access to the GPL source code, and they cannot redistribute it (or improvements to it) publicly. Is that a real thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If 1 is real. Can a public GPL project be combined with the private GPL project?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then, can the author of the public GPL project demand that the improved and functional parts of his project (a code that works and has no private closed source dependencies) are also made available publicly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 1 is no then 2 is nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31190" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T21:36:59.173" LastActivityDate="2023-10-11T19:23:08.003" Title="Does private GPL open source exist? if so, how does it work if mixed with public GPL?" Tags="|gpl-3|publishing|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14337" CreationDate="2023-10-10T13:33:05.397" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your first statement is ultimately false. Anyone who receives a copy of GPL'd software must have the right to redistribute it, so we can be sure that second half of statement #1 is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the first part of #1 contains an important half-truth: there can be &lt;em&gt;voluntary&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;private&amp;quot; possession of GPL code. If Author A writes some new modifications to GPL'd software and sells it to Company C, then Company C is &lt;em&gt;allowed&lt;/em&gt; to share those modifications, but they might not &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; anyone else to have those modifications (i.e., because sharing them might help C's competition). In this way, the first half is true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a company may sell a binary under the GPL, and only who bought it can have access to the GPL source code&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because only recipients have access to the code, and existing holders of the code might have a business interest in not sharing it. Nothing can legally compel them to keep the code private, but nothing compels them to disclose it, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-10-10T19:30:57.337" LastActivityDate="2023-10-10T19:30:57.337" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14337" CreationDate="2023-10-11T03:38:31.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you receive a GPL'ed binary three primary rights are conveyed to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can redistribute the binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can request/obtain the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can redistribute the source code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: If you choose to redistribute a binary that has been compiled from modified source code you also have the obligation to distribute the modified source code - if requested by the person you sent the binary to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you modify and compile a program, you can choose not to distribute it at all - meaning you chose not to send any part of the modified source code or binary to anyone else. Assuming you do this - don't release anything - no one can compel you to do so under the terms of the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could consider this to be &amp;quot;Private GPL&amp;quot;, however it is the fact that you don't redistribute it that makes it &amp;quot;Private&amp;quot;. As such you can combine it with any number of additional GPL projects - as long as nothing is redistributed - you can't be compelled to release any of it by the GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also consider the situation of work for hire on unreleased GPL code to be &amp;quot;Private GPL&amp;quot; where someone is an employee of a company, they enhance an open source product - using the companies hardware, where they are being paid for the work and deploying only to internal servers of the company (no public access). Specifically it is private as the company has no intent to ever release it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29869" LastEditorUserId="29869" LastEditDate="2023-10-11T15:18:45.127" LastActivityDate="2023-10-11T15:18:45.127" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-11T11:38:21.377" Score="1" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used the design palette in Apache Netbeans to design a gui application. I have modified much of the code to suit my needs but some remains pure copy and paste. Am I allowed to use the autogenerated code in a commercial application? If yes, do I need to disclose something in the source code or how does it work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31278" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-11T14:24:09.170" LastActivityDate="2023-11-26T11:08:04.780" Title="Netbeans Apache Autogenerated Code - Commercial Use" Tags="|license|java|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14337" CreationDate="2023-10-11T19:23:08.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can have any kind of license. As long as the developer and the customer agree. So I’m sure you can have a license as described. It wouldn’t be the GPL license though. It would probably not be an open source license at all, the way you describe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And apart from there being different numbered versions of GPL, there is only one GPL license, and I don’t think anyone could legally call a different license “GPL” or “public GPL” or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="454" LastActivityDate="2023-10-11T19:23:08.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-12T12:56:54.653" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming we have a kubernetes application stack consisting of - among other things - MongoDB and Metabase. Metabase is APGLv3 licensed. We share the combined code as e.g. helm charts publicly on github. Now we host this application internally and save user data to the database and use Metabase to create dashboards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct to assume that any user data does not fall under the copyleft license? And that the approach described above fulfills the copyleft license well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;//EDIT: I've seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6153/can-i-use-agpl-component-to-create-a-data-file-for-commercial-application&quot;&gt;Can I use AGPL component to create a data file for commercial application?&lt;/a&gt;, but this referred to software output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31288" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T20:15:26.953" Title="Is user data part of an AGPL-derived-application?" Tags="|gpl|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14346" CreationDate="2023-10-13T05:54:21.680" Score="10" ViewCount="2321" Body="&lt;p&gt;Accidentally a few weeks ago I've implemented a logic into my &lt;strong&gt;MIT&lt;/strong&gt; licensed public library, which has been patented by someone else some years ago. That library isn't only about that patented logic - it's only a small part. But days ago I've found the patent during research, and now I'd like to ensure that I'm not breaking any law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I develop that library as a private individual, but it may be used in a commercial environment also. Now I've updated my README to include a warning to be aware of the patent. Per default the developer must explicit make a special configuration to use the library in the patented way, but it offers everything to go. Anyway, I've documented the detailed steps how to configure and use the library in the way, which would definitely break the patent (including the warning), when being sold, or distributed, or hosted (&amp;quot;as a Service&amp;quot;) from a business like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I know the patent should only touch commercial/business usages, but not private use. So I actually feel safe for the moment, but I still have a little headache because in fact I license partial patented material with MIT. Some questions that came around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Am I doing it right? Is a warning in the documentation (README) enough?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is MIT the right (safe) choice, or should I overthink to switch to another license?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the MIT licensing affect the patent holders rights in any way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would it change anything, if I'd transfer my license to a business which continues developing the library (using the MIT license also)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: After I accepted the answer I have to add that in the particular case of patent US10402172B1 (I didn't ask explicitly for that) things are a bit more complicated: I've created code which aggregates multiple RNGs (entropy sources) into one random data stream, and also makes it easy to distribute that stream over a network in the way (all ways) that is being described in the patent. Aggregating multiple RNGs (or entropy sources) is a common practice since decades already, so this can't be patented in 2019. But distributing the resulting random data in form of a &amp;quot;Random/Entropy as a Service&amp;quot; (R/EaaS) API or application over a network can, it seems. This isn't implemented in my library, but simplified a lot by just using my library. For this case a warning not to do in the specified way seems to be enough, since my library doesn't contain code to exhaust the patent, finally, but it needs only one more simple step to ~~breaking a law~~ (&amp;lt;- forget that) stepping into a patent trap. If this would be a problem, publishing a programming language would be a problem also, because it can be used to break patents easily - let's keep the church in the village (let's not exaggerate things)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the general question about including patented logic into an Open Source library, the accepted answer is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31298" LastEditorUserId="31298" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T19:07:50.793" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T19:07:50.793" Title="Making it possible to implement a patented algorithm with a MIT licensed library" Tags="|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14345" CreationDate="2023-10-13T06:44:22.910" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fear you have a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;A patent is a limited legal monopoly granted to protect an invention, giving the holder the right to exclude others from using, making, selling, and importing the invention (including things that embody the invention) for a fixed period of time.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/780078/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;; in the spirit of full disclosure I should note that I wrote that article, though I didn't give the talk on which it's based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has (sadly) long been held that software is perfectly capable of embodying a patented invention.  That your codebase doesn't enable that functionality by default doesn't make it non-infringing, any more than a machine that embodies a patent when running, but ships turned off and without batteries, becomes non-infringing.  Warning your users in BIG LETTERS doesn't stop your code infringing, any more than warning users that your code contains a big chunk of unlicensed copyright material dispels the copyright violation.  It doesn't matter that you're not doing this for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may get worse yet, because some jurisdictions punish more harshly infringement that is &lt;em&gt;knowingly&lt;/em&gt; committed, and both documenting the patent in the codebase and publishing your question here make it somewhat easier to show you knew you were infringing the patent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read it, much your safest bet is to stop distributing your code, at least until such time that you can have confidence that the patent doesn't cover your code, or until you have rewritten your code to avoid the infringement, or the patent expires.  Sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-13T06:51:56.857" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T06:51:56.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14345" CreationDate="2023-10-13T15:37:54.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;After your update, I think it's pretty clear that you're massively overthinking this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't implemented in my library, but simplified a lot by just using my library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter how much your work simplifies someone else doing this.  You say that on its own, your work does not do this.  That's the end of all possible discussion.  Anything after that is a doom spiral of negative overthinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;warning not to do in the specified way seems to be enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spiral in progress!  For starters, worrying about how people will use your code is bad for your stress levels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for another thing, if your documentation says &amp;quot;this could be used to infringe that patent by doing these steps&amp;quot;, you're potentially making yourself liable simply by saying that.  An unscrupulous lawyer (they exist!) could make a case that you've provided instructions for how to infringe the patent.  Even if the text finishes &amp;quot;...so don't do it&amp;quot;, that doesn't get you out of the hole.  Probably you could fight it if they did, but do you really want to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, suppose your code makes no reference to the patent and has no warnings.  Then no-one can make that claim.  And as you've already said, your code doesn't (in itself) do what the patent says.  So by leaving the warning off, you're &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delete all warnings, delete all references to the patent, and you're good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16289" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T15:37:54.190" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-09-20T14:56:18.430" Score="2" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working on a project to create (in PDF) letter charts for children for alphabet learning. This involves a number of different pictures from different sources (but mostly Wikipedia) and different licenses (but mostly GNU FDL, Creative Commons or public domain). My problem is: how do I properly attribute copyright and licensing of all those different pictures? How do I reconcile all those different licenses, i.e. what license can/should I use for my final work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make any difference whether we're talking about the source code here (images lying around as project files) or final PDF documents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="stf" LastActivityDate="2023-10-13T16:16:40.430" Title="using external images of multiple different licenses in a single document-oriented project" Tags="|software|licensing|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14349" CreationDate="2023-09-20T15:08:29.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For each work that you use, you must conform to the license requirements of that work. For example, if someone releases a picture into the wild with CC0 and imposes no requirements, you may do whatever you want w.r.t. that image. If you want to use a work licensed under CC BY-ND-NC, you must give the book away. Focusing just on the attribution requirement, a typical way of doing this is in the foreword to give a list of images and their sources. This will include appropriate &amp;quot;share alike&amp;quot; language, where you may say that Images 3, 8, 12, 19 are licenses under CC BY-NC and Images 4, 5, 15 are licensed under GPL3, etc. There almost certainly must be complex language saying what permissions are given for each part of the work (you get to decide what license to use for the part that you wrote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6726" LastActivityDate="2023-09-20T15:08:29.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14354" CreationDate="2023-10-13T18:41:35.073" Score="5" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain on behalf on my company a few Java libraries, with a small yet non-null userbase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The powers that be have decided to change the name of the company, and while the plan is to hold onto the domain name for the foreseeable future, the company does not wish to be associated with its old name &lt;strong&gt;at all&lt;/strong&gt;, and quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is that the Java packages published use the name of the company, &lt;code&gt;com.foo.awesomelib&lt;/code&gt; will become &lt;code&gt;com.bar.awesomelib&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I, in the most respectful way to the users, make the move?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29395" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-14T08:03:09.777" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T08:03:09.777" Title="How to handle breaking change due to company change of name?" Tags="|distribution|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-14T03:03:56.697" Score="2" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone tried to separately license their repository (e.g. Git) from the code that it holds? How did it go? (Sorry about the open-ended nature of the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Corollary to this question: what is the legal status of repositories? Typically, projects do not articulate the copyright and license status of the repository objects. The &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; files and copyright headers refer to the content, but are mum about the version control meta-data. I don't think I've ever seen the licensing documents in a FOSS project say anything about the status of, say, the bodies of commit messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, a developer could claim claim that all the commit log messages and other meta-data, such as the names of branches and the shape of the object graph, are proprietary. In essence, that the whole repository object as such is not free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus replicating the directory (with &lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt;, or any other means) would be forbidden. Or various other rules: e.g. the developer could impose that clones of the repository are allowed, but may not be publicly hosted or redistributed. Outside contributors of the project might be required to assign copyright, to the project, of any commit message text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, a tarball made of a source code baseline using &lt;code&gt;git archive&lt;/code&gt; (or a web front end thereof) could be freely licensed, e.g. BSD, MIT. It would contain a free &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file and other files with copyright headers pointing to or reiterating that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be used as a tactic for discouraging forking, unofficial mirrors (particularly on hosting sites the developer disagrees with) hostile project takeovers and such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What experience is there with this sort of positioning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T09:54:11.587" Title="Open code, closed repo?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|git|version-control-systems|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14351" CreationDate="2023-10-14T08:02:56.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't speak with any particular authority on this matter, but it seems to me that a halfway house is the best approach.  Do by all means change the name going forward, but leave the old repository up and available; essentially, fork the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt the company will wish to expunge any evidence of its old name from the historical record, but that's just tough.  Code was released with the company's name in, and the company chose to put it there.  It happened, so it's part of the historical record; the company's desire for a quick-change act doesn't invalidate history.  Perhaps the company will learn a thing or to from this about using java package names as a &lt;em&gt;sub rosa&lt;/em&gt; form of advertising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to remove the packages under their old name from wherever it is they are currently distributed, and assuming they were distributed under a free licence, someone else in the user community may well put them back, and they'd be well entitled to do so.  Such a bad faith act also makes it &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; likely, to my mind, that the community will continue development under the old naming scheme, instead of adopting the name change going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-10-14T08:02:56.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-15T01:59:36.207" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow community!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a Swift package and am having some trouble deciding which FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) license to use. I have specific requirements and am hoping someone can guide me in choosing the right license. Here's what I'm aiming for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want the code to be openly available and modifiable. Anyone should be able to use it, tweak it, or even port it to another language or platform like Kotlin on Android.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The package represents a barebones version of some business logic that can be &amp;quot;compiled and integrated as you see fit.&amp;quot; On my end, I plan to use it in a closed-source, monetized iOS app. While I haven't decided if the iOS app will eventually be open-sourced, I want to leave that option open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given these conditions, what FOSS license(s) would you recommend? I've been considering the MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPL licenses, but I'm not sure which one would best fit my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What I've Looked Into:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MIT License&lt;/strong&gt;: This seems to allow almost everything, but I'm not sure if it covers the future open-sourcing of the app that will use the package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apache 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;: This is similar to MIT but includes an explicit grant of patent rights. Would that be beneficial for my situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GPL&lt;/strong&gt;: I've read that using GPL code in closed-source applications can be problematic, so I'm hesitant to choose this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would greatly appreciate any insights or advice on which license would best meet my needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@phillip-kendall et al - I looked at the question that I am supposedly duplicating and I don't see how my question is duplicating a question about GPL ?  Please help me understand.  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31314" LastEditorUserId="31314" LastEditDate="2023-10-16T16:52:33.667" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T16:52:33.667" Title="Need Help Choosing a FOSS License for a Swift Package With Specific Requirements" Tags="|licensing|gpl|mit|apache-2.0|floss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-10-16T08:52:56.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14362" CreationDate="2023-10-15T11:19:51.660" Score="1" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;CIS Benchmark is freely distributed under creative commons licence which says &amp;quot;use as is&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CIS has several assessment and hardening tools based on their benchmarks and all of them are paid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is - can I create a commercial product - assessment and hardening software that follows the CIS Benchmarks and can claim to be CIS Benchmark compliant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their terms of use are mentioned here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cisecurity.org/terms-and-conditions-table-of-contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cisecurity.org/terms-and-conditions-table-of-contents&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creative Common License Link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31315" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-10-16T10:16:27.503" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T22:33:38.050" Title="Can I use CIS Benchmarks to create a product?" Tags="|commercial|creative-commons|cc-by-nc-sa|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-10-17T11:05:30.883" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14358" CreationDate="2023-10-15T18:36:34.247" Score="4" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make a sustainable living, we ask people who want to use our program to choose one of these options before receiving the source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Donate/pay X amount of money&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Volunteer/work for us for Y tasks&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If they don't have money and time to help us, and the program is indeed important to relief some of their burdens, write us an email explaining their situation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the hard time has pass, we will open the source. We want that during this time, once they have been granted to access the code, they can use it as if it's an open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What licenses we can use before and after we open it? Can we still call the software open source when barrier is still there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6810" LastEditorUserId="6810" LastEditDate="2023-10-16T08:57:29.330" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T21:41:44.000" Title="Is it open source for allowing people who have access to the source act as if it's open source?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|relicensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14357" CreationDate="2023-10-16T20:20:36.087" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes down to whether you offer the code to the recipients under a true free/open license. The preconditions under which you freely choose to offer the code does not pertain to its status as free or open: the Free Software Foundation's list of required freedoms and the Open Source Definition both deal with what actions &lt;em&gt;recipients&lt;/em&gt; can or can't take with the code, not the conditions under which someone becomes a recipient in the first place. In other words, if you choose to give the code only to people who have paid someone some amount of money, that's still compatible with open source, but if you want to &lt;em&gt;limit&lt;/em&gt; others to distribute &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; copies only when some money has been paid appropriately, that's not a kind of restriction that's within the definition of free software or open source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you offer a binary without source and/or offer source under non-free/open terms, as a lesser tier alongside a paid tier to access full free/open rights, you should clearly indicate that only the paid (or volunteer) option gives recipients full free/open rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practically, though, if you offer the code under free terms, then it's likely that someone will very quickly use those rights to host a mirror of your code, unencumbered by the requirements to pay money or perform other actions. If you don't afford your recipients the right to do this, then you should not call your software &amp;quot;free software&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; -- the usual term for source code without full rights to distribute or modify it is &amp;quot;source available&amp;quot; software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask if you can require distributors to link back to your project. This is narrowly allowed in a non-obnoxious way; see the Apache 2.0 license's NOTICE file for a model of how this is done. (The GPLv3 also permits this, to enable compatibility with Apache 2.0.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-10-16T21:41:44.000" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T21:41:44.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14361" CreationDate="2023-10-16T07:28:45.967" Score="15" ViewCount="3443" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking to purchase a license to software from the author.  The software is GPL licensed (I assume because its a Wordpress plugin - and thus compelled to be GPL).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interest in purchasing the software from the author rather then an aftermarket site was to support the author and get updates for the lifetime of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was about to complete the purchase when I read &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20231016072430/https://divi-modules.com/legals/product-license/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the terms of purchase&lt;/a&gt; - which appears to be in breach of the GPL.  I reached out to the seller/author and his response was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If the intention of a customer in purchasing our product is to resell&#xA;it, re-distribute it, or incorporate it into another product then we&#xA;would prefer that they didn't purchase it. As also mentioned in our&#xA;terms and conditions, &amp;quot;If you disagree with any part of the terms,&#xA;then please do not use the Divi-Modules website, products or&#xA;services.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret this to a threat of the author to not uphold his obligations to provide access to new versions and support (which is what I was purchasing) if I want to take advantage of my right to redistribute a copy of the software or use it in ways the author would rather I didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring for the moment that the license on the site is contradictory and on the face of it a breach of the GPL &lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL allow for a person providing support for GPL licensed software to tie that support to you not using rights given to you under the GPL?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12747" OwnerDisplayName="davidgo" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T21:04:41.773" Title="Can support of GPL software legally be done in such a way as to practically force you to abandon your GPL rights?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14359" CreationDate="2023-10-16T07:44:09.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The author can license their work under multiple, incompatible licenses&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the owner, the author is not bound to follow the user-facing terms of any license. They can offer a GPL license and they can offer another license: the terms of those licenses do not have to be compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a user, you can choose to follow the GPL license or the other license. If they are incompatible, you can’t do both - you have to commit to one or the other. The owner must fulfill their obligations under whichever license you chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the GPL, their only obligation is not to revoke the license as long as you comply with it. They are under no obligation to provide updates or, if they do make updates, that these will be released under the GPL. They also don’t promise that they won’t release the software under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27862" OwnerDisplayName="Dale M" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T07:44:09.380" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14359" CreationDate="2023-10-16T21:04:41.773" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the GPL allow for a person providing support for GPL licensed software to tie that support to you not using rights given to you under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maybe&lt;/em&gt;. But if you're going to do it, you need to be very careful about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I think is not in dispute is that a third party &amp;quot;C&amp;quot; can do this if offering support to you &amp;quot;A&amp;quot; when receiving software from &amp;quot;B&amp;quot;, so long as C is a true third party and not actually an entity controlled by B; that's two separate relationships and you are not in any way prevented from exercising your GPL rights in B's software if you do or do not take up C's support contract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it becomes tricky is if B and C are the same entity. Bradley Kuhn, who is the Policy Fellow at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; and probably has more knowledge in this area than just about anyone else, recently wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an analysis of Red Hat's changes to the RHEL's licensing agreements&lt;/a&gt;. His summary of Red Hat's business model is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most concise and pithy way to describe RHEL's business model is: “if you exercise your rights under the GPL, your money is no good here”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is very similar to the case you are describing. Kuhn's summary of the position is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Red Hat] have further argued that such business relationships can be terminated based on any behaviors — including exercising rights guaranteed by the GPL agreements. Whether that analysis is correct is a matter of intense debate, and likely only a court case that disputed this particular issue would yield a definitive answer on whether that disagreeable behavior is permitted (or not) under the GPL agreements. Debates continue, even today, in copyleft expert circles, whether this model &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt; violates GPL. There is, however, no doubt that this provision is not in the spirit of the GPL agreements. The RHEL business model is unfriendly, captious, capricious, and cringe-worthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if the SFC would be interested in pursuing a case against the plugin author; you could contact them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T21:04:41.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14356" CreationDate="2023-10-16T22:33:38.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The creative common license you link to is the 'Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International'. That obviously has the word 'non-commercial' in it. So no, you cannot base a commercial solution on it without violation of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also cannot base an open-source product on it, as open source implies the grant for any use, thus also for commercial use. And that somewhat sadly makes the question off-topic for an open source site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-10-16T22:33:38.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14364" CreationDate="2023-10-17T14:22:25.327" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's consider a scenario where when working on embedded software, I had to obtain datasheet related to some chip from X manufacturer. This datasheet is not publicly available, but can be obtained under NDA or under specific terms of service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question related to NDA and opensource has been open for a very long time, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/203562/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://lwn.net/Articles/203562/&lt;/a&gt;. But this article relates to &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;drivers written under NDA&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;drivers written based on datasheet that is under NDA&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it allowed to contribute driver to opensource when to write it confidential datasheet was needed? Or does it depend sorely on NDA/terms of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31335" LastActivityDate="2023-10-18T07:15:43.880" Title="Can I contribute device driver to opensource when datasheet is under NDA/confidential?" Tags="|open-source-definition|nda|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14363" CreationDate="2023-10-18T07:15:43.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it allowed to contribute driver to opensource when to write it confidential datasheet was needed? Or does it depend sorely on NDA/terms of use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends almost entirely on the terms in the NDA, but I would expect that any properly drafted NDA contains a clause that forbids you to disclose the &lt;em&gt;information&lt;/em&gt; that you receive under the NDA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the source code of the driver contains basically a subset of the information that is in the datasheet, if the NDA forbids disclosure of the information, that means that you are not allowed to distribute the source code. This is independent of what license you would want to attach to the driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-10-18T07:15:43.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14335" CreationDate="2023-10-19T09:43:05.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you use GPL software in this way, it can be considered a case of aggregation if they are able to run independently of each other and your configuration combines them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the case of Objective-C. Apple wanted to make a workaround by providing an object file for connection to GCC. They failed because the object file is not self-contained and must work with GCC. I personally would quibble about some aspects of this, but the reality is that Objective-C is Free Software Licensed today.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case: linux kernel and &amp;quot;blobs&amp;quot;. The Linux kernel includes small pieces of object code called &amp;quot;blobs&amp;quot; that are sent to and run on the CPU and other devices and are used for basic hardware support (at least by design). They can exist in GPL Linux because the Linux kernel would work without them (at least on the right hardware) and are independent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, what you want to do can be subjected to aggregation, but let's be honest - you do it to avoid publishing the code under the GPL. If the GPL code is adapted to your application and additionally downloaded from the same installer, someone may try to prove to you that it is a derivative work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it is best to require the user to download this environment separately (just like JRE is required to execute Java), and also to operate on a specific protocol (described in some document), so as to show that it is not a dependency on a program, but only on some API /protocol or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect is the word &amp;quot;service&amp;quot;. If your GPL application is on a server, you DO NOT NEED to share the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T09:43:05.413" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14352" CreationDate="2023-10-19T09:54:11.587" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, commits and other settings in a GIT repository are just files contained in the .git directory.&#xA;From the moment you add the license, all files are licensed under that license, but since the license also covers .git files, there is a chance that it applies retroactively to all changes to the repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky topic, but you can assume that if someone provides a tarball or other licensed archive and that archive contains a .git directory, then if you can extract the changes from those files, these changes may be licensed under that license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some licenses, as mentioned in the comments, include the description &amp;quot;contribution&amp;quot;, which may support the thesis. Additionally, some licenses mention &amp;quot;accompanied documentation&amp;quot;, which may suggest that the commit descriptions are documentation, but this is also one interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T09:54:11.587" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14340" CreationDate="2023-10-19T10:05:10.497" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, the automatically generated code is your code, because you designed the design (which is often saved as xml or other anyway), and the program converted it into code, i.e. it was a converter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear, it depends on the specific case, but even if it is copyrighted by Apache Netbeans, Netbeans is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license which is permissive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming such a case, what you need to do is meet the basic credit requirements. Of course, if you want to be very correct, it will take some space (note, license, authors, description of changes), but it will not affect your product with any copyleft or non-commercial terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read about Apache 2.0 License &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastEditorUserId="25883" LastEditDate="2023-11-26T11:08:04.780" LastActivityDate="2023-11-26T11:08:04.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14316" CreationDate="2023-10-19T10:52:27.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I'm not a lawyer, and &lt;strong&gt;this is not legal advice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, why is this question asked?&#xA;Answer: Because Unity is a commercial product, it is incompatible with Open Source licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you choose GNU GPL (but also AGPL or LGPL)? So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens if you choose the GNU GPL? So... nothing for you unless you accept changes from other people. Simply put, the code will be under the GNU GPL, the binaries will have to be under the freeware/shareware EULA or whatever, and users of the code will have to compile the source code themselves and use it privately without publishing binaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can add an exception, e.g.:&#xA;&amp;quot;As a special exception, you may link this source code to the Unity libraries provided at (URL to Unity site) and share the binary code under the license described below&amp;quot;&#xA;Then you license the freeware, which you can either write yourself or modify an existing one, and that's it. Only if someone removes the exception from his fork, you will not  be able to use his modifications.&#xA;I then recommend the GNU GPL v3 because it describes the realm of exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is still the issue of &amp;quot;system libraries&amp;quot; in the GNU GPL, but Unity probably doesn't fit into that.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.unity.com/threads/gnu-gpl-3-open-source-license-and-unity-question.590035/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For AGPL, it is similar to GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Weak copyleft licenses:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;LGPL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you would like the game modifications to keep the open source code, LGPL is good, but difficult to evaluate in the case of Unity. Let me know if you specifically need this license, and I will try to read about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MPL v2.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is file-level protection, so you can definitely take advantage of it.&#xA;Modifications, i.e., changes to the code or new files that contain parts of other files covered by the MPL, must be provided, but Unity libraries do not.&#xA;But on the other hand, someone who modifies your code by adding new files can only share your files if done skillfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Permissive licenses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache, MIT, BSD, ISC and other permissive licenses should work well with Unity. Please ensure that the license for the binaries is different from these licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you want to share a project under a FOSS license and not care about forks, use a permissive license.&#xA;If you want to keep the Unity project open source, you have these options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly:&#xA;Let's skip LGPL; it would be good, but you need to spend time analyzing to what extent you can do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They stay:&#xA;GNU GPL+Exception&#xA;MPLv2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MPL v2 is good, but remember that any extensions to the project that use the API rather than the code itself do not have to be open source.&#xA;GNU GPL + Exception&#xA;Good choice. The problem is that if you want to accept changes from others, you have to make sure they haven't removed the extension.&#xA;And you have to write an extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that you need to write a license for the binary code anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever route you choose, feel free to ask. For the GNU GPL, I can help with creating the exception and also help with licensing the binary code (although &lt;strong&gt;I'm not a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T10:52:27.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11310" CreationDate="2023-10-19T11:42:21.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file contains license that apply to all the code in &lt;strong&gt;this one package&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES&lt;/code&gt; file contains a list of copyright owners, credits and licenses for the code that was used to make this package.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need to provide all &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES&lt;/code&gt; files in your software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some packages use &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt;. Some add &lt;code&gt;COPYRIGHT&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;AUTHORS&lt;/code&gt; files. Some packages are multi-licensed, and you need to include all copyright files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a simpler way, like copying all licenses to one directory and adding a list of NuGet packages with the name of the license and all copyright notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also provide a zip file with the source code and license files for all NuGet packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can check some software, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nuget.org/packages/dotnet-project-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dotnet-project-licenses&lt;/a&gt; which may be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-10-19T11:42:21.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14374" CreationDate="2023-10-20T10:10:14.060" Score="4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a company we have a proprietary software, coded in Java and distributed to our clients in .war packages that they run on their servers. To run, the software requires a program licensed under GPLv2 or later. The creator calls this program a library, but it can be executed from shell as a standalone entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How it works is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;our software receives a file via API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we convert the file into another format using the program (run from shell)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we extract certain data from the new format, we organize it, aggregate information and perform analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;we return the new information in XML/JSON to the client via API&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our software is used by our clients under our own license for a fee. Before actually using it, the clients have to download and install the program on their own as a dependency. So in that regard we're in the clear selling our software without any GPL restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However we've run into an issue with interpreting the license when one of our clients asked us if we could release our software as a docker image with all dependencies already inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our issue is that we would technically be distributing the program as part of a whole (our software + program in one entity) which in theory would fall under:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, 2 paragraphs down we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't modify the program we use at all, we just use it in runtime. We also believe our software can't be classified as &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;work based on the Program&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; under the definition of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the Program or any derivative work under copyright law&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. This leads us to believe that the docker image with both our software and the program would not make the software or the docker image a GPL licensed Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new client in question doesn't want to get the docker file, they require an already &amp;quot;compiled&amp;quot; docker image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can we distribute docker images containing a GPL licensed program used by our proprietary software without making the software fall under GPL as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31363" LastEditorUserId="31363" LastEditDate="2023-10-24T11:49:47.640" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T18:10:22.230" Title="Docker image with proprietary software and GPL library" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|docker|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14373" CreationDate="2023-10-22T07:11:11.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before actually using it, the clients have to download and install the program on their own as a dependency. So in that regard we're in the clear selling our software without any GPL restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not correct. The determination if your software is a derived work of the GPL program does not depend in any way on the number of parts you divide it in or from how many locations your customer needs to download the various parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your software can only work with this particular GPL program, then it is most likely a derived work and needs to be GPL licensed itself as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if your software can work with any package that provides the needed functionality and can be invoked in &amp;lt;this&amp;gt; way, and if that package can be created without knowing the source of the GPL program, then the two are most likely a mere aggregation and unrelated in copyright terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the determination if an alternative to the GPL program can be used, only the technical possibility is needed,  not the economical feasibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking all that into consideration, it makes no difference if you distribute the complete installation as a docker image, or if you let your customers download from multiple locations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-10-24T18:10:22.230" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T18:10:22.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14373" CreationDate="2023-10-23T12:14:42.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OP wrote in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we convert the file into another format using the library (run from shell)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And OP also wrote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/14373/docker-image-with-proprietary-software-and-gpl-library#comment38161_14374&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once our clients install it, they can just run it from the terminal&#xA;like &amp;quot;program -i file.docx -o file.html&amp;quot;. Our software does the same&#xA;thing, calling the &amp;quot;library&amp;quot; in that way and receiving its output to&#xA;process further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 FAQ entry (below) states that calling a GPLv2 program by command line is normally considered mere aggregation, as a form of inter-process communication, and thus the GPLv2 conditions would not apply to the calling program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if your software is dynamically or statically linked to the GPLv2 library, then the conditions of the GPLv2 would apply to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#MereAggregation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is the difference between “mere aggregation” and “combining two&#xA;modules into one program”?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mere aggregation of two programs means&#xA;putting them side by side on the same CD-ROM or hard disk. We use this&#xA;term in the case where they are separate programs, not parts of a&#xA;single program. In this case, if one of the programs is covered by the&#xA;GPL, it has no effect on the other program. Combining two modules&#xA;means connecting them together so that they form a single larger&#xA;program. If either part is covered by the GPL, the whole combination&#xA;must also be released under the GPL—if you can't, or won't, do that,&#xA;you may not combine them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What constitutes combining two parts into one program? This is a legal&#xA;question, which ultimately judges will decide. We believe that a&#xA;proper criterion depends both on the mechanism of communication (exec,&#xA;pipes, rpc, function calls within a shared address space, etc.) and&#xA;the semantics of the communication (what kinds of information are&#xA;interchanged).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the modules are included in the same executable file, they are&#xA;definitely combined in one program. If modules are designed to run&#xA;linked together in a shared address space, that almost surely means&#xA;combining them into one program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, pipes, sockets and &lt;strong&gt;command-line arguments are&#xA;communication mechanisms normally used between two separate programs.&#xA;So when they are used for communication, the modules normally are&#xA;separate programs.&lt;/strong&gt; But if the semantics of the communication are&#xA;intimate enough, exchanging complex internal data structures, that too&#xA;could be a basis to consider the two parts as combined into a larger&#xA;program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2023-10-24T04:02:14.840" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T04:02:14.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14342" CreationDate="2023-10-24T20:15:26.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL has no requirements for sharing of user data.  This was the reason for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/cal-1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creation of the CAL&lt;/a&gt;, which does have limited requirements for sharing data as well as code.  If the AGPL had covered any data, the authors of the CAL would have used it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note, though, that MongoDB is under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSPL&lt;/a&gt;, a non-OSS license, and not the AGPL, so the SSPL's terms may affect you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11583" LastActivityDate="2023-10-24T20:15:26.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14335" CreationDate="2023-10-25T05:21:45.527" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the GPL license (I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a lawyer) is that if you can code some &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; service (a toy application is enough) with a GPL license (or a compatible one) which interoperate with the GPL service you are safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my advice is to code (under GPL license) a toy application which interoperates (like your proprietary app is doing) with the GPL service, using the same protocol to communicate. If this is not doable you could be (legally) in trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The communication protocol is a specified and documented convention. For examples (GPL licensed) &lt;a href=&quot;https://gcc.gnu.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GCC&lt;/a&gt; can be extended by &lt;code&gt;dlopen&lt;/code&gt;-ed plugins, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU emacs&lt;/a&gt; accepts proprietary and GPL-ed scripts, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cirt.net/nikto2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nikto2&lt;/a&gt; interacts using HTTP with web services and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU bash&lt;/a&gt; can run open source or proprietary scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the communication protocol is ad-hoc and tied to your proprietary software, you should be careful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all cases, &lt;strong&gt;consult a lawyer&lt;/strong&gt; since these issues are country specific (or at least different in the EU and in the USA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, my pet open source project is (in 2023) the &lt;a href=&quot;http://refpersys.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RefPerSys&lt;/a&gt; (GPLv3+ licensed) inference engine on &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/RefPerSys/RefPerSys/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt; and I am living in France near Paris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="910" LastEditorUserId="910" LastEditDate="2023-10-25T05:43:59.563" LastActivityDate="2023-10-25T05:43:59.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14378" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2023-10-25T16:59:04.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;apsillers&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hi, I'm Andrew Sillers, a current &lt;em&gt;pro tem&lt;/em&gt; moderator from the site's days in beta. I'm running for reelection because I want to see this site continue to be a source of information for FLOSS veterans and newcomers alike. I strive to be patient, welcoming, and curious in resolving disputes, to ensure everyone who wants to be a member of this site feels welcome doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2023-10-25T16:59:04.253" LastActivityDate="2023-10-25T16:59:04.253" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2023-10-25T16:59:04.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11277" CreationDate="2023-10-26T12:43:28.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apple does something like this arleady.&#xA;macOS/iOS use XNU Darwnin as kernel (it was developed by Apple using many 3rd party components). As far as I understood, Apple is not required to publish   Darwin sources but they still do that that (see  &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu&lt;/a&gt; ). This even helps with Hackintosh development.&#xA;Only difference is that Darwin is not under GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31034" LastActivityDate="2023-10-26T12:43:28.500" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14382" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2023-10-28T06:44:30.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;MadHatter&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm Tom Yates, your other current &lt;em&gt;pro tem&lt;/em&gt; moderator.  I'm standing for&#xA;re-election firstly because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool fan of free software, I object when people spin FUD about it, and this is a good way for me to help bring clarity to the understanding of how free software works and can be used; and secondly, I'm standing because the past four years have been OK, and I think I've done a reasonable job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/election/1?tab=election#post-8818&quot;&gt;my candidate statement&lt;/a&gt; from the last time I was elected, if you&#xA;want to; I stand by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-10-28T06:44:30.573" LastActivityDate="2023-10-28T06:44:30.573" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2023-10-28T06:44:30.573" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14385" CreationDate="2023-10-28T13:44:49.850" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to build an application that will enable a user to convert files from any one of three formats, into any of those three formats. In order words, there are three formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aaa, bbb and ccc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My application will enable the user to convert aaa to ccc, or bbb to aaa, or ccc to bbb, etc. The origins of the three formats are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;aaa&lt;/strong&gt; (closed source product, I have permission and a license to read/write this format)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bbb&lt;/strong&gt; (open source GPL license, file format is published on the Internet)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ccc&lt;/strong&gt; (open source GPL license, file format is visible as JSON and easy to read)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All source code will be my original code, I will not be using any source code from any open source product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: Given that I am reading file formats created by GPL products, do I need to release my source code? This will be difficult given that I am also reading a properietary format. Ultimately I wish to sell a binary and not release any source given the complexity around the one closed source format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31419" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-10-31T03:37:12.487" LastActivityDate="2023-10-31T03:37:12.487" Title="File format convertor for open source and proprietary file formats" Tags="|gpl|closed-source|file-formats|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14384" CreationDate="2023-10-29T16:06:16.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: Given that I am reading file formats created by GPL products, do I need to release my source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Not if you have never seen the source of the GPL products.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As explained in the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/5478/is-the-output-of-an-open-source-program-licensed-the-same&quot;&gt;Is the output of an open source program licensed the same?&lt;/a&gt;, the output from a GPL-licensed application is itself not subject to the GPL license.&#xA;As an example, if I write software that I compiler with the GCC compiler (GPL license), then I can still distribute my software as closed-source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your situation, the important determining factor is if you can read and write files in the bbb and/or ccc formats without inspecting the GPL source code that is used to produces those files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the bbb format is published in a descriptive format (so, not as &amp;quot;this GPL-licensed source code describes the file format&amp;quot;), then you are good on that front and you can base your implementation on the description of the file format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the ccc format, you need to be a bit careful. As there is no description, there is a high temptation to look at the GPL sources for some of the more intricate details of the file format. You have to fight that temptation, because once you give in it becomes much harder to prove that you did not (subconsciously) copy parts of the GPL code into your own code and that would make your code a derived work that needs to be licensed under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you can do is use the program that creates ccc files to create as many variations of the ccc format as it can and work backwards from those output files to reconstruct the intricate details of the ccc format. Then you can still truthfully claim that you have never seen the GPL code and therefor you cannot have copied any part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-10-29T16:06:16.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14386" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-10-30T14:58:43.427" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to license Go source code using the AGPL? Every Go program gets linked statically with the Go runtime, which does not use the AGPL. Is this allowed to use the AGPL for my own code and link it with the Go runtime?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31436" OwnerDisplayName="ceving" LastActivityDate="2023-10-30T17:50:14.270" Title="Is it possible to use AGPL with Go?" Tags="|licensing|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14386" CreationDate="2023-10-30T15:52:31.330" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Go Runtime appears to use the so-called BSD 3-Clause &amp;quot;New&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Revised&amp;quot; License - see &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/LICENSE&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This licence &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/13809/can-i-use-a-mit-licensed-library-with-an-agplv3-project&quot;&gt;is compatible with the AGPL&lt;/a&gt;, so releasing a work that combines novel code licensed by you under AGPL with third party code (Go runtime) licensed by others under BSD 3-Clause should be no problem. As you or others distribute the work you need to observe the terms and conditions of both licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact as a non-copyleft license the MIT licence is compatible with almost any other licence. If you want to licence your code with a condition that all distributors must pay you £50 per copy issued, or only distribute copies on Mondays, or only distribute copies while wearing silly hats, or that no-one may distribute your code at all without express permission, you are also free to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" OwnerDisplayName="bdsl" LastActivityDate="2023-10-30T15:52:31.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14310" CreationDate="2023-11-02T08:09:35.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does CC BY-NC ensure that the NC restriction is passed forward?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not by its terms (but see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, someone could make a tiny change to the work and release under whatever license they please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a problem, because any downstream reuse of the modified work still has to comply with the original BY-NC license, provided it is still a derivative work of the original. As a result, the fact that the modified work is under a different license does not enable downstream reusers to do anything that they would not already be allowed to do under the original license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: BY-NC does not explicitly pass along the restriction, because copyright law already does that for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part of the license quoted in MadHatter's answer only requires the intermediary to link to the CC BY-NC license, and to state that &lt;em&gt;the original&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Licensed Material&amp;quot; as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.en#s1f_licensed_material&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the legal code&lt;/a&gt;) is under BY-NC. Nowhere does it say that the modified version (&amp;quot;Adapted Material&amp;quot;) must be licensed under BY-NC, because if you wanted to require that, you would use BY-NC-SA instead. In practical terms, this means that (with BY-NC) the intermediary is allowed to impose additional restrictions on downstream reusers (up to and including &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;), but they can't get rid of the restrictions that were already there. BY-NC-SA instead says that the intermediary must provide the modified version under &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; BY-NC-SA, no additional restrictions allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-11-02T08:09:35.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14391" CreationDate="2023-11-01T22:54:41.593" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to keep the source code under an exclusive license, but apply the GPL license only to the built binary code, so that software that uses this binary code is subject to a GPL-compatible license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is possible, is there an example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31469" OwnerDisplayName="user212942" LastActivityDate="2023-11-02T16:21:47.970" Title="Is it possible to apply the GPL license to “built static libraries”?" Tags="|gpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14390" CreationDate="2023-11-02T16:21:47.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you're the sole rightsholder in the library, you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; do this, but it's pointless.  You &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;are not bound&lt;/a&gt; by your own license grant, so can refuse source to those who ask for it (there might be arguments to made about promissory estoppel, but I'd hate to guess which way that would go).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the recipients do not have that freedom.  They have no power to redistribute source alongside the binary, because you have not given it to them, so they may not redistribute the binary at all (see, eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt; s12).  So what you've released is unredistributable software.  I can't imagine anyone would have the slightest interest in using it, so I wouldn't bother if I were you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the sole rightsholder in the library, but are releasing it GPL because you used upstream code in it which you received under GPL, you may not do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-11-02T16:21:47.970" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11748" CreationDate="2023-11-03T07:52:59.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;MS &lt;a href=&quot;https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/updates-to-visual-studio-build-tools-license-for-c-and-cpp-open-source-projects/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;updated the license of Visual Studio Build Tools&lt;/a&gt;. (Aug 2022)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Visual Studio Build Tools (VSBT)&lt;/a&gt; can now be used for compiling open-source C++ dependencies from source without requiring a Visual Studio license, even when you are working for an enterprise on a commercial or closed-source project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even before this change, &lt;a href=&quot;https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/express/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VS Express 2017 for Windows Desktop&lt;/a&gt; was available for commercial projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Download link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vs_WDExpress.exe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vs_WDExpress.exe&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31455" LastEditorUserId="31455" LastEditDate="2023-11-03T07:53:29.613" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T07:53:29.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5337" CreationDate="2023-11-03T08:44:06.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Questions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1/ If I'm using this for a commercial web application project, I need not&#xA;to mention the font source and/or the license as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2/ Is it advised to use OFL fonts in commercial projects with custom&#xA;licenses which are not open-source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not &lt;strong&gt;need&lt;/strong&gt; to mention the font source &amp;amp;/or licence but it is generally considered polite to do so as one or more people may well have spent 100s of hours on the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general it is usually considered fine to use OFL fonts &lt;strong&gt;unmodified&lt;/strong&gt; in non-open source products but it is polite, &lt;em&gt;(and advisable)&lt;/em&gt;, to mention that you have used them &lt;em&gt;possibly as a footnote to your license&lt;/em&gt; that they are present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you &lt;strong&gt;cannot&lt;/strong&gt; do is modify the font and then redistribute it under a different license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The usual disclaimers that I am not a legal expert in any country let alone the readers apply!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T08:44:06.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14404" CreationDate="2023-11-03T10:06:10.680" Score="2" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I fork a repo that contains an Apache 2.0 license and I want to modify things like github-config or the build tools that have been used, it may happen that I want to delete files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would I correctly document this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31457" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T08:10:31.673" Title="How to document removal of files for project under Apache 2.0 license" Tags="|apache-2.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14396" CreationDate="2023-11-03T17:40:09.183" Score="6" ViewCount="1487" Body="&lt;p&gt;An issue looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author: There is this issue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Me: Offer some workaround.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Owner: This fix should be made. Someone can make a PR for this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wait for 2 days for Author to repsond but there is none:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Me: I will make a PR unless Author wants to go for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this good ettiquete to make a PR on someone else's reported issue? How long should I wait from the last comment until I make a PR? Just for context the issue is very easy to fix and there're only 3 small changes needed and I was already a contributor to that project while issue OP is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27821" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2023-11-04T16:21:11.657" LastActivityDate="2023-11-04T16:21:11.657" Title="When the project owner offers contribution on an issue that I am not the issue author, how long should I wait?" Tags="|etiquette|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14395" CreationDate="2023-11-03T18:28:31.490" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are &lt;em&gt;massively&lt;/em&gt; overthinking this. The author of the issue has given no indication they are working on a fix, or want to work on a fix, the owner has requested a fix be made, you can do a fix, just do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-11-03T18:28:31.490" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14394" CreationDate="2023-11-04T22:16:55.703" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, git is your friend, and commit is the documentation of changes itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, you can create a file called CHANGES.TXT or another changelog file and list the removed files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-11-04T22:16:55.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2023-11-05T14:34:23.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These types of licenses are called &amp;quot;springing licenses.&amp;quot; One example of this type of license was created by MariaDB - the Business Source License. This might not quite meet your objectives, since the time period (of no more than 4 years) starts when it is first &amp;quot;released&amp;quot;. So, if the code is only used internally, it would never have to be open sourced. Before it is open sourced, there are restrictions that disallow the use in production (unless granted by the licensor), but allow the redistribution. This license requires that the new license be compatible with GPL. However, it would not itself be compatible with GPL until then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.com/bsl11/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://mariadb.com/bsl11/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-provisions-history/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://fossa.com/blog/business-source-license-requirements-provisions-history/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/about/legal-tools-licenses/springing-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/about/legal-tools-licenses/springing-licenses/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31475" LastActivityDate="2023-11-05T14:34:23.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="292" CreationDate="2023-11-07T11:11:47.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice of putting legal headers to source files came from USA, because USA joined international agreements on intellectual much later and practiced local legal mechanisms, requiring dancing with headers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are a part of civilized world - your country respect Berne Convention &amp;amp; TRIPS Agreement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under Berne Convention 1971 (my highlighting):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article 5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The enjoyment and the exercise of these &lt;strong&gt;rights shall not be subject to any formality&lt;/strong&gt;; such enjoyment and such exercise shall be independent of the existence of protection in the country of origin of the work. Consequently, apart from the provisions of this Convention, the extent of protection, as well as the means of redress afforded to the author to protect his rights, shall be governed exclusively by the laws of the country where protection is claimed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under TRIPS Agreement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Article 10 Computer Programs and Compilations of Data&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Computer programs, whether in &lt;strong&gt;source or object code, shall be protected as literary works&lt;/strong&gt; under the Berne Convention (1971).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need to indicate license by headers or LICENSE file. Your work is automatically protected regardless of any rituals you might imagine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11497" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T11:11:47.550" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-07T13:07:48.753" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a project on GitHub I would like to use.  There is no license posted, and the author has not responded to a request for clarification.  As per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#5-license-grant-to-other-users&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GitHub terms of service&lt;/a&gt;, under &lt;em&gt;License Grant to Other Users&lt;/em&gt;, it says (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content &lt;strong&gt;solely on GitHub&lt;/strong&gt; as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read this, I couldn't legally clone the repository.  When I do &lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt;, I am reproducing the content outside of GitHub and making a copy or my local computer.  Am I allowed to make a copy for myself, or is &lt;code&gt;git clone&lt;/code&gt; a copyright violation when no license is posted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I merely want to use the code. I do not intend to make any changes, do any redistribution, or incorporate it in any other code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T13:07:48.753" Title="Can I clone and use a GitHub project that doesn't have a license?" Tags="|github|unlicensed-code|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2023-11-07T13:23:25.123" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14403" CreationDate="2023-11-07T17:29:05.987" Score="2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I am working on a business to provide support for independent musicians, and I would like to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/scale-type/data.ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/chord-type/data.ts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; to essentially copy and paste this information as training data (I’m planning to use a fine-tuned GPT 3.5 turbo). It is important to note that I am not going to use this as code, but as written information for a large language model (essentially I want to avoid logging all this information myself).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;License:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This library has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/docs/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT license&lt;/a&gt;, but I’m unsure how it applies to this specific use case. I eventually want to use this AI to be part of a for-profit website. This AI will be available to the consumer for free (the website will run off ads), so I won’t be making money &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt; from this. I’m pretty new to all of this, and there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the use of licensed content in artificial intelligence, so I am rather confused when it comes to the use within a LLM.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/tree/main&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the library itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31492" LastEditorUserId="31492" LastEditDate="2023-11-07T17:56:18.227" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T17:56:18.227" Title="Can I use part of a MIT-licensed library as training data for an AI that will be used commercially?" Tags="|mit|commercial|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14402" CreationDate="2023-11-07T17:49:35.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two possibilities here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The outputs of your LLM are not a derivative work of its input data - this is essentially what is being claimed at a larger scale by OpenAI, Meta, Google et al. In that case, the license of whatever input data you used has no bearing on what you can do with your model, so you can use it commercially (without legally needing to credit the library, but you can of course still do so if you wish).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The outputs of your LLM &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; a derivative work of its input data. In that case, you will need to follow the MIT license when using them, but all that requires is for you to credit the library in the way specified in the license, so you can still use it commercially.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of November 2023, there is just about zero clarity as to which of these two scenarios applies; multiple court cases in multiple jurisdictions are already underway and we can expect many more in the next couple of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-11-07T17:49:35.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14394" CreationDate="2023-11-09T08:10:31.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question focuses on the requirements (legal, based on the license language) and best practices related to the removal of files in a fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache license&lt;/a&gt; lists the requirements you need to fulfill when distributing derivative works. Section 4.a. is a no-brainer, just check the paragraph &lt;em&gt;How to apply the Apache License to your work&lt;/em&gt; on the webpage of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 4.b of the Apache 2 license requires you to clearly indicate in any modified file that you have changed it. Such an indication is obviously irrelevant in files that you are removing from the repo. Therefore it is a best practice to create (or ammend) a Changes.txt file, where you provide a summary of all your changes based on the previous version (which you clearly identify), and where you should list all the files that you have deleted. This list of deleted files is not a strict requirement of the license language, but it definitely helps to document all the changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a clear matching between a specific file that you are deleting and (a) one specific author or (b) one specific entry in the Notice file, then the respective copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notice or entry in the Notice file can be removed (actually: should be removed, the license language states &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). If, however, the author is also involved with other files in the repo, which you want to keep, then you must not remove any of this. To err on the side of caution, if there is no clear match between the deleted file and one specific copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices or specific entry in the Notice file, then you need to keep all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices and notice file entries. This will take care of Sections 4.c. and 4.d. of the Apache 2 license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T08:10:31.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14406" CreationDate="2023-11-09T11:54:59.000" Score="5" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a new self-hosted open source software under the &lt;strong&gt;Apache License 2.0&lt;/strong&gt;, but at some point of the development I figured out that I need an object storage to manage generated files, because I think the PostgreSQL is not the best approach to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the premise that my software is going to run without internet or with restrictive connections, and I don't want my final user to have cost issues, I can't use Azure Blob Storage, AWS S3 or other cloud services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During my researches I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://min.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minio&lt;/a&gt;, with a good library to use with .NET, support the same protocols as AWS S3 and have Docker support. But I'm stuck in the licenses description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;minio&lt;/strong&gt; uses &lt;strong&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/strong&gt;, but I don't understand if I can use it into my project keeping in mind that I'm not going to modify the source code (using the Docker image only and referencing in my docker-compose installation file). And if the user has a private company for example, will he need to pay a minio license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help with this, please? I tried to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choose a license guide&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm having issues with this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31491" LastEditorUserId="29779" LastEditDate="2023-11-19T16:29:59.440" LastActivityDate="2023-11-19T16:29:59.440" Title="Licensing compatibility for final user" Tags="|license-compatibility|apache-2.0|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14405" CreationDate="2023-11-09T12:50:48.127" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minio's non-commercially-licensed offering is AGPLv3.  Assuming that the FSF's position on dynamic linking creating derivative works is correct, and assuming that you're linking the minio library into your distributed executable, then you can do it, but you can't license your work under Apache2; instead, the software that you distribute must be licensed AGPLv3 in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are wedded to a permissive licence for your creation, you'll need to find a different library; sorry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-09T13:06:55.793" LastActivityDate="2023-11-09T13:06:55.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-09T19:02:35.327" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a PIL library that is for images in Python. I am developing a desktop program that is for commercial purposes. However, I am not selling, I only offer voluntary donations to users. The PIL library is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/historical-php/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HPND license&lt;/a&gt;. It has some terms that say that without written permission I cannot even use the name of the copyright holder for advertising purposes. It also appears that the copyright notice must appear on all copies of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't know if to comply with this in the app I must license my app under the same license, because it asks that I leave a copyright notice on copies of the software. I have checked the library, and a copyright notice appeared in its code. The point is, it asks me to also leave the notice in the software documentation. The license states that I can modify, use, copy for any purpose, free of charge if those conditions are met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help to understand how I can meet those license requirements. Is it required that I leave a file in my source code that says &amp;quot;copyright notice.txt&amp;quot; and it contains the PIL permission notice and its copyright notice? Is that enough to meet those requirements? When compiled into an exe, would the library code need to be duplicated? Do I comply with leaving a copyright notice in the main folder of my desktop app?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31509" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-11-10T07:17:03.070" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T07:17:03.070" Title="How can I comply with the terms of the HPND license if I am using a library that contains that license in a commercial application project in python?" Tags="|copyright|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2023-11-12T11:23:09.243" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14405" CreationDate="2023-11-10T00:20:59.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;MinIO supports an API compatible with that of Amazon S3. You can freely use MinIO &lt;em&gt;server&lt;/em&gt; under its AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i'm not going to modify the source code (using the Docker image only and referencing in my docker-compose installation file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will need to distribute the complete, corresponding source code of MinIO that you are using. Since you will be using the upstream image, that should be relatively straightforward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the user has a private company for example, will he need to pay a minio license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. They could use it under the AGPL as well. They could &lt;a href=&quot;https://min.io/pricing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use a commercial offering&lt;/a&gt;, but they don't need to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protocol is based on connections over TCP, this does not make the license apply to the client. In fact, I would recommend to make your software &lt;em&gt;configurable&lt;/em&gt; so it can work with multiple providers supporting that API, such as MinIO, Amazon S2, Backblaze...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even though they will all support the same API on paper, there are probably small variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you also mention that it provides “a good library”. If you link to a MinIO library under AGPL license, then you would have to apply the AGPL license to your whole client program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the &lt;em&gt;server&lt;/em&gt; license shouldn't be a problem, as your client will be communicating with another program over a TCP connection with a defined API. But if you use an AGPL &lt;em&gt;library&lt;/em&gt;, then you would need to convey the rest of your code under the AGPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T00:20:59.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-10T17:25:47.193" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently developing a new functionality for an existing open-source project on GitHub (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fusionpbx/fusionpbx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FusionPBX&lt;/a&gt;), and I have a question regarding licensing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original project contains files with the following license header:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA;    FusionPBX&#xA;    Version: MPL 1.1&#xA;&#xA;    The contents of this file are subject to the Mozilla Public License Version&#xA;    1.1 (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;); you may not use this file except in compliance with&#xA;    the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at&#xA;    http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/&#xA;&#xA;    Software distributed under the License is distributed on an &amp;quot;AS IS&amp;quot; basis,&#xA;    WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License&#xA;    for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the&#xA;    License.&#xA;&#xA;    The Original Code is FusionPBX&#xA;&#xA;    The Initial Developer of the Original Code is&#xA;    Mark J Crane &amp;lt;markjcrane@fusionpbx.com&amp;gt;&#xA;    Copyright (C) 2013 - 2023&#xA;    All Rights Reserved.&#xA;&#xA;    Contributor(s):&#xA;    Mark J Crane &amp;lt;markjcrane@fusionpbx.com&amp;gt;&#xA;*/&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not modify or copy any file, only create new ones in my project, but in order for my new function work with the software, some code will be copied such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//includes files&#xA;    require_once dirname(__DIR__, 2) . &amp;quot;/resources/require.php&amp;quot;;&#xA;    require_once &amp;quot;resources/check_auth.php&amp;quot;;&#xA;&#xA;//classes and functions&#xA;    $database = new database;&#xA;    $result = $database-&amp;gt;select($sql, $parameters, 'all');&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some code will be similar such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;//new permissions&#xA;    if (permission_exists('my_new_permission')) {&#xA;        //access granted&#xA;    }&#xA;&#xA;//sql queries&#xA;    $sql = &amp;quot;select contact_uuid, something_different &amp;quot;;&#xA;    $sql .= &amp;quot;from v_contact_settings &amp;quot;;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project needs the original software installed for it to work since its a new functionality for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have little understanding of software licensing, my research shows that MPL 1.1 is per file and if my code derives from it, I need to include it in my project too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this scenario a have the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to include this license on every file that has such similarities?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If so, do I just copy it at the start? Do I change anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if missed anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31517" LastActivityDate="2023-11-10T17:25:47.193" Title="Creating new functionallity for an existing project under MPL 1.1" Tags="|licensing|mpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14414" CreationDate="2023-11-11T12:24:02.220" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &lt;code&gt;IconCast&lt;/code&gt; is the name of a close-sourced app I'm publishing that makes money, and &lt;code&gt;AppIconSetGen&lt;/code&gt;, an open source library under the MIT license made by someone else that I made some changes to (which is also open source and under the MIT license), would the copyright notice that could be shown by pressing the &amp;quot;About IconCast&amp;quot; button under the &amp;quot;IconCast&amp;quot; menu when the app is focused be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IconCast (C) 2023 Charles Yiu&#xA;AppIconSetGen (C) 2023 Charles Yiu &amp;amp; Attila Bencze&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to say how &lt;code&gt;AppIconSetGen&lt;/code&gt; is under the MIT license? Do I have to include a copy of the MIT license? How would I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for clearing things up for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31519" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T08:55:22.207" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T09:01:01.180" Title="How do I properly put third-party dependencies under MIT on my copyright notice for a published MacOS app on the App Store?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|commercial|license-notice|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5207" CreationDate="2023-11-12T11:03:23.490" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could have a look at the Elastic License is one such license:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.elastic.co/fr/licensing/elastic-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.elastic.co/fr/licensing/elastic-license&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not specific about modified vs. unmodified form, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31523" LastActivityDate="2023-11-12T11:03:23.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-13T03:32:22.213" Score="10" ViewCount="4912" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do open source licenses such as GPL or MPL include page content such as text and such within the open source file, or just code, therefore layout?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if I go open source for my website can someone just host a duplicate and try to do a phishing operation where I can't do anything to stop them except for DMCA for images, but what about page content such as text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27674" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T09:02:00.570" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T17:25:28.047" Title="If I make my website open source, does it include page content?" Tags="|gpl|mpl|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14411" CreationDate="2023-11-13T08:13:55.980" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...], would the copyright notice that could be shown by pressing the &amp;quot;About IconCast&amp;quot; button under the &amp;quot;IconCast&amp;quot; menu when the app is focused be valid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the About screen is a valid and customary place to also show the copyright information of (open-source) third-party components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have to say how AppIconSetGen is under the MIT license? Do I have to include a copy of the MIT license? How would I do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have to include a copy of the MIT license. You don't have to re-distribute AppIconSetGen under the MIT license, but you still need to include a copy of it in your documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear that the MIT license is only relevant with regards to AppIconSetGen and not IronCast as a whole, you can structure your About dialog like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;IconCast (C) 2023 Charles Yiu, licensed under &amp;lt;proprietary license&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;Ironcast makes use of the following third-party software that has its own license&#xA;- AppIconSetGen (C) 2023 Charles Yiu &amp;amp; Attila Bencze, received under the MIT license&#xA;&#xA;License texts:&#xA;&amp;lt;Proprietary license&amp;gt;:&#xA;&amp;lt;text of the license&amp;gt;&#xA;&#xA;MIT license:&#xA;&amp;lt;text of the license&amp;gt;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T09:01:01.180" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T09:01:01.180" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14413" CreationDate="2023-11-13T08:17:32.027" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you create the content of the website, you can license it however you wish, regardless of the licensing of the code and/or layout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly valid to have a license that boils down to &amp;quot;All code and layout as specified in files XYZ are licensed under the MIT license. All other content, including textual content and images are copyright to ABC and may not be redistributed without written permission.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="327" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T08:17:32.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-13T10:39:25.440" Score="6" ViewCount="1224" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use a project that are licensed under&#xA;GNU General Public License version 2 or later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code owner has abandoned the project and announced they leave it public as FOSS on github.&#xA;The company with copyright is gone out of business (bankrupt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is now that i have updated a lot of the code to a newer version so it will work for a new version of the cms system is created for. Right now the original project does not work anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can i just take over the copyright, when the codeowner is &amp;quot;gone&amp;quot;. (I guess not)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, as i read the license. Can i re-distribute the project without changing the copyright line in the files?&#xA;I would do it as a paid download business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31530" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T11:14:19.193" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T11:39:09.683" Title="GNU licence re-distribute abandoned project" Tags="|gpl|gnu|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14416" CreationDate="2023-11-13T10:52:02.913" Score="13" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can i just take over the copyright, when the codeowner is &amp;quot;gone&amp;quot;. (I guess not)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright owner is not gone; someone will have bought the assets of the company, which includes the copyright to the project, as part of the winding up procedure. Jurisdictions have rules for what happens to any assets not purchased - in the UK, they are deemed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/bona-vacantia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bona vacantia&lt;/em&gt; and are owned by the Crown&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, as i read the license. Can i re-distribute the project without changing the copyright line in the files? I would do it as a paid download business model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes. But remember the GPL rights transfer downstream to any recipients of the project, meaning that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You must provide them with the full source to the project on request (if you are distributing binaries only)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They will be able to redistribute both the source and binaries without your permission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T11:39:09.683" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T11:39:09.683" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14413" CreationDate="2023-11-13T14:12:09.367" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Open Source&lt;/em&gt;, as such, means nothing more, and nothing less, than that the source of a digital artifact is open for people to inspect. Any HTML page is open source to every single visitor, as the original HTML is sent to the visitor, for their browser to parse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open Source licenses are often (not always, but most times) Open Source &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Free software licenses: people are allowed to use the software freely, without restrictions, and often (but not always) for free, as in gratis, as in for no money at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A license will do two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;protect the users of your software, because you have granted them rights (especially important if you want professionals/businesses to use your software, as they need reassurances)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;protect you &lt;em&gt;if you are willing and able&lt;/em&gt; to sue people who violate the license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may want to visit &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choose A License&lt;/a&gt; which aims to help people explore licenses and decide on the right one for them. Mostly focused on software licenses, they also provide help with licenses for content or imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16156" LastActivityDate="2023-11-13T14:12:09.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-13T16:39:45.537" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm developing a new project, which uses the following licenses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────&#xA;│                                  Package Name  License&#xA;├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────&#xA;│                           _fe_analyzer_shared  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                        _flutterfire_internals  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                      analyzer  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                     app_links  Apache-2.0&#xA;│                                       archive  MIT&#xA;│                                          args  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                         async  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                              boolean_selector  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                    characters  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                  checked_yaml  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                      cli_util  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                         clock  Apache-2.0&#xA;│                                    collection  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                       convert  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                      coverage  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                                        crypto  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                               cupertino_icons  MIT&#xA;│                                   dart_dotenv  AGPL-3.0&#xA;│                                          dbus  MPL-2.0&#xA;│                              device_info_plus  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│           device_info_plus_platform_interface  BSD-3-Clause&#xA;│                               email_validator  MIT&#xA;│                                     equatable  MIT&#xA;│                                     event_bus  MIT&#xA;│                                    fake_async  Apache-2.0&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt; I couldn't mix MPL-2.0 along with AGPL-3.0, MIT and others. Is it correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, I would like to keep it open by using the MIT license, but I'm not that sure I can with this kind of licences to be compliant with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31536" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-13T22:42:00.117" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T06:51:50.700" Title="Can I combine MPL-2.0 along with MIT and AGPL-3.0 within the same project?" Tags="|mit|license-compatibility|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14419" CreationDate="2023-11-13T22:51:25.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the FSF's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#MPL-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility list&lt;/a&gt;, MPL2 is (indirectly) compatible with AGPLv3 provided the MPL-licensed content is not marked &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Incompatible with Secondary Licences&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  If that's so, you may release your project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to keep it open by using the MIT license, but I'm not that sure I can with this kind of licences to be compliant with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right to be unsure, since you may not do this.  The entire project must be released under AGPLv3, save that the originally-MPL content should be marked as &amp;quot;also available under MPL2&amp;quot; (see the FSF's list for further details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dbus&lt;/a&gt; suggests it's under GPLv2+, in which case you should instead release your project as a mix of GPLv3 and AGPLv3 code (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#AGPLv3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;compatibility list entry on AGPL&lt;/a&gt; for further details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-14T06:51:50.700" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T06:51:50.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14413" CreationDate="2023-11-14T13:09:43.253" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're asking the wrong question here, but I'm going to answer it as given, in the hope that this helps clear things up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;If I make my website open source, does it include page content?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do open source licenses such as GPL or MPL include page content such as text and such within the open source file, or just code, therefore layout?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're creating a piece of software to run your website, you can license that software under an &lt;em&gt;open source software license&lt;/em&gt;, such as GPL or MPL, or indeed others like AGPL or BSD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you're just, say, installing WordPress (or some similar product), creating a theme and writing content, then you're not creating a piece of software, so there's nothing to apply a software license to (regardless of open source or not). Similarly, if you're writing a good old-fashioned website in plain HTML and CSS, with nothing dynamic/interactive in it, then again there's no software there to license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wish to release the theme/layout of your website under an open license, software licenses aren't really the right tool for the job (they &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been used for this, but it creates some complications). Normally, you'd use a Creative Commons license, or something similar, if you wanted to do that. These (non-software) licenses can also be used for the content, but it's up to you to choose how much of your work to release under a particular license. If you wish to only release the theme/layout, and not the content, you can easily state something like &amp;quot;Theme released under CC-BY-SA, content © All Rights Reserved&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're creating a piece of software &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a theme &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the content, you could state &amp;quot;Powered by SoftwareProductName released under AGPL. Theme released under CC-BY-SA. Content © All Rights Reserved.&amp;quot; (Or whatever licenses you wish to use.) Of course, you'd need to read up the specifics on the correct way to use each license you choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because if I go open source for my website can someone just host a duplicate and try to do a phishing operation where I can't do anything to stop them except for DMCA for images, but what about page content such as text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was answered in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using a software license won't do anything to stop phishing operations. Software licenses are legal tools, not technical ones; they don't &lt;em&gt;prevent&lt;/em&gt; anyone doing anything, they just give you the right to bring certain legal actions against someone who goes against your license. Phishers will do what they do, license or no license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, go ahead and choose the license(s) you think work best for you, but don't base that choice on what you think phishers and other cybercriminals will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26108" LastEditorUserId="26108" LastEditDate="2023-11-14T17:25:28.047" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T17:25:28.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14422" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-14T14:31:35.447" Score="16" ViewCount="5251" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any way, that I can lock myself from ever changing the repository license to non open-source one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These is this trend with open-source companies, that once they gain enough press, and enough users, they change the license from the open-source one, to the source-available (e.g. Business Source License).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to assure the users and contributors, that my software will stay open-source forever.&#xA;How can I do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20139" LastEditorUserId="16771" LastEditDate="2023-11-16T12:46:36.633" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T03:08:51.007" Title="Locking myself from ever changing license" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license-notice|copyleft|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14422" CreationDate="2023-11-14T14:50:53.850" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't do anything within the constraints of copyright law as &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;the copyright holder is never restricted by the license&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Practically&lt;/em&gt; if you accept contributions from a large number of contributors without a copyright license agreement (CLA) then it essentially becomes impossible to relicense because you need the agreement of every contributor, some of whom are probably non-contactable. The only reason &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-source-license&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HashiCorp&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lightbend.com/blog/why-we-are-changing-the-license-for-akka&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lightbend&lt;/a&gt;/whoever else can do what they did is because they required a CLA from everybody before accepting code. However, it is always in theory possible for you to either get agreement from everybody, or remove the code from outside contributors, when you can then change the license again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-11-14T14:50:53.850" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-14T12:51:18.657" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a short weak (or strong) copyleft license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the GPL v3. The way that all its different sections interlock is quite poetic. However, this beauty comes at the cost of it being near impossible to understand. In licensing things I would like to be able to understand at least one of the licenses that I use. I was wondering if there are any short, permissive software licenses ideally consisting of only a weak copyleft clause that I could dual license under.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair license&lt;/a&gt; gives me hope that this must be possible, but I have not been able to find or make a short copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked at the Mozilla Public License, but it too is quite long and complicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was my effort to write a short, weak copyleft license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This datum may be used if distributed versions of the datum clearly direct users towards the source form of all files utilizing the datum clearly released under this license or this license and second compatible and more restrictive license that does not include terms that have never allowed by either the OSI or FSF or been contained in this license (except all patent provisions which may be changed to that of any license approved by the OSI or FSF and compatible with the GPL v3 regardless of how they compare to those of this license) and is compatible with the GPL v3 and the source form of all files utilizing the datum are available in a reasonable manner for no more than the cost of distribution and a nominal fee and without unreasonable delay; each contributor hereby grants every entity an irrevocable, unconditional, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive patent license to make, use, sell, offer for sale, have made, import, and otherwise transfer either its contributions or the combination its contributions and those of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Crab" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-11-15T08:41:32.893" LastActivityDate="2023-11-15T08:41:32.893" Title="Short Weak Copyleft Software License" Tags="|copyright|software|licensing|media|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14422" CreationDate="2023-11-15T02:59:07.263" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may assign the copyright of your project to a trusted organization. While you, &lt;em&gt;as the copyright holder&lt;/em&gt;, may change the license freely, transferring your rights to someone else removes that ability. Both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Software Foundation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/assignment/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Software Freedom Conservancy&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/may/02/copyright-assignment-project/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt;) offer such services. You must keep in mind that this also grants copyright enforcement rights. The SFC states that &lt;a href=&quot;https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this policy&lt;/a&gt; is their main goal of this project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By filling in and submitting the below form, you agree to assign your copyrights in the specified projects to Software Freedom Conservancy, which means that Conservancy can enforce the licenses for your code in court, minimizing the need for you to be involved. Conservancy agrees to keep your code under a free and open source license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the size of your project, it may make sense to seek becoming part of a larger free software organization, such as GNU, Apache, or the many under the Linux Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11536" LastActivityDate="2023-11-15T02:59:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14424" CreationDate="2023-11-15T08:36:46.317" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Really, the comments above say everything that needs to be said, but I'll pull it together into a single answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the GPL is complex in its writing because it's a legal document; it's meant to stand up in court, rather than be easily read by people, and it's done so successfully on numerous occasions.  If it were easier to read, it would very likely be less effective in court, and that would be bad for everyone.  The intent is simply expressed: if you use GPL code in your software, you must give to all recipients of your software full source code, a copy of the licence, and the same rights and obligations you were given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, as Brandin says, everyone in the free software world already understands how the GPL works; when we see something's under GPL, we don't read the copy of the licence that comes with that software, we all just already know what we may, may not, must, and must not do with the software (that, by the way, is one reason why the GPL doesn't allow modified versions of itself to be distributed without a clear name-change).  There are often questions about the fine detail, but the general principles of GPL compliance are well-understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, even if you could write a shorter legally-robust copyleft licence, you shouldn't, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;all the reasons&lt;/a&gt; that crayon licences are problematic.  High amongst these is that very few people will use your software if they have to parse a new licence clause-by-clause to find out if they may do so.  See, eg, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/782862/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, where a senior free-software lawyer in a large corporation says that if it takes him more than &lt;em&gt;five seconds&lt;/em&gt; to work out whether a piece of software can be used by his company, he won't bother (full disclosure: I wrote that article, but I didn't give the talk on which it is based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop worrying about the textual complexity of the GPL; it is much less off-putting to your potential users than anything shorter you could ever write would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-11-15T08:36:46.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14422" CreationDate="2023-11-15T20:06:26.657" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You can't, in some jurisdictions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under US law (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/203&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 203&lt;/a&gt;), any transfer or license of copyright (other than a work-for-hire or a bequest) automatically gives rise to &lt;em&gt;termination rights&lt;/em&gt;, which may be used to unilaterally terminate the transfer or license between 35 and 40 years after it is granted. Termination rights are inalienable, cannot be waived or surrendered by any means, and may be exercised &amp;quot;notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, including an agreement to make a will or to make any future grant.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose and function of termination rights is best explained by historical context. In the old days of copyright, the general arrangement worked like this: A creative person would make some artistic work (for the sake of example, let's say they wrote a book), and sign an exclusive licensing deal with a publisher. These deals were often rather one-sided, especially for first-time authors. An author's book might make millions, but they would get paid pennies on the dollar. The publisher would argue that this is fair, because they took a risk on the author, and need to recoup the cost of all the books that didn't become popular. Authors, as you might expect, disagreed with this interpretation and wanted more in royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congress (and the British Parliament before them) foresaw this imbalance and sought to prevent it. In the US Copyright Act of 1790 (as well as the British Statute of Anne of 1709), copyright could be &amp;quot;renewed&amp;quot; - each work would be entitled to two separate terms of copyright protection, and authors would (notionally) be able to get their copyright back after the first term had expired. This did not work, because publishers simply included renewal rights in their publication contracts, so in 1976, when Congress was rewriting the whole copyright statute almost two centuries later, they decided to take stronger measures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we ended up with are modern termination rights, which work more or less like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author signs whatever license the publisher demands.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After 35 years, the author's work has become popular and the author now has greater leverage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author serves a notice of termination on the publisher. Nothing in the license may prohibit the author from exercising this right, not even wholesale transfer of the entire copyright. If the author is dead, then the rights pass automatically to the author's heirs according to a fixed scheme - you can't bequeath them to e.g. the Software Freedom Conservancy or something like that. They pass to your spouse and/or children regardless of what your will says.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a one-year grace period before the termination is effective. During this time, the license remains in effect. This one-year grace period must be scheduled so that the effective termination date falls within the five-year window 35 years after the license was originally granted (which means the author might send the notice after 34 years, so that the termination takes effect at the earliest possible time).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hopefully, the publisher and author are able to renegotiate a more equitable license, and everything goes on as normal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If not, then the license is terminated and the copyright reverts to the full control of the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a provision protecting derivative works &lt;em&gt;that already exist when the license is terminated&lt;/em&gt;, but you can't create any new derivative works after the termination (unless you get a new license).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this effectively means for open source is rather unclear. The difficult part is that notices of termination must clearly identify the grantee whose rights are being terminated - you can't terminate everyone's rights with a blanket notice. This is supported both by the statutory text (linked above) and by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Copyright Office's regulations&lt;/a&gt; on the matter. However, you can still cause havoc by terminating the rights of (say) one or more large companies that happen to use the work in question. If those companies are the main contributors to the work, then it might suddenly go from fully supported to fully unmaintained, just because one former contributor doesn't like one or two of those companies, or even because the heir of a former contributor wants to make a quick buck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5902&amp;amp;context=flr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This law review article&lt;/a&gt; discusses the matter in greater depth, but it's all ultimately speculation, since (as far as I'm aware) nobody has ever actually terminated a FOSS license, so we have no case law on how it would be handled in practice. The article recommends that Congress should amend the law to fix this problem - I agree with its conclusion that the law ought to be changed, but I must admit that I find its discussion of compulsory licensing rather puzzling in this context. Surely it would be easier to exempt licenses offered to the public at-large from termination, rather than inventing a whole new statutory scheme for working around termination rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2023-11-15T20:06:26.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14422" CreationDate="2023-11-16T02:45:59.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to assure the users and contributors, that my software will stay open-source forever. How can I do so?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Make at least one Open Source release&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Changing the license of the project &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;does not change the license of previous releases&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; it only changes it for new releases going forward. Users may continue to use and build on the old Open Source versions. For example, if you release v1.2.3 as Open Source and then v1.2.4 under a restricted license, v1.2.3 remains Open Source. The community can then fork your repository at v1.2.3 and continue Open Source work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in a way, by making an Open Source release you have promised the project can continue without you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can be explicit about this, such as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.php.net/license/3_01.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PHP License&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The PHP Group may publish revised and/or new versions of the&#xA;license from time to time. Each version will be given a&#xA;distinguishing version number.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once covered code has been published under a particular version&#xA;of the license, you may always continue to use it under the terms&#xA;of that version.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; You may also choose to use such covered code&#xA;under the terms of any subsequent version of the license&#xA;published by the PHP Group. No one other than the PHP Group has&#xA;the right to modify the terms applicable to covered code created&#xA;under this License.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;How To Torpedo An OSS Fork&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some ways you can still make life difficult for a hypothetical OSS fork. An OSS project is more than just the code. The founder may own patents, trademarks, and domain names critical to the project. It would be good to address these early to avoid &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;founder's syndrome&lt;/a&gt; where the founder uses the threat to revoking them as leverage to maintain control of the OSS project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Patents and Trademarks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you own any patents or trademarks the project is using, and your Open Source license did not include a patent nor trademark grant, you can use those patents and trademarks to block the Open Source fork. The Open Source project can then attempt to rewrite their code to avoid the patents and trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many OSS licenses lack a patent grant, and most lack a trademark grant. Some, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#trademarks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Apache License&lt;/a&gt;, explicitly deny it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses#General_comparison&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a table of which OSS licenses have patent and trademark grants&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Names&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few Open Source licenses put restrictions on things like terms and executable names. For example, the [PHP License] requires that you do not use the name PHP without permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name &amp;quot;PHP&amp;quot; must not be used to endorse or promote products&#xA;derived from this software without prior written permission. For&#xA;written permission, please contact group@php.net.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Products derived from this software may not be called &amp;quot;PHP&amp;quot;, nor&#xA;may &amp;quot;PHP&amp;quot; appear in their name, without prior written permission&#xA;from group@php.net.  You may indicate that your software works in&#xA;conjunction with PHP by saying &amp;quot;Foo for PHP&amp;quot; instead of calling&#xA;it &amp;quot;PHP Foo&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;phpfoo&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would require the OSS fork to change the name of the project, and possibly the names of any executables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Domain names&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A project may have domain names associated with the project. The original project owner may retain ownership of those domains and deny use of them to the OSS fork. The OSS fork would have to register their own domain names and change tooling to use them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Perl has perl.org and cpan.org. perl.org is critical for downloading Perl and getting information about Perl. cpan.org is critical for downloading Perl modules. These were originally registered to individuals. The possibility that any of these individuals might repurpose their domain lead to them (I believe) being transferred to The Perl Foundation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast &lt;em&gt;perl.com&lt;/em&gt; is registered to one of the original authors of Perl and is not used by Perl in any official capacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Bundled projects&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From time to time, a project will rely on another project so heavily that it will be bundled with the distribution, and eventually become part of the distribution. It can happen that the &amp;quot;bundled&amp;quot; content is owned by a different copyright holder with a different license from the main project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of this is the Perl FAQ. Originally written as a separate project, it was incorporated into Perl &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/625ca0ef1ad7060d558556613e7fbcdabcef30a9/pod/perlfaq.pod#author-and-copyright-information&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;with a restrictive license&lt;/a&gt;. The original author would sometimes use this license to wield authority over the Perl FAQ long after it had been incorporated into Perl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This situation was later resolved by relicensing the Perl FAQ to be the same as Perl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Email addresses, social media, service accounts, etc...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any number of email addresses, social media accounts, service accounts, and other points of contact for the project may be controlled by the original author. If the original author retains control of these, the OSS project will have to establish new contact points and social media presences and accounts and redirect everything and everyone to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can mitigate this by putting your accounts under project control. For example, if the repository is owned by your personal Github account, you can create a &lt;a href=&quot;https://support.github.com/features/organizations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Github organization&lt;/a&gt; which owns the project instead, and then distribute ownership of the organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Foundations&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once your project has reached a certain size, you may wish to assign the project's intellectual property rights to an existing foundation, or start your own. Many large Open Source projects have had their copyright, and other intellectual property rights, granted to a foundation. This foundation would then have it baked into its bylaws that the project will remain OSS forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mostly useful when a project has additional critical assets beyond the code such as domain names and trademarks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, MariaDB is owned by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.org/about/#about-mariadb-foundation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MariaDB Foundation&lt;/a&gt; which promises that &amp;quot;MariaDB Server will remain Free and Open Source Software licensed under GPLv2, independent of any commercial entities.&amp;quot; This is baked into &lt;a href=&quot;https://mariadb.org/certificate/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their incorporation&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIRD: The Corporation is formed exclusively to further and promote charitable, scientific and educational purposes, and the business and objects to be carried on and promoted by it are to&#xA;(1) continue the development of, free public access to, and adoption of the open source database management software known as “MariaDB” (which is based on the MySQL open source software);&#xA;(2) promote, foster and facilitate collaboration among developers and users in the continued development and improvement of, and free public access to, MariaDB open source software; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even this can be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ELEVENTH: The Corporation reserves the right to amend, alter, change or repeal any of the provisions contained in this Certificate of Incorporation, in the manner now or thereafter prescribed by the laws of the State of Delaware.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3228" LastActivityDate="2023-11-16T02:45:59.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14433" CreationDate="2023-11-16T06:18:38.240" Score="4" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;Section 14 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL-1.2&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jurisdiction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without prejudice to specific agreement between parties,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— any litigation resulting from the interpretation of this License, arising between the European Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, as a Licensor, and any Licensee, will be subject to the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union, as laid down in article 272 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— any litigation arising between other parties and resulting from the interpretation of this License, will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent court where the Licensor resides or conducts its primary business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which seems well and dandy, &amp;quot;the competent court&amp;quot; being the court of wherever it is one resides. But section 15 follows this up with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Applicable Law&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without prejudice to specific agreement between parties,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— this Licence shall be governed by the law of the European Union Member State where the Licensor has his seat, resides or has his registered office,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— this licence shall be governed by Belgian law if the Licensor has no seat, residence or registered office inside a European Union Member State.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which to me suggests if the licensor is outside of the EU &amp;quot;the competent court&amp;quot; has to interpret the license text from within the context of Belgian law, which seems like a lot to ask of  a court in say, the U.S... Would the licensor have to get a resident or register an office in Belgium to bring forth a copyright claim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31560" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T15:43:23.673" Title="Do EUPL-1.2 license violations have to be disputed in an EU court?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5813" CreationDate="2023-11-16T08:31:45.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it OK to have a product of 2 parts where one is open sourced (because it makes use of a existing screen-casting application with a GPL licence) and the other is closed source (where communication between the 2 parts is via a REST API).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends, amongst other things, on the nature of that communication.  One of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the FSF's tests&lt;/a&gt; for whether, for copyright purposes, two pieces of code are in fact one piece of code split into two is that if&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your REST API is simply shipping files like mkv (which contain video and metadata in a standardised form), or some other standardised format, then it seems likely to me that the two are separate works.  If the API ships complex content in a non-standard format, agreed between the two programs, then it seems much more likely that they are not separate works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You note that the two parts could function independently of each other.  I do not believe that is a good test for their copyright status as independent works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If this is OK, I'm assuming the license of the open source client must be GPL also (because it's using an existing GPL program)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I think that is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-16T10:44:17.850" LastActivityDate="2023-11-16T10:44:17.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14436" CreationDate="2023-11-16T13:37:38.120" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have written a Java class &lt;code&gt;Sequence&lt;/code&gt; that presents a similar interface to &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt;, but with some changes. For convenience I copied the Javadoc comments from &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt;, adapting them as necessary for my own code. I have included a copyright notice (namely Oracle) for the copied comments, but I'm unsure about the licence implications. &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt; is released under GPL v2, which I understand requires that any derived work be similarly licensed. But does the GPL licence cover only the code proper, or does it also include comments? I would like to release my code under the MIT licence, but I'm unsure whether my inclusion of comments from &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt; obliges me to release it under GPL v2 instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31564" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T23:37:16.263" Title="What are the licence implications of including comments from code licensed under GPL v2 in my own code?" Tags="|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2023-11-16T15:10:02.780" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most free software licences don't contain choice-of-law clauses; &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/13514/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; examines the whole issue in more detail, and sheds some interesting light on why the FSF, in particular, don't think it's a good idea.  So you're not alone in thinking that language in the EUPL could cause problems for random licensors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Public_Licence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EUPL&lt;/a&gt; was originally drafted for software written by EU public bodies as part of the IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) program, and has since been taken up by a number of EU public bodies for free software they release in general.  For them, the choice-of-law clause doesn't pose a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licence is not really intended for random developers to use, particularly those that aren't in the EU.  To address the problem of downstream developers who want to release derivative works, the EUPL &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/EUPL-1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allows&lt;/a&gt; (in &amp;quot;Article&amp;quot; 5) derivative works to be relicensed under GPL, or nearly any other major copyleft licence, as listed in the Appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think you're right that it would make life difficult for a developer in, say, Brazil, to release software under this licence, but I also think there's no good reason why (s)he should have to.  If, despite this, (s)he chooses to, then we might reasonably conclude that (s)he's willing to endure the potential complications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-17T17:30:19.860" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T17:30:19.860" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-16T23:14:46.487" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I sell my program in blazor and use mysql community for the data layer... my blazor program would be under the GPL?, that is, would I have to deliver my source code of my blazor made in program?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31570" LastActivityDate="2023-11-16T23:14:46.487" Title="Can I use blazor (MIT) and mysql community (GPL) for commercial purposes?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|license|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2023-11-21T12:31:24.593" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14422" CreationDate="2023-11-17T03:08:51.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you're asking about isn't &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; unheard-of.  The short version is that you can't strictly &lt;em&gt;prohibit&lt;/em&gt; yourself from doing this, but you can make it so ridiculously unlikely that it's almost the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea comes from &amp;quot;poison pill&amp;quot; policies that corporate boards will enact to protect themselves against hostile takeovers.  It's a provision that takes effect when certain specified things happen, and usually results in something extremely detrimental to the would-be acquirer.  For example: in the event that a company gets acquired, the company will immediately issue a new round of stock and then distribute it freely to all existing employees, who will become fully vested if they leave the company within 30 days.  This heavily dilutes the acquiring entity's overall share of the stock pool (and thus their control), and gives employees incentive to cash out and quit (leaving the company an empty, worthless shell).  It's the equivalent to burning the building down on your way out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has occasionally been done in the world of software licenses.  The example I can remember was &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20171114074757/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11/11/oracle_chokes_on_peoplesofts_poison/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PeopleSoft&lt;/a&gt;, back when Oracle was trying to acquire them.  They instituted a policy where if they were acquired and support terms for their product was reduced (a fair assumption based on Oracle's track record), then all customers would be entitled to a refund of 2-5x what they originally paid.  If Oracle completed the takeover, it would immediately cost them something like $800 million.  That was more than enough to stop most would-be corporate raiders, but unfortunately not Oracle (nothing ever seems to be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're not Oracle, though, so something similar could accomplish your goal.  Add a provision to the license entitling all users of the open-source version to be paid (by you) a sum of money in the event that the software gets released under a different license.  That would make it so expensive to go closed-source that there's no practical way to actually do it. Open-source projects don't have exact numbers of how many users they have, so you can't even &lt;em&gt;estimate&lt;/em&gt; how much money you'd be on the hook for.  Be careful if you go this route, though.  Some licenses like the GPL explicitly permit license version upgrades, so you may need careful wording to avoid creating something contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T03:08:51.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14432" CreationDate="2023-11-17T09:12:27.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does the GPL licence cover only the code proper, or does it also include comments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPL license is a copyright license and it applies to all parts of a project that are subject to copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright law provides copyright protection for things that are the result of a human creative process and that includes both source code, documentation and comments. There is an exception here in the form of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction#Merger_doctrine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merger doctrine&lt;/a&gt;, which states that if there is only one (or a very few limited) way to express an idea, then the expression is not copyright protected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to release my code under the MIT licence, but I'm unsure whether my inclusion of comments from &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt; obliges me to release it under GPL v2 instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless those comments are the only way to write the needed information, copying those comments from &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt; means that you have included GPLv2 content in your project and you need to use the GPL license yourself as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T09:12:27.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14432" CreationDate="2023-11-17T23:37:16.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Missing any other statement, I expect the Javadoc comments from &lt;code&gt;Stream&lt;/code&gt; to be under GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One argument would be that of fair use. For example, if you included in your comment a relevant quote (e.g. from an standard). But I don't think it really fits this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you have different licenses for code and comments? I think you could, but the result is quite sketchy. Comments and code are clearly separated, so you could e.g. state that comments are available under CC-BY and code under GPL, I think there are some projects in that vein. The opposite is more peculiar. And, since code and comments will be on the same file (as opposed to having some GPL files with documentation and some different MIT files with code) it's more complicate to present to the final users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you could release your whole project under GPL, with the provision that it can be used under a MIT license if they remove the comments from the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would recommend to just write new comments from the ground up, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="502" LastActivityDate="2023-11-17T23:37:16.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14440" CreationDate="2023-11-20T09:38:09.690" Score="9" ViewCount="2124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been working on my own changes to a complicated academic/scientific project whose name contains their organization (university) name that I am not part of, for example, if their organization name was &lt;code&gt;ABCLabs&lt;/code&gt;, the project name is &lt;code&gt;ABCLabsPotatoSimualator&lt;/code&gt;. This is not just used as the Github repository name, but also the name of the source files, namespaces, etc in the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some initial collaboration, the original authors do not seem very receptive of merging my changes (active development is sparse and they often don't publish their working branch until they have published academic papers about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myself / my colleagues need significant changes made to the codebase for our own research, so I have forked it, but I am conflicted about the program name. Sure the code is open source, but I technically do not have the rights to their organization name &lt;code&gt;ABCLabs&lt;/code&gt;. Scrubbing the class names / package namespaces of all mentions of their organization feels like I'm just stealing their code - but at the same time, it is going through a significant refactor that will not be backward compatible with their version. The classes/interfaces are going to be significantly changed, but several of the internal underlying algorithms will still remain untouched, as written by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are my options regarding naming the new repository &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; dealing with classnames that contain their organization name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Append my organization name in the repository name (e.g. &lt;code&gt;ABCLabsPotatoSimulator-MyOrgFork&lt;/code&gt;, but leave the classnames intact. Again, I am worried that I do not have the rights to use the name &lt;code&gt;ABCLabs&lt;/code&gt; in both accompanying documentation and the names of the source code classes/executables.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Replace all instances of their organization name in both the repository name and the classnames in the source code with my own organization name. &lt;code&gt;MyOrgPotatoSimulator&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Remove all organization names in both the repository and the source code. However, I am worried just &lt;code&gt;PotatoSimulator&lt;/code&gt; is extremely ambiguous, because there might be other potato simulators written in other languages etc (I cannot use the name of the programming language, because it is written in MATLAB, and MATLAB is trademarked by MathWorks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is GPL licensed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: regardless, I will leave comment blocks attributing the original authors of the files/classes that I left intact, or sections of code that is largely left intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31593" LastEditorUserId="31593" LastEditDate="2023-11-20T15:37:51.750" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T22:00:56.797" Title="Maintaining a parallel fork of a project that contains the original authors' company name" Tags="|gpl|github|forking|trademark|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-11-20T15:29:11.370" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In copyright terms, you must obey the GPL - leave intact all copyright notices, and provide a copy of the source etc to anyone you distribute the binaries to. If you do that, you can remove all mentions of the original source from the code, the documentation and everywhere else and be &lt;em&gt;legally&lt;/em&gt; in the clear. This would generally be considered bad form in the FLOSS community but everybody acknowledges that it is legal, and something that we allow to happen when we publish our code under a FLOSS license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In academic terms, you would almost certainly be commiting plagirism if you did this. That's not something anyone here can really advise on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T15:29:11.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-11-20T15:54:34.800" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a legal point of view, the GPL license allows you to rename everything in sight, except for mentions in the copyright lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, a complete renaming of all files and classes is rarely to never done, primarily because it is a lot of work with no (or even negative) added value. Keeping the original names makes it easier to provide your changes to the upstream developers (ABC Labs in your case), or to integrate subsequent changes from upstream in your fork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advise would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name your repository as you like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Name new files/classes as you like&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you change existing code in a manner that it is still recognizably derived from the class of ABC Labs, keep the original name. Especially if the change is backwards-compatible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When you change code in a more extensive manner, or in a non-backwards compatible manner, consider changing the name to clearly indicate that it will not work together with code that expects the original version.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within OSS projects, it is not common to include organization names within file or class names, they appear at most in the package names (for example in Java packages). I am not sure what the convention is in academic settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-20T16:07:43.470" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T16:07:43.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-20T17:39:29.010" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 requires, when redistributing modified version of the source code, to notify in the source files the date of change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what about removing source files? Is there any requirements of notifying a file is removed from the source? What about things like makefile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally - what about adding new source files? Does it suffice to state in the file the date on which the source file is added, and a copyright notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31597" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T19:43:00.537" Title="What does GPLv2 say about adding or removing source files?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14441" CreationDate="2023-11-20T19:43:00.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to notify the recipients of changes being made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of a person - like you - who discovers a new repository which solves some issue you have or which is a cool project. Where do you look what it does, what changed and who works on it? You usually go first to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the readme file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the changelog file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the copying file&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the whole repository is covered by one license - thus it also includes the instructions for the build system like &lt;code&gt;Makefile&lt;/code&gt; etc. If several licenses cover different files, the readme or license or copying file is also a good place to indicate that (additional to any header in the files themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, it's good practise to summarize changes made in the readme or changelog file. That solves at the same time the issue that removed files cannot carry any changed headers due to their absence. Thus removal is easily indicated also like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleanup / Update: removed long out-dated port to OS/2 and updated build system for x86 to work with newer versions of gcc and clamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to adding new files: Yes, it's good to add a header to them with project name, license indication and copyright statement - but it's not a requirement either. The important thing is, that recipients are clear under which license and under whose copyright a file falls. Thus I'd do both and also add it to the readme, changelog or copying file of the project indicating that you made changes (and roughly which).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T19:43:00.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14438" CreationDate="2023-11-20T22:00:56.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to depend on how much effort you want to do. But a solution I have used in the past is to &lt;code&gt;include&lt;/code&gt; &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; classes and then overload where I needed to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;GenericSimulator extends ABCPotatoSimulator {&#xA;&#xA;  int leaves(seeds)&#xA;    return seeds * 4 * sunlight / 2&#xA;  end&#xA;&#xA;end&#xA;&#xA;ABCPotatoSimulator {&#xA;&#xA;  int leaves(seeds)&#xA;   return seeds * leaves * sunlight&#xA;  end &#xA;&#xA;  int sunlight()&#xA;    return 44 &#xA;  end&#xA;end&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no reason this can't work if you're trying to maintain everything. Then you're taking over the responsibility for preserving GenericSimulator, but not messing with ABCPotatoSimulator.  Contributing to ABCPotatoSimulator becomes more challenging, but they sound like they don't want that anyway. And! There's nothing stopping you from contributing to ABCPotatoSimulator when working on potatoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="892" LastActivityDate="2023-11-20T22:00:56.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14445" CreationDate="2023-11-22T08:16:22.443" Score="14" ViewCount="2899" Body="&lt;p&gt;A library I have used has recently introduced a payment requirement, i.e buy a license code and enter it to be able to use the library. The library is however still MIT licensed. Would it be legal to fork the repo and remove the license check?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21086" LastActivityDate="2023-11-22T12:26:19.903" Title="Can I remove payment requirement part of a MIT licensed library" Tags="|mit|license|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14444" CreationDate="2023-11-22T12:26:19.903" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In copyright terms, you can make any changes you like to MIT licensed software so long as you ensure that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That includes removing any parts of the software you don't like, including any licensing checks. Your case is very odd in that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The code in question is fully client-side, it's not that the license key is used to communicate with a server-side component.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Looking at the code, the &amp;quot;license check&amp;quot; is trivial anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author presuambly knows all this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most likely possibility here in my opinion is that the author is using this as a very clumsy way of getting donations towards their project. That's legally fine, but I personally think they'd do better just asking for donations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-11-22T12:26:19.903" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-23T10:27:38.527" Score="6" ViewCount="2656" Body="&lt;p&gt;I posted some library in public repository on github.&#xA;Say, I do not want it to be used for machine learning purposes.&#xA;General question: How could this be achieved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoiler: I found some collection of &amp;quot;Non-AI&amp;quot; licenses here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;If I publish my work under AGPL-3.0, could those licenses interfere with my current license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: by &amp;quot;interfering&amp;quot; I mean that some terms on non-AI license may may weaken or strengthen some terms of AGPL license. Or vice-versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14862" LastEditorUserId="14862" LastEditDate="2023-11-23T10:44:35.753" LastActivityDate="2023-11-25T10:47:42.793" Title="How to prevent using source code as data source for machine learning activities?" Tags="|github|agpl-3.0|public-domain|agpl|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14446" CreationDate="2023-11-23T10:47:39.277" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me clarify, again, the old misunderstanding, by pointing out that &lt;strong&gt;licences don't inhere in code, their obligations attach to recipients through the act of conveyance&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are the sole rightsholder in some code, and you release it under some non-AI (and thus non-free) licence, and you also release it under AGPLv3, those recipients that receive it under AGPLv3 are completely unaffected by any restrictions that applied to those who received it under, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses/blob/main/NON-AI-APACHE2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache2-nonAI&lt;/a&gt;.  Conversely, those who received it under Apache2-nonAI are completely unaffected by the requirements of AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So hopefully that deals with your second question, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If I publish my work under AGPL-3.0, could those licenses interfere with my current license?&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.  No, they couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the larger question of how to prevent your code from being used for machine training, well, the licences you list should achieve that, but at the expense of making your code non-free when so licensed (and given a solution to the detection-and-enforcement problem, which is non-trivial).  The larger question of whether the output of an LLM is a copyright derivative of its training inputs is still very much a live legal question, and I don't think anyone knows how the chips are going to come down.  If it is eventually decided the output &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a derivative of the inputs, that will completely torpedo proprietary LLMs, as it's a rare one that won't have scooped up some copyleft-licensed inputs in its training maw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think the problem's going to go away fairly soon anyway, as the internet fills up with the output of trained machine models which is then used in turn as training input for the next generation of machine models.  There is some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/06/06/will-gpt-models-choke-on-their-own-exhaust/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;very interesting work&lt;/a&gt; from the University of Cambridge showing that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and that within a few generations the outputs become indistinguishable from garbage (and they're clear the work is not limited to natural language models, or even to text-based models).  Since there is no generally-reliable way to distinguish model-generated content from human-generated content (see many long discussions &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;here on meta.SE&lt;/a&gt;) I don't see how this effect can be long avoided, and the whole problem will disappear up its own tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-11-23T12:02:53.070" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T12:02:53.070" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-11-23T13:05:24.717" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a practical angle.&#xA;Say I downloaded some Open Source SW which is dually licensed, e.g. by AGPL and European Union Public license.&#xA;Now I want to include it into my project.&#xA;What steps should I make to establish that of 2 licenses I choose to comply with, say, AGPL?&#xA;Is it necessary to make such choice and declaration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="14862" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T08:05:12.060" Title="How to use technically dual-licensed software?" Tags="|agpl-3.0|eupl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14452" CreationDate="2023-11-23T15:26:07.147" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am developing an Unity game where I require the functionality of this tool (which is written in Unity itself) at runtime: &lt;a href=&quot;https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It essentially processes images/textures. Speed is not upmost concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me please if I'm wrong, but due to the licence, I cannot simply include the code as part of the game but I have to make it independent and &amp;quot;replaceable&amp;quot; so that the game itself does not need to fall under GPL as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have thought of the following approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strip that project off its UI and make it a headless Unity application (normally used for server backends) with a command line interface. The command inputs would be the path of an input image file, and output images as well as params.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pack this executable as well as its sourcecode (under GPL) with the game (which has a different licence).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the actual game, when the functionality is needed, write out the texture to an image file, launch the external executable and read in the produced new textures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means anyone can take that sourcecode and compile a new headless Unity executable.&#xA;Therefore would this be a way to comply with the copyleft licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative that comes to mind is to compile the functionality as a pure C# DLL and provide the sourcecode of that with the the game. However while surely smaller filesize, that adds headache for the intended Windows, Linux and Mac cross compatibility.&#xA;Any other viable approaches?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31622" LastEditorUserId="31622" LastEditDate="2023-11-23T15:28:06.917" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T15:57:27.997" Title="Include Tool under GPLv3 licence as an additional Unity executable - Is this approach viable?" Tags="|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14449" CreationDate="2023-11-23T15:42:52.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to make such choice and declaration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it is not needed to make an explicit choice and declaration on which license you choose to follow. It is even possible to use the library in a way that is compliant with all the applicable licenses and allow your users to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all licenses require that you inform your users about the license under which you received the third-party code. If the software is dual-/multi-licensed and you choose not to follow some of those licenses, then you choose to receive the software only under those licenses. You communicate only the licenses you comply with to your users and you don't mention the licenses that you chose to ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For your users, the most important information is what terms apply to the copy they received from you, not what other terms could apply if they get a separate copy directly from the upstream provider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T15:42:52.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14450" CreationDate="2023-11-23T15:57:27.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means anyone can take that sourcecode and compile a new headless Unity executable. Therefore would this be a way to comply with the copyleft licence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that you don't need to read the GPLed source code to produce a replacement (i.e. you use standard file formats and no (complex) internal knowledge in the parameters), then that is indeed a way to comply with the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-11-23T15:57:27.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14455" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14456" CreationDate="2023-11-26T14:13:23.237" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand the answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/210/6810&quot;&gt;How can free and open source projects be monetized?&lt;/a&gt;, the only time open sourcing is not a threat to business is when you dominate the market. Is that correct? If so, then why don't monopolies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. go fully open source? Those companies don't do that on their main products, but there are various other products that they do. Or is the only explanation that it is a way to build their brands and communities? There is no reason for them to not keep them closed for monetization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer also doesn't explain why companies that open-source their main products afford to do so. For example those with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Open-core model - Wikipedia&quot;&gt;open-core model&lt;/a&gt;. Are they confident that they have dominated the markets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think the question &amp;quot;When is open sourcing a threat to business&amp;quot; is better than &amp;quot;How or why to monetize open source&amp;quot;. The &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; question not only requires explaining reasons or methods to monetize, but also implies that they may change depending on the situation, and pushes us to explain when those changes in the situation happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6810" LastEditorUserId="29330" LastEditDate="2023-12-10T02:53:07.670" LastActivityDate="2023-12-10T02:53:07.670" Title="When is open sourcing a threat to business?" Tags="|monetization|business|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14455" CreationDate="2023-11-27T08:29:03.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer to &amp;quot;when is open sourcing a threat to business&amp;quot; is that it is a threat when it allows competitors an easier and cheaper path into the market. Making things that you don't expect/want to make money off open source is not a threat to your business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see several major reasons for a business to provide open-source technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because they can't avoid it. If they used third-party code under a strong copyleft license, like the GPL, the license obligates them to make their code open-source as well. Similarly, the HTML code of a website or portal which is anyhow visible to everyone (can't avoid it), and it usually is not your company's core IP (your secret sauce), you might as well publish it under an open-source license without suffering any downsides as compared to publishing it with 'all rights reserved'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To create goodwill among the open-source community. I believe this is the case when a company offers some tooling or a fringe library they developed in-house. Those things are typically not critical for what is generating the money for the company, so it doesn't matter if a potential competitor gets them cheap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To create brand recognition and increase market share. I would put most dual-license and open-core offerings under this one. You see this mostly in the areas of libraries and service offerings. The idea is that projects start small and can use the open-source version. But as the project grows and people want to start making money with it, they would need to switch to the (extended) paid version.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the market-share side is that if the majority of hobby programmers are familiar with your product, then they might convince the buyers of the companies they join also to buy your product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because your business model is designed around offering service on a product. This applies mostly to companies that re-distribute an already open-source product and make their money from services they offer in relation to the product.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It may be required by the market. For example if you want to sell hardware (components, such as ICs) into an ecosystem which is based on Linux (GPLv2) such as Android, then you might be forced to provide your drivers and software stack under a compatible Open Source license, because otherwise the kernel cannot be compiled to communicate with your hardware (and eventually you will not sell your ICs).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-11-28T18:04:43.460" LastActivityDate="2023-11-28T18:04:43.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14457" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14458" CreationDate="2023-11-29T16:01:14.560" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14456/6810&quot;&gt;When is open sourcing a threat to business?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer to &amp;quot;when is open sourcing a threat to business&amp;quot; is that it is a threat when it allows competitors an easier and cheaper path into the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then why aren't open-core or dual-license easier and cheaper paths for competitors to enter the market? Even when the real money makers for a business are not in the core but in the non-free add-ons, isn't it still easier and cheaper for competitors to only build the add-ons than having to build both the core and the add-ons? Let's say A is the original company and B is the competitor. B can compete by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;making its own add-ons, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;packaging the core with its own add-on and release in a different brand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does A let B do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6810" LastEditorUserId="6810" LastEditDate="2023-11-30T02:07:46.387" LastActivityDate="2023-11-30T10:33:32.503" Title="Why aren't open-core model easier and cheaper paths for competitors to enter the market?" Tags="|monetization|business|open-core|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14457" CreationDate="2023-11-30T10:33:32.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice builds from scratch and releases her own open-core product.  You ask why Bob doesn't either (a) make his own proprietary add-ons, or (b) copy her code and release it as Bob's Open Core, with Bob's proprietary add-ons.  The answer in both cases is that Bob may not do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice will have released her core under a copyleft licence, probably GPL or AGPL.  It is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally understood&lt;/a&gt; that plugins for a GPL program must themselves be GPL.  Yes, this can depend on how the plugins communicate with the open-core, but you may rely on the plugin architecture being designed in such a way that plugins &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; have to be GPL - or the open-core model doesn't work.  So - unlike Alice, who &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2077/so-the-gpl-doesnt-restrict-the-creator-of-the-software-in-any-way&quot;&gt;isn't bound by her own licence grant&lt;/a&gt; - Bob's plugins must be GPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Bob takes the open-core code, modifies it, and releases it as Bob's Open Core, Alice still has a copyright interest in it, so Bob &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; bound by the GPL, and still cannot release proprietary plugins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-11-30T10:33:32.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14463" CreationDate="2023-12-01T17:37:14.393" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can a machine learning model have a less restrictive license than the database it was trained on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know there was a similar question to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/8178/sharing-machine-learning-models-of-a-confidential-dataset&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but I want to ask more specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was building a program that a company aims to use commercially later. To help me I used the open source library &lt;a href=&quot;http://dlib.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dlib&lt;/a&gt; by Davis King. The models I obtained separately from his &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davisking/dlib-models/tree/master&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;github&lt;/a&gt;. Generally, the repository they are contained in is licensed with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davisking/dlib-models/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Therefore it should be safe to use for a production environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in contradiction to that there is a note under one contained &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/davisking/dlib-models/tree/master#shape_predictor_68_face_landmarksdatbz2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;model&lt;/a&gt;, saying this model should not be used ' in a commercial product.', because the dataset excludes commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that, but is it always that the ML model inherits the license of the dataset? Why does Davis King even publish the models under CC0 then? Because also the other models were trained on datasets that might be more restrictive. All in all I am kind of scared to use these pretrained models now, because it is really not clear to me. This extends to the images he scraped from the internet, how am I supposed to know what license they are underlying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have a second example. In the &lt;code&gt;face-api.js&lt;/code&gt; library there is a model contained called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js/tree/master#ssd-mobilenet-v1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSD Mobilenet v1&lt;/a&gt;. It is included in the library that is licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/justadudewhohacks/face-api.js/blob/master/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt;. But it was trained on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shuoyang1213.me/WIDERFACE/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WIDERFACE&lt;/a&gt; database underlying &lt;em&gt;Creative Common License (cc by-nc-nd)&lt;/em&gt;, so not allowing commercial use. Isn't that totally misleading as there is zero note on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my question got clear and there are not too many details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31683" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2023-12-02T11:56:53.557" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T09:03:50.840" Title="ML model license in contradiction to that of dataset" Tags="|license|commercial|law|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14460" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14468" CreationDate="2023-12-02T12:52:41.923" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a book using this Latex Template&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/nice-arabic-book-template/qttfgxhqbwkc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/nice-arabic-book-template/qttfgxhqbwkc&lt;/a&gt; licensed under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The LaTeX Project Public License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I print and sell the book that I wrote using this template, provided that I mentioned in the book that I used this template?&#xA;Also, are there any restrictions?&#xA;I thought about contacting the original author  PASQUET Stéphane but I couldn't find his email!&#xA;I appreciate any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31691" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-12-05T08:10:37.247" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T10:59:37.883" Title="Writing a book using LaTeX Project Public License" Tags="|copyright|license|distribution|restrictions|books|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-02T17:40:07.437" Score="10" ViewCount="3506" Body="&lt;p&gt;I check the FAQ page of GNU Licenses but cannot find the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is using my code (in Python) that is released under GPLv3, does s/he violate my GPLv3 rights if s/he uses my library intensively (has intimate data communication) by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;import the library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and does function call multiple times,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but does not modify the library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but when distributing his/her software s/he does not distribute my library but give the URL to the user to download my python code separately instead. His/her program will not work if the users do not download my library. For example, s/he makes python files import my library to use with it, then convert/compile all py files to pyx files (using cython), then release pyx file but the end user has to download my .py file from the internet. Technically, all pyx files do not contain any part of my library except the name of the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I use AGPLv3 instead of GPLv3, does it help to prevent someone else from releasing his/her program in a closed-source format if the program uses my library but the library is not part of the distribution and the users are required to download the AGPLv3 protected library in order to make the main program released as the closed-source software to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also read the license fine print (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;and it just protects against&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so if the violator does not &amp;quot;convey&amp;quot; any part of my source code that is protected under GPLv3 and ask the end user to download my library, how can &amp;quot;GPLv3&amp;quot; cover my works? I think it does protect my work but cannot fine the fine print that talk about that. Can you point me to where in the fine print that talk about that, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer from stackoverflow confuses me even more&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11033418/library-dependencies-compatibility-for-non-commercial-use&quot;&gt;https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11033418/library-dependencies-compatibility-for-non-commercial-use&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you do not re-distribute your dependencies, it doesn't really matter what licenses they have, compared with what license you choose for your own project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yea, that is true ... for open source dependencies with mainstream licenses. But: It forces your users to download all of the dependencies which is a bad idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant GNU page on this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;It talks about whether GPLv3 part and the closed-source are two separate programs or they are linked to each other and formed a single program.&#xA;Yet, it does not say about the final distribution of the software.&#xA;The part that I worry is that the violator may say the violation will occur only if s/he distribute the GPLv3 part, but when the end user download it manually, it is not the violation. If this is the case, is there a way to modify GPLv3 such that even if the GPLv3 part is not &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; during the final distribution, it is still violating the license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help. Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31693" LastActivityDate="2023-12-08T16:38:48.870" Title="Distribute the code as closed source and the end users download GPLv3 dependencies separately" Tags="|gpl-3|license|agpl-3.0|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2023-12-03T04:16:18.283" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're rightfully confused, it should be simple (but the world is complicated): a GPL-licensed library can only be used in a programme which does give its users the same rights as the GPL provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely this means: you must not include that library into your programme if the programme is not distributed under GPL or compatible terms. This cannot be circumvented by asking the user to install the files themselves separately. However here it gets indeed tricky with python or other interpreted languages. When I say 'include' above, it means in python to use the &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; statement. Yet the GPL applies to the binary provided to users, thus when distributing the work as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraph does not change, if you talk about the AGPL instead of the GPL. It would make a difference if the library uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LGPL&lt;/a&gt; which is designed to uphold the obligations of the GPL limited to the library itself as long as the main programme allows the user to replace the library by another version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case concerning python the &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; way to circumvent the GPL is to call the library in a completely separate process and to NOT &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; the library, e.g. by &lt;code&gt;subprocess.run()&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;import subprocess&#xA;result = subprocess.run([&amp;quot;python&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;my_gpl_python_file.py&amp;quot;], capture_output=True, text=True)&#xA;print(result.stdout)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use via &lt;code&gt;import&lt;/code&gt; is (IMHO) a violation of the license, at least in the spirit of the license - but it has not been contested in court for an interpreted language like Python. As for Python it suffices to distribute the source code, and compilation is done by the user's python interpreter by its just-in-time compiler. And I'm not aware of any court ruling for this particular case - which might or might not uphold the GPL requirements for this case. It could be argued that the wording of the GPL was crafted with compiled languages in mind, like C. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6033/can-a-non-gpl-python-program-use-gpl-python-module&quot;&gt;see also this very similar or identical question coming to a similar conclusion&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end a license, any license, is just a few words. Any license itself does not stop anyone doing anything, including what you describe. It can only as strong as the authors are willing to uphold it and their copyright, i.e. to sue violators who are unwilling to comply even when asked nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2023-12-03T18:20:21.893" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T18:20:21.893" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14459" CreationDate="2023-12-03T09:03:50.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As indicated by the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/91785/is-it-illegal-for-a-firm-to-train-an-ai-model-on-a-cc-by-sa-4-0-corpus-and-make&quot;&gt;Is it illegal for a firm to train an AI model on a CC BY-SA 4.0 corpus and make a commercial use of it without distributing the model under CC BY-SA?&lt;/a&gt; over on our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Law&lt;/a&gt; , the status of AI models within copyright law has not yet been determined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is unknown if an AI model is considered a work that is protected by copyright at all and how the model relates to the training material in terms of copyright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-12-03T09:03:50.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2023-12-03T13:36:17.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any conditions GPL places on distribution are based on copyright law. It does not involve patent law or contract law, unlike some closed-source software licenses. Details of copyright law vary by jurisdiction, but are largely similar in countries that are part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_copyright_agreements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the international agreements&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the actions of the people involved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developer downloads your software and writes his own code to use it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developer publishes his own code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Developer publishes documentation that instructs downloading your code.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;User downloads developer's and your code and combines them to run it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, 1. and 4. clearly require licenses from you, but GPL gives very large freedom of running software and most of the requirements only kick in once you propagate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishing documentation in 3 is also fine. If they write it themselves, you don't have copyright claim over it. If they reuse your documentation, they could comply with whatever license applies to the documentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only point where copyright claim can potentially occur is 2. &lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; the software they have written builds so intimately upon your software that it can be considered a derivative work, then they need to follow your license for publication even if none of your original work is included. How courts evaluate whether software is a derivative work &lt;a href=&quot;https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is a complex subject&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is insufficient legal precedent to predict how a lawsuit would go. In particular it is unclear whether merely calling a library makes the calling code derivative. If there is significant API structure that is imparted on the calling code, that is a good basis to claim it is derivative. Most companies play it safe and avoid any linking to GPL code, but the legal boundaries are not clear and few cases end up in court. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/bulr/volume85n5/STOLTZ.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Penguin Paradox&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Mitchell L. Stoltz explores this in depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do have a legal basis of making a copyright claim on 2, then GPL does apply to the derivative work also. Otherwise you would require a license that forbids either 1 or 4, but I'm not aware of any open source license that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3919" LastEditorUserId="3919" LastEditDate="2023-12-04T07:16:29.933" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T07:16:29.933" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2023-12-04T15:28:52.480" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I certainly understand your frustration but I don't think that what you've described is a copyright violation - and I don't think any of the OSI approved licenses would restrict this type of use. Think of my bash script using the GNU toolchain - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndNonfreeOnSameMachine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLAndNonfreeOnSameMachine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the nice things about GPL is that the FSF had lots of resources (like the faq above) to support the use of the license including a license violation mail list. They will also even get involved in legal compliance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No I don't think so, but I'm not an attorney.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Match up this use with other scenarios at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fsf.org/licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.fsf.org/licensing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you find a violation or if you're still unclear get answers from FSF via license-violation@gnu.org&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31704" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T15:28:52.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2023-12-04T19:08:55.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because the GPL grants recipients of GPL programs almost carte blance to produce derivative works that won't be distributed, there's not apt to be any way to prevent the development of closed-source programs that benefit from functionality provided by open-source GPL &amp;quot;plug-ins&amp;quot; that use GPL libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best one could do would be to design one's library in such a way that it would only be usable in ways that would make direct client code a derivative work, and specify that the author of any client code must make a bona fide effort to include in the &amp;quot;published source code&amp;quot; sufficient information that would allow anyone the same ability to build and use modified versions as the author would have.  The GPL wouldn't allow a library author to forbid the use of a plug-in architecture to invoke GPL libraries from within closed-source libraries, but the GPL's definition of &amp;quot;source code&amp;quot; could probably be used to compel someone using plug-ins in such fashion to make a bona fide effort to publish all of the information necessary to effectively write both plug-ins and clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastEditorUserId="4645" LastEditDate="2023-12-08T16:38:48.870" LastActivityDate="2023-12-08T16:38:48.870" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2023-12-04T20:31:58.343" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPL license prevents creation of a derivative work using any license other than GPL (or maybe just open source). For the purposes of dynamic/run time linking, this occurs at run-time. The problem is not whether someone distributes a GPL library alongside their proprietary code, or instructs someone to download it themselves. It is that the end user has no valid license with which to run the program. They would create this derivative work which violates the GPL by linking it to the closed source code by running the program.&#xA;I'll try find a link I once read about it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31712" LastEditorUserId="31712" LastEditDate="2023-12-04T20:33:00.087" LastActivityDate="2023-12-04T20:33:00.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14460" CreationDate="2023-12-05T10:59:37.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the license language is a bit messy and difficult to apply to templates for documents. Based on the definitions contained in the LPPL, your book is a 'Derived Work' of the template you are using. I am not an expert on LaTeX Templates, so I am assuming they are similar to WORD templates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exporting a document into anything a printer would understand (i.e. a page-description language such as PDF) is not explicitly mentioned in the license, but the language related to '&lt;em&gt;compiling&lt;/em&gt;' or '&lt;em&gt;Compiled Work&lt;/em&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 10 of the license allows you to distribute the Derived Work under a license other than LPPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;a. A Derived Work may be distributed under a different license&#xA;provided that license itself honors the conditions listed in&#xA;Clause 6 above, in regard to the Work, though it does not have&#xA;to honor the rest of the conditions in this license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. If a Derived Work is distributed under a different license, that&#xA;Derived Work must provide sufficient documentation as part of&#xA;itself to allow each recipient of that Derived Work to honor the&#xA;restrictions in Clause 6 above, concerning changes from the Work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Way back in the license document you can find these words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derived Works That Are Not Replacements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several clauses of the LPPL specify means to provide reliability and&#xA;stability for the user community. They therefore concern themselves&#xA;with the case that a Derived Work is intended to be used as a&#xA;(compatible or incompatible) replacement of the original Work. If this&#xA;is not the case (e.g., if a few lines of code are reused for a&#xA;completely different task), then clauses 6b and 6d shall not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is applicable to you, as your book is by no means trying to replace the template (your book is not a template).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where do we stand now? You may distribute your Derived Work (LaTeX file of your book) under a license different from LPPL. This is good for you, as you can then select any license or even a 'all rights reserved' and sell it in paper or digital format. You only need to comply with Section 6 conditions, where &lt;em&gt;6b and 6d shall not apply&lt;/em&gt; and 6a (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If a component of this Derived Work can be a direct replacement for a component of the Work ...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) is also not applicable, so only 6c is left, which should be easy for you to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you translate/export your LaTeX file (the book) into PDF, the LaTeX file is already under a different (your) license, and you can ignore the requirements and conditions stated in Section 7 of LPPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T10:59:37.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14449" CreationDate="2023-12-05T15:23:21.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree and share the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14451/25562&quot;&gt;answer by @Bart van Ingen Schenau&lt;/a&gt;, adding that dual licensing should be granted with licenses presenting some similarity. EUPL &amp;amp; AGPL fit, because they both cover remote access &amp;quot;distribution&amp;quot; and are both share-alike/reciprocal (however, with more compatibility/interoperability on the EUPL side).&#xA;At the contrary, dual licensing with a strong copyleft license one side and a totally persissive license on the other side would not be the most appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-12-06T08:05:12.060" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T08:05:12.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14429" CreationDate="2023-12-05T15:43:23.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed a distinction to do between the venue (competent court) and the applicable law. In case the licensor is in Rio - Brazil, and has no office in EU, the compentent court (according to the EUPL) will be Rio. But if a specific point requests interpretation, the judge will have to consult the (Belgian) law. Knowing that all Member States copyright laws applicable to software transpose exactly the same Directive 2009/24/EC, that both the EUPL itself and the Directive have working value in portuguese, this is not &amp;quot;overcomplicated&amp;quot;! It is probably less complicated, for a written-law country like Brazil, to find in their native language these two explicit sources from the Internet than having to look for &amp;quot;precedents&amp;quot; in a common law country (like US).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Just my two cents...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25562" LastActivityDate="2023-12-05T15:43:23.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13888" CreationDate="2023-12-05T22:49:56.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I ran into this license recently and wondered the same thing. It's still true as of 2023-12-05 that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FSF license commentaries&lt;/a&gt; have no entry for this. Here's my own (non-legally-informed) analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section 13 holds the most notable change. Here's the addition that sent me running for the hills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such&#xA;that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very strong position, vastly stronger than AGPLv3 gets. I wouldn't feel comfortable running this sort of software (as least in a manner that counts as public serving) on anything but a dedicated bare-metal hardware instance. From my (again, not at all legally-trained) perspective, this prohibits running on e.g. AWS because that involves automation that is not FOSS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MongoDB SSPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt; calls Section 13 out explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What specifically is the difference between the GPL and the SSPL?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only substantive modification is section 13, which makes clear the condition to offering MongoDB as a service. A company that offers a publicly available MongoDB as a service must release the software it uses to offer such service under the terms of the SSPL, including the management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the source code made available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the portion that the OSI objected to in their &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rejection of SSPF as an open source license&lt;/a&gt; and why Stallman stated the FSF has no incentive to comment (FSF-approved Free Software licenses are, afaik, a strict subset of OSI-approved Open Source licenses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31727" LastEditorUserId="31727" LastEditDate="2023-12-06T16:33:28.177" LastActivityDate="2023-12-06T16:33:28.177" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14473" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-09T10:28:11.347" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone accidentally (or otherwise) violates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openfontlicense.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OFL&lt;/a&gt; license, it's clear that their licence is terminated.  But if they fix the violation, can they get a renewed licence, or have they lost it for ever?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user31759" LastEditorUserId="190" LastEditDate="2023-12-09T23:21:30.090" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T09:47:43.550" Title="OFL license and errors" Tags="|license|ofl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-09T12:20:34.083" Score="6" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;Text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GNUAllPermissive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU All-Permissive License&lt;/a&gt; (also known as the &amp;quot;FSF All Permissive License&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,&#xA;are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright&#xA;notice and this notice are preserved.  This file is offered as-is,&#xA;without any warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The FSF only recommends its use for README files and other short documentation (reference: [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/License-Notices-for-Other-Files.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;License Notices for Other Files&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;], [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html#documentation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;How to Choose a License for Your Own Work&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]), but is the license also usable for source code (anywhere from 10 to 10,000+ lines)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The license is approved by the FSF. Is it also approved by the OSI?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21138" LastActivityDate="2023-12-09T16:00:53.257" Title="Is the GNU All-Permissive License suitable for source code?" Tags="|licensing|source-code|gnu|permissive|fsf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14474" CreationDate="2023-12-09T16:00:53.257" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Legally, you can license your code under any license you feel like, even one which doesn't make sense: for example, you could license a piece of music under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Database License&lt;/a&gt;. In some cases, that might mean that you aren't in fact granting anyone any rights, but that's still something you're allowed to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a good idea to use licenses for purposes they're not intended? In almost all cases, almost certainly not. License proliferation - where users must understand more and more licenses in order to use a combined work - is a real problem. If you want to license code under a short, permissive license instead use one of the MIT or BSD licenses; these are better understood by the community and will probably lead to greater uptake of your code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-12-09T16:00:53.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14473" CreationDate="2023-12-11T09:47:43.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any better answer, I'll note that the OFL has a termination clause, but no reinstatement clause.  That differs from eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, which discusses reinstatement in s8.  So I don't think we can read a clause into the OFL which is patently not there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I also note that licences don't inhere in content; instead, their obligations attach to recipients through the act of conveyance.  So while I don't see there's any right to reinstate your lost licence, I think you can just get a fresh one by getting a fresh copy of the font from wherever you got it the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-12-11T09:47:43.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14482" CreationDate="2023-12-11T17:58:30.537" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our team is thinking to call for volunteers to solve an advanced problem in an open source project. The solution for the problem will take collaboration, prototyping and number of pull requests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, we are afraid to get contributors, that do not have enough engineering skills (like creating design doc, reviewing it, planning good user experience) and will expect a lot of coaching to deliver the solution, that will create a lot of extra work for maintainers, more than actual work to solve the problem.&#xA;While in general we are ok to provide coaching for small tasks, a lot of coaching for project-like tasks seems to be too costly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a known framework/pattern for selecting/rejecting external contributors for advanced problems in open source projects?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31770" LastEditorUserId="31770" LastEditDate="2023-12-12T19:32:15.570" LastActivityDate="2023-12-13T10:15:29.040" Title="What is proper way to reject contributors for a complex project, based on their skill level, to save on coaching effort?" Tags="|problem-contributor|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14487" CreationDate="2023-12-12T12:08:31.860" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to open source an HTTP Client for a closed source software product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vendor of this product distributes the binary packages / executables only in forums / repositories which require proper authentication. In addition, the product requires a license key to be usable. Without this key, the program would not work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My overall impression is that this vendor prefers to not publicly expose both documentation and the actual software but instead wants to control who has access to their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Can I open source an HTTP client for the API which this software product exposes? And if so, are there license models which I should avoid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31774" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2023-12-12T18:17:54.413" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T16:37:54.300" Title="Can I open-source an API client for a closed-source product?" Tags="|proprietary-code|closed-source|api|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14478" CreationDate="2023-12-13T10:15:29.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most established pattern is called a job interview. I'm aware that's a slightly facetious answer, but the reality of the world is that a large proportion of the &amp;quot;advanced problems&amp;quot; in open source are done by commercial entities who pay people and take the time to vet them first; if you want high quality contributions, it's likely the best way to get them is to pay for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can certainly try the same sort of thing with volunteers - you can ask them to do a &amp;quot;take home&amp;quot; project or something before starting to work with them. But don't expect too many people to take you up on that offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realistically here, it sounds like you may just be best off doing the work yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2023-12-13T10:15:29.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14484" CreationDate="2023-12-13T13:43:51.087" Score="3" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it legal to fork an AGPL project and change names and namespaces? All the work will be public and available to users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31771" LastEditorUserId="673" LastEditDate="2023-12-14T17:00:27.053" LastActivityDate="2023-12-14T17:00:27.053" Title="To what extent can I change an AGPL project?" Tags="|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14483" CreationDate="2023-12-13T14:16:47.360" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license allows you to change anything and everything within the project, except&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the license. The modified project must remain under the AGPL license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the copyright lines. You are not allowed to remove or modify existing copyright lines -- except when completely removing a file; no need to keep a file that consists only of copyright information --, but you can add your own copyright line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-12-13T14:16:47.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14501" CreationDate="2023-12-14T03:04:41.303" Score="1" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been experimenting with databases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea of Collection-Document relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;const client = new Client(&amp;quot;localhost&amp;quot;, 8080, &amp;quot;project&amp;quot;)&#xA;&#xA;const City = client.createCollection(&amp;quot;city&amp;quot;, {&#xA;  name: { type: String, required: true },&#xA;  index: { type: Number, default: 0 },&#xA;  visited: { type: Boolean, default: false },&#xA;});&#xA;&#xA;await client.connect();&#xA;&#xA;const cities = await City.query().find({ index: { $gt: 1 } }).fetch();&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I wanted to write a similar code for MongoDB, we would have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;const client = new MongoClient(&amp;quot;mongodb://localhost:27017&amp;quot;);&#xA;&#xA;await client.connect();&#xA;&#xA;const db = client.db(&amp;quot;project&amp;quot;);&#xA;&#xA;const collection = db.collection(&amp;quot;city&amp;quot;);&#xA;&#xA;const cities = await collection.find({ index: { $gt: 1 } })&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry for comparing both projects, I have to do it so you can give me a better explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, there are some differences, for example, my project accepts a &lt;code&gt;Collection&lt;/code&gt; schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing I'm worried about is that the &lt;code&gt;find&lt;/code&gt; argument is very similar in both cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My project will also accept things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;.find({ $or: [{ index: { $gt: 1 } }, { index: { $lt: 3 } }]&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which is also really similar to MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I get into trouble because of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to clarify that I use no code from MongoDB. Everything is written from scratch, from client to server. My project is an independent database.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31783" LastEditorUserId="31783" LastEditDate="2023-12-14T04:53:39.667" LastActivityDate="2023-12-28T11:04:51.187" Title="My OS project's API looks similar to another one" Tags="|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14485" CreationDate="2023-12-14T04:43:32.113" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been doing my research, and the syntax I'm talking about is used in projects other than MongoDB.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://couchdb.apache.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CouchDB&lt;/a&gt; they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/intro/tour.html#running-a-mango-query&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mango queries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cloudant&lt;/a&gt; they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/Cloudant?topic=Cloudant-creating-an-ibm-cloudant-query&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cloudant queries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://rxdb.info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RxDB&lt;/a&gt; they have &lt;a href=&quot;https://rxdb.info/rx-query.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RxQuery&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's safe to assume that I should not worry too much about using the same syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31783" LastEditorUserId="31783" LastEditDate="2023-12-26T16:58:48.737" LastActivityDate="2023-12-26T16:58:48.737" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14481" CreationDate="2023-12-16T16:37:54.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the documented API, which you have received from the copyright holder, you can certainly create an HTTP client and use it for yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question --which is difficult to answer-- is if you may publish (open-source or not) this client. Because by publishing your code you might be revealing part of the API documentation. If your access to the documentation of the API is linked to your agreement to a NDA, then this will become tricky. You would need a lawyer to understand the details of the NDA (but this site is not the right place to discuss this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend that you reach out to the vendor of the software product and discuss it with them. It is possibly a question if the software vendor feels that the API contains a lot of their know-how. Maybe they say 'no' and you might not want to enter into a fight with them. Maybe they say 'yes' and you can go ahead with your open-source plans. Maybe they even welcome it and start paying you to maintain the open-source tool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/14455/when-is-open-sourcing-a-threat-to-business&quot;&gt;This recent question and its answer&lt;/a&gt; might give you some ideas why the vendor might (or might not) like your idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2023-12-16T16:37:54.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14489" CreationDate="2023-12-19T14:54:33.467" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;To avoid an XY question, the general requirements I have are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The licence should not impose operational complexity for downstream users of a library (users should not be forced to think about linking)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should protect the author's rights as much as possible, without harming or annoying legitimate downstream users&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should give reasonable protections to users, including protection against patent trolling and full freedom to publicly fork the library with the same licence whether or not it is still maintained&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It should be straightforward for downstream users to tell if they have a specific version or fork of that library as a transitive dependency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently looking at the apache licence and the mozilla public licence. Among those two, which gives better protections against patent trolling (including foundations/lawyers defending them)? Are there any other licences worth considering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31813" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2023-12-19T19:16:41.380" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T08:08:18.810" Title="What is the best weak copyleft licence against patent trolling?" Tags="|copyleft|mpl|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14488" CreationDate="2023-12-20T08:08:18.810" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First up, there is no copyright license, open-source or otherwise, that can protect you from a patent infringement lawsuit by someone who control a patent but has not made any contributions to the software covered by the copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, if patent holder P has never made any contribution to software Foo, then there is no copyright license that the maintainers of Foo can use that would protect them (and their users) from a patent infringement lawsuit by P. The only defense they might have is to get the patent itself nullified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/mpl-2-0/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0&lt;/a&gt; does fit most of your requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a weak copyleft license, without the requirement that end-users can replace the MPL parts of a product. They need to receive the MPL source code, but not the ability to update the product that uses the code. That implies there are no requirements around linking.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It contains a patent grant on infringing contributions for patents controlled by contributors. This prevents a bait-and-switch tactic by less scrupulous contributors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-12-20T08:08:18.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-20T19:30:43.247" Score="3" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to distribute my code &lt;strong&gt;simultaneously&lt;/strong&gt; under multiple open-source licenses, so that consumers who have problems with one license might rest easy in the terms of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've currently got a license text file containing literally&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;SPDX-License-Identifier: (AGPL-3.0 OR (BSD-3-Clause AND LicenseRef-PATENT.txt))&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, &amp;quot;everyone knows&amp;quot; that the &lt;code&gt;OR&lt;/code&gt; keyword means &lt;em&gt;something like&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may, at your option, receive this Work under the terms of either, or both, of These licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, whenever both of These licenses would simultaneously permit You to redistribute this Work under the same terms, and whenever You are not otherwise forbidden to sublicense this Work under different terms, &lt;strong&gt;You may sublicense this Work under the terms of This Dual License.&lt;/strong&gt; (This Dual License does not IN ANY WAY modify or attempt to modify any of These Licenses, including any applicable patent or sublicensing rights granted thereunder.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Question&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &amp;quot;something like&amp;quot; is a bit vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this question isn't &lt;em&gt;critical&lt;/em&gt; when one or more of the licenses in question are permissive, but I'm still curious if there's any &amp;quot;best practice&amp;quot; boilerplate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After searching around on Open Source Stack Exchange, I found &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/COPYING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“dbus dual”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;{project} is licensed to you under your choice of {license1}, or {license2}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2332/18552&quot;&gt;“ArtOfCode dual”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This project is dual licensed under {license1} and {license2}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5270/18552&quot;&gt;“Lukas Atkinson dual”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may use, modify, and distribute this software under the terms of either {license1} or {license2}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/blob/f135775ad4e5d4408d2e12ffcc71bb36e6b48551/contrib/gregbook/LICENSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“libpng dual”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contents of this file are DUAL-LICENSED. You may modify and/or redistribute this software according to the terms of one of the following two licenses (at your option): ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www-archive.mozilla.org/mpl/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri-license-html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Mozilla triple”&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;(No longer used!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contents of this file are subject to {license1}; you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, the contents of this file may be used under the terms of {license2}, or {license3}, in which case the provisions of {license2} or {license3} are applicable instead of those above. If you wish to allow use of your version of this file only under the terms of either {license2} or {license3}, and not to allow others to use your version of this file under the terms of {license1}, indicate your decision by deleting the provisions above and replace them with the notice and other provisions required by the {license2} or {license3}. If you do not delete the provisions above, a recipient may use your version of this file under the terms of any one of {license1}, {license2} or {license3}.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But (almost) none of these vague gestures actually SPECIFY the “sublicensable &lt;code&gt;OR&lt;/code&gt;” legal semantics—the ability to continue re-distributing the codebase under this &amp;quot;superposition&amp;quot; which might be &lt;strong&gt;too permissive to actually be allowed by any of the specific licenses in question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there ever been any co-ordinated or centralized effort to build an unambiguous &amp;quot;dual license&amp;quot;? The closest thing I could &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/mpl/mpl/2.0/process/scope/tri-license-and-the-gpl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mozilla's efforts&lt;/a&gt;, but obviously they didn't stick with that long term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18552" LastEditorUserId="18552" LastEditDate="2024-01-09T20:17:25.400" LastActivityDate="2024-01-10T06:48:15.253" Title="Dual-licensing standard verbiage for “sublicensable OR”?" Tags="|law|dual-license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14490" CreationDate="2023-12-21T08:06:44.080" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to dual licensing, the OR keyword in &amp;quot;license A OR license B&amp;quot; means that the recipient can choose to follow the complete license A or the complete license B. It does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; give you the right to pick and choose clauses from the two licenses in a manner you like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefor, this part in your description of OR does not make sense to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, whenever both of These licenses would simultaneously permit You to sub-license this Work under the same terms, and whenever You are not otherwise forbidden to sub-license this Work under different terms, You may sub-license this Work under the terms of This license. (This license does not affect your ability to sub-license this Work under either of These licenses separately.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sub-licensing is only allowed if the license under which you receive a work allows sub-licensing and you have to follow the conditions that the license places on the sub-license that you can offer. The only impact of dual or multi-licensing here is that the different licenses offered may have different sub-licensing options and you get to choose which one fits your needs best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the ability to continue re-distributing the codebase under this &amp;quot;superposition&amp;quot; which might be too permissive to actually be allowed by any of the specific licenses in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dual licensing does not create such a &amp;quot;superposition&amp;quot; that is more permissive than one of the individual choices, because dual licensing does not create some kind of new license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question posed in the comments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL doesn't permit me to redistribute software under the terms of the React license, and the React license doesn't permit me to redistribute software under the terms of the AGPL. If I fork so-called &amp;quot;dual-licensed&amp;quot; software (that used OR rather than AND), then, how am I legally able to redistribute it under the same terms I got it under—terms which, taken as a whole, are noncompliant with &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; of the agreements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most typical case where dual-licensing is used is when there is a need or desire to offer the software under multiple, mutually incompatible, license. If all licenses are compatible, it is way easier to release under the most permissive one and dual licensing only really comes into the picture when there is an incompatibility between the licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is, if you receive a dual-licensed work under &amp;quot;License A OR License B&amp;quot; and if your actions (how you use the work and redistribute the modified or original) are compatible with each license in isolation, then you can, both at the same time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose to receive the work under License A and redistribute your version under License A&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose to receive the work under License B and redistribute your version under License B&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As what you are distributing in both options is identical, you can equally indicate the license as &amp;quot;License A OR License B&amp;quot; and allow your users to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2023-12-21T15:24:26.483" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T15:24:26.483" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-21T16:28:55.720" Score="4" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;A literate program is a set of of source files each containing a mix of documentation (e.g. as Latex 'code') and code (e.g. as C++ code -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming&lt;/a&gt;). From them one can generate a PDF (for instance) containing the documentation and the source code listing. One can also extract the source code and compile it into a usable binary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can these literate source files be licensed, such that the PDF resulting from them - containing the source code listing - can be distributed freely for non-commercial use (e.g. with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA), while the program extracted from them is ``open source'' (e.g. GPL, BSD, etc), and the literate source files themselves can be distributed with something like a BY-NC-SA too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15820" LastActivityDate="2023-12-22T08:06:03.920" Title="How to license a literate program?" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|multi-licensing|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14494" CreationDate="2023-12-21T20:50:46.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My first thought was to suggest making the file self-documenting: that is, the resulting PDF, while clearly declaring itself CC BY-NC-SA, would make it clear in the appropriate places that the source code contained therein was available under a free licence.  Then I realised that was a lot of effort, and frankly complex, likely to go wrong, and unlikely to be of much use to most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that you make the literate source file CC BY-NC-SA, and make the resulting PDF output CC BY-NC-SA in its entirety (which is implicit, but there's no harm in clearly saying it).  But distribute the source code, on its own, separately, under the free licence you prefer.  For maximum utility, make it clear in the PDF that the program source can be had under free terms from &lt;code&gt;insert-your-URL-here&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2023-12-21T20:50:46.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14494" CreationDate="2023-12-22T08:06:03.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my understanding, the tools used in literate programming need some kind of marker to know what is compilable source code and what is documentation. My approach would be to give the literate programming source one license and to give the compilable source an additional license, using the marker system to indicate which parts are subject to the second license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, this could look like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This literate programming project is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Additionally, the source code, which is delimited by the &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;&amp;lt;...&amp;gt;&amp;gt;=&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;@&lt;/code&gt; lines in the literate programming source, can be used under the 3-clause BSD license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to have the compilable source under a copyleft license like the GPL, then it might be better to either have the complete project under that license or to distribute the compilable source separately (as mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/14495&quot;&gt;answer by @MadHatter&lt;/a&gt;), to make it easier on the downstream distributors to comply with the requirement that they must make the source code available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2023-12-22T08:06:03.920" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2023-12-20T15:33:32.770" Score="1" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a program in Python that currently uses several different packages, mainly BSD licenses, e.g. Pandas, NumPy, etc. The finished program is distributed in the form of an .exe file. My question is whether I should inform somewhere in the program that such packages were used and under what licenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found a clear answer anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31860" OwnerDisplayName="hiero" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T20:42:11.510" Title="Python packages and their license in the binary program" Tags="|python|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2024-01-14T17:18:02.740" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14485" CreationDate="2023-12-28T11:04:51.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In programming and in copyright law, ideas and conventions are not protectible by copyright. Oftentimes, an existing convention will be in place in a particular domain, and it is prudent to reuse that convention in the interest of making your code more understandable to others. So, in general, if you are &amp;quot;copying&amp;quot; a convention (without copying source code) then in general that does not require a copyright license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the system you have described, it appears you have the technical problem of trying to express a logical statement that would traditionally be written like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(index &amp;gt; 1) ∧ (index &amp;lt; 3)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that you have a technical solution for this to write it in a JSON-friendly manner, by translating it as follows (since I don't think symbols like &amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;&amp;amp;&amp;amp;&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;||&amp;quot;, etc. are allowed to be used as key names in JSON):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;{$and: [{index: { $gt: 1 }}, {index: { $lt: 3 }}]}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly speaking, this idea, this particular convention, and/or the technical solution itself are not protectible by copyright law, but any &lt;em&gt;creative expressions&lt;/em&gt; using this solution would be. For example, if you were to write a technical document in which you described all of the different possible operators in your convention ($eq, $ne, $gt, $ge, $lt, $le, $and, $or, $not, etc.), then such a specification document itself would probably count as a creative expression and would therefore receive copyright protection, just like any other technical documentation gets copyright protection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a quick Internet search I also found a non-open source product (IBM Db2) which supports the above syntax as well (or something that looks very much like it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2/11.5?topic=queries-logical-operators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2/11.5?topic=queries-logical-operators&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, those technical documents themselves are protected by copyright, as is the actual software (Db2) but the fact that IBM used the same symbols as you ($and, $or, etc.) should not be a copyright concern. The only possible risk to open source might be if a company or individual tried to patent such a scheme, but that seems pretty unlikely in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard some people advocate that to properly write your own code free of license concerns, that you must not allow yourself to be &amp;quot;contaminated&amp;quot; by looking at other implementations, but for this case, since what you are writing is basically a user interface for other programmers, then I would personally advocate looking at the available documentation from IBM and others (CouchDB, etc.) and consider supporting some of the same features as well in your version if they seem useful (such as $in, $nin, $regex, which seem pretty convenient as well as self-explanatory). Also take a look at IBM's version of the &amp;quot;$and&amp;quot; JSON logical operator, since the way they specified it in Db2 seems like it would lead to a cleaner and easier-to-use syntax. Just be sure to &amp;quot;copy&amp;quot; only the convention (such as allowing $regex to specify a regular expression) but to write the underlying code yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1159" LastActivityDate="2023-12-28T11:04:51.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14499" CreationDate="2023-12-31T20:42:11.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you package a file and provide packages that are covered by a given license, you MUST provide copyright notices if that license requires them (e.g., MIT, BSD, GNU GPL, and others like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, many developers may avoid this, but if you want to be completely correct, you should include all the information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exception to this rule is when the user downloads the packages themselves (via &lt;code&gt;requirements.txt file&lt;/code&gt;, but if you package to an EXE, I doubt this applies to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Python, you can use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/pip-licenses/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;pip-licenses&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; command, but it lists all the packages you have installed, not those required by &lt;code&gt;requirements.txt&lt;/code&gt; or others, so if you want to use this tool, create a virtual environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend this combination, but remember that you should adapt it to yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;pip-licenses --with-notice-file --with-license-file --output-file ThirdPartyNotices.html --format html --no-license-path&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can change the format to another, like plain text or CSV. &lt;a href=&quot;https://pypi.org/project/pip-licenses/#option-format&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here,&lt;/a&gt; you can read the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pip-licenses must be installed beforehand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25883" LastActivityDate="2023-12-31T20:42:11.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-02T09:15:37.420" Score="3" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am creating a library by building source of wkhtmltopdf which is having a LGPLv3 license. Is it legal to change the file names of wkhtmltopdf source used in my library ? My library will be integrated to a commercial application. If it is OK to change can you share some website or resource which describes that file name change of LGPLv3 source code is legit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31884" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-01-02T09:31:57.150" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T08:08:18.577" Title="Is it legal to change the file names of wkhtmltopdf source" Tags="|licensing|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14508" CreationDate="2024-01-02T14:53:30.110" Score="12" ViewCount="2669" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about GPLv3 usage in a commercially sold embedded system. The product sold uses a Raspberry Pi under the cover, and in the users manual provided it does mention the use of GPLv3 software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this is an embedded system and no software/binary is physically handed over to the end user, does their code which integrates with the GPL licensed projects also need to be GPL licensed &lt;em&gt;and their source made available to the users&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I have mounted the microSD used in the Pi, looked at the filesystem, and found the main binary. Putting this through a decompiler, though still very obfuscated, I can see direct python &lt;code&gt;import gplv3_project&lt;/code&gt; in the decompiled output - therefore it seems they are directly importing the library - and not using some sort of &lt;code&gt;subprocess&lt;/code&gt; wrapper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26006" LastEditorUserId="26006" LastEditDate="2024-01-02T15:38:24.737" LastActivityDate="2024-01-04T09:55:38.853" Title="GPLv3 use in commercially sold embedded system" Tags="|licensing|gpl|gpl-3|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14507" CreationDate="2024-01-02T17:47:08.197" Score="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering this is an embedded system and no software/binary is physically handed over to the end user&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have legal ownership of the device, then the software/binary has been handed over to you, the end user. It doesn't matter that it isn't in a format that is directly readable by a PC, but packaged in a device that uses the software to perform some function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 license gives you the right to obtain the source code of the GPL-licensed parts of the software on the device. You also have the right to run a modified copy of the software on the device, to the point that any keys needed to make the software operational also need to be shared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the structure of the code, not everything running on the device needs to be under the GPL license. But if parts directly link to the GPL code, then those parts also need to be available under the GPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-01-02T17:47:08.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14506" CreationDate="2024-01-02T18:22:57.767" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of course it is legal to make changes to an open source programme or library - that's the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of a strong copyleft license like the GPL you are, however, required to provide the sources to your customers of the changed versions which you distribute - and it's necessary to indicate that you made changes to the version (thus you have to give credit to the original contributors as by the license requirements, but you also may not wrongfully attribute the modified work (only) to other people).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases where the actual name is trademark registered it may be required to change the name you distribute the programme or library under, if you want / need to distribute modified versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular case of an LGPL - licensed C/C++ - library you will need to allow replacing the libary on the provided product. For dynamically-linked libraries this is no problem: the user just needs to be able to rebuild the library. For statically-linked libraries this is usually done by providing the object files to your binary so the users can re-link the binary with a modified library. In both cases you might simply want to publish the sources of your library in a repository with clearly-tagged versions used for distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2024-01-12T08:08:18.577" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T08:08:18.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14507" CreationDate="2024-01-03T05:19:23.127" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Respectfully, the accepted answer isn't correct.  The problem you're describing is related to a problem known as the &amp;quot;tivoization&amp;quot; problem -- the distribution of binaries on systems which it's not possible to modify because of DRM.  The GPLv3 was specifically written to solve this problem.  However, the anti-tivoization clause only applies to products intended for regular consumer use (called &amp;quot;User Products&amp;quot; in the license); it specifically excludes products exclusively used for industrial or commercial applications.  This is described in section 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31889" LastActivityDate="2024-01-03T05:19:23.127" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14507" CreationDate="2024-01-04T09:39:46.437" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers are both correct, but I'll try to clarify further. The quoted sections are from the GPLv3 text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the text of the license, interpret &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; to refer to the person/company which sold you the system including the software; the license is talking about the terms of what they can/have to do with the software, including what they have to do if they distribute it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Considering this is an embedded system and no software/binary is physically handed over&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; - Acccording to your description, the software is absolutely &amp;quot;handed over&amp;quot;, it's just handed over on a SD card. But GPLv3 uses more specific terms for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without&#xA;permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for&#xA;infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a&#xA;computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying,&#xA;distribution (with or without modification), making available to the&#xA;public, and in some countries other activities as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other&#xA;parties to make or receive copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense if you purchase a physical product with binary of a software on an SD card, it is both &amp;quot;propagated&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;conveyed&amp;quot; to you by the seller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;does their code which integrates with the GPL licensed projects also need to be GPL licensed and their source made available to the users&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; - Yes, it does, because of this part of GPLv3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of&#xA;sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable&#xA;Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these&#xA;ways&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(followed by a description of different ways of providing the source code)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the object code can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be conveyed if the source code is also conveyed using one of the described ways.  Without that, they don't have permission convey the object code - including, in particular, they don't have permission to sell you a device with the object code in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the specific meaning of &amp;quot;integrates with&amp;quot; needs to be handled carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To “modify” a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work&#xA;in a fashion requiring copyright permission, other than the making of&#xA;an exact copy. The resulting work is called a “modified version” of&#xA;the earlier work or a work “based on” the earlier work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “covered work” means either the unmodified Program or a work based&#xA;on the Program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may convey a work based on the Program ... provided that you also&#xA;meet all of these conditions: c) You must license the entire work, as&#xA;a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a&#xA;copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable&#xA;section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its&#xA;parts, regardless of how they are packaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent&#xA;works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work,&#xA;and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program,&#xA;in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an&#xA;“aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not&#xA;used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users&#xA;beyond what the individual works permit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the key question is whether the software which integrates with the GPL software together forms a &amp;quot;work based on&amp;quot; or an &amp;quot;aggregate&amp;quot;.  This depends mainly on how the two interact, and whether they are &amp;quot;separate and independent&amp;quot;.  By its nature, including C/C++ headers in C/C++ code usually creates a &amp;quot;work based on&amp;quot; because copies of parts of the headers end up in the object code.  Calling a command line program is usually an aggregate.  Simply importing a python module in python code is less clear; I don't think I can reliably tell you whether that is a &amp;quot;work based on&amp;quot; or aggregate.  But if it is an obfuscated binary that needs to be run through a decompiler to see the python code, that (as a whole) is almost certainly a modified work as well.  If it is importing a module which is essential for function rather than optional, it is probably also a modified work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, there is the issue that @hlieberman brought up: is the device you purchased a &amp;quot;User Product&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “User Product” is either (1) a “consumer product”, which means any&#xA;tangible personal property which is normally used for personal,&#xA;family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for&#xA;incorporation into a dwelling. In determining whether a product is a&#xA;consumer product, doubtful cases shall be resolved in favor of&#xA;coverage. For a particular product received by a particular user,&#xA;“normally used” refers to a typical or common use of that class of&#xA;product, regardless of the status of the particular user or of the way&#xA;in which the particular user actually uses, or expects or is expected&#xA;to use, the product. A product is a consumer product regardless of&#xA;whether the product has substantial commercial, industrial or&#xA;non-consumer uses, unless such uses represent the only significant&#xA;mode of use of the product.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually has no impact on whether the seller has to give you a copy of the source code; they would have to whether the device is a &amp;quot;user product&amp;quot; or not.  But if it is a user product, they also have to give you &amp;quot;installation information&amp;quot;, ie everything you need to load your own (possibly modified) copy of the software onto the device:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods,&#xA;procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to&#xA;install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User&#xA;Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The&#xA;information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of&#xA;the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with&#xA;solely because modification has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that about covers the terms of the GPLv3 as they apply in your case.  If you suspect a GPLv3 violation (and clearly having obfuscated code suggests that it is a knowing violation), I would encourage you to contact the authors of the software and the FSF, and let them decide how they want to handle this.  There have been some prominent cases of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/GPL%20Enforcement%20Cases&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;big companies losing GPL cases against the FSF&lt;/a&gt;; it wouldn't be bad to add one more to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18661" LastEditorUserId="18661" LastEditDate="2024-01-04T09:55:38.853" LastActivityDate="2024-01-04T09:55:38.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14514" CreationDate="2024-01-04T11:49:54.420" Score="9" ViewCount="770" Body="&lt;p&gt;With some colleagues, we have been developing a programming university course over some years, and now we want to make it available to the public as open-source, in the form of a GitLab repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repository contains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LaTeX code to generate the course slides based on a minimal template&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some code example files, as well as exercise solutions in code&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some third-party data files that I can isolate into a &lt;code&gt;thirdparty/&lt;/code&gt; directory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we mainly want is a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, so that others attribute our work, but we don't want the course to just be copied into a proprietary format. As far as I understand, CC BY could also be enough here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does LaTeX code count as software or as text? My main focus is the content, not so much that it is in LaTeX. I will include a minimal template, but nothing special.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Following the answer of (1): Would a CC license be appropriate for LaTeX files?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It would be convenient to license the code examples with the same license, but CC seems to be discouraged for code. Would it be fine in this context, in which the code only has the purpose of accompanying the slides?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it enough if I isolate the foreign files into a &lt;code&gt;thirdparty/&lt;/code&gt; directory and maintain the license notices?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already see examples of such material published under CC BY, while I also see examples of a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; file containing a &amp;quot;The instructional material is available under CC BY&amp;quot; followed by a &amp;quot;Software is available as MIT / BSD-3 Clause&amp;quot;. Would that be better practice, or just make everything more complicated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26978" LastEditorUserId="13340" LastEditDate="2024-01-05T11:46:04.260" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T11:46:04.260" Title="Choosing a license for a repository of programming course material (LaTeX slides + examples code)" Tags="|license-recommendation|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14513" CreationDate="2024-01-04T17:10:52.703" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does LaTeX code count as software or as text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both. Neither. A mixture of the two. Copyright law doesn't in general make this kind of distinction, in the same way that a piece of paper might be &amp;quot;software&amp;quot; if it's got code printed on it, or &amp;quot;text&amp;quot; if it's got a novel printed on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would a CC license be appropriate for LaTeX files?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, given the &lt;em&gt;typical&lt;/em&gt; content of LaTeX files - they are normally much more like text than software. Although if you've taken the entirety of your program's source code and just dumped it into a LaTeX file without any additional text or explanation round it, you may want to treat it more like software. (I'm not saying this latter thing is a good or sensible idea, but it's something you could do if you really wanted to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be convenient to license the code examples with the same license, but CC seems to be discouraged for code. Would it be fine in this context, in which the code only has the purpose of accompanying the slides?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This (as always) depends what you mean by &amp;quot;fine&amp;quot;. If the examples are pedagogical and you don't really expect people to copy them wholesale into working programs, there's no real pain to having them under a CC license. If on the other hand, they are more like boilerplate examples which you expect people to copy and &amp;quot;fill in the blanks&amp;quot; for their actual programs, you may want to consider (dual) licensing them under a more common code license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it enough if I isolate the foreign files into a thirdparty/ directory and maintain the license notices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is impossible to answer without knowing the licenses (or lack thereof) of those files, but &amp;quot;probably&amp;quot;, assuming that you have the rights to distribute the files at all. If they are open source, then yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we don't want the course to just be copied into a proprietary format. As far as I understand, CC BY could also be enough here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CC-BY would &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; accomplish this, all that requires is for the source to be acknowledged. You need a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA or similar) to ensure that the materials remain open, even when reused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the MIT and BSD licenses would also allow your code to be used in proprietary products if you go that route.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2024-01-04T17:17:00.703" LastActivityDate="2024-01-04T17:17:00.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14513" CreationDate="2024-01-05T05:00:54.230" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;LaTeX is a funny beast since it's both code &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; content intermingled.  Licensing it can be tricky.  What I typically do is to move all the &amp;quot;code-like&amp;quot; portions into a separate package (.sty) file.  Then, there's a separate .tex file(s) containing the content.  The .tex files will unavoidably contain &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; LaTeX code, but that code should either be calls to macros in my custom package or very basic typesetting commands. Nothing beyond the trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can then license the package file under a source code license (MIT, Apache, etc) and the content under a license for creative works (GFDL, CC-BY, etc).  Being cleanly separated means you can store them in different directories, each with its own license notice.  You'll likely find that you re-use a lot of the LaTeX code in other projects, and it may be worth storing the code portion as a completely separate project/repository.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as code examples go, I typically use the &lt;code&gt;listings&lt;/code&gt; package and do something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;\usepackage{listings}&#xA;\lstset{language=C}&#xA;\begin{document}&#xA;\lstinputlisting{example_1.c}&#xA;\end{document}&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code stays in a separate file, where it can be licensed separately from the rest of the content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9682" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T05:00:54.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-05T21:21:28.330" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say I've developed a library and licensed it under EPL 2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody statically links his/her software to my library, is that software considered a derivative/modified work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does s/he has to publish his/her source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I want to allow the library users to statically or dynamically link their software without publishing their source code. If they modify my library, they must publish the modifications just to it and not the source code of their software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2: Unlike LGPL licenses, I don't want them to distribute their object files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5896" LastEditorUserId="5896" LastEditDate="2024-01-05T23:28:43.627" LastActivityDate="2024-01-05T23:28:43.627" Title="Is it allowed to statically link to a library licensed under Eclipse Public License 2.0 without publishing the source code of linked software?" Tags="|licensing|license-recommendation|derivative-works|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-05T23:33:41.570" Score="6" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;Imagine, a company, contributes to a huge Apache 2.0 project. The company owns a patent. The project is huge, and there's a small fragment of its code which infringes on the patent. The company submits a contribution to unrelated code fragment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a contribution give a license grant to the patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apache 2.0 has the following patent grant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It says, applies only to those patent claims. What does it mean exactly in respect to the situation above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastActivityDate="2024-01-06T15:35:12.160" Title="Apache 2.0 and patent grant to the code not related to the contribution" Tags="|apache-2.0|contributor|patents|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2024-01-06T12:55:24.140" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In normal English, if a company holds a patent and that same company makes a contribution to an Apache-licensed project that causes the project to infringe on the patent, then the Apache license causes/forces the company to also give a patent licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other situations, like when the project was already infringing without the contribution of the company, or a later modification by someone else causes it to start infringing, &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; patent licence is given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This clause of the Apache licence primarily prevents bait-and-switch practices, like adding something you know infringes on your own patent and then sue the project for infringing that patent. It does not prevent protecting your patent against infringement caused by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-01-06T12:55:24.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14518" CreationDate="2024-01-06T15:35:12.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does such a contribution give a license grant to the patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license grant is expressly limited to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question supposes that the material contributed by the patent holder is unrelated to the infringing part of the work.  In that case, the contribution itself does not infringe, and the infringement is not created by combining the contribution with the rest of the work, either.  The combined work's (continued) infringement is therefore outside the scope of the patent licensing clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another answer observes that the purpose of the patent-licensing clause is to prevent bait &amp;amp; switch maneuvers, which is true, but it's also crafted carefully to avoid making it unpalatable to well-meaning patent holders. No one who held patent rights that they wanted to protect would make contributions if they had to worry that they might thereby unintentionally and unforeseeably grant a patent license because of infringement unrelated to their contributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9078" LastActivityDate="2024-01-06T15:35:12.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-07T20:31:36.530" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apologies if this is no the correct forum for my question - it looked like good fit though!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some software ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rgraph.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.rgraph.net&lt;/a&gt; ) that I used to sell - thus it was commercial. This was OK for a few years but it kept dropping further and further in Gooogle rank such that no one would find it and subsequently use or pay for it. So it's now Open Source (MIT license). I've been developing it constantly over the past 15 years and as a result, it's now a very capable library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently found the issue with Google hating the site (in March 2023) and have risen in rank - but I'm hoping for more rises in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is my sites traffic still too low (500-600 genuine page views on a good day) to expect any monetary donations (in place of license purchases) - do I need way more traffic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31922" LastActivityDate="2024-01-07T20:31:36.530" Title="Why don't people want to pay/donate for my software?" Tags="|license|source-code|donations|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-01T21:10:23.707" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;What should be considered to make an original project released under BSD-3 license, added modifications (many things changed) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elastic License 2.0&lt;/a&gt;, at least for the changed parts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume I will keep the BSD-3 note/license and add paragraph that changed parts are under Elastic License 2.0?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should be also considered? Could be problematic/blocker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="dev" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2024-01-08T08:13:09.150" LastActivityDate="2024-01-08T08:13:09.150" Title="Convert BSD-3 license project with own modification added to Elastic license" Tags="|licensing|bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-09T19:52:21.590" Score="3" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have any hard evidence what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; are the terms and conditions of the patent license that Dr. Whyte / OnBoard Security has pledged to provide to any prospective implementers of &lt;a href=&quot;https://openquantumsafe.org/liboqs/algorithms/sig/falcon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Falcon cryptosystem&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was only able to find the following IP Statement, which only says that the terms (whatever they are) will be royalty-free and fulfil &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so-called &amp;quot;RAND&amp;quot; criteria&lt;/a&gt;, the Wikipedia page on which cites several articles&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goland.org/buyingopenstandards/#:%7E:text=With%20RAND%2DZ%20the%20company%20promises%20to%20license%20the%20technology%20at%20no%20charge.%20But%20the%20tricky%20part%20is%20that%20implementers%20still%20have%20to%20get%20the%20licenser%27s%20permission%20to%20implement.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20091124021116/http://standardslaw.com/?p=36#:%7E:text=even%20the%20most%20permissive%20RAND%2Dz%20commitment%20has%20at%20times%20created%20tension%20with%20implementers,the%20license%20itself%20may%20include%20other%20terms%20that%20some%20believe%20are%20incompatible%20with%20certain%20open%20source%20licenses.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; arguing that this scheme is *absolutely not* a subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, even when it is royalty-free (&lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;). Really, this is a question of &lt;strong&gt;whether the Falcon cryptosystem is &amp;quot;open source&amp;quot; at all&lt;/strong&gt;, or only &amp;quot;source-available freeware&amp;quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, William Whyte, am the … authorized representative of the owner, OnBoard Security, of the following patent(s) and/or patent application(s): US 7308097 B2 (“Digital signature and authentication method and apparatus”), and do hereby commit and agree to grant to any interested party on a worldwide basis, if the cryptosystem known as &lt;em&gt;Falcon&lt;/em&gt; is selected for standardization, in consideration of its evaluation and selection by NIST, a non-exclusive license for the purpose of implementing the standard[,] without compensation and under reasonable terms and conditions that are demonstably free of any unfair discrimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I further do hereby commit and agree to license such party on the same basis with respect to any other patent application or patent hereafter granted to me, or owned or controlled by me, that is or may be necessary for the purpose of implementing the standard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;–Page 20, &lt;a href=&quot;https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/selected-algorithms-2022#:%7E:text=Selected%20Algorithms%3A%20Digital%20Signature%20Algorithms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Selected Algorithms 2022, Digital Signature Algorithms&lt;/a&gt; - Falcon - IP Statements&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above doesn't look like terms or conditions of a patent license to me; it looks like a binding &lt;em&gt;pledge&lt;/em&gt; to provide a patent license under &lt;em&gt;under-specified&lt;/em&gt; terms and conditions in the event it's selected for standardization (which it actually was). But I can't seem to find the follow-through document actually specifying these T&amp;amp;C anywhere on Google. Even the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/PQClean/PQClean/blob/8e220a87308154d48fdfac40abbb191ac7fce06a/crypto_sign/falcon-1024/clean/LICENSE#L28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PQClean &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; document for Falcon&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have anything less ominous than what I've said so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference implementation was published by the patent holders under the MIT license, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6811/18552&quot;&gt;that license is ambiguous on patent rights&lt;/a&gt;, and when I asked the Falcon Project whether this was meant to include an implied patent license, the response I got &lt;strong&gt;declined to clarify&lt;/strong&gt;, citing the vagueness of NIST's direction on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to reiterate that it's not obvious to me that the T&amp;amp;C finally offered in fulfilment of this pledge will necessarily be &lt;em&gt;libre&lt;/em&gt;; the only guarantee I can see is they'll be &lt;em&gt;gratis&lt;/em&gt;. (The patent license's associated T&amp;amp;C will also be “free of unfair discrimination”—but that's cold comfort if everyone's subjected to the same, subjectively-unreasonable terms!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember: this issue *cannot* just be sidestepped with a clean-room implementation from the public spec, because the threat here is one of &lt;em&gt;patent&lt;/em&gt;, not copyright. The patent license terms are something even a clean-room implementation will be subject to, even if the patent license terms (&amp;quot;RAND&amp;quot; though they may be) aren't OSI-approved, for example. Not even an implementation written by Richard Stallman himself would be free of these conditions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure it's &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; fine&amp;quot;, but this just feels very weird to me and I'd feel much more comfortable if I could actually find the terms of this patent license in writing somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18552" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-01-12T09:04:24.717" LastActivityDate="2024-01-18T10:42:39.453" Title="Patent encumbrances on Falcon?" Tags="|licensing|patents|cryptography|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14490" CreationDate="2024-01-10T05:54:31.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.dev/learn/handling-license-info/#how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SPDX IDs: How to use&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The licensee may choose&#xA;to use the file under &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; the Apache-2.0 license &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; the MIT&#xA;license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that it is an exclusive-OR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the licensee must choose only one of those licenses to comply with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When described in a longer form, the SPDX way of &amp;quot;either A or B&amp;quot; is the clearest way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes most sense when two of those licenses are incompatible with each other, for e.g. GPL-2.0-only OR Apache-2.0.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-01-10T06:48:15.253" LastActivityDate="2024-01-10T06:48:15.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14524" CreationDate="2024-01-12T08:57:01.450" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a new digital signature algorithm incorporating a patented method, with a reference implementation released under MIT.  The inventor, who has transferred the patent to a holding company of which he is CTO, has undertaken that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; the algorithm is selected as a standard, which it since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_(signature_scheme)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been&lt;/a&gt;, the patent will be generally licensed on &amp;quot;reasonable and non-discriminatory terms&amp;quot;, with no licence fee payable, though this has not yet happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You want to know if it's currently safe to write your own implementation.  You have approached the author and asked, and received a less-than-unambiguously-positive reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previous patents licensed on RAND terms in pursuit of a standardisation process have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in some cases&lt;/a&gt; required a per-seat licensing fee, so there is definitely nothing in &amp;quot;RAND&amp;quot; that requires licensing on terms that would allow safe embodiment in free software.  We can therefore disregard any undertakings to release on RAND terms when considering your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You point out that the reference implementation is released under an MIT licence, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/7429/458&quot;&gt;some argue&lt;/a&gt; that the language of MIT implies a patent licence.  Firstly, that point &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is not universally accepted&lt;/a&gt;.  Secondly, it's not at all clear that the legal entity who licensed the copyright in the code is the same legal entity that controlled the relevant patent at the moment of code release (a requirement in order to benefit from both implicit and explicit patent licence clauses in free software licences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lwn.net/Articles/780078/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some have argued&lt;/a&gt; that releasing free software that embodies one (or more) of your own patents not only licences, but extinguishes, those patents, so I imagine that standards-track patent holders are pretty cagey about releasing code that might have the effect of completely destroying a potential business model.  (Full disclosure: I wrote that article, but I did not give the talk on which it is based.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the argument that, right now, you can safely embody that patent in free software is dangerously weak, and I would certainly not rely on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-01-12T09:58:40.510" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T09:58:40.510" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-12T20:58:39.380" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;NIST &lt;a href=&quot;https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography/documents/selected-algos-2022/nist-pqc-license-summary-and-excerpts.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claims that they “[have] entered into”&lt;/a&gt; an agreement with the holders of patents US9246675/EP2837128B1 and US9094189B2/EP2537284B1, to allow people to implement and operate the &lt;a href=&quot;https://openquantumsafe.org/liboqs/algorithms/kem/kyber.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kyber cryptosystem&lt;/a&gt;— which is the most popular open-source post-quantum KEM, in fact the &lt;strong&gt;only option&lt;/strong&gt; currently &lt;a href=&quot;https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1826451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;supported by Firefox's NSS&lt;/a&gt;! —without getting sued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can only find the above-linked “License Summary &amp;amp; Excerpts” document, which does *not* appear to be signed by any of the patent holders, instead only containing &lt;em&gt;paraphrases&lt;/em&gt; written by NIST of the parts of the agreement it &lt;em&gt;felt&lt;/em&gt; were relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The licenses were drafted such that any implementer of the CRYSTALS-KYBER algorithm as&#xA;published by NIST receive the benefits of a grant to the licensed patents within the scope of a field of use limited to implementing CRYSTALS-KYBER as a PQC algorithm. The licensors&#xA;agreed, on a royalty-free basis, to place into abeyance any right of enforcement of the licensed patents against any implementer or end-user of the algorithm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant language (with modifications for readability) from the licenses regarding the scope of use permitted to implementers of the CRYSTALS-KYBER algorithm follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/116/materials/slides-116-pquip-patents-and-pqc-00&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;weirdly vague slide deck&lt;/a&gt; from March of 2023 by the IETF's pquip WG, which expressed nothing &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; ominous that what I've been able to find myself so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don’t know [What these patents may mean to you]. The NIST license for CRYSTALS-KYBER may or may not apply to you, depending on what you implement. … Some people have said in private that they are very worried about the patents and may not be able to implement CRYSTALS-KYBER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess I'll upgrade “some people have said in private&amp;quot; to “I'm asking, now, in public”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that I don't &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; whatever well-meaning NIST employee prepared the “License Summary &amp;amp; Excerpts” document; it's just that I'd like to &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; the actual agreements I'd be relying on for legal permission to trespass on some international corporations' intellectual property before I do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this agreement been published anywhere? I've just spent around half an hour Googling desperate mixtures of appropriate keywords, and have come up empty-handed so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18552" LastEditorUserId="18552" LastEditDate="2024-01-12T21:06:04.840" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T21:06:04.840" Title="Patent encumbrances on CRYSTALS-Kyber?" Tags="|license|patents|cryptography|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14529" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14530" CreationDate="2024-01-12T21:13:47.877" Score="7" ViewCount="965" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a piece of software for which I am the sole author, I would like to dual-license it with AGPLv3 and proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, this is ok and actually quite common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I wish is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enforce the proprietary licensee to push direct changes toward the open-source community. This is quite easy, just by adding a clause to the proprietary license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;enforce the open-source community to provide &lt;strong&gt;direct&lt;/strong&gt; changes with this same dual-licensing. I was thinking of some code header like this following one:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;/*&#xA; * Copyright [Year] [My name - contact]&#xA; *&#xA; * Dual License Notice:&#xA; * This file is part of [Library project] and is licensed under two &#xA; * distinct licenses:&#xA; * 1. Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3.&#xA; * 2. Proprietary License.&#xA; *&#xA; * You may choose to use this file under either of the above-mentioned licenses.&#xA; * &#xA; * If you choose to use this file under the AGPL version 3, you must&#xA; * comply with the terms of that license. Additionally, you agree to include &#xA; * this exact dual licensing notice with any direct derivative of this &#xA; * library (defined as any modification, enhancement, extension, &#xA; * or other alteration of this library source code, where mere usage is excluded). &#xA; *&#xA; * If you choose to use this file under the Proprietary License, you must&#xA; * comply with the terms of that license as agreed upon with [My name].&#xA; *&#xA; * For more information on the AGPL license, see &amp;lt;http://www.gnu.org/licenses/&amp;gt;.&#xA; */&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is to avoid divergence between the proprietary library (which most probably will be the origin of most changes, at least at the begining), and the open-source community, which changes could not (otherwise) be added to the proprietary version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand to which extends this is possible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21915" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T21:24:13.897" Title="Is it ok to enforce a dual-licensing clause in a copyright header?" Tags="|dual-license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14529" CreationDate="2024-01-12T21:24:13.897" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, it isn't possible.  AGPLv3 s7 precludes the addition of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;non-permissive additional terms&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and a requirement to dual-license under a proprietary licence definitely, to my mind, falls under that heading.  So anyone receiving your code under AGPLv3 could quite legitimately ignore that requirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may certainly require a CLA from contributors to your codebase that permits this dual-relicensing, though it may (or may not) discourage people from contributing back to you.  But if someone takes your codebase and modifies it themselves, they are free to distribute it under simple AGPLv3, and there's nothing you can do to compel them to contribute those changes back to you with permission for later dual-licensing.  You can take the changes, but you'll take them under simple AGPLv3, and if you incorporate them in your code, you lose the right to dual-license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's your call: you can have the world help your develop your code, but if they choose not to accept your dual-license terms, you will have to choose between their help, and the dual-licensing scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2024-01-12T21:24:13.897" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-17T11:07:54.900" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm using a GitHub project dual-licensed under GPL and LGPL (some files are GPL and some are LGPL). That's why it has two files with its license terms and conditions &amp;quot;COPYING&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;COPYING.LESSER&amp;quot;. To stick to the LGPL terms only, I removed all the GPL-licensed files. Now, considering the project can be built and used with just the LGPL files, is it permitted to delete the COPYING file and retain only COPYING.LESSER?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31994" LastActivityDate="2024-01-17T11:07:54.900" Title="Removing GPL files from a dual-licensed project with LGPL" Tags="|gpl|lgpl|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-17T13:04:31.517" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to use ptrace APIs in proprietary code. If I use them must I license my program as GPL? I could not find exact answer for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for libraries and applications that use the ptrace APIs and found that they are GPL. But some libraries written in rust are MIT. This is confusing for me. I want to get a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31995" LastActivityDate="2024-01-17T13:30:17.000" Title="Does Use of ptrace APIs Require GPL Distribution of Code" Tags="|gpl|proprietary-code|linux-kernel|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2024-01-17T13:30:17.000" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;APIs themselves are (probably) not copyrightable and thus copyright licenses do not apply to them. In the particular case of ptrace, it is a &amp;quot;generic&amp;quot; API shared between various OSes so it would be very hard for anybody to actually claim copyright on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User-space libraries which happen to make calls to the ptrace API can be under any license they want to be, and therefore if you are using them you must obey their licensing conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to your question as written is &amp;quot;no, your program does not have to be under the GPL if all you are using are the OS-supplied ptrace APIs&amp;quot;. However, it sounds like you may be trying to use libraries which wrap the ptrace APIs, which is a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2024-01-17T13:30:17.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-17T17:37:14.250" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if it would be legal to train AI code generators on various code bases separated by license and then get assistance on your project by whatever model complies with your project's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question differs from &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/14402/can-i-use-part-of-a-mit-licensed-library-as-training-data-for-an-ai-that-will-be&quot;&gt;Can I use part of a MIT-licensed library as training data for an AI that will be used commercially?&lt;/a&gt; in that the latter can be answered (and has been answered) without answering my question: Obviously you can use the generated code commercially regardless of how licenses transfer onto it because MIT allows for commercial use. What exactly the situation is in terms of licenses is irrelevant to that question but is the core of mine and it remains unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29064" LastEditorUserId="29064" LastEditDate="2024-01-20T09:29:25.660" LastActivityDate="2024-01-20T09:29:25.660" Title="If an AI is trained on code under a specific license (e.g. MIT) would it be legal to use the generated code under that same license?" Tags="|derivative-works|artificial-intelligence|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2024-01-18T14:34:06.143" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14524" CreationDate="2024-01-18T10:42:39.453" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I fundamentally believe that this question is off topic here, because it asks for clarification of specific RAND terms of a patent license related to Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs). This is nothing that this community can answer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But then the discussion around this question moved into the more generic direction, if an OSS developer would be liable for patent infringement merely by developing and publishing source code related to the patented method. This is what I want to discuss below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source code does not infringe software patents, because it is just a human-readable step-by-step description of a method/procedure. The patent document itself is also just a description (which b.t.w. is in public domain), and distributing the patent document itself certainly does not constitute patent infringement. In USA, source code might even be protected by the First Amendment.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In order to infringe a software (method) patent, you have to perform the method itself. For that it is necessary to take the source code description, translate it into computer-executable code (my means of a compiler or interpreter) and run it on one or more computer(s) and/or networks, as the case may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine Bob is looking for software related to a patent-encumbered encryption method. He downloads a ZIP file made by Alice with some source code, unzips the file to create the entire code structure on his hdd, then inspects the code. He finds that it is not suitable for his purpose and therefore does not run the code. Under the theory that creating and storing patent-encumbered source code on a computer-readable medium constitutes patent infringement, Bob would clearly be infringing the encryption patent without even having encrypted one single byte of data. Do you see, to which absurd situations this thought process leads? (This example is not mine, it is mentioned on several other webpages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you are not aware of any patents, the 'non-infringement disclaimer' which is part of most OSS license terms, is a way to protect you from liabilities. One should however not knowingly create source code that implements a patented method. If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-Tech_Appliances,_Inc._v._SEB_S.A.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB&lt;/a&gt; it shows that -in order to avoid induced infringement- software developers should never search or read patents and should never try to assess if their code is infringing a specific patent. This is what I always recommend. The Debian project also recommends this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here under the headline '&lt;em&gt;Are you suggesting that it is better for developers and contributors not to read patents? If yes, why?&lt;/em&gt;'&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, the OP is aware of some patents, so the above paragraph does no longer help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you become aware of patents, which might possibly be infringed by executable software created from your published source code, then an approach like the one of LAME could reduce your risk (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://lame.sourceforge.io/tech-FAQ.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 6. of the FAQ&lt;/a&gt;). Note: At the time when the patents were valid, many LINUX distros did not include LAME on their CDs/DVDs to avoid risks, however they often included How-To's to help users install it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In big OSS projects it is often unclear which contributing developer is responsible for a specific part of the software that the patentee might identify as infringing. And the damages, which the patentee can attribute (and possibly recover in court) from such a developer are not worth the effort of going to court and paying the lawyers. Therefore it is unlikely that an individual developer contributing to a big project will face a risk. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2022/6/9/defending-open-source-an-2022-litigation-update&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unified Patents&lt;/a&gt; shows that defendants in OSS cases are mainly big-tech companies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IANAL and this is not legal advice. And this might be highly dependent on the jurisdiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24836" LastActivityDate="2024-01-18T10:42:39.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-22T11:43:28.523" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose I receive a copy of some software with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/preview/BSD-2-Clause-Patent.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause Plus Patent&lt;/a&gt; license.  Can I make some modifications to that software, then distribute my changed version of that software under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/preview/BSD-2-Clause.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BSD 2-Clause &amp;quot;Simplified&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, if I receive some software under BSD-2-Clause, can I modify it and distribute the modified version under BSD-2-Clause-Patent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I am not sure, is because while both of these licenses contain a clause requiring me to &amp;quot;retain this list of conditions&amp;quot;, the patent grant section does not appear to be a &amp;quot;condition&amp;quot; in the same sense as the other conditions, and it does not appear in the &amp;quot;list&amp;quot; if one considers the scope of the list to consist only of the numbered paragraphs.  So it seems to allow the possibility of dropping the paragraph section (or adding it when it is not present) without otherwise going against the terms of the license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32021" LastEditorUserId="32021" LastEditDate="2024-01-22T12:10:33.893" LastActivityDate="2024-01-22T16:14:53.673" Title="Can the patent grant in BSD 2-Clause Plus Patent be simply added or removed?" Tags="|bsd|patents|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14543" CreationDate="2024-01-22T14:35:26.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about removing it, not least because I'm not sure why you would, but you definitely shouldn't add it if it's not there in what you got from upstream.  This is because the patent clause says that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;each copyright holder and contributor&lt;/strong&gt; hereby grants to those receiving rights under this license a perpetual [...] patent license&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you've received no such licence for any patents that might be embodied in the code you got from upstream, you're in no position to promise that such a licence exists.  I don't know how false a position you'd place yourself in by adding such a promise - I suspect it's jurisdictionally-dependent - but nothing good can come of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD-style licences aren't copyleft, so there's no reason to have the whole codebase under a single licence, and certainly not a single BSD-style licence.  If you're minded to use BSD2-plus-patent-clause for the code you add, that's great, feel free to do so; but leave the upstream stuff under plain BSD2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="24836" LastEditDate="2024-01-22T16:14:53.673" LastActivityDate="2024-01-22T16:14:53.673" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14546" CreationDate="2024-01-22T22:14:25.473" Score="6" ViewCount="1274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a Flask application that is being sold to a client. I remain in control of the source code, and it is a private repo. I wanted to ensure I was not violating License Agreements, and ran a tool to check the licensing of each Python repo from my requirements.txt file:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/FHPythonUtils/LicenseCheck#install-with-pip&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/FHPythonUtils/LicenseCheck#install-with-pip&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got a file back showing me the various licensing each Python package is using:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;MIT License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;BSD License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public Domain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apache Software License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Python Software Foundation License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each case, I see that commercial use is permissible. I also see with the MIT License if I was redistributing the code, then I would need to include the original License file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not planning on redistributing the code in this case, but if I were, how should you include the license files that require this? Do you need to keep a folder in your repo that contains all the license files from the various packages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I have any further obligations to include License file, even though it is a private repo? ( I don't believe I do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any guidance on this topic is greatly appreciated. Thank you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32027" LastActivityDate="2024-01-23T18:33:54.220" Title="Python Commercial Use of Software Licensing Compliance" Tags="|licensing|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14545" CreationDate="2024-01-23T06:54:43.817" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a general point I would strongly suggest &lt;strong&gt;always&lt;/strong&gt; including a license file in any and all source code. This is because there are a number of scenarios where even a private repository might be exposed. These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Legal Requirements including future legislation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The country where the repository is hosted getting invaded or taken over by a group with a very different view on &amp;quot;privacy&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changes in practices or the terms and conditions of company hosting the repository&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accidental &lt;em&gt;or deliberate&lt;/em&gt; failure of the security/privacy settings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A computer with a checkout going for repair or being disposed of without being scrubbed first.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The license file should be a plain text file in the top level directory and called either &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; so that people know where to find it. It should contain an indication of &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; current position on the use/re-use of the code and can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Open Source License, e.g. MIT or CC&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Commercial License&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A copyright statement &amp;amp; a &amp;quot;hands of this is mine &amp;amp; I don't want anybody to use it but don't blame me if you do and it all goes horribly wrong&amp;quot; statement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I recommend starting new projects with &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cookiecutter&lt;/a&gt; which will prompt you for which license to use as well as many other details that are often forgotten then ensure that all of the necessary files are created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your code relies on any Open Source components then one of the standard standard practices is to state so &amp;amp; which ones and to reference where to find the license files for those components. Some Open Source licenses request or require that you include their license file even in binary redistributions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Generally On Redistribution&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt; that &amp;quot;redistribution&amp;quot; is giving or passing the code, &lt;em&gt;(even as linked binaries)&lt;/em&gt;, to someone else - so if your code is being &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; going to be used by someone other than yourself, &lt;em&gt;or outside of your organisation if you are a company,&lt;/em&gt; then you &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; redistributing it! In the case of a company changes in ownership of the company may even trigger the redistribution clause, e.g. if a part of the company that uses some internally developed code &lt;em&gt;dependent on Open Source components&lt;/em&gt; is sold to another company this &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt; count as redistribution of that code. Likewise, if a business consists of several separate legal entities sharing your code between divisions &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; be considered redistribution &lt;em&gt;(pointed out by @nekomatic in comments)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally considered polite to acknowledge the contributions made by the Open Source community by mentioning the presence of their code within your package. It might also reduce the damage to your reputation &lt;em&gt;&amp;amp; possibly pocket&lt;/em&gt; if it turns out that one &lt;em&gt;or more&lt;/em&gt; of the Open Source components has bugs, errors or vulnerabilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the standard places to include the licenses of dependent code, &lt;em&gt;(Open Source or otherwise)&lt;/em&gt;, include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the Release Note, (possibly as an Appendix).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;code&gt;ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS&lt;/code&gt; file.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A component licenses directory or zip file suitably named.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Python Specific&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course &lt;em&gt;specifically with python &amp;amp; some other languages&lt;/em&gt; the components or dependencies will normally contain license for that item as one &lt;em&gt;or more&lt;/em&gt; of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The package metadata License entry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a &lt;code&gt;LICENSE&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;COPYING&lt;/code&gt; file inside of the wheel file, (you can see this by various mechanisms).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same files inside of a zip or tar.gz file for source distributions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also you will most usually not be actually shipping the dependencies unless you are using a bundler such as &lt;code&gt;pyinstaller&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;cxFreeze&lt;/code&gt; but rather will be referencing them for installation in one &lt;em&gt;or more&lt;/em&gt; of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;pyproject.toml&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;setup.py&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;setup.cfg&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;requires.txt&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it can be argued that you &lt;strong&gt;are&lt;/strong&gt; automatically including these licenses, &lt;em&gt;(it is still nice to give acknowledgements of course)&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;However, it is important to remember that the licenses of these components &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; change between versions, (normally only on major version changes, e.g. 2.x.y to 3.0.0), so it is generally good practice to pin the version of the requirements to at least the current version number major component, &lt;em&gt;this also guards against possible breaking changes of course&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/strong&gt;: I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a lawyer nor any kind of legal, or copywrite, practitioner in &lt;strong&gt;any&lt;/strong&gt; country or jurisdiction let alone the OPs or the readers - I am attempting to reflect what &lt;strong&gt;my personal&lt;/strong&gt; experience &amp;amp; opinion &lt;em&gt;at this point in time&lt;/em&gt; suggests to be good practice. Accordingly I could be completely wrong in any given framework or time. So &lt;em&gt;non mea culpa&lt;/em&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;em&gt;caveat lector&lt;/em&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4659" LastEditorUserId="4659" LastEditDate="2024-01-23T18:33:54.220" LastActivityDate="2024-01-23T18:33:54.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-23T19:57:35.983" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some open-source licenses contain a copyright notice at the beginning, and then further down in the license text, refer to &amp;quot;the above copyright notice&amp;quot;.  When these licenses are stored in the SPDX database, they are stored without a specific copyright notice; instead they are essentially templates.  For example, the second line in SPDX's &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT&lt;/a&gt; reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright (c) &amp;lt;year&amp;gt; &amp;lt;copyright holders&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, this SPDX license template text is used not just to relate the content of a license, but to actually convey the license terms of a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://reuse.software/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;REUSE&lt;/a&gt; project, as of version 3.0, recommends the following practice for presenting the licensing and copyright information of a software distribution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Choose a license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Download the plaintext license text from the SPDX database, and place it unmodified in a central LICENSES directory in the distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Add a reference to the downloaded license, along with copyright information, in a header section in each of the files in the distribution that the license applies to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a license like MIT, this gives rise to a situation where the language of the license is now necessarily subject to interpretation.  Namely, what does &amp;quot;the above copyright notice&amp;quot; now refer to?  The &amp;quot;copyright notice&amp;quot; that is literally above the license text is a template only, while the relevant copyright notice(s) distributed amongst the set of licensed files are not &amp;quot;above&amp;quot; the statement in the license text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very literal interpretation of the license text would seem to be that it requires you to retain the copyright notice template, while not requiring you to retain the copyright message(s) in the licensed file(s) themselves.  This is clearly absurd, but this is also clearly what it literally says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that someone who is considering adopting this method of conveying license terms should worry about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32021" LastActivityDate="2024-01-23T19:57:35.983" Title="What are the implications of using a license template as a license?" Tags="|license-notice|license-file|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T00:40:53.287" Score="7" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing a library and I want to license it so that if you modify and use it, even at a network service, you will need to disclose the modified source code of the library (as in the AGPL) but it would only apply to the library itself (like the LGPL). Is there any way to do this, preferably retaining compatibility with AGPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the sole copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="28703" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T14:57:25.207" Title="LGPL and AGPL combo - how?" Tags="|lgpl|license|agpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T03:09:58.220" Score="2" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I plan to build an app based on a public repo with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://snyk.io/learn/what-is-copyleft-license/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copyleft license&lt;/a&gt; (AGPL-3.0 license). I don't want to open-source my own code (my own code will just server and front-end code, which are built on top of that repo's codebase). I wonder what the potential consequences are? Theoretically can the original repo's owner sue me? But if I don't publish my code, how can they even prove whether I am using their repo or not? Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32034" LastEditorUserId="32034" LastEditDate="2024-01-24T16:22:10.967" LastActivityDate="2024-01-26T12:31:53.633" Title="What if I don't open-source my code after using a copyleft public repo?" Tags="|licensing|license|copyleft|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14550" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-24T07:49:27.120" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am writing a python app and I am using external open source dependencies in 2 different ways:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A) standard import&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;B) calling an executable as a subprocess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper language to refer to such 'software combinations'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typical words I've seen used in that context are: derivative work, separate work, bundle, static link, dynamic link...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32038" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T07:49:27.120" Title="What are the proper terms for those types of software combinations?" Tags="|licensing|linking|combined-work|bundling|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14549" CreationDate="2024-01-24T13:09:40.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's about distribution with most licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you build a web app based on software that is copyleft-ed, but if you don't distribute it, and only make it network-accessible, then you don't have to make available the source code to your app or any changes to that copyleft-ed software, unless the license in question is the AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AGPLv3 requires all linked software that is network accessible, to have their source codes made available to those accessing and using the app by a network interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based on section 13 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your&#xA;version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the&#xA;Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some&#xA;standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This&#xA;Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any&#xA;work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is&#xA;incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T13:09:40.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14548" CreationDate="2024-01-24T14:13:52.867" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're the sole copyright owner, you can write an exception text, to be attached to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;, similar to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-3.0-interface-exception.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL-3.0 Interface Exception&lt;/a&gt;, and it may look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linking &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt; statically or dynamically with other&#xA;modules is making a combined work based on &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt;. Thus,&#xA;the terms and conditions of the GNU Affero General Public License,&#xA;version 3 (&amp;quot;AGPLv3&amp;quot;) cover the whole combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a special exception, the copyright holders of &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;give you permission to combine &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt; with&#xA;independent modules that communicate with &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt; solely&#xA;through the &lt;em&gt;[name of library's interface]&lt;/em&gt; interface, and exclude the&#xA;source code of those independent modules from the&#xA;Corresponding Source of section 13 of the AGPLv3, provided&#xA;that you do not modify the &lt;em&gt;[name of library's interface]&lt;/em&gt; interface and provided that those independent modules are themselves not licensed under the AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that people who make modified versions of &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt; are&#xA;not obligated to grant this special exception for their modified&#xA;versions; it is their choice whether to do so. The AGPLv3 gives&#xA;permission to release a modified version without this exception; this&#xA;exception also makes it possible to release a modified version which&#xA;carries forward this exception. If you modify the &lt;em&gt;[name of library's&#xA;interface]&lt;/em&gt; interface, this exception does not apply to your modified&#xA;version of &lt;em&gt;[name of library]&lt;/em&gt;, and you must remove this exception&#xA;when you distribute your modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exception is an additional permission under section 7 of the&#xA;AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-01-24T14:57:25.207" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T14:57:25.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-19T14:51:54.253" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to upload a project to GitHub, which I will later host on a web hosting service solely for the purpose of having a project in my portfolio. I am using the following third-party libraries in my project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;dependencies&amp;quot;: {&#xA;    &amp;quot;primereact&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;^10.2.1&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;js-cookie&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;^3.0.5&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;react&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;18.2.0&amp;quot;,&#xA;    &amp;quot;react-dom&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;18.2.0&amp;quot;&#xA;}&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I add all the licenses of the libraries i used to a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt file, and would that be sufficient?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I need to add anything to my source code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do i need to add anything to my LICENSE.md file if i don't mind if someone uses my code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't taken any specific actions yet regarding MIT license compliance for third-party libraries in my project. I'm seeking guidance on the best practices before proceeding.&#xA;I hope to gain insights into the recommended approach for handling MIT licenses associated with the third-party libraries in my project. Additionally, I want to ensure that my project is legally compliant, avoiding potential legal issues.&#xA;As of now, I haven't implemented any solutions, so there's no specific outcome to report. I'm looking for advice and direction on how to proceed correctly before uploading my project to GitHub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Sergio" LastActivityDate="2024-01-24T16:00:27.133" Title="How to comply with MIT licenses for third-party libraries in my GitHub project?" Tags="|github|npm|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2024-02-01T16:38:22.013" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14549" CreationDate="2024-01-26T07:54:52.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A copyleft license has the requirement that when you distribute a derivative work, then you are required to do so under the same copyleft license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AGPL license is one of the strictest licenses regarding what triggers the copyleft nature of the license and regarding what acts are considered to be distribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In simplified terms, if the program you execute contains code that is under the AGPL license (even if it is just a single line), then the AGPL license requires that the complete program is released under the AGPL license. Also, just giving people remote access to the program, like the server backend of a web-app, triggers a requirement that you must give your users access to the source code under the terms of the AGPL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failure to follow the requirements in the license you received from a third party means that you are infringing upon their rights under copyright law and the copyright holders of the third-party code have the right to start legal action to stop the infringement and to seek damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without access to the source code or even a binary, similarities in behavior, especially for edge-cases, can be sufficient for a suspicion of a copyright violation. I am not a lawyer, but I can imagine that if a strong enough case of such suspicion can be made, that a judge could order you to give an independent auditor access to your code to assess if you actually make use of the code you are thought to infringe upon. And as copyright violations are civil law, the standard of proof isn't as high as for criminal law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2024-01-26T12:31:53.633" LastActivityDate="2024-01-26T12:31:53.633" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-29T22:57:15.973" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking into publishing some hardware I designed. I began to look into the world of Open Hardware License(s) and discovered the closest to the GNU GPL TAPR and CERN (strong copyleft). And figured out that you can just use a GPL and others like MIT. Why does OHW exist and how/why is it different from OSS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32072" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2024-01-30T00:00:45.457" LastActivityDate="2024-01-30T00:00:45.457" Title="Open Hardware: Why does it Exist if you can License Hardware Under Standard Open Source License?" Tags="|licensing|hardware|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2024-01-31T15:50:11.427" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14563" CreationDate="2024-01-30T14:34:43.483" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a Linux embedded OS usingYocto in which I have to include SoX to perform downsampling of .wav files.&#xA;SoX is under GPL or LGPL license (the downsampling function I use is under LGPL)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I build my Linux, an error occurs as SoX depends on ffmpeg.&#xA;When I add it, another error occurs :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;ERROR: Nothing PROVIDES 'ffmpeg' (but /home/myHome/Yocto/poky/meta-openembedded/meta-multimedia/recipes-multimedia/sox/sox_14.4.2.bb DEPENDS on or otherwise requires it)&#xA;ffmpeg was skipped: because it has a restricted license 'commercial'. Which is not whitelisted in LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I set LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST=&amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; in conf/local.conf, as suggested, it builds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have a question: why using ffmpeg does require &amp;quot;commercial&amp;quot; license, as it is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or later (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html&lt;/a&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I avoid to set this flag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32078" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2024-02-02T08:26:11.280" LastActivityDate="2024-02-02T08:26:11.280" Title="Using SoX requires commercial license" Tags="|licensing|ffmpeg|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14562" CreationDate="2024-01-30T16:23:39.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As discussed in comments, your build of FFmpeg was created with the &lt;code&gt;--enable-nonfree&lt;/code&gt; option which means it &lt;a href=&quot;https://ffmpeg.org/general.html#OpenCORE_002c-VisualOn_002c-and-Fraunhofer-libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;links with the non-free Fraunhofer AAC library&lt;/a&gt;, so while you are correct that the FFmpeg code itself is free software, the the combined work is non-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2024-01-30T16:23:39.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14564" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-01-31T22:34:42.903" Score="4" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;How can I find-out the licensing information on a product that's funded by the EU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, enormous amounts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/search/publication?q=eurotrough&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; has been published about the &amp;quot;Euro Trough&amp;quot; -- a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Parabolic_trough&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linear parabolic solar concentrator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of this research was funded by the State, but I can't find the licensing information anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who legally owns the intellectual property for products funded by the EU? And is there some authoritative source (eg website) where I can figure out what the licensing information is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30915" LastActivityDate="2024-01-31T23:13:22.967" Title="How to find licensing information on EU-funded projects?" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14564" CreationDate="2024-01-31T23:13:22.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reasonably sure there is no authorative source for anything like this in this generality. Only in recent years a move is made to require researchers and contractors of grants to follow more open standards so that research results and code produced is made available to the public in an open manner. This is still not the norm (everywhere). And there is no central registry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus: the copyright will need to be indicated within the repositories, on the pages, in the documents or the sources you want to use, thus in the usual places. If you find no information, the general rule applies: &amp;quot;all rights reserved&amp;quot;. It's tedious, but it never hurts to ask the authors / copyright owners if the information is unclear or missing. It definitely is worth continuing to lobby for public availability and access to results and works funded by public money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastActivityDate="2024-01-31T23:13:22.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14567" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14568" CreationDate="2024-02-03T02:03:17.633" Score="10" ViewCount="7370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am the maintainer of a open source project Uptime Kuma (&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma&lt;/a&gt;), The project is under MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, for most cases, I don't mind how people used my software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until recently, I discovered a website called &amp;quot;MyUptimeKuma&amp;quot; (See image below) which is not related to me. This website is directly using my project logo as their website logo and the name is quite similar. It is a bit uncomfortable for me, because the website is pretending they are the official service of my project in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, it is completely OK to resell it like what Linode or MyPikPods did, since it is clearly stated in MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also this project is just my personal project, the name and logo are not trademarks, and the logo is also a SVG file inside the git repo which should be part of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are people allowed to create their website/service with the logo which comes from projects under MIT license and pretending they are official?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not just for my project, let's say I would be now going to make a website &amp;quot;my-syncthing.com&amp;quot; which would be selling Syncthing (also a open source project) and I directly put the Syncthing logo as my website logo, am I allowed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they are allowed to do that, are there any open source license to improve this situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zoADe.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zoADe.png&quot; alt=&quot;MyUptimeKuma&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32102" LastActivityDate="2024-02-09T16:34:18.297" Title="If someone used my open source (MIT license) project's logo and name to create their website/service, is it allowed?" Tags="|licensing|mit|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2024-02-03T10:14:14.470" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that you're distributing the logo image file under the MIT licence as part of your repository, this really boils down to a question about trademark law, rather than copyright law.  Trademarks are how you protect the right to use a name and/or logo to represent &lt;em&gt;your&lt;/em&gt; particular project, rather than other people's versions of the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike copyright, trademark protections don't arise automatically, but must instead be applied for via whatever process your jurisdiction has for this.  There is usually a fee.  Moreover, they are not automatically internationally-valid, though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Protocol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madrid Protocol&lt;/a&gt; has made the business of applying for an &amp;quot;international trademark&amp;quot; registration somewhat easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further assuming you apply for, and are granted, registration of your mark(s), you then need to use an open-source licence that clearly and explicitly restricts or denies rights to use your trademarks.  We discuss that in more issue in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/13608/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but I note that while MIT makes no mention of trademarks, and is thus a poor licence in this regard, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apache licence&lt;/a&gt; achieves this in s6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you avoid accidentally giving away rights to your trademark, you  then have to defend it, which involves lawyers and more actual money.  That is why few free software projects go that far; when mark registration does occur, it's generally a defensive registration, to avoid others from registering it (see, eg, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright,_trademark,_and_naming&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;history of the &amp;quot;Linux&amp;quot; trademark&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to your actual questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, though I'm not sure those people are &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;pretending they are the official service of my project&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, because as I understand it you don't &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; an official service.  A cursory glance at their site doesn't unearth any actual claims to be the official site of the project, or endorsed by you, or anything actionable in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't tell if the &amp;quot;syncthing&amp;quot; logo and name are registered marks, but assuming they're not, then I don't see any reason you couldn't host your own MySyncThing service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but they involve you applying for trademark registration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-02-03T10:21:04.843" LastActivityDate="2024-02-03T10:21:04.843" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14567" CreationDate="2024-02-04T19:32:17.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until recently, I discovered a website ... which is not related to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website is ... pretending they are the official service of my&#xA;project in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As already written in the other answer, this is not (only) a copyright question - and therefore it does not play any role if your project is an open-source project or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is one point in which I disagree with the other answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It surely depends on the country, but here in Germany &lt;strong&gt;criminal law&lt;/strong&gt; could also play a role in your case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand the laws correctly, it would be &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__263.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fraud&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; if the operator of the web site offers products or services thinking that at least some of the customers will only buy as long as they are convinced of false facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;Pricing&amp;quot; in the screen shot shows that the operator of the web site is offering some products or services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now: Does the operator think that some of his customers will only buy as long as they think that his web site is the official project web site...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2024-02-04T19:32:17.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14572" CreationDate="2024-02-05T07:59:46.707" Score="6" ViewCount="1039" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a commercial project involving an STM32 microcontroller, designed to be locked down for security and business reasons. The device can only be updated through a bootloader controlled by a Android app, which allows users to select the firmware version for update without access to the actual hex file or source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small portion of our FW is under LGPLv2.1. Given the restrictive update process and the lack of direct access for users to the hex or source code, I'm concerned about complying with the LGPL requirements that allow users to modify and recompile at least the LGPL parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can LGPLv2.1 requirements be met in this restricted environment?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there recommended practices or alternative solutions that allow the use of LGPL code without violating the terms while maintaining device security and integrity?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any advice or insights from similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32113" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-02-05T09:11:47.063" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T05:50:32.563" Title="Compliance with LGPL for a Locked STM32 in a Commercial Product?" Tags="|lgpl|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14571" CreationDate="2024-02-05T11:04:16.220" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2.1 has a &amp;quot;loophole&amp;quot; that makes it possible to use an LGPLv2.1 library in your situation. The &amp;quot;loophole&amp;quot; is that, while customers must be able to build their own copy of the hex file, you are not required to give them the possibility to upload that custom hex file to their device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To comply with the LGPLv2.1 license requirements, you must provide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The source code of the LGPLv2.1 portion of your software&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Source code or binary files of the rest of the software to make it possible to re-create the binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Enough information on the build tooling that a fellow programmer is able to re-create the binary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the dependency were under the LGPLv3 license, you would have been required to also provide a means to actually run the produced executable/hex-file on the device, but that requirement does not exist in the LGPLv2.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there recommended practices or alternative solutions that allow the use of LGPL code without violating the terms while maintaining device security and integrity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL does not care about why you would want to prevent your users from knowing what software runs on their device or, in the case of LGPLv3, to run a modified version of that software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the LGPLv3 also doesn't care about the level of warranty and support that users get who run a modified software. Having a custom firmware version on the device is a valid reason to void the warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are legal reasons (e.g. complying to mandated standards) why parts of the code cannot be modified, then those parts can be in a proprietary-licensed part that links to the LGPL part and is provided only in binary format (with a license that explicitly forbids all modification).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2024-02-05T15:53:47.873" LastActivityDate="2024-02-05T15:53:47.873" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-05T11:59:52.790" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm building a software which is publicly hosted on GitHub. Its deployed on Play Store as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few contributory pull requests, but im concerned over possible legal complications over a long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to own the software by all means, this mean that contributions, once merged, are entity of the software owner (me).&#xA;I want to be able to sell or SaaS the software when I need to, without anyone else doing the same with my code.&#xA;This isn't supposed to be open source, since the word is misleading due to complete ownership, but anyone is free to contribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestion on existing, or modified LICENSE file may be suggested, Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32116" LastActivityDate="2024-02-05T11:59:52.790" Title="Github Public Repo License" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2024-02-05T13:14:11.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14577" CreationDate="2024-02-06T10:37:45.643" Score="18" ViewCount="7531" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working on a Unity project for a company and, while doing so, I wrote some code that I think would be cool to have it on the internet, free to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I never released something that is owned by someone else, specifically someone that I work for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the bureaucratic procedures, if there's any, that I need to follow in order to release it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was thinking to use GitHub, but which license should I use for the repository?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DISCLAIMER&lt;/strong&gt;: I already have the permission of the company in question to publish the code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: For now the &amp;quot;permission&amp;quot; they gave me is not actually written down in a legal document, and I'm working on obtaining it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32120" LastEditorUserId="32120" LastEditDate="2024-02-06T11:34:50.673" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T16:09:16.000" Title="How do I release code written for a company to the public?" Tags="|license-recommendation|copyright|github|proprietary-code|open-source-definition|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14575" CreationDate="2024-02-06T12:03:06.863" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mere permission to publish is no use if you want to make this software open-source (and I'm assuming you do, because otherwise this question's off-topic!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important thing is to get a clear statement of the necessary permissions from the rightsholders.  You could list those permissions out (eg, I need to be able to share the code with others; I need you to license any patents you hold that are embodied in the code for everyone's use; I need to be able to host the code on this server, or that service; I need to be able to require others who re-share it to do so on the same terms).  But &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1445/how-can-a-crayon-license-be-a-problem&quot;&gt;experience with crayon licences&lt;/a&gt; suggests that it doesn't work well when random users without legal training try to codify legal requirements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the easiest and clearest way to do this is to &lt;strong&gt;get them to give it to you under the same licence under which you intend to distribute it to others&lt;/strong&gt;.  Standard free software licences are written in well-tested legal verbiage, and are suitable for corporate legal departments to read; they'll know where they stand if they are asked to OK this.  Moreover, if they have problems with giving it to you under, say, GPLv3, then it's reasonable to assume they'll not be happy with you sharing it with others on those same terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;a href=&quot;https://choosealicense.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;decide on your licence&lt;/a&gt;, give them a copy of that licence, and ask them to give you a copy of the source code under those terms.  Then you'll know exactly what you can and can't do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2024-02-06T12:03:06.863" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-06T21:01:54.120" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am developing a solution to deploy open-source hardware in a way that would be similar to APT or Portage in software. As a matter of fact, the idea is to extend something like Portage to make it compatible with hardware deployment in parallel with software.&#xA;I started this project some time ago and I have an opportunity to recruit someone to help, but I am not sure where to advertise this job. This is a rather focused profile I need, and dedicated forums tend not to approve of job advertisement.&#xA;So my question is: where could I advertise a job in open source software/hardware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32125" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T07:50:14.133" Title="Advertising a job in open source software and hardware" Tags="|software|project-management|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14571" CreationDate="2024-02-07T05:36:20.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is answered by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#Tivoization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ on Tivoization&lt;/a&gt; (quoted below), which applies to LGPL too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv2 and GPLv2 requires source code and the means to recompile a modified version of the software to be made available to those who received a copy of the software. However, it does not require the software to be updateable into the device. Updating the software into the device is typically prevented using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.solcept.ch/en/blog/critical-systems/secure-boot/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Secure Boot&lt;/a&gt;, because the end user would not have the signing keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The LGPLv3 and GPLv3 introduced new conditions in Section 6 to require that the end user of a consumer product must be able to receive the signing keys and update the software into the device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to this, to be on the safe side, many embedded product manufacturers ban the presence of any software licensed under GPLv3, LGPLv3 or AGPLv3 on their products, regardless of whether it is a consumer product or not. Secure Boot is necessary for ensuring security and safety of the product, while preventing violation of product liability and loss of warranty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus Torvalds strongly &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?si=zgBvNsYjERMb1fdx&amp;amp;t=154&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disagreed&lt;/a&gt; with the anti-Tivozation clause, and hence licensed the Linux kernel under GPLv2-only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is tivoization? How does GPLv3 prevent it? (#Tivoization)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some devices utilize free software that can be upgraded, but are&#xA;designed so that users are not allowed to modify that software. There&#xA;are lots of different ways to do this; for example, sometimes the&#xA;hardware checksums the software that is installed, and shuts down if&#xA;it doesn't match an expected signature. The manufacturers comply with&#xA;GPLv2 by giving you the source code, but you still don't have the&#xA;freedom to modify the software you're using. We call this practice&#xA;tivoization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people distribute User Products that include software under&#xA;GPLv3, section 6 requires that they provide you with information&#xA;necessary to modify that software. User Products is a term specially&#xA;defined in the license; examples of User Products include portable&#xA;music players, digital video recorders, and home security systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-02-07T05:50:32.563" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T05:50:32.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14578" CreationDate="2024-02-07T07:50:14.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some job boards focused on open source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fossjobs.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fossjobs.net&lt;/a&gt; (the website itself is &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open source&lt;/a&gt;, too!)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://opensourcejobhub.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opensourcejobhub.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fossfox.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fossfox.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for completeness, I'll also mention a couple such projects that have since gone extinct/inactive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20180303054720/https://www.osjobs.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;osjobs.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/JobsOpenSource&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jobs in open source&lt;/a&gt; (Twitter profile)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="427" LastActivityDate="2024-02-07T07:50:14.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14584" CreationDate="2024-02-09T07:36:19.437" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a technical document with various code listings and diagrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to release the actual text under the &lt;code&gt;GNU-FDL license&lt;/code&gt;, while keeping the code listings under &lt;code&gt;GNU-GPL V3.0 or later&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I have read, I am in my right to release my work under multiple licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is now, how do I include the licenses in the repository and document. And how do I state what is released under which license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first attempt at writing a license notice led me to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This document is released under the GNU-FDL license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While all included code listings are released under the GNU-GPL V3.0+ license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;links to the individual license texts&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also read a little bit about the &lt;code&gt;CC BY-SA 4.0&lt;/code&gt; license, but I am less familiar with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any feedback and suggestions will be greatly appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32152" LastActivityDate="2024-02-09T16:41:43.570" Title="Different OSS license for LaTeX project source and code listings" Tags="|gpl|multi-licensing|gfdl|books|code-snippets|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14583" CreationDate="2024-02-09T08:00:09.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I would phrase it a bit differently, your first attempt at a license notice is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your source code also appears in the (printed) document, I would phrase the license notice as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This document is released under the GNU-FDL license.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The included code listings are also released under the GPL license version 3 or later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;links to the individual license texts&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main differences with your version are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I refer to the GPL license in the same way as the license reference that you would add to the source files. Such consistency avoids confusion, but otherwise it is just a textual change.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I made the source code dual-licensed under both the FDL and the GPLv3+ (by including the word &amp;quot;also&amp;quot;). I haven't checked all the FDL requirements, but that may make it easier to create hardcopies of the document without having to wonder what hoops to jump through to satisfy the GPLv3 requirements on the source listings. The idea here is that people can choose to apply only the FDL license to that hardcopy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-02-09T08:00:09.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14583" CreationDate="2024-02-09T16:41:43.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Online software and television firmware bundles all the license notices in one menu item. Gazillion pages of &amp;quot;PQ software distributed under the Foo License, MN software distributed under the Fizz License, etc.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consumer, I would understand the intent if a document author created a license appendix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Code sample on page 234 copyright Some Dude and released under the Foo license. See hyperlink+text for full license. Etcetera.&#xA;Ad nauseum.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32153" LastActivityDate="2024-02-09T16:41:43.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14588" CreationDate="2024-02-09T22:03:53.100" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I maintain a parser combinator library called &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GregRos/parjs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parjs&lt;/a&gt;, licensed under the MIT license. I’ve received a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/GregRos/parjs/pull/99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PR&lt;/a&gt; that contains a copyright notice by Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was under the impression that whoever contributes to an open-source project retains copyright to the thing they did, but licenses it under the same license the project uses. So it would seem that the copyright notice isn’t needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1202" LastActivityDate="2024-02-10T18:36:44.930" Title="Someone wants to contribute code with a copyright notice. Should I be concerned?" Tags="|licensing|mit|copyright|proprietary-code|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14587" CreationDate="2024-02-09T22:20:33.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a reasonable thing for the contributor to include in their modification to your project. It is normal for modifications to an open source project to include copyright notices of (up to) everyone who ever introduced copyrightable changes into the work, because each contributor holds copyright to their contributions. You say the copyright notice &amp;quot;isn't needed&amp;quot; which is largely true -- copyright notices don't serve a significant legal function anymore -- but neither is it incorrect or a hindrance to your project's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has no impact on the usability of your project under the MIT license, as long as the contributor is clear their intent is to also license their contribution under the same license. This is a normal expectation called &amp;quot;inbound=outbound&amp;quot;. For an MIT-licensed project especially, it doesn't hurt to be crystal clear on this point. For Apache licensed projects, this is actually encoded in the license text (exceptions to the rule must be labeled &amp;quot;not a contribution&amp;quot;), and for GPL projects, any modification that isn't GPL'd is copyright infringement, but for MIT projects, a fork could reasonably introduce proprietary code without a legal issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any intent to license under non-MIT terms (and especially in the face of a positive intent to use MIT terms) you may freely incorporate the changes from the contributor's fork. You are free to reject the PR, or free to accept under the terms they offer it (probably the same license your project already has), but you are not free to remove the copyright notice present on their changes, as this is one of the few requirements of the MIT license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2024-02-10T18:36:44.930" LastActivityDate="2024-02-10T18:36:44.930" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-12T07:51:20.303" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a passionate developer who sought to invest in open source contribution. So, I've learned how to contribute through posting questions/answers on GitHub, issues and pull requests, reporting bugs ...&#xA;For now, I would be glad if someone could teach me how, when and where the responsible committee (or whatever, and who these persons are ???) do manage versioning . I.e what features will following minor/major version consists of, what pull request/issue fixing/bug fix/patch or whatever should be validated or not, ... I've looked for these topics on various open source projects documentations but to no avail.&#xA;My question pertain to open source projects in general. Thank you very much all. Have a nice day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32167" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T09:28:28.343" Title="Open source contributing process" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14589" CreationDate="2024-02-12T08:16:04.600" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question is unanswerable, because there is no answer that applies to a large portion of the open source projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each and every project decides for itself who gets to determine when to make a release, what to put into that release, what amount of verification &amp;amp; validation is needed, what version identifier to assign to the release and if and how to document all of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Open source projects range from the very small one-person projects that only get used by the developer him/herself, to fairly big organizations that have a reputation to uphold (like Debian or the linux kernel) and there are no guidelines that could possibly apply to all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T08:16:04.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14589" CreationDate="2024-02-12T09:23:23.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is not one answer which can say &amp;quot;this is how people do it&amp;quot; - as every person and every organisation has their own answer to these question. Everyone decides how to make the rules for contribution, how and who decides and what processes (if any) are needed to join these groups or how to contact them or make suggestions to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One typical way for many larger open source projects is a somewhat regular release schedule. This schedule and process often is agreed-upon by the core contributors or developers who then also do the associated work of preparing necessary patches and tests and collecting and addressing feedback from pre-release versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially for smaller projects you also often find a policy of &amp;quot;we release when its done&amp;quot; as the progress often depends on the availability of time of core contributors who might have other day jobs than maintaining a certain piece of open source software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other projects maintained and/or sponsored by large(r) corporations might have release schedules done according to whatever business plan or product launches need...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It really boils down to &amp;quot;ask the project&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However personally I found so far that it often becomes apparent when I got invested into a certain project, that I rather quickly learned who is responsible for what, and how releases do work; one learns it from feedback one gets from developers reviewing patches, from requests to do something first or a certain way, to ask for feedback from whomever or answers when one asks for how-to-do certain things in a project in order to do XYZ... It helps to hang out in the developers preferred communication platform and just curiously read who writes what (be that e-mail list, forum, IRC, discord, bug tracker, slack, rocket chat,... every project is different there). Read the commit logs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2024-02-12T09:28:28.343" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T09:28:28.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14593" CreationDate="2024-02-12T13:54:57.393" Score="12" ViewCount="2980" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following hypothetical situtation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The company C uses the library L under the MIT license to create a distributable binary under proprietary license&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later, the author of the library L finds out that they have to license it under the GPL due to a dependency not previously accounted for&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What should the company C do in this case? Does the company C have the option to cease all distribution of the binary, get rid of the library dependency, and release a new version of the binary? Or is it required to release the whole source code under the GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are ways to prevent such risks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://itnext.io/8000-python-packages-might-have-to-change-to-gnu-public-license-87bbe6e69705&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="5373" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T00:56:17.947" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T00:56:17.947" Title="Risks of using code under a permissive license that could later convert to GPL due to licensor oversight" Tags="|gpl|mit|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14592" CreationDate="2024-02-12T15:02:19.393" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In law, C has committed a copyright violation. Nothing they do now can undo that fact and any of the copyright holders of the GPL code has a very good chance of winning if they sue for damages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the company C has an option to cease all distribution of the binary, get rid of the library dependency, and release a new version of the binary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They certainly &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; do this ASAP; courts generally look a lot less favourably if a party continues to commit an offence once they have become aware of it. However and to re-emphasise the point: doing this does not make good the violation; C can still be sued for damage caused up to this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it required to release the whole source code under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not. While the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_performance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;specific performance&lt;/a&gt; does exist in law, this is a case where damages are a sufficient remedy so a court would be incredibly unlikely to order this. (Disclaimer: my knowledge is mostly based on UK law, with a bit of an extension to other legal systems in the same family. If you care about a specific jurisdiction, consult a lawyer in that jurisdiction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are ways to prevent such risks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Properly audit the dependencies you are using. If you don't have the expertise to do this internally, there are plenty of companies who will do it for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stepping back slightly here, unless this is an exceptional case (e.g. something like Apple discovering a GPL library which is crucial to all functionality of the iPhone), the actual damage caused here is likely to be small. Proactively contacting the authors of the GPL code and offering to make a donation to the project is probably the best solution for everyone, except the lawyers who now won't get lots of fees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I also know the above paragraph is probably naive and realistically what most companies will do is just to silently stop distributing the GPL code and hope nobody ever notices / actually sues. That would be unethical though)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastEditorUserId="5601" LastEditDate="2024-02-13T19:58:42.197" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T19:58:42.197" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14594" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-12T15:12:46.450" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about to re-license my desktop application as open source software. For several years now, the application is published and sold under a commercial license. While working on a new version (including a complete code rewrite, even using a different programming language), I decided to release the new version as open source. (I also intend to release the source code of the previous versions as open source, but that's not important here, I think.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the open source release, I have to find an appropriate license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My main goals are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want a copyleft license.&lt;/em&gt; It'd be very easy for a company to add some simple features and sell it as a better application, without providing those features back to the project if it'd be under a permissive license.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to easily attract users and contributors.&lt;/em&gt; I initially intended to use the GNU AGPL as the &amp;quot;most modern&amp;quot; license, but learned that users (especially in companies) may have restrictions regarding AGPL, one example being Google: &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to retain control over the name and the logo of the application.&lt;/em&gt; The software is sold now for several years under this name and as such is connected with me. So, I want to make sure the name is only used for releases I authorize. Forks using another name would be fine, of course. (I have no registered trademark for the name.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand, the GPL v3 would support these goals. Is this correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one additional goal as I'm based in Germany:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I want to be compatible with German law.&lt;/em&gt; AFAIK, the GPL v3 clause &amp;quot;16. Limitation of Liability&amp;quot; conflicts with some part of German law, which basically says that &lt;em&gt;General Terms and Conditions&lt;/em&gt; (in German: AGB – Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen) may not contain surprising clauses or restrict rights that are granted by law. Thus, some lawyers in Germany suggest to add a clause to the GPL that clarifies this, but I think such a changed GPL could discourage contributors. OTOH, there are lawyers saying that's not a problem at all as the liability restrictions of the GPL would just be invalid and the default liability clauses of the German law would be in place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some additional information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm the sole developer so far&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The new application is written in Python 3.x, using wxPython as its GUI toolkit and SQLite as the internal data storage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The old application uses C++ and FLTK&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm only using software that has a license that's compatible with commercial licensing, it should all be compatible with the GPL, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given my current knowledge, I'd use the unaltered GPL v3 for my application. Do you see anything that would lead to use a different license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17647" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T08:21:51.863" Title="Choosing an open source license for my up to now commercial project" Tags="|gpl-3|license-recommendation|relicensing|closed-source|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14594" CreationDate="2024-02-12T15:50:41.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv3 covers most of the goals you mentioned and is a good choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal it doesn't cover is the one about the name and logo of the application. Who can use that name and/or logo is a matter of trademark law and not copyright law. For that reason, a copyright license (like the GPLv3) does not affect who can use your program's name and/or logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you find it important that you retain control of the name/logo and that forks must change those, then I recommend you look into registering a trademark for your program's name and logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the compatibility with German law, clause 16 of the GPLv3 is denying liability &lt;em&gt;to the extent allowed by law&lt;/em&gt;. If German law states that, for example, you are liable to give a money-back guarantee in certain cases, then the GPLv3 does not prevent your users from claiming that liability. Also, such warranty and liability disclaimers are fairly common in open-source licenses (and I would expect also in closed-source EULAs), so I don't think it can be classified as a surprising clause either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T15:50:41.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8309" CreationDate="2024-02-12T23:33:26.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can release code that is designed to be linked with GPL code under whatever license you wish, provided that you make clear a requirement that any forms of distribution which would not be allowed under the GPL license must not include any GPL code.  Such distributions could either instruct recipients to acquire the GPL code separately and then build the program in a manner that does not involve any distribution of the resulting derived work, they could include alternative libraries which are not covered by the GPL, or both (the latter situation perhaps being appropriate if the GPL library would provide enhanced functionality that would benefit some, but not all, users of the program).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4645" LastActivityDate="2024-02-12T23:33:26.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-13T02:10:42.910" Score="3" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;We have a web application (for internal users) using free version of AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web application is NOT a commercial application. Do we need to use commercial license instead of free version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32174" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-02-13T04:21:36.033" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T04:21:36.033" Title="AGPLv3 version of itext" Tags="|licensing|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14597" CreationDate="2024-02-13T04:14:33.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume that your web application would use a library that is licensed under AGPLv3, and this library is also available under a commercial license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't matter at all whether your web application is commercial or not. As long as your web application is linked to a AGPLv3-licensed library, your web application too would be licensed under AGPLv3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that you must make the source code of your web application available to those who can use your web application over a computer network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you don't want that, you need to use the commercially licensed version of that library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based on section 13 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AGPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the&#xA;Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users&#xA;interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your&#xA;version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the&#xA;Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the&#xA;Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some&#xA;standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-02-13T04:19:36.453" LastActivityDate="2024-02-13T04:19:36.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14601" CreationDate="2024-02-13T18:46:14.857" Score="18" ViewCount="5093" Body="&lt;p&gt;PySimpleGUI, a GUI framework for Python, has previously been published under the LGPLv3. They just &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.pysimplegui.com/en/latest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;announced&lt;/a&gt; that they are changing to a subscription model with PysimpleGUI 5, and that previous versions will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://docs.pysimplegui.com/en/latest/readme/sunset/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sunsetted&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pysimplegui.com/eula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;new license&lt;/a&gt; is also pretty unclear about how open source software using their library is supposed to work. Furthermore, it's unclear if a free and open source Python program using PySimpleGUI would be considered hobbyist (free) or commercial (paid subscription).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since all prior versions were distributed under the LGPL, I don't understand how this works. Isn't the prior version still FOSS? Furthermore, wouldn't the new version also be somehow subject to LGPL since it presumably is mostly the old code that is LGPL licenced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the new licence also has a statement about not distributing prior versions of PySimpleGUI, which also didn't quite make sense to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licensee may not (and shall not permit any third party to): ... (i) incorporate PySimpleGUI or any portion thereof into any software that purports to subject it to open source software or similar license terms, including any prior version of PySimpleGUI (modified or unmodified) which was previously distributed under such licenses;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32187" LastEditorUserId="32201" LastEditDate="2024-02-16T05:52:01.497" LastActivityDate="2024-02-16T05:52:01.497" Title="PySimpleGUI, until now, has been distributed under the GPLV3, but just became a subscription model. How does that work?" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|lgpl|relicensing|python|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14600" CreationDate="2024-02-13T20:00:51.493" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn't the prior version still FOSS?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Licences do not inhere in software, but instead their obligations attach to the recipient through the act of conveyance.  If you received a copy of this software under LGPL, your rights and obligations with respect to that copy remain those described in the LGPL.  We cover that in much more depth in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/4012/458&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, wouldn't the new version also be somehow subject to LGPL since it presumably is mostly the old code that is LGPL licenced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the consent of all existing rightsholders, both new versions of the software and new copies of old versions may in future be conveyed under different licences.  This can occur either through explicit agreement of existing rightsholders, or because the project required a CLA from contributors that gave the project the right to do this (consent to relicensing thus already having been given).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you didn't happen to get yourself a copy of the existing sources under LGPL, now might be a good time to find someone who did, and get a copy off them, under the terms of LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-02-14T10:22:48.100" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T10:22:48.100" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14594" CreationDate="2024-02-14T08:21:51.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;I'd still suggest considering AGPL&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I [...] learned that users [...] may have restrictions regarding AGPL, one example being Google&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you also say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd be very easy for a company to add some simple features and sell it as a better application, without providing those features back to the project&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore... Weigh up how important it is to you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for users to be able to use your software in (probably) commercial environments that are prevented from using AGPL software, versus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for you to be able to prevent someone making a cloud-based spin-off of your product, which they would be able to modify to their heart's content and never have to release to anyone under the GPL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although you've said your product is a desktop application, making it less likely such a cloud-based spin-off would arise, I think these days, FOSS proponents should assume this treatment can happen to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; project. If your project includes any significant &amp;quot;calculation&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;logic&amp;quot; component that does something non-trivial and useful, people will look to use that in their projects; but even if not, GUIs can be wrapped, or at the most basic level someone can just set up some kind of web-accessible desktop &amp;quot;emulator&amp;quot; or remote display. And these days, there are a lot of consumers that don't understand either FOSS or the cloud and are perfectly happy to use whatever SaaS someone is selling as long as it does what they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under GPL, anyone who feels they have something to gain could potentially benefit from your product in this way without giving anything in return. Under AGPL, they can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What about dual-licensing?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you release your product under AGPL &lt;em&gt;and you retain full ownership of the IP&lt;/em&gt;, you can of course provide users with a choice between receiving your product under AGPL, or agreeing to a proprietary license of your choice (whether this is paid or free-beer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; not what you want to do. Users like Google that ban the use of AGPL software as a matter of policy would be just as unlikely to go with your proprietary license (even if it's free-beer), and meanwhile, going this route would alienate potential users, because it signals that you will go full commercial at some point and screw them over (as this has happened so many times in recent history).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to keep copyleft long-term, the best policy is to encourage outside contributions &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; using a CLA, such that over time your product becomes owned more and more collectively by a diverse group of people / legal entities. That way, it becomes impractical for anyone (including you) to relicense the software in future, and this will attract users who want a product that they believe will remain maintained into the future without any surprising license changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this all applies regardless of whether you go with GPL or AGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26108" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T08:21:51.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="33" CreationDate="2024-02-14T08:38:46.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  This is my lay understanding.  If you are unsure, consult a lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that under U.S. copyright law, any co-author can relicense software without consulting other co-authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-works.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to the University of California&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A joint work is a work prepared by two or more individuals, with the intention that their separate contributions be merged into a single work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A collective work is generally a compilation, such as a periodical, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of separate and independent works are assembled into one larger work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a joint work, under U.S. copyright law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each joint author has the right to exercise any or all of the exclusive rights inherent in the joint work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grant third parties permission to use the work on a nonexclusive basis &lt;strong&gt;without the consent of other joint authors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for a collective work, each author remains the copyright holder of their part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then is: is your opensource software a joint work or a collective work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation would be that, if your software can be separated in independent parts that each have a single contributor, you cannot relicense the whole thing without removing those independent parts first.  But if the contributions are intended and designed to be a single integrated work and removing individual contributions would not be easily possible, then it is a joint work.  It would seem most open-source projects are thus joint works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether each contributor is a co-author I don't know, but as the main contributor you are clearly a co-author.  It would seem that, if U.S. copyright law applies, you should have the right to relicense copies of this joint work as you see fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;a href=&quot;https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;would seem to be the opposite in Germany&lt;/a&gt;, where all co-authors would need to agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="33" LastEditDate="2024-02-14T10:25:17.707" LastActivityDate="2024-02-14T10:25:17.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-22T09:50:45.347" Score="7" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;When creating a new R package version under an existing MIT licence, should the year be [creation_year], [current_year] or [creation_year - current_year]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32253" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T07:45:25.030" Title="When updating a package version, what should the license year be?" Tags="|licensing|mit|license|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14606" CreationDate="2024-02-22T12:52:59.173" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The year in a copyright notice is the first year that a work has been published. A work can be the original software, or it can be the &lt;em&gt;changes&lt;/em&gt; to a piece of software, assuming that those are significant enough to be protected by copyrights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, in a particular year, you have made significant enough changes to the package, you are entitled to add another copyright line to the existing set of copyright lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid having a long list of very similar copyright lines like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copyright &amp;lt;year1&amp;gt; Author&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;copyright &amp;lt;year2&amp;gt; Author&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;copyright &amp;lt;year3&amp;gt; Author&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;copyright &amp;lt;year4&amp;gt; Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is possible to merge the lines containing copyright statement for the same author, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copyright &amp;lt;year1&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;year2&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;year3&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;year4&amp;gt; Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that list of years gets too long, you can merge several &lt;em&gt;consecutive&lt;/em&gt; years into a range.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For example, if there is a gap between year1 and year2, but the other are all consecutive, the copyright line can also be written as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;copyright &amp;lt;year1&amp;gt;, &amp;lt;year2&amp;gt; - &amp;lt;year4&amp;gt; Author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2024-02-26T07:45:25.030" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T07:45:25.030" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-23T18:27:50.850" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a nice Python class on a website devoted to nice Python gists - and on its web page (but not in the source code) it has the author's name and says it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.org/license/python-2-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PSF licensed&lt;/a&gt; - which wikipedia says is BSD-style and even allows for proprietization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fixed a bug and added a feature.  But it is &amp;gt;90% the same code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to do is include it in a repo where all the code is covered by Apache 2.0 license, and where all the code has it's own license/copyright header - which claims copyright for the company owning the repo and names Apache 2.0 as the license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I certainly put a header at the top of it naming the contributor, naming the PSF license, and including the URL where I found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I/Do I &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; put our company license/copyright header (described above) on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6410" LastEditorUserId="6410" LastEditDate="2024-02-26T16:05:52.757" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T16:05:52.757" Title="Do I put my license/copyright header on top of a permissively-licensed file I found on the internet?" Tags="|apache-2.0|license-notice|derivative-works|psf|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-25T12:32:14.200" Score="5" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://developercertificate.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Developer Certificate of Origin&lt;/a&gt; is a well adopted contribution model in open source projects that protects both the contributors rights of their changes and the project. Could it also be used in projects that have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Business Source License&lt;/a&gt; given that the contribution will, eventually of course, be transformed into a GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33275" LastEditorUserId="16634" LastEditDate="2024-02-25T13:54:26.633" LastActivityDate="2024-02-25T13:54:26.633" Title="Can DCO be used in BSL?" Tags="|gpl|license-compatibility|developer-certificate-of-origin|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14610" CreationDate="2024-02-25T12:44:28.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would strongly recommend against using the DCO for anything involving the BSL - the DCO makes references to &amp;quot;open source licence(s)&amp;quot; and the BSL is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an open source license, even if code licensed under the BSL converts to open source down the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2024-02-25T12:44:28.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-25T16:28:59.067" Score="-4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any projects currently developing libre medical equipment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this would include the designs and instructions to build common medical equipment, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Autoclaves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Microscopes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;EKG machines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hematology analyzers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultrasound machines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Defibrillators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ventilators&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;X-ray machines&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but it should also include machines needed to make basic medical consumables, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saline&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antibiotics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Insulin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there currently any projects that have designed any of these technologies for medical use, released with an open license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30915" LastEditorUserId="30915" LastEditDate="2024-02-27T14:53:17.417" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T14:53:17.417" Title="Open Source Medical Equipment" Tags="|hardware|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2024-02-27T14:55:19.713" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14621" CreationDate="2024-02-25T21:55:06.480" Score="23" ViewCount="3228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm facing a dilemma. As a independent software developer and vendor, I code and sell the product of my work making some profit out of it. It's not much, it won't make me rich, but it's enough to make my living and there's room for giving back a bit of that amount to the FLOSS projects I use everyday to make the product a reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use two primary sources for packages and modules: &lt;code&gt;npm&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;composer&lt;/code&gt; (packagist). Whenever I run their &lt;code&gt;update&lt;/code&gt; commands, I read on terminal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;$ npm update&#xA;#...suppressed&#xA;98 packages are looking for funding&#xA;  run `npm fund` for details&#xA;$ composer update&#xA;#...suppressed&#xA;126 packages you are using are looking for funding.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be fairly easy go through the path bellow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set a sum of money available, e.g. US$ 1,000.00;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sum all those &lt;code&gt;looking for funding&lt;/code&gt; packages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To divide the money by the sum of projects: 1000/(98+126)=4.464285714285714;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Go to every URL from &lt;code&gt;npm fund&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;composer fund&lt;/code&gt; and donate US$ 4.46 to each.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I feel this is not a fair distribution for various reasons, some being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some projects plays more crucial roles to my project than others;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't feel right that well funded projects like, let's say, Bootstrap, Guzzle and Symfony takes the money that will serve better to less funded projects (I'm not telling these projects don't deserve any money! They do! I just want to give money to less funded projects.);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The value of each donation is just too low.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What my heart says ATM can be summarized as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set a blacklist containing the 'well funded' projects;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Get the most used classes and methods from the packages within the project (excluding the ones from the blacklist);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Set a kind of 'grade weight' for each project based on their usage;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Provide a list with, let's say, the top 10 most relevant packages based on their usage within the project;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using the 'grade weight', divide the available budget for each package.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been researching for quite some time how to give back to the community when a project uses FLOSS packages. Most of the content I read focus on contributing with code and documentation (which I already do), but none that I could find talks about sharing money in a 'fair' manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I kindly ask from this community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my idea of 'fair' really fair?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be a fair method to share money with FLOSS projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I implement the method proposed above? Code examples are welcome!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33278" LastEditorUserId="33278" LastEditDate="2024-02-25T22:00:32.223" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T11:11:59.660" Title="How to fairly distribute a sum of money among the most relevant FLOSS projects to a codebase?" Tags="|commercial|floss|ethics|business|economics|" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-26T07:05:50.847" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I freely concede that this question has no single definitive answer, but I think there are a few general truths that can usefully be marshalled in response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't tell you what &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; means to you.  Some might think the projects most-used by number of library calls are the most deserving.  Others might see the largest, most active projects as those that can make best use of your kind gift.  Others yet might favour one of the smaller, less-supported projects as one that could make best use of it.  A fourth group might point out that pies crumble when you slice them too thin (thank you, Neal Stephenson) and that a small number of large donations was all-round more useful than a large number of small ones - the processing costs of a $4.46 donation being quite likely to exceed the value of the donation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to my mind, your biggest danger here is not unfair giving, but decision paralysis.  In other words, your search for the &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; method of division may result in you not actually giving at all, and that is a worse outcome than even an arbitrarily lopsided donation plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very strongly advise you to pick some scheme, even if it's just the pin-in-the-source-code method, and &lt;strong&gt;actually give the money&lt;/strong&gt; while you still have it to give, and are still minded to give it.  However &amp;quot;unfair&amp;quot; your scheme, you will still have done more for free software than 90-odd-percent of users, and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; will be an unqualified good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T07:05:50.847" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14609" CreationDate="2024-02-26T09:22:29.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Including the file in an otherwise Apache-licensed project is fine. For clarity sake, if there is a central location that states that all source code is under the Apache 2.0 license, I would recommend that you add something like &amp;quot;unless noted otherwise&amp;quot; there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you cannot do is just blindly slap a copyright notice and Apache license header on a third-party file. But you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; license your changes to the file under the Apache license and add the license/copyright header for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T09:22:29.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14612" CreationDate="2024-02-26T09:50:28.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having worked in the medical industry and other highly regulated industries, I don't believe that there are, nor will there ever be, projects for libre medical equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regulated industries, the products have to comply with certain norms in order to be allowed to be brought to the market. Those norms exist to ensure the product is as safe as it can be (while still doing its job) and they cover everything from design to manufacturing. Those norms also make it impossible to disclaim liabilities..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you create a medical device, it has to conform to the relevant norms. And if you claim that your product conforms to those norms, you better prove that it does, because you are liable if it later turns out that your product contains a flaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With libre medical devices, there are two parties that could be held liable if an incident occurs: The person who built the device and the person/organization who provided the designs. For both of those, the risk imposed by the liability and being unable to control the other party means that creating libre medical devices is a sure way to bankruptcy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T09:50:28.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-26T13:03:52.433" Score="6" ViewCount="915" Body="&lt;p&gt;In MPL license:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5.1. The rights granted under this License will terminate automatically if You fail to comply with any of its terms. However, if You become compliant, then the rights granted under this License from a particular Contributor are reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until such Contributor explicitly and finally terminates Your grants, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean I could permanently lose rights from a contributor? Doesn't that mean that the contributors could ban anybody from having grants permanently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32057" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T13:20:53.057" Title="MPL license: Can I completely lose grants?" Tags="|mpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14617" CreationDate="2024-02-26T13:20:53.057" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't that mean that the contributors could ban anybody from having grants permanently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but only if you were out of compliance in the first place, and the &amp;quot;first time exception&amp;quot; later in 5.1 doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple solution here is to make sure you stay in compliance with the license then none of this applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T13:20:53.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-26T14:44:48.910" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm integrating a component in my commercial software called ABC, in which some part of code is licensed under LGPL and some part it is licensed under GPL. And there are some shared libraries created from ABC component itself, which are further using/linking dynamically with GPL files of the same component(ABC). So are these shared libraries become subject to GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33283" LastEditorUserId="327" LastEditDate="2024-02-27T09:03:51.790" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T09:03:51.790" Title="What happens If a LGPL-licensed shared libraries are dynamically linked to GPL-licensed files of same package?" Tags="|license-compatibility|license-recommendation|lgpl|open-source-definition|floss|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-26T15:13:59.790" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;decide on per-project donation that is not too small (e.g. maybe 30-60$), so the processing costs don't eat too much of it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;decide on cutoff point (on number of users / popularity) for projects that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;will survive just fine without my help&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. make a manual or half-automatic exclusion list of already big/popular projects)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pick one of directions you want to take:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;calculate how much you use each project (count imports or whatever), and sort remaining projects by that usage. (this helps the most the projects you use most)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sort projects by how small they are (i.e. prioritize giving to smallest projects, which likely need help the most)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pick some weighing method that combines above two criteria in some ratio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;randomize the list&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;each time you have extra money to donate, from that sorted list of eligible projects, take top &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; projects (where &lt;code&gt;x = total_amount_of_money / donation_per_project_from_step_1&lt;/code&gt;), and donate to them amount decided in step 1, and remove that project from the list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;when you've cleaned up the whole list; start from the beginning; generating new list&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastEditorUserId="5923" LastEditDate="2024-02-26T18:52:56.247" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T18:52:56.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-26T21:31:08.093" Score="18" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I kindly ask from this community:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is my idea of 'fair' really fair?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would be a fair method to share money with FLOSS projects?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I implement the method proposed above? Code examples are welcome!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am coming at this from my perspective as an economist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fair is subjective and ill defined. Your proposal is definitely not the worst way to divide the funds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are a couple of other ways that could be considered &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot;.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Randomize &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; pots among the &lt;code&gt;y&lt;/code&gt; projects you feel should be considered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Think of the top &lt;code&gt;x&lt;/code&gt; projects that would be hardest for you to replace. Fund those ones. This has the benefit of aligning your payments with your needs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick the project with the funniest tag line or mascot. Nobody said you should base payments off of their technical merits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no one best way to do this. As Matija Nalis points out, you may want to consider the effects of fees etc when donating (depending on the amounts you will be donating). A general principle for valuing things is taking into account the cost of replacing them (the opportunity cost of the choice). I hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33286" LastEditorUserId="33286" LastEditDate="2024-02-26T21:31:30.527" LastActivityDate="2024-02-26T21:31:30.527" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-02-27T01:52:38.503" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;CC0's fallback license is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public License Fallback.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should any part of the Waiver for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted taking into account Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged Affirmer hereby grants to each affected person &lt;strong&gt;a royalty-free, non transferable, non sublicensable, non exclusive, irrevocable and unconditional license to exercise Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the &amp;quot;License&amp;quot;).&lt;/strong&gt; The License shall be deemed effective as of the date CC0 was applied by Affirmer to the Work. Should any part of the License for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, such partial invalidity or ineffectiveness shall not invalidate the remainder of the License, and in such case Affirmer hereby affirms that he or she will not (i) exercise any of his or her remaining Copyright and Related Rights in the Work or (ii) assert any associated claims and causes of action with respect to the Work, in either case contrary to Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BSD's 0-clause license is (without the waiver, handled separately in the CC0):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any difference between the CC0's license and the process of distributing individual non-transferable licenses to every affected person, compared to something like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public License Fallback.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should any part of the Waiver for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted taking into account Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. In addition, to the extent that the Waiver is so judged, the permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32191" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T01:52:38.503" Title="Could the CC0's fallback license be the BSD-0? is there any difference?" Tags="|cc0|0bsd|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-27T02:53:06.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, as others have said, it's really commendable that you are thinking about these things -- it's important that more of us do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a comment on the question mentioned, Attribution Based Economics (ABE) is a movement that attempts to solve precisely this problem. Take a look at drym.org/about which contains many curated resources for learning about ABE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem you've identified is very challenging, and in fact it's the tip of the iceberg on a problem of much wider scale in society -- that of fairly recognizing contributors, regardless of the type of value contributed. We don't do this well even in society at large, since only a small subset of valuable contributions are capable of being recognized financially. In open source it's especially challenging because &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of the valuable contributions, on their own, are capable of being recognized financially, since existing ways that we've developed to do this are rooted in supply and demand, a heuristic which is inapplicable in open source except through indirect, and indeed wasteful and often unfair, means. The consequences of our inability to do these things is honestly staggering and not at all well appreciated today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ABE addresses this problem through a novel economic foundation regarding the ex nihilo origin of money (where does money come from?) and the nature of economic value (it's not just about supply and demand, but needs to be more general). Additionally, it develops formalized processes that anyone can participate in that determine the distribution of raised money over all contributors, and libraries used, and beyond. It's still in the early stages of implementation, but we've already raised some money and recorded payments to many contributors in several open source projects, with more payments soon to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in trying it out, please contact the organizer (that's me!) via the site for your project to be part of the pilot, and we will help you divide up the funds according to ABE principles. You're also welcome to participate in developing these solutions that we deploy across open source projects and beyond, and the community is always glad to have more interesting projects and people to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33289" LastActivityDate="2024-02-27T02:53:06.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2024-02-28T11:11:59.660" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most answers here are already great. They tackle the ethics and the question &amp;quot;what is fair&amp;quot;. So I won't duplicate any of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I want to give a technical alternative to solving your dilemma.&#xA;you say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how to give back to the community when a project uses FLOSS packages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if I understand you correctly, it's not necessarily the software you yourself use on your computer you want to reward, but instead, you want to pass on some of the profits your made with the software you made, to the contributors of the underlying software that you used. (E.g. you use OpenSSL in your tool, you want to give them a cut). That's definitely admirable!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to share your pot of money based on how much the underlying FOSS has contributed to your own project, the fairest way would be to check how often their functions are being called. You can do this by using a profiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if your project would be a C-program you could use the &lt;code&gt;-pg&lt;/code&gt; argument in gcc and then parse the output with &lt;code&gt;gprof&lt;/code&gt;. This would give you a list of all function calls, how often they were called, and how much CPU-time was spent in them. If you filter out your own functions you end up with an ordered list of your FOSS calls. After aggregating them by library, you are left with a list of percentages of usage of FOSS libraries. You are then still free to blacklist the ones you wanted to exclude for various reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21035" LastActivityDate="2024-02-28T11:11:59.660" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13560" CreationDate="2024-02-29T11:33:55.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a lawyer, but I am not sure if CSS output should even have a MIT license? Isn't this like compiled output from a compiler? The license of the compiler does not apply to the compiled output?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the fact that TailwindCSS adds that banner is misleading and they should not be doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you say that in the case of TailwindCSS it combines pre-made (licensed) parts together, then I say that compilers do that as well. A compiler has a pre-made part for how to convert a for loop in C into assembly, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29567" LastActivityDate="2024-02-29T11:33:55.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13560" CreationDate="2024-03-04T11:22:22.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/issues/11536#issuecomment-1618990213&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creator of TailwindCSS claims that they do not hold any copyright over the output&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought terribly hard about — my instinct is that it's important to me that the license and copyright notice are included when making a copy or derivative of Tailwind CSS the tool (made up of files like this one), but that the generated CSS is generally yours, not ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a bit of a gray area here with things like preflight which is a considerable chunk of CSS code that becomes part of your project, but I'm not personally bothered by that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Candidly it's not important to me that the generated CSS contains any mention of Tailwind or our license for legal purposes at all, we only add it there because it's a helpful way to tell when a site is using Tailwind and what version it's on, and not even for any particular data analysis reasons or anything, just because it's fun to celebrate when we see a cool new site that's built with Tailwind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if such an answer can be seen as legally enforceable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29567" LastActivityDate="2024-03-04T11:22:22.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2024-03-09T13:29:00.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is uncertain. While the MIT license doesn't contain the word &amp;quot;patent&amp;quot; (as pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1418/33373&quot;&gt;bmargulies's answer&lt;/a&gt;), some argue that its very permissive wording implies or even constitutes a patent grant. For example, from a detailed &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.com/article/18/3/patent-grant-mit-license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;analysis by Scott K Peterson&lt;/a&gt; from a US perspective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's return to the MIT License. There is an express license. Does that express license grant patent rights? Indeed, with permission granted &amp;quot;to deal in the Software without restriction,&amp;quot; it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advantage of an explicit patent clause (e.g., the explicit patent grant in the Apache 2.0 license or the explicit patent &amp;quot;non-grant&amp;quot; in CC0) is exactly that it removes that uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33373" LastEditorUserId="33373" LastEditDate="2024-03-20T12:42:38.570" LastActivityDate="2024-03-20T12:42:38.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-15T15:31:16.507" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice created a work and died without publishing it. Bob and Charlie jointly inherited the copyright. Bob wants to release it under a license of his choice without involving Charlie. Can he do this? If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-03-16T13:14:06.567" LastActivityDate="2024-03-16T13:14:06.567" Title="How can an inherited copyright be released under a Creative Commons license?" Tags="|copyright|law|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2024-03-16T13:14:39.783" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-16T21:52:15.517" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alice created a work and died without publishing it. Bob and Charlie jointly inherited the copyright. All three live(d) in the United States. Bob wants to publish the work under a Creative Commons license, specifically CC BY-SA 4.0, but he would prefer not to have to communicate with Charlie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, under US copyright law, &lt;a href=&quot;https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/81204/what-happens-if-multiple-people-inherit-a-copyright?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;only one copyright holder needs to agree to grant a non-exclusive license&lt;/a&gt;. This would apply to Creative Commons licenses, unless they are either considered exclusive licenses, or they specifically require the consent of all or a majority of the copyright holders. &lt;strong&gt;Are there any terms in Creative Commons licenses that, under US law, would require Bob to obtain Charlie's consent?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Bob can release the work under a CC license, that leads to the question, &lt;strong&gt;How should Bob write the copyright and license notice?&lt;/strong&gt; Typical CC copyright notices assume that the work is being released by the author; if Alice had granted the license while she was living, she would have used something along the lines of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2000 Alice. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably Bob shouldn't just use that, because it appears that Alice issued the license. Perhaps he could write this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copyright 2000 Alice. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license by Bob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27453" LastActivityDate="2024-03-19T08:18:55.003" Title="Can one of several heirs of a copyright release it under a Creative Commons license, and if so, how?" Tags="|licensing|copyright|license-notice|creative-commons|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14636" CreationDate="2024-03-18T22:45:15.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please do not do this&lt;/strong&gt; without consulting a qualified copyright attorney, or getting Charlie's permission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the problematic clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent possible, the Licensor waives any right to collect royalties from You for the exercise of the Licensed Rights, whether directly or through a collecting society under any voluntary or waivable statutory or compulsory licensing scheme. In all other cases the Licensor expressly reserves any right to collect such royalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob has a duty to share the proceeds of any non-exclusive licenses he may enter into. If Bob responds to that duty by offering a license which explicitly waives the right to collect royalties, it is at least conceivable that Charlie could sue both Bob and any (hypothetical) commercial licensee under a theory of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unjust_enrichment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;unjust enrichment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The argument is, essentially, that Bob and the licensee have conspired to deprive Charlie of his share of the proceeds. Another interpretation (if you want to insist that the license is not a conspiracy) is that Bob has undermined Charlie's practical ability to collect royalties from anyone, in violation of Bob's duty to account, and the licensee has wrongly benefitted from Bob's action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It must be emphasized that unjust enrichment has nothing to do with copyright &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. It is about money. Bob had a fiduciary responsibility to Charlie, he (arguably) failed to uphold it, and this resulted in some licensee obtaining a benefit that they would otherwise have had to pay for. The problem, however, is that we have very little case law dealing with open-ended licenses like the Creative Commons family. We do not know if this theory of unjust enrichment would succeed, or what remedies a court might plausibly order if it did. What we do know is that this would create a great deal of unwanted legal uncertainty for any prospective licensee. Bob may think that he is providing a benefit to the public at large, but the reality is that he is setting a trap for the unwary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2024-03-19T08:18:55.003" LastActivityDate="2024-03-19T08:18:55.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14642" CreationDate="2024-03-20T15:18:17.623" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm finishing up a Java JSON parser that I want to release under the LGPL 3.0 license. Thing is, I'm using JUnit 5 for unit tests (falls under the Eclipse 2.0 license), and some Apache Commons code for comparing doubles and string replacement (are under the Apache License 2.0). The unit tests appear in a single file, as does the commons code (in a different file). I'm not sure exactly what to do, this is my first FOSS project and all these licenses are very confusing for me. I would appreciate it if someone could guide me on what &lt;strong&gt;exactly&lt;/strong&gt; I need to do to comply with all 3 licenses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33426" LastActivityDate="2024-03-21T12:11:51.180" Title="Want to release FOSS project under under LGPL 3.0, have Eclipse 2.0 and Apache 2.0 licensed code, not sure what to do" Tags="|gpl-3|apache-2.0|lgpl|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-20T19:35:43.770" Score="5" ViewCount="319" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to create a new dataset which I want to publish on e.g. Hugging Face. I plan to have multiple versions with different licenses, depending on which data I used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now wondered whether I can combine multiple licenses, i.e. having data which is licensed &amp;quot;less strictly&amp;quot; also in the dataset that is licensed &amp;quot;more strictly&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Is there a list, or even better, a hierarchy where I can look up which licenses are compatible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33427" LastActivityDate="2024-03-20T22:18:23.320" Title="Correct license for dataset if source data has different licenses" Tags="|licensing|license-compatibility|license|relicensing|open-data|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14640" CreationDate="2024-03-20T20:14:54.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several pages which offer a compatibility hierarchy or chart. Generally it's like in order of successively stricter terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Public domain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Permissive (MIT, BSD, CC-BY,...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weak copyleft (LGPL, CC-BY-SA,...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strong copyleft (GPL,...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Network protective (AGPL,...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See (without particular order) e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mend.io/blog/license-compatibility/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mend.io&lt;/a&gt;, or on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#AllCompatibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16634" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-03-20T22:18:23.320" LastActivityDate="2024-03-20T22:18:23.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14639" CreationDate="2024-03-21T12:11:51.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to release under the LGPL 3.0 license&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, what this means is that all code you use must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-can-i-determine-if-two-open-source-licenses-are-compatible-with-each-other&quot;&gt;compatible with the LGPL v3.0&lt;/a&gt;. For the purposes of this discussion, we can consider compatibility with the GPL v3.0 as the LGPL v3.0 is the GPL v3.0 with additional permission clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Apache 2.0 license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitely compatible with the GPL v3.0&lt;/a&gt; so you're fine there. You must of course obey the requirements of the license, in particular those in Section 4 &amp;quot;Redistribution&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Eclipse 2.0 license is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#EPL2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not compatible with the GPL v3.0&lt;/a&gt;. However, due to the weak copyleft nature of the the Eclipse license, your code is not covered by the Eclipse license unless you have actually modified anything in JUnit itself (which is unlikely).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I believe you can do this. Usual disclaimer about trusting anything you are told by a random on the Internet applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5601" LastActivityDate="2024-03-21T12:11:51.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14644" CreationDate="2024-03-21T18:01:53.983" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;My proprietary program dynamically links with an LGPL (2.1 or later) library. However, for technical and practical reasons, the need to distribute the library as a separate .so/.dll file is inconvenient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer to statically link with the library, but my understanding is that this is only acceptable if there is some other way for the user to replace the library. Normally, this is done by providing object files and build scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I'd like to use the following mechanism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My program contains a statically linked version of the library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, before using the library, my program first checks whether the user has placed a .so/.dll file with a particular name in a particular place.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that file exists, the library is dynamically loaded from that file and used. The statically linked version goes completely unused.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the file does not exist, my program uses the statically linked library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This system is documented, including instructions for building a compatible dynamic library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In pseudocode,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;function_pointer = null&#xA;&#xA;if file &amp;quot;libfoo.so&amp;quot; exists:&#xA;    replacement = dlopen(&amp;quot;libfoo.so&amp;quot;)&#xA;    function_pointer = dlsym(replacement, &amp;quot;do_something&amp;quot;)&#xA;else:&#xA;    function_pointer = &amp;amp;statically_linked_do_something&#xA;&#xA;function_pointer()&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say this complies with the &lt;em&gt;spirit&lt;/em&gt; of the LGPL, as it allows the user to completely replace the LGPL library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I worry that it may not comply with the &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; of the license, because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The statically linked version remains present in the binary, even if completely unused&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The LGPL makes specific reference to object files, and it is not clear if alternative mechanisms are acceptable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that, if they use this mechanism, the user will be subject to the technical and practical inconveniences that motivated its creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33436" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T07:37:39.833" Title="Linking both statically and dynamically to an LGPL library from a proprietary program" Tags="|lgpl|linked-libraries|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14643" CreationDate="2024-03-22T07:37:39.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe your proposed scheme is compliant to the LGPL, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The LGPL does not have the requirement that users must be able to delete the version of the library that you distributed. They just must be able to provide their own version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where the (L)GPL speaks of &amp;quot;object code&amp;quot;, that term is used to refer to any format of the code that is not source code. It does not specifically refer to .o/.obj files that a traditional C/C++ compiler would generate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T07:37:39.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14653" CreationDate="2024-03-22T12:19:36.047" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I publicly uploaded a GPLv3 source code to GitLab, and they received a DMCA takedown for it. I think the complaining party may be the current copyright owner of (most of) the code, who is now extremely against having this particular software published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not violated any terms of the GPLv3 since I got it, so I am a lawful licensee fully authorized to publish it. I would like to fight the DMCA notice, but my problem is that the instructions for counter notice says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To submit a counter notice, you must provide the following information:&#xA;[...]&#xA;Signature: An electronic or physical signature of the owner of the copyright or a person authorized to act on the owner's behalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I am not the copyright owner, nor a person authorized to act on the owner's behalf. But since I am a (non-exclusive) authorized licensee, can I be considered &amp;quot;owner&amp;quot; for DMCA counter-notices purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20993" LastActivityDate="2024-03-26T01:38:24.743" Title="How to counter notice a DMCA takedown if I am merely a GPLv3 licensee?" Tags="|gpl-3|dmca|" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4142" CreationDate="2024-03-22T21:09:22.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whoever owns a GPL program should also be able to access the source code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if you want you can distribute the whole thing as paid, but distributing the program without the source code is making the user dependent on the program without having their freedoms. This is the exact reason for which GPL was introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33444" LastActivityDate="2024-03-22T21:09:22.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14651" CreationDate="2024-03-24T02:18:58.973" Score="17" ViewCount="7884" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suppose there is a GPL program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I used a closed source &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot; to build it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In building so, I pulled in a proprietary library, but I considered it part of my compiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the compiler is also proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the program can be built using GCC / Clang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it won't have my proprietary build modifications, which my &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot; provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this legal under GPL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional Reference from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MustSourceBuildToMatchExactHashOfBinary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPL FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the GPL require me to provide source code that can be built to match the exact hash of the binary I am distributing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complete corresponding source means the source that the binaries were made from, but that does not imply your tools must be able to make a binary that is an exact hash of the binary you are distributing. In some cases it could be (nearly) impossible to build a binary from source with an exact hash of the binary being distributed — consider the following examples: a system might put timestamps in binaries; or the program might have been built against a different (even unreleased) compiler version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suppose I download GIMP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I used my proprietary &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot; to build it. When it builds, it will patch GIMP to add my own modifications and library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a dynamically linked library, because the library is part of my compiler. That is, it's statically linked. But I haven't modified the GIMP code prior to compile time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps it's not even &amp;quot;linked&amp;quot; at all. My &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot; may even be built precisely for this purpose, and is only good for compiling GIMP into a Photoshop rival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is a program that is better than Adobe Photoshop. But without the power of GIMP, I couldn't have done it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I will distribute the binaries for money. If anyone will ask for the source code, I will provide the GIMP source code. Because I haven't modified GIMP. I've only made a compiler that builds it in a sneaky way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they will not be able to reproduce my binary as they do not have my compiler, and will be dependent on me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not required by GNU GPL to be able to build the exact binary hash using any free compiler, i.e. a reproducible build.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a potential loophole of the GNU GPL license?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Make no mistake, I'm very well aware that this is in clear violation of the spirit of GPL. I'm trying to see if this is a loophole, which will need us to create a better GPL with reproducible builds in mind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33444" LastEditorUserId="33444" LastEditDate="2024-03-24T14:46:17.123" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T05:05:26.140" Title="Is it legal to distribute GPL software compiled with a nonfree compiler?" Tags="|gpl|license|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14647" CreationDate="2024-03-24T04:39:00.850" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the proprietary library would be dynamically linked with your program, this would not be allowed by the GPL license, unless it's a system library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it would be allowed by the GPL license because it is a system library, then I assume that it would either be present on the Operating System, or independently installable as runtime libraries, and therefore you should not be distributing it along with your program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical use case for this would be building an app for Windows on desktop using the MSVC compiler. In this case, the app would be dynamically linked with Windows runtime libraries, that may be proprietary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GPL FAQ on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#SystemLibraryException&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;system library exception&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I link a GPL program with a proprietary system library?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both versions of the GPL have an exception to their copyleft, commonly&#xA;called the system library exception. If the GPL-incompatible libraries&#xA;you want to use meet the criteria for a system library, then you don't&#xA;have to do anything special to use them; the requirement to distribute&#xA;source code for the whole program does not include those libraries,&#xA;even if you distribute a linked executable containing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The criteria for what counts as a “system library” vary between&#xA;different versions of the GPL. GPLv3 explicitly defines “System&#xA;Libraries” in section 1, to exclude it from the definition of&#xA;“Corresponding Source.” GPLv2 deals with this issue slightly&#xA;differently, near the end of section 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the text of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;System Libraries&amp;quot; of an executable work include anything, other&#xA;than the work as a whole, that (a) is included in the normal form of&#xA;packaging a Major Component, but which is not part of that Major&#xA;Component, and (b) serves only to enable use of the work with that&#xA;Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an&#xA;implementation is available to the public in source code form.  A&#xA;&amp;quot;Major Component&amp;quot;, in this context, means a major essential component&#xA;(kernel, window system, and so on) of the specific operating system&#xA;(if any) on which the executable work runs, or a compiler used to&#xA;produce the work, or an object code interpreter used to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Corresponding Source&amp;quot; for a work in object code form means all&#xA;the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable&#xA;work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to&#xA;control those activities.  However, it does not include the work's&#xA;System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free&#xA;programs which are used unmodified in performing those activities but&#xA;which are not part of the work.  For example, Corresponding Source&#xA;includes interface definition files associated with source files for&#xA;the work, and the source code for shared libraries and dynamically&#xA;linked subprograms that the work is specifically designed to require,&#xA;such as by intimate data communication or control flow between those&#xA;subprograms and other parts of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GPLv2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for&#xA;making modifications to it.  For an executable work, complete source&#xA;code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any&#xA;associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to&#xA;control compilation and installation of the executable.  However, as a&#xA;special exception, the source code distributed need not include&#xA;anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary&#xA;form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the&#xA;operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component&#xA;itself accompanies the executable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit based on the update of the question and this comment from the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about a library that is statically linked by the compiler&#xA;patching the source code during compilation. Say it is GIMP. I&#xA;downloaded GIMP, but when I compile it with my compiler, I get a&#xA;Photoshop beater. But when others ask for the source code, I will&#xA;provide the GIMP source code. Without my &amp;quot;compiler&amp;quot;, they cannot get&#xA;the same binary as me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the patched program (&amp;quot;Photoshop beater&amp;quot;)  is derived from both the GPL-licensed code and proprietary code, the GPL license then applies to the whole patched program, if you're not the sole copyright owner of the GPL-licensed software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to be compliant to GPL, all of the source code and build scripts needed to regenerate the patched program from source code, must be distributed (or made available) to the recipient of the binaries of the patched program. The licensee must be able to completely regenerate the patched program based on all the inputs you make available to them under GPL. &lt;strong&gt;If they are not able to regenerate the patched program using all your inputs, then you would have not fulfilled the requirements of GPL&lt;/strong&gt; (please see the definition of &amp;quot;Corresponding Source&amp;quot; above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The compiler itself is not subject to GPL, but anything inserted into the patched program by the compiler would be subject to GPL. The license of the compiler itself doesn't matter, but the license of anything inserted by the compiler into the patched program must be GPL-compatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are the sole copyright owner of the GPL-licensed code and the proprietary patch code, then you can relicense the combination under another license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WolfSSL is an example of a software that's available under either the GPLv2+ or a commercial license. The WolfSSL company can add additional features to the commercial license version of the software, if they wanted to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="26317" LastEditorUserId="26317" LastEditDate="2024-03-25T05:05:26.140" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T05:05:26.140" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14647" CreationDate="2024-03-24T22:38:33.733" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your example, the answer is probably no. The library that the compiler embeds into the program doesn't fit the definition of a system library, and the fact that it's part of the program blocks the other potential exemption from the corresponding source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of a system library (in GPL v3) requires that it &amp;quot;serves only to enable use of the work with [a] Major Component, or to implement a Standard Interface for which an implementation is available to the public in source code form&amp;quot;. I would put emphasis on the word &amp;quot;only&amp;quot;. It does enable your code to be used with your compiler, but that's not its only purpose; it also adds new functionality, so the first half of the statement wouldn't apply. A &amp;quot;Standard Interface&amp;quot; needs to be approved by a standards body or widely used by developers for a particular programming language, so that wouldn't fit either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other way that you could exclude the source code of the library would be if it falls under the category of &amp;quot;general-purpose tools or generally available free programs which are used unmodified in [generating, installing, or running the work] but which are not part of the work&amp;quot;. However, your library would be considered &amp;quot;part of the work&amp;quot;, since it's incorporated into the compiled program (which is the relevant work in this context), so that doesn't apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the source code for the library would be part of the corresponding source, and you would need to share it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33458" LastActivityDate="2024-03-24T22:38:33.733" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8025" CreationDate="2024-03-25T18:02:39.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From my reading of this, the relationship of the SSPL to the AGPL is similar to that of the GPL to the LGPL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say I create a calculator with a really nice, sophisticated user interface that uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Multiple_Precision_Arithmetic_Library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library&lt;/a&gt; (GMP library) and I distribute binaries of this. Because (since version 6) this is licensed under the LGPL, so long as I give you a copy of the GMP library source, along with any modifications I have made to this, everything's fine; I need not give you the source for my nice, sophisticated user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I'd done the same thing with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Library_for_Numbers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Class Library for Numbers&lt;/a&gt; (CLN), it would not be enough to give you the source code and any modifications I'd made to that; because it's licensed under the GPL, I would also need to give you the full source code (in a form suitable for modification and rebuilding) to my nice, sophisticated user interface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A parallel to this would be if I created a nice, sophisticated user interface for something like Redis and sold access to this user interface as an on-line service. If Redis were distributed under the AGPL I would need to give you the source code for Redis and any changes I'd made to it, but not to the nice user interface I'm providing because I'm not linking my sophisticated user interface to Redit code, I'm merely accessing it over the network as part of my service, even though my service is basically a nicer version of Redis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of the slight change from the AGPL to the SSPL is that, because my nice, sophisticated user interface is basically still selling the Redis service itself, I must give you the source code for my nice UI, as well as the Redis source code, if I'm selling you network access to my system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this might be (and, it seems, is) seen by some as &amp;quot;unfair&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;restricting freedom,&amp;quot; especially if the nice, sophisticated user interface I created is a large work that's doing some fairly sophisticated and valuable stuff. And that's not an unreasonable opinion.  But this is nothing new; the exact same thing is done with the GPL with libraries such as GMP before version 6 (when it was GPL), CLN, and even readline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, the GPL is even less open than the SSPL in intent. The SSPL, though it may not be written to make this as well defined as it could, at least does declare that it's trying to address,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...offering a service the value of which entirely or primarily derives from the value of the Program or modified version, or offering a service that accomplishes for users the primary purpose of the Program or modified version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the GPL, on the other hand, it's been made clear by at least some of its users that it's directly designed to force release of source code even when the GPL code added to it is serving only a relatively trivial function unrelated to the core functionality of the full source code, such as adding readline to a large and sophisticated language system. Bruno Haible, (the original author of GMP), when discussing why he wanted GMP to remain under GPL instead of LGPL, &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/JoshCheek/clisp/blob/e65a18f16de2b35791216f93bdf3c4c2376e426d/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Building libgmp.a was just too hard work. Other people shouldn't get it for free.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15544" LastEditorUserId="15544" LastEditDate="2024-03-25T18:12:20.570" LastActivityDate="2024-03-25T18:12:20.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14645" CreationDate="2024-03-26T01:38:24.743" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;GitLab has asked you for the wrong thing. The format of a counter-notification is specified in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;17 USC 512&lt;/a&gt;(g)(3), which requires, among other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The subscriber&amp;quot; in this context refers to the person who originally uploaded the content (i.e. you personally). It has nothing to do with the copyright owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the comments, you have indicated that the item in question is the Yuzu emulator. Yuzu has not previously been challenged under section 512 (as an unauthorized copy), but under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 1201&lt;/a&gt; (as a circumvention technology), which is an entirely different provision of copyright law that is not subject to counter-notices (but, confusingly, is sometimes also referred to as &amp;quot;the DMCA&amp;quot; because it was enacted at the same time as section 512). If your clone of Yuzu was removed as a result of a section 1201 claim, GitLab can and probably will ignore any counter-notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GitLab should have provided you with a copy of the takedown notice, which should clearly identify the basis on which the notice was sent. If it alleges &amp;quot;that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law,&amp;quot; then it is a section 512 notice and may be counter-noticed. If it alleges that the repo can circumvent technologies which &amp;quot;effectively control access to a copyrighted work&amp;quot; (or any similar language), then it is a section 1201 notice and may not be counter-noticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, please be aware that a section 512 counter-notice requires you to provide personally identifiable information sufficient for the complainant to file a copyright lawsuit against you, and to consent to the jurisdiction of the United States over such a lawsuit. You should be prepared to defend such a lawsuit before you file any counter-notice. It may be wise to consult a copyright attorney who is licensed to practice in the United States before proceeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastActivityDate="2024-03-26T01:38:24.743" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-26T11:47:05.477" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;GPLv2 terms state the following (see below). But does this means to be able to charge an unlimited amount for copy transfer (it may be object code) and the limitation not to exceed distribution fees is applied only to source code (especially when asked by a user who recieved the object code)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:&#xA;a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,&#xA;b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33472" LastActivityDate="2024-03-26T13:27:02.090" Title="Does GPLv2 allow to charge an unlimited amount as fee for copy transfer?" Tags="|licensing|gpl-2|" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14654" CreationDate="2024-03-26T12:12:00.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The GPLv2 requires, as a rule, that GPL'd object code be accompanied by its source code. Whenever you transfer a copy of the binary (which must generally be accompanied by corresponding source), you may charge whatever you like (or whatever your buyer will agree to)  as part of that transaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One special case of this rule is that you may, instead, have the binary accompanied by a promissory document that says &amp;quot;I, Foo Barr, will send a copy of the source to anyone who asks.&amp;quot; That promise may also require a small fee, e.g., &amp;quot;I will send it to anyone who asks on CD media for a shipping cost of $5.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fulfilling the promise to send the source on demand cannot cost more than what it actually costs you to send the source. This fee constraint has no relationship to unlimited prices that you (or downstream distributors) may set for transferring the binary (either with source code or an attached promise for source code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2024-03-26T13:27:02.090" LastActivityDate="2024-03-26T13:27:02.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14654" CreationDate="2024-03-26T12:15:21.187" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the FSF &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clearly state&lt;/a&gt;, charging money for free software is absolutely fine; what you're not allowed to do is hold your users to ransom once they've bought the software.  Buying the software includes the four freedoms; your users are allowed to share copies of the software, to have access to the source, and may use your software in their own projects and for their own purposes, so long as, if they distribute it, they do so under similar free terms.  All versions of the GPL permit this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find that if you set the price too high, the business model is unsustainable as the users will use their freedom to share their own copies - both binary and source - but that's just how free software helps keep people honest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="458" LastActivityDate="2024-03-26T12:15:21.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14660" CreationDate="2024-03-26T21:37:29.000" Score="5" ViewCount="1770" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found that my most recent project has been taking a significant portion code from a GNU GPL code base. While i’m aware that the nature of copyright law allows for such usage, I’m unclear about the concept of ‘fair use’ as it pertains to code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I’m wondering how much of a given work of software can be claimed under fair use? I understand that this might vary based on jurisdiction and the specific license of the software, but any general guidance or resources to understand this better would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="24428" LastActivityDate="2024-03-28T06:05:29.557" Title="How much of a given work of software can be claimed under fair use?" Tags="|copyright|law|" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="14" ClosedDate="2024-03-29T06:16:09.807" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-26T22:47:58.100" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a large open source project that I hope will have many contributors. This project is expressly for collaboration and practice on using and creating industry best practices. While this project is an imaginary project, the code we create may serve many business cases. I want a license that will allow unfettered copying and view of the code but forbid using the code for private or corporate use without express permission. I want to protect the rights of all contributors and prevent exploitation of their hard work. What would be the best open source license for this task?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33474" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T05:58:50.890" Title="Looking for the best licensing model" Tags="|license-recommendation|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2024-03-27T05:59:05.220" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14657" CreationDate="2024-03-27T08:15:40.753" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fair use is not a right that you have, but it is a way to defend yourself against a claim of copyright infringement. In the end, it is a judge who decides if your use of the copyrighted work falls under the fair use doctrine or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In determining if something is fair use, four factors are considered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For what reason the re-use occurred. If you quote parts of a work to give context to the critique you are writing, that is more likely to be ruled fair use than if you copy something just to save yourself the time of writing code with a similar functionality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nature of the copyrighted (original) work. This seems to relate largely to if the work should be protected by copyright in full, or if if it contains parts that are not subject to copyright protection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The amount and substantiality of the re-use. This is the point that relates to the amount of code that you copied.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The effect of the re-use on the potential market of the original. If your re-use is in competition with the original, or even if you could have obtained a license for your re-use, then it is less likely to be considered fair use.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at open-source software, the fourth consideration is likely to be a killer against using the fair use defense. A license to use the code, and even to transform it, is available, so just pay the price and be done with it (where the price is not necessarily a money transfer to the suppliers of the code).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-03-27T08:22:36.570" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T08:22:36.570" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14657" CreationDate="2024-03-27T14:02:26.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/murky-waters-international-copyright-law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no international fair use doctrine&lt;/a&gt;, so it varies by jurisdiction. That means relying on &amp;quot;Fair Use&amp;quot; might not be very helpful, if you don't want a resulting software product derived from it to be restricted to the more permissive jurisdictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13327" LastEditorUserId="13327" LastEditDate="2024-03-27T17:38:50.193" LastActivityDate="2024-03-27T17:38:50.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14657" CreationDate="2024-03-27T19:09:58.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, the answer is: &lt;strong&gt;none&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you are describing is the creation of a &lt;strong&gt;derivative work&lt;/strong&gt;, which falls entirely under copyright laws the moment you use any of the original code at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since the GPL is a copyleft licence, by using code that is covered by the GPL, your entire software can now be distributed only under the terms of the GPL. Thank you for your (involuntary) contribution to Free Software.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way to avoid this scenario is to either write all the code internally, or if you absolutely want to copy how someone else did it without getting into copyright issues, to use a clean-room implementation where the people actually writing the code never see the design you are copying and instead have it explained to them by those who have. With good procedures and extensive documentation of what exactly passed between these two teams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, proper clean-room implementations are more effort than just writing it all from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13242" LastEditorUserId="458" LastEditDate="2024-03-28T06:05:29.557" LastActivityDate="2024-03-28T06:05:29.557" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-28T13:22:05.643" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;GDB is using GPL. I am writing scripts/python commands using its python scripting API and importing &lt;code&gt;gdb&lt;/code&gt;: the module they expose for that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should my scripts be also distributed under GPL? Or can i distribute them as closed source part of a proprietary product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Adding some details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have many python modules that use the gdb api in various ways, exposing &amp;quot;commands&amp;quot; implementing domain-related functionality to the upper layers of our non-released product.&#xA;Those layers communicate with the gdb process using stdin and files (but our own scripts run in the gdb process)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gdb api is exposed as a python api with classes and methods/functions that we directly call in our code:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Python-API.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Python-API.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Basic-Python.html#Basic-Python&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Basic-Python.html#Basic-Python&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33484" LastEditorUserId="33484" LastEditDate="2024-03-28T18:01:53.523" LastActivityDate="2024-04-01T08:37:25.733" Title="If I script a GPL software like GDB using its scripting API, should my scripts be distributed as GPL as well?" Tags="|gpl|api|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-29T23:35:19.167" Score="-3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Existing tools intended to help in picking up a license for an OSS are not able to fully differentiate among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose this open source &lt;a href=&quot;https://sihem.pythonanywhere.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tool&lt;/a&gt; to help OSS authors in discovering, understanding and selecting OSI-approved open source licenses. It exhibits the terms dealt with in the licenses texts as features and compares licenses based on that. It also displays the licenses satisfying a set of selected features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a research tool (for non-profit); and I need to collect feedback from its (potential) users (OSS developers and experts) in practice for evaluation purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it right to share this knowledge and request here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If yes, take a look to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sihem.pythonanywhere.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tool&lt;/a&gt; and leave your valuable feedback through the &amp;quot;feedback&amp;quot; button in the home page or through this &lt;a href=&quot;https://sihem.pythonanywhere.com/questionnaire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, where can I find OSS developers and OSS / legal experts that may be interested in and can help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33491" LastActivityDate="2024-03-29T23:35:19.167" Title="Where can I get feedback about a licensing open source tool?" Tags="|licensing|osi|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2024-03-30T09:16:09.350" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2024-03-31T11:57:32.843" Score="-3" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it worth learning python, c# and php if I want to become a competitive web developer? I completed the odin project course, but I feel that this is not enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33502" LastActivityDate="2024-03-31T11:57:32.843" Title="Is it worth learning python, c# and php if I want to become a competitive web developer?" Tags="|software-development|" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2024-04-01T06:24:30.743" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>